On the Sacred in African Literature: Old Gods and New Worlds

On the Sacred in African Literature Old Gods and New Worlds Edited by Mark Mathuray On the Sacred in African Literat...

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On the Sacred in African Literature Old Gods and New Worlds

Edited by

Mark Mathuray

On the Sacred in African Literature

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On the Sacred in African Literature Old Gods and New Worlds Mark Mathuray

© Mark Mathuray 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-57755-8 ISBN-10: 0-230-57755-5

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mathuray, Mark, 1972– On the sacred in African literature : old gods and new worlds / Mark Mathuray. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-57755-8 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-230-57755-5 (alk. paper) 1. African literature (English)—History and criticism. 2. Holy, The, in literature. 3. Myth in literature. 4. Religion in literature. 5. Culture in literature. 6. Africa--In literature. 7. Magic realism (Literature) 8. Literature and society—Africa— History—20th century. 9. Politics and literature— Africa— History—20th century. I. Title. PR9340.5.M37 2009 820.9’382—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2009013639

For my parents


Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction I

1

Directions

19

1 Realising the Sacred: Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God

21

2 Dramatising the Sacred: Wole Soyinka’s ‘The Fourth Stage’ and Kongi’s Harvest

45

3 Politicising the Sacred: Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between

86

II

Indirections

113

4 Sacred Realism: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

115

5 The Stalled Sublime: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe

137

Conclusion: The Political as Tragic Effect

162

Notes

172

Works Cited

185

Index

197

vii

Acknowledgements Research for this book would have not been possible without the generous financial assistance of the Gates Cambridge Trust, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and Cambridge University’s Board of Graduate Studies. Special thanks must go to Dr Gordon Johnson, Dr Claire Preston and Gabrielle Rose, who have been helpful and understanding. I am deeply indebted to my advisers and intellectual mentors: Tim Cribb, Ato Quayson, Elleke Boehmer, Ulrike Kistner, Minoli Salgado and Robert Eaglestone. Their intellectual rigour, patience and insightful comments have helped me to stay focussed and productive. My friends have been wonderfully supportive. They deserve mention: Hugh McLean, Torsten and Regina Riotte, Hugo Macdonald, Dennis Novy, Ligaya Salazar, Bettina Malcomess and, of course, Andrew Nye. I am very grateful to my family, the Mathurays (my parents and Trevor and Annie) and the Naidoos (Anisha, Ridwaan and Riaan), for their support and love. Slightly different versions of Chapters 1 and 3 appear in Research in African Literatures as ‘Realizing the Sacred: Power and Meaning in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God’ (34.3 (2003): 46–65) and ‘Resuming a Broken Dialogue: Prophecy, Nationalist Strategies, and Religious Discourses in Ngugi’s Early Work’ (40.2 (2009): 40–62), respectively. The publishers and I are very grateful to Indiana University Press for permission to reproduce the material. A section of Chapter 5 appears as ‘Sublime Abjection’ in J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory edited by Elleke Boehmer, Robert Eaglestone and Katy Iddiols and published by Continnum. Every effort has been made to trace rights holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Finally, I would like to thank Paula Kennedy and Steven Hall at Palgrave Macmillan for their help and encouragement.

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Introduction

Like nationalist discourses, African literary criticism revolves around the question of authenticity. The distinctiveness of the African text, its distance from or subversion of European literary forms, constitutes, it seems, its authentic quality. Thus, the ‘Africanness’ of the African text is elaborated and celebrated through positing its appropriation of the oral tradition – both in terms of form and content – as well as the use of myth and ritual. Within African literary criticism, these considerations often provide the impetus for political judgements, prescriptive and proscriptive. This ideological move establishes the primacy of the political in the discipline. This is not surprising as African postcolonial cultural praxis, from its beginning, has allied itself in varied ways to the process of decolonisation and social critique. The relation between the text and the world was pre-eminent. Writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ayi Kwei Armah engaged with the extratextual world through narrative strategies that were often oppositional and disjunctive. If we agree with Jonathan Culler that ‘the novel serves as the model by which society conceives of itself, the discourse through which it articulates the world’ (189), then the African world presented to us is one rent by conflicts and contradictions: the scatological and the sublime, the demonic and the utopian, the mythical and the historical. Yet, at the same time it is also a world of profound unity. In both the ‘mythical’ and ‘realist’ writers, early postcolonial literary production aims towards a sense of totality – an idea of the interconnectedness of the African world. This unity is achieved in very different ways. The realist novel, whose most widely read exponent is Chinua Achebe, attempts to achieve unity and totality through the form of the novel and through the mediated relationship it establishes with the referential world. At the opposite 1

2


pole, and around whom the putative mythopoeic writers like Kwei Armah and Kofi Awoonor coalesce, Wole Soyinka utilises a mythic paradigm for aesthetic production and political action. There is a certain centrifugal tendency in African literary production around each of these writers. As literary critics and social commentators, both Achebe and Soyinka have argued vociferously for the particular merits of their aesthetic approaches; this has helped to consolidate the divide. In dealing with the political imperative, Chinua Achebe employs a strategy of metonymic recuperation, of substituting his specific traditional framework for an elaboration of African culture in the pan-Africanist agenda. He uses Igbo history and culture to articulate the upheavals and dislocations of colonial and postcolonial existence. Similarly, Wole Soyinka offers Yoruba myths as a basis for the understanding of African religious, political and philosophical thought and practice. A ‘primal phenomenon’ posits a cosmological order, ‘a cosmic totality’, in which Africans exist (Myth, Literature and the African World 3). The reciprocal porosity of the natural, social and supernatural spheres derives from an animistic religious framework. Implicit in both their projects is a belief in the unity and certain homogeneity, both political and metaphysical, of Africa. Although Achebe and Soyinka provide distinctively localised engagement with their sociopolitical contexts, their political and aesthetic visions are ‘continentalist’. Soyinka sees no problem in lending his Yoruba patron deity to the southern African liberation struggle. Literary critics have sought to oppose Achebe and Soyinka not just in terms of the narrative strategies they employ but they also translate these strategies into the conditions of possibility for political action. The privileging of one over the other is determined by the scope for political praxis that is believed somehow to inhere in the aesthetic forms adopted by the writers. Therefore the choice between Achebe and Soyinka, between realism and mythopoesis, is often polarised into a choice between progress and reaction.1 It is perhaps unsurprising that Soyinka has been singled out for much criticism given that realism in Africa (as elsewhere) is the privileged mode of most nationalist discourses. Gerald Moore suggests of Soyinka that there is an ‘absence of any direct imprint of history in his governing ideas’ (217). Reviewing Myth, Literature and the African World, Biodun Jeyifo also sees as deeply problematic the dehistoricising impulse of Soyinka’s mythic paradigm: ‘(N)otions, conceptions, symbolic actions and relations are all lifted clean from their material, historical contexts and fused into an ideal world-view whose coherence is purely conceptual.’ (Rev. 15) This derogation of myth is echoed by other African writers and critics. ‘Myths,’

Introduction

3

Simon Gikandi argues along familiar lines, ‘have actually been naturalised by the dominant culture or class to justify its hegemony.’ (Reading the African Novel 150) He problematises what he believes to be Soyinka’s approach of privileging myth as a ‘special kind of insight, the key to a total understanding of the African world’ (Reading the African Novel 150). The derogation of a ‘mythical’ aesthetic and its ability to offer a coherent political vision represents a dominant trend in African literary criticism. This approach, in which there is an implied prioritisation of the realist text to reflect the historico-political, assumes as irreconcilable the opposition of the empirical to the fantastical, the rational to the religious. Readings of realist texts also suppress mythical elements in narrative. Of the conflicts in Umuaro in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God, Gikandi argues that it has nothing to do with the rivalry between the gods, Ulu and Idemili, but represents rather ‘a struggle between two conflicting ideological interests and authorities’ (Reading the African Novel 153). Not only does this critical approach to myth suppose a dichotomisation of history and myth but it also carries assumptions about disenchantment, rationality and the nature of political power. Weberian processes of societal rationalisation and the teleology of the Marxist narrative of production fix the terms of the critique and lead, I believe, to the misrepresentation of the values and forms of the texts. However, Soyinka himself appropriates the term ‘myth’; and its institutionalisation through his theoretical writings has come to determine the manner in which his work, and those who share similar aesthetic strategies, has been analysed. ‘Myth’, which minimally refers to a narrative about gods or mythic personalities in common usage, often indicates, as Jean-Pierre Vernant points out, error, fiction, make-believe and superstition (Myth and Society 186). The co-incidence of myth and falsity may be traced back to a Platonic privileging of reason over narrative, transcendent truth over myth. Plato warns the citizens of the Republic that if they fall under the spell of myth ‘pleasure and pain will be enthroned in [their] city instead of law and the principles which the community accepts as best in any given situation’ (Republic 74). In his conceptualisation, myth and narrative are opposed to rationality and truth. The dominant strand in African literary criticism that opposes myth to truth – be it historical or political – partakes of a movement that began with the birth of Western metaphysics. As Vernant explains, it is specific to Western thought: ‘The concept of myth that we have inherited from the Greeks belongs, by reason of its origins and history, to a tradition of thought peculiar to Western Civilisation in which myth is defined in terms of what is not myth, being opposed to reality

4


(myth is fiction) and, secondly, to what is rational (myth is absurd)’ (Myth and Society186). This conception inaugurated in classical Antiquity ‘became clearly defined through the setting up of an opposition between mythos and logos, henceforth seen as separate and contrasting terms’ (187). For Vernant, this opposition between mythos and logos came to dominate the various attempts to conceptualise myth. For Soyinka, however, myth is both real and rational. The ‘primal reality’ that is myth is not a regression into a subconscious world of fantasy but rather the ‘essentialisation of a rational world-view, one which is elicited from the reality of social and natural experience and from the integrated reality of racial myth, into a living reality’ (Myth 34). ‘Myth’, therefore, is a problematic term to house the process representing this complex African reality, at least in its conceptualisation within the Western episteme. Although modernity, as Max Weber would have it, has completed, to a large extent, the process of disenchanting the Western world that began with Greek speculative philosophy, the recent history of the term from the Romantics to the Modernists has tended to invert the hierarchisation of mythos and logos. The modernism associated with T. S. Eliot has accorded myth the perspective of transcendence, perfection and order. Myth, for Eliot, is opposed to ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ (177); it is an escape from history. Soyinka’s positing of the mythical as an ideal order and his privileging of the mythical method to the narrative method resonate with Eliot’s Modernist articulation of the mythical. However, I have noted that Soyinka’s ‘mythical’ is also inextricably linked to the ‘historical’. This suggests that Soyinka’s view may be associated with the ancient Greeks, for whom myth was foremost a religious epiphenomenon. Writers like Soyinka and Ben Okri have pointed to the similarities between the metaphysical and religious ideas of Homeric Greece and the tragedians, and those of Africa.2 Not much comparative work has been done, apart from correlating certain thematic concerns in the Greek tragedies and African texts. The allusion to the ancient Greeks serves to introduce an idea central to their religious symbolic order that I offer as an alternative category to the ‘mythical’: the sacred. The mythical, however, is not abandoned but will be used very specifically to refer to narratives of divinity.

The ambivalence of the sacred In Indo-European Language and Society, a monumental work on comparative linguistics examining terms related to primary principles of society,

Introduction

5

Émile Benveniste identifies two words in Latin which denote the idea of the sacred: sacer (which corresponds to the Greek hieros) is a thing or person consecrated to the gods; and sanctus (the Greek hagios) refers to a person who, as a result of the attribution of divine favour, possesses a quality which raises him above other men. However, according to Benveniste, sacer has an ambiguous character. Not only is homo sacer animated by a divine force, he is also affected with ‘an ineradicable pollution’. He is both ‘august and accursed, worthy of veneration and evoking horror’ (Benveniste 452).3 Sacer incorporates both the mythic hero and the sacrificial victim. Mary Douglas observes that in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury anthropology and sociology, primitive religion was defined by its inability or refusal to make a clear distinction between sanctity and impurity. For the ‘primitive’, according to these early anthropologists, there was ‘little difference between sacredness and uncleanness’ (Douglas, Purity and Danger 7). Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion, acknowledges psychological and moral components to the ambivalence of the sacred: ‘The ambivalence of the sacred is not only in the psychological order (in that it attracts or repels) but also in the order of values; the sacred is at once “sacred” and “defiled”’ (Patterns in Comparative Religion 14–15). Therefore, divine energy – for example, the Polynesian mana which can be both sanctifying and polluting – is associated with danger. This association includes those invested with divine favour: the absolutely pure is at the same time absolutely impure. Reiterating the Heideggerian conceptualisation (which also defines Heidegger’s ground of Being), Maurice Blanchot writes of the sacred that it is ‘the violence of chaos that offers no pause, the terror of the immediate that thwarts all access’ (cited in Hill 89). As Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy, puts it, the sacred presents the universe as a mysterium tremendum, dreadful and ambiguous. Douglas’s and Blanchot’s similar conceptions of the ambivalence of the sacred derive from distinct intellectual backgrounds, the anthropological/sociological and philosophical/theological respectively. The theory of the original indistinction between the sacred and the impure was first formulated through the study of biblical religion. In his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, the Late Victorian anthropologist William Robertson Smith seminally linked the concept of taboo, which was derived from the study of ‘primitive’ religion, to the rules of uncleanness in Semitic religion. This ground-breaking identification was to have a major influence on the scientific study of religion and, particularly, in the acute interest in so-called ‘primitive religion’

6


during the early decades of the twentieth century.4 In the fourth lecture, Robertson Smith points out that: [A]longside of taboos that exactly correspond to rules of holiness, protecting the inviolability of idols and sanctuaries, priests and chiefs, and generally of all persons and things pertaining to the gods and their worship, we find another kind of taboo which in the Semitic field has its parallel in rules of uncleanness. Women after child-birth, men who have touched a dead body and so forth, are temporarily taboo and separated from human society, just as the same persons are unclean in Semitic religion. […] In most savage societies no sharp line seems to be drawn between the two kinds of taboo just indicated, and even in more advanced nations the notions of holiness and uncleanness often touch. (152–3) In his attempt to distinguish Semitic religion from its ‘pagan’ predecessors and from other ‘taboo’ religions, Robertson Smith claims that the ‘fact that the Semites – or at least the northern Semites – distinguish between the holy and the unclean marks a real advance above savagery’ (154). If the religion is primitive, no clear distinction between the pure and the impure is made; if advanced, the sacred and the unclean are clearly separated. Douglas argues that anthropological evidence does not support this argument and that it may be related to the ‘confused nineteenth-century dialogue between anthropology and theology’ (11–12). She further suggests that Robertson Smith’s influence on Victorian anthropology was to lead to a dead-end in the work of James Frazer, while his influence on French sociology was to lead to fruitful, although problematic, theories in Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.5 Frazer relates the ambivalence of the sacred to the thought processes of what he calls ‘the savage’. The savage cannot distinguish the difference between what is holy and what is unclean;6 s/he thinks like a confused child and, like a child, has difficulty in separating reality and its fantasies. It is from this mistake that magic emerges. As Douglas points out, the savage was for Frazer a ‘credulous fool’ (Purity 23). Thus, Frazer’s phylogenetic schema (which Freud adopted) of evolutionary change from magic to religion to science rehearses ontogeny – the savage thinks and acts like a Western child. In Elementary Forms, Durkheim provided the most detailed examination of the ambivalence of the sacred to that date and the most comprehensive critique of Frazer’s ideas. He believed that he was exploring the most

Introduction

7

elementary of religions – totemism – among the most elementary of peoples: the central Australian aborigines.7 He adopts from Robertson Smith both a communal-ethical view of religion and the belief that the opposition of magic to religion reflects the opposition of individual to society.8 In terms of the sacred, Durkheim makes a clear distinction between the sacred and the profane. Sacred things are subject to prohibitions and restrictions and are kept completely apart from the profane world. He claims: [T]he real characteristic of religious phenomena is that they always suppose a bipartite division of the whole universe, knowable and unknowable, into two classes which embrace all that exists, but which radically exclude each other. Sacred things are those which the interdictions protect and isolate; profane things, those to which the interdictions are applied and which must remain at a distance from the first (40–1). As Steven Lukes points out, for Durkheim the sacred and the profane are ‘mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive’ (Emile Durkheim, His Life and Work 24). The ‘propitious’ sacred forces, which inspire respect, love and gratitude, are ‘only collective forces hypostatised; that is to say, moral forces; they are made up of the ideas and sentiments awakened in us by the spectacle of society’ (Durkheim 411, 322). He explains that the ‘close kinship’ between the propitiously sacred and the ‘unpropitiously’ sacred (those evil and impure powers, which are productive of disorder) may be related to the collective nature of both aspects of the sacred. As objectifications of collective states, as representations of different aspects of society, the opposite strands of the sacred tend to blend into each other (see 410–13). In Durkheim’s theory, confused ‘thinking’ is placed, it would seem, at the level of the collective. For Durkheim, the propitiously sacred and the unpropitiously sacred represent the two poles of religious life which are clearly distinguished from the realm of the profane, which he characterises by both a certain ‘ordinariness’ – ordinary life and relations with ordinary things – and by its opposition to the social nature of the sacred – its private nature. The two categories, which he sees as profoundly differentiated and radically opposed to each other, can be related to one of the Weberian processes of societal rationalisation: the differentiation of society in modernity into different autonomous spheres of activity, like religion, economics, politics etc. Thus, the profane in Durkheim’s dualism recuperates the economic realm as he associates it with the utilitarian world of economic production and clearly demarcates it from the religious sphere.9 For Robertson Smith, however, among the Semites

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there is ‘no separation between the spheres of religion and ordinary life’ (29). The rigidity of Durkheim’s opposition between the sacred and the profane and his methodology of positing static dichotomies have received much criticism and have been duly rejected; for example, W. E. H. Stanner writes that the aboriginal ‘world’ is ‘not divided in fact, and therefore should not be divided in theory, into two classes’, and that Durkheim’s dichotomies (sacred-profane, society-individual etc.) are ‘unusable except at the cost of undue interference with the facts of observation’ (230, 229). Douglas, from her social-structuralist perspective, acknowledges social anthropology’s debt to Durkheim for the emphasis (most would say over-emphasis) he places on the social in accounting for religious forms and values. He regards the totem, the divinity, or the sacred itself, as society transformed and conceived symbolically. Douglas extends this analysis to relate the sacred to a general view of the social order. She interprets the ambivalence of the sacred as ‘symbols of the relations between parts of society, as mirroring designs of hierarchy and symmetry’ (Purity 4). In general, I adopt this social-structuralist approach as the basis for describing and evaluating the use of ritual and religious forms in society and in the chosen texts.10 However, it is the cultural anthropology of Victor W. Turner that seems, to me at least, to be more appropriate to the project at hand. Douglas limits her analyses to the social-structuralist context of rituals, regarding rituals as mere expressions of ‘society’s awareness of its own configurations and necessities’ (Implicit Meanings 54). In providing a processual view not only of traditional society but also of ritual itself, Turner’s conceptual apparatus and methodology escape the rigid dichotomising of Durkheim’s theory. In foregrounding the transformative aspects of ritual and the use of symbols therein as a means of generating change, Turner moves away from the ‘functionalism’ of Douglas’s approach and its strategy of relating ritual exclusively to aspects of social structure.

Structure and communitas In The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Turner extends his ritual studies of the Ndembu, particularly in The Forest of Symbols and The Drums of Affliction, to embrace aspects of general society. He adopts Van Gennep’s view of the processual nature of ritual to develop his ideas about liminality. Van Gennep identified three phases to the rite of passage ritual. The first is the pre-liminal phase, or separation stage, in which a group or individual, through particular symbolic behaviour, is detached from an earlier

Introduction

9

fixed point in the social structure. This is followed by the liminal period, in which the ritual subject has an ambiguous nature. S/he is ‘neither here nor there’, s/he is ‘betwixt and between’ social structures; stripped of rank, status, property etc. (The Ritual Process 95). The rite of passage is completed in the post-liminal phase, during which the ritual subject is reintegrated into the social structure with a new set of rights and obligations. Turner adopts Paul Goodman’s term communitas to designate the feelings of comradeship and egalitarianism that develop among the ritual subjects during the liminal phase. In the Ritual Process, Turner suggests: What is interesting about liminal phenomena is the blend they offer of lowliness and sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship. We are presented, in such rites, with a ‘moment in and out of time’, and in and out of secular social structure, which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of a generalized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be fragmented into a multiplicity of structural ties. These are the ties organized in terms either of caste, class, or rank hierarchies or of segmentary oppositions in the stateless societies beloved of political anthropologists (The Ritual Process 96) He therefore extends one of the characteristics he identifies in the liminal phase to denote one of the modalities in his theory of society. Through the notion of communitas, liminality, marginality, inferiority and equality come to represent the generalised social bond that stands outside society – society understood as a structure of differentiated relationships that give it its character at any given moment in time. Beyond the particular structure and, as such, ineffable, communitas, the ground of social being, is at the same time the ultimate source of structure, power and authority, and is always in play. This ground is the realm of the sacred. Unknowable but essential, the sacred is fraught with danger and contradiction. Communitas and structure represent two modes of society that operate simultaneously and in tension with each other. Turner also suggests that a dialectical relation between structure and communitas operates in a cyclical manner in history: ‘Maximisation of communitas provokes maximisation of structure, which in turn produces revolutionary strivings for renewed communitas.’ (The Ritual Process 129)11 Turner’s opposition of structure and communitas may be distinguished from Durkheim’s sacred-profane dualism. Not only is his model processual, it also acknowledges sacred aspects of structural

10


positions: ‘Certain fixed offices in tribal societies have many sacred attributes; indeed, every social position has some sacred characteristics.’ (The Ritual Process 96–7)12 Turner stumbles when it comes to addressing the polluting, negative pole of sacred ambivalence. Following Douglas, he attributes it to a problem of classification – that which falls between classificatory boundaries is almost everywhere regarded as polluting (see The Ritual Process 108–09). Why this should be so, or why such divergent social positions – for example, the sacred king and the socially marginal person – accrue sacred ambivalences, remains unexplained. I relate forms of the sacred found in the various texts, on the one hand, with the ancient Greeks; to traditional society’s attempts to both set limits to society and to create a space for the contestation of those limits. On the other hand, and more significantly for my project, I also relate the sacred to arguments about the distribution of power in the socio-political structure of traditional society, and to the strategy of giving sense to the structure and functions of social organisation. Turner’s symbolic approach to ritual also informs my reading of traditional religious forms. He draws attention to the culturally meaningful aspects of ritual which anticipate and generate change and thus impact on history. His early educational training in English language and literature allows Turner to bring a distinctively literary approach to his studies of ritual. In Schism and Continuity in an African Society, his doctoral dissertation, he introduces the idea of ‘social drama’ to account for the processes of resolving social conflict in Ndembu society.13 In The Forest of Symbols and The Drums of Affliction, Turner offers a sophisticated model for the analysis of symbols in ritual. Symbols are the smallest unit of ritual which still retain the specific properties of ritual behaviour. They are the ‘ultimate unit of specific structure [he means semantic structure here] in a ritual context’ (Drums 2). They ‘store’ fundamental social and religious values and are transformative in relation to human behaviour. For Turner, ritual is symbolic action (see Deflem 3–4). In Forest, Turner differentiates between dominant and instrumental symbols; the former possess a high degree of autonomy and consistency in many different ritual contexts and the latter become meaningful only in relation to other symbols and the total system of symbols comprising the ritual (see 31–2). The semantic structure of the ritual (the relationships between signs and symbols and the things to which they refer) has several characteristics. Briefly, they include: multiple meanings (what Turner calls significata) of the actions or objects in the ritual; unification of apparently disparate significata through analogy or by association; condensation, in which many ideas, relations between things, actions,

Introduction

11

interactions and transactions are represented simultaneously by the symbol; and, finally, polarisation of significata (or bipolarity), in which the symbol refers to two distinct and opposed poles of meaning – the ideological or normative pole (referring to aspects of the moral and social order) and the sensory (or orectic) pole, which stimulates desires and feelings (See Forest 28–9, 50–5 and Drums 18–19). Turner’s insistence on the fundamental importance of dominant symbols in the ritual context distinguishes his approach from the analytical methodology of structuralism. Whereas structuralists insist that the meaning of a symbol can only be sought in its relation to its oppositional symbol, Turner claims a certain autonomy for the dominant symbol and can thus relate the bipolarity of the symbol to the ambivalence of the sacred, i.e. a single symbol can house the bipolar quality within itself.14 My approach to the texts maintains, in relation to the sacred, a balance between communitas and structure, paying much attention to social-structural contexts, including: the relations between royalty and subjects; the tensions produced from competing spheres of political influence; and the conflict between lineages and age-grades etc. in order to ‘ground’ my deployment of Turner’s cultural anthropology. However, with the help of Soyinka (and Turner), I resist an approach to the sacred that relates it exclusively to principles and conflicts of the socio-political order, and also explore the metaphysical implications of the idea of the sacred. Although my approach emphasises ontological, epistemological and historical continuities between diverse societies, it is not essentialist or essentialising. It is properly attentive to the differences of historical, political and cultural contexts of the various writers and their texts.

Myth and animism As the object of enquiry, or in the interests of establishing continuities with the past, myth, ritual and magic are important elements of African cultural production. This book seeks to introduce to the field of African literary criticism the idea of the sacred. Theories of the ambivalence of the sacred have not been used in the elucidation of the logic of African symbolic production. Myth has been the preferred term. Surprisingly, there have been very few studies that deal with the literary deployment of myth (in its most general form of referring to mythical stories, cosmology, magic, ritual and traditional religion), on a continental-wide basis or even on a regional basis.15 In terms of regional studies, the focus has been, to a large extent, limited to the West African context.16 In Myth, Realism and the West African Writer, Richard K. Priebe uses the

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well-trodden opposition between the aesthetics and politics of Soyinka and Achebe to discuss the use of myth in writers like Ayi Kwei Armah, Kofi Awoonor, Amos Tutuola and Soyinka himself.17 His opposition between Soyinka and Achebe rests on dualisms he sets up between mythical and ethical consciousnesses and rhetorics. Since Achebe’s ‘The Novelist as Teacher’, it has become a critical commonplace to regard Achebe as a didactic writer. However, anyone reading Achebe’s novels would realise that they are anything but didactic. There are no major lessons that Achebe didactically imparts to the reader, no understanding of inevitable historical processes that this writer of realist fiction uses to frame his narrative project. In fact, Priebe derives the opposition that he sets up from Soyinka himself, using Soyinka’s derogation of Achebe and praise for Tutuola for his characterisation of the distinction between mythical and ethical consciousness.18 By using the idea of the sacred, I attempt to short-circuit this opposition by suggesting that forms of the sacred operate in both writers’ works. Thus, the trope of liminality (and marginality) that Priebe sees as distinctive of the mythical writers proves crucial to understanding the ‘big men’ in Achebe’s and Ngugi’s novels. The most noteworthy study of myth and ritual in the Nigerian context is Ato Quayson’s Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing. In this incisive book, he explores the deployment and transformations of elements from an indigenous resource base (the oral tradition, myth, ritual etc.) by a range of Nigerian writers and through various genres (historiography, folktale, modernism and ‘magic realism’). Despite claiming that he extends and moves away from Abiola Irele’s identification of a specific ethnic tradition, his choice of writers means that Quayson’s focus in terms of the indigenous cultural realm is almost exclusively directed at Yoruba history and cultural forms. Although sitting uneasily with the rest of the book, which deals with Yoruba writers, his chapter on Ben Okri complicates this specific ethnic focus. As in Priebe’s analysis, Quayson identifies a trope of liminality as ‘a thread of continuity’ between the various works (Strategic Formations 160). I will show that this particular trope is both fundamental to and constitutive of the conceptual underpinning of the indigenous resource base through the idea of the sacred. I will also show that myth, ritual and the oral repertoire play just as fundamental a role in African realist texts as in those ‘mythical’ ones identified by Priebe and Quayson. An exemplary continental-wide analysis of the use of myth and ritual in African literature is Caroline Rooney’s African Literature, Animism and Politics. Rather than myth, Rooney proposes a re-appropriation, following Robin Horton, of Tylor’s largely discredited theory of animism

Introduction

13

as a means of addressing ontological and cultural continuities among African peoples and literatures. I follow Durkheim in his rejection of Tylor’s view of animism, propounded in Primitive Culture, which relates the emergence of religion to the processes of dreaming and death, and which leads to a misconstrued extrapolation of the existence of a double self, a soul (anima), by the child-like ‘savage’. If Tylor’s theory of animism were true, Durkheim asserts, ‘it would be necessary to admit that religious beliefs are so many hallucinatory representations, without any objective foundation whatsoever’ (68). Tylor reduces religion, Durkheim thus argues, to a ‘tissue of illusions’ (69). However, recent views of animism tend to blend theories of naturism and animism to refer to a vision of the world in which the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, the animate and the inanimate, the dead and the living, are relatively porous, and nature itself seems to be charged with animate forces.19 Margaret Thompson Drewal’s description of Yoruba thought succinctly conveys the contemporary view of animism: In Yoruba thought, the otherworldly domain (orun) coexists with the phenomenal world of people, animals, plants and things (aye). Orun includes a pantheon of uncountable deities (orisa), the ancestors (osi, egun), and spirits both helpful and harmful. The world and the otherworld are always in close proximity, and both human and other spirits travel back and forth between the two. (Yoruba Ritual 26) It is this view of animism, broadly speaking, that informs aspects of Rooney’s approach. In her complex and interesting book, she uses this view to deftly traverse postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis and feminist theory, and provide insightful partial readings of a very wide range of texts. However, the problem with this approach, as I see it, is the wholesale adoption of animism as a framework to engage African texts. Animism emphasises continuity and harmony between different ontological and epistemological spheres. Soyinka, as we shall see in more detail in Chapter 2, has qualified the animistic view of traditional African religion by suggesting that it represents only one half of its ontological apparatus. The other half is characterised by danger, forms of pollution, loss of subjectivity, radical discontinuity and the liminality explored by Priebe and Quayson. Many anthropologists have also pointed to the characterisation of the supernatural in traditional thought as menacing and destructive, as potentially antagonistic to human society.20 This is where the idea of the sacred becomes crucial.

14


It brings to the fore the bipolar quality of certain religious ideas and the ambivalence attached to the religious experience in traditional African society (and in most other traditional religious societies in the world). The idea of the sacred also houses, often within a single term, both oppositional qualities and at the same time charts their reversibility and interchangeablity. Most significantly, the ambivalence attached to the sacred allows us to address the social conflicts, as well as solidarities, expressed in sacred symbols, and, following on from that, insists on relating them to history and society. The book is an interdisciplinary project, drawing on the disciplines of social anthropology, sociology and history, specifically the history of religion. I aim to explore the idea of the sacred in relation to a variety of English African texts and to provide a framework for the analysis of the sacred in Anglophone African cultural production. My discussion of the sacred operates on two levels simultaneously. From ‘below’, I use ethnographic and historical evidence to tease out the significance of the idea of the sacred for the reading of African texts which attempt to represent or bring into play both indigenous beliefs and practices and traditional social and political structures. This involves a focus on the local and the specific content and contexts of the works discussed. From ‘above’, I investigate the theoretical and philosophical elaborations of the idea of the sacred. I foreground the more materially-minded aspects in the first part of the book, and the theoretical aspects in the second. The structure of the book is determined by a consideration of both generic and thematic concerns. In the first section, ‘Directions’, I focus on three major figures in African literary-cultural production: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thing’o. I provide detailed readings of a work by each of them, in which I interrogate the tension between power and authority, which is crucial to an understanding of their work, by refracting that tension through the prism of the sacred. It will become clear that approaching the analysis of power from the ground of the sacred offers original insights into the functioning and representation of the politics of power in the texts addressed. As my analysis of the sacred draws primarily from research into traditional society, I am interested in how these writers negotiate and depict continuity with and change from traditional beliefs and practices. Therefore, I have chosen those texts by Achebe, Soyinka and Ngugi that engage the tumultuous encounter between the traditional and the imported – belief systems, social and political structures, and forms of cultural expression.21 The first three chapters analyse Achebe’s Arrow of God, Soyinka’s play Kongi’s Harvest and Ngugi’s The River Between

Introduction

15

respectively. Due to his extensive critical work on the significance of the indigenous religious framework to aesthetics and politics and his deployment of ‘mytho-poetics’ in his plays, novels and poetry, Soyinka receives the lion’s share of the commentary. In the second part of the book, ‘Indirections’, I move away from the interrogation of the ontological, political and epistemological implications of the idea of the sacred and from the ethnographic data and historical evidence used to locate and explore the political unconscious of African symbolic production in specific circumstances. In this section, I address the issue of the representation of the sacred and extend theoretical elements of the category of the sacred. The fourth chapter explores the textual inscription of the sacred and reveals how the sacred, defined in the preceding chapters, exposes mistaken assumptions in the way ‘magic realism’ is used to describe magic, myth and ritual in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. The final chapter departs from the ‘African’ sacred but extends the theoretical discussion of the sacred by investigating the relation between the sacred and the aesthetic category of the sublime in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe. In this chapter, the non-ethnographic philosophical approach to the sacred comes to the fore. Otto’s The Idea of the Holy is crucial to this endeavour. His 1917 book, itself a hybrid text caught somewhere between theology and secular philosophy, represents a culmination of a long history in German philosophising on the sacred. As in Max Müller’s point of departure for his theory of naturism, humans’ encounter with the might of nature and the concomitant sense of ‘nothingness’ in relation to this absolute Other represent, for Otto, the distinctiveness of the religious experience. He elaborates what he calls the ‘non-rational’ elements of religious experience. Primary to this experience is a sense of mystery, which denotes not merely that which is hidden and esoteric, but also that ‘which is beyond conception or understanding, extraordinary and unfamiliar’ (13). His terms rehearse the ethnological conceptualisation of the ambivalence of the sacred. Religious experience involves, in a ‘strange harmony of contrasts’, the combination of the experience of the mysterium tremendum (in which the awe-fulness of the divine object is foregrounded, religious dread being its most significant affective correlative) and the mysterium fascinosum (in which a sense of awe-someness, fascination and veneration takes precedence) (see Otto 26–31). Otto locates precedents to his theory in Goethe’s ‘daemonic’, Schopenhauer’s Will and Kant’s aesthetic of the sublime. Heidegger’s and Blanchot’s views on the ambivalence of the sacred belong to this intellectual tradition. Georges Bataille’s theorising of the sacred attempts to bridge the German philosophical and

16


English/French anthropological and sociological strands, in a similar manner to Soyinka’s elaborations. Anyone familiar with mythical tropes and archetypes in African literatures would not have failed to notice a significant absence in my project – the sacrality of the female body. As we shall see, in the texts discussed, which are all by male authors, the female body often functions as a sacred being, accruing to itself all the ambivalences of the realm of the sacred – unknowable but essential, generative and destructive, fecund and barren, life and death. There are a number of female writers (Ama Ata Aidoo, Buchi Emecheta, Yvonne Vera etc.) who have contested the strategy of sacralising the feminine as this strategy arguably detracts from addressing the very real problem of the gender stratification of social inequalities in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa. I have not dealt with this problematisation of the sacred female subject partly due to length restrictions of the book and, from this perspective, understand that my project would be far more comprehensive if I had. This absence is also partly due to the specific focus in the first part of the book. While issues of gender and sexual inequality have been addressed both in literary depictions of traditional African society and in critical analyses, not much literary critical work has been done on what emerges from my reading as the definitive rupture in traditional sociopolitical structure, the destabilisation of and break with gerontocracy, which defines, in large part, the ambit of my approach.22 As a point of departure, allow me to clarify some of the terminology used in the book. Terms such as myth, ritual, magic, religion and the traditional have had long histories in various disciplines and their meanings are still contested today. I do not have the space to get into the arguments about each of these terms and I choose those definitions, with some expediency, that fit well both with the object of the study and my approach. As I pointed out above, I will use ‘myth’ to refer to narratives of gods. The centrality of the sacred for Durkheim’s conceptualisation of religion motivates my preference for his definition of religion: ‘A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.’ (47) The dual character of Turner’s view of ritual is compelling. On the one hand, he defines ritual as ‘prescribed formal behaviour for occasions not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in mystical beings and powers’ (The Forest of Symbols 19). On the other hand, he emphasises the processual nature of ritual and relates ritual to historical change through the manipulation of symbols (see above). Although magic in the anthropological sense refers to the belief in and

Introduction

17

the practice of the influencing of events through supernatural means, the use of the term ‘magic’ in Chapter 4 relates to (and problematises) its function within discourses of magic realism, where it refers to anything from the indigenous religious realm to non-scientific thinking. I use ‘the traditional’, in a traditional sense, to designate the pre-colonial although not always necessarily the pre-modern. With these definitions in mind, let us turn to the analysis of the functioning of the sacred in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God.


I

Directions


1 Realising the Sacred: Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God

In ‘Chi in Igbo Cosmology’, Chinua Achebe attempts to explicate aspects of the sacred worldview of the Igbo through an analysis of the nature of chi, which he claims is central to Igbo psychology.1 Without an understanding of chi, he maintains, ‘one could not begin to make sense of the Igbo world-view’ (93). Achebe argues that in the language of the Igbo, the two distinct meanings of chi, a ‘god-agent’ and a transitional period between night and day, actually reveal a common etymology – both are related to the sun, and hence to Chukwu (literally, the Great Chi), the Igbo supreme deity. Chi, in an important sense, partakes of the nature of Chukwu. As a god-agent, chi, the spirit-double of every terrestrial being, is responsible for the creation and destiny of its terrestrial counterpart. Chi is thus the ultimate source of destiny for each individual. This religious understanding that every Igbo person is ‘both a unique creation and the work of a unique creator’ generates a belief in the fundamental worth and independence of every human being and a political organisation that is marked by a ‘fierce egalitarianism’ (‘Chi’ 98, 103). However, Achebe is quick to point out that, unlike the Western ideal of individual autonomy, the Igbo immediately set about balancing what he would call in a later essay this ‘extraordinary specialness’, this ‘unprecedented uniqueness’, through a curtailment of the individual’s power by making it subordinate to the will of the community (‘The Writer’ 39). In support of this point, Achebe re-phrases a line from his third novel, Arrow of God: ‘No man however great can win judgement against all the people.’ (‘Chi’ 99)2 He also points out that the Igbo do not normally associate chi with moral sanction, which is the responsibility of Ani (the Igbo goddess of the earth), but relate it to social success or failure (as the source of destiny). 21

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The socially-derived oppositions in Igbo beliefs – between the power of the individual and the will of the community, between private autonomy and public accountability, and between destiny and morality – gird a symbolic opposition of earth and sky forces, which I will discuss at greater length below. The Igbo oppose, in symbolic thought, the sources of destiny (chi, the deities, Chukwu) to the moral domain (the clan, the community). Thus, chi is seen as somehow antagonistic to its terrestrial double precisely because of its determinate relation to its human counterpart, the ‘special power that chi has over its man’ (‘Chi’ 96). This opposition is reflected in the spatial differentiation of the Igbo cosmos. Two supernatural realms exist in parallel to the human realm: the land of the ancestors (ani mmo), which is similar in appearance and contiguous with the human abode; and the land of chi, which is forbidden to humans and is thus taboo. The realm of chi is of a radically different order from that of the other two realms, and, like the supreme deity, is shrouded in ‘mystery and metaphor’ (‘Chi’ 102). The opacity of the realm of the sources of destiny caters for contingency, for chance, in a world otherwise integrated through an animistic framework. More importantly, the opposition between the sources of power and humans works to set a limit to human aspirations: ‘The limit is not the sky; it is somewhere much closer to the earth.’ (Achebe, ‘Chi’ 96) Chi is the quintessential sacred entity: it evokes both dread and reverence, it is consecrated and taboo. The various social and symbolic oppositions derived from Achebe’s essay on the significance of chi will be explored in this chapter. By proposing the term ‘sacred’ for what was previously termed the ‘mythical’ in Achebe’s Arrow of God, I hope to preserve both the religious charge of the mythical and the original ambiguity of the sacred (as both divine and defiled, as evoking horror and reverence, and as that which animates and that which puts to death). The sacred will not be explored by proceeding to identify the traces of myth per se and mythic personalities in the text. Rather, I seek to interrogate the conceptual underpinnings of the symbolic order of the world created by the text: the political and epistemological implications of a specific articulation of the sacred.

Reading the mythical Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God has drawn much critical attention, perhaps the most of all his novels. Interpretation seems to flounder in the face of the preponderance of the representation of myth, ritual and religious beliefs and practices in the realist novel. In dealing with

Realising the Sacred 23

the question of power in Arrow of God, a common strategy for analysis is to foreground both ‘the colonial factor’ and the opposition of the power-hungry individual to his ‘republican’ society. Focussing on the resultant conflict from the cultural contact between Igbo traditional society and the colonial authority, Emmanuel Obiechina argues that Nwaka is able to subvert Ezeulu’s power because ‘the colonial authority has taken away from the traditional authority and the peoples the right to exercise judicial or even non-legal violence. The exercise of judicial coercion and violence belongs solely to the colonial regime from now onwards.’ (235)3 The assumption that underlies his reading is the Weberian-derived specification of power and political community as necessarily coercive and violent. Through a consideration of South American ‘stateless’ societies, Pierre Clastres argues that it is possible for societies to exist and develop without a division between coercers and coerced structuring the sphere of the political (4). Notwithstanding a certain idealisation involved in Clastres’ argument, it does problematise a reading that centralises a conceptualisation of power appropriate only to the modern European state, thus allowing us to read more critically a novel principally concerned with elaborating the religious and political dimension of segmental traditional society. Moreover, in Arrow of God, it is this particular approach to power that informs the colonial characterisation of Igbo society as lacking in ‘natural rulers’ as justification for instituting warrant chieftaincy – an approach that Achebe is at pains to destabilise. The concomitant of this tendency, the opposition of the individual to society, centralises Ezeulu and places him at odds with his republican society. Critics like Obiechina, Simon Gikandi and Umelo Ojinmah attribute the central conflict in the text to the chief priest’s desire for personal power. Simon Gikandi goes so far as to suggest, ‘Ezeulu’s quest for “ultimate things” or “cosmic control” is exposed, in the course of the novel, as a subtle mask for his more pragmatic desire for secular authority.’ (Reading Chinua Achebe 55) For these critics, it is Ezeulu’s pride, ambition and egotism that precipitate the outcome of the narrative. Akuebue’s warning to Ezeulu, which is repeated at the conclusion of the novel: ‘no man however great was greater than the clan’ (Arrow 230), is often quoted as textual evidence. According to this line of argument, Ezeulu is trapped between his desire for power and his obligation to fulfil his social function. Not only is this indicative of the pyschologistic tendency in analyses of realist texts, but Achebe, writing of the figure of the ‘hero’ in the African novel, argues, in ‘The Writer in His Community’, that ‘the non-Westerner does not have the obligation of creating the individual

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hero, the very paradigm of creation, because the individual is subordinate to the community and is subject to non-human forces in the universe’ (38). Achebe’s specification of the socio-religious articulation of the individual in the African realist text destabilises an approach that proceeds by opposing the individual to society. If Lukács is right in asserting that form determines content, then Achebe’s realist text is inevitably locked in an inescapable paradox; that is, of subverting that which defines it as itself. I return to this later. More importantly, both aspects of the identified tendency, the centralisation of the colonial factor and the opposition of Ezeulu to Umuaro, subtly delimit the discourse of critical work as both involve an implicit disavowal of the mythico-religious aspects of the text by according primacy to socio-political interpretation. This is achieved by universalising a Weberian-derived conceptualisation of power particular to the West and by adopting a literary framework specific to European realism. Another strategy in critical analyses of Arrow of God attempts to deal directly with the sacred elements in the text. Representative of this tendency is Simon Gikandi’s reading, which suppresses the mythico-religious dimension of the text by claiming that ‘the conflicts in Umuaro are not a rivalry between two gods Ulu and Idemili’ but ‘actually a struggle between two conflicting ideological interests and authorities’, represented by Nwaka and Ezeulu (Reading the African Novel 153). Following Roland Barthes, he posits myth and ideology as coincidental and suggests the need to historicise myths because they ‘become instruments of domination when historical events are presented as manifestations of an ahistorical and natural order’ (Reading the African Novel 154). However, Barthes, contra Gikandi, makes an important distinction between ritual and ideology/myth. Ritual emphasises its own artificiality (its arbitrariness) rather than concealing it behind an appearance of naturalness (see Mythologies 95–7). This distinction is fundamental for any critique of a novel that abounds in painstakingly detailed descriptions of events consecrated and regulated through ritual activity. Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, also notes that the collectivity represented by the sacred cannot be the same as dominant class interest (see 407–08). On the question of meaning, Gikandi’s analyses share with almost every other reading a preoccupation with the ‘crisis of meaning’ in the novel, what G. D. Killam in an early analysis called ‘the problem of knowing’ (60). Gikandi notes that Ezeulu’s ‘drive for monological meanings’ opposes the ‘plurality of perspectives insisted on by the novel and the authorial representation of the traditional Igbo system of


knowledge’ (Reading Chinua Achebe 57–9, my emphasis). Critics attribute this hermeneutical indeterminacy, in every instance, to authorial intentionality. For example, David Carroll claims that Achebe is ‘unwilling to commit himself finally on the precise relationship between inner and outer, between Ezeulu’s need for power and the god he worships’ (123), and Innes believes that the author is ‘unresolved’ about the issue, leaving ‘the reader involved in the problem of knowing’ (73). On the one hand, this argument reveals a belief in the transparency of the realist text to offer itself up with interpretive ease, for it suggests that authorial intervention deliberately creates this indeterminacy. On the other hand, it betrays a refusal on the part of the critics to relate this ‘crisis of meaning’ to the symbolic order of a society regulated by the sacred. By treating myth as ideology and by raising the fallacy of intentionality, these readings occlude the ambivalences and antinomies of the sacred. Much that has been written on Arrow of God has focussed on the political and is invariably centred on the coercive power of the colonial force and the abhorrence of the concentration of excessive power within the Igbo traditional political system. This comparative approach has often not gone beyond identifying one as secular and the other as religious. A more nuanced distinction is necessary.

Locating power In S/Z, Roland Barthes argues that antithesis is the most stable figure in the art of rhetoric: ‘Its apparent function is to consecrate (and domesticate) by a name, by a metalinguistic object, the division between opposites and the very irreducibility of this division.’ (26–7) Of the five ‘codes’ of the text, under which all textual signifiers are grouped, only the symbolic is based on antithesis, which allows for ‘a whole space of substitution and variation’ to be opened up (S/Z 27). These oppositions are ‘separated by the most inflexible of barriers: that of meaning’, and it is precisely this barrier that is exploited by the text – exposing, manipulating and transgressing it. This manifestation and deployment of the play of signification draws attention to the symbolic processes of ‘condensation’ (‘the paroxysm of transgression’) and ‘transference’ (S/Z 27). For Claude Lévi-Strauss, these processes involve the opposition and conjuncture of terms by a shared quality, which is followed by a redeployment of their oppositionality in relation to the shared quality, signifying either its absence or presence. Lévi-Strauss is keen to demonstrate that the principal opposition in any symbolic system is that between nature and culture, and it is this opposition that brings

26


to a halt both the movement of the narrative and the potentialities of metaphor (The Raw and the Cooked 28). This privileging of the systemic denies the dynamics of narrative and, as Jacques Derrida points out, continues the project of Western metaphysics:,the abrogation of mythos in favour of a logocentricism (‘Structure, Sign and Play’ 291). Therefore, I suggest that a consideration of the deployment of antithesis in literary texts must not only involve the structuralist assertion that meaning is generated not through the terms themselves but by their relationality, but must also engage the processes through which these oppositions are generated by the narrative: more specifically, how they function to institute crises that propel the flow of events. This approach seeks to deprioritise the symbolic insofar as its meanings are inextricably linked to the logic of narrative, although not fully exhausted by it. Like Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God charts the downfall of a figure of central importance to his society.4 Unlike Things Fall Apart, where Okonkwo’s suicide is related to the upheavals and transformation brought about by the military superiority of the colonial regime, Ezeulu’s madness is tied to an examination of Igbo society itself and the ambivalences it generates. In the novel, the temporal movement between co-ordinate elements along the temporal axis of the text, which corresponds to Barthes’ proairetic code, is crossed both by the elaboration of specific oppositions organised around the principal antagonists of the chief priest and by detailed descriptions of rituals, sacred or otherwise. Of the latter, one may note a certain archival tendency in Achebe’s ‘traditional’ texts, and in African literary realism in general – to collect, catalogue and store within the realm of fiction those aspects of culture that have been obliterated or are under threat of being engulfed by the tides of history. As such, archival realism is a genre of loss. In European realism, these ‘digressions’ and anecdotes might be attributed to the signalling of l’effet du réel, of constituting the realistic texture of the novel and assimilating it to the contingent details of reality itself (see Barthes, ‘L’Effet’ 84–9). This affirmation of an objective referent is always potentially refused in Achebe’s texts as a result of a disjuncture in the code through which narrator and reader are signified. The world that Achebe communicates is a world that is potentially alien or forever lost to the reader. Archival realism is, therefore, also a genre of alienation. Of the elaboration of symbolic oppositions in Arrow of God, one notes the pre-eminence of a continuity/change opposition, one that narrates both loss and alienation, specifying the ambit of archival realism. The symbolic code of the novel proceeds through a series of


antagonisms: Winterbottom/Ezeulu (colonial power/traditional power), Nwaka/Ezeulu (political power/sacred power), John Goodcountry/Moses Unachukwu (desacralisation/retaining the sacred), Oduche/Nwafo (conversion/fidelity). The left side of these oppositions represents change to the socio-political and religious framework of Umuaro and metonymically to actual Igbo society, while the right side asserts the importance of continuity. It must be remembered that although Ezeulu is open to change, he is ultimately interested in preserving the religious order of his society. These oppositions may be translated, pace Lévi-Srauss, as an opposition between the prioritisation of autochthony and its refusal. By focussing on the symbolic oppositions of the text, the relationship between power and the sacred makes itself manifest. Ezeulu, the chief priest of Umuaro, a confederacy of six villages, is central to his society. He mediates between Ulu, the deity who offers protection and security, and the clan; keeps the calendar; and calls and performs Umuaro’s two main planting and harvesting festivals. As the axis of Umuaro’s socio-religious relations, Ezeulu represents their collective solidarity. His power over the lives of the people arises from his mediation of the forces of nature, which are also sources of destiny. A cursory glance at the colonial factor is necessary. The symbolic opposition of Winterbottom to Ezeulu is established at Winterbottom’s first appearance in the text through a metonymic displacement: it is the district officer’s relation to nature that sets up the opposition. While Ezeulu acts as mediator between his god and his people principally through nature and the physical universe, Winterbottom feels under threat from the African landscape. By internally focalising the narration, Achebe skilfully portrays the colonial perspective and its discursive strategies of inscribing the encounter with Africa. Expressions like ‘the heat had been building up to an unbearable pitch’ and ‘the country turned into a furnace’ (Arrow 29), render the environment from Winterbottom’s perspective as a purgatorial space. Not only does it represent disease and death (‘Perhaps another bout of fever was on the way’, Winterbottom worries (Arrow 29), but also a threat to the sense of selfhood (‘Could it be that the throbbing came from his own heat-stricken brain’ (Arrow 30)). The contrasting relation between Ezeulu and Winterbottom, through its displacement to their relation to nature, may be seen as a signifier of their radically different approaches to power. Ezeulu derives his power from a symbolic order that locates being-in-the-world bound to nature and the realm of spirits, ancestors and gods. The reciprocal porosity of the natural and supernatural, the visible and invisible, means that

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power in African social systems, as many anthropologists have suggested, is linked to the ability to access the supernatural realm through nature. ‘The exercise of political influence derives from access to and work upon the natural and supernatural spheres, both as source of power to control others and the legitimisation of actions’ (Arens and Karp xvii). Modern power, on the other hand, abrogates the supernatural. In fact, the condition governing the possibility of modernity is the divorce of the political from the theological. The perceived autonomy of the political in the modern Western nation-state allows the state to possess, as Weber has argued, a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. The colonial state, however, was different from its metropolitan model. This difference is articulated in the narrative by depicting the colonial power as both personalised and arbitrary. The beating of Obika and the incarceration of Ezeulu have no legal basis, except the whim of the functionary of the colonial state. The textual strategy of establishing antagonisms around which different sets of values are elaborated, sets up Nwaka in a homologically similar position to Winterbottom. However, the narrative registers Nwaka as a more significant antagonist, as it is his actions that propel, and to some extent determine, the teleology of the narrative. With the Okperi land dispute, it is his rhetorical prowess that convinces the council of elders and men of title (the ndichie) to set aside Ezeulu’s advice twice, and it is his argument about the putative friendship between Winterbottom and Ezeulu which brings about the ‘rite of passage’ sequence in the text. Both instances are linked to significant moments in the text and the development of the narrative. The first, through analeptic narration, precipitates Ezeulu’s separation of Ulu from the fate of the clan: he reveals a desire to set up Ulu above, beyond and against the clan. The second facilitates, for Ezeulu, the identification of Nwaka’s perspective with that of the clan. This identification provides the justification for Ezeulu’s desire for revenge. Often, in critical analyses of Arrow of God, Nwaka’s opposition to Ezeulu is seen as a commendable attempt to curb the autocratic impulses of the chief priest and Nwaka’s insistence on the epistemological validity of a plurality of perspectives is admired (see Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe 70–1). In elaborating this opposition, Victor Turner’s distinction between communitas and ‘structure’ is helpful. Turner, in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, deploys Arnold Van Gennep’s rites de passage, which are marked by three phases: separation, limen (or margin) and aggregation, to constitute the notion of communitas. Communitas is aligned to the limen, and opposed to ‘structure’.5 ‘Liminal entities


are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial’ (The Ritual Process 95). ‘Structure’ relates to a model of society as differentiated, often hierarchical, and whose politico-legal positions are involved in forms of evaluation, of ‘separating men in terms of more or less’ (Ritual 96). Communitas is everywhere held to be sacred and is often regarded as dangerous and polluting, Turner argues, as a result of the threat unstructured communitas represents to the maintenance of ‘structure’, both in ‘stateless’ societies and in more hierarchically organised ones. This can be seen as Turner’s attempt to deal with the double value of the sacred along socio-structuralist lines. In both ‘stateless’ societies and more hierarchically organised ones, structure is opposed to the danger and excesses of the homogenous totality of communitas: ‘Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality, and from beneath structure, in inferiority.’ (Ritual 128) Communitas is everywhere held to be sacred. It is in some sense an impossibility, an impossibility that founds and exceeds the mediacy of structure.6 If power is understood as ‘the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which the probability rests’ and authority, as the acceptance of this process without reflection (Weber, Theory 152), then the problem of universalising a Western-specific becomes apparent, in relation to Ezeulu. From the Weberian derived specification, Ezeulu has neither power nor authority, as Nwaka is able to subvert his power through the ndichie. Turner’s distinction between communitas and social ‘structure’ proves more appropriate. Nwaka’s speeches to the assembly of elders reveal a series of rhetorical moves that qualify the opposition of structure to communitas (see Arrow 27–8). He often seeks to distinguish Ezeulu’s religious function from his political role: ‘The man who carries a deity is not a king. He is there to perform the god’s rituals and to carry sacrifice to him.’ (Arrow 27) This asserts the autonomy of the ndichie in the sphere of the political. This autonomy, if it is to be that, must oppose the claims of the sacred. Another important strategy Nwaka employs is to oppose the personal to the sacred. By asserting that if a man says yes his chi also says yes (Arrow 28), Nwaka opposes and privileges free will to the determinism implied in the dominance of the sacred. Nwaka, who functions as a representative of ‘structure’, opposes communitas, which demands humans’ submission to the will of the gods, a will that is beyond the knowledge of mortals. The claims made on behalf of ‘structure’ are properly ideological, as it

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aims to maintain the power of the differentiated ruling body. It is the threat to his position, as one of the wealthiest men and one of the only two men in Umuaro with four titles, that motivates the attack against Ezeulu, whose ascendancy would challenge his power. Nwaka’s rhetoric too is problematised by the text as his rhetoric is also rhetoric for and about war. However, in the communitas/structure divide, Ezeulu is not unproblematically aligned in the text with communitas. Achebe says of Ezeulu that he has a sense for ‘ultimate things’. This sense is registered in the narrative through Ezeulu’s framing of the crises in Umuaro in apocalyptic terms. He believes Umuaro to have reached a point ‘beyond the end of things’, where the sacrifice of one’s own blood was necessary (Arrow 159). The clan’s refusal to hear the ‘truth’ represents for him ‘an augury of the world’s ruin’ (Arrow 7). Turner identifies the apocalyptic vision with communitas. Certain millenarian religious movements attempt to institutionalise communitas by opposing the structured inequality of their societies with an alternate form of social structure. This institutionalisation is antithetical to the notion of communitas (Ritual 111). Ezeulu, likewise, attempts, and this may be the crucial point in his downfall, to convert communitas, the radical potentiality of anti-structure into structure itself, to constitute the sacred as the unique bearer of truth, holding sway over the political. A consideration of the constitution of the ndichie reveals a more nuanced approach to the question of the sacred and power. In ‘acephalous’ societies, Robert M. Wren notes, title investiture is an in-built mechanism preventing the excessive concentration of power in any single individual. Ozo, the first title of significance that a man took, not only entitled him to participation in communal deliberations but also involved an induction into mmo, the world of the ancestors (57–9). The ndichie, the representative body of the clan, were made of ‘men’ (we are told in Things Fall Apart that those without titles were regarded as agbala, women) and ancestors. This connection to the ancestors proclaims ‘the divine authority of the Earth’ (Wren 61). Ani, the earthgoddess, is the guardian of moral values and protectress of the clan. The political function of the ndichie is authorised by the religious. What Nwaka opposes in his rhetoric is not the religious and the political, but two different forms of divine authority that organise power relations within the social structure. This distinction is developed through an opposition that introduces another level generated by the text – the mythical. Nwaka’s mentor, and the one the clan believes offers him protection against the wrath of Ulu, is Ezidemili, the priest of Idemili. This battle between the gods is a


significant structuring device in the text. The importance of Ezidemili to the present discussion is Ezidemili’s specification of his relation to the earth and the structurally homologous position in which Ezeulu locates himself. Ezidemili says to Nwaka: ‘Idemili belongs to the sky and that is why I, his priest, cannot sit on bare earth [...] And that is why when I die I am not buried in the earth, because the earth and the sky are two different things.’ (Arrow 41) In discussing the antipathy to rigid social structures in various African social systems, Dennis Duerden claims that an important distinction is made between that which is consecrated to the sky and that which is consecrated to the earth, which is both superior and senior to the former (55). This translates into a political philosophy that insists on the deference of the king to the will of the assembly of elders. In fact, Ezeulu fulfils the function of most kings south of the Sahara, as Duerden suggests: he fixes the calendar, foretells the seasons and is bearer of the sky spirit. As with most African kings, his closeness to the sources of sacred power means that he needs to be kept in check by the ndichie, who assert both the authority of the clan and the earth. The social-structuralist distinction between communitas and social structure, and the symbolic opposition within ‘structure’ of those institutions consecrated to the sky and to the earth (a religiopolitical construct) provide the basis for a detailed interrogation of the function of the sacred in the text, and its specification of the limits of power.

Realising the sacred In the oppositions (symbolic and material) so far elaborated, Ezeulu transgresses the divide: both accepting change and being a representative of continuity, and simultaneously participating in communitas and structure. Both the institution of oppositions and its transgression find their apotheosis in the central ritual of the novel – it is through this ritual that Ezeulu’s power is signified. For the Romans and throughout the Middle Ages, of central significance to political authority was the concept of auctoritas. Steven Lukes defines auctoritas as signifying ‘the possession by some of some special status or quality or claim that added a compelling ground for trust and obedience’ (642). This was often related to a founding act or sacred being. Auctoritas, the basis for obligatory belief, is created through the rituals symbolising the unity and the creation of that unity during the two major festivals in Umuaro: the festival of the Pumpkin Leaves and the feast of the New Yam. The festivals also have an instrumental function, which is to produce the

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appropriate ritual conditions for planting and harvesting. During the Pumpkin Leaves ritual, ‘Ezeulu re-enacted the First Coming of Ulu and how each of the four Days put obstacles in his way.’ (Arrow 72)7 He reenacts and relates to all of Umuaro his epic mythical journey where, having been called upon by the clan, he encounters, names and offers sacrifices to the four Days. In terms of mythic discourse, this represents a setting in order of the world, a process of classification, a naming of the world. Encounters with deities are fraught with peril for the mythic hero. As in most renewal ceremonies, the priest-king, by demonstrating his control over the encounter with the sacred, emerges as a source of power himself, legitimising his exercise of power. This encounter with the sacred also necessarily pollutes the subject of the ritual. Hence, the epic heroism of Ezeulu’s journey has as its counterpoint the pathos of his symbolic function as scapegoat. By taking the place of the first victim that makes possible the creation of Ulu, Ezeulu cleanses the villagers of their sins before the planting season. Ezeulu races around the centre of the marketplace as the women of Umuaro fling their pumpkin leaves, ‘containing’ (in a magical manner) the sins of their households, at him. This dual inscription of the sacred subject, as hero and victim, correlates closely with other African rituals of renewal and royal installation. Richard N. Henderson describes how the Onitsha Eze re-enacts both his installation and his funeral during his public appearances (298–304). Before each new yam festival, he must also prove himself guiltless of the deaths of the previous year; that is, of not being a witch (396). As far south as Swaziland, T. O. Beidelman describes how the Swazi king is thought to annually regenerate the cosmos itself at the moment ‘that he takes on the filth of the nation on himself’ (373). The ambiguities of Benveniste’s onto-etymology of sacer become apparent. The double articulation of the sacred subject, glorified and accursed, venerated and despised, demands the creation of the subject and its destruction in the self-same moment. The ritual, in an important sense, is subjectless; or, more precisely, its subject is the clan, the clan’s social cohesion and functional unity. The sacred subject is effaced so that the clan may reveal itself to be the true subject. Throughout the narration of the Pumpkin Leaves ritual, Achebe constantly signifies the unity of Umuaro, whereas the preceding part of the text had emphasised the rivalries, conflicts and disunity among the six villages comprising Umuaro. The beat of the Ikolo becomes the heartbeat of the clan. Unity emerges out of the contradictions of the sacred, and where there is coherence in contradiction, Derrida reminds us, there is also the force of desire (‘Structure’ 278).


‘The mounting tension which had gripped the entire market and seemed to send its breath going up, up and up exploded with the last beat of the drum and released a vast and deep breathing down.’ (Arrow 73)8 The symbolic transference from the epic hero to sacrificial victim and back again manifests the danger that is often associated with the exercise of power within traditional African social systems. Divine power can either sanctify or pollute. Durkheim, in extending Robertson Smith’s theorising of the ambiguity of the sacred, argues, ‘the pure and the impure are not two separate classes but two varieties of the same class, which includes all sacred things’ (411): the pure and impure transform into and provide a substitute for one another. In political terms, this translates into a distrust of power itself, as power belongs to the realm of the divine, and into ambivalence towards those who exercise power. Through his fieldwork on witchcraft among the Maka in southeast Cameroon, Peter Geschiere notes, ‘discourses on witchcraft reveal a profound distrust of power. They are subtended by the firm belief that all forms of power can easily degenerate.’ (133) This ambivalence is registered in the text through a number of semic and symbolic significances. The first articulates the belief that authorised power may degenerate into its opposite. Before Ezeulu goes to visit a sick man, Akuebue warns him: ‘If you go there on your way home say nothing that might make them think you wish their kinsman evil.’ (Arrow 113) Implicit in this warning is the assumption that Ezeulu’s power may be used for injurious action that is not sanctioned by the clan, action that would constitute him as a witch, like the Onitsha Eze in Henderson’s study. Often Ezeulu’s power is signified through the discourse of witchcraft. For the people of Okperi and Umuaro, Winterbottom’s sudden illness is related to Ezeulu’s power. The policemen who come to arrest him seek protection from a medicine man. He tells them that they had indeed ‘walked into the mouth of a leopard’ (Arrow 158). His statement points to the aforementioned distinction between power within African social systems and the concept of power generated through Western modernity. Power, therefore, is also closely aligned to witchcraft.9 The novel generates another level of signification through the process of symbolic condensation. It is around a joke that the ambivalences of sacred power coalesce. Nwaka, in pointing out that it is Ezeulu’s friendship with Winterbottom that removes the district officer’s summons from the involvement of the ndichie, says, ‘It seems to me that Ezeulu has shaken hands with a man of white body.’ The narrator informs the reader ‘this brought low murmurs of applause and even some laughter. Like many potent things from which people shrink in fear leprosy is nearly

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always called by its more polite and appeasing name – white body.’ (Arrow 114) The symbolic co-incidence of the colonial and the leper through the relationship to whiteness has been foregrounded in the text through an emphatic symbolic transference and substitution of one for the other. The first time the white man is referred to in the text, outside the internally focalised episode of Ezeulu, is by Akukalia. He tells his companion of the white man: ‘It was once said that he had no toes.’ (19) This creates a link with the figure of the leper. This figure represents the outcast, the marginal, who, being diseased, is defiled and defiling. In Nwaka’s recounting of his mythical journey in the place Beyond Knowing, he claims, ‘I made friends with a leper from whom even a poisoner flees.’ (Arrow 39) His power is manifested by his ability to assimilate the inassimilable. The Agaba, the mask that Obika’s age-group presents to the clan, warns that those who ignored its advice would become outcasts with no fingers and toes: lepers (Arrow 199). The worst punishment imaginable within the symbolic order of the Umuaroans is to become like a leper. However, the leper, from Nwaka’s account, is also sacralised in the religious framework and accords with Turner’s communitas, where the marginal represents the sacred and its powers. The power of the colonials, which is undisputed by the clan, is established by their destruction of Abame through brute might. Translating this military power into sacred power, Moses Unachukwu claims: ‘The white man has a power which comes from the true God and it burns like fire.’ (Arrow 84–5) The symbolic condensation, therefore, of the white man and the leper symbolically links a power that burns like fire with sacred marginality. Akuebue describes Ezeulu: ‘He is as tall as an iroko tree and his skin is white like the sun.’ (Arrow 153) Apart from the metaphorical implications of Ezeulu’s connection with the sky (‘tallness’ and the sun) as opposed to the earth (see Duerden’s argument above), this statement implicates Ezeulu in the symbolics of whiteness. Within the conceptual framework of communitas, and as sacrificial victim in the cleansing ritual, the chief priest’s location within the symbolic order of the Igbo society depicted in the text is structurally the same as that of the leper. The symbol of the clan’s unity and exclusiveness, Ezeulu, it has been noted, is central to their political and religious relations. At the same time, the transgression of the divide between the sacred and secular through the symbolic enactment of sacrifice, casts the chief priest as potentially polluting; hence his liminal status and isolation: But the heaviest load was on Ezeulu’s mind. He was used to loneliness. As Chief Priest he had often walked alone in front of Umuaro.


But without looking back he had always been able to hear their flute and song, which shook the earth because it came from a multitude of voices and the stamping of countless feet. […] But although he would not for any reason now see the present trend reversed he carried more punishment and more suffering than all his fellows. (Arrow 218–9) His role as solitary leader is balanced by his function as scapegoat, or, more precisely, he is leader because he is also the victim of the sacrificium. This recalls Frazer’s corn king and the drama of the dying and reviving god, and the above-mentioned royal installation. As political authority becomes more centralised, the dual articulation of the sacred subject becomes separated, although both aspects, leader-hero (homo sanctus) and victim-outcast (homo sacer), retain traces of the original ambiguity.

A sacred dialectic The dual articulation of the sacred invites a dialectical reading. In considering the elaboration of the sacred in the text, one detects a separation and dispersal of the double value of sacer. On the one hand, the claims to leadership in the novel are articulated through narratives of the ‘mythical’ journey; and, on the other, the narrative registers sacrifice as its most significant structuring device. Various characters recount journeys into ‘foreign’ lands, where they undergo certain ordeals and return communicating new strength to their societies. In Myth, Literature and the African World, Soyinka describes the epic as arising from the need of man to confront and attempt to initiate a rapport with the immovable immensity, the realm of the supernatural, in which being is located (2). This unknowable void needs to be breached periodically by a human challenger who journeys to this ‘primal reality’ and returns triumphant with a moral code for that society. Nwaka parallels Ezeulu’s mythic journey of the Pumpkin Leaves ritual in the land Beyond Knowing, where he confronts and befriends a wizard, a poisoner and a leper (Arrow 39). By asserting his power over these liminal and dangerous figures on the mythical plane, he legitimises his claim to authority. Moses Unachukwu adopts the name of Moses because he sees his sojourn in Onithsha, where he is converted, as a parallel to the Old Testament Moses in Egypt. In this ‘alien’ land he confronts the terror of colonial power. ‘The white man has a gun, a matchet, a bow and carries fire in his mouth.’ (Arrow 85) He returns

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to Umuaro and ‘protects’ the people from the excessive zeal of his antagonist, John Goodcountry (who desires to desecrate the totemic animal) and acts as liaison between the colonial authority and the clan. Achebe imbricates even religious conversion within the dynamics of the traditional epic and the processes of the rites of passage (separation, liminality and aggregation). This is an assertion of continuity, of the persistence of the symbolic order of traditional African socio-religious systems. Ezeulu also repeats his mythical journey of the ritual through his separation from Umuaro, his incarceration in Okperi and his reintegration into the community. On his return, Ezeulu realises ‘it was right that the Chief Priest should go ahead and confront danger before it reached his people’ (Arrow 189). Ezeulu’s reintegration has a further significance. Where previously he desired to ‘wrestle’ with his people, on his return, and for the first time in the narrative, he is able to separate the people of Umuaro (the clan itself) from his political adversaries (those representative of ‘structure’). ‘Ezeulu continued his division of Umuaro into ordinary people who had nothing but goodwill for him and those others whose ambition sought to destroy the central unity of the six villages.’ (Arrow 187) This distinction that arises out of the awareness achieved after the ‘rite of passage’ sequence marks the important distinction between communitas (the clan) and ‘structure’ (Nwaka’s position), a distinction that Ezeulu both transgresses and initially confuses. In the communitas/structure divide, it is Akuebue that represents the voice of the clan in the text. Significantly, the clan speaks the language of the sacred. Akuebue warns Ezeulu: ‘And they [the clan] will say that you are betraying them again today by sending your son to join in desecrating the land.’ (Arrow 131, my emphasis) The structure of journey, ordeal, survival and social or individual purgation places these episodes firmly within the ambit of the African tradition of the epic, which itself repeats the social category of rites of passage. It is, therefore, through the narrative of the epic and the structure of the rites of passage that authority is established; that is, the concepts and processes that legitimise the exercise of power. The other series of repetitions in the narrative that forms a counterpoint to the ‘epic’ chain revolves around the invocation of effective sacrifice. The crisis that confronts Umuaro, the upheaval caused by a radically altered state of affairs, is from the perspective of the central interpreter in the novel, Ezeulu, a sacrificial crisis. From his apocalyptic vision and from within the discourse of the sacred, the solution to the crisis is finding the appropriate sacrifice to set the world/cosmos in


order again. Ezeulu explains to Akuebue why he sent Oduche to join the Christians: A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured with everyday herbs. When we want to make a charm we look for the animal whose blood can match its power; if a chicken cannot do it we look for a goat or a ram, if that is not sufficient we send for a bull. But sometimes; even a bull does not suffice, then we must look for a human. (Arrow 133) The gradient of sacrificial value places plants at the lowest end and the human at the highest. The highest sacrifice is necessary when ‘they are pushed beyond the end of things’. With the slave-raids of the Abame warriors, the sacrifice of one of their own was necessary – the sacrifice that makes possible the creation of Ulu and whose position Ezeulu symbolically substitutes during the planting/cleansing ritual. Likewise, Ezeulu believes that sacrificing his son Oduche to the Christian god will protect Umuaro. However, the search for effective sacrifice is thwarted by a series of ritual lapses and desecrated sacrifices. As Durkeim points out, a ritual lapse is always a threat to the collectivity, the collectivity that is sacred and moral (408). Ezeulu refuses to perform the appropriate propiatory rites after Oduche almost kills the totemic python sacred to Idemili. The healer who performs Obika’s bride’s ‘covering-up’ sacrifice does not sacrifice the hen, but makes off with it. At the presentation of the ancestral Mask, Obikwelu messes up the sacrifice of the ram. Wade, one of the colonial officers, desecrates a roadside sacrifice. This textual chain of inappropriate and desecrated sacrifices parallels the deepening social crisis in Umuaro, the sense of things falling apart. When Ezeulu refuses to call the New Yam Festival at the expected time, the elders ask of Ulu: ‘Is there no sacrifice that would appease him?’ This not only points to the clan’s submission to the desire of the gods, but also to the particular significance of sacrifice in establishing relations between the human and the divine spheres. The sacrifice, Turner argues, is the ‘high spot’ of the ritual, ‘where the visible and invisible components of the cosmic order interpenetrate and exchange qualities’ (Drums 276). Turner argues further that in cyclical social systems, it is only through sacrifice that the development cycle can get going again. Thus, Arrow of God may be seen as a search for the appropriate sacrifice to facilitate the shift to a new cycle. In the Pumpkin Leaves ritual, Ezeulu functions as a symbolic sacrifice, taking on, as the scapegoat, the sins of Umuaro. Believing that his society is beyond the end of things, in that

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space outside temporal determinants, Ezeulu attempts to recuperate the figure of the victim through a metonymic displacement to Oduche, substituting his son for the role that is originally and crucially his. Through another act of metonymic (dis)placement, the gods, it seems, substitute another of Ezeulu’s sons, Obika, for the role of sacrificial victim. But it is at the New Yam feast, the festival that should inaugurate the new cycle and the New Year, that the sacrificial victim is absent. It is here that the text identifies the pre-eminence of Ezeulu’s role as victim and, through the demands of narrative closure, accomplishes the fulfilment of that role. Narrative closure and the beginning of the new cycle are achieved through Ezeulu textually enacting his most significant function in Umuaro and the novel. The dialectical opposition of the dual series of epic heroism and maimed sacrifice is superseded by the text’s ritualistic closure, revealing the text’s desire for ritual status. In the preface to the second edition of Arrow of God, Achebe writes: For had he been spared Ezeulu might have come to see his fate as perfectly consistent with his high historic destiny as victim, consecrating by his agony – thus raising to the stature of ritual passage – the defection of his people. The ‘triumph’ of the Christian religion does not represent a rupture, a rending of the world; rather, the ‘defection’ reinforces the symbolic order of traditional Igbo (and African) society, through the formal ‘totality’ of the text. This is achieved, it has been noted, through the text’s sacrificing of Ezeulu, of not ‘sparing’ him. Therefore, by revealing its desire for ritual closure, the text marks itself as always already inadequate, as necessarily narrating the loss of the immediacy of the ritual. In the central ritual of the text, Ezeulu relates and re-enacts both his roles as hero and scapegoat – through words and gestures he creates order and control (as hero) and expiation (as victim). In a fundamental sense, words in a ritual are performative. J. L. Austin distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts: the former performs what it says at the moment of its utterance, and the latter achieves its effects as a consequence of its utterance. In this ‘enactive’ mode, speech, in the ritual, achieves pure mimesis and collapses the distinction between utterance and event, image and significance. Meaning, in the ritual, is always immanent and asserts both the power of the word and the primacy of language. A symbolic chain running through the text repeatedly substitutes a specification of power with the power of words,


or metaphorically displaces this power to the ‘mouth’. Nwaka’s subversion of Ezeulu’s authority succeeds partly, the narrator suggests, as a result of his rhetorical prowess, the perlocutionary force of his words. He is called the ‘Owner of Words’. The white man, Moses Unachukwu claims, ‘carries fire in his mouth’. Ezeulu proclaims his power over the white man: ‘If I did nothing else I would pronounce a few words on him and he would know the power in my mouth.’ (Arrow 99) Thus, power, sacred and political, is associated with the instrumentality of words. Their performativity and materiality derive from the enactive nature of words in the ritual context. The co-incidence of utterance and action, the self-presence of the subject (as the community) and the originary fullness of social unity in the ritual correspond to the early Lukács’s ‘social totality’ (55).10 It is this totality, represented by Homeric Greece in Georg Lukács’s account, which makes possible mimetic literature. In the era when mimetic literature becomes impossible, the successor of the epic, the novel, recuperates this social totality through its formal totality. ‘The novel,’ Lukács claims, ‘is the epic of the age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.’ (56) The novel is ineluctably involved in narrating the loss of the social totality of the historico-philosophical reality of the epic. Strictly speaking, the subject of the epic can never be the individual. ‘Its theme is not a personal destiny but the destiny of the community.’ (Lukács 66) This correlation of the ‘subjectless’ organic totality with the sacred ritual reveals the Pumpkin Leaves ritual as fundamental in Arrow of God. It holds the work together insofar as the text aspires to the immediacy and the immanence of meaning of the ritual. Arrow of God is a ritual writ large. Determined by its form, however, the realist novel can only narrate the loss of this totality. Its hero is always already alienated from the world, an alienation that makes interiority the regulative idea of narration and the narrative biographical. ‘The gods are silent and neither sacrifice nor the ecstatic gifts of tongues can solve the riddle.’ (Lukács 66) The African realist novel that attempts to recreate the ‘pre-colonial’ past is a paradox, an impossible project. This is not the well-worn dictum of the impossibility of recuperating the past, but an assertion of the impossibility of actualising/representing an organic totality within a form that necessarily excludes it. The depiction of the Pumpkin Leaves ritual also makes clear that it is not only through the sacred that the alienated, interiorised subject of the novel is destroyed, but that

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through the ritual he becomes the bearer of the destiny of his people, or more precisely, the community becomes the subject – communitas is made manifest. Consequently, we see the dual inscription of Ezeulu’s functions on both a symbolic and a formal level. Symbolically, he acts as epic hero and scapegoat. On the formal level he is the epic individual, the hero of the realist text, and epic hero, the bearer of the fate of the community. The latter duality manifests itself in the text’s own ambivalence. In the first half of the novel, its mythical dimension subtends the rationalist-realist rhetoric of the text. The narrative is principally focussed around a ‘problematic individual’ who wants to imprint his desires on the world; it is a narration of self-contemplation. The text holds open the possibility of rationalist interpretation. For example, the significance of Winterbottom’s sudden illness is left ambiguous: Perhaps it was Captain Winterbottom’s rage and frenzy that brought it on; perhaps his steward was right about its cause [Ezeulu’s power]. But on the very morning when two policeman set out to arrest Ezeulu in Umuaro, Captain Winterbottom suddenly collapsed and went into a delirium. (Arrow 149) However, in the latter part of the novel, the hierarchy of the rationalist-realist and mythical is destabilised. The figure that had remained hidden for the most part of the novel reveals itself. The appearance of Ulu jolts the realist mode of the text. This most literal deus ex machina breaks down the realistic verisimilitude that the text had tried to maintain and shifts the narrative into the mythic mode. It is this ‘magic realist’ moment in the text that is also the moment of bifurcation in which the realist rhetoric of the alienated individual gives way to the mythical articulation of the subject. This moment, which poses a problem of classification, is resolved through thematic recuperation implied by the title of the novel. Titles, as Barthes (in S/Z) points out, tend to arrest the play of signification by organising the novel in terms of a specific theme. It would seem, therefore, that as an arrow of god Ezeulu functions less as the interiorised and interiorising subject than as a structural element in the mythical narrative. We thus have a divided text: the realist narrative comes up against its own impossibility, enacts its own demise and gives way to the mythical imperative. This formal division resists the Lukácsian ‘totality’ producing an alienated realism.


Finding meaning At the end of the novel, Achebe offers the reader a series of possible interpretations for the outcome of the narrative. Each relates to a different level of the narrative: unanswered and unanswerable questions leading to Ezeulu’s madness (epistemological uncertainty); ‘an implacable assailant’, one of the gods, Ulu or Idemili, had crushed him (mythological explanation); or his demise reflects the fact that the wisdom of the clan is upheld – ‘no man however great was greater than his people; that no man ever won judgement against his clan’ (Arrow 230) (sociological argument). The latter two interpretations are oppositional and contradictory. The first may be related to the mythical battle of the gods in which Ezeulu is entirely innocent, and the second to the priority of communitas, the sacred over structure, in which Ezeulu is guilty of attempting to convert one into the other. However, by the narrational offering of a variety of meanings, the text reveals, apart from a desire for totality stemming from it, also a desire for meaning. Inasmuch as the exercise of power is delimited by the sacred, epistemological determinacy is also constrained by it. Ezeulu claims: ‘I can see things where other men are blind. That is why I am Known and at the same time I am Unknowable.’ (Arrow 132) The part which is unknowable even to himself is the spirit half of his being. The great tragedy of Ezeulu lies in his belief that he had access to this unknowable side. When the ancestral Mask, the Agaba, asks the chief priest if he knows who he is, Ezeulu replies, ‘How can a man know you who are beyond human knowledge?’ (Arrow 199) The realm of the supernatural is essentially opaque, and as that realm is ultimately determinate of socio-religious relations in a society organised around the sacred, then this is necessarily a society that posits epistemological indeterminacy as the fundamental basis of its processes of the production of meaning. This is still relevant to the African postcolony. Adam Ashforth attempts to explicate the symbolic and political significance of Nkosi ya Manzi (Lord of the Waters) for a group of people living in the highly urbanised area of Soweto in South Africa. He suggests that the subjects possess a worldview in which an immense transcendental power exists that seems unconstrained by any ethical principle or anything resembling law; where the distinctions between private and public, natural and supernatural, are not respected; where there is a fundamental indeterminacy (the theological problem of ‘unknowing’) in relation to unseen powers and their motives (39). Ashforth, therefore, concludes that this openness to the transcendental leads to great spiritual insecurity and ‘epistemic anxiety’ (68). These

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societies are thus also ones with an overabundance of meaning, which amounts to the same thing. A number of interpretations may be possible for any single event; these are not mutually exclusive as they refer to different levels of meaning. By offering a variety of meanings to the text, the narrator partakes of the symbolic order of the world he has created. Yet this offering also divides the text from itself – a self-reflexive narrative that comments on itself and its own process of producing meaning. Arrow of God is not only divided in itself, but also from itself, producing a peculiarly fragmented realism, an alienated realism. It is through the central character that the text makes visible its own processes of the production of meaning. This does not refer to the often-noted opposition between a society that demands a plurality of perspectives and an individual who insists on a single meaning. Rather, it points to the mirroring of the text’s desire for totality, its attempts to give form and meaning to the experience it has organised in the text, as the essence of its central personality. Ezeulu, therefore, is not a problematic individual because he insists on a single meaning; he is the force of Meaning itself. Meaning, Barthes suggests, is ‘a force that tries to subjugate other forces, other meanings of language itself’ (S/Z 160). It is therefore both an act of violence and exclusion, of subjugation and brutal single-mindedness. Ezeulu is the philosopher and artist par excellence. He searches the skies for signs from the heavens and communicates their message to his people. He articulates Heidegger’s ‘median space’ (das Zwischen) that separates, while thereby connecting gods and humans (312). He is the Lukácsian ‘seeker’, testing and theorising both the limits of knowledge and power. What was power if it could not be used? Could he discern the wishes of the gods? These are the two central questions that he tests as the narrative unfolds. However, it is at the moment of the bifurcation of the narrative that the text problematises Ezeulu’s and its own quest for Meaning. After being chastised by Ulu for his presumptuousness in the deus ex machina sequence, Ezeulu realises that the ‘truth’ of the crises of Umuaro had little to do with Umuaro and even less to do with Nwaka. ‘It was a fight of the gods. He was no more than an arrow in the bow of his god.’ (Arrow 192) He begins to retrospectively attribute significance to a sequence of events: ‘past events took on a new and exciting significance’ (Arrow 192). Oduche, the sacred python, and Winterbottom, are all subjugated to the force of Meaning; all events are abstracted and made to serve a single pattern, a single meaning. Being the arrow of god, Meaning is revealed and structures the process of decoding. Even if this borders on the sacrilegious, what Soyinka calls ‘religious treachery’ (Myth 36), ‘Ezeulu was now in


the mood to follow things through’. The revelation of Meaning analeptically and proleptically recuperates the entire text, arranging the proairetic sequence in a single indisputable symbolic order. Referring to the title of the novel, a pre-eminence is given to Ezeulu’s interpretation. However, Ezeulu’s demise destabilises Meaning. It is the pursuit of Meaning that the narrator provisionally offers as one of the possible purposes of the text. ‘Perhaps it was the constant, futile throbbing of those thoughts that finally left a crack in Ezeulu’s mind.’ (Arrow 229) Violent and brutal, Meaning is also the voice of madness. Thus, Ezeulu is an assigned impossibility, the locus of incompatible processes. As the representative of the symbolic order of his community, he is the vector of indeterminacy, the abrogation of Meaning; in mirroring the process of writing he is the force of Meaning itself. Tragedy is the only possible outcome. Allow me to re-state some of the important conclusions drawn from the reading of Achebe’s novel. In attempting to specify the limits of power and authority in Achebe’s Arrow of God, the Weberian-derived specification of power and political community proved inadequate to the task. V.W. Turner’s opposition of communitas and structure proved more instructive. The dialectic between sacredness and the structure of the social aggregate finds its correlative in the central ritual of the text, the Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves, in which the Chief Priest of Umuaro’s power is signified and authorised. The narrative of the epic journey, in which the hero creates order and control through the ritual, is counterposed with the symbolic representation of the sacrificial ritual, in which the hero-victim provides expiation for the clan. The double articulation of the sacred subject, glorified and accursed, pure and filthy, demands the simultaneous creation and destruction of the subject. The ritual is, essentially, subject-less as the clan reveals itself to be the true subject. As divine power can either sanctify or pollute, much danger is associated with the exercise of power within traditional African social systems. Furthermore, a reading of Achebe’s rendering of the Pumpkin Leaves ritual suggests that a deployment of the concept of the sacred not only allows the epic narrative to be read against the structure of the ritual, but insists on it. The former creates the conditions for authority; the latter qualifies the authorised power. A dialectical reading of Arrow of God reveals a separation and dispersal of the double value of the sacred through the textual representation of epic narratives, which rehearse the social category of rites of passage, and by registering sacrifice as the novel’s most significant structuring device. The latter, I have shown, is prioritised by the text. The sacrificial crisis and the ensuing

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search for effective sacrifice is thwarted by a series of ritual lapses and desecrated sacrifices that parallel the deepening social crisis in Umuaro. The dual series of epic heroism and sacrifice is superseded by the text’s ritualistic closure – Achebe does not spare Ezeulu. The sacrifice of the Chief Priest produces narrative closure, ushers in a new socio-political order, yet also suggests the persistence of the sacred within the new order – a sacrifice that also inaugurates the time of the African Novel. From a formal perspective, the novel is cleft in two. Ezeulu, as agent of the realist text, is doubly inscribed as alienated interiorised subject and bearer of the fate of the community. The opposition between epic individual and epic hero splits the text – the rationalist-realist rhetoric of the first part gives way to the mythical dimension, which privileges the sacrificial logic, and generates an alienated realism. Also, by pointing to the unpredictability of the gods who control the clan’s destiny, the text problematises its own search for meaning, its own desire for ritual closure, by suggesting that it is precisely the search for Meaning that produces the tragic end of the central interpreter in and of the text.

2 Dramatising the Sacred: Wole Soyinka’s ‘The Fourth Stage’ and Kongi’s Harvest

Theorising the sacred In ‘The Writer in a Modern African State’, published in 1967, Wole Soyinka argues for a return to the traditional role of the artist so as to ameliorate the state of despair that had beset African writers dealing with the political and cultural realities of the postcolonial African nation-state. ‘The artist has always functioned in African society,’ Soyinka points out, ‘as the record of the mores and experiences of his society and as the voice of vision in his own time.’ (20) If the writer does not function as the conscience or the visionary of her/his society, s/he is left to withdraw to the position of mere chronicler, or, as Soyinka calls it, the ‘post-mortem surgeon’ (‘The Writer’ 20). Implicit in Soyinka’s strategy of distinguishing between the chronicler and the conscience/visionary poles of African literary vocation is, I suggest, an attempt to differentiate his aesthetics and political choices from those of Chinua Achebe. In an earlier essay in which he attempts to specify the particularities of a cultural matrix from which a variety of African writers draw – the ‘common backcloth’ – Soyinka describes Achebe as a ‘chronicler, content to follow creases and stress lines, not to impose his own arrangement on them’ (‘From a Common Backcloth’ 11). In this essay Soyinka also argues that Achebe’s perspective is essentially religious. Not only is Achebe’s realism subtended by a pattern of mysteries but also his works reveal an ‘acceptance of forces that begin where the physical leaves off’ (‘From’ 11). Later, after Soyinka has clarified his ‘mythopoesis’, his non-realistic aesthetics and the centrality of tragedy to his artistic practice, he once again distinguishes his position from Achebe’s by arguing, in a complete turnabout, that Achebe’s portrayal of a religious community in Arrow of God was deeply flawed because it 45

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represented a secular vision of religion and society. He decries the fact that in the novel ‘the struggle of the gods has been placed squarely in the province of the political’ (Myth, Literature and the African World 88). Notwithstanding the too simplistic reading of Achebe’s novel, Soyinka’s contradictory views of Achebe’s vision (or, according to the playwright, a lack thereof) reveal the difficulties Soyinka encounters in locating his mythopoeic project – a project that simultaneously affirms and disavows a religious perspective, a vision that upholds and subverts the mythic paradigm. The 1960s represent a period in which we note a shift in Soyinka’s dramatic works from a largely satiric approach to one that increasingly privileged the tragic. The shift maps the change to the ‘stage of disillusionment’ which Soyinka regards as defining the period. As the pioneer and foremost proponent of modern African tragedy, Soyinka has proposed, it has been suggested, a unique ritual theory of tragedy. It is unique because, on the one hand, it draws on African cultural sensibilities and systems of thought, and, on the other, it ties the ritual account of tragedy to cultural and political praxis. I shall clarify these two elements by exploring the relationship between the sacred and Soyinka’s theorising of the tragic. His theory, I suggest, negotiates the unmediated ambivalences of the sacred that inform the ontology, epistemology and cosmology of the African religious worldview. Africa and the West Wole Soyinka’s theory of tragic art takes as its point of departure the proposition of a generic discontinuity between African and Western tragedy. Soyinka’s philosophico-political proposition signals a specific polemic position. By relating the African form to conceptualisations inherent in specific systems of thought and cultural sensibilities, he is affirming the distinctiveness of the African worldview. This uniqueness arises out of the claim of the persistence of a religious framework: that of the animistic interfusion of the natural and the supernatural, of being and phenomena. This is neither a strategic necessity nor an ideological projection, as in the Marxist Lukács’ prescription for the representation of totality, but a statement of the conceptual underpinning of African epistemology and ontology; or, in Heideggerian terms, that which qualifies being-in-the-world for the African. In Soyinka’s theorising this animistic framework does not reveal itself to be a seamless, harmonious totality between the visible and the invisible, the animate and the inanimate, humans and the gods. Soyinka notes that there is ‘an essential gulf’, an almost insurmountable gap, ‘that lies between one area of existence and another’ (‘The Fourth Stage’ 29). By extrapolating

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the ‘existence’ of these areas of existence (those of the living, the dead and the unborn) from Yoruba cosmology, he asserts the significance of a cyclic consciousness of time for the Yoruba (Myth 2). The proposition of the coexistence of past, present and future in the present is another means of distinguishing Africa from the West, with its allegedly exclusive reliance on a linear time consciousness. By generalising a particular Yoruba conceptualisation as African, Soyinka posits the metaphysical unity and certain homogeneity of the continent. The philosopher Anthony Kwame Appiah faults Soyinka on his assertion of the metaphysical unity of Africa. Being directly determined by their relation to the West and the experience of colonialism are the only elements that Africans have in common (see Appiah 81–3). Appiah’s criticisms of Soyinka hinge ultimately on his privileging of a mythologicallyoriented aesthetics. With greater advances in technology, literacy and scientific rationality, Appiah would have us believe, Africa may one day be as ‘disenchanted’ as the West. This is Appiah’s desideratum, informed by his ‘faith in the life of reason’ (134). Appiah’s argument rests on the West as the exemplary historical model. Soyinka’s ‘rationalising sacralisation’, informed as it is by the Nietzschean critique of Enlightenment philosophy, questions Appiah’s faith in reason and technology. The importance he accords to tragedy arises from the form’s problematisation of the belief in a technologically remediable world, as it puts into play forces that contest this assumption (see Myth 49). Apart from the articulation of temporality and the conceptualisation of an animistic socio-religious order, which inform practices from ethics to poetics, Africa as a cultural entity is further distinguished from the West through its ‘physics’, in the Aristotelian sense. People in Africa exist (as those in Asian and European Antiquity existed) in a ‘cosmic totality’ in which a ‘gravity-bound apprehension of self’ is inseparable from the entire cosmic phenomenon (Myth 3). By contrast, the West is characterised by a suppression of earth-forces, which arose from the Platonic-Christian tradition (Myth 3).1 Soyinka calls the Western derogation of the sacred aspects of the earth ‘anti-terrestrialism’ – an overemphasis on the importance of the sky-gods. The West in antiquity was terrestrial and material in its metaphysics (as Africa is now) but began to lose touch with this from Plato onwards. Verticality and hierarchy define the western viewpoint, as the cosmos attains a transcendental status losing the essence of ‘the tangible, the immediate, the appeaseable’ (Myth 4). Plato’s expulsion of tragedy and literature from his republic is premised on their depiction of the weaknesses of and rivalry between the gods (Republic book X).2 The birth of Western metaphysics,

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as Jean-Pierre Vernant reminds us, rests on an opposition that is set-up between mythos and logos (Myth and Society 187).3 Plato disavows the mythical representation of the weakness and brute violence of the gods in order for the Good to acquire the status of truth as transcendental value. The gods, in Soyinka’s theoretical appropriation and elucidation of Yoruba cosmology, by contrast, display similar weaknesses to humans: they are marked by excess, a ‘hubris’ that is both their weakness and their greatest strength (Myth 13); they are incomplete, desiring to come to humans ‘needing to recover their long-lost essence of totality’ (Myth 27); and in the form of images they die, ‘fall to pieces’ (Myth 86). Moreover, the deities, Soyinka explains, are placed under an eternal obligation to compensate humanity for their weaknesses (Myth 13). The centrality of the human to its religious and philosophical discourse determines the radically different structuring of the African cosmological order, hence its ‘geocentric bias’ (Myth 27). ‘The Fourth Stage’ Despite claiming that the African worldview is essentially humanistic in its articulation of its cosmologies, Soyinka’s theory of tragedy is cast in terms of alienation. Ideas of ‘severance’, of alienation of essence from self, of anguish, of the experience of being and non-being, abound in his interpretation of Yoruba myth. There is a certain critical incomprehension that meets these metaphysical elaborations. They are often explained away as either arising from something personal (for example, Quayson suggests that Soyinka is exercising poetic licence with this notion of a ‘generalised existential void’ (Strategic Transformations 71) and Jeyifo argues that Soyinka’s inventive appropriations of the Ogun myth is central to his ‘project of self-understanding and self-constitution’ (Wole Soyinka 29)) or representative of certain historical dislocations (for example, arising out of the pressures of cultural transition (Quayson) and meeting the violence of modernity Jeyifo)). An analysis of the most metaphysical of Soyinka’s essays, ‘The Fourth Stage’, in relation to theories of the ambivalences of the sacred will reveal that rather than a highly subjective, idiosyncratic deployment of the significance of ideas of alienation, dissolution and existential voids, Soyinka has identified and brought to the fore a fundamental aspect of the African traditional religious universe. Quayson, in Strategic Transformations, notes that Soyinka, in ‘liberally re-writing the terms of Yoruba mythology, is doing it in the service of a clearly expressed aesthetic and political ideology’ (76). However, the terms of the aesthetics and the politics forwarded by the playwright


have remained somewhat opaque and have been received with some suspicion by African writers and critics; for example, the early Biodun Jeyifo, Femi Osofisan, Simon Gikandi, Anthony Appiah etc.4 Critics engaging with Soyinka’s theory have often involved themselves with extracting from his dense, metaphorical, and, as Jeyifo calls it, ‘aporetic’ discourse (Introduction xxvi), the symbolic and formal significances of ritual and myth on the one hand, and its relation to political or revolutionary change on the other. However, this theoretical manoeuvre seems to me to miss and exclude what is fundamental to Soyinka’s theory: the importance he accords to both the aesthetic and the philosophical. It is a critical commonplace in commentaries on Soyinka’s writings on tragic art to regard them as advocating a sacrificial and ritual conception of the dramatic form. Ann B. Davis argues that his theory depends on a ‘reformulation of the terms of previous ritual approaches’ to tragedy, thus validating these approaches (147). Ketu H. Katrak suggests that the ritual and its sacrificial ideal is a model for Soyinka’s Yoruba tragedy (31). Jeyifo regards the playwright’s mythopoeic aesthetics as ‘vigorously and irreducibly ritualist’ (Introduction xix). Ritual theories of tragedy turn on the principles of societal renewal and solidarity that are realised through the blood of the victim. The scapegoat is killed or expelled so the community may live. In what may be termed productive misreadings, both Davis and Katrak, in specifying the ritualistic aspect in Soyinka’s theory, project this sacrificial view of tragedy onto Soyinka’s. The resolution of Yoruba tragedy, Katrak notes, lies not just ‘in the protagonist’s death, but in his bringing new strength into the communal life-blood’ (19, my emphasis). However, Soyinka describes the tragic protagonist, ‘like Ogun before him’, as resisting ‘the final step toward complete annihilation’ (‘The Fourth Stage’ 28). The tragic character benefits the community precisely because he triumphs over the forces that are inimical to his assertion of will: the community is re-invigorated because he lives. Implicit in his description of tragic action is a radical disavowal of the logic of sacrifice in the ritual. Soyinka’s plays consistently problematise the sacrificial logic and complicate the processes of social renewal. The deaths of Eman in The Strong Breed and the Elesin and his son in Death and the King’s Horseman do not result in the creation of communal unity, and there is even less a sense of the re-invigoration of the socio-religious order. Soyinka contests the view of ritual and myth being solely defined in terms of ‘social mechanics’ – it is ‘only one of the many functions to which myth has been put’ (‘The Critic’ 118). In fact, Soyinka’s trenchant critique of Achebe’s

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characterisation of the deity Ulu in Arrow of God is premised primarily on this assumption. ‘In Achebe’s work, the gods are made an expression of the political unity (and disunity), of the people. Their history or measure (or both), testifies to their subjection to secular consciousness’ (Myth 92). Katrak and Davis also extrapolate the procedures of social mechanics in their attempts to specify the relationship Soyinka establishes between tragedy and the development of political, revolutionary consciousness. The plunge into the transitional abyss is the process by which the tragic protagonist in Soyinka’s specification of tragic action, Davis claims, ‘loses his previous self in communal consciousness’ (150). She argues further that this loss of self in the experience of ‘communal joy’ is the impetus to revolutionary action that will benefit society (149). This functionalist approach to ritual resonates with the Durkheimian view of religion, in which the community affirms its cohesion and solidarity through religious and ritual practices. Soyinka, however, sees things quite differently. For him, the transitional abyss is no space of communal joy, but a terrifying realm, ‘the transitional yet inchoate matrix of death and becoming’, in which only ‘a titanic resolution of will’ prevents the loss of self (‘The Fourth Stage’ 28, 31). In fact, Soyinka elaborates the relationship between ritual, tragedy and political agency on very different terms (to which I will later turn). It seems, therefore, that Soyinka refuses a sacrificial view of tragedy in exclusively functionalist terms, disavowing the logic of sacrifice on which (in functionalists’ accounts) ritual depends. Yet it does seem that Soyinka’s dense and often obscure writings produce a certain confusion. Jeyifo goes so far as to claim that Soyinka strategically employs ‘a contradictory discourse’, and also suggests, from a sociological perspective, that this might be less conscious and more reflective of contemporary African society, ‘wracked by profound antipodal impulses’ (Introduction, xxix; xxviii). The contradictions and inconsistencies ascribed to Soyinka’s theory of tragedy may be related, on the one hand, to a misapprehension of his project (in designating it as privileging sacrificial death) and, on the other, to Soyinka’s attempt to articulate a non-symbolic view of the sacred. In ‘The Fourth Stage’, Soyinka relates Yoruba tragic art to both foreign and indigenous dramatic forms: Greek tragedy and the drama of Obatala respectively.5 In relation to the latter, Soyinka argues that ‘mystery and terror’ are banished (‘The Fourth Stage’ 34). The perspective of Obatala is essentially religious, as it involves an acceptance of the wisdom of the gods, and, therefore, Yoruba religious art can only generate an accommodating and accepting attitude, a ‘spiritual complacency’ towards the modern


world (‘The Fourth Stage’ 36). Tragic art, by contrast, emphasises conflict, the revolutionary spirit, and the ‘effect of the unknown’ (‘The Fourth Stage’ 34). Note how his strategic distinctions between Yoruba religious and tragic art map the contours of the differentiation of his art from Achebe’s. The dance of Obatala is antithetical to the drama of Ogun.6 In terms of foreign dramatic forms, it is through ‘the light of Nietzsche and the Phrygian deity’ that Soyinka analyses Yoruba traditional tragic art, which is to be distinguished from the modern form of which he is the major exponent in Africa (‘The Fourth Stage’ 27). Consequently, his theory, like Nietzsche’s, is less a ritual account of tragedy, but one that is profoundly aesthetic and metaphysical. In Myth, Literature and the African World, he clarifies the distinction he sets up in ‘The Fourth Stage’ between Yoruba religious and tragic art. Soyinka aligns religious art with general religious ritual and ascribes the narrative structure of the latter, with its ‘catalysers’ (to use Barthesian structuralist terminology) of conflict, suffering and restitution, to the form of the epic (2). Tragic rituals are decidedly more metaphysical, associated as they are with the ‘more profound, more elusive phenomenon of being and non-being’ (Myth 2).7 In addition to the elucidation of the philosophical dimension of Yoruba tragedy, Soyinka employs the language of dramatic aesthetics to qualify the metaphysical concepts: dramatic technique is discussed in terms of ritual possession; the transitional abyss is called ‘the fourth stage’; Ogun, Soyinka’s tutelary deity, is regarded as the ‘first actor’, and the tragic rite as ‘the first art‘ (‘The Fourth Stage‘ 28, my emphases). This deliberate aestheticisation cradles a specific polemic position; one that contests the European ethnographer’s relegation of African ritual practices to the inartistic, the merely religious. The privileging of aesthetics and metaphysics reveals, as Frederic Jameson has suggested in a different context, ‘the substitution of new positivities’ for the older mythical content (The Political Unconscious 134). Soyinka’s strategies represent a search for secular equivalents for the religiously-inscribed narratives. The priority accorded to aesthetics stems from Soyinka’s avant-texte, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, in which the German philosopher claims that it is ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified’ (32). However, Soyinka is quick to distinguish Yoruba tragedy from Greek (or Nietzsche’s account of it at least) by rejecting the Nietzschean celebration of artifice and illusion. Yoruba traditional art is ‘not ideational, but essential’ and is primarily concerned with transmitting essential aspects of both being and morality (‘The Fourth Stage’ 28). Soyinka’s distinction is fundamental as it establishes a distance from Nietzsche’s (and Schopenhauer’s) relegation

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of the human world to the merely illusory, and is thus profoundly more humanistic. However, the difference between German idealist tragic theory and Yoruba tragedy functions less as a comprehensive comparative perspective than as a point of departure for a theoretical elaboration of the Yoruba metaphysical concepts that are imbedded in mythical narratives and ‘performed’ in ritual and religious practices. Ogun In a cosmic framework defined by continuity between the natural and the supernatural, the visible and the invisible, Soyinka’s choice of Ogun as his muse and paradigm of social and cultural praxis qualifies and complicates this seeming harmony and is consistent with the emphasis he places both on the insurmountable gaps between the various areas of existence and the experience of alienation in Yoruba tragedy. Ogun in his various mythical significations (‘protector of orphans’, ‘roof over the homeless’, ‘revolutionary leader’, and so on (see ‘The Fourth Stage’ 28, 35)) combines, in a single being, the contradictory drives towards creativity and destruction (Myth 26). Soyinka warns us that where Ogun is concerned ‘the blood is never completely absent’ (Myth 26). The playwright deploys the deity’s mythical narrative to construct a theory of tragic art, to explicate certain dramatic practices (acting, the construction of tragic plots etc.), and to motivate for the development of a revolutionary consciousness. Ogun is, as Jeyifo notes, ‘overstretched and somewhat ineluctable in its multiple significations’ (Introduction, xviii). As with Soyinka’s various characterisations, for Ogun devotees the Yoruba god incorporates a variety of meanings. The deity, however, is principally the god of warfare, hunting, iron and the road (Barnes 2). Diametrically opposed images cluster around the figure of Ogun. He is at once a creator and a destroyer, ruthless and nurturing, central to society and marginal. Sandra T. Barnes and Paula Girshick Ben-Amos describe the development and elaboration of a ‘symbolic complex’ which incorporated the three elements of iron, warfare and state-building, and which centred on the figure of Ogun between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries along the forest belt region of the Guinea Coast (see ‘Ogun, the Empire Builder’ 39–64). A series of conquest states (Benin, Oyo and Dahomey) that depended on policies of aggressive militarism rose to power during this period. These states owed their political dominance not just to their well-organised armies, but also to their weapons made of iron. As god of iron, Ogun became associated with warfare and ultimately with the establishment of empires. In fact, Ogun was thought to be central


to the major historical milestones of these West African empires. The ‘Ogun concept’ encapsulated the first act of clearing the land (the progression from hunting to agriculture), the development of metallurgy (new technology), urbanisation (a ‘new way of life’ through the founding of cities), and, finally, empire (and consequently kingship) (Barnes and Ben-Amos 39, 57).8 These acts, which were seen as ‘firsts’ and as revolutionary (and thus associated with the ‘new,’ the ‘modern’), were also associated with death. Consequently, the Ogun concepts drew around them attributes of pollution.9 Iron, ironworkers and their smelters and forges (in what Barnes calls the ‘sacred iron complex’ (4)) were thought of as sacred – they were both revered and feared. The forges were also sanctuaries for people fleeing political conflict, for the dispossessed, and for anyone losing a battle (Barnes and Ben-Amos 52). These Ogun-spaces were, therefore, located outside the political sphere. The Edo of Benin, the Fon of the Dahomey and the Yoruba identified Ogun with both the marginal and the central, with war-mongering and with protection.10 Soyinka uses a particular myth of Ogun to highlight his destructive and impure sides. Soyinka powerfully evokes this version in ‘The Battle’ section of ‘Idanre’. In a drunken frenzy, Ogun mistakenly kills his own men. In the epic poem the people call out to their leader: ‘Murder, stay your iron hand/Your men lie slain – Cannibal.’ (‘Idanre’ 80) Significantly, the two attributes of Ogun that Soyinka chooses to emphasise involve a concern with justice and revolutionary change. For Soyinka, Ogun is the deity that best exemplifies the revolutionary urge and a commitment to a ‘transcendental, humane but rigidly restorative justice’ (‘The Fourth Stage’ 28). If we regard Soyinka as identifying himself with the conscience/visionary pole of African literary vision, then his choice of Ogun as tutelary deity is apposite. Although initially being related to hunting, iron technology and warfare, the contemporary Ogun is associated with roads, modern transport and technology (see Barnes 2). Soyinka’s choice therefore also represents a strategy of escaping traditionalism. Violent and protective, beneficent and destructive, Ogun exemplifies the ambivalences of the sacred. René Girard calls those deities that combine the contradictory logics of the sacred ‘monstrous doubles’ (Violence and The Sacred 251). He identifies these deities with a specific category: those that involve themselves in the affairs of humans. It is therefore the proximity of certain gods to humans that results in this peculiar mythological signification. Soyinka, however, locates the sacred ambivalence within another discursive framework; that of the Will: ‘Ogun is the embodiment of Will, and Will is the paradoxical

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truth of destructiveness and creativeness in acting man.’ (‘The Fourth Stage’ 32) It is this Will that rescues the tragic protagonist from loss of self within the abyss, that terrifying matrix of dissolution and death. In ‘The Critic and Society’, Soyinka qualifies his metaphysical characterisation of the abyss by suggesting that it represents one of the ‘faces of Ideality’ (116). The other ‘faces of Ideality’ include the ‘State, Divinity, The Absolute and History’. Their challenger, by modelling himself on Ogun, is the essence of a ‘combative, even revolutionary humanism’ (‘The Critic’ 117). The ritual agent of Yoruba tragedy challenging the might of the gods, risking dissolution to contest the powers of the abyss, provides Soyinka with a model for revolutionary agency. Myth is thus made accountable to history. The return of the subject Wole Soyinka’s theory of tragic art takes as its point of departure the proposition of a generic discontinuity between African and Western tragedy. By relating the African form to conceptualisations inherent in specific systems of thought and cultural sensibilities, he is affirming the distinctiveness of the African worldview. This uniqueness arises out of the claim of the persistence of a religious framework: that of the animistic interfusion of the natural and the supernatural, of being and phenomena. This is neither a strategic necessity nor an ideological projection, as in the Marxist Lukács’ prescription for the representation of totality, but a statement of the conceptual underpinning of African epistemology and ontology or, in Heideggerian terms, that which qualifies being-in-the-world for the African. In Soyinka’s theorising this animistic framework does not reveal itself to be a seamless, harmonious totality between the visible and the invisible, the animate and the inanimate, humans and the gods. Soyinka notes that there is ‘an essential gulf’, an almost insurmountable gap, ‘that lies between one area of existence and another’ (‘The Fourth Stage’ 29). By extrapolating the ‘existence’ of these areas of existence (those of the living, the dead and the unborn) from Yoruba cosmology, he asserts the significance of a cyclic consciousness of time for the Yoruba (Myth 2). The proposition of the coexistence of past, present and future in the present is another means of distinguishing Africa from the West, with its allegedly exclusive reliance on a linear time consciousness. Soyinka, however, problematises the idea of continuity in the African perspective. Continuity for the Yoruba, Soyinka believes, produces metaphysics of accommodation and resolution (Myth 54). This metaphysical effect (of accommodation), and this is the crucial point for


Soyinka, ‘could only come after the passage’ (‘The Fourth Stage’ 30).11 Tragic art precedes religious art. Ogun’s plunge into the abyss echoes the ritual agent’s and the tragic actor’s conquest of the ‘realm of nothingness’ (‘The Fourth Stage’ 30). Therefore, Soyinka’s theory may be distinguished from other ritual accounts of tragedy – it is the structure of the epic, rather than the sacrificial ritual, that is the privileged form in the sacral conjuncture of epic heroism and sacrifice. Achebe (the religious writer?) opts for the latter. Yet in Myth the dramatist polemically proclaims that tragedy comes before the epic, it is the prologue to the epic. According to Soyinka, the tragic objective is an engagement with the ‘areas of terror and blind energies’, a realm beyond rational recognition or control, a space potentially destructive of human awareness, an idea before which language fails and human consciousness balks (‘The Fourth Stage’ 30). The objective of the epic is, on the other hand, the conquest of a substantial object. Georges Bataille, in theorising the sacred, distinguishes between the Christian quest for the Holy Grail and the quest determined by ‘essential religious activity’ (242). ‘The development of knowledge touching on the history of religions has shown,’ Bataille argues, ‘that essential religious activity was not directed toward a personal and transcendent being (or beings) but towards an impersonal reality.’ (242) A disjuncture thus arises between the impersonal sacred and different forms of transcendence: a disjuncture that opens up, for Bataille, a field of potential violence and death. The ‘fourth stage’ in Soyinka’s theory can be seen as an attempt to symbolically articulate this impersonal reality, this realm of terror. The sacred precedes religion. Soyinka’s theory of Yoruba tragedy deploys the narrative structure of the epic, but, in specifying the object of the quest of tragedy as the ‘impersonal reality’ of the sacred, it marks a distance between the epic and the tragic. The characterisation of the deities in Soyinka’s Yoruba cosmology bears striking similarities to the Greek pantheon, as elaborated by JeanPierre Vernant: they are incomplete, neither omniscient nor omnipotent, they make errors etc. (see Vernant, Myth and Society 90–3). The deities represent and are part of the conflicts and contradictions of the world. As a means of ordering and conceptualising the universe, they are a means of distinguishing between the ‘multiple types of forces operating within it’ (Vernant, Myth and Society 94). Vernant claims further that as elements of opaqueness and unpredictability define the sovereignty of the different types of power, the divide between the human and divine spheres are almost insurmountable (95). Soyinka proclaims both the ‘geocentric bias’ (Myth 27) of Yoruba cosmology and a compensatory

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mechanism, which ties the gods to humans in a relation of obligation, thereby attempting to close the distance between the mundane and numinous spheres. However, it is clear that his tutelary deity belongs to the Girardian-identified category of ‘monstrous doubles’. The mythological significance of Ogun slaughtering his own ‘kin’, an act that would cast the deity, in terms of the ambivalences of the sacred, as an outcast, a defiler, is reconstituted by Soyinka as the creative and destructive impulses of the aesthetic act itself. Ogun’s chain of significations, which include hero-victim-artist-revolutionary-outcast-defiler, is curiously split in Soyinka’s theorising. The outcast-defiler significations are muscled out of the mythological narrative and defined as a ‘postscript’ (‘The Fourth Stage’ 33). By using Ogun as exemplary mythical model for his politics and aesthetics, as representing the commitment to restorative justice and revolution, the ‘impure’ associations of the Yoruba deity prove more difficult to accommodate. With the notable exception of A Dance of the Forests, the action of Soyinka’s plays and novels operates on the human level, rather than the mythological plane. The deities are rarely active agents. Modern African tragedy, Soyinka claims, ‘echoes’ the ‘emotions of the first active battle of will through the abyss of dissolution’ rather than representing the mythical narrative of deities (‘The Fourth Stage’ 32). In his tragedies ‘Nature’ or the gods function in neither an arbitrary nor a wilful manner. In Greek tragedy, the motives of the gods are often opaque and their actions often incomprehensible. Vernant notes that the deities represent an element of brute force. What George Steiner identifies as central to tragic action, the ‘exposure of man to the murderousness and caprice of the inhuman’, is absent in both Soyinka’s elaboration of Yoruba cosmology and in his literary and dramatic productions (143). In contradistinction to Achebe’s rendering of sacred inscrutability in Arrow of God, the gods in Soyinka’s works are strangely absent and their actions function as role models for modern tragic action, acting and political agency.12 There is a repression in ‘The Fourth Stage’ (at least) of an important element of the Ogun mythical narrative – the outcast-defiler significations. This repression is an attempt to circumvent what in terms of the ritual, I shall call the problem of proximity, which is intimately related to the symbolic structuring of the power dynamic of religious society. Rick Franklin Talbott’s work on sacrifice is instructive. He identifies transcendence and immanence, or the presence of gods and humans together, as the central problem of the sacrificial ritual (57). As the impossible distance between the realm of the human and the divine is


bridged in the sacrificial ritual, he argues: ‘The ritual itself becomes an insurmountable problem.’ (51) The distinction between the two realms is not moral but ontological (following Rudolf Otto’s notion of das ganz Andere, the altogether different), and the barriers confronted in the sacrificial act, described by Hubert and Mauss, are specifically related to the difference between the divine and humans (57), a difference that is at once both ontological and epistemological. ‘Clouding these distinctions,’ Talbott suggests, ‘would have meant obliterating ontology and cosmology in one secularising act.’ (59) Marcel Gauchet, a historian of religion, argues that in an all-encompassing religious system humans are ‘radically dispossessed’ in an ontological sense (ix). All members of society are on an equal footing, as ‘no one stands closer to the origin point than others’ (x) – a radically egalitarian view of society.13 The incarnation or embodiment of divinely ordained power, characteristic of the divine-kings of the early modern European absolutist states, is impossible in traditional religious society, as power is accessible and manipulable to a limited extent by ‘technicians’; for example, the priest, the witch and the king (Gauchet 31). We are thrown into a world where, although the gods’ relation to the human world may be entirely arbitrary, each personal act functions in an order of interconnectedness between the human/social world, nature and the universe. Within the religious framework of the sacred, power belongs exclusively and legitimately to the sphere of the gods, and in partaking of the power of the impersonal reality, that is power per se, the deities determine the contingencies of nature and social relations. Power can only be corrupted or improperly deployed by humans themselves. From the perspective of humans, then, the gods, forever outside human society, are potentially antagonistic to them and are figured as ambivalent entities. Douglas suggests of traditional society ‘that which is not with it, part of it and subject to its laws, is potentially against it’ (Purity 4). The ontological distinction, therefore, between the divine and the human structures the political field by paradoxically levelling it. Gods and humans belong to two ontologically distinct spheres and those that transgress those borders, like Turner’s liminal figures in the ritual process, partake in the ‘monstrosity’ of sacrality. The problem of proximity in ritual and cosmology suggests that the sacred, with its dual specification of purity and defilement, functions as a negative other of the animistic framework; it is the non-personalised and non-personalising aspect of the traditional religious system. Whereas animism relies on continuity and integration, the sacred offers a radically different view of the universe: humans are constantly under threat from anti-human forces, contingency and

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epistemological anxiety rule, and humans’ assertion of freedom is forever tenuous. From this perspective, one can appreciate Soyinka’s view that power stands outside history and his location of sacred ambivalence within the discursive framework of Will: a human hubris that contests the power of the vastness of the abyss.14 Nietzsche deploys Schopenhauer’s distinction between will and representation in his articulation of the opposing forces of Apollo and Dionysus (see The Birth of Tragedy 29–30). For both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, the will must ultimately be negated, it must be overcome if we are to glimpse the underlying reality of the cosmos. Only with music, Schopenhauer claims, ‘in this pure state knowing comes to us, as it were, in order to deliver us from willing and its pressure’ (cited in Nietzsche, The Birth 31). Soyinka breaks from this negation of will: he prioritises it, following Nietzsche, as the decisively human act. It is only the titanic resolution of will that prevents the protagonist’s death in his journey through the abyss.15 Will, for Soyinka, becomes that which articulates man’s independence from nature; that which marks the leap from nature to culture. Radical as always, Nietzsche assigns will to the conquest of the unnatural. Tragedy, for him, rehearses the foundational narrative of culture through extreme unnaturalness. He asks: ‘For how should man force nature to yield up her secrets but by successfully resisting her, that is to say, by unnatural acts?’ (The Birth of Tragedy 61) Will, in this sense, is tied neither to the idea of the individual subject, nor does it belong exclusively to the new order of the city-state. It is the humanistic complementary to a socio-religious order that proclaims the rights of the ancients. Here again Soyinka’s radical contribution to tragic theory becomes apparent. Rather than locating resistance in the Marxist dialectical approach, espoused by Fanon and affirmed by Jeyifo, in the claim that colonialism creates the conditions for resistance against itself (see ‘What’ 154), Soyinka locates this impetus to rebellion within the African socio-religious system. The significance of will and responsibility in African and Greek tragedy is that it is the true measure of the human in precisely its desire to transcend that measure. In contrast to Achebe’s poetics in which the individual subject is effaced in the sacrificial ritual (the true subject is the clan), Soyinka’s conceptualisation of the Will privileges the subjectivity of the ritual victim/agent. Implicit in the process of making the ritual victim a subject is a distinction between sacrificial ritual and tragedy – the subjectivation of the victim through action. ‘The tragic victim,’ Soyinka suggests, ‘is redeemed only by action. Without acting, yet in spite of it, he is forever lost in the maul of tragic


tyranny.’ (‘The Fourth Stage’ 30) Born in the instance of transcendence and negation is a revolutionary impulse that contests domination and subjugation by the assertion of human freedom. Action is all. A consideration of the sacred sheds some new light on Soyinka’s theory of Yoruba tragic art. The conquest of the sacred, variously represented as the realm of dissolution (housing the absolute power of death), as the realm of the deities (housing the sources of destiny for the community) and as the sovereign sphere that challenges the freedom of humans, provides both the mythical (narrative) and ritual (structure) foundation for his theory.16 Although Soyinka distinguishes the structure and meanings of the epic from those of Yoruba tragedy, I argue that he deploys the narrative structure of the epic to account for tragic form in order to refuse the logic of sacrifice in functionalist accounts of religious ritual with the qualification that the objective of the tragic quest – the conquest of the sacred, the realm of nothingness (‘the areas of terror and blind energies’) – clearly distinguishes the epic from the tragic. The exploration of ideas of the sacred in Soyinka’s theory has led to a more complex view than that offered by the theory of animism in traditional African religious society. His choice of the ‘monstrous double’ Ogun as titular deity, the significance of forms of alienation to the experience of the ritual, the theorising of the unbridgeable gaps between the various areas of existence, and a view of the cosmos, in which contradiction, contingency and ‘epistemic anxiety’ dominate, suggests the sacred as bringing into play animism’s other. Implicit in his theorising of Yoruba cosmology and metaphysics is a strategy of political agency. The treatise on Ogun attempts to clarify a political and aesthetic project by means of Yoruba mythology, a secular project. Soyinka radically locates the impetus to revolution within the traditional African framework and identifies the contestation of any form of power that does away with freedom as the decisive and central action of any form of political and aesthetic praxis. However, in the mobilisation of Yoruba religious ideas for his politics and aesthetics, Soyinka finds them already inscribed with the thoroughgoing ambivalences of the sacred. In his repression and exclusion of aspects of the Ogun narrative and the redirection of sacred duality into the aesthetic act, the sacred is revealed.

Power and authority in Kongi’s Harvest Making Soyinka’s elaborations of Yoruba tragedy a fulcrum for the interpretation of his plays is a problematic point of departure for the critic. Yoruba tragedy reposes on the culturally specific domain of

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a religious worldview, while modern African tragedy partakes of an uneven and fraught modernity, a modernity that, in theory, disavows the traditional religious framework. Africa’s modernity, more specifically, is Janus-faced: looking to the past in an attempt to locate a precolonial (not necessarily pre-modern) heritage/identity for the project of imagining the postcolonial future. The mythico-ritualistic elements of Soyinka’s aesthetics are similarly doubly inscribed. The playwright deploys the structural and narrative elements of myth (specifically, the epic quest) to both address the pathologies of the postcolonial condition and locate political agency. In ‘The Fourth Stage’, the Ogun myth and ritual provides the basis for Soyinka’s exploration of what he calls ‘Yoruba tragedy‘ and an elucidation of the postulates of Yoruba metaphysics. It is, as Biodun Jeyifo points out, one of the finest examples of African idealist philosophy (Introduction xviii). In the later series of essays, Myth, Literature and the African World, Soyinka begins to address tragedy’s modern form. What had remained implicit in the earlier paper, the realm of the aesthetic, comes to the fore in Myth. The use of the language of dramatic aesthetics to qualify Yoruba metaphysical concepts suggests that the totality and continuity of the African worldview, championed by Soyinka in ‘The Fourth Stage’, is redirected in Myth to define the aesthetic artefact and act. The ‘microcosmic completeness’ of the aesthetic object replicates the macrocosmic totality of the African world, as an organicist conception informs both (Myth 50). The transvaluation of the ostensibly religious into the aesthetic effects a desacralisation. In modern tragedy, aesthetics and politics take priority over religious belief. The tension between a sacred metaphysical view and a desacralised aesthetic is deployed in one of Soyinka’s early plays. Kongi’s Harvest was performed for the first time during the same period as the playwright was writing his treatise on Yoruba tragedy. The play was a major preoccupation of Soyinka’s during the 1960s. Although first performed in 1965, after his release from prison in 1969 Soyinka took over a production of the play and in 1970 he prepared a film script of the play. In the film version, he played the most power-crazed and demonic of his creations, Kongi himself. In Wole Soyinka, an insightful study of Soyinka’s life and works, Jeyifo points out that Soyinka is known by his band of acolytes and admirers in Nigeria as Kongi (22). Yet Kongi’s Harvest has not received much critical attention. This dearth of critical activity may in part be related to its ‘populist’ sensibilities and its peculiar generic heterogeneity.17 As a result of increasing censorship of newspapers and radio during the early 1960s, James Gibbs suggests that Soyinka


returned to the satirical revue to voice his criticisms of the Nigerian government (6–7). During this period, the playwright was attempting, among other things, to incorporate elements of African festival performance and ritual practice into his dramatic practice, to speculate on the nature of African tragic art and to specify the distinctiveness of African cultural sensibility without recourse to Negritudinist ideas. The desire to blend political critique with indigenous cultural forms resulted in a play, Gibbs points out, which formally prioritises contrast and juxtaposition over narrative and character as structuring devices (20). The comingling of political satire and tragedy established a dominant mode in his approach to dramatic practice. However, after the tragic strand found its apotheosis in Death and the King’s Horseman, political satire and the dynamics of alienation came to dominate Soyinka’s approach from the late 1970s to the present day. Soyinka’s Nietzschean-inspired view of tragedy was replaced by the politically motivated aesthetics of Brecht. Kongi’s Harvest is significant in Soyinka’s oeuvre in establishing the tragic-comic mode and being one of the first attempts by the playwright to mould an aesthetic view (specifically Nietzschean) of tragic action to a strategy of political agency. Furthermore, the text distinctively displays a high degree of modernist self-reflexivity as it shows an awareness of its own generic strategies and mimetic devices. ‘Orisa l’oba’: The end(s) of charismatic authority Attention to the textual and dramatic process of constituting symbolic relations in the play reveals semic antithesis as its most significant structuring device. ‘Antithesis,’ Roland Barthes writes in S/Z, ‘is the battle between two plenitudes set ritually face to face like two fully armed warriors.’ (27) The primary structure of antithesis in Kongi’s Harvest opposes the values, ideas, symbolic associations and ideologies that coalesce around the figures of the deposed king of the imaginary Ismaland, Oba Danlola and the new leader of the modern African nation-state, Kongi. The human versus the monstrous, life versus death, holy versus unholy, tradition versus modernity, religion versus science, feudal versus modern, are some of the oppositions that have been visited by other critics (for examples, see Jones 73–4, and Msiska 71–3). These oppositions are reflected and echoed in the various media of the dramatic apparatus; for example, language and music. The poetic register of Danlola’s language contrasts with Kongi’s prosaic utterances. The royal drums compete with the national anthem and the Carpenters’ praise-chants for the audience’s attention. What remains poorly analysed, often not going beyond designating one as modern and the other as traditional,

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is Soyinka’s most persistent thematic concerns: the conceptualisation and symbolic articulation of the abuse of ritual and power. The ideological opposition of Danlola and Kongi is set up in the Hemlock section through a series of acts of desecration operating on what Barthes calls the level of the proairetic. Danlola ‘desecrates’ the national anthem by changing the words into a criticism of the brutality of Kongi’s regime, and the national flag by wearing it as a wrapper. The superintendent, in retaliation, strips the king and stops the royal drums (both taboos within Yoruba society). These acts foreground the sacred as the principal arena in which the symbols and discourses will be contested in the play and mark out the lines along which conflict will develop. The series of desecrations are brought to a halt when Danlola threatens to prostrate himself in front of the superintendent in the suspended, comic climax of the scene. The superintendent pre-empts the violation of the taboo by throwing himself on to the ground, identifying with the chthonic source of power of the elders. He says: SUPERINTENDENT.

Only a foolish child lets a father prostrate to him. I do not ask to become a leper or a lunatic. I have no wish to live on sour berries. (65)18

Explicit in his act and words is a refusal to upset a religiously sanctioned hierarchical relation. The relation is symbolically represented as a patriarchal one in a society where a gerontocratic power dynamic is prioritised. The relation between the king and the superintendent of the camp is therefore based neither on common reason nor on the power of the king, who is both deposed and imprisoned. Danlola does not have the power of the one who commands. What they have in common is the hierarchy itself – a hierarchy which both agents recognise as right, good and legitimate, and in which both of them have their specific place. The superintendent submits before the king and the king knows full well that he will. The relation that is affirmed, as Hannah Arendt defines it, is one of authority (see ‘What was Authority?’ 82–3). Deposed and imprisoned, Danlola lacks political power but still possesses authority. Sociologists and political scientists alike see authority as central to the functioning of any political system, the means by which the exercise of power – domination, as Max Weber would have it – is legitimated. The superintendent symbolically articulates his relation to the king as a patriarchal one. In Hemlock and in the Second Part, Sarumi consistently evokes the patriarchal image to represent Danlola’s relation


to the rest of the community that he rules: ‘Kabiyesi,’ he admonishes Danlola, ‘a father employs only a small stick on his child.’ (66) Implicit in the superintendent’s and Sarumi’s use of the paternalistic image is, as I have noted, the privileging of the gerontocratic power dynamic that structures the political sphere of Yoruba society. The ‘foolish child’ is distinguished from the implied ‘wise father’. Danlola calls the Aweri, the clan of elders, his ‘props of wisdom’ (63) and Sarumi sings, ‘the dandy’s wardrobe […] cannot match an elder’s rags’ (68). For Weber, gerontocracy and patriarchy are fundamental aspects of traditional authority (On Charisma 231). He identifies three pure types of authority or sources of legitimate domination. A brief discussion of the typology will be instructive in identifying precisely the social opposition of Kongi and Danlola. Traditional authority rests on the established belief in the sanctity of ‘immemorial traditions’ and therefore the person exercising authority derives his/her legitimacy from these sacred traditions (Weber, On Charisma 214). The form of authority that is opposed to the traditional type is legal/rational authority. Both rules and rule are impersonal, based as they are on the belief in the legality of patterns and the right of those designated by the impersonal order to rule. Democracy and bureaucracy are concomitants of the rational-legal type. The third form in Weber’s typology is a transitory mechanism. Charismatic authority rests on the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by the leader. The charismatic leader imbued with (in Christian terminology) the ‘gift of grace’ is considered extra-ordinary and is ‘treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers’ (Weber, On Charisma 241). It is interesting to note that Weber explains political change as a process that necessarily involves a transitional stage of charismatic leadership, with the attendant type of authority (a personal relation between and a leader and his devoted followers) becoming ‘routinised’ into predominantly one of the other two types; that is, traditional or legal-bureaucratic. The hierarchical relation between the superintendent and the king is of a traditional nature as it reposes on an ideological structure that affirms belief in the sanctity of traditions. The leader who wields traditional authority is not seen, Weber claims, as a ‘superior’ but as a ‘personal master’ (227); hence the patriarchal image (the distinction between the father and the child) and the privileging of gerontocracy (which entails an opposition between the wise and the foolish as knowledge and age are seen as equivalent) by the superintendent. But rather than merely reflecting the power structure of Danlola’s kingdom, the division of labour between men and women and the division of

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power between the old and the young, the patriarchal and gerontocratic images represent attempts to go beyond and mask those structural divisions. They negate the coercer-coerced relation between the one who issues commands and the one who submits. As Arendt argues in ‘What was Authority?’ with regards to Plato and Aristotle, the patriarchal and educational images represent efforts to identify a relation of authority that exists outside the realm of command that is then mapped onto the political domain. The ‘superiority’ of the ruler is thus not an inherent personal trait. However, in the text (and in Yoruba society), Danlola’s (and the king’s) right to command arises out of a special type of superiority – an authority that is ideologically inscribed as a distinctive relation to divinity. ‘Orisa l’oba’, chants Sarumi (62). The king is a god. Danlola’s authority is entrenched by his role as the axis of his people’s social and religious relations and as the being that allows for what Soyinka has regarded as central to Yoruba (and African) society; the idea of continuity: SARUMI.

We lift the king’s umbrella Higher than men But it never pushes The sun in the face. (67)

The king is regarded as closer to the divine sphere (symbolically represented by the sun) than the rest of the community, and as the being that protects the community from that sphere (like the umbrella). Oba Danlola’s authority, therefore, rests on his personal and distinctive relationship with the deities, the sources of destiny whose actions determine the survival of the community. During his enthronement the oba-elect of the Yoruba performs a series of acts that set him apart from his own kin group (see Pemberton 122–3). Officially, these acts designate his location in a unique descent group that has its origins in Oduduwa, the ‘divine mythical king of all Yoruba’ (Pemberton 122). The line of consanguineally-related sovereigns, although carved out from the ruling house lineages, represents a separate and sacred descent group. From this perspective, his authority is of the charismatic order. Sarumi begs Danlola: ‘Don’t give voice to the awesome names on an Oba’s tongue.’ (66) The king’s personal relation to divinity makes him a powerful priest/witch whose curses would have fatal repercussions. In fact, Dennis Duerden and Max Gluckman point out that many putative divine-kings in sub-Saharan Africa function less as issuers of


enforceable commands and more as performers of rites.19 Danlola’s authority can thus be seen as a synthesis of the Weberian-identified traditional and charismatic types. In addition to relating the king’s authority to his distinctive relation to the sky-spirits, Sarumi’s dirge also makes clear the insurmountable difference between them, the ontological distinction between the divine and the human. Although higher than men, the king’s umbrella never pushes the sky in the face. Danlola’s privileged position and the power he would have wielded in the traditional system, the theologico-political matrix in which the religious and political spheres are inextricably linked, however, are limited on various fronts. Danlola asks in the prologue: ‘What is a king without a clan of elders?’ Yoruba kings’ (and most sub-Saharan kings’) monopoly of power is far from total and their exercise of power is never absolute (see Duerden 27–30). Although he praises Danlola, Sarumi, a member of the Aweri and father of the heir-apparent, repeatedly evokes the Aweri’s relation to the ancestors: SARUMI. They say we took too much silk For the royal canopy But the dead will witness We never ate the silkworm.

(66) As I noted in Chapter 1, with the ‘counter-stational’ Igbo society, the division of political power between the elders and the chief priest is mythologically and symbolically articulated as the division between that which is consecrated to the sky (the implacable forces of destiny, the gods) and that which is consecrated to the earth (the earth and the earth gods).20 The representatives of earth (the clan of elders) are perceived to be superior and senior to the sky-representative to ensure that the interests of the clan are placed above the demands of the gods. This symbolic division of power persists in Kongi’s Harvest. The major difference between Kongi’s Reformed Aweri and Danlola’s clan of elders is that the latter, as Duerden suggests, would have had the right, as do the Ogboni of the Yoruba, to depose their leader, ‘a mystical power derived from their understanding of Ogun [… ] and their relationship to the earth goddess and the powers of rebirth’ (41). A brief discussion of the Iwa Ogun ritual will help clarify the limits of the Yoruba king’s power.21 In the annual Yoruba liturgical calendar, in the town of Ila-Orangun there are two festivals in which Ogun is central: the Odun Ogun (the festival of Ogun), which takes place in

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early June and lasts for seven days, and the Odun Oro (the festival of the king), which is held for thirteen days in early September. During the festivals, the Iwa Ogun ritual is performed three times, once at the end of Odun Ogun and twice in Odun Oro. The ‘staging’ of the ritual involves three different locations that are situated along a single axis: the palace veranda, where the oba (also called Orangun) and his retinue are located, the veranda of Chief Obale (who is second in rank among the seven senior chiefs of Ila) and the shrine of Ogun, which is halfway between Chief Obale’s compound and the palace, and also the midpoint of the three major roads of Ila. The seven senior chiefs and the representatives of the junior chiefs of Ila gather on Chief Obale’s veranda as they do every week to discuss the town’s affairs. During the ritual, the chiefs enact three ritual affronts towards the sacred oba. Firstly, they do not respond to the summons made by the afobaje chief (the kingmaker) on behalf of the oba. Tension and anxiety builds among the spectators as the chiefs studiously ignore the pleading messenger. After the third summons, the chiefs reluctantly acquiesce and they make their way to the Ogun shrine and take their seats. When the king, who has been dressed in the outfit of the paramount chief, sees the chiefs moving to the Ogun shrine he retires to a chamber in the palace and re-emerges dressed in the regalia of sacred kingship. Thus, the first ritual affront is directed at the king in his capacity as political apex of Ila. Secondly, when the king, in his role as sacred authority, makes his way to the Ogun shrine, he has to suffer another ritual affront as the chiefs refuse to rise and pay their respects to him. The conflict that arises from the disregard for sacred authority results in the enactment of a mock-battle between the palace servants and the warrior chiefs in the space between the Orangun and the seated chiefs. However, when the mock-battle comes to an end, the chiefs make their way to the palace veranda where the king is on his throne, kneel and greet the Orangun with the salutation: ‘E ku Odun. Kabiyesi. Oba alaase ekiji orisa.’ (Festival greetings. Your Highness. The king’s power is like that of the gods. (Pemberton 118)) After the chiefs have acknowledged the power of the oba over them, they enact a final ritual affront by refusing his hospitality. In a ‘secret’ chamber behind the palace veranda walls when the king offers the chiefs a calabash of palm wine, they make a show of pretending to drink. The king chides them and asks them why they refuse his hospitality. Their only response is to say ‘Kabiyesi’. The king gives them a kola nut each and dismisses them. In a study of the political development of six eighteenth and nineteenth century Yoruba kingdoms, Peter C. Lloyd argues that conflict


between the interests of the king and those of the chiefs characterises Yoruba political systems (see The Political Development 1–8). These kingdoms were neither segmentally structured (like the Igbo) nor highly centralised (as in the monarchies of Benin and Dahomey where the king functioned as absolute authority). The struggle for power between the king and the council of chiefs shaped the Yoruban political landscape. The Iwa Ogun (which means ‘the essential character of Ogun’) dramatically enacts this political conflict. The ritual affronts that the chiefs perform make the oba acutely aware not only of his constitutional obligation to accept their decisions, even if it is a decision to depose him, but also of their obligation to another allegiance outside of their political commitment to his royal person – their allegiance to kin, to their descent group (see Lloyd ‘Political’ 221 and Pemberton 122). Yoruba towns are essentially aggregates of descent groups. As junior and senior chieftaincy titles are hereditary, each lineage holds land and rights to political office collectively and each has its individual history and myth of origin. Lloyd points out that competition between the descent groups constitutes much of the daily political process in Yoruba towns (‘Political’ 221). Competition between the lineage groups means that there is always the potential for conflict and discord between them. When the chiefs kneel before the Orangun after the mock-battle, they acknowledge an allegiance to an authority that transcends that of kinship, the authority of the king and the city. From this perspective, kingship represents the subsumption of descent-group conflict, and a commitment to the welfare and survival of the polis. However, powerful kings may abuse their independence and their sacred status, and exploit the conflict between descent groups to bolster their power (see Lloyd ‘Political’ 222). There is, thus, a potential for monarchical tyranny. In the final ritual affront of the Iwa Ogun, after the chiefs have acknowledged the sacrality of the Orangun’s authority, they refuse his hospitality, exposing their essential mistrust of kingship (Pemberton 132). The Iwa Ogun ritual dramatises and only momentarily resolves the conflict between the king and his Aweri. Note also that it is at the shrine of Ogun that the political conflict results in the enactment of civil war. Therefore, the ‘Ogun-space’ is located outside the two competing spheres of power (kingship and kinship). In this frontier zone the competing powers are brought into direct opposition, disclosing contradictions at the political heart of Yoruba society. The Iwa Ogun gives the violence of Ogun its proper location: the political realm. The relation of the exercise of monarchical power to the sacred allows for further recuperation of symbolic associations freighted with cultural

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significance. I noted that the king’s power is clearly distinguished from that of the deities. Yet he is closer to the realm of the divine than all other people in his society, hence his authority is invoked by a source that is beyond and above the ruler. The king’s proximity to the sources of power, however, casts him as an ambivalent figure. As a means of explaining his desecration of the national flag by wearing it as a wrapper, Danlola tells the Supervisor of the detention camp: ‘The nude shanks of the king/Is not a sight for children–/It will blind them.’ (64) Belying Danlola’s jesting is a warning about sacred pollution – a warning that is only explicable through recourse to an understanding of the sacred. Girard notes that the so-called divine-kings among many African peoples possess similar attributes to the above-mentioned ‘monstrous doubles’, a symbolic articulation of what I have called the problem of proximity. The presence of a figure imbued with the sacred poses problems for the community. Often ‘divine’ African kings, Girard claims, are forbidden to touch the ground and are isolated or hidden from view to protect the people from sacred pollution (Violence 268).22 The taboos and prohibitions that surround the office of the king suggest that much danger is attributed to the exercise of power. Ambivalence accrues to the figure exercising that power. This is, as I noted earlier, both a symbolic means of preventing the abuse of political power and a reflection of the humanistic bias of the religious order. Therefore, in relation to the political division of power between the monarch and the clan of elders, the religious demarcation of divine sovereignty, and the symbolic representation of the danger attendant on the exercise of power, Danlola’s power is very carefully restricted within the traditional system. Also implicit in the superintendent’s remarks is the acknowledgement of the coincidence of the marginal (and its sacred powers) and the position of the king. The Superintendent wants to avoid becoming a leper or a lunatic. Through a consideration of V.W. Turner’s distinction between communitas and structure, I have noted the structural homology of the leper or the lunatic and the venerated leader of the clan in certain traditional African societies – the coincidentia oppositorum of the sacred subject. Pemberton’s analysis of the images carved into the palace veranda walls in Ila is revealing. Rather than the image of the king being surrounded by the images of pliant chiefs, it is surrounded by depictions of marginal figures and activities – couples copulating, acrobats, hunters, warriors etc. Pemberton concludes that the carvings reveal that the ‘palace is an anomalous realm and its chief resident also is a marginal person’ (127). At the New Yam Festival, the climax of the play, Danlola says: ‘This is Harvest. An Oba must emerge/In sun colours as a laden altar.’ (105–6)


Not only does Danlola evoke his distinctive relation to the realm of the deities, but his words also designate his role as victim at the sacrificial altar. Soyinka counterposes Danlola’s role as priest-king (as Achebe with Ezeulu’s role as chief priest in Arrow of God ) with his symbolic role as sacrificial victim at the Harvest. The symbolic associations of the pure and the impure, the venerated and the accursed, attach to the dual specification of the sacred. Therefore, the curse that Kongi’s lackey attempts to avoid arises less from the possibility of the king abdicating his position as leader of the political hierarchy of the clan, but from the threat of the sacred, with which he is imbued and from which he protects his subjects. The sacred realm both bolsters and delimits Danlola’s power. Within the traditional system it is this taboo (the reversal of the position of the king and subject) that cannot be transgressed (the limit-taboo) without also destroying the various characters’ imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence; that is, their ideological location. The practicalities that have underpinned Danlola’s political power have ceased to function effectively. Danlola’s authority is a synthesis of the Weberian-identified traditional and charismatic types, a synthesis that problematises the Weberian typology and his explanation of social transformation. In Kongi’s Harvest, the latter aspect of Danlola’s authority qualifies and delimits the former. With the loss of his power as ruler, Danlola claims that he is not capable of casting ‘subtle damnations’ (65). The king’s charismatic authority rests in some part on the sacred power of his words, the awesome names he carries on his tongue. Although Danlola is being partially disingenuous about his ability to curse, his statement alludes to the weakening of his power as priest. Deserted by his magical powers, Weber argues, the authority of the charismatic leader will ultimately disappear (244): DRUMMER. I saw a strange sight In the market this day The sun was high But I saw no shade From the king’s umbrella.

(67) As hero-victim, as sacred subject, as charismatic leader, the king should be able to protect the community from the blinding rays of the sun, from the realm of power itself, from what Soyinka had called in his theory of tragedy ‘the abyss’. But the loss of political power undermines the religious sanctions with which that power has hitherto been

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invested. The integrated social, political and religious domains become fractured. Soyinka’s deployment of a double register in the praise-chants and in the elder’s justification of royal privilege reflects the unsettling of the ideological framework that has bolstered royalty. The father of the heir-apparent sings: SARUMI. Oh yes, we know they say We wore out looms With weaving robes for kings But I ask, is popoki The stuff to let down To unformed fingers clutching up At life?

(67) The same movement that seems to put into place royal privilege also challenges it. The argument for the use of expensive material (the popoki) simultaneously centralises the role of the king in cosmological continuity and creates the impression of a hollow ideological justification for the wealthy. Moreover, the play dramatises the upheavals of the traditional power structure and the loss of Danlola’s power to command through the above-mentioned series of acts of desecration in Hemlock (in the order of narration) and through a series of reversals in the order of symbolic determination. Reversal, Jean-Pierre Vernant claims, is the ‘keystone of tragic structure’ (‘Ambiguity and Reversal’ 93). The series of reversals involves a textual and dramatic redeployment of the symbolic recuperation of what Barthes has termed the agglomerative space, which functions as a stratum of the sequential space. In fact, the first words spoken in the play announce a reversal: SUPERINTENDENT. Kabiyesi, be your age. These antics may look well on a common agitator but really, an elder is an elder, and a king does not become a menial just because he puts down his crown to eat. (62)

The elder/child and king/menial oppositions suggest a political division that is gerontocratic and hierarchical. These reversals inhere in Soyinka’s depiction of Danlola in Hemlock. Through his bawdy and scatological remarks, Oba Danlola recalls the figure of the jester. The


Fool, as in Shakespearean drama, functions as a double and an inversion of the king.23 Girard argues that the jester replicates the position of the victim in the sacred conjunction of hero-victim, as kingship emerges from the divided entity of the victim as both saviour and alien alterity (see Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World 51–5). Therefore, the significance of the sacred gains further weight with the depiction of Danlola as the Fool. ‘Hemlock’ recalls the death of Socrates and para-textually refers a reading/performance of Kongi’s Harvest to Greek tragedy. The ‘prologue’ of the play also ends with a dirge that predicts disaster, foregrounding the tragic aspect of the play. The reversals that have been registered by the text in the preceding part coalesce in the final image of the dirge: the monster-child (see 68–9). The monster-child that eats its mother reflects both a reversal in the natural order and a negation of origin. The king as jester, as victim, symbolically articulates Danlola’s loss of power. The monster-child image reflects the demise of the traditional system, which interprets this upheaval through an animistic framework of continuity between the natural, social and supernatural domains. However, the king’s authority as traditional leader, the text suggests, remains intact. The superintendent refuses to allow the limit-taboo to be transgressed, affirming the authority of the oba (and the traditional system). Kongi’s Harvest takes as its point of departure, therefore, a disjuncture that arises with the advent of the African nation-state – the division (and opposition) between power and authority.

Power versus authority The whole of the action of the play prepares for and centres on the New Yam Festival. What, within the traditional framework, would have been a celebration of the fecundity of the earth and a start of the harvest season becomes politically over-determined and is expected to inaugurate the authority of Kongi and his ‘modern’ regime. FOURTH. And Danlola, the retrogressive autocrat, will with his own hands present the Leader with the New Yam, thereby acknowledging the supremacy of the State over his former areas of authority, spiritual or secular. (81)

The central rite of the Yoruba New Yam Festival is a purification rite – a ritual cleansing of the first yam after which the harvest of yams may be

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eaten by the community without fear of contamination (see Ogunba 169–70). In fact, the Odun Ogun and the Odun Oro also contain ceremonial cleansings of yams. The purification ritual calls attention to the sacred aspect of the king’s authority rather than his political role as paramount chief. Kongi and his Reformed Aweri ignore the oba’s sacred function at the New Yam Festival with, as we shall see, disastrous consequences for their regime. In contradistinction to Danlola, Kongi’s power is without limit. He has power over life and death. Kongi muses: ‘I don’t remember condemning them to death.’ (90) In the bastardised anthem that begins the play, the autocrat’s power is represented as one that refuses communication (‘government diffusion sets/Which talk and talk and never/Take a lone word in reply” (61)) – a univocal power that rejects any dialogue. The anthem of the Carpenters, the military wing of Kongi’s state, suggests that Kongi’s power is that of the coercer – brutal and unabashedly ruthless. ‘Heads’ too slow to acquiesce ‘feel the weight of their mallets’ (115). In the play, this power that rests on sheer violence is signalled not only by specific stage directions, like the ‘Nazi salute’ of the Carpenters at the beginning of the harvest feast, but also by Soyinka’s use of lexical ambiguities in the Secretary’s and the sycophantic Reformed Aweri’s remarks. The Secretary informs the Reformed Aweri, the ideologymachine of Kongi’s regime, that their leader has decided on a theme for the Festival: ‘The key word is Harmony. Total Harmony.’ (76) The Third Aweri notes later: ‘Especially when harmony is the goal. The ultimate goal.’ (81) The use of the adjectives ‘total’ and ‘ultimate’ echoes the totalitarian nature of Kongi’s modern nation-state and, as the adjectival qualifications suggest, a harmony that is wrought at any cost; they identify it with violence. Harmony is turned into its opposite. The significance of the New Yam becomes apparent. Through the transgression of the limit-taboo, the king’s submission before the new leader, Kongi attempts to convert his absolute power, insufficient in itself for the functioning of the new political system, into authority. Arendt distinguishes power from authority: ‘Authority precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used, authority itself has failed.’ (‘What’ 82) She traces the emergence of the concept of authority within Western discourses. The Greeks, she argues, had no concept of authority in political experience – they knew only persuasion of equals and coercion of subordinates. The word and concept (auctoritas) are Roman in origin and for the Romans the definitive aspect of authority was that those who supposedly possessed authority did not have power. Authority emerges as a relation that is opposed to rule,


to the exercise of power. E. D. Watt sees this as a separation in Roman republican government between potestas (the right to issue enforceable commands) and auctoritas (11). Arendt suggests that, for the Romans as opposed to the Greeks, auctoritas arises out of the sacredness of foundation. The founding of Rome was the central, unrepeatable and decisive beginning of Roman political life – every moment in its history is then added to this unique event. The sacredness of foundation results in a prioritisation of the past. Therefore, the deeds and words of the ancestors, precedents and the traditions that have emerged from them are ‘always binding’ (Arendt, ‘What’ 101). The sacred act of founding has important implications for Roman religion and society. The gods, to whom authority is attributed, operate less as determining forces and more as sources of endorsement or disapproval. Also, the gerontocratic division of power in Roman society is authorised as a privilege that the elders get from having grown closer to the ancestors and the past. The idea of foundation is central to Soyinka’s treatise on Yoruba tragedy, cosmology and metaphysics, ‘The Fourth Stage’. Beyond locating an origin, the importance of mythical narratives for Soyinka’s elaboration of the significance of the Ogun rite is that they designate founding as the decisive socio-political act. The narratives that he explicates include the narrative of primordial genesis, in which the original godhead’s unity is shattered by the rebellion of his slave, Atunda; the narrative of primal becoming symbolised by the epic adventure of Ogun’s daring plunge into the transitional abyss to re-unite the deities with humans; and the foundational social narrative of Ogun’s ‘post-script’ act of hubris, in which he commits the taboo of slaughtering his own people in a bout of drunken frenzy.24 Kongi and his Reformed Aweri, the ideological wing of the state of Ismaland, desire to legitimate his power to command by attempting to incorporate all three forms of authority in the Weberian typology; that is, traditional, charismatic and rational. The New Yam Festival is fundamental to Kongi’s government, I have noted, as Kongi expects it to inaugurate and authorise his exercise of political power, a ceremony of the state to found his authority. The use of the festival to facilitate the change in political dispensation reveals a recognition and affirmation of traditional forms of authority. While Kongi is committed to new and the modern, the importance of the decrees and actions of the ancestors for Danlola’s authority suggests that foundation as political act and imperative is decisive for the community. The past is privileged. To proclaim the authoritative nature of his statement, Danlola says, in Hemlock, ‘It was our fathers who said, not I.’ (64) When Sarumi seeks

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justification for the king’s and the Aweri’s privilege and position, he repeatedly invokes the authority of the ancestors: ‘But the dead will witness.’ (66) Kongi also distorts another aspect of Danlola’s authority: the authority of the charismatic leader and his devoted followers. The putative fasting and meditating are attempts by Kongi to sacralise his power by casting himself as the New Messiah. Soyinka often uses the dramatic discontinuity of voice and gesture to signal a disjuncture. Some of the poses he performs for the photographer include ‘A Leader’s Temptation’, ‘The Giver of Life’, ‘Agony in the Mountains’, ‘The Spirit of Harvest’. The tyrant desires to become a charismatic figure that incarnates both Christian and African religious deities. The messianic vision is however Judeo-Christian in nature. It links the second coming of Christ with the emergence of a new spatial and temporal order. As the Harvest is expected to consummate Kongi’s messianic vision, what the Aweri’s call ‘his inevitable apotheosis’, the Secretary reveals that, ‘This year shall be known as the year of Kongi’s Harvest. Everything shall date from it.’ (92) The statement prioritises linear time over the dialectic between linear and cyclical times that characterises time-reckoning in traditional African society.25 Founding, therefore, becomes the central strategy of their attempt at legitimate domination. Kongi and his followers interpret the transgression of the limit-taboo, identified by the text, as the founding act of the new. Furthermore, the Reformed Aweri attempt to authorise Kongi’s power by the employment of modern discourses on the rational-bureaucratic front. They define their role as those responsible for devising ‘a more systematic formulation of comprehensive philosophies’ (81). They oppose scientific truth to the traditional wisdom of Danlola’s Aweris. The Fourth Aweri proclaims: ‘The period of isolated saws and wisdoms is over.’ (81) In designating the traditional form of authority as ‘superstitious’ (81), the Reformed Aweri must look elsewhere to find a source of authority that is beyond and above their ruler to legitimate his power to command. The Fourth Aweri claims: ‘I am being practical. Now let us see the problem as part of a normal historic pattern. This means in effect that – Kongi must prevail.’ (77) The source that is invoked is nothing less than history itself, more specifically the Marxist (and Weberian) view of history with its mode-of-production narrative and its teleology of disenchantment. The action of the First Part of the play and much of its humour derive from the various strategies the repressive, pathological autocrat and his sycophantic Reformed Aweri employ in their attempts to transcend


the traditional system of knowledge. The Reformed Aweri spend much time searching for an appropriate image for themselves and Kongi so that they might distinguish themselves from their predecessors – they interpret the distinction as the divide between the traditional and the modern (a distinction that Soyinka regards as false), which is variously identified as the opposition between the religious and the secular, religion and science, and derivative of the preceding oppositions, that between the symbol and the concept. The Fifth Aweri suggests: ‘No proverbs nor verse, only ideograms in algebraic quantums.’ (72) Significantly, they interpret the crisis of authority as a crisis of symbols, a crisis of the realm of the symbolic. When identifying the images and discourse they have chosen, conjunctions of paradoxical moments are specified, taking the form of couplets of antithetical terms such as ‘youthful elders’ and ‘modern patriarchs’. The oxymoron is the figure of speech that recurs most frequently in their discourse. The Reformed Aweri re-interpret a death sentence as ‘an act of scientific exorcism’ (78), and they designate the state’s appropriation of the Harvest as an example of ‘Enlightened Ritualism’ (81). The conjunction of the antithetical terms – the transgression of antithesis – is trivialised and ironised by the text. The oxymoron, however, functions as an indicator both of an epistemological contradiction and a discursive reflex of the more profound historical contradiction of African modernity: the simultaneous affirmation and disavowal of the sacred order. An ambivalent relation to the realm of the sacred is thus established. However, Kongi’s desire for authority surpasses the three forms of pure authority. Four times, he repeats, ‘I am the Spirit of Harvest’ (91) – and changes the syntactical emphasis three times. Soyinka signals the incompatibility between the speaker and the utterance by foregrounding the difficulty Kongi has in locating the precise significance of the statement. Within the traditional religious framework, the Spirit of Harvest is one deity among many, each limited by the knowledge and power of the others (see my discussion of Soyinka’s elaboration of Yoruba cosmology above). By superimposing the Christian view of the transcendental status of divinity onto African cosmology (a move that is inconceivable within the latter), the leader of the nation-state desires to be the ultimate Auctor – the creator, founder and originator of all, the most complete source of authority. Signs of all the institutions and public works of Ismaland surround the dais at the New Yam Feast. All bear the name of Kongi. The planned inauguration of the new calendar betrays a desire to monopolise time. Derivative of the Judeo-Christian messianic vision, the tyrant casts himself as omnipresent and omnipotent.

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Although the characters of the play interpret the opposition between Kongi and Danlola as the divide between the traditional and the modern, the text suggests that the primary opposition, clustered around the semic poles, which provides the impetus to the action of the play, is an opposition between power and authority. Kongi’s Harvest, moreover, points to a division between radically different conceptions of power. Soyinka excludes the colonial moment in the movement from one type of power to the other – that fateful encounter is simply eradicated in Soyinka’s Ismaland to bring to the surface the disjuncture between African precolonial and postcolonial conceptions and functioning of power. In thinking that their predecessors’ authority is an effect of their style (speaking in ‘proverbs and ponderous tone rhythms’ (70) and their ‘remote and impersonal’ demeanour (71)) the Reformed Aweri fundamentally misrecognise the power structure of Danlola’s kingdom. The dramatic and comic effectiveness of these scenes depends on the audience’s ability to recognise the misrecognition. The Aweri would have had the power to depose the king, a power that is mythically imbricated as the opposition between the forces of the earth and the sky, the former seen as superior and senior. Danlola’s power to command is, as Weber points out in relation to the traditional type of authority, exercised as a joint right in the interests of all members of the society (On Charisma 231). Therefore, when Sarumi begs Danlola not to curse the Superintendent in Hemlock, he is also reminding the king of the nature of his power. SARUMI.

Kabiyesi, a father employs only a small stick on his child […] Don’t give voice to the awesome names on an Oba’s tongue. […] They must fulfil what task they were called to do. (68)

The rights of the traditional master simultaneously impose limitations. Sarumi makes clear that Danlola’s use of his power to redress a personal slight (the Superintendent strips the king in public) exceeds the parameters of his rights as traditional leader. In his study of indigenous African states, Max Gluckman argues that in both hierarchical and ‘acephalous’ African states there is ‘no fundamental cleavage between rulers and ruled’ (29). The king and the wealthy could not use their wealth and the produce of the land to raise their own standards of living, with the result that there was rarely any systematic exploitation by the leader/s of the labour of the people they ruled (see Gluckman, Custom and Conflict


29–31). Thus, on the economic and political levels, the members of the traditional community cannot be considered as ‘subjected’. Weber charts the change from the traditional structure to patrimonialism: when the master develops a military force and an administrative body the group right of the traditional master is converted into the personal right of the tyrant who uses these bodies to force compliance. Kongi says of the Carpenters’ Brigade: ‘They complement my sleepy Aweris here. These ones look after my intellectual needs, the Brigade take care of the occasional physical requirements.’ (91) Soyinka’s simplification of the institutions of the nation-state into the Reformed Aweri and the Carpenters’ Brigade succinctly represents what Althusser calls the ISA (Ideological State Apparatus) and the RSA (Repressive State Apparatus); the former responsible for the “interpellation” of subjects and the latter enforcing the power of the state and its appointed leaders (136). Together with the ruthless Carpenters’ Brigade, the Reformed Aweri facilitate Kongi’s claim to the right to rule.26 Within the patrimonial state, the ruled become subjects. Defining both his and the Superintendent’s relation to Kongi, Danlola says, ‘We chew the same tobacco.’ (63) All are subjected to the power of the ruler, the king and the lackey alike. Authority and agency Although the text suggests that Danlola’s traditional authority remains in place, it also points to the erosion of his charismatic powers. I have shown that the former is contingent on the latter. As charismatic authority prioritises the personal dimension, the king’s ‘loss’ of magical powers casts him as unworthy of leadership. Kongi’s Harvest dramatises the disjuncture between the traditional structure (and its conceptualisation of power) and the person of the king, the value of traditional leadership and Danlola’s inadequacies. Soyinka stages these disjunctures through his choice of dramatis personae – Danlola and Sarumi – the latter functions as type and standard of an oba. Sarumi’s role is one of consistently restricting Danlola’s excesses. In the discourse of sacred kingship, mishaps that befall a society are seen as direct reflections of the moral, physical or ritual unworthiness of the king. Unable to cast ‘subtle damnations’, playing the Fool, and wanting to use his power to redress personal insult, Soyinka portrays Danlola as an unworthy leader. Of Danlola, Daodu says, ‘For him, kingship is a role’ (95), implying his lack of responsibility. Similarly, the play suggests that the paradoxical strategies, which Kongi and his Reformed Aweri deploy to constitute the autocrat’s authority, forever withhold the promise of authority.

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Soyinka sets up the crisis of authority at the heart of the play and attempts a resolution by proffering an alternative nucleus of authoritative values that cluster around the figures of Daodu, the heir-apparent, and Segi, his mistress. They represent an urge to clarify the direction of the ‘new-dug path’ which leads to ‘the secret heart of being’ prophesied in the dirge of Hemlock in order to suggest a form of political agency (68). The male-female complementary oppositionality of Segi and Daodu contests principally Kongi’s absolute power but is also directed against the traditional authority of Danlola. In Kongi’s Harvest physical space functions as political and cosmic space, the stage being both a cosmic topos and, to use Bakhtinian terminology, a chronotopos, in which time ‘thickens’ and space ‘becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ (‘Forms’ 85). In the First Part of the play, both Segi’s bar and Kongi’s mountain retreat are on different parts of the stage and are brought into play in turn. The action alternates with frenzied rapidity between these frontier-spaces of Ismaland – the mountain retreat, where Kongi and his ideological and repressive organs of state isolate themselves from the rest of the nation, and the bar, which is peopled with prostitutes and political dissidents. The Messenger acts as the go-between. The staging partially mirrors the division of space in the Yoruba festivals discussed above. As the messenger moves from one ‘political’ space to another he repeats the movement of the afobaje chief in Iwa Ogun ritual. Like the afobaje chief the Secretary in Kongi’s Harvest also attempts to get another source of power to acquiesce to the authority of the leader. As political space, Segi’s bar becomes the locus for the contestation of the power of Kongi’s totalitarian regime. The contestation of power is two-fold. When the Secretary tries to reassure Segi that he is not looking for trouble when he enters the bar, she says gently, ‘You couldn’t, even if you wanted. Not here.’ (72) The repressive violence of the State is annulled in the bar and it becomes a centre of opposition to Kongi’s power. Kongi’s structurally similar relation to Danlola is signalled in the play at his first appearance – he is at his mountain retreat sitting in a cell above the Aweri, recalling the ‘hemmed in’ and ‘locked up’ Danlola of Hemlock. The traditional symbolic of a distinctive relation to the sky-spirits is given an aura of transcendence through Kongi’s appropriation of Christian imagery. The semic antithesis of Danlola and Kongi initially deployed by the text is transgressed and reveals itself as homology. Northrop Frye reminds us that the functions of the eiron (the man who deprecates himself, the fool) and the alazon (the boastful imposter) are logical inversions of one another (173). As a structure of paired


opposites, Segi and Daodu come to represent one term in the generated antithesis, the other term being the Kongi-Danlola homology. The opposition generates the structure of a dialectic moment. The owner of the bar and her lover are part of a familiar tradition of characterisation in Soyinka’s oeuvre. Female figures in Soyinka’s works often supply the cosmological perspective (consider also the old women in Madmen and Specialists). They also seem to represent the thoroughgoing ambivalences of the sacred, allied to both regeneration and destruction, partaking in the divide in mythical thought between nature and culture, and symbolic of the latter. The Secretary calls Segi a ‘witch’ and Danlola regards her as ‘[a] right cannibal of the species’ (96, 104). Fear and unease at her presence are the most common reactions by the men in the play who most often invoke the patriarchal image to represent the power structure of their society. Although Kongi claims, ‘I am the Spirit of Harvest’, Segi coaches Daodu to perform the role of the Spirit. Her identification of the authoritative leader gains certain moral weight as she is allied to a regenerative principle. Daodu’s song identifies Segi with ‘Mammy Watta’, a dangerous and seductive deity, and compares her to the ‘agbadu’ snake (88). The agbadu, which turns ferocious when provoked, is a black snake with a red stripe on its back (Ogunba 188). It is known for its speedy and fatal attack and the Yoruba associate it ritually with the deity of hunting and warfare, Ogun (Drewal, ‘Dancing’ 204). Thus, Segi’s bar may also be seen as an ‘Ogun-space’, located outside the two competing spheres of power (‘traditional’ and ‘modern’). In this frontier zone the competing powers are brought into direct opposition. Soyinka’s depiction of Segi validates the patriarchy of Danlola’s sociopolitical system by having her conform to the position of an object of exchange. She acts as an attendant to the men of power, the leader and the rival, initially supporting Kongi and then transferring her affections and support to the heir-apparent. Her agency as political actor is limited as she serves the male protagonists rather than representing an autonomous moment of agency. This is dramatically represented by Soyinka’s use of a dramatic tableau that recalls the image of the unborn clinging to the robes of the king to register the implicit hierarchy of the terms of the Daodu-Segi male-female opposition. When Segi dresses Daodu as the Spirit of Harvest, the stage directions read: ‘She comes round, surveys him. Suddenly she kneels and clings to the hem of his robes. The other women kneel too.’ (98) It is Segi, however, rather than Daodu who brings about the climax of the play. The text relocates her agency to the sacred level. The sacred ambivalence which accrues

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around her appearances in the play emphasises this relocation. Thus it is as vengeful daughter, outside the system of exchange between the male protagonists, that she ‘improvises’ the dramatic climax of the New Yam Festival. At a basic level, Segi’s father’s head is a protest against the brutality and ruthlessness of Kongi’s government, the harvesters of death. The biblical allusions to John the Baptist seem to be of secondary importance. The tragic significance of the climax of the play lies in the sphere of the sacred and Soyinka’s appropriation and redeployment of the Ogun myth and rite. As early twentieth-century French sociologists argue, the distinction between the divine and the mundane, the sacred and the profane, is the central religious affirmation and the aim of ritual.27 As often occurs in Greek tragedy, the central ritual of Kongi’s Harvest fails. Instead of clarifying the distance between the ontologically distinct spheres, the result of the ritual is both holy and obscene. The severed head reveals the double value of the sacred (the conjuncture of hero and victim, the god and the scapegoat) and in representing the transgression of the problem of proximity becomes the most concrete symbol of the ‘monstrous double’. The fate of Segi’s father echoes the Ogun myth. In challenging Kongi’s power (an example of one of the ‘faces of Ideality’) he sacrifices himself and is then dismembered. This unnamed figure, therefore, functions as the absent hero of the play, existing on the fringes of the text and entering as a disembodied head. Ogun-like his ‘actions’ destabilise Kongi’s regime, allowing the king to escape, with the possibility of challenging Kongi’s rule. The political in Kongi’s Harvest is recuperated as the effect of the sacred. As the climax of the ritual is coincidental with the climax of the dramatic action, the political also emerges as an effect of the aesthetic. By replacing the ‘monsteryam’ (an echo of the monster-child of Hemlock) with her father’s head, Segi forces the tyrant to confront the obscenity of his power, the horror of his sacred transgressions, and his attempt at self-deification. It is rare for a female character to have such a pivotal role in Soyinka’s dramatic and literary productions. One of Chinua Achebe’s consistent concerns in his writings has been the interrogation of the unequal distribution of power between men and women in traditional African societies. He problematises and addresses the privileging of masculinity. Soyinka not only takes as unproblematic the mythical complementary oppositionality of the male and the female but also, as we have seen in Kongi’s Harvest, actively deploys the opposition for tragic/aesthetic effect. Soyinka does seem to be more concerned with the gerontocratic division of power than with the division of labour in traditional society.


A number of the plays he wrote in the 1960s problematise the youth/ elder opposition, or, when this division is mapped onto the family structure, the father/son opposition. The figure of authority of the elder is also often invested with religious authority (for example, Kadiye in The Swamp Dwellers, the Tutor in The Strong Breed and Reverend Erinjobi in Camwood on the Leaves). Daodu also belongs to a tradition of young male characters in Soyinka’s plays that challenge the authority of the elders who cannot meet the demands of the radically altered state of affairs. By being cast as a farmer, Daodu is symbolically related to the earth and through his relation to Segi, who represents the water-deity, he is cosmologically allied with another force which is opposed to the sky-spirits. Soyinka utilises the culturally symbolic privileging of the earth over the sky (the agglomerative space) to address the crisis of authority that he sets up at the heart of the play. Within the traditional mythical framework, Daodu is identified as the figure most appropriate for political authority as Segi is marginalised in the political domain. However, her association with the realm of the sacred gives authoritative weight to her identification of Daodu with the Spirit of Harvest. As mythical actor, Daodu is coached by Segi to preach ‘living and loving’ against ‘all Messiahs of pain and false burdens’ (99). The heir-apparent resigns himself to being ‘a mere antithesis’ to Kongi (99). The action of the play suggests that the dialectic cannot be transcended within the mythical framework to which it consistently refers, hence the rather un-dramatic nature of Daodu’s speech at the New Yam Feast, which has little effect on Kongi and the action of the play. It is unable to achieve ritual or dramatic climax. What Vernant has written of the Greek tragic hero seems apposite to the mythical dimension of Soyinka’s characterisation of Daodu: his commitment to the heroic tradition ensures that the solution to the dilemma escapes him (see Tragedy and Myth vii). Soyinka, however, locates Daodu’s authority within another discursive framework. The concept of the Will, I have noted, is fundamental to the playwright’s location of agency and authority in African religious systems. Daodu’s breaking of the royal lead drum in the Second Part repeats the Superintendent’s first act of desecration in Hemlock. Total silence follows both acts. The stage directions that the playwright gives after Daodu’s essential gesture are: ‘At its [the praise-song’s] height Daodu moves with sudden decision, pulls out the ceremonial whisk of Danlola and hits the lead drum with the heavy handle. It bursts. There is a dead silence.’ (111) For a play that bursts with so much song, dance, rapidly changing scenes and dialogue, the ‘dead silence‘ must come as a shock to the audience, and achieves the status of what Mircea Eliade has called

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a ‘hierophany’ – an irruption of the sacred into the mundane world (The Sacred and The Profane 11). A song about Ogun precedes Daodu’s essential gesture and invests the act with divine authority. Daodu’s transgression of the taboo effectively ends the traditional structure of authority. DANLOLA.

Life gets more final every day. That prison Superintendent merely lay his hands On my lead drummer, and stopped The singing, but you our son and heir You’ve seen to the song itself. (111)

Daodu’s ‘sudden’ act effects a transcendence of the opposition between the unfit king and the maniacal modern dictator from within the traditional system. This essential gesture is a dramatic manifestation of how Soyinka accounts for change in what he describes as the cyclical consciousness of time among Africans. For Soyinka, change is a ‘quantum leap’ represented by a ‘sudden kink, the sharp evolutionary kink in an existing, pre-existing cycle’ (Interview in Wilkinson 102). The heir’s act achieves the status of an essential gesture providing the impetus for the superseding of the dialectical structure. Soyinka signals Daodu’s act as one made with “sudden decision”, thus locating him firmly within the ambit of the metaphysical characterisation of tragic actors. For both Aristotle and Hegel, the primary attribute of tragic character is the firm resolve to act without doubt or hesitation. Neither of them saw internal conflict, what Hegel calls ‘the drama of the mind’, as essential to the tragic hero (see Gellrich 160). Soyinka casts the essential gesture as spontaneous and beyond the framework of morality, and precisely for these reasons, authoritative. Crucial to an understanding of Soyinka’s theory of Yoruba tragedy and the role of the individual in his plays, is the awareness that the essential gesture arises from ‘beyond’ the individual. Spontaneity suggests that the impetus to action derives from outside the demands of purposive rationality. In this important sense, to act, as Bakhtin argues, means to be possessed by the domain of culture; that is, to respond to a cultural and political imperative (Towards 21). The mythical model, derivative of Yoruba cosmology, evoked by the playwright provides the second order of narration: the interpretive sequence. It is in relation to this model that Daodu’s gesture is invested with authority as it replicates Ogun’s daring plunge into the abyss, the ‘first active battle of will through the abyss of dissolution’ (Soyinka, Myth 32). If one connects the two significant events in the Second Part,


Daodu’s destruction of the royal drum and Kongi’s encounter with the disembodied head of Segi’s father, a mythical structure emerges that replicates the Ogun myth and ritual. Both events have political significance. In the first sequence of the Second Part of Kongi’s Harvest, the heir’s essential gesture symbolically ends the traditional structure of authority and in the second sequence the severed head destabilises Kongi’s government and creates the chaos which allows the imprisoned king to escape and Kongi’s military wing to desert him. The events dramatically re-enact two principal moments in the Ogun narrative – the deity’s plunge and his dismemberment by forces in the abyss, respectively. These, in turn, rehearse the duality of the sacred subject, the sacred duality of hero and victim. By splitting these functions between Daodu (the imperfect hero) and Segi’s father (the absent hero) the play refuses, or is unable to generate, the hero of the mythical tradition. This arises, in part, from Soyinka’s disavowal of the logic of sacrifice and his privileging of the myth of the epic quest as a metaphorical articulation of political agency. It also arises from a specifically modernist approach to the use of the mythical tradition: a deployment of its structures and motifs that acknowledges the disjuncture between the modern condition and the mythical age; to put it another way, the historical impossibility of the older forms to reproduce themselves fully through the contemporary content. The final moment of the Ogun rite, the reunification of the body of the deity, which in terms of the ritual symbolically unifies the body of the clan, remains unrealised in the action of the play. This absence of the re-memberment of the body politic casts the final mythical/ritual moment as a political imperative. The expulsion of the final moment prevents any form of catharsis. Dramatic closure does not resolve the conflict and crisis of authority through the triumph of one of the forces over the others, neither does it transcend the opposition of the forces through ritual catharsis. The social antagonisms, not yet articulated as the struggle of social classes, remain suspended. Thus, as Lukács claims, in that space between the already (nocht mehr) and the not yet (noch nicht) only the demonic can prevail (87). One of the most powerful images of the play is the dictator of the one-party African nation-state, vilifying, reviling and cursing until ‘he is a demonic mass of sweat and foam at the lips’ (131). Daodu’s essential gesture not only signals the end of the traditional structure of authority but also brings to a halt the playacting within the play. Danlola registers the full significance of Daodu’s act – he says that the heir has ‘split the gut of our make-believe’ (112). Kongi’s Harvest shows a distinctively high degree of awareness of its own mimetic and

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dramatic strategies by interrogating its (and all drama’s) essential mode of being – playacting. The action before the New Yam Feast replicates the preparations involved in dramatic production: rehearsals, scriptchanges, costume-changes etc. The antagonists, Danlola and Kongi, consciously adopt various roles throughout the play, including those of the Fool, the affronted king and the Messiah. The other voices in the text that foreground their penchant for playacting annul the antithesis that the play initially sets up between the antagonists. Both, we are told, have a ‘flair for gestures’ and performance (see exchange between Daodu and the Secretary 95). Near the close of the First Part, Segi and Daodu rehearse the roles of Queen and Spirit of Harvest respectively, and together with the women ‘perform’ a ritual tableau. Much of the action of the play centres on the different factions’ preparations for the performance of the New Yam Festival, which is also the climax of the play. The comic exchanges between Dende and the king revolve around finding the appropriate costume for the performance. However, the principal moments of the action identified by the text are brought about outside of the boundaries of playacting. Daodu makes his essential gesture with ‘sudden decision’ and it is Segi’s improvisation that brings about the climax of the play and performance. Both moments are also ‘hierophanies’, sacred irruptions. The action of Kongi’s Harvest suggests that meaning is produced at precisely the points when its essential aesthetic strategy (playacting) is negated. The realm of the sacred also brings about the subsumption of oppositional political forces, not through ritual catharsis but through the staging of a cultural and political imperative, an ethical prescription. Soyinka expends much critical energy distinguishing his theory of tragic art from its Western and indigenous counterparts. In terms of the latter, his strategy is two-fold. Firstly, he marks the differences in ‘world-views’ that attend the Yoruba and Western forms of tragedy. The African worldview, according to Soyinka, characterised by the persistence of an animistic religious framework, a cyclical consciousness of time, and a terrestrial (and material) orientation both centralises the human(istic) and proclaims the interdependence of nature and humanity. I have shown that in his theory of tragedy Soyinka, through the strategy of ‘subjectivising’ the victim, refuses the logic of sacrifice. Instead he deploys the rite-of-passage narrative, in which the welfare of the triumphant protagonist is inseparable from that of the community. Continuity and integration are the attendant values of this approach. However, his choice of the deity of warfare, hunting, iron and the road as his Muse and his theorisation of a ‘fourth stage’ reveal a radically


different view of the African cosmos – contingent and filled with violent, anti-human forces that the alienated individual must face at his/her own peril. The challenger in the ritual context provides Soyinka with a model for modern social agency: facing the possibility of death the challenger courageously contests those powers that would restrict his/her freedom. Secondly, and in relation to the revolutionary humanism implicit in the model of the ritual challenger, he distinguishes his theory of tragedy from Nietzsche’s. The Nigerian playwright refuses the Nietzschean relegation of the human world to the merely illusory. By charting the differences between Yoruba tragic and religious (Obatala’s) art, Soyinka marks his distance from the religious inscriptions of the mythical narratives he deploys and, once again, uses the distinction to motivate for a combative, revolutionary humanism. The new positivities of aesthetics and metaphysics replace the religious content of the mythical narratives. The reading of Kongi’s Harvest reveals the difficulties, also encountered in Chapter 1, in utilising Weberian typologies to address questions of power and authority in the sub-Saharan African context. Modelled on Kwame Nkrumah, Kongi is exemplary of a number of dictators that rose to power in newly-independent Africa. Soyinka, with much humour, derides the various strategies these dictators employed to legitimate their authority. Kongi’s paradoxical attempts to incorporate traditional, charismatic and modern forms of authority, however, reveal a historical fact – the intrinsically hybrid nature of the African postcolonial state, old and new, traditional and modern, African and Western. Soyinka’s mobilisation of mythical subjects and narratives in the play is fragmented, heterogeneous and incomplete. The mythical material is unable to reproduce itself fully in the modern form. The fractured content and disjunctive form reflect both the conflict between the older forms and the contemporary material, and the historical contradictions inherent in the postcolonial moment when old gods are made to serve new worlds.

3 Politicising the Sacred: Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between

In his early novels, Ngugi wa Thiong’o shares significant preoccupations with both Soyinka and Achebe (and much of African literature written between the late 1950s and late 1970s). Historical recuperation in African postcolonial cultural production often involves an emphasis on the dynamics of particular historical junctures, what Ato Quayson calls the ‘literary thematisation of epochality’: a double layering of event and personage, of momentous occurrence (taking as its model the sense of beginnings and endings that accompanied the coming-into-being of the postcolonial nation-state) and a particular character type that is thought of as best situated to produce the conditions necessary for social change (Postcolonialism 82). The thematisation of the dynamics of charismatic social change and the interrogation of the figure of the leader-priest-prophet consistently recur as aspects of the works of Achebe and Soyinka. The charismatic Okonkwo and the prophetseer Ezeulu precipitate historical and epistemological transformations ironically and despite themselves. With Chief Nanga, demagoguery replaces charisma as charismatic leadership becomes radically altered in the postcolonial African state. Soyinka satirizes prophetic social change and the prophet-figure in ‘The Trials of Brother Jero’ and explores the shadowy side of charisma in Jero’s transformation into a corrupt politician.1 While these elements represent aspects of Achebe’s and Soyinka’s narrative strategies, the bringer of salvation and the dynamics of charismatic social transition are the dominant objects of attention in Ngugi’s fiction. Several characters in Ngugi’s early novels use messianic narratives to claim a social role for themselves. Waiyaki, Kabonyi, Njoroge, Mugo, Kihika and Mumbi see themselves as redeemers and saviours of their people. Mugo, the reluctant ‘prophet’ of A Grain of Wheat believes that 86

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he, ‘an only son, was born to save’ (134). ‘As a chief,’ Mugo dreams, ‘he would lead his people across the desert to the New Jerusalem.’ (Grain 134) Although the prophetic discourse seems to be drawn from a Christian framework, the millenarian vision implicit in Mugo’s allusion to the New Jerusalem does not augur the Kingdom of God but refers to the mobilisation of traditional prophecy in Gikuyu nationalist discourse and the fulfilment of the prophecy of the nineteenth-century Gikuyu seer, Mugo wa Kibiro. The central elements of the vatic proclamation of the Mugo of A Grain of Wheat – the figure of the son and the role of the leader-cum-saviour – are initially established in the ancient prophecy of The River Between: ‘Salvation shall come from the hills. […] A son shall rise. And his duty shall be to lead and save the people.’ (20) Njoroge, in Weep Not, Child also voices his fantasies of messianic leadership. Critics have pointed out that Ngugi’s first three novels are located at the ‘nationalist’ high points of the early colonial and colonial history of the Agikuyu viz. the clash between the Church of Scotland Mission (CSM) and the Agikuyu over the practice of clitoridectomy that precipitated the establishment of the Independent Gikuyu and Kareng’a schools (The River Between), the Mau Mau Rebellion (Weep Not, Child) and the aftermath of the rebellion in the four days leading up to Uhuru (A Grain of Wheat). Therefore, his novels necessarily draw from Gikuyu nationalist discourse which, as John Lonsdale suggests, drew on different and often opposing prophetic traditions (241). Nationalists in the 1930s interpreted the historical Mugo’s prophecy as advocating a political strategy of reconciliation and negotiation.2 Some two decades later, Mugo’s prophecy is refracted through a Christian eschatological narrative. A Heilbringer, the reincarnation of the Gikuyu anti-colonial hero Waiyaki, in the form of Jomo Kenyatta, would personally bring the freedom that Mugo had prophesied would come to the Gikuyu through discipline, non-resistance and learning (see Lonsdale 273–5). An innovative and powerful theory of leadership and political change emerges. One of the characters in Weep Not, Child proclaims: ‘There was a man sent from God whose name was Jomo. He was the Black Moses empowered by God to tell the white Pharaoh ‘Let my people go!’ (58).3 The forest fighters during Mau Mau used prophetic discourse to argue for a form of active millenarianism – armed rebellion to bring about radical social change. The Mau Mau revolt, Ngugi maintains, arose from both anti-European and anti-Christian stances (Homecoming 28). The language the forest fighters used involved a liberal rephrasing of Christian symbols, Biblical narratives and Church hymns – a discourse turned against itself. Clearly, through a hermeneutics of prophecy the Gikuyu

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not only ‘invented’ themselves but also justified their anti-colonial and nationalist strategies. Yet, in Ngugi’s early novels it is unclear if the fantasies of the selfproclaimed Messiahs are the empty delusions of alienated individuals or if they fulfil their roles as prophets (almost despite themselves). Thus, even with Mugo, the most pathological of all Ngugi’s prophets, the role of redeemer is accomplished. His confession at the end of A Grain of Wheat facilitates the reconciliation of Mumbi and Gikonyo, which Ngugi figures metonymically as a promise of hope for the Kenyan nation. Ngugi is less equivocal with Kihika, the forest fighter in Grain. He is different in that he offers a radically innovative form of messianism: ‘We have to be ready to carry the cross. I die for you, you die for me, we become a sacrifice for one another. […] Everybody who takes the oath of Unity to change things in Kenya is a Christ.’ (95) The mutual self-sacrifice that Kihika advocates represents the synthesis in Ngugi’s search in his early novels to locate the agents of social change. In the Makerere novels, The River Between and Weep Not, Child, there is a bristling tension between the idea of prophet-inspired social change and the idea of change brought about by social crises and trans-subjective historical forces. Kihika’s demo-charisma proclaims the community of resisters against colonial domination as a community of Messiahs, a community of saviours.4 Kihika also represents the synthesis in Ngugi’s attempt to specify the appropriate Christian messianic narrative for the anti-colonial struggle. In The River Between, the ritual sacrifice of Waiyaki and Nyambura recalls the martyrdom of Christ, while in Weep Not, Child Moses’s ‘Let my people go’ narrative of slavery and redemption looms large. The first two novels thus recall different Christian prophetic traditions. In A Grain of Wheat, certain chapters of the novel are preceded by extracts from Kihika’s Bible, which are underlined either in black or red. The latter comes from the Old Testament, John A. Stotesbury points out, and is concerned with the suffering of the oppressed, thus alluding to the Moses messianic narrative (14). The former, from the New Testament, emphasises sacrificial martyrdom. By conjoining the two biblical traditions Kihika simultaneously converts Christian religious discourse into a form of political praxis and subsumes the Old and New Testament prophetic narratives. The River Between, the first novel Ngugi wrote (the second to be published) is significant because it attempts to draw part of its prophetic discourse from the indigenous religious sphere. However, throughout the narrative, representations of prophecy recall Biblical language. The textual opposition between the indigenous and Christian prophetic traditions subtends the central


narrative opposition in the text, of that between the Christians and the adherents of Gikuyu religion. Thus, linear and cyclical views jostle with each other. The River Between is also significant, I shall show, in that Ngugi establishes a certain symbolic framework (a sacred geometry if you will) to which he consistently returns in his novels. There is much scholarship about a peculiar style of leadership that emerges with the independent African nation-state. Terms like ‘personal rule’, Caesarism and Bonapartism represent various attempts to explain the highly wrought cult of the leader and his identification with both the unified space of the nation-state and the welfare of his people, which characterized the emergence of the African postcolony.5 As apex of the social and political structures and symbol of the unity of the various social strata, the African head of state often aspired to transcendental quasi-religious status, revealing a constitutive contradiction at the heart of the modern African state. A. H. M. Kirk-Greene describes the climax of the Kenyatta Day celebrations: a ritualised memorial of the last meal Jomo Kenyatta had taken before his arrest (see 179). The allusion to Christ’s Last Supper gestures in two conflicting directions. On the one hand, it represents a strategy in the Kenyan anti-colonial struggle of appropriating Christian mythology to serve political and secular ends – a demythologising impulse. On the other hand, the state ritual identifies Kenyatta with Christ, imbuing his status with quasi-religious prophetic authority. The Last Supper ritual thus generates simultaneous secularising and sacralising perspectives: the double bind of the emergent postcolony, the subject of an uneven and conflicted modernity. However, the relation of prophecy to political challenge and authority has had a long history in East Africa. If prophecy is traditionally understood as the monopoly of a particular type of knowledge – prediction, the foreseeing of future events – then a range of practitioners of mantic activity was present in nineteenth-century East Africa: diviners, seers, spirit-mediums etc.6 Richard D. Waller argues that ‘close and more than co-incidental similarities’ between the divining methods among the Agikuyu, the Embu and Meru suggest that ‘something of a common prophetic idiom, adapted in different ways to meet the local requirements’ gradually spread through East Africa over a long period (53). The existence of a large number of prophetic clans in early colonial East Africa undermines Max Weber’s claim of the inherent instability (hence, transitoriness) of the charismatic phenomenon.7 By the end of the nineteenth century, among the Turkana in north-western Kenya, the Kalenjin of Kenya’s Western Highlands and the Maasai, prophetic lineages were well established. J. Bernsten points out that the Maasai

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came to derive their identity from their allegiance to particular prophets (laibons) (cited in Waller 36). By prophesying for the Kalenjin in the organisation of wars and cattle raids, the Kapiso clan of prophets (orkoiik) came to hold ‘unprecedented’ economic and political power by the end of the nineteenth century (Anderson 167). Although these prophets and prophetic lineages were incorporated within the structure of traditional society and operated within an established prophetic discourse, their authority was precarious. The prophets’ authority was often perceived as a threat to traditional forms of power and authority. Traditional, segmentally structured societies are riven by the conflict between elders and youth as a result of their gerontocratic division of power. By gaining influence over the warriors (the youth) through successful prediction in cattle raids and in the provision of magical protection during wars, the prophets came to play an ever-increasing central role in political and religious life. War prophecy was seen as a subversive threat to the authority of the elders.8 The power of the prophets was regarded with some ambivalence, which draws from the sacred quality of that power. Waller suggests that the conflict between the prophets and elders relies on the opposition between power and authority: ‘the special and intrusive power of the prophets’ and ‘the secular authority of the community elders’ (39). Like blacksmiths, prophets are outsiders whose powers are necessary yet dangerous, venerated yet despised. East Africa, in the final few decades of the nineteenth century, seemed like a world on the brink of catastrophe. Floods, diseases and droughts abounded: the Nuer experienced a disastrous flood in 1878, huge losses were inflicted on the Maasai by rinderpest and smallpox between 1891–2 and the Agikuyu were beset by ng’aragu ya ruraya (the famine of Europe) in 1899 (see Waller 36; and Lonsdale 254). Slave raids, early colonialist exploitation and expansion, and economic demands eroded the socio-political structures of many East African societies. Certain historians argue that in German East Africa early colonial demands for tax, labour and commodities precipitated the Maji Maji rebellion, led by the prophet Kinjitikile Ngwale in 1905 (see Wright 130; and Waller 25–7). When, as Michael Adas suggests, this sense of social and natural disorder is linked to the African belief in the periodic renewal of a blighted world, a powerful millenarian ideology is generated (104). A person (or persons) with special powers arises promising an epic resolution: a complete removal of evil from earth, a regeneration and renewal of the world. An apocalyptic vision emerges. An important distinction needs to be made between the temporal orders of the millenarian visions of the prophets in early colonial East Africa and the Christian apocalyptic vision. The


former relies on a progressive cyclical view of history: the prophetic renewal sets the world right so that it may begin again its corruption in history, which will at some point in the future require another renewal, ad infinitum (see Horton, ‘African Traditional Thought’ 176–80). The latter Christian view is linear, progressive and apocalyptic, proclaiming the end of history as the culmination and fulfilment of prophecies in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. We shall see below that the opposition of linear and cyclical views of history is inherent to the traditional perspective and in the case of the Agikuyu embedded in their social structure. These temporal and religious distinctions were fundamental to the Gikuyu nationalist appropriation of prophetic narratives and therefore crucial for an understanding of the trope of prophecy central to Ngugi’s novels. Ngugi’s and the nationalists’ appropriation cannot be seen as merely a redeployment of Christian and colonial discourse but also as a development of a pre-colonial language of prophecy. Terence Ranger points out, however, that this strategy should not be seen as ‘a mere repetition of pre-colonial forms as an archaic response to modern conditions’, but as involving innovation and syncretization of ideas and forms (48). It is a commonplace to note that in his fiction Ngugi fuses mythological tropes from the Gikuyu and Christian religions. In all of his novels, be it part of the narrative strategy or in the language spoken by his characters, Biblical language, symbols and narratives are ubiquitous. The complex cosmological systems of the Yoruba and, to a lesser extent, the Igbo provide his Nigerian counterparts with much symbolic material. In contrast to the West Africans, Ngugi has claimed ‘The Gikuyu society is somewhat lacking in mythological background’ (interview with Githae-Mugo, cited in Meyer 41).9 He makes this point to defend his use of Biblical references and Christian mythology. He emphasizes the analogical and contingent nature of the appropriation: The Bible conveniently provides one with a relevant framework. For instance, the idea of destiny with regard to the Israelites and their struggle against slavery [sic]. The Gikuyu people have had similar experiences. Biblical mythology is widely known and has the advantage of being easily understood by most audiences. (cited in Meyer 41) In various articles Ngugi has identified the Church as part of the apparatus of social and cultural oppression, as what Rosberg and Nottingham call ‘the spiritual edge of the imperialist sword’ (125). As Ngugi himself

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points out, however, critics tend to regard him as a religious writer, sometimes even a Christian one. Despite detecting ‘a curious and baffling ambivalence’ in the writer’s portrayal of Christianity in A Grain of Wheat, Govind Narain Sharma argues that the central message of Ngugi’s third novel is profoundly Christian (169). He follows Peter Nazareth’s argument that the novel is essentially religious in nature and its concepts of sin and salvation are derived from Christianity (136).10 He suggests that the novelist uses Christianity against itself (26). Other critics have pointed to a changing attitude in Ngugi’s early novels: espousal of Christian values in The River Between; a pointing to the inefficacy of the Christian ideas of fraternity and solidarity in relation to the brutality of colonial oppression in Weep Not, Child; and a certain ambivalence (that of rejecting the Christian messianic narrative with its individualistic tenor and offering a revised messianic narrative derived from Christianity) in A Grain of Wheat. This evolving attitude is often seen as paralleling Ngugi’s maturing and radicalising political vision. By the fourth novel, we note an outright and bitter disavowal of Christianity and Christian teaching. Yet other critics (for example David Cook and Michael Okenimpke) regard the writer as being consistent in his approach: identifying Christianity with colonialism and therefore rejecting it. As we can see, much critical energy has been engaged in locating the significance of the Christian religion and the Bible to Ngugi’s oeuvre and socio-political outlook. Most critics note, often gesturally, that Ngugi blends elements from Gikuyu religion and culture with a re-phrasing of the language of the Bible. Apart from noting the use of traditional elements on the lexical level (the use of proverbs, songs and other elements from the oral repertoire etc.), there is an almost exclusive emphasis on colonial Christianity. In following Ngugi’s exhortation to resume the broken dialogue with the gods of his people, I shall attempt to uncover the symbolic order that is determined by Gikuyu religious and cultural concepts and practices in The River Between (see Ngugi, Homecoming, 43). Simon Gikandi rejects outright this hermeneutical strategy: ‘Any attempt to read Ngugi’s work in relation to a Gikuyu ontology or aesthetic […] is bound to fail.’ (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 14) He privileges a reading of Ngugi’s works as inseparable from the consideration of colonialism and Christianity. Be that as it may, analyses of Ngugi’s work cannot possibly be fully exhausted by or reducible to the colonial encounter. My intervention, hopefully, will go some way in disproving his thesis. I shall show that in The River Between motifs and ideas drawn from the indigenous sphere exist in a contradictory and dynamic relationship to the explicit Christian discourse. References to


his other novels will show how this foundational symbolic structure persists or is transformed. My approach is framed by Ngugi’s foremost thematic concern and personality type: the dynamics of charismatic social change and the figure of the leader-saviour-prophet. In many of Ngugi’s novels, trees and rivers, mountains and plains, and elements of the weather appear repeatedly and seem not to function as mere background to the unfolding of events or as reflections of characters’ mental states. Their significant literary treatment gestures outside the use of detail as unit of exchange in the realist reception process; what Barthes calls l’effet du réel. They tend to acquire the status of symbol. For Paul Ricoeur, in The Symbolism of Evil, the symbol ‘conceals in its aim a double intentionality’ (15). He regards the ‘polysemy’ of the symbol – its potential to generate multiple, sometimes conflicting, interpretations – as its primary intentionality. Polysemy produces another set of meanings analogically (Symbolism 16). Ricoeur’s different sets of meanings seem to point in two directions. On the one hand, explication of the primary intentionality of the symbol produces a relation to the referential world: the multiple significations of the symbol relate to history and systems of knowledge. The secondary intentionality moves in the opposite direction, producing the uniqueness of the text. The movement into the text relates the symbol to others in the text: it is extended, modified or counteracted in the economy of symbols. I shall attempt to ‘unfold’ the dominant textual and religious symbols (the tree and the river) in The River Between through this double hermeneutic.

The tree In the novel, the principal protagonists, Waiyaki and Nyambura, are shown to have much in common. Initially they have much reverence for their fathers and refuse to challenge parental authority. In one of his many internalised monologues, Waiyaki attempts to understand why Nyambura has rejected him: ‘She had taken the path of duty. He too would take the path of duty and stick to the tribe.’ (60) Duty, here, is understood as abiding by the injunctions of their fathers. Both characters see themselves as alienated from their society and as isolated individuals: ‘He felt a stranger, a stranger to his land’ (60); and, of Nyambura, ‘All she wanted was to be alone’ (114). Significantly, the affinity between the couple is textually underscored by the repetition of a striking image, an image that presages the tragic demise of the characters. Realising that certain aspects of Christian teaching appealed to him, Waiyaki, who casts himself in the role of saviour of the tribe, notes

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of Jesus Christ: ‘The suffering of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane and His agony on the tree had always moved him.’ (100, my emphasis) It is interesting to note that the thought that immediately follows the use of this image is one that draws attention to his status as Leader of his people. At the meeting that ‘marked the height of his glory’ (100), the people had ‘called him saviour. His own father had talked of the Messiah to come.’ (101) The coincidence of allusions to both, his role as sacrificial victim, the pharmakos, and Leader is striking. In the next scene of the chapter, Nyambura’s reverie reveals that she ‘clung to Christ because He had died on the Tree’ (102). The capitalisation of the pronoun in Waiyaki’s monologue replicates the sacralising of the religious subject (Christ) and the object (the Tree) in Nyambura’s Christian language, revealing an identity in attitudes to the significance of the Christian prophet. The phrase ‘on a tree’ recurs in almost all Ngugi’s characters’ references to the crucifixion of Christ in the novels and the plays. The Pastor recounts the words of Remi, the putative saviour of his people, in the play The Black Hermit, which was written around the same time as the Makerere novels: ‘Christ dies on the tree’ (18), he says. The narrator in A Grain of Wheat echoes this image of ‘Christ on a tree’ (17). In the same novel Mumbi imbues Kihika’s death with sacred significance by creating a textual echo of the sacrificial death of Christ: ‘Kihika was arrested and hanged on a tree’ (120). The repetition of this phrase in nearly all of Ngugi’s novels seems almost liturgical. Rather than locate its significance in the long history of Christian iconography, I turn to the symbolic significance of the tree and forms of sacrifice in Gikuyu religious practice to ‘unfold’ the use of the particular symbol in the substitution of object (tree for cross) and the semantic peculiarity of the phrase – an attempt to resume the broken dialogue with the gods of the Gikuyu people. In Facing Mount Kenya, Kenyatta suggests that as the Agikuyu have no temples (as well as a priestly class), huge trees are chosen under which they worship the creator (called Ngai, Mwene-Nyaga or Murungu) and perform sacrifices (250, see also Sandgren 196).11 Sacred trees are, Kenyatta further argues, one of the key institutions of Gikuyu culture: It marks at once their unity as a people, their family integrity (for their fathers sacrificed around it), the close contact with the soil, […] and, to crown it all, their most vital communion with the High God of the tribe. (Facing 250)12


In light of the Gikuyu attachment to these trees and their significance to sacrificial rites, we can readily understand Ngugi’s object substitution in the phrase ‘on a tree’ – the Gikuyu symbolic order determining the appropriation of Christian mythology. However, there may be more to Ngugi’s substitution of the tree for the cross in the incantatory phrase. Witchcraft, anthropologists tell us, is the most hated of magical practices among traditional African peoples. It is akin to criminality of sorts as it designates the practice of employing preternatural powers for injurious actions against individuals (see Geschiere 133). Kenyatta points out that the murogi (witch/wizard) is seen as a dangerous and destructive individual who transgresses the ethical codes of the community (299). If a person is found guilty of this criminal offence s/he is put to death either by burning or crucifixion at the junction of main roads (see Kenyatta, Facing 302, 305). The ‘devil’ is literally on the cross. The tree is itself a symbol of Kirinyaga, the Gikuyu name for Mount Kenya. Kirinyaga, in Gikuyu mythology, as Ngugi often notes in his novels, is seen as the resting place of Murungu/Ngai when he visits the earth. The tree and mountain represent liminal entities. Both are earth-bound and simultaneously directed at the sky, mediating between the sky forces (the deities) and the chthonic powers of the earth (the ancestors). Ngugi’s first completed piece of writing is a short story entitled ‘The Fig Tree’, which was later translated to ‘Mugumo’ in his first published collection of short stories, Secret Lives. It is a strange story in which the gods restore a woman’s fecundity and demand her continued subjugation to an abusive husband. In Matigari, the novelcum-political fable, the narrative begins and ends at a mugumo and the sacred value of the tree is cast wholly within the domain of radical political activism. Similarly, a sacred tree frames the narrative of his first novel. The mugumo functions both as primary symbol and central element in the geometry of the text. At the beginning of the novel, it is the locus of the repetition of the original covenant between Murungu and the Gikuyu people. It is also the oracular site of the revelation of prophecy in which Waiyaki’s role as saviour and leader of his people is given divine authentication. Thus, the tree as symbol also acquires the status of event, propelling the subsequent action of the narrative. A big Mugumo tree stood near the edge of the hill. It was a huge tree, thick and mysterious. Bush grew and bowed reverently around it. And there the ancient tree stood, towering over the hill, watching, as it were, the whole country. It looked holy and awesome, dominating

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Waiyaki’s soul so that he felt very small and in the presence of a mighty power. This was a sacred tree. It was the tree of Murungu. (15) In the journey up to the hill on which the tree stands, Chege, his father, reveals to him knowledge of Nature (a powerful force that could be both benevolent and malevolent) and recounts the history of the tribe (specifically how patriarchy is established among the Agikuyu). Waiyaki’s phallocentric description of the tree conjoins his new knowledge to the power of a transcendental force by establishing a direct connection between the tree (‘a mighty power’ towering over the whole country) and Murungu. An expression like ‘a mighty power’, and the adjectival qualifications of ‘awesome’ and ‘mysterious’ represent a deployment of the language of the sacred and evoke the idea of a superior transcendental power having sway over the lives of humans (‘he felt very small’). It is also the language of charisma. Outside the realm of the everyday and the mundane, it reflects the intervention of the extraordinary and the sacred. At the foot of the tree, Chege retells the Gikuyu racial myth of Gikuyu and Mumbi as progenitors of the tribe. This myth recurs in Ngugi’s early novels: ‘Murungu brought the man and woman here and again showed them the whole vastness of the land. He gave the country to them and their children and the children of the children, tene na tene, world without end.’ (18)13 Here, the myth functions in a similar manner to the way in which the Agikuyu made use of it during the Kenya Land Commission: it establishes a sacred and historical precedent for the Agikuyu claim to their land. Ato Sekyi-Otu’s detailed reading of the doubled textual representation of the myth in the novel suggests its political and politicised renderings: ‘As a contested myth of shared but indeterminate origins, unable to consecrate the hegemonic pretensions of either Makuyu or Kameno, the founding narrative is a quintessentially political act, for the political is the speech act of the community invoking unity with the forked tongue of partisan claims.’ (60) However, in relation to the narrative, it also seems to gesture in a different direction. In retelling the myth to Waiyaki, Chege adopts the voice of Murungu – the retelling is also a re-enactment, thus imbuing his words with illocutionary and ritual force. The voice of the father mimics the voice of God and patriarchal authority is identified with divine authority. This identification generates the central crisis for the protagonists: how to challenge the Law of the Father.


The revelation of Waiyaki’s role as prophet rests on the idea of hereditary succession.14 His father reveals to him that they are direct descendants of Mugo wa Kibiro: ‘We are his offspring. His blood flows in your veins.’ (19); and Waiyaki is the last in the line. There is no precedent for the notion of prophetic hereditary succession in Gikuyu society. The role of the seer (murathi) cannot be inherited. Among the sacrificial elders, who represent the ‘apex’ of Gikuyu religious organization, some men are believed to be endowed with the power of divination and the ability to foresee the future. These are the Arathi (see Kenyatta, Facing 242; Middleton 65; and Rosberg and Nottingham 327). Their faculties are regarded as the sole prerogative of the elders as Gikuyu traditional social structure works on the principle (as do most segmental African traditional social structures) that only when one is beyond a certain age is one able to put the welfare of the community before one’s own personal interests and the welfare of one’s family – hence, their gerontocratic division of power. Although the existence of prophetic clans among the Turkana, the Maasai and the Kalenjin (discussed above) relies on the idea of hereditary succession, succession is never automatic. The prophet had to prove him/herself to be a prophet through successful prediction (see Waller 39 on the laibons of the Maasai). More important to the designation of prophet was structural alterity. Like the Greek who solves the riddle of the Sphinx and destroys its oppressive reign, many prophets were seen as foundlings of the wild – the historical Mugo wa Kibiro is thought to have been found in the wild, his parents unknown (Lonsdale 241), and Inkidongi, the first laibon of the Maasai, is believed to have been found as a child wandering on the Ngong Hills (Waller 29). Also in relation to prophetic clans, Waller notes: ‘the genealogical traditions of all major prophet lineages […] emphasise alien origins’ (29). In claiming ancestry with Mugo wa Kibiro, Chege too claims the fate of the seer of old: ‘The seer was rejected by the people of the ridges’ (19) – as he is at the beginning and as his son will be at the end of the novel. The notion of the rejection of Mugo’s prophecy is historically inaccurate. It is precisely at the beginning of what might properly be called a Gikuyu nationalist movement (the historical background of the novel) that the prophecies of Mugo wa Kibiro were being used to both ‘invent’ a corporate Gikuyu identity and to argue about political strategy. However, Ngugi’s model for Waiyaki’s claim to prophetic status comes from another prophet. He is cast in the mould of Jesus Christ. Chege echoes the evangelical language of the missionaries when he remarks of himself: ‘He lived in the son.’ (38) The narrator describes Waiyaki as the ‘only son of Chege’ (6), creating an implicit reference

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to the Christian designation of Jesus as God’s only son. Ngugi makes this narrative strategy more concrete both with the idea of rejection by the people and in casting Kinuthia in the role of disciple, specifically in the role of one of Jesus’ disciples, Peter. For Kinuthia, Waiyaki ‘was a revelation, a thing not of this earth’ (138) and he promises his leader: ‘I will never leave you’, echoing Peter’s words to Jesus after his arrest. Just as Peter denied Christ, Kinuthia, at Waiyaki’s trial, ‘sought to hide himself in the crowd as if he did not want to be identified with the Teacher’ (149). Ngugi’s use of a specifically New Testament model of charismatic leadership produces anxiety at the diegetic and extra-diegetic levels of the text, to use Genette’s terminology. Much African literature that is set during the colonial period rehearses a fundamental shift in the socio-political structure of traditional African society. The colonial education of young people disrupts gerontocratic stratification. Literacy and migrant labour empowered the Gikuyu youth, resulting in parents’ resentment at what they saw as insubordinations (Lonsdale 254). This rupture is subtly and brilliantly illustrated at the end of Achebe’s Arrow of God, where the harvest is conducted in the name of the son. Also, Okonkwo’s demise is foregrounded in his son’s escape from his authority. In Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest, Daodu’s breaking of the royal drums similarly echoes this rupture and in effect secures the demise of the traditional framework of the Yoruba kingdom depicted. The River Between, likewise, registers ambivalence about the shift to the political valorisation of youth: a religion of the Son at odds with the religion of the Father. The anxiety and the rupture are succinctly conveyed by the narrator’s use of a lexical peculiarity: ‘And Chege’s son. The elders feared.’ (58) The object of the sentence is displaced and constructed as a separate entity preceding the subject. This creates a prosodic effect. The verse-like quality of the construction imbues it with the quality of sacred discourse and the fragmented construction performs the rupture. A similar grammatical construction recurs in the novel and is precisely about the anxiety generated by Waiyaki’s age: ‘So young. This puzzled people’ (70) – another symptomatic expression of the contradiction. There is much attention drawn by the characters in the text to Waiyaki’s youth. Kabonyi, an elder and Waiyaki’s antagonist, uses the designation ‘the boy’ to refer to Waiyaki in their public argument, thus manipulating to his advantage the central problematic of his leadership for the people of Kameno and Makuyu. As age is revered in gerontocratic society, at the diegetic level (at the level of the discourse of the character), recognition of Waiyaki’s charismatic sanction flounders. However, at the extra-diegetic


level (at the level of the discourse of the narrator), the ‘diegetic’ attention drawn to the putative prophet’s youth is counteracted by a narrational insistence on the infirmity of other figures of authority. Of Chege, the narrator tells us: ‘Again he felt his bones. He touched his grey hairs with a sigh and meditatively watched the dying day.’ (54) Kabonyi is described as ‘old, very old’ (124). Even the description of Livingstone, the headmaster at Siriana, emphasizes his old age: ‘He was now an old man, bald-headed and with a double chin.’ (55) The contradiction in the text, which arises from Ngugi’s use of a model of charisma drawn from a ‘religion of the son’, mediates specific socio-historical contradictions. A conflict between generations, between the youth and the elders, lies at the heart of gerontocratic Gikuyu society. This division not only structured the political field, but also, as Lonsdale points out, the terms of the Gikuyu nationalist and anticolonial struggle (see 260–81). Tension between subclan (mbari ) and generation (riika) often polarised the movement. The mbari, represented by the chiefs, saw themselves as dynastic heirs to land and cattle. They negotiated with the colonial administration on the basis of the privileges associated with lineage. The mbari’s opposition, during the 1930s, represented by the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), deployed the social structural elements of generation conflict and succession to contest mbari claims. They argued for a more militant response during the clitoridectomy episode, and favored struggle and resistance rather than the strategy of negotiation by the chiefs. During the Emergency, the ‘deepest discord’ in the nationalist movement rehearsed the conflict between lineage and generation, mbari and riika (Lonsdale, 270). As mbari genealogies rely on a linear and progressive view of time (and, of course, the steady accumulation of land and cattle), and riika relies on a cyclical view, Mugo, who prophesied cyclical renewal, was adopted to the ‘cause of riika solidarity’ (Lonsdale, 264). By making Waiyaki (in The River Between) the descendent of Mugo, and through the consistent textual attention drawn to the infirmity of the ‘elders’, Ngugi, likewise, through the idea of generation succession, claims Mugo as an advocate of social change. Ngugi subtly presages the challenge to the elders’ authority, and Waiyaki’s representative nature in that regard, through a mythical evocation early in the novel. Like the myth of divine offering (the Gikuyu and Mumbi narrative), the myth of Demi na Mathathi provides an argument for the Gikuyu land claim: Demi na Mathathi were giants of the tribe. They had lived a long way back, at the beginning of time. They cut down trees and cleared

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the dense forests for cultivation. They owned many cattle, sheep and goats and they often sacrificed to Murungu and held communion with the ancestral spirits. (10) Demi na Mathathi refer to the first two generations of the Gikuyu: the Demi (the ‘cutters’ who cleared the forests for cultivation), and the Mathathi (the generation that protected the gains made by the preceding generation).15 While the names of the riika normally alternate between Mwangi and Maina, the first two esteemed riika were given specific names, Demi and Mathathi. The myths played a crucial role in the Gikuyu struggle for land restitution. While the Gikuyu and Mumbi myth establishes divine ordinance as the basis for the land claim, the Demi na Mathathi myth regards agency as decisive (see Lonsdale 258). The myth rhetorically reveals the Gikuyu mastery over nature (clearing dense forests), and rehearses their shift from nomadic to settled community (owning domesticated animals). Implicit in the myth is the establishment among the Gikuyu of property as right, which opposed the colonial view that land did not function as a commodity among the native population. By claiming that they made fruitful an empty land grazed by the Maasai (Lonsdale 260), the Gikuyu repeated the form of the colonial claim on their land towards the neighbouring Maasai. Ngugi goes further than merely drawing attention to the issue of generation succession through a narratorial repetition of the myth. Waiyaki claims to embody the first generation: ‘But I am Demi,’ he says (11). The writer foreshadows the challenge to patriarchal authority that Waiyaki’s charismatic sanction will represent by having him butcher the tree: ‘He took an axe and rushed to the tree, oblivious of everything. He began to cut it with all his strength.’ (11) Given his phallocentric description of the sacred mugumo, this is also an act of castration. To sanction Waiyaki’s charismatic leadership within the framework of gerontocratic Gikuyu society, Ngugi thus relies on an implicit reference to the idea of revolution (ituika), which derives from the traditional Gikuyu system of government.16 At the meeting at Marioshoni, Waiyaki, through his rhetorical prowess and vision of the singular importance of education, wins the argument over the elder Kabonyi. The latter insists on militant political activism against Waiyaki’s call for more education. The narrator notes that the children’s song voices the silent cry of ‘generations that feel their end is near’ (94). The narrator explicitly points to the damage colonialism had wrought on the villagers’ lives yet the narrative seems to suggest also that the time of the older generation is


up. We are told that at the meeting the young people ‘were on Waiyaki’s side’ (96). It is interesting to note that the ituika ceremony was supposed to take place somewhere between 1925 and 1928 around the same time as the historical incidents that are the subject of the novel. However, the ituika ceremonial dances and songs were declared seditious by the British and were banned, thus preventing the changing of government among the Agikuyu (see Kenyatta, Facing 196). At this all-important meeting, Waiyaki believes that the destiny mapped out for him at the mugumo at the beginning of the narrative is fulfilled. He thinks of the effect he has had on the lives of the people of the ridges: ‘A saviour had come. He had opened the eyes of the people.’ (94) His prophetic message prioritises education above all else, hence his designation as ‘Teacher’ (rather than prophet or seer) by the people. He steadfastly counterposes ‘Education’ to the political activism advocated by the Kiama. Waiyaki is caught between double binaristic religious discourses. On the one hand, Joshua’s followers, the Christians, cast the conflict between Makuyu and Kameno as an opposition between the forces of Jesus and Satan that is discursively articulated as the opposition between the forces of light and darkness. Joshua notes that ‘the unerring white man had called the Gikuyu god the prince of darkness’ (29). The Gikuyu, on the other hand, cast the conflict as an opposition between the pure and the impure. Their rallying cry is ‘Keep the tribe pure.’ (68) On the two occasions that Waiyaki is called before the Kiama, the council of elders, he is accused of thahu, of breaking a taboo and thus of impurity: first of touching a dead body and second (with dire consequences) of sleeping with an uncircumcised woman. In addition to this set of religious oppositions, the narrative also opposes Waiyaki’s desire for education against the demand for militant political action at the colonial intrusion. Once again, a historically inaccurate refraction can be detected. While the text relies on the notion of ituika to bolster Waiyaki’s claim to leadership, it reverses the terms of the riika and mbari positions during the historical conflict of the clash between the missionary churches over female circumcision. It was the youth, represented by the KCA, who argued for a more confrontational engagement with the churches rather than the chiefs. The KCA, as Rosberg and Nottingham point out, also did not seek the wholesale rejection of Christianity, rather its adherents argued for the preservation of certain elements of Gikuyu culture (113).17 We shall see that the reversals result from both a textual schematisation and a dislocated mediation of history. On the hill of God, Waiyaki attempts to reconcile the conflict that has propelled the narrative: the religious opposition between Christianity

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and Gikuyu religion. His reconciliation reveals that the underlying religious conflict, at the level of narration, is not between autochthonous religion and the imported variety but between two versions of Christianity. Waiyaki concludes that circumcision ‘could not be stopped overnight. Patience and, above all, education, were needed. If the white man’s religion made you abandon a custom and then did not give you something else of equal value, you became lost.’ (142)18 The prophet thus sides with the Christians in believing that the custom had to be stopped and all that Christianity needed to do was to stop the gap left by the loss of this ritual practice. The ‘reconciliation’ radically alters the sacred value of the sacred tree. Where initially the Tree functioned as locus of divine authority, of sacred space, it is now figured in terms of the profane: ‘the sacred grove seemed to be no more than ordinary bush clustering around the fig tree’ (140). The mystery surrounding the tree persists, but its nature becomes radically altered. The awe and fascination of the first visit is replaced by dread and terror of ‘forces that seemed to be destroying him’ (140), foreshadowing Waiyaki’s status both leader and sacrificial victim, as hero and pharmakos. Waiyaki, as we have noted before, is impressed with aspects of Christian teaching and also admires Joshua: ‘He felt Joshua’s words touching a chord in the dark corner of his soul.’ (86) But it is Nyambura who alerts us to the underlying ideological structure. She calls Christianity a ‘religion of love and forgiveness’ (134) yet also characterizes Joshua’s religion as running counter to her spirit and of violating love (134). In fact, Joshua’s version of Christianity does run counter to Nyambura’s religion of love. His is a religion of war. ‘He would journey courageously, a Christian soldier, going to the promised land.’ (31) He demands of his god to ‘Bring down fire and thunder / Bring down the flood’ on the people who refuse to bow down to him (32). His words succinctly convey the puritanical and rigid teachings of the CSM. Dr. J. W. Arthur, the CSM’s militant proponent of the eradication of the custom, wrote during the height of the crisis: ‘[T]he spirit of indiscipline and absolute devilment must be exorcised somehow. I see no alternative to the strong ruthless hand.’ (cited in Rosberg and Nottingham 121, my emphasis) When Waiyaki chooses Nyambura over the tribe, a choice that secures his demise, he privileges ‘the religion of love’ over that of the tribe, which designated his act of having sex with an uncircumcised woman as an impurity.19 His choice of romantic partner betrays its Christian dimension by Waiyaki’s/the narrator’s deployment of the Christian symbolic framework of the conflict between themselves and the villagers; that is, the opposition between the forces of light and


darkness. When Kamau calls Waiyaki before the Kiama, the narrator notes: ‘And the two stepped out in the dark night.’ (120) A few lines later, the darkness acquires a terrifying incorporeal quality: ‘He looked around in the darkness and felt a terror of nothing visible pursue him.’ (121) When he reaches the meeting, Waiyaki (and the narrator) establishes a direct relation between the dreadful darkness and the elders. He describes the Kiama as ‘figures lurking in the edges of darkness’ (124). The identification of the Kiama with darkness recurs at various points in the narrative. Ian Glenn has persuasively argued that there is much resemblance between Mau Mau and the representation of the Kiama in The River Between: their recourse to violence, the oathing, the struggle for land and the danger associated with their activities (see Glenn 55). In relation to Mau Mau, images of danger, death and darkness abound in Weep Not, Child. The repetition reveals a historical dislocation: Ngugi’s representation of the clitoridectomy episode is refracted through an historical conflict that was to come some two decades later. An awareness of the temporal dislocation and historical refraction helps us to understand better the ‘historical’ dimension of the narrative. The nationalist opponents of Mau Mau deployed a specifically Christian model of charismatic leadership by fusing the content of Gikuyu prophetic and Christian eschatological narratives. According to the new hermeneutics of prophecy, the historical Waiyaki was shown to be reborn as Jomo Kenyatta, who would personally bring freedom to the Gikuyu. By his fervent opposition to Mau Mau and having studied overseas, Kenyatta was also supposed to have fulfilled Mugo’s prophecy of learning from the foreigners and not attacking them (see Lonsdale 274). It is thus clear that Ngugi’s model of charismatic authority in The River Between derives, in part, from the conservatives’ appropriation of generation succession for the creation of the myth of Kenyatta. Therefore, Ngugi echoes Kenyatta’s opposition to the militants through the narrative opposition he sets up between Waiyaki and the Kiama. The words of the children’s song at the Marioshoni meeting: ‘I do not want a spear / I do not want a shield / I want the shield and spear of learning’ (93), mimic the words in the pamphlet of 1952 ‘The Prayers of Waiyaki’, which made the claim that Kenyatta was the re-incarnation of Waiyaki, the nineteenth-century Gikuyu leader: ‘[T]oday the spear is the pen, the sword is the book, the shield is reason and the club unity.’ (cited in Lonsdale 274) In casting the Kiama in terms of darkness and danger, the historical dislocation in The River Between also performs a symbolic refraction. Only when Waiyaki descends from the hill of God and leaves the tree of Murungu is he able to resolve the political conflict, or more

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precisely the conflict between politics and no politics. Political understanding, Ngugi therefore suggests, arises with the demise of the sacred framework (the sacred grove does not light his path anymore). The text posits as coincidental the emergence of a political consciousness and the recognition scene of tragic structure. ‘One of the meanings of anagnorisis,’ Raphael Falco suggests, ‘might well be the sudden recognition of oneself as a cultural being in a particularized social reality.’ (89) This is the recognition of oneself not as an idealised figure of the imagination controlled by supernatural forces but rather as a subject of social forces.20 Throughout the narrative, Waiyaki consistently evokes his Destiny as pre-ordained, a subject of divine sanction. Although the idea of independent schools was Waiyaki’s, ‘he could not understand how this idea had borne fruit so quickly. He saw it as something beyond himself, something ordained by fate.’ (67, my emphasis) He constructs his relationship with Nyambura along the same lines by believing them to be ‘held together by something outside themselves’ (76, my emphasis). Yet, at the trial, the clan, and not the gods, ultimately decides his fate. Recognition of the political imperative is accomplished by the tragic fall into sociality. The text thus refuses a mythico-religious understanding of choice and action, and insists on the location of experience in temporality and locality; that is, in history. Anagnorisis facilitates the destabilisation of Waiyaki’s role as Leader. Where previously he beheld the vision of his greatness in which he sees the educated ‘acknowledging their debt to him’ he is now ready ‘to move together with people’ (146). Like all tragic protagonists, recognition comes too late. Anagnorisis thus prepares for his role as pharmakos – he is condemned to death by the people.

The river The initial textual reference to ‘the river between’, Honia River, recalls the radical equality of what Turner calls communitas (the feelings of comradeship and egalitarianism that develop among the ritual subjects during the liminal phase): ‘And men, cattle, wild beasts and trees, were all united by this life stream.’ (1) The name, Honia, which means, as the narrator tells us, ‘cure, or bring-back-to-life’ links the river’s function as symbol to ideas of death and re-birth, signalling both its ritualistic significance and ambivalent nature. In a novel that charts the increasing alienation of its protagonists from their society, the writer explicitly links communal involvement with a geographical and symbolic specificity: the river. Alienation in the text is metaphorically figured


as a refusal to join this ‘life stream’: ‘At first that thing inside him kept him aloof, preventing him from fully joining the stream.’ (River 42) Waiyaki’s successor, the self-deluded Mugo, another reluctant ‘prophet’ in A Grain of Wheat who uses Christian mythology to sanction his messianic role, is willing to kill to prevent a ‘drowning’ in the communal space. Mugo echoes Waiyaki’s words when he says of Kihika: ‘Then he came into my life […] and pulled me into the stream. So I killed him.’ (210) The only point in the narrative when Waiyaki escapes his sense of isolation is during the liminal phase of the rite of passage. As Waiyaki sits on the banks of the river during the circumcision ceremony, the narrator notes: ‘Waiyaki was not alone.’ (45) The ceremony is preceded by a night of frenzied and ecstatic dances in which divisions of power and labour are annulled. They were free. Age and youth had become reconciled for this one night. And you could sing about anything and talk of the hidden parts of men and women without feeling that you had violated the otherwise strong social code that governed people’s relationships, especially the relationship between young and old, man and woman. (41) This is a graphic representation of the social dimension of communitas, of a group operating outside the bounds of social structure, of an ‘emptiness at the centre’ which is determinate of and beyond social structure. Consequently, Ngugi constructs a reciprocal relation between Waiyaki’s increasing belief in his role as redeemer of the people and his growing isolation from the peoples of Kameno and Makuyu with his failure to participate in their ritual activities: ‘Waiyaki was losing that contact with people that can only come through taking part together in a ritual.’ (113) As signified in its name, the symbolic associations of the river are also shot through with ambivalence. The locus of communal joy and collective solidarity, the river is also the scene of ritual bloodletting. ‘Blood trickled freely on to the ground, sinking into the soil. Henceforth, a religious bond linked Waiyaki to the earth, as if his blood was an offering.’ (45) The description explicitly links the space of communitas with the earth. In the economy of symbols in The River Between, Ngugi structures the opposition of ‘Tree’ and ‘River’ along what Barthes calls ‘semic’ lines, allegorising the conflict as the divide between the two protagonists. Thus, the character that is most closely associated with the river is

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Nyambura. It is at the river where we first encounter her and throughout the narrative Waiyaki frequently encounters her on the banks of the river. Nyambura’s focalised description of the river immediately registers its ambivalent nature: ‘She looked at the pale dark water of the river.’ (23) The combination of opposing elements (‘pale’ and ‘dark’) generates ambivalent sexual imagery. ‘Nyambura was fascinated and felt attracted to the river. […] It was an exhilaration, a feeling of acute ecstasy, almost of pain.’ (23) This, in turn, informs the central crisis for the character as it produces rival desires, which are alternately voiced next to the river: the desire to obey the Law of the Father (which is simultaneously the law of her god) and the desire to seek sexual gratification. In much the same way as Waiyaki’s description of the sacred tree is decidedly phallocentric, the river acquires, in Nyambura’s sexualized subjective mode, phallic qualities: ‘she felt something strange stirring in her bowels’ as she listened to ‘the throb of the river’ (23). However, as the narrative progresses the ambivalent symbolic qualifications of the river vary their field of application so as to assume a sinister and malevolent dimension. Where initially the river is the locus of both communal joy and ritual sacrifice, of the catalysis of ambivalent desires, and of the balanced combination of opposing elements, in the latter part of the novel Ngugi construes its symbolic value largely along negative lines. During his initiation the shedding of Waiyaki’s blood represents for him a bond with the earth, a commitment to the tribe. Later in the novel it becomes ‘the place where he had shed blood, red blood, as if it were needed to propitiate angry spirits’ (104). The river and the earth acquire the status of malevolent deities demanding the sacrifice of the protagonists. Waiyaki feels that he is ‘confronted with a might, a presence beyond him’ and the river becomes ‘an altar of sacrifice’ (104). Waiyaki’s and Nyambura’s growing alienation from the tribe constitutes the idea of the communitas as equivalent to death. Through the symbolic chain, the community is set up as the antithesis and the negation of individual self-assertion. Recognition of their mutual interdependence within the traditional Gikuyu framework comes too late for the central characters. Ngugi demonstrates Waiyaki’s construction of the ‘self’ and ‘tribe’ relation as mutually exclusive, as irreconcilably opposed, in a frightening vision of the seer-prophet. The vision also rehearses the founding horror of tragedy, sparagmos. And then horror caught him. They were pulling her [Nyambura] into pieces, as if she were a thing of sacrifice to the god of the river, which


still flowed with life as they committed this ritual outrage on her. And he too had joined the crowd. (120) The river between, the ‘life stream’, is here cast wholly within the domain of malevolence. The irrational mob and an inscrutable transcendental realm (‘a darkness which no one could fathom’) seek to destroy the individualists. Waiyaki’s deployment of the Christian’s binaristic symbolic logic, which opposes the forces of light and the powers of darkness, incorporates within its ambit the symbolic associations of the river. We have seen how the Kiama is figured in terms of darkness in the text: Ngugi’s representation of their destructive acts (the burning of the hut and the desire to enforce clitoridectomy) presents the Kiama in the same light (or darkness) articulated by Joshua. Thus, in registering the river also in terms of darkness Waiyaki posits as coincidental the communality of communitas and the increasingly destructive Kiama and its prescriptions. In fact, Ngugi establishes a direct symbolic relation between the two. In Waiyaki’s vision, the unfathomable darkness that carries away the dismembered body of Nyambura is echoed at the end of the chapter when Kamau summons him to appear before the Kiama, signifying a will to link together two independent systems of signs, the symbolic value of darkness to the binaristic discourse of the Christians and the symbolic associations of the river to Gikuyu religious discourse. A homology is established between the two. The narrator notes: ‘the two stepped out into the dark night’ (123). In terms of the structure/communitas opposition Waiyaki effectively empties out the pole of communitas and replaces it with ‘distorted’ structure – a corrupted doubling. The foregrounding of the tragic status of the central characters through the verbal echo of a peculiar phrase ‘Christ on the tree’ has been noted above. I have also suggested that a form of anagnorisis and a strategy of reversal structure the novel. Waiyaki’s vision of sacrificial dismemberment, of sparagmos (the tearing to pieces and devouring of the sacred being) further recuperates the tragic dimension of the text. In ‘Charisma and Tragedy: An Introduction’ Falco provides a compelling reading of the significance of sparagmos to charismatic social organization by relating the horror of Dionysian dismemberment to the fear of ‘individuation’. ‘The symbol of group dismemberment,’ Falco argues, ‘remains the constant threat to charismatic groups.’ (88) Through the representation of sparagmos the threat is constantly rehearsed and eternally negated. Due to the charismatic organization of Gikuyu (and

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pre-colonial African) society, in The River Between Waiyaki’s alienation translates into the symptomatic expression of a fear of dismemberment: the self-society dialectic is out of sync, generating a neurotic reaction. Waiyaki’s fear of drowning in the communal space (his inability to join the stream) and the fear of dismemberment represent two sides of the same coin. In his early novels Ngugi opposes the individual self to communal and historical imperatives, which is why the fear of sparagmos, the symptomatic expression of the contradiction, haunts many of his characters. In A Grain of Wheat, Mugo, after his public confession, worries: ‘Suppose all those people had risen and dug their nails and teeth into his body.’ (232) At the end of The River Between, the people ‘began to press towards Kabonyi as if animated with the desire to tear him to pieces’ (149). The image also recurs in his later novels. In Matagari, the tearing to pieces of the prophet and the reformed prostitute returns sparagmos to the ritual domain. It is telling that a river, once again, accepts this sacrificial offering. I suggest that another textual association of the river’s darkness is a sense of the opacity of the indigenous religious realm, what Adam Ashforth has called ‘epistemic anxiety’ – an epistemological indeterminacy which arises from an unfathomable religious sphere. In Ngugi’s novel, this problematic is subtly registered through the textual repetition of a biblical quotation. In the final scene of the novel there is a peculiar authorial intervention – the insertion of a quotation from the Book of Isaiah: ‘They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.’ (150, my emphasis) The quotation is set off from the rest of the text and further attention is drawn to its italicisation. The narrational intervention is part of a larger quotation that Nyambura articulates earlier in the novel in support for her understanding of Christianity as a ‘religion of love’ in contrast to her father’s religion of war. The quotation, beginning with ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid […]’ (134), announces the annulment of Nature’s unpredictability and hostility, the escape from contingency. The quotation from the Book of Isaiah also represents Christianity as a religion of ‘full knowledge’, of epistemological certainty. The repetition of part of the biblical quotation in the final scene functions as a means of introducing Nyambura to the scene and seems to echo the idyllic description of Honia River in the first chapter, the life stream that unites man, animals and trees. However, I suggest that rather than detecting a syncretizing impulse in the narrational intervention, it actually seeks to distinguish Gikuyu religion from Christianity. The line that precedes


the Biblical quotation reveals the implicit narrational opposition. ‘And Honia river went on flowing through the valley of life, throbbing, murmuring an unknown song.’ (150, my emphasis) The unknown song is sharply distinguished from the full knowledge of the Lord. Ngugi also designates the river’s inscrutability at various points in the narrative as a form of indifference. Thus, through the metonymic recuperation of the indigenous religious sphere by the symbol of the river, inscrutability and a certain epistemological indeterminacy opposes transparency and knowledge. Deriving from this opposition, a religion of love opposes an indifferent divine sphere. Ngugi parallels the transformation of the tree from sacred object (sacred site of divine imperative and transcendental alterity) to the tree as desacralised entity (mundane object in a world of other profane things) with the shift from an articulation of a specific ambivalence in the symbolic value of the river to a position in which the negative aspects of the ambivalence is emphasised. A prioritisation of political understanding and the privileging of a specific vision of Christianity accompany this movement.

The mountains and the plains Enfolded within the symbolic antagonism of the river and the tree, and derived from it, is a subtle set of symbolic oppositions, oppositions that recur throughout Ngugi’s oeuvre. At the beginning of the novel, Waiyaki’s father reprimands him for returning home late. ‘Why do you come home with darkness?’ Chege asks his son, to which Waiyaki replies, ‘We took the cattle to the plains.’ (8) The plains represent the geographical boundaries of the Gikuyu land, a space where ‘danger lurks’ (8). Ngugi also registers this geographical space as the locus of conflict. The childhood fight between Kamau, Kinuthia and Waiyaki on the plains provides, at least in part, the impetus to Kamau’s desire for revenge. ‘Waiyaki had humiliated him in the plains. […] Waiyaki was his rival to death.’ (107) Gikuyu land is, the narrator informs us, made up of ‘ancient hills and ridges’ (3). As boundary and limit the plains operate as liminal space symbolically opposed to the hills and mountains of Gikuyu territory. Facing the plains, Njoroge in Weep Not, Child contemplates suicide. In A Grain of Wheat, the flatness of the landscape at Yala, the prison camp, registers for Gikonyo a sense of exile, suffering and alienation. The hills and ridges of Thabai, his home, contrast starkly with the flatness at Yala, ‘a flat land spotted with cactus bush and thorn trees’ (107). When Gikonyo returns to discover Mumbi’s infidelity, his torment is signified as a flatness: ‘Life had no

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colour. It was one endless blank sheet, so flat. There were no valleys, no mountains, no streams, no trees – nothing.’ (112) When Matigari and Guthera cross the plains at the end of Matigari they are torn to pieces by dogs. As the Gikuyu rural landscape provides the backdrop for Ngugi’s literary sensibility, he skilfully deploys the opposition between flat land and hills in his economy of symbols, locating alienated mental states, literal and symbolic danger, and liminal zones in the former. In The River Between, flat spaces not only represent the margins of the Gikuyu lands (the outside) but also signify the liminal spaces betwixt and between. Waiyaki tells Kinuthia: ‘Call a meeting at Honia River. It is flat there.’ (139, my emphasis) In the final scene of the novel, there is a layering of event, temporality and space. At the meeting on this liminal space, Waiyaki attempts to impart authority to his leadership by appealing to the people. Earlier in the narrative, Waiyaki notes of the self-same ground that he and Nyambura, standing on it, looked as if they were ‘standing on an altar ready for sacrifice’ (104). As this is also the ground on which he spilt his blood during the initiation ceremony, an equivalence of Waiyaki’s role as leader and pharmakos is established. There might be an historical reason for the association of flat land with death. Michael Adas has shown how landscape affected the strength of clan organisation amongst the Ngindo and Matumbi in East Africa in the late nineteenth century (Prophets 28). The Matumbi, who dwelled in the forests, were better able to defend themselves from slave raids and attacks from neighbouring peoples. However, the Ngindo, who lived on the more exposed plateaus, were ‘tempting targets for slave traders and slave raiders’ (Adas 28). As a result, the landscape contributed to some clan groups of the Ngindo being completely wiped out. Ngugi distinguishes the seat of the clan from the flat ground: ‘Waiyaki strode towards a raised piece of ground where the Kiama sat’ and where Waiyaki’s destiny is to be decided, thus creating a structurally homologous relation between the power of the Kiama and both the sacred hill of Kameno, on which the sacred mugumo stands, and Kerinyaga, the seat of the High God. Structure is distinguished from communitas. In the novel, the symbolic chain of tree-mountain-sky has as its antagonist the river-flat land-earth sequence. Significantly, Waiyaki’s trial takes place on the day before the initiation ceremonies, which, in Ngugi’s proffered syncretism, is made to coincide with Christmas, the celebration of the birth of the prophet-saviour who is the model for Ngugi’s black messiah. The text’s desire for ritual status may be detected in its attempt to mimic both nature’s cycles (the end of the year provides narrative closure) and the cycles of the social life of


the Gikuyu: the death of Waiyaki follows the celebrations of the birth of another saviour and the rebirth of Gikuyu adolescents into adulthood, thus performing the ritual dimension embedded in the river’s name, ‘bring-back-to-life’. However, the narrative-as-ritual fails, and indeed it must to achieve tragic status. Like much African literature that explores the religious transformations of pre-colonial African society by the colonial incursion, The River Between enacts the uneven transition to modernity by positing the inefficacy of ritual sacrifice. Overdetermined by the radically altered socio-political climate, rituals, which are made to serve other ends than those circumscribed by the traditional framework, fail. The ritual sacrifice is unable to provide cathartic closure. Guilt is the outcome. After Waiyaki is condemned to death, the crowd ‘did not want to look at the Teacher, and they did not want to read their guilt in one another’s faces’ (152). But the linearity inherent in this rupture is counterposed by the cyclicality of an aesthetic totality, as narrative closure is achieved through ritual closure. The alienated bourgeois subjects of the realist novel and the couple of the romantic tradition are sacrificed and thus made to fulfil their role within the traditional domain. Alienation gives way to redemption as the blood of the victims inaugurates a new cycle. Prophetic renewal has set the world right again on a different historical level. The sacred dialectically recuperates both the aesthetic and the socio-political. The ritual fails and succeeds. By moving away from the well-trod terms in the critical work of Ngugi’s early period, those of Christianity, colonialism etc., I have located his early novels in a conflicted field of local discursive and historical forces, of prophecy and its anti-colonial and postcolonial deployments. The history of prophecy in East Africa reveals its significant role in anti-colonial resistance and the contestation of traditional forms of authority. Through mobilization and syncretisation of the language and forms of prophecy, the Gikuyu invented themselves as a nation and rationalised their anti-colonial nationalist strategies. Divisions between the various factions of the nationalist struggle, which initially reflected the social structural conflicts of gerontocratic Gikuyu society, often represented different interpretations of prophecies, both pre-colonial and Christian. Charismatic authority becomes crucial for postcolonial leadership as it represents not only a legitimate traditional alternative to the authority of elders but also represents a traditional strategy of overcoming clan and ethnic boundaries. Ngugi’s early work exists in a dynamic and sometimes contradictory relationship to Gikuyu nationalist and postcolonial appropriations of the prophetic idiom. In The River

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Between, he establishes a symbolic framework derived principally from the indigenous religious and cultural sphere, although amplified by syncretism with Christianity – a framework which he repeats in his other novels. In the novel, a reciprocal and mutually reinforcing relation between socio-political rupture (of the gerontocratic organization of traditional society) and religious rupture (of ritual effectivity) functions as the condition of the possibility of the emergence of a distinctively African modernity.

II Indirections


4 Sacred Realism: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

In Magical Realism in West African Fiction, Brenda Cooper touts Ben Okri’s The Famished Road as definitive of magic realism of the postcolonial African variety. In the novel, Okri draws on mythical beliefs and ritual, and aesthetic practices of Nigerian society, to create, within the form of the novel, a complex amalgamation, in generic terms, of realism and fantasy. However, his novel is vastly dissimilar from the magic realisms of Gabriel Gárcia Márquez and Salman Rushdie, who both essentially rely on forms of allegory to address historical concerns in most of their novels. Wendy B. Faris argues that one of the defining features of magic realism is an extensive use of detail as a means to highlight the mimetic and referential quality of the writing. This characteristic is more applicable to the work of Okri than to the allegorical quality of Rushdie’s and Gárcia Márquez’s works. This might sound strange when we are presented in The Famished Road with a world populated by spirits, gods, the unborn, the living and the dead, where mutant and hybrid creatures intermingle with ordinary people. Yet, it is my contention that Okri, in contradistinction to Rushdie and Gárcia-Márquez, is writing/re-writing a form of realism, which I shall call sacred realism. This new term is necessary not only to distinguish it from the aesthetics and politics of magic realism(s), but also to point to its historical and geographical specificity. Magic and witchcraft have often been viewed as inimical to development and the processes of democratisation in the African postcolony and therefore characterised negatively. On the other hand, the magicomythical in African literature, in its putative contestation of Western cultural hegemony and its inscription within a postcolonial or postmodern cultural community, has become an increasingly privileged mode of aesthetic production. Writers like Ben Okri, Syl Cheney-Coker and Zakes 115

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Mda, in contradistinction to Achebe, Soyinka and Ngugi, have been included under the rubric of magic realism.1 Magic realism, which initially referred to certain Latin American novels that combined the literary and discursive strategies of realism and fantasy, has come to identify almost any novel that contains mythical or fantastical elements. Like the ‘King of the Road’, in Okri’s The Famished Road, this generic category seems to have an insatiable appetite, devouring everything in its path to achieve identification with it. What was thought to be rooted in the tropical landscape of Latin America has come to include writings from Nigeria to Canada; what was conceived in dialogic oppositionality to French Surrealism, as a particular trend within Modernism, is now seen as indicative of the metafictional games of postmodern aesthetic strategies; what had placed historicity at its heart is now claimed to celebrate the dismantling of History and traditional historiography.2 At this rate, the term ‘magic realism’ might share the same fate as the ‘King of the Road’ in Okri’s novel: his hunger is so great that after eating almost everything he finally devours himself. This chapter is aimed at gustatory moderation. In this chapter I shall extend the exploration of the category of the sacred on two fronts. On the one hand, I shall interrogate the literary mode of magic realism because in relation to myth, magic, ritual and autochthonous religious beliefs and practices the term has gained a certain currency. I shall attempt to delimit the use of the term ‘magic realism’ by problematising its applicability to Okri’s The Famished Road and the literary use of myth and magic in African cultural production. On the other hand, I shall extend the exploration of the sacred through a discussion of the relationships between time, history and narrative in Okri’s novel.

Magic realism In a bid to fill the ‘theoretical vacuum’ that, as Roberto González Echevarría claims, surrounds the use of the term ‘magic realism’, recent analyses of magic realism expand on the oxymoronic nature of the term with its implication of the dialectical interweaving of oppositional categories to subscribe to a wide range of dual world theses, be they formal or contextual (108). Stephen Slemon’s argument that magic realist texts combine two distinct literary modes, the realist and the fantastical, in such a way that the ‘two modes never manage to arrange themselves into any kind of hierarchy’ has become the benchmark for the formal application of the term (410). He posits the generation of a state of equivalence at the level of narration between the empirical

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and the imaginary, the realistic and the mythical, the quotidian and the numinous. As a formal definition of magic realism, one cannot do better. However, due to the history of the term (the Latin Americans’ insistence of its historical and geographical particularity) and the desire to extend the applicability of the generic mode to texts from other postcolonial contexts, attempts to provide a historical/contextual basis for the modal applicability has proved much more difficult. Wendy B. Faris argues that all magic realist texts contain an ‘irreducible element of magic, something we cannot explain according to the laws of the universe as we know them’ (167). She elaborates this by suggesting that this magic often means the disruption of the ordinary logic of cause and effect. John Erickson offers another variation by claiming that two diametrically opposed ontologies mark the narratives of magic realism: the empirical world of reason and logic and the supernatural world of unreason (428). It may be noted that the oppositions deployed are of an epistemological bent, logic and rational empiricism acting as the points of reference (and contestation). As these critics locate themselves in different ways with the postcolonial project, these categories are refracted through an opposition of the Western world and its ‘logocentric’ bias to the ‘non-West’ (be it Latin America or other postcolonies). Literary distinctions become a means of privileging the margins by rejecting rationality’s hierarchisation of the terms (real and fantasy, reason and unreason etc.), and thus recuperating the postcolonial oppositional nature of magic realism. However, Liam Connell argues that by differentiating the terms as belonging to two different and opposing worlds, the West and the non-West, they implicitly cast magic and the irrational as the exclusive preserves of the postcolony (an ideological strategy not much different from colonial discourse).3 In the same instant that these theorists attempt to distance themselves from the hierarchisation of the different terms, they replicate this particular binarism (Connell 103). The terms are re-arranged, but are left as unproblematic categories. Moreover, Latin American writers do not make reference to a dual worldhood, but rather to a singular worldview that comingles the marvellous and the mundane (problematising that distinction). The terms employed in the classification of the two antagonistic systems (and worlds) by the postcolonial critics betray a reliance on an evolutionary schematic that opposes magic to science. Phrases like ‘experientially impossible’, ‘empirically unverifiable’ and ‘ordinary logic of cause and effect’, take as unproblematic both the project of modernity as completed (rationality’s total triumph over and destruction of all

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mystical thought in the West) and the opposition of science to magic (specified as pre-scientific and unscientific). Adorno and Horkheimer question the opposition of myth to science that characterises the Enlightenment by suggesting that ‘the entirety of Western rationalism is finally dependent on precisely the same formulation as the mythic: the principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition that the Enlightenment upholds against the mythic imagination, is the principle of myth itself’ (cited in Connell 108). The opposition between magic and science may be a false opposition after all.4 Jameson’s deployment of a dual economy thesis for the analysis of the material conditions of production of magic realist texts has proved highly influential in the field.5 Jameson writes: ‘magic realism depends on a content which betrays the overlap or the co-existence of precapitalist with nascent capitalist or technological features’, resulting in the ‘articulated superposition of whole layers of the past within the present’ (‘On Magic Realism in Film’ 311).6 The raw material of magic realism, for Jameson, derives from peasant society or ‘even tribal myth’ (‘On Magic Realism’ 302). Rushdie, writing about Gárcia Márquez, suggests that his works ‘deal with what Naipaul has called “half-made” societies, in which the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new’ (Imaginary Homelands 302). This dual economy thesis has at its foundation Marxist and Weberian processes of societal rationalisation.7 In contemporary India we are told that gods and spirits still exercise agency at the heart of the labour process. In his study of jute-mill workers of Bengal, Dipesh Chakrabarty points to the persistence of magicoreligious beliefs. He describes the worshipping of machinery by workers in the 1930s accompanied by the ritual slaughter of animals. This is a public holiday for the working classes, named after the engineer-god Vishvakarma. In a more recent article, he maintains that in realising the significance of these rituals the secular state, through institutionalising these festivals, inserts itself into the magic-religious cosmos, creating an alliance between itself, workers, employers and the supernatural. Not only are the capitalist modes of production and exchange still subjected to magico-religious metaphysics but also the significance of deities in the negotiation of parliamentary democracy in India poses a problem for materialist historiography. These ‘enchantments’ figure as a challenge to, and critique of, the Weberian and Marxist schemas with their ‘modes of production’ narrative and their teleology of disenchantment. Recent African anthropological studies also contradict this model by revealing the intimate relationship between forms of magical action, for eample, witchcraft, and power. Not only is magic so closely linked

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to the proper functioning of certain African societies (some would say all), but also the speed and cunning with which it adapts to modern transformations – the new distributions of power and goods – is striking (see Geschiere 2). Some have argued that the incorporation of magical practices and the production of discourses on witchcraft are essential factors in the process of African state-formation.8 The rise of capitalism and the advent of democracy produce more magic, not less. Amaryll Chanady, moreover, counters the claim that magic realism is derivative and expressive of a peasant view of reality and society. Opposing Carlos Fuentes, who says of Gárcia Márquez that he is the ‘writer who refines to their essence and converts into literature the traditional themes of the countryside’ (Fuentes cited in Wilson 223), Chanady remarks, ‘there are many supernatural motifs such as flying carpets and meditation that have no more connection with an indigenous worldview than the transformation of Gregor Samsa into an insect in Kafka’s Metamorphosis’ (‘Origins’ 50). I suggest that the relation of ‘magic’ to a rural peasant view is at best anecdotal and strategic. It involves, on the one hand, the anecdotal portrayal of magico-religious interpretations, and, on the other hand, the strategic deployment of mythico-religious ideas to extend aspects of novelistic practice. Principally, the latter move tends to superimpose the cyclical recurrence of myth on the chronological linearity in the organisation of time in the novel. Chanady, also, notes that Alejo Carpentier’s effort to destabilise traditional historiographical writing included a privileging of what he felt to be indicative of ‘primitive’ peasant mentality, the notions of cyclical temporality and the eternal recurrence of events. Carpentier’s specification of peasant reality, and he is not alone in this, is highly simplistic and conflates myth/belief with a mode of thought. Myth may rely on a cyclical notion of time (that is nevertheless historical), but to depict a mentality as exclusively cyclical is not intelligible. The discussion of the relationship between myth, ritual, the sacred and temporality will clarify this point.

Beyond realism In some of his earlier short stories and in his novels, Ben Okri blends realist and fantastical literary modes. The impetus towards the intermingling of the referential and the imaginary represents a major trend within African cultural production. Various writers, for example Achebe, Ngugi and Okri, began their writing careers employing conventional realist modes and then one notes a turn towards ‘non-realist’ novelistic

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strategies. Achebe’s Anthills of Savannah and Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross evidence this transition in their writing careers. The change or rupture is attributed, on the one hand, to the attempt to draw on indigenous systems of belief; for example, the animistic interpenetration of the natural and the supernatural, the belief in ancestors, spirits and ancestors, and the pre-eminence of rites and rituals in regulating social processes. On the other hand, the change supposedly represents an attempt to reflect the phantasmagoric political realities of the African postcolony. Critics such as Biodun Jeyifo relate the disjunctures in content and form of novels such as Soyinka’s The Interpreters, Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments and Achebe’s Man of the People to the attempt by the writer to reflect/mediate the crisis in the socio-political domain. ‘The narrative and stylistic organisation’ of these novels, Jeyifo asserts, is informed by the ‘socio-historical reality of alienation, degradation, chaos and instability for the vast majority of its living generations’ (cited in Quayson, ‘Esoteric Webwork’ 156). However, realism, from the beginnings of African literature, has proved a fraught exercise. The rise of the novel in the West has been characterised as the literary expression of the coming-into-being of the bourgeoisie, or associated with the philosophical paradigms of secularism, rationalism and empiricism, or with the triumph of science over religious explanatory models. Above we noted the persistence of traditional religious ideas and practices in African statecraft. The social stratification in the early postcolony, it has been noted by certain political theorists, prevented the formation of a hegemonic middle class. Representing this reality must, it would seem, come into direct conflict with realism as a historico-literary category. In fact, many African novels of the referential kind consistently gesture toward and often perform the inadequacy of the realist mode. In Achebe’s Arrow of God, a divine intervention, a literal deus ex machina ruptures the text. The realist mode gives way to the mythic narrative.9 If we abandoned a purely formalist approach to the genre, it would seem that realism is a historically impossible project for the African artist. Writers like Ayi Kwei Armah, Kojo Laing (of Search Sweet Country) and Soyinka (in his novels) opted for the modernist approach to the novel, problematising the relation between language and the world. Highly poetic, lyrical and metaphoric language drew attention to the reading process, which in turn produced alienation effects that contested the realist novel’s putative direct relation with historical reality. Writers of both the realist and the modernist camps drew on indigenous systems of knowledge and belief, on traditional ritual practices etc. Magic realism,

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Syl Cheney-Coker contends, represents a new direction for the African novel: ‘The novel in Africa had been cloistered as it were within very precise forms.’ You either had ‘a sociological view of the novel within the Achebean definition, or you were a political novelist within the Ngugian concept of it’ (interview with Brenda Cooper, ‘Syl CheneyCoker’ 10). However, most critics have attributed this ‘new direction’ to the influence of the mythopoeic works of Soyinka.10 Various critics cite Soyinka and Amos Tutuola as Okri’s literary forebears (e.g. Quayson in Strategic Formations aligns Okri with a range of Yoruba writers who exercise ‘the option of mythpoesis and ritual’ (158)). However, Okri is as much indebted to the realisms of Achebe and Ngugi (I shall show below) as to the mythically-oriented cultural discourse of Soyinka.11 More importantly, readings of non-realist modes of representation in the African novel which house both modernist and magic realist literary strategies under the same rubric tend to obscure important differences between the approaches. Émile Benveniste’s distinction between histoire and discours may prove helpful in teasing out the problematic (see Culler’ discussion of this distinction 196–200). Benveniste distinguishes between objective utterance (a series of events) and its subjective re-arrangement and deformation by the speech of the narrator (what Henry James called ‘the story of the story’). These two distinct systems of story and discourse, which provide a grammar of narrative modes, are both independent and complementary. Therefore, if in dealing with non-realist representation we clarify at which level this interweaving of fantasy and realism occurs, the modal designation may prove more precise. The intermingling functions at the level of story (the world inhabited by the characters, in which they take cognisance of the fact) or at the level of discourse (the speech of the narrator), will help to distinguish the modernist from the magic realist. In the early novels of Ayi Kwei Armah, the novels of Soyinka and Kojo Laing’s Search Sweet Country, one notes that the interpenetration of the realist and fantastical modes operates at the level of narration, of discourse. Quayson suggests of Search Sweet Country that the surreal, fantastical quality of the writing is largely a function of the narrator’s perspective and the language used, having ‘little impact on the way characters perceive setting’(Quayson, ‘Esoteric Webwork’ 147) – a thoroughgoing example of the modernist preoccupation with the problematisation of the relation between language and representation. Verisimilitude is not transcended; rather, the means of representation becomes the object of focus. Transformation in the object of representation at the level of story/narrative produces fabular and fantastic writing of various kinds;

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for example, the ‘magic realism’ of Okri, Cheney-Coker and Zakes Mda, the allegorical and fabular works of the later Ngugi, and the carnivalesque and science fiction novels of Kojo Laing (Woman of the Aeroplanes and Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars).

Sacred realism In The Famished Road, Ben Okri employs the conventions of the realist text in the descriptions of the labours of Azaro, the abiku (spirit-child) and his parents, nominally designated by their the filial relationship to Azaro, as Mum and Dad. They constitute a closed narrative nexus as Okri consistently pits this triad against both their neighbours in the compound and their extended family. The writer graphically represents the poverty and desperate struggle of the family. Much of the novel revolves around the difficulties they encounter in surviving each day. Okri is unwavering in his elaboration of this relentless cycle of despair, hunger and dispossession. Dad unloads heavy bags off trucks until he is almost broken in two and carries buckets of excrement. Mum hawks her meagre wares. The exhaustion forces her to contemplate suicide. The henchmen of corrupt polticians destroy Mum’s store at the market and harass Dad because he supports the ‘Party of the Poor’. The family is endlessly plagued by the landlord. Set in the period just prior to Independence, the novel negotiates historical changes and the emergence of new political forms. This is very much in the vein of the realist novel. The realism of The Famished Road, which veers towards a type of social realism, is ruptured by representation of the religious and mythical world of spirits, gods and epic adventures, a world where the barriers between the visible and the invisible, natural and supernatural, are permeable. Dad boxes ghosts in the world of the living and battles spirits in his very real dreamworld. Azaro, the abiku, trapped in his exilic existence in the interspace between spirit-world and the living, constantly struggles with his spirit companions who want to tempt him back to the world of spirits. This world, at first glance, derives from an animistic and mythical conception of the universe, a sacred web that emphasises the interconnectedness of all things. As the tortoise, the archetypal bearer of knowledge in African folktales, tells Mum: ‘All things are linked.’ (483) The highly realistic descriptions of the lives of ordinary people are interwoven seamlessly with the impressionistic language of the mythical battles in the dream world and Azaro’s encounters with the spirits. Okri does not present us with a dual world, but a

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single (and singular) world in which ‘being’ is located in an intricate network of relations between the material and the spiritual. While certain Latin Americans suggested that ‘true’ magic realism arises from a world still open to a magico-mythical worldview (that is, the ontological nature of the form), Okri, however, refuses the ontological argument and points out that his use of the fantastic in The Famished Road is motivated less by the desire to represent comprehensively an indigenous worldview but rather primarily by an attempt at an aesthetic experiment. ‘I’m not saying reality is fantastic as [Gárcia] Márquez did.’ (interview with Deandra 80) Instead, an attempt to write a particular ‘poetic point of view’ motivates Okri – the point of view of an impossible narrator, a spirit-child: ‘When he looks at reality, he does it through the eyes of a spirit as well as through those of a human being, so everything is both ordinary and transfigured simultaneously.’ (interview with Deandra 80) We shall see later that by treating the abiku point of view as allegorical topos, as tropological cipher for the emergent Nigerian nation-state, this particular poetic point of view is not only cast as impossible but also necessarily undesirable. The novel thus maps the contours of its own aesthetic failure as the political intentions of the novel work to disavow its aesthetic project. Okri’s relation to traditional beliefs and aesthetic practices is, therefore, more strategic then representative. In fact, numerous critics have commented on the hybrid, heterogeneous and eclectic nature of Okri’s representation of the spiritual universe inhabited by the charcters in the novel – mingling as it does elements from the Ancient Greeks, Christian discourse, various traditional African religions and, as Douglas MacCabe, following Appiah, points out, New Age spirituality.12 In terms of the indigenous religious realm, Azaro, the spirit-child, blurs the boundaries between the human and spirit worlds as he moves fluidly in either direction. In West African traditional society, the borders between these realms, between the sacred and the profane, are ritually guarded and carefully maintained. Crossing over into the sphere of the spirits requires ritual and ontological transformation. In myths, the hero’s movements into the dark forest (in the European context) or into the bush (in West Africa) signal the transformation. The fluid to-ing and fro-ing of Azaro is culturally incongruous. Okri’s vision is a swarming, dissonant world of angels and demons (see 496–7) in which Hades and Styx play just as prominent a role as the Tutuola-esque ‘parttime human beings’ (460). Azaro’s journeys in the spirit realm are also textually structured by a Christian dualistic discourse: ‘For every power on the sides of those that feed on the earth’s blood, a fabulous angel is

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born.’ (496) Okri’s syncretic mythic, religious and aesthetic appropriations transform, distort and reformulate the appropriated genres and beliefs. The novel proceeds, Bakhtin maintains in ‘Epic and Novel’, by incorporating, transforming and satirising the preceding aesthetic genres: ‘The novel gets on poorly with other genres. […] The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accentuating them.’ (5) In The Famished Road, the textual movement between the real and the remarkable, between the recognisable and the prodigious, charts certain aesthetic oscillations. The bizarre monsters in the supernatural world, the violation of anatomy in the depiction of spirits in the ‘real’ world of the text, the episodic and sequential nature of Azaro’s travels in the spirit realm and the restriction of the character’s agency in that world, recall West African folktales and the fictional universe of Amos Tutuola.13 Dad’s epic battles and journeys through the ambivalently registered fourth area of existence and the transformations generated for social benefit echo Soyinka’s theorising of the Yoruba rite of passage, in which the challenger contests the power of the deities and returns to rejuvenate his community (see Soyinka’s ‘The Fourth Stage’). Moreover, Okri’s deployment of West African aesthetic traditions, pre- and post-colonial, invests the realm of the extraordinary with the quality of fantastical adventure, an adventure that is foremost textual play.14 Fantastical adventure (and fantasy literature) is given free flight in Okri’s Astonishing the Gods, where the relationship to the referential world is minimal. Okri chooses another direction for the play of fantasy in Songs of Entchantment (the second book in The Famished Road trilogy) – the fable with its Manichean conflict and moral resolution. The precision and denotative quality of writing in the realist mode of The Famished Road gives way in Azaro’s and Dad’s journeys in the spirit realm to language which is emotionally charged, extremely lyrical and metaphoric: The sky was full of dense white clouds moving like invading armies of mist and ghost over the deep serene blue and under the regenerative stars. The ghost ships of centuries arrived endlessly on the shores. (457) The effect of the semantic construction is prosodic and rhythmic. The narrator, through metaphoric and metonymic registers, alludes to the

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history of slavery and colonialism. The passage resonates with images of invasion, conquest and suffering. Okri’s language in the fantastical episodes represents a departure from the folktale and its most modern purveyor, Tutuola. Whereas assertion of fact and details take precedence in the latter (see Armstrong, The Affecting Presence 156), Okri privileges language’s connotative potential. Description gives way to enactment. Azaro’s spiritual adventures are also adventures in the play of language itself. A further point of departure from Tutuola’s wondrous world is an implicit rationalisation of his selective aesthetic and religious appropriations. While Tutuola’s heroes cross over into the bush and are ontologically transformed by this movement outside the sphere of human society, Okri reverses the direction of the crossing-over and registers Azaro’s escapes into the world of the spirits as hallucinations, as dreams, as visions, as movements inwards. The narrator, the spirit-child, claims that he is ‘assailed by hallucinations’ (4). The process of interiorisation is integral to Okri’s privileging of what he thinks of as transformative consciousness. Reacting to the inordinate attention he believes that is paid to colonialism and its effects on the postcolonial condition, Okri claims: ‘I am much more interested in transforming consciousness, which goes beyond colonialism.’ (interview with Deandra 66) Okri’s hybrid mode is thus both close to and distanced from the folktales of Tutuola, the realism of Achebe (with his careful rationalisation of indigenous beliefs) and Soyinka’s mobilisation of Yoruba cosmology. The realist mode in the novel establishes a further distance from Achebe’s realism. Whereas Achebe focuses mainly on the ‘big men’, marginal figures, dispossessed individuals and peasants occupy the foreground of Okri’s tableau (as in much of Ngugi’s later works). Like the road of the title, the abiku functions in the latter half of the novel as allegorical topos.15 The abiku is an obstinate spirit who is born, only to die again, returning to the spirit world and causing great grief to his/her parents. ‘Our country is an abiku country,’ Ade says to Azaro. ‘Like the spirit-child, it keeps coming and going. One day it will decide to remain. It will become strong.’ (478) The cycle of birth, death and rebirth, of choosing not to live, Okri likens to Nigeria’s unreadiness and irresolution, its fear of ‘being’ (of existing in the present) that traps it into an eternal cycle of despair. Azaro rejects the liminal existence of the abiku and decides ‘to remain’: I was a spirit-child rebelling against the spirits, wanting to live the Earth’s life and contradictions. […] I want the liberty of limitations,

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to have to find or create new roads from this one which is so hungry, this road of our refusal to be. (487) In the first five books of the novel, the abiku condition provides Okri with a narratorial perspective and agent that is able to slip between the referential world of Mum and Dad with its reality of squalor and dispossession and the fantastical world of the spirits populated by the hero’s helpers and opponents. In Book 6, both realms converge and rupture the text. At the one point that Azaro consciously and deliberately crosses over into the spirit world (in the light of Okri’s strategy of interiorisation, plunges into himself), taking cognisance of his abiku condition, he decides ‘to remain’, and thus rejects his existential position. The convergence of the ‘real’ and hallucinated worlds is produced in the text by the seamless movement of actions from one realm to the other. Each realm reciprocally determines the significance of acts in the other realm: ‘The old woman struck the spirit at the same moment, with a mighty swipe of her weapon. Dad slashed the chicken’s throat. The old woman severed the spirit’s last head.’ (339) The locus of conjuncture of the two realms, which had been until this point in the narrative studiously kept apart, is also the locus of disjuncture. Azaro’s decision to remain, to refuse his ontological ambivalence, generates a structural shift, an aesthetic disavowal of his pre-eminence as narrative agent. Dad then becomes the primary focus of the novel and Okri displaces the gifts of visionary knowledge and wisdom, the boons of the abiku condition, onto another abiku child, Ade. Through the characterisation of Ade, the sacred nature of the abiku condition is brought into relief. The abiku child is blessed and holy through its prophetic prescience: ‘Our mouths utter obscure prophecies.’ (4) However, the child is also cursed, creating untold misery for his/her family who have to endure his/her death again and again. ‘There was something cruel about my friend’s spirit,’ Azaro says of Ade ‘and I understood why spirit-children are so feared.’ (485) Okri persistently draws attention to Azaro’s status as polluted being, as taboo object. The idyllic description of the abiku heaven at the beginning of the novel is subverted by the threat its inhabitants represent to Azaro, as they constantly try to tempt him back to their world, and to other human beings, as a result of the anguish that his death will bring. His abiku condition also means that he tends to attract the more malevolent elements of the traditional religious sphere; for example, he is kidnapped by witches who want to sacrifice him to a female deity (see 12–18) and in another episode Azaro is adopted by a

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policeman who uses witchcraft for nefarious purposes. The abiku child, as sacred being, partakes of simultaneous opposing conditions – s/he is holy and the accursed. The realm of the sacred is both celebrated by the novel as it generates fantastical adventure, an escape from the degraded mundane world and access to visionary knowledge, and disavowed because it is represents an escape from, and an indifference to, history. Fraught with danger and potentially housing death, the sacred also generates suffering for the living. The ambivalent relation the text establishes with the indigenous religious sphere, motivates, in part, my characterisation of Okri’s novel as a form of sacred realism. It seems to me to be more appropriate to Okri’s discursive and literary strategies than other generic specifications: animist realism (Quayson’s preferred term), poetic realism (Rooney’s argument) or spiritual realism (Appiah’s designation). Sacred realism brings into play not only the opposing forces of animism’s sense of continuity and harmony, and the sacred aspects of pollution, contamination and accursed states, but also Okri’s literary enjoyment and political disavowal of indigenous mythical and ritual tropes. Okri converts the abiku’s sacred ambivalence into a political critique of the Nigerian nation-state and thus casts the aesthetically enabling condition as socially and politically undesirable. The aesthetic project of writing a particular poetic point of view is superseded by the allegorical demands of the text. A paradox emerges. When Azaro decides to remain, to choose ‘the earth’s life and contradictions’ (487), when, through allegoresis, his decision metonymically recuperates the novel’s hope for the future of the postcolonial state, his primacy as narrative agent is abolished. Dad and his journeys, which incorporate an alternative aesthetic tradition, take over. Dad’s various forays into the spirit world, what Soyinka calls the ‘primal reality’, map a process of politicisation. After the devastating and monumental fights with spirits in the world of the living, Dad enters an almost comatosed state in which he battles with spirits in the spirit world. Like the hero-gods, he challenges the abyss of the spiritual realm to return renewed, communicating a new strength for action. This renewal is cast in distinctively political and historical terms. The structure of journey, ordeal, survival and social or individual purgation, places these episodes firmly within the ambit of the African tradition of the epic. Soyinka describes the epic as arising from the need of man to confront and attempt to initiate a rapport with the immovable immensity in which his being is located (Myth 2). This unknowable void needs to be breached periodically by a human challenger who journeys

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into this primal reality and returns triumphant with a moral code for that society. The primal reality is not a regression into a subconscious world of fantasy, but rather the ‘essentialisation of a rational worldview, one which is elicited from the reality of social and natural experience and from the integrated reality of racial myths, into a living reality’ (Soyinka, Myth 34). Although Okri’s novel draws from the structure, aesthetics and political strategy of the epic form, it mocks and establishes its distance from it. In the first fight with Yellow Jaguar, the boxing match is transformed into a struggle between titanic, elemental forces of nature: ‘He descended on Dad like a whirlwind, a mistral, a tornado.’ (356) In turn, Dad ‘was going back to simple things. He was going back to water, to the earth, to the road, to soft things.’ (357) The battle is registered in epic terms, as a prodigious event. When Dad arises from his comatosed state, after the second match with Green Leopard, his head is filled with ‘grand schemes’ (408). He wants to get involved in the burgeoning pre-independence politics of Nigeria. The violence and corruption that characterise the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor, and Dad’s lack of political education, makes this attempt futile. He only manages to get a group of beggars to follow him. Okri satirises the transformative process and social function of the epic. Not only does Okri point to the futility of Dad’s endeavours to provide for the poor or to become Head of State, but also ironises his self-assumed charismatic posture: ‘Today there will be a miracle!’ Dad announces to the crowds as he attempts to divide a chicken to feed the multitudes, echoing Christ’s division of the fishes and loaves. By satirising its claims and extending its boundaries outside the domain of official history, Okri mocks and transforms the epic’s form. Implicit in the satirical tenor of the deployment of the epic is the suggestion of the inability to link individual agency to the history of the nation. However, Dad’s final epic journey does rehearse what seems to be a genuine transformation in consciousness. Through visions and ‘cyclical dreams’, Dad re-dreams the world and sees the ‘real scheme of things’ (492–3). Although Okri satirises, mocks, transforms and establishes distance from the indigenous forms of cultural expression he draws on, he also deploys the foundational ideological function of the epic. Whereas his second transformative experience is directed both at the nation-state and to the world of poverty and dispossession, the final transformation (the telos of the process of transformational consciousness) prioritises both interiorisation and universalisation. The final escape into the ‘great realms and spaces’ results in Dad gaining understanding into the

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history of humanity and the need for justice in the world. He finally has insight into the universal human condition, and begins to locate freedom, not just within the confines of Nigeria and Africa, but as a universal imperative. After he resurfaces from this inner reality ‘his hands had healed, his spirits had sharpened, his despair was bigger, he was a bigger man with a bigger madness’ (497). The message with which the book closes reveals what he has learnt: ‘Our road must be open. A road that is open is never hungry. Strange times are coming.’ (497) Despite this sounding suspiciously like coming from a New Age manual, the transformative journey from the ‘hungry road’ to the ‘open road’ can only be achieved, Okri seems to suggest, through an openness and commitment to universal justice and freedom. Despite the linguistic exuberance that accompanies the escapes into the lyrical and imaginative realms through Azaro’s travels in the spirit world and Dad’s epic journeys, the centre of gravity of the text remains its realist discourse with its concomitant concerns. Thus, after Dad reveals his final transformation, Mum reminds him that during his visionary flights: ‘We have been hungry and full of fear.’ (500) The realism functions as a counterbalance to Azaro’s and Dad’s mystical flights.16 In the face of the socio-historical realities of poverty, alienation and instability, Okri, therefore, problematises the narratorial claim for the efficacy of the power of the imagination and its aesthetic escapes into the spirit realms. Mikhail Bakhtin distinguishes epic from novelistic strategies. The former tends to be foundational, serious and principally involved in naturalising official history and values. He attributes to the latter a parodying and travestying function directed at other genres (like the epic) and dominant values. Bakhtin locates the precursor of the novel in the Menippean satire. Similarly, the African folktale, which often uses the trickster figure, transgresses boundaries, often between the spirit and human worlds, and satirises other genres. The Drinkard in Tutuola’s famous tale believes himself to be the ‘Father of the Gods’ when he crosses over into the realm of the spirits. As his quest is determined by self-interest and greed, Tutuola’s folktale stages its own distance from the epic by satirising its claims. From a Bakhtinian perspective, the precursor of the African novel would be the folktale rather than the epic. Yet African literature in the 1960s and 1970s often had a foundational aim: not the affirmation of official rhetoric and dominant ideology but, as Chanady points out, in a different context, an emphasis on ‘cultural specificity and difference, identity construction and selfaffirmation in the context of neo-colonialism’ (‘Territorialsiation’ 137).

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Through Azaro’s travels in the spirit world and Dad’s epic quests, Okri is able to incorporate and transform indigenous aesthetic practices and their social functions. Not only does The Famished Road therefore represent a departure from the epic and mythopoeic works of Wole Soyinka and Amos Tutuola, but its take on the national question also signals a movement away from the fiction of Soyinka, Achebe and Ngugi. Achebe and Soyinka tend to be both nationalist and continentalist in their political visions, and Ngugi looks to the mobilisation of the masses in developing a national culture/identity. Okri’s commitment to the nationalist project seems to locate the recuperation of the national within a universalist movement. In A Way of Being Free, Okri sees the need ‘to create the beginnings of the first truly universal civilisation in the history of recorded and unrecorded time’ (133).

Sacred time Although many commentators on the novel have pointed to Okri’s use of various temporalities in The Famished Road, his juxtaposition of sacred time, personal time and public social time has not received a sustained analysis. Mircea Eliade, in Cosmos and History, opposes religious and non-religious time perceptions. The former is heterogenous; it oscillates between sacred (cyclical) time and profane (linear) time. Sacred time, Eliade contends, can be accessed through myth and ritual. Non-religious time tends to be homogenous, linear and irreversible. In the social sciences, and especially in early anthropology, geometric temporal metaphors came to be associated with particular types of societies. The opposition between cyclical and linear time coincided with the distinction between traditional religious society of the colonised world and the West’s modern secularism, where the cyclical was also designated as timeless. These temporal distinctions determined the tenor of colonial discourse. The East, in relation to European modernity, came to signify timelessness (being constant and unchanging), while Africa came to represent ‘time-lessness’ (being without time). Elleke Boehmer points out that in favouring scribal over oral cultures, Europe’s colonial officers cast Africa, the ‘New’ Empire, as a continent ‘entirely without time before the coming of the Europeans. It was a terra nullius lacking all traces of history.’ (195).17 The precedent had long been established by Hegel. The discursive opposition of linear rational time of modern Europe and the cyclical, hence timeless, time of the colonised sought to contain Africa within the imperial and colonial discourses that made its subordination to the West logical, necessary

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and ultimately beneficial to its subjects. By casting Africa as primitive, irrational and without time, Europe was able to dialectically register itself as humanity’s supreme model. Colonialism thus presented itself as a historicising project, of giving time and history to Africa. Since Durkheim’s denaturalisation of time through the claim of its social nature, various anthropologists have attempted to specify the significance of temporal heterogeneity among traditional peoples. In his experiential model, Edmund Leach argues that there are two contradictory ‘basic experiences’ of time: the non-repetitive and the repetitive (125–7). Death and the understanding of finitude cast time as irreversible and thus non-repetitive. Certain alternating natural phenomena generate experiences of repetition.18 Religion mediates between the two experiences, Leach argues, and converts non-repetitive time (the inevitability of death) into repetitive time. Through religion we live beyond our earthly finitude. Linear time is the reality of temporal irreversibility, while repeating time arises out of religious mediation. Maurice Bloch presents us with a cognitive model of temporal differentiation. Contesting Clifford Geertz’s supposed cultural relativism, he argues that there are only two possible means to apprehend time: the linear and the cyclical; what he calls ‘cognitive universals’, which correspond to the Kantian categories (see Bloch, Ritual 285). Bloch calls the cyclical form of time ritual time and attributes to it an ideological function – the traditional legitimisation of the ruling group’s hegemony.19 Bloch’s ritual time seems to me less cyclical and more a time suspended, where past, present and future are identical and where nothing ever changes. Linear time, by contrast, is mundane and profane and indicates people operating in history as historical subjects. Sacred time is opposed to linear history. Similarly, a distinction between the ritual suspension of time, in which the past and present are both conjoined and disjoined to produce an experience of totality, and historical mundane time, informs Lévi-Strauss’s logical model (see The Savage Mind 236). Myth, in much the same way as Leach’s religion, ‘overcomes the contradiction between historical, enacted time and a permanent constant’ (Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked 16). In traditional societies, myth thus mediates between diachrony and synchrony. In the above formulations, cyclical time functions as a non-time, as a suspension or destruction of the ‘true’ nature of time; that is, its linear, non-iterative and irreversible nature. Cyclical time is identified, as with Bloch, with the realm of ideology, as a mystification (religion, myth etc.) that is ineluctably irrational in relation to the rationality and reality of mundane history.

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In A Moment’s Notice, Carol Greenhouse argues that far from representing an opposition to the religiosity of cyclical time, linear time itself emerged as a religious construct. The expansion of Christianity into Europe brought with it two fundamental Middle Eastern ideas of time: the origin of time in creation and the end of time in the apocalypse. ‘The linearity of time derives from the geometric connection between these two end points’ (Greenhouse 20). The linear perspective on time came to dominate other conceptions of time during the Middle Ages for religious and economic reasons. The Church and monarchs popularised linear time, as they saw, in the implication of progression in time’s linearity, their own progressive aggrandisement (see Greenhouse 23). In terms of economic forces, Barbara Adam shows how at the height of the Middle Ages a ‘goal-oriented, teleological awareness arises’ with the development of world trade, which provided the foundation for mercantile time (138). The future was ‘colonised’ and commodified into an object of exchange and control (Adam 139). However, in medieval Christian discourse, Greenhouse points out, the linearity of time also marked the world with incompleteness and contingency in relation to the transcendence and completeness of God’s time. Profane linearity was opposed to sacred timelessness. The reader will not have failed to notice that the anthropological models of time (secular and scientific) discussed rehearse the fundamental opposition set up by the Church: profane history versus sacred time. What passes as cyclical time in the models is for the most part a non-geometric conceptualisation of time: the timeless or, as Greenhouse puts it, ‘shapeless time’ (86). Trapped, as they seem to be, within the terms set up by Christian doctrine, Leach, Bloch and Lévi-Strauss do not provide, for me at least, useful models to engage both the cyclical reality of the sacred dimension of Okri’s text and the cyclical dimension of narrative. The mbari and riika conflict among the Gikuyu of Kenya reveals cyclical and linear conceptions of history embedded in social organisation and integral to mechanisms of social change. The conflict generated through the oppositions of these forms proves to be the motor of historical change in Gikuyu society (see Lonsdale 270). One notes an African conception of time that does not oppose the timeless and static to the temporal and dynamic, but rather locates dynamic temporality in both the cyclical and linear forms of history. Barbara Adam foregrounds another important distinction between Western religious conceptions of time and African conceptualisations: whereas in the Christian context the suspension of time is the prerogative of God alone, in African traditional society time can be ‘suspended’ through human practices, through sacrificial rituals and

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rites of passage (136). Therefore as human agency is privileged in both forms of history, these forms may produce different political strategies and instantiate different values. The pre-eminence of the mythical dimension and its concomitant cyclical reality in The Famished Road has led Brenda Cooper to reject its political impetus as ultimately conservative. She claims that in the novel ‘history and politics are governed by a universal and repetitive cycle of greed’, in which mythical recurrence presents a vision of the impossibility of real change (91). Okri’s promulgation of a sacred rewriting and overwriting of history, conceived through its chronological linearity and its relation to the ‘real’ historical event, results in, Cooper argues, ‘the novel contradicting itself in its simultaneous representation of a journey as both a futile return in circles and also a road to a new destination’ (99). These remarks are based, I believe, on certain (commonly held) false assumptions of myth and ritual, and their relation to historical reality: that myth and ritual are ahistorical and timeless (e.g. see Cezair-Thompson 35), and that their cyclical nature prevents the negotiation of change.20 Cooper’s critique of Okri also relies on the assumption that the circularity, recurrence and repetition that define myth and ritual, as opposed to the linear emplotment of history, preclude change. There is an overwhelming sense of cyclical recurrence in The Famished Road that abolishes a plot movement that is linear or chronological. ‘Outside’, Okri writes, ‘the winds of recurrence blew gently over the earth’ (71). The writer draws attention to the repetition of numerous actions (washing, drinking etc.) and episodes (the transition at parties in Azaro’s house from celebration to chaos). Madame Koto’s exchange with Azaro makes apparent a reality that relies on cyclical transformations, which structure and restructure it. Madame Koto begins by chastising Azaro: If you misbehave the same thing will happen to you. What? The forest will swallow you. Then I will become a tree. Then they will cut you down because of the road. Then I will turn into the road. Cars will ride on you, cows will shit on you, people will perform sacrifices on your face. And I will cry at night. And then people will remember the forest. (219)

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The exchange charts a series of transformations, a linear succession of events: the forest swallowing Azaro, Azaro becoming a tree, the tree being cut down, and so on. In terms of Benveniste’s grammar of narrative modes, the successive transformations function at the level of histoire. Azaro’s final statement recalls the initial transformation, thus allowing the beginning to be read into the end. The exchange between Azaro and Madame Koto metonymically replicates the temporal dialectic of the text and the linear and cyclical histories promulgated by the narrative. Paul Ricoeur suggests that the textual process of eliciting configuration from succession (the generation of a pattern from the episodic succession of events) produces the temporal dialectic of narrative (‘Narrative Time’ 174). In opposition to the structuralist project of deriving the non-chronological (the logical) from the chronological, Ricoeur offers repetition and reversal as alternatives, thus recuperating the geometric forms of the text’s temporality (the linear and the cyclical). However, the return (and reversal) in the above exchange is not a return to the point of origin. The people do not remember Azaro but the forest. The text which has consistently drawn attention to the encroachment on the forest (symbolically registered as a cipher for the indigenous religious sphere and the sphere of the supernatural) by roads and progress, demands that the ‘return’ privileges the forest through the force of signification. The repetition of the origin, Ricoeur maintains, ‘has to be superseded by an act of rupture’ (‘Narrative Time’ 181). Azaro’s figurative transformations thus chart a process of repetition and reversal, a cyclical return to an origin of a different order, a return that incorporates change. It is through another allegorical topos derived from West African cultural practice that Okri makes manifest cyclical and linear conceptions of history. Okri warns us that his road is not the mythopoeic road of Soyinka. ‘My road is quite different. My road is a way. It’s a road that is meant to take you from one place to another, on a journey towards a destination’ (interview with Wilkinson 83). It’s a cyclical ‘journey’ that involves movement and change. Okri presents us with a ‘sacred realism’ in which history ‘progresses’ through different cycles. One of the principle sites of the text is Madame Koto’s bar. Situated at the edge of the forest it acts as a gateway for the spirits. The forest (or bush) in Yoruba oral tradition is the place where spirits, ghosts and monsters reside, and ‘which only the most powerful hunters and heroes can survive’ (Andrew Apter 175). But it also opens up onto the road that will bring ‘progress’ (electricity and cars), and the corrupt new politicians. In the many descriptions of events at Madame Koto’s bar,

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a night of revelry ends in total chaos as her clients smash up her bar. The bar seems trapped in an endless destructive cycle. Yet the bar and Madame Koto change: the spirit clients are replaced by ordinary people who in turn are cast out in favour of the new politicians and their henchmen; the rural bar is modernised into a brothel with electricity, which serves beer instead of palm wine; and Madame Koto, who is initially seen as not much different from the ordinary people, becomes excessively wealthy through her patronage of the ‘Party of the Rich’. Driven by insatiable greed, Madame Koto comes to represent the new face of postcolonial politics, which is to be determined by the demands of capitalist expansion. This movement and change is imbricated within the time of myth – different cycles following each other, the succeeding cycle incorporating and superseding the one that has come before it. At the bar Azaro realises that they ‘were in the divide between past and future. A new cycle had begun.’ (220) This is a cycle in which ‘new forces were being born to match the demands of the age’ (496). It suggests a non-teleological theory of change, of repetition with variation and a sacred reality that accommodates change and diversity, progressing as it moves from one cycle to another. In fact, The Famished Road’s central image, the famished road, carries an implicit warning against endless recurrence, politically and philosophically. The famished road is the mythical road of Ogun. Dad, whose father was the ‘Priest of the God of the Road’, relates the story of the King of the Road to Azaro. It draws on the Yoruba myth of Ogun, in which, due to his insatiable greed, the King of the Road, after having eaten almost everything, turns on and devours himself. As ingestion is a form of identification in psychoanalytical terms, self-ingestion is the pure form of narcissism, to be transfixed wholly by the image of oneself. Soyinka describes Ogun as ‘The Lord of the Roads’, and as wearing a tail-devouring snake around his neck to ‘symbolise the doom of repetition’ (Myth 88). Therefore, Okri’s use of the Yoruba myth registers a critique of Soyinka’s celebration of the Yoruba god by relating it to a critique of repetitive postcolonial Nigerian violence. To move beyond the cycle of violence, typically extrapolating the historical into the mythico-universal, Okri seems to suggest that the hungry road, which is fed by blood and violence, needs to be replaced with an ‘open road’, the mythical road of knowledge and wisdom, one that looks outward to universal justice. This road of knowledge and life is just one of the many roads in Okri’s novel. On his journey to the spirit world, Azaro comes across strange

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beings building a road. His multiple-headed spirit guide, who is tempting him back to the spirit world, informs him that these creatures have been building the road for two thousand years and they will never finish. The road ‘was a work of art, a shrine almost, beautiful beyond description’ (329). Azaro’s guide informs him that ‘the road is their soul, the soul of their history’ (329). This is the mythical road of Western progress. The road is also inscribed within a critique of colonialism and certain aspects of modernity that the road is supposed to bring. To make way for progress, the dwelling of the spirits is destroyed: ‘bushes were burnt, tall grasses cleared, tree stumps uprooted’ (137). But the spirits attack, unleashing a storm that reduces the road of modern progress to ‘what it used to be, a stream of primeval mud, a river’ (286). The cyclical return to mud thwarts Western linearity. Cooper, in pointing to the different roads in The Famished Road, argues that it is an attempt by the author to deal with very different issues: the African past, colonialism etc. I suggest, rather, that Okri’s inscription of the political and historical within the sacred, or as the sacred, is an attempt to convey the complexity of the functioning of myth, ritual and traditional aesthetic practices in African society. The multiple registers in the signification of the elaboration of the symbol of the road point not to a conflicted society, but a worldview that embraces and negotiates contradiction. Okri’s evocation of historical material in The Famished Road is tangential. The familial triad does not seem to have any strong kinship ties. Lineage, one of the fundamental aspects of identity constitution and historical location in African traditional society, is dissolved in the depiction of Azaro’s family. Okri also does not refer to any major historical incidents in the novel except Independence, the cominginto-being of the Nigerian nation-state, which functions as the implied telos of the narrative. He seems to be more concerned with exploring both the semiotic potential of the text and the aesthetic possibilities of traditional conceptualisations of cyclical and linear time. We have seen however that ritual and myth can be deeply historical and often represent a society’s means of negotiating change and transformation. The sacred dimension does not detract from historical concerns. Rather, by incorporating them within magico-mythical spaces within the geometry of linear and cyclical time, Ben Okri, in The Famished Road, generates non-teleological approaches to history and narrative. In establishing an ambivalent relation to the supernatural realm, in his commitment to some of the protocols of realism, and in his emphasis on local context, he writes a sacred realism.

5 The Stalled Sublime: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe

From the sacred to the sublime By way of introducing the discussion of the sublime, let me recall and elaborate Rudolf Otto’s version of the sacred, what he calls the ‘idea of the Holy’. The theory of the ambivalence of the sacred, initiated in late nineteenth-century British anthropology, was developed through early twentieth-century French sociology. The ethnographic approach established in these two disciplines proved invaluable to my discussion of the texts in the preceding chapters. However, as ethnography is not a relevant factor in Coetzee’s writings, I look to a ‘philosophical’ treatment of the subject in Otto’s 1917 book. The idea of the holy is somewhat of a misnomer for his subject as he makes clear that the holy only becomes holy when charged with ethical content. According to him, this happens only in the more developed religions when the holy attracts and appropriates meanings derived from ‘social and individual ideals of obligation, justice and goodness’ (114). The large part of his book is more concerned with exploring what he calls the mysterium tremendum (or the numinous), and its coupling with the mysterium fascinosum that produces a ‘strange harmony of contrasts’, which rehearses the phenomenon of sacred ambivalence, as evoking horror and fascination, awe and reverence. For Otto, the original religious experience involves humans’ engagement with an impersonal realm (the numen) that has no necessary connection to morality. His characterisation of the numinous bears striking resemblance to Soyinka’s theorising of the ‘fourth stage’ in Yoruba metaphysics.1 The numinous is a terrifying esoteric realm that is beyond conception or understanding. It is replete with an awesome power, which, like the wrath of Yahweh, incalculable and arbitrary, operates like a ‘hidden 137

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force of nature’ (18). The mysterium tremendum is non-personalised and non-personalising (an aspect of the sacred discussed in Chapter 2), as no personal relationship with a transcendental being is possible – all delusions of selfhood are rejected (see Otto 21). As with Soyinka’s ritual challenger, horror at the ‘daemonic divine object’ attends the impulse to make it somehow his/her own, to contest its dominion over him/her (Otto 31). Also, Otto’s argument that animism succeeds the experience of the numinous, that it represents an ‘early’ mode of rationalising a ‘precedent experience’, mirrors Soyinka’s idea that tragedy, in its echoing of the contestation of the terrifying impersonal ‘fourth stage’, precedes the epic (Otto 27; and see Soyinka, Myth 30) .2 Otto’s theorising of the numinous, which is more or less identical to the sacred, also bears a striking resemblance to an aesthetic category that gained much literary and theoretical currency in the eighteenth century – the category of the sublime. He points out that there are two fundamental similarities between the category of the sublime and his idea of the numinous. Firstly, both are ideas or concepts that ‘cannot be “unfolded” or explicated (unauswickelbar)’ (42). Secondly, the sublime exhibits the same peculiar dual character as the numinous – at once ‘daunting and singularly attracting’, it humbles and exalts, limits and extends us (43).3 Otto argues further that the sublime and the sacred tend to pass over into each other (43). In fact, the German philosopher regards Kant’s version of the sublime as not merely a secular analogy of the ‘non-rational’ mystery behind religious experience but a ‘pale reflection’ of the true experience of the numinous (42).4 In terms of structure, content and process, however, Otto characterises the aesthetic category of the sublime as almost identical to the numinous. Of the sublime, Thomas Weiskel suggests that it emerges in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when ‘God withdraws from an immediate participation in the experience of men’ (3). The Romantic sublime, for him, represents an attempt to modify the experience of transcendence when traditional versions of sublimity were somehow felt as inadequate to the scientific spirit of the age. It involved a ‘massive transposition of transcendence into a naturalistic key’ (Weiskel 4). In the secularised and reified world of modern capitalism, Fredric Jameson argues, ‘epiphany is not possible as a positive event, as the revelation of presence’ (The Political 135). We are thrown into a world that is ‘forever suspended on the brink of meaning, forever disposed to receive a revelation of evil or of grace that never comes’ (The Political 134–5). The aesthetic of the sublime can, also, be differentiated from the literary mode explored in the previous chapter. Weiskel notes: ‘The sublime takes us to the frontier of

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the “invisible world” but leaves us as soon as the world is consciously represented or given any positive content’ (43). An aesthetic of the sublime operates on the border of literary realism and magic/sacred realism. The elements of the sacred explored in the previous chapters emphasised their liminal qualities. The Latin roots of the word ‘sublime’ also mark the distance between the sacred liminality and the limits of the sublime. Sublime conjoins sub (‘up to’ or ‘so as to reach from below’) and limen (‘threshold’ or ‘lintel’) to gives us sublīmis (‘up to the threshold or lintel’) (OED online). Thus, the sublime also operates on the border of liminality – it remains at the limit. ‘Then there is the matter of Friday’s tongue’ (Foe 67) Much has been made of the mutilated and silenced black slave at the heart of J. M. Coetzee’s Foe. Analyses of Coetzee’s depiction of Friday, a puzzling site of hermeneutic recuperation, are put at the service of opposing approaches to the South African writer’s figuring of alterity in his novels. Recent postmodern and postcolonial readings emphasise both a reticence on the part of the author to speak on behalf of the oppressed: they make a specific claim about political representation – a refusal on the part of the white writer to script the dominated black voice – and by representing as heterogeneous the language-games of the oppressor and the oppressed, they claim that the writer invests the scripted silence with power, thus casting the figure of the slave as embodying a form of anti-colonial resistance.5 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s article ‘Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe/Roxana’ has proved influential in relation to poststructuralist and postcolonial readings of Coetzee’s Foe. Not only does Spivak argue that the novel stages the impossibility of an overdetermined political project as it casts as oppositional the political programmes of feminism and postcolonialism, she also locates the representation of Friday in the novel in (and as) the ‘strange margins’ – an agent, rather than a victim, that resists the metropolitan’s attempt to voice his claims and desires (172). He is, according to Spivak, ‘the curious guardian at the margin’, ‘the unemphatic agent of withholding’ (172). An effective rejoinder to Spivak’s argument is voiced by the protagonist of Coetzee’s novel. Susan Barton, the would-be writer in the novel, is also an astute critic of her (and Coetzee’s) text, and her various attempts to analyse her story both anticipate the critical responses to the novel and often subsume their arguments. In the third part of the

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novel, which consists, in most part, of a series of theoretical arguments between Susan Barton and Daniel Foe, Barton carefully distinguishes between her silence and Friday’s. She argues that whereas her silence is ‘chosen and purposeful: it is my own silence’, Friday’s silence (an imposed silence, an authorial and colonial imposition), is a ‘helpless silence’ (122). ‘No matter what he is to himself,’ Barton passionately proclaims, ‘what he is to the world is what I make of him.’ (122) Rather than identifying the muted slave’s disarticulation with power, agency or resistance, Barton suggests that his silence is no guarantee against assimilation to the dominant discourse, the dominator’s discourse. In fact, it is precisely his silence which facilitates a co-option into any number of critical paradigms – be they modernist, postmodernist, postcolonialist, Marxist, feminist or otherwise. Barton further agues that it is her silence that is invested with power – a power that lies in the ability ‘to withhold’ (123). Through her deliberate silence about her daughter, Barton, rather than Friday, functions as the agent of withholding in the novel. More Marxist-minded approaches, however, contest the positive tenor of the above readings. Benita Parry’s particularly incisive article ‘Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J. M. Coetzee’ is exemplary in this regard. Parry argues that the silencing of the dominated in Coetzee’s texts repeats the exclusionary gestures of colonial discourse – his texts rehearse the failures the writer himself has ascribed to ‘white writing’ in South Africa.6 As they remain unknowable and radically other, these figures are not given a space from which to contest their constitution by the narrative voice, which is almost always European (or white) and very often female, making it impossible for them to disturb the dominant discourse (152).7 Barton’s ‘hermeneutics’ may once again prove useful. She seems to be acutely aware that her texts (the memoir/letter in Part 1, the letters to Foe in Part 2 and the first-person narrative of Part 3) return repetitively to the site of their silence, to the sign of their blindness – Friday’s tonguelessness – a void at the heart of her narrative, which destabilises her quest for control (of the self and the text). Friday’s mutedness disturbs and interrupts the oppressor’s voice, casting its projects, in relation to the historical other, as irredeemably incomplete and as always-already unresolved. ‘To tell my story,’ Barton writes to Foe, ‘and be silent on Friday’s tongue is no better than offering a book for sale with pages in it quietly left empty. Yet the only tongue that can tell Friday’s secret is the tongue he has lost.’ (67)! More significantly for my purposes, Parry also suggests that the multiple scoring of silence in Coetzee’s novels has less to do with articulating


the disarticulation of the relation between oppressor and oppressed but rather signals the ‘fictions’ urge to cast off worldly attachments, even as the world is signified and estranged’ (153). Thus for Parry speechlessness in Coetzee’s texts becomes identified with the ineffable, signifying what cannot be spoken, and the figure of the oppressed, as arbiter of this portentous silence, is given access to a numinous condition (154). In terms of Foe, she argues that ‘the outflow of sounds from the mouth of Friday gives tongue to meanings? desires? which precede or surpass those that can be communicated and interpreted in formal language’ (154). Other critics have also detected a desire in Coetzee’s texts to escape the quotidian, a drive toward sublimity, toward transcendence. Kwaku Larbi Korang perceives in Susan’s relation to Friday and in the final dream-like epilogue a ‘straining towards an impossible beyond’ (190). In relation to Coetzee’s earlier novels, Stephen Watson notes a ‘desire to preserve the contemplative, mythmaking, sacralising impulse at the heart of modernism’ (34) – an Eliot-like recourse to myth as a disavowal of history. However, it is Graham Pechey who has clearly identified Coetzee’s poetics with the category of the sublime. In ‘The Postapartheid Sublime: Rediscovering the Extraordinary’, Pechey heeds and qualifies Njabulo Ndebele’s call for the rediscovery of the ordinary through the analysis of a relatively recent literary phenomenon, ‘the postapartheid sublime’, which would, according to Pechey, transform the victory over apartheid into a ‘gain for postmodern knowledge, a new symbiosis of the sacred and the profane, the quotidian and numinous’ (58). As Pechey does not refer to any other novels except Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg that might fit into this category, I feel that his ‘postapartheid sublime’ operates more as a prescriptive rather than descriptive analytical tool. His language is Christian. Words like ‘temptation’, ‘false gods’, ‘latter-day prophets’, and ‘grace’ gird a Romantic view of literature which regards the novel (and art in general) as a conduit between the everyday and the sacred. As Pechey sees Coetzee’s deployment of the sublime in The Master of Petersburg as being identical with his earlier novels written during apartheid, I am unsure as to what is particularly postapartheid about the postapartheid sublime.8 However, Pechey’s observation of the significance of the category of the sublime for an understanding of Coetzee’s aesthetics and politics is incisive. The sublime, as we shall see, allows for a reading that extends and subsumes the Spivak/Attridge and Parry camps – it offers an alternative view of silence in Foe, a silence that commands, obliges and dispossesses yet also suggests the numinous realm and its plenitude of Being, a silence that is powerful yet also ineffable.

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Like Pechey, I suggest the centrality of both the sublime phenomenon and the ambivalent experiences it produces for an understanding of the narrative strategies and textual processes of Foe, but depart from Pechey’s postmodernism and Parry’s Marxist position to argue that Coetzee’s fiction deploys the sublime only to disavow it. Coetzee refuses the moment of rational and psychological triumph which succeeds the moment of defeat and failure in the Kantian version of the sublime experience. Key to understanding Foe is the idea of what I term the stalled sublime – a post-Kantian, post-Romantic rupture and stalling of the sublime movement. This suspension prevents the intervention of the transcendent. The refusal to resolve the breakdown of discourse/meaning means that Coetzee’s novels rest uneasily on the moment of defeat. There is no intervention of grace, no resolution of the breakdown in meaning. Terror does not transform into tranquil superiority. In his texts we are confronted not with a failed dialectic (the disarticulation between self and other) but rather with a failed epiphany.9 The principal subjective dimension of the stalled sublime is alienation – the metaphysical homelessness of the modern subject and the solitary individual estranged from history are its correlatives. In In the Heart of the Country, Magda agonises that: ‘there is no act I know of that will liberate me into the world. There is no act I know of that will bring the world into me.’ (10) The medical officer writes of Michael K as a ‘soul untouched by history’ (207). Susan Barton, in a flash of acute self-awareness, conjoins her eternal homelessness and her desire for redemption: ‘When I was on the island I longed only to be elsewhere, or, in the words I then used, to be saved.’ (Foe 51)

Coetzee on the sublime Two years after Foe was published, a discussion of the sublime appears in Coetzee’s theoretical writings in the central chapter of White Writing. In ‘The Picturesque, the Sublime, and the South African Landscape’, Coetzee raises the question of the absence of the aesthetic category of the sublime in nineteenth-century South African poetry. He notes a variety of meanings read into the landscape of the colonial hinterland; for example, a naturalisation of the relationship between volk and land in Afrikaans patriotic poetry, a confrontation with vast, empty spaces yielding a sense of vacuity as in Roy Campbell’s poetry, or as exemplary of human separation from a transcendental destiny through their mortality (C. M. van den Heever). However, Coetzee argues: ‘a certain way of feeling about the landscape in which awe weighs heavily did not


flourish’ (White Writing 55). More specifically, he attempts to understand why the reclamation of the vast spaces through the category of the sublime does not occur at a time when it had not exhausted its potency in Europe (see White Writing 46). One of the principal reasons for this significant absence is, he believes, an historical insecurity which confronts writers of European heritage in relating to the African landscape: the vastness and emptiness of the ‘alien’ landscape block its interpretation or reclamation through the sublime; its translation into the language of the settlers (White Writing 59–60). Unable to read the landscape, the ‘white’ writer is faced with an interpretative block. The failure of comprehension in the face of what is perceived as the absolutely unknowable mirrors many of Coetzee’s characters’ relation to their historical others. The doctor in Life & Times of Michael K, the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians and Susan Barton in Foe seem to be haunted by their historical others. They obsessively attempt to ‘read’ them, to construct narratives around them, to invest them with meaning. Similarly, the Magistrate, the interpreter of the law, cannot read the body of the other and yet he regards the act of decoding it as the means to an escape from alienation, as salvation itself. Beneath the skin of the ‘barbarian’ woman, the Magistrate senses a form of writing, a text that needs to be deciphered if he is to redeem himself: ‘It has been growing more and more clear to me that until the marks on the girl’s body are deciphered and understood I cannot let go of her.’ (31) At the end of Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate acknowledges his failure to interpret the opaque signs that the ‘barbarian’ woman’s body seems to offer: ‘There has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it.’ (149) Barton tells Foe, in the third part of the novel, that of ‘the true story of that year’ on the island ‘I remain as ignorant as a new-born babe. That is why I cannot rest.’ (126) Coetzee’s understanding of the sublime and his analysis of South African poetry of the nineteenth century is heavily indebted to Thomas Weiskel’s semiotic and psychoanalytical model of the sublime, which is itself derived from a specific reading of Kant’s theory. Weiskel extends Jakobson’s analysis of disorders in discourse (aphasias) that generate metaphor and metonym to suggest that the sublime moment originates when ‘conventional readings of landscape and text break down and in that collapse another order of meaning is generated’ (22). Drawing from the Kantian formulation of the sublime, Weiskel identifies, heuristically, three phases of the ‘mental movement’ involved in the sublime encounter (xx). A phase in which the relationship between mind and object breaks down, or in which the reader is confronted with a text

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that exceeds comprehension by having too many signifiers or signifieds (what he calls an ‘epiphany of absolute limitation’ (44)) is preceded by a phase in which mind and object, signifier and signified, are in a determinate relationship and succeeded by the recovery of balance between inner and outer through the intervention of the transcendent. For Kant, the transcendent reveals a ‘supersensible substrate of nature’ (Critique 109). The third phase allows us to glimpse at and become aware of our destiny as moral beings. Thus the possibility of meaning is rescued (see Weiskel 23–8). The sublime moment (the second phase for Weiskel, the first for Coetzee) is dichotomous. The metaphoric sublime generates a disruption on the plane of the signifier – too many signifiers lead to underdetermination as they overwhelm the possibility of meaning. The wasteland is its dominant literary motive. The metonymic sublime refers to an excess of the signified in which meaning is overwhelmed by overdetermination. As the metonymic sublime relates to the vertical plane, the abyss, which is a variant thereof, represents the dominant image. Each mode, Weiskel further argues, has a distinct strategy of resolution: the hermeneutic or the poet’s sublime (27).10 During her stay on the island, Barton is confronted by two forms of interpretative blocks, which rehearse Weiskel’s dichotomy. Coetzee articulates the modal dichotomy of the sublime moment along semic lines. When Barton tries to find out about Cruso’s past from him she writes that ‘the stories he told me were so various, and so hard to reconcile one with another’ that she is unable to recount his ‘history’ because he offers too many alternatives (Foe 11). As in the metaphoric sublime, there are far too many signifiers for any sort of meaning to be fixed. She believes that ‘he no longer knew for sure what was truth, what fancy’ (12). Coetzee registers Cruso’s association with the metaphoric sublime through his identification with the island. Barton often refers to the island as ‘Cruso’s island’ (71). The island, as Barton points out, is more a wilderness, a wasteland, than a ‘desert isle’: it is ‘a great rocky hill with a flat top […] dotted with drab bushes that never flowered and never shed their leaves’ (7). It is surrounded by seaweed, which gives off a ‘noisome stench’ and supports a ‘swarm of fleas’ (7). In his essay on the picturesque and the sublime, Coetzee distinguishes between two opposing notions of the ‘wilderness’ in Judeo-Christian tradition and theology (see ‘The Picturesque’ 49–50). On the one hand, it referred to a realm that was sundered from God, a realm where the law of nature reigns. He loosely ascribes this particular meaning to the relation between British colonialism and the South African land – the ‘effort to maintain a border separating a region of order and culture – the


Colony – from the barbarian wilderness’ (49–50). Cruso’s hut, which he calls his ‘castle’, and the fenced-off habitat register his desire to separate himself from the wilderness surrounding him and his nominalisation of the hut registers his monarchical pretensions (Foe 9). He warns Barton ‘not to venture from his castle’ (Foe 15). Coetzee links the other meaning of wilderness to Afrikaner isolationism. The wilderness, instead of signifying the absence of god, becomes a place of contemplation and purification, ‘a place where the true ground of one’s being could be rediscovered’ (‘The Picturesque’ 49). Every evening Cruso stands on the bluff staring out to sea. The castaway thinks he is looking out for a ship but she admits that she is mistaken. His visits to the Bluff belonged to a practice of ‘losing himself in the contemplation of the wastes of water and sky’ (Foe 38). In this pose he is the quintessential figure of Romanticism that contemplates the sublime expanses of nature. By having Cruso ‘embody’ both meanings of the wilderness, Coetzee is able to subtly rehearse the history of South African colonialism and also ally Cruso to the metaphoric sublime through his association both with the underdetermination of meaning (the excess of signifiers) and the ‘wasteland’ of the island. With Friday, Barton encounters an interpretive block that is the opposite of the one generated by Cruso. Friday’s silence, for Barton, is a text that exceeds comprehension as there are too many signifieds. He is whatever she makes of him. His disarticulation, as we have seen in the critical approaches to the text, seems to ‘contain so much that there is nothing we cannot read into it’ (Weiskel 26). As an example of Weiskel’s metonymic sublime, the silence of the slave ruptures Barton’s discourse, casting it as irrevocably incomplete – the pages left blank in her book. Coetzee’s identification of the wasteland motif of the South Africa hinterland (51), the significance of verticality to the European sublime (52, Weiskel 24), and the identification of the sublime with imperialism (53, Weiskel 6) in the above-mentioned chapter in White Writing suggest a reliance on Weiskel’s arguments, which Coetzee duly acknowledges. However, Coetzee’s gloss of Kant’s argument with regard to the sublime also reveals a reliance on Weiskel and it is this appropriation that proves, I believe, most problematic for Coetzee’s argument. Coetzee reads Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ in Critique of Judgment as specifying a first moment in which the ‘[natural] spectacle exceeds all measure’, creating a mixture of astonishment and anxiety in the subject (‘The Picturesque’ 54). Coetzee’s summary erases the Kantian distinction between the mathematical and dynamical sublimes. In the former Kant charts the encounter of the mind with ideas that are conceptually

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understood although ultimately unpresentable – like the ideas of infinity or eternity. Although Reason demands the idea of the object as a whole, the imagination fails to make these ideas presentable and in its ‘fruitless efforts to extend this limit, recoils upon itself, but in so doing succumbs to an emotional delight’ (Critique 114). As the primary significance of the sublime, for Kant, is always moral, he suggests that the operations of the mathematical sublime are evidence of a ‘supersensible’ faculty within us – a faculty that transcends nature (Critique 109). Or, as Coetzee puts it, recognition ‘that there exists within us a standard which the imagination, as a faculty based on our senses, has failed to measure up to, namely, the idea of the transcendent’ (White Writing 54). The dynamical sublime is generated by the subject’s encounter with the absolute might of natural phenomena, where the subject’s relative powerlessness induces both terror (at its powerlessness) and delight in transcendence over fear by imagining possibilities of moral conduct. By imagining one’s potential to contest nature’s omnipotence, one refutes necessity, nature’s dominion.11 It is peculiar that in his essay on the symbolic value of the landscape in nineteenth-century South African poetry, Coetzee reads the sublime exclusively in relation to the mathematical sublime. His focus is on extension rather than power, measure rather than might. The ideas of power and terror induced by landscapes and natural phenomena in the dynamical sublime are elided in his analysis. This is due, it would seem, to his reliance on Weiskel’s reading of Kant. For Weiskel, the incapacity of the imagination in the mathematical sublime is primary as it facilitates the disruptions on the linguistic level. Therefore Coetzee’s analysis foregrounds (problematically) the extension of the mathematical sublime rather than the might/terror of the dynamical sublime. In a strange paradox, Coetzee’s appropriation of the Weiskel model repeats the gesture of what he has identified as the salient feature of white writing; it empties out the African landscape. Weiskel’s proposed resolutions of the anxieties and disruptions generated through the metaphorical and metonymic sublimes suggest a general approach to Coetzee’s texts. For Weiskel, the hermeneutic sublime refers to a mode in which the absence of determinate meaning is crucial (28). What Paul Goodman writes of Kafka’s works (that they are ‘somehow meaningful but not quite graspable’) may just as well refer to elements within Coetzee’s novels and to the works themselves (254). His novels invite allegorical interpretations, seem to promise meaning, yet ultimately withhold any indication of specific intent. In Foe, Friday’s silence, the images he produces when he attempts to write


(the walking eyes and the ‘O’s), and the ‘ghost-daughter’ are some examples of Coetzee’s deployment of the hermeneutic sublime. Each image of symbol seems instinct with potential meaning yet they are compelling precisely because their ultimate significance cannot be grasped.12 In this highly self-reflexive novel, I have noted, Coetzee both stages the textual production of interpretative blocks by having Susan function as critic/interpreter of the text and anticipates the critical responses to the novel. In Part 2, Susan Barton enumerates the various ‘mysteries’ of her memoir; for example, Cruso’s terraces, the loss of Friday’s tongue, the lack of desire on the part of Cruso and Friday, the import of Friday’s scattering of petals, (see Foe 83–7). These mysteries and other ‘aporias’ in the text remain unresolved at the end of the text and it would seem that the logic of the hermeneutic sublime demand that they remain unsolvable.13 As critic, Barton demonstrates the indeterminacy of images and signs. Attempting to ascertain if Cruso was responsible for the cutting out of Friday’s tongue, she makes a sketch of Cruso and a black man kneeling before him: ‘In his left hand the whiskered figure [Cruso] gripped the living tongue of the other; in his right hand he held up a knife.’ (68) Barton then begins to doubt the univocality of meaning she intends by the picture and is forced to admit, with chagrin, that the picture ‘might also been taken to show Cruso as a beneficent father putting a lump of fish into the mouth of child Friday’ (68–9). The interpretation of the image is radically indeterminate and generates opposing readings. The matter of the loss of Friday’s tongue remains opaque.14 Despite an attempt to decode the interpretive blocks in Foe, Spivak is well aware that there is a ‘structural possibility’ that these blocks (the ‘O’s, the walking eyes, the episode of Barton and her ‘daughter’ in Epping Forest) may mean ‘nothing’ (171). Coetzee’s novelistic strategy can be termed ‘aporetic’ (rather than dialectical). It demands and forecloses interpretation.15 Weiskel relates the failure of interpretation to the category of the sublime and also makes clear that its significance ‘cannot be derived from the signifying relations that occasion it’ (28). For meaning to be rescued from either overdetermination or underdetermination in the sublime moment an ideological component is necessary. The resolution of the breakdown in discourse occurs through substitution of another order of discourse. Thus, meaning arises finally through agreement, through ‘relative ideological unanimity’ (Weiskel 28). If we regard the critical reception of and engagement with the aporia of Friday’s disarticulation as attempts to resolve the breakdown in discourse in the text, then the critical work can be taken to represent Weiskel’s third phase in his

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semiotic of the sublime. I noted that the poststructuralist and Marxist readings of Friday’s silence generate not just different but opposing approaches to Coetzee’s politics and aesthetics. The ideological unanimity of each opposing camp fixes meaning and rescues sense of the sublime moment. By deploying the category of the sublime, Coetzee’s aporetic novelistic discourse leaves radically underdetermined the sites of its silence. Interpretation slides from possibility to possibility without ever settling on a univocal reading. Meaning is deferred, postponed, suspended.

The other In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the concept of the sublime dominated aesthetic thought and practice, artists pursued transcendent experiences of God or looked to nature for sources of sublimity. The Romantic sublime, Weiskel notes, was an attempt to revise the meaning of transcendence, to return it, as it were, to nature (4). The other side of the search for sources of sublimity in a world that was becoming progressively secularised involved the positing of a world with no metaphysical consolations, a futile reaching after a deus absconditus. David Miller points out that the basic pattern of the eighteenth century sublime involved a movement from certainty (mental equilibrium and epistemological security) to trauma (profound uncertainty, and emotional and intellectual trauma) and finally to recovery (validation of original epistemology or explosion thereof) (see 197–8).16 The Gothic supernatural moment or the Gothic sublime replaced traditional sublimity with ‘a sense of despair’ (Miller 201). David B. Morris, who uses Weiskel’s semiotic of the sublime, regards the Gothic sublime as ‘utterly without transcendence’, taking us ‘deep within rather than far from the human sphere’ (306). By deploying Rudolf Otto’s ideas of the mysterium tremendum, G. R. Thompson regards the gothic as a form of ‘dark romanticism’, in which the sublime moment generates a combination of mystery (a nameless apprehension that may be called religious dread in the face of the Wholly Other) and horror (the perception of something incredibly evil or morally repellent) (3).17 Explicit in the above readings of the gothic sublime is the forestalling of the third phase of the sublime moment. Stuck at the second phase, horror is the dominant experience of the gothic sublime. As no transcendent object is constructed or intimated the gothic sublime produces a bleak vision of the world, a world which withholds ultimate revelation or illumination.


It is in Foe, a revision of an eighteenth century text, that Coetzee’s poetics of the stalled sublime is given its most explicit treatment. Barton refuses Cruso’s romantic contemplations of the sea and sky. It is suggestive that she uses the word ‘wastes’ to describe the expanses of sea and sky (see quotation above), implying that she regards the exercise as a waste, a squandering of time, and suggests that the elements themselves are somehow wasted, worn away, dissipated. She proclaims: ‘To me, sea and sky remained sea and sky, vacant and tedious. I had not the temperament to love such emptiness.’ (38) She does not reclaim the natural spectacle in the name of the sublime. It is Barton’s encounter with Friday’s tonguelessness that bears the hallmarks of a properly sublime experience. When Cruso attempts to show her the reason for Friday’s silence, she draws away. She claims that: ‘I began to look on him with the horror we reserve for the mutilated.’ (24) The primary images of the sublime moment, the abyss, darkness and silence, dominate the scene. Barton says of Friday’s mouth, which seems to her to be an abyss, ‘it is too dark’ (22). The text registers that ‘a silence fell’ (22). The moment generates, in Barton, what seems to be Burkean terror and a bewildering and paralysing of rational faculties. She claims not to be ‘mistress of [her] own actions’ as she shrinks from the slave: ‘I caught myself flinching when he came near me.’ (24) In the April 25th letter to Foe, Barton admits that the thought of Friday’s mutilated tongue causes her to ‘shiver’ (57). Rudolf Otto describes the encounter with mysterium trememdum as eliciting a ‘shudder’ – the subject ‘held speechless, trembles inwardly’ (17). Coetzee’s structuring of the sublime moments in the text mirrors Weiskel’s first two phases of the sublime moment. We encounter a determinate relationship that Barton establishes with the black slave. He is a ‘shadowy creature’, a ‘dull fellow’ to whom she gives little more attention than ‘any house-slave in Brazil’ (22–3). Racial difference and a power differential are firmly in place. At this point, Friday operates in Barton’s narrative as nothing more than he would have in the Coetzeeidentified ‘white writing’ of southern Africa – the figuring of blackness as silence or a ‘shadowy presence’ (see White Writing 81, 5). It is neither the fact of his blackness nor his status as a slave but rather the awareness of Friday’s mutilation that seems to rupture Barton’s established relationship with Friday. The rupture, the shift from security to profound anxiety, is signalled and performed by the text through the use of the temporal qualifier ‘Hitherto’ (24). Friday’s silence becomes more than mere mutedness, more than a ‘shadowy presence’, but a significant absence. For Barton, there seems to be a pressing presence in his silence,

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the significance of which she will pursue throughout the novel and attempt to convert into narrative. When Barton tries to rationalise her reaction to Friday’s mutilation, she acknowledges that what truly disturbs her is less the actual violence that perpetrates this atrocity, but rather the ‘secretness’ of Friday’s loss (24) – a revealed yet invisible secret. Initially she interprets the mystery/secret of his physical mutilation as relating to the suffering body. Coetzee points out about his work: If I look back over my fiction, I see a simple (simple-minded?) standard erected. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not ‘that which is not’, and the proof that it is is the pain it feels […] in South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body […] the suffering body takes this authority: that is its power […] its power is undeniable. (Doubling 248) In Coetzee scholarship, Friday is often identified with the wholly Other – an incommensurable historical other that refuses translation into the discourses of European modernity. This reading is given a particular psychoanalytical bent through the application of Lacan’s formulations.18 One must remember, however, that for Lacan the Other is related to the repressive mechanisms of the superego. The Other, the phallus or symbolic father, operates as auditor or the regulator of one’s actions by situating the body in a system (of relations, of language etc., see Lacan 304–09).19 The Other, as Julia Kristeva points out, is the ‘one that separates, prohibits’ (2). The Other in Waiting for the Barbarians is represented by authoritarian state power, which attempts to separate the Magistrate from the ‘barbarian’ woman and prohibit interaction between the two. Its most brutal embodiment is Colonel Joll. In Foe, Coetzee locates the Other as patriarchal authority (and the authority of the literary tradition).20 The various white male characters in the novel come to occupy the place of the Other whose authority Barton simultaneously upholds and contests. In the memoir-letter of part one of the novel she calls Cruso her ‘singular saviour’ but a few lines later she belittles his power over her by calling him a king of a ‘tiny realm’ (14). Likewise, she remarks to Cruso that his terraces were a ‘mighty labour’ (33) only to deride it a little while later: ‘I held it a stupid labour.’ (35) The ambivalence towards male authority is mirrored in her relation with Daniel Foe and compounded by her ambivalence to the literary tradition. The tone of the letters in Part 2 of the novel vacillates between


praise for, to aggressive derision of, Foe’s abilities. Barton claims that she needs absolution from Foe in the April 15th letter. Yet almost immediately she asks: ‘What art is there to hearing confessions? – the spider has as much art, that watches and waits.’ (48) At the beginning of April 21st letter, she apologises for seeming to ‘mock [his] art of writing’ (52). Coetzee establishes a chain of equivalences between the various male figures of authority within a single paragraph early in the novel: And all at once, though I had remained dry-eyed through all the insults done me on board ship and through the hours of despair when I was alone on the waves with the captain lying dead at my feet, a handspike jutting from his eye-socket, I fell to crying. I sat on the bare earth with my sore foot between my hands and rocked back and forth and sobbed like a child, while the stranger (who was of course the Cruso I told you of) gazed at me more as if I were a fish cast up by the waves than an unfortunate fellow creature. (9) The passage describes a scene in which the male figures of authority are directly related to Barton’s speech and acts. Coetzee stages the dead captain at her feet and Cruso gazing at her, with her at his feet. As this is the first time that she recounts her past to Cruso he seems to be the addressee. But mention of a second person as addressee comes as a surprise and transforms what seems at first to be a memoir into another ‘non-literary’ form, a letter. The introduction of the second person (who we will later find out is Daniel Foe) propels the latter into position of primary addressee. This substitution of addressees suggests interchangeability of the male figures. Coetzee strengthens the chain of equivalence through the identity of the fates of the authority figures. The dead captain at the feet of Barton anticipates Cruso’s death on the John Hobart, which, in turn, mirrors the corpses of Foe and the dead captain with which we are confronted in the final section of the novel. Barton ‘moves’ from the captain to Cruso and finally to Foe. The epilogue closes the circle by returning Barton to her position beside the dead captain. Figuring the Other through Cruso and Foe, Coetzee sets them up as ‘ego-ideals’ that attempt to control and direct Barton’s actions. The relation of self to Other generates, on the part of the subject, an infantalisation (‘sobbed like a child’) and an animalisation (‘as if I were a fish cast up by the waves’). Coetzee’s novels complicate the relationship between self and Other through the positing of a third term – a third term that ‘blocks’ the

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articulation of self to Other. The third term, at least in Waiting, Michael K and Foe, finds its nexus in the damaged/mutilated body of the historical other. Of Michael K, Nadine Gordimer says that his harelip and ‘strangled speech’ are emblematic of the damage wrought by the race laws of apartheid (139). The Magistrate obsessively returns to the torture cell in which Colonel Joll blinds the ‘barbarian’ woman. Barton experiences horror and revulsion at the thought of Friday’s tonguelessness. It is precisely the mutilation of the body of the historical other that produces a rupture in the relation between self and other, and indeed, between the self and Other. The historical other becomes other than other, an opaque mystery that Coetzee’s white protagonists somehow feel obliged to read, to decipher. As the physical mutilation itself prevents the reading process, the process that would facilitate the constitution of the self (through the other), the self feels itself to be dispossessed by the other. The mutilation of the body of the historical other in Coetzee’s novels forestalls the third moment of the sublime experience, thus preventing both hermeneutic closure and full subjective knowledge. The figure of the Other always looms large, curtailing the self’s actions and intervening in its relationship with the historical other. Thus, the world that Coetzee creates in these novels is always ternary. In the context of writing under apartheid, Coetzee sets up a primal scene of apartheid violence. The ternary structure allegorically recuperates the relation between writer/white subject and state. As the Other, the apartheid state is the authoritarian power that separates and prohibits – the brutal censor of the white subject’s actions and writings. Through the representation of the damaged body of the victim, Coetzee prevents what in any normal society would be the necessary articulation of self and Other. Coetzee’s ternary structure figures prominently in Foe. Barton describes Cruso’s castle as an ‘encampment in the shape of a triangle’ which symbolically rehearses the semic structure of the novel: Barton (self) > [Friday (other)] < captain/Cruso/Foe (Other). Whenever Barton is in the presence of the Other, Friday is never far away. In Cruso’s ‘castle’, Barton sleeps at ‘an arm’s-length from Cruso’ with Friday in the hut (14). On board the Hobart, the sleeping arrangements are repeated. When Barton forces Cruso to board the ship back to England and ensures Friday’s capture, Barton insists that Friday ‘would rather sleep on the floor at his master’s feet than on the softest bed in Christendom’ (41). At Foe’s refuge in Whitechapel Barton, once again, insists on having Friday close to her. He sleeps in the alcove while Foe and Barton share the bed (see Foe 137). Part 4 of the novel repeats the scenic structure twice: first, as in the Whitechapel scene and, second, with Barton and the dead captain


in the hold of a wrecked ship where the unnamed narrator finds Friday ‘in the last corner under the transoms’ (157). Her insistence on Friday’s presence during her most intimate moments reveals Friday as a necessary and compelling presence – an obligation. The demand his mutilated state makes on her cannot be escaped even in the most private of encounters. The Other (Cruso, Foe, the dead captain) fails to separate, to prohibit. It would seem also that from this perspective the ‘discourse of the body’ structures Barton’s reaction to Friday’s mutilation. When Barton lists the different mysteries in Part 2, mysteries that insist on and block interpretation, she, however, dispels the claims of the suffering body to explain her peculiar reaction to the loss of Friday’s tongue. ‘Toward you’, Barton says to Friday, ‘I felt a deeper revulsion’ – not simply horror at the fragility of the body when ‘at the stroke of a sword or a knife, wholeness and beauty are forever undone’ (85). The ‘deeper revulsion’ can be related to the primary social distinction, the distinction between humans and animals, (or in her words ‘beasts’ (85)) between the human and the non-human. The tongue as opposed to the heart is a ‘member of play’ and it is, Barton argues, the ‘members of play that elevate us above beasts’ (85). Without a tongue, Friday becomes animallike, located on the margins between the human and the non-human. Barton’s revulsion from the slave, the terror and anxiety generated through the sublime experience, at this point in the text, rests on what for her seems to be the unbearable fragility of the borders between the human and the animal world. To the reader at least, the ‘true’ significance of her aversion to Friday becomes apparent in her ‘confession’ to Foe at his Whitechapel refuge. She tells Foe that on the island she refused to look directly into Friday’s mouth but that ‘from that night on I had continuously to fear that evidence of a yet more hideous mutilation might be thrust upon my sight’ (119). The ‘hideous mutilation’ she constantly fears is the possibility of Friday’s emasculation – ‘whether by a dumb slave [she] was to understand a slave unmanned’ (119). Coetzee subtly registers throughout the text the equivalence she represses between the cutting out of Friday’s tongue and his ‘unmanning’ by the metaphors she employs to describe Friday’s tonguelessness or his character. We have seen, above, that Barton refers to the tongue as a ‘member of play’. In Part 2, she wonders if Friday lost his tongue ‘at the age when boy-children among the Jews are cut’ (69). Later, she compares the cutting out of Friday’s tongue to the ‘gelding of a stallion’ (98). The phallic imagery not only prefigures Barton’s suspicion of Friday’s emasculation but also suggests that the emasculation rather than the removing of Friday’s tongue is of central

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significance to Barton. If we are then to assume that it is neither Friday’s lack of speech (which seems to be of central importance to recent analyses of the text) nor the actual physical mutilation (as Barton implies that its significance goes beyond the claims of the suffering body) that generate her revulsion toward Friday, why then should Friday’s surmised emasculation produce sublime horror in Foe’s protagonist?

Sublime abjection I regard Kristeva’s theory of abjection in Powers of Horror as a version of what I have called the stalled sublime and her concomitant view of subjectivity proves illuminating for the attempt to address the aporia of Barton’s horror. For Kristeva, abjection, like the sacred and the sublime, generates an experience that is a ‘compound of abomination and fascination’ as it is related simultaneously to fear (phobias) and pleasure ( jouissance): ‘One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion.’ (167, 9) However, the sublime, with its appeal to transcendent principles for its resolution, ‘covers up the breakdowns associated with the abject’ (Kristeva 12). In relation to Weiskel’s model, the third phase becomes the ‘something added’ to abjection (Kristeva 12). Specifically, abjection is occasioned, as the sublime in Weiskel’s and Coetzee’s analysis, through a breakdown in meaning. In abjection it is caused by a loss of distinction between self and other, between subject and object. Yet, paradoxically, the subject is drawn, compulsively and obsessively, to the objects or the phenomena that facilitate the crisis. Abjection, Kristeva argues, is related ultimately to ‘what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, position, rules.’ (4) She relates the experience to a stage in psychosexual development before the subject establishes relations to objects of desire or of representation, a stage when the distinctions between human and animal, between nature and culture are marked. An encounter that produces a radical breakdown in meaning returns the subject to that limit-situation. ‘There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.’ (Kristeva 3)21 In her essay on abjection, Kristeva claims that the abject is also a ‘deject’ – ‘he separates, places, situates himself, he strays’ (8). As much as Foe is ‘about’ Susan Barton’s attempt to have her story told, it also charts her search for a home. Yet we are made aware that she is never at home. On the island she desperately wants to be rescued and tells Cruso, ‘I have a desire to be saved which I must call inordinate.’ (36) However, as soon as she leaves the island, she begins to hanker after the life on the island


(see Foe 43). In England, she longs ‘to be borne away to a new life’ (63). Coetzee gives us an acute sense of Barton’s unbelonging, her eternal homelessness, her obsessive desire to be elsewhere. She is a ‘deject’, she strays. The novelist translates the transcendental homelessness of the modern subject, a subject cast away, into Barton’s paradoxical desire for a home and the knowledge of its eternal impossibility. Kristeva’s claim about the salvation of the deject (‘the more he strays, the more he is saves’ (8)) echoes Foe’s acknowledgment of the ‘maze of doubting’ in which every writer is lost and his proffered solution to Barton’s fears about the insubstantiality of her daughter (and herself). He tells her that ‘your search for a way out of the maze […] might start from that point [the sign of blindness] and return to it as many times as are needed till you discover yourself to be saved’ (136, my parentheses). Constantly threatened by the loss of system or of order, the abject is ‘necessarily dichotomous, somewhat Manichean’ – she never stops demarcating her universe (Kristeva 8). The Susan Barton of the memoir is a supreme arbiter of difference. Not only does she seek to distinguish Cruso and herself from Friday by her characterisation of the slave as a ‘cannibal’, a ‘savage’ and ‘superstitious’ (for examples, see Foe 31, 104, 106), she also polices class and social differences. She says of Captain Smith: ‘I found him a true gentleman though a mere ship-master and the son of a pedlar.’ (42) Early in her memoir-letter, even before she recounts her meeting with Cruso, Barton establishes a distinction between humans and animals, which will prove crucial to her relationship with Friday. She identifies speech with civilisation and humanity: So if the company of brutes had been enough for me, I might have lived most happily on my island. But who, accustomed to the fullness of human speech, can be content with caws and chirps and screeches, and the barking of seals, and the moan of the wind? (8) The onomatopoeic quality of the animal sounds she describes (the caws, the screeches etc.) establishes an organicity between sign and referent, a direct relation between language and object, from which as we shall see she clearly separates herself. The rhetorical nature of the question suggests an agreement between her and the reader – a shared ideological position that distinguishes the speech of the ‘civilised’ from the sounds of animals and brutes. Note also the slippage from ‘brutes’ to animals, which posits an identity between them. Barton deploys this identity to ascribe Friday’s lack of speech, his enforced silence, to the trope of

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animality (he is ‘like an animal wrapt entirely in itself’ (70)). His is the life of an animal. Although the ascription echoes racist colonial ideology, it seems to have a rather different import for Barton. She writes: ‘I have no doubt that amongst Africans the human sympathies move as readily as amongst us.’ (70) Rather, it is allied to the affective correlative of the sublime/abject moment, alienation and the radical exclusion from intersubjective community. The major implication of Friday’s mutedness is not some hidden story of colonial brutality but rather that it prevents communication and exacerbates her alienation. ‘To live in silence,’ Barton writes, ‘ is to live like the whales, great castles of flesh floating leagues apart […] or like the spiders, sitting each alone.’ (59) Animal similes dominate Barton’s narrative and letters. In the opening paragraph of the novel she describes herself floating in the sea ‘like a flower of the sea, like an anemone, like a jellyfish of the kind you see in the waters of Brazil’ (5). The excess of similes marks the gap between language and reality, problematising a mimetic theory of language. By reaching for one simile after another, her language struggles to overcome the divide between sign and referent and suggests an important tenet of structuralism – ultimately it is only through similitude that language approaches referentiality. Implicitly, the excessive similes stage a crucial distinction for Barton, that between herself and the animal world. From this point of view, it is precisely the gap between language and reality that she wants to maintain. The indirect nature of the comparisons opposes the organicity of the animal sounds (discussed above). When she is cast up on the island, Barton is deeply disturbed by Friday’s and Cruso’s initial reactions to her, which blur the boundaries between humanity and animality. She believes that Friday regards her ‘as a seal or a porpoise thrown up by the waves’ and Cruso as a ‘fish cast up by the waves’ (Foe 6, 9). This unease at her closeness to the animal world finds symptomatic expression in her refusal to use ape-skins for warmth. She writes: ‘I preferred not to have the skins upon me.’ (19) Otto suggests that an encounter with the numinous produces a feeling of what he calls ‘creature-consciousness’ (20). The subject experiences a sense of being a ‘nothingness’ in relation to an overpowering might. S/he is reduced to the status of a creature, an animal. In a letter to Foe she wonders if she should have asked Cruso if he ever had an epiphany on the island, a moment when ‘the purpose of our life here has been all at once illuminated’ (89). Would it reveal, she asks, the island (and the world) ‘insensible of the insects scurrying on its back, scratching an existence for themselves? Are we insects, Cruso, in the greater view? Are we no better than the ants?’ (89) The opposition between humanity and


animality, and the racial, social and class differences that Barton obsessively keeps watch over seem constantly to be under threat, thus revealing the frailty of the symbolic order, which as Kristeva, following Mary Douglas, points out is a ‘device of discriminations, of difference’ (69). Coetzee structures two sequences in the novel as rites of passage, as passages through a liminal phase in which the symbolic order of the social aggregate is undermined (Turner’s communitas). Barton ascribes an epic narrative to Cruso’s experiences on the island. She thinks of him as a ‘hero who had braved the wilderness and slain the monster of solitude and returned fortified by the victory’ (38). The description of the epic nature of Cruso’s struggles on the island immediately succeeds Barton’s recounting of her journey through listlessness and melancholy to a return to fruitful labour (see Foe 35–6). As Barton is wont to associate narrative with investing experience with meaning she expects Foe (and the reader) to establish a congruence between her experience and the epic she ascribes to Cruso’s stay on the island. She calls this period ‘the darkest time’, a time of ‘despair and lethargy’ (35). During this period the divisions and distinctions that Barton uses to demarcate her universe become unhinged: social and racial distinctions (‘My skin was as brown as an Indian’s’ (35)), the divide between human and animal (she bolts food ‘like a dog’ (35)), and the opposition between savagery and civilisation (‘I squatted in the garden, heedless of who saw me’ (35)). For the abject, whose need to mark out the world borders on obsession, this ‘liminal’ period can be nothing other than the ‘darkest time’. She conceives her return to the symbolic order as a return to labour (‘step by step I recovered my spirits and began to apply myself again to little tasks’ (35)). By the end of the novel, she reverses her view on productive labour. She casts a return to society as a return to a ‘life [that] is abject. It is the life of a thing’ (126, my emphasis). The other rites-of-passage sequence also replicates the crossing-ofboundaries generated in and by the liminal phase. In the final sequence of Part 2 of the novel, Barton and Friday journey to Bristol to try and find a ship that will take Friday back to ‘Africa’. The journey to Bristol is also a return to their point of entry into England. In a text that privileges spatial inertia to temporal movement as its structuring device, the journey to Bristol with its picaresque quality appears ‘out of place’. It is during this sequence that boundary-crossing, characteristic of liminality, is most apparent. For safety reasons Barton pins her hair under her hat and wears a coat at all times, ‘hoping to pass for a man’ (101). An old man calls Barton and Friday ‘gipsies’ and explains: ‘we call them gipsies […] men and women all higgledy-piggledy together’ (108). Not

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only are gender distinctions blurred, but also Barton begins to apply animal similes to herself; for example, ‘a woman alone must travel like a hare’ (100) and ‘I stripped off my clothes and burrowed like a mole into the hay’ (102). As we have seen in the previous chapters, an important aspect of rites of passages (for example, in initiation rites) involves the acquisition of knowledge about the gods and about their relationship to humanity.22 During the journey to Bristol, Barton believes that she learns the secret of Friday’s dancing. As she dances she falls into a trance in which she sees ‘wondrous sights’ and comes to realise that ‘there is after all design in our lives, and if we wait long enough we are bound to see that design unfolding’ (103). Like the epic hero, she is rejuvenated after the encounter with the noumenal realm.23 Barton is convinced that she has received a message of other lives ‘being open’ to her (see Foe 104). The access to the transcendental sphere, the ‘plenitude of perceptions and gifts’ that Parry sees as the prerogative of the ‘muted’ dominated characters in Coetzee’s novels seems also to be available to the white female protagonist (see Parry 153). Coetzee’s deployment of the function and structure of the rite of passage narrative is clearly different from the West African literary treatments. Achebe, Soyinka and Okri emphasise the ‘subjectlessness’ in their textual mobilisation of the narrative in which the cohesion and functional unity of the clan/society takes precedence over the individual subject – the traditional import of the rite. The hero returns communicating new strength to the community. In Coetzee’s recitation/revision of the rite-of-passage narrative not only is the resultant transformation directed solely at the individual subject, but also the identification of the subject with society/community is thwarted. The return to society exacerbates, rather than mollifies, the alienation of the individual. After Barton’s encounter with the noumenal realm, in a sort of ironic epiphany, she comes to understand that the reason Friday danced at Foe’s Stoke Newington house was to ‘remove himself’, to escape social interaction (104). The text ultimately refuses the reconciling fictions of a transcendent vision by preventing both a resolution in the benevolent Oneness of traditional sublimity and an escape from isolated individualism to identification with humanity. From this perspective, we can see Coetzee’s novels as rehearsing the first two stages of Van Gennep’s (and Turner’s) rites of passage. In the pre-liminal phase, the subject is detached from an earlier set of social conditions, from his/her place in the social structure – the Magistrate from his position as magistrate of the frontier town, Michael K from his gardening job, David Lurie from his teaching post at the Technical University of


Cape Town etc. Deprived of status and rank, his characters then exist as marginal or liminal figures that are ‘neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between’ and his novels chart their existence during this ‘phase’ (Turner, The Ritual Process 95). However, this novelistic strategy refuses a ‘post-liminal’ re-aggregation in which the subject is re-integrated into society into a new stable state. The author draws attention to Barton’s state of abjection not only through her dejection (her eternal homelessness) and compulsive need to institute and mark boundaries but also, most clearly, in her peculiar reaction to Friday after the primary sublime moment in the novel – her encounter with his missing tongue. After she discovers Friday’s mutilation, Barton writes: ‘I caught myself flinching when he came near, or holding my breath so as not to have to smell him. Behind his back I wiped the utensils his hands had touched.’ (24) After the sublime encounter, Friday becomes unclean, somehow polluted, to the castaway. The reaction she claims is outside her conscious control: ‘I […] was not mistress of my own actions.’ (24) Kristeva suggests that abjection involves a process of jettisoning the object that produces the specific crisis in subjectivity from the symbolic order (see 65–7). The excluded object becomes defiled, an agos. In purification rites, a filthy object is prohibited, it is extracted from the secular order and invested with a sacred (secret?) quality. Defilement is thus filth sacralised (Kristeva 65). It is the process of prohibition that anthropologists and religious historians (for example, Frazer, Robertson Smith, van Gennep and LéviStrauss) see as founding the social aggregate by maintaining divisions and distinctions between ‘society and a certain nature’ (Kristeva 65). Mary Douglas suggests that filth in African symbolic systems is not a quality in itself but rather relates to a boundary, a limit. By treating the object (in the case of Foe, Friday) that brings about the abject experience as agos, the subject (Barton) attempts to re-instate the boundaries that have suddenly become indistinct, the boundaries between self and other, subject and object, inner and outer. The primary sublime moment in the novel, therefore, stages the absolute limit of subjectivity itself.24 A concomitant of treating the object as agos is its removal from the location of libidinal object. It is, Kristeva argues, ‘asserted to be a nonobject of desire’; it is ‘abominated as abject, as abjection’ (65).25 Coetzee is careful to remove Susan Barton’s relation with Friday from the circuit of desire. Barton tells the slave: ‘Be assured, Friday, by sitting at your bedside and talking of desire and kisses I do not mean to court you.’ (79) She refuses a psychoanalytical reading of her language: ‘This is no

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game in which each word has a second meaning in which the words say […] “I crave an answer” and mean “I crave an embrace”.’ (79) What she feels towards Friday is, according to Barton, not love but more like something beyond it. She tells her lover: ‘We [she and Friday] have lived too close for love, Mr Foe. Friday has grown to be my shadow.’ (115) Barton’s refusal of the logic of desire in her relationship with Friday resonates with the experience of the Kantian sublime – a certain disinterestedness, a refusal on the part of the subject to possess the object that occasions the sublime moment. Although the abject-object fascinates and beseeches desire, abjection is not sustained by desire (See Kristeva 1, 6). The object is, thus, cast as threatening and as fascinating, it is a non-object into which the speaking being is engulfed. The ambivalent emotions elicited in relation to the object replicate the ambivalences of the sacred. More significantly, as with the pharmakos in the sacrifice (the being which purifies the community through its impurity), and as with the epic protagonist (both hero and victim, both leader and outcast), the object, through abjection, is constituted not only as agos (that which defiles), but also as katharmos (that which purifies) (see Kristeva 84–5). In Kristevean abjection, the social significances of the pharmakos and the epic hero-victim are repeated at the level of the individual subject.26 Barton’s first description of Friday casts him in the role of angelic redeemer. She addresses her existential plea, ‘I am cast away. I am all alone’ to a ‘dark shadow […] with a dazzling halo’ (5). As katharmos and agos, Friday incorporates ambivalence and reversal in a single being. In the scene in which Barton explains to Friday that she is not courting him, she interprets her obsession with Friday as the desire for ‘answering speech’. Her desperation in confronting a world in which she speaks ‘into a void, day after day, without answer’ (80) suggests a godless universe without the possibility of grace or transcendence. Coetzee makes Friday the bearer of this particular load of signification by replacing the deus absconditus of modernity with the homo absconditus of the apartheid state – the ‘missing’ black citizen of a segregated state, the brutalised and tortured black body that cannot be read. It is only through the forever withheld possibility of Friday’s ‘answering speech’ that Barton sees herself as escaping alienation. That is why she cannot rest. I have argued that Barton’s reactions to Friday’s tonguelessness and her obsessive need to invest his silence with meaning arise neither from the racial difference, nor from the power differential (his status as a slave), nor even from his physical mutilation. The seeds of an answer to the question posed above – the reason why Friday’s perceived emasculation should produce sublime horror in Barton – lies in her description


of how she imagines Friday’s tonguelessness. This immediately precedes her confession to Foe in Part 3 of the novel. She says: ‘I pictured [it] to myself wagging and straining under the sway of emotion as Friday tried to utter himself.’ (119) As Friday’s lack of tongue functions as a cipher for emasculation in Barton’s imagination, on one level, his tonguelessness erases the gender distinctions that are crucial for Barton. More importantly, as a woman, as marginal and marginalised (taken for a gipsy, she is thrown out of the alehouse), as destitute, Barton betrays her awareness that she is as much silenced as Friday. Identity, rather than difference, confronts Barton in the sublime moment. For the abject, the obsessive marker of the universe, the supreme arbiter of difference, the breakdown in meaning generated by the loss of distinctions (between man and woman (through his emasculation), savage and civilised (through her silenced, marginal status), and deriving from both of these distinctions, the human and the animal (through the opposition she sets up between civilised speech and the sounds of brutes and animals)) can only produce horror of the sublime kind. The distinctions between slave and master, human and animal, self and other, male and female, fall apart and Barton is struck with awe and terror. In refusing to resolve the breakdown in discourse and by withholding the inter-articulation of the self and other, Coetzee places his white protagonists in an unbearably fragile symbolic order (both colonial and apartheid), thereby drawing attention to its constructed nature, to the nature of its construction. Through the deployment of the stalled sublime, he refuses the reconciling fiction of a transcendent escape from sublime alienation, the emergence of a stable identity and hermeneutic closure. In Foe, as in his other novels, Coetzee replaces traditional forms of sublimity with a reaching after the ‘mystery’ of the brutalised body of the historical other (and the ‘mysteries’ of the literary text itself) – a reaching after that is eternally suspended.

Conclusion: The Political as Tragic Effect

The book’s subtitle comes from Anthony Kwame Appiah’s In My Father’s House and its arguments are specifically directed against Appiah’s claims about the role of traditional religious beliefs in Africa’s modernity. Appiah (as I noted in Chapter 2) takes the West as the exemplary historical model and relies on an evolutionary schema of social rationalisation of the Weberian kind to account for the persistence of traditional religious beliefs among Africans. With greater advances in technology, literacy and scientific rationality, Appiah would have us believe, Africa may one day be as ‘disenchanted’ as the West – the old gods will eventually die to be replaced by the scientific ‘spirit’ (with all the contradictions that word entails). The series of intellectual changes that constituted the philosophical and scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century in Europe, the upsurge of technology and the development of literacy, are generally acknowledged as the reasons for the demise of magical beliefs and practices in the West. Appiah believes that, in time, Africa will follow the same trajectory (see 81–4). Keith Thomas’s study of medieval magic in the Renaissance period contests this view. He proves that the above-mentioned changes are inadequate in accounting for the demise of magical beliefs and practices in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Thomas points out that the intellectual changes fail to account for the decline of magic because ‘there were too many “rationalists” [for example, Lollards of the fourteenth century] before, too many believers afterwards, for so simple an explanation to be plausible” (647). He, also, demonstrates that English magic had ‘lost its appeal before the appropriate technical solutions had been devised to take its place. It was the abandonment of magic which made possible the upsurge of technology, not the other way round’ (657). 162

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Furthermore, recent anthropological and political studies reveal that processes of modernisation have not significantly eroded traditional religious beliefs in the African postcolony. As Patrick Chabal and JeanPascal Daloz point out, in Africa, today, like in the past, ‘the occult is alive, witchcraft is thriving, ritual ceremonies abound, the link with the ancestors is strong as ever and African religious communities are growing in strength’ (63). Political analyses, which link modernity with secularisation (the erosion of the religious worldview by the scientific perspective, and the dissociation of the religious from the political spheres) struggle with the centrality of religious personalities and phenomena to the political process in sub-Saharan postcolonial Africa. Religion and politics seem to go hand in hand. Politicians seek the help and advice of those with access to the supernatural and often deploy religious rhetoric and display sacred insignia that are liable to invoke in the minds of people a strong link to supernatural powers.1 Modern political legitimacy, like traditional authority, it would seem, relies, in part, on access to the supernatural; and modernisation, political or otherwise, does not seem to be necessarily inseparable from secularisation. Chabal and Daloz suggest distinguishing between forms of rationality as a means of going beyond the ‘theoretical’ impasse. They distinguish scientific or universal rationality (the basis of technological progress) from social rationality (how people make sense of how they live and interact within a given society). Weber, and most modernisation theorists, assume a ‘covalence and coevality of the two forms’ (Chabal and Daloz 64). However, by maintaining the theoretical distinction between the two forms of rationality, one is able to account for political modernisation without necessarily relying on a concomitant process of secularisation. From this perspective, one can begin to account for a particular type of development in sub-Saharan Africa that differs fundamentally from Westernisation – a world in which old gods have no problems with serving new worlds. The theoretical terms of this line of development have yet to be established. In the book, I make a case for the use of the concept of the sacred in the analysis of myth, ritual and magic in African literary texts, premised on the acknowledgement of the persistence of the sacred in the modern. A corollary of this acknowledgement is an implicit pan-Africanist ‘essence’ – one that emphasises ontological and historical continuities between very diverse types of societies. This approach is partly motivated by the claims of the writers themselves. Through varied fictional strategies and different political outlooks, Achebe, Soyinka and Ngugi have proclaimed a certain unity and interconnectedness of the African

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world, metaphysical, cultural and political. In the years leading up to decolonisation and in the early years of independence, this was as much an ontological description as a political claim or ideal. In ‘The Myth of an African World’, Appiah faults Soyinka on his assertion of the metaphysical unity of Africa. He regards Soyinka’s disclaimer at the beginning of Death and the King’s Horseman that the ‘Colonial Factor’ in the play is merely a catalyst for the more profound metaphysical repercussions in the indigenous religious sphere, as ‘disingenuous’ (Appiah 78). For Appiah, colonialism meant ‘a profound assault on the consciousness of the African intellectual’ (78). Having no metaphysical notions in common, it is only the experience of colonialism and their present relation to the West that defines the ambit of commonality between Africans. Jeyifo has accepted this criticism as (methodologically) correct, but one that ignores the strategic ideological need for the assertion of the unity of the African peoples in the project of revolution (‘What’ 151). Thus, Jeyifo’s Marxist approach endorses the political need of an African totality in the pan-Africanist agenda but rejects the ontological implications of this project. However, I hope that through my discussion of the sacred in the first part of the book I have gone some way in disproving Appiah’s and Jeyifo’s arguments by following particular writers, anthropologists and historians and showing important ontological, epistemological and political continuities in (pre- and post-) East and West Africa. Implicit in this approach is a claim that the impact of colonialism on local and traditional culture has been far more superficial than assumed in the culture-clash model. The ambivalence of the sacred, identified in Late Victorian anthropology, proved very useful in attempting to deal with, on the one hand, the representation of myth, ritual and magic in the novels discussed and, on the other, the texts’ interrogation of the dynamics of power and authority in traditional society. In the central ritual of Achebe’s Arrow of God, the Pumpkin Leaves ritual, there is a symbolic transference of the sacred subject from epic hero to sacrificial victim. The dual inscription of the sacred subject, glorified and despised, venerated and accursed, rehearses the ambivalence of the sacred as both holy and unclean. As the ritual is the basis for the establishment of authority, the double articulation of the sacred subject encodes a view of political power. The epic dimension of the ritual creates the conditions for authority – a heroic leader who bravely faces dangers, creates order and returns revitalising the community. The sacrificial component qualifies this power. Possessing new power from his/her contact with the sacred, the ritual subject is potentially threatening to the community.

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Symbolically associated with danger, power can either sanctify or pollute. This symbolic articulation works to prevent the abuse of political power. A consideration of the sacred also reveals another fundamental symbolic opposition that is common to West and East Africa (and the works of Achebe, Soyinka and Ngugi): the opposition between earth and sky forces. This symbolic opposition both clarifies the distribution of political influence between competing sources of power in traditional society and ensures the precedence of the community or the polis over local conflicts and individual demands. This opposition proved crucial to understanding the conflict between the ‘leader’ and the group of elders in the segmental societies depicted in Arrow of God and The River Between, and the dramatic conflict Soyinka sets up between the king and the modern dictator in Kongi’s Harvest. In the third chapter, I moved to East Africa with its different ethnography and tested the viability of the model of the sacred constructed in the Introduction and the first two chapters. It would seem that the political unconscious of West African symbolic production persists also in East Africa and the idea of the sacred is sufficiently fundamental that it supports the analysis of the prophetic movements in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century East and Southern Africa. However, Achebe, Ngugi and Soyinka also deploy the sacred in very different ways. Achebe privileges the sacrificial ritual in terms of bringing about narrative and ritual closure and ushering in a new sociopolitical order. The individual subject is destroyed so that the clan can reveal itself as the true subject of the ritual. Alternatively, Soyinka refuses the logic of sacrifice. Instead, by emphasising the significance of the Will and by deploying the narrative structure of the epic to account for tragic form, he ‘subjectivates’ the ritual agent through action. Soyinka’s project of articulating the distinctiveness and unity of the African world also functions as a prescription of ‘authentic’ cultural practices; he validates an aesthetic that draws on endogenous cultural sources that include the rich and complex mythologies of Africa and its utilisation of ritual to engage both historical factors and ahistorical truths. He counters the denigration of Africa by colonial discourses as simple, existing outside time and bound to nature, and the specification of myth and ritual as static and principally involved with the maintenance and renewal of a community (also seen as static). He provides, instead, a dynamic view of ritual and mythology: they engage complex metaphysical problems, negotiate historical transformations, address paradoxical and ambivalent conceptual categories, and provide the framework through which power in society is articulated. Yet, in his

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theory of traditional Yoruba myth, Soyinka also establishes a distance from the logic of sacrifice that informs the sacrificial ritual and on which the sacred religious worldview reposes. Aesthetics and metaphysics replace the religious content of myth and ritual. He also makes a claim for the humanistic enterprise – the idea of Will as the impetus to political change and activism is the basis of his revolutionary humanism. Soyinka locates this impetus within the traditional African framework. Significantly, his metaphysical elaborations of Yoruba myth offer a different view of the African cosmos than that suggested by the animistic interpenetration of the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural, the animate and the inanimate and so on. The sacred functions as the negative other of animism and suggests a view of the universe in which alienation, epistemological anxiety and contingency dominate. However, the bipolar quality of the sacred recuperates both animistic continuity and integration and sacred alienation and dispossession. In following Ngugi’s exhortation to resume the broken dialogue with the gods of his people, Chapter 3 delineates a ‘religious’ geometry that the novelist establishes in The River Between and which he repeats in his other novels, a symbolic framework derived principally from the indigenous religious sphere, although amplified by syncretism with Christianity. The conflict in the novel brings into play the symbolism of the sacred Mugumo against the river (of the title), the mountains against the plains. The movement between these two spaces succinctly rehearses the dialectic between Turner’s communitas and structure. Thus the fate of the protagonist is understood in terms of movement in and between these symbolic spaces; he too enters the liminal gulf and, in his case, is destroyed. The sacred also allows us to extend John Lonsdale’s structural analysis of the central conflict between the age-groups and the elders in the nationalist movement in colonial Kenya into the realm of the mythic and through the religious geometry into the tragic which lies below and beyond structure. Having pointed out some differences in their approaches to the sacred, let us return to some important continuities between the writers. In the first part of the book, the three works discussed engage a fundamental socio-political rupture. The disorder created by colonialism generates a destabilisation and rupture of the gerontocratic organisation of traditional society, segmental and monarchical. The move towards the political valorisation of youth, the death-knell of traditional African society, seems ironically to be celebrated in Soyinka’s works but is handled with some ambivalence in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God and Ngugi’s The River Between and Weep Not, Child.

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Another common factor in dealing with the realm of the sacred is the acknowledgment of the relative opacity of the transcendental realm of traditional religion and its concomitant of epistemological indeterminacy. Soyinka deploys this opacity for metaphysical effect in his elaborations of Yoruba myth and Achebe’s essentially religious vision embraces it. Ngugi seems far more ambivalent about the occult nature of divine powers. In The River Between at least, he opposes Christian transparency and knowledge to the opacity of the Gikuyu religious sphere, and clearly prefers the former. The opacity generates epistemic anxiety both on the diegetic and extra-diegetic levels of the text. To deal with the issue of opacity, Antonin Artaud’s ideas are instructive as they signal a desire to break with the Western episteme. Artaud argues that an insurmountable problem, which is the condition of possibility of Greek tragedy, is precisely the opacity of the sphere of the gods. In Greek tragedy, the gods often operate randomly and with brute violence. George Steiner suggests of the tragic worldview: ‘The forces that shape or destroy our lives lie outside the governance of reason or justice.’ (144) Artaud’s desire to restore mystery and terror to the theatre through a theatre that enacted the cruelty of the universe is motivated by this argument. He claims: ‘We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads and the theatre has been created to teach us that first of all.’ (79) He links the terror of the sacred to epistemological uncertainty. From the perspective of traditional religion and the worldview evoked by tragedy, where the sacred appears both beneficent and maleficent, there is an acknowledgement of the inability of humans to entirely master the contingent, the random. In traditional African religion, the sacred then appears, in the language of Frederic Jameson, as a symbolic resolution of a fundamental contradiction, the contradiction of the sacred itself: the animistic universe of personal forces, where each personal act functions in an order of interconnectedness between the human/ social world, nature and the cosmos, is subtended by the impersonal dominance of contingency. The dominant relation of Nature to humanity is often the latter’s symbolic articulation. Celebrants of scientific rationalism would have us believe, however, that this law has been superseded. However, Hannah Arendt argues that from the beginning of Western philosophy the contingent has been unamenable to reason (see The Life of the Mind 27–32). It is for this reason that Aristotle rejects history. Although both history and tragedy ‘deal with actions that are by nature contingent […], not occurring always and in every case but admitting of being other than what they are’ (Nicomachean Ethics 3.3), tragedy converts the indeterminate into another form of contingency,

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more amenable to systematic philosophy, the contingency of ‘that which usually happens’ (Prior Analytics 32b 5–15). Michelle Gellrich argues that randomness and unpredictability are contained in tragedy for Aristotle by being integrated within a design, the tragic muthos (see 111–12). Therefore, Aristotle’s Poetics lacks any discussion about Fate, the gods or necessity – forces that impinge on the protagonist from without – as he desires to ground tragedy in a logos, a rational principle. Likewise, for Hegel, the contingent in tragedy and philosophy is eliminated by the ‘cunning of reason’. Where ‘for ordinary sight, only obscurity, accident and confusion seem to have control’, for the dramatist and the philosopher, ‘is revealed the real self-fulfilment of that which is in the end for itself rational and true’ (cited in Gellrich 40). Hegel and Aristotle attempt to resolve the contradiction between Reason and contingency by circumventing the latter. The sacred, on the other hand, allows for the acknowledgement of this insurmountable human problem. Achebe and Soyinka also have some common literary and thematic interests with the white South African writer, J. M. Coetzee. There is some affinity between Soyinka and Coetzee as their writings are consciously suspended over and posited on an abyss. Soyinka’s theorising of the transitional abyss can be related to Rudolf Otto’s writings on the non-rational factor of religious experience, the experience of the numinous. Otto’s mysterium tremendum also shares much in common with Achebe’s theory of the functioning of chi in Igbo cosmology. In terms of structure, content and process, Otto defines the numinous as almost identical to Kant’s aesthetic of the sublime. It would seem that with progressive secularisation in European modernity, with the displacement of God and the concomitant forms of transcendence associated with monotheism, we see a return to experiences of the imagination’s encounter with overwhelming natural phenomena which was thought in theories of naturism to explain the genesis of religion and to be the basis of ‘primitive’ religion. Kant’s idealism transforms the sense of nothingness experienced by the subject in relation to Nature into the subject’s experience of Reason’s transcendence. Through the stalled sublime, Coetzee refuses the resolution of the sublime moment in traditional and rational forms of transcendence. He presents us with a godless universe without the possibility of transcendence. Yet, paradoxically, his novels seem to be haunted by a metaphysical absence, an obsessive preoccupation with the absence of god (unlike Soyinka’s novels and plays). Alienation, loss of inter-subjective community and a withdrawal from history seem to be the affective and material repercussions of the refusal of transcendence.

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In much the same way as writers of European heritage confronted with the alien South African landscape in the nineteenth and early twentieth century are unable to read, translate or reclaim the landscape, the white writer/critic in apartheid South Africa balks before the damaged body of the black other. His characters, stuck at the limits of society, subjectivity and the text itself, unable to act, are forever lost, as Soyinka might put it, in the maul of tragic tyranny. An avoidance of a direct political vision and a specific view of the relation between writer and society distinguish Coetzee from the other writers considered in the book. Although Achebe, Ngugi, Okri and Soyinka use the narrative device of alienated subjects to various effects, character is secondary to historical and communal imperatives. Moreover, their very different political visions assert both the primacy of the political in African cultural production and the pre-eminence of the relationship between the writer and his or her society. In addition to engaging the socio-political rupture of gerontocracy, the literary and dramatic works in the West and East African writers posit and enact the inefficacy of ritual sacrifice. It is thus also through the maiming of rituals that these works enter into the tragic space that lies below social structure. It is interesting to note that in dealing with the transformations of traditional society Achebe, Ngugi and Soyinka adopt the discourse of the tragic. This represents a dominant trend in Anglophone African literature. In fact, in the three texts examined, the political emerges in these texts as the effect of the tragic (and thus the sacred). The linearity of the ruptures of ritual effectivity and gerontocracy is contraverted into aesthetic totality. In all three works, narrative and dramatic closure is achieved through the representation of ritual closure. However, these rituals, like the rituals of Greek tragedy, fail in their function within the traditional framework but succeed in inaugurating a new era. Precisely for this reason, Walter Benjamin distinguishes the tragic from the sacrificial ritual. Although tragedy is based on an idea of sacrifice, it fundamentally alters its meaning, thereby announcing the end of effective sacrifice. ‘[I]n respect of its victim, the hero, the tragic sacrifice differs from any other kind, being at once a first and a final sacrifice. A final sacrifice in the sense of the atoning sacrifice to gods who are upholding an ancient right; a first sacrifice in the sense of the representative action, in which aspects of the life of the nation become manifest’ (110) – a sacrifice both to the old gods and the new world. Raymond Williams, as Soyinka does in his theory of Yoruba tragedy, links the tragic to revolution. Rather than regarding tragedy as being engaged in any specific worldview, Williams

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insists that it is involved in a more persistent phenomenon, that of historical change. The evolution of the form, from the Greeks to the modern stage, reflects dialectically the historical progression of knowledge with its concomitant ruptures and continuities. Williams argues that tragedy arises whenever there is an extreme tension between belief and experience, when contradiction itself is experienced (154). Tragedy is therefore intimately linked with revolution, ‘a time of chaos and suffering’ (163). To prevent the exclusive attribution of disorder to the revolutionary impulse, which would designate it as anarchy, Williams argues for a dialectical understanding of how order and social continuity is the effect of tragedy and revolution. Tragic action, therefore, does not confirm the disorder of which it is the effect but is ‘its experience, comprehension and resolution’ (178). Order then is recreated by and is the result of the action of tragedy itself. The aesthetic totality of the texts analysed in ‘Directions’ thus also has a foundational aspect, in the sense of both founding a new order (an African modernity) and new literary paradigm – the modern African text. However, the desire for aesthetic totality is counterposed by formal fragmentation and heterogeneity. In Achebe’s Arrow of God, the text is split – the rationalist realist rhetoric gives way to a mythical narrative, producing an alienated realism. Bourgeois realism is not an option for the novel in Africa. Also, Soyinka’s use of mythical subjects and narratives in his plays is fragmented and incomplete. Kongi’s Harvest is unable to, or refuses to, reproduce the figure of the hero of the mythical tradition. The role of the hero is split between an absent figure and one that does not seem ready for his role as hero. Other mythical material is unable to reproduce itself fully in the modern form. The deployment of myth and ritual in Arrow and God and Kongi’s Harvest reflects the disjuncture between the old and new forms of cultural expression. In The River Between, this disjuncture translates into a conflict between the diegetic and extra-diegetic levels of the text. Ngugi’s deployment of a discourse of a religion of the Son is at odds with the gerontocratic organisation of Gikuyu traditional society. The formal fragmentation of the texts discussed reveals the historical contradictions inherent in the postcolonial moment. The double value of the sacred, structuring and delimiting the sphere of political relations, and its relative opacity places indeterminacy at the heart of epistemological and poltical concerns, an indeterminacy that institutes a specific form of morality. Power and Meaning (both in capital letters) are placed outside the sphere of humans in the symbolic order of the sacred, thus the exercise of power and the search for meaning is always constrained by this belief.

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The approach to the sacred has been premised, as pointed out above, on the belief of the persistence of the sacred in contemporary African society. Concerns with the sacred continue to be of relevance to a whole generation of younger writers and a potentially fruitful project would be to chart the changes in approach from the earlier generation of writers. The early novels of Kojo Laing and Biyi Bandele (-Thomas), the historical novels of Ayi Kwei Armah, Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger and some of his short stories, Yvonne Vera’s modernist works, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus address in very different ways the persistence and significance of traditional religious, cultural and political values, which both precede and survive the colonial assault, to the degraded postcolonial (and post-apartheid in Mda’s case) nation-state. In Purple Hibiscus, Adichie casts the process of healing of a young abused girl, Kambili, as a movement from a resigned silence to suffering and abuse to laughter and speech, from a privileging of English to an embracing of the Igbo language, and most importantly from a rejection and repression of Igbo religion and cultural practices to an understanding of their worth and value to the postcolonial condition. Mda’s The Heart of Redness, a literary exploration of the prophetic traditions and the history of the Cattle Killing Movement among the amaXhosa in nineteenth-century southern Africa, reveals the disastrous prophetic syncretism of Christian apocalyptic linearity and indigenous anthropocentric agency. The novel, in a similar fashion to Adichie’s text, maps a process of ‘healing’ as a return to, an embracing of, the ideas, religious and cultural values and history of the indigenous community. The sacred in Biyi Bandele’s early novels, however, becomes the bearer of the traumas and degradations of the postcolonial state. In the oneiric The Sympathetic Undertaker and Other Stories, the brutalities of the Nigerian postcolonial state are highlighted through the mental breakdown and schizophrenia of the protagonist (Rayo/Kayo) and in the shifting of the sacred into the world of his nightmares. The idea of the sacred may prove invaluable to the analysis of African texts which deal with questions of power, meaning and postcolonial identities, which is another way of saying that it may prove crucial to the analysis of much of African literature.

Notes Introduction 1. In what has come to be known as ‘bolekaja’ criticism, this position is militantly argued in Chinweizu’s and Madubuike’s Toward the Decolonisation of African Literature. See Gerald Moore’s Twelve African Writers for a similar but more nuanced argument. 2. In an interview with Jane Wilkinson, Okri refuses to acknowledge that Wole Soyinka or Amos Tutuola influenced him but readily cites the ancient Greeks as his literary forebears. He also claims similarities in the ‘worldviews’ of African and the ancient Greeks (see Wilkinson 87). 3. In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben contests Benveniste’s interpretation. He believes that Benveniste has fallen for what he calls a ‘scientific mythologeme’; the theory of the ambivalence of the sacred (75). He does not, however, provide any evidence for his claims of its inaccuracy as a theory. He is more interested in proving that the Latin homo sacer – he who may be killed and yet not sacrificed – cannot be related to the religious category of the sacred, but instead ‘constitutes the first paradigm of the political realm of the West’ (8). 4. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss begin their essay Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (1889) by pointing to the ‘ambiguous character of sacred things, which Robertson Smith has so admirably made clear’ (3). In 1915, Émile Durkheim, Mauss’s uncle, suggests that the ‘greatest service which Robertson Smith has rendered to the science of religions is to have pointed out the ambiguity of the notion of sacredness’ (409). Roberson Smith’s work proved crucial also to James Frazer’s argument on the evolution of society and his theory of magic, and to Freud’s Totem and Taboo. 5. Douglas claims that Frazer takes up a minor thesis of Robertson Smith, that of magic, and ‘sent comparative religion into a blind alley’ (19). 6. See Frazer, Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild, vol. 2, 23, 109 and Taboo and the Perils of the Soul 224. 7. The ethnography on which Durkheim based his entire theory has been faulted. Steven Lukes points out that Central Australian totemism, on which Elementary Forms is based, is highly atypical, even within Australia. He also argues that there is no evidence that Australian totemism is the earliest form of totemism, or that these Aborigines have the least developed kinship system or totemic organisation, or that it necessarily follows that a less technologically advanced people have a simpler religion (see Emile Durkheim, His Life and Work 477–9). 8. For a detailed discussion of Robertson Smith’s influence on Durkheim, see Douglas, Purity 19–21. 9. See Anthony Giddens, Durkheim 93. 10. The indication of a social-structuralist approach at this point is merely to point out that I have not chosen the epistemological route, which has 172

Notes

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

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received a contemporary treatment in Robin Horton’s ‘return’ to E. B. Tylor and, to a limited extent, James Frazer (see ‘Neo-Tylorianism: Sound Sense or Sinister Prejudice?’ and ‘Back to Frazer?’ ). Horton’s refutation of a distinctive religious experience and his definition of religion as ‘an extension of the field of people’s social relationships beyond the confines of purely human society’ (‘A Definition of Religion’ 31–2), do not seem particularly useful to my approach. In fact, Horton does admit that when he tried to make ‘intellectualist’ analyses of various African religious theories, he always came up ‘against the fact that they were above all theories of society and the individual’s place in it. Hence it was impossible to gain understanding of them without taking detailed account of the social organisations whose working they were concerned to make sense of.’ (‘Neo-Tylorianism’ 62) More details of Turner’s analysis will be explored in the chapters that follow. Turner’s argument has been criticised on various fronts. Max Gluckman suggests that Turner’s opposition between communitas and structure may be a false one after all as communitas has meaning only ‘within an established structure which is asserted again afterwards, and which indeed is asserted during the liminal period itself, by inversion’ (‘On Drama and Games and Athletic Contests’ 242). Brian Morris faults Turner’s characterisation of structure and claims that Turner failed to see the egalitarian aspects in certain structured relationships (see 122). In Chapter 3, we shall see that it was precisely the comradeship in certain structures of Gikuyu traditional society that led to the development of the anti-colonial nationalist movement in Kenya. Another problem I see with Turner’s argument is his use of Weber’s ideas of the ‘routinisation’ of charismatic authority (discussed in Chapter 3) to suggest the inevitability of the demise of communitas-inspired action, its ‘decline and fall into structure and law’ (The Ritual Process 132). Moreover, in his work after The Ritual Process, Turner came to see liminality in almost every facet of contemporary society and he eventually claimed a neurobiological basis for his social theory (see ‘Body, Brain and Culture’ 221–45). Mathieu Deflem suggests that Turner’s ‘social drama approach transgresses the static framework of classical structuro-functional analyses to reveal social structure in action’ (2). For a brief overview of Turner’s methodological framework, mode of analysis, and his innovative contributions to the study of ritual and religion in anthropology, one cannot do better than Deflem’s article. Mathieu Deflem points to other divergences of Turner’s symbolic analysis from French Structuralism. The structuralists emphasise mythical thought whereas Turner focuses on ritual performance. For the structuralists, oppositional symbols correspond with relationships between different categories of thought, whereas Turner foregrounds the efficacy of symbols in action. As Turner put it, he wanted to bring the ‘human co-efficient’ into the study of symbol in rituals (Dramas, Fields and Metaphors 33). Studies of the use of ‘myth’ have focused almost solely on the works of Wole Soyinka. See Stephan Larsen’s A Writer and His Gods, Ralf Hermann’s Creation Snake and Mobius Strip and Ketu H. Katrak’s Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy.

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16. Brenda Cooper’s Magical Realism in West Africa will be discussed in Chapter 4. 17. Acknowledging that there is no consensus among linguists, anthropologists, folklorists and literary critics on the definition of myth, Priebe defines myth as ‘a narrative that explains, explores or attempts to resolve the primary ontological, psychological and physical contradictions that man has recurrently faced’ (12). There are many shortcomings, as one might expect, with this definition. Armah, Awoonor and others are certainly not writers of myth unless all writers of fiction are considered as such. Also, his definition of myth would place a writer such as Milan Kundera, who deals, in his recent novels, with the recurrent problems of aging and death that humans face, as a mythical writer. Most importantly, however, is a logical problem, a petitio principio, in his definition of myth and his distinction between ethical and mythical writers. Thus, according to Priebe, a mythical writer has a mythical consciousness which ‘insists on viewing life with regard to open and perpetual contradiction’ in contradistinction to closed didacticism of the realist writer. 18. For Soyinka, Achebe is a mere ‘chronicler’, albeit a creative one (see Priebe 13 and Soyinka, ‘From a Common Backcloth’). 19. The naturist view of religion was forwarded most comprehensively by Max Müller (see ‘Comparative Mythology’ in the 1856 Oxford Essays). According to this view, religion emerges with the sensory perception of the physical world and with the imagination’s encounter with natural phenomena. The sense of being overwhelmed by nature translates, through a deformation in language, through a literalisation of the metaphoric into religious discourse. 20. For example, see Douglas’s Purity and Danger and Andrew Apter’s Black Critics and Kings 97–9. 21. Although the works of Amos Tutuola provide interesting material for an exploration of the sacred, I have chosen not to address them in a comprehensive manner in the book because they do not bring to the fore this encounter and, being transformed folktales, they provide, at least for me, less interesting material for the analysis of formal and thematic deviations from Western literary models. 22. There are fleeting references to the representation of the rupture of gerontocracy in some articles and books that deal with specific texts and writers. I shall refer to these when they arise in my discussion of the texts. However, to my knowledge, there has been no attempt not only to address this issue fully within a single text but also to provide a comparative basis by relating it to a range of texts.

1. Realising the Sacred: Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God 1. As a man of letters, Achebe derives axiomatic statements about the ‘Igbo world-view’ through an analysis of proverbs, cautionary tales and proper names. 2. In ‘The Writer in His Community’, written more than a decade after the chi essay, Achebe offers another element that limits the power of the individual

Notes

3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

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in Igbo society. He uses the fate of Ezeulu in Arrow of God as illustrative of the fact that the individual is ‘subject to the sway of non-human forces in the universe’ (39). The sociological perspective in the earlier essay is replaced by a religious one. In fact, Achebe clarifies his religious position – a belief in what he calls the ‘Powers of Event’, a Platonic-Christian hybrid, which function as the ‘repositories of causes and wisdoms’ (39). Whereas Achebe prioritises the ‘total community’ as the fundamental curtailment of the excessive expression of Igbo individuality in the chi essay, in the later essay he deems supernatural forces as ‘more important’ to this process (‘The Writer’ 39). David Carroll, C. L. Innes and Simon Gikandi hold, to a greater or lesser extent, to this view. Although I have chosen to focus on Arrow of God, my analysis of the significance of the sacred can also be related to Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the Savannah. Turner distinguishes communitas from ‘community’. The Latin word implies a ‘modality of social relationship’ rather than the more restrictive and particular ‘area of common living’ implied in community (96). Although Turner’s categories are important for my reading, a more detailed consideration of the opposition (and relation) between ‘structure’ and communitas in The Ritual Process reveals that Turner, rather than opposing structure to anti-structure, as the title of his book suggests, distinguishes between two types of structure, one hierarchical and the other egalitarian, thus restricting the radical potentiality of communitas. The four days correspond to one of the basic units of the Igbo calendar, the four-day ‘small week’. The Ikolo as symbol reveals what Turner has identified as the bipolar nature of the symbol in ritual; that is, its normative function, fundamental to moral order and social need, and its orectic role. The symbol, thus, ‘represents both the obligatory and the desirable […] an intimate union of the material and the moral’ (Turner, The Forest of Symbols 54). Numerous anthropological studies reveal the intimate relationship between forms of magical action; for example, witchcraft and the functioning of power in the African postcolony (for examples, see Geschiere, Ciekawy, and Rowlands and Warnier). Lukács insists on the importance of the recreation of a harmonious totality even in his Marxist phase. He derives the idea from Hegel and it is thus thoroughly idealist in its conception. The insistence on formal integration and harmonious totality in the literary work puts him at odds with Brecht’s more materialist aesthetics.

2. Dramatising the Sacred: Wole Soyinka’s ‘The Fourth Stage’ and Kongi’s Harvest 1. In the East, Buddhism, Soyinka claims, has a similar perspective to the Platonic-Christian tradition. 2. Plato’s desire to establish the primacy of rational philosophy over social reproduction also dethrones the gods.

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3. Soyinka may have been introduced to this view of the Ancient Greeks when he was a student, along with Christopher Okigbo, at the University of Ibadan. 4. See introduction for some examples. African critics from the Left have reproached Soyinka for what they see as the political conservatism of his plays, such as Death and the King’s Horseman (for example, see Jeyifo, The Truthful Lie 23–35) and others (for example, see Appiah) contest his assertion of African metaphysical unity. The first of these criticisms will be addressed in this chapter; the second, in the conclusion. 5. Little reference is made to modern African tragedy but it receives some clarification in the series of essays written after the Cambridge lectures. 6. In ‘Who’s Afraid of Elesin Oba?’ Soyinka repeats the distinction he makes between Yoruba religious and tragic art forms to counter Biodun Jeyifo’s and Femi Osofisan’s problematisation of his mythopoesis. Rather than, as Osofisan argues, a mythical intuition leading to a reconciliation with history, a passive resignation to historical forces, Soyinka’s prioritisation of Yoruba tragic art over its religious art emphasizes the combative, aggressive, revolutionary spirit of Ogun (see 72–3). 7. Later we shall see that it is actually the structure of the epic that provides Soyinka with a means of escaping the sacrificial logic of the ritual. 8. Early Alafin (kings) of the Yoruba Oyo Empire worshipped Erinle, the god of hunting. However, Abiodun, who reigned between 1760 and 1789, during the height of the power of the Oyo Empire, adopted his mother’s deity. As she was of the Bashorun line (the lineage group that led the warrior chiefs) whose chief deity was the god of warriors and smiths, he fused Erinle with Ogun, thereby establishing the supremacy of the Alafin over the Bashorun. It was this conflict between the king and his chiefs that was to lead to the demise of the Oyo Empire (see Barnes and Ben-Amos 58, and Lloyd, ‘Political and Social Structure’ 221–2). 9. Robert G. Armstrong contests Barnes and Ben-Amos’s association of Ogun originally with the African Iron Revolution and suggests that more a metaphysical idea may have been involved in the genesis of Ogun. He locates the beginning of Ogun’s ambivalent qualities to the purification rites of hunters (see Armstrong 29–38). 10. Due to the high mobility of Ogun devotees during the period of the great empires of West Africa, Ogun also was associated with the road (see Barnes 5). 11. The passage refers to a particular myth of Ogun that brings to the fore his uniqueness and his bond with humanity. In the myth deployed by the dramatist, Ogun hacks his way through the primordial abyss to unite the gods with humanity. 12. The difference in Achebe’s and Soyinka’s characterisation of the significance of the gods in African cosmology is similar to the difference between Ancient Greek and Roman views on the roles of the gods in their lives: the latter attributing authority, rather than power to the gods. 13. In ‘Chi in Igbo Cosmology’ Achebe offers the belief in chi – a god-agent responsible for the creation and fate of each individual – as indicative of the Igbo’s ‘fierce egalitarianism’ (98). 14. Although Soyinka does not refer to ase specifically, his enigmatic pronouncement that power stands outside history can be related to the Yoruba concept

Notes

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

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of ase. Ase was initially translated as ‘authority’ or ‘command’ (Abraham 71). Margaret Thompson Drewal, drawing on the work of Pierre Verger, gives a more precise definition. She suggests that it is a neutral force and that ‘in and of itself ase has no moral connotations; neither good nor evil, neither positive nor negative’ (‘Dancing’ 203). It is rather the ‘principle of all that lives or acts or moves , […] everything which exhibits power’ (Verger cited in Drewal, ‘Dancing’ 203). Friedrich Schiller writes: ‘All other beings obey necessity; man is the being who wills.’ (cited in Gellrich 253) The abyss and the quest echo the principal themes that Lévi-Strauss identifies in mythical narratives: the negation of non-existence and the need for self-assertion (Structural Anthropology 175). Oyin Ogunba suggests a variety of other reasons for the particular lack of critical interest in the play: the absence of metaphorical and metaphysical density when compared to Soyinka’s other major plays of the 1960s, The Road and Madmen and Specialists; Soyinka’s desire to write a ‘people’s play’ meant that he uses simple plot, staging, melodrama and broad humour; and most significantly M.M. Mahood suggested to Ogunba that the era which Kongi’s Harvest so faithfully portrays seems to have passed in postcolonial Africa (see 193–200). All references to Kongi’s Harvest come from Oxford University Press’s Collected Plays 2. See Duerden, The Invisible Present 30 and Gluckman, Custom and Conflict in Africa 29–32. Pierre Clastres argues that segmental traditional societies are not societies without a state in the sense that they have not yet reached the stage of state development but they must be seen rather as counter-stational societies – societies which institute social and political structures that actively prevent the centralisation and unification of power in the form of the State. I rely on John Pemberton’s analysis of the Iwa Ogun ritual, which he witnessed in 1977 in the northern Yoruba town of Ila-Orangun (see ‘The Dreadful God and the Divine King’ 105–46). For a similar viewpoint of Igbo ‘kings’, see Richard Henderson’s The King in Everyman. Note a Luba ritual chant: The chieftain is neither this nor that. The chieftain is neither good nor bad. He is at once guest, foreigner and host villager. He is the wise man and the fool. (cited in Girard, Violence 253).

24. The emphasis on genetic narratives betrays a desire to specify an origin and to locate the beginnings of an aesthetic tradition, to ‘authenticate’ contemporary cultural practices. This foundational drive can also be related to significance of epic form, and its ideologies, to Soyinka’s theory of tragedy. 25. I shall discuss this particular ‘geometry’ of time in Chapter 4.

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Notes

26. In ‘The Writer in a Modern African State’, written soon after Kongi’s Harvest, Soyinka criticised the writers and intellectuals who became ‘props of the state machinery’. They embraced ‘any –ism […] with a clear conscience’ and were turned into ‘demagogic opportunists of the new aggressive national consciousness’ (17). The angry tone of the article gives some indication of the impetus behind the ridicule the playwright invests in the characterisation of Kongi’s ISA. 27. See Hubert’s and Mauss’s essay on sacrifice.

3. Politicising the Sacred: Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between 1. ‘I am a prophet. A Prophet by birth and inclination,’ proclaims Jero at the beginning of the play. 2. Many prophets in East Africa predicted the coming of the white man and the destruction he would bring. Charles Ambler notes that the arrival of the colonial force had been predicted for three generations before the colonial and missionary penetration of the interior and that many prominent seers saw invasion and subjugation as inevitable, resistance as futile (see 222–9). Other prophets like Kinjitikile and Koitalel advocated resistance and led armed rebellions (see Adas 25–34 and Anderson 167). The historical basis for the prophecies of colonial conquest problematises Amoko Apollo’s claim that Ngugi’s deployment of this prophecy in The River Between represents an authorial bid to ‘transcend coloniality’ (37). 3. Kenyatta, in his Uhuru Day speech, likened the decolonisation process to the Biblical narrative of slavery and redemption, the Release of the ‘Children of Israel’ from bondage in Egypt (Suffering 19). Implicit in the use of this symbol is his unacknowledged role as saviour, as messianic hero delivering his people from the shackles of colonialism. 4. Legesse uses the term ‘demo-charisma’ in connection with the Rastafarian movement in which each individual adopts a charismatic stance. 5. See Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg; and Robert Fatton 44–5. 6. See Anderson’s and Johnson’s introduction to Revealing Prophets. 7. Charisma, Weber’s master concept for explaining social change, must, he claims, eventually become ‘routinised’ into either one or a combination of the other forms of legitimate domination; that is, rational-bureaucratic or traditional (see On Charisma 54). 8. John Lamphear argues in The Scattering Time that the prophet Lokerio transformed his previous role of diviner into a more centralising political authority among the Turkana (see 29–38). Kinjitikile, the leader of the Maji Maji Rebellion in Tanganyika, Michael Adas suggests, represented his authority as transcending clan and ethnic boundaries, thus superseding the authority of the elders (144). For a discussion of the eclipsing of the elders’ authority by the laibons among the Maasai see Waller 45–6 and the orkoiik of the Kalenjin see Anderson 165–7. 9. This claim will be interrogated by a reading of the religious symbols of The River Between. 10. John A. Stotesbury makes a more incisive argument on the Biblical and Christian references in the novel.

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11. Kenyatta’s account of Gikuyu culture in Facing Mount Kenya is inspired by Malinowski’s anthropology. Not only does this lead to a view that privileges a functionalist understanding of Gikuyu rituals and social organisation but also one that emphasises harmonious social interaction. While this serves well its interests as polemic, it leads to a partial account of Gikuyu culture. Therefore, the ethnographic details, which I derive from this book, are qualified by other commentaries. 12. While Simon Gikandi sees the holy tree as ‘the most obvious symbol of Gikuyu collective interests’ (43), Lee Haring argues that a single holy tree represents Biblical influence (84). 13. A ‘world without end’ suggests a prophetic discourse that relies on a cyclical view of history. 14. Amoko O. Apollo makes a much broader claim for the relation of prophetic knowledge to the textual evocation of the history and destiny of the Agikuyu in the novel: ‘The text suggests that the entire history and destiny of the tribe – from the tribe’s originary wholeness in immemorial time, to its complacent immediate past, to its calamitous colonial present, to its future organic restoration – is contained in the body of prophetic and historical knowledge handed down through generations of seer families.’ (37) 15. For a discussion of the significance of the myth of the Demi and Mathathi to the Gikuyu legal argument during the Kenya Land Commission see Lonsdale 258–65. 16. One of the rules of traditional governance was that one generation should hold the office of government for a period of thirty to forty years, ‘at the end of which the ceremony of ituika should take place to declare the old generation had completed its term of governing, and that the young generation was ready to take over the administration of the country’ (Kenyatta, Facing 189; and Leakey 29). 17. In the aftermath of the clitoridectomy episode, Johanna Karanja, the president of the Kareng’a movement, said; ‘We were anti-mission, not anti-God.’ (cited in Rosberg and Nottingham 126) 18. Waiyaki’s emphasis on education as the means to eventually eradicate the custom echoes the colonial state’s official policy on the matter (see Rosberg and Nottingham 123). 19. ‘Romantic love,’ Gikandi argues, ‘is an imaginative mechanism for overcoming the divisions embedded in the polis. In an ideal world, Waiyaki’s marriage to Joshua’s daughter would overcome the division between Kameno and Makuyu.’ (66) 20. In terms of Weber’s articulation of charismatic authority, the textual anagnorisis mirrors the process of the routinisation of charisma, what Turner calls the ‘decline and fall into structure and law’ (132). Therefore, Falco argues that tragedy is ‘the pre-eminent discourse of the failure of charisma’ (71).

4. Sacred Realism: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road 1. Brenda Cooper, who reads Ben Okri, Kojo Laing and Syl Cheney-Coker as magic realist writers, makes these distinctions on the basis of a putative difference in political outlook between the older and younger generation of writers.

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2. The collection of essays in Zamora and Faris’s Magical Realism: Theory, History and Community is exemplary of this trend. Zamora and Faris argue that magic realism is an ‘international commodity’ – postmodern in its orientation it is ‘especially live and well in postcolonial contexts’ (2). 3. Zamora and Faris argue that magic realism draws on ‘non-Western cultural systems that privilege mystery over empiricism, empathy over technology, tradition over innovation’ (3). 4. Connell notes that the ‘formal descriptions of magic realism that fundamentally depend on the dissimilarity of the two modes of thinking … begin to appear considerably less informative’ (103). 5. Faris, Martin, Stephen Slemon, Wilson, Connell and Brenda Cooper, all subscribe, in the most part, to Jameson’s materialist thesis, in attempts to locate magic realism contextually. The above theorists often make a case for an international postcolonial/ postmodern movement. 6. Kole Omotoso provided an historical basis for magic realism sometime before Jameson’s analysis. In 1979, drawing from Carpentier’s work, he related the term ‘marvellous realism’ to African novels that depicted the ‘juxtaposition of the belief system of one archaic economic and social system side by side with the belief system of another economic and social system, this time capitalism’ (26). 7. Jameson’s approach is subtended by the assumption that the magicomythical is effaced with the rise of capitalism and increasing social rationalisation. 8. For a discussion of the relationship between the modern African state and magical practices and beliefs, see Diane Ciekawy 119–41, Peter Geschiere’s The Modernity of Witchcraft, and Rowlands and Warnier 118–32. 9. A suggestive, if controversial, reading of Things Fall Apart could regard the District Commissioner’s Pacification tract at the end of the novel as being generated by the same form of rationalism that governs the rest of Achebe’s text. 10. Priebe, for example, distinguishes the realist, pedagogical and ‘ethical’ fiction of Achebe from the ‘mythical consciousness’ of the writings of Soyinka, Kwei Armah and Tutuola. 11. The protagonist of his first novel, the realist Flowers and Shadows, wiles his time away reading Achebe’s Arrow of God before his world falls apart. 12. Despite the harshness of her tone in her critique of MacCabe’s argument, Esther de Bruijn quite correctly points out that MacCabe overstates his case when he claims that ‘New Age spirituality – not postmodernism or postcolonialism – is the most important cultural vector shaping The Famished Road’ (2). 13. On the restriction of agency and the sequential rather than the consequential nature of Tutuola’s episodicism see Robert Plant Armstrong, The Affecting Presence 155–7. For a discussion of bodily transgressions in West African folktales see Robert Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa 30. 14. For a brief discussion of the fabular elements in Songs of Enchantment see Quayson, ‘Esoteric Webwork’ 154. 15. Both topoi have a long tradition in West African cultural production (see Quayson, Strategic Transformations 121–4).

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16. ‘The ability of the novel to criticize itself is a remarkable feature of this ever-developing genre.’ (Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’ 6) 17. Boehmer discusses the significance attached to historical retrieval in early postcolonial writing, which represented an attempt to negate this negation and constitute Africans as makers and subjects of their own history (see 194–9). 18. Leach opposed the commonly held view of the perception of cyclicality in the repetition of natural phenomena. For him, primitive peoples, including the ancient Greeks, regard time as alternating between polar opposites: night and day, life and death etc. 19. Alfred Gell shows that Bloch’s confinement of cyclical time to ritual contexts and hierarchical traditional societies cannot be sustained (see 84–5). Periodicity and recurrence, Gell argues, are the most salient features of time in agrarian societies and therefore there is nothing mystical about cyclical time (84). 20. With regards to Yoruba ritual, Andrew Apter argues that they are not ruled by ‘timeless traditions’, but rather negotiate history from multiple and often opposing perspectives (1).

5. The Stalled Sublime: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe 1. Otto’s characterisation of the amoral character of the numen (and its overpowering might over the individual subject) also shares similarities with Achebe’s theorising on the significance of chi to the Igbo worldview (see Chapter 1). 2. Bataille’s ideas on the sacred, discussed in Chapter 2, and Turner’s theorisation of the social category of communitas, can also be seen as versions of the numinous. 3. In Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Jean-Francois Lyotard explicates the Kantian version of the sublime: ‘The admixture of fear and exaltation that constitutes sublime feeling is insoluble, irreducible to moral feeling.’ (127) 4. His religious approach to his subject is clarified when he insists that those who have not had a ‘moment of deeply-felt religious experience’ should not bother reading his book (8). 5. For examples of these positions, see Splendore 59, Bishop 54, Marais 73, Macaskill and Colleran 446. 6. Coetzee characterises the defining feature of ‘white writing’ – that is, the literature of a people that are not quite European and not quite African – as a ‘literature of empty landscape […] [which] is thus a literature of failure, of the failure of historical imagination’ (White Writing 9). 7. Kwaku Larbi Korang agrees, regarding Coetzee’s disfiguring and disabling of Friday as a locking into place of blackness, a hedging in that underwrites a ‘quasi-essentialist interpretation of race and culture’ (193). 8. ‘Like Coetzee’s earlier fiction,’ Pechey argues, The Master of Petersburg ‘concentrates – only then to displace away from itself – a force of sublime dissonance.’ (71)

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9. As identification with the historical other is often thwarted in Coetzee’s novels, their discursive strategy operates outside a structuralist model, which relies on relation for meaning. Also, poststructuralist approaches that celebrate the playfulness of the text, the joy in the infinite deferral of meaning, seem far removed from the anguish the lack of meaning or connection produces in Coetzee’s characters. 10. Weiskel’s adherence to a structuralist approach and its methodology of deriving synchrony from diachrony, system from change, means that he relies on an arbitrary principle for its synchronic dimension – one derived from biology, that of homeostasis. Weiskel sees the sublime moment as ‘an economic event, a series of changes and the distribution of energy within a constant field’ (28). Therefore, Weiskel is forced to acknowledge that his model ‘requires and can in no way provide a dynamic element’ (37). 11. ‘The irresistibility of the might of nature forces upon us the recognition of our physical helplessness as beings of nature, but at the same time reveals a faculty of estimating ourselves as independent of nature and discovers a pre-eminence above nature that is the foundation of a self-preservation of quite another kind.’ (Critique 125) With this remark Kant clearly distinguishes his argument from Edmund Burke’s. Burke was original in insisting on the centrality of terror to the experience of the sublime: ‘Terror is, in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime. No passion so effectually robs the mind of its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.’ (101–02) For Burke (contra Kant) objects themselves are sublime and must contain power or extreme pain to be considered so. Hence the Burkean sublime is intimately related to selfpreservation. Kant’s self-preservation ‘of quite another kind’ suggests instead that the sublime experience occasions the calling-up of our moral vocation and thus founds our transcendent freedom. 12. Richard Begam interprets Friday’s writing of ‘O’s as an attempt to address himself as a ‘textual gap or a lacuna’ in the narrative – as nothingness – or as meaning the exact opposite by referring to Friday’s god of Defoe’s novel – as everything (123). 13. From the Greek for ‘no passage through’ or ‘impassable’, aporia refers, as it did in the Platonic dialogues, to a difficulty, an insoluble contradiction or a puzzle in logic. 14. Barton’s hermeneutics are further complicated by another important factor, which she admits must be taken into consideration before any meaning is derived from the picture. She asks: ‘Who was to say there do not exist entire tribes in Africa among whom the men are mute and speech is reserved to women? Why should it not be so?’ (69) The reading of images (texts), she implies, is culturally specific, and ideologically generated. The scene concludes with her emphasising the irreducible gap between reality and representation by tearing up the pictures (see Foe 70). Coetzee also draws attention to the codification of images by racial stereotypes (palm trees standing for Africa, a sickle-shaped knife to represent a Moor). 15. See Marais 66–81. 16. The pattern rehearses Todorov’s theory of the fantastic including the moment of hesitation, and Weiskel’s three phases of the sublime moment.

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17. S. L. Varnado also deploys Otto’s theological concept of the numinous to explore the Gothic imagination. 18. The Lacanian reading is most comprehensive in Teresa Dovey’s book (see especially her chapter on Foe). 19. Despite the numerous designations for the Other in Lacan’s work JacquesAlain Miller suggests that they have two common factors: ‘their dimension of exteriority and … their determinant function in relation to the subject’ (623). 20. See Attridge’s ‘Oppressive Silence: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and the Politics of Canonisation’, in which he argues that Coetzee’s novelistic strategies subvert the canon and critique the processes of literary legitimation. Parry suggests that as Coetzee does not refer to any ‘non-canonical knowledges’ and represents them as ineffable, he actually upholds the canon (158). 21. There are multiple registers in which Kristeva scores abjection. At times the abject refers to the subject experiencing the breakdown (of meaning, identity, order). At others, abjection refers to the defiled object/other, which for Kristeva is a non-object, a non-other as abjection operates outside the logic of desire or representation (65). Yet at still other times she relates abjection to the occasion, the impersonal moment that disturbs identity, order etc. 22. Turner refers to the acquisition of sacred knowledge as the ‘communication of sacra’ (see The Forest of Symbols 99–108). 23. The structure of rites of passage replicates that of the epic narrative (see Chapter 2). 24. In Waiting, however, the discourse of defilement and purification operates at the limits/boundaries of state power – at the frontier of the colony and in the torture chamber. Coetzee suggests that the torture chamber ‘provide[s] a metaphor, bare and extreme, for relations between authoritarianism and its victims’ (Doubling 363). For the Magistrate, the violence perpetrated in the torture cell sacralises the space and when he enters it, he wonders if he is ‘trespassing […] on what has become holy or unholy ground’ (6). Coetzee’s view of the sacred resonates with the double value, the coincidentia oppositorum, of the holy and unholy, I have been exploring in the dissertation. By perpetrating the most violent of rituals, torture, Colonel Joll, in the eyes of the Magistrate, becomes unclean, and, thus, the Magistrate’s central problem in his relation to the torturer is Joll’s apparent lack of need for a rite of purification – his ability to move ‘without disquiet between the unclean and the clean’ after he has trespassed into the forbidden (Waiting 12). The Magistrate asks the Colonel: ‘Do you find it easy to take food afterwards? I have imagined that one would want to wash one’s hands. But no ordinary washing would be enough, one would require priestly intervention, a ceremonial cleansing […] Otherwise it would be impossible to return to everyday life.’ (126) 25. Kant, in his ‘analytic’ of the sublime, writes of the pleasure, the one half of the ambivalent sentiment generated in the sublime encounter, as ‘disinterested’ (113). There is no desire on the part of the subject to possess the object that facilitates the sublime experience.

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26. Kant’s dynamical sublime repeats at the level of the individual the importance of contesting the power of Nature. The power of the individual’s imagination replaces the enactment of ritual challenge.

Conclusion: The Political as Tragic Effect 1. See Chabal and Daloz 65–6, Ciekawy 119–41, Geschiere’s The Modernity of Witchcraft, and Rowlands and Warnier 118–32.

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Index A abiku 125–7 abjection 154–61 Aborigines 7 Achebe, Chinua 1, 2, 3, 11–12, 14, 17, 21–44, 45, 86, 98, 116, 119–20, 130, 158, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 173, 174–5 acts of desecration 62 Adam, Barbara 132 Adas, Michael 90, 110 Adiche, Chimamanda Ngozi 171 aesthetic of the sublime 138, 142, 148, 168 Africa conception of time 132 contemporary society 50 contradictions 1 as cultural entity 47 dictatorships in 85 interconnectedness 1 and modern occult 163 newly independent 85 post-colonial 86, 89, 135, 177 pre-colonial past 39, 60, 108 as seen by colonial powers 130–1 sexual inequality in 16 status of heads of state 89 and time-lessness 130 unity 1 and the West 46–8 as without history/time 130 worldview of religion 46, 84 see also colonialism African Literature, Animism and Politics 12 Afrikaans poetry 142 agglomerative space 81 Agikuyu 90 alazon in drama 78 alienation 104–5, 168, 170 allegoresis 127 allegory in literature 115

amaXhosa 171 ambivalence of the sacred see seacred anagnorisis 104, 107 ancient Greece 4, 10, 39, 72, 123, 167, 169, 172, 176, 181 ancient Rome 72–3, 176 animism 11–17, 46, 57, 59, 127, 138, 168 Anthills of Savannah 120 anthropology and Durkheim 8 and theology 6 antithesis in rhetoric 25 antithesis structure 61 apartheid 160 Appiah, Anthony Kwame 47, 49, 123, 162, 164 archival realism 26 Arendt, Hannah 62, 64, 72, 167 Aristotle 64, 167, 168 Arrow of God 3, 14, 17, 21–44, 45–6, 56, 98, 120, 164, 165, 166, 170, 175 Artaud, Antonin 167 Arthur, Dr. J.W. 102 artist in African society 45 Ashforth, Adam 41, 108 auctoritas 31 Austin, J.L. 38 authenticity 1 authority and agency 77–85 in ancient Greece 72–3 in ancient Rome 72–3 charismatic 63, 69, 74, 76, 86, 99, 100, 103, 107–8, 111, 173, 179 crisis 75, 78 and divinity 64–9 political 81 and power 59–71 religious 81 types 63–5 versus power 71–7 Awoonor, Kofi 2, 12, 174 197

198

Index

B Bakhtin, Mikhail 78, 124, 129 Bandele, Biyi 171 Barnes, Sandra T. 52 Barthes, Roland 24, 25, 26, 40, 42, 61, 93 Bataille, Georges 15–16, 55, 181 Ben-Amos, Paula Girshick 52 Benjamin, Walter 169 Benveniste, Émile 4–5, 121, 172 Bernsten, J. 89–90 Bible see Christianity The Birth of Tragedy 51, 58 The Black Hermit 94 Blanchot, Maurice 5, 15 Bloch, Maurice 131 Boehmer, Elleke 130 Book of Isaiah 108 Buddhism 175 Burke, Edmund 182 C Cameroon 33 Campbell, Roy 142 Carpentier, Alejo 119 Carroll, David 25 Chabal, Patrick 163 Chanady, Amaryll 119, 129 charisma 63, 86, 178 demo-charisma 88, 178 charismatic authority/leadership 63, 69, 74, 76, 86, 99, 100, 103, 107–8, 111, 173, 179 Cheney-Coker, Syl 115–16, 121, 122, 179 chi 21–2, 168, 176 Christianity 87, 88–9, 91–4, 97–8, 101, 102–3, 108–9, 111, 112, 128, 132, 141, 144, 166, 167, 171, 175, 178 Church and oppression 91–2 Church of Scotland 87, 102 Clastres, Pierre 23, 177 Coetzee, J.M. 15, 137–60, 168, 169, 181, 182, 183 cognitive universals 131 colonialism 23, 25, 27, 34, 35, 39, 41, 90, 100, 111, 125, 129, 130–1, 144–5, 156, 164, 165, 166

communitas 8–11, 28, 29–30, 31, 34, 36, 40, 41, 43, 68, 104, 105, 106, 107, 110, 157, 166, 173, 175, 181 comparative linguistics 4–5 Connell, Liam 117 continentalist vision 2 Cooper, Brenda 115, 133, 136, 179 cosmic totality 2, 47 Cosmos and History 130 Critique of Judgement 144, 145, 146 Custom and Conflict 76–7 cycle of greed 133 cyclical dreams 128 cyclical time 131, 132, 134, 181 D Daloz, Jean-Pascal 163 A Dance of the Forests 56 das ganz Andere 57 Davis, Ann B. 49, 50 Death and the King’s Horseman 49, 61, 164 death sentence as scientific exorcism 75 defilement 159 Deflem, Mathieu 173 demagoguery 86 demo-charisma 88, 178, see also charisma Derrida, Jacques 26, 32 desecration 62 deus absconditus of modernity 160 Devil on the Cross 120 divine energy 5 Douglas, Mary 5, 6, 8, 57, 159 dramatic technique 51 Drewal, Margaret Thompson 13 The Drums of Affliction 8, 10, 11, 37 dual worldhood 117 Duerden, Dennis 64 Durkheim, Émile 6–8, 9, 13, 16, 24, 33, 37, 50, 131, 172 dynamic temporality 132 dynamical sublime 145, 146, 184 E East Africa 89, 111 Echevarría, Roberto González 116

Index eighteenth century sublime 148 eiron in drama 78 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life 6, 24 Eliade, Mircea 5, 81–2, 130 Eliot, T.S. 4 epiphany of absolute limitation 144 epistemic anxiety 41, 59, 108 epistemological anxiety 58 epistemological continuities 164 epistemological determinancy 41 epistemological indeterminancy 108, 167 epistemological transformations 86 epistemological uncertainty 41, 167 epistemology, African 46, 54 Erickson, John 117 essential gesture 82, 83 F Facing Mount Kenya 94, 97 Falco, Raphael 104, 107 The Famished Road 15, 115–36 fantastic 123, 125, 183 Faris, Wendy B. 115, 117 female body as sacred 16 female writers 16 Foe 15, 137–60 Fool in drama 70–1, 77 The Forest of Symbols 8, 10, 16 foundational social narrative 73 The Fourth Stage (Soyinka) 46, 48–52, 54, 55, 56, 60, 73, 137, 138 Fragments 120 Frazer, James 6, 172 Freud, Sigmund 6 Frye, Northrop 78 Fuentes, Carlos 119 G Gárcia Márquez, Gabriel 115, 118, 119, 123 Gauchet, Marcel 57 Geertz, Clifford 131 Gellrich, Michele 168 Geschiere, Peter 33 Gibbs, James 60–1 Gikandi, Simon 3, 23, 28, 49 Girard, René 53, 56, 68

199

Gluckman, Max 64, 76, 173 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 15 Goodman, Paul 9, 146 Gothic imagination 183 Gothic sublime 148 A Grain of Wheat 86–7, 88, 92, 94, 105, 108, 109 greed, cycle of 133 Greenhouse, Carol 132 H The Heart of Redness 171 Heidegger, Martin 5, 15, 42 Heilbringer 87 Henderson, Richard N. 32 hermeneutic sublime 146, 147, 182 hermeneutics of prophecy 87–8, 103 hierophany 82 historical junctures 86 Holy, idea of 137, see also sacred homo absconditus of apartheid state 160 Horton, Robert 12 House of Hunger 171 Hubert, Henri 57, 172 I The Idea of the Holy 5, 15 idea of the Holy 137 Igbo culture 2, 21–2, 23, 24–5, 26 illocutionary speech acts 38 Implicit Meanings 8 In the Heart of the Country 142 Indo-European Language and Society 4–5 The Interpreters 120 Irele, Abiola 12 ituika ceremony 100–1 J Jameson, Frederic 18, 51, 138, 167, 180 Jeyifo, Biodun 2, 49, 50, 52, 58, 60, 120, 164 K Kalenjin 97 Kant, Immanuel 15, 138, 142, 143, 144, 145–6, 160, 168, 182, 183

200

Index

Katrak, Ketu H. 49, 50 Kenya 89, 96, 166, 179 Kenyatta, Jomo 89, 94–5, 97, 103, 178, 179 Killam, G.D. 24 Kirk-Greene, A.H.M. 89 Kongi’s Harvest 14, 59–85, 98, 165, 170, 177 Korang, Kwaku Larbi 141 Kristeva, Julia 150, 151, 155, 157, 159, 183 Kwei Armah, Ayi 1, 2, 12, 120, 121, 171 L Laing, Kojo 120, 121, 122, 171, 179 Last Supper allusion 89 Leach, Edmund 131 leader cult 89 leadership, post-colonial 111 Lectures on the Religion of the Semites 5 l’effet du réel 93 legal/rational authority 63 leprosy 33–4, 35, 68 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 25, 27, 131, 177 liberation struggle 2 Life & Times of Michael K 143 The Life of the Mind 167 liminality 9, 12, 28–9, 35, 104, 139, 157 linear time 131–4 literary thematisation of epochality 86 literature see writing Lloyd, Peter C. 66–7 logocentricism 26 Lonsdale, John 87, 166 Lukács, Georg 24, 39, 40, 46, 54, 83 Lukes, Steven 7, 31 M Maasai 89–90, 97 MacCabe, Douglas 123 magic and culture 11 medieval 162 in post-colonial Africa 115–19

realism 15, 40, 115–19, 120–1, 122, 123, 179–80 and religion 6 and technology 162 theory of 172 use of term 16–17 Magical Realism in West African Fiction 115 magico-mythical in African literature 115, 136 Maji Maji rebellion 90 Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars 122 Maka culture 33 Man of the People 120 mana 5 Marechera, Dambudzo 171 Marxism 3, 118, 140, 142, 164 The Master of Petersburg 141, 181 Matagari 10, 108 mathematical sublime 145, 146 Mau Mau rebellion 87, 103 Mauss, Marcel 57, 172 Mda, Zakes 115–16, 122, 171 meaning, as a force 42 mental movement in the sublime 143 mercantile time 132 messianic narratives 86 messianic role and mythology 105 messianic visions 74 metaphoric sublime 144 metaphysical concepts 52 metonymic recuperation strategy 2 metonymic sublime 144 Miller, David 148 modernism 4 A Moment’s Notice 132 monster-child image 71, 80 monstrous doubles 56, 59 Moore, Gerald 2 Morris, David B. 148 mountains and plains in literature 109–12 Müller, Max 15, 174 mutilation 149–54 mysterium fascinosum 137 mysterium tremendum 137–8, 148, 149, 168

Index myth in African literature 1, 2, 12, 16, 22–5, 40 and animism 11–17 definition of 174 and epic quest 60 as ideology 25 importance of mythical narratives 73 and land restitution 100 magico-mythical in African literature 115 and messianic role 105 and metaphysical concepts 52 mythical model 82 mytho-ritual 60, 166 and religion 119 and sacred time 130 as timeless 133 Myth, Literature and the African World 2, 35, 46, 51, 60 Myth, Realism and the West African Writer 11–12 Myth and Society 3, 4, 48, 55 mythico-religious ideas 119 Mythologies 24 N narrative closure 38 modes 121 strategies 1, 38, 86, 165, 169 narrative of primal becoming 73 narrative of primordial genesis 73 naturism 15 Nazareth, Peter 92 Ndembu culture 8 New Age spirituality 123, 180 Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1, 12, 14, 86–112, 116, 119, 130, 163, 165, 166, 169, 170, 178 Ngwale, Kinjitikile 90 Nietzsche 51–2, 58, 61, 85 Nigeria 60–1, 115, 123, 125, 128, 129, 136, 171 Nigerian writing 12 Nkrumah, Kwame 85 novel and genre 124

201

Nuer 90 numinous see mysterium tremendum O Obiechina, Emmanuel 23 occult in modern Africa 163 Odun festivals 65–6, 177 Ogun 52–4, 55 Ojinmah, Umelo 23 Okri, Ben 4, 12, 15, 115–36, 158, 169, 172, 179 On Charisma 63 ontological continuities 164 opacity 167 oral tradition 1 Osofisan, Femi 49 Otto, Rudolf 5, 15, 57, 137, 138, 148, 149, 168 outcast-defiler 56 P pan-African agenda 2 Parry, Benita 140–1 patriarchal image 62–3 Patterns in Comparative Religion 5 Pechey, Graham 141–2 Pemberton, John 68 perlocutionary speech acts 38 plains and mountains in Ngugi’s work 109–12 Plato 3, 47, 64, 175 Poetics 168 polarisation 10–11, 14 political continuities 164 The Political Development of Yoruba Kingdoms in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 67 political imperative 2 political reality, postcolonial 120 political satire 61 The Political Unconscious 51 Polynesia 5 postcolonial politics 135, 177 Postcolonialism 86 power 23, 25–31, 33, 56, 57 absolute 78 and authority 59–77 gerontocratic division 80–1 versus authority 71–7

202

Index

Powers of Horror 154 Priebe, Richard K. 11–12, 13 primal phenomenon 2 primal reality 127–8 Primitive Culture 13 problem of proximity 56, 57, 80 profane and the sacred see sacred prophecy 89, 90, 91, 97, 99, 102, 103, 105, 111, 165, 178, 179 Purity and Danger 5 Purple Hibiscus 171 Q Quayson, Ato 12, 13, 48, 86, 121, 127 R rationality 163 The Raw and the Cooked 26, 131 Reading the African Novel 3, 24 Reading Chinua Achebe 23, 25, 28 realism alienated 40, 42, 44, 170 animist 127 archival 26 beyond 119–22 European 26 in Famished Road 122 magic 15, 40, 115–19, 120–1, 122, 123, 179, 180 sacred 122–30 in writing 119–20, 122 religion according to Müller 174 advanced 6 African worldview 46, 84 in Arrow of God 46 characteristics of 7 and charisma 63 forms in society 8 and hierarchal relations 62 and magic 6 metaphysical concepts 52 mysterium tremendum 15 and myth 119 naturist view 174 pagan 6 and politics 163 primitive 5–6

religious activity and reality 55 religious art 51 religious authority 81 religious conversion 36 religious experience 15 religious framework 2 religious treachery 42 rhetoric and politics 163 ritual 10, 50, 166 Semitic 5, 6, 8 taboos 5, 6, 22, 62, 68, 71, 72, 74 traditional African 123, 162 and war 102 Yoruba 59 see also Christian/Biblical Republic 3, 47 Ricoeur, Paul 93, 134 ritual 1 abuse of 62 in African literature 12 and alienation 59 and auctoritas 31 bipolarity 10–11 and the clan 165 condensation 10 and culture 11 in festivals 66 functionalist approach 50 ituika ceremony 100–1 liminal period/phase 9, 104 meaning in 38 metaphysical concepts 52 multiple meanings 10 mytho-ritual 60, 165 polarisation 10–11, 14 post-liminal phase 9 pre-liminal phase 9 primacy of language in 38–9 processual 8 purification 159 religious 10, 50, 166 of renewal 32 rite of passage 9 separation stage 9 significata 10 state 89 structure 9, 10 symbolic 10 time 131

Index as timeless 133 unification 10 victims 58 Yoruba 13 see also sacrifice The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure 8, 9, 10, 28, 29, 159, 175 The River Between 14, 86–112, 165, 166, 167, 170 the river in literature 104–9 Robertson Smith, William 5–6, 7, 8, 33, 172 Romantic sublime 138, 148 Rooney, Caroline 12, 127 royalty 70 Rushdie, Salman 115, 118 S sacred ambiguity of 33, 172 ambivalence 5, 8, 10, 14, 15, 53, 79–80, 127, 137, 164, 172 and chi 22 and class interest 24 and concepts of religion 16, 22 and conflict 62 definition 5, 14 and destruction of subject 39 dialectic 35–44 and divine imperative 109 duality 83 and the female body 16 and festivals 31–2 forces 7 idea of the Holy 137 liminality 139 in literature 12, 14, 21–44 and monarchial power 67 persistence of 171 and power 57, 67, 171 and profane 7–8, 9, 82, 132 propitious 7 realism 122–30 sacer 5, 35, 172 and social order 8 social structure 11, 29 and sublime 137–42

203

and supernatural 13, 33, 115 terror of 167 and theorising of tragic 46 time 130–6 and tribal societies 9–10 and uncleanness 5, 6 and the universe 5, 57–8 and Yoruba art 59 and younger writers 171 The Sacred and The Profane 82 sacrifice 36–8, 43–4, 49, 50, 56–7, 111, 126, 132, 160, 165, 172 satire 61 The Savage Mind 131 Schiller, Friedrich 177 Schism and Continuity in an African Society 10 Schopenhauer, Arthur 15, 51–2, 58 scientific rationality 163 Search Sweet Country 120, 121 Sekyi-Otu, Ato 96 self-ingestion 135 shapeless time 132 Sharma, Govind Narain 92 Slemon, Stephen 116 social and natural disorder 90 social rationality 163 social totality 39 societal rationalisation 118 Socrates 71 Soyinka, Wole 1, 2, 3, 4, 11–12, 13, 14–15, 16, 35, 42, 45–85, 86, 98, 116, 120, 121, 125, 128, 130, 134, 137, 138, 158, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 176 see also Wole Soyinka sparagmos 106, 107 speech acts 38 spirit-children 126 spiritual edge of the imperialist sword 91 spiritual universe 123 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 139 the stalled sublime 142, 161, 168 Steiner, George 56, 167 Stotesbury, John A. 88 Strategic Formations 121

204

Index

Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing 12, 48 strategies in writing 129 The Strong Breed 49 structural ties 9 structure 8–11, 26, 28, 29, 31, 36, 68, 70, 182 subjectlessness 158 sublime 137–61, 168, 181, 182, 183, 184 supernatural, and Famished Road 115, 122 symbolic articulation 167 symbolic complex 52 symbolic framework of Christianity 102 symbolic logic 107 symbolic oppositions 26 symbolic relations 61 symbolic value of landscape 146 symbolism and authority 75 and discrimination 157 dominant 10 instrumental 10 polysemy of symbol 93 in ritual 10 and the river 105 using nature 93 The Symbolism of Evil 93 The Sympathetic Undertaker... 171 T taboos 5, 6, 22, 62, 68, 71, 72, 74 Talbott, Rick Franklin 56, 57 theology, and anthropology 6 Things Fall Apart 26, 30, 166 Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World 71 Thomas, Keith 162 time, sacred 130–6 time-lessness 130 totality 46 totemism 172 traditional authority 63, 76, 83 traditional sublimity 158, 161 tragedy 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 60, 61, 73, 81, 168, 170 tragic action 61

tragic art 46, 49, 50–1, 54, 61, 84 tragic structure 70, 104 tragic tyranny 58–9 tragic victim 58 the tree in literature 93–104, 106, 109, 179 trickster figure in literature 129 Turkana 97 Turner, Victor 8–11, 16, 28, 29, 30, 37, 43, 57, 68, 104, 157, 159, 166, 173, 175 Tutuola, Amos 12, 121, 125, 130, 172, 174 Tylor, E.B. 13 U universal rationality 163 V Van Gennep, Arnold 8–9, 28 Vera, Yvonne 171 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 3, 4, 48, 55, 56, 70, 81 Violence and The Sacred 53 W Waiting for the Barbarians 143, 150, 152 Watson, Stephen 141 Watt, E.D. 73 A Way of Being Free 130 Weber, Max 3, 4, 7, 23, 28, 29, 62, 63, 69, 73, 76, 85, 89, 118, 162, 178, 179 Weep Not, Child 87, 88, 92, 103, 109, 166 Weiskel, Thomas 138, 143, 146, 147–8, 154, 182 West, compared to Africa 47 Western metaphysics 48 White Writing 142, 143, 145, 146, 149, 181 Wholly Other 148, 150, 153 Will concept 53–4, 58, 81, 165 Williams, Raymond 169–70 witchcraft 33, 127, 180, 184 Wole Soyinka 60 Woman of the Aeroplanes 122 writer as post-mortem surgeon 45

Index writing Anglophone African literature 169 foundational aims 129 myth 1, 2–4 novel and genre 124 postcolonial 1, 41, 86, 139 reaction 2 realist 1, 2, 3, 39

205

strategies 129 in the West 120 Y Yoruba culture/myth 2, 5, 12, 13, 46–7, 48, 49, 50–1, 52, 54, 59, 64, 91, 124, 134, 137, 165, 166, 169, 176, 181

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