University of Nevada, Reno

Return of the Pre-Colonial Environment? Land Questions and the Environmental

Imagination of Nationhood in Southern African Literature

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in English

By

Frank Merksamer

Dr. Jen Hill / Dissertation Advisor

December, 2019

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

We recommend that the dissertation prepared under our supervision by

Entitled

be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

, Advisor

, Committee Member

, Comm ittee Member

, Committee Member

, Graduate School Representative

David W. Zeh, Ph.D., Dean, Graduate School

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Abstract

As historical and sociological studies of land questions multiply across Southern

Africa, the possibilities for thinking about the literary imagination of Southern African environments expand. Thinking about changing governmental conceptions of land ownership and land usage, sociologist Ruth Hall argues that an expansive land question is a question of “how our cities and rural areas can look different” (Interview). Her words belie analytic connections between urban migration and land discourse, linking two, often diametrically opposed spaces. Land questions form political bases and lead to paradigmatic shifts. As Southern African literature responds to land questions and their potential for widespread change, such literature participates in contests over

“environment,” squaring developmental and community concepts, urging epistemic reevaluation. I argue that selected Southern African literatures take on what I consider to be an environmental imagination of nationhood. They do this precisely by engaging schisms between governmental and popular conceptions of land.

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Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter One ...... 32

Chapter Two...... 66

Chapter Three...... 107

Chapter Four ...... 140

Conclusion ...... 175

Notes ...... 187

Works Cited ...... 197

1

Introduction

Defining the postcolonial nation and its cultural legacy in Southern Africa is a difficult process. On the one hand, migration and cultural contact complicate ethnic notions of “nation.” Regional migrations during the nineteenth-century Mfecane responded to colonial incursion and created many of the modern ethnic and political boundaries for Southern African nation-states. Post-independence Southern African states wrestle with a range of political contradictions including ethnic unrest and conflicts between precolonial and colonial legacies. Yet in addition to the ways in which migration and cultural contact have shaped the Southern African nation, the literary imagination can help reformulate social relations. By this I mean that literature sometimes acts as what historian Benedict Anderson calls an imagined community. Competing political imaginaries emerge in Southern African governmental documentation as well as in all manner of literature, which in this study expand upon the novel that Anderson primarily focuses upon to also include poems and plays. The Southern African literary imagination can dispute and complicate meanings for the nation, notably in terms of the ways in which a national imagination relies upon questions of access to and usage of land, also known as land questions. As Southern African literature helps to reimagine the nation in terms of land questions, it shapes social and cultural contests that in turn shape access, for millions of Southern Africans, to not only material security but to cultural relevance.

Looking to land questions, questions of land usage and ownership, we might reformulate debates within postcolonial studies over the validity of “nation.” Many postcolonialists have rightfully been weary of “nation” because of the ways in which nationalist discourse handles difference. As one influential example, Gayatri Spivak’s 2

“Can the Subaltern Speak?” poses the problem of Indian nationalist discourse that translates the suicide of a woman. In deploying the woman’s suicide in the service of national discourse building, Spivak argues, the state appropriates cultural difference, doing epistemic violence to it. The problem of the state’s speaking for subaltern political subjects relates, adds weight to what other postcolonialists have interpreted as the trend of post-independence nations towards ultra-nationalism, neo-paternalism, and neo- colonialism. However much the postcolonial state uses or ignores cultural difference in the naturalization of its rule, conflicts of governance do exist and do echo through the literature of a nation. The representational strategies of Southern African literature raise epistemic conflicts over “land” and “nation” as well as the relationship between the two.

That such conflicts mirror and enable reconsideration of philosophical divides within national governance allows us to reevaluate postcolonial critic Neil Lazarus’s defense of a critical nationalism. Bolstering a growing number of postcolonialists who do so1,

Lazarus argues the potential in the nationalist writings of Franz Fanon and Amilcar

Cabral for something quite responsive to cultural difference despite the potential for violence, epistemic and physical. Such potential props Lazarus’s advocacy for an

“African nationalism” and ultimately a more generalized form of nationalism that can be critical of itself and engaged in dialectical relationships between national leadership and diverse groups of people (84). In addition to the connections that Lazarus uses Fanon and

Cabral to build between what historians study as modernizing and traditionalist factions within postcolonial states2, literary land questions in Southern Africa also promote dialectical connections between ethnic imaginaries, national and transnational political frameworks, and ongoing social movements. Through often geographically complex 3 schema that map to layers of national identity, literary land questions engage and reformulate local and global notions of political practice.

This study intervenes, from a postcolonial-ecocritical perspective, into the undertheorized potential of literary land questions to shape the “nation” as an environmentally significant entity. Postcolonial-ecocritic Rob Nixon influenced the scope of the field by rewiring tensions and overlaps between postcolonial and ecocritical studies. One of Nixon’s central arguments, which draws upon historian Dipesh

Chakrabarty’s strategies of provincializing history in order to work against Euro-centric tendencies towards the universal, is that ecocriticism has the potential to treat environments in universal, ahistorical terms, which work against the historical contextualizing in which postcolonialism is so invested (236). Because place-based thinking can create powerful environmental advocacy but risks awareness of political responsibilities beyond an immediate region (239), and political frameworks of transnationalism can attend the forces of Diaspora and shared postcoloniality but risk abstracting away unique experiences of places and environments (236), Nixon advocates an intersection of the two modes of thinking that produces what he calls a “transnational ethics of place” (245). Relative to Nixon’s mapping, postcolonial-ecocritical studies define ethical concern for the environment and for environmental communities by attending unique interactions between universalizing and “provincializing” dynamics.

Sharing Nixon’s investments, this study argues that the literary imagination of land questions can galvanize widespread concern for natural environments by encouraging the reevaluation of relationships to land at multiple levels of interaction, from the government, to the local community, to the nation, to the region, and finally more 4 globally. Repeating patterns of struggle over land emerge in the darkly comic contrasts of magical realist landscapes or in the complexities of gendered representations for environmental belonging. Such representations harness similarities in pre-colonial and colonial histories and thus enable political reconsideration and reformulation of transnational political influences including the Bretton Woods institutions and the

Southern African Development Corporation. As reimagined by Southern African literature, land questions can drive or combat human Diaspora, urban growth, sweeping material precarity, environmental degradation, conflict over environmental resources, and more generally participate in economic shifts at all scales. Reading Southern African literary imaginations of land questions thus provincializes “the nation” as a unit of decision making and conflict resolution that interacts with larger economic and social influences while engaging specific, local language for a sense of belonging to the lands and environments of the nation. The environmental imagination of nationhood that I consistently locate in this study responds both to global and local pressures that shape the nation and promotes environmental and political sustainability over developmentalism or nativism.

Land Questions and the Scales of Postcolonial-Ecocriticism Selected literatures in Southern Africa fashion an environmental imagination of nationhood by engaging schisms between governmental and popular conceptions of land usage and ownership. Such schisms bolster, throughout the world, notions of community and nation. As sociologist Blessings Chinsinga, who uses Malawian struggles over land to think more widely about the negative impacts of market-driven, “pro-poor” land reforms, puts it: 5

The politics of land generally entail who should gain access to it, how should it be

utilised and how it should be settled. This is further manifested in the architecture

of institutions, in the disciplining of social relations, in ideas about what

constitutes development and in the definition of property rights.” (5)

Because land questions condition social architectures and relations, their literary imagination reinforces or reformulates the material foundations of the nation and of the region. As Southern African literary texts reveal and intervene into what Fredric Jameson calls the political unconscious3, historical vantage points emerge that cross national boundaries. Although the geographical re-imagination of land questions is striking throughout Southern African literature, it is perhaps exemplified by South African and

Zimbabwean writing. There formal experimentation and linguistic playfulness exceeds the racial and anti-colonial discourse that has driven land questions in those countries and has become a vehicle for the elite capture of land. As is true elsewhere in the region, the literary response to land questions—as naturalism, modernism, or magical realism— maps cultural conflict and embodies a new political consciousness.

Two divergent patterns of land questions shape the literary imagination that I study here. As agrarian studies scholar Sam Moyo points out, patterns of struggle over land ownership and usage in Africa often align along major axes: state activism that uses distributive justice principles to redistribute land or to redefine land usage for reasons that interact with and form the national political dispensation (10-11); market-driven, pro- poor initiatives that derive to a large extent from Bretton Woods institutions and appear to participate in the privatization and often transnational economic development of land and environmental-resource-driven industry (9-10); and land-based social movements 6 that often have rural bases but commonly link to urban areas in terms of shared concerns over economic and material stability (12-13). In terms of the political unconscious, the dynamic interaction and palimpsestic behavior of all three forms of Southern African land questions frames the literary imagination. While the Bretton-Woods form of land questions has unfortunately pervaded the sub-continent since the 1990s, the literary imagination of such a general pattern interacts in Zimbabwe and South Africa with the anti-colonial imagination of governmental land programs. A history of state activism that responds to massive levels of land expropriation under British colonialism drives the literary imagination of both countries. Selected South African and Zimbabwean literature contests the anti-colonial underpinnings of land redistribution programs as shallow populism and interrogates community relationships with the land and environment, creating stronger and more inclusive definitions of local and national communities.

Literature in Malawi and Lusophone Africa, however, coalesces around a different pattern of land questions than the anti-colonial one in which the state acts, in a much contested manner, as guarantor of “racial justice” by “reversing” the impacts of colonial, racialized land expropriation. Malawi, Angola, and Mozambique rather have land questions that are predominantly post-independence and developmental in nature despite connections to respective British and Portuguese colonialism. Because the state in all three cases does not act as redistributive “activist” so much as a point of control for economic transformations from the land up, the literary imagination in these three countries often appears more unequivocally engaged on the side of social activism involving popular land rights and overall material security. Such greater engagement nonetheless leads overall to a significant level of literary experimentation and 7 investigation of the “environment,” which does not combat populist appeals as does

South African and Zimbabwean literature so much as push back against very strong

“modernizing” tendencies from the national government down. Pre-colonial cultural imaginaries thus become a site from which to reimagine a nation that from the top down has threatened to obliterate such culture and has unraveled collective title on the land

(Malawi) or has done little to protect or understand such collective title and the lifeways that build from it (Angola and Mozambique).

The literary, environmental imagination of the nation, as evidenced in but not limited to Southern Africa, operates at several scales of impact but intervenes first at the level of local contests over “land” and “environment.” Given that literary texts intervene into practices of environmentalism through the process that ecocritic Lawrence Buell adapts from Jameson’s political unconscious and names environmental consciousness— the socially, culturally, and texturally mediated process that limits and enables individuals and groups in their awareness of their physical environment and their placement within it (24-27)—representations of land questions inform the continuing, national debate over “environment.” They do so by not only by broadly restructuring social relations and reconditioning notions of property but by bolstering social movements and land patterns that increase environmental stability4. Land-question- centric ecocriticism thus relates to the line of thinking that ecocritic Dan Wylie terms local ecocriticism: ecocriticism that works within dynamics of transculturation and political change that have the greatest legibility at local and national levels while not foreclosing broader legibility. In addition to the South African Truth and Reconciliation

Commission that Wylie thinks about, its ability to discipline transcultural understandings 8 of South African environments, national land questions discipline “land” and

“environment” along lines of belonging, acceptable usage, and inclusion / exclusion within decision making. Literary land questions shape national dialogues about ecological health as well as about political economy and overall material stability. More than just conditioning an understandable or transcultural “environment” that can build national unity by opening a space for dialogue amongst stakeholders on the land, literary land questions have the potential to create political and environmental stability by synchronizing practices of “community” and practices of “environmentalism.”

Land-question-centric ecocriticism works most importantly alongside local and national struggles for political redefinition. Throughout Southern Africa—in response to a general misapprehension of land questions as rural issues with decreasing relevance as

Southern Africa, like Northern Africa before it, “resolves” its agrarian questions5—the issues of translation and transculturation across rural and urban divides as well as across other cultural paradigms deepen the environmental imagination of nationhood.

Representations of “environmental communities,” which in standard Africanist practice are understood as stand ins for the nation, raise questions about language and culture at the level of vexed and contested projects of national unity. Attending such representations mobilizes land questions as a way to address shallow or dangerous populism as well as economic discourses that undermine communities. Land-question- ecocriticism can re-map the “environment” as a simultaneously shared and contested terrain that acts as a pathway to material and cultural growth for a diverse “community” including multiple ethnicities as well as the human and the non-human.

On a regional level, land-question-centric ecocriticism addresses blind spots in 9

African literary criticism concerning the location and importance of land questions.

Literary critic Melissa Myambo elucidates one such aporia, in South Africa, by considering the impacts of post-racial discourse and long frustration with the slow pace of land redistribution. Myambo suggests overall that South African literary scholars find land questions increasingly less interesting because scholars associate land questions with strictly rural problematics, which is a dynamic that has intelligibility in other Southern

African nations albeit for different reasons6. Specific to South African literary scholarship is what Myambo calls the problematic of Rainbow Nationalism: a sidestepping of land questions as increasing urbanization and governmental discourse promotes a shared belonging to South Africa without addressing land ownership and usage or other forms of material control (96-97). As redress to such an aporia, which echoes the ways in which

Malawian and Lusophone African discourse has downplayed land questions, the geographic and social re-mapping of land-question-centric ecocriticism undermines the epistemic pull of dominant discourse concerning land. Reading land questions as part of a national imaginary fosters political and material growth by revealing and valorizing the material basis of the nation. More than treating land as central to urban and rural health, land-question-centric ecocriticism promotes a shared environmentalism based upon the imagination of a national community that must adapt to and respect its environment.

In addition to expanding critical focus on the location and scope of land questions, land-question-centric ecocriticism addresses the critical minefields caused by the political over-determination of relationships between a nation and its lands. The post- independence government of Zimbabwe offers perhaps the most dramatic regional example of overdetermined land questions. Zimbabwe’s government framed a largescale 10 expropriation of land from white farmers, in the early 2000s, as the prophesized return of the Shona to their lands. Such populism effectively conflates the nation, Shona lifeways, and relationships between communities and their environments. Zimbabwean land questions thus create a critical minefield—one that is particularly pronounced from a postcolonial-ecocritical perspective7—relative to what literary scholar Kizito Muchemwa posits as the constant need to interrogate continuities and discontinuities in literary representations of “Shona” identity (201) as an alternative to the government’s

“primordial and essentialist modes of identity” (197). Throughout the region, land questions are fully or in part overdetermined by populism, potentially rendering politically inert or suspect all representations of “environmental communities.” In response, land-question-centric ecocriticism locates “environmental communities” within broader discourse. The multifactorial mapping of literary land questions protects from political capture an emergent national consciousness based upon relationships between communities and environments.

As much as the literary imagination of land questions stems from and in turn drives conversations about national identity, such re-imagination usefully revitalizes regional, “African” identities. In terms of an “African” environmental identity, postcolonial-ecocritic Byron Caminero-Santangelo addresses a generalized European colonialism that treated the various lands of Africa as “waste” and authorized developmental incursions in response, a dynamic that continues today under the guise of the Bretton Woods institutions. Reading a diverse set of texts in dialogue with such an

“African” identity, Caminero-Santangelo heeds Nixon’s injunction to balance critical scales and therefore advocates an expansive approach to “African” ecocriticism: 11

if postcolonial ecocriticism allows itself to be tied to overly specific theoretical

positions and / or conclusions flawed by the repression of geographical and social

difference, it will risk betraying its resistance to colonizing forms of

representation and its commitment to true dialogue among different narratives of

nature and culture. (15)

Following Caminero-Santangelo, scholarship must not ignore an “African” identity that shapes and filters the regional possibilities for “environmentalism.” Although constituting perhaps “overly specific theoretical positions,” land questions offer a lens through which to reconsider broader epistemic boundaries. Land questions act as ground zero for an

“African” developmental agenda. Such land questions in turn interact with and constrain other land questions, governmental and popular. As battles over “land” and

“environment” become visible in literary texts that reimagine land questions, a potential for environmental and cultural change emerges. The “true dialogue” about nature and culture that Caminero-Santangelo advocates, I argue, can be beneficially framed in terms of the debates, like those inherent in land questions, over relationships between communities and their environments. Southern African literary imagination thus resists

“colonizing forms of representation” by locating and engaging both the African and

Southern African land questions that have shaped patterns of national governance and experience in sweeping ways.

Because land questions operate in the sphere of national politics while bearing transnational import, their literary imagination opens a space to reevaluate defenses of the nation as a response to external forces. The much debated tenor of Fanon’s “African” nationalism, when connected to the evolving imagination of Southern African land 12 questions, moves beyond the potential in Fanon’s work for violence. A potentially violent aspect of Fanon’s revolutionary thinking comes through in his definition of decolonization at its outset: “decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain

‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men” (35). Similarly to Lazarus, however, I understand Fanonian decolonization as the larger process that responds to the problematic and promise of independence from a colonial power, which is a process of forging a new national consciousness despite the ways in which colonialism sought to overwrite native identity8. Lazarus valorizes Fanon’s critical focus on the native intellectual and political leader as a vehicle for self-reflective nationalism that can truly adapt to the needs of the people. I see the most potential for a critical, self-reflective nationalism in Fanon’s enduring support of collective land title as a pathway to lasting social change9 and the ways in which evolving land questions seem to vindicate Fanon’s belief10.Relative to

Fanon’s fundamentally “Marxist” view that land is the ultimate basis for social change11—resulting in decolonization or “in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up” (35)—Southern African literature participates at times in fashioning new national identities through an environmental imagination that valorizes collective land claims. The location of a land ethics in such literature relates less to a space of violent revolution or a nativist, pre-colonial imaginary than to Fanon’s notion of national culture:

“the whole body of efforts made by people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence” (233). Land ultimately carries the potential for revolutionary social transformation to the extent to which land has defined and continues to define notions of identity in the larger society. “The whole body of efforts” found in a national culture, the 13 contradictions and shared belief, when connected to evolving land questions, concerns ongoing material negotiation and redefinition more than violent, cataclysmic reversals of power.

Although the imagination of land—from the perspective of belonging, ownership, and usage—operates at national and regional scales in Africa, it also raises timely questions about the future of the planet. The global reach of land questions in terms of rising levels of conflict over environmental resources and general human precarity12 means that their literary imagination matters at the “highest” scale of ecocritical thinking.

Postcolonial-ecocriticism has responded to a call, by ecocritic Ursula Heise and historian

Dipesh Chakrabarty perhaps above others, to embrace global definitions of planetary crisis related to climate change. One of the common variants of such a postcolonial- ecocritical approach also utilizes Spivak’s notion of the planetarity, which is part of

Spivak’s larger thinking about comparative literary studies as a response to global economic and cultural integrations under Late Capitalism. Spivak argues that literary scholars must attempt to imagine themselves as part of a planet that does not belong to them while at the same time it provides a common home that “contains us as much as it flings us away” (Death np). Spivak’s challenge to imagine a shared planetary existence without ignoring our linguistic, cultural imbrication motivates a recent “global” postcolonial-ecocritical study by Elizabeth DeLoughrey. For DeLoughrey such a planetary imagination allows consideration of climate change in its myriad physical guises and in the myriad cultural conceptions of human-environmental interaction, particularly in terms of literature from islands where climate change is becoming an undeniable reality. The literary imagination of land questions also enables a syncretic 14 experience of global environmental changes. Fundamental questions about how communities should use environmental resources open in the reimagination of land usage and ownership. A shared sense of being environed, physically bound to the environment akin to Spivak’s notion of the planetary, emerges even as the cultural lenses for understanding differ and participate in local and national imaginaries. The possibility of shared environmental belonging opens, in the works that I study, at a local level in terms of land ownership and usage laws, at a regional level in terms of a shared history of survival in sub-Saharan climates, and at a global level in terms of the impact of and resistance to global forces of social change that begins on the land. In short, the literary imagination of land questions offers a space from which to evaluate and challenge fundamental models for how communities at all levels interact with and impact their environments.

Complicating Spivak’s contention that literary critics can most easily understand planetarity in relation to pre-colonial cultures (np), the Southern African literary imagination often interrogates “native” conceptions of community and of environment.

The texts that I study share a regional philosophical framework: communities must adapt themselves to a changing environment, following environmental signs to the correction of cultural dynamics, leadership problems, and community imbalances in power. A community conceived of in this way makes sense within what is commonly called

Southern African ethnophilosophy, which is a set of cultural practices and philosophical premises that operates in syncretic fashion throughout Southern Africa because of a shared history of Bantu13 migration. Whereas appeals to shared “Bantu” culture and philosophy have rationalized the policies of populist leaders and have led to “strong man” 15 governments like that of Robert Mugabe, the post-independence Southern African literary imagination has often worked to deepen, reclaim, or defamiliarize the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of such appeals. The ontological, metaphysical, and ethical interest that philosophers have paid to Southern African ethnophilosophy14 echoes in the inquiries of writers.

Perhaps most relevant to “planetarity” is the representation of interconnected,

“vibratory” matter and the associated literary inquiry into Southern African ethnophilosophy. Such “vibratory” matter forms the basis for an ethnophilosophical belief system that philosopher Fainos Mangena unpacks and connects to belief systems known as Ubuntu in South Africa, Botho in Botswana, and Hunhu in Zimbabwe: metaphysically, people are understood within the regional ethnophilosophy to be connected to all other things, living and non-living, natural and super-natural, bound within the multiple and vibrating, interacting states of reality, all of which operate as part of “nature” (211); ethically, an individual takes on value to the extent to which she stands in relation to others and heeds the radical demands of interconnection (212-213); and temporally, multiple timelines of interconnection, ancestral and natural and historical, overlap and create a vibratory, rippling dynamic (214). Literature that invokes such ethnophilosophical discourse often enters into a range of negotiations with it, sometimes valorizing the discourse not as ontological reality so much as a useful point of inquiry into “community” and environmental “belonging.” Nonetheless, the presence of a strong theory of material interconnection—one that crosses the racial, class, gender, and geographic divides that the texts that I study here also map—has implications for

“planetarity.” The inseparability of bodies from their environment, the lack of firm 16 boundaries between forms of matter, as materialist ecofeminism has explored15, poses literary questions of agency and relationships between characters and settings.

Representational strategies emerge in the studied literature for asserting a shared existence on the land and land questions that derive first and foremost from humanity’s shared embodiment and collective material imbrication.

Imagining the Land beyond the Rainbow: Literary Visions for post-Transition

South African Land Questions

My first chapter addresses the “post-transition” concerns and literary imagination of South African writers Zakes Mda and Yael Farber, particularly in terms of unresolved land questions. In the largest and most general sense, the social unrest and literary response generated by South African land questions stems from the ways in which policies of land usage and ownership have created deep and lasting social divisions. The

British colony in South Africa interacted with native populations in ways that by the end of the 19th century radically altered people’s use of land. Settlements of natives defined by British treaty and as a response to European encroachment lived in increasingly agricultural communities, gradually losing the ability to herd cattle in seasonal fashion across the land as had earlier Bantu peoples. New living patterns on the land congealed into labor patterns as the Afrikaner people grew politically ascendant in the British

Commonwealth of South Africa during much of the 20th century. Afrikaner law that held land in reserve for but prohibited individual ownership by “natives” (1913) formed the spine of the formal system of Apartheid that would begin in 1948. As a system of labor,

Apartheid or “separateness” in Afrikaans, relied upon the spatial divisions and land insecurities that had begun with British rule and that had become the impetus for many 17 native South Africans to seek work on white-owned farms, in the mines, or in the cities.

In response to the social engineering of Apartheid and its legacy political systems, native and “colored” South African writers worked in various Bantu languages16 and progressively in English. A clear “Protest Literature,”17 pitted against Apartheid, morphed, however, even in the decade prior to the impossibly fast transition to independence. Starting at the moment of political independence in 1994, an African

National Congress that promised massive land redistribution and social reforms to reverse the social and cultural impacts of Apartheid transitioned to one that encouraged transnational, market-driven development as a form of economic justice18. In relation to political transitions such as these, South African literature has turned to what Njabulo S.

Ndebele calls a “rediscovery of the ordinary,” a movement away from the all-consuming political gravity of apartheid and towards detailed observations of daily social relations that offer “methods for [Apartheid’s] redemptive transformation” (154). Land and relationships with it thus becomes—in the work of Farber, Mda, and other post-transition writers—an invitation to transform social relationships. While the work of both Mda and

Farber reveals a lack of justice tied to South Africa’s Apartheid history, it surpasses mere protest by complicating and reformulating racial and economic imaginaries that have participated in social segregation and immiseration.

In South Africa’s “post-transition” moment, two different camps of land questions appear most readily and widely, each creating tension with the other. The 19th century and earlier land expropriations under British and Afrikaner colonialism create the most far reaching land questions. In addition to various levels of expropriation, British colonial rule through indirect or customary authority defined and limited collective land title in 18 large areas, over-determining the political autonomy and cultural independence of many people groups “on the land.” Complicating customary authority’s simultaneous protection and undermining of land claims19, the Southern African Mfecane radiated from what is now South Africa, redistributing people groups throughout the 19th century and redefining patterns of land usage as well as claims to the land. Radical changes in land discourse and in environmental belonging make 19th century and earlier land questions both foundational for any notion of land justice as well as a source of complication!

Modern South African land officials have claimed that a lack of documentation surrounding land title and people movements from this time make a more sweeping platform for distributive justice on the land difficult. However, the social reorientation caused during this epoch of land transformation casts shadows over more limited notions of justice and seems to be leading within the current ANC government closer to widespread land expropriation from white farmers and businesses. Such a larger scope of justice carries the biggest promise for reinventions of economic and cultural models for land use and belonging but also brings international critiques of violations of rules of law and the potential for social upheaval20. In contrast to the “long view,” the social engineering of pre-Apartheid and Apartheid governments during much of the 20th century created the constraints that operate around the official program of land redistribution that has slowly and for many ineffectively responded to popular cries for justice. The shallowness of the official land question stems in part from the historical limits of its reach: it focuses primarily upon documented “forced relocations” of African communities to urban and peri-urban townships as well as upon later “black spot removals,” which removed smaller groups of people from farming areas that had already become heavily 19 populated by whites. From another perspective, however, the limited and documentation- heavy process of land redistribution that the ANC has used results from the compradorism of the ANC’s transition into power. As Patrick Bond has meticulously documented, the handover of power from the Afrikaner nationalist party to the ANC involved a number of compromises with Bretton Woods institutions. The scope of

“justice” and the pace of delivery became from transition onward the subject of much debate and social outrage. Many scholars critique the official land question as being inadequate for the transformation of economic and environmental inequalities created over the last two centuries. Overall tensions between land questions leave unresolved the possibilities for justice and for social cohesion throughout the larger nation, culminating in a steady history, since the 1994 political transition, of social protest.

Exposing and responding to tensions within South African land questions, the texts that I read in my first chapter enable the re-imagination of land questions as a path to a stronger national identity, one that relies upon a shared environment. Both Farber’s

2012 play Mies Julie and Mda’s 2005 novel The Whale Caller deploy naturalism in their approaches to environments and to the communities that live in them. A naturalist sense of biological and social determinism works in both pieces of literature to convey a totality of environmental experience that is simultaneously socially inscribed, particularly in terms of land ownership and more generally in terms of material stability. Farber’s Mies

Julie relocates the naturalism and class critique of Strindberg’s Miss Julie to an Afrikaner farm house, posing but not resolving tensions over histories of sexual and racial prohibition, ancestral amaXhosa and Afrikaner memories of the same space, and the promised but failed return of land to black hands. Such intersecting narratives mirror the 20 complex and ultimately naturalist drama of Mda’s novel. The divergent subject positions of the whale caller and the woman who becomes his girlfriend, Saluni, evoke the twinning movements for environmental and economic justice that still define much black

South African activism. The inability but also clear necessity of integrating these movements structures the main characters’ narratives as they diverge and intersect. As land and environment become the limit of social change in both literary narratives, postcolonial naturalist critique emerges in linguistically, culturally complex tropes.

Naturalist violence erupts in both texts because of the ways in which cultural tensions remain unresolved but clearly framed by South African land questions. The environmental impact of unresolved land questions adds to the violence in both works, an impact that proves inseparable from social engineering under colonialism and after independence. As character development and interaction suggests but does not resolve cultural tensions over land, and the environmental consequences of such failure become clearer, both works inscribe a form of literary nationalism. A shared “planetarity,” particularly in the inseparability of community formations from their environments, transforms the ethnophilosophical frameworks (including the role of ancestors and environmental prophesy) that inform both works, creating an overall vision of the nation that provides redress to social hierarchies and related environmental degradation.

Wresting an Environmental Community from the Telos of History: Zimbabwean

Literature against Chimurenga Logic and the Inevitable Return to the Land

The writers that I study in the second chapter share a status known in Zimbabwe as “second generation,” which parallels that of South Africa’s post-transition writers.

This periodization associates writers coming to age during the war for liberation with the 21 further disintegration of tribal identities, rampant violence, family trouble, and identity confusion caused by growing up shuttling between rural and urban areas and receiving a

“modern” education while the Rhodesian government tried to create and control a distinctly “native” literary identity for black writers (Veit-Wild 157). Such confusion and disgust stems, in part, from a history of anti-colonialism that, under the first president of

Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe, would fuel shallow populism and kleptocracy. Shona and

Ndebele people resisted British incursionary forces in the 19th century as they came up from what is now South Africa. Similarly to South Africa, native resistance to colonialism proved fierce and generated a widely held ethos of rebellion21. Despite popular anti-colonialism, the level of white land expropriation in colonial Rhodesia— aided as in South Africa by racially motivated land laws22—grew rapidly. As in South

Africa, unequal land holdings drove labor practices, with many members of Shona,

Ndebele, and other native people groups working in South Africa’s mines or on the white-owned farms of Rhodesia, which had become the bread basket of the region. When the ZANU-PF and Robert Mugabe declared themselves the winners of the Rhodesian civil war in 1980, connecting their victory to 19th century Shona resistance against colonialism and to prophesies of the triumphant return of the Shona to power,

Zimbabwe’s second generation of writers began to form their voice. Whereas some earlier writers write in native languages or in often social realist fashion as part of a

“literature of commitment” against the Rhodesian government, second generation writers often demonstrate fraught relationships with native languages and cultures, routinely manifesting more modernist writing styles. The questions of identity that emerge in many second generation writings demonstrate political dissatisfaction to the extent that they 22 respond to the ways in which the Mugabe regime rewired cultural imaginaries for their own benefit. A second generation literary moment overall forms around questions of political and cultural practice on the land, in the classroom, within the family, and in the government, all of which become contradictory sites in this writing, most of which is in

English.

The second generation of Zimbabwean writers engage a land question that is both an evolving political discourse and a popular response, both of which, as in South Africa, push and pull against the orbit of a populism that has rationalized the elite capture of land. 19th century Shona and Ndebele resistance to British colonialists echoes strongly within modern Zimbabwean land questions. Post-independence leaders of the ZANU-PF party harness traditional resistance as “Chimurenga logic,” conflating Shona governance with the result of 19th century prophecies of a return of the Shona to power and to the land. Despite such rhetoric, ZANU-PF president Robert Mugabe (1980-2017) created the first Zimbabwean (as opposed to Rhodesian) land question by failing to redress the massive levels of land expropriation under colonialism. Largescale farms and other white businesses clearly dominated on the land and triggered mounting levels of land hunger.

Facing a crisis of authority by the year 2000, Mugabe reinvigorated Chimurenga logic, claiming that the time for a Shona “return to the land” had come as prophesized. The Fast

Track land resettlement program expropriated land from white owners and created the second Zimbabwean land question. As many land scholars claim, the Fast Track program radically changed land usage and tenure patterns, leading to larger cultural changes, but in ways that created new forms of social inequality and material insecurity23. People with ties to Mugabe received much of the redistributed land or captured it from subsistence 23 farmers. Agricultural and economic collapse ensued, driving widespread urbanization and precarity. To make matters worse, World-Bank-backed “pro-poor” solutions to

Zimbabwe’s economic crisis have begun to substitute one form of social hierarchy with another, undermining collective and smaller individual land claims while promoting more

“economically feasible” uses of land24. Overall, the economic immiseration of Zimbabwe coupled with its history of anti-colonialism have sent a powerful message, mirrored in current volatility over land patterns in South Africa and echoing alternatively throughout the region as evidence of the need to address colonial land expropriation or as proof of what happens when the rule of law collapses.

Whereas the haunting presence of older land questions mires and complicates some post-transition South African literature, in Zimbabwean literature daily realities often vex governmental rhetoric and promote a deeper national imagination.

Ethnophilosophical connections between communities and environments once again appear and once again in no less overdetermined or strategic a fashion from the perspective of land questions. Chengerai Hove’s 1987 novel Bones, like Farber’s Mies

Julie, genders environmental knowledge and an environmental sense of identity. The ways in which the novel’s female characters suffer for that knowledge suggests the need for more expansive and inclusive land questions. Marita, the main character, faces brutality from Mugabe nationalists, expressing the realities of Chimurenga logic and situating “Shona” governance as dictatorial and self-serving. Epistemic battles over

“environment” and “community” in the novel promote reevaluation of the social transformations that the Mugabe regime would and would not make on the land. Such transformations ultimately generate numerous literary responses, particularly Charles 24

Mungoshi’s 2003 “The Sins of the Fathers” and Shimmer Chinodya’s 2003 “Queues.”

Unlike Hove’s Bones, the more overtly modernist short stories center upon main characters who cannot align themselves with community values or environmental signs, their lack of character development and moral ambiguity operating as a condemnation of the Fast Track political paradigm. The absence of a clear pathway to a lasting, communal identity, at least for the main characters in both stories, signals the disruptions of

“community” caused by Mugabe’s populism. Tensions between “lost” main characters and those who can embrace a shared identity, one associated in both stories with material security and knowledge of traditional lifeways on the land, imply that better resolutions for land questions can create a new society. As in Bones, I argue in my second chapter that an environmental imagination stems from relationships with the land but exceeds nativist land claims or legal rights to the land. Environmental imagination rather derives from ethical connections to the land that people must live up to and can use to bridge communitarian divides. All three thus support a Zimbabwean “national culture” that builds from traditional values that paradoxically allow the most adaptation and change.

Exploring the Myths and Realities of Malawian Connections to the Land: Malawian

Writers Group Poetry against Neo-colonialism

Malawian writers in the Malawian Writers Group, some of whom I study in the third chapter, engage with post-independence political populism that is perhaps more culturally problematic than that of the Mugabe regime. The difference in populism owes to the different trajectory of British colonialism in “Nyasaland,” where the colonists formed limited settlements and expropriated land mainly near the central lakes region of modern Malawi. As a result, anti-colonial sentiment did not become as popular in the 25 imagination as it did in South Africa and Zimbabwe, and “tribal” identities remained much more intact than they did under other Southern African forms of colonial occupation. The strength of tribal and particularly Chewa culture led to a shocking post- independence moment, an independence that came about peacefully in 1964 in comparison to that of South Africa or Zimbabwe. Writers at Chancellor College in the

University of Malawi began to respond to the independence government’s mixture of pro-British and traditionalist values as well as to the government’s increasing dictatorship. These writers, unlike an earlier generation, work mainly in English due to their educations and more often urban upbringing. They deploy modernist strategies for cultural inquiry in poems that cleverly hide political critique from government censorship, asking questions about Malawi’s past and raising cultural paradoxes. In their work, Malawi is multi-cultural and reliant overall on the land, despite being a “modern” nation with many British influences. Neither purely traditional nor modern, the Malawi in much Malawian Writer’s Group writing vexes the government’s shallow populism.

The cultural paradoxes that certain writers explore relate squarely to the land questions of Malawi, which prior to independence evinced a high degree of collective land title and a preponderance of communities living under British customary authority.

Traditional cultures therefore thrived, and local agricultural and subsistence economies produced various levels of political autonomy. However, as Chinsinga points out, colonial agribusinesses did weaken and rewire rural labor practices to some extent and thus partially enable the modern Malawian land question (14). Malawi currently has a

“classic” land question despite the “atypical” pathway to it. In the classic configuration of land questions, largescale land expropriation, usually under colonialism, disrupts 26 traditional cultural lifeways and creates mounting land hunger amongst the dispossessed while often fueling the “agrarian transition” of the larger society. Both Zimbabwe and

South Africa despite the differences of execution reached state-driven political dispensations for land redistribution in such a manner. Malawi’s difference involves the nature of the cultural leadership that would fuel agrarian transitions towards more industrial economic models. “Life President” Hastings Banda (1964-1994) led Malawi into independence and almost immediately began to transform the national economy. He set up the popular land question by imagining the diverse nation as Chewa and by employing his ancestral title as “elder brother” to undermine collective land title. Banda caused cultural contradictions to replicate throughout Malawi as populist appeals to traditional social structures clashed with Banda’s dictum to create an agricultural export empire by seizing collectively held lands as “waste” and privatizing them. Banda cronies and a whole network of beneficiaries to Banda’s neo-paternalism soon created the social foundation of a “strong man” state, Banda’s authoritarianism growing from the land up!

Even now that Banda has passed and a more “democratic” multi-party government has replaced the Banda dictatorship, erosions of land title and frameworks for tracking and protecting property have created what Chinsinga considers to be a market-oriented land dispensation prone to corruption and uneven development (14). In popular terms, cultural integrity builds upon decades of rural political strength, which leads to cognitive dissonance with the bleak social outlook for the many Malawians who have been deprived of access to or title over land. Economic immiseration, as in South Africa and

Zimbabwe, justifies World Bank “pro-poor” land programs that paradoxically target for development the very “waste” land whose transformation during the agrarian transition 27 caused economic precarity.

Zimbabwean strategies of undermining Chimurenga logic find parallel in the poetry of the Malawian Writers Group (MWG), which in my third chapter also leads to an environmental re-imagination of the nation. Banda’s dictatorial leadership meant that the MWG needed to veil their political and counter-cultural attacks through what

Mukhubu studies as “obscuring devices,” appeals to classic Malawian themes and mythology that encode critique and hide it from governmental censorship. Beyond their role in shielding poets from governmental scrutiny, MWG engagements with the natural world also strengthen and test imagined communities in terms of their traditional adaptations to their environments. Discourses of environmental and political sustainability abound throughout the modernisms of Jack Mapanje’s 1993 poetry collection The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison and Steve Chimombo’s 1994 collection Napolo and the Python. In Mapanje’s work, especially his poems about his imprisonment under Banda, an imagined community participates in a larger ecology and becomes responsible for it, tied to its survival through its own struggles and adaptations.

The environmental consciousness of a “Malawian nation” thus becomes a vital component of national culture. In contrast, Chimombo’s modernist Napolo series of poems opens to the possibility of a radical political resistance waged by means of a shared environmental consciousness. However, Chimombo’s Napolo poems suggest that the Malawian people under Banda are losing touch with the environmental-cultural intersections of the past, the very ones that helped previous generations survive colonialism. Thus in both works emerge imperatives towards sustainability that could counteract the government’s developmental attitudes towards communities and 28 environments.

Magical-Realist Chimeras of the Land: Portuguese Acculturation and Land-Based

Nationalism in Postcolonial Lusophone Literature

Similar to writing of the post-transition in South Africa and of the second generation in Zimbabwe, writing at the moment of “transition” to market-driven governance in Mozambique and Angola responds to conflicts of identity and does so in experimental and overwhelmingly modernist ways. Lusophone African literature of the transition manifests an intensity of formal experimentation and interrogation into national identity because of the ways in which national history has evolved in bifurcated and contradictory ways. The power of Portuguese influence in Angola and Mozambique, as the biggest of the five Lusophone African nations, has cast a long shadow. Portuguese governance treated all of its colonies as overseas portions of Portugal and encouraged strong bonds with the mother country. Lusophone influence extended to language, education, and government but did so primarily in urban areas that served as points of control for economic activities like the slave trade (Angola) and export-driven agriculture

(Angola and Mozambique). Within urban areas, native languages and cultural affiliations weakened under the weight of Lusophone forces of acculturation. The cultural gap between the urban areas where writers of Portuguese descent or those who otherwise experienced strong Lusophone cultural influence and the rural areas where the majority of the population lives according to different cultural and social dictates—this is the strongest impetus on Lusophone African writing since Mozambique and Angola declared independence from Portugal in 1975. An earlier generation of post-independence writers relied upon more direct ties to “African” influences beyond the urban areas where they 29 wrote and responded to contradictions within the post-independence government concerning “African” versus “Portuguese” influences. A later generation responded to a widening gulf between the two political identities, one driven by chiefs and traditional institutions for land management and the other by European models of economic and social governance25. The political gulf fanned greater and greater levels of literary experimentation, which many literary scholars have called an attempt to imagine political unity against the linguistic, cultural, and political barriers that limits such writing from reaching a fully “Angolan” or “Mozambican” audience. Forming a high water mark,

Lusophone writing at the moment when the national political parties of Angola and

Mozambique openly embraced market-based governance, in the mid-1990s, and thus seemed to even further drift from the traditional social logic that made sense to so many millions, challenge but do not necessarily abandon the national imagination.

In terms of the enormous tensions between “modern” and “traditional” influences that have legibility throughout Southern Africa, Lusophone land questions mark a sharp departure in terms of the “classic” framework that has some legibility in South Africa,

Zimbabwe, and Malawi. Angola and Mozambique, like Malawi, exhibit striking proportions of “traditional” areas over “modern” settlements. Selective agricultural development in both countries and a slave trade intensified in one part of Angola created, during colonialism, an urban-rural divide that is perhaps the strongest in Southern Africa.

Portuguese settlements in Angola and Mozambique trended urban and developed an overwhelming sense of Portuguese identity despite a range of social classes including those of mixed race26. The cultural gravity of such settlements has very much framed current land questions. Intellectual relationships between the “Overseas Portuguese 30

Colonies” and Portuguese centers like Lisbon created a strong class of “modernizers,” those who followed European suit in imagining the nation in Universalist terms. The resistance parties that led fights against Portuguese forces during the colonial wars (1961-

1974) thus unsurprisingly set themselves up as ruling parties, with Marxist-Leninist visions of agrarian transition as a way of uniting rural and urban areas. Modern land questions immediately emerged with independence as Angola and then Mozambique entered into civil wars between modernizing and traditionalist factions. Disruptions to rural life caused by the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars caused a cyclical dynamic of dispossession followed by the elite capture of land, a process of capture that the modernizing governments of Mozambique and Angola facilitated. The undermining of rural lifeways and collective land title in turn bolstered tensions between modernizers and traditionalists, prolonging civil war in both countries and even further disrupting access to and title over land and other environmental resources27. Civil war violence and devastation drove new levels of urbanization. Cities in turn, with their Lusophone processes of acculturation became places of further contest for traditional relationships with land, legal frameworks failing to honor changing settlement patterns. Overlaying civil war disruptions, market-driven, pro-poor land questions have since the 1990s participated in the erosion of collective land title and traditional patterns of usage, forming overall land questions that also relate to the overdetermined and often criticized

“transition” in both countries from Marxist-Leninism to free market capitalism28

Similarly to MWG literature, some Angolan and Mozambican post-independence literature reacts to massive social restructuring on the land, manifesting in its experimental and hybrid forms a postcolonial political consciousness. The magical 31 realism of both of the novels that I read in chapter four—Pepetela’s 1995 Return of the

Water Spirit and Mia Couto’s 1996 Under the Frangipani Tree—promote re-imagination of, respectively, Angolan and Mozambican land questions. Urban-rural gaps and transformations that structure Lusophone land questions also structure violent and often absurdly funny cultural confrontations. Luanda, in the case of Pepetela’s novel, becomes the locus of a rising “environmental community,” one that has traditional and modernizing tendencies and that threatens social revolution by the end of The Return of the Water Spirit. Less overtly Marxist in its re-imagination of land questions as the path to national reinvention, the more post-modernist-leaning Under the Frangipani promotes a national imagination tied to shared environmental-community intersections, intersections that generate linguistic playfulness and a sense of cultural fluidity. The position of both writers within the modernizing parties of their respective countries further frames the novels as modes of imminent critique. In relation to their shared

Portuguese ethnicity and educational background, as well as their shared governmental service, their novels operate within a broader framework for transculturation that Russel

Hamilton calls self-reflexive and conscious of the problems of translation, of Lusophone appropriations of an “African” imaginary (321-323). Ultimately, an environmental imagination of nationhood, as both novels suggest, can build off of and harmonize

African and European conceptions. As both novels manifest the chaos and continued consequences of battles over land, a shared material platform for national belonging opens.

32

Chapter One

Imagining the Land beyond the Rainbow: Literary Visions for post-Transition South

African Land Questions

South African literary responses to land questions stand out within the region due to both the formal inventiveness of South African writing and the political paradoxes that surround South African land questions. Writing of the post-transition (1994’s movement of the ANC to market-driven governance) moment build upon the “literature of commitment” and social realism that emerged during Apartheid. In terms of the transition that Ndebele observes in South African literature, from overt political commitment to a concern with daily life and everyday methods for social transformation, post-transition literature becomes more formally complex overall by continuing to imagine needed social transformations but to do so in ways, overall, that are more self-reflexive and experimental. The works of Zakes Mda and Yael Farber stand out with regard to their formal, inventive reinvigoration of old social battles, especially those concerning land ownership and access. Because issues of land access and ownership (land questions) structured much of the political and social system that was Apartheid, the literary imagination of land questions contends with deep philosophical legacies that on one hand concern racial identity and on the other concern belonging and property. Works by Mda and Farber create an environmental imagination of the nation not by merely observing the uneven development and broken political promises of the post-transition era; both works perform a compelling and necessary epistemological examination of “land” and

“belonging.” The naturalist frameworks for Farber’s 2012 play Mies Julie and Mda’s

2006 novel The Whale Caller engage a national post-transition government that has 33 addressed the nation’s land questions in incomplete, ultimately unsatisfactory ways.

Epistemological rupture thus allows both works to escape the bonds of populism and anti-colonial rhetoric that make the South African land question exceptional.

As part of the political paradox into which South African literary land questions intervene, differing scales of “environmentalism” become visible in South Africa and reveal tensions between global and local dynamics that in turn shape the postcolonial nation. Demonstrating a unique blend of political influences that are common to Southern

Africa, the originally Marxist-Leninist and redistributive-justice platform of the African

National Congress (ANC) created powerful contradictions that still haunt the party.

Thabo Mbeki as deputy president under Nelson Mandela encoded, in much of the first post-independence constitution and in the accompanying “I am an African” speech of

1996, an environmental vision based upon “traditional” relationships between South

Africans and land. However, transnational economic pressure during the 1994 transition to ANC rule had already set the party on what many historians describe as a sweeping neoliberal trajectory, by which I mean a pathway of market-driven governance with strong transnational influence. As just one example of the transnational, economic governance that now influences “environmentalism” in South Africa, ANC promises for free water as redress to rampant environmental degradation in the former Bantustans and widespread political unrest had, by 1999, triggered a global-market-mediated attack.

Other pre-transition environmental problems that post-transition politics exasperated included “erosion, desertification, and degradation of wetlands” in rural areas and racially-unjust development and exposure to toxicity in urban areas (Bond 41). Situating

South African environmental crises within the contradictory transition to ANC power, 34 political economist Patrick Bond claims that by the late 1990s “neoliberal hostility to government subsidies was a general phenomenon within the post-apartheid state” (29).

Environmental crises mounted in post-transition South Africa because the ANC deployed a market-driven land reform program that Bond deems “severely limited” and structurally unable to meet the World-Bank-approved redistribution goal of just “30% land redistribution during 1994-1999” (40). The neoliberal redistribution plan trends towards selective, individual resettlements of land and virtually ignores collective land title.

Larger individual landholders such as commercial farmers exploit the neoliberal plan to capture the holdings of smaller landholders such as subsistence farmers.

With the neoliberal program for land redistribution revisited and reopened in 2014 as a response to widespread political discontent, the South African land question stands out within the region in terms of its unresolved environmental and social ramifications.

Recently, the ANC has opened new possibilities for the official land question largely in response to the rise of the socialist-leaning Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the forced transfer of the presidency in 2018 from Jacob Zuma to Cyril Ramaphosa. Such possibilities for positive change stem from what sociologist Ruth Hall, in a recent interview, views as an emerging dialogue about land reform and “how our cities and rural areas can look different” (Interview). Despite the ANC’s current analytic connections between urban and rural land problems and national housing crises, income disparities, and food security (Interview), sweeping legal changes have not yet happened. The balancing act between the ANC’s navigation of a crisis of authority and the ANC’s promised delivery of social justice remains indeterminate as of 2020.

Responding to the contradictions of environmental experience in postcolonial 35

South Africa and situating land questions within a regional framework of environmental

“community,” post-independence South African literature re-imagines land-based citizenship. Literary South African imagined communities hearken to Mbeki’s promises but better synthesize apparent gaps between rural and urban spaces, male and female political agency, and South Africa’s new racial imaginary and its racial realities. Farber’s

Mies Julie and Mda’s The Whale Caller, more than other texts, reframe, in naturalist fashion, local environmental communities as response to global environmental dynamics.

Both texts vex what Myambo uses novels by Zakes Mda and Jonathan Morgan to trace as the critical aporia of land questions in South African literary scholarship. The problem for

Myambo is a limited scope of critical focus on land questions despite the fact that “the struggle over land is at the very core of southern Africa’s fraught racial history” (96) and that issues of land redistribution have at multiple times in post-independence South

Africa threatened to rip the country apart (96). Myambo explains the contradiction as the result of collective frustration with the official land question and a population shift from rural to urban. Related to the urban shift that marks the region and belies Southern

African land questions29, Rainbow Nationalism promotes post-racialism and promises shared belonging to the land of South Africa, doing so in a way that Myambo argues obscures and undermines pathways to land and property ownership for most citizens (96-

97). In contrast to the empty promises of rainbow nationalism, Farber’s setting of Mies

Julie on a rural farm and the play’s larger naturalism reassert the need for land reform as the basis for future racial and national harmony. The act of miscegenation that drives

Farber’s plot forms a central taboo by which the play explores causes of racial division in twenty-first century South African communities. Mies Julie ultimately suggests that land 36 reform can (and must) drive a shared national identity but must first reconcile communitarian claims to the land in order to escape the quagmire of the official land question. Whereas in Farber’s play the protagonists square off over gendered and racialized land ownership, two black African characters in The Whale Caller, Saluni and the whale caller, bring into contrast pre-colonial and more developmental conceptions of land. When The Whale Caller finally builds to naturalist excess and explodes tensions between the Marxist-leaning Saluni and her traditionalist boyfriend the whale caller, the brief and rocky relationship echoes unresolved tensions within national ANC governance.

In class terms, the novel’s backdrop of so-called “Black Empowerment” programs that clearly advantage those connected to the ANC but few others indicts the government’s limited social vision. In cultural terms, pre-colonial environmental practices fail to stem environmental degradation coming from neoliberal patterns of governance, including the death of a right whale Sharisha (Mda 224). It is within such seeming impasses between ideologies that the land question as a focal point for justice emerges. The Whale Caller, like Mies Julie, ultimately undermines rainbow nationalism, this time through an ever- present attention to land and other material inequalities in dialogue with a radical vision of ethnic and species diversity within a shared environment.

Merging Pursuits of Justice in Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller

Whereas the biological legacies of miscegenation and inheritance structure the naturalism of Farber’s play, racial and species divisions animate the naturalism of Mda’s novel The Whale Caller. Similarly to Mies Julie, The Whale Caller maps social tensions, which similarly erupt in spectacular violence, in geographical fashion. Entrenched differences between two neighboring towns belie the racialized nature of uneven 37 development in the Western Cape as described by one of the novel’s central characters:

While the town of Hermanus is raking in fortunes from tourism, the mothers and

fathers of Zwhelile are unemployed. It is a world where people have lost all faith

in politicians. Once, they had dreams, but they have seen politicians and trade

union leaders become overnight millionaires instead. Only tiny crumbles trickle

down to what used to be called the “masses” in the heyday of the revolution (86).

Striking differences between the two towns stem from the racial segregation of Apartheid and become entrenched in the post-1994 era of market-driven or “trickle down” justice that the passage evokes. In the sense that new geographic and class divisions build off of the racial legacy of Apartheid, the novel’s additional divisions along species lines radiate naturalist excess and court epistemic rupture. Sexual, class, and species lines intersect in a love triangle that crosses both Hermanus and Zwhelile. The eponymous whale caller

(associated with Hermanus) falls for the speaker of the quoted passage, Saluni (associated with Zwhelile), a woman who identifies with the disempowered black African masses of a new South Africa. The novel layers their relationship with meaning: it is a fraught meeting of class-based concerns with the environmental sensibilities of the whale caller, who can communicate with whales and who also loves a right whale, Sharisha; even more significant, the whale caller and Sharisha’s transgression of species boundaries is a sexualized challenge to the racial logic that still clearly inscribes post-Apartheid South

African experience. The intersecting relationships and geographic planes of the novel— human and non-human, rich and poor, predominantly white and predominantly black, land and ocean—ultimately defamiliarize entrenched social patterns while throwing into paradox a plot that reaches a violent denouement and leaves Sharisha and Saluni dead. 38

Through its separation of narrative and descriptive moments, the naturalism of

The Whale Caller ultimately reformulates national consciousness. Postcolonial scholarship generally accepts the idea that literary naturalism can productively approximate popular political consciousness. Rejecting the critique of naturalism leveled by Gyorgy Lukacs that naturalism is incapable of capturing the movement of history

(unlike social realism) because of its use of static and disjointed description at the

“expense” of narration and narrative progress, some postcolonialists explore the formal structures of naturalist texts as a political intervention into the historical dynamics of postcoloniality. Relative to the time period that I study here, postcolonialist Eric Smith provides one instructive model30. Smith triangulates a historical approach off of the work of Lazarus and Homi Bhabha to argue in his study of VS Naipaul’s Guerrillas that the increasingly widespread post-1990s reality of market-driven governance structures the naturalism of much postcolonial literature. It is at such a time that postcolonial naturalism intervenes, for Smith, into a political moment in which political revolution seems unfeasible, as Smith explores relative to the protagonist in Guerrillas. Riotously descriptive elements or ekphrasis cleaves from the dominant political narrative of the time (Smith 382-383) to suspend in the literary form itself (385) an unadulterated political consciousness trapped in the midst of global cultural and social integration (391-

392). In contrast to the idea that the postcolonial naturalist novel captures an arrested and momentarily powerless political consciousness, influential Africanist Simon Gikandi argues that the striking formal contradictions of post-independence African literature can define community and nation against the forces of transnational economic and cultural integration (“globalization”) and more purely economic control from the former colony 39

(“neo-colonialism”). While Gikandi does not think specifically about naturalism, he argues that a range of African writings using European languages and literary forms navigates the potential essentializing, fixing of their “African” subjects to ultimately pose and resolve unique dialectics between local and global dynamics (15-16), which is to say express a national consciousness. Extrapolating from Gigandi’s argument about African texts in European languages and using European forms, I argue that South African naturalist texts like The Whale Caller express a national consciousness that reformulates popular social relations, particularly in terms of land and environmental usage and ownership. In The Whale Caller, the split between more static descriptions of places and people and a dynamic narrative expresses a political consciousness that stands in contrast to the forces of globalization and neo-colonialism. Ekphrasis cleaves from dominant narratives as it does in Guerillas, not working to define the limits of political resistance in the post-Bandung era but in this case to define a persistent “environmental community” in tension with the developmental narrative that fuels tourism in Hermanus and ignores the town of Zwhelile. The novel’s stylistically inventive mapping of an environmental community ultimately suggests broad material foundations for political consciousness that escape the forces of geo-political capture that Smith relies upon for his argument.

Naturalism in The Whale Caller rather reveals and intervenes into an enduring and ultimately inextinguishable ability for communities to build themselves from their environments. Despite the intelligibility of such community dynamics within pre-colonial

South African history, the complexities of The Whale Caller’s literary form defy a nativist essentialism, framing political possibilities without reinforcing a strictly

“African” moral character. 40

The Whale Caller formulates a national consciousness at the intersections of historical legacies of people “on the land” as evoked by the descriptive elements of the novel and the need for socio-economic progress as evoked by the novel’s narrative. In relation to the novel’s narration of the Cape’s uneven experience of transnational development as well as to Smith’s definition, The Whale Caller’s naturalism emerges:

Literary naturalism, as we have already observed, may then be recognized as the

earliest moment in a process of ekphrastic autonomization, in which scene pulls

itself free from narrative continuity and expresses from within the progressive

chronologies of realism itself the entropic anxieties of an arrested present now felt

as such. (385)

Although temporal continuities that are important within social realism as it promotes the progress of a particular group do mark as distinct and thus as legible the postcolonial consciousness that arises in naturalist works (391-392)—within The Whale Caller as in

Guerrillas—those temporal intersections center in Mda’s novel around a pluralist rather than an “arrested” notion of the present. Naturalism in The Whale Caller arises because of tensions between socio-economic logics that are most legible in South Africa in the form of popular and governmental land questions as is true elsewhere in Southern Africa.

The development of the whale caller’s character makes visible an enduring popular claim to environment and environmental resources. The whale caller’s somewhat tawdry and materially insecure existence still relies upon and promotes access to the ocean environment, to which he comes on most days with his kelp horn, enjoying his commune with the whales but also making a living by calling whales into the view of international tourists. A suggestion that traditional and modern notions of South African identity must 41 merge, a suggestion that Mda has made before31, thus coalesces around the narrative arc of the whale caller even as the whale caller’s imagination constitutes ekphrasis:

He can see even deeper in the mists, before there were boats and fishermen and

whalers, the Khoikhoi of old dancing around a beached whale. Dancing their

thanks to Tsiqua, He Who Tells His Stories in Heaven, for the bountiful food he

occasionally provides his children by allowing whales to strand themselves. But

when there are mass strandings the dance freezes and the laughter in the eyes of

the dancers melts into tears that leave stains on the white sands. (Mda 4)

The mysteries of the ocean environment, ranging from the boon of a sole stranded whale to a rash of whale deaths, inscribe a “nation” founded upon an environmental commons and maintained by an environmental ethics. Such a “nation,” although certainly risking the essentialization that Gikandi finds in much post-independence African literature, takes on significance in light of the extractive forces of colonialism as evoked by whaling boats as well as the neo-colonial tourism that has replaced whaling in the area. Mda’s novel does not ultimately remove the nation from global economic concerns so much as cast it as globalization’s socio-cultural Other.

Because the novel’s narrative of the post-independence Cape cannot easily resolve the novel’s ekphrastic, static portraits of socio-cultural difference, Mda’s novel simultaneously complicates and promotes the merger of disparate forms of social activism through the shared gravity of land questions. An apparent distance opens between Saluni’s ekphrasitc imagination of a town cut off from the flow of capital, and far removed from the promises of a once communist government, and the whale caller’s imagination of a former Khoikhoi community. When South African literary scholarship 42 has approached the difference between the main characters and their overarching concerns, it has formed a range of interpretations. Whereas Wendy Woodward uses the difference to propose a shared culpability for environmental degradation, Harry Sewlall poses the slipperiness of “the human.” Concerned most directly with social activism,

Jonathan Steinzwand focuses on the whale caller’s “aestheticism and self-mortification,” which he compares to Saluni’s “self-indulgent ‘worldliness.’” Steinzwand uses the opposition to valorize survivance strategies, ways in which indigenous characters or characters linked to the indigenous, like the whale caller with the Khoi Khoi, adapt and preserve their cultural and social imperatives in the face of a hostile modernity. As much as the whale caller’s attitude towards the environment at large offers resistance to the forces of whaling, tourism, and other modern environmental degradations, the shared ekphrasis through which Mda’s novel embodies the concerns of both the whale caller and

Saluni promotes a philosophical merger. Shared ekphrasis suggests that the nation’s communist past and the environmental community of the pre-colonial Khoikhoi meet in opposition to the narrative’s representation of modern South Africa’s uneven development. Despite Saluni and the whale caller’s different approaches to the self, as

Steinzwand observes, the spatial imaginations of both characters in turn fuel and become intelligible through modern South African questions of access to and control over the sources of material stability. False divides in the conception of land questions over rural and urban, agricultural and industrial divides break down in the jointure of the novel’s ekphrastic moments. Spatial mapping between Zwhelile and the beach of the Khoikhoi reveals a shared imagination of self-determining communities, one through environmental commoning and the other through class activism. 43

Ultimately, The Whale Caller—through the tensions between ekphrastic moments that reveal robust bases for national community and a narrative that represents various levels of social immiseration—ruptures the dominant concept for the nation. With the social gaps between Hermanus and Zwhelile, the narrative evokes South Africa’s former institutionalization of racial division, which, much like the customary authority that preceded Apartheid, paradoxically preserved and undermined cultural identities on the land. Such problems of identity have in turn led to the dominant political narrative of

Rainbow Nationalism. As Rainbow Nationalism counters what historian Gary Baines situates as the violent potential of social upheaval from white nationalism and

“Africanism” following the transition in 1994 to ANC rule, Rainbow Nationalism’s language of multi-cultural nationalism relies upon a shared belonging to the land of South

Africa without fanning the flames of nativist claims to that land. A decade of

“rainbowism,” circulated through the media and spread in political discourse and created what Baines studies overall as both a form of multi-culturalism that does not dissolve difference so much as encourage transculturation and as a compromise between collectivist and individual conceptions of citizenship. Whereas Baines finds in rainbowism a necessary intervention into an extremely volatile political conflict, The

Whale Caller represents citizenship based upon multiculturalism as shallow and unreliable, revealing more of a national delusion than an identity. The whale caller observes fellow residents of Hermanus just prior to a first meaningful encounter with

Saluni. The residents wear all the colors of the rainbow in their hair, celebrating the removal of the past’s racial hierarchies yet signifying something quite different for the whale caller: “Only their eyes portray the big lie. In these eyes you can see a people 44 living in a daze. Rainbow people walking in a precarious dream that may explode into a nightmare without much warning” (Mda 18). In the distance between the whale caller’s observations of a celebratory, national mood that ignores material instability and ekphrastic descriptions of earlier communities, Mda’s novel undermines Rainbow

Nationalism.

Despite the potential of the ekphrastic moments to reinvigorate “the nation,”

“rainbowism” limits Saluni and the whale caller’s relationship before it starts. The naturalist tensions between ekphrasis and narrative thus undergird the importance of resolving land questions and creating real material and political stability for communities.

Saluni’s constant poverty and the whale caller’s bare living in a Wendy house, a small and temporary dwelling, belie Rainbow Nationalism’s contradictions between belongings and belonging as Myambo puts it. Even as the relationship between Saluni and the whale caller is about to begin, the novel suggests, the realities of social isolation trump the promises of a shared nation. Although the whale caller and Saluni relate to each other through awareness of the material realities of post-transition South Africa, their isolation as individuals—both are misfit, closet activists, somewhat alienated by their powerlessness32—limits their relationship. Thus, in the limits of the romantic relationship between Saluni and the whale caller resonate the lack of collective material control and political decision making that the whale caller observes in the eyes of the rainbow revelers. The nightmare that potentially awaits is not only one of material precarity but one of social disintegration.

Paradoxically, through the failure of the novel’s chief romantic relationship, The

Whale Caller encourages a merger between notions of environmental and economic 45 justice. In terms of naturalism’s mercurial jointures of competing formal and social dynamics, the divisive tensions between Saluni and the whale caller work as forces of attraction, leading to a brief, sexual relationship that quickly devolves. There is the whale caller’s dancing by the ocean in the early morning to commune with the ocean and its inhabitants. Saluni ignores her deep suspicion of the whale caller’s relationship with the whales, which she derogatively calls fish (69), hoping for a change: “She hopes that their discovery of something that they can do together will make him appreciate her more, and will bind them together, until she becomes indispensable” (68). Although Saluni starts to enjoy the dancing (67-68), the novel structures the strength of Saluni’s hatred of whales in an ekphrastic moment in which Saluni imagines a past Hermanus, a whaling town in which the whale Sharisha could never become an object of love because “[Sharisha’s] baleen would have been part of [Saluni’s] corset and umbrella” and also part of “the chair-seats in [Saluni’s] beautiful seaside cottage” (75). The novel similarly structures the whale caller’s attraction to Saluni as an uneasy crossing of philosophical boundaries.

When Saluni demands that the whale caller go “window shopping” with her, looking at food that they cannot afford and that vastly exceeds the macaroni and cheese that they eat every day (71), the whale caller is pushed beyond the austerity that Steinzwand associates with the character. The fact that the whale caller can embrace a greater “appetite” for material goods—and that Saluni can “frolic in nature”—suggests a meeting of the material philosophies that undergird the two characters. Their courtship through dancing and window shopping expresses the material jointure of environmental and economic philosophies. Both philosophies rely upon environmental resources, which each character approaches in a new way during the course of the evolving relationship. A steady supply 46 of nourishing food and a healthy ocean environment both resonate with the material stability and possibility that the novel establishes in the main characters’ ekphrastic memories. Although the relationship fails and ends in Sharisha’s violent death after a beaching (224) and Saluni’s stoning by two children that she watches (228), those deaths function in a ritual fashion, similarly to violent acts in other naturalist literature

(including Mies Julie), to reassert social norms. There is a helplessness and inevitability in those deaths, which, in the negative, valorizes the potential for something more than rainbowism, more than empty promises of belonging.

Overall, both “rainbowism” and the anti-discriminatory and anti-colonial language of the original ANC Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) become the foil for Mda’s novel and enable new meanings for “justice.” Governmental language in the post-independence (1994) South African land question has equated “justice” with the reversal of “black spot removals” and forced relocations in former “Bantustans.” Yet in The Whale Caller, the wealth gaps between Hermanus and a nearby village highlight the failure of “reversals” in the area. The presence of “Black Economic Empowerment” discourse in the novel further specifies the nature of “justice” in the Cape and the extent to which it relies upon populist appeals to a postcolonial identity and decolonizing logic.

Mda’s novel thus ultimately reimagines what philosopher Samuel Fleischacker defines as modern “justice,” a range of schemes for the state’s distribution of social “goods.” The neoliberal thresholds of South Africa’s perhaps questionable commitment to thirty percent redistribution of land33 relate to the right-leaning version of modern “justice” that

Fleischacker describes in general, non-African contexts. “Justice” in that case becomes overly reliant on the inalienable right to private property (Fleischacker 119-121) and on 47 philosophical assumptions that undermine the Marxist and Utilitarian underpinnings of distributive justice. Rather than conceive of society as “a scheme of cooperation,” right- leaning “justice” conceives of society as “an unplanned, less than fully voluntary coming together of different individuals” (120). In South Africa, the neoliberal Growth

Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) program that replaced the RDP protected existing economic interests while not impeding the “liberty” of other, often transnational property holders to expand in South Africa. The result of such right-leaning “justice” has been elite capture of a number of those lands that the government has redistributed and a more general lack of economic redistribution despite neoliberal claims of a “trickle down” effect. The narrative elements of The Whale Caller decry the economic immiseration caused by post-transition economic schemes. On the other hand, through the promise of a relationship between and Saluni—and in their ekphrastic descriptions of potential communities—The Whale Caller imagines communal claims to land as a fundamental shift from the property-centric land question that exists at the governmental level. Such a shift tests Fleischacker’s thoughts about Marxist “justice” as a concept that avoids redistribution by obviating it through reformed production processes, which will harness collective decision making at every stage (97-98). The Whale Caller imagines the environment as the source of all human culture as well as that which reveals changes in culture. As the novel advocates a marriage between environmental and economic management based upon an ethnophilosophical assumption that culture and nature work inextricably, Mda’s novel pushes “justice” from something that happens only during economic distribution towards a dynamic that builds upon myriad cultural-natural intersections across the mode of production. 48

Farber’s Gendered Environmental Imagination

Farber’s play similarly expresses an environmental imagination of nationhood.

The “environmental community” that emerges in Farber’s Mies Julie, like the one in The

Whale Caller, emerges through naturalist ekphrasis locked in productive tension with a narrative of postcolonial strife, this time in terms of the racial realities of farm life despite the promises of rainbowism. From the moment that it sets the play in its initial stage directions, Mies Julie reworks the class tensions of August Strindberg’s 1888 naturalist masterpiece Miss Julie for legibility within a post-transition South Africa:

The kitchen is defined simply by an oxblood coloured floor, which sits like an

island in the centre of the endless plains of the Karoo’s bleak beauty. Downstage

right, the floor’s stone tiles are ruptured by a truncated tree stump and its

surrounding roots—which protrude and have spread along the floor. There is: a

kitchen table and chairs; a stove on which a pot smolders with steam; a small

bench that John sits on to polish boots; a larger bench lined with rubber gumboots

and rough farming implements (sickle, panga, machete, pitchfork, spade, sheering

scissors). A birdcage hangs upstage right, just outside of the defined kitchen area.

Its shape should resemble a small house. A large pair of lace up boots stands

alone. Their power is obvious. (Mies Julie 10)

The rural location of the farmhouse, the Afrikaner-owned Veenen Plaas or The Weeping

Farm, evokes a long line of Afrikaner farm literature (including “plaasroman” or novels of farm life). A central question of this literature, that of the Afrikaner’s relationship to the land, appears in the first sentence as the stage directions cast the kitchen as an island in the vast Karoo veld. The “obvious” power of the farmer’s boots stems in large part 49 from the “island” setting. Within the kitchen, the boots stand supreme but appear surrounded by contenders for dominance. Akin to the ways in which plaasroman novels of the post-transition era, most notably Coetzee’s Disgrace, reevaluate the position of the white farmer, Mies Julie over-determines and destabilizes the representation of the never- seen farmer and master of the house. From a labor standpoint, Farber’s adaptation takes

Strindberg’s naturalist tensions between classes and reworks them for post-Apartheid

South Africa, as other scholars have noted34. John and his mother become important parts of the kitchen and the greater farm through the respective representations of the polishing bench and the boiling pot.

Farber adapts Strindberg’s master-servant dialectic so that instead of being primarily class based it runs precariously and violently between the farm land and the farmer as well as between the white farm owner and the black farm worker. Given the representation, from the very beginning, of a black labor force that has historically been coerced through limited access to land, post-transition land questions, with their ethnic and anti-colonial underpinnings35, compel the play’s action into being. The panga and other farming implements that ring the boots evoke an even larger Southern African history of revolts and the violent overthrow of white-owned farms. Although the boots stand “alone” and suggest that the farmer’s dominance holds for the moment, John and his mother’s labor still vouchsafed and submitted for the master’s pleasure, the tree that pierces the floor suggests the precarity of white farm life. The karoo surrounds the house and pierces the floor, suggesting, as other Afrikaner farm literature has done, that the hold of the white farmer on the land is tenuous. As hard as it appears to be for the white farmer to keep the “wilds” down and to subdue the land, post-transition land questions, 50 the very question of who owns land, rise along with the tree. Land ownership and the nature of that land tangle within the question of labor and dominance on the farm.

The farm setting of the play ultimately takes a familiar framework and adapts it in light of the ongoing land questions that shape debates over national identity. Initial familiarity and de-familiarization emerge in Farber’s play through what literary scholar

Miki Flockemann studies overall as a strategy for post-transition South African play writes. Farber’s play takes on a number of familiar tropes, which for Flockemann include miscegenation and the violent class tensions inherent in Strindberg’s source material.

Mies Julie stages historical moments that Flockemann argues the play embodies in new and confronting ways, signaling an overall ethos of reinvention and cultural contest in post-transition South Africa. The strongest legacy that Mies Julie reinvents is the one that

Flockemann connects to the play’s setting as “the racialized legacy of paternalism and intimacy that thwarts the struggle over land and ownership in the rural backwaters of

South Africa” (405). Not only is such a legacy still active and thus given new attention by the play’s performance as Flockemann suggests, but the gendering of such conflict over land also revitalizes tired land questions. Part of the play’s staging adapts Strindberg’s play as when the servant Christine tells her son John that she had to poison “puppies in the womb” because “our Swartkop got her” (Farber 12). Because women in Mies Julie sense the environment, the veld, differently than the male characters, the somewhat

“stock” (Apartheid era) condemnation of miscegenation represented by the aborted puppies of an “African mutt” and the white family’s dog takes on a whole new meaning.

The event of course foreshadows the also aborted miscegenation between the amaXhosa

John and the Afrikaner Julie. Violent abortion therefore underscores both the “wombs” 51 through which new life flows and the discourse controlling those “wombs.” In the sense that the dog and later Julie might have given birth, the play conflates women with wanted or unwanted generational and cultural change. From the perspective of the play’s setting, swartkop means “black hills” in Afrikaans and thereby invokes the Afrikaner path of settlement including the eponymous town in the Eastern Cape and river emptying into

Nelson Mandela Bay. The difficulties and disappointments of the Afrikaner process of settlement reverberate in the name and, along with the play’s “island” setting in the kitchen, evoke the ways in which land has enabled an Afrikaner identity but not without doubt, trauma, and a love-hate relationship with place. Thus in both the case of ancestral lineage and land as “womb” or material basis for culture, Afrikaner identity becomes politically suspect and defamiliarized early in the play.

Defamiliarizing representations of an Afrikaner, “racialized legacy of paternalism and intimacy,” the play implies that land has both birthed and limited Afrikaner identity.

Whereas Disgrace uses human-animal relationships to re-imagine Afrikaner identity by pushing “environment” beyond “property” and “resources,” Farber’s Mies Julie re- imagines Afrikaner identity and vexes rainbow nationalism by first gendering and then violently opposing environmental conceptions. Swartkop doubles as racial slur for the puppies’ unwanted father and as adopted homeland. As Mies Julie linguistically inscribes an Afrikaner history on the land of South Africa within racialized aspects of land theft preceding and during Apartheid, two opposing environmental conceptions appear that, in their contradiction, undermine rainbow nationalism. The violent tensions that the play stages over land and environment as property contend with gendered connections to the land that appear to stem from the fact that women (through their wombs) create heirs to 52 land. Knowledge of and connection to the land flows through women in Mies Julie even as the play positions male heirs to land as mere property owners! Whereas rainbow nationalism grants belonging on the basis of citizenship, connections to the land in Mies

Julie flow through a clearly hierarchical and contentious discourse. Mies Julie interrogates the “environment” that within post-transition discourse belongs to all South

Africans, simultaneously linking it to and decoupling it from “property.”

Exceeding an individual or racial claim to land, ekphrasitic descriptions of environments, “talking environments” engender an enduring and expansive sense of community that has intelligibility within regional philosophical frameworks that link a community to its environment. Complicating the regional ethnophilosophy, the women of the play—Julie, her dead mother, Christine, and Christine’s spirit ancestor—relate simultaneously to each other and to the surrounding Karoo, forming a community that crosses generational and ethnic affiliation. Julie and Christine form the core of the community primarily as evidenced by the fact that Christine raises Julie after Julie’s mother dies. Both women relate across gaps of class, age, and ethnicity because they in turn relate themselves to the greater environment and to women that they associate with it. Julie senses and remembers her dead mother in the smell of veldt fires (15), in the dreamed-of feel of veldt beneath her fingers (24), in the air of the Karoo near the power station (44), and in the silence and space surrounding the farm (45). Christine similarly connects to her ancestor, who periodically shows up on stage, and to the environment that

Christine shares with the ancestor Ukhokho. Christine explains to John her connection to the tree that pierces the kitchen floor: “That tree was here before any of us. We planted it over your great grandmother’s grave. And under the roots, lies Ukhokho. This tree saps 53 from her bones. Your great grandmother won’t let me sleep until I free them from beneath” (18). Building off of the “swartkop” reference that conflates women and environments as so much literature has done36, Julie and Christine exhibit connections to the environment through their wombs, a connection to the flow of human generations across the South African landscape. The ways in which such a history haunts and defines both women, however, offers a “community” based upon a collective environmental life and future. Julie like her mother before her can find a lasting sense of identity, a feeling of permanence, out on the veld. There is an inevitability within her touching the veld with her fingers that suggests that the surrounding Karoo, the greater environment in which the farm sits, records and preserves the human history of the area. Julie can feel her dead mother there, and she offers to take John into the veld where they can be together unseen, beyond the judgment of either the white farmer or the black farm workers (23-24). Mies

Julie thus squares representations of the same environment against each other: the farm environment is circumscribed by racial discourse, hedged by the veld that the Afrikaner farmer cannot fully tame as well as by stalled promises of political change on the land; the farm is also part the larger veld that contextualizes all of the endeavors of the farm, gives them meaning and connects all of the farm’s inhabitants through their shared environing and material existence. Julie like her mother before her routinely chooses to connect to this larger, material sense of existence (24), which builds bonds of community with the play’s other women. As the play codes “property” as male, women become the vehicle to a “community” that defines itself in relation to the environment and that finds deeper connections than the fraught history of land expropriations has allowed.

Because it situates women within eco-feminist intersections between “woman” 54 and “environment,” particularly in terms of the flow of history, Mies Julie expands South

African land questions well beyond issues of ethnic entitlement. The play rather links the women and the land in a dialectic that situates women within the history of the Cape environment and in turn reimagines the Karoo as untenable Other, radiating mystery and silence, elusive while at the same time vitally connected to both Christine and Julie. To sense the environment as the women do, the play infers, is to engage in a process of self- discovery that can support larger, cultural forms of identity. Lineage and relatedness for

Christine and Julie become more than pathways to property through “paternalism and intimacy.” They enable thinking about what Patrick Murphy, in a broad consideration of eco-feminism’s potential as a site of environmental ethics, argues as socially necessary connections between women and environments. Representations of Christine and Julie and the other female characters in Mies Julie complicate what Murphy calls women’s relationship to “the situatedness of cultures, and within that situatedness the relationship of beliefs, practices, and character to the place from which they stem and in which they continue to be worked out” (26). In one sense, Julie and Christine represent a part of ethnic and propertied entitlement through their potential as mothers of future generations.

However, the women also seem to record and observe the perspective of females like

Ukhokho and Julie’s mother, who are forever linked to the place and in fact tie Julie and

Christine to it as well. It is such an inextricable bond between women and place that becomes visible as cultural-natural intersections within the play. The greater environment preserves human history and becomes the source of the women’s identity as well as the setting for plot development and historical “progress” overall. The play insinuates that the environment can and will house new “communities,” will fuel cultural change as 55 when Julie pleads with John to flee with her to the city. Julie wants the two of them to escape, before her father can discover her pregnancy by John, and return “someday with a child who walks with all our ancestors in the shadows—who [can] lay claim to Veenen

Plaas” (Farber 48). A future thus appears to lie in a common belonging to place that, for now, only the female characters can heed. The sense of necessary exile following Julie’s potential pregnancy situates the formation of a community that relates itself to a shared environment. As Murphy suggests, cultural dynamics work themselves out in the representations of women, in this case the ability of women to create a community that is currently bound and limited by the official land question and racial discourse. The violent abortion and suicide that follows Julie’s vain exhortations to John resound with postcolonial critique of current political limits in South Africa while not foreclosing future potential. Julie’s ability to return to a place that she loves with her “colored” child and to lay claim to Veenan Plaas relies upon a shifting national imaginary founded upon environmental connections shared across races, connections and claims that exceed both racial and post-racial discourse.

The play’s gendered environmental schema ultimately pushes the naturalist foundations for Mies Julie towards an epistemic rupture that is just as dramatic as the one in The Whale Caller. Owing to naturalist tendencies present in the original narrative that

Farber adapts for a South African audience, the acutely volatile racial and class tensions between John and Julie are seemingly biologically and materially inscribed by the bloodlines that Apartheid-era discourse had policed and that such discourse had codified through laws limiting ownership of land on the basis of race. In other words, the sexual relationship between John and Julie that drives the play forward is massively 56 overdetermined. Within the larger historical trajectory that the play evokes, racialized discourse still obviously limits black access to land, and the meaning of land restitution is completely bound by a shallow racial imaginary. That Julie’s suicide after her sexual encounter with John turns to violent rape (Farber 40) indicts the racial and economic realities that limit justice in post-Apartheid South Africa. Part of the usefulness of such representation becomes shock value in the sense that the naturalist framework for Mies

Julie explodes tensions and resolves them only through violence. In the words of literary scholar William Hutchings, who compares Farber’s adaptation to Strindberg’s original, the “entire purgation ritual to which [the audience has] been witness has come to its inevitable, self-sacrificial end” (77). It is Julie who begins to close what Hutchings calls a

“purgation ritual.” She tells John that she will not have a child with him and thus allow

John to have a legal, biological recourse to Veenan Plaas, her subsequent suicide and simultaneous abortion with the panga (56) ending this possibility and restoring the racial discourse over land to dominance. Despite the inevitability of the play’s ending because of the current limits to justice in South Africa, the play also opens new angles for viewing

South African history. Mies Julie has such a potential in part because of what

Flockemann calls the play’s transcultural deployment of striking images. Considering mainly Farber’s adaptations of Strindberg and the performance of Mies Julie in different parts of South Africa and the world, Flockemann argues that the play translates culturally specific moments and objects across epistemic boundaries. Mies Julie thus transfers the import of its images to new audiences and creates ethical considerations, albeit via a distinct loss of authenticity or strict reportage of what actually happened (Flockemann

407). Such epistemic boundary crossing also happens, and in fact veers towards epistemic 57 rupture, through the play’s environmental schema as when Julie speaks her dying words to John. Julie envisions as she dies that she is part of an amaXhosa village that Boers have set fire to. When she tells John that “ash [is] in our hair as our farms burn” and John replies that “these memories are not yours, Julie” (Farber 56), the question of belonging to the land breaks into new terrain. The boundaries around the Karoo are of course as social as they are environmental and material. The Karoo as property and farmland intersects, against the logic of dominant discourse, with the Karoo as shared environment and basis for all social life. Julie can mourn the loss of amaXhosa farms, presumably during the 19th Century “Xhosa Wars,” precisely because she identifies with a larger community that has its foundations in the environment. Julie can imagine what John cannot. John’s claims to land rely upon strictly racial imaginaries that burst as land questions open anew and cross ethnic notions of belonging to the land.

As Mies Julie frames transcultural thinking about the South African environment, cultural conflicts over that environment lead to a reimagined land question. Julie ironically participates in the negotiation over the meaning of “environment” while signifying with her very body and her ancestral lineage the limits of such negotiation.

Murphy’s notion of women as cultural representation and as open questions concerning environmental-human intersections frames Mies Julie as a complicated knot. Women in the play cannot directly impact the flow of land and in fact sit outside of the flow of property even as male heirs to the land flow through their wombs. Yet Julie makes a counter-cultural assertion that she chooses to be, like her mother, “tender” towards the environment, to listen “to what’s beneath” even as her father suggests that such tenderness is what killed Julie’s mother (44). Mies Julie thus implies that women’s ways 58 of relating to the environment are bound by “male” attitudes towards the environment as property. The suggestion that women are weaker or more vulnerable in their ties to land echoes further within the post-transition official land question, which trends towards a shallow racial imaginary and partly as a result commonly ignores or proves biased against the land claims of women37. The play’s treatment of sensitivity and openness to the environment as “feminine” characteristics thus frames competing cultural views of land (gendered and racialized) in terms of what Murphy calls the “situatedness of cultures.” The land question becomes from that perspective tied to both specific places and to evolving and competing cultural conceptions of those places, opening possibilities for dialogue even while foreclosing access to participation. The gendering of environmental connections in Mies Julie thus promotes not only the expansion of who counts in land claim processes but also the refurbishing of communal concepts of land well beyond ethnic imagination. In their clear and embittered rivalry—as when John tells

Julie that she cannot love the land or listen to it so closely because she is white and therefore an interloper on the land (45)—the play’s gendered and oppositional concepts of land raise radical questions. How should humans relate to their environment if they want their cultures to thrive? How might environmental relations engender respect for other members of an environmental community despite cultural differences? How can reinvigorated land questions, swept beyond their racial and anti-colonial anchors, create a stronger society overall by changing human-environmental relationships?

Mies Julie queries the relationship between human communities and their environment, not ignoring cultural differences so much as subsuming them into a dialectic and ultimately materialist sense that culture and the environment evolve 59 together. Linguistic / cultural differences clearly structure the play but do not conceal the multi-generational and multi-ethnic female community’s ability to adapt by watching and contemplating the environment. In eco-feminist terms, the play’s women are not only tangled socially in the history of place, of the Cape, of South Africa, as it unravels. The women are also biologically inscribed by and “open” to that place in a way that previous eco-feminism might have found problematic. When Christine speaks of her ties to

Veenan Plaas, she speaks of an ancestor and the biological record of her family, one of whom is trapped beneath the tree that pierces the kitchen floor. The tree that saps from the great-grandmother’s bones frames the larger environment as the origin for all life, borrowing from Southern African ethnophilosophical concepts and from more specifically amaXhosa notions of the interconnectedness of all beings in nature. Yet the idea that Christine must free Ukhokho from that tree, the very one that Christine’s relatives planted over Ukhokho’s grave, belies the discourse of property ownership, one that makes the “island” kitchen a trap for the tree and for the ancestor beneath.

Historical discourses such as those pertaining to Apartheid thus work through the play without removing or superseding material, ecological interrelationships, a state of complexity that material eco-feminists have in particular valorized. Political scientist

Susan Hekman praises such a potential within feminist thought more generally by arguing that the “discourse” that so many “third wave” feminists have explored relies upon cultural and natural intersections. Hekman builds an “ontological ballast” for the kinds of discursive work that she and other feminists want to do primarily by looking to

“discourse” as practiced by Michel Foucault. In terms of additional sources for an ontological ballast for feminism, Mies Julie reframes ethnophilosophical concepts that 60 have wide legibility within South Africa. Dynamic “disclosure,” by which Hekman means human interpretation of reality to create knowledge and interaction with that reality, leading to new epistemic paradigms (111-112), emerges in the play’s gendered contest between “environments.” The challenge to environment as property entailed by

Christine’s insistence that she free her ancestor stems from Christine’s belief system, beliefs that have led her in the past to rip up the kitchen floor to free the tree’s roots. For

Christine, the tree and her ancestor were free once, the tree located in open veld, unowned, and not bound as it is now, along with Christine’s ancestor (Farber 17). There is in Mies Julie a poetic emphasis to the environment as material font for all culture—

Christine tells John, for instance, that when she dug through the floor with her fingers, she discovered roots “fat and wet and full of the earth’s blood under those old tiles” (17).

Roots full of “earth’s blood” suggests that biological connections between beings and between humans and environments endure although, as the play literalizes with its setting, social discourse builds atop, threatening to erase its material foundations but unable to keep them from breaking through, Even as Julie attempts to explain Christine’s self-identification with and attachment to the tree as ancestral and ethnic notions of land ownership, comparable to her father’s firm belief that he and his ancestors “all the way back to the Vortrekkers” belong to the land (36), Julie’s openness and tenderness towards the land stems from a different notion of “environment” than one founded merely upon

“property.” She and Christine represent a community based upon interrelation between culture and nature, a “community” that breaks sharply from those, black or white, that are lost in the “racialized legacy of paternalism and intimacy” on the land.

The re-imagination of the land question in Farber’s Mies Julie builds upon the 61 play’s epistemic divides over “environment,” escaping the narrow imaginary that has both caused and thwarted “the struggle over land and ownership in the rural backwaters of South Africa.” Mies Julie mines the epistemic gap or “disclosure” between governmental and popular land questions while transforming a popular vision of the

South African land question into one that builds a sustainable and inclusive

“community.” The play symbolizes the failure of the governmental land question with the aftermath of Julie’s rape and suicide, as the lights dim and the play ends. Simply reversing the results of “black spot” removals under Apartheid and reinstating “black farmers” to the land will fail to create lasting political change, the play suggests. John ends the play by pulling on the farmer’s boots and arming himself with gun and sickle, telling himself, “It’s easy. Just pretend you’re him” (57). The reductively anti-colonial imagery of John’s preparing for battle on the farmer’s terms valorizes an entirely different political dispensation than the one evoked by John’s mother Christine or by

Julie. Julie rebukes John for wanting to “grab” land through his offspring with her—she tells him that possession of land is “not some score to be settled, John. Farming is a business. And a tough one” (30). In other words, well beyond land title, knowledge of the land including an ecological framework for farming is necessary for the success of long term human inhabitation on the land. Christine similarly balks at John’s notion of the land as individual property that one person can take back from another. There is a sense of condemnation for the theft of land in Christine’s assertion to John, after he warns her not to break open the floor again and attempt to dig up the tree, that “They can cover what they’ve done but the roots keep breaking through. These roots will never go away.

Never. Never. Go away” (18). However much Christine seems to mourn the original 62 enclosure of amaXhosa land by Vortrekkers, the persistence of roots, of human inhabitation on the land, seems to matter so much more. There is a cultural survival at stake, one that exceeds a merely nativist claim to the land. Christine is willing in fact to forgo the land claim that John makes upon the farm. Near the play’s end, she accuses him of impatience, of being “born 10 minutes ago” (53). Christine implies that land has engendered human cultures that in turn can adapt with the land and environment, suggesting, along with Julie, that land claims need to be based upon an understanding of human-natural intersections: she tells John that “These roots are my hands. And beneath these stones—my blood is warm” (53). The disclosure that insinuates itself between

“masculine” and “feminine” ways of thinking about belonging to the land in Mies Julie rests primarily upon notions of collective versus individual ownership.

Such a disclosure transforms contradictions within the official land question. It evokes the ways in which government discourse has failed to create justice but has also paradoxically invoked the land as the way forward to social cohesion through the ethnophilosophical trait of Ubuntu, which “is part of a people’s expression of themselves, for themselves and of themselves,” such that access to land becomes “the very foundation of [an African people’s] existence” (Department of Rural Development and Land Reform

2). The land question in Mies Julie becomes the question of how best to ensure the survival of a national South African culture, one that has ties to the land and environment that exceed but do not erase racial discourse. Material and cultural foundations for a society bolster collective decision-making about the environment. As much as the play avers that the process of redistributing land must harken to greater notions of racial and gender equality, Mies Julie promotes an ecological vision for the communities that come 63 together on the land and that have thrived or faltered along with their environment. Mies

Julie suggests that renewed political futures require the patience and self-awareness that

Christine models. South Africa’s future becomes sustainable to the extent that it builds from environmental and historical “roots” that South Africans can and must identify in common.

Conclusion

As postcolonial critique, both Mies Julie and The Whale Caller simultaneously rely upon and complicate pre-colonial difference. They thus reformulate the paradoxical basis for South African and other Southern African land questions. Both works invoke the “African” character of land in different ANC conceptions—a conception that echoes

Southern African ethnophilosophy in terms of the environmental nature of community, the ways in which shared environmental resources like land create communities and allow them to change. Contradictions in governance, however, soon arise in both works and re-frame the pre-colonial environmental imagination. Intersecting scales of environmental imagination in Mies Julie and The Whale Caller ultimately position a nationally imagined community as a productive space of difference. The “nation” that emerges in both works resists transnational conceptions of development and market- driven governance, building upon relationships with land that cross urban and rural divides, exceed a geographically or socially pre-colonial imagination.

Because South African land questions demonstrate a unique form of a regional pattern, the naturalism of The Whale Caller and Mies Julie wrests a productive political consciousness from the anti-colonial but shallow populism of state-sponsored land reform programs. The political consciousness of environmental communities in the two works is 64 productive because it stands in tension with the political limits of governmental land questions and neoliberal developmentalism more generally. Such imagined communities draw strength from a history on the land without staying locked in pure nativism or traditionalism. In The Whale Caller such communities have clear corollaries to the communist imaginaries of an earlier ANC and so evoke relationships between communities and the land that are simultaneously pre-colonial and embedded within modern notions of the nation. In contrast, Mies Julie genders Southern African ethnophilosophy and so opens philosophical frameworks for community building to

“modern,” individual notions of rights. The communities that emerge in both works reinvigorate land questions by tying land access and usage to the material and cultural strength of communities, thus defying a crass developmentalism or a sense of ethnic entitlement by locating communities outside of a narrowly defined “rural” space. Rather, the communities become important within broadly legible—national and regional— battles for material, cultural, and political stability.

As much as both literary works help form a national consciousness that can oppose transnational developmentalism, they also instantiate and foster the “planetary” scale of environmental imagination that has become so pivotal in this age of climate change and widespread resource wars. Both works locate the ethnophilosophical imagination of communities, avoiding the essentialism that can reify negative social relations even as “traditional” notions of environmentalism promise alternatives to

“modern” ones. Rather, the environmental communities in both works have a direct, ontological connection to their environments that becomes both politically inscribed and important. The naturalism of both texts situates human-environmental borders as vivid, 65 compelling spaces that nonetheless compete with narratives of social precarity. The result of such strategies is that the literature promotes a shared, “human” capacity for environmental belonging and responsibility without freeing the reader of political responsibility for social structures. Enduring wealth gaps between Zwhelile and

Hermanus in The Whale Caller signal the failure of earlier social justice movements while suggesting the inadequacy of an environmentalism that protects the environment from people. Gendered property lines and environmental histories in Mies Julie similarly locate and valorize “community” at the intersections of social and environmental activism. A planetary identity thus becomes the starting but not finishing line for a widespread environmental ethics, which, both the play and the novel suggest, must draw upon the shared, physical reality of “our” environed and environmentally dependent lives without diminishing the cultural specificity with which we adapt to life on this planet.

66

Chapter Two

Wresting an Environmental Community from the Telos of History: Zimbabwean

Literature against Chimurenga Logic and the Inevitable Return to the Land

Whereas the literary imagination of South African land questions raises and resolves contradictions of Southern African governance, particularly in terms of the

ANC’s past distributive justice platforms, some Zimbabwean writing works against a level of political populism that is unprecedented in the region. In contrast to the ways in which the naturalism of Farber and Mda’s texts position an environmental imagination against narratives of racial tension and economic development, Chenjerai Hove’s 1988 novel Bones and short stories by Shimmer Chinodya and Charles Mungoshi interrogate and rehabilitate “environmental communities.” The modernism of all three pieces of literature defamiliarizes populist invocations of “Zimbabweans on the land.” Ultimately, community concepts emerge from all three works that prove resilient and adaptable, capable of resisting capture by a shallow populism that has naturalized kleptocracy.

“Environmental communities” in all three works operate on an even larger scale to reformulate essentialist invocations of “African” identities, promoting a sense of environmental connection that is at once planetary and fully located within regional land questions.

Hove’s novel Bones, as a prominent example of Zimbabwean post-independence literature, reevaluates the political importance of Shona prophecy that both incites and predicts the return of the Shona to stolen lands following the British colonial invasion in the 1890s of what is now Zimbabwe:

Arise all the bones of the land. Arise all the bones of the dying cattle. Arise all the 67

bones of the locusts. Wield the power of the many bones scattered across the land

and fight so that the land of the ancestors is not defiled by strange feet and strange

hands. Do not allow the shrines of your fathers to wilt under the arms of the

strangers who behave as if they do not have shrines where they come from. (51)

Hove’s speaker in this section of the novel, whom the text does not name but does link to the nineteenth-century spirit medium for the Shona royal ancestor, Mbuya Nehanda, foresees Shona defeat at the hands of the British as revealed by signs in the physical environment such as locusts and sick cattle. The medium-like speaker then demands and predicates eventual Shona victory against the “strangers,” the British38, on the longstanding connection between the Shona and their land, “the power of the many bones scattered across the land,” further commanding, “Sing all the tunes of the land so that any stranger will know that this land is the land of rising bones” (52). Hove’s speaker ultimately suggests that years after defeat her own bones will rise up again along with all of the other “defeated” Shona to overcome the invaders and take back the land (53). The post-independence violence and political turmoil that occupies the greater portion of

Hove’s novel, however, undercuts the spirit medium’s homage to fallen ancestors and the euphoria of a promised end to defilement “by strange feet and strange hands.” In the greater narrative arc, a Shona farming woman named Marita travels to the city to find her missing son, a soldier in the Rhodesian civil war (1964-1979), and post-independence government officials murder her for her insistence. The novel’s Zimbabwe thus appears divided rather than united by the ancestral prophecies that Robert Mugabe and his political regime (1980-2017) built upon as the nationalist logic of the Chimurenga or revolutionary and prophesized struggle by the people. 68

Short stories by Mungoshi and Chinodya similarly undermine nationalist agendas operating on behalf of the Shona and indict these agendas as malign appropriations of popular culture. Mungoshi, Chinodya, and Hove join other Zimbabwean writers who came to age during the Rhodesian civil war in contesting the three “historical”

Chimurengas through which the Mugabe regime defended its cultural relevance. This generation of writers, in Muchemwa’s words, challenged the dominant nationalist discourse by contrasting historical and personal narratives to plumb “continuities and discontinuities” of ethnic and particularly Shona identity (201). Hove’s Bones references the first “historical” Chimurenga or late-nineteenth century Shona and Ndebele resistance to colonization in his poetic and ecological rendering of what later Shona nationalists called the Nehanda prophecy. Bones does not ultimately invoke rights to land based upon the proliferation of Shona bones in an area. The novel thus avoids making a land claim that some sociologists problematize as an overly simple foundation for land questions given that it potentially ignores massive social rewiring by colonial projects, variations within traditional land ownership patterns, and social relations and hierarchies amongst traditional and postcolonial communities (Allan Cain 178-183). The novel rather uses

Nehanda and Marita to gender and thus complicate connections to the land of Zimbabwe as both characters attend cycles of birth and death. Only some Shona, in Hove’s modernist novel, understand the ecology of bones and the “tunes of the land,” an understanding that both alienates and elevates characters within their communities. In a more “primordial and essentialist” sense of Shona identity, Mugabe’s party of freedom fighters (ZANU-PF) claimed responsibility for winning the civil war against white

Rhodesians, connecting their victory to the Nehanda prophecy and hailing the nation as a 69

Shona nation, their party’s rule serving as the preordained rising of bones, which they historicized as the second Chimurenga.

In further contrast to a rigid Shona nationalism, Mungoshi’s 2003 “The Sins of the Fathers” and Chinodya’s 2003 “Queues” complicate and challenge later phases of the

Mugabe regime. “The Sins of the Fathers” centers upon tensions between a son and a father who has likely murdered and tortured thousands for the Mugabe regime while

“Queues” follows the economic and political immiseration of the Zimbabwean people following independence. Mungoshi and Chinodya write their stories in the early 2000s, raising ethnic “discontinuity” by critiquing the validity of the last or third “historical”

Chimurenga. By 2000, Mugabe faced serious political pressure due to growing land hunger and popular dissatisfaction after two decades of economic policy that primarily benefitted an upper class that still included many white Zimbabweans. “Fast Track” land reform policy sought to stem a crisis of authority for the Mugabe regime by opening white farm land for immediate expropriation without compensation. Although Mugabe claimed this act of land redistribution as the prophesized “return to Shona land” and so historicized it as the third Chimurenga, the short stories by Mungoshi and Chinodya critique the upheaval and negative impact that the third Chimurenga caused for most

Zimbabweans. The title “Queues” references the fantastically long lines that Chinodya’s speaker and many other Zimbabweans waited in as a result of fairly unregulated transfer of land that was prone to elite capture and agricultural collapse. Mungoshi’s text in turn illustrates the problems of unjust land redistribution through the father of the title, who attempts to seize white-owned farmland for himself through an exercise in political force and violence. The third Chimurenga thus becomes in both stories a historical moment as 70 equally overdetermined in its cultural significance to a “Shona nation” as the second

Chimurenga (the Rhodesian civil war) that also builds itself off of the prophecies of the first Chimurenga (1890s resistance to British colonization). Modernist narratives by all three writers deflate the historical telos of Chimurenga logic, challenging and adapting rather than blindly accepting traditions. Rather than praise the Chimurengas as inevitable steps on the way to political decolonization, all three texts complicate and scrutinize the cultural meanings that the ruling party hijacked to rationalize a narrow, nationalist path of economic and social benefit wide enough only for the Shona elite and their international supporters39.

Second Generation texts prompt social reevaluation similarly to post-transition literature in South Africa; however, the degree to which the ruling party has discursively formed itself around the “inevitable” return of the Shona to their lands has led much

Second Generation Zimbabwean literature into particularly intensive and creative confrontations with “environmental” precepts that link the nation’s “African” leadership and citizenry to the land. The question of prophesy and the traditional ability of Southern

African communities like those of the Shona to reformulate in relation to changing environments drives the poetics of political critique in the writings of Hove, Mungoshi, and Chinodya. In terms of a “Bantu ethnophilosophy” or shared philosophical premises based upon the common linguistic and historical origins that link many peoples in

Southern Africa, Mangena connects broader and more specifically Zimbabwean conceptions of ethics, known in South Africa as Ubuntu but in Zimbabwe as Hunhu.

Mangena claims that Hunhu ethics rest upon the fact that the individual Shona has free will but must learn how to act from the living and the dead as well as from the non- 71 human environment. Communities emerge out of groups of individuals who choose to relate themselves to and adapt their moral principles from changing social and physical contexts (Mangena np). Hove’s novel Bones explores the potential of ethnophilosophy to grow communities and lead necessary social adaptation, the martyrdom of Hove’s main female characters positioning prophesy and environmental knowledge as information that one person cannot simply share with another and that individuals of a community must wrestle with for themselves. I argue that Bones transcends the ethnic nationalism of what became the third Chimurenga by linking rural and urban areas and suggesting the need for a varied practice (in spatial and gendered terms) that links community and environmental health.

As much as Hove’s novel anticipates and undercuts the restrictive ways in which the ZANU-PF conflates a Shona nation with a precolonial, agricultural imaginary, works by Chinodya and Mugoshi directly confront third Chimurenga apologists by deepening and reclaiming “environmental prophesy.” In that Mungoshi’s modernist story centers upon a son who senses greater environmental connections than those that he can readily see but cannot make sense of them in time to stop his father’s imperialism, “The Sins of the Fathers” valorizes traditional relationships between the Shona and other “Bantu” peoples and their environments while complicating and expounding upon the mediating factors that someone who would interpret environmental signs must weigh. Mungoshi’s story suggests a rift in ZANU-PF culture and its wider nationalism that separates the ruling party from the land as they succumb to and breed (in the case of what the story’s son has learned from his father) an environmental imperialism. Whereas the social implications of a growing environmental imperialism amongst the Shona manifest 72 themselves in Mungoshi’s modernist-Gothic drama between family members,

Chinodya’s story interleaves stylistically divergent threads of narrative in order to locate environmental aspects of Shona identity on simultaneously national and personal terms.

Chinodya’s narrator in “Queues” suggests that something has changed both in the narrator’s personal awareness and in the larger Shona community / nation. “Queues” refutes teleological claims of a Shona return to health and prominence on the land, for both the narrator and Zimbabwe have become in the story predatorial and selfish, environmental resources no longer truly shared but rather lusted over in what the story reveals to be a rampant and widely internalized neo-colonialism that nonetheless fails to obliterate a Shona identity based upon community and environmental awareness. Both short stories prompt evaluation of the role of environmental awareness in creating national health while also forcing confrontation with personal obstacles to community formation.

National Identity and Environmental Conflict in Hove’s Bones

As a modernist work, Bones inscribes cultural conflict and ultimately postcolonial critique with both its narrative structure and its use of setting. The novel structures itself around what literary scholar Susan Friedman, who thinks about the production of multiple modernisms on an international and dynamic plane, calls cultural parataxis.

Bones exhibits strong cultural parataxis—the effect of spatial practice and meetings of and across borders within the text itself (Friedman 37-38)—when it tells overlapping stories from the perspective of differing characters. Hove’s fifteen chapters, all but one of which, the prophecy narrative, tell the story of Marita’s life and death through others’ oral narratives. Each narrative layers cultural complexity as when the farm girl Janifa 73 remembers and translates the cultural wisdom of the older Marita, or the farm’s cook relates his love for Marita and their somewhat antagonistic relationship. The novel’s bricolage thus builds a picture of Marita that has conflicting generational and gender perspectives and relies upon “meetings across borders” in the sense of competing aspects of Shona farm life. Neither Marita nor Shona “farm workers” seem stable, their fluid identities creating an overall de-centered narrative structure. Compounding the dynamism of the novel’s narrative structure, the setting of Bones creates a spatial poetics and an ultimately postcolonial critique based upon environmental conflict in modern Zimbabwe.

The narratives shuttle Marita between different environments, some of which occupy the same space! The farm where most of the novel’s action occurs bleeds almost inextricably into a nearby Shona village, a space of aggressive, often violent agricultural production overlapping a natural haven where Marita facilitates Janifa’s spiritual and ecological training. Cognitive dissonance between such spaces drives the narrative events of the novel, particularly in terms of Marita’s decision to seek her son, simultaneously fleeing the abuses of farm life and leaving behind her protégé Janifa. Ultimately, the novel’s multiple “environments” evoke tensions between modern Zimbabweans’ precarious reliance upon physical resources, ethnophilosophical connections between Shona and the environment, and the mercurial relationship between the Zimbabwean people and the

Mugabe regime. An overall postcolonial modernism emerges in relation to the represented spaces of a modern Zimbabwe that connects to but differs from other modernities or, in Friedman’s words, that bears “its own hegemonies and internal divisions” while also bearing “some sort of changing but hierarchical relation to others”

(36). The novel’s environments, rural and urban, all relate to global capitalism while also 74 taking on competing signification within Zimbabwe. Plot and character developments in

Bones thus allow divergent interpretation and defy Mugabe’s ultra-nationalist narrative of

Zimbabwean history.

Bones plots itself in relation to a common African modernist template—a

“traditional” person’s journey to the city amidst a perceived collapse of tribal values—in order to create temporal and spatial connections between the novel’s rural and urban settings. In a simple sense, Marita’s journey to find her son and her murder in the city indicts the postcolonial government that is located there of apathy, self-importance, and a loss of traditional values such as respect for elders and compassion. Marita’s murder further suggests that the difference between the postcolonial and the colonial governments might be insignificant. As literary scholar Ranka Primorac thinks about the novel’s sense of historical progression, or rather its lack, she claims that the central chronotope of the novel operates in cyclical rather than historical time. For Primorac, the novel fails to valorize, and in fact critiques, Mugabe’s Chimurenga logic precisely by creating a cyclical sense of time as the single narrative chapter depicting the first

Chimurenga from the perspective of Nehanda’s prophecy interacts with orally inflected chapters that tell of Marita’s death. Citing the novel’s heavy reliance upon Shona prophecy and orality, Primorac derives and amplifies the novel’s critique of the Mugbe regime as one that freezes memory and fixes rural identities as it ruthlessly deploys

Chimurenga logic for its own ends and against the very communities that the

Chimurengas are supposed to liberate (90). At the same time that Marita’s murder condemns Mugabe’s populism and her presence in the city defies Mugabe’s freezing of

Shona identity, her journey bears a very dynamic temporal component that casts Bones as 75 a site of re-imagination for political progress, which many modernists connect only to linear, historical time. Marita crosses spatial borders as she travels from the farm to the city: the ways in which the farm doubles as an agribusiness and a Shona village or settlement, the surrounding environment serving as a source of physical nourishment and spiritual interaction, meets the city as a place where, in Marita’s words as cited by another character, “many things lose purpose.” Whereas in the villages and on the farms, as Marita relates, people “finish this or that before they can catch the next meal” such that

“to eat is to look for life,” to eat in the city is “to look for something to do” (Hove 75).

Spatial differences between the city and rural Zimbabwe, in Friedman’s terms, reveal the unique “hegemonies and internal divisions” of a Zimbabwean modernity such that connections to nature and to life in a philosophical sense fade or change from one space to another. Whatever global and local dynamics cause spatial transformation reveal themselves in Marita’s seemingly simple observations. Marita appears to critique a whole host of cultural changes from the “simple” position of a rural woman tied to a physically and spiritually cyclical existence. Her ability to embrace the friendship of a city woman whom she meets on the bus ride from the farm (75), moreover, belies powers of insight and interpretation that can pierce and ultimately rewire political and spatial separations.

The city woman’s “infection” by Marita, her joining the novel’s other characters in taking up the narrative of a unique and compelling woman, creates an even larger resonance between rural and urban spaces that nonetheless do not collapse into each other.

In its deployment of Marita as de-centered protagonist, Bones enacts a sense of

“African time” that creates a physically grounded political consciousness that counters

Chimurenga logic. In contrast with Primorac’s reading of Bones in terms of a non-linear 76 progression through time that she names the chronotope of Shona peasant life (82), the peasants’ lives remaining locked in cyclical relationship with the seasons and with Shona ancestors, Hove’s novel appears to create a web of narratives that cross disparate timelines and spaces to project not only Marita’s character but a growing political consciousness. Taking exception to a “Western” binary that opposes the linear time of historical progress with the cyclical time of Others and nature40, literary scholars

Terrence Musanga and Anias Mutekwa think about the non-linear progression of narratives that Bones deploys and argue that the novel’s structure encodes “African time.” For Musanga and Mutekwa, “African time” follows not from the universal of linear time but from relationships between events and people. The concept of “African time” that the scholars derive from African philosophy and connect in Bones to the shared experience of female oppression and spiritual interaction with Shona ancestors

(Musanga and Mutekwa 1308-1309) does more than create an anti-colonial and female- centered nationalism (1314-1317). Political consciousness also emerges in the novel through its modernist representations of relationships between humans, environments, and a variety of physical / spiritual states that connect community and environmental growth. Relative to the fact that the Mugabe regime’s populism to a large extent exploited relationships between the Shona and their land, the novel’s deepening and temporal expansions of those relationships addresses the concerns of Muchemwa and Primorac while creating a strong framework for political resistance to the Mugabe regime. The novel inscribes a growing political consciousness through a frame-narrative structure in which the farm girl Janifa serves as primary story teller, revealing near the end of the novel that she is “now” in a mental institution and is remembering her dead friend Marita. 77

The fact that Janifa appears to be repeating her stories (112) gives the overall novel a spiral rather than a cyclical quality as Janifa’s stories cross spatial and temporal boundaries with each telling and illustrate Janifa’s changing identity. Janifa is reliving memories of Marita in “African time” and is showing a sense of futurity and political subjectivity not just in terms of the oppression that Janifa shares with Marita. When

Janifa declares that despite the travails that she experiences during the timeframe of the novel—rape, verbal abuse by her mother, and the loss of her friend Marita—“I will sing to the ears of those who have died so that the bird which once had broken wings can fly for all to see” (111), she ties her hoped for mental recovery to the act of storytelling and to the lessons that Marita taught her. Recovery will come in time and through the acts of witnessing and remembering Marita, who taught Janifa that all forms of matter connect to one another in an unbroken, material web. Such ecological wisdom exceeds nativist claims to land and rather belies years of observation and study, which Janifa suggests will more than outmatch being “broken by so many ruthless hands that many people think it is not possible for [me] to fly again” (111). Recovery is rather an issue of drawing on a network of connections, human and non-human. In the act of tying oneself to ancestors and to environments, Janifa implies, a shared culture and identity emerges. Yet such cultural identity arises within the narrative complexity of Bones along so many timelines of memory that it escapes the Mugabe regime’s telos.

By working through the central trope of Janifa’s spiritual training and by fluidly adapting ritual aspects of the training for modern contexts, Bones models the growth of a popular postcolonial Zimbabwean political consciousness. Marita trains Janifa in a way that expresses core concepts of Hunhu ethics: the shared choice to heed environmental 78 and other signs creates a community based upon what Mangena acknowledges as the bedrock of free will. Bones creates impetus for a growing community by having it adapt—adaptation being the purpose of community in Mangena’s study of Hunhu ethics—to the cultural disruptions and tensions of postcolonial Zimbabwe, first and foremost through the farm that doubles as a “traditional” village. Janifa thus embraces seemingly perennial wisdom that can help her to navigate the violence of an industrial farm owned by a ruthless white man. There is a dramatic spatial juxtaposition as Janifa moves from remembering Marita’s plan to sleep with the farm cook Chisaga in return for money for her trip to the city (Hove 31) to mourning the loss of Marita’s guidance:

But, Marita, now that you are dead, who will show me where there are dark holes

and stumps on the path to the well? Who will tell me the songs that made my

heart sit in one place? Can you think of the hard hearts that are many here and tell

me one which can lead me to a place of comfort? You used to say that a bird

might fly high up into the sky, but its heart remains with the little ones in the nest.

What I do not know is, am I one of the little ones you will think about as you fly

in the sky? (32)

The farm with all of its racial and gender dynamics intersects with the space of “the village,” in which Marita appears to function as an older woman charged with Janifa’s

“traditional” education. Beyond the novel’s modernist use of spaces, “dark holes and stumps” on the way to water resonate in “African time” in light of what Marita calls

Chisaga’s “greed for women” (30), which utterance Janifa is remembering after Chisaga rapes her! Connections to events thus create memory and identity while suggesting the choice that Janifa makes in keeping Marita’s wisdom in view. To do so is to ground 79 herself, literally entangling location and memory as she re-imagines the farm as a place of learning and growth. Marita’s ability to live on “in the sky,” as an ancestor, further enables Janifa in her re-imagination. The act of re-imagination appears to adopt a traditional imaginary at the same time that it addresses the present violence of the farm and it creates space for Janifa’s cure in the future. Bones thus models community in terms of interactions between individuals who create a space for shared growth, as the novel suggests by having Janifa, the woman that Marita met on the bus, and ultimately even

Chisaga embrace much of Marita’s wisdom as part of a new identity41. A flexible

“Zimbabwean community” thus emerges that is not gendered so much as it is tied to overcoming shared obstacles and to adopting and adapting standards for living in a

Zimbabwean moderntiy. Community ancestors like the one that Marita is becoming ultimately live on through shared memory and in their usefulness to likeminded individuals.

Because the spiritual training trope and Marita’s becoming an ancestor who can guide the living rely upon a flexible definition of community, the material underpinnings of such representation do not reinforce Mugabe’s Chimurenga logic as much as valorize material interconnections that form the basis for community. Relative to what Musanga and Mutekwa think of as the novel’s use of “African time” to invite epistemological reevaluation of modern Zimbabwe—in their case of colonial and more generally imperialist attitudes towards African tradition (1302-1304), evident primarily through the

“Western” temporal binary that denies political agency to colonized communities and rationalizes the twining forces of ecological destruction and uneven development in the name of progress (1317-1318)—Bones situates environmental observation and 80 experience at the center of a community formation that can escape not only imperialism but populist nationalism! Marita can understand her environment in a deep way and can teach Janifa to navigate not only “the path to the well” but to recognize rain in the movements of birds and ants (Hove 18) and to otherwise thrive in and adapt to the physical environment. To become part of the “community” that Marita invites her into,

Janifa must relate herself to the physical environment and learn from it enduring but also extensible ways of being in the world. Marita helps Janifa to reflect upon and ultimately to adapt character lessons inherent in the flight of the eagle versus the flight of the hornbill. Whereas the eagle has a streamlined body and can hold a course and fly to a chosen destination (61, 108), winds blow the hornbill off track because the hornbill has too many feathers and so puffs up in the wind (61). Being centered and self- knowledgeable thus becomes a desirable trait even if such wisdom looks insignificant in relation to the “hornbill” and its brilliant show of plumage and power. Within the larger novel, “hornbill” characters such as the government officials and workers at the insane asylum can threaten and even kill “eagle” characters like Marita and Janifa, but they cannot stop the eagles from reaching their destination! When Janifa extolls her own mental if not physical liberation at the end of the novel and praises Marita’s wisdom as the pathway to her freedom (112), Bones implies that environmental-community intersections are tantamount to a community’s physical and cultural survival. Further, the novel’s ending resonates with implicit scorn for the shortsighted “hornbill” characters and the larger regime behind them. Janifa’s “madness” indicts an epistemological system that has evolved in postcolonial Zimbabwe to exploit African traditions rather than to simply dismiss them as Musanga and Mutekwa suggest that colonialism has done in the 81 past. Janifa’s madness condemns facile tradition such as a mother’s control over her child in that Janifa’s mother can commit Janifa for protesting her own rape and for fleeing the sexually inappropriate “healing” of a traditional herbalist (95-96). Characters like Janifa’s mother and other “hornbills” become damnably trapped in a cycle of unchanging tradition that shuts them off from the process of change and mental convalescence that is available to Janifa and others like her, hornbills going rather to “a place where one does not come back like the sun” (112). Bones ultimately condemns populist nationalism for exploiting “Shona” and “rural” identities, “puffing up” with a shallow ethnic nationalism.

The “hornbill” characters in the novel do not and cannot recognize the community principles that Janifa, Marita, and others demonstrate. A new form of community thus emerges from environmental-community intersections without reifying a populist and anti-colonial logic that inextricably links the Shona to their lands.

The community principles modeled in Bones by “eagle” characters’ navigation of and adaptation to environments that operate on multiple spatial registers create an overall literary nationalism. The future of the “Zimbabwean community” in the novel, moreover, depends upon material intersections between culture and nature. Profound material connections across different spaces within the novel are intelligible through a traditional

Shona and ethnophilosophical lens. Characters in Bones do not merely influence each other by power of personality but rather work across seeming material divides to communicate and inspire, particularly through the vehicle of living ancestry. Because in

Hunhu ethnophilosophy a person exists on a material plane with every other being, alive or dead (Martin 216), communal bonds take on a material significance that defies social hierarchy and undermines spatial separations. The city space in which Marita dies 82 intersects a larger material plane in which some Shona individuals become ancestors.

When Marita’s friend from the bus risks her own life to go to the morgue and demand

Marita’s body (Hove 67) so that she might give it a proper burial (68), the chapter valorizes the material journey that the larger novel establishes for Marita in a later chapter called “The Spirits Speak” and in which Marita appears to live on as an ancestor.

The novel’s vision of material continuity depends upon a complex cultural framework that interprets and mediates boundaries between life and death42, boundaries that in turn dissolve in the environmental systems that teach Marita, Janifa, and others how to interact with one another. According to Shona tradition, as evoked by the novel’s repeated description of the morgue as a place where no worms can grow (79, 103), worms decompose a body, and when a worm or caterpillar finally emerges from the gravesite, that animal becomes the spirit of the deceased, which will wander unless ritual observances and the overall memory of others bring the ancestor back home (Murungu).

Bones establishes spatial and material boundaries in order to map a community that persists in shared memory and materiality as exemplified by Marita’s journey from human to ancestor. Building upon the trope of ancestral and natural sources for a community’s identity, Bones exceeds what literary scholar Matthew Engelke, who compares the nationalism in Bones to Mugabe’s, calls expressive nativism. Strong environmental and community intersections in the novel do not reduce to simple nativist claims to the land nor lead to expressive nativism’s most blatant feature, which is an environment that resonates with and directly speaks the will of a community (Engelke

28-29). Rather than merely reify social relations within a nation that the Mugabe regime had inscribed as Shona, community-environmental intersections in Bones situate and 83 contextualize the adaptations of a Shona community to a changing environment, which representations for Engelke center around a dynamic and diverse community’s shared language for nature (34-35). For me, the “natural” language in Bones belies the entanglement of community and environmental health and makes visible a community’s struggles for both. Bones juxtaposes the idea that people travel through an endless array of material states with the openness and interconnection of all bodies within the material plane as when Marita remembers her brother who died of smoke inhalation while working in cane fields. She remembers that the workers’ bodies were “like trees burnt black, with legs and eyes” (Hove 70). The simultaneous destruction of the fields and the workers imbricates the social and the environmental, Marita’s bitterness and anger over industrial farming practices (70) belying the disruption to her family caused by environmental degradation. Marita’s inability to bring her brother’s body home for burial rights after his “bad death” (70) further suggests community disruption, particularly in terms of a community’s ability to attend to its own spiritual and material continuity. The fact that doctors forbid Marita from taking her brother’s corpse out of fear of contagion, defending their decision with “scientific” rigor (70) goes even further to pose an epistemological crisis over the nature of life and death, a crisis that simultaneously threatens a community’s future and an environment’s integrity.

Nationalism in Bones ultimately derives from an environmental imagination in which material interconnectivity resonates beyond the specific confines of Hunhu ethnophilosophy and creates shared responsibility and identity. Shared identity amongst characters in Bones tests the potential of what ecocritic Stacy Alaimo, who intervenes into feminism from a new materialist understanding of the human body, calls trans- 84 corporeality or the “time-space where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment’” (238). Because Bones represents the material boundary between bodies and environments as porous, the novel’s nationalist ethos depends upon a sense of shared physical endangerment that trans-corporeality can also generate. Threats to environments immediately become threats to communities in Bones, yet the novel’s invocation of Shona ethnophilosophy works to deepen and complicate relationships between a community and its environment. Alaimo’s position that a society always politically inscribes and mediates a biological sense of trans-corporeality (246-

248) suggests the necessity of political battles over a community’s identity of the kind that Bones explores. The inseparability of human bodies and environments in Bones operates in a complex spatial and temporal pattern to not only create a sense of shared environmental vulnerability but also a sense of environmental responsibility tied to the community’s projection of itself into the future. When Janifa relates at the end of the novel that she has removed the chains of her bondage and cured herself of mental affliction, she suggests that the ultimate cure comes from her environmental connections and the moral practices that Marita helped her to build from such connections: “I will stand here to watch the rising sun, to see the little animals jumping up and down with the power of the early sun to start a new fire to cleanse the infected soil” (112). Janifa’s cure comes from her ability to stand as animals stand and not separate herself from the environment. Connections and energy accrue to Janifa, who simultaneously perpetuates a communal practice that binds Marita, Janifa, and others. To “cleanse the infected soil” of past social violence and of Zimbabwean environments becomes a goad to Janifa and gestures towards a national political consciousness based upon a shared vision of 85 communal and environmental health. Openness to one’s environment resonates less as a biological fact than the result of an ideology that attempts to construct an environmentally and politically sustainable community.

Chinodya and Mungoshi’s Political Ecological Contests of Third-Chimurenga Logic

Rather than reify Mugabe’s conflation of Zimbabwean land with a shallow

“Shona” cultural imaginary, Bones deploys cultural parataxis to complicate the nature of

Shona environmental connections, challenging an easy, nativist sense of belonging by situating Hunhu ethnophilosophy within the post-independence moment. Just as the birth struggles of a Shona “community” in Bones amplify the dangers of a populism that would speak for the national community while denying most Zimbabweans material stability,

Mungoshi’s post-Fast-Track story “The Sins of the Fathers” critiques a national leadership that preys upon the people while claiming that it protects and provides for them as Shona leadership has always done. The story stages the Mugabe regime’s historical projection of itself by means of the third Chimurenga or the prophesized return of the Shona to their lands following colonialism. In the mode of family gothic43, “The

Sins of the Fathers” centers upon a family crime that might or might not have happened.

The protagonist Rondo sets the pace for the story as he reflects and remembers tensions between his father and his father-in-law that might have led Rondo’s father to order a vehicular homicide that took the lives of the father-in-law and Rondo’s two children.

Rondo’s ability to understand reality progressively requires that he faces “uncanny” tensions between his two elder relatives. Such tensions represent what literary scholar

Pauline Dogson-Katiyo, who connects Mungoshi’s story to the Zimbabwean land question, calls a choice of national leadership styles. Within tensions between a strongly 86

“Shona” leadership that Dogson-Katiyo ties to the father and a more inclusive and less imperialist leadership that she ties to the father-in-law (52-53) lies not only the question of land redistribution that Dogson-Katiyo raises but also questions of political consciousness, the ways in which Zimbabwean subjects perceive and make political choices, particularly in relationship to the land that drives national debates. Connections to land become uncanny in “The Sins of the Fathers” just as they become defamiliarized and elusive in Bones. In both cases, the actual land and environmental bases for a Shona community discursively undermine the political apparatus of “Shona” national governance, which in Mungoshi’s story, though set a later historical moment than the one that Bones inhabits, still clearly fails to express the will of “the people.”

Communal connections are uncanny in Mungoshi’s story to the extent that Rondo, in his grief and reflection, experiences a push-pull in relation to a larger community from which he has been cut off through his relationship with his father, which is ironic given the father’s exalted status in the “Shona” government. The overbearing relationship that

Rondo has with his father and that Dogson-Katiyo compares overall to the relationship between the Zimbabwean people and the national government produces the fog through which Rondo sees the events of the story. Questions of community identity and belonging open through the stupor in which Rondo mourns his dead relatives and a crowd gathers in a tent set up outside of Rondo’s house. The narrator relates that “for the whole week

[Rondo] had been hearing the low continuous buzz of murmuring voices, broken now and again by the keening and wailing of some female new- arrivals, as the mourners came in and went out of the tent” (Mungoshi 138). Although Rondo’s dazed awareness stems in part from trauma, the shift in the narrative suggests that Rondo has lived in isolation from 87 a larger community. The Gothic frame for the story projects communal over family drama when in the midst of his family’s grief, Rondo discovers a “Shona community” that in turn reveals his family’s true status:

And then he heard all the voices as one, a strong hushed roar—wild beasts on the

rampage? A distant river in flood? Only it was July, height of the cold dry season.

Some voices had found lodging in his mind and he had heard—and understood

that they were all talking of what had happened in his home. It was not natural,

they were saying. And then there were the songs. The haunting songs that the

women had sung all night, every night, throughout the whole week, and that were

now echoing back to him as he sat there across the fire from his father. (139)

As the narrative depicts the crowd of mourners as something that Rondo cannot avoid, their voices rising from a setting that suddenly changes to an unfamiliar but strangely natural landscape, “The Sins of the Fathers” reveals the gulf that Rondo has faced with regards to a larger “community.” The location of the community in Rondo’s imagination belies a stereotypical image of the Shona in all of their environmental trappings. Death rituals, presumably related to spirit religion, enter into Rondo’s mind but mystify him and along with the shifting landscape reveal a mindset (Rondo’s) that regards communal frames of reference through a hazy lens. ZANU-PF invocations of a Shona national identity and Chimurenga logic resonate through Rondo’s perception of community and echo all the more because Rondo’s father the former governmental minister sits beside him when the community suddenly “speaks” (to Rondo and presumably not to the father).

The fact that the former minister consoles his son by callously suggesting that Rondo will thank him later for what has happened (139) and that Rondo can have other children 88

(140) implies that the father has little regard for “communal” notions of continuities between life and death despite his role as a Shona leader. The community thus appears to ideologically hail Rondo through a fog of populist rhetoric. Rondo’s relationship with his father has obscured a real “Shona” identity, the existence and nature of which becomes the primary cause of gothic unrest in the story!

In its Gothic re-imagination of the nation, “The Sins of the Fathers” re-assesses the role of prophecy as a basis for a “Shona” community, ultimately suggesting that prophecy is less a mystical artefact than the result of intuition and observation. The fact that a “Shona” community appears to see the truth of the ex-minister’s murderous nature long before Rondo raises questions of historiography and national identity. Relative to what postcolonialist Gerald Gaylard, who connects Southern and postcolonial Gothic literature along a shared subalternity, calls postcolonial Gothic’s interminable suspension of historical narratives and refusal to grant easy access to a national or otherwise stable identity (5-6), interpretation and historical inquiry become greater imperatives in “The

Sins of the Fathers” than joining a community founded upon prophecy. Whereas for

Gaylard postcolonial Gothic’s suspension of historical narratives mirrors postcolonial national trajectories in their ongoing dialectical tensions between traditional and modern dynamics (10), the father in Mungoshi’s story, like the Mugabe regime that he represents, is less the voice of modernity than of a shallow “Shona” identity. Oppositions between shallow and “real” Shona identities erupt in an overdetermined and exaggerated way.

Although prophecy alone appears to counter the voice of Rondo’s father in his cold rationalism and his political expediency, the truth of Shona prophecy or related ethnophilosophical concepts becomes less important in “The Sins of the Fathers” than the 89 ability of an uncorrupted or “subaltern” position to challenge the father’s narrative for the accident. Mungoshi’s narrator frames the story from the first lines as the question of whether or not Rondo will shoot his father (37), which anticipates evidence or guilt that the story has not yet revealed. Following such a blatant question of heuristic approach to reality, the scene of prophecy comes out of nowhere precisely because Rondo has for so long suppressed forms of identity that do not suit the father. The father’s presence as

Rondo sees the truth echoes multiple scenes in which the father exerts rigid control over

Rondo’s intellectual and emotional development. The show down promised by the story’s opening lines thus raises questions about how historiography and national narratives shape visible reality and limit identities. Mugabe’s regime had created a national imaginary, “The Sins of the Fathers” suggests, that suppressed but did not extinguish alternative narratives. Subaltern identities related to prophecy act as a standpoint from which to reevaluate Zimbabwean history and form a new political consciousness rather than to re-inscribe a pre-colonial one.

Connections in Mungoshi’s narrative to land form an even stronger yet no less

“Gothic” goad for community formation. The prophecy that helps Rondo to see his father’s sins becomes stronger during the progression of the narrative from the present to the past, serving as prophecy not only in content but in form as “truth” repeatedly radiates towards Rondo and at last enters his consciousness, triggering the narrative’s movement from suspense to resolution. “A distant river in flood” returns within the narrative and so draws attention to the narrative’s textual inscription of prophecy, casting the land through which prophecy reveals itself to a community as unstable, the subject of ongoing discourse. What Gaylard observes as Gothic’s mirroring of postcolonial national 90 trajectories becomes textually inscribed in the landscape of “The Sins of the Fathers” as the narrative reveals the chronologically earlier prophecy. Just before the conflict that led

Rondo’s father to order the father-in-law’s assassination, Rondo is in a car with his father and father-in-law, on the way to visit a farm that the father is interested in acquiring.

Sitting in the backseat while the father drives, “something affected the atmosphere so that the heat seemed subdued and the air acquired the dark colour of old memories.” Rondo imagines that a duiker at any moment will dash across the road, “and more from a forgotten or unknown memory rather than a remembered reality, his nostrils were filled with the smell of fresh water” (152). Because the stream comes into view but the duiker does not (152), “The Sins of the Fathers” neither denies nor confirms the existence of

“Shona” mystical connections to land in the form of prophecy. Rondo’s strong connection to the land is in fact not strong enough to generate a vision of what will follow or to prevent it. The strangeness of Rondo’s environmental connection to the water, however, resonates through the story and comes back in the form of the “distant river” that is simultaneously the water speaking to Rondo again and an act of meta- narrative. The self-reflexivity of the representation for Rondo’s “environmental connection” ultimately suggests that such connections discursively belong to a Shona ethnic imaginary but may have quite a different reality from the one that Rondo imagines in his hyper awareness. Further, if Rondo is experiencing “old memories”—presumably the result of his Shona ethnicity and ancestral ties to the landscape—he has no basis for understanding or acting upon them, which the narrative suggests through his failure to comprehend reality until much later. The overall narrative inscription of prophecy within the Gothic mode by which characters intuit what reason does not reveal thus casts 91 connections to land as a suspect basis for knowledge and thus as a suspect basis for the formation of a stable national or communal identity. As “The Sins of the Fathers” de- centers the shallow “Shona” imaginary that the Mugabe regime has deployed to authorize redistribution of land that has benefitted the ruling party and its associates more than others, the basis for land claims opens for reevaluation. Compared with Mungoshi’s earlier writing in the Shona language, the modernism of “The Sins of the Fathers” leads to a much more unknowable sense of environmental connection than the multiple land- based identities that literary scholar Maurice Vambe (“History”) finds in an earlier

Shona-language novel by Mungoshi. In contrast to the multiple options for rural Shona beyond “the peasant option” that Vambe finds in Mungoshi’s Second-Chimurenga-era narrative (211), the Third-Chimurenga-era “The Sins of the Fathers” appears to undercut and complicate rather than expand upon the potential for a land-based national identity.

Fleeting depictions of land-based identity become almost mythical and unquantifiable in juxtaposition with the Gothic framework for land-based prophecy in “The Sins of the

Fathers.” Rondo learns about a rural “tribe” that is so secure in its land practices that it can execute rituals for a white farmer, causing “bumper crops” on the farmer’s land and leading to a productive relationship between the Pazho people and the white agribusiness man (Mungoshi 155). The fact that the central conflict of “The Sins of the Fathers” revolves around a dispute between the father who is willing to steal land from a farming couple because they are white and the father-in-law who protests and tells the story about the Pazho as he confronts Rondo’s father (155) further expresses the cultural slipperiness of claims to land. The father-in-law’s resistance to the father stems less from a stable ethnic background than from a willingness to connect and adapt the stories of various 92 communities to current situations. Religious connections to land become less the grounds for land claims than do the hospitality and cultural openness demonstrated by the Pazho.

An ethnophilosophical ability for communities to adapt to their environments becomes the ultimate source of community instability and unknowability in “The Sins of the Father,” a source of slipperiness that the narrative deploys against the Mugabe regime’s Chimurenga logic in order to reimagine the Zimbabwean land question.

Mungoshi’s narrative ultimately envisions the land question in terms of collective land title or relative to a “community,” which becomes intelligible through its land usage and its meanings for land as it addresses and overcomes problems. The narrative therefore pushes far beyond what Vambe, in a wider study of land-based resistance and its representation in Southern African fiction, calls a common political imaginary both within governments and within national literatures. “The Sins of the Fathers” avoids what

Vambe calls a common trope of small-scale farmers fighting against agribusinesses, a rhetorical appeal based upon misunderstandings of the “peasant option” for Africans as well as upon nativism and anti-colonialism (“Fictional” np). However, relative to

Vambe’s argument that depictions of land-based resistance to imperialism must move from the question of to whom land rightfully belongs towards notions of national stability and ecological sustainability (np), “The Sins of the Fathers” remains somewhat agnostic.

Land grabs like the one attempted by Rondo’s father are a problem largely because they benefit an individual at the expense of a community as confirmed by Rondo’s premonition and environmental vision just prior to the conflict between the father and the father-in-law. A community appears to create and maintain the most ecological and political “balance” in the narrative, but the path to that wisdom and hence to sustainable 93 land practices is not fixed! Likewise, the nature of a “community” is flexible and ties to its sustainability and health, which supports Vambe’s desire for national stability without denying the process of commoning, in this case enclosing land for the purposes of a shared future on that land. Although environmental imagination of land in Mungoshi’s

“The Sins of the Fathers” ultimately connects political control and growth to environmental awareness and the ability to make collective decisions about land, political and cultural mediation of environmental connections, which Buell names the environmental consciousness, becomes a conspicuous source of narrative instability. In the sense that Mungoshi’s Gothic modernist narrative squares the individual who would act independently—the father in terms of his attempted seizure of land and Rondo in terms of his waffling and inability to act even once he realizes the truth (159)—with a nebulous “community,” the fog through which Rondo sees environments and the greed through which the father sees them indict the ideological impacts of Chimurenga logic as a negative form of mediation that acts upon environmental relationships and perception.

Chimurenga logic may promote itself in terms of the Shona community, but Mungoshi’s narrative clarifies that such logic isolates individuals from a larger community and a larger environment by fostering the crass individualism and selfishness that the father displays fully and that has infected Rondo. When the story ends with a still confused

Rondo surrendering his gun to his father, who then shoots himself out of guilt for his part in the murder of Rondo’s family (160), “The Sins of the Fathers” implies that the Mugabe regime needs to be punished for undermining a robust “Zimbabwean community.” The ex-minister’s coming to justice further suggests the impossibility of removing the bases for community resistance even as the ruling party brutalizes opponents and rewires land 94 practices and environmental access44. An environmental consciousness nonetheless remains, not tied solely to rural communities but beckoning characters like Rondo even in the suburbs of Harare.

The power of an environmental consciousness in Zimbabwe to galvanize common identities and political action, which in “The Sins of the Fathers” crosses urban and rural borders and situates a community in terms of its ability to adapt to changing environments, escapes the orbit of political pan-Africanism that has “captured” traditional environmental knowledge in the past. Chinodya’s post-fast-track story

“Queues” likewise interrogates the location and ultimately harnesses the power of an environmental consciousness against what Denise Martin distinguishes overall from living ethnophilosophical pan-Africanism as populist appeals to Southern African or

“Bantu” identities. Contrasting shallow pan-Africanism in its rationalization of ultra- nationalism, living ethnophilosophical pan-Africanism, a spiritual and community framework with broad legibility in Southern Africa and beyond, emphasizes a rigorous process of moral development that Martin situates at environmental-community intersections. Because Hunhu ethics drive individuals to relate proper action to the confluence of natural and spiritual influences that Hunhu cosmography suggests is the root of human existence (Martin 213), the selfishness of characters in Mungoshi’s and

Chinodya’s narratives opens ethical dilemmas. As a “community” claims Rondo in “The

Sins of the Fathers,” it claims him in terms of communal and environmental ties that have become atrophied and vestigial, ambiguous. Similarly, the blatant womanizing and sexism of the Chinodya-like narrator in “Queues” manifests a lack of moral development that individuals, in Hunhu terms, must choose and maintain. Whereas the usually cowed 95 and withdrawn Rondo lacks the vitality that Martin claims is the goal of Hunhu ethics, the ability to stand in relation to all other beings and manifest a “goodness” based upon such intentional interrelation (216), the narrator in “Queues” appears to channel a lack of connection to a wider community into serial sexual conquests. His entire vision for the nation has in fact become sexualized and reduced to notions of dominance and submission! As he alternatively narrates an ultimately exploitive relationship with a woman that he met on a plane and comments upon Zimbabwean politics, the narrator describes post-independence Zimbabwe as an African man courting a white, Euro-centric world, which he represents as a tart wearing “a wig and sweet-smelling musk, large round earrings, a black T-shirt, a short denim skirt and black gogo shoes” (Chinodya 47). The question of Zimbabwe’s national identity revolves around Europe’s acquiescence to intentions that the narrative suggests overall that Zimbabwe has learned under English colonialism. Crass exploitation doubles in the narrative, echoing between the

Zimbabwean government in its pursuit of profits and the narrator in his pursuit of sexual validation. Community thus serves, as it does in “The Sins of the Fathers,” as the foil for a protagonist’s moral development or lack thereof. Whether or not the protagonist can escape the negative aspects of his identity ultimately revolves around and tests the power of the “community.” Ambivalence towards community and towards its location relative to the Zimbabwean environment ultimately expresses, in both narratives, a modernism that is typical for Zimbabwean Second Generation writings, a modernism that responds to social corruption and exploitation of pre-colonial identity as well as to a modernity that has weakened the Second Generation’s “tribal” connections45.

Chinodya’s story twines accounts of hyper-masculine characters who mask 96 vulnerability and depression through aggressive womanizing, a state of consciousness that belies cultural confusion and self-conflict. Such a framework for a modernist narrative in turn relies upon what Africanist Musaemura Zimunya studies Zimbabwean

Second Generation literature overall to call a common trope of community disintegration.

In light of the fact that traditional philosophies in Zimbabwe share a common ethnophilosophical belief in curses that befall a community for abandoning proper social and cultural practices, Zimunya follows the common representational structure of the

“cultural drought.” The “cultural drought” trope, which even for Zimunya in his just- post-independence viewpoint appears to be a response to Mugabe’s populism—an invitation to modernist intervention into a “community gone wrong” and against those who would speak for the community—works through the frame narrator in “Queues” and his double the nation of Zimbabwe precisely because they have both lost touch with communal values. As a cultural drought, the narrator’s showing up at a female relative’s place of work in the mid-1970s because he has been expelled from school for participating in anti-colonial protests expresses the dilemma of the “native intellectual” in

Fanonian terms. The narrator has a strong anti-colonial sentiment but cannot escape an emasculating desire to emulate the colonists and to possess what they have as when the relative leads him to food after assuring him that the white family has gone on vacation:

“I shoved my modesty into my shorts and she took me to the house and showed me a

‘dick freeze’ loaded to the neck with steaks” (43). Desire and repulsion undergird the double entendre of the scene, which carries pathos because the narrator cannot go home and admit to his parents that he has lost his “good” colonial education despite a growing tide of hostility against white Rhodesian rule. The “exile” scene thus contextualizes the 97 greater narrative in relation to the question of decolonization, both mental and physical, the narrator’s week with his relative the maid spent writing stories and eating the white family’s food and listening to their records in secret (43-44). As the overall narrative builds, it doubles the narrator as the nation and thus pushes the cultural drought trope to the level of postcolonial critique. Because post-independence “Zimbabwe” can never seduce “Europe,” despite repeatedly courting her and paying for every date (47) and for agreeing to all of “her” terms (50), true decolonization seems far off. The native intellectuals and native leadership that the frame narrator stands in for cannot apparently resist emulating colonial patterns just as the frame narrator could not resist the white family’s food and records. The drought works on an intellectual level because

Zimbabwe’s national and intellectual leadership wrestles with too many “isms” from

Europe: the narrator personifies Zimbabwe as politically diverse (51) but caught in a cycle of imported capitalism, racism, and sexism, chauvinism that occasionally saw weak

“local” philosophies like Hunhuism that could not reverse the psychological impacts of imperialism (53). The drought works on a physical level as a result of the intellectual

“perversion” of Zimbabwe’s postcolonial leadership. Much of the narrative describes the changes in material security that befell Zimbabwe post-independence. Just as the frame narrator sets up his narrative of a sexual relationship with Rudo with a scene of exile and emasculation, Zimbabwe’s inability to “score” with “Europe” sets up postcolonial

Zimbabwe’s squandering of its agricultural prowess through an over reliance on export agriculture and the subsequent economic collapse that would lead Mugabe to institute the

Third Chimurenga Fast-Track program and lead to even greater levels of material instability. Thus, in both the case of the frame narrative and its “Zimbabwe” double, 98 postcolonial critique opens through the ongoing psychological and material impacts of colonialism, literal and intellectual precarity framing “Queues” from the first scene of forced exile.

Although much of the narrative conflict within “Queues” forms around “native leadership” and the ineffectiveness of the Mugabe regime’s Shona populism, the story triangulates a “community” through an environmental consciousness that asserts the popular land question as the best way forward to a stronger nation. In terms of an environmental consciousness as a mediated connection to the environment, one that changes along with social and cultural mores, the frame narrator in “Queues” promotes respect for the environment because he understands how a change in environmental connection has led to the nation’s collapse. The narrator clarifies that past leadership used environmental connections to make decisions that benefitted larger swaths of the

Zimbabwean population than those who benefit under the ZANU-PF46. When “the spirits of the land sometimes smiled, and sometimes frowned” before independence (44), and after independence in 1980 “Chaminuka and Nehanda smiled and released a deluge of rain to wash away all of the blood and pain of the war” (46)—it seems to be largely because people made choices about their lands that allowed them to weather drought and other disasters. The adaptability of rural life that Mungoshi implicitly valorizes in his earlier Shona-language writings seems to equally appeal to Chinodya’s narrator when reflecting on early Zimbabwean independence. Because people made decisions that benefitted each other and adapted to the environment as needed, Zimbabweans in the past seem to have avoided the cultural drought that plagues Chinodya’s frame narrator and his double. The smiles of Chaminuka and Nehanda reveal the ways in which a Zimbabwean 99

“community” when taken as a whole survived together by means of an apparently widespread environmental consciousness that routed connections to land through a spiritual system that favors interrelation and collective decision making. Chinodya’s narrator valorizes such an environmental consciousness as producing not only the nation’s material sustenance, its survival despite war and drought in the past, but also a thriving physical environment as when “hippos waded out of the rich mud” alongside

Zimbabweans who were “dirt poor” but who “seldom starved” (45). A Zimbabwean community’s loss of respect for the physical environment in “Queues” mirrors the narrator’s loss of connection to others as well as the narrator’s double’s crass opportunism. Although an overall process of neo-colonialism seems to lead overall to the change in Zimbabwean postcolonial politics, in Chinodya’s narrative a very particular and personal psychological shift also occurs that constitutes a new environmental and community consciousness. Underlying shifts in community and environmental consciousness within “Queues” is a commitment to land reform that both literary scholar

Irikidzayi Manase and Vambe have observed in Chinodya’s writing. Manase, who like

Vambe, thinks about Zimbabwean depictions of land-based political resistance overall, links Chinodya’s fiction to a growing land hunger that responded to land expropriations under colonialism, later neo-colonial land interventions, and that eventually forced

Mugabe into the ill-fated Fast-Track program (7-8). Vambe, like Manase, situates

Chinodya’s depiction of land-based political resistance within a postcolonial trajectory, differentiating Chonodya’s poetics from those of the Mugabe regime, which focus on the return of the “Shona” to their land as the end of all cultural and spiritual dilemmas, the highest good for the nation (25). In terms of what Vambe and Manase both argue is 100

Chinodya’s historical contextualization and complications of land-based identities, dynamics that exceed the earlier politics of land hunger and exceed what Vambe calls the simple black-and-white racial dynamics of Mugabe’s anti-colonial land reform

(“Fictional,” 29), Chinodya’s “Queues” indicts “native leadership” of continuing a colonial tradition of disrupting communal connections. In contrast with the Mugabe regime’s invocations of a Shona return to the land as the highest political good, the selfishness of characters in Chinodaya’s narrative expresses a continuing cultural drought. Ironically, the narrator can mourn but not reproduce an environmental and communal consciousness, revealing along with his double a new way of seeing the nation and its lands. In the sadness and grief that the narrator experiences in his inability to connect to others or to a wider, shared environment, however, lies an implicit valorization of collective environmental decision-making.

The shift in environmental consciousness that underpins what the narrator calls

“the depth of my depression” (44) is both a personal and national phenomenon in

“Queues,” which suggests the potential for shared identification through the land of

Zimbabwe and a more inclusive system for land distribution despite the obstacles to community formation. “Queues” expresses a shift in a “Zimbabwean” environmental consciousness through scenes of intense resource commodification that undercut a formerly shared sense of environmental belonging. The narrative projects such a shift onto every Zimbabwean despite the ways in which national leadership plays a clear role, suggesting that the Mugabe regime has manipulated widespread Zimbabwean land hunger for its own political survival, taking advantage of the fact that “the national cake was getting smaller, but suddenly everyone wanted a piece” (49). The regime appears to 101 exploit land hunger—the result of colonial and neo-colonial dynamics overall—through a virulent nationalism that promises environmental commodities for loyal “Shona” citizens.

Everyone is soon clamoring for their “piece” including the peasants, teachers, and ex- combatants (49), whose violent occupations of white farm land would drive Mugabe into the Fast-Track program as a way of averting a military coup. There is a fervent self- righteousness to the greed that replaces a former environmental consciousness as “pastors and priests in the pulpits of poverty pined for Lazarus’ pitiful morsel” (49), suggesting that spiritual connections of all manner suffer because of a rampant material instability and national political ethos of greed. A former environmental consciousness morphs further in the alternating, short narrative segments of “Queues,” self-interest becoming a shared Zimbabwean identity and erupting in the urban lines for petrol that give the story its name. The narrative of economic collapse becomes personal again as the narrator spends a day of waiting for his petrol rations along with dozens of others who talk about the lengths that people are going to so that they might secure their “pitiful morsel” whatever that might be (57-58). Visible through a fog of self-interest, the resources of

Zimbabwe appear in the lists of frustrated people in line: “bread, sugar, maize, mealie- meal, salt, and cooking oil” (58). Further, discrepancies in material stability become a shared obsession for the diverse crowd (58-59), creating on the largest level a form of cosmopolitical identity that Manase, who also studies fictional representations of

Southern African cities, links to spatial divides that are common throughout the region.

While common ground does open for the crowd in terms of what Manase calls the

Southern African city, a shared experience of cities that split into rich and poor areas (90) and so allow meetings across borders that border crossers often face as initially bleak and 102 tumultuous spaces (93) and a shared sense of dislocation (95), the city and its queues in

Chinodya’s narrative ties strongly on a national level to wider forces of environmental disruption that appear to impact everyone in the country. The dialogue of the crowd links urban and rural Zimbabwean spaces through a shared process of intense resource commodification as when rural farmers earn prizes for growing commodity crops and townships horde supplies and sell them to city dwellers for “five or six times the normal price” but without a wait in lines (58). Resource scarcity becomes the common experience and drives the popular Zimbabwean land question towards a dialectic between individual and community survival and commodity farming47. As all resources, human and environmental, gain a market price, a shared process of enclosure creates a

Zimbabwean identity based upon a common reliance on the environment and the shared social and cultural precarity that emerges with environmental instability.

Ultimately, “Queues” denies an easy path to community, rather identifying and problematizing the moment at which a once shared environmental consciousness becomes a neoliberal obsession with the flow of commodities, the narrative’s modernism tracing the arrival of a neoliberal modernity in the most intimate aspects of the frame narrator’s life. The relationship between Rudo and the frame narrator promises connections and shared identification that the other narrative threads work against, creating a sense of pending doom for the relationship even as it starts. A more directly ironic dismissal of the relationship stems from the ways in which the narrator equates

Rudo’s potential for lasting connection to the environment: “Perhaps it was true that she had lain fallow for years, that she had survived the droughts and famines of her life, that she was now waiting dangerously to be ploughed up and seeded and fertilized” (49). 103

Rudo appears to have maintained an integral vision for herself akin to the environmental- community continuity that “Zimbabwe” demonstrated in the earlier narrative. Avoiding the cultural drought that seems to plague the narrator, Rudo holds forth the potential to bond with another, the language of bonding linked to the environmental adaptability that has defined Zimbabweans in the past. Rudo’s survival of “droughts and famines” enables the commoning that David Harvey considers overall to be an important aspect of community and cultural survival precisely because she has preserved a space to meet others and to build a future upon. Yet, the narrator also conflates Rudo with the earth in a fully commodified way, his sexual stereotyping and covetousness evoking the wider processes of enclosure that have eroded common identification. In relation to Harvey’s assertion that commoning and enclosure work in dialectical relationship to produce the human and environmental potential that capitalism creates profit from by enclosing (105), the narrator’s ambiguity towards Rudo, as both promise and threat of communion, belies intense political economic shifts in the post-Fast-Track, post-transition era. The fact that political and material disruptions surrounding the land question have created a new political subjectivity defines the modernist literary nationalism in Chinodya’s narrative.

When the frame narrator breaks up with Rudo and brings “Queues” to a close, confessing that he has grown up selfish, “sleeping in endless queues” and unable to let people into his heart because he has “waved away kindness and trapped myself among the Combis of my own selfishness” (61)—“Queues” textually inscribes the limits of a neoliberal political subjectivity and infuses it with pathos. To the extent that the physical changes impacting Zimbabwe have limited the narrator’s character development by creating an inability to connect to others, the narrative’s sad ending implies a national cause for 104 mourning. A particularly Zimbabwean potential for interrelation and community formation has become enclosed in the queues and queuing for resources that the modernist narrative inscribes as a “Zimbabwean” space with both rural and urban features. The land question under Mugabe has devolved into a source of endless social division and calcifying hierarchies, even as it still reverberates with the historical memory of how Zimbabweans have in the past built sustainable communities by means of a shared environmental consciousness.

Conclusion

The positioning of “environmental communities” along differing ethical and geographical scales is a distinctive feature of Southern African land question literature.

On one hand, the nature of land questions frames their literary imagination on divergent scales. The fact that the literary imagination of land questions often exceeds the fixed geographic and cultural location of land questions within dominant political discourse sets the stage for epistemic rupture. On the other hand, literary form inscribes the postcolonial experience. A new, national political consciousness contrasts colonial mentalities. Such consciousness stands in relief to historical telos, which looms particularly large over Zimbabwean post-independence society.

Narratives by Hove, Mungoshi, and Chinodya share a postcolonial critique of

Chimurenga logic as reductive and ultimately as an obstacle to the formation of a sustainable national community. Zimbabwe’s postcolonial trajectory becomes problematic in all three cases because of the cognitive dissonance between populist notions of community and the experiences of protagonists whose character development depends, in a variety of complicated ways, upon the health of communities and upon 105 processes of community formation. Pre-colonial communities that once adapted to their environments through environmental observation and prophecy appear in all cases as foils for characters who contend with postcolonial conflicts and test the limits of a shared identity. In Hove’s Bones, environmental observation and connection alienate characters from other Zimbabweans, suggesting the difficulty of learning such “Shona” traits and reframing community formation as a flexible commitment to shared principles rather than the ethnic imaginary that has driven postcolonial politics in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Set against the later historical moment in which the Mugabe regime warded off a crisis of authority by securing a “return of Shona lands” that created new forms of social injustice,

Mungoshi’s “The Sins of the Fathers” and Chinodya’s “Queues” defamiliarize

“community” and reevaluate the bases for future justice.

Because all three narratives interrogate the popular land question as a road to environmental and community sustainability, the fact that all three, albeit in very different ways, rely upon a Zimbabwean community’s historical, ethnophilosophical connections to its environment, reframes such connections within broader discourses of environmentalism. The ethics involved in a community’s adaptations to its environment stem in part from what new materialists think of as the inseparability of human bodies and human societies from the environment. Narratives by Hove, Mungoshi, and

Chinodya position what Alaimo calls the “time-space” of “human corporeality” relative to past acts of “Shona” inhabitation. Rather than nativism, the narratives rely upon awareness and vulnerability to create longstanding connections and claims to the land, whether this be the level of emotional connection to the environment that Marita demonstrates, the powers of observation that the mysterious “community” communicates 106 in part to Rondo, or a past ability to patiently weather droughts and economic calamity in

“Queues.” There is in all of these cases a deep continuity with a Shona past as well as with natural cycles that do not shield a “Shona community” from historical change as much as catalyze a process of constant adaptation and observation. A community’s inseparability from the natural environment creates, in fact, an ethical imperative for character and social development. Whereas Marita and Janifa heed the call and thus more directly model a political subjectivity based upon an environmental consciousness, the narrator in “Queues” and Rondo suffer degrees of ambiguity and frustration towards connections that they can comprehend but not directly act upon. However, the basic disassociation that both Rondo and the narrator of “Queues” exhibit creates pathos around the act of connection and implicitly valorizes it. Connecting to a larger community becomes possible, in all three narratives, because of a biological inseparability between humans and their environments that seems to have fomented complex aspects of Hunhu ethnophilosophy in the past and that still encourages, even in post-transition Zimbabwe, adaptation. Within the cultural imperative of a community’s ability to adapt to its changing environment lies the ecological and “trans-corporeal” potential of a community to impact its environment for the negative or for the positive.

All three narratives frame and test the limits of a Zimbabwean environmental and communal ethics, their narrative form embodying and promoting in different ways the ability of a “community” to create and maintain a healthy physical environment.

107

Chapter Three

Exploring the Myths and Realities of Malawian Connections to the Land: Malawian

Writers Group Poetry against Neo-colonialism

The national imagination of Southern African land question literature takes its shape from and in response to post-independence political moments that share tensions between traditionalist and modernizing tendencies48. Rural and tribal imaginaries associated with the traditionalists pressure the “national” and “transnational” political imagination of the modernizers, who most frequently write from urban areas, in the colonial languages, and using literary frameworks learned in the course of colonial educations. The inventiveness of literary form throughout the region, when thinking of tensions between modernizers and traditionalists, represents a local and regional phenomenon caused by the interaction of differing discourses. An ethnophilosophical imagination of community provides the most obvious evidence of such interaction. A revised, national imagination expresses traditionalist political will while working in the modernizer’s language of governance, adapting the “environmental community” not only for both the colonial concept of “nation” but for colonial literary vehicles such as the novel. As much as the naturalism of Yael Farber’s play and Zakes Mda’s novel exhibits productive tensions between modernizers and traditionalists, as does the modernism of

Zimbabwean novels and short stories, the poetic imagination of post-independence

Malawian literature responds to political tensions that take the clearest shape in Malawian land questions. As Malawian land questions exhibit what is within the region perhaps the most violent tension between modernizing and traditionalist notions of land, a largely poetic imagination arises as a way to reinvent the “nation” while avoiding censorship49. 108

As a vehicle for a literary imagination of the nation, the ideological underpinnings of governance become visible and open for critique in official land questions. The impact of land question programs hinges upon the wider political discourse that surrounds the particular program, or as Blessings Chinsinga puts it, the ways in which “the politics of land” interacts with the systems of governance that derive from such politics. Shifts from communal control over land as a postcolonial legacy of rule by customary authority happen during national transitions to neoliberalism and under conditions of compradorism as exemplified by but in no way unique to South Africa. It is therefore not surprising that the neoliberal willing-buyer willing-seller programs that rhetorically aim to resolve property inequality, in Malawi and elsewhere in Southern Africa, have the opposite impact, as many land question scholars readily acknowledge50. Conversely, despite the dominance within land question scholarship of the idea that communal control over land surpasses the potential of individual ownership schemes for lasting material and political stability51, a restoration of communal land control would entail, in many

Southern African Development Corporation (SADC) countries, sweeping political changes. Such a change requires political feedback between national governance and a community that serves as political and economic unit. In a way that only the government of Botswana has approached52, a SADC nation that enrolls and empowers communities in nationally organized land management practices might encourage sustainability over ethnic notions of land control, pure economic developmentalism, or trenchant localism.

Just as official land questions in South Africa and Zimbabwe have prompted rigorous re-imagination, Malawi’s kleptocracy has precipitated a literary response that marshals the most valuable and enduring facets of Malawian identity against forces of 109 cultural amnesia and fascism. Whereas the South African and Zimbabwean governments have in the past fashioned traditional relationships between communities and land into a shallow populism that has naturalized elite capture and unsustainable land policies,

Malawi’s post-independence government has openly attacked and transformed traditional values related to the land. Malawian president Joseph Banda created the modern

Malawian land question when he lashed the nation’s land to an export economy based upon tobacco and tea, thus precipitating the literary nationalism of Malawian Writer’s

Group (MWG) poets. In the work of MWG poets Jack Mapanje and Steve Chimombo, the Malawian land question prompts both environmental critique and vision. The

“environmentalism” of Mapanje’s 1993 poetry collection The Chattering Wagtails of

Mikuyu Prison and Chimombo’s 1994 Napolo and the Python derives in part from a pan-

Africanist mode of address (one that builds ethical appeals around a regional “African” identity). Reuben Chirambo, who studies Mapanje’s Of Gods and Chameleons, describes pan-Africanism as a common response within the MWG as it faced the Cold War’s forced choice between capitalism and communism (“Subverting” 144) and Banda’s pro-

British and pro-South African policies of cultural and social development that brutally uprooted Malawi’s rural communities (151-152). In an initially pan-Africanist manner, both collections connect traditional values to community and cultural health, suggesting that the loss of such values has led to the “curse” of Banda and that the return of those values can oppose Banda. Within Mapanje’s The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison, a “Bantu” or more broadly “African” traditional environmental knowledge sustains an imprisoned population in some poems and works as the backdrop for cultural loss and deprivation in other poems that follow rural Malawian communities. Many of The 110

Chattering Wagtails’ modernist poems adapt pan-Africanist (regionally shared mythological and religious) links between African communities and their environments to urge resistance to Banda. In Chimombo’s Napolo and the Python, speakers evoke a shared “African” identity in terms of the degree to which the Banda regime has eroded traditional culture as well as the environment. The poems use regionally intelligible myths that have in the past allowed Chewa communities to interpret environmental signs and restructure themselves in relation to environmental change. Chimombo’s poems explore the loss of such interpretive ability while suggesting that Malawian communities suffer because of it.

Despite their initial pan-Africanist tendencies, both collections employ modernist juxtapositions of traditional and modern Malawian identities to emphasize less a shared

African identity than vital intersections between Malawians’ physical and political well- being. The ways in which both works invoke altered but enduring relationships between

Malawians and the nation’s land promote materialist understandings of the physical bases for society and social sustainability. Thus, the work of both poets reinvigorates debates surrounding Fanon’s “African Nationalism,” particularly in terms of its potential for nation building in excess of the violent forces of modernization and collectivization that

Fanon sometimes seeks to harness as part of his “Marxism.” Poems by Mapanje and

Chimombo test and expand upon Fanon’s association in The Wretched of the Earth of the formerly colonized with vital energy and plant growth as the result of representational violence under colonialism (42-43), which is how Fanon frames his wide-ranging concern with the physical health of the postcolonial state and the ways in which health builds upon land, “the land which will bring [the colonized] bread and, above all, 111 dignity” (44). Poems by Chimombo and Mapanje harness the potential of environmental knowledge and experience in a region prone to droughts and floods as the basis for material and cultural prosperity, both in the past and in the future. They situate local and regionally recognizable environmental experience at the heart of a process of decolonization that Fanon claims will prove itself “in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up” (35), literally from the land up, while demonstrating the historical specificity of what Fanon calls national culture or the actions that a culture has taken in the past to define and defend itself. Land in the poetry of Chimombo and

Mapanje continues to be the battle ground, under Banda as under the British, for social and cultural practice. Communal ties to environments in Chimombo’s and Mapanje’s poetry hold memory of past cultural and political survival that Malawians must hold onto and sharpen against present realities and threats.

Land-based Resistance to Historical Overwriting in the Poetry of Jack Mapanje

From the first line of the 1993 long poem “The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu

Prison,” Mapanje’s speaker promotes a political consciousness that the poem locates in a prison that stands in for a nation: “Welcome to the chattering wagtails” (48). Similarly to

South African writer Phaswane Mpe’s representation of a diverse part of Johannesburg in

Mpe’s 2001 novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow, the poem initially depicts the prison as a space of what political scientist Scott Malcomson terms “actually existing / forced cosmopolitanism” or meeting and identity convergence that stems not from choice but from external pressures and crises (238-240). The welcome message repeats throughout the poem and amplifies representations of the prison as an impossibly cramped and diverse place with miraculous room for yet one more prisoner. Mikuyu, according to the 112 speaker, has housed various prisoners from all over Malawi and over several different generations. Mapanje’s speaker clarifies that Mikuyu has multiple histories, originating in design as a prison for the Malawian president (48) while actually housing the ministers of a failed coup attempt (49) before expanding to shelter guards and their families (49) and receive an ever-widening swath of prisoners (50). Compounding the irony of the poem’s welcoming mantra, the speaker clearly stands in for Mapanje, who spent time at Mikuyu as a political prisoner from 1987-1991. The poem pushes its historical and textual inscription of the prison space beyond a sense of terrific but overdetermined diversity and achieves a sustained meditation on the location of the “nation.” Because the prison houses “the nation’s doctors, teachers / diplomats, journalists, lawyers, pastors, / farmers, all the other nameless bumblebees” (50), imprisonment as a vehicle for shared identity seems to undermine the power of such a range of social positions to constitute a politically diverse nation. The “nameless” epitaph further suggests wasted and suppressed democratic potential under the Banda regime. However, the speaker’s litany of the nation’s diverse workforce simultaneously evokes a political consciousness that the poem locates beyond the cramp and austerity of the prison. Cities and rural spaces, along with a fantastic array of ideologies, attach themselves to the “nodes,” of the prison roll call as the poem implies that there are an infinite number of ways to relate to the land of Malawi.

Considering the figures of the nation / prison as “bumblebees” adds a layer of spatial complication to the cosmopolitical sense that people connect to each other through some common “belonging” but in disparate ways. The bees evoke many hives or physical bases from which the prisoners have been taken. They also evoke the democratic nature of bumblebees, who possess such a high degree of social organization that all of the bees in 113 a hive work together, using a complex waggle dance, to vote on and ultimately choose a new place to live. It is in that implicit move towards a new home and questions of how people work together to best build a society that the poem makes visible and attractive a national political consciousness.

Although “The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison” ultimately imagines land as a vehicle for the presumed ability of the now nameless and imprisoned “bumblebees” to constitute a more democratic nation when unimpeded and un-incarcerated, the poem’s spatial poetics often complicate the cramp of the prison as a troublesome but incomplete lack of something more expansive and more “Malawian.” The poem uses free verse stanzas that center upon the space of the prison and link to one another through the device of the welcoming of the new prisoner by means of a tour. The speaker describes the prison’s originally built cells, wing D4: “those brown brick cells, four in front / and four behind, three paces by two” (48). He constricts the space that he describes by following the breadth-giving spondee feet “those brown brick cells,” with the trochaic “four in” and

“front and.” He then moves from the longer syllables of “hind,” “three,” and “pace” to the short syllables “es,” “by,” and “two.” After the meter in these two lines compresses space, the poem moves steadily through the wing to the courtyard that gives the prisoners some sight of the outdoors despite a cramp that the poem creates once again through alternations in the meter: “They built a courtyard, sixty-five bricks / high, twelve paces long, four paces / wide; an open flush-pit latrine rested” (49). A number of long syllables casts the courtyard—which the Banda regime constructed in an annex, the “New

Building” (49)—as initially more spacious than the prisoners’ cells. Yet the poem deploys caesuras between “yard” and “sixty,” “high” and “twelve,” and “wide” and “an” 114 before it fills the trochaic third line, and the courtyard, with the latrine. The poem thus disorients by crafting the courtyard as an open space that nonetheless fails to maintain the expansiveness that the not-quite iambic first two lines promise. Such a space ultimately fills with squalor and bare physical necessity without removing a complicated connection to wider spaces. Within the ever-expanding New Building overall, “that annexe writ large” (49), is a sense of containment that must grow to contain, but cannot contain, a

Malawian identity. The nation arises cosmopolitically through the prisoners’ diversity, their connections to other spaces in Malawi, and their implied resistance as political detainees.

In the process of locating a national political consciousness in the midst of and as a response to political and physical oppression, “Welcome to the Chattering Wagtails of

Mikuyu Prison” revives a Fanonian sense of national culture that works against violent authoritarianism. The poem’s attention to the physical inhabitation of the prison along with subtle references to all of the other places in which Malawians live connects material inhabitation to political power. In literary scholar Lupenga Mphande’s discussion of Mapanje and Chimombo’s poetics, the poets’ primary concern is “a culture that was closer to the experience and the memory of the people, and not just some fossilized version of it,” one that ties to “the history—and the actions—that the people had waged for their own liberation” (np). While inhabitation alone might not constitute actions waged for a people’s liberation, “Welcome to the Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu

Prison” multiplies the prisoners endlessly and suggests that the entire population of

Malawi might one day rest in prison! To enter the prison’s modernist admixture of tradition and modernity, a reference to the Gymkhana where Banda’s forces arrested 115

Mapanje (Mapanje 48) meeting a Christian reference to the biblical figs that give Mikuyu its name (49) meeting a reference to a Chewa circumcision ritual that welcomes prisoners into their new life (49), means rebirth into a subject position that is not strictly pre- colonial but that arises from the postcolonial nature of Malawian identity. The complexity of being Malawian, the poem suggests, works antithetically to Banda’s unilateral reorientations of Malawian social and cultural structures. Cycles of inhabitation in the poem’s prison and in its unseen but implied city and rural spaces create an oppositional Malawian identity that stems from physical “vitality” as the political force that literary scholar Stephanie Clare extracts from her review of Fanon’s work: in Clare’s reading, the ultimate goal of political decolonization is physical health and vitality for the formerly colonized such that “freedom from colonization . . . [is] acting with the earth to fashion land” (72). Similarly to the ways in which Clare reveals the embodied and environed force of decolonization in its material contexts, “Welcome to the Chattering

Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison” connects the “chattering” and other signs of the wagtails’ inhabitation to the prisoners’ political agency. Because the sparrow-like wagtails can fly away while the prisoners must linger below the “wire mesh” on which thousands of birds assemble every day (51), the speaker reinforces the prisoners’ lack of physical freedom, contrasting it with the fluid movements and uninterrupted chatter of the birds.

A tonal change occurs, however, when the birds assemble on the wire overhead:

“thousands of wagtails that sleep standing / on one leg, head under wings, snoring / about today, fabricating their stinking / shit on the courtyard for us to mop” (51). The repeated welcoming to “the chattering wagtails” works with this and other gatherings of the birds to reveal the poem’s chronotope. Layers of birds on the wire “thicken time and space” as 116 the outside spaces of the prison and the inside meet, and the ecological cycles of the area meet the schedules of prisoners as they come in and out of the courtyard. All of the intersections between wagtails and prisoners happen within such a chronotope, imbuing contact with weight and charging the poem with a shared inhabitation. The chattering of birds and presumably of prisoners in the courtyard takes on a vitality and becomes a record of physical inhabitation. Within the space below the wire, excrement gathers from both human and avian sources, becoming another record of bodies and the physical occupation of an environment. The fact that the detainees must mop away such a record and in fact must form “wagtail shit-mopping rosters” in order to keep up with the task

(51) implies that records of inhabitation threaten the regime that runs the prison.

Ultimately, political agency accrues to the prisoners through leavings, verbal and physical, as well as through the prisoners’ connections to the larger environment, no matter how much guards attempt to isolate and erase prisoners from the rest of the nation53.

Exceeding evocations of physical persistence and the power of environmental inhabitation, the accumulation of bird shit stands in for the collective connections that

Malawians have to their various lands, the places that the birds can fly away to and that their broader movements in the poem evoke. The prisoners’ mopping of the courtyards expresses the visceral, “stinking” nature of memory such that “every day you must mop this / courtyard to survive the stench” (51), implying the painfulness of memories of home in the face of imprisonment and immiseration. As the shit piles higher and higher, the poem contradicts more than the guards’ control over prisoners. It counters Banda’s complicity with neo-colonialism in that Banda claimed that Malawians were not properly 117 utilizing their land. The result of Banda’s neo-colonial social engineering, the poem suggests, is the political and physical precarity exemplified by Mikuyu prison. However, the poem also creates a sense of what postcolonialist Joshua Etsy, following Warwick

Anderson, calls “postcolonial excrementalism.” Etsy refers to second generation African writing and its reaction to post-independence nationalism such that “shit can redress a history of debasement by displaying the failures of development and the contradictions of colonial discourse and, moreover, by disrupting inherited associations of excrement with colonized or non-Westernized populations” (25-26). In terms of developmental discourse,

Banda called the rural populations of Malawi backwards and cited development as the way forward to a proper modernity, using this call to progress to rationalize massive land expropriation. By associating those who would claim space (in prison and at home) with shit, the speaker ironically gives redress to a postcolonial discourse (Banda’s) that excrementalizes, that forbids collective claims to land as inefficient and wasteful.

Against the historical “progress” of the Banda regime, “Welcome to the

Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison” asserts and promotes a flourishing ecosystem that exists in “African time” as a multi-temporal sense of interrelatedness. Mapanje’s speaker relates the Malawian national subject to the Malawian environment, which is a dynamic that literary scholar Theophilus Mukhubu surveys Mapanje’s oeuvre to posit as a recurring component of Mapanje’s poetics of political resistance. For Mukhubu,

Mapanje’s “fauna and flora sensibility becomes a metaphorical representation in which urban and rural landscapes, innocence and experience, real and imagined merge in the attempt of making sense of a present reality” (33). The reality of enduring hope and persistent imprisonment and censorship certainly expresses itself through the poem’s 118 meetings of natural and human spaces as when geese float across the sky and cheer the prisoners from their one unfettered view (51). However, the central chronotope goes further than merely, autoconthically setting the prisoners’ (and by extension Malawians’) political struggles on a larger, environmental stage54. When the poem uses animals like the wagtails to connect Malawian prisoners to environments beyond the prison, it reveals a particularly Malawian environmental consciousness. Mikuyu prison serves as a provocative point of reference, a heavily mediated perspective from which Malawians observe an entire ecosystem: wagtails nest on the wire gauze and thus participate in seasonal ecological cycles along with the marshland trees and other plants just out of view in the surrounding area of Mikuyu; similarly, bumblebees—along with “dragon- flies, hundreds of moths / in golden robes” (Mapanje 51)—evoke lower-level flora and fauna that prisoners cannot see from their positions. The mediation of the prisoners’ gaze implicitly condemns the entire social apparatus of the Banda regime as one that attempts to remove people from participation in a wider environment. In spite of such mediation, the poem evokes suppressed but continuing ethnophilosophical connections between environments and communities in a region prone to drought and floods, one in which communities have traditionally adapted social and cultural patterns to the changing environment. When the poem begins to close with a suggestion that such environmental knowledge keeps prisoners alive by allowing them to survive political oppressors that the poem encodes as blood-sucking insects (52), the prisoners enduring because of their

“desert skin” (52), the flourishing cycles of birds and insects surrounding Mikuyu evoke a web of relation (an ecology) that is inherently political. The web stretches indefinitely in time, not just in terms of the seasonal movements of animals but in terms of 119 community growth and the ways in which communities have participated in the health of ecosystems. The apparent health of the ecosystem surrounding Mikuyu, built as it is from the ground up, illustrates a simultaneously environmental and political principle, one that does not become visible in linear, historical time or within a sense of time as wholly natural, cyclical, and removed from social progress. As the poem ends with yet another welcome to the chattering wagtails, it suggests that a vibrant sense of interrelation can create a future for Malawi and can do so despite the oppressions of “progress.”

Similarly to the “desert skin” that survives Banda’s capitalist assaults, “Scrubbing the Furious Walls of Mikuyu” fashions a Malawian identity built to withstand the forces of historical overwriting, taking on eco-Marxist overtones in its conception of political subjectivity. The land that becomes the basis for hope in “Welcome to the Chattering

Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison” also exists as what Marx studies in Capital as a pillar of primitive accumulation. Because the land serves, from a Marxist perspective, as the engine of the “social metabolism”—yielding to human labor and thus creating use values such as crops and natural resources that then drive, through the differentiation of labor, the entirety of the social process (Marx 198-201)—it helps to form both traditional and modern political subjects. Mapanje’s poem illustrates conflicting dynamics within the social metabolism by representing “the vampires of New Building, / those ticks in the cracks of cement floors” and the “fleas in the pores / of your desert skin” (52). Ticks and fleas as vampires preying on the desert skin of Malawians evokes the capitalists that

Marx often refers to as vampires and other monsters. Banda’s capitalist regime transforms the font of Malawian identity, the land, into what Marx follows as dead labor preying on living labor. Banda grows in wealth as his attack on collective land title 120 transforms Malawians into agricultural workers who work themselves into poverty55 much as Marx describes in Capital as the plight first of English peasants-turned-farm- workers and then of English industrial workers. Just as connections to land in “Welcome to the Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison” create a political identity that resists vampiric forces that would completely rewrite Malawian history, “Scrubbing the Furious

Walls of Mikuyu” locates within the speaker a subaltern political agency that arises from the traditional social metabolism. The Mapanje-like speaker serves on a prison roster and so must remove traces of former prisoners from where “they dump those rebels” in “these haggard cells stinking of bucket / shit and vomit and the acrid urine of / yesteryears”

(Mapanje 53). However, the speaker pauses and ultimately refuses to erase evidence of another prisoner’s inhabitation. A collective identification based upon the land of Malawi manifests itself as the speaker relates bloody marks left by a prisoner to the Mphunzi hills where he once “marveled at the rock paintings” (53). The speaker’s connection to a location that has housed centuries of Malawians combats a sense of linear progress in which one prisoner replaces the next, or a “modern,” fully “developed” Malawi replaces one based upon collective land title and subsistence agriculture. “Scrubbing the Furious

Walls of Mikuyu” ultimately models a powerful national consciousness as the speaker holds onto a collective and land-based identity in the face of its programmatic erasure.

When the speaker stops cleaning the cell and asks “dare I / overwrite this precious scrawl?” (54), he reinforces a Marxist and ultimately Fanonian sense of the land as the basis for a national identity that is not as ethnically based as it is materialist in its core assumptions. “Scrubbing the Furious Walls of Mikuyu” works against a merely ethnic or pan-Africanist nationalism by connecting the not-quite-erased prisoner with an eco- 121 system that the speaker also refuses to “overwrite” with his mop. Not overwriting the history of particular Malawian identities leads the speaker into to not overwriting webs of interconnection that include diverse “nodes”: mosquitos and other bugs dot the walls of the cell; flying cockroaches have slept there, and black wasps have somehow found clay to nest in the corner of the cell (53). The layers of insects belie a purposeful sense of interaction between different beings that the poem connects to the diversity of Malawian society by leaving the cell’s former human inhabitant nameless and faceless. No matter who the prisoner was, the poem implies, what matters is that the prisoner related to other

Malawians as well as to the larger environment. Interactions between divergent bodies produce a material history and an identity that in turn the poem’s speaker can read on the walls. The poem implies as much by having its speaker refuse to remove any of the cell’s biological record, human or non-human, vowing to “throw my water and mop / elsewhere” (54). As the poem participates, like other MWG work, in the creation of what

Mphande calls “a different consciousness [that] did insist on the right to inscribe different measures and meanings in the remaking of Malawi” (np), that consciousness builds upon interactions with the material environment. A sense of Fanonian national culture arises in this instance from the radical ways in which the imagined Malawian community empathizes. Such empathy illustrates Clare’s argument that Fanonian decolonization means a psychological sense of wholeness linked to collective control over land (68-70) and leads to the reversal of colonialism’s simultaneous colonization of humans and environments (71). The environmental consciousness that “Scrubbing the Furious Walls of Mikuyu” inscribes includes a culture of environmental sustainability. Prisoners and animals will survive together, the poem implies, because the imagined Malawian 122 community sees itself as a vital part of the environment and relates environmental health to community health. Filth, poverty, and precarity do not rob the poem’s imagined community of its vitality, which serves as the banner overhead a march towards greater political decolonization (as the reversal of colonial hierarchies).

Overall, Mapanje’s poetry collection forms an environmental stance in resistance to forces that threaten to destroy environments and cultures that Chewa and other

Malawian people groups hold as inseparable. In terms of linkages between capitalism and environmental degradation, the collection enables more explicit political ecological thinking elsewhere. A number of poems56 take on political ecology’s adaptation of

Marx’s notion of political economy, adding to interactions between everyday life and economic, social organization a focus on environmental resources and hazards. Whereas

“Furious Scrubbing” and “The Chattering Wagtails” achieve a cryptic sense of spatial expansion in the service of larger environmental and cultural connections, Mapanje’s

“Baobab Fruit Picking” directly critiques Banda’s land expropriations as it conveys a sense of impending precarity and necessary political resistance to the loss of such connections:

But you imported the Boers,

Who visited our chief at dawn, promising boreholes!”

These pine cottages on the beach shot up instead, some

With barbed wire fences fifty yards into the lake! (22)

The alternation between iambic and trochaic feet in all three lines makes more menacing the pun, spoken by Balamanja women, which the poem slips in between “Boers” and

“boreholes.” Each line not only breaks the regularity of the iambs—working with the two 123 caesuras to emphasize Banda’s broken promises—but each creates a spatial crampness that pushes against the opening, expanding space created by the iambs. Although

“Boers,” “promis”-ing, and “cottages” push their trochaic crampness earlier and earlier into the subsequent lines, sonically performing the brutal intrusion of barbed wire into the lake, the fourth line works against this effect. It establishes iambic regularity all the way to the fifth pair of syllables (the trocharic “into”), converting a sense of intrusiveness into one of solidity, an impressive and unexpected bulwark against the women’s subsistence activities.

“Baobab Fruit Picking” creates an environmental ethic by showing how Banda eroded community access to land and thus removed a basis for environmental and social sustainability. From the extending fence trope, the larger poem expands into a political ecological sense of how Banda’s actions have undermined traditional, ancient interactions between a community and its environment such as fishing, fruit picking, agriculture, and the ritual use of the Baobab (22). Although the fence represents a sudden obstacle to the local community’s physical and cultural wellbeing, the larger poem represents intruding factors as multi-form and evolving over time. Factors of uneven economic development compound an apparently earlier expropriation of land such that the women’s husbands have already needed to seek employment far from home in the mines (22). The decline of traditional subsistence activities testifies, through the impact of their absence, to the efficacy of what land scholars Jenny Clover and Siri Eriksen name as the goal of popular land questions, “human security”: this is the political ability to use options on land and other environments for the benefit of individuals and communities, where this benefit is often seen as socially and environmentally sustainable, predicated as 124 it is upon future use (56). The poem uses its central joke to ironically call false Banda’s rhetoric of social improvement as well as wider pro-poor land development schemes, implicitly valorizing the local community as the better steward of both social and environmental health. In a broadly political ecological sense and in the more specific absence of needed “boreholes” for water, the newly arriving Boers, who have acquired

Balamanja land through Banda (23) find local women “shoving dead cassava stocks into rocks, catching / fish in tired chitenje cloths with kids, picking / baobab fruit and whoring” (22). Each of the opening trochaic feet breaks from the iambic pattern that the larger poem establishes and underscores the bitterness with which the women of

Balamanja tell the joke of Banda’s promise. The futility of subsistence in this dying environment57 looms larger as the lines progress from signs of drought, to frustrated fishing as the women find passages on the lake blocked, to the traditional economy’s collapse into prostitution for the South Africans. An apparently thriving community of summering South Africans has, in fact, rewired the lake’s ecosystem and the local economy. A loss of human security stems from Banda’s vision of the area as a tourist attraction and the ways in which this discourse works against the Balamanjans’ longstanding and sustainable practices of inhabitation.

Chimombo’s Modernist Environmental Re-imagination of Malawi

Chimombo’s poetry, unlike Mapanje’s, directly questions the ability of the

Malawian people to marshal traditional environmental knowledge, or pre-colonial culture more generally, against Banda’s political and historical overwriting. Through such questioning, however, the more overtly modernist poetry forms a critique of Banda and fashions an environmental consciousness that can, as is the case with Mapanje’s poetry, 125 participate at first in a national culture and then ultimately in decolonization. The collections Napolo and The Python, brought together in Chimombo’s 1994 book, interrogate two primary frames of Chewa tribal reference: Napolo represents a mythical serpent residing under Mount Zomba who is blamed for earthquakes and landslides throughout Malawi, his movements underground thought to bring rippling catastrophe, natural disaster traditionally understood as a punishment for a community’s moral failures; Mbona represents a mythical hero who rises up to help the Chewa against

Napolo and who can bring rain to end drought as the other major community punishment prominent in Malawi. As “second generation” poetry, the poems in Napolo and the

Python treat such mythology with reverence tempered by cultural curiosity and experimentation as when the speaker of the Napolo cycle of poems goes on an uncertain, self-reflective journey to comprehend the wrath of the serpent and to entreat the help of

Mbona, planning to speak with a prophet along the way. Although Napolo’s destruction of sacred shrines serves as a symbol to the speaker that his community must change

(Chimombo Napolo, 4), he eventually admits that no one knows how to read the signs of

Napolo as revealed by a traditional prophet, adding that the prophet “spoke to us in a strange tongue / and we greeted it with laughter” (5). While the base of knowledge that might have protected the cycle’s community as it stands in for the Malawian nation emphasizes a traditional cause of supernatural punishment, the abandonment of cultural norms, the people’s outright laughter belies the cycle’s modernist deployment of

Malawian pluralism. The people’s inability to respect prophecy despite the opposite intention suggests that Malawians can no longer return to a pre-colonial political imaginary but must instead triangulate themselves between modernity and tradition. In 126 the absence of a clear rubric for cultural interpretation, the poem cycle implicitly relies upon the represented environment as the textual inscription of a Malawian consciousness, revealing intersections between nature and community. The Napolo cycle thus promotes an environmental consciousness that treats the environment as historical and cultural record without objectifying it or otherwise removing it from ethical consideration.

Rather, understanding the plight of the environment becomes tantamount to re-imagining the postcolonial trajectory of the nation.

The Napolo cycle has a paradoxical relationship with traditional environmental knowledge: overall, it expresses the idea that the environment, as per Southern African ethnophilosophy more broadly and Chewa tradition more specifically, can help a community correct its cultural and political practices but in a way that is meta-discursive and modern in some of its interpretive frameworks. The Napolo cycle overtly juxtaposes modern and traditional cultural references, forming a bewildering textual environment in terms of content and changing form, each part of the cycle proving varied and difficult terrain and not always dovetailing with the next. The complexities of both textual environments also emerge from a suspiciously copious use of geography. Chimombo’s speaker opens the poem cycle with a whole mountain range of explosions and disruptions:

Mlauli’s tomb roared:

“Mphirmo! Mphirmo! Mphirmo!

Kudzabwera, Napolo!”

Mbona was checked in mid-leap,

Chilembwe turned over and went back to sleep. 127

Mulanje, Zomba, and Nyika fled their places,

Whimpered and hid their faces.

Shire curled round its course and bit its tail.

Lilongwe reared its head but it was too frail.

Songwe exploded and threw its seed

Into the lake where it caught typhoid. (3)

The rhymed couplets, the only in the poem cycle, leave the bond between the mountains somewhat overdetermined and oversimplified as the poem simultaneously complicates connections as political, mythological, and geological. Such discursive entanglement inherently raises postcolonial critique. Diverse place names that evoke both Chewa and

English history meet a mythological hierarchy of serpents. Napolo will emerge as the victor who scares the other serpents into hiding and reforms the landscape with rain and landslides (3), which follow along geologic lines as well as mythological ones.

Politically, the landscape evokes a changing Malawi as Lilongwe’s frailty evokes the move of the colonial capital in that city to the postcolonial capital of Zomba, which as the traditional origin of Napolo links the spirit with Banda’s postcolonial government as a fellow force of chaos. Yet as much as the geographic litany of the lines gives credence to the common scholarly assertion that the poem cycle and other of Chimombo’s poems use geography and mythology to critique Banda’s government despite widespread censorship58, the litany also exceeds such direct critique. Broader postcolonial critique centers on what Chimombo reveals in a critical work on traditional Chewa riddles as a complex confrontation with moments of historical change and disputes over historiography (“Riddles”). In other words, the discursive complexity of the poem creates 128 a locus for the cultural reevaluation of Malawi. In the Napolo cycle’s Kairotic moment— a cyclical, natural affliction overlaid with political and cultural angst—the journey to discover the nature of Napolo constitutes a journey to discover the future of a people as they face uncertainty.

The Kairos of torrential rains, earthquakes, and landslides in the Napolo cycle situates a community at a precarious cultural and material crossroads, crossroads which in the case of Chimombo’s poetry express the land question as the fundamental question facing the Malawian people. A purely “ecological” viewing of the physical environment that the poem represents reveals soil erosion as the result of cycles of drought and rain and leading to violent landslides of the sort to which Malawi is famously prone for basic geographic reasons. However, the use of the Napolo myth burdens the poem cycle with intersections between culture and the natural environment. The wrath of Napolo serves as a cultural punishment that an objectified and non-agential nature can never represent as when “Napolo gnawed the womb of the earth” and “its teeth uprooted the trees on the banks” (Chimombo Napolo, 3). Napolo as a critical but ultimately unintelligible actor throws into question the cultural practices, the apporia that have led over time to material disaster. Not only do Napolo myths historically reference relationships between the

Chewa (along with other Malawian people groups) and their lands, they do so within a

Southern African literary framework that uses environmental “curses” to engender political response to land questions. Exploring such a framework, Vambe studies a swath of Southern African literatures to draw correlations between communal land title and fertility and environmental abundance, as well as correlations between the erosion of collective land title and drought and dryness (“Fictional” 18-19). Also intervening into a 129

Southern African literary discourse of environmentally situated communities, the Napolo cycle builds off of a wider mythological platform that helps to interpret and intervene into seasonal and periodic variations in the weather and broader environment. Adding Mbona to the mix as one who brings rain after drought, Napolo as one who brings landslides completes a climactic understanding similar to a scientifically “ecological” understanding based upon delicate balances kept in the very soil. As Chimombo’s speaker relates,

Napolo comes only after heavy rains that quenched terrible drought such that “the parched throat of the earth drank it up, / swelled its stomach in pregnancy” (Chimombo

Napolo, 3). Nevertheless, the people’s ability to exert environmental control and to weather environmental disaster attaches to the Napolo and Mbona mythology and to the degree to which a people’s cultural practices, such as collective control over land, remain intact. The Napolo cycle’s tone of simultaneously ecological and mythological awareness valorizes such an ability in the people, doing so in the negative by suggesting a loss of ability (as when the people laugh at the prophecy) and thus implying that a loss of human security has led to even greater ecological disaster. Banda’s agribusiness empire and the ways in which it has transformed the Malawian environment from the soil up lurk in the background of the poem not as the brunt of simple political critique but as part of the popular land question’s re-imagination of the future for both the Malawian people and the

Malawian environment.

In its use of weakened soil that prepares the ground literally and figuratively for

Napolo, Chimombo’s poem cycle builds an environmental consciousness that captures

Banda’s land-based revisions as a process that weakens an entire nation. The Napolo cycle builds an environmental consciousness through the basic framework of the 130 speaker’s trying to understand the environment and what it signifies for a community. In the sense of what Mukhubu looks to Mapanje to describe as a natural sensibility deployed in the mapping of social realities, understanding what has gone wrong in the community and how that has invoked Napolo constitutes at first glance a projection of the social onto an environmental scene. However, the very ability to read the environment becomes the more central target of the poem cycle as when the speaker asks:

And did Napolo pass here indeed?

The trembling earth under my feet?

The roaring waters around my ears?

The hurtling mountains? (Chimombo Napolo, 4)

The fundamentally iambic meter of the lines creates passage, great movement, but motion that leads in each case to an open question. The speaker perceives a powerful environment “trembling,” “roaring,” and “hurtling” in a litany of sublime characteristics.

Yet the speaker seems doubtful of a greater meaning. In terms of an environmental consciousness as the mediation between a subject and the subject’s perception of an environment, a Romantic sublimity mixes in this scene with notional Chewa tradition to decentralize the lines and prompt epistemological inquiry into the very act of interpreting the environment. Although these lines and the rest of the Napolo cycle generate pathos as they suggest an impacted, less empathetic Malawian subject, the anti-Banda nationalism that Africanist Fetson Kalua reads in the cycle’s purposeful ambiguity—its creation of veiled critique by layering modernist adaptations of ‘The Waste Land” onto cryptic uses of Chewa mythology (8-9)—becomes here, equally, an invitation to pierce layers of environmental meaning in search of political subjectivity. The mediation that the speaker 131 undergoes as he perceives the environment becomes important in its own right. His decreased ability to understand the environment stems from a whole suite of material and cultural revisions, all of which relate to Banda but only in so much as Banda has worked through wider neo-colonial influences and helped usher in a social revolution that must be understood before it can be countered:

The nation held its breath:

There had been nothing like it before.

A lifetime of spiritual somnolence,

Intellectual malnutrition,

Improvised existence,

Pressurized underdevelopment,

Programmed exploitation,

Needed Napolo to rouse it. (Chimombo, Napolo, 7)

The coming of Napolo cannot be easily understood, the above passage infers, because new relationships between Malawians and their environments have arisen through a

“modernity” that eliminates tradition through educational programs, uneven economic development, and an entirely different view of the natural environment. Napolo rises like a ghost, a spirit of something past but one that must be understood in new ways because the old mediums (literally in the terms of prophecy) work through a now dead language.

Building upon the problematic of environmental interpretation, Chimombo’s original Napolo poem cycle and his wider collection of Napolo poems work in deeply modernist fashion to protest and ultimately reject colonial and neo-colonial influence.

The social and cultural developmental path that Britain and then Banda set Malawi upon 132 reveals itself in the environmental consciousness of the speaker. He drives up a mountain, parks, and enters on foot into a pilgrimage towards a sacred lake,

Self-consciously inching my way

To the life-giving waters.

Started and stopped,

Knowing the blockage had infected

The blood system, arteries, veins. (21)

Self-conscious, isolated, and feeling separated from the environment that he has come to consult for answers, the speaker manifests an awareness of a cultural infection. Change upon change has led to this modernist moment of the individual cut off from community or other collective identification. In the absence of traditional, prophetic ability, the speaker can diagnose but not cure his affliction. As the speaker manifests connections between long processes of social change and the environment, his environmental consciousness a sign of some alternative way of relating to the land and to other

Malawians, the poem inscribes an anti-colonial nationalism. One scholar suggests in his reading of Chimombo’s collection that colonial and neo-colonial social revisions degrade the landscapes of the poems and thus threaten and ultimately invite a nationalist response from a land-based social majority (Magalasi 85-87). Although the speaker’s infection relates to environmental changes, it belies so many cultural changes that the notion of land-based resistance becomes suspect. The speaker rather implies that individual

Malawians must form an anti-colonial consciousness in spite of a pluralist social reality and in spite of profound social disruption. Valorizing a necessary but cryptic connection between Malawians and their environment without simply echoing an ethnic claim to the 133 land, the poem uses the infection and the pilgrimage tropes to model a delicate process of awareness that the Malawian political subject must guard well against capture, either by

Banda’s populism or by broader neo-colonial forces.

While the Napolo poems’ environmental consciousness holds forth possibilities for national political resistance, the poems participate in a more globally recognizable environmental ethic through the ways in which they record and protest the similar process by which communities and environments become degraded. In a broadly Marxist sense, Chimombo’s poetry like Mapanje’s positions environmental degradation as a function of the social metabolism. Whereas the traditional social structures appear more active in Mapanje’s work and can thus create environmental health, a more complete disruption of Malawian traditional communities in Chimombo’s poetry means that the social metabolism of capitalism appears all the more ominous. The Napolo poems resonate against a widespread capitalist “modernity” that seems to have gradually broken the temporary and cyclical nature of the Napolo spirit of Chewa tradition. When the speaker announces that “Napolo was here / to stay” (6), he bemoans not only Banda’s becoming an authoritarian figure who will keep power at all costs but also an unimaginable level of social and cultural disruption, which the speaker locates, in the later poem about an automotive pilgrimage, within a once sacred environment. The place no longer serves as communal site in the sense of a shared linguistic and more broadly cultural reference. Rather, the various groups of Malawians who have made the pilgrimage in their cars have given into the act of “queuing” for resources rather than consulting or conversing, an act that the speaker implies is a self-serving obeisance to the dictates of neo-colonialism. Such a rewiring creates “cabbage-in-pod existences, / eyes of 134 zombies queuing / at the fountain of life” (23). Malawians have learned to commodify each other and their environment and in the process have taken on the social isolation of capitalist “individualism” much as the speaker finds in himself.

By calling such individuals zombies, the speaker suggests that the infection that he identifies in himself will eventually force his own participation in mindless self- interest. As the poem’s speaker reveals a potentially permanent social “turn,” he relies upon and thus burnishes a particularly political ecological subtext. Through the poem’s

“zombies,” capitalism rewires everyday life and identity by creating the basic conflicts of political ecology, which are “social conflicts over the access to, and the destruction of, environmental resources and services” (Martinez-Alier 73). The destination of the zombies’ pilgrimage after all is the “fountain of life,” which evokes a single natural source for all social and environmental life. Land enclosure and commodification simultaneously endanger communities and environments as the speaker describes a series of newly formed capitalists who change their “natural” identities to make a profit. Snakes stop “sloughing” in order to incorporate and sell “wash ‘n’ wear fabrics.” “Polecats / bought shares in industry / to increase the pollution explosion.” Crocodiles went upstream to participate in frenzied murder (22). In all cases, industry, social brutalization, and environmental pollution flow along the same course of historical change. The use of animals reveals how shifting access to the environment transforms Malawi at all levels.

Communal identities based upon changing with the environment—sloughing, taking on new skin like a snake, or using the water for subsistence activities like the polecat and crocodile who in the poem used to hunt there sustainably—now give way in the absence of collective control over land and environmental resources. 135

Conclusion

Planetarity in Chimombo and Mapanje’s collections emerges in complex ways through modernist land question poetics. As in Zimbabwean and South African literature, the environmental sustainability of a community becomes its chief source of ethos, and the ability of communities to adapt to their environments becomes the foundation for a nationalism. Such a national imagination is not pure or easily available. Memory and political subjectivity, rather, become a battle ground. As an oppositional and environmentally sustainable political consciousness comes into view, it is through the frame of a postcolonial present, complicated and contradictory. A shared environing becomes visible in these works as is true elsewhere in Southern Africa, but the environmental ethics that surrounds land questions is often chained to the fight for social justice. Planetarity thus becomes the goad to continuing political and cultural battles on a local and regional level.

The poetry of both Chimombo and Mapanje sets a violent, environmental stage for Banda’s material and cultural transformations. The striking difference, however, between the poetry collections lies in their representations of collective resistance from the people, a difference that enables two ways of thinking about Fanonian decolonization when it comes to culture. In Mapanje’s poetry, the fact that traditional connections to larger environments and to collective ownership over land holds to some extent— offering an identity that can endure imprisonment, torture, and “accidental” death— locates the environment as a critical component of national culture. Such environmental representations form a national sentiment that is part of the dynamic through which a people “praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in 136 existence” as Fanon says. As a cultural construct, the environment in Mapanje’s poems holds enough pre-colonial meaning to valorize a Malawian people who have tended to environmental-community intersections in the past and who can fashion such connections into a common identity for the future. Mapanje’s poetry does not attempt to capture whole and then wield a pre-colonial cultural imaginary as much as, in Fanonian terms, it seeks to enter, as the work of a “native intellectual,” into “the zone of occult instability where the people dwell (227). Fanon’s dynamic understanding of culture as ever- changing and the very opposite of an “African culture,” which he understands to be the dogged and ultimately misguided response of a native intelligentsia to European claims that there is no African culture (216-217), comes to life in Mapanje’s poetry. Mapanje’s speakers seek connection with a Malawian people primarily through a shared oppression that opens through Banda’s land practices. When Mapanje’s speaker channels the ire of increasingly dispossessed Balamanja women, it is to observe the broader repercussions of

Banda’s broken promises rather than to evoke a rural peasantry as a stable concept. Given that the speaker of the prison poems seemingly languishes in prison because of the ways in which Banda’s land grabs have created a political behemoth, the speaker’s claims to land-based political subjectivity belie less an appeal to an indelible “African” or even

Chewa identity than to a still locally recognizable source of material and cultural change, which is to say the land and people’s relationship to it.

In light of the “occult instability” of historical movements for decolonization, the ways in which as Fanon puts it, the past meets the needs of a people building a new future such that “our souls are crystallized and that our perceptions and our lives are transfused with light” (227), a very different invocation of popular resistance in 137

Chimombo’s poetry pushes even further than is the case of Mapanje’s work towards cultural reinvention as means of decolonization. Napolo and the Python’s significantly more modernist response to Banda’s cultural and material assaults on Malawi positions

Banda and his colonial forebears as a force of cultural hegemony much as Fanon often positions colonial influence in Wretched of the Earth. The transformation of traditional pilgrimage, such that it has become queuing in cars for privilege at Banda’s table, is just one example of seemingly permanent changes in national cultural identity, the political and social sphere having rewired different cultural identities by “allowing” their inclusion such as when Banda evokes Chewa title to seize lands for development. As a response to hegemony, Chimombo’s recurring speaker / pilgrim in the Napolo poems insinuates that seeking connection to traditional environmental knowledge fails the would-be native intellectual or leader of decolonizing movements. Just as Fanon suggests that the “the people’s culture,” in its European and then African mythos, eludes the liberatory literary nationalist, Chimombo’s speaker fails to understand traditional languages or prophecy, fails to connect to an environment and understand its wisdom for a “community,” which seems as mythical in Chimombo’s poetry as the spirit Napolo!

Locating a political consciousness in records of environmental change, both poetry collections bear witness to the effects of governmental land questions while advocating, albeit in different ways, for the resolution of popular land questions as the way forward for the Malawian nation. The national imagination in both works, therefore, centers squarely upon the issues of land as the social metabolism for a nation and national culture as the degree to which a people fights for or utilizes land to create a nation that

“the people” recognize. Because both Napolo and the Python and The Chattering 138

Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison operate, to a large degree, as simultaneous postcolonial environmental critique and functional guide to a popular political consciousness, their decolonizing nationalism is “critical” in the sense advocated by Lazarus, among other defenders of Fanon’s nationalism. The potential for a decolonizing nationalism to fight colonialism and capitalism lies for Lazarus in Fanon’s model of national consciousness and its ability to help “the people” fight for what they need. In terms of popular decolonizing movements, both poetry collections raise the fight for material and cultural liberation in terms of intersections between community and environmental health, which is a move that defies political and scholarly condemnations of nationalist sentiment as sites of elite cultural and material capture59. Both works locate political consciousness through sophisticated and self-reflexive means. They form less an essential Malawian identity that can be easily re-deployed for popular control than an environmental consciousness that reveals its origins and, in differing ways across the two collections, its ongoing mediation.

The works, therefore, join other pieces of decolonizing national literature from

Zimbabwe and South Africa in focusing on the land question as a discursive site rather than the natural rights of “African” communities whether they be essentialized forms of

Shona, Xhosa, or Chewa people groups. Whereas in Zimbabwean literature the idea of

“returning to the land” fuels great epistemological reevaluation of the nation and its relationship to the land, Napolo and the Python and The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu

Prison clearly protest the removal of collective land title while opening to new notions of

“community.” The flexibility of a community to reform itself in relationship to the land in Mapanje’s poetry meets in Chimombo’s collection the resounding silence of tradition, 139 its inability to be translated for a new Malawian generation. An environmental consciousness, therefore, becomes radical in both works as it takes on the ability to rip back what populism has stolen, namely the ability of communities and environments to evolve together rather than being locked, in Banda’s conception, in an unchanging traditionalism that wastes human and environmental potential. Both collections clarify, rather, that the ability for communities to adapt to and to live in harmony with their environments is not a traditional artefact but a vital part of a national culture that must grow and change to survive.

140

Chapter Four

Magical-Realist Chimeras of the Land: Portuguese Acculturation and Land-Based

Nationalism in Postcolonial Lusophone Literature

The literary imagination of land questions engages social contradictions, particularly those concerning land and its importance for the nation. The linguistic and cultural complexities of “land” and “belonging to land” evoke long processes of social interaction and so express postcolonial critique. In turn, the postcolonial critique of literary land questions drives formal invention, erupting into naturalism or modernism. If formal inventiveness serves as a measure of re-imagination as postcolonial literature reworks social antagonisms, the increasing degrees of literary complexity represented in this study evoke the social interactions that create overlapping yet unique land questions within the region. Differing scales of modernist inquiry into identity, between Zimbabwe and Malawi, belie differences in the discursive frameworks surrounding land questions such that in Zimbabwe the literature works against cultural essentialism and in Malawi the literature works against cultural appropriation and ultimately its destruction, tying choices in national identity to the land. Just as the land becomes the font of national identity elsewhere within Southern African literature, Lusophone African literature intervenes into the social antagonisms surrounding land questions, this time into a process of acculturation that is regionally exceptional for its virulence. Antagonisms between “Portuguese” and “African” in post-independence Lusophone Africa outstrip tensions between “modernizers” and “traditionalists” elsewhere in the region. Because such tensions have directly caused land questions in Lusophone Africa, the high degrees of formal, magical realist inventiveness in prominent works of Lusophone African 141 literature expresses the antagonisms, the torturous incompatibility, and the sometimes absurd clashing of cultures while aiming at a goal that is perhaps more difficult to achieve in Lusophone Africa than elsewhere in the region, national unity.

As a response to Portuguese acculturation and related land questions, The Return of the Water Spirit, the 1995 novel by Angola’s perhaps most internationally renowned novelist, Pepetela, ultimately promotes subaltern cultural connections between a community and its environment. Pepetela’s narrative consistently externalizes one character’s perspective and thoughts while occasionally revealing more than João knows of the uncanny events of the novel. A recurring event is the fall of tenement buildings in

Luanda’s Kinaxixi Square, collapses that every time, miraculously, tenement residents survive without injury, even as walls and floors disintegrate around them. The building collapses that the Luandans in the novel call the Syndrome remain mysterious to João even as his own building falls by the end of the novel:

João Evangelista felt that he had been hurled into space. He grabbed his computer

and tried to press the key that would function as a catapult against the Romans,

but with a cut in the power supply the screen went down. And in the vortex of that

fall he saw that Carmina was on top of him, her arms out stretched as they tried to

hold him, her eyes full of terror and love. He saw objects, tables, bricks, people

swirling in the air as if in slow motion, and a cat with his fur on end and with his

paws ready to land as cats know how. João Evangelista did not see . . . (Pepetela

The Return, 101).

Pepetela’s novel does what so many works of magical realism do: it brings impossibly conflicting ideologies into contact, often comically, as in this case the novel provokes 142 reevaluation of social realities and consideration of power imbalances by juxtaposing the

Portuguese-named-Ambunda João and his empire-building game with the cat’s situational awareness and those characters who see what João does not. Because João does not see the water spirit from Ambunda mythology, Kianda, emerge from beneath

Kinaxixi Square accompanied by the song of an ever-expanding crowd (101-102), João’s rapture with the game evokes a larger process of Portuguese acculturation that eclipses

Ambunda and other “Angolan” beliefs. Having staged a comic, carnivalesque moment of literalized social and cultural upheaval with “all of the objects, tables, bricks, people swirling in the air,” the novel ultimately rejects the negative influence of Portuguese colonial literature like that of Luís de Camões and its valorization of Portuguese empire and its praise for the Portuguese civilizing mission. A better world suggests itself at the end of the novel for those who can heed Kianda’s earthquake-like movements beneath the city. In its linking of those characters who observe Kianda with the cat, The Return of the Water Spirit enables imagination of an Angolan literature, and by extension a historiography, that can weave environments and cultures to better understand the forces that have shaped both.

Along with those of Pepetela in Angola, the novels of Mia Couto in Mozambique respond to strong historical and cultural tensions that have shaped Lusophone Africa, leading in all five nations to especially difficult projects of post-independence national unification and creating cycles of crisis ranging from landlessness to electoral anemia to civil war. One “side” of the tensions within Lusophone Africa is the traditionalism that scholars observe in most Southern African nations and note as the antagonist to modernizing tendencies. For land questions, traditionalism relates to pre-colonial land 143 holdings, collective land title, or the customary authority over land that many Southern

African groups experienced during colonialism. In the post-independence Southern

African nation, “universal” or “modern” ideologies of land practice, particularly neoliberal or Marxist-Leninist visions of land use and reform, compete politically with what historian Patrick Chabal, who studies Southern African political rifts, calls a subject position connecting “to the existing African socio-political order” and rising from

“chiefly origin,” “chiefly networks,” or specific political entities where “the most important constituency was at the local level” (6). The level of political traditionalism preserved in Lusophone Africa compares to that of Botswana or pre-Banda Malawi.

Mozambique and Angola manifest striking urban-rural divides, land-based economies in vast rural areas partially preserving the politics and culture of non-Europeanized populations. Traditionalism has led to the modern land questions in Angola and

Mozambique as various degrees of civil warfare, communism, and privatization have threatened the land-based existence of traditionalists and fueled cycles of social instability that exceed other such cycles in Southern Africa and have lasted for decades since Portugal recognized Lusophone Africa’s independence in 1975. In Angola and

Mozambique, traditionalism relates not only to spaces beyond the urban areas where writers like Pepetela and Couto grew up but to the hybrid identities of ruling parties such that rural and tribal ties contend with Marxist, capitalist, and other Euro-centric influences. Therefore, scholars of Lusophone African Literature commonly note that when writers of direct-Portuguese descent like Pepetela and Couto represent traditionalism in Portuguese and found significant portions of their work upon local and pre-“existing African socio-political” concerns, such writings enter into a larger, self- 144 reflexive dialogue about national identity and the ways in which a Lusophone, urban minority speaks for a rural, traditionalist majority (Hamilton 321-323). Whereas The

Return of the Water Spirit enters into a discussion of national identity by squaring those who recognize their dependence upon the land of Angola against those who do not,

Couto’s 1996 novel Under the Frangipani stages complex scenes of double consciousness in which the concerns of traditionalists and modernizers meet in the same character or within the close quarters of magical realist narratives.

Although Pepetela’s novel grafts to the land of Angola a vision of nationhood that parallels the ultimate correspondence, in Couto’s novel, between land use and notions of national unity, neither narrative merely reifies or rejects the “nation” of those whom

Chabal calls modernizers: the modernizers were “imbued with an universalist political vision” and represented mainly “a younger generation, who were relatively well educated

(often in the mother country), were assimilated or acculturated into the dominant colonial social and political ‘mentalities,’ and were ideologically progressive, that is, in tune with the left opposition in the metropolis” (5). Both Couto and Pepetela share Portuguese ethnicity as well as European-style educations that they have pursued into advanced levels of academic specialization. As “white revolutionaries,” they have served the currently ruling, modernizing parties of their nations and have participated in national projects of cultural unification based upon universal and originally Marxist philosophies.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Marxist approaches to land and environmental resources as the basis for all social production structure both The Return of the Water

Spirit and Under the Frangipani. The social upheaval that the land can literally cause in

Pepetela’s novel meets, in Couto’s novel, an island that has the potential to reverse what 145

Aimé Cesaire calls the “thingification” of cultures under colonialism by hosting collaborations and collective decision-making amongst the island’s inhabitants. In the traditionalist commitments that both novels manifest, however, lies a conflict of cultural and social identity that the respective narratives leave intact and therefore productive of a more diverse “nation” than an ultimately communist one. While open to orthodox

Marxist interpretations that the revolution at the end of The Return of the Water Spirit never quite arrives because the rising precariat does not sufficiently control the land or other means of production and thus does not represent a truly revolutionary class,

Pepetela’s narrative complicates the idea when a high rise that has sheltered the poor also falls during Kianda’s return to the ocean (101). Kianda as the force that has facilitated the rising community thus takes on a meaning outside of the battle between economic classes. The spirit’s agency remains tied to traditionalist concepts that the novel does not resolve, cultural dispute over land and land usage remaining the key obstacle to national unification. Just as Kianda sweeps away to sea and leaves an incomplete revolution behind, Under the Frangipani similarly undercuts universal solutions to ruthless class antagonism and leaves tensions between traditionalism and modernism provocatively unresolved as when the frame narrator ends the novel by transforming into a wordless and thoughtless plant in order to escape the wearying Mozambican civil war (Couto 150).

Even as Couto’s more pervasively post-modernist narrative stops far short of suggesting a dialectical antithesis to the ruling class, Under the Frangipani maintains a nationalist vision by promoting the resolution of land questions by means of a darker environmental aesthetic. Communities and environments prosper and falter together in Couto’s novel and so invoke a national imaginary in which culture and nature evolve inextricably and 146 therefore demand a politics of social and environmental sustainability.

Pepetela’s The Return of the Water Spirit and the Land of Angola

The narrative structure of Return of the Water Spirit prompts reflection on the

Angolan civil war and ultimately suggests that the ideologically obstinate ruling party perpetuates the conflict. Whereas many characters in the novel incorrectly speculate about the causes of the Syndrome or like João cannot manage speculation because of their acculturated, “Portuguese” identities, the narrative reveals more insights into the nature of the Syndrome than any named character possesses. The novel’s irony depends primarily upon what the reader learns from the unnamed narrator, especially about the social conflict at the center of Return of the Water Spirit:

More tents would be put up to house the homeless from the collapse of that fourth

building. And in many other squares tents would be put up for all those who were

fleeing from different parts of the country, for the war had now spread all over.

And the havoc that had begun in Kinaxixi would spread to all the cities in a

whirlwind of madness. Except that in other places the buildings didn’t fall to

musical accompaniment and without wounded victims, as they did in Kinaxixi. In

other places the falling was red coloured, bloodied. (Pepetela 44-45)

“Fleeing from different parts of the country” in the “whirlwind of madness” that is civil war, the homeless crowded in Kinaxixi reveal the Syndrome as a metaphor for the dispute between traditionalists in the countryside and the modernizing members of the

MPLA with their stronghold in Luanda and nearby urban areas. The inability of those acculturated into a Portuguese “modernity” to see the mythical Kianda mirrors the inability of the acculturated MPLA as a whole to understand or negotiate with the 147 traditionalists, the MPLA triggering the civil war (1975-2002), immediately following independence, by representing themselves as the single government for the nation and by launching what many consider to be a stillborn plan of national unification centered upon a Marxist-Leninist transformation of rural areas to communism60.

Return of the Water Spirit amplifies wider, national disruption and locates it in

Luanda and thus implies that the MPLA faces a crisis of authority, particularly in terms of the dissolution caused by the Angolan land question. The novel captures a dynamic that Cain describes by highlighting the role of the Angolan land question in the civil war: colonial patterns of land use and land legislation weakened Ovimbundu and Ambundu

(collective) land title (184) while anti-colonial-war and then civil-war disruptions exasperated already weak legal hold on the land to allow increasing levels of elite capture and thus create lasting displacement (185-187). The narrative’s linking of homelessness in Luanda to displacement and war elsewhere in Angola represents landlessness as a vital part of the civil war, a factor that Cain links to the early 1990s economic and land reforms that would precipitate the return to civil war by reproducing colonial land dynamics and dispossessing record numbers of peasant farmers to the benefit of

European commercial farmers (188). What Cain describes as the flood of internally dispossessed people—landless and not properly represented by the law, vulnerable to further exploitation but attempting to build informal settlements and survive through an informal economy (189)—to the cities creates a new Luanda, one that cannot remove itself spatially from the conflicts in the countryside. In the novel’s Luanda, social disruption “to musical accompaniment and without wounded victims,” moreover, forces through its defamiliarized violence an epistemological reevaluation of the MPLA’s 148 management of land and resources. The novel opens rifts in concepts of land and property ownership as a new Angolan community forms in the streets. Pepetela’s line about blood in the countryside while those in the city experience an “unreal” and initially inexplicable fall to the earth raises questions about the ideological bases for the MPLA’s rule and the degree to which the MPLA understands the nation’s relationship to the land over which their housing developments tower.

Using MPLA members as foils and Luanda as an ideological battle ground,

Pepetela’s narrative organizes itself as wider dialectical inquiry into the relationship between Angolan communities and their environments. In terms of a Hegelian dialectic,

Return of the Water Spirit raises the specter of the “end of history” by first posing the question of what drives Luandan society into new shapes and then revealing the mystical force behind historical change. The range of failed explanations for the Syndrome that occur in the novel reveals the pluralism that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel observes as an underlying cause of history’s apparent contradictions: subjective experience emerges as part of systems that the individual might not fully comprehend, and so the march of history first appears contradictory and full of antithetical occurrences rather than purposeful and in the process of unfolding, “coming-to-be” (18). Because in Hegel’s thought the individual has ideological differences and differences of social position from other individuals, history’s systemic nature lies as obscured by competing visions as when characters in Pepetela’s novel explain the Syndrome in a political way as owing to the “satanic hands of the CIA” (11), in a mechanical way as a problem of cement that crumbles in the buildings’ foundations (29), and in a religious way as a curse for the abandonment of “proper” Christian practices during these “sinful times” (5). In Hegel’s 149 thought, “the path offered to everyone and available for all” (11) opens through a “true science,” a dialectical science that can promote social equilibrium based upon the spiritual substance that humanity shares with the world, the “weltgeist” (21). Similarly, representing a pathway to new, widespread social relations, Kianda in Return of the

Water Spirit provides for a diverse Angolan public a basis for dialogue. Such dialogue opens in other Pepetela’s, according to Africanist Igor Cusack, who looks at Lueji. The dialogue that opens in Lueji over interethnic disputes including those over land (181) by historicizing ethnic and geographic differences within the nation of Angola (173-174) runs parallel to such dialogue in Return of the Water Spirit. Kianda evokes shared reliance on the natural environment without diminishing an Angolan pluralism as when a character Kalumbo clarifies that Kianda was never a mermaid as the Portuguese claimed:

“No one has seen him in that form. The settlers stole our soul; they changed everything that was ours, even our way of thinking of Kianda. The result is out there, with this country turned upside down” (Pepetela 83-84). Although Kianda became a mermaid through the translation of local mythology into a Euro-centric form, Portuguese stories of the spirit still capture Angolan ties to the land and sea while perhaps eroticizing the seafaring quest that led the Portuguese into such an early colonial empire. Kalumbo suggests that understanding the cultural and social conflicts behind the civil war including the land question will create a new appreciation for Kianda as a symbol of the ways in which historical conflicts have shaped the environment in which Angolans live.

The novel’s treatment of Luanda as a heterogeneous territory relies upon magical realist fantasy and ultimately fashions the environment as engine for social change.

Postcolonialists generally accept that magical realism can offer multiple strategies for 150 postcolonial critique. Postcolonialist Carina Yervasi, as one example, studies recent magical realist films from Burkina Faso and traces such strategies: there is the relevance- making of pre-colonial lifeways (45) as well as the positioning of urban battles for material survival between incompatible economic systems (48-49). Such strategies emerge from magical realism’s dialectical suspension of enlightenment realism and fantasy (44) “as [magical realism] retains the elements of local and hybrid cultures that it seeks to make recognizable and relevant for present-day audiences” (45). We can observe similar strategies in Return of the Water Spirit in the potentially revolutionary reappearance of fishing as subsistence activity in the middle of Luanda. A pool opens within the streets of Kinaxixi square, and as “the puddle began to grow and the plants that burst from within the water gave it a greenish appearance,” tadpoles and then fish appear within Luanda’s new water feature (Pepetela 8). The ecological metaphor that the narrative creates with the pool relies upon an ecosystem-like expansion. Plants form a layer of energy production and provide food and habitat for other animals. Mirroring the limitless power of the sea with that of a subsistence community, Return of the Water

Spirit inextricably entwines—with the squatter settlement that forms near the widening pool, slowly gathering basic necessities for their community and expanding (25-26)— environment and economy. The novel’s thriving natural and human communities, relative to Yervasi’s second strategy, remain miraculously, impossibly resilient, somehow resisting the erosion of collective land title and the collapse of the official economy. As

The Return of the Water Spirit represents the unsanctioned restoration of the landless to material stability, environmental and community dynamics achieve relevance and articulation in contradistinction to imperialist attitudes towards both. 151

When The Return of the Water Spirit locates the environment as simultaneously a source of capitalist wealth and as the basis for a subsistence community, issues of sustainability emerge not as merely environmental issues but as ones with profound social consequences for the entire nation. In contrast with the community that the environment, through Kianda, helps to survive, businesses associated with the MPLA exploit the environment. One government-representative-turned-businessman in particular prepares his ship to obliterate “the last whales of the ocean” and to mercilessly pursue “the poor sea breams and groupers in Mussulo Bay” with explosive charges (14).

Ultimately, The Return of the Water Spirit’s titular character promotes less a traditionalist

“win” within the civil war’s ongoing struggle over land61 than a cessation of unsustainable political practices through collective ownership and decision making over natural resources. The novel’s representation of Kianda carries with it an egalitarianism that Thema Simplu, who studies the mythology of Angola in general, accords to the spirit: Kianda punishes the greedy or environmentally insensitive individual or community through magic or by inciting a crowd of the poor through the power of song

(np). In a more regional sense, Kianda manifests clear similarities with the Malawian myth of Napolo as a spirit-creature associated with the natural environment and whom a community heeds for survival, tying to larger (Bantu) ethnophilosophical beliefs in the indivisibility of culture and nature. The subaltern belief system animating The Return of the Water Spirit represents the environment overall as something that “speaks” to those in a community who can listen and who can use their observations to help a community grow. A community forms during the unfolding of the novel by increasingly observing

Kianda and responding: early observers detect the presence of Kianda in a wider host of 152 environmental signs such as flying ducks and rainbows over water (83); a growing community joins in the singing of the water spirit until by the end of the novel a large congregation stands and applauds the spirit’s violent, Syndrome-causing escape from beneath an urban landscape that the Portuguese had created so that “the island [of

Luanda] would cease to be an island, and could become instead a peninsula that was connected to the African continent by an isthmus of stones and cement” (102). As the environmental “communication” in the novel redresses the historical influences of

Portuguese colonization—by progressively toppling the Portuguese-built environment and restoring the pre-colonial one, water at first opening from beneath Kinaxixi Square and finally flooding it until the spirit, “free at long last, had earned for himself the high seas” (102)—The Return of the Water Spirit evokes a pan-Africanism that seems to reject

“foreign” influence and promote a return to regionally intelligible African culture. The novel, however, works against such simplicity not only through its magical realist structure but through the myriad ways in which it contextualizes the radicalism of the growing community who seeks subsistence and collective control over the environment.

As the novel advocates for and explores obstacles to collective land title and shared control over environmental resources, Return of the Water Spirit creates a uniquely regional contribution to Marxist thought. As Africanist Phillip Rothwell suggests in his reading of The Return of the Water Spirit, the novel invests in the economic gap between classes as much as it does in pre-colonial culture. The novel, for

Rothwell, pushes beyond “the pretense of a Marxist model foisted on the Lusophone

African nations at independence,” a pretense that worked “as an ideology in the Marxist sense of a mechanism used to distort reality for the benefit of the ruling classes” 153

(“Rereading” 204). In addition to Rothwell’s thought about how the novel’s expanded

Marxism enables analysis of the international capital driving class tensions in Angola and bolsters the rise of a lower class revolution as predicted by Karl Marx, The Return of the

Water Spirit also enables Marxist analysis of the relationship between human societies and their environments as part of combatting capitalism. Against crass populism, the narrative materially grounds the “Marxism” of its MPLA members—in ironic ways, against their knowing—as when João’s wife Carmina explains to João her decision to exploit her political position and become a prominent businesswoman (15). Shortly after praising as a successful entrepreneur the man who used state resources to pursue and capitalize on fish in Mussulo Bay, Carmina proffers:

Sonny boy, that old Marx explained it all ages ago. To create a business class

someone needs to lose money to them. How’s this class going to make money?

And it’s always better if it’s the State that’s losing the money, instead of

expropriating or stealing directly from citizens. Didn’t we decide to move towards

a market economy? So somebody’s got to pay. (17)

The exploitation evident in the actions of Carmina’s MPLA peer, obliterated aquatic life as the result of a business scheme, literally spawns, in terms of Carmina’s adulation, the epistemological violence of Carmina’s words as Carmina misquotes and shallowly references parts of Capital. Carmina’s words ironically evoke Marx’s overarching political economic argument that capitalism creates profits not through market exchange but by exploiting labor during the production of commodities.

In pamplisest to a simple and painless “losing” of money that the state

“mercifully” shields the people from as Carmina puts it, Marx’s erased thought about 154 labor as the metabolism for an entire society emerges: man “develops the potentialities slumbering within nature” through purposeful labor (283), which leads to labor as social metabolism, an exchange of use values and commodity values driving an entire process of social division (198-201). As a product of social metabolism, the state resources that

Carmina proposes to “expropriate” in order to create an “import-export” business dealing in “wine, rice, codfish, cars, dresses, anything at all” (Pepetela 18) represent the result of the continued cycle of exploitation and elite capture that has hindered pro-poor and socially justifiable versions of land reform and control and that in turn builds off of the colonial-era exploitation of agricultural labor62. Environmental resources seem so far removed from their social and physical sources in the novel’s representation of Carmina that Marx’s thoughts can again ironically rise to the surface, this time on the “primitive accumulation” that through the social metabolism turns the land and environment into the ultimate source of all social structure and wealth. Just as for Marx the British ruling class participated, in the centuries leading up to and including the eighteenth, the enclosure of agricultural land and rural communities—“the law itself now [becoming] the instrument by which the people’s land is stolen” (885)—Carmina abstracts and justifies the theft of the nation’s resources. Carmina’s idea that the resources in question belong to the state and so should fuel the nation’s economic “transition” to a market economy belies an erosion of collective control over land in Angola that parallels the one that Marx studies in Britain and that similarly involves the large scale farmer’s capture of land as the acceleration of nascent capitalism (905-907). Just as Marx argues that colonization also served as a chief source of primitive accumulation in Europe through “undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder” abroad (918), Carmina un-problematically relies upon 155 the material, resource accumulation of the previously colonial and now postcolonial state for the generation of new capital.

In its support of collective control over land and environmental resources, Return of the Water Spirit encourages imagination of the environment as something thoroughly imbricated with human communities, a relationship that the novel treats as both Marxist and ethnophilosophical. The novel’s MPLA members—in opposition to the rising and ethnophilosophically inflected community in Pepetela’s novel—reveal a simultaneously environmental and social insensitivity that literary scholar Chris Williams proposes as the primary target for Marxist eco-criticism. Characters like Carmina illustrate what

Williams argues is the environmental blindness of capitalism, an inability to link social and environmental productivity. Because the novel’s rising community does not suffer such a blindness as to their dependence upon the land, the novel implicitly advocates as

Williams does explicitly that “only by holding land, along with the instruments of production, in common and producing to meet social need will the simultaneous exploitation of nature and humanity end” (np). It is against Carmina’s nascent neoliberal logic, therefore, that the mid-1990s novel speaks most loudly, foregrounding Angola’s particularity in its ability to resist what Francis Fukuyama considers to be neoliberalism’s historical position, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the only surviving and therefore undisputable world order. Carmina passionately plans to take advantage of state resources and do what so many others in the MPLA have done. She mentally erases oppositional forces through an abstracted, neoliberal business model that views economic growth as a moral priority, one that is historically mandated as when Carmina suggests that the people have chosen “to move towards a market economy.” Foiling Carmina’s 156 plans, land-based opposition rises against a MPLA-neoliberal transition, literally hurling

Carmina from her property and thus blocking her entryway to a transnational capitalism that cloaks itself in the logic of supply and demand rather than directly reveal its exploitive nature.

The novel’s implicit critique of private property as the great rationalizer of exploitation rejects what Fukuyama praises: neoliberalism’s triumph as an “ideology” or a social and cultural system with “a comprehensive agenda for socioeconomic organization” (14) that creates a democratic stasis built upon the rule of law, obviating further antithetical tensions between neoliberalism and Communism, Fascism, religion, or nationalism (16). Return of the Water Spirit rather envisions a Hegelian weltgeist and therefore an end of history based upon shared control over natural resources. Fukuyama’s general dismissal of “Third World” instabilities as counterargument to neoliberalism’s ascendency notwithstanding, aspects of Communism, religion, and nationalism work together in the novel’s land-based community to overwhelm the abstractions of global neoliberalism, asserting the need for a society beyond “democratic stasis” and implicitly indicting as dangerous the property-based “rule of law” as something that might make invisible and perpetuate colonial and postcolonial patterns of theft.

The movement of the novel’s growing community—and hence of an imagined

Angolan nation—away from what Fukuyama paints as neoliberalism’s economic and risk-based conception of the environment, models an expansion of consciousness through dialectical thinking. Return of the Water Spirit suggests that seeing reality correctly requires surrender of the sort of objectification that Fukuyama’s text laments: nothing remains during the neoliberal end of history but “economic calculation, the endless 157 solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands” (17). Whereas nature exists within Fukuyama’s End of

History as a concern for supply chains, important for the solving of mathematical equations and the avoidance of risk, Joao remembers thirty years prior how two prominent Angolan writers of Portuguese descent, Luandino Vieira and Arnaldo Santos, stood in Kinaxixi Square and passionately debated what environmental signs meant for a community. The writers thus evoke Lusophone African literature’s potential to participate in the formation of a new social consciousness. The writers discussed a tree that workers had felled in Kinaxixi square as part of filling in a lagoon. As the stump had mysteriously run red for a week, Vieira interpreted the bleeding as “the products that the roots had sucked from the red earth,” and thus disagreed with Santos, who accepted the

Ambundu wisdom that “the Water Spirit’s tree cries blood when it is cut” (Pepetela 37-

38). Because the writers debated what the novel later reveals to be one cause of the

Syndrome, Kianda’s loss of a tree and a lagoon, the narrative moves in simultaneously ethnophilosophical and Hegelian fashion by underlining how few people can comprehend the forces of historical and community change as they occur. João’s inability to stop objectifying nature—as demonstrated most forcibly by his addiction to an empire- building game that harnesses natural resources as a force against other empires like that of the Romans—leads to a parallel with Vieira’s rational dismissal of the bleeding stump as omen. The novel implies that Vieira and João both succumb to a Portuguese-inflected version of what political philosopher Murray Bookchin calls “conventional reason” or instrumental thinking that relies upon the separation of entities by “clear-cut boundaries that are immutable for analytical purposes” (np). Vieira cannot connect Angola’s social 158 history to the tree that Santos can see properly as an emblem of the Ambunda people who have long lived in the area and have claimed land there. In the divisions of reason, Return of the Water Spirit suggests, lie imperialist tendencies that Santos expunges when he does as he advises Vieira to do and “stop trying to explain the inexplicable” (38). Santos heeds both the popular mythology and the singularity of the event. He models the ability to connect culture and nature at the deepest levels, understanding their imbrication with one another through a mythology that he treats as an invitation to observe and experience nature, much in the way that Hegel thinks of a scientific vehicle for understanding the paradoxes of reality as they unfold.

Return of the Water Spirit’s magical realist denouement further blurs lines between mythology and science in order to promote an Angolan, environmental identity that might someday prevail against the MPLA’s neoliberalism. To call the believer in

Kianda “scientific” is to acknowledge such belief’s potential for a dialecticism that exceeds Hegel’s rejection of “natural evolution as a viable theory in favor of a static hierarchy of Being” (Bookchin np), meaning that a developmental logic can emerge in

Hegel’s thinking and trump an objectified “nature.” Although the community that rises by the end of the novel relates to each other in part through mythology—two of Kianda’s believers transform into mythological figures as the spirit calls “from the waters of the lagoon” (Pepetela 101-102)—the novel has by this point shown the practicality and social progressiveness of the belief system. Rather than what Bookchin fears as a sense of mystical “interconnection” between humanity and nature that might authorize “social control and political manipulation” (np), the novel treats the belief in an all-inclusive, responsive nature as the basis for a truly democratic society. Before Kianda’s escape 159 knocks the building down, Kianda’s material gift of fish fuels a highly egalitarian expansion of the squatter’s settlement floor by floor, eventually leading to the distribution of electricity as squatters steal it from the power grid (Pepetela 25-26). The narrative expands upon the Kianda-inspired egalitarianism of the rising community: the larger movement of homeless people that the novel follows requires full consensus amongst members before making decisions and listens equally to men, women, and people of different ethnic backgrounds (98-99). In their ability to see across social differences and to situate their movement within the evolving environment of Luanda, the rising community demonstrates a process of thinking that Bookchin names dialectical naturalism: the thinker enjoins the natural and the social as “entities” for analysis that relate to one another not through a linear developmental logic but through a process of becoming that treats the “past and future” as “part of a cumulative, logical, and objective continuum that includes the present” (np). The rising community in Return of the Water

Spirit wants to practice collective ownership over natural resources and grow in a sustainable manner. Part ethnophilosophy and part Marxism, the group’s philosophy appears to promote community and environmental health at the same time, working from an imaginary that holds together past and present conceptions of Luanda, pushing towards a powerful praxis of social and environmental responsibility. An abstract

“democracy” based upon market principles thus begins to crack and implode under force of a social movement that better builds upon the intersections of environment, society, and culture.

In spite of the revolutionary intent with which it threatens to use environmental foundations for political expansion, the rising community does not quite achieve a social 160 revolution by the end of the novel. The novel thus fashions a dialecticism that is ultimately materialist and focused on the ways in which social change requires material traction. Within its reevaluation of Marxism and related philosophies, Return of the

Water Spirit seems to reject the Hegelian dialectical notion that ideologies can close upon the weltgeist and so produce historical change primarily through ideological influence. As opposed to Fukuyama’s adaptation of Hegelian philosophy, collective control over environmental resources clearly emerges as the “better idea” in the novel and threatens social change by presenting a major alternative to the individual-property-based workings of neoliberalism; yet, as Marx suggests in his critique of Hegel’s dialectical approach to history, “Revolutions require a passive element, a material basis. Theory is fulfilled in a people only insofar as it is the fulfilment of the needs of that people” (Introduction np).

Similarly to how Marx and Bookchin reject some of the religious and mystical aspects of

Hegel’s concept of historical change while maintaining a Hegelian dialectic that centers upon relationships between humans and between humans and their environments, the novel poses revolutionary, material struggle between those who understand environmental-community relationships and those who do not. As Kianda sweeps away to sea and destroys a building that has sheltered the homeless, Kianda presumably leaves the community to its own devices. The material foundation for the crowd gathered in the street will likely not endure long enough to allow the lasting revolution that Marx associates with a proletariat class who truly controls through its labor the material basis of society. In magical realist form, then, the novel’s most decisive intervention into an anti-capitalist revolution is to defamiliarize Luanda and to associate its scores of homeless with the Angolan land question. The collective decision making and resource 161 sharing that the community demonstrates locates lasting political change in a return to what Williams, via Marx’s theory of the “metabolic rift” caused by capitalism, considers to be the proper metabolism between earth and man, collective ownership of environmental resources for the good of nature and human communities (np). The novel maintains a chimeric balance between antagonistic forces while valorizing the rising community as heroically engaged in a fight that is simultaneously against the MPLA and wider forces of globalization.

Mapping a path of resistance that needs more material support in the form of legal protections for collective land and resource holdings, Pepetela’s Return of the Water

Spirit forms a regionally relevant Marxism that has the most in common with the environmentalism of the poor. As the operation of “ecological distribution” conflicts range rural and urban spaces and connect social structures with environmental experiences including land and water rights, environmental racism, urban planning, and rural land reform (Martinez-Allier 70-74), environmentalism of the poor emerges in many places at once just as the social movement in The Return of the Water Spirit does.

The novel’s expansive, dialectical naturalist approach to history opens room for what

Joan Martinez-Allier calls the environmentalism of the poor’s operation as new social movement, linked to no particular territory or social group but cutting across both (x).

Kianda’s community in The Return of the Water Spirit heeds a song particularly intelligible in Angola but resonating in a wider sphere of conflicts over environmental resources. It rises as any number of groups have risen worldwide in response to globalization and earlier histories rooted in colonial and environmental imperialism: as a demand for social and cultural justice that is simultaneously a demand for environmental 162 sustainability.

Reimagining the Land in Couto’s Under the Frangipani

Similarly to The Return of the Water Spirit, Couto’s Under the Frangipani creates postcolonial critique through a complex narrative structure. The 1996 novel has two overlapping plots that put traditional and modernizing tendencies into magical realist tension. The frame narrator, a Mucanga man named Ermelindo, died on an island in the last days of the Portuguese Overseas Colony of Mozambique and has come back in the mid-1990s, just after the Mozambican civil war, as a shipoko or night spirit. Ermelindo follows the spiritual advice of a supernatural anteater and links his consciousness with that of a detective—a Portuguese-speaking man of native Mozambican descent, Izidine— who caries Ermelindo, unbeknownst to Izidine, with him through a murder investigation at a retirement community on the same island where Ermelindo died. The “modern” literary form of the detective narrative thus works in pamplisestic fashion with traditional oral mythology as Izidine tries (but fails) to use inductive reason to transform a series of clues into a collar for the murder of the retirement facility’s director as Ermelindo simultaneously navigates a bewildering array of states between life and death that accord to Southern African ethnophilosophy in general and relate more specifically to myths of the chameleon63. The stories of each murder suspect spin each chapter both further from and closer to an understanding of the murder, which becomes the focal point for a series of wandering ruminations on death, often from a traditional viewpoint but inflected by observations of postcolonial Mozambique. Its formal complexity running parallel to the chameleon myths that it relies upon for character development, Under the Frangipani builds its postcolonial critique off of the mythical notion that chameleons reveal the 163

“secrets” of creation but in cryptic ways. The novel reads and responds to the mysterious and secret-like potential for a Mozambican national identity as Izidine and Ermelindo attempt to understand complex realities. The main characters’ double consciousness in turn fashions the complexity and diversity of Mozambican identity into a postcolonial critique of discourses of national unification and the resulting Mozambican civil war

(1977-1992).

Extending postcolonial critique, the island becomes, in magical realist fashion, the locus of competing socio-economic identities that shape history in Mozambique as they do in Angola. From a traditionalist perspective, the retirees’ largely egalitarian running of the island evokes tribal influences on Mozambique’s ruling party. Many of the island’s residents equally share in their home’s environmental resources, surrendering their rights to all private property and respecting their environment as the source of their material existence (Couto 21). In a parallel manner, greater social movement between colonial cities like the capital Maputo and rural spaces to the north means that the modernizers, who absorbed progressive ideologies through a Portuguese-style education in the cities as they did in Angola, have greater cultural connections to rural / traditional Mozambique than their counterparts. The modernizing and currently dominant party in Mozambique,

FRELIMO, has evinced factions with tribal connections and has attended to rural land issues much more closely than the MPLA. Although FRELIMO like the MPLA attempted to drive the rural economy towards communism from the land up using a

Marxist-Leninist agenda, FRELIMO leadership quickly surrendered the plan following

Mozambican independence in 1975. Despite the potential that the novel accords to a

Mozambican nationalism centered upon collective decision making over land, much as 164 the predominantly rural Botswana has harnessed64, the material neglect of the island and its residents complicates any such notion. The islanders’ land-based political autonomy comes under threat as the retirement home’s director Vatsome starves and exploits old

“believers” (102) who wait to die in a rural space removed from the urban seat of national governance. Similarly, post-independence Mozambique demonstrates a process of political unification around market-driven capitalism that simultaneously creates land questions as FRELIMO elites drive rapid urbanization and open Mozambican land for international development, undercutting collective title in the name of national progress

(Paul Jenkins 131). Globalization thus transforms earlier rural-urban divides in

Mozambique and in sociologist Paul Jenkins’s words leaves the predominantly rural population cut off from the civil-war and post-civil-war seats of government and progressively dependent upon urban economies until “the best that can perhaps be hoped for is a ‘holding’ position, where part of the population begins to cover part of its subsistence requirements through agricultural production on a small scale” (124-125).

Because FRELIMO land policies fail to adequately address the initial disruption of collective land title under colonialism, the material disruptions of the civil war, and the economic rewiring of globalization, lifeways on the island take on paradoxical meaning.

The retirees’ island lifestyle offers hope in its continued intelligibility to millions of

Mozambicans while assuming an ever-increasing fragility as the Mozambican nation

“modernizes”65.

As Under the Frangipani locates the island within tensions between modernizers and traditionalists, the novel deploys post-modern strategies to elevate the Angolan land question to a place of importance within the global expansions of capital. The novel’s use 165 of the island as simultaneous paradise and prison creates what Fredric Jameson names postmodernism’s cognitive maps of late capitalism. Cognitive maps locate “the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system” and thus help visualize the incomplete but persistent effects of “late capitalism” in its global reorientation of space (Jameson np). Although initially seeming to be “outside” of modernity, the island is not merely a place where spiritual connections between a community and their environment still dominate everyday life, stemming in part from the island’s direct portal to the spirit realm that further solidifies the bond between residents

(Couto 73-74). Owing to its colonial and postcolonial history, the island has participated in the growth of international capital: Ermelindo remembers the fort on the island through which the Portuguese empire moved “slaves, ivory, and cloth” (3); the Lusophone / colonial space dovetails in the mid-1990s with the forces of globalization as the narrative reveals that the murder victim used his position as a government official to turn the island into a clandestine depot for the sale of guns and other state stores to an international clientele (104). Representations of the island thus take on a spatial ambiguity by co- locating global capitalism and local social practices in an uneasy relationship that drives much of the novel’s formal experimentation. The island appears to have participated in the creation of globalization as a continuation of colonialism as much as globalism appears to delimit the growth of the egalitarian community of retirees. Land usage drives overlapping but different socio-economic practices and forms the basis for their articulation.

In its representation of two competing forms of land usage and management that create very different spheres within the same island, Under the Frangipani centers on the 166 land question as the shared foundation for the growth of disparate communities during globalization. The disparity between the post-independence capitalist cabal that uses the island to grow in wealth and influence and the precarious situation of the residents exist in dialectical opposition. Vatsome steals funds meant for the care of the retirees until, as

Vatsome’s wife puts it, “the old folk weren’t even being fed the basic necessities and so they were wasting away” (102). Such competition between the more “Lusophone” use of environmental resources as the material foundation for an exclusive and hierarchical community of capitalists and the “native” use of environmental resources as the basis for an egalitarian community belie what Rothwell calls the novel’s post-modern nationalism, its fashioning of “a syncretistic identity for [the] nation that both rests on and refutes a return to ancestral values” (A Postmodern Nationalist np). Besides the overall cultural hybridity that Rothwell links to Mozambique’s “failure” to become fully Lusophone in a linguistic sense, with Portuguese not intelligible to the majority of Mozambicans yet shaping Mozambique’s national and international politics (np), the novel’s representations of antagonisms over environmental resources create a particularly

“syncretistic identity” based upon post-modern tensions between local practices and global capitalism. A shared environmental basis for a national identity thus suggests itself in the seeming incompatibility of economic systems on the island. Because the future for both communities fuses with the island’s environmental resources—the egalitarian community progressively unable to feed itself and preyed upon by a transnational capitalist community that is exploiting the island’s for profit and that ultimately kills

Vatsome when the contraband disappears (Couto 142)—collective title and decision making over environmental resources emerge less as part of a pre-colonial imaginary for 167 the nation than a necessary, national commitment to sustainability.

As it builds a nationalism responsive to the use of and meaning for land in global and local contexts, Under the Frangipani imagines belonging to the land neither in merely ethnic nor economic terms but in terms of an environmental awareness that is difficult but possible to cultivate. As Ermelindo / Izidine interviews the murder suspect

Domingos, the Portuguese-born Domingos takes over the narration and recounts, as all of the suspects do, so much more than the detective requires, in this case hijacking the

“whodunit” narrative with a moving treatise on dying in the land of his rebirth!

Domingos has learned to love Mozambique more than his homeland and wants to die on the island in part because of the frangipani tree that grows there and reminds him of the climate and four seasons of his homeland (41). Despite the clear ways in which

Domingos finds some of Portugal in Mozambique, he more paradoxically conceives of himself as part of the Mozambican landscape and relates himself to the frangipani tree through his own potential for cultural transformation: “Well now, mister inspector, I’m that tree. I come from a plank in another world but my ground is here, my roots were reborn in this place” (42). The magical realist ability for a ship plank to revert to root- bearing plant highlights the frangipani’s journeys around the world and on the waves of colonialism. Within discourses of colonialism, the Portuguese and the frangipani travel, their conflation signifying the power of both “roots” and “routes” to shape postcolonial identity—the frangipani might remind Domingos of “home,” but the plant came to

Europe from South America as part of colonization. While valorizing the fecundity and adaptability of identity-forming processes, Domingos’s use of the frangipani as a way to understand his own identity relies upon a complicated, simultaneously historical and 168 environmental view of reality, an understanding of how the culture and environment of

Mozambique have evolved together.

Although nationalism in the novel progressively becomes equal to the ability to relate to a shared environment, the novel casts nationalism in light of battles for political expression that hang upon the imbrication of nature and culture. Thinking idealistically,

Domingos’s ability represents what literary scholar Sean Rogers—who looks primarily at

Under the Frangipani and enters into conversation with many scholars who think about the ability of other texts by Couto to create a surreal, fantastic “dream” of a shared nation in the face of so much social unrest—calls an “organic vision of the future that Couto thus imagines is a Mozambique where time and history is re-voiced, re-claimed, and allowed to grow according to dictates of a progressive society.” In such an ideal, future society, Domingos can become Mozambican through the use of an organic signifier, the frangipani, which becomes for Rogers transcendent, “a language that is accessible to all and is therefore able to transcend language borders such as those that are present in

Southern Africa” (np). Less idealistically, however, Domingos can become Mozambican because he can understand the culturally specific relationship of his community to the environment. Rather than an “organic” or pre-linguistic symbol, Domingos’s evolving relationship with the frangipani ultimately becomes a sign that, as Domingos puts it, “It’s these black men who scatter my seeds every day” (Couto 42). As he adapts to non-

Lusophone, ethnophilosophical cultural influences in Mozambique, Domingos surrenders a sense of separateness from nature. He becomes very similar to others on the island who have traditional, Bantu backgrounds, suggesting that his participation in the collective ownership of the island’s resources shapes his process of rebirth as a Mozambican. One 169 murder suspect tells Izidine / Ermelindo that on the island because the residents have collective ownership of its resources, “Here, it’s the grass that eats the cow” (Couto 21).

If the grass and cow prove inseparable in a materialist sense of connection—the food creating the cow and thus destroying / eating it as a separate object, the cultural basis for collective ownership of and benefit from environmental resources valorized through the suspect’s saying—such understanding of nature proves culturally specific. Under the

Frangipani harnesses the entanglement of “culture” and “nature” to valorize the ethnophilosophical view that communities should change in response to an evolving environment. Nationalist imagination, the novel’s “dream” of unity, thus takes on intelligibility in Southern Africa in terms that relate to and bolster collective, community claims on environmental resources throughout Southern Africa.

Under the Frangipani entangles nature and culture throughout the novel in ways that promote the partnering of ethnophilosophy and Marxism. The primary trope for natural-cultural entanglement in the novel follows Southern African chameleon myths as the trope builds off of the chameleon’s shifting appearance to describe the almost unfathomable bond between all living and non-living beings. Ermelindo confesses, chameleon-like, the unreliability of his frame narrative because as a shipoco he will be a spirit that travels in “someone else’s shape” and as such “sees the world through a gauze” while fully comprehending only the past (Couto 7). Although Ermelindo as shipoco has the chameleon-like ability to take multiple shapes and so presumably could explore all aspects of reality in time, Ermelindo adds the complication that the dead know fear and cannot fully dispel their ignorance of reality, affirming that “even a veteran of death like me can count wisdom on the fingers of my hand” (3). Philosophical limits to 170 understanding reality emerge: reality appears through a specific “gauze” or consciousness, which in turn creates anxiety and compels individuals to trust the past and perhaps rely upon it rigidly, removing all hope for wisdom or growth. The primary obstacle as well as the only window to understanding interrelation and reality overall thus becomes one’s embodied perspective. Under the Frangipani’s deployment of the chameleon’s journey to earth—in its traditional, cryptic “revelation” of man’s immortal nature, but too late, leading to man’s stumbling towards death without understanding the larger interrelation and movement of beings from form to form—promotes in Under the

Frangipani a dialectical understanding of history that relies upon the inextricability of the natural and the social. In simultaneously ethnophilosophical and dialectical fashion, the novel expresses the paradox of consciousness through the shapeshifting-chameleon character Domingos, who tells the detective Izidine / Ermelindo that when he inhales the scent of the frangipani and feels so powerfully compelled to relate himself to the plant

(and the nation to which the plant has traveled), “I fill myself with eternity and get drunk on it. Yes, I know the dangers involved: he who confuses sky and water ends up unable to distinguish between life and death” (44). Through its reliance upon an ethnophilosophical framework, the passage affirms non-hierarchical relationships between all forms of matter (“eternity”) while foregrounding the need to be dialectical and to avoid the mysticism that Bookchin councils against. Through his connection to the frangipani, Domingos can “become one with all things,” but Domingos’s warning belies the dialectical distinctness of each “entity” in a greater reality and thus the need to attend the fullness of form rather than elide it in mystical connection.

Domingos ultimately serves within the novel as evidence that a Portuguese 171 subject and by extension a Lusophone literature can overcome a false separation from nature that manifests itself paradoxically as either environmental imperialism or as transcendence from the social. The “environment” becomes a chief signifier of postcolonial cultural conflict as when Domingos maintains a Christian view of the tree as a heaven-like object, a transcendent “eternity,” “an immortal soul,” each touch of the tree’s trunk revealing “the earth’s blood flowing round every vein in your body” (62). He thus evokes what ecocritic Timothy Morton studies as a widespread trope within Euro- centric literature, that of nature as a surrounding, external, and greater reality to which characters must ascend. There is a mysticism present in Domingos’ words that abstracts all difference and dissolves what Morton calls nature as “things that are not identical to us or our preformed concepts” (7). Under the Frangipani continues to associate an

“incorrect” view of nature with globalization and Portuguese identity as when Domingos argues to a native character Navaia that black men do not like trees because Domingos sees them cutting trees down (Couto 63). The Christian worldview that nature manifests

God’s presence clearly shapes Domingos’s desire to protect the tree but also carries with it a larger philosophical sense of separation from nature that much of the island lifestyle contradicts and undercuts. By the time that Izidine / Ermelindo interview Domingos as murder suspect, Domingos appears to view the tree as a being like his own, embodied in a particular way and manifesting the non-hierarchical organization of all matter. He seems to have finally understood what Navaia counseled during their misunderstanding over a tree-cutting incident. Navaia clarified that he cut the tree out of complex necessity rather than ignorance: “We’re all brothers, trees and animals, animals and men, men and stones. We’re all related, created out of the same matter” (64). The amazing change in 172

Domingos’s consciousness valorizes traditional cultural values as ways to explore relationships between one’s consciousness and one’s larger surroundings. Just as

Domingos’s growth demonstrates, cultural changes bring about enormous changes in

“nature” and suggest the absolute inseparability of nature and culture while underscoring the material basis for all consciousness.

Under the Frangipani’s ultimately “environmental” aesthetic lies in Couto’s post- modernist novel’s complicated positioning of a simultaneously environmental and community consciousness against the forces of globalization that in one character’s words kill traditions and create “people without history, people who live by imitation”

(54). Intimations that Mozambique cannot escape the continuing effects of colonization and globalization darken th5e novel and give it a feeling of bleakness punctuated by hope. A poetics of nature embattled, forgotten on an island and continuously transformed into raw materials for capitalist development contend with the promise of a community’s political persistence and a national practice of sustainability. Because—as Morton suggests in his advocacy for a “dark ecology” by which to view nature during Late

Capitalism—flourishing nature and culture happen when we treat our environment as

“theory not as answer to a question, or as instruction manual . . . but as question, and question mark, as in question, questioning-ness” (175), the incompleteness and only momentary stability of the island’s ephemeral community demand an ethical response.

From beginning to end, the novel urges inquiry into the ways in which material, environmental imbrication shapes every second of our existences. At the close of Couto’s novel, Ermelindo can rejuvenate an almost decimated frangipani tree, his touch bringing the plant back petal by petal. Ermelindo covers himself with the once disintegrated 173 frangipani and prepares for his “arborescence,” his becoming a tree shared by Navaia, who has recently died and who also seeks another form (Couto 149-150). As Ermelindo becomes a tree and loses the last of his human language, “merging with the sound of stones” (150) and thus ending the novel that Ermelindo’s narration framed, Under the

Frangipani inscribes itself textually within Ermelindo’s particular, cultural vision of the island and of Mozambique. The novel asserts the falseness of apparent differences between nature and culture. Ermelindo’s descent into the earth and wordlessness represents an impossible and therefore melancholic, ironic escape, compelling the questioning of relationships between individuals and larger simultaneously cultural, social, and material environments.

Conclusion

In the face of globalization, the novels of both Pepetela and Couto fashion traditional environmental knowledge into models for community survival and ultimately for nationalist unification. The level of simultaneous environmental and community disruption brought about by globalization leaves universalist claims for the “rights” of the environment, similarly to that made by Domingos on behalf of the wounded frangipani, less ethically imperative than inquiry into relationships between communities and their environment. As The Return of the Water Spirit and Under the Frangipani explore intersectionality between “nature” and “culture,” both novels deploy environmental imagination as a way to promote the necessary crossing of political and cultural divides caused by Lusophone acculturation and the forces of colonization. In their mixtures of novel and oral / mythological form, both works clearly seek to expand their respective

“national” communities, navigating and synthesizing disparate ideologies through an 174 environmental imagination of nationhood.

Because both novels bolster land claims by adapting subaltern environmental imaginations as principles for national governance, they join a wider circle of Southern

African writings that critically engage pan-Africanist political dynamics, deepening appeals to “African” identity and rescuing them from ideological irrelevance (Malawi,

Angola, and Mozambique) or shallow populism (South Africa and Zimbabwe). The complications of regional, Bantu identities presented by Pepetela’s and Couto’s novels form in a more exaggerated, stylized manner than those of any other writers discussed so far, owing perhaps most clearly to the level of Portuguese acculturation manifested in the literatures of Angola and Mozambique. Pepetela and Couto as writers of Portuguese racial and educational backgrounds cannot build upon mostly intact ethnic traditions as in

Botswana nor upon an earlier generation of “native” writers as do the members of the

“second generation” of writers in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Nor can they claim a squarely anti-imperialist perspective as seen in the Malawian Writers Group. Rather, the magical realist novels of Pepetela and Couto connect pan-Africanist but ultimately critical visions for social growth to formally inventive explorations and reevaluations of

“nature.” The Return of the Water Spirit and Under the Frangipani therefore serve as the most useful novels studied so far in positioning land questions within the ongoing regional tensions between Southern African modernizers and traditionalists as well as in showing how land questions participate in environmental change.

175

Conclusion

The ability of a community, a nation to adapt to its environment and use its lands to build a shared future is on full display within Southern African literature. Within that literature, nations take shape in contradictory terms, many of which route through land questions. Formally inventive and contrasting imaginaries for the nation belie the unfinished state of many postcolonial projects for unification. While providing evidence of the difficulties of nation building, Southern African literature also enables reevaluation of the bases for stronger societies. Representing the land as a foundation for nation building, select pieces of literature map a national consciousness that wrestles with the economic, cultural, and environmental importance of the nation’s land. Competing visions of the nation’s land—as material and spiritual basis for the community as well as more squarely economic instrument—position the nation at a crossroads. Yet a sense of national unity still emerges in this literature in terms of different but shared histories on the land. As modernist, magical realist, and other representations of disparate relationships with the land serve, in a Fanonian sense, as the foundation for a national culture, a sense of national consciousness can grow. Struggles to build a community through land policies and practices that can sustain diverse and future generations echo with the promises of decolonization itself. A national community that uses its land in an environmentally and socially sustainable way is a community that has overcome the imperialism bequeathed by the forces of colonialism. Similarly, it is a community that has used the land to reformulate economic relationships, many of which are transnational and not environmentally sustainable. The literary reimagination of land questions thus 176 marries an ideal vision of the nation as cultural beacon with a thoroughly envisioned political apparatus that builds itself from the land up as ultimately all states do.

Given the importance of land questions to the national imagination, their literary representation requires the utmost attention, particularly at a moment when urbanization and globalization threaten to distort land questions as mere rural and therefore lesser problems. The land questions that Sam Moyo studies in an African context as a diverse set of conflicts over land usage and ownership remain one of the most driving dynamics within Southern African states. Current political unrest in South Africa, as one prescient example, illustrates the ways in which models of land use and ownership form the foundation of the political state, for good or for worse. Just as Fanon described and many sociologists today advocate, shared ownership and decisions over the nation’s land build a strong foundation for political inclusivity at all levels of the state. Thus land questions throughout the region threaten or actively reveal crises of political authority and tensions within political programs of governance. Because the literary imagination explores and exploits such conflicts, attending the representation of land questions fosters necessary political change and makes the “nation” more responsive to social and cultural diversity.

On the other hand, critical paradigms that separate land from environment or urban from rural threaten to reify a developmentalism that structures many land questions today. In that version of land usage and ownership, land reforms primarily function as a dubious, individual (in terms of land title) vehicle for poverty relief and international economic competition. Such land schemes culturally diminish the values of shared political control and community decision making that in Southern Africa so strongly relate to land. 177

By locating and evaluating competing visions of land usage and ownership, this study participates in urgently needed shifts within environmental discourse towards sustainability and political ecology. Postcolonial ecocriticism as response to what Rob

Nixon calls “the tension between a postcolonial preoccupation with displacement and an ecocritical preoccupation with an ethics of place” (238) is a step towards understanding places and environments in simultaneously national and transnational terms. Land- question-centric ecocriticism, as a form of postcolonial ecocriticism, greatly increases our critical ability to address the intersections of environmental experience and transnational dynamics such as developmentalism and colonialism. Attending the literary imagination of land questions situates environmental practice and meaning relative to struggles for community survival and definition, which becomes a matter of political ecology.

Mapping the formal complexities of postcolonial literature to a dynamic spatial imagination allows the greater consideration of the ways in which socio-economic factors affect both environments and communities. By charting the literary imagination of national communities in relationship to patterns of land usage and ownership, we can support justice movements that can in turn promote changing patterns of local, national, and global patterns of environmental use.

Shifting Scales of Justice

The range of land questions in Southern Africa means that their literary re- imagination is quite diverse. However, regional ethnophilosophy and a rejection of neoliberal notions of governance show up in all of the reviewed works, belying common tensions between modernizing and traditionalist tendencies, particularly with regards to

“justice.” All of the literary works here share a modernist sensibility that stems from the 178 contrasts between Euro-centric and “African” discourses as they form postcolonial nations. In Fanonian terms, these second generation writings are the result of the propulsion of the “native intellectual,” into “the zone of occult instability where the people dwell” (227). The “African” nature of parts of their cultural imaginary is always the point of inquiry and contrast with something more “modern.” None of the writings ultimately rely upon a purely “African” or pre-colonial national imaginary, and so they avoid the rigid pan-Africanism that Fanon calls the dogged and ultimately misguided response of a native intelligentsia to European claims that there is no African culture

(216-217). Rather, these works explore the cognitive and political dissonance between conceptions of land and environment. The traditional environmental knowledge that informs all of these works—particularly in terms of the traditional relationship between a community and an environment such that the community changes in response to environmental signs and evolves along with the environment—becomes a vantage point from which to reevaluate populist or neoliberal notions of justice. Modern frameworks for land tenure and usage often view environments developmentally as opposed to the community-environmental intersections found in many “traditional” imaginaries. As the traditionalist “environment” becomes instrumental to plot and character development,

Southern African literature takes up traditional imaginaries but in ways that push against and reshape developmental and populist concepts. Individual land tenure in Mies Julie becomes untenable and the source of worsening communal conflicts over land. Likewise,

Zimbabwean relationships between communities and their lands prove irresolvable, in the stories of Charles Mungoshi and Shimmer Chinodya, with the government’s notions of development or national identity. The chief contest in all cases becomes first the question 179 of how the land or environment builds a society and then how a government should manage and utilize the land. Distributive justice as practiced by populist or neoliberal governments becomes defamiliarized and open not so much to a return of the pre-colonial as much a hybrid re-imagination that rests first and foremost upon an environmental consciousness.

As explored in chapter one, South African works contest the individual property framework of both an anti-racial populism and a neoliberal land question; in contrast, select Zimbabwean literature counters an ultra-nationalism that in many ways co-opts traditional concepts of land. The “Shona” government has imagined itself as the guarantor of “justice” in parallel to the ways in which Fleischacker defines the modern state’s role in issues of redistribution. Yet the evolution of “justice” in Western philosophy passes through a utilitarianism and Marxism that contrasts sharply with the

Chimurenga logic that drove the Fast Track land redistribution program. Chimurenga

“justice” looks the most like what Fleischacker describes as older Western philosophical meanings for the concept: Aristotle first coins “distributive justice” as the distribution of

“honor or political office or money,” which is to be “apportioned in accordance to merit,” merit being a status that Aristotle leaves open to interpretation (Fleischacker 19). Robert

Mugabe effectively placed governmental redistribution of land within a historical telos. A prophesized “return to the land” routes redistribution through ethnic belonging in a populist way and through closeness to the ruling party in practical terms. Although neo- liberal pro-poor land questions have insinuated themselves into Zimbawean politics, the earlier Chimurenga logic triggers a strong response from the writers that I have reviewed, particularly in terms of the merit for redistribution. All three writers contribute 180 environmental imaginations of their country’s land questions, building from the

“traditional” potential of a community to read and adapt to their environment. Hunhu ethics clearly accords the merit of Marita and Janifa in Hove’s Bones and allows the novel to undermine Mugabe’s populism. Marita and Janifa demonstrate the effort and self-knowledge that “environmental prophecy” actually requires. As much as Bones separates the merit of environmental connection from that of ethnic belonging or land ownership, the stories of Chinodya and Mungoshi question the ability for modern

Zimbabweans to achieve such merit. Ultimately, characters like Rudo in “Queues” and

Rondo’s father-in-law in “The Sins of the Fathers” suggest that the ability might exist but again accrues only to someone who can remove the “poisons” of selfishness and self- doubt, poisons that both Chinodya and Mungoshi seem to associate with postcolonialism.

The modernist frameworks for all three pieces of literature thus attempt to catalyze the environmental imagination of a national community that can better relate itself to its environment without acting in an imperialist or nativist manner.

Like those in Zimbabwe, Malawian land questions encode populist perversions of land and environmental relationships, relationships that writers once again reimagine.

Malawi’s lower levels of colonial land expropriation lead to a stronger literary reaction to market-driven changes on the land as post-colonial political dispensations actively target and disrupt communal land title and usage. As Blessings Chinsinga suggests, “life president” Joseph Banda’s targeting echoes colonial cries (elsewhere in Southern Africa) of “waste” or undeveloped land (7-9). Given that pro-development discourse and radical levels of corruption on the land have created post-Banda land issues including ineffective land boards and the elite capture of redistributed lands (14), the state’s role in “justice” 181 becomes even more suspicious. The pro-poor neo-liberal land policies that now operate in Malawi take on a teleological bent in their ineffectiveness at creating social justice.

They seem in fact to operate as the end result, as in other Southern African nations, of significant levels of land expropriation and the undermining of “traditional” relationships on the land. In response to both the Banda and post-Banda land questions, the poetry of

Steve Chimombo and Jack Mapanje interrogates the extent to which the modern

Malawian state has intensified colonial attitudes towards land and environments. Both poetry collections ultimately condemn the Malawian state for undermining collective notions of justice in favor of a liberal and neo-liberal “justice.” Chimombo and Mapanje combat what Fleischacker follows as the pervasive, Smithean tenor of market-driven

“justice”: although Adam Smith worries about capitalism’s penchant for inequality, he ultimately defends market-driven distributions as opposed to state-driven distributions because “the apparently unfair division of goods he describes still leaves poor workers much better off than the richest people in egalitarian societies” (38-39); neo-liberal philosophers contesting state-run schemes for distribution use similar language, pushing

“justice” towards the distribution of opportunity and legal status rather than of property while only going as far as advocating a baseline pro-poor distribution that guarantees social and economic stability (117). Chimombo and Mapanje critique the economic and cultural disaster that follows from such developmentalism. The environmental imagination of “traditional communities” becomes the foil for modern development as both collections advocate the preservation of environmental relationships and use them as vantage points to a national culture. Environmental practices are fraught and threatened constantly, shifting as Banda undermines traditional lifeways. Speakers struggle to 182 achieve a level of communal belonging to their environments, resulting in modernist overtones. Yet a culture of resistance emerges in both works as they valorize traditional environmental relationships as a point of departure rather than of return.

Whereas similar contests between traditionalists and modernizers color the

Lusophone writings of Mia Couto and Pepetela, rural and urban divides in Mozambique and Angola intensify the modernist reinvention of “justice.” Both novels work against the force of Lusophone acculturation in the limited urban areas of both countries and the ways in which acculturation creates moral gulfs between the urban modernizers and the rural traditionalists. In response to the civil wars between modernizers and traditionalists that have created land questions in both countries, Under the Frangipani and The Return of the Water Spirit question a universal, national mode of production and attendant form of government while bolstering community land claims. Specters of Lusophone Africa’s past Marxist-Leninism animate both novels, invoking the potential for what Fleischacker calls a “justice” that is entirely different from the liberal species of the concept. The distribution of goods by those who own land and resources creates, in Fleischacker’s view of Marx, a paradox for thinkers of distributive justice, a paradox that can serve as mere apologia for capitalism and can spoil a “socialism” that relies upon distributive justice without addressing the inequities of production (97). Marx’s difference from other socialists of his time is that he does not focus on the individual re-distribution of goods post-production but rather broadly considers the distribution of goods in relationship to the mode of production, arguing that socialists must re-humanize the worker by working against capitalism’s alienation of labor from laborer as well as its alienation of laborers from each other (98-99). Although the novels similarly mine types of Southern African 183 ethnophilosophy for culture-nature intersections, the collectivism that post-Marxists have read in Marx’s concept of the land as the engine of the “social metabolism” comes to life as both novels follow communities that thrive and defy opposition precisely by building their culture from the ground up. Tensions between traditionalist (ethnophilosophical) and modernizing (Marxist) notions of land drive the novels to uneasy mergers of the concepts as when the water spirit Kianda topples squatters’ housing and Couto’s narrator surrenders his human form to become a frangipani. Both endings suggest that Lusophone acculturation, even in the form of a robust “Marxism,” stands as obstacle to national unification in countries where local, collective claims to land inform the politics and political memory of so many beyond the urban areas. Yet in both cases collective claims to the land, and the environmental consciousness that radiates from it, serve as the starting point for a new national imaginary.

The Environmental Re-imagination of the Nation

In contrast to their treatment in much literary scholarship, Southern African land questions concern the shape of national governance and the environmental consciousness of the nation. Focusing on the ways in which land questions determine, as many sociologists have argued, sweeping patterns of political economy and political participation at every level of society, allows literary scholarship to make connections between rural and urban spaces as well as between competing socio-economic visions for

African nations. The longstanding tensions between traditionalists and modernizers in

Southern Africa manifest themselves fully in the land questions of individual countries.

Universal and communitarian visions structure the language of many official land questions and lead to the response of myriad “popular” land questions, a local-global 184 dialectic that has a truly profound impact on political practice, as evidenced by persistent

“flare ups” of land disputes throughout the region, most recently in South Africa. South

Africa’s official re-consideration of more sweeping land reforms evinces the temporary nature of neo-liberal land “justice” that has insinuated itself in much of the region. As many land question scholars have argued, neo-liberal and populist land reform often works against the collective decision-making on the land that proves time and again to create widespread environmental and more widely material security. Breaking ecological crises in the Brazilian amazon and on Native American land demonstrate the more global potential of unresolved land questions to cause hemorrhaging environmental and social impacts. From a more ecocritical vantage point, modernist and magical realist responses to official land questions navigate the postcolonial tensions that Rob Nixon calls the distance between cosmopolitanism and bio-regionalism, which distance then becomes for

Nixon the proper scope of postcolonial ecocriticism. Local relationships to the land contend in such literature with notions of national governance. Ethnophilosophical frameworks compete with Euro-centric “environments,” opening space for new definitions of community. The potential for environmental and community sustainability emerges, ultimately, as Southern African literature reformulates traditional notions of

“environmentalism” for national praxis. As new notions of “justice” emerge, wider political ecological discourse expands to reverse narrow measures for environmental access and over exposure of some communities to environmental degradation.

The literary re-imagination of land questions in Southern African literature often so deeply contrasts the official versions of land and environmental practice that the question of national practice remains somewhat open and looming. Owing to the contest 185 between traditionalist and modernizing tendencies that pervades the region, Southern

African literature raises fruitful questions about the relationships between communities and their environments and thus about the political and environmental practices that should guide a nation. The line between pan-Africanism and Fanonian “national culture” proves pivotal, especially in countries with such a strong legacy of pan-Africanism like

Malawi and South Africa. Any redress to traditional environmental practices needs to be weighed against the degree to which literary representations of such practices form the vantage point to a living culture of political resistance and change. Appeals to traditional environmental knowledge must become less the sign of “environmental thinking” than an invitation to reimagine political-environmental practice, in accordance to the longstanding trope of Southern African communities adapting to their environments.

Accordingly, the relationship between political and environmental change and the region’s land questions raises questions about the wider impact of land questions in

Africa and elsewhere. Although different resolutions to “the agrarian question” have led to striking regional differences, diffusive ethnophilosophical and pan-Africanist imaginaries beg similar questions about the potential for a critical decolonizing poetics that respond to Northern and Central African land questions. Such connections stem from the movement of people and political notions across Africa as well as to the global framework of land questions as an agent of political “progress” and as popular response to that progress. Even more sweeping comparative frameworks open in consideration of continuing crises of political ecology throughout the formerly colonized world. Re- imaginations of land questions often defamiliarize market-driven governance and interrogate the environmental sustainability of a global economy that so often undermines 186 collective land title and decision-making on the land. Global transformations of “land” and “environment” thus emerge in numerous world literatures that anticipate and combat the evolution of Late Capitalism without obviating or dampening the specificities of postcolonial critique.

The ambivalent nature of postcolonial land questions—their current imbrication in neo-liberal globalization coupled with their persistent meaning for local, national, and regional fights for “justice”—reveals their analytic value. They truly bridge the traditionalist and modernizing tendencies that have so much legibility throughout

Southern Africa and elsewhere in the postcolonial world. They in turn shape the

“environment” and “environmentalism” through hybrid but no less powerful cultural lenses, forming cultural-environmental intersections that ecocritics must not ignore. Few discourses shape the environmental consciousness of a nation more than land questions as they dictate patterns of land usage and ownership, promoting or undermining the sustainability of intersecting communities, human and environmental. Southern African literature thus usefully interacts with changing land questions as they form the bedrock of political access and mold the environmental imagination of the nation.

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Notes

1 Also see postcolonialists Achille Membe, Reiland Rabaka, and Stephanie Clare for different views upon Fanon that read against the “obvious” violence in Fanon’s thought and look to Fanon’s potential for sustainable, inclusive nation building. 2 See David Birmingham for a good overview of this historical dichotomy, which explains for many postcolonial historians the development of unique postcolonial nations. The tensions are between Euro-centric social structures and those related to chiefly and “tribal” social formations. 3 Within postcolonial studies, scholars use the political unconscious to think about the unique cultural and social formations of postcolonial states. For postcolonialist Terry Eagleton, as one example, “gothic” features in Anglo-Irish writing help pose and resolve tensions between Irish Catholics and the Anglo- Irish population. 4 See Cherryl Walker et al. for a comprehensive situation of South African land questions relative to ongoing pursuits for social and geographical justice. The work of sociologist Thembela Kepe is often engaged in intersections between South African land questions and the state of environmental health, particularly from the perspective of land boards and their increasing environmental concerns. More generally, the work of Martin Sjostedt as well as that of Jenny Clover and Siri Eriksen cogently defends collective control over land by linking it to environmental and political stability in several case studies spread throughout Southern Africa. 5 Moyo’s second chapter sets up the “classic agrarian land question” before suggesting that claims by Northern and Southern African governments to have resolved such questions through economic development are misleading. The key to understanding Southern African land questions according to Moyo, overall, is that economic transitions involving the industrialization of agriculture and then sublimation into industrial capitalism (the agrarian question) make limited sense in Southern Africa given striking rural and urban divides coupled with the ways in which urban and rural experience actually relate to each other as indicators of the social efficacy of land usage and ownership patterns. In such an intersectional view, the growth of urban areas in Southern Africa belies land questions as does the regular flare ups, throughout the region, of social protest over economic stability. 6 Lusophone literature provides an instructive example. The rural and urban divides in Mozambique and Angola, among the most trenchant in the region, make land questions into a low priority for the urban, national governments. The general dynamic in the region is related to increasing urbanization and economic shifts away from subsistence agriculture on the land, the “peasant option,” which is to say that many governments interpret land questions in terms of the agrarian question or as a matter of poverty relief rather than as a sweeping issue of political economy as does this study.

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7 Rob Nixon helps to define and illustrate a postcolonial-ecocritical mandate, one that guides this study, to engage local environmental knowledges without essentializing environmental subjects or abstracting them away from global dynamics such as colonialism or capitalism. 8 Lazarus is instructive here as is Fanon’s chapter in The Wretched of the Earth entitled “Concerning Violence.” 9 Although there are a number of points in the Wretched of the Earth in which Fanon advocates collective land title, Fanon’s “Concerning Violence” is once again helpful, especially pages 42-44, which deal with the ways in which colonialism related “natives” to plants and animals, leading Fanon to advocate that a reversal of such cultural damage must be built from the land up. Stephanie Clare takes a “new materialist” approach to Fanon, finding in his work support for environmental interaction and sustainability, which are for Clare the ultimate goals of Fanonian decolonization. 10 The work of Sjostedt as well as of Clover and Martin comes to mind. 11 See Marx’s thoughts in Capital about land as the “social metabolism,” driving the mechanisms of labor and thus of social differentiation and experience (198-201). Such thought has influenced modern ecocritical perspectives as evidenced by Chris Williams’ explication of Marxist ecocriticism, which for Williams builds from the social metabolism concept to force dialogue between “community” and “environment.” This study, overall, takes such a Marxist ecocritical approach. 12 See Moyo and the work of Clover and Eriksen for contextualization of land questions, worldwide, relative to resource wars, wealth gaps, poverty, and general material insecurity. 13 This is a term associated in one sense with Apartheid-era South Africa and its “lumping” of diverse peoples into “Bantu-stans” and for the purposes of labor control and social administration. However, linguists

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entangled, inextricable from the brutality of Apartheid, which entanglement Ndebele studies overall as an unavoidable concern with spectacle. 18 See Patrick Bond for a critical look at the South African political transition to independence, which coincided with a major change in the ANC’s direction. Bond charts the transition to market-driven governance alongside unresolved and newly created environmental and social injustices. 19 See both anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani and Moyo for connections between customary authority and the nature of modern land questions, which can be shown to undermine collective land title and serve as forms of neo-colonialism while at the same time, in the popular imagination, tie to collective identities on the land. 20 The current land crisis in South Africa is instructive here. ANC president Cyril Ramaposa, who has replaced Jacob Zuma after Zuma’s corruption scandal, has been in conference with the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and has begun to investigate options for the large scale expropriation of white farmland. International complaints tout the rule of law, but SA proponents of expropriation have called the rule of law simple justification for stolen property. The crisis clearly builds upon the failures of the neoliberal land question to create social or cultural justice and has opened up ranging governmental and popular debates over land use and ownership. 21 See Chivaura as well as Guvamombe for reporting on the legacies of resistance built upon 19th century figures such as Nehanda. 22 The Southern Rhodesian Land Apportionment Act of 1930 barred black land ownership, created racially divisive labor dynamics, and necessitated but also ultimately worked against the Lancaster House Agreement of 1980, which sought to counteract such massive levels of land expropriation. 23 See Charles Chavunduka for a sociological analysis of how the Fast Track program increased material stability for many. See Stephen Chan for analysis of the political nepotism and neo-paternalism involved in the land seizures. Maurice Vambe offers some positive analysis of the community changes brought on by the Fast Track program while suggesting that battles over class, race, and gender lines mark the experience of new communities on the land. 24 Chavunduka is helpful in understanding this type of land question, which scholars commonly call the neoliberal land question. 25 See Patrick Chabal for a good distinction between modernizers and traditionalists, one contextualized within civil wars and ongoing political schisms. 26 See David Birmingham for a look at common patterns in racial relations in Lusophone Africa, ultimately focusing on the non-existent potential for economic and cultural unification in Angola. Patrick Chabal is also good for a comparative study of Lusophone nations, again focusing on the obstacles to national unification. The chief obstacles in both cases are racial imperialism from the Lusophone cities towards the more “African” countryside as well as the social univeralism that radiates from the seats of governance but that meets traditionalism or notions of politics related to chiefdoms, local communities, and collective land title.

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27 See Allen Cain for analysis of the land question from the perspective of the civil wars in both Mozambique and Angola. 28 See Birmingham for analysis of Lusophone “communism,” with a particular focus on Angola and the inability there to transform the agrarian sector using Marxist- Leninist approaches, which Birmingham and others consider still born. Rather, the ruling parties’ communism is a form of imperialism and top-down ideology that rationalizes central control of the nation by Angola and Mozambique’s ruling parties. 29 See Sam Moyo for a thorough study of the contradictions of African land questions, one of which is the seemingly disparate dynamics that shape rural and urban spaces. For Moyo, the growth of urban spaces throughout the region belie the conflicts over land that displace so many Southern Africans (12-13). 30 Postcolonialist Eleni Coundouriotis thinks more specifically about African naturalism as does postcolonialist Eli Sorensen. Both scholars find more than the cynicism and overdetermined social violence that others have associated with naturalism. Both find a popular political consciousness--respectively, in representations of warfare and market-driven governance--in naturalism’s suspension of narrative and descriptive elements. 31 See Mda’s novel The Heart of Redness for its extended treatment of a conflict between traditionalists and modernizers over the fate of a town, Qlohra-by-Sea, in the Eastern Cape. Similarly to The Whale Caller, as well as to much Southern African literature, pluralist tensions rise between those who advocate political organization around traditional structures (chieftainships, customary authority, and communal property rights) and modern structures (communism or else capitalism and individual notions of property including those promoted by structural adjustment programs). 32 Early in the novel, Saluni and the whale caller both demonstrate social engagement as they challenge the prejudice of a group of pastors. Despite the protagonists’ courage, their social isolation stops them from being taken seriously (Mda Whale Caller, 21-23). 33 Patrick Bond explores the neoliberal transition in South Africa. See pages 38-41 for a good description of the target points for the neoliberal, compradorist land redistribution plan. 34 See Miki Flockemann for a performance-centric look at how Farber adapts Strindberg’s naturalism. See William Hutchins for a more direct comparison of Mies Julie to Miss Julie, particularly in terms of naturalist excess. 35 Cherryl Walker gives an excellent overview of the South African land question, focusing on its limited governmental scope including a focus on areas of farm land that have become overwhelmingly white because of Apartheid-era removals of black farmers. Abel Diale also connects the historical expropriations of black land under Apartheid with the limited scope of redistribution in the governmental land question. Diale also explores the paradoxes of neoliberal pro-poor distribution schemes.

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36 See Annette Kolodny for a pivotal exploration of literary tropes that feminize landscapes, often with the effect of opening environments to developmental and imperialist logic. 37 See Department of Rural Land Reform for expansions on the governmental land questions scope including better access to land and adjudication procedures for women. 38 This and related prophecies are actually a bit more complicated than those fables conscripted into a Shona nationalist telos of inevitable Shona victory over the British colonists and a re-appropriation of stolen land. See Vimbai Gukwe Chivaura for the distinction between the spirit mediums who channel messages and the royal ancestors who speak through them like Nehanda and Chaminuka. See Terrence Ranger for a more thorough history of Shona and Ndebele resistance against colonization that foregrounded the 19th century prophecies and that became intellectually influential on Shona freedom fighters during the civil war, who began to relate their activities to a prophesized Shona victory over foreigners or “strangers.” Isadore Guvamombe helps clarify the process by which the ZANU-PF began to relate itself to and rely upon the intervention of royal ancestors; the civil war also sees a growing literary use of royal prophecies, with which Hove, Mungoshi, and Chinodya certainly interact via a shared modernist sensibility that rejects an essentialist Shona identity. Munhamu Pekeshe helps complicate the Shona nationalist use of the royal prophecies by tracing them to a line of prophecies against the weapons (“wilt under the arms of the strangers”) brought to the area by even earlier colonists such as the Portuguese; Pekeshe further clarifies that the prophecies do not predict the eviction of foreigners as much as the continuance of Shona lifeways, which had in the past coexisted with European influence. Openness to outside influence in turn relates to Shona ethnophilosophy that demands adaptation of a community to changing environments, a process aided by prophecy and environmental signs such as locusts and sick cattle. 39 See Stephan Chan and Ranka Primorac for a solid correlation between the Fast Track program and the growing immiseration of Zimbabweans as the process of land redistribution funneled through the Mugabe regime and those with loyalty to it, exasperating divides between the rich and the poor. Charles Chavunduka and Daniel Bromley take a more strictly sociological approach to the problem, historicizing land distribution through different periods of Zimbabwean history and challenging pro-poor and racially motivated land distribution as fundamentally inadequate for the creation of material stability. Both sources contextualize ongoing land injustice in terms of neoliberal economic developmentalism that buoys the Mugabe regime. 40 See Fanny Söderbäck for a critique of the binary, which for Söderbäck forecloses social revolutions in its replication of an imperialist sense of progress as well as in its shunting of Others, its relegation of Others to cyclical and therefore non- historical and non-political time. 41 Janifa uses Marita’s wisdom and memory to overcome madness while Chisaga remembers Marita and thus begins to overcome the shame that he feels in raping

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Janifa (87-88). The woman on the bus remembers Marita as a call to action, an act of penance for her husband’s betrayal of Shona fighters in the Rhodesian civil war (76-77); the woman goes to the morgue to collect Marita’s body and incites the same brutality that killed Marita (82). 42 See Canisius Mwandavi for an in-depth explanation of Hunhu (and particularly Shona) conceptions of the afterlife and the ancestral connection between the living and the dead including the ultimate indistinguishability of body and soul (207). Placide Tempels provides a good description of Bantu “force” as the main unit of existence, connecting all entities, ancestral, godly, human, or non-human. The experience of time relates to the interconnection of all forces such that “the world of forces is held like a spider’s web of which no single thread can be caused to vibrate without shaking the whole network” (433). See I.A. Menkiti for an explanation of how Bantu communities teach their members about and live in relation to metaphysical concepts like “time” such that nature acts as a primary basis for all understanding of experience. A person simultaneously experiences reality along multiple timelines that connect the different facets of existence (130- 131). 43 I imply “gothic” as a recurring mode rather than the gothic genre that some have argued temporally preceded Romanticism. I also imply strong connections between gothicism and modernism, particularly in terms of fraught notions of community and anti-realist aesthetics. My own reading of Mungoshi’s short story accords with Philip Holden’s injunction to contextualize gothic elements within the historical dynamics and socio-political transitions that undergird a work of literature and that so often inform postcolonial writing in its inquisition of “modernity.” 44 See Lloyd Sachikonye for a description of economic and social changes caused by the fast-track program. 45 See Flora Veit-Wild for a thorough contextualization of Second Generation writing in terms of Zimbabwe’s political independence, earlier generations of writers who wrote predominately in Shona and other native languages, and the writers’ European-style educations. What Veit-Wild calls the second generation switch from communal to individual responsibility (93) thus belies a whole suite of social changes around the time of political independence. The question, which works by both Chinodya and Mungoshi raise, of political consciousness rely precisely upon the altered but not eliminated viability of “community” and the consciousness formation that an individual must participate in and take responsibility for. 46 Chan and Primorac quantify benefits and describe the inequalities of land distributions under the ZANU-PF. 47 Chavanduka and Bromley describe the conflicts between neoliberal, pro-poor land initiatives and community health on the land. 48 Although Patrick Chabal focuses mainly on Lusophone Africa, he provides an in- depth comparison of these two socio-political “camps,” both of which have broad intelligibility and come into conflict throughout Southern Africa. The modernizers are associated with city spaces most often as well as with colonial intellectual

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developments, largely as a result of colonial educational systems in Southern Africa. Most of the currently dominant political parties in Southern Africa are modernizers. Conversely, traditionalists abound in the region and have expressed an opposing political will, one associated largely with rural areas and tribal politics. For many Africanists, the tensions between these socio-political groups shapes Southern African literature. 49 Much of Malawian post-independence literature is poetry, a fact brought on by the Banda dictatorship. See Reuben Chirambo for explication of Malawian Writer’s Group (MWG) poetry as representative of literary production in post- independence literature. Poetic language and themes, including mythology, allowed poets to hide political critique from Banda’s censorship and violent despotism. 50 See Gibson Nene and Inoussa Boubacar for a comprehensive study of Southern African Development Corporation countries and the negative impacts of willing- buyer, willing-seller programs on poverty relief. 51 See Clover and Eriksen for correlations between communal control over land and greater material security when compared with neoliberal dispensations for land control, which tend to focus on individual property and development at the expense of greater understandings of political ecology and environmental justice. 52 Martin Sjostedt connects secure land tenure in Botswana to a greater preservation, when compared to other Southern African nations, of collective land title. Collective land title in so many areas of Botswana in turn enables greater collective decision making over natural resources like water. Despite the ways in which the Botswanan government interacts with traditional institutions of land management, there is a clear ethnic, Tswana bias to the interaction. Many scholars have commented upon the Botswanan government’s neglect of Khoisan resource and land rights. Judith Kinaird explores the relationship between mining rights in Botswana and the health of Khoisan political resistance. 53 The poem’s speaker acknowledges that the prison guards have murdered prisoners and that prisoners have vanished without a single record (50-51). The poem also more broadly concerns the censorship of the Banda regime and the ways in which the Banda regime has attempted to silence prisoners, an attempt which is compromised by oral and other records. 54 Christine Loflin usefully delineates a long tradition in African literature of projecting social struggles onto particular, dramatic landscape features. I am differentiating eco-criticism from such projection by thinking about the degree to which a text’s environmental imagination configures relationships between human communities and their environments as well as the degree to which such relationships enable thinking about environmental ethics. 55 Chinsinga describes the cycle of exploitation as follows: Banda became a pass through to World Bank initiatives that used a rhetoric of African land hunger to justify individual sales of land, particularly for the purposes of commercial farming; the land parcels often went directly to Banda cronies or else became gobbled up by larger commercial farms who could weather the economic inequalities of World Bank loans; such an economically exploitive process of

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converting collective land claims into individual land ownership simultaneously forced even more subsistence farmers into farm labor for agribusinesses (7-9). 56 “Moving into Monkey Bay” contrasts types of access to the lake of “Baobab Fruit Picking,” ratcheting tensions between leisure and subsistence activities while having the speaker take on complicity with Banda’s social re-engineering. The eponymous character in “The Haggling Old Woman at Balaka” haggles over the milk tins and developmentally minded loans that her government suddenly offers her, prompting her suspicion. Similarly, “The Farms that Gobble the Land at Home” directly confronts the false rhetoric of developmentalism that seems to aid and promote small farmers. 57 “Baobab Fruit Picking” suggests that the inability to control water, which relates in turn to collective land and lake access rights, has led to dying Baobab trees and scant agricultural harvests. The poem also insinuates that the South Africans’ fences carve the lake up and cause disruption to the movement of fish, which in turn affects subsistence fishing. “Moving into Monkey Bay: Balamanja North” relates more of the fences’ disruptions and uses animal metaphors to suggest that such disruption, along with heaps of waste thrown into the lake by South Africans (24), negatively affects the environment at the same time that it impacts the Balamanja community. 58 See Mufunanji Magalasi for an exploration of geographical linkages in Chimombo’s poetry to the diversity of the nation, which shares a national imaginary, for Magalasi, in terms of a common oppressor in the form of Banda. For Magalasi, the unnamed Banda erupts throughout the poetry of Napolo and the Python just as Napolo does throughout Malawi, the poetry’s mythological vocabulary serving “to camouflage some of the critical literature for circulation without reprisal.” (80). Conversely Bright Molande studies two later works by Chimombo to suggest that the poery uses a simple pan-Africanist framework for Napolo, unleashing Napolo not as the will of Banda but of the people, who are displeased with colonialism and imperialism (317). Similarly, Kalua Fetson interprets the Napolo poems as adapting Eliot’s poetry to dislocate and hide political critique, becoming nationalist in its local, discursive appeals to the Malawian people. In all three cases, Napolo serves as a punishment and communicates to the community the need to rise up against oppression that the critics all see as neo-colonial in nature. 59 Lazarus has updated his original entreaty to differentiate between ultra-nationalism and decolonizing nationalisms, locating a formerly broad condemnation of all nationalisms within postcolonial studies as a political response to the Washington Consensus, which is a move that he makes, more presciently, in the original article as well (70). Theoretically, the condemnation emerges from misinterpretations of Fanon made by Bhabha and others, misinterpretations which center around the nature of cultural resistance in Fanon’s work. See Lazarus for more detail and for cogent defense of Fanonian decolonizing nationalisms as vitally important and entirely different from ultra-nationalisms. 60 See Patrick Chabal’s “Lusophone Africa in Historical and Comparative Perspective” for a detailed contextualization of various “socialist” plans for

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national unification that emerged after Lusophone African independence in 1975. Rather than faulting a Marxist socialist vision in terms of principle, Chabal finds that the newly independent nations faced economic crisis as well as the overdetermined “choice,” during the Cold War, between communism and capitalism. Chabal suggests that the MPLA in Angola, specifically, embraced a Marxist-Leninist plan as a response to South African (and later American), capitalist backing for groups associated with traditionalists, using socialism as a way to consolidate power from the city while targeting the rural bases of traditionalists for change and integration (77). For their continued reign, the MPLA ultimately relied less upon a socialist infrastructure—one that the majority rural populations of Angola had almost no potential to or interest in accepting— than upon oil wealth, staying in power as a neo-paternalist organization and having “solid” reign over the Luanda area only while representing themselves as the national party. See David Birmingham’s area study on Angola for a more in- depth look at the MPLA’s neo-paternalism and the ways in which it allowed the party to survive against geographic and geo-political odds. Focusing on the MPLA’s nominal socialism but true neo-paternalism also helps to explain the failure of peace talks in the mid-1990s as the MPLA ultimately refused to share wealth and power with the major opposing party UNITA, something that both Chabal and Birmingham cover and that sets up the resumption of civil war violence in The Return of the Water Spirit. Neo-paternalism also helps to explain the changing relationship between the MPLA and capitalist countries like South Africa and the US, which by the mid-1990s were beginning to back the MPLA in exchange for trade concessions, leading to the “switch” from socialism to capitalism, which for the MPLA is really just an official abandonment of nominal socialism. 61 There are several factors that make a “traditionalist win” suspect and in need of significant clarification including the actions of the central party associated with the traditionalists, UNITA. See Chabal and Birmingham for descriptions of UNITA’s assault on Angolan peasantry, forcing farmers to join the movement. Both scholars also detail the neo-paternalism of UNITA in its reliance upon diamond wealth and mining rights. Finally, the backing of South Africa, the DRC, and the US also turned UNITA into an anti-communist weapon in a Cold War proxy war rather than a simple expression of traditionalist values. 62 Cain argues in “Luanda’s post-War Land Markets” that weak governmental infrastructure around land questions as well as biases towards colonial-era conceptions of land ownership continue to disadvantage musseque dwellers, those in informal slums who have a range of community-recognized property mechanisms that the official government ignores, thus undercutting efforts at reducing poverty through land ownership. Pétur Waldorff adds to Cain’s analysis by situating collective and other historical land claims within an urban politics of land exclusion, which for Waldorff like Cain is the result of colonial and postcolonial attitudes towards land that ignored or discounted community practices in favor of the elite and businesses. Overall, Waldorff treats the formal system of land / property adjudication as a predatory machine acting on behalf of

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developmental interests. See Blessings Chinsinga for a more general denouncement of Southern African pro-poor land reform policies that ultimately contribute to the elite capture of land, the primary problem being the ways in which the process for official land redistribution simultaneously erodes collective land title. 63 Early in his frame narrative, Ermelindo explains his relationship with the chameleon mythology by telling the reader that although “everyone knows the tale” of the chameleon as “the creature [that] dallied in giving men the secret of everlasting life,” leading to God changing his mind, Ermelindo is a “back-to-front messenger” who delivers “messages from men to gods” but takes “too long to deliver my tidings” (5). Although the indecisiveness of Ermelindo’s physical and spiritual journey provides a clear analogy to the chameleon mythology and draws upon that mythology’s notion of interconnection between material and spiritual states, Denise Martin usefully explores the ontological and epistemological inquiry present in ethnophilosophical mythology, of which the chameleon mythology stands as one of the strongest strains in Southern Africa. 64 The sharp difference in land questions between Botswana and other Southern African nations arises in part because of Botswana’s absence of widespread land expropriation under colonialism as well as a national commitment to coordinating land usage and ownership dynamics with local, kgotla organizations for decision making. See Martin Sjostedt for connections between collective land title in Botswana, water access, and political autonomy for various people groups. Also exploring the high degree of collective land title and traditional land management institutions in Botswana, J. Clover compares levels of land control between different Southern African groups and also argues that Botswana preserves enough collective control over natural resources and land to create measurable differences in political and environmental sustainability. Botswana thus becomes a primary example for land question scholars (like Chinsinga) who argue against the neoliberal and Southern African Development Corporation’s use of individual land title as the dominant vehicle for land reform and pro-poor policy. 65 The potential for Mozambican national unification is both dynamic and paradoxical. As Philip Havic explores in the nationalisms of Southern Africa more widely and Lusophone Africa more specifically, somewhat rigid ideologies emerge as part of the universalism inherited by modernizing parties from their leaders’ colonial education as well as part of their ultimate authoritarianism. At the same time, modernizing parties emerge and change through a complex interaction with local differences in geography, economy, and culture that create and reveal tensions within the party that shape its path, its “legitimization and reification of the nation” (Havic 36-37).

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