Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Negotiating Afropolitanism Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore

146

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

In Verbindung mit Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

Negotiating Afropolitanism Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore

Edited by

Jennifer Wawrzinek and J.K.S. Makokha

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Cover image: “Lines of Attitude” British Council South Africa collaborative project, District 6, Cape Town, painted by the artists Phiks, Mode2, Faith47, Dreph, and Falko. Permission to reproduce the image granted by the artists and the British Council South Africa. Photograph courtesy of Lauren Joffe. Cover design: Pier Post Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 978-90-420-3222-4 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3223-1 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

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Simon Gikandi Foreword: On Afropolitanism

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J. K. S. Makokha Introduction: In the Spirit of Afropolitanism

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Part I: Border Crossings, Precarity, Syncretism Sim Kilosho Kabale Afropolitanism and Erudition in Francophone African Novels, 1994 – 2000

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Jens Frederic Elze-Volland Precarity and Picaresque in Contemporary Nigerian Prose: An Exemplary Reading of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

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Sola Ogunbayo Border-Crossing Through Myth-Making: The Unbarred Muse in Selected Nigerian Literature

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Fella Benabed Syncretic Worldviews in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters

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Part II: Dissidence, Absence, Transgression Catherine Kroll Dogs and Dissidents at the Border: Narrative Outbreak in Patrice Nganang’s Temps de Chien

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Jennifer Wawrzinek Addressing the Absent Other in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron

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Phillip Rothwell Nearly Ending the World the African Way: Pepetela’s Suspension of Capital’s Frontiers and Flows in O Quase Fim do Mundo

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John E. Masterson A Post-mortem on the Postmodern? Conflict and Corporeality in Nuruddin Farah’s Links

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Russell West-Pavlov Sociology/Matriology in Maghreb Writing: Space and Feminine Transgression in Fanon’s Sociologie d’une révolution and Chraibi’s La Civilisation, ma mere!

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Part III: Unhomeliness, Diasporic Narration, Heterotopia Emilia Ilieva and Lennox Odiemo-Munara Negotiating Dislocated Identities in the Space of Post-Colonial Chaos: Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting

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Nalini Iyer No Place to Call Home: Citizenship and Belonging in M. G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

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Remmy Shiundu Barasa and J. K. S. Makokha Weaving Exilic Narratives: Homodiegetic Narration and Postcolonial Translocation in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Admiring Silence

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Maria Jesus Cabarcos Traseira Between Diasporic Identity and Agency: Versions of the Pastoral in Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way and Mahjoub’s Navigation of a Rainmaker

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Godwin Siundu Locating Cultural Ambivalence and Afropolitanism: Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam as Heterotopia in the Fiction of Dawood and Vassanji

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Part IV: Language, Borders, Spaces Mikhail Gromov Across the Language Border: The Case of Bilingual Writers in Tanzania

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Alina N. Rinkanya Sheng Literature in Kenya: Socio-Linguistic Borders and Spaces in Popular Poetry

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Mbugua wa Mungai “Na Hawa Watu Lazima Wakuwe Serious!: FM Radio Spaces and Folkloric Performance of Cosmopolitan Identities in Kenya

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Michael Wainaina Empire Speaks Back: Authenticity, Folk Voices and Re-Presentation of Across in Gikuyu Radio Narratives

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Contributors

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Acknowledgements We wish to express our gratitude to Russell West-Pavlov of the English Department, Freie Universität Berlin, whose financial support and encouragement enabled this project. This volume is the result of commitment by scholars both in Europe and abroad. We recognise and salute the efforts of all the authors who contributed individual chapters to this book. We also wish to extend our thanks to Gbemisola Adeoti, Babatunde Ayeleru, Nicoletta Brazzelli, Reuben Chirambo, Eleni Coundouriotis, Ruth Finnegan, Russell G. Hamilton, Frederick Kang’ethe Iraki, Stephanie Jones, Sim Kilosho Kabale, Samuel Kasule, Susan Kiguli, Sue Kossew, Mike Marais, Grace Musila, Evan Mwangi, Kimani Njogu, Hamza Njozi, Joyce Nyairo, Dan Ojwang, Garnette Oluoch-Olunya, Tony Simoes da Silva, Pippa Skotnes, Maria Suriano, Veronique Tadjo, Saeed-Reza Talajooy, Maria J. C. Traseira, Daria Tunca, Anastasia Valassopoulos, Alex Wanjala, Chris Wanjala, Peter Wasamba and Garth A. Myers. We would like to extend a special note of appreciation to Simon Gikandi, Harry Garuba, Bernth Lindfors, and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni for providing critical insights and useful suggestions for the improvement of various parts of this collection. We would not have been able to complete this project without the untiring assistance of Jens Frederic Elze-Volland on all matters great and small, the careful and meticulous sub-editing of Judit Minczinger, and the help of Caleb Sivyer and Jörg Kaufmann on the layout and formatting of the final manuscript.

Simon Gikandi

Foreword: On Afropolitanism It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that all current debates about the future of Africa in regard to the production of knowledge and the role of the creative imagination in the process are attempts to overcome the malady of Afro-pessimism – the belief that the continent and its populace is hopelessly imprisoned in its past, trapped a vicious cycle of underdevelopment, and held hostage to corrupt institutions. Afro-pessimism, which emerged as the figure of representing Africa during the political and economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s, has become the dominant idiom through which African experiences are recuperated and filtered. Fitting neatly into traditional Western notions of Africa as the “other” of modern reason and progress, Afro-pessimism has proven hard to dislodge because it seems to be the only logical response to political failure and economic stagnation in Africa. Increasingly, however, a younger generation of Africans – and scholars of Africa – is beginning to question this idiom and to recover alternative narratives of African identity in search of a hermeneutics of redemption. The idea of Afropolitanism, the rubric around which the essays collected in this book are organised, constitutes a significant attempt to rethink African knowledge outside the trope of crisis. Initially conceived as a neologism to describe the social imaginary of a generation of Africans born outside the continent but connected to it through familial and cultural genealogies, the term Afropolitanism can now be read as the description of a new phenomenology of Africanness – a way of being African in the world. Afropolitanism may sound awkward as a term, but there is no doubting that it has been prompted by the desire to think of African identities as both rooted in specific local geographies but also transcendental of them. To be Afropolitan is to be connected to knowable African communities, nations, and traditions; but it is also to live a life divided across cultures, languages, and states. It is to embrace and celebrate a state of cultural hybridity – to be of Africa and of other worlds at the same time. Once upon a time, this kind of hybridity was conceived as the source of deep cultural anxieties and psychological division; narratives and essays were produced to imagine the lives of Africans hopelessly, and sometimes tragically, torn between cultures, languages, and traditions. Not any more. For a new generation of Africans, being African and American, African and German or Swede or Scottish is no longer considered to be a contradiction in

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terms; it is simply a recognition of how the structural disadjustment of Africans in the crisis of the present has become an opportunity for reimagining new narratives of the future. To live between cultures or languages is one important way of coping with the disorientation of moral geographies at the end of modernity. But the discourse of Afropolitanism goes far beyond the existential situations of Africans born across languages, nations, and identities. As the essays in this collection illustrate vividly, Afropolitanism reflects a new attitude towards Africa and the wider world in which it is a part. Instead of conceiving the massive migration of Africans to other continents and countries as a loss, the idiom of Afropolitanism embraces movement across time and space as the condition of possibility of an African way of being. Dispersal implies a new ontology, not a tragic drama of sorrow. Here, in worlds that were furthest removed from Africa, from Iceland to China, expatriated African imaginaries and knowledges are turned from an intellectual deficit to a cultural bonus. As its title suggests, Negotiating Afropolitanism goes beyond earlier manifestos to provide specific examples of the way in which local experiences encounter global narratives and how African writers, artists and intellectuals manage the cultural traffic that takes place on both spheres of social life. In addition to the rigour with which the contributors approach the task of mapping these new identities and their modes of formation, one salient aspect of this book is its ability to take up and expand the ideas of Afropolitanism first proposed by Achille Mbembe and Taiye TuakliWosornu. Almost each contribution complicates the relationships in which the narrative of African difference, hybridity and multiplicity is measured against, or reconciled to, the continuing dream of a shared identity or the vision that informs the continent that goes by that name. In other words, the hybridity of Africa and the cosmopolitanism of its subjects does not imply the negation of horizontal social relationships, local affiliations and the modes of knowledge that they generate. Indeed, many of the essays here, especially the ones dealing with popular cultural forms, provide powerful testimony to one of the most remarkable transformations in the condition and form of the African social imaginary – the paradoxical situation in which the withering or delegitimation of the African state has given credence and authority to both the idea of a global Africa and its particular localities. Once seen as the major threat to the authority of the postcolonial state, the vernacular and the region have become, together with the transnational, the only sites in which African futures can be guaranteed.

Foreword: On Afropolitanism

11

A celebration of Afropolitanism should also, of course, consider the negative consequences of transnationalism, the displacement of Africans abroad, the difficulties they face as they try to overcome their alterity in alien landscapes, the deep cultural anxieties that often make diasporas sites of cultural fundamentalism and ethnic chauvinism. Still, this book is outstanding in many respects. It carefully maps the stories Africans tell themselves as they respond to transnational challenges, of the complicated relationships between regions and traditions within Africa, and of the role of the so-called “Africans of the world” in building cultural bridges between countries, languages, and localities. But perhaps the most compelling aspect of this book is to be found in the range of topics it takes up and the diversity of methods and contributors invited to rethink Afropolitanism. Why is this important? For several years now I have been concerned about the domination of debates about Africa by a small privileged elite located in American and European universities. I have expressed the worry that the power and authority of this group as the authorised arbiter of knowledge about Africa has been achieved at the expense of work produced in African universities, which has increasingly been marginalised or delegitimised. This book is an outstanding example of the difference African sites of knowledge make in global debates. For here we witness a multiplicity of theoretical approaches, ranging from semiology and sociology, diverse linguistic traditions, deep literary histories and most significantly a conception of Africa that recognises its complexity, its vivaciousness, its imagination, and indeed its own particular way of seeing and being in the world. J. K. S. Makokha and Jennifer Wawrzinek are to be commended for recognising and reauthorising African modes of knowledge.

J. K. S. Makokha

Introduction: In the Spirit of Afropolitanism In his 2001 introduction to a special edition of the African Studies Review at the dawn of the new century, entitled “Ways of Seeing: Beyond the New Nativism,” the prominent social scientist and cultural theorist Achille Mbembe offered a description of the newness of the new century in African terms. He pointed out the various processes that were creating flows and movements from issues and impasses across the social, political and cultural spectrums of the continent. In his own words: The rise of new sites of accumulation, the reconfiguration of economic and political systems, the recomposition of gender relations, the fragmentation of nations into competing war-zones and “fiefdoms,” the struggles over particular sites and resources, the partial imposition of a market road to capitalism: All are as much a part of a complex reworking of old historical social relations as a response to changed circumstances. Over and above this, the various forms assumed by these processes in different countries are the expression not of a state of anomie, but of a process of transnationalization. The rhythms and logic of this process are played out in multiple ways. Almost everywhere, however, the process itself accentuates the conflict between a cosmopolitan and a nativist vision of identity and of African culture. (1)

His observation isolates some of the features, old and new, that are emerging, in old and new ways, and contributing towards the production of the socalled African condition at the turn of the century. In an attempt to find a way out of the conflict between the cosmopolitan and nativist descriptions of identity and culture, new terms have emerged. The spirit of the cultural reawakening in a post-Apartheid South Africa has given rise to the intellectual clarion call for an African Renaissance. Initiatives to reconfigure economic systems across the continent to respond to transnational flows of capital have given rise to approaches such as the optimistic setting up of The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) in 2001. In the important summit of the African Heads of States in Addis Ababa held in February 2009, the African Union devoted a whole session to debate the formation of a Unites States of Africa on the path of a slow regional integration approach which will enable countries in similar regions to coalesce into regional units that will in turn ultimately coalesce to form a single continental political unit. The other option, favoured by the current head of the AU, the Libyan President Colonel Muammar Gaddafi called for the acceleration of the

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integration of the whole continent under a single government with a cabinet drawn from each of the member countries commanding different executive jurisdictions. One may choose to view these happenings as disparate events and processes without any direct relation to each other. Yet it is obvious that there are some common threads that bring the disparate developments together in efforts towards the definition of what Mbembe calls the “New Ways of Seeing” Africa today. The continental desire to formulate responses to transnational challenges that manifest themselves across the continent in political, security-based, economic and social terms is a major guiding spirit that weaves the concerns of nations and regions in 21st Century Africa. Whether one talks of a philosophical movement such as the African Renaissance popular in the South of Africa, an economic framework such as NEPAD popular in the West of Africa or a renewed effort to cultivate a new pan-African spirit or state espoused by the well-known efforts of President Gaddafi, the common thread running through these realities is that, once again, like in the 50s and 60s, the continent and its regions, rather than singular nations, are the theatres of problem-identification, reaction and aspirations. Let us ponder this conviction via the arena of culture and society. The impact of the end of Apartheid in South Africa in 1994 ushered in a new political and economic dispensation in the southern part of the continent in particular, and the whole continent in general. Laureate Wole Soyinka has highlighted the umbilical connection between South Africa’s fate and that of the rest of the continent in a recent workshop bringing together South African writers and writers from the Francophone African countries in Johannesburg. 1 The liberation of South Africa at the turn of the previous century, which was celebrated across the continent, and indeed the world, ushered in a crucial era that continues to witness the rise of the continental powerhouse and its increasing role as a leading player, if not leader, in the political, economic, social and especially cultural politics of Africa in the 21st century. South Africa today is the location of a cosmopolitan African culture, powered by the South Africans themselves as well as artists, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, migrant labourers, investors from the rest of the continent, with countries such as Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya and Zimbabwe playing a crucial role, and others from farther a field such as African Americans and Western Europeans. This observation is especially true if one is to argue from 1

See Pius Adesanmi’s report “The Many ‘Spaces’ of the African Writer: The Meeting of African Writers in Durban, South Africa, 2-7, 1998.”

Introduction

15

the standpoint of the urban and urbane trends in the cities of South Africa, from the tourist hub of Cape Town to the cultural focus of Johannesburg and the seasoned Durban. From these nuclei, culture, fashion and a new way of being African is being transmitted, consciously and subconsciously, through media and other modes, to other cities such as Maputo, Gaborone, Windhoek, Nairobi and further North. The location of the widely popular Big Brother African series, the prestigious KORA music awards, the pan-African Channel O music channel, the impending World Cup 2010, leading academic journals such as English Studies in Africa and fine centres of learning and research such as WISER, all in the new South Africa, has ensured the systematic cultural (re)connection of the former pariah to the rest of post-colonial Africa, south of the Sahara. The cultural impact of post 1994 South Africa on the cultural trends and patterns across sectors such as fashion, literature, society and the arts deserves further scholarly investigation across the humanities. 2

*** Understanding the continental impact of a new South Africa with its panAfricanist intelligentsia, both citizen and migrant, as well as its advanced urban-centred resources is crucial for us. Mbembe, one of the leading thinkers on issues of cosmopolitanism in recent African intellectual discourses, is based at WISER, a distinguished research centre at one of the competitive African universities, the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, a fulcrum of culture and social trends in the new South Africa. In a bid to elicit a response, a continental response, to the forces of nativism that privilege primary identities and an autochthonous perspective on African identities and African culture, Mbembe is credited for introducing a new term 2

The forces of the local and nativism are also hindering such expansion and spread of cultural cosmopolitanism in Africa. Scholars are talking about “the return of the local” and “increasing marketisation” as well as commodification of ethno-histories, ethno-cultures and ethno-identities in such communities as the Zulu in South Africa. See Peter Geschiere’s The Perils of Belonging and John L. and Jean Comaroff’s Ethnicity, INC. These insights discuss ways in which nativism hinders or fails to consolidate some of the gains of cosmopolitanism in contemporary Africa. Afropolitanism becomes problematic in such contexts as well as within the politics of narrow nationalisms re-emerging across parts of the continent and addressed in Sara Dorman, Daniel Hammett and Paul Nugent’s Making Nations, Creating Strangers. How else should we understand the paradox that Mbembe’s Johannesburg is a fulcrum of forces of cosmopolitanism as well as a theatre of the xenophobic attacks of 2008?

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into the continental cultural discourse, Afropolitanism. He arrived at the term after his scholarly investigations of the roles and nature of culture and society in a South Africa in transition using cosmopolitan Johannesburg as his case in point. The term has since become a buzz word and, as such, is interpreted or defined by different people and associations in different ways. A review of its deployment in the arena of culture and society across contemporary Africa is useful as we negotiate the references and impulses the term aspires to describe. There are two main descriptions and deployments of the term Afropolitanism currently acknowledged in cultural discourse. One of the interpretations is associated with Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu in her widely acknowledged descriptive article, “Bye-bye Babar (Or What is Afropolitan?)” Her definition has mainly been deployed in the realm of popular discourse and the arts, appearing in many articles addressing issues of architecture, art, lifestyles, fashion and design as well as in cyberspace (e.g., Facebook). She defines the Afropolitan as “the newest generation of African migrants.” They are the Africans or children of Africans who moved to the West in the 1960s and 1970s for various reasons. Most of them are now embodiments of inter-cultural or inter-racial union between Africa and the rest of the world, especially the Occident. She observes that: You’ll know us when you see us by our funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics and academic successes. Some of us are ethnic mixes e.g. Ghanaian/Jamaican, Nigerian/Swiss; others are cultural mutts: American accents, European affect, African ethos. Most of us are multilingual: In addition to English and a Romantic language or two, we understand some indigenous language and speak a few urban vernaculars. […] We are Afropolitans – not citizens but Africans of the world. (“Bye-bye Babar”)

The definition is clear and so are the bearers of the label. African immigrants and citizens of African nations living in the West are automatic Afropolitans. Their dispersal across the world cities is an ongoing phenomenon powered by personal ambition, political strife, the dynamics of transnational capital and corporate culture as well as the quest for a better life away from an “unpromising” continent. Some of the notable Afropolitans in the field of culture and literature identified by Tuakli-Wosornu include the US based, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie and the UK novelist Diran Adebayo who has Nigerian roots. The founder-editor of Trace, Claude Gruzintsky, architect David Adjaye and the artist Keziah Jones are defined as exemplary Afropolitans. This list can be broadened to include the post-1990s icons of African literature such as influential Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina

Introduction

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who runs the Chinua Achebe Center at Bard College, Hisham Matar of Libya, Laila Lalami of Morocco, Marie Ndiaye of France/Senegal, Alain Mabanckou of Congo-Brazzaville, Abdourahman Waberi of Djibouti, Helon Habila of Nigeria and his peers, Calixthe Beyala of Cameroon and her compatriot Patrick Nganang, M. G. Vassanji and Shailja Patel of Kenya, as well as the Zimbabwean short story writer Brian Chikwava just to mention a few names across several regions of the continent. These writers rose to prominence in African literary circles at the turn of the century and have become increasingly familiar to most African readers and critics during the past decade of the 21st century. They are both cosmopolitan and internationally acclaimed. Most of them live outside the continent but remain committed to the cultural politics of their own native/natal nations and the continent at large. They are the cosmopolitan African writers – a new generation that can boldly lay claim to the name, “the Afropolitan generation.” The name is in keeping with Tuakli-Wosornu’s. In the view of the writer: What distinguishes this lot and its like (in the West and at home) is a willingness to complicate Africa – namely, to engage with, critique, and celebrate the parts of Africa that mean most to them. Perhaps what most typifies the Afropolitan consciousness is this refusal to oversimplify: the effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to honour what is unique. Rather than essentializing the geographical entity, we seek to comprehend its cultural complexity; to honour its intellectual and spiritual legacies; to sustain our parent’s values. (“Bye-bye Babar”)

It is this anti-essentialist stance and the desire to complicate primary roots as well as localised identities that connects Tuakli-Wosornu’s description of Afropolitanism to Mbembe’s own. The two cultural critics take different epistemological approaches, using different discursive trajectories to describe their “new ways of seeing” Africa at the dawn of the 21st century. Nevertheless, they both describe a novel critical term, at whose core are questions of borders and spaces of new African identities. These questions, as we shall see, are, interestingly, the themes that are prioritised and discussed in the essays collected in this volume. The re-examination of how spaces and borders can be engaged anew, within the parameters of literary criticism, to bring out the nexus between history, culture and identity, with the continent as a backdrop is the concern that connects both the reflections of TuakliWosornu and Mbembe together with the collective of authors whose essays we present to you. Achille Mbembe’s thinking has consistently, and at times provocatively, asked us to rethink the limits and loculi of questions such as: Who is an

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African? Perhaps the debate needs to be kept alive even as provisional answers lead to more questions being asked. One such way of going about it may lie in a constant re-examination of such questions, at the core of African literary criticism, in light of the diversity and history of the continent as well as its present. In his widely published article on “Afropolitanism,” Mbembe posits: For many to be an African is to be ‘black’ and therefore ‘not White,’ with the degree of authenticity being measured on the scale of raw racial difference. Thus, all sorts of people have a link with, or simply something to do with Africa – something that gives them the right ipso facto to lay claim to ‘African citizenship.’ There are naturally, those called Negroes. They were born and live in African states, making up their nationals. Yet if Negro Africans form the majority of the population in Africa, they are neither the sole inhabitants nor the sole producers or art and culture of the continent. (26)

He proceeds to point out the presence and influence of peoples from the Far East, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe in various parts and nationstates of Africa. Such influences have always been occluded when nativist interpretations of culture and the claim to autochthonous cultures are invoked as the standards of measurement as far as African cultural production, whether literary or otherwise, is concerned. The implicit contradictions in such claims are many and have been discussed widely by cultural thinkers such as Chinua Achebe and cultural theorists such as Anthony Kwame Appiah, among others. 3 In so far as the reference and location of Afropolitanism is concerned, both Mbembe and Tuakli-Wosornu hold common views. They both identify the Africans at home and abroad who subscribe to anti-nativist and cosmopolitan interpretations of African identities and cultures as Afropolitans. Such Afropolitans abound in the continent’s bustling Afropolises such as Cape Town, Accra, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Lagos and Abidjan, according to Mbembe. They also are a growing demographic in Western metropolises such as Paris, London, New York and Toronto. However, Mbembe departs from Tuakli-Wosornu when temporality is factored into the definition of Afropolitanism. Unlike the latter, who chooses to view Afropolitanism as a strictly novel phenomenon whose initial appearance can be traced to post-colonial translocations, the former avers that Afropolitanism, as a form of manifesting cosmopolitanism in Africa, is an ancient phenomenon evident across centuries of continental history. He

3

For both references, see Appiah’s article and quotes from Achebe in it, “African Identities.” See also Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, 101-54.

Introduction

19

elaborates this point further, using what he calls the “worlds-in-movement” approach. The Cameroonian scholar sees Africa as a historical donor of cultural trends and transporters to other continents, especially Europe and the Americas as well as a recipient of the same. Intercultural hybridities and transnationalisms, rather than cultural purity and essentialisms, are the signature marks of an African cultural stamp. He observes: When discussions arise about aesthetic creativity in contemporary Africa, and even knowing who or what is an ‘African,’ the political and cultural critics tend to pass over in silence this historical phenomenon of worlds in movement. (S)een from the viewpoint of Africa, the worlds in movement phenomenon has at least two sides: that of dispersal as already mentioned and that of immersion. Historically, the dispersal of populations and cultures was not just about foreigners coming to settle in our backyard, in fact, the precolonial history of African societies was a history of people in perpetual movement throughout the continent. It is a history of colliding cultures, caught in the maelstrom of war, invasion, migration, intermarriage, a history of various religions we make our own, of techniques we exchange and of goods we trade. The cultural history of the continent can hardly be understood outside the paradigm of itinerancy, mobility and displacement. (“Afropolitanism” 27)

Afropolitanism is the spirit that espouses this “paradigm of itinerancy, mobility and displacement.” It is the spirit that emanates from those cultural narratives and fictional memories being generated by migrants and their descendants who live in racial minorities across Africa, such as the Asians of Eastern and Southern Africa as well as the immigrants (and their descendants) of African descent currently located in the Diaspora. Afropolitanism as the mind of movement, naturally, calls for innovations in modes and genres used to transport contemporary cultural narratives and motifs. And in so far as the continent of Africa is a metaphor and consequence of movement and its attendant necessary impulses of innovation and tradition, Afropolitanism splits itself into a term that is both old and new. This is a term that has probably existed in Africa for a long time, expressed in the vocabulary of the hundreds of languages and dialects across the continent, or preserved in the memories of forgotten and living griots. In order for one to enthrone Afropolitanism as a new critical term within the purview of African literary and cultural criticism today, it is important, as we have argued, to recognise that its currency and value obtains from its phenomenal rather than conditional quiddity. The phenomenon of displacement and mobility across the limits of African spaces – physical, epistemological and disciplinary – changes across teleology and geography but the condition of humanity, or Africanity, remains existential across the expanse of the continent. The journey motif and the figure of the migrant are inherent, perhaps even essential, in the African condition but the phenomena

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that (in)forms the existence of the two vary across time and space. New phenomena arise with the passage of time. The rise of such phenomena can be attributed to shifts in spatial-temporal dimensions and their contexts. Boundaries are normally traversed or transgressed in such scenarios but the basic element, universal essence, of such experience is irreducible. It is retained ad infinitum. Migration can forge new identities but the wanderlust that sets migrants on the journey across borders to new spaces and ways of being is as transcendental as it is elementary. The contexts of phenomena arising from flows of global capital and the present stage of globalisation, postcolonial translocations, constraints on transnational migrations in light of recent events such as 9/11 and the recent failed 25th December 2009 terror attack in the US, recent political stalemates in Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Madagascar and Zimbabwe, the radical militancy that persists in Algeria despite the withdrawal of the French decades ago, the politics of incumbency and electoral fraud in Cameroon and Ethiopia, the miasma of instability in northern Uganda, Southern Sudan and Eastern DR Congo, other forms of privatisation of state violence, the salient and silent disillusionment in Nigeria, the commingling of ethnic cultures in the context of rapid urbanisation as well as the proliferation of new media and digital technology across the continent are some of the new contexts in which the phenomena of transnationalisation and cosmopolitanism are being experienced in Africa. Out of these new conditions, the dynamics of cultural mobility and translocation identified by Mbembe continue to inspire African writers and the writings from Africa in significant ways. Forms are being innovated, styles imported, traditions revised, issues revisited and arguments deconstructed by some of the writers who have gained prominence in African literature in the recent past, in their remarkable attempts to understand the newness of our times and beingness. The prominent writers at the turn of the century are evidently those who have given original and refreshing (re)presentations of the good, old and familiar narratives of relocation and recollection in the context of the new forces and times of cultural mobility. Readers readily identify (with) their protagonists, and critics are alert to the shifts in narrative styles and techniques as well as affiliations to modes associated with migrant writers and immigrant literatures. The very best of the Afropolitan generation have won accolades for their sterling works in the past fifteen years. They have taken home various internationally competitive awards from the Orange Prize to the Commonwealth Prize, from the Booker to the Giller Prize, from the Prix Goncourt Prize to a gamut of national awards given by literary associations and organisations across Africa from

Introduction

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Senegal to South Africa and inbetween. Their names are familiar to pundits and students who attend literary festivals across the world from the annual International Literature Festival in Berlin and the famous Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. African-based events such as the annual Kwani? Litfest in Nairobi, Kenya and the Time of the Writer festival in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa are some of the platforms where audiences on the continents have interacted with and questioned some of the Afropolitan writers identified in this introduction. In Afropolitanism, cultural theorists and workers such as Mbembe and Tuakle-Wosornu offer us a term that we can find useful in our attempts to negotiate fundamental questions at the centre of new African literatures in Europhone and Afrophone languages being produced by a new generation of writers for a new time and a new century. Let the critics continue to engage.

*** This volume brings together a range of scholars located in English Departments, Departments of Literature, Departments of Foreign Languages and Folklore across Africa, Western Europe and the United States. Their essays reflect the continental diversity in terms of region and linguistic tradition. Articles treat writers from Anglophone, Lusophone, Francophone, Afrophone and the Maghrebian linguistic traditions – writers from all four corners of the continent. The essays treat both younger African writers such as Patrice Nganang, M. G. Vassanji, Goretti Kyomuhendo, Jamal Mahjoub, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Calixthe Beyala as well as offering fresh re-readings of some canonical writers such Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, J. M. Coetzee, Idris Chraibi and the late Ahmadou Kourouma. Oral artists using slang and vernacular mediums to traverse genres and participate in the culture of mobility across space and generation are also treated. The volume, therefore, brings these contemporary cultural workers, and their emerging concerns on questions of borders, spaces and identities across contemporary Africa, together in support of a cosmopolitan turn within African literary studies. Some authors approach the theme of border-crossing by situating their subject in given critical traditions for the purposes of criticism whereas others approach the same theme by situating their subject in given cultural contexts. The final product is a volume that showcases, as Gikandi observes, various aspects of Afropolitan African literature – form, content, style and context – ensuring that a recent panorama of some of the literary patterns and praxis across regions of the continent continues to emerge.

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Works Cited Adesanmi, Pius. “The Many ‘Spaces’ of the African Writer: The Meeting of African Writers in Durban, South Africa, 2-7, 1998.” Research in African Literatures 31.1 (2000): 144-48. Appiah, Anthony Kwame. “African Identities.” Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics. Ed. Linda J. Nicholson and Steven Seidman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 103-15. ——., Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London: Penguin, 2007. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. Ethnicity, INC. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Dorman, Sara, Daniel Hammett, and Paul Nugent, eds. Making Nations, Creating Strangers. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Geschiere, Peter. The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Mbembe, Achille. “Afropolitanism.” Trans. Laurent Chauvet. African Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent. Ed. Simon Njami and Lucy Duran. Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2007. 26-29. ——., “Ways of Seeing: Beyond the New Nativism.” African Studies Review 44.2 (2001): 1-14. Tuakli-Wosornu, Taiye. “Bye-bye Babar (Or What is Afropolitan?)” Afropolis 26. Jan. 2009. 20 July 2009 .

Part I Border Crossings, Precarity, Syncretism

Sim Kilosho Kabale

Afropolitanism and Erudition in Francophone African Novels, 1994–2000 The spread of cosmopolitan trends in African literary production at the turn of the century has made critics to talk of “the new generation” of writers. Some of the writers may be new voices indeed but others are established names in the field who have kept up with the changing times by adjusting to current trends with remarkable success. The literature of the new generation appears not to be rigid of form or governed by conventions of a single genre. Rather the works appear as crucibles of interdisciplinary knowledge of all kinds: historical, political, customary, philosophical, sociological, et cetera framed by conventional genre forms such as the postcolonial novel. A reading of the following novels serves as proof: Calixthe Beyala’s Assèze l’Africaine (1994), Emmanuel Dongala’s Les petits garçons naissent aussi des étoiles (1998), and Ahmadou Kourouma’s two novels, En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages (1998) and Allah n’est pas obligé (2000). The novels form our basis for discussing the themes of Afropolitanism and erudition in contemporary African fiction, key concerns of the new generation writing. In spite of diversity in individual talent and idiosyncratic concerns raised in the craft of each of the selected writers, our intention is to highlight the expansion of several common aspects converging around the themes of Afropolitanism and erudition in the selected novels. These aspects evolve in each novel as if the authors were acting in concert to enable readers’ access common realities of cultural hybridism across the continent where the fiction is set. Out of the convergence of the shared concerns comes our assumption that expression of Afropolitanism and the condensation of universal knowledge into African fiction is a noticeable feature of the so-called new generation writing. Let us recall with Achille Mbembe that Afropolitanism is an African aesthetic, which stands apart from its precursors, Panafricanism and Negritude: C’est une esthétique et une certaine poétique du monde. C’est une manière d’être au monde qui refuse, par principe, toute forme d’identité victimaire – ce qui ne signifie pas qu’elle n’est pas consciente des injustices et de la violence que la loi du monde a infligé à ce continent et à ses gens. C’est également une prise de position politique et culturelle par rapport à la nation, à la race et à la question de la différence en général. Dans la mesure où nos États sont de pures inventions (récentes, de surcroît), ils n’ont, strictement parlant, rien

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dans leur essence qui nous obligeât à leur vouer un culte – ce qui ne signifie pas que l’on soit indifférent à leur sort. (“Afropolitanisme”) It is aesthetics and a certain poetics of the world. It is a manner of being in the world which refuses, by principle, any form of victim identity - that does not mean that it is not conscious of the injustices and the violence which the law of the world inflicted on this continent and its people. It is also a political and cultural standpoint regarding the nation, the race and the question of cultural difference in general. Insofar as our States are pure fabrications (in addition, recent), they have, strictly speaking, nothing in their essence which should make us worship them that does not mean that one is indifferent to their fate. 1

On the basis of this concept of Afropolitanism, we want to examine the selfconsciousness of the main characters of the novels named above. We will see how their identities evolve in various spaces and how they assume the posture of well-travelled, erudite persons in their efforts to inform the reader about the experiences and occurrences at home and abroad which have made them embodiments of the Afropolitan spirit.

Phenomenon of Border Crossings and Voyages of Protagonists According to Mbembe, Afropolitanism results from an experience of several cultural worlds. It is in a way about the expression of a transnational culture by African individuals open to the worlds: Beaucoup d’entre eux ayant eu la chance d’aller et de revenir, développant au détour de ces mouvements, une incalculable richesse du regard et de la sensibilité. Il s’agit généralement de gens qui peuvent s’exprimer en plus d’une langue. (“Afropolitanisme”) Many of them have likely been able to travel and come back, developing in the course of these movements, an incalculable richness of the glance and sensitivity. It is generally about people who can express themselves in another language besides their own (as a result of their experience abroad).

Indeed, the narrative unit of each novel of our corpus is presented in the form of a fusion of reports that bring together the experiences of indigenous people, foreigners and protagonists as a result of border crossings from one country to another for various reasons. Some travel between African countries while others travel abroad. Such is the case in En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages (1998) by the distinguished Ivorian novelist, Ahmadou Kourouma. Koyaga the hero plunges the readers into a captivating tale on his quixotic adventures, war exploits and outlandish political expediency. He travels for the first time in 1

All the translations are the author’s.

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his life outside his native village when “the Whiteman sought him to attend their newly established school” (23). He thus left the mountains of Tchaotchi to study at the rural school in the urban centre of Ramaka, before being registered in Kati, close to Bamako. This change of place taught him to hide his nudity by wearing clothes and to disavow his own African traditions, the customs of the naked men, his people’s ancient way of life. From then on, the enlightened Koyaga dons clothes imported by the white man until the end of the account. His travels do not cease with the completion of his studies. Later, he undertakes several other voyages when he enlists as an officer in the French colonial army. Koyaga’s military service takes him to the deserts of Algeria and the distant lands of Indo-china. When the Second World War ends and General De Gaulle returns the African riflemen back to their home countries, Koyaga requests to be integrated in the young national army of his home country. Luck does not smile on him. The government even refuses to pay him his pension, allowances of demobilisation and savings. He is devastated. But all is not lost. According to his native customs and the culture of the naked men, which is still deep inside him in spite of his proclaimed “transformation” into a modern man through schooling, it is necessary to resort to revenge and force in the event of provocation or aggression. Consequently, he issues a death threat to his superiors and decides to pursue political power and gun for the presidency. Unfortunately for him, he is picked and locked up in the Central Prison of the capital city before his evacuation to the Ramaka Prison near his native village. Here he learns of his father’s death. This return to his native village is also a return to the fold of his kinsmen and the ancient customary way of life and beliefs of his now distant childhood. It is a period where he relearns the ancient ways of the so-called naked men. Koyaga learns from his mother and the Bokano marabout (muslim mystic), the powerful magic formulas that will later enable him to kill the leader of his country, President Fricassa Santos, to win the presidency and by extension the destiny of his country. When he ascends to the presidency, the protagonist draws much from lessons learned during the voyages abroad of yesteryears and his new travels as the president, especially in Africa, where he has been quickly admitted to the exclusive club of fellow dictators. He finds a new cause in the so-called South-South bilateral relations. The now famous “novice” Head of State endorses ebulliently the idea of Panafricanism and prefers to place his confidence in the ideal of an Africa that would trade with Africa rather than be a junior partner on the global trade arena. The connection between his eloquent enthusiasm for a transnational political framework and the cosmopolitan outlook acquired

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during his voyages to distant lands in the past is obvious. His is now a world view defined as much by the local as by the translocal or the transnational. The phenomenon of dislocation whereby African characters travel from their countries to other foreign countries is also illustrated in Kourouma’s last novel, Allah n’est pas oblige (2000). After the death of his mother, Birahima, an Ivorian youth, leaves with Yacouba for neighbouring Liberia in search of his long lost Aunt Mahan. On the way, in order to be secure in the foreign country embroiled in a vicious tribal war, Birahima disguises himself as a child soldier and Yacouba as a fétichor (fetishist). Their mission in search of the aunt always forces them to move on from one place to the other. Each time they move they switch loyalties between different rebellious factions that control different ethnic parts of the country. Sometimes they cross borders from one region to another under their real names but use aliases at other times, perpetually shifting their local identities as it were. Birahima gives the light on a range of identities they assume while moving towards the South: “Nous (c’est-à-dire le bandit boiteux, le multiplicateur des billets de banque, le féticheur musulman, et moi, Birahima, l’enfant de la rue sans peur ni reproche, the small-soldier, nous allions vers le sud quand nous avons rencontré notre ami Sékou; 137)” (“We [i.e. the lame gangster, the multiplier of banknotes, the Moslem fetishist and me, Birahima, the street child without fear or reproach, the small-soldier, we went towards the south when we met our friend Sékou]”). Following the exemplary typical hero of the novels of adventure, these characters become ontological outlines in perpetual reconfiguration. ‘South-South border-crossings’ involve someone travelling between two or more African countries rather than from an African country to, say, a European one. This phenomenon can be clarified through a description of journeys undertaken by tradesmen in several African countries where bloody civil wars are raging: Et quand tout est au prix cadeau dans un pays […] les commerçants et les commerçantes qui veulent s’enrichir vont tous au Liberia pour acheter ou échanger […] ça vient le vendre ici en Guinée et en Côte d’Ivoire à des prix forts […] Et quand il y a guerre tribale dans un pays, on entre dans ce pays par convoi. On entrait au Liberia par convoi. (Kourouma, Allah n’esy pas obligé 38) And when all is at the price of a gift in a country […] business people who want to grow rich all go to Liberia to buy or exchange […] then come to sell it here in Guinea and Ivory Coast at high prices […] and when there is a tribal war in a country, one enters this country in a convoy. One entered Liberia as part of a convoy.

Let us note that in these two kouroumanesque novels, these African characters are not locked up all their life in their own native countries. Their

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consciousness is not bound by the limits of their national borders nor their national experience. The spirit of Afropolitanism is evident here in three tendencies; namely, the desire to leave home, the need to meet and trade with others. Elsewhere, a ‘South-North’ crossing is highlighted in Les petits garçons naissent aussi des étoiles (1998) by Emmanuel Dongala, the famous novelist from the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville). It is articulated when Matapari tells how the character Bidié made a fabulous round- the-world tour before his final return to the fold of his native African home: Au milieu des années soixante, jeune garçon, alors que les jeunes générations rêvaient de la France et des diplômes, lui il rêvait d’Amérique. Il s’était embarqué clandestinement sur un bateau panaméen ancré à Pointe-Noire, et après de longues péripéties […] où il fut jeté à la mer par les marins qui le découvrirent dans la cale où il s’était caché, où il battit à la nage un requin et où il fut repêché par un autre navire, il se retrouva sous la protection d’un capitaine au long cours argentin qui l’embaucha comme marmiton sur son bateau. (Dongala 213) In the middle of the Sixties, young boy, whereas the youth of his generation dreamed of France and degrees, him he dreamed of America. He had embarked clandestinely as a stowaway on a Panamanian boat anchored at the port of Pointe-Noir, and after long adventures […] he was thrown into the sea by the sailors when they discovered him in the hold where he had hidden. He fought with a shark before being fished out of the sea by another ship. He found protection and patronage under the ship’s Argentinean captain and was employed as a kitchen boy on the ship during the long journey back to South America.

The narrator continues that they made a voyage along the South American coast. Bidie discovered the exotic cities of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Montevideo and Bahia Blanca. When the Captain finally retired and left for Argentina, he took Bidié with him to his home near Pampa. On the death of the captain, Bidié returned to Buenos Aires where he worked initially as a bouncer in a nightclub before becoming a Tango musician. Later in life Bidie returned again to Africa and had his own band. Although he ravished his countrymen with exotic dances from unknown countries, his music career ended badly. His small enterprise fell into bankruptcy when Tonton Boula Boula ensnared him with his lovely wife, Tantine Lolo. The quixotic character eventually died blind after seeing the wonders of the world. Let us retain this adventure of Bidié and his taste of exile that led him to discover the remote countries abroad and become a citizen of the world. Nomadist sensibilities feature also in the novel Assèze l’Africaine (1994) by the Cameroonian writer, Calixthe Beyala. Assèze is the heroine. She is born and brought up in a remote corner of Cameroon but does not spend her entire life there. Like Koyaga, her wanderlust begins with the experience of schooling. Her grandmother and her mother take her to a school located

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fifteen kilometres from their native village to learn how to read, write and “to count starting with sticks” (43). Her alienation and dislocation from her native home and the local worldview becomes more obvious with the death of her grandmother. She travels to Douala, the largest city in her native Cameroon for further studies and eventually moves on to “discover the crowded glands of Paris” where she will “tempt the white cake with sweet mysteries of Africa” (301). Afterwards her life journeys take her across several African villages, cities and tourist places. The migrations make the protagonist view herself as “Assèze the African” rather than the more nondescript “Assèze the Cameroonian.” She hails this transnational expansion of her local identity when she self-consciously points out to the readers as much: Les villes traversées m’avaient légué leurs fièvres, leurs tristesses ou leurs sourires. J’avais quitté Douala, fait un détour par N’Gaoundéré, Garoua, j’avais remonté, Ndjamena et Bardjal, grimpé le Kilimandjaro, bifurqué par Edjeleh, Hadssi Rhat, Tripoli, Tunis et accosté à Marseille. (Beyala 232) The cities I visited had bequeathed me their fevers, sadness or smiles. I had left Douala, passed through Gaoundéré, Garoua, I had gone up Ndjamena and Bardjal, had climbed Kilimanjaro, had forked by Edjeleh, Hadssi Rhat, Tripoli, Tunis and had docked at Marseilles.

It follows that Assèze the African is a character emancipated from the limits of a national consciousness and is possessed with a cosmopolitan yet African spirit. Her travels lead her to different places and she meets peoples other than her own. She subsequently attains a cosmopolitan outlook of the world even as she retains her African roots. The travels open her to the world and she becomes its citizen. Some of her folks cannot understand her “tourist passion” for travels that lead her beyond her national borders. They utter in astonishment, “Be insane for You, completely nut, to leave in a country where you know me nobody!” (232). Out of these four exemplary works analysed above, the trend of creating African characters who frequently transgress their national borders and achieve cosmopolitan worldviews on top of their native traditions, becomes clear and consistent across contemporary African fiction at the turn of the century. Koyaga, Birahima, Bidié or Assèze, all find pleasure in exile and the experience of journeys abroad across national borders.

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The Fiction of Erudition It is a challenging undertaking when one sets out to determine at every instant the real source of all speeches and ideas of the highlighted protagonists out of the four novels under discussion. The echo of a rich range of personal knowledge that they produce shows how much their authors embrace the knowledge of the world other than theirs in the true spirit of cosmopolitanism. The literature which these fictions offer to us, testifies on behalf of the authors several tendencies like a true “mathésis” (Barthes 59) or universal field of knowledge beside the familiar African cultural experience. Let us quote inter alia their tastes for documentation and quests for the truth as well as the romantic escape leading both authors and their protagonists to seek textual release in all the fields of the life. The tendency for erudition and scholarship in the authors and their mentioned chief characters (who appear as authorial voices in most cases) is evident when they assume various roles as connoisseurs of learning, prosaic observers of daily life, voices of popular wisdom and sometimes as erudites having the concern of sharing their deep knowledge and broad experience with fellow characters and readers. Michel Matapari’s father, a well educated teacher takes every occasion to teach his son about life. Michel remembers, for example, the geography lesson that his father gave him when he entered one day in his small office filled with books, pencils and scattered sheets: Viens voir, Michel. […] “Ces lignes que tu vois s’appellent des Méridiens.” Il en pointa une et la remonta avec la pointe de son crayon jusqu’au point où toutes se croisaient: “l’heure est la même sur toute cette ligne, du sud jusqu’au Nord. Maintenant, regarde. Regarde ce point où se croisent tous les méridiens. […] C’est le point zéro du globe terrestre, origine et aboutissement de tous les méridiens.” (Dongala 72) Come see, Michel. […] “Those lines you see are called Meridians.” He pointed one and traced it with the tip of his pencil to the point where all crossed: “The time is the same throughout the line, south to north. Now, look. Look at this point where all meridians intersect. […] This is the point zero of the terrestrial sphere [earth], the origin and culmination of all the meridians.”

His father-teacher proceeds to expound the famous “Fermat’s theorem”, the “balance of atoms” and the thoughts of great scientists like Einstein, Matt Henson, Peary, and so on to his awe-stricken son (237, 245, 108). To have grown up in the shadow of such a highly educated father and a grandfather who routinely quips at him, “my baby can read, can read the books and the universe,” Matapari himself becomes a scholar. Throughout the novel he flaunts his encyclopaedic knowledge not only in mathematics and biology but

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also in philosophy. To convince us he quotes by heart a few titles of his bedside books: J’ai déjà lu Robinson Crusoé, L’île au trésor, L’Enfant noir, Cent ans de solitude, Le Merveilleux voyage de Niels Holgersson à travers la Suède, Tom Sawyer et Les Aventures de Huckleberry Finn, Les Contes d’Anderson, des Contes du Bengale, Les aventures de Pinocchio et son nez qui s’allongeait chaque fois qu’il mentait, j’en passe car je ne peux les citer tous. (Dongala 160) I’ve already read Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, The African Child, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Wonderful Trip of Niels Holgersson through Sweden, Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Tales of Anderson, Tales of Bengal, The Adventures of Pinocchio and his nose that grew longer every time he lied, I stop because I cannot mention all of them.

Note that these titles include several genres (stories, novels and comic books) and the classics from different nations such as France, USA, Cameroon, Colombia and so on. And to demonstrate to readers that this list is not exhaustive of the numerous books he has read, Matapari concludes that he has to stop for the list of the titles he has read is lengthy. Previously he had already declared that due to his “burning desire to know” he reads the biographies of famous scientists and political figures. He pontificates, “I read the biographies of Albert Einstein, Arthur Ashe, Matt Henson, George Washington Carver, Srinivasa Ramanuja and also those of Alexander Pushkin, of Rigoberta Menchu…” (155). In addition to the numerous scientific books that he has read and thinks has understood very well, Matapari studied physics and the theory of evolution (296, 297). Our erudite protagonist is not only a devourer of books, he is also a voracious consumer of movies and enjoys listening to music. He speaks from time to time about a few titles such as Paysages après la bataille (Landscape after the Battle) (70) in his father’s library and the videos of his brothers (219). Finally, the young Matapari announces his passion for the “music of the Kora and the Balafon” (156). In an Africa plagued by civil wars, this African character who quests for erudition and celebrates pursuits of knowledge as avenues of engaging the world, has a remarkable command of the lexicon of criminology. His enmity with the father of his lover Alédia serves as a pretext to enumerate a long list of fatal procedures that he could use to eliminate his foe. Among the traditional as well as international methods, which he learned by watching military films, he cites, hanging on a Draculian pole of torments and shooting. He then enumerates the burial alive of adulterers, the “necklace method”, which is to put a burning rubber tyre around the neck of a thief,

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execution with blows from blunt machetes practised in the genocide of Rwanda and Burundi and so on and so forth (Dongala 94). In Beyala’s Assèze l’Africaine, the narrator also flaunts the bookish knowledge she has acquired since leaving her childhood and life in the remote village where she was born and where traditional lifestyle still reigns. Assèze the African admires the intellectual rigour of her teachers. They made such an impression on her at school that lasted a lifetime: Les maîtres avaient des livres Mamadou et Bineta et la bible. […] Il avait été formé quelque part du coté de Marseilles. Il parlait comme une bibliothèque. Il avait lu Proust, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Zola. La langue de maître d’école était à la fois abstraite et pleine d’esprit. (Beyala 92) The teachers had books like Mamadou and Bineta and the Bible. […] He was educated somewhere near Marseilles. He spoke like a library. He had read Proust, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Zola. The language teacher was both abstract and full of intellectual spirit.

Recognise the rapid transformation of the protagonist as the plot of the novel develops. Assèze grows from a local village girl to an emancipated woman, a citizen of the world. She is no longer an African villager of Batouala or as traditional an African as one who is forced by circumstances to grow up, live and die in his native village. Nevertheless her bookish knowledge has not eroded her roots in her customary African culture. She is a child of both worlds. She exists in-between the two with such comfort that it sets her apart from the Westernised African characters of novels by early generations of writers from the continent. Just like a Samba Diallo or a Giambatista Vico, she too studied the classics but did not lose local knowledge such as the art of wood binding. In Douala she reads Simone de Beauvoir. She also attends an impressive library “a great library with diverse contents—books by Baudelaire, Bellay, Victor Hugo, Sartre, tests on one’s hair, hard, hard” (111). She later encounters “the cubism of Kant, Hegel and Jean Paul Sartre” (114). In Douala, while attending an event featuring an agitated crowd of dancers made up of the children of the Whites and the wealthy Africans, the heroine opens up to the spirit of Afropolitanism hitherto not yet declared. Her discovery is that there is no cogency in the idea of cultural purity and the notion that cultural identities are ideally local and traditional. White and Black mix. Africa, she learns, exists in constant contact with the rest of the world, especially the West. It is at this time that it dawns on her that even the other (the White) is indescribably quite common to her. For this reason she concludes that “the future of the music (and by extension literature, in Africa) is in cultural mixing” (Beyala 99, 114).

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African Religious Beliefs and Tradtitions Cultures of mobility bear the spirit of Afropolitanism, Achille Mbembe has argued. Afropolitanism goes hand in hand with cultural ambivalence, cultural amalgamation and overlap: L’on peut aller jusqu’à affirmer qu’au fond, ce que l’on appelle la « tradition » n’existe pas. Qu’il s’agisse de l’Islam, du christianisme, des manières de s’habiller, de faire du commerce, de parler […] rien de tout cela ne survécut au rouleau compresseur du métissage et de la vernacularisation. C’était le cas bien avant la colonisation. Il y a, en effet, une modernité africaine pré-coloniale qui n’a pas encore fait l’objet d’une prise en compte dans la créativité contemporaine. (“Afropolitanisme”) We can go on to say that, basically, what we call ‘tradition’ does not exist. Whether it's Islam, Christianity, ways of dressing, trading and talking […] none of this would survive the steamroller of miscegenation and vernacularisation. This was the case long before colonisation. There is, indeed, a pre-colonial African modernity which has not yet been taken into account in contemporary creativity.

We focus particularly on characters that mix the practices of Paganism, Christianity and African religions, and even magic and witchcraft. In some recent studies, there are throughout the world, “Ten great religions and around 10,000 sects. 6000 sects exist in Africa, 1200 in the United States and hundreds in other countries” (Watchtower 310). This survey shows how religion, the opium of the people, as Marx famously said, occupies a prominent place in the lives and letters of Africans, both contemporary and otherwise. In the Sixties, Merville J. Herskovits stipulated that “the religion has an important role in the life of Africans and in fact is an intimate part of it” (99). The various beliefs in God and in the supernatural forces that the characters in the selected novels engage further elaborate the view. Let us consider on a purely illustrative basis the temptation that Tonton Boula Boula fails to overcome in Dongala’s Les petits garçons naissent aussi des étoiles. He was sworn into high office by the Leader of the Revolution. Tonton venerates the Leader of the Revolution and has publicly and solemnly declared that his faith is in him alone. But, in spite of the oath of fidelity, Tonton Boula Boula acknowledges being seduced by religion, “I ask forgiveness, forgiveness. I admit that several times I have succumbed to the lure of the opium of the people because I attended two Catholic Masses clandestinely. […] I also consulted a Malian marabout and a Pigmy fetishist when I felt my position in the party was under threat” (191). In spite of all such preemptive and preventive methods against malefaction, his position is extremely threatened when Tonton Boula Boula is “accused of leading the biggest conspiracy ever organised” to overthrow the regime. In such perilous

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times, it is still spiritualism that his sister turns to in order to find the right solution out of the dire situation in which Tonton finds himself: Sa sœur est allée voir un “prophète de Dieu” de la capitale, pas un marabout musulman, ni un féticheur animiste, mais un prophète de Dieu qui basait ses évocations sur la bible. Certes, avec lui des cornes d’animaux, des cauris, des statuettes et autres ingrédients dont les féticheurs faisaient usage étaient là, mais la bible était là qui neutralisait toute influence animiste ou païenne. (Dongala 160) His sister went to a “prophet of God” in the capital, not a Muslim marabout, animist or a fetishist, but a prophet of God, who based his evocations on the Bible. Of course, the horns of animals, cowries, statuettes and other ingredients, which fetishists use, were there but the bible was the only influence which was neutralising animist or pagan influences.

The neutralisation of animism and paganism forces by biblical power implied in this passage is symbolic. It refers to the distrust shown at the beginning of the same novel for the colonists, accused of having “chased her ancestors from the graves (figurines) behind the boxes where they lived and replaced them with Jesus Christ, the Bible and the Cross” (10). A similar phenomenon also appears in Beyala’s novel, Assèze l’Africaine, when the natives of Assèze’s land struggle to adopt Christianity and regard it as a religion of the White. Although Father Michel teaches them catechism and baptises them in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, for them God of the White is white and worries little about Blacks. This God manufactures marvellous things for the White and blesses them. Assèze’s fellow villagers arrive at this conclusion quite understandably when a native was crushed into the dust as Father Michael reverses his motor cycle one bright day: C’est le Dieu des Blancs qui a invité ça, dit le Nègre. - Tu peux nous montrer comment fonctionne cet engin, mon frère. Et ce Dieu, c’est le Dieu des Blancs. - Et comment qu’il fait pour me montrer? Redemanda mon concitoyen. Le Nègre nous expliqua qu’il fallait écouter le père Michel. Il était venu dans notre pays nous apporter la lumière. […] Il dit qu’il fallait que nous soyons baptisés sinon on mourait pauvres, car seul le Dieu des Blancs apportait la richesse. (Beyala 32) It is the God of the Whites who caused that, says the Black man. - Can you show us how this machine works my brother? And that God is the God of the Whites. - And what I need to do so as to be shown? My fellow citizen asked again. Tha Black man explained to us that we should listen to Father Michael. He came to our country to bring us the light. […] He says that we should be baptized or else we would die poor because itis only the God of the whites who brings wealth.

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The trick to make them believe in the new faith is found to be in wealth. In order for the locals to be as rich as the whites, they need to embrace the new faith. They will receive many blessings, including material benefits upon their conversion. It is therefore clear the indigenous community in the novel feels obliged to abandon the traditional beliefs lest they die poor and “all burn in hell” (32). Despite their racist indifference, a latent spirit of Afropolitanism leads them to accept the white missionary, Father Michel, to convert and teach them biblical truths about the “White God” and a way of life so foreign from their ancient ways. In response to this “meeting of alien cultures,” the head of the village himself, the custodian of the people’s way of life and their leader mobilises the people on these terms: J’aime mon peuple, les choses ont changé, nous devons suivre le chemin du progrès c’est avec plaisir que j’autorise les habitants de mon village à être baptisés. Que faut-il faire? Le Nègre dit qu’il fallait obéir à certaines règles. Règle 1: rapporter nos fétiches. Règle 2: suivre des cours d’évangélisation des enfants à la préfecture Règle 3: envoyer nos enfants à l’école. (Beyala 32-33) I love my people [and their way of life] but things have changed, we must follow the path of progress. It is with pleasure that I authorise the people of my village to be baptised. Let me know whether there is more to be done. He was told that he had to obey certain rules. Rule 1: report their fetishes. Rule 2: take lessons in the evangelisation of children in the prefecture. Rule 3: send their children to school.

This awakening of the chief reflects the will of all the African characters of the novel dedicated to the change of traditional lifestyles and beliefs in favour of the new Western message. However, certain characters such as the grandparents of Assèze oppose it categorically. And yet there are others who simply pretend they have accepted the religion. This last group in the words of Mukala Kadima Nzuji, “rock quietly to any religious conviction that vibrates deep in their spiritual flesh”  (9). However, it is important to announce that the apologetic deference for and acceptance of Christianity in Beyala’s novel does not dominate the rest of the sample. From the start, the revealing title of Kourouma’s Allah n’est pas obligé, announces how Allah, the most powerful God as the Moslems confess, does not act under any external pressure. “He is not obliged to be right with all his creation” (9, 13). Dongala in Les petits garçons naissent aussi des étoiles, manifests Allah as omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. Allah rewards the faithful and reserves additional happiness in the paradise for them only (296, 297). He strikes down the malicious and does not answer their prayers. The child soldier Birahima and his fellow characters are aware that Allah indeed is the

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master of his own will. With this in their minds, they believe in Allah and pray five times per day. However, when their prayers go answered, they resort to the paganic intervention of their ancestral spirits by consulting marabouts, the wizards and the féticheurs. It is in awe of the marabouts, that Yacouba picks up the alias “maker of amulets.” The irony of fate occurs when neither Allah, nor the African spirits manage to solve the problems of their religious admirers. Solutions may sometimes not exist both in local and alien prescriptions. The mother of Birahima, an enthusiastic Moslem woman suffers from the bad fate launched against her right leg by an evil-eyed one. When she dies from it, he declares “Allah killed her by use of ulcer and the tears she shed so much in her life because Allah, he of the sky does his own will; he is not obliged to do always all that is right (32)”. The child soldiers of Liberia who appear in the novel believe also that their fetishes bearing inscriptions from the Koran will protect them from their enemy in combat (76-80). The belief in fetishism, the evil eye, and magic is evident in the intrigues of Kourouma’s other work, En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages. In an account of a purificatory ceremony, the reader discovers how characters with supernatural powers dominate trade by controlling the minds of their peers using nefarious forces. Bokano the healer of the dispossessed, the insane, and the incurable among other ailing groups, is an astute scholar in the evil eye and divination arts. He handles with ease the teachings and prophecies of Mahomet drawn from the Koran. The Djinns and the ancestral spirits do not conceal any secrets from him when he questions them with the thimble, a sabre of mystery, on his finger (51). He is the one who helps Koyaga’s sister to right the wrongs committed to him after the hero returns to his native land from the wars of De Gaulle and is denied his allowances, a chance in the army before ending up in prison. Bokano the marabout helps Koyaga’s sister Nadjouma through consultation with his nether worlds. As a result of his interventions, Koyaga becomes a “superman” protected by all the powers of mysterious African divinities. The hero becomes invincible and gains the favour of the gods of the land (29). Let us remain with the same novel and note that a clear margin is traced between Christianity and Islam. According to the narrator, to proclaim his faith in the Bible amounts believing in the blessing of the Whites (Shem, Japheth) and the curse of the Blacks (Ham, Canaan) written in the book, or the dominance of light (incarnated by the White) on darkness (Black) (234). Islam is conceived differently, “This religion born of the heat of the sand of the desert is a faith of the men and women of the desert. Paradise, celestial residence, and the eternal kingdom it promises, and is sort after by the pious

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of its adherents is a safety haven from tormenting deserts” (356). The Koran is viewed as a book of morals and ethics. The narrator explains that “Islam forbids a woman to start a conversation with a man who is absorbed in his communication with her creator, the women being impure” (234). The idea of female impurity develops more elsewhere. In En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, the marabout accustomed to reciting intense prayers of “rhirib of icha” for two or three hours each morning feels unable to concentrate because his thought turns to Nadjouma. He sees her, dressed so decently, just as he offers his last invocations addressed to Allah: Cette quête par plusieurs fois avait été gâtée par l’irruption inopportune, blasphématoire, des images de la jeune femme; Il retrouvait dans le ciel le regard de la jeune femme, ses muscles, son pagne à moitié dénoué et même. […] Le marabout arrêtait sa quête, disait quatre vingt dix-neuf fois sarafoulahi (le pardon d’Allah), s’imposait quelques jours supplémentaires de sévères jeûnes comme pénitence. (62) This quest several times had been spoiled by the inappropriate, profane, irruption of images of the young woman, and he saw in the sky the glance of the young woman, her muscles, her loincloth half unwound and even. […] The Marabout stopped his quest, and said the Sarafoulahi (forgiveness of Allah) ninety-nine times. He gave himself a few additional days of severe fasting as penitence.

Philosophical Thoughts We understand by philosophical thought the reflexions or knowledge aimed at understanding the main causes, absolute realities as well as the base of human values. In Africa, according to Dominique Zahan, in his seminal work Religion, spiritualité et pensée africaine, “The problems of life and death constitute the basis for many of the religious feeling and the unconscious background of philosophical reflection” (62). Africans like all humans raise questions about existence, death and life in the hereafter. In the four novels of our corpus, the ambiguity of a number of situations leads people to ask fundamental questions about their destiny. Let us illustrate this by listening to Matapari’s conversation with his mother about death in Dongala’s Les petits garçons naissent aussi des étoiles. The protagonist’s grandfather is very ill and he does not want him to die. With this in mind, Matapari raises an akward question on dying that his mother replies with a detour: What is death precisely, mom?: Ah! Je ne sais pas, Matapari. Cela dépend de ta croyance. Quand je connaissais que la spiritualité chrétienne, je t’aurais répondu que la mort est une délivrance du péché originel et qu’elle n’est qu’une voie de passage vers le paradis. Un musulman te dirait peut être la

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même chose, que la vie ici-bas est éphémère, seul compte le paradis que l’on rejoint après la mort. Dans nos religions traditionnelles par contre, la mort n’est pas un état, elle n’est qu’un voyage pour rejoindre le pays des ancêtres. Ce pays s’appelle Pemba chez les Kongos et c’est d’ailleurs là que va aussi le soleil le soir quand il disparaît du ciel. C’est dire que les morts ne sont jamais morts. (294-95) Ah! I do not know, Matapari. It depends on your belief. Within Christian spirituality, I may answer that death is salvation from original sin and therefore it’s just a path to Paradise. A Muslim can reply the same way, that life here is fleeting, heaven is the ultimate destination and one can only enter it after death. In our traditional religions on the other hand, death is not a state, it is only a voyage to the country of the ancestors to join them. This country is called called Pemba among the Kongos and that is where the sun goes at night when it disappears from the sky. This means that the dead are never dead.

This display of encyclopaedic religious knowledge continues when the mother offers critical reflection on the Buddhist beliefs and the reincarnation cycle governed by karma (295). She also considers the Jewish notion of death as the means to return humans to the covenant with God broken by the first man, Adam. Accustomed to logical and scientific reasoning, Matapari expressed amazement about the inconsistency of all these responses. He said, “Mom, after all you told me, what is the best way to reach God? The mother warns her Cartesian-minded son by insisting that religion should not be put in the field of human rationality. Such a move only leads to loss of answers or answers that are ridiculous” (295). In his time, Kant showed how fear of death is natural to all men, even the most unfortunate, and the wise “shudder not from horror at the fact of dying, but out of the horror of having perished the thought of death” (46-47). The moral and psychological imbalance of Assèze the African as a young girl after the sudden disappearance of his grandmother serves as an example. Like Matapari, the girl raises several questions concerning the origin of death and the destiny of humans. And when she does not find satisfactory answers she is sorry: “I was like one standing at the end of heat, I felt uneasy to an indefinable point. Hell was out […] that night grandmother died in her sleep. I really became aware of this disaster as soon as grandmother was buried on the day of the funeral” (Beyala 54). Despite this awareness, the disappearance of a person she cherished so much affects even her school results, “My grades remained mediocre. Why? I preferred to go to my house to watch the curling green leaves and to think about my grandmother” (55). Obviously, the narrator plunges the reader in a religious philosophy. Man is crushed by destiny and envisioned as the eternal listener to God. The upheaval of Assèze points out to us the three beautiful formulas of Zahan relating to African spirituality: (1) “the favorite place of the beatific vision of the Black remains the ground.” (2) “The African is

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primarily a stubborn terrier” and (3) “The sky is the large village, it is the resting place for the departed who want to return to Earth. It is far, but not really” (Zahan 33). From the foregoing rumination, the palpable fear of death expressed by the characters cited above demonstrates two important points. On the one hand it demonstrates the continual commitment of Africans to their native traditions as well as natural connection with the cosmos. On the other hand, it demonstrates the intellectual thought harnessed from modernity and erudition as they find pathways to understanding their reactions to the death and fate of their missing loved ones. The journey motif and the concept of bordercrossings at the centre of Afropolitanism as a spirit of the African people, are thus discussed beyond the mundane realm. Human life itself is conceptualised as the ultimate journey and death, perhaps, the ultimate border-crossing point to the realm of beyond.

The Historical Frames of Pre-colonial Africa Reading the four novels shows that contemporary African authors do not ignore the past in their texts. Without attempting to measure the gap or accuracy between these works of fiction and reality, we want to highlight a close relationship between them and the texts of the social sciences. It is certain that the novels aspire towards realism but they are not held to respect reality by their very nature and location in the domain of imaginative writing (Cressent 55). However, nothing prevents the reader from investing in the work and recognising the historical events or social issues the fiction reflects. Let us start with a typical statement. In the incipit or first paragraph of Kourouma’s En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, the griot of the hunters who tells Koyaga’s biography immerses readers in Egyptology and in the pre-colonial history of Africa. He first compares metaphorically Koyaga to Rameses II, the warlike Pharaoh of ancient Egypt around 1400 BC., to J. C. and to Soundiata. “Your name: Koyaga! […] You are a hunter! You will remain with Rameses II and Soundiata, one of the three hunters of humanity” (9). Moreover, at the end of the novel, the popular Radio Liberty circulates false information that Koyaga, the leader, had been assassinated. When he resurfaces in the midst of the speculations, the narrator recalls and draws parallels between this condition and the apocalyptic spectacle of the end of the reign of the great leaders of yesteryear: Rameses II, Sundiata Keita, and Alexander the Great. The evocation of the last name further amplifies the greatness of Koyaga (62). Doesn’t the history of ancient Greece teach us that

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the destiny of Alexander the Great was exceptional? No doubt, this young monarch who died at age 33 seeing himself as “god and emperor of the world” fed from the same pot of grandeur and power as did Ramses, Sundiata, and in our case, Koyaga. Let us note that the intersection between the chronology of the real-world and that of the romantic universe of Kourouma arises thus through the veracity of certain testimonies. Historically speaking, starting from the 13th Century until the end of the 17th Century, Africa made great strides in the establishment of several great medieval empires: Songhai, Lunda, those of Kanem-Bornu, Ghana and Mali, the kingdoms (Kongo, Ashanti, Zulu, of Monomotapa…). African culture and indigenous customs are viewed as derivatives if not offsprings of this great heritage. The so-called custom of the naked man so loathed by protagonists in the novel and the very idea of nakedness as backwardness to be discarded at the earliest chance of schooling are both given a rational justification. In a revealing episode, Koyaga’s father is sentenced to death under the most inhumane conditions for violating the custom of his people and betraying his kin to the French. In his agony, the traitor tells how the custom of nudity has protected his people against the invasions of the great imperial African powers of the medieval times quoted above: Il est vrai que c’est la nudité et rien d’autre qui, des millénaires durant, nous a protégés contre les Mandingues, les Haoussas, les Peuls, les Mossis, les Songhaïs, les Berbères, les Arabes…C’est à cause de notre nudité que tous les envahisseurs, bâtisseurs d’empires, prosélytes de croyances étrangères nous ont méprisés et jugés trop sauvages pour être coreligionnaires, des exploitables. Peut être les colonisateurs français auraient eu le même mépris. (Kourouma, En attendant le vote 20) It is true that nudity and nothing else, in this millennia, has protected us against the Mandingo, the Hausa, the Fulani, the Mossi, the Songhai, the Berbers, the Arabs ... It is because of our nudity that all the invaders from these great kingdoms, the builders of empires, proselytes of foreign beliefs (some of the empires were Islamic) scorned and judged us too wild to be co-religionists. Maybe the French colonisers had the same contempt.

Fascinated by the history of the world, the griot does not only strive to tell the glorious past of pre-colonial Africa. He is also interested in dates and events which have marked the world in general but that are especially meaningful to Africa. Consider for example, numerous references to the “Berlin Conference” which took place from 15 November 1884 to 26 February 1885 and led the colonial partition of Africa (11, 211, 229). In order to engrave the memory of the First and Second World Wars in the memory of the readers, the griot on

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several occasions quotes them in its accounts (85, 211, 258, 287, 288). He speaks not only about the year 1960 having marked African independences but explains also the fall of “communist democracies” of capitalism and the legacy of the Cold War (286, 287, 288). Fascinated by the history of France, the same character masquerading as a connoisseur of Gaullism tells a humorous account of the war of Algeria and the defeat of the French and their allies in Indo-china, in the face of Viets—these little inventive, brave and smart, like small marmosets (33). When talking about Mitterrand, the griot refers primarily to the “Summit of La Baule in which the French president recommended to the Heads of African States to change policy, to stop being dictators to become angelic Democrats” (344). This reference is drawn indeed out of the 16th FrancoAfrican summit held in the seaside resort of La Baule, near Nantes (France) from 19 to 21 June 1990 where the French president then announced by implication that the traditional support of France would be reconsidered in the case of regimes which behave in an authoritarian manner, without accepting the move towards democracy and would be bolstered for those who take this step with courage. The result is well known. Several presidents held high the banner of democracy even as they remained astute dictators marching to the tune of their own authoritarianism. They organised, controlled, and conducted sham national conferences and manipulated the multiparty elections they held in haste. They adopted the Western political practice of multi-partism and reduced their prerogatives tactfully and symbolically by naming friendly members of the Opposition as Prime Ministers. Unfortunately, all these political posturing and charades only caused riots and widespread civil chaos in Zaire, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire and the list continues. The juxtaposition of history and humorous revelations on African dictatorships in Kourouma oeuvre does not stop with, En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages. In his final novel before his demise, Allah n’est pas obligé, the Ivorian author adopts a journalistic style in order to, if one may quote Patrick Charaudeau, “inform the citizen [readers] on what happened or is currently happening in the world from the social life” in Liberia and Sierra Leone (74). Moreover, while at times remaining in the realm of imagination and outside the “constructive perspective” of the journalist, the novelist tells real facts to actual dates and in the well-known places. Thus, although the character Balla says that “dates do not have importance and interest nobody,” Nathalie Roy points out that the passages reporting historical events are accurate and the very dates of occurences are also precise in Allah n’est pas obligé. Let us for example look at 27 April 1961, date of independence of

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Sierra Leone, the death of Milton and his succession by Albert Margai, 28 April 1964, or the coup d'état against Siaka Momoh Steven in 1991. One could also cite 23 March 1991, when the outbreak of civil war happened or 15 April 1995 marking the Sankoh offensive (Allah n’est pas oblige 172, 173, 176). Apart from the historical evidence found in the novels of Kourouma, it should be noted that Emmanuel Dongala and Calixthe Beyala also display their knowledge of history and events of the past. Dongala, for example, refers repeatedly to the twentieth anniversary of the independence of CongoBrazzaville, 15 August 1980 (11). On the ninety fourth and ninety fifth pages of the novel, he immerses readers in the history of Russia, Communism and more particularly that of Lenin and Poutchkine, “He did not know if this Poutchkine were a revolutionary companion of Lenin or one of these bourgeois intellectuals that Lenin fought firmly. […] You joke? You dare put Lenin on the same plane as Pushkin? […] Boula Boula, Leninist or Marxist?” (94, 95) Matapari returns to this point when he recalled later that their “revolution, modeled on that of the Soviet Union was Marxist, Leninist and atheist,” whereas religion was “opium of the people” (116, 191). Moreover, as if inspired by Kourouma’s En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, Emmanuel Dongala also alludes to the “fall of the Berlin Wall” (197, 198) in the “war in Vietnam” (60) and “16th Franco-African Summit under Mitterand's patronage” (198) cited above. In Assèze l’Africaine, although Beyala’s narrator is committed to Africa, she also immerses the reader in the history of France. Several times the characters sing the Marseillaise and talk about the French Revolution. For example, we refer to the history of the mother who says, “À quatorze ans, maman était toute développée, des mamelles immenses, une peau couleur noire de mangue […] le 14 juillet, c’est elle qui brandissait le coq. […] Elle levait la rue principale derrière elle à bander la marseillaise” (“When she was fourteen years old, my mother became very attractive, with immense breasts, a Black skin of a mango […], on July 14th , she was the one tooking the cock. […] In the street behind the principal she was singing “La marseillaise”; 23). In the same novel, when the new school teacher trained in Moscow intends his students to sing the Marseillaise, he interposes his low voice and speaks of the Russians and their impenetrable wonders of Marxism at the time “There was the world of alarming miracles, inventions of atomic bombs, from remote-controlled planes to cosmonauts and Russian spies with Bulgarian umbrellas” (146-7).

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Conclusion From the foregoing, it is clear that the contemporary African novels we have studied share the spirit of Afropolitanism advocated by Achille Mbembe. Their characters are driven by self-consciousness that is located within and outside their national boundaries. They wear both the labels of Africanness and universalism. Their cosmopolitan worldview points to a newness in the African sensibility driven by contemporary dynamics, stimuli and patterns of movements across and beyond the continent. Like multicoloured tapestries whose frames unite several stories of travel, these works provide readers with a woven texture where many threads come together to accentuate the aesthetic value of the handiwork. The selected authors illustrate a trend in contemporary African literature arising from the nexus between the local and the universal. The historical traces in concert with fiction, the religiousphilosophical thoughts mixed with tradition, and the multiplicity of foreign and familiar allusions and references are the proof. Fiction and encyclopaedism are brought together to articulate the spirit of Afropolitanism embodied by the protagonists in the novels and the newness of contemporary African literature becomes evident.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Le plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Beyala, Calixthe. Assèze l’Africaine. Albin: Michel, 1994. Charaudeau, Patrick. Le discours de l’information médiatique. La construction du miroir social. Paris: Nathan, 1997. Chartier, Pierre. Introduction aux grandes théories du roman. Paris: Dunod, 1998. Chevrier, Jacques. Littérature nègre. Paris: Armand Colin, 1984. Coussy, Denise. La littérature africaine moderne au Sud du Sahara. Paris: Karthala, 1995. Cressent, Armelle. “Penser une guerre de libération et (ré) écrire l’histoire. Le cas de Mongo Beti.” Études littéraires 35.1 (2003): 55-71. Dongala, Emmanuel. Les petits garçons naissent aussi des étoiles. Paris : Le serpent plumes, 1998. Elungu, P. E. A. Tradition africaine et rationalité moderne. Paris: Harmattan, 1987. Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966.

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Garnier, Xavier, and Pierre Zaberman, eds. Qu’est-ce qu’un espace littéraire. Presse universitaires de Vincennes, 2006. Herskovits, Merville. L’ héritage du Noir. Paris: Présence africaine, 1966. Kant, Emmanuel. Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique. Traduction de Michel Foucault, 1984 (1798), édition Vrin. Kourouma, Ahmadou. Allah n’esy pas obligé. Paris: Seuil, 2002. ——., En attendant les votes des bêtes sauvages. Paris: Seuil, 1998. Mbembe, Achille. “Afropolitanisme.” Africultures 66 (2006). 14 Dec. 2008 . Mukala, Kadima Nzuji. Roman africain et christianisme. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002. Nathalie, Roy. “Chaos temporal et chaos romanesque dans Allah n’est pas oblige.” Revue internationale de langue et de litterature 63 (2004): 115-29. Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. Comment raisonner à partir des écritures. Brooklyn: New York, 1989. Zahan, Dominique. Religion, spiritualité et pensée africaine. Paris: Payot, 1972.

Jens Frederic Elze-Volland

Precarity and Picaresque in Contemporary Nigerian Prose: An Exemplary Reading of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road After Ben Okri’s The Famished Road was published in 1991 it became the first West-African novel to win the prestigious Booker-Prize and has retrospectively been posited as being one of the emblematic representatives of a so called ‚third generation’ in African literatures. Third generation writers have subsequently been attached many labels, among them postmodern (Appiah), magical realist (Cooper) and/or cosmopolitan (Brennan), and were seen as standing in rigid opposition to decolonisation predecessors, like Chinua Achebe or Ngugi Wa Thiongo, whose texts are considered nationalist realist epics which “seem to belong to the world of eighteenth and nineteenth century literary nationalism” (Appiah 349). As tempting and useful as such a stagist polarisation can sometimes be, it is also not entirely unproblematic because it assumes a one-tiered development in West African (written) literature from Achebe’s realism over Armah’s modernism to Okri’s postmodernism. However, anti-realist forms of writing have always existed parallel in Anglophone African literatures, most prominently in Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard, which could be considered the seminal countertext to Things Fall Apart (Newell 79). Therefore, one might well support the claim that “Okri’s text operates in the same [alternative] tradition as Soyinka’s and Tutuola’s” (Quayson, Strategic Transformations 121). Rather than a new phase in a postcolonial literary history that is constructed as a high-speed avatar of Western literary history, it seems, therefore, to make more sense to speak of various parallel modes of writing, which can be either emergent, dominant or residual, to use Raymond Williams’ terminology. To allow for such a dynamic shift in Anglophone African literary history without reinforcing the rigid binary discussed above, it is helpful to consult Ato Quayson’s conceptualisation of two poles of postcoloniality. He distinguishes between: Postcolonialty of ‘normativity and proleptic designation’ and that of ‘interstitial and liminal’ postcoloniality. The first category […] often entails a return to cultural sources, the projection of a futurist agenda, and the celebration of authenticity. […] ‘interstitial’

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postcoloniality, embraces what is normally perceived in the West as a metropolitan or hybrid sensibility. (Quayson, Postcolonialism 77-78)

I would therefore opt for understanding the post-1980s transformations not so much as a radical rupture between realism and postmodernism or nationalism and cosmopolitanism, but as what Brian McHale – for a different context – called a “change of dominant” between these two postcolonialities; towards a postcoloniality that no longer projects a better future after a rite du passage, which is independence, but becomes increasingly sceptic about such teleological, bildungsroman-like, narratives of development. The central condition of possibility for this shift has not only been a mere frustration with postcolonial nationalisms, as is mostly asserted (see Gaylard, Appiah, Cooper) but also – if not foremost – a large scale material precarity, which has dramatically increased in many African nations – with Nigeria definitely among them – after the implementation of the so-called structural adjustment politics of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These were introduced in the early 1980s following a trend of deregulation initiated by the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. In the wake of this heightened precarity, a dominantly “proleptic designation” and only emergently “interstitial or liminal” designation is transformed into a postcoloniality that is dominantly “interstitial or liminal” but also residually “proleptic” (Quayson, Postcolonialism 77). I will, drawing largely on Achille Mbembe’s work On the Postcolony, discuss these social and economic shifts and the large scale material and existential precarity they produced and will exemplify in a reading of The Famished Road how picaresque structures and motifs reverberate in that text and suggest that the picaresque is an more generally an appropriate mode of narration for expressing this large scale liminality and precarity. Aside from better understanding the dynamics that shaped texts like The Famished Road, this emphasis on material precarity must also be seen in a larger context of redeeming postcolonial studies – in Europe almost exclusively institutionalised in literature departments – from recent accusation of culturalism and overtheorisation. Since the mid 1990s it has been argued “that the impasse which now besets the field derives from the failure of its practicioners ... to move out from a focus on essentially literary concerns to engage with disciplines like economics and sociology, in particular” (Moore-Gilbert 186). While in European academia, there is a “tendency to exclude economic factors from works of art and literature [that] mystifies their very nature” (Maiorino, “Picaresque Econopoetics” 6) and a focus is placed on formalism, African literary studies have contrarily “tended

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to be in thrall to the sociohistorical” (Gaylard 7). I consider it indispensable for postcolonial literary studies to combine the two aspects and to overcome its ignorance of economics since “postcoloniality today is necessarily shaped by the operations of capitalism … neither local nor global cultures, neither nation nor hybridity, can be thought about seriously without considering how they are shaped by the economic system” (Loomba 208). Because of its tendency to deal with the “marginality [of] lives shaped by survival”, picaresque texts lend themselves very approproiately to such “economopoetic” approaches in which “economy presents a distinctive ‘point of entry’ into a reading that pays equal attention to aesthetics and social relationships” (Maiorino, “Picaresque Econopoetics” 5-6). Relative social cohesion, even in the poorest African countries had, according to Achille Mbembe, in the first phase of formal independence from colonialism been provided through an elaborated and mostly uneconomical system of social services, trough salaries provided via employment in what can – even by people critical of deregulation and anti-state policies of the Worldbank and IMF – only be described as an overblown bureaucratic state apparatus. A relative lavishness of means especially in countries rich in natural resources like Nigeria financed this state apparatus and provided the state with a certain capacity to regulate. Such systems of management were of course seen as highly problematic – especially in the West – because they were not designed to be efficient but to ensure submission and domination through obligation and dependency: salary is transformed into a claim whereby the state granted means of livelihood to all it had put under obligation. This meant that any salaried worker was necessarily a dependant. The means of livelihood he or she received were not designed to reward a process of converting energy into wealth, but were helping to shape a particular figure of submission and domination. (Mbembe 45)

Despite the almost unanimous Western critique of this form of governance, these processes have also assured a degree of social cohesion and burdened political leaders with a certain responsibility. Similarly, Mbembe states that “This does not mean that state domination was total and unyielding or that the holders of power had complete autonomy and were not subject to social pressures” (Mbembe 42; emphasis in original). Indeed, he reemphasises that, despite being hierarchical and repeatedly relying on force in securing their domination: until the late 1970s, a number of postcolonial systems of inequality and domination could be credited with a degree of effectiveness in the allocations of utilities … the state was also

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able to control ethnic and regional tensions either by creating jobs in the public services or through borrowing or direct intervention in the productive system … In short by partly or wholly replacing the market, the state became a vast machine creating and regulating inequalities. (Mbembe 43-4)

In The Famished Road, this double function of – often violent – domination combined with a degree of social responsibility, necessary to uphold one’s domination, is reflected in the two political parties, the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor, who provided milk and money but also almost indiscriminately made use of violence and “seemed prepared for war and charity at the same time” (Okri 180). Okri however does not seem to suggest the same effectiveness in the allocation of resources that Mbembe diagnoses, since the money and milk provided by the parties only produced intracommunal violence and vomiting and diarrhea. Furthermore both instances of “generosity” are clearly linked to political rallies prior to elections. However, let us follow Mbembe’s insistence that this type of allocation and domination provided for at least a minimal degree of social cohesion and a minimum of material security and thereby created what I would, rather crudely, like to call biographical predictability for many of its citizens. With the deregulation of the 1980s these governments and economies have been compelled to reposition themselves, as the IMF and the World Bank intervened more explicitely in African politics via “credit control, implementing privatisations, laying down consumption requirements, determining import policies, agricultural programs and cutting costs – or even direct control of the treasury” (Mbembe 74; emphasis added). This robbed many states of their bases of legitimation: subsidies that are targeted for dismantling have previously underpinned a system that albeit involving coercion, also involved transfers, reciprocity, and obligations and created a degree of social cohesion and prevented a slide into complete arbitrary rule and raw violence … neoliberal claims to reduce the social role of the state robbed it of its already fragile base. (Mbembe 76; emphasis added)

This base of state legitimacy, social cohesion, state allocation and relative income security has now vanished almost completely. Social peace and state agency have become extremely precarious, as have the material and social well-being of most individuals, who could no longer rely on state allocations – provided either directly or via state employed family members – but had to become small time entrepreneurs or daily labourers which resulted in very unreliable income. Such highly unreliable forms of income had so widely come to replace state salaries and wage labour that Mbembe had to assert that

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“wage employment almost disappeared in Africa since the deregulation of the 1980s” (Mbembe 52). The economic situation of most characters in The Famished Road corresponds to this loss of secure employment and a worsening of working and living conditions. Dad is a daily labourer who has unreliable, physically hard and badly paid employment. One day after he returns home from one of these jobs, Azaro asserts: “He smelt of overwork, sadness, and ash” (Okri 291). Mom on the other hand goes hawking which can is the the epitome of unreliable precarious income. Biographies that are lived before the backdrop of such material scarcities and, more importantly, insecurities and unpredictabilities – such as those in The Famished Road –generally lose what I have termed biographical predictability and are no longer concerned with maturation, development and conscious self-fashioning (often designed precisely to break out of these biographical predictabilities) but with mere survival. Long term “strategies” for designing a life are now replaced by short term “tactics” for survival (De Certeau xiv). While such indeterminacy and ateleology is hailed by poststructuralist critics and embraced by many first world subjects, they must be experienced as less than liberating if that what is being undetermined are the most basic necessities. To misconstrue this ateleology and indeterminacy as an expression of cultural specificity would be a blatant depoliticisation of poverty. A picaresque mode of narration is one appropriate way of expressing and critiquing this existential precarity and the change of dominant towards a more liminal and ateleological postcoloniality, because typically – for better or worse – “the picaresque form in the novel is intended to be deformative of teleology“ (Quayson, Postcolonialism 96). Therefore the second part of this essay will be devoted to reading the most important picaresque motifs and structures that reverberate in The Famished Road. This analysis will not amount to a close reading of the text, since it will not be about making an essentialist statement and conceptualising Okri’s text as a fully fledged picaresque or African reality as inherently picaresque but is more of an attempt to establish the productivity of a mode of reading recent African texts in relation to the European picaresque tradition, especially with regard to material and existential precarity. When applied other African, or even postcolonial texts in general, some texts will definitely employ other picaresque motifs and structures than others. The Famished Road is “a work revealing a multiplicity of narrative dimension and cultural interdiscursivity” (Ogunsanwo 41) one of these dimensions is, at least residually, a picaresque mode (see also Ogunsanwo, and Mo). Especially when understanding the picaresque mode as the precarious underside of the developmentalist, selffashioning and proleptic bildungsroman.

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On a first glance, the picaresque and the Bildungsroman are not so different, as both usually portray the voyages of an adolescent hero. Therefore, not a few novels have been attached with both labels, like for example Fielding’s Tom Jones or Thomas Mann’s Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull [Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man]. One feature that distinguishes the two forms is, in my opinion, the narrative typology. While often narrated in the first person (e.g. Gottfried Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich [Green Henry], Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship]), the Bildungsroman can also be narrated in third (e.g. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Clarín’s La Regenta [The Regent’s Wife]) person perspective. The picaresque novel is – in my estimation – inevitably narrated as a first-person fictional autobiography because the life narrative always connects a “pseudoautobiograohischen Erzählstrang der Selbstdarstellung mit einem paraenzyklopädischen Erzählstrang der Weltdarstellung” (“a pseudoautobiographical portrait of the self with a paraencyclopaedic portrait of the world”; Bauer 1-2, my translation). Inevitably, problems of credibility result from this mix of inner and outer perspective applied in this mode of writing. In a fictional autobiography, the first-person narrator is necessarily the protagonist of his own narration, which should make the reader suspicious to his reliability and limitedness from the outset. According to Franz K. Stanzel, we should always suspect that “bei Ich-Erzählern auf Grund ihrer existentiellen Motivation zum Erzählen eher eine gewisse Parteilichkeit in der Wiedergabe ihrer Geschichte anzunehmen ist als bei auktorialen Erzählern” (Theorie des Erzählens 200) (“because of their existential motivation for narrating first person narrators are more likely to exhibit a certain bias in the rendering of their story than are authorial narrators”; Theory of Narrative 150). For the postcolonial narrator this perspective creates an inherent narrative inside-outside aporia, as he/she can no longer “suppl(y) readings of national liberation struggles from the comfort of the observation tower” (Brennan ix); very much unlike the decolonisation nationalist epics, which have mostly been narrated “from the observation tower” by omniscient third person narrators helping to render their depictions supposedly authoritative and unbiased. This limited and biased picaresque narrator only has a precarious control over his own life narrative, whereby the narrative structure reflects the basic problem of the picaresque world: insecurity. The Famished Road – though a first-person narrative – obviously is no fictional autobiography (Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or Adinga’s The White Tiger for example perform this picaresque pseudoautobiographical narrative structure much more fully) in the sense that it narrates or stages the full maturation of a hero, especially since Azaro does

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not significantly age throughout the novel. This, however, can be construed as a literalisation of the lack of the protagonist’s development, which I consider to be another central aspect distinguishing the picaresque from the Bildungsroman, and a dominantly ‘proleptic’ designation from dominantly ‘liminal’ designation. The first, and most obvious hint, that probably leads many academic readers to assume a connection between The Famished Road and the picaresque novel is the protagonist’s name “Lazaro” (almost immediately shortened to Azaro – Okri 5), which is also the name of the narrator of the first and most popular Golden Age Spanish picaresque novel, the anonymously published, La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). While the name Lazaro or Lazarus has many other cultural and theological connotations, I would argue that in a novelistic context it almost inevitably reverberates the Spanish picaresque novel and thereby provides a first intertextual link. Secondly, both the picaresque and The Famished Road feature an unmarked and unnegotiated incorporation of folktales into novelistic text(ure)s. In West-African Anglophone fiction such devices were generally on the increase since the early 1980s (see Quayson, Strategic Transformations). Likewise, the Spanish picaresque also retains so many elements from folktales and epics that its status as novel has always been heavily disputed (Bauer 20). Another crucial motif of the picaresque is mobility. The hero of Lazarillo de Tormes is the prototypical “servant to many masters”, as he subsequently serves a blind man, a priest, a squire, a friar, a pardoner, a chaplain and a bailiff, in the course of a story that in some editions spans less than a hundred pages. The unavoidable mobility accompanying such unsteady affiliations is more curse than blessing and seems heavily contingent, rather than continuous, let alone teleological. Unlike the rite du passage in the Bildungsroman this is not a self-willed movement (like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s famous Wanderjahre) necessary for eventually achieving maturity and development over time. Instead the movements – as also in Azaro’s case – become non-directional, repetitive and seemingly random, replacing the Bildungsroman idea of a consistent development in time with a contingent meandering through space. This undirected straying, often at the margins of society, has been interpreted as being in stark contrast to the regulated movement of bodies, even as rendering it absurd through the inflationary use of the motive of mobility and dislocation. Through this mobility Lazarillo and Azaro paint a “social panorama” (Wicks 242) of the territory they traverse. While Azaro meanders through a more geographically confined

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area, that is still ordered by his parent’s house and his home village, he nevertheless betrays a constant desire to sneak out and walk around and also repeatedly wanders off his path (e.g. 279 “and then I wandered. I wandered for a long time in the forest”) on his way home and often gets into situations from which he has to hurry off or flee. In one passage Azaro explicitely reflects his strong desire for mobility and his restlessness in an assertion that could easily be transposed onto the heroes of the novela picaresca and could easily be the motto of any picaresque hero: “my feet started to itch again, and I resumed wandering the roads of the world” (169). Similarly, “during the 1980s a different trope of culture heroism becomes manifest in urban Nigeria … that of the trickster figure” (Quayson Postcolonialism, 87). Previously very prominent in the West-African oral tradition, the trickster now also gained prominence in prose fiction. Though not interchangeable, the picaro and the trickster have much in common, as both are mobile marginal, interstitial and protean in nature. This transgressive picaresque mobility that inherently comes with a protean adaptability, or even a strategic use of mimicry – another important motif of the picaresque – is reflected in the first lines in The Famished Road with respect to the Abiku Spirit children: “We could assume numerous forms. Many of us were birds. We knew no boundaries” (Okri 3). These short affiliations and the external characterisation they necessarily enforce lead to another aspect Okri’s text shares with the picaresque, namely that no specific names, both place names and full names for persons are used throughout most of the text. Most personal names are typicalisations or generalisations, being either professions (the photographer, the carpenter), functions (Mum, Dad), descriptions (the blind man) or only first or last names, mostly clearly allegorically charged (Madame Koto, Lazaro). This lack of full names is also a clear parallel with the picaresque tradition. In this specific respect not only handed down from the Spanish picaresque but also from the British Picaresque of the late 18th century, most notably Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, whose lack of full names has been discussed by Ian Watts seminal study The Rise of the Novel. He claimed that “it is a custom initiated by Defoe and Richardson of using ordinary contemporary proper names for their names […] although this custom was not always followed by some of the later eighteenth century novelists, such as Smollett and Sterne” and “that Fielding’s practice in the naming, and indeed in the whole portrayal of his characters, is a departure from the usual treatment of these matters in the novel” (Watt 20). The short affiliations that define precarious and highly mobile biographies are reflected in (and only allow for) such typicalised external characterisation rather than for a full psychological and introspective

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creation of characters, and is hence more panoramic than realistic. This style of characterisation and naming, that is also taken up by Okri, is characteristic of the picaresque tradition as it is more appropriate for a “social panorama” (Wicks 242), a “Sittengemälde” (portrait of manners) and/or a “Typenrevue” (revue of types; Bauer 2, 21, my translation) which picaresque texts always combine with their pseudoautobiographic narrative. For conveying such a, mostly satiric, social panorama typicalisation is the appropriate form of characterisation and naming. This mode of external characterisation always runs parallel to the realistic characterisation – which of course also typicalises to an extent – of writers like Samuel Richardson or George Elliot but becomes dominant, in the Spanish picaresque, the late 18th century picaresque and in more recent postcolonial writing. Third generation writers, especially when based in the metropolis – like Okri who is based in London – have been accused of their “escapist postmodernist pretensions” (qtd. in Newell 131). These accusations have mostly been levelled by Marxist critics and the so called AlterNative poets like Niyi Osundare of Nigeria and Kofi Anyidoho of Ghana. They considered postmodernism valuable for its rejection of the dichotomies that enabled racism and colonialism, but it was at the same time seen as “insufferable” in its supposed “effort to run away from the kind of art that means, the type that effects” (Newell 131). While it is true that some of postmodernism’s, poststructuralism’s and postcolonialism’s most prominent terms and concepts “such as ‘multiplicity’, ‘polyvocality’, and ‘indeterminacy’ can too easily erase important social and political determinants of a text” (Newell 181), noone reading The Famished Road can convincingly claim that it is a purely self-reflexive text that avoids portraying local specificity and social plight. There is an abundance of blatantly realist passages depicting physical violence, disgusting hygienic standards and the struggle for food. The feeling of being hungry is mentioned dozens of times throughout the text (e.g. Okri 18, 93, 98, 194, 373, 419). This economic marginality, scarcity of food, the vivid depiction of hunger and survival as primary purpose and preoccupation of life, while being surely a reference to Nigerian realities, are also a shared trope with the early modern picaresque tradition, as two of the most important recent studies such as Anne J. Cruz’s Discourse of Poverty (1999) or Giancarlo Maiorino’s At the Margins of the Renaissance: Lazarillo de Tormes and the picaresque Art for Survival (2003) already document in their titles. Lazarillo de Tormes suffers from hunger throughout most of the text and repeatedly tells us how thin he or his poor masters have gotten. The third chapter of the text, for example, revolves solely around a piece of old bread, which one of Lazarillo’s masters keeps in his cupboard. Lazarillo designs

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very elaborated tricks only to get a crumb from this loaf of bread, every now and then and we constantly hear him complaining about his growling stomach. This grim portrayal of socio-economic reality also includes the vivid depiction of bodily excesses, vomit, feces, sex, vermin, rotten food, dead bodies, puss. This places the text within a long tradition of scatological writing in West-Africa (see Newell ch. 5), which has in postcolonial writing been re-opened with Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not yet Born (1968). It has been noted that especially excremental motifs in postcolonial texts can function as “symbolic disturbance of inside outside models” (Esty 35), forming an essential aspect of the texts’ transformation of earlier modes of postcolonial nationalist writing (see Esty). As Michael Bakhtin has shown in his Rabelais and his World, first published in 1941, scatological motifs, however, also have a long history in European literature, and especially in the early modern picaresque. Its carnivalistic nature was “promoting unoffical dimensions of society and human life and does so through a profane language and drama of the lower bodily stratum”, depicting, above all in Francisco de Quevedo’s picaresque novel Él Buscon, “images of huge bodies, bloated stomachs, orifices, debauchery, drunkenness and promiscuity“ (Allen 22). Images that are all too prominent in The Famished Road, for example in the “refrain of vomiting” (Okri 153) which set in after most of the compound population has consumed rotten milk which had so generally been distributed by the “Party of the Rich” or when a customer in Madame Koto’s bar “brought out his gigantic prick, and pissed in every direction” (100). There are many more of these unsettling passages throughout the text. With the rise of individualism, which is often equalled to a so-called process of civilisation such vital functions and bodily spheres of human life have, in the West, been almost entirely sublimated. They have either been relegated to the level of disgust or repressed into the unconscious. In carnivalistic literature, of which the picaresque novel is an important exponent, these aspects were (re)accentuated. Therefore, the scatological motifs of The Famished Road, which has indeed been seen as indicative of a “rise to prominence of sprawling Rabelaisian epics” (Gaylard 6), place it both in an African tradition of scatological writing but are also a parallel to the carnivalistic picaresque tradition. Aside from these motifs, existential precarity in The Famished Road is structurally expressed in the literal non-development of the protagonist and the text’s episodic plot structure. Even though Azaro has some degree of formal education, as he is able to read and seems to be going to school occasionally, he does not pereceivably grow or age, and neither does he seem

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to mature. Very much like the picaresque heroes of El Buscón and Lazarillo de Tormes, who experience a series of substantially similar and structurally equal adventures and affiliations without applying their insights and experiences to later situations, Azaro seems to be almost immune to learning and developing. Whatever lesson one would expect him to learn from an incident, provoked by his extensive wanderings, he does not. Soon, he seems to have forgotten whatever incident and wanders off to his next adventure often following a very similar pattern. Some of these episodes might even be read as standing for themselves and could quite unproblematically be separated from the others. Often, the only thing connecting them is the presence of Azaro’s character – a lose plot-structure more reminiscent of the prose epic. Arguably, some episodes could even be erased, or skipped over without perceiving a lack in the development of the narrative or the characters. At the end of most stories, or adventures, Azaro is at a similar point as he was in previous chapters, and many chapters reverberate earlier chapters, which mostly end with Azaro walking off or even escaping a situation he was involved in or witnessed (e.g. 17, 22, 287, 298, 218, 320). This circularity and repetitiveness reflects the deadlock of non-development characteristic of precarious biographies. From the point of view of character development and motivation of action, many of these repetitive episodes are quite literally futile in the sense that what Azaro has learned or experienced in the respective incidents or episodes bears no relevance since it almost never informs Azaro’s future behaviour and actions. Thereby, he stands in stark contrast to what Ian Watt had to say about characterisation and plotting in the modern novel. His dictum, especially with regard to Richardson was that “the novel’s plot is […] distinguished from most previous fiction by its use of past experience as the cause of present action” (Watt 22). Azaro, on the other hand, regardless how badly he gets into trouble will not be cured from strolling around and getting into trouble again and again. Hence, the idea of consistent development through learning from experiences over time which inform and motivate future behaviour and eventually lead to maturation are literally made impossible – especially by a hero, who does not age or grow throughout a novel spanning 600 pages – and gets replaced with a contingent meandering through space. Whereas the Bildungsroman is often about self-development via the non-conformist breaking-out of such narrow, predictable and teleological structures and biographical itineraries, which seem to hamper the self-fulfillment of its paradigmatic adolescent protagonist, the picaresque is precisely about breaking-in to such predictable and security-providing structures.

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This picaresque non-development of the subject can also be transplanted to the level of the non-development of the whole nation or region. Okri is probably not interested in perpetuating the usual Eurocentric view of Nigeria as a dark, war-ridden, irrational body where the “idea of progress is said to disintegrate” (Mbembe 4) – and neither am I. Nevertheless, the picaresque repetitiveness of the story, the recurring violence, the recurring hunger, the recurring question of how to pay the rent, the recurring emasculating frustration with which Azaro’s Dad arrives home from his jobs every night, Azaro’s recurring disappearance, does not paint a picture of a linear way from the region’s problems but seems to be synecdochic of a society caught in a deadlock, which “follows a predictable pattern of trouble, crisis, escape and resolution” (Mo 80), mirroring the increasing frustration with the independent African nations and the all-pervasive existential precarity. Therefore, the picaresque episodic structure reflects not only precarious existences of African individuals but also the non-development and deadlock and repetitive structures of Nigeria and other African nations and regions, in whose recent history democratic models and military regimes reliably alternate, and the endpoint of each circle, just as in episodes of a picaresque, is structurally similar to the previous. The national or regional experience of a disaster often does not often help prevent very similar patterns of events from happening again and again, even though the fact that Azaro, as an Abiku child who normally die before they are twelve, decides to stay in the earthly realm, seems to shed a more optimistic light on Okri’s imagination of a Nigerian or regional (since the Abiku-myth is transgressive of national borders as it can also be found in Benin or Ghana – a cultural reference that is therefore more regional than purely national) future. Despite this slightly optimistic turn with respect to the Nigerian national project, the large scale material and existential peracrity that pervades the text and shapes many contemporary Nigerian biographies transforms a dominantly proleptic postcoloniality into a dominantly interstitial postcoloniality and is modelled literarily in a shift of the dominant mode of fictional autobiographies from the teleological Bildungsroman to the ateleological and precarious picaresque tale.

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Works Cited Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. London: Routledge, 2000. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 336-57. Bauer, Matthias. Der Schelmenroman. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1994. Brennan, Timothy. Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation. London: MacMillan, 1989. Cooper, Brenda. Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye. London: Routledge, 1997. Cruz, Anne J. Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. De Certau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Dunn, Peter, H. Spanish Picaresque Fiction: A New Literary History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Esty, Joshua D. “Excremental Postcolonialism.” Contemporary Literature 40.1 (1999): 22-59. Gaylard, Gerald. After Colonialism: African Postmodernism and Magical Realism. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2005. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 2005. Maiorino, Giancarlo. At the Margins of the Renaissance: Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque Art of Survival. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. ——., “Picaresque Econopoetics: At the Watershed of Living Standards.” The Picaresque Tradition and Displacement. Ed. Giancarlo Maiorino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 1-39. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Trans. Steven Rendall et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987. Mo, Felicia Alu. Ben Okri: An Introduction to his Early Fiction. Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 2002. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London: Verso, 1997. Newell, Stephanie. West-African Literatures: Ways of Reading London: Oxford University Press, 2006. Ogunsanwo, Olatubosun. “Intertextuality and Post-Colonial Literature in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road.” Research in African Literatures 26.1 (1995): 40-52.

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Okri, Ben. The Famished Road. London: Random House, 1992. Quayson, Ato. Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? Malden: Polity Press, 2000. ——., Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality & History in the Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka & Ben Okri. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Stanzel, Franz K. Theorie des Erzählens. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001. ——., Theory of Narrative. Trans. Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. La Vida del Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades. In La Novela Picaresca Espanola. Ed. Francisco Rico. Barcelona: Planeta, 2002. 6-80. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Richardson, Fielding, Defoe. London: Pimlico, 1957. Wicks, Ulrich. “The Nature of the Picaresque: A Modal Approach.” PMLA 89.2 (1974): 240-49. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. London: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Sola Ogunbayo

Border-Crossing Through Myth-Making: The Unbarred Muse in Selected Nigerian Literature Introduction The term myth has been variously defined but what unites these definitions is that a myth is a story. E. B. Tylor deems myth as a causal explanation that happens to take the form of a story. To him, a myth is a literal account (Segal 10). For a sociologist like Emile Durkheim, a myth is a projection of the sum of “consciousness of a society held in a delicate balance and shared in mutual understanding” (qtd. in Segal 19). Durkheim considers social roles, group norms and shared values before reaching his conclusion. Max Muller sees myth as a “perceptual activity” (qtd. in Segal 55) based on feeling or imaginative construct. That is, a myth is an account rendered by a group of person based on sheer opinion. To Max, a myth is an idea about the cosmos rendered in a story form. Claude Levi-Strauss, on the contrary, defines myth as “a type of tale which stands midway between history and fiction that is characterised by being based on a firm structure of binary oppositions” (qtd. in Segal 57). A myth, to Levi-Strauss, is a human construct based on classification and pairs of structural opposition and projected in narratives. Bronislaw Malinowski opines that “myth comes into play when rite, ceremony, or a social or moral rule demands justification […] and sanctity” (qtd. in Segal 107). To this anthropologist, a myth is created when a conciliatory function is demanded or when an explanation is needed to resolve our puzzles. This is in consonance with Rene Girard’s view that myths are accounts which help us to cope with “human nature […] and human aggression” (qtd. in Segal 129). Georges Sorel asserts that beyond entertainment and placation, “a myth is a narration that advocates an imminent end to oppression” (qtd. in Segal 133). For Sorel a myth is contemporaneous and not only primitive and, antithetically to Malinowski and Girard, serves not only to bolster the society but also significantly to change it. Sorel’s position supports the view that a myth is a tale which envisions an alternative way of life or, in a socialist term, an ideology. The foregoing definitions of a myth underline its universality, communality and contemproreneity. However for the purpose of this research, we shall subscribe to Richard Chase’s view who considers a myth

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from the literary perspective. To him, a myth is essentially an aesthetic creation rather than philosophical creation (15). In this sense, the stories narrated in a myth are rich in symbolic significations such that the epistemological values derived from them transcend even their peculiar cultural production. In other words, because a myth is particularised, nationalised and indigenised does not limit its universal appeal. This reiterates W. K. Wimsatt’s opinion in “The Concrete Universal” where he explains that “an object […] is both highly general and highly particular” (160). This idea is implicit in Aristotle’s poetic polemics that poetry imitates action which also consequently expresses the universal (17). Philip Wheelwright argues that “myth consciousness is the bond that unites men both with one another and with the unplumbed mystery from which mankind is sprung” (qtd. in Alade 119). The universal bent of myth is further strengthened by “archetypes”, a term popularly credited to Carl Jung (qtd. in Cirlot 19). According to Jung, myths contain images or “archetypes,” traditional expressions of collective dreams, developed over thousands of years, of symbols upon which the society as a whole has come to depend. These archetypes, revealed in peoples' tales, establish patterns of behaviour that can serve as exemplars, as when we note that the lives of many heroes and heroines share a remarkable number of similar features that can be identified as worthy of emulation. Similarly, other kinds of concept are to be classified among the many and varied types of Jungian archetype embedded in our mythic heritage: the great earth mother, the supreme sky-god, the wise old man, the idealistic young lover and so forth. We see the archetypes of unreciprocated love in Ben Okri’s Starbook and human ambivalence in Wole Soyinka’s Ogun Abibiman and they are comprehensible to all readers because, still in the words of Jung, these are primordial images embedded in the “collective unconscious,” a shared pool of memories, ideas, and modes of thought which comes from the life experience of one's ancestors and from the entire human race. Primal experiences are represented in the collective unconscious by archetypes, symbolic pictures, or personifications that appear in dreams and are the common elements in all myths. It is clear now that a myth or narrative whose thematic preoccupation or ideational bent transcend the shores and creeks of its creation is said to have crossed the borders, howbeit imaginative. It means therefore that the imagination, the tool of mythmaking, could be deployed as a border-crossing mechanism which first imbues ingenuity and particularisation on the first draft of the myth and then casts originality and universality upon the strength of its global acceptance. In this discourse, border crossing through

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imaginative creation means that the artist can deploy myth to communicate beyond a cultural affinity.

The Politicised Imagination in Wole Soyinka’s Ogun Abibiman Wole Soyinka's Ogun Abibiman relies on Thomas Mokopu Mofolo’s Chaka, the story of the great Zulu leader in the history of Southern Africa military traditions, together with the Ogun myth to exhort black people fighting for freedom and human rights in Southern Africa. Ogun is a war god in Yoruba mythology and the bringing together of Ogun and Shaka fuses the best in black Africa’s military experience. Among the Yoruba and the Zulu people war is a noble act, especially when fought to assert one's dignity. The kinship between Shaka and Ogun is emphasised in these lines: Beset by demons of blood, /Shaka reaped Harvests of manhood when time wavered /Uncertainly and the mind was transposed in /Another place. /Yet Shaka, king and general /Fought battles, invented rare techniques, created /Order from chaos, coloured the sight of men /In self-transcending visions, sought Man’s renewal in the front of knowledge (Ogun Abibiman 15)

Soyinka's mythmaking ability transcends the pantheon of Yoruba mythology to include another god, Shaka. The mythic power is enhanced by the combination of the gods and it imbues pungency on the subject matter of revolt. Soyinka's statement to other borders is explicit in the view that every human shares this common archetypal experience: frustration leads to agitation. It does not matter therefore if the frustrated people are in the borders of Africa: the only qualification for this universal experience is to be in flesh and blood. For instance, the French Revolution (1789-1799) was a period of political and social upheaval in the history of France, during which the French government structure, previously an absolute monarchy with feudal privileges for the aristocracy and Catholic clergy, underwent a radical change to forms based on Enlightenment principles of nationalism, citizenship and inalienable rights (19). But these changes were accompanied by pandemonium and turmoil which were the effects of frustrations and lachrymose. In “Morality and Aesthetics in the Ritual Archetype,” the first session of Myth, Literature and the African World, Soyinka demonstrates his penchant for cross-border appeal by stating right at the start:

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I shall begin by commemorating the gods for their self- sacrifice on the altar of literature, and […] press them into further service on behalf of human society and its quest for the application of being. (1)

Self-sacrifice is an archetypal idea personified by Ogun and Shaka and literature or mythmaking is needed to project this germane attribute as an example to the human society, especially when the names of these deities resonate in the arts and technology of other creeks such as Cuba, Brazil and “much of the Caribbean” (1). Soyinka’s predilection is for a poetry that is earthed in an indigenous culture but reaches out to other cultures by the diversification of its subject matter. The poetic truth in Ogun Abibiman, fictitious, mysterious, paradoxical, is universal because it is intensely particularised; it has crossed beyond the borders of Nigeria and South Africa. In the first section titled “Induction” we see Ogun Abibiman as a call for violent change if other means fail to win a just cause. References to “embers,” “steel events,” “slumbering ore,” are related to Ogun and the newly acquired will. The wargod “in vow of silence till the task is done/ kindles the forge,” neglecting his farm for the urgent task of liberation and when “The Blacksmith’s forearm lifts/ and dances/ its swathes are not of peace,” “Hammer and anvil,” “the craft man’s hand unclenches” and “in depths of molten bronze aflame” (1922) refer to Ogun, kindling the black fighters with a strong will. In apartheid South Africa, the failure of dialogue and sanctions left the black with no alternative but war. The war situation in South Africa is a reenactment of Ogun’s violence: Ogun, who right to a wrong emptied reservoirs of blood in heaven yet rage, with thirst- I reed his savage beauty on black brows, in depths of molten bronze aflame beyond their eyes fixation distances […] and tremble. (Ogun Abibiman 7)

The point of equivalence is that Ogun is like Samora Machael: ambivalent figures who believe in restoration through destruction. Another is that just as Ogun strengthens the will so also does Samora, an act which Soyinka describes in the preface as, “the primary detonation of a people’s collective will” (iv), an act which condemns the futility of dialogue in apartheid South Africa but applauds change through confrontation. The tenacity to confront oppression is underlined in the fourth stanza of the first section where the oppressors of South Africa are associated with steel and iron, which indicates that the one in whose footsteps they are following is none other than the god of iron or metals. This impregnable steel is mentioned again in the fifth stanza:

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A savage truth, the steel event /Shall even dislodge the sun if dark /Must be our aid… (Ogun Abibiman 10) The tension rises in the sixth stanza as the Earth Rings in unaccustomed accents /Time Shudders at the enforced pace Ogun /In vow of silence till the task is done, /Kindles the forge (Ogun Abibiman 11)

Thus, the myth of Ogun is a universal metaphor for a revolution, a change. Ogun’s relevance occupies a space beyond the creek of Africa; it is a blueprint available for anybody whose self dignity has been mortgaged. In the second section, Soyinka mythologises history by reminding the readers of some semblances in the life of Shaka of which, foremost, is that the will, and not necessarily the size, wins war or achieves success: The termite is no match for the black soldier ant, /Yet termites gnawed the house posts of our kraal (Ogun Abibiman 12)

That is “the will should far outrace/ swords in sinews.” These lines are reminiscent of the popular maxim: “where there is a will there is a way.” Ogun Abibiman is not a clarion call to pandemonium but a creative piece which abhors inhumanity and thus supports revolt through our common impregnable will. In his opinion, Stephan Larsen adds that “The gigantic hand of Ogun grasps forests and mountains, gathering all his warriors into a great whole, inspired by a single will” (131). It is this point that makes Soyinka’s art a statement beyond the space of Africa to include every human community whose cultural pride is at stake and thus seeks for change and order. To Soyinka violence and revolt beget peace and tranquillity; the Ogun myth is restorative, cathartic and therapeutic. The calmness that results from a revolution is part of the entry in the list of our common archetypes or common residual epistemology. The deployment of chorus in Ogun Abibiman or the adaptation of Yoruba praise-chant reinforces the ritual content and structure. The chorus comes in the middle section, and with its regular cheers of “Bayete”, “Rogbodiyan…” (73) makes the poem a dramatic enactment of the concept of change. The chorus enhances the communal act and, generally speaking, adds to its universal appeal. It shows that the passage of Shaka and the ambivalent activities of Ogun have a global credibility. The mythical re-enactment of Shaka’s moral regeneration is the same act that Soyinka advocates for in our society. The myth thus becomes the paradigm, the metaphor of moral signification. In addition, the communal temper in ‘Sigidi’ section is a myth which buttresses Soyinka’s stance: change can only be necessitated by a collective, social action propagated by the will.

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In Ogun Abibiman, we see Soyinka setting a binary opposite against the inhumane myth of dialogue as offered by the oppressors. Dialogue is taken to be the creative synonym of diplomacy and it has failed to solve the problems of the black people. All that remains is armed resistance. The myth of failed dialogue confronts active change through violence. Ogun advocates that violence must be driven away by means of violence, since the dialogue proposed by the oppressors is only a smokescreen: Sanctions followed Dialogue, games Of time-pleading. /And Sharpeville followed Dialogue/ And Dialogue /Chased its tail, a dogged dog Dodging the febrile barks /Of Protest (Ogun Abibiman 21)

In character of Ogun and Shaka, Soyinka mythologises the timeless truth that if nothing is sacrificed, nothing is gained. Larsen observes that “The violence exercised by Ogun and Shaka and those who follow these leaders is the violence not of death but of life” (134). Reconstruction, healing and rebirth all stem from some measure of violence, resistance and opposition. Ogun Abibiman is a celebration and a racial call to the black people to imbibe the spirit of Ogun and Shaka to fight for the liberation of apartheid Southern Africa. The poet is politically committed in his support for the victims of apartheid. He does not rely on fancy as in the “lone figure”and “grey season” (5) poems of Idanre and Other Poems but on available materials: the Ogun myth, Shaka’s history, literary tradition and contemporary African history. The Ogun myth lends immediacy, vividness and urgency to Soyinka’s voice. By extension, readers from other borders are able to garner common archetypal experiences from the travails of Ogun and Shaka, as they peep into the peculiar socio-cultural space called Africa. Larsen avers that “Ogun Abibiman expresses a firm repudiation not only of the oppression and violations of personal liberty, both in Africa and in other parts of the world” (136). The figure of Ogun that straddles Ogun Abibiman can be interpreted on the artistic, political, historical, mythical, spatial, scientific and temporal levels. The fundamental intention behind Soyinka’s interest in Yoruba myth has little to do with popularising the archaic; his concern would appear rather to be that of discovering in mythic history certain principles upon which contemporary behaviour might be based and by which it might be legitimately judged. This judgement of behaviour and assessment of plausible human actions from the plots of the narrated myth are not exclusive to the terrain of the creator. The archetypal content of myth fosters its universal understanding. Indeed, there is a profound sense in which it might be said

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that the chaotic nature of social behaviour in our time is the single most important justification for Soyinka’s mediation on myth. The multidimensionality of Ogun’s personality accounts for the ease with which Soyinka moves in and out of borders, creates peculiarity of space and then crosses to another space, speaks of one medium in the language of another and collapse many discrete idioms into one. The result is an eclectic artistic method. In “Between Self and System: The Artist in Search of Liberation” Soyinka declares: Genuine eclecticism manifests itself in awareness more than in application …eclectic mind employs for its own regulation a constant matrix of possible idioms of expression for a particular reality…from these various choices, it selects, evolves or recreates an apposite metaphor. (19)

From the above, it is clear that the process of selection of “possible idioms of expression” through eclecticism generates myths and for Soyinka every myth has a symbolic value. Like William Blake’s The Four Zoas, Ogun Abibiman therefore is a collage of possible medium of expression which births myths that counter the oppressive ideology of the ruling class. While William Blake condemns the inhumane reasoning Urizen in The Four Zoas, Wole Soyinka vilifies oppressive acts and erects the war-god Ogun as the liberator but the point of sameness is that both William Blake and Wole Soyinka resolve the contradiction of the chaotic world at the realm of symbols, the realm of mythmaking. The duo communicates to other borders by first imaginatively creating space (Urizen, Los, Orc, Urthorna for Blake; Ogun, Shaka, Obatala, etc for Soyinka) and then symbolically plotting humanity’s common archetypes in such a way that one could make either The Four Zoas or Ogun Abibiman a literary document for change and revolution.

The Concretised Universe in Ben Okri’s Starbook Ben Okri’s Starbook clearly shows that the mythmaking process can stem from the indigenous and shoot to the global. Okri announces this in the first page: “The shrinehouse was at the edge of the village and the path that ran past it led to the outside world” (1). The “shrinehouse” is the mythmaking seat, the “village” is the footing of the author, the “outside world” is the international bearing or relevance while “the path that ran past” may be described as the imaginative art of border crossing. On the one hand, the entire Starbook narrates a myth that serves as a protocol of reading the paradoxes of existence and of surviving in it and because myths do not

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delimit boundaries, Starbook, on the other hand performs the utilitarian value of world regeneration. This creative ingenuity of a mythmaker aligns with Edward Young’s view in “Conjectures on Original Composition” where he asserts that Spirit rouse at an original; that is a perfect stranger, and all throng to learn what news from a foreign land…we are at the writer’s mercy; on the strong wing of his imagination, we are snatched from Britain to Italy, from climate to climate, from pleasure to pleasure. (160)

Starbook thrives on personal myths whose explication crosses borders, nationality and race. The essentials of myths are manifest in the narratives in that it is timeless, dateless and there is little or no hint about the spatiotemporal location. The central characters, the prince and the maiden, have no proper names, save some few minor characters: Mamba and Chief Okadu. All these imbue neutrality on the created myth and further enhance its universality. Principally, Starbook treats the subject of degeneration and unreciprocated love as they affect a nameless kingdom. Shawn Peterson submits that it is “a novel about art and its capacity to creatively reconfigure the cruelties of the world” (14). Degeneration and unreciprocated love are few of the archetypal concerns of Okri and the adept treatment of these strong parts of our ‘collective unconscious’ fosters Okri’s speed of crossing. Structurally speaking, degeneration is in binary opposition to regeneration and it exists in every gathering of humans just like unrequited love is an unavoidable presence. Both are archetypes in that they are not culturally restricted; degeneration is not restricted to Africa just like unrequited love goes beyond the Renaissance English literature. According to Lévi-Strauss, “mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution” (19). In other words, myths consist of elements that oppose or contradict each other and other elements that resolve those oppositions. While the council of elders and Mamba may be described as sets of contradictions and degeneration, the dying prince serve to resolve the paradoxes of these existing disorders. The motive behind the maiden’s refusal of Mamba’s proposal is resolved in the myth of longsuffering enacted by the prince. The story of the decaying kingdom in Starbook is narrated against the backdrop of a superior myth anchored by the prince, “If I am to be future king I want to know what good and what evils we have done as a people” here was deep silence among the elders. Then they began to murmur in great perplexity (18). The dying prince, who is also cast as the new pupil (384) in Starbook is set in binary contrast to Mamba: the former signifies tenacity of

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purpose and truthfulness of vision while Mamba, the present generation of false cleverness and shortsightedness, mythically symbolises pseudoexistence marked by celebrated carnality. The conflict in these two oppositions is later resolved by a mythical juxtaposition during a duel (38289) and the enduring humane value of the new pupil supersedes the carnality and self-centredness of Mamba. Degeneration is personified in the dying prince whose ailment affects the entire land. Degeneration is treated by Okri to signify a universal malaise; every country in the world is affected by one ailment or the other, primarily the disease of character. The entire gamut of magical incidences in Starbook is about the degeneration of characters and morals, especially from the leaders. The council of elders, a resemblance of party politics, holds a myth (21) which degenerates the entire kingdom and the questioning prince, whose concern is to explode their inhumane ideology of life, is made to pay the price (18-21). This border crossing archetype called degeneration is a common denominator of contemporary nation-states. In developing nations, degeneration is aptly captured in the brazen activities of “advancing […] privileges, acquiring mew wives, furthering the interest of […] children, families and tribes” while the super powers are enmeshed in “slippery words” and “attitudes that cannot be detected” – two expressions which underline hypocrisy an self-centredness of developed nations (45). But the dying prince is the mythical representation of an overwhelmed antidote: he is symbolic of a new system, a questioning attitude, a newer generation which eschews the inhumanity of the council of elders. However, the enormity of the decadence overwhelms him: He fell into a deep illness because of all the evils in the kingdom that he was shown in his dreams. All the hidden evils affected him so powerfully that he slid into a profound sickness that lasted a long time. (Starbook 50)

It is a common epistemology and a universal truth that one positive voice amongst the irrationality, the corruption and the treachery of evil perpetrators, is ineffective. That is, the mind of such advocate of change would soon be stifled by the immensity of corruption but not like Ayi Kwei Armah plotted in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born where everyone is a transgressor. Rather, it is a degeneration that holds the breath of inspiration and mythmaking; a decay that frustrates progress and cripples attempts to erect a sustainable binary opposite. This view is upheld towards the end of the narrative where Okri posits that, “Somebody has to create a myth. Somebody has to turn a life into a legend. Somebody has to project a story into the future” (415). The prince’s counter narrative stands in opposition to

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the degeneration of the kingdom and the resolution is made manifest in the magical encounter between him and Mamba (384-87). Degeneration as an archetypal concern is also amplified in Okri’s examination of a sub-theme called ‘gaps’ (272, 273). Taken to be a creative synonym of degeneration, gaps are observed by the prince shortly after his recuperation and he suspects the activities of the council of elders (279). It is clear that gaps are the handmaiden of corruption and degeneration and it is a universal experience. The resolutions of the gaps seem far-fetched because even the wise people are incapable of solving the puzzle since it is a deep rooted corruption with phenomena spread. In this sub-plot, it is demonstrable that the panacea to the disturbing case of gaps cannot come from members of the degenerated kingdom because even the philosophers, magicians, savants and sages are all guilty of gaps. Okri universalises corruption by redefining it as a gap. Hence, any system that has a loophole is replete with gaps, including democracy as it is practised in the developed nations. Any system that forbids questions and constructive self-criticism (274, 275) suffers from gaps. Spaces, hollows, emptiness, mediocrity are gaps and agents of corruption which are common quotidian experiences in all ages, tribes and cultures. The gaps in Starbook seems irresolvable and so Okri describes it ‘ultimate mysteries’ (279) much so because the painful efforts of all humanity (policies, rules, edicts, constitution) have been to erase gaps but they keep appearing because the supposed agents of change, Chief Okadu for instance, are also full of gaps. Undoubtedly, the fight against degeneration, corruption or gaps is not exclusive to Africa or the developing world; rather it is a cosmic disorder which craves for a sacrifice, an attitudinal change. In Starbook, the prince is the sacrifice just like Olunde in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, Piggy in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Jesus in Jewish mythology. While unreciprocated love is widely acknowledged as characteristic of English Renaissance age and the medieval era, it is far from true to make it exclusive. Every society at every time experiences emotional interactions which include unrequited love. The universal law that governs the myth of unrequited love sets it as an archetypal opposition which is reducible thus: attraction and repulsion. The maiden’s disregard for Mamba unfurls the former’s quest for an idealistic young lover and, in opposition, reveals the latter’s disposition towards rumour mongering, an attitude which really repels him not only from the maiden but also from all readers who share the same primordial knowledge (187-93). Mamba’s failure in winning the heart of the maiden is reminiscent of Thomas Wyatt’s “The Hind” where the persona “faintly follows” (43) the hind, after a series of fiascos. In Starbook,

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unrequited love is an apt archetype in that it correlates with common human experience that there is more danger in embracing or managing half-truth. Here, Mamba is the mythical figure of half-truth. Though he appears to be the best of the legion of suitors, he lacks depth of character, the mysterious artistry and the fearful humility which the heart of the maiden craves for. Mamba represents the favoured, arrogant elites who, because of the silver spoon advantage (170), see it as a right to impose their selfish myths on others: myths without humanity, myths without a heart, myths without character. What the maiden, a representation of the cosmic corporate concern, desires is a love that is borne out of patient learning, as did the prince in the her father’s workshop, attentiveness to the heart of the matter, condescension to the lowly and ability to reconcile warring opposites. The maiden, our world, is love sick of character and not the charisma of Mamba: the only antidote to her love illness is not the menacing muscles of the wrestlers seeking her hands in marriage but the mighty mind of the learning prince: The new servant that he was, he sat there quietly, and obediently and still. He learnt the art of statues. He learnt their stillness. He learnt their repose…how to absorb all things, all energies, all memories all thoughts and moods around him into his unresisting being. (Starbook 299)

But even the prince must indeed be patient in the creation of his myth of selflessness, attentiveness, character and humility because, observably, it takes time before the depressed maiden notices the new myth, the prince (296). Somehow, the prince also has his share of the unrequited love. It appears that the tormented maiden has grouped all myths to be Mamba type because of the loss of confidence but the prince’s servant attitude, the gracefulness in stillness and longsuffering approach to life’s vicissitudes enhance the originality of his myth. What it means therefore is that a love remains unrequited until the other mate finds what satisfies the heart. In other words, there shall continue to be rebellion, fracas, wars, indifferences, political lethargy so long as the leaders fail to meet the love demand of our maiden, our world.

Conclusion Both Starbook and Ogun Abibiman reinforce the idea that even indigenous myths can be understood across borders. The space occupied by a created myth has only taken a shape or a form. Okri clarifies that “Those stories…took form and wandered about the world and one day would take on

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a life of their own” (Starbook 4). Every myth takes the life of its own, garnishes itself with a universal content called archetypes and when an official language, say English for postcolonial countries, is deployed to project this myth, it is called translation. For postcolonial literature, every narrative in English is a translated myth. And what are actually keenly translated are the common archetypes, the primordial shared symbols of our common memory. The official language may serve as sign in the translation process, but the actual substance in translation is the archetype. It is archetype that Okri creatively describes as “the book of life among the stars, in which all things are known” (3). Hence, Starbook, we have seen, parades translated archetypes called degeneration and unrequited love such that the “fragment of that story” (418) haunts every reader in any space or border. In Ogun Abibiman the merging of the forest and savannah cultures of Ogun and Shaka may have provided an epic background for the gods who are seemingly transformed into ancestral deities of modern Africa but the motives behind their vagaries are of universal human interest. African postcolonial literature has sufficiently carved a niche as a tour de force in mythmaking not just an attempt to exult the cultic or the exotic, but as a bold imaginative endeavour to remind all humanity of our shared dreams. Isidore Okpewho in Myth in Africa: A Study of its Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance, takes on scholars like Ruth Finnegan who claim that myth is absent in Africa. He argues that the contention is borne out of inadequate information and rather restricted definition of the word “myth.” To Okpewho, it is a prejudice which ignores the creative element in myth and which also sees it as solely as a sacred tale that commands an awed acceptance from its tellers (155-221). Okri and Soyinka have creatively highlighted the abstract tendencies that unite us, though different in spaces and borders, but common in memories, dreams and consciousness. It follows therefore that our borders should be marked with carefulness and with the comprehensive consideration for other spaces since, unavoidably, in Okri’s words, our indigenous borders are “fragments” in the vast “infinity” (Starbook 422) of sameness.

Works Cited Alade, Toriola, ed. Mythic Thinkers: A Critique. Lagos: Scrollthrough Press, 2001. Aristotle. “The Poetics.” Poetry: Theory and Practice. Ed. Lawrence Perrine. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 2003. 15-35.

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Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. London: Heinemann, 1968. Chase, Richard. “Notes on the Story of Myth.” The Mythic Experience. Ed. Bedgiel Rose. New York: Oxford, 2003. 5-19. Cirlot, Juan Eduardo, ed. A Dictionary of Symbols. 5th ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2000. Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. United Kingdom: Faber and Faber, 1954. Larsen, Stephan. A Writer and His Gods. Stockholm: University of Stockholm Press, 1983. Okpewho, Isidore. Myth in Africa: A Study of its Aesthetics and Cultural Relevance. London: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Okri, Ben. Starbook. Lagos: Farafina Press, 2007. Peterson, Shawn. “Starbook in Rider Books Review.” Reviewing Literary Quotes (2005-2008). Ed. Jacob-Allyson Zainab. Lagos: Mamily and Konilly Press, 2008. 14-19. Sean, Alfred, ed. The Revolutionary Years: A Compendium. Johannesburg: Innocenta Press, 2006. Segal, Robert, ed. Myth: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford, 2004. Soyinka, Wole. “Between Self and System: The Artist in Search of Liberation.” Wole Soyinka: Statements. Ed. Adejare Dele. Lagos: Lilt Press, 2005. 10-19. ——., Death and the King’s Horseman. London: Norton and Company, 1986. ——., Myth, Literature and the African World. London: Cambridge University Press, 1976. ——., Ogun Abibiman. London: Rex Collings, 1976. Wimsatt, W. K. “The Concrete Universals.” Poetry: Theory and Practice. Ed. Lawrence Perrine. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 2003. 159-66. Wyatt, Thomas. “The Hind.” The Poet’s World. Ed. James Reeves. London: Heinemann, 1978. 42-43. Young, Edward. “Conjectures on Original Compositions.” Poetry: Theory and Practice. Ed. Lawrence Perrine. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 2003. 171-82.

Fella Benabed

Syncretic Worldviews in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters Introduction In this era of global cultural rifts, it is interesting to ponder on the value of cultural syncretism in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters, a novel written in 1965, in which African and foreign cultural traits are blended to depict the reality of post-independence Nigeria. The book explains that the colonial situation caused severe identity confusions for the Yoruba, but their obsession with the past would hinder their development. It describes the reality of syncretism, defined as the “fusion of two distinct traditions to produce a new and distinctive whole” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 229). In Soyinka’s view, this situation requires a continuous “self-apprehension” (Myth, Literature and the African World xi) to reconcile tradition and modernity, and to find the right balance between Yoruban and foreign values. The chapter initially provides some theoretical guidelines to understand the theme of syncretism in The Interpreters. It subsequently ramifies the topic into two parts: syncretic spirituality and syncretic mentality. The former describes the author’s insertion of ancient myth into modern reality as a complementary source of knowledge. The latter examines his description of hybrid intellectuals trained in (neo)colonial institutions, and finally inquires about the possibility for the African to relieve the burden of the past, to take inspiration from it, and to build a better future.

Theoretical Signposts The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis advances that every language uniquely expresses the specific worldview of its native speakers. Benjamin Lee Whorf contends, “[w]e dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages” (qtd. in Valsiner and Rosa 42). No other borrowed language can appropriately replace a mother tongue in the expression of its specific worldview. When using a foreign language, therefore, post-colonial writers suffer from what David Crystal calls “the conflict between intelligibility and identity” (134), a kind of ambivalent attitude towards it for both its alienating

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and liberating potentials. They rely on numerous sources of inspiration, both local and foreign; they draw from the wide repertoire of orality, and insert vernacular lexis within the foreign language. This strategy is part of the postcolonial struggle for discursive liberation from the norms of the EuroAmerican canon. Soyinka, like many post-colonial writers, uses the English language as a counter-discursive strategy that, in his words, assaults “the West […] with the West’s own dialectical weapons” (Myth, Literature and the African World 82). The hybrid style of The Interpreters, a blend of oral Yoruba and written English techniques, creates a considerable difficulty for readers to fathom its cultural differences and nuances. Julia Kristeva believes that such writers are lost in the “kaleidoscope” of their “multiple identities” and “unbearable memories.” She refers to the “silence of the polyglot” to describe the formal and sophisticated use of the foreign language, because the subconscious does not participate in its production (57). This literary strategy, however, has an ethnographic function; it is a sign of cultural difference and a form of identity affirmation. Cultural theorists presently consider that the preservation of a pristine cultural identity is impossible, because the interconnectedness initiated by colonialism and intensified by globalisation require change in continuity. Cultural identity, in this view, is not predetermined and static; it undergoes a permanent change through contact with other cultures. This new conception of identity requires a new conception of culture. The history of the world indeed shows that a careful cultural selection has always been the law for cultural growth. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin use the image of the “palimpsest,” an old document whose writing is partially or completely erased to be replaced by another, to describe the particularly synthetic nature of cultures in the post-colonial context. In their words, “previous ‘inscriptions’ are erased and overwritten, yet remain as traces within present consciousness. This confirms the dynamic, contestatory and dialogic nature of linguistic, geographic, and cultural space as it emerges in post-colonial experience” (176). Culture is thus seen as a storehouse of traditions that can continuously be adapted to changing situations, while useful traits can be selectively added to avoid regression or extremism.

Syncretic Spirituality When colonial missionaries started preaching the Holy Scriptures in Africa, the natives have simultaneously felt wonder and threat. Homi K. Bhabha

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notes that despite apparent acceptance, the natives have slyly rejected the imposed religion by “using the powers of hybridity to resist baptism and to put the project of conversion in an impossible position” (118). As a result, some “animist” beliefs have disappeared, but others have tarried thanks to religious syncretism. They have mingled with Abrahamic religions through what Bolaji Idowu calls “diffused monotheism,” which is the belief in a Supreme Being and a pantheon of deities called “orisas.” The Yoruba creation story relates that “Olodumare,” the Supreme Being, breathed life in the bodies created by “Obàtálá,” King of the white cloth. As he was once drunk with palm wine, he created the albino, the dwarf, the lame, the blind, and so forth (135-36). In his autobiography Aké: The Years of Childhood, Soyinka relates that his grandfather has initiated him to the Yoruba religion, while his mother, whom he calls the “Wild Christian,” has initiated him to Christianity. He remembers that he used to watch the parade of the “elegúngún” 1 in the streets of his hometown Abeokuta, and to project them on the Christian saints appearing through the windows of the church. He says, “the stained-glass window behind the altar of St. Peter’s church [which] displayed the figures of three white men, dressed in robes which were very clearly egúngún robes” (32). As he grows old, he understands that the resolution “to replant the displaced racial psyche was one reason for the ease and permanence with which the African gods were syncretised with Roman Catholic saints” (Myth, Literature and the African World 17). Roger Bastide, in his studies of religious practices among Yoruba deported slaves in Brazil, explains how they created “correspondences” between their Yoruba gods and Christian saints; he concludes that syncretism provides a psychologically appeasing  solution to the stress of acculturation (391). Although The Interpreters is firmly rooted in the Yoruba ground, it also relies on the Christian tradition. It includes many Biblical passages, such as: “I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me shall not perish, but shall have everlasting life” (165; emphasis in original), and “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; blessed be his name for ever” (170; 1

In the Yoruba glossary at the end of The Interpreters, Soyinka defines “elegúngún” as an “ancestral masquerade” (260). It refers to the one who wears “egúngún”, which means “bone” and symbolises the “skeleton” of the dead. The “elegúngún” is a man with a long robe and a mask that often represents an appalling human face or an animal. He stands for a returnee from the land of the dead to inquire about the conduct of the living; he leaps, dances and shouts to frighten those who committed a mischief. It is traditionally believed among the Yoruba that touching “elegúngún,” even accidentally, leads to death (Ellis, Chap. VI., n. p.).

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emphasis in orginal). In addition to such direct quoting from the Bible, there are some allusions, for example, in the comparison of the African American Joe Golder to the Biblical character Esau who was “cheated of his birthright” (102). He expresses his uprootedness from Africa, his mother land, in the song “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child” (244; emphasis in original). Yet, Soyinka maintains that the missionaries have been “spreading a Word which in spite of ritual acceptance altered little” (12). This means that they have tried to wipe out the Yoruba inherited beliefs, but these attempts have been circumvented in a variety of ways, such as through the reinterpretation of ancient myths through Abrahamic beliefs. Soyinka demonstrates that counter-acculturation can take the form of myth revival, which appears in what anthropologists call “messianic,” “nativistic,” or “millenarian” movements common among indigenous societies across the world. They are symptomatic of a cultural and psychological malaise, and echo a desperate search for the preservation of a threatened worldview. Their prophet leaders or Messiahs attempt to revitalise important elements of their agonising native cultures, by prophesying the advent of a golden age that would restore the lost dignity of the natives (Balandier 42). It is important to note that Soyinka wrote The Interpreters in the sixties, a period marked by the proliferation of breakaway Churches in Africa seeking a change in ritual practices. For Pope Paul VI, the “language and mode of manifesting this one Faith may be manifold; hence, it may be original, suitable to the tongue, the style, the character, the genius and the culture of those who profess this One Faith. From this point of view a certain pluralism is not only legitimate but desirable” (n. p.). The mainline Church then accepted to adapt to local traditions, and African Christianity was recognised. African Christians started imagining new representations of religious symbols to express their particularity, such as a black Christ and a black Mary. In The Interpreters, for instance, Egbo forms a syncretic image of the Mother and Child as “a brown sepulchre amidst dew greenness” (132). He takes the unnamed student to his place of pilgrimage in the province of “Ògún,” and tells her about his conception of Christianity in Yorubaland. He shows her “the desolate cathedrals, ignored now by the fat whitish ants who built them. There were new ones rising slowly from the ground” (132). This image symbolises the demise of the white man’s Church in Africa, and the birth of the black man’s own one. In another instance, Soyinka syncretises the Biblical belief in the return of Jesus and the Yoruba myth of the “Àbíkú,” a child who continually dies and returns, to illustrate again his “cyclical view of history and the hope of

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escaping from it” (King 92). Lazarus converts this child, re-baptises him Noah, and asks him to hold a huge cross on his shoulder, saying that it is “one of the few gifts which [they] have for the new church” (The Interpreters 176). A musical group called “àgídìgbo” plays the liturgy during Noah’s baptism by tuning up Yoruba religious chants with drums and violins (174). Like the “Àbíkú” and the Christ, the child Noah dies at the end of the novel, and he is supposed to come back as a saviour. Soyinka also takes inspiration from Biblical parables such as the resurrection of Lazarus to represent his conception of a new African Christianity. A Nigerian messianic prophet leader pretends that after his death, he was resuscitated as an albino and “re-baptised Lazarus, the good Lord raiseth from the dead” (165). The albino symbol might mean that African Christianity would put all human beings on an equal footing, regardless of their skin pigmentation. In the Yoruba pantheon painted by Kola, Lazarus represents “Esumare” (also written as “Òsùmàrè” or “Oshumare,” the literal translation of rainbow), an intermediary between man and his deities who can prevent the rain from falling (Ellis, Chap. III, n. p.). Lazarus, however, cannot ward off the rain, since he believes that God might soon provoke another Deluge, from which he wants to save his community. The Bible relates that when God saved Noah and his followers, He made a covenant with them that He would no more punish them with another Deluge, and the rainbow would permanently symbolise this covenant. For Lazarus, therefore, human beings forgot their duty towards God; He will also revoke His covenant, and plague them with a new Deluge. In his view, “it was the time of floods and […] Revivalist Services” (The Interpreters 229). Egbo saves Lazarus and the child Noah from the flames, and they escape “in an arc framing a canoe” (222). The use of the words “arc” might allude to Noah’s Ark, with its connotations of salvation; the symbol of the fire stands for the healing and redemptive force. Since the Biblical “Curse of Ham” 2 has considerably substantiated the colonial racist theories, Soyinka is probably deconstructing the disadvantageous look at his descendents by giving a “new dimension to the covenant” (232). In Soyinka’s mythic vision, materialism has destroyed “the cosmic principle of complementarity” (Myth, Literature and the African World 22) with the supernatural world, and the revival of primeval myths can renew the “assertive links with a lost sense of origin” (54). His “cosmic vision” can be 2

The Biblical parable of Noah has a particular importance in the history of colonialism and slavery; it recounts that Ham found his father Noah drunk and naked in his tent, and that, as a punishment, God cursed Ham by giving him a black progeny, forever condemned to servility to the progeny of Shem and Japheth (Genesis 9: 20-29).

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summarised in the existence of three worlds; each belongs to the “ancestors,” the “living” or the “unborn,” to which he adds the fourth stage, a median location in the life-death “continuum […] the abyss of transition” (26) inhabited by “Ògún,” the god of iron, the warrior and explorer. When the “cosmic balance” is shaken, he and his disciples catalyse an “organic revolution” to bridge the widening abyss. Continuous ritual observance soothes the cosmic forces of this gulf, the function of art, like ceremonies of food offering and dancing, is to mediate between these worlds. A proverb foreshadows the sacrificial death of Sekoni, the engineer and artist, “[t]he rains of May become in July slit arteries of the sacrificial bull” (The Interpreters 155). From an anthropological standpoint, sacrifices are forms of defensive reactions and collective “exorcism”; they enable the human being to enter into contact with “numinous”  forces to draw strength, and to restore the lost harmony of the cosmos (Cazeneuve 143). Sekoni significantly dies in the road, the abyss of transition where “Ògún” lives; he is run down by a lorry, a modern invention made of iron. 3 This event shows that although “Ògún” is a creative god, when the “cosmic balance” is shaken as in the post-independence period, his wrath becomes destructive; it needs to be appeased by a sacrifice. Metaphorically speaking, therefore, Sekoni is sacrificed on the altar of modernity; his blood would atone for the sins of his community to engage in a guiltless borrowing of science and technology. Soyinka believes that the artist is “the embodiment of challenge […] constantly at the service of society for its full self-realisation” (Myth, Literature and the African World 30); so the novel ends on a posthumous celebration of Sekoni’s sculpture, a man strangling a python. Knowing that in African traditional beliefs, serpents symbolise renewal or reincarnation, this can be interpreted in terms of the author’s opinion about the cyclic conception of history. The image of python reflects two well-known alchemical symbols, the “ouroboros” and the “Möbius strip,” which represent the cyclic vision of history, and question the possibility of escape from it. The “ouroboros” is “the tail-devouring snake” which also symbolises “the doom of repetition” (88). The “Möbius strip,” named after the mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius, is a geometrical figure formed by twisting a band 180°, and then attaching its two ends. Soyinka describes it as a “mathemagical ring, infinite in self-recreation into independent but linked rings” (Idanre 87). It is thus for him a symbol of hope, since the torsion of the strip

3

In a poem entitled “In Memory of Segun Awolowo”, Soyinka describes “Ògún” as the agency of death in the road: “Death the scrap-iron dealer/Breeds a glut on trade. The fault/Is His of seven paths whose whim/Gave death his agency” (1967, 14).

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is a way out from the circle, from endless repetition and historical determinism. With its supernatural elements inserted in the texture of the realistic discourse, The Interpreters can be categorised under the genre of “magic realism,” in which “man, nature and supernatural agencies are united in a complex cosmogonic design in which the laws of logic and causality peter out into irrelevance” (Amuta 44). Soyinka therefore takes inspiration from the mythical world to subvert the realistic conventions; he meshes the real and the marvellous as part of the Africans’ belief in the power of gods and ancestors on the living. The imagery of the novel particularly bears a local hue, and reflects the Africans’ symbiotic alliance with their deities and their environment.

Syncretic Mentality Colonial education tried to divest the colonised of their distinctive cultural identity, and to create a category of semi-westernised elite that would perpetuate hegemonic interests. Analysing the process that underlies the backwardness of Africa, Walter Rodney considers that Africans did not hear about education from the colonisers, because they had had their own precolonial systems of knowledge acquisition. He states, “colonial education was education for subordination, exploitation, the creation of mental confusion and the development of underdevelopment” (263). Notwithstanding its philanthropic guise, therefore, colonial education aimed to produce alienated Africans to serve the hegemonic system, and to train a minority to help in the exploitation of the majority. By the time The Interpreters was published in 1965, most African countries had obtained their political independence, but were still under the economic and cultural yoke of their former colonisers. The reins of power shifted to bourgeois compradors deculturated in colonial schools and missionary churches; they chose to rule their countries with calqued EuroAmerican forms of governance. According to Frantz Fanon, this category of Africans “follows the Western bourgeoisie along its path of negation and decadence without ever having emulated it in its first stage of exploration and invention. […] It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness or the will to succeed of youth” (The Wretched of the Earth 123). This reflection reveals that the rulers of newly independent African nations, being too unfledged for a successful nation building, imitated the appearance of progress and discarded its essence. They turned to their former

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colonisers seeking political and technical support, thereby causing the permanent dependence of their countries upon them. In The Interpreters, Soyinka describes the post-independence repercussions of colonial education, which created caricatures of Westerners that he calls “black oyinbos.” 4 They hastened after independence to benefit from the commodities so far forbidden to them, seeking the white man’s recognition by identifying with him. He also indicates that colonial education created disillusioned intellectuals who suffer from “an overdose of cynicism” (227), while post-independence nation building needs a kind of “organic intellectuals,” whose role is “active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator” (Gramsci 10). Such intellectuals would constitute a responsible organising body in the community; they would change the minds of their fellow-citizens, remind them of their endangered values, and inject new ones acquired throughout their education. The Interpreters opens with Sagoe, the journalist, saying that “metal on concrete jars [his] drink lobes” (7). He holds industrialisation and urbanisation responsible for the secularisation of the Yoruba spiritual worldview; the sight of “the Petrified Forest” (140), and “congealed sheets of rust and silver patches” (189) irritates his “drink lobes,” the locus of his sensibility. He finds refuge in alcohol to obliterate these stressful signs of modernity, and asks his attendant Mathias to drink, because it “puts [him] in a receptive mood” (70), but he regrets that “those whiskers burnt out all [his] negritude” (34). Sagoe’s words reflect his awareness about the effect of alcohol on Africans. While in the past, it was a colonial weapon of subjugation, in the present, it is has become a self-destructive means of oblivion. Sagoe equally finds refuge in what he calls a “voidancy” philosophy, a scatological ritual that reflects the socio-political situation of postindependence Nigeria; it is, according to him, “the last uncharted mine of creative energies” (71). With his “been-to” girl friend Dehinwa, Sagoe stands for a generation that is losing its traditional grounds. After a drinking party, they both go to the girl’s apartment, causing her mother to wonder furiously if that is “a decent time for a young girl to be out?”; the aunt, in turn, reprimands the girl of her promiscuous behaviour (36-37). This scene of intergenerational conflict reflects the widening chasm and misunderstanding

4

The word “oyinbo” is translated in the glossary of The Interpreters as “white man” (260); therefore, “black oyinbo” means black white man.

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between young persons, who adapted to modern life, and their conservative parents, who cannot tolerate the severance from time-honoured traditions. In a traditional African community, a person can only be respected as a member of a group, and whatever happens to the individual should affect the group. For instance, Sekoni grows with the hope of serving his community; he builds a power plant that would symbolically set the social machine in motion. His chairman, however, thwarts these rosy prospects by summoning the “expert-expat,” 5 who says that it is a “junk” (28). Soyinka uses this episode to denounce the inferiority complex of the African bourgeois leaders, who consider that their fellow Africans cannot intellectually vie with their foreign “masters”; Sekoni consequently starts stuttering and goes mad. The author treats the theme of mimicry in his novel with a satiric tone; he shows how Ayo Faseyi, the x-ray analyst, keeps caring about “the code of etiquette” (145) instead of diagnosing the diseases of his society. According to Kola, he married the European Monica to get “the prestige of a white wife” (214). Such interracial marriage is, in Fanon’s view, motivated by the white woman’s need for “exoticism” and the black man’s desire of “lactification.” “Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind,” he says, “surges this desire to be suddenly white. I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness” (Black Skin, White Masks 63; emphasis in original). This quotation reflects the depth of the inferiority complex in the colonised man’s mind, whose self-concept is boosted by the love of a white woman, through whom he can embrace white culture, and get children with a fairer skin. Mr. Oguazor, a university Professor, is another prototype of “black oyinbos” who seem to bow “from the marionette pages of Victoriana” (The Interpreters 142); his house, speech and manners are all grotesque mimicries of old-fashioned European styles. The description of his carnivalesque party seems to ridicule the new upper class and its superficiality; Sagoe ironically compares the guests to the Knights of the Round Table, saying that the “place is crawling with Sir Galahads” (146). With this sarcasm, Soyinka depicts a negative type of cultural hybridity. However, a positive alternative exists, although not apparent in the novel, probably because it was written in the early years after independence, when the cultural question was more ambiguous. Today, many African people believe that they have benefited from a positive type of acculturation, based on a careful cultural selection. As bearers of flexible identities, they remain faithful to their traditional values, but they also cross cultural boundaries for a fruitful exchange. 5

The “expert-expat” is Soyinka’s ironic appellation for the expatriate expert.

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Throughout the novel, Egbo is burdened by questions about the past and the dead, tradition and modernity, until the death of Sekoni catalyses his opinions. In the beginning, he feels “the burden of a choice” (14) between replacing his ageing grandfather at the head of his tribe, or working in the Nigerian Foreign Office, but he follows the tide and ambivalently opts for the second option. Deep inside, however, he finds in his grandfather “a virile essence, a redeeming grace. [...] And this was being destroyed he knew, and by cozening half-men who came bloated on empty wind” (11-12). Yet, in his view, since the dead have no power over the living, they should no longer determine his life. All choices should come from his own will, “not from promptings of his past,” which should “stay in its harmless anachronistic unit so [he] can dip into it at will and leave it without commitment, without impositions!” (120-21). He understands that he should honour his past, but he can substantiate it or condemn it through his present and future experiences. The image of the bridge in The Interpreters can be interpreted as the permanent bond between the past and the present, modernity and tradition, the living and the dead. Sekoni, who views history as a continuum, believes that “a bridge also faces backwards” (9). Significantly, the bridge is an important symbol in the theory of cultural hybridity; Bhabha notes, “always and ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro, so that they may get to other banks” (5). The bridge here stands for the link between cultures, but under it, there is a permanent risk of drowning, and this is another leitmotif in the novel. In the beginning, Egbo shows his friends the place where his parents drowned, and at the end, he tells them that his decision to go “with the tide” (14) was “a choice of drowning” (251). Soyinka means that Egbo should have chosen to become the warlord of the creeks after his grandfather, among the traditional elders known as “ogboni”, “a conclave of elders, a kind of executive council to the throne” (240). 6 He affirms that, as opposed to the negative practices which African leaders have inherited from their former colonisers, the Yoruba chieftaincy rests on the principles of polyarchy, check and balance. When Kola paints Egbo, therefore, he projects on him only the negative sides of “Ògún”; this is due to Egbo’s failure to play a vital role in his community, that of change and creativity. While in the myth, “Ògún” accepts to rule his people, Egbo refuses to become the warlord of the creeks; he does not resemble “Ògún” in his ingenuity and craft, but in his aggressivity and 6

In the meetings of the “Ogboni Society”, the members deliberate on all the concerns of the community; their decisions are irrevocable, and no importance decision can be taken without their approbation. “The Ogboni Society really holds the reins of government, and kings themselves are obliged to submit to its decrees” (Ellis, Chap. V, n. p.).

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lust. He has an affair with Simi the prostitute and impregnates a student of Bandele. With his moral values and wiser visions, the latter represents “Obàtálá,” whose disciples observe strict rules of moral rectitude, as unstained as the white robe he wears.

Conclusion The preceding analysis demonstrates that Soyinka’s The Interpreters provides a pertinent illustration of syncretic worldviews in post-independence Nigeria. It indicates that colonialism imposed an alien worldview on Africans, and created an irreversible cultural hybridity. The novel describes negative cultural hybrids, who break with their native culture, and embrace the foreign one, in which they see more prestige. Others strive, but do not yet succeed, to be positive cultural hybrids, by staying halfway between their traditional culture and the foreign one, where there is a considerable potential of mutual enrichment. The author himself is an interesting example of positive hybrid intellectuals who have been exposed to foreign cultures, but who nonetheless succeed in maintaining their basic African personality. He believes that the insertion of primeval myth into contemporary reality enhances Yoruba “self-apprehension,” to avoid the errors of the past and envisage a more harmonious future. This way, traditions would be preserved but not petrified, continually re-examined, re-adapted and syncretised with beneficial modern practices. To the tradition / modernity dichotomy, he proposes “a marriage of the two contending tendencies that will produce a healing millennial trilogy: Truth, Reparations and Reconciliation” (The Burden of Memory 92). The Interpreters demonstrates his attempt to adapt Yoruba myths to the modern reality of Nigeria, Africa, and the world at large, in a manner that transcends religious boundaries.

Works Cited Amuta, Chidi. The Theory of African Literature. London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1989. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Balandier, Roger. “Messianismes et nationalismes en Afrique noire.” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 14 (1953): 41-65. Bastide, Roger. Les religions africaines au Brésil. Paris: PUF, 1960.

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Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Cazeneuve, Jean. Sociologie du rite. Paris: PUF, 1971. Crystal, David. English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Ellis, A. B. Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa. 1894. Internet Sacred Texts Archive. 16 Aug. 2009 . Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. C. L. Mankman. New York: Grove Press, 1967. ——., The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. C. Farrington. London: Penguin Books, 1963. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Trans. and ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. The Holy Bible, New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992. Idowu, Bolaji. African Traditional Religion: A Definition. London: SCM Press, 1973. King, Bruce. The New English Literatures: Cultural Nationalism in a Changing World. London: Macmillan, 1980. Kristeva, Julia. Etrangers à nous-mêmes. Frantzia: Arthème Fayard, 1988. Pope Paul VI. “Eucharistic Celebration at the Conclusion of the Symposium Organized by the Bishops of Africa.” 31 July 1969. 10 August 2007 . Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Harare: ZPH, 1981. Soyinka, Wole. Aké: The Years of Childhood. London: Rex Collins, 1981. ——., The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ——., Idanre and Other Poems. London: Metheun & Company, 1967. ——., The Interpreters. London: Heinemann and Andre Deutsch, 1965. ——., Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Valsiner Jaan and Rosa, Alberto, eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Part II Dissidence, Absence, Transgression

Catherine Kroll

Dogs and Dissidents at the Border: Narrative Outbreak in Patrick Nganang’s Temps de Chien “Was willst du denn jetzt noch wissen?” fragt der Türhüter, “du bist unersättlich.” “Alle streben doch nach dem Gesetz,” sagt der Mann, “wieso kommt es, daß in den vielen Jahren niemand außer mir Einlaß verlangt hat?” Der Türhüter erkennt, daß der Mann schon an seinem Ende ist, und, um sein vergehendes Gehör noch zu erreichen, brüllt er ihn an: “Hier konnte niemand sonst Einlaß erhalten, denn dieser Eingang war nur für dich bestimmt. Ich gehe jetzt und schließe ihn.” Franz Kafka, “Vor dem Gesetz” (132) … we must clear an intellectual space for rethinking those temporalities that are always simultaneously branching out toward several different futures and, in so doing, open the way for the possibility of multiple ancestries. Achille Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing” (258)

The reader’s experience of Patrice Nganang’s Temps de chien is mediated by intersecting narratives: in the background hover Enlightenment grands récits of liberation with their pronounced valorisation of reason dividing the world into “civilised” and “primitive” spheres. Other narratives formative for the African social imaginary 1 include a Marxist teleology of history on the one hand, and the discourse on racial “authenticity” on the other. Cameroon’s Big Men and political elites have their own iron-fisted narratives of how to maintain peace on the streets: by silencing oppositional speech and imprisoning dissidents. The novel is peppered by the street narratives of radio trottoir (“pavement radio” or rumour) that attempt to make sense of the power and sorcery infiltrating daily life. Writing against all of these narratives, Nganang deploys textual “outbreaks” that erupt in barks, shouts, vehement denunciations of unethical behaviour, mockery, and self-defence. An earlier version of this essay was presented as part of the “Representations of Power in African Literature” panel at the Modern Language Association Conference in San Francisco in December 2008. My thanks to Livinus Odozor for organizing this session. 1

Charles Taylor uses the term social imaginary to express what “extends beyond the immediate background understanding that makes sense of our particular practices,” which include the “‘repertory’ of collective actions at the disposal of a given sector of society.” See “Modern Social Imaginaries” 107.

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The first glimpse of Yaoundé’s power hierarchy appears as Mboudjak, the canine narrator of the novel, offers a clear-eyed assessment of his subjected state within his master’s household. Because of the audacious intelligence of his speech, we are impelled to see it as a political allegory that ruptures the chronology of the novel, referring to an individual and collective past and gesturing proleptically into the future. This outbreak both expresses his dignified, agonistic position vis-à-vis his master, Massa Yo, and it metonymises the neocolonial relationship between Africa and the West. His master’s derisive term for him – “dog” – reflects the human world’s obsession with hierarchies of power: Au tout début, je ressentais une blessure jusque dans les mots les plus anodins des hommes. Tout ordre m’ensanglantait le regard. Il m’arrivait même d’entendre mon nom comme une insulte, de confondre un appel avec un crachat morveux. ‘Chien’ était alors une de ces innombrables choses humaines qui m’étranglaient, me décapitaient, m’éventraient, m’édentaient, m’embouaient, me tuaient, m’enterraient. C’est qu’il me signifiait l’arrogance qu’ont les hommes de nommer le monde, de donner une place aux choses autour d’eux, et de leur intimer l’ordre de se taire. (Nganang, Temps de chien 11-12) At first I was wounded by even the most innocuous human words. Any order made me see red. At times I even heard my own name as an insult, mistaking someone’s call for the splat of a gob of spit. Then ‘dog’ was just another of the countless human things that grabbed me by the throat, cut off my head, tore out my guts and my teeth, covered me with filth, killed and buried me. Because for me the word signified the arrogance with which men name the world, assigning a place to each thing, and ordering them to be silent. (Nganang, Dog Days 7) 2

The allegorical tenor of these words echoes widely in time and space: subSaharan Africa has endured several centuries of subjection in the form of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, inscription into European Enlightenment narratives as the “dark continent,” and colonisation of its land, peoples, and cultures. Today, the region labours under the neocolonial yoke of unfavourable financial relationships with the West, including mandates by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to pursue structural adjustment programs. As is well known, such programs have led to high unemployment and uneven economic development, as well as massive debt servicing that has crippled countries’ abilities to fund health, education, and other elements of their core infrastructure (Bond 31-54; Sen 96-99; Stiglitz 41-42, 228-229). Thus, when Mboudjak barks out his critique of the arrogance, predation, and silencing to which he has been subject, we hear not 2

I have used Amy Baram Reid’s English translation of Dog Days; all other translations from the French are my own. I am grateful to Jörn Kroll for assistance with the translation of Hegel. Throughout, I use the English word “dog” for its acoustic marking of the pejorative.

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only his justifiable outrage at his own subaltern status, but also allusions to Africa’s cultural memory and present material realities that reflect its peripheral position in the global economic hierarchy. In this chapter, I theorise the space between dog and “dog.” By what is each term inflected, and what is signified by crossing the borders between dog and “dog,” and from “dog” and dog? Given Cameroon’s contemporary political realities, how does the text cross from a localised narrative to a commentary on French neocolonial interference and a country hijacked by autocracy? Further, in the global frame of signification, how does the trope of border-crossing from “dog” to dog allegorise two conceptions of Africa: “Africa-read-by-the-West” and Africa qua Africa, or Africa seizing its own sphere of definition? What kinds of ontological, political, and expressive issues are raised in moving from one defining border to another? With his interrogation of terms, borders, and identities in Temps de chien, what Nganang tacitly discloses is a web of multi-sited indigenous authority shared among “dogs,” women, children, bayamsalam (market women), town criers, poets, seers with an open democracy in front of them (“La République invisible”), and men who are genuine men, recalled to their traditional masculine obligations. The characters’ “outbreaks”—small acts of daily defiance that reveal their dignity and irrefutable claim to their existence— counter the totalising narratives that pass for public discourse in the banality of the quotidian (Le Principe dissident 15). Temps de chien thus removes itself from inscription in either a Western narrative of the modern or an agonistic response to it in the form of a Marxist revolution. Nganang suggests that, for Cameroon, the border that needs to be crossed is a debilitating mentality, rather than the threshold to a specific teleology.

Theorising “Dog” Expressing the dissonance between his self-understanding as dog and the ways in which human beings interpellate him as “dog,” Mboudjak pragmatically acknowledges the world of human judgments and hierarchies. Of the word “dog,” he comments: “Il me signifiait, toutes les fois qu’il était prononcé à mon endroit, que je faisais partie de l’univers humain, que j’avais cessé d’être ce que je suis réellement, que je n’avais point droit à la parole” (12) (“Each and every time it was used to refer to me, the word let me know I was an object in the human universe, that I had stopped being what I really was, and that I had no right to speak”; 7). In this introductory speech, he twice references the “arrogance” which characterises human beings’

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presumptuous efforts to name or “fix” the arrangement of the world. What we notice here is the contrast between the human proclivity to arrogate according to fixed hierarchies and Mboudjak’s mobility of perspective and fluid mastery of human grammar, language, philosophy, and ethics: Je suis un chien. Qui d’autre que moi peut le reconnaître avec autant d’humilité? Parce que je ne me reproche rien, ‘chien’ ne devient plus qu’un mot, un nom: c’est le nom que les hommes m’ont donné. Mais voilà: j’ai fini par m’y accommoder. J’ai fini par me reconnaître en la destinée dont il m’affuble. Dorénavant ‘chien’ fait partie de mon univers, car j’ai fait miens les mots des hommes. J’ai digéré les constructions de leurs phrases et les intonations de leurs paroles. J’ai appris leur langage et je flirte avec leurs modes de pensée. Je me suis accommodé jusqu’à l’arrogance de leurs ordres. Qui aurait seulement pu l’imaginer jadis? Je m’exécute sans rage aucune quand mon maître m’appelle, même si je le fais toujours en traînant un peu la patte. (11) I am a dog. Who else but me could admit it with such humility? Since I see no reproach in this confession, ‘dog’ becomes nothing more than a word, a noun: the noun men use to refer to me. But there you have it; in the end, I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve assumed the destiny it places on my shoulders. From here on out, ‘dog’ is part of my universe, since I’ve made men’s words my own. I’ve digested the structures of their sentences and the intonations of their speech. I’ve learned their language and I flirt with their ways of thinking. I’ve even gotten used to the arrogance of their orders. Who could ever have imagined such a thing? I obey without the slightest bit of anger whenever my master calls, even if I do always drag my paws a little. (7)

Mboudjak seizes upon the arbitrary nature of signifiers here: in his analysis, “‘chien’ ne devient plus qu’un mot, un nom” (11) (“‘dog’ becomes nothing more than a word, a noun”; 7). He, in turn, displays such a versatility of tone and emotion that we cannot help but ascribe human characteristics to him: mimicry, derision, and pragmatic metis. This harnessing of a plurality of personal characteristics – from undaunted courage to “scientific objectivity” – and knowing how to play each of them at the appropriate moment distinguishes him from the human beings in the text who are stuck at the borders of their own short-term interests. Incredible though it may be, this dog has a wider social and historical vision than those humans who exalt themselves above him. Mboudjak allies himself directly with those who were subjected to physical and psychic violence in the colonial era. It is precisely this nexus of naming and violence that Pius Adesanmi points to as having fuelled the colonial imperative: “Naming precedes and begets (mis)representation which, in turn, is deployed as justification for all the forms of violence that have been masquerading for five centuries as a mission civilisatrice” (108). As if these memories of violence had become reality once again, Mboudjak almost loses his life at the hands of Massa Yo’s son, Soumi, who

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tries to hang him. Massa Yo had scolded Soumi for not sharing his meal with Mboudjak, and Soumi had then sought revenge by tricking Mboudjak into a game of “horse” when he was tethered. When Soumi climbs the tree, Mboudjak becomes stuck in the branches and is left hanging by the rope. Soumi unleashes a cascade of curses at the suffering dog and leaves him for dead. Mboudjak is rescued by a passerby and, upon reflecting on Soumi’s “murderous plot,” he decides nonetheless to return to Massa Yo’s house: Entre nous: pourquoi ne diriez-vous pas alors que je suis le fidèle compagnon de l’homme? Car en effet, pourquoi faut-il que, plusieurs fois victime de la rage folle de ce nommé Massa Yo et maintenant rescapé du meurtre de son Soumi de fils, je me retrouve encore à l’ombre d’un homme, là même dans la maison de la faim qui causa ma mort? Faut-il, diriez-vous, que je sois tué, retué, reretué et rereretué, faut-il que je meure une, deux, trois, dix, cent, mille fois, pour enfin penser à quitter mon sempiternel assassin? Pensez tout ce que vous voulez, cher lecteur, mais ne dites pas que je ne suis retourné chez mon maître que parce que je suis un chien, car voici: je suis avant tout rentré chez Massa Yo, poussé par ma décision de me rendre justice moi-même. Insistons bien sur le ‘moi-même.’ (31) Just between us, wouldn’t you say that I’m man’s best friend? Why else would I—more than once the victim of the insane rage of that man known as Massa Yo, and now the survivor of his son Soumi’s murderous plot—find myself back again in that man’s shadow, in that house of hunger, which had led me to my death? Do I have to be killed, re-killed, re-rekilled, and re-re-re-killed? Do I have to die once, twice, thrice, ten, a hundred, or a thousand times before I finally consider leaving my perpetual assassin? Think what you will, dear reader, but don’t say I returned home to my master just because I’m a dog. No, here’s why: more than anything else, it was my decision to seek justice for myself that pushed me back to Massa Yo’s. Let’s underscore the word ‘myself,’ shall we? (20)

The communal cultural memory he bears within him and his determination to claim a “self” underlie his resolve to operate with bold agency: “flirting” with human thought and pursuing justice. Nganang’s emphasis here on the courage of claiming and asserting a self even in the face of overwhelming autocratic predation is a rallying cry for Cameroon’s citizens. For political change to be effected, there must first be an elemental valuing of oneself as worthy of justice. Mboudjak expresses the mounting cruelty he faces in Massa Yo’s household as predation raised to exponential proportions: “Faut-il, diriezvous, que je sois tué, retué, reretué et rereretué?” (31) (“Do I have to be killed, re-killed, re-re-killed, and re-re-re-killed?”; 20). When he later reflects on Soumi’s attempts to pretend as if nothing had happened, his memory becomes distorted, and he starts to blame himself: “Et d’ailleurs: y avait-il crime? Toutes les fois, oui toutes les fois, c’est à moi qu’ils demandaient méchamment de foutre le camp” (33) (“But then again, did a crime really take place? I was always the one they brutally told to get the hell out”; 22). In

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this passage, Nganang directly references the discrepancies among stories of the killing of students during a demonstration in support of opposition parties on 6 May 1991 in Obili, the quarter adjoining the University of Yaoundé. According to Ladislas Nzessé, conflicting reports of the demonstration circulated, ranging from accounts of a number of students killed by the police to no casualties at all (82). But this passage also recalls the suppressed historical memory of the violence of both the colonial era and of France’s withdrawal from its colonies. 3 This suppression of memory occurs not just in the West, but it also occludes the consciousness of those struggling to rebuild their countries after independence. In the shadowy spaces of suppressed memories, the boundaries of guilt slide into one another, to the point that past and present victims become subject to regimes of blame. A line of voice-over narration from Jean-Marie Teno’s film Afrique: Je te plumerai throws this point into high relief: in contemporary Cameroon, “Tout ce passe comme si le système a refusé un développement pour la société, comme si une partie de ses fils doit expié pour quelque chose” (“Events unfold as if the system refused development for society, as if a part of the citizenry must atone for something”). Teno’s perspective reinforces the widely held view that Africa’s victims of colonial domination are being further victimised by their own post-independence governments, who induce further internalisation of blame and inferiority in their citizens. Charles Forsdick explains the wider loss of historical memory in francophone Africa in this way: violence in the French colonial era and during the withdrawal of Empire was “often censored in the short term and subsequently suppressed in the official memories of both coloniser and colonised (a suppression whose institutional form is the amnesty) as part of a desire for a post-independence ‘clean-break’ settlement with the past” (42). In Temps de chien, Mboudjak must thus navigate the potentially treacherous streets of the neighbourhood – bereft of the memory of past wrongs – with his only ally The Crow. Mboudjak realises the pragmatic advantages of accepting his designation of “dog,” since this term has more to do with the perspective of his selfish 3

In France-Afrique: Le crime continue, François-Xavier Verschave describes the violent suppression of the Union des peuples du Cameroun (UPC) during the 1950s: “Tous les leaders indépendantistes camerounais ont été assassinés, empoisonnés, toute une partie de la population de l’ouest du Cameroun, la région bamiléké (où l’UPC connut son essor le plus considérable) a été massacrée.” (“All of the Cameroonian independence leaders were assassinated, poisoned; a portion of the population in Western Cameroon, the Bamileke region [where it was known that the UPC had the most extensive influence] were massacred”; 14-15).

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master than with him. This frees him for the language games and “poaching” possibilities that allow him to straddle a space between interpellated “dog” and his integral subjectivity as dog. Further, he is conscious of the contingencies of place within multiple hierarchies: his place within Massa Yo’s family, within the hierarchy of Mini Minor’s dogs, and within the hierarchy of street dogs, who accuse him of being a “petit-bourgeois” dog (17), of being alienated from his “canitude” [read: négritude] (21), and of failing to join the ranks of those preparing for the canine revolution (34). It is because he sees something more fluid and pragmatic ahead of him that he takes aim at the strictures of Marxist rhetoric: Oui, tous les jours, j’observe les hommes, je les observe, je les observe et je les observe encore. Je regarde, j’écoute, je tapote, je hume, je croque, je rehume, je goûte, je guette, je prends bref, je thèse, j’antithèse, je synthèse, je prothèse leur quotidien, bref encore: j’ouvre mes sens sur leurs cours et leurs rues, et j’appelle leur univers dans mon esprit. (35-36) Yes, every day I observe men: I observe them, and observe them, and observe them some more. I watch, I listen, I tap, I sniff, I chew, I sniff some more, I taste, I lie in wait, I conclude; I come up with a thesis, an antithesis, a synthesis, and a prosthesis on their daily routine. In short, I open up my senses to their courtyards and their streets, I invite their universe into my spirit. (23-24)

While the tone here is puckishly comic, the sentiment is not. One reason Nganang satirises the rhetoric of Marxist revolution is that, during the Cold War era, African nations were subjected to violent internal power struggles that were in part fueled by imported Marxist ideas, leading to what Mbembe has termed “politics as a sacramental practice” of violence (“African Modes of Self-Writing” 251). Nganang further develops the theme of contingent hierarchies in the allegory of Mama Mado’s makeover of Mboudjak into a French poodle: “le chien du futur” (104) (“the dog of the future”; 70). Commenting on this coercive cultural re-fashioning, he describes himself as “tout petit chien de rien du tout, tchotchoro à dire vrai, enfoncé dans le fauteuil de ma métamorphose” (100) (“a real little nothing of a dog, a tchotchoro, if truth be told—sunk deep into the easy chair of my metamorphosis”; 67). He uses the term “tchotchoro” ironically, aware of the context in which he has found himself: he is both small vis-à-vis the chair and lacking in the expected glamour of this feminine ethos. Yet, as before when he realised that “dog” was only a word from the human world, he only looks like a “nothing” in the context of this particular place. There can be no definitive judgments about him, given his place both within and among so many shifting hierarchical contexts.

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Mboudjak’s realisation of his place in the mammalian hierarchy is echoed in the mix of ironic resignation (“Le Cameroun, c’est le Cameroun” [141]; “Cameroon is Cameroon” [96]) and the outright defiance of radio trottoir. Speaking of his creative process in composing Temps de chien, Nganang explains that his intention was to produce an “école de la rue,” with rumour serving as the linguistically animating force of the novel: “La rumeur et les commentaires ont une subversion terrible que les écrivains n’ont pas, même les écrivains les plus chevronnés n’ont pas la liberté de ton de la rue” (“Rumor and commentaries have a terrible subversive power that writers do not have, even the most celebrated writers do not have the liberty of tone of the street”; “L’écrivain à l’école de la rue” 104). Those on the street are not as cowed as their leaders may believe, for radio trottoir bends the force of power, extruding it into colourful caricature and disemia: “Leurs rires habillaient également la petitesse de la Mini Minor d’une menaçante vitalité” (68-69) (“Their laughter also enveloped Mini Minor’s small self in a garb of threatening vitality”; 46). Similarly, the police commissioner Etienne survivait dans la parole du bar en caricature magnanime, en un verbe conjugable à souhait: ‘Étienne’. Au présent de l’indicatif: ‘Je vous dis qu’elle le tient, dites donc.’ À l’imparfait: ‘No-o, c’est lui qui la tenait.’ Au futur: ‘Laissez-moi vous dire. Le tiennement-là va finir demain.’ (69) lived on as a magnanimous caricature in the vernacular of the bar, as a verb that could be conjugated at will: ‘Etienne’: to have a hold on or control someone.’ In the present indicative: “I tell you, she sure ‘Etiennes’ him.” The imperfect: “No-o-o, he was ‘Etienning’ her.” The future tense: “I’ll tell you something—that ‘Etienning’ will stop tomorrow.” (46)

Thus, the bar’s regulars reduce Etienne, the civically powerful police commissioner, to someone disempowered (or “held,” punning on the French tient) in his own interpersonal affairs. Addressing the shifting status of signifiers within any given context, Jean-François Lyotard reminds us that all communication exists within a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. […] One is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass. No one, not even the least privileged among us, is ever entirely powerless over the messages that traverse and position him at the post of sender, addressee, or referent. (15)

Michel de Certeau likewise insists upon the social configuration of meaning, suggesting a productive “leveling” of hierarchies as power circulates among all of those who wield language:

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Innumerable ways of playing and foiling the other’s game. […] That is, the space instituted by others, characterize the subtle, stubborn, resistant activity of groups which, since they lack their own space, have to get along in a network of already established forces and representations. People have to make do with what they have. In these combatants’ stratagems, there is a certain art of placing one’s blows, a pleasure in getting around the rules of a constraining space. We see the tactical and joyful dexterity of the mastery of a technique. (18)

This passage speaks directly to Mboudjak’s subjected posture as Massa Yo’s “dog,” and yet also to his canny realisation of how he can “play it.” It is Mboudjak’s distinctive ability to adopt perspectives from the entire circumference of these positions – to see with a comprehensiveness that knows no borders – that makes his perspective trustworthy for us. Mboudjak’s analysis of the name given to him by Massa Yo – “main qui cherche” (13) (“the outstretched hand”; 8) – constitutes one such example of his ability to “flirt” with human ways of thinking and to see comprehensively, since it signifies his own creative grafting of a name onto his higher purposes of seeking justice. Mboudjak exploits the full meaning of his name as signifying a jointly dependent relationship: there is, first of all, Massa Yo’s idealised self-regard that characterises his support of his wife, son, and dog, but Mboudjak also postulates that there must be a receiving hand (“Ne suppose-t-il pas que j’ai une main moi aussi?”[13]; “But doesn’t it suggest that I have a hand of my own?” [8]) which makes him effectively Massa Yo’s equal, and, as he takes it further, perhaps even his master’s hand. Here we can appreciate a kind of triumphant ambiguity: while Massa Yo may see Mboudjak as a passive receiver – “main qui cherche” – the locution in fact signifies an active stance: a hand that looks for something, and, indeed, Mboudjak is our intrepid seer in this text. Further, Mboudjak seizes “le domaine de définition des choses” (39) (“the field of definition”; 26) and masters human grammar, scientific observation, and analysis. The decidedly human wit and analytical acumen of his commentary are posed ironically against his ebullient “doggish delights” of sniffing, chewing on leather, urinating on walls, and his utter horror at being confused for a man: “Être pris pour un homme demeure cependant toujours l’insulte la plus terrible qu’on puisse me faire” 46) (“Yet, to be taken for a man is the worst insult of all”; 30). Mboudjak treads lightly among men obsessed with their positions within hierarchies, barking out his warnings and denunciations. The role of town crier is one he shares with the philosopher-writer (and Nganang’s avatar) The Crow. Both Mboudjak and The Crow are self-described “scientific

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observers” who cry out repeatedly “Where is the man?” in response to the pervasive womanising, cowardice, and lassitude of the men of the quarter. Indeed, the very mobility of Mboudjak’s linguistic craft (in contrast to the relentlessly arrogating utterances of the chief men in the novel) reveals how he crosses the border from dog to “dog” and back again. Mboudjak puts in practice Hegel’s notion of how “the negation of the negation” produces the “Fürsichsein” (“being-for-oneself”): “Da in diesem Sein Negation ist, ist es Dasein, aber da sie ferner wesentlich Negation der Negation, die sich auf sich beziehende Negation ist, ist sie das Dasein, welches Fürsichsein genannt wird” (“Since this [self-reflected] being contains negation, it is existence. But since this negation is essentially negation of negation – negation that refers to itself – it is that existence which is called ‘being-for-oneself’”; 166). It is in negating the negation – through analysis, through parody, through insurgency – that the subjected seize their subject status for themselves: “Moi, son chien” (15) (“Me, his ‘dog’”; 9). Mboudjak’s ironic deployment of the term “dog” buffers him from interpellation at the same time as it deflates Massa Yo’s authority. This negative dialectic informs Fanon’s well-known critique of imperial rhetoric in The Wretched of the Earth: “The violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and of thought of the native mean that, in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when Western values are mentioned in front of him” (43). Similarly, Mboudjak realises that he has been relegated to the lower rungs of the mammalian hierarchy (or “dogged”) by a man who has no claim to ethical authority at all. When the term “dog” is rescued from the tyranny and contingency of the flawed judge, Mboudjak moves from “dog” to dog, turning the energy of derision back to the source and reclaiming dog for himself. When Mboudjak takes charge of the narrative and becomes its ethical diviner (showing himself to be no mere “dog”), he displaces human beings once and for all from their position of assumed authority. His commentary on the foibles of humans operating in the world constitutes both an ironic trope and also the necessary leverage for us to be able to form comprehensive judgments. This crossing of creatures and their characteristics is what we might term chiasmic irony: the reversed pairs of wise dog/human fool, courageous dog/human coward, and compassionate dog/human tyrant signify the decomposing ethical context in which Nganang’s critique unfolds. The hurling of names to point up the deficiencies of Man structures both the irony and the political critique of the novel. Mboudjak’s increasingly impatient question “Où est l’homme?” (35) (“Where is Man in all of this?”;

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23) is elaborated by “l’homme à la tête de bouledogue” (234) (“the man with the bulldog head”; 163), whose oppositional critique helps build momentum for the final scenes: Ils pillent nos richesses […] ils mangent nos rêves. […] Ils faussent notre passé, ils mentent notre présent, ils suspendent tout ce qui pourrait nous advenir de bien. Ils nous disent que c’est nous les éternels responsables, et nous croyons que c’est à nous la faute si nous sommes pauvres. Ils montrent des boucs émissaires parmi nous, et nous nous mettons à nous entredéchirer. Des chiens, ils sont tous, rien que des chiens! (235) They loot our wealth […] they eat up our dreams. […] They distort our history and lie about our present. They put off anything good that might be coming our way. They say we’re always to blame, and we believe it’s our fault we’re poor. They point out scapegoats among us, and we start tearing each other limb from limb. Dogs, they’re all nothing but dogs! (164)

After being denounced as “a member of the opposition,” The Crow echoes Mboudjak’s earlier theorising on names: “Notre homme en noir-noir ne semblait pourtant pas en être impressionné. Pour lui, ‘opposant’ n’était apparemment qu’un mot de la langue française” (141) (“Our man in black didn’t seem overly impressed by it though. For him, ‘opposition’ was nothing more than a word in the French language”; 97). The Crow’s observation recalls Mboudjak’s view that “‘chien’ ne devient plus qu’un mot, un nom: c’est le nom que les hommes m’ont donné” (11) (“‘dog’ becomes nothing more than a word, a noun: the noun men use to refer to me”; 7). The ethical intention is clear here: to expose the contingency of interpellative signifiers and thereby to neutralise their force.

The Invisible in the Visible The border-crossing from dog to “dog” and from “dog” to dog is more than an ironic tropological feature of the text. The juxtaposition of a shrewd, lightfooted dog taking to task his rotund, authoritarian master exemplifies the interpenetrating realms of the “real” and the occult, of the visible and the invisible in this novel. The dog effectively changes places with the human, penetrating the human world, while men repeatedly reveal themselves to be dogs. Massa Yo—a witless womaniser who opens a bar after he is laid off during Cameroon’s crisis of 1989—tries to mould reality to suit his tastes (teaching his son Soumi to do the same), while Mboudjak continually proves his canny judgment, courage, and ethical determination. Nganang incorporates a key element of the Cameroonian episteme in his rendering of metamorphoses from animal to human (Mboudjak) and from human to animal (the men of Yaoundé’s district of Madagascar).

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The visible migrates into the invisible—with Mini Minor’s mysterious boxes disappearing behind the walls of her chantier – and the invisible haunts the neighbourhood’s visible daily realities, evincing Cameroonians’ deep suspicion of wealth accumulation and the contingencies of the modern economy (Geschiere 25; Fisiy and Geschiere 242-43; Shaw 203). Mbembe has coined the term “simultaneous multiplicities” to capture the traditional Cameroonian episteme that recognises the presence of the invisible in the visible, and the visible within the invisible (On the Postcolony 145). Temps de chien pulses with spectacular rumours, taking its readers down passageways into the invisible, but plausible realms of Cameroon’s psychic realities. Nganang evokes a world in which business is transacted behind walls and in back rooms out of reach of the public eye, but not entirely out of its consciousness. The visible is only a shadow of the full reality, which also includes the invisible. Geschiere explains that it is the occult force of djambe that allows a person “to transform himself or herself into a spirit or an animal and to do all sorts of other exceptional things” (13). Thus, in Temps de chien, Docta’s guilty girlfriend claims that her husband has transmigrated into Mboudjak: “‘Qui sait si ce n’est pas mon mari’, avait répondu la femme. Et elle avait ajouté peureuse: ‘Docta, tu as vu comment il nous regarde?’” (45) (“‘How do you know it’s not my husband?’ the woman replied. And then she added fearfully, ‘Docta, did you see how he’s looking at us?’”; 30). Massa Yo speaks casually of thieves’ disappearing potions (50). Mboudjak observes The Crow fly into the air: “Je voyais sa silhouette lugubre planer au ciel comme un oiseau de malheur” (172) (“I saw his lugubrious silhouette soaring ominously overhead, a bird-like portent of evil”; 119). People fear their shadows will be sold to Famla (123), a Bamileke secret society rumoured to be comprised of shady entrepreneurs (Geschiere 158). Dogs howl with cannibalistic laughs (187), and both Massa Yo and Docta “eat up” the women of the street with their eyes and their predatory scams (52). Presence, absence, predation, and privation all circulate in radio trottoir. Frances Nyamnjoh explains that The popular epistemological order in Cameroon and most of Africa does not subscribe to the same dichotomies [of rational vs. irrational, real vs. unreal]. On the contrary, it builds bridges between or marries the so-called natural and supernatural, rational and irrational, objective and subjective, scientific and superstitious, visible and invisible, real and unreal; making it impossible for anything to be one without also being the other. […] In this epistemology emphasis is on the whole, and truth is something consensual, not the result of artificial disqualification, dismemberment or atomization. (29)

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One of the more arresting stories set in motion by Panther is that of the bangala (penis) thief: “‘il paraît qu’un homme passe de quartier en quartier et fait disparaître le bangala des gens’” (117) (“‘it seems there’s a guy going from quarter to quarter, making men’s bangalas disappear’”; 79). Such stories regularly circulate in Central and West Africa and are widely regarded as credible (Nyamnjoh 33). Nganang’s inclusion of the bangala thief story reveals Panther’s striking ability to bend reality for entertainment purposes, since “‘la vie est invivable si elle n’est pas réinventée’” (94) (“‘life is unlivable if it’s not reinvented’”; 64). But here we also see the decidedly material effects of rumour: because the thief is identified as a member of the opposition, his actions infect everyday reality with threat and portent, effectively paralysing the will for concerted political action against the Biya regime. Nganang’s text thematises border-crossings in both tropological and ontological respects. His attribution of human virtues to a dog and of animallike failings to men structures the satire of the text, but, of even more consequence are the ontological borders dissolving in the face of “simultaneous multiplicities.” Given that everyday realities consist of the invisible within the visible, Nganang reminds us of the power of writing to keep alive invisible or dormant ethical principles “comme une transcendance de la barbarie” (“like a transcendence of barbarism”; Le Principe dissident 45). His text reveals how Cameroon is engaged in a battle for the field of definition: a battle of naming and denunciation. In this text, Mboudjak strips away the artifice of names and the arrogance of power, while the countervailing force of ratio trottoir embellishes stories in ever more hysterical iterations.

The Autocrat Story both accounts for Cameroonian daily life, and it works as an anodyne for what Mboudjak calls “l’insultante réalité de la rue” (106) (“the insulting reality of the street”; 72). But story can be a debilitating distraction from the exigencies of the present. In the midst of telling his own narrative, Nganang critiques Panther’s imagination as being little more than “web-web” (chatter) (109): “Sa gueule inventrice d’histoires rocambolesques ne bégayait que son silence devant les tragédies de la vie” (148) (“He told stories of the superfluous so he could keep silent about the essential”; 102). And what is this essential? Shortly after Panther delivers his bangala thief story (and after Mama Mado “reinvents” Mboudjak as a French poodle in the beauty parlor),

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the cigarette vendor reads aloud The Crow’s notes on the neighbourhood’s invisible potential: “‘Les sous-quartiers sont la forge inventive de l’homme. La misère de leur environnement n’est qu’illusion. Elle cache la réalité profonde de l’inconnu qu’il faut découvrir: la vérité de l’Histoire se faisant’” (121) (“‘The neighborhoods are the forge of mankind’s creativity. The wretchedness of their surroundings is but an illusion. It conceals the profound reality of the unknown which remains to be discovered: the truth of History in its creation!’”; 82). As we will see, it is in this transformed seeing that neighbourhoods are awakened to their potential, and illusion can be superseded by genuine political renewal. Panther’s stimulus of the endless kongossa (gossip) of the street fosters the very “mutual ‘zombification’” that Mbembe theorises is constitutive of autocratic regimes: “the postcolonial relationship is not primarily a relationship of resistance or of collaboration but can be best characterized as convivial, a relationship fraught by the fact of the commandement and its ‘subjects’ having to share the same living space” (On the Postcolony 104). It is thus ironic that Paul Biya speaks of himself as a trustworthy father, claiming that his government is the sole organ of truth: “Truth comes from above; rumour comes from below” (qtd. in Ellis and Ter Haar 30). Because rumour generates fear, quiescence, and mistrust, it becomes a potent weapon of control wielded by political elites. Harry Garuba argues that “the new elites who control economic and political power within the modern state often prey upon the animist unconscious for spurious cultural instruments to bolster their authority and legitimacy” (285). 4 And, as Nganang points out in his essay on Jean-Marie Teno: “The autocratic society does not even need the presence of the autocrat to function properly” (105) since its citizens replicate the “totalizing structure” of autocracy themselves (104). Beyond threats of personal harm and imprisonment from the regime, “mutual ‘zombification’” and cowardice, are there other reasons why Cameroon is stuck at the border between autocracy and political freedom? Nganang cites Teno’s question “What shall we say about the fascination of the people for authority . . .?” and comments: “The question helps us look beyond the unified and centralising figure of one single possessor of power, of one autocrat, Paul Biya, the administrative officers or the traditional Chiefs, and see Cameroonian society as an autocratic society, as a society in which the autocrat and his numerous victims are more or less chained

4

See also Ellis and Ter Haar’s citation of Ahmadou Kourouma’s En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages: “In Africa, there is not a single head of state who doesn’t have his magician or his marabout; magic and political power are virtually one and the same thing” (81).

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together” (105; emphasis in original). It is a society in which the peace of the streets is equated with order, but, as Nganang explains in Le Principe dissident, this “order” is bound to erupt in an uprising in the near future. He cites the Cameroonian journalist Théophile Kouamouo as predicting that: “tout peut basculer à n’importe quel moment” (“everything could seesaw at any moment”; 19) and himself expresses the paradox of public life in Cameroon: “même si nos journaux sont mortellement ennuyeux, nous vivons à la lisière du cauchemar . . . “ (“even if our newspapers are deathly boring, we are living at the edge of a nightmare”; 19). Mbembe has theorised Cameroon’s crisis as the persistence of a central excess, of a form of opaque violence and degree of terror that flow from a particular failure: that of the postcolonial subject to exercise freely such possibilities as he or she has, to give him/herself and the environment in which he/she lives a form of reason that would make everyday existence readable, if not give it actual meaning. (On the Postcolony 143)

What can account for this combination of the excessive violence of the commandement and its vampiric extraction of Cameroon’s human potential? Theodor Adorno and his co-authors in The Authoritarian Personality argue that subjection can be understood as a psychological blockage resulting from the proscription against confronting “ingroup authorities”: the authoritarian [personality] must, out of an inner necessity, turn his aggression against outgroups. He must do so because he is psychologically unable to attack ingroup authorities, rather than because of intellectual confusion regarding the source of his frustration. If this theory is correct, then authoritarian aggression and authoritarian submission should turn out to be highly correlated. (233)

Following Adorno’s reasoning, one can see that, to the extent that Cameroonian political elites represent themselves as heads of a national “family” or at least are able to wield the propaganda of affinity and intimacy, they prevent their own citizens from launching a political uprising. Judith Butler poses the issue in somewhat different terms, conceptualising the way in which the vulnerable become subject to power: To underscore the abuses of power as real, not the creation or fantasy of the subject, power is often cast as unequivocally external to the subject, something imposed against the subject’s will. But if the very production of the subject and the formation of that will are the consequences of a primary subordination, then the vulnerability of the subject to a power not of its own making is unavoidable. That vulnerability qualifies the subject as an exploitable kind of being. If one is to oppose the abuses of power (which is not the same as opposing power itself), it seems wise to consider in what our vulnerability to that abuse consists. (20)

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Her proposition that “it seems wise to consider in what our vulnerability to that abuse consists” offers an illluminating gloss on Mboudjak’s experience of subjection and his border-crossing from “dog” to dog. He has indeed theorised his own vulnerability in three respects: first, in a Fanonian gesture, he denounces the ethical failures of Massa Yo, disqualifying his master from being able to judge him as “dog.” Second, Mdoudjak grasps the contingency of judgments, as we have seen in the allegory of the beauty parlor scene (where he realises that, sitting in the beauty parlor chair in that pretentious environment, he must indeed look like a “tchotchoro”). And third, he, like The Crow, realises that “dog” is just a word. Thus, Nganang affirms that the border-crossing from “dog” to dog that Mboudjak has been able to accomplish – his seizing of the field of definition – is within the reach of Cameroonians, and indeed this was the case in 1990-1991 during “les années de braise” (“the years of burning embers”) when opposition parties demanded that they be included within a multi-party democracy (Le Principe dissident 25).

Outbreaks The world of Temps de chien is one of small, everyday triumphs: the exercise of ethical determination that Nganang has made the core precept of Le Principe dissident. The aspiration for political renewal remains vigorously alive, as evidenced by the many courageous individuals Nganang cites in his literary manifesto, as well as those few whom he depicts in Temps de chien. In this way, the invisible power of hope penetrates the visible circumstances of the quotidian. Nganang presents individuals who quietly and determinedly call others to account. Chief among them are Mboudjak and The Crow, whose jointly voiced admonition “Where is the man?” echoes throughout the novel. This is not a tale of subjection or victimisation, but a celebration of the power of outbreak, which Nganang upholds as the primary obligation of art: Invisibility is cardinal to the artistic process. To make the invisible become visible is as important in cinema, theatre arts, and painting as it is in literature. It is as important for the European artist as it is for the African because it describes an outbreak, which is the essence of all art. Beyond that general definition, the metaphor of invisibility gains a particular meaning in autocratic societies, for in societies where the structures of power embrace all spheres of life, places of sanity are invisible. In such a totalizing relation of power, making the invisible visible can only be a subversive and political act: it means taking a challenging position, looking for a position which is not allowed to exist. (“Filming an Autocratic Society: Jean-Marie Teno” 107; emphasis added)

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Numerous individuals fight back in outbreaks against all manner of hierarchies and abuses of power in the novel, exemplifying Nganang’s repeated point about the dignified resistance that individuals muster every day of their lives. As he notes in his essay on Teno, “Women […] are not pure victims” (104). Their own field of definition is to fight for their basic rights. Consider the sharp-tongued bayamsalam (market women) and Docta’s former girlfriend Rosalie, who induces him to take responsibility for fathering their child. Likewise, Mboudjak returns after being nearly hung by Soumi, “dirigé par [sa] volonté de voir Soumi répondre de sa cruauté” (31) (“impelled by [his] desire to see Soumi held accountable for his cruelty”; 20). The Crow stands up for justice throughout the novel, directly questioning the rights of the police to arrest the cigarette vendor, chiding the bar-drinkers for their cowardice, and writing a letter to Paul Biya requesting that he visit the neighbourhood: “Il lui a simplement demandé de venir se balader dans un sous-quartier, s’il avait du courage. Il l’a invité, quoi. Comme un homme bien élevé. C’est tout. Et c’est pourquoi il a été arrêté” (278) (“He just asked him to come take a walk through a neighborhood, if he had the courage. He gave him an invitation, you know. Like a gentleman. That’s all. And that’s why he was arrested”; 193). 5 For Nganang, political revolt is historic, democratised, and multi-sited. It arises in the fields, spreads its ideals throughout all sectors of society, and is distinguished by many everyday heroes, with the writer being just one among them: “l’activité d’écriture est une parmi des milliers d’autres activités dans lesquelles les Africains défendent, circonscrivent et définissent chaque jour leur dignité” (“the activity of writing is one of among the thousands of other activities in which Africans defend, delineate and define their dignity each day”; Le Principe dissident 43). In each instance of individuals calling others to account, we hear Mboudjak’s “Where is the man?” as a sharp, shaming exhortation, as if to say: “Be the term that you have called yourself in the first place; live within that field of definition that you call your own.” Needless to say, this admonition is meant especially for those in power, whose roles are defined by indigenous expectations of leadership, chief among these being their responsibility for the collective well-being of their people.

5

This episode in the novel directly alludes to the letter Célestin Monga wrote to the Cameroon weekly Le Messager, for which act he was promptly arrested (Nzessé 83).

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Indeed, the activities of speaking out and breaking out dominate both Le Principe dissident as well as Temps de chien. The Crow’s rage against the cowardice of the street marks him as “le maître de la parole qui rend fou” (172) (“the true master of the speech that drives people crazy”; 119). Mboudjak barks out warnings, and Nganang specifically identifies himself with the figure of the town crier rather than that of the griot (Le Principe dissident 29), standing shoulder to shoulder with those in the marketplace as a “colporteur de parole” (“peddler of words”; 30).

Les Étoiles du Quotidien The young Eric Takou’s spoken confrontation with political authority provokes his killing, and it is the street’s outrage at his fate that catalyses the movement for democracy. The historical Eric Takou was killed in Douala during the opposition demonstrations in 1991, which were mounted to create a National Conference that would create an inclusive political system for all opposition parties. Nganang dedicates Le Principe dissident to Takou – “Dans l’esprit du parlement pour Eric Takou” – identifying with Césaire’s goal of being “la voix de ceux qui n’ont point de voix” (“the voice of those who have no voice at all”; Le Principe dissident 16). Takou, having absorbed the neighbourhood’s slogans and its phantasmagoric radio trottoir, sums up the mood of the street and yells out when he sees the police commissioner on his way to visit Mini Minor: le trop bavard gosse du Docta avait piaffé, secoué sa tête et dit suffisamment haut pour que toute la rue entende: ‘Vraiment, le Cameroun, c’est le Cameroun, hein!’ C’était la parole d’un autre, c’était la parole commune de la rue, et d’ailleurs, c’était la parole d’un enfant. Seulement, Monsieur le Commissaire l’avait pris trop personnellement. Il avait sorti simplement son arme et avait tiré un coup sur l’opposant en puissance. L’enfant était tombé en silence. (289) Docta’s overly talkative kid had stamped his feet, shaken his head, and said loud enough for the whole street to hear, ‘Really, Cameroon is Cameroon, huh!’ They were someone else’s words, heard often enough on the street and, what’s more, they were spoken by a child. But the police commissioner had taken it too personally. He had simply pulled out his weapon and shot at the powerful opposition figure. The child fell silently. (201)

When Takou is transformed into an angel (283), the full power of radio trottoir is unleashed, this time in English: “Biya must go!” (295). Madagascar’s streets erupt like a flow of lava, with the tar exploding (296) and Mboudjak marching along with collective Man: “Unis nous étions,

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l’homme et moi, dans la précipitation saccadée du langage nôtre: dans nos aboiements” (296) (“United we were, Man and me, in the spasmodic rush of our language: our barks”; 206). But this is no tidy resolution to the struggle, for Mboudjak recognises its unformed, provisional character: moi j’attendais toujours l’arrivée de la Rosalie-Sylvie-Yvette Menzui, en abrégé Rosalie, pour moi, pour moi seul Rosa Rosa Rose, mère du petit Takou, et je me disais – ô convainquez-moi donc que ce ne sera pas illusion! – qu’avec elle viendrait à coup sûr l’ultime marche: la revendication de la mère sevrée de son fils. Et toutes les fois que je passais à l’endroit de la mort de Takou, je humais je rehumais je rerehumais et je rererehumais le goudron qui plus que quiconque avait vu le silence abrupt de son infantile parole. Oui, croyez-moi chers lecteurs, l’odeur de son sang y était toujours chaude. (296-97) I was still waiting for the arrival of Rosalie-Sylvie-Yvette Menzui, Rosalie, for short – or as I alone call her, Rosa Rosa Rose, little Takou’s mother. And I said to myself – please convince me it won’t be just an illusion – when she comes, it will surely be the last march of all: the march for the demands of the mother brutally weaned from her child. Each time I passed by the place where Takou died, I sniffed, re-sniffed, re-re-sniffed, and I re-re-resniffed the tar that, more than anyone, had witnessed the abrupt silencing of his infantile words. Yes, you can believe me, dear readers, the scent of his blood was still hot. (206)

Here Nganang evocatively explores the multi-layered significance of Takou’s death. The street remains bloody after his killing, having turned into a monument that spurs political action. Here we are meant to see the contrast between Mboudjak’s earlier fear of suffering repeated assaults (“Faut-il, diriez-vous, que je sois tué, retué, reretué and rereretué?” [31]; “Do I have to be killed, re-killed, re-re-killed, and re-re-re-killed? [20]) and his vigorous sniffing of the tar again and again for confirmation that a new movement has begun. The “waiting for Rosalie” holds open the indefinite space of democracy for Cameroon, echoing the suspended, inchoate democratic project waiting to be forged: “nous savons déjà que l’écrivain, lui, même s’il dansait avec les foules libérées un moment, n’abandonnera pas ce jour-là son principe cardinal, car après tout, il sait, lui, qu’il écrira toujours pour une République invisible” (“we know already that the writer himself, even if he were to dance with the liberated crowd for awhile, will not abandon his cardinal principle that day, because, after all, he himself knows that he will always write for an invisible Republic”; Le Principe dissident 48). Nganang states that it is the Cameroonian writer’s role to engage in the building of a République invisible, a République de l’imagination, and a République de l’espoir (“an invisible republic, a republic of the imagination, and a republic of hope”; Le Principe dissident 48). Writers living in times of acute struggle must, like German authors writing within the era of Nazi fascism, keep alive their guiding ethical principles, even if the prevailing

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social conditions threaten their resolve (Le Principe dissident 15, 46). In these last sentences of Temps de chien, the imagery of the fiery streets, blood, and a mother’s connection to her child (with the suggestion of the elemental bonds of blood and milk) signify that this is a struggle which can be born at any moment. Thus, the larger trajectory of this novel crosses over from the apparent calm or “mutual ‘zombification’” of Cameroon’s streets to the “colère des rues” (“anger of the streets”; Le Principe dissident 27). Nganang insists that the Cameroonian writer must define a “space of civility” generous and flexible enough to represent the country’s democratic strivings: l’écrivain Camerounais d’aujourd’hui, quand il écrit, définit un espace de civilité républicain dans lequel toutes les colères, toutes les revendications, toutes les convulsions de notre présent et de notre futur devraient trouver leur maison. Il bâtit une vraie maison de sorcière donc, une République de l’imagination, et ceci ne peut être acquis que s’il accepte le principe de cette larve infinie, de ces feux qui secouent les dessous des goudrons de nos rues, bref, s’il fait corps avec le principe dissident de notre société. (27-28; emphasis in original) Today’s Cameroonian writer, when he writes, defines a space of republican civility in which all the angers, all the demands, all the convulsions of our present and our future must find their dwelling. He builds a true house of sorcery, therefore, a republic of the imagination, and this will only be attained if he accepts the principle of this infinite larva, of these fires which shake underneath the asphalt of our streets; in short, if he joins himself to the dissident principle of our society.

Crucially, this “vraie maison de sorcière” (“true house of sorcery”) can be wrought from the fires of the streets only by Cameroon’s citizens themselves within the coordinates of an autochthonous African time-space. It is in this spirit that Paul Zeleza urges intellectuals “to formulate historiographies that are not Eurocentric, to write history with multiple pathways, that focuses on varieties of human experiences and connections, and tells stories of change without presenting linear tales of progress” (26). Temps de chien constitutes one such defiant border-crossing of the conceptual terrain. Despite Nganang’s allusions to a non-violent Marxist coming-to-consciousness, this novel has no definitive “grands récits” of its own. The movement toward democracy is always provisional: it is a democratic project permeated by outbreaks, and, further, it is envisioned as incipient and open. All telic movement is suspect, whether long- or shortterm, whether forward-looking – “preparing for the revolution” – or backward-looking – “pursuing one’s canitude” (négritude) – or both. Jean-François Bayart has written extensively on what he terms the “totalitarianising and detotalitarianising” vectors of power at play in

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contemporary African states, reminding us that Africans have long engaged in creative appropriation of the power wielded over them. 6 Nganang in Temps de chien emphasises that the political story of contemporary Africa will unfold not as yet another narrative of victimisation, but as a polyphonic weaving of multiple voices, informed by the many narratives of the African past and the principled dissent of the present. This chapter has theorised the border-crossing from the contested identities of “dog” and dog and has considered the resonance produced by the mobility of such a trope. Because one assigned a place as “dog” can theorise and transcend this position, by the end of the text, we readily appreciate the chiasmic irony of wise dogs and human fools. But the novel’s allegorical inflections do not amount to simple categorical equations: dog, “dog,” Man, men, Cameroon, and Africa are all malleable, self-determining signifiers. Temps de chien suggests not that all men are dogs, but instead juxtaposes the mobility and courage of a dog returning to the lion’s den to fight for justice against the human rationalisations that perpetuate epistemic barriers and political stasis. Nganang’s larger purpose is not simply to give value to the humblest dog among us; his real centre-piece are the “étoiles du quotidien” (“stars of the quotidian”) whose political determination was boldly displayed in “les années de braise” of 1990-1991 (Le Principe dissident 44). Given the country’s recent history, Cameroon will not long remain stuck at the border of freedom. Without reaching for a deterministic conclusion, we can perhaps simply say with Mboudjak that the first necessary act of dissidence is to emulate those Cameroonians who bravely traversed borders: “qui s’étaient fâchés et l’avaient fait savoir sans demander l’avis de personne” (270) (“who’d gotten mad—and who’d done so without asking anyone’s permission”; 188).

Works Cited Adesanmi, Pius. “Third Generation African Literatures and Contemporary Theorising.” The Study of Africa. Vol. 1: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Encounters. Ed. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza. Dakar: Codesria, 2006. 105-16.

6

See Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly: “the production of a political space is on the one hand the work of an ensemble of actors, dominant and dominated, and […] on the other hand it is in turn subjected to a double logic of totalitarianising and detotalitarianising” (249).

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Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper and Row, 1950. Afrique: Je te plumerai. Dir. Jean-Marie Teno. Cameroon. VHS. California Newsreel, 1992. Bayart, Jean-François. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. Trans. Mary Harper, Christopher Harrison and Elizabeth Harrison. London and New York: Longman, 1993. Bond, Patrick. Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Ellis, Stephen, and Gerrie Ter Haar. Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1963. Fisiy, Cyprian F., and Peter Geschiere. “Witchcraft, Development and Paranoia in Cameroon: Interactions between Popular, Academic and State Discourse.” Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Ed. Henriette L. Moore and Todd Sanders. New York: Routledge, 2001. Forsdick, Charles. “‘Ceci n’est pas un conte, mais une histoire de chair et de sang’: Representing the Colonial Massacre in Francophone Literature and Culture.” Postcolonial Violence, Culture and Identity in Francophone Africa and the Antilles. Ed. Lorna Milne. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. 31-57. Garuba, Harry. “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society.” Public Culture 15.2 (2003): 261-85. Geschiere, Peter. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Trans. Peter Geschiere and Janet Roitman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997. Hegel, G. W. F. Wissenschaft der Logik. Vol. 1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969. Kafka, Franz. “Vor dem Gesetz.” Sämtliche Erzählungen. Ed. Paul Raabe. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1969. 131-132.

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Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Mbembe, Achille. “African Modes of Self-Writing.” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 239-73. ——., On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Moore, Henriette L., and Todd Sanders. Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. New York: Routledge, 2001. Nganang, Patrice. Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle. Trans. Amy Baram Reid. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. ——., “Filming an Autocratic Society: Jean-Marie Teno.” The Literary Griot 12.1 (2000): 102-18. ——., Le Principe dissident. Yaoundé: éditions interlignes, 2005. ——., Temps de chien: Chronique animale. Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 2001. Nyamnjoh, Frances B. “Delusions of Development and the Enrichment of Witchcraft Discourses in Cameroon.” Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. New York: Routledge, 2001. 28-49. Nzessé, Ladislas. “Temps de Chien de Patrice Nganang: quand le texte se charge des réalités camerounaises.” French Studies in Southern Africa 33 (2004): 75-93. Sen, Amartya. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Shaw, Rosalind. Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Stiglitz, Joseph E. Making Globalization Work. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. Taylor, Charles. “Modern Social Imaginaries.” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 91-124. Tervonen, Taina. “L’écrivain à l’école de la rue: Entretien avec Patrice Nganang.” Africultures 37 (2001): 104-05. Verschave, François-Xavier. France-Afrique: le crime continue. Lyon: éditions tahin party, 2000. Zeleza, Paul T. “Historicizing the Posts: The View from African Studies.” Postmodernism, Postcoloniality, and African Studies. Ed. Zine Magubane. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2003. 1-38.

Jennifer Wawrzinek

Addressing the Absent Other in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron J. M. Coetzee’s novel Age of Iron describes a period of social and moral breakdown during the South African Emergency Period of the late 1980s, when civil society under apartheid was collapsing under the strain of forty years of racial segregation, political protest and increasingly violent stateenforced repression. The depiction of social breakdown in Age of Iron is allegorised as a malignant cancer that is destroying the body of the novel’s protagonist, classics professor Mrs Curren. It is this juxtaposition between Mrs Curren’s bourgeois liberal humanism and the political demands of a country divided and torn apart by racial segregation under apartheid that foregrounds not only the troubled relationship between ethical humanism and political commitment, but also between the self and the others produced by these discourses. Moreover, this relationship is complicated by a history of colonisation and revolution that has ensured the difficulty of locating any single centre of hegemonic power. Michiel Heyns argues that the South African context complicates the notion of imperial centre because, to many Afrikaners, colonial domination was represented by the English occupation of the Cape and Natal, and the annexation of the Boer republics. In this sense, the Nationalist victory in 1948 and the declaration of the Republic in 1961 was, to these people, an articulation of liberation from an oppressive British colonial power. However, as Heyns notes, these dates also signify to the majority of South Africans the accession to power of a racist Afrikaner nationalism that was far more oppressive and violent than the previous British colonial authority had been (105). In this case, power comes to be disseminated from multiple localities as an obvious and direct display of political repression under Afrikaner rule and in the cultural and linguistic vestiges of British colonial rule, evident in Mrs Curren’s reference to her Hillman as a car that came from the days when “British was best” (AI 99). In Age of Iron the complex assertion of a political and discursive power that emanates from various sites but is nevertheless invasive and colonising is powerfully depicted in the body of Mrs Curren as a painful and debilitating cancerous growth that divides and multiplies so excessively it destroys the body on which it depends.

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In its malignant form cancer is a class of disease where a particular group of cells displays an uncontrolled growth. These cells invade and destroy surrounding tissue as they proliferate, often spreading to other locations via the lymphatic and circulatory systems. Mrs Curren’s suffering body enacts the destructive potential of a power that seeks to replicate itself endlessly regardless of the location of that power. Teresa Dovey, writing on Coetzee’s earlier novel Waiting for the Barbarians, suggests that Coetzee’s portrayal of the suffering body functions as a critique of liberal humanist discourse that is shown to be impotent (61). In Age of Iron, Mrs Curren’s training as a classics professor, together with the weight and authority of Western civilisation this carries, proves inadequate in helping her to come to terms with the breakdown of her own body and the social body of a divided South African society. South African writer Nadine Gordimer has argued that the only way to change to world is to “describe a situation so truthfully” that it would be impossible for the reader to avoid or to negate the world that is being described (248-50). André Brink similarly attests to a confidence in the ability of literature and discourse to recover the histories of those who have been marginalised and silenced by the workings of socio-political oppression (17). For Mrs Curren, however, this proves to be a difficult task and is complicated by the clash of discursive contexts and ideologies that have proliferated as a result of South Africa’s complicated history. Barbara Eckstein suggests that even though discourse can never reveal history as such, one must nevertheless comprehend one’s others across the boundaries of difference. But as Jacques Derrida has shown, the very comprehension of otherness effectively reduces the other to the same, thereby negating the otherness of the other. Even the categorisation of the other under the banner of racism is, as Derrida argues, not a response to alterity or the singularity of the other, but is rather a form of exclusion and reduction of otherness as it is circumscribed and contained by discourse (336 n17). In Age of Iron, as in many other of his works, Coetzee attests to an otherness outside history that cannot be reduced to the same, and a notion of history that is not a priori but that remains open to the future and to refiguration. The characters that Mrs Curren encounters throughout the narrative of the novel resist comprehension, as do many of the specific events she experiences. It is this radical alterity as an ineffability beyond the limits of discourse that forces her to question her Enlightenment values and the liberal philosophies underwriting her sense of self. It is this radical otherness that the logocentric discourse underwriting systems of colonisation and domination seeks to reduce or to expel. However, as Simon Critchley’s work on Derrida illustrates, the demand that alterity places on us is an ethical

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demand (296). At the basis of the act of comprehension is the reduction of alterity to identity and of otherness to the same. The reduction of otherness in this way fails to acknowledge the otherness of the other. Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas both attempt to locate an otherness as a transcendent point of exteriority to the logos. Blanchot argues for that which is “prior to the day”, that is, prior to revelation and comprehension and thus prior to negation by human language and systems of communication (The Work of Fire 329). In contrast to Blanchot’s generalised mysteriousness, Levinas posits the point of absolute exteriority to the logos in what he refers to as the face of the Autrui – a wholly singular other who, as Critchley writes, “denies himself to me by escaping my field of comprehension” (91). In this way, the self can no longer exert power over the other. Rather it must welcome alterity and in so doing open the self to interrogation. In many philosophical discussions, the other refers to an already existing entity such as a human being. Indeed, Levinas uses the term Autrui in order to distinguish a singular human dimension from the more general conception of l’Autre. In postolonial studies, the other generally refers to the colonised culture and its people. But as Derek Attridge notes, in both cases, the otherness that is being described functions as “an impingement from the outside that challenges assumptions, habits, and values and that demands a response” (“Innovation” 23). In Coetzee’s earlier novel entitled Foe, the protagonist Susan Barton attempts to comprehend the tongueless Friday’s silence but fails in her attempt. His radical alterity demands what Michael Marais refers to as “an attentional response to his otherness” (172). Similarly in Age of Iron Mrs Curren’s confrontation with an inexplicable otherness opens a dimension of alterity that can neither be reduced, comprehended or even thought. Otherness in this novel is not instantiated, neither is it negated. Rather, the text self-reflexively alludes to an otherness that is absolutely foreign to the subject and her experiences. Moreover, the singularity of this otherness instates an obligation for the other that demands responsiveness and that highlights otherness as a mode of relating. Age of Iron begins self-reflexively and metatextually as an address, in the form of a letter, to an absent other. On the day that Mrs Curren receives the news that she has a particularly aggressive form of cancer she begins writing to her absent daughter who has left South Africa in disgust and is living in the United States. On the same day, a homeless alcoholic named Vercueil takes up residence on Mrs Curren’s doorstep and, in the ensuing weeks, becomes her only companion. At the time of writing Mrs Curren is an old woman. She is a retired classics professor, opposed to the ruling Afrikaans

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regime, sympathetic to the struggle of black South Africans but averse to their revolutionary and sometimes violent political strategies. As Mrs Curren recounts to Vercueil one day as they are waiting in her car, the policies of Afrikaner nationalism were the direct cause of the daughter’s decision to leave the country, vowing never to return until the people responsible for apartheid were “hanging by their heels from the lampposts”. If that were to happen, Mrs Curren tells Vercueil, her daughter would happily “throw stones at their bodies and dance in the streets” (AI 75). In a novel that depicts the socially and corporeally destructive consequences of subversion, domination and colonisation, Coetzee’s choice of an old and dying woman as narrator in conjunction with a homeless alcoholic and absent daughter as addressee and potential witness suggests that the figure of the displaced provides a deliberate strategy to resist and disturb the authority of South African white hegemony from a position of exteriority. Fiona Probyn argues that Coetzee’s use of the feminine voice in particular, not only in Age of Iron but across his literary oeuvre in general, constitutes a textual strategy of disabling authority with the promise of a nonposition outside one that would rival structures of state, truth or realism (4). This use of the feminine is predicated on the idea that women’s access to representation and to power has been marginalised under patriarchy. In this sense, Mrs Curren’s recounting of her last days in the form of an address to her absent daughter functions as a limit narrative – one that does not invade and colonise the space of the other but rather, as Michael du Plessis writes, enunciates “femininity to test the limits of meaning” (120). This use of the feminine voice as a mode of disruption to structures of authority and meaning is, as I mentioned earlier, a strategy that Coetzee also employs in Foe. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reads this novel as an illustration of the “wholly otherness of margins”, suggesting that it serves as a warning against feminist readings that do not heed the “Eurocentric arrogance” inherent within attempts to give voice to the margins (157). Spivak’s argument highlights the importance of gaps and silences, or what Coetzee himself refers to as “the veiled; the dark, the buried, the feminine; alterities” (White Writing 81), but cautions against any desire to speak for the other. In his book of essays entitled White Writing, Coetzee similarly suggests that reading the other as a mode of subversion can all too easily, “like all triumphant subversion” become simply another dominant mode of representation” (81). Whilst the gaps of knowing in the text of Age of Iron are important for the way they suggest strains and tensions that allude to the presence of radical alterity and the ineffable, it is not simply the trace of otherness that is important here but rather the way in which these gaps in the

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conceptual material of the text function as sites of disruption. Circumscribing or containing otherness as a conceptual category would do little to change hegemonic systems of representation. In Age of Iron it is rather the way in which these gaps and silences break down Mrs Curren’s familiar world as the irruption of the other into the same and as a result of the internal contradictions produced through the exclusion of otherness. Mrs Curren’s ethical humanism depends upon concepts such as ‘wisdom’, ‘knowledge’, ‘understanding’, and ‘insight’. These belong to a discourse of European philosophical universalism, or what we might otherwise call cosmopolitanism – a concept that designates an intellectual ethic of universal humanism that transcends regional particularism. According to the ideal of cosmopolitanism, there is only one worldwide community of human beings. To this end, Immanuel Kant dreamed of a cosmopolitan point of view that would lead to what he referred to as “perpetual peace” and was invoked as a reassertion of Greek and Enlightenment values. However, when Mrs Curren is asked by her maid, Florence, to take her to Guguletu and then to Site C in order to find her teenage black activist son, Bheki, this discourse appears inappropriate to the context of violence and suffering she encounters on the journey and the following events stage an acute awareness of Mrs Curren’s comprehensive limitations. In Guguletu Mrs Curren discovers a settlement under siege. She writes, “there was a smell of burning in the air, of wet ash, burning rubber. Slowly we drove down a broad unpaved street lined with matchbox houses. A police van armoured in wire mesh cruised past us” (AI 90). This scene of foreboding intensifies when Mrs Curren accompanies Florence’s brother, Mr Thabane, to Site C and witnesses the burning of a black township. She stands in a large crowd as shanties burn and pour forth black smoke. Groups of men, she writes, “were at work trying to rescue the contents of the burning shacks, going from one to another, putting out the fires,” except that she then realises these groups of men are “not rescuers but incendiaries.” They are not battling the fires but the rain (AI 95). They eventually find Bheki in a nondescript building not far from the burning township, laid out with four other teenagers against a wall after having been executed by gunfire. Mr Thabane tells Florence that she will find the bullets used to kill the children are “SABS approved” (AI 103). As Abdul JanMohamed suggests in another context, comprehension is possible only “if the self can somehow negate or at least severely bracket the values, assumptions, and ideology of his culture” (59). The events of violence and brutality that Mrs Curren witnesses emphasise the limitations of her ethical system, something that is further highlighted when Mrs Curren

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discovers Bheki’s friend, John, hiding out in her house. Despite her efforts to contact Mr Thabane and to protect the boy from the authorities, the police arrive and eventually kill him, notwithstanding Mrs Curren’s protestations or her efforts to save the teenager. It is these very moments of blindness, or incomprehension, that attest to the trace of an alterity that exceeds human systems of meaning and which Derrida would suggest also exceed the logocentrism of state authority. Mrs Curren is at a loss to comprehend the experience of the township people whose houses are destroyed by statesanctioned burnings, the motivations and desires of the teenage black activists who are assassinated by state troopers, and especially the motivations of John, who first appears in her back yard harassing the homeless alcoholic Vercueil, is then hit by a van as he is cycling with Bheki on the street in front of Mrs Curren’s house, and is finally shot by the South African police when he takes refuge in the small room beside her kitchen. Coetzee depicts a woman whose cultural values and assumptions delimit her narrative awareness of other/s but not, however, her ability to act ethically despite those limitations. Indeed, Mrs Curren’s responses to the otherness she encounters acknowledge an impenetrability between self and other and an acceptance that the other’s ethical claims cannot be limited. This is indeed a response to otherness as generic, that is, to a Levinasian l’Autre. However, the attentionality that Mrs Curren displays towards the specificities of otherness and the way that she describes the faces of the young revolutionaries who have been executed with “eyes open and staring” and a “dead look” (AI 102) also suggest a responsiveness to the singularity, the Autrui, of the other. As Levinas explains, it is “in the exposure to wounds and outrages, in the feeling proper to responsibility, the oneself is provoked as irreplaceable, as devoted to others, without being able to resign, and thus as incarnated in order to offer itself, to suffer and to give” (Levinas Reader 95). For Levinas, the reponse that is demanded by such a confrontation instates the ethical relation as one that is open to the other and which takes responsibility for the other.

The Ethical Relation To varying degrees, each of the characters in Age of Iron exists in a different relationship to structures of state power, although they are all variously external to those structures. Their bodies are marked and re-marked with signs of otherness to both the ruling Afrikaner society under apartheid and the previous colonial administration of the British Empire. These bodies,

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whether aged and female, derelict and homeless, or black and militant, are compromised in their abilities to be heard or to be represented according to their own determinations. They are simply not recognised as legitimate persons within the socio-political structures of state. This is illustrated most dramatically in the siege narrative when the police invade Mrs Curren’s house in search of the fugitive John and when she is forcibly removed after trying to negotiate with the boy. After he is shot by the police, Mrs Curren walks to a vacant lot beneath the overpass where she falls asleep wrapped up in a pink quilt. There she is mistaken for a homeless person by a band of children who force a stick into her mouth in order to look for gold fillings (AI 159). This scene of utter degradation mimics the rape of her body by the invasive cancerous cells that will soon destroy her. And yet, it is this very experience of the world around her, of its violence and suffering, its “wounds and outrages”, that generates the narrative which forms the address to Mrs Curren’s absent daughter ironically as an articulation of love. Addressing the other as absent other in Age of Iron is significant because the moment of interpellation does not demand a response or a legitimation of self that the moment of self-reflective transmission might. The recounting of such terrible suffering and violence to someone who has left the country and refuses to return whilst such atrocities are being repeatedly enacted not only calls the absence of the other to account, but projects that accounting into the future as one that is open-ended and non-directed. Mrs Curren’s addresses to the other primary characters of the novel are all to some extent unable to be answered, either because of physical absence in the case of the daughter; absolute indifference in the case of Vercueil; or due to the radical differences between her own socio-cultural position and that of John and Bheki. Rather than invoking relations of reciprocity, which are founded on a contractual logic of give and take, the relationships depicted in Age of Iron are distinguished by their asymmetrical and distinctly non-reciprocal character. Michael Gardiner argues that this is nevertheless a dialogic relation because of the way it demands a response not for what has been said but in terms of the relation it forges (131-32) – a relation not founded on a dialectic of recognition but on one of openness. The absence of Mrs Curren’s daughter draws the narrative of Coetzee’s novel into being as a gesture of openness towards an/other across boundaries of self and nation. In one sense, the daughter’s very decision to leave a country torn apart by the political tensions of apartheid can be understood as a privileged but irresponsible detachment. Her absence from the political regime that she detests does little in the novel to enact any form of change. Moreover, the irony of her escape to the United States cannot be

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underestimated. She leaves ostensibly as a protest against the Afrikaner government for its policy of racial segregation, police repression and the maintenance of white domination and relocates to a country where, in 1991, the brutal bashing of African-American Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police Department underscored the continuing legacy of American racial division and discrimination. Mrs Curren’s direct address to her daughter as a letter to be delivered only after her death, and which therefore cannot be answered, announces the openness of Blanchot’s “Here I am” as an act of self-exposure and vulnerability. In this sense, the letter gestures to what YiFu Tan refers to as “cosmopolites who are inhabitants of a vast universe” (159), demanding that they witness the suffering of others not as spectacle but as an appeal for the respect of human suffering – irrespective of difference. Whilst Mrs Curren is acutely aware of the heroism evident in the selfsacrifice of the five teenage activists who were lined up against a wall and brutally executed, she cannot support a revolutionary cause she perceives as one that re-inscribes the divisions of black and white. The difference between the political commitment of the activists and her own ethical humanism is further emphasised throughout Mrs Curren’s encounter with the unlikeable John. After the boy is run over by a van in the street outside her house, Mrs Curren searches for and finds him in Woodstock Hospital. As John is lying on the hospital bed, suffering from injuries that are the direct cause of his blind commitment to black activism, Mrs Curren lectures him on the importance of allowing for exceptions in the general rules, even as she halfacknowledges that the situation of the Emergency Period does not allow for “all that close listening, all those exceptions, all that mercy” (AI 81). On a later occasion, she once again disputes John’s Manichean, masculine and iron view of the world in order to argue for “everything indefinite, everything that gives when you press it” (AI 146). Mrs Curren not only opposes John’s radical and revolutionary political beliefs, she dislikes him as a person. As she writes to her daughter, she is unable to find a way to sympathise or connect with this teenage militant, of whom she knows little: I do not like him. I do not like him. I look into my heart and nowhere do I find any trace of feeling for him. As there are people to whom one spontaneously warms, so there are people to whom one is, from the first, cold. That is all. […] A simplified person, simplified in every way: swifter, nimbler, more tireless than real people, without doubts or scruples, without humour, ruthless, innocent. While he lay in the street, while I thought he was dying, I did what I could for him. But, to be candid, I would rather I had spent myself on someone else. (AI 78-79)

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Nevertheless and despite her dislike of the young teenage activist, Mrs Curren does not dismiss him. As Critchley argues, “the otherness of Necessity is the writing that calls us beyond desire” (90). Mrs Curren delineates a contradiction in her response to John between her desire to spend time on someone else, and the necessity of helping the injured boy. John comes to be figured as the personification of necessity, that is, as a singular other who instantiates the process of the self’s deconstruction. The truthfulness of this relation is not an objective truth comprehended by a dispassionate subject. Rather it is, as Levinas argues elsewhere, “a commitment in which the other remains in his otherness” (“Meaning” 67), but which alters the subject by rendering that subject responsible for the other and placing the self into question. When John appears at Mrs Curren’s house to hide from the authorities, still suffering from the injuries sustained by the hit and run, Mrs Curren nurses the boy and then later attempts to protect him from the police. In her letter to her daughter, she once again questions the appropriateness of her values and her ethical system in a context that appears to demand something quite different: What I had not calculated on what that more might be called for than to be good. For there are plenty of good people in this country. We are two a penny, we good and nearly-good. What the times call for is different from goodness. The times call for heroism. As word that, as I speak it, sounds foreign to my lips. I doubt that I have ever used it before, even in a lecture … I would have used the words heroic status instead. (AI 165-66)

The realisation here is that Mrs Curren’s values are not quite appropriate to a political struggle that demands the heroic self-sacrifice evidenced by the teenage activists. As Derek Attridge argues, this is a situation that demands “an ethic of comradeship, single-mindedness and blind courage” (“Trusting the Other” 76). The shift in Mrs Curren’s understanding of the word ‘heroic’ in the context of political events rather than as the abstract concept suggested by the phrase ‘heroic status’, indicates a shift in Mrs Curren’s thinking from the general to the particular. Moreover, in acknowledging the specificity of individual heroism, rather than heroic status as an abstract concept, Mrs Curren simultaneously attests to the sigularity of John’s otherness and to the impossibility of locating him within a generalised system of meaning. John’s otherness is, however, very different to the otherness represented by the homeless alcoholic, Vercueil. His difference from Florence, Bheki and John is highlighted by the hostility displayed by the latter towards the former. Florence pronounces that Vercueil is “rubbish” and that he is “good for nothing” (AI 47). The boys, Bheki and John, are openly aggressive and

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violent towards Vercueil when they chase him out of the shed, push him to the ground and begin to kick him. Bheki takes off his belt and begins to lash the homeless man who lifts his hands to his face in a gesture of selfprotection and supplication (AI 46). This scene illustrates the selfperpetuating brutality of political resistance that re-enacts the violence of the apartheid regime. Here the teenage boys simply repeat the violence that has previously been perpetrated against them. In this sense, we cannot read the critique of Mrs Curren’s ethical humanism that I discussed earlier as one that would support in its place a militant political activism because Coetzee critiques such activism itself as one that has the potential to replicate the structures of domination and oppression it seeks to overthrow. Vercueil takes up residence on Mrs Curren’s doorstep on the day she receives the news that she is suffering from an aggressive type of cancer that does not leave her long to live. Just as the political activism of John and Bheki challenges her ethical humanism, so too does Vercueil’s presence challenge her daily habits of order and cleanliness together with her moral principles of moral responsibility and obligation. David Attwell argues that Vercueil’s role in the narrative is to serve as an “Archimedean point of reference outside of the dimensions of what is recognisably real” (174). To this extent, his absence of social position (homeless, alcohol-dependant, unpredictable and unreadable) within the black/white economy of the South African socio-political system means that, as Attridge notes, he is “outside any of the normal codes that govern interpersonal relations” (“Trusting the Other” 62). As such he is unaffected by the obligations of human relationship or community and is impervious to the logic of labour and reward, service and debt, governing the social economy. Vercueil’s paradoxical presence in the novel both reminds Mrs Curren of her limitations and enables her to transcend the distinction between strangers and friends. This constitutes the ethical not, as Anthony Appiah suggests, a universal that represents only another form of Western arrogance and the universalising of culturally conditioned norms (155). Rather it gestures towards the humanitarian recognition of suffering despite the radical unknowability of the other. Mrs Curren gives refuge to John and tries to protect him from the police despite her confession that she does not like him and that she disagrees with his politics. Likewise, Mrs Curren entrusts Vercueil with the delivery of the letter to her daughter, even though she knows little about him and his lack of reliability throws his appropriateness to this task into doubt. Like the figure himself, who appears from nowhere and then disappears and reappears unpredictably, the name Vercueil alludes to the hidden, the

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forgotten and the unknowable. The alliteration of the name Vercueil with the Afrikaans word ‘verskuil’ (to hide) suggests the figure of the homeless man as one who remains intrinsically unknowable because any appearance of presence is necessarily deceptive. The name itself, however, is not typically Afrikaans, English or African. As such, Vercueil cannot be racially or culturally classified. His naming thus locates him as marginal to the classificatory systems governing apartheid South Africa. It is therefore surprising that this figure should serve as the locus for Mrs Curren’s intimacies and the repository of her trust. Yet the relationship that Mrs Curren develops with Vercueil during her last days is one of startling intimacy, generosity and openness. It serves as a counter-current to the frustrations of her inability to deal with the violence and suffering that she witnesses in the township and through the figures of the teenage activists.

Attentional Responsiveness In his 1997-98 Tanner Lectures at Princeton University (subsequently published as The Lives of Animals), Coetzee presented a ficto-critical narrative about an Australian novelist and animal rights campaigner named Elizabeth Costello. She delivers lectures at the fictional Appleton College where she enjoins her audience to open themselves to the fullness of another’s being, despite the apparent impenetrability of that otherness. The alterity to which Elizabeth Costello refers is in this instance the non-human animal. Her call for ethical compassion towards the suffering of others, despite the radical otherness of that other, is instantiated upon the notion of “the sympathetic imagination”, which Costello explains as “the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another” (LA 35). This appeal to the imagination has the potential to define collectivities of belonging and responsibility in the absence of reciprocal communication that is normally thought essential to the idea of community. As such it designates what Bruce Robbins refers to as “a field rather than an identity” (3), thus enabling intimacy and contact without dissolving the otherness of the other. In Age of Iron the sympathetic imagination is illustrated most poignantly in the scene where Mrs Curren imagines Vercueil, who is standing outside smoking a cigarette, listening with her to a piece of music. She describes the moment with the proximity of love-making when she writes, “Together we listened. At this moment, I thought, I know how he feels as surely as if he and I were making love.” She then goes on to imagine their bodies pressed together as though they were strangers travelling on a bus in Sicily, their

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souls “twined together, ravished. Like insects mating tail to tail, facing away from each other” (AI 30). This curious description of an intimacy that is at the same time a turning away designates more a shared terrain, a mutual sphere, than a reading of the self through the other or an attempt to possess or contain the other. The description does not make it clear whether Vercueil is listening to the music or not. He is simply shown leaning against a brick wall, smoking his cigarette and then flicking the butt into the darkness. Mrs Curren’s experience of Vercueil is therefore depicted as a highly creative responsiveness that remains respectful of Vercueil’s radical alterity because of the disjunction that is highlighted between Mrs Curren’s fantasies of erotic intimacy and Verceuil’s primal darkness. The sympathetic imagination is here instated as a means of transgressing, for a moment, the radical divide between self and other. Mrs Curren can never know Vercueil, just as Elizabeth Costello can never know what it is like to be a dog or a cow, but she can approximate an experience in order to create a resonance that is shared as a fullness of being and an ethical gesture of compassion. For George Salemohamed, this creative attentional responsiveness constitues what he refers to as “true pluralism,” where “darkness and secret prevail; and allow the other to be the other: the face which the other presents to the self symbolises the impossibility of synthesising him/her” (199, 200). The reciprocity of listening between Mrs Curren and Vercueil is less important here than the resonance that is created through an acute responsiveness to the other’s otherness. This is an ethical relation that is not founded on a Kantian or Platonic dichotomy of reason and emotion. Nor is it founded upon a connection or dialogue that transforms the relationship between Vercueil and Mrs Curren, dissolving Vercueil’s incomprehensible otherness in order to engender true commuication across radical difference. As Attridge has shown, Vercueil’s otherness cannot be erased or dissolved. He remains unknowable to the end of the novel, where he fuses with “the equable irreducible otherness of death” (“Trusting the Other” 67). Nevertheless, this otherness is not depicted as malevolent or sinister. Vercueil’s generosity towards Mrs Curren is exemplified both in his companionship and in the way he listens to her as witness without judgement. Moreover, he appears as a kind of fallen angel to comfort and aid her when she has been traumatised by the siege of John in her house and is then molested by the gang of children beneath the overpass. The kind of relationship depicted between Vercueil and Mrs Curren parallels the “Here I am” articulated in Mrs Curren’s letter to her absent daughter, and Coetzee’s address to the reader of his novel. There is of course

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a certain risk involved with opening the self to the other as an attentional responsiveness. Attridge describes this risk as an obligation to affirm something “with all that I am before I know what it is, before, in fact, it is” (“Innovation” 28). It is only by accepting responsibility for Vercueil that Mrs Curren brings his otherness into existence because this responsibility necessarily precedes the self that responds to the other. In Age of Iron the address to the (radical) other as the other who cannot be apprehended and is, therefore, either partially or fully absent, is therefore a gesture towards the unknown. As such, it cannot be directed or controlled. The address Mrs Curren makes to her daughter in the form of the letter remains open-ended because the recipient of the address will not read her words (if they are read at all) until after her death. In other words, she places her trust in the other who will read the letter and this other cannot be known or fixed in advance. She similarly places her trust in Vercueil by asking him to make sure the letter is delivered. Both relations are therefore projected into a future where they necessarily remain undetermined. It is this insistence on a future that remains open and full of potential that informs the staging of the ethical in Age of Iron. The gesture of the novel as a whole is towards the unpredictability of the future and of the other. We cannot know if Vercueil will deliver the letter. If the letter is delivered, we cannot measure its effect on Mrs Curren’s daughter in advance. As Attridge shows, the importance of literature as a cultural practice is that it has the ability to dramatise social issues in a way that cannot be measured according to pre-determined ends and, as such, compels one to accept “the responsibility imposed by the work’s singularity and difference” (“Trusting the Other” 77). The ethical relation in Age of Iron is therefore not one that can transcend the particularities of time and place as an ethical universal. Mrs Curren’s perception and understanding of the world around her under apartheid cannot be separated from the particular negotiations and self-questionings she experiences on an everyday basis. The ethical does not exist in Coetzee’s novel as a detached and abstracted humanism but as a process subject to the demands of space and time. As a consequence it remains necessarily open to constant reappraisal. When understood under the rubric of what Paul Rabinow describes as “an ethos of macro-interdependencies” (258), or what I previously referred to as an overlapping resonance, the ethical response on the part of white South Africans such as Mrs Curren and her expatriate daughter to the violence perpetrated under the banner of apartheid would be one that Attridge describes as a “living-through (in concrete action as well as in thought and emotion) of the torsions it produces in shared value systems” (“Trusting the Other” 76). In the context of South Africa in 1986 during the

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late phase of apartheid, the ethical response engendered by the address to an absent other who remains radically other is one that calls the other to bear witness to the suffering of others as a non-determined contextualised responsiveness that simultaneously questions the self of the address.

Works Cited Appiah, Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Attridge, Derek. “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other.” PMLA 114.1 (1999): 20-31. ——., “Trusting the Other: Ethics and Politics in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 93.1 (1994): 59-82. Attwell, David. “Dialogue and Fulfillment in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron.” Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy 19701995. Ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 166-79. Baier, Annette. Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ——., The Work of Fire. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Brink, André. “Reinventing a Continent (Revisiting History in the Literature of the New South Africa: A Personal Testimony).” World Literature Today 70.1 (1996): 177-81. Cheah, Pheng. “Introduction Part II: The Cosmopolitical – Today.” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 20-41. Coetzee, J. M. Age of Iron. New York: Penguin, 1990. ——., Foe. New York: Penguin, 1986. ——., The Lives of Animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ——., Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin, 1980. ——., White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Critchley, Simon. “The Chiasmus: Levinas, Derrida and the Ethical Demand for Deconstruction.” Textual Practice 3.1 (1989): 83-97.

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Derrida, Jacques. “Psyche: Invention of the Other.” Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992: 311-43. Dovey, Teresa. “Waiting for the Barbarians: Allegory of Allegories.” Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee. Ed. Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson. Basingstoke: St Martin’s Press, 1996. 138-51. Du Plessis, Michael. “Bodies and Signs: Inscriptions of Femininity in John Coetzee and Wilma Stockenström.” Journal of Literary Studies 4.1 (1998): 118-28. Eckstein, Barbara. “Iconicity, Immersion and Otherness: The Hegelian ‘Dive’ of J. M. Coetzee and Adrienne Rich.” Mosaic 29.1 (1996): 5777. Gardiner, Michael. “Alterity and Ethics: A Dialogical Perspective.” Theory, Culture & Society 13.2 (1996): 121-43. Gordimer, Nadine. “Living in the Interregnum.” The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places. Ed. Stephen Clingman. Johannesburg: Taurus, 1988. 219-50. Heyns, Michiel. “An Ethical Universal in the Postcolonial Novel: ‘A Certain Simple Respect?’” Thresholds of Western Culture: Identity, Postcoloniality, Transnationalism. Ed. John Burt Foster and Wayne Jeffrey Froman. London: Continuum, 2002 103-13. JanMohamed, Abdul. “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference.” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 59-87. Kant, Immanuel. Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History. Trans. David L. Colclasure. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Levinas, Emmanuel. The Levinas Reader. Trans. Sean Hand. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. ——., “Meaning and Sense.” 1957. Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. 75-107. ——., “Phenomenon and Enigma.” 1957. Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. 61-73. Marais, Michael. “‘Little Enough, Less Than Little: Nothing’: Ethics, Engagement, and Change in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee.” Modern Fiction Studies 46.1 (2000): 159-82. Probyn, Fiona. “J.M. Coetzee: Writing With/out Authority.” Jouvert 7.1 (2002). 3 Feb. 2009 . Rabinow, Paul. “Representations are Social Facts.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of Claifornia Press, 1986. 234-61.

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Robbins, Bruce. “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism.” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 1-19. Rorty, Richard. “Justice as a Larger Loyalty.” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 45-58. Salemohamed, George. “Levinas: From Ethics to Political Theology.” Economy and Society 21.2 (1992): 192-206. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe/Roxana.” Consequences of Theory: Selected Papers of the English Institute 1987-1988. Ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991. 154-80. Tan, Yi-Fu. Cosmos and Hearth: A Cosmopolite’s Viewpoint. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Yeoh, Gilbert. “Love and Indifference in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38.3 (2003): 107-34.

Phillip Rothwell

Nearly Ending the World the African Way: Pepetela’s Suspension of Capital’s Frontiers and Flows in O Quase Fim do Mundo The modern history Africa and Europe share is one of constant flows and rigid frontiers. From the times of the Moors in Iberia and the so-called Christian Reconquest, to the Portuguese expansion into the African continent, and subsequent facilitation of the slave trade on a monumental scale, the dynamics between the two continents have often rested on the twin pillars of rapid movement and rigorous restriction. What may flow and what may not has varied over time. At one time, one of the resources most on the move was Africa’s humanity, sent to the New World as a commodity in the service of the Old World. In the era of global capitalism, humanity is the continent’s resource whose movement is most impaired. Of course, in the age of the slave trade, Africans were not free to move where they wished. However, as part of the economic paradigm that governed the inception of Modernity – a paradigm that Northern Europeans often forget began on the Iberian Peninsula – African labour was repeatedly relocated. The greatest marker of global flows was once the lives forcibly transported as a commodity over vast distances. As the world economic system evolved, becoming more abstracted in a system of capitalist alienation championed by northern European powers, the notion of what needed to flow for the economic system to function became firmly entrenched in the concept of the flow of capital itself. Capital demanded all frontiers and restrictions on it be removed, while sanctioning restrictions on which people could move freely, and who was to be left on the other side of opulent fortresses’ impenetrable walls. In its most recent manifestation, prior to the apparent collapse of the global financial system, the world’s affluent regions became ever more impregnable, exclusive citadels, like “Fortress Schengen,” designed to facilitate internal labour flows and capital’s volatility, but prohibit absolutely a flow of labour from Africa to Europe, or from the global south to the global north. At the same time, the designator of wealth within that system, capital itself, demanded the greatest of liberty in its movements over frontiers, pulling out of one area without notice, and redeploying elsewhere regardless of the human consequence. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we were repeatedly told that global capitalism was the only game in town. Ideological debates were successfully

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reduced to questions of “cultural” politics that never fundamentally challenged the predominant economic model. This dogma was particularly championed by “Third Way” politicians in the global north, and a plethora of former anticolonial freedom fighters in the global south who opened up their nations’ frontiers to the vagaries of free-flowing capital often in return for personal gain. Capitalism, we were expected to believe, was the (Darwinian) Law trumping all other laws. Everything operated under its dictates. Political differences were merely a “cultural” issue. Yet, as the global financial system begins to sputter to a halt, nose-diving and taking with it the sense of invulnerability and inevitability of its Law, it is increasingly important to conceive of a political debate in which what has been relegated to the realm of “cultural” differences assumes a more strident role in the realm of real “grown-up” politics. Only there will we be able to imagine alternate systems to legislate human interactions. One author who understood the importance of this debate before the recent crisis was the Angolan, Pepetela. In one of his latest works, he literally suspends capitalism as the Law, in order to allow the “cultural” realms of science, religion, feminism and African tradition, to dialogue with each other, unencumbered by subservience to capitalist normativity. In the post-apocalyptic world order Pepetela imagines, Africans can move freely into the space once occupied by Fortress Schengen. At the same time, the only flow that is restricted, or rather discarded, is that of capital itself, which no longer makes sense in a world that has ceased to imbue bits of paper, or numbers in electronic bank accounts, with any exchange value. Pepetela has an impressive literary trajectory, witnessing the multiple phases of his nation’s political journey over the last half century. From his early short story, “As Cinco Vidas de Teresa” (1962) [Teresa’s Five Lives], published under his legal name, Artur Carlos Pestana, to his novel, O Quase Fim do Mundo (2008) [The Near End of the World], Pepetela has repeatedly critiqued the political shortfalls and injustices afflicting the Angolan polity. 1 First, there were the abuses under Portuguese colonialism and the consequent struggle for independence. Then, there was a shabby rhetorical brand of scientific socialism imposing the clientelism of an authoritarian one-party rule and exacerbating a horrific civil conflict. Now, there is a superimposed system of increasingly malfunctioning, all-appropriating global capitalism. The style with which Pepetela has critiqued these various systems has developed from the stilted dialogues of the first novel he wrote, Mayombe 1

Pepetela was a nom de guerre which became a nom de plume. It means “eyelash” in Umbundu, as “pestana” does in Portuguese.

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(1980), to the brazen humour of the Jaime Bunda parodies (2001; 2003). So too has his format, from the highly didactic short story As Aventuras de Ngunga (1973) [Ngunga’s Adventures], and the equally pedagogical play A Corda (1978) [The Rope], to the palpable sense of utopian betrayal in A Geração da Utopia (1992) [The Generation of Utopia], and the amusing mordancy of his latest fiction. A common thread in Pepetela’s literary output is the centrality of dialogic characterisation. In his first novel, Mayombe, the dialogic technique was blatant, as a multiplicity of characters controlled the narrative, laying bear the foibles and strengths of the struggle for independence from the Portuguese of the Marxist-leaning Angolan Independence movement, the MPLA (the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola). As Pepetela became a more accomplished writer, this dialogism remained, but in more nuanced forms, such as in Lueji, O Nascimento de um Império (1990) [Lueji, the Birth of an Empire], a novel in which past and future fuse in a multiplicity of voices that all reflect on the corrupting processes of power across the ages, genders, and classes. In this article, I will focus on Pepetela’s recent O Quase Fim do Mundo. It is a novel which demonstrates once again the author’s commitment to narrative dialogism, as well as his constant probing of the machinations and mechanisms of power. As is often the case in Pepetela’s writing, each character embodies a discourse. The plot is designed to allow each discourse to compete against the other discourses, as a means of teasing out the flaws and challenges of all the ideologies which have staked a claim to Angola, and more generally Africa, over its history as a political entity. As is increasingly the case in Pepetela’s fiction, Angola is replaced as the setting for the action. In O Terrorista de Berkeley, Califórnia (2007) [The Terrorist of Berkeley, California], for example, Angola is only present in the epistemology of the narration, in a peculiar reconfiguration of the narrator’s gaze that thwarts the Orientalist tendencies of modern colonialisms by telling a story of American insanity through the appropriating voice of an Angolan third-person narrator. O Quase Fim do Mundo takes place primarily in Calpe, an imagined point in Africa at the centre of a triangulation between the sources of the Nile, the Zambezi and the Congo rivers. There, in the heart of the “Dark Continent,” life persists among a very small group, after a mysterious annihilation of all other living beings takes place. The handful of survivors each represents an ideology: from religious fundamentalism and scientific positivism to women’s liberation and African traditions. The rather contrived plot conspires to land them all together in a situation in which the dominance of the Law of capitalism – both symbolic and judicial – has been suspended. As

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a result, each ideology embodied in a character must interact unmediated by the symbolic frontiers that customarily govern our interactions in a global economy. It is Pepetela’s greatest attempt to date to bring the primary discourses of Modernity into raw dialogue, and to oblige them to answer for the ways they have operated in colonial, postcolonial and post-globalisationera Africa, without being mere byproducts or servants of Modernity’s most prevalent ideology, capitalism. The novel raises a set of issues around the meaning of frontiers in a world based on the paradoxical and yet unified Law of free-flowing capital and rigorously enforced borders. Pepetela speculates about how a variety of ideological positions which are predominantly in the realm of “cultural” politics (such as the discourses of religious fundamentalism, African traditionalism, feminism, racism) interact when the dominant paradigm of global capitalism, which has successfully co-opted them, is suddenly removed from the equation. Can these discourses of the realm of “cultural” politics negotiate with each other once they no longer bow before the capitalist Law of appropriation? And what alliances would they make? The narrative begins with the apparent near complete disappearance of all sentient matter. Simba Ukolo, a Western-educated doctor, gets out of his car to urinate, glimpses a flash, and returns to the centre of Calpe to realise that every creature, from the simplest microbe to the most intelligent species, seems to have vanished. Over time, other people begin appearing, who have avoided whatever the “Thing” was that obliterated life. The cast of characters assembles to include Geny, a religious fanatic who is a member of the cult of the “Paladins of the Sacred Crown”; Joseph Kiboro, a thief by profession and a communist by inclination; Janet Kinsley, an American doctoral researcher more at home with her gorillas in the mist than with the rest of humanity; Jan Dippenaar, a South African Boer with a mysterious past; Jude, a sensual sixteen-year-old who desires to be treated like an adult; Julius, an engineer who has erased his Masai heritage by living in a city; Riek, an Ethiopian shaman; and Ísis, a Somali academic. The plot traces their interactions, and is centred on discovering what the “Thing” was that led to humanity’s near oblivion. Fortunately, Jan Dippenaar is a pilot, albeit with a flying trauma in his past. He is able to teach some of the others to fly, and thus facilitate a trip to Europe where they stumble across the cause of the demise of life. A perniciously racist sect, the same sect to which Geny unwittingly belongs, conspired to “cleanse” the world of impure races, by wiping out every living being with the exception of a select few of “pure” white DNA, hidden in a protected bunker in the Austrian Alps. However, the plan goes wrong, and the sect members are all eliminated alongside the rest of humanity.

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Furthermore, because of their disdain for Africa, they did not fully cover the continent with their annihilation beam, leading to the anomaly of a handful of survivors remaining in the middle of the continent whose people they most despise for supposedly being furthest from the “superior” white gene. From his very first literary endeavors, Pepetela has always been intelligently critical of the shortcomings of power structures, even when he supported the ideologies behind them. His Mayombe, a narrative of the unsung heroes of Angola’s struggle for independence, already highlighted the potential pitfalls of what would follow the revolution. He boldly asserts through his first novel’s denouement that there would be no place for the true heroes in the aftermath of the Marxist revolution. Only the corrupt and the pragmatically political would survive to rule in the stead of the idealists. Pepetela was himself a minister in the government of Agostinho Neto, Angola’s first president. As a writer, Pepetela had foreseen the MPLA’s failure to live up to its promises. When he left the Angolan government, and dedicated more of his time to writing, Pepetela continued to document, through his fiction, the failures of the revolution to deliver on the ideals it had promised. His work witnessed the nation’s transition to one of the most kleptocratic and inequitable embodiments of capitalism in Africa. His increasing trend to locate his narratives outside Angola signposts a realisation of the extent to which national frontiers – even those gained at the expense of revolutionary blood and the anticolonial struggle – have become blurred in the globalised flow of market forces. With O Quase Fim do Mundo, Pepetela does not abnegate his interest in the Angolan polity. Instead, he foregrounds the extent to which power structures are generalised, and what applies in Calpe, applies in Angola, or in many other previously colonised African countries. This does not mean that Pepetela homogenises the postcolonial experience. Rather, he draws attention to a steady pattern in the functioning of power structures in the world today and, with his 2008 novel, aims to interrogate what would happen if competing discourses of power were free to engage with one another in a “primordial” setting in which the future of the world literally depended on the outcome of their debates. To achieve this result, Pepetela fashions a circumstance that results in the collapse of all law, and he signals this collapse of the Law – the occurrence that ruptures all the symbolic relations between competing subjectivities – as the “Thing” (a Coisa). 2 2

The “Thing,” or “das Ding” or “La Chose,” occupied much of the French psychoanalyst Lacan’s interest at the turn of the 1960s. He used the term to designate, among other things, a lost object that must be continually re-found. It is impossible to attain, and as such, a constant object of desire. In the context of the Thing, Lacan interprets Freud’s Pleasure

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Pepetela’s “Thing” annihilates almost everything, and the remnants of subjectivity that remain by accident are Lawless. His interest is to see what happens in such a situation, as the Law seeks to reassert itself after all its symbolic strength has been sapped. The provenance of the Thing is a mixture of science (the Gamma Alfa Ray that zaps the whole world is the creation of American defence contractors) and religious extremism (the Paladin sect triggers the technology’s effect on the world) – two discourses with pretensions to be totalising. The remains of their discourses are represented in the novel by Simba (the medical, positivist doctor) and Geny (the only remaining member of the Paladin sect, and the self-declared guardian of the moral Law). It is no coincidence that the pair is the first to meet in the narrative, and never gets along. Each is suspicious of the other’s motives, and in true Pepetela fashion, hypocritical and flawed within the parameters of the discourses they both represent. Simba comes across Geny as they both rob banks. His medical materialism is confronted with her religious fundamentalism. She constantly exhibits the psychotic traits of her utter conviction, and yet both indulge in something they know to be prohibited by the disappeared Law. For the greatest Law of capitalism is that the banking system and those who own it are the only ones with the right to rob. The greatest proof that capitalist Law has been suspended is the impunity with which they remove currency from vaults. At the same time, the fact that they do steal sacks full of money demonstrates the residual strength of the Law which has been suspended. The irony of their theft – an irony that repeats itself as other characters appear in the novel – is that what they steal has no meaning. As they stuff their bags with paper currency, they remain captives of the financial fetishes of a previous (reigning) order. The currency has, post-Thing, assumed its status as a worthless paper marker only granted meaning by the residues of a fetishistic fantasy for a pair whose own discourses always officially disavowed the overriding value of capital exchange. Pepetela describes how Simba first resists the temptation to riffle through police files he comes across, as he still feels the threat of a Law lingering even though there is no one there to restrain his formerly illegal curiosity. Principle as the Law that maintains each person at a distance from the Thing, obliging us to circle it, without ever being able to reach it. Until he transmuted many of the underpinning attributes of the “Thing” into his later “objet petit a,” the Thing occupied for Lacan the psychic space Freud assigned to the incest taboo – as something that is intensely desired but simultaneously absolutely prohibited. To achieve the Thing is to be destroyed – to have bypassed the Pleasure Principle’s limit, which is the limit of pain the body can bear. It also means to enter a territory where there is no Law.

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Yet, when the opportunity presents itself to walk into a deserted bank and remove its money, he no longer resists, a clear indication of the extent to which money fetishism has informed his prior existence despite his wish to believe the contrary. Likewise, Geny’s high ideals and moral standing are betrayed by her instinct to indulge her fetish even in a new world where it is obvious that money has no value – intrinsic or imagined. Its only value is as a residual fantasy of a symbolic order that once gave it supreme meaning. Significantly, the first character to realise the meaninglessness of money in the new world is Joseph Kiboro, the thief whose profession disappears with the Law’s demise. In fact, as someone who always acted outside the Law, he is the character most able to adapt to the new circumstances. He will end up in Europe, in a twist of fate in which he, the guardian of Proudhonian ideals that all property is theft, will become the adoptive father of another man’s child, and alongside his Somali partner, may become the founder of a New Europe populated entirely with African blood. His former profession is the underside of the Law of capital flows. For all the talk of unfettered movement of capital and the rhetorical conflation of democracy and entrepreneurial opportunity for all within a global capitalist paradigm, the free market has never been about a generic removal of frontiers. Rather, from its colonial incarnation to its more recent neocolonial practice, it has always rigorously enforced frontiers of exclusion, centripetally absorbing wealth and resources and concomitantly fomenting and exaggerating gross disparities between classes and regions. As a Marxist kleptomaniac, Kiboro only ever robbed the rich from his first act of thievery as a six-year-old with no way to pay for the trappings of his education. His pilfering was always simultaneously an ideological statement about the sanctioned larceny of a society which internalised the profoundly bourgeois, European and colonial notion that exclusive ownership is a moral right, signaling a nation’s progress into Modernity and away from “primitive” concepts of collective stewardship. There is another side to Kiboro’s pacifist socialism and commitment to the redistribution of wealth: the extent to which he, too, has internalised the trappings flaunted by the capitalism against which he strove in his profession. In a typical Pepetela twist which prevents the complete deification of any single characterisation, given the opportunity of the Law’s absence to choose any car he wishes, Kiboro is obsessed with driving the most expensive vehicles available in the showrooms the survivors “plunder” regardless of transport’s usefulness or reliability. For him, the car’s price tag signifies its importance and value. This obsession reveals how much Kiboro is a product of capitalism and remains true to its Law. It is not so much that he worked

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against the capitalist classes in his pre-Thing life, but rather that he aspired to be the capitalist, and his profession was a symptom, revealing, as its microcosm, the true nature of the capitalist system as a project of colossal theft. In some ways, Pepetela targets in Kiboro those who espoused socialism in Africa’s transition to independence, and rapidly acquired a taste for the luxurious baggage of power, becoming more ardent supporters of the free market than their colonial masters had ever been. Their commitment to redistribute wealth became a commitment to sell off the nation’s resources for their own personal gain. They were, psychologically, the greatest captives of capitalism’s Law, for they were created by that very Law. Pepetela’s point is that they really cannot exist without that Law. His other point is that one of the greatest flaws of the African liberation movements, a flaw against which they could hardly be immune, was to depend so utterly on a European ideological posture created by the system against which they struggled. The MPLA revolution in Angola (like its FRELIMO counterpart in Mozambique) sought to create a Marxist New Men – scientific socialists who would be free from both a mentality of colonial enslavement and racial denigration, and also liberated from what the new regimes deemed to be the unsavory superstitions of traditional Africa. These New Men were always males who claimed a near monopoly on the political arena of the newly born nations. Throughout his work, Pepetela has been concerned with how women have been enmeshed in the discourses of post-revolutionary power, and how they have never fared as well as men, or been granted the same ground on which to operate as political subjects. His depiction of Ondina, in Mayombe, a woman who acts on her desire and whose body becomes the target of appropriation by a range of different discourses, raised the opprobrium of Agostinho Neto. 3 Pepetela repeated his depiction of women in positions of political strength in Lueji, O Nascimento dum Império, and less attractively in O Desejo de Kianda (1995) [Return of the Water Spirit]. In the former, the narration focuses in part on the Lunda Queen, Lueji, whose Machiavellian spirit enables her to create a centralised empire. In the latter, Carmina is an MPLA party apparatchik whose rhetoric transmutes from a vacant Marxism to a crude capitalism. In O Quase Fim do Mundo, Pepetela foregrounds the challenges that feminism poses to religious, traditional, and (scientific) socialist discourses in Africa, as well as the challenges it faces on its own terms. The problematics of feminism beyond the confines of a western, middle-class white, AngloSaxon academy have been well debated. One of the greatest grounds of 3

For more on this, see Rothwell.

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contention for feminism beyond the western world is the role of motherhood. 4 The notion of motherhood as a positive sacrifice-for-another, which infuses the cultural parameters of many societies, has, in certain strains of feminism, been deemed intrinsically enslaving to the potential selfrealisation of women. In the African context, the political conflation of Africa itself with motherhood, over-utilised in the lusophone African context as part of the imagery of the independence struggles, has complicated the issue further. 5 A sleight of hand took place, post-independence, in which motherhood was designated an act of national service. The attitudes of Agostinho Neto, in Angola, and Samora Machel, in Mozambique, who nominally spoke in favour of equality of the sexes, were profoundly informed by the dogma that women’s rights were a distraction from the real politics of the class struggle against colonialism and capitalism’s oppression of the masses. With his suspension of capitalism’s Law, Pepetela interrogates what happens to feminism’s various positions if it is no longer deemed politically subservient to an economic structure, or a “cultural” issue that can wait for the success of the class struggle before any attention is paid to it. Pepetela presents four principal female positions in his novel. The first is Geny, who espouses a discourse of feminine abjection, grounded in extreme religious psychosis. The narrative gives her little credence, presenting her as the most pitiable of characters. Her delusions are not altered by the discovery that the sect to which she belongs is responsible for the near annihilation of humanity. Rather, she narcissistically sees the opportunity to rise up the ranks of her church, becoming one of its apostles in the absence of other male members. She sees her calling as the rapid conversion of as many survivors as possible to her psychotic belief system. The second female position is occupied by Ísis, the Somali beauty, who is often confused with a mulatto, and whose father left their homeland to prevent his daughter being circumcised. Thanks to her father’s progressiveness, she escapes a practice that denies female pleasure, and receives a high level of formal education. In the post-Thing world, she will be the first to become pregnant, inseminated by the shaman, Riek, whose appeal is precisely that he reminds her of her father. Most importantly, both

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A particularly instructive work referencing motherhood in the debate around feminism as a politics with concerns well beyond the sphere of white, middle-class women is Obioma Nnaemeka’s edited volume. See Hilary Owen’s groundbreaking Mother Africa, Father Marx, for an analysis of how the rhetoric of Africa-as-Matrix-for-another and paternal political authority inform and are contested by twentieth-century women’s writing in Mozambique.

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her father and Riek are African men concerned with realising the hopes and aspirations of women. The third female characterisation is Janet Kinsley, the white American and Berkeley doctoral candidate. Both her name and her research project (the sexual practices of gorillas) are haunted by Alfred Kinsey, one of the twentieth-century’s greatest researchers of sexuality. He was primarily responsible for breaking in the West many of the sexual taboos surrounding sexual orientation and pleasure. Janet, too, will become pregnant in the plot, pairing up with Julius, whose African phallus is so big it does not fit completely inside his American partner. The stereotyping is completed in the pairing by Janet’s desire repeatedly to call Julius her “gorilla.” Having studied the simian’s sexual practices, her primary fantasy is to be loved by a gorilla, a desire she transfers onto her relationship with Julius. Finally, the fourth female characterisation is Jude, the adolescent who is desperate to seduce Simba. She learns quickly whatever she is taught, from driving to flying. She is headstrong. At the same time, she is the only female prepared to accept Simba’s declaration that the primary duty of women in the new order is to be reproductive vassals guaranteeing the future of humanity. Simba’s assertion becomes the focus of a debate between discourses about what is the role of woman in Africa today. And, more pointedly, is feminism only a luxury of developed societies? His contention, as a scientist, is that women’s biology assigns them a “natural” role as mothers in the new world order in which they find themselves. Neither Ísis nor Janet is prepared to countenance the role of perpetual reproducers. They hold firmly to the belief that a woman’s right to her control her own fertility and to self-realisation are values it took too long to achieve to give up, no matter how dire the situation. Pepetela’s deployment of this debate reminds us of arguments rehearsed at the time of the independence struggles, when women were expected to put on hold their aspirations for equal rights in the name of a greater struggle. Marxist Leninism trumped all, and the woman’s greatest national service alongside policing her husband into an essentially westernised family unit was to produce and rear New Men for the revolution. Simba, the westernised scientist, is the greatest advocate of this policy of obliged reproduction. Pointedly, the representative of African tradition, Riek, the fertility shaman, is the character most in tune with female desire, and most capable of letting Ísis, the carrier of his own child, follow her own path. Ísis wants to see the world. She wants to visit where the first woman head of state, the female Pharaoh Hatshepsut, once ruled. She wants to see the sights of Europe. Ultimately, she will remain in Europe, with Kiboro, when the rest of the group returns to Africa. There, she will give birth to the shaman’s

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child, who will be raised by her and Kiboro, the thief with leftist leanings and the obscene underside of the suspended capitalist model. Simba and Kiboro are closer to Geny and Jude’s positions on the role of women in society. Geny abnegates the equality of the sexes. Jude is happy to be used as a womb, as many times as necessary and possible. Particularly Simba becomes obsessed with the need to reproduce for the sake of humanity. Yet, both men find most attractive Ísis, and her ideological position is furthest from theirs. Once again, Pepetela uses the woman’s body, like Ondina in Mayombe, as a conflict zone. However, the case of Ísis differs from Ondina. The moral charge associated with Ísis’s claim to be the mistress of her own body and her own destiny has changed from the times when Pepetela fashioned Ondina. While Ondina ended up used by three men, and blamed for it in both the text and by Agostinho Neto who disapproved of her “immoral” example to Angolan women, Ísis literally rides the desire of the men near her. As the sexual atmosphere around her becomes increasingly tense, with most of the men competing for her attention, her narrative voice claims she took pleasure in their desire (“a ter prazer com o desejo deles”; 231). Her desire feeds off their desire, and has nothing to do with a duty to procreate but rather with the irrational promise of jouissance which the text makes clear is hers to seize. Shortly after this scene, she chooses to make love with Riek, the one man none of the others envisage being a rival for her affection. An alliance is thus formed between her feminism and his African tradition – an alliance that counters the rationalist discourses of science and socialism, as well as the rhetoric of female abjection present in Geny’s religious position. Even in Geny’s position, the power to decide may rest with a woman. Geny may make choices that the other characters abhor as self-abjecting, but she is making choices for herself. The result is that the discourse that remains intransigently least sympathetic to women’s rights once capitalism’s Law is in abeyance is the scientific socialism that always claimed a sympathy toward female emancipation, even if as a tangential benefit of the revolution and progress of the masses. At the same time, African traditions, often disparaged as oppressive to women in the rhetoric of scientific socialism, are embodied in the man, Riek, who is most attuned to what a woman wants. It is no coincidence that one of Ísis’s primary desires is, then, to see the place in the world where a woman ruled first – a place located in Africa. Pepetela’s message gives pause for thought. For Pepetela, in the absence of the symbolic mediator of Modernity – capitalism – the discourse revealed to be most caught up in the tenets of its Law is a socialism born of it. The

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materialist parameters of science, claimed by the socialist experiments of lusophone Africa as underpinning their ideology, also remain tied up discursively in that same Law. Pepetela seems to be calling for new alignments, new commitments and new debates between ideologies that capitalism deemed utterly antagonistic and incapable of dialogue. The new beginnings Pepetela’s narrative offers rely on a wholistic coming to terms of what capitalist and socialist New Men dismissed as primitive tradition, and a (feminist) discourse of true emancipation no longer enmeshed in a perpetual framework of constant deferral. In that (near) ending of the old world, the African way, Pepetela dreams of a new world where ideological positions come back into real dialogue, no longer constrained or silenced by the enforced frontiers and fictitious flows of global capital.

Works Cited Nnaemeka, Obioma, ed. The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity and Resistance in African Literature. New York: Routledge, 1997. Owen, Hilary. Mother Africa, Father Marx: Women’s Writing of Mozambique, 1948-2002. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Pepetela. “As Cinco Vidas da Teresa.” Novos Contos d’África. Ed. Garibaldino de Andrade and Leonel Cosme. Sá de Bandeira: Publicações Imbondeiro, 1962. 44-54. ——., A Corda. Luanda: União dos Escritores Angolanos, 1978. ——., O Desejo de Kianda. Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1995. ——., Jaime Bunda, Agente Secreto. Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 2001. ——., Jaime Bunda: Secret Agent. Trans. Richard Bartlett. Laverstock: Aflame Books, 2007. ——., Jaime Bunda e a Morte dum Americano. Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 2003. ——., Mayombe. Lisbon: Dom Quixote (Edições 70), 1980. ——., Mayombe. Trans. Michael Wolfers. London: Heinemann, 1996. ——., Ngunga’s Adventures. Trans. Andrew Zankanani. Harare: Anvil Press, 1988. ——., O Quase Fim do Mundo. Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 2008. ——., Return of the Water Spirit. Trans. Luís Mitras. London: Heinemann, 2002. ——., O Terrorista de Berkeley, Califórnia. Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 2007. Rothwell, Phillip. “Unmasking Structures: The Dynamics of Power in Pepetela’s Mayombe.” Luso-Brazilian Review 39.1 (2002): 121-28.

John E. Masterson

A Post-mortem on the Postmodern? Conflict and Corporeality in Nuruddin Farah’s Links There are none so ignorant of geography as those with their military bases in every quarter of the planet. It is possible to have satellites which survey every square inch of the globe while producing schoolchildren who think Malawi is a Disney character. Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror (85) ‘American movies, English books – remember how they all end? … The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta … He’s going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.’ Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (285-86)

Eagleton’s notion of schoolchildren imagining Malawi as a Disney character is typically provocative. Were Somalia to be captured in animated form, so the Western media narrative goes, it would have to carry a parental advisory sticker rather than a Mickey Mouse club badge. 1 Yet, it is the way international conflicts are represented as made-for-television productions that is one of the most compelling features of Links, which takes an imagined post-Operation Restore Hope setting as its backdrop. As Slavoj Zizek maintains, issues of “out-there” and “up-close” have been definitively problematised post-9/11: The same ‘derealization’ of the horror went on after the WTC collapse: while the number of victims – 3000 – is repeated all the time, it is surprising how little of the actual carnage we see – no dismembered bodies, no blood, no desperate faces of dying people … in clear contrast to reporting on Third World catastrophes, where the whole point is to produce a scoop of some gruesome detail: Somalis dying of hunger, raped Bosnian women … These shots are always accompanied by an advance warning that ‘some of the images you will see are extremely graphic and may upset children’ – a warning which we never heard in the reports on the WTC collapse. Is this not yet further proof of how, even in this tragic

1

“If Me Against My Brother were to be shown on television, it would require a disclaimer often used for much weaker material: We must warn you that what you are about to see includes graphic images that some may find offensive” (Peterson xxi).

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moment, the distance which separates Us from Them, from their reality, is maintained: the real horror happens there, not here? (Zizek 13) 2

For the purposes of this analysis, Zizek’s visceral attention to the body and its (mis)representation in discourses concerning “postmodern” conflict is salutary. From Farah’s critically and commercially acclaimed Maps (1986), which focussed on the Ogaden War between Somalia and Ethiopia in the late seventies, his work has often been saddled with the postmodern tag. Whilst many of these speculations have added new dimensions to Farah scholarship, others have somewhat side-stepped the material concern with body politics and the body politic that, I believe, has defined his oeuvre. By offering a closer analysis of Links, taking account of the peculiar context in which it was conceived, produced and consumed, I aim to reassert the significance of those discomfortingly fleshy realities that have always been so central to Farah’s authorial vision. The novel draws significantly from ongoing discussions of the myriad politics of (dis)location, encompassing everything from transnational travel to military strategy. As such, the familiar journey motif assumes an even greater burden of significance here. It provides a gateway into those geopolitically broader concerns with displacement, detachment and distance sometimes problematically filed under ‘postmodern.’ 3 Emerging from the same U.S.-based Somali diaspora as Sholoongo in Secrets, Jeebleh is another prominent returnee in Farah’s work. Flying in for his first visit to Somalia in “more than two decades,” he returns to visit his mother’s desecrated grave and settle her outstanding accounts. Like Farah in 1996, he witnesses the apocalyptic state of the nation where carrion birds appear to be the only adequately fed creatures. After disembarking, Jeebleh attempts to justify his return to himself and others. Seasoned Farah readers will note the familiar jostling of pronouns in the following, as his protagonist bemoans those interrogations endured at the hands of host patrons: ‘I had returned to reemphasize my Somaliness – give a needed boost to my identity. […] I was fed up being asked by Americans whether I belonged to this or that clan […] many assuming that I was a just-arrived refugee. […] It’s irritating to be asked by people at the supermarket which clan I belong to. […]  4 You see, we Somalis who live in America, we 2 3

4

Also see Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 63-64. See, for example, Caren Kaplan’s illuminating study, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. “There has been a conflation of ethnicity with the old meaning of race as social differentiation with a biological basis, and many ethnic explanations of conflict are in fact inherently racist” (Allen and Seaton 31). See also Crawford and Lipschutz.

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keep asking one another where we stand on the matter of our acquired new American identity. I’ve come because I want to know answers.’ (Links 36)

As in earlier novels, such as Sweet and Sour Milk and Close Sesame, questions are open-ended and answers conclusively inconclusive. When thinking about more recent work, the comparative reader can trace overlaps and differences in the textual dialogue between Secrets and Links. In the former, ‘stayee’ Kalaman expresses his weariness with ‘returnee’ misrepresentations of Somalia’s intricate lineage system. In the latter, it is the diasporic figure who frames his concerns in terms of an ambiguous, because transnational, politics of personhood. As he seeks to patch the schism in his hyphenated identity by bearing firsthand witness to conditions on the ground, Jeebleh’s exasperation might be read as a transposition of Farah’s own sentiments in Yesterday, Tomorrow: “there were areas of their lives that I had no access to, because I was not there when the horror came to visit their homes. They were part of a ‘we,’ sharing the communal nightmare. That I was not included in the ‘we’ was made clear to me. But then I was not assumed to be part of the ‘they’ either” (5). Similar pronominal strains between ‘I,’ ‘we’ and ‘our’ pepper Links. If Secrets’ fraught terrain exists somewhere between pre-Islamic myth and postmodern global village, the diasporic dynamics of Links only amplify these competing claims and loyalties. Now, the extreme, if representative juxtaposition is between American supermarket and Somali shantytown. In an early survey, D.R. Ewen suggested Somalia would gradually lose its central status in Farah’s novels (209). If this prediction proved somewhat premature, it is testimony both to the author’s intention to “keep my country alive by writing about it” and to the fact that the turbulent national narrative has provided so much fictional mileage. 5 With the publication of Links, however, Ewen’s thematic wager might be renegotiated. With the opening up and subsequent dissolution of the nation in post-dictatorship and then postinterventionist contexts, the lines of Farah’s fictive maps have been redrawn accordingly. The newly globalised labyrinth of Links refracts the explosion of Somalia and its diaspora onto broader territories and, thus, a more truly global consciousness. With the compression of time and space, achieved by technological advances, comes a concomitant attention to grim reality shows being played out in previously ‘dark,’ now dimly-exposed, areas of ‘Google Earth.’ Textual references to what some consider a postmodern politics of media, travel and conflict, therefore, exist in an intertwined triptych

5

See “Nuruddin Farah.”

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purposely designed to focus attention on issues of distance and disparity, transnational traffic and territories. Considering Links in the post-Restore Hope and 9/11 context in which it was produced and consumed, the reader is struck with this new focus. With the realignment of global power following the lifting “of the fog of cold war,” the ‘Che’ Guevara posters and Soviet insignia of the Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship cycle have been replaced with other commodity fetishes (Moynihan 9). On his return to once familiar, now disorientating Mogadiscian streets, Jeebleh’s pronominal struggles become even more intense. Cut adrift on the precarious soil of his homeland, an errant re-memory casts him back to his New York apartment. He recalls a distant Somali drama depicted, not by Pixar but CNN: ‘But despite everything, and despite the prevailing obfuscation, I’ve come to assess the extent of my culpability as a Somali.’ And he imagined seeing corpses buried in haste by his kinsmen, the palms of the victims waving as though in supplication. Similar images had come to him, several times, in the comfort of his own home, in New York, and on one occasion, in Central Park, he had been so disturbed that he had mistaken the stump of a tree for a man buried alive … This was soon after he had watched on television the corpse of an American Ranger being dragged through the dusty streets of Mogadiscio. These images had given him cold fevers for months. Now he felt the strange sensation of a many-pronged invasion, as if his nightmares were calling on him afresh. His throat smarted, as with an attack of flu coming on. (Links 32)

For some commentators, the symbolic representation of besieged bodies is a little overdetermined in Maps and Secrets. Here, it might be argued, Farah is engaging in a slightly subtler exploration. It is multiply revealing, for example, that, in this globalised context, Jeebleh’s own anxieties back up on and betray him at the corporeal level. The critical supplement is that these queasy after-effects result from his interaction with the virtual reality projected onto his television screen. The sanitised representation of distant events, he both craves and fears, is called into question at the level of his own divided subjectivity. Jeebleh feels his flesh crawl as he attempts to come to terms with his own detachment from events, as well as trying to negotiate the contested hyphen in his Somali-American identity. It is highly significant that the media replay leaves him stranded, to borrow from Zizek once more, in a desert of the “virtual real.” His disturbed psychological state leads him to confuse a tree trunk with a human corpse. The keyword in the passage as a whole, therefore, appears to be ‘obfuscation,’ as it characterises the very uncertain terrain upon which, at various levels, he now roams. The rules of

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the game, however repressive, were indeed much clearer in the old days of autocracy. 6 Farah attends to this spiralling chronology in revealing detail. Jeebleh stumbles in the newly disorientating wasteland of Central Park following his encounter with the “media ‘flashframe’” that burnt itself into the unpopular American consciousness during the Somali debacle (Hoskins 6). 7 The critical point is that this haunting image of a mutilated U.S. Ranger captures the corporeal fracture between militaristic engagements in the far-flung “out there” and an all-too-material corporeality brought painfully “back home.” This is captured by Ignatieff, who states, “if the consensus in favor of humanitarian interventions can be shaken – as it was in Somalia – by the sight of a single American serviceman’s body being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, then keeping those images off the screen becomes a central objective of the military art” (Ignatieff 191-92). With the graphic representation of such flashframes, in the novel and beyond, transnational audiences are connected to one another through their very disconnection from events. As he bids the reader accompany diasporic Jeebleh on his problematic return journey, Farah invites us to consider much broader political questions. In a context where concerns over the use and abuse of transnational power and contested body politics remain paramount, the text has a peculiarly haunting resonance today. As Baudrillard suggests, spectres of the abuse carried out at Abu Ghraib prison hang heavy over many of these issues: “the bad conscience of the entire West is crystallised in these images. The whole West is contained in the burst of the sadistic laughter of the American soldiers. […] This is where the truth of these images lies; this is what they are full of: the excessiveness of a power designating itself as abject and pornographic” (Baudrillard 207). 8 Once again, I suggest, overlaps between concerns with the contested body politic, both national and transnational, and individual body politics are central both to Links and the wider discourses with which it engages. When thinking about the value, as well as limitations, of a notion such as “postmodern conflict,” numerous scholars have pointed to strategic links between operational failures in Vietnam and Somalia. Using revealingly embodied rhetoric, U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke maintained that “the scars from [the Somali disaster] would deeply affect our Bosnia 6

7

8

“The Siyad Barre dictatorship was easy to find as a theme, whereas it was very difficult nowadays, you couldn’t actually tell” (Farah, “How Can We Talk of Democracy” 43). “Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image” (Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 19). For Susan Sontag, there is “a larger confluence of torture and pornography” in this Abu Ghraib context (“Regarding The Torture of Others” 134).

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policy. Combined with Vietnam, they had what might be called a ‘Vietmalia syndrome’ in Washington” (qtd. in Peterson 163). A supporting intertext might be used to illuminate some of the issues pertinent to what might be the latest incarnation of Farah’s body politics project.

“I speak with the voice of things to come” 9 The first-person narrator of J.M. Coetzee’s ‘The Vietnam Project’ is Eugene Dawn. A military scientist commissioned to research the conflictual fallout by the American administration, he subsequently finds himself in a mental institution for harming his son. He is a disturbed and suitably disturbing bookish type who, once ensconced in the sanatorium, takes unbridled pleasure in assisting his therapists with their diagnosis: When it comes to my turn I point out that I hate war as deeply as the next man. I gave myself to the war on Vietnam only because I wanted to see it end. […] I believe in life. […] Nor do I want to see the children of America poisoned by guilt. Guilt is a black poison. I used to sit in the library in the old days feeling the black guilt chuckling through my veins. I was being taken over. I was not my own man. It was insupportable. Guilt was entering our homes through TV cables. We ate our meals in the glare of that beast’s glass eye from the darkest corner. Good food was being dropped down our throats into puddles of corrosion. It was unnatural to bear such suffering. (Coetzee 48) 10

The most intriguing connection with Links concerns the relationship between the militaristic aspects of what has been called “postmodern warfare” and its dissemination via global news providers. Vietnam, of course, represents the decisive chapter in the U.S.’s post-war interventions. 11 Yet, for Dawn, it is the representation of this fallout that most disturbs, leading to physiognomic disruption. Parallels between Coetzee’s Dawn and Farah’s Jeebleh are intriguing. For both, the television metamorphoses into a penetrative glasseye, invading the home and inducing “a tele-intimacy with death and destruction” (Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 18). A “grotesque infantile reality-show” it may be, but the at once beautiful and brutal truth is

9 10

11

Coetzee 29. Consider Dawn’s words alongside those of Marlin Fitzwater, the White House Press secretary, who offered the following comment on U.S. deployment to starving Somalia: “we heard it from every corner, that something had to be done […] the pressure was too great […] TV tipped us over the top […] I could not stand to eat my dinner watching TV at night. It made me sick” (qtd. in Robinson 50). See David Culbert’s counter-argument (204-13).

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that the spectator can switch to another channel or shut off (Baudrillard 206). As Sontag maintains, “the whole point of television is that one can switch channels. […] Consumers droop. They need to be stimulated, jump started, again and again” (Regarding the Pain of Others 94). Fast forward to presentday Iraq and Afghanistan, which bear the scars of Abu Ghraib, and debates concerning the intricacies of postmodern warfare and its representational regurgitation become even more charged. 12 In Postmodern War, Chris Gray is eager to explore the inherent fractures of that notion of cynically/clinically-detached conflict so brilliantly captured by Zizek: “we should note the structural homology between this new warfare-at-a-distance, where the ‘soldier’ (a computer specialist) pushes buttons hundreds of miles away, and the decisions of managerial bodies which affect millions … in both cases, abstraction is inscribed into a very ‘real’ situation” (35-36). When militaristic discourse is still peppered with references to “surgical strikes” and “collateral damage,” attending to these fractures, both rhetorical and real, appears as urgent as ever. For Gray, the cataclysmic, because never quite closed event, is Vietnam. He goes on to speculate about continuities between his experiences with, what Jameson calls, the “first terrible postmodernist war” (Jameson 1971) and an earlier Gulf conflict: 13 A few years ago I visited an embalmed Titan missile silo in Green Valley, Arizona. It floats on giant springs for riding out a near-miss. I sat in one of the easy chairs. I reached for the key. I pushed the red button. A year later I watched TV in horrified fascination as my country technologically dismembered Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands. Since then there have been many wars … It haunts me. The sheer weight of war’s materiality and the violence of the inscription on the body politic, as well as my own body, force me to seek an explanation for the strange danse macabre of our age, war. (Gray 7)

Gray’s work is variously enabling when considering Links, as he gestures towards the complex relations between conflict, representation and a resistant attention to corporeal materiality so central to Farah’s novelistic vision (Gray 160). Peterson’s study can be used to extend these overlaps further. In his account, a Somali fighter makes explicit reference to an insurgent forerunner: “looking up while a US reconnaissance plane passed overhead, he defined the American predicament: ‘We can fight like the Viet Cong,’ he said. ‘How can that airplane stay in the air without fuel and without money? But I can stay here forever’” (Peterson 111). Whilst, perhaps surprisingly, referring to Mark 12 13

See Gourevitch and Morris. For an effective juxtaposition of the first Gulf War and Operation Restore Hope, see Robinson 46.

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Bowden’s partisan account in his author’s note, Farah has one of his fictional combatants deliver a critique of the “infidel” invaders in similar terms: “as fighters, there was a major flaw in their character. […] They thought less of us, and that was ultimately the cause of their downfall” (Links 268). This provocative notion of “downfall” can be re-appropriated in relation to some of the debates considered above. At one level, Farah’s novel is concerned with how a seemingly postmodern conflict is brought back down to a level of materiality which, so the official discourse goes, technological “progress” could and should have allowed it to overcome. In literal and figurative senses, the U.S. soldier’s mutilated figure haunts Jeebleh and the global viewing-public, providing abject evidence of an all-too contested corporeality. For Farah, in terms of the prescient discourses he refers to throughout Links, a “re-grounding” of conflict at the level of besieged bodies remains both politically vital and vigilant. Through the figure of a diasporic protagonist attempting to negotiate certain divides in terms of his own Somali-American identity, Farah also obliges the reader consider the significance of such embodied schisms at the level of representing and engaging in militaristic conflict. This is lucidly captured by Stephen Graham, who asserts, “to put it mildly, dreams of clinically identifying and surgically killing only ‘fighters’ within sprawling megacities, through the agency of autonomous computer algorithms, are dangerously deluded” (263). The body politics motifs of earlier novels, such as Sardines and Maps, are galvanised anew, shifting in accordance with the undulating movements of geo-political narratives, both national and international. 14

“There must be some way out of here” Whatever has a body can be smashed to smithereens. […] Like finance capitalism, political terrorism is also diffuse, ubiquitous, and largely invisible. […] Yet if it deploys avant-garde technologies, it is in order to strew the flesh of men and women on the streets. […] In this combination of technology and body, the impalpable and the grossly carnal, global terrorism is quintessentially postmodern. Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror (82-83)

For many commentators, it is the innate slipperiness of the term ‘postmodern’ that is most appealing. In the sense outlined by Eagleton, therefore, Links can

14

As Barry Buzan suggests, “difficult questions arise about countries with strong structures of tribe and clan, such as Afghanistan, Congo, Libya, Somalia, Iraq, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia” (89).

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be seen to inhabit the kind of postmodern terrain commonly associated with Maps, as it is concerns areas of confusion and the dissolution of rigid boundaries in terms of personal/political behaviour and affiliations. When Ali reminisces to Jeebleh about “times […] when you knew who was bad and who was good. Such distinctions are now blurred. We are at best good badmen, or bad badmen” (Links 41-42) he is referring to the disorder of things in a post-Siyad Barre power vacuum. 15 Amplified at a more transnational level, it might also correspond with Zizek’s sobering and politically potent deconstruction of notions of “out-there” and “back-here.” As above, Jeebleh’s identity struggles are played out within the same fraught zone that Farah himself roams. In the fictional sphere, Jeebleh is caught between solipsistic notions of “me” and “we” generations: He thought of how it was characteristic of civil wars to produce a multiplicity of pronominal affiliations, of first-person singulars tucked away in the plural, of third-person plurals meant to separate one group from another. The confusion pointed to the weakness of the exclusive claims made by first-person plurals, as understood implicitly in the singled-out singular (Links 42; emphasis added)

That this is one of Farah’s most sustained, if not convoluted, considerations of pronominal politics cannot be divorced either from this national sense of dissolution or the personal impact of his documentary excursion. Such struggles are manifest as, in this globalised environment of compressed time and space, the politics of antagonistic affiliation take on ‘trans-,’ if not ‘post-,’ national urgency. This diasporic dimension is alluded to in the final segment of this long meditation. Jeebleh re-grounds his complex, divided feelings at the personal and familial levels that often hold out most promise, if not stability, in Farah’s fiction: “he was sure that he did not love Somalia the way he used to love it many years before. […] Maybe love did not enter into one’s relationship with one’s country? […] Can one continue to love a land one does not recognize anymore? He had never asked himself whether he loved America. He loved his wife and daughters, and through them, was engaged with America” (Links 42). Whilst there are pronounced parallels between the rhetorical strategies of both reportage and fiction, these questions may frustrate rather than capture the reader’s imagination. For an author preoccupied with the notion that “a country is a working hypothesis,” such equivocations should not come as too great a surprise (Yesterday, Tommorow 48). The text’s central tension is alluded to in the above passage, 15

As Furio Colombo suggests, “Somalia was undergoing a state of collapse. […] It is a new and terrible situation that no longer resembles older civil wars or coups” (86-87).

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with the loaded reference to a psychic-political ‘engagement’ with the U.S. For all Links’ attendant indeterminacies, tensions and flaws, the challenge confronting its readers is comparable with that faced by protagonists throughout Farah’s novels, from Ebla in From a Crooked Rib to Cambara in Knots. Complications and consequences must be lived with, however openended and painful that task might be. If, from the vantage point of 2009, Links can be seen as a quasi-successful exploration of pertinent issues, it owes much to Farah’s reinvigorated ability to shift between these personal and viscerally political spheres. NGO worker Seamus is used to deliver the broadest critique of post-Cold War imperialism: 16 ‘Everything that could’ve gone wrong for the Yanks had gone wrong because they saw everything in black and white, had no understanding of and no respect for other cultures. […] They were also let down by their intelligence services, arriving everywhere unprepared, untutored in the ways of the world; he brought up the collapse of the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and the disintegration of several ramshackle states in different parts of the globe.’ (Links 260-61; emphasis added)

Once again, the idea that more complex realities reside in the grey areas between such binary designations is as central to Farah’s authorial vision as it is to wider debates concerning the ‘War on Terror.’ Preoccupied with remapping co-ordinates of power from Russian betrayal during the Ogaden War of Maps to ever bloodier Western intervention in Links, Farah also draws the reader’s attention to some longer lines of continuity: It was from the ocean that all the major invasions of the Somali peninsula had come. The Arabs, and after them the Persians, and after the Persians the Portuguese, and after the Portuguese the French, the British, and the Italians, and later the Russians, and most recently the Americans. […] In any case, all these foreigners, well-meaning or not, came from the ocean. The invaders might be pilgrims bearing gifts, or boys dispatched to do “God’s work.” (Links 124)

The function of historical-consciousness bearer has shifted from figures such as Deeriye in Close Sesame and Nonno in Secrets, yet appeals to Abdulle Hassan’s insurgent legacy continue to resonate. 17 In the historical present, neo-imperialistic invaders still seek to inscribe their dominance in the pages of, or with pointed reference to, certain books. References to ‘God’s work’ thus link fathers and sons in their roles as (mis)leaders of the free world: 16 17

See Somerville 134-69. See ‘Abdi Sheik-‘Abdi.

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[Jeebleh] recalled sitting in an apartment in Queens with his wife and daughters, and watching the main event on television: Marines in combat gear, and cameras flashing as photographers took pictures of the Americans alighting from their amphibious craft. In a moment, several of the Marines, appearing proud, would be interviewed by one of the most famous anchormen in America. Jeebleh’s wife turned to him to ask whether the Marines knew what doing “God’s work” meant in a country like Somalia (Links 123-24).

As such, it becomes crucial to read this Bush-senior neologism in the context of events surrounding the previous Gulf conflict. Seamus continues, ‘The Americans came to show the world that they could make peace-on-demand in Somalia, in the same dramatic fashion as they had made war-on-demand in the Gulf. They came to showcase peace here as a counterpoint to their war effort elsewhere. Iraq and Somalia had one thing in common: both were made-for-TV shows […] the prime-time performance was their focus all along.’ (Links 261) 18

Seamus, of course, is from Northern Ireland and so brings a convenient amount of conflict baggage, if not reconciliatory hope, to his NGO work in war-ravaged Somalia. 19 Whilst his introduction may seem clunky, it does allow those interested in representations of conflicts defined in neocolonial/neo-ethnic terms to make some provocative links. Moynihan cites Horowitz on tangled webs of ethnicity spun from Burundi to Belfast. His focus on various degrees of blurring might appeal to those with a hankering for the postmodern: “‘connections among Biafra, Bangladesh, and Burundi, Beirut, Brussels, and Belfast were at first hesitantly made – isn’t one ‘tribal,’ one ‘linguistic,’ another ‘religious’? – but that is true no longer. Ethnicity has fought and bled and burned its way into public and scholarly consciousness’” (11). In an alternative, Northern Ireland-specific study, Allen Feldman asserts that the body itself remains at the literal and figurative heart of these political struggles and semantic contests. 20 Such broader references also refocus attention on Links’ diasporic dimensions, elevating it beyond any monolithic exercise in ‘America-bashing.’ Given events post 9/11, it is even more critical to emphasise these subtler strains in Farah’s work. As the Persian Gulf excerpt demonstrates, Jeebleh’s intellectual perspective, much like 18

19

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“The invasion was shown live on prime-time television. It was the easiest the world had ever seen. American soldiers landed on the beach at Mogadishu blinded by the flashlights and floodlights of the international media. There was not a Somali in sight” (Polman 28). Consider William E. DeMars, NGOs and Transnational Networks: Wild Cards in World Politics, and Katarina West, Agents of Altruism: The Expansion of Humanitarian NGOs in Rwanda and Afghanistan. “I have turned to the sociohistorical site occupied by the body in Northern Ireland in order to approach power from its point of effect and generation – agency” (Feldman 3).

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Deeriye and Nonno, is to offer a more spatially and temporally entangled version of events. I leave the reader to consider the titular significance of Knots (2007). Whilst the means of global hegemony may appear new, the dominant ends exist in an ominously intertwined web from which neither European, American, Arab nor African power players can extricate themselves. These geopolitical preoccupations seep into the very fabric of the text. Whilst the author’s note is an increasingly significant feature of Farah’s later fiction (invariably stockpiling organic and/or body metaphors), Links’ bibliographical survey is multiply revealing. 21 Whilst referring to the Bowden account that provided the template for Ridley Scott’s vacuous blockbuster, it is equally significant that Farah pins his allegiance to Dante. In contrast to the intertextual eclecticism of previous works, which in Sardines, for example, ranges from Virginia Woolf to Derek Walcott, Links takes all its epigraphs from The Inferno. 22 This slight detail glosses a more nuanced engagement with the journey motif. Having left America for now apocalyptic Mogadiscian streets, Jeebleh finds himself reliant upon a Virgilesque guide who emerges in the shadowy form of Af-Laawe. In this ninth novel, Farah appears to be playing with a Dantean conception of hell. It has a peculiarly Somali resonance that Peterson, in an alternative context, alludes to: “defined by centuries of hard parched existence, in which the human presence was ever but the smallest point of life struggling in the midst of an inhospitable threatening desert, the Somali world order is delineated by a series of concentric rings, designed to ensure survival” (Peterson 118). 23 Peterson refers to the spiralling re-emergence of political affiliation along distorted clan lines following the implosion of authoritarian rule. Yet the image is thoroughly Dante-esque. The very rhetoric employed here gives grist to Farah’s comparative mill; colonial and neo-colonial continuities are framed in strikingly similar terms. 24 In relation to the text, however, it is

21 22 23

24

See the ‘Acknowledgements’ section of Maps, for example. Jeebleh has a doctorate in Dante. Moynihan names Pandaemonium after Milton’s conception of hell (24). See “Order in the Age of Chaos” (143-74). Somalia is, typically, depicted as an apocalyptic backwater (1516). Gerald Hanley served in Somalia during World War II and offers the following, suitably Conradian comments on the spate of suicides amongst fellow servicemen: “we do not know the size and strength of our own manias until they fall upon us and drag us down, or the barrenness of our inner deserts until real loneliness, fear, bewilderment and sun-madness have cast us into them. There is something huge and dark in the African world which can chew through the defences of white men who have not been harnessed to that continent’s

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significant that explicit links are made between protagonist and polity. When Jeebleh suggests a “poet might have described Somalia as a ship caught in a great storm without the guiding hand of a wise captain” (Links 18), the reader is charged with directing the tempestuous comment onto the diasporic wanderer himself. 25 Fittingly, it is Af-Laawe’s (mis)guiding voice that disturbs Jeebleh. He offers incessant interrogations of the opaque world of political and personal affiliations into which his charge has now stepped and finds himself lost: ‘Some of us are of a ‘we’ generation, others a ‘me’ generation. You mix the two modes of being, and things become awkward, unmanageable. I belong to the me generation, whereas my clan elders belong to the we generation […] while our European counterparts belong wholeheartedly to the me idea, you and I belong at one and the same time to the me and the we […] You and I […] are made up of competing ways of doing things.’ (Links 139)

Reading Jeebleh’s final departure from Somalia in this light, it is his very inability to deal with contradictions, complexities and competing ways of doing things that results in his unbearable “pronominal confusion.” Whilst attention to, rather than evasion of, specific class privilege has always provoked divided reactions to Farah’s work, here it is designed to concentrate rather than compromise the political dimensions of a text inextricably concerned with the entanglements of globalisation. As suggested, an enduring fascination with awkward, arguably postmodern, blurring colours the textual fabric. A more than parodic sense of the hegemonic reach of global culture charges an early scene in which young militia members are depicted “standing with their backs to each other, in imitation of what they must have seen in American movies” (Links 23). 26 Elsewhere, Jeebleh dwells on pan-African comparisons with civil wars in Rwanda and Liberia before indulging in a speculative juxtaposition between American ghetto and Somali shantytown. He concludes that even poverty has its hierarchies; windows in the former context would at least be boarded up (Links 70). A macabre Mogadiscio is envisaged where the Somali corpses strewn across streets exist in sombre simultaneity with action movies beamed into crumbling buildings. This has haunting resonance with Linda Polman’s

25 26

almost mindless friendship with suffering and annihilation” (Hanley 19). Peterson refers to Hanley throughout his account. The same nautical image is used in Yesterday, Tomorrow 54-55 (see above). See “Media Culture, Politics and Ideology: From Reagan to Rambo,” in Douglas Kellner, Media Cultures – Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern, 57-92. Also consider Adi Wimmer’s chapter, “Rambo: American Adam, Anarchist and Archetypal American Frontier Hero,” in Vietnam Images 184-95.

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account in We Did Nothing: “Down in the street one of these precious generators starts up and a movie screen appears. The cinema has lost its roof and the top half of its walls. From our high position we enjoy the top half of the main feature, a tired Hollywood version of the hell that was Vietnam” (Polman 24). Like Polman and Coetzee, Farah’s series of juxtapositions (representation/reality, machine/body, commodity/conflict, displacement/engagement) defines the textual action and Links’ broader preoccupations. In suitably postmodern terms, therefore, the novel might be framed as occupying a territory somewhere between Dante and Ridley Scott. 27 This holds both in relation to Links’ central fascination with a politics of pronouns and in terms of its all-too pressing concerns with contemporary warfare. Critically, these tensions are embodied by those who stayed and those who left: “he thinks our reliance on blood kinship is backward and primitive. He is saying that he has money, that his family is safe and in America, that he belongs to the twenty-first century, while we belong to the thirteenth” (Links 30). The problematic spectres of what might be called postmodern blurring emerge once again. Not only does this character go on to allude to the resistant role he played in the counter-American struggle of which Jeebleh, like Farah, was not a part, but he also adds temporal as well as spatial dynamics to the mix. A standoff between the late twentieth and thirteenth centuries is presented in strikingly similar terms to what, under the previous U.S. administration, passed as informed comment on the phantom ‘War on Terror.’ (Sontag, “One Year After” 121). It is at this juncture, however, that Farah dangles an obvious if pointed irony before the reader. With acknowledgement of operational and symbolic parallels with Vietnam, Links alludes to the fact that it was the very strategies of this ‘thirteenth century’ force that defeated the military might of the twenty first century’s only remaining superpower. Whilst such temporal and spatial tensions continue to enliven many of the most urgent debates of our time, they also signal an extension of the author’s enduring concern with highlighting knots of complicity and complexity. In Links, much like Coetzee’s hauntingly prophetic Waiting for the Barbarians, the whole binary logic underpinning ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ is thrown into confusion. 28 As such, John Berger’s foreword to The Algebra of Infinite Justice seems peculiarly apt: “I’m tempted to say that the world has never been more confused. Yet this would

27

28

Derek Walcott, one of Farah’s epigraphical favourites, maintains “[the] antecedent of cinema is Dante.” Interview in Fumagalli (277). See, for example, Patrick Lenta’s “Waiting for the Barbarians After September 11th.”

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be untrue. The world has never had to face such global confusion” (Roy xxii). Whilst Jeebleh transgresses international borders and timezones to make a transient reconnection with his homeland, the blood and bones irritations that define the imaginative terrain of Secrets become ultimately unbearable and he departs. 29 There are, however, several additional reasons for his exit. As Seamus, an arguably more engaged outsider, cautions him, “[my] only advice is that if you won’t quit it, you watch out and make sure you don’t get sucked into the vortex” (Links 215). This spiralling imagery is significant. Whilst Peterson draws attention to the concentric structures of Somali society and the security of being closest to the centre, here that nodal point is situated at the darkening heart of a whirlpool. With appropriate allusions to Dante, Jeebleh envisions himself teetering on a dystopian brink. At one significant point, he even risks becoming the kind of gangster imagined in his family’s Americanised portrait of this ‘savage land.’ In a reworking of Loyaan’s brush with brutality in Sweet and Sour Milk, it is the sadistic sensation of gun cradled in hand that, at one level, triggers his desire for transatlantic detachment: “perhaps he wasn’t as exempt from the contagion that was of a piece with civil wars as he had believed. […] He knew he was capable of pulling the trigger if it came to that. His hand went to his shirt pocket, where he had his cash and his U.S. passport” (Links 69). As I’ve suggested throughout, Links’ broader triptych of concerns can be seen in terms of travel, conflict and media. Yet it is the way these meta-issues are grounded by a more concrete, class-specific and corporeally-imagined ensemble that captures the negotiation that Farah, at his evocative best, manages between personal and political, micrological and macrological. The new (un)holy trinity comprises wallet, passport and gun. Typically, Farah has his protagonist and, by extension, his reader, interrogate the impenetrability of their moral fortresses. Like Loyaan in Sweet and Sour Milk, Jeebleh begins to inhabit an interstitial area which confuses any rigid binaries or moral absolutes. It is multiply revealing that he employs others to do his dirty work when confronted with the task of disposing of warlord Caloosha. The cathartic killing done, he seeks to wipe his hands by passing through customs. Issues of detachment, participation and engagement thus colour 29

“Today, no one stays at rest, all is in flight. […] The habit of returning to our source, of rediscovering our origins, our ‘identity,’ suddenly seems an absolute necessity. To accomplish the backwards journey, to become again what we were yesterday, the regression that leads back to the point of departure is like some parlour game” (Virilio 39).

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every aspect of Links. Jeebleh’s final departure, of course, is only assured by his material position, as represented by his wallet and even more valuable passport. With an all-too ominous insight into the compression of moralistic distances, it becomes imperative that even more valuable, because classspecific, weapons are called on to put some physical space between “outthere” and “back-home.” As he does in so many of his novels, Farah invokes a fleshy supplement to shore up these meditations. Jeebleh’s body betrays him in a way that recalls Coetzee’s own divided and detached protagonist, Eugene Dawn: [Jeebleh] was having difficulty breathing, not because the smells were new to him – they weren’t – but because they had become even more overpowering. People living in such vile conditions were bound to lose touch with their own humanity, he thought; you couldn’t expect an iota of human kindness from a community coexisting daily with so much putrefaction. Maybe this was why people were so cruel to one another, why they showed little or no kindness to one another. (Links 200-1)

It is multiply revealing that the familiar politics of privilege are reconfigured at an embodied level. Indeed, the idea of “losing touch” seems to encompass concerns physical and metaphysical, political and symbolic throughout Links. Surveying the scene on the ground, Jeebleh finds his dignified physiognomy has let him down. Such fictive episodes appear intimately connected with Farah’s own accounts and those of his professional interviewees in Yesterday, Tomorrow. “The food [members of the Somali diaspora] eat is the food the poor eat anywhere, foods eaten not to please the tongue but to fill the stomach. I ate it, and it did damage to my constitution, not robust at the best of times. From then on, I called at non-eating hours of the day, and still they prepared ghee- and butter-rich meals for me, which got my stomach arunning” (103). This interpretation aside, Farah also reworks Deeriye-esque metaphors of moral asphyxiation to interrogate the profoundly un-Islamic activities he has elsewhere critiqued. 30 The above incident refers to the brutal beating of a pregnant dog. When Jeebleh chases the culprits away and attends to the wounded creature, he is viewed with incredulity for breaking taboos relating to human and animal conduct and contact. As in Secrets, one of Farah’s primary objectives in Links is to disrupt such ‘taboo politics.’ 31

30

31

See Derek Wright’s chapter on Close Sesame “The Grandfather: Close Sesame” in The Novels of Nuruddin Farah (90). “My view is if the members of a society can do unto each other such savageries, then who are they to remain prudish?” Farah, “How Can We Talk of Democracy,” in Wright, Emerging Perspectives (44).

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The fact that Jeebleh finds himself confronted with messy bodies, dirty dogs and problematic kinsfolk is multiply revealing. The sanitised eye of CNN that beamed images into his New York apartment may have provided an unsettling sense of corporeal fracture in the establishment of the New World Order. Yet, for all their technological advances, global media networks have so far been unable to transmit the olfactory sensations from “out-there” in the killing zone. 32 Jeebleh’s divided self betrays him on the most intimate level. He ultimately returns to his transatlantic jet and then his apartment to struggle with the spectres of detached affiliation all over again: “after all, he was not prepared to dwell in pronominal confusion, which was where he had been headed. He had to find out which pronoun might bring his story to a profitable end” (Links 332). Like the supposedly definitive revelation in Secrets and Askar’s interrogation in Maps, the reader confronts the familiar irony that this end is no ending at all. Whilst Farah may appear to smooth over these indeterminacies with the final plane ride home, the reader is charged with interrogating these opacities and seemingly postmodern areas of confusion in greater detail. As I’ve argued throughout, the globalised and diasporic dimensions of Farah’s novel are inextricably linked to its exploration of some of the most urgent geopolitical debates of our time: The final challenge – drawing on theorists as diverse as Foucault (1977), Agamben (1998), Deleuze and Guatarri (1987), Gregory (2004) and Said (1978) – is to expose in detail the ways in which urbanized RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs) weapons programmes – and the discourses which fuel them – embed stark biopolitical judgements about the varying worth of human subjects, according to their location, beneath the intensifying transnational gaze of militarized surveillance. Such a theme must be at the very core of any retheorizations of the links between corporeal, urban and transnational power in what Derek Gregory has called our ‘colonial present’ (2004). (Graham 265-66; emphasis added)

Fittingly, therefore, the novel remains just as concerned with contested relations between individual body politics and the wider body politic as Farah has been throughout his career. As with the shadowy figure of Ahmed-Wellie in Variations, Af-Laawe’s guide status is problematised in relation to the wider power games being played out on Mogadiscio’s streets. Shanta, the mother of kidnapped Raasta, delivers the following indictment:

32

“[The] Imperial War Museum […] now offers two replicated environments to visitors: from the First World War, The Trench Experience (the Somme in 1916), a walk-through complete with taped sounds (exploding shells, cries) but odourless (no rotting corpses, no poison gas)” (Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 109).

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‘Terrible things are done to the bodies between the time they are collected in Af-Laawe’s van and the time they are taken to the cemetery. A detour is made to a safe house, where surgeons on retainer are on twenty-four hour call. These surgeons remove the kidneys and hearts of the recently dead. Once these internal organs are tested and found to be in good working order, they are flown to hospitals in the Middle East, where they are sold and transplanted.’ (Links 208-9)

As with so many other features of this troubling text, what at first appears a superficial aside might be interpreted as more-than-mere sensationalism. As Scheper-Hughes, amongst others, suggests, a truly transnational economy in the body-as-commodity can be traced along all too familiar trade routes (Scheper-Hughes and Wacquant 5). 33 As such, debates clustered around the global phenomena of “postmodern forms of human sacrifice” intersect with similarly pressing concerns being raised in the name of the post-nation/posthuman fallout: “the flow of organs follows the modern routes of capital: from South to North, from Third World to First World, from poor to rich, from black to brown to white, and from female to male” (Scheper-Hughes 209). It is the process of forging such links, over space and time, which remains vital (Wilkinson). Accordingly, speculations about the possible new directions of Farah’s forthcoming work might heed Zizek’s comments on the spectre of bioterrorism. 34 Here, the body not only becomes a potential incubator for diseases that exist off the radar; it also threatens the porous borders of all seemingly sovereign states: “a superpower bombing a desolate desert country and, at the same time, hostage to invisible bacteria – this, not the WTC explosions, is the first image of twenty-first-century warfare” (Zizek 37). Whilst those thinkers and theories most commonly associated with postmodernism can enrich our reading of texts like Links, it remains imperative that we consider how such novels critique and reground some of their more indulgent excesses. This appears particularly urgent when thinking about the ubiquity of certain discussions about the ‘post-human.’ In the interests of vigilance, both scholarly and geo-political, it becomes 33

34

Scheper-Hughes maintains that this is a truly postmodern phenomenon as it blurs early modern and post-human/post-nation discourses: “at one level […] the commodification of the body is a new discourse linked […] [to] the spread of global capitalism. […] But on another level [it] is continuous with earlier discourses on the desire, need and scarcity of human bodies and body parts for religious edification, healing, dissection, recreation and sports, and for medical experimentation and practice” (3). See Cohen’s chapter, “The Other Kidney: Biopolitics beyond Recognition,” (9-29). Guillemin notes an ironic twist in his chapter “Bioterrorism and the Threat of Proliferation.” In this context, NBC stands for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons rather than National Broadcasting Corporation (149).

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increasingly necessary to ask where these supposedly universal templates are coming from, who is promoting them and for what purposes. In Links, as throughout Farah’s fictional corpus, the body takes contested centre stage. As such, it seems fitting to recall that Fanonian impulse that appears to drive much of his finest work: “my final prayer: O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” (Fanon 232).

Works Cited Abdi, ‘Abdi Sheik. Divine Madness – Mohammed ‘Abdulle Hassan (18561920). London: Zed Books, 1993. Allen, Tim, and Jean Seaton, eds. The Media of Conflict – War Reporting and Representations of Ethnic Violence. London: Zed Books, 1999. Baudrillard, Jean. The Conspiracy of Art – Manifestos, Interviews, Essays. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Trans. Ames Hodges. New York: Semiotext(e), 2005. Booth, Ken, and Tim Dunne, eds. Worlds in Collision – Terror and the Future of Global Order. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Bowden, Mark. Black Hawk Down. London: Corgi Books, 2000. Buzan, Barry. “Who May we Bomb?” Worlds in Collision – Terror and the Future of Global Order. Ed. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 85-94. Coetzee, J. M. Dusklands. London: Secker and Warburg, 1982. Cohen, Lawrence. “The Other Kidney: Biopolitics beyond Recognition.” Commodifying Bodies. Eds. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loic Wacquant. London: Sage, 2002. 9-29. Colombo, Furio. “The Media and Operation Restore Hope in Somalia.” Somalia, Rwanda, and Beyond – The Role of the International Media in Wars and Humanitarian Crises. Ed. Edward R. Girardet, Andrea Bartoli and Jeffery Carmel. Dublin: Crosslands Communications, 1995. 85-90. Connelly, Mark, and David Welch, eds. War and the Media – Reportage and Propaganda, 1900-2003. London: I. B. Taurus, 2005. Crawford, Beverley, and Ronnie D. Lipschutz, eds. The Myth of ‘Ethnic Conflict’: Politics, Economics, and ‘Cultural’ Violence. Berkeley: University of California, 1998. Culbert, David. “American Television Coverage of the Vietnam War: The Loan Execution Footage, The Tet Offensive (1968) and The Contextualisation of Visual Images.” War and the Media – Reportage

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and Propaganda, 1900-2003. Ed. Mark Connelly and David Welch. London: I. B. Taurus, 2005. 204-13. DeMars, William E. NGOs and Transnational Networks: Wild Cards in World Politics. London: Pluto, 2005. Eagleton, Terry. Holy Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Ewen, D. R. “Nuruddin Farah.” The Writing of East and Central Africa. Ed. G. D. Killam. London: Heinemann. 192-210. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Farah, Nuruddin. Close Sesame. 1983. Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1992. ——., Gifts. London: Penguin, 1992. ——., “How Can We Talk of Democracy.” Emerging Perspectives on Nuruddin Farah. Ed. Derek Wright. New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2002. 25-46. ——., Knots. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. ——., Links. New York: Riverhead Books, 2004. ——., Maps. London: Penguin, 1986. ——., Sardines. 1981. London: Heinemann, 1982. ——., Secrets. London: Penguin, 1998. ——., Sweet and Sour Milk. 1979. Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1992. ——., Yesterday, Tomorrow – Voices from the Somali Diaspora. London: Cassell, 2000. Fawcett, Louise, and Yezid Sayigh, eds. The Third World beyond the Cold War: Continuity and Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Feldman, Allen. Formations of Violence – The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Fraser, Mariam, and Monica Greco. eds. The Body – A Reader. London: Routledge, 2005. Fumagalli, Maria Cristina. The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. Girardet, Edward R., Andrea Bartoli, and Jeffery Carmel, eds. Somalia, Rwanda, and Beyond – The Role of the International Media in Wars and Humanitarian Crises. Dublin: Crosslands Communications, 1995. Gourevitch, Philip. and Errol Morris. Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story. London, Picador: 2008. Graham, Stephen. “Surveillance, Urbanization, and the US Revolution in Military Affairs.” Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond. Ed. David Lyon. Devon: Willan, 2006. 247-69.

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Gray, Chris Hables. Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict. London: Routledge, 1997. Guillemin, Jeanne. “Bioterrorism and the Threat of Proliferation.” Biological Weapons – From the Intervention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 148-66. Hanley, Gerald. Warriors – Life and Death Amongst the Somalis. 1971. London: Eland, 1993. Hoskins, Andrew. Televising War – From Vietnam to Iraq. London: Continuum, 2004. Ignatieff, Michael. Virtual War – Kosovo and Beyond. London: Chatto and Windus, 2000. Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. 1960-74. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Kellner, Douglas. Media Cultures – Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern. London: Routledge, 1995. Killam, G. D., ed. The Writing of East and Central Africa. London: Heinemann, 1984. Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Lenta, Patrick. “Waiting for the Barbarians After September 11th.” The Journal of Postcolonial Writing 42.1 (2006): 71-83. Lyon, David. ed. Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond. Devon: Willan, 2006. Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. Pandaemonium – Ethnicity in International Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. “Nuruddin Farah.” Lettre Ulysses Award. . Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost. London: Picador, 2000. Peterson, Scott. Me Against My Brother – At War in Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda. New York: Routledge, 2001. Polman, Linda. We Did Nothing – The Untold Story of the Modern Battle for Peace. Trans. Rob Bland. London: Viking, 2003. Robinson, Piers. The CNN Effect – The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Foreign Intervention. London: Routledge, 2002. Roy, Arundhati. The Algebra of Infinite Justice. London: Flamingo, 2002.

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Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “The Global Traffic in Human Organs.” The Body – A Reader. Ed. Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco. London: Routledge, 2005. 208-15. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Loic Wacquant, eds. Commodifying Bodies. London: Sage, 2002. Somerville, Keith. “Africa after the Cold War: Frozen Out or Frozen in Time.” The Third World beyond the Cold War: Continuity and Change. Ed. Louise Fawcett and Yezid Sayigh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 134-69. Sontag, Susan. At the Same Time - Essays and Speeches. Ed. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007. ——., “One Year After.” At the Same Time - Essays and Speeches. Ed. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007. 118-23. ——., Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin, 2004. ——., “Regarding The Torture of Others.” At the Same Time - Essays and Speeches. Ed. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007. 128-44. Virilio, Paul. Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light. Trans. Michael Degener. London: Continuum, 2002. Walsh, Jeffrey, and James Aulich, eds. Vietnam Images: War and Representation. London: MacMillan, 1989. West, Katarina. Agents of Altruism: The Expansion of Humanitarian NGOs in Rwanda and Afghanistan. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Wilkinson, Stephen. Bodies for Sale – Ethics and Exploitation in the Human Body Trade. London: Routledge, 2003. Wimmer, Adi. “Rambo: American Adam, Anarchist and Archetypal American Frontier Hero.” Vietnam Images: War and Representation. Ed. Jeffrey Walsh and James Aulich. London: MacMillan, 1989. 18495. Wright, Derek, ed. Emerging Perspectives on Nuruddin Farah. New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2002. ——., The Novels of Nuruddin Farah. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies Series, 1994. Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso, 2002.

Russell West-Pavlov

Sociology/Matriology in Maghreb Writing: Space and Feminine Transgression in Fanon’s Sociologie d’une révolution and Chraibi’s La Civilisation, ma mere! In 1961, the psychiatrist and anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon diagnosed grave problems among the nation states emerging in the wake of independence across the African continent. He saw an increasing gap between the erstwhile colonial bourgeoisie, now the new ruling elites, and the people, for whom, in many cases very little had changed. He warned that national spirit might become “an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty” (“une forme sans contenu, fragile, grossière”). He predicted a situation in which “the nation is passed over for the race, and the tribe is preferred to the state. These are the cracks in the edifice which show the process of retrogression that is so harmful to national effort and national unity” (WE 119) (“on passe de la nation à l’éthnie, de l’état au tribu. Ce sont ces lézardes qui rendent compte des retours en arrière, si pénibles et si préjuciables à l’essor national, à l’unité nationale”; Les Damnés 113). Fanon’s polemic was largely directed towards a post-colonial middleclass elite which continued to identify with metropolitan culture and sought its own material betterment at the cost of the rural masses. Fanon’s language explicitly included an architectural topos – that of the “cracks in the edifice” (“lézardes”) – which resonates with his usage elsewhere of the common synecdoche of the nation as house or home. In his best-known work Black Skin, White Masks (trans. 1986) (Peau noire, masques blancs; French original 1952), he had already written that “In Europe and every country characterized as civilized or civilizing, the family is a miniature of the nation. […] There is no disproportion between the life of the family and the life of the nation” (BSWM 143) (“En Europe et dans tous les pays dits civilisés ou civilisateurs, la famille est un morceau de la nation. […] Il n’y a pas de disproportion entre la vie familiale et la vie nationale”; Peau noire 115-16). The nation-family synecdoche is an odd one, sitting uneasily alongside the more common state-citizen copula (Chakrabarty 35, 36-37) and perhaps pointing up a certain aporetic quality in the latter. Unsurprisingly, then, like the borders of the nation state, a legacy of the colonial period which has continued to dog the stability of postcolonial nations, the nation-family synecdoche may be equally problem-laden. Paradoxically, just such a use of

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the family serves to figure the national liberation struggle in the propagandist Résistance algérienne of May 1957 quoted at length by Fanon: What is true is that under normal conditions, an interaction must exist between the family and the society at large. The home is the basis of the truth of society, but society authenticates and legitimizes the family. (DC 66) C’est que, dans les conditions normales, un double courant doit exister entre la famille et l’ensemble social. Le foyer fonde la vérité sociale, mais la société authentifie et légitime la famille. (Sociologie 49)

When it occurs as an index of revolutionary action, this evocation of the closed Maghreb domicile may provoke perplexity, to say the least. There appears to be a disturbing continuity between colonial metropolitan uses of the family as national synecdoche and a postcolonial reinscription of the same fraught trope. Anne McClintock describes the synedochic use of the image of the family to figure the nation as seemingly natural model for reconciling the conflictual forces of historical change. The image of the family “sanctions national hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests” – a “‘natural’ trope for figuring national time” (McClintock 91). Fanon employs this synecdoche in precisely this way: “The Algerian couple rids itself of its traditional weaknesses at the same time that the solidarity of the people becomes a part of history. This couple is no longer an accident but something rediscovered, willed, built” (DC 114) (“Le couple algérien se dépouille de ses faiblesses traditionnelles dans le même temps où la cohésion du peuple s’inscrit dans l’histoire. Ce couple n’est plus un accident mais quelque chose de repris, de voulu, de construit”; Sociologie 100). The family and its organic continuity becomes a guarantor of historical progress only by virtue of the rejection of one topos of continuity (tradition as accident) for another (progress as human agency). In this essay, I concentrate on the family and the house as its locus classicus, as images for the nation, which translate some of the unease gathering around the postcolonial nation. Like the space of the nation itself, the notion of nation as family, or the household, is a synecdoche which has been inherited from colonialism, not without generating a considerable number of contradictions. These contradictions parallel those identified by those feminist critics who see Fanon as collapsing feminine experience into that of the nation, making them a metonymy of the nation, and their revolutionary action merely designated and auxiliary (Moore 59; Fuss 27-28; McClintock 98). In what follows, I shall place in apposition to one another Fanon’s remarkable observations on the role of the family and that of the

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women within it in the Algerian revolution in A Dying Colonialism (trans. 1994) (Sociologie d’une révolution, 1959) and Chraïbi’s fiction. I shall focus in particular upon Fanon’s fascinating discussion of the transgression of the household boundaries undertaken by Algerian women. I shall then compare a fictional text, Chraïbi’s Mother Comes of Age (trans. 1984, 1998) (French original, La civilisation, ma mère!…, 1972), which explores, albeit from a slightly different angle, parallel problems of feminine transgression in a fictional Morrocco from the 1930s to the 1950s. Both texts share an overwhelmingly positive perspective upon feminine transgression. Fanon’s text supports feminine transgression of traditional boundaries because of its propagandist role in an ongoing war of liberation, while Chraïbi’s fiction embraces the mother’s liberation by endowing it with an ambient fairy-tale quality. Both texts, however, at second glance, prove to engage with feminine liberation and its spatial aspects in more complicated ways evinced primarily by their own internal contradictions. Rather than exploring the manner in which feminine agency exceeds the limiting framework of a patriarchal (and) nationalist project as other critics have done (Moore 59) I focus upon other complications and contradictions within Fanon’s text. I highlight Fanon’s need to ascribe patriarchal oppression to colonisation so as to make room for unexpected resurgences of spatial restriction with the narrative of political struggle, and place this in parallel to Chraïbi’s patent unease about the presumption of his masculine narrators as they go about the process of engineering their mother’s spatial emancipation.

Fanon’s Women on the Street For all the radicalism of his attitudes to racism and its manifestations in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon appears to be remarkably conservative when it comes to questions of gender. In his famed discussion of Fanon, Bhabha cautions that “There are times when [Fanon] is too quick to name the Other, to personalise its presence in the language of colonial racism” (Bhabha 60). The same may be true of gender representations. While he embraces a stance of radical constructivism with regard to racial identity – “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man” (BSWM 231) (“Le nègre n’est pas. Pas plus que le blanc”; Peau noire 187) – he appears to be caught up a number of stereotypical assumptions about gender as it functions within the racist differential. In particular his claims regarding the attitudes of ‘the’ white woman towards ‘the’ black man are remarkably essentialist and merely instances of

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reverse stereotyping: “when a [white] woman lives the fantasy of a rape by a negro, it is some way the fulfilment of a private dream, of an inner wish” (BSWM 179) (“Quand la femme vit le fantasme de viol par un nègre, c’est en quelque sorte la réalisation d’un rêve personnel, d’un souhait intime”; Peau noire 145). Equally surprising, but perhaps less offensive is his simple admission of bafflement regarding the black woman: “Those who grant our conclusions on the psychosexuality of the white woman may ask what we have to say about the woman of color. I know nothing about her” (BSWM 179-80) (“Admettant nos conclusions sur la psychosexualité de la femme blanche, on pourrait nous demander celles que nos proposerions pour la femme de couleur. Nous n’en savons rien”; Peau noire 145). In the light of these attitudes, the contrast to the Fanon’s stance a decade later at the time of his involvement in the Algerian revolution is striking: The freedom of the Algerian people from then on became identified with women’s liberation, with her entry into history. This woman who, in the avenues of Algiers or Constantine, would carry grenades or automatic rifle magazines […] this woman […] at the same time participating in the destruction of colonialism and in the birth of a new woman. (DC 107; translation modified) La liberté du peuple algérien s’identifie alors à la libération de la femme qui, dans les avenues d’Alger ou Constantine transporte les grenades ou les chargeurs de fusil-mitrailleur […] cette femme qui […] conjointement collabore à la destruction du colonialisme et à la naissance d’une nouvelle femme. (Sociologie 93)

The stark contrast between Fanon’s positions in these two texts is all the more striking for the distance between the quite retrograde statements in the former passages and the politicised awareness of gender in the latter writings. The crucial gear change in this remarkable contrast in attitudes to gender may be located, paradoxically, in the later assessment of conservatism, and particularly of spatial conservatism, as part of the liberation struggle rather than its mere opposite. Characterisations of the Algerian woman as a secluded figure locked into the closed sphere of domesticity, “who before the Revolution never left the house without being accompanied by her mother or her husband” (DC 59, n14) (“qui, avant la Révolution ne sort jamais de la maison, si elle n’est pas accompagnée de sa mère, ou de son mari”; Sociologie 43, n1), that is, as governed by a regime of spatial restriction, occur on several occasions in Fanon’s account of the Algerian revolution. However, rather than they do so in two very specific contexts: first, as part of a defensive reaction to colonial intrusion, and second as one tactic is the terrorist battle against the military occupiers. Spatial restriction is thus recoded, in the descriptions of the Algerian struggle, as part of a “strategic” deployment of spatial conservatism

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(see for instance Spivak, In Other Worlds 205). But before analysing that strategic conservatism in more detail, it may be worth presenting the background to that specifically positioned tactical deployment of spatial regimes of seclusion, namely, the extraordinary surge of feminine liberation unleashed by the necessities of the struggle for liberation. In explaining the entry of women into the revolutionary war, Fanon initially appears to be caught up in a rhetorical dilemma that mirrors a more practical dilemma of the revolutionary leadership itself. Involving women in the armed struggle was not simply a matter of expanding the reserve of combatants to include the whole nation: “involving the women was not solely a response to the desire to mobilize the entire nation” (DC 48) (“engager les femmes ne correspond pas seulement au désir de mobiliser l’ensemble de la Nation”; Sociologie 30). Rather, Fanon explains, it involved modifying the very mode of revolutionary tactics. The reasons for this are not made clear. Initially, the text appears to be complicit, in its reticence about the hurdles to female mobilisation, with the masculist reticence about admitting women into the public sphere of revolutionary war (“the internal resistance was massive” [DC 50; translation modified]; “les résistances intérieures se firent massives” [Sociologie 32]), although it is notable that these passages are placed in the past tense (Moore 61). Swiftly, however, the text moves to a more pragmatic plane, explaining that women had to overcome deep-seated inhibitions about entering the world outside the home – inhibitions so deeply internalised that they have become part of the bodily habitus. Fanon identifies a sort of agoraphobia experienced by the cloistered woman upon first venturing into the street : “her body did not have the normal mobility before a limitless horizon of avenues, of unfolded sidewalks, of houses, of people dodged or bumped into” (DC 49) (“son corps n’acquiert pas la mobilité normale en face d’un horizon illimité d’avenues, de trottoirs, de gens évités, heurtés”; Sociologie 31); “When the Algerian woman has to cross a street, for a long time she commits errors of judgement as to the exact distance to be negotiated” (DC 59) (“Quand l’Algérienne doit traverser une rue, pendant longtemps il y a erreur de jugement sur la distance exacte à parcourir”; Sociologie 42). The “interior resistance” initially ascribed to the revolutionary leadership is transferred to the women themselves, and categorised as a possible handicap in their participation in armed struggles in the public world. However, what Fanon then maps is a rapid double transformation of the spatial and social status of the once-enclosed woman: “the committed Algerian woman learns both her role as ‘a woman alone in the street’ and her revolutionary mission instinctively” (DC 50) (“l’algérienne engagée apprend

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à la fois d’instinct son rôle de ‘femme seule dans la rue’ et sa mission révolutionnaire”; Sociologie 32). Thus, “the revolutionary character of this decision” (DC 51) (“le caractère révolutionnaire de cette décision”; Sociologie 33) to involve women in the war of liberation makes gender one aspect of what Régis Debray has called a revolution within the revolution (Debray 114-209; see also Young 209). Fanon constantly stresses that the emergence from the closed domain of the home is an emergence from the barriers imposed by colonialism itself. When the liberated woman moves into the street, she is not merely escaping from her husband, but is escaping from the patriarchal closure imposed by colonial urban planning. Fanon underlines the Manichean structure of the Arab town and European town: “The European town is not a prolongation of the native town. The colonisers […] have surrounded the native city; they have laid siege to it. Every exit from the Kasbah of Algiers opens on enemy territory” (DC 51-52) (“La ville européenne n’est pas le prolongement de la ville autochtone. Les colonisateurs […] ont cerné la ville autochtone, ils ont organisé le siège. Toute sortie de la Kasbah d’Alger débouche chez l’ennemi” ; Sociologie 34). The colonial town surrounds the colonised town, making this former and is an essential element in the military conquest of the colony “The native cities are deliberately caught in the conqueror’s vise” (DC 52) (“Les villes indigènes sont, de façon concertée, prises dans l’étau du conquérant”; Sociologie 34). When the Algerian woman revolutionary starts to penetrate into the European town in ways hitherto impossible (Sociologie 34-35), it would seem that the penetration of a modern urban area is less a conquest of traditional restraints than a conquest of colonial siege structures. It is therefore within the structure of a spatial dynamic that is in the first instance colonialist (and only secondarily patriarchal) that Fanon places the emancipation of Algerian women. Fanon’s polemic suggests that the notion of the patriarchal Maghreb society cannot be understood outside the system of Orientalist knowledge which has dominated virtually all discourse about the colonised world. According to the fundamental dialectic of Orienatalism, to speak of the patriarchal hierarchies of Maghreb society is to instantiate by discursive means the modernity of the West itself. At a more empirical level, Fanon does not deny the existence of this patriarchy, but claims that its forms have been generated in the relationship with the coloniser. Just as Fanon claims that “It is the white man who creates the Negro” (DC 47) (“C’est le blanc qui crée le nègre”; Sociologie 29), so he appears to suggest that the conservative spatial regime of feminine seclusion, though part of patriarchal rule, has been instigated and reinforced by colonisation. Thus, he seems to be claiming,

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much of the rigidity or archaism of North African patriarchy is not inherent, but a reaction to the intrusive, penetrative action of conquest itself. Sequestration, in this reading, is a perfectly legitimate and rational reaction to colonial violation. Fanon documents the literal homology of military penetration of the country at the moment of colonisation: “The history of the French conquest of Algeria including the overrunning of the villages by the troops, the confiscation of property and the raping of the women” (DC 45) (“L’histoire de la conquête française en Algérie relatant l’irruption des troupes dans les villages, la confiscation des biens et le viol des femmes”; Sociologie 27). This is nothing other, according to Fanon, than a further offensive in a long-running invasion: “The Algerian woman is conceived of as the platform for Western penetration into indigenous society” (DC 42; translation modified) (“La femme algérienne [est] conçue comme support de la pénétration occidentale dans la société autochtone”; Sociologie 24); “If we want to destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women” (DC 37-38) (“Si nous voulons frapper la société algérienne dans sa contexture, il nous faut d’abord conquérir les femmes…”; Sociologie 19). The colonisers’ attempts to modernise Algerian women, above all in removing the veil, a corporeal metonymy of their domestic sequestration, is part and parcel of these invasive strategies: “The dominant administration solemnly undertook to defend this woman, humiliated, sequestered, cloistered” (DC 38) (“L’administration dominante veut défendre solennellement la femme humiliée, mise à l’écart, cloîtrée”; Sociologie 19). Here we have the familiar prospect of colonisation legitimising its undertakings by mobilising a discourse of gendered philanthropy (from the notion of white men saving brown women from brown men in the Indian context [see Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason 284] to more recent justifications of US intervention in Afghanistan). The priority of colonising agency is matched by the use of the passive form in connection with the colonial subject: “Here and there it thus happened that a woman was ‘saved’, and symbolically unveiled” (DC 42) (“Çà et là il arrive donc que l’on ‘sauve’ une femme qui, symboliquement, est dévoilée”; Sociologie 24). In particular, European rhetoric demands the ripping away of the veil, the sartorial equivalent of the cloistering of Arab women: “there is in the European the crystallisation of an aggressiveness, the strain of a kind of violence before the Algerian woman. To unveil this woman is to reveal her beauty, it is to lay bare her hidden secret, break her resistance, make her available for a brief affair” (DC 43; translation modified) (“il y a chez l’Européen cristallisation d’une agressivité, mise en tension d’une violence en face de la femme

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algérienne. Dévoiler cette femme, c’est mettre en évidence la beauté, c’est mettre à nu son secret, briser sa résistance, la faire disponible pour l’aventure” ; Sociologie 25-26). The linkage between the spatial ‘liberation’ of Algerian women, in European rhetoric, and sexual penetration, is made manifest in the fantasy material analysed by Fanon the psychiatrist: “The rape of an Algerian woman in the dreams of a European [man] is always preceded by the rending of the veil” (DC 45) (“le viol de la femme algérienne dans un rêve d’Européen est toujours précédé de la déchirure du voile”; Sociologie 28). Under these conditions, the spatial seclusion of the Algerian woman is less a sign of tradition or conservatism than of resistance. It is thus that Fanon can quote a text from Résistance algérienne of May 1957 in which the cloistering of the Algerian woman, paradoxically, is presented as an integral part of the liberation movement: The Algerian woman’s ardent love of the home is not a limitation of her universe. It is not hatred of the sun or the street or of public events. It is not a flight from the world. […] The Algerian woman, in imposing such a restriction on herself, in choosing a spatially restricted form of existence, was deepening her consciousness of struggle and preparing for combat. (DC 66; translation modified) L’amour du foyer si ardent chez l’Algérienne n’est pas limitation de l’univers. Ce n’est pas haine du soleil ou des rues ou des spectacles. Ce n’est pas fuite du monde. […] La femme algérienne, en s’imposant une telle restriction, en choisissant une forme d’existence limitée dans l’espace, approfondissait sa conscience de lutte et se préparait pour le combat. (Sociologie 49)

This astonishing equation of tradition and restriction with revolution and liberation makes more sense, however, if it is seen as one aspect of the way colonisation worked to “give rise to reactionary forms of behaviour on the part of the colonized” (DC 46) (“provoquer chez le colonisé des comportements réactionnels”; Sociologie 29). Fanon insists that “The phenomena of resistance observed among the colonised must be related to an attitude of counter-assimilation, of maintenance of cultural, national originality and identity” (DC 42) (“Les phénomènes de résistance observés chez le colonisé doivent être rapportés à une attitude de contre-assimilation, de maintien d’une originalité culturelle, donc nationale”; Sociologie 24). The notion of national unity is central here (see M’Bokolo 334-41). It is worth citing once again the synedochic relationship posited by the 1957 editorial of La résistance algérienne: What is true is that under normal conditions, an interaction must exist between the family and the society at large. The home is the basis of the truth of society, but society

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authenticates and legitimizes the family. The colonial structure is the very negation of this reciprocal justification. (DC 66) C’est que, dans les conditions normales, un double courant doit exister entre la famille et l’ensemble social. Le foyer fonde la vérité sociale, mais la société authentifie et légitime la famille. La structure coloniale est la négation même de cette réciproque justification. (Sociologie 49)

The cloistered existence of the Algerian woman thus becomes a spatial image of the consolidation of the nation-in-liberation with its stable boundaries. Once again, Fanon quotes La résistance algérienne: This withdrawal, this rejection of an imposed structure, this falling back upon the fertile kernel that a restricted but coherent existence represents, constituted for a long time the fundamental strength of the occupied. […] What was important was that the occupier should constantly come up against a unified front. This accounts for the aspect of sclerosis that tradition must assume. (DC 66) Cette fermeture, ce rejet d’une structure imposée, ce repliement sur le noyau fécond qui représente une existence rétrécie, mais cohérente, constitue pendant longtemps la force fondamentale de l’occupé. […] L’essentiel est que l’occupant bute constamment sur un front unifié. D’où l’allure sclérosée qui doit revêtir la tradition. (Sociologie 50)

Patriarchy thus becomes, on the one hand, something that occurs in a process of reaction formation, moulded in a defensive impulse by the aggressive inroads of colonisation, and on the other hand, a conscious instrument in the struggle for liberation. It is in the latter sense, for instance, that the veil is first put off by Algerian women, and then, several years later in the struggle, is taken up again. Fanon notes that the veil is abandoned from 1955 by women posing as Europeans so as to pass unnoticed into the European town – and from 1957 it returns, together with the long gown, worn so as to afford better concealment for the transport of money, documents or weapons – the veil or its absence as strategic elements of the armed struggle (Sociologie 44-47; DC 61-63). If we read the veil as the sartorial metonymy of a closed-up existence, then it is a further instance of the contingency of tradition and its re-encoding as militaristic strategic essentialism posited by Fanon. During the revolution, the entire nation undergoes an experience of spatial fragmentation, orchestrated for instance by the French colonial government’s internment of tens of thousands of Algerians and their implementation of other forms of demographic displacement: “With the enormous displacements of segments of the population, the whole social panorama and the perceptual frameworks are disturbed and restructured” (DC 117; translation modified) (“Avec les déplacements considérables de populations, c’est le panorama social, le monde de la perception qui sont perturbés et restructurés”; Sociologie 103). What Fanon calls “Algeria Dispersed” (DC

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118) (“L’Algérie dispersée”; Sociologie 105) has its synecdochic counterpart at the level of the family: “the family, from being homogeneous and virtually monolithic, is broken up” (DC 99; translation modified) (“la famille, homogène et quasi monolithique, se brise”; Sociologie 83). The spatial fragmentation of the nation as macro-family and of the family as micronation go hand in hand and are causally connected to each other. As already pointed out above, Fanon’s text displays a number of moments of slippage as it attempts to reconcile feminine cloistering as a form of reactive defence mechanism or revolutionary strategic essentialism with the patent evidence of women’s equally revolutionary enhanced mobility outside the home. It negotiates these contradictions by making patriarchy an effect of colonialism. Thus Fanon can say that the colonized father at the time of the fight for liberation, gave his children the impression of indecisiveness, or avoiding taking sides, indeed, of adopting an evasive or irresponsible attitude. […] This experience occurs at a national level and is part of the great upheaval which founds a new world which was felt throughout the territory. (DC 100; translation modified) le père colonisé, au moment de la lutte de Libération, donne à ses enfants l’impression d’être indécis, d’éviter l’option, voire d’adopter des conduites de fuite et d’irresponsabilité. […] Cette expérience, en effet, se déroule à l’échelon national et s’intègre à la grande secousse fondatrice d’un monde nouveau, ressentie sur toute l’étendu du territoire. (Sociologie 84).

The difficult syntax of Fanon’s prose betrays the effort needed here to homogenise the Algerian liberation struggle, and to engineer an isomorphism between the disparate levels of the family and that of the nation. The synecdoche between colonised father (in both the strong and the weak senses of the word colonised) and the nation allows the fragmentation of the family as micro-nation to transpire as the unification of the nation as macro-family. What appears to be a deeply traumatic experience at the level of the family, “loses its noxious character” (DC 141; translation modified) (“perd sa nocivité”; Sociologie 84) and becomes a liberating experience, in Fanon’s account, at the level of the nation. Thus the synecdoche of family and nation, itself a legacy of colonial rule, involves a reversal of semantic valency from micro- to macro-level. The synecdoche is explicitly spatialised at the end of the passage quoted. The closure of the household opens up the expanse of the national territory as the scope of this revolutionary transformation. The oppression exercised by the father upon the family, in Fanon’s reading, is simply a function of the oppression that he himself experiences at the hands of the colonising power. The loss of his patriarchal status is that symptomatic of the evaporation of the colonising power itself, and signals the liberation of the nation as a whole: “This defeat of the father by the new

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forces that were emerging could not fail to modify the traditional relationships that had formerly prevailed in Algerian society” (DC 105) (“Cette défaite du père par les nouvelles forces qui émergent de la Patrie ne peut laisser intacts les rapports anciens qui ordonnaient la société algérienne”; Sociologie 90). The paradoxical collision of two masculine entities – father vs. Fatherland / père vs. Patrie – results in their emancipatory decoupling, allowing the transformation of spatial fragmentation at the level of the family to trigger the spatial coagulation of the nation as “the allembracing crystallisation of the innermost hopes of the whole people […] the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilization of the people” (WE 119) (“la cristallisation coordonée des aspirations les plus intimes de l’ensemble du people […] le produit immediat le plus palpable de la mobilisation populaire”; Les Damnés 113). Fanon’s vision here is patently utopian, as “the glaring incommensurability between women’s anti-colonial militancy and their disenfranchisement in independent Algeria” has amply demonstrated (Moore 57). Critics have suggested that the veil as an index of conservatism and as a metonymy of feminine spatial restriction was not merely a reaction to a specific colonial context, but had much deeper roots in religious prescription and entrenched patriarchal custom: “Fanon underestimates the influence of religio-cultural determinants and tenacious, local forms of patriarchy” (Moore 62). Such powerful substrata of conservatism re-emerged intact after independence, with the very spatial liberation championed by Fanon being reversed, and old restrictions being reestablished: “we had broken down all the barricades, [but] in 1962 the barricades were put back in place again” (Baya Hocine, qtd. in AmraneMinne 146, translation Moore 62).

Chraïbi’s Mother on the Street In the second part of this essay I examine another attempt to negotiate comparable contradictions within feminine spatial liberation in Driss Chraïbi’s 1970 novel Mother Comes of Age (La civilisation, ma mère! ...) The novel is a sustained and affectionate evocation of a mother by her two sons. The first part, set in 1930s Morocco, is narrated by the younger of the two sons, “the little rascal” (“le petit loustic”), and portrays the mother’s emergence from the strict sequestration reserved for Muslim in highly traditional contexts:

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the very intelligent man who had married her in her puberty […] had done nothing more than apply the letter of the law. Religiously. He had closed her up in the house from the day of their marriage until the day we had made her come outside. She had never once crossed the threshold. She had never even thought of it. (MCA 54) l’homme très intelligent qui l’avait épousée en pleine puberté […] n’avait fait qu’appliquer la loi. Religieusement. L’avait enfermée dans sa maison depuis le jour des noces et jusqu’à cet après-midi-là où nous l’en avions fait sortir. Jamais elle n’en avait franchi le seuil. Jamais elle n’en avait eu l’idée. (La civilisation 68)

The second part is related by the elder brother, Nagib, and continues the narrative of the mother’s emancipation as she becomes involved in the revolutionary period of the post-war era. The dual structure of the text is reflected in the apposition inherent in the title (an apposition with ironic intention, if one believes the author [Bouraoui 60]), between maternity and civilisation, terms which the text brings together on one axis (the character of the mother), but also pulls apart on another (the split narrative structure and differing narrative perspectives thus generated). This tension is underlined by the spatial centrifugal dynamic accompanying the dual structure of the narration: both the first and the second parts are closed-off by a departure. Part one ends with the departure of “the little rascal” (“le petit loustic”) for study in Paris; part two finishes with the mother’s isomorphic departure for France, accompanied, at the last moment, by her son Nagib. This novel epitomises Maghreb writing as a disaporic literary tradition. Indeed, Chraïbi himself has termed it a “literature of departure” (Marx-Scouras 137; see also Abdalaoui 27). Thus the mother’s spatial emancipation as portrayed by an already fragmented text, uneasily takes its place in a larger tradition of spatial unrest. It is thus, from the outset, and despite its won best intentions, riven by contradictions at different scales of narrative scope (individual, male or female, family, nation, literary culture). In a manner roughly parallel to Fanon, the transformation of the family goes hand in hand with anti-colonial emancipation, thus implicitly proposing as the text’s underlying model the family or household as synecdoche for the nation. Once again, however, the text evinces a prominent, if only implicitly marked tension between national unity and open household, via the centrifugal vector of departure. The openness of the household, its status as the point of departure for demographic depletion, may threaten the integrity of the nation as community. This threat cannot be banished by neatly making the second departure a mission to recuperate the younger son from his Parisian exile and cultural alienation (see Bouraoui 60) – that is, a departure which implicitly projects a return journey. That potential return, however,

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lies beyond the text’s own diegetic limits, in an as-yet-unwritten and thus uncertain future. That gesture of recuperation itself is indicative of the text’s own impulse to downplay these tensions. The journey’s incompletion, however, it is equally indicative of the text’s refusal to curtail those tensions altogether. Initially, the metaphors used to portray their mother’s emancipation are ostentatiously organic, suggesting an unproblematic resolution of the aporia of liberation narratives: “She was a tree shut up in a prison courtyard, but one that would bud and burst into blossom at the slightest breath of spring” (MCA 26) / “Elle était un arbre, cerclé dans une cour de prison, mais que le moindre souffle de printemps pouvait faire bourgeonner et fleurir avec luxuriance” (La civilisation 25). But the process of emancipation is sometimes portrayed in quite different terms, as a violent process of almost catastrophic nature: “then suddenly and all together the external world and the violence of freedom descended before her and upon her like an equinoctial deluge. She was frightened” (MCA 68; translation modified) (“Alors, brusquement et tous ensemble, le monde extérieur et la violence de la liberté s’étaient abattus devant et sur elle comme un déluge d’équinoxe, elle en avait peur”; La civilisation 83-84). The tumultuous emotions aroused by this process of spatial emancipation are not merely the result of apprehension, but more acutely, of a clear knowledge of the problematic character of the syncronicity of the asynchronous [“Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen”] (Bloch 153). The tempo of modernity remains contiguous to the incarcerating stasis of archaism: “freedom is a bitter thing”, she said in a sort of whisper, “It brings suffering in its wake. […] It does not solve the problem of loneliness. You see, I’m going to tell you something. I wonder whether you and Nagib have done the right thing by opening the gates of my prison. […] I have to go back to that prison every night. Just like before.” (MCA 72-73) – La liberté est poignante, dit-elle à mi-voix. Elle fait parfois souffrir. […] Elle ne résout pas le problème de la solitude, tu vois, je vais te dire : je me demande si vous avez bien fait, Nagib et toi, d’ouvrir la porte de ma prison. […] Cette prison, je suis bien obligée d’y rentrer le soir. Comme avant… comme avant… (La civilisation 98)

In this context, emancipation is only partial, taking place in a largely untransformed topography of ongoing sequestration. What is most problematic is that such a liberty, forced upon the subaltern subject by others who see themselves as the representatives of modernity, are its manifold ambivalences. The play of various centres of agency in the giving of liberty are significant in this context. The sons, in their own account, “gave her a polished steel mirror so she could judge the effect

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herself, but it was in our eyes that she saw herself” (MCA 50) (“lui donnâmes un miroir en acier poli afin qu’elle pût juger de son propre effet – mais c’était dans nos yeux qu’elle se contemplait”; La civilisation 63). The gift of selfreflexivity installs a novel relationship of selfhood, but nevertheless appears to maintain a relay via alterity which merely replaces one relationship of dependence with another: the naked power of the father is replaced by the epistemological power of the sons. Indeed, such a ‘gift’ of liberty may take on the appearances of a form of privation, especially when it undercuts the very sources of selfhood upon which cultural agency is based: What I kept tenaciously in my sights were the layers of ignorance, of conditioned thinking and of false values which held her prisoner deep inside herself. […] Day after day I encouraged her to call her own past into question. (MCA 66-67) Ce que je visais, tenacement, c’était la carapace d’ignorance, d’idées reçues et de fausses valeurs qui la maintenaient prisonnière au fond d’elle-même. […] Jour après jour, je l’amenais à remettre en cause son propre passé. (La civilisation 90)

The sons pursue the active destruction of past, of tradition, of the sources of their mother’s identity: ostensibly in order to free her to full selfhood, but only by freeing her from that self-same selfhood! Modernity emerges here as a radical form of rupture which releases the self from its selfhood, into another form of being which, far from being self-determining, may be equally other-determined. The prison of selfhood is a metaphor which equates selfhood and house. Release into the wider world generates the sort of anxious vertigo documented by Fanon in his discussions of newly independent Algerian women: “What will your father say? … No, no, no. I can’t do it. … […] Let’s go right back into the house. … You know very well that I’ve never been outside of it” (MCA 52-53) (“Mais que va dire votre père … non, non, non, je ne peux pas… […] Retournons vite à la maison… Vous savez bien que je n’en suis jamais sortie…”; La civilisation 66). The mother’s anxiety is not merely an index of the shock of the new (“Colours are too intense for her and have almost astigmatized her from the corner of the street on” [MCA 53]; “Les couleurs sont trop vives pour elle et l’ont comme astigmatisée dès le coin de la rue” [La civilisation 67]). Far more, this anxiety betrays the manner in which the driving force of modernity tramples rough shod over the complex networks of experience, habitus and meaning which it aspires to transform. In so doing, it comes dangerously close to replicating the very elision of subaltern agency which it seeks to counteract. This is the central tension identified by Chraïbi in his narrative of feminine emancipation.

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An even more sinister facet of this aggressive pedagogical impulse is revealed by the language of veiling used by the younger brother: “I taught her about her body, Yes, with calm persistence. […] Taboos, modesty, inhibitions all were stripped away veil by veil” (MCA 66) (“Je lui appris son corps. Oui. Avec un acharnement tranquille. […] Taboues, pudeurs, hontes, je les mettais à bas, voile après voile”; La civilisation 89). The ripping-off of the veil is commonly associated with the penetration of the confined, hidden enclosure of the feminine world, and in turn resonates with the invasive action of colonisation itself. The sons thus take up a position which is that of the coloniser within the colonised world, one which is coeval with the status of the father. Clearly the aporia of feminine emancipation are situated in different locations by Fanon and Chraïbi. Fanon struggles with the ways in which masculine power may be at the same time a function of colonial oppression, and the manner in which the fragmentation of the household may be reconcilable with the unity of the nation. Chraïbi, in contrast, confronts the ways in which spatial emancipation may falls back into new forms of feminine oppression, and new configurations of sequestration. None the less, the rhetorical resources used to express these aporia are those of the house as locus classicus of sequestration, but also of belonging and cultural coherence: “Let’s go right back into the house” (MCA 53) (“retournons vite à la maison…”; La civilisation 66). Fanon may attempt to mitigate patriarchal power in the Maghreb, explaining it as a reactive hypercorrection resulting from the inroads of colonisation; no such explanatory attempt is undertaken by Chraïbi. On the contrary, colonisation and patriarchy are collapsed into one another, making the former a derivative of the latter. After a very early sortie into the world outside the house, the text tells us that “a few days later the trapdoor of colonisation closed down on her again” (MCA 26; translation modified) (“quelques jours plus tard, retomba sur elle la trappe de la colonisation”; La civilisation 25). Chraïbi discretely mobilises counter-discourses. The patent presumption, self-aggrandisement and insensibility of the two brothers’ emancipationist education, though buffered somewhat by the book’s ambient affectionate humour, is most effectively countered by words put in the mother’s mouth: “I don’t need any help. […] Not from you or anyone else. I am conscious now and entirely responsible for my own life. Do you understand that? I haven’t just freed my self from the custody of your father in order to come asking for your protection, no matter how big you are.” (MCA 97)

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– Je n’ai pas besoin d’aide. […] Ni de toi ne de personne. Je suis à présent consciente, entièrement responsable de ma vie, entends-tu ? Je ne suis pas en train de me libérer de la tutelle de ton père pour venir te demander ta protection, tout grand gaillard que tu es. (La civilisation 136-37)

But a more significant riposte is one couched in the language of maternity: “I’m older than you are. I gave birth to you and not the other way around, if I’m not mistaken” (MCA 43; translation modified) (“Je suis plus âgée que toi. C’est moi qui t’ai enfanté, et non le contraire, il me semble”; La civilisation 54). The image of birthing is, after all, a spatial one. The maternal body nurtures the foetus and then releases it into the world, just as the mother will later release the child into the larger world beyond the nurturing home. Here it is the mother who commands the agency to emancipate – in spatial terms – her children: “She was far more effective at teaching me human geography than any of my books or teachers. Without leaving the house, she had established an intricate network of links that became more tangled with every passing day. […] Public relations avant la lettre” (MCA 46 ; translation modified) (“Elle était capable de m’enseigner la géographie humaine bien mieux que ne l’avaient jamais fait mes livres ou mes professeurs. Sans quitter la maison, elle avait établi un réseau inextricable de liens. […] Les relations humaines avant la lettre”; La civilisation 58). The mother and the home may be equated, but the creation of a topography of sustainable liberation, that is, one based in a durable community of human relations, goes beyond the boundaries of the home in a way more radical than the sons’ corrosive spatial pedagogy. When, at the end of the novel, the leaves behind both the home and the nation-as-home, her departure is what allows the older brother, Nagib, also to leave – taking the family contours with her, as it were, beyond the boundaries of the post-colonial nation. In a sense, Chraïbi’s the text grapples with an unsaid problem, namely, that of the split narrative consciousness of its two fraternal narrators. This split narrative is itself an index of their own split project, exemplary as it is of the “paradox, identified by Freud and articulated by Lacan, [of] the manifestation of aggression at the very moment we set out to do good” (Rutherford 10). It is also an index of the aporetic projet of spatial emancipation, torn between the will to liberate and the will to invade. Where Fanon is concerned to reconcile the unity of the house of the nation with the disunity of the household, Chraïbi confronts this problem by making the dissent latent in the very action of liberation the driving force of a diasporic impulse across the boundaries of nation and beyond. Chraïbi harnesses the centrifugal dynamic of modernity itself – from the closed world to the infinite universe, in Koyré’s famous formulation (Koyré) – to spring over the

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boundaries of its own brain child, the nation-state. The nation-state is the form that emerges as the world is “disenchanted” (Weber 155), as space undergoes a process of “emptying” (Giddens 18), generating a need to replace the dwindling power of religious values by other forms of communal bonding. Yet the nation itself, as the geopolitical template handed down to postcolonial societies on the eve of independence, is already outmoded, outstripped by its own modernity, as it comes into force. Fanon, writing as he did in 1959 Algeria from the midst of a struggle for a liberation not yet achieved, still believed in the salutary and necessary role of the nation, and was thus obliged to work to reconcile the house-nation synecdoche. By 1961, his scepticism was growing: “The moment for a fresh national crisis is not far off” (WE 150) (“L’heure d’une nouvelle crise nationale n’est pas loin”; Les Damné 139). And by 1972, the year Chraïbi’s Mother Comes of Age / La civilisation, ma mère!… was published, this scepticism had taken root deeply, as diaspora rather than the nation appeared on the horizon as a new paradigm of cultural identification.

Works Cited Abdalaoui, M’hamed Alaoui. “The Moroccan Novel in French.” Research in African Literatures 23.4 (1992): 9-33. Amrane-Minne, Danièle Djamila. Des Femmes dans la guerre d’Algérie. Paris: Karthala, 1994. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bloch, Ernst. Ungleichzeitikeit und das Geschichtsbild der Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988. Bouraoui, Hédi. “Ambivalence structuro-culturelle dans La civilisation, ma mère!… de Chraïbi.” Modern Language Studies 10.2 (1980): 59-68. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chraïbi, Driss. Mother Comes of Age. Trans. Hugh A. Harter. Boulder CO: Three Continents/Lynne Riener, 1998. Trans. of La civilisation, ma mère!… 1972. Paris: Gallimard/folio, 1980. Debray, Régis. Révolution dans la révolution? Et autres essais. Paris: Maspero, 1972. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markman. London: Pluto, 1986. Trans. of Peau noire, masques blancs 1952. Paris: Seuil/Points, 1971.

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——., A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Trans. of Sociologie d’une révolution (L’an V de la révolution algérienne). 1959. Paris: Maspero, 1968. ——., The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Contance Farrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Trans. of Les Damnés de la terre. Paris: Maspero, 1961. Fuss, Diana. “Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification.” Diacritics 24.2-3 (1994): 20-42. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Koyré, Alexander. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957. Marx-Scouras, Danielle. “A Literature of Departure: The Cross-Cultural Writing of Driss Chraïbi.” Research in African Literatures 23.2 (1992): 131-44. M’Bokolo, Elikia. L’Afrique au XXe siècle: Le continent convoité. Paris: Seuil/Points, 1985. McClintock, Anne. “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race and Nationalism.” Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives. Ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 89-112. Moore, Lindsey. “The Veil of Nationalism: Frantz Fanon’s ‘Algeria Unveiled’ and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.” Kunapipi 25.2 (2003): 56-73. Rutherford, Jennifer. The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy. Carlton VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2000. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. ——., In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988. Weber, Max. Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Part III Unhomeliness, Diasporic Narration, Heterotopia

Emilia Ilieva and Lennox Odiemo-Munara

Negotiating Dislocated Identities in the Space of PostColonial Chaos: Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting Writing and Dislocation Conflicts dominated the twentieth century, and are steadily becoming part of the structuring forces of the twenty-first century global order. These conflicts take the form of inter-state and inter-ethnic/civil wars and strife within states, and military occupations of other nations. Violence has thus come to define the contemporary world; and as its result, displacements have occurred, and the number of the dislocated and migrants worldwide continues to increase. Caren Kaplan points out to the need to scrutinise this trend: As travel, changing locations, and leaving home become central experiences for more and more people in modernity, the difference between the ways we travel, the reasons for our movements, and the terms of our movement in this dynamic must be historically and politically accounted for. (102)

Migrations of the displaced within, and from, violence-prone nations are thus opening up new debates and discourses on borders and spaces; as well as on the resultant identities that are being assumed and negotiated. African postcolonies have been among those nations most adversely affected by war and violence. Not long after the end of Western colonisation of Africa in the late 1950s – 1970s, African nations started experiencing various forms of authoritarianism perpetuated by post-independence leaders. And partly because of the failure by the post-independence political leaderships to establish credible institutions to ensure justice and good equitable use of available national resources, coups, counter-coups, and protracted civil wars became common occurrences in many African countries. In East Africa, and generally what is referred to as the Great Lakes region (the geographical area that comprises Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo), the effects of war and violence have been immense, and their manifestations in socio-cultural aspects diverse and varied. The histories of Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are the most problematised. Rwanda’s 1994 Genocide claimed the lives of an estimated one million Tutsis and

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moderate Hutus and was attributable to, among other factors, a colonial legacy that endowed certain groups with racial identity perceived to be superior to others, and the failure by postcolonial governments to dismantle such systems of differentiation (Mamdani 2002). This was a tragedy whose ramifications in terms of displacements and trans-national migrations have been massive. Though Rwanda itself is slowly stabilising, the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is immersed in insurgencies that are partly associated with the Hutu/Tutsi displacements of 1994 and the intervening years. In Uganda, there have been the socio-political mutations of Milton Obote’s reductionist politics and latent authoritarianism (1962-1971; and the period 1980-1985, referred to as Obote II); Idi Amin’s outrageous, anomic militarism (1971-1979); various subsequent weak caretaker regimes; Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) dispensation of “no party democracy” (1986 to date); and the myriad brutal Northern rebellions (Odiemo-Munara), of which the ongoing one is that being spearheaded by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). This has since degenerated into a war not only restricted to northern Uganda but also eastern DRC, parts of the Southern Sudan and the Central African Republic. The violent history has had long-lasting effects on both the socio-cultural and economic spheres of Uganda. The postcolony, in Achille Mbembe’s understanding of it as an entity that “identifies specifically given historical trajectory – that of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonisation and the violence which the colonial relationship, par excellence, involves” (“Provisional Notes” 3), in East Africa emerges as a space of competing political and economic interests. In Mbembe’s argument: the postcolony is chaotically pluralistic, yet it has nonetheless an internal coherence. It is a specific system of signs, a particular way of fabricating simulacra or re-forming stereotypes. It is not, however, just an economy of signs in which power is mirrored and imagined selfreflectively […] [it] is characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation, by a tendency to excess and a lack of proportion as well as by distinctive ways in which identities are multiplied, transformed and put into circulation. (3)

In the postcolony, therefore, are played various dramas of power, authority and resistance by both the leaders and the perceived subjects. It is postcolonial literature that captures the disillusionment, desperation, and also resistance, by the people most vividly. In this literature, questions of national liberation struggles and the subsequent political independence, the emerging political elite and their connivance in the production and

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perpetuation of narrow exclusivist, most times ethnic, nationalisms, find space for interrogation. Indeed, as Francoise Lionett has argued: Literature as a discursive practice that encodes and transmits as well as creates ideology, is a mediating force in society: it structures our sense of the world since narrative stylistic conventions and plot resolutions serve to either sanction and perpetuate cultural myths, or to create new mythologies that allow the writer and the reader to engage in constructive rewriting of their social contexts. (205)

Thus, in postcolonial literature, there emerges a sustained critical interrogation of the African (post)colonial crisis and what Frederick Cooper has called: a simultaneous awareness of how colonial regimes exercised power and the limits of that power, an appreciation of the intensity with which that power was confronted and the diversity of futures that people sought for themselves, an understanding of how and why some of those futures were excluded from the realm of the politically feasible, and an openness to possibilities for the future that can be imagined today. (40)

Such a tendency is part of a vast tradition. Starting with the Iliad, it is literature, in its various forms, that has most consistently and effectively performed the crucial task of meditating the most extreme and deadly realities of human experience. Thus European literature has continued to wrestle with the difficult meanings of the violent 20th century history of its homeland: The Balkan wars, two world wars, the racial anti-Semitism that led to the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” the genocide of minority peoples, and a constellation of civil wars. The list of books written with these events weighing on the mind is long and unending. Paul Fussel, in his unparallelled The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), brilliantly evaluated the overwhelming literature on the First World War in particular. Outside Europe, the Vietnam conflict, for example, has given rise to an “immense body of memoirs, histories, analyses, novels and other responses” (Shippey 19). In an appendix to his The Perfect War (1986), James William Gibson provides a brief survey of that literature. All in all, writing that strives to represent war has become an art sui generis, and one that is constantly evolving, in its search to convey messages that are both freshly revealing and convincing. In the course of some half a century, war writing has proliferated in African literature too, with some of the most startling recent examples coming from young writers. Similarly, the study of that writing has started in earnest. During the 2006 Modern Language Association Convention in Philadelphia, at least three of the arranged programs, comprising paper

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presentations and discussions, focused on the most “burning” issues: The Rhetoric of Genocide; African Writers in Exile; and Writing about War [in Africa] (Program 1900; 1941; 1958). Uganda’s post-independence literature, to a large degree, has been concerned with the examination of the violation of the socio-cultural spheres of that country. Robert Serumaga’s Return to the Shadows (1969), intricately burrows into the causes of post-independence conflicts in Uganda. It narrates the 1966 event in Uganda in which Milton Obote, then Prime Minister, violently confronted the forces of the Kabaka of Buganda, eventually establishing himself as the President of the Ugandan Republic. In a way, Obote had sanctioned violence as a means of “resolving” conflicts. S. R. Karugire comments that the “period between May 1966 and January 1971 was a very uneasy one […] in Uganda for then the country had a civilian administration which employed military methods and means to implement whatever policies they chose” (177). Other texts that capture the violence of the Ugandan state at various points in time include, among others, Grace Ibingira’s Bitter Harvest (1980), John Nagenda’s The Seasons of Thomas Tebo (1986), John Ruganda’s The Floods (1980), Magala-Nyago’s The Rape of the Pearl (1985), Alex Mukulu’s Thirty Years of Bananas (1993), Arthur Gakwandi’s Kosiya Kifefe (1997), and Moses Isegawa’s The Abyssinian Chronicles (2000). These writers lament the “desecration” of the Ugandan independence dream and the dehumanisation of the country’s people through subjection to brutalities of power. Peter Nazareth best depicts issues concerning the strained racial relations in Uganda in his In a Brown Mantle (1972) and its sequel The General is Up (1991). In these texts, Nazareth, in part, bemoans the cruelty and inhumanity unleashed on the East African Asian community because of narrow perceptions of identity, culture and belonging by the post-independent East African political establishments. Nazareth also critiques the creation of unnecessary, otherising ambivalences by the Asian people. Mary Okurut’s The Invisible Weevil (1998) takes a wide-ranging view of the annihilistic nature of the different regimes in Uganda’s independence history, and shows how they managed to construct the Ugandan postcolony. Okurut particularly focuses on the violation of the national morality and ethos, and the tough circumstances that subalternised groups such as women, children and the elderly find themselves in. However, these “underprivileged” groups, especially the women, are shown to be in perpetual struggle to create a society ruled by justice and moral orderliness. This is an

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important undertaking on the part of Ugandan writers who seek particularly to encentre women in Ugandan history. As Mahmood Mamdani argues: The regime [of Idi Amin] tried to use the mantle of morality to mask policies and practices that were destructive to women physically and psychologically. It created an atmosphere that caused women to be perceived as the enemy of national morality, and this paved the way for groups and individuals to inflict violence on women. (Imperialism and Fascism 5455)

It is in this corpus of writing endeavouring to see the debilitating effects of war and violence in the East African society, and Uganda in particular, that Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War (2007, hereafter referred to as Waiting) is situated. This novel stands out in the way it visions human interactions and relationships in times of suffering. Kyomuhendo occupies a central space in Uganda’s postcolonial literature. She is an essayist, children’s storywriter, short-story writer, and novelist. Her first published work, The First Daughter (1996), is a story about temptations of growing up for a teen-age high school girl. The girl becomes pregnant and is rejected by her father. However, this rejection does not diminish her hopes. She develops a strong resilience that enables her struggle through her education to obtain a law degree. It is, however, in Secrets No More (1999) that Kyomuhendo demonstrates her creative growth as a novelist capable of exploring labyrinthined sociocultural and political issues emerging in the East African society. In this novel: Public and private history are inextricably intertwined to create a strong woman figure who goes through a series of harrowing experiences but devises such emotional, psychological and moral ways of dealing with them, that she overcomes their traumatic effect to become a steady and complete person as well as a dependable member of society. (Ilieva and OdiemoMunara, “Strategies” 260-61)

Waiting is the object of our discussion in this article. Its depiction of the horrors of war and violence in contemporary Africa forms the basis of our examination of the various ways in which chaos necessitates rethinking of stable ethnic/national notions of belonging, migration, language, and social interaction. We argue that experiences of war and violence bring forth sustained identity negotiations and constructions.

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Waiting: An Emerging Community In Waiting, Kyomuhendo’s focus is on a small village group that on the surface seems peripherally defined, powerless and subjugated. But as Michel Foucault has argued, “[p]ower must be analysed as something which circulates, or as something which only functions in the form of a chain. […] Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. […] Individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application” (Power/Knowledge 98). Thus in this small group, we see various enactions of power and resistance to it; in the process of which members of the group create their own desirable world where they “continuously renew and maintain power relations” (Mills 52). In as much as the state plays a somewhat prominent role, and in this case a violent one, in the exercising of power, relations of power play surpass it because the state, for the omnipotence of its apparatuses, is far from being able to occupy the whole field of actual power relations, and further because the state can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations. The state is superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology, and so forth. (Foucault, The Foucault Reader 64)

Kyomuhendo’s is a mosaic community that is invariably taking a new shape with the continued enactment of Amin’s violent politics and in its own re/negotiation of different power networks. It is in this sense that this community is seen as an emerging, an ever evolving one in accordance with the prevailing circumstances and conditions. Mbembe (2007) delineates the philosophy of “Afropolitanism” as Awareness of the interweaving of the here and there, the presence of the elsewhere in the here and vice versa, the relativisation of primary roots and memberships and the way of embracing, with full knowledge of the facts, strangeness, foreignness and remoteness, the ability to recognise one’s face in that of a foreigner and make the most of the traces of remoteness in closeness, to domesticate the unfamiliar, to work with what seem to be opposites. (28)

This formulation is useful in the reading of Waiting and the strategies it employs in depicting war and violence, and how human beings who find themselves in such situations resist subjugation by mapping new paradigms to re/define their lives. Abasi Kiyimba holds that “[f]or the literary character of Uganda, the Amin experience was a significant turning point, because it inspired large volumes of literature” (124). Waiting is part of this literary inspiration. It

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delves into the last year of Idi Amin’s despotic militarist regime. The allied exiled Ugandan and Tanzanian forces are advancing and Amin’s army can no longer put up significant resistance. The soldiers are thus on the run towards the northern parts of Uganda, in a bid to escape the advancing “liberating” forces. And as they frantically make their way to the north, they mete out horror and terror on innocent civilians. The soldiers are engaged in a frenzied destruction as they use the local highway to escape. They engage in delirious orgies of rape, murder and other bestialities. The dehumanised soldiers callously confess to being interested in nothing else but “food, women and money” (37). The people, at the individual, communal and national level, are left hanging in an unpredictable season of “waiting,” unsure of what is to befall them. Waiting employs the narrative voice of a thirteen-year old girl, Alinda. This is an important strategy that is used to advance the novel’s concern with possibilities open to a people in times of violence, especially those of negotiating and constructing new identities. In Madelaine Hron’s argument, “[t]he space of childhood is a space of hybridity, possibility and, most importantly, resistance” (29). Hron views childhood as representing “a particularly resistant space, of complex, on-going negotiation and articulation of difference that is perhaps not as readily accessible in the stable, socially constructed world of adults” (30). In her use of Alinda as the narrator, therefore, Kyomuhendo develops fluidity in the narrative; the space is open for one to continue re/thinking issues of transformation – individual, communal, and national. The novel starts with the unsettling, destabilising sense of the not exactly specific but inevitable horror and terror approaching: It was Saturday evening. Tendo was perched high up on one of the inner branches of the big mango tree, which threw hazy shadows over the large compound. Its leaves trembled despite the lack of wind, and one wafted slowly down from the branch and fell before us. (3)

Tendo, Alinda’s elder brother, is acting as sentry to watch out for the impending danger posed by the fleeing soldiers. The others have to be ready to run once this “danger” is identified. Kaaka, the elder woman in this emerging community, reminds Alinda’s mother, who is expecting a baby: “you must finish that food. […] You’ll need energy to push out that child […] to run” (3). The life to be lived here is that of running, and these people are uncertain of when the running will commence. Thus, apart from Kaaka, they have to sleep away from their houses, in a place where, together, and shielded away in the thicket by the banana plantations, they feel a sense of security:

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Darkness was gathering. Kaaka had already gone to her house. […] Maya came out carrying Mother’s sleeping things: a mat and two blankets folded together and tied with a sisal string. Father walked ahead. He had tucked the heavy coat under his arm. Tendo held the spear while I carried the sleeping blanket that I would share with Maya. (5)

Kaaka, who rejects “running” herself, because “[a]t my age, what I have seen, I have seen. What I have eaten, I have eaten” (4), falls victim later on when the soldiers eventually “visit” and she is brutally murdered. This murder scene at once demonstrates her defiance and the “subversive recodifications of power relations” (Foucault, The Foucault Reader 64); and brings out the banal nature of the Amin military: Kaaka slowly managed to sit up. The soldier who had assaulted her muttered something, and the other soldiers laughed as if they were drunk. Kaaka spoke again, “Go you beasts! I have to attend to a woman giving birth to a baby who will be more useful than you. How can you beat a woman old enough to be your great-grandmother?” (38)

In reading the concept of banality of power, Mbembe (1992) gives us useful insights into elements of the obscene and the grotesque that constitute banality. He speaks of the madness that power manufactures in the society, in a way privileging vulgarity and wrongdoing, making them appear as normal ways of life in the postcolonial nations. The Amin regime, to be sure, thrived on the utilisation of the obscene and the grotesque; thus to these soldiers, the perpetuation of the bizarre is a means of affirming their “power.” The soldier who kills her does it in a way to illustrate she is a subordinate who should not be allowed to “subvert” the power he deems he wields: The soldier whom she had addressed pointed his gun at her and fired. Then he fired again, aiming at her stomach. The other soldiers had walked away; the one who seemed to be their leader shouted at him to follow them. The soldier kicked Kaaka once more and she screamed loudly. Then he turned around and began to walk away. The sound of their footsteps beat loudly on the dry earth. (38)

The soldiers, with their strong links to state power, “invent entire constellations of ideas [and] adopt a distinct set of cultural repertoires and powerfully evocative concepts [and also] resort […] to the systematic application of pain” (Mbembe, “Provisional Notes” 4). Because, and with this kind, of collective violence, the people in this community at once establish new forms of solidarity, and, in their own small ways, seek to subvert the dominant powers. Others, like Kaaka, succumb to the brutality and die, yet those who remain consistently seek ways of creating their lives anew. Mildred Barya (2008) rightly argues that the characters in

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Waiting manage to “give each other support and keep re-inventing themselves and their community […] [and] are solid and stable with a sense of purpose and dignity […] [so that] when one character fades, another slips in naturally and becomes a part of the community.” The community in Waiting, to use Sanya Osha’s words, “through their very own transformative will, through their own deliberate mode of aesthetisation and principles of construction” (161), are able to negotiate – through war and violence – and imagine new identities. Violence and its effects make it possible for the members of this community to come to the awareness of their predicament. They discover that one of the ways out, and perhaps the most feasible, at least for the moment, is to transform themselves into a new identity that does not often recourse to the indigenous/outsider binary. In a way, they aspire to Mamdani’s argument to “reconsider the colonial legacy that each of us is either a native or a settler, and that it is with that compass in mind that we must fashion our political world” (“Identity and National Governance” 278-79). Therefore, in their coming to the realisation of how their lives and circumstances are interconnected, they establish necessary and useful grounds for the formation of a community that would accept multiplicity and the reality of the interrelatedness of the human universe. Waiting thus affirms hope in human co-existence, and shows that this can only come with a close reflection on the various problematised conditions in the postcolonial setting.

Negotiating New Identities in Waiting In this novel, the negotiation of new identities happens at different levels of the individual, the community, as well as the national and the transnational; the latter in the sense that there emerge in this community in Waiting “forms of organization and identity which are not constrained by national boundaries” (Kearney 121). In the small emerging community of people that Kyomuhendo focuses on, every individual has his/her own story that in essence influences the defining of their present identity and world-view. Nevertheless, the commonality of the experience of the dominant violence in the larger society, and the fact that its impact cuts across community/ethnic and national borders, is apparent. Hence, the importance of the formation of collective identities that makes the re-configuration of individual identity possible. By examining the lives of individual characters we witness determined negotiations of new identities. Both male and female characters in the novel

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evolve new identities; they travel, re-locate, re/marry, and engage in trade to come to terms with their present realities. The female characters, for example, Kaaka, Nyinabarongo, and the Lendu woman, are in a state of perpetual migration. According to a local myth, Kaaka, as a teen-age girl: came across two snakes making love in the fields where she had gone to collect food. She placed her kanga close to where they were rolling, intertwined, and soon it was wrapped around their bodies. This way, the fluids from their mating gave the kanga permanent medicinal value. (60)

As owner of this specially endowed kanga, she is destined not to be married in her life. Not to be married means that she has to stay in her village. But then she gets pregnant and marriage becomes a necessity. Her mother thus decides to take her to “a strong medicine man who will make the pregnancy invisible so that when you do marry, no one will suspect that you were already pregnant” (61). Once married, Kaaka fails to deliver the baby, and because the medicine man had long died, she ends up carrying “a child of the spirits”, one that cannot be born. Kaaka decides to leave her husband, whom “she used to beat […] mercilessly whenever he accused her of having failed to deliver their baby” (61), and settles with the family of her nephew, Alinda’s father. In this movement, she becomes part of a new community. The other woman in the novel, Nyinabarongo (“the mother of twins”), abandons her marriage to live with her mother after her husband’s family drive her away because of the failure of her impoverished people to undertake certain expected rituals. Initially she is rejected by the people but with time they realise that if they are to survive as a community they need to form new relationships that transcend gender and other cultural stereotypes. As well as Nyinabarongo, the community rejects the Lendu woman because they suspect her to be a witch (50). However, the story of her experiences in Zaire, and her witness account of the turmoil following the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1971, helps to bring into light the interconnectedness of political violence in the Great Lakes region. Indeed, when “the Liberators” have restored a sense of order and security in Uganda, the Lendu woman “ask[s] them to go and liberate Zaire too” (78). The distrust with which the Lendu woman is held within this community dissipates when it becomes clear that her knowledge of traditional herbal medicine is useful for their well-being. Circumstances, therefore, transform her into an invaluable member of the emerging community, and her “outsider” identity ceases to be a major defining trait. Within these women characters, and others who die in the course of the narrative, for instance, Kaaka, and Alinda’s mother, Kyomuhendo, like other

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postcolonial women writers, manages to accomplish what Elleke Boehmer (1995) has called “retriev[ing] suppressed oral traditions, half-forgotten histories, unrecorded private languages, moments of understated or unrecognised women’s resistance” (227). Of the male characters, Uncle Kembo, Alinda’s paternal uncle, graphically conveys the fluidity in identity negotiation. He reflects Mbembe’s reading of subjects in the postcolony who “have also had to have a marked ability to manage not just a single identity for themselves, but several, which are flexible enough for them to negotiate as and when required” (“Provisional Notes” 5). Initially, Uncle Kembo is a night watchman in an Indian owned sawmill, but he loses his job when, in 1972, President Idi Amin decides to expel the Indians. He seizes what he recognises as an opportunity and, defying threats of rejection by his family, embraces the dictator’s Islamisation rhetoric by converting to Islam and even changing his name to Abdulla. He is then given a shop “full of free merchandise that had once belonged to the Indian businessman who had been chased away” (58). But just like other Ugandan beneficiaries of this dubious gesture: He became generous and allowed his wives’ relatives and their friends to take goods on credit, but they never paid him back. Eventually, the stock dried up, and he did not have enough money to replace it, so the shop collapsed. His two Muslim wives left him. He sold the cars and came back to live with his first wife in the village. He said he had become a Christian again and even started going to church. He and Father were reconciled. (58-59)

Uncle Kembo’s story brings out the fluidity of identity showing how human beings are always evolving new outlooks in order to situate themselves in spaces of comfort. It matters little to them even if such spaces are bound to be short-lived, as “in their desire for a certain majesty, [they] join in the madness and clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power so as to produce its epistemology” (Mbembe, “Provisional Notes” 29). Like Uncle Kembo, “the old man”, who had murdered his wife and was serving a life sentence, converts to Islam when Amin takes power. He is subsequently pardoned, but, fearing reprisals, he does not return to his native village and instead settles in the community. Though the community believes there is a curse on him (75), the ravages of war make it possible to accommodate him. “The old man” graphically highlights the suffering and violence to which the civilians are exposed. When he steps on the landmine planted on the village path, the horror of this violence emerges:

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We walked to the scene of explosion. The old man was lying in the shrubs, a few meters away from the footpath that led from his house to ours. The grass was crimson with his blood, and his right leg was dangling by a fragile piece of skin at the knee. Words were bubbling from his mouth. (66)

The only way of saving his life is by cutting off his mutilated leg without any form of anaesthesia. His protestations capture the community’s sense of desperation: “Don’t cut off my leg. I came into this world whole, I want to leave it whole” (68). This scene, and the image of the damaged old man, remind us of Ugandan artist Francis Nnaggenda’s larger-than-life sculpture “War Victim” (created 1983-1986), which is permanently installed in the Main Library of Makerere University. In Carol Sicherman’s sensitive description: It depicts a finely carved, highly polished, headless torso in subtle colorations of brown suggestive of human skin; one leg is cleanly amputated, one arm deformed and the other missing. Yet for all the deformity and mutilation, the torso is muscular, tough, powerful, even triumphant. (189)

However, in contrast, there is no trace of triumph in the wailing figure of Waiting. He is certainly not a character from a patriotically inspired wartime narrative of valour and sacrifice. Kyomuhendo’s interest is not in the clear ideas and ideals of heroism; rather, she implicitly questions them, and exposes the long-term effects of war on those who have remained away from the battlefields. This scene also demonstrates the interchanging of gender roles in this society. The women, led by the Lendu woman, try to save the old man while the men only watch in fright. Louise Vincent’s observation, “in conflict and post-war situations gender relationships are challenged [and] both women and men struggle to identify and consolidate new identities and roles” (25), explains these circumstances. Jungu, Alinda’s schoolmate and friend, underlines the complexity of race in the novel, and in particular the Asian/African relationships. We are reminded that “[h]er real name was not Jungu, but she was called that because she had mixed blood. She was half Indian and half black” (19). When she was born, her mother, out of frustration and fear of stigmatisation in a society that still disapproved of inter-racial sexual relationships, had tried to kill her: Jungu’s mother delivered two or three months after the Indians had left. No one saw her give birth. […] People just saw her at the stream where she had gone to wash her blood-soaked clothes. When they asked her after the baby, she said that it had died. The police came a

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week later, looking for a woman who had been pregnant. They took her away. She had left the baby in a garden and covered it with a big clod of earth, but some one had discovered it that same day. She was not put in prison, but released so she could nurse her baby. She never lived in our village after that. Instead, she went to town, where she started selling vegetables in the market. (20)

With this kind of problematised identity, Jungu had to find her “location” on her own in the emerging Ugandan society. Therefore, the community in Waiting is becoming hybridised, “living on the borderline of history and language, on the limits of race and gender,” and hence it is “in a position to translate the differences between them into a kind of solidarity” (Bhabha 170). It gradually disrupts the nativistic logic of the autochthons and non-natives. Waiting shows a people determined to forge new identities in order to survive socio-political upheavals. The violence of the present and the uncertainty of the future help collapse rigidity in the characterisation of national and ethnic spaces and identities.

Interstices/Border-Spaces in Waiting In its lucid depiction of the effects of war and violence, Waiting illustrates the complexities of displacement and migrancy. It shows the challenges and alternating definitions of individual identities and societal/national cultures in Uganda and how these circulate in the Great Lakes region. The Lendu woman “crosses” over from Zaire with her fish-trading husband, who operates between the two countries: fish is caught from the Lakes in Zaire but sold in the Ugandan village market, known as Center. When she feels abandoned by her husband who has, in the meantime, returned to Zaire and ostensibly to his first wife, she “marries” Uncle Kembo. Her life attests to the argument that the “negotiation of borders includes both the practical negotiations involved in cross-border transfers of people and goods, as well as the more abstract negotiations over meaning to which these activities, among others, give rise” (Wilson and Donnan 21). Earlier in the text, on their arrival in the village, it is “the old man,” an outsider/stranger in the view of the villagers, who sells them land. Alinda’s mother is disturbed by the transaction and she attempts to offer resistance: After we had eaten breakfast, people gathered in our homestead. In addition to Nyinabarongo and her child, there were Uncle Kembo, the Lendu woman, and the old man, who only came to our house when Father was around. Mother did not like him. One reason was that they had quarelled over the piece of land he had given to the Lendu woman and her husband. Mother had said that she did not want to have foreigners, whose ways she did not

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know, as neighbours. But the old man had argued that the Lendu people were useful because they had rid the village of monkeys by eating them. Previously, people had woken up to find their potatoes uprooted and eaten by the monkeys. (25).

Although Alinda’s mother “never changed her attitude” (25), especially towards the old man, a “foreigner” in the village, the others had agreed with the old man’s logic, and had, in effect, given other “foreigners” space in the community. In Edward Said’s argument: Moving beyond nativism does not mean abandoning nationality, but it does mean thinking of local identity as not exhaustive, and therefore not being anxious to confine oneself to one’s own sphere, with its own ceremonies of belonging, its built-in chauvinism, and its limiting sense of security. (277)

Indeed, most of the “indigenes” of the community realise this “limiting sense of security”, and hence the temporal necessity to reach out to the Other. They aspire to Mbembe’s “specific form of domestication and mobilisation of space and resources: the form that consists in producing boundaries, whether by moving already existing ones, or by doing away with them, fragmenting them, decentring or differentiating them” (“At the Age of the World” 261). They, in turn, de-accentuate the distinction between the “autochthonous peoples and foreigners [and the] ethnoracial principle serving increasingly as the basis for citizenship and as the condition of access to land, resources, and elective positions of responsibilities” (267). Bahati, a member of the Tanzanian army who participates in the “liberation,” decides to remain and become a member of the community. From the beginning, he impresses the community as a desirable individual from whom they can learn multiple aspects of Tanzanian cultures including the Swahili language. Once again this demonstrates how migrancy oppositionally interrogates the dominant views of nationality and borders. As Andrew Smith notes: Whatever older formations of identity were based in – ancestry, passport, or geography – it is their apparent fixity that migrancy calls into question. If there is a space left for unity and political action it is an awkward one in which what we share is, as it were, a strangeness, the common fact of having little definite in common. (249)

The East African Asian/African question remains contentious in this region. The East African Asians often find themselves in an in-between space; and hence highly vulnerable when politicians turn on them as scapegoats over the postcolony’s economic and other social malpractice. This was most manifest in the infamous Asian expulsion from Uganda by Idi Amin. Amin expelled

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close to 50,000 Ugandan Asians, in what he described as an “economic war” on a foreign group that sought to dominate Uganda’s trade and manufacturing sectors, and to occupy the civil service (Ilieva and OdiemoMunara, “Idi Amin” 4). Subsequently, Amin dished out the Asians’ property to friends and loyalists. Mbembe argues: Localities and internal divisions, some historical and others institutional or even cultural and territorial, are superimposed on the space of the state. Each locality is subject to different jurisdictions: state jurisdiction, traditional jurisdiction, religious jurisdiction. Different orders coexist within an interlacing of “homelands” and “communities”. The coexistence of these different orders is disturbed by a multiplicity of local conflicts. Most of these conflicts are expressed in the form of an opposition between autochthonous populations and strangers. Citizenship is conceived in ethnic and territorial terms, and individual’s enjoyment of civil rights depends on his appurtenance to an ethnic group or locality. (“At the Age of the World” 279-80)

This, in a way, reads into the Asian question in East Africa. For the reason that they have geographic and socio-cultural limitations in identifying with East Africa as a “homeland,” the locals raise strong opposition to any of their claims to insider status. East African Asians, therefore, aware of their construing as provisional citizens by the “indigenous” East Africans, have in turn constructed provisional and migrant spaces of operation. Peter Kalliney in his evaluation of Moyez Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack, a book that in the most penetrating manner captures the Asian people’s search for identity in the sub-region, argues that it “offers a narrative of perpetual motion”; and that it is “a narrative of packing and unpacking, of making do in situations that offer few easy choices.” Concerning the metaphor of “the gunny sack,” he reads it as “a signpost for the family’s resourcefulness, and […] their participation in transnational systems of migration” (8). This, to a large degree, is also the non-textual and non-fictional narrative of the Asian person’s space in the East African society. Jungu, a child begotten of the “shameful” African woman, finds herself in an in-between world until she gets the company and acceptance of Alinda and her family. However, prejudices about her mixed-race identity still abound. For example, Alinda is told by her mother that “people of mixed blood [are] short-tempered and could easily commit suicide” (20). Peter Simatei has argued that the Asians’ feeling of racial superiority, together with the notion of exclusion, so ingrained in their caste-centred social organisation, militate against social/sexual relations between them and the Africans (74). This, coupled with the history of colonialism, in its racist and exclusivist senses; and the awareness by the Asians of their perceived

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provisional status, enhance the Otherness of the East African Asians. Therefore, as a child close to this “provisionality”, Jungu’s decision to follow “the Liberators” is, metaphorically, a continuing discovery of the Others beyond borders and spaces. Hers is a strong determination to cross geographical, cultural, linguistic, national and other borders. She demonstrates the difficulty of closure of such border-spaces in contemporary Eastern Africa.

Identity Form(ul)ation and the Space of Language in Waiting Inter-ethnic and transnational migrations in East Africa have called for the rethinking of the narrow conceptualisation of languages and their importance. A failure in knowledge of the “dominant” language(s) of the new geographical/social space one occupies, temporarily or permanently, could easily be viewed as either an inability or lack of willingness to integrate or a tendency towards racial/ethnic isolationism. While Swahili has been seen as the language capable of facilitating transnational and inter-communal dialogues in this region, Ruth Mukama argues that Uganda “stands out distinctly in East and Central Africa as a country without grassroots language for mass inter-ethnic communication” (335). Therefore, she holds that the country needs to deliberately appropriate Swahili “not only for mass inter-ethnic communication but also for regional harmony” (348). In the usage of Kiswahili in the military in East Africa, Mazrui and Mazrui (1995) argue: Throughout the colonial period, recruitment for the armed forces drew mainly from that large section of the African population that had little or no educational training, and whose linguistic competence was limited to non-European languages. Kiswahili became virtually the only possible medium of inter-ethnic communication for this population. […] Kiswahili in the armed forces of colonial East Africa facilitated not only inter-ethnic communication, sometimes across national boundaries, but also inter-racial communication. The army had thus served as a crucible within which the role of Kiswahili in expanding the social horizons of African officers had assumed a trans-continental dimension. (7)

Idi Amin was part of this colonial military arrangement, having joined the King’s African Rifles (KAR) in 1946 and served in Burma, Somalia, Kenya, and his own country, Uganda (Ilieva and Odiemo-Munara, “Idi Amin” 4). Limited in the use of English, Amin set on the advancement of the use of Kiswahili among the military in Uganda both as Chief-of-staff and

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subsequently as President. Mazrui and Mazrui note of the “potential danger of Kiswahili being hated by Ugandans due to its association with Amin’s tyranny” (6). Indeed, in Waiting, it gains notoriety as “a language mainly spoken by Amin soldiers” (30). And because the soldiers represent oppression and cruelty, Kiswahili is resented. It is the language used by the escaping soldiers as they brutally confront the old woman, Kaaka, demanding for women, food and money. Alinda’s encounter with the language is horrifying because it reminds her of the violence that caused the death of Kaaka as well as her mother. She is weary as she recollects, “[t]heir loud voices sounded ugly as they echoed across the empty yard” (38). However, another perspective of Swahili is brought in with the arrival of the “liberating” forces. In its use by “the Liberators” like the Tanzanian Bahati, it comes across as a language of peace and liberation. Therefore, “[t]he association of Kiswahili with the tradition of post-colonial liberation in Uganda’s military history […] increase[s] its potential contribution towards various aspects of the process of ‘detribalisation’” (Mazrui and Mazrui 6). Jungu, who has started to understand Swahili, informs Alinda that she knows only a few words, “but it’s not difficult. Most of the words are derived from the Bantu languages and are similar to our own” (82). She is taught by Bahati, who is “keen for [her] to learn it” (82), and in turn she teaches him English and the local language. This interaction not only fosters wider sociocultural dialogue but it disrupts socio-cultural barriers, making it possible for Jungu and Bahati to aspire to a married life in Tanzania after the conflict. Alinda, on her part, asks questions about Tanzania’s other languages, “their own languages […] the languages of their tribes” (82). The fact that in Tanzania Swahili is both national and official language, spoken by everyone, makes her reflect on aspects of tribe, nation, language and identity. Hence, “[the] transnational linguistic exchanges are the novel’s greatest sign of hope for the future […] a hope relevant to the present circumstances in Uganda as well as to the fiction’s historical context” (Daymond 125). Mazrui and Tidy have argued that in Africa “Kiswahili is not associated with any particular ethnic community numerically, politically or economically to arouse the linguistic jealousies of other groups” (300). Contestable as this may be, we agree with Daymond that the discussion of and keen interest in language by the young people in Waiting offer “[a] penetrating glimpse of the reshaping of identities and the re-drawing of regional maps that come about through the transnational aspect of war” (125).

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New Insights, Multi-cultural Futures As “the Liberators” leave for northern Uganda in pursuit of Amin’s soldiers, there is a heavy thunderstorm that apparently “cleans” away the violence from the village, and by extension from the Ugandan nation. Nyinabarongo declares: “now we have nothing left to remind us of that painful era” (107). However, the knowledge and memory of this past is necessary, partly as a possible deterrent to such historical occurrences in the future. Also, the fact that Bahati, a participant in the “liberation” war, has remained behind; and Tendo and Jungu have translocated with “the Liberators,” signifies that the past remains to be negotiated through; “it must remain open to a process of rectification, and not be closed off in the assertion of a phantasised ‘authentic community’” (Venn 114). As the text closes, the acceptance of diversity is evident. Nyinabarongo, the Lendu woman, and Bahati, are now part of the Alinda extended family. A new community has emerged and is certain to continue expanding and/or shrinking depending on the various instances that call for negotiations of identities in the East African post-colonial space. In this acceptance, hostilities have obviously mellowed. As for Alinda’s father (the most visible male representative of this community), “there was noticeable laughter in his voice” (110). In addition, as they are escorting him to board a vehicle to the city, the openness of possibilities of human journeying become apparent: We had to remain standing near the junction of the three roads. One led to Zaire, via Lake Albert, the same road Amin’s soldiers had used as their exit route. The second led to the city, while the third led to the big tea plantation, which used to be owned by the Indians. (110)

Said’s argument becomes illuminating as we vision these roads and the possibilities of voyaging in and out in the contemporary global order: No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was all about. (408)

Waiting is an important text in the re-evaluation of national/ethnic and other identities. As we have argued, as a result of postcolonial chaos, various identities are re/negotiated and border-spaces re/crossed whenever sociocultural and economic conditions necessitate. Waiting clearly envisages the

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emergence of an Afropolitan community that is determined to interrogate and re-order the autochthon/foreigner dichotomy in contemporary Eastern Africa.

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Mukama, Ruth G. “Recent Developments in the Language Situation and Prospects for the Future.” Changing Uganda: The Dilemmas of Structural Adjustment and Revolutionary Change. Eds. H. B. Hansen and M. Twaddle. London: James Currey, 1991. 334-50. Mukulu, Alex. Thirty Years of Bananas. Kampala: Oxford University Press, 1993. Nagenda, John. The Seasons of Thomas Tebo. London: Heinemann, 1986. Nazareth, Peter. The General is Up. Toronto: TSAR Publishers, 1991. ——., In a Brown Mantle. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1972. Odiemo-Munara, Lennox. “Women Engagement with Power and Authority in Writing East Africa”. CODESRIA page. 7 Dec. 2008. 30 June 2009 . Okurut, Mary. K. The Invisible Weevil. Kampala: FEMRITE, 1998. Osha, Sanya. Kwasi Wiredu and Beyond: The Text, Writing and Thought in Africa. Dakar: Codesria, 2005. Program of the 122nd MLA Annual Convention. PMLA 121.6 (November 2006). Ruganda, John. Floods. Nairobi: East African Publishers, 1980. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Knopf, 1993. Serumaga, Robert. Return to the Shadows. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1969. Shippey, Tom. “The Grunts and the Loots.” Times Literary Supplement 5463 (14 Dec. 2007): 19-20. Sicherman, Carol. Becoming an African University: Makerere 1922-2000. Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2006. Simatei, Peter. T. The Novel and the Politics of Nation Building in East Africa. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2001. Smith, Andrew. “Migrancy, Hybridity, and Postcolonial Literary Studies.” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Ed. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 241-61. Venn, Couze. The Postcolonial Challenge: Towards Alternative Worlds. London: Sage, 2006. Vincent, Louis. “Engendering Peace in Africa: A Critical Inquiry into Some Current Thinking on the Role of African Women in Peace-building.” Africa Journal on Conflict Resolution 2.1 (2001): 13-28. Wilson, Thomas M., and Hastings Donnan, eds. Introduction. Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 1-30.

Nalini Iyer

No Place to Call Home: Citizenship and Belonging in M.G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall Indo-Kenyan Canadian writer M.G.Vassanji’s fiction documents the predicament of the Indian diaspora in East Africa – a people who inhabit multiple geographic spaces and for whom citizenship and belonging are constantly negotiated and reformed. His novel, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall published in 2003, explores and theorises through fiction the very same question that Achille Mbembe pursues in his writings on Africa. Mbembe notes in the introduction to the 2004 special issue of Public Culture that “To write the world from Africa or to write Africa into the world, or as a fragment thereof, is a compelling and perplexing task” (“Writing the World” 348). Mbembe has noted elsewhere that it is important to recognise that population movements and cultural flows have always been a part of the continent’s history (“Afropolitanism”). Mbembe writes of a new form of identity and belonging for contemporary Africa which he terms “Afropolitanism.” For him, Afropolitanism is a transnational sensibility that is not built on victimhood but on an interweaving of “here and elsewhere” and as the “primary way to embrace […] knowingly the strange, foreign and distant” (“Afropolitanism”). Mbembe’s idea of Afropolitanism blurs the distinction between diasporic and native subject and recognises that the idea of Africa is formed as much on the continent as it is in the world beyond it. Vassanji’s fictional works from The Gunny Sack to The In-Between World of Vikram Lall have been engaged with the interrogation, description, and creative expression of the cultural and population flows of Indians to and from East Africa. In his engagement of the here and elsewhere, of the relationship between India and Africa and how each has formed the other, Vassanji might be described as an Afropolitan writer, but his conceptualisation of this Afropolitanism is different from that of Mbembe. 1 Not only does Vassanji’s fiction compel South Asian literary scholars to rethink what role the diaspora plays in the formation of national and cultural identities in South Asia, it also compels those engaged in African literary studies to ask how diasporic cultural texts shape individual, cultural, 1

Vassanji does not comment on Mbembe nor use the term “Afropolitanism” but his fictional rendition of Africa with questions of African identity, the role of diaporic subjects, and the emphasis on urban settings suggest that he has similar concerns as Mbembe.

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and national identities. 2 By telling the multi-generational story of the Lall family and that of several characters’ engagement with and creation of individual and collective identity, Vassanji’s In-Between World of Vikram Lall recognises that there is no master narrative of belonging or citizenship. The novel demonstrates that cultural and national identities are fluid, individually negotiated, occasionally transgressive, historically contingent, and often underpinned by economic realities. Mbembe and Nuttall’s essay on Africa in Public Culture notes that the ways in which societies compose and invent themselves in the present (the creativity of practice) is always ahead of the knowledge produced about them. In addition, these compositional acts always move in multiple and unforeseen directions. What binds societies, made up of multiple assemblages and disjunctive syntheses, is some kind of artifice they come to believe in. They have, thus, the capacity to continually produce something new and singular, as yet unthought, which cannot always be accommodated within established conceptual systems and languages. (348-49)

Vassanji’s novel, as a cultural artefact, shows how people continually invent and reinvent themselves while simultaneously producing knowledge about themselves. 3 Mbembe and Nuttall’s conceptualisation of this “new and singular” is celebratory whereas Vassanji’s narrator, Vikram Lall, has a more dismal view of belonging and even the existence of what Mbembe and Nuttall identify as “the kind of artifice they come to believe in” (348). After all, Vikram Lall tells most of his story when isolated in a remote snow-bound Canadian town while living in a fake African style house and finding himself having to rebuild his life once again. A closer examination of the novel demonstrates how home, belonging, citizenship, and identity are negotiated by different generations of Indian migrants to and from Kenya. The first generation of Indian immigrants is represented by Vikram Lall’s grandfather who had come as a Railway worker and had helped lay the railroad tracks for the East African Railways from Mombasa to Kampala. Anand Lal Peshawari had been an indentured labourer from Punjab who came in 1897 with fellow Punjabi labourers (Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh) and once the indenture was completed, he and his fellow Punjabis stayed on in Kenya to build a life there. At the beginning of Vic Lall’s narrative, the 2

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Academics have also in recent times been engaged in the analysis of the Indian diaspora in Africa. Notable recent books inlcude John Hawley’s Africa in India, Indian in Africa and Pallavi Rastogi’s Afrindian Fictions. While Mbembe and Nuttall focus on scholarship on Africa and how it produces knowledge about Africa, I suggest that novels are both creative expression and theorization of knowledge production.

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extended family lives in Nakuru running a small store and leading a close knit community life in which they served British consumer needs and engaged the Africans, especially Kikuyu, as servants. For Anand Lall’s generation, assimiliation in Africa comes from having earned their position through work. As the narrator tells us, Our people had sweated on it, had died on it: they had been carried away in their weary sleep or even wide awake by man-eating lions of magical ferocity and cunning, crushed under avalanches of blasted rock, speared and macheted as proxies of whites by angry Kamba, Kikuyu, and Nandi warriors, infected with malaria, sleeping sickness, elephentiasis, cholera; bitten by jiggers, scorpions, snakes and chameleons; and wounded in vicious fights with each other. (Vassanji 16-17)

Even as working the land not as an agricultural labourer but as a construction worker transforming the African landscape for the British master enables Anand Lal to carve out a political identity as British colonial subject, it is also important to note that a subtle shift occurs in the naming. He drops the “Peshawari” which means of “of Peshawar” and which identifies him with a native land and becomes Anand Lall, one unmoored from a place but whose ties to his ancestral land are through daily practice and cultural life. As indentured British subjects in imperial territory, he and his peers negotiate a tenuous economic space in Kenya once they complete their indentures – they open small shops that cater to the needs of the Africans and occasionally to the exotic needs of the British settlers. Their social life is limited to their Indian friends and extended family, and they focus on preserving their cultural traditions in the new land while pursuing prosperity and stability in their economic lives. Because much of Anand Lall’s story is retold by the young Vikram Lall, the narrative only hints at the undercurrents of racism and ethnocentrism (British, Indian, and African) that form this close knit community. Anand Lall married a Punjabi woman from another immigrant family and established a life in Kenya. His friend, Juma Molabux, a Punjabi Muslim and also former indentured labourer married a Maasai woman, Sakina, and through this marriage cemented his ties to Africa. The child, Vikram Lall, is surprised to discover that Sakina Dadi was a Maasai because she spoke fluent Punjabi and made authentic Punjabi food. However, as the Sakina-Juma story is narrated, we learn that Sakina has had to forego her Maasai roots and completely embrace Punjabi diasporic culture. One of her sons rebels, returns to his Maasai heritage and when trouble comes during the Mau Mau uprising, another of the Molabux sons is arrested and taken away by the British police whose suspicion of him is based on his biracial heritage. Even as the child

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narrator, Vic Lall, views the multiracial world of Nakuru as an Edenic place with racial harmony, the undercurrents of violence and the compelled cultural and religious conversions of Sakina tell a different story. Anand Lall’s son, Vikram’s father, although raised in Kenya has cultural ties to Punjab. When time comes for him to marry, he returns to his father’s home town, Peshawar, meets a beautiful college girl, the daughter of a police inspector in the colonial government of India, and marries her in 1944. The Partition of India forces the Hindu Verma family to migrate from Peshawar, now in Pakistan, to Hindu India, and Vikram’s maternal uncle, Mahesh, moves to Kenya. Vikram’s parents’ story examines how the place of birth and ancestry gain significance even as governmental and state forces compel separation from the land. As the Vermas become refugees after the Partition and the Lalls migrate to another place as indentured labourers, their ties to Punjab are more symbolic than physical. For Vikram and his sister, Deepa, who represent the third generation in Kenya, the connections to India are mostly mythical and represented by family recollections and reworkings of the Ramayana epic as part of the children’s play. While the children speak and understand Punjabi, celebrate Hindu holidays like Rakhi and Diwali, and eat gulab jamuns and pakodas, they also speak Swahili, become more engaged in local cultural and political life, and eat ugali and spinach with as much relish as they do chappatis. For the first generation, Indian identity was distinctly connected to birth and to Punjab as land and culture. For the second generation of Lalls, Punjab is mostly symbolic either because of distance as in the case of the father or by forcible loss and distance as in the case of the mother. For the third generation of Lalls, however, the tie to ancestral land and culture is still symbolic but ethnic identity as Punjabi seems to matter very little. “Indian” identity as one that is trans-linguistic and trans-ethnic supplants particularities of being Punjabi. (Vikram Lall’s narration of life in Dar es Salaam during his college years amongst Gujarati migrants nuances the understanding of “Indian” in East Africa. While the Africans see them as “Asians” or muhindi, as inside cultural informant, Vikram Lall presents the myriad differences that morph into “Indian” in East Africa.) Deepa marries a third generation Punjabi man while Vic marries a Gujarati – what matters is that their spouses are Indian and Hindu and it is assumed that their common understanding of their identities as tied to a far away land and daily practice is what matters. In an essay on Indians in East Africa, Savita Nair notes that many of the movements of the people overseas that constitute diaspora demographically do not constitute it culturally because the homeland is never actually left behind but rather is extended and attached to regions of social life that extend over space without alienation or

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stark separation; and because the homeland is not an imagined place of origin but rather a living land of family life. (89)

Nair’s description is particularly true of the first and second generation of Lalls, but the coming of age of the third generation of Lalls coincides with the independence of Kenya. Just as the different Kenyan ethnic groups (Kikuyu, Luo, Maasai to name a few) are striving to articulate a common national identity, the third generation of Lalls is attempting to craft a place for themselves in this newly formed nation. As students Vic and Deepa, who are raised in Nakuru and then Nairobi, discover that education, childhood ties to people (British and Kikuyu in particular) make for a bi-cultural life in which they are able to manage both the living of daily life within the diasporic community and yet being able to embrace and imagine a cross-racial relationship with the Kikuyu. For Vic his brotherly relationship with Njoroge and his childhood love for Annie, the murdered British child, represent the possibility of creating a Kenyan identity for himself that will allow him equality in this country he considers his own. For Deepa, her forbidden and passionate love for Njoroge renders her Indianness unimportant. Her singleminded pursuit of her love for Njoroge is the most transgressive of the relationships in the novel and unlike the Juma-Sakina relationship where the woman had to abandon her culture completely, Njoroge and Deepa mutually accept each other’s cultural paradigm and seek to create something new. This tenuous hybrid Indo-Kikuyu culture is depicted in Deepa’s breaking of class and race boundaries and his easy navigation of Indian cultural practices. However, cultural expectations from the Lall family and their rigid need to maintain cultural purity and the fundamental distrust of Indians in the new Kenya as British collaborators and middle-men make a marriage impossible. Vic and Deepa, each in his/her own way begins to recognise that no matter how trans-racial their personal philosophies might be, the social and political realities of being Indian in Kenya would determine much of their adult lives. While Deepa acquiesces to marriage and motherhood the Indian way, Vic continues to push against the political realities of Kenya. Marriage and kinship networks are critical to the East African Indian community in this novel to maintain not just cultural identity but also economic power and political authority and influence. Deepa’s forbidden love threatens the very idea of difference upon which this postcolonial society is built. Even as “native” African identity is fragmented by the push for ethnic solidarity and the political process in the country is fraught with negotiated alliances, corruption, and betrayal, Deepa and Njoroge’s relationship threatens the very idea of difference that is the foundation of new

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political power and influence. The detailed descriptions of the Kenyatta government, the place of Kikuyu identity, the betrayal of the Mau Mau fighters, the corruption of the inner circle of politicians all undergird the precariousness of the place of Indians who are the eternal foreigners and the feared colonial collaborators who are reviled in postcolonial Kenya. If Njoroge wants to rise in the world of politics, he is better served by marrying a Kikuyu; if Deepa’s family is to retain the support of its community in times of trouble, it is necessary that she marry an Indian. The shadow of Uganda’s expulsion of the Indians haunts the fortunes of the Indian community in Kenya and many Indians in this novel leave Kenya for fear of retaliation using previously acquired British passports. The Lalls are unusual in that they refuse to consider departure and had acquired Kenyan citizenship prior to independence. Yet, the Lalls prosper in Nairobi when Vic’s father’s realestate business eventually profits from the community’s exodus. Deepa’s inlaws thrive economically in post-colonial Kenya by expanding their jewelry and pharmaceutical business and bartering political influence through Vic. The economic and political power of the Indian community is writ on the bodies and desires of the women whether it is Sakina who fully Indianises herself or Deepa who loses her love. The choice of many Indians in Kenya to claim British passports and eventually either migrate permanently to England or to maintain homes in multiple places so as to facilitate a quick exit is a survival strategy for a community that has been unmoored from place and for whom place is contingent on who rules the land at any given time. The Indo-Kenyans exercise what Aihwa Ong has called “flexible citizenship” (Ong 449). 4 While “flexible citizenship” is practical and allows for opportunistic mobility, it does not transform substantially the diasporic subjects’ transnational sensibility and allegiance to multiple national and communal identities. Although the novel focuses mostly on Punjabis in Kenya, Vassanji is familiar with the diversity of the Indian community in East Africa including Gujarati Ismailis. The Punjabi experience and the Gujarati Ismaili experience regarding cultural and national identity were a little different. As Rose Kadende-Kaiser and Paul Kaiser note of the Ismailis in Tanzania, the community exercises a hierarchy of citizenship identities which allow it to simultaneously claim Tanzanian citizenship and also participate as citizens in the transnational Ismaili community with its own system of governance. The

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Ong defines flexible citizenship as follows: “‘Flexible Citizenship’ refers to the cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions” (449).

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Ismailis pay allegiance to the Aga Khan as their supreme leader and no matter what particular nation-state or states they claim citizenship in, their allegiance to the Aga Khan allows them to negotiate a dual citizenship that transcends the nation-state. While the Ismaili community offers support and safety to its members and thus facilitates their flexible citizenship, the Hindu Punjabis like the Lalls do not have such a tangible transnational government structure. They have to rely more on an informal transnational kinship and friendship structure. So the choice of some Indians in Kenya to leave and of others to stay is determined not just by what passports they hold, but also what transnational networks they can rely on to facilitate their exit. The Lalls decision to claim Kenyan citizenship while presented by Vikram Lall as proof of his family’s commitment to Kenya was also perhaps a very pragmatic decision based on the need to articulate said commitment through legal state structures. The Lalls had only emotional ties to India and were not deeply networked with an expatriate Punjabi community in Englad or Canada. Therefore, declaring a Kenyan citizenship was their best alternative. Vikram’s Mahesh Uncle’s story is another case of what happens to Indians who do not have powerful transnational networks. When Mahesh Uncle rises to power as the ally of Okello Okello, a powerful Luo politician, his fall from grace and subsequent inability to re-enter Kenya are connected to the power struggles between Kenyatta and his political rivals. Mahesh is exiled in India (a land to which he has legal claim but no emotional ties because of the expulsion of his family from Peshawar during Partition) and he manages a return to Kenya because of Vic’s influence with Mzee Kenyatta. However, upon his return (dramatically staged with kissing the earth at the airport), he returns to India permanently with his wife and children to a life as an educator in an elite school. His support of anti-colonial struggles, his political work with Kenyan politicians, his many years of stay in Kenya amount to nothing. Economic and political opportunities are no longer available to him, and Mahesh staunchly returns to South Asia and determines to live amongst his own people. Unlike the many Indo-Kenyans with flexible citizenship who migrated to other countries in the West, Mahesh returns to India and disavows the migrant life. The novel demonstrates that aside from sentiment and idealism, the diasporic Indian community in East Africa manages to stay influential through corruption and by pandering to the needs of the ruling elite. If Vikram’s parents sold smelly cheese, English whisky and other luxury items to the British and extended credit to them to maintain their lavish lifestyles, their son pursues a similar strategy but on a much larger scale. Vikram Lall has very little scruples and is the perfect flunky for the ruling elite – he

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unquestioningly does the bidding of those in power. In his negotiation with an Italian company bidding on a railway contract, he flamboyantly displays his patriotism and ideals only to be naively dragged into a web of corruption. However, once he recognises the power of this corrupt network and what proximity to Jomo Kenyatta’s inner circle can bring, he actively creates a shadow banking and money-laundering scheme that helps the ruling elite. He arranges through his Indian business connections for foreign aid to be siphoned to personal accounts of politicians and uses his in-laws’ jewelry empire to personally win favours from Kenyatta himself. When he is made a scapegoat by the corrupt Minister Paul Nderi because the government’s dealings with the white Rhodesian government come to light, he joins his inlaws’ business and facilitates private support for his relatives. When his father’s business is arbitrarily claimed by a small-time politician who wants to Africanise it and when Kenyatta’s mistress tries to take over his brother-inlaw’s pharmaceutical empire, he seeks the help of Mzee to thwart such moves. In a country where corruption rules and the legal system offers no protection to minorities or citizens, Vikram Lall becomes the purveyor of personal favours. He is derided as a dalal, a middleman, but he creates for himself a lucrative and powerful position. Vikram Lall’s story of corruption and violence underscores that for the Indian diasporic community in Kenya, citizenship and belonging are not just sentimental or legal but also about appropriating a strategic political position based on economic power and influence. Vikram’s position is contrasted by Njoroge who is idealistic about land reform. As an orphan child who lost his parents and grandfather to the violence that accompanied colonialism and the Mau Mau uprising, Njoroge seeks to restore land rights to the poor. His alignment with leftist politicians who threaten the power of Kenyatta’s inner circle and his affair with Deepa lead to his murder. In telling us Njoroge’s story and also the story of Mahesh Uncle’s disillusionment, Vikram Lall articulates a very dark vision about the emerging African sensibility. Eventually, Vikram Lall is compelled to leave Kenya as his role in money laundering schemes is uncovered by an investigative body. He is a top criminal on a “List of Shame” and exiles himself to Canada. This novel is written as the memoir of an exiled corrupt Indo-Kenyan who believes that he needs to tell his story. In his preface, he writes that he has no need to confess or seek redemption. He just wants to talk about his ordinary life lived in extraordinary times. He is accompanied in his exile by a young man, Joseph, who is the son of Njoroge. Joseph is angry and in exile because his antigovernment activities fueled by idealism and anger have made him a target for the government. While he rails against the genocide of his people, he

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connects with other patriots of the MuKenya group through the internet. While Vikram seems to seek Joseph’s forgiveness and love, Joseph rejects him for what he represents. Joseph’s vision of a new Kenya is nascently Afropolitan – it blurs the boundary between local and transnational and uses contemporary technology to forge a sense of belonging between the two. However, Joseph is young, his future is uncertain because he returns to Kenya only to be imprisoned. Thus, the nascent Afropolitanism is threatened even before it can fulfill its goals. Vikram Lall eventually returns to Kenya at great risk to his life so he can come clean to the investigative commission about his corruption. His return threatens the safety of the many African politicians who had relied on his network to amass their private fortunes. At the end of the novel, he is living in a poor neighbourhood in Nairobi in the home of Ebrahim, an Indian Muslim married to a Luo woman. Vikram’s widowed father is now living with an African woman and he awkwardly confesses the relationship to his son. These cross-racial relationships mark the possibility of a new Kenyan identity – one that might be considered Afropolitan. Like Mbembe’s Afropolis, Johannesburg, 5 Nairobi is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and the old rigid social boundaries are breaking down amongst the urban populace. However, as the novel ends with an arson aimed at killing Vikram Lall and the uncertainty of his even surviving this fire, we recognise that the emerging Afropolitan culture of Nairobi threatens the power structure of corruption in the country. However, the arson that ends the novel gives the ruling corrupt elite more power than the Afropolitan urban community. While Mbembe celebrates the burgeoning Afropolis, Johannesburg, in his writings and sees that as the evidence of a different African sensibility, Vassanji’s novel has a much more dismal view. Although the novel underscores the need for a new vision for Kenya, the history of the nation from indenture and colonialism to Mau Mau and neo-colonialism told from the perspective of a culturally marginal yet socially powerful group suggests that history casts a very long and dark shadow over Kenya’s future. While Vikram succeeds in telling his story and believes that the telling of such stories would make people in Kenya a much happier and less nervous people, there is no resounding celebration of what might be emerging as the future. From an Indian diasporic perspective, many questions remain: Will Kenya accept its immigrant minorities as Kenyan? Will the Indo-Kenyans always remain opportunistic “flexible citizens?” If the different Kenyan ethnic groups articulate an Afropolitan identity, will there be room in it for the Indo5

For greater discussion of Johannesburg, see Mbembe and Nuttall’s “Afropolis.”

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Kenyans despite their troubled history in East Africa? Ultimately, we have to ask, is Mbembe’s vision yet another idealistic one like previous philosophies of Pan-Africanism or Negritude, the articulation of which emerges from a particular moment in global African history and has the power to mobilise some but eventually is destined to fade. Vassanji articulates no master theory that will be the solution, he acts as the diagnostician of the problem.

Works Cited Hawley, John, ed. India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Mbembe, Achille. “Afropolitanism.” Africultures 26 Dec. 2005. 11 Feb. 2009 . Mbembe, Achille, and Sarah Nuttall. “Writing the World from an African Metropolis.” Public Culture 16.3 (2004): 347-72. Nair, Savita. “Shops and Stations: Rethinking Power and Privilege in British/Indian East Africa.” India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopoliltanisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. 77-94. Nuttall, Sarah, and Achille Mbembe. “Afropolis: From Johannesburg.” PMLA 122.1 (2007): 281-88. Ong, Aihwa. “Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality.” The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations. Ed. Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt. New York: Routledge, 2008. 446-50. Rastogi, Pallavi. Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. Vassanji, M. G. The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. New York: Knopf, 2003.

Remmy Shiundu Barasa and J. K. S. Makokha

Weaving Exilic Narratives: Homodiegetic Narration and Postcolonial Translocation in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Admiring Silence Introduction The telling of stories is so commonplace an aspect of our environment that we sometimes forget stories provide the initial and continuing means for shaping and sharing our experiences. Stories are the repository of our collective wisdom about the world of social/cultural behaviour; they are the key mediating structures for our encounters with reality. One of the important contemporary East African story-tellers using the English language and the novel as medium and mode of expression respectively is Abdulrazak Gurnah from Tanzania. In most of his fiction, the novelist has distinguished his accomplishment as a postcolonial writer of fiction by consistently helping us understand the complex nature of dislocation and exile in the post-colonial world. He counterpoints the anguish of migrant existence with the clever recognition that life is itself a story and can perhaps be better understood when the mechanics of the story-telling process and the situation of the narrator together with his authority are perceived as part of a creative process. This chapter therefore examines how aspects of narrative design – narration, narrative situation and focalisation – are used to present the themes of quest for self-identity and postcolonial translocation in his fifth, and highly sophisticated, novel Admiring Silence (1996). The novel features a man (unnamed narrator) who escapes from his native Zanzibar to England in the early years of Tanzanian independence. His furtive departure makes it unlikely that he will ever return, but he and his family agree a bright future lies ahead. He meets an English woman, Emma and they build a life together. She is writing a thesis on narrative theory; he becomes a teacher in a cramped London School. His cathartic release is to weave stories, often fictional, for her and her comfortably suburban parents. These are romantic and reassuring tales of post-colonial Africa, of the scented terrace in Old Town, Zanzibar, where he would sit and listen to his mother’s lyrical voice as a child. However, for all these nostalgic narratives of warmth and hospitality, the man has not heard from his family since his departure, nor has he written to tell them of his new secular life with a white

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wife. Later in the novel, the barriers come down and he is able finally to return for a visit. He finds a different Zanzibar, more degenerated than he had ever imagined or remembered, a country that allows him to see his life with a new clarity as a “returnee.” It is out of this homecoming and the subsequent rememberings that he comes to understand the transformations that have befallen him since his departure. Through a twisting many-layered narrative the novel explores many themes, such as race and betrayal, translocation and homecoming with a heavily satirical sense of purpose. The story is told by a first-person narrator. Besides Admiring Silence, Gurnah is also the author of six other novels. These other novels are: Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988), Dottie (1990), Paradise (1994) – for which he was nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize, – By the Sea (2001) and Desertion (2005).

Gurnah and the Craft of Post-colonial Fiction in Tanzania Tanzanian novelists have made significant contributions to modern African literature, especially in the indigenous language tradition. Novelists such as Mohamed Said Abdullah, Said Ahmed Mohamed, Euphrase Kezilahabi, S. A. Shafi, S. O. S. Baalawy, Abdallah S. Farsy, Shabaan Robert, Mohamed Bin Suleiman, David E. Diva, Ebrahim Hussein, and S. A. Abdullah using Kiswahili as their literary language have been the subject of numerous studies that have sought to explore, interrogate and assess their literary achievements (Bertoncini-Zubkova, Gromov, Khamis and Wamitila 2008; Murimi 1998; Njogu 1997; Mbughuni 1978, among others). The focus on the much smaller population of Anglophone Tanzanian writers such as Gabriel Ruhumbika, Peter Palangyo, Ismael Mbise, W.E. Mkufya, Hamza Ssoko, Sikeena Karmali, Jules Damji, Yasmin Ladha, Elieshi Lema, M. G. Vassanji, Abdulrazak Gurnah and their individual works remains quite a neglected area of literary study. By looking at a prominent novel of perhaps the most prolific writer from this group, Gurnah, this study makes a modest attempt at addressing this paucity and contributes to the research interest in post-colonial literature in English from Tanzania. Two notable early accounts deserve mention – Dawthorne (1974) and Cook (1977). In his survey of African literature in the twentieth century, O. R. Dawthorne discusses at length the sole novel of Gabriel Ruhumbika, A Village in Uhuru (1969). This novel is arguably the first Tanzanian novel to be written in English. The novel details the drama between traditionalism and

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modernity as experienced by the immediate post-independence African society in an imaginary African context that closely mirrors Tanzania. Although Dawthorne does not go to an in-depth analysis of the novel to include stylistic or thematic exegesis for instance, the very fact that he mentioned it in his survey volume gave recognition to the existence of writers in Tanzania using English as their literary medium. Ruhumbika later abandoned the medium for Kiswahili thus joining the dominant trend in the country. Cook (1977), in a stimulating chapter wholly dedicated to Peter Palangyo’s Dying in the Sun (1970) gives an in-depth analysis of this early Tanzanian novel in English leading to the conclusion its accomplishment was Dostoevskian in proportion. The two early novels, which are out of print, remain in the penumbra of Anglophone literary studies in the region. Other works of the period such as Ismael Mbise’s Blood on our Land (1973) and even the critical essay by the same writer entitled “Writings in English from Tanzania” in Killam (54-69) further attests to this marginality vis a vis Anglophone works from Kenya and Uganda that are synonymous with East African literature. This could be the same fate that awaits a recent novel, Parched Earth – A Love Story (2001) by the Tanzanian woman writer Elieshi Lema. A ray of hope has however been offered by developments in cultural theory and literary criticism within the field of postcolonial studies. The impact of postcolonial theories of language and literature over the past two decades as well as their steady dissemination from Western universities to the academies in the postcolonies is beginning to emerge. A new generation of critics as well as writers is slowly taking the centre-stage in East African literature in English. Most of these critics are academics who have pursued their postgraduate work abroad and imbibed the ideas of Edward Said and Homi K. Bhabha among others. Their intellectual fascination with postcolonial writers in East Africa goes beyond those located in the national spaces of their homelands to authors writing about these spaces from the various diasporas that have arisen out of post-independence migrations to the West. This new critical school include academics such Evan Maina Mwangi, Daniel Ojwang, J. K. S. Makokha, Godwin Siundu and Peter Simatei from Kenya and Danson Kahyana from Uganda. Mikhail Gromov and Eliah S. Mwaifuge have shed new insights into Anglophone Tanzanian fiction. Journal articles, book chapters and entries in encyclopaedia by scholars abroad focusing on aspects of Tanzanian postcolonial literature in English is also aiding the unfolding visibility on Anglophone Tanzanian writers in the diaspora and their works. Works, for example, devoted to the study of Gurnah’s fiction include, inter alia, Helff (2009), Olaussen (2009), Farrier

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(2008), Nasta (2004), Griffiths (2000), Lindfors (2000), Bardolph (1998), Schwerdt (1997) and Maslen (1996). Most of these academic studies dwell on Gurnah’s famous novel Paradise (1994) and his more recent By the Sea (2001). This article makes a contribution to the outlined critical trends by treating yet another significant though understudied novel by Gurnah, Admiring Silence (1991). The concerns of this article are theoretically located at the intersection of the afore-mentioned recent gains out of postcolonial theories and discourses on identity and texts arising out of post-colonial diasporas as well as the more textual-based theories of literary criticism normally associated with structuralism. Narratology is specifically used as the basis of literary criticism guiding us to the ultimate goal of moving beyond a taxonomy of formal elements that combine to produce the selected novel to an understanding of how these elements are arranged in actual narratives, fictional and non-fictional. Our discussion does not just stop at the identification of narratological aspects of the narrative design in Gurnah’s selected novel, but further explores how these narrative elements work to articulate certain important post-colonial themes. The intellectual tradition out of which narratology grew began with the linguistic work of Ferdinand de Saussure. By distinguishing between parole (specific instances of spoken language) and langue (the idealised abstract grammar relating the entire specific instances of speech) Roman Jakobson and the Russian Formalists also influenced the study of narrative, revealing how literary language differs from ordinary language. Structuralism was further shaped by French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who concluded that myths found in various cultures can be interpreted in terms of their repetitive structures (Jahn, Narratology). Equally important is rhetoric as broached by Aristotle. He conceived of it as the art dealing with the discovery and use of all the available means of persuasion in any given case. The old-styled rhetoric still has some pertinence to the social and political purposes of our age and stands to gain from a study of the new strategies of persuasion that have been developed.

Thematic Significance of the First-Person Narrator Strategy Admiring Silence is a typical homodiegetic narrative because the nameless narrator tells an autobiographical story in retrospect about a set of seemingly disparate but finally interconnected past experiences that evidently shaped and changed his life and made him into what he is today. The narrator,

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unnamed, escapes from his native Zanzibar to England where he gets a teaching job and a white woman, Emma, with whom he builds a life. He weaves stories to his partner and her parents. The stories are a recollection of his past. He then travels home and reels more of these stories to his mother and relatives. When he returns to the UK, his wife deserts him, leaving him a shell of hopelessness. The story presented in Gurnah’s Admiring Silence is purposely manylayered as our hero begins with meeting his partner’s parents and then shifts attention to his heart ailment – the reader is not sure how ill the narrator really is. One wonders whether it is a metaphor for loss of home and family or a mere disillusion of the new millennium. From then on the pace changes. The narrative sweeps us back and forth between our hero’s relationship with Emma, and his daughter Amelia, and his family without his father in what is identifiably Zanzibar. The time sequence and flashbacks are woven adeptly into the fabric of the text, and some adroit writing takes place. Much of the text is narrative, as opposed to dialogue; as a result, the focus of attention is maintained throughout. Tales within tales arise when a character in a story begins to tell a story of his own, creating a narrative within a narrative. The original narrative now becomes, narratologically, a matrix narrative and the story told by the narrating character become the hyponarrative in the sense propagated by Mieke Bal in Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts In Literary and Cultural Studies (2004). Ordinarily the transition to hyponarrative, its termination and the return to the matrix narrative are explicitly signalled in a text; occasionally, however, a text closes on a hyponarrative without explicitly resuming the matrix narrative. Admiring Silence leaps through various hyponarratives before resuming the matrix narrative with the narrator weighed down with loss of family – both his wife (Emma) and daughter (Amelia) have deserted him in quick succession. Hyponarratives can be analysed at several levels: A first degree narrative (a narrative that is not embedded in any other narrative); a second degree narrative (a narrative that is embedded in a first degree narrative); a third degree narrative (one that is embedded in a second degree narrative); and so on. A first degree narrator, by analogy, is the narrator of a first degree narrative; a second degree narrator is the narrator of a second degree narrative, and so on in exact correspondence. Through hyponarratives the narrator in Admiring Silence sustains suspense in so far as his ailment, his relationship with Emma and his family in Zanzibar are concerned. The narratives help to enrich and develop the theme of suffering in exile. The embedded narrative about the narrator’s journey back to the UK on a plane,

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perhaps, prepares us for a foul ending of betrayal when the narrator’s wife, Emma, deserts him effectively ending their marriage. The matrix narrative in this novel is the story of the hero’s family which takes place as a long lie recounted to the partner, and then is recounted in “fact” by the hero as he returns to his home island. This reads with the authenticity of an autobiography; the manner in which the hero gently dupes his partner feels totally accurate, and one can only feel that the partner gets her revenge in the end as she tells the hero of her own duplicity. Even the minor characters in the plot, chance encounters on the aeroplane as the narrator returns to the UK, have a place in the metaphoric scheme of things. The farting fellow-passenger seems like an archetype of bad things to come, significantly in the polluted seas between the two countries, into which our (anti-)hero has got himself without a paddle. The farting is a metaphor, perhaps, for late twentieth century decay. This metaphor coupled with the narrator’s personal experience with the farting incident, builds up the suspense which in turn develops the theme of loss which the narrator finally suffers when Emma deserts him. The novel is based on homodiegetic narration. In this type of narrative, the story is told by a homodiegetic narrator who is also one of the story’s acting characters. A text is homodiegetic if among its story-related action sentences, there are some that contain first person pronouns (When I first met Mr and Mrs Willoughby, Emma and I were both students) indicating that the narrator was at least a witness to the events depicted. In order to assess the typical implications of such a scenario, and put them to work in an interpretation, we will also consider that a homodiegetic narrator always tells a story of personal experience. Like other typical homodiegetic narrators, the narrator is restricted to a personal and subjective point of view; he has no direct access to (or authority on) events he did not witness in person; he can’t be in two places at the same time, and he has no way of knowing for certain what went on in the minds of other characters. Let us sample the excerpt below: Perhaps Hussein had sworn his admirers to secrecy until he was safely away, or perhaps in the manner of scandals, the details take a little time to be whispered around, or perhaps some of them are only interventions. (160; emphasis added)

It is obvious that a narrator’s handling of these limitations, and a text’s relative closeness to or distance from such default conditions can tell us a lot about the attitude of the narrative voice as well as the motives for telling the story. The narrator in Admiring Silence attempts to concretise his stories by repeating the stories from time to time. He also evokes sympathy from his

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narratee by letting other characters such as his mother tell the stories in order to establish facts. Telling as a narrative strategy is adequate in presenting the sub-theme of self identity, especially when the historical background of the narrator has to be told by someone more mature than the narrator himself. The use of repetition and silence are strategies common in the African oral forms. They are used to emphasise particular themes, appeal and attract sympathy. A narrator who is the speaker or “voice” of the narrative discourse is the agent who establishes communicative contact with an addressee (the “narratee”), who manages the exposition, who decides what is to be told, how it is to be told (especially, from what point of view, and in what sequence), and what is to be left out. The narrator in Admiring Silence, however, leaves his stories wide-open and uses physical and emotional flight as a metaphor for insoluble internal shuttling between national and personal affiliations. For analysis, we will simply repeat the text’s incipit (beginning), inserting some analytical annotations: I [self-reference of an overt narrator] have found myself leaning heavily on this pain [looks like a story of personal experience]. At first [chronological order of events] I tried to silence it, thinking it would go and leave me to my agitated content [narrator’s main activity is silencing and thinking]. That it would linger for a season, a firm reminder of the disquiet that lurks and coils below the surface of the stubbornly self-gratifying vision of our [=my and your… the narrator acknowledges an addressee and provides the first illustration to the foregoing generalisation] lives. Far from going, it became more clear, more precisely located, concrete, an object that occupied space within me, cockroachy, dark and intimate, emitting thick, stinking fumes that reeked of loneliness and terror [narrator’s self-evaluation of the nature of the pain]. When I woke up in the morning [setting of events], I groped for it, then sighed with plunging recognition as I felt it stirring inside me, alive and well [further evaluation of the pain]. Emma [character exposition] said it was indigestion or something similar, but I could see [self-characterisation] from the surprised anxiety in her eyes that she did not believe that. For a few weeks she persuaded [block characterisation] me to try a variety of powders and tablets, and she began to read about special diets, and acidity and roughage and vitamins [further characterisation]. Emma was like that with problems [further characterisation of Emma]. She gave them her careful attention, at least for a while.

In the foregoing excerpt, the narrator presents Emma in an exposition that develops the theme of love, and subsequent loss that the narrator encounters as an exile. This is clearly an overt narratorial voice engaged in giving concise and reader-conscious expository information on the main character(s). The paragraphs that follow present additional background information on the narrator and Emma. The narrator introduces himself with an ailment and Emma with her virtues. Some of the character traits attributed to Emma are obviously wholly conventional; others strike one as slightly

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unexpected, perhaps deserving careful attention (and intonation!). We may observe the projected tone of voice in “Emma was like that with problems…,” for instance. Clearly, this is a judgemental voice that gives Emma positive attributes and whatever else may be entailed by the summary characterisation of Emma is, therefore, not an entirely negative one. All narration, whether it is oral or written, whether it recounts real or mythical events, whether it tells a story or relates a simple sequence of action in time, presupposes not only (at least) one narrator but also (at least) one narratee, the narratee being someone whom the narrator addresses. The narrator does this in Admiring Silence in order to solicit for the narratee’s sympathy and develop the theme of exile and loss. The excerpt has plenty of emotional and subjective expressions – expressions like “found myself leaning heavily on this pain,” “I tried silence,” “surface of the stubbornly self-gratifying vision of our lives,” “it became more clear, more precisely located, concrete, an object that occupied space within me” and so on. Since these are strong voice markers they suggest a highly overt rather than neutrally overt voice then this must be a homodiegetic overt narration. Depending on how the presence of a narrator is signalled in the text, one distinguishes between “overt” and “covert” narrators. An overt narrator is one who refers to himself in the first-person (“I,” “we” etc.), one who directly or indirectly addresses the narratee, one who offers reader-friendly exposition whenever it is needed (using the “conative” or “appellative” discourse function), one who exhibits a “discoursal stance” toward characters and events, especially in his use of rhetorical figures, imagery, evaluative phrases and emotive or subjective expressions. One of the stylistic effects of homodiegetic narration in Admiring Silence is the creation of irony. Irony is always the result of a disparity of understanding. In any situation in which one person knows or perceives more – or less – than another, irony must be either actually or potentially present. In any example of narrative art there are, broadly speaking, three points of view – those of the characters, the narrators and the audience. As a narrative becomes more sophisticated, a fourth point of view is added by the development of a clear distinction between the narrator and the author. Scholes and Kellogg (240) observe that narrative irony is a function of disparity among these three or four view points. Stories appeal primarily because they offer a simulacrum of life which enables an audience to participate in events without being involved in the consequences which events in the actual world inevitably carry with them. Our pleasure in narrative literature itself, then, can be seen as a function of disparity of point

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of view or irony. Because we are not involved in the action represented, we always enjoy certain superiority over the characters who are. When Gurnah allows us to know that the unnamed narrator (in Admiring Silence) is deceiving Emma – or is unreliably telling the story of his background which the reader confirms when the narrator goes back to Zanzibar – then the operation of the simple irony adds to our pleasure or displeasure in the narrative. Our sympathy for Emma is heightened, but we also make our emotional preparations for the narrator’s downfall or defeat when he suffers loss of family and home. The control of irony is a principal function of point of view. There are predictable moments of this downfall, for instance: So back to holy matrimony. The joke about that was that Emma and I were not married but had been living in increasingly fractious sin for the last donkey’s years. (17)

This points to lack of commitment that is so pertinent in the call of marriage, at least from the point of view of the Zanzibari. But the racial difference between the narrator and Emma perhaps is the greatest stumbling block to the realisation of this union within its context. In telling the story personally, the “I” narrator hopes to elicit sympathy from the narratee and by so doing, brings to the fore the themes of disjointedness in exile as a result of racism. Admiring Silence deals with lives woven out of complex links between Arab-African culture in a former colony of the British Empire and a contemporary British suburbia. What Gurnah offers us is a unique perspective, built out of his own life experience, of a story of borders and their transgression that is reproduced across the modern world in various ways as a result of contemporary human migration patterns. The sense of dislocation post-colonial migrants feel in the contemporary world, what they leave behind or, rather, carry within them after translocation offer the fabric from which the complex narrative design of his fiction is woven. It is for this reason that Admiring Silence makes a captivating reading to audiences of diverse yet similar backgrounds whose lives, though perhaps lived in particular locales, share the modern sense of dislocation either at the temporal or spatial dimension. The protagonist’s predicament highlights the latter dimension while that of his wife Emma is a case of the former. Both readers from the metropole as well as its peripheries in the form of ex-colonies find their experiences articulated by one of these two characters. This is what makes much of what Gurnah refers to in his spinning narrative ring true to human experiences of dislocation in the postcolonial world. The novelist cuts through to the various layers of the culture and geography one leaves behind and those that one adapts shedding light on the influence of the two locales in

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the formation of the characters of in the novel. The novelist describes through his fiction the confusion that arises with the transgression of cultural and geographical boundaries especially when the transgressor seeks adjustment to the new environment, as is the case of the main character, an African from Zanzibar trying to find fulfillment in post-colonial Britain. A sophisticated writer, Gurnah examines the reinvention of the past and its roles in the making of the present moment through building his fiction on deceptively simple tales of exile or translocation. It is the treatment of exile as a source of stories and narratives that motors his literary oeuvre, as is evident in the novel under study here. The central character opens the main story in Admiring Silence, with the need to understand the exilic present by crossing the borders of time in order to find meaning in a past lost or rather fallen apart. The novel is therefore a reinvention of the past in order to make the present meaningful as much as a remembrance of things past that makes the present what it is. It appears, therefore, that the narrator in Admiring Silence is trapped in some sort of limbo between here and there or now and then, apparently unable to avoid the confusion that comes with such a locus of in-betweeness. After a twenty year life in England and absence from his natal home, Zanzibar, during which he has severed links with his Zanzibar family through silence to the extent that they do not even know of his marriage with an English woman or their child, on return to Zanzibar the narrator finds himself caught up in marriage negotiations which he cannot possibly honour but which he is too embarrassed to put an end to as a “lost” past comes back to haunt his “concealed” present. Gurnah’s re-examination of geography as a location of self-identification in relation to the quests for self-identity embraced by his protagonist is brilliant. As the first sentence of the final section of Admiring Silence hints, the narrator can only be ever in flight “from home” (177) – the impossibility of all his domestic situations has set him in a state of perpetual flight. On his flight “home” to that “secretest” most real part of him in Battersea, Emma brusquely terminates their marriage by explaining that she has found someone else and finds her husband’s presence “unbearable” (210). The novel ends with the narrator rejected by his English wife, and rejecting his Zanzibari family’s renewed pleas to “come home” because “it wasn’t home any more and I had no way of retrieving that seductive idea except through more lies” (217). No longer able to affiliate himself nationally or domestically he floats the possibility of an attachment to his female travel companion on the flight from Zanzibar to London. This woman, Ira, like the narrator, is another interesting native of East Africa with an ambivalent identity; born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, to

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Indian parents, she had experienced a traumatic removal to England in the late 60s when her Indianness – which up till then in Kenya had been an effective marker of her privileged “British” high social status that most Kenyan Europeans and Kenyan Indians enjoy – got her racially labelled as “wog, coon, Paki bitch” (204). Let down by England (to which she had been brought up us a child to view as a partner to her Indianness in Africa), Ira is later let down also by an English husband when they end up in divorce. The failure of that marriage foreshadows the narrator’s soon-to-end marriage to Emma and frames their shared disillusionment as colonial migrants around the idea of “disappointed love” characteristic of the relationship between the ex-colonial centre and its margins (205). The sense of rootlessness which links Ira and the narrator produces a postcolonial African subjectivity rather different from the more familiar hybrid protagonists of Achebe or Ngugi. The figures of Gurnah’s fiction form both a dual identity evident in the likes of Obi Okwonko and Njoroge as well as a non-identity located in the ambivalence at the centre of multiple worlds, African, Arab/Asian and European, which renders their various flights ever away from old homes yet never towards (or sometimes caught in between) new homes. In his efforts to present the meditations and mediations about exilic identities and the implicit as well as explicit post-colonial issues involved, the nameless narrator at times becomes quite extravagant with his seemingly endless tales and affection for detail. In his comparison of the sophistication of the metropolis where he currently lives with the squalor of his former life in the third world, he reflects on the injustices meted out to Africans by British colonialists. For instance, he uses in great detail his visit to a personal doctor to bring out the difference between home and diaspora and touches on one of the motivations that make people, like himself, relocate. Whereas in the UK it is common to have a general-practitioner, it is not so in the third world countries which the narrator metaphorically refers to as “darker corners of the world” (4). The narrator attributes this disparity to the unequal economic power relations between the two brought about by exploitation of one by the other during the long period of slavery and colonialism: Then let your eyes wander farther a field, and there are the factories and warehouses and mechanized farms and model towns and chapels, and museums bursting with booty from other people’s broken histories and libraries sprawling with books congregated over centuries. (4; emphasis added)

Here, the I-narrator strategy helps the protagonist addresses the narratee directly, to solicit for the reader’s sympathy and appeal to the conscience about the ills meted out to Africa by the west. It is through this mediational

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strategy of comparative narration that the themes of prejudice and cultural difference, common in most fiction of border-crossings or postcolonial relocation, are developed in Admiring Silence. The narrator’s doctor makes racial utterances to the narrator based on their cultural differences and origins of the protagonist. He addresses the narrator who is an Arab-African by referring to his colour and apparent resemblance to the multiracial people of the West Indies as “Afro-Caribbean people” (9). The narrator reveals to his readers that the term is a euphemism or synonym for “darkies, hubshis, abids, bongo-bongos […] victims of starvation and tyranny and disease and unregulated lusts and history, etc.” (10). The “I” narrator is adequate in presenting this theme because racism involves personal experiences which can be best narrated from first-hand experience.

Formal Significance of Rhetoric as a Narrative Strategy If we conceive of rhetoric as Aristotle conceived of it – namely, as the art dealing with the discovery and use of “all the available means of persuasion in any given case” – the old-style rhetoric still has some pertinence to the social and political purposes of our age and, of course, stands to gain from a study of the new strategies of persuasion that have been developed. Although increasing attention will indubitably be paid to those emotional, psychophysical springs that trigger men’s responses and actions, it does not seem likely that men will entirely abandon the strategy of appealing to the rationality, the reasonableness, of their fellow men. One of the most salutary lessons that has come down to us from the Greek rhetoricians and philosophers is that unless we treat man as an integrated complex of intellect, will, passions, and physicality, we shall not produce whole men. Aristotle, the forerunner thinker of rhetoric did not sit in his cubicle and dream up a set of principles for convincing other men. Rather, he observed the practice of effective orators, analysed their strategies, and from that observation and analysis codified a body of precepts to guide others in the exercise of the persuasive art. He believed, as did every other rhetorician who composed a treatise on the persuasive art, that what men did instinctively they could do more effectively if they consciously schooled themselves in the art of that activity. Rhetoric then is an inescapable activity in our lives. Of the four conventional forms of spoken or written discourse – exposition, argumentation, description, and narration – that we get involved in, argumentation is most often. Everyone living in community with other men is a rhetorician.

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One of the chief values of rhetoric, conceived as a system of gathering, arranging and expressing our material, is that it represents a positive approach to the problems of writing. Students have too often been inhibited in their writing by the negative approach to composition – don’t do this, beware of that. Fiction rhetoric too has had its negative prescriptions, but, in the main, it offers positive advice to help the student in the composition of a specific kind of discourse directed to a definite audience for a particular purpose. Rhetoric cannot, of course, tell the student what he must do in any and every situation. At least it can provide the student with a set of procedures and criteria that can guide him in making strategic decisions in the composition process. Rhetorical approach can be used to study irony and satire in Admiring Silence. Satire is essentially an exercise in rhetoric – rhetoric in the fictional sense of persuasive discourse. The satirist is engaged either in deliberative rhetoric or in ceremonial rhetoric: either the satirist is seeking to influence the attitude of his audience, often with the ultimate purpose of moving his audience to do something, or he is seeking, through the medium of praise or blame, to induce his audience to accept or reject some person or group of persons. Gurnah’s Admiring Silence is a display of deliberative rhetoric. The novel’s outrage at the “petty hardships” of Africa and its satire on obscenely self-serving leaders is uncompromising. Yet Gurnah is acutely aware of the hazards of raging against post-colonial Africa – the “overcharged ironies” in labelling those in charge “cannibal louts.” His hero’s pandering fictions to the Willoughbys reflect the dilemma of the writer coming from what he terms with irony as “darker corners of the world” (4) to play up to expectations of the “exotic” with anodyne nostalgia, or risk confirming bigotry through harsh realism. The author’s own choice is clear: “We keep silent and nod. For fear of our lives – while bloated tyrants fart and stamp on us for their petty gratification.” It is tyrants who commend muteness in their subjects, like the ayatollah with fatwa – “another admirer of silence.” But the hero’s stories also have a self-protective function. They shield him from guilt and recrimination and from the wounding power of words. However, his traumatic visit home banishes fearful silences within himself and his family, as he overcomes the obtuse resentments of childhood. Despite its biting humour, Admiring Silence is in some ways a muted novel, an anguished mediation on home and loss that refuses the comfort of resolution. While it eloquently charts the cumulative changes wrought by geographical displacement, it also reveals the loss of love as a kind of exile. In other words, satire helps to bring out the themes of loss and self-identity.

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The narrator in Admiring Silence invokes the assistance of other narrators such as his mother and the prime minister to develop the theme of both self and national identity. The temporal and psychological distance between the narrating I and the experiencing I is known as narrative distance. Usually, the narrating I is older and wiser than the experiencing I. Example: I wish I could have said that I taught neurology at University College London and in my spare time took a clinic at Guys Hospital, and at times appeared on TV when one of my cases caught the public imagination. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have got the disconcertingly crestfallen smile she gave me. This would have been the moment to say something about the kind of school I taught in, and the barbarians who were my students. And then perhaps towards the end of this description I could slip in that the work was so crushing that I had suffered a heart attack (God forbid). (Gurnah, Admiring Silence 164)

This is a block characterisation of the experiencing I, from the point of view of the narrating I. The first-person/homodiegetic narration aims at presenting an experience that shaped or changed his life and made him into what he is today. A first-person narrator is an important witness offering an otherwise inaccessible account of historical or fictional events. Typical sub-genres of first-person narration are fictional autobiographies, initiation stories, and skaz narratives. The use of a first-person narration is adequate as it is more reliable because the narrator speaks from first-hand experience. However, we cannot trust “I” to recollect all his childhood happenings vividly. The failure to remember his childhood is what leads the narrator in Admiring Silence to give an adult’s view to things that occurred when he was a child vividly. Indeed, at certain points the “I” candidly confesses that he is not sure about certain things. Let us sample the excerpt below: The only time he ever hit me was when a bicycle barged into Akbar when he was playing in the road and I was supposed to be keeping an eye on him, and my attention had wandered or Akbar had been reckless. I don’t remember… (117)

Such confessions reduce the narrator’s reliability to articulate the themes of identity and loss. Gurnah uses many internal focalisers in order to bring out the irony of fact that underlies the narrative. It is because of several internal focalisers who see what happens in the story that the narrator’s unreliability is brought out. The narrator embroiders romanticised childhood tales to woo a fellow student, Emma Willoughby, and baits her father with indecorously parodic “Empire stories.” His biggest lie paves the way for abject farce. The experiencing “I” is used as internal focaliser when he visits his home in

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Zanzibar and asks his mother to “Tell me about my father” (123). It is through his mother’s narratives that he discovers the facts. He has told the Willoughbys a lie – his mother’s stories contradict his own knowledge about the same stories. The presentation of different episodes of the story as seen through the eyes of several focalisers helps to give the story authenticity and let the reader make his own judgement. The stories help develop the theme of self-identity and explore the effects of dislocation. The patient organisation of rhetorical detail in Admiring Silence is postcolonial in its devotion to brilliant outward design. Even more striking, however, is the post-colonial quality of the way in which the work is meaningful. Rather than referring to medieval types of actuality, its images carry allegorical meanings. When the allegorical significance is not culturally stipulated, that is, not traditional, it is a private significance attached to Gurnah himself. To study Admiring Silence is to study all the books Gurnah read, or by some even less legitimate method stole from, as well as all the meaningful elements in his private life. Not even the ideal reader with the ideal insomnia will penetrate to the heart of Admiring Silence without studying the novelist. For at the heart of Admiring Silence is the inarticulate underside of the novelist himself, casting up out of the deepest recesses of being, on a Zanzibar-UK trajectory, all the images ever dreamed by himself. The silence between the narrator in the UK and his family in Zanzibar could be an allegory: an allegory of detachment, absence, nostalgia, migration whose import is grim, not admirable! In the narrator’s silence is the jerky information about his own identity, he does not have facts about his own father and that is why, perhaps, he is nameless; in the same silence is the allegory of the farting man on the plane to symbolise a foul relationship between Africa and Europe. Through silence the narrator’s marriage to Emma Willoughby is not guaranteed. Here, perhaps, Gurnah urges us to stir our conscience and route for cultural identity as a basis for our own survival. As earlier observed, Gurnah’s novel is a fictional autobiography. The narrator is a mature man who looks back on his past life. Although he is only forty two at the time of writing the story, he feels his life is all but over, “Now that she’s gone, I find myself living in England for reasons I no longer know” (215-16). Like many first-person narrators, he has now become not only older but also wiser. Looking back on his life, he realises that he made many mistakes, especially in his detachment from his father: “I meditate on my father Abbas. I like saying his name to myself. I meditate on the callousness, or the panic, or the stupidity that could have made him act with such cruelty. Is he perhaps living two streets away from me. [...] I imagine him in his sixties, sitting alone with his silences” (216). The story’s first-

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person narrative situation is uniquely suited for presenting the narrator’s insights about his wasted life, effectively developing the theme of loss and nostalgia. The story is told in a straight-forwardly chronological manner, and its timeline can be established quite accurately. The story’s action begins with the narrator’s acquaintance with Emma Willoughby. He is now forty-two years old and has been away from his Zanzibar home for twenty years: “I did not want another twenty-year silence” (217). So the narrator must have left Zanzibar at the age of twenty two years old only. The narrator’s daughter, Amelia, is nineteen which means she was born one year after the narrator’s entry into the UK. The long period the narrator has been away from home helps develop the themes of nostalgia and home-coming. The narratee sympathises with the narrator when the latter tells lies about himself due to ignorance occasioned by a long period of detachment from home. We also sympathise with the narrator because of the persuasive strategies he uses such as repetition of certain incidents, silence and the rhetorical questions. The story’s action episodes focus on the narrator, his “buggered” heart, acquaintance with the Willoughbys, marriage to Emma, visit to Zanzibar, flight back to UK and the subsequent bolting of Emma from the marriage. The story ends on a note of loss and despair. The only thing the narrator can do is obsessively review his past. In the final retrospective epiphany, he realises two things with devastating clarity: that Emma’s estrangement from the marriage robbed him of a purpose in life and; that had he known his father he probably would have leaned back on him in such trying moments. The sub-theme of self-identity is treated well in a first-person narrative situation. Unlike the well-spoken omniscient narrator, who cannot himself be present as a character in the story, the narrator’s voice and diction are functional and characteristic features in Admiring Silence. His selfconsciousness in telling the story – “Age breeds aches. I could have told her ages ago – that my father was Abbas and he left my mother before I was born, that he probably came to England” (215) – and his involvement in the story support the development of theme of self-identity. Whereas the narrator’s story is an account of personal experience, an omniscient narrator knows everything from the beginning and cannot normally undergo any personal development (unless this is caused by the act of telling itself). The major theme of translocation and recollection that runs through Gurnah’s story would, however, be well manageable in a figural narrative situation, in which the narrator could serve as a third person character (an internal focaliser, a reflector figure) in the act of recollecting his past. A figural story tends to focus on merely a scenic view of life. Admiring Silence spans a

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story-time of at least twenty-two years. In fact the narrator’s telling of his own story helps him think about his life and clarify his own thoughts and judgements. A reflector-figure, in contrast, is not a narrator and cannot address a narratee. It is important to the narrator in Admiring Silence to tell his story to a known audience but in a sense also, most importantly in our view, to himself.

Conclusion In this study, close reading and the method of detailed analysis have been applied to Gurnah’s Admiring Silence (1996) in order to draw conclusions about his narrative skills in the depiction of the condition of exile and concomitant quests of identity in the post-colonial world. The theme of migration from the former colonial society of Zanzibar to metropolitan Britain, and the problems associated with experience of homecoming as narrated through the consciousness and conscience of the narrators, was the central topic of discussion in the article. Invoking the theory of narrative, we borrowed the interpretative framework with which to tease out meanings in the novel from rhetoric narratology – the art of talking to persuade the audience. Rhetorical narratology deals with the use of discourse, either spoken or written to inform or persuade or move an audience, whether that audience is made up of a single person or a group of persons – rhetoric seems to comprehend every kind of verbal expression that man engages in so as to achieve an end. We conclude from the foregoing discussion that – the tools provided by the theory of narrative – namely, narration, narrative situation and focalisation have been adequately used to present the predicament of the transitional character of the nameless protagonist of, Admiring Silence. Through this brilliant novel, Gurnah ably asserts his position as a cosmopolitan African writer who helps us through narrative fiction and the English language as medium and mode of post-colonial expressions to grapple with one of the challenges of a changing Africa – translocation.

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Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Bal, Mieke, ed. Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 2004. Bardolph, Jacqueline. “Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise and Admiring Silence: History, Stories and the Figure of the Uncle.” Contemporary African Fiction. Ed. Derek Wright. Bayreuth University: Bayreuth African Studies, 1997. 77-89. ——., “Major Works on Displacement.” New Fiction in English from Africa: West, East and South. Ed. Andre Viola, Jacqueline Bardolph and Denise Coussy. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. 73-107. Barthes, Roland. “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” New Literary History 6 (1975) [1966]: 237-72. Bertoncini-Zubkova, Elena, M. D. Gromov, S. A. M. Khamis, and Kyallo Wadi Wamitila. Outline of Swahili Literature: Prose, Fiction and Drama. 2nd rev. ed. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Booth, Wayne, C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York; Random House, 1984. Callahan, David. “Exchange, Bullies and Abuse in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise.” World Literature Written in English 38.2 (2000): 55-69. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978. Cook, David. African Literature: A Critical View. London: Longman, 1977. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. London: Routledge, 1977. Dawthorne, O. R. African Literature in the Twentieth Century. London: Heinemann, 1974. Farrier, David. “Terms of Hospitality: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43.3 (2008): 121-39. Gikandi, Simon. “The Growth of the East African Novel.” The Writing from East and Central Africa. Ed. G. D. Killam. London: Heinemann, 1984. 231-46. Gikandi, Simon, and Evan Mwangi. The Columbia Guide to East African Literature Since 1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Griffiths, Gareth. African Literatures in English: East and West. Essex: Pearson Educational Publishers, 2000.

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Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Admiring Silence. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996. ——., By the Sea. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. ——., Desertion. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. ——., Dottie. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990. ——., “Imaging the Postcolonial Writer.” Reading the New Literatures in the Postcolonial Era. Ed. Susheila Nasta. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. 73-86. ——., Memory of Departure. London: Jonathan Gape, 1987. ——., Paradise. London: Hamish Halmilton, 1994. ——., Pilgrims Way. London: Jonathan Cape, 1988. ——., “Writing and Place.” World Literature Today 78.2 (2004): 26-28. Helff, Sissy. “Illegal Diasporas and African Refugees in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.1 (2009): 67-80. Jahn, Manfred. Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative. University of Cologne, 2005. Jahn, Manfred, and Marie-Laure Ryan. The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 2005. Kahyana, Danson. “Deconstructing Colonial Identities in Fiction by East African Writers of South Asian Origins.” M.A. Thesis. Kampala: Makerere University, 2006. Killam, G. D., ed. Writings from East and Central Africa. London: Heinemann, 1984. Lee, Robert A. “Long Day’s Journey: The Novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah.” Other Britain, Other British: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction. Ed. Robert A. Lee. London and East Harbour: Pluto, 1995. 111-13. Levi-Strass, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Lindfors, Bernth. Black African Literature in English, 1992–1996. Oxford: Hans Zell, 2000. Njogu, Kimani. Maudhui na Mapinduzi Katika Riwaya ya Visiwani Zanzibar. Nairobi: University of Nairobi Press, 1997. Makokha, J. K. S., Jennifer Wawrzinek, and Russell West-Pavlov, eds. Border-Crossings. Forthcoming 2011. Maslen, Elizabeth. “Stories, Constructions and Deconstructions: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise.” Wasafiri 24 (1996): 53-56. Mbise, Ismael. “Writings in English from Tanzania.” Writings from East and Central Africa. Ed. G. D. Killam. London: Heinemann, 1984. 54-69. Mbughuni, Patricia McKinney. “From Oral to Written: The Politicisation of Kiswahili Literature.” Diss. Indian University, 1978.

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Murimi, Joseph Gaita. “Narrative Process in the Kiswahili Novel: Readings of E. Kezilahabi and Said Ahmed Mohamed.” M.A. Thesis. Kenyatta University, 1998. Mwangi, Evan Maina. Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender and Sexuality. New York: State University of New York Press, 2009. Nasta, Susheila, ed. Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk. New York: Routledge, 2004. Ojwang’, Dan. “The Construction of East African Indian Identities in M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack and Uhuru Street.” M.A. Thesis. University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1997. ——., “Writing Migrancy and Ethnicity: Politics of Identity in East African Indian Literature.” Diss. University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2004. Olaussen, Maria. “Refusing to Speak as Victim. Agency and the arrivant in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Novel, By the Sea.” Africa Writing Europe. Ed. Maria Olaussen and Christina Angelfors. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 217-43. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen, 1983. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage: London, 1994. Scholes, Robert, and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. Schwerdt, Dianne. “Looking on Paradise: Race, Gender and Power in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise.” Contemporary African Fiction. Ed. Derek Wright. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 1997. Siundu, Godwin W. “Multiple Consciousness and Reconstruction of Home in the Novels of Yusuf Dawood and Moyez Vassanji.” Diss. University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2005. Stanzel, Franz K. A. Theory of Narrative. Trans. Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Tirop, Peter Simatei. The Novel and the Politics of Nation Building in East Africa. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2001. Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction to Poetics. Brighton: Harvester, 1981. Tunai, Charles Kesero. “Technique of Narration and Its Role in the Communication of Meaning in Three Novels of Nurrudin Farah.” M.A. Thesis. Kenyatta University, 1997. Wanjala, Chris, L. “Growth of an East African Literary Tradition: Inaugural Lecture.” Nairobi: University of Nairobi, 2003. Wright, Derek. New Directions in African Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1997.

Maria Jesus Cabarcos Traseira

Between Diasporic Identity and Agency: Versions of the Pastoral in Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way and Mahjoub’s Navigation of a Rainmaker The authoritative, compelling image of the empire, which crept into and overtook so many procedures of intellectual mastery that are central in modern culture, finds its opposite in the renewable, almost sporty discontinuities of intellectual and secular impurities – mixed genres, unexpected combinations of tradition and novelty, political experiences based on communities of effort and interpretation. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (335)

Introduction: The Postcolonial Version of the Pastoral Novel Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way (1988) and Jamal Mahjoub’s Navigation of a Rainmaker (1989) revise the characteristics of the post-romantic pastoral, thus exemplifying a late twentieth-century trend in the pastoral tradition. Following Paul Alpers’s reading of the pastoral tradition as a history of reversals of previous versions of the pastoral, post-colonial pastoralism tests the limits of pre-established traditional oppositions such as the country-city binary. The post-colonial pastoral text proposes a range of alternatives to such dialectical categories. Thus, these novels foreground images of reconciliation of extremes; they focus on the tension between and on the mutual influence of the two ends of the oppositions; they find alternative cosmologies that do not read the world as a system of binaries; or they highlight the subjective and the individual perception as strategies that counter a systemic ordering of the world. In doing this, these post-colonial novels reject the highly oppositional features of post-romantic pastoralism, and they seek inspiration instead in the romantic revolutionary version of the pastoral. William Wordsworth is invoked as the poet who “shatter[ed] the continuity” of the pastoral (Sambrook 133), and his The Prelude is read as the work that took “us out of the woods of Arden and into the world of the modern shepherd and, perhaps, of a modern pastoral” (Alpers 21). The most influential of the romantics in this regard, Wordsworth reformed the pastoral as he reconciled pastoral elements that were traditionally separate or even

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dialectically opposed. He merged the mythical and the personal, the general and the particular. “Wordsworth’s lyrics,” writes Harold E. Toliver, “unite spiritual elevation with anecdotes of time, place, and common experience in a new way that reconceives their relationship and radically reconceives pastoral” (258). Likewise, Michael Squires feels that “Wordsworth is not writing as a traditional pastoralist. Nor is he literal […] in interpreting humble and rustic life. Put simply,” Squires concludes, Wordsworth “alternates between realism and idealisation in his treatment of rural life” (47). In his reinterpretation of the pastoral, “[t]he golden past and the pleasant place become a personal time and a personal landscape and yet retain the equivalent of mythic dimensions” (Toliver 258). 1 For Renato Poggioli, the revolutionary reversal of the pastoral tradition brought about by the romantics and the historical circumstances that surrounded it ended the pastoral tradition. Thus, Poggioli considers that four different forces came together during the advent of romanticism that, “[w]hile creating quasi-pastoral utopias, […] destroyed the conventional and traditional pastoral.” These four “cultural trends” he lists as “the humanitarian outlook, the idea of material progress, the scientific spirit, and artistic realism” (31). The scientific spirit and the coming of romanticism coincided, Poggioli holds, in the repudiation of the “conventional and the fanciful” and in the development of a “new spirit of ‘truth’ that inspired modern Western culture even in the artistic field” (32). The new imagination promoted by the romantics “expanded nature into a boundless realm, which replaced the meadows and groves, as well as the orchards and gardens, of traditional poetry.” As a consequence of the convergence of these historical factors, Poggioli claims that “pastoral poetry finally died, and disappeared from sight” (33). Nevertheless, Poggioli readily admits that, although he feels that pastoral poetry died with the romantics, “the pastoral ideal survived” (33; emphasis added). This ideal emerges in non-literary forms such as “‘the back to nature’ movement […] [or] the cult of the primitive.” As for modern literary pastorals, Poggioli finds that most of them are written in prose. These prose pastorals are “devitalised and unrecognisable,” and they “break all 1

Other romantic poets attempted also this “union of passion, simplicity, and truth” (Sambrook 132) in a variety of groundbreaking ways. Coleridge, for instance, rejected the established separation between the retreat in nature and the life of the court and he endeavored to “achieve communion […] through the imagination […] with the total body politic.” Likewise, Shelley understood his role as the channel through which “what the west wind and the skylark offer” may reach society. Finally, Keats, too, regarded poetry as a means of political and social improvement by “its offering of realisable dreams” (Toliver 263).

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traditional patterns and attitudes.” As examples of these radical departures, he mentions extravagant new settings and characters. Pastorals set in urban settings, or even indoors, or during the winter, replace country and rural pastorals, while “plebeians and urban outcasts fill the role once played by countrymen and villagers” (33). In What Is Pastoral? Alpers reviews the pastoral as a history of critiques of the previous version of the tradition. Based on a similar assumption about the dialectical progression of the pastoral, Toliver writes that the romantics in general and Wordsworth in particular respond to (and to an extent react against) previous tenets of the tradition, and that the post-romantics re-assert some of the values that the romantics had deconstructed. As we saw, the romantic pastoralists’ view of the locus amoenus reconciled the realistic and the symbolic, the transcendental and the personal. Toliver holds that the realistic inclination of the romantics informs the post-romantics’ view of the opposition of country to city. Thus, he explains that post-romantic pastoral consists also in a “[failed] attempt to find a means to unite them – or at least minimise the impact of their separation” (210). Because their effort does not succeed, the post-romantics re-assert the distance between the real and the ideal, the industrial city and the pastoral country that the romantics had attempted to reconcile. Furthermore, this seemingly irresolvable separation between fiction and reality engenders in the post-romantics a “sceptical view of the pastoral tradition.” This scepticism leads modern versions of pastoral to “suggest that the distance between fictional idylls and the daily world precludes any genuine transformation of reality except an imagined one” (Toliver 14). In The Pastoral Novel, Michael Squires examines the evolution of the post-romantic pastoral. He shares Poggioli’s and Toliver’s opinions about the diversification of this literary mode’s post-romantic versions as well as about this new pastoral’s inclination towards the personal and the realistic, but he does not see these as indicative of the end of the pastoral. Further, he does not consider the novel as a “devitalised” (Poggioli 33) contemporary manifestation of the pastoral ideal, and thus goes on to elaborate a definition of the pastoral novel to cover its diverse manifestations, and he lists the motifs that were passed on from earlier moments of the pastoral: the pastoral novel […] [is] the subgenre of the novel, developing out of the pastoral tradition, which idealises country life by using many of the elements and techniques of traditional pastoral – principally, the contrast between city and country; the re-creation of rural life from both urban and rural viewpoints; the implied withdrawal from complexity to simplicity; the nostalgia for a Golden-Age past of peace and satisfaction; the implied criticism of modern life; and the creation of a circumscribed and remote pastoral world. This

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remote pastoral world features harmony between man and nature, idyllic contentment, and a sympathetic realism which combines elements of idealisation and realism and by means of which country life, stripped of its coarsest features, is made palatable to urban society. (18)

Summing up, Poggioli, Toliver, Alpers, and Squires highlight some important main features in the post-romantic pastoral in general and in the pastoral novel that flourished after the romantics in particular. The postromantic pastoral novel is, then, indebted to the romantics for their turn towards the realistic and for their valorisation of the personal and the subjective. As a reaction to the romantic pastoral, however, the pastoral novel re-establishes the separation between traditionally opposed terms such as the country-city and the ideal-real binary. Finally, this separation leads pastoral novelists to adopt a sceptical view of the actual possibilities of influence of the "ideal" (i.e., both the pastoral novel itself within historical context and the pastoral moment within a literary work) on the “real” (i.e., the material circumstances surrounding the production of the novel and the “city” in the pastoral novel). My contention is that Pilgrims Way and Navigation of a Rainmaker, as examples of late twentieth-century post-colonial pastoral novels, react against systemic binaries that relegate the multifaceted histories and backgrounds of the formerly colonial worlds to pre-established categories of otherness, darkness, primitivism, or unrealistic paradises. These post-colonial pastoral novels propose instead a reconciliation of or an alternative to traditionally opposed binary terms, and they restore the attention to the subjective and the individual. In this, as in its underlying realism, these post-colonial pastoral novels are indebted to the romantic revolutionary mutation of the pastoral.

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way: Paradise Reconstructed by the Serpent Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. […] “Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all cattle […] He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel. Genesis 3, 1-15

Abdulrazak Gurnah's Pilgrims Way tells the story of the Tanzanian immigrant Daud, who has been living in Canterbury, in the “heart of the evangelical centre,” for five years. Daud’s life in England is dominated by the fear of and the contempt for those who look at him with an “imperial grin,” a mask showing racist hatred that is worn by many English citizens.

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Contempt has led to violent feelings of rejection and prejudice on Daud’s part, while fear has rendered him incapable of any action beyond haughty detachment. Pilgrims Way shows the process through which Daud comes to realise that this initial attitude buys directly into the racist discourse that promotes the rigid opposition of white to black and British to alien that he meant to counter in the first place. In this process, Daud searches for the origins of his defeatist life philosophy and he finds them in the racial and religious confrontations that victimised him in his homeland after decolonisation. As he connects his current condition in England with his past experiences in Tanzania, his binary distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is ruptured and Daud is pushed out of his present condition of paralysis into one where he can accept the possibility of change outside the racist discourses by which he has been othered. He further realises that it was in his homeland that his complicit involvement in the process of othering began, as he himself used to reenact narratives of conquest over the land that had been previously subjected to colonialism. With this realisation Daud finds the possibility to rethink, first, his ancestral home as something other than a territory for narratives of conquest and dreams of pastoral primitiveness and, second, his migrancy as a site of agency and power. In a strategy that parallels Daud’s effort to find alternatives to the existing racist categories and their loaded entailments, Pilgrims Way makes use of the pastoral tripartite motif of flight from the city/ retreat into the country/ return to the city to describe Daud’s return to agency. This appropriation revises the pastoral tradition in that the location for a pastoral retreat – the site of the discovery of empowering agency – is found in the acceptance of a hybrid city, constantly renewed by the incorporation to its life and identity of components like the post-colonial migrant. Named after David, the child who had to meet the Philistine giant Goliath in unequal combat (40), Daud conceives of life around him in terms of disadvantageous oppositions, a direct legacy from colonialism. All confrontations are symptomatic of the central confrontation between coloniser and colonised, and all encounters between a British white and a black alien re-enact the colonial encounter. The opening scene of the novel exemplifies Daud’s perspective of the world. At a bar, he suspiciously observes the barman chatting with an old man; he then sees how they chuckle to themselves and how they turn to look at him. As the old man grins, Daud thinks of the grin “as the one that won an empire. […] It had traveled the seven seas, flashing at unsuspecting wogs the world over” (5). The grin as a racist mask, as a facade hiding xenophobia and racial prejudice, is thus introduced in the first pages of the novel. Its acknowledgment marks the

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initial stage in Daud’s process of identity transformation as it identifies the position from which Daud evolves in the novel. His evolution will take him to find ways to fight what the grin represents, to recognise his own prejudiced grins, and to accept the possibility of two individual people facing each other without grinning. Through the novel Daud is subjected to numerous instances of blatant racism as well as of hypocritical egalitarianism. Walking in the streets, he often encounters unnamed citizens who think it their duty to make him feel unwelcome among them. On one such occasion, Daud sees a man walking his dog “start to grin.” Recognising the sign, he “threw dignity to the winds and fled, the [man’s] dog panting and leaping behind him. He heard the man laugh” (9). Still, Daud is particularly critical of members of the English society who flaunt their liberalism while remaining fundamentally prejudiced. He realises that to his young and educated English neighbours, Susan and Tony, Daud is public proof of their open-mindedness, which they are intent on demonstrating publicly by establishing physical contact with him. Out driving, Susan perches behind him in the car, “her arm on his shoulder and her plump breasts leaning against him.” At another gathering, Tony tells Daud about his experiences working in South Africa and about how pleasantly surprised he had been at “the amount of contact between black and white […] multi-racial parties, children playing together.” When conversation warms up, it reveals that “the best-loved character in the office [where Tony worked] […] was Amos the black messenger […] [who] kept everybody in tucks with his antics.” To culminate the string of racial slurs, Tony explains how his nephew had been nursed by a black woman. “Christ,” he declares, “how far can you go to show that you don’t have any racial prejudices? To let your own child be suckled by a black woman!” (93). Constant persecution has made Daud as paranoid as he appears at the beginning of the novel, when he explains that he feels “exposed when he [sits] […] in a pub alone” (6). To cope with the grins and the racism, Daud has devised his own strategies, but none of them take the form of open confrontation or direct opposition. He vents his frustration by writing letters, in an elevated tone and full of irony, to those whom he suspects are prejudiced against him. When a young white girl he has been observing returns his gaze, he mentally composes an imaginary letter addressed to her: “Dear Pale Face,” he starts, “Did you think I was studying you with desire throbbing through my veins? Is that why you looked so amused? Black Boy Lusts After White Flesh” (26). He also sublimates his anger by transferring it to the sport of cricket. He follows the progress of the English team as it faces teams from former colonies (Australia, West Indies) and he perceives these

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matches, which he describes with war metaphors, as contests for colonial supremacy: “It was as if they were the last two Englishmen on the walls of Khartoum or the beaches of Dunkirk. […] They were demonstrating their moral superiority over their torturers. Britons nevernevernever shall be slaves” (88). This two-fold, bloodless sublimation proves self-castrating on two counts. On the one hand, it invokes essentialised categories that were established in colonial times and it reinforces the validity of such divisions made on racial terms primarily. On the other hand, venting actual racial frustration through a vicarious confrontation on a cricket field denies Daud the agency and courage that his namesake, the heroic David, flaunted in face of a seemingly hopeless combat. It further reveals Daud's fundamental selfpositioning as the weakest of the two ends of the binary. As Stuart Hall explains, during colonialism, “not only […] were we constructed as different and other within the categories of knowledge of the West,” but the colonial empires “had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘Other’” (394-95). Describing the main character’s dissatisfaction in and alienation from a city that defiles his soul constitutes also the prerequisite for the tripartite structural motif of flight/retreat/return of the pastoral tradition. Pilgrims Way alludes to this traditional pastoral retreat in its reference to the island off the coast of Daud’s native city in Tanzania. Daud’s reflections on his life in Canterbury, in which he feels victimised by prejudice, trigger memories of a boat-trip with his friend Rashid (Bossy) to an island, memories that are framed by recollections of a city also full of abuse and violence (Gurnah 16466). From the reality of the present, as from the memories of the city on the Tanzanian mainland in the past, Daud escapes to the island. He recalls how, on one December afternoon, he and his friend had “sailed serenely on [as] […] Rashid began to sing” (171). The adventure, however, soon turns into a re-enactment of the journeys of exploration and conquest that had in the past brought the British Empire to those shores. For the Royal Naval officer who had first “discovered” the island by being “the first European to stumble on it,” the island had constituted the retreat of the pastoral tradition: “Exhausted by […] [the] courageous act” of bombing the city across the island, the officer “had sought to soothe his shattered nerves by going rambling on the green, off-shore island that was unmarked on his map.” Furthermore, when the naval officer set foot on the island, “he roamed its gentle hills” and saw the enclosure of the site as a possibility for archeological and military exploitation. Pilgrims Way implies that this act of colonialist “discovery” and exploitation shattered the pastoral possibilities of the colonies as represented by this city and its off-shore island.

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Decades after the Royal Naval officer had walked there, Rashid and Daud escape to the island, but it is full of mementos of the colonial presence and its pastoral beauty has turned into decay: the “grove of palms” is “choked with weeds and wild tomatoes,” the ground is covered with “pungent leaf-mould and rotting humus,” and even “the haven of the waterfall” is circled with “slimy rocks […] covered with slime” (173-74). The transformation observed in this island after its “discovery” by the imperial officer suggests that the imposition of a pastoral tradition on the colonial space goes hand in hand with the political domination exercised by imperialism as they both cause equal destruction. As a consequence of the visit of the Naval officer and of the reenactment of his example by Daud and Rashid, there is no invigoration of self for either one of them in that afternoon escapade. 2 The return to the city does not bring a fuller understanding of self and a stronger notion of social action, as a fatal squall ends Rashid’s life and violent racial and religious riots overwhelm a defenceless Daud. In this way, the presentation of the island as a retreat in the “country” for the imperial officer invokes the traditional pastoral and highlights the relation of power/powerlessness implicit in the city/country binary when it is relocated, essentialised and untested, on colonial grounds. The novel shows ways in which the pastoral city/country divide can be problematised and proposes an alternative that leaves the binary opposition and its potentially discriminatory characteristics aside. In this process, the novel as a whole and the identity quest of its protagonist follow a similar progression: both move away from the invocation (and its implicit restatement) of existing essentialising binaries and carve out alternative spaces from which they generate their narrative pastoral images and personal identity, respectively.

2

Squires holds that the pastoral novel often deals with the issue of personal identity: “the pastoral novel seeks to create a feeling of wholeness in those whose lives have been fragmented in the urban centres” (11). To this purpose, the novel usually adopts the following tripartite structure: “a withdrawal to a place apart that offers a perspective on sophisticated life, a reassessment of values and a reorientation toward society, followed by a return to the complex and active world” (9-10). David Young insists on the need for the third stage to take place: “to be a credit to art, […] pastoral had to avoid the limited accomplishments of escape” (32) and Richard Hardin argues that, “if the work advocates an escape instead of an invigorating retreat leading to a return to the city, the work is an example of ‘flawed pastoral’” (2). For a detailed study of the different forms this three-stage motif has taken through time, see Toliver (1971: passim), Young (20), and Poggioli (15557).

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In his work, Homi K. Bhabha has studied the psychological implications of the colonial encounter in depth. 3 He explains how, in order to be able to conceptualise the new worlds and the new worldviews of the colonies, the colonisers created stereotypical images of the colonised. At stake was the colonisers' own identity, since they defined who they were by opposition to the stereotype of the colonised, who functioned – in this psychological process of identity formation – as the other to the colonisers (and vice versa, as the colonised were forced to assume their condition as “other,” thus inextricably linking their identity formation to that of the colonisers’ stereotype). Bhabha holds, however, that there is a fundamental ambivalence in the invocation of such stereotypes (i.e., they are by definition fixed, but they are renewed and renovated every time they are invoked) and that in such ambivalence resides the possibility of resistance and power for the colonised. Since the identity of each group depends on that of their “other,” the perception that the latter does not stay contained by the limits of their stereotypes ruptures the identity of the former. In the novels which frame such identity reconsideration processes within the pastoral tripartite motif, the encounter triggering such a rupture is located in the second stage of the process, “retreat into nature.” In Pilgrims Way, the “colonial” encounter is represented by the relationship between Daud and the white, high-middle class English nurse Catherine Mason. When Daud meets Catherine at the hospital where he is an orderly, he measures her by the standards he applies to the rest of society. When, in desperation, a novice Catherine rushes out of the operations theatre asking where the “protractors” are, Daud ignores her plea for help on the grounds that “he had had to force himself to start off for work at all, let alone be civil to some heartless, mindless colonel’s daughter who was demanding a protractor from him like he was the club punkah-wallah” (15). Catherine consistently reacts by challenging Daud’s prejudices, which in turn triggers an effort on his part to reconsider. The step that follows in the process – asking Catherine out – demonstrates his openness to be questioned and to find a respite away from the grimness of his racism-dictated life. This moment is also the first time the novel pays any significant attention to the natural surroundings in which the action takes place:

3

For a full explanation of the theories here summarised, see Bhabha’s “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition” and “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.”

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‘Have dinner with me tonight,’ he said. In the silence he heard the breath wheeze out of him. The light was gentle, the sun having disappeared behind a cloud. A sudden burst of bird song reached him across the glade. The sedge swayed along the margins of the lake. The sound of water rippling over rocks was hushed by the fragrant bushes that surrounded the pavilion: lavender and jasmine and sweet oleander. In the distance, he heard the sound of bells pealing the hours, joyous and lifting. (50)

In this passage all the classic characteristics of the locus amoenus are present: a bright and positive nature that mirrors the protagonist’s feelings at this moment; sensory imagery with special emphasis on the sound and odours of nature and its creatures. Pilgrims Way, however, does not present sudden and radical conversions of characters, and Daud’s self-transformation takes time. Even before Catherine turns down this first invitation, the lines that follow the passage quoted above indicate that Daud has not radically abandoned his perspective of life: “He struggled to prevent a grin of triumph from breaking across his face. […] He had beached and laid low all her defences. He could already see the acclaim his conquest would bring. His landlord would grin […]. Karta would see it as a victory for black humanism” (50). The process will progress as Catherine’s individuality continues to defy Daud’s essentialised notion of the “British.” For instance, when she does accept a later invitation, she openly reflects on the racial component of their relationship: “Am I crazy, going to spend a weekend with this man I hardly know? A black man. […] Part of me was ashamed of […] us. As if it was a kind of failure. […] Everybody will think there’s something wrong with me” (107). As the conversation goes on, Catherine gains a larger and larger understanding of her own motives and her own prejudices. At the end, she comments how “what [she] […] should’ve said [was] that [she] […] was going to spend the weekend with this poverty-stricken black man who is a Muslim as well” (109). In contrast to her first description of Daud as a “black man,” her new more complete portrayal highlights the recognition of the essentialist and racist assumptions underlying her first impression of Daud. The first real step in Daud's transformation takes place when Daud experiences moments of harmony with nature in the middle stage of the tripartite pastoral process of flight/retreat/return. When Catherine accepts Daud’s second invitation, the classical pastoral feature of seclusion in nature is highlighted again. This time, they are sitting “under a chestnut tree in the garden that led off from the common room but was enclosed from the road by a hedge.” Daud and Catherine talk “comfortably and easily together,” washing away the “awfulness of the ward.” In this atmosphere of natural

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seclusion and ease, Daud suggests “get[ting] away from the hospital regime” and she accepts. “Just like that!” Daud feels. In contrast to previous instances, when he gets home, his thoughts of war-like efforts are not connected to the conquest of Catherine, but they are directed against the tangible grime in his life, represented here by “the slimy shower floor, […] spongy with rot” (67). Targeting the dirty floor that he had simply taken for granted up to this point constitutes a symbolic divergence from Daud’s initial policy of detachment and non-involvement. From this point on the novel incorporates numerous instances in which Daud demonstrates a progressive reconsideration of his life-philosophy. Instead of simply noticing everybody else's racism, he remembers instances in which he himself behaved with racial prejudice (137-38). Also, as he watches a cricket match, he admits the courage of the English captain (207). His recollection of the afternoon he spent with his friend Bossy at the island constitutes, however, the most meaningful instance of the change Daud is undergoing. He remembers now how, after the riots, the streets showed the traces of the events. “There were signs of looting everywhere but no signs of fighting,” he recalls. “Nobody had stood up and said you can’t do this to us. We’d allowed ourselves to be treated like contemptible bloodless parasites, to be brushed off as if we truly did not belong there” (180-81). The lack of resistance of the groups under attack offered a lesson to Daud that had gone unexamined until now. Up to that point, the pastoral retreat had not yet ended in a stronger grasp of self identity and social responsibility, as is common in the pastoral tradition, because, as Bossy and Daud bought directly into the dialectic of absolutist categories, the retreat had turned into an opportunity for the reenactment of colonial conquest. That afternoon, Bossy died, and it took Daud eleven years to gain a fuller understanding of himself and to comprehend the lesson implicit in the retreat. The form of Daud’s fuller involvement with society that marks his “return to the city” remains unclear at the end. He is fully aware that his resistance to the processes that still position him on the weakest end of Manichean oppositions cannot be a quixotic and individual fight – just like singlehandedly confronting the rioting mobs after his trip to the island would not have improved his situation. A term-by-term reversal of binaries that came into existence during colonial times is equally unfruitful, since these reversals restate as they invoke former situations of inequality. The end of the novel presents a Daud that is taking strides forward in his attempt to understand his position in society outside of the two possibilities (colonised/coloniser) he recognised up to that point. One evening Catherine rushes in from the street, after a man had tried to sexually assault her in a telephone booth: “He had

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managed to get an arm in and kept trying to reach her, saying I want to fuck you, I want to fuck you.” Daud interprets the incident by relating it to his own experiences. When “he had been spat at, threatened, pissed on for being in a call box,” he had assumed that the reason was entirely race-related. Now he recognises that “perhaps the matter was more complex than that” (209). As he realises that prejudice is not necessarily restricted to the experience of colonialism, and as he accepts that one of the “others,” a British citisen, might be subjected to a position of disadvantage in certain specific circumstances, Daud is admitting the inadequacy of his rigid binaries and beginning to devise strategies to conceptualise the world from a position outside the limits of these categories. In the last scene of the novel, Daud reaches an awareness of what his position in society needs to be. He feels that “he had come, carrying a living past, a source of strength and reassurance, but it had taken him so long to understand that what he had brought could no longer reach its sources” (231). Daud realises that, because of his fixation with the past, the past “became a thing, maggoty and deformed, a thing of torture […]. And he began to think of himself as a battered and bloated body washed up on a beach, naked among strangers. Like Bossy in the end” (231). Daud’s final “return” to the city, his engagement with social action, occurs when he no longer aligns himself with individuals who allow things to happen to them and consider it a victory. As he visits the Canterbury cathedral for the first time, he realises that his place in the English society where he has been living for five years is the same of earlier foreigners whose presence had transformed the environment they entered. He finds the key to his survival as a migrant as he discovers “how newness enters the world,” and how the “entering” by a foreign cultural component of a “recipient” culture destroys the latter’s nativist dreams of “supremacy” not as it negates it but as it negotiates its temporal manifestations (Bhabha 227-28). In the cathedral Daud feels that he “had come for the same kinds of reasons that had made barbarian wolf-man build that stone monument, part of the same dubious struggle of the human psyche to break out of its neurosis and fears.” The ultimate motivation, Daud realises now, “wasn’t about God. It was about the resourcefulness to create something huge and beautiful, a monstrous monument to the suffering and pain that we travel thousands of miles to lay at some banal shrine. And it’s been going on all the time” (231-32). And this process that had been happening “all the time” entails, in this case, the transformation of the British culture by displaced foreigners who gave birth to the “heart of the evangelical centre,” so intrinsic to the British culture.

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Daud’s epiphany at the cathedral leads to his selection of a new image to substitute for the life philosophy of non-involvement. Daud promises Catherine that, “when he had had a rest, […] he would release the bunched python of his coiled psyche on an unsuspecting world” (232). The metaphor of the serpent is influenced by the different lessons Daud has learnt all along and it pushes the cathedral’s epiphany even further: the constant proof of the racist society where he lives cannot be ignored, but neither can the possibility of happiness and pastoral harmony with others and with nature in the city where Daud lives. Daud does not forget the very real power of the mainstream white culture, the shallow liberals and the outright racists and xenophobes who will continue to wish to subject him to the position of the ‘other,’ but he has now carved out for himself a place in that society that can hold the agency and the power to transform the world. Overall, Daud’s image of himself as the python ready to uncoil suggests that he has shed his defeatist compliance with the roles to which he had been subjected and that, from his position of marginality, he reclaims the authority and flaunts the energy of a being that, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, changed the course of history. 4 The serpent-Daud that closes Pilgrims Way is meaningfully located in paradise. This metaphor, together with the legend of the secluded orchard that Daud tells Catherine close to the end, offers a final commentary on the trajectory that the pastoral motif of the locus amoenus has developed in the novel. Earlier, Daud had invoked the traditional image of the homeland as a territory of exoticism and pastoral primitivism, only to denounce the process of conceptualisation as a colonialist technique. In the legend of the orchard, Daud indicates how the danger of essentialisms is possible in other contexts. Thus, one summer afternoon, he and Catherine “hired a boat and drifted lazily under the old arches[,] […] [and] tied up their boat beneath an overhanging oak” (208-09). From this stereotypically pastoral secluded spot, they can observe an enclosed orchard, and Daud recalls the legend of a young rich local girl and a vagrant boy with “dark looks” whom the girl’s father hires out of pity. Because, out of prejudice, the boy is treated poorly (by all but the girl), he decides to run away, but not before “he lured [her] […] into 4

Although the novel calls attention to the Christian tradition in its references to the “evangelical center” of England and to the Canterbury cathedral, it is undeniable that the image of the powerful serpent has to be put in the context of the religious background of the protagonist. In the Islam, the serpent is considered a mighty and powerful being. This, of course, emphasises the reading of the novel proposed here, in its understanding of how the British culture and its traditional Christian heritage are being modified by the newness of the migrants arriving from different cultural and religious backgrounds.

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the orchard and slaughtered her, mutilating her sex to show his contempt for her.” Apparently, “years later,” the legend continues, “his body was found there on the river bank, where he had returned to die” (209). Telling the story of these unfortunate lovers while he sits on a boat with Catherine, as he had years earlier with his friend Bossy, Daud demonstrates his newly-acquired understanding of the dynamics of prejudice. Had Daud not learnt the reality of his own racism, the legend indicates, he would be eternally connected to the “maggoty and deformed” past, and even after death would he be unable to move entirely forward. Thus, Pilgrims Way proposes that there is power and agency in positions between and outside the Manichean categories inherited from colonialism, and that invoking these binaries – even in an attempt to fully oppose them – actually revitalises the demons of the past in the present. The novel proposes that the characteristics of categories such as coloniser and colonised, white and black, country and city are rigid only when each individual invokes them as fixed. The legend and the memory of the island illustrate how pastoral retreats are not dependent on external stereotypical locations such as exotic isles or secluded orchards by the river. Instead, the novel shows redeeming possibilities and pastoral retreats next to prejudice in a metropolitan centre, locus amoenus that could turn destructive from an imperialistic outlook, and as the central metaphor of it all, paradise deconstructed and reconstructed by the serpent.

Jamal Mahjoub’s Navigation of a Rainmaker: Wastelands and Pastoral Retreats After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places The shouting and the crying Prison and palace and reverberation Of thunder of spring over distant mountains He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying […] a flash of lighting. Then a damp gust Bringing rain T. S. Eliot, ‘What the Thunder Said,’ The Waste Land (lns 322-394)

Jamal Mahjoub's Navigation of a Rainmaker (1989) inscribes its protagonist’s process of identity reconsideration within the pastoral tripartite

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motif of flight from the city / retreat into the country / return to the city. Its young protagonist, Tanner, finds his identity destabilised by circumstances generated by post-colonial migration. Not only does he occupy a position of marginality in the formerly colonial urban centre where he lives as the novel opens, but the experience of migrancy itself produces rupture and instability at the core of his self. As Tanner’s pastoral process progresses, he abandons the rigid binaries by which he was operating (metropolis vs. colony, British vs. post-colonial, first vs. third world) and he redefines the relationship between the two extremes of these oppositions as one of interpenetration. Subsequently, he realises that one of the manifestations of this interpenetration between “first” and “third” worlds is ecological neoimperialism orchestrated from the metropolitan centres. In this connection of contemporary social issues such as environmental responsibilities and the search of identity, the novel revitalises the pastoral tripartite motif of the tradition. This traditional motif becomes then an adequate frame for the achievement of the “new critical consciousness” that Said calls for in order to fight the main conflicts of the neocolonial world, conflicts which he summarises as “the struggle of nationalities or […] the problems of deforestation and global warming, the interactions between individual identities […] and the general framework” (330). In the novel, Tanner reformulates the terms along which he defines his identity crisis – terms of post-colonialism and migrancy, terms of national frontiers and political domination. Because he originally interpreted his personal apathy as the consequence of the imperial disruption of his paternal ancestors’ Sudan, Tanner feels that, by reversing the journey and “returning” to a Sudan he has never been to, he will find the missing piece in the puzzle of his life and identity. Tanner is thus conjuring up an ancestral home, an “imagined community,” 5 that would immediately return his essential self to him. His expectation, however, is not satisfied because it aligns itself with nativist and essentialist concepts of identity that, although seemingly different, buy directly into the dynamics of the othering processes they mean to defy. These nativist efforts rest on the notion that it is possible to recover the wholeness of the colonised people as it existed before it was disrupted and othered by colonialism. This essentialist nativism “offer[s] a way of 5

This term is borrowed from Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. In it, Anderson explains the processes through which incipient nationalisms found inspiration in imagining the nation as a “community” (56). As he attempts to define his identity, the protagonist of this novel of the diaspora also imagines this essentialised notion of a community.

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imposing an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation, which is the history of all enforced diasporas” (Hall 394). These nativist discourses also idealise the images of the ancestral communities, but from the position of the displaced subject in a post-colonial and neo-colonial context, these idealised locations are always found in “other” places in the world. Furthermore, since these nativist discourses intertwine place and identity, they also relegate the possibility of achieving a unified notion of self to other locations. The images of these distant communities feed for their literary description on traditions such as the pastoral, which speaks of alternative havens of harmony with nature and people in spots of simple beauty that counter the effects of colonial metropolitan centres corrupted by progress. Tanner’s journey does not work in the manner that he anticipates because going back in space does not imply going back in time also. Tanner essentialises the Sudan as England’s other and imagines an instant communion with the formerly colonised “Land of Blacks” (49). In this communion with “the land of his origin,” he envisions the solution to the “listless[ness]” and “deject[ion]” he feels. Because of his hybrid racial identity Tanner has been stigmatised as an outsider in England. Also, as he has been subjected to the knowledge of his own otherness (Hall 395), Tanner has been confronted with “inequalities [,][…] poverty[,] and […] racism” (Mahjoub 66). After four years in Khartoum, however, the process of selfdegeneration initiated in England has actually been intensified. Instead of instant personal enlightenment, Tanner has found corruption, legions of homeless and poor, and a young and privileged generation that embraces the commodity-life of the “first” world and neo-colonial acculturation (50). Although unsure of where the root of his error lays, he feels that “there was a sense in which he had betrayed his own beliefs. He had come here to start a new life, to find out if he had a home here. Yet here he was isolated and alone” (69). The same erroneous instinct that guides Tanner to leave England as the answer to his apathy leads him now to escape from the place that has not fulfilled his expectations: “He would always be a tourist here, a foreigner anyway. […] If he was a foreigner both here and in Britain, then he would be a foreigner wherever he went” (105). In his inclination to travel from place to place as a citizen of the world, Tanner is close to the ideal position of Victor St. Hugo’s “perfect man” or “emigrant intellectual,” from which a critical perspective of a neo-colonial world could be retained, according to

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Edward Said. 6 Tanner, however, misunderstands the quality of personal involvement Said hopes for at the end of Culture and Imperialism. “The ‘perfect’ person,” Said explains, “achieves independence and detachment by working through attachments, not by rejecting them” (336). Tanner’s progress in the novel can be described as the evolution from the disoriented lack of involvement he displays at the beginning to the achievement of the kind of attachment that would make him a “perfect man.” The popular pastoral tripartite motif of flight / retreat / return rests, as seen above, on the assumption that a commitment to the workings of society similar to Said’s assertion will be achieved by the character who completes the three stages of the process. In Navigation, Tanner initially seeks escape from his life of disillusionment in Khartoum as he once had left England by travelling to the Sudan. Thus, as he is offered a chance to leave the capital for a few days on a road trip further South into the desert, he readily accepts because he “realise[s] […] that he had needed to get away.” fHe obtains “a 6

According to Said, “the time-honored conventions of art, history, and philosophy do not seem well suited” (330) to tackle the controversies and problems brought about by the “new overall pattern of domination developed during an era of mass societies commanded at the top by a powerfully centralising culture and a complex incorporative economy” (326). As a result, he feels the need to theorise a “new critical consciousness” from which to approach “the interactions between individual identity […] and the general framework” (330). In order to conjure up this new critical positioning from which the challenge of the world of post-colonialism and neo-colonialism can be met, Said recalls French urban sociologist Paul Virilio’s invocation of “people whose current status is the consequence either of decolonisation […] or of major demographic and political shifts” as the “real alternative” to state authority. According to this view, migrant workers, refugees, immigrants, and urban squatters, among others, “inhabit the normally uninhabitable” (326) and their situation could be understood as a metaphorical positionality of resistance. Likewise, in his search for a new critical position, Said finds Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno’s understanding of the “unanswerability” of the immigrant within the host society as a site of resistance useful. According to Said, together with the obvious “disabling” entailments of the immigrant’s marginality, “there is also the positive benefit of challenging the system, describing it in language unavailable to those it has already subdued” (333). Finally, Said recalls a haunting passage by the Saxon monk Hugo of St. Victor who, in the twelfth century, anticipated the independence and fertile productivity of the eternally nomadic immigrant, whom he conceived of as “the perfect man.” “The tender soul,” he describes, “has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his” (qtd. in Said 335). Said explains that it is Hugo’s notion of “working through attachments” as a way to achieve “independence and detachment” that he finds compelling. It is that love-based independent detachment that Said predicates as the location of the new critical perspective that could effect a critical reading of the hybrid nature of “cultures and identities on a global scale” (336), free of liberation-inspired nationalisms that could in fact contribute to a repetition of the imperialist experience (331).

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sense of freedom out here in the open” and, speaking like a character from a tradidional pastoral work, he explains that “it was a relief to be away from the hollow walls of the city” (104-05). This second trip will eventually lead to Tanner’s willing involvement with the world and, therefore, unlike his first escapade, this trip will turn into a complete three-stage pastoral process of identity reconfiguration. The transition in Tanner’s attitude towards his role in the trip and in society is framed by more and more frequent discussions of a political nature. In the past, he noted conversations at the office and in the streets about the redemption of the country by one individual. He has often questioned whether it could be as simple as some people around him seemed to protest: “How could anyone believe that one man could save the world?” (43). Furthermore, the street conversations never lead any of the people voicing their opinions to take any sort of action, as if the political and the private were completely unrelated spheres. The novel compares these attitudes to Tanner’s evasionist escape South and it offers, then, a critique of this perspective in Tanner’s transformation. Further, Tanner’s eventual death resulting from his engagement in social action will be given heroic and legendary dimensions as it is contrasted to the choices of his co-workers (154). Tanner realises what his action needs to be, the specific form his “returnto-the-city” commitment takes, as he gets closer to the heart of the desert. Since his arrival at the geological camp in the desert with his charge, the American “seismic expert” Charles Gilmour, Tanner has the same dream on several occasions. This dream recreates a feeling of choking fear, but in it he finds himself “more relaxed and comfortable than he could remember in months.” Besides, Tanner feels that in his dream he is heading towards a concrete destination and that this place is clearly connected to some kind of action, to something is “about to happen” (116). Equally important in the sense of foreshadowing are the premonitory feelings that Tanner has about how his trip away from the city will defy his expectations. The trip is meant to give him the opportunity to enjoy a “few days of peace and quiet down here” and, in his non-committal, escapist frame of mind, Tanner would have liked to dwell solely on “the feeling of living back in the land; the country for the city” (121). There is evidence all around him, however, of the latest violent encounter of rival factions, “the charred remains of rig and possibly men,” give him the certainty that “things were not to be taken for granted,” and that there just might not be a way to escape his personal involvement in the conflict (121).

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The dream sequence also adds a new element to Tanner’s progression: the connection between the individual and the natural surroundings. His dream describes how “the wind hummed in anticipation, the lightning flickered expectantly and the thunder rumbled” (115). The attention paid to the weather developing in the background of the action emphasises the continual search for life-bringing water. In this sense, Navigation invokes T. S. Eliot’s classic modernist poem The Waste Land. 7 Eliot’s poem progresses from the description of a post-war sterile land breeding only death, corruption, loveless relationships, and madness to a final image in which the rain drops begin to fall and there is a slim promise of redemption, even if it is expressed in words that are set apart from the rest of the poem by their foreignness. Through this poem, there are recurrent images of thunder rolling as the messenger of rain. Likewise, Navigation emphasises the presence of thunder and the lack of the life-generating rain until the very end. Thus, the opening image of the novel invokes a nomadic tribe travelling through the desert. “The desert,” the man whose perspective the narrator adopts in this scene describes, “is a broken place where the wind and the sand and the stars live. […] Further to the west […] the rains had come and turned the land green […]; life could go on” (3). This aridity seems to be the condition of most of the territory: “Everyone they met told the same story. The land was drying up, shrivelling like a leaf in front of their eyes” (4). The novel refers repeatedly to the absence of rain (35, 85) that has transformed the land into a “wasteland of cactus and green puffball plants” (37) and to the increasingly heraldic presence of thunder (115). However, unlike in The Waste Land, in which the rain belongs to a natural cycle that is indifferent to human kind, the rain will appear in Navigation only after Tanner commits himself to fighting the actions of Charles Gilmour, who has been harming the environment. The scepticism and despair of the modernist poem is thus revised in the novel by a connection between the human and the environmental spheres in a manner typical of the “return” stage that follows a retreat from the city in the pastoral tradition. The dream that links Tanner to images of place, rain, thunder, and action represents a progression from the first step of the tripartite pastoral process, flight from the city, into the second, retreat into nature. Tanner goes into this 7

The novel integrates other references to Eliot’s poem. Tanner’s involvement with the prostitute recalls the affair between “the young man carbuncular” and the typist; also, the figure of the Prophet that visits Tanner during his visions resembles the figure of Tiresias, who claims to “have foresuffered all” (243); the sunken boat as a premonition of Tanner's death recalls that of Phlebas the Phoenician, foreshadowed by Madame Sosotris (55), and which is described in “Death by Water.”

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second stage with an increased interest in the topic of social responsibility and action. He has begun to question Gilmour’s actions and, because he fears the repercussions of those actions in the country, he has tried to get him to change his secret plans: “This is their life and their land, it’s not for you to decide what’s best for them” (133). To Tanner’s argument, Gilmour replies with prophetic words. “In this day and age,” he explains, “there’s no such thing as a domestic argument. […] You can’t turn your back on things for ever Tanner – sooner or later things come round to look you in the eye” (133). Tanner begins to understand the need to abandon the models of identity that have subjected him to a feeling of his own otherness. Now he sees the need to replace them with a new cosmology emphasising individual responsibility and the hybridity of a world that challenges the imperialistic categories. The second stage in Tanner’s identity reconsideration occurs in a highly symbolic enclosed location in which the protagonist faces a life-turning metaphorical representation of his attachment to society. Tanner and Gilmour meet a young man named Daniel as they drive through a desert settlement. For Tanner, Daniel represents the antithesis of the young nouveau riche of the country who are educated in the “first” world and cannot wait to leave that “dump” of the Sudan (66). Daniel is involved with the specific needs of his country, as he studies for a degree, Agriculture, that “seemed to make some kind of sense,” unlike those college “graduates sitting around unemployed in the capital because they were too highly qualified to fit into the job market” (131). Daniel, who reconciles also the two “opposites” city and country in Tanner’s eyes, takes him to the mud pyramid built by the mysterious “Rainmaker.” Tanner is struck by the atmosphere inside the construction, which had “the pulse of a temple” and which made it resemble “a religious place” (137). On the walls, which are covered with drawings, Tanner sees “figures painted in various shades of red and brown, heavy shading in charcoal,” depicting “tall people […] [and] outlines of birds in full flight” (136). The drawings cover the walls in mural-like fashion, representing “a mixture of traditional scenes of life on the cattle stations among the tribes.” The pictures wall represent, thus, an image of a bygone time that has been influenced by a nostalgic view of the past. The positive connotation of the birds in flight anticipates the pastoral mood that envelops the next drawing that catches Tanner’s attention: “a figure in a green landscape.” The figure is “drawn slightly larger than most of the others […] the moon rested in his palm. The left hand was held up, palm open towards the sky. From the cupped palm, water flowed through the fingers.” In this drawing that incorporates some of the traditional components of a pastoral

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setting (idealised nature, water – doubly idealised in the context of the desert, – birds, and humans in harmony with it all), Tanner sees a prophetic recreation of life mission: “a dusty echo of […] [his] life and perhaps also a hint towards the premonition that drove him on” (137). In the enclosed space of this mud pyramid Tanner sees the representation of the communion that he would like to have with the world. In this pastoral image, Tanner witnesses the antithesis of the world he has been living in and of the way he has been living in it. In what becomes a progressively clearer projection of Tanner himself onto the mythical level of the story, Daniel explains that the artist of the pyramid “wasn’t from this tribe originally,” that he had simply “appeared one day from nowhere” and that he was “just an ordinary man” (137). The day after he disappeared, as this man had prophesied, “the heaviest rains ever arrived” (138). When put next to the foreboding dream Tanner has had repeatedly during this trip, the story of the Rainmaker acquires prophetic dimensions for Tanner, and it once again connects whatever action he feels he has to take to the natural cycle of drought and rain in the desert. As he leaves the mud pyramid behind, Tanner demonstrates the lesson learnt at this pastoral retreat when he abandons the apathy that has characterised him from the beginning of the novel in order to commit himself personally and socially. As Gilmour’s intentions to “instil confusion” become more and more obvious (168), Tanner confronts him and he is injured in the car accident that follows the struggle. While unconscious, a mythical figure alike the Rainmaker visits him to confirm and, rather superfluously, to explain Tanner’s actions to the reader and to Tanner, and to propose the novel’s premise for the salvation of a more and more hybrid world. “This war,” the Prophet tells Tanner, “is the same war all over again” (159). The only hope for this ever-in-conflict world, alleges the Prophet, lies on inbetween figures that incarnate the reality of a world that breaks boundaries and defies absolutism – figures like Tanner: “you and I are similar in that we were born out of opposites, the coming together of differences. We are both born of integration. That is the only solution” (162). In a later and final confrontation, Tanner resolutely kills Gilmour, and subsequently “the thunder rumble[s] across the troubled sky” (171) announcing the arrival of life-bringing water and the end of Tanner’s pastoral progression towards self-identity. Agonising on a stranger’s bed, Tanner reflects that he “had acted finally and in doing so he had killed a man, but he had also released himself from the years of frustration and lack of direction” (181). With this self-fulfillment and social involvement, Tanner’s personal identity quest ends with the quasi-mythical repercussions of his actions. As

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has been anticipated by the dreams, by the Prophet, and by the legend of the Rainmaker, Tanner’s actions bring water to the land: The ground was coming to life below his feet. […] The water flowed down from the high ground that lay to the west and the east of his bowl, and from the big rivers. The swamps would expand. […] The reeds and the floating grass would flourish and everything would turn green. […] The children dance in the cascade of tears, singing and laughing with all the innocence of joy. […] In the city the cars gleam in their shiny new coats, washed clean by the storm. (173-76)

In this way, the novel ends by replying with a definite “yes” to the question repeatedly asked in previous sections: can a man strong enough to give his own life in the process change the world? In fact, such an action can turn a world devastated by war, a waste land, into a paradise. The novel’s final scenes of pastoral bliss extending from the desert into the cities offer a final commentary on the traditional notion of the locus amoenus. The pastoral pleasant place is represented not as an essentially harmonious secluded spot in which one may find untroubled refuge from the vices of the city. Likewise, the novel suggests that corruption is not naturally contained within the boundaries of urban settlements. The locus amoenus becomes intimately intertwined with the life of the city: what happens in one of them has a life-and-death bearing on the other. In this, Navigation reinterprets the traditional understanding of the connection between country and city. At best, in previous pastoral works, an invigorated pastoral initiate would return to the city and effect some changes in his immediate circle of influence. When the country/city divide is relocated on a neocolonial setting, the novel seems to argue, issues such as the destruction of the natural environment resulting from commercial enterprises ordered by the urban centres give this connection a new dimension and the pastoral is revised as a consequence. Furthermore, the destruction of the environment is presented in Navigation of a Rainmaker as the contemporary version of the effects of an imperialistic vision of the world. In order to fight these contemporary crimes that are turning nature into barren territories, this novel agrees with Said that “a new critical consciousness is needed” (330). This consciousness partakes of the marginal positionality of the migrant who, first, has not yet been absorbed by the foster society’s homogenising apparatuses and who, second, is able to feel the attachment to the land that has become a new home. Such a critical position is required for those who would be able to see the pastoral possibilities of a neo-colonial world that is, at present, in danger of becoming another wasteland.

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Works Cited Alpers, Paul. What Is Pastoral? Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983. Bhabha, Homi K. “How Newness Enters the World.” The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. 212-35. ——., “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition.” Introduction. Black Skins, White Masks. Franz Fanon. London: Pluto Press, 1986. vii-xxvi. Rpt. in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 112-23. ——., “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 144-65. Rpt. in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. 29-35. Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Pilgrims Way. London: St Edmundsbury Press, 1988. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader. Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 392-403. Hardin, Richard F. “The Pastoral Moment.” Survivals of Pastoral. Ed. Richard F. Hardin. Lawrence: University of Kansas Publications, 1979. 1-17. Mahjoub, Jamal. Navigation of a Rainmaker. Oxford: Heinemann, 1989. Poggioli, Renato. “The Oaten Flute.” Harvard Library Bulletin 11 (1957): 147-84. Rpt. in The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Sambrook, James. English Pastoral Poetry. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Squires, Michael. The Pastoral Novel. Studies in George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974. Toliver, Harold E. Pastoral Forms and Attitudes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1815: Authoritative Texts, Context, and Reception, Recent Critical Essays. New York: Norton, 1979.

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Young, David. The Heart’s Forest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Pastoral Plays. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.

Godwin Siundu

Locating Cultural Ambivalence and Afropolitanism: Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam as Heterotopia in the Fiction of Dawood and Vassanji In this article, we seek to examine how the cities of Nairobi and Dar-esSalaam are literarily represented as heterotopias in a novel each by Moyez Vassanji – The Gunny Sack – and Yusuf Dawood – Water Under the Bridge – both being East African writers of Asian extraction. Specifically, we examine the places/spaces of different racial categories within the cities against the backdrop of dichotomies of rooted/rootless, indigenous/immigrants et cetera, as they have been used to describe indigenous African and Asian inhabitants of East Africa, to argue that present-day East African Asians resident in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam can no longer be viewed as a marginal community. The article is influenced to some degree by Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopias, which are seen as real places as opposed to utopias, and which provide a canvass for contests and inversions. 1 Reading urbanisation and its epistemic forms through the novel form differs significantly from using other disciplines for the reason that, as Roger Kurtz notes, “the novel as a form lends itself quite easily to the hybridity that characterises the postcolonial city and consequently makes a useful literary vehicle for exploring urbanization” (76). Guided by a conflation of historical, political and cultural theoretical constructs within the wider postcolonial discourse, we seek to advance two positions: one, that both Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, as indeed many contemporary cities in Africa, have through history invited ambivalent attitudes from nationals of the respective countries, whether these nationals are of the African, European and or Asian provenance. This ambivalence arises out of the simultaneous promises and threats that are enfolded in the trappings of modernities that only the cities offer, in particular possibilities of upward social mobility that creates a sense of sophistication among the urbane members of society, but also the unhingement from social support structures and exposure to risks related to crime, social degeneration, and work-related uncertainties. Our second argument, which arises from the first, is that different groups appropriate specific city spaces as forms of exercising 1

For details of Foucault’s arguments on heterotopias, see “Text/Context of Other Space.”

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agency or securing their own senses of stability within the matrix of racial, economic and social contests. A subsidiary argument is that Nairobi and Dares-Salaam as re-imagined in the novelistic discourses subvert, and therefore transcend, the metonymic role quite often conferred on them by scholars on the city in its relation to the nation. Put differently, we argue that the cities do not provide a chance to imagine the notion of unitary nations along nationstate borders: on the contrary, they provide occasions for strengthening loyalties to sub-nations of ethnic or tribal dispensations. Such ambivalence towards cities is also with regard to the inhabitants of the cities themselves: it is ambivalence towards the various groups that inhabit the cities – whites, Asians and Africans – partly due to the roles played by some of the groups’ forbearers in the histories of slavery, colonialism and, later, postindependence politics of ethnic/racial affirmation. As was with colonial times, the post-independence Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi were affected by a systematic play on and use of stereotypes as instruments of group and society control. Although most of the stereotypes – especially at tribal level – were constructed and applied by colonialists in pursuit of their divide and rule style of governance, the full weight of stereotypes was more potent in the post-colonial times, when the African political elite assumed leadership of the African countries. We are aware that stereotypes and prejudices may obscure important “truths” about groups, but we also acknowledge that such preconceptions are constructed and propagated on the basis of some “truths,” and that they are not absolutely abstract. Indeed, stereotypes quite often mask given communal ideological objectives and may in themselves yield important information about group interactions. This argument is inspired to a degree by Nyairo and Ogude’s view that “[i]t is crucial to interrogate the makers and purveyors of the stereotypes in terms of their ideological objectives and their socio-political impact” (392). In this instance, stereotypes come in handy when imagining forms of identity that not only ensure secure claims to spaces within the cities, but also mark out some claimants as positively different from their competitors. This may well be the point in Nyairo and Ogude’s assertion that “since individual identity is, in part, created through differentiating oneself from others […] in the same way communities – ethnic groups, nations and races – understand themselves in part by stating the differences between them and other communities” (389). The invocation of stereotypes in negotiating belonging to the city spaces is seen in the perceived and actual roles of various groups in the histories of Kenya and Tanzania we mentioned earlier. More urgent to this essay, the dynamics of roles in the late colonial and early post-colonial times witnessed

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a phenomenon where the increasing numbers of indigenous Africans in the urban centres was a cause for concern among the resident whites as well as the Asians who had come in to assist in laying the colonial foundations in Africa. Like their indigenous African neighbours, the whites and Asians also experienced a degree of ambivalence towards the cities they lived in. The ambivalence was seen in the simultaneous perceived risk of the repercussions of mixing with the Africans in their estates and the need to accommodate them in order to tap their labour, as now a semblance of market forces that grounded the exchange of labour on some willingness by concerned parties was in operation. Put in other words, the Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam of immediate pre- and post-independence period were characterised by a remarkable sucking into the white and Asian dominated economies of Africans who went there in search of jobs at a time when the political climate had bestowed power on the black majorities. This called for an act of balancing their interests in a manner that both whites and Asians were strange to. Although such acts of balancing had been instituted at the beginning of colonialism, the boundaries that were set at the same time were now disturbed by the massive incursions of Africans in the urban areas. The one thing that such incursions led to was the perpetuation and mapping of social attitudes carried by indigenous Africans and other racial groups into the various zones that had been prepared to at one level protect the same patronising attitudes in as far as they served the politically and socially dominant whites and Asians and, at another level, make some of the attributes of the dominant groups admirable by the dominated blacks. At the end of the day then, the design of the cities of Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi was done in a manner that relayed the social attitudes that were prevalent at the time. In the post-independence period, the same attitudes persisted in their exclusionary nature to communicate societal tensions, and they have found representation in most of the novels that have emerged so far. 2

2

Indeed Roger Kurtz avers that the East African novel is by and large an urban novel, going by the numerous novelistic works that use the city as the canvass for articulating their respective issues. In fact Kurtz goes ahead to suggest that even the novels that do not use the city as their setting all the same foreground the essence of the city via its absence. See his Urban Obsessions Urban Fears: The Postcolonial Kenyan Novel.

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Historical Emergence of East African Cities The emergence of contemporary East African cities can largely be attributed to the process of colonisation that began from the end of the 19th and ended roughly in the mid 20th centuries. Although in itself a short-lived phenomenon, the effects of colonialism were far-reaching in practically all aspects of life for the majority of indigenous Africans who were to remain on the continent even after the process of formal colonisation had come to an end. The significance of colonialism in the emergence of contemporary African cities is seen in the way in which, through the introduction of the Althusserian apparati, colonialism expedited the entry into the continent of new possibilities of modernities. Socially, culturally, politically and materially, old forms of thinking gave way to occidental influences that now facilitated movement and relocation – with the attendant dislocation – lifestyles that refashioned hitherto unknown forms of vertical differentiation within groups as between them. This scenario also extended to new forms of subjectivities to different and sometimes state-backed loci of power. In a sentence, groups began interacting on new terms by new means. These new dynamics naturally led to intra- and inter-group social, economic and political contests that culminated in the attainment of political independence at the beginning of 1960s. All along, the people were controlled by a conflation of raw weaponry as they were by ideologies of knowledge and power that were exercised and experienced through occupying different spaces within the same regions. Related to this, Foucault is of the view that understanding spatiality is a way to understanding the relationships between power and knowledge: “[o]nce knowledge can be analysed in terms of region, domain, implantation, displacement, transposition, one is able to capture the process by which knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates the effects of power” (69). Deriving from Foucault’s views, we hold that part of the reasons why studies on immigrants continue to yield new debates is because of the weight in the spatial metaphors like displacement, which in their turn evoke images of how the powerful exercise their power on the powerless directly or otherwise. Kurtz writes that modern day Nairobi can be said to have begun in May 1899, when the Uganda Railway reached what was called enkare Nairobi, or place of cold waters, by the Maasai people (77). Because of its relative centrality vis-à-vis Mombasa and Kisumu, Nairobi was significant both to the colonial administrators as well as to the traders who had been around much earlier. Soon, settlements sprouted around the railhead, and the situation was intensified two years later when railway administrative headquarters was

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moved to the site. Kurtz writes that Nairobi offered a perfect opportunity for colonial authorities to experiment with urban planning. He says: Nairobi’s design was the result of two predominant and not necessarily conflicting imperatives: on the one hand to create a model of a Garden City, a concept that was becoming important in British urban planning at the end of the nineteenth century; and on the other hand to create an essentially European city in the African setting, based on the South African model. (77)

Through architectural zoning and legislation – pass laws – the colonialist British then embarked on a process that would later ensure that they had almost total control of the city in terms of who did or did not inhabit it. This decision of policing inclusion/exclusion was based on quasi-legal commissions that recommended racially based segregation of housing quarters that yielded distinctly separate housing for the minority whites who occupied the north and west of the city, followed by Asians (in the Indian bazaar) and then Africans (behind the railway quarters). 3 So right from the beginning, the Asians’ residential area served as a buffer zone between the very few whites and the densely populated indigenous Africans. Whites and Africans were two groups that had inversely related economic power and whose interests clashed the most. This, as it would later emerge, put the Asians in a precarious position that invited mistrust and contempt from their African neighbours. In terms of housing amenities, the colonial administrators initially felt that providing permanent structures would attract more Africans into the city, which was something they did not want. So Africans were only allowed to erect haphazard and temporary structures to house the increasing number of their lot who were migrating into Nairobi. The colonialists’ assumption that Africans were temporary inhabitants of the city did not factor in the determination of the latter to partake in what was deemed as the trappings of Western modernities that were enviable to the majority of peasant Africans. Nor did they consider the possibility of an emerging class of African subelites whom, by virtue of either working for the white men in the city or being marginally educated, alienated themselves from their kith back in the rural areas. The point is that as early as the 1920s when the generation of Harry Thuku internalised sporadic aspects of Western lifestyles, a new crop of urbane Africans was emerging, and it would be nearly impossible to have them return to the rural areas. Instead, the same would attract further emigration to the cities because they led lifestyles that were socially, 3

Kurtz mentions some of the commissions as the Williams Report of 1907, the Simpson Report of 1913, and the Feedham Report of 1926. See Kurtz 78.

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economically and even politically better or admirable than those of the majority of their kith. Hence, as Kurtz writes, the unwillingness by the colonialist administrators to build more decent or durable housing for their African subjects did little to deter the Africans from flocking into the city. Instead, the greater discrepancy in terms of housing quality for whites and Africans only embittered the latter who saw it as unacceptable to have foreign whites living well while the Africans lived in hovels. Indeed the issue of housing would later find a permanent slot on the agenda of the political activists among African leaders, while in the meantime poor and jobless Africans in the city would find criminal activities directed towards whites and Asians in the city an option for survival. For the whites and Asians then, the continued migration of Africans into the city – attracted as they were by the city’s promises – constituted a risk to their wealth, health and power, and it was dealt with through what Kurtz summarises as “the government policy of neglect and containment” (79). Later on, the colonial government changed its policy on racial housing in Nairobi and, as Kurtz writes, shed the easier policy of “neglect and containment” in preference to that of “government paternalism” (79). Beginning in 1939, the colonial government began “to make provisions for workers to live there with their families, thus creating [...] the first housing estate projects for Africans in Ziwani, Kaloleni, and Pumwani. Others followed in the 1940s in Ofafa, Maringo, Makadara, and Jericho” (80). That the colonial administrators had revised their approach in controlling the city space of Nairobi was seen when, as Joseph Slaughter writes, “two town planners and a sociologist were commissioned by the British government to produce a ‘Master Plan of a Colonial Capital’ that would provide a blueprint for the projected development of Nairobi” (37). Nguluma writes that present-day Dar-es-Salaam started in 1860 when Sultan Seyyid Majid Bin Said established his administrative centre there. Its quick development saw the German colonial government shift its capital from Bagamoyo to Da-es-Salaam in 1891 (14). Nguluma adds that “[t]he present land use structure for Dar-es-Salaam and house types in the city centre have been much influenced by early colonial planning” (14). The sociological reading of the racialised zoning of housing in Nairobi as conducted by Kurtz, and the same as is re-produced by Nguluma and Lupala all indicate that as early as the colonial period, the two cities had within them disparate racial, social and economic communities whose knowledge of their neighbouring communities was scanty, based on prejudicial fears and anxieties, and designed by colonialists to remain as such. And this fits in well with Robert Park’s view, as read in Kasinitz, that “[t]he process of

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segregation establish[es] moral distances which make the city a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate”(163). This situation is quite different from what would emerge in the early post-independence period where some inhabitants of the cities would try and reach out to places beyond those they had known for a long time, making these cities spaces that Pratt calls “‘contact zones’ [which are] social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination – like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (4). Indeed one can argue that it is the skewed distribution of economic and political power that makes the city spaces of Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam attractive to some people and scary to others. The fears of such characters as Judson in Dawood’s Water Under the Bridge, as we shall demonstrate in a moment, arise out of an awareness of their privileged positions during late colonialism and early post independence, which positions are exposed in the latter periods, hence precipitating the anxieties they live with. To the extent that the city spaces do allow pockets of various racial categories to exist side-by-side without necessarily mixing indeed lends a lie to the common view of the city – generally seen as cosmopolitan – as metonymic of the ideal of a wider multicultural nation. Our view is that on the contrary, it is within the city spaces that forms of identities that had hitherto been seen as backward – tribal or ethnic for instance – are reinvented and invoked to justify perceptions of difference and sameness, and that these are some of the ideas that filter to the rural areas. This is not to suggest that inhabitants of the rural areas are not capable of forming their own ideas of what differentiates them from others or for that matter, what makes them the same. Our point however is that such ideas as coming from rural areas have for a long time been “accepted” and even “expected.” It is in the contemporary African city spaces where people fashion or aspire to some form of “civility” supposedly absent in the rural areas; people who are viewed as having transcended their ethnic or tribal instincts and therefore representing the most desirable in the imagination of post-colonial nationhoods, where the lie of a homogenous nation is most brutally told.

Independence, the City and its Allures The coming of independence in the early 1960s and the subsequent lifting of the existing migration restrictions led to a further migration to the city, leading to a drastic population increase that saw the demand by far

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outstripping supply for amenities within the cities of Nairobi and Dar-esSalaam. At the same time, unemployment in the formal sector saw the emergence of informal occupations, or jua kali, as a way of earning a living. Hence, the centrality of the cities as sources of social and economic amenities such as employment and housing was disturbed at a fairly early stage because there sprouted some nodal centres offering services that were hitherto a preserve of the main cities. Indeed this is in line with Robert Beauregard’s reading of the distinguishing aspects of the contemporary city in general, where he says “[o]ne of the most frequently mentioned spatial components of the contemporary urban scene is ‘edge cities’, the nodes of office activities, retail stores and apartment buildings that now dot metropolitan areas” (27). What this means then is that at the time of independence, and owing to the post-independence realities of limited resources, the cities of Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam adopted some aspects that would make the two fit within the definition of postmodern cities – they were fragmented in terms of social and economic inequities and racial partitioning. To that extent then, the two cities can be deemed contemporary cities because they represent new urban forms that reflect social attitudes that have been fashioned by the exigencies of migration, senses of minority versus majority groups and the attendant dynamics of 20th Century realities of migration and hybridity against the backdrop of growing global capitalism that increases the pace of life. This is coupled with the resurgence of old forms of nationalism that harp on notions of purity, marginality and other related categories to define inclusion/exclusion and lend weight to their respective claims over social, economic and political spaces. Edge cities, apart from capturing the marginality suggested in the phrase, also point to the shift in focus of the gaze from what is central to what is seen as peripheral and examining the contributions made by the marginal to the daily operations of the cities. The position of this paper is that the edges of these cities, or residential and shopping centres in the Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam case, do point to the plight of that group of Asians who are loosely described as immigrants in countries where most of them have found homes, and where a majority of their ancestors actually introduced money economy at the turn of the 20th Century by venturing deep into the hinterlands where they opened trading outposts. This indeed is the crisis of interracial relations in the two countries as imagined by Dawood and Vassanji. The Asians in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam at this moment continue to battle with the vicissitudes of numerical marginality and a complex of ethnocultural as well as historical baggage – claims of insularity and their perceptions of superiority over indigenous Africans are examples. By

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assuming the buffer status that we alluded to earlier, the business class of Asians in the two countries tended to benefit economically, socially and politically during late colonialism, and were therefore viewed with suspicion by indigenous Africans in the post-independence era. The reversal of roles that independence brought about witnessed a near-collapse of the business empires that had been built under the patronage of British colonialists, and which continued to marginalise Africans. With independence, elite classes among the African communities rose to assume positions of power and thus further moved to the centres of the two cities. Metaphorically then, Asians still occupied the margins of the cities as they literally did during colonialism (this is because although Asians were allowed chances to amass wealth, their “seniority” was only second to that of Whites, and the latter still harboured feelings of superiority over the former). Yet, it is precisely their position as secondary to Whites during colonialism that renders the position of Asians as marginal problematic. If they had occupied the margins of the city space during colonialism – therefore being on the literal margins – they had at the same time availed themselves of opportunities of making economic fortunes. For the Asians, the coming of independence had two major impacts on their position in the area: first, it affirmed their position as largely forming the economic elite and, secondly, the increased rural-urban migration of indigenous Africans displaced them as occupants of geographical margins in the city spaces. To bare it all, the coming of independence and the subsequent relocations exposed the East African Asians’ ruse of dislocation to show them as more rooted geographically and economically than the indigenous Africans who left their rural villages – derogatively called Native Reserves by British Colonialists – to wedge themselves to modernised city spaces. The position of East African Asians as “rootless immigrants” is hence only sustainable when looked at from the vantage point of global immigrancy and Asian diasporic communities the world over. In light of this, we argue here that the continued projection of East African Asians as a rootless minority – even subaltern community – is done with the end of a convenient removal from sight of particular pasts and futures that would impact on social interactions with non-Asians. We shall elaborate in a moment.

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Baghdad and New York in East Africa: Novelistic Re-imagining of the Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi In a somewhat different context, Sarah Nuttal argues that there is a relationship of racial, class and spatial intersection in the context of the city, which “becomes a key archive from which to read these configurations” (15). An important point in these dynamics is how the cultural specificities regarding the city space provoke and sustain varying imaginaries of individual and group identities, which are understood and experienced in the framework of the different meanings of the city. Although she writes in the historical context of post-apartheid South Africa, Nuttal’s theorisation of the nature of the city space is relevant to our chapter here, especially in her assertion that “[t]his is the world, too, of migrants – and the city becomes a metaphor of motion, mutability and metamorphosis” (19). All these are indeed captured in the novels we read for this chapter, where the cities of Dar es Salaam and Nairobi are perceived as a canvas upon which experiences in other cities – Baghdad and New York for instance – could be imagined: [t]here were three dreams in this town that aspired to Baghdad once and New York afterwards. The European dream stayed near the seashore. Everything beyond Ingles Street up to the ocean in the north and east was Uzunguni, ‘where the Europeans live’. Whitewashed, tree-lined, breezy: dreamlike. Huddled behind the Europeans, crowded, came the Indian quarter, with its dukas [shops] of groceries, produce and cloth: gutters overflowing and smelling at street corners, rotten potatoes and onions smelling outside the produce shops, open garbage smelling in the alleys. Then came a breathing space from the European and Asian […] the Mnazi Moja ground, uninhabited, uncultivated, a sandy desert: and beyond this, in the interior, was Kariakoo, formerly home of the German Carrier Corps, the beginning of the African quarter. Only a few streets ventured, from the Indian quarter, into the African quarter, but once inside, got lost in the maze of crisscrossing, unpaved streets lined with African huts. (The Gunny Sack 85)

The presentation of Dar-es-Salaam in Vassanji’s novel is in pattern with Nguluma’s assertion that “[t]he housing programmes that were implemented following the colonial housing policy were based on ideas of racial segregation. There were separate housing schemes for Europeans [Kurasini and Oysterbay], Indians [Upanga and Chang’ombe] and Africans [which were carried out in four phases, depending on whether the African was a government employee or not]” (17). As expected, the British houses in Oyster Bay were “located along the Indian Ocean” (19) for the breeze to moderate the high humidity of Dar-es-Salaam, then followed by those of the Indians and Africans respectively.

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The presentation of these housing inequities in the two novels is laden with suggestions that post-independence government housing strategies that meant to demolish walls of racial segregation through zoning also led to the degeneration of the cities. Hence in their novels, Dawood and Vassanji tend to portray Asians as victims of malice and envy at their business astuteness, while at the same time portraying Africans as lacking in patience, disposed towards extravagance and as unreliable business partners. This is particularly evident in Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack, where the city of Dar-es-Salaam supposedly glitters with shops owned by Asian businessmen, but start decaying with time especially in the post-independence period when many of the Asians are emigrating to Europe and North America. It is significant that this period also coincides with the ideology of Nyerere’s Socialism where competitive capitalism is frowned upon and actually discouraged at the national policy level. Another instance is seen in Dawood’s Water Under the Bridge, where the character of Charles Oloo is representative of the economic and political elite that emerged immediately after political independence and rose in the ranks to achieve feats that were unimaginable only a few years earlier. Born in the backwaters of a provincial village in western Kenya, Oloo works as a junior fishmonger under the patronage of an Asian called Jaffer. This occupation enables him to move on to Kisumu, a town on the shores of Lake Victoria where the fish is caught and prepared for sale in other parts of Kenya. A play of ill fortunes on Jaffer’s part and ambition on Oloo’s sees the latter acquire the shop. This allows him some economic power with which he negotiates entry into the main city, Nairobi, where he sets out to pursue further economic and later political ambitions. Along the way he is spotted by the Desais, an Asian family that incorporates him in a rather unconvincing way to a matchbox company they are starting, where Oloo’s role is primarily to act as a front in borrowing money from lenders, and also in beating what is seen as the system’s desire to Africanise major business enterprises.4 One can establish a pattern in Oloo’s lifestyle: from the safety of his village of birth, Oloo moves on to Kisumu where he earns a modest living; he is then 4

However, I need to state here that Africanisation was never adopted as an official government policy in Kenya, although many books on Kenya’s immediate postindependence era may seem to suggest so. Neither did this policy benefit all or even the majority of Africans. Only a few elites benefited after using the masses to legitimise their own pursuits. On the other hand, the Tanzanian case was that of Ujamaa, socialism, which meant that the government repossessed properties from individuals who had more than one. Given that the colonial matrix had allowed Asians to amass more wealth than their neighbours, the Ujamaa enterprise would then on prima facie basis appear to target Asians.

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tempted to move on to Nairobi where though he registers some success, the city ultimately destroys him. Hence from the periphery towards the centre, Oloo’s life becomes materially better but socially and emotionally worse. Reading the plight of Oloo in relation to that of other characters, one may be forgiven for concluding that the city, for the African elite, has some destructive elements. The failure of Oloo is read as the failure of the larger crop of African political and economic elite whose impatience and errors of judgment lead to their downfall. The city for the characters then carries these elements of potential destruction especially for those who do not have the attributes of patience and hard work. Moyez Vassanji has written other novels that also portray the Africans in a similar vein. In The Gunny Sack for instance, the novel reverts to the ideas of centre and marginality, Self and Other, et cetera, to present the picture of Asians in East Africa. Borrowing from aspects of the epic, the novel traces the origin of Asians in the region, showing the sacrifices that earlier immigrants made in order to achieve the economic power that they now enjoy. As in his other novels like The Book of Secrets and Amriika, Vassanji in The Gunny Sack is concerned with the historical origins and presence of Asians in the region especially as far as the histories affect or are affected by the present. And unlike Dawood who looks at the Asians’ place in the region starting from the time of political independence, Vassanji starts off from the close of the 19th Century when the earliest Asian immigrants came to the region as petty traders or servants in the then budding colonialist enterprise. The novel then points out what the author deems as the silences of the existing variants of history, especially with regard to the role Asians played in opening up the interior for administrative and capital economic activities. In the end, there is a suggestion that what the Asians own as individuals and as a community is what they worked for, and that policies such as Ujamaa in actual fact rob them of their sweat. Unlike Dawood, Vassanji extensively invokes the trope of migration to and from East African cities as one of the ways in which the Asians confront the “injustices” of post-independence African leaderships, where Asians emigrate from Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi to the metropolises in the United Kingdom, Canada and America. As we have indicated before, this emigration is in part justified by the suggested decadence of the city of Dar-es-Salaam under the Nyerere government, which has apparently resulted to a malfunctioning economy that pushes the Asians to other places. But a closer reading of the novels reveals that while the cities and the countries at large fail to meet the economic expectations of their citizenry, this failure only provides a convenient ruse for the East African Asians’ own desire for an arrangement that would place them above indigenous Africans

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in the groups (racial, if you may) hierarchy. At the same time it provides them with protection from business competition against the merging crop of indigenous African entrepreneurs. As the indigenous Africans continue to migrate to the city spaces, they exert pressure on the limited amenities the implications of which are experienced by all. Considering that the colonial laws that guarded against “unnecessary” presence of Africans in the cities (vagrancy, loitering with intent) have been repealed, the spatial and economic security that such protectionism offered is no longer available, meaning that the East African Asians have to compete for business and spatial resources just like their indigenous African neighbours. It is this competition, in my view, that evokes nostalgia of the good times gone by, where Asian investors in African quarters were certain not to face any competition. Because of the movements by indigenous Africans to and from the city, there is need for imaginative investments that target African clientele, meaning economic survival becomes increasingly hard. Those who can stay on, while those who cannot live with the competition emigrate further to other places beyond Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. Ultimately, our argument is that these migrations and dislocations underscore the fluidity of the city space as one in perpetual flux both in its own growth as in the people there. It also conforms with Kurtz’s view that the African “city is where the hinterlands meet the metropoles” (7) to various degrees: locals coming to the cities, some city dwellers migrating to the metropolises of Europe and back to Nairobi or Dar-es-Salaam. The point that can be condensed from the foregoing reading of the novels is that for the two writers, both Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam invite multiple layers of ambivalence: towards other people, towards the places, towards history and even towards their own projects. This ambivalence is born out of the seeming motive of the authors to advance the commonly held view that Asians in the region, and particularly in the two cities, have been deliberately marginalised from central political spaces by the powers that be. In other words, affecting the novelistic imagineering of the two cities to a large extent is the idea of positionality that colours the perception of the realities of a postcolonial region. Hence, a careful play on prejudices and stereotypes becomes handy in re-reading the common history, and instead attempting to seal the fissures by providing alternative versions of what are still contesting and contestable histories. It is to this that we now turn my attention.

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Fear in the Cities: A Play on Stereotypes in Mapping Groups As we indicated earlier in this chapter, the novels under study have instances where characters are put in types of groups, a process which we read as an attempt to deal with the uncertainties and seductions accorded by the cities in changing times. In Dawood’s Water Under the Bridge, some characters harp on the fears of the departing colonialists to play on the concerns of the whites who choose to remain. As Judson, a character in the novel says, “[t]he situation in the Congo has clearly shown what can happen. It will be worse here. There will be rivers of blood in the streets of Nairobi. The Congo in comparison, will look like a Sunday afternoon picnic” (9). Here, the character exhibits a significant lack of understanding of the complexities of the Congo debacle – a simplification shown in his juxtaposition of cliché images of “rivers of blood” and “Sunday afternoon picnic” – and his incomprehension leads him to a conclusion that the same could happen in Nairobi, despite the extremely different political dynamics in the two cities. Earlier on another character, Archer, has told a new arrivant from Britain that “[w]hy do you think we are here [Nairobi]? [...] Life is still very comfy for our people, but don’t ask me how long it will last” (8). In the first quotation, the speaker is worried about what will happen to the city of Nairobi after what has happened in the Congo. Perhaps one should remember that the time setting for this part of the novel is at the beginning of independence, in the early years of 1960s, when the Congo sank into a civil war barely after independence from Belgium. With this inspiration, Judson imagines that such internecine strife is either infectious, or is a “rite of passage” for all African countries attaining independence. One can say, perhaps in Judson’s defence, that Dawood presents him in this instance with a bit of irony, especially in the character’s use of clichés. But even such a concession still raises two issues: one, the use of irony still defers the moment of engagement with the issue at hand and, secondly, clichés so used are neither completely abstract nor devoid of any “truth.” Indeed as Chabal and Daloz assert, “[c]liches are always the resort of the analytical feeble, but they are not always wrong, based as they are on some distorted perception of actual events, on some kernel of truth, and that is why they deserve to be taken seriously, even (or particularly) by scholars” (xv-xvi). The appropriation of these clichés as done by Judson in actual fact reflects – albeit in a twisted way – the events in Congo and Kenya, but they also reflect historical fears of a given community of people at a particular moment in the history of these countries. Judson’s fears indeed fit in what Chabal and Daloz further state regarding the

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behaviour of an individual as a member of a broader community: “individual rationality is essentially based on communal logic” (156). In the second quotation, the dichotomy of Self and Other is operational, even if subconsciously, because the speaker looks at the little good that is still left in Nairobi as making life comfortable for “our” people. But in both quotations, the spread of fear is effectively managed by an invocation of what is deemed as latent evil in some groups. Without saying it in so many words, one is left without a doubt that the Whites are easy targets for any acts of violence that are likely to be visited upon them by their neighbours. But the prophesied doom for the white population in Nairobi is still not a good reason for them to leave the city as yet, since life “is still very comfy for our people.” In the same quotations, two points are bare: the radiance of the city is not sufficient enough to undo the current idea in cultural studies that emphasise the unknowability of the Other – who invariably cause fear – and, two, the layered meaning of life in the city remain obscured to a majority of city dwellers who seem stuck in their own groves of misconceptions – Africans are dirty, violent, they want sex with Asian girls, African leadership is decadent, Gikuyus are dangerous, et cetera, views that are amply littered in the novels under study, on occasion without any redeeming counter-images. We should, however, remind all that this employment of stereotypes in actual fact was in line with the colonial objectives of mapping subjects who at once respected colonial authority as they accepted their place in the hierarchy of racial categories. Indeed Harry Garuba argues that “[c]olonial mapping represented landscapes of mobility for the coloniser, but for the colonised it presented a circumscribed landscape of constraint” (96) where entire groups were tethered within given geographic spaces to deliberately stop them from moving to other places, and acquiring new forms of knowledge of other people, or even uniting to conceive a formidable group that would resist colonialism. This colonial mapping, Garuba continues, was important to them because “maps became instruments for the production of colonial and postcolonial subjectivities by constituting and constraining what should be enunciated within their discursive space” (90). In Water Under the Bridge, this divide and rule strategy is seen in instances where tribal prejudices are summoned to articulate the general ambivalence of Nairobi and its markers of modernities. The character of Oloo, a Luo from western Kenya, for a long time lives with a pathological mistrust of the Gikuyu people. In one of his business conversations with his Asian partners, Oloo notices that there is a boy around whom he mistrusts: “‘Is that boy a Kikuyu?’ He asked Kanti.” When the latter answers in the affirmative, Oloo finishes off thus: “‘Just that I don’t trust people from that

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community. They think they are too clever and chaps like us from Nyanza are supposed to be chini kabisa [very low]’ Oloo explained” (68). Indeed one may argue that the use of this particular ethnic prejudice has a historical background in the power politics between Kenya’s first president Jomo Kenyatta and first vice-president Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. The two came to a disagreement that reached its peak in 1966, when Odinga resigned in a huff to found an opposition party to Kenyatta’s government. Happening as it did at a time when the country was still heavily polarised along ethnic lines, the incident resuscitated the latent sentiments of mistrust that had been created and propagated by the colonialists in pursuit of their divide and rule administration of the country. A clearer explanation of this history is necessary. Because Nairobi was situated in the heart of Gikuyu land, the subsequent colonisation of the country affected them much more and much earlier than it did the rest of the peoples of Kenya. The Gikuyu were dispossessed of their lands earlier; they had to carry passbooks earlier; and, ironically, they were also introduced to money economy and formal education much earlier. When colonised Kenyans began struggling for independence, the Gikuyu people were much more active because of the aforementioned reasons. They were more educated; they were wealthier, more visible and, in any case, had suffered the brunt of colonialism much longer and from a closer range. The colonialists’ responses to rising waves of Gikuyu insurgence was typical of their divide and rule strategy, which in this case included creating and propagating damaging stereotypes about them being money minded, untrustworthy and disposed towards betraying even their most dependable of friends. These are stereotypes that even Vassanji’s characters in The Gunny Sack seem to subscribe to, as they use them to explain their refusal to hide a Gikuyu young man at the height of Mau Mau rebellion (78). Although the motive of the colonialists was to isolate the Gikuyu in their struggle for independence, the stereotypes they developed about them would remain as serious impediments to harmonious ethnic co-existence in independence day Kenya. The historical fall-out between Kenyatta and Odinga in 1966 went a long way in “confirming” what the people had always “known”: that the Gikuyu are unreliable, and they would do anything they can to push out anyone who stood in their way of money and power. The Luo people have particularly been suspicious of the Gikuyu, which is what we find in the novel as Oloo seriously mistrusts Ndegwa despite not knowing him at all. What emerges from this kind of treatment is a situation whereby Oloo, suffering some anxieties after coming newly to the centre of economic and political power, mistrusts one who has been there before. His fear of not fitting in the new place that he

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has chosen is expressed in an obviously weak displacement to a person he knows nothing about. Stereotypes against whole ethnic groups then become one of the ways in which some characters manage their own fear of the unknown and rationalise their actions by falling back on received notions about the evil inherent in other people who do not belong in the same groups as they do. Fear in The Gunny Sack is manifested at various levels: there is fear that given groups’ authority is likely to be lessened; fear that their economic fortunes are about to be seized; and fear that the purity of the community is about to be adulterated or, generally put, contaminated. For the Asians particularly, the fear of sexual contamination is so deep-seated that they go to great lengths to control the sexuality of their members. In The Gunny Sack for instance, the pioneer immigrants are forced by an outcry from India – “[o]ur [Asian] sons are keeping golis, black slaves in Africa. And there are children, half-castes littering the coast from Mozambique to Karachi” (11) – to abandon their African wives or mistresses, and to neglect any children who may have issued out of such unions. Dhanji Govindji, the Asian patriarch in The Gunny Sack for instance had sexual liaisons with a slave woman, Bibi Taratibu, with whom they had a son, Huseni. When he can no longer ignore the wishes of his people to “marry properly,” Govindji abandons the woman and sends her to the fringes of community, where she eventually disappears into the unknown hinterlands. Govindji and his new wife mistreat the half-caste son to a point where he escapes from home into the unknown that is Africa. Juma, a third generation descendant of Govindji, still battles with the baggage of his hybridity: “[k]nowledge of Juma’s pedigree followed him to the capital. And so Juma, because even the big house was packed, and to avoid his associating with her sons, was given a room in the courtyard, next to the servants’ quarters and the outhouse” (63). Prejudices against Africans and blackness in the novel assume the magnitude of pathological fear, such that unions between the two communities are highly discouraged for fear of spreading contamination to what is deemed a superior race. Kulsum’s theory of creation is perhaps what captures best the stereotypes associated with the various groups: When God was well and ready after all his exertions finally to create mankind, he sat himself beside a red-hot oven with a plate of dough. From this he fashioned three identical dolls. He put the first doll into the oven to finish it, but, alas, brought it out too soon: it came out white and undone. In this was born the white race. With this lesson learnt, the Almighty put the second doll into the oven, but this time he kept it in for too long. It came out burnt and black. Thus the black race. Finally the One and Only put the last doll inside the oven, and brought it out at just the right time. It came out golden brown, the Asian, simply perfect. (73)

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The jingoism in the foregoing quotation is hard to miss. The stereotypes in the same quotation are used to camouflage Kulsum’s own anxiety with purity and superiority of her race, as she is worried of “disappearing” in darkness should her community fail to preserve their numbers and purity. They imagine their superiority as a race to rationalise their conservative attitudes towards sexuality, intermarriages and other forms cultural blending. Hence they hang onto such notions as communal shame and pride, networking in social and economic terms to maintain their social, economic and cultural position in Dar-es-Salaam. There is a distinct difference between Vassanji and Dawood in the ways in which they project their characters’ handling of stereotypes as a way of confronting their fears. While Vassanji would present a homogenous picture of Africans, Dawood goes ahead to deal with some of the differences within the wider group of Africans by pointing to the long known suspicions and stereotypes against specific ethnic groups in the country. This difference can again be explained by understanding the respective positions that the two authors occupy. While Vassanji conforms to the postcolonial trend of writing about Africa from the metropolises of the west, Dawood reverses the same to live and write from Nairobi. It is possible then that Dawood has a clearer view of the issues that affect the various groups resident in the country he writes about. Also, Vassanji, by writing from afar – and is it above? – could well be demonising the decadence of Dar-es-Salaam in order to create what George in a different context calls a “joyous international homelessness” (8) in Toronto and other metropolises. Whether this is true or not is, of course, beyond the ambit of this chapter. By problematising the relationship between African characters, Dawood on his part undermines the commonly held view that urbane Africans are detribalised. This can only be true outside the matrix of economic and political power contests – meaning it is a rarity. Both writers are however not innocent when it comes to presenting some homogenised groups especially when it fits well in their scheme of presenting the Asians as a victimised lot. In other words, while Dawood makes an effort of avoiding any erasures where the Africans are concerned, he does not in the same vein recognise the differences that exist within the wider group that we refer to as Asians. For him Indians, Goans, Pakistanis and other related communities pass for “Asians” while for Vassanji, all pass for Shamsis. This can be read as a way through which the two writers, and possibly the people they write for, improvise communal identities to present a united front where none would otherwise exist. As Bensman and Vidich argue, the expression of communal solidarity through social and other forms of networking among ethnic and

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other related communities are influenced remarkably by the political dispensation in which the communities exist (196-203). The persistence of community among Asians in an environment where other racial groups are assumed to be adopting more individualistic approach to modern life is almost certainly informed by a sense of risk, and the desire to spread the same, with regard to the dynamics of life outside the very same community. This is one strategy that enables them to compete for limited economic and political opportunities. In fact the guiding rationale behind such strategies is founded on the need to secure some reliable space within the economic, social and political dynamics of the two countries within a specific historical period. The Asians then end up forming, in the words Kasinitz uses in another context, “[a] community of limited liability, [where] both physical and social boundaries are as much a creation of political structures, voluntary organisations and local institutions as a reflection of the patterns of face-toface interaction of the residents” (165). Indeed these are some of the similarities that bind African cities like Dar-es- Salaam and Nairobi to the metropolises of America such as New York and Chicago during the midtwentieth century, which coincides with the time many African countries attain their political independence.

Conclusion The origins, growth and development of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, as indeed many African cities, was a process that was externally influenced by changing economic and political interests of Europe in its bigger scheme of dominating Africa. Writing on the city of Johannesburg, Achille Mbembe states that “[l]ike every colonial town, it found it hard to resist the temptation of mimicry, that is, of imagining itself as an English town and a pale reflection of forms born elsewhere” (375; emphasis in original). Hence, the colonial race ideology informed not just the physical planning of the cities, but the racial, social and even cultural mapping of the urban spaces with a view to reflecting mimicking what existed in the European metropolises. Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, to be specific, mimicked values of Englishness that, with the coming of independence, left behind a legacy of regret, nostalgia, and well entrenched notions of racial difference between Asians and Africans who survived colonialism, with the overall effect of widespread uncertainty. Reading the two novels in this chapter reveals that the post-independence period is one with many uncertainties for almost everybody, but probably

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more challenging for the Asians whose role in the historical paths of the country, and their very existence in the countries is surrounded by what one would describe as a crisis of visibility. This visibility is both in terms of their sheer presence as well as their seeming success in amassing wealth in economies that are largely malfunctional. For the Asians, succeeding in business is not just a challenge; it is also a dilemma because it is precisely their success in business that makes their presence in the countries controversial. The dilemma is also that in as much as the cities expose them to visibility and risks, it is possibly the only places where they can rationalise their continued stay in the countries. Their continued inhabitation of the city space is rationalised, and indeed sustained, by massive capital investments whose returns can only be possible in concentrated markets that are provided by the many Africans who inhabit the same cities. The cities, by providing huge markets with disposable incomes, allow the Asians to exercise agency that is denied them on the political front where their numerical inferiority means they fall victims to notions of majority rule. Of course, when looked at from the viewpoint of national demographics, no single community – Asian or otherwise – is not numerically inferior. But there has been a tendency to look at Asians as a “different” ethnic community that is undeniably weak in numbers, the underlying assumption being that they are unable to close ranks with any other community in order to influence political decisions at the national level or, inversely, that the other communities will naturally ally with each other to exact such influence. But going back to the point of markets and business, especially the way such business bequeaths influence upon people seen as numerically marginal, one sees the way in which the city spaces enables a renegotiation of ascribed positions. That is what one notices in Dawood’s Water Under the Bridge where factory Kiberiti Limited is located in the city involving millions of shillings in capital and equally huge sums of money in returns as profits. It is indeed the huge profits that Asians earn which enable them to bargain for influence through employment of Africans – which means Africans would have some interest in the Asians’ business by depending on them – and supporting some of them financially to run for political positions, as the Desai family supports Oloo in Dawood's novel. In Water Under the Bridge, the employment of Africans is also informed by a desire to forestall any future problems. In fact when old Man Desai advises his son to employ their cook’s son as a shop assistant, he says: “[h]e [Ndegwa] could do a holiday job and earn both money and practical experience. [...] That way they will not look at us with avaricious eyes” (62). From the foregoing quotation, the Asians in Nairobi presented by Dawood use their investments to negotiate for acceptance among the wider

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African community, and therefore subvert their position as a marginalised group. The whole economic interaction between Oloo on the Desai family on the one hand, and that of the Desai family and Ndegwa on the other, brings out AbdouMaliq Simone’s idea of “people as infrastructure, which emphasises economic collaboration among residents seemingly marginalised and immeserated by urban life” (407). It is a plea for simultaneous or shared occupation of a premium space that demands an increased level of negotiation about the terms of racial and socio-economic engagements.

Works Cited Beauregard, Robert. “The Unavoidable Continuities of the City.” Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? Ed. Peter Marcuse and Ronald Van Kempen. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 22 -36. Bensman, Joseph, and Arthur Vidich. “Race, Ethnicity and New Forms of Urban Community.” Metropolis: Centre and Symbol of Our Times. Ed. Philip Kasinitz. London: Macmillan, 1995. 196-203. Chabal, Patrick, and J. Jean-Pascal Daloz. Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. Oxford: James Currey, 1999. Dawood, Yusuf K. Water Under the Bridge. Nairobi: Longhorn Kenya, 1991. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972 – 1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York & London: The Harvester Press, 1980. ——., “Text/Context of Other Space.” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27. Garuba, Harry. “Mapping the Land/Body/Subject: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies in African Narrative.” Alternation 9.1 (2002): 87-116. George, Rosemary M. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kasinitz, Philip, ed. Metropolis: Centre and Symbol of Our Times. London: Macmillan, 1995. Kurtz, Roger J. Urban Fears Urban Obsessions: The Postcolonial Kenyan Novel. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1998. Mbembe, Achille. “Aesthetics of Superfluity.” Public Culture 16.3 (2004): 373-405. Nutall, Sarah. “City Forms and Writing the ‘Now’ in South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 30.4 (2004): 731-48. Simone, AbdouMaliq. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16.3 (2004): 407 – 429.

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Vassanji, Moyez. Amriika. Toronto; Ontario: McLelland & Stewart, 1999. ——., The Book of Secrets. London: Picador, 1996. ——., The Gunny Sack. Oxford: Heinemann International, 1989.

Part IV Language, Borders, Spaces

Mikhail Gromov

Across the Language Border: The Case of Bilingual Writers in Tanzania Creative writing in Tanzania has been strongly associated with the language of Swahili, which still functions as the main linguistic medium in the country, putting English in secondary position. In fact, English was almost completely “wiped out” of the literary map of Tanzania, at least in the eyes of the outside world – which partially happened due to over-hastened opinions of some literary scholars; for example, Rajmund Ohly (1990) once wrote: “While literature in Swahili flourishes both in Kenya and Tanzania, literature in English does not exist in the latter” (105). Paying all due respect to the memory of the well-known researcher, I dare state, however, that such an opinion seems to be at least slightly inaccurate, and English has been holding a much more tangible position in Tanzanian literature even from its very first days. Suffice it to recall just a few facts: novel writing in Tanzania started with English books – Dying in the Sun by Peter Palangyo and Village in Uhuru by Gabriel Ruhumbika, both published in 1969, by their artistic qualities by far surpassed any other literary attempt existing in Tanzanian literature at that time, either in English or Swahili. It is also known that many outstanding Swahili authors of Tanzania – among them, for example, the doyen of modern Swahili writing Euphrase Kezilahabi 1 – made their first attempts in creative writing also in English. Moreover, since 1970s Tanzanian literature features small, but artistically accomplished group of English medium authors. Some of them, like Peter Palangyo, Hamza Sokko, Ismael Mbise, Barnabas Katigula, Osija Mwambungu (who also published his works under the pen-name Prince Kagwema), Joel Lawi, Tengio Urrio and some other authors, chose English as a sole medium of literary expression. Others later made a considerable contribution to creative writing in Swahili, thus serving two major strata of Tanzanian imaginative literature and, eventually, becoming bilingual writers. Creative work of this latter group of writers will be discussed in this article. The problem of being a bilingual – and even more so, English-language – writer in Tanzania at least initially seemed to be rather different compared to many other parts of the world. First of all it should be borne in mind that 1

I am particularly referring to Kezilahabi’s early poems in English, published in Darlite journal in the late 1960s (some of them were later translated into Swahili by the author).

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literary bilingualism in Tanzania in the ujamaa 2 times was not quite in line with the official policy. English was not very much encouraged in Tanganyika even in colonial times, its place as a medium being already then largely taken by Swahili. After independence, impressive effort was put into developing and promoting Swahili in every possible way – especially as the language of newly-born Tanzanian literature. The attitude to English (popularly referred to as kimombo – a derogatory word, which could be translated as something like “mumbling”) was semi-officially expressed by the slogan “Kimombo zii!” – “Down with kimombo!” Thus, the attempts to write in kimombo were by definition not very much welcomed. In other words, already in the first decade of independence a very tangible border was drawn in Tanzanian literature: what was written in English, even by the local writers, was “not ours,” it was nearly foreign, and the attempts to use the language were not taken as positively as the efforts to write in Swahili – which, in fact, led to the emergence in the following decade of a large body of indigenous Swahili writing. Hence, the most likely reason why the Tanzanian writers attempted to write in English as early as 1960s was that at that time new creative writing, especially prose, in Swahili was making only the first humble steps – no matter how great was the encouragement from the government, learning to use the language with new literary forms definitely required some time. Many writers, therefore, were still cautious about the abilities of Swahili to serve the needs of modern genres, and turned to English, following the example of many other African writers who already have attained considerable fame for their works in the “language of Shakespeare.” Speaking about the two above-mentioned groups of Anglophone Tanzanian authors, one can notice an interesting thing: the “English-only” Tanzanian writers mostly published one, at best two books (the sole exception is Osija Mwambungu, who authored four novels in English), whereas the prolificacy of bilingual authors is much more impressive. This may be caused by the fact that the “English-only” authors were reluctant to cross the above-mentioned language border, thus confining themselves to a rather limited audience of those Tanzanians who were fluent in English, 3

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3

Ujamaa – the concept that formed the basis of Julius Nyerere's social and economic development policies in independent Tanzania, based on the Marxist-Leninist model of oneparty rule. It could be assumed that the “English-only” Tanzanian writers were also targeting the readers outside Tanzania and even Africa – but, bearing in mind the fact that Tanzania’s links with the outside world during the ujamaa times were rather limited (for example, the

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whereas the latter, after making some attempts of using English, opted for wider audience and “added up” Swahili, the major language of the country, to their arsenal of artistic means – in most of the cases, successfully. The practical usefulness of this bilingualism was confirmed in an interview, taken in 1995, by the director of Tanzania Publishing House, the country’s leading publisher, Primus Karugendo: MG: I happen to know that here in Tanzania there is a number of writers who write novels in English – and not children’s books or school books, but books for adult readers. These are people like Agoro Anduru, like Prince Kagwema, and Henry Muhanika, and Hamza Sokko, and Mkufya. […] In your view, what kind of readers do they write for? PG: If we take the book by Mkufya, which he wrote more than fifteen years ago – this was for ordinary people, who read about these girls and city life… he wrote about city life for everyone – the young and the old, without discrimination. Agoro Anduru – he tried to write for a person who came to town from the rural areas and the matters that he encounters there… Prince Kagwema – he writes about politics, about love, he writes, say, about postindependence time and the way those with power – bureaucrats – tried to live, and their conflicts. But I can not say that, for example, this Prince Kagwema – I myself read three of his books – is read widely… I mean that people do not know this writer, his books are not very popular, like, for instance, the books by Agoro Anduru… I saw people buying books by Prince Kagwema – like Chausiku’s Dozen and others – and those were people with education higher than secondary school level, those who understood English (Mazungumzo 28-29; all the translations from Swahili are mine - MG).

Here we see that the books by an “English-only” writer Prince Kagwema were much less popular than those written by the bilingual writer Agoro Anduru, who is known and reputable for both parts of the audience – and thus those familiar with his English books would buy his Swahili one, and vice versa. This scheme seems to work for most of the bilingual writers in Tanzania, who by crossing the language border appeal to both parts of the country’s reading public. There is another notable trait in the creativity of bilingual Tanzanian writers. Their earlier works, being written in English, obviously were influenced by certain writers, literary schools or trends in world Anglophone literature. This influence allowed them to adapt the artistic achievements of their “literary mentors” into their own works – and later, when they shifted to Swahili as the main medium, the “artistic heights” that they conquered were fluently incorporated into their Swahili works. Below we will illustrate this observation with some examples.

books by these authors could hardly be found even in the libraries of neighbouring East African countries), this intention, even if existing, was hardly feasible.

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Chronologically, the first bilingual writer to emerge in Tanzanian literature is Gabriel Ruhumbika (born 1938). His novel Village in uhuru (1969) was the first specimen of social-critical novel in Tanzania, its stylistic features and creative method reminding of such major figures in Africa’s social novel as Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o and South African Jack Cope. The story of the village chief Musilanga, whose life is ruined by his son Balinde, a party functionary who is bound to move his father and other people of his village to an ujamaa camp, is narrated in seemingly “indifferent,” impartial manner of describing the characters and events, slowly but firmly involving the reader into the peripeteias of the plot. This manner was later developed by Ruhumbika in his first Swahili novel Miradi bubu ya wazalendo (The invisible enterprises of the patriots, 1992), which in a similarly dispassionate manner tells about the bitter disappointment of the ordinary citizens of the country in the policy of ujamaa in the early 1980s. Ruhumbika’s thorough acquaintance with Western literature also shows in his brilliant attempt to combine African orality, post-modern methods and dystopia in his latest-to-date novel Jangwa sugu la wazawa (Everlasting doom for the children of the land, 2002). William Mkufya (born in 1953) seems to be the most prolific bilingual writer in Tanzania. Elena Bertoncini, internationally known scholar of Swahili literature, describes him as “a well-read author who builds up his literary background on a great many African, Anglo-American, French, German, Greek and other novelists, poets and philosophers” (“William E. Mkufya’s Latest Novel” 3). Mkufya’s debut novel The Wicked Walk (1977) – the story of slum areas life in Dar es Salaam – bears distinct traits of influence of many outstanding figures of social critical method in literature, from Charles Dickens to Meja Mwangi. Mkufya also initiated in Tanzanian literature the practice of self-translation, which was later adopted by other Tanzanian writers – Swahili translation of The Wicked Walk, titled Kizazi Hiki (This generation), was made by Mkufya in 1980. The practice of transferring into Swahili the artistic achievements of the English text apparently considerably heightened Mkufya’s own creative abilities in Swahili, which he applied with brilliance in his first Swahili novel Ziraili na Zirani (Azrail and Zirani, 1999). This allegorical dystopian novel ingeniously combines various stylistic elements from both Swahili and English literature – from the works of Shaaban Robert, the founder of modern Swahili writing, and the late post-modernistic novels of Euphrase Kezilahabi, to the influence of John Milton, Ayi Kwei Armah and Christopher Okigbo (see Diegner 27). Mkufya returned to social criticism in his English novel The Dilemma (1982) and Swahili novel Ua la Faraja (Flower of consolation, 2004).

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Agoro Anduru (1948-1992) became known as the pioneer of English short story in Tanzania – in the early 1980s he authored two collections of short stories and a novelette in English. What is notable is that again his writing manner was later transferred by him to his only Swahili work – a short novel Kukosa Radhi (Without blessing, 1983), the tragic love story of a Christian boy Jonathan and a Muslim girl Mwanaidi, who married against the will of their parents and ended in failure. As Elena Bertoncini puts it, The best developed character is Mwanaidi; depraved as she is at the beginning, she redeems herself and becomes an affectionate and attentive wife who courageously endures all the blows until she is sure of her husband’s love. When Jonathan abandons her, however, she rebels and stabs the wicked Anna. […] Mwanaidi is sentenced only to a term of three years, hence the author in fact does not condemn her. He seems to be torn with two opposite forces: his duty to illustrate on a moralistic story that the children must obey their parents at all costs, and his sympathy for his heroine. (Outline of Swahili Literature 106).

This state of being “torn with two opposite forces: his duty to illustrate on a moralistic story” and the sympathy for the characters, victims of unfavourable social circumstances, permeates the English stories by Anduru, making his writing style unique and equally appealing to his English and Swahili readers. In 1980s and 1990s there emerged a number of other writers, who also bridge their English and Swahili works in less elaborate, but no less illustrative way. A notable fact about these authors is that, unlike the ones discussed above, they made their first writing attempts in Swahili, “adding up” English at a later stage of their literary careers. The possible reason was formulated in an interview by popular writer Ben Mtobwa. Being once asked about his future plans, he answered: “Plans for the future are, in fact, to expand […] and to find other language that would be [even] more fitting that the one I have been using for writing” (Mazungumzo 35). Apparently the language meant by the grandmaster of Swahili action novel was English, since he himself by the time this interview was taken (1995) successfully translated three of his Swahili novels into English. Unfortunately, Ben did not have the time to “add up” English as his another writing language – he untimely passed away in November 2008. However, the very fact that the translations of his novels were published in the late 1980s in prestigious international series Pacesetters, printed by Macmillan and distributed all over Africa and even beyond, showed that most of these writers were pursuing the same aim – to expand, to reach to the wider audience, in other words, again to cross the language border. But while their colleagues in the seventies and early nineteen-eighties were crossing the

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language border within the country by adding up Swahili as their language of writing, the writers after 1982 were adding up English as a writing medium in order to cross the language border not only within the country, but the country’s borders as well. It was caused to a great extent by the fact that after 1982 and especially during the subsequent reforms of Ali Hassan Mwinyi the attitude to English considerably “warmed up,” the borders of Tanzania were opened, and the urge to internationalise among the members of Tanzanian literary community appeared to be more than natural. Bernard Mapalala (born in 1957), who currently is mostly known for his historical novel Kwaheri Iselamagazi (Goodbye Iselamagazi, 1992), previously authored two Swahili novelettes – Cheo dhamana (Precious position, 1976) and Salome maskini (Poor Salome, 1992), in which he also developed a recognisable writing manner: in a simple, appealing, but not a didactic, rather thought-provoking way he was telling the readers about cause and effect of various social ills of contemporary Tanzanian society, such as corruption, nepotism, economic difficulties, hardships of city life –all of which are overcome in the end by virtuous and sensible main character. Similar traits are preserved in his English novelette Death Factory (1996), where a virtuous village girl Asabea discloses the schemes of unscrupulous “industrialists” who, pretending that they want to develop a remote village in Kilimanjaro region, build there a factory producing dangerous pesticides. The fact that the novelette was printed not by a local publisher, but appeared in prestigious Junior African Writers Series printed in UK by Heinemann, also testifies that the writer was successfully targeting a pan-African audience, since the problems discussed in the book are typical and urgent and understood all over the continent. It must be noted that even in the early 1980s the “warming up” of the attitude to English caused a considerable increase of the potential Englishreading audience, thus some Swahili writers added up English in order to target the local reading public. Henry Muhanika (born in 1949) became known as the author of Swahili play Njia Panda (Crossroads, 1981), where he focused on the theme of family relationship. Similar topic dominates his two collections of short stories in English – Killer drink and other stories (1982) and My dear bachelor and other stories (1985), where he deals with the themes of friendship, marriage, human relationship, using readily recognisable local context. In a similar way, Hammie Rajab (born 1940), one of the masters of Swahili thriller, after authoring about a dozen books in Swahili published in 1982 the English novel Rest in peace, dear mother, where he inventively combines elements of “hard-boiled” Western detective and Swahili “maisha” – biographical appraisal. Emmanuel Makaidi in his

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novelettes The Namanga Diary and The serpent-hearted politician (both 1981) condemns the misuse of power in Tanzanian political structures. There are some other bilingual writers who appeared on Tanzanian literary scene within the last ten or fifteen years, such as Elieshi Lema, who after producing a number of works for children and adolescent readers in Swahili shook African and international literary community with the English novel Parched Earth (2001) – a moving life story of a young rural woman; there are some other names that could be mentioned. What brings all these writers together is their choice to cross the language border between English and Swahili, to avoid the label of “Swahili writer” or “Tanzanian English writer.” As English poet and critic Adam Donaldson Powell (2006) once wrote: “What strikes me about my own disposition towards bilingual literature is that it affords me an extra set of wings on which to soar... high above the limitations that both I and others set for myself. I […] find that multilingual writing gives me the opportunity to reach out to persons from many cultures on their turf […] thus the act of multilingual writing becomes a statement and a form of expression in itself” (3). This seems to be exactly the case with bilingual Tanzanian writers – literary bilingualism was indeed “a statement by itself,” showing their commitment to explore the creative abilities of another language (and this statement was even more daring at the initial stage, bearing in mind the language policy of the government); bilingualism enabled them to expand their artistic horizons and present a different artistic view of the country’s social reality. Moreover, by using the two languages these writers have expanded their existing audience and created new, bi-lingual reading public, thus redefining the place of Tanzania on the literary map of sub-Saharan Africa not as a realm of solely Swahili writing, but a country with bilingual literature. Of course, speaking about the re-definition of Tanzania’s place on the literary map of sub-Saharan Africa, one can hardly forget about such writers as Moyez Vassanji and Abdulrazak Gurnah. Both are the authors of international fame; both are East Africans by birth and upbringing – Vassanji, an Indian, was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania; Gurnah, a native Zanzibari, was born and raised on Zanzibar; both opted later for living far from their native East Africa (Vassanji is currently living in Canada, Gurnah – in the United Kingdom); both chose English as their sole medium of writing; and, since East Africa is almost the only topic of their books, both demonstrate in their writing amazingly strong reliance on East African culture, history, and therefore – language (needless to say that for both authors Swahili is near-native or just native language). Though these writers can not be deemed as properly bilingual (although Gurnah is said to have

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made some earlier attempts of writing in Swahili), they might have made more than anyone else for the world popularisation of East African and, specifically, Tanzanian history and culture. And language, Swahili language, serves here as a major “conductor” of this culture; I would give only one example – both writers in their books, otherwise written in immaculate “Queen’s English,” abundantly use the glossae for the denotation of cultural realities specific to east Africa – for instance, mbuyu instead of “baobab,” vitumbua instead of “rice cakes” (see, e.g., Vassanji 42) as well as words like sharifu (Muslim elder), and others. In my opinion, here we also encounter with a specific case of “latent bilingualism” – very much the same one as was used by Chinua Achebe in his efforts to “Africanise” English. Same as Achebe, Vassanji (as well as Abdulrazak Gurnah in many of his novels) enters the Swahili lexemes without immediate translation, thus hitting the double goal – for the East African audience (which, in my opinion, the novels are also addressing) these glossae serve as an unmistakable sign of the author’s “East Africanness”; for the audience outside East Africa, these words give the author’s language this very much needed local flavour – once having referred to a meaning explained in the glossary at the end of the book, a foreign reader is able to follow the narration uninterruptedly, thus doing themselves this “code switching” which the authors designed as one of his main devices to attain the “Africanness” of the language itself. As for the inevitable question “is Vassanji a Tanzanian writer,” I dare quote an opinion posed once by a distinguished Tanzanian author and scholar of Swahili literature Mugyabuso Mulokozi, who, discussing the first and arguably still the most famous Vassanji’s novel The Gunny Sack, said: “If he speaks about Tanzanian problems, that is, he gets his impetus from Tanzanian life, which he experienced before he went abroad – he will still remain a Tanzanian author. If he abandons Tanzanian matters and starts to discuss American or other matters – here, maybe he will have extracted himself. But concerning The Gunny Sack, – in fact it is a novel about Tanzania to a very large extent. You can not detach it from Tanzania and proclaim it to be an Indian or European novel” (Mazungumzo 90). For the conclusion, I would allow myself a pleasure to speak of the foreseeable future – and, in my opinion, it is rather evident that in the foreseeable future English, as I noted in an earlier published article, will remain the alternative medium of expression for Tanzanian writers (Gromov, “Lingustic Situation” 269), allowing them to expand both artistically and geographically; at the same time, with the resurrection and expanding of East African Community Swahili also acquires growing importance – it has currently been adopted as an official language in five countries and is rapidly

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spreading. Thus, under the imperatives of today literary bilingualism in East African literature ceases to be only a daring attempt and “statement in itself,” but becomes a first-rate necessity, since the two languages have become to a varied extent international, and for a literary person crossing the language border becomes, in fact, the main way to survive. It can be confirmed by the example of many Kenyan writers, who either were bilingual throughout the literary career (example of playwright David Mulwa), or turned to Swahili after writing for a long time in English (Henry Ole Kulet), or vice versa (Kyallo Wadi Wamitila). Thus I dare assume, that literary bilingualism, favoured by East Africa possessing two languages of international importance, either regionally or world-wise, will attain growing importance in the regional literature.

Works Cited Bertoncini-Zubkova, Elena. “William E. Mkufya’s Latest Novel Ua la Faraja: A Commitment to the Fight Against HIV/AIDS.” Swahili Forum 15 (2005): 3-13. Bertoncini-Zubkova, Elena, et al. Outline of Swahili Literature. Prose Fiction and Drama. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Diegner, Lutz. “Intertextuality in the Contemporary Swahili Novel: Euphrase Kezilahabi’s Nagona and William E. Mkufya’s Ziraili na Zirani”. Swahili Forum 15 (2005): 25–35. Gromov, Mikhail D. “Linguistic Situation and the Rise of Anglophone Literature in Tanzania.” New English Literatures: Defining New Idioms of Expression. Ed. Eckhard Breitinger. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. 265-69. ——., ed. Mazungumzo ya fasihi. Mahojiano na waandishi, wahakiki na wachapishaji wa Tanzania. Yamekusanywa na yametayarishwa na Mikhail D. Gromov. Moscow: Humanities Publishing, 2001. Mkufya, William Eliezer. “Mazungumzo na Lutz Diegner juu ya riwaya ya Ziraili na Zirani.” Swahili Forum 15 (2005): 37-62. Ohly, Rajmund. Zanzibarian challenge: Swahili prose in the years 19751981. Windhoek: Academia, 1990 Powell, Adam Donaldson. The Dilemma of Modern Bilingual Poetry. . Vassanji, Moyez. The Gunny Sack. London: Heinemann, 1988

Alina N. Rinkanya

Sheng Literature in Kenya: Socio-Linguistic Borders and Spaces in Popular Poetry Since late 1960s Kenyan literature has been known as one of the largest, richest and fastest developing literary systems in sub-Saharan Africa. Dozens of books and hundreds of articles have been written about the works of various Kenyan authors, different trends and periods in Kenyan writing. However, very few of these scholarly books – if any – paid special attention to social aspects of Kenyan writing, namely, the “division” of the entire corpus of Kenyan writing depending on the audience or, rather, social groups that the writers were allegedly addressing. J. Roger Kurtz in his seminal monograph Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears: the Postcolonial Kenyan Novel (1998) states that “one could discuss the Kenyan novel thematically. […] Alternatively, it would be possible to discuss the works on the basis of geographical or ethnic categories” (20). As we see, social dimension of Kenyan literature – be it Kenyan novel, short story, drama or poetry – has never been in the focus of scholars’ attention. Meanwhile, in order to understand at least some recent developments in Kenyan writing it seems important to tackle the issues of “social addressees” or specific audience targeted by different trends in Kenyan literature. In our opinion, very rough picture might look as follows: Since the very first years of its existence, Kenyan literature was divided into two major trends – “serious” and “popular” literature (these terms in relation to Kenyan writing are used, for example, in Kurtz’ study above, as well as by other authors, such as Angela Smith and Tirop Simatei). “Serious,” or “high-breed” writing, represented by such well-known authors as novel writers Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Meja Mwangi, poets Jared Angira, Marjorie Oludhe-Macgoye, playwrights Francis Imbuga and Kenneth Watene, was frequently called “elitist.” 1 This name may be ascribed to the fact that these writers have always been targeting the upper-middle-class 1

In this brief survey of Kenyan “elitist” writers we deliberately do not mention any Kenyan authors writing in Swahili. The reason is that until 1990s Kenyan Swahili writing was pronouncedly “school-oriented,” and the number of titles was rather scarce. Only in the late 1990s and the first decade of the twenty first century Kenyan literary scene saw the real outbreak of Swahili fiction, with the emergence of such “high-breed” writers as Kyallo Wadi Wamitila, Ken Walibora, Kithaka wa Mberia, Mwenda Mbatiah, and others.

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readers – well-educated, well-off, well-acquainted with creative writing as such and well-conversant with the urgent problems of the society. Oddly enough, that part of literature that was usually labelled as popular (the authors are numerous, and, as Kurtz puts it, these texts “continue to dominate the Kenyan market” [Kurtz 19]) could, in our opinion, be qualified as no less “elitist” than the “serious” writing – for popular novels target the same middle-class (probably lower-middle class) readers. The factors that confine these two trends to predominantly middle-class audience are numerous, among them the crucial ones being those of education (the possession of “reading habits”) and economic wealth (only the middle-class readers can merely afford buying fictional books). Because of this, lower social groups – rural population (the rich farmers, being a part of middle class, do not fall into this category) and the inhabitants of lower-cost city areas, e.g. slums– in other words, the majority of the country’s population is simply and completely “excluded” from the consumers of Kenyan creative writing. As regards the rural dwellers, the reasons are multiple – for example, it is no secret that even the distribution of school books in Kenya’s rural areas remains a major problem, thus it looks like that the coverage of the country’s rural population with fiction reading even in schools belongs to not-so-foreseeable future. Thus, creative writing in all its forms still remains the privilege of urban dwellers – we would state that this observation applies to the majority of countries in sub-Saharan Africa. But, returning to Kenya, does it also mean that it remains the privilege of middle class? Has there been no form of creative expression that was commonly acceptable and commonly needed for both upper and lower strata of urban population in Kenya? A glance along the historical perspective of Kenyan literature’s existence would tell us that since the early years of independence creative writing was serving mostly – if not only – the aesthetic demands of upper social groups. We can even assume that lower-class urban dwellers – the inhabitants of slums, “ghettoes” and “lower-cost” residential areas – did not have any kind of “their own” literature that could be likened, for example, to Onitsha market publishing in Nigeria. Even the “cheaper” publishers in Kenya, like Spear Books, later appropriated by one of the country’s largest publishers, or Comb Books once run by a prominent Kenyan writer David Maillu, were basically targeting the middle-class readers. The reasons were the same – educational and economic: the poorly educated lower groups of urban population (whose educational facilities and therefore standards are very low even now) were not able to afford buying books, their economic priorities being bound to the needs of daily survival.

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To put it short, Kenyan literature from its very beginning until recently seems to have been bound by very strict and hardly breakable borders – primarily social (being confined to the middle class as the only consumer of fictional books), which in turn posed other restrictions (or borders) – stylistic (readership demanded certain stylistic standards, such as the use of standard literary English), thematic (as Kurtz testifies, almost all the Kenyan novels are to this or that extent dealing with city life [Kurtz 5]). The poorer urban folk was merely “thrown overboard”: first, there was no common medium of writing –standard English, habitual among the middle-class readers, was hardly used by the poor; secondly, there was no common form of expression – a book, which was an everyday life item for the middle class, for the poor was a rare, expensive and largely unnecessary commodity. It could be argued that in fact a common medium was there – everyone knows that English is not the most wide-spread and ever-understandable language in Kenya, for the country’s most important language is Swahili – the lingua franca of Eastern Africa. But it should be remembered that until recently Swahili, being understood and used by all Kenyans, was almost totally neglected by the governmental programs and even ignored in schools – it was introduced as a compulsory subject (and not as a medium of instruction) only in 1985! Therefore, for the middle class it was almost a jargon, which they used almost solely to communicate with their compatriots from lower classes – to whom, on the contrary, English was at best the language of their meagre schooling, rarely used after the school-leaving day, while Swahili was the language of everyday communication. It should also be noted that both upper and lower strata of Kenyan urban population were using a very specific, grammatically and lexically poor version of Swahili heavily mixed with English unlike Tanzania, where the governmental backing of refined and standardised Swahili led very soon to the outburst of creative writing in the language. This brings to light another serious border dividing the lower and upper groups of Kenyan urban population – the language border, and this alone made the existence of any kind of verbal art common for both upper and lower classes hardly possible. Indigenous languages of various Kenyan communities as a medium were even more out of question, for their usage was mainly confined to the rural areas. In the cities, Swahili and English were the two common languages, the tribal ones being used only in corresponding neighbourhoods. Local creative writing in English and even Swahili was for the richer; for the poor – there was none. 2 2

It is quite possible that in the period under description there existed a certain kind of “urban slum oral literature” – but such a phenomenon is quite beyond the scope of this article.

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And there was not a single form of literature – or any other form of verbal art – that was able to cross the above-mentioned borders. The situation changed only recently – and this change was even more drastic as unexpected. A new culture bridging the aesthetic demands of the well-off and the poor dwellers (especially the youth) of Kenyan cities seems to have emerged – a culture of sheng. What is sheng? We would like to start with one serious reservation: not being linguists, we will not to discuss this phenomenon of sheng from the linguistic point of view. We would first of all note (as we did elsewhere, see Rinkanya 2005, 2008), that various types of ‘synthetic’ or ‘hybrid’ languages, based on mixture of European and African languages and being generated and practiced principally in urban areas, characterised by mixing of different ethnic, social and professional groups of local population, are common all over the continent of Africa – suffice it to recall camfranglais in Cameroon, nouchi in Abidjan, tsotsitaal in South Africa, various forms of pidgin in Nigeria, krio in Sierra-Leone, creolho in Cabo Verde, etc. (see Kiessling and Mous 1). Some of these languages have recently acquired wider status and now serve as languages of inter-ethnic communication for vast groups of urban population in major cities of Sub-Saharan Africa, where the mixture of different ethnic communities and social strata is extremely high. For many city dwellers these “urban languages” serve as the first and sometimes the only tongue – for the languages of their own ethnic communities are practiced basically on the family level, and, due to the insufficient (although not always absent) formal education these people lack the fluency in a European (or sometimes local) language which otherwise meets the purposes of inter-ethnic communication in their country. The above described situation applies perfectly to Kenya, where the most common – and most likely the only – “urban language” is exactly what is called sheng. The name sheng is, to one of the versions, derived from the mixture of the words Swahili and English (see Mbaabu and Nzuga), although there are other etymologies. Sheng as a medium of interethnic and social communication has been used in Kenya since the late colonial times. It is characterised by mixing of lexical and grammatical units from Swahili, English and local languages. The versions of sheng could vary from city to city (in Nairobi – even from area to area), and also different social groups use different versions of sheng. In order to give the reader an idea what sheng is, we will quote here an example from the article by Roland Kiessling and Maarten Mous, where the authors cite the following phrase:

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“kuthora madoo za mathee” to steal mother’s money In [this example], ku-thora ‘to steal’ is from Kikuyu; ma-doo is a truncated Swahili slang word donge ‘amount of money’[…]; mathee is from English ‘mother’, with the last syllable replaced by [i:]. (9) 3

Socially, sheng has traditionally been the language of urban youth – and, moreover, youth belonging to lower, poorly educated groups of Kenyan society. Naomi Shitemi confirms that “sheng is also stigmatized as the idiolect of the urban illiterate. […] The linguistic behaviour of the sheng locutor is still frowned upon by various people in the social hierarchy” (14). Nevertheless, the present tendency is that the use of sheng becomes characteristic to other social groups, e.g. high school, college and university students – we will detail the reasons later. However stigmatised could it be, the spread of sheng became so prominent already by the 1970s, that even since that time it has been widely employed by Kenyan writers – mainly to bedeck the urban characters both in English and Swahili books, to render an unmistakable “urban flavour” to the speech of these characters. Moreover, in the late 1980s attempts were made to write full-length literary pieces in sheng – namely, by one of the most prolific writers of Kenya, David Maillu, who produced in 1988 a hundredpage novelette titled Without Kiinua Mgongo (kiinua mgongo – in literal translation from Swahili “back straightener” – is a sheng term for bribe), which was followed by Anayekukeep (He who keeps you, 1989). However, these attempts were reluctantly accepted by Kenyan reading public, since sheng, like many other urban languages over the continent, lacked in Kenya any status which brought it anywhere closer to official recognition. Sheng was used by many and was nevertheless frowned on by at least higher social groups. That is why Maillu's works were perceived by the readers more like a funny curio than the serious attempt to use an alternative medium in literature. The writer's attempt was met with apparent, although maybe friendly, perplexity – to write literature in well-used, but equally welldespised urban, “market” language, obviously seemed irrelevant at that time. The situation seems to have changed rather drastically in the 1990s and the 3

Naomi Shitemi in her article cited in this paper describes all those features in detail. She also observes that “some locutors, particularly from the affluent parts of the city, have a sheng version which is heavily based on English (so-called engsh) with no infusions of Swahili or mother tongue hence being a form of English slang” (7). In our opinion, the main distinguishing feature of engsh is that it is characterised exactly by no or very few infusions of mother tongue, English and Swahili being the two components. And since Naomi Shitemi herself acknowledges that engsh is in fact a version of sheng, we will use the word sheng as an umbrella term for both versions.

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first decade of the twenty first century, the period characterised by major social change in Kenya – namely in the sphere of democratic rights, of which the freedom of speech has come to the extent previously unheard of in the country’s history. Democratic reforms, initiated “slowly by slowly” by Daniel arap Moi in 1990s and gaining momentum in the “post-Moi era” after 2002, stimulated the emergence – or, rather, “unearthing” – of underground youth culture, of which sheng is undoubtedly the main medium. It all started with popular music – Kenyan version of rap, hip hop and other demanded popular trends came to life in abundance; all of a sudden, radio broadcasts were filled with the songs of Kenyan musicians sung almost exclusively in sheng. Most of the musicians who authored these songs were from the lowest social groups, mainly slum dwellers from Kenya’s major cities; however – and this is the most remarkable thing – these songs immediately became understandable and popular with literally all groups of urban youth, from slum kids to university students (to our knowledge, sheng culture has even more far-reaching effect, capturing even the adult population and spreading into rural areas). The reason was obvious: these musicians were singing (or rapping) in commonly understandable language – sheng – about commonly understandable problems of contemporary Kenyan life, addressing not only the specific problems of Kenyan youth, but the ailments common to the entire Kenyan society – social, political, ethnic, etc. The popularity of these songs and their authors has become so immense, that in a very short while sheng became the language of all the social groups of urban youth in Kenya, from the highest to the lowest; nowadays, sheng has become almost the “official language” of Kenyan youth culture. The question that now arises is: sheng as the language of urban youth music is well understood, but what does it have to do with literature? Literature in sheng emerged soon after the outbreak of popularity of sheng popular music. And, surprisingly enough, it was not the “home-made” editions printed in slums on a discarded equipment; on the contrary, the first specimen of sheng writing were published in a reputable almanac, sponsored by – of all organisations – no less a grantor than Ford Foundation. The reason why sheng writing became part and parcel of this edition is that the almanac was put up as an outlet of “youth literature,” of new writing culture, largely opposed to the already existing, “official” culture of letters. As the founders of the almanac put it themselves, “what we have found is that the literary intelligentsia, together with African publishers and founders of literary projects have lost touch with a new generation of Africans who are sick of being talked down to; who are seeking to understand the bewildering world around them – to be validated in print” (Kwani?). Therefore, the almanac “is

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a serious publication – over 300 pages of new journalism and fiction of experimental writing, poetry, cartoons photographs, literary travel writing, creative non-fiction” (Kwani?). We are referring to Kwani? – the most daring and, eventually, the most popular almanac of “new writing” in Kenya. Founded in 2003, with the support of Ford Foundation, the almanac, whose title is a reduced version of a Swahili phrase Kwa nini? (why?), has been published in four subsequent issues from 2003 to 2008 (Kwani? 1,2,3,4). As the editorial board proclaims on the almanac’s web site, “in three years, we have sold over 5000 copies of the journal, and have gotten a new generation of Kenyans reading. All together 30, 000 Kenyans have read Kwani? and we continue to grow” (Kwani?). The figures, which have increased recently, are really impressive for a non-school book in Kenya; it should also be mentioned that the almanac has its own book-publishing series, currently featuring over a dozen titles. Writing in sheng has from the very beginning become, as we noted earlier, part and parcel of Kwani? editions. In fact, the attitude to sheng has even been formulated on Kwani? official website: Language: We recognise that English and Kiswahili are the languages that Kenyans are literate in at this level; we aim to encourage work from other languages that we shall translate and present to a Kenyan audience. Achieved so far: Kwani? issue 02 has thirty pages dedicated to oral stories and rap and poetry in Sheng. (Kwani?)

In real sense, not only the second volume of Kwani? has a sizeable part devoted to sheng literature – it has been featured in all the issues since the very first one. What seems to us important in the above quotation is that speaking about Swahili and English, the editors automatically refer to sheng – as the medium bringing the two languages together and thus, probably, becoming more “Kenyan” than even the two official languages of the country. The first place here apparently belongs to poetry, since so far it has been the most prominent (but by no means sole) type of sheng writing. Poems in sheng were impressively represented in all the four issues of Kwani?. It could be stated, that these poems are in fact song lyrics – for their authors are the musicians and DJs popular in Kenyan scene. However, we venture to state that the editors of Kwani? did not pursue the simple target of increasing the almanac’s popularity by merely publishing the lyrics of popular songs. Their goal seems to be much deeper. First, these writings (which in fact even their authors position not as lyrics, but as poems – we will see it later) are written

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in a medium which is really “native” to urban youth regardless of their social background. Second, the contents of these songs corresponds fully with Kwani?’s vision of committed poetry – for the very essence of sheng poetry is very sharp and impartial social comments. Third, by publishing these “poems-cum-lyrics” in a reputable almanac, read and demanded in even the highest social circles, the editors of Kwani? elevate the sheng poems to the level of “high-breed” literature, transforming them from “suburban hip-hop” into the kind of alternative poetry, which developed a huge following in Kenya. All the three factors seem to be equally important. Language-wise, sheng literature appeals to all the groups of Kenyan urban (and increasingly rural) population, regardless of their ethnic origin and social and educational stand. In terms of content, the problems discussed in the poems are understood by all Kenyans and, moreover, are acknowledged as urgent (it should be noted that some of the poems were published in Kwani? also because the radio stations refused to rotate them in song forms for the reason of “too biting” social criticism). And it definitely pleases all the readers and listeners that this literature, which they consider part and parcel of their lives, is in fact represented in an edition with international reputation and high literary quality. In terms of artistic qualities, sheng poems possess two main features: they use simple, but expressive language and leave no sacred cows as far as the targets of their criticism are concerned. Below we will give a few examples. Whereas, as we mentioned, even the very first issue of Kwani? features some impressive examples of sheng poetry, Kwani? 2 (2004) contained more numerous and complicated works in sheng – short stories, poems, and a commentary on the present state of urban languages in Kenya by the members of popular collective Mashifta (Mashifta 286-96). Most of these young penmen still preferred to hide behind pen-names – sometimes almost gruesome ones, like Jambazi Fulani (“A Certain Criminal”), who delivered to this next issue of Kwani? two sketches of everyday life of Nairobi youth (Jambazi Fulani 57-58, 127-29). However, the pen-names of most of the authors – McKah, G-wiji, etc. – are readily known to the audience, because they are popular DJs and musicians. Their poems have many common traits, the most important one, in our opinion, being their contents – the mostly address the urgent social problems of Kenyan society, the continent of Africa and, on wider scale, the whole world. “Money, alcohol, politics and women” – “pesa, pombe, siasa na wanawake” – this is the title of poem by G-wiji, whose real name is Moseti Kamanda (G-wiji 284). And this is how the author with a pen-name MC Kah (a.k.a. Samuel Kang'ethe Ngigi) presents his visions of the future in his poem Ndoto Za Future (“Dreams of the Future”):

Sheng Literature in Kenya

Hakuna cha labda (1) Hakuna cha kuweza (2) Nikufanya kujua(3) Kawaida miujiza (4) ghetto maisha kukaza (5) Sikitu kwetu si mabratha (6) Tunatangaza ufalme wa sanaa za kuangaza(7) kwanza kabisa, kufufua masoldier wote (8) Walo kufa vitani, freedom fighters jangwani (9) Nuru gizani, ukoloni mambo leo, giza nuruni, (10) nduru mitaani, mbulu mjini. (11)

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There is nothing that may be (1) there is nothing that can be (2) I will make you know (3) Usually miracles (4) [only] tighten the ghetto life (5) it does not matter for us, for are we not brothers (6) We are declaring the kingdom of the enlightening art (7) first of all, revive all the soldiers (8) That perished in the war, freedom fighters in the desert(9) Light in the darkness, neocolonialism, darkness in the light, (10) screams in the slums, madness in town (11) (McKah 285)

The “stylistic patchwork” even in this short excerpt is rather elaborate – here we see the mocking allusions to a popular evangelistic slogan “kuna nuru gizani” – “there is light in the darkness,” which the poet mockingly turns into “giza nuruni” – “darkness in the light,” using this metaphor to describe the ever-dark life of the slum dwellers. A possible meaning of the call to “revive all the soldiers that perished in the war, freedom fighters in the desert” is to restore the rights of all the common wananchi, whose grandparents gave their lives for the freedom, and their descendants got nothing. It should be noted that this is the recurrent image and common idea even in “high-breed” Kenyan literature – from the novels of Ngugi wa Thiong’o to the plays of Kenneth Watene and David Mulwa. It seems that speaking about sanaa ya kuangaza na kuungaza as it was called in a later version of the poem – the art of enlightening and uniting – the poet first of all refers about sheng poetry, which really enlightens – in term of its social content – and, moreover, unites young and not-so-young people of different social backgrounds, from slum dwellers and jua kali workers to university students and white-collar-job occupants, speaking about the issues that most of them consider as important and relevant, thus this poetry in real sense works across borders. The third issue of Kwani? 4 features even more elaborate and colourful use of sheng. There again are poems by well-known Kenyan rap and hip-hop stars. A good example is a poem by Kenyan rapper Kama, member of the 4

It is indicated on the date-line page that the collection was published in 2003, whereas in real sense Kwani? 3 appeared not earlier than 2005.

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crew named Kalamashaka, “the pioneers of Kenyan Swahili rap.” The poem is titled Zana za vita nashika (“I am holding the weapons”): Vifaa vya vita nashika (1) Ambazo ni kalamu karatasi, haya mashairi naandika (2) National archive, next na ya Jomo Kenyatta (3) Utayapata hata after tashaukata (4) Kalamashaka ni ka shada (5) Pombe, ukuro (6) International tuko (7) Ningekua mnyama fuko (8) Creep toka under, alafu baadaye thunder, mlipuko (9) Alfa, Omega (10) Masikio tega (11) Naficha makucha (12) Sura zichonge jiwe confuse hizi dreadie zangu na (13) Nyoka za medusa (14) Past, present na future (15) Reincarnation wathii (16) Life yangu ya last nilikuwa Kimathi (17) Before hiyo nilikuwa Mugo wa Kibiro basi (18) Na kabla ya hiyo nilikuwa… nafasi (19) Patia pharaoh, kamau, na utie zii kunionyesha Madharau (20) Knowledge kuwakumbusha kule mmetoka (21)

msisahau

I am holding the weapons (1) Which are the pen and the paper, and I write these poems (2) At the National archive, next to Jomo Kenyatta avenue (3) You will get them even after you are refused [to be given] (4) Kalamashaka are like drugs (5) Alcohol, addiction (6) We are international (7) I would become a beast like the mole (8) Creep from under, then suddenly afterwards a thunder, explosion, (9) Alfa, Omega, (10) Listen attentively (11) I am hiding claws (12) [Those] stone-faced confuse my dreadlocks for the (13) Snakes of medusa, (14) Past, present and future (15) Reincarnation [of] people (16) In my last life I was Kimathi (17) Before that I was Mugo wa Kibiru (18)

And before that I was… it could well be (19) That I was a pharaoh, man, and don’t you dare to show contempt for me (20) Let knowledge remind you all – do not forget where you came from (21) (Kama 30)

It is worthwhile to notice that he poet refers to his writings exactly as mashairi - “poems,” and not as “song lyrics” or otherwise. Although preserving the main device of rap song-writing – the non-elaborate end rhymes, the poem contains the message which, as we presume, would be more difficult to grasp while listening to it then while reading. The message is in fact a monologue of a young Kenyan, who is determined to obtain his own place under the sun, and thus he is warning those “stone-faced” who may stand in his way – and those are many on all social levels, thus “Alfa, Omega”; this also could contain a satirical reference to Bible. He is warning

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them that to achieve that he “would become a beast,” that he is “hiding claws” and “don’t you dare to show contempt for me.” This message is apparently understandable and relevant to all the young Kenyans, regardless of their various backgrounds. And obviously the author, being also “flesh and kin” of Nairobi slum areas, in this poem puts his message “across the audiences.” Apparently he addresses the audience of higher social stand – it could be judged by such words as “snakes of Medusa,” “Alfa-Omega,” “reincarnation,” which are not a part of everyday language of lower social circles. Meanwhile, he uses the references which are clear and dear to all Kenyans – names of Dedan Kimathi, the leader of Mau Mau movement in 1950s and Kenya’s national hero, and Mugo wa Kibiro, a legendary prophet who foretold the coming of the colonisers. The name of Pharaoh is used here not in the biblical sense, as a symbol of oppression, but on the contrary – as a symbol of the grandeur of Africa’s ancient civilisations. By using these names, Kama appeals to all Kenyans with a call to realise that they are the inheritors of the country’s and the continent’s glorious past, and thus they deserve their place under the sun, no matter which part of the society they belong to. He also warns that the messages sent by him and his crew Kalamashaka will spread in space and endure in time – “we are international, like drugs, alcohol or bhang,” and the readers will be able to get these poems even if they refuse to be given them at the National archives; the latter assertion seems also to be mocking the system – if the poems are not obtainable from the “official” sources, the audience will still get them because of their high popularity. There is a number of other poems, also authored by people known as musicians as well as contributors to the previous editions of Kwani?, such as McKah, G-wiji, and Kitu Sewer a.k.a. Paul Mboya – these poems are even gathered in Kwani? 3 in the separate section titled “Sheng’speare” (sic!). In our opinion, this title itself shows that the authors consider their verses as not songs, but primarily poetry (be it for reading or performing). Another example which we would like to give is another poem by MC Kah, titled, Ukombozi wa ki akili (“Liberation of the Mind”): UKOMBOZI WA KI AKILI: PART I

LIBERATION OF THE MIND: PART I

Wanasiasa wa plot (1) Vile wata grab ma plot (2) Pahali pangetengenezwa industries, mashule (3) pangetengenezwa jela na hospitali ka mathare (4)

The politicians plot (1) So that they will grab the plots (2) Where would be built industries, schools (3) Where would be built prisons and hospitals like Mathare (4)

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Wasee wali wazimika na shika nare (5) Nilikuweko titanic ikigonga iceberg (6) Politicians waki brag vile walitoa pesa kwa harambee (7) Wanasiasa pamoja na wenzao ma pastor kwa kanisa (8) Sadaka kudaiwa ni kaa za kiasari (9) Politician kuchukulia civilian, alien kwa uwanja wa haki na ukweli (10) Hatari ikiongezeka ma revolutionary tayari (11) Vijana wa mtaa, sambamba na sanaa (12) Sanaa kutumwagikia ka manna kwa sana (13) Kwa danger zone tu reason kama mababu (14) Meditation za revolution zifikie African population (15) Mwisho wa struggle (16)

People went insane and became furious (5) I was on the Titanic when it hit the iceberg (6) Politicians bragging that they give money for self-help initiative (7) Politicians together with their friends – pastors in church (8) [Give] charcoal with honey for demanded alms (9) Politician is fooling a civilian, an alien in the field of justice and truth, (10) If the danger increases, the revolutionaries are ready (11) The youth of the slums, parallel with art, (12) Art will pour upon us a lot of manna, (13) In the danger zone reason like our forefathers, (14) Let meditations of revolution reach the African population (15) End of the struggle (16)

UKOMBOZI WA KI AKILI: PART II

LIBERATION OF THE MIND: PART II

Wazaliwa mtaa, nightmare na ka ni ndoto (1) Ni za vile watawaipata gold mines (2) Kabla wa grow old, vanity souls za vijana kuwa sold, (3) Wakuu wa Africa kuvunjika guu, (4) Casualty majuto mjukuu, political Africa kuruka (5) Kwa election bila liberation, (6) Ma squatter wana vote, (7) Ma squatter wanaendelea ku squat (8) Philosophy hunipiga kofi (9) Asubuhi kabla coffee, (10) Niamke nirudishe Afrika usafi (11) Ule ulikuwa kabla walafi wa magharibi wafe (12) Namaanisha wale watakasirika sana (13)

Nightmares of the slum-born (1) Are the dreams of those who will get them in gold mines (2) Before they grow old, vanity souls of the youth [are] to be sold, (3) Leaders of Africa break their legs, (4) Casualty – repentance later, political Africa jumps (5) To the election without liberation, (6) Squatters vote, (7) [But] squatters continue squatting (8) Philosophy usually gives me a slap (9) In the morning before coffee, (10) Let me wake up and give purity back to Africa? (11) That was (there) before the gluttons of the West died (12) I mean those who’ll be very angry (13) (McKah 168)

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This poem in fact could be called a “brief encyclopaedia” of modern Kenyan cultural references as well as social ills. Even the title itself would immediately invoke in the memory of a reader, well-conversant with Kenyan “high-breed” literature, the famous slogan “decolonising the mind,” posed in 1980s by Kenyan classic Ngugi wa Thiongo. The author speaks about politicians grabbing for their needs the public land, where the industries, schools and hospitals for the common wananchi could have been build (again, here the name of Mathare – a well known psychiatric clinic in Nairobi – is rhymed with nare, a sheng word for fury, indicating that in fact the hospitals are needed for the common people who go mad being infuriated with the present situation). Meanwhile, these politicians brag (notice how the poet uses the consonance in grab and brag) that they give money for harambee (an exclamatory word in Swahili, used in Kenya to denote public self-help initiatives) whereas in real sense they and their friends, who are pastors (church being a profiteering business in Kenya) give only “charcoal with honey” for alms. Ordinary citizen, fooled by the politicians (notice the constant repetition of the word, both in English and Swahili – thus the enemy is indicated), are only “aliens in the field of truth and justice,” and hence revolution is needed, and meditations about it should be carried to African population by “youth of the slums.” It seems that here the author talks mostly about sheng poets like himself, who through their art (which will “pour upon us a lot of manna” – again a biblical image) will bring the “revolution of the mind” (this, in our opinion, is the kind of revolution the author talks about) to the people, whose state he compares to the state of Titanic passengers after ship hitting the iceberg (images from international pop culture also comprise an important source for sheng poetry). In the second part of the poem, the stylistic allusions are even more complicated and at the same time understandable to the widest audience. Speaking about the politicians, the author quotes well-known Swahili proverb asiyesikia la mkuu huvunjika guu – “who does not listen to the elders breaks the leg,” implying that African politicians do not have the traditional – or any other kind of – wisdom. He also quotes a common Swahili expression majuto ni mjukuu – “repentance comes later,” meaning that the politicians would not care about the casualties since their own aims are achieved. The author again addresses hot social issues – land squatting (poor people illegally planning their small fields on huge areas of land, belonging to rich families but unused by the owners), hopeless future of the young, election being used as a tool of manipulation by the politicians. He daringly rhymes Swahili word kofi – a slap – with coffee, confessing that his spiritual reflections slap him every morning and urge him to wake up and give back to Africa the purity that

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allegedly was there before colonialism. This idea of “going back to the roots” (see also “reason like our forefathers” in the first part of the poem) also has been widely contemplated in “high-breed” Kenyan literature, from poems by Jared Angira to the novels of Meja Mwangi, and is somewhat dear to the heart of many Kenyan intellectuals. In Kwani? Volume 4 (2007) Sheng poetry is represented to a lesser extent than in the previous two editions, but the poems are no less expressive and colourful. We will give two examples; first, again a poem by MC Kah (alias Kang'ethe Ngigi) Hatua – “A step”: Mwafrika imani mlimani tengeneza altar (1) Punguza majeneza, magerezani (2) Omba jah jah Malcom X (3) Custom za ethias, bomb Gomora na Sodom (4) Burn burn ma sheriff wa town (5) Ma clown wenye crown za gold (6) Bila wisdom ya old (7) Namuomba Mungu, mumba earth na mbingu (8) Nauliza mbona minyororo za chuma hamna (9) Na bado tabu? (10) Ananijibu ukoloni mambo leo tangu (11) Uafrica kukosekana, kwa vitabu za kizungu (12) Na share hili jibu na ma intellect (13) Wa university (14) Wanao jali economy, technology (15) Zaidi ya humanity, (16) acha niwakumbushe humility (17) Karibu mau-mau university (18) Elewa wisdom ya mababu (19) Freedom kujivunia mila bila aibu (20) Ku-realise kujitegemea culture-wise (21) Kujitengenezea black man paradise (22)

African, on the mountain build an altar of faith, (1) Reduce the [number of] coffins and prisons, (2) Ask from Jah and Malcolm X (3) Ethical customs, bomb Gomorra and Sodom (4) Burn burn the town sheriffs (5) The clowns wearing crowns of gold (6) Without wisdom of old (7) I pray the God, create [anew] earth and heaven (8) I ask why there are no more chains of iron (9) But the misery is still there? (10) He answers me neo-colonialism persists (11) Africanness is missing in the European books (12) And share this answer with intellectuals (13) Of university (14) Who care for economy, technology (15) More than humanity, (16) let me remind them of humility (17) Welcome to Mau-Mau university, (18) Understand the wisdom of the forefathers, (19) Freedom of being proud of traditions without shame (20) Realise self-reliance culture-wise (21) To create for yourselves black man’s paradise (22) (McKah 136)

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Here the author addresses primarily “ma-intellect wa university,” urging them to raise their eyes from “European books,” which mostly neglect Africa, and start to care about “Africanness” and humanity more than economic interests. Again the reader encounters with “back to the roots” standpoint – “intellectuals” are compelled to enter the “Mau-Mau university” (referring to the ideals of the liberation struggle), “understand the wisdom of the forefathers” and take pride in the traditional past. We again see the recognisable images of politicians – “the clowns wearing crowns of gold without wisdom of old” and their servants – “the town sheriffs” (corrupt policemen). The author again uses commonly understandable images, uniting the dislikeable features of present day Africa under the image of “Gomorra and Sodom” and putting the figure of Malcolm X on the level with the divine figures of Jah, the god of the Rasta, and Mungu – a Swahili word for the Supreme Being. In other words, we again see that the contents and the form of the poem appeal to most of the compatriots of the author, regardless of their backgrounds and even age. A similar example is found in the poem “C.C.T.V” by Paul Mboya, a musician more known under the pseudonym Kitu Sewer (“something from the sewer”). Also born in Nairobi slums, Mboya is currently one of the outstanding figures in Kenyan music scene (which he confirms referring to his writings as rather “lyrics” than poems). Using as a title the popular abbreviation for the video surveillance camera, the author, like his fellow artists, addresses the burning issues of today’s reality. Watu huniambia (1) Kitu sewer shampoo (2) Lyrics zako na-gospel kama bamboo (3) Utadhani rap ni nywele na studio ni bafu (4) Ni kuchafu (5) Mpaka siafu zinabuy viatu (6) Pwaguzi na pwagu waargue kuhusu lyrics zangu (7) C.C.T.V camera zinazoom katikati ya town (8) Nikawanyama kuwa zoo (9) Kwa bush watu wanakufa Darfur na njaa (10)

People tell me (1) Sewer stuff (stage name) [you are like] a shampoo (2) Your lyrics and gospel are like bamboo (3) You would think rap is hair and studio is a bathroom (4) And [here] it is dirty (5) To the extent when even ants buy shoes (6) Small and big thieves argue about my lyrics (7) C.C.T.V cameras are zooming in the town centre (8) Watching them like animals in a zoo (9) In the bush people die [of] Darfurs and hunger (10)

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Ye na G-8 wametuma shuttle kwa moon(11) Wametoka tour ya kuokota diamonds (12) Sierra leonne wimbo (13)

ndi ndio akicompose

Mapya akue na bling za ku floss (14) Iyo song inaitwa world war four (15) Iko sure kukuweka on toes super powers wana try kufight fyucha (16) Gavaa inahide huduma (17) Shahidi wako shy kutoa ushuhuda (18)

Juu fine wawalitoleana judge unasikia (19) Kujinyonga ka judas (20) Mind inachukua muda kuelewa (21) Shetani ka hawakimbizi (22) Amewamark masura (23)

Yes and G-8 have send a shuttle to the moon (11) They returned from the tour of picking diamonds (12) In Sierra Leone, so that if one [of them] composes a new song (13) He has jewelry to floss (flaunt) (14) This song is called world war four (15) It is sure to put on toes super powers they try to fight the future (16) Government hides services (17) Witnesses are shying to give out testimony (18) Up there judges fine them [until] you hear (19) [One of them] hangs himself like Judas (20) It takes mind time to understand (21) If they do not run away from Satan (22) He has marked their faces (23) (Paul Mboya 388)

The metaphors are powerful but simple – Kitu sewer, the author, compares himself to a shampoo who uses rap music (and not gospel mostly sung in pure Swahili ad English) as hair and studio as a bathroom to wash away all the dirt of modern Kenya and, on a wider scale, the whole modern capitalist world run by super powers. The manifestations of this dirt are multiple – from the magnates of G-8 countries, spending money on “shuttles to the moon” and “tours to pick diamonds” and trying “to fight the future,” to the local government “hiding services,” authorities scaring witnesses so that they are “shying” to testify in courts, corrupt judges, etc., etc. Again, we see the use of biblical images (Judas), allusions to recent political developments in the region (Darfur), use of commonly known Swahili expressions (a proverb pwagu hupata pwaguzi – a thief will always meet a greater thief). In our opinion, the cited poems demonstrate a remarkable ability of sheng poetry to cross borders – for, being conceived in slums and targeting mainly the domestic audience, by being published in the prestigious and reputable almanac these poems are automatically addressing the higher social circles; and, as shown by the brief analysis of the poems above, they are understood

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on all social levels. The reasons are clear – the language is more common and dearer to the hearts of the audience than even “official” Swahili and English, the problems discussed are equally understandable and disturbing to all Kenyans, and even the stylistic devices that the authors use make the poems understood by everyone. Of course, sheng literature, as we mentioned above, is not exhausted with poetry. In the four issues of Kwani? there are also short stories – like the one by Roger Akena, characterised in a short biographical sketch as a “cartoonist and Kenya’s No 1 Matrix fan” who presented on six pages a love story in SMS messages written in sheng, titled “Machoco, maSMS, Hanyaring na Kompe” (which could be translated as “Chocolates, SMS, Chasing About, and Rubbish” – Akena 100-05). Martin Mbugua Kimani in his feature article “Blood and 100% Human Hair,” depicting the life in the barbershops in Nairobi markets and slum areas, uses sheng more or less in a way it was used before in Kenyan creative writing – to decorate the speech of his characters. The passages he chooses are so colourful that sheng surpasses the role of a mere decoration and becomes a full-fledged hero of the text; and some more names could be mentioned. In the above-quoted article Naomi Shitemi wrote, At start, the language identified as sheng was frowned upon and seen as a lack of linguistic competence. With time, however, it became stylistic and was thought fashionable by the youth. […] Sheng is therefore a form of new outlet for the expression of various cultures, especially the metamorphosed cultures resulting from the co-existence of various cultures and linguistic forms. It is therefore a lucid vision of the development of a new African language. (Shitemi 11)

We fully agree with the observation about the importance of sheng as the medium of alternative, youth inter-ethnic and inter-class culture, the existence of which enhances such important social processes as detribalisation and the creation of new multicultural identity. Sheng has been “officialised” by the new Kenyan popular culture, having deeply penetrated the popular music (especially), radio broadcasting (to a slightly lesser extent), some TV shows (like the immensely popular “Redykyulass” and “Red kona” where sheng is used as the main medium). We state that today more than 80 percent of urban youth, regardless of their social background, are to various extents sharing the sheng culture. And it is rather symptomatic that sheng has soon afterwards received another “officialisation” on behalf of the “highbreed” writing, sheng literature being published in such a reputable edition as Kwani?, presented at the literary festivals, critiqued and researched by scholars.

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In editorial to Kwani? Volume 4, Billy Kahora, the assistant editor, talking about the stories that he heard from his fellow Kenyans all over the country, wrote, As different as all these narratives were I could relate to them as they were essentially Kenyan. Though these didn’t make it into these pages they remain the reason why we at Kwani? do what we do; we recognise that in these stories we share a common identity and, perhaps more importantly, tell others about who we are. (Kwani? 4, ii-iii)

In our opinion, these words are even more applicable to sheng texts that did make it to the pages of Kwani?. These texts, being written in the language that many readers, especially the young, consider “more native” than “bookish” English, “standard” Swahili or even the rarely-used mother tongues, and dealing with problems that are acknowledges as urgent and essential by the young Kenyans, provide them with the sense of identity which crosses all the possible borders – ethnic, social, language, etc. This brings the young people together in a feeling of “Kenyanness,” creating awareness of the present-day situation and urging them to care about their future – and doing it in much more convincing and appealing way then “high-breed” literature, school programs and even mass-media.

Conclusion In conclusion, sheng literature and, in my view, especially poetry presently seems to be the only kind of verbal art in Kenya with an ability to cross multiple borders – generic and textual (creating a certain kind of synthetic genres such as “poem-cum-song” or “short story-monologue-diary”), stylistic (since the imagery and references used by the authors are commonly understood by many Kenyans), language, ethnic and cultural (since the medium, which brings together the two national languages of Kenya, is understood by many groups of population regardless of their ethnic origin), and finally social, providing Kenyan youth (and, presumably, even the people who have already) not only with the form of expression alternative to already existing and “elitist” kinds of verbal arts, but with a new common view of the country’s social reality, new inter-ethnic and multi-cultural consciousness – and the means to express this consciousness in a clear, appealing and convincing way.

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Works Cited Akena, Roger. “Machoco, maSMS, Hanyaring na Kompe.” Kwani? 03 (200x): 100-05. G-wiji. “Pesa Pombe Siasa na Wanawake.” Kwani? 02 (2004): 284. Jambazi Fulani. “Nairobi Reloaded.” Kwani? 02 (2004): 127-29. ——., “Nyof Nyof.” Kwani? 02 (2004): 56-57. Kama. “Zana za Vita Nashika.” Kwani? 03 (2005): 30. Kiessling, Roland, and Maarten Mous. “Urban Youth Languages in Africa.” Anthropological Linguistics 46.3 (2004): 1-39. Kimani, Martin Mbugua. “Blood and 100% Human Hair.” Kwani? 03 (2005): 221-29. Kurtz, J. Roger. Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears: the Postcolonial Kenyan Novel. Oxford: James Currey; Trenton: Africa World Press, 1998. Kwani? . Maillu, David. Without Kiinua Mgongo. Nairobi: Maillu Publishing House, 1989. Mashifta, Crew. “On Sheng.” Kwani? 02 (2004): 286-96. Mbaabu, Ireri, and Kibande Nzuga. Sheng-English Dictionary. Dar es Salaam: Institute of Kiswahili Research, 2003. McKah. “Ndoto za Future.” Kwani? 02 (2004):285. Mwas. “Captured.” Kwani? 03 (2005): 378-83. Rinkanya, Alina. “Sheng Literature in Kenya: A Revival?” The Nairobi Journal of Literature 3 (2005): 41-45. ——., “Some Notes on Sheng Literature in Kenya.” Creative Writing in African Languages: Production, Mediation, Reception. Eds. Anja Oed and Uta Reuster-Jahn. Köln: Rudiger Köppe, 2009. Shitemi, Naomi L. “Pidginization: Sheng, the Melting Pot of Kenyan Languages and an Anti-Babel Development.” Kiswahili 64 (2001): 116.

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“Na Hawa Watu Lazima Wakuwe Serious!”: 1 FM Radio Spaces and Folkloric Performance of Consmopolitan Identities in Kenya In 2000, then president Daniel Arap Moi threatened to ban Kameme FM, a Gikuyu-language radio station that was then only a few years old, allegedly because they could be used to fan what he called “anarchy and genocide” as had happened in Rwanda (“President Moi”). He is quoted as having further stated: “I am not against people promoting their culture, but vernacular stations like Kameme must be transparent first.” A similar ban-drama played out in 2005 president Mwai Kibaki’s government shut down briefly KASS FM, a radio station serving Kalenjin-language speakers, ostensibly for airing what was called “inflammatory content” during the referendum campaigns. In 2008 the Minister for Information and Broadcasting threatened to shut down the station for airing what he alleged was inciting content. In the case of both Kameme FM and KASS FM it has not helped matters that the two presidents come from ethnic groups that are perceived to be “enemies”: Moi is Tugen (a Kalenjin sub-group) and Kibaki is Gikuyu thereby causing the citizenry to interprete, rightly or wrongly, the hand of government as being aimed at undercutting the influence of particular ethnic groups. It appears that in making his claims Moi was alluding to the significant cultural and ideological power radio wields amongst audiences not just in Kenya but also in other parts of Africa where situations of acute social injustice prevail (see Gunner). In post-independent Kenya radio – as expressive space – has over time become both a critical space upon which specific questions are “debated” and a platform upon which citizens contest relations between themselves and the state. This ability of radio to subvert government agenda is arguably one of the key fears that informed the thinking of authorities in the incidents alluded to above. Some of radio’s negative power might be seen for instance in the role of broadcasting during the Rwanda genocide (see Dallaire) and as such there can be no doubt about the existence of immense potential for such abuse

1

“These people need to get serious” is Mwalimu King’ang’i’s signature response when he doesn’t agree with either the callers or Maina Kageni, his co-host on the Classic FM breakfast show.

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elsewhere. Whether this is a plausible reading of the role KASS FM played in the violence that was experienced in Kenya’s Rift Valley province before and after the disputed general election of December 2007 largely depends on one’s ability to read and understand the nuances of the Kalenjin language in which it broadcasts. Indeed the same is true about other vernacular radio stations which have proliferated beginning in the early 1990s when the government eased the stranglehold on broadcasting that it had maintained since the founding of radio broadcasting in Kenya in 1928. The country has 83 licensed broadcasters who between them offer service on 247 different stations. Before this liberalisation of the airwaves the country only had Kenya Broadcasting Corporation – the public radio and TV broadcaster – which now has to compete with privately-owned radio and TV stations for audiences eager to escape what they see as the tyranny of the government mouthpiece. 2 The call-in show is one of the more visible traditions to have emerged forcefully out of this rearrangement of the electronic broadcast field. The numerous vernacular FM radio stations are sites for the active summoning of folklore and emically-situated local knowledge and its deployment in othering different ethnic communities as has happened during some of the country’s recent political crises. These interactions that take the format of call-in shows usually have insider-outsider boundaries; language, ethnicity and subcultural identity are some of the facets that determine participation. 3 What all this boils down to is the fact that over the last decade, because it is interactive in a way that state-controlled KBC previously was not, FM radio has evolved into a powerful tool with which presenters can engage with their audiences. The performative space thus availed by electronic media, and how citizens use it to constitute a popular culture that appropriates heavily from folklore as well as other modes of expression, is what this paper seeks to examine. Popular culture is used here in a liberatory sense to refer to creative expressive acts constituted upon media that are utilised not because participants have no alternatives but because they choose them. At any rate given that many citizens do not fall properly within strictly defined social classes, economic stratification is a rather tenuous measure upon which to describe popular culture; appeal, access and function, rather than a high/low-brow dichotomisation, define Kenyan popular culture. This paper begins by setting out its problematic within Kenyan folkloristics praxis and then broadens out to explore FM radio shows as 2

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See http://www.cck.go.ke/radio_and_tv_stations/ for a complete list of licensed broadcasters and radio and TV stations currently available in Kenya. This observation is based on discussions with listeners of various vernacular broadcast stations in the six months to, and four months after, the December 2007 elections.

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folkloric performance. Especially in the closing years of the 20th century electronic media have become a key avenue through which folklore is mediated to larger audiences necessitating an interrogation of specific relationships that obtain between radio audiences and the material that is aired for them. A key assumption in this paper is that electronic media play a role in the transformation of performances and the spaces in which they are performed. Proceeding from the conception of verbal arts as performance (see Bauman), this paper seeks to examine ways in which “narrative” performances on Kenyan FM radio – a practice that has become prevalent in urban East Africa since the early 1990s – enable a translation of traditional artistic practice(s) into contemporary media spaces and certain theoretical challenges this phenomenon might raise in thinking about aspects of local folklore. We seek to interrogate a related set of questions; first, in what ways does radio – if we accept electronic modes of communication as narrative agency – affect creative texts and, secondly, what forms of cultural translation obtain in such a situation? A critical thrust in this study will be an interrogation of some of the theoretical assumptions in Kenyan folkloristics that are often treated as a binding especially as they relate to the authority of performers, the supposedly “stable” nature of folklore material and the “predictable” character of their audiences. How do these performances challenge, for instance, the characterisation of post-colonial Kenyan cultures as “orate”? What exactly does contemporary FM radio narrative adapt from the “global ecumene,” after Hannerz (1996), and how does it work vis-à-vis “tradition”? Aware of the crucial ways in which the “mediascape,” pace Appadurai (1997), affects forms and arenas of cultural expression, the paper attempts an interrogation of performance on Kenyan FM radio as a means to assessing how ideas on identities, and by extension the culture(s) upon which they are forged, are continually (re)deployed in ways that challenge the borders that seek to define them. Primary material for analysis is drawn from Kenyan FM radio as well as direct interviews. First some broad questions related to the study of folklore in Kenya are examined immediately below in order to set the basis for undertaking analysing FM radio presentations as folkloric performance. Whereas in theory it should not be difficult to cut an independent path in any discipline in practice one finds that the contrary is often true especially when the ground has been mapped by scholars who cast their gigantic imprints upon the discipline so firmly and broadly that those who come after

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them tend to assume that “everything has been covered.” 4 As such it might happen that one of the most difficult things for successive scholars to do is to try and advance meaningfully the dominant terms of a discipline’s discourse as set by its pioneers. Certainly this seems to be the case with Kenyan oral literature studies that began in the 1970s. 5 Thus for instance whereas generally Finnegan’s seminal Oral Literature in Africa (1970) has had a phenomenal influence on at least a generation of Kenyan scholars, it is curious that the work remains by and large the major reference text in the local folklore curriculum. While there is nothing wrong in referring to this pioneering work, an unfortunate assumption has developed amongst folklore students that there is little if any need to either re-examine the issues Finnegan raised – even if for no other reason to see how else the material might be understood – or even to move forward from where she left nearly four decades ago. One of the unfortunate outcomes of this stasis then has been that efforts of scholars like Okpewho (1992) who has suggested that folkloristics ought to broaden out both spatially (fieldwork) and in terms of genre to include emergent sites and forms of cultural production in order to examine the synthesis that takes place in contemporary cultural practices have gone largely unheeded in Kenya. Incidentally, even where a useful text like Teaching Oral Literature (Masinjila and Okoth-Okombo, 1994) has raised important theoretical and methodological issues that should have formed a key re-orientation moment for Kenyan folkloristics much in the manner that Paredes and Bauman’s Toward New Perspectives in Folklore (1972) did for American folklore study, little work has appeared to build upon the foundation laid by this important text. The net result is that much material that ought to form a rich field for study has over the years been left 4

5

The main data for this paper are derived from interactions with students and their lecture hall responses during folklore courses that I have been teaching at Kenyatta University’s Literature Department over the last twelve years, as well as from regular conversations with other researchers of popular culture and listeners to the various FM radio stations especially since 2004. To the extent possible narratives are presented in informants’ voices in order to enable an understanding of how listeners read them. I am grateful to Becky, Beth, Cathy, George, Kaburu, Mariga, Michael, Muthoni, Njuguna, Odyssee, Shailja, Wambui as well as the others who wished to remain anonymous for permission to use their feedback on the radio narratives. Two sources were in their mid-20s while the rest ranged in age between 31 and 46 years. Folklore does not exist as an independent discipline in the Kenyan school curriculum. As the term oral literature suggests, it is treated as a subset of literature, thus severely limiting the space for its deeper interrogation at either undergraduate or post-graduate levels. For reasons that have already been explored elsewhere (see Wa Mungai, “Nothing but ogre tales”) – amongst them that the term oral literature invites us to view non-literary material according to literary lenses – the term folklore will be used throughout.

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unattended to. The irony of this situation in relation to Kenya is that whereas Finnegan is emphatic about the absolute need for fieldwork as a basis for folkloristics – after all her 1970 opus was the product of such extensive work – visits to the field are no longer a core requirement for the study of folklore, at least not in the literature departments with which I am familiar where the curriculum policy is set by the department, not the course lecturer. Even in situations where students are taken out for ‘fieldwork,’ resource allocations to academic departments in all Kenyan public universities hardly allow for a trip lasting more than a few days. This begs the question of whether such brief excursions to a village or an outpost like the Gedi ruins in Malindi serve any real purpose in terms of either creating familiarity with the field data or, even more crucially, imparting skills about ethnographic method. This raises a tragic contradiction in which students of folklore adeptly describe in classic terms the material of their sub-discipline – at least in all Kenyan university literature departments in terms of disciplinary placement folklore is subsumed into literature – but fail to recognise the same or similar things when and where they appear in contemporary everyday environments. In this manner as sites of folkloric encounter and production urban social set-ups are a much neglected field. One of the explanations for the messy state of affairs in which students of folklore find themselves might be found in the way the subject is conceptualised, analysed and taught. In this regard a number of issues stand out clearly. First, in school texts folkore is still presented as ‘communal lore’ even where the evidence suggests that the definition of a community as necessarily ‘rooted,’ ‘rural’ and ‘homogeneous’ that would have been accurate in the 1950s no longer applies given the social changes that have taken place; the word tribe (users happily ignore the racist underpinning of the term in descriptions of Africans, particularly in colonial anthropology) is often used to stand for community, an equivalence that no longer makes sense. Increasingly people have left their once-small rural countryside communities for urban centres in huge numbers, thus sundering earlier understandings of a ‘folk’ as a group of people that are rooted to some geographical space. At any rate even within rural spaces people from different ethnic groups have moved to settle amongst others, resulting in highly complex inter-ethnic kinship networks that in turn lead to a commingling of diverse folklore. Kenya’s vast Rift Valley province largely testifies to this fact as intermarriages and general every day interaction amongst the Kalenjin, Luhya, Gikuyu, Maasai, Kisii and Luo demonstrate. In effect most Kenyans now have a multiplicity of identities which they move in and out of contingent to particular needs.

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The above issue leads to a second related problem: the question of folklore’s authenticity, which is usually another way for people to disguise their thoughts about the troubling state called modernity, an assumed counterpoint to the term traditional, not just as an adjective but more importantly as a state of being pristine in the romantic folklorists’ sense. These supposedly authentic folk are then thought to be the legitimate cultural authorities and that anyone else is a pretender. Thus for instance a ‘Maasai dancer’ – for non-Maasai also dress up as such and then trade in that identity – performing at local tourist sites is assumed to be less of a real Maasai than his colleagues herding and selling cattle in the Rift Valley plains but who incidentally happen to be wearing watches, carrying transistor radios around, displaying expensive cell phones and retiring in the evening to pricey guesthouses in urban centres rather than traditional huts, manyatta. But as will be shown further below, the reality of cultural production in Kenya is such that individuals have over time appropriated the authority to create their own lore, and that increasingly we have fewer performers who rely solely on some notion of traditional authority to legitimise their work. Without doubt voices of folk performers who are deemed to be carriers of tradition in the older sense still exist, but they co-exist with other emergent cadres of practitioners whose authority is derived solely from their own creativity and their audiences’ approval as we see in the case of FM radio culture and the closely-related sphere of urban youth music. The above issues might be crystallised by drawing on two examples from my classroom experience. By the time undergraduate students come to folkore classes, their minds are already set firmly on the notion that there exist authentic folk (i.e. ‘uncontaminated by modernity’) who are creators of ‘genuine folklore.’ Of course these are located in the rural country side, students repeatedly state in classic folk theory fashion. Nevertheless it is usually possible to dissuade them from this mode of thinking by posing the question: “Do we have folklore forms in the immediate university environment?” Gradually, most are able to reconcile themselves to the fact that lecture theatres, residential halls, playing grounds, police road blocks where roadside negotiations for bribes take place daily, commuter vans (matatu), cheap eateries at KM1 (Kilometre one) – a sprawling shanty in the university neighbourhood – beer lounges and dance halls amongst other spaces are legitimate folklore sites. The tension normally is between the received wisdom that some folklore is genuine while another kind is fake, a notion that “new perspectives” in folklore research has long since debunked by showing that folk groups and communities are always being created, and with them shared traditions from which ‘new’ folklore is fashioned (see for

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instance Dundes, The Study of Folklore; Paredes and Bauman, Toward New Perspectives in Folklore). In any event, logically the idea of change and the much-touted maxim that ‘culture is dynamic’ ought by now to have sufficiently prepared anyone inquiring into folklore to anticipate the idea that human creativity and increasing connectedness occasioned by a diverse range of human occupations renders inoperable and irrelevant the notion of cultural purity and, consequently, that of genuine performances. Folklore by nature is improvisational, not unmediated mimicry. The issues raised above – where either the field evolves in unapprehendable ways or it where it moves so far ahead of the analytical prisms deployed in its critique – are what are referred to here as traditional apparatuses. As such they do not meaningfully anticipate changed socialeconomic realities that are vastly different from those that obtained three or four decades ago when folklore was in its infancy in the Kenyan academy. For instance, some commonly-used reference texts treat folklore as a bounded, stable category representing a set of immutable values and identities, a medium for “going back to our cultural roots” (Akivaga and Odaga 2. See also Kabira and Mutahi, “Introduction”; Kipury, “Introduction”). Indeed, one of the most popular injunctions issued when teachers need to summon their students to the fieldwork task, at least in theory, is a popular quotation from Nandwa and Bukenya to the effect that the collection of field data is an urgent task “before the old people who are granaries of knowledge die off with it” (39). Be that as it may, this has unfortunately led students to the conclusion that younger people may not be taken as legitimate bearers of folkloric knowledge, and since there are few really old people in urban centres, it has been mistakenly assumed that the only true bearers of folk knowledge are to be found in rural villages. The realities of modern existence have forced some radical social mutations and now for instance village story tellers rarely have audiences given that their children and grandchildren have moved out to urban centres or to rural dwellings elsewhere. Even work-related folklore has been affected by the vagaries of commerce: when for instance young women or men are invited to help cultivate a farm often they turn up depending on if and how well they will be compensated financially; they may or may not be in the mood to perform work songs. Thus it is necessary to consider the changes that have occurred in socio-economic settings and the implications of these on performance and traditional academic conceptions and descriptions of it. The kinds of lapses suggested in the discussion immediately above might be illustrated more pointedly by the following two examples set apart by about a quarter of a century. A colleague who was born and raised in Nairobi

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reports that as undergraduate students in a Literature Department at a local university she and her classmates were required to submit examples of ‘oral literature’ forms from their communities: “I promptly went and recorded the cheering songs that we had at rugby matches all over and happily submitted my work. It was promptly tossed out with a terse admonition—‘Go and get real oral literature!’” 6 The second illustration is an incident that happened at a dinner table conversation during a conference in Italy in November 2008. An African lecturer of African Art at a notable West African university seated across the table inquired what my field of research is, to which I promptly stated “urban folklore/popular culture.” “Is there then such a thing as folklore in urban centers?” she inquired, puzzled by what to her must have sounded like a most scandalous claim. An American historian working on traditional healing practices in Kenya and South Africa who was seated with us, perhaps correctly deciphering the shock in the manner of my facial expression, gently and helpfully interjected: “Surely, when people migrate to cities they form communities and groups as urban centers become their homes, permanent or transient. For those who are born in the city this becomes their ‘urban village’ – if we insist on dragging the village along – the spring from which they then create ‘new’ folklore sometimes by refashioning the old and at other times by inventing new forms contingent to the urban context.” “Amen!” I exclaimed inwardly. This response that would have been so apt for the folklore lecturer who rejected “rugby songs” as “fake” lore so many years ago as well as the context (a multicultural research team working on different areas of African cultures) served to point out the vast gaps that still need to be filled, the paradigms that need to be reconceptualised and accommodations that have to be made if especially Kenyan folkloristics is to formulate relevant approaches to the study of the field. Home, village and city/town are key terms in the life of any Kenyan – and Africans generally – and it is not clear why local folklore scholarship keeps treating them as if they are irreconcilable with each other. As will be shown in subsequent discussion, the opposition set between these three spaces is deeply flawed, especially given the reach of technology, particularly the broadcast media that will form a key plank for the discussion in this paper. Such oppositions between home as either village or city, because they invite essentialising, often result in the setting up of untenable assumptions such as those made by my West African colleague. As has been pointed out above, “new directions in folkloristics” work has been 6

Personal communication, 2008. The informant’s occupational placement does not allow name citation.

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addressing these kinds of claims for some time now. Accordingly, where terms like community and group meant rooted entities in the 19th Century when William Thom was trying to fix a definition to the term folklore it is obvious that this term must today necessarily mean differently given the kinds of changes that have occurred to societies all over the world, as shown in the work of Degh (1994 and 1999), Howard (2008) and Ben-Amos (1982) amongst others which utilises the insights of network theory as well as the notion of “imagined communities” (Anderson) to apprehend the nature of complex social-political entities in which folklore thrives. This paper is not suggesting in any way that local scholarship is not up to the task of interrogating folklore but rather that the approaches used in folkloristics locally need to be updated to accommodate a radically altered field and forms of lore that have morphed into shapes that might not be immediately recognisable as folkloric. In this regard there have been efforts to rethink the subject; Miruka (1999) has attempted a theorisation of it while Kabira (1983) has insisted that the performer, and therefore fieldwork, must be brought back to the core of folkloristics. Interdisciplinary scholarship is also increasingly pointing to the ways in which folklore is embedded into Kenyan popular culture, the latter itself being a broad lens with which to view the everyday (see among others Githinji, 2008; Nyairo, 2007; Odhiambo, 2007; Odhiambo, 2008; Wa Mungai and Samper, 2006; Wa Mutonya, 2007). Combining a range of interdisciplinary methods (mainly from music, anthropology, folklore, literature and linguistics) the cultural studies approach that is seen in this work, and which this paper advocates, has opened up possibilities that enable the probing of emergent forms of cultural practice that do not sit neatly within the traditional genres of scholarship. In this case, folklore straddles many fields, and an investigation of it needs to be attentive to this fact. This is the context within which will be interrogated FM radio performances not just in order to show that the cultural ground has shifted but most crucially in order to encourage discussions about cultural forms that do not fall within the doxa of Kenyan folkloristics.

‘New’ Narrative Spaces: New Voices at the Urban ‘Hearth’ A critical issue that one has to confront especially when thinking about questions of cultural representation in Kenya is generational competition, in our case especially because the matter of (self-)authorisation has already been raised. In this regard, it is necessary to note that one of the issues requiring reconceptualisation is the notion of performance spaces given that

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the definition of a folklore performer as ‘traditional’ has become largely blurred given the many shifts in social organisations that have occurred in contemporary society. However, this is precisely the condition of cultural destabilisation that enterprising individuals have seized upon to launch their innovative performances. In other words, the context of social change has meant that where traditional processes have been destabilised new forms of agency have arisen – in these circumstances, concepts like ‘original folklore’ can at best only mean hazily as they do not convincingly describe any of the material that might still be seen even in rural villages. This is especially so in urban settings where through appropriated forms of music that combine local and ‘foreign’ styles, themes and languages such as we see in urban popular culture, residents have forged new spaces of performance. The dance hall and FM radio are illustrations of this new cultural space not just because they traffic the same commodity but even more interestingly given that the expressive forms in both sites are mutually reinforcing. What is more, the moral economies that emerge within these urban musical forms are quickly, perhaps even simultaneously, disseminated throughout the three East African countries, meaning that technology has come to have an impact over the lives of people in ways that might not be immediately evident from a casual look. This discussion will centre on FM radio ‘narratives’ as folkloric performances and the agency of technology in a bid to demonstrate how new voices and forms of folk expression work in contemporary Kenya. At the very least a case will be made that instead of insisting on orateness as the distinguishing mark of local folklore analysing the interpellations between orality and technology is a more viable mode of thinking about the complexities of contemporary cultural production. This might then allow a contemplation of folklore, not in terms of its homogenised characteristics but, more productively, in terms of its disjunctures which in turn may shed light on how creativity is shaping ‘new’ folklore forms and the spaces of its performance. After all, if the axiom that folklore is in some way tied to identity holds, then it is also true that we are likely to learn more about modes of being that contemporary Kenyans craft for themselves by paying attention to the ‘breaks’ between their ‘pasts’ and ‘presents. The radio in Kenya has a long history; from shanty towns in urban centres to remote villages in the countryside it is one of modernity’s most widely circulated goods. The need by the colonial government to communicate its policies to the ‘natives’ led to the introduction in 1953 of broadcasts in the major local languages by the settler radio service that had hitherto since its inception in 1928 only been broadcasting in English, and briefly to the African “native” population whose opinion about the Second World War the

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British wanted to court. The government took over the radio station at independence in 1964 and it became a critical mouthpiece for communicating to citizens the ‘development’ and nationalist agenda of the new government and, most visibly during Moi’s authoritarian reign (1978-2002), it was critical to spreading propaganda (see Ligaga 55). For our purposes, the importance of the politics of radio broadcasting lies in the fact that previously the radio was a whites-only commodity. This might be seen in terms of what Burke has called, in his study of the consumption of toiletries in Zimbabwe under English colonialism, “‘the biography’ of a commodity […] ‘its prior meanings that […] give[s] various goods their rich individuality within a specific place and time’” (6). Despite the fact that most indigenous Kenyans reviled colonialism, still they loved the radio – amongst other English commodities – because it was understood as an indicator of the owner’s “modernity.” This might then explain radio’s remarkably high penetration rate of 95% in Kenya (Obonyo), making it by now one of the most reliedupon traditional forms of communication. This then allows for the quick flow of cultural expressions even into far flung areas of rural Kenya and in the absence of other forms of quick communication radio is an important means for keeping informed about the outside world. However, FM radio has now radically changed the way people keep abreast of their social world. Whereas it is true therefore that Kenya Broadcasting Corporation radio is known more for studied adherence to broadcasting in “correct language” – which FM radio stations have overthrown (Christopher J. Odhiambo 153) – it is also necessary to point out that KBC radio and TV have historically been at the core of the technologisation of folklore practices in Kenya. For instance, the Kiswahili program Je, huu ni ungwana? (“Is this civilised behavior?”), presented by Leonard Mambo Mbotela since 1966, is arguably one of the centrepieces of this process and draws wide listenership on Sundays when it is aired; a television version has recently been launched in recent years. The program offers short verbal snaps of mainly life in the city. Typically, Mbotela presents to his audience a simple plot, ‘characters’ and a dilemma about social decorum. After the problem has been posed, he will then dissect it to show why some things are socially unacceptable. And even though the lessons drawn from these mini-narratives apply more to urban living, their thematic breadth makes it possible for anyone in Kenya to deduce from them some social skills. Even if these radio presentations are not fully-fledged narratives within the conventional understanding of the term as the presentation of a story through action unfolding over time, they have sufficient characteristics to qualify them as mini-narratives: a narrator,

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setting, participants, structured action recounted creatively and a resolution which comes in terms of a moral. Within KBC General Service radio, Elizabeth Omollo’s Saturday morning program Hello Children might also be cited as another crucial example of how folklore has been brought adapted to technology. While the fact of narrating on radio is not in itself sufficient radically transform folklore, the point is that the mass media in Kenya – particularly KBC radio – has played a critical role in keeping folk traditions alive, a fact that is hardly acknowledged. At present we see privately-owned TV stations like Kenya Television Network (KTN) attracting large viewership for the popular children’s program Klub Kiboko in which storytelling features prominently. Overall, my argument is that though they may now be said to be amongst the more visible and, perhaps, most popular spaces of expression FM radio stations that emerged in the 1990s did not necessarily introduce a new radio genre per se; rather they have built upon and extended the space created by the mode of radio narration that was pioneered by Mbotela and Omollo among others. What might be considered new is the subversive nature of FM radio program format, for instance their undermining the established linguistic order in which the official languages, Kiswahili and English, are overthrown by Sheng (at least in the city) 7 and by other local languages on various radio stations. 8 Further, FM radio call-in shows are carried on in linguistically uninhibited terms i.e. verbal excess is a core characteristic. The significance of this aspect lies in the fact that the verbal transgressions presage and enact a contest over matters of taste, and to this extent the FM radio phenomenon might be deemed to be playing an overt politics of subversion (see Christopher J. Odhiambo; and Wa Mungai, “Pale Pale”). The significance of these performances is worth underscoring on two specific counts. First the complex nature of FM radio narratives, as opposed to the simplicity of the earlier narratives carried on KBC radio, might be taken as a function of the convoluted nature of social lives in contemporary post-

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A sociolect that works by combining words from different languages based on a Kiswahili stem and sometimes by giving new meanings to old words or inventing new ones altogether. Initially an urban hybrid for youth solidarity, it is now used extensively for various functions in different social contexts in many parts of Kenya. For an extended discussion of Sheng see among others Samper (2002), Githiora (2002), Wa Mungai (2004), Githinji (2006, 2007 and 2008) and Mutonya (2008). Whereas most radio stations have at least one Kiswahili channel, they will also have other channels broadcasting in local languages targeting particular communities. For instance Royal Media Services which owns Citizen Radio has nine such ‘vernacular’ FM channels.

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colonial Kenya. In other words, when the earlier narrators began their work the social dilemmas in question were addressed within a clearly-understood moral framework in which people adhered more or less to the same codes of conduct given that they were only recently emerged from tightly-knit communities. The consequence of this is that people who have stayed longer in urban centres for instance have developed ‘new’ codes by which they conduct their lives. For example, modernity’s emphasis on an individual’s achievement as a basis for achieving social recognition – and hence the general shift away from an emphasis on community to society – has been instrumental in encouraging individual creativity and, in regard to folklore, thereby sundering the requirement that before one can become a performer they need to have traditional/communal authorisation. People in the city are largely anonymous (see Hannerz, Exploring the City), a situation that conduces for uninhibited expression. This anonymity means that even the most private ‘problems’ can be shared with anonymous audiences over radio and audiences can call in without fear that their identities might be unmasked. Such interaction demonstrates the idea of a virtual community – a loose transient ‘group’ comprised of not faces but voices and which in this case is brought ‘together’ by nothing other than the radio experience. This faceless communication, as might be correctly assumed, is the perfect cover for excess but it is also useful to our understanding of narrative process and its transformation because now we have a series of anonymous virtual performers – we might even more meaningfully call them voices – with each chipping in to fill in bits and pieces into the larger story. The second point derives directly from the first. As postcolonial Kenyan society has become inexorably more complex, so have individual’s sense of being and their enactment; older identities are never discarded as has been assumed, rather they have been layered over and incorporated to ‘modern identities’ to create a palimpsest. As a consequence, people have had to innovate new modes of self-expression that both capture the reality of their social conditions as well as produce identities suited to these circumstance; whether or not the identities so-produced are in tandem with sociallyaccepted values becomes a significant point of the mainstream culture’s angst. Thus for instance where pioneer radio narrators like Mbotela would be concerned with ‘mundane’ issues like neighbours who come conveniently call everyday only at meal times, or gossip amongst neighbours, FM presenters are preoccupied with issues that make Jee Huu ni Ungwana? appear terribly dated. Sexuality (and violations like rape and incest), the pursuit of vast riches, the kinds of cars a ‘real man’ should drive, whether the president – and by extension Kenyan men – is hen-pecked or not, which

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politician has been sighted in Nairobi or another town’s red-light district amongst others are some ‘issues’ around which a radio narrative might revolve. In this manner, some of these topics enable listeners to imagine themselves in particular states of being, with the result that some might actually take these narratives, for instance about material wealth, as charters around which to create their identities and aspirations. Each generation sees things differently, a matter that in turn shapes the narratives that are (re-)told on FM radio. In this case, the observation that FM radio stations have helped subversion of the “‘monologization’ of communication” (Christopher J. Odhiambo 154) is apt because it speaks both to the overthrow of the autocracy of the state, of which KBC is a monumental index, and to the emergence of contestatory generational worldviews. Thus within the context of their knowledge of the past, listeners often use FM radio narratives to often to fantasise and perform diverse social scenarios – for as informant consensus indicates most of these presentations are apparently staged – but ultimately the studio presenter shapes the story in a preferred direction. In a sense these radio shows enable not merely the contestation of the present realities but also allow listeners to grapple with probable scenarios and what the attendant dramas might portend for those involved in them. For instance the stories always entail a shock element, as we shall see further below, which is a useful narrative strategy that performers use to jolt listeners to various configurations of contemporary realities. It has been argued that these FM radio stations “encourage EuroAmerican cultures which are not always in tandem with local cultures […] [a process which ends up] developing urban subcultures which are usually deemed to be antagonistic to the master culture of society […] sometimes the whole show degenerates into pornography” (Tom Odhiambo 164-65; emphasis added), where that master culture is specified as being “the adult culture in Kenya” (Tom Odhiambo 164; emphasis added). There are three problems with this proposition, an examination of which might enable a slightly different understanding of the role of FM radio. First, to the extent that FM radio is a consequence of the early 1990s struggle for greater expressive space in various spheres, then its “rebellious” character is naturally a reflection of the heritage that led to the ousting of the state – or any other centre – from the authority of claiming to speak for everyone. At any rate, the author has already indicated that “intervention, inversion, subversion and dialogic interaction” (Tom Odhiambo 153) are some of the strategies at work in FM radio, modalities which logically suggest an agonistic stance between these stations and “the master culture of society.”

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As such it is unclear why these stations should be expected to shoulder the burden of carrying the values of the master that KBC performs rather well. Secondly, aware of the ways in which cultural contact, however unequal, creates fluid identities and if we consider Kenyans’ jubilation over the demise of single-party autocracy in 1991 and consequently their eager acceptance of participation in the global communication economy, it is rather late to bemoan the foreignness of the cultures that the mediascape throws up into people’s lives. In any case, Kenyans’ having sought out the radio as a consumer commodity implies that they are ready to withstand the contact between their values and those from other cultures, the latter’s characteristics notwithstanding. Lastly, it is not necessarily the case that “the” adult culture in Kenya is homological in its values, or that it automatically shies away from the verbal excess characteristic of FM radio culture. Recent studies on Mugithi 9 and Matatu 10 subculture demonstrate the untenability of a dichotomisation of Kenyans into morally-austere and singularly debased factions; adults and the youth, church goers and secularists participate in the ribald entertainment culture in equally zealous terms (see particularly Wa Mutonya, 2007; Mutongi, 2006; Wa Mungai, 2004). A lot of cultural exchanges take place in between the extremes of expression suggested above and Kenyans effortlessly slip on one mask or the other as need arises. Thus for example listeners are hardly shocked with the sleaze on FM radio because they already are acquainted with it through the ribaldry of Mugithi. The adoptions of trickster disguises, a common enough practice locally, enables individuals to participate in multiple cultural spaces. Contemporary radio practice has made the process of slipping on masks much easier as seen in the case of late Saturday night ‘religious’ and ‘family’ call-in shows such as Kameme FM’s Hutia Mundu – Gikuyu literally for ‘touch someone’ but which in fact is an euphemism for ‘having sex’ – whose aim is ‘counseling’ but which almost always end up as narratives of heterosexuality. Under the mask of a radio show, listeners call in to talk about salacious things whose reference to they will shun on Sunday morning as they troop to church.

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The Gikuyu name for train, this term refers to a type of dance in which a lone guitarist “corrupts” the lyrics of a well-known tune by inserting his own words into a song. Beer lounge patrons stomp around the floor in train formation, holding onto the shoulders or waist of the dancer ahead. A lot of folklore goes into the creation of mugithi’s lyrics. For a detailed discussion of the dynamics of mugithi see among others Wa Mungai (2004), Wa Mutonya (2005 and 2007) and Githiora (2008). Privately-owned commuter vans and minibuses that are known for their masculine subculture of excess – verbal, embodied, musical as well as visual iconography.

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On the whole it is possible to understand the FM radio representational styles if we place them alongside other mass media practices from which they seem to have developed or which they might have appropriated. For instance the banter that is a key aspect of these presentations has a long tradition in Kenyan mass media. This might be seen for instance in TV comedy which has been one of local popular culture’s most enduring genres. Farces like the Kiswahili Vitimbi and Plot 10 on KBC have for decades now captured lightheartedly the vagaries of urban life, and even though the setting is in the city, the situations they present might apply in most parts of Kenya. In a sense, today’s FM radio talk-show hosts might be seen as following along the path of lighthearted social critique that was cut by such 1980s KBC TV entertainers like Amka Twende, Othorong’ong’o Danger, Mzee Tamaa Bin Tamaa, Ojwang Hatari and Mama Kayai amongst others. In the late 1990s stand-up comedians KJ, Tony Njuguna and Walter Nyambane took the modality of presentation established by their predecessors, refined it and hit the airwaves through Nation TV’s Reddykyulass and later Intrukalas; Nyambane subsequently showed up on Kiss FM’s breakfast show as Baby J Nyambs, where he played the role of a city “greenhorn” (Raban). Elsewhere, a team of beer hall comedians under the leadership of Kihenjo has over the last five years produced on VCD numerous Gikuyu farces which poke fun at individuals who are unable to cope with the vast social changes taking place around them. Kihenjo’s male actors clearly seem to have adopted the presentation style popularised by Cameroon’s Zangalewa Dancers: caneswinging, potbellied white-haired ‘old men’ in shorts, military jackets and round-brim colonial style hats stomping around the stage. They cut the air of buffoons, which is an interesting contradiction given that universally in local cultures old men are ordinarily expected to be have dignified deportment. Gikuyu popular musicians have increasingly been making use of Zangalewapose dancers, meaning that the comic as a character has over time become a permanent and recognisable feature of Kenyan popular culture. The comic also features on the Gikuyu language radio Kameme FM. While it lasted the 5 p.m. presentation Mataaro na Mathekania ma Githingithia (Githingithia’s advice and jokes) perhaps came closest to rendering the traditional oral narrative performance on contemporary FM radio. For matatu travelers going home, 5 pm on Kameme was an appointment with the contemporary storyteller, which informants explained was a useful way of filling the void “now that in the city we no longer have story-telling sessions like we used to.” The improvising narrator Domenico Githingithia would take on the persona of a worldly-wise city dandy and humorously narrate the foibles and naivety of others less versed than himself

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in ways of the city and life generally. He had one studio listener, Njaramba, who would make an old woman’s ‘noises’ and interjections of surprise at the twists and turns in Githingithia’s tales. Unlike contemporary presentations on other FM stations where single topics are presented for ‘discussion,’ most of Githingithia’s narratives were episodic, giving the impression of a continually-unfolding plot. Njaramba’s equal on Kameme’s early morning show was Cucu Nyakairu (African grandmother), Baby J Nyambs on KISS 100 and Filgoneus on Classic 105. These are all stock provincial characters – metonymically captured in various Dholuo, Ekegusii, Gikuyu and Kikamba accents – whose quaint perspective on the baffling ways of modernity occasion mirthful reflection amongst listeners. A critical point to note about these radio presentations is that informants are clear that whether one is thinking about TV comedy or FM radio shows they are often deemed to be (creative) approximations of life situations, to be taken as an alternative to other forms of creative self expression. In other words, the staginess of it all is clear such that perceptive listeners approach the presentations fully aware that the artifice involved is second-order reality. The staging begins when a pattern of ‘special callers’ whereby particular individuals will always get through to the studio; the phenomenon is prevalent even on vernacular radio stations and used to be on one of the prominent TV stations during Daniel Moi’s dictatorship. Indeed some informants report that they or their relatives have been called up and instructed on particular lines of argument or an angle that they are to present when they call in. Nevertheless, because FM presenters are real people talking to others, the listening audiences’ degree of credulity is much higher than is the case when reading a novel; the places mentioned are readily identifiable, and sometimes the experiences narrated on these radio forums sound like they could just be happening round the corner. Thus, whether or not people believe the things they hear on FM radio, the immediateness of it all as callers update the narratives in real time – as opposed to the fixed nature of TV programs for example – might be one way of explaining their vast appeal. There is also the thrill that individuals experience as they hear their voices or those of their friends on air, enunciating the concept of selfvoicing for people who would otherwise never get to be heard by anyone beyond their immediate circle of friends. In this regard an informant stated: “one can always tell that house maids – their speech being distinctly marked by poor grammar and enunciation – are having a field day by the excitement in their voices as they call in to these shows between when their employers are at work!” If this characterisation of the audience is correct, then these shows might be said to be a space where even those barely surviving on the

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social margins participate. Below are examined two ‘cases’ featured on Easy FM’s Busted show and several mini-narratives from Classic FM – which a majority of informants indicated listening to – in order to demonstrate the nature of these staged narrative performances. The Busted presentations are accusatory in nature and often elicit confessions and hence the characterisation of them as cases; they seem geared more to accusers’ emotional relief rather than achieving a ‘reasonable’ resolution. An informant stated that Busted might even be taken as a downgraded radio version of the USA’s Jerry Springer TV Show. Informant responses have been used as a means to establishing how multiple narration works in the construction of these FM radio performances. The agonised exclamation “Na hawa watu lazima wakuwe serious. Ai, we” indexes the ‘provincialism’ of Mwalimu King’ang’i, a city greenhorn who is constantly perplexed by the ways of the city as indicated by his signature ‘village’ interjection ‘Ai we!’ But it is also necessary to note that his bemused injunction for listeners to get serious is also a “key” (Goffman) offered to guide audience interaction; he lets listeners know that he does not take them, and by extension their “talk” too seriously. The possibility that nothing on this show is to be taken too seriously is raised by the irony raised by King’ang’i’s first name Mwalimu—Kiswahili title for ‘teacher’—even though his opinions almost always sound thoroughly unschooled. This irony and the general playfulness of King’ang’i and Maina’s conversation set the ground for the staged euphemistically-coded verbal free-for all that follows on the show. Linguistic excess (insults, obscenity and general lack of taste) and the laughter that this often occasions is both a function of and a condition for grotesquerie 11 – of which vulgarity, such as is heard on Classic FM, is part—and this in turn enables the disinhibition of individuals. Once this modus operandi has been established it becomes apparent to listeners that the show is open to fantasy, and this might explain why, even though they are crafted around probable happenings, the narratives are also largely taken as hyperboles about life. That listeners suspect these performances to be staged is illustrated by the following informant response: My favorite call-in show is Busted which seeks to catch cheating partners with their pants down, literally. It follows the same script where a distressed woman suspects that her husband or boyfriend is cheating on her and wants him busted [exposed] calls the radio station. Ciku [the presenter] calls the culprit, pretends to have some ‘hot’ date for the man and his chick which usually he falls for. When the partner who has been listening in 11

See Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World for a discussion of grotesque as social commentary.

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interrupts, and confronts him, he is remorseful etc. I will not pick any particular incident. What has struck me about these Busted sessions is that for the past 3 years, the script is always the same, where men are ever being busted and they seem to have no clue. Oh, yeah, and no matter how enraged the woman is, she always takes the man back later. The question is, are Kenyan men so foolishly clueless and women so vulnerable and hopelessly naïve as to keep making the same mistakes over and over again? Or is it the case of a carefully scripted talk show as I am tempted to think? That is what jazzes [fascinates] me. (Emphasis added)

According to this informant these confrontational narratives, part confession and part accusation, follow a pattern; it does not much matter what the specifics of the one that is aired are as the results are predictably the same. Men are “clueless culprits” and women the persecuted “victims”; there is never a variation from this villain-victim pairing. The suspicion that these are normally staged performances is seen from another informant’s response about the Classic FM show: “a couple of staged Classic workers are usually called (rather than them calling in) to air already-agreed upon ridiculous views.” Indeed, if a caller offers a story that sticks to the normative and does not veer off towards aberrance, they will be dismissed by Maina’s telling icy monotone: “Ok,” “Let’s hear from another caller” or simply “thank you.” On the other hand, if the story has a salacious angle, he will interject by exclaiming excitedly in various languages; “O-o-h m-y-y G-o-d!”, “Ati!” (Gikuyu), “Haki ya mungu!” (Kiswahili). Thus over time listeners have become aware of the staged element, and no matter the gravity of what they have to say they know that lighthearted, uninhibited talk is the key to participation in these shows. There is also a general consensus amongst informants that these shows are age-targeted, with the “sleazy” morning shows attracting the youth: I don’t know of a serious 35-70 year old who bothers to call in to the breakfast social/lifestyle call-in shows. In any event most of those in that group are too busy earning their keep to bother ringing pseudo-psychologists with their views of our social malaise. On the other hand the political talk shows in the evenings are the preserve of retirees. Everyone else is unwinding from the rigors of the day, doing homework with kids, cooking, having a beer with buddies or reading the paper as they wait for dinner/to fall asleep.

If this age categorisation is correct then these shows are a lens with which might be viewed a critical social dynamic which is the cause of much anxiety in Kenya; the vast numbers of jobless youth who, on account of the fact that they have neither meaningful occupations nor incomes, are unable to either play social roles like parenting or even partake of the mundane pleasures of everyday life like buying a newspaper or sitting down for a drink with

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friends. Instead for such youth the radio talk show becomes their virtual communion point. And given that the presenters are aware of or they can at least surmise the sociological characteristics of their listeners, it seems hardly surprising that, in the words of an informant who listens to Classic FM radio on his way to and from work, “they tend to concentrate too much on the lower parts of the body morphology about which they make sorts of weird discussions.” Indeed, out of twenty one responses in which informants had been asked to recall a presentation from their favourite shows, only two respondents cited examples from Busted while the rest referred to Classic but without exception, all of their responses were about a sex/sexuality topic. Whereas sexuality has always been a concern in society, in the past it has been a taboo topic on radio and the fact that it is now being talked about more openly might be taken not necessarily as a moment of disinhibition but more critically as recognition that gender power is intricately woven into sexuality. The need to “discuss” gender matters on radio is more acutely felt by individuals who have few other public spaces, if any, upon which to express their ideas. At another level that these shows are understood as “scripted talk” does not necessarily mean the situations they present could never happen—they are as probable as other forms of creative fiction that people engage with in other spheres. Like other fictional presentations these scripts too have a moral embedded to them; the more socially-respectable the male villain is the higher the emotional drama and the consequent “fall.” This might be seen in the following accusatory narrative on Busted: I recall one show way back in 2007 which featured a cheating Catholic priest. The poor man was put on air to be asked whether he believed in the sanctity of priestly vows, the sacred rite of confession and the role-model status of a Catholic priest. On his part he was guardedly telling Ciku to come over to his parish where they could meet and discuss these issues all the while not knowing that a) he was on air to the whole nation and b) that his girl had been on air before him confessing to an affair with him, her pregnancy and his advice that she abort shortly before he abandoned her. I arrived at my destination before I got to hear the part where Ciku put the girl back on air to confront the amorous priest.

Important as the issues of sexuality raised here are, the narrative goes beyond the “shocking” revelations a church man’s randy escapades to point to the moral crises of facing mainstream society’s values. The critique is directed at obvious double standards, and often total irrelevance of some of religion’s edicts to adherents; the hypocrisy of church leaders constantly comes up in Kenyans’ moral economy. In a related context dilemmas that individuals face when they follow religion uncritically have been a subject of the Classic

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show. For example in mid-2008 a woman called in asking for “advice” on what to do with regard to a pregnancy for which she claimed her biological son, in his thirties, was responsible. A “mama’s boy,” he used lived to live in the mother’s house. He is alleged to have drugged her drink after which he raped her. He then cleaned her up and put her to bed and when she regained consciousness the following morning she had no recollection of the previous night’s happenings and she suspected nothing untoward since she was in her own bed anyway. She only learnt of her pregnancy when she went to consult her gynecologist over her missed periods. Being born again, she claimed that she had not sexual partner and therefore the finger of blame was pointed at her son. The mother’s Christian faith, she stated, did not allow her to undergo an abortion yet even to her it was clear that having to give birth to and to raise a child sired by her own son is an abomination. Again, religion here is presented as a hindrance to making pragmatic choices in life because it is not attuned to believers’ material realities. At a more social level, the woman does not question the wisdom or lack of it in housing and providing for a 30year old son who ordinarily would be expected to be independent. Be that as it may this narrative – as callers’ responses indicated – speaks to the rampant social problem of incest. One of the curious contradictions of Kenyan law is that whereas it expressly defines incest as a crime, rarely is it punished mainly because it is rarely reported but also because such incidents are often ‘settled out of court’ with the women and girls in question persuaded by elders and family members to hush up matters. Whereas the latter method might be families’ way of avoiding further shame that would follow from publicly exposing incest – the women’s humiliation is disregarded in favour of social peace – it also means that both women and men who disagree with these indignities have few forums where they can ventilate about this form of gender abuse. Like all questions of sexuality, this one too almost always leads to a discourse on gender power. Two incidents might be used to demonstrate this point. An informant reports: The topic that day was about the incest that is happening among Gikuyu families in Kawangware and Riruta Satellite [Nairobi suburbs]. This young girl had gone to inform her married older sister that their dad wanted to have sex with her. She had refused and instead reasoned that informing her sister about the problem was the most appropriate thing to do. She was shocked to learn from the elder sibling that the father had had sex with all the daughters in the family. Of course there were many calls coming in condemning such practice as the height of incest and breakdown in social values. Several people however said that this has been happening routinely as a form of ritual sex that guarantees the girls a land inheritance from their father. It was alleged that this is the reason why Gikuyu women from those areas always find a reason to visit their paternal homes every once in a while despite

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their being married. The sad bit about it is that there have been deaths associated with fights over property since the boys do not see how their parents can endow an inheritance to these married women. On their part women have been known to organize for the killing of their brothers for refusing to allow the girls to inherit their father’s property. There is quite enmity between female and male siblings around Kawangware.

It is instructive that people are even willing to invent rituals that contravene one of a community’s most sacred ethical norms in order to explain away particular social phenomena; in Gikuyu culture there has never been such a thing as ritual incest. Indeed, incest of any nature between close blood relatives was outlawed (Kenyatta 35) but then if this new ritual exists it demonstrates how radically change has impacted upon social ethics. On the other had whether it is true or not that the murders alluded to are as a result of sibling rivalry over land inheritance, what seems clear enough is that land, the principal means of economic production in Kenya, is a major point of conflict. But it is also true that Kawangware and Riruta Satellite are densely populated low income peri-urban neighbourhood where crime (rape, murder, robberies and illegal brewing of cheap alcohol, chang’aa) is rampant. The houses are tiny and closely packed together thus creating a cover under which things like incest can easily happen within the family set-up; husbands sleeping with domestic servants is another topic that has been repeatedly narrated on Classic FM radio. In a process of “inverted projection” whereby victims are given negative attributes in order to justify whatever negative treatment is meted out to them by aggressors (Dundes, From Game to War), city residents explain away the various social phenomena by blaming ‘the breakdown in social values’ on women. This is certainly made even clearer in the second narrative on incest. Sometimes in 2008, a caller stated that men should be wary of Kiambu girls, especially the ones who apparently are “doing well. Have you ever wondered how come nearly all the girls from near Kiambu town drive expensive cars and live in their own houses on their fathers’ compounds? Those are daddy’s girls and do not even bother asking to marry them. Their fathers build them houses and buy them these cars in return for sleeping with them.” While male callers predictably castigated the practice as immoral, a few ladies who called even claimed to be involved in such relationships with their fathers, with one of them remarking “after all, my dad is a man like any other and in any case he is the best man I know having seen him all my life so why should I give my body to some other man that I don’t know? He takes care of all my needs anyway!” It was illustrative that male callers blamed the women for not keeping the requisite social distance from their fathers, and the unstated position seemed to be that the latter might not really be to blame

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since they supposedly did not court the temptation and that it was visited upon them. Again, if these claims are to be believed, two key issues emerge from them; first is the normative position according to which women are viewed as breaching social norms and, secondly, the underlying issue that such a breach masks. In the latter case, the real concern for these men is rooted in the fact that Kiambu women own (expensive) cars and houses, two of the most central signifiers of male status in Kenya; it is also true that perhaps on account of their father’s set of contacts these women are connected to vast business networks and hence their material prosperity. If the men do not command similar wealth, then naturally this will cause them to be wary of such women. Marrying such independent women obviously means that the men would have to live under their terms – contemptuously known in Kiswahili as kukaliwa, “to be sat on” – something that does not sit well with men in cultures where they consider themselves generally as the real owners of wealth. This in turn has spawned the common stereotype that Kiambu women are “not suitable for marriage.” It is further claimed that the real reason fathers ask for astronomical bride-wealth figures for their daughters is to make it impossible for any prospective suitors to marry their daughters and thus ensuring continuity of their hanky-panky. However, it is necessary to note that Kiambu occupies a special place in Kenyan politics as the home of the so-called “Kiambu Mafia,” a group of fabulously wealthy men who were close to then-president Jomo Kenyatta and who in popular stereotypes are infamous for their arrogance and for their pursuit of both power and their enemies with singular ruthlessness. It seems natural then for less-prosperous men such as those who call in to the show to try and get back at the wealthy men by besmirching their daughters’ character. The tensions between poor(er) men and richer women are played out in a related presentation reported from January 2009. A woman called in to say that because her salary stands at a million Kenya shillings per month, she cannot stand “lazy men” and consequently she had found it impossible to a male partner. Apparently stung by the allegation that they earned less money (if at all) due to laziness, the men who called said it was not possible for “a woman to be earning that kind of a salary” or that she must have slept with a man in order to get to such a highly-paying job, if it was true in the first place that she earned such a salary. Whether this story is true or not, it can be used to gauge the contemporary “backlash” against women (Faludi) in which men blame their own lack of social mobility on women who have made concrete social and material gains. Ultimately, anxieties over access to and control over material resources are woven into the local folklore that informs the construction and “discussion” FM radio narratives. These might then be seen

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as attempts to interrogate some of the more unsettling social-economic realities in modern Kenya which, as we have seen relate to both power and identity. At other times in order to spice their staged performances studio presenters also adapt popular culture texts from other spaces. An informant reported the following narrative about the February 6 2009 Classic FM breakfast show: Maina was doubtlessly inspired by Millie Jackson’s 1984 remake of Luther Ingram’s 1974 If Loving You is Wrong when he invited all mistresses to call in and confirm that Christmas is indeed the worst time of year for them as “their” men run off to enjoy festivities with their families and leave their mistresses stewing in the pain of abandonment for days on end! Maina asked the mistresses to call and share stories of how they overcame those boring days. For my son and I listening to the show, the gem came from a 25 year old man who called to say his “mama” [woman] had left him at her house as she went back home to her husband for the holidays and he spent the lonely days indoors until she returned on 2nd January 2009. In typical fashion Mwalimu King’ang’i intoned in his Kikamba-accented Kiswahili: “ati ukakaa hapo ndeee kama muti ya stima? Endelea kutembea na huyo mama wa 45 years na uta zeeka kama mujinga!” [so you just sat there idly like an electricity pole? You continue moving with that 45 year-old woman and you will age like a fool]. But what my son and I wanted to know was what does the word “mistress” mean? Back you have to admit that our male mistress succeeded in turning the show on its head which was why Maina rang him in the first place!

However, the persona in Jackson’s song is a married man who acknowledges that he has a wife and children waiting for him. In the above instance, the man has no family, meaning that unlike the other man his dalliance with the older woman might not necessarily be driven by the search for sexual thrills as an escape from the routine of marriage. Though he could be getting some emotional succor out of the ‘relationship’, in a society where unions between older women and younger men are generally frowned upon as was demonstrated by the public invective occasioned by 67-year old WambuiOtieno’s marriage to 25-year-old Mbugua in 2003 (see Wa Mureithi, “Kenya Split by Wedding”), the callers expected a real reason why the young man would willingly subject himself to such a situation. What is most instructive about this story is that it points to the broader emergent phenomenon of “toy boys” and the role reversals where men become dependent on women for material provisions. In his own admission, the young man in the story above is the “kept” partner – he is living in her house – a role that has hitherto been thought of as belonging solely to women. Incidentally it is a common-enough practice around the tourist towns of Mombasa and Malindi to find young local married men who, as legitimate forms of income-earning, provide sexual services to other women with the full knowledge of their wives (see

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also Musila 128, n.14). As a look at any Soulmates column in the Saturday Nation Magazine might reveal, young men are increasingly turning to older women (married or single) for material sustenance; those who advertise for “soulmates” are usually unemployed but at any rate they explicitly state that they expect the women to be financially-secure. This suggests that they expect some form of compensation for supplying “companionship.” The following two entries from the Saturday Nation October 31 2008 amply demonstrate this conclusion. I am a 26-year-old Luo man staying in Nairobi’s Eastlands and currently unemployed but a college leaver. I am medium in looks and looking for a lady for love, romance and good times. The lady should be of any race and not more than 45 years, must be financially-stable, medium to big body size and preferably staying in Nairobi. Must be ready to start immediately. If interested sms only to 0715647009. I’m Richie, 25, from Mombasa - a romantic, charming man looking for a financially-stable older woman for a romantic or secret relationship. Age, race or tribe no issue. For more, call 0735972904. (Original emphasis)

The fact that these advertisements for “romantic relationships” are framed in the manner of job descriptions makes it clear that the men in question see themselves as “service providers” of sorts (permanent callboys) and the invocation of the word romance is merely a cover for other kinds of anticipated negotiations. Whatever the case, the rampant joblessness amongst Kenya’s youth seems to suggest that there are many more men who are likely to be caught up in similar role reversals such as are suggested by the FM radio shows. In this regard, it is necessary to point out that young women are also caught up in unusual dilemmas. Where for instance it is generally accepted that men often actively seek out multiple female sexual partners – whether within the set up of socially recognised polygamous practice or in the more rampant mistress and concubinage cultures – women too are now assuming the agency for seeking out men for whatever goals they might have in mind. In this case, the men happen to be their girlfriends’ boyfriends as the following narrative illustrates. Sometimes in mid-2008, Maina asked ladies whether they share men and whether they are happy to do it. I was surprised that many ladies called in, declaring they do it, willingly and happily, and that they admire their lady friend’s boyfriend and go ahead to sleep with them if they get a chance. Many lady callers said they actually know who the other lady friends of their boyfriends are but they don’t mind provided they get their share of love. I was really surprised that it can happen. I wondered whether this is acceptance or “refusal to die” of the African polygamous culture which I thought was dead in our emerging modernity but which

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seems to be unconsciously or consciously rampant among the youth in our society. (Emphasis added)

This pre-marital sharing of men cannot strictly speaking be called polygamy because marriage is not involved. However, what is interesting is that women clearly have the option of looking for their own boyfriends choose not to do so and instead pursue relationships with those men who are already “taken.” Informants explained this issue on the basis of economics: ostensibly there are not enough “good” single working men to go around. Thus where the religiously inclined are tempted to object to the boyfriend-sharing practice, the women involved will argue that in fact such acts are an expression of their “liberated modernity.” This then might indicate, as does the informant above, that young women are consciously on the look-out for values and practices that the mainstream might disapprove (on the basis of religion and/or “modernity”) which they then rework to pragmatically address their needs. Modernity here takes an intriguing character when its very composition is forged out of supposedly “dead” local practices, calling to question the very assumption made by mainstream society (church, government and the school system for example) that to be modern necessarily means to part with particular local traditions, or that the young always want to distance themselves from the old. These are the very complexities of life in contemporary Kenya that FM radio shows bring into the public domain where they might then be debated. Ultimately, even if studio presenters are deemed to be “pseudo-psychologists” it might still be argued that the mini-narratives they present – or whose emergence they facilitate to be emerge through collaborative telling – mask deeper sociocultural realities about Kenya and especially about urban culture.

Conclusion: The Moral in the Story of and for Contemporary Kenyan Folkloristics This paper set out to examine the nature of oral performances on the FM radio contemporary Kenya beginning and it began with a review of some conceptual issues in Kenyan folkloristics. It has been argued that part of the reason that a rethinking of these issues is necessary has to do with the fact that there have been radical shifts in the field since the 1970s. It has been argued that folkloristics theory and praxis needs to be re-oriented to cater for cultural productions that result from the vast socio-economic changes that have occurred particularly over the last fifteen years since the advent of FM

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radio but also in the long term since the beginnings of the interaction between locals and the mass media. Arising from the discussion of the data a number of conclusions might be drawn. The folkloric performances that have emerged on FM radio are a function of the result of the frenetic lifestyles into which Kenyans have been ushered as they go about the regular business of contemporary existence. For instance all sources indicated that they listen(ed) to the radio shows commuting between places or even working out at the gym; no one indicated that they ever purposively sit down to listen to these shows. At any rate, given the nature of urban life, where and when can it ever be logistically possible to gather a group of Kenyans for them to “just to tell stories”? This demonstrates a sociological fact that might be useful to an understanding of the transformation of folklore practices particularly in Nairobi, and perhaps other urban centres as well. Increasingly people’s lifestyles do not allow them to merely engage in leisurely contemplation of or participation in folklore say by dedicating a whole day or a few hours to these kinds of performances. Where traditionally people might have gathered to participate in specific forms of folklore performances and where stylistic formulae would even be deployed to alert them to the fact that a differentiated type of social activity was underway, now individuals participate in folkloric performances all the time – sometimes consciously, at other times not-so consciously. As such folklore is seamlessly ingrained into acts of ordinary life – a matatu ride, driving to work, having a drink at the beer lounge – in a manner that even participants take for granted. Every minute is a folkloric moment and one cannot meaningfully set apart folklore from the business of life itself. This then might lead us to another issue – that of structure. How might the narratives’ structure, as “observed-heard” on these radio shows, be described? To answer this question necessitates thinking about the term narrator. Whereas more usually within traditional modes of folklore a performer’s role is conceptualised as that of a single dominating narrator the nature of FM shows is such that we can only think of multiple narrators. The stories that callers recount are only loosely tied to those of other callers (whose identity thus oscillates between audience and performer) by an idea and not by any binding or discernible plot. As such callers’ accounts are mini-narratives, clips of larger stories that may or may never have happened. In the case of Classic the two studio presenters and their oppositional commentary add to the narration another dimension – that of interested observers whose duty is to evaluate, chide or support callers/participants. Even though what each participant’s contribution matters not all of it bears or is given the same weight by other commentator-narrators in their overall

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interpretation of these performances; the scandal and excess wired into them is a structural device meant to make them vivid and therefore memorable. Therefore it seems possible to think about FM radio narratives as looselytied, collectively narrated-discussed self-performances mediated by technology. In this case it is no longer possible to talk about an ‘oral’ culture per se but more meaningfully we might talk about its auditised agency – through the cell phone and the radio – without which this particular kind of cultural performance cannot take place. And whereas these accounts might be linked by a broad theme they could have as many morals as there are mininarratives. This then suggests that the overall performance will be as complex and as layered as the totality of callers’ social experiences. In a related sense participation in FM talk shows seems to be structured around two main characteristics: age and class. Older working class people rarely call in to these shows; the majority of callers are young(er) people, many of them unemployed and a vast number being in low-paying informal jobs. However, the fact that the older generation does not call in does not mean they do not listen to these shows. They also happen to be part of the middle class that drives to work or performs works at the gym while through listening they voyeuristically participate in the world of ‘those crazy others’ as an informant put it. This seems to indicate that whereas the social happenings (real or imagined) that are the spine of these shows affect the whole society, the youth are more eager to experiment with new ways of representing their experiences than older Kenyans who often tend to fall back to the idea of taste – the socially appropriate – in their characterisation of these shows as “debased,” “madness,” “nonsense” and “pornography.” This need not surprise as it is the same epithets that are routinely hurled at Kenyan youth culture generally; the incomprehensibility of banality can be a source of deep anguish for members of mainstream society. However whether or not one agrees with the content and particular expressive style of FM radio narratives, the fact is that they have evolved into a key aspect of youth culture an examination of which might enable a window into the world of contemporary Kenyan youth. If anything is to be learnt from the many studies of subcultures worldwide – from the punks and the mods to rappers and graffiti artists (see among others Hebdige, 1979; Rose, 1994; Ross and Rose, 1994; MacDonald, 2002) – then it is that mainstream society’s wishes for members of a subculture to restrain their rhetorical expression – somatic and verbal – are futile. Defiance of societal constraint is core to the politics of all subcultures, and Nairobi FM culture is not and logically cannot be different. After all as vernacular expression folklore contests, or is at least placed in oppositional terms to, institutionalised truths as contained in

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mainstream narratives whose restrained language is a core aspect of the ways in which the dominant culture seeks to determine what constitutes acceptable representational strategies. What ought to concern critics, beyond the matter of its rhetoric, is FM radio culture’s politics, the underlying social issues and anxieties that it points to; no matter the language used in evaluating them these remain unalterable material realities. At the same time it is necessary to be avoid drawing too rigid a line separating urban and rural spaces since some of the realities upon which these radio shows dwell (sexuality, violence, ‘kept’ men and joblessness for instance) are evident in the rural countryside too. More usefully one might show how the FM radio phenomenon generally highlights socio-economic changes that are common to Kenya but which have impacted upon individuals’ sense of being with differentiated outcomes. This might then make it possible to tease out particular factors responsible for differences for example in youth identities in different parts of the country. Ultimately it needs be stated that students of Kenyan folklore have the responsibility of ploughing the field beyond where the local pioneers of the discipline left off. For instance, while many students will recite the popular definition of “oral literature” as encompassing all the regular activities that people engage in during the course of everyday life including jokes, gestures and insults (Lo Liyong, “Introduction”), serious thought does not seem to have been applied to the import of Lo Liyong’s delineation of folklore. If this had been the case, it would not have taken close to four decades before seeing at Kenyan universities’ literature departments the first trickle of postgraduate work in non-canonical fields of folklore. 12 On the one hand Lo Liyong was implicitly pointing to possible folklore forms and sub-genres that might be interrogated off the beaten path and on the other his definition included the rubrics that might have been used to chart new fieldwork spaces. He probably was also the first to conceptualise East African folklore as popular culture, a connection that has taken unusually long to take root in folkloristics. It therefore need not surprise for instance that even years after the publication of the edited volume Readings in African Popular Culture (Barber) – the introduction and essays suggest frameworks that enable the interrogation of a broad range of popular arts in Africa – the connections 12

When in April 2000 a PhD proposal on the study of matatu folklore was presented to the literature department at a local university, it was tossed out with the injunction that it could only be studied “perhaps in a hundred years at a sociology, anthropology or history department.” Since then a few M.A and PhD students at Kenyatta University have over the last few years successfully undertaken the study of contemporary local popular music as well as rap and hip hop culture.

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between diverse spaces of popular culture of which folklore is a key part are, still, hardly appreciated. In this case it might even be argued that for a long time now a singular failure of Kenyan folkloristics has been one of a reticent imagination and perhaps an unwillingness to experiment with data that might lead to the reformulation of old(er) concepts. A radical rethinking of the traditional parameters according to which folkloristics genres have hitherto been categorised and understood is required if we are going to study meaningfully emergent genres. These things are possible. For instance fieldwork for this paper was carried out largely in cyberspace. Sources, all Kenyan, were scattered far afield across three continents in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA; they were not known to each other but they have a shared tradition of listening to FM radio call-in shows. This, in short, is the virtual field where members have no physical ties and they are not even aware that they constitute a “community.” However analytically it is possible to see that in fact they are a folk group. As for the insistence on the need for visuality in folkloric communication, Youtube.com, Myspace and Facebook offer a vast fieldwork resource. Overall it is hoped that the kind of interrogation done here demonstrates at least in a preliminary sense some conceptual and methodological turns that might be of use in the study of Kenyan folklore.

Works Cited Akivaga, Symonds K., and Asenath B. Odaga. Oral Literature: A School Certificate Course. Nairobi: East Africa Educational Publishers, 2000. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. 1983. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Isawolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Barber, Karin, ed. Readings in African Popular Culture. London: James Currey, 1997. Bauman, Richard, ed. Folklore, Cultural Performances and Popular Entertainments. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Ben-Amos, Dan. Folklore in Context. New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 1982.

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Timothy. Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. Dallaire, Romeo. “The Media Dichotomy.” The Media and the Rwanda Genocide. Ed. Allan Thompson. Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2007. 12-19. Degh, Linda. American Folklore and the Mass Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. ——., “Collecting Legends Today.” Europäische Ethnologie und Folklore im Internationalen Kontext. Ed. Ingo Schneider. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999. 55-66. Dundes, Alan. From Game to War. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997. ——., ed. The Study of Folklore. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1965. Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Crown, 1991. Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Goffman, Ervin. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Githinji, Peter. “Bazes and their Shibboleths: Lexical Variation and Sheng Speakers’ Identity in Nairobi.” Nordic Journal of African Studies 15.4 (2006): 443-76. ——., “Mchongoano Verbal Duels: Risky Discourse and Socio-Cultural Commentary.” Cultural Production and Social Change in Kenya: Building Bridges. Ed. Kimani Njogu. Nairobi: Twaweza Communications, 2007. 89-109. ——., “Sexism and (Mis)representation of Women in Sheng.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 20.1 (2008): 15-32. Githiora, Cege. “Sheng: Peer Language, Swahili Dialect or Emerging Creole?” Journal of African Cultural Studies 15.3 (2002): 159-81. Gunner, Liz. “Wrestling with the Present, Beckoning to the Past: Contemporary Zulu Radio Drama.” Journal of Southern African Studies 26 (2000): 223-37. Hannerz, Ulf. Exploring the City. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. ——., Transnational Connections. London: Routledge, 1996. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Suffolk: The Chaucer Press, 1979.

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Howard, Robert G. “Electronic Hybridity: The Persistent Processes of the Vernacular Web.” Journal of American Folklore 121.480 (2008): 192218. Kabira, Wanjiku M. The Oral Artist. Nairobi: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1983. Kabira, Wanjiku M., and Karega Mutahi. Gikuyu Oral Literature. Nairobi: Heinemann, 1988. Kenyatta, Jomo. Facing Mount Kenya. New York: Random House, 1965. Kipury, Naomi. Oral Literature of the Maasai. Nairobi: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983. Ligaga, Dinah. “Retreat to Moral Space: Radio Theatre.” Jahazi 1.3 (2008): 54-57. Lo Liyong, Taban. Popular Culture of East Africa. Nairobi: Longman Publishing Group, 1972. MacDonald, Nancy. The Graffiti Subculture: Youth, Masculinity and Identity in London and New York. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Masinjila, M., and Duncan Okoth-Okombo. Teaching Oral Literature. Nairobi: KOLA, 1992. Miruka, Okumba. Studying Oral Literature. Nairobi: Acacia Stantex Publishers, 1999. Musila, Grace. “Age, Sex and Power in Modern Kenya: A Tale of Two Marriages.” Social Identities 11.2 (2005): 113-30. Mutongi, Kenda. “Thugs or Entrepreneurs? Perceptions of Matatu Operators in Nairobi, 1970 to the Present.” Africa 76.4 (2006): 549-68. Mutonya, Mungai. “Swahili Advertising in Nairobi: Innovation and Language Shift.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 20.1 (2008): 314. Nandwa, Jane and Austin Bukenya. African Oral Literature for Schools. Nairobi: Longman, 1983. Nyairo, Joyce. “‘Modify’: Jua Kali as Metaphor for Africa’s Urban Ethnicities and Cultures.” Urban Legends, Popular Culture and Popular Literature in Kenya. Ed. James Ogude and Joyce Nyairo. Trenton and Asmara: Africa World Press, 2007. 125-54. Obonyo, Levy. “From Hate Media to Bloodshed: Citizen Ethnicization.” Unpublished paper. Re/Membering Kenya Public Lecture Series. Goethe Institut, Nairobi. 2008. Odhiambo, Christopher J. “Reading FM Radio Stations in Kenya: Opening a Pandora’s Box.” Cultural Production and Social Change in Kenya: Building Bridges. Ed. Kimani Njogu. Nairobi: Twaweza Communications, 2007. 151-66.

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Odhiambo, Tom. “Pavement Democracy: Word on the Street.” Jahazi 1.3 (2008): 17-20. Okpewho, Isidore. African Oral Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Paredes, Americo, and Richard Baumann, eds. Toward New Perspectives in Folklore. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1972. “President Moi Repeats Threat to Vernacular Radio Stations.” IFEX 10 Oct. 2000. . Raban, Jonathan. Soft City. Glasgow: William Collins Sons, 1974. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Ross, Andrew, and Tricia Rose, eds. Microphone Fiends: Youth Music & Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. Samper, David A. “Talking Sheng: The Role of a Hybrid Language in the Construction of Identity and Youth Culture in Nairobi, Kenya.” Ph.D. dissertation. University of Pennsylvania, 2002. Wa Mungai, Mbugua. “Identity Politics in Nairobi Matatu Folklore.” PhD dissertation. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2004. ——., “Nothing But Ogre Tales: Problems in the Conception and Practice of Folklore in Kenya. Indian Folklife 19 (2005): 20-24. ——., “Pale Pale: Sexual Healing – On the Couch with FM Radio.” Jahazi 1.3 (2008): 31-35. Wa Mungai, Mbugua, and David Arthur Samper. “‘No Mercy, No Remorse’: Nairobi’s Matatu Mode of Travel and Passengers’ Personal Experience Narratives.” Africa Affairs 52.3 (2006): 51-81. Wa Mureithi, Kariuki. “Kenya Split by Wedding.” BBC News Online. 2003. . Wa Mutonya, Maina. “Mugithi Performance: Popular Music, Stereotypes and Ethnic Identity.” Africa Insight 35.2 (2005): 53-60. ——., “‘Touch What You Don’t Have’: Mugithi, One-man Guitar and Urban Identities.” Muziki 4.1 (2007): 12-26.

Michael Wainaina

Empire Speaks Back: Authenticity, Folk Voices and Re-Presentation of Across in Gikuyu Radio Narratives Introduction Cognizant of the dominant stereotypical image of Africa in Western writing; in appreciation of the fact that stereotyping of difference works both ways; being critical of the capacity of canonised African literature to capture authentic voices of the folk as they speak back to the West; recognising the power of radio in its reinforcement of oracy and representation of a folkcentred world view; I proceed to analyse radio narratives from Kameme Kayũ Ka Mũingĩ (The Voice of the People Radio) an independent communityoriented radio station in Nairobi Kenya that broadcasts in Gĩkũyũ to answer the question: “What are the contemporary representations of across, going across and engaging with those from across 1 in relation to transgression of geographical and cultural borders by Gĩkũyũ folk?” The analysis shows that the folk create their own image of across and the crossing of borders in characterising the relationship between themselves and the West. They not only speak back to the stereotypes of the West about Africa, but they also create their own stereotypes in return. They characterise those from across as odd and gullible. They freely suspend the moral rules of engagement that they use with their own, evaluate their relationship with the West on largely economic terms and take no moral responsibility in engaging with those from across in extortionist and depraved terms .The dominant stereotypical image of Africa in Western thought and the equally stereotypical responses by the folk in engaging with Westerners indicates that there does not seem to be a mutually affirming discourse between the two cultures.

1

The word for “abroad” or “overseas” especially in relation to Europe and America in Gĩkũyũ language is Mũrĩmo meaning “across.”

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The Imperials Write Africa In Western writing and thought Africa has remained the strange other, the resource and now, the market and experimental laboratory of Western technology (Abubakar). Africa has been a representational narrative subject or “object-being” since antiquity. This stereotypical approach to writing Africa characterised the demarcations of Africa versus the West through the medieval context – where the relationship was represented by Pagan versus Christian dichotomies; to the renaissance – where the relationship was represented by malformation versus perfection dichotomies; to the enlightenment and postenlightenment periods – where the relationship was characterised by the racial inferiority versus superiority dichotomies; to the post colonial era where Africa is not only the ancestral home of humankind but also the centre of today’s tensions, civil wars, dislocations, and genocides. It is instructive to note that the rhetorics and discourses of “African otherness” have survived African decolonisation. But the Empire is writing back!

The Empire Writes Back A body of post-colonial studies of literary responses to the writing of Africa by the West has gained currency over the last few decades. My concern in this paper emanates from a discomfiture with the fact of “writing” in relation to the problem of representation and the language of African literature. The crucial function of language as a medium of power demands that post-colonial writing defines itself by seizing the language of the centre and re-placing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized place. (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 37; emphasis added).

My contention is that this emphasis on writing is overstated because African communities are largely oral and are fairly still attached to their vernaculars. Therefore “post colonial writing” represents only a part of the body of cultural production of African cultures. Given the relatively low literacy rates in Africa, this writing circulates within a minority who can read and write and those who are comfortable with foreign languages. Unfortunately, postcolonial theorising in and about Africa especially on literary forms has tended to privilege this canonised written literature and place it at the centre of the so called African literatures. This form has a big dilemma arising from its definitional crisis in trying to “(seize) the language of the centre and replacing it in a discourse [supposedly] fully adapted to the colonized place.”

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The grip of European languages on “African literature” is so enmeshed in the colonial process and product so as to create a big dilemma as to whether the concept of African literature in colonial languages is tenable. Ngugi Wa Thiongo tenuously discusses this dilemma in Decolonising the Mind. He decries at length the assault of African Literature by European languages under the misguided pursuits of elitist pioneer African writers who were part of an emerging and alienated petty-bourgeoisie class. This class was equally a product of the colonial education system which had deliberately taught them to look down on their own languages. His argument is that this class essentialised their alienated state as “the state of the African,” and thus legitimised their conception of African literature in European languages. This class: spoke as if its (alienated) identity was that of society as a whole. The literature it produced in European languages was given the identity of African literature as if there had never been literature in African Languages. Yet by avoiding a real confrontation with the language issue, it was clearly wearing false robes of identity: It was a pretender to the throne of the mainstream African literature. (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 22)

The in-authenticity of this literature in portraying realistic African experience is emphasised by the fact that written literature in English, “falsely and even absurdly created an English speaking African peasantry and working class, a clear negation or falsification of the historical process” (22). Arising from the above, in writing about the transgressions, disruptions and or redrawing of borders and notions of border crossings within literary forms of cultural production, I am compelled by the absurdities of African literatures written in European languages to seek for authentic peasantry or folk voices. The folk voices must be sought from among the people and must be delivered in the language of the people. In extending his argument on the use of European languages in African literature, Ngugi remarks: African languages refused to die. They would not simply go the way of Latin to become the fossils for linguistic archaeology to dig up, classify and argue about the (sic) international conferences. These languages, these national heritages of Africa, were kept alive by the peasantry. (23)

The Empire Speaks Back Using their own languages, this peasantry has created their own view of the West with its attendant identities, relationships, borders and their transgressions. I seek to investigate how they construct, deconstruct and

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reconstruct identities as they characterise and interpret the actions, motivations and consequences of crossing borders by way of Westerners coming within their geographical boundaries and also in the case of one of their own crossing borders to the West. In investigating the contemporary representations, I explore the folk voices through radio narratives. The focus on the radio here is by no means fortuitous and I should turn to the subject of radio briefly in order to contextualise its usefulness in the foregrounding of authentic folk voices.

Subversions of the Medium: Why Radio? According to Daloz and Verrier-Frechette: radio is rightly acknowledged as the crucial medium of mass communication in sub-Saharan Africa: both more widespread than television and more accessible than newspapers. Its omnipresence in everyday life, whether in rural or urban settings explains its strategic importance as a means of communication. (Qtd. in Furdon and Furniss 180)

The authors underscore the importance of radio as a crucial medium of mass communication in sub-Sahara Africa. I have elected to focus on the radio, not only because of its importance as cited above but also because of its close relationship to the colonial and post-colonial developments in African history. Radio was first seen as a means for settlers and colonial civil servants to keep in touch with African cities and the world outside Africa. It later served the needs of a small African elite. Britain introduced state radio services in Kenya as early as 1927 (Spitulnik). Radio’s potential role in informing (and misinforming?) the masses has been the driving force of the successive policies adopted by different regimes in Kenya. From its advent in the 1920s, colonial authorities held inflated and often racist views of the ‘subversive’ impact of African exposure to radio and other mass media (Zaffiro). Such were further given impetus by the propaganda legacy of WWII and further strengthened by the hostile anti-communist strains of the early cold war years. The rise of serious African nationalist challenges to colonial domination after WWII set the stage for extensive heavy handed and generally unsuccessful colonial information ‘management’ policies. Notably, colonial Britain was generally more credulous than other European colonial powers as it drew from extensive wartime propaganda experience to develop, use and tightly control radio, newspapers and film to fashion post war (mis)information policies for its African territories, one of which was Kenya.

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Ownership and control of radio and regulatory mechanisms were inherited by the new states following independence and with the exception of a few religious radio services, it was not until the 1990s that commercial radio and deregulated public service parastatal radio services appeared in Africa and most specifically in Kenya. In line with the colonial objectives of radio, African leaders have viewed radio as a powerful tool for ‘national integration,’ ‘development’ and maintaining themselves in power. With the former two platitudes and the later aim, highly centralised state broadcast monopolies could be justified. The history of radio can thus be described with among many others words, as ‘highly controlled’ with the aim of subjugating the masses through a top-bottom (mis)information structure that imposes itself on truly people driven and relevant content and values. In Kenya, the situation has changed over the last few years with the entry into the electronic media market of independent, indigenous investment in broadcasting. This has seen unprecedented growth of FM stations some of which broadcast in vernacular. This is a phenomenal development for contemporary narrative since radio reinforces oracy, the dominant form of African composition and performance, and a counter-balance to the EuroAfrican versions of African literature in foreign languages as discussed above. Thus, the establishment of vernacular radio stations means that we can now hear “authentic” folk voices, disencumbered from the need to translate authentic cultural voices into a foreign language. The folk are thus able to use and subvert the controlled and exclusive medium of radio to present their own experiences, as opposed to that of the coloniser or the equally oppressive post-colonial African regimes. This access equally subverts the notion of perceived cultural superiority of foreign languages by presenting folk experiences in indigenous languages through oracy, a decidedly indigenous mode of narrative production. The radio offers wide reach, provides space for indigenous language and re-emphasises oracy. For the folk, it provides the platform for authenticating cultural experience through indigenous language and the power to name and affirm themselves and their own experiences and world view. Radio reinstates the folk’s power to express themselves and with this reinstatement the folk is ready to speak back presenting their version of across.

We the People In the year 2000, a Radio station was commissioned in Nairobi, Kenya. It was named Kameme, Kayũ ka Mũingĩ, translated as “The Voice of the

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People Radio” which was broadcasting in Gĩkũyũ, the language spoken by the AGĩkũyũ of Central Kenya, the largest ethnic community in Kenya. One of the premium programs was a narrative performance titled “Mathekania na Mataaro ma Gĩthingithia” (MMG) interpretively translated as “The Anecdotes of Gĩthingithia.” A more direct translation that captures the essence of the narratives would be “The Moral Impartations and Humorous Narrations of Gĩthingithia.” The narratives in MMG seek to create a realistic presentation of ‘the people’ what I refer to as the ‘folk.’ In the context of MMG, this would refer to all Gĩkũyũ speakers. The style and form MMG however, seeks an idiosyncratic way to characterise ‘the folk,’ which I adopt in this paper. First, the narratives are delivered in a dialogue between two characters, named Gĩthingithia and Njaramba. Through self-disclosure, we are able to establish the station of life of both characters. Gĩthingithia is the narrator, the ‘owner’ of the narratives, and hence the title, “The Anecdotes of Gĩthingithia.” He is a literate, worldly-wise, fantastic conversationalist with a keen sense of the bizarre and the funny. He is in his late fifties or early sixties and for a villager his age, he is quite mobile, especially in the rural-urban circuits. He also has modest real estate investments on the outskirts of Nairobi and an extensive social network. His mobility, rural-urban connections, interests and his chronological age bring him in contact with a wide range of ‘folk,’ players whom he experiences, watches, hears about, remembers and/or imagines. Typically, these players are rural dwellers or have active rural ties and/or belong to the urban margins. Njaramba is Gĩthingithia’s illiterate friend, neighbour and an age-mate in the traditional sense of the word. Though they share the same values and worldview, Gĩthingithia is everything Njaramba is not. The latter seems to understand that Gĩthingithia is a more worldly-wise, more experienced, better networked peer, and holds a good deal of respect for him. In all the narrations, he is the receiver, a fitting representation of the illiterate/semiliterate, non-travelled rural folk. A good descriptor of folk-lore as characterised in these narrations is the fact that a good number of the stories revolve around clarifications of rumour and gossip. According to Bergmann, gossip is a moral discourse about the behaviour, social situation and character of absent known others. It is a “form of sociable interaction which depends upon the strategic management of information through the creation of others as ‘moral characters’ in talk” (Yerkovich 192). As a speech act, gossip allows people the possibility to express their communities’ values and beliefs on ideal, proper and moral behaviour and also, with considerable force and intention, to influence proper

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behaviour without risking direct confrontation. Gluckman asserts that, as scandal, gossip functions as a system that asserts collective norms as well as creating and maintaining strong communal bonds because the process of gossiping creates and strengthens social ties of intimacy. For an individual, like Githingtihia, knowing the latest gossip increases their status, reputation and the social standing within a social network since they claim a special access to knowledge and the privilege to speak it. Therefore we need to look at gossip as both text and social activity. Two definitional aspects of gossip discussed above are relevant in our understanding of the folk in MMG. The first is gossip being “talk about someone with someone else.” The discourse between Gĩthingithia and Njaramba often involves people around the village or at least people known to either or both them. In other instances, the names are given and the places of the action of the story identified. The second aspect is that gossip “is a moral discourse.” In fact, the program is called “mataaro,” which means “moral impartations.” MMG as gossip creates “moral characters in talk,” allowing Gĩthingithia and Njaramba to, “express their community’s values and beliefs on ideal, proper and moral behavior […] and influence behavior without risking direct confrontation” (Yerkovich 192; Peek and Yankah 152). This latter aspect of gossip brings us to the broadcasted audience of MMG, i.e., the audience receiving these stories over the radio. It is their behaviour that MMG seeks to represent and influence. They thus become players in the function of gossip “as a system that asserts collective norms as well as creating and maintaining strong communal bonds” (Peek and Yankah 152). Njaramba and Gĩthingithia, thus become to the broadcasted audience, not just two narrators on radio, but their ‘folks’ – neighbours – revealing the behaviour of other ‘folks’ through gossip, which they – the broadcasted audience – eavesdrops in. Because the audience is able to receive information about others Gĩthingithia, the narrator of MMG, claims status, reputation, and social standing within the broadcasted ‘folk,’ since he claims special access to knowledge about other ‘folks,’ (named and described in the discourse), and the privilege to speak it via radio. To the listening ‘folk,’ the moral characters in MMG are thus people who live among ‘us.’ MMG never discusses remote experiences from newspapers, radio, TV, books, nor discusses remote personalities or historical figures, or scientific and technological advances, or any other type of experiences outside the folk. The narratives are about the folk told by the folk to the folk. They thus offer us a very unique arena to explore representations of notions of across among the folk through radio as contrasted to the West’s conception of the folks’ otherness as discussed above.

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Oddities and Degeneration of Across While MMG has an impressive repertoire of stories only a few feature Western characters. This tells us that the Westerner is a rare oddity in the day to day lives of the folk. In terms of borders, the geographical distance of the West seems to be real in the lives of the folk and therefore when they encounter Westerners, they stand out and their mannerisms become an object of curiosity for the folk. Among the folk, a Westerner is referred to as Mũthũngũ (pronounced /moðo:ngo/) a Gĩkũyũ version of the Swahili word, mzungu referring to white people. I use the term “white people” deliberately because in the world of the folk all white people be they Europeans, Americans, Canadians, Australians etc., are all the same. While geographically and culturally white people are of particular nationalities and would refer to themselves and each other in relation to their nationalities, to the folk they are all athũngũ (plural of Mũthũngũ). The term is loaded with cultural connotation of difference and otherness in regard to the subject. I will use the term in this paper, as used in the stories, to refer to any and all Western white peoples, in line with the folk understanding of the concept. I start by discussing two stories 2 where the folk encounter the Westerner “across.” Our first story is Gĩthingithia Visits London. This is a travel narrative where Gĩthingithia is relating his experiences after he had traveled to London. Gĩthingithia guceera London (Gĩthingithia Visits London) Gĩthingithia goes on a trip to London. On one winter day he goes to see the Queen’s residence at 10 Downing Street (sic). He gets hungry and goes into a restaurant to have some food and hot coffee. As he is eating away, an elderly English couple strolls into the restaurant and sits next to him. The man goes to the counter and orders for a single plate of french fries and hamburger. He carries the food to where the wife is and sits down. He then asks for an extra empty plate and divides the food into two portions and passes one portion to the wife. Gĩthingithia thinks that they do not have enough money and they have decided to share one plate. He walks up to them and volunteers to buy them an extra plate of food. They politely decline the offer by saying that they have been married for over fifty years and that they share everything. Then, the man proceeds to eat as the wife watches. Gĩthingithia still watching and interested thinks that the wife is not eating because the food is hot. When the man is about to finish his food and the woman has not touched her food, Gĩthingithia walks up to the couple to enquire on what the problem could be. The woman complains that he is really meddling into their

2

Stories discussed in this paper were accessed from Kameme Studios. They were downloaded on CD, replayed, transcribed and translated freely. They were truncated into a synopsis as presented in the current paper. The stories are delivered in conversation mode but the synopsis is presented in prose for the benefit of the reader and demands on space.

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affairs. She explains that she is going to eat after the husband has finished since she is waiting for him to give him their ‘teeth’ (dentures) for her to eat the food. Both Gĩthingithia and Njaramba are tickled by the absurdity of the couple sharing a pair of ‘teeth.’

This story illustrates the transgression of geographical and cultural boundaries when Gĩthingithia travels to the West. When narrating his experiences, Gĩthingithia chooses to foreground a pretty bizarre event that portrays the English couple as an oddity. The sharing of dentures by the couple is a strange event in the minds of the folk. It is not uncommon for people who travel across to regale the folk back home with stories from the other side. In such stories, it is not uncommon that incidences highlighted foreground the odd and the unusual as in the case of this story. Often, fancy and a sense of adventure inform these travelogues and their purpose is to amuse, to amaze or to uplift the status of the narrator rather than to present factual information about across. The actual facts in these stories are of secondary importance. In this particular story, the bizarre is foregrounded at the expense of any other “normal” experiences Gĩthingithia may have had, reinforcing stereotypes about across by portraying it as an odd and bizarre place. Facts and figures are not important. One notes that Gĩthingithia claims to have gone to the Queen’s residence at 10 Downing Street. This is factually incorrect. The folks’ knowledge and use of such facts as to who exactly lives in 10 Downing Street or the exact residence of the Queen is limited, for such facts are largely unnecessary. They observe selectively, constructing their own image of across, a process which has little regard to correctness of places and people. The case for the scarce knowledge of such facts begs comparison here. Often one hears the reference of Africa in the West as if the whole continent is one country with South Africa as its capital. In one of my own travels to Salt Lake City, Utah, I met up with an African American young man in a train station. As we sat waiting for the train, he looked at my shoe and retorted: “Nice shoe!” “Thanks,” I said. “Where did you buy it?” he enquired. I told him “I bought it in Nairobi, Kenya.” The young man tried to jog his mind for a second then asked, “Where the (Expletive) is NairobiKenya? California!” For him, Nairobi Kenya is one word and it could as well be in California. Likewise, for the folk, 10 Downing Street is the Queen’s residence!

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The folk associates some status to those who have been across. In an effort to earn this status, those who deliver these travelogues exaggerate their engagement with the place and the people. One sees this attempt in Gĩthingithia’s insistence that he offered to buy food for the English couple that came into the restaurant and was sharing one plate. As the subsequent discussions of this paper will show, this is a deliberate subversion of the expected relationship between the folks and the Westerner. Economic relations between the two hardly portray the folk as the benefactor and the Westerner as recipient. In subverting this relationship and putting himself in the place of a benefactor, the narrator is trying to elevate his own position in order to live up to the status ascribed to those who have been across by the folk. The economic relations between the folk and the Westerners are of a different kind. I proceed to illustrate these using a different story. Mũrũ Wa Ngahũ (The Son of Ngahũ) 3 Gĩthingithia begins by informing Njaramba that the Son of Ngahũ who had gone across has come back to the village. Njaramba responds by saying that he has heard that when his wife had gone to visit him across, he threw her out of his house. Gĩthingithia clarifies that that was not the case and that he knew what really happened. Njaramba asks him to narrate it for him adding that he (Gĩthingithia) always has deeper knowledge of issues. Gĩthingithia narrates that when the Son of Ngahũ went across, he finished his studies and got employed. And because getting-by economically when one is across is not as easy as the village folks think, the Son of Ngahũ moved in with a Mũthũngũ woman to boost his economic well-being. It looked like he had been married by the Mũthũngũ woman because it is he who took his belongings and moved into the Mũthũngũ woman’s house. This is very disappointing to the two characters because in normal circumstances men do not get married by women. Njaramba wonders whether the man would have any respect in the house now that he was the one married to the woman. Gĩthingithia remarks that it is really the Son of Ngahũ’s problem seeing that he had consciously decided to enter into such an arrangement. Njaramba concurs. Gĩthingithia continues to narrate that before the Son of Ngahũ went across, he had done a wedding and promised the wife that he would arrange for her to join him soon after his arrival there. After waiting for a long time without any effort on his part to invite her over, she started wondering what the problem was but comforted herself that the husband was probably too busy making money. However rumours started circulating that her husband was married by a Mũthũngũ woman. When she heard the rumor, she wrote to her husband and told him that it really didn’t matter whether he was married to a Mũthũngũ woman or not, she was still his wife. Njaramba concurs that that position is tenable because she had

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Among the folk, kinship ties are very important and often, as in this case one is referred to by his kinship ties as opposed to their personal names. This reinforces a sense of kinship among the folk, foregrounding the role of communal ties in individual identity and behaviour.

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been married to him and goats 4 paid for her bride price. When the man got to know that he had been discovered he got very uneasy. However, correspondence began between him and the wife. He informed her that he would very much want her to visit him across but it would be dangerous especially if the Mũthũngũ woman got to know that she was his legally wedded wife. The wife said she would like to meet him nevertheless. They agreed she could go across but that they should tell the Mũthũngũ woman that she was his sister so that she would actually facilitate her crossing over. Arrangements were made for her to go, and when she arrived across, she was met by the Son of Ngahũ and his Mũthũngũ wife. They went to the house and the “sister” was settled into a guest room. She was however very uncomfortable and grew jealous of the Mũthũngũ woman and her relationship with her husband. The man would occasionally sneak into the room of the “sister” at night. This arrangement continued until one day, the Mũthũngũ wife forgot her mobile phone after leaving the house. She came back to pick it and found her husband in a compromised situation with his “sister.” She was shocked beyond words. The “sister” explained that they were man and wife and that the whole arrangement was a sham. The Mũthũngũ woman was very annoyed and kicked them both out of her house. It is after that ordeal that they came back to the village quietly and are trying to rebuild their lives.

After the Son of Ngahũ goes across, rumours start circulating in the village that he had entered into an illicit relationship with a Mũthũngũ woman. This is eventually proven true and his wife comes to know of it. First, his going across represents a temporary break from his communal and cultural ties and structures occasioned by sheer geographical distance. These ties and structures would have prevented him from getting into such a relationship in the first place. One can thus say that the distance of across is not only geographical but it is also socio-cultural and moral. With cultural ties and moral codes of home so remote, an otherwise well respected member of the folk suspends the cultural and moral values of his people to “get married” by a Mũthũngũ woman. The narrator is quick to note that this arrangement on the part of the Son of Ngahũ is for economic expediency. Economic advantage thus becomes a major motivation in suspending all rules of moral engagement when folks cross over. This advantage is persuasive enough since the real wife, who had mistaken his silence for industry and enterprise as he makes money agrees to go and live with him without the precondition of breaking this relationship with the Mũthũngũ woman. It thus seems that the wife’s expectation that the husband was busy making money was not at variance with the fact of the illicit relationship. She sees the economic advantage for both of them in his staying in the relationship, but much more importantly, downplays the significance of the “romantic” side of the

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Payment of goats as bride price is a necessary and sufficient requirement for a union to be recognized as a marriage under customary law.

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relationship which the Mũthũngũ woman seems to have been convinced about. It is instructive to note that the illicit relationship across does not delegitimise the relationship back home. Njaramba correctly notes that the Son of Ngahũ had paid goats as bride price and thus the local woman remained his legal wife without regard to what he may have got himself into, and in this case despite what the Mũthũngũ wife may have been made to believe. The local customary system is binding and the transgressions of across cannot break the local ties. In fact, in analysing the actions of the Son of Ngahũ, Gĩthingithia and Njaramba agree that he was culpable but only of neglecting his local wife, not of extortion of the Mũthũngũ woman. While rules of engagement are suspended across for economic expediency, this does not delegitimise local relations and one can navigate pretty effortlessly between the two states. The fact that the Son of Ngahũ lived in the same house with his local wife and the Mũthũngũ woman, with the consent of the former to extort the latter, explains this navigation. It was made possible by the fact that the rules of engagement for the couple when viewed across were mutually inclusive, none delegitimising the other. It is however not surprising that once the Mũthũngũ woman discovered the arrangement, her deluded life was over. For the other couple however, they simply returned home and took over where they had left off. This emphasis on perverted social relations, redefined morality and value system based on economic ends is exemplified further in situations where the Westerners come from across and engage the folk in their home ground.

Misadventures of the Transgressing Stranger from Across We subsequently turn to the events engendered by the Westerners coming over and engaging the folk in their home turf. This encounter is illustrated by two stories Ndereba Wa Mĩrũthi (The Lion Rider) and Cokora na Mũgathĩ (The Street boy and a necklace) Ndereba Wa Mĩrũthi (The Lion Rider) Njaramba seeks clarification on the puzzling development where the Son of Kagwai has built an expensive stone house. The young man earns a living doing petty menial jobs in the village, earning peanuts. “How then was he able to build a brick house?” Njaramba enquires. Gĩthingithia explains that, tired of the menial jobs he was doing in the village, Kagwai’s son decided to try his luck poaching in the game park. He prayed to God that when he goes poaching he meets elephants and rhinos and not dangerous animals like lions, leopards and snakes. As fate would have it, when he went to the game park, the first animal he encounters was a hungry lion. When the lion charged, the youngman climbed a tree. The lion lay at the

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bottom of the tree in wait for the youngman to come down. With time both the lion and the youngman fell asleep. The youngman let go of the branch on which he was resting and he fell on the lion. The lion was startled by the youngman on its back. The youngman held onto its tail and the lion started moving in circles trying to get hold of the youngman on its back. Some Western tourists happened to be nearby and saw the commotion of the youngman riding on the back of a lion. They started taking video clips of the extremely exciting scene. In due course, the youngman out of fatigue and fright let go of the lion. The lion runs away. When he came to, the youngman realized that the scene had attracted some athũngũ tourists. When they came near him, his first words were (in heavily accented English), “Dollars then talk.” He wanted to be given dollars so that he could explain what was happening. When he was given some dollars, he told the tourists that he does his daily routine exercises by riding on all sorts of wild animals. He told them that that day’s performance only involved the lion, but if they wanted to see him ride on other animals like the leopards and rhinos, they should come there the following day and pay so that he could come the following Sunday to perform. The following day the tourists brought a lot of money and gave it to the lion rider booking the Sunday performance. On Sunday the tourists were back, looking for the lion rider. The youngman of course never turned up. That is how the Son of Kagwai had grown rich overnight and put up the stone house that Njaramba was asking about.

The hero of “The Lion Rider” is an illiterate manual labourer called the Son of Kagwai. In real terms, this kind of a person would be condemned to the intergenerational poverty that hounds a large percentage of illiterate rural peasants all over sub-Saharan Africa. Nothing short of a miracle would obviate this kind of fate for the Son of Kagwai. The villagers are therefore understandably puzzled when he puts up a stone building, a preserve of the urban middle class and the upper class in the experience of the folk. But then miracles do happen when a Mũthũngũ comes into the picture. The miracle for Kagwai’s son happened through a very bizarre chance encounter with tourists in his near tragic attempt to try his hand at poaching. It however takes the subversion of the image of “intelligent Western other” for the young man to have his way with the tourists. Western writing has attributed intelligence to western civilisation and its antonyms to Africa. It is ridiculous to believe that a man can do his daily exercises by riding on lions and rhinos. To understand why “intelligent” tourists would fall for such a trick, we may need to revisit the images of Africa that have historically informed the Western imagination and even today, informs millions of white tourists crossing over into the continent with a sense of heightened adventure. In “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” Chinua Achebe argues that that there has been a dorminant image of Africa in Western thought. The image, according to Abubakar is represented by a “style of symbolizing Africa in which the enormous complexities of the continent are reduced to simple conventions or rhetorics of representation,

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such as ‘oddity,’ ‘savagery’ or ‘darkness’” (Abubakar 844). Thus, Africa is, at least the “other,” against which the Westerners could only think of within the binary of civilised/savage, white west/black Africa. During the colonial period, in order to justify colonialism and exploitation, Africa and Africans were caricatured as “wild” and in dire need of “civilisation.” Nandwa andd Bukenya describe this image in more vivid terms: It became a habit during the colonial period for Europeans to exaggerate and ridicule everything African. The fashion was to present everything as “wild wild” and “way way out.” European audiences […] were always hungering for something new and bizarre out of Africa […] and there was a […] definite bias in what [Europeans] published about Africa. They usually went for the outlandish, the facetious, and the shocking, in a word, the sensational. (32)

The currency of these images in Western cultures cannot be disputed. I have been offering an online course 5 where students from different Universities North America, Europe, Middle East and Africa are pared in ctured crosscurricula interactive sessions embedded in their regular curriculum. The course typically starts by asking students to give their perspectives of other students and their countries. I have sampled some sentiments expressed about Kenya by American students: When I think of Kenya, I think of a hot and dry climate with many wild animals like giraffes and antelope just running around. Here, we have squirrels everywhere we turn, but I can imagine in Kenya it is quite different. I feel that the people are all very tall and skinny and have the build of basketball players. To be completely honest, when I think of Kenya, most of all I think of the Disney cartoon film “The Lion King.” I imagine beautiful sunsets and flat plains, but I can't quite make a perception of what I think the social life of a young adult might be, or what education is like.

Another student writes: [When I think of Kenya] I […] think of great track athletes competing in the Olympic games. I always wished I could be a great runner like the Kenyans when I ran track in high school. I also think of a very hot, desert-type climate, with flat dirt plains, few trees and the kings themselves, lions.

Another one writes:

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The course is branded Global Modules and is meant to help students explore ideas of global concern from a multi-cultural perspective. It can be accessed on http://www.globalmodules.net.

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When I think of Kenya, I do get the image of great athletes, however I also, like [the student with the response above, name omitted] get the feeling that there are wide open plains with many wild animals roaming around. However I am sure that I am completely wrong it is still what pops into my head when I think of Kenya.

Another writes: Whenever I think of Kenya, I picture all of the photos that a friend's mother had taken a few years ago. Beautiful lions, cheetahs, and other animals that can probably rip your head off. Elephants are okay though. Anyways, I’ve always admired Kenya’s wildlife. Although I don’t know much about its people, I imagine incredible tribal artwork, as well as some really intense stretched earlobes. I hope so, because gauges are sacred.

And another writes: When I think about Kenya, images of the jungle, wild animals and gold Olympic medalists come into my mind.

And yet another writes: When I think of Kenya my first perception is that the country is mainly comprised of large wildlife preservations and also a number more populated metropolises. It also seems that Kenyans lead a much simpler life than what the average American lives.

With these kinds of stereotypes its little wonder that Western tourists cross over from the North to come to “wild Africa” to “go back in time” and experience the African landscape in its exotic primal, vegetative and wild untameness. Motivated by such images, a lion rider is the epitome of all experiences of bizarre Africa for a modern Western tourist. And yes, it is ridiculous to believe that a man can do his daily exercises by riding on lions and rhinos, but that would be so only in Europe and America, this is Africa! Thus the tourists so easily believe what the lion rider tells them and are only too willing to pay, after all, it is the kind of spectacle they had saved for a long time in the hope of crossing over to Africa to see. On his part, the young man’s perception of the Mũthũngũ as a rich lay about in search of adventure, makes him quickly turn his near tragic encounter with the lion into a once in a lifetime economic opportunity. It is doubtful he would have asked for money in the very unlikely event the tourists were local folks. The chance encounter engenders the playing out of imaginations of otherness; for the tourists, the lifetime experience of African wildness and for the young man, an opportunity to exploit the expectations of excitable Westerners, to make

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easy money. Thus his first words when he sniffs the opportunity knocking are, “dollars then talk.” One significant fact is that this story is among the very few where the narrators describe characters as being naïve and ignorant. As the narrative closes, Gĩthingithia and Njaramba agree that this is an illustration of ignorance on the part of the Western tourists. The myth of intelligent other gets subverted when the Westerners are tricked by a village destitute like the Son of Kagwai. But more significantly, it is an indictment of an unjustifiable, if not plainly ignorant representation of Africa and Africans by Westerners. It is their expectation of exotic wildness and savagery in Africa, and the whole “going back in time” project being referred to as an enterprise in ignorance. The economic implications of contact with the Western other are strongly reflected in the next story, “The Streetboy and the Necklace.” Cokora na Mũgathĩ (The Streetboy and the Necklace). A streetboy snatches a necklace from a Mũthũngũ outside the Hilton, Nairobi, and runs away. When the streetboy is pursued by members of the public and fears being apprehended, he swallows the necklace. The Mũthũngũ insists that under no circumstances was he ready to part with the necklace. He suggests that the fair and non-oppressive method to retrieve the necklace it to feed the streetboy with a lot of food so that the necklace can go through the alimentary canal and come out in excrement. The streetboy is taken to the police station and fed on a lot of ugali 6 and milk bought by the Mũthũngũ. Everyone including the Mũthũngũ waits for the necklace to come out. The streetboy suspects that the necklace must be very expensive, since he would not expect the Mũthũngũ to be so concerned about a necklace that is not expensive. Gĩthingithia and Njaramba are in agreement with the sentiment that the fact that the Mũthũngũ was willing to wait for the necklace implies that it must have been a very expensive one. The necklace eventually comes out but the streetboy is not about to let it go. Since he is in the police station surrounded by policemen he hatches an escape plan. He removes his clothes and smears his whole body with the excrement. He then calls out saying that the necklace had come out and they should open the cell and come and get it. Everyone including the Mũthũngũ comes to the cell in order to receive the necklace. On opening, the streetboy comes out stark naked smeared all over with excrement holding the necklace on one hand and excrement on the other. No one was willing to go near him, and he runs away with the necklace as the policemen watch and the Mũthũngũ laughs in amazement.

The prospects of the monetary gain from the necklace, is the motivation of the totally baffling events of the story. Both the narrators and the street boy are in agreement that the necklace must have been very expensive because in their view that is the only plausible reason why the Mũthũngũ was determined to wait. On the strength of that, the street boy had to resort to 6

A staple Kenyan diet made by cooking a mixture of ground maize meal and water into a thick gruel.

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extreme measures to retain the “expensive” necklace. It is possible that the necklace had another value to the Mũthũngũ, other than a monetary one. But in the mind of the folk, white people are rich. In fact, a “poor white man” is an oxymoron in the imagination of the folk. Within this context the extreme measures of the street boy seem well calculated.

The Financial End Justifies the Immoral Means In reference to the stories where Westerners cross over and get into the turf of the folk, it seems that the ensuing engagement is purely economic. Moral precepts and values applied by the folk in dealing with their own are suspended for economic gain without any sense of moral liability when dealing with the Western other. Viewed from a moral point of view the events of “The Streetboy and the Necklace” and “The Lion Rider,” depict wanton if not criminal theft and extortion of Westerners by the folk. However, in the stories, there is no indication of recognition of any wrongdoing on the part of the streetboy or the Son of Kagwai. It is known in the village how the young man got rich. Yet, there is no indication that there is indignation from the fact that he grew rich by extorting from athũngũ. One notes by listening to a large repertoire of these stories that describe engagements of folks with their own that they are highly moralistic to the extent of being preachy. In fact, an expanded definition of the stories as noted earlier is “The humour and moral impartations of Gĩthingithia” signifying that issues of propriety and morality are at the centre of the narrative radio program. Rarely would the folk get away with immoral or criminal behaviour in engaging with one another. The fact of moral impropriety is however not extended to the Westerners. In dealing with them, the folk have essentialised the rich/poor dichotomy with which they engage the Westerner at the expense of their own codes of right and wrong. So, while the actions of the protagonists of the two stories border on criminality, the street boy is portrayed as innovative and the lion rider as quick-witted as they admirably rise to a once in a lifetime opportunity to make money from a Mũthũngũ. In the mind of the folks, the financial end justifies the immoral means when the money is got from a Mũthũngũ. This should be seen against the background of the sense of justice that the Mũthũngũ seeks to be guided by which only serves to emphasise his outsider status. After the streetboy snatches the necklace and is caught, the Mũthũngũ victim wants to use the most ‘just’ and ‘fair’ method to retrieve the necklace. The whole idea of feeding the streetboy and waiting for the necklace to pass

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through the alimentary canal was his. His outsider status does not allow him to realise that in the laws of the street-jungle, where the streetboy reigns supreme, concepts of ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’ as espoused in his understanding of social justice are farfetched and even naive. In the street jungle ‘mob justice’ is the only justice since the folks do not underestimate the street boy. It is not uncommon for motorists to be harassed by streetboys carrying excrement in their hands in the streets of Nairobi. In the event that the street boy had snatched a necklace from the folk, chances are that he would have been lynched and cut open to retrieve the necklace. The fact that he gets away with stealing from a ‘just’ and ‘fair’ Mũthũngũ only emphasises the cavalier attitude of the folks to the concept of justice when a Mũthũngũ is involved. Clearly, the concept of wronging and being wronged does not extend to the Western other in the morality of the folks. They are allowed impunity when the would be victim is a Mũthũngũ.

Conclusion: Search for a Mutually Affirming Discourse In this paper I set out to answer the question, “What are the contemporary representations of across, going across and engaging with those from across in relation to transgression of geographical and cultural borders by Gĩkũyũ folk?” Against a backdrop of controversy as to what constitutes authentic African literature, I have sought to show that authentic folk voices from which this question can be explored can be captured through the newly liberalised mass communication medium of radio. By analysing four stories from the conversational radio narratives titled Mathekania na Mataaro ma Gĩthingithia, I have shown that these folk voices provide us with unique insights on how the folk reconstruct identities and relationships across geographical and cultural borders in the contemporary world. It is clear that the folk construct their own stereotypes in regard to the said identities and relationships with the West. They characterise those from across as odd and gullible. They freely suspend the moral rules of engagement that they use with their own, evaluate their relationship with the West on largely economic terms, and take no moral responsibility in engaging with those from across in extortionist and depraved terms. My contention therefore is that the existence of a stereotypical image of Africa in the West needs to be seen in line with the capacity for reciprocity by the folk. In a Chapter entitled “The Persistence of Natives,” Limerick 1987 asserts that “the natives did not vanish” (179). She reckons that the natives [folk] are as much the actors as the acted on and that “it is important –

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and unnerving – to realize that ethnic stereotyping can work both ways” (180). I have endeavored to show that in the Gĩkũyũ case the folk did not vanish, and although their voices were hardly captured in the canonised written African literature, they continue to express themselves and construct their counter-images and re-presentations through folklore. The dominant stereotypical image of Africa in Western thought and the equally stereotypical responses by the folk in engaging with the West indicate that there does not seem to be a mutually affirming discourse between the two cultures. If the essential function of a boundary is to facilitate communication, there is urgency to institute meaningful communication that interrogates existing stereotypical inscriptions across Western and African cultures in search of a mutually affirming discourse.

Works Cited Abubakar, Tanimu. “Africa in Western Literature.” Encyclopedia of African History. Ed. Kevin Shillington. Vol. 1. New York: Fitzroy DearbornTaylor and Francis, 2005. 843-46. Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Massachussetts Review 18.14 (1977): 782-94. Rpt. in Hopes and Impediments. London: Heinemann, 1988. 1-13. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 2000. Questia. 11 Feb. 2009 . Bergmann, Jurg. Discreet Indiscretions: The Social Organisation of Gossip. New York: Aldine, 1993. Daloz, Jean Pascal, and Katherine Verrier-Frechette. “Is Radio Pluralism an Instrument of Political Change? Insights from Zambia.” African Broadcast Cultures: Radio in Transition. Ed. Richard Fardon and Graham Furniss. Oxford: James Curry, 2000. 180-87. Gluckman, Max. “Gossip and Scandal.” Current Anthropology 4.3 (1963): 307-16. Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 1987. Questia. 20 Jan. 2009 . “Mathekania na Mataaro ma Gĩthingithia” (MMG). Radio Broadcast. Nairobi: Kameme, Kayũ ka Mũingĩ, 2000. Nandwa, J., and Austin Bukenya. African Oral Literature for Schools. Nairobi: Longman Kenya, 1983.

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Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Nairobi: EAEP, 1986. Peek, Philip M., and Kwesi Yankah. African Folklore: An Encyclopedia. New York: Routledge, 2004. Shillington, Kevin, ed. Encyclopedia of African History. 3 vols. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn-Taylor and Francis, 2005. Spitulnik, Debra. “Electronic Media and Oral Traditions.” African Folklore: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Phillip Peek and Kwesi Yankah. New York: Routledge, 2004. 109-13. Yerkovich, Sally. “Gossiping as a Way of Speaking.” Journal of Communication 27 (1997): 192-96. Zaffiro, James. “Media as Propaganda.” Encyclopedia of African History. Ed. Kevin Shillington. Vol. 2. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn-Taylor and Francis, 2005. 972-73.

Contributors Remmy Shiundu Barasa teaches in the Faculty of Education, St. Augustine University of Tanzania. His research interests are in narrative theories and contemporary African literature. He holds MA (Literature) and B.Ed. (Hons) degrees from Kenyatta University in Kenya. Fella Benabed teaches English at Badji Mokhtar University, Annaba in Algeria. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Comparative Literature. She has a Magister Degree (equivalent to Master of Arts) in Comparative Literature. In her thesis, she adopted a post-colonial approach to the novels of Wole Soyinka and Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and studied the issues of colonialism, neocolonialism, interculturality and hybridity in Africa. She is presently writing a doctoral thesis on Native American literature, using a multidisciplinary approach, particularly postcolonial and ecocritical, to study the issues of internal colonialism and environmental racism in the United States of America. She is equally interested in the study of globalisation and ICTs to keep track of international academic advancements. Jens Elze-Volland holds a BA in English and Spanish and an MA in English Studies from the Free University Berlin. He has studied at the Free University Berlin, University of Potsdam and Georgia State University and has been a visiting academic at the English and African Studies Departments at the University of Cape Town in 2009. He is currently working on his PhD in English at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies at the Free University Berlin. His areas of research and teaching include the history of the novel, narratology, 18th century British Literature, Modernisms, Postcolonial Literatures, Sociology and Urban Studies. Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University. He graduated with a first class degree in literature from the University of Nairobi, was a British Council Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, and got his PhD in English from Northwestern University. His major Fields of Research and Teaching are the Anglophone Literatures and Cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Postcolonial Britain, the “Black” Atlantic and the African Diaspora. He also has a special interest in the relation between literature and the production of knowledge and the history of English as a field of study. His many books include Reading the African Novel, Reading Chinua Achebe, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and

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Caribbean Literature, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. He is the general editor of The Encyclopedia of African Literature and co-editor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. Mikhail Gromov was born in Moscow on 27.08.1967. After graduating from the Department of African Studies, Moscow Lomonosov State University, with MA in African literature and Swahili language, he joined a PhD course at Gorky Institute of World Literature (Moscow), which he completed successfully in 1993. Since 2003 he has been living and working in Kenya, where he currently holds the post of Assistant Professor of Literature at the United States International University in Nairobi. His works have been published in such journals as Kiswahili and Nairobi Journal of Literature, he is a regular contributor to the journal Swahili Forum and a regular participant of the Swahili Colloquiums at the University of Bayreuth since 1995. Recently he participated as one of the authors in the international project Outline of Swahili Literature, published by Brill in 2008. His areas of interest are literatures of Eastern and Southern Africa in English and Indigenous languages, Swahili literature, comparative literature. Emilia Ilieva is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature, Egerton University, Kenya. She is a prolific critic and has published widely on African literature. Her contributions appear in The Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 2oth Century (1999), The Companion to African Literatures (2000), The Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2005) and Encyclopaedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (2005) among others. Her publications also appear in Bulgarian and Russian learned journals. She has translated a number of African fiction into Bulgarian notably, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood (1977). Sim Kilosho Kabale is lectures in the Foreign Languages Department, Kenyatta University, Kenya. He also gives seminars periodically at the l’institut supérieur pédagogique de Bukavu and the University of Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He holds a PhD in the science of language and communication from the University of Rouen (France). Professor Kilosho is interested in Francophone Literature and Popular Culture. He has published learned articles prolifically in these domains. Catherine Kroll Catherine Kroll is Associate Professor of English at Sonoma State University in California, USA. Among her recent publications

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are “Rwanda’s Speaking Subjects: The Inescapable Affiliations of Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi” (Third World Quarterly 2007) and “Imagining Ourselves into Transcultural Spaces: De-centering Whiteness in the Classroom” in Undoing Whiteness: Critical Educultural Teaching Approaches for Social Justice Activism, ed. Virginia Lea and Erma Jean Sims (Peter Lang, 2008). Her current research focuses on representations of land and place in South African writing. Nalini Iyer is Associate Professor of English and also the Director of the Center for the Study of Justice in Society at Seattle University. She was also the Patricia Wismer Professor for Gender and Diversity Studies at Seattle University from 2003-2005. Nalini Iyer specialises in Postcolonial Studies and teaches courses in British, African, and South Asian literatures. She has published essays in ARIEL, Pakistan Journal of Women Studies, and Samar. Professor Iyer is currently working on a book focusing on South Asian American writing in North America. J. K. S. Makokha is DAAD doctoral research fellow at the Institut für Englische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin. He holds an MA (Literature) and B.Ed. (Hons) degrees from Kenyatta University in Kenya. He teaches courses on African, Caribbean and South Asian literature in the Institute for English Philology, Free University of Berlin. Makokha is the author of Reading M. G. Vassanji: A Contextual Approach to Asian African Fiction (2009) and co-editor of Weavers and Bards: Emerging Perspectives on Literary and Narrative Styles in Contemporary African Literature (forthcoming 2010). His areas of interests include: Contemporary African literatures, Diasporic literatures and Gender. His poetry has appeared in various journals in the USA, Europe and Africa. John E. Masterson is a lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He teaches postcolonial studies, critical theory, European and U.S. literatures. He has published chapters and articles on Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers and Nuruddin Farah. Forthcoming articles concern the work of Abdulrazak Gurnah and Kiran Desai, as well as an interview with Elleke Boehmer about her 2008 novel, Nile Baby. He is currently preparing a monograph for publication entitled The Disorder of Things: A Comparative Approach to the Work of Nuruddin Farah.

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Lennox Odiemo-Munara is currently a graduate research student in literature at Egerton University, Kenya, where he has also been a teaching assistant. His research and academic interests are in postcolonial studies, gender criticism, and philosophy of literature. He has published in literary journals such as Research in African Literatures; and contributed to A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2005), The Sage Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice (2007), and Women Writing Africa: The Eastern Region (2007). He is also a creative writer. Mbugua wa Mungai teaches at the Literature Department, Kenyatta University, Kenya. He holds BA (Hons) and MA (Lit) degrees from the institution. He received his PhD in Comparative Folklore from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He is the author of numerous articles on aspects of African popular culture and the history of African folklore research. He is currently doing postdoctoral work as a Fulbright scholar at Center for Folklore Studies at Ohio State University in the United States. Sola Ogunbayo is a poet and literary critic. He teaches literature at the Department of English, Redeemer’s University, Ogun State, Nigeria. He is the author of two works of fiction, The Wheel of God (2001) and The Lion and Joel (2002). Ogunbayo is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Lagos. His fields of interests are: Myth Criticism, Romantic Poetry and Postcolonial Literature. Alina N. Rinkanya lectures in the Department of Literature, University of Nairobi, Kenya. Since 1985, she has taught various courses at the Department in European, Eastern African, African-American literatures. She holds an MA degree (Literature) from the Leningrad State University (1980) and received her PhD degree from the Gorky Institute of World Literature (Moscow) in 2001. Her dissertation was entitled, The Development of Kenyan Novel in 1980s - 1990s. She is currently preparing a monographic study of the same name. Her areas of research interest are: Literatures of Eastern Africa, Urban languages as literary medium, Comparative literary studies. Phillip Rothwell is Professor of Portuguese and Spanish Graduate Program Director at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He is author of A Canon of Empty Fathers: Paternity in Portuguese Narrative and A Postmodern Nationalist: Truth, Orality and Gender in the Work of Mia Couto.

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Godwin Siundu is a lecturer in the Department of Literature, University of Nairobi. He holds a PhD from University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. His articles have been published in a number of scholarly journals such as African Identities, Africa Insights and the Nairobi Literary Journal among others. He is also the author of several book chapters in a number of edited volumes. Maria Jesus Cabarcos-Traseira graduated from the University of Santiago de Compostela and then completed her PhD in English at the University of Kansas. She currently lectures at the Department of English Philology at the University of Corunna (Universidade da Coruña), Spain. Her main research areas are contemporary (South) African and Australian literatures in English, which she has approached from the point of view of postcolonial studies, ethical criticism, feminist theory and eco-criticism, as well as the study of the reception of literary texts and genres across cultures. She has published articles and book chapters in her areas of interest. Michael Wainaina is Associate Dean, Graduate School, Kenyatta University, Kenya. He holds MA and PhD degrees and teaches courses on African literature at the Literature Department in the same instituion. He has published widely in the fields of Popular Culture and Orature in contemporary Africa. He is currently working on a book project entitled, The Worlds of Gikuyu Mythology: A Mytho-Structural Analysis of a Culture’s Modes of Though and Practice (2009). Jennifer Wawrzinek researches and teaches at Freie Universität Berlin. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Melbourne, is the author of the monograph Ambiguous Subjects: Dissolution and Metamorphosis in the Postmodern Sublime (2008) and co-editor of the collection Frontier Skirmishes (Winter Verlag 2010). She has been a Felix Meyer Scholar and a Varuna Fellow, and she is currently working on a book-length project which examines the notion of radical passivity in British Romanticism. Russell West-Pavlov is Professor of English Literature at the Institut für Englische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Figures de la maladie chez Andre Gide (1997), Transcultural Graffiti: Diasporic Writing and the Teaching of Literary Studies (2005), Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze (2008), and Spaces of Fiction/Fictions of Space: Postcolonial Place and Literary DeiXis (2010).