Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures

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Author: Annalisa Oboe | Shaul Bassi

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Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures

Modern ideas of freedom and human rights have been repeatedly contested and are hotly debated at the beginning of the third millennium in response to new theories, needs, and challenges in contemporary life. This volume offers culturally diverse contributions to the debate on freedom from the literatures and arts of the postcolonial world, exploring experiences that evoke, desire, imagine, and perform freedom across five continents and two centuries of history. Experiences of Freedom opens with an introductory philosophical essay by Achille Mbembe and is divided into four sections that consider: • • • •

resisting history and colonialism the right to move and to belong the right to (believe in) free futures imaginative freedom and critical engagement.

Each section contains a piece of creative writing directly connected to these topics from authors Chris Abani, Anita Desai, Caryl Phillips, and Alexis Wright, followed by a selection of critical essays. Contributors: Chris Abani, Rochelle Almeida, Gil Anidjar, Jogamaya Bayer, Elena Bernardini, Anne Collett, Carmen Concilio, Paola Della Valle, Roberto Derobertis, Anita Desai, Lorna Down, Francesca Giommi, Gareth Griffiths, Dave Gunning, John C. Hawley, Russell McDougall, Peter H. Marsden, Achille Mbembe, Cinzia Mozzato, Kevin Newmark, Berndt Ostendorf, Mai Palmberg, Owen Percy, Kirsten Holst Petersen, Caryl Phillips, Annel Pieterse, Christiane Schlote, Nermeen Shaikh, Patrick Williams, Alexis Wright, and Robert J. C. Young. Annalisa Oboe is Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Padua, Italy. Shaul Bassi is Associate Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at Ca’ Foscari University, Italy.

Experiences of Freedom

in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures Edited by Annalisa Oboe and

Shaul Bassi

First edition published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2011 Annalisa Oboe and Shaul Bassi for selection and editorial matter; individual contributions, the contributors The right of Annalisa Oboe and Shaul Bassi to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted, in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Experiences of freedom in postcolonial literatures and cultures / edited by Annalisa Oboe & Shaul Bassi.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Liberty in literature. 2. Postcolonialism in literature. 3. Postcolonialism and the arts. 4. Human rights and globalization. I. Oboe, Annalisa. II. Bassi, Shaul. PN56.L47E96 2011 809’.933581–dc22 2010038603 ISBN 0-203-82892-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN: 978–0–415–59191–1 (hbk) ISBN: 978–0–415–59192–8 (pbk) ISBN: 978–0–203–82892–2 (ebk)

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction: Trying Freedom

ix xi xiii 1

A N N A L I S A O B O E A N D S H AU L B A S S I

Fragile Freedom

13

AC H I L L E M B E M B E

PA RT O N E

Resisting History and Colonialism 1 Where to Point the Spears?

33 35

ALEXIS WRIGHT

2 The Right to Resist

43

RO B E RT J . C . YO U N G

3 Blind Man’s Buff in a Sandstorm? Literary Education in the Late Condominium Sudan

59

RU S S E L L M C D O U G A L L

4 “Saving Africa”: Narrative Persistence, Missions, Development, and the “Freeing” of Sub-Saharan Africa GAR ETH GR IFFITHS

71

vi

Contents

5 Forms of Resistance: Writing from and about Uganda

79

C I N Z I A M O Z Z AT O

6 Whose Biafra? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

91

M A I PA L M B E RG A N D K I R S T E N H O L S T P E T E R S E N

7 “I am not a slave . . . I will be worthy of my native land”: Italian Melodrama as Resistance Strategy in Witi Ihimaera’s Work

103

PAO L A D E L L A VA L L E

PA RT T WO

The Right to Move and to Belong 8 Coming to America—A Remix

115 117

CHRIS ABANI

9 The Blood of Freedom

122

G I L A N I DJ A R

10 Going Away/Coming Home: Searching for a Fixed Point in Postcolonial Indian Writing

132

J O G A M AYA B AY E R

11 Infrahuman Rights, Silence, and the Possibility of Communication in Recent Narratives of Illegality in Britain

141

DAV E G U N N I N G

12 Anglo-Indian Migrants: Children of Colonialism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter

151

RO C H E L L E A L M E I DA

13 Everyday Border Surveillance and Trespassing: Cities in Contemporary Indian Art

163

ELENA BER NA R DI NI

14 Negotiating Freedom on Scarred Bodies: Chris Abani’s Novellas F R A NCESCA GIOM M I

176

Contents vii PA RT T H R E E

The Right to (Believe in) Free Futures

185

15 Rude Am I in My Speech

187

C A RY L P H I L L I P S

16 Freedom of What Religion? An Archeology of American Religious Passions

192

BER NDT OSTENDOR F

17 Sartre’s “Morality and History”: Ethics for Postcolonial Times

205

PAT R I C K W I L L I A M S

18 Trauma and Children’s Rights in Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi

219

CA R M EN CONCI L IO

19 “Flying inna massa face”: Woman, Nature, and Sacred Rites/Rights in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable

231

L O R N A D OW N

20 Freedom for/from Self-Immolation: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

242

J O H N C . H AW L E Y

21 Good Again? Imperialism and Salvation in The Kite Runner and Caché

254

NERMEEN SHAIKH

22 “Holding All the Pieces Together”: Colonial Legacies and Postcolonial Futures in the writings of Igiaba Scego and Cristina Ali Farah

265

RO B E RT O D E RO B E RT I S

PA RT F OU R

Imaginative Freedom and Critical Engagement

275

23 Growing into Free Writing

277

A N I TA D E S A I

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Contents

24 Generic Activism: Ahdaf Soueif’s and Etel Adnan’s Art of Creative Non-Fiction

283

CHR IST I A NE SCHLOTE

25 Dark Freedom: On J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

296

KEVIN NEWMARK

26 “i mike what i like”: Excesses of Freedom in Urban, Post-Apartheid South African Poetry

307

ANNEL PIETERSE

27 Tri-Freedom: The Libretti of George Elliott Clarke

316

OW E N P E RC Y

28 A Poetics of Political Commitment: Robert Sullivan and Human Rights

328

PETER H. M A RSDEN

29 Writing Freedom: Nadine Gordimer and The New Yorker

341

A N NE COLL ET T

Index

353

List of Figures

13.1 Navjot Altaf, Mumbai Meri Jaan, 2004. Detail from four channel video installation, 13 min. 37 secs, color, sound, loop. Courtesy of the artist. 13.2 Navjot Altaf, Mumbai Meri Jaan, 2004. Detail from four channel video installation, 13 min. 37 secs, color, sound, loop. Courtesy of the artist. 13.3 Raqs Media Collective, Co-Ordinates of Everyday Life 28.28 N / 77.15 E, 2001/2. View of the installation. Installation using four projections, soundscape, slide projection, and print elements (including broadsheet, floor mat, and eighteen kinds of stickers). Courtesy of the artist. 13.4 Raqs Media Collective, The Impostor in the Waiting Room, 2004. View of the installation. Installation with three projections, two lightboxes, architectural drawing, noticeboard with narrative frames, framed letter, and a soundscape. Courtesy of the artist.

165 168 170

172

Acknowledgments

The ideas behind this book were first nurtured in preparation for the EACLALS Triennial Conference on “Try Freedom. Rewriting Rights In/Through Postcolonial Cultures,” jointly organized by the Universities of Padua and Venice and held at Venice International University in March 2008. Our thanks go first and foremost to the European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, to which many of us owe fruitful academic collaborations, meaningful encounters, and long-standing friendships, and to all the institutions and people that made it possible to create a uniquely thought-provoking environment eventually leading to a desire for this book. We are grateful to all contributors, colleagues, and friends who joined our efforts, and particularly to the four distinguished writers who offered their creative pieces: they all enabled us to beget an exciting hybrid creature in which critical and imaginative thinking and writing sustain each other. Our gratitude also goes to Polly Dodson, Emma Nugent, and all their colleagues at Routledge for their invaluable support and assistance. Grazie. The publisher and the editors would like to thank the following for permission to reprint material under copyright: Excerpts from Baumgartner’s Bombay by Anita Desai, Copyright © 1988 Anita Desai. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders. The publishers would be pleased to hear from any copyright holders not acknowledged here, so that this acknowledgement page may be amended at the earliest opportunity.

Notes on Contributors

Chris Abani is a “global Igbo” writing from Los Angeles. He is the recipient of many literary awards and a Professor at the University of California, Riverside. His prose includes Song For Night (Akashic, 2007), The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007), Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006), and GraceLand (FSG, 2004). Among his many poetry collections are There Are No Names for Red (Red Hen Press, 2010), Feed Me the Sun: Collected Long Poems (Peepal Tree Press, 2010), Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001). Rochelle Almeida is a Professor of Global Cultures in the Liberal Studies Program at New York University. She is the author of Originality and Imitation: Indianness in the Novels of Kamala Markandaya (Rawat, 2000) and The Politics of Mourning: Grief-Management in Cross-Cultural Fiction (Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, New Jersey, 2004). Gil Anidjar teaches in the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies and in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. He is the author of “Our Place in Al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters (Stanford University Press, 2002), and The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford University Press, 2003). His latest book is Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford University Press, 2008). Shaul Bassi is Associate Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He has edited and translated the anthology of Indian English poetry Poeti indiani del Novecento (Supernova, 1998). His other publications include Le metamorfosi di Otello. Storia di un’etnicità immaginaria (B. A. Graphis, 2000), a critical edition of Othello (Marsilio, 2009), and Visions of Venice in Shakespeare (with L. Tosi, Ashgate, 2011). Jogamaya Bayer is an independent scholar and has published mainly on postcolonial theory and writers of the Indian subcontinent. Recent publications

xiv Notes on Contributors include “Crossing the Borders in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and V. S. Naipaul’s Half a Life,” in A Sea for Encounters (ed. Stella Borg Barthet, Rodopi, 2009). Elena Bernardini has submitted her PhD on New Media/Installation Art from India at the School of African and Oriental Studies, London. She has published essays and interviews on Indian contemporary art. She currently teaches on the Asian Art Diploma at SOAS and lives in London. Anne Collett is Associate Professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia, where she teaches in the English Literatures Program and edits Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing & Culture. She has published widely on postcolonial women’s writing. Most recently she has co-edited (with Louise D’Arcens) a collection of essays on women’s lifewriting, The Unsociable Sociability of Women’s Lifewriting (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Carmen Concilio is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Turin. She has recently co-edited a collection of essays on J. M. Coetzee (Gorée, 2009) and a collective volume on Image Technologies in Canadian Literature: Narrative, Film, and Photography (Peter Lang, 2009). She has also published essays on “Megacities” (2010) and on New York in the works of Jumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai (2010). Paola Della Valle holds a PhD from the University of Turin. She is the author of From Silence to Voice: The Rise of Maori Literature (Auckland: Oratia Media, 2010), and of several articles on Ihimaera, Grace, and the relationship between New Zealand and Italian literatures, which appeared in NZSA Bulletin of New Zealand Studies (2010) and English Studies (2005, 2006, 2007). Roberto Derobertis completed his PhD in Italian Studies at the University of Bari (2007), where he is currently working. His research interests focus on Italian colonial and migration literature. He co-edited the volume L’invenzione del Sud: Migrazioni, condizioni postcoloniali, linguaggi letterari (B. A. Graphis, 2009) and edited the collection Fuori centro: Percorsi postcoloniali nella letteratura italiana (Aracne, 2010). Anita Desai is an internationally celebrated Indian novelist, short-story writer, and children’s author. Her novels include Bye-bye Blackbird (1971), Fire on the Mountain (1977), Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), Journey to Ithaca (1995), Fasting, Feasting (1999), and The Zigzag Way (2004). A recipient of many prestigious awards, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Girton College, Cambridge, and Clare Hall, Cambridge. She lives in the United States, where she taught Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.


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Lorna Down is Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Education, UWI, Mona. Her recent publications include “Stepping out of the Kumbla: Kincaid’s AIDS narrative, My Brother,” Sargasso 1 (2007); and “Extending the Constructivist Paradigm: A New Approach to Learning and Teaching for Sustainable Development,” Caribbean Journal of Education 30(1) (2008). Francesca Giommi earned her PhD in Literatures and Cultures of the EnglishSpeaking Countries from the University of Bologna in 2007. She was research fellow at the University of Padua from 2008 to 2010, specializing in Black British fiction, drama, and cinema. She has published Narrare la Black Britain: Migrazioni, riscritture e ibridazioni nella letteratura inglese contemporanea (Le Lettere, 2010). Gareth Griffiths is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, and has published widely on postcolonial cultures. He co-authored The Empire Writes Back and co-edited The Post-Colonial Studies Reader with Helen Tiffin and Bill Ashcroft. His recent work focuses on religion, missions, and colonial power, including an edited book, Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality and Missions with Jamie S. Scott (Palgrave, 2005). Dave Gunning lectures in contemporary literature at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is the author of Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2010) and Postcolonial Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). He recently guest-edited (with Abigail Ward) a special issue of Atlantic Studies (2009) on African American influence on black British culture. John C. Hawley is Professor and former Chair in the Department of English at Santa Clara University. President of the US chapter of ACLALS and associate editor of the South Asian Review, he has co-edited The Postcolonial and the Global (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and published in Research in African Literatures and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Russell McDougall teaches English and Communication at the University of New England, NSW, Australia. He has published widely on African and Caribbean literatures. His book publications include: Writing, Travel, Empire (I. B. Tauris, 2007), edited with Peter Hulme; and The Roth Family, Anthropology & Colonial Administration (Left Coast Press, 2008), edited with Iain Davidson. Peter H. Marsden has recently retired from Aachen University, Germany. He has published widely on the Aboriginal and Maori oral traditions and on individual authors such as Peter Bland, Peter Goldsworthy, Les Murray, Robert Sullivan, and Hone Tuwhare. He is currently working on New Zealand/ German literary relations.

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Achille Mbembe is Research Professor in History and Politics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He also teaches in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University, Durham, SC. His many books include On the Postcolony (University of California Press, 2001) and Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée (La Découverte, 2010). His forthcoming book, Critique de la raison nègre will be published in Paris in 2011. Cinzia Mozzato holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Padua, Italy. She has edited an Anthology of Contemporary European Poetry (Hebenon, 2009) and contributed an essay on post-Wall British poetry to When the World Turned Upside Down (Cambridge Scholars, 2009). She has recently translated and edited a selection of Ken Smith’s poems (Hebenon, 2010). Kevin Newmark teaches French Literature as well as Literary Theory at Boston College. He has recently completed a book entitled Irony on Occasion: From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and De Man, and is currently working on another, Chance Encounters: Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Mallarmé. Annalisa Oboe is Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Padua. Her publications include Fiction, History and Nation in South Africa (Supernova, 1994); the edited volumes Recharting the Black Atlantic: Modern Cultures, Local Communities, Global Connections (with A. Scacchi, Routledge, 2008) and Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo (Rodopi, 2003); the Italian editions of Olive Schreiner’s short stories and of Athol Fugard’s Port Elizabeth plays. Berndt Ostendorf is Professor Emeritus of North American Cultural History at the Amerika Institut, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany. He has published Black Literature in White America (Harvester, 1982), Die multikulturelle Gesellschaft: Modell Amerika? (Fink Verlag, 1995), and Transnational America: The Fading of Borders in the Western Hemisphere (Carl Winter, 2002). Mai Palmberg is an Africa researcher from Finland, with political science as her main subject. From 1995 to 2010 she was the coordinator of a research programme for African-Nordic cooperation, called “Cultural Images in and of Africa” at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden. Owen Percy recently earned his PhD in the Department of English at the University of Calgary where he currently teaches. His research and teaching interests span the fields of Canadian and postcolonial literary texts and cultures, poetry in English, historiographic metafiction, ecocriticism, and genre studies. Kirsten Holst Petersen teaches postcolonial literature at Roskilde University, Denmark. She specializes in African literature, particularly women’s writ-


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ing and issues around Third World feminism. Her published work includes “First Things First: Problems of a Feminist Approach to African Literature” in B. Ashcroft, G. Griffith, and H. Tiffin (eds.) The Post-colonial Studies Reader (Routledge, 1995). Caryl Phillips is an internationally acclaimed writer and noted professor. He has taught at numerous universities in various countries and his work has been recognized by prestigious literary awards. He began writing for the theater, and has contributed many dramas and documentaries for radio and television. Among his novels are The Final Passage (1985), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997), A Distant Shore (2003), Dancing in the Dark (2005), Foreigners (2007), and In the Falling Snow (2009). His non-fiction includes The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000), and A New World Order (2001). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages. Annel Pieterse is currently pursuing her Doctoral studies in experimental poetic forms at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, where she also teaches film and literature courses. She has published “‘We who belong to this landscape’: Antjie Krog and the Politics of Space” in Current Writing 19(2). Christiane Schlote teaches postcolonial literatures and drama at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She is the author of Bridging Cultures: Latino- und asiatisch-amerikanisches Theater in New York (Reichenberger, 1997), and coeditor of New Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Theatre and Drama (WVT, 2003) and Constructing Media Reality: The New Documentarism (Verlag Königshausen and Neumann, 2008). Nermeen Shaikh lives in New York. She is the author of The Present as History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power (Columbia University Press, 2007) and is on the editorial board of the Rome-based journal Development. Patrick Williams is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Nottingham Trent University, UK. His publications include Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory (Columbia University Press, 1993), Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (Longman/Pearson, 1996), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Manchester University Press, 1999), Edward Said (Sage, 2000), Postcolonial African Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2007). Forthcoming books include The Routledge Companion to Diaspora Studies. Alexis Wright is a multi-award-winning Indigenous Australian novelist. Her acclaimed first novel Plains of Promise was published in 1997 by University of Queensland Press. She has published short stories, the anthology Take Power (Jukurrpa Books, 1998)—celebrating twenty years of land rights in Central Australia—and Grog War (Magabala, 1997), an examination of the alcohol

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restrictions in Tennant Creek. Her latest novel, Carpentaria (Giramondo, 2006), won the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2007. Robert J. C. Young is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University and the founding General Editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. He has published White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (Routledge, 1990 and 2004), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (Routledge, 1995), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2001), Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2003), and The Idea of English Ethnicity (Blackwell, 2008).

Introduction: Trying Freedom Annalisa Oboe and Shaul Bassi

I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate the cycle of my freedom. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) Freedom Manipulated (by powers, by capital): this could be the title of our halfcentury. Thinking freedom should mean: freeing freedom from manipulations, including, first of all, those of thinking. This requires something on the order of revolution, and also a revolution in thinking. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom (1988) Precisely because making a life is an activity . . . we should expect to learn more from experiments in living than from experiments in philosophizing. Kwame A. Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (2008)

In the internationally acclaimed Gomorrah (2006) by the Italian writer Roberto Saviano, we find a thought-provoking passage on the relationship of human and civil rights to violence, criminality, and the global economy: International research institutes in economics are in constant need of data, which they serve like daily bread to newspapers, magazines, and political parties. For example, the celebrated “Big Mac” index estimates the prosperity of a country based on the cost of a McDonald’s hamburger. To calculate the state of human rights, the analysts consider the price of an AK- 47. The less it costs, the more human rights violations there are, an indication that civil rights are gangrening and the social structure is falling to pieces. In western Africa, an AK- 47 can cost as little as $50. And in Yemen it is possible to find second- or third-hand weapons for as low as six dollars. The best resource for arms traffickers are the Caserta and Naples clans, who, together with the

2

Annalisa Oboe and Shaul Bassi Calabrian Mafia, with whom they are in constant contact, have their paws on the arms deposits of crumbling Eastern European socialist countries. (Saviano 2008: 180)

In just a few sentences a world map is spread out in front of us, in which Africa, the Middle East, the ex-Soviet empire, and a ruthlessly trafficking southern Italy are seamlessly joined and seem to speak a common violent language of exploitation and warfare, against the self-righteous background of research institutes, probably located in the West, which “measure” in dollars the state of “rights.” Saviano’s piece, which centers around the controversial figure of Mikhail Kalashnikov, the “father” of the AK- 47, is probing and suggestive and, far from offering an easy moralistic approach to undoubtedly very hot questions, it prefers to juggle a multiplicity of opposite viewpoints. Kalashnikov lived a rather long, protected (though far from wealthy) life in a sort of house-museum at the foot of the Urals, in which he had collected the pictures of children from all over the world who were named after his “creature.” In a sudden twist of perspective which is almost Fanonian in its conjugation of violence and the vision of future freedom, Saviano offers a kind of footnote to this idiosyncratic passion of old Kalashnikov, and adds that a well-known guerrilla fighter with the Popular Liberation Movement in Angola once told an Italian reporter, “I named my son Kalash because it is synonymous with liberty” (2008: 175). There is nothing new in the fact that how you experience freedom is indeed a matter of opportunity and perspective, and different perspectives today still testify to the divide between the non-free and the free defenders of freedom and rights. But the quotation is useful in that it brings attention to the state of the contemporary debate on freedom—mostly freedom in the negative, as absence of freedom, freedom “manipulated” and conjugated with violence, with the free flowing of criminal economies and of inexpensive weapons that have paradoxically democratized the access to “liberation” of the wretched of the earth in various parts of the globe: a freedom qualified by the flawed future of children who carry the unfreedom of the fathers in their very name. To try and talk about freedom in ways that move beyond signifying it merely in the negative or the defensive appears as an almost self-defeating endeavor. How can we have a discourse of freedom independently of a discourse of constraint/ bondage? Is there a language of rights which is not also a language of wrongs (as debated, for example, in Owen 2003 and Spivak 2004)? These are some of the questions we would like to ask at the outset of this discussion of freedom, which is aware of the real excess of inputs coming from all quarters and at the same time looks for its own space among them, in the knowledge that there is little written on the subject in the contemporary context of arts and humanities (see Boym 2010: 30).

Trying Freedom 3 The modern ideas of freedom and human and civil rights have been repeatedly (con)tested in the twentieth century; they are again hotly debated at the beginning of the third millennium in response to new theories, needs, and changes in the contemporary world situation. The spread of fundamentalisms and the dramatic developments in what has been perceived as a new phase of confrontation between the Western world and “its others” are holding in check those who have seen in the postcolonial, postnational global context and in the attainment of fluid or hybrid identities the projection of a dream of universal and substantive democracy. Although we live in an increasingly mobile world of migratory flows and transnational movement, frontiers have become less and less negotiable, and freedom as a universally accepted human value is undergoing a deep crisis. Repeated threats to freedom of speech and creative expression have affected also the world of literature and the arts, which nevertheless continue to respond creatively to these tensions, as this volume demonstrates.1 A complex theoretical debate has developed around these issues: while, for instance, diaspora theory and globalization studies draw attention to the necessity of global citizenship and rights that might accommodate the predicaments of migrants and refugees, and world capitalism points to new geopolitical models and eco-environmental questions, the more pragmatic approach of international cooperation and anti-global networks proposes a renewed attention to basic rights which should precede those traditionally privileged in the West (the right to water, food, health care . . .). Freedom, therefore, can be seen as one of the central narratives of our late modern societies; the word itself and its cognates have been relentlessly appropriated, used, and abused. The precedents are infamously numerous (if Mussolini and Orwell’s Big Brother condemned freedom as slavery, Hitler and Stalin proclaimed themselves champions of liberty), and “freedom” continues to be waved as a banner by endless parties and movements across the political spectrum. The US political arena preceding Barack Obama’s presidency, and its political and military impact on the current world scenario, are perhaps the most obvious recent example of a hijacking of the rhetoric of freedom on the part of the establishment in the name of security and the right to self-defense. In Italy, from where we write, a government party named “Il Popolo delle Libertà” (the people of liberty) has been trying to restrict the space of freedom for ordinary citizens while increasingly extending the space of maneuver and impunity of a small political elite.2 In the West freedom insists on being claimed as a general value to be championed and also imposed, no matter the means; this often comes with a concurring devaluation of the “freedoms” of particular sectors of society, but also and more frequently of other cultures and civilizations. As Amartya Sen has persuasively demonstrated, this prejudice should not only be countered with relevant examples of how democracy and various models of freedom were experimented and

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Annalisa Oboe and Shaul Bassi

experienced many times outside of Europe (perhaps at the same time in which the continent was ravaged by political and religious persecutions), but also by calling into question the whole concept of the West as direct and sole legitimate heir to the Greek polis, and by recognizing the “global roots” of democracy (Sen 2006). What this variety of discourses and practices shows is that freedom resists our attempts at defining, describing, or fully experiencing it; it keeps escaping us by receding into idealized pasts or preceding us into futures which are forever not yet, leaving the present in need. And yet, we cannot say that freedom does not exist: If there were not something like “freedom,” we would not be speaking of it. For even when it is deprived of a referent or empty of all assignable signification, this word still carries, even to the point of indecision, or rather the impasse of its meanings, the very meaning of logos in which philosophy recognizes itself: the opening of a free space of meaning. (Nancy 1993: 8) Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy, in its attempt to make freedom speak freely, radically separates itself from current political philosophies or histories of freedom: freedom is not a concept, the French philosopher says, it is not an idea or a value. It is not a right or a property of the individual or collective subject, but an experience, or a choice of existence. Against any negative vision, Nancy tries to give back to freedom its original affirmative power and, more importantly, he reconstructs the link between freedom and community, which neither the liberal tradition nor the neo-communitarian one have been able to formulate, or have been interested in.3 But even before shaping his thinking about freedom, he opens up a space for that freedom of thinking and being which is a crucial need of contemporary time—the time of which Experiences of Freedom mostly speaks. This book represents the possibility of opening such a free space of meaning where words and worldly experiences interact around freedom from a multiplicity of cultural, literary, and theoretical viewpoints. There is huge potential in this, the potential coming not only from the free sharing of distant voices out of different settings but also from the fact that all of these voices can be located within and variously refer to a broadly postcolonial background, against which this opening is experienced. By postcolonialism we intend here a loose framework: not so much a philosophy or an ideology or a praxis (certainly not a canon or a chronological designation), but the terms of a critique which can address the question of freedom for its ability to destabilize normative understandings and received perceptions, to ask questions and keep debates open, and which may indeed help us, in the radical uncertainty of the present, to understand what being in a free world (with others)

Trying Freedom 5 might mean. Because of its programmatic revisionary impetus, the field of postcolonial studies has been the target since its appearance of implacable criticism and self-criticism. It has subjected itself to unrelenting justification about its scope and critical and political thrust, haunted by the suspicion of substituting one fixity for another, while setting out to demystify traditional fields of enquiry. So there is no postcolonial book without a caveat. This collection presents a geography still largely influenced by imperial maps and master languages, and its planned diversity in scope does not intend to suggest in any way exhaustiveness or representativeness of the “global.” But it is programmatically heterogeneous, and it exudes a wide array of themes and critical idioms, matched by a deliberately eclectic methodology and diversity of approach—from close readings to thematic criticism, from cultural history to theoretical analysis, from sociological scrutiny to psychoanalytical interpretation. The volume also takes into account a range of discourses and genres (fiction, poetry, oral performance, journalism, opera, non-fiction, video installations, film, popular culture, religious, and political discourse), and it extends the familiar archive of postcolonial writing to include new voices and writers from lesser-researched traditions while touching on now canonical authors (J. M. Coetzee or Nadine Gordimer) and hosting some of them (Anita Desai and Caryl Phillips), in a tribute to the cognitive power of art and fiction. A possible map of territories considered in the essays includes (in alphabetical order) Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Lebanon, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, the United Kingdom, the United States, and many other places that the nomenclature of nationstates overshadows, silences, or conceals—notably the Indigenous territories. To these geopolitical realities we need to add unnamed locations and fictional sites, landscapes and cityscapes, routes and itineraries, non-places and rhetorical loci, trajectories of migration and reterritorialization, and a crisscross of lines that mimic the euphoric connectedness suggested by airline magazines. The opening of this wide textual space to freedom wants to be an act of “sharing” that is both cultural and ethico-political, and which delineates a field where freedom presents itself in action, in fact produces itself there, in the same way as “an actor, in order to be the actor he is, produces himself on stage” (Nancy 1993: 78). Freedom as a philosophical category is not openly examined in the volume, it is not “thematized,” apart from Achille Mbembe’s theoretically rich introductory piece, which discusses Western political and philosophical thinking on freedom against the pervasive quest for it in black thought and experience. Most of the contributions prefer to “act it out” by looking at experiments or pointing to experiences that evoke, desire, and perform freedom. In so doing, Experiences of Freedom as a whole acknowledges the difficulty of “appropriating” freedom as an idea, an

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object of thinking. As Nancy suggests, freedom “cannot be appropriated, but only ‘pirated’,” and this is exactly what characterizes our effort here: we are “trying freedom” in the knowledge that “its ‘seizure’ will always be illegitimate” (20). The idea of “trying freedom” in this collection comes from the fact that scholars and writers are called upon to talk about “attempts at freedom” or “experiments in freedom” in the double sense of making efforts to achieve freedom while at the same time putting these efforts, and freedom itself, on trial. Today, maybe even more than before, freedom clearly appears as a trial that is on trial, something we need to confront constantly. The volume makes clear that it is only when freedom is acted out and located, when it comes to circumscribe a set of essentials for the here and now of a culture, an individual, a class, a society, that it can somehow “speak.” What we can hear, then, is how freedom posits itself as an essential constituent of the human experience in its manifold declinations. So we need to confront freedom not so much as a grand scheme of liberation of humanity from falsehood and oppression but as an ensemble of multiple and varied attempts at performing what in fact it might mean, through experiences involving minorities, colonized and neo-colonized people, children, women, migrants, asylum seekers, the garbage people and disposable workers of globalized economies; but also and above all through an aesthetic commitment to its representation in the arts and, particularly, in writing. What we hear, moreover, is that there seems to be no language of freedom or writing of freedom that is not underpinned by a language writing of rights, including, to begin with, the right to freedom itself and the freedoms that these rights make possible. This dialectical tension and entanglement of freedom and rights is implicit in most of the contributions, while others explicitly choose to work on this ambiguous and complex correlation: they are willing to face this twin issue of freedom and rights as two sides of one of the most important political, moral, and ethical dilemmas of our times. * Resisting, moving, belonging, believing, having a future, exerting responsibility, making choices, and being freely and actively involved in the world—as human beings and as artists—are the “rights” on which the collection mainly focuses. Though the “experiences” discussed in the essays are by no means restricted to these, they all broadly refer to the “freedoms” that they variously entail and promote.

I As Robert Young reminds us in the insightful critical survey included in his contribution to this volume, there are rights so universally assumed that they are not

Trying Freedom 7 normally interrogated, and resistance seems to be one of them. There is nothing so plain and fragile, ineludible and controversial in relation to freedom as resistance and the right to resist. The essays in the first section specifically deal with strategies of historical-literary-cultural resistance which discuss and exemplify the struggle for freedom in the postcolonial world—whether in the form of active physical resistance to oppression (with all the ethical quandaries and dilemmas connected to the use of violence), or of resistance to dominant narratives and historical representation, or of appropriation and translation of distant cultural forms. They move from the nineteenth century into the twentieth and twentyfirst and address anticolonial movements, links between nineteenth-century missions and contemporary NGOs and charity missions, the ethnicization of conflict, educational agendas, and subversive counter-discourse. In pursuit of freedom, intellectuals and writers have walked and still walk the frontline of resistance, as Albert Camus argued in his speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm in December 1957: by definition [the writer] cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it . . . None of us is great enough for such a task. But in all circumstances of life, in obscurity or temporary fame, cast in the irons of tyranny or for a time free to express himself, the writer can win the heart of a living community that will justify him, on the one condition that he will accept to the limit of his abilities the two tasks that constitute the greatness of his craft: the service of truth and the service of liberty . . . Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression. Half a century later his words, that apply so well to much postcolonial writing, still sound powerful thanks to his ambitious reference to truth and liberty. To put oneself in the service of those who “suffer history” and to resist all forms of falsehood and subjugation seems to be a grand, self-renovating project. Is it still possible to “write freedom” in this way? Resistance underpins Alexis Wright’s passionate reflection in “Where to Point the Spears?” in which Australian Indigenous traditions are creatively taken on to prove that “it is possible to imagine difference, and it is possible to live the opposite of being shackled.” Resistance runs through Mbembe’s discussion of death and freedom in the black tradition, it surfaces in the screaming and singing of the plantation slaves, it reaches forward to include Frantz Fanon’s intoxicating insurrection against race subjection and abjection (which many contributors refer to), it informs gender-motivated responses to unfreedom in contemporary cultures as diverse as the Arab, the Indian, or the Caribbean, and it feeds contemporary

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practices of border trespassing—in life and in the arts—which resist imposed restrictions and look for alternative ways of surviving and imagining. So “the right to resist” still holds, and it circulates in the many routes that men and women and children follow in the hope to achieve freedom.

II The second section in this volume takes circulation—of “blood,” bodies, commodities, cultures, ethnicities, ideas, art forms—as a right which subtends the freedom to move and to be “at home in the world” (see Brennan 1997). By probing and critiquing the home/abroad, inside/outside, belonging/rootlessness dialectics, the essays included here problematize what it means to be free to move and to belong today. As Hannah Arendt famously observed, “before it became an attribute of thought or a quality of the will, freedom was understood to be the free man’s status, which enabled him to move . . . and meet other people in deed and word” (Arendt 1968: 148). Movement—within, across, and beyond the borders of national formations—has increasingly become one of the ways of responding to conflict, exploitation, and poverty, and words like “immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest-worker, exiled community, overseas community, ethnic community” (Tölölyan 1991: 4) have come to constitute the current semantic fields of diaspora, transnationalism, and globalization. The contemporary world situation, however, embodies a paradox that sees both movement and the lack thereof increase at an unprecedented pace. In Liquid Modernity Zygmunt Bauman reminds us that for power to be free to flow, “the world must be free of fences, barriers, fortified borders and checkpoints” (2000: 14). But, as our collection confirms, the freedom to move is not granted to everyone and it is still an unaffordable dream for millions of people. On the one hand, the unequal global distribution of wealth and of the quality of life—personal, economical, political—has turned the ius movendi or migrandi into an urgent need, while on the other the control on one’s own and other people’s movement or location is regulated by power: to decide who can move and who should not is in fact gradually becoming one of the contemporary hallmarks of sovereignty. “To be able to move is to allow oneself to reopen one’s own future. The right to move equaling de facto the right to be alive.”4 The endlessly circulated photograph of a Mexican man camouflaged as a leather car seat discovered while trying to cross the border between his native country and the American land of freedom and opportunities may be an icon of the contradictions of global movement. He is at once in motion towards a kind of freedom, and grotesquely trapped in his ingenious disguise; free to leave and forced to leave; persuaded to leave a hard life behind, and bound to lead a

Trying Freedom 9 clandestine existence of illegal and yet necessary labor, a life that will never start because the immigration police have unmasked and exposed him. In an uncanny echo of the archetypal “extravagant stranger” Othello—who appropriately reappears in Caryl Phillips’s creative piece in this volume—this man has been turned into a “fixed figure for the time of scorn,” since his picture is more likely to be found in websites dedicated to cynical college humor than in forums on migration. As Salman Rushdie, no doubt an omnivorous reader, pithily puts it: “The most precious book I possess is my passport” (2002: 367). Colonialism and its aftermaths have been responsible (long before our interpretive vision began to become “global”) for mass movements of people that have produced stories of violent eradication, dispersion, and relocation. More recently, postcolonial criticism has focused on transcultural, global/ized discourses and practices as the necessary horizon against which radical politics may be thought out or enacted. As Paul Gilroy has argued, the political conflicts which characterize multicultural societies can be read differently “if they are understood to exist firmly in a context supplied by imperial and colonial history. Though that history remains marginal and largely unacknowledged, . . . it represents a store of unlikely connections and complex interpretative resources” (2005: 2). The contributions in the second section of this volume offer a view of the complexity of the possible responses to this challenging, layered landscape. They stress the counter-hegemonic potential of circulation, hybridity, and border trespassing, which, however, inevitably coexist with the desire for a home that may compensate the devastating effects of living in transit in “postcolonies,” globalized economies, and other inhospitable places. The world is “home” only in so far as it allows each of its citizens to find a place that may contain their future.

III “The future of the world is above all the future of the freedom of the world. As any kind of freedom contributes to all others, so different freedoms sustain each other”: Amartya Sen rightly conjugates freedom and future in this statement (2004: 135). The two invoke one another, both because the present is seldom “free” and because there is of necessity a utopian element in freedom, a moment of deferral in its experience which calls for belief and hope. The essays in the third section radiate a “spirit of utopia” that does recall, in spite of the different spatial/temporal contexts it refers to, Ernst Bloch’s thinking about the future. The German philosopher, writing at a moment in European history when all was death and destruction, saw hope in the future as strictly related to the darkness of the present—“the contemporary” being an intermediate point between memory and prophecy, a blind spot whose shadow can only fade away when the utopian spirit is activated. Much postcolonial writing has for a long time

10 Annalisa Oboe and Shaul Bassi been produced exactly at this juncture between memory and prophecy, where darkness may be dispelled and unfreedom overcome by searching for alternative truths in the past and hoping for a free future. The contributions deal with the right to believe in alternative ethical/sociopolitical/religious models that might lead to freedom. This seems, though, an even more complicated task now than it was back in 1918 (when Bloch was writing). Alongside the apparent exhaustion of the utopias of liberation that supported some of the most powerful radical movements for decolonization of the twentieth century, the bankruptcy of the political philosophies of anticolonial nationalisms, and the vanishing of ideologies, we are also now witnessing a crisis of vision that encompasses a crisis of the future—the future as a political question or as a term for the struggle to produce a meaningful life. This crisis of the future, both as a political and a cultural form, is apparently undermining the utopian elements that are constitutive of any imagination of freedom, and one wonders whether the undeniable difficulty in “seizing” freedom, and in “speaking” and “writing” freedom in postcolonial texts (which this volume inevitably registers) may indeed be a result of such an impasse. An understanding of freedom as “an adventure that tests the limits” and as “a cocreation in the public world,” as Svetlana Boym suggests, would force us to think differently about the progress of freedom and to explore the reservoirs of our cultural memory and imagination to recover a broader understanding of the political: “an occasional nostalgia for past dreams of freedom might offer a creative way of addressing the current situation and a way around an impasse in the future” (2010: 9–10).

IV Creative engagement, intellectual commitment, and freedom of expression in writing and the arts is what the works and authors analyzed in the last part of this volume particularly focus on. Aesthetics joins hands with ethics and politics to communicate an increasingly urgent need for forms that may address once again the uneasy relationship between art and power, art and dissent. This relationship has a long and complex history that may have alerted all but the naive and those in bad faith about the frequent symbiosis between the sovereign and the intellectual, but not everybody is equally ready to countenance the discomfort of the dissident writer. As Nadine Gordimer (quoted and glossed by Collett in this volume) puts it, the world finds it easy to understand and identify with the writer’s struggle against censorship and any form of repression of political freedom, but there is another threat to his or her freedom that is more insidious and less obvious: That other, paradoxically wider, composite freedom—the freedom of his private view of life—may be threatened by the very awareness of what is

Trying Freedom 11 expected of him. And often what is expected of him is conformity to an orthodoxy of opposition. (Gordimer 1989: 106) Even in the academic field of postcolonial studies, all too often literature and the arts are deployed as embellishing props and corroborating evidence for more sophisticated theoretical elaborations. The critical essays in the last section of the book, as well as the creative pieces that introduce the four main sections, alert us to the role and the value of writing and the arts as epistemological-ethical-political imaginative experiences, which stem from the freedom of the imagination, promote the enjoyment of aesthetic pleasure, and should embody the right to freedom of the artists themselves. This freedom is the same that each of us, as editors and contributors, have “tried” and “experienced” in planning and writing this volume, and which we invite our readers to share. This freedom, to go back to Nancy’s proposal, is the same that finally “asks us, proposes to us, requires us to be free to the point that we remain free with respect to it, to the point that we free ourselves from freedom . . .” (1993: 170).

Notes 1. A valuable imaginative contribution from literature is the recent collection Freedom: Short Stories Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (2009) commissioned by Amnesty International from some of the world’s top writers. 2. So that at the present moment, as Maurizio Viroli argues, our freedom is not what the citizens of a republic should enjoy—it rather resembles the parodic freedom of courtly serfs (Viroli 2010). 3. Nancy insists that “freedom withdraws being and gives relation” (1993: 68), and that “being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with as the with of this singularly plural coexistence” (2000: 3). Levinas also elaborates on the centrality of proximity and community in the exercise of freedom: “A freedom in fraternity, in which the responsibility of onefor-the-other is affirmed, and through which the rights of man manifest themselves concretely to consciousness as the rights of the other, for which I am answerable. Their original manifestation as rights of the other person and as duty for an I, as my fraternal duty—that is the phenomenology of the rights of man” (1993: 125). 4. From A. Mbembe’s keynote speech at the international conference “Try Freedom: Rewriting Rights in/through Postcolonial Cultures,” Venice, March 25, 2008.

Bibliography Appiah, K. A. (2008) Experiments in Ethics: The Mary Flexner Lectures, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Arendt, H. (1968) “What is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future, New York: Penguin.

12 Annalisa Oboe and Shaul Bassi Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bloch, E. (2000 [1918]) The Spirit of Utopia, trans. A. A. Nassar, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Boym, S. (2010) Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Brennan, T. (1997) At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Camus, A. (1957) “Banquet Speech,” The Nobel Prize in Literature 1957, Stockholm, December 10 (from Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901–1967, ed. H. Frenz, Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1969). Online. Available: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_ prizes/literature/laureates/1957/camus-speech-e.html (accessed August 30, 2010). Fanon, F. (1967 [1952]) Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press. Freedom: Short Stories Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (2009), compiled by Amnesty International UK, Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing. Gilroy, P. (2005) Postcolonial Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press. Gordimer, N. (1989 [1988]) The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, New York: Penguin. Levinas, E. (1993 [1987]) “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other,” in Outside the Subject, trans. M. B. Smith, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nancy, J.-L. (1993 [1988]) The Experience of Freedom, trans. B. McDonald, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —— (2000) Being Singular Plural, trans. R. D. Richardson and A. E. O’Byrne, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Owen, N. (ed.) (2003) Human Rights, Human Wrongs: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2001, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rushdie, S. (2002) Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002, New York: Random House. Saviano, R. (2008 [2006]) Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia, trans. V. Jewiss, London: Pan Books. Sen, A. K. (2004) La democrazia degli altri: Perché la libertà non è un’invenzione dell’Occidente, Milan: Mondadori. —— (2006) Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, New York: Norton. Spivak, G. C. (2004) “Righting Wrongs,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103(2–3), Spring/ Summer: 523–81. Tölölyan, K. (1991) “The Nation State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface,” Diaspora 1(1): 3–7. Viroli, M. (2010) La libertà dei servi, Bari: Laterza.

Fragile Freedom Achille Mbembe

Freedom is everything except an ‘Idea’. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom (1993)

The persistent desire for human freedom has been the main interrogation around which the best of Western philosophy has unfolded. Regardless of how it has been conceptualized, freedom has been the most important political concept in modern and Enlightenment political theory, lying at the heart of social relations and fueling related concepts of rights, obligations, justice, and responsibility. But so too has been freedom in black experience and, to a large extent, in postcolonial thought. As a struggle and as an event, freedom has been understood, within the history of black thought, as a significant moment for the reconstitution of the former slave, the “native” and colonized, as a moral subject.

I In the project of modernity freedom has been both central and elusive, subjected to deferral, and constantly reinscribed in some future time. Karl Marx, for instance, assumed not only that freedom was the telos of the human species but also that history was tethered to the project of freedom. “True human emancipation” (his formula for overcoming what he saw as the limited forms of freedom peculiar to liberalism) could only be achieved at the end of history, with the abolition of capitalism. In his mind, the end of capitalism was supposed to usher in “not simply liberation from particular constraints,” but a manner of freedom “that was both thoroughgoing and permanent”—a kind of freedom “that was neither partial nor evasive but temporally and spatially absolute” (Brown 1995: 7). For Hannah Arendt, freedom was the raison d’être of politics (2006: 146). She understood politics as the will for some degree of collective self-legislation and

14 Achille Mbembe the desire to participate in shaping the conditions and terms of life. She identified freedom with self-rule and regarded political life as the primary domain in which the virtues were exercised and the human good achieved. For Arendt, the will of self-legislation and the desire to shape the terms of one’s life constituted what we today call “empowerment,” that is, that feature of freedom concerned with action and with capabilities. For numerous other thinkers, the quest for freedom was conceived as a quest for mastery or, more precisely, the maximizing of predictability and rationality. Furthermore, as the late Foucault taught us, in so far as freedom is a mode of activity and thought, the practice of freedom requires an ethics of care for the self (Foucault 1988 [1984]). The self Foucault has in mind is not the abstract individual of liberal-state-of-nature theory but a social being in need of community. The relation between the care of the self and knowledge of the self has therefore been a crucial axis for understanding not only the philosophical connection between the subject and truth but the very manner and matter of freedom itself.

II The project of freedom has been the horizon against which the critique of modernity as a critique of the present has developed. A substantive part of the critique of modernity itself has been either about its failure to realize freedom for all, or about its tendency to use freedom as a mask for cynical political ends and for the advancement of a concept of the human that privileges a single race, gender, and organization of sexuality. That freedom is not only an Idea has been, indeed, one of the main contributions of feminist, postcolonial, and cultural theory to the debate about freedom’s predicament in modernity. To these theories we owe the notion that the experience of freedom is always constituted as a response to a particular practice of domination and exclusion. Freedom is always arrayed against a particular experience of un-freedom. Postcolonial and, to a lesser extent, feminist theories have devoted a great deal of energy to unmasking the languages and practices of freedom typical of colonialism, patriarchy, and liberalism. They have shown that these languages and practices are, more often than not, entangled either with long histories of masculinism and sexual slavery or with similarly long histories of cruelty, sadistic pleasures, and, as Aimé Césaire argued not so long ago in Discourse on Colonialism (1955), racial terror and outright massacre. The contribution of these theories to our understanding of the complexities of un-freedom is immense. But because postcolonial and feminist theories have been operating at times as discourses of objection, they have hardly been able to produce a theory of freedom in their own right. It is therefore not my intention to rehearse their core arguments here.

Fragile Freedom 15

III Nor will I insist on the paradoxes of freedom as such. For instance, in the final pages of his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber points to the fact that the unbridled desire for mastery animating instrumental rationality is likely to turn freedom into its very opposite, that is, a system of constraints by norms of routinization and calculability that generates little in the way of emancipation. To Max Weber’s critique of freedom as mastery, rationalization, and predictability one could add the traditional debates concerning the relationship between freedom, justice, and equality. Such is, for instance, the meaning of the following (pessimistic) assertion by Catharine MacKinnon: “freedom before equality, freedom before justice, will only further liberate the power of the powerful and will never free what is most in need of expression” (MacKinnon 1987: 15). Finally, Rousseau’s considerations on the relationship between freedom and responsibility are another case in point. Indeed, with freedom comes responsibility. Liberation from masters constrains us to an extraordinary responsibility for ourselves and for others. To be free is to take up the weight of the future. It is to attend to the task of making something not only of ourselves but of the world whose making now lies in no hands but our own.

IV The above remarks are evidence enough to the fact that contrary to the received wisdom, the question of human freedom and that of “the subject of freedom” in Western history and thought has not been a straightforward matter. It is not only that what is called “Western thought” is not all of a piece. Nor is it only that the meaning of freedom has been a central bone of contention among theorists, and there have been vast disagreements among philosophers over what kinds of actual political, social, and cultural practices the term entails. It is also that the typical approach to freedom found in contemporary liberal Western political philosophy suffers from its over-reliance both on classical utilitarianism and on Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 famous but overdrawn and at times simplistic typology of “two concepts of liberty” (Berlin 1969). Furthermore, this dominant approach is entirely dependent on Locke’s idea of the unity of freedom and the law. Indeed, in his Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), Locke explicitly argues that “the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.” And he adds: “Where there is no law, there is no freedom” (Ch. 6: “Of Paternal Power”). This is why, for instance, John Rawls can declare that “liberty is a certain structure of institutions, a certain system of public rules defining rights and duties” (1999: 177; see also Rawls 1993). In so doing, not only does he suggest

16 Achille Mbembe that liberty is a certain pattern of social forms but he is also implicitly highlighting the role played by law in the very constitution of freedom.

V As a result of the powerful grip Isaiah Berlin’s typology has retained on political thinking about freedom, a conception of freedom as the absence of interference and the absence of domination has superseded and displaced what, for me, are “the deeper reaches” of Western philosophical thinking on freedom. This conception of freedom as the absence of interference and domination, let us call it “a surface level conception of freedom.” What characterizes the deeper reaches of Western philosophical thinking on freedom is its articulation of freedom with the master–slave dialectics on the one hand, and with the death-event on the other. In other words, in the deeper reaches of Western philosophical thinking on freedom, the death-event is posited as the final ground on which the meaning of freedom rests.

VI In view of the above, my argument is that Berlin’s typology (as well as much of the theorizing that relies on the idea of freedom as the absence of interference on the one hand and the ability of the individual to make choices and act on them on the other) is really about the manner of freedom and its semantics. On the other hand, in the deeper reaches of Western philosophy—from Hobbes and Machiavelli to Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, and others—we find the idea that freedom can only be thought of on the basis of the death-event, its phenomenology and its politics (for a summary see Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Emmanuel Levinas’s God, Death, and Time, esp. Part I). In contrast with its surface level, the deeper reaches of Western philosophy deal with the matter of freedom. I also argue that the dissociation of the manner of freedom and its matter— this bifurcation between a political thinking of freedom and a philosophical thinking of the same subject—is the dominant feature of Western theories of freedom. On the contrary, the originality of modern black thought lies in its reconciliation of a critique of the manner of freedom with a critique of its matter. Race is what allows for this reconciliation—race in its double meaning of a form of warfare, law, and lawlessness on the one hand, and of the empty space constitutive of social relations of subjection and of the political order itself on the other hand. The major claim of black criticism is that in contexts of racial terror, freedom’s knot is tied in the death-event, or at least in the death threat—the final ground without which consciousness cannot think and comprehend itself.

Fragile Freedom 17 That the entire structure of freedom is drawn from the relationship to death, the latter being both an event and a modality of being, is a question I shall return to in the second and most important part of my contribution.

VII For the time being, let me return briefly to Isaiah Berlin’s classic essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” to which I will add a number of (neo)republican theories of freedom exposed in a series of important historical studies by Quentin Skinner (see in particular Liberty Before Liberalism), Philip Pettit (Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government), or Maurizio Viroli (Republicanism) and Jean-Fabien Spitz (La liberté politique). Although these various works differ in more than one instance as to what constitutes the core meaning of freedom, I would like to use them as a pretext to comment on what I have called “a surface level conception of freedom.” Berlin is, to a large extent, responsible for the famous distinction between negative freedom and positive freedom. In his view, negative freedom is the domain of action where individuals can do as they may want without interference at the hands of others—interference itself being understood broadly to include, not just the actual preventing of a course of action but also acts of coercion. Negative freedom, Berlin once remarked, is not compromised by a despotic regime, so long as the despot happens to be benevolent and chooses to pursue an indulgent policy towards his population [“It is perfectly conceivable that a liberalminded despot would allow his subjects a large measure of personal freedom” (1969: 129)]. Indeed, for those who rely on his typology or who display a strong allegiance to various strands of the liberal or (neo)republican approaches to freedom, we are free to the extent that we do not find ourselves under the domination of others, subject to their will and thus vulnerable to how they may choose to use their power. A free person is one who, unlike a slave, does not find himself or herself in what Roman law used to call potestate domini (the power, or the dominion, of a master). When, in the eighteenth century, Rousseau claims that “liberty consists less in doing one’s own will than in not being subject to that of another” (1968 [1762]: 32), he is fundamentally signifying that freedom consists in an independence from the will of another. The freedom of the individual is here measured by the extent to which he or she is not restrained by external forces. Positive freedom on the other hand coincides with rational autonomy and democratic self-government. It refers to the activity by which we supposedly realize our true nature or give expression to our higher self according to a law of conduct we give ourselves. The best law of conduct we can give ourselves is to bring ourselves under the rule of our own reason.

18 Achille Mbembe

VIII In “the surface level conception of freedom,” what is therefore important is that I be allowed to make choices. Freedom here is constituted by the absence of obstacles to the exercise of choice. It is a conception of freedom that does not denote the exercise of a capacity. There is no sense here that people must exercise their full capacities if they are to be free. Nor is there a sense that choice is a complex process of negotiation and relationship between what we commonly call “internal” and “external” factors; between will, preferences, and desire on the one hand, and forces that not only inhibit or enable the realization of such desires but also contribute to, or influence the formation of these desires, on the other. Furthermore, negative conceptions of freedom hardly say anything meaningful about the nature of domination or what we are to do with the possibilities at our disposal. After all, to be free from the domination of a master does not necessarily mean to be one’s own master (see Mbembe’s On the Postcolony). Freedom is rather identified with a condition in which we may find ourselves—for instance, not living under the dominion of another or at the mercy of another’s will or another person who controls the shape of our existence or significantly diminishes our possibilities. Surface level conceptions of freedom also rely on a strict atomistic notion of the individual. It is an individual who is responsible for his actions and choices, his desires, preferences, interests, and needs—all of which he or she formulates by himself or herself, without interference. And that is how he or she is able to make the choice he or she wants. Even more so, they underplay the idea of an individual having conflicting desires—a divided self and a divided will—and the reality that there may be internal barriers to freedom. As Nancy Hirschmann has observed in The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, “many of these questions—and indeed much freedom theory— are arguably “semantic” (2003: 3). In these debates, the political question of what or who the “self” is that makes these choices is seldom addressed; what constitutes the choosing subject of liberty; what is the context in which choices arise and are made; how systems of power, social norms, practices, and languages set the conditions within which choices are made, determine what options are available, and shape individual desires and self-understanding.

IX I would now like to examine some of the ways in which freedom is imagined and spoken about in black thought. In my mind, the term “black thought” refers to the modern exercise by which Africans and people of African descent have engaged with what Zora Neale Hurston called “the essential drama of black life.” It can

Fragile Freedom 19 be said that the essential drama of black life has been the struggle or the quest for selfhood or self-ownership—owning oneself, being one’s own property. Historically, this quest for selfhood has taken the triple meaning of self-rule, self-knowledge, and self-expression. In turn, self-rule, self-knowledge, and selfexpression have been understood not simply as a work of thought but, more importantly, as an attempt to become free by transforming one’s way of thinking—all in order to better take care of oneself. I would therefore like to probe some of the vocabularies that have been used in order to imagine freedom in contexts dominated by racial terror and subjection and the potential of these vocabularies to allow for a complex understanding of freedom that is conducive to current global concerns.

X What I call “black thought” is a thoroughly modern phenomenon. It is also a diasporic phenomenon. Black thought is diasporic not necessarily because it is rooted in notions of displacement from a location of origin—in this case Africa as the imaginary reference point in the construction of black identity—but more importantly because it is constituted at the interface of multiple factors and transmitted along circuits of culture and meaning that keep converging and diverging at the same time. There are, therefore, variants of black thought that are more expressive of the historical conditions of those we could call “Western Blacks” (African Americans and the question of slavery for instance) and other variants that are expressive of the existential dramas of “Southern Blacks” (colonialism and apartheid for instance).

XI Let us consider those I have just called “Western Blacks.” In The Black Atlantic Paul Gilroy has shown that their sense of embeddedness in the modern world was, in turn, shaped by “the need to escape slavery” and various forms of bondage, as well as by various “attempts to acquire meaningful citizenship in post-emancipation societies” (1993: x). It is clear that the question of freedom here is predetermined by the specific historical context of slavery. Slavery is a context in which “blackness marks simultaneously both the performance of the object and the performance of humanity” (Moten 2003: 2). Indeed, the slave is a unique species of living and speaking commodity that cuts across the founding difference between persons and property. In other words, slave life “violates liberal standards of sovereign possession (standards in which the first thing one owns is oneself)” (Best 2004: 2).

20 Achille Mbembe On the other hand, in the slave, the commodity celebrates its becoming human. It is in this sense that Stephen Best, in The Fugitive’s Properties, can speak of “the slave’s two bodies”—the human person that has become a thing, a transferable and exchangeable property, and the thing that is human and as such a subject of sentiments, emotions, and imagination (2004: introduction). To be sure, this vacillation between embodiment and abstraction, material property and willing self, objectification, and humanization—this double ambivalence forces another kind of questioning when it comes to probing the divide that separates slavery and freedom.

XII It is significant that the first step to freedom, in such a context, is the restoration of speech. Frantz Fanon, for instance, devotes the first chapter of his Black Skin, White Masks to the question of language. Indeed, under colonialism, the first form of human destitution consists in the fact that the colonizer did not address the colonized. Or when the colonized did address the colonizer, the colonizer did not bother to reply because to reply would have meant to confer a certain human status on the one speaking to him. Under such conditions, the first site of struggle for freedom is therefore the terrain of speech and language. Fanon shows that language is the first instance from which the colonized is excluded. To be excluded from the realm of language is to be excluded from the realm of the human, the realm in which humans are addressed as humans and constituted as such. Under conditions of slavery too, speech and language became the prominent vehicles for the rearrangement of the relationship between human freedom and human essence. Commenting on this dimension of the slave life, Édouard Glissant writes: From the outset, the spoken imposes on the slave its particular syntax. For Caribbean man, the word is first and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech . . . Since speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provocative intensity of the scream. It was taken to be nothing but the call of a wild animal. This is how the dispossessed man organized his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise. (Glissant 1989: 123–24)

XIII At the end of the chapter on “The Commodity” in the section called “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret” of volume 1 of Capital, Marx writes about the commodity’s impossible speech:

Fragile Freedom 21 If the commodity could speak they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. Marx believes neither in the fact nor in the possibility of such speech. But then, long before Glissant, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass recounts the commodity’s screams. In this instance, the shrieking commodity is Douglass’s own aunt forced to utter a degraded speech by her master: I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran faster, there he whipped the longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. (Douglass 1845: Ch. 1)

XIV The scream is precisely the metaphor of the conflicting presence of value and nonvalue contained in the slave. It is the first form of objection to the law of nonvalue, on the path to speech-as-such. To be sure, the scream is not the whole of the voice. It nevertheless opens the way into the knowledge of slavery and the knowledge of freedom. That is why, most of the time, it turns into song—an ecstatic, possessive inability to stop singing. While on their way to the Great House Farm, They would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound;—and as frequently in the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone . . . they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves . . . The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them . . . To those songs

22 Achille Mbembe I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. (Douglass 1845: Ch. 2) Screaming and singing, therefore, as ways of saying. In this case, the singing and the saying are formulated as here I am—the impossibility of keeping silent, which, as Levinas argued, is “the whole scandal of sincerity” (Levinas 2000: 192). In this sincerity, he added, there is witnessing—a witnessing which, contrary to what he believed, presupposes an experience—the experience of violence in the making of the slave and violence as an original generative act equivalent to the statement “I was born” (see Hartman 1997). This experience also attests the spectacular character of black suffering, such is the ease with which, at least according to Douglass, these scenes were usually reiterated, and the casualness with which they were enacted, with the consequent routine display of the slave’s ravaged body.

XV Let us leave the plantation and consider another moment of the Western black experience—the Jim Crow period after the Reconstruction (see Du Bois 1998 [1935]). In those years of American history, political disenfranchisement is not only enacted by the use of violence in general and the terror aroused by the threat of lynching in particular. In fact, much of the black imagination of freedom takes the form of a meditation on the deployment of death as a form of coercion. Indeed, it is not simply that impediments to freedom are deliberately placed, are socially generated and generate, in turn, specific forms of life characterized by un-freedom and general incapacity. The main barrier to freedom in those years is the very ubiquitousness of the threat of death itself. In the Jim Crow configuration, the black subject is literally produced by the threat of death—a threat that is constant yet unpredictable. The innermost reaches of his or her subjectivity are penetrated and percolated by the fear of death. As Abdul JanMohamed suggests in The Death-Bound-Subject (2005), the work of Richard Wright epitomizes this moment. But this work is itself part of a wellestablished tradition that includes the earliest slave narratives (Equiano reports of slaves being buried alive; Douglass tells of his battle with Covey, the negrobreaker, and so on). This tradition undergoes renewed articulations in a remarkable cluster of feminist novels such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975). The same tradition is reconceptualized in Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying (1993) and John Edgar Wideman’s The Lynchers (1973). It then reappears in the lyrics of rappers such as

Fragile Freedom 23 Tupac Shakur and Biggie, or the prison culture that permeates much of contemporary African American life. More fundamentally, it is enforced by the overwhelming reality that to be black in America is to live under a conditionally commuted death sentence— under death row (see Abu-Jamal 1996 and Gilmore 2007). In this context, the absolutely total subservience of blacks is not only demanded but policed by the threat of death.

XVI Before I delve into Richard Wright’s critique of freedom, it may be useful to return briefly to what I characterized as the deeper reaches of Western understanding of freedom. Hegel’s phenomenology of the master–slave dialectics here comes to mind. But also Heidegger’s existential analysis of death. To be sure, Hegel strenuously refuses to consider the economic aspects of slavery. He uncritically valorizes “work” as the singular avenue through which the slave can supposedly find his freedom. On the other hand, in the Heideggerian analysis of death, one is struck by the reduction of human time to being-towarddeath (Heidegger 2008 [1927]). Heidegger considers that man’s humanity and time are only in the sense of his being-toward-death. The relationship to this being-toward-death is, for him, the true relationship on the basis of which freedom can be understood. But freedom, for Heidegger, is to a large extent but another name for the anxiety of nothingness. Since there is no eternity, the tragic character of finite existence remains, and time has no other meaning than to-be-toward-death. In time as in freedom, there is an essential disappointment. And as long as this is the case, what we call “Man” lives in the obscurity that is his share of facticity. So, for both Hegel and Heidegger, death is the fundamental horizon that constitutes the structure of life—and therefore of freedom.

XVII We find a very similar way of posing the problem of freedom in variants of black thought. Since death (Hegel’s Absolute Master) is brought by another, the problem of freedom in black thought is obviously rendered in terms of the ownership of death. To be free in the world of the slave, in other words, is to be able to recognize one’s death as one’s own most valuable possession, that is to embrace it as a property of one’s own subjectivity. It is precisely the slave’s ability to actualize his potential death that permits him or her to find the exit that leads to his or her freedom. In other words, the road to freedom is revealed precisely by the slave’s ability

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to recognize that while the master can appropriate the value of his or her labor, even the value of his or her life, the only thing that the master cannot appropriate is the use-value of his or her actual death. The master and the slave prove themselves and each other through a life-anddeath struggle. For Hegel, the master who wins the initial stages of this struggle confines the slave to a mode of “living death” (1997: 111–19).

XVIII Paul Gilroy has already drawn our attention to the value and agency of death for the slave: “the slave actively prefers the possibility of death to the continuing condition of inhumanity on which plantation slavery depends” (1993: 63). This is akin to what Steve Biko called a “method of death” in I Write What I Like: “You are either alive and proud or you are dead,” he said: And when you are dead, you can’t care anyway. And your method of death can itself be a politicizing thing. So you die in the riots. For a hell of a lot of them [his friends in the anti-apartheid struggle], in fact, there’s really nothing to lose—almost literally, given the kind of situation that they come from. So if you can overcome the personal fear of death, which is a highly irrational thing, then you are on your way [to freedom]. (Biko 1987: 152–53) The will to be free therefore entails a preparation to death, in the sense in which Nelson Mandela spoke of an “ideal for which I am prepared to die” (1994: 322).

XIX Then, there is that other road to freedom that takes the form of killing the master or, under colonial rule, the settler. For Frantz Fanon, the colony is such a scene. In the colony, race is the privileged site of all phantasmal activity. It is in its name that the power to kill or to civilize is exerted. To kill or civilize, moreover, are quite interchangeable. Exercised by the settler, the power to kill always hides behind the pantomime of the law. Because colonial law is the daughter of violence, concealing its primal foundation—the desire to murder. Under these conditions, Fanon argues that life and freedom are not pregiven. Life is a trial of the self and of the world. The politics of freedom is that by which one tears oneself out of one’s historical conditions, beginning with race. And in refusing to let oneself be shut up in the gaze of the other, one works to create the conditions by which history remains always open and the subject never closed. The labor of life, he asserts, is from one end to the other a totalizing and

Fragile Freedom 25 “violent praxis” in the midst of a “great chain,” “a great violent organism” (Fanon 2005: 50).

XX To pose the problem of life in these terms—to so tightly articulate the politics of life and the politics of enmity—forces us to discuss the status of death as such, or more precisely, of death’s life or the life of death in Fanon’s imagination of freedom. Fanon holds that the historical event par excellence is the act of taking life and giving death. In his eyes, the taking of the enemy’s life in the context of absolute subjection and abjection owed to race is the privileged dialect of history, the language of becoming-subject, or, as he himself puts it, “the absolute practice.” For him, in such contexts, one attains the status of a true subject in the act in which he or she transcends the inherent fear of taking not one’s own life, as in Richard Wright’s critique, but the settler’s life. In this context, giving death is clearly linked to enmity. To live upright is to harness, for oneself, the power of giving death that the settler tries to monopolize. Indeed, to give death to the settler is, for him, a politico-ethical responsibility. For the colonized, he maintains, “life can only arise out of the decomposing cadaver of the settler” (Fanon 2005: 89). To give one’s life for the sake of freedom, or still to kill the settler, is to be born into freedom, he concludes.

XXI I would now like to consider briefly another version of freedom in which freedom is understood as the restitution of manhood. Today, we know that the everyday structures of gender domination that emerged in the process of racial domination tended to replicate the routine of racial brutality toward black men. Whether in South Africa or in the United States of America, the war between the races was constructed as a war between men, but a war in which the main assets were women’s bodies. Women’s bodies were themselves imagined as territories to be invaded, protected against the enemy, or, when lost to the latter, to be won back. At stake in these racist states was therefore the body as a territory of male power. The body was what gave substance to race and what marked the limits of territorialization.

XXII Reflecting particularly on reproduction in bondage in Killing the Black Body (1998), Dorothy Roberts has shown how the control of black procreation not only

26 Achille Mbembe helped to sustain slavery but was also a central aspect of white subjugation of African people in America. Critical to the dehumanization of slaves was the capitalization of black women’s wombs. Two forms of sexual violation were particularly strategic in the process by which black female slaves were disowned of their personhood. The first was rape by the white master. As a matter of fact, sexual terror under slavery was a means to subjugate both black women and black men. Significant in this regard was the fact that in addition to the rape of black women, the ownership of the body of the white female by the white master became the terrain on which to lynch the black male. As shown by Roberts, white sexual violence not only deprived black women of control over their own bodies but also attacked black men’s masculinity by challenging their ability to protect black women.

XXIII The second form of sexual violation was the practice of breeding. The latter consisted in compelling slaves considered “prime stock” to mate in the hope of producing children especially suited for labor or for sale. Men of exceptional physical strength could be rented as studs. As evidenced by the practice of lynching, the paradox of the black male body and black sexuality was that the black male body was seen as a site of threat and confrontation while black sexuality was a site of envy and fear. Precisely because the black male body was perceived as a threat, it had to be regulated and positioned in the juridical, economic, and sociopolitical order. As a way of internalizing white supremacy, it had to be isolated from a sense of anything but its own vulnerability and abjection. It had to be trapped in occupied and outlawed spaces. But the fact of it being trapped in occupied zones and subjected to trials of humiliation and eventually of death had to do with an even darker ritual, the ceremonial of lynching—the ultimate figure of castration and a cruel form of negative breeding. Such was the logic of calculated destruction of black manhood under early and late modern regimes of racialized sovereignty. This is one of the reasons why in most narratives of black emancipation, the “birthing of the nation” is almost always akin to the “birthing of manhood.” If love is involved at all in this process, it almost always takes the form of an angry love, itself linked to the memory of a body on the Cross.

XXIV As shown by Robert Carr in Black Nationalism in the New World (2002), it is in this context that the attempt to step outside the white man’s law and the project of

Fragile Freedom 27 becoming a law unto oneself almost seem to entail, first and foremost, a confrontation with one’s own body. But because nationalism conceptualizes power as a masculinist prerogative and firmly inscribes resistance in the framework of a war between men, to wrestle one’s body from the property of a racist state or to confront it as an irretrievably corporeal and physical phenomenon is often reduced to a mere recapturing of one’s lost balls. It is evident that in such a calculus of manhood, women’s bodies are still assigned to the status of territories as well as superfluous and interchangeable assets. We find a similar paradox in Fanon. The latter is trying to bring down a version of man and to bring out another. In so doing, he advocates a specific cultural formation of the human that is preeminently masculinist. His demand is a demand for a restitution of masculinism as well as an effort to query whether the kind of human to come might be posited beyond the strictures of gender.

XXV Finally, there is a long established tradition of black thought that locates freedom in the realm of aesthetics. This is a kind of freedom we could call originary freedom. Aesthetics, in this sense, appears as the domain where we make the experience of the multiple powers of the human mind and of the ways in which these powers appeal to different modes of cognition simultaneously: reason, understanding, emotion, pleasure, sympathy. Here, freedom consists primarily in the will to recognize oneself as free. This implies the conscious cultivation of a deep structure of self-relationality. For Léopold Senghor in particular, there are three areas which manifest this deep structure of self-relationality or originary freedom. The first has to do with music/ dance/poetry or, as he calls it, the domain of syncopated imagination (see Senghor 1964).

XXVI The kind of syncopation he has in mind does not take place independently of all syntax. In fact, in its pulsation it assembles, establishes, and extends a rhythm. It offers a grammar on the edge of language. In the syncopated imagination, Senghor argues, the figure figures itself, the form forms itself for itself. In figuring itself, in forming itself for itself, it constitutes a trace, an image. It makes a world. To do this, it has to detach itself from limitation while anticipating its own advent. The politics of freedom therefore becomes the politics of anticipation. Aesthetic practice becomes the text of that anticipation.

28 Achille Mbembe

XXVII The second area has to do with “the beautiful-as-such.” For Senghor, the beautiful is not simply a quality. It has also to do of course with pleasure. But more importantly, what the beautiful reveals is fragility, instability, and lability. Freedom is as precarious as the beautiful. That is why, for Senghor, it belongs to the order of “the gift.” The last area has to do with joy. Senghor defines joy as the “trembling of deliverance” and the moment when we face “the extremity of being.” To be sure, joy can also express pain and sorrow. In this case, it is not about appeasement, nor is freedom about appeasement. Instead, joy makes being felt and shared, and the same is true for freedom. There is freedom to the extent that it is felt and shared. Finally, joy is intimately related to visions about the end. “God be praised that it has come at last,” writes Frederick Douglass in My Bondage and My Freedom: “The apocalyptic trumpet has sounded its clearest note,” he comments after the Emancipation Proclamation. And he adds: It made all other words cheap. It seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed. The very thought of being set at liberty and having no more auction blocks, no more separation of parents and children was so heart-gladdening that scores of colored people literally fell dead with joy. It was indeed a time of times and a half-time. Nothing like it will ever be seen again in this life. (Douglass 2003 [1855])

XXVIII To go back to Fanon in conclusion, his work heralds a moment in black thought when the idea of freedom, or at least the quest for freedom, is conceived of as an ascetic practice. In fact, Fanon’s entire oeuvre can be read as a manual or guide to the art of freedom—the art of freedom as a spiritual and ascetic practice. It is a set of instructions in the art of living counter to all forms of colonialisms and therefore coercion [see C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins: “without coercion of the natives how could the colony exist?” (1989: 3)]. What Fanon also understands is the fact that the meaning of freedom in the black experience is rooted in the desire or the will to live. In order to fully come to terms with the extent to which the will to live is central to Fanon’s definition of freedom, we need to read Fanon against Richard Wright. More than any other black writer, Richard Wright is the author who describes in the most haunting way the imminent and ubiquitous threat of death that is so crucial to the biopolitical operations of racialized forms of sovereignty. He shows how, in such conditions, the liberal distinction between being “unfree” and “unable” as that which counts as a barrier to freedom does not hold.

Fragile Freedom 29 This will to live is not akin to the politics of self-preservation if only because the latter has nothing to do with the project of freedom. As has been made clear, the politics of self-preservation is that which prevails in a state of war in so far as the state of war portends the dissolution of any kind of civil relation. Selfpreservation as such is not a moral fact. As a primordial fact, it is outside moral normativity. Strictly speaking, normalizing everything through destruction— which is the real name of the politics of self-preservation—does not pertain to the realm of freedom. It is but a moment of pure violence, the transformation of everything, of oneself and others into instruments, the absence of any project other than self-perpetuation. It is also a practice of perseverance and a disposition towards others—the encounter of the self with another. But this is an encounter that closes the door to the death drive; to the possibility of destruction in the hands of someone else’s will and to the possibility of self-destruction. In short, it is an encounter that opens wide the potential of affirmation of life—an encounter in which death itself is ordained to the multiplication of life. We therefore have to be explicit about what the absence of constraints means historically. In the context of the dialectics of the master and the slave, the major external constraint is that of death. In such circumstances, the revocation of external constraints is akin to letting be. The original meaning of freedom, therefore, has to do with letting human beings be the human beings that they are meant to be. And to let human beings be the human beings that they are meant to be, for Fanon, means to let them engage themselves with the openness into which every human being is called upon to stand. The first definition (freedom as the absence of external constraints) clearly indicates that freedom is first and foremost a relational and contextual practice, that is, a practice that always takes shape in opposition to whatever is locally conceived as un-freedom (in our case, slavery, colonialism, apartheid). This is why, to a large extent, freedom is always freedom from something. This is also why, regardless of how it is conceptualized, freedom is not a state of being or a quality one possesses once for all, but a mode of activity, a praxis. Indeed in black experience, freedom has been of necessity the outcome of a specific kind of struggle—the struggle of becoming. As Fanon shows, the goal of freedom is the perpetuation and amelioration of the conditions that make this struggle possible—something which includes the means by which the self creates itself (self-creation, self-invention). This is why he referred to freedom as an épreuve sur soi, an endless trial that presupposes a certain ethics of the self, a certain way of caring for the self, and a certain way of interpreting the self, of becoming who one is (self-transformation) (Fanon 1967 [1952]).

30 Achille Mbembe

Bibliography Abu-Jamal, M. (1996) Live from Death Row, New York: Harper Perennial. Arendt, H. (2006 [1968]) “What is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future, New York: Penguin. Berlin, I. (1969) “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty, London: Oxford University Press. Best, S. M. (2004) The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Biko, S. (1987) I Write What I Like, Oxford: Heinemann. Brown, W. (1995) States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Carr, R. (2002) Black Nationalism in the New World: Reading the African-American and West Indian Experience, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Césaire, A. (1972 [1955]) Discourse on Colonialism, trans. J. Pinkham, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Online. Available: http://www.bandung2.co.uk/Books/ Files/Politics/Discourse%20on%20Colonialism.pdf (accessed August 28, 2010). Douglass, F. (1845) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself, Boston, MA: The Anti-slavery Office. Online. Available: http://sunsite. berkeley.edu/Literature/Douglass/Autobiography/ (accessed August 28, 2010). —— (2003 [1855]) My Bondage and My Freedom, London: Penguin Classics. Online. Available: http://www.online-literature.com/frederick_douglass/bondage_freedom/ (accessed August 28, 2010). Du Bois, W. E. B. (1998 [1935]) Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880, New York: Free Press. Fanon, F. (1967 [1952]) Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press. —— (2005 [1963]) The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press. Foucault, M. (1988 [1984]) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, New York: Vintage. Gilmore, R. W. (2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso. Glissant, É. (1989) Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. M. Dash, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Hartman, S. (1997) Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, New York: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1997 [1807]) Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit, trans. J. B. Baillie. Online. Available: http://www.gwfhegel.org/PhenText/compare.html (accessed August 28, 2010). Heidegger, M. (2008 [1927]) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper Perennial. Hirschmann, N. (2003) The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. James, C. L. R. (1989 [1938]) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, New York: Vintage Books.

Fragile Freedom 31 JanMohammed, A. (2005) The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Levinas, E. (2000) God, Death, and Time, trans. B. Bergo, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Locke, J. (1690) The Second Treatise of Civil Government. Online. Available: http://www. constitution.org/jl/2ndtreat.htm (accessed August 28, 2010). MacKinnon, C. (1987) Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mandela, N. (1994) Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company. Marx, K. (1999 [1867]) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels. Online (Marx/Engels Internet Archive). Available: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867–c1/ (accessed August 28, 2010). Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Moten, F. (2003) In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, J.-L. (1993 [1988]) The Experience of Freedom, trans. B. McDonald, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pettit, P. (1997) Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. (1993) Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press. —— (1999 [1971]) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roberts, D. (1998) Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, New York: Vintage. Rousseau, J.-J. (1968 [1762]) The Social Contract, trans. M. Cranston, London: Penguin. Senghor, L. S. (1964) Liberté 1: Négritude et humanisme, Paris: Le Seuil, 1964. Skinner, Q. R. D. (1998) Liberty Before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spitz, J.-F. (1995) La liberté politique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Viroli, M. (2002 [1999]) Republicanism, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Weber, M. (1904–5) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Online. Available: http://www.ne.jp/asahi/moriyuki/abukuma/weber/world/ethic/pro_eth_frame. html (accessed August 28, 2010).

Part One

Resisting History and Colonialism

1

Where to Point the Spears? ALEXIS WRIGHT

Where to point the spears? Let me warn you that I do not for one moment believe that the Indigenous people of Australia are standing around right now, wondering where to aim their spears. The art of the hunt—the skill of locating the target, aiming and firing spears metaphorically speaking—was the core activity of our political strategy against the broad scale attack on Indigenous rights by Australian governments throughout the last decades of the twentieth century. There is much that Indigenous people have lost to the continuous attack on the rights of our culture to exist, our dignity, and our wellbeing, by governments still guided by the principles of colonialism. However, we have not lost sight of the spirit of the hunt that has grown within us, and is an essential part of our identity—of who we are. Our knowledge of hunting and gathering is at the forefront of our incredible survival, because these skills are an intrinsic part of our culture of stories and the means by which, even in the modern world, we can nourish our minds. Even though our voices have been stifl ed by the dominating media, which have intimidated our free speech on issues that affect us by belittling our ability of self- determination and questioning the right of our culture to exist, there are many of us who are very fortunate indeed to still be able to practice the wondrous art of hunting and gathering traditional bush tucker, and to learn, or be the learned of our own universities in the vast lands and seas of the ancestral domain of Indigenous nations across the continent, where the knowledge of our culture has been stored for countless millennia. It is more victory to us that a very high percentage of a half million Aboriginal people in Australia have been able to hold on to a spiritual and emotional attachment to their land, environment, and people through understanding the ancient knowledge of our culture, and have still retained the spirit to hunt. I believe that this is true even if the pressures of the ongoing process of colonization over two centuries have created difficulties—or the

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impossibility for many Indigenous people to continue to have a very close, physical relationship to their land—and, as a consequence, have produced disharmony in the relationship of the stories of landscape of the heart, soul, and mind to traditional land. This strong feature of our humanity has occupied a good deal of my concentration in my writing: this meaning of hunting and gathering in the home within, what is happening in the land of the mind. This is the country of our oldest love and of our strong passion for the ancient, where the stories of all times nourish and create the contours of this terrain, which at the same time closely connects the sacredness of attachment to traditional land. It is in landscapes that the principles of culture are contained, maintained, renewed, replenished, and transferred through a constant process of retracing and recital of stories. This is also about the art of the story, to shed new light and understanding, and resembles the hunter or gatherer moving through a legacy of stories that are interlocking all that can be or must be remembered, to keep whole the country of the mind. The catch is great for those who have their internal and external worlds securely connected, but, for others, the catch is small. What I believe is kept alive, as we strive to retain a closeness to the beliefs and principles of culture, is that this knowledge of the ancient methods of storytelling is closely related to skills associated with hunting and gathering, and can be seen, for instance, in senior traditional Aboriginal men and women in countries like Central Australia. Their stories are a deeply religious unity of mind and soul, inseparable from a spiritual land, and they are able to physically locate—even in featureless desert places not frequently visited—hundreds of sacred and important sites in the ancestral estate. When I worked with some of these important senior people in Aboriginal law over a number of years, they were exploring how to extend their rights over land they had won back into their care after long battles through the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. What they sought to do was to establish an Australian law that safeguarded Indigenous rights in the constitutions of Northern Territory and Australian governments. They live to the measure contained in the ancient stories of their traditional lands and, within this framework, they were interested in creating a story for the future that included recognition of Aboriginal law as the right direction for their people to create a future, and where responsibility also came from the long relationship with the knowledge and wisdom from the ancient world. In the work that we did together, they always stated very clearly, and insisted, that we already have our own constitutions which are our own laws, and that we have been governing ourselves since the beginning of time. It is true that they do govern their spiritual world, which is a very important aspect of why the stories, which are also the ancient scriptures, laws, and land title

Where to Point the Spears?

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deeds, are continually retold. Australian governments and their policymakers might do well to come to terms with the necessity of working with the Aboriginal government, instead of pushing against it from the outside with policies and bureaucratic initiatives that always eventually seem to come to no good. I wanted to write in a way that was somewhere near to this reality of Indigenous sovereignty of the mind, and how skilled people of this mind were in the massively difficult challenge of survival. This uncharted place in Australian literature was the exact place that I wanted to explore in a novel like Carpentaria (2006). If you look at the Aboriginal people, or Anangu as they call themselves in the Central Australia Western Desert, their word Tjukurrpa is related to story, and given a meaning by K. Hansen and L. Hansen’s Pintupi/Luritja Dictionary (1992) to include the following:

Tjukurrpa n. Dreaming; dream time; birth dreaming; a dreaming is any mythical hero from the distant past concerning which there are stories and songs, these heroes are understood to be responsible for the creation of physical features throughout the land; dream time is the time when these heroes and the physical features came into being etc. I have worked on the deep causes of Indigenous Injury in Central Australia in the early 1990s, and the research in communities in the region was continued by Jeff Hulcombe, a deeply respected man in this area of Australia, who has dedicated many years of his adult life to working with family communities in the Western Desert. In his 2006 final report he explains that Tjukurrpa can simply mean any story about the past or current events, but in the fullest sense of the word, the parable-like stories, or those of the dreaming, provide the spiritual, philosophic, and logical rationale of Anangu existence. Tjukurrpa is the bedrock of Anangu knowledge, the immovable foundation of Anangu being. He also makes clear that what happens through the revitalizing process of the story is its re-reading, for knowledge to be passed on, and while the land survives so does the Tjukurrpa which is inscribed into it. This is what provides the philosophical, spiritual, and moral foundation of Anangu. A cultural story map includes everything you see of and in the land, sea, and skies as Anangu see it, or as any other Aboriginal people across the country visualize the stories that have been given to them, and also represents the production and maintenance of literature on a grand scale since ancient times. It is a literature that is not only inscribed into the land, or visibly painted on, or chiseled into rock, but it is written in the mind. This method of story keeping is the spearhead of culture, and it closely resembles the skills of our hunter

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and gatherer people who lived nomadically in a close spiritual relationship with the land. So, it comes as no surprise to me that everywhere I have been throughout contemporary Indigenous Australia, there has been an overwhelming desire to retrace many of our stories, particularly about people and the contemporary situation, through the written form of literature. The original question I asked myself when I was planning to write Carpentaria was how any Aboriginal person could live with a sense of integrity in contemporary Australia. Then, I suppose I was left with two words—integrity and hope—or, perhaps, the hope of integrity. This led to the question of how integrity is defined—what makes someone feel that they have integrity, or how we can weigh the measure of personal integrity in a powerful culture in the often powerless reality of our lives. I somehow decided that I could explore these questions in imaginative storytelling by developing a model of the way ancient Indigenous beliefs are retraced and retold in the mind of the novel’s characters. If I found anything at all, it was that the heart of integrity of the unity of soul/heart/mind with land creates different responses in different characters, but even so, each character had a prevailing belief in the strength of their own integrity to encounter the very difficult tasks created by the novel. Interestingly, I do not think that any of the characters ever expressed the desire and hope of survival, but conduct themselves like islands of possibility, and I can see there is an island mentality in Australia as a country, as a region, and between boundaries, people, relationships, and even in ideas such as ownership of history. In Carpentaria a child of the driest grasses in the world asks the old people whether they know what the word “hope” means. The elders, too busy considering the perils of time lost, finally answer that hope is found in stories. Stories that have kept us alive, regardless of whatever else might happen to us. This leads to a second question, which is how to understand the way we live with the stories of all times, given that the more contemporary stories of oppression are being created too quickly and more frequently. I wanted to understand whether and how the negative impact of these stories bombards the ancient story world. Which will prevail in the end? Will it be the lost spirits from other worlds, or the spirits that belong to this world? Can both be reconciled? I think these questions are very relevant and ought to be something to focus on when political questions about assimilation are mooted, as they have been in Australia from time to time without due consideration to the negative impact on the right of the Indigenous culture to exist. I then had to think about how to write a novel where all stories come alive, to demonstrate somehow the sovereignty of mind in the characters, a place where the “fugitive future” is being lived through the imagination—an idea that I found was explored by the Irish writers Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane, but which in


39

this case was being imagined from one’s own idea of ancient storytelling principles. I tried to work with this idea through the creation of Indigenous heroes, as a way of understanding through fiction the significance of the lives of the characters, and as lived with or through the ancestral land and sea spiritual creation heroes that I also created. Some people ask: why doesn’t the novel concentrate on the terrible realities of the Indigenous world, which make up the current public face of Aboriginal Australia? While Carpentaria did not shy away from the realities of the contemporary world of Indigenous people, I was not interested in retracing and documenting the result of the damage created by the failed policies of Australian governments that continue to tie up the lives, work, and thinking of thousands of Aboriginal people in Australia. The question that might be posed is, who should take responsibility for the psychologically injured framework of our humanity? I do not accept nor take the responsibility for what has not been of our creation. I have done this in the past, but I now feel that it is not my role to document the paralyzed state of this mess. I understand the limitations of my capacity and time to be a writer, and know that I should use this time to explore questions that might contribute to our own understanding of the core of our selves. I was not bowing to an expectation that I can only look through the glare of the narrow prism of colonialism to infinity. My novel is set around a small fictional town called Desperance in the Gulf of Carpentaria, but it could be any town, particularly of northern Australia. It is a town that most Australians can recall, or feel that they know because they have experienced this kind of town, or they already have a vision of it: the familiarity of such place already exists in the national psyche of Australia. Desperance is a town where people are physically and physiologically separated by race, voluntarily perhaps, and they watch each other. When I was researching my book Grog War in Tennant Creek in 1997, I was told by a white man I had interviewed that he knew what Aboriginal people do all the time, because he watched them from the top of the hill. I used his statement at the beginning of that book. In Carpentaria I searched until I reached the conclusion that the novel should be narrated by the voices of the old people who are telling a story with compassion and humor to the spirits of the land, about how their people are traveling in life in today’s world. It is the old people, the elders, some of the poorest people in the world, who sit in the tall grass and watch and tell with linguistic freedom the story of old Australian families hidden behind a common name, like Smith. They have become scientify in their understanding of the importance of their words, which are being beamed away by satellite, translated into proper English and discussed on the other side of the world in the boardrooms of the multinational mining company that

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is plotting against them. The old people are not short of praising men of ambition who strive for newfangled ideas like reconciliation in Australia—like the town clerk L. Valance (an outsider), who strives to create the perfect world of race harmony in Desperance and rings the town bell, hoping the Holy Trinity in the storm clouds will give the poor unfortunate Aboriginal people the strength to walk to town, where they would only be there to hear criticism about them. We were certainly being positioned to the tolling bells of assimilation through the first years of the new millennium. In the Australian media we wore the same yolk given to us in 1788, as being barely human enough to be capable of “self- determination” or speaking for ourselves. Carpentaria is about hunting and gathering, and you might recognize the metaphor in the value of gathering from the bee’s story in Jonathan Swift’s The Battle of the Books, where the Ancients say that all that they have was only achieved through “infinite labour and search, and ranging through every corner of nature . . . to till our hives with honey and wax,” to bring to mankind “sweetness and light.” I have hunted endlessly and gathered from all the finest literary flowers across the world to try to understand from other writers how to write with the freedom of my own imagination. I was interested in the connections I could find in the literature of writers Indigenous to the countries described in their writing and their understanding of the complexity of time inherited from a long, ancient tradition. I looked at some of the best writers from European countries, Irish writers, the French Caribbean, South American, Indian, Asian, and African writers. I still search. For example, I recently had the great pleasure of meeting in India the highly respected Hindi poet and long time promoter of culture Ashok Vajpeyi. Ashok describes the value of literature as being necessary for its intellectual toughness, moral responsibility, and self- questioning, because it is through literature that we can once again meet ourselves in what he described as “the other reality, the other republic of imagination.” I am interested in this idea of the reality of imagination, or the terrain of the other home place that creates possibilities as well as barriers, and why it is necessary to find a way of tracking, tracing, and backtracking to create literature that might be able to give readers a chance to meet people who are or who might start journeying more frequently to this other home, out of necessity perhaps, and who are even becoming their own imagination. I am reminded of the work of Ngangkari, or traditional healers of Central Australia, who say that they travel the land at night, journeying far away, to visit relatives and sick people, and to school the minds of children whom they have chosen to follow them in the art of traditional healing. I like the idea of exploring ideas that can build new links or branches


41

from our own traditions. The Sarod and Indian classical music master Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, one of the most charismatic performers of Indian ragas, has described his urge to create new ragas as still being traditional, but using the platform of his creativity for new explorations, and not seeing tradition as a limiting force. Ali Khan’s music contains the same “genes” as the parent music. On the other hand, when I listen to the literature of the traditional Indian classical music called Jugal- gaan, now called a “duel of difference,” that musicians like Ali Khan and Ravi Shankar have performed in their raga music, I feel the symmetrical perfection of blending a musical story told through the imagination. This was the kind of seamlessness I wanted to create by blending time, voice, rhythm, and style of culture, as I describe the story world of Carpentaria, trying to replicate a helix of divided strands forever moving, entwining all stories together, just like a lyrebird is capable of singing several songs at once. While writing this novel, I hoped to come to some understanding of how we have continued to live with antiquity as a state of mind. I am able to feel the spiritual antiquity of our culture in a river with an ancient story in our traditional country, and I feel the power of this story, and similar stories from our land. The thought of being close to something so ancient and still alive, and living in the essence of our people, leaves a more enduring image of unfathomable survival and beauty, than of myself as being simply a human presence, just as fleeting as my ancestors had once lived. I began to think about what it means to be a spiritual ancestor. What might this ancestor look like, and how its stories, the stories that the old people tell and are the framework of Aboriginal Law, can be true, or do become truth. I remember once an old man telling me a story about a crashed, abandoned car left in the dry grass next to the road. He said it was like that because the young men who owned the car had refused to give him a lift home when he had asked them to, and they had been taught a lesson. This story might require detailed examination of the clash between the modern and the ancient worlds, but the moral lesson from the ancestor who destroyed the car was that it was irresponsible to refuse an elder a lift home. People who do not know me, or my work, often ask me whether I feel restrained by writing about the world of Indigenous people. I think what is meant by the question is that the Indigenous world is a sad and sorry place. This is a reality, and it can be a reality that makes a jail for the mind. It does. However, there is also a lot of encouragement and hard work happening in the Indigenous world of Australia. It can be like being in a bog of sadness and unworthy action to rectify the causes of so much sorrow. It can be a place where the mind is so submerged it cannot lift itself up and look past the wall it has built around its small enclosure. This can be a narrow- minded world that

42 Alexis Wright is maintained that way in order to protect itself, and where there is no heart to embrace differences cropping up on the narrow horizon. Yet, here also lives the hunter of the old world of wonder and imagination, who drew his strength from questioning how the fish were traveling. Now, instead, he stays in his coop created for him by the largess of indifference to whether he survives or not, while guarding this wall that should not exist, even across the invisible boundary of your neighbor. I think this way of colonized thinking is a death trap that ensures that there is no real joy coming from the imagination, and those who cannot imagine their own future have let their future die. I actually feel liberated because I have tried to write from the difficult questions I am asking of the world I inhabit. I think I have been able to find a place in my imagination where I can live and work with characters like Mozzie Fishman, Norm Phantom, Angel Day, and Elias Smith. Let them live and point to something in ourselves that we might either like or dislike, but that can be embraced as life. It has given me a chance to create something of my own imagination, and that is breaking through the mould of expectation. I think that I have been able to reach a point where I can imagine a world from the “hell that is within,” as I believe was once said by Nietzsche. It is not all scorched earth in the mind. The hunter within is still able to trace the spiritual terrains of his country and she will still gather from the gardens of our bush, and there will still be the guardians of our world. I would like to see the idea of the exploring imagination, freedom of thought, and examining of questions that we want to ask ourselves as being the key for the future of our people, not simply a life that is imaged by others developing narrow thinking programs and targets for our communities. It is possible to imagine difference, and it is possible to live the opposite of being shackled.

2

The Right to Resist Robert J. C. Young

Do we have a right to resist? While the question of rights and human rights has been extensively discussed and theorized in the human rights field in recent years, within postcolonial theory, resistance as a category and as a practice has been less frequently theorized and interrogated.1 This has often surprised me in so far as resistance is a concept that is especially prized within postcolonial theory. Indeed, postcolonial theory assumes the right to resist as a sine qua non of its political perspective—perhaps its being a right that is so universally assumed explains the lack of interrogation. Looking for and highlighting moments of resistance within colonial discourse could be said to have been one of the major tasks of colonial discourse analysis. You often feel in an analysis of a literary text from the past, or a historical incident, that there is an assumption that you have only to retrieve resistance for your job to be done. Your task: to read a text and find evidence of resistance that goes against the triumphal narrative of imperialism. Having found its expression or, at the very least, evidence of some form of agency, your task is complete. The subaltern has spoken, the subaltern has resisted. I’m not sure if anyone actually practices colonial discourse analysis any more, but we could think of Barbara Harlow’s book Resistance Literature (1987) as an important example of this mode. What, though, does resistance literature actually resist? The fact that literature is transtemporal makes its form of resistance very different from the habitual practices of political and military resistance which are responses to immediate formations of power. This means that resistance literature will necessarily tend to be ideological or counter-hegemonic rather than a form of everyday political intervention, though there are some novels—Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) or NgŨgĩ wa Thiong'o’s Matigari (1989)—or literatures such as Palestinian literature since 1948, that manage to be both (Kanafani 1982). On occasion literary texts will be subsequently used and appropriated as a form of resistant political intervention: the now-terminated website of the Sri Lankan Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) (tamilnation.org) closes its valedictory

44 Robert J. C. Young page not with a lyric from M.I.A. but by quoting the whole of Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard” (1751). The concept of resistance literature leaves open the larger question, however, of resistance itself and whether resistance forms are a valid political practice in any context or power structure. Are all forms of resistance equally acceptable? For example, looking at the general political conservatism of the English literary tradition, we could say that much literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth century forms a resistance literature—resistance, that is, to the contemporary progressive forces of liberalism, anarchism, and socialism. The names Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot come to mind. If we go back to the radical tradition, highlighted by Harlow, literary resistance in general seems positive and progressive. Nationalist novels signaling resistance to the colonial state cause us little moral qualm, even if some of them, for example Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938), seem to pose unanswered questions about the destructive violence involved. But what if we transpose this paradigm into the contemporary arena? Dalit literature is probably the most conspicuous form of an active resistance literature in our own time, but it is not one that finds favor with all Indian critics, even those who might be characterized as “postcolonial.” In the context of the sustained critiques of the state formulated by Indian postcolonial theorists, would everyone in postcolonial studies feel equally unambiguous about the assertion of agency in nationalist novels concerned with resistance to postcolonial states—for example, novels from Kashmir or Assam or Manipur or Nagaland that advocated resistance to the Indian State? The idea that the nation should fragment does not seem to follow from the idea of the nation and its fragments. As Toral Gajarawala (2009) has observed of Sudeep Chakravarti’s Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (2008), in documenting the current state of the Naxalites across northern India, Chakravarti has done what Indian literature in English has avoided doing for the last five decades; that is, he investigates (often at the level of daily experience) a political movement that exists outside of the electoral, the parliamentary, and the sanctioned—and poses serious questions about the future of India as a country. On the other hand you could argue that the ideology of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India is formulated as a kind of resistance literature, which aims to convince Indian Hindus that they are still somehow oppressed by the minority of Indian Muslims. Would representations of resistance from any or all of those forty to fifty contemporary groups designated as terrorist by the EU, the US, or the UK (whose list is the longest) appeal in the same way as the resistance to the British colonial state represented in a novel by NgŨgĩ wa Thiong'o? Or to take a contemporary non-literary example, what about Robert Mugabe’s current discourse of resistance to global capitalism which in certain respects invokes the rhetoric of postcolonial Marxist theory, or the resistance formulated in similar terms by the former South African Premier, Thabo Mbeki, to the Western medical discourse

The Right to Resist 45 of treatments for AIDS? Resistance in the past seems safer, easier to read, less complicated. It does not threaten anyone any more. My concern here, however, is not with the complexities of resistance as such, whether detecting it and revalorizing it in the past, or espousing it in the present, as with the more fundamental question of whether we have a generic right to resist, and if so where its foundations lie, and if so what ethical and political issues follow from that. I am going to pass over the question of whether we have a right to have rights, the kind of challenge represented by Alasdair MacIntyre’s strictures on rights discourse altogether (MacIntyre 1981). Let us begin by assuming, with Hannah Arendt, as I do, that we have the right to have rights. So what kind of right would a right to resist consist in? On what basis do we have the right to resist? Would we list it as a fundamental human right? Does it involve the individual or the group, or both equally? From a historical perspective, it could be said that as a general rule every individual or group assumes a right to resist as a natural or inalienable right, just as most people in the West assume that they have such a right to freedom. The distinction between natural and civil rights becomes blurred when we think of the ironies of the song that used to be sung during the time of the British Empire, “Rule Britannia.” It did not seem to occur to the author, the Scotsman James Thompson, that the sentiment that “Britons never never shall be slaves,” asserting their natural rights to freedom and celebrating their resistance to anyone who threatened that freedom, need have as its corollary the idea that others should not be slaves either, or that Britons did not have the right to rule and dominate colonized peoples, thus depriving them of their natural as well as civil rights—a topic the song predictably never broaches. Similarly, the right to resist asserted in the American Declaration of Independence in the name of the natural or “inalienable right” of liberty was not, as is now frequently recalled, also extended to African American slaves on the American plantations or to native Americans. Resistance, like freedom, has been a right that individuals and groups have claimed for themselves, but not necessarily allowed to others. Resistance, we might speculate, never got formulated as a human right because it constitutes in a sense the oldest right of all—the right to defend yourself and preserve your own life, the right that John Locke reformulated as the basis of the right of property, by arguing that your first property is your own body, which you have the right to defend. At the other end of the scale, resistance also involves intra-state conflict. Its earliest use as a linguistic term comes in the context of war: resistance to invasion or military attack. And here we see the rub of it: you have the right, but in the context of a power struggle in which the other—your attacker—recognizes your right only in the sense that he is prepared to use force against you, while he only recognizes your right to freedom if you defeat him. When the Normans invaded England in 1066, it was no good King Harold standing on the beach at Hastings and saying “I have a right to resist.” Resistance in this

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sense is not an abstract right, even under international law, but only a right in the performative, when you actually do it. And by definition you can only claim that right not by the other’s recognition of your claim but by the successful effects of the resistance itself, something that Harold singularly failed to achieve, even if he asserted his rights. Resistance therefore, as the English name of the French Resistance during the Second World War suggests, also belongs to the performative art of war as well as to the discourse of human rights. In legal terms, there are different forms of legitimacy accorded to resistance, bound up in a complex way with the laws of war, which have evolved over the centuries. The laws of war, while implicitly acknowledging the right to resist, codify the conduct of war and the treatment of combatants and non-combatants. De facto, a nation’s right to resist has always been acknowledged as a form of natural law. Military resistance is the right of national sovereignty. Resistance within a state, on the other hand, is governed by strictly defined limits: even when human rights have been violated, in practice armed resistance to power is regarded as illegitimate because, as Max Weber and Walter Benjamin variously remarked, the state holds a monopoly on violence. Within a civil society, resistance is required to follow the established civil channels, such as the law. Within a colonial society, the same rule also applies, even if that society cannot convincingly be described as legitimate. Here we have the gray area of anticolonial struggle—between “terrorists” and “freedom fighters”—in which what is contested is the right to resist and the legitimacy of authority. The anticolonial question then becomes: should resistance follow the protocols allowed by the colonizer, which are very often virtually zero, or should it challenge those protocols altogether through forms of violent resistance? Or should it find altogether other forms of resistance, which was the strategy of Gandhi? This is the direction of argument developed by Homi Bhabha in his article “Signs Taken for Wonders,” in which he narrates an account of resistance by native Indians to an English missionary (Bhabha 1985). Here a group of vegetarian Indians—which means that they must be upper-caste Hindus—reject Christianity on the grounds of its cannibalistic communion service in which participants are obliged to eat Christ’s body and drink his blood. This operates at the level of ideological resistance, measured by the failure of the missionary’s zeal to transform and convert his native subjects, which has to be acknowledged de facto even by the missionary himself. The question that follows from these considerations is a simple one: if resistance is a right, and I think that generally we all assume this right—except for our enemies of course!—does this right authorize all forms and means of resistance? In other words, should we distinguish different levels of resistance in terms of what can be considered justifiable? Do we always have the right to resist “by any means necessary,” as Malcolm X put it? Do all forms of oppression, lack of rights, warrant all forms of resistance, or should there be some sense of correlation

The Right to Resist 47 or measure between them? Should the punishment, so to speak, fit the crime? Should the kind of resistance fit the degree of oppression? Resistance is ambiguous as a term because it covers multiple possibilities: it involves both war and ordinary or regular resistance of politics in civil society against the state. In practice it is impossible to avoid a certain generic resistance that exists in the system anyway, like that to an electric current in any material, Ohm’s law, which defines the relation between power and resistance, or the resistance which prevents the creation of a perfect perpetual motion machine. As Althusser recognized, institutions are the social equivalent of Ohm’s law. Equally it is effectively impossible to deny behavioral practices of resistance by people, as in the Bhabha example, and not just the so-called lying native: resistance from your children, your (silent) class, your audience at a lecture who get restless, querulous, or bored. Only in a dictatorship are we supposed to accept the practice of being lectured at on the assumption that we will all agree with what is being said. But what about in a democracy? Here resistance in itself remains a right, but within limits—in the lecture, for example, the convention of the question period—though paradoxically, in this case an absence of questions represents the most severe form of resistance. Even in a democracy, some forms of civil resistance are forbidden—such as not paying your taxes in protest against the fact that the money is being spent on a war which you regard as illegal. In general, societies only recognize certain forms of rights of resistance, and certainly no extreme ones. Neither a dictatorship nor a democracy recognize violent minority resistance, such as blowing up trains or underground railways full of innocent people, as legitimate. Should we also distinguish between violent struggles against a dictatorship or colonial rule and violent forms of resistance or subversion in a democracy by tiny minority groups who believe they are the vanguard of the revolution, for example, the Brigate Rosse, or the neo-fascist terrorist organization Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari blowing up the train station at Bologna in 1980? Anyone who thinks that Europe was peaceful before 9/11 has a short memory. It was JeanPaul Sartre who, in the context of the semi-civil war of early 1970s France, developed the important moral distinction between violence erupting organically from exploited groups, and violence initiated by isolated sectarian groups that have not arisen from the politics of community (Scriven 1999: 73–78.) Sartre, in fact, was one of the few philosophers who has seriously addressed the ethics of the right to resist. He argued that any violent resistance must be ethically grounded in the whole community that is being oppressed. Here, then, we find an important argument being made about the right to resist: violent resistance can only be justified if the whole community is being oppressed. There is no logical reason why this argument should not be equally deployed for a minority community, particularly in the face of sectarian tyranny enforced by the majority. But what degree of oppression legitimates violent resistance?

48 Robert J. C. Young In general it seems tempting to argue that peaceful forms of resistance are ethical or moral—as opposed to violent resistance, which is unethical. Sartre’s intervention, however, also brings home the fact that generally even violence, like war, always claims an ethical basis—an ultimate good, such as the nation, or a religion, in the name of which violent and unethical practices are committed. The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algeria or the LTTE would be two cases in point. An alternative would be the case of Marx, who rejected ethics as such, that is normative human ethics, as a liberal bourgeois ideology, in the name of a higher ethico-political object, socialism. In general, the Marxist dismissal of bourgeois ethics is not really so different from any other kind of revolutionary ideology, for example the rejection of liberalism, relativism, and the toleration of difference by fundamentalists (of all varieties), where one ethics is rejected in the name of another. Introducing the ethical question into resistance prompts a further question: what position should we take when we sympathize with the cause, or the end, but not the means? Many of those who sympathized with the overall nationalism of the LTTE in Sri Lanka, for example, found their action of blowing up a bus full of mothers and schoolchildren, and then machine-gunning the survivors, totally unacceptable. Where does that leave you? Beyond that, should we, and if so, how can we, construct an ethics of resistance that distinguishes the modes of democracy, dictatorship, and colonial rule from the forces of globalization? And following from that, can there be an ethics that distinguishes between different forms and modes, violent and non-violent, of resistance within these different political contexts? Since Postcolonial Studies has emerged from the history of the anticolonial movements, it ought to be uniquely qualified to address these questions. Not only has it developed out of the longest history of resistance struggles in the modern era, going back five centuries, but that tradition itself also has a long, sophisticated, and impassioned history of debating not the right of resistance as such, which is generally assumed, but the ethics of the right to resist. I therefore want to reconsider that aspect of the anticolonial tradition, and to suggest its continuing relevance for our own times. This is particularly because the anticolonial tradition has for centuries now focused on a particular ethical question within the context of the right to resist, namely the right to use violence or the choice of non-violence. This important distinction within the general category of resistance that was developed during the history of anticolonialism prompts us to ask the question: Should the right to resist always include the domain of the ethics of resistance? What are the ethical grounds for resistance, and what forms might it take? In ethical terms, should we consider some forms of resistance legitimate and others illegitimate? And if so, how would we do so? Starting with Irish resistance to the Act of Union at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the practice of resistance has always been consciously divided

The Right to Resist 49 up between violent or non-violent strategies: “resistance” can involve terrorism or social activism. In anticolonial struggle, this distinction was formulated in terms of violence or armed struggle versus what the great Irish politician Daniel O’Connell called “moral force,” Gandhi Satyagraha, and Nkrumah “non-violent (or positive) action.” This ethical, or pragmatic, tradition has proved one of considerable and enduring power. The contemporary tradition of civil disobedience or resistance—that can be found in the civil rights movements, the anti-apartheid movement, the campaign for nuclear disarmament, the new social movements, and the global anticapitalism movements—is for the most part the heir of the non-violent tradition of the anticolonial movements, which themselves drew on the examples and practices of “old” transnational social movements, such as the Anti-Slave Trade campaign and the Suffragette movement (Young 2009b). Since the 1920s, this tradition has always been centrally identified with the figure of Gandhi, its most successful proponent and the man who put the question of ethics at the center of anticolonial resistance. Despite the success of Irish independence after 1916, to say nothing of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, in the twentieth century Gandhi managed to reestablish non-violent resistance as the most well-known and apparently most effective form of anticolonial endeavor until the time of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The strength of its influence can be seen in the agonized moment in which the African National Congress, which remained in many ways committed to the stance that Gandhi had first elaborated in his South African campaigns, announced, ten days after Fanon’s death in 1961, that it had changed its method of resistance from non-violent to violent means and had formed a military wing named Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). Arguably, the emergence without substantial violence of the postcolonial South African nation owes much to its long tradition of commitment to ethical non-violent forms of politics, even in the face of unethical oppressive practices. In a positive way, therefore, it is also the South African example which prompts us to revisit the question of the ethics of moral versus physical force. What is the relation of the means of liberation, violent or non-violent, to the subsequent fate of the postcolonial nation? Was Hannah Arendt right when she argued that violence only produces more violence?2 In opposition to the Gandhian method, the other tradition of anticolonial struggle, armed struggle, indelibly associated with the antithetical figure of Frantz Fanon, is also still alive and well today. I have already mentioned the LTTE in Sri Lanka: the most substantial extracts of Fanon on-line were formerly to be found on the website tamilnation.org. The first piece of Fanon’s that they displayed was his essay “Concerning Violence,” from the opening of The Wretched of the Earth.3 Similarly, though they do not cite him as explicitly, much of the rhetoric—to say nothing of the practice—of Al-Qaeda appropriates the tradition of Fanon. Originally formulated for an Arab-Berber struggle in Algeria, it has been adapted

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over the years, moving eastwards from its origin in the Mahgreb to the centers of struggle in the Middle East, particularly Egypt and Palestine, but also further westwards in today’s struggle of the Polisario Front and the Sahrawi people against the forces of the King of Morocco, after the latter’s annexation of their homeland in the Western Sahara in 1975. The question of choosing between violence and non-violence as the mode of resistance to oppressive rule has been central to the history and ethical thinking of anticolonial struggle. Ironically, in the context of today’s world, it was the American colonists in 1776 who initiated the modern tradition of violent rebellion versus the colonial power in the name of freedom. Though they were of course in their turn colonizers—the native Americans fought on the side of the British, which is not surprising when you recall that the Declaration of Independence itself describes native Americans as “merciless Indian savages”—the American War of Independence initiated the history of modern violent revolution against colonial rule and was quickly imitated in Haiti against the French, at the end of the century by the Irish in Wolfe Tone’s Rebellion of 1798, and in the early nineteenth century by the South American wars of independence. The text that has come down to us in this context is not so much drawn from debates about the ethics of the move to armed rebellion: the founding document that established the doctrine of the right to use violence against tyrannical colonial or imperial oppression is the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. The bulk of the Declaration amounts to a justification of the extraordinary steps that the colonists took in taking up arms against the British government. The right to resist asserted in the Declaration is essentially based on the claim of tyranny and oppression, and follows the model of the Act of Abjuration declared by the Dutch in 1581 to assert their independence from the Spanish king Philip II: the claim here is that there is a level of political oppression, what we would now call colonial oppression by an external power, that justifies armed rebellion in the name of freedom. The right to resist is invoked in the name of its defence of the inalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The Declaration justifies the violent step of dissolving the bonds with Britain on the grounds that the British king was attempting to impose tyranny in the face of the American colonists’ natural right to freedom: Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide

The Right to Resist 51 new Guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. (Jefferson et al. 1776) The Declaration of Independence then marshals “the facts” at great length to justify the violent rebellion to which it bears witness. The ethics of violent rebellion against the “oppression” of the ruling power are thus effectively justified in the US Declaration of Independence by the Right to Resist. Every subsequent declaration of independence—and there have been around sixty in the modern period, including the Tibetan in 1913, the Israeli in 1948, and the Palestinian in 1988— implicitly asserts the right to resist. One consequence of this was that, as British supporters of the Southern states liked to point out at the time, it was the American Declaration of Independence that in turn offered grounds for the secession of the Confederacy from the Union at the time of the American Civil War. The individual Southern states declared independence between 1860 and 1861. The enduring legacy of 1776 has made it morally difficult for the US to control resisting groups or nations, in so far as the Declaration legitimates violence against the perceived abuse of power. The origins of Fanon’s position are thus to be found in 1776, and all modern forms of armed political resistance find their founding origin in the US rebellion. It was the legacy of the anticolonial movements to foreground an “ethical” means of resistance against a violent one. For O’Connell, it was a pragmatic question; for Gandhi it was both pragmatic and ethical: anticolonial activists should take up a superior, more advanced moral position than that of the West. For Gandhi, to use violence against the West is only to succumb to its own logic of violence. The American Declaration of Independence suggests that resistance is not in itself a right but constitutes the rightful defense of a right, of freedom or of property. This is echoed several centuries later in the UN General Declaration of Human Rights (1948), where resistance is not formulated as a right but rather specified as the very activity that the Declaration is designed to make unnecessary: “Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law . . .” (United Nations 1948). Implicitly therefore, the UN Declaration authorizes or at the very least legitimates resistance and rebellion—“if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion”—if human rights are not protected by the rule of law in any particular state. Such rebellion is therefore authorized if Article 21 of the Declaration,

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which sets out rights and conditions that could never apply to colonial rule, is violated: 1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives. 2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country. 3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures. Under these terms, everyone has the right to resist under colonial rule, though it remains unspecified whether all the rights outlined in the Declaration—cultural rights, for example, or the right of parents to choose their children’s schools— equally legitimate the same degree of rebellion if they are not present. The North and South American examples of resistance by settler colonies, where the settlers seek to sever themselves from the metropole, or from other settler governments, offer relatively simple examples of the claim to the right to resist—they were simply separating themselves from a parent government whose legitimacy they no longer recognized. For the indigenous colonized, things are somewhat different. They can, of course, and often did, claim that the colonizing power has usurped an originary freedom or local autonomous government that existed before colonization, as for example in the Maori Declaration of Independence of 1835. But they also made other arguments. It is one of the ironies of history that the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence of 1945, written by Ho Chi Minh, was quite closely modeled on the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, adding only a slightly different but no less powerful claim, namely that the French should apply the same system of the rights of man, including freedom, to Vietnam as they applied to themselves, especially in the context of their liberation from Nazi rule in the same year. The French were deaf to this argument. What is generally not specified in these statements is what means might be legitimate for “rebellion” to employ. In so far as it involves a refusal of obedience to power, rebellion encompasses a whole range of forms of civil disobedience right through to terrorism and to armed revolution. The right to rebellion, asserted by declarations of independence, could be taken to justify all or any means, but generally the means are left open. It was not until 1966, in the General Declaration of the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (known as the Tricontinental), that the right to resist of colonized peoples through armed struggle was given overt form. Its first declaration reads:

The Right to Resist 53 The conference proclaims the inalienable right of all peoples to full political independence and to resort to all forms of struggle that may be necessary, including armed struggle, to conquer that right. There is no more important task for the subjugated peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. (OSPAAL 1966: 155) Of course the Tricontinental’s Declaration did not achieve legitimacy through international recognition in the manner of UN declarations, but its organization OSPAAL did offer a source that, in the eyes of some, explicitly authorized resistance in the form of armed struggle from that point on, reinforced by the powerful militancy of Che Guevara’s famous “Message to the Tricontinental” of the following year (Guevara 1967). In an essay called “Ethics and Socialism,” written many years before the Tricontinental but published in the third issue of OSPAAL’s journal Tricontinental, the Chilean Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui began with the observation: “Revolution is, unfortunately, not made with fastings. Revolutionaries from all parts of the world must choose between being the victims of violence or using it” (Mariátegui 1967: 20). Mariátegui, as Michael Löwy has remarked, was attempting to refute the dismissal of ethics in Marxism and to forge a new revolutionary humanism, a revolutionary humanism that would be most fully embodied in that most humane and ethical of revolutionaries, Che Guevara (Löwy 2007: 22). Yet at the same time Mariátegui here anticipates the argument of a more remorseless revolutionary, Frantz Fanon. In “Concerning Violence” Fanon argued that just as colonialism was established by violence, so must decolonization always be a violent phenomenon. At the same time, he also makes a more subtle argument, essentially highlighting the dimension of the Declaration of Independence that would be made explicit in the Tricontinental Declaration, namely that in a situation of violent oppression it is ethically justified to employ violence as a mode of resistance. Why did Fanon emphasize this aspect of colonial struggle? There are two reasons, one of them specific to his particular struggle and the other a more general one. In the case of Algerian independence, the stress on violent struggle, as opposed to reformist agitation for constitutional reform, defined the ideological difference between the FLN and the older anticolonial party in Algeria, Messali Hadj’s constitutional nationalist Mouvement pour la Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (MTLD). In order to assert itself as the undisputed voice of Algeria, the FLN effectively wiped out Hadj and his MTLD supporters in Algeria and in France, practicing the violence against them that they claimed was essential to achieve freedom. Fanon’s argument in “Concerning Violence” (the opening chapter of The Wretched of the Earth) for a regenerative anticolonial violence was in fact nothing less than a voicing of the distinctive hallmark of hard-line FLN policy (Fanon 1991 [1963]: 35–106). That was the particular reason for Fanon’s stress

54 Robert J. C. Young on violence at that moment. The more general one was the Leninist tradition of violent anticolonial revolution, which was of course a severely modified appropriation of the American revolutionary tradition via the French. In Fanon’s time the Leninist view had been effectively disempowered by the strength of the Gandhian tradition of non-violent struggle; the independence of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and then Ghana seemed to have been evidence of both much greater practical effectiveness as well as vastly preferable ethics. It was in fact Fanon himself who was partly responsible for turning the tide and shifting the primacy of the anticolonial tradition and political practice from the Gandhian one to the violent one of the FLN in Africa (Young 2005). Fanon’s insistent division of the world into two clashing opponents, and his representation of the only resolution of that division as a violent Manichean struggle to the death between totally incompatible and irreconcilable forces, has also now been desecularized and fully absorbed into the rhetoric and thinking of those militant nationalists and transnational radical Islamists today designated as terrorist. Despite Fanon’s role as its major authorizing intellectual founding father, Postcolonial Studies has had little to say in general about Fanon’s role in the modern world of so-called global terrorism. When we teach Fanon should we also take into account the ways in which Fanon is used today outside the benign realms of postcolonial studies in academia? Edward Said was one of the few who addressed the question of the contemporary ethics of Fanon’s espousal of violence, but few others working in Postcolonial Studies have been as explicit in defining their own ethical position. We talk about or cite Fanon almost endlessly, but unlike most commentaries on, say, the Nazi legal philosopher Carl Schmitt, you rarely hear people disassociating themselves from Fanon’s political practice when they start their analyses. There has been, of course, one famous rejection of Fanon, and of Sartre to boot, on the grounds of his espousal of violence, by Hannah Arendt in On Violence. Arendt’s essay, published in the New York Review of Books in 1969, and very much written for an American domestic audience, formed a response to the student uprisings of May 1968, which she admits herself were hardly notable examples of the use of violence in the political realm. She cites Fanon’s work primarily, she says, because of “its great influence on the present student generation” (Arendt 1970: 14). This means that his ideas are discussed in the context of student revolt rather than anticolonial wars whose victory she pronounces “unlikely” (21). Her main objection to Fanon comes with his use by the Black Power movement and “Negro students” (18). The latter’s demands with respect to universities she calls “clearly silly and outrageous” (19), particularly the demand to diversify the kinds of cultural range of the knowledge that the university teaches. Arendt is contemptuous of Black students’ demands for an ‘education’ in Swahili (a nineteenth-century kind of no-language spoken by the Arab ivory and slave caravans, a hybrid mixture of a Bantu dialect with

The Right to Resist 55 an enormous vocabulary of Arab borrowings; see the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1961), African literature, and other non-existent subjects . . . (96) When faced with such ethnocentrism and prejudice in the prestigious university professor, it is not difficult to understand what radicalized students felt at that time, or why books like Edward W. Said’s Orientalism, published nine years later, challenging the objectivity of academic knowledge, were entirely necessary. From our present perspective, what is noticeable is that Arendt’s moral objection to and rejection of Fanon is almost entirely mediated through the events of contemporary US student revolt, as opposed to the much more complex situation in colonial Algeria faced by Fanon. Would Arendt have dismissed Fanon so easily if his opponent had been Nazi Germany rather than the colonial government of the FrenchAlgerian colons? When he was part of the FLN command, criticisms of the FLN use of violence were in fact strong enough for Fanon to feel that their policy needed additional justification: the 1959 French edition of L’An V de la révolution Algérienne (Toward the African Revolution, Fanon 1994 [1959]) includes an additional article by Fanon entitled “Why We Employ Violence,” where he goes into much more specific detail, and provides a much more nuanced explanation of FLN policy, than in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon’s justification for the use of violence was threefold: first, he argued that there is no ethical issue given that the colonizer himself used violence in order to establish the rule of colonial law. Second, that the use of violence essentially re-empowers the native who has been existentially disempowered by being forced to assume the passive dispossession of colonial subjectivity. This is a rewriting of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, via Alexandre Kojève, where the slave achieves freedom through self-consciousness, which for Fanon is achieved through the work of violence. Third, he argues that in a situation of settler colonialism such as Algeria, as opposed to colonies such as India or Ghana, which were not settled but simply ones of economic exploitation, violence is the only effective method of removing colonial rule since resistance to independence is much more locally entrenched in the pied noir community who have a lot more at stake than the metropolitan government of the imperial state. It is the government or state use of violence, which Fanon charts elsewhere in some detail, that ultimately justifies the native’s violent response. The problem with “Concerning Violence” in The Wretched of the Earth is that, unlike the much more situated “Why We Employ Violence” in Toward the African Revolution, Fanon does not contextualize his remarks but offers them as an existential state of being—“decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon” (Fanon 1991: 35). He presents only what we might call an unmediated, unqualified, ethical absolute. And this is what makes him vulnerable to Arendt’s equally conceptual and unsituated critique. However, Arendt also ignores the final chapter of the

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book in which Fanon considers the cost of violence on both sides, and dismisses Fanon’s attempt in the epilogue to explore how to go beyond its legacy through a new inclusive humanism. Arendt’s shifting descriptions of the 1968 student revolt move between violence and non-violence and show it is often hard to draw a strict line between them. She herself cites the comment of William O’Brien, the nineteenth-century Irish agrarian and nationalist agitator, who remarked that sometimes “violence is the only way of ensuring a hearing for moderation” (Arendt 1970: 79). Although anticolonial struggle divides up between these two methods of resistance, it is fair to say that, in practice, most liberation movements always negotiated a whole range of tactics of civil and militant resistance, between armed struggle and nonviolent methods, even in India. As even Fanon, Guevara, and the ANC in South Africa emphasized, armed struggle was always the strategy of last resort for any liberation movement, decided upon only once peaceful means of struggle were exhausted. Moreover, there were significant differences elaborated even within armed struggle. In this connection, we might cite one of the most famous of Indian women freedom fighters, Aruna Asaf Ali, writing in her ABC of Dislocation of 1941, where she makes an important ethical distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of violent resistance: Dislocation is a common and effective method used by enslaved and oppressed peoples against their ruler . . . Thus, if telegraph wires are cut, fishplates on railway lines are removed, bridges are dynamited, industrial plants put out of order, petrol tanks set on fire, police stations burnt down, official records destroyed—they are all acts of dislocation. But a bomb thrown at a market place or a school or a dharma-shala [a shelter for pilgrims] is not dislocation. It is either the work of agents provocateurs or misdirected energy. (quoted in Forbes 1996: 207) Che Guevara makes exactly the same point in a discussion of terrorism, where he considers only attacks on strategic targets justifiable. Violence, in his opinion, should only be deployed against strategic state or military targets, not against civil targets or civilians (Guevara 1998: 22). This would seem explicitly to disallow most activities today designated as “terrorist.” In the face of the violence of both repression and rebellion today, we need a stronger conceptual and moral framework in which to discuss acts of resistance beyond the ritual denunciation of acts of violence as “outrages” or even “terror” that are always voiced by politicians and commentators, which—as Slavoj Žižek characteristically observes—are themselves simply a symptom of the problem (Žižek 2008; cf. Young 2009a). If the divisions or the different versions of anticolonial liberation movements continue to be played out in contemporary global

The Right to Resist 57 struggles, then it is time to revisit their perspectives and their ethical stances with respect to modes of resistance. Postcolonialism too is still riven by that division, between Fanon and Gandhi, drawing on both. In general it has not defined its own ethical parameters in relation to them, even though you could argue that at one level the arguments within it—between those critiquing postcolonial theory and calling for a return to revolutionary Marxism or Trotskyism, and postcolonial theorists who focus on more psychological strategies of “sly civility” and the like—implicitly circulate around that divide. Coming directly out of the long history of the liberation movements, postcolonial theory remains uniquely positioned to re-articulate an ethical framework for the right to resist and to legitimate the basis of ethical strategies of resistance. The urgent question that haunts us and demands an answer is this: at what point should an ethics of resistance foreground ethics above resistance, if it begins to take unethical forms? More simply, at what point does resistance become unethical? Are there ethical limits to resistance?

Notes 1. Lazarus (1990) and Parry (1994). Duncombe’s Cultural Resistance Reader (2002) is notably weak on anticolonialism. 2. “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world” (Arendt 1970: 80). 3. http://www.tamilnation.org/ideology/fannon.htm [sic] (accessed March 30, 2008).

Bibliography Arendt, H. (1970) On Violence, New York: Harcourt. Bhabha, H. (1985) “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” in F. Barker et al. (eds.) Europe and Its Others, vol. 1, Colchester: University of Essex. Duncombe, S. (ed.) (2002) Cultural Resistance Reader, London: Verso. Fanon, F. (1991 [1963]) The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press. —— (1994 [1959]) Toward the African Revolution, New York: Grove Press. Forbes, G. (1996) Women in Modern India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gajarawala, T. (2009) “The Hungry Tide” (Review of Sudeep Chakravarti, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country [2008]), The National, June 25. Online. Available: http:// www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090626/REVIEW/706259978 (accessed July 10, 2010). Guevara, E. Che (1967) Message to the Tricontinental. Tricontinental Special Supplement. —— (1998) Guerrilla Warfare, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Harlow, B. (1987) Resistance Literature, London: Methuen. Jefferson, T. et al. (1776) Declaration of Independence. Online. Available: http://www. archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration.html (accessed July 10, 2010).

58 Robert J. C. Young Kanafani, G. (1982) Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine 1948–1966, Beirut: Institute for Arab Research. Lazarus, N. (1990) Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Löwy, M. (2007) The Marxism of Che Guervara: Philosophy, Economics, Revolutionary Warfare, 2nd ed., Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. MacIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Mariátegui, J. C. (1967) “Ethics and Socialism,” Tricontinental 3: 20–27. OSPAAL (1966) First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (Tricontinental 1966), Havana: OSPAAL. Parry, B. (1994) “Resistance Theory/Theorising Resistance, or Two Cheers for Nativism,” in F. Barker et al. (eds.) Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rao, R. (1938) Kanthapura, London: George Allen and Unwin. Scriven, M. (1999) Jean-Paul Sartre: Politics and Culture in Postwar France, Basingstoke: Macmillan. United Nations (1948) The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Online. Available: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ (accessed July 10, 2010). Young, R. J. C. (2005) “Fanon and the Turn to Armed Struggle in Africa,” Wasafiri 44: 33–41. —— (2009a) “The Violent State,” Naked Punch, supplement no. 2. Online. Available: http://issuu.com/naked_punch_review/docs/supplementyoung (accessed July 10, 2010). —— (2009b) “Dai movimenti anticoloniali ai nuovi movimenti sociali,” Politica e Società 2: 51–64. Žižek, S. (2008) Violence, New York: Picador.

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Blind Man’s Buff in a Sandstorm? Literary education in the late condominium Sudan Russell McDougall

In the early 1950s, as it began to contemplate the decolonization of its African colonies, Britain judged it essential to isolate Black Africa from the alleged corrupting influence of the Middle East. Winston Churchill gives a fair idea as to the consistency of that corruption, based on his own experience at the Battle of Omdurman, where the severed head of the fallen hero of empire, General Charles Gordon, had been paraded on a spike. In Churchill’s vivid account of Kitchener’s reconquest of the Sudan,1 he declaims the “dreadful” curses of Mohammedism, which induces a fanatical frenzy in its followers “as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog” (Churchill 1899: 248–50). Somewhat paradoxically, Islam was believed also to bring about a “fearful fatalistic apathy”: “Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live” (248–50). In short, the disease of Islam in Africa threatened “to paralyse the social development” of any newly independent nations and so undo all the good work British imperialism had invested in them. According to Churchill, “No stronger retrograde force exist[ed] in the world”; and if Islam once overwhelmed the Christian values transplanted in Africa, then, as Churchill said, “the civilisation of modern Europe [itself] might fall” (248–50). The Sudan was the crucial cordon sanitaire between Black Africa and the Middle East. For this reason it too was effectively divided, in an attempt to preserve the Southern Sudan from Islam and confine Arabism to the North. To a large degree it was the discipline of English literary studies that would provide the mechanism for maintaining this boundary. Kitchener, the British redeemer and conqueror of the Sudan, formed the idea of founding Gordon Memorial College to honor the martyrdom of General Gordon: it would provide, he said, “the focus of higher education in the Sudan for all time.”2 Inspired by this conceit, the British public responded enthusiastically, subscribing £100,000 in just six weeks. Lord Cromer, the first British Viceroy of Egypt, laid the foundation stone of the College on January 5, 1899. Queen Victoria agreed to be its patron.

60 Russell McDougall While there has been much scholarly publication and debate on the political function and cultural effect of colonial education, it has tended to the predictably ideological, and is often under-historicized. It has also generally overlooked Islamic cultures. Heather Sharkey’s book, Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (2003), is the exception. Its focus is on the Gordon Memorial College prior to its becoming a university in 1956, and prior to the Sudan’s independence. The information and analysis missing from the book—in particular, any description of the actual content of the curriculum— is in fact largely missing from the colonial archive. This goes some way toward explaining why almost nothing has been published about the subject “English” (or indeed any other historical formation of disciplinary knowledge and praxis) taught in the Sudan during the transition from the late condominium to independence and decolonization. This is despite the strategic importance of the subject, for English, like Arabic, was compulsory in the Preliminary year for both degree or diploma students. After that they were permitted to choose between the two, but most chose English. As Sharkey says, “Like kindred institutions elsewhere in Africa—including Sadiqi College in Tunisia, Makerere College in Uganda, École William Ponty in Senegal, and Fourah Bey College in Sierra Leone—Gordon College served as both a training ground for bureaucracy and a crucible for nationalism” (2003: 7). Khartoum University College, like its predecessor, was “the primary purveyor of English education in the Sudan” (51), and it favored enrolling young men of “high-status backgrounds . . . from Arabspeaking, Muslim families of the central riverain North” (8), initiating them into a wider Anglophone culture as it prepared them for government. Initially Gordon College focused on primary education, but it also included a training college for teachers and an industrial workshop. The students of course were mainly boys. Fifty years after its opening, the College had only two female students. Sir William Mather, of Manchester, donating the money to equip the College’s workshop, expressed his hope that students would acquire habits of “observation, carefulness, precision and logical thought, and a sense of reality, proportion, form and strength.” Their education was for this purpose “practical,” combining mental with physical activities: so, by appealing to the senses, making the easiest path to the brain and stimulating it to action. Mather recommended particularly “nature study” as the “most impressive means of education with a people so keenly sensitive to external phenomena as the Egyptians and the Sudanese.” Studying the natural sciences, the “young people of the Sudan” would learn the “laws of nature,” and so be prepared to adapt and use these “in whatever occupations they may follow in after life” (University College of Khartoum Calendars 1952–54: 8–15). English Literature was an essential aspect of this learning of “the laws of nature,” for, as we know from other studies of colonial education in different

Blind Man’s Buff in a Sandstorm?

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parts, it was apt to reveal moral truths and values considered universal, transcendent of social and cultural forms. The truths it taught, far from being fanciful, could be “embodied and illustrated by concrete things produced, under instruction, by the boys themselves in the workshops” (Mather to Lord Cromer [1903] quoted in an unsigned review of James Currie, the Gordon Memorial College of Khartoum: 205–6). Acquiring English, and absorbing the values of Englishness, was considered essential for their success in the postcolonial era beyond the condominium. The period on which I will focus is the five years from 1951 to 1956. That is, the in-between period: the period of the University College of Khartoum, transitional between Gordon Memorial College and the University of Khartoum; but also in-between in the sense that this is the period when Britain was planning its withdrawal and Sudan was working toward independence. A time of great political debate and difference. It was crucial that the right men be left in charge when Britain withdrew; and neither the political service nor the educational authorities had a map as to how a handover should proceed. The College sought to develop those “qualities of mind and character” judged necessary for future “good citizenship and professional competence” (University College of Khartoum Calendars 1952–54: 14). The graduate attributes (as we would now call them), that is the attributes the College aimed to create in its graduating class of future civil servants, were as follows: first, “cultured and balanced minds”; second, an “objective interest in work and study”; third, “a sense of responsibility and a genuine desire to serve the community.” The College’s Statement of Aims went so far as to say: “Academic attainments have little worth without a moral basis and a social sense” (University College of Khartoum Calendars 1952–54: 14). Perversely, this education bestowed a sense of Englishness upon the Arabs in the North, creating in them an expectation of the right to administer and govern in Britain’s place after independence; while it left the Southerners (predominantly black and mission-educated) shackled to an ideal of the primitive. Only 5 per cent of the South was Moslem. The idea was not only to preserve the South from the alleged disease of Islam but also to administer a tertiary education tonic to the afflicted Arabs of the North, a medicinal course of English values. As a result Southerners were given less access to higher education resources and, postindependence, would play less of a role in democratic government. The advantage to the North may be gauged by the language options available to incoming students in the Prelim Year. All Arts students in the Preliminary Year had to take English, but only Arabic speakers were able to take Arabic; while nonArabic speaking students were channeled instead into Mathematics. Then, in the Intermediate Year, as I have already indicated, students were forced to choose, Arabic or English. It was considered “politically expedient” to restrict the use of

62 Russell McDougall English to a small educated elite, so that when independence came they would be the chosen ones, to take over the government and administration, more or less as Britain’s proxies. Thus Arabic speakers (overwhelmingly Northerners) were given English, the language of the colonizing class, while non-Arabic speakers (i.e. Southerners) were kept away from Arabic, which would be the language of administration post-Independence. The Southerners instead learned Maths, the language of the junior partner, the office clerk. Here I can give only a brief insight into the concrete realities of education in Sudan on the eve of African decolonization—that aspect of the education project, as I have said, which is most difficult to unearth from the colonial records. Two set pieces, if you like. The first is drawn from the private papers of D. R. Ewen, now Professor Emeritus at York University in Canada, who taught at the University of Khartoum from 1951 to 1965 (Ewen’s Papers, in author’s possession). The second from an interview with the late John Ingledew, Professor at the University of the West Indies Jamaica, who also taught in Khartoum, from 1954 to 1960 (interviewed by the author, January 2002). August 1951. Ewen has learnt three words in Arabic: mustaba, the protruding platform for sun-basking beside the swimming pool; aiwa, yes; and mafish, there isn’t any. He is playing squash regularly, and after just one month in the Sudan he has lost half a stone. Taking his meals in the Sudan Club he will soon reverse the trend. He is abundantly fed and abundantly fit. Tuesday is his most exacting day of lectures, with Modern Poetry from 10 to 11, and English Prose 1780–1832 from 11 to 12, and little room for free-wheeling in either. He himself has only just discovered Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and after swiftly bandaging up the Great War Poets he has been compelled to discover the Georgians as well, and to find something to say about them. In the prose course, he has been lumbered with the English essayists, Lamb and Hazlitt. He struggles to extend the three or four sentences he has to say about Lamb into an hour’s lecture, for frankly he finds the subject wearisome. Unfortunately the two great stand-bys of lecturers in the civilized West—alcohol and sex—are of slight avail. Alcohol at least is strictly forbidden. Dick lectures his students on how Lamb “discovered in alcohol a relief from the slyness & worry & depression with which he was (understandably) beset” (Ewen Papers). For the Victorians, Ewen’s theme is hypocrisy—“how the father would lecture his son on morality, & keep his wife & daughters in tedious seclusion, while he himself would resort in private to prostitutes—whom he would condemn in public” (Ewen Papers). To a student audience whose fathers might have four wives to a man, this was pointed enough. Girls and boys attended separate schools and it was rare for any girl to move beyond secondary education. By nature, or by the wickedness of his predecessor, the students had learned to like their poets presented to them in groups, schools, and trends.


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Give them a good trend, and they are happy for hours. A tendency is also welcome, but less satisfying. They also have a good taste in spheres, fields, and crucial respects. I tried them with a proclivity the other day, just a small one, but they were a bit wary of it. A psychological implication, however, is meat and drink to them. Whether I can ever train them up to residual aesthetic impressions or organic unifications of the stylistic with the visionary, is doubtful. (Ewen Papers) Nonetheless, it is a moral lesson that he gives them on the War Poets. Wilfred Owen is best: he “never forgets that a human being is a human being,” unlike Rupert Brooke, who falls into the trap of seeing men as “splendid spirits,” or Siegfried Sassoon, who sees them either as villains or fools. Only Owen’s emotion thus remains positive. “Pity, not hatred. Hatred being negative, & a confession of defeat. To hate the [enemy] is to surrender your self-control into their hands” (Ewen Papers). It is easy to see from this example how “English” served the ends of colonialism. It so effortlessly displaced the psychology of resistance into more manageable metaphysical binaries. Do not hate your enemy. Keep your self-control. Fast forward to December 1955. Ewen is now an old hand, having been four years in the Sudan. As an atheist, however, he has had little contact with the student minority Southerners. John Ingledew, on the other hand, has not long arrived, but he is a Catholic; he engages the Christian fellowship of the Southern student minority. Some students have asked Ewen and Ingledew together to help with a theatrical production that they are preparing for the Festival of Culture to be held in December. The students urge their request in the most pleading way, and with the promise that they will undertake all the time-consuming work themselves, that the academics will merely have to advise from time to time. Ewen and Ingledew agree. The students then ask them to choose the play. Ewen makes a few suggestions, all of which are turned down, because of something in them that offends Moslem sensibilities. One play is no good because the women in it would not be able to maintain traditional dress, concealing their contours from the eyes of men from eyes to ankles. As the objection seems to Ewen to apply to nearly every play ever written, he looks for an exit, thinking that the whole thing is destined to founder in a mash of objections, sulks, and protests. But at last, after many weeks, the students themselves suggest Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, a play they had read in their Prelim Year. The other plays in the Prelim Year were Sophocles’s Oedipus and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The students preferred A Doll’s House. So Ingledew set about producing Ibsen. But this was the year of the rebellion, the Southern Mutiny. The authorities had made feeble attempts to cover up what was happening. But everyone knew that there was a revolt in the South. It had begun in Torrit in August and it soon spread throughout Equatoria. Resentful

64 Russell McDougall of Islamic domination, the South had gone on a rampage killing several hundred Northerners. Under attack, the rebel troops offered eventually to surrender, on condition that British and Egyptian troops returned to replace the northern Sudanese army. But the Sudanese parliament had unanimously called for the evacuation of the condominium troops; and Britain as well as Egypt had already agreed. So the Governor General insisted on an unconditional surrender. When the government troops reoccupied Torrit the rebels fled into the surrounding bush. But the movement dispersed rather than collapsed. Indeed, the 1955 rebellion marked the beginning of a “trans-ethnic insurgency” of self-determination that flowed into a civil war, depending on definitions, that lasted at least until 1972 and cost 500,000 lives (Wakoson 1978: 132). After the rebellion, the government proposed a plebiscite, offering Sudanese the choice between independence and a link with Egypt. On November 10, 1955, a vote of no confidence in the budget forced the resignation of the Premier. But five days later the general election restored him to power. On December 3, Britain and Egypt signed an agreement granting the Sudan independence. On December 19, the Sudanese Parliament, ignoring both the previously proposed plebiscite and the South’s demands for secession, declared the Sudan an independent state. The new nation began in chaos. Meanwhile, Ingledew’s production of A Doll’s House is also floundering. Some of those students who had most movingly pressed him to take the job—on the grounds that the play will be the first ever in the Sudan to have both male and female actors and will thus strike a wonderful blow for progress and emancipation—these same students now visit him in his office to tell him he is being tactless and premature in insisting on having female actors at this crucial stage in the country’s development. It is too soon, they say. Others protest that the girl in the leading role is “too dark” and “not sufficiently beautiful” (Ingledew interview). “I had discovered an absolute gem of a girl for Nora’s part,” Ingledew recalls, “but the Moslem Brotherhood visited me insisting that there would be a civil war because the girl was darker than the northern Sudani cast in the male lead as her husband” (Ingledew interview). The man was from Wadi Halfna, on the border with Egypt, and light-skinned; the girl was black. “The other way round would have been acceptable, because he would have been ‘raising [her] colour’” (Ingledew interview). It was the first time Ingledew had come up against color prejudice in Africa, and he would not back down. The senior English man, Glaswegian James Donaghy, seconded as Deputy Registrar in the Faculty of Veterinary Science, and soon to retire to a training college in Chichester, recalled his experience of staging Othello, with an all-black cast, save of course for a white Othello. And that was before the Rebellion. “Save yourself, Laddie!” he warned. It was good advice. So Ingledew saved himself: he scrapped the production completely.


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The education system of the condominium had intended to meet the objectives set out by James Currie, the first Principal of Gordon Memorial College, in 1901, the most important of which was to create a class of English-speaking clerks and translators. They were to act initially as intermediaries for the British administrators, then to take over and run the place. But looking back upon the realities of their education—the actual content of the curriculum (which is the more difficult for its being largely absent from the colonial archive), and particularly considering the subject “English” in the Sudan—we begin to see the contradictions of the bloody new nation. The Sudanese citizen clerk of the future would endure fifty years of war and horror, unless of course he or she fled or, indeed, perished. It is often thought that Ghana was the first British colony in Africa to achieve independence—that is, the first member of the Commonwealth to be governed by Africans (1957). The Sudan acquired independence a year earlier. But the special nature of the British colonial relationship there, the care-taking governance established by the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement in 1936, has tended to obscure the Sudan’s crucial significance in the history of the British Empire. Across the border the Kenyans certainly looked to the Sudan anxiously as a test case for independence. The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty had given Britain the right to govern the Sudan for a period of twenty years. But 1956, the year set down for the British withdrawal, was now tomorrow. And the post-war period of African de-colonization, much anticipated as a prelude to freedom and democracy, looked like it might be undermined by Cold War isolationism and instability in the Middle East, as heralded by the partition of Palestine, the creation of Israel, and the outbreak of the first Arab-Israel War (1948), as well as a whole series of political assassinations in Egypt. It seemed more important than ever that Black Africa be preserved from Islam. An English education would never be more critical. At the chalk-face, Ewen sometimes wondered whether, rather than teaching the War Poets, or A Doll’s House, or even as he grew bolder Shelley’s Revolt of Islam or Kipling, the Poet of Empire, who had given the Dervish warrior his British reputation as a “first-class fighting man” (Kipling 1940: 401), it might not be more useful to have his students draw pictures of literary critics all pulling wool over one another’s eyes, desperately dodging the risks of meaningfulness—something like “blind man’s buff in a sandstorm” (Ewen Papers). British education in the Sudan proved more diversely influential, directly and indirectly, than its agents in the field could ever have anticipated. It succeeded in grooming for power not only the first Prime Minister but also a number of other future heads of state. For example, Abdel Aziz al-Nasri Hamza, a graduate of 1953 (with merit in English!), later held a variety of ministerial commissions and diplomatic missions. But the College also educated those who would resist the State, as it became eventually more fundamentalist and less tolerant of religious and political difference. Ahmed Ibrahim Diraige, for example, who heads

66 Russell McDougall the National Redemption Front, an alliance of rebel groups in Darfur opposed to the signing of the Abuja Peace Agreement (2006). In 1954, he was Ewen’s most promising English student, much feted by his teachers, yet showered by reproach from his own family for his abdication of a Fur chieftaincy so that he could enrol in the Faculty of Arts. Diraige graduated BA in 1957, and was the Governor of Darfur from 1981 until forced into exile in 1983. The political effects are linked to the literary, as Sharkey points out: British education, with the aid of the moveable-type printing press (which Britain also introduced to the Sudan), “promoted literary experimentation, and ultimately fostered the development of early nationalism through the medium of print culture” (2003: 51). It stimulated “a sense of Arabic renaissance (nahda), comparable in its literary genesis, content, and agenda to the contemporary Bengal renaissance (nabajagaran) in Calcutta,” which ended with its most important representative, Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore, himself educated in Britain (though he had departed without his degree), had stressed the need for a purposeful education of the masses as the means to revolution. In the Sudan, G. N. Sanderson (a contemporary of Ewen and Ingledew at the College) noted in 1963: “the traditional Sudanese ‘Establishment’ of distinguished families” had set about recruiting “members of the new intellectual and administrative elite,” whose family background was “often quite unpretentious” (1963: 451 n. 135.) It was the University College that had created this new elite. Sanderson pointed in retrospect to Edward Atiyah’s novel Black Vanguard for the best insight into British influence in the Sudan. Just a year after Ewen’s arrival, the novel had been a talking point in the English Department in Khartoum when it appeared in 1952, not only as the first Sudanese novel written in English but also because its subject was the increasingly topical one of racially mixed relationships. Charged with presenting the British university to their aspiring students as the ideal destination for their improvement and advancement, Ewen and his colleagues were fascinated by the novel’s fictionalized study of acculturation among the Sudanese elite educated (and in part created) there.3 The best-known Sudanese writer, again a graduate of Gordon College, is Tayeb Salih (1929–2009), whose first novel, Mawsim al-hijra ila al-shamal, achieved instant acclaim when first published in Beirut in 1966. It appeared in translation as Season of Migration to the North three years later. In 2001 the Arab Literary Academy in Damascus declared it “the most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century” (“In Memoriam,” n.p.). The migration in the novel is often seen as a reversal of the journey in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a counterdiscursive response to the idea of Africa the Dark Continent. As Robyn Creswell writes, “Rather than following a white man traveling upriver into the heart of Africa, where he indulges in a fantasy of primitivism, Salih sends Mustafa Sa’eed down the Nile and into the heart of Europe. There he masters the ways of the


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natives—Fabian economics, but also race-think—the better to subjugate them” (2009: 75). Salih himself migrated to England in 1952, and spent most of his life outside Sudan. While he was hailed as “one of the greatest symbols of traditional Northern Sudanese culture,” his novel was banned by the Sudanese government in the 1990s because of its telling of Mustafa’s sexual encounters abroad. The amalgam in his character of poetry and violence is a startling comment on the transition from colonization to independence. A report in the Times Higher Education Supplement in 1952 (“Two Colleges in Africa”) applied the distinction often employed in British education to differentiate the two university colleges established in Africa east of the Sahara: Makerere in Uganda was “Oxbridge;” Khartoum was “Redbrick.” The latter type, evolving out of the mid-Victorian civic university movement in Britain, was generally “non-collegiate,” admitted students “without reference to religion or background,” and concentrated on “imparting . . . ‘real-world’ skills, often linked to engineering.” It emphasized practical rather than academic knowledge. Ironically, as Lilian Sanderson, another of Ewen’s contemporaries, points out: “There was strong resistance to Western technological and scientific education. The [educational] emphasis in Islamic culture had been literary” (1975: 427). This is the context in which Sudanese students of English furthered their literary education, as a form of inter-cultural knowledge they were encouraged to think would prepare them for political and administrative careers. British educators in Africa were conscious of making history. The prospect of a self-governing Sudan without administrators and technicians educated at the University College was frankly “inconceivable.” The British assumed that English would continue as the language of administration and governance despite the dominance of Arabic in Khartoum. In 1956, on the eve of independence, three-quarters of the college staff were still British, and all instruction was in English—except in the departments of Arabic and Sharia Law. This, it was thought, would give the new independent university (and the independent nation it educated) a window—indeed, as the British Vice Chancellor Designate said in 1956, “a whole of series of windows”—facing onto the Western world (University College of Khartoum Calendars 1952–54: 789). But the windows let in a dust storm after independence and then changed into a complex maze of mirrors. The house of mirrors continues to be a defining trope of postcolonial discourse. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi characterize the writing of postcolonial authors (as well as those from subaltern cultures) as “a house of mirrors in which the reader and writer alike risk being lost in the tangle, confusion and redundancy of reflections” (1999: 19). Caliban smashed his mirror, enraged by the image it gave him of himself. Similarly, the only access to the free world that Tennyson allows “The Lady of Shalott” is through the reflections she sees in her carefully positioned mirror. She is forbidden in her confinement to gaze upon the world directly from her window. When she disobeys, turning her gaze to the window,

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the mirror again shatters. She leaves her prison and boards a boat, singing her own death as she drifts down the river to Camelot. Garland Cannon (1970) has argued that Tennyson’s looking-glass device in “The Lady of Shalott” may have its origin in a tale recited by Scheherazade in the 269th of the Arabian Nights, “The Tale of Zayn Al-Asnam,” where the mirror serves as “the touch-stone of virtue.” The hero has only to look into it to tell whether his bride remains faithful or not. Tayib Salih’s Season of Migration, often described as the Arabian Nights in reverse, uses the mirror to similar effect. Its nameless narrator, returning to the Sudan after seven years’ education in Britain, finds himself “caught in a morass of self-doubt about his own ‘purity’” (Geesey 1997: 132). As Marlow is to Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, so the narrator is to Mustafa, who precedes him to Britain and returns before him, a British citizen and a professor of the University of London, now living in the narrator’s own village. But Mustafa is the deranged and damaged image of the narrator: one spends seven years in prison for killing an English woman, his wife; the other seven years at Oxford studying poetry. Mustafa’s presumed drowning in the swollen Nile recalls the fate of the Lady of Shalott. The narrator is swimming at the end, in the same place. The death of Mustafa—“the Black Englishman”—has apparently liberated him; and the future, before the dust storm of continuing civil war and chaos, appears open (Salih 1969: 53). Of the men (and some few women) who did the teaching in Sudan most eventually returned to Britain, but many spread throughout the Commonwealth to university posts in India, the West Indies, Australia, Canada, and other parts of Africa. They too had tasted freedom, and were stifled by homecoming. Their teaching gave them a passport, and they responded gradually by smuggling into the teaching canon the texts now considered postcolonial, loosening the ties that bound the subject “English” to its moorings. Ewen went to Canada, then Trinidad, then back to Canada (York University); Ingledew, to the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. G. N. Sanderson did return to England (Royal Holloway in London), where he enjoyed the experience of being “a tourist in your own native country” (Sanderson, interview). It was hard to break “the habit of a double life,” the luxurious freedom that their lives in the Sudan had given them, the sense of living in two places at one time. Those who voyaged further out, after the Sudan, formed an intellectual diaspora. So did their students, in reverse. The literary education of young Sudanese created a yearning for freedom—migration— where the homecoming inevitably imposed restrictions. Salih’s narrator aspires to be a writer, but the nation to which he returns from his British education needs administrators, not poets. Many, like Salih himself, chose not to return.4 This was the beginning of the brain drain, which affects so many African countries. Philip Emeagwali, whom CNN credits as a founding father of the Internet, estimates that African universities are training one-third of their graduates for export to the developed nations:


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We are operating one third of African universities to satisfy the manpower needs of Great Britain and the United States. The African education budget is nothing but a supplement to the American education budget. In essence, Africa is giving developmental assistance to the wealthier western nations, which makes the rich nations richer and the poor nations poorer. (Brain Drain, n.p.)

Notes 1. Until 1975 Sudan was known as “The Sudan.” I have retained the historical usage appropriate to the time. The definite article was deleted in order to differentiate between the nation and the territory. But it is more difficult to omit in Arabic than in English. Hence, as Deng D. Akol Ruay observes in The Politics of Two Sudans (1994: 174), the definite article continues to be used in official records. 2. This brief history of Gordon College draws substantially upon the Historical Note that prefaces the University College of Khartoum Calendars (1952–54: 8–15). 3. Today, the perspective of Black Vanguard is regarded by some Arabized Sudanese as impure, “foreign,” and hence inauthentic—precisely because its author was Oxfordeducated, and also because, while born and bred in the Sudan, he was of a Syrian family (“The Bright Legacy of Sudanese Novelists,” n.p.). El-Nour regards Malakat Addar Mohammed’s Al-Faragh al-’arid (“The Wide Emptiness”) as the first “true example” of the Sudanese “been-to” novel (1997: 156.) 4. Migration is multidirectional and its season has no end. It is estimated that in 1997, as a result of ongoing civil conflict in Sudan, 452,000 refugees were living in camps in other parts of East Africa alone. At the same time, Sudan was hosting an estimated 392,000 refugees from other parts of Africa, including substantial numbers from countries that had taken its own refugees, like Eritrea and Ethiopia. The fighting in Sudan has claimed over two million lives, and has destabilized much of East Africa. In 2000 the total number of migrants from Sudan was 780,000, including 415,000 refugees (Sudan Migration, n.p.). Today’s Sudan generates “forced migration on an unprecedented scale, creating the world’s largest crisis of human displacement.” Six million people have been displaced within Sudan, two million in Darfur in less than three years (Forced Migration Online).

Bibliography Akol Ruay, Deng D. (1994) The Politics of Two Sudans: The South and the North, 1821–1969, London: Coronet Books. Atiyah, E. (1952) Black Vanguard, London: P. Davies. Bassnett, S. and Trivedi, H. (eds.) (1999) Post-colonial Translation Theory and Practice, London: Routledge. “Brain Drain. Education in Africa.” Online. Available: http://www.emeagwali.com/ interviews/brain- drain/education-in-africa-brain- drain-problem-worldnet-africajournal.html (accessed June 2010). “The Bright Legacy of Sudanese Novelists,” (2010) Sudan Vision Daily, January 12. Online.

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Available: http://www.sudanvisiondaily.com/modules.php?name=News&file=articl e&sid=190 (accessed June 2010). Cannon, G. (1970) “‘The Lady of Shalott’ and ‘The Arabian Nights’ Tales’,” Victorian Poetry 8(4): 344–46. Churchill, W. (1899) The River War, vol. II, London: Longmans, Green and Co. Creswell, R. (2009) “Eloquent Phantom: Tayeb Salih’s search for an elusive present,” Harper’s Magazine (July): 75–79. El-Nour E. (1997) “The Development of Contemporary Literature in Sudan,” Research in African Literatures 28: 150–63. Ewen, D. R., Papers, in author’s possession. —— (2005) “Interview” by R. McDougall. Forced Migration. Online. Available: http://www.forcedmigration.org/browse/ regional/sudan/ (accessed June 2010). Geesey, P. (1997) “Cultural Hybridity and Contamination in Tayeb Salih’s Mawsim al-hijra ila al-shamal (Season of Migration to the North),” Research in African Literatures 28: 128–40. Ingledew, J. (2002) “Interview” by R. McDougall. “In Memoriam: Al-Tayeb Salih: 1929–2009” (2009) Arab Studies Quarterly (Summer): n.p. Kipling, R. (1940) Rudyard Kipling’s Verse. Definitive Edition, London: Hodder and Stoughton. “Review [unsigned] of James Currie (1904) The Gordon Memorial College of Khartoum” (Report, May 1, 1903) Journal of the Royal African Society, 3–10: 205–6. Salih, T. (1969) Season of Migration to the North, Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers. Sanderson, G. N. (1963) “The Modern Sudan, 1820–1956: The Present Position of Historical Studies,” Journal of African History 4(3): 435–61. —— (2005) “Interview” by R. McDougall. Sanderson, L. (1975) “Education and Administrative Control in Colonial Sudan and Northern Nigeria,” African Affairs 74 (297): 427- 41. Sharkey, H. (2003) Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Berkeley: University of California Press. Sudan Migration. Online. Available: http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/Africa/ Sudan-MIGRATION.html#ixzz0mAPsdXKz (accessed June 2010). “Two Colleges in Africa: Khartum and Makerere,” (1952) newspaper clipping [The Times Educational Supplement, 1952] Durham University Sudan Archive, GB- 0033–SAD SAD.676/2/3–4. University College of Khartoum Calendars, 1952–54. Wakoson, E. N. (1978) “The Anya Nya Movement: Its Military and Political Aspects,” unpublished MA thesis, University of Khartoum.

4

“Saving Africa” Narrative persistence, missions, development, and the “freeing” of sub-Saharan Africa Gareth Griffiths

This contribution focuses on the important role mission narratives have played in shaping economic and cultural interventions in the postcolonial world and especially on their ongoing role and influence on development narratives for modern NGOs operating in Africa. I also want to consider the similarities and differences between these two external institutional practices: the religious mission and the development agency. The arguments have wider application, and scholarly searches reveal similar relations in other parts of the postcolonial world. I limit myself to Africa for two reasons: firstly, because this has been the principal focus of my archival research; and, secondly, because the case of Africa offers one of the most glaring examples of how these narratives continue to shape contemporary representations of the so-called developed world and the role in this process of the non-government institutions of global power (the so-called NGOs).1 The main title, “Saving Africa,” results from an experience I had in South Africa a little over ten years ago when, with a South African friend, Isabel Hofmeyr, I visited the Voortrekker Monument, near Pretoria. After viewing this fascinating and disturbing site and thinking about its role in constructing the myths of Afrikaaner nationalism, I was approached outside the visitor center by two middle-aged Americans, who clearly took me for a local, since one of them asked if they might enquire from me if I knew to which “tribe” Nelson Mandela belonged. At that time I claimed no great expertise on Southern Africa, having focused my research on West and East Africa for many years, but having just read his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom I was able to tell them that I believed Mandela was a member of the Thembu people, a Xhosa-speaking people from the Transkei region. But, I added, a South African friend, who would join me shortly, would be able to give them more information. I then asked them what they themselves were doing in South Africa, to which query they replied that they were part of the “Saving Africa” Christian mission. This moment has come back to me several times over the years as I went on to look at the role of missions and mission texts in Africa. It struck me at the time as

72 Gareth Griffiths quite ironic that people felt so confident that they could save countries and peoples about whom they knew so little. Of course, it is axiomatic for all proselytizing religious missions (Christian and Islamic) to assume that people outside the faith need to be “saved” from their ignorance of the revealed truths of their particular faiths, and that possessing that faith qualifies one to do it. But, of course, along with the confidence in these spiritual truths goes an equally confident assertion of the pre-eminent status of one’s own political and cultural baggage over those of the other. For this reason both Christian and Muslim missions to Africa have often resulted not only in spiritual conversion to Christianity or Islam but also to the Europeanization or Arabicization of the indigenous cultures of the “unbeliever.” In similar ways, in the post-imperial period, with the emergence of a global economy largely controlled by agents and institutions located in the so-called developed world, we have seen the growth of the same idea that some cultures stand in need not only of economic salvation but also of the transformation of their political and cultural practices. Cultures whose progress has not been consistent with the economic programme and goals set by the international financial community are required to conform in a variety of ways to practices which extend well beyond the strictly economic realm. The viability of cultural practices is judged by the degrees to which they have or have not facilitated a successful response to the challenge of a competitive, globalized economy. In the post-Cold War period even cultures remaining nominally communist, such as China, or to a lesser extent Vietnam, but which have developed competitively with their capitalist neighbors in the global “free market,” have been permitted entry to the circle of cultures which are capable of achieving their own “salvation.” This acceptance results often despite a minimum degree of cultural or political change. Nevertheless, they are represented as partners rather than as mere aid recipients who must conform to be rewarded. The latter countries or regions are perceived to have failed the test of economic competence and so are seen once again as in need of “salvation,” this time by the modern mission of economic rationalism and its accompanying doctrines of free trade, privatization, and debt interest reduction. This is nowhere truer than in the case of Africa. Africa is almost always represented in the Western media as an economic “basket-case” in which the conversion of a corrupt leadership and elite to a broader vision of wealth creation and economic self-reliance is the direct and unquestionable road to success and salvation. Now corrupt leadership there is in Africa aplenty, though one might reflect that it is not restricted to that continent quite as exclusively as the current media representations suggest. But, of course, these modern salvation narratives neglect to chronicle the role of developed countries, acting both through multinational corporations and through governmental and non-governmental agencies, in initiating and sustaining an economic world

“Saving Africa” 73 system. Through international cartels, the developed countries fix world prices and subsidize their own industries and agricultural products. Such narratives also ignore the fact that such acts effectively undercut possibilities for sustainable macro-economic development programmes elsewhere, and focus attention on small-scale self-help programs which offer no long-term possibilities for these regions to emerge as large-scale competitive players in the global marketplace. The one exception to this process in Africa is the role of these same agencies in promoting macro-economic solutions based on cultural programs, which serve and sustain a narrow vision of the past of those cultures and which become the bedrock for a mono-economy based on various forms of natural (conservationist) and cultural (heritage) tourism. The limitations of tourist-based mono-economies need not be stressed. In the light of this broader situation, what I want to suggest is the role narratives play in this process, and the ways in which these two missions, the Christian mission of the imperial period and the modern developmental aid programs share narratives that illustrate the degree to which their practices are disturbingly congruent. Bret Benjamin has provided a masterly analysis of these World Bank narratives in Invested Interests: Capital, Culture and the World Bank (2007). In a chapter entitled “Success Stories: NGOs and the Banking Bildungsroman” he outlines a story entitled “Sole Comfort Dot-Com: Bridging the Global Income Gap through Hard Work, Quality Sandals and ICTs.” The story concerns Roselyne, a worker at the Eco-Sandals factory in the Nairobi slum of Korogocho. The factory is dedicated to manufacturing sandals from recycled rubber (especially automobile tires). This is, of course, a fairly well-established local manufacturing technique. But marketed internationally through the on-line facilities provided by World Bank financing, and as ecologically friendly products, the factory has become a World Bank “success story,” employing a number of women such as Roselyne. The story recounts how, Two years ago [Roselyne] would wake up each morning and set out in search of some way to earn money . . . She never had formal employment and had little education. She really had nowhere to go and little to do but tried to achieve her singular goal each week, each year: to find enough money to keep her family alive and, where possible, keep her five children in school. (Benjamin 2007: 145–46) The report then outlines how by finding work in the Eco-Sandals factory, the success of which has been the result of a global marketing of its products on the web with World Bank encouragement and expertise, Roselyne and the other workers have achieved financial success. Benjamin makes several points about this story. He argues that it seems to

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show how Roselyne’s life is transformed from “a precarious struggle at the margins of subsistence to a life of fulfilment and growth” (146). But, as he further argues, the real heroic protagonist of the story is not Roselyne but the World Bank, and the story, like many others on the Bank’s recent postings, is purposely designed to create a positive image to counter the negative image of the World Bank’s role in encouraging Third World indebtedness though the 1970s and 1980s.2 Benjamin shows the shift in the publicity focus of the Bank from grand macro policy documents in the 1970s and 1980s to the narratives in the 1990s, which place an “emphasis on ‘the local,’ the ‘micro’ and ‘the participatory’.” He further suggests that this is a response to the increasing criticism of the role of the Bank and of the IMF by critics from the early 1990s until the present day. Benjamin’s account is primarily concerned to focus on the specific role of the Bank, which he argues has already been clouded by its being “lumped into a loose constellation with multicultural aid, development, Americanism, neocolonialism, industrial modernization, and the like” (135), though he does not for a moment deny that all these elements are vital to the overall story. Thus he only briefly acknowledges that stories such as “Sole Comfort,” “particularly given the word play in the story’s title (Sole/Soul), reference the long line of conversion narratives elicited by colonial missionaries, the original NGOs” (146). This limited reference is understandable given the specific focus of Benjamin’s account. But the connection of these two forms—mission and development agency “success” stories—seems to me worth exploring further, as it illustrates the convergences and divergences between the institutions and their practices. And it is to this task I want to turn now. As an example of the kind of “success story” published by missions we might turn to one from Central Africa recorded by the Pères de Saint Esprit or Spiritans at their mission at Mhonda in what is now Tanzania, and published in their journal Annales Apostolique in 1896 with the title “Proof of Divine Mercy: The Story of Angelina.”3 This discusses how Angelina arrives at the mission requesting food, as the fields and her crops have been devastated by locusts and drought and she is hungry. She tells the narrator that “my fields have been devastated by locusts, I have no more hope of harvests.”4 The Spiritans father tells her that the locusts and the drought have affected many people and that since they are already feeding more than seventy children and sick people they have no further resources to feed her or others. Instead he advises her to take some goods, which he supplies to her, and trade them with the people of the mountain, who still have a store of maize and bananas. Look at the clouds of locusts who cover the mountain trees, listen to the cracking of the branches, as they break under their weight, and the cries of those who flee away from there. If I am not able to give you food, take,

“Saving Africa” 75 at least, these small bottles and glass beads, and go and offer them to your friends on the mountain. Who will certainly give you in exchange a little maize and some bananas.5 The exact economics of this advice is rather obscure, but it is implied that, although the locusts are on the mountain too, since the people there do not grow maize they have been less affected than the people of the plains by the plagues and the drought which have devastated the crops of Angelina’s people. Angelina departs and returns after two weeks with a gift for the mission, “a packet wrapped in cloth.”6 It is a beautiful woven mat, which she offers the mission father as a gift, refusing to accept any payment for her work.7 The story concludes with the woman recognizing the divine mercy of God8 and converting. Her conversion is expressed here through a change of name: “At last, she added, by the grace of God, I am no longer Hazina the pagan but Angelina the one who has been blessed.”9 I hope it is not too cynical to suggest that Angelina, in offering the rug free, has not learned her lesson in small enterprise capitalism fully. One supposes that the “self-help” advice of turning from subsistence farming to small-scale trading, which I would suggest is the core of this narrative, would require Angelina to have learned the tough nature of economic exchange. Though perhaps the mat is a symbolic gesture, analogous to the repayment of interest to modern NGOs for their advice on economic development. But just as modern NGO narratives do not stress this aspect of their work, for reasons which Benjamin and others have made clear, so the nineteenth-century missionaries stress the disinterested aspect of their intervention—the exercise of divine mercy in the mission case, or of microeconomic self-help in the case of the development agency. In both cases the institutions concerned occlude the broader colonial and global capitalist forces, which lie beyond the sphere of the local on which these narratives lay their stress. But let me put this note of cynicism and of polemic aside for the moment and try, as dispassionately as I can, to see what this brief example of narrative collusion between two periods and practices seemingly so far apart in time and intent might indicate. It is not possible of course to prove that there is a direct connection between these narratives, which are a century apart in time. But given the similar roles played by missions and contemporary aid agencies in both periods in areas such as Africa it is worth noting that their narratives are so startlingly similar. Does this imply then that the nineteenth-century missions and the contemporary development and aid agencies had similar agendas? This again is hard to assert in any simple way. But clearly while individual missions and individual World Bank aid programs were and are beneficial to the immediate recipients, and it would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise, it is equally clear that in their relations with the dominant power structures they serve to divert attention

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from the entrenched and institutional inequalities of the systems which sustain them— imperialism on the one hand, and global free market capital on the other. As I argued at the beginning, self-help narratives do not address the structural inequalities which the so-called “free market” maintains, inequalities of pricing and of economic subsidy by the developed world of its producers over competing producers in the so-called developing world; in the same way missions did not question the often asserted justification for imperialism, that it brought a higher form of culture and civilization, based on European values to the countries in which it operated, the so-called mission civilisé or “civilizing mission.” Radical analysts such as Benjamin and contemporary oppositional groupings such as the World Social Forum have argued that the emphasis on self-help and micro-development is a conscious strategy to divert attention from these profounder economic inequalities. Even if these shifts are unconscious, or even if they are profoundly well intentioned, they may well still have that same effect. What is intended and what results may be very different. It would be easy to simply celebrate or to demonize missions or modern development agencies. Looking back at the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century religious missions now we can see that their role was often complex and contradictory. Much more complex in fact than radical critics such as J. A. Hobson had suggested at the turn of the twentieth century, when he noted that imperialism operated by introducing “first the missionary, then the Consul, and at last the invading army”—a comment frequently adapted and often misquoted (e.g. “First the Bible then the Gun”).10 At an individual level, missions often had a profound effect in improving conditions for education, health, and even, as I have argued in earlier work, in providing (though perhaps unintentionally) the means for colonized people to gain a voice of resistance which could be heard by the oppressor. Some missions even supported specific resistances by indigenous people to the demands of the colonizers, as was the case for example in Kenya in the 1920s, when missions supported African resistance to the settlers’ desire to force Africans into a wage labor role on large-scale European farms. But overall, of course, missions in the end also were a major force in disrupting indigenous cultural and social forms. They often opened the way for denigratory and negative representations of cultures which did not adhere to European practices—in dress, building forms, dance, music, economic and family structures, law codes, political and social forms, and much else. In our time, the development agencies have often stressed the need to respect cultural differences, notably in the recent emphasis by organizations such as UNESCO on cultural heritage as a basis for sustainable macro-economic development through tourism. But this has sometimes led only to a museumization of such cultures, stereotyping them and denying them the right to change that all viable traditions must maintain if they are to survive and grow. This, of course, opens up a much larger area for debate and discussion than I am able to deal with here (see Griffiths 2007).

“Saving Africa” 77 In conclusion, just as mission narratives (with all their many inadequacies) were a main source of popular information on regions of the world such as Africa in the nineteenth century (see Griffiths 2005a), so the stories on the web from institutions such as the World Bank can be seen to be an equally strong influence on the reportage of Africa in the wider media, underpinning the idea once again that Africa needs to be saved from itself. As a result this is a view held as axiomatic by people who know little or nothing about the traditions or the modern realities of that complex and rich continent, and who are willing to ignore the role of our own practices in the problems we seek to address with the same patronizing assurance exhibited by those two well-meaning if ill-informed Americans on the steps of the Voortrekker monument many years ago.

Notes 1. This chapter extends the insights of a series of earlier papers I have published and which are listed in the Bibliography. 2. For example, by displacing US debt onto the poorer nations by its support of policies which effectively displaced debt from the US to the rest of the world, beginning with the decision to decouple the dollar from the gold standard under the Nixon administration to address the balance of payments problems arising from overextended foreign investment and the huge costs of the Vietnam War. 3. “Preuve de la miséricorde divine: Histoire d’Angelina” (all translations are my own). 4. “mes champs ont été dévastés par les sauterelles, je n’ai plus d’espoir de récoltes” (77). 5. “Vois ces nuages de sauterelles qui couvrent les arbres de la montagne; écoute le craquements des branches qui tombent brisées sous leur poids, et les cris de ceux qui veulent les éloigner. Si je ne puis le donner de nourriture, prends, du moins, ces flacons et ces colliers de verroterie, et va les offrir a quelque ami de la montagne, qui te donnera certainement en échange, un peu de maïs et des bananas” (77). 6. “un paquet enveloppé d’un chiffon” (77). 7. “une magnifique natte qu’elle m’offrit sans rien vouloir accepter pour ce travail” (79). 8. “preuve de la miséricorde divine” (76). 9. “Enfin, ajouta-t-elle, grâce á Dieu, je ne suis plus Hazina la païenne, mais bien Angelina qu’il a bénie” (79). 10. For a fuller account of this influential comment and its many variations see Etherington (2005: 1–2).

Bibliography Benjamin, B. (2007) Invested Interests: Capital, Culture and the World Bank, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Etherington, N. (ed.) (2005) Missions and Imperialism, Companion Volume, Oxford History of the British Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griffiths, G. (2001) “Appropriation and Control, the Role of the Missionary Text,” in

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G. Stilz (ed.) Missions and Colonies in the English-Speaking World, Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag. —— (2005a) “Popular Imperial Adventure Fiction and the Discourse of Missionary Texts,” in J. S. Scott and G. Griffiths (eds.) Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Missions, New York: Palgrave. —— (2005b) “Trained to Tell the Truth: Missionaries, Converts and Narration,” in N. Etherington (ed.) Missions and Imperialism, Companion Volume, Oxford History of the British Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2007) “Sites of Purchase: Slavery, Missions and Tourism on Two Tanzanian Sites,” in L. Dale and H. Gilbert (eds.) Economies of Representation 1790–2000: Colonialism and Commerce, Burlington, VT, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. “L’Histoire d’Angelina” (1896) from Report of the Mission de Mhonda, Zanguebar, Annales Apostoliques 42, April: 76–79. “Sole-Comfort Dot Com: Bridging the Global Income Gap through Hard Work, Quality Sandals and ICTs” (April 14, 2002). Online. Available: http://www.iconnect-online. org/Stories/Story.import4909 (accessed June 1, 2010).

5

Forms of Resistance Writing from and about Uganda Cinzia Mozzato

Ethnic conflict has always been a major obstacle to democratization in Uganda. The politicization of ethnic diversity has played a highly ambivalent role since the country achieved its independence in 1962, and the tumultuous alternation of different regimes has enhanced internal polarizations along the lines of ethnic belonging. In Juma Okuku’s words, “the 1971 coup by Idi Amin, the civil war of 1981–86 and the insurgency in the North since 1987 have all had ethnicity as one of the driving factors” (2002: 9). Throughout the post-independence period, the “ordinary” redefinition of ethnicity in the process of poly-ethnic nation-building has been thwarted by the persecution and marginalization of and systematic discrimination against social sections. In particular, the mutually exclusive empowerment of ethnic groups has resulted in the opposition between economically dominant minorities, such as the southern Buganda (Kampala region), and relatively marginal but larger groups, such as the northern tribes of the Acholi and the Langi, who became the notorious right arm of Obote’s regime but were eventually disempowered by the advent of the National Resistance Army (NRA). As Reto Kuster and Martina Santschi show in Krieg in Acholiland, the kind of pluralism supported by Yoweri Museveni’s present leadership, which introduced multiparty politics only as late as 2002, has not radically challenged ethnicized politics reaching back to Idi Amin’s and Milton Obote’s regimes (2007: 17–30; 53–62). As a consequence, in the last fifteen years the “process of democratization has been thrown back into reverse” (Mwenda 2007: 23). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the political turmoil propelled by inter-ethnic instabilities and local conflicts has afflicted the most visible parts of the country, the north and Acholiland: in Gulu, Kitgum, and Pader, civil strife has been raging since Museveni’s Movement came to power. Basically perceived and represented as an inter- and intra-ethnic conflict between the northern peoples (Acholi, Teso, and Langi amongst others) and the Acholi soldiers enrolled by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), this conflict reaches back to the postwar period and to the aftermath of Amin’s rule (Mwenda 2004). It was actually

80 Cinzia Mozzato Amin’s government that paved the way for the resurgence of anti-Acholi feelings in the 1980s, when part of the Acholi started to join the LRA and the atrocious retaliation against both other groups and pacifist Acholi tribes began. Though aimed at defusing a ten-year-long guerrilla war, Museveni’s peace-keeping operations—backed as they are by the no less notorious NRA army—have done little to appease ethnic tensions. As Koigi wa Wamwere puts it, “a no-party democracy does not guarantee the ethnic integration of a whole country” (2003: 178). What makes integration more problematic is, however, the very obliteration of ethnic difference and division in political discourse: in the name of democracy, press groups are discouraged from mentioning past—let alone present—episodes of ethnic persecution. The representation of Uganda abroad widely reflects this kind of self-censorship. The country was virtually swept off geopolitical maps for a long time and the implications of its recent re-emergence are inevitably liable to misconstruction. Consequently, the current gap between the image of Uganda as the leader of economic renaissance and democracy in East Africa and the image of a country still torn by internecine conflict as reported by Human Rights Watch (or the NGOs operating there) is yet to be bridged. The geopolitical landscape that lurks behind bleak stories of assumedly “tribal” hatred is now the focus of both Ugandan intellectuals and foreign journalists or writers who set out to approach the country’s complex history. All share the urgent need to correct the representation of Uganda at home and abroad: as the novelist Doreen Baingana puts it, “if we [writers] have any duties at all, . . . one of them is to try to skew, or at least complicate, this negative narrative on Africa” (2005: 17). Ugandan conflict-ridden society thus looms large in both the wideranged diasporic literature originating in the migratory waves propelled by internal conflict, and in the output of novelists who still live in Uganda. Taking its cue from some of the questions raised by recent political literature about Uganda, this essay will try to assess new perspectives on the ethnic question offered by, respectively, a British journalist and a Kampala-based novelist.

The Gaze of the Muzungu: Giles Foden Taking up the challenge offered by Uganda’s relative visibility, writers have turned backwards to the period where bottom–up tensions exploded, and the government’s autocratic drift seemed relentless: that is, General Idi Amin’s administration (1971–79). If Amin’s impact and fame have turned him into “the most dominant single factor in Ugandan literature” (Kiyimba 1998: 124), the oblique perspective inherent in diasporic writing has been crucial to face the memory of Amin’s regime: as Moses Isegawa points out, to write from a distance is to refrain “from painful emotional involvement” (Jones 2000: 85). For most writers, to write also means to undermine misleading clichés about those

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anomic tendencies which the Amin age still epitomizes. Interestingly enough, it is not only Ugandan but also foreign writers who have contributed to this trend: amongst the novels which unravel the tangled skein of Ugandan past, a radically decentering perspective has been endorsed by Giles Foden, a Scottish writer and journalist who lived in Uganda in the 1970s and whose focus on Africa has been steadfast ever since. The blend of literary imagination and journalistic research lends Foden’s novel The Last King of Scotland (1998) a stimulating cross-cultural and critical edge. Central to Foden’s depiction of Uganda is actually the writer’s need to demystify a shallow, if sensational, “outsider” approach to episodes which made Uganda visible all over the world. Foden’s perspective pierces through the dark age of Uganda; merging history with “legend,” its critical standpoint best emerges as the narrator Nicholas Garrigan learns about Amin’s notoriously “doomed” past. Before describing how the dictator (an ethnic Kawka) and his circles persecuted various tribes, Garrigan repeatedly hints at the ethnic question: Who knows what curses beat down on the straw roof of the hut that night, what blessings rose from the hard earth floor? Such questions are germane to the Kawka territory. I recently found an excellent book in the Fort William library, by a Mr. George Ivan Smith. He says: it is a barren region where stones are set on the hills to attract the rain . . . The Kawka question is not “who are you?” but “What are you, what kind of man? Are you a big man? Are you a slave?” (Foden 1998: 131–32) In the novel, the adoption of a “journal” technique and the narrator’s own status as a muzungu (stranger) privy to Idi Amin’s life and secrets, provide precious insights into Amin’s politics and the inter-ethnic struggle it provoked: the massacre of Lugandan families, the tensions in Karamoja, and the retaliatory moves of the Acholi and the Langi flash across the dreadful scenario of the 1970s, pointing to punitive policies which targeted supposed “slave” clans (106–14). Foden’s concern with ethnic tensions is subtle. Initially, the novel’s groundtone hovers uneasily between the narrator’s spontaneous observations and a sort of pseudo-ethnographic approach which casts an ironical light on any possible assessment of what Garrigan is witnessing. As Garrigan registers the escalation of war, however, his initial indifference to the government’s abuse of power gradually starts to crumble. The journalist is mesmerized by Amin’s charisma: as a Scotsman, he feels sympathetic with Amin’s self-styled “postcolonial” (and antiEnglish) consciousness. At the same time he becomes aware of the racist politics embraced by the dictator and aimed at eliminating “internal enemies” as well as non-privileged muzungus:

82 Cinzia Mozzato The worst thing was seeing the Sikhs have their turbans knocked off, and their beards cut with bayonets. I stood by, I know that now—there was nothing I could do, I thought. Not all of the Asians made the deadline, which only increased the brutality . . . It was also about this time that the stories about Amin began to fascinate me. And when, with my gummy ears, I heard him calling himself the last rightful King of Scotland again on the radio, I thought, in a wild moment, that it had some special relevance for me. As if I were his subject. (117–20) By choosing a European main character/narrator, Foden draws attention to the chasm between the Uganda he depicts and the distorted representation of it abroad. Garrigan’s sense of being “a subject” is therefore quite affecting, as it aligns him to the very people whom Amin’s government persecutes. No doubt Garrigan’s passivity underlies the entire novel: as Michael Kerrigan remarks, intellectually sophisticated yet ethically indolent, Garrigan is much given to soul-searching, yet not much interested in doing the right thing [as he] paints a horribly vivid portrait of a land blasted under the outrageous authority of a man who is at once genuinely ridiculous and genuinely terrifying. (Kerrigan 1998: 22) Yet Garrigan’s detachment clearly helps his descent into “hell,” which is no hell at all but the result of international realpolitik: as he soon realizes, Amin’s illiberal regime is supported by various international agencies which have vested interests in maintaining the status quo. Once he has fled Uganda, Garrigan resumes the main threads of his story, tracked by journalists and by a mixture of remorse and disappointment with the role he has been playing as a reluctant mole for British intelligence and as a “complicit” witness to Amin’s dictatorship. By playing the character’s limited focus against a much more complex historical scenario, the author finally enables readers to grasp the relativity of Garrigan’s viewpoint and to move beyond it. This ultimately debunks Garrigan’s perception of Uganda as an anomic country and provides stimuli for a sharper contextualization of the conflicting political histories that interweave with his story. Foden’s skeptical treatment of Ugandan history is leavened by remarks which look forward to ongoing ethnic conflicts, for which external agencies are responsible; its political “incorrectedness” is consequently hardly negotiable. In this respect, Kevin MacDonald’s world-acclaimed film,1 shot in 2006 and based upon Foden’s novel, provides a less nuanced “negative narrative” of Africa. MacDonald openly adheres to the postcolonial subtext of the novel, which is implicitly subverted by the dictator’s role as a plaything of international and British

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pressure groups. However, while Foden uses this subtext to conjure up dynamics of empowerment in Uganda’s multi-ethnic society, the film drops the hint completely and foregrounds the relation between Garrigan and Amin against a quite dim sociopolitical backdrop: it is therefore hard for the audience to grasp the relation between the Amin years, the crucial changes which took place between the 1980s and the 1990s, and present Uganda. Whereas at the end of the novel, Obote’s coup is reported with disparaging detachment, at the end of the movie credits roll on documentary footage portraying pro-Obote street celebrations. Though historically accurate, MacDonald’s focus on Ugandans’ momentary release from dictatorship hardly foreshadows what was to happen soon, or who the people who celebrated Amin’s fall were. What Foden’s novel, unlike the film, ultimately highlights is the official downplaying of the ethnic question in Uganda: during the Amin age, “national cohesion” required ethnic discrimination, and the decades that followed signaled no remarkable departure from the politicization of ethnic division. The consequences of this have been so paramount that ethnic conflict is now the focus of a host of Ugandan novelists writing in English.

Looking Northwards: Monica Arac de Nyeko A burgeoning community of writers who were born between the late 1960s and the 1970s and who experienced the consequences of Amin’s rule are actually fostering cross-ethnic dialogue in Uganda. The post-Amin age, and more specifically the conflict raging in northern Uganda, has made them recognize that, in fact, ethnicity does matter in today’s Uganda and that it undermines different minorities’ right to freedom. If ethnicity is “the primary terrain of collective identities in contemporary Africa, . . . a variable array of attributes such as language, culture, shared historical narratives, kin metaphors of belonging, and beliefs” (Young 2002: 37), all these elements have been altered during the recent civil conflict in northern Uganda, or Acholiland (1987–2002). For the Acholi, who were perceived as both victims and aggressors, even self-identification has become extremely difficult after the first LRA attacks. The sense of local and regional belonging, as a marker of group identity and self-comprehension, has been destabilized by displacement and by the “contrasting pulls of identification and disidentification with the oppressor” (de Swaan 1997: 128). The hardening of group boundaries “has fissured the region” (Amselle 2002: 24) too; the very survival of once tightly-knit communities has been compromised, following the forceful enlisting of men and the abduction of children. The recodification of sociohistorically constructed ethnic markers, originally triggered off by post-war conflicts, has also been troublesome, since the Acholi’s self-comprehension as a “warrior race” has fatally

84 Cinzia Mozzato intersected with the LRA’s eschatological framing. What the war has unsettled is ultimately the psychological and sociological basis for group identification and inter-group relation. Conflict, the people’s suffering, and the rebels’ ravages are recurring topoi in the fiction inspired by the northern civil war. In particular, concern with the possible extinction of northern communities has been aired by women writers who, addressing an increasingly international audience, have chosen a local perspective to promote dialogue across regional and national borders. In keeping with the recent flourishing of women’s writing in Uganda, this trend thus offers a compelling kind of commitment. Not only has gendered consciousness been used to address social changes in contemporary society through a cosmopolitan/metropolitan perspective—as happens, for example, with Doreen Baingana2 —it has also encouraged the retrieval of local, less-known, and often non-narratable stories. The success of war-focused anthologies testifies to the women writers’ rising self-awareness as “privileged” witnesses to conflicts; the increasing diffusion of the short story as a genre has also registered a shift away from the broad historical canvasses endorsed by expatriate (and mostly male) fiction. Writers who witnessed the turmoil of the mid-1980s and 1990s and eventually took part in projects of social reconstruction are merging their narrower, local focus on today’s Uganda with a compelling documentary drive. Amongst them, Jackee Budesta Batanda and Monica Arac de Nyeko—both members of FEMRITE, the Uganda Women Writers Association—have emerged as representatives of this new mood. Yet whereas Batanda, the well-known Lugandan novelist, has focused on life in the internal displaced (ID) camps around Kampala,3 the younger novelist has primarily focused on the northern wars and on the northerners’ claim for peace. An emergent Acholi writer who moved to Kampala after witnessing conflicts in Kitgum and Gulu, Arac de Nyeko won international attention thanks to her short story “Jambula Tree” (2006), which was awarded the 2007 Caine Prize for Literature. Set in the 1990s, the story falls within the dominant, love-centered strain of female fiction promoted by anthologies such as A Woman’s Voice (Karooro Okurut 2002), where war is usually at the background. It also captures the climate of diffidence and closure which pervaded the aftermath of conflict. Arac repeatedly suggests the instability surfacing on the outskirts of Kampala: We got used to the sight of green soldiers perched in our football fields. This was new order. Soldiers doing policemen’s work! No questions. Uganda yetu, hakuna matata. How strange it was, freedom in forbidden colours. (Arac de Nyeko 2006: 167)

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More significantly, she captures the nexus between oppression outside and the hardening of social relations within the group represented by the community of Northern immigrants. The main character, Anjangu, is a young girl who loses her lover because of their community’s ban on homosexual love. Personal relations, which mostly revolve around women (daughter, mother, the community of women of the Nakawa Housing Estate, the “old gossip” Mama Atim), are central to the short story; so is the awareness of the deep unbalance between individual and community life, personal choices and social relations. Imposed “freedom” exacerbates the community’s sense of internal besiegement and rising tension, which Arac illuminates by intertwining gender and class frictions. More specifically, her concern with homosexual love (and, obliquely, with incest) testifies to her willingness to unveil what is mainly regarded as obscene and is consequently expunged from social discourse and literature.4 Conversely, her recognition of the relative “invisibility” ascribed to women highlights the potential in women’s socially liminal status. When facing the “obscene” presence of war in the north, Arac de Nyeko turns her sensitivity and her slant perspective to even stronger effect by turning her gaze away from the capital and looking backwards to the “everyday” dimension of besieged villages. The lack of freedom following war in Acholiland is the theme of Arac’s first success “In the Stars” (2003), a short story/reportage about Kitgum which was published in The Nation and won the 2003 Women World Voices in War Zones prize. In her short story “Strange Fruit” (2004), Arac somehow blunts her documentary grasp of events and switches to the lyrical register of stories like “Jambula Tree” in order to filter conflict through the questioning viewpoint of a woman and a survivor. Unlike “Jambula Tree,” “Strange Fruit” has a firm grounding in provincial life and in the Acholi community. It actually resumes the “village vs. metropolis” relation which is one of the tropes of recent East African writing (Griffiths 2000: 128–32): Kampala becomes the distant capital where people regard disorders in the north as mere barbarity, and life in the village as a series of tribal rituals. Arac’s depiction of the north can thus primarily be seen as a counterweight to this kind of misrepresentation, as much as a response to the capital’s alleged indifference to the northern troubles. Two prominent tropes of war-centered fiction are relevant to “Strange Fruit”: the ubiquitous presence of the “soldiers/rebels” and the inner displacement experienced by civilians. Both hint at the politicization of ethnic difference and its devastating effects by denouncing the LRA’s illiberal ideology, which posited reckless soldiers as “rescuers.” Set in Kitgum at a time when the LRA rebels were still recruiting people, “Strange Fruit” plays the (lost) everyday dimension of village life against a climate of diffuse pent-up tension. From the very beginning, the bush where the rebels hide after their massive operations of recruitment seems to threaten the village. This both creates and demystifies an edenic image of village

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life, which is often described through references to Acholi lore: the village’s growing disbelief in the peaceful spirit of the river works as a powerful, ominous reminder of the community’s threatened unity. While an all-women community begins to witness and indirectly to connive with the “soldiers,” the connection between a menacing, anomic outside and a threatened inside is ushered in by the internal attack of Acholi rebels. The group’s self-division is actually brought to the fore through the gradual estrangement between Sofia, an Acholi woman from Kampala, and her husband Mwaka, who is forced to enlist in the LRA and subsequently commits to their “revolutionary” cause. The half-oneiric register Arac chooses underlines the all-pervading atmosphere of suspension and distress which underscores a wider unrest and risk of social explosion. Despite her husband’s “desertion” and present troubles, however, Sofia decides not to flee her village. Her sense of rootedness is a strong counterweight to threatening anomy, and all through the story her ethnic belonging is stressed rather than obliterated. Sofia’s memory of the day Mwaka was enlisted is charged with the paradoxical awareness of how the “rebellion” has undermined the very sense of communal belonging: My memory has chosen to take me back to the day they took Mwaka. He wanted to go drinking with his friends in the trading centre. I sulked till my long face weakened his feet. The simmering midday sun brought the rebels. They found Mwaka at home like a good husband and wheeled him to the end of a mirage. My hands beat into my lap resonating the wail of an Acholi woman who widowed herself. (Arac de Nyeko 2004: 41) Since the story is told from within the site of struggle, Arac both assumes and challenges current representations of the rebels, who first feature as ghosts evoked by street talk and the radio, and then burst into the community scattered around Kitgum: “They whispered stories they had heard from other people. At the river, women stayed longer and spoke of men who came and abducted men and young boys to force them to fight” (29). Arac explores the way the rebels are seen by their former community: the recurrent appeal to a choral subject (“they say”), which voices its diffidence towards the self-styled “warriors,” is made more urgent by Sofia’s considerations: “I studied him [Mwaka] stealthily. In his soldier uniform, Mwaka looked like an image I had seen before but could not recognize anymore” (36). Mwaka epitomizes those rebels who periodically come back but have grown internal strangers and no longer seem to belong anywhere. Nor is their cause allowed to be credited: their violence is presented as gratuitous and disruptive, their hopes as merely delusive. The narrative is thus tinged with distrust of the

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pseudo-Christian rhetoric though which the LRA address its “people.” Moreover, Arac’s criticism of the LRA’s notion of liberation is palpable in the bathetic allusion to one of the tropes of East African recent history, the Mau Mau rebellion. When Sofia hears the soldiers singing Mau Mau songs, she remarks: something about this chant was different . . . The voices outside rose sharper than Waragi Extra Strong Spirit as they started to chant: “Death to the traitors! Death to the traitors!” People had spoken about such things. They said the rebels considered every male a traitor if he refused to join the liberation war. He was an enemy of the Acholi people, and the great rebellion to oust the government. (29–30) Nonetheless, the insurgents are not totally represented as traitors, or enemies: they still are part of the community, and this is nowhere more explicit than when we hear these rebels (and Mwaka after his conversion) speak Acholi. Language distinguishes them from the other aggressors on which the story revolves: the NRA soldiers, who come from the south and who are heard shouting in Swahili— a language which, now as much as in the past, identifies the armed forces and the oppressors of northern tribes. The NRA thus represents an external kind of oppression, to which Sofia significantly reacts by speaking Acholi: They [the NRA soldiers] approach it and kick at the door. The weak hinges give way. The wooden door falls flat on the ground. They crash inside. Piloya rushes to me and clings to my hand. I look to the old house. Sounds of a struggle come through. “Atim ango?” [“What shall I do?”] I shout out. (47) Set against the story’s dramatic close, the use of Acholi exposes Sofia’s controversial allegiance to Mwaka and her people. The community’s own language is charged with the violence of aggression and the violence of resistance, but it is also significantly invoked to challenge the estrangement between the main characters. Sofia’s refusal to reply to her husband in Acholi at the end of the story is therefore tragically counterpointed by her shouts at the soldiers who brutalize Mwaka. Through her handling of language and viewpoint, Arac de Nyeko captures the contrasting effects of shared traumas, pain being the ground for empathetic relation as much as the instrument of potential division. Her focus is on the community of women who survive, on their experiences and their memory, which might be their only form of living and of coping with the impending fracture that Sofia’s loss of Mwaka bodies forth. As the novelist claims, “even if, say, the conflict ended now, it is going to be ever present in a sense, in the scars it created, in what it destroyed and in what it allowed” (Musoke-Nteyafas 2007). Individual and

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collective memory is thus recognized as a powerful form of resistance against the community’s internal cleavage, as well as against its isolation. Alongside Sofia’s reflections, it is the interplay of registers that makes Arac’s evocation of ethnic conflict both all-pervading and oblique: violence and death are neither “obscenely” exposed nor downplayed. At the end of “Strange Fruit,” Arac returns to, and enhances, the surreal mood of the beginning: I take a quick glance towards the mango tree. I notice something. Two hands knotted behind a back and a frozen stare, curled over a rock plate of bulged eyes. Mwaka does not swing with the powerful afternoon wind draft. Thirtythree. That is his age. All he is. A number scribbled on a page, a vocal parting of lips, as light as a hair strand. I watch him. My defeated warrior hangs like strange fruit, waiting to be plucked. (52) In the final section, a further edge to Arac’s treatment of ethnic questions is provided by the intertextuality that sets the story apart from both “In the Stars” and “Jambula Tree.” Arac’s voice actually accommodates a number of different voices, drawn from local folktale and lore (like the story of the Nyadwe, the moongoddess), from East African lyric tradition (from Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino to the poetry of Timothy Wangusa) and from music (as in the lines borrowed from the Acholi singer Geoffrey Oryema).5 Rather than fading into a self-absorbed, elegiac song, the “Acholi woman’s wail” invokes dialogue and memory as a site of sharing as well as self-recognition for communities threatened by “internal hatred.” “Strange Fruit” thus engages with a cross-cultural framework of testimonial writing which pulls against the erasure or misuse of memory. In sharp contrast to Foden’s outsider stance, to his journalist and factual register and his ultimately defamiliarizing approach to Uganda’s past, Arac de Nyeko’s insider standpoint, her lyrical register and oblique testimony provide a valuable and far-reaching attempt to tackle recent conflicts through an ethnically grounded standpoint. Foden’s and Arac de Nyeko’s achievements might therefore be regarded as complementary. Both have been fueling cultural discourses about and within Uganda, unveiling narratives which hinge equally on memorial and documentary pulls. Both underline the relevance of ethnic difference to the creation of the Ugandan nation, thus alerting readers to the misleading political use of it from, respectively, a detached and estranged perspective and a more intimate viewpoint. In fact, by debunking the image of Uganda, and of East Africa, as irresistibly doomed to suffer anomy and endless wars, their writing encourages a non-ideological assessment of difference, within and beyond the boundaries of this long-afflicted country.

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Notes 1. The Last King of Scotland, dir. Kevin MacDonald (2006). 2. Baingana’s successful collection Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe (2006) has a clear cosmopolitan and postcolonial focus on today’s Uganda and especially on Kampala. 3. Batanda’s short story “Aciro’s Song” (2007), for example, depicts everyday life in an ID camp. 4. The debate about “Jambula Tree” is summed up in Ayebia Clarke (2007). 5. “Sounds of morning bring the long / squawk of dawn bird song” (Arac de Nyeko 2004: 48) are lines from Oryema’s song “Exile” (1990).

Bibliography Amselle, J. L. (2002) “La globalisation et l’avenir de la différence culturelle,” in J. L. Amselle (ed.) Branchements: Anthropologie de l’Universalité des Cultures, Paris: Flammarion. Arac de Nyeko, M. (2003) “In the Stars,” The Nation, September 15. —— (2004) “Strange Fruit,” in M. Arac de Nyeko et al. (eds.) Seventh Street Alchemy: A Selection of Writings from the Caine Prize for African Writing 2004, Johannesburg: Jacana. —— (2006) “Jambula Tree,” in A. A. Aidoo (ed.) African Love Stories, Banbury: Ayebia. Ayebia Clarke, B. (2007) “The Caine Prize for Literature: A Publisher’s Response,” Wasafiri 52: 72–73. Baingana, D. (2005) “Our Stories Aren’t All Tragedies,” The Guardian, August 2. Batanda, J. Budesta (2007) “Aciro’s Song,” Wasafiri 22(2): 8–12. Breitinger, E. (1999) “Political stories and ethnic tales: tensions in Ugandan Fiction,” in E. Breitinger (ed.) Uganda: The Cultural Landscape, Bayreuth: University of Bayreuth. Chua, A. (2004) World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Economy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instabilities, London: Heinemann. De Swaan, A. (1997) “Widening Circles of Disidentification: On the Psycho- and Sociogenesis of the Hatred of Distant Strangers. Reflections on Rwanda,” Theory, Culture and Society 14(2): 105–22. Foden, G. (1998) The Last King of Scotland, London: Faber and Faber. Griffiths, G. (2000) African Literatures in English: East and West, Harlow: Pearson. Jones, J. (2000) “An Interview with Moses Isegawa,” English in Africa 27(2): 85–102. Karooro Okurut, M. (ed.) (2002) A Woman’s Voice: An Anthology of Short Stories by Ugandan Women (2002) Kampala: FEMRITE. Kerrigan, M. (1998) “In the Footsteps of Prester John,” Times Literary Supplement March 13: 22. Kiyimba, A. (1998) “The Ghost of Idi Amin in Ugandan Literature,” Research in African Literatures 29(1): 124–38. Kuster, R. and Santschi, M. (2007) Krieg in Acholiland: Ethnicität, Gewart und Politik im Norden Uganda, Bern: Institut für Sozialanthropologie. MacDonald, K. (dir.) (2006) The Last King of Scotland, screenplay by P. Morgan and J. Brock, Fox SearchLights. Musoke-Nteyafas, J. (2007) “Interview with Arac de Nyeko,” Ugpulse online, July 31.

90 Cinzia Mozzato Online. Available: http://www.ugpulse.com/articles/daily/Literature.asp?id=669 (accessed June 2010). Mwenda, M. A. (2004) “The Link Between Movement and War.” Online. Available: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg13320.html (accessed June 2010). —— (2007) “Personalizing Power in Uganda,” Journal of Democracy 18(3): 23–37. Okuku, J. (2002) Ethnicity, State Power and Democratization Process in Uganda, Uppsala: Nordic African Institute. Oryema, G. (1990) Exile, Real World Records. Young, C. (2002) “Pluralism, Ethnicity, and Militarization,” in R. Laremont (ed.) The Causes of Warfare and the Implications of Peacekeeping in Africa, Portsmouth: Heinemann. Wa Wamwere, K. (2003) Negative Ethnicity: From Bias to Genocide, New York: Seven Stories Press.

6

Whose Biafra? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun Mai Palmberg and Kirsten Holst Petersen

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) could be described as a battlefield of the ethics of resistance. It agonizes over the dilemma of a just cause but unjust means, it struggles with the necessity of reconciliation, it lashes out against the West’s (mis)uses of the images of the war, and at the end it expands the battle to include a discussion about who has the right to write the history of the war. Struggle, armed and unarmed, is its central theme.

Wars and Images in the West There are some twentieth-century wars on the African continent which have contributed symbolic power to Western images of Africa. The Anglo-Boer war (1899–1902) hardly registered the black Africans, but for some it made the Boers into freedom fighters against British imperialism. For others, it was a mere disturbing moment in Cecil Rhodes’s dream of Cape to Cairo which left to posterity the boy scout and girl guide movement. The Mau Mau revolt in Kenya (1952–60) brought in the Africans, but as terrorists rather than freedom fighters. The image in the West was one of bloodthirsty primitives, and the huge discrepancy between the victims of British security operations and the Europeans killed was an untold story.1 The next war in Africa to make a strong impact on Western minds, the Congo crisis, fed similar images of Africans as savages, despite the fact that the secession of the copper province Katanga (now Shaba), which sparked off the war in 1960, clearly was a European, notably Belgian, maneuver. The Nigeria–Biafra war (1967–70) belonged to a different category. A strong wave of sympathy swept over the West. Pictures of starving children made people react against the policy of starvation employed by the Lagos government. But they also established an image of Africans as helpless people, whose destiny is wholly dependent on Western help and initiative.

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Mai Palmberg and Kirsten Holst Petersen

The Powerful Images of Biafra Public opinion in the West had strong sympathies for the Biafran cause, while Western governments either supported the Federal government of Nigeria (as did the British), expressed sympathies for Biafra but did not give it diplomatic recognition (as did the French), or professed neutrality (as most did). Sympathies for Biafra were shaped by images which powerfully appealed to emotions. We single out four images (not mutually exclusive) as the most important ones: 1. 2. 3. 4.

the stark pictures of starving children Igbos as a persecuted ethnic group seeking self-determination Biafra as an experiment in democracy and self-sufficiency the Nigeria–Biafra war as a battle between Islam and Christianity.

With Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reopens the Nigerian discussion about the Biafra war, its background and unfolding. Most, but not all, of the characters are Igbo, and the narrative point of view is shared by three of the protagonists: Olanna, a rich chief’s daughter and university lecturer; Ugwu, a young houseboy in the household of Olanna and her husband Odenigbo, a radical university lecturer in Nsukka; and Richard, an Englishman, who falls in love first with Igbo traditional art, and then with Olanna’s sister Kainene. Both through its narrative structure and through its character development the novel presents a series of arguments and images in polemical debate with pre-existing ones— Nigerian and Western—raising a relevant question: what does Adichie’s voice add to the stories and images produced before? Does her story challenge or revise the Western interpretations contained in the images of Biafra formed during the war? Where should memory and images be revised? Images and memory are not synonyms. Adichie’s ambition is to revive and give voice to the memory of what happened to Biafrans; the Western images are moral generalizations of right and wrong, with little room for individual fates, and even less for the ethical complexities which make up the fabric of her book. When Adichie lets her characters speak of how “The World Was Silent When We Died,” this expresses Biafrans’ feeling of abandonment, and their disappointment in European, especially British, government policies more than it reflects the state of public opinion in the West. The famine pictures created a strong wave of sympathy with Biafra, and widespread humanitarian concern. This can be dated to the summer of 1968, when pictures began to spread, first in the UK, of wasting mothers of children with stomachs swollen from kwashiorkor. The war had gone on for a year when David Cairns from the Daily Express in London went to Biafra and brought home some pictures of starving children, victims of the Nigerian war of attrition. His editors did not publish them, they thought they looked more like Oxfam posters than news. The Sun, along with the Independent

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Television Network (ITN) with Alan Hart, published similar pictures from Biafra on June 12, 1968. Such pictures had not been seen since the photographs of Belsen after the defeat of Hitler’s Germany. The history of how victims of famine and conflict in Africa entered the television sets in Western homes started with the images of starving children in Biafra, to be followed some years later by famine pictures from Ethiopia, and later pictures of refugees from Rwanda and Darfur, all of which contributed to forming the image of disaster and helplessness in Africa. In response to the reports of the humanitarian crisis, and the use of starvation as a weapon of war, Biafra committees were formed in many Western countries. Biafra became a symbol for humanitarian concern pitted against cynical use of power. There were, however, minority voices in the West which did not agree with the pro-Biafra opinion. Among the solidarity groups already working with Africa there was, by and large, silence. Other wars had changed their image of Africa and Africans: first the liberation war in Algeria (1954–62), then the armed struggle in the Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Angola. The image of helpless African children was contrary to the images constructed by the solidarity groups in the late 1960s. The emblem here was the liberation soldier with a gun and ammunition belt. Solidarity was the motto. Charity was despised. Among those in the West who have been actively involved with Africa, this liberation fighter image has been important; in the popular consciousness, however, the Biafra image remains paramount. There were other counter-claims and skeptical objections to the Biafra campaigns. Some pointed out that the Igbos expressed a false claim to ethnically defined self-determination, as minority peoples in Biafra were not consulted. Others explained the secession as elite competition for the oil resources in the Eastern region. Some warned against being swayed by the starvation pictures by pointing out that the Biafran government had employed an advertising agency based in Geneva (Markpress) to spread pictures of starving children to influence the public opinion. In actual fact it was the Western media which spread the pictures of starving children, as the Biafran message at the time of the appearance of the pictures was still that they were winning the war.

Adichie’s Story and Other Stories The author says that in Half of a Yellow Sun she attempted to give not a factual truth, but “an emotional truth.” Despite the disclaimer that this is not a history of Biafra, there is a wealth of factual references based on her long study of the war; the main purpose of the book, combining the factual and the emotional aspects, is to reopen the discussion about what happened, and how it affected people. It is

94 Mai Palmberg and Kirsten Holst Petersen meant to handle the war trauma, collective and individual. She brings to light stories of the horrors of killings of Igbos in the north, Biafran pride and aspirations, the war effort, and the suffering. How does Adichie portray the war? There are, in our view, three different strokes of the brush, sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory. One is a sympathetic description of Biafran nationalism, one is an increasing moral and emotional distance to the war effort, and one is a conciliatory gesture towards the enemy, particularly northern Nigeria. Set in eastern Nigeria in the early 1960s and ending with the Biafran surrender in January 1970, the book follows a group of middle class, mainly academic Igbos working at Nsukka University. They form the think-tank and fuel the enthusiasm and idealism which started the war, and they also suffer its consequences, moving further and further into the Igbo heartland as the Federal troops advance. Finally, after the war is lost, they move back to Nsukka to a defeated new start in life. Biafran nationalism is an undercurrent in the whole book, but it is embodied most consistently in Odenigbo, the university teacher in Nsukka. His Biafran nationalism is based on the conviction that only tribal identity is firm and authentic. In the latter part of the book, describing the events during the war, Biafran nationalism colors numerous descriptions of how enduring the Biafrans were. At the same time, there are statements against the nationalist propaganda, especially where it portrays Igbos as good and northerners as evil. “We are all capable of doing the same things to one another, really,” Olanna says when Nigeria embarks on its first military action against Biafra in 1967. “No, mah,” says Ugwu, “we are not like those Hausa people” (177). There is in Adichie’s book a moral and ethical distance to the way the war is waged. In places she offers a view of the war as a competition of elites; there are stories of corruption (for instance, 278); there is the theme of brutally executed forced conscription of “idle civilians” (298, 357), and soldiers in search of money to go drinking stealing a private car from a couple looking for their son (363). As in some Zimbabwean novels (for example novels by Stanley Nyamfukudsa and Alexander Kanengoni), but unlike in most stories of liberation wars, Adichie does not shun the dark side of hunting for and killing saboteurs (313, 377). There is also a feminist streak in the novel. We find it not only in the loaded description of the prewar one-night stand between Odenigbo and a young village girl whom his mother brought for the very purpose of impregnation, but also in the implicit condemnation of his repeated infidelity with a lonely woman who, like Odenigbo and his family, had to flee from her home. Another level of feminist critique is found in the contrast between Odenigbo’s long rambling ideological speeches, which betray a high degree of ignorance of the hardships of everyday life, and the scenes in the market and at the food relief centers where the women fight for food.

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Negative masculinity is illustrated here both by the above-mentioned infidelity, denied and explained away by sexual attraction without any assumption of responsibility, and by the excessive violence showed in the war effort. The experiences of Ugwu illustrate this. From a houseboy who gets unusual attention to his schooling from “Master” (Odenigbo) he becomes a soldier for Biafra, kills many “vandals” in action, and takes part, somewhat hesitantly at first, in a gang rape of a bar girl (362–65). The view Adichie projects from inside her fictional beleaguered Biafra is bifocal: it is aimed towards fellow Nigerians (the national healing project) and towards, or perhaps more precisely against, the West and its images of the Biafran war. A comparison between the four images mentioned above and the novel shows both contrasts and convergences. 1. The stark pictures of the starving children: Adichie writes about the starving children at the end of the book, where, for example, Kainene is responsible for a refugee camp (348). Kwashiorkor, Mama Oji explains, is called the Harold Wilson syndrome, after the British prime minister (338). 2. The Igbos as a persecuted group, seeking self-determination: Adichie describes the killings of Igbos in the north as the first political rumblings and a strong argument for seeking secession. The argument for separatism gained much understanding in the West at the time. In the novel the discussions in the home of Odenigbo in Nsukka showcase some of the arguments for and against separation. When the declaration of independence for Biafra came, the main characters in the book are jubilant and confident. When things do not go well, there is a tendency to blame the outside world for helping the Federal side, referred to as “the vandals.” 3. Biafra as an experiment in democracy and self-sufficiency: the country is clearly for Odenigbo and his dinner guests in Nsukka a model for a new and better Africa, a forward-looking experiment. The book depicts this view as a variant of “Black power” philosophy, a brotherhood based on being black. There is a natural identification with the blacks in South Africa, Rhodesia, and the US. This section of the novel, describing the beginning of the war, gives a positive picture of the enthusiasm, involvement, and idealism of the Igbo intellectual elite, which is not so much denied but worn down by the horrors of the war in later sections of the novel. The vision of Biafra as a model society has receded into the back memory in the West, but it had its advocates. Helge Rønning, a still active literature and media scholar, wrote in a Norwegian paper in 1969 that Biafra was “the only country in Africa—perhaps with the exception of Tanzania—which had carried through a real national revolution” (Rønning 1969). 4. The Nigeria–Biafra war as a battle between Islam and Christianity: the novel also takes into account this view, which gained popularity particularly in Catholic circles. The story frequently tells how in the popular imagination in

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Biafra the Muslims seek dominance and have nothing but contempt and hatred for Biafrans—though it is not clear whether this is against Igbos as a an ethnic group, as an economically and educationally advanced group, or as a Christian community. Adichie lets the Swedish Count von Rosen, who flew some of the nightly emergency flights (because Nigeria did not permit direct flights), figure. What she does not say, and what was not so well known, was that he was propelled not only by humanitarian instincts but as much or more by his feeling that Biafra was contested territory in a battle of Christians resisting the Islamic thrust.2 In conclusion, we find more convergences than contrasts when comparing Western images—or explanatory patterns—and Adichie’s novel. As a polemic voice Adichie seems to have no basic disagreement with the minority Western explanatory patterns, but the same cannot be said of the majority image in the West, that of the starving children. The book does include strong and emotionally charged descriptions of starving and dying children, and it describes the relief operations as lifesaving exercises, but Adichie vehemently objects to the West’s use of these images to convey a general impression of African helplessness, in need of rescue from the West. On the home front she wants to open up a discussion about the war in order to start a process of healing the still-festering national wounds. She makes no apologies for having sympathy for Biafra, but on the other hand she does not wish to demonize the Nigerians. This combination of a moral purpose and a double focus immediately invites a comparison with Chinua Achebe, particularly Things Fall Apart, and Adichie acknowledges her debt to both the author and his seminal novel (see Arana 2007). The two texts have the same geographical setting and in that way tell a story about the same group of people, with three generations between them. In both texts this society is first flourishing, then beleaguered, then fighting outside enemies and finally losing. Both writers have a strong vision of the novelist as teacher. Echoing Achebe’s much quoted statement of purpose: I for one would not wish to be excused. I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them. (Achebe 1975: 45) Adichie says: “People are talking about Biafra in Nigeria now, and generations are growing up not knowing anything about the war at all. I think that’s wrong, and I’m hoping my new book will perhaps educate the young people a little” (quoted in Roberts 2006). Another parallel is the deliberate desire to give a balanced picture, to show both good and bad aspects of both pre-colonial Umuofia and beleaguered Biafra.

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The blame and praise are portioned out very carefully: the vision, inventiveness, solidarity, and willingness to sacrifice everything which characterized the early part of the secession and the ensuing war in Adichie’s novel is increasingly marked by corruption, and widespread raping of women. As mentioned earlier, this feature also includes a desire to stretch the fairness to include the federal side, and the novel features a positive and centrally placed Hausa. This character, here called Mohammed, has a more central role in an earlier play by Adichie (1988), called For the Love of Biafra. Here the central story, set in the north of Nigeria, is a love story across ethnic groups between Mohammed and the Igbo girl Adoabi. Marriage is unthinkable and they plan to elope, but the war separates them, the pogroms in the north force her to go back to the east, and when he seeks her out after the war and proposes marriage and a life in London she refuses and instead accepts a loveless marriage to a rich Igbo businessman who will help look after her war-damaged and reduced family. Love is defeated by ethnically based loyalty. In Half of a Yellow Sun this stark scenario is scrambled. One of the main characters, Olanna, has already left her Hausa lover Mohammed for Odenigbo when the war breaks out, but Mohammed remains helpful and likable in the background. At some point he sends Olanna a parcel of expensive chocolates from Europe. This sign of luxury enrages her in her war-torn and starving Biafran reality. However, this change is not a direct result of different tribal affiliations but portrayed rather as a question of being trapped inside a shrinking and starving Biafra as opposed to being out, at large in the world. There is a subtle change from a discussion about ethnic affiliation to one about the war experience. The novel remains open on this point of possible reconciliation, balanced between Adichie’s belief that “[o]f course we can bloody well live together” (in McGrath 2006), her cautioning that “[t]here’s still a lot of resentment in Eastern Nigeria, which I think is to be expected” (in Weaver 2007), and even a mentioning of MASSOB, an outlawed organization which tries to rekindle the dream of Biafra. Adichie is aware that she has opened a potentially explosive subject, and that she is vulnerable to charges of bringing wood to the fire of ethnic division, but her desire to “teach” and heal overcomes the fear of repercussions. In Achebe’s text the second part of the bi-focal aim, that of talking to the West, consists of a series of refutations of prejudicial Western images of both the war, as outlined above, and of Africans in general. It is important here to take into account the time gap between Achebe’s and Adichie’s texts (1958, 2007). The clash is not between the Westernization represented by the British military invasion on the one hand, and traditional Igbo society fighting for independence on the other, but between a modernized elite, fighting for independence from an enforced unity (by the same colonial power) with a vast, and culturally and religiously vastly different, Nigeria. This time change brings into focus the feature of class. The central characters

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are highly respected and very rich middle class Igbos, and they are both the active initiators and ideologists and fellow sufferers in the conflict. Adichie makes a point of showing the importance of class. In her interview “Madonna’s Not Our Saviour” she says: People forget that Africa is a place in which class exists. It is as if Africans are not allowed to have class, that somehow authenticity is synonymous with poverty and demands your pity and your sympathy . . . And it’s very troubling to me . . . Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wild life, poverty, maybe Aids . . . (Moss 2007) Both Half of a Yellow Sun and Adichie’s previous book, Purple Hibiscus, have urban settings in the modern sectors of the rich business community and the university community, and two of the main characters—Olanna and Kainene—are educated, successful urban women. This focus on both class and gender aspects of modernity is shared with Ama Ata Aidoo’s novel Changes, set in Accra. When faced with criticism from those who said that this focus was not “really African” Ama Ata Aidoo answered that “we also exist” (quoted in Palmberg 2005). Adichie’s concern with class and the possibility of class mobility goes further in her portrayal of the houseboy Ugwu, who rises through education from illiterate village boy to becoming the author of a book about the war. He becomes a symbol for the rising lower classes. Adichie says in an interview that she thinks Ugwu embodies the spirit of the book. Adichie’s focus is still on a vindication of the Igbo way of life, but this way of life has changed since Things Fall Apart. Her five main characters are all “decent” but also flawed people developing and changing under the extreme pressure on personal integrity and interpersonal relationships caused by starvation and the daily proximity of death. They are decent modern people in moral chaos, not just as background to the Biafran war but as upholders of a nation-state ideology against an enforced state formation; they are not simply representatives of ideological positions but individuals, embroiled in an extreme situation that tests individual identity formation as well as state formation. This part of the novel claims for Biafra, and Nigeria, and perhaps Africa, the personality and relationship dilemmas of the modern world, devoid, deliberately, of any exciting qualities of the exotic other: the main characters cope, don’t cope, take to drink, betray, resolve old resentments under the impact of the shared experience of the horror of the civil war or grow in maturity and understanding. The war is not just a background to this, as they are all not only suffering from it but also emotionally and actively involved in it. This is part of her objection to the West on another question: the image of helplessness, created by

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the pictures of the starving children, and the feelings of pity which this produced in the West. She objects strongly to this simplification of Africa, and the awareness of what class means is one way of dispelling this image. In the novel there is a strong emphasis on lively discussion and active participation on the part of the middle class main characters, and their class advantages are highlighted. They own cars and houses, have money, and can get relief food through a network of connections, even in the extreme starvation period at the end of the war. The usually disapproved-of advantages which class can offer are here foregrounded to emphasize the power and agency of the middle class characters. This insistence leads to another reassertion, which writes directly into another Western prejudice: that of African wars being meaningless, “tribal” conflicts without cause. She wants to show that the war had a cause, an ideology, a hope, all of which is clearly articulated by the middle class characters. Another clear stylistic parallel between the two books is the ending. In Things Fall Apart the district commissioner plans to write a book on “The Pacification of the Tribes of the Lower Niger,” giving a paragraph to Okonkwo’s suicide. Through this sudden and unexpected switch of point of view from the Igbo community to the British invaders Achebe achieves a devastating irony, highlighting the District Commissioner’s ignorance. In Half of a Yellow Sun there is a similar surprising reversal on the very last page. The Englishman Richard, who has assumed Igbo identity and joined the war effort as a propaganda writer for the Biafran cause, is throughout the novel seen to be trying to write a book, first about Igbo art, later about the war, and interspersed in the text of the novel are a number of excerpts from the book in progress. On an organizational level these serve to give factual information about the war to help readers who might not have very clear ideas about its intentions and scope, but on the last page this bricolage feature also serves another purpose. The very last words, in which the houseboy Ugwu writes a dedication in the book under construction “for Master, my good man”’ makes him the writer of the excerpts which the reader has assumed were written by Richard. The point of the reversal is given in a brief exchange of words between the two—Ugwu asks whether Richard is still writing his book, and Richard answers “No.” Ugwu persists: “The World Was Silent When We Died. It is a good title.” “Yes it is. It came from something Colonel Madi said once.” Richard paused. “The war isn’t my story really.” Ugwu nodded. He had never thought it was. (425) The point is that the Biafrans/Nigerians/Africans should write their own stories. The irony is less devastating than in Achebe’s novel. Richard is not a negative or brutal character, he is instead a reversal of the character of the District

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Commissioner: as an Englishman in Africa, he is passive, unsure of himself, sexually weak, and in search of some form of belonging. Richard identifies with the Biafrans, and works successfully for the Biafran external propaganda department. In this metamorphosis of an English colonial, he has the author’s sympathy, but not enough for her to let him be the interpreter of their shared war experience: “whites must learn to listen,” Gordimer writes in The Essential Gesture (1989: 267), and this is what the changed perspective indicates. The story should be written by the emerging educated elite, here the houseboy who in the course of the novel has come into both maturity and modernity.

Ownership of the Story and Memory There is thus a story about telling the story of Biafra running as an undercurrent through the book. For this theme the English character Richard is central. One can interpret Richard’s fate as a symbol of the Third World rising against the exploitation and expropriation by the West of its resources, of its voice. Adichie often returns to the theme of “telling our own stories.” But should writing also be restricted by belonging and perhaps race? In an interview Adichie says that Richard “doesn’t quite grasp that being a white Englishman who makes a choice to be Biafran is quite different from someone who doesn’t necessarily have that choice” (in Bolonik 2008). In the novel, however, both Richard and Ugwu are technically equally qualified to write about the war, as they are both first-hand witnesses, and the plot seems to be carefully organized in such a way that Richard goes through the same trauma and suffers the same deep emotional loss as the other characters. For these reasons the point about the inappropriateness of Richard writing the story appears as an ideological assertion which is not written into the emotional fabric of the book: though clearly expressed, both in and outside the text, the point is not supported by the plot, and the question of who can legitimately write about the war remains fraught. Adichie claims her own legitimacy from being a child of parents who experienced the war and suffered losses and lived with painful memories which they passed on to her. Born ten years after the Nigeria–Biafra war erupted in 1967, she explains that in her own school days there was a conspicuous silence about the war years of 1967–70, as if they did not exist, but the stories and the resulting pain were still very much alive in the memory of the people, though hidden from the public eye. She says: I wrote this novel because I wanted to write about love and war, because I grew up in the shadow of Biafra, because I lost both grandfathers in the Nigeria–Biafra war, because I wanted to engage with my history in order to make sense of my present, because many of the issues that led to the war remain

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unresolved in Nigeria today because the thought of the egos and indifference of men leading to the unnecessary deaths of men and women and children enrages me, because I don’t ever want to forget. (Adichie 2007) Stories of war, such as this, have an urgency, because they also have a therapeutic quality. There has been a silence about Biafra because of the idea that silence heals wounds, which it does not. Adichie opens up an important questioning of and reconsidering of official history. The novel, courageously, investigates the point where a just cause is in danger of being thwarted by unjust means, but complicating this self-scrutiny is a disagreement about what constitutes a just cause in an atmosphere where the consequences of having the wrong opinion can be deadly.

Notes 1. According to official British sources 11,503 so-called terrorists were killed in 1952– 56, and 93 Europeans (Jonsson 2002). 2. This is the view he presented in Uppsala in a 1969 public lecture. Palmberg’s critical article about it was rejected by a handful of established papers until it was published by a small leftist paper, Tidssignal.

Bibliography Achebe, C. (1975) “The Novelist as Teacher” (1965), in Morning Yet On Creation Day: Essays, London: Heinemann Educational Books. Adichie, C. N. (1998) For the Love of Biafra, Ibadan: Spectrum books. —— (2006) Half of a Yellow Sun, London: Harper Perennial. —— (2007) “Half of a Yellow Sun: The Story Behind the Book.” Online. Available: http://www.halfofayellowsun.com/content.php?page=tsbtb&n=5&f=2 (accessed August 25, 2010). Akpata-Ohohe, B. (2008) “I am a work in progress.” Interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Africa Today, April 12. Online. Available: http://africatoday.eh7.co.uk/cgi-bin/ public.cgi?sub=news&action=one&cat=154&id=1559 (accessed August 25, 2010). Arana, M. (2007) “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Teller of Tales.” Interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Washington Post, June 17. Online. Available: http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2007/06/14/AR2007061401729. html (accessed August 25, 2010). Azodo, A. U. (2006) “Interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Creative Writing and Literary Activism” for National Book Critics Circle USA. Online. Available: http:// www.iun.edu/…/interviews/interview_chimamanda_ngozi_adichie.pdf (accessed August 25, 2010). Baden-Powell, R. (2005) Scouting for Boys, the Original 1908 Edition, edited with an introduction by E. Boehmer, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Bolonik, K. (2008) “Memory, Witness, and War.” Interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Bookforum December/January. Online. Available: http://www.bookforum. com/inprint/014_04/1403 (accessed August 25, 2010). Gordimer, N. (1989) “Living in the Interregnum,” in The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, London: Penguin. Jonsson, B. (2002) “Kamp för jord och frihet i Mau Mau-upprore,” in Populär Historia 2, Sweden: Online. Available: http://www.popularhistoria.se/o.o.i.s?id=43&vid=656 (accessed August 25, 2010). McGrath, C. (2006) “A Nigerian Author Looking Unflinchingly at the Past.” Interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, New York Times, September 23. Online. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/23/books/23adic.html (accessed August 25, 2010). Moss, S. (2007) “Madonna’s Not Our Saviour.” Interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Guardian, June 8. Online. Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/ 2007/jun/08/orangeprizeforfiction2007.orangeprizeforfiction (accessed August 15, 2010). Palmberg, M. (2005) “Reception, Community and Expression: Competing Perspectives on Contemporary Arts in Africa,” paper presented at the AEGIS European Conference on African Studies, London. Roberts, A. (2006) “My Father Was Horrified.” Interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Online. Available: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/showbiz/article-10530888my-father-was-horrified.do (accessed August 25, 2010). Rønning, H. (1969) “Biafra og imperialismen,” Den 3. verden, 3: 14–21. Weaver, C. (2007) “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Latest Novel Remembers Biafran History,” Voanews April 25. Online. Available: http://www.voanews.com/english/news/ a-13-2007- 04-25-voa49.html (accessed August 25, 2010).

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“I am not a slave . . . I will be worthy of my native land” Italian melodrama as resistance strategy in Witi Ihimaera’s work Paola Della Valle

I Ihimaera’s The Matriarch (1986) was the first work to offer a Maori view of the nineteenth-century New Zealand Land Wars, and was followed in 1997 by its sequel The Dream Swimmer. Although the extensive use of operatic quotations in both novels cannot go unnoticed, scholarly comment has largely avoided investigation of their functions. Judith Dell Panny briefly mentioned how Verdi excerpts in The Matriarch provide a parallel between the Maori struggle to achieve nationhood and retrieve their land, and the nationalistic struggle of the Risorgimento in Italy in the nineteenth century: “The references [to the Italian context] assist the European reader to proceed from the familiar to the unfamiliar, to see history in a wider context, and to see it from a Maori perspective” (1998: 6). Alistair Fox has been the only critic so far to analyze in depth their symbolic meaning, bringing into focus how “they provide a symbolic subtext that, in combination with elements drawn from Greek myth, helps to shape and intensify the whole fictive representation” (2006: 5). Fox concentrates in particular on The Dream Swimmer and on how its quotations (all from Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida) serve as “symbolic markers” that define the protagonist’s experience in political, cultural, and psychological terms. He acknowledges the political implications that Aida’s fable suggests in the New Zealand context, in particular “the general evocation of a sense of grievance and the desire to be liberated from oppression” (6). However, Fox notices how in The Dream Swimmer the cultural and psychological implications of the operatic quotations have even more relevance to the narrative than the political ones and he basically concentrates his attention on them: “Political allegory is the simplest level at which the story of Aida is applied” (7). This essay explores Ihimaera’s appropriation of Italian melodrama, in particular in The Matriarch (2003 [1986]), which includes excerpts from a wide number

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of Verdian operas. In order of appearance in the novel they are: Aida (13, 121, 197), Otello (45, 368–69), La forza del destino (51, 55, 62, 392, 415), Macbeth (78), Nabucco (207, 228, 292), Don Carlo (301, 362) and Un ballo in maschera (314, 341, 347). The aim is to demonstrate that Ihimaera’s political allegory is not so simple as Fox contended in relation to The Dream Swimmer, and not limited to the use of operatic quotations. Ihimaera does not only trace a vague political parallel between two Antipodean nations fighting a patriotic war of liberation in the same period. The spirit of the Italian Risorgimento is fully evoked by Ihimaera’s drawing on the emotional Manicheism and characterization of Verdian operas, and by blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, which also characterized both the Risorgimento and its most remarkable artistic product, the melodramma.

II The Risorgimento is an unicum in the history of the Italian peninsula, and the Risorgimental idea of “the nation” is the fruit of an invention. The fervor animating Italian patriots, l’amor di patria (the love for one’s homeland), as Folco Portinari suggests following Ernest Gellner’s proposition in Nations and Nationalism (1983), precedes the actual existence of a patria. Patria is the object to be made, after centuries of fragmentation into many kingdoms dominated and contended for by foreign powers. This implies a creative as well as a sacrificial effort. And the sacrifice, in turn, invests the patriotic struggle with a religious sacredness in a secular form (Portinari 2007: vii). It is worth noticing that the word patria comes from the Latin patres (fathers, that is, ancestors). The notion of patria involves kinship, blood relations, the bond with one’s ancestors. While its English renditions as “home,” “homeland,” or “native land” imply physical, geographical, and territorial connotations, patria is literally the home of one’s ancestors or “fathers.” The Italian invention of patria bears many similarities with the Maori nationalist struggle. The Maori, too, saw themselves as a nation only in the midnineteenth century, as a result of their disillusionment with the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) and of the increasing presence of the Europeans, who surpassed the Maori population in 1860. In this decade the word “Maori” (normal, ordinary) came into common use, as opposed to “Pakeha” (alien, foreign), while previously their identity was simply expressed according to their tribal affiliations. And these years are marked by the birth of the Maori King Movement in 1856, the rise of Messianic movements (the Hau Hau and Te Kooti’s Ringatu Church), and the renewal of the hostilities between Maori and Pakeha in the Waikato War. The notion of patria or nation was the result of an imaginative creation for Italians and Maori alike, who saw themselves as “imagined communities,” in Benedict Anderson’s words (1991 [1983]), claiming their descent from the original inhabitants of the land and investing their struggle with the sense of a religious mission. This can be read as a

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nativist form of resistance (see Parry 1994: 175) appealing respectively to an ideal “Italian nation”—which had never really existed, except for the common heritage of the Latin civilization and language—and to a “Maori nation,” which similarly defined itself as such only after the arrival of the Europeans. Portinari also stresses the crucial function of melodramma in nineteenthcentury Italy as a vehicle of ideological transmission, much more effective and powerful than books and literature. Carlotta Sorba further develops Portinari’s argument by contending that Italian melodrama was not only the most popular dramatic and musical genre of this period but it also became the artistic form which embodied the collective imagery and sensibility of the people (2007: 483). Furthermore, she stresses the complex interrelation between life and art, fact and fiction, which characterized the Risorgimento and melodramma, arguing that while Italian political events went on stage entering (allegorically) into the plots of the operas, similarly the aesthetics and ethics of melodramma moved out of the theater to influence deeply the language, gestures, behavior, even the clothes of common people and politicians, as though the country had been transformed into a big stage where patriotic actors performed their struggle for liberation. Sorba views Italian melodrama not only as the product of an age but as an active agent and “sense-producer,” following Victor Turner’s theory (1982) that in a complex culture performing and narrative arts function as “active and acting” forces of the culture itself. Sorba underlines how Turner articulates his theory by playing on the double meaning of the verb “to act” and by applying the original etymological meaning of performance, from the old French parfournir, which signified “to complete, to bring to an end.” “To perform” means to bring to an end a complex process (Sorba 2007: 483).1 Sorba substantiates her argument by citing excerpts from public speeches, political manifestos, pamphlets, and notices, all sharing an emphatic common rhetoric and syntax. She underlines their frequent use of exclamation marks, interjections, and repetitions; their prophetic and exhortatory tone; a plethora of rhetorical figures such as the oxymoron, hyperbole, and antithesis, which emphasize the polarization between good and evil. This Manichean view of reality is reinforced by the personification of virtues and vices, and their identification with the oppressed Italians and the foreign oppressors. Overtly moral epithets are employed in descriptions of the enemy, investing the political battle with a larger universal meaning (498–99). As shown by Risorgimental iconography and historical records, this emphatic rhetoric was accompanied by exaggerated facial expressiveness and gestures, and the open manifestation of emotions and feelings: the same hyperbolic aesthetics characterizing melodrama. When Milan was liberated on March 23, 1848, the chronicles describe a great theatrical scene, where one could easily meet people disguised as medieval knights or bandits. Theatrical costume-shops were stormed

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by people buying all sorts of items. The patriotic “look” or “guise” was not a novelty. It had accompanied all the demonstrations and uprisings as a sort of “visual challenge”: a provocation to authorities and police forces, and a recognizable sign of belonging to the same cause as the revolutionaries (492–93). The interconnection between art and life was therefore one of the most striking features characterizing the Risorgimento, which saw the opera conveying major historical issues and inflaming the patriotic spirit, and patriots dramatizing their ideals and principles according to the aesthetics and ethics of an artistic genre.

III Ihimaera’s The Matriarch includes three major strands. The main narrative revolves around the figure of the protagonist Tamatea Mahana and his quest in the present to unveil mysteries concerning the past of his grandmother, Artemis Riripeti Pere, the matriarch. The second strand tells of Tamatea’s recollections, partly from memory, partly from witness reports, of Artemis’s story, including the education she imparted to him as a future leader of the clan, invested with the crucial mission of retrieving lost tribal land from the Pakeha. The third narrative covers the general history of the Mahana clan, which is connected to Maori cosmogony and myth. This part includes sections on the illustrious ancestors of the family that took active part in the New Zealand Wars: prophet Te Kooti and Member of Parliament Wi Pere Halbert, two historical figures and heroic patriots of the Maori nation. If The Matriarch is one of the first historical fictions in New Zealand literature to provide the Maori perspective on the past, as exemplified by the account of the “Matawhero Massacre” purposely defined “Matawhero Retaliation” by Ihimaera, the novel owes much to the aesthetics and ethics of Italian melodrama, which serves as a “sense producer” of the fictional story and of the crucial moments of New Zealand history it recounts. Italian melodrama is not only present in the quotations from Verdi’s operas, interacting with the narrative so as to amplify the protagonists’ emotional feelings in various situations. It escapes from those quotations and pervades the whole work. And since fictitious as well as real facts and people intertwine, melodrama becomes the link between reality and imagination, fact and fiction. New Zealand history and the novel’s story are taken onto a stage, amplified, and dramatized. This adds to the representation of figures and episodes endowed with sacredness and symbolism, as well as serving as a parallel with the Italian liberation war to legitimize the Maori nationalist struggle. All the ingredients of melodrama are present: a Manichean vision, hypertrophic rhetoric and gestures, and even the use of attire which resembles theatrical costumes. Furthermore, the “triangle” formula—ever-present in melodrama and


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opposing the couple of soprano and tenor to an antagonist, a baritone or mezzosoprano (see Chiappini 2007: 306–7)—is also the basis of the complex intertwining sub-plots of the novel, presenting a heroine (Artemis, who has “a dramatic soprano voice”), a hero (Tamatea), and an antagonist (Artemis’s husband, Ihaka, or Tamatea’s mother, Tiana). The only variation to the melodramatic formula is that Artemis is not a young innocent woman but the young hero’s grandmother. Her age justifies the dark timbre of her voice as a “dramatic soprano.”2. Their relationship, however, can be easily defined as a physical and spiritual affection, with erotic connotations too, as testified by the jealousy aroused in both Ihaka and Tiana. When Artemis does not allow Ihaka into her alcove, because little Tamatea is sleeping there, Ihaka’s enraged reaction alludes directly to Tamatea as a sexual rival: Go to him, your man-child, but remember this Artemis, if we fight he and I, in future times, I will give him no quarter . . . He has taken you away from me, he whose boy-cock is match for that of a full-grown man. (367) Tiana is also seen competing with Artemis for primacy in Tamatea’s affection, as testified by her refusal to let Artemis adopt Tamatea and take him away from her. Their confrontation reaches dramatic tones at the Wellington hui (meeting), when a journalist reports the “mortal struggle” going on between the two women, only resolved by Tamatea’s intervention (266). Artemis is always depicted as a “diva” on the stage. She is actually compared to an Italian opera singer, Renata Tebaldi, not only for her physical appearance “which belies the [same] strength of intellect and beauty,” but most of all for the intensity and passion of her voice, conveying her “imperious” and “commanding” temper in “ravishing pianissimo” (13). She also shares with the Italian singer the same “patrician” features and a “madonna smile,” emphatic epithets which are repeatedly used for her in the course of the novel, together with those of “Roman beauty” and “goddess.”3 Her position is always in the limelight—literally shining, gleaming, glowing, blazing, or figuratively being the center of the attention— both in her family and in public events, such as Tamatea’s piano concert or the Wellington hui (a meeting between the Prime Minister and tribal delegations to debate land questions). Her suggestive attire—a black dress, a veil and pearls threaded through her hair—becomes her “costume” throughout the novel. The apotheosis of her theatricality occurs at the Wellington hui, where the phases of the ceremony are marked by her lifting the veil or pulling it back over her face, a hypertrophic gesture which seems to be a command for her own people, for the hosting party, and also for natural elements: it can attract the sun, disperse clouds, even cause a moon eclipse. With her dramatic performance, Artemis not only defies the Pakeha Prime Minister but also challenges Maori

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traditions, which confine the role of women to karanga (calls) in public meetings, excluding them from whaikorero (oratory). The claim Artemis makes to give a speech like all the other male chiefs in the assembly is a claim to exert her full authority as a political leader and her role as prima donna on the stage. After being paralyzed by obscure supernatural forces seemingly wanting to punish her act of pride and threatening her “luminosity” (245), she is saved by the intervention of her young grandchild Tamatea—the heroine saved by the hero—with a singing performance: Tamatea begins a chant evoking the origin of their tribe from the gods transported on the Takitimu canoe from Hawaiki to Aotearoa. By claiming their credentials to speak on the marae (an open gathering place in front of the meeting house) Tamatea appeases the “creatures of light and creatures of darkness” adverse to the matriarch, and she can gloriously finish her performance (115). The crowd in the marae, previously “hissing” and “shouting” like a disappointed audience (112), starts to applaud, as first Tamatea and then an eager journalist report: Her voice was strong and challenging. It seemed to ring out and across the marae, filling the air with its authority and arrogance. The crowd continued to applaud. With a dramatic gesture, the matriarch began to stand, climbing into the sky, to receive the acknowledgement of her mana . . . (“Oh, it was quite a show,” the journalist said. “There’s no doubt in my mind whatsoever that your grandmother was an actress of the first magnitude. She had us all eating out of her hand . . .”) (246, my emphases) The double meaning of “acting” and “performing,” as previously suggested by Turner, applies to this scene. Artemis acts in both senses of the verb, and “performs” her mission, both dramatizing it and bringing it to an end. Artemis is not the only melodramatic character of the novel. All the Mahanas are described as opera heroes and heroines, conforming to dramatic roles and judged according to the quality of their performance. Just as the journalist stressed Artemis’s theatricality, so another external observer mentions the dramatic penchant of the whole family: Tamatea’s Pakeha wife Regan. She defines Tamatea’s family “so . . . so . . . Italian. All this Sicilian passion” (19), and she later adds that the whole clan is “so Italianate” and that they are “larger than life” (20). The melodramatic traits of the Italian character had already been noted by Madame de Staël, who defined them as “a people torn apart by invasions, oppressed by present conditions, but not oblivious of its past greatness” (De Staël quoted in Chiappini 2007: 290). As Simonetta Chiappini reports, according to De Staël the opera suited Italian people because it was a projection of all their impulses and surges mortified by their exclusion from an active participation in political and civic life. In the novel, the condition of Italians and Maori is equated


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not so much by the search for a precise historical parallel as by the dramatization of their life as a result of oppression and foreign colonization. On the day of their wedding, Uncle Alexis and Aunt Roha are compared to Escamillo and Carmen in Bizet’s opera (11). Tamatea’s father is depicted as a “nobleman” (39, 58), although lacking the charisma, intelligence, and cunning of the leader. He never reaches a heroic stature and remains a second lead in the novel. All the members of the family are said to have “patrician” features (216), all but Artemis’s husband, Ihaka, who becomes Tamatea’s principal enemy after Artemis’s death. Ihaka first appears as a second lead, shadowed by Artemis’s charisma and beauty. After her death, however, he achieves his fulfillment as a villain. Ihaka cannot but be an antagonist, because he does not possess the physique du rôle of the hero, as Tamatea notes: “The aging process has not been kind to him. The virility which one associates with a tribal leader has gone from him. The physical presence, that he never had . . . Look elsewhere for the patrician features of the family” (216). In The Dream Swimmer, he is described exactly as a bad opera singer, “a faded Italian baritone who has lost everything except his sense of drama, attempting to convey strength of voice with an instrument that has never been noted for vocality” (Ihimaera 1997: 400). Tiana is the other antagonist in the “triangle” formula, and her character recalls the negative heroines such as Amneris in Aida or Abigaille in Nabucco. While the matriarch’s beauty is unquestionable and adds to her charisma, Tiana “has never been conventionally beautiful” (52). She is never radiant or in the spotlight. She is rather in half-shade or in the background, like “a dark star” (402), and must tilt her face for the light to illuminate her: “My mother had a habit of tilting her face so that the light struck its plane with strength, with resolution” (21). Her character is not fully developed in The Matriarch, as it will be in The Dream Swimmer, but her feeling of “loving-hate” for Tamatea, in Fox’s words (2006: 12), is already alluded to: the same contrasting feeling that pervades the negative heroines of the Verdian operas. The treatment of the two real figures, Te Kooti and Wi Pere, can also be connected with melodramatic ethics and aesthetics. Their stories are narrated from a Maori perspective, using different sources: the matriarch’s account, witness reports, letters, official records, chronicles of the time, and finally the direct intervention of the narrator, who acts as an ultimate commentary emphatically addressing the reader. Te Kooti’s figure could be compared to that of the eponymous character of Verdi’s opera Ernani. Ernani is in fact a nobleman, Don Giovanni d’Aragona, who conspires against the king, Don Carlo, to revenge his father’s killing. Ernani acts according to a strict code of honor, which will lead him to suicide at the end of the opera. Te Kooti himself appears as an educated nobleman and loyal warrior serving the Pakeha government, but he is turned into a bandit after his unjust

110 Paola Della Valle imprisonment and exile in the Chatman Islands. Like Ernani, his code of honor is strong and inflexible, emphasized by the religious mission he has been invested with by God. Te Kooti becomes a prophet and military chief, in charge of freeing all the Maori rebels imprisoned with him and leading them to the “land of Canaan,” under the protection of the Maori king. The Matawhero Retaliation is therefore presented as a necessary act of war against the governmental forces chasing him and as an ultimate vindication of his injured honor. The Manichean division between good/oppressed/Maori and evil/oppressors/Pakeha is established by the biblical metaphor used by the matriarch in her account and by Te Kooti himself, when his words are reported. Their tone is prophetic and exhortatory, as shown in the following passages: Glory To Thy Holy Name. And upon landing at Whareongaonga, on 10 July 1868, the prophet told the people that he would be like unto Moses and that, with the guidance of Jehovah, would lead us out of the bondage of Egypt. (140) Glory To Thy Holy Name. It was then that the prophet gathered the people together. He said unto them: “Three times we have been attacked since we left Whareongaonga and three times I have entreated the Government not to kill us . . . But Pharaoh still pursues us . . . For this reason, and in the name of Jehovah, the people must be protected. The Egyptians will never leave us in peace.” (141–42) The narrator’s words, too, are very emphatic, including interjections, repetitions, question marks, and addressing the reader directly: Oh yes, lest we forget, where was the Pakeha law when Gisborne settlers began to seek out Maoris who were suspected of having been involved in Te Kooti’s retaliation at Matawhero? Where was the law when some former followers of Te Kooti, mostly women and children, were held overnight at Patutahi in March 1869? (173) Yes Pakeha, you remember Matawhero. Let me remind you of the murder at Ngatapa. (177) As to the “Honourable Wi Pere,” his story is narrated through many sources, including his public speeches recorded in the Parliamentary Hansard. Wi Pere is defined as an excellent orator “with outstanding vocal and histrionic abilities” and “a man of passion especially when debating the land” (315). Most of the section is centered on his above-mentioned histrionic qualities. Like Artemis, Wi Pere is a


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prima donna, and this time the “stage” is the public arena of the Parliament. At the beginning of the section she saluted him with “Ave, ave Caesar” (301) and later he is equated with a Roman senator. In his speeches he makes extensive use of rhetorical devices, metaphors and similes, quotations from the Bible and from literary texts (for example, Robinson Crusoe), Maori proverbs, interrogative sentences, in a direct and forceful language, as shown in the following passage: I think this Bill should be called ‘An Act to prevent Satan dealing with Native Lands’. By ‘Satan’ I mean those who have obtained our lands wrongfully. I do not think that any European members ought to object to this Bill; because his own land will not be affected by it—it only touches the lands of the Native people, and will save them from the teeth of the dragon which has been devouring them hitherto. (337) Te Kooti and Wi Pere are two historical figures, but they are endowed with the same theatricality of the fictitious characters, raised to the status of legends and mythologized. They become symbols of two different ways to fight a right cause, exemplifying the same mix of fact and fiction which characterized real life and art in the Risorgimento. The melodramatic quality of the whole story is further underlined by numerous allusions to musical terms, as if the novel were indeed a musical score. The squealing of some pups is called “appogiaturi” (63 [sic]: “appoggiatura” is a musical embellishment) as opposed to the loud barking of the dogs, and Rongopai paintings, too, “were embellished with the appogiaturi of the oppressed” (190). Major Biggs’s assassination in the Matawhero Retaliation is preceded by a “lyrical and rhapsodic interlude” (144): the account of a picnic at the river with his family, the day before they are all massacred by Te Kooti’s followers. The building of Rongopai meeting house is defined as the most beauteous triumph of the Maori nation in its darkest hour, and compared to an “aria” (193). Italian words common in opera libretti are interspersed in the novel: fatalità (83 and 144), furore (115), bravo (243), morbidezza (229). Similes are traced to reinforce the Maori/Italian parallel: Rongopai is the Sistine Chapel of the Maori nation (133), its architect a Maori Leonardo da Vinci (184), and the feud between the two Maori chiefs is parallelled to “the great Italian struggles between rival citadels and aristocratic houses” (98). Finally, the function of the operatic quotations, whether they are sung by a character or just inserted in the narrative, is always to provide an emotional equivalent—that is, to offer an amplified and evocative explanation to a certain scene or subject, to dramatize it. Artemis is the only character who actually sings passages from Aida, Don Carlo, and Otello, which confirms her role of prima donna in the book. A couple of examples will serve to exemplify Ihimaera’s use of the Verdi excerpts. At the beginning of the novel, Renata Tebaldi (and implicitly

112 Paola Della Valle Artemis) are made to sing an aria from Aida: “A costoro schiava non sono . . . della mia patria degna sarò. I am not a slave . . . I will be worthy of my native land” (13).4 Aida, the daughter of the Ethiopian king Amonasro, is enslaved in Egypt and loves the Egyptian warrior Radamés. When Amonasro’s army attacks Egypt to free her, he is made prisoner too, but succeeds in concealing his real identity from the Egyptians in order to lead the Ethiopians’ rebellion. These words are pronounced by Aida after her father has accused her of being a traitor, since she does not want to betray Radamés. Her tormented oath of loyalty to the Ethiopian cause alludes to Artemis’s painful acceptance of her destiny as a tribal leader, which had a price to pay, too. Artemis loved only once in her life, when she was completing her education in Venice (Italy). But she renounced love to fulfill her mission and went back to New Zealand, on her great-uncle Wi Pere’s request, for her arranged marriage with Ihaka Mahana, which would guarantee the alliance to another powerful tribe. Later on, a quotation from Verdi’s Macbeth opens a section dealing with the events that constitute the prelude to Te Kooti’s retaliation. Because Ihimaera wants to offer the Maori perspective on this gloomy episode of the Land Wars, he needs to analyze, step by step, all the complex causes which preceded it. Following Ihimaera’s account, Te Kooti’s retaliation comes to be seen as a ring in a chain, a bloody answer to other bloody or unjust events, in a spiral of violence which characterizes any war. The quotation from the aria sung by Lady Macbeth in Act II, just before Banco’s assassination, alludes exactly to this spiral of violence that, once started, cannot be stopped: La luce langue, il faro spegnesi ch’eterno scorre per gli ampi cieli. Notte desiata, provvida veli la man colpevole che ferirà. Light thickens, and the beacon that eternally courses the far-flung heavens is spent . . . (78) 5 The three extracts from Nabucco (207, 228, 292) are all from the famous aria “Va pensiero sull’ali dorate,” sung by the enslaved Jews in the kingdom of Babylon.6 This became a sort of national anthem for patriots during the Risorgimento, an allegory of the condition of the Italians under foreign oppression. In The Matriarch, the Nabucco excerpts always introduce sections on Tamatea’s education, steps in the poutama (staircase) of knowledge he is ascending to become the future tribal leader. The matriarch teaches him about his birth and family (207–8), about the history of their tribal confederation and the geography of his land (228–33), and about the origin of his people grounded in myth (292–97). The Verdian excerpts allude to the objective of Tama’s education: fulfilling his mission, fighting the Pakeha, and retrieving the tribal land, as shown in the first of the three quotations:


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Va pensiero, sull’ali dorate; va ti posa sui clivi, sui colli . . . Go, my thought, on golden wings; go, alight upon the slopes, the hills, where soft and warm, the sweet breezes of our native land are fragrant . . . Del Giordano le rive saluta . . . Greet the banks of the Jordan and Zion’s razed towers . . . My parents, Te Ariki and Tiana, are the first step of the poutama of my life. The matriarch, my grandmother, the woman who wore pearls in her hair, is at the second step of the poutama. Hers is a blinding presence, imperious and commanding, bidding me forever forward to battle with the world of the Pakeha. (207)7 For the Maori, as it had been for the Italians, Nabucco becomes a hymn of liberation, expressed in the same biblical imagery that had kindled their minds and emotions during the New Zealand Wars, thanks to the teachings of prophet-warriors like Te Kooti. It accompanies the future leader, chosen by Artemis to continue her mission, that is, to be “forever forward to battle with the world of the Pakeha” (207). To conclude, in The Matriarch (and in its sequel The Dream Swimmer, which follows exactly the same aesthetic line, although focusing more on the character of Tiana) Ihimaera does not only trace a vague parallel between two nationalist movements developing and fighting in the same period in two Antipodean countries. He enacts a conscious appropriation of a Western genre with a highly political and symbolic value, and inflects it so as to serve the Maori view. In using a “purposeful form of hybridity” (Fox 2006: 16), he claims the right of postcolonial subjects to counter-colonize Western literary expressions. The result is an evocative and sophisticated work, which shows that “composite” complexity which characterizes the postcolonial world. The word composite, rather than “hybrid,” seems the most appropriate for Ihimaera’s works, since “it embraces creativity as part of its intrinsic meaning,” as suggested by Eva Rask Knudsen (2004). And this is what The Matriarch provides: a creative representation of Maori history, whose subversive power lies in the richness of its composite textual form.

Notes 1. In Sorba (2007) references to Turner’s work From Ritual to Theatre (1982) are in the epigraph on p. 481, in note 11 on p. 483, and on p. 507. 2. According to the timbre of her voice, a soprano can be leggero (coloratura soprano), lirico (lyrical), or drammatico (dramatic). The lighter timbre of a coloratura or lyric soprano is more suitable to young heroines. 3. As for Artemis’s “madonna smile,” see pp. 78 and 121 (“She smiled her madonna smile”), and 210 (“In the photograph, the matriarch has a slight smile like a madonna”). For patrician and Roman attributes, see pp. 18 (“The face of a patrician woman. The matriarch.”), 130 (“He looked into that patrician face of hers”), and 209 (“She was a striking lady, very beautiful in a Roman sort of way”). For her resemblance with a goddess, see pp. 16 (“People were very respectful to her not only

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4.

5. 6. 7.

because of her status but also because she was like a goddess”) and 406 (“the light of a thousand torches made her look like a golden goddess”). See Verdi, Aida (III), in Mioli (2001: 663). This is the only operatic quotation on p. 13. Ihimaera generally (but not always) quotes operatic passages in Italian followed by their English translation. When there are several quotations on the same page, they are interspersed in the narrative, not always in the order they appear in Verdi’s work. But they always pertain to a specific aria or duet, evoking the specific feelings of the Verdian characters at that moment. It is as though Ihimaera’s characters were singing pieces by heart, caring less for the exact correspondence to the Verdian text and more for the feelings that the musical piece evokes. See Verdi, Macbeth (II.ii), in Mioli (2001: 577). See Verdi, Nabucodonosor (Nabucco) (III.iv) in Mioli (2001: 81–82). See Verdi, Nabucodonosor (III.iv) in Mioli (2001: 81).

Bibliography Anderson, B. (1991 [1983]) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York: Verso. Chiappini, S. (2007) “La voce della martire. Dagli ‘evirati cantori’ all’eroina romantica,” in A. M. Banti and P. Ginsborg (eds.) Storia d’Italia. Annali 22: Il Risorgimento, Turin: Einaudi. Dell Panny, J. (1998) “Artemis and The Matriarch,” in The Culture Within: Essays on Ihimaera, Grace, Hulme, Tuwhare, Occasional Paper no. 3, International Pacific College, New Zealand, February. Fox, A. (2006) “The Symbolic Function of the Operatic Allusions in Witi Ihimaera’s The Dream Swimmer,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 42(1) May: 4–17. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Ihimaera, W. (1997) The Dream Swimmer, Auckland: Penguin Books. —— (2003 [1986]) The Matriarch, Auckland: Reed. Mioli, P. (ed.) (2001) Giuseppe Verdi: Tutti i libretti d’opera, Rome: Newton and Compton. Parry, B. (1994) “Resistance Theory/Theorising Resistance, or Two Cheers for Nativism,” in F. Barker, P. Hulme, and M. Iversen (eds.) Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Portinari, F. (2007) “Il Risorgimento a cuore aperto,” Tuttolibri (La Stampa), March 10: vii. Rask Knudsen, E. (2004) The Circle and the Spiral, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Sorba, C. (2007) “Il 1848 e la melodrammatizzazione della politica,” in A. M. Banti and P. Ginsborg (eds.) Storia d’Italia. Annali 22: Il Risorgimento, Turin: Einaudi. Turner. V. W. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

Part Two

The Right to Move and to Belong

8

Coming to America—A Remix CHRIS ABANI

So you order the three dollar coffee with a practiced ease—grande, non-fat, sugar-free, vanilla latte—and as you pay you catch sight of your refl ection in the shiny backdrop of the green wood and glass Starbucks stand. You are reminded of the moment in Derek Walcott’s Midsummer when the poet persona confronts himself in the grimy mirror of a motel room; lost. You do this because you have taken, lately, to finding your home in literature, in language. You are standing in an airport departure lounge and people hive around you. Yet you have never felt so alone. As you pick up the paper cup of coffee at the end of the bar, you recall your refl ection and muse that it reminds you of no one you know. Making your way to the gate, you expertly dodge the melee around you, brown leather bag over one shoulder, coffee cup in one hand, the other deftly scrolling through your Blackberry catching up on email. In many ways you have learned to maneuver the physical world with the skill of the blind, your hands juggling more tasks than any Hindu deity should while your mind deconstructs your latest review; the new book you are plotting; ideas of self; identity and race; the fact that you dare not look into the face of your grief at your mother’s recent death, and more. In interviews you joke, in response to questions about your citizenship and abode: airport lounges. Pause. Oh, and airplanes. Navigating the tightly packed waiting area seats, choosing one near enough to hear your boarding call but far enough away from the crowds; the more you have to speak to large groups of people, the more you shy away from them. As you sit you notice that once again you have fallen victim to white fright: that curious phenomenon where people start to subtly check their wallets, hold on tighter to handbags in your presence even though you are better dressed than they are. Even though your hands are full and a mugging, even if you were so inclined, would be impossible to pull off. Not to mention that you are brown, wearing a wrist mala (beads that though Buddhist, resemble Muslim prayer beads) in a Los Angeles airport post 9/11. You throw your bag to your feet, sit, shake your head at the scared whiteys

118 Chris Abani as though to say, shame on you, and then return to your email. The message just popping up onto the screen is from your friend, the editor of an issue of this magazine asking you, in language more polite than you deserve, to please send in your essay which is now months overdue. You take a too large sip from the too hot coffee and swear silently as you feel a layer of your tongue being abraded and thumb a quick response: one line apologizing. You feel terrible. But you are having difficulty writing since your mother got ill in the summer and passed as the first leaves of fall began to form on trees.

* The auditorium is packed. An audience awaits you; nearly 200 people. You’ve been doing book and lecture talks for three years now and yet you are always surprised when people come out to hear you talk; hear you read, and in such numbers. You clear your throat. You are more tired than usual and the house lights seem to have an extra glare to them. As you look into the audience you see a hunger in their eyes. You still haven’t figured out exactly what the hunger is for—novelty? ideas? answers? challenge? hope?; it doesn’t matter, you cannot sate it. You hope they realize this, you hope you realize this. You want to say, listen, I am here to complicate your life. To make your questions deeper and more nuanced. To leave you with thoughts and ideas that will disturb you, possibly keep you from sleep. You want to talk about Othello and the idea of immigration and what it means to be foreign and other and here right now in the US. But this is not what you have been asked to speak about. You take a deep breath, smile and welcome them to the reading. An old trick you learned from soccer tournaments in your childhood. Welcome the home crowd to their own arena and you feel less vulnerable. The talk goes well and the questions begin. What language did you originally write in? When did you learn English? What is the current situation in your country? Are you close to the war in Sudan? Geographically? Emotionally? Why do Africans hate themselves? You deflect the earlier questions with ease; they have ceased to bother you. When you speak on those matters, you answer directly but move the questions and questioners into more nuanced areas. But this last question is different. While you are still rolling around the unfamiliar shape of the word African around your mind, bumping up against your fears and limitations in discussing the terrible yet beautiful balance on your continent between selfloathing and an incredibly deep humanity, and sometimes an even ordinary but still good humanity, another question zings through the air toward you. What are your thoughts on race and racism in Africa? In that moment you realize that even though you grew up bi-racial in Nigeria, even though there had been Indians and Lebanese and other whites (outside the missionaries) in

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your life, race has never been the way you conceptualized or approached your identity. Your sense of self, of identity, is rooted not in race but in an ethnicity. This thought takes you completely by surprise. Of course in the US you feel black, you feel the full effects of racism, but your internal landscape is not as scarred by it because it had always seemed not only unjust but an inane way to chart a person. The questioner is waiting patiently and you try to explain that you are Igbo and as you look for words you realize that you have only a received narrative about what this means, to be Igbo that is, but that you have never felt the need to interrogate this. Why, you think, remembering Soyinka’s riff on Negritude about tigers not needing to assert their tigritude, hadn’t you thought about this more? In Nigeria you were Igbo with the entire trauma and pride that carried but there you had a much stronger if uninterrogated sense of what that meant, that you had never thought what it could mean. But now the question about Africans is bothering you and you realize why. The idea of Nigerians declaring negritude is as ineffable to you as the idea of being African. You want to say, there are no Africans. Instead you say, only people not from the continent refer to its citizens as African, on the continent we talk sometimes about being Nigerian and Kenyan, but more often, about specifi c ethnic nationalities like Igbo and Yoruba. You admit that for a short period when you lived in England and were ashamed of some of the negative associations with the word Nigerian you had cheated and called yourself African, or West African, but that you have always been proud of being Igbo and have always claimed that. From the glazed looks in the eyes staring back at you, you know no one knows what you are talking about. Absently you wonder who these Africans are and what they look like.

* That night in your hotel room, watching an episode of CSI, you return to the thoughts about tigritude and Soyinka. It dawns on you that Soyinka was speaking out of the Yoruba tradition of intellectual inquiry that has always battled with notions of self. Perhaps in a culture that has spun several empires this becomes an important thing: to clarify how the Ijebu is different from and similar to the Egba. It is harder because the Igbo had devoted less time to this. You discover that you are wrestling with questions of modernist thoughts about the self, questions that your recent Nigerian forebears had always inadequately framed in terms of nationalism. Suddenly you think: how interesting that I had to come to America to ask these kinds of questions about my identity. The thing is, easy soundbites and loosely amalgamated bits of information that were enough to prove to yourself and others that you were indeed Igbo begin to crumble in the face of an overwhelming white monolithic

120 Chris Abani structure so intent on ascribing you an identity that makes it comfortable, that you realize to fight this, you have to figure it out for yourself. The oddest thing about it though is that you have to think through this puzzle in English. What a strange thing, to arrive at being Igbo through a process couched entirely in English. You have always realized that coming from Afikpo you are different, diasporic even, within Igboland. Why? Perhaps because more than any other group (with the exception of the Ika-Igbo perhaps) your culture is a mix of your neighbors’ in a non- hierarchical way, an amalgam of the Efik, Ibibio, Ejagham, Adda, Aro (Chukwu and Izuogu), and even Igala. The Ogo and Egbele cults and rites of passage into manhood are specific to being Ehugbo (your people’s name and the name of their language) and unlike anything else in Igboland. That your dialect is now considered a separate language in itself and not a dialect of Igbo. That somehow you can speak and understand nearly every dialect of Igbo but that no one understands yours, not even your Wa- wa neighbors. Yet you are troubled because you know every myth of origin is tied to land and the ownership of it, that the name, Ehugbo, means womb of the Igbo, that though your people are clearly hybrid, and stronger for it, they need to assert their common Igbo-tude to establish rights to land and water. You realize the incredible gift that your father gave you by insisting you be raised in that tradition, in spite of, or maybe even because, your mother was white. Like he knew at some point you would come west and would need this knowledge. Like he was still scarred himself from the terrible racism he’d been subject to in the UK, in the fifties. He clearly understood what a lack of this sense of self that transcended skin color could do to you; do for you. Your complex understanding of your cosmology and mythology, while relatively small in the face of what your Yoruba neighbors have, is his gift to you. This sometimes forgotten knowledge always comes to the fore when you need it.

* But you are losing language, your language, and faster the longer you don’t use it. There is, however, an incredible freedom in this, the sudden understanding that your language is fluid, must be, and that as a writer it is your duty to make this language even more plastic. That like Shakespeare you are in the realm of possibility and that all language, like the culture it derives from, is forever evolving. This comes to you of all places in a Starbucks by the beach in Santa Monica as you sit down to sip a cold chai latte on a hot day. The woman passing in a skimpy bikini mistakes your smile as a leer directed at her and gives you a dirty look. You don’t care. In the fight for your soul, you have just uncovered an important truth, you flip open your moleskin notebook

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and begin a poem in Igbo. You pause as you struggle to find the word for horizon. Then you make it up, kenning like Chaucer, the word for rim and world: mbgere- uwa. It is a small victory, but you have begun. You silently mouth a prayer of thanks to Kamalu and the gods of California. You would never have begun this journey when you were still in Nigeria. But you have made a decisive step. You will not become less Igbo. If anything you will become more Ehugbo by slowly disengaging from the received narratives of your culture. Omenala will never be the same unassailable idea. You know you are the perfect candidate for this. After all, you are bi- racial, tri- cultural, and transnational, you are a hybrid and that is what it has always meant to be Ehugbo. The many parts of you come together when you no longer have the need to prove absolute residency on the land that birthed you. If it means that you are part Ejagham, Ibibio, Igbo, Aro-Igbo, Igala, English, and now American, then you are truly and perhaps for the first time, honestly approaching your fluid self. You also know that a book has just begun.

* This kind of transformation and study has to be not only fluid but necessarily ambiguous. It also has to be adaptable. Your poems, non- fiction, and fiction will no longer be the same. You will be free of an easy Igbo nationalism, free of declaring your Igbo-tude, and yet constantly mining and exploring it, challenging it to yield a more philosophical being to you. Your novels and your poetry are only possible because of the physical and now psychic and intellectual distance from the romantic notion of home and yet now more than ever you can stand up and say, Eha’m bu Chris Abani. Abu’m onye Igbo. My name is Chris Abani and I am Igbo. This is America’s gift to you.

This essay is also available online in the journal Tarpaulin Sky http://www.tarpaulinsky. com/Summer08/Abani.html.

9

The Blood of Freedom Gil Anidjar

Venid a ver la sangre por las calles, venid a ver la sangre por las calles, venid a ver la sangre por las calles!

Pablo Neruda, España en el corazón (1937)

“For power to be free to flow,” Zygmunt Bauman writes in 1999, “the world must be free of fences, barriers, fortified borders and checkpoints” (2000: 14). Power, then, is a flow. It circulates. And the freedom of power is the freedom of a world free and open to flow. The freedom of flow—the rhetoric of liquidity and the affirmation of fluidity—is here invoked by Bauman as a contrast with “the practice of feverish nation-and-nation-state building” which “put the ‘soil’ firmly above the ‘blood’” (12). The association of freedom (or its semblance, as Bauman makes clear) with motion and circulation and, more precisely, with the liquidity of the sea, as opposed to the constraints of the solid ground, is an ancient one. More puzzling, perhaps, is the conjunction of the freedom of the sea with the liquidity of the blood. Italo Calvino sheds a difficult and equally ancient light on this matter (that is, on this liquid matter) when he tells us in a segment entitled “Blood, Sea” that “the primordial wave” of the oceans “continues to flow in the arteries” (Calvino 1969: 39; 2002). Our blood, Calvino continues, “in fact has a chemical composition analogous to that of the sea of our origins, from which the first living cells and the first multicellular beings derived the oxygen and the other elements necessary to life” (1969: 39). Grounded in the rhetoric of scientificity, Calvino’s sea is also surrounded by walls, although these seem to be different from Bauman’s modern “fences, barriers, fortified borders and checkpoints.” Blood, at any rate—“a kind of general pulsation” and the free flow of power (43)—is inside us, enclosed within us. As Calvino writes, “the sea where

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living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies” (40). Blood thus evokes the ancient, primordial seas more than it does the figure of the future, the prospective expectation that is our modernity and that Bauman calls “liquid modernity.” Yet, across the span of time of our entire history, we may be led to imagine “a combustion chamber of infinite volume as the sea appeared infinite to us, or rather the ocean, in which we were immersed” (44). By blood, we were perhaps fated to perceive the past into the future, the future of the past, and thus to “repeat the pulsing of the ocean now buried inside us, of the red ocean that was once without shores, under the sun” (44). And though it seems natural enough to think of the free flow and pulsing of the sea as having a “piston effect,” after Calvino, we would have “to imagine a piston without walls” (43). Oceans without shores, power without borders, blood without walls—such would be the unfinished project, not of modernity but of our oceanic history. “The sea-blood would have become one with us, that is, all blood would finally be our blood” (47). Calvino’s famous narrator, old Qfwfq, sums all of this up with a kind of warning that would be inherent to the history of blood, to the uncertain progress and development of the blood of freedom. Thus far everything may seem clear: however, you must bear in mind that to make it clear I have so simplified things that I’m not sure whether the step forward I’ve made is really a step forward. Because from the moment when blood becomes “our blood,” the relationship between us and blood changes, that is, what counts is the blood insofar as it is “ours,” and all the rest, us included, counts less (49). Blood counts—and there are bloods that count less. That is the history of blood. And the question this raises is that if the blood that counts is the blood that freely flows, the blood of freedom—what then of the blood of others? Well, “let’s start talking right now about the others, those who are not I,” as Qfwfq puts it in “Blood, Sea.” They are after all “our neighbor” and “we know our neighbor exists because he’s outside, agreed?” (40–41). Pursuing his reflections out of the flow of power and within its freedom, Qfwfq acknowledges that, already on the inside, there is a demographic threat that runs along bloodlines. For, along with his prospective partner, he too is “willing to multiply our presence in the sea-blood so that there would be more and more of us to profit from it . . ., so that our presence would increase in both absolute number and in percentage.” Majority rule: O poca nostra nobiltà di sangue! Such, at least, “was the dream, the virtual obsession that gripped me—a minority that would become smaller and smaller, insignificant, zero point zero zero etc.” (47). Along with his prospective partner, Qfwfq is less the surviving witness of a prophesized hecatomb than he is the haematoid, dissolute embodiment, himself the red tide, of a demographic threat. And it is as such that he understands the freedom of power to flow in terms that are at once reminiscent of and markedly different from Bauman’s. Qfwfq reminds us that the most common way to deal with the neighbor, with these unseemly minorities, is

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to engage in a political pedagogy of sorts (is there any other kind of pedagogy?), to teach them something about the difference between inside and outside. It is, at any rate, “the best way to separate [them] from the blood-sea when the blood [is] in fact the sea, when our present inside was outside and our outside, inside” (48). Keeping in mind the distinction between inside and outside certainly makes it easier to imagine the free flow of power. It makes it easier to imagine oceans without shores, power without borders, blood without walls. And yet it would be a gross understatement to suggest that, since Bauman made his own prediction on the “new technique of power” and the forthcoming liquidation of fences, barriers, fortified borders, and checkpoints, walls have in fact been proliferating. We seem to be back at having to imagine the freedom of the sea and the flow of power as contradictory. Once again, it would appear that the solidity of the soil has seized control over the liquidity of the blood, the blood of freedom.

The Time of Blood But what precisely is the nature of this insistence on blood? Why revive and reactivate what seems like an odd archaism with occult echoes and disturbing political associations? What—aside from the powerful craft of Italo Calvino’s hematography, or the elemental force, which blood shares perhaps most closely with fire— justifies this sanguification of rhetoric, the general iteration of prophecies of blood? Blood is indeed a thing of the past, is it not? It is an archaism and a remnant of antiquated thought. Blood is so far gone for us that it no longer holds even the memory of a promise of “the elixir of long life that would make it possible to recover time gone by and consumed years” (Camporesi 1995: 17). The time of blood has passed. If it belongs anywhere—and who would want to revive a politics of belonging predicated on blood?—if it belongs, then it is to what Piero Camporesi calls “the bygone culture of blood” (28). In a way, blood marks the passing of time, as it remains trapped in the past. “The taste of blood permeated yesterday’s violent, cruel, immoderate society” (27). It testifies to “a logic of life that we have no more” (28). Michel Foucault concurs when he joins Camporesi and writes of blood in the past tense, assuring us that “the blood relation long remained an important element in the mechanisms of power.” Blood, Foucault continues, “constituted [note the past tense again] one of the fundamental values.” In that distant past, “power spoke through blood.” And if “blood was a reality,” it was so because it had “a symbolic function.” Society was, it could become, then, “a society of blood” (Foucault 1990: 147, emphases added). And though “the passage from one to the other did not come about without overlapping, interactions, and echoes,” it is nonetheless clear that something “caused our societies to go from a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality” (148–49). Commenting on Foucault’s work and on its pertinence in the colonial context, Ann Stoler is of course correct


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to warn those readers “who may think that the thematics of blood disappears with the analytics of sexuality” (Stoler 1995: 38). After all, Foucault himself insists that the symbolics of blood constitute “a living discourse” that continues to lend its weight “to a power exercised through the deployment of sexuality” (Foucault 1990: 39). Indeed, it would be impossible to deny the importance of blood, the way “the myth of blood . . . pervades nineteenth-century racism,” aristocratic preoccupations, as well as the “imperial politics of exclusion that was worked out earlier and reworked later on colonial ground” (51). Still, Stoler insists that Foucault fails to provide an account for the rhetoric of blood. “He looked at ‘blood’ as a body fluid, expressive of vitality, kinship and contamination, not at its part in defining the imperial body and its interior borders” (52). This, though, should not be taken to say that blood is a figure of our future. Still, Nazi awakenings notwithstanding, it does seem ever harder to imagine oceans without shores, power without borders, blood without walls. Is blood truly a thing of the past, then? Writing of “the militarization of thinking” to which we are witness, Samuel Weber explains that “although the history of words is rarely simple or transparent, it is almost always symptomatic, which is to say, significant, though often in a dissimulating mode” (Weber 2005: vii). I would like to register the tentative (and potentially offensive) suggestion that the word “hemophilia” is, in this context, not only symptomatic—historically and otherwise—but further that it testifies to a “sanguification” of rhetoric and of thinking that, simultaneously exposed and dissimulated on the surface of our own oceans, has yet to be lingered upon. And though I remain uncertain with regards to the precise meaning of this occurrence, it strikes me as significant that in 1828, Johann Lukas Schönlein, a German physician, first coined the German word hämophilie in order to name a pathological condition that hardly seems to indicate a love (philia) of blood (haima). Oblivious to such minor, semantic obstacles, the word rapidly spread through other European medical lexicons and has generally remained confined to medical, professional vocabularies. One could argue, therefore, that the word functioned as part of a containment apparatus, channeling a more general flow of blood, which it seized and confined to this physiological terminology. It obscured, perhaps obscures still, a phenomenon of much broader import, and one that resonates with Qfwfq’s wish that “all blood would finally be our blood” (Calvino 1969: 47). The history of this phenomenon—in a dissimulated mode, as Weber suggests—whereby blood becomes one and the world evolves into “a sea of common blood,” this phenomenon is perhaps traceable through the translations of a famous biblical passage. It emerges in the momentous distance that, prior to its overlooked vanishing, had separated the Vulgate from Martin Luther, and filiation from blood. Indeed, whereas Jerome’s Latin for Acts 17:26 has “fecitque ex uno omne genus hominum inhabitare super universam faciem terrae,” Luther’s sixteenth-century German offers: “Und er hat gemacht,

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daß von einem Blut aller Menschen Geschlechter auf dem ganzen Erdboden wohnen.” The difference between old and new (between the Latin genus and German Blut) is precisely reversed in the notes of the NRSV (“From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth”) that attribute to “ancient authorities” the more recent variant “from one blood” (and see the King James version: “And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth”). The continued relevance of Acts 17:26 in nineteenth-century American “blood talk,” for example, has been compellingly demonstrated by Susan Gillman, who shows how blood increasingly pervades the discourses of science and spiritualism and underscores the tension at work between efforts at keeping bloods separate (“Strange it is that our bloods, / Of colour, weight, and heat, poured all together, / Would quite confound distinction, yet stands of / In differences so mighty” is the way Shakespeare puts it in All’s Well that Ends Well, II.iii.118–21) and the universal humanist dream of one world, one blood: from the one-drop rule to the one blood world. Either way, blood counts and blood rules, if in a peculiarly ambivalent way. As Gillman herself puts it, in the United States of America, “the uses of blood do not add up: both literal and figurative, blood remains both a stubborn biologism and a vision of interracial harmony” (Gillman 2003: 70). Blood counts, then, but it does not add up. It remains, or so I want to argue, a dissimulated keyword of a culture and society in which hemophilia—the love of blood—is a general but not universal condition. Blood is a word that implicates much more than medieval phantasms or Nazi phantasmagorias. Blood is a word, but it is hardly a word from the past—much more of our present, infusing the order of things in ways more numerous than we seem to recognize. Like Qfwfq, albeit unwittingly, we live in a red ocean and are traversed by hematologies. I do not mean by this to prompt the reader’s sanguinary instincts, only to take seriously Qfwfq’s own assertion as to a broad order of dissimulation. Sanguinary instincts, what can only be referred to once again as hemophilia, occur, Qfwfq says, “in all secrecy, given my constant mien as a civil, polite person just like the rest of you.” Still, it is precisely such a “sanguinary instinct” that remains “connected to the meaning of blood as ‘our blood’ which I bear in me just as you do, civilly and politely” (Calvino 1969: 48). Nothing is therefore said here that would intend to reiterate the otherwise uncontroversial claim that “blood is one of the most powerful and ubiquitous of human symbols,” that “the way we understand this ‘special juice’ shapes the way in which we conduct our lives, choose our partners, structure our institutions, and express our culture” (Bradburne 2002: 11). Instead, I wish to underscore that, though they seem suffused with it, neither law nor politics, neither science nor kinship, not theology or literature are universally or naturally predicated on blood, on an understanding of blood. Besides, it makes as little sense to claim that blood is a universal as to say, after Foucault, that sexuality is a universal. At stake is rather the peculiar way in which blood speaks


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and is spoken, the way it governs and rules over us—beginning perhaps with the very fact that the conception of a collective body, whether familial, tribal, national, or racial, is, in the Christian West and its historical (and historicist) avatars, massively conceived or figured, as consanguinity, by way of blood. The relation between blood and the distinct realms—the wall-divided seas—that define this particular civilizational area (what Cormac McCarthy somewhere refers to as “the evening redness in the West”) does not separate one red ocean from another. Instead, the sanguification of rhetoric, the very idea that there are distinct bloods in the world, and distinct blood realms, testifies to a hematopoietic activity, which cannot be understood by flattening and diluting the rivers of blood that run through it, that are made to run through it. “Because from the moment when blood becomes ‘our blood,’” Qfwfq explains, “the relationship between us and blood changes, that is, what counts is the blood insofar as it is ‘ours,’ and all the rest, us included, counts less” (Calvino 1969: 49).

Political Hematographies Since “Shakespeare’s Several Degrees in Bloud” and Goethe’s Faust, at least, by way of Dracula and all the way to Calvino and Cormac McCarthy, blood irrigates literature and philosophy (Berkeley 2001; Anidjar 2005). Nietzsche famously spoke, and forcefully so, “of writing in blood, telling us that of everything written, his Zarathustra ‘loves’ only ‘what one has written with one’s blood. Write with blood and you will learn that blood is spirit’” (Babich 2006: vii). Commenting on this well-known topos, Babette Babich reminds us that we must take Nietzsche at his word, and read the hard and bloody letter of his words (29). Although it is not clear that what she refers to here is, in fact, the blood that Nietzsche insists on inscribing, Babich does explain that the matter is of greater import. It implicates others. Thus, she writes, “words in blood express the passion that for Heidegger belongs to philosophy at its inception” (vii). Spinoza would hardly disagree who offered the image of “a little worm” that “would live in the blood, in the same way as we live in the universe” (Spinoza 1955: 291; and see Anidjar 2009a). Nor would Hegel himself dispute the matter, who, in a prefiguration of Calvino’s universe, proposes that the absolute Notion [der absolute Begriff ] may be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood [das allgemeine Blut], whose omnipresence is neither disturbed nor interrupted by any difference, but rather is itself every difference, as also their supersession; it pulsates within itself but does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest. It is self-identical, for the differences are tautological; they are differences that are none. (Hegel 1977: 100; Semm 1994: 17–70)

128 Gil Anidjar Blood is and is not difference, yet blood would make all the difference. And the difference it makes exceeds philosophy to become part and parcel of politics, blood politics (Sturm 2002). This too is indicative of the red ocean of modernity such as Thomas Hobbes invented it when he first introduced William Harvey’s new discovery, the circulation of the blood, into political philosophy. In Leviathan, Hobbes thus writes of “the Sanguification of the Commonwealth” (“For Natural Bloud is in like manner made of the fruits of the Earth; and circulating, nourisheth by the way, every Member of the Body of Man”) and announces the demographic threat associated with the foreign blood of the multitude (Hobbes 1996: 174). Giambattista Vico also put this discovery to good scientific use, sealing thereby the sanguification of rhetoric in and as “the study methods of our time.” We shall arrange our discourse in corresponding order, and discuss first the instruments, then the aids to our method of study. As for the aim, it should circulate like a blood-stream, through the entire body of the learning process. Consequently, just as the blood’s pulsation may best be studied at the spot where the arterial beat is most perceptible, so the aim of our study methods shall be treated at the point where it assumes the greatest prominence. (Vico 1990: 6) The “new science” is recast as the science of blood, a hematology, and it functions always as a political science. It endures, as I have said, not only through modern politics, circulating like a blood stream though the entirety of our body politic, from kinship to nation, and from tribe to race, explaining the fact that to this day “the [US] federal government through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) continues to use blood quantum as both a metaphor and measure of ‘Indian’ identity . . . Not quite a century ago, blood degree varied among tribal members from ‘full-blood’ to 1/256. Today the range is far greater—from full-blood to 1/2048” (Sturm 2002: 2). Majority rule, indeed. And don’t drop from your memory “the one-drop rule” and its continuing effects, as well as what Anne Norton has referred to as the “Bloodrites of the Post-Structuralists.” Finding the sources of these rites in the early modern period, Norton explains that “blood flows . . . not only on the battlefield but between men and women in sex, between the mother and the child in her womb and at her breast, between one generation and the next” (Norton 2002: 10). “Woman is the keeper of the blood” affirms, for her part, Luce Irigaray, whose proposition to think “a metaphysics generated from feminine desire . . . might conceptualize being as fluid rather than as solid substances, or things. Fluids, unlike objects, have no definite borders; they are unstable, which does not mean that they are without pattern. Fluids surge and move” (Grosz 1994: 204, quoting Iris Young). Irigaray takes us back to Bauman and to Calvino, to law and literature and to the gendering of blood.


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As Peggy McCracken describes, “the gendering of blood in literature does not simply reflect medical, religious, or popular views of sexual difference. Rather, in their appropriation and modification of cultural views about men’s blood and women’s blood, literary texts expose the gender systems that these views construct” (McCracken 2003: 116). Between literature and politics, between words and blood—a division that hardly does justice to the circulation of blood through distinct linguistic and institutional realms, but testifies to the peculiar hematology I am trying to identify—between words and blood, then, most modern states still deploy a legal notion of citizenship that is predicated on variations of jus sanguinis. Blood is in the law, blood is the law, the force of law and its violence, which Jacques Derrida articulates, after Walter Benjamin, around the force of blood (Anidjar 2009b). Derrida went so far as to implicate deconstruction in the history of blood and the history of its future. “For what remains to come of or from deconstruction,” Derrida writes, “I believe that something else runs through its veins, perhaps without filiation, an entirely different blood or rather something else entirely than blood, be it the most fraternal blood.” Such an “impure genealogy” will perhaps refrain from creating “a law that makes blood flow and exacts blood as payment” (Derrida 2002: 292). Be that as it may, by way of law, kinship, and race science, and most prominently, through the history of medicine, blood is at the heart. It is at the heart of economics and of what Douglas Starr has called “an epic history of medicine and commerce” (Starr 2002). From Harvey’s discovery, which I have already mentioned, to Marx’s concern for “the living blood of labor” and all the way to Richard Titmuss’s groundbreaking study of “the gift relationship,” which takes us “from human blood to social policy,” the centrality of blood to political economy and “tissue economies,” as well as its formative role in the market in human goods, what Kaushik Sunder Rajan refers to as “biocapital,” is impossible to miss or deny (Marx 1990; Titmuss 1997; Rajan 2006; Healy 2006). Thus, referring to the international system of blood donation and the complex technologies it involves, Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell underscore the social dimension of “blood economy” as they lament the fact that rather than a form of circulation that includes all citizens and revivifies the body politic, it has become a form of circulation that divides populations precisely because it links them . . . the power of the gift to circulate tissues potentially vitiates rather than augments the body politic. (Waldby and Mitchell 2006: 183) Speaking more generally of the use of “human materials,” they reveal “the extent to which strategies of appropriation once reserved for the Third World—for example, the perceived right to appropriate terra nullius (empty land)—are being extended to the citizenry of first-world countries” (108).

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Literature and philosophy, law and politics, colonialism and race science, medicine and social policy—the sanguification of rhetoric through all these realms, such as I have been rapidly describing here, testifies to more than a division between bloods. It certainly maintains the enigma of blood as a site of difference, a difference that matters and does not. It speaks, at any rate, of our relationship to blood, our generalized hemophilia. But I have simplified things. And like Calvino’s narrator, whom I have already cited at length, “I’m not sure whether the step forward I’ve made is really a step forward. Because from the moment when blood becomes ‘our blood,’ the relationship between us and blood changes, that is, what counts is the blood insofar as it is ‘ours,’ and all the rest, us included, counts less” (Calvino 1969: 49). All the rest—everything really. Everything but blood; and blood in everything. Eduardo Galeano thus recounts that a Grenadian economist, Davison Budhoo, resigned from the International Monetary Fund. In his farewell letter he wrote: ‘The blood is too much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up too; it cakes all over me; sometimes I feel there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me from the things that I did do in your name’. (Galeano 1992: 251) Indeed, everything is as if we were merely repeating “the pulsing of the ocean now buried inside us, of the red ocean that was once without shores, under the sun” (Calvino 1969: 44). How far does this red ocean reach? I have said that, hardly universal, it may still be general, even global—a generalized hematology, and a growing hemophilia—but the sanguification of rhetoric has yet to produce a world of oceans without shores, power without borders, blood without walls.

Bibliography Anidjar, G. (2005) “Christians and Money (The Economic Enemy),” Ethical Perspectives: Journal of the European Ethics Network 12(4): 497–520. —— (2009a) “We Have Never Been Jewish: An Essay in Asymmetric Hematology,” in M. Hart (ed.) Jewish Blood: Metaphor and Reality in Jewish History, Culture, and Religion, New York: Routledge. —— (2009b) “Blutgewalt,” Oxford Literary Review 31(2): 153–74. Babich, B. E. (2006) Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Albany: State University of New York Press. Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Berkeley, D. S. (2001) “Shakespeare’s Severall Degrees in Bloud,” in P. C. Rollins and A. Smith (eds.) Shakespeare’s Theories of Blood, Character, and Class: A Festschrift in Honor of David Shelley Berkeley, New York: Peter Lang. Bradburne, J. M. (2002) “Perspectives on Art, Power, Politics and Pathology,” in


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J. M. Bradburne (ed.) Blood: Art, Power, Politics and Pathology, Munich and London: Prestel Verlag. Calvino, I. (1969) t zero, trans. W. Weaver, Orlando, FL: Harcourt. —— (2002) Tutte le cosmicomiche, a cura di Claudio Milanini, Milan: Oscar Mondadori. Camporesi, P. (1995) Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic Significance of Blood, trans. R. R. Barr, New York: Continuum. Derrida, J. (2002) “Force of Law,” trans. M. Quaintance, in G. Anidjar (ed.) Acts of Religion, New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1990) The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Vintage Books. Galeano, E. (1992) We Say No: Chronicles 1963–1991, trans. M. Fried et al., New York: W. W. Norton. Gillman, S. (2003) Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Healy, K. (2006) Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobbes, T. (1996) Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCracken, P. (2003) The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Marx, K. (1990) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. B. Fowkes, New York: Penguin. Norton, A. (2002) Bloodrites of the Post-Structuralists: Words, Flesh and Revolution, New York: Routledge. Rajan, K. S. (2006) Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Semm, M. (1994) Der Springende Punkt in Hegels System, Munich: Klaus Boer Verlag. Spinoza, B. (1955) “Correspondence,” in On the Improvement of the Understanding, trans. R. H. M. Elwes, New York: Dover. Starr, D. (2002) Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce, New York: Harper Collins. Stoler, A. L. (1995) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sturm, C. (2002) Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Berkeley: University of California Press. Titmuss, R. M. (1997) The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, New York: The New Press. Vico, G. (1990) On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. E. Gianturco, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Waldby, C. and Mitchell, R. (eds.) Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weber, S. (2005) Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking, New York: Fordham University Press.

10 Going away/Coming home Searching for a fixed point in postcolonial Indian writing Jogamaya Bayer

The right of world citizenship is for Kant contingent on conditions of universal hospitality. As he defines it, this is no guest right but the right of a temporary visitor, permitted, nonetheless, to every human being. It is, however, possible that far-away countries peacefully agree on terms among themselves that are sanctioned by law. A constitution of world citizenship for humanity could finally be realized on the basis of these terms (Kant 1795: 15–16). Derrida critiques this juridical aspect as it contains a deferral element and lacks the decided unconditionality which is important for Levinas. It is also significant that for Levinas the earth grants a guest a temporary hospitality which is to be regarded as a sojourn in a dwelling (Derrida 1999: 87, 93). What follows explores today’s experiences of proliferating non-places in supermodernity—places of ephemerality, mobility, migration, as well as solitude and similitude (Augé 1995: 103)—and how they problematize the tension between the troubling quest for a fixed point and the temporality of home in the literature of the Indian subcontinent. Today more than ever the question of belonging has to be seen in a wider context with millions of undocumented immigrants demanding humanitarian politics. In postcolonial diasporic and partition literature the displaced, the liminal, the border crosser play a dominant role. While in Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man, Uma Parameswaran’s Trishanku, and Raninder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman the anxiety of inhabiting an imaginary non-place is a central theme, in Leena Dhingra’s Amritvela this anxiety turns more into relief. In Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay the main character experiences the ephemerality of home, and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss similarly describes the fragility of this home, which Augé defines as an “anthropological place.” In Saadat Hasan Manto’s partition stories, Mottled Dawn, or Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines, frontiers—also non-places—not only define exclusion but also evoke the very possibility of turning them into crossings. Kamala Markandaya belonged to a generation of writers who experienced the

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great upheaval directly during the years of the independence movement and partition. She, like many other Indian writers, was influenced by Mulk Raj Anand, the pioneer of social realism in Indo-Anglian writing. As early as 1972 her novel The Nowhere Man defined the immigrant as occupying a space which is a kind of nonplace—an idea which will be taken up by many other Indo-Anglian writers later. This “nowhere” is associated with an eternal lack of place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper place; it can mean the legitimacy of occupying a place. It can also imply an ever enduring journey, rootlessness, and the transience of home. Markandaya’s novel begins with the doctor’s confirmation that Srinivas has leprosy, for which he should be quarantined. As it is unlikely that he could contract this disease after so many years’ stay in England one is reminded of Gregor Samsa, the anti-hero of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1916), who, one morning after waking up, discovers that he has been transformed into a beetle. It is the time when racial conflicts start and Srinivas, an unwanted immigrant, is treated like an outcast and becomes more and more isolated. After his wife’s death he had lost contact with his son and had already been left alone. Now he feels painfully the loss of his roots on the one hand and the failure to belong to his chosen home on the other. The disease develops into a picture of his inner world. Srinivas becomes a real victim in the end, for he dies when a young neighbor sets fire to his house. Raninder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman, published by the London-based Women’s Press in 1987, likewise deals with the immigrant experience, but in the context of race, class, and gender. Kulwant, or Kuli, who grew up in England, as well as several other characters of the novel, give the reader an insight into the life of women of the community. The actual thread of action is interwoven with Kuli’s memories and daydreams. Caught in the conflict between two value systems, Kuli’s self lives in permanent fragmentation. The novel questions the contextuality of a code of values that should evoke the permanence of “home” in one’s own tradition. It suggests that their culture could preclude its disintegration by recognizing these women’s intention to map out their own way to self-realization. In order to achieve this “right of way” Asian women should choose sisterhood and start to look at one another “horizontally” instead of looking hierarchically through their own patriarchal family structures. They could then come out of the impasse generated by the binary oppositions between the genders and the races (Bayer 1993: 339–40). Uma Parameswaran’s Trishanku, a cycle of poems consisting of about fifteen voices that cumulatively reflect the first quarter century of Indo-Canadian experience in Manitoba, defines the condition of someone who feels suspended in a limbo in terms of mythology. In the Hindu epic the Ramayana, Trishanku is a king who demands of his priest that he should be sent alive to heaven. But, being thrown back by the gods, he remains hanging in the air, where the power of

134 Jogamaya Bayer the words of his priest prevents him from falling down. The suspension of Trishanku between earth and heaven is a consequence of his desire for heaven as well as fear of incurring the wrath of the gods. Uma Prameswaran’s cycle of poems begins with this dilemma as to where to belong: “Shall I hang myself in the sky / As Trishanku did of old?” (Parameswaran 1988: 7). While reading the poems, rich in Hindu mythology as they are, we find that the answer becomes easier to anticipate. Although the poems also deal with the concerns of common men and women, the dominating idea is to invoke the rich tradition of Hinduism which would sustain their spirit of self-reverence and unite them against discrimination. In the four short monologues of Vithal, for example, the main point is that through religious commonality the migrants can come together and challenge the social adversary. An engagement with one’s own culture as represented by religion should serve as an anchor in solitude. Though this is a response to the experience of exclusion, it fails to capitalize upon the solidarity of others, outside the community, who also face the same hostility. The ideological content of the anthology is problematic. However the non-place it describes—in mythological symbols to thematize the experience of falling into an abyss followed by a transgression, a confrontation with the law of a place (de Certeau 1988: 128), here paradise—deserves particular attention. Augé argues that in today’s world of supermodernity, “roots” contain a different meaning: For the time we live in is paradoxical in this aspect, too: at the very same moment when it becomes possible to think in terms of the unity of terrestrial space, and the big multinational networks grow strong, the clamour of particularisms rises; clamour from those who want to stay at home in peace, clamour from those who want to find a mother country. As if the conservatism of the former and the messianism of the latter were condemned to speak the same language: that of the land and roots. (Augé 1995: 34–35) He exhorts his reader to give up the old way of looking at things and to de-center the perspectives. This demands reconsidering space in a new way. In trying to differentiate “anthropological place” from “non-place” Augé explains to what extent identity and relations play an important part in the concrete and symbolic construction of space by collectivities. In this “anthropological place” everybody is allotted a particular position (36, 51). “To be born is to be born in a place, to be ‘assigned to residence.’ In this sense the actual place of birth is a constituent of individual identity” (53). The Latin etymology of the word “monument” divulges the very aspiration for duration. Thus the presence of monuments in social spaces conveys the feeling of continuity (60). This also implies the very rootedness of an


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individual in the culture one is born into. Contrary to this place, a space which is not relational or historical or focused on identity is a non-place—denoting such spaces as transport, transit, commerce, leisure, and also how people evaluate them. Supermodernity differs from Baudelairean modernity, as it reduces historical places to “places of memory.” While anthropological places are intrinsically social, non-places are specified for solitary individuality, the fleeting, the temporary, and the ephemeral (77–78). In Levinas’s writing these concepts have a completely different meaning. The substitution of the shared identity of the anthropological places based on the same language and local references by that (the shared identity) of transit passengers, supermarket customers, and highway drivers in non-places is a characteristic of supermodernity. However it is not totally fixed. Seven years before Augé’s book was first published we find a related notion of non-place in Leena Dhingra’s Amritvela (1988). The word suggests the time of nectar, the time just before dawn when the sun has risen but cannot as yet be seen. The main character, Meera, says right at the beginning: The non-stop flight to New Delhi is now halfway. But only my watch informs me of that. Through the window we appear quite immobile, suspended over a vast expanse of curdling clouds. If, as I have often said, I feel myself to be suspended between two cultures, then this is where I belong, the halfway mark. Here in the middle of nowhere, up in the atmosphere, is my space— the halfway point between East and West. My watch informs me and my mind agrees. (Dhingra 1988: 1) At the end of the story the protagonist feels secure in the plane on her return journey back from her place of birth. After the rush and noise of the airport, the plane is calm, cocooned, with everybody gratefully settling into their nests. Outside it is still dark, but soon it will be the amritvela once again—a brief time quivering between the ‘kal’ of yesterday and the ‘kal’ of tomorrow. Maybe even for an instant they are all one—yesterday, today and tomorrow. (177) This reminds us of what Augé says about space being “trapped by time, as if there were no history other than the last forty-eight hours of news” (Augé 1995: 104). But here the protagonist faced with the task of resolving the dilemma of belonging is at the end relaxed in her “home in the clouds” as she rides with the sun and experiences the sun rising in one place after the next for she is travelling from the east to the west (Dhingra 1988: 177). Here we see how a non-place can become

136 Jogamaya Bayer the fixed point. Here there is no outside, but only inside. In solitude and defamiliarization one finds an anchor in supermodernity. The sharing of Augé’s non-place is not unconditional. The contract is juridical and, more importantly, financial. If a visitor has no paper and cannot prove his identity he will be denied access. “Non-lieu,” as he explains in the footnote, is more commonly used in French in the juridical sense of “no grounds for prosecution,” meaning that the accused is innocent (Augé 1995: 102). In Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss Biju, whose attempts to acquire a valid working permit in New York are baffled, cannot prove this innocence, and so cannot juridically belong to the place he wishes to inhabit. His right to belong to the anthropological place where he ultimately returns, only to be robbed of all his possessions, is likewise questioned. This is interwoven with the ambiguity of the cartographical location of this place where the story mostly unfurls. Kalimpong, located in the northern part of the state of West Bengal and adjacent to the state of Sikkim, is set amongst the foothills of the Himalayas. Until the eighteenth century Kalimpong was ruled by Sikkimese rulers. It was then taken over by the Bhutanese. In the nineteenth century, the British took over Kalimpong and merged it into the present Indian state of West Bengal. The arbitrariness of borders may explain why until today there are political conflicts as to where it should belong. Caught in this turmoil all the main characters are suspended in uncertainty as to their right to occupy the space. The juxtaposition of the present cartography of the place and the inscriptions on the soil underlines how ephemeral the conception of home is. Memories of absence tie us to a place and give it the character of a palimpsest. Following Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, de Certeau develops an idea on how a child first learns spatial structure through the perception of the mother’s absence and the possibility of being somewhere without her. In Freud’s analysis the playful manipulation of a spool by his grandson, in which the child substitutes the spool for the mother, making her come and go (“fort,” “da”) inaugurates for the child the beginning of its differentiation of itself from its mother. Likewise in Lacan’s mirror stage the “spatial captation” opens up for the child the way to be other and to move toward the other (de Certeau 1988: 108–10). In a similar vein as de Certeau, Derrida argues that displaced persons, exiles, rootless nomads, all have one thing in common: the memory of the dead and the nostalgia for the language. The very definition of home is intrinsically intertwined with the resting place of the ancestors as well as the mother tongue. The latter does not have the immobility of homeland for it becomes mobile as soon as the speaker abandons a place. The language carries us from birth to death, and so becomes a home that never leaves us (Derrida 2000: 87, 89, 91). Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay exposes a degree of latent ambiguity in this nostalgia. It describes the inexorable fate of a Jewish immigrant who flees from Nazi Germany and survives internment in a British camp during his exile in


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colonial India. After independence Baumgartner, who is now also free, settles in Bombay where he lives a lonely life; in the course of time, he will be robbed and killed by a drug addict who is a German tourist. Indo-Anglian literature, in which alienation of the Eastern immigrant in the West mainly prevails, exceeds its limitations through the representation of this figure of a Western refugee in the East. As he travels for the first time from Bombay to Calcutta, “the shadow of the past, of elsewhere, of what had been and could never be abandoned—an animal in its grey pelt” (Desai 1989: 89) chases Baumgartner. He has ceased to crave for his language, for his confinement with Nazi Germans had extinguished that need. At the end of the novel he realizes his thirty years’ stay has not helped him to enter the life of Bombay, which has remained for ever elusive to him. He is unable to read either Germany or India. Oblivion is all that remains for Baumgartner, which is probably a way out of the torture of the memory of “Nacht und Nebel” (150, 216). “Night and Fog” was a directive of Hitler’s in 1941, leading to the prosecution of many political victims. Already before her “homecoming” the grandmother in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines does not understand what a border in reality signifies, or that her birthplace does not determine her nationality. It is even more difficult for her to grasp that she could not go to Dhaka, which after the partition is in Bangladesh, as easily as in the past before the country was divided. This trip is not as easy as she had always believed “homecoming” would be. Upon her arrival in Dhaka she cannot believe that this is the same place she used to know. The city has changed. For her it is marked by memories and absences. The narrator, who was never there, knows the city perfectly well only from her stories and her memories. He could even see the sweet-shop around the corner from the house where she grew up or hear the noise coming from there. “I could see all that, because people like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection” (Ghosh 2005: 190). During her stay the grandmother visits the old uncle in order to bring him to Calcutta. Soon after, the car carrying them crosses a bridge to reach the part of the city where the house of the uncle stood, and familiarity is regained (201–2). Here almost everything corresponds to her memory excepting the house itself. With the realization that the ancestral house—their patrimony—is forever lost through the partition she also experiences the fragility of home as an “anthropological place.” The crossing of the bridge that separates the familiar from the unfamiliar turns into a kind of trespassing, as their visit is seen as an encroachment. As a consequence, they are involved in a deadly riot in which her nephew, Tridib, as well as the old uncle along with his rickshaw-driver, are killed. The bridge is ambiguous, it brings people together, but it also distinguishes them (de Certeau 1988: 128). In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch Immanuel Kant writes:

138 Jogamaya Bayer Whether this satirical inscription on a Dutch innkeeper’s sign upon which a burial ground was painted had for its object mankind in general, or the rulers of states in particular, who are insatiable of war, or merely the philosophers who dream this sweet dream, it is not for us to decide. (Kant 1795: 1) Peace among men living side by side is not the natural state. The natural state is one of war. As it implies an unceasing threat of war a state of peace must be established on condition of political and juridical treaties among the states (7). No other writer of the Indian subcontinent has written more satirical sketches on this “perpetual peace” of a cemetery in the aftermath of partition than Saadat Hasan Manto. In the stories Mottled Dawn (1997), originally written in Urdu and later translated by Khalid Hasan, the frontier represents displacements. They do not acknowledge the necessity of the frontier’s existence and allow the re-emergence of the desire for reconciliation with the neighbor. In “Toba Tek Singh,” considered to be the greatest of Manto’s partition stories, the horrible reaction of those who refused to accept the disaster or were unable to grasp it is ironically represented as the unrest of the lunatics in an asylum who are involved in an exchange. They do not understand why they should be forcibly removed. One of the inmates, Bishan Singh, tries to escape the exchange. All efforts to make him go behind the Indian border prove to be futile. He remains standing the whole night in no man’s land until, the next day, he falls dead. Toba Tek Singh is an everlasting image of the dislocation and rootlessness of the refugee—a product of the many partitions the world today has to struggle with. Not only here but also in stories like “The Last Salute” and “The Dog of Titwal” the frontier raises the question as to where it belongs. The frontier is not really a nowhere, as cartographical representation presumes (de Certeau 1988: 127). Further, it makes negotiations possible as does the story that deals with it. Toba Tek Singh disregards the fact that the frontier is a place of exchanges and encounters and must remain a void. As an in-between space it cannot be filled with permanent presence. As he tries to do so, he is left to die. Manto’s stories work on the dislocation following the partition and try to turn the frontier into a crossing. “[T]he door that closes is precisely what may be opened” (de Certeau 1988: 128). Benedict Anderson elaborates on how much importance was given to the rule that the colonial subjects could have only one unambiguous place in society, a legacy which was taken up by the nations as they became independent (Anderson 2006: 166). One of its consequences is to be seen in the demand for partition. The confidence in a determinacy of home loses its meaning with the experience of its fleetingness. At the same time the question arises as to what is home in connection with such non-places as borders and migration. The chosen home is for Levinas the opposite of a root.


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It indicates a disengagement, a wandering [errance] which has made it possible, which is not a less with respect to installation, but the surplus of the relationship with the Other, metaphysics . . . The possibility for the home to open to the Other is as essential to the essence of the home as closed doors and windows. (Levinas 1998: 172–73) Levinas’s definition of hospitality is in Derrida’s reading more radical than that of Kant, for whom it is political, juridical, and civil. For Levinas “hospitality,” “asylum,” “the inn”—all these concepts include fraternity, humanity, and hospitality. Hospitality and peace for Levinas go beyond the juridical and the political (Derrida 1999: 49, 68). Our task here is simply—between Kant and Levinas—to sharpen a difference that matters today more than ever with regard to this right of refuge and all the most urgent matters of our time, everywhere that—in Israel, in Rwanda, in Europe, in America, in Asia, and in all the Churches of St. Bernard in the world—millions of “undocumented immigrants” [sans papiers], of “homeless” [sans domicile fixe], call out for another international law, another border politics, another humanitarian politics, indeed a humanitarian commitment that effectively operates beyond the interests of Nation States. (Derrida 1999: 101) Indian literature in English contains the anguish for a home and its very character of fleetingness in a world of pogroms, exiles, frontiers, and refugees. The question of belonging is defined not only against the backdrop of the immigrant experiences in the West but also as a part of the anomalies of arbitrary borders and non-places of supermodernity.

Bibliography Anderson, B. (2006 [1983]) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and NewYork: Verso. Augé, M. (1995 [1992]) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. J. Howe, London and New York: Verso. Bayer, J. (1993) “Ravinder Randhawa,” in E. S. Nelson (ed.) Writers of the Indian Diaspora: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press. de Certeau, M. (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Derrida, J. (1999 [1997]) Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. P. A. Brault and M. Naas, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —— (2000 [1997]) Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. R. Bowlby, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Desai, A. (1989) Baumgartner’s Bombay, London: Penguin Books. Desai, K. (2007) The Inheritance of Loss, London: Penguin Books. Dhingra, L. (1988) Amritvela, London: The Women’s Press. Ghosh, A. (2005) The Shadow Lines, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Kant, I. (1795) Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf, Königsberg: bey Friedrich Nicolovius. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. Online. Available: http://www.constitution.org/kant/perpeace.txt (accessed June 1, 2010). Levinas, E. (1998 [1961]) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press. Manto, S. H. (1997) Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition, trans. K. Hasan, New Delhi: Penguin Books. Markandaya, K. (1975) The Nowhere Man, Poona: Sangam Books. Parameswaran, U. (1988) Trishanku, Toronto: TSAR. Randhawa, R. (1987) A Wicked Old Woman, London: The Women’s Press

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11 Infrahuman Rights, Silence, and the Possibility of Communication in Recent Narratives of Illegality in Britain Dave Gunning

“I am a refugee, an asylum seeker. These are not simple words” (Gurnah 2001: 4). Saleh Omar, the primary narrator of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea, identifies some of the predicaments that face the illegal immigrant in twenty-firstcentury Britain. While the situation of illegality presents a particular challenge in relation to speech, as the national language works simultaneously to reflect and enforce the political boundaries of the nation, for the refugee additional complex movements with discourse are required. The terms of reference by which we might know the refugee, and in which the refugee might present him or herself, are not simple but weighted with complicated political and social baggage. Another meaning also haunts Saleh’s phrase: the labels are not simply words but vital tools through which the distinctions between national citizens, illegal immigrants, and the precarious liminal status of refugees come into being. Manzu Islam’s novel Burrow (2004) presents an illegal immigrant struggling against the threat of deportation, but also against confinement within the extant possibilities of expression in the English language. Tapan Ali is a Bangladeshi exstudent who has overstayed on his visa following the end of his studies. To grant him leave to stay, he arranges a sham marriage with Adela, his white English girlfriend. When the Home Office begin their investigations, Tapan is forced to move out. He starts on a journey to map his experience onto the city. While this need for geographical certainty aligns him with the figure of Brothero-Man in Islam’s earlier The Mapmakers of Spitalfields, “drawing the secret blueprint of the new city” (1997: 66), Tapan simultaneously suffers from a crisis of personal identity which threatens wholly to destabilize him. He recognizes that the life of the undocumented migrant would be worse than that of a prisoner condemned to a life sentence. Even if a prisoner was locked up somewhere like Alcatraz, he could at least go by his own name—call himself Al Capone if he liked. Tapan would be nameless; he wouldn’t exist as far as the world was concerned. (Islam 2004: 73)

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Tapan also comes to realize that, while he would remain nameless as an individual, he would, however, come to find a name; his condition would be determined by the force of a potent signifier: “he was a criminal, a fugitive. Why hold it back? Say it loud, say the shame of our time: an illegal immigrant” (75). The threat is not simply that of anonymity but of being called a name other than one’s own; “not a simple mis-recognition, but rather a designation that marked [his] location in Britain” (Islam 2000: 449). Within the racist atmosphere evoked as “the time of the skin” (Islam 2004: 85), the possibilities for self-realization seem drastically limited. In the act of naming, exclusions and hierarchies come into being. Tapan’s attempt throughout the novel to come to terms with the pressures exerted by his status upon his sense of self are partially articulated through an engagement with words: he collects stories that will allow him to make sense of his fate, looking to figures from Western literature and film as well as from Bangladeshi folk-legend, and also to the memories of the immigrants from across the world who have consistently reshaped the metropolis. Employed to write for Dr Karamat Ali’s English language newspaper, Tapan sits at his typewriter and feels the seductive power of giving names to things, but begins to recognize that this must be seen as a means to a different end: “He should . . . let himself slide through the body of words. Once on the other side of words, he could easily fly like the good Count [Dracula] and touch the pulse of the earth like a[n] [Australian] bushman” (130). The novel suggests, however, that the path to such desired non-verbal possession of space cannot be found in passing through language to something beyond, but must instead proceed from an initial abjuration. Tapan’s intimate account of how an immigrant might locate themselves in London is unable to act as testimony or historical record because Karamat Ali curbs dissemination of the text, fearing such a commonplace report might shame him. Instead of continuing with his experimentation with language, Tapan instead turns to acts of geographical and spiritual unity to allow for a reshaping of migrant territory in ways that renounce language. The book ends ambiguously, as immigration officers break down the door of Tapan’s apartment, accompanied by a cacophony of noise as the migrant community who inhabit the building start “banging pots and pans [and] hitting their ceilings with brooms and . . . ululating” and Tapan himself hums a constant note. Karen McIntyre-Bhatty reads this final scene as Tapan “escap[ing] the confines of Western, logocentric thought” and that he instead “occupies a more liminal space of potentiality, between and within creation and destruction: both a beginning-point and an end” (McIntyre-Bhatty 2007: 31). It is not only Tapan who rejects the logic of naming here; the ambiguity of the ending can be read as Islam himself also taking such a refuge in silence. The acts of naming that comprise the discourse of racism in Britain have made the illegal immigrant into the worst of folk devils, yet Tapan finds a way to step outside of language; equally, his creator refuses to narrate his final fate.

Recent Narratives of Illegality in Britain

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For Islam, then, the language that defines the situation of illegal immigrants may be not only unacceptable but also unworkable, necessitating a mode of expression through silence. Yet the retreat into silence may not be possible for all illegal immigrants: for the refugee, verbal enunciation seems necessary to any form of flourishing. Article 31 of the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees identifies this special kind of illegal immigrant: “The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees . . . provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence” (UN Refugee Agency 1951: 31). The refugee, then, is the subject who can claim, from the midst of illegality, the rights and protection of the law; they are the illegal immigrant who isn’t. Of course, this negation of illegality can only take place “provided they present themselves . . . to the authorities.” If you want asylum, you have to ask for it. But willfully to participate in language to affirm one’s legally validated right is paradoxically to identify oneself as the illegal subject-without-rights; taking advantage of the freedoms offered by the law first requires a submission to its most brutal incarnation. The paradoxes involved in British asylum law were succinctly captured by the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, in a 2000 speech: “[the 1951] Convention gives us the obligation to consider any claims [for asylum] made within our territory . . . but no obligation to facilitate the arrival on our territory of those who wish to make a claim” (quoted in Kundnani 2007: 68). Although the status of the refugee, protected under international law, is recognized, the nation-state proceeds to tighten its borders against them and intensifies the demonization of those who permeate these precious boundaries. The effect on the refugee is profound. The institutional spaces in which one might claim asylum are sanctified by the force of the humanism that finds its ultimate expression in talk of universal rights, but they nonetheless remain places of inhospitality. Guaranteed by the law, the compassion of asylum is a benevolence that eviscerates the supplicant and simultaneously seems to iterate its awareness of their humanity while acting to compromise the affective and ethical force this notion might exercise. This is not quite the challenge to autonomy that exists in the state of exception, “in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension” (Agamben 2005: 3), but is rather a situation where law becomes the only guarantee of humanity and yet remains uncompromisingly positivist and divorced from any usable conception of justice. As Matthew J. Gibney succinctly puts it, “To be a refugee, it seems, may be to have access to important rights, but woe betide those who arrive in Western states claiming to be a refugee” (Gibney 2006: 141). In Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2003), Gabriel, who has fled to England from an African war, undergoes the process which will name him as a refugee. He begins the interview with his immigration lawyer and barrister with an offer

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of full participation: “I am ready to answer any questions. I have nothing to hide” (Phillips 2003: 112). Yet, when the questions begin and the legal team looks to construct a narrative of Gabriel’s arrival in England, he finds it difficult to answer. Words do not come easily in response to the enquiries and he begins to recognize the degree to which he “is first of all foreign to the legal language in which the duty of hospitality is formulated” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000: 15); he simply nods or shakes his head, he begins to sweat. “Gabriel hears a question, but his mind blocks it, like a boxer might parry a blow” (Phillips 2003: 114); he understands that there is a violence inherent in this questioning, and that even these people who are ostensibly on his side are somehow striking at him. To claim asylum is to name oneself as victim over there, but perhaps also to be hailed to the position of victim over here; to consent to the racist subjection that will restrict selfhood even as it offers the promise of liberty. Gabriel “suddenly realiz[es] that he can trust neither of them” (115). The refugee is granted rights that other illegal immigrants are denied, but they perhaps cannot be seen as human rights. Rather, they are the rights of the less-than-human: infrahuman rights. Agamben identifies the figure of the refugee as a “disquieting element,” precisely because in “breaking the identity between the human and the citizen . . . it brings the originary fiction of sovereignty to crisis,” and he suggests that “the concept of refugee must be resolutely separated from the concept of ‘human rights’,” as rights discourse is formulated only to deal with the claims of the citizen rather than those of the human (Agamben 2000: 20–21). Yet it is within the spaces of rights legislation that the refugee finds not only sanctuary but meaning. Joseph Slaughter has noted that our standard formulations of human rights law deal with “persons,” rather than “humans,” and that “the person’s figurative correspondence with the human cannot be taken for granted” (Slaughter 2007: 58). In A Distant Shore, we can see how the refugee enters language as a being-with-rights: not as individual human, but neither as the universalized figure of the person; rather they are interpellated to a position wholly determined by the invidious distinction between “nonracial humanity” and “racialized infrahumanity” (Gilroy 2000: 182). Gabriel’s lawyer, Katherine, advises him to “do a runner”; to escape from his difficulties in the south of England by heading north. She also advises him to “call yourself something else. Take a chance up there they won’t know who you are” (Phillips 2003: 166). Like Tapan Ali, Gabriel is faced with a descent into anonymity, or accepting a name other than his own. Rather than asking the “very human and sometimes loving” question of “what is your name?” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000: 27), the conditional hospitality of Britain instead demands that this name be forsaken. He is unwilling to follow this advice immediately and instead goes on to London, where he continues to identify as Gabriel. He is soon robbed by his “countryman,” Emmanuel, and is forced to seek Katherine’s help again. This time her advice is more strongly worded: “you really should become


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someone else, Gabriel” (Phillips 2003: 181). If there is a space of sanctuary available to the refugee in Britain, it is one which can only be occupied after important acts of compromise. The senses of personal identity and personal history, embodied most clearly in one’s individual name, must be given up as a condition of the infrahuman rights of the refugee. Gabriel takes the name Solomon and the advice to travel north. He is taken into the household of Mrs. Anderson, who is in many ways to be his savior. Phillips has written of the contemporary world as a place “in which it is impossible to resist the claims of the migrant, the asylum seeker, or the refugee” (Phillips 2001: 5). Yet the articulation of this claim is necessarily determined by the conditions under which it is allowed to be made. Gabriel is made childlike in this household, even addressing Mrs. Anderson as “Mum” (Ledent 2007: 71). The refugee steps outside of the history that determined his identity to accept the bestowal of novelty upon him. Mrs. Anderson questions Gabriel, and his answers are instructive: I told her about the pain of leaving my country, and the uncomfortable journey to England, and the difficulties of travelling on the boat . . . I told her that at home things were very, very bad. That the war has left many people afraid, and they have nothing, and nobody wishes to remain there, but in England there is peace . . . I told her nothing of Felix, or Amma, or my Uncle Joshua, or Bright; I told her nothing of how my heart bled at these partings . . . I told her nothing of Said, or prison . . . I told her nothing of Katherine . . . I told her nothing of Hawk, I told her nothing of Gabriel. I told her my name was Solomon and I needed to acquire papers so that I could work and remain in England. I told her that I had no other country. (Phillips 2003: 277–78) The condition of the refugee is one from within which certain types of story can be articulated but others cannot be spoken. He is free to tell of his experiences which confirm the version of the refugee subject made possible within rights discourse, but not of those more specific events upon which a deeper sense of his personhood might be seen as constituted. The self must be curtailed in interaction with the world; only the fact of needing, and deserving, refuge can be stated. Gabriel’s limited expression is partly imposed but also partly chosen. There is a degree to which the acceptance of the truncated humanity of the refugee allows him to protect himself from a more complete assault on his selfhood. Silence is a defence. This is most explicitly captured in the blinds behind which Gabriel stands to watch the people of Weston. He is confident no one can see him behind the blinds that hang in his window: “This pleases me, for although I welcome the opportunity to look out at them, I do not wish these people to be able to look in at me” (283). This security is that of the person who protects their insularity against

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the threat of incursion. But the form of sanctuary found by Gabriel in the novel is not truly able to satisfy, and not just because of the racial harassment he suffers. Living as Solomon is a loss of voice—his own “language was drying up in [his] mouth” as he has no chance to speak in it (284)—but Gabriel is also voiceless in that the creation of his refugee persona has robbed him of his lived identity. “If I do not share my story,” he tells us, “then I have only this one year to my life. I am a one-year-old man who walks with heavy steps” (300). The enforced infancy of his situation is the result of his ideological location as a subject less than fully human. The friendship he makes with Dorothy in the novel is particularly important to him as he sees her as someone to whom he can tell his story. Dorothy’s alienation from her society seems to make it possible for her to communicate with the refugee at the required level. The novel traces the possibility of the type of communication that will restore depth to the flattened humanity bestowed on this man by the asylum process, but it is suggested, rather than diegetically realized: “non-telling is the ground on which telling occurs in A Distant Shore” (Clingman 2007: 57). Gabriel’s murder at the hands of racists reminds us of the brutal treatment of those marked as other in Britain and offers a bleak view of how successful such a communicative bond would have been between him and Dorothy, even if the chasm between persons and infrahumans had been bridged. In Gurnah’s By the Sea, Saleh Omar is also trying to claim the right of asylum in Britain. Despite being able to speak and understand the language perfectly, Saleh has been advised to pretend he knows no English. Kevin Edelman, the immigration officer who berates and threatens him, wants to make clear his right to belong in Britain, and the illegitimacy of the illegal immigrant, but is denied the chance of receiving explicit verbal recognition of this from the man he detains. Edelman’s words are interesting in that he manages to conflate his personal history, his position of institutional authority, and his role as metonym for the wider hostility of British society into a focused attack on Saleh: My parents were refugees, from Romania . . . I know something about the hardships of being alien and poor . . . But my parents are European, they have a right, they’re part of the family . . . You don’t belong here, you don’t value any of the things we value, you haven’t paid for them through generations and we don’t want you here. We’ll make life hard for you, make you suffer indignities, perhaps even commit violence on you. (Gurnah 2001: 12) In this movement from a suggestion of empathy to the closing of ranks of the national “family,” the iniquity of the asylum process is made clear: the granting of shared humanity is grudgingly admitted but immediately qualified as the receiving nation finds a way to disqualify the claimant from full membership of the


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social body. The threat of violence is simultaneously placed outside of the institutional space yet, in its invocation, shown to be informing this official transaction even as it is held in abeyance. Edelman constructs Saleh as an embodiment of the abstraction of the asylum seeker; doing so, of course, should simultaneously function to render the real body, and person, of Saleh as abstract, to reduce him to no more than a devalued racist stereotype. The fact of Saleh’s deception complicates this: while his silent body offers recognition of Edelman’s fantasy of power, his deliberate muteness is simultaneously a refusal to confirm the description offered. Something like Bhabha’s “sly civility” is given here—the ambivalent reproduction and repetition of the signs of power indicates the presence of a crisis in this relationship. Edelman has no reason to suspect the trick before him, yet his paranoid rant at his detainee suggests at least an unconscious awareness of the precariousness of his position. As Edelman’s formal interrogation momentarily breaks down, we see the failure of the command that “the Other should authorize the self, recognize its priority, fulfil its outlines, replete, indeed repeat, its references and still its fractured gaze” (Bhabha 1994: 98): Reason for seeking entry into the United Kingdom? Are you a tourist? On holiday? Any funds? . . . Was there someone you were hoping to stay with while you were in the United Kingdom? Oh, bloody hell, bloody stupid hell. Do you have family in UK? Do you speak any English, sir? (Gurnah 2001: 7) However, as Phillips’s Gabriel comes to realize, silence is an unwieldy tool of resistance and Saleh begins to regard the advice he was given to remain silent less as “canniness” and more as “the paranoia of the powerless” (64). Fearing that he will become no more than “an instrument of other people’s contented stories,” he reveals to Rachel, his case-worker, that he can in fact speak English. The disclosure of the deception exasperates her and she asks him why he had chosen to conceal his knowledge of the language. His answer—“I preferred not to” (64)—is crucial to the development of his version of resisting the disenfranchisement of the refugee. He suggests that he was reminded of Bartleby by seeing a brick wall in the room before him, but Melville’s scrivener’s refusal can seem ideally suited to elucidating a strategy of resistance from within the silencing of the asylum process. “I preferred not to” is a civil articulation that positions its speaker within the codes of legitimate language and speaks of rationality, autonomy, control. Yet it refuses definition—in Melville’s story we never find out why Bartleby prefers not to participate in the expected run of life in the Wall Street chambers, simply that his preference exists and will be acted upon. Deleuze reads Bartleby’s declaration both as evincing “a certain mannerism” but also notes that “its abrupt termination

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. . . which leaves what it rejects undetermined, confers upon it the character of a radical, a kind of limit-function” (Deleuze 1997: 68). The smooth functioning of language is disrupted, the flow of interpellation suspended. For Saleh, then, the phrase offers a way for him to assert a full identity, precisely through its refusal of complete disclosure, “creating a vacuum in language in order to illuminate the place of the refugee within that vacuum” (Farrier 2008: 133). The enigma of the statement insists on interiority, a life behind, or beyond, any reduction to the condition of infrahuman refugee, while at the same time claiming the rights of that position. Saleh explains to Rachel the attraction of Bartleby: The story does not allow us to know what has brought Bartleby to this condition, does not allow us to have sympathy for him. It does not allow us to say, yes, yes, in this case we understand the meaning of such behaviour and we forgive it. The story only gives us this man, who says nothing about himself or about his past, appears to make no judgement or analysis, desires no reprieve or forgiveness from us, and only wishes to be left alone. (199) For Saleh then, Bartleby remains completely other. Derrida’s ethics of absolute hospitality precisely require the acceptance of the absolute other, welcoming them while resisting the urge to lessen their difference. It requires that “I give . . . without asking of them either reciprocity . . . or even their names. The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000: 25). We can read this model of hospitality as that which might be offered before the moment of becoming a subject, before the law’s ascription of personhood or infrahumanity to the humans who come before it. In a parallel way, the model of Bartleby seems to grant Saleh a strategy of insisting upon his human rights as refugee, not simply the infrahuman rights the asylum system offers. Preferring not to tell his story might seem to be the way for this man to protect his unique human identity. Rachel refuses to read “Bartleby, the Scrivener” in the same way. For her, Bartleby “made me think of someone dangerous, someone capable of small, sustained cruelties on himself and others weaker than himself, an abuser” (Gurnah 2001: 198). She will not read resistance in the story, but instead sees it as someone “relishing his defeat” (199). Her dismissal is reminiscent of Primo Levi’s injunction against silence: “to say that it is impossible to communicate is false; one always can. To refuse to communicate is a failing” (Levi 1989: 68). While complete silence may seem defeatist, so too is Bartleby’s form of enunciation which vitiates against rejoinder. Significantly, by the end of the novel, Saleh is sufficiently disturbed by Rachel’s reading of the story to think again before offering the phrase (Gurnah 2001: 244). That complicated act of entering into discourse while refusing to explain serves a crucial purpose—meaning is deferred and an


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encoded gap is established between speaker and utterance that dislocates the racist logic of the asylum process. But this is not enough. As Saleh’s characterization above makes clear, Bartleby does not explain, and does not ask for forgiveness. For Saleh, too, to require to be forgiven would be a betrayal of autonomy. Yet explanation, or at least some form of striving toward communication with another, comes to seem necessary for him. Saleh addresses his need for an audience in a way that rejects Bartleby’s reticence but still refuses to ask for forgiveness. The tentative relationship he begins to strike up with Latif Mahmud sets in motion a process where a full account can be given, on the refugee’s own terms: I knew I would tell him. I needed to be shriven. Not to be forgiven or to be cleansed of my sins . . . whose consequences had already been steep for me and for others. Little could be done to lighten those sins, I needed to be shriven of the burden of events and stories which I have never been able to tell, and which by telling would fulfill the craving I feel to be listened to with understanding. He was my shriver, and I knew I would tell him what he had asked of me. Then after telling him, I would have found a good place to stop. (171) As an audience for Saleh’s unburdening of his self, Latif may begin to offer the acknowledgment necessary for a sense of personhood to be reasserted. In each of these novels, the illegal immigrant looks to communicate to someone who might understand him. In Burrow, Adela is unable to help Tapan, and, although various strategies for belonging present themselves to him, he is forced ultimately to abandon language in favor of a more intangible form of communication; A Distant Shore’s Gabriel comes close to meaningful dialogue with the increasingly abject Dorothy, but this possibility is never realized; in By the Sea, however, communication takes place. While the position of Bartleby might be invaluable in disrupting the racist logic of the asylum system and mobilizing the requirement of hospitality, putting into action the rights this system simultaneously declares and withholds, the place of absolute otherness is not one that can comfortably be held by a person for long. The subjectivity of the infrahuman must be rejected, but not in favor of possessing no subject position at all. The flourishing of humanity and welfare of the refugee demands more. Ultimately, someone must listen to, someone must recognize the refugee.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to the British Academy for its support and to David Farrier (University of Leicester) and Maurizio Calbi (University of Salerno) for their comments.

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Bibliography Agamben, G. (2000) Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binnetti and C. Casarino, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— (2005) State of Exception, trans. K. Attell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bhabha, H. K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Clingman, S. (2007) “‘England has changed’: Questions of National Form in A Distant Shore,” Moving Worlds 7(1): 46–58. Deleuze, G. (1997) Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. and Dufourmantelle, A. (2000) Of Hospitality, trans. R. Bowlby, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Farrier, D. (2008) “Terms of Hospitality: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43(3): 121–39. Gibney, M. J. (2006) “‘A thousand little Guantanamos’: Western States and Measures to Prevent the Arrival of Refugees,” in K. E. Tunstall (ed.) Displacement, Asylum, Migration, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gilroy, P. (2000) Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gurnah, A. (2001) By the Sea, London: Bloomsbury. Islam, M. (1997) The Mapmakers of Spitalfields, Leeds: Peepal Tree. —— (2000) “Memories of an Immigrant,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2(3): 442–54. —— (2004) Burrow, Leeds: Peepal Tree. Kundnani, A. (2007) The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st century Britain, London: Pluto. Ledent, B. (2007) “Family and Identity in Caryl Phillips’s Fiction, in Particular A Distant Shore,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 29(2): 67–74. Levi, P. (1989) The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal, London: Abacus. McIntyre-Bhatty, K. (2007) “Escaping the Molar: Excavating Territories in Manzu Islam’s Burrow,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 42(3): 25–43. Melville, H. (1994 [1853]) “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” in Nina Baym et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 4th ed., Vol. I, New York: W. W. Norton. Phillips, C. (2001) A New World Order: Selected Essays, London: Secker and Warburg. —— (2003) A Distant Shore, London: Secker and Warburg. Slaughter, J. F. (2007) Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, New York: Fordham University Press. UN Refugee Agency (1951) Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, Geneva: UNHCR Media Relations and Public Relations Service. Online. Available: http:// www.unhcr.org/protect/PROTECTION/3b66c2aa10.pdf (accessed June 2010).

12 Anglo-Indian Migrants Children of colonialism and the cultural geographies of encounter Rochelle Almeida

Controversies surrounding the definition of the term “Anglo-Indian” are as old as the community itself, the first Anglo-Indian in recorded history having been born in India the year after the East India Company arrived on the sub-continent (1600). The sexual encounters that spawned this ethnic group were followed by cultural ones, none more complex or varied than those that arose when migration and relocation extended its geographical boundaries. For the purpose of this essay I have used the term as referring to the human progeny of Britain’s colonization of India.1 Borrowing from the title of Salman Rushdie’s novel, Glen D’Cruz, an Anglo-Indian scholar in Australia, calls Anglo-Indians “Midnight’s Orphans” in his book Anglo-Indians in Post-Colonial Literature. He alleges that Anglo-Indians felt like orphans after Indian Independence in 1947—abandoned, on the one hand, by the British to whom they had always looked for protection, and rejected, on the other, by their fellow Indians who regarded their mixed racial heritage with suspicion and their loyalty to the new republic with skepticism. Indian Independence created a fissure among members of the Anglo-Indian community not least because the British administrators’ reservation policies that guaranteed them jobs in civil institutions were terminated. Economics uncertainly combined with racial ambivalence in newly independent India made escape to England a logical alternative. While the politics of cultural encounter had plagued the community for at least a century (i.e. even while they were domiciled in India), it was migration to British Commonwealth countries—both before and after Independence—that brought them in headlong collision with racism (as in the UK) as much as it garnered for them untold economic prosperity (as in Australia). This essay examines the manner in which postcolonial Indian fiction has portrayed this migrant people. Two novels, G. V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (1948) and David McMahon’s Vegemite Vindaloo (2006), written within a timespan of more than half a century, provide a portrait of the community. What emerges from a textual and sociological exploration of these novels is the certainty that attitudes towards Anglo-Indians changed dramatically as the twentieth century

152 Rochelle Almeida marched on, and that recent notions of political correctness supporting racial equality in immigrant communities have worked to the enormous benefit of this hybrid group. The voluntary mass exodus of Anglo-Indians began after 1947 and was mostly directed to the United Kingdom, with which they could claim not just cultural, linguistic, historical, educational, and religious links but also blood ties. For her part, according to the clauses contained within the British Nationality Act of 1948, Great Britain agreed to honor settlement claims of Anglo-Indians holding British passports for a stipulated limited time. It also agreed to grant landed immigrant status to Anglo-Indians producing proof of paternal British descent. The ones who most closely identified with England as Home glowed at the incredible opportunity that fate and history had unexpectedly provided. G. V. Desani’s protagonist H. Hatterr’s amusing account of his elation upon his arrival in England no doubt echoes that of many Anglo-Indian immigrants: “as the train gathered momentum, and the clatter-clatter calmed, merging into a smooth tempo . . . I felt like California, here I come!” (Desani 1998 [1948]: 35). Desani’s Hatterr, in his role as narrator of his own life story, draws the complex geographical trajectory that caused him to be domiciled in India, the son of a European man and a Malay woman. Hatterr writes: “Biologically, I am fiftyfifty of the species” (31). Hatterr’s Malaysian mother would technically classify him as a “Eurasian” but his eventual domicile in India would categorize him as an Anglo-Indian. Desani’s Hatterr, representing India’s Anglo-Indians, traveled to England while the sub-continent was still a British colony, in the tradition of other Indian settlers that had included sailors, lascars, ayahs, and princes. Among reallife contemporary people of mixed descent who journeyed to England to spend an extended period of time was an Anglo-Indian named Henry Gidney (later knighted), who having aced British competitive medical examinations, achieved prominence as a surgeon in the British army in India where he served as lieutenant and became an influential representative of his community.2 His meteoric rise to success, however, was the exception rather than the rule, as Hatterr soon found out. Despite their loyalty to the British, during the Victorian period the fortunes of the Anglo-Indian community in India declined rapidly. Mendel’s Laws of Genetic Inheritance, Victorian mores of social respectability and middle-class morality, and advancements in navigation and shipping that brought Englishwomen to India in search of husbands among East India Company servants (the so-called “fishing fleets”) combined to lower the status of the community considerably. Indeed, after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, legislation was enacted to restrict promotional avenues available to Indians serving in the armed forces. The Anglo-Indian community was severely affected and brought face-to-face, for the first time, with issues of racial inferiority. Discrimination on grounds of skin color eventually led

Anglo-Indian Migrants 153 to the community’s first encounter with poverty—a condition that continued to dog them in postcolonial India and has worsened steadily with time. The complex phenomenon that lowered the social and financial status of Anglo-Indians in India had negative repercussions upon the reception of the community even as far away as Great Britain. Perhaps because he remained largely ignorant of prevailing British prejudice towards dark-skinned ethnicities and people of hybrid racial composition, Hatterr arrived in England gung-ho about finding his niche in a country that spelled freedom and opportunity. Even when he did encounter rejection from English clubs whose “No Indians” policy debarred him from acquiring membership privileges, he did not allow his enthusiasm for England to be dampened. Hatterr’s desires were similar to scores of Indians’ who arrived in the UK before him—enthusiastic and eager and “anxious to mix freely with English men and see English life” (32), as Shompa Lahiri reveals in her extensive research. If Hatterr expressed disillusionment it was only with England’s rainy weather and habitual grayness: Damme, as unexpected a hole as I ever unexpected! There was no transparent amber and cider sunshine-glow, which I had accustomed myself into imagining as a perpetual God’s gift aura over England . . . No: instead by Pitt (’88) and Gladstone (’86)! Lightning, clang o’ doom, thunder, and Glasgow fury! (35) Anglo-Indians, like most Indians in the UK during the Raj and soon after Independence, expected a right royal English welcome when they arrived. Instead, they came in contact with Britain’s working classes who disdained their swarthy skin and claims of British blood lines. Much to their chagrin, they experienced racism in one form or the other. They found their way around such prejudices by denying their Indian connections and claiming Spanish, Greek, Italian, or other Mediterranean descent. It did not take Hatterr long to realize, for instance, that the light color of his skin could allow him to “pass” as a white Englishman—as many real-life Anglo-Indian immigrants did. He tells the reader, for instance, in Chapter I, that he was admitted into a club meant for whites only by a sahib who had made him “wink off his real origin” (47). Hatterr explains: “He got me into the Club on false pretexts, as an Indian-born, pure Cento-per-Cento AngloSaxon breed” (47). Despite his light skin coloring, Hatterr discovers that once the secret of his mixed racial heritage is exposed, he is perceived in England as an Indian, certainly not as an Englishman, indeed not even as an Anglo-Indian. He is painted with “the tar brush,” to use Frank Anthony’s expression (1969: 5). Ed Haliburn borrows Anthony’s phrase when he writes non-judgmentally about those Anglo-Indians in Britain who remained reticent about their origins or denied their Indian connections, stating that “a touch of the tar brush was fatal to any upwardly mobile aspirant” (2008: 247).

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Hatterr’s Anglo-Indianness made the acquisition of respectable employment impossible in England. It didn’t help that he had emigrated without a useful set of skills and was far less qualified academically than the many Oxford- and Cambridge-educated Indians who, despite possessing British educational credentials, had found themselves jobless in England as a result of racial prejudice long before Hatterr’s arrival. In fact, in desperation, Hatterr accepts a job in a circus as a “human dinner plate,” an account of which makes for a truly hilarious chapter in Desani’s novel. Not just jobless but friendless, Hatterr, who arrived in England in the late 1930s, turned for companionship to one Banerrji, a fellow Indian Bengali in England, who became his friend, philosopher, and guide. Upon realizing that his Anglo-Indian cultural heritage was by no means an asset in the UK, Hatterr decides to go native. He declares to Banerrji, “Damme, I will go Indian! Live like you fellers . . . and no dam’ fears!” (47). He pokes fun of his own “fifty-fifty Oriental mind” (58) and of the Englishmen who come seeking the wisdom of this exotic man of the East. Hatterr recognized early in his experience of the country that Englishmen were unwilling to fraternize with Indians, a fact to which many Indians in Great Britain had reconciled themselves much earlier. Lahiri gives several examples to illustrate that race and class were at the very heart of Empire and that they directly affected Indians in England, leaving them with little choice but to find friendships among their own countrymen. Those Indians fortunate enough to find employment in the UK made considerable career and salary adjustments. Hatterr reacts to the personal compromises he is required to make in England by ridiculing the country and its people at every opportunity. Adopting the pose of a sophisticated, worldly wise observer of human nature, he pours sarcasm over the stereotypically Indian roles he is expected to play in England such as that of a holy sage. His convoluted, long-winded narration describing the people and places he encounters is, in actuality, a desperate cry for acceptance, an attempt to prove that he can speak the King’s English as well as the best of them, indeed that his linguistic prowess is so impressive and his education so superior that he can pun effortlessly, indulge in the humor of double entendre and allude continually to the works of the world’s most renowned philosophers and thinkers while quoting freely from sources as varied as the Bible, Shakespeare, and the jargon of Indian litigation. Indeed, even the novel’s title is Desani’s brilliant pun on “A Chatterer” because Hatterr is nothing if not loquacious. As young men in India, many Anglo-Indians had allowed members of their own community to convince them that they were not as good as Europeans. Nor indeed did they consider themselves as good as highly educated Indians.3 Convinced that they were unlikely to succeed in postcolonial India, they sought immigration opportunities in droves and clung to delusions that life in England would far exceed the tenuous opportunities left for them in the land of their birth. But

Anglo-Indian Migrants 155 in post-war England, Anglo-Indians encountered the realities of racism in ways they had never anticipated. Prejudicial attitudes towards Indians had intensified since the late Victorian era; with India, their most lucrative colony lost to independence, the English were far from cordial or hospitable towards their erstwhile subjects who arrived in their country as first-generation settlers.4 Hatterr realized, as Homi Bhabha puts it, that in “the ambivalent world of the not quite/not white, they would forever stay on the margins” (1994: 89) of mainstream English society. They would remain branded, as “individuals of mixed race who taken all round resemble white men but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other and on that account are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges” (89). Tired of tussling with race and class distinctions in England but continuing to aspire towards economic prosperity, Anglo-Indians turned towards other pastures. By the time versions of British hostility towards Anglo-Indian immigrants filtered into India, Australia had opened her doors to new immigrant opportunity. Seeking to escape racial tension—both in India and the UK—and looking for the promise of balmy temperatures, thousands of Anglo-Indians left India in the 1960s to move to the English-speaking former British colony Down Under. As it turned out, half a century after Anglo-Indians like Hatterr had confronted racism in the UK, issues of miscegenation no longer plagued those making the journey from India to Australia—at least not if representations of their community delivered by first-time novelist David McMahon are accurate. The immigrant experiences of protagonists Steve and Hilary Cooper, AngloIndians from Calcutta, who feature in Vegemite Vindaloo by McMahon, himself an immigrant Anglo-Indian from Calcutta to Australia, are positive, even if their attitude towards Anglo-Australian culture is cloying. Indeed, Vegemite Vindaloo is a significant novel in the genre of “immigrant postcolonial Indo-English literature.” While reams of published fiction have exposed the lives of diasporic South Asians in other parts of the world as in the US (Bharati Mukherjee’s and Chitra BanerjeeDivakaruni’s works, for instance) and in the UK (Gita Mehta and Hanif Kureishi were pioneers, joined in more recent times by Monica Ali), hardly any fiction has exposed the lives of South Asians in Australia despite the fact that the country has played host to such immigrants for at least a century (notable exceptions are the recent novels of Christopher Cyrill, a second-generation Anglo-Indian immigrant in Australia, and Suneeta Peres de Costa, an immigrant to Australia from Portuguese Goa). Seemingly unfettered by the psychological burdens of un-belonging and inbetweenness that had tormented members of their community in England, a half century earlier, the Coopers find a comforting support system in the form of their relatives from Calcutta, Robert and Edith, who preceded them to Australia and provide hospitality and guidance upon their arrival in Melbourne. The Coopers,

156 Rochelle Almeida somewhat annoyingly, behave in the typical fashion of Indians who “fresh off the boat” marvel at every technological miracle such as automatic parking meters and EFTPOS cards.5 Their hosts are exceedingly proud of their adopted country, Australia, and constantly praise its civility, natural beauty, and the friendliness of its people. Their awe-struck observations are similar to those of Hatterr and other early real-life immigrant Indians in the UK who, as Lahiri documents, were besotted by England’s impressive history and literature and could not stop gawking at the law and order, clean streets, lack of corruption, and healthy human bodies everywhere. If Banerrji was Hatterr’s friend, philosopher, and guide in Desani’s novel, Robert and Edith play the same role in the lives of Steve and Hilary, only less comically and more earnestly so. But while Hatterr struggled to find a circle of friends in England, the Coopers experience no lack of companionship. Indeed, on the very first evening of their arrival in Australia, their hosts arrange a welcome barbecue party that introduces them to fellow Anglo-Indians who preceded them to Australia by at least two decades. It also exposes them to the Australian diasporic lifestyle that the immigrants have proudly, completely, and unselfconsciously embraced (indeed, as Bhabha puts, it, mimicked). Curiously, their circle of friends does not include any Caucasian Australians. Is this because they are rejected by non-Anglo-Indian Australians or is this because they reject social intercourse outside their own intimate ethnic circle? This phenomenon, I believe, is worthy of inquiry as a crucial indicator of the socio-racial practices and barriers that govern the lives of diasporic Anglo-Indians in Australia. It might also help explain why the diasporic Anglo-Indian community (at least in McMahon’s novel) lives on the margin, making little attempt to infiltrate into the metropolitan center. It is not long, however, before the Coopers realize that they must abandon a great number of their illusions about their prospects in Australia. A qualified commercial pilot who trained on fighter aircraft in the Indian army then resigned from a coveted position in Indian Airlines, idealistic Steve expects to be snapped up instantly by a major Australian aviation network. Knowing how well pilots are paid in Australia, Hilary nurses dreams of a luxurious life as a pampered housewife and is reluctant to seek employment herself. Over several conversations with their relatives and other Anglo-Indian immigrants in Melbourne, the Coopers gradually realize that they have little choice but to become more realistic in their professional aspirations. Their snooty consciousness of class and social status— hallmarks of a conventional middle-class upbringing in India—becomes more acute when they realize how many of their values, acquired in India, were compromised by their Anglo-Indian counterparts in their attempts to carve a niche for their community in Australia. Little had changed, in that respect, in the half century since Hatterr made

Anglo-Indian Migrants 157 ludicrous professional compromises to stay financially afloat in England. Bob, a fellow Anglo-Indian, tells the Coopers that when he first arrived in Australia with his family they “were overjoyed to be in this country” (McMahon 2006: 233). Early financial hardship was cushioned by the awareness, he said, that “every nook and cranny of this big-hearted country is filled with people who came here with a head full of dreams and a pocket full of holes” (234). Bob compromised on his own expectations as an accountant and took a lowly position in a factory when his uncle Harry explained to and indeed managed to convince him that “it did not matter in the least what sort of work a new migrant took” (236). Which begs the question, to whom does it not matter? To native Australians, maybe not. Indeed, the fact that new immigrants entering the country are willing to take low-wage jobs to stay financially afloat works to their own advantage. But to those who must make the compromises and endure status loss, i.e. to new immigrants—Anglo-Indian or otherwise— it does matter. If this were not true, new immigrants like the Coopers would not need to be convinced to adjust their social attitudes and financial expectations in Australia. Both Bob and his wife Betty explain to Steve and Hilary that “no one looks down their nose at you in this country. They don’t judge you by the job you do. But they judge you by the sort of person that you are” (237). More conversations with enthusiastic AngloIndians reveal to the Coopers that jobs as tram conductors and garbage collectors were often taken, always reluctantly, by the pioneer immigrant members of the Anglo-Indian community, in their attempt to find their footing in Australia. The same Anglo-Indians who in India considered themselves “too high class to be in trade unions” (240) gratefully accepted redundancy “packages” offered by Australian firms for whom they had worked for decades. The appropriation of the Australian lifestyle through mimicry by the Anglo-Indian diaspora Down Under seems to have facilitated their entry and acceptance into the mainstream; but then Australia, like the United States, is a nation of immigrants, unlike Great Britain, whose native people can trace family roots that go back to the Domesday Book (the medieval census of 1085–86 ordered by William the Conqueror). Any pangs of status loss experienced by early Anglo-Indian settlers in Australia were suppressed, if painfully. They have receded from the collective memory as complete identification with the culture of their host country eventually occurred. Such unconditional identification with the host culture brought economic prosperity to the generation that followed the pioneering one. Paul Sharrad is correct when he states that “the celebration of transitional hybridity ignores the pain and absolutism that can also characterize diasporic experience” (2006: 18). It is not merely in the matter of accepting low-wage employment that the Coopers made psychological adjustments in Australia. Steve who states that he had “never been anywhere near a cooking implement” (McMahon 2006: 244) in his life, discovers that in Australia gender equality determines domestic roles. At a

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barbecue party, he is astonished to see his male counterparts take up positions at the grill and adroitly turn steaks and sausages on a spit. Indeed, in matters of cuisine too, cross-cultural encounters altered Anglo-Indian palates. The Coopers’ observation of the menu at the picnic is an indication to them, as also to the reader, that Australian Anglo-Indians gradually developed transnational tastes— another reality that gives the novel its title “Vegemite,” a widely consumed sandwich spread in Australia, the equivalent of Marmite in England, and “Vindaloo” being a vinegar-based curry that originated among Portuguese-Goans and has made its ubiquitous way across global Indian menus. The food preferences of Australia’s Anglo-Indians also reflect their hybridity, as they indulge in what Paul Sharrad calls “the icons of Euro-Australian domesticity” (2006: 16). The affluence of the community is clearly apparent in the abundance and the quality of the food and drink consumed at the picnic and their acclimation to their environment is evident in the ease with which they use barbecue spits and Eskies (thermos flasks). Their lifestyle has blended perfectly with that of Anglo-Australians, or more specifically Anglo-Celtic Australians, characterized by their love of the outdoors and al fresco entertainment. Indeed, as Sharrad writes, “Global commodification of identity” especially in terms of food—Vegemite being a recurring trope in immigrant Australian fiction—is a visible theme in the latter half of McMahon’s novel, as it has been in the work of a number of recent Australian immigrant writers such as Suneeta Peres da Costa’s novel Homework (1999).6 Indeed, long before he arrived at the picnic, Steve recognized the need to mimic the ways of his Australian countrymen. When instructed by Hilary to abandon his trousers for a pair of shorts and a formal shirt for a casual one—standard Australian clothing of choice—he understands the extent to which he must transform himself in Australia in order to make his decision to immigrate a successful one. In mimicking the ways of their host nation, Steve and Hilary attempt to blend in, to find camouflage, as it were, within the conventions of mainstream Australia. This homogenizing of labyrinthine ethnic cultures through which Steve must negotiate his way—Indian, Anglo-Indian, then Anglo-Celtic Australian—effaces difference where it most seems to celebrate it. As Jacques Lacan put it: “The effect of mimicry is camouflage . . . It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled—exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare” (quoted in Bhabha 1994: 85). Steve’s situation is doubly perplexing because within the rules operating in this immigrant warfare, he, the foot soldier, is required to enter active combat as a mimic man for a second time. Having appropriated the ways of the colonial English in Calcutta, an undertaking that placed him within an elevated social class in India, he must now unlearn those ways in order to accomplish successful mimesis within the mottled and uncertain environment of Anglo-Australia—mottled because the country is composed of immigrants, all of whom have subordinated

Anglo-Indian Migrants 159 their own identity to the larger national purpose, and uncertain because the transformation can guarantee nothing except a means of economic survival. Sharrad quotes Samir Dayal who posits the nature of such diasporic double consciousness in negative terms: “not as both/and as much as neither this/nor yet that” (2006: 14). Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry can be reworked to this specific historic moment and this precise spatial reality. Anglo-Indians in Australia have camouflaged their appropriation of imperial knowledge by adopting a mask of assimilation and integration. But in this epoch, mimicry is relocated, away from the colonial periphery (India) to what has become their new metropolitan center (Melbourne). The new class dimension causes formerly colonized Anglo-Indians (who find themselves in Australia) mimicking “Aussie” working-class, metropolitan culture rather than the British middle-class, colonial culture that they had embraced while still living in India (Lahiri in Bhabha 1994: 85–92). Surprisingly, the impact of their need to rapidly compromise their cultural value system is neither profound nor disturbing for the Coopers. Somewhat unrealistically, they do not experience the proverbial torment of the dark night of the soul for they battle no fractured issues of hyphenated socio-racial identification. By the evening of their very first day in Australia, Steve and Hilary, optimistically convinced about their prospects, decide to make the necessary adjustments in order to start afresh and attain prosperity in a foreign land. At least Hatterr had mocked the compromises expected of him in England and through the vehicle of humor had parodied both—the expectations of his host community as well as the willingness of new Indian settlers in England to mold their personae to fit in. Whereas, in their determination—desperation even—to assimilate, the Coopers suppress their feelings of indignation. In doing so, as characters, they seem to lack both the sensitivity that would cause new immigrants to feel degraded by the expectations of their host country and the intelligence to rebel against them. Stylistically, Vegemite Vindaloo could not be a more traditional narrative. Speaking of Christopher Cyrill’s novel The Ganges and Its Tributaries, Paul Sharrad had commented: “The book is written in the drab factuality of a boy’s diary” (2006: 24). The same description could apply to McMahon’s omniscient narrator. Sharrad explains the lack of stylistic and linguistic innovation in such AngloIndian immigrant writing as such: “This typical, mundanely local narrative . . . is perhaps deliberately ‘ordinary’ to show how typical of Australia’s general migrant experience is the story of the particular and usually unrecorded Anglo-Indian community” (24). Critiquing Cyrill, Sharrad continues: “The repetitive insistence on dates and exact addresses (6 Cararas Street, Waverley Gardens, Dandenong, St. Kilda . . .) suggests . . . the unstable newness of housing estates still under construction” (24). This literary phenomenon is echoed in Vegemite Vindaloo where location is frequently mentioned (Melbourne, Jindaroo Creek, St. Kilda Road,

160 Rochelle Almeida Trafalgar, Ivanhoe, Alice Springs, Tullamarine Freeway . . .). Dates, however, are often skewed or not mentioned at all. For instance, Chapter One begins: “5 pm, Melbourne, Grand Final Day” (1), Chapter Three begins: “Bhowalpur, Eastern India, 1998” (11), Chapter Ten begins: “Two Years Later” (118), while none of the other chapters offers the reader any sense of the passage of time or change in location. This “forgetfulness,” as it were, on the part of McMahon’s omniscient narrator is perhaps indicative of the manner in which time has merged confusingly in the consciousness of Anglo-Indians as they have awaited the turning of the notoriously slow bureaucratic wheels that enabled their immigration from India to Australia—or Canada or New Zealand, the newer Meccas of Anglo-Indian relocation. Mental and psychological dislocation might account for the narrator’s inability to provide a clear linear narrative or might have forced him to abandon the chronological method of narration that he had probably originally intended. Transnational bureaucracies, therefore, can be held responsible for postmodernist slippage as well as blurring of dates and events in the mind of McMahon’s storyteller. While Gloria Jean Moore admits that Australia’s Anglo-Indians had not fled war-torn Southeast Asia or Communist China to find freedom in Australia, they do face what she calls “cultural genocide”—a gradual erasure of cultural identity (1986: 134). This is the Lacanian camouflage which, Moore is aware, will lead eventually to the erasure of their unique ethnic identity—a phenomenon that not many members of the community seem to care about or wish to preserve. Australia, however, seemed to offer, at least until recently, a relatively non-racist environment for this uniquely Indian ethnic minority. National animus, at least in recent years, seems to have shifted towards Islamic settlers, deflecting the censure that dogged early Anglo-Indian settlers. While complicated geographical and cultural trajectories have problematized the identity of these people of mixed descent in every immigrant milieu, based on current principles governing Australia’s immigration policy, the Anglo-Indian community can claim to have one of the best settlement records and the best potential for migration to Australia (Moore 1986: 137). Since opportunities for migration to Great Britain have closed completely, many relatives wait for eight to ten years to arrive in Australia under family reunion schemes. It continues to be the first country of choice for Anglo-Indians contemplating emigration from India today. How successful a diasporic experience it promises to be can only be determined by future representations of it in fiction and extensive ethnographic inquiry.

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Notes 1. F. Anthony provides a useful note in Britain’s Betrayal in India (1969): “all persons of European descent in the male line, whose parents were habitually resident in India were and are Anglo-Indians.” 2. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Gidney 3. Haliburn states that Anglo-Indians seeking immigrant opportunities in Britain, accepted “the systemic derogation that the Indian could never perform as well as the European” (2008: 248). He states that the Anglo-Indian became systematically brainwashed into believing that he should know his place—both in India and then, upon migration, in British society. He, therefore, accepted the notion that he was “intrinsically inferior” (248). 4. Haliburn writes: “The UK, to many of us, was a seminal awakening to the realities of a competitive world. Much was bandied about the welcome Anglo-Indians could expect, but all that we were greeted with was anger, suspicion and open racial hostility. ‘Rooms for Rent—No Niggers, No Wogs, No Children, No Dogs’ . . .” (248). 5. EFTPOS is an abbreviation in Australia for Electronic Funds Transfer at Point of Sale. Australian consumers use them to pay for commodities through debits taken directly from their bank accounts. 6. For a detailed analysis of food and its role in Homework see Sharrad (2006).

Bibliography Ali, M. (2003) Brick Lane, London: Doubleday. Anthony, F. (1969) Britain’s Betrayal in India: The Story of the Anglo-Indian Community, Bombay: Allied Publishers. Banerjee-Divakaruni, C. (1995) Arranged Marriage, New York: Doubleday. —— (1997) The Mistress of Spices, New York: Doubleday. Bhabha, H. (1994) “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Cyrill, C. (1993) The Ganges and Its Tributaries, Melbourne: McPhee Gribble. —— (1999) Hymns for the Drowning, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Dayal, S. (1996) “Diaspora and Double Consciousness,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 29(1): 46–62. D’Cruz, G. (2006) Midnight’s Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Post-Colonial Literature, New York: Peter Lang. Desani, G. V. (1998 [1948]) All About H. Hatterr, New Delhi: Penguin. Haliburn, E. (2008) “What If?” in L. Lumb and D. Van Veldhuizen (eds.) The Way We Are: An Anglo-Indian Mosaic, Monroe Twp, NJ: CTR Publishing. Kureishi, H. (1990) The Buddha of Suburbia, London: Faber. —— (2002 [1985]) My Beautiful Laundrette, London: Faber. Lacan, J. (1978) “The Eye and the Gaze,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan, New York: Norton. Lahiri, S. (2000) Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity 1880–1930, London: Frank Cass. McMahon, D. (2006) Vegemite Vindaloo, Delhi: Penguin.

162 Rochelle Almeida Masters, J. (1954) Bhowani Junction, New York: Viking Press. Mehta, G. (1980) Karma Cola, London: Jonathan Cape. Moore, G. J. (1986) The Anglo-Indian Vision, Melbourne: A E Press. Mukherjee, B. (1971) The Tiger’s Daughter, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. —— (1975) Wife, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. —— (1989) Jasmine, New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Peres da Costa, S. (1999) Homework, London: Bloomsbury. Rushdie, S. (1981) Midnight’s Children, London: Jonathan Cape. Sharrad, P. (2006) “Convicts, Call Centers and Cochin Kangaroos: South Asian Globalizing of the Australian Imagination,” Unpublished Paper, University of Wollongong. Online. Available: http://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/107 (accessed June 1, 2010).

13 Everyday Border Surveillance and Trespassing Cities in contemporary Indian art Elena Bernardini

I As Étienne Balibar noted (1998: 219), the meaning of borders today has been changing, both in terms of their layout and their function, and this has impelled the discussion on sovereignty to move beyond the question of territory and external recognition by other states. The new terms of debate acknowledge the way sovereignty is exercised within states through discipline and violence (following philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben), as well as the simultaneous presence of sovereign agencies besides the state. The shift has proved useful in order to analyze sovereign power in colonial and postcolonial states (see Hansen and Stepputat 2005). Agamben’s understanding of sovereignty through the ideas of the exception, sacred life (homo sacer), and the camp is crucial in the present analysis, which considers a number of video installations by the contemporary Indian artists Navjot Altaf and Raqs Media Collective. Their artworks address issues of mobility and hospitality arising within the cities of Delhi and Mumbai or at state frontiers. In this context the marginalized body of the urban poor, in particular that of the impoverished migrant, emerges as a crucial site where sovereign power is exercised. Whether foreigners or nationals, the conditions of vulnerability of these figures interrogate the validity and meaning of citizenship in its capacity to guarantee human rights. With this in mind, I will consider the way in which life is inscribed within the order of the nation-state and the political sphere through the figure of the citizen and the idea of a sovereign people. The aim is to explore their relation to the production of a completely de-valued form of life, a life Agamben has called “sacred,” which is directly exposed to the sovereign’s violence and power to kill (Agamben 2000: 22). This will enable a discussion that underlines how, in Indian cities, sovereignty is exercised by different agents besides the state, within and outside institutional politics proper. In the artworks taken into consideration here, cities figure as heterogeneous

164 Elena Bernardini and conflicting spaces where lives like those of low-income migrants find themselves deprived of basic rights in a situation Agamben would call of “exception,” of legal abandonment, at the mercy of sometimes competing sovereign wills and their violence. Underlining some of the “mechanisms” which lead to the marginalization and vulnerability of these subjects, these works enable a reflection that recovers such people’s role in today’s politics. The idea I want to pursue is that these artworks highlight not simply a humanitarian crisis but a crisis of politics, of the very political categories that sustain Indian modernity and that mark the inscription of life in the political sphere.

II Navjot Altaf’s video installation Mumbai Meri Jaan (2004) focuses primarily on the experiences of migration of three street children in Mumbai. It comprises a three channel projection and a single channel one. The three channel projection presents a spatial exploration of the city through closeups and highly cropped images, an array of visual textures bearing the marks of the everyday. Mumbai is shown as a lived, living social space in which the children appear and disappear, in which their visibility remains precarious. The presence of the children is thus carefully calibrated to consider them as individuals without, however, losing sight of the context in which they are positioned. Indeed, it is by way of context that Navjot makes us understand their condition of marginality, enabling an exploration of the political meaning the children assume in the city. The single channel projection is crucial to insert the children’s personal experiences of movement and labor within a wider discourse of migration, and to address the migrants’ marginality and contested presence in the city. For this purpose Navjot presents us with a complex ensemble of images (mostly of Mumbai, the children, and workplaces) interspersed or superimposed with a variety of visual, aural, and written material: footage of interviews with migrants in Mumbai, transcripts of interviews with the children, selected shots from a documentary by Anand Patwardhan, Hamara Shahar (Bombay Our City, 1985),1 and extracts from essays and articles on migration. Here the presence of low-income migrants and the urban poor is not only acknowledged through their direct testimony but addressed also as object/subject in a variety of discourses such as the social sciences, the state’s development program, nativist politics, activism, and art. In order to discuss the children and low-income migrants within the problematic of sovereignty I will single out their position with respect to urban planning and policies and Shiv Sena’s ethnic refounding of the city. Shiv Sena is a political organization supportive of Maratha identity with a Hindu nationalist agenda, to which we owe the change of the city name from Bombay to Mumbai in 1995.

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Figure 13.1 Navjot Altaf, Mumbai Meri Jaan, 2004. Detail from four channel video installation, 13 min. 37 secs, color, sound, loop. Courtesy of the artist.

Indeed, the title of the installation, paraphrasing the Bollywood Hindi song Baambay Meri Jaan (Bombay My Darling) with the name of the city changed into its current Marathi one, frames the hope and dream of turning the city into one’s own home within conflicting visions of modernity tinged with ethnic violence and aggressive nationalism. The videos’ insistence on glowing signs of clubs and restaurants, advertisements of foreign brands, cranes, and building sites introduces a Mumbai which is being reshaped to meet the needs of the global economy. In this process the state has actively embraced globalization as part of its program of development and modernization promoting urban redevelopment and regeneration. Also for this purpose, as Partha Chatterjee has underlined, in concomitance with the city entering a post-industrial phase in the 1990s we note the enforcement of eviction policies on the proper use of the land and public spaces (Chatterjee 2003: 180). These affect directly the many in Mumbai who are forced to find residence by illegally occupying land. However, if government policies of evictions and forced relocation have sometimes been effective in securing the illegally occupied land

166 Elena Bernardini back to the state, they have certainly done little for the rehabilitation of the dispossessed (see Alternative Law Forum 2004–5). The state seems to view urban spaces according to a historicist perspective, which orders them in an “evolutionary” scale from areas in need to “catch up” (for example slums) with others at a more advanced stage of development, like middle-class neighborhoods (Prakash 2002: 5). A similar treatment seems to have been accorded also to their residents. The attempt at spatially displacing the urban poor to the city’s margins is thus accompanied by a temporal displacement, in which their position of disadvantage is seen as an evolutionary stage rather than a result of city policies favoring better-off agents (see Fabian 2002; Massey 2005; Prakash 2002). In such historicist readings of urban subject positions, poor city residents are not considered proper members of the urban or national community as they presently are, but are consigned to the promise, in due time, of being made into ones and to the violence this entails. This has the effect that rather than being considered as citizens sharing in the sovereignty of the state and therefore entitled to specific rights, they are treated as “populations” (Chatterjee 2003: 175), a biological body to be handled, controlled, and molded, in order to fit eventually the image of the “proper” citizen. In other words and to the extent in which it is possible to talk about politics as separate from bio-politics, they have been excluded from the former while being the object of the latter. As Agamben has noted, our age is nothing but the implacable and methodical attempt to overcome the division dividing the people, to eliminate radically the people that are excluded . . . The obsession with development is as effective as it is in our time because it coincides with the biopolitical project to produce an undivided people. (Agamben 1998: 179) With her insistence on the heterogeneity of urban space, the simultaneous presence of different subject positions, and their interrelatedness, Navjot recovers from the very spatiality of the city the possibility of questioning historicist readings. Furthermore, she paves the way for addressing the political meaning migrants and urban poor assume with respect to sovereign power. What I argue is that they have become crucial sites where the state reinforces its sovereignty claims. Urban planning and related legislation are ways through which the state controls and regulates its territories and the people within them, as well as securing its visibility and authority. As in the case of the clearing of illegal settlements, the exercise of the law and its enforcement is simultaneously simple and spectacular. As Thomas Blom Hansen pointedly states, politics, like naming, is a performative process that seeks retroactively to fix and stabilize identities, to invent constituencies and audiences, to create state


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effects by making the state visible, and to narrate and represent “society” through speech and public spectacles. (Hansen 2001: 232, my emphasis) Agamben has underlined how the concept of “people” does not design a unitary subject but maintains a double reference to “People” as the complex of citizens (the political body) and “people” as the members of the lower classes (“fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies,” Agamben 1998: 177). This tension within the idea of people becomes tangible within the city’s space where, to say it with Gyan Prakash, the masses of India’s urban poor refuse to “bow out of history” and at the same time “cannot be acknowledged by the official city as a part of itself” (Prakash 2002: 5). Within the concept of people we acknowledge a distinction between a “qualified” type of life with clear socio-politico-juridical ascription and one to which this is delayed or denied, and is thus reduced to bare life. According to Agamben, there is a fundamental aporia at the basis of the inscription of the individual (as bare life) within the political community. Although the simple fact of being born lies at the very foundation of human rights and sovereignty, it is not fully acknowledged as such, and it is being born a citizen that is (Agamben 1998: 128–31). Furthermore, as Chatterjee and Prakash have pointed out, citizenship is no guarantee of effective rights and participation in the political community. Impoverished citizens are de facto, if not de jure, excluded from politics on the same grounds as they are from civil society: they are not considered proper citizens, at “best” they are seen as “citizens to come.” Indeed, as Agamben has acutely observed, the idea of a sovereign people is an idea that needs to be realized: “it is the pure source of every identity but must, however, continually be redefined and purified through exclusion, language, blood, land” (1998: 178). If, in the artwork, impoverished migrants do not fit the state’s vision of modernity, its urban regeneration and beautification plans, they are also displaced by identity politics such as those of Shiv Sena and their vision of “a more vernacular modernity” (Hansen 2001: 6). In the single channel projection we note the image of a Muslim woman who becomes almost a black hole against the landscape of the city, and excerpts from an article on recent attacks against Bihari migrants. Indeed, as the urban poor are excluded by an economic and urban discourse favoring an already privileged elite, non-Maharastrians and Muslims are threatened by Shiv Sena’s claims over Mumbai as a Hindu and Maratha territory. For Shiv Sena, in “their” land they have to make it constantly known that there is no space for the foreigner, even if this means encroaching upon the sovereignty of the state. When it is a matter of restoring his [sic] pride as Hindu, the Maratha has to take law into his own hands, thus reaffirming through violence and from outside the realm of institutional politics who the sovereign subject is.

168 Elena Bernardini In ancient Roman law, homo sacer identified a life which could be killed with impunity. Agamben has recovered this obscure juridical figure in order to underline its modern avatars and their crucial relation to sovereign power. Homo sacer is the one who, reduced to bare life—a life without clear juridical or political connotation, is exposed with no mediation to sovereign violence.2 Shiv Sena’s aggressive activism has effectively turned migrants and Muslims in Mumbai into “sacred life,” into lives with no value, whose purging from the city and the nation is crucial to reclaim such spaces as their own. That Shiv Sena claims impunity for the violent acts of its sainiks is unsurprising if we consider the organization’s politics and violence as an assertion of a sovereign will (see Agamben 1998: 81–86). The single channel projection ends with an emblematic image. One of the children walks away while holding an umbrella with a glass on top. The image refers to Magritte’s painting Les Vacances d’Hegel (1958). The umbrella with the glass on top is an object with opposing functions, which at the same time collects and repels water. This seems a good metaphor of the position the children and migrant workers occupy as foreigners and urban poor. As Agamben would say, they are included in the city by way of their exclusion, as an instance that cannot

Figure 13.2 Navjot Altaf, Mumbai Meri Jaan, 2004. Detail from four channel video installation, 13 min. 37 secs, color, sound, loop. Courtesy of the artist.


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be assimilated yet maintains in its exclusion an intrinsic relation to the power that has banned it. Indeed, such lives stand at the core of urban politics aimed at confirming the sovereignty of a community or the state. Caught in the dis-locating effects of development projects and ideologies as well as attempts at ethnically redefining the city and the nation, migrants appear as sacred life, a life directly exposed to the sovereign’s excessive violence and power to kill, and as docile bodies, “populations” to be managed and controlled through institutional discipline. Migrants expose that bare life which is the counterpart of sovereign power, whose exception marks the moving threshold of the citizen and the political community. It is clear that we are looking at a different model of sovereignty from Foucault’s, and that in Indian cities sovereignty is not exercised only by the state through legislation, institutional politics, and discipline. Sovereignty is also exercised by competing agencies outside institutions and, like in the model explored by Agamben, it has recourse at the same time to the spectacle of violence and to institutional discipline.3 Ultimately, as new homines sacri, impoverished migrants deserve our attention to attempt a critique of the fundamental political categories of modernity, which inscribe life in the political sphere through the exception of bare life.

III Rather than concentrating on specific marginalized subjects, Raqs Media Collective’s video installation The Co-Ordinates of Everyday Life (2002) engages directly with forms of control and appropriation of urban space, and further underlines the role of urbanism and legislations in the production of sacred life. The installation is articulated through two video-projections on the wall, one on the floor, and a board with text taken from street signs and hoardings in New Delhi. In the form of stickers, the text fragments were also distributed outside the exhibition when the work was first installed in Kassel for Documenta11. The floor projection provides the spatial and temporal coordinates of the artwork through a satellite image of New Delhi at the time. The wall projections look more closely at the city as a lived space focusing on how planning and legislations order modalities of presence within it. In one of them a series of images show arrivals in the city by train, framing New Delhi within a context of mobility and hospitality. Misty, illuminated by electric lights, and buzzing with activity, the city is introduced to us at night, dark and unknown, as an object of expectations and full of mystery, a place of transit and a destination, of temporary and permanent dwelling. That the question of hospitality is tied to apprehensions and struggle over urban space and resources is underlined by the appearance of a series of legal definitions

170 Elena Bernardini

Figure 13.3 Raqs Media Collective, Co-Ordinates of Everyday Life 28.28 N / 77.15 E, 2001/2. View of the installation. Installation using four projections, soundscape, slide projection, and print elements (including broadsheet, floor mat, and eighteen kinds of stickers). Courtesy of the artist.

concerning city spaces and their usage, comments from people responsible for the city master plan, and a municipal logbook. Indeed, the state, through the master plan, the legal coding of urban space, and the enforcement of laws on the proper use of the land, has been a major player in controlling, regulating, and “normalizing” life within the city. The board stresses this point by presenting texts taken from signs around Delhi, many of which are interdictions. The problematic inherent in the legal mapping of urban space becomes clearer in the wall projection which addresses the state’s controversial politics of slum clearance and relocation. The images are from an illegal settlement, LNJP colony (Lok Nayak Jai Prakash) and a resettlement colony, Narela, a dwelling provided by the state to relocate people from evicted neighborhoods. Rather than contrasting the two, the installation presents them both against a common horizon of legal abandonment and violence. Whether within or without the law both spaces face us with a situation that, following Agamben, I would term of “exception.” This implies the affirmation, on one view, that illegal settlements are not simply on the “wrong” side of the law but “abandoned” by it; on the other, that the same can be said of resettlement colonies, despite their being legal. Chatterjee has remarked how the illegality of the settling practices of the


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urban poor (a fact which, it should be noted, is a matter of everyday survival) has debased their position in the eyes of the state and turned these city residents, many actual citizens, into “populations.” Since they are trespassing, the state cannot consider them equal to “proper” citizens, for doing so would mean jeopardizing the entire structure of legality (Chatterjee 2003: 174–75). However, there are reasons for which the state is willing to accord some concessions. What is of interest to us is that these urban residents are tolerated and attended to by the government on an exceptional basis. The negotiations, which do exist between “populations” and the government, are not carried out because of the state’s moral duty as regards the wellbeing of its citizens. Provisions are accorded to “populations” on the basis of a sovereign decision to face a situation of emergency, in other words of exception. In the case of legal settlements, these spaces and residents fall under the aegis of legality; however, they have been de facto abandoned by the state and left to provide for themselves. In the historicist discourse of development they have been relegated to the temporal backwaters of “citizens-to-come.” It follows that the urban poor are not so much excluded by way of an interdiction: rather they are abandoned by the law and in this way kept in relation to it. Agamben has spoken about “the camp” as the space where the exception has become the norm, a “dislocating localization,” where lives, which cannot be accommodated within the order, find permanent location (Agamben 1998: 175). The issue is that where the law is suspended, life is vulnerable and directly exposed to the sovereign’s power over life and death. The dis-locating function of the camp seems to haunt the city as it is presented in the artwork. Under this light, at the core of urban planning and architecture stand not the citizen and his or her wellbeing but, once again, bare life and its exception. Such insight is crucial for any serious reflection on the marginalization of urban poor or migrants, which is thus revealed to be far more radical than expected. Being the one who has the power over the state of exception, the sovereign does not simply decide what is legal or illegal but the very threshold, within the order, of the inscription of life (Agamben 1998: 25–28).

IV The exception, this dis-locating principle at the basis of the inscription of life in the political community of modern democracies, emerges with particular poignancy in another video installation by Raqs, The Impostor in the Waiting Room (2004) Here Raqs address a discourse of modernity, which divides territories into areas already fully modern and others yet to become, into a “center stage” and its “waiting rooms.” The image of the waiting room has been used by Dipesh Chakrabarty to underline historicist ways of thinking that sustained colonialism

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Figure 13.4 Raqs Media Collective, The Impostor in the Waiting Room, 2004. View of the installation. Installation with three projections, two lightboxes, architectural drawing, noticeboard with narrative frames, framed letter, and a soundscape. Courtesy of the artist.

and its “civilizational” project (Chakrabarty 2000: 6–11). It is taken here to indicate spaces of exception where, for example, the urban poor and the foreigner are confined nowadays as people whose inclusion in the political community is contested. In the installation the recurrent figure of a man in a bowler hat hints to a specific dominant model of modernity with which those in the waiting rooms are expected to comply— that of the bourgeois citizen. Raqs elaborate on this image with reference to a series of paintings by Magritte, inspired by Fantômas, a character in a series of early twentieth-century novels.4 The allusion to Magritte adds an intriguing twist since, as we can see in Magritte’s painting Le Barbare (1928), the bourgeois attire of Fantômas is actually a disguise. He is not only confirmed a foreigner but “a barbarian in a hat,” an impostor, a delinquent (Raqs 2005: 164). In order to exit the antechambers and move further into the alleged territories of the fully modern or the political community, people are required to undergo complex processes of desubjectification and resubjectification. Although the sovereign is the one demanding the change from those waiting in the antechambers, this change is always encountered with the suspicion that it may not be authentic, that a dangerous radically other like Fantômas may be hiding under suit and hat.


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If for the people in the waiting rooms, identity constitutes a performing practice in order to gain access to modernity or the political community, for the sovereign the controlling of identity is an essential performance if it wants to maintain legitimacy. Policing state borders and regulating modalities of presence within its territories through urbanism and legislation help preserving hierarchies of identities and meanings. In the present installation this is further suggested by a map with the blueprint of roads, upon which Raqs have marked the presence of waiting rooms as reminders of those who were not contemplated in the master plan’s vision. One of the projections shows a man impersonating with considerable effort a series of different characters dressing as the “Peasant,” “Factory worker,” “Convict,” and of course, “Man in a bowler hat.” The man in a bowler hat, however, does not, as the historicist argument would have it, crown the series of transformations. His appearance is accompanied by all the other personae, who become simultaneously visible on the screen. The co-existence of the man’s avatars in fact denies the idea of the bourgeois model of the citizen as the exclusive way to access modernity. This is, however, not the only insight offered by the man’s performance. Throughout, the man’s face remains resolutely hidden, like that of Fantômas in Magritte’s Le Barbare. The unintelligibility of his face hints at the impossibility of fixing the man’s identity owing both to his inexhaustible capacity for self-refashioning and also to the presence of “something” which seems to escape any order of representation. In this respect the conundrum of the face underlines not only the possibility of surviving through self-transformation but also the necessity to rethink politics itself. Indeed, if the sovereign exception is the original structure which defines the political community by isolating in the ban a bare life, it is not just the inclusiveness of citizenship which needs to be questioned but its very validity, how to think a politics outside the sovereign exception, the division between a form of qualified life and bare life, between People and people.

V In conclusion, the artworks analyzed here underline the presence of spaces of exception within cities and nation-states, and the life caught within them: a life deprived of any rights, a life that can be killed with impunity, a sacred life. Furthermore, they have highlighted competing sovereign discourses in Indian cities, where both spectacular violence and institutional control emerge as modalities in which the sovereign affirms its power. Sacred life carries a crucial relation to the working of sovereignty and lies at the center of its politics. Sovereign power is, in fact, always engaged in drawing and maintaining those borders between inside and outside, which found the political community while isolating in the

174 Elena Bernardini exception various forms of bare life. As Balibar suggests, any discussion of sovereignty cannot be limited to considering margins (state borders) but should also look at individuals, groups, and spaces within states (Balibar 1998: 217). Lastly, cities emerge as places of difference and struggle which challenge the sovereign as represented by the state and the law and definitions of the body politic of the nation. By underlining those spaces of exception marking the urban, these contemporary Indian artworks present them also as sites where the very idea of democratic state politics comes into crisis. Therefore, it is not just a matter of saving that bare life which has been abandoned by the law but also of acknowledging its political meaning. Following Agamben, the challenge is perhaps to imagine a politics where bare life is not “excepted” (and its rights preserved) in the figure of the citizen. And if this is the aim, the performances of the various “impostors” in the waiting rooms of the world should more than ever occupy our reflections. It may well be that to think a politics beyond the sovereign ban, the concept of refugium implying “aterritoriality” and “exodus” provides a more viable option than the ius of the citizen implying territoriality and belonging (Agamben 2000: 24–26).

Notes 1. The film looks at slum dwellers in Mumbai. Although part of the working force of the city, they are denied basic services such as water, electricity, and sanitation, and often live under threat of eviction. 2. In Homo Sacer (1998) Agamben refers to the distinction the ancient Greeks made within the concept of life, between bios—a form of “qualified” life, political life, and zoe—natural life. 3. In examining the birth of the modern prison, Foucault distinguishes modern political technologies of the body operating through discipline from more archaic forms of sovereignty characterized by spectacular, excessive violence, thus differentiating between “sovereignty” and “biopolitics” (see Foucault 1979). Focusing on bare life, Agamben instead underlines how the original task of sovereign power has always been the production of a biopolitical body; therefore, he considers biopolitics not as a modern invention, but as old as the sovereign exception (Agamben 1998). 4. The novels are by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. See Raqs (2005).

Bibliography Agamben, G. (1998 [1995]) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. HellerRoazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —— (2000 [1996]) Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Alternative Law Forum (2004–5) “Mumbai to Shangai without Slums.” Online. Available: http://www.altlawforum.org/globalisation/research-publications/mumbai-toshanghai-without-slums (accessed June 1, 2010). Balibar, É. (1998) “The Borders of Europe,” in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds.) Cosmopolitics:


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Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ, and London: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, P. (2003) “Are Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois at Last?” in I. Chandrasekhar and P. C. Seel (eds.) body.city: Siting Contemporary Culture in India, Berlin and Delhi: Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Tulika Books. Fabian, J. (2002 [1983]) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, M. (1979 [1975]) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hansen, T. B. (2001) Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton, NJ, and London: Princeton University Press. Hansen, T. B. and Stepputat, F. (eds.) (2005) Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Massey, D. (2005) For Space, London: Sage. Prakash, G. (2002) “The Urban Turn,” Sarai Reader: Cities of Everyday Life: 2–6. Online. Available: http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/02–the-cities-of-everyday-life/ 02urban_turn.pdf (accessed June 1, 2010). Raqs Media Collective (2005) “Dreams as Disguises, as Usual,” Sarai Reader: Bare Acts: 162– 75. Online. Available: http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/texts7.html (accessed June 1, 2010).

14 Negotiating Freedom on Scarred Bodies Chris Abani’s novellas Francesca Giommi

Chris Abani is an outstanding migrant writer who is increasingly acquiring an international—or perhaps a post-national—status and citizenship.1 Being part of the black diaspora, at different stages of his life and at different levels of willingness, Abani likes to define himself as a “global Igbo,” looking for a particular location within at least three different aesthetic and geopolitical traditions—African, British, and American—that mix together in the global context of hybrid urban and metropolitan cross-pollinated cultures and identities. This displaced location offers him a vantage point of view over the individuals and cultures he depicts in his work, seemingly always on the verge of a complete breakdown. Abani himself experienced imprisonment and political persecution in Nigeria in the mid-1980s for his writing and activism, which was considered subversive. In the early 1990s he was forced to migrate to the UK in search of not only greater freedom of expression and self-fulfillment but also, and more urgently, political asylum and mere survival, because of a death sentence issued by the Nigerian goverment against him. The torture and psychological violence he suffered in jail is described in the poignant collection of verses Kalakuta Republic (2001), defined by Harold Pinter, in his blurb for the book jacket, as “the most naked, harrowing expression of prison life and political torture imaginable. Reading them is like being singed by a red hot iron.” This personally suffered restraint—combined with an insuppressible concern for life and mankind in all their plights—makes the themes of freedom and human rights a constant presence in Abani’s writing. These hungered liberties are always striven for, but never achieved, by the characters in his novels, novellas, and poems, which are populated by outcasts, individuals reduced to victims of human trade, bodies without rights or recognition, negotiating their right to belong in a hostile country, society, or community, striving for survival in the dangerous underworlds of Lagos, London, or Los Angeles. The apparently hopeless humanity he depicts—bearing sly and sarcastic nicknames, such as King of de

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Beggars, Redemption, or My Luck—also emanates an insuppressible vital energy and their despair is sublimated into poetic expression. Known mainly as a novelist but expressing himself at best through poetry, Abani adopts a masterly combination of the two, forging an inimitable lyrical prose in his two novellas, Becoming Abigail and Song for Night. A brief glance at his poetry is therefore extremely useful to better appreciate these two works, as it reveals an intensely visual style and a prodigious imagination, crowned by mature and bounteous writing skills. As Kwame Dawes suggests, “Abani’s line has a sharp precision that turns a scream into a line of memorable lyrical music without losing the emotion and force” (Dawes 2000: 17). Natasha Trewethey says of “Aphasia” in Abani’s collection Hands Washing Water (Abani 2006c) that [he] reminds us that even as we live in a time of lost language—of meaningless soundbites and empty slogans—it is the poet’s job to find words that can, as Keats put it, sharpen one’s vision into the heart and nature of man . . . Abani’s unflinching vision shows us not only love and sorrow but also atrocity and the possibility of redemption, the line that pulls us from despair to salvation. (Trewethey 2006) Becoming Abigail and Song for Night are two devastating yet lyrical accounts of humanity reduced to its worst and lowest degree, coming-of-age narrations relating how an innocent child grows into a hardened young man or woman in soulcrushing environments that threaten to engulf and destroy them, depriving them of their future (as happens in Graceland, Abani’s debut novel and unsurpassed masterpiece so far). The smaller canvas of the novella compresses the lives, experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the two protagonists into moments of utmost but silent despair, turning them into subhuman beings, ghosts exiled to society’s underside, yet never indulging in nostalgia and refusing the romantic notions of exile or excessive victimization. Both works effortlessly glide between past and present, as Graceland successfully does, but in this case the past is not an idyllic place of the memory evoking a happy childhood. On the contrary, it is already redundant with the seeds of suffering and sorrow, especially in the case of Becoming Abigail, from which my closer analysis starts. Becoming Abigail tells the story of the dehumanization of a brutalized Igbo girl given no control over her life or body, repeatedly sexually abused by members of her extended family, sold into slavery, and almost forced into prostitution. In an essay written in 2006 soon after the publication of the novella, Abani reports he heard on the news the true story of a Nigerian girl reduced to such a miserable condition close to slavery while in London in 1996. Since that moment Abigail’s ghost haunted him for a few years until he responded to her, writing a book on

178 Francesca Giommi the tragedy of sex trafficking with a single human being at its core. The declared intention of the book is to try to remove any sentimentality and polemic and to stay away from numbers and statistics, because, as the author states: “in the end it doesn’t matter how many young women are victims of this trade. One is already one too many” (2006b). On the necessity of creating Abigail and giving her a voice, Abani continues in the same essay: “There is no deep fiction without ghosts. Ghosts leave their vestigial traces all over your work. Once they have decided to haunt you, that is. These ectoplasmic moments litter your work for years” (2006b). His work arises from these sorts of epiphanies, maintaining the confused profiles and lightness of touch of a dream-like vision. Becoming Abigail proceeds through fleeting brush strokes. The narration is fractured into short chapters and even shorter and intense lines, which sometimes need to be read twice to be deciphered or imbibed, and most of the characters assume a ghost-like essence. The supreme specter is the ghost of the mother (the first Abigail of the story, after whom the protagonist has been named), who died giving birth to her, and who continues to haunt her family with her unreplaceable presence and unfillable absence. Her death turned her husband into an alcoholic and chronically depressed father who foolishly tries to recover her lost love in their daughter, investing this fragile being with an unbearable burden. Her name thus constitutes a heavy legacy, denying the child and young woman her own identity, preventing her from developing her own true self, different from her mother’s, reducing her to the evanescent shadow of a ghost. Recurrently in Abani’s work names are destiny: these arbitrary signifiers impose patterns of behavior and inescapable lots on their carriers, revealing the instability of a self in the act of formation, in search of its true being. Both Abigail and Elvis in Graceland bear someone else’s name or dream: this distortion and insane projection reflect unstable and shifting identities, uncomfortable with themselves and incapable of achieving a proper defined essence. The recurrent flashbacks to Abigail’s childhood do not depict happy memories but sorrowful events, her life being a chain of tragedies and abuses since its very beginning. Growing up with a crippling guilt, Abigail carries out bizarre mourning rituals, burning and cutting herself apparently for no reason. This painful selfmutilation is ever-present in Abani’s fiction, with the scope, on the one hand, to satisfy the need for self-punishment and sin-expiation, and on the other, to stress the corporeality of the characters, to escape the ghost-like existence and social marginalization to which most of them are condemned. Through the impression of distinguishable marks on their own body, they assert their right to exist in themselves, blood and flesh, exalting the body’s capacity for both ecstasy and pain, which Abani is a master in conveying. Despite all these attempts to attach herself to an earthly physical condition,


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Abigail’s life seems destined to produce only death. Her father commits suicide, unable to overcome his grief, and her own short existence is doomed to perdition. Taken by force to England on a fake passport, meant to be sold as human trade, she loses even the fragile and ambiguous identity she had conquered at home, becoming a completely unnamed ghost in a foreign country. Her transformation follows the downward parable of human degradation of a girl trying to become a woman but slowly becoming almost an animal, devastated both in body and spirit by brutal violence. The relative who promised to give her a better life in London attempts to force her into prostitution, and when she resists, he handcuffs her in a doghouse on her fours, urinates on her, beats and rapes her, making the process of her dehumanization complete. The faint possibility of salvation offered by her escape and subsequent encounter with Derek, a social worker whom she eventually loves, free from any obligation, is only an ephemeral flash of light before the final plunge into the abyss. As stated towards the end of the book, “second chances are a fact of life for the Igbo. Even for the dead” (2006a: 107), but this second chance is not within reach for Abigail, at least not in this life. The reader is only momentarily deceived by Derek’s quotation of Dylan Thomas’s famous line “and death shall have no dominion.” Physically freed from the chains which bound her, Abigail begins to gain an agency over her body and the names become clearer. For the first time in the whole book, she reveals her full name to the police, Abigail Tansi, and then also her relation to Igbo culture becomes manifest, as Tansi is one of the oldest Igbo names as well as the name of the first canonized Nigerian saint, Reverend Father Tansi. As Abani explains in an interview, “towards the end, Abigail’s body, which was ephemeral before, is beginning to collect and solidify. And yet, just at the moment when it all comes together, it transcends into this ephemerality once more” and forever (Abani in Singer 2006). In the final sequence by the River Thames—“playing on all those nineteenth-century English books set around the hysterical woman standing by the River Thames about to do something” (Abani in Singer 2006)—Abigail seems to have a choice, but the overwhelming despair and the moody atmosphere swallow a permanently obfuscated character, incapable of finding a true self or humanity out of her tragedy. The book preserves nevertheless the powerful undiminished poetic treatment of terror and loneliness of this harrowing discourse on memory, loss, exploitation, and suffering. The same human potential in the face of unspeakable cruelty and fiendish conditions emerges with renewed vigor in Abani’s novella, Song for Night, which also recovers part of the vital energy capable of overcoming death in spite of all human abominaton that permeates every single page of Graceland. It is the story of a West African boy soldier in search of his lost platoon, across a nightmarish desolated landscape, both geographically and metaphysically. The terrifying journey through the horrors of war assumes the connotations of a sorrowful quest,

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a descent into hell that eventually leads to the possibility of a re-emergence into light, however ambiguous. The book does not give any direct clue as to which country it takes place in or when, except for some reference to the Igbo ethnic group and tradition, which induces us to suppose it refers to the Biafran war. The location remains intentionally undefined, similarly to the choice of Uzodinma Iweala, the NigerianAmerican, 23-year-old Harvard-educated author who locates his debut novel, Beasts of No Nation, in an unnamed war-torn West African country.2 Both Abani and Iweala seem to share the choice of many black writers of the diaspora, who treat terrible events such as civil war in their universal significance, focusing on the devastating effects they have on humanity at large, out of their contingency. Both novels, written in the US in recent years, also stress how these conflicts and tragedies—apparently so far away in time and space—are still at the core of contemporary world history and deeply affect our Western societies, as Caryl Phillips also suggests in his Commonwealth Prize-winning novel A Distant Shore. Reflecting on the universality of the human experience on the occasion of a talk he gave in Tanzania in June 2007, Abani recalled how, during his chidhood in Nigeria in the 1970s, the government forbade teaching about the civil war in schools, fearing that it would engender a new generation of rebels. It was only thanks to an inventive Pakistani-Muslim teacher who taught his Igbo students the Jewish Holocaust history, that a young Abani could realize how human fragility and sorrow are universal: “I learned the melancholic history of my people from the melancholic history of another people . . . Story is powerful, story is fluid and it belongs to nobody” (2007b). That is why the writer now firmly declares: “I’m trying to move beyond political rhetoric to a place of ethical questioning” (2007b). The protagonist of this second novella has no proper name either. We are only told that his mother called him My Luck, but during the war he thinks he should change his name to Unlucky. Recruited by a platoon of mine defusers when he was only a child, My Luck had his vocal chords severed, along with his platoon mates’, so that they wouldn’t scare each other with their death screams and could avoid any risky distraction from their job, “too intense for idle chatter” (2007a: 20). Bereft of hope and language, the young boys experience the horror around them, amplified internally: “in the silence of our heads, the screams of those dying around us were louder than if they still had their voices” (35), and they invent a sort of sign language to replace verbal speech. As happened to Foe in J. M. Coetzee’s eponymous novel, the lack of the organ of speech— the tongue in that case, vocal chords in this one—or better, the brutal mutilation of it, allows the creation of a highly meaningful metalanguage, a tool of resistance and self-assertion which can be much more powerful than any human verbal language.


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Through this arbitrary medium of communication, My Luck, once left alone, tells his painful story and journey in a sort of interior monologue, thought in Igbo3 and not in English, because, as he explains, there is something atavistic about war—an experience which, in any case, can hardly be described or grasped in any human language. This reflection on communication and language accompanies Abani all along his artistic enterprise, as he firmly believes that language actually makes the world in which we live. During the same talk in Tanzania, Abani told of how he grew up very privileged in Nigeria, and how his own story was very different from his prison story, so that, when he found himself in such an unknown alien condition, “I had no language for it. I was completely broken, completely terrified. Kept trying to find a new language, a new way to make sense of all that” (2007b). Likewise My Luck has to find or invent his own tools of interpretation of an inhumane condition and subverted order of the world he was not prepared for— as no human being could ever be—in order to survive it. In wartime the horror of death is constantly balanced by the miracle of a life preserved and the hope that all will soon be over, in one way or another. My Luck’s quest thus shifts from hope to despair, to hope again, from terrifying and undescribable visions to lyrical sublimated images, such as when he says, for example, that the dirt of that terrible war sticks to his body, and it is a “dirt impossible to wash: [but] even if water won’t wash me, hope might” (140). Wandering through a devastated and desolated dark forest, My Luck sadly considers that much of the generation surviving this war will not be able to rebuild their communities because many of the parts won’t add up. He encounters pitiful creatures, groups of half-people, children without arms or legs or both, men with only half a face, women with shrapnel-chewed scars for breasts. Unbelievably, however, all of them are holding onto life and hope with a fire that burns feverishly in their eyes, such as a bunch of disabled children dancing in a circle with an elemental force of nature to the music of a radio found in the forest. Even with the knowledge that there are some sins too big for even God to forgive, and with such dreadful images in his eyes, My Luck lifts them overhead and every night the sight of a sky full of stars arouses a wonderful song for night (79). Memory once again plays a fundamental role, as My Luck recognizes that “before we can move from here, we have to relieve and release our darkness” (104). In order not to forget the horror, he keeps cutting a pattern of crosses on his forearms with a knife, like a map of his consciousness. This mnemonic device embodies his own personal cemetery, each cross cut for every loved one lost in the war in his left arm, and one for each person that he enjoyed killing in his right arm. Some of the memories of his childhood might be happy (unlike Abigail’s), but this fledgling childhood was brutally shattered by the war raging through his

182 Francesca Giommi country. Its children were forced to leave their childhood behind and to face the crimes and hardships of war: looting, rape, killing, and starvation, so that My Luck declares: I have never been a boy. That was stolen from me and I will never be a man—not this way. I am some kind of chimera who knows only the dreadful intimacy of killing. If it would help, I would cry, but tears are useless here. (143–44) Nevertheless, he is still able to find somewhere at the bottom of his soul the light he needs to cross the darkness: I feel alone in the world. Yet it is not sadness I feel. This morning; unaccountably, I am filled with an almost unbearable lightness. This light comes not from a sudden wholeness on my part, but from the very wounds I carry on my body and in my soul. Each wound, in its particular way, giving off a particular and peculiar light. (151) By the end of his journey My Luck finally sees from a distance his lost platoon and he embarks across a river full of corpses in a floating coffin to join it, but the coffin spins around midway across the river and he cannot make himself heard in any way, so that the platoon heads off into the forest, leaving him behind for ever. The open ending of the book sees My Luck arriving at a house and finding his young, smiling, and happy mother who welcomes him whispering “My Luck, My Luck. You are home” (167). My Luck whispers the word “Mother” in his turn, his voice has come back. But we know that the boy’s mother had been killed during the war, so we are led to doubt that this final vision is only a dream or even that My Luck is already dead—and thus a proper ghost—at the beginning of his journey. What interests me at the moment, however, is not so much a univocal interpretation of My Luck’s journey and of all the symbolical elements met on the way. My intention is instead to stress once again Abani’s ability to represent the modern human experience in all its fragility and sometimes perversity, and to demonstrate how much literature can do to sustain freedom and human rights in such a confused contemporary global society. These two slender yet poignant accounts of inhumanity and denied freedom strike the very heart of our Western world or, to borrow Pinter’s metaphor, singe like a red hot iron the core of our modern democracies, reminding us how long the path still is towards a truly peaceful, free, and human world. Globalization and media communication have made it clear and visible to all that there are parts of our humanity still reduced to several forms of slavery and subjugation, where the most elemental human


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rights still need to be allowed and recognized. Abani’s work gives a penetrating and powerful voice to this silenced ghostly humanity, confirming Said’s belief that liberation as an intellectual mission resides in marginal, decentered, and exilic energies. In compliance with both Bhabha’s and Said’s statements, Abani demonstrates how telling a story is occupying a space, shaping an identity and belonging. The presence of foreigners, aliens, migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and blacks in modern societies, at the heart of old and new empires, carves out “inbetween third spaces” which become the very site of encounter, negotiation, and hybridity. Their existence and claim for recognition displace the idea of center and periphery, of hegemony and subalternity, and contribute to rewriting borders and rights. Abani once defined African writers as “curators of our humanity,” and on more than one occasion he affirmed that there are no essential Africas and no essential pure identities. His work can be read as a lasting tribute to the triumph of the human spirit, and a claim for the wordliness of literature and—on a wider level—of belonging, freedom, and humanity.

Notes 1. Very close to those writers defined by Gareth Griffiths as “new transcultural voices” (2000: 309). 2. Unlike what happens, for example, in Half of a Yellow Sun, written in the same period by another young Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, unequivocally set against the backdrop of the Biafran war. 3. The Igbo language, as a mother tongue for the indigenous people of the Nigerian region identified as Igboland, is here opposed to the English language brought and imposed by the colonizers, incapable of expressing My Luck’s inner thoughts and deepest feelings and emotions.

Bibliography Abani, C. (2001) Kalakuta Republic, London: Saqi Books. —— (2004) Graceland, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. —— (2006a) Becoming Abigail, New York: Akashic Books. —— (2006b) Abigail and My Becoming, April 19. Online. Available: http://www.truthdig. com/report/print/20060419_chris_abani_unintended_worship/ (accessed June 1, 2010). —— (2006c) Hands Washing Water, Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press. —— (2007a) Song for Night, New York: Akashic Books. —— (2007b) Chris Abani on the Stories of Africa, August. Online. Available: http://www. ted.com/talks/chris_abani_on_the_stories_of_africa.html (accessed June 1, 2010). Adichie, C. N. (2006) Half of a Yellow Sun, London: Harper Perennial. Bhabha, H. K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.

184 Francesca Giommi Coetzee, J. M. (1988) Foe, London: Penguin. Dawes, K. (2000) “Introduction,” Kalakuta Republic, London: Saqi Books. Griffiths, G. (2000) African Literatures in English, East and West, Harlow: Longman. Iweala, U. (2005) Beasts of No Nation, London: John Murray. Kaufman, Z. (2006) Chris Abani: The Truthdig Interview, April 18. Online. Available: http:// www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060418_chris_abani_truthdig_interview/?/ interview/item/20060418_chris_abani_truthdig_interview/ (accessed June 1, 2010). Phillips, C. (2001) A New World Order, London: Secker and Warburg. —— (2003) A Distant Shore, London: Secker and Warburg. Said, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto and Windus. Singer, R. (2006) An Interview with Poet and Fiction Writer Chris Abani, January 6. Online. Available: http://www.pw.org/content/interview_poet_and_fiction_writer_chris_ abani (accessed June 1, 2010). —— (2010) Chris Abani on Genre and Gender, Love and Sex and Nigerian Politics. Online. Available: http://www.ronsinger.net/manuscripts/Armchair.html (accessed June 1, 2010). Trewethey, N. (2006) Online. Available: http://www.chrisabani.com/Abani_Poetry/ Hands.htm (accessed June 1, 2010).

Part Three

The Right to (Believe in) Free Futures

15 Rude Am I in My Speech CARYL PHILLIPS

Perhaps the most arresting moment in the first act of Shakespeare’s Othello occurs when the soldier is asked by the Duke of Venice to respond to the accusation that he has ‘beguiled’ Brabantio’s daughter, Desdemona, away from the protection and safety of her father’s house. The soldier is an outwardly confident man, full of pride and bombast, and hugely aware of his celebrity in Venice. He addresses the Duke. ‘Rude am I in my speech’, he says, and then he continues and spins a masterfully persuasive narrative full of lyrical eloquence which the Duke eventually acknowledges would have ensnared his own daughter too. The poised, silver-tongued soldier is vindicated and the play can proceed. What is clearly established in this first act is that Othello is an outsider both racially and socially. In this thoroughly demarcated Venetian world where Michael Cassio is simply ‘a Florentine’, the ‘old black ram’, although he claims to be descended from ‘men of royal siege’, is regarded as little more than an ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger’. For the full length of the first act, what Shakespeare does not allow us to see is that for all Othello’s public success there is at the centre of his personality a kernel of self- doubt, a tight knot of anxiety, which is eventually exploited by his ancient Iago. During this first act the soldier appears to be in control. He plays games, protesting that he is in possession of a clumsy tongue yet his language betrays no hint of rudeness or foreign taint. It is clear that if Othello possesses any self- doubt, or inner discomfort, its origins are not rooted in language. What if he had begun his mellifluous speech with ‘Rude am I in my visage’? Would it have been possible for this self-assured black migrant to Europe to have stood before the Duke of Venice and played fearlessly with notions of identity and belonging that were rooted in race as opposed to language, or would this have been to trespass too close to the source of his well- hidden self- doubt? Almost ten years ago, I arranged to meet my father at lunchtime in a hotel in Manchester. The night before I had given a reading at a local bookshop, and that afternoon I was planning to move on to Liverpool and give another reading at a local university. My father lives maybe an hour away

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from Manchester, and so this seemed like an opportune moment to get together. What made the meeting unusual was the fact that we had not seen or spoken with each other for some years. I came down into the hotel lobby a little early, but there he was already sprawled out on a sofa and watching the news on the television. He saw me and stood up. I was glad to see him. He had not changed much, and we hugged and I suggested that we go to another hotel around the corner which had a nicer restaurant. There were very few people in the place and the hostess seated us and gave us our menus. She asked us if we would like a drink to start with. My father ordered a Scotch and I asked for a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and, having informed us of the specials, the hostess left us alone. Five minutes later a waitress arrived with our drinks. As she withdrew we raised our glasses and clinked, and then I sipped and grimaced. My father asked me if there was a problem and I said that the wine was not Sauvignon Blanc. It tasted like Chardonnay. I signalled to the waitress and then I saw a flicker of panic pass across my father’s face. He asked me if I couldn’t drink it. I said, ‘why, it’s not what I ordered’. The waitress came over, and I explained the situation and she shrugged her shoulders and took up my glass. There was no apology, but there was no surliness either as she disappeared from view. My father remained quiet and I could see that he was uncomfortable. For a few moments I made inane conversation, then eventually the waitress returned with the new glass of wine and I tasted it. Better, I thought, so I nodded and thanked her and she left us alone. However, the atmosphere between father and son remained strained. First generation migrants to Europe, from wherever they may originate, have to learn quickly how to read the new society in order that they may successfully navigate their way forward. Sometimes this involves learning when to remain quiet, and somewhat compliant, and not risk causing offence. When West Indians first arrived in England in the fifties, there were countless pamphlets thrust into their hands which explained to them the ways of the English. They were instructed that they must line up at bus stops in an orderly fashion, and not keep working when their fellow labourers were on a tea break, and it was suggested that they should try to join a trade union, and perhaps they should not bring food that smelt ‘foreign’ to work. In common with many other immigrants, they were being taught how to tread carefully, the unspoken contract being that eventually they would learn the rules and become familiar with how the society worked, so much so that one day they might be considered domesticated. Whether they would ever become fully fledged insiders was not something that was discussed, but for many first generation migrants this was not something that was necessarily desired. The hope on both sides was for some vestige of toleration and respect. There are, of course, two places where the new immigrant can find some

Rude Am I in My Speech 189 relief from these anxieties of belonging. First, at home with their families, where the rules are of their own making and no local person can prevent them from being kings and queens in their own castles. Behind closed doors they can cook their own food, listen to whatever music takes their fancy, and curse the locals in whatever tongue or dialect they choose. And then of course there is the world of the pub, or the club, or the café, where immigrants gather together socially and over a drink and compare notes with others of their own tribe. The home and the social gathering place constitute zones of psychological relief for immigrants. In such spaces one doesn’t have to be called ‘Sam’ or ‘Son’, or take aggressively delivered orders from ignorant people half one’s age. In the kingdom of the home, or in the citadel of the club, the first generation migrant is free to be who he or she imagines, or remembers, themselves to be, and there is no expectation that they should perform the shape- shifting dance that immigrants often have to execute in order that they might safely negotiate a passage from sun- up to sundown. Of course, the more successful the immigrant the more difficult it can be to keep in touch with the ‘club’. Upon assuming a white- collar job as a foreman, or an executive role in a company, the rules become more complex for there are now men and women above you and men and women below you, and with the job comes a salary increase and perhaps a move to a new neighbourhood where there are less of you and more of them. To keep contact with fellow migrants one has to now travel further, both physically and psychologically. During the first, Venetian, act of Shakespeare’s play, before the action moves off to Cyprus, it is clear to us that Othello, this ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger’, is a man who is a long way from home. In Venice he is an exotic celebrity, and as such the Duke is inclined to overlook the social and cultural transgression of not only an interracial marriage but a secret one, therefore allowing Othello to indulge in behaviour that would almost certainly be frowned upon if attempted by a non- celebrity. This being the case, this extravagant stranger appears to be untroubled by the fact that he has recourse to neither home nor club as places to which he might retreat and recuperate from the daily fatigue of living a performative life, and he appears content to veer dramatically between rhetorical swagger and self- deprecating bluster like a kite snapping in the wind. Apparently he feels that his success is such that there is no need for him to be cognizant of the unwritten Venetian rule book which tells him that he must line up in an orderly fashion for a gondola, and don’t even think about cooking chickpeas or couscous, and whatever you do don’t mess with the local ladies, especially the titled ones. Our celebrity migrant considers himself above and beyond such restrictive nonsense. By the end of the first act the newly married man truly believes that he has crossed over into full acceptance but, the truth is, without family or peer group, and

190 Caryl Phillips without societal knowledge born of vigilance and judicious interaction, he is incapable of making sound decisions about something as basic as knowing who to trust. It soon becomes lamentably evident that, far from being in control of the situation and participating as an insider, our black first generation migrant to Europe is about as unmoored as any man can be. My father is no Othello. He may have polished up a few words and phrases here and there, and done a little studying of the dictionary, but to this day he remains admirably rude in speech. But then again he has never been a vital or essential cog in British life and occupied the role of super- migrant. What West Indian immigrant has? In fact, what immigrant has? As a first generation migrant he has always been aware of the home and the club as zones of sanity in which he can be himself. Like most second generation children I have, at times, been puzzled and frustrated by his dependence upon one form or another of the ‘club’, and irritated by the taciturn manner in which he often exercised his authority in the home; not that he was always wrong. When I was fifteen or sixteen, I remember one Saturday night standing upstairs in front of the mirror and preparing myself to go out to the church discotheque. Eventually I ventured downstairs wearing tight blue nylon bellbottoms, black platform shoes, a pink shirt with a huge collar that was trimmed in brown piping, and a black and white checked jacket. My father was sitting at the kitchen table reading a newspaper and he looked up at me over the top of his paper. He shook his head and said, ‘Somebody tell you that shit matches?’ The second generation was stepping out into England with a confidence and brashness that, in retrospect, could have used a little more of his cold water being poured upon it. It was his house and he was trying to tell me something about how to look and comport myself out there on the streets, like the time a year or two later when I passed my driving test and he told me that I must be very careful if I was out driving at night with a white girl in the passenger seat. He warned me that I should be prepared to have the police stop and harass me for no other reason than the fact that I was with a white girl. Again he was passing on knowledge which was meant not only to help prepare me for life in England, but it also reaffirmed who he was when in his own private sphere. I listened, and I assumed that my father knew what he was talking about for, at the time, he had a white wife. As a reader and a writer, I am interested in loneliness and isolation, and I have found myself returning time and time again to consider those who have suddenly realized themselves to be marooned. Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas in that huge Chicago mansion, scared out of his mind and not knowing whether to stay put or flee; Ibsen’s Oswald, recently returned to Norway with his body eaten out with disease and his mind racked with pain at the bleakness of his own country; James Baldwin’s David, alone in a house in the south

Rude Am I in My Speech 191 of France at precisely the time his lover Giovanni is about to be guillotined in Paris; Shusaku Endo’s medical intern, Suguro, whose conscience begins to torment him as he remembers the past and finds himself increasingly detached from daily reality. However, I know of no character in literature more profoundly alone and isolated than Shakespeare’s pioneer migrant, Othello, who, once he passes beyond the imaginary security of his life in the great city of water, suddenly finds himself adrift with no son or daughter to measure his situation against, no peer group to bond with at the end of the day, no Venetian home to return to, and loving a local woman who he eventually decides he cannot trust. No wonder he loses his mind. Immigrants will continue to enter Europe, and initially they will be unsure of how to be an Italian, or how to be a Dane, or Irish, or Greek. It takes many years for a first generation migrant, of any race, to become socially confident; perhaps, in the end, it is only those closest to them, the second generation, who can fully understand the price they pay as they grapple with self- doubt and attempt to hitch their fortune (and talent) to a new country. Increasingly I am beginning to feel that witnessing and recording the predicament of the first generation is a responsibility, because by the time we reach the commendably brash third generation a parental comment about one’s dress, or how to be circumspect in the street, is likely to be met with a bemused and slightly disdainful ‘What are you on about?’ As the grandchildren enter fully and boldly into the country with not only the temerity of an Othello but, crucially, armed with social knowledge and understanding that the Venetian resident didn’t have or ever seemed to desire, the kernel of self- doubt which speaks to either social standing or race is, in their lives, beginning to disappear. Nervous hesitation will once again be visited upon the next wave of first generation migrants, wherever they might hail from, and to the list of potential sources of anxiety to be negotiated we might add religious belief. Rude am I in my speech. Rude am I in my visage. Rude am I in my faith. When I left my father in Manchester that lunchtime, and took the train to Liverpool, I began to think about first generation diffidence, and again I refl ected upon the supreme loneliness of the migrant to Venice, who also had a white wife but it never occurred to him that the police were going to pull him over until, of course, it was too late.

16 Freedom of What Religion? An archeology of American religious passions Berndt Ostendorf

Denis Diderot, a prominent exponent of European secularism, expressed his conviction that “man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” Among enlightened Europeans the incompatibility of liberty and religion had become an article of faith. With some surprise therefore the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1830 that in the USA religion and liberty were not in opposition (de Tocqueville 1945 [1835]: I, 310 ff.). Unlike in Europe there was a marked compatibility, if not symbiosis, between religious and democratic passions (I, 319). After all, had not the American clergy supported the revolutionary struggle of the republic, thus giving Protestantism a progressive political spin (I, 310–18)? James Bryce, British ambassador to the US from 1907 to 1913, commented that in America Christianity had entered the body politic and become the “common law of the United States” (Bryce 1888: 560–61). And the English novelist Gilbert Keith Chesterton concluded in 1920 that the US was “a nation with the soul of a church” (Mead 1967). Clearly, all three would have agreed that Denis Diderot was dead wrong as far as the US was concerned. Since the beginning of the American republic, religion and liberty have remained not only compatible but deeply dependent on each other to the point of fusion in an all-pervasive civil religion. But how do the observations of Tocqueville, Chesterton, and Bryce square with the institutional separation of church and state? For the republic was conceived by the Founding Fathers in 1789 as a radically secular state with an enlightened constitution, a document that does not mention God at all. This is remarkable in view of the brouhaha over the constitution in supposedly secular Europe, where many members of its parliament demanded that God be mentioned in the preamble. As a follower of the French and Scottish enlightenments Thomas Jefferson saw a “wall of separation” between church and state. He, James Madison, and particularly George Washington were sympathetic to Freemasonry. To this day the iconography of the one-dollar note speaks for the historic impact of that decidedly secular tradition. Like their friend, Benjamin Franklin, they

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were at best deists and at worst agnostics who kept a respectful distance to God and to the established church (Holmes 2006). In the Federalist Papers James Madison had argued eloquently for a perfect separation between “ecclesiastical and civil matters.” The First Amendment secured these positions of the Federalist debate: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Eight years later Congress had an occasion to test the First Amendment in political practice. After having lost the trading privileges of the British empire, the young American republic was eager to develop new markets in the Mediterranean. In 1796 US Consul General Joel Barlow was sent to negotiate the treaty of Tripoli with Muslim representatives of the Barbary Coast in North Africa. The Barbary States were the rogue nations of their day who made money through piracy and extortion on the high seas. The treaty was designed to curb the raids of Muslim pirates on the American merchant marine, and hence its wording was penned to prevent religion from interfering with the commercial progress of the young republic. Congress recognized these secular priorities and ratified the treaty by a unanimous vote. It was signed into law by President John Adams in 1797. Here is the text: As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquillity of Messelmen [sic],—and as the States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mohammedan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever interrupt the harmony existing between the two countries.1 It is remarkable that in his speech on June 4, 2009, at the university of Cairo, President Obama should have rescued this treaty from deserved neglect; for it does not represent a success story in the annals of American foreign policy. Soon after its ratification it was broken again by the Muslim side, most likely because the English translation penned by Barlow did not represent a faithful rendering of the oral negotiations conducted in flowery Arabic. Hence between the Arabic and English versions of the treaty there remained a wide margin of error. Would a similar treaty with today’s rogue nations such as Iran, Somalia, or Libya receive a unanimous vote in Congress? Hardly. After 1797 the symbiosis between Protestantism and politics has progressed steadily, and the irritations of European observers have increased accordingly. Two hundred years later a public forum on religion in New York with European intellectuals in attendance came to the following conclusion: “The role of religion in the US is an affront against secular Europe” (Anderson 2004: 153–54). Thirty years after its ratification James Madison praised the wisdom of the amendment in a letter to Edward Livingston,

194 Berndt Ostendorf adding a comment that reveals his ulterior motives: “Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Govt” (Koch 1965: 465–66).2 He figured that the institutional secularism of the republic would in the long run encourage religious energies rather than suppress them. It would be best to leave the production and organization of religious faiths to the market, that is to the active control of the (paying) consumer. In short, the separation of church and state has had two long range consequences: it has given a healthy boost to the market-oriented religious supply side and has equally empowered the religious demand side, thus creating a never-ending, dialectic source of energy and passion. Divesting religions of all ecclesiastic power and turning the religious controls over to the customer, this constitutes Madison’s conservative cunning in preparing the ground for an exceptional American popular religiosity with a patriotic spin. Yet, we may well ask what are the unintended long range consequences of Madison’s choice? Are these still in line with the original intention of the Founding Fathers to empower religion, yet to maintain a wall of separation between church and state? Since the times of the founders the religious market has come a long way, but where exactly are we now? Have the formerly secular institutions been overlayered or even displaced by the tidal wave of religious passions pushed relentlessly forward by the booming religious market? Is the institutional secularism in danger of being dislodged by the growing theocratic passions of leading politicians and their clienteles? Is not the United States today by common consent a Christian nation? More than 60% of Americans seem to think so (Shorto 2010). A European observer may well ask, what type of Christianity are we talking about? Are we witnessing a return to an older disposition such as Calvinism or a fundamentalist recovery of “origins,” which in America translates into political conservatism? And what are we to make of the new “postmodern” and “post-secular” megachurches that resemble WalMarts, yet are in their politics surprisingly “progressive”? What long range effect does the ongoing commodification of religion have? Does it set limits to its religious authority and thus curtail its doctrinal influence? Is the wholesale commodification of American religion in fact a subtle form of neo-secularization? Are we dealing with a form of religion that has more to do with individualized lifestyle politics, less with classic doctrine, and that owes more to Hollywood than to Calvinism? This is ground for much debate on both sides of the Atlantic. A controversial question within the debate is, what were the intentions of the founders? It seems that historical knowledge has dimmed over time; indeed, there is an increased revisionist debate by Christiannation advocates that the “real” intentions of the founders with respect to religion were different from what the First Amendment explicitly states.3 This reversal in the interpretation may have to do with the measurable changes in the religious life of the republic since the Founding Fathers. More people attend church today, polls hover around 60%, than in 1789 when Finke and Stark (1992) estimated a


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mere 17% churchgoers. The sense of national identity has undergone a profound change too, and the political realignment since the 1960s has taken a religious turn. There is a new partisan division between those who go to church and vote overwhelmingly Republican and those who don’t and vote Democrat. According to Samuel Huntington, “America has been spared class conflicts in order to have moral convulsions”; and hence grassroots politics is regularly galvanized by periods of “creedal passion” (Huntington 1981: 11, 85–129). There is also a growing recognition that Americans base their national identity, including their quotidian patriotism, on beliefs that have a religious origin. This symbiosis of a robust nationalism and commodified religion makes secular European observers increasingly nervous. To unravel this puzzle of religion and politics from a transatlantic perspective and to move beyond stereotypes, let me present six working hypotheses. They chart the historical unfolding of the American religious passions within the framing dialectic of the First Amendment.4 They also indicate the faultlines of transatlantic irritation concerning the role of religion in the public sphere.

First: Secularization did not work the same way in America as in Europe Max Weber’s secularization paradigm does not apply to the US, certainly not to the entire country. Although the US was conceived by the Founding Fathers as a radically secular state with an enlightened constitution, and although the forces of modernization that Weber names as the primal cause of secularization were in the US more rigorous than in Europe, they did not lead to a disenchantment with or to a weakening of religion. To wit, there are urban spaces such as New York or San Francisco that are overwhelmingly secular, but the majority of Americans have remained immune to and were not affected by secularization. The explanation for the failure of secularization resides in the dialectic tension within the First Amendment. While it codifies the institutional separation of church and state from above (anti-establishment clause), it also protects the right of individuals to freely exercise their particular religion from below (free exercise clause). The primary motif of the designers was to liberate and equalize the free exercise of religious faiths and thus avoid religious wars, but it also introduced an unintended consequence, namely the privatization, popularization, and pluralization of religious beliefs as marketable commodities. In preventing the dictatorship of one faith Congress established a competitive market of many denominations.

Second: Desecularization increases religiosity After the foundation of a secular republic in 1789 a process of reactive desecularization has set in, first regionally and then, in fits and starts, also nationally.

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Animated by the First Amendment’s “free exercise clause” there have been a series of popular religious reactions to the separation of church and state, commonly called awakenings or revivals.5 With the exception of the Second Awakening (1800–30) these mobilizations from the bottom up remained politically inconsequential. This is particularly true for the early twentieth century. The then emerging Bible Belt was protected by the Democratic political machine, the so-called Roosevelt Coalition, that bound together Southern racists with Northern working classes in a pact of mutual non-interference. The liberal revolution of the 1960s terminated this coalition and began to threaten the conservative lifestyles of Southern Democrats. After the prayer-in-school decision in 1962, the Civil Rights revolution and particularly after the abortion decision Roe vs. Wade in 1973, the formerly apolitical Bible Belt had the choice of either losing ground or of entering the political arena. Since then the formerly “silent minorities” of the solid Democratic South morphed into “moral majorities.” After the breakup of the Roosevelt coalition we witness the wholesale defection of Southern Democrats to the Republican party, a realignment that begins with Nixon’s “Southern strategy” and ends with the “Reagan Democrats.” Thereafter desecularization accelerated rapidly and seriously impacted the national political scene. The born again experience of the evangelicals favored highly personalized instead of ecclesiastic solutions and introduced the personal hotline to God. The religious revivalism therefore had an inbred bias against hierarchical authority and favored its radical privatization. The new litmus test of religious authenticity became “Have you chosen Jesus as your personal savior?”

Third: Religious supply and demand invites new denominations The promise of “free exercise” has transformed the New World into a biotope for new religious movements, as the yellow pages of any telephone directory indicate. Most religious movements that suffered persecution in Europe eventually ended up in the New World. All radical, democratic, and separatist fringe groups of the reformation withdrew to the politically safe periphery of the colonies. The Puritans, Pilgrims, Anabaptists, Mennonites, Hutterites, Amish, Herrenhuthers, Schwenckfelders, Diggers, Quakers, Pietists, and Shakers brought their religious fantasies, mostly millenarian and apocalyptic, to the New World. In 1855 Philip Schaff aptly called America “the Phoenix grave . . . of all European churches and sects” (Mead 1967: 263). These religious groups were by no means in doctrinal agreement, but they bonded on the basis of a free and voluntary consent of individual dissenters. They implanted local habits of religious liberty and tolerance which later would serve as the grass roots of democracy. As Søren Kierkegaard put it: Radical Protestantism threw out King or Pope and set the public on the


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throne, progressing from the rule of the sovereign to the rule of law. Thereafter religious groups on the American continent were not defined on the basis of a top–down doctrine (“Roma locuta, causa finita”) but on the basis of their bottom– up religious needs. Practical, congregational Christianity emerged through a visible moral life in plain daylight, as Nathaniel Hawthorne wryly put it. Due to its voluntary origin—and this is an important difference to Europe—American religiosity never stood in opposition to a grass-roots politics of individual rights and liberties. Grass-roots democracy and religious utopias joined in a symbiotic relationship of supply and demand. Even the “una sancta catholica” is just another denomination in the market of faiths. The market even provided an element of choice, for there is a wide selection of denominations, some 1500 in all, to service a great variety of individual tastes and customers. Then came television and a host of new media-derived denominations appeared on the scene. The proliferation of new religions is a function of what a target group researcher in advertising, Michael Weiss, has called the “clustering” of America. Among these we find those who return to a pre-secular fundamentalism of old, then there are the classical mainstream churches, but post-secular hybridity and New Age lifestyles have their religious followers as well. Robert Bellah presents a woman who lists her religion as Sheila-ism, her name being Sheila, accentuating a new, private lifestyle religiosity without outside dogma or moral demands. David Brooks in his bestseller Bobos in Paradise (2000) quotes a 26-year-old BoBo (Bourgeois Bohemian), daughter of a Methodist minister, who positions herself in the religious market as a “Methodist Taoist Native American Quaker Russian Orthodox Buddhist Jew.” A rabbi from Montana preaches “flexidoxy,” which satisfies the conflicting demands of his faithful for both flexibility and orthodoxy. The market believes in the customer as king and provides for all, even for off-beat religious tastes.

Fourth: Religion forms part of popular culture The new religious market has deeply affected popular culture and vice versa. The demands of the market have honed the ritual and shaped the choreography of American religions; over time they have led to its mise-en-scène as spectacle. Religion and entertainment, particularly with the advent of television, joined forces in a symbiotic relationship that has given us what Guy Debord calls a “society of the spectacle.” The popular culture market has hijacked religious symbolism as added value and has domesticated religious rhetoric in the secular sphere. Thus secularism returns by the back door in the guise of commodified popular culture. Over time, an apocalyptic, Manichean narrative matrix has evolved that can be detected in Hollywood films or in Black rap as well as in foreign policy. It is characterized by a melodramatic battle between the forces of Good and Evil culminating in Armageddon and Christ’s second coming. Manichean melodrama rules

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both popular culture and religion as a formative paradigm. In one of his last films before he converted to politics Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name is J.C. and his job is to save a virgin from being impregnated by the devil.

Fifth: The religious springs of patriotism Over time there has been a growing fusion of millenarian and democratic passions and their incorporation into a popular patriotism. “Thus religious zeal,” wrote de Tocqueville, “is perpetually warmed in the United States by the fires of patriotism” (de Tocqueville 1945: I, 317). Since the 1960s various religious micro-organizations that had previously been weak and politically inconsequential networked into what is known as the “Christian Coalition,” and thus united they embarked on a march through the political institutions. In order to combat excessive secularization and moral relativism the crisis management of the religious right called for simple answers and urged a return to so-called fundamentals, pitting a conservative moralism against relativism and “intelligent design” against evolution. In the midst of creeping secularity the Christian Right promised to restore “moral clarity,” as George W. Bush put it (Pally 2010). The Christian Coalition managed to mobilize voters with emotional appeals to morality and patriotism. Politically speaking the new religious mobilization proved to be particularly beneficial to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Stimulated by eschatological fantasies that were popularized by the bestselling Left Behind novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the religious right has had an influence on a number of foreign policy issues such as the role of the UN, globalization, NAFTA, ecology, the Iraq war, and Middle East policy (Boyer 2003: 10–11). It is telling that the Antichrist in the Left Behind series is a polyglot, cosmopolitan intellectual from Romania, Nicolae Carpathia, who speaks six languages, believes in liberal values, and is the designated Secretary General of the United Nations. The religious right understands the United States as a redeemer nation that should make the world “safe for democracy”: the slogans “Iraqi Freedom” and “mission accomplished” feed from the same religious register. The Wilsonianism in boots that gave us the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures was buttressed by a general willingness to justify unilateral violence on religious grounds, a new faith that during the presidency of George Bush joined the lex talionis of the Old Testament with the bellicosity of the neo-conservatives. Patriotism and religion have become partners within the American identity, a symbiosis that has evolved since 1789. “In America,” writes Samuel Huntington, “the common sources of religious and political belief give political relevance to religion and add religious passion to politics” (1981: 166). Hence the President is expected to speak as the high priest of civil religion, particularly when addressing matters pertaining to what Gunnar Myrdal identified as the “American Creed.”


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This fusion resulted in a sacralization of national rhetoric, which has over time become a habit of the American executive office. The ex cathedra style sanctifies and legitimates civil content. Europeans tend to find such executive rhetoric hypocritical and hard to stomach. Behind this development we see the contours of Madison’s intentions. A spin-off of Madison’s cunning was to keep the republic united by an invisible bond of religiously based patriotism. In sum, a liberated and popular religiosity helped to hold the nation together at the very grass-roots level. What Madison could not foresee is the degree of the commodification and popularization of religion which would pull its doctrinal teeth and by expanding its acceptance trivialize its religious doctrine. Seymour Martin Lipset understood the atrophy of religious doctrine in the wake of commodification as a quiet form of secularization (1979: 151–57).

Sixth: Megachurches and the new realignment An intriguing new development is the phenomenal growth of so-called megachurches. They make skilful use of the new consumer-oriented media and of new marketing strategies, such as McDonaldization and franchising in the selling of God. To conquer the market the megachurches had to learn the business of selling Jesus, primarily via the new media and with the aid of new advertising strategies. Jon Butler quips: “Only in America was Christianity hawked as a ‘bargain’” (cited in Moore 1994: back cover). Therefore an MBA-driven market language has become perfectly normal in religious discourse and has acquired, in the view of the majority, God’s sanction. It is telling that some of the pastors of these megachurches hold degrees from business rather than from divinity schools. And it shows. The new crowd has graduated from selling Jesus to the marketing of churches and of religious ideologies as commodities. The vanguard in the business now teaches the art of mobilizing religious paying customers: Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, has a $48 million budget and attracts more than 21,000 people to its weekly services. It services members from 90 denominations, which means that they need to downplay religious differences by lowering the doctrinal thresholds. The executive pastor Greg Hawkins is a Stanford MBA and an ex-consultant at McKinsey. The Willow Creek Association is headed by Jim Melado who holds an MBA from Harvard and who runs workshops on methods for creating more effective religious markets (Business Week 2008). In current US public discourse morality and authenticity drive out economics and income disparity as orientations. The battle line runs between Joe Sixpack and effete snobs, between genuine, authentic, religious folk and a Frenchspeaking Volvo-driving Eastern establishment. Not class but lifestyle marks the cutting edge of difference. And here the political bottom line is no longer income or class membership but moral authenticity, a religious marker, which may be

200 Berndt Ostendorf instrumentalized by politicians. In that sense religious sincerity serves as a particularly effective form of self-authentication as a full-blooded American. Finally, the need to mobilize and please religious customers from a variety of cultures or classes has led to the inclusion of all sorts of therapeutic lifestyle services which have given some of the new megachurches the aura of a metaphysical wellness club. The market orientation has enhanced the service function of religions with several consequences. It has toned down religious doctrine, and it has stabilized an I’m-ok-you’re-ok tolerance. Megachurches make available a post-secular lifestyle faith or a wellness religion without having to submit to the doctrinal rigor or complexity of traditional religious authority. At the same time the commercial sphere has hijacked religious symbolism as a mystic or charismatic added value. Such religious symbolism, Graham Ward writes, “lives in commercial business, gothic, and Sci Fi fantasy, in health clubs, themed-bars and architectural design, among happy hour drinkers, tattooists, ecologists, and cyberpunks. Religion has become a special effect, inseparably bound to an entertainment value” (2004: 133). This post-secular commodification of religious symbolism, he adds, serves as “an aesthetic diversion from the profound uncertainties, insecurities, and indeterminacies of postmodern living” (133). Even the recipients of the chief icon of commodification, the Grammy, consider it their first duty to thank God—usually in tears, for added sincerity. Moreover the body–soul relationship has become a major preoccupation of dieting Americans. Weight reduction has acquired a religious legitimacy and given a boost to a multimillion dollar Christian fitness industry. Many people are making weight loss a religious duty by enrolling in Christian diet programs and reading Christian diet literature like Fit for God and What Would Jesus Eat? Not surprisingly, Jesus does not touch pork, avoids red meat, but loves extra virgin olive oil, fresh salads, fruit, and plenty of fish.6 The new religious market is full of political surprises. Among evangelicals and pentecostals a new, liberal, and ecological movement has emerged that, while remaining conservative on certain key issues such as abortion, clearly has a progressive social agenda close to the classic Social Gospel (Pally 2010: 12). That Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church was invited to say the prayer at the inauguration of President Obama is an indication of that political realignment. What unites Obama and Warren? Obama calls on civic patriotism and Republican virtues, he believes in a national covenant, the beloved community, and common good: this is classic liberalism couched in the rhetoric and cadences of a civil religion represented by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Like Lincoln he defines the US as a nation defined by “propositions,” a nation, though still imperfect, that continues striving to close the IvI gap between high ideals and human-alltoo-human institutions (Huntington 1981: 39–41). And despite allegations by the Republicans he is anything but a liberal secularist. He writes in his autobiography that as a young man he was drawn to the power of the African American religious


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tradition and its power to spur social change. With King he insists on the reform promise of African American religious institutions and its motivating civil religion. Faith he understands therefore as an active, palpable agent of reform. This is where he connects with the new evangelicals. Therefore these new megachurches, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church or Willow Creek, should not be underestimated or confused with the religious right. While the religious right is estimated to claim a mere 13%, the new evangelicals amount to 25% of the population. They mirror the social consequences of a recent demographic shift: Today the country is less white, more ecological, less homophobic, less racist, and more multicultural than in the 1960s. Recently evangelicals nationwide signed a manifesto strongly supporting a pluralist America. The manifesto approves of a secular government, though with a strong influence of religion on civil society, and proposes to keep a safe distance from political parties in order not to become a useful idiot of politics. In line with their approval of the First Amendment the new evangelicals advocate a denominational pluralism. They are more class- and income-conscious and their concern about poverty is high. Saddleback Church has started a mobilization called PEACE: its goal is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality and improve maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, and develop a global partnership for development. This is quite in line with Obama’s social agenda and with the political priorities of the Social Gospel. Critical points remain such as abortion or faith-based initiatives, and here Obama and Warren “agree to disagree.” The National Association of Evangelicals today embraces 45,000 churches and some 90 denominations. Most noticeable is a great increase of Latinos, many of them Catholics. In short the evangelical megachurches such as Willow Creed and Saddleback reach out to more progressive constituencies in politics than did the Christian right. The comprehensive new evangelical policy dovetails with Obama’s conviction that the culture wars which Obama dismisses as the psychodrama of the baby boomers are counterproductive. As Obama’s favourite president Abraham Lincoln had it, “a house divided cannot stand.”

Conclusion: American religion between democratization and commodification The separation of church and state and the discharge of religion into the free market had, as we may now conclude, long range consequences—some intended, others unintended. The establishment clause reduced the control of religious groups over law, politics, welfare, education, and sciences; yet it also set up the public sphere as the arena for a perpetual debate over the extent of free exercise

202 Berndt Ostendorf of religion. One consequence is that this freedom in and of the religious market leads to a permanent democratization of religious energies and to the fanning out of religious supply for every possible cultural and political demand. The free exercise of religion becomes ever more a personal choice, whether to be religious at all, and the market responds to such individual passions by providing ever new religious lifestyles. In line with postFordist consumption patterns we witness a religious clustering of America (Weiss 1988). Hence we may expect a permanent creative innovation of religious supply from the free market in line with the demands of lifestyle politics.7 The toning down of doctrinal differences and their Aufhebung in therapeutic services ushers in what Philip Rieff has called the “triumph of the therapeutic.” This leads to a lowering of thresholds between the faiths and encourages their reaggregation in megachurches or in a National Association of Evangelicals as part of the ongoing political realignment. In order to avoid religious wars among the faiths and sects, there is a tacit strengthening of the pragmatic common ground, the common ethical denominator of the so-called Judaeo-Christian tradition. American denominations, who by virtue of market pressures are committed to permanent growth, aim for greater demographic breadth than doctrinal depth. The question remains: Does the liberation of religion in a free market lead to its democratization or to its commodification? A continued public debate over this question is part and parcel of the dynamic relationship between religion and politics in America. This may well continue to irritate Europeans, but it guarantees the remarkable energy level of religious passions in the United States. I would like to close this archeology of religious energy by quoting the American creed rendered in the form of a national prayer. A clerk in the House of Representatives, William Tyler Page, penned this imitation of the Apostles’ creed in 1918. Most contemporary Americans who consider themselves patriots will feel comfortable with the high-toned sentiments expressed. I believe in the United States of America as a Government of the people by the people, for the people; whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes. I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it; to support its Constitution; to obey its laws; to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies. (Huntington 1981: 159) But such patriotic bathos does not explain all of America. The IvI gap, the incongruity between high ideals and rotten circumstances, is the wellspring of creedal


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passions, but is also the source of American humor (Huntington 1981: 65). The New Yorker, probably the most secular institution in the US, can be depended on to view all American foibles including Madison’s choice with an unsentimental and deconstructive gaze. Donald Reilly’s cartoon, although some 35 years old, is surprisingly topical. It speaks to the high ideals of religious freedom and to their hidden mundane motives within the double-edged American dream. Two Pilgrims travel to the New World on the Mayflower, one says to the other: “Religious freedom is my immediate goal, but my long-range plan is to go into real estate.”

Notes 1. Joel Barlow is best known as the author of the Vision of Columbus (1787), reprinted 1807 as the Columbiad, an epic poem on the destiny of the young republic. A friend of Jefferson and Paine, he shared their disdain for established churches and like them was a strong advocate of the separation of church and state for the sake of inspiring “the passion of commerce” (see Boston 1997: 11–14). 2. See also Madison’s earlier letter of 1774 to William Bradford on Liberty of Conscience (Koch 1965: 435–36), or Jefferson’s deism in his letter of 1803 to Doctor Benjamin Rush on “The Morals of Jesus” (Koch 1965: 344–46). 3. According to the New York Times of March 12, 2010, the Texas Board of Education voted on a social studies curriculum that insists on the Christian intentions of the founders and on the divinely preordained mission of America (see Shorto 2010). 4. The historical dimension of religious formation is explored in greater detail in Ostendorf (2004–5). 5. As de Tocqueville noted, the new American political and economic order was based on a popular mandate, not on a feudal order or on religious estates. Although the exercise of political power remained for a good while in the hands of gentlemen of property and standing, a class to which the Founding Fathers belonged, popular culture rode to its victory on the coattails of republican self-government and popular sovereignty. This difference in political semantics revolutionized not only the political but also the religious order and redirected, in the long run, the undertow of US political culture (Ostendorf 2001). 6. “Fat People Don’t Go to Heaven!” screamed a headline in the tabloid Globe in November 2000. The story recounted the success of the Weigh Down Workshop, the nation’s largest Christian diet corporation and the subject of extensive press coverage from Larry King Live to the New Yorker (Griffith 2004). 7. J. Gordon Melton divides American religious practice into twenty groups that share a family resemblance with regard to “heritage, theology and lifestyle” (Encyclopedia of American Religions 2009).

Bibliography Anderson, B. C. (2004) “Secular Europe, Religious America,” Public Interest 155: 143–59. Bacevich, A. and Prodromou, E. (2004) “God is Not Neutral: Religion and US Foreign Policy after 9/11,” Orbis 48(1): 43–54.

204 Berndt Ostendorf Bellah, R., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W., Swidler, A., and Tipton, S. M. (1985) Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Berkeley: University of California Press. Boston, R. (1997) “Joel Barlow and the Treaty with Tripoli. A Tangled Tale of Pirates, a Poet and the True Meaning of the First Amendment,” Church & State 50(6): 11–14. Boyer, P. S. (2003) “John Darby Meets Saddam Hussein: When US Foreign Policy Meets Bible Prophecy,” The Chronicle of Higher Education February 14: B10–11. Brooks, D. (2000) Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, New York: Simon and Schuster. Bryce, J. (1888) The American Commonwealth, London: Macmillan. Business Week. Online. Available: http://images.businessweek.com/mz/05/21/0521_79 covsto_a.jpg (accessed June 2010). The Encyclopedia of American Religions (2009) 8th ed., Detroit, MI: Gale. Finke, R. and Stark, R. (1992) The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in our Religious Economy, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Griffith, R. M. (2004) Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity, Berkeley: University of California Press. Holmes, D. L. (2006) The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, New York: Oxford University Press. Huntington, S. (1981) American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Koch, A. (ed.) (1965) The American Enlightenment, New York: George Braziller. Kohut, A. and Stokes, B. (2006) “A Blessed People,” America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked, New York: Times Book. Lipset, S. M. (1979) The First New Nation, New York: W. W. Norton. Mead, S. (1967) “The Nation with the Soul of a Church,” Church History 36: 262–83. Moore, R. L. (1994) Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture, New York: Oxford University Press. Ostendorf, B. (2001) “Why is American Popular Culture so Popular? A View from Europe,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 46(3): 339–66. —— (2004–5) “A Nation with the Soul of a Church: The Strange Career of Religion in America: A View from Europe,” Rivista di Studi Anglo-Americani 15–16: 169–96. Pally, M. (2010) “Amerika im Dienste Gottes. Auch unter Obama verfolgen evangelikale Kirchen und Staat gemeinsame Ziele—Schutz der Armen und der Umwelt,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (January 5/6): 12. Rush, B. (1786) Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic. Online. Available: http://www.schoolchoices.org/roo/rush.htm (accessed June 2010). Shorto, R. (2010) “How Christian Were They?” The New York Times, February 14. Tocqueville, A. de (1945 [1835, 1840]) Democracy in America, 2 vols., New York: Vintage Books. Ward, G. (2004) “Postsecularity? The New Public Faces of Religion,” in M. Hoelzl and G. Ward (eds.) The New Visibility of Religion in European Democratic Cultures, Manchester: Continuum. Weiss, M. J. (1988) The Clustering of America, New York: Harper and Row.

17 Sartre’s “Morality and History” Ethics for postcolonial times Patrick Williams

What use is our thought, if not for humanity? Mahmoud Darwish, “The Hoopoe” (2003) Humanity, we say, is to be made. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Morality and History” (1964)

Why talk about Sartre in a postcolonial context? The man himself was notoriously complex and contradictory, so perhaps it is fitting that his place here should be less than straightforward. On the one hand, his inclusion as philosopher could appear the epitome of the (over-)obvious—what, after all, could be more Sartrean than the theme of freedom?, or of the outdated—what, really, has Sartre to say on the subject of ethics after Being and Nothingness? In a similar vein, his position in relation to postcolonial studies can appear unclear. On the one hand, it is claimed that he is absent, neglected: “Although overlooked by critics in postcolonial studies, Sartre’s contribution to the debate on colonialism is of great importance” (Haddour 2001: 7). On the other, he is apparently far too present: “Still the dominant conceptual frameworks of postcolonial theory [here construed as altogether unsatisfactory] remain tethered to assumptions embedded in the first form of anticolonial theory to assume a major role in Western intellectual history, that of Jean-Paul Sartre and his associates” (Wehrs 2003: 761). Another reason for not talking about Sartre here would be his apparently unacceptable legacy, whether in postcolonial studies—“only by breaking with its Sartrean legacy can postcolonial theory nurture a literary criticism that takes seriously non-Western historicity, agency, and rationality” (Wehrs 2003: 770)— or in relation to Palestine, as Joseph Massad has claimed: “The intellectual and political commitments inaugurated by a pro-Zionist Sartre . . . remain emblematic of many of the attitudes of leftist and liberal European intellectuals today” (Massad 2003). Arguably, however, both of these accusations are incorrect, as

206 Patrick Williams this essay will attempt to demonstrate, as it discusses Sartre both as a philosopher of ethics with contemporary relevance and as a postcolonial thinker who takes the non-West seriously. The wider context for Sartre’s unpublished Rome lecture that is the focus of this essay was his continuing radicalization, particularly in terms of anticolonial theory and practice: from Black Orpheus to Colonialism and Neocolonialism; from Algeria to Cuba and Vietnam; the more immediate one was the attempt to articulate a different ethics for a different world—“different” firstly in terms of the changes since he wrote Being and Nothingness, but “different” also in so far as it was an ethics for a world not yet come into existence. Sartre was also aiming to produce a different ethics in terms of a better ethics—more useful, relevant, or true. This was partly for himself, not least because he had still not written the book to fill the gap in ethical thinking noted in Being and Nothingness. At the same time, it encapsulated Sartre’s notion in Critique of Dialectical Reason of a “spiralling return” to older aspects of life and thought, but at a higher level. More generally, however, the project of formulating a materialist or Marxist ethics aimed at providing a better model of ethics for the contemporary Left. This essay will briefly discuss a number of the key positions from Sartre’s lecture. Some of these may sound familiar: echoes, perhaps, of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, or the preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, or even of Fanon himself, or the result of the ways in which Sartrean ideas have become part of postcolonial perspectives. It is, nevertheless, important to understand the lecture first and foremost as an intervention in ethical philosophy, where its implications are particularly radical, as well as to see it both as a text of its own time, and one which retains the power to speak to ours. The particular ways in which the text relates to its time are also crucial: ethical questions are not eternal, says Sartre, and Kant’s ethics are no longer relevant to our world—hence the need, just mentioned, to formulate a different ethics for a different world. Even contemporary ethics may be inadequate, however, in ways that recall Marx’s comments in the Theses on Feuerbach and the problems with both idealist philosophy and earlier materialism, variously construed as de-historicized, ungrounded in social reality, over-abstracted, or over-individualizing. All of these could apply to the currently fashionable (not least in postcolonial circles) ethics of Levinas, for instance. Sartre’s aim is to unite ethics, politics, and history. The extent of work still to be done to overturn dominant practices of separating them is shown by, for example, the contributors to a collection like The Turn to Ethics, who persist in opposing the terms, or by Ronald Aronson in his introduction to the Sartre interviews published as Hope Now, where he says, “On the theoretical level, Marxism is replaced by ethics” (in Sartre and Lévy 2007: 34). Against de-realized and de-historicized modes of thought, the Rome lecture grounds itself firstly in a series of case studies drawn from contemporary reality.

Sartre’s “Morality and History” 207 These move from the relatively mundane (schoolgirls and telling the truth), to the distinctly more problematic (cases of thalidomide-related infanticide in Liège in the 1950s), to the painfully unresolved psycho-social wound in French society of the time (the Algerian war). A second form of grounding is in the analysis of systems of domination—unsurprisingly, perhaps, the capitalist and the colonialist— which make the construction of a better ethics simultaneously so necessary and so difficult. Finally, there is the lecture’s insistence on the centrality of human action as praxis—productive, creative, potentially progressive. Another unsatisfactory mode of ethical thought is “ethics by edict,” typified for Sartre by Kant (once again) and Nietzsche, which produces universalizing imperatives. Against these, Sartre champions the norms of everyday moral experience. Norms, he argues, prescribe acts, and hence futures, given as unconditionally possible (since it must be possible for you to do what the norm enjoins you to do), and these combined elements of action and future-orientation structure much of the lecture’s content. So important is human agency, especially as an ensemble of actions, projects, and life choices, that Sartre sees the struggle between praxis (creative acts tending towards an unconditioned future of human self-determination) and the practicoinert (actions structured by repetition, regulation, reification, and systematization) as constituting the “motor of history” just as much as class struggle. History has no reality except as the unconditioned possibility for man to realise himself in his full autonomy, in other words as praxis dissolving the practico-inert in proportion as it produces it. Or if you prefer, as the praxis of all men in association. (Sartre 1964: 46) Despite no longer constituting the principal motor of history, class struggle retains its importance nonetheless: “Morality—as the direction of history and the structure of historical praxis—takes root in the exploited classes and their struggle against the dominating classes” (46). Even in those situations where positive praxis overcomes the practico-inert, however, there is always the danger that it can become solidified or reified back into that state from which it so laboriously emerged. Similarly, following the ethical norm projects a pure, open future of possible self-determination, but it can also involve mere repetition of, for example, past social roles—the practico-inert in another guise—leading to a more limited, predictable future of repetition of past praxis (now reified into the practico-inert). It is nevertheless the case that history and ethics are mixed together . . . True ethics founds and dissolves alienated moralities in the sense that it is the

208 Patrick Williams direction of history, that is to say the refusal of all repetition in the name of the unconditioned possibility of making man. (47) Human beings function as both products and producers of the system which contains and constrains them into different modes of “sub-humanity.” For Sartre, however, human praxis always offers the potential for hope: Humanity, we say, is to be made . . . [It] is the end—unknowable, but graspable as orientation—for a being that defines itself by praxis, that is, for the incomplete and alienated men that we are. (48) Not only that, praxis has its moral dimension: “Morality and praxis are one and the same, in the sense that they define man as that always future being who cannot not freely desire his unconditioned future” (50). Repetition of the practico-inert as the simple process of how life is lived means that both the dominating and the subordinate classes tend to maintain the existing capitalist system. Despite that, they aim at radically divergent futures: the dominating, as beneficiaries of the system, want more of the same; the subordinated, to the extent that they are not ideologically co-opted, want something altogether different. In this respect, the proletariat are both the products of the system and its “radical contestation.” The main section of the Rome lecture, “The Roots of Ethics,” looks at colonialism in Algeria as its major case study. Here, Sartre returns to the idea, articulated in Situations V, of colonialism as a system, and one which has racism as its functional morality. It is a system which produces doubly exploited, doubly dehumanized individuals: colonial capitalism is simultaneously premised on the exploitation of the metropolitan working class, and, in Sartre’s terms, the “surexploitation” [super-/over-exploitation] of the colonized, their reduction to less than subsistence level in order for the colony to generate sufficient profit. This in turn requires the rigorous maintenance of the colonized in the position of the subor non-human, and not only does racism become a functional necessity of keeping the system going, it also, very ironically, becomes a moral duty for the colonizers in this context. The colonized are subject to especially acute forms of need, ranging from the material (the product of their immiserated, super-exploited state), to the ethical/ existential need for recognition as human (which a racist colonialism has to deny). Sartre sees need, and the struggle for its satisfaction, as the basis of all ethics: “The root of morality is in need, in other words in the animality of the human. It is need which poses humanity as its own end, and praxis as the domination of the universe to be realised through labour” (79). Recognition of the importance of need occurs earlier in Sartre’s work, for

Sartre’s “Morality and History” 209 instance in a piece like “To be hungry already means that you want to be free” (Sartre 2001b: 8), which in turn carries very strong overtones of the famous passage in Capital volume III on the process of “wresting the realm of freedom from the realm of necessity.” For Sartre, the “hunger” is for true freedom, not those “mystificatory” partial freedoms which bourgeois society offers, and which apply only to a small section of the population. The fundamental ethical drive towards the production of integral humanity as the fulfillment of need necessarily, then, brings the colonized into conflict with the colonial system, whose survival precisely demands that the needs of the colonized not be satisfied. In the particular case of the (unavoidable) Algerian conflict, Sartre identifies three stages: revolt, assimilation, and the “dialectic of the impossible,” and the process itself resembles a dialectic, with the (unsuccessful) polar opposites of the first two leading on to the enormously challenging but potentially integrative/synthesizing possibilities of the third. Revolt occurs in the immediate aftermath of occupation. It aims at the recovery of lost independence, culture, and traditions. It fails, not only for military reasons but also, in Sartre’s terms, because its backward-looking aims contradict the future-orientation of the ethical drive. For Sartre, it is a “blind revolt,” organized on regressive principles. After the failure of revolt, there is a move to the opposite extreme: the attempt to achieve a posited “wholeness” in emulating the colonizers and becoming assimilated into the colonial system. Unfortunately, the desire of the colonized to be like “those people there”—the colonizers, seemingly all-powerful, wealthy, civilized, possessors of rights and protected by armies—is a mistaken one. Their attempt fails, not least because of the functional racism of the system which maintains the colonized in the position of the sub-human, and which will always refuse to accept the full humanity of “the native.” It also fails because it is, in Sartre’s terms, “a deviation”: instead of pursuing the ethical drive towards full humanity, the colonized simply opt for a slice of colonial power, not recognizing that their models to be emulated are, in their racist, colonialist condition, very far indeed from the integral beings which they (all) might aspire to become. This ethical deviation reveals the colonized as doubly alienated: firstly by the processes of colonial over-exploitation already mentioned; and secondly in their misrecognition of the “alienated morality” of their oppressors as a possible example of fully realized humanity. The “Dialectic of the Impossible” begins with the moment of realism: the recognition of the impossibility of the other two approaches—retrogressive revolt and alienated assimilation. Other blocked alternatives include, on the one hand, reformism and, on the other, revolution. At the same time, consciousness of a different form of impossibility emerges—the impossibility of living ethically in conditions of fundamental scarcity and ongoing oppression. In such a state, the future

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of the colonized in terms of satisfied need and the production of integral humanity can only be achieved through their radical rejection of the system which oppresses them and denies their human status. Their positive ethical norm is then, in Marx’s terms, the negation of the negation. Life as such is experienced as impossible by the Algerians. Negating this negation involves them in a radical next step: if their lives are declared to be of no value by the colonizers, then they have nothing to lose in being prepared to die in pursuit of their aims. Their willingness to forfeit “valueless” lives in support of living values points to the possibility of integral humanity “beyond the impossibility,” and marks the failure of the system that dehumanizes them. Colonialism may alienate and atomize them, but their collective ethically grounded praxis signals both the end of their condition as colonized and of the system which colonizes them, as a first step in the long process of the creation of the wholeness of the human: “There will be no integral humanity until every man is a whole man for all other men” (112). This is a powerful ethical model. Indeed, as Stone and Bowman, in their pioneering work on the Rome lecture, say, We find the Rome Lecture Notes to be better argued, conceptually richer, and philosophically more consistent than any published work on ethics by Sartre. Its radical challenge to the modern tradition of ethical theorising will, we believe, re-invigorate ethical inquiry generally . . . As for this work’s contemporary bearing, we think Sartre’s dialectical ethics might well be considered the theory of ethics proper to Marxism. (Stone and Bowman 1986: 212) Be that as it may, how can we see what Sartre is attempting, as, in the words of the essay’s title, an “ethics for postcolonial times”? There are a number of different ways in which this could be seen to be the case. Among the most obvious are the following. Firstly, Sartre, as mentioned, always wanted “to write for his own time,” and that time was, among other things, the period of developing postcolonialism. The 1960s was the major moment in the process of decolonization in terms of the numbers of former colonies achieving independence. In Africa alone, Kenya, Algeria, Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda had most recently become free, preceded by Ghana, Nigeria, Congo, Senegal, Tanzania, and others. Formulating his theories in relation to arguably the most important of contemporary events was the best way for Sartre to develop the historically grounded ethics to which he aspired. Then there is postcolonialism as theory and practice of resistance. Firstly, “Morality and History” includes the recognition of the existence of indigenous resistance from the earliest moments of colonial conquest—as argued, for

Sartre’s “Morality and History” 211 example, by Ashcroft et al. in The Empire Writes Back (1989), but not always recognized by other critics—though it takes pains to point out the limitations of the earliest forms. Secondly, and most importantly, the lecture emphatically states the ethical nature of resistance to colonial exploitation in the project to bring to being an integral humanity. Thirdly, there is resistance in the form of the rejection of a swathe of Western ideologies of superiority and progress which aim to legitimate oppression. The unacceptability of this particular form of resistance is demonstrated by the fury that Sartre provoked: remorseless criticism of the West by one of the great contemporary Western intellectuals led to him being dubbed “the most hated man in France.” Another way of thinking about the lecture as articulating an ethics for postcolonial times would be in terms of postcolonialism as an anticipatory discourse for an as-yet unrealized condition (as argued, for instance, in Childs and Williams 1996). As Sartre says in “Morality and History,” “humanity . . . is to be made” (1964: 48). This is a continuing and clearly far from finalized project, and ethics is central to its eventual successful resolution. A properly-realized postcolonial condition would be an absolutely necessary (if not automatically sufficient) stage in the making of an integral humanity. Perhaps the most shocking example of non-realized postcolonialism, as well as one of the greatest ethical scandals of our time, is Palestine, and in the final section of this essay I would like briefly to consider the question of Sartre’s problematic relation to Palestine. Following the extent of his involvement in the Algerian fight for independence, it was felt in certain quarters that he might offer similar support for the Palestinian struggle in the period preceding the Six Day War of 1967, and even more so in the wake of the war. Sartre’s response was considered equivocal at best, and the absence of the anticipated full support for the Palestinian cause disappointed many, such as the group of Egyptian intellectuals who had invited him to Cairo in 1967. There exists, subsequently, a consensus that Sartre did not support the Palestinians at all. This owes much to Edward Said’s stated disappointment when he met the aging, and ailing, Sartre in 1980 (Said 2000), and is repeated by others such as Benita Parry, and amplified by people like Joseph Massad. Massad, for example, calls Sartre “anti-Palestinian” and “pro-Zionist” (Massad 2003), and finds him guilty of creating a legacy of blindness among European intellectuals to the reality of the changed nature of European Jews, operating pre-eminently as oppressive colonizers rather than traumatized Holocaust survivors. Quite why Sartre should be held responsible for the opinions of his contemporaries, such as Derrida and Bourdieu, is not at all clear. Beyond that, the idea that he was either simply anti-Palestinian, or pro-Zionist (as opposed to variably pro-Jewish) seems to me entirely unproven. If, however, for the sake of argument, we accept that the accusations might be correct, how could we account for such a terrible ethical lapse on Sartre’s part?

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The most obvious explanation, suggested by Said, Parry, and others, is the extent of Sartre’s investment in a pro-Jewish position, both in and after Anti-Semite and Jew. The degree of investment, was, however, somewhat variable: Sartre’s main interest in writing Anti-Semite and Jew, as he points out in Hope Now, was in attacking the anti-Semite, not in defending the Jew. In the post-war world, however, the ethical/moral power of the recent suffering of the Jews was such that the reluctance of any intellectual to risk appearing anti-Semitic becomes understandable. In Derrida and others, as Massad points out, this turns into the ability to maintain seemingly contradictory positions simultaneously: voicing support for the Palestinians while also asserting that the existence of the Israeli state “it goes without saying, must henceforth be recognised by all” (Massad 2003). Sartre, too, while feeling able to criticize specific Israeli policies, was not prepared to countenance the wholesale destruction of the Israeli state. A second possible explanation for Sartre’s failure to adopt an appropriately anticolonial stance in relation to Palestine might be found in the general lack of awareness or information about the fundamentally colonial nature of the Israeli occupation, something which, in the case of his own society, Sartre felt was the fault of the French government and press. Although the first Zionist Congress in 1897 explicitly created both the World Zionist Organization and a Programme for the Colonization of Palestine, vehement denials that Zionism had any colonialist intentions continue to this day. The presentation of the military occupation of Palestine in 1948 as the “national liberation struggle” of the Jewish people, coming as it did just months after the achievement of independence by India, Pakistan, Ceylon, and Burma, was ideologically highly persuasive (if factually less convincing). In fact, it appears that Sartre was aware of the colonialist nature of the Zionist project, and felt that “The catastrophe lies in the fact that this solution [Zionism] came into being in another age, an age when the colonised peoples had begun to gain awareness and colonialism was ending” (Sartre in Elbendary 2000). Another possible reason why Sartre and others were unable to evaluate the situation clearly and act accordingly lies in the dominance of Israeli self-representations, especially in the media. The remarkable power of the Israeli “narrative” has been commented on by Said, particularly in terms of its ability to prevent the emergence of a corresponding narrative from the Palestinian side. The constituent elements of the former are well known. Repeatedly revealed for the lies they are, but still likely to be presented as truth, they include: “the national liberation struggle” just mentioned; “the empty land” (mysteriously devoid of Palestinians, making it available for settlement); “making the desert bloom” (Israelis compensating for the supposed Palestinian failure to farm the land properly); “purity of arms” (the Israeli Defence Force as an “ethical” army); and “the Second Holocaust” (which Palestinians and others allegedly hoped to visit on the Israelis). The power of the narrative is shown by the fact that the Second Holocaust claim, not exactly the

Sartre’s “Morality and History” 213 most credible, was apparently believed by Sartre: “Many people of goodwill felt that the war would start by Arab aggression and end with the rapid destruction of Israel and genocide of the Jews” (Sartre, in Elbendary 2000). The fact was, however, that even in 1948 the Israeli high command knew that they had the military capability to defeat their under-equipped and inadequately organized Arab enemies, and 1967 was a good opportunity to demonstrate this in spectacular fashion (see, for example, Pappé 2006). The remarkable repetitiveness of the repertoire of assertions offers a classic example of the practico-inert operating as ideology, endlessly claiming the moral high ground, but in fact only revealing the persistence of what Sartre calls “alienated moralities.” The power of the narrative is such that an academic who—in his clear-sighted philosophical way—takes Sartre to task for a lack of clarity in his position on violence can offer this as an image of the situation in Palestine/Israel: In the Middle East, to use but one example, a small, historically oppressed yet now technologically sophisticated people, intimidated by killings and “suicide bombings” and other threats to its security, has, in the name of necessary “self-defence” or counter-violence, demolished the offices of the Political Authority as well as major towns of the neighbouring poor and oppressed people striving to attain legitimacy as a state. (Santoni 2003: ix) The image of “intimidated” Israel and its “necessary” state violence is the same legitimating discourse used for the latest murderous onslaught on Gaza, and so much in between. The power of the image of Israel and its accompanying narrative to disable ethical judgement extends to a philosopher like Levinas, who is so strongly associated with the ethics of responsibility towards the Other. In an interview carried out just days after the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982, Levinas—although his answers appear to dodge and fudge almost every question put to him—declines to consider the Palestinians as Other: “My definition of the other is completely different. The other is the neighbour, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you’re for the other, you’re for the neighbour” (Levinas 1989: 294). If Sartre appears to forget the Palestinians, they don’t forget him: Mahmoud Darwish, for example, writing of the Israeli attacks on the West Bank in 2002, interpolates a moment of philosophical irony into the brutalities of military incursions: “Soldiers measure the distance between being and nothingness / With a tank’s gun-sight” (Darwish 2010). Arguably, however, Sartre does defend the Palestinian position. Noureddine Lamouchi, for instance, in Jean Paul Sartre et le tiers monde, notes Sartre’s support

214 Patrick Williams for Palestinian national rights. In 1967, before the Six Day War, he commissioned a special issue of Les Temps Modernes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In an interview from June 1967 with Lutfi El-Kholi, the editor of Al Tali’a, he called for the right of return of all Palestinians. In the context of widespread euphoria at the Israeli victory, this was a radical, potentially inflammatory act, even if, at one level, it did no more than echo the much-repeated (and much-rejected by Israel and the United States) legitimation of the right of return embodied in UN Resolution 194 (Elbendary 2000). Sartre’s most outspoken, certainly inflammatory—and most surprising—defence of Palestinians came a few years later, in the aftermath of the attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics by members of the Black September movement, the first instance of terrorism as global media event: It is therefore politically accurate to say that a state of war exists between Israel and the Palestinians. In this war the Palestinians’ only weapon is terrorism. It is a terrible weapon, but the oppressed poor have no other . . . This abandoned, betrayed, exiled people can show its courage and the force of its hate only by organising deadly attacks. (Sartre 2003: 7) To some, all this will look like nothing more than the return of the Sartre of the Preface to The Wretched of the Earth, recklessly advocating unjustifiable violence— a view that owes much to Hannah Arendt’s peremptory dismissal of Sartre in On Violence. It also ignores the way in which “respectable” leaders of liberation struggles have used similar arguments: Nelson Mandela, for instance, in Long Walk to Freedom, talks of the inevitability of “fighting fire with fire” since non-violent methods are routinely (violently) suppressed. Unlike so many commentators, however, Sartre points out the hypocritical double “moral” standard in operation in relation to violence in Palestine and Israel: It must be said that for those who agree with the terrorist attacks to which the Israeli establishment and the Arab dictatorships have reduced the Palestinians, it seems perfectly outrageous that the French press and a segment of opinion should judge the Munich attack an intolerable outrage while one has read dry reports of strikes in Tel Aviv that cost several human lives. (7) This is useful as a partial corrective, though it neglects to mention the stateterrorist response in the Israeli air strikes on Lebanon and Syria which followed, killing hundreds, as well as the campaign of assassinations of individuals held to be connected with the attack on the Olympics (as immortalized by Spielberg in Munich, 2006). Sartre concludes his defence of the Palestinians by blaming the German police, rather than the Black September fighters, for all the deaths. The

Sartre’s “Morality and History” 215 fact that that account is not universally accepted, especially by Israelis, makes Sartre’s support for it all the more courageous. The perennially thorny question of terrorism as the apparent extreme of unethical violence leads us back to the final sections of “Morality and History.” There, Sartre notes the way in which the ongoing violence of the colonialist state (or, we could add, the Israeli state in the case of the Palestinians) is lived and internalized by the colonized population as terror. In a manner which inevitably recalls The Wretched of the Earth, the originary violence is unquestionably that of the colonizers. Further, its standard mode of operation is terror directed against a civilian population incapable of defending itself. In a Fanonian framework of the constrained reciprocity of colonial and anticolonial violence, then, the colonizers should expect nothing less than terror in return. In these extreme conditions, the right to resist appears as ethically given, though the question of the means used to achieve the ethical aim of human wholeness remains a difficult one. In the final section of the lecture, “The morality of praxis and alienated moralities,” Sartre asks whether terror, even if deemed unavoidable, might have anything of the ethical about it, and sets out four criteria, according to which terror might conceivably be justified. The first is that terror should not become systematized, but rather remain “a provisional expedient” (to that extent, retaining the positive fluidity of praxis in opposition to the deadening mechanisms of the practico-inert). The second criterion is that there should be no “ideology of terror” as such (the theoretical equivalent of the first—practical—criterion, rejecting any systematic legitimation beyond the exigencies of the historical situation). The third is that it should never be the “easy solution” while others— regardless of their difficulty—exist; (terror may be justified by its “necessity,” but an easy option cannot be; non-violent methods must be tried first). The last criterion is that it only becomes excusable if it “issues from the people” (in other words, self-selecting vanguardist groups and terror cells do not qualify). Because terror is a negative phenomenon, representing both a halt in revolutionary momentum and a “deviation of humanity as an end” on the grounds of the urgency of the situation, it can only be justified if it embodies something like the popular will. Sartre concludes this discussion with the statement: “In short, the humanising of terror is possible—in principle.” Recognizing the difficulty of this “humanising,” however (and potentially undercutting the argument he has just constructed), he goes on to say, “An abstract possibility is not the same as a real possibility: the man of Terror would have to be an angel” (Sartre 1964: 135). The final aspect of the argument is the question of ends and means. In opposition to the over-simplification of “the end justifies the means,” imperfectly understood but endlessly used in an attempt to discredit Marxist arguments, Sartre offers some thoughts on the topic in the fraught context of terror. The importance is the relation of the means to their ethical goal, and rather than merely justifying

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the means, the end works to control their operation in order to assure its own ethical status: “socialist morality is nothing other than the end itself returning to its means to control them in the light of itself” (138). This is, once again, something like the flexible, responsive, vigilant side of praxis working to ensure that the effect produced by the actions involved does not firstly, distort the nature of those actions, nor, secondly, take the process towards the wrong kind of goal. “All means are good,” says Sartre, “except those that denature the end” (139). While the first half of the sentence looks like the bad old Sartre, reckless as ever, the second makes perfectly clear that an ethical end (the unconditioned future of integral, autonomous humanity) cannot be produced by unethical (anti-human, inhumane) means which would destroy its ethical nature. Terror, then, would have to be fundamentally “humanised” in order to qualify as an acceptable means. It remains debatable whether such a paradoxical construction (properly humanized terror) could ever be achieved. What is not debatable is that Sartre’s ethical system would not justify anything less. The Palestinian struggle for freedom (repeatedly categorized by the Israeli and US governments as terrorist, especially if expressed in anything resembling physical resistance to Israeli oppression, and generally regardless of the forms and methods of resistance actually employed) all too often seems to lack credibility in the eyes of the world—as opposed to the image of passive victimhood established by their ongoing dispossession. Clearly, we continue to have urgent need of a Sartrean version of the ethical, which would precisely insist, in historically relevant terms, on the morality of the fight against dehumanization, as well as assessing the political valences of that fight. While tactically it did not advance their cause, [the attack on the Olympics] established better than any speech at the UN both that we must now, right away, solve the Palestinian problem and that this problem has become everyone’s. (Sartre 2003: 8) If the political dimension—a solution “now, right away . . .”—continues, nearly forty years on, to offer little more than cause for anger and despair, the human and ethical one—“this problem has become everyone’s”—establishes an important connection. Though it is beyond the scope of this essay to explore, it links Sartre’s discussion in the Rome lecture of the relationship between the universal and the singular in ethics with Said’s call, particularly to intellectuals, to “universalize the crisis” (though not only the Palestinian one), and also with Mahmoud Darwish, speaking in the context of the ethical status of the situation of the contemporary (postcolonial) oppressed: “From this day on, he who does not become Palestinian in his heart will never understand his true moral identity” (Darwish 2002). Sartre could hardly have put it better.

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Note This essay began as a paper on ethics, aiming to discuss an unpublished lecture Sartre gave in May 1964 at the Istituto Gramsci in Rome. It then developed what might be called a “Palestinian turn,” partly in reaction to what seemed to me a problematic consensus regarding Sartre’s position on Israel and Palestine, and particularly in the context of a range of anniversaries whose importance was too great to ignore: above all, perhaps, 2008 as the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also of the founding of the state of Israel and simultaneously of the Palestinian nakba, the catastrophe from which as a people they have yet to recover. The lecture, as it exists in typescript and manuscript with corrections by Sartre, has no formal title. “Morality and History” is the title given by Sartre to this and its (undelivered) companion piece, intended for Cornell University the following year. All work on these unpublished pieces is indebted to the pioneering efforts of Robert Stone and Elizabeth Bowman.

Bibliography Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., and Tiffin, H. (1989) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London: Routledge. Childs, P. and Williams, P. (1996) Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory, Harlow: Longman/ Pearson. Darwish, M. (2002) “A War for War’s Sake,” Al Ahram Weekly 581, April 11–17. Online. Available: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/581/fr2.htm (accessed August 25, 2010). —— (2003) Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, trans. M. Akash et al., Berkeley: University of California Press. —— (2010) “State of Siege” (2002), in State of Siege, trans. M. Akash and D. Moore, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Elbendary, A. (2000) “Of Words and Echoes,” Al Ahram Weekly 477, April 13–19. Online. Available: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/477/bk5_477.htm (accessed August 25, 2010). Haddour, A. (2001) “Introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre,” in Colonialism and Neocolonialism [originally published as Situations V, 1964], London: Routledge. Lamouchi, N. (1996) Jean Paul Sartre et le tiers monde, Paris: L’Harmattan. Levinas, E. (1989) “Ethics and Politics,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. S. Hand, Oxford: Blackwell. Massad, J. (2003) “The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre,” Al Ahram Weekly 623, January 30– February 5. Online. Available: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/623/op33.htm (accessed August 25, 2010). Pappé, I. (2006) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford: Oneworld. Said, E. (2000) “Sartre and the Arabs: A Footnote,” Al Ahram Weekly, May 18–24. Online. Available: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/482/cu3.htm (accessed August 25, 2010). Santoni, R. (2003) Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent, Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press.

218 Patrick Williams Sartre, J-P. (1964) “Morality and History,” unpublished lecture, delivered at Istituto Gramsci, Rome. —— (1995) Anti-Semite and Jew, trans G. J. Becker, New York: Schocken. [Originally published as Réflexions sur la question juive, Paris: Gallimard, 1948]. —— (2001a) Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. A. Haddour, S. Brewer, and T. McWilliams, London: Routledge [originally published as Situations V, Paris: Gallimard, 1964]. —— (2001b) “To Be Hungry Already Means that You Want to Be Free,” Sartre Studies International 7(2): 8–11 [originally published in Caliban, 20, October 1948]. —— (2003) “About Munich,” trans. E. Bowman, Sartre Studies International, 9(2): 7–8 [originally published as “À propos de Munich,” in La Cause du people, 29, October 15, 1972]. Sartre, J.-P. and Lévy, B. (2007) Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stone, R. and Bowman, E. (1986) “Dialectical Ethics: A First Look at Sartre’s Unpublished 1964 Roman Lecture Notes,” Social Text 13/14 (Winter–Spring): 195–215. Wehrs, D. R. (2003) “Sartre’s Legacy in Postcolonial Theory; or, Who’s Afraid of Non-Western Historiography and Cultural Studies?” New Literary History, 34(4), Autumn: 761–89.

18 Trauma and Children’s Rights in Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi Carmen Concilio

Children’s rights, and particularly those of street children, have long been at the center of a wide field of research: law, sociology, medicine, psychology, and literature. Tsotsi (1980), the well-known (and only) novel by the South African playwright Athol Fugard, indirectly investigates the violation of black children’s rights in the South African context of the late 1950s. As a psychological novel it may be fruitfully read in the light of theories of early trauma in childhood. By negating very basic rights children should enjoy universally—a family, a house, formal education—early trauma strongly influences a child’s life and may even turn him/ her into a criminal. In this specific case, trauma theory will be mainly approached through Jungian psychoanalysis, which convincingly explains deranged behavior or a borderline personality. Certainly, the right to live precedes any other right, as Sindiwe Magona claims in Beauty’s Gift (2008), her work of fiction about the high rate of women dying of AIDS in South Africa. Along the same lines, the photographer Jodi Bieber in her reportage Between Dogs and Wolves: Growing up with South Africa (2006) writes that over the past ten years, mere survival is still of primary importance to street children and tsotsis growing up in economically depressed townships, while hope for adoption animates abandoned, lost, or HIV-negative children of various institutions. The appointment of South African Judge Navanethem Pillay as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, on July 28, 2008, seems an answer to such expectations and certainly creates high hopes.1 Back in the 1950s, it was common for the police to break into township dwellings at night and it is such a violation that abruptly interrupts Tsotsi’s childhood. His life, already marked by an absent father, is completely shattered the night the police enter his house to arrest his mother. And although they spare his life, they break one of the fundamental rights of the child: “The child must be the first to receive relief in times of distress,” as it was claimed as early as 1923 in Article 3 of the World Child Welfare Charter (WCWC), endorsed by the League of Nations General Assembly on November 26, 1924.

220 Carmen Concilio It is not until chapter nine when Tsotsi manages to reconstruct those moments which precede his finding shelter among ruins with other children: “He one too . . . He’s like us” (Fugard 1983: 162). The poor syntax of the expression “He one too” implies that Tsotsi is an orphan too, a street child too, who has lost his parents, his house, and the chance to be nurtured and educated. In other words, he has lost his freedom. It is useless to say that in South Africa, in those years, security measures did not include “special care and protection provided both to the child and to his mother” (WCWC 1924: Art. 4), nor that “a child of tender years shall not, save in exceptional circumstances, be separated from his mother. Society and the public authorities shall have the duty to extend particular care to children without a family and to those without adequate means of support.”2 Early orphanage, mere survival with a gang of children among the debris of the township, and early criminality soon become Tsotsi’s trap, while the township itself becomes the surrogate mother and father of these young children and also the only source and site of their education. The release of Gavin Hood’s film version of Tsotsi, winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2006, has been accompanied by such discourses about the lack of formal education for children like Tsotsi as a violation of children’s primary rights. This is, for instance, Nadine Gordimer’s argument in an interview on the film: We need more technological education. Not everybody can be a lawyer or a doctor or study in the humanities. Let’s take Tsotsi, this young chap. He could learn to be an electrician, or plumber, or do something in the industry. We need people like this in our industries. But where are the training schools for them? This to my mind is one of the most important things: we don’t have enough training for these young people. Simply, taking them off the streets and putting them in some shelter, it doesn’t give them the means of earning their own living and using their own brain and their own abilities. So I think we need to [improve] training at all levels. Not just University level, but indeed at the level of technological skills. (Gordimer 2006, my transcription) Gordimer thus responds to her viewing of Tsotsi in the light of Gavin Hood’s adaptation of the story to post-apartheid South Africa, even though such observations perfectly work also for Fugard’s Tsotsi back in the late 1950s, for the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child (DRC) recites: The child is entitled to receive education, which shall be free and compulsory, at least in the elementary stages. He shall be given an education which will promote his general culture and enable him, on a basis of equal

Trauma and Children’s Rights in Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi 221 opportunity, to develop his abilities, his individual judgement, and his sense of moral and social responsibility, and to become a useful member of society. (DRC 1959: Art. 7)3 At that time, Tsotsi was the typical product, or by-product, of the townships: a criminal youngster, though non-politicized, whose story is framed by the bus boycotts, the pass laws and arrests, and the doom of Sophiatown. Tsotsi has several brothers in the angry young men of South African literature, such as Michael Adonis, an unemployed youth who turns into a murderer in District Six, in Alex La Guma’s A Walk in the Night (1962); or as Beki, the half-politicized child-soldier who dies in the township of Guguletu around 1985 at the time of the Emergency and of the school boycotts, in Coetzee’s novel Age of Iron (1990); or even as Mxolisi, the teenage killer of Ami Biehl, a young American girl, in Guguletu, in Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother (1998), to name but a few. The Sharpeville and Soweto uprisings, respectively in 1960 and in 1976, were still ahead when Fugard was writing his novel on his way to England, as were the enraged black schoolchildren of André Brink’s A Dry White Season (1979), or of Fugard’s My Children, My Africa! (1990). When we first meet Tsotsi, he is a very young and tough boy who never has dreams or memories of his past, who knows neither his age nor his real name, nor his family. As reports and studies inform us, most of South African street children are black and male. All these boys refuse or avoid formal education, while the street becomes their only master (see Le Roux 1996; Richter and Van der Walt 2003; Dissel 2010). Tsotsi’s amnesia only allows psychic insights consisting of bits and pieces of memories: a nostalgic smell of wet newspapers, the terror of spiders, a man called Petah, and, recurrently, “boys scavenging the township.” Now and then he is hit by the sudden flash of a yellow bitch crawling towards him. This kind of existential black hole—in the form of trance-states, depersonalization, and psychic numbing or amnesia defence barriers—characterizes his psychopathology and his own inner defences. When asked about his real name, he provides no answers: “Tsotsi hated questions about himself” (Fugard 1983: 16), for “he didn’t know the answers . . . if he had once known he no longer remembered . . . not knowing himself had a deeper meaning . . . He allowed himself no thought of himself, he remembered no yesterday” (20–21). After becoming an orphan, Tsotsi has renounced his name, thus contributing to his loss of identity. People who have suffered early trauma are unable to include that event within the constellation of connected events that give orderly meaning to life. In a similar way, Tsotsi is unable to provide such a logical and organized sequence of facts about his life. By forgetting his past and renouncing his name Tsotsi starts an unconscious process of de-personalization that brings him to identify with “all men.” Yet, everyman is also a nobody. Apparently, Tsotsi perceives

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himself as a sort of Odysseus, who has been driven away from home and has lost his route. This loose association with Ulysses is one among a series of “images” that might find an explanation by referring to Jungian theory about “early trauma.” This might hint at Tsotsi’s impossibility of getting back to the Mother(land). Being adrift or taken away by currents or winds is a typical imago in traumatized children, whose mother was not there or not able to mediate between their anxiety and the external world (Kalshed 1996: 30, 35). Similarly, according to Linda Richter’s report, “street children are likely to be affected by numerous factors, including possible emotional trauma, under-nutrition, and neurological damage or neuropsychological dysfunction caused by injuries and/or substance abuse” (Richter and Van der Walt 2003). In the novel Tsotsi and his gang smoke “dagga” and drink heavily (Fugard 1983: 22). To reinforce this hypothesis of precocious trauma there stands Tsotsi’s memory made of scattered, fragmentary flashbacks. This, too, is the cause of disordered sensations, an individual memory made up of holes, an inconsistent personal history.4 Moreover, when Tsotsi looks at himself in the mirror he finds himself “meaningless”: “His own eyes in front of a mirror had not been able to put together the eyes, and the nose, and the mouth and the chin, and make a man with a meaning. His own features in his own eyes had been as meaningless as a handful of stones” (21). In particular, Tsotsi’s features do not correspond to any familiar/familial image. Similarly, a test proposing drawings to street children has shown that they are unable to describe people according to personal qualities, they only refer to simple physical dimensions, while emotions are categorized solely as happiness or unhappiness (Richter and Van der Walt 2003). Yet, this absent mirror-imago further prevents Tsotsi’s self-identification. This de-facement of the subject is but another typical effect of traumatic experiences: for instance, dreams of lacerated or decomposed faces refer to phenomena of depersonalization and psychosis (Benedetti 1980, quoted in Oliva 1999: 37). Tsotsi’s lack of formal education—and consequently his inability to verbalize logically and rhetorically what has happened to him—clearly appears in the exchange with the educated and almost sophisticated Boston. The latter and the simple, uneducated Tsotsi are presented as rivals for the leadership of the gang they belong to. Boston is the one who solves all problems. He fights a rhetorical war for supremacy with Tsotsi. Boston, the one who talks too much, uses a maieutic approach to challenge his opponent. He insists on deep feelings and inner perceptions, playing the moral tune. He also uses abstract words such as “decency.” By means of his intuition he asks about Tsotsi’s missing family ties, about his lack of affections and “feelings” towards a woman-mother-father-sister, or even towards a dog. Tsotsi’s callousness, total indifference, and apparent amorality are also signs

Trauma and Children’s Rights in Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi 223 of a disturbed personality. When trauma affects the psyche of a small child, a split personality results; one side normally regresses to infancy, the other progresses, growing and maturing prematurely. The grown-up part takes care of the regressed one. As Kalshed writes, “in dreams, the regressed part of the personality is usually represented as a vulnerable, young, innocent (often feminine), childor animal-self who remains shamefully hidden. Occasionally it appears as a special animal—a favourite pet, a kitten, puppy, or bird” (Kalshed 1996: 3). In spite of the fact that Tsotsi shows the world only the hardened and impenetrable surface that has been molded by life, he is increasingly haunted by the image of the paralytic bitch of his infancy. This shows the kind of psychological identification of the helpless child with the dog. On the contrary, his sheer terror in front of a spider, which prevents him from sleeping, will only be clarified much later in the novel when we discover that the little creature was the first thing Tsotsi saw when alone at night in the pipes. Since “traumatic affect may appear in dreams as a ‘wild animal’” (Kalshed 1996: 14), the pet dog and the spider are clear opposites, representing respectively identification/rejection, sympathy/terror. Further evidence characterizing trauma is the identification of the damaged subject with darkness. Trauma introduces into the individual psychic world the image of one’s own death, an idea that up to that moment was inconceivable. The inner darkness, this void that characterizes Tsotsi, mirrors this possible visualization of death: “His second rule was never to disturb his inward darkness with the light of a thought about himself or the attempt at a memory” (Fugard 1983: 36). “A darkness like an enormous unending night that closed in when the fires burned low and out, leaving only ash as an epitaph to their passing warmth” (38). This vast area of darkness both precedes him (past) and surrounds him (present/ future). Tsotsi is thus entrapped within his traumatic experience that even prevents him from growing up free and from planning—or projecting himself into—the future. The dichotomy between darkness and light, evil and goodness is natural in any small child, due to his/her experience of satisfaction, security, comfort, and alternatively dissatisfaction, uncertainty, anxiety. Apparently, to the interviewed street children “the darkness of the pictures suggested night and elicited talk about fears of the dark, which was associated in their minds with interpersonal violence and supernatural forces” (Richter and Van der Walt 2003). If the child doesn’t have a loving mother who metabolizes his anxiety by reassuring and soothing him, he/she will never be able to endure strong emotions and to differentiate himself into a being capable of tolerating conflicts. Tsotsi clearly finds himself in a state of de-integration, where his psyche is imprisoned in darkness. This state of blocked and interrupted development is also demonstrated by Tsotsi’s silence, or in clinical terms by his alexythymia: having no words for feelings (McDougall 1985). Alexythymia is a radical defensive strategy enacted as a consequence of early trauma during infancy. “What’s the matter with you? You

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say nothing . . . Listen say something man. You say nothing” (Fugard 1983: 164): these are the words a fellow child repeatedly pronounces in order to shake Tsotsi out of his apathy. Early shocks and traumas completely silence children. The Xhosa writer Sindiwe Magona provides a powerful example of such a case, when the 4-year-old Mxolisi betrays his dearest friends in what he believes is a hide and seek game with policemen. The friends are killed on the spot and Mxolisi will not speak again for the next two years. Later in his life, Mxolisi will also turn to a gang and kill Ami Biehl, who had come to South Africa on an international cooperation project. As the case became public, Sindiwe Magona wrote a novel by which the South African mother explains—without justifications—what the historical and social extenuating circumstances are for her son to murder a foreign white girl. The same circumstances are true for Tsotsi. Exposure to violence, the lack of positive role models, the gangs’ collective drive that temporarily erases individual responsibility, all these participate in the young criminal’s obliged choice of violence. This is the accusation Mandisa in Magona’s Mother to Mother moves against township life: “these monsters our children have become. Here in Guguletu or in Langa or Nyanga or Khayelitsha” (Magona 1998: 2), the same kind of life that has absorbed Beki in Coetzee’s Age of Iron, so as to force Florence to admit that “there are no more mothers and fathers” (Coetzee 1990: 39). Exposure to violence is explicitly denounced, among others, by J. M. Coetzee in almost all his novels. “The damaged child,” both physically and psychologically, has been a central figure since his early works (Gillmer 1984: 107–20). Yet his more effective observations are expressed in Waiting for the Barbarians (1982) and in Age of Iron (1990). In the first case the author despises torturers who humiliate fathers in front of their children: “one should never disparage fathers in front of children” (Coetzee 1982: 17), thus inducing them to doubt their father’s protective capacities. In the second case, he denounces the thoughtlessness of a mother who allows her infant daughter to watch the slaughtering of chickens: “the child, her fingers gripping the mesh, drank in the sight too. So hard and yet so easy, killing, dying” (1990: 42). More interestingly, in Waiting for the Barbarians the protagonist produces a sequence of dreams where small children are playing with clay, once taking bread out of an oven, then building a castle with a red flag on top. This is a game of communion and creation, probably symbolizing a better world. These dreams about an undamaged, more innocent, and free childhood also create an alternative to the reality of the tortured, mutilated, and blind captive barbarian girl. Exposure to violence, the loss of his mother and father is exactly what has deranged Tsotsi’s life, as well as the violation of the right to education that has damaged entire generations of young people in the townships from the 1950s up to the present day. Moreover, Tsotsi like most street children also loses his right to a house:

Trauma and Children’s Rights in Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi 225 “It’s no good,” Petah told him. “It’s no good at night.” It was all right, he explained, to look during the day. Like with Sam. He had found his mother, but it was during the day. They all looked, in a way, during the day. But at night there was danger. Like Joji, who like him had gone home at night, but other people were living in the room, not his, and when they heard the scratching at the door they thought it was a burglar and took their sticks and beat him to death . . . Joji. (Fugard 1983: 166) Tsotsi’s attempt to go back home—always rehearsing the promise he had made to his mother not to leave their shack and wait there for her return—is thwarted by his mates who know that there is no place to return to. This episode, however, shows how easily street children were victims of “property grabbing” in the 1950s just as AIDS orphans are today in South Africa.5 Tsotsi only “awakens” when he finds himself with a male baby in his hands, in a chapter that recalls the prototypical scene of Charlie Chaplin with the foundling kid. The baby is the gift a woman leaves to Tsotsi, while he is about to rape her. It is treacherous because it obliges Tsotsi to dig into his past memories of trauma: All it said was, “Pass kaffir.” When his mother started to speak they stretched out their hands and got her out of bed and then dragged her to the door . . . there was time only to call back, ‘Don’t cry, David!’ . . . and he was alone. (151–52) Thus, the baby triggers memories of Tsotsi witnessing violence against parental figures, an event which Coetzee harshly denounces, as previously stated. Moreover, also his long absent and idealized father is the cause of a profound disillusionment on the day of his arrival: This big man, this big, gentle, laughing man—his father—was coming tomorrow . . . So a red, glowing man, always laughing, with big hands, being a big man, and maybe covered with feathers because she said he was soft and full of love . . . And he was coming tomorrow, maybe to come flying this long way away, moving his feathered arms like wings as he settled in the backyard. (148–49) The much expected and idealized father, that “made up for not having an ordinary one like other children” (149), has a double nature. On the one hand, David— Tsotsi’s real name—imagines him as gigantic, as a glowing sun, a burning fire. On the other hand, the father is also light like a bird, or an angel with feathered wings. Both a demon and a celestial figure, the father stages another trauma for

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David to witness. In a fit of rage, when neighbors break the news of his wife’s arrest to him, he brutally kicks David’s dog under his son’s petrified eyes: He had to open his eyes, and when he did he wished he hadn’t, because for all his tears and prayers he could not close them again until it was over. He had kicked her and she was walking around in circles, biting at her own back legs and rolling over and over in the sand . . . She took an eternity, dragging her hindquarters which were useless in the great labour of her effort, and she was whining all the time with foam at her mouth. David shrank back, jabbering to himself, feeling for stones but finding only feathers and dry droppings and not even being able to hold these because he couldn’t flex his hands. (160) David finds himself paralyzed, not so much by terror after this outburst of volcanic violence but by empathy towards the innocent, defenceless, and pregnant bitch. In his mind he had probably equated the two violent acts he witnessed, both being perpetrated by strong and violent male figures on a weaker, female being. As a result, David runs away and joins homeless children. He does not speak any more. This state of alexythymia as described above, together with dreamless nights and confused memories of the traumas, characterize the defensive system adopted by the psyche. For “it is thought that certain ‘protective factors’ act to assist such children to overcome seemingly insurmountable disadvantages” (Richter and Van der Walt 2003). Thus, Tsotsi’s new identity as a criminal is the result of a split subjectivity that only gives voice to the negative psychic drives that apparently make of him a selfsufficient, strong boy. This is of course a delusion destined to fall apart. What shakes the apparently unassailable castle of his psyche is first the presence of the baby and then the meeting with a crippled man. The baby can be seen as the external object—the fact that he is male is also important—that embodies Tsotsi’s weak psychic side, the side in need of care and tenderness. Both kidnapped by and given to Tsotsi, the baby slowly works as an antidote to his compulsive violent drives, placing him in front of the dilemma whether to kill him or nurture him. The child breaks Tsotsi’s defences, freeing his tender qualities that can finally come to the surface, while helping him dismiss the mask of invincible virility he has worn since the worst had happened in his life: the child is the carrier of the story’s hope. This is often the case in fairy tales and mythology. In the child, what is still potential has a chance to actualize in-the-world. Symbolically, therefore, the child represents the potential for realization of the personal spirit in life. (Kalshed 1996: 152) 6

Trauma and Children’s Rights in Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi 227 The newborn baby, in Jungian terms but also in several African cultures, is therefore the symbolic medium between worlds. The foundling in Nurrudin Farah’s Gifts (1990), in the Muslim Somali world, or the abiku in Yoruba Nigerian culture, as presented in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), show magical powers, connecting the world of the young with that of the adults, and of male (father) and female (mother); and similarly the world of the living and of the dead and the spirits. Here, in turn, the child bridges darkness and light, evil and goodness, chance and free choice, and even the male and the female spheres, for Tsotsi breaks his comradeship with the other male gangsters and is driven towards Miriam, a woman who can breastfeed “his” child. Later on, the encounter with the cripple, a paraplegic man (also associated with the bitch), teaches Tsotsi (who was unable to mourn) another lesson about empathy. Also in this case Tsotsi chooses freely not to assault and rob the man. From this moment light, the sun, enters Tsotsi’s life and conscience. From then on, the novel follows Tsotsi’s slow path towards light and freedom. The story does not, however, have a happy ending, for redemption (also in religious terms) in a criminal’s life is obtained only through real expiation: death. On his path to light, Tsotsi seems to acknowledge his own right to education. He addresses Boston, the teacher: “I need to know things, Boston, man.” “I need to know things. You must tell me.” “You were a teacher man. You read the books.” This time Boston is the one who has no answers: “I know nothing,” he says (Fugard 1983: 202). Tsotsi becomes loquacious, Boston does not know anything anymore. Tsotsi confesses everything to Boston, for the first time he is able to narrate his life story. The rhetorical fight between the two that opened the text now shows a reversal, in favor of a still stammering Tsotsi. Tsotsi insists: “Boston, you’ve read the books.” “I’ve read the books . . . All of us are sick from life” (204). A life without any opportunity of education, a life of self-apprehension from the streets, this is all Tsotsi has taught himself. The next step for him will be to attend a lesson on religion offered by the church gardener, Isahia. The film better encapsulates Tsotsi’s acknowledgment of education as a way to free oneself from the enslavement of poverty and criminality, when he offers the money of his last criminal act to pay for Boston’s admission back to college. Tsotsi’s improbable white shirt in the film’s last shot, a magisterial touch that parallels the character’s slow evolution from darkness to light in the novel, symbolizes not so much and not necessarily (Christian) salvation but the freedom from his past life of traumas and cruelties and the final acceptance of a grown man’s free choices and responsibilities. It is the apocalyptic destruction of Sophiatown in the novel, under apartheid’s worst measures, that once again blocks and interrupts such a possible development towards a future of individual freedom:

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He heard the bulldozers and saw the dust a long way away. It was a strange noise, and he had been hearing it for a long time . . . Then it was too late for anything; and the wall came down on top of him, flattening him into the dust. They unearthed him minutes later. All agreed that his smile was beautiful, and strange for a tsotsi, and that when he lay there on his back in the sun, before someone had fetched a blanket, they agreed that it was hard to believe what the back of his head looked like when you saw the smile. (226)

The women’s section of the now banned African National Congress decided that on the Sunday before the day of the removal, all women and children should hold a prayer meeting on the Freedom Square . . . The next day, Sophiatown was virtually under siege, the residents were finally removed under police escort. All the pavements were lined with heavily armed police of all colours from all over the Republic. There was practically no resistance, how could there be? . . . When the people and their belongings had been removed, the bulldozers moved in like tanks, destroying, smashing, razing, reducing everything to ruin. All around us dust, heaps of dirty bricks, soot and rubble . . . (Tlali 1987: 127)

In conclusion, among the many possible critical approaches to this challenging novel, a psychological reading offers especially fascinating insights into Tsotsi. The “trauma paradigm,” as elaborated in the British psychoanalytic community (Kalshed, Winnicott), seems to better explain Tsotsi’s inner world, as well as a common condition among street children: a lack of ethical inhibitions, an impossible self-identification, a split personality and siding with darkness, and an ultimate acceptance of light and free will. Psychologically noir with a touch of gothic, and partly recalling scatological novels of the African tradition,7 Tsotsi also epitomizes the living conditions of street children in the past and present South Africa and their struggle for personal freedom. Tsotsi, in fact, experiences an inner battle between nature and nurture, for he has missed both a nurturing principle in his mother as well as proper formal education, which is the right the children of Soweto had died for in 1976, and the children of Guguletu were still dying for in 1985, and many children in South Africa are still deprived of nowadays: “throwaway and neglected children are assumed to experience a failure of nurturance, which is likely to be compounded by abuse and derogation on the street” (Gulotta 1979, quoted in Richter and Van der Walt 2003). Jodi Bieber, interviewing tsotsis who still populate the townships around Johannesburg in post-apartheid South Africa (1994–2004), has learned their philosophy:

Trauma and Children’s Rights in Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi 229 “A coward dies a hundred times, a soldier dies only once.” In her journey through present-day South Africa, Bieber understands that the legacies of the past and of poverty have created a still visible, profound anomaly in society: tsotsis and street children. Her reportage is about individuals who, even in the most debased existential conditions, are brave and look forward in the face of the future. And this has understandably been read as a metaphor for the still young post-apartheid and free South Africa.

Notes 1. Born in 1941, the daughter of a Tamil bus driver in Durban, Pillay earned a law degree at Harvard. During apartheid, she was not allowed to practice as a lawyer because of her origins. In 1995 she was the first woman in this position to become a judge on the High Court. She served as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, she presided over cases that established rape as a war crime, convicted a former head of state for atrocities, and prosecuted the media for inciting genocide. She has served for five years on the International Criminal Court at The Hague. UN News Centre (December 9, 2008). See http://www.un.org/apps/news/ newsmakers.asp?NewsID=4# (accessed June 1, 2010). 2. Art. 6, Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted by UN General Assembly Resolution 1386 (XIV) of December 10, 1959. 3. By 1959 apartheid laws had already established the Bantu Education Act (1953), the Extension to University Education Act (1959), and, later, the Coloured Person’s Education Act (1963), the Indian Education Act (1965), and the Afrikaans Medium Decree (1974), by which black and coloured students were relegated to a low-profile and segregated education system, while Afrikaans was imposed in all black schools. 4. “This means that the normally unified elements of consciousness (i.e. cognitive awareness, affect, sensation, imagery) are not allowed to integrate. Experience itself becomes discontinuous. Mental imagery may be split from affect, or both affect and image may be dissociated from conscious knowledge. Flashbacks of sensation seemingly disconnected from a behavioral context occur. The memory of one’s life has holes in it—a full narrative history cannot be told by the person whose life has been interrupted by trauma” (Kalshed 1996: 13). 5. “There is evidence of ‘property grabbing’ against children orphaned by AIDS. This can lead to AIDS orphans becoming homeless and living on the streets. Street children, of course, suffer from multiple human rights abuses . . . The Convention recognises this need [Art. 27(1)]. They are also at risk of ‘property grabbing’, which may leave them without a home.” See Freeman in Cortese (2010: 177). 6. “I recalled Winnicott’s comment that patients like this, in presenting a false self, are rather like a nurse who brings a sick baby for treatment” (Kalshed 1996: 29). 7. “There are several descriptions of fights, beatings, bloodshed, rapes, and illness. In this respect [it] echoes the scatological molds of other African novels such as Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968)” (Quayson 2003: 83).

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Bibliography Benedetti, G. (1980) Alienazione e personazione nella psicoterapia della malattia mentale, Turin: Einaudi. Bieber, J. (2006) Between Dogs and Wolves: Growing up with South Africa, Amsterdam: Mets and Schilt. Brink, A. (1979) A Dry White Season, London: W. H. Allen. Coetzee, J. M. (1982) Waiting for the Barbarians, London: Penguin. —— (1990) Age of Iron, London: Secker and Warburg. Cohen, D. (1984) “Beneath the Underworld: Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi,” World Literature Written in English 23(2): 273–84. Cortese, G. (ed.) (2010) Reflections on Children’s Rights: Marginalized Identities in the Discourse(s) of Justice, Milan: Polimetrica. Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted by UN General Assembly Resolution 1386 (XIV) of December 10, 1959, United Nations Organization. Online. Available: http://www. un.org/cyberschoolbus/humanrights/resources/child.asp (accessed June 1, 2010). Dissel, A. (2010) Youth, Street Gangs and Violence in South Africa. Online. Available: http:// www.csvr.org.za/wits/papers/papganga.htm (accessed March 12, 2010). Fugard, A. (1983 [1980]) Tsotsi, intr. D. Coplan, Edinburgh: Canongate. —— (1990) My Children! My Africa!, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Gillmer, J. (1984) “The Motif of the Damaged Child in the Work of J. M. Coetzee,” in M. Lenta, M. J. Daymond, and J. U. Jacobs (eds.) Momentum: On Recent South African Writing, Durban: University of Natal Press. Gulotta, T. (1979) “Leaving Home: Family Relationships of the Runaway Child,” Social Casework 60: 222–24. Kalshed, D. (1996) The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, London: Routledge. La Guma, A. (1967 [1962]) A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, London: Heinemann. Le Roux, J. (1996) Street Children in South Africa: Findings from Interviews on the Background of Street Children in Pretoria, South Africa. Online. Available: http://pangaea.org/street_ children/africa/safrica2.htm (accessed June 1, 2010). Lodge, T. (1981) “The Destruction of Sophiatown,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, 19(1): 107–32. McDougall, J. (1985) Theaters of the Mind, New York: Basic Books. Magona, S. (1998) Mother to Mother, Boston, MA: Beacon. —— (2008) Beauty’s Gift, Cape Town: Kwela Books. Oliva, R. (1999) L’invenzione del cavallo: Storia di Alex, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Pajalich, A. (1991) “Postfazione,” in A. Fugard, Tsotsi, Genoa: Marietti. Quayson, A. (2003) Calibrations, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Richter, L. and van der Walt, M. (2003) “The Psychological Assessment of South African Street Children,” Children, Youth and Environments 13(1), Spring. Online. Available: http://colorado.edu/journals/cye (accessed June 1, 2010). Tlali, M. (1987) Muriel at the Metropolitan, Harlow: Longman. Winnicott, D. W. (1965) Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development, New York: International Universities Press.

19 “Flying inna massa face” Woman, nature, and sacred rites/rights in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable Lorna Down

Travel brochures for Dominica boast of its unspoilt nature. In fact, a recent National Geographic survey rated Dominica as one of the top islands and joint first in the Caribbean to visit (Discover Dominica Authority 2008). Unlike many of the other islands, its development was slower and so it was saved from the concrete gardens of tourists’ hotels, with their accompanying destruction of coastlines, coral reefs, mangrove swamps; or, as the narrative tells it, the island’s “backwardness had turned profitable, it was now called authentic and untouched” (John 2006: 230). This is the broad context of Marie-Elena John’s powerful novel Unburnable (2006). And as the description of the setting intimates, there are two dominant constructions of this place: the insiders’ (the natives/the islanders) on the one hand, and on the other the outsiders’ (the tourists). Contrasting the tourists’ view of the island with that of the natives, John particularizes this broad context. For the tourist, the outsider, relation to a place not their own tends to be voyeuristic. John, on the other hand, shows that the native by being “in place” needs to acknowledge the connection between the natural environment and its social and economic one. The tourists may choose to leave the comfort of their homes and hotels to “hike in sun and rain and mud” in order to get to the attraction of “the steaming crater at the top of the mountain” (178). But the islanders, though aware of the attraction of the crater, know that their interest has to center on the possibility of its eruption—an eruption that may mean, as the writer points out, 30,000 dead as it did in Martinique in 1902. There is no escaping for the islanders this fact of the interfacing of the physical, social, and economic environment, in their place: So Dominicans mostly chose to save any long kind of hiking they might end up doing for something with a purpose, like running for their lives. They didn’t understand what motivated the tourists. They had great appreciation for things like the beds for their backs at night, the roof over their head, and the happy fact that their land was fertile and their children well fed. (178)

232 Lorna Down Their lives are embedded in the natural landscape. Furthermore, the landscape also carries for them the imprint of the economic relations—for the majority of them the basics of food, shelter, and work cannot be taken for granted, much less dispensed with. But if the broad context of relations to place is represented in the contrasting relation of natives and tourists to nature, the specific context and content are woman’s relation to nature and, by extension, place and the attendant power relations. An eco-critical approach focuses our attention on this dialogic relation between people and nature (the physical environment) as well as its intersection with economic, social, cultural, and political relations. Or, as Greg Garrad defines it in Ecocriticism (2004), it is a political mode of analysis explicitly tied to a “green” moral and political agenda, and synthesizes environmental and social concerns. It can also be seen as an approach which recognizes that the physical world is connected to human culture, affecting it and being affected by it (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996). And even as there is the tendency in ecocritical practice by some critics to limit the environment to the “natural” environment, Lawrence Buell, who also admits this tendency in Writing for an Endangered World (2001), affirms the connection between the natural and human environment. He argues that literature and environmental studies must reckon more fully with the interdependence between urban and outback landscapes. While postcolonial criticism, like ecocriticism, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey et al. point out in Caribbean Literature and the Environment (2005), explores place, it has given little attention to environmental factors. The authors of the The Post-colonial Studies Reader (Ashcroft et al. 1997) speak of developing or recovering an appropriate identifying relationship between self and place because it is in that process that subjectivity can be conducted. Moreover, they argue that history is embedded in place and is linked in complex ways to issues of power. There is no denying the validity and value of these critics’ argument. Yet place as it relates to the sustainability of the physical environment is absent from their study as well as from those of many other Caribbean literature critics. My reading of John’s Unburnable attempts to address this gap by attending to the sustainability issue of the physical environment in relation to the human environment (that is the social, economic, and political), and so extends the postcolonial reading. Equally important, it seeks to foreground an ecocritical reading that privileges the spiritual dimension and argues that such a reading is not only true to many Caribbean literary works but that it brings a needed dimension to ecocriticism. If, as Glen Love argues in “Revaluing Nature” (1996), the most important function of literature is to redirect human consciousness to a full consideration of its place in a threatened natural world, then the spiritual aspect of this has to be taken into account. The discourse on nature has not focused on nature as a specific place of spiritual power. It often fails to make the link between

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the natural environment and the spiritual inner nature of peoples. Such relations often are the center in African and Native American fiction or philosophies. People living close to the natural world often perceive the link between the natural world and the spiritual nature of human beings, how one inheres in the other, how destroying either of these is to destroy the other. The focus of my essay is thus on both the spiritual and physical dimension of the natural world as it interconnects with the social, political, and cultural environment. It argues that particular relations to nature built on respect for the land and an understanding of the need for its sustainability are empowering; nature is a source of spiritual power. Close attention to this source encourages human relations and structures built on ideas of justice, individual rights, and freedom. And most importantly, the essay shows that what is truly sustainable, what is “unburnable” is the human spirit. This centring on the spiritual as it informs nature and human relationships—of place, history, and power—indicate future directions for both postcolonial and ecocritical readings of Caribbean texts. Specifically, I analyze the lives of three generations of women and the interfacing of their relation to nature with their relation to the dominant power structures in their society. I examine how relations to nature, in particular the spiritual dimension of nature, allow the central female figures to “fly inna massa face,” that is, effectively challenge dominant (colonialist) power structures. John’s novel is rich in its description of the natural environment. The author is part of the long line of Caribbean writers whose works are oriented towards the landscape and presenting nature as a source of spiritual power for society. Walcott, in his essay “A Frowsty Fragrance” (2005), alludes to the strong connection between the landscape and the inner lives of a people when he suggests that the survival of the slaves owed a great deal to the beauty of the islands. McKay, Virtue, and Marson, early Caribbean “nature” poets, were not merely imitating the British Romantic poets but were often employing nature as a way to create the idea of place as source of inner power. McKay’s nostalgic poems, for example “I Shall Return,” were a way to sustain the Caribbean people’s sense of place, of home. Images of the natural environment provided spiritual healing. Contemporary poets Senior, Goodison, Brathwaite, and Walcott’s “nature” poems often merge descriptions of nature and people, of the natural landscape with those of a people and their history to uncover their power and strength. Philip Sherlock’s classic poem “The Fisherman,” for example, expresses succinctly this relation of nature, history, and power. John is very much in the tradition of these writers for whom the landscape is an essential part of Caribbean art as a source of nurturing. In effect, John’s evocation of a traditional worldview of animism highlights this spiritual dimension of nature. John’s novel presents three generations of women—Matilda, the matriarch; Iris, her daughter; and Lillian, her granddaughter—who create a sense of place,

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identity, and self. This self is represented as existing in a dialogic relation with place—shaping and being shaped by it. Exploring these women’s constructions of and relation to place—physical, social, and economic—and how that relation shapes their identity and brings coherence will disclose how they are able to confront life-negating structures. The description of the natural environment is thus more than setting, than tourist brochure. As Buell suggests in The Environmental Imagination (1995), the non-human environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history. What John’s novel in fact uncovers is the unconscious relation of a people to the natural landscape, which in turn creates a sense of place, of deep connections to specific landscapes, of home, where “mi navel string bury” (a Jamaican saying that indicates the strong bond with place where one was born. It is based on a custom of burying the navel cord of a newborn to mark the child’s birth and to link the child to the place). Thus natural landscapes become for a people their sacred places. John’s comparison of the tourist and native connection to place also makes clear, as Walcott explains in his Nobel Lecture (1992), that “the Caribbean is not an idyll, not to its natives. They draw their working strength from it organically, like trees . . . Its peasantry and its fishermen are not there to be loved or even photographed; they are trees who sweat, and whose bark is filmed with salt.” This conflation of the natural landscape and the people is not the romanticized idea of such relations as in the pastoral literary tradition. It is instead an indicator of the strong dialogic, interdependent relation between nature and people. Furthermore, John’s description of the natural landscape—“mountains so high that only the smallest circle of sky was visible directly” (2006: 208), and “genuine virgin rain-forests [with] latticework of green forest roof, unbroken, through which here and there bits of bright light penetrated in flashes of silver” (244)—is an “original” landscape, unwritten. It is a pre-European arrival setting, and so it is removed from the delimiting inscriptions of the Caribbean landscape, from what Helen Tiffin in “Man Fitting the Landscape” (2005) has referred to as island landscapes shaped by some form of engagement with English representations of the tropics. It is within such a landscape that John locates Matilda’s village—a village that functions as a prototype of a community at one with nature and itself—elemental, not edenic, though there are such allusions in the text. The prototype of modern eco-villages, John’s New World African Village is a world where respect for self, others, and nature translates into a world of harmony. The image of villagers’ mud hut dwellings with straw roofs and doors of twigs and saplings reflects an understanding of their place in and with nature. Moreover, it is the villagers’ minimalist incursions into the natural environment that makes for its sustainability. Significant, too, is the name of the village—Noir, which came to be


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recognized and recorded as Noah ironically after it had ceased to exist. The symbolism of the name is clear: the name Noah echoes the biblical narrative of the remnant that was saved in Noah’s ark after the destruction of the earth. John merges two meanings: Noir/Noah is a village comprised of the remnant of African descendants, saved from the destructive enslavement of Africans in the Caribbean. But there is another reading suggested by the Noah’s ark symbolism: Noir is a metaphorical ark preserving relations between people and nature that are sustainable. This offers an alternative future for a global world threatened by the destructive practices of human beings. Noir, founded by abandoned Maroon women, is “hidden” at the top of one of the island’s highest mountains. And invisible to the town of Roseau, the villagers are outside the belief systems and structures that inscribe blackness and femaleness as subordinate. Rooted in this kind of archetypal community and, therefore, able to act from a position of confidence and ease is Matilda: healer, magistrate, wife, and mother. The narrative provides both a factual and mythologized account of Matilda. The factual details are of her ability and knowledge of healing, of her leadership of the village, of her role as a magistrate and of her being hanged. What the narrative insists on is her power, deriving from her knowledge of herbs and her sense of the wholeness of things, “for her there could be no clear separation of the physical, the mental, and the spiritual” (John 2006: 11). She is thus shown to treat the sick and dying with medicine made of “compounds of the extracts of plants and occasionally of animals, insects and sometimes fish” (11), along with “prayer and sacrifice and ritual” (11). The mythologizing of Matilda that follows such “miracles” is deconstructed to show that fundamentally these acts follow naturally from the extraordinary connection that Matilda has achieved with nature and with spirit. Set in opposition to the village is the world of the town. This is no simply rural/urban binary. Neither is John simply pitting the world of nature against the world “of men.” Matilda’s village, Noir, has its own problematic structures. This recast traditional African village is governed by a council of only women, and Matilda, the village healer, is also a magistrate on this council—passing life and death judgments. John, however, does draw a contrast between a world conscious of its connections to nature and that of the world below the mountain, where the man-made social and economic structures dominate those of the natural. The contrast shows how places are structured according to their relation to the landscape. Narratives, too, as well as identities are shaped by place. So the narratives of Matilda and Iris created in Noir are significantly different from those produced in Roseau. Iris’s narrative in Roseau is mainly that of a marginalized and powerless woman. Significantly, the image with which this narrative opens is of a woman of “uncommon beauty,” damaged by a broken Coca-Cola bottle, living on the fringes of the society, the daughter of Matilda. The gossipy tone of the narrative

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subversively emphasizes the tragedy of her story. But juxtaposed against this image is that of the child Iris, growing up in her village, self-assured, her beauty and her position as Matilda’s daughter guaranteeing her exceptional treatment from the villagers. Fascinated by her hybridity—African and Carib—they see her “singular, iridescent looks” as the result of “some kind of other worldly intervention in her conception” (4), and so mirror for her a privileged selfhood, powerful, free of and uncontained by place. Yet, Iris, living within this place constructed for her by others, cannot possess either place or self. The contrast between the two images of Iris marks the way place shapes identity and how an individual’s identity construct can be damaged by place. The spiritual relation between place and people so evident in Noir is absent in Iris’s Roseau. Notably, the richly evocative description of the landscape is absent in the portrayal of this place. Nature as in the physical landscape is represented by only one scene—the river scene with the washerwomen. Here the country people are shown at ease with nature, playing a child’s game called Jesus Walks. But the natural world they inhabit is not a source of power, the walking on water they do is an illusion, a child’s game, where feet firmly planted on river rocks appear instead to glide on water. Iris, too, at ease in this natural environment, also plays the Jesus Walks game, suggesting a power that she does not possess. In fact, the power that the villagers of Noir possess, emerging from their connection with the natural landscape and knowledge of their place, is limited in Iris. The flying she does in “massa’s” face is primarily located in the personal space, a “one-room house” (74), provided by John Baptiste. It is only later, after Matilda’s confrontation with the political structures in Roseau, that Iris uses that power to assert herself and subvert the dominant hierarchies in that colonial world. The narrative thus reveals that even as Iris carries within herself a notion of her status—that of the privileged daughter of Matilda—she, who is not grounded in Noir, cannot escape the configuration/disfiguration of the self in this town. In other words Iris, possessing an identity based primarily on an image reflected by the villagers and not in the spiritual connection to place, is unable to assert herself in the colonial structures and systems of Roseau. Ironically, the narrator explains that had “Iris been properly grounded, she might have had a chance to fit properly into the slot for which she was made” (55). Iris’s desire for marriage to John Baptiste and its tragic consequences reveal on several levels the “destruction” of women by oppressive colonial structures. Both complicating and clarifying this picture is the representation of the country women’s response to marriage in such a political structure. Unlike Iris, the rich creoles and the Lebanese recognize that marriage positions them in a subservient role, despite its elaborate rituals. Yet their acceptance of concubinage as the only possible option for one in their class with the “son of a rich boug” (78) is


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equally troubling. The writer, however, makes it clear that marriage is a signifier of the social systems and structures in which Roseau operates; it is an economic and social transaction within a particular racial and class group. Iris is thus “disqualified” from marrying Baptiste, given their difference. Iris’s insistence then on marriage to Baptiste is a flying in the face of the conventions of social, racial, and economic interests, combined to keep her in her designated place. But Iris’s lack of knowledge of this world and its construction of blackness, in direct opposition to hers, makes her particularly vulnerable. This attempt to move from a position of marginality to the center and to be free of such structures is vividly depicted through the detailed description of the first of two carnival scenes. In effect, this scene is the precursor of the later one, titled “The Clash.” Both scenes represent a clash of ideologies concerning place. On one level, these ideologies appear to operate in the simple binaries of nature-spiritual-black, on one hand, and on the other unnatural-constructeddespiritualized-white. Such a reading is, however, limited, as John reveals in the character of Iris. Her hybridity disrupts any such reading—her fluidity between places is at once a strength and a weakness. She is at home with the country women, the Lebanese, and Baptiste. Yet this easy adaptability marks her rootlessness and, therefore, her vulnerability. Iris is seen as the way to integrate the life of Noir into Roseau, to find a way in which the nature and spirit of Noir could exist in a modern urban space, but choosing Iris to negotiate a way for them in the urban, modern world puts Noir at risk. Iris, ungrounded, is almost destroyed by the structures of Roseau. Iris’s carnivalesque show of power is in contrast to Matilda’s. “The Clash” demonstrates the power that comes not from the political structures, from creating hierarchical relations of power, but from a strong awareness of the spiritual connection to nature and to people. So Matilda’s entry into Roseau that “dark j’ouvert morning” (127), with the other villagers wearing masks from all over the west coast of Africa, wooden masks with raffia fringe, is as if nature itself had moved down into the town. Matilda’s band, unlike the other masquerade bands, with their show of defiance, demanding to be feared and respected, very much like the bad johns in Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance (1981), is part of an old African tradition. The writer ironically has an old colonial administrator reveal the truth of this band, as a people who “for a time would become the embodiment of the gods of the savannas and the forests, representations of the spirits of the ancestors, wherein lay the highest authority” (John 2006: 130–31). The narrative of Matilda’s masqueraders thus begins with a scientific account that slowly moves into a tale of the super-natural. Cecile, Mrs. Richards’s daughter, on seeing the band begins to say her rosary, and John Baptiste’s first sight of them leaves him afraid, paralyzed, and heaving “man-sized sobs” (137). The colonial administrator realizes that the masks worn by Matilda and her people

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are war masks. He wants to explain to his host that the people in the band had been “transformed, that they were now possessed by the spirits represented by their masks and head-dresses; their full-body covering of raffia” (139), but recognizes the futility of explaining the non-scientific, the super-natural events about to occur. Nor could he explain that it “was a masquerade that only came out to direct strong magic against those who had broken the law, perpetrated a taboo” (140) and so warn of the impending danger. The climax of the scene is Matilda’s flying. The impersonal tone of the narrative, the deliberate understating, “leaping out from the middle of the band, the thing looked as if it would jump into the very sky,” ironically highlights her power. John’s description of Matilda’s flying—“the thing that flew three times around John Baptiste, was not a human being, because not only did it fly in a circle at the level of his head, it also clearly had no limbs, no arms, no legs” (141)—lifts the experience into the realm of the super-natural and myth. Matilda’s flying is a signifier of her freedom of being, her power, her assertion of self, and of her role as a magistrate passing judgment on the injustice meted out to Iris. More so, Matilda’s flying emphasizes the power inherent in a deep spiritual connection to place and people. The narratives of Iris and Matilda are presented as the history that Lillian needs to understand if she is to write her own history, a history from inside, as even the supposed “insiders’” songs—the folk songs with their bare bone history—are incomplete. And the colonial tale of these women erases their power. Lillian is the central character in this novel and her story is really its focus. Matilda’s and Iris’s stories are part of her history with which she needs to connect in order to achieve a sense of wholeness. Lillian is as much “out of place” as her grandmother was “in place.” The narrative, reading like snatches of memory, reflects Lillian’s inner confusion and her disconnection from place. The reader is drawn into this swirling mass of memories, of unfinished stories, half-understood history and myth, and so experiences Lillian’s confusion and need to make the connection. The central image, which is captured in the title of the novel, refers to Lillian’s cufflinks. They are a present she originally bought for Teddy, friend and lover, but which, significantly, she decided to give herself. Its design is translated to mean “that which does not burn,” a “symbol of the permanence of the human soul” (7). This is the heart of the narrative: what does not burn is the spirit of a people, and so Lillian’s spiritual connection with her mother and grandmother cannot be erased by time or place. Limited knowledge of such connections leads, however, to a limited knowledge of one’s power and selfhood. To know this connection, and thus to find the ease of being which has eluded Lillian for most of her childhood and adult life, Lillian has to return to her birthplace. Her real homecoming is to a home that she has known only in spirit. Echoes


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of “back to Africa” movements, of returning to an originary landscape, filter through the background of the narrative but John’s Africa is located in the Caribbean, in a remade African village, Noir. And it is here, in the natural environment, that Lillian finds her healing as she claims her “grandmother’s legacy” (246), her history of female power and survival. The connection between Lillian and Matilda, though unrecognized by Lillian, surfaces in her art of healing. But placed in that foreign landscape, never knowing the natural warmth of that community “Up there” at the top of the mountain nor Matilda’s restorative powers, Lillian herself is in need of healing. And heavy with the history of the shame of her people and fragments of narratives dimly understood, Lillian is lost in “massa” world, isolated and on the edge of falling. To heal herself, Lillian has to return to the “familiar” landscape of the mountains, of vegetation in vivid colors, and not like the tourist who visits but like one whose “navel string is buried there.” Moreover, the connection that Matilda and to some extent even Iris have had with the natural environment is missing with Lillian. There is one recorded incident of Lillian experiencing the natural physical surroundings and that is at the school picnic, high in the mountains. It is there, however, that she receives Mavis’s plain presentation of the alleged facts of her family history, which lead to her attempted suicide. Lillian also lacks the community of Noir, its caring relations. Neither is she shown as having Iris’s experience of community in the Lebanese household and later with the river women. She grows up isolated from others, as Icilma, her “stepmother,” creates a conspiracy of silence around her in a bid to protect her from her history. The normal human bonds that children create are thus denied her. Moreover, the popular myths about Matilda, as a powerful obeah woman, responsible for the strange circumstances of her birth and later for her failed first communion, instill fear or pity for her and so effectively separate her from normal human intercourse or from interfacing with the church. Such lack of communion with others is replaced by Lillian’s highly charged sexuality, where sex becomes a “clawing” for connection with the other. John collates two images—that of mother and home—to indicate what is needed for recovery. Primary and necessary relations with mother and grandmother are missing. Instead memories of “mother” surface as disturbing flashbacks, because Lillian is unable to get beyond the partial readings of others. These partial readings, these limited narratives of her history, destabilize her. Lillian’s recovery of self and of place is shown to be dependent on knowledge of the “complete narrative.” In fact, the relation between the possession of an incomplete narrative of one’s history with a lack of power and place is aptly expressed in the popular songs of Bob Marley and Buju Banton. Marley’s cry “half the story has never been told” and Banton’s lament “we could go on and on the full has never been told” accurately capture the loss of self and place. Significantly, her visit to Noir provides a stillness that slowly begins to free her.

240 Lorna Down The memory of her mother that surfaces, of a woman smelling of leaves and bark attempting to tell her something good about her grandmother begins to help her remember/link with her members, her ancestors/reconnect with these primary relations. It is a reconnection that is further grounded when Lillian returns to the mountains. There, in the deep foliage and the mountain mist, now fully attuned to her inner self, she “hears” the ancestral voices and experiences their presence as “a thousand pairs of wings, beating like butterflies all around her” (291). It is an ephiphanic moment as the knowledge of who her people are and who she is fills her. Lillian, claiming the power and spirit of Matilda and Iris, leaves the mountain able to “fly inna massa face.” The narrative of this genealogy of women with varying connections to the natural and spiritual world provides us with a female account of a people who in order to have a coherent sense of self and to survive must thoroughly inhabit both the natural and spiritual world. John’s Unburnable discloses how constructs of identity based on the natural landscape, on nature as sacred place, allows one to “fly” free. It shows that to ignore the world of nature and spirit is to ignore the foundation upon which human beings depend. In contrast, a reading that attends to this world can provide us with a vision of sustainable free futures. John’s novel thus enters Caribbean discourse emphasizing for people everywhere the importance of the natural environment, answering as it does DeLoughrey’s warning about environmental indifference in literary discourse.

Bibliography Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., and Tiffin, H. (eds.) (1997) The Postcolonial Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge. Buell, L. (1995) The Environmental Imagination, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (2001) Writing for an Endangered World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. DeLoughrey, E., Gosson, R. K., and Handley, G. B. (2005) Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Discover Dominica Authority. Online. Available: http://www.dominica.dm/site/index. cfm (accessed June 1, 2010). Garrad, G. (2004) Ecocriticism, Oxford and New York: Routledge. Glotfelty, C. and Fromm, H. (eds.) (1996) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Athens: University of Georgia Press. John, M.-E. (2006) Unburnable, New York: Amistad/HarperCollins. Love, G. (1996) “Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism,” in C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm (eds.) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Lovelace, E. (1981) The Dragon Can’t Dance, London: Longman Press. Tiffin, H. (2005) “‘Man Fitting the Landscape:’ Nature, Culture and Colonialism,” in


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E. DeLoughrey, R. K. Gosson, and G. B. Handley (eds.) Caribbean Literature and the Environment, Between Nature and Culture, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Walcott, D. (1992) “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” Nobel Lecture, December 7. Online. Available: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1992/walcott-lecture.html (accessed June 1, 2010). —— (2005) “A Frowsty Fragrance,” in E. DeLoughrey, R. K. Gosson, and G. B. Handley (eds.) Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press.

20 Freedom for/from Self-Immolation: The Reluctant Fundamentalist John C. Hawley

I resolved to look about me with an ex-janissary’s gaze. Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)

The world of the imagination surely offers plenty of access to the general psychological field of besieged adolescence (one-off from abnormal psychology in such novels as Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy). Studies of the making of a terrorist are rapidly becoming a literary trope as a subgenre within portrayals of disturbed late adolescence, appearing centrally, for example, in John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) and Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist (2007). As an initial entrance into the theological specifics of Islamic teachings on the subject of terrorism, though, more helpful are those novels written by cultural Muslims: Tahar Djaout’s The Last Summer of Reason (2001), Slimane Benaïssa’s The Last Night of a Damned Soul (2004),1 Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (2004), Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005), or the earlier ones that precede today’s preoccupation with terrorism but that treat the conflict at its heart: the seductions from two cultures that lead to a fundamental choice as a shield against hybridization—Taha Hussein’s A Man of Letters (1994) or Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure (1962). Hanif Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic (1998) underscores the generational divide, with adolescents rejecting the accommodational views of their parents (see Shore 2006: 165–97).2 Kureishi explores the idealistic convictions of younger Muslims in the diaspora who wish to counter the stark cynicism of an older generation that has replaced religion with capitalism. That adolescent urge for a greater simplicity, a purer devotion to a transcendent cause greater than oneself, is familiar in the literature of the West, and indeed is touted as something to offer students to nurture their ideals before they are completely overcome by pragmatic, levelheaded greed. But such idealism can transform confused and slovenly young men into intolerant, self-righteous, and confrontational bullies. Most of the conflicted

Freedom for/from Self-Immolation 243 protagonists in these recent studies do not end well, with some committing suicide, some assassinated, some becoming deracinated agnostics—and others, suicidal assassins. What is needed today, in light of the novels that offer compelling portraits of these “reluctant fundamentalists,” is a consideration of the freedom available to young practicing Muslims, mainly male, who transform themselves into explosive devices, or who express their choice of a binary worldview in a less radical manner; that is, what options do they truly have?3 Most disturbing about the recurring dehumanizing of such young men is the supposedly religious foundation upon which it is built, but in her convincing study of the psychological disturbance that actually grounds this structuration Ruth Stein writes that The violent erasure of human obstacles to a transcendent merging with (“love” of) the deity expresses the desire to return to “the fundamentals,” to a state of pure, unrivaled oneness with the Creator. This desire, conjoined with cultural and group processes, leads to fundamentalist religious practice, and with further developments, to coercion and violence. The person possessed by this desire exudes a sense of certainty, of being in the right; he possesses a certain kind of assertiveness, self-confidence, and airtight cohesiveness; he tends to feel superior to the other and to devalue him. He simplifies complexities into binary oppositions (basically of good and bad), not only creating order out of ambiguity and chaos but also constituting a “vertical,” homoerotic quest for God’s love. (Stein 2010: 45) 4 In The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) Mohsin Hamid’s eponymous narrator gradually reveals himself to his unfortunate dinner guest as very similar to the character skewered by Slimane Benaïssa in The Last Night of a Damned Soul (a story of one of the 9/11 terrorists). These young men, and others like them appearing in recent novels, are not uncouth wide-eyed radicals but graduates of prestigious Western universities who know American and European society well—in fact, from their point of view, they know these societies too well—and have grown to loathe them and to see them as Goliath (if not Delilah): strong corrupting temptations for any young man. They never feel completely accepted in their adopted culture—praised for their hard work and for their success as capitalists, but only so long as they increasingly assimilate and become less foreign—and each is brought up short by some historical event that brings “home” to them their comparative isolation in a Judaeo-Christian milieu. Hamid’s 22-year-old protagonist, Changez (in itself a thematic pun), begins his account like something out of David Copperfield (“Princeton inspired in me the feeling that my life was a film in which I was the star and everything was possible”

244 John C. Hawley [3]), but that privileged setting with its valorization of the ego underscores for him the divide between the West and the humble ideals of Islam, the submission to Allah. Unlike most of his coterie at the school, he works several jobs in remote corners of campus to pay his bills, noting defensively and with some guilt that he comes from a family of some wealth and standing, a family that struggles to maintain a membership in the prestigious Punjab Club. Surrounded by the apparently greater wealth of his American colleagues, whom he frequently describes as nonchalantly broadcasting a sense of superiority (21), he identifies ever more fully with a Pakistan that he describes as the sixth most populous nation on earth, a culture that had built great fortresses and palaces well before America was even a few ragtag English colonies. Hamid’s and Benaïssa’s novels counter the common perception that terrorists are members of the lower socioeconomic classes who are tapped by crafty sophisticates to do their dirty work. Hamid’s protagonist, like Benaïssa’s, is well connected and plays the Western game of social advancement exceedingly well, rising to the top of his class not only at school but also in the valuation firm that hires him. Changez characterizes capitalism in the terms used by the West to objectify the terrorists: the protagonist is praised by his employers for his “controlled aggression . . . determination . . . utter concentration . . . politeness and sense of formality” (41). Hamid’s suggestion is clear: the only difference between the terrorists of the Islamic world and those of Western business is the object they seek through their violence. Later, back in Lahore, in his mind’s eye he looks around the office at Underwood, Samson & Company and concludes that “shorn of hair and dressed in battle fatigues, we would have been virtually indistinguishable” (38)—much as Islamic men are viewed today in America, all of a breed. Changez speaks of his American company’s “creed” (116), its “exclusive temple” (159) and “the growing importance of tribe” (117). Most telling is the central irony of the book’s title, at once broadcasting the narrative endpoint while implicitly throwing in the reader’s face the question of “fundamentals” by which any culture survives. At Underwood Samson the guiding principle is comfortingly simple: “focus on the fundamentals” (98). Thus, though we may be startled that the protagonist’s first reaction to the collapse of the twin towers is a wry grin (72), its apparent amorality is viewed synechdochically, foregrounded repeatedly as the vacuity central to capitalism—as if the protagonist had learned his sociopathic sense of amusement as a prerequisite for the success he had achieved in corporate America rather than as the moral evisceration portrayed by the West as the wherewithal of Islamic terrorist activity. Companies such as Underwood Samson, after all, evaluate other firms with an eye to corporate raiding, risk arbitrage, options trading, and all without a moment’s concern over the consequences of such calibrations in the lives of targeted employees. The reader recognizes the noble qualities that lead Changez, in his direct confrontation with the effects of his work in finance,

Freedom for/from Self-Immolation 245 to a metanoia with enormous consequences (“my blinders were coming off, and I was dazzled and rendered immobile by the sudden broadening of my arc of vision” [145]). Hamid suggests the process behind this conversion that is both understandable and frightening: he begins with this familiar critique of the West and overlays the devious (and literally captivating) machinations of his protagonist’s narrative skills (like Scheherazade’s strategy, turned to an opposite end). He underscores Changez’s mix of anger, bruised narcissism, loneliness, and unstable ego that undergirds his complete abandonment of responsibility to his company and family (who regret his retreat from independent self-sufficiency in American society). When his boss touts their position at the top of the evolutionary heap, Changez reveals that he “was uncomfortable with the idea that the place I came from was condemned to atrophy” (97). He notes that he is “filled with contempt for [him]self” (129) for living a cushy life in the land of those he now envisions as his countrymen’s enemy. All the while, Changez is reflective enough to recognize his psychological state: “I lacked a stable core,” he tells his “guest.” “I was not certain where I belonged—in New York, in Lahore, in both, in neither . . . my own identity was so fragile” (148). He speaks of himself being in “a peculiar emotional state, in a sort of semi-hypnotic daze” (157), and as with most such psychological changes, the inner reality finds an outer expression; in this case, the complete exchange of identities is symbolized by the growth of his beard. This is followed by a feeling that “a world had ended” (160) and he hungrily grasps at the clarity of a fundamental set of new definitions and maxims that is stridently Manichean: as he tells his dinner guest, he sets out to stop America “in the interests not only of the rest of humanity, but also in your own” (168). The suicidal undertone of this complete volte-face resonates in his Conradian explanation as he leads the American to probable death: “since then, I have felt rather like a Kurtz waiting for his Marlowe” (183)—but in this instance, Marlowe will not end up in some pleasure boat on New York’s East River recounting his successful retrieval of this former employee of Underwood Samson. He will die in the “Congo” that Changez has chosen for him—and, indeed, for himself as well. The enclosed world of these novels about violent jihad is homosocial: women are portrayed as seductive, on any number of levels, as seriously flawed (Changez’s elusive child-woman Erica ultimately commits suicide), and as unnecessary. In his last meeting with Erica, Changez describes her as “gaunt, her flesh seeming almost bruised where it passed over the bones of her face, and she glowed with something not unlike the fervor of the devout” (133)—rather ghoulish or vampiric, one might conclude. In fact, these various novels are remarkable in the paucity of their female characters, as though women needed to be tucked away from their protagonist’s consciousness. In fact, following Erica’s disappearance Changez says he felt “a sense of euphoria at finally being liberated” (158). As Lee

246 John C. Hawley Harris observes of the world of suicidal terrorists, “testosterone still matters. Radical Islam knows this. Indeed, radical Islam represents a revolt of the unbridled alpha male within Islam itself” (2007: 272). Nowadays, the proposed defense mounted by writers like Harris against Islamically-inspired youthful zealots is nicely encapsulated by the quotes with which he begins The Suicide of Reason (2007): Lawrence R. Brown warns that “no society has long existed through the forbearance and charity of another” (vi); Charles Darwin chimes in, as well, noting how difficult it is constantly to remember that life is a universal struggle. By these standards Harris, a frequent contributor to Policy Review, offers backhanded praise to the version of Islam that he is discussing, noting almost with admiration that it has been “successful” wherever it became fanatical.5 He suggests that militant jihad may succeed for four reasons: first, “they have the demographics—in Europe, the birthrate of the native Europeans continues to fall, while the birthrate among the Muslim immigrants is explosive” (231–32); second, the modern jihadists are facing an enemy that has a superstitious awe of the very idea of democracy . . . [which] overlooks the fact that in the Muslim world, those who historically have been the most tolerant and cosmopolitan in their outlook have come from the ruling political class and the economic elite, while the religious class and the bulk of the population have been precisely those who are most fanatically opposed to Western ways (232); third, the West has forgotten the need to protect its culture (233); and fourth, radical Islam sees the West as having “succumbed to cultural decadence” (233). These points are all contestable—for starters, we might question the very notion of discrete “cultures” in a globalizing world, as well as, conversely, the notion of any blanket categorization of a particular cultural manifestation as being definitively descriptive of one of these supposedly discrete cultures. Countering Harris, Robert Pape writes that [t]he data show that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any of the world’s religions. In fact, the leading instigators of suicide attacks are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a MarxistLeninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion . . . Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal . . . Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting. (Pape 2005: 3–4)

Freedom for/from Self-Immolation 247 The point of this essay, though, is that these same disputes in how to analyze the data are also being argued from within Islam, among those who are believers and among those who would more readily describe themselves as cultural Muslims. Talal Asad, for example, points out that Pape’s argument does not answer the question of why individuals agree to be recruited, and he notes that explanations in terms of religious (and especially Islamic) motive are still favored, partly because they provide a model that combines psychological elements (familiar from criminal trials) and cultural signs (distinguishing them from us), a model that lends itself to the discourse of the protection of civilization (committed to life) against barbarism (a love of death). (Asad 2007: 56) Anouar Majid, on the other hand, suggests that “there has never been a better time to cast aside unexamined tribal attitudes.” He posits that “Muslims are as capable of self-criticism as are the members of more mature democratic polities” (Majid 2007: 12), but that these critiques are not given the attention they deserve. At the same time, though, he sees a crucial obstacle for many Muslims in their confrontation with ridda (apostasy). Majid notes that in 2005 a Moroccan journal (Le Journal Hebdomadaire) suggested that to change one’s faith in a Muslim society . . . is something that cannot be contemplated . . . [and] to proselytize on behalf of other religions is a crime punishable by a prison sentence ranging from six months to three years . . . Worse still, many religious scholars . . . are clear about the punishment meted out to the apostate: death. All religious scholars in the Muslim Sunni tradition agree on this. (81–82) “Thus,” concludes Majid, “it would seem that a person born in a Muslim society has no right to think for him- or herself, a situation that is vital to unraveling the crisis besetting the Muslim world today” (82). Such a condition would seem to be the perfect breeding ground for fanaticism, which Harris describes as “the negation of individual thinking” (2007: 159). This is much the conclusion of Tahar Djaout’s unlucky protagonist (like Djaout himself, who was assassinated by fellow Muslims outside his home), who writes that “the price to be paid is not an exorbitant one: it would have been enough to join the herd, to bleat in unison, to watch out for false notes. Besides, the faithful are there to make the task easier: their pious clamors stifle any question” (2001: 142). But Majid protests that there is a long history of ijtihad (interpretation), crucial to Islam and not the exclusive domain of mullahs. He mentions Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Mohammed Abdu, Abdu’s disciple Mohammed Rashid Rida, who

248 John C. Hawley distorted Abdu’s pluralism and in the process led to the more traditional approach of the Wahhabis and Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Islamic Brotherhood. He speaks of Sheikh Rifa a-Rifa al-Tahtawi, Taha Hussein, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, and Ali Abderraziq. Among contemporary reformers Majid focuses on Rachid Benzine, Abdul Karim Soroush, Mohammed Arkoun, Amin al-Khuli, Mohammed Khalafallah, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Abdelmajid Charfi, Farid Esack, Mohammed Talbi, Hichem Djaït, and Abdelwahab Meddeb. Several of these, he suggests, argue that “the content of the Qur’an is a form of human communication . . . and must thus respond to the basic rules of language and communication analysis” (2007: 89). Of course, arguments over freedom of interpretation and the nature and meaning of scripture continue to roil Christianity (consider the ongoing schisms within the Anglican communion, for example), and there was a time when standing on the wrong side of such arguments could result in death in various European capitals. Still, it comes as a surprise to many in the West when they learn that the argument is today also a heated one within Islam. But how prevalent such controversies are among actually practicing Muslims may be another question. When, for example, Abdelmajid Charfi argues that “sealed prophecy” means that “God affirmed that humans are henceforth capable of thinking for themselves and no longer need the procession of prophets who had punctuated human history until then,” and when he argues that “sealing prophecy announces the advent of mature, independent human beings, not their enclosure in an unchanging orthodoxy” (quoted in Majid 2007: 90), one can understandably question the level of acceptance of such theories in contemporary Islam. In any case, Majid comes to a conclusion quite similar to Harris’s, at least in one sense: “such a process of liberation,” writes Majid, “can only happen in a secular environment, one in which the individual is fully free to choose as he or she pleases” (90). Such a conclusion, surely, is anathema to those who strap on an explosives vest. So, where is the “disconnect”? Mohammed Talbi, a practicing Muslim influenced by Freud, argues for “the absolute necessity to free ourselves from fear, participate in a universal modernity, promote total freedom of thought and expression, and institute a secular democratic order” (quoted in Majid 2007: 92). And Hichem Djaït similarly argues for “the absolute necessity to embrace modernity” (92). But these, again, are not the folks who are blowing themselves up. Majid argues that, “despite its social constraints, Islam was far more tolerant than and never as prosecutorial as Christendom in the pre-colonial period,” but he concedes that “it has fallen way behind on the issue of human rights in the past two centuries” (97). First among the problems is the fact that “there has never been a separation of state and church in Islam” (98). But equally troubling are the consequences of accepting the Qur’an as the product of revelation, which is seen to be a non-negotiable act. When that is done,

Freedom for/from Self-Immolation 249 one is conceding . . . much of the ideological and cultural terrain to the ulema and the mostly conservative juridical corpus that underpins their theology. For it is the ulema who are the final arbiters in matters of faith in Muslim societies, and it is they who maintain the oppressive tautologies and cultural conformities that make independent thinking, at least in matters of religion, a near impossibility. (102) On the political plane, as an extension of interpretation, “Islamism,” with its call for a renewed caliphate, seems a natural extension of the need for submission to some version of a strict interpretation of the Qur’an. But here, whether as a threat, challenge, or desperate hope, Majid proposes that Islamism, with its delusions, cannot endure in a world traversed by a consciousness shaped by a more accurate knowledge about the past, as the reliable critic of religious thought Sadik J. al-Azm put it recently; it is, in fact, already on its way out, a thing of the past, perhaps the gasp of a dying order. Impotent, resentful, and politically reckless, there is no going back for Islamism to a golden age or creating a functioning umma, the large, transcontinental community of Muslims that existed only as a form of subjectivity, never as a political reality. (106) But isn’t that the issue? As Harris observes, “reasonable men are the result of a visceral code that must be implanted within them from an early age” (2007: 275), and there are many Muslims in their twenties who, it would seem, had little access or desire for that code while they were growing up in refugee camps, or attending schools in the West where their cultures were implicitly or explicitly demeaned on a daily basis. How are they to avoid “fundamentalism,” no matter how reluctantly it may be entered into? To read Fawaz A. Gerges on the subject, of course, is to tremble at the wall that is built between reason and faith by strict adherents. For them, “the near enemy and the far enemy ha[ve] become as one, a great world order that need[s] to be destroyed” (2007: 181). Gerges, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, ultimately draws conclusions similar to some of Harris’s, although he takes a different path to get there. On the one hand, he writes that “conservative ‘neo-fundamentalism’ (which aims primarily at Islamizing society from the bottom up through what is called da’wa, ‘the call’) has generally replaced revolutionary jihadism, whose goal is to Islamize society by simply seizing state power” (16). The conversion implied by this neo-fundamentalism is an interior purification of self, rather than a political overhaul of society—though an eventual overhaul through spiritual enlightenment is desired. But this leads Gerges to conclude that studying Islam itself will not help us understand “the goals and

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strategies of the jihadist” because “the key to understanding the jihadist and his journey lies in politics, not in religion” (12).6 For the confirmed jihadist, one assumes this would be a distinction without a difference. But there are many religious spokesmen who are arguing vociferously these days that such “martyrdom” is anti-Islamic—that, in effect, such purists are in fact not religious enough. Most recently, the critique has been aimed at Osama bin Laden from some of his closest allies and former mentors, most notably Sayyid Imam Al Sharif, whose Rationalization of Jihad appeared in an Egyptian newspaper in November of 2008 (in Shehadeh 2010). Much of the criticism comes from a concern that the hubristic doctrine driving bin Laden (takfir, whereby one claims authority to discern who is or is not a “true” Muslim) is harming Islam. Peter Bergen summarizes the slippery slope: “first, the radicals deem some Muslims apostates; after that, the radicals start killing them” (Bergen and Cruickshank 2008: 4).7 Thus, there is an ongoing debate within Islam itself, and it involves a conversation among Muslims living in traditionally Islamic countries, and those living abroad. Renowned Muslim scholar Muhammad Tahir ul-Qadri, Sufi founder of the Minhaj-ul-Qu’ran International movement with centers in ninety countries, in March 2010 issued a 600-page fatwa outlawing suicide bombing and calling those who commit such acts unbelievers. He issued the decree in London, hoping that it will have some effect on young Muslims in Europe who might otherwise be attracted by the reasoning of fundamentalist groups (World News Network 2010). This is much the same group addressed by Hamid in his novel: young Muslims living in the West. Clearly, a question that must be addressed by both Muslims and non-Muslims is the scope and place of Islamic thought in lands traditionally identifying as Christian and now, increasingly, secularized. Akbar Ahmed and Eboo Patel are among the most hopeful of those who seek an ecumenical inclusion of Islamic thinking in the public forums in the West, and Ahmed, Professor of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington DC, also challenges Islamic societies. He writes that his recommendation to Muslim leaders would be as follows: Stay as close to your ideals as possible. Emphasize ilm, knowledge; ihsan, balance and compassion; and adl, or justice in your societies. At this time, your people groan under your rule because they see little of these attributes. Neither you nor the surrounding world can afford to keep the Muslim ummah from playing its full role on the world stage. That role will be positive and beneficial when it is defined by these great Islamic ideals. (Ahmed 2007: 267) Patel, who is the founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core in Chicago, is yet more practical, focusing specifically on youth and their needs for

Freedom for/from Self-Immolation 251 clarity and inspiration. He notes that “Muslims under the age of thirty make up about 60 percent of the world’s Islamic population” (Gerges 2007: 6), and goes on to make the following stark analysis: Every time we read about a young person who kills in the name of God, we should recognize that an institution painstakingly recruited and trained that young person. And that institution is doing the same for thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of others like him. In other words, those religious extremists have invested in their youth programs. (Patel 2007: 149) Patel widens the lens through which this current bizarre crisis of suicide bombing can be viewed, and thereby broadens the underlying threat: “Religious extremism is a movement of young people taking action,” he writes. “Hindu nationalists, hate-filled rabbis, Christian Identity preachers, and Muslim totalitarians prey on young people’s desire to have a clear identity and make a powerful impact” (xvii). The fictionalized crisis of values that Mohsin Hamid offers readers in The Reluctant Fundamentalist plays out in daily news accounts. Adam Gadahn, who has also been called Yahya Majadin Adams and Azzam al-Amriki, was born and raised in California as Adam Perlstein and became radicalized there. He has become an effective spokesperson for Al-Qaeda, congratulating Major Nidal Hasan for his attack on fellow American servicemen in Texas. “Brother Nidal,” he has said, “is the ideal role-model for every repentant Muslim in the armies of the unbelievers and apostate regimes.” No longer reliant on poor young men with few options in life, the forces of fundamentalist violence have something grander to offer welleducated and financially secure young men in the West who seek a higher calling, a supposed return to their faith. But such ideals, it seems, have little humanity about them. “As the blessed operations of September 11th showed,” says Gadahn, “a little imagination and planning and a limited budget can turn almost anything into a deadly, effective and convenient weapon’” (quoted in Khan 2010). “As for myself,” notes Mohsin Hamid’s fictional Changez, “I was clearly on the threshold of great change; only the final catalyst was now required” (Hamid 2007: 150). For Changez, that catalyst came in the question of his role in history—as a “janissary” employed by the dominant world power, or as one trained by that power who chooses to work towards its dismantlement in the name of the powerless. How such idealism might be channeled more peacefully is the vexing question of our day.

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Notes 1. See Hawley (2010). 2. Christoph Reuter writes that “we are faced with people in revolt not only against the state but also all other candidates for supreme authority, religious or secular” (2004: 3). 3. Talal Asad notes that “the insurgents are faced with an adversary that possesses formidable military weaponry as well as methods of controlling civilian populations in occupied territory that are often very effective, and this superiority cannot be met directly” (2007: 55). 4. “It is usually assumed that the religious quest is a search for meaning, but what is often downplayed is the observable fact that this quest is at the same time a series of transformations of fear . . . fear of death, of human finitude, of personal annihilation; and . . . fear of the other’s existence, of the force of the other’s own intentions and aims” (Stein 2010: 45). 5. Harris contrasts this fanaticism with that of contemporary fundamentalist Christians in the United States: “the mere fact that Christian fundamentalists hold beliefs that are considered to be silly or irrational by the intelligentsia does not make them fanatics: they may be deluded fools, but they are peaceful deluded fools” (2007: 209). 6. For a discussion of the politics of the movement see Hafez (2007). 7. For an interesting analysis of al-Sharif’s book see Wright (2008).

Bibliography Ahmed, A. (2007) Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Asad, T. (2007) On Suicide Bombing, New York: Columbia University Press. Benaïssa, S. (2004) The Last Night of a Damned Soul, trans. J. and D. Gross. New York: Grove Press. Bergen, P. and Cruickshank P. (2008) “The Unraveling: The Jihadist Revolt Against bin Laden,” The New Republic, June 11. Online. Available: http://www.tnr.com/article/ the-unraveling (accessed June 1, 2010). Djaout, T. (2001) The Last Summer of Reason, trans. M. de Jager, St. Paul, MN: Ruminator Books. Gerges, F. A. (2007) Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy, Orlando, FL: Harvest Harcourt. Hafez, M. M. (2007) Suicide Bombers in Iraq: The Strategy and Ideology of Martyrdom, Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. Hamid, M. (2007) The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Orlando, FL: Harvest Harcourt. Harris, L. (2007) The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West, New York: Basic Books. Hawley, J. (2010) “Jihad as Rite of Passage: Tahar Djaout’s The Last Summer of Reason and Slimane Benaïssa’s The Last Night of a Damned Soul,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46(3– 4): 394–404. Hussein, T. (1994) A Man of Letters, trans. M. El-Zayyat, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.

Freedom for/from Self-Immolation 253 Khan, A. (2010) “Pakistan Arrests American-Born Al-Qaida,” Associated Press, March 7. Online. Available: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h3FN9 ZXp8uKf-Wdfo1- 0EiN9KSmwD9E9V6580 (accessed March 1, 2010). Majid, A. (2007) A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent Is Vital to Islam and America, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pape, R. (2005) Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, New York: Random House. Patel, E. (2007) Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Reuter, C. (2004) My Life as a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, trans. H. RaggKirkby, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Shehadeh, M. (2010) “Weakening al-Qaeda: Literature Review Challenges Its Authority.” Online. Available: http://www.arabinsight.org/aiarticles/215.pdf (accessed December 7, 2010). Shore, Z. (2006) Breeding Bin Ladens: America, Islam, and the Future of Europe, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Stein, R. (2010) For Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Terrorism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. World News Network (2010) “Tahir Qadri’s Fatwa for Terrorists: Hell Waits for You,” March 3. Online. Available: http://article.wn.com/view/2010/03/03/Tahir_Qadris _ Fatwa_for_terrorists_Hell_waits_for_you/ (accessed June 1, 2010). Wright, L. (2008) “The Rebellion Within: An Al Qaeda Mastermind Questions Terrorism,” The New Yorker, June 19. Online. Available: http://www.newyorker.com/ reporting/2008/06/02/080602fa_fact_wright?currentPage=all (accessed June 1, 2010).

21 Good Again? Imperialism and salvation in The Kite Runner and Caché Nermeen Shaikh

I What does it mean to be responsible? And what is the distinction—if there is any, and should there be any—between individual and collective responsibility? How can such a distinction be drawn, and what are its consequences? And what of forgiveness? Who is able to grant forgiveness: an individual, a society, a polity? What does it mean to seek, and to receive, absolution for a historical, and persistent, injustice? From whom can such absolution be sought, and in what form? Can such issues, which are inherently political, be represented in art without making art political (assuming it can ever be anything else)? And finally, how should such art be interpreted, or received, and are the authors themselves ultimately responsible for what they portray, for the perceptions they foster or encourage? By way of two texts (visual and written), Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden) and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, the present essay will examine these questions in the context, respectively, of the legacy of French colonialism in Algeria, and of past and continuing imperial wars in Afghanistan. Both texts are explicit in their exploration of historical injustice, enacted both individually and collectively. However obliquely, they engage the repetition of a similar (yet different) injustice in the context of radically different (and yet again, similar) circumstances. Forgiveness, then, and responsibility, with regard to a particular injustice, in the face of repetition and the persistence of historical inequities, are fraught and, in a sense, impossible. This is so not least because two questions—namely, who is to apportion blame on the one hand, and who is to grant forgiveness on the other— have yet to be adequately settled (if raised at all). The political is figured unequally in the two texts; it assumes in fact radically different forms. Although the explicit, if selective, invocation of contexts and events in Afghanistan and the US in The Kite Runner appears formally less ominous—even as it compromises the integrity of the whole—in Caché one witnesses a slow and gradual disclosure of the colonial history that haunts and marks contemporary French society. In the latter case, then, the inheritance of a marred

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past remains largely undisturbed, whereas the former enables a closure, a sense, however trite, that the past can, in an apparently meaningful way, be overcome. The two texts also have much in common. They both examine the effects of acts committed by the protagonists in the course of their childhood, acts they are forced to confront as adults. In both cases, the offense takes place in the context of larger political and historical prejudices, and is itself directed at children who are marked as socially inferior, lower class, and vulnerable—servants in the household. For them, the consequences are dire, irreversible. This is underscored, both formally and symbolically, by way of unsettling narrative shifts that occur in each case: both victims, both young boys, are first evicted from their homes on false charges, and are again sacrificed—or perhaps martyred—as adults. What renders such violence necessary (both victims suffer rather grisly deaths), which is in neither case ultimately determining? What does it convey about the larger questions the texts attempt to address? The political context, as it is both revealed and concealed in The Kite Runner and in Caché, can be said to anticipate or even frame the position of audiences visà-vis the two works. Thus, the choice of historical period and political events covered in The Kite Runner can hardly be innocent when considering the context of its publication: the year is 2003, the US invasion of Afghanistan is being replayed daily in the news, and the so-called—though as it happens, provisional—routing of the Taliban is heralded in all quarters. And yet, none of these events are mentioned or alluded to. This is omission on a large scale. Moreover, the configuration of world events at the time of writing and publication would make any claim to randomness, or indeed innocence, naïve and facile at best, disingenuous at worst. As a matter of fact, and obviously not unrelated, The Kite Runner has enjoyed virtually unprecedented popularity—for a work set almost entirely in a foreign country—with American audiences. Recall that Hosseini is writing about a country that is frequently featured in the headlines, which few Americans can even locate on the map. Virtually on the day following the publication of his book, Hosseini became a celebrity. (This is one aspect in which the two works are clearly not equivalent: Haneke is an art house director, whose audiences, by definition, tend to be limited.) Incidentally, and adding to its surprising success, this was Hosseini’s first novel. These issues are not just of academic interest. There was more than one major world-historical event in September 2001: the UN World Conference Against Racism concluded on September 8 in Durban, South Africa, but only after the US (which had sent a low-level delegation in the first place) and Israel walked out, citing their objections to the equation of Zionism and racism. Other delegates in Durban claimed that the US had never wanted to be part of the negotiations because of the fear of having to pay reparations for slavery, and indeed for colonialism. Naomi Klein explains:

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Nermeen Shaikh the gathering’s overriding message was that even though the most visible signs of racism had largely disappeared—colonial rule, apartheid, Jim Crowstyle segregation—profound racial divides will persist and even widen until the states and corporations that profited from centuries of state-sanctioned racism [slavery and colonialism] pay back some of what they owe. (Klein 2009: 57)

The lingering question—of who bears responsibility for the devastation of the global South, the inequality that persists, and in some cases grows despite formal decolonization—informs my reflections in this essay. Given the endurance of the historical legacy of colonialism and slavery, compounded by the continuity and extension of imperial structures and practices, responsibility not only accrues for events in the past but also with regard to the very inheritance of this legacy, its persistence in manifold forms in the present. It may well be too early to speak of forgiveness. How can one seek forgiveness, after all, while committing the same infraction? In other words, is it not premature to invoke forgiveness for colonialism or imperialism whose abuses and atrocities persist, thinly veiled under the various guises of structural adjustment or humanitarian intervention, to name only the most obvious? All this to say nothing of entire peoples killed, legacies lost and destroyed, economies distorted and ravaged, traditions marred, cultures decimated, languages made obsolete. Who will assume the position of addressee when there is no one left?

II Hosseini’s Kite Runner is set in Kabul, first during the period prior to the Soviet invasion (late 1970s) and then, after a long hiatus, in Afghanistan under Taliban rule (late 1990s). As I have suggested earlier, the choice of the events covered can by no means be seen as innocent: it quite precisely glosses over the entire period of the proxy war fought on Afghan soil between the US and the Soviet Union, and then, more recently (and to this day), the period after the American invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. The aesthetic and political decision to omit these two key moments in the country’s history, while including the many depredations of the 1979 Soviet invasion and the numerous (well-documented, and ceaselessly rehearsed) atrocities of the Taliban regime, seems rather too comfortable, expressed as it is in the country where the author resides and where an allpervasive triumphalism prevails. (Not coincidentally, this same country has long been declared the victor—above all morally—against these two particular unredeemable enemies.) In the intervening period (the 1980s and early 1990s), Amir, the novel’s protagonist, finds himself briefly in Pakistan and then in Fremont, California. As a

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child in Kabul, he is brought up by his father, a widower, and an older male servant, Ali, whose son, Hassan, is Amir’s close friend and companion. It is made clear early on in the novel that the domestic servants are treated much as family members, so that the relationships that develop between them far exceed the moral economy of those between employer and employee. Nevertheless, there is class inequality: Hassan is clearly the servant, who prepares Amir’s breakfast, makes his bed, and, while Amir is in school, helps his father in the house, washing clothes, sweeping, and preparing food. Interestingly, Amir confesses that he never thought of Hassan and himself as friends, though he does not attribute this to class difference at all, only to ethnicity and religion: “Because history isn’t easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi’a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing” (Hosseini 2003: 25). The master of the house, Amir’s father, treats Hassan much as he does his own son. This explains why we are given many early indications of the jealousy that torments Amir when his father turns his attention to Hassan. The occasion, for example, when Hassan undergoes surgery for his harelip, and Amir writes, “I wished I too had some kind of scar that would beget Baba’s sympathy. It wasn’t fair. Hassan hadn’t done anything to earn Baba’s affections; he’d just been born with a stupid harelip” (46). It turns out of course that there is much more to this, as we discover only at the conclusion of the novel. Ali is infertile and Hassan is not his son; he is in fact Amir’s brother, the son of his own father. The pivotal episode in the narrative occurs when, at the age of 12, Amir watches Hassan, his longtime servant and companion and a boy his own age, being raped by school bullies. The perpetrators are, like Amir, upper-class Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan. Hassan is Hazara, an ethnic minority persecuted at different points in the country’s history. More important than ethnicity, however, the child is principally assaulted because, in an earlier encounter, he had defended Amir against precisely the same bullies. The rape itself occurs as Hassan has gone out in search of Amir’s kite, which he wants to reclaim because he and Amir have just won the seasonal kite-running competition in Kabul. Amir desperately wants the kite in his hands. His responsibility– indeed, his guilt—is therefore compounded: Hassan is punished first for protecting Amir, as well as for submitting to Amir’s request to find and return his kite. The rape is exacted as revenge against Hassan for overstepping the boundaries of his class and ethnic position (by standing up to boys who are both upper-class and of the majority), but the burden is clearly on Amir, and even greater as a result. Present at the scene, moreover, Amir remains silent and allows the rape to occur without intervening. When the boys attack Hassan, not only does Amir fail to protect him (or at least attempt to do so), he goes on to pretend he has not witnessed what took

258 Nermeen Shaikh place in front of his eyes, namely, the rape. Out of guilt or possessiveness of his father, Amir then begins to spurn all of Hassan’s attempts at resuming their relationship. He eventually sets about trying to get Hassan expelled from the house, an endeavor that is ultimately successful. In his privileged position as narrator, Amir is also able to turn this series of episodes—culminating in this final violent and brutal exercise of class and social privilege in the form of a quite spectacular betrayal—into an occasion to indulge in endless, rather self-serving speculations about himself (a gesture that really starts with the first line of the book: “I became what I am at the age of twelve”). Decades later, haunted by guilt, his transgressions still shrouded in complete secrecy, Amir is given the, as it were, miraculous opportunity to be “good again,” to return to Kabul and save Sohrab, Hassan’s orphaned son (Hassan is long dead, killed along with his wife by the Taliban). After some initial hesitation, and at some risk to his life, Amir leaves the sanctuary of his comfortable home in California, travels to Kabul, and rescues the child, eventually bringing him home to the US (192).

III Haneke’s Caché (2005), set in present-day Paris, presents its audience with a similar episode, one that is slowly revealed by way of flashbacks. The principal character, Georges, a bourgeois cultural figure, lives with his wife Anne and son Pierrot in a posh residential neighborhood. Georges is a TV personality, the host of a literary talk-show; Anne works for a publishing house. The film opens with a videotape Georges has received anonymously. The tape arrives alone, and includes a view of Georges’s house from the street, as if in a surveillance video. More tapes are subsequently delivered wrapped in child-like drawings in which blood figures in one way or another: in a boy’s mouth, around the neck of a chicken. These images prove to be increasingly relevant as the narrative unfolds, with one of the later videotapes featuring scenes outside Georges’s childhood home. As soon as the drawings appear, however, Georges starts to show clear signs of distress. He suffers from nightmares, visions of a child with blood in his mouth, and sees himself, also as a child, confronting a darker boy his own age. We soon find out that the darker child is Majid, the son of Algerian servants who had been employed by Georges’s parents. Following the servants’ disappearance in the wake of a demonstration called by the Front pour la Libération Nationale (FLN), in which over 200 Algerians were murdered, drowned in the Seine by the French police (a reference to the events of October 17, 1961), we learn that Georges’s parents had intended to adopt Majid. In a series of gestures reminiscent of Amir’s in The Kite Runner, Georges, then age 6, fabricates lies to have Majid (who is also 6) evicted from their home, first by telling his parents that Majid is coughing up blood (the

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attempt is thwarted when the doctor examines him), then by convincing Majid that his father wants him to kill the rooster. Once Majid has done so, Georges complains to his parents that Majid slit the bird’s neck to terrorize him. The plan succeeds, and Majid is literally forced from his home in tears, protesting wildly, to an orphanage, relegating him forever to a life of poverty as a member of the large Arab-Muslim underclass in France. The videotapes trigger Georges’s memory, who reproduces much the same injustice by disavowing any responsibility towards Majid or for what occurred. When Georges first tells his wife, after much insistence on her part, that he had simply lied about Majid (without revealing the precise content of the lies), he dismisses his childhood misdeed as an “interlude.” While holding Majid responsible for the disturbing tapes, Georges demands that she endorse his interpretation: “What should I call it? A tragedy? Maybe it was a tragedy. I don’t know. I don’t feel responsible for it. Why should I? It’s all so absurd.” He remains adamant in his refusal to assume responsibility, in public or private, despite insistent questioning on the part of his wife and despite the nightmares that haunt him as the videotapes keep arriving. The most dramatic moment in the film occurs when Georges, who accuses Majid of sending the tapes, has already questioned and even threatened him, is then asked by Majid to come to his apartment, with no explanation. In a completely unexpected move that occurs as Georges enters the impoverished quarters, Majid grabs a knife and, in the blink of an eye, slits his own throat. Blood splashes on the wall, and Georges leaves, terrified, after a minute’s hesitation. It is only when he finally tells Anne that Majid killed himself in front of him that Georges begins to come to term with his past actions. He confesses to Anne the nature of the lies he told his parents, the way he had Majid evicted from the house when they were children. When Majid’s son confronts Georges, he nonetheless maintains his innocence. He grows more fearful with the arrival of a tape at his place of work, becomes increasingly aggressive towards the young man, and insists that he bears no responsibility for how awful Majid’s life was, much less for his suicide.

IV Memory, as it confronts us in these two works of art, is at once ethical and political. It engages more than the individual at the center of the narrative, even if it is not quite clear to what extent it engages the audience. The crucial problem, I want to argue, is that in both texts, it is children who are responsible for the initial transgression. It is as a child that Amir has Hassan dismissed, as a child that Georges has Majid evicted. And the principal motives in both cases are typical of childhood: jealousy and possessiveness—not wanting to share the love of their parents (in Amir’s case, just the father) with another. How, then, is one to

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understand responsibility, how to apportion blame? Should 6- or 12-year-old children be held accountable for what they do? And, translated, as the texts readily are, into political allegories, what would this suggest? Why is childhood used in this way? The wars in Afghanistan and Algeria were not, and are not, conceived of, or waged by, children. Colonialism, or present-day imperialism, is not born of children’s misdeeds, much less attributable to their petty calculations of self-interest. By invoking in such a particular manner the transgressions of children, both Haneke and Hosseini no doubt make it easier for us as viewers and consumers to forgive or, as it were, forget the context in which these crimes occur—namely, in Afghanistan, the class difference, as well as the economic and geopolitical context (the exploitation of the ethnic Hazara minority, the ability of Amir and his father to escape once the Soviets invade; the means to return as an adult, to rescue Hassan’s child and bring him to America), and in Caché, the history of colonialism in Algeria, the brutal colonial wars, the position of formerly colonized populations in French society, and the persistence in different forms of the same spectacular imbalance in power. These are all part of what grants Georges (and finally Amir) a certain entitlement—indeed, what affords him the privilege of indifference or ignorance. We are confronted with the striking contrast between the upper-class, cultural elite lifestyle and home of Georges’s family as against the dilapidated public housing in which he finds Majid as an adult— perhaps the most obvious material demonstration of Georges’s position relative to Majid. But there are numerous other—material, social, cultural, and importantly, political—markers of this disparity inscribed throughout the film. There is a significant difference between the way in which the two narratives conclude, of course, and what they therefore suggest about the possibility of seeking forgiveness, of making amends. Still, the perspective ultimately adopted in both is that of the protagonists as adults, who look back upon their past youthful—if also grave—behavior. It is this perspective that, intentionally or not, introduces a measure of justified skepticism regarding that which links these adults to a past that may or may not be “theirs” to assume and claim, much less repair: in Kite Runner, when Amir is informed by an uncle of Hassan’s fate in Taliban-dominated Afghanistan, he returns to try and save Hassan’s son. Amir feels guilt-ridden and seeks to correct past sins, the measure of which he may be overestimating after all; whereas Georges seems to act out the guilt he also denies. Thus, when faced with the videotapes, he remains convinced that it is Majid who is the offender, Majid who is sending these tapes (the question of who is responsible for the videotapes is never fully resolved in the film, and may, in fact, not be that important). Georges thus continues to insist—also out of guilt and fear—on his innocence, thereby treating Majid even worse than he did as a child. As an adult, in any case, his behavior is obviously far worse than Amir’s, and the results irreparable. In The Kite Runner, by the time Amir hears from his uncle, Hassan is dead. It

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is Amir who finds redemption—of a peculiar kind, to be sure—since he is able to rescue Hassan’s son and bring him to America, spending weeks and months trying to make him happy. Ultimately, as the book concludes, Amir takes Sohrab to a park in Fremont, and flies a kite with him. The child smiles, and although the protagonist recognizes that the gesture is small (“It was only a smile”), he says “But I’ll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.” Amir is thereby “forgiven,” and in this, the last page of the book, virtually absolved, in our eyes and tentatively in his own, for his childhood transgression. That Hassan is dead, that the past cannot be erased, seems less important with the last lines of the book: “I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the Valley of Panjsher on my lips. I ran” (Hosseini 2003: 371). I would argue that the way both texts work also allows us to feel comfortably complicit; as consumers of Haneke’s high cinema, we are certainly given more of an opportunity to identify with Georges than with Majid, just as we identify more with Amir than with Hassan. In one scene in Caché, at a dinner hosted by Georges and Anne in their home, one of the guests is black, a French woman of African origin, who dines with the others as one of them. This touch—a multicultural moment, so to speak—allows us, the viewers, to think that Georges and Anne are much like so many among us in metropolitan centers in Europe and America, allegedly well past uncomfortable positions on race, integration (or assimilation), difference, etc. Haneke does unsettle some of this complacency in another scene, where Georges and Anne are crossing the street and a black cyclist almost runs into them, resulting in a shouting match whereby the audience feels deeply discomfited for having already made its emotional investment in the white characters. And given what transpires, perhaps what this overall sense of complicity is meant to reveal is the hypocrisy and moral ugliness that lies just beneath the genteel surface of our comfort and—to say it again—complacency. Or perhaps, having identified with Georges to the extent that we do, we are sympathetic to his predicament, to the difficulty he finds himself in, tormented by the constant arrival of these videotapes, the impending sense of doom and entrapment, and the conclusion (although unverified) that only Majid or his son could be responsible. In other words, given that Georges did what he did as a child—as he points out to his wife, he was after all only a child—does he really deserve to being haunted, even provoked, in this way? Is Amir, also a child at the time, justified in carrying the burden of guilt to the extent he has?

V Khaled Hosseini’s novel remained on the bestseller list of the New York Times for several years. This is not often the case with foreign fiction in the US, which is

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why there is room to ask what accounts for such an enthusiastic response. The most obvious explanation has to do with the events that followed September 11, 2001, namely US military and political engagement in Afghanistan, making Afghanistan figure in the American popular imagination as never before. A second explanation has to do with the novel’s style and accessibility. The language is simple and the style is rather like a suspense thriller; one really just wants to know what happens next. It is written in prose that is clearly geared towards a mainstream, American audience. But the most important factor, I would argue, is the following: the novel’s theme of redemption, namely the oft repeated “It is possible to be good again,” which resonates widely,1 and works well in the American context in particular. The message is simple: the worst crimes can be forgiven, the past may be erased. How else is one to explain the total absence, in the media and in the public sphere, of any discussion of the genocide of America’s native population? On the contrary, various holidays mark the triumph of white settlers—Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, etc.—with hardly a mention of the people who inhabited this land for centuries and were all but wiped out. The same can be said of slavery, which scarcely figures in American public consciousness, and when it does, is framed exclusively as a distant problem of the remote past. In its historical reach, The Kite Runner simply omits the matter of American complicity in Afghanistan’s devastation, past or present. Instead, given the scenes of Taliban-dominated Afghanistan in the last moments of the book (the Taliban are blamed for the death of Hassan and his family), the novel reinscribes a form of triumphalist amnesia in which the only villains (according to the book and the film) are the Russians, followed closely, skipping more than a decade ahead, by the Taliban. The rights to the book were subsequently purchased by a Hollywood production company and made into a film. As one reviewer noted, the film ultimately reproduced quite precisely the injustice the book talks about.2 As far as its reception is concerned, Haneke’s Caché has had much less resonance. Still, it cannot but be read as an exploration, sometimes even an indictment, of the fragility of historical memory, of the enduring effects of past crimes, of the need to claim an equally persistent responsibility. Paradoxically, the problem still resides in the past, even if it lingers on. Hosseini’s text, eager to forgive even the present carnage in Afghanistan (after all, devastation in the name of salvation is no more than collateral damage), has, as its central motif, “It is possible to be good again,” and the protagonist is, predictably, redeemed, all past transgressions erased, the world created anew (and what better place to create that world than Fremont, California?). In Caché the protagonist can only seek expiation through escape (hiding in his bedroom, curtains drawn, taking sleeping pills). Whatever ambiguity remains at the close of the film, the reclamation of “goodness” is simply impossible. The film ends on a long, steady shot outside Pierrot’s school as the children disperse. Roughly half the audiences for the film

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notice, after a minute or so of that same, still shot, Majid’s son and Pierrot walking out of the frame together. The cinematic gesture itself is profoundly enigmatic. What would it mean and what does it say about the narrative we’ve just witnessed? Were Majid’s son and Pierrot responsible for the tapes? Or is it a different kind of gesture, which, however tentative, would imply that the next generation may still make amends? What remains in either case is the sense that the “crime” that Georges committed in his childhood is negligible when set against the greater crime of a hushed-up massacre perpetrated by a so-called civilized state. While Georges’s guilty secret has caught up with him and may yet destroy his little world, France has yet to atone for its past atrocities.3 How do literature and politics, or culture and politics, work together? Although many people still insist on the absolute separation of spheres, political and cultural, there is little doubt that art is often political. What does this say about the question of representation? Whose history gets told by whom, and, assuming there is a history, under what guise (fiction, literature, film, etc.)? And what about the persuasiveness of a certain representation, if for no other reason than the power that produces it and disseminates it? Should we be troubled by the fact that Khaled Hosseini’s book became a bestseller after the US invasion of Afghanistan following 9/11, or by the fact that the National Gallery in Washington, DC, and then the Metropolitan Museum in New York City featured for the first time an exhibition of Afghan art as the war in Afghanistan was being waged? Numerous other examples come to mind. Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003) is another case in point. The question is particularly relevant when considering these works in the context of the massive amount of “newsworthy” writing on Afghanistan and the Muslim world in the US, given wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and possible war in Pakistan or Iran—and who knows where else. What is the role of literature in this context? It appears that even though both of these rather different texts address the question of the responsibility accruing from imperialism, the absolution of the protagonist in The Kite Runner is facile and, ultimately, politically fatal, both in the context of the narrative, as well as the past and persistent devastation of Afghanistan. Caché, in contrast, and even if couched in terms of childhood misdeeds, may open the possibility of reflecting on historical injustice, guilt, and, ultimately, the inescapable call of responsibility, individual and collective (although on the latter it maintains a perhaps equally sinister silence). In neither case is it possible to abstract the narratives as they unfold from the public and social upheavals occurring in their midst, and which, in both cases, reveal the political significance of the narrative per se. Whereas Caché foregrounds the colonial question, practically in the form of a political pedagogy, only to eventually fail (necessarily?) to take its real ethical measure, The Kite Runner goes out of its way to bury that

264 Nermeen Shaikh abyssal ground, and thus reaps the rewards from a metropolitan audience steeped in a self-exonerating, cheap sentimentality. An enduring question, regarding the continuities between history and the present, the persistence, indeed “presence,” of so much relegated to the past, is whether a work of art can adequately answer the ethico-political call that this moment demands.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Gil Anidjar, James Ingram, and Nauman Naqvi for providing invaluable comments on earlier versions of this paper, as well as to the participants at the 2008 “Try Freedom” conference in Venice where this essay was initially presented.

Notes 1. This is precisely the theme that surfaces repeatedly in the novel and again in the movie, and in fact featured prominently in all the advertisements leading up to the film’s release, where the posters display the phrase, “There is a way to be good again” just under the movie title. 2. The two boys who played the role of the children were threatened in Afghanistan and eventually forced to flee to exile in Dubai before the release of the film, which was delayed to make this possible. This episode was widely covered in the media; for details, see Masters (2007). 3. Atonement seems a long way off given that, in early 2005, a new law was passed in the country requiring school history teachers to stress the “positive aspects” of French colonialism. (The law was subsequently repealed in response to public protest, but, given that the law was passed as recently as 2005, the larger point stands.)

Bibliography Caché (Hidden) (2005) Screenplay by Michael Haneke. Dir. Michael Haneke. Perf. Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, and Maurice Bénichou. Les Films du Losange. Hosseini, K. (2003) The Kite Runner, New York: Penguin Group. Klein, N. (2009) “Minority Death Match: Jews, Blacks, and the ‘Post-Racial’ Presidency,” Harper’s 319 (1912): 53–57. Masters, K. (2007) “Trouble with The Kite Runner,” Slate, October 5. Online. Accessible: http://www.slate.com/id/2175373/ (accessed June 2010).

22 “Holding All the Pieces Together” Colonial legacies and postcolonial futures in the writings of Igiaba Scego and Cristina Ali Farah Roberto Derobertis

This essay offers a reading of the work of two Italian-Somali writers, Cristina Ubax Ali Farah and Igiaba Scego, whose narrations weave the vicissitudes of the Somali diaspora, the trails of Italian colonial occupation of Somalia, and the condition of migrancy in today’s Italy and Europe. The texts often go back and forth from contemporary everyday life to the past by means of digressions and memoir, and they become crossroads where the forgotten Italian colonial past meets contemporary transnational migrations, thus showing how second generations reshape colonial memories in the migration context of the former colonizing country. These postcolonial textures have hardly entered the field of Italian literature and literary criticism and, broadly speaking, of Italian studies in Italy. As Sandra Ponzanesi has argued, in one of the first books that set to work postcolonial studies and theories on a group of texts written in Italian by migrant writers from former Italian colonies, “Italy has removed its Imperial deeds from the national consciousness,” so that the country “has not really dealt with the representation of the other since the images created by the Fascist propaganda with school books, huge maps, advertisements, posters, songs and films” (Ponzanesi 1999: 202). Within this cultural and political frame Scego’s and Ali Farah’s writings interrogate contemporary Italian culture, its roots and amnesias; at the same time they force Italian literary criticism and historiography to open up to postcolonial thinking.

“A Symptom Insisting on the Present”: A Postcolonial Perspective on Italy In September 2006 during a conference about migration, Gianfranco Fini (the Italian minister of foreign affairs between 2004 and 2006) stated the following:

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The Libyan embassy in Rome replied by reminding Mr. Fini of all the Italian crimes, adding that Libya today “enjoys the freedom, dignity and pride which were brought by the Revolution of 1 September 1969.”2 Nonetheless, Mr. Fini’s statement was, and still is, shared by many people in Italy. Indeed, in January 2008 the magazine L’Espresso published a few pictures, showing an Italian military jeep destroyed after an attack in Afghanistan, displaying the logo of Afrikakorps, the German expeditionary force in Libya and Egypt during the North African campaign of the Second World War. If we move from Libya to Somalia, we find another link between Italian colonialism and its warfare written into our language. According to the eminent linguist Tullio De Mauro, one of the very few Somali words that entered the Italian dictionary is dubat (from the Somali duubcad), which means “white turban” and became the name for Somali reserve troops in the Italian army (De Mauro 2006: 53), and it is a word from the army slang. A link that acquires new meanings today, as Libya is one of those non– EU countries that more than others are involved in the surveillance of European Union external borders. Actually, Frontex (The European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union) and the European Neighbourhood Policy provide for a strong interference in Libyan external relations (Rigo 2007: 77–116). So our present finds itself displaced in an intricate “historical canvas” (Spivak 1999: 209), and our “postcolonial condition” comes to the surface through stale revisionisms about Italian colonialism, through European global neo-colonialist and neo-imperialist policies, through words such as “freedom,” “dignity,” and “pride” used by a postcolonial regime, in military visual culture and in the re– establishment of old colonial borders. As Sandro Mezzadra has noticed, colonialism and the partial failure of anticolonial struggles are a “symptom insisting on the present” (Mezzadra 2008: 31).3 These haunting presences of the past were already foreshadowed in Ennio Flaiano’s colonial novel Tempo di uccidere (1947). After having wounded the native woman with whom he has had sex, the protagonist, an Italian lieutenant, dreads the consequences of her death: The priest would come to bless the corpse, the burial service would take place and (since I had asked that woman to take me back to a disowned but still present time) now I had to take the consequences.4 (Flaiano 2000: 44)

“Holding All the Pieces Together” 267 The time the lieutenant refers to is an allegedly primitive time in which he had arbitrarily located the woman’s temporality. But if we displace that time to a different configuration it becomes a perfect metaphor of Italian colonialism: repressed and yet present.

Postcolonial Writings in Italian My analysis focuses on two novels: the first is Rhoda (2004) by Igiaba Scego, who was born in Rome of Somali parents; the second is Madre piccola (2007) by Cristina Ali Farah, born in Mogadishu of a Somali father and an Italian mother.5 Their backgrounds are as different as are their respective links to the Somali diaspora. They share the ability to depict postcolonial Italy as an elaborate texture where the traces of Italian colonial discourse and transnational migrations cross. The two texts are fraught with characters in never-ending transition: social, political, cultural, and existential transitions. Somalia finds itself displaced in Scandinavia, in London, in the United States, in Italy, in the Arab Emirates; Somali people gather at Termini Station in Rome or on the coasts of Lampedusa; China and its trades blossom in the streets of Mogadishu, where movie theaters screen Indian comedies and Italian schools still educate the local elites. Rhoda and Madre piccola do not simply describe the routes of women and men who leave Somalia to reach the former colonizing country from the 1970s onward, but they constantly refer to the layers and contradictions of postcolonial time that, in Mezzadra’s words, is the time of a unified world whose unity is crossed by the subversion of differences, by inequalities, and whose distinguishing feature seems to be that of exploitation. So we could say that the colonial matrix has trespassed on the global present (Mezzadra 2008: 31–33). The continuous shifting of fictional points of view and the proliferation of narrating voices produce a sense of displacement that endlessly redefines time and space codes. In both novels the narration is hardly consistent and plots can be followed only by gathering stories and details told by many voices, which are made of body and memory: “The smell of Mogadishu is the same of the vagina’s,” we are told in Rhoda (Scego 2004: 35); while in Madre piccola we read that the civil war has changed the city into “a woman with her skin stuck to the bones” (Ali Farah 2007: 144). Thanks to the intensive use of body language and “plurivocity” (Bakhtin 1981; Hall 1996) within a complex storytelling structure, the novel attempts to bring together what is dispersed. In the interstitial space of migration: Scego’s Rhoda The novel consists of five parts, each of them subdivided into five more parts which borrow their titles from the protagonists’ names. Each subsection is told by

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an external narrator with internal focalization, with the exception of those entitled “Rhoda” which are told post mortem by the character herself, in her burial place in Somalia. Each subsection takes place in different times and only at the end can the reader grasp the relations between events and characters. Rhoda has a frantic spatiality: the way characters with their own specific existential conditions occupy a specific location gives a literary insight into the multiple layers of reality, which would be otherwise hard to catch. Pino, the only Italian and male character, wanders in a troubled Naples: That night the city was covered in a thick layer of dust. A yellowish thin dust that caused allergies, fear, suspicion, anxiety and gossip. The TV said that it was desert sand. And the TV also said that it came from Africa like those illegal migrants who landed every day on the Italian coasts. The TV often lied. Or, better, it failed to say. Perhaps that dust was just the symbol of a nation’s decay and, who knows, of the whole world. It was the symbol of global misunderstanding.6 From the transnational flows crossing Naples, where Rhoda prostitutes herself, the reader is taken to Roman streets and neighborhoods, especially working-class ones like Primavalle, today mostly inhabited by migrants: Most of all Barni . . . liked to see many coloured faces in the neighbourhood. There were Filipinos, Polish, Egyptians, Romanians, Peruvians, Ethiopians, Argentinians, Indians and many others that she didn’t have the energy to mention. She didn’t feel too far from home when she walked the streets of the neighborhood. She didn’t feel that cold sensation in her guts that tore her when she cleaned posh toilets of posh gaal.7 In the landing place home and homeliness are connected to the neighborhood streets, while the domestic dimension is the place of work and exploitation. In the new global division of labor, the domestic dimension often keeps women out of public spaces. In this crucial passage of the novel, Barni reflects on her double condition: that of a colonized who was given an Italian education, through the history of Italian literature and the Risorgimento mythical figures, and that of a lost migrant in the formerly colonizing country: After all she had attended Italian schools or, as they said where she lived, she was an ‘Italian type’, she had studied Dante, Ariosto and Leopardi. And she even liked it! Now—grown up—she understood that she shouldn’t have liked it. One must study their own history before the history of others. When she was young she knew everything about Garibaldi, Mazzini, Cavour, King

“Holding All the Pieces Together” 269 Vittorio Emanuele II, but she didn’t know anything about her national heroes, she didn’t know anything about the darawish, about Saydka or Ahmed Gurey.8 The translated subject of colonialism (Young 2003: 140) is caught between Italian colonial discourse and Somali nationalism. And we should not be surprised if the workings of global capital force a passage between the two, thanks to their multicultural hints and the rhetoric of integration and “entrepreneurial spirit.” Indeed, thanks to the Somali diaspora social network, Barni with her old friend Faduma and her niece Aisha start an ethnic clothes shop. Not infrequently, migrant writings make us face the radical ambivalences of global capital and, at the same time, they cast light on the unknown spaces of invisible lives: How come she let herself be persuaded to join in what she considered a bizarre venture? It was all the half-light’s fault. She was in the half-light and she was crying when she had taken that epoch-making decision. She always found refuge in the half-light to cry and make decisions. That distinctive time of the day excited her and, at the same time, humbled her. But she liked it a lot. It was not light anymore, but it was not yet dark. It was in the land in between where everything could still happen and where human beings could still get lost in their dreams. In this halfway land she got lost every day and every day she found herself again.9 Regaining a role in the public space by means of trade is a counterpoint to the twilight image of the “half–light,” an interstitial space of solitude and reflection, of waiting and never-ending transition. Knotting the threads of the Somali diaspora again: Ali Farah’s Madre piccola Ali Farah’s Madre piccola also moves ceaselessly through space and time between Italian colonial occupation and diaspora. So Taageere, the character that more than others has suffered from migratory roaming, remembers his childhood, when he found out that his old people used Italian words with total confidence: The elderly have Italian deep inside. I can imagine what it is like to learn a language when you’re a child, when your head is free from troubles, with enough space to put everything you want in it.10 “A space that can be filled with everything you want” reminds us of violence and violations, translations and intercultural relations that have changed the course

270 Roberto Derobertis of Italian and Somali histories for good. In this novel characters are more discontented and less peaceable towards their landing places. They are exhausted, they have resisted and claimed but they have only ended up with restlessness. This is the way Barni, a midwife in a Roman hospital, maps her migrant routes: D’you know about those years? What I can’t do is describe the places. It was all an internal movement from one house to the next. You could be anywhere. To me and to all of us it was all the same. You had to get used to different languages, different prices and to reconstruct the map: the map of your links with others and of the junction-places where to meet, where to phone, where to buy, as if perpetually carried away by an air bubble, and within the bubble our sound, our smell. Sounds and smells so sharp that they covered all others. By becoming aliens, we lived.11 Mapping is the poetical and political labor of these diasporic writings. Madre piccola has a similar structure to Rhoda’s: it is made up of nine chapters, and each of them borrows its title from the name of the character telling the story. Each chapter is narrated in the first person with an abundant use of digressions. The technique is that of free direct speech, addressed to one of the other narrating characters. Thus the plot unravels slowly and the pieces of this relational mosaic gather painfully. Languages, bodies, territories, times, and memories are the throbbing matter of an inextricable, discontinuous, and jagged narration that creates a recollection of forgetfulness: “The forgotten Somali. Every day I noted down in my notebook words, verbs to be stored.”12 Writing is the labor of memory: it allows the recording of a vanishing mother tongue. Therefore we have to linger over words, and taste this language made of nouns, adjectives, and verbs which are bent in order to tell of planetary connections and disconnections. It is a suture: that tireless work of uniting the margins of a wound that will never meet again. In Madre piccola the words “links,” “knots,” and “wrappings” are ever present (and the first two recall the titles of two Nurrudin Farah novels). There is an urgent need for gathering, sewing, binding off, saving, and preserving but without resisting the transformations and the unsettled state of diasporic lives. Here the keyword is “thread”: Fragments of my story: everything is so mixed up. The reasons that move us are thickly interwoven threads. I felt all filled up with that fire which is fuelled by sea water, while I was being carried out of that hospital room.13 In the hospital where she works, Barni meets a Somali man who survived the shipwreck of a boat full of migrants. He is shocked and temporarily dumb, and Barni

“Holding All the Pieces Together” 271 is asked to help him speak. Once again we face travels, translations, and violence: today’s “black Mediterranean,” wounded by fences and borders, perpetuates colonial violence. Here is again the symptom that insists on the present and that opens this novel, with the words of the Italian-Somali Domenica who is renamed Axad: Soomaali baan ahay, like my half that is a whole. I am the thin thread, so thin that it threads and stretches, extending itself. So thin that it does not break. And the tangle of threads widens and shows the knots, clear and well-tied knots, though very distant from each other, that don’t loosen. I am a trace in that tangle and my beginning belongs in the multiple one.14 Domenica/Axad, whose multiplicity is inscribed in her name(s), claims to be a thin thread of a wider texture, that is the location where she struggles to try the freedom to belong to a wider transnational community.

“Holding All the Pieces Together” in Postcolonial Time-Spaces Moving carefully in the tangle of threads of these stories, I have tried to find my way through a skein that won’t be disentangled: too stratified are the subjectivities involved. I have tried to put to work Edward Said’s teaching, in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, that repeatedly and pedantically invites the reader to “read carefully,” to go back to words and the formal structures of books to put back into the world the words and the forms that the writers have taken from the world (Said 2004). This “worldliness” of the texts shows us that the postcolonial subjectivities depicted in Scego’s and Ali Farah’s texts bear the traces of Italian colonial violence and are still daily reinscribed by the so-called Bossi-Fini Law that currently regulates the incoming migration flows to Italy. This reinscription connects them to the more general phenomenon of migration that affects all subjects in transition through Italy and Europe. Starting to speak in the language of the “roccaforte” (the “stronghold”), the name repeatedly used to refer to Italy in Madre piccola, also shows a powerful redefinition of Italian identity; an idea now widely acknowledged in the critical debate on Italian migration literature during the last twenty years. Thus Italy becomes the landing place for some migration routes and, at the same time, caught in the fabric of the Somali diaspora, also one of the points of global swarming. In both novels the Italian language is marked by the systematic use of Somali words, while the stories constantly remind us that Italian identity is indeed a transitory one (Ali Farah 2007: 15). In this transition there is women’s writing, the ongoing reference to the metaphors of sewing and weaving, the multiple references to the pervasive femininization

272 Roberto Derobertis of labor imposed by global capital and exemplified by the relevant presence of domestic and care work, kinds of work as excellent historical counterpoints for that “colony for males,” as Giulietta Stefani has defined Italian East Africa. From the exotic and orientalist representations, strongly sexually marked by the male gaze, Scego and Ali Farah build a new and secularized global epic with different gender features, recovering the decisive role of women in all diasporas in the construction of the future. These texts inhabit and live our present as a time-space of conflict, that recently Homi Bhabha has effectively exemplified in the formula “a past that doesn’t want to pass and a future that doesn’t want to wait” (Bhabha 2006: 12). The phrase “holding all the pieces together,” from the title of a short story by Ali Farah, is a sort of invitation to criticism and resistance for those who try to elaborate new paths for postcolonial criticism in Italy. It is work still carried out by few people, most of whom, however, do not work within the field of literary criticism and historiography of Italian literature in the strict sense. And yet the critical work is being done: it moves underground or is hidden in the anonymity of precarious research. Precariousness, feminization of labor, migration, exploitation of those who still inhabit non-places and are often effaced by mainstream postcolonial discourses, help us make sense of what the expression “postcolonial Italy” refers to. We still need to turn our dialogic abilities towards radical alterity, to the leftovers, to the nameless, to what stays out of the picture that we are trying to describe and criticize.

Notes 1. Online. Available: http://www.tgcom.mediaset.it/politica/articoli/articolo329337. shtml (accessed March 10, 2010). 2. Online. Available: http://www.tgcom.mediaset.it/politica/articoli/articolo329337. shtml (accessed March 10, 2010). 3. All the translations from texts in Italian are mine. 4. Flaiano (2000: 44): “Sarebbe venuto il prete a benedire il cadavere, si sarebbe svolto il rito funebre ed io (poiché avevo chiesto a quella donna di riportarmi ad un tempo ripudiato ma tuttora presente) ora dovevo pagarne le conseguenze.” 5. The writer signed her previous publications with her full name—Cristina Ubax Ali Farah. 6. Scego (2004: 15): “La città quella sera era coperta da uno strato spesso di polvere. Una polverina giallastra che provocava allergie, paura, diffidenza, angoscia e pettegolezzo. La TV diceva che era sabbia del deserto. La TV diceva pure che proveniva dall’Africa come i clandestini che sbarcavano ormai giornalmente sulle coste italiane. La TV però spesso mentiva. O meglio, ometteva. Forse quella polverina era solo il simbolo del degrado di una nazione e, chissà, del mondo intero. Era il simbolo dell’incomprensione globale.” 7. Scego (2004: 154): “A Barni piaceva (e anche alla nipote Aisha) soprattutto vedere tante facce colorate nel quartiere. C’erano filippini, polacchi, egiziani, rumeni,

“Holding All the Pieces Together” 273 peruviani, etiopici, argentini, indiani e tanti altri che non aveva la forza di nominare. Non si sentiva tanto lontana da casa quando camminava per le strade del quartiere. Non provava quella sensazione di freddo alle budella che la lacerava quando puliva i cessi chic di gaal chic.” 8. Scego (2004: 155): “Dopotutto lei aveva fatto le scuole italiane o, come si diceva dalle sue parti, era ‘un tipo italiano’, aveva studiato Dante, Ariosto e Leopardi. E le era piaciuto anche! Ora—da grande—si rendeva conto che non le doveva piacere. Si deve studiare la propria storia prima di quella degli altri. Quando era piccola sapeva tutto di Garibaldi, Mazzini, Cavour, re Vittorio Emanuele II, ma non sapeva assolutamente nulla dei suoi eroi nazionali, non sapeva nulla dei darawish, del Saydka, di Ahmed Gurey.” 9. Scego (2004: 185–86): “Ma come mai si era fatta convincere a entrare in quella che lei considerava una bislacca avventura? Fu tutta colpa della penombra. Era in penombra a piangere quando aveva preso quella sua decisione storica. Si rifugiava sempre nella penombra a piangere e a prendere decisioni. Quel particolare frammento della giornata la esaltava e allo stesso tempo la umiliava. Le piaceva tanto però. Non era più luce, ma non era ancora oscurità. Era nella terra di mezzo dove tutto poteva ancora succedere e dove gli esseri umani potevano ancora perdersi nei loro sogni. In questa terra a metà strada, lei si perdeva ogni giorno e ogni giorno si recuperava.” 10. Ali Farah (2007: 192): “I vecchi ce l’hanno proprio in fondo in fondo l’italiano. Immagino come deve essere imparare una lingua da bambini, quando hai la testa libera da preoccupazioni, con lo spazio per farci entrare tutto quello che vuoi.” 11. Ali Farah (2007: 112): “Sai di quegli anni? Quello che non riesco a fare è descrivere i luoghi. Era tutto un movimento interno da una casa all’altra. Essere, potevi essere ovunque. Per me, per noi tutti, era indifferente. Ti dovevi solo abituare alle lingue diverse, i prezzi diversi e ricostruire la mappa: mappa dei legami con gli altri e dei luoghi–snodi dove incontrarsi, dove telefonare, dove comprare, come perennemente trasportati nella bolla d’aria e dentro la bolla il nostro suono, il nostro odore. Suoni e odori così pungenti da coprire tutti gli altri. Alienandoci, vivevamo.” 12. Ali Farah (2007: 102): “Il somalo dimenticato. Sul mio taccuino ogni giorno appuntavo parole, verbi da memorizzare.” 13. Ali Farah (2007: 35): “Frammenti di storia mia: è tutto talmente mescolato. Le ragioni che ci muovono sono fili intessuti fittamente. Io mi sentivo tutta piena del fuoco che si alimenta d’acqua marina, mentre uscivo trascinata da quella stanza di ospedale.” 14. Ali Farah (2007: 1): “Soomali baan ahay, come la mia metà che è intera. Sono il filo sottile, così sottile che si infila e si tende, prolungandosi. Così sottile che non si spezza. E il groviglio dei fili si allarga e mostra, chiari e ben stretti, i nodi, pur distanti l’uno dall’altro, che non si sciolgono. Sono una traccia in quel groviglio e il mio principio appartiene a quello multiplo.”

Bibliography Ali Farah, C. U. (2005) “Tenere insieme tutti i pezzi,” in A. Gnisci (ed.) Allattati dalla lupa, Rome: Sinnos. —— (2007) Madre piccola, Milan: Frassinelli. Bakhtin, M. (1981) “Discourse in the Novel,” in M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. M. Holquist, Austin: Texas University Press.

274 Roberto Derobertis Bhabha, H. K. (1994) The Location of Culture, New York and London: Routledge. —— (2006) “Il passato che non vuole passare, il futuro che non vuole aspettare. Intervista di Ida Dominijanni e Brett Neilson a Homi Bhabha,” Il manifesto, July 12. De Mauro, T. (2006) “I dubat,” in T. De Mauro, Parole di giorni lontani, Bologna: Il Mulino. Flaiano, E. (2000 [1947]) Tempo di uccidere, Milan: Rizzoli. Hall, S. (1996) “The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual. An Interview with S. Hall by Kuan-Hsin Chen,” in D. Morley and K. Cheng (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge. Mezzadra, S. (2008) La condizione postcoloniale: Storia e politica nel mondo globale, Verona: Ombre Corte. Ponzanesi, S. (1999) Paradoxes of Post-colonial Culture: Feminism and Diaspora in South-Asian and Afro-Italian Women’s Narratives, Utrecht: Universiteit van Utrecht. Rigo, E. (2007) Europa di confine: Trasformazioni della cittadinanza nell’Europa allargata, Rome: Meltemi. Said, E. W. (2004) Humanism and Democratic Criticism, New York: Columbia University Press. Scego, I. (2004) Rhoda, Rome: Sinnos. Spivak, G. C. (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Stefani, G. (2007) Colonia per maschi. Italiani in Africa Orientale: una storia di genere, Verona: Ombre Corte. Young, R. J. C. (2003) Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Part Four

Imaginative Freedom and Critical Engagement

23 Growing into Free Writing ANITA DESA I

As a child, whenever I was sick, my mother would bring out two boxes with which to keep me amused in bed. One was a box of buttons I could endlessly arrange and rearrange and the other was a box of photographs from her past. Amongst these was one of her in a 1920s’ dress and a large hat standing in the Piazza San Marco, feeding the pigeons. She and her Indian husband, my father, had stopped there on their Grand Tour of Europe before embarking in Marseilles for India. The photograph was faded by the time I saw it, all in the same shades of grey and sepia as the pigeons that fluttered about her. It lacked any touch of gold or glitter of glass but it was Venice, my first sight of Venice. Some fifty years later when I first visited Venice myself, it was November and the air was filled with mist and a soft drizzle. Yet it was a vision embodied and I instinctively knew that one day I would write of it. When I did at last come to write my Venetian book Baumgartner’s Bombay, I imagined my hero, Baumgartner, as a German Jew who escapes from Berlin when Hitler begins to seem invincible and, on his way to India, pauses, like my mother, in this city at the edge of the sea: The boat to the Orient was not due to arrive for at least another week. Having with the greatest difficulty acquired – and understood – this information from a small window that usually had its shutter pulled down and was scarcely ever known to open, Hugo felt a lurch of fear, found he had to accept it – the prospect of at least seven days in this strange city, not only the first in which he had ever found himself alone but one so palpably foreign as to make him feel he was already transported to the East, it had so little relation to the Europe of the north. True, the weather was European, it could be nothing else – these lowering clouds of melancholy grey, the fine rain that came down like a soft, clinging net to settle on head and shoulders and dampen them – and yet

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Anita Desai it was not Europe after all: there was here a magical, a poetical quality he had never known in Berlin. He walked in the narrow lanes till his shoes were soaked, his feet wet, his new suit drenched, and then entered the nearest church to sit in a velvet- covered pew and try to get some warmth from the candles that flickered under a crucified Christ, a weeping Madonna or a gaudily bleeding heart, from lamps of coloured glass in which light glowered like embers from a fire, and breathed in the swirling clouds of incense, watching the candlelight play on a bit of gilt here, a piece of Murano glass there, and asked himself if he was not actually in Tartary or in Persia, in some magical fairyland not only south but far, far east of Germany and everything he had known in his life till then . . . At San Marco he paid a coin to see the Pala d’Oro and imagine, when close to the gems encrusting the gold sheet, that he was already in an Oriental potentate’s palace for such riches could only belong to the East, could not be of the West with its greyness, its rain, its lodging houses and black and brown garb. He climbed up in the basilica and walked through the marble maze, the thin soles of his cheap shoes slipping on the glassy mosaic underfoot. The throngs in the chapels below, the incense, the candlewax, the flickers of light and colour in the furry dark, all oppressed him and seemed to repulse him till he was thrust out of the door into the Piazza. Stumbling in its lighted space, he tried to avoid the pigeons and the pigeon-feeders who teemed, together, and seemed to him equally gluttonous in their taking and receiving: was this not how beggars were said to behave in the East, beggars and their patrons who gave alms for their own sakes? Sometimes the easternness of the city disturbed him so much, he wondered if he would be able to face India . . . He walked down the Zattere where people had come out to walk in the pale sunlight while the great vaporettos swept by, leaving in their wake a wash of froth and foam. When he was hungry, he began to peer into trattorias he passed and finally found one that did not look too forbiddingly expensive for it had prams with babies and families gathered at the tables. He went and sat down in the thick, heated air that reminded him of the Bierkeller at home. The menu posed a problem, every item on it being unfamiliar, and he looked into the waiter’s face – for once swarthy and foreign – in despair. The waiter made no response but a young woman at a neighbouring table leant across to recommend the cannelloni. ‘Is good, good,’ she nodded at him reassuringly from over the top of a newspaper printed in Hebrew. Seeing him stare at it, she smiled, shook the sheets slightly and told him she lived in the Jewish quarter of the city where such papers were available, why did he not come and visit it? A fine place, she had her studio there, was a painter. At that, Hugo began

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to shift in his chair in unease. She noticed, and shrugged her shoulders, making a move. ‘Staying here long?’ she asked before returning to her paper. Hugo burst out, ‘I – I am leaving – for India.’ ‘India!’ It had the expected effect. The newspaper was lowered, her face appeared, looking suspicious. ‘But whoever goes to India? If you are not a sailor?’ Hugo shook his head, laughing. The cannelloni arrived. Politely she turned her face away so he could eat it. Before he had finished it, she left, squeezing past his table with her thin hips swivelling in the shiny orange material of her dress. ‘Good luck,’ she murmured, still with a suspicious twist to her lips, and he rose to his feet, dropping his napkin and bumping into the table so that his coffee spilt. He considered leaving his meal and following her, to the Jewish quarter and her studio, but the waiter came up as if he sensed Hugo’s intention, and presented the bill . . . Thinking to follow her, Hugo ran out on the fondamenta but, apart from a small dog on a long leash held by a man in a large coat and a purple muffler, there was no one to be seen. The golden light of an hour ago had thinned to an icy wine-like substance close to freezing. Hugo walked along, thinking he might find the Jewish quarter she had spoken of; if he did not see her there, he might see other Jews. Strange, in Germany he had never wanted to search them out, had been aware of others thinking of him as a Jew but not done so himself. In ejecting him, Germany had taught him to regard himself as one. Perhaps it was important to find what she had called their ‘quarter’. Perhaps over here he would find for himself a new identity, one that suited him, one that he enjoyed. The air quivered with possibilities, with the suspense of quest and choice . . . For a large part of the afternoon, he wandered up one calle, down another . . . When Hugo came to a calle half-submerged in water and realised the tide was rising, he lost heart and turned around to retrace his steps. He did so wrongly and found himself in the Rialto with its sudden flurry of sound and activity, crates of oranges standing about, stallholders shouting, and all around a profusion of design, of arabesques in stone and colour, and for a moment or two he was fooled into believing that his wrong turning had led him straight into the East, into an eastern market, and he stood there as entranced as he was alarmed. Venice was the east, and yet it was Europe too; it was that magic boundary where the two met and blended, and for those seven days Hugo had been a part of their union. He realised it only now: that during his constant wandering, his ceaseless walking, he had been drawing closer and closer to his discovery

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Anita Desai of that bewitched point where they became one land of which he felt himself the natural citizen. It made him forget the Jewish woman, the painter, and when it grew dark, he got onto a vaporetto with a crowd of other home- goers. He found himself standing- place and let himself be carried up the canal, believing himself to be on the sea, to be on his way . . . On returning to his lodginghouse, he was handed a letter from the shipping company – the boat had arrived, and passengers were requested to embark before midnight. Packing his valise, he ran out into the moist dark. (57–64)

Many years and many bitter experiences later, the impression left by Venice on his memory is still so sharp that he speaks of it, inadvertently, to his uncomprehending friend, the cabaret dancer Lotte: ‘Where could we go, Lotte? Where could you and I have gone?’ Baumgartner had taken out his handkerchief again and sat twisting and crumpling it. ‘Hmm,’ she muttered, scratching her arms thoughtfully, brooding. ‘Yes, there was nowhere to go. Germany was gone – phut. Europe was gone, all of it. Let us face it, Liebchen, there is no home for us. So where can we go? Hah? Tell me.’ ‘Venice,’ said Hugo unexpectedly. ‘If I could go, if I could leave, then I would go to Venice.’ Her jaw dropped. For a while it attempted to utter some sound, but hung emptily. ‘Venice, he says,’ she said at last. ‘Venezia – no less. As if he were a duke, or a count. You a millionaire, maybe, in your dreams?’ Baumgartner laughed shamefacedly. ‘Only an idea, Lotte,’ he apologised. ‘Once I was there – for seven days. I caught the boat to India from there. It was so strange – both East and West, both Europe and Asia. I thought – maybe in such a place, I could be at home.’ ‘At home – in Venice?’ she screamed, beginning to shake with volcanic laughter. Hurt, he retreated. ‘Let me be, Lotte,’ he muttered, and struggled out of the chair. (80–81) Venice has always had this special fascination for those of us, like Baumgartner, who have become déraciné, dépaysé, stateless. It does not surprise one that Joseph Brodsky chose to be buried here. I believe we are drawn to this lagoon where continents wash into each other like the seas because we are of the tribe that have, for one reason or another, pulled up our roots and set ourselves loose in the world like pieces of driftwood and chosen the tides and

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currents to be our fluid, uncertain home. We are not people who understand or observe borders. And there are not few of us any longer. In fact, the whole world now seems on the move. We meet each other in the long queues at embassies and consulates where we line up with our frayed and thumbed over applications for visas and passports. Looking at the others in the queue with us, we are struck by how similar are the expressions we wear of hopeless appeal. Obediently we surrender the information required of us: name, nationality, place of birth, profession, even our fingerprints as though we had returned to illiteracy. Curiously though, no one asks us our language. Language is the one thing that is free to cross borders unobstructed and unobserved. Ironically it is also the most valuable possession we have. And it is this very quality of an indefinable freedom that gives it its value. If languages are free and not confined by borders, it follows that literature is too. As long ago as in 1827, Goethe had already remarked in conversation with Eckermann that ‘National literature no longer means much these days; we are entering the era of Weltliteratur and it is up to each of us to hasten this development.’ This could seem a tragedy to nationalists who believe firstly that a nation must be linked to a language; but these links become meaningless in an age when what is required is transnationality. The poet Rabindranath Tagore, who was a fierce opponent of nationalism even during India’s freedom movement when it was an unpopular view to hold, said: ‘There is only one history, the history of man. All national histories are merely chapters in the larger one.’ And another poet, Joseph Brodsky, recommended that we give up labelling literatures, noting that ‘every reductive tendency stems from the terror of the infinite,’ and in his poem ‘Anno Domini’ wrote: ‘The grave will render all alike. So, if only in our lifetime, let us be various.’ This is how even my timid, bumbling Baumgartner finds he must cope with his history, with his times. In India, he finds: he had to build a new language to suit these new conditions – German no longer sufficed and English was elusive. Languages sprouted around him like tropical foliage and he picked words from it without knowing if they were English or Hindi or Bengali – they were simply words he needed: chai, khana, baraf, lao, jaldi, joota, chota peg, pani, kamra, soda, garee . . . what was this language he was wrestling out of the air, wrenching around to his own purposes? He suspected it was not Indian, but India’s, the India he was marking out for himself. (92)

282 Anita Desai So he was not so very different after all from the great traveller, Joseph Conrad, who said that the language one adopts, as he adopted English, is ‘a matter of discovery, not of inheritance’. And the history of our times requires of those of us who have inherited, through displacement, only loss – and here I quote the title of my daughter Kiran’s book, The Inheritance of Loss (2006) – to become discoverers instead.

Note This chapter is the text of Anita Desai’s Acceptance Speech on the occasion of the award of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice Prize in Venice, March 25, 2008. The text contains excerpts from Desai’s novel Baumgartner’s Bombay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.

24 Generic Activism Ahdaf Soueif’s and Etel Adnan’s art of creative non-fiction Christiane Schlote

In April 2006 Ahdaf Soueif gave a lecture at the American University in Cairo in which she focused on the image of Arabs in modern Western literature (see Morgan 2006). On that particular occasion, the familiar Saidian subject of the politics of representation was not only discussed as a recurring theme in her own work, but Soueif further linked it to her own experience as an Egyptian writer in Britain. Thus, she spoke about the development in regard to her critical reception and the evolution of her own public persona: from the carefully constructed identity of a hyphenated Anglophone Arab writer and translator to that of an— at times polemic—activist, who openly takes sides with Arabs, Palestinians, and others neglected by official representations. Her medium of choice for the literary reflection of this process of personal politicization has been a collection of essays and book reviews called Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (2004) to, as Soueif put it herself, “mark time between novels” (Morgan 2006: 13).1 In a similar vein, the Lebanese writer, poet, and painter Etel Adnan describes the origin of her seven essays that make up In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005) as an endeavor that “was close to writing an autobiography, the past mixing with the present, each distorting the other, opening into the tensions of repetition” (Adnan 2005: xiv).2 Although Soueif’s and Adnan’s styles are markedly different, both works can be seen as examples of the expansive label of “creative non-fiction” by Arab women writers who have already greatly contributed to modern Arabic literature in the form of novels, poetry, and short stories, but who, according to Joseph Zeidan, will no doubt also increasingly do so in other genres (Zeidan 1995: 1). In its broadest outline Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard describe creative non-fiction as the province of factual prose that is also literary—infused with the stylistic devices, tropes, and rhetorical flourishes of the best fiction and the most lyrical of narrative poetry. It is fact-based writing . . . that has at heart an interest in enduring human values: foremost a fidelity to accuracy, to truthfulness. It is

284 Christiane Schlote storytelling of a very high order—through . . . the subtle braiding of themes, rhythms and resonance, memory and imaginative research, precise and original language, and a narrative stance that is . . . individual and implicitly alert to the world. (Forché and Gerard 2001: 1) Forché and Gerard also point out that there has been an ongoing discussion regarding the most fitting terminology, with some critics suggesting the use of the term “literary journalism” instead of “creative non-fiction” (1). Due to the term’s inclusive nature, the genre can encompass any form from memoir, travel writing, and personal essay to autobiography and nature writing, which is, indeed, the generic mixture prevalent in Soueif’s and Adnan’s works discussed here. In the following, I will argue that their choice of the non-fiction genre corresponds to their thematic concerns in Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground and In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, which include civil rights, the ethics of engagement, committed writing, and their experience of living abroad—Soueif in Britain, Adnan in the US and France—as women writers of Arab descent in times of war, and the war in Iraq in particular. These preoccupations have to be seen in view of the effects the sociopolitical situation of the Arab world has had on its writers, which, already in 1975, the Syrian sociologist and writer Halim Barakat described as follows: “A writer could not be part of Arab society and yet not concern himself with change . . . the theory of influence which sees writers as agents of social change, applies more accurately to contemporary Arab novelists than the theory of reflection, which sees writers as objective and detached observers holding a mirror to reality” (in Caiani 2007: 4). Yet since this kind of commitment has also been criticized as paternalistic, Fabio Caiani argues that the attitude of Arab writers has changed from “envisaging guiding their fellow citizens from above” to being “more receptive towards their concerns while still producing discourses critical of what they feel are dangerous trends (like radical Islamic thought)” (Caiani 2007: 6). In her essay “Palestinian Writers,” Soueif refers to Palestinian writers and poets such as Mourid Barghouti (whose memoir I Saw Ramallah Soueif translated from Arabic into English) and Mahmoud Darwish, who insist on their right “to write about things that are not Palestine . . . to make a professional or aesthetic decision not to write about the situation,” and poignantly asks: “Can a novelist or a poet ignore the situation? Is there room to write outside the situation?” (Soueif 2004: 324–25). Also drawing on Barghouti’s memoir I Saw Ramallah (2003), Susan Babbitt states that Barghouti’s insight “that looking toward the past can rob us of freedom because it robs us of understanding,” has led her to the hypothesis that, in regard to agency and embodiment, “it is more important to address the question of responsibility for the present . . . than that of content of memory” and she argues

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for a more “experiential understanding,” by which she means an understanding “that becomes possible only as a result of a certain way of being situated in the world, and of awareness of that state of being so situated” (Babbitt 2009: 235– 41). This essay sets out to explore how Soueif and Adnan have responded generically to these ambiguous issues and whether their “storytelling of a very high order” can indeed be a means of being “alert to the world” in the sense of an experiential understanding and of disrupting conventional ways of seeing and representing complex Arab and global realities. Soueif’s and Adnan’s work, fiction and non-fiction, can be read within the context of a growing body of Arab literature written in languages other than Arabic (e.g., English, French, German, Hebrew), as exemplified in various genres and languages by prominent writers and critics such as Leila Aboulela, Assia Djebar, Edward Said, Rafik Schami, Anton Shammas, and others. While their output may still be relatively small compared to writing in Arabic, in a special issue of the Egyptian journal Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics on Arab authors writing in foreign languages, Ferial Ghazoul argues, that it “is important as a literary phenomenon” (2000: 6).3 Questions of if and to what extent Anglophone and Francophone Arab diaspora literatures can be analyzed within the context of postcolonial literary theory and criticism have only begun to be addressed recently (see, for example, Valassopoulos 2007, Moore 2008, Al Maleh 2009). Yet, like South Asian or African literature in English, apart from viewing Anglophone Arab writing as an attempt to enter Western markets, it has also been seen as a body of work that “can directly speak to the (ex)colonial other, without the mediation of translations . . . a way of confronting the hegemonic centres and their monologic discourse” (Ghazoul 2000: 6). One may want to add here prominent predecessors voicing their protest in Arabic, such as the legendary Egyptian singer and actress Oum Kalsoum, about whom Adnan writes: “She sings ‘on target,’ like a whip . . . a whip against anything foreign, because, then, the foreigner was the colonizer. She took it on herself to tell the world that the Arab world existed” (Adnan 2005: 12). In a Francophone Maghrebian context, Assia Djebar’s docudrama La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua (1977) comes to mind, chronicling Algerian women’s experiences of anticolonial resistance in Arabic, Berber, and French. In the preface of Mezzaterra Soueif explains: “If the New World Order was a mechanism to control the Arab and the Muslim worlds then I felt that the media of the West was complicit in it; for they always represented those worlds in terms that excused or even invited the imposition of control” (2004: 3). Similarly, in the introduction to In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country Adnan remembers: In March 2003, war was brewing in Iraq. History was again bringing unbearable tensions. My imagination was on fire and my anger was increased by the

286 Christiane Schlote triumphant tone of the news. In California, very few people were really concerned . . . I was numb with apprehension . . . detached from my environment, projected to an East of my own mind . . . I took paper and ink and started to write “To Be in a Time of War.” (Adnan 2005: xvi) Since both writers have—perhaps not at all surprisingly, given the Arab and American traditions of the genre—chosen forms of creative non-fiction to address and critique that “monologic discourse,” I will start with a brief overview of the forms and the significance of literary journalism in post-1945 Egyptian and American literary history.4 I will then proceed to sketch its adaptation by Soueif and Adnan, both of whom make use of spatial metaphors to explore their personal and artistic positions within broader discourses of exile and war and their problematic rhetoric. Moreover, Soueif and Adnan’s decision to voice their discontent in the form of essays may also be explained by Caiani’s important observation regarding the reception of Arab writing: Arabic fiction is today often read by Western academic and non-academic readers alike for extra-literary reasons. In other words, Arabic novels are usually read . . . and analysed not as works of art in their own right but because they are seen as interesting documents from diverse points of view anthropological, socio-political, feminist, historical and so on. (Caiani 2007: 1–2) Likewise, Lisa Suhair Majaj and Amal Amireh warn of the danger of using novels by Arab women “in the classroom as sociological texts, ‘reflections’ of the lived reality of Arab women,” since common Western preconceptions about Arab culture often lead to a reduced reading of these texts as “examples of how all Arab women are oppressed by their misogynistic societies” instead of “granting Arab women’s texts the same level of literary nuance attributed to the work of western authors” (Majaj and Amireh 2002: 3). In her recent study Literature, Journalism and the Avant-Garde: Intersection in Egypt (2006), Elisabeth Kendall argues that while journalism played an unparalleled role “in the evolution of modern literary forms and techniques in Arabic” (1) and that independent and often dissident journals “were the real hotbed of literary experimentation” in Arabic literature (2), the impact of literary journalism in the Arab world has remained “a scholarly oversight” (8). Likewise, in a famous introduction to a collection titled The New Journalism (1973), Tom Wolfe argued that non-fiction—not the novel—had become “the most important literature being written in America today” and that journalism had become “literature’s main event” (in Boynton 2005a: xi).

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Through her focus on the 1960s avant-garde journal Gallery 68, Kendall shows that, while the tendency in Egyptian literary criticism to “periodize by generation” has been criticized, the shared sociopolitical experience of the 1960s generation in Egypt (particularly the 1967 defeat by Israel) has led to a literary movement which “may be viewed as the spearhead of the cocktails of generations and decades through which modernist forms and techniques were introduced into prose literature in Egypt” (Kendall 2006: 3). Kendall uses the term “literary journalism” in reference to “any press content pertaining to creative literature,” including poems, plays, critical articles, serialized novels, etc. (3–4). In her opinion, the gap between more established Egyptian authors and the Gallery 68 generation of writers was by no means as great as often claimed, and she emphasizes the group’s wish to be more independent while also keeping its links to Egypt’s literary past: “Naguib Mahfouz in particular provided a link between the establishment and the fringe. On Fridays, he would hold a literary ‘salon’ at Casino Opera . . . then later he would retire to Café Riche where the young avant-gardists gathered” (113–15). While Mahfouz may have provided an intergenerational link, Zahia Smail Salhi argues that Arab writers writing in foreign languages could provide “a bridge between the Diaspora writers’ host society . . . and their country of origin” (2006: 4). Kendall identifies the Gallery 68 writers’ avoidance of “direct political comment in their literature” as one of the main differences between the Gallery 68 authors and the “prevailing wave of ‘committed’ literature” (2006: 121). In an interview Soueif suggested that one way of being politically active could also be to “take hold of a situation by putting it into a work of art rather than any direct attempt at analysis . . . some sort of fictional way of dealing with it” (Soueif 2005). While being politically aware and leftist, the journal “took pride in its journalistic medium, rather than viewing it as a utilitarian platform for a literary or political ideology” (Kendall 2006: 116–17). The main proclaimed aim of Gallery 68 was to get at “the truth,” which they saw as fluid, and they shared the belief “that brutal honesty in their writing, with whatever new stylistic and technical departures this entailed, was enough to shake up their readership and eventually to effect literary change” (121). In an American context, the contributions of the New Journalism Movement, also often described as an avant-garde movement and personified, for example, by one of its most glamorous protagonists, Truman Streckfus Persons (better known as Truman Capote), and his masterpiece of a non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood (1965), can be summarized as transgressing journalism’s rhetorical and literary scope and experimenting with new forms such as the use of complete dialogues, various points of view and movie-like scenic structures (Boynton 2005a: xii). By the 1980s, many argued that New Journalism was dead. Nonetheless, more than thirty years later, critics talk about New New Journalists who not only

288 Christiane Schlote continue experiments with form like their predecessors in the 1960s and 1970s, but who—in view of their strong concern for social and political issues—have also experimented with different ways and immersion strategies of how to get a story. Robert Boynton describes new new journalists as “[n]either frustrated novelists nor wayward newspaper reporters . . . who have benefited enormously from both the legitimacy Wolfe’s legacy has brought to literary nonfiction, and from the concurrent displacement of the novel as the most prestigious form of literary expression” (Boynton 2005a: xi–xii). He also adds that, while Wolfe “went inside his characters’ heads, the New New Journalists become part of their lives” (Boynton 2005b). In a similar vein, Soueif accepted an offer by the Guardian to go to Palestine in November 2000 and Mezzaterra actually starts with a recollection of that experience entitled “Under the Gun: A Palestinian Journey”: I have not felt such anticipation or such fear since I was a child. For the past two months I have been following the news of the Intifada . . . And again and again I have asked myself: ‘What is it that I can do?’ Now at last I can do something; I can go there for myself, and write. (Soueif 2004: 29) While Wolfe and many of the New Journalists concentrated on extreme situations and extraordinary people, according to Boynton, the New New Journalism “goes in the opposite direction, drilling down into the bedrock of ordinary experience into what Gay Talese has called ‘the fictional current that flows beneath the stream of reality’” (Boynton 2005b). Talese’s observation is echoed in Adnan’s statement that “what I write is reality, what I do is fiction” (2005: 25), and the New New Journalists’ “literature of the everyday” (Boynton 2005b) is reflected in Adnan’s following explanation: Contrary to what is usually believed, it is not general ideas and a grandiose unfolding of great events that most impress the mind in times of heightened historical upheavals but, rather, it is the uninterrupted flow of little experiences, observations, disturbances, small ecstasies, or barely perceptible discouragements that make up the trivialized day-to-day living. (Adnan 2005: xii) Critics have argued that the appeal and success of literary journalism has been inextricably linked with the enormity of changes in America around the fin de siècle—from urbanization to the strong influx of waves of immigrants—and that traditional journalism did not suffice in capturing these extraordinary transformations (see, for example, Hartsock 2000). Similarly, in 1997, Samah Idris,

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editor-in-chief of the prestigious Lebanese literary magazine al-Adab, dedicated its May/June issue to experimentation and innovation in the Arabic novel, since, according to Idris, new novelistic styles are needed in order to keep up with a life “which has become unpredictable and constantly changing” (in Caiani 2007: 1). On the whole, in their essays Soueif and Adnan reflect on and examine issues which, according to Boynton, have long been the mainstay of New New Journalism: “How does a fast-growing society of immigrants construct a national identity? How does a country built by capitalism consider questions of economic justice? How does a nation of different faiths live together?” (Boynton 2005b). In the case of both writers, Soueif and Adnan’s reflections have been propelled by exile, return journeys to their countries of birth, and the mediated experiences of war in their “new” home countries. Muhammad Siddiq actually identified “the emergence of a new form of writing on exile, homeland, and identity” as the common characteristic of exiled Arab writers who continue to write about Arab issues in both Arabic and European languages (Siddiq 2007: 3). Drawing on Timothy Brennan’s and Edward Said’s work on exile, Salhi argues that the attempt to capture notions of home while being in exile not only results in nostalgia for certain food or “scents in the sea air” but also in creating a somehow artificial world and a new landscape in the host country, as Said puts it: “The exile’s new world . . . is unnatural and its unreality resembles fiction” (quoted in Salhi 2006: 3). Both Soueif and Adnan construct this kind of “new world,” which forms the basis of their ensuing personal and political reflections, and they offer these newly created spaces as agorae for further debate. Interestingly, one of Gallery 68’s main achievements has been its “willingness to introduce conflicting opinions” and thereby promoting more open discussions “as opposed to the polarized standpoints of previous avant-garde journals” (Kendall 2006: 117). As mentioned before, concepts of space—real and imagined—abound in both essay collections, starting with the books’ titles and their covers. The cover of the Bloomsbury 2004 edition of Mezzaterra is a photo by the Finnish photographer Ilkka Uimonen. It shows a part of the Israeli cement barrier between the Palestinian town of Beit Jala and the Israeli settlement of Gilo. Apart from the general controversy surrounding Israel’s separation barrier, which advocates have also called a “security fence” and which critics have labeled an “apartheid wall,” among other references (Jacoby 2007: 1), the photo—composed as a muralwithin-a-photo—complicates matters further, since the barrier is decorated with a landscape mural which, according to the photographer Michelle Woodward, “depicts the hills as they would be without the Palestinian town of Beit Jala” and, in contrast to other murals, thus serves a different purpose which is “not to resist the divisions caused by a wall but to mask them instead” (Woodward 2007).5 While the cover of the City Lights Books’ 2005 edition of In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (designed by Yolanda Montijo) is not specifically

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located, incidentally, its composition also relies on the framing of space. By showing a somewhat overgrown garden path with a dulled window pane on its left and a partly unhinged door with an equally dulled small window on its right, it thereby not only mediates but also partly obstructs the viewer’s/reader’s view. On a textual level, Soueif and Adnan also correspond to what Sabry Hafez has identified as one of the most important textual changes in regard to contemporary Arabic novels: In the new novels, space becomes a place of contradictions and a battleground in which discordant voices contend for legitimacy. It is crowded with obstacles and barriers, an arena for testing and proving one’s worth . . . The new novel seeks to explore a new land and discover new horizons. (Hafez 1994: 106) Moreover, the essays themselves could be read as performative in that they present “a space in which the conflicts and crises that animate contemporary Arab/ Islamic culture take imaginative shape” (Siddiq 2007: xiii). Adnan’s essays— her response to the world around her—span a period of thirty years and a geographical range from Beirut to Paris to Sausalito and Greece. Her main narrative strategy is based on the book’s intertextual relation to the collection of five short stories by the American writer William H. Gass with the almost identical title In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968). In the story of the same title the narrator tells of his return to a fictional rural town named “B” in Indiana by writing a series of episodes structured by often recurring headings which, taken together, convey the image of a quasi-mythical city in provincial America. On a return trip to Beirut, after having lived in the San Francisco Bay area for seventeen years, Adnan takes her cue from Gass’s book and writes her own “return story”: I began by taking over his headings and ‘answering’ them. They became magic keys, no longer to the B . . . that was his city in his country, but to the city of Beirut, a harbour in Lebanon. And so I went about telling my side of the story, entering into the heart of the heart of another country. (Adnan 2005: xiv) Twenty-five years later Adnan writes six more essays (“Twenty-Five Years Later,” “Further On,” “At Both Ends,” “Present Time,” “Time, Desire, and Fog,” and “To Be in a Time of War”), using Gass’s headings as a structuring device in four of them. But while Adnan uses Gass’s keywords, such as “Place,” “Church,” “Business,” and “Politics,” the results are very different due to Adnan’s gendered and culturally different perspective. As one entry under the heading of “Place” reads: “My place: highways, trains, cars. One road after another, from ocean

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shore to ocean shore. From Beirut to the Red Sea . . . From Oregon to La Paz. I keep going, prisoner of a body” (Adnan 2005: 11). This reflects what Zeidan has called the Arab women writers’ “ambivalence toward their own bodies,” seen as markers of their individuality on the one hand, yet also “constructed as objects by their culture” and consequently limiting, on the other. This kind of ambivalence regarding their gendered identity indicates that, like many women authors from postcolonial countries, Arab women writers have been engaged in the well-documented debate on the tensions between the need for national solidarity and demands for global feminism, which Zeidan in the Arab context calls “interdependent struggles” (Zeidan 1995: 6–7).6 Neither can Adnan’s recollections be contained by the poetics of her first essay, as her later essays are marked by her observations of (often surreal) American life twenty-five years later. The last essay, “To Be in a Time of War,” is a case in point, where Adnan manages to convey the pain, anger, and desperation of the impending war in Iraq in a particularly stark manner: through her strict use of the infinitive form over seventeen pages Adnan shows the loss of the subject most drastically:7 To say nothing, do nothing, mark time, to bend, to straighten up, to blame oneself, to stand, to go toward the window, . . . To read: “Target: Baghdad.” . . . Do some cleaning. To put up with an inner rage. To admit the evidence of evil, the existence of pain . . . To find the radio unbearable . . . Turn the radio on KPFA. To absorb the news like a bitter drink. To create terror, that’s war. To wallow in cruelty, conquest . . . To rise early, to hurry down the driveway, to look for the paper, take it out of its yellow bag, to read on the front-page WAR, to notice that WAR takes half a page, to feel a shiver down the spine, to tell that that’s it, to know that they dared, that they jumped the line, to read that Baghdad is being bombed, . . . to feel paralyzed, to look for help within oneself, to know helplessness, . . . to suffer from the day’s beauty . . . To put on the radio. To listen and to be hit in the face with much poison . . . To pick up the telephone, dial a number in Beirut . . . To look at the narrow and long road that leads the world to the slaughterhouse. (Adnan 2005: 99–116) While the tirade-like character of this essay may recall Gass’s insistence on anger as the most productive force in his literary production (“I suspect that in order for me to produce my best work I have to be angry . . . I am angry all the time . . . my work proceeds almost always from a sense of aggression,” Gass 1977: 4), Adnan’s almost relentless list of infinitives also bears testimony to the belief that quieter, ordinary voices can be as powerful—and at times even more so—than the dominant voices of war and ideological discourses. In a study of the autobiographical writing of the Arab women writers and activists Fadwa Tuqan, Assia Djebar, and

292 Christiane Schlote Latifa al-Zayyat, Magda Al-Nowaihi shows that these writers’ success of textually situating their personal experiences within a broader sociopolitical context is also a result of their willingness to allow silence to be an essential part of their works: breaking the silence is not always a sign of liberation. As they speak, they make us acutely aware that silence is often a form of rebellion, and that writing and speaking are sometimes dishonest compromises that veil the truth rather than expose it . . . in exposing their tentativeness, vulnerabilities, hesitations and stumblings—these women’s voices are much more powerful and compelling than the louder voices of those who are self-assured. (Al-Nowaihi 2001: 498) Both Soueif and Adnan explore wider political realms, not least to situate themselves in regard to the different places they have lived in and the shifting positions they have inhabited. Soueif constructs her utopian “new world” on the basis of her socialization of “[g]rowing up Egyptian in the Sixties” which she summarizes as “growing up Muslim/Christian/Egyptian/Arab/African/Mediterranean/ Non-aligned/Socialist but happy with small-scale capitalism” (Soueif 2004: 5). She goes on to describe her Sixties identity, which, at the time, was not problematized as such, as follows: a spacious meeting point . . . This territory, this ground valued precisely for being a meeting-point for many cultures and traditions—let’s call it “Mezzaterra”—was not invented or discovered by my generation. But we were the first to be born into it, to inhabit it as of right . . . This was the world that my generation believed we had inherited: a fertile land; an area of overlap, where one culture shaded into the other, where echoes and reflections added depth and perspective, where differences were interesting rather than threatening, because they were foregrounded against a backdrop of affinities. (Soueif 2004: 6–8) 8 Again, Soueif’s vision mirrors Babbitt’s concept of “experiential understanding” and her preference (particularly in reference to Barghouti) of the future over the past: It is not the possession of stories that explains understanding and freedom, but rather, the expectation that such stories matter to who we can be and, importantly, the desire to be more than we are . . . Effective agency is best explained by sensitivity to and awareness of a present reality, and not primarily stories of the past. (Babbitt 2009: 248)

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Soueif then charts the shrinking of that space and the hardening of positions in each of the political essays and book reviews compiled in Mezzaterra (similar to Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991) and describes her non-fiction as a defense of that particular space: I think of myself as a writer of fiction. But fiction allows its own rhythms; it cannot be forced. In my experience, fiction—except of a certain raw kind— will not be born today out of today’s events . . . Journalism, on the other hand, responds to the day’s most pressing concerns, tries, even, to nudge them on to a different track. These non-fiction pieces, then, are the direct product of the interaction between my self and the condition of living in the UK. (Soueif 2004: 1–2) Hafez has explained how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Arabic fiction, at the time greatly influenced by the West, perceived itself as an equivalent of reality or as its reproduction in verbal form. Its starting point was a belief in the infallibility of mimesis, which was seen as a trustworthy representation of life with its verisimilitude as the ultimate proof of its plausibility and relevance to the reader’s experience. (Hafez 1994: 102) Yet, this kind of Mahfouzian representation of reality has long been subverted and questioned by contemporary Arab writers (Caiani 2007: 7–8). Just as, to briefly return to the image of the mural, truth “in the Israeli-Palestinian context is a difficult, if perhaps impossible ideal to attain” (Jacoby 2007: 1), Soueif’s and Adnan’s collections show that some of the most significant innovations in contemporary Arabic novels, such as narrative fragmentation, intertextuality, and “some sort of alternative historiography” (Caiani 2007: 4) can be used as effectively in creative non-fiction, thus indicating that their essays signify less a “marking of time between novels” than a welcome experimental expansion of their work. There is no doubt that Arab authors residing in the Arab world often have to pay personally for their commitment in writing about politically controversial topics (Caiani 2007: 6–7). Yet Soueif’s and Adnan’s use of creative non-fiction may also be seen as an attempt to enter into “a dialogue with reality” (Kendal 2006: 175) and to link personal and global concerns, which, in turn, provoke important questions, without falling into the genre’s traditional—and often didactic—trap of trying to imitate or reflect a general and most often conflicting reality.

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Notes 1. For analyses of Ahdaf Soueif’s fiction see, for example, Chakravorty (2007), Nash (2007), and Malak (2005). 2. See Majaj and Amireh (2002) for a comprehensive collection of essays on Etel Adnan’s writing and artwork. 3. On the relation between language and genre in Arab writing see Miriam Cooke’s insightful essay “In Search of Mother Tongues” in her study Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism through Literature (2001). 4. For a historical overview, also including pre-Second World War literary journalism, see Hartsock (2008) and Kendall (2006). 5. A photo of the mural can be found on the homepage of the landscape photographer Simon Norfolk: http://www.simonnorfolk.com/. 6. See, for instance, Sabbagh (1996) and Majaj et al. (2002). 7. See Weidner (2004: 13). 8. For a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between geography and ethics see Proctor and Smith (1999).

Bibliography Adnan, E. (2005) In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, San Francisco, CA: City Lights Bookstore. Al Maleh, L. (ed.) (2009) Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Al-Nowaihi, M. (2001) “Resisting Silence in Arab Women’s Autobiographies,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 33(4): 477–502. Babbitt, S. E. (2009) “Collective Memory or Knowledge of the Past: ‘Covering Reality With Flowers’,” in S. Campbell, L. Meynell, and S. Sherwin (eds.) Embodiment and Agency, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University. Boynton, R. S. (2005a) The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft, New York: Vintage Books. —— (2005b) “The Roots of the New New Journalism,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 4. Online. Available: http://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay. php?article_id=1515 (accessed June 2010). Caiani, F. (2007) Contemporary Arab Fiction: Innovation from Rama to Yalu, London: Routledge. Chakravorty, M. (2007) “To Undo What the North Has Done: Fragments of a Nation and Arab Collectivism in the Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif,” in N. Al-Hassan Golley (ed.) Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through Writing, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Cooke, M. (2001) Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism through Literature, London: Routledge. Forché, C. and Gerard, P. (2001) “An Adventure in Lyric, Fact, and Story,” in C. Forché and P. Gerard (eds.) Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from the Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs, Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books. Gass, W. (1977) “The Art of Fiction No. 65. William Gass Interviewed by Thomas

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LeClaire,” The Paris Review 70: 1–33. Online. Available: http://www.theparisreview. com/media/3576_GASS.pdf (accessed March 2010). Ghazoul, F. (ed.) (2000) “The Hybrid Literary Text: Arab Creative Authors Writing in Foreign Languages,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 20: 6–7. Hafez, S. (1994) “The Transformation of Reality and the Arabic Novel’s Aesthetic Response,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 57(1): 93–112. Hartsock, J. C. (2000) A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form, Cambridge: University of Massachusetts Press. —— (2008) Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Jacoby, T. A. (2007) Bridging the Barrier: Israeli Unilateral Disengagement, Aldershot: Ashgate. Kendall, E. (2006) Literature, Journalism and the Avant-Garde: Intersection in Egypt, London: Routledge. Majaj, L. S. and Amireh, A. (eds.) (2002) Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist, Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company. Majaj, L. S., Sunderman, P. W., and Saliba, T. (eds.) (2002) Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Malak, A. (2005) Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English, Albany: State University of New York Press. Moore, L. (2008) Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film, London: Routledge. Morgan, M. (2006) “All strings attached,” Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 790, April 13–19. Nash, G. (2007) The Anglo-Arab Encounter: Fiction and Autobiography by Arab Writers in English, Oxford: Lang. Proctor, J. D. and Smith, D. M. (eds.) (1999) Geography and Ethics: Journeys in a Moral Terrain, London: Routledge. Sabbagh, S. (ed.) (1996) Arab Women: Between Defiance and Restraint, New York: Olive Branch Press. Salhi, Z. S. (2006) “Defining the Arab Diaspora,” in Z. S. Salhi and I. R. Netton (eds.) The Arab Diaspora: Voices of an Anguished Scream, London: Routledge. Siddiq, M. (2007) Arab Culture and the Novel: Genre, Identity, and Agency in Egyptian Fiction, London: Routledge. Soueif, A. (2004) Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground, London: Bloomsbury. —— (2005) “I Have Always Looked at Life as though It Were a Novel,” The Guardian April 25. Online. Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/apr/25/news. islam/print (accessed June 2010). Valassopoulos, A. (2007) Contemporary Arab Women Writers: Cultural Expression in Context, London: Routledge. Weidner, S. (2004) “Ein Land ohne Grenzen,” Die Zeit, September 23. Online. Available: http://www.zeit.de/2004/40/LB-L-O-Adnan (accessed June 2010). Woodward, M. L. (2007) “The effect of painting the walls,” Online. Available: http:// photobeirut.typepad.com/photo_beirut/2007/05/painting_the_wa.html (accessed June 2010). Zeidan, J. T. (1995) Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond, Albany: The State University of New York Press.

25 Dark Freedom On J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace Kevin Newmark

What is the relationship between freedom and knowledge? Is it possible to be free without knowing it? Alternatively, is there something about knowledge and its conditions of possibility that impose exacting limits upon the concept and experience of freedom? These are among the questions that emerge from reading J. M. Coetzee’s strangely disturbing novel Disgrace (1999). They have to “emerge” from a reading because they are not there at the beginning. Or, rather, the questions are there from the start, but in the unacknowledged and displaced mode of answers, of presupposed “solutions” for problems that no longer seem of direct concern to the protagonist of the fiction, David Lurie. “For a man of his age,” the novel begins, “he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well” (1). David Lurie’s “age,” moreover, is not simply his chronological age of 52 years. It is also the “age” of a certain kind of self-assured knowledge—the knowledge that this particular self, and he alone, can use his mind to solve all the problems with which it is still confronted in what is described as “a post-religious age,” an age that is “post-Christian, posthistorical, [and] postliterate” (4, 32). For a man of his age—in short, the postcolonial era of South Africa—David Lurie has pretty much figured things out. Thanks to the vast body of knowledge he possesses, or believes he possesses, of all things. This is David’s profession, for he is a professor of European Romanticism who, in this postcolonial age that is as posthistorical as it is postliterate, can have only one real student—himself. He continues to teach because . . . it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing. (5) What is most ironic, perhaps, is the way in which “humility” is originally paired in David’s own mind with an attitude of “irony.” Even before anything has really

Dark Freedom 297 “happened” so to speak, David’s own understanding of his “humility”—precisely because he considers it “ironically”—quickly reverses itself into the most compulsive form of superiority. No longer “surprised at the range of ignorance of his students,” David Lurie conceives of himself as a super-self-conscious hero exiled from the poetic world of Byron, a postcolonial Lara: “He stood a stranger in this breathing world, / An erring spirit from another hurled; / A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped / By choice the perils he by chance escaped . . .” (32). As if “by chance,” David finds himself from the beginning in a state of disgrace— fallen into a “middle” age, a postcolonial, and therefore degraded era where he has become a mere “adjunct,” part of a new, “rationalized,” African university system in which, “without warning, his powers fled” (3, 7). In this “transformed and . . . emasculated institution of learning,” we are told, “[David] is more out of place than ever” (4). But within this unfamiliar world in which David now breathes so laboriously, he still imagines, however darkly, that he can “shape by choice” whatever paths and perils of erring might still remain open to him in this transformed space of South Africa. One of these paths leads him to enter, uninvited, his student Melanie’s apartment, where he, by a specifically masculine choice, will subject her to peril: At four o’clock the next afternoon he is at her flat . . . He has given her no warning; she is too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her . . . “No, not now!” she says . . . Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nonetheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration . . . (24–25) Another path, in a spectacular reversal, will compel him, by chance, to encounter a similar peril from a radically different perspective: “Three men are coming toward them on the path . . .” (91). These are the three intruders who will thrust themselves upon David’s daughter, Lucy. This time, the rape that was “not quite that” in the earlier scene, will be brutally repeated—not just as rape, but as a multiplication of rapes—and in the most literal fashion. At the heart of Disgrace, then, is the inverted path on which David travels from being a perpetrator of an act that is “not quite” rape to being someone who is “not quite” a witness to a scene of multiple rape. Why does “rape” become in this way the iterative figure around which the novel is constructed, and, more curiously, why is David Lurie’s relation to rape always qualified by a highly restrictive economy of “acting” and “knowing”? In other words, when David is himself acting on Melanie, the text suggests that he is “not quite” raping her. And when Lucy is being brutally raped by the three intruders, David is not allowed to witness this directly, and therefore he cannot ever fully “know” exactly what happened to her. Just as in the passage from Byron’s

298 Kevin Newmark “Lara” the distinction between chance and choice is never allowed to crystallize into a simple alternative, so too the relation between the subject’s acting and knowing becomes unsettled by a series of fundamental obscurities. David knows that he is acting on Melanie, but the act itself is neither one thing (rape) nor another (not rape). Lucy is most definitely raped by the three strangers, but David’s knowledge of that rape is a form of non-knowledge, since he wasn’t really there to see—and even if he had been, we later learn, he could not ever have known it from the one point of view that really matters: hers. “You weren’t there. You don’t know what happened,” insists a strangely disembodied voice, a voice that partly echoes what Bev Shaw has just said to David in the present, and partly repeats an earlier statement that Lucy had addressed to him when she resisted his attempts to regain a position of paternal authority after the attack. “Do they think,” David wonders concerning all women, “that where rape is concerned, no man can be where the woman is?” (140–41). Could it be that there is something about “rape” itself that imperils the very categories of knowing and acting, at least as they have been conceived since the age of European Romanticism, and as they are exemplified in the point of view of David Lurie? For it is not only the case that when David knows for sure what he is doing to Melanie, it is not actually, not quite called rape; and also not only the case that when the three strangers are actually raping Lucy, David cannot quite know, not for sure, what precisely that is. It is also true in this text that the act of rape—what one could, by a perverse twist, call the “freedom” to rape—exemplifies a very peculiar kind of free choice. On the one hand, at David’s Hearing, where he is asked to respond to the complaint lodged against him by Melanie, he deflects the question of his own agency in the act with a familiar and self-serving gesture: “Very well,” he begins, “let me confess . . . I was not myself . . . I became a servant of Eros” (52). What is remarkable about David’s defense by reason of not being himself is that he himself admits it is not really a defense: “It is not a defence,” David replies to one of the committee members, “I give you a confession. As for the impulse,” he continues, “it was far from ungovernable. I have denied similar impulses many times . . .” (52). The oddity of the position will not go unnoticed by the committee. For how can David claim both that his act was dictated by a force beyond himself—he was a servant of Eros—and that he nonetheless could have resisted such a force had he so chosen: he had been able to deny similar impulses many times? How, in sum, can David’s act have been his and not his at the same time? “We are going round in circles,” Farodia Rassool says at this point (53). This particular scene will end with no clear resolution. By maintaining what he later calls his “ freedom of speech, [his] freedom to remain silent” (188), David ultimately frustrates the entire process of the Hearing. No matter what he says, David still seems to be saying nothing, at least nothing that can be “heard” according to the conventions

Dark Freedom 299 governing this investigation into what he might have known (and not known) about his own use (and abuse) of power over his student, Melanie. It seems clear, moreover, that David is merely prevaricating. He is using the reference to Eros as a cover to conceal what he may know about his own actions. Despite the loss of his job that this stance will entail, David appears to preserve both his own knowledge and power to reveal or conceal it. It was Eros, and not exactly, not quite David, who forced his way into Melanie’s apartment, depriving her of her own body: “she is too surprised to resist the intruder . . . But nothing will stop him . . . [it was] undesired to the core . . . as though she had decided to go slack, to die within herself.” By using Eros as an alibi David refuses to go slack in his turn, and thus protects his own autonomy from being violated by the questions and demands of the committee. David’s behavior appears always to be motivated by his desire to retain and manifest his own freedom: free in the first place to penetrate unbidden the secluded space of Melanie’s apartment; free in the Hearing to maintain his own privacy by refusing to speak, as demanded by the committee, “from his heart” (54). At the far limit of his powers, even in this posthistorical age, David clings to certain structures of colonial exploitation and appropriation. The power to conceal knowledge about past abuses becomes fully complicit with the loss of power to perpetrate those abuses in the same exact acts. In David’s case, the pretension to know but not to speak thus perpetuates the abusive freedom to act that now finds itself curtailed. However, once David undergoes the shock of experiencing these same forces of expropriation in reverse, as victim rather than perpetrator, his own relationship to both the power to act and the power to know begins to change. “What if,” David wonders, “after an attack like that, one is never oneself again? What if an attack like that turns one into a different and darker person altogether?” (124). Called to account for his actions at the Hearing, David had no difficulty deflecting responsibility by claiming that he fell, momentarily, under the sway of another, the god Eros. Deprived of the power to choose his own actions freely during the assault, he now repeats that gesture in an uncanny mode by questioning whether one can ever continue “being” oneself after such a violation. David’s earlier assurance about surrendering himself temporarily to Eros later becomes a more unsettling hypothesis. “What if one is never oneself again?” constitutes the most threatening of questions when asked by the one whose very existence as a self depends on maintaining itself intact from such a disintegrating possibility. Of course, in this particular instance, David is not at first even aware that the question concerns him. He believes he is asking it only about Lucy, whose strange behavior after the attack, which consists in her becoming increasingly estranged from him, is troubling to his own understanding of the world and his own place within it. But further on, it is precisely this possibility of becoming “a different

300 Kevin Newmark person altogether,” and therefore one who, having turned “darker,” is no longer recognizable even to himself, that ineluctably surfaces: “He does not understand what is happening to him” (143). What does it mean in this novel to turn “darker”? It certainly does not mean that David can simply continue to identify with Byron’s Lara: “He stood a stranger in this breathing world . . . A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped by choice the perils he by chance escaped” (32). These dark imaginings of Lara, which David himself imagined sharing with the fictional fallen-angel, are associated with the pride and wantonness of unlimited freedom—a freedom of choice unchecked by any human limits. Rather, the turning darker that dawns on David after the assault on his imaginary freedom to stand apart in this breathing world recalls the way he had actively reinterpreted the name “Melanie” at the very moment he became truly interested in her. “Melanie—melody: a meretricious rhyme. Not a good name for her. Shift the accent. Meláni: the dark one” (18). What David learns throughout Disgrace is an undoing of the lyric imagination. Precisely that which he at first takes himself to be, a student of poetry as song and as melody, turns out to be meretricious and therefore thoroughly misleading. David’s transformation after the attack, the possibility of his changing into someone altogether different, also points to a process of becoming more like Meláni, more precisely and literally, a process of melanization. If melanization refers to a darkening process that will bring David unexpectedly closer to Meláni, then it will necessarily involve a loss of his earlier ironic detachment, a loss of the insulated and autonomous self that he once was, or believed himself to be. But if Meláni is “the dark one,” David can never become exactly that, either, for he will never be the same as Meláni. He can never quite return to being wholly himself again, the white one, but neither will he simply become “the dark one,” or even one of the black ones, like Petrus, or the three intruders who rape Lucy. David is from now on merely “a darker person altogether” than he was before the turning point of the attack—a point that turns him away from who he was and toward both Meláni and Lucy, as well as toward his new “neighbor” Petrus. Above all, this darkening turn will consist in the trying process of David’s no longer being so certain of his own capacity to act and to know according to the purely subjective and thus ironic criteria by which he conducted his life in the past. What David experiences in the first half of the novel as his freely keeping in the dark his own knowledge of his behavior, including what he did to Meláni, will therefore change into a disconcerting experience of darkness; one that will sorely try his freedom to know or act exclusively through his own choice. For example, in the second half of the novel, David is consumed both with trying to discover something about Lucy’s attackers and with acting so that he can have an effect on Lucy’s own future after the attack. But, in both cases, David

Dark Freedom 301 is repeatedly confronted with his impotence to penetrate the darkness: he is able to learn nothing for sure about the attackers, and his renewed attempts to regain paternal influence over Lucy end only in her increasing distance and independence from him. “Does Petrus know who the strangers were?” David wonders. “Was it because of some word Petrus let drop that they made Lucy their target . . . Did Petrus know in advance what they were planning? In the old days one could have had it out with Petrus” (116). In this scene, David finds himself in the place of the committee members at the Hearing: he is frustrated by Petrus’s unwillingness to say what David assumes he must know. Consequently, David is prevented from acquiring a kind of knowledge that, at least in his own eyes, would make the unforgivable event more accessible to an act of retributive “justice” by giving it a proper name and thus condemning it: “He does not care how he gets the words out of Petrus, he just wants to hear them . . . Violation, that is the word he would like to force out of Petrus. Yes, it was a violation, he would like to hear Petrus say” (119). But in this scene, it is Petrus who, repeating David’s earlier gesture, exercises his own freedom to remain silent about whatever it is he might know about that assault on Lucy’s freedom, and so David ends up powerless, either “to force the words out of Petrus” or “to send him packing,” as would have been possible “in the old days” (116).1 If indeed Petrus knows anything specific about the “violation” endured by Lucy, he now shelters this knowledge from being violated in its turn by David learning any more about it. Instead, in this melanized world where David and Petrus are unwilling neighbors, he and Petrus provide mirror images for each other, working side by side, in silence, to protect the privilege of not sharing with the other what each of them thinks he knows for himself. In Lucy’s case, David would like to pry out of her what he calls “[her] secret; his disgrace” (109). The exact relation between Lucy’s secret and David’s disgrace remains unclear here, the odd mark of punctuation, the semi-colon, serving both to join and to separate them in the grammar of the phrase. It is precisely the fact of having “shared” the experience of the attack with Lucy—without however knowing what exactly that experience was for her—that troubles David the most. In the immediate wake of the assault, David is therefore anxious to reassume the paternal control the attack demonstrates in fact that he no longer possesses, if he ever did. He imagines that he now knows the path Lucy ought to take—namely, a return to Europe that would make her future into a symmetrical reflection of his past—but he must acknowledge at the same time that this imaginary knowledge is deficient precisely in regard to what in fact he did not see for himself in her past. Thus, and in order to recover as much of his lost privilege as possible over Lucy, David will need to know something more about her that only she could reveal: what actually happened when she was raped and why she refuses to speak about it with anyone, including David. “Why aren’t you telling the whole story,” David

302 Kevin Newmark coaxes Lucy, “why don’t you want to tell?” (110, 111). Lucy’s response to David, though originating from far different motives and resulting in far different consequences, is yet another version of the failure to know and to act that David must endure when he confronts Petrus. “This is my life,” Lucy calmly tells David at last. I am the one who has to live here. What happened to me is my business, mine alone, not yours, and if there is one right I have it is the right not to be put on trial like this, not to have to justify myself—not to you, not to anyone else. (133) Having had her freedom tried to the extreme by the actual rape, Lucy adamantly resists in its aftermath a new trial of her right to silence, to privacy, and thus to a special kind of secrecy. It is a remarkable paradox that the novel goes out of its way to emphasize this one, highly restrictive, and thus “dark” freedom: the right not to speak. David claims this right in the first half of the book, when he refuses to bring into the light what he is supposed to know but what he will not pronounce. Petrus makes use of the same right in the second half of the book, when he will not reveal what David assumes he must know about his true relations with Lucy’s attackers. And, finally, Lucy herself has recourse to this peculiar freedom to remain silent when she resists David’s entreaties to make public the violation she has experienced at the hands of the three rapists. To formulate the pattern in this way, however, is also to expose the radical difference that separates Lucy on the one hand from both Petrus and, especially, David, on the other. For David, and to a lesser degree for Petrus, what one chooses to keep silent is what one knows to be a violation of someone else that one has either committed oneself or knows about without lifting a finger to prevent it or examine it critically. In Lucy’s case, however, the asymmetry is glaringly obvious. The silence to which Lucy demands the right has nothing to do with anything she did or has any true knowledge about. All she knows is the unthinkable aggression that happened “to her,” and this was a violation that could in no way leave intact what it means to be a freely acting and knowing self. “I am not the person you know,” Lucy finally writes to David, “I am a dead person and I do not know yet what will bring me back to life” (161). Thus, Lucy’s silence is not a simple choice that would preserve a secret knowledge that she herself possesses and therefore could either freely keep for herself or share with another of her choosing. Rather, Lucy’s silence, as she herself suggests, is the silence of the grave, the silence into which the violated self falls and “dies” at the hands of the violator, and which as a result no longer leaves the “same” self behind to speak in its “own” name, or for itself. The one that Lucy may have been before is now gone, and all she really “knows” for the time

Dark Freedom 303 being is that: the radically expropriated space of a lost past and an indeterminate future. Lucy’s silence, unlike the silence of David and Petrus, does in no way protect a hidden knowledge that she keeps for herself—it marks a blank in the entire system of knowledge production and dissemination. David comes closest to understanding this when he meditates on rape as the inverted figure of what he earlier celebrated as Eros: “Rape, god of chaos and mixture, violator of seclusions” (105). Lucy will not tell her story precisely because it is no longer “hers” to tell. Chaotically, her “own” experience has been taken from her and mixed with all manner of others in violation of her. It does not therefore belong to her in any proper sense of the term, and she will keep silent rather than pretend, unjustifiably, to be its “owner.” Lucy’s secret must therefore be considered not as something she possesses and refuses to share with others. Rather, Lucy’s secret, her violent dispossession at the hands of the rapists, her consequent darkening and turning into something altogether different from what David always imagined her to be as his daughter, is something just as inaccessible to her as to everyone else. The sole difference, but it is decisive, is that she does not claim to know in what secret she is being held. This refusal to feign knowledge is what, in response to David’s impatient demand to know what is happening to her, Lucy will call her indeterminate time of waiting: “Now I can only wait . . . A month. Three months. Longer. Science has not yet put a limit on how long one has to wait. For ever, maybe” (125). This, of course, is also a reference to Lucy’s other secret, a secret “child” to be fashioned from the difference the rape in her past will have made when it gives birth to Lucy’s unknowable future. Whether Lucy decides to keep the biological pregnancy—which she does—or to terminate it—a choice David advocates—there can be no knowledge capable of putting a “term” to Lucy’s waiting, that is, to the darkness she has now become for herself as well as for others. No science, no history, no story can legitimately lay claim to illuminate it. Ownership, moreover, is the over-determined concept to which David had recourse in his attempt to seduce Melanie: “a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone,” he tells her, “she has a duty to share it . . . She does not own herself” (16). Then, of course, the challenge to ownership, to what is most essential, most proper to anybody’s property, including the property of one’s own body, is meant to be merely playful. These are, David admits to himself at the time, “smooth words, as old as seduction itself. Yet at this moment he believes in them.” Later, in the inverted world of violent dispossession where David is forced to dwell, such words will not sound so smooth, nor will they have anything to do with seduction. “A risk to own anything,” David ruefully opines immediately after the attack reveals the truth lurking beneath his playful banter with Melanie by stripping it of all rhetorical ornament (98). In both cases, however, what is at stake for David is self-preservation. Women, he believes at the start of the novel, should

304 Kevin Newmark be willing to give themselves away—preferably to men, and above all men, him. Others, he fears after the attack, especially black others, constitute a grave threat to men like him being able to own anything, including their daughters. It is for this reason, at least up to the point where David himself begins to darken and turn into a different person altogether, that David’s thinking and behavior are always dictated by the need to protect himself, if not always by retaining what he “has” in the form of empirical property, at least by maintaining what he “is” in the most proper sense of his identity. For the same reason, David is intensely concerned with Lucy’s secret—the story of her past (disgrace) as well as her future (recovery). If the story of the rape spreads, David fears initially, then Lucy—and by extension David—will lose a measure of control, or ownership, over this story, which is itself a story of the self’s lost integrity. David’s first impulse is therefore a gesture of damage control: recovery from the assault will have to include erasing the physical traces as well as reassuming the authority to speak in one’s own name. By asserting her right not to speak, by refusing to put the story of her rape into her own voice, as though it still belonged properly to her, Lucy frustrates David’s desire for a narrative explanation that could, even if only retrospectively, presume to describe, interpret, and therefore understand the unthinkable event that befell both of them. Of course, Lucy’s right to remain silent, her repeated invocation of a freedom not to speak, remains itself powerless to prevent others from speaking in her place, from usurping in this way a freedom that does not properly belong to them either. “Like a stain,” David worries, “the story is spreading across the district. Not her story to spread but theirs: they are its owners” (115). At this point, David persists in believing that whatever is not claimed and protected as one’s own property—be it as a body, an action, or a story—can become available to someone else for ownership. This belief prolongs the error he made when he imagined that he too was free to possess Melanie’s body at the very moment she appeared, for reasons the novel will keep in the dark, to give it up: “She does not resist. All she does is avert herself: avert her lips, avert her eyes . . . As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself” (25). Neither Melanie nor Lucy will ever reveal in their own words what it must have been like to “die” in this way at the hands of another. At the hands or in the voice of another, for the “stain” of which David speaks is yet another usurpation, yet another claim to possess the story to which one is not entitled, and about which one knows literally next to nothing. Rape upon rape, and coercive story upon coercive story, such would be the increasingly violent gestures of appropriation and reappropriation that define all colonial (and postcolonial) attempts to regain control, i.e., ownership over a situation of chaotic admixture from which nothing can blot up the lack of proper conduct and discourse. Servants of Eros, or rape, or history, or science, servants of whatever “god”

Dark Freedom 305 one chooses to call the impersonal impulse to drive forward, to mark territory and claim it for one’s own, it is primarily the “men” in Disgrace, both black and white, who, again according to David, first act without knowing exactly why and then afterwards “tell themselves many things [because] it is in their interest to make up stories that justify them” (156–58). But if the self-interested freedom to make up stories justifying their acts can never catch up to the lack of understanding that drove them to commit these same acts in the first place, then such stories will become in their turn only further violent and blind acts of non-knowledge. It is no wonder, then, that the one right Lucy steadfastly claims is the right not to “justify” herself; that David will forever be deprived of Melanie’s first-person testimony; and that the novel itself will fall oddly silent precisely at those moments when one most wants, or even demands to hear it speak with the voice of its own knowledge and authority. What critical act of interpretation, for instance, could ever legitimately claim to understand and thus explain Lucy’s “mad” decision to keep the child to be born only on the far side of this fiction, but, as David emphasizes, necessarily born from “seed driven into the woman not in love but in hatred, mixed chaotically” (199)? And speaking of madness, where is the story that would justify—that is describe, explain, and therefore understand—what David himself refers to as his increasingly “stupid, daft, wrongheaded service” to the dogs in Disgrace, a service that does them “honor,” though only at the moment of their own mute disappearance from life (146)? Finally, what still untold story could ever bring to light and thus justify the peculiar darkness into which Melanie, in many ways the “source” of David’s “own” story, disappears in the course of the novel? Let us not forget that Lucy comes more and more to blot out Melanie in the second half of the book. Melanie herself is relegated to the status of a mere stage prop; she plays the role of an actress who merely recites lines in a darkened theater, neither acting nor speaking in her own name. By the end of the novel, she has become a ghostly presence, represented, in her proper identity, only at a double remove: by her boyfriend at the theater and, at the home where she no longer resides, in the displaced figures of her father, mother, and younger sister. Can we say that the increasing centrality of Lucy—whose very name means light—helps to restore at least a semblance of David’s power to understand and begin to remove the stain that has spread across his own race and family lineage? Or, rather, is Meláni, herself of mixed origin, not silently casting a shadow over the “dark” future contained within the hollow at Lucy’s core? In refusing to bring any of these stories more clearly into the light, Disgrace insists upon its own dark freedom, as a literary fiction, to remain doggedly silent before our most aggressive and demanding gestures of interpretation and thus reappropriation. Strange freedom of fiction, which always pretends to be what it is not, though only in order to resist pretending to act and to know in ways that

306 Kevin Newmark could ever be considered proper only to it. Whether we, like David in the end, could ever learn to abandon our own insatiable need to hold fast whatever most tenaciously eludes our grasp is of course not a question we are even yet free to ask as such.

For my students and colleagues at Venice International University.

Note 1. At one point, at the marriage celebration for Petrus, David believes he “knows” something about the dark trio: “From the far side of the fire someone is staring at him. At once things fall into place. He knows that face, knows it intimately . . . ‘I know you,’ he says grimly . . . ‘Do you know who this is’ he asks Petrus. ‘No, I do not know what this is’ says Petrus angrily. ‘I do not know what is the trouble’” (131, 132).

26 “i mike what i like” Excesses of freedom in urban, post-apartheid South African poetry Annel Pieterse

Since the early 1990s South Africa has seen an explosion of new performance poets working in genres that range from izibongo (praise poetry) to spoken word and rap. Conjunctly with this phenomenon there has also been a marked growing interest in the formal organizing of space for use in the public performance of poetry. What becomes apparent from attending one of these organized poetry festivals is the preference given to oral and performance poetry, especially amongst the younger urbanized poets. According to Ruth Finnegan, “[n]ewly emergent genres or forms” in Africa draw on “a mix of languages or media” and are “no longer automatically brushed aside as somehow hybrid or un-African, an untoward departure from the pure and authentic genres of the past” (2007: 182). Furthermore, recent studies in orality attest to “an altered vision of oral texts, no longer automatically assigned to some uniform ‘Tradition’ of the past, but also regarded as creatures of the present” (181). These newly emergent forms and genres offer contemporary poets a certain freedom, in the sense that the more open, process-oriented nature of the poetry allows for the intrusion of the body, through voice, sound, and gesture in the poems. Oral forms allow further freedom, since they can be transmitted without leaving behind evidence, and without being censored. They are thus also free in that they circumvent and disrupt the symbolic Law. This essay looks at the work of two South African performance poets, namely Lesego Rampolokeng and Kgafela oa Magogodi. In both cases, I want to show the particular way in which the notion of freedom manifests in their poetry, both in terms of the content as well as the form of the respective poems. Rampolokeng is an established South African poet who is also well known abroad. Oa Magogodi is a kwai-jazz poet and Spoken Word Theatre director. Like Rampolokeng, whom he constantly cites as one of his influences, oa Magogodi employs multiple media, including written texts, through which to present his performance poetry. It is important to note that both these poets publish as well as perform their work: in their publications both draw attention to the spoken word through their use

308 Annel Pieterse of word-play and homophones. Even when reading their work silently, the focus remains on the orality of the text, in that one can “hear” the poetry and the voice within the poetry. They therefore appear to have the freedom to move between “the oral” and “the textual,” borrowing from both traditions and forms to express both their conscious and unconscious perceptions as urban, post-apartheid, black South African men. It is my intent to investigate what the term “oral” means in this new context, since it is obviously no longer the same “oral” of “the oral tradition,” a contested term, inadequate to the task of defining a poetic form that is mutable and in continual development. We need to develop new theoretical models to account for the role of content in these new “literate oralities,” since new developments in African poetry demand a nuanced engagement with the way orality is developed by these poets as a kind of invasion of language by the embodied, dissident current of the voice. Rampolokeng’s poem “For the Oral,” published in 1993, attests to the role of “the Oral” in a South Africa which was, at that point, just emerging from the oppressive legislature of apartheid, but had yet to encounter its “unofficial” history as revealed, orally, and made official at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. The title addresses the oral form: the preposition “for” not only implies that the poem is to the benefit of “the Oral,” but also that the poem represents “the Oral,” is in favor of “the Oral,” and is moving towards it, wanting to reach it, as in “we are heading/moving for the oral,” establishing “the Oral” not only as a thing but also as a location. From the outset, the poem seems like a möbius strip, where following the content results directly in an encounter with form. The poem offers no punctuation, resulting in lines which are often ambiguous, since by varying the pauses in the word order one can create varied phrases, resulting in shifts in meaning. The meaning of the poem is therefore established or at least narrowed down only in performance, what Finnegan calls “the enperformancing of a written text, the ‘now’ when the reader personally experiences and re-creates it—‘performs’ it and makes it their own” (2007: 192). Thus, the “oral text exists in the unique situated moment. It is realized in active and embodied participation” (192). The voice is thus essential to the way the poem produces meaning, since the poem has no stanza breaks but consists of fifty-two run-on lines of free verse, thereby creating the effect, when read aloud, of a barrage of stream-ofconsciousness associations.1 The qualities of “the Oral” are listed: intuitive it is instructive expressive it is excessive flaming it is flailing hand knowledge of the age it is rage too hot for the page it is searing on the wing

“i mike what i like”

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Rampolokeng insists on the ontologically mutable quality of the oral: it exists as an adjective (“instructive”), as a noun (“rage”) and as a verb (“searing”). “The Oral” is therefore a mutable principle of connection, a kind of pure “being” aligned to shift, change, and transformation. The last eighteen lines of the poem all begin with “it is,” the repetition suggesting that “the Oral” is presence per se, that it resides in the verb “to be.” This is an interesting central preoccupation in the poem, since, as Duncan Brown suggests, [t]he suppression and/or marginalization of the oral proceeds from two related problems . . . the ontological (the linguistic/textual “status” of the poems as mediated through the processes of transcription and translation); and the paradigmatic (the inability of traditionally literate paradigms in criticism to account adequately for oral poetry). (Brown 1998: 9) By foregrounding the state-of-being of “the Oral,” Rampolokeng asserts the status of the oral as an existing presence, but one that cannot be objectified. Rampolokeng insists on its existence, its urgency, and its priority, but in the same gesture refuses to fix it under a particular sign, thereby also demanding an alternative paradigm with which to account for oral poetry. The poem starts off slowly, the stress on the second syllable of “intuitive,” “instructive,” “expressive,” and “excessive” giving way to a shorter, rapid rhythm as the poem progresses towards images of “the Oral” as “mass bounding,” “black / lightning bleeding through the mouth,” “super-charged kinetic it is MOTION in the word / unchained it is bounding across the walls.” Here, “mass bounding” can refer to movement (as in leaping and bounding), but also to stasis (as in bound up or bound copy). Either way, it is an action which flows from or is applied to something—a verb, rather than a noun. For Rampolokeng, “the Oral” is mass in motion, mass that cannot be fixed. It is the energy that underpins mass, the forces of physics and nature, the principles of reality underlying our understanding of the world. Furthermore, whilst it is certainly “expressive,” and can therefore play an orthodox and instructive role, it is at the same time excessive. This notion of “the Oral” as excessive succeeds in several ways. Firstly, the excessive nature of “the Oral” suggested by Rampolokeng implies that it represents an excess present in the material reality of the culture from which it originates and which it describes. In his discussion of “The ‘Thing’ & Its Double in Cameroonian Cartoons,” Achille Mbembe notes the “material underpinnings and common features of urban popular culture on the basis of which images are elaborated and take on meaning” (Mbembe 1997: 153). He then lists some of the “everyday realities that people are constantly endeavoring to transform into signs . . . the realities around which the categories and the rules of

310 Annel Pieterse reasoning—whether in images, in writing or in speech—are organized” (153). At the top of his list is what he terms “overloading: overloading of language, overloading of public transport, overloading of living accommodation, beginning with the crowding together of houses. Here, everything leads to excess” (153). Mbembe is talking about day to day African life, especially in the big urban centers. The poetry that I am discussing is born out of the same context and reflects the same energetic, overloaded quality. The list of these “everyday realities” includes several other points, but the most interesting one, for me, is the prevalence of “fixing” in urban cultures. In African cities, as in other urban contexts, everyday situations are “fixed,” the “fixes” being “facilitated by the fact that in this society, what is written only has meaning in relation to its ‘other’: oral formality” (Mbembe 1997: 153). An example of such a “fix” would be the unlicensed taxi driver’s regular pay-offs to the traffic police, or the money slipped into a passport at the border, inducing the border police to turn a blind eye to any irregularities in the passport. The official document of the Law (the license, the passport) has little meaning in the context of the reality of the situation, where the exchange of meaning between the individuals concerned is determined by their corporeal needs in the moment. The written Law thus requires an unwritten Oral supplement in order to function. The Oral supports the Law, but is also in excess of it, and undermines it. If, as Rampolokeng suggests, “the Oral” is excessive, it also resembles Lacanian lalangue, a concept which Lacan developed in seminars during the 1970s. Slavoj Žižek notes that lalangue designates the ‘remainder’ of the symbolic order of language: all those features which bear witness to the fact that language ‘ran amok’ and started to speak by itself, bypassing the domination of meaning (wordplays, nonsense, etc.) as well as the violent inscriptions of ‘pathological’ power relations. (Žižek 1996: 108) Rampolokeng’s form evidences the excess of the material conditions underpinning its production and as such represents them. When Rampolokeng asserts that “the Oral” is “pain on the stage spit sweat fart / cunt cock your gun invective it is what I said / and what you haven’t heard censored in the night,” the effect is disruptive. The sudden change in the rhythm of the poem is a good illustration of “the Oral” as lalangue, the “inconsistent bric à brac of ‘pathological’ tics” (Žižek 1996: 109), signaling the violent intrusion of the Real of the body and its drives into the structure of the poem. Lalangue would also account for his sometimes clumsy formulation, which imitates the uneven rhythms of speech as it appears in the real of the voice. In Flora Veit-Wild’s reading of his work, Rampolokeng’s use of scatological


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images is analogous to Bakhtin’s “grotesque body.” Rampolokeng’s statement that “the Oral” is “excessive” suggests Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, “the grotesque and the hybrid, satire and parody, polyphony and ambiguity” (Veit-Wild 1997: 555). In the extract cited above, Rampolokeng links “the Oral” and the word directly to those parts and functions of the body dealing with excretion and expectoration. He seems to be suggesting that, while “the Oral” can be “censored,” ultimately it cannot be repressed—since “the Oral” is linked to bodily functions, it insists on expression. “The Oral” is also represented as violent and sinister: “it is glaring at you between / the lines sharpening its teeth to chew your mind.” Again, “the Oral” is conceptualized as something immanent to and beyond the symbolic. It threatens the symbolic and the securities offered by the symbolic, but it is also produced by the very lines that open up the “in-between” space of “the Oral.” It is important to bear in mind that these are poets working with orality in prominently literate contexts. They conceive of orality in relation to the written line and the Law, not as some “pure and authentic” separate genre, but inscribed by it in order to contain the danger that “the Oral” poses to the mind of the reader-listener. This is confirmed in the next line, which claims that “it is mad psychopathic guilty before it’s charged,” where “the Oral” is described in terms of those sociopsychological states (of madness, psychopathy, and criminality) that threaten normativity and are always already beyond the Law. One can thus deduce from Rampolokeng’s imagery here that “the Oral” is circumscribed and trapped by “the lines” (of language and symbolization) because it is beyond them and it can be beyond them only in the sense that it is trapped between them. Freedom, in other words, is always already defined by the line of the Law. The general lack of punctuation is in itself an evasion of the Law or Symbolic, since it breaks down the boundaries between phrases and sentences that constitute fixed meaning. This makes it possible to read the phrase “guilty before it’s charged,” as “guilty before, it’s charged.” Both these variations can be borne out by the poem, and depend on the voice for realization. The first reading suggests “the Oral” as victim of the Law, and invokes memories of the apartheid-era Terrorism Act of 1967, which allowed detention indefinitely, with no public access to any information regarding the detainees. However, the second variation suggests both the always already existing, perceived “guilt” of “the Oral,” not only as “guilty before”—in other words, before the present time—but also as before a court or judge. This also affects the meaning of the phrase “it’s charged,” since “charge” again has a legal connotation, but at the same time the phrase calls to mind and reiterates the kinetic nature of “the Oral” suggested earlier in the poem, aligning it to a position both outside and immanent to the Law. The polyphonous nature of “the Oral” as site of excess is also addressed by Rampolokeng when he claims that “it is lkj speaking in voices of the living and

312 Annel Pieterse the dead / it is checking it out muta style / it is rasta ranting in benjamin,” invoking Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mutabaruka, and Benjamin Zephaniah. In this way, he introduces his affinity with dub poetry, in which “resonances of ‘the Oral’ are introduced to both political and poetic effect through the spellings of their printed forms—less phonetic transcription than deliberate assertion of the oral . . . voice in the midst of a print culture once restricted to the written ‘standard’ language of European English” (Finnegan 2007: 182). Furthermore, his statement that “the Oral” is “lkj speaking in the voices of the living and the dead,” that it is “rasta ranting in benjamin” resonates with the practice in spoken word poetry of summoning by name—and thereby invoking through remembering—the presence of other poets, writers, and activists and insisting on their embodiment, since they are seen to “speak” through a living person. In one of the last images in the poem, “the Oral” is “taking rubber stamps from power clamps / it is DEMOCRACY beyond the statute book.” This again suggests that “the Oral” is in excess of the formalities of the Law, and can therefore effect real political change. This view is supported by Duncan Brown’s discussion of the work of Mzwakhe Mbuli, in which he claims that, in the South African “State of Emergency in the 1980s, the poetry of performance served to convey important information otherwise difficult to disseminate” (Brown 1998: 252). Thus, information in written form could be censored and confiscated, restrictions that are not so easy to impose on oral forms. More recent oral poetry has made use of the availability of new technologies such as CDs, DVDs, and the internet as a way of circumventing the perceived univocal nature of written texts. Kgafela oa Magogodi is an example of a poet who develops oral poetry through new electronic media. Oa Magogodi describes his work as celebrating “the mutinous journey of the underground nation towards spoken word uprisings” (oa Magogodi 2006, DVD leaflet). Again, the choice of image suggests the revelation or release, through spoken word (the oral), of the excess of the reality which is repressed, the nation kept underground. “i mike what i like” was originally performed live as a stage play and then developed into a film through collaboration with director Jyoti Mistry, who claims that the film “aimed to capture the visceral connection of the sound of words, its social and political commentary with complimentary and contradictory images inspired by the city of Johannesburg” (Mistry 2006, DVD leaflet). The title obviously derives from the collection of Steve Biko’s columns, entitled I Write What I Like, published in the journal of the South African Student Organization under the pseudonym “Frank Talk.”2 Oa Magogodi adopts this derivation as his title, thereby not only signaling the influence of Black Consciousness on his work but also, in the tradition of South African imbongi and performance poets, invoking the memory of those who have gone before, calling Biko to mind and thereby assuring his presence for the duration of the poem. Similarly, oa Magogodi also refers to


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(Dambudzo) “marechera,” “papa ramps” (Lesego Rampolokeng), “mumia” (AbuJamal), and “lefifi tladi,” all writers who employ oral forms as a means of circumventing the limitations of the Law. In changing the title from “I write” to “I mike,” the pen gives way to the microphone as technological medium for oa Magogodi’s voice and performance, and he emphasizes its role in the poem, linking his freedom directly to the microphone when he concludes the poem by stating “when i sound check 1 2 3 / i’m free.” Here, the microphone, like Rampolokeng’s “the Oral,” transforms from a noun to a verb. Oa Magogodi’s mixture of media (theater, performance, film, and written texts) and of languages suggests what Karin Barber describes as a scene of metamorphoses and mutations, in which written texts are performed, performed texts can be given a written recension, and a network of allusions and cross-references enables audiences in whatever state of literacy to access texts in one way or another (Barber 1995: 12) This illustrates the manner in which oral texts should be envisaged as “created and changed and manipulated for many purposes and through many media by active participants in the world, present no less than past” (Finnegan 2007: 184). As such, an analysis of oa Magogodi’s form and the media through which he chooses to present it reveals poetry which carries the potential for radical innovation in terms of circumventing and decentering the dominant structures of literacy as well as artistic appreciation. “i mike what i like” is oa Magogodi’s manifesto of his spoken word resistance to the imposed norms and censorship of the Law. In a sense, oa Magogodi appears to be aligning himself with the role of an imbongi, a praise poet whose function is “to negotiate relations of political power within the society, which means that the imbongi is ‘licensed’ by the poetic form to criticize the king when this is perceived to be necessary” (Brown 1998: 91). A “strong rhetorical sense of the presence of the imbongi” (Brown 2006: 47) is also conveyed by the poem, since oa Magogodi positions himself firmly at the center of the poem, the pronoun “I” and the possessive “my” appearing repeatedly throughout, stating “i am not a lick-ass poet,” “i give no blowjobs to politicians,” “my tongue can’t be bought / to dance in the rot of the king’s court,” and “i’m nobody’s official poet or puppet.” By creating such a strong sense of his presence, oa Magogodi insists on a recognition of his self-appointed role as “the unwrapper,” asserting “i unwrap the napkins of this baby nation / to show you the slime of the times.” As with Rampolokeng’s imagery, oa Magogodi’s suggests that what he reveals in his poetry is the excrement/ excess of the structures which he interrogates, and that this is an inevitable result of the form of the oral, or the “spoken word.”

314 Annel Pieterse As spoken word poet, oa Magogodi claims for himself the culturally privileged space of the imbongi. Jeff Opland argues that “the imbongi’s freedom to censure the king constitutes a ‘ritual of rebellion’ which functions to confirm the validity of the kingship by institutionalizing criticism” (quoted in Brown 1998: 92). However, “the extent of the imbongi’s licence to criticize has . . . been the subject of much debate” (93). While the imbongi can be critical—it is, so to speak, coded into the Law—he/she rarely is. The imbongi decries “whatever threatens the ideal polity” (92), their “essential role” is political, they are “concerned with the well-being of the polity” (92). The fact that the imbongi is often expected to be critical makes her/his praise more believable, more authentic. What makes the work of oa Magogodi and Rampolokeng so transgressive is that they take the possibility of criticism, coded into the Law as a way to authenticate the praise, and then proceed to exploit it, so that it starts to undermine the very Law that offers the choice in the first place. By taking the choice seriously, spoken word poets alter the very idea of the imbongi and his or her function. The choice that was supposed to make the praise sweeter is used to launch a bitter invective not only against the leaders and the social structures that produced them, but also against the society that allowed the oral poet the floor in the first place. Furthermore, the poets see poetry as a kind of violence. The relationship between speaker-poet and listener-reader is essentially an imperative, violent one: the poet-speaker commands the reader-listener and insults him or her. This echoes the obscene, hidden violence that underpins social relationships in our contemporary African context (for example between the police and the citizenry, between husband and wife, between teacher and pupil). But by speaking the violence, and harnessing it to a revolutionary vision, it starts to undermine the very bonds that violence normally enables. Both oa Magogodi and Rampolokeng thus assert their preference for the oral/ spoken word as a means of expression that allows them to uncover and expose structurally inherent forms of violent repression and oppression. Their form relies heavily on the presence of many voices, invoked not only as a source of inspiration for the poetry, but as inherent to the very poetry itself. The poetry is the presence of these voices. This notion places the poets in a broad context of influence, and in constant dialogue with the work of various other writers/performers. This suggests a tradition that is, according to Jen-Marie Makang, “in continual development” (in Finnegan 2007: 180), a point borne out by the poets’ use of electronic media as a means of production, allowing them to bypass more traditional means of publication and platforms for performance, not only in order to reach a larger, more international audience, but also as a means of subverting the dominance of established agents in the field of cultural production. As such, the oral form allows greater freedom of expression not only because it can express, through its similarity to lalangue, the excesses of social existence, but also because


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it is in itself an excess of social existence and therefore able to remain beyond the Law even while it is intimately connected to it.

Notes 1. In order to respect the freeform nature of the poems, I will not use line references, which, to my mind, seem to impose a false formal category on the poem. 2. In the poem oa Magogodi claims to “walk the frank talk,” suggesting a more embodied form of resistance than that allowed by mere “talk.” This is picked up again in the move from “write” to “mike.”

Bibliography Barber, K. (1995) “African-Language Literature and Postcolonial Criticism,” Research in African Literatures 26(4): 3–28. Brown, D. (1998) Voicing the Text: South African Oral Poetry and Performance, Cape Town: Oxford University Press. —— (2006) To Speak of This Land: Identity and Belonging in South Africa and Beyond, Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Finnegan, R. (2007) The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa, Oxford: James Currey. i mike what i like (2006) [DVD] Dir. Jyoti Mistry. Written by Kgafela oa Magogodi. Performers: Kgafela oa Magogodi, Ernest Mothle, and Musawenkosi Xokelel. South Africa: Kgafela Productions. Mbembe, A. (1997) “The ‘Thing’ and Its Double in Cameroonian Cartoons,” in K. Barber (ed.) Readings in African Popular Culture, London: The International African Institute School of Oriental and African Studies. Mistry, J. (2006) “Director’s Note,” in i mike what i like, DVD leaflet. Oa Magogodi, K. (2004) Outspoken. South Africa: Laugh it Off Media. —— (2006) “Poet,” in i mike what i like, DVD leaflet. Rampolokeng, L. (1993) Talking Rain, Johannesburg: COSAW Publishing. Veit-Wild, F. (1997) “Carnival and Hybridity in Texts by Dambudzo Marechera and Lesego Rampolokeng,” Journal of Southern African Studies 23(4): 553–64. Žižek, S. (1996) The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters, London: Verso.

27 Tri-Freedom The libretti of George Elliott Clarke Owen Percy

Like a bird on the wire, Like a drunk in a midnight choir I have tried in my way to be free.

Leonard Cohen (1993)

With the recent publication of Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path, George Elliott Clarke’s third jazz-opera libretto, there suddenly exists an enigmatic and distinctive body of musical texts within the Canadian poet’s pantheon of work. I call these texts “musical” not only because of their operatic assignations, nor only in reference to the blues- and jazz-infused vibrancy of Clarke’s language, but rather because they pose significant resistance to any kind of exclusive classification as libretto or drama. In his afterword to Clarke’s earlier libretto, Québécité, Ajay Heble mused that the jazz opera itself is “not a well-documented genre . . . but that, I suspect, may well be part of its allure. Alert with the snap of the new and untried, and unfettered by settled habits of convention, this hybrid genre compels us to imagine an alternative vision of human possibility” (2003a: 97, his emphasis). Clarke’s libretti proffer an intriguing enigma for both the literary critic and the musicologist by textualizing a musical genre that itself “stages bordercrossings by its very definition” (Obert 2006). In one of the only published analyses of Clarke’s first libretto Beatrice Chancy, Maureen Moynagh argues that “[t] here is abundant textual evidence suggesting that the drama is to be read as poetry rather than performed as a play; stage directions scan, descriptions of the characters are similarly poetic, there are photographs scattered through the volume, and the arrangement of the words on the page is frequently key to meanings,” rendering integral features of the published “verse drama” literally “unperformable” (Moynagh 2002: 101, also see Larson 2006: 113). This is true of the other libretti as well, at least in their incarnations as texts which are, tellingly, made available in the poetry section of most bookstores. Released in 2007, Trudeau has since been reviewed as a work of drama (in The Malahat Review [#162]), but also as a book of

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poetry (in The Antigonish Review [#151] and The Dalhousie Review [#88.1]), and yet remains exuberantly fickle when it comes to any kind of generic exclusivity. Below, I consider these three libretti—Beatrice Chancy (1999), Québécité (2003), and Trudeau (2007)—not as musical artifacts, nor as lyrics to be set to music, but rather as dramatic poems and/or verse dramas. This is not to ignore the plethora of possibilities of performativity, operatic history, orality, aurality, or audience, which inevitably bloom from these libretti, but to focus on the writhing textual heart from which these possibilities can emerge for readers. Even a cursory consideration of the plotlines of the three verse dramas insists that Clarke is a writer who remains intensely dedicated to the pursuit of various notions of freedom in and for his texts. I will suggest that, in his exploration of various kinds (various genres, if you will) of possible freedoms, Clarke manipulates and marries different generic conventions in order to reflect and exude—formally—the resistance, tenacity, idealism, inclusivity, and ebullient hope of his content; Clarke’s libretti thus try freedom on several levels. In assuming, then, that poetic performance and not theatrical performability is the priority of this triumvirate of texts, we must recognize, in them, the “generic restlessness” and “lawlessness” (Kamboureli 1991: xiv) of the postmodern Canadian long poem.

Liberal Libretti and the Legacy of the Long Poem The legacy of the long poem in Canadian literature can hardly be overestimated. The earliest significant writing in and about the country—aside from explorers’ journals and a few early colonial novels—appeared in the form of the long poem. Works like Oliver Goldsmith the younger’s The Rising Village, Alexander McLachlan’s The Emigrant, and Charles Sangster’s The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay laid the foundations for what was to become the Canadian literary tradition and established a legacy of extended poetic engagement that has survived to become the genre par excellence of postmodern Canadian writing. Consequently, the major critics of Canadian letters have done their part to reify the genre as one whose legacy every major Canadian poet must wrestle with in some form or another. In reading Clarke’s libretti through this legacy, though, we must recognize that it is an unhappy marriage from the start. His landmark works Whylah Falls and Execution Poems are surely best read as book-length poems—that is, thematically and narratively coherent collections of poems—but until his libretti the genre seems to be a form that he has kept at an arm’s length. Looking back to Dorothy Livesay’s arguments on the Canadian documentary poem in 1969—themselves a “making new” of Northrop Frye’s 1946 article “The Narrative Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry”—we find the articulation of a generic and thematic framework which accommodates Clarke’s libretti to no small degree; one which is, as Livesay put it, “based on topical data, but held

318 Owen Percy together by descriptive, lyrical, and didactic elements” (1969: 269) but which still treads, as the title of Smaro Kamboureli’s 1991 study of the form suggests, On the Edge of Genre. Livesay’s notion of the “documentary poem” is one in which she claims “our narratives reflect our environment profoundly; they are subtly used to cast light on the landscape, the topography, the flora and fauna as well as on the social structure of the country” (1969: 269). Despite her essentializing pronouns here, this vision recalls considerations of nationality within a theorizable generic tradition “which is valid as lyrical expression but whose impact is topicalhistorical, theoretical, and moral” (281). A reflection, to simplify archaically, of the land and its peoples, and one which Clarke—in his constant quest to suggest “new, more inclusive definitions of Canadianness” (Clarke 1997: xxiii)—similarly aspires to in his multicultural and postcolonial Canada. But since the publication of Michael Ondaatje’s original Long Poem Anthology (1979) and Sharon Thesen’s revampings thereof (1991, 2001), criticism of the genre has focused on what we might call (after Robert Kroetsch) the “erotics” of the long poem: an insistent delay and deferral of narrative and a “disbelief in belief” (Kroetsch 1989: 118) of systems of order purporting any definitive national truth, as well as an emphasis on process over product. Kroetsch outlines “[t]his basic tension, then, in the Canadian long poem: a) the temptation of the documentary, b) the skepticism about history. And as a consequence: a kind of madness in the recording” (119): the madness, I suggest, of jazz (“blackmarket, black-magic Music: / Its voodoo fuses Malcolm X and Confucius,” Clarke 2003: 77), and in turn, the jazz opera. Although the poems in Ondaatje’s original anthology are championed by their editor as “speak[ing] the unsaid politics of the day” (1979: 18), Ondaatje admits that in 1979 “we are not dealing with poetry whose themes are hardened into stone, into a public cultural voice . . . The poems have more to do with open fields and quiet rooms than public stages” (12–13). In Beatrice Chancy, Québécité, and especially Trudeau, the chorus of speaking/singing voices exulting towards their own freedoms fill those fields with song, bust explosively out of quiet rooms, and commandeer public stages as a matter of course; Clarke re-envisions not just the (rhythm-)nation per se, but the literary mediums through which it has defined itself. What these libretti offer is a questioning of “the taken-for-grantedness of words such as literary history, national, and Canadian” (Brydon 2000: 22, her emphasis). They offer varying kinds of freedom from these rigidities by freeing history from its master-narratives; they retell the not-yettold to, of, and by Canada, be it that of an eighteenth-century “martyr-liberator” slave (Clarke 1999: 10), of a “rainbow quartet of lovers” in fin-de-nouveau-siècle Québec (Clarke 2003: 11), or of the nation’s most famous “pur-et-dur internationalist . . . cosmo, anti-nationalist liberal” Prime Minister (Clarke 2007: 20, 22). These three works, then, free themselves from the legacies of Canadian popular history as well as those of the long poem and the libretto; they revel in their

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hybridity—their “deformation of mastery” (Houston A. Baker Jr. quoted in Clarke 2002: 275) of both history and its telling.

Literally . . . Critical considerations of Clarke’s early work have recognized that much of the poet’s verse is written “from and to a particular locality” (Clarke 1996: 72). Specifically, most of his early writing attempts “to establish an Africadian or AfricanCanadian vision, or perspective, on Canadian history and politics” (Clarke 1998: 159). Beatrice Chancy, though not penned particularly early in his career, is steeped specifically in the history and geography of its own particular place— Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. In terms of what we might call its stereotypical “postcoloniality,” Beatrice Chancy is in the tradition of Walcott and Césaire in that it rewrites and replaces the colonial ur-story into recognizably local and marginalized contexts. In this case, the trials of the Cenci Family (famously recounted or rewritten by everyone from Shelley to Artaud to Kathy Acker) are recast in the Annapolis Valley in 1801. The libretto envisions Beatrice as the mixed-race daughter of Frances Chancy, a white Loyalist slave owner (and a “Jefferson provincial” [Clarke 1999: 108]) and one of his slaves. Upon her return from boarding school in Halifax, Beatrice falls in love with a slave named Lead, declares this love to her father, and suffers the consequences. Those consequences include a violent sexual assault by Chancy himself, who only then—ominously—realizes that “Plays spawn treason, / Poems assassination” (49) and, self-reflexively, “Opera, suffic[es] no one” (105, Clarke’s emphasis). Beatrice rallies her now-compatriot slaves, kills Chancy, and incites a revolt that leads to the death of her lover but the freeing of her community by Nova Scotia Governor John Wentworth before she is apprehended and eventually hung by the Royal Nova Scotia Regiment. Described in the Dramatis Personae as a “martyr-liberator” (10), Beatrice is established as the catalyst of freedom from the work’s very beginning. The text’s opening lines of dialogue are sung by Chancy’s slaves, who foreshadow their master’s murder with “O sweet Jesus, / Won’t we be free? / O King Jesus, / Slay slavery!” (12). And when the slave Dumas muses on the return of Beatrice, calling her “pure song, / So elegantly spoken, / A philosophy shaken / Into a new language, / Demanding new lips / And a new heart, / To speak her for who she is” (30), the trajectory of the narrative becomes clear. If indeed “Chancy’s life be [their] doom,” and “His death be [their] freedom!” (101), Beatrice is the purveyor of that freedom. Upon brutally murdering her rapist/master/father, Beatrice concurs by exclaiming “Slave days is over!” and “I’ve never felt freer. This rain glints gold” (126, 129). Even given the death of Lead and the prospect of her own execution, Beatrice remains the pariah of freedom, musing “My life’s a prison that Death will unlock. / Like Marie-Josèphe Angélique / Like Évangéline

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Bellefontaine” (140). These Montreal and Maritime martyrs—the former a slave who set fire to her master’s house and most of the city of Montreal in 1734, and the latter the subject of Longfellow’s poem about the expulsion of the Acadians by British troops in 1755—simultaneously retrieve themselves from histories that have tried to ignore them, and pull Beatrice into their exclusive circle of martyrdom. Ironically, Beatrice Chancy-as-long-poem does not allow itself or its readers the freedom of absolute imagination, as many of the “stage directions” which structure the text’s dialogue remain abstractly poetic. The voice which appears in italics repeatedly throughout the verse drama to suggest, for example that “Slavery is global industry and trade—the future” (25), or to describe, in unperformable terms how “A Düreresque light crouches over North Mountain, speculating on a storm” (62), and that “Invisible shovelsful of dirt thud upon the scene” (91), is clearly that of a poet at work. As Beatrice is being violated by Chancy, she warbles “I hurt [two words garbled] my throat / [Several words whited out] a knife” (87, poet’s brackets); Clarke thus accesses the self-conscious performativity of his text by freeing Beatrice’s performable narrative from the fetters of any actual physical (visual, vocal) performance.

Culturally . . . Clarke’s second libretto—Québécité: A Jazz Fantasia in Three Cantos—spins out of a more specific and definitive moment in Canadian history. After losing the 1995 referendum vote on whether or not the French-speaking province of Québec would secede from Canada, the leader of the separatist Parti-Québecois Jacques Parizeau blamed his party’s very slim loss (50.58% to 49.48%) on “money and the ethnic vote” (quoted in Donnelly 2003: D8). Clarke, who calls himself “one of those people who happens to believe that Quebec belongs to everybody” (quoted in Donnelly 2003: D8) (and despite expressing sympathy for the separatist cause), responded with Québécité, which he describes as an Absinthe-Champagne-Chartreuse-Chicoutai-Grappa-Palm Wine-PastisRum-Saki-Sangria-Scotch-Tequila-Vodka opera, one coloured intensely with notes of ebony, dark-cherry, India indigo-ink, and bronze-beige the shade of papyrus or bamboo. (quoted in Heble 2003b: 219) As one might surmise, the libretto aspires to emphatic diversity and aims to assure itself and its readers that “Québec’s no Puritan paradise!” (Clarke 2003: 20). The cast consists of a Canadian-born Hindu architecture student (Laxmi), an immigrant Chinese law student (Colette), a Haitian-born architect (Ovide), and an

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African-Canadian (Clarke specifies “Africadian”) musician (Malcolm). The plot swirls around the romances between the four and the ways in which they are complicated by Québec’s sociopolitical environment. Much of the freedom sought in Québécité is the freedom to exist as part of a society and to love whomever one chooses. In declaring Clarke successful in his search for freedom, Heble—who, as Artistic Director of the Guelph Jazz Festival, commissioned Québécité from Clarke and composer D. D. Jackson—notes that “in an era when demands for tighter controls on immigration and border-crossing threaten the dreams of the aggrieved, the structures of hope, possibility and momentum embodied in Clarke’s rainbow quartet of lovers seem particularly pertinent” (Heble 2003a: 101). In one representative scene, Laxmi and Ovide bicker terribly in a didactically symbolic place and Ovide asks: “Must we spat outside Quebec’s parliament? / Ici nous sommes—tous—Q*uébecois, suprèmement” to which Laxmi replies “La peau brune, mais le Coeur québecoise? / Tell that to the pur-laine québecoises!” (Clarke 2003: 66). The relationship between Malcolm and Colette fares little better: Colette’s recently immigrated parents brand Malcolm a “nigger” unworthy of their daughter (69). She asks Malcolm: “Should I just destroy my parents’ hearts? They dreamt of golden, Chinese grandchildren, / . . . /Would our children be black or gold?” to which her lover—tragicomically—replies “do you think our kids’d be striped like zebras? / Or look like Neapolitan ice cream?” (71). Like Beatrice Chancy, it is Malcolm who becomes the primary purveyor of possibility when it comes to trying freedom in Québécité. Ranting variously that the “Québécois claim they’re ‘white niggers of America,’ / Peut-être but I’m the Negro nègre of Québec!” (69), he vows, like Clarke does, “I’ll not be a decomposing composer, / Asphyxiating his gasping sax. / God, damn a keep-quiet revolution! / I’ll holler love maximally max!” (76). As if responding to Laxmi’s lament that “Je me souviens, Québec’s motto, says it all: / We are the heirs of History’s crushing pall” (60), Malcolm takes the reins of his own victimhood to become the figurehead for cultural and political freedom in the face of the history books and their authors, like Parizeau, who would happily edit him out. In his telling prelude to Québécité—a libretto dedicated to “Two Visionaries of Liberty,” Pierre Trudeau and then-Governor General of Canada Adrienne Clarkson—Clarke himself encloses the word “libretto” in quotation marks (11). As in Beatrice Chancy, Clarke’s stage directions prove more of a platform for the poet than for the director. Speckled with scenes which “recall May 68: Trudeaumania in Canada, Pre-Raphaelite Marxism in Czechoslovakia, and classy, sexy, revolt in France” (91), Québécité is similarly unperformable, yet reliant on a readership willing to treat the text poetically. Further representative examples include a “stage direction” which describes how “Laxmi turns away. She resembles Madhuri Dixit in Versace and Marpessa Dawn in Orfeu Negro” (43), and a set enigmatically described as “an

322 Owen Percy impressionist canvas by Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions” (30). More than this simple reliance on poetic reading, Québécité returns to Livesay’s conception of the “Canadian genre” (1969: 267) of the documentary long poem. Typical of this form is the shattering of myths about places and spaces in Canada: “By deposing the old myths a new myth is asserted: the Canadian frontier, it is suggested, will create the conditions for a new Eden. Neither a Golden Age nor a millennium, neither a paradisal garden nor an apocalyptic city, but a harmonious community, here and now” (Livesay 1969: 274). The “frontier” of Québec’s ethnophobic provincial politics certainly facilitates at least the envisioning of such a community by the lovers; the libretto’s closing lines provide much reinforcement to the text’s freedomseeking rhetoric by seeing both sets of lovers ultimately and joyously wed despite the significant cultural and political obstacles that the rest of the libretto has suggested stand between them. All four harmonize the text’s final dialogue: [S]tates, parents, gods, Must have no say: Love is a tyrannical democracy. Vive le Québec. Vive le Québec. Vive le Québec libéré Vive aussi le Québec de couleur – Toutes les couleurs. Vive notre québécité. (Clarke 2003: 92) Additionally, Clarke’s final stage directions have “[t]he Quebec flag descend[ing] from the rafters, but its four panels are, here, beige, pink, gold, and indigo, and its fleurs-de-lys are, correspondingly, violet, orange, black, and crimson” (92). A simple enough direction to stage physically, but its value as a textual image is equally weighty; like Québécité as a whole, it riffs on its own form so as to reauthor its potential for freedom.

Sociopolitically . . . While it contains none of the unperformable stage directions of Beatrice Chancy or Québécité, Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path is riddled with academic footnotes that resist any consumption outside of textual reading. Additionally, Clarke preempts his libretto with an explanatory aesthetic and political essay. In the prefatory “Vrai: Un Essai,” he defends his adoption of Trudeau-as-subject by arguing that he was the first Canadian Prime Minister “who was comfortable with a Canada that looked more like Expo 67 and less like the Grand Ole Opry” (Clarke 2007: 20).

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Indeed, Clarke posits his hero as what J. A. Wainwright calls “a philosopher of a ‘new Canada’” (Wainwright 2007). The first Canadian PM born in the twentieth century, Pierre Elliott Trudeau held office from 1968 to 1979 and then again from 1980 to 1984. He was the architect of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as the controversial Multiculturalism Act of 1971 which promoted an ideal, at least, of inclusive and tolerant citizenship. This Trudeau—like most Canadian-claimed icons—is teeming with what Clarke calls his “usual contradictions” (Clarke 2007: 22); he was also the invocator of the dreaded War Measures Act (a temporary police-state) during what has come to be known as the “October Crisis” of 1970.1 Consequently, Trudeau and his legacy are generally either loved or loathed by those whom his policies affected. While Clarke claims that his libretto “crafts no elegy” (21) (despite an epigraph from Joseph Howe that reads “A wise nation . . . decorates the tombs of its illustrious dead” [12]), Trudeau remains the text’s heroic freedom fighter. Trudeau, thus, is a text of revolutionary contradiction: its cast consists of— in no particular order—Mao Zedong, Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as well as the conspicuously named Jacques Fanon (a militant Québec separatist) and Simone Cixous (a curiously mini-skirted reporter). The libretto opens on a mountainside near Nanjing as Mao’s troops are surging to victory in 1949, but the backpacking Trudeau is unimpressed, if nonplussed: “How can men fire guns at others? / In such fog, aren’t all men brothers? / Who is fighting whom? What for? / In history’s fog and fog of war?” (33). In the opera’s early acts, both Mao and Castro chant that “Political power flows and runs / Out of the barrels of our guns,” an assertion that similarly disgusts Trudeau but which he himself will come to recite in invoking the War Measures Act in a later scene. Whether drinking rum and smoking cigars with Castro on the eve of the Bay of Pigs or shocking the Canadian literati by asserting his preference for Marilyn Monroe over Alice Munro (54), the frustrated PM continually struggles to publicize his vision of a diverse and inclusive Canada, often by committing the Canadian cultural sin of looking south for inspiration; addressing the crowd at his April 1968 inauguration, Clarke’s protagonist sadly croons “Two days past, Martin Luther King / Was shot through the throat, just for dreaming / Of a truly Just Society— / Exactly what Canada must be” (72). His role models of freedom prove as tragic as they do hopeful, and it is no coincidence that they are all indisputably political. Free to contradict himself as his protagonist did, Clarke is certainly not concerned, as Livesay was, “with an idealized ‘hero’” (1969: 269); rather, in following Kroetsch who noted “a changing sense of hero” (1989: 132) in the Canadian long poem in 1989, Trudeau portrays Trudeau (in Jacques Fanon’s words) as a “a Judas to Québec, un ‘Oncle Tom’” and “a bullshit Machiavelli” (Clarke 2007: 93), in the same textual breath that it champions his Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

324 Owen Percy The “J.F.K. of Montreal” (53) who is “[u]npredictable as free jazz” (52) always resists the closure of political, cultural, or social definition and remains the last bastion of the “Freedom nation” (81) he represents to his supporters, or the “domination” (81) he is to his detractors. This liminal Trudeau is a “linguistic / Mulatto; a bilingual / Half-n-half Canuck. / Mr. In-Between— / a duet of splintered mirrors, / Mixed identities” (68), which, instead of restricting him, proves to be the source of his own, and his nation’s dream of freedom. In the libretto’s closing scene, Castro, Cixous, and Margaret Trudeau sing in harmony “This Canada may pass away, / But snow will still fall, rains still spray, / His name be sung when dreamers sing” (114) and then Trudeau himself, paddling his canoe off into the distance (in the ultimate unperformable scene) joins them in the final line: “O Canada! May dreamers sing?” (114). By enacting Trudeau’s dreams of freedom within the emancipatory, genre-defying form of his libretti, Clarke insists, indeed, that they must. In eschewing any formal or narrative sense of deferral or delay, these works are instead urgent, engaged, cacophonous, and mad in their recording—striving (literally) for public stages over quiet rooms—and spewing a politics of freedom that remains local, national, and global in scope. Frank Davey, weighing in with his own building-upon of the theory of the long poem in his 1983 essay “The Language of the Contemporary Canadian Long Poem,” gives the following brief history of the genre: At one time the long poem was a story, a folk-epic, an epic, an elegy, a romance; in Classical Rome and seventeenth and eighteenth century England it was also satire, didactic essay; later in Wordsworth and Whitman it became the story of an inner life, the story, increasingly episodic with Tennyson’s In Memoriam; in our century the discursive or narrative line broke apart into the collaged segments of The Waste Land, the assembled documents, images, and contentions of The Cantos, the recollections regrouped on musical structure of Bunting’s Briggflatts. (Davey 1983: 184) If considered under the rubric of this simple chronology, we must agree that these verse-drama-as-long-poems refuse generic classification: they are at once stories, epics, elegies, romances, satires, essays, episodic biographies, as well as assemblage of documents, images, and contentions. The documents, in these unique cases, are as varied as reprinted/reimagined newspaper articles (Clarke 1999: 150–51), snippets of political speeches (Clarke 2003: 67), and moments of supposedly collective public memory (soundbite quotations, apocryphal stories, rumors), “the emphasis” of which, going back to Livesay, “is on historical perspective and the creation of a national myth” (1969: 269). But reading the long

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poem as “something”—a poem, a libretto—is always, as Kamboureli suggests, “already a misreading based on the generic fallacy that a literary text, no matter how complex, tends to privilege one genre among the many it might borrow from” (1991: xiii). She goes on to suggest of the contemporary Canadian long poem that “[i]nside and outside, within and beyond the limits of the genres it both employs and resists, the contemporary long poem offers us a ‘long view’ of the past it never inhabited and of the future it will never reach” (204). This inevitable failure is marked by Trudeau’s Simone Cixous, who, in defending Trudeau (and Trudeau), quips: “few failures earn an opera” (Clarke 2007: 107) even if that opera—that long poem—is itself a political failure that succeeds. If Kroetsch is on the mark in suggesting that “to understand the long poem of our time would be to understand our time” (1989: 132) we must read these libretti—these dissertations on freedom—as (re)turns to a socially conscious poetics that wants for something more, something perhaps even utopic: “a changing sense of place, a changing sense of hero, a reluctant joy at the discovery that we can live without an Arnoldian longing for the old cosmologies” (Kroetsch 1989: 132), and a poetics that still somehow believes, on some level—that “History dwells in a brothel, / But the future stays virginal” (Clarke 2007: 75). If the future is indeed “virginal,” then in their various aspirations to freedom these texts offer not only an evolution and renovation of staid forms, but hope for forms yet to come. As Kroetsch suggests, “the question then” of the Canadian long poem is “not how to end, but how to begin” (1989: 118). It is not quite possible to suggest, as libretti, dramatic poems, or verse dramas, that these works have a “lack of common generic locus” (Kamboureli 1991: 28), but they certainly lack a dominant one: as unstageable libretti or self-reflexively performative poems, they might in fact stand as “a supreme example of what poetry is and can do” (Wainwright 2007) in a literary era which supposedly lacks authoritative forms or narratives. Or at least what it can aspire to do: to revive the idealism of nationalism—as Clarke calls it in Trudeau, “a Just Society / a rainbow of minorities— / Multicultural, bilingual, at peace” (2007: 104)—without the pesky sociopolitical actualities that tend to come with its practice. If indeed “Our responsibility to the past / Is to be contemporary” (67), then pushing the boundaries of convention—trying, in their various ways, to be free—is precisely what Clarke’s libretti achieve. It remains, we might hope, the poet’s job to exploit the “defiant potency of poetry as a genre” (Larson 2006: 111, my emphasis); to actively disrupt what Jacques Derrida called “the law of genre” (1980: 55) by “calling on all dreamers to work towards a more inclusive vision of valued social practices” (Heble 2003a: 100) in both the content and form of their work. And while Clarke takes pains to remind his readers, tongue firmly in cheek, that “[a] poet’s only useful as a poet” (2007: 37), that “[p]oets never sound like anything but poets” (2003: 33), and that “[p]oets are intolerant, wanting beauty” (1999: 48), it is

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indeed he who realizes what Beatrice can only dream—“Would my words stab!” (Clarke 1999: 72)—in these aggressive love letters to poetry, opera, and freedom itself.

Note 1. A Québecois guerilla separatist group known as the FLQ began a campaign of bombings and kidnappings which terrorized the streets of Montréal for several weeks prompting Trudeau to call in the military.

Bibliography Brydon, D. (2000) “It’s Time for a New Set of Questions,” Essays on Canadian Writing 71: 14–25. Clarke, G. E. (1990) Whylah Falls, Victoria, BC: Polestar. —— (1996) “Mapping Africadia’s Imaginary Geography: An Interview with George Elliott Clarke,” interview with Maureen Moynagh, ARIEL 27(4): 71–94. —— (ed.) (1997) Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. —— (1998) “Standing Your Ground: George Elliott Clarke in Conversation,” interview with Anne Compton, Studies in Canadian Literature 23(2): 138–64. —— (1999) Beatrice Chancy: A Libretto in Four Acts, Victoria, BC: Polestar. —— (2002) Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —— (2003) Québécité: A Jazz Fantasia in Three Cantos, Wolfville, NS: Gaspereau. —— (2006) Black, Vancouver: Polestar. —— (2007) Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path, Kentville, NS: Gaspereau. Cohen, L. (1993) Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Davey, F. (1983) “The Language of the Contemporary Canadian Long Poem,” Surviving the Paraphrase, Winnipeg: Turnstone. Derrida, J. (1980) “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry 7(1): 55–81. Donnelly, P. (2003) “Ethnic Vote Strikes Back,” The Montreal Gazette, June 21, D8. Frye, N. (1995 [1946]) “The Narrative Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry,” in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, with an introduction by Linda Hutcheon, Toronto: Anansi. Heble, A. (2003a) “Postlude: You Break No Laws By Dreaming: George Elliott Clarke’s Québécité,” in Clarke (2003). —— (2003b) “You Break No Laws By Dreaming: George Elliott Clarke’s Québécité,” in D. Sears (ed.) (2003) Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama, vol. 2, Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Kamboureli, S. (1991) On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kroetsch, R. (1989) “For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem,”

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in The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New, Toronto: Oxford University Press. Larson, K. (2006) “Resistance from the Margins in George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy,” Canadian Literature 189: 103–18. Livesay, D. (1969) “The Documentary Poem: A Canadian Genre,” in E. Mandel (1971) Contexts of Canadian Criticism, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Moynagh, M. (2002) “‘This History’s Only Good for Anger:’ Gender and Cultural Memory in Beatrice Chancy,” Signs 28(1): 97–124. Obert, J. C. (2006) “The Cultural Capital of Sound: Québécité’s Acoustic Hybridity,” Postcolonial Text 2(4). Online. Available: http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/ view/493/353 (accessed June 2010). Ondaatje, M. (1979) “Introduction,” in The Long Poem Anthology, Toronto: Coach House. Wainwright, J. A. (2007) “Review of Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path by George Elliott Clarke,” The Antigonish Review 151. Online. Available: http://www.antigonishreview. com/bi-151/151–review-ja-wainwright.html (accessed May 25, 2008).

28 A Poetics of Political Commitment Robert Sullivan and human rights Peter H. Marsden

Sullivan and Commitment In a stirring address on the subject of human rights, Robert Sullivan said: Words are a powerful weapon. In many places people are imprisoned for saying, or writing, words. When Aotearoa/New Zealand was first colonized it was the Word that was used to colonize Maori. Missionaries used the tools of literacy and the Bible to capture the hearts and minds of Maori. Indeed, the Word softened the way for the words of the Treaty of Waitangi, and their duplicity: the biblical word kawana (governor) makes a special adjectival appearance in the text of the Treaty to disguise its true intent, the surrender of mana or absolute sovereignty by the Maori to Great Britain. Once British sovereignty was established, eventually by force, it was again the task of words to smooth the process. This time in the law courts. “The Treaty is a legal nullity” was a resounding phrase by a judge which was repeated and emphasized by many others for nearly the next one hundred years. The Native Land Court also used the word of law to strip our land from us, to commodify the very thing that defined us as tangata whenua, as “people of the land.” Not as people on the land, or who own land. As in other European colonies, our names for places were replaced with European names. The name for the place I live in, Taamaki Makaurau, ‘the land of a hundred lovers’, a place desired by many, was renamed to Auckland (pronounced Awk-land). The names of our mountains were changed. Aoraki, ‘sky world’, became Mount Cook. The ancestral mountain Taranaki was renamed Mount Egmont. One colonizes minds with words. With the words for one’s world, for instance . . . In terms of human rights and literature . . . writing can help us to reclaim our humanity . . . Just as our people have reclaimed the names for

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our mountains Aoraki and Taranaki through the Treaty of Waitangi reparations process . . . To me literature will never define in a prescriptive sense what it is to be a human being. But literature reminds us that we are human beings. And that is so powerful. (Sullivan 2004: 225–26)1 In other words, the pen is mightier than the sword—or, perhaps, to relativize somewhat, it is at least as mighty as the sword, for instance when it comes to reclaiming by re-inscribing a colonized landscape. Or when it comes to pointing out that a treaty may sometimes be a cheaty. Such clear-eyed and clear-cut programmatic statements form an important and central part of Robert Sullivan’s work, alongside the six volumes of poetry he has produced so far: Jazz Waiata (1990), Pike Ake! Poems 1990–92 (1993), Star Waka (1999), Captain Cook in the Underworld (2002), voice carried my family (2005), Shout Ha! to the Sky (2010). With this already quite substantial body of work Sullivan is arguably the most significant Maori poet since “Grand Old Man” Hone Tuwhare (1922–2008), whose mantle he now looks set to inherit. Sullivan has emerged over the last two decades as a distinct and distinctive political presence, a powerful public advocate of human rights, especially those of indigenous peoples—in this, too, a worthy successor to Tuwhare. He is, as the opening quotation has shown, a firm believer in the power of words, and a most effective wielder of words, deeply committed to empowering the “first people” of Aotearoa New Zealand by verbalizing their concerns, by putting into practice the ideas he so eloquently puts into words. Sullivan has been aptly described as an author who “furnishes Maori identity with a new voice, sophisticated yet passionate” (Robinson and Wattie 1998). He puts that authentic and authoritative voice at the service of articulating issues and concerns that go far beyond his individual sense of belonging (or not belonging)— to family, both nuclear and extended, or to ethnic and cultural group. Within this overall framework, the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840 (Te Tiriti, in Maori) and the exegetic (at times almost Talmudic) debate which that historical and historic document continues to trigger, has always been more than a mere leitmotif. In fact, one of the very earliest poems of Sullivan’s which arrested public attention was entitled: “Not the 1990 Poem”—1990 having been the (officially much celebrated) sesquicentenary of the signing of the Treaty. The poem appeared first in that selfsame year, in Jazz Waiata, and again a couple of years later in the first volume of Witi Ihimaera’s anthology E Ao Marama, where it was paired with an equally satirical brief radio play “Sale of the Treaty,” in which the Treaty of Waitangi is actually one of the characters and, what is more, a speaking part (Ihimaera 1992: 336–41).

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To return to Sullivan’s latest volume, Shout Ha! to the Sky, it may be instructuve to note that the title the author originally chose for this book was Our Illustrated Treaties (my emphasis). Excitingly, it shows the poet squaring up to New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark (at the time of writing in her third term and ninth year of office) on the Foreshore and Seabed Act. I shall be coming back to that literary stand-off later. Suffice it to say at this juncture that Sullivan’s central— and eminently postcolonial—project is, and remains, the rewriting of rights, the righting of wrongs, the rewording of the world. Sullivan is, in my submission, a clearly and classically committed writer, un écrivain engagé in the sense advocated and propagated by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s and 1950s (for example in his Qu’est ce que la littérature? of 1947) and expounded for the English-speaking world, for instance, by John Mander in his 1961 study The Writer and Commitment: the committed writer as counter-pole to the practitioner of art for art’s sake—“engaged” or “committed” being taken here to signify or at least to imply socially, preferably politically, committed, i.e. using (one’s) art as a vehicle or medium for the enunciation and promulgation of sociopolitical ideas. In New Zealand these days, opinion on the subject of writerly commitment seems to be divided. On the one hand, we find Fiona Farrell in the poem “Politics and economics” alluding to her Irish roots in the following terms: It’s all politics, isn’t it? This patch of rough ground where 9000 lie buried like spuds. That’s politics. (Farrell 2007: 21) Like Sullivan, Farrell is a New Zealander conscious of her partially Irish roots— unlike Sullivan, the “other half” of her is Pakeha, not Maori. Then on the other hand, we have Chris Else (another Pakeha writer) breezily concluding a recent review of Patricia Grace’s novel Tu (2004) with the somewhat dogmatic, diametrically opposed, assertion, only slightly modified: “Art, perhaps, ought to be above politics” (Else 2004: 5). At any rate, Robert Sullivan is one of those who believe that poetry does make something happen, is more than a way of happening—much, much more than a mere mouth. Official accounts of Sullivan’s biographical background typically refer to his being “of Galway Irish and Ngapuhi (Northland) descent.” Diachronically, he is an integral link in the long chain of oral tradition of the Maori; synchronically, he inhabits the modern “Western” world of the Pakeha. David Eggleton hailed him, right at the outset of his career back in 1991, as “a convincing version of what we


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have been looking for: a poet who can write eloquently about growing up with a bicultural heritage in South Auckland, with that heritage both a handicap and a means of liberation” (Eggleton 1991: 380). Sullivan is deeply committed to the cause of giving the “first people” of Aotearoa New Zealand a voice, to empowering them via the power of poetry, to consciousness-raising (to resurrect a good old unreconstructed late-1960s concept). As The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature so appositely puts it: “Sullivan’s predominantly urban, postmodern poetic is enriched by his acute awareness, as a Maori, of New Zealand racial and social issues” (Robinson and Wattie 1998).

The Foreshore and Seabed Act As I have already pointed out, the Treaty of Waitangi is one of those (racial and social) issues, and one that Sullivan has dealt with frequently—persistently, even—and imaginatively over time. But in very recent years an even more topical and very hot issue has been taxing the minds of New Zealanders in general and occupying that of Robert Sullivan in particular most intensively. This cause célèbre, comparable in its polarization of the nation (though not perhaps in its scale) to the wave of protests against the building of an aluminium smelter at Aramoana in the late 1970s or to the notorious and traumatic Springbok Tour of 1981, is the Foreshore and Seabed Act of 2004, itself in turn closely connected with the Treaty. It is about land rights, specifically those territorial rights that obtain in what one might call a liminal, or littoral, area, i.e. where land meets sea, where sea meets land, that in-between, interstitial space lyrically evoked by Patricia Grace’s firstperson narrator as the setting of her novel Potiki (1986): “We live by the sea, which hems and stitches the scalloped edges of the land” (Grace 1986: 15). First, some background: many Maori groups believe that Maori have a rightful claim to title.2 These claims have a dual basis, namely in historical possession and in encoded law, in the form of the Treaty of Waitangi. The foreshore-andseabed controversy was sparked when, on June 19, 2003, New Zealand’s Court of Appeal ruled, in the Ngati Apa decision, that Maori were entitled to seek “customary title” over areas of New Zealand’s foreshore and seabed in the Maori Land Court decision. There was a sense at this point that the door was now open for Maori to claim title to the entire coastline of New Zealand through the Maori land court. Indeed, many Maori groups interpreted the ruling this way, and claims were subsequently lodged with the court, claiming just such title. The prospect of a successful claim created considerable hostility in many sectors of society owing to New Zealand’s strong tradition of public access to beaches and waterways, which was perceived as being under threat. The Labour Prime Minister, Helen Clark, announced that the government

332 Peter H. Marsden would legislate to ensure public ownership of the foreshore and seabed. And legislate they duly did. On November 18, 2004, the New Zealand Parliament passed a law which deemed the title to be held by the Crown. The Foreshore and Seabed Act itself was enacted on November 24, 2004. This piece of legislation was, however, seen by some (not only Maori) as “one of the worst mistakes of Helen Clark’s government,”3 tantamount as it was to virtually expropriating the Maori from their traditional ancestral access to the sea. Whilst the Clark government went very far towards antagonizing Maori notions of traditional guardianship of land and coast, it didn’t go anything like far enough for the Opposition. The National Party, led by Don Brash, vigorously attacked the government’s proposals as being too favorable towards Maori; the government was leaning over backwards, as it were, in its striving for evenhandedness and historical equity. Some people were starting to say: “Enough is enough!”—the formerly underprivileged Maori, they said, had benefited so much from affirmative action that it was now the poor Pakeha who were underprivileged “in their own country.” In this rash of populist indignation, the Brash backlash gained ground (the moral low ground, it has to be said). Unexpectedly, there had also been vehement opposition from the supposed beneficiaries—the Maori: protest took a number of very tangible forms: for instance, on May 5, 2004, a hikoi (a traditional Maori term for a long walk or march; in this case, a protest march) arrived in Wellington.4 It had begun in Northland thirteen days earlier, picking up supporters as they drove to the capital. The hikoi, which some estimated to be 15,000 people strong by the time it reached Parliament, strongly opposed the plans put forward by the government. Helen Clark turned down the opportunity to talk with the protesting party, describing them as “haters and wreckers,” and instead devoted her time and attention to a sheep named Shrek (or so the media reported). According to Denys Trussell, a highly (and deeply) committed Pakeha poet known for speaking out, particularly on ecological and environmental issues: “[o]ne of the more moving demonstrations was the ‘planting’ of guardian posts carved by Maori, along the west coast of Northland, combined with a human chain that lined quite a lot of that coast in areas extending over 200 miles” (personal communication 2007). These two examples of constructive peaceful protest are intensely reminiscent of the “glory days” of Maori activism (or the “Maori Renaissance”) in the 1970s, especially the Land March of 1975 known at the time as “The Awakening,” which wound its way down almost the whole length of the North Island, from Te Hapua near Cape Reinga to the Parliament Building in the capital, Wellington. Hone Tuwhare took a very active part—physically, and then literarily—and ultimately produced his much anthologized classic gem “Papa-tua-Nuku (Earth Mother),” in which he presents the protest marchers as palpably demonstrating their love for the land by the very act of walking over it, stroking


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and caressing its very spine, its “ricked back”: “Hell, she loves it! / Squirming, the land wriggles / in delight” (Tuwhare 1978).

Foreshore and Seabed Poems Protest can take many forms. You can make statements dissociating yourself from official positions; you can take to the streets, paint posters, and shout slogans; you can march on embassies, seats of government, etc. You can also protest by writing poetry, by composing verses versus the violation of your rights, verses versus violence, verses versus injustice and disempowerment. As a matter of fact, Sullivan has an entire section in Shout Ha! to the Sky (the last of five) headed “Foreshore and Seabed Poems,” comprising the following sixteen poems (out of a total sixty-nine in the volume): 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

For Sure After the UN Rapporteur Supported Maori Customary Rights Ngā Tohu Whenua Suite of Poems Addressed to Prime Minister Helen Clark Poetics Tunnel One Art Fancy that Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan with an Hook? Let’s Karanga The Whole Thing Off Manawawera Someone Asks Us Why It Will Leave You The Sneeze Greenstone Monologues Spiralling Ground Karakia

In what follows I will be quoting from, and commenting on, some of the poems from this section as illustrative of Sullivan’s poetic/political commitment. Let me start with No. 55 (“After the UN Rapporteur Supported Maori Customary Rights”). Which indeed he did: the Maori’s unexpected champion was one Professor Rodolfo Stavenhagen, a Mexican sociologist, reporting for and to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (UNCERD). The poet, being a committed writer, hails this welcome support from high places in no uncertain terms and in very down-to-earth, demotic language:

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Peter H. Marsden . . . English boxed on for 13 centuries since Caedmon like fish and chips love? cuppa tea love? where’s my CliffsNotes on The Odyssey, darling? English broadcast from the moon, is spoken by our family plus it’s orbiting Saturn! Yet Maori liberty is still recognized by Earth. (Sullivan 2010: 84)

The poet being a poet, he homes in on the language issue(s) involved. The Foreshore and Seabed Act was not actually about the language issue, but the political poet makes it into a language issue. The poem is about the politics of language, but it also uses language politically. Language—especially the English language, English as the language, the world language English with all the power that that entails—is the theme. But language, especially the English language, is also used to illustrate the theme and to turn on their head the linguistic power games played by vested interests. By juxtaposing (and half-rhyming) “Westminster / & Trickster” and “Councillors & Scrabblers,” Sullivan neatly cocks a snook at the respectability supposedly guaranteed by the language’s longstanding tradition (“English / boxed on for 13 centuries”). With cheeky tongue firmly in cheek, he evokes the huge range of the language, diachronic (Caedmon to Saturn) as well as synchronic (“cuppa tea love?” ÅÆ “The Odyssey, darling”); and its local and global reach (“spoken by our family” ÅÆ “broadcast from the moon”). To cap it all, Sullivan sheathes his irreverent slings and arrows in the form of a sonnet, using that time-honoured standard Eng Lit vehicle to poke fun at the master culture and the master language—whilst never forgetting for a moment that he himself is a native speaker—and to demonstrate that even such worldly word power has its limits. The poem as a whole conveys a mood of great elation and euphoria generated by the ineluctable fact that Maori, the minority indigenous group with its minority language, te reo, has won out against the global might of the English language on the world stage. Little David was small but oh my . . .! The light self-ironic thrust of the poem may remind the reader of an earlier poem by Sullivan, viz. “Waka No. iv,” of Star Waka, headed “2140 AD,” which leads off with the line “Waka reaches for stars” and proceeds to humorously envisage a sci-fi tercentennial Waitangi Day marked by the first Maori mission to outer space “to consult with the top boss. / to ask for sovereignty” (Sullivan 1999: 7). Not many prime ministers get to have poems addressed to them (although there is a volume by the Australian poet Romaine Moreton entitled Post Me to the Prime Minister [2004]). At any rate this honor has been accorded by Sullivan to the current New Zealand premier. Indeed, Sullivan has not just one poem but a whole sequence or cycle, or at least a quartet, viz. No. 57, a “Suite of Poems Addressed to Prime Minister Helen Clark.” The first of the four weighs straight in, in medias res, the title already being part of the text, which addresses the Head


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of Government directly (ad feminam, as it were, or even ad ministram [primam] /“E TE PIRIMIA”) and, in true Kiwi style, with her first name. This is speech-act theory in practice. It rapidly becomes clear that, to use the current form of the language, the poet has issues with the politician: I. E TE PIRIMIA, ... You removed the courts, Helen. You took away one of the reasonable and peaceful tools we had for redress. So this is personal. You have three and a half million New Zealanders in one Treaty basket filled with snappers, oysters, green-lipped mussels, jon dory, caviar, plus 90% of the land which they inherited, bought, mortgaged, rented out to each other and some Maori, and 700,000 New Zealanders in your finely woven kete probably given to you by some beautiful weavers who trusted you to look after the mother they struggled for, and cuddled for a thousand years. (86) The text plays neatly on current figurative use of the concept of “basket”—in connection with “political” legislation, “diplomatic” negotiation etc. (think OSCE), by recuperating the literal sense in very vivid terms, filling the “Treaty basket” with fresh new live produce or catch, as it were: “snappers, oysters” plus “90% of the land.” The effect is reinforced by the introduction of the standard Maori word for basket: “kete,” one of those indigenous terms that is in universal use throughout the country by Maori and Pakeha alike to denote the everyday down-to-earth article used for actual shopping. The dialogue between poet and prime minister continues in the third of the Helen Clark poems, which is somewhat enigmatically entitled “MY APOLOGIES TO THE EGYPTIAN PEOPLE.” The first line: “for inaccuracies regarding the needle” expands the title without explaining it. Perhaps it is an internal reference, harking back to the second Helen Clark poem, “MY TREATY QUOTA”: I like the ancient Egyptian system—the country’s great artists will adorn Her needle with special effects—Helen’s Column. (87) and to No. 19: “Gesturing at the Sky”: . . . See over there where the light

336 Peter H. Marsden flashes red against the horizon? That’s Helen’s Needle. (26) Is this perhaps a dual allusion to Cleopatra’s Needle and Auckland’s Sky Tower (which is, after all, the highest building not only in New Zealand but in the southern hemisphere)? The Egyptian obelisk “relocated” as colonialist trophy in the European metropolis blurred with the settlers’ own home-grown construction? Be that as it may, the third poem (“MY APOLOGIES . . .”) revolves around a nononsense comparison between the occupations of speaker and addressee: . . . To be a leader requires a certain bluffness, an unnatural certainty about oysters, an inhuman quality to prevent the peasants rising up to question your inhumanity. So I accept that your job is difficult. My job in writing this is a difficult one too. (88) The poem ends with the speaker reminding the Prime Minister that he had once read her a poem about his desire to “drop the politics/and write in freefall.” But, he concludes, “there’s so much gravity here.” The dual force of gravity, with its positive and negative connotations (seriousness and dignity vs. heaviness and weightiness) is all the more effective for its almost final positioning at the bottom of the poem, its center of gravity, so to speak. The light, playful, bantering tone, disarmingly innocent and direct, is even more conspicuous in the fourth and final poem of the suite, “OKAY OKAY,” as for instance when the speaker exclaims: “I love your arts policy . . . And thank god for democracy. I love it!” But after the flippancy the poet starts to get serious and to move towards his own form of gravity: This poem is part of the freedom of expression in our country . . . I know you have a very tough job, but my job is tough too. It’s my job to remind you and the governments that follow what you have done to many Maori people and what you should be doing too. So I’m going to serve out my complete term. No one elected me. Only my heart, my nose, my liver, my stomach, my veins and all the blood they carry, all the cells, each hair,

A Poetics of Political Commitment my whole body is gathering to use its two Mixed Member Proportional votes for Love and Happiness to change this.

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(88–89) 5

The poet as unacknowledged legislator of the world in direct confrontation with a very expressly acknowledged legislator thereof. In this context, the superficially neutral: “I still have friends in your party” seems to have a barbed sub-text, along the following lines: “Some of my best friends are Labour politicians . . .” Later on in the section, Sullivan takes the most pointed arrow from his quiver, his ultimate weapon: the sharp shaft of humor, which had briefly glinted and flashed in quite a number of the previous poems, to help him deliver the following devastating tour de force: 62 Let’s Karanga The Whole Thing Off You say potato and I say kumara You say Gidday and I say Tēnā koe Potato, kumara, Gidday, Tēnā koe, Let’s call the whole thing off. You say Treaty and I say Tiriti, You say justice and I say hegemony, Treaty, Tiriti, justice, hegemony, Let’s call the whole thing off. (94) Sullivan is of course invoking the familiar lyrics from Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire’s celebrated dance duet in the 1937 film Shall We Dance?—a rhetorical question if ever there was one. The result is a catchy parody of a catchy classic: Gershwin and Gershwin’s “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” popularly known by its first line: “You say ‘tomahto’ and I say ‘tomayto’.” The pre-text musically harmonized the conflicting positions of the singers, which might be glossed as: “We think we’re speaking the same language but we’re not,” even as they simultaneously and synchronizedly tap-danced and roller-skated. Sullivan gives the basic situation a much more serious twist: this is not just a case of two national varieties of one language—the language: British English and American English. Here, there are two national languages involved, namely English and Maori—the two languages of the officially bilingual country Aotearoa New Zealand. And despite the officially orchestrated harmony, the two language communities still don’t understand one another, with serious consequences. The lack of communication is epitomized by the blunt juxtaposition: “Treaty, Tiriti,” a possible echo of Maori

338 Peter H. Marsden references to the “Cheaty of Waitangi” and the poem finishes by rather unpoetically calling a spade a spade: its concluding stanza invokes the possibility of a reconciliation if, but only if, the unnamed prime minister were to “give back the foreshore and seabed.”

Conclusion In other words (so to speak): on the Foreshore and Seabed issue as well as on the Treaty of Waitangi, Sullivan is saying of the opposing parties (which is broadly tantamount to the opposing ethnic groups): “We don’t speak / We’re not speaking the same language”—in both the literal and the figurative senses. For two decades now, Aotearoa New Zealand has been an officially bilingual country with an official policy of promoting and protecting biculturalism. But in practice? The very least that can and must be said is that there is plenty of slippage between the policy and its implementation. There is quite a case to be put for saying that each of the two cultures, and the languages that articulate them, is leading its own separate existence; at best, they are in a state of (not particularly peaceful) co-existence. It is my impression that in his latest volume of poetry, Robert Sullivan may be entering a new phase of his development, particularly in terms of attitude and approach. In his earlier work, he fruitfully and constructively drew on the twin cultural strands of his own background to form exciting new syntheses. Now, for all the (good) humor, he appears to be growing more skeptical, to be emphasizing the gap between, rather than the ties that bind. There is moreover a possible aporia here: a bicultural and/or bilingual person, with their virtually inbuilt tendency and inclination to see both sides of the story, may well find it hard—on principle, almost by definition—to “take sides.” They may be almost constitutionally unable to commit themselves to one side or the other, to one side rather than the other. For Sullivan, one way of resolving the dilemma and getting out of the impasse may have been to prioritize the underprivileged side of his two sides—to commit himself unequivocally to his Maori roots. Ultimately, we might say that Sullivan is committed not so much to a specific cause as to speaking out on whatever issues may concern his community, using his special gift as a writer to find the most powerful words in order to assist the sociopolitical thrust of the message he is articulating on behalf of the underdog— pace Samuel Beckett or Roman Polanski, he is not content to leave the delivering of the message to the postman. His concern is to empower the “first people” of Aotearoa New Zealand by verbalizing their political perspective. To let the poet have the last word, I would like to end by quoting something from Sullivan’s very first volume of poetry—the poem “Uncle Tangiwai” (No. 3 of “Tai Tokerau Poems”): “I speak / for the speechless” (Sullivan 1990: 38).


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This essay is dedicated to the memory of Hone Tuwhare (1922–2008).

Notes 1. The address was delivered at the 2000 ASNEL conference held in Aachen and Liège. 2. See, among various other websites: Ministry for the Environment/Manatū Mō Te Taiao, “Foreshore and Seabed”; Ministry of Justice/Tahū o te Ture, “Foreshore and Seabed”; Morris, “The Foreshore and Seabed Act: Sad End to a Sorry Spectacle”; “Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004.” 3. D. Trussell in personal communication, September 10, 2007. 4. See, among other websites, “Support the foreshore and seabed hikoi”; “hikoi” (Wikipedia). 5. The literally organic imagery may well remind the reader of the following passage from the poem “Waka 99”: “blood relations / of the crews whose veins / touch the veins who touched the veins / of those who touched the veins / who touched the veins / who touched the veins / of the men and women from the time / of Kupe and before” (Sullivan 1999: 109).

Bibliography Eggleton, D. (1991) “Robert Sullivan’s Jazz Waiata,” Landfall 179 (September): 380–82. Else, C. (2004) “For God, King and Country” (review of Patricia Grace’s novel Tu), New Zealand Books, December: 5. Farrell, F. (2007) The Pop-up Book of Invasions, Auckland: Auckland University Press. Grace, P. (1986) Potiki, Auckland: Penguin Books. Ihimaera, W. (ed.) (1992) E Ao Marama: Contemporary Maori Writing, vol. 1, Te Whatahuatanga O Te Ao / Reflections of Reality, Auckland: Reed Books. Mander, J. (1961) The Writer and Commitment, London: Secker and Warburg. Moreton, R. (2004) Post Me to the Prime Minister, Alice Springs: IAD Press. Robinson, R. and Wattie, N. (eds.) (1998) “Sullivan, Robert,” in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, Melbourne/Oxford/Auckland/New York: Oxford University Press. Sartre, J.-P. (1947) Qu’est ce que la littérature?, Paris: Gallimard. Sullivan, R. (1990) Jazz Waiata, Auckland: Auckland University Press. —— (1993) Pike Ake! Poems 1990–92, Auckland: Auckland University Press. —— (1999) Star Waka, Auckland: Auckland University Press. —— (2002) Captain Cook in the Underworld, Auckland: Auckland University Press. —— (2004) “Literature and Human Rights,” in P. H. Marsden and G. V. Davis (eds.) Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Human Rights in a ‘Post’-Colonial World, Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi (Cross/Cultures 76: ASNEL Papers 8). —— (2005) voice carried my family, Auckland: Auckland University Press. —— (2010) Shout Ha! to the Sky, London: Salt. Tuwhare, H. (1978) Making a Fist of It, Dunedin: Jackstraw Press.

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Documents “Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004.” Online. Available: http://legislation.knowledge-basket. co.nz/gpacts/public/text/2004/an/093.html (accessed June 2010). “Hikoi.” Online. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikoi (accessed June 2010). “Support the Foreshore and Seabed Hikoi.” Online. Available: http://www.converge.org. nz/pma/hikoi.htm (accessed June 2010). Ministry for the Environment/Manatū Mō Te Taiao, “Foreshore and seabed.” Online. Available: http://www.mfe.govt.nz/issues/marine/foreshore-seabed.html (accessed June 2010). Ministry of Justice/Tahū o te Ture, “Foreshore and Seabed.” Online. Available: http:// www.justice.govt.nz/policy-and-consultation/justice-system/foreshore-and-seabed/ background (accessed June 2010). Morris, E. “The Foreshore and Seabed Act: Sad End to a Sorry Spectacle” (November 19). Online. Available: http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/fs191104a.htm (accessed June 2010).

29 Writing Freedom Nadine Gordimer and The New Yorker Anne Collett

In an address given at the Durban Indian Teachers’ Conference in December 1975, published as “A Writer’s Freedom,” Nadine Gordimer asked, “What is a writer’s freedom?” and replied: To me it is his right to maintain and publish to the world a deep, intense, private view of the situation in which he finds his society. If he is to work as well as he can, he must take, and be granted, freedom from the public conformity of political interpretation, morals and tastes. (Gordimer 1989: 104) This of course is no easy thing to accomplish in a repressive state where books are banned and authors imprisoned; but Gordimer remarks on the other threat— the more insidious threat—to a writer’s freedom “in any country where political freedom is withheld.” This is the threat which comes from the very strength of the writer’s opposition to repression of political freedom. That other, paradoxically wider, composite freedom—the freedom of his private view of life—may be threatened by the very awareness of what is expected of him. And often what is expected of him is conformity to an orthodoxy of opposition. (106) But Gordimer does not stop here: she goes on to acknowledge that even in conditions other than those special ones common to writers “beleaguered in the time of the bomb and the colour-bar, as they were in the time of the jack-boot and rubber truncheon” the writer’s freedom of mind may be hampered—by literary fashion, for example (109), or, I would suggest, by public expectations of consistency, and the pressures to conform to a public image; and more recently, by the demands of a celebrity culture. Even the longevity of a writing life is something of a hazard: much better to die young before your image is set in stone (or stuck on the envelopes of day-to-day correspondence).1

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Whilst acknowledging that some or all of these factors might have been an imposition on Gordimer’s writing freedom, this essay is particularly interested in the degree to which a specific political environment might have impacted on writing and reading freedom at the level of form or style or even prosody: it is easy to see how word choice can be influenced by the political, but less apparent is the degree to which even punctuation can be influenced by politics and become a political act in itself—an expression of a writer’s freedom or lack. A select examination of Gordimer’s correspondence with The New Yorker in relation to the publication of her short stories reveals a fascinating tension between politics and poetics, freedom achieved and freedom restricted. In the introduction to Read it Again (2005), the Australian poet and scholar Chris Wallace-Crabbe writes: Poetry has the misfortune to be written in the medium of language. Why do I say misfortune? Well, I do so because the same medium is commonly used in gossip, in story-telling, in newspaper articles, in parliamentary debate, even in e-mail messages. And the danger is that the habits developed in reading transparent prose, like that of the sports page, bear no relation to how we read modern poetry. (Wallace-Crabbe 2005: xi) Although the language of poetry is not the language of the short story, nevertheless the language of the short story is not the language of the newspaper article, parliamentary debate, or email: it requires careful and detailed reading. It requires fresh reading—something difficult to achieve when an author like Gordimer has been read in particular ways through particular lenses for almost seventy years; and even what is said of her and how she represents herself, in writing or in speech or in person, becomes something of a repeat program. Gordimer takes on the role of the public figure living up to expectations not only of their person, or their politics, but even of the resonances and the allusions of the language they speak or the language they are heard to speak (which is not necessarily the same thing). This is a point that Dorothy Driver makes so well in the introduction to the bibliography of Gordimer’s works and associated secondary sources. Driver writes, firstly, of the problem created by South Africa’s “limited cultural intercourse with the rest of the world” (Driver et al. 1994: 3) during the period in which Gordimer’s writing became nationally and internationally acclaimed, and secondly of the problem associated with a reputation based primarily on her novels that results in a separation of short and long fiction which “tends to serve rather than enrich or adjust” critics’ views of Gordimer’s “realism,” Driver moves on to remark on the critical tendency, “no doubt because of the political demands

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of the time” (3) to focus on the historical and political dimensions of her writing, and concludes with the observation that what is missing, and what is much needed, is the critical work of close textual analysis: Gordimer’s work is concerned with the interplay between two commitments: one to the craft of writing, and the other to the duties of the white South African writer. Encouraged by recent developments in the South African political situation critics may now start to read the relations between art and politics in her writing not simply at the level of content but also at the level of form. (Driver et al. 1994: 5) It is this relationship between style and content that particularly interests me— and that requires careful reading. I realized the importance of this relationship, and the need to look closely at the aesthetics in relation to the ethics of Gordimer’s work, when I recently sought to understand her relationship with The New Yorker. Reading Ronald Suresh Roberts’s 2005 biography of Gordimer, I was struck once again by the kudos attached to The New Yorker by serious writers2 and what appeared to be a hurt and a puzzlement initially, and resignation later, felt by Gordimer in response to the repeated rejection of her work (although she has continued to be published by The New Yorker very spasmodically over the course of her writing career). It surprises me that so many writers should feel acceptance by The New Yorker is, if not the pinnacle, then certainly a literary imprimatur, particularly given my discovery on looking through the issues of the 1950s the extent to which space in The New Yorker is given over to high-class advertisement. It is a magazine primarily comprised of pages and pages of glossy color advertisement of things, at the edges of which is the remaining space assigned to stories, feature articles, regular columns, and poems; and scattered indiscriminately throughout are the cartoons for which the magazine is equally famous: it makes for quite weird reading. The pages of The New Yorker feature luxury cars, diamond jewelery, whisky, perfume, beautiful white women dressed in the latest fashion, travel to exotic locations like the Bahamas, the Caribbean, Hawaii; black men or women very rarely make an appearance, and generally only as servants (although there are some exceptions). What is someone of Gordimer’s political affiliation doing here? In 1965, on the fortieth anniversary of The New Yorker, New York reporter Tom Wolfe infamously made a mockery of its literary pretensions and its pedantic, boring journalistic style, which he felt had long passed its “use by date.” He debunked The New Yorker as nothing more than “the national shopping news.”3 From inception the magazine claimed to speak to “a sophisticated and educated elite” and was selling 400,000 copies a week to an upwardly mobile “middle America”

344 Anne Collett even through the Depression years of the 1930s (see Douglas 1991: 172–73). Founding editor Harold Ross described the magazine as a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire, but it will be more than just a jester. It will not be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers . . . As compared to the newspaper, The New Yorker will be interpretive rather than stenographic . . . Its integrity will be above suspicion. (quoted in Douglas 1991: 143) I am not entirely sure what “integrity” means exactly in this case, but there is no mention here of that smutty word “politics,” rather emphasis is placed upon “style.” Why did Gordimer publish in The New Yorker? This was a decision that was, at least in part, economic, and it indicated acceptance in the big wide world—out there beyond Springs or Johannesburg, South Africa. A writer has to live and a writer usually wants to be read by as many people as possible. Believing that the lack of financial security was “one of the greatest problems of this business and . . . of American letters in general” (quoted in Roberts 2005: 95), Ross offered annually renewable contracts to selected freelance writers, of whom Gordimer was one. The New Yorker gave Gordimer a kind of literary “first option” contract and it paid well— for her second story for Ross, “A Bit of Young Life,” she received $895—and having the contract meant she was paid at a higher rate than casual authors. This was a significant step toward professional independence. From the publication of her first stories in the 1950s, The New Yorker gave Gordimer the financial independence and the literary reputation to achieve international recognition and readership for her writing: that is, it gave her writing freedom. Recalling the jubilant sense of liberation she achieved with this access to a profession and economic independence, the Gordimer who has become renowned for her refusal of feminism and the ghetto-ization of “the woman writer,” sounds positively Woolfian: The thrill when I really got to make my living! When I could provide, alone, doing my kind of work, for my child and myself. When I could just thumb my nose at the world. I was a liberated woman . . . I hadn’t quickly run to the shelter of another man . . . From then on I was lucky enough to always earn my living as a writer. (quoted in Roberts 2005: 95) But such a reliable source of income and exposure came at a cost that ultimately Gordimer refused—one kind of independence could not be achieved through

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another kind of dependency. The New Yorker might have been vague about what it meant by “integrity” but Gordimer was not. Her first publication in The New Yorker was a story called “A Watcher of the Dead”; it appeared in Jewish Affairs in 1948 and was republished in The New Yorker in a revised form in June 1951. This was followed by “A Bit of Young Life,” published in November 1952, “Six Feet of the Country” (first published in The Forum [Johannesburg] and revised for publication in The New Yorker, May 1953), and “Clowns in Clover” in October 1953. 1953 was also the year Gordimer published her first novel, The Lying Days. 1954 saw the publication of two more stories, “Out of Season” in March and “The Smell of Death and Flowers” in May, and the autobiographical piece “A South African Childhood: Allusions in a Landscape” published in October of that year. Up until 1962 Gordimer published usually one but often two stories each year in The New Yorker, with 1958 seeing the publication of her second novel, A World of Strangers. During the 1950s, publication in a variety of magazines outside South Africa such as Harper’s Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The Paris Review, Mademoiselle, and Cosmopolitan began to replace earlier publication in local (Johannesburg) magazines like South African Opinion, Common Sense, and Trek. But from 1963 (perhaps not uncoincidentally with the publication of Occasion for Loving), Gordimer’s stories rarely appeared in The New Yorker, although they continued to be published in Cosmopolitan, The London Magazine, The Cornhill Magazine, Harper’s Magazine and Harper’s & Queen throughout the 1960s and 1970s. I wondered what brought about this shift in favor: might it be accounted for in terms of a shift in Gordimer’s writing, or a shift in what was seen to be desirable by The New Yorker? Many writers contracted at the same time or before Gordimer continued to be published regularly by the magazine until their deaths. Was this a political change—in Gordimer’s contributions or in the magazine? Although Gordimer’s first stories in The New Yorker were not race-based, subsequent publications like “Six Feet of the Country” clearly were. An examination of her stories written throughout the 1950s and 1960s does not appear to indicate an overt political shift—the impact of race had been at the heart of Gordimer’s stories from the beginning. This led me to look for changes in the political climate in South Africa that might be reflected in Gordimer’s stories: increased political activity characterized the 1950s that resulted in bannings (of people and books), treason trials and prison terms, and the Sharpeville massacre of 1960; but I was unconvinced that this political shift was any more evident in stories of the 1960s than those of the 1950s. Perhaps I was looking in the wrong place, and the shift in attitude toward her work had to do with race relations in the US. The Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum throughout the 1950s and 1960s: anti-segregation protests in Birmingham in 1962 led to Martin Luther King’s arrest and jail term, and the publication of his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that argued for the moral duty of individuals to disobey unjust rules; Malcolm X was

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shot dead in 1964, race riots erupted in Los Angeles in 1965, Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase “black power” in 1966, and in 1967 the Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting interracial marriage was unconstitutional. Perhaps The New Yorker took a non-aligned stance; perhaps The New Yorker would rather abjure the politics of race. Certainly Katharine White, Gordimer’s onetime editor and lifelong friend, took a cautious anti-violence stance, writing to Gordimer in 1966 of “the student and Negro demonstrations that often harm the cause they hope to help” (quoted in Roberts 2005: 93). But The New Yorker published James Baldwin’s inflammatory essay, “Letter from a Region in My Mind” in 1962, in which he writes that “[t]he Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream” (Baldwin 1964: 76); and it also published Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in serial form that same year, beginning in the June 16 issue (obviously a different issue, but nevertheless a very political one): but these were essays, not fiction. Here then perhaps lies the answer and the reason for the difficulties Gordimer encountered with the editor. Her view of fiction was not his. Her view of “the world” of which fiction speaks and in which fiction is involved was not his. In interview with Alan Ross in 1965 Gordimer remarked on the irritation she felt “when people say: ‘You write for the New Yorker, don’t you?’” “I’ve never written a line for anyone or any magazine in my life,” Gordimer expostulates: I write what I want and if the New Yorker has wanted to publish it, they have done so. I haven’t had a story in the New Yorker for more than two years, because they haven’t been getting what they had learnt to expect from me. That’s the only criticism I would make of the much-maligned New Yorker: it’s not that there is a New Yorker ‘formula’ to which writers are encouraged to conform (a sort of plot-theme machine . . .) but that once having bought a particular kind of story from you because it was something fresh and original, they seem to yearn to have you go on writing the same kind of story for the rest of your life. They are not interested in growing pains over something new; but who wants to go on doing successfully what he can do with one hand tied behind his back? (quoted in Bazin and Seymour 1990: 41) 4 So perhaps rejection (of Gordimer by the magazine and the magazine by Gordimer) was a question of style rather than politics; indeed, perusal of Gordimer’s correspondence with The New Yorker (held by the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana) confirms this view.5 In July 1952, Katharine White wrote to Gordimer indicating the need for some editing of “A Bit of Young Life”: “In a few passages we felt quite strongly that

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you had hurt your story by too much ‘writing’ . . . made it seem too studied and too fancy;”6 and Sidney Satenstein wrote to Gordimer that “The New Yorker realizes that you are quite sensitive about [the] editing of your material” but that White was “tactful and understanding” and to please “be as amenable as possible to these people” for “the sake of income, reputation and prestige.”7 Despite Gordimer’s perception that the rejection she suffered at the hands of The New Yorker in the early 1960s was related to the magazine’s desire to publish more of the same and a lack of interest in experimentation, it is evident that Gordimer’s prose style is a bone of contention from the earliest days of her relationship with the magazine. Rejecting “The End of the Tunnel” in June 1951, William Maxwell writes: It has many excellent qualities and real psychological insight, but the writing seems to us too rococo and the action of the story not quite strong enough to hang such a weight of introspection on. Miss Gordimer is too good a writer for us to dream of suggesting what direction she should follow, but we hope, for our own sake—because we very much want to publish her stories—that she will keep somewhat more to the direct, restrained style that she has also at her command. In this story we can’t help feeling quite as much is lost in the writing as the writing contributes to the story.8 Although Maxwell claims he wouldn’t dream of suggesting what direction she should follow, he does just that; and as Gordimer became more confident of her market value, she became less prepared to comply. In 1959, when Roger Angell (The New Yorker’s fiction editor who replaced Katharine White) asks for a rewrite of the story “A Thing of the Past,” Gordimer refuses, complaining that “I feel I’ve done what I wanted to do in that story; what you want of it seems to me to be another sort of story entirely.”9 Here again style is at issue to the extent that even the “House Grammar” begins to grate, with the result that Gordimer refused to capitulate on requests for punctuation change (see Roberts 2005: 269). There was a point beyond which Gordimer would not go. It was a question more I think of aesthetic and artistic integrity than one of politics—although it might be called the politics of artistic freedom. What becomes apparent is that although by the late 1950s Gordimer had achieved an international profile that meant she did not need to rely on publication in The New Yorker (the story “A Thing of the Past” was published later that year in the London magazine Encounter), she still deemed publication in its pages to be of value, although her offerings increasingly resulted in a quarrel and, ultimately, rejection. Did rejection continue to be based on disagreement over “style,” or was something more involved? The story “Not for Publication,” rejected by The New Yorker in 1964 and published in 1965 both in Contrast and in slightly revised form in The Atlantic, was deemed by Roger Angell, along with other stories submitted

348 Anne Collett at this time, to suffer from an imbalance in which too much weight was given to the social or political “problem” with consequent damage to the literary quality of characterization: Angell suggests that Gordimer’s characters are no longer individual but representative of a particular group or social class.10 Gordimer denies this shift, claiming that she hoped “to bring to people who could be dismissed as categorical ‘victims,’ ‘oppressors,’ etc., exactly the same scrupulously personal approach that I have always used for people whose labels are not so easily read— in fact, I have wanted to peel off the labels, as it were.”11 Apparent in this tussle is the degree to which style and content, aesthetics and ethics, art and politics are entwined. Perhaps, although Angell does not put it in so many words, Gordimer’s stories began to feel too burdensome, too heavy: they lack the lightness of touch and “lift” that characterizes so much of The New Yorker fiction and poetry as represented by Thurber, Updike, Nash, Nabokov, Hale, Cheever, Gallant. As Roberts remarks, “The New Yorker prized affect and virtuosity; it pioneered an entire genre—the ‘casual’—that dealt in inconsequential moments, exquisitely portrayed” (Roberts 2005: 274). Gordimer had no interest in the casual or inconsequential; South Africa demanded more. In addition, a tiredness can be discerned, not in the style of Gordimer’s stories but in their content, or at least in their content as evaluated for marketability by The New Yorker. Angell’s letter to Diarmuid Russell explaining his rejection of “The Conservationist” is apposite: he remarks that the story is “remarkably wellwritten, even for a Gordimer” and that, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it except for the fact that it seems all too familiar. It is my strong conviction that all of us know the news in this story by now. This quiet piece of irony is no longer effective because we have already absorbed its contents from so many other places—including some stories by Nadine Gordimer.12 It is not just that the world (and The New Yorker) is tired of the subject matter of the story—“the situation” in South Africa is old news—but that being tired of it, quiet irony is insufficient to the demands of a political problem that “goes overtime.” The problem with Gordimer’s story then is not only one of style but one that results from the longevity of a cause, and the difficulty of maintaining audience interest. Gordimer does not appear to acknowledge either problem, but by the early 1970s she cannot help but recognize a gap too wide to be bridged between the stories she wants to write and the stories The New Yorker wants to publish: “they don’t like any of them,” she writes to a now retired Katharine White. “I know that the magazine doesn’t like stories that have the faintest hint of propaganda, no matter how good the cause is. Whether any of that crept in (it would be quite natural) and affected opinion, I don’t know” (quoted in Roberts 2005: 274).

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Gordimer understands The New Yorker’s rejection of her work to be the result not of the tiredness of her subject matter or style but of an adherence to the requirement that “art” remain “disinterested”; and many other critics besides The New Yorker would find Gordimer’s writing increasingly “committed” (or “responsible”) to the detriment of its literary quality. Given the dangers to a writer’s freedom of political orthodoxy and the impact of “awareness of what is expected of him” that Gordimer makes particularly clear in her 1975 lecture to the Durban Indian Teachers’ Conference, I began to wonder if the lecture represented an honest, although covert, assessment of problems she herself encountered increasingly as a young writer throughout the 1960s—that is, does she recognize herself as a writer not only exposed to but who has also fallen victim to the dangers which come from “the writer’s opposition to repression of political freedom”? But this is not how the lecture reads. Let me turn for a moment to Gordimer’s Nobel Prize speech on “Writing and Being” delivered in 1991, in which she speaks of “this aesthetic venture of ours” as one that becomes “subversive”: when the shameful secrets of our times are explored deeply, with the artist’s rebellious integrity to the state of being manifest in life around her or him; then the writer’s themes and characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and distortions of that society as the life of the fisherman is determined by the power of the sea. (Gordimer 1991) This is a revealing simile—society is equated with the sea. It is a simile that acts to naturalize and depoliticize the social forces that shape the writer and her characters. The writer as fisherman: it is odd but it makes a sort of sense if you think about the position Gordimer takes on what she understands to be the difference between herself as a white writer in South Africa and the position of the white writer in America (for example). An essay published in Christianity and Crisis in 1977 reveals the degree to which Gordimer feels the specificity of being born South African differentiates her from her American or English friends: They begin to seem to me a protected species; in one way, I could define my South Africanness by the extent to which they differ from me in their secure sense of what they are. Once mature, they may have to make adaptive changes to outward circumstances, they may have to face slumps and unemployment, changes in the standard of living, even the possibility of atomic annihilation together, but they will never have to change the concept of who and what they are in relation to their country. (quoted in Roberts 2005: 275)

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Here Gordimer claims an almost unbridgeable divide, between the writer (and reader) born in South Africa and the writer (and reader) born in the United States (or England). Her difficult relationship with The New Yorker, and related correspondence with its editors, prompts me to think about the impact of a particular sociopolitical environment (in this case apartheid South Africa) and related political commitment on the aesthetics and the reception of the writing it engenders. Gordimer herself has said that she would have been a different writer, written differently, in a different time and place, and this of course is the impact of the sea upon the fisherwoman and the technique she employs. In interview with Alan Ross in 1965, Gordimer remarked that I am not a politically-minded person by nature. I don’t suppose, if I had lived elsewhere, my writing would have reflected politics much. If at all . . . If I’ve been influenced to recognize man as a political animal, in my writing, then that’s come about through living in South Africa. (Bazin and Seymour 1990: 35) The comment suggests that Gordimer felt driven against her “natural instincts” as a writer and a person. Perhaps this goes some way toward understanding why Gordimer’s writing is often hard to read, not only hard in terms of an unrelenting “high seriousness” (that The New Yorker ultimately found too tiring to publish) but also in terms of prosodic fluency. The New Yorker’s quarrel with Gordimer’s style, even at the level of punctuation, reminded me of the difficulty I encounter in reading her prose. This is not the difficulty of the jaded reader, tired of politics or of the particular politics of South Africa during and post-apartheid; rather, it is a difficulty encountered at the level of reading as an act that engenders aesthetic pleasure and also comprehension of meaning. The quality of Gordimer’s prose is uneven: this is not an observation about its “quality” in terms of “value” but of its “quality” in terms of visceral experience. Her prose jars and often requires re-reading. In discussion with colleagues (Australian and South African) I have discovered this to be a common experience, and many, like The New Yorker editors, see it as a fault; which brings me to what I see as the critical need to address the relationship between writing, politics, and prosody. The freedom to write or not to write and the constraints upon the subject matter of that writing have been foregrounded by postcolonial criticism at the expense or neglect of “the aesthetics” or the construction of writing at the most fundamental level of word order and word choice, sentence structure, and rhythm. The inconsistencies, the faultlines, the ruptures in Gordimer’s writing—its “unnatural” flow—might be understood as symptomatic of the stresses experienced by the writer for whom the pervasiveness, indeed the intrusiveness,

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of the political, determines not only the subject but the style—the tone, shape, and rhythm—that writing takes. The time indeed has come “to read the relations between art and politics in Gordimer’s writing not simply at the level of content but also at the level of form” (Driver et al. 1994: 5).

Acknowledgments Thank you to the Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia, for the provision of funding that allowed me to visit the Lilly Library at University of Indiana, Bloomington, USA, where the correspondence between Nadine Gordimer and The New Yorker is held.

Notes 1. Nadine Gordimer featured on a South African postage stamp in 1996 and a Swedish postage stamp in 1998. 2. I have discussed Jamaica Kincaid’s relationship with The New Yorker in an essay published in 2002. 3. Gordimer is in fact shocked by Wolfe’s attack, observing in a letter to Angell, dated May 14, 1965: “I simply couldn’t believe it. It was not the full text of the attack, of course, but the gist was sufficiently scurrilous. I suppose Mr Wolfe thought this was a good way to attract attention.” Nadine Gordimer Archive, Lilly Library, LMC2355, Box 3, MS VII: New Yorker correspondence 1963–65. 4. Even as early as 1958 Gordimer is making the same claim to The Star (Johannesburg, 11 July): “I don’t consult anybody, but rely entirely on my own judgement. I write the way I want, and though I could have made a lot more money if I had angled my stories, that’s the way I want it” (in Bazin and Seymour 1990: 3). 5. Roberts defines The New Yorker style of this period as “a direct restrained style that avoided the baroque” (2005: 93). 6. Letter to Gordimer from (Mrs.) Katharine S. White, dated July 25, 1952. LMC2355, Box 3, MS I: New Yorker correspondence, 1950–53. 7. Satenstein to Gordimer, July 3, 1958, quoted in Roberts (2005: 93–94); the last words in quotation marks are a paraphrase of Satenstein by Roberts. 8. Letter from Maxwell to Gordimer, June 28, 1951. LMC2355, Box 3, MS I: New Yorker correspondence, 1950–53. 9. Letter from Gordimer to Angell, June 17, 1959. LMC2355, Box 3, MS V: New Yorker correspondence, 1959–60. 10. See correspondence between Gordimer and Angell. LMC2355, Box 3, MS VII: New Yorker correspondence, 1963–65. 11. Letter from Gordimer to Angell, May 1, 1964. LMC2355, Box 3, MS VII: New Yorker correspondence, 1963–65. 12. Letter from Angell to Diarmuid Russell, September 13, 1972. LMC2355, Box 3, MS IX: New Yorker correspondence, 1968–72.

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Bibliography Baldwin, J. (1962) “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” The New Yorker, November 17. —— (1964 [1963]) “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” in The Fire Next Time, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bazin, N. T. and Seymour, M. D. (eds.) (1990) Conversations with Nadine Gordimer, Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi. Carson, R. (1962) Silent Spring, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Collett, A. (2002) “A Snake in the Garden of The New Yorker?” in G. Stilz (ed.) Missions of Interdependence, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Douglas, G. H. (1991) The Smart Magazine: 50 Years of Literary Revelry & High Jinks at Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Life, Esquire and The Smart Set, Hamden, CT: Archon Books. Driver, D., Dry, A., MacKenzie, C., and Read, J. (eds.) (1994) Nadine Gordimer: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources, 1937–1992, London: Hans Zell. Gordimer, N. “Nadine Gordimer Archive” LMC2355. Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington, USA. —— (1972) Why Haven’t You Written? Selected Stories 1950–1972, London: Penguin. —— (1976 [1958]) A World of Strangers, London: Jonathan Cape. —— (1983 [1953]) The Lying Days, London: Virago. —— (1983 [1963]) Occasion for Loving, London: Virago. —— (1989 [1988]) The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, New York: Penguin. —— (1991) “Writing and Being,” Nobel Lecture, December 7. Online. Available: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1991/gordimer-lecture. html (accessed June 2010). —— (1993) Selected Stories, London: Penguin. —— (1995) Writing and Being: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1994, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kaufer, S. A. (1975) “Golden Anniversary in Whichy Thicket,” The Harvard Crimson, February 27. Online. Available: http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=251967 (accessed June 2010). Roberts, R. S. (2005) No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer, Johannesburg: STE. Stories from the New Yorker 1950–1960 (1975 [1960]), Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wallace-Crabbe, C. (2005) Read it Again, Cambridge: Salt Publishing.

Index

Abani, Chris 117–21, 176–83 Aboriginal people of Australia 37 Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (1976) 36 Aboriginal law 36, 41 culture 35–36 Ngangkari (traditional healers of Central Australia) 40 stories 36–39, 41 Abuja Peace Agreement (2006) 65–66 Achebe, Chinua 96, 99 Act of Abjuration (1581) 50 Adams, John 193 Adams, Yahya Majadin (Adam Gadahn) 251 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 92–101 Adnan, Etel 283, 285–86, 288, 289–91, 292, 293 aesthetics 27 Gordimer and 343, 348 Italian melodrama 105–6, 109 African National Congress (ANC) 49, 56 Agamben, Giorgio 143, 144, 166 bare life 167, 174 biopolitics 174 n. 3 sacred life (homo sacer) 163, 168 on sovereignty 144, 163, 169, 174 n. 3 state of exception 143, 164 on urban poor 171 Age of Iron (Coetzee) 221, 224 Ahmed, Akbar 250 Aida (Verdi) 103 Aidoo, Ama Ata 98

Algeria colonialism in 208–10 independence 48, 49–50, 53–54, 55–56 Ali Farah, Cristina Ubax 265, 267, 269– 71, 272 Ali Khan, Ustad Amjad 41 All About H. Hatterr (Desani) 151, 152, 153–55 Altaf, Navjot 163, 164–69, 165, 168 Althusser, Louis 47 American Declaration of Independence (1776) 50–51 American War of Independence 50 Amin, Idi 80 Amireh, Amal 286 al-Amriki, Azzam (Adam Gadahn) 251 Amritvela (Dhingra) 132, 135 Amselle, J. L. 83 Anand, Mulk Raj 133 Anangu people, see Aboriginal people Anderson, Benedict 104, 138 Angell, Roger 347–48 Anglo-Boer war 91 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (1936) 65 Anglo-Indians 151–60 and education 154 and racism 153, 160 Anthony, Frank 153 Anti-Semite and Jew (Sartre) 212 anticipation: politics of 27 anticolonial tradition 48–57 Appiah, Kwame 1

354 Index Arab Literary Academy, Damascus 66 Arab writing 283–93 “Arabian Nights, The” 68 Arac de Nyeko, Monica 84–88 Arendt, Hannah 8, 13–14, 45 on US student revolt 54–55 on violence 49, 54, 55–56 Aronson, Ronald 206 Asad, Talal 247, 252 n. 3 Asaf Ali, Aruna 56 Ashcroft, B. 232 asylum seekers 141–49, 183 and identity 143–46 Atiyah, Edward 66 Augé, M. 132, 134–36 Australia Anglo-Indians in 155 racism in 160 see also Aboriginal people, Australia Babbitt, Susan 284–85, 292 Babich, Babette 127 Baingana, Doreen 80, 84 Baker, Houston A., Jr. 318–19 Baldwin, James 346 Balibar, Étienne 163, 174 Barakat, Halim 284 Barbare, Le (Magritte) 172, 173 Barbary States 193: see also Algeria; Morocco Barber, Karin 313 bare life 167, 168, 169, 171, 173–74 Barghouti, Mourid 284 Barlow, Joel 193 Bartleby, the Scrivener (Melville) 147–49 Bassnett, Susan 67 Batanda, Jackee Budesta 84 Bauman, Zygmunt 8, 122, 123, 124 Baumgartner’s Bombay (A. Desai) 132, 136–37 Beasts of No Nation (Iweala) 180 Beatrice Chancy (Clarke) 316, 318–20 Beauty’s Gift (Magona) 219 Becoming Abigail (Abani) 177–79, 182–83 Bellah, Robert 197

Benaïssa, Slimane 243 Benedetti, G. 222 Benjamin, Bret 73–74 Benjamin, Walter 46 Bergen, Peter 250 Berlin, Isaiah: two concepts of liberty 15, 17 Best, Stephen 19–20 Bhabha, Homi 46, 147, 155, 156, 159, 183, 272 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 44 BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) 128 Biafra 91–101 images of 92–93, 95–96, 98–99 Bieber, Jodi 219, 228–29 Biggie (rapper) 22–23 Biko, Steve 24 bin Laden, Osama 250 biopolitics 174 n. 3 BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) 44 black criticism 16 black sexuality 26 black thought 16, 18–19, 27 ownership of death 23–24 Black Vanguard (Atiyah) 66 Bloch, Ernst 9 blood biblical references 125–26 consanguinity 127 hemophilia 125, 126, 130 political hematographies 127–30 sanguinary instincts 126 symbolism of 122–30 Bobos in Paradise (Brooks) 197 borders 136, 163–74, 183 and belonging 138–39 dialogue across 84 European 266 and flow of power 122–24 language and 281 literature and 281 see also migrants; migration Bowman, E. 210 Boyer, P. S. 198 Boym, Svetlana 10

Index 355 Boynton, Robert 287, 288, 289 Bradburne, J. M. 126 Brash, Don 332 Brigate Rosse 47 Britain Anglo-Boer war 91 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (1936) 65 and Anglo-Indians 151–60 narratives of illegality 141–49 and Sudan 59–69 Brodsky, Joseph 281 Brooks, David 197 Brown, Duncan 309, 312, 313 Brown, Lawrence R. 246 Bryce, James 192 Brydon, D. 318 Buell, Lawrence 232, 234 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) 128 Burrow (Islam) 141–42, 149 Bush, George W. 198 Butler, Jon 199 By the Sea (Gurnah) 141, 146–49 Caché (Hidden) (film) 254–55, 258–60, 261, 262–63 Caiani, Fabio 284, 286, 293 Cairns, David 91 Calvino, Italo 122–23, 125, 126, 127, 130 Camporesi, Piero 124 Camus, Albert 7 Canada documentary poems 317–18 literary tradition 317 long poems 317–26 Cannon, Garland 68 capitalism 13, 208, 244 Caribbean nature poets 233 Carpentaria (A. Wright) 37, 38–40, 41 Carr, Robert 26–27 Certeau, Michel de 136, 137, 138 Césaire, Aimé 14 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 171–72 Chakravarti, Sudeep 44 Charfi, Abdelmajid 248 Chatterjee, Partha 165, 166, 170–71

Chesterton, G. K. 192 Chiappini, Simonetta 108 children 2, 136 and conflict 48, 83, 91 in Dominica 234, 236, 239 in India 164–69 in South Africa 219–29 starving, images of 91, 92–93, 95, 96, 98–99 street children 164–69, 219–29 see also Becoming Abigail (Abani); Caché (Hidden) (Haneke); Kite Runner, The (Hosseini); Song for Night (Abani) children’s rights: in South Africa 219–29 Christian Coalition, USA 198 Christianity 46, 284 and Islam 59, 95–96 missions 71–72, 74–76, 328 in USA 192–203 and weight loss 200 Churchill, Winston 59 citizenship 19, 61, 117, 173, 323 and human rights 163, 167 legal notion of 129 urban poor and 171 world citizenship 132 civil resistance 47, 49 civil rights 1–3 Clark, Helen 331–32 Clarke, George Elliott 316–26 classical utilitarianism 15 Clingman, S. 146 Co-Ordinates of Everyday Life, The (Raqs Media Collective) 170 Coetzee, J. M. 221, 224, 296–306 Cohen, Leonard 316 colonial capitalism 208 colonial discourse analysis 43 colonial law 24 colonialism in Algeria 208–10 anticolonial tradition 48–57 and language 20 and law 24

356 Index commodities Marx on 20–21 slaves as 19–20 Congo crisis 91 Conrad, Joseph 66, 68, 282 creative non-fiction 283–93 Creswell, Robyn 66–67 Cromer, Lord (Evelyn Baring) 59 Currie, James 65 Cyrill, Christopher 159 Daily Express 92 Dalit literature 44 Darwin, Charles 246 Darwish, Mahmoud 205, 213, 216, 284 Davey, Frank 324 Dawes, Kwame 177 Dayal, Samir 159 D’Cruz, Glen 151 de Certeau, Michel 136, 137, 138 De Mauro, Tullio 266 de Swaan, A. 83 de Tocqueville, Alexis 192, 198 death black thought, and ownership of 23–24 as form of coercion 22 threat of 16–17, 22, 28 Deleuze, Gilles 147–48 Dell Panny, Judith 103 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth 232 democracy 3–4, 17, 171 Biafra 95 and civil resistance 47 religion and 192, 196, 197, 198 Uganda 79–80 Derrida, Jacques 129, 132, 136, 139, 144, 325 ethics of absolute hospitality 148 Desai, Anita 132, 136–37 Desai, Kiran 132, 136 Desani, G. V. 151, 152, 153–55 desecularization 195–96 development agencies 72–74, 75–76 Dhingra, Leena 132, 135

diaspora 68, 157, 176, 180, 242, 287 Somali 265–72 Diderot, Denis 192 Diraige, Ahmed Ibrahim 65–66 Disgrace (Coetzee) 296–306 melanization/darkening 300–301, 304 ownership 303–4 rape 297–99, 301–5 Distant Shore, A (Phillips) 143–46, 149, 180 Djaïs, Hichem 248 Djaout, Tahar 247 Djebar, Assia 285, 291–92 documentary poems 317–18 Dominica: relations to place 231–32 Donaghy, James 64 Douglass, Frederick 21–22, 28 DRC (UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child) 220–21 Dream Swimmer, The (Ihimaera) 103, 109, 113 Driver, Dorothy 342–43, 351 Dufourmantelle, A. 144, 148 ecocriticism 232 education 227 Anglo-Indians and 154 literary, in Sudan 59–69 religion in USA and 201 religious missions and 76 as right 201, 220–21 universities 54–55 Eggleton, David 330–31 Egypt: literary criticism 287 Elbendary, A. 214 Else, Chris 330 Emeagwali, Philip 68–69 ethics of absolute hospitality 148 norms of everyday moral experience 206 postcolonial 205–16 of resistance 47–48 and responsibility 15, 254–63

Index 357 ethnicity 117–21 in Nigeria 91–101 racism and 118–19 in Uganda 79–88 European Neighbourhood Policy 266 Ewen, D. R. 62–63, 65, 68 exception, state of 143, 164, 171 Execution Poems (Clarke) 317 Famished Road, The (Okri) 227 Fanon, Frantz 1 language 20 on life in colonies 24–25 LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and 49 Al-Qaeda and 49–50 and restitution of manhood 27 taking life and giving death 24 on violence 53–54, 55–56 will to live 28 Farah, Nurrudin 226 Farrell, Fiona 330 Farrier, David 148 feminism 94 feminist novels 22 feminist theories 14 Fini, Gianfranco 265–66 Finke, R. 194–95 Finnegan, Ruth 307, 308, 313 Flaiano, Ennio 266–67 FLN, see Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), Algeria flow concept of 8, 122 of power 122–24 Foden, Giles 81–83, 88 For the Love of Biafra (Adichie) 97 “For the Oral” (Rampolokeng) 308–9, 310–12 Forché, Carolyn 283–84 Foreshore and Seabed Act, New Zealand 331–34, 335, 337–38 “Foreshore and Seabed Poems” (Sullivan) 333–38 forgiveness 254, 256

Foucault, Michel 14 on blood 124, 125 sovereignty and biopolitics 174 n. 3 Fox, Alistair 103, 109 freedom fighters 46, 56, 91 Freemasonry 192 Freud, Sigmund 136 Fromm, H. 232 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), Algeria 48, 53, 55 Paris demonstration 258 Frontex 266 Fugard, Athol 219–29 fundamentalism 242–51 Gadahn, Adam 251 Gaines, Ernest 22 Gajarawala, Toral 44 Galeano, Eduardo 130 Gallery 68 (avant-garde journal) 287, 289 Gandhi, M. K. 49, 51 Ganges and Its Tributaries, The (Cyrill) 159 Garrad, Greg 232 Gass, William H. 290, 291 Gellner, Ernest 104 General Declaration of the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAL, Tricontinental, 1966) 52–53 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 143 Gerard, Philip 283–84 Gerges, Fawaz A. 249–50 Ghazoul, Ferial 285 Ghosh, Amitav 132, 137 Gibney, Matthew J. 143 Gidney, Henry 152 Gifts (Farah) 227 Gillman, Susan 126 Gillmer, J. 224 Gilroy, Paul 9, 19, 24, 144 Glissant, Édouard 20 Glotfelty, C. 232 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 281

358 Index Gordimer, Nadine 10–11, 100, 220, 341–51 and freedom of writers 341–51 and The New Yorker 343, 344–50 Gordon Memorial College, Sudan 59, 60: see also Khartoum University College Grace, Patricia 331 Graceland (Abani) 177, 178, 179 Gray, Thomas 43–44 Great Britain, see Britain Guevara, Che 53, 56 Gulotta, T. 228 Gurnah, Abdulrazak 141, 146–49 Haddour, A. 205 Hadj, Messali 53 Hafez, Sabry 290, 293 Half of a Yellow Sun (Adichie) 92–101 class issues 97–99 Haliburn, Ed 153, 161 nn. 3 & 4 Hamara Shahar (Patwardhan) 164 Hamid, Mohsin 242, 243–46, 251 Hands Washing Water (Abani) 177 Haneke, Michael 254–55, 258–60, 261, 262–63 Hansen, K. and L. 37 Hansen, Thomas Blom 166–67 Harlow, Barbara 43, 44 Harris, Lee 245–46, 247, 249 Hau Hau 104 Hawkins, Greg 199 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 196–97 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 66, 68 Heble, Ajay 316, 321, 325 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 23, 127 Heidegger, Martin 23 hemophilia 125, 126, 130 Hirschmann, Nancy 18 Ho Chi Minh 52 Hobbes, Thomas 128 Hobson, J. A. 76 Homework (Peres da Costa) 158 homo sacer (sacred life) 163, 168, 169, 173 Hood, Gavin 220

hospitality 139, 144, 163, 169 ethics of absolute 148 for migrants 155–56 universal 132 Hosseini, Khaled 254–55, 256–58, 260– 62, 263–64 Hulcombe, Jeff 37 human rights 1–3, 45, 328–38 education as 201, 220–21 infrahuman rights 141–49 sovereignty and 167 world citizenship 132 see also Abani, Chris; children’s rights Huntington, Samuel 195, 198, 202–3 Hurston, Zora Neale 18 I Saw Ramallah (Barghouti) 284 identity asylum seekers and 143–46 illegal immigrants and 141–43 loss of 221 ideological resistance 46 Idris, Samah 288–89 Ihimaera, Witi 103, 106–13, 329 illegal immigrants 141–49 and identity 141–43 imbongi (praise poets) 312, 313–14 Impostor in the Waiting Room, The (Raqs Media Collective) 171–73, 172 In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (Adnan) 284, 285–86, 289–90 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (Gass) 290 “In the Stars” (Arac de Nyeko) 85, 88 independence: in Algeria 48, 49–50, 53–54, 55–56 Independent Television Network (ITN) 92–93 India Mumbai 164–69 New Delhi 169–71 sovereignty in cities 163–74 urban planning 166 urban poor 163–64, 166, 167 Indian music 41

Index 359 Indian writing: and place/non-place 132–39 Indigenous people of Australia, see Aboriginal people of Australia individual: notion of 18 infrahuman rights 141–49 Ingledew, John 62, 63, 64, 68 Inheritance of Loss, The (K. Desai) 132, 136 integrity 38 Irigaray, Luce 128 Isegawa, Moses 80 Islam 193 and Christianity 59, 95–96 cultural 246–47 fundamentalism 242–51 Qur’an, interpretation of 247–49 radical 245–46 religious missions 72 Islam, Manzu 141–43, 149 Islamism 249 isolation 190–91 Israel: and Palestine: 211–15, 216 Italy Brigate Rosse 47 colonial legacy 265–72 Italian melodrama in Ihimaera 106–11 Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari 47 Venice 277–81 Iweala, Uzodinma 180 Jacoby, T. A. 293 “Jambula Tree” (Arac de Nyeko) 84–85, 88 JanMohammed, Abdul 22 jazz operas 316–26 libretti 316–26 Jefferson, Thomas 192–93 Jenkins, Jerry 198 Jerome, St. 125–26 John, Marie-Elena 231–40 Jones, Gayl 22 justice 15, 148, 250: see also Caché (Hidden) (Haneke); Kite Runner, The (Hosseini) Kalakuta Republic (Abani) 176 Kalashnikov, Mikhail 2 Kalshed, D. 222, 226

Kalsoum, Oum 285 Kambourelli, Smaro 317, 324–25 Kant, Immanuel 132, 137–38 Kanthapura (Rao) 44 Kendall, Elizabeth 286, 287, 289, 293 Kerrigan, Michael 82 Khartoum University College 60, 61–64 Kierkegaard, Søren 196–97 Kitchener, Herbert, 1st Earl Kitchener 59 Kite Runner, The (Hosseini) 254–55, 256– 58, 260–62, 263–64 Kiyimba, A. 80 Klein, Naomi 255–56 knowledge: and freedom 296–306 Kroetsch, Robert 318, 323, 325 Kureishi, Hanif 242 Kuster, Reto 79 La Guma, Alex 221 Lacan, Jacques 136, 158, 310 “Lady of Shalott, The” (Tennyson) 67–68 LaHaye, Tim 198 Lahiri, Shompa 153, 154, 156, 159 Lamouchi, Noureddine 213–14 language 187, 281–82 and borders 281 colonialism and 20 Foreshore and Seabed Act and 333–34, 335, 337–38 Igbo 181 lalangue 310 and metalanguage 180 screams and 20, 21 and singing 21–22 Larson, K. 325 Last King of Scotland, The (film) 82–83 Last King of Scotland, The (Foden) 81–83 Last Night of a Damned Soul, The (Benaïssa) 243–45 law Aboriginal 36, 41 colonial 24 natural, military resistance as 46 unity of freedom and 15 League of Nations 219

360 Index Ledent, B. 145 Left Behind novels (LaHaye and Jenkins) 198 Levi, Primo 148 Leviathan (Hobbes) 128 Levinas, Emmanuel 11 n. 3, 22, 135, 138–39 hospitality 132, 139 on Palestinians/the other 213 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, see LTTE libretti 316–26 Lincoln, Abraham 200, 201 Lipset, Seymour Martin 199 literary journalism 286–89 Livesay, Dorothy 317–18, 323, 324 LNJP (Lok Nayak Jai Prakash) colony, New Delhi 169–71 Locke, John 15, 45 Long Poem Anthology (Ondaatje) 318 Long Walk to Freedom (Mandela) 214 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Uganda 79–80, 86–87 Love, Glen 232 Löwy, Michael 53 LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army), Uganda 79–80, 86–87 LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) 43–44, 48, 49 Luther, Martin 125–26 lynching 22, 26 McCarthy, Cormac 127 McCracken, Peggy 129 MacDonald, Kevin 82–83 MacIntyre, Alasdair 45 McIntyre-Bhatty, Karen 142 MacKinnon, Catherine 15 McMahon, David 151, 155–60 Madison, James 192–94, 199 Madre piccola (Ali Farah) 267, 269–71 Magona, Sindiwe 219, 221, 224 Magritte, René 168, 172 Mahfouz, Naguib 287 Majaj, Lisa Suhair 286 Majid, Anouar 247–49 Makang, Jen-Marie 314

Malcolm X 46 Mandela, Nelson 24, 214 manhood black 26 restitution of 25, 27 white sexual violence and 26 Manto, Saadat Hasan 132, 138 Maori Declaration of Independence (1835) 52 Maori King Movement 104 Mapmakers of Spitalfields, The (Islam) 141 Mariátegui, José Carlos 53 Markandaya, Kamala 132–33 Marx, Karl 13, 20–21 masculinity, masculinism 14 negative 94–95 Massad, Joseph 205, 211, 212 master–slave dialectics 16, 23–24, 29 Matawhero Retaliation 106, 110 Mather, Sir William 60 Matriarch, The (Ihimaera) 106–13 melodrama in 106–11 musical terms in 111 operatic quotations 103–4, 111–13 Mau Mau revolt, Kenya 91 Mawsim al-hijra ila al-shamal (Season of Migration to the North, Salih) 66–67, 68 Maxwell, William 347 Mbeki, Thabo 44–45 Mbembe, Achille 309–10 megachurches 199–201 Melado, Jim 199 melodrama in Ihimaera 106–11 Risorgimento and 104, 105 Melville, Herman 147–49 memory 135, 142, 270, 277, 280 of absence 136, 137 and childhood 177, 178, 181–82, 221– 22, 225, 226 collective 87, 157 and images 92 loss of 221–22 and ownership of story 100–101

Index 361 postcolonial writing and 9–10, 265 and reconnection 240 and resistance 87, 88 see also Caché (Hidden) (film); Kite Runner, The (Hosseini) Mezzadra, Sandro 266, 267 Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (Soueif) 284, 285, 288, 289 migrants 3, 280–81 Anglo-Indian 151–60 asylum seekers 141–49, 183 compromises by 154, 156–59, 188–89 hospitality for 155–56 illegal immigrants 141–49, 183 impoverished 163–64, 166 migration 68, 164 military resistance: as natural law 46 mimicry 156–59 Mistry, Jyoti 312 Mitchell, Robert 129 modernity: critique of 14 Moore, Gloria Jean 160 “Morality and History” (Sartre) 205–16 Morocco 50 Morrison, Toni 22 Moten, F. 19 Mother to Mother (Magona) 221, 224 Mottled Dawn (Manto) 132, 138 Mouvement pour la Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (MTLD), Algeria 53 movement 8–9: see also migrants; migration Moynagh, Maureen 316 Mugabe, Robert 44 Mumbai 164–69 evictions/forced relocation 165–66 Mumbai Meri Jaan (Altaf) 164–69, 165, 168 Museveni, Yoweri 79 Mwenda, M. A. 79 My Son the Fanatic (Kureishi) 242

al-Nasri Hamza, Abdel Aziz 65 National Association of Evangelicals, USA 201, 202 National Redemption Front, Sudan 65–66 National Resistance Army (NRA), Uganda 79–80, 87 nationalist novels 44 negative masculinity 94–95 Neruda, Pablo 122 New Delhi 169–71 New Journalism Movement 287–88 New New Journalism 288, 289 New Yorker, The 203, 343, 344–50 New Zealand Foreshore and Seabed Act, New Zealand 331–33 Maori Declaration of Independence (1835) 52 Maori King Movement 104 Maori land rights 331–33 Maori nationalist struggle 104–5 Matawhero Retaliation 106, 110 New Zealand Land Wars 103 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o 43 Nietzsche, Friedrich 127 Nigeria Abuja Peace Agreement (2006) 65–66 Igbo people 92, 93–94, 95, 97–98 Nigeria–Biafra war 91–101 Nkrumah, Kwame 49 non-fiction 283–93 non-violent resistance 49–50 Norton, Anne 128 Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua, La (Djebar) 285 al-Nowaihi, Magda 291–92 Nowhere Man (Markandaya) 132, 133 NRA (National Resistance Army), Uganda 79–80, 87 Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, Italy 47

Nafisi, Azar 263 Nancy, Jean-Luc 1, 4, 6, 11, 13 Narela (resettlement colony), New Delhi 169–71

oa Magogodi, Kgafela 307–8, 312–14 Obama, Barack 193, 200–201 Obert, J. C. 316 O’Brien, William 56

362 Index O’Connell, Daniel 49, 51 Okri, Ben 227 Okuku, Yuma 79 Olympic Games, Munich (1972) 214–15, 216 Ondaatje, Michael 318 Opland, Jeff 314 OSPAAL (General Declaration of the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Tricontinental, 1966) 52–53 Othello (Shakespeare) 187, 189–90, 191 Page, William Tyler 202 Palestine 43, 284 and Israel 211–15, 216 “Palestinian Writers” (Soueif) 284 Pape, Robert 246 Parameswaran, Uma 132, 133–34 Patel, Eboo 250–51 patria: notion of 104–5 patriotism: religion and 198–99 Patwardhan, Anand 164 Peres da Costa, Suneeta 158 Pères de Saint Esprit (Spiritans) 74–75 performance poets: South Africa 307–15 Perlstein, Adam 251 Pettit, Philip 17 Phillips, Caryl 143–46, 149, 180, 187–91 Pillay, Navanethem 219 Pinter, Harold 176 Polisario Front 50 Ponzanesi, Sandra 265 Popolo delle Libertà, Il: 3 popular culture: religion and 197–98 Portinari, Folco 104, 105 postcolonial ethics 205–16 postcolonial theories 14 postcolonial writing 9–10 Italy 265–72 postcolonialism: and resistance 210–11 Potiki (Grace) 331 poverty 163–64, 166–67, 168, 170–71, 172

Prakash, Gyan 166, 167 Protestantism: and politics 192, 193 ul-Qadri, Muhannad Tahir 250 Al-Qaeda 49–50 Québécité (Clarke) 316, 318–19, 320–22 race 7, 16, 24, 119, 345 racial terror 14, 16, 22 racism 255–56 Anglo-Indians and 153, 160 in Australia 160 and ethnicity 118–19 Rajan, Kaushik Sunder 129 Rampolokeng, Lesego 307–9, 310–12, 314 Randhawa, Raninder 132, 133 Rao, Raja 44 rape 26, 257–58, 297–99, 301–5 Raqs Media Collective 163, 169–73, 170, 172 Rask Knudsen, Eva 113 Rawls, John 15–16 Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Nafisi) 263 Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (Chakravarti) 44 redemption 177, 227, 261, 262 refugees 69 n. 4, 93, 137, 138, 141–49, 183 Reilly, Donald 203 religion Christianity 95–96, 192, 193, 200 and democracy 192, 196, 197, 198 desecularization and 195–96 Islam 59, 95–96, 193, 242–51 megachurches 199–201 new denominations 196–97 and Nigeria–Biafra war 95–96 and patriotism 198–99 and popular culture 197–98 Protestantism 192, 193 and redemption 177, 227, 261, 262 religious missions 71–72, 74–76, 328 religious symbolism, commodification of 200

Index 363 Ringatu Church 104 secularization and 195, 198, 199 in USA 192–203 and weight loss 200 Reluctant Fundamentalist, The (Hamid) 243–46, 251 resistance 6–7 civil 47, 49 ethics of 47–48 forms of 79–88 ideological 46 military 46 non-violent 49–50 postcolonialism and 210–11 religious missions and 76 right to 43–57, 144 violent 47, 48–51 see also war resistance literature 43–44 responsibility 15, 254–63 Reuter, Christopher 252 n. 2 revolutionary humanism 53 Rhoda (Scego) 267–69 Richter, Linda 222, 223, 226 Rieff, Philip 202 right of property 45 Ringatu Church 104 Risorgimento and melodrama 104, 105 and New Zealand Land Wars 103 Roberts, Dorothy 25–26, 348 Robinson, R. 329, 331 Rønning, Helge 95 Ross, Harold 344 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 15, 17 “Rule Britannia” 45 Rushdie, Salman 9 sacred life (homo sacer) 163, 168, 169 and sovereignty 173 Saddleback Church 200, 201 Sahrawi people 50 Said, Edward 54, 55, 183, 211, 216, 271 on exile 289 Salhi, Zahia Smail 287

Salih, Tayeb 66–67, 68 Sanderson, G. N. 66, 68 Sanderson, Lilian 67 Santoni, R. 213 Santschi, Martina 79 Sartre, Jean-Paul 47, 205–16 colonialism in Algeria 208–10 on Israelis 212–13 need, importance of 208–9 norms of everyday moral experience 207 and Palestine 211–15, 216 praxis and morality 207–8 on terror 214–16 on Zionism 212 Satenstein, Sidney 347 Saviano, Roberto 1–2 Scego, Igiaba 265, 267–69, 272 Schaff, Philip 196 Schönlein, Johann Lukas 125 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 198 Second Awakening 196 secularization 195, 198, 199 self-expression 18–19 self-help narratives 72, 74–76 self-knowledge 18–19 self-preservation 29 self-rule 14, 18–19 Sen, Amartya 3–4, 9 Senghor, Leopold beautiful-as-such 28 domain of syncopated imagination 27 joy 28 sexual slavery 14 sexual terror 26 sexual violation breeding 26 rape 26, 257–58, 297–99, 301–5 Shadow Lines (Ghosh) 132, 137 Shakespeare, William 126, 187, 189–90, 191 Shakur, Tupac 22–23 al-Sharif, Sayyid Imam 250 Sharkey, Heather 60, 66 Sharrad, Paul 157, 158, 159

364

Index

Sherlock, Philip 233 Shiv Sena 164–65, 167, 168 Shorto, R. 194 Shout Ha! to the Sky (Sullivan) 330, 333–38 Siddiq, Muhammad 289, 290 Skinner, Quentin 17 Slaughter, Joseph 144 slavery 19–23, 255–56, 262 black procreation 25–26 commodities, slaves as 19–20 lynching 22, 26 master–slave dialectics 16, 23–24, 29 ownership of death 23–24 rape 26 rights and responsibilities 45 sexual 14 sexual terror 26 and singing 21–22 Social Gospel 200, 201 Somali diaspora 265–72 Song for Night (Abani) 177, 179–83 Sophiatown: destruction of 227–28 Sorba, Carlotta 105 Soueif, Ahdaf 283, 287, 288, 289, 290, 292–93 South Africa children’s rights in 219–29 performance poets 307–15 Sophiatown: destruction of 227–28 see also Coetzee, J. M.; Gordimer, Nadine Southern Mutiny, Sudan 63–64 sovereignty 8, 144 and biopolitics 174 n. 3 human rights and 167 impoverished migrants and 166 in Indian cities 163–74 of the mind 37, 38 racialized 26, 28 and right of resistance 144 sacred life and 173 violence and 168 Soyinka, Wole 119 Spinoza, Baruch 127 Spiritans (Pères de Saint Esprit) 74–75

Spitz, Jean-Fabien 17 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 266 Staël, Madame de 108 Stark, R. 194–95 Starr, Douglas 129 Stefani, Giulietta 272 Stein, Ruth 243 Stoler, Ann 124–25 Stone, R. 210 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 43 “Strange Fruit” (Arac de Nyeko) 85–88 Straw, Jack 143 street children in India 164–69 in South Africa 219–29 student revolts (1968) 54–55, 56 Sturm, C. 128 Sudan Gordon Memorial College, Sudan 59, 60 Khartoum University College 60, 61–64 literary education in 59–69 National Redemption Front 65–66 Southern Mutiny 63–64 Sullivan, Robert and commitment 328–31 and Foreshore and Seabed Act 331–33 and human rights 328–38 Sun, The 92–93 surface level conception of freedom 17, 18 Syria 214 Arab Literary Academy, Damascus 66 Tagore, Rabindranath 66, 281 Talbi, Mohammed 248 Talese, Gay 288 Te Kooti 104, 106, 109–10, 111, 112 Tempo di uccidere (Flaiano) 266–67 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 67–68 terror 56 racial 14, 16, 22 Sartre on 214–16 sexual 26 terrorism 56, 214–15, 242

Index 365 disturbed late adolescence and 242 Fanon and 54 Munich Olympics 214–15, 216 rebellion and 52 resistance and 49 terrorists 44, 46, 91, 242, 243–46 neo-Fascist 47 Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 96, 99 Thompson, James 45 Tiffin, Helen 234 Times Higher Education Supplement 67 Titmuss, Richard 129 Tjukurrpa 37 “To Be in a Time of War” (Adnan) 291 Tocqueville, Alexis de 192, 198 trauma theory 219–29 alexythymia 223–24, 226 Trewethey, Natasha 177 Tricontinental (General Declaration of the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, OSPAAL, 1966) 52–53 Tricontinental (OSPAAL journal) 53 Tripoli, treaty of 193 Trishanku (Parameswaran) 132, 133–34 Trivedi, Harish 67 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott 323 Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path (Clarke) 316–17, 318–19, 322–26 Trussell, Denys 332 Tsotsi (film) 220 Tsotsi (Fugard) 219–29 alexythymia in 223–24, 226 baby in 225, 226–27 darkness in 223 father in 225–26 identity, loss of 221 memory, loss of 221–22 Sophiatown, destruction of 227–28 Tuqan, Fadwa 291–92 Turner, Victor 105 Tuwhare, Hone 332–33 Uganda 79–88 Acholi tribes 79–80, 83–87

and democracy 79–80 ethnicity in 79–88 LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) 79–80, 86–87 NRA (National Resistance Army) 79–80, 87 Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), ANC 49 UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child (DRC) 220–21 UN General Declaration of Human Rights (1948) 51–52 UN World Conference Against Racism 255–56 Unburnable (John) 231–40 carnival scenes 237–38 natural and spiritual worlds 232–33 relations to place 231–32, 235–37, 238–40 women characters and relation to place 233–35, 238–40 United States of America (USA) American Declaration of Independence (1776) 50–51 American War of Independence 50 BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) 128 Christian Coalition 198 IvI gap 200, 202–3 religion in 192–203 secularization in 195, 198, 199 Southern Blacks 19 student revolt 54–55 Western Blacks 19–23 urban poor 163–64, 166–67, 168, 170– 71, 172 utilitarianism 15 Vacances d’Hegel, Les (Magritte) 168 Vajpeyi, Ashok 40 Van der Walt, M. 222, 223, 226 Vegemite Vindaloo (McMahon) 151, 155–60 Veit-Wild, Flora 310–11 Venice 277–81 Verdi, Giuseppe 103 Vico, Giambattista 128

366 Index video installations Altaf 164, 165 Raqs Media Collective 169–73 Vietnamese Declaration of Independence (1945) 52 violence 53–54, 55–57 resistance and 47, 48–51 and sovereignty 168 white sexual 26 Viroli, Maurizio 11 n. 2, 17 von Rosen, Count Carl Gustav 96 wa Wamwere, Koigi 80 Waikato War 104 Wainwright, J. A. 323, 325 Waitangi, Treaty of 329, 331 Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee) 224 Walcott, Derek 233, 234 Waldby, Catherine 129 Walk in the Night, A (La Guma) 221 Walker, Alice 22 Wallace-Crabbe, Chris 342 war Nigeria–Biafra 91–101 peace and 138 resistance and 45–46 starvation as weapon of 92–93 Ward, Graham 200 Warren, Rick 200 Washington, George 192–93 Wattie, N. 329, 331 Weber, Max 15, 46, 195 Weber, Samuel 125 Wehrs, D. R. 205 Weiss, Michael 197, 202 Western Blacks 19–23 Jim Crow period 22–23 slavery 19–22

Western thought 15–16 White, Katharine 346–47 Whylah Falls (Clarke) 317 Wi Pere Halbert 106, 109, 110–11, 112 Wicked Old Woman, A (Randhawa) 132, 133 Wideman, John Edgar 22 Willow Creek Association 199 Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington, Illinois 199 Wolfe, Tom 286, 288, 343–44 women’s writing Arab 283–93 creative non-fiction 283–93 Italian-Somali 270, 271–72 Ugandan 84 Woodward, Michelle 289 World Bank 73–74 World Child Welfare Charter 219 world citizenship: right of 132 Wright, Alexis 35–42 Wright, Richard 22, 28 writers Arab 283–93 freedom of 341–51 Indian 132–39 Italian-Somali 270, 271–72 Palestinian 43, 284 postcolonial 9–10 Ugandan 84 women 84, 270, 271–72, 283–93 Young, C. 83 Young, Iris 128 al-Zayyat, Latifa 291–92 Zeidan, Joseph 283, 291 Zionism 212, 255 Žižek, Slavoj 56, 310

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