The Body in Post-Independence African Novels

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National bodies:

The body in post-independence African novels

Madeleine Wilson

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

School of the Arts & Media

Faculty of the Arts & Social Sciences

February 2018 THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: WILSON

First name: Madeleine Other name/s: Kate

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD

School: School of the Arts and Media Faculty: Faculty of the Arts and Social Sciences

Title: National bodies: The body in post- independence African novels

Abstract 350 words maximum:

Western narratives have long associated Africa with the body. In these narratives Africa was caught in a Hegelian master–slave relation influenced by the Cartesian dualism, where the body was presented as the labouring body to Europe’s rational brain. In direct response to this matrix of representation, the so-called ‘first generation’ of African writers in the 1950s and 1960s centralised the African body as part of their quest to legitimate African experience: a project largely effected through the pre-independence realist novel. However, independence ushered in its own political urgencies, with the failure of the new postcolonial elite to overcome systemic corruption and operate a truly postcolonial state. In this thesis I contend that after independence writers turned to a new figural syntax of the body. This figural shift, I argue, saw the inheritance of the symbolic weight of the human body in African fiction into a new conceptual space. Rather than ‘writing back’ to earlier derogatory representations from the West, the political literature of the post-independence period addressed new issues advanced by the State. Employing a postcolonial studies framework and drawing from recent body scholarship, including biopolitical and necropolitical approaches, this research undertakes close readings of a selection of novels from writers across the continent in order to examine four predominant political categories of the body in African fiction: the dictator’s body, engorged and grotesque; the concealed, wounded prisoner’s body, including the sub-category of the child soldier; sexual violence against women’s bodies as forming a metonymy for land in conflict situations; and the outsider body of the deformed beggar in the city. In addressing these four categories, this study forms part of a growing body of research on the recent boom in African literatures. In applying theories of the body to close readings of a range of novels, this project extends analyses of the political spectre of the body in African fiction and will contribute to future research on similar topics.

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I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.

I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.

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Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank Fiona Morrison, my supervisor, for constantly extending my thinking in new directions and enriching my project in the process. She assisted me in transforming a vague and nebulous idea into this completed project, and challenged and supported me to engage with new ideas. Many thanks for her insight, encyclopaedic theoretical knowledge, and patience.

I would also like to acknowledge how indebted I am to my co-supervisor, Bill Ashcroft, for his wealth of knowledge on the field, clear structural advice, recommendations for further reading, and for his generosity with his time.

Many thanks also to the panel readers of my thesis, Sean Pryor, Laetitia Nanquette and Chris Danta for their insightful criticism and support.

Finally, I thank the friends with whom I have navigated the path to thesis completion: Naoko Mochizuki, Xi Luan, Han Xu, Daniel Hempel, Rose Arong, and many more; and Paul Kopetko, for his sharp editing, encouragement, and good humour in the face of deadlines.

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Contents

Introduction ______1 The body and the state ______2 African bodies in Western stories ______20 The body in African literature ______34 The market and translation ______44 Outline of chapters ______47 Chapter 1: The dictator body ______49 Deification of the leader ______52 Father of the nation ______55 Mythification: The dictator’s extraordinary body ______64 Demythification of the ruler’s body ______68 Official narrative and counter-narrative ______81 Conclusion ______94 Chapter 2: The prisoner body ______96 Homo sacer, order-building and the right to exclude ______99 The management of life ______103 The child soldier ______117 Survival as resistance ______130 Conclusion ______139 Chapter 3: Women, land and nationalism ______141 Fanon, women and nationalism ______149 The politicisation of the African girl’s body in fiction ______153 Mother’s body as the earth ______161 Rape and land disputes ______169 African women overseas ______191 Conclusion ______197 Chapter 4: The beggar body: Poverty, deformity and the grotesque ______199 The beggar and the city ______201 The beggar’s ambivalent power ______203 The beggar and disability ______206 iv

Beggars and the grotesque ______213 The eating beggar ______222 Outsider communities ______225 The madman as abject ______231 Conclusion: The transgressive potential of the outcast ______239 Conclusion ______241 Coda: A transnational generation? Afropolitans and ‘postnationals’, cosmopolitanism and class ______244 State of the field: Postcolonial and world literature ______248 A new hope: Postcolonial utopianism ______250 Conclusion ______253 Works Cited ______255

Introduction

Our conception of modern African literature tends to start with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), which culminates with the accusing body of Okonkwo hanging from the tree. The slow advance of indignities forced on him and his family by their conflicts with the colonial administration leaves him at the end of the narrative as nothing but a destroyed body on show, strung up for the District Commissioner to comment on, dismiss and pass by. Okonkwo’s body is a significant choice for the closing image of the novel due to the long history of Africa’s association with the body. The body has a particularly strong valence in relation to Africa following centuries of stories told in the West that describe the continent as the site of ‘monstrous races’. This proceeded into later discourses that rendered African bodies as both demonised and sexualised, made the fetishistic commodity of labour through the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Global capitalism was born on the backs of labouring African bodies, and, in the continuing European project of colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Africans continued to be described in a Hegelian discourse that viewed them as irredeemably Other: irrational bodies with little capacity for independent thought. In the lead-up and push towards independence African writers like Achebe and his contemporaries focused on centring experience in the African body, representing African characters in literature as fully human—as complex and intelligent—rather than empty bodies. Following independence, the primary political use of the body shifted as writers turned their attention to the all-too-frequent problems of state corruption, mismanagement and violence. In post-independence fiction, the symbolic force of the body is harnessed for political criticism: the source of allegory, metonymy and symbolism through which to condemn the failings of the state. This privileging of the body as bearer of political meaning is prevalent across the literature of several African countries, a significant convergence that warrants investigation. It is particularly pressing in light of the fact that many of the issues against which writers protest continue in new forms (or depressingly old ones) into the twenty-first century. The ethical function of this move cannot be ignored. There is a shortfall in the existing criticism on the political function of the body in post-independence African fiction: this study addresses this gap.

My thesis examines four prominent categories of the body in politically motivated post-independence African fiction and analyses writers’ figural use of the body in critiquing state authority. These categories are: the body of the dictator, the body of the prisoner, women’s bodies as metonymy for land, and the body of the urban beggar. Through close analysis of a selection of novels for each category, I argue that writers use the ancient symbolic weight of the body as microcosm for larger organisational structures to criticise the excesses of state power, placing pressure on the productive tension between the individual and the collective in order to conjure avenues for future change.

In this introduction, I first review some of the issues at stake in representing the body as the subject of violence in the contemporary African state. I then move to a brief history of the discourses that led to Africa being viewed as a ‘dark’ region of savage bodies, before arriving at the question of ‘African literature’ and the vast scope implied in that term. Here I discuss the political function of the novel in the postcolony and the pre-independence process of ‘decolonising’ the novel. Following a brief discussion of the market and the politics of translation, including the latter’s impact on my study, I provide an outline for the coming chapters.

The body and the state

It is not the free man and his statutes and prerogatives, nor even simply homo, but rather corpus that is the new subject of politics. And democracy is born precisely as the assertion and presentation of this ‘body’: habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, ‘you will have to have a body to show’.

(Agamben Homo Sacer 124)

The body’s figural significance

I am not in front of my body, I am in it, or rather I am it.

(Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception 150)

The question ‘what is the body?’ is also the question of ‘what is the world?’ The mystery of the body is at the heart of experience and being-in-the-world: it forms ‘our anchorage in a world’ (Merleau-Ponty 144), and forces us to contemplate our relationship with that world that envelops us and which we assist in constructing. ‘A world encloses and worlds itself,’ Eric Hayot suggests, ‘as the container that is identical with its contents and its containing, as a ground for itself that does not exceed or reach outside of itself’ (On Literary Worlds 24). Understood in this way, it becomes evident that the body itself is a world, formed both by the ‘container’ and its identical ‘contents’, both physical and of the mind. The body mediates all experience: the perspective of our sight alters as we move through space and time, but we may never truly perceive any objects in the world outside the constrictions of our own body. The body is therefore our entry point into the world, as well as that which closes us off from it. These considerations transform the question of the body from the insular to the collective, as we consider the body as the gateway to a larger geography of bodies. Our bodies occupy space: we occupy our bodies—or we are our bodies, depending on one’s point of view.

Is the body an object in the world? In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau- Ponty argues that it is only the situatedness of the body in the world that renders it observable as an object: ‘Otherwise it would be true like an idea and not present like a thing’ (90). The body places restrictions upon perception even as it defines it, shaping the lens through which we perceive others; this understanding is necessary not only in the consideration of the self as a philosophical entity, but also in what we might term (with some misgivings) the ‘real’ sense of an ethical relation with others. In the term ‘body’, Elizabeth Grosz explains:

I understand a concrete, material, animate organization of flesh, organs, nerves, and skeletal structure, which are given a unity, cohesiveness, and 3

form through the psychical and social inscription of the body’s surface. The body is, so to speak, organically, biologically ‘incomplete’; it is indeterminate, amorphous, a series of uncoordinated potentialities that require social triggering, ordering, and long-term ‘administration.’ The body becomes a human body, a body that coincides with the ‘shape’ and space of a psyche, a body that defines the limits of experience and subjectivity only through the intervention of the (m)other and, ultimately, the Other (the language- and rule-governed social order). (Grosz 104)

It is through its interactions with others that the body becomes, for Grosz, transformed through social inscription from raw matter into properly a ‘human body’, altered through the social terms of the human. The body scholarship of the Enlightenment philosophers codified the truly ‘human’ body as resembling themselves: normalised as white, European and male. They perceived the Cartesian schism between mind and body as recreating an essential categorical difference between men and women (or Europeans and ‘natives’), where the latter category was cast as the irrational body ‘naturally’ subservient to the rational masculine mind. However, they also placed the white male body on a pedestal as the inscription of normative humanity: the body created in the likeness of God. This may have been a product of the very restrictedness of the seeing self’s perception—Merleau-Ponty reflects that: ‘I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, examine them, walk round them, but my body itself is a thing which I do not observe: in order to be able to do so, I should need the use of a second body which itself would be unobservable’ (91). The white male body was normalized because it was not observed: as so many have commented, it was the holder of the gaze, rather than the gazed-upon.1

And yet, if the body is not an object in the world, what is it? A world within another world? The body as a world is complete in the sense that our skin finishes and contains us; and yet in certain Bakhtinian ways, it is unfinished and ‘opened’ to the world, and forms part of a collection of others’ bodies with whom we form (however

1 Merleau-Ponty comments that the ‘visual body is certainly an object as far as its parts far removed from my head are concerned, but as we come nearer to the eyes, it becomes divorced from objects’ (91–92); we may touch our right hand with our left as though it were touching an object, but the two sensations are different, for ‘the right hand as an object is not the right hand as it touches’ (92). He concludes: ‘In so far as it sees or touches the world, my body can therefore be neither seen nor touched. What prevents its ever being an object, ever being “completely constituted” is that it is that by which there are objects. It is neither tangible nor visible in so far as it is that which sees and touches’ (92).

4 raggedly and incompletely) a collective. It is a totality that is both more and less than itself. The body comprises, moreover, a structure that is replicated in human forms of organisation: we are beings who think in metaphor, and so, significantly, the body is recreated in functional systems. The Oxford English Dictionary provides unsettlingly dualistic definitions of what comprises a ‘world’, such as: ‘human existence; a period of this’; or ‘the earth (also the universe) or a part of it’ (OED). Hayot suggests of these slippery definitions that the repeated ‘double “or”’ and ‘semicolon’:

forces ‘world’ to pivot between an ontological reference to any self- enclosing whole (what are, after all, periods, regions, or parts of wholes but wholes themselves?) and a material reference to the largest possible versions of such wholes (history; the planet Earth; the universe) […] highlighting the tension between world as a generic totality and world as the most total totality of all—the totality of the ‘part’ and the totality of the ‘whole’. (On Literary Worlds 39)

The dizzying and relentless pitching of ‘world’ ‘between an ontological reference to any self-enclosing whole […] and a material reference to the largest possible versions of such wholes’ mirrors the slipperiness of the borders of the body and its entry into ‘the’ world. The body itself is a miniature world, and is for this reason so readily co-optable as a metaphor for things larger than itself. ‘The body,’ Mary Douglas advises in Purity and Danger (1966), ‘is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures’ (142). The coding of the body as the world is an ancient device. The mediaeval concept of the ‘body politic’ was strengthened by Neoplatonism: it was ‘related to the allegorical concept of microcosm in which the cosmos is contained in the “little cosmos” of the world and both are represented in miniature in the human body’ (Williams 108). The largest-known mappa mundi, the thirteenth-century Ebstorf map (destroyed in the 1943 bombing of Hanover) depicted the world as contained within the body of Christ, with his head at the top of the circular world, his hands to the ‘east’ and ‘west’, and his feet below. In a politicized modern extension of this idea, the famous frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), etched by Abraham Bosse, shows the crowned sovereign as a giant overlooking the land, his form comprised of the many bodies of his citizens, turned inwards to face him. 5

We understand expressions of state power in bodily terms: the ‘head’ of government, the ‘long arm of the law’, the army that ‘marches on its stomach’, and the masses who comprise the ‘body politic’. In her work on the more recent concept of the social body, Mary Poovey discusses its rise from the nineteenth century sanitation movement in Britain, explaining that in this context: ‘the sanitary idea constituted one of the crucial links between the regulation of the individual body and the consolidation of those apparatuses we associate with the modern state’ (Poovey 115). In The King’s Two Bodies (1957), Ernst Kantorowicz explores the ‘dual’ body of the medieval king in political theology, and the understanding that ‘the king is immortal because legally he can never die’ (Kantorowicz 4): he is both an individual body who is born and dies, and a ‘superhuman’ (5) immortal who, due to the title passing instantly to another on his death, remains forever unchanged.2

The structure of the body is readable even into narrative structures: Merleau- Ponty affirms that ‘our body is comparable to a work of art. It is a nexus of living meanings’ (151), in the same way that in narratives, ‘the expression is indistinguishable from the thing expressed’ (151). In narrative content, the body is the prime site of what Hayot terms ‘figural metadiegesis’:

In the figural, a diegetic object (character, space, moment, event) is marked off as an especially intense site of interpretative force, one whose effects resonate beyond the immediate diegetic sphere. The relation between object and its metadiegetic meaning differs depending on the type of figuration. The latter’s traditional arrangements include allegory, symbol, and metaphor, but may be extended to include any figure that encodes a relation between two levels of diegetic ‘reality’ (the fetish, the myth, the totem, the emblem, and so on). […] Figural metadiegesis thus describes the modes of relationship assumed between sacred and profane space, in the religious life-world, or to the more general relationship

2 This concept altered interestingly over time with the passage to democratic forms of government. ‘By the seventeenth century,’ Poovey observes,

one of the uses to which the medieval metaphor of the body politic was put was to indicate the political subjects of English society. The political subjects, members of Parliament and gentlemen, were held to constitute the ‘second body’ of the king. Unlike these political subjects, the poor were not usually considered members of the body politic. Indeed, as ‘diseased’ (unproductive, criminal, plague-ridden) members, the poor were considered inimical to the health of the body politic. (Poovey 7)

between a primary referential layer and a secondary one (real Paris vs. Balzac’s Paris; Sancho’s windmills vs. Don Quijote’s giants) governing the internal ontological structure of all made worlds (68–69)

It is this, the body’s marking off as ‘an especially intense site of interpretative force, one whose effects resonate beyond the immediate diegetic sphere’, that renders the body so open for figural metadiegesis in narratives towards allegory, metonymy, symbolism and metaphor as means of reading large-scale formations of governance (such as the state) into the body: the large writ into the small. As such, the confusion in scale is particularly productive when the individual body is linked with the state.3 The state is nothing if not a container (both geographically delineated and at the same time purely imagined) of bodies—like the world and the body, it forms a ‘container that is identical with its contents and its containing, as a ground for itself that does not exceed or reach outside of itself’ (Hayot On Literary Worlds 24). The body’s ability to stand in for the state in fiction thus marks a fruitful conceptual swing between the individual and the collective.

Biopolitics and necropolitics

Power is a large, though ordinarily hidden, element of what it means to be belong.

(Robbins Perpetual War 28)

Perhaps the most significant challenges to our conceptions of the body have arisen from feminist scholars of the latter part of the twentieth century, seeking to complicate and question the normalization of the body (as white, able-bodied, masculine) and the establishment of women as irrational flesh to men’s rational mind. ‘Only very recently,’ Grosz muses, ‘has the body been understood as more than an impediment to our

3 ‘The state parallels the body; artifice mirrors nature,’ Grosz affirms. ‘The correspondence between the body and the body politic is more or less exact and codified’ (106). 7 humanity’ (2). This concept of the body as ‘impediment to our humanity’ has of course been implicit in figurations of women and non-Europeans as corporeal rather than intellectual, mired in the clay below the philosophers’ firmament. ‘Such feminist analysis,’ Wendy Harcourt acknowledges:

encourages us to go deeper into a vision of bodies removed from essentialist, naturalistic and scientific modes of explanation in order to position bodies as sites of contestation in a series of economic, political, sexual and intellectual struggles. If we understand that knowledge on bodies is irreducibly interwoven with other discourses—social, colonial, ethical and economic—we can strategically reconceptualize bodies as cultural products on which the play of powers, knowledges and resistances are worked out. (Harcourt 22)

On this understanding the body—the corporeal, the biological—is not separate from politics, but forms its very heart.

Interest in the body and its intersection with state politics has in recent decades largely formed the study of biopolitics. In his landmark work, Foucault describes two forms of ‘power over life’ as having emerged during the seventeenth century. While the first, anatomic power, ‘centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls’ (The History of Sexuality 139), it is the second that provides the biopolitical connection between the body and state politics, for it:

focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population. The disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed. (Foucault History 139)

This regulatory control over ‘the mechanics of life’ finds its pinnacle in the ‘obscene excess’ (Žižek 123) of state sovereignty. Foucault plots the shift from the sovereign’s power over death into the new ‘administration of bodies and the calculated management of life’ (History 140), which ‘characterized a power whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through’ (History 139). Giorgio Agamben’s more recent homo sacer project builds on Foucault’s work, and is heavily indebted to Arendt on totalitarianism in the Nazi death camps and the colonial sphere. Agamben draws on Carl Schmitt’s evocation of the sovereign exception in order to claim that:

the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original—if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. […] Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life. (Homo Sacer 6, original emphasis)

However, the concepts introduced by Foucault and Agamben are not fully charged to discuss all forms of power. Some markers are notably absent from the study of biopolitics, whose putative subject tends to be universalised. Indeed, Foucault has been described as ‘notoriously myopic about the domain of the colonial in his analyses of both the history of sexuality and of state-sponsored surveillance’ (Ballantyne and Burton 406). Achille Mbembe presents a more rigorous entry to the field in thinking contemporary biopolitics outside Europe in his work on ‘necropolitics’—that is, ‘contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death’ (‘Necropolitics’ 39). Mbembe extends Foucault’s concepts by determining the centrality of ‘race (or for that matter racism)’ to ‘the calculus of biopower’ (‘Necropolitics’ 17). He examines the slave plantation, the colony and the apartheid regime to isolate what he describes as a ‘terror formation’, the ‘most original feature’ of which ‘is its concatenation of biopower, the state of exception, and the state of siege. Crucial to this concatenation is, once again, race’ (‘Necropolitics’ 22). Mbembe has also contributed work on death-worlds, ‘new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (‘Necropolitics’ 40). This work speaks cogently to twenty-first century crises of war, such as the West’s investment in drone warfare and the plight of stateless groups, when he observes that 9 war ‘is as much a means of establishing sovereignty as a way of exercising the right to kill’ (‘Necropolitics’ 12). Mbembe’s ‘necropower is not simply about the distribution of death; it is also about the accumulation of social or economic capital through death and precarity’ (Ahuja xii). Necropolitics presents a viable and productive concept for the study of contemporary state power in Africa, and it is to Mbembe that I turn in my study.

The ethical return to the body

I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it myself, and except in so far as I am a body which rises towards the world.

(Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception 75)

In his keynote lecture at the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University in 2016, Homi Bhabha argued that ‘we are seeing a resurgence of the body that needs to be thought through again after a generation of biopolitics: not merely the body as an inscription of difference, but as forming something social. Not only the object of surveillance, but also forming a new demand for security’. This new, post-biopolitics, post–9/11 surveillance discourse should, Bhabha argued, be predicated upon life and death: the life, or extinction of life, of the human body. A new return to ethics as situated in the body is particularly prescient in relation to issues of security, immigration and the politics of habitation. Differentiating this discourse from prior demands to locate or define the body in terms of race or gender, Bhabha instead called for a new move: a discussion of the body in this affective, ethical space. This is, he argued, a case of pedagogical urgency, emerging in part from a rhetorical framework around refugees. In what he has termed ‘the diurnal measure’, Bhabha attempts also ‘to understand the both banal and entirely uncanny temporality of that kind of day-by-day existence’, calling for a renewed consideration of the everyday in the diurnal measure, the lived experience of time and proximity. The call for a renewed attention to the

10 experience of the physical body, particularly under stress or duress, as properly the matter of ethics points to the urgency of contemplating the body in politically motivated fiction.

The body as ‘an affective object’ (Merleau-Ponty 93) is the site of joy; it is also the site of pain, becoming a ‘pain-infested space’ on impact by violence or injury (93). The body is where the physical ramifications of oppression are experienced, such as incarceration, deprivation and torture. If the body is a world, which ‘makes, and is, in other words, and in the broadest possible philosophical sense, a physics’ (Hayot On Literary Worlds 24), then the physics of the corporeal body delineate, more than anything else, the realm of ethics.4 Merleau-Ponty affirms that:

Whether it is a question of another’s body or my own, I have no means of knowing the human body other than that of living it, which means taking up on my own account the drama which is being played out in it, and losing myself in it. I am my body, at least wholly to the extent that I possess experience, and yet at the same time my body is as it were a ‘natural’ subject, a provisional sketch of my total being. (198)

Literature arguably features an ethical project absent from other purely visual media such as paintings, film and most installation art: that of inhabiting the body of the Other. We want our children to read books because, rather than merely watching (and judging) others from the familiar ground of our own bodily perspective, we want them to ‘walk

4 In The Hypothetical Mandarin, Hayot draws on Adam Smith’s 1790 thought experiment ‘suppos[ing] that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake’, in which a European might ‘express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people’ (136) before retiring to sleep soundly in his bed. However, Smith conjectures, ‘If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own’ (Smith 136–7). Hayot questions how spatial distance affects moral responsibility, and how societies have ‘drawn the line between the doorstep and the world, teaching their inhabitants where moral responsibility ends and indifference begins?’ (5). He contends that ‘“China” has been most consistently characterized as a limit or potential limit, a horizon neither of otherness nor of similarity, but rather of the very distinction between otherness and similarity’ (8) for Europe: that is, Europe perceives China as a threat because it forms ‘an actively competing civilizational model’ (9). Africa, I argue, more than China, has become the test for the limits of ‘moral distance’ (Ginzburg) in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries in the visual language of news media and televised charity soliciting. It is the African mother who we are shown holding her hungry child by the well in the refugee camp, the image of the African child who gazes steadily into the camera in appeals for funding. The body is the focus of these relational ethics. This question of distance and sympathy remains relevant today, having morphed into a new visual language we implicitly understand through represented suffering. This language is deployed in Western humanitarian drives such as the Band-Aid concerts, and is humorously reversed in the 2012 viral ‘charity single’ video ‘Africa for Norway’. 11 in another’s shoes’—or, more specifically, to inhabit their heads and think their thoughts. There are arguments to be made for orature in this respect, but it is the particular magic of written narrative to facilitate this occupation, because the process of world-creation occurs inside the head of the reader, unmediated by the sound of another’s voice. While the input is taken in via sight, meaning-making occurs in the brain’s interpretation of the input words as signs. The product of literature is, one may argue, empathy: empathy not in the sense of feeling for the perceived Other (as on the screen or in a painting), but feeling in the first degree, from the thoughts of the narrator or, in third person narratives, the focalised narrated.

Of course, this can go a bit awry, as when a character does not read as realistic because they have been written in accordance with a stereotype, or some idea of what a certain person filling a certain category should be—as in denigrating presentations of black Africans or women, for instance, in the writing of (mostly) past centuries. However, the project remains the same, even if the individual tool for the project (the character itself) is faulty. Moreover, the ethical project of literature is related, of course, to the represented body.

Representing violence

The literary focus on the body and its intersection with state and non-state politics necessitates, to a large degree, a focus on violence. Violence and the ethics of its representation in twenty-first century literature is an important question for consideration. What affective principles are at stake in the representation of violence— and how is this impacted by locating violence in Africa? In writing about the literature of violence, we need to avoid reverting to what Mbembe has described as a meta-text about inhumanity, when he points out that ‘discourse on Africa is almost always deployed in the framework (or on the fringes) of a meta-text about the animal—to be exact, about the beast: its experience, its world, and its spectacle’ (Mbembe On the Postcolony 1). Media representations of Africa have frequently focused on the continent as a space of difference from what are considered ‘normal’ human values: a place where

12 death is so excessive as to prevent its being ‘mournable’ (Butler). While the literary project of many African novels since independence has been in representing Africans as sympathetic characters leading ordinary lives (in reaction in part against the earlier stereotyping), novelists also participate in political critique, which frequently necessitates depictions of violence.5 ‘The challenge we face,’ Norridge, Baker and Boehmer reflect, ‘when examining the ways in which African writers, filmmakers, and artists have rendered the invisible traumas of the difficult past visible is that such renderings may, at times, be accused of feeding into negative images of Africa, reinforcing African suffering as the hypervisible’ (vii). In interpreting such texts, critics must be vigilant against perpetuating a ‘horror pornography’ of literature from African countries, cementing a view of Africa as ‘one of the dark places of the earth’ (Conrad 29) and speaking to ‘signs of Africa’s postcoloniality as a site of perennial political and other emergencies’ (Adesokan 3).

In her project on human rights, Lynne Hunt has argued that the development of a certain critical function of individual or communal empathy for ‘imagined others’ (via Anderson) arose in direct relation to the rise of the novel. The novel is perfectly formulated to assist readers to grow with the characters over the course of the action.6 This means that violence in the novel has the capacity for strong emotional impact upon the reader. In contrast to visual media, against which we hear we are all becoming desensitised (and which distances violence’s subject at any rate by the barrier of the screen), the novel places us in the extended moment of action (or forces us to hunt for the occluded traumatic moment) and gives us insight into the violent act itself—from the perspective of the fictional victim, witness, or perpetrator.

During the violent changes in colonial Kenya during the 1950s and ’60s, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o explains that he ‘had no vocabulary by which to understand and name what I was seeing and feeling’ (Globalectics 17). Recalling that he first turned as a

5 The expressibility or ‘inexpressibility of colonial and postcolonial violence,’ Charlotte Baker observes, ‘has long preoccupied African writers, who have explored a range of responses from the multiplication of autobiographical voices, to the adoption of narrative voice by an animal, the fracturing or even loss of narrative voice’ (‘Necropolitical Violence’ 316). 6 The novel creates a world, and within that world it facilitates sympathy, or empathy, for its characters. The novel, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o observes, ‘helps organize and make sense of the chaos of history, social experience, and personal inner lives. As a creative process, it mimics the creation of the universe as order from chaos’ (Globalectics 16–17). At its most basic level, the story ‘has its basis in the human confrontation with time’ (Globalectics 79).

13 writer to journalism, Ngũgĩ discovered journalism’s shortcomings in the representation of violence, witnessed or experienced:

How could an article really capture the complexity of what I had experienced in colonial Kenya? The blood in the streets; the dead guerrillas hung on trees as a public spectacle; the horror stories of white officers collecting ears, noses, eyes, genitalia, or even heads of the vanquished as trophies! […] Fortunately, news of it somehow came out and reached the world. There were many horrors whose knowledge never went beyond the location of their commission. There was also the violence of the guerrilla army not always directed at the guilty party. Horror multiplied was still horror. (Globalectics 17)

It was, of course, the novel to which Ngũgĩ turned for the literary and ethical project of representing violence.

Language has the capacity to explain violence after the fact, but it may also, of course, be used to incite violence. With reference to the Rwandan genocide, in his lecture Bhabha spoke of the role of language and rhetoric in galvanizing long-standing social problems (such as poverty, land disputes, and the failure of the United Nations to effectively intervene) into rapid and uncontrollable violence. Bhabha follows Adorno’s famous and frequently misinterpreted statement about poetry after Auschwitz in questioning whether, in fact, there can be language after genocide? Rhetoric was, after all, the match that ignited the violence. The connection between politics and aesthetics is set aflame in represented violence: it is no idle concern to consider the deep implications of Adorno’s statement in relation to stylized or literary violence. If we cannot write poetry after Auschwitz without being implicated in the modes of social and aesthetic production that produced the culture that lead to the Holocaust, is it then possible for violence to be represented at all in literature without contributing to authoritarian narratives sanctioning its use?

This opens a Pandora’s box of other questions about violence and its representation. Is it possible for violence to be represented and suspended in narrative? Will the reader feel what they are intended to feel, and is the writer implicated if they do not? Should violence, from an ethical standpoint, be represented solely from one perspective—that of its victim? (My thought is: surely, no, if we want to understand 14 how violence perpetuates.) Should literary violence be beautiful? Does aestheticising violence domesticate it, or render it incomplete? Should its duration in the narration be quick, to demonstrate its suddenness,7 or long, to demonstrate the traumatic disruptions of time that attend to its experience in the body and mind? In his comments above, Ngũgĩ suggests that reportage of violence falls short of what fiction may achieve. Is there an ethical problem in thus privileging the fictive over the real? How can the fictional become more emotionally ‘real’ for the reader than reality without emptying out its characters’ signification, into which the reader may pour themselves? Is there a problem with the give-and-take of fiction in terms of constructing violence? Can the experience of violence ever be shared between people, and is it possible to share this experience specifically via literature? Does intent matter in the representation of violence? Surely, yes.

Violence, in some disturbing ways, is the rejection of solipsism, or a working out of its parameters: the self cannot be the only thing to exist if one’s presence—and the harm one can wreak—can be inflicted upon another. Violence connects people’s bodies, though in the worst of ways. On this understanding, violence is also a terrible form of authorship: the inscription of one’s own will into another person, and turning the disfigured body of the victim of violence into a text whose author is the perpetrator.8 Representing violence can serve to complicate situations in readers’ minds that had appeared clear-cut, offering more nuanced views of social and political situations that challenge the reader. It is violence that places the body ultimately at the centre of politics, and the literary representation of violence creates its own politics in terms of the implied author, narratee, and implied readership. This project is concerned with representations of violence, for violence in its various forms always rears into view when discussing the body’s intersection with the state.

7 And, as Cathy Caruth points out in relation to events causing traumatic shock, ‘precisely the missing of this experience’ (62). 8 For example, Sierra Leone’s infamous Revolutionary United Front (RUF) amputated would-be voters’ arms to stop them from voting (or for other perceived slights). Soldiers asked their victims whether they would like ‘long sleeves’ or ‘short sleeves’, amputating above the wrist or further up the arm. People’s capacity for authorship, writing their citizenship into the ‘x’ on the voting cards, was overwritten by the perpetrators’ machetes.

State violence in Africa

In the shadow of armed conflicts, the massive deployment of violence required to restore authoritarianism almost everywhere, and the deregulation of the economy, conditions for the establishment of private powers are gradually being realized […] Everywhere, too, war—and not only war—is accompanied by the rise of a culture of immunity that ensures that private actors of publicly admitted crimes go unpunished. For example, troops assume a right to pillage and rape; towns and villages are sacked; death is administered publicly. A deliberate attempt is made to terrorize people. And no one is prosecuted for anything.

(Mbembe On the Postcolony 82)

The state in Africa has its roots in colonial violence as a space of exception where, in colonials’ attitudes towards the ‘natives’, codes of normal civility did not apply. The postcolonial state, in too many cases, has prolonged that violence. Arendt argues that while violence can be ‘justifiable’, it can never be ‘legitimate’ (On Violence 52); in explaining the origins of justified violence, Uday S. Mehta describes the transfer of violence from the state of nature onto the political state in the philosophy of Hobbes and Locke, and its subsequent constitution upon a conditional, rather than a moral, attitude towards violence. When living in an unsupervised state of nature, Hobbes and Locke argued, human beings were essentially anarchical and ‘likely to descend into a condition of war in which human life and interests are inescapably threatened by the imminence of disorder and the preponderance of violence’ (Mehta). This led to the birth of political society, a contract ‘to surrender all or some of their natural powers, thus forming a political society that can deploy the power of the state to regulate the interactions between individuals and between different states’ (Mehta). Mehta astutely observes that in this narrative ‘that encourages and justifies the formation of political society and authorizes the power of the state, there is no argument against killing, violence, or war per se’. The state’s regulation of violence is justifiable in order to secure a condition of peace:

The conditional rationality of violence that marked the individual in the state of nature […] now merely conditions the behavior and rationality of the state. The state, once it is formed into a cooperative singular entity must, for the sake of its own preservation—in principle—retain a strictly conditional and hence permissive attitude towards violence. That is the measure of its legitimacy and the legitimacy of violence in the liberal order. This is not to say that the state has some broad reason for deploying violence; it may or it may not. That is where context matters. (Mehta)

The problem, as Mehta suggests, arises when states do have a motivation for violence. Bruce Robbins has observed that in antiquity, empires were constructed to deal with diversity. This is not true of the modern nation-state, whose goal is the enforcement of homogeneity over the citizens’ actual diversity. It is to the nation-state that the legitimate exercise of violence has been turned over. However, Robbins also observes that empires needed violence, having to kill a certain percentage of people in conquest in order to subdue local populations and accumulate land. Nation-states, by contrast, may not have the same compulsion to violence, however much they are authorised to deploy it (Robbins). Thus, while the form of empire required violence but not its self- narrative, in the nation-state we find the inverse imperative.

In Africa, of course, the state is a legacy of European colonialism.9 Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues that in the modern period what he terms the ‘first genealogy of coloniality’, that is, ‘the discovery paradigm and mercantilist order […] began to envelop Africa in 1415 when Portugal invaded the Moroccan port of Ceuta’ (22, original emphasis). The discovery paradigm and the mercantilist order of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, for Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘inaugurated a commercial shift from the Mediterranean-centred economy to the Atlantic-centred economy’ (22), eventually linking the continents with the transport of human cargo in the slave trade. Thus, ‘to a large extent, the [slave] trade was the event through which Africa was born to modernity. Colonialism also, in both its forms and its substance, posited the issue of contingent human violence. Indeed, the slave trade and colonialism echoed one another with the lingering doubt of the very possibility of self-government’ (Mbembe On the

9 ‘The core of the problem of the post-colonial nation,’ Ashcroft observes, ‘was the inheritance of colonial boundaries’ (‘Post-colonial Utopianism’ 31). 17

Postcolony 13). Modernity and the rise of capitalism in Europe, which itself was shifting away from the ‘antique monarchical states’ (Anderson 19) into nation-states, was mediated by the view of African bodies as cargo, saleable commodities for international export.

‘Late’ or ‘liquid’ modernity has spread unevenly, with ‘latecomers to modernity’ (Bauman 73) rendered as disadvantaged players in the global economy, even when those countries are in possession of valuable resources, such as Sierra Leone or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In African states, predatory trade agreements, government corruption, and an increased trust in the international market have contributed to the gradual erosion of the state’s legitimacy. In the wake of crippling foreign debt, Structural Adjustment Programs and the broad-reaching deregulation policies of the 1980s, the premise that ‘the state as a productive structure has failed in Africa’ (Mbembe On the Postcolony 78) has led to widespread economic deregulation policies in the form of the ‘sale of public assets, freeing of de facto monopolies, privatization of collective goods and services, changes in customs regulations, revision of exchange rates—in short, to partial or total transfer of what was public capital into private hands’ (On the Postcolony 78).10 The loss of economic legitimacy and the privatisation of assets have, disturbingly, ‘created the conditions for a privatisation of […] sovereignty’ and, further, to:

privatize the means of coercion, because control of the means of coercion makes it possible to secure an advantage in the other conflicts under way for the appropriation of resources and other utilities formerly concentrated in the state. In other words, leaving aside variations from one sub-region to another, one characteristic of the historical sequence unfolding in Africa is the direct link that now exists between, on the one hand, deregulation and the primacy of the market and, on the other, the rise of violence and the creation of private military, paramilitary, or jurisdictional organizations. (On the Postcolony 78–79, original emphasis)

10 The tethering of the state to the market renders it vulnerable to instability. Mbembe argues that such processes ‘lead, not only to the prolonged withering away of the state, but also to an extraordinary fragmentation of the market—the two processes being disproportionately conducive to an uncontrolled upsurge of violence’ (On the Postcolony 57). 18

In the context of this privatisation of sovereignty and of coercion, the management of the state’s justified and ‘legitimate’ violence is passed on to its contracted agents: thus, the chilling effects of the privatisation of public funds and services has been the corresponding ‘privatization of public violence’ (On the Postcolony 66). Zygmunt Bauman explains that:

One of the most sinister effects of globalization is the deregulation of wars. Most present-day warlike actions, and the most cruel and gory among them, are conducted by non-state entities, subject to no state laws and no international conventions. They are simultaneously outcomes and auxiliary but powerful causes of the continuous erosion of state sovereignty and the continuing frontier-land conditions in the ‘interstate’ global space. (Bauman 75)

Within such environments the ‘distinction between a state of war and a state of peace is increasingly illusory’ (On the Postcolony 89), as privately contracted militias are given increasingly free rein to exert their force over civilian populations and extort private commissions.11 The privatisation of coercion also leads to a further sinister outcome in the increase in bribery and state corruption:

Finally, the corollary of the privatization of public violence, and of its deployment in aid of private enrichment, is the accelerated development of a shadow economy over which elements of the police, the army, the customs, and the revenue services attempt to ensure their grip, through drug trafficking, counterfeiting money, trade in arms and toxic waste, customs frauds etc. […] What is therefore at stake is the possibility of new ways and means of subjecting and controlling people. (Mbembe 85)

11 Under such circumstances:

Coercion itself has become a market commodity. Military manpower is bought and sold on a market in which the identity of suppliers and purchasers means almost nothing. Urban militias, private armies, armies of regional lords, private security firms, and state armies all claim the right to exercise violence or to kill. Neighboring states or rebel movements lease armies to poor states. Nonstate deployers of violence supply two critical coercive resources: labor and minerals. Increasingly, the vast majority of armies are composed of citizen soldiers, child soldiers, mercenaries, and privateers. (Mbembe ‘Necropolitics’ 32)

The state’s loss of genuine authority and ‘credit with the public’ (On the Postcolony 76) erodes state credibility, which in turn encourages a ‘shadow economy’ of bribery and corruption of public services. Power and capital are siphoned away from the public coffers to industry and lobbyists, private militia, individual wealth accumulation for those in power, and the black hole of international debt. Citizens have become increasingly unable to place their trust in the public/private bodies charged with ‘the everyday administration of coercion’ (On the Postcolony 83). ‘In short,’ Mbembe observes, ‘by partly or wholly replacing the market, the state became a vast machine creating and regulating inequalities’ (On the Postcolony 44).

This dire picture is evoked in contemporary war novels from the continent, while the ‘shadow economy’ that Mbembe emphasises also appears in novels relating to everyday life in zones of peace. In order to contemplate the significance of the body in such narratives, we must first turn to the persistent history of Africa’s representation in relation to the body.

African bodies in Western stories

Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Locke, who sailed to West Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as ‘beasts who have no houses,’ he writes, ‘They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts’.

Now, I’ve laughed every time I’ve read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Locke. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: a tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are ‘half devil, half child’.

(Adichie ‘The Danger of a Single Story’)

The dark-skinned races that live in the land vary widely. Some are warlike, cattle-owning nomads; some till the soil and live in thatched huts shaped like beehives; some are fisherfolk, some are ape-like, naked savages, who dwell in the woods and prey on creatures not much wilder or lower than themselves.

(Theodore Roosevelt African Game Trails viii)

Africa has long been regarded in the West as the ‘dark continent’, tangled with jungles, inhabited by extraordinary beasts and peopled with savages. This narrative of Africa as the site of deviant bodies has been in circulation for many centuries, first popularised by writers of ‘the cradle of Western civilization’, the Greeks. Ancient Greek writers such as Herodotus, Ctesias and Megasthenes—in addition to Macedonian warlord Alexander the Great—gave accounts of ‘monstrous’ races in far-off lands like North Africa and modern-day India (Harley and Woodward 330). These accounts were later popularized by Pliny the Elder in his Historia Naturalis, and further entrenched in the West’s discourse about itself and its others by European scholars throughout the Middle Ages. Medieval mappae mundi such as the Walsperger, Ebstorf and Borgia maps show an Africa peopled with strange beings like the Blemmyae, lacking heads and whose faces are sunken into their chests; the cave-dwelling Troglodytes; the Maritimi, possessing four eyes and, therefore, excellent archers; the Cynocephali, humans with the heads of dogs (often taken as a pictorial shorthand for Islam); and the Anthropophagi, cannibals who ‘drink from skulls’ (Harley and Woodward 331). For Medieval scholars these strange bodies reflected an inner disturbance, for ‘what is inscribed on the body can be, at least within an early Christian ontology, interpreted as unnatural and, as such, a potential sign of inner corruption’ (Edwards and Graulund 36–37).

Mapping Africa and midwifing its birth into the world has been a project of Europe. Up to the eighteenth century, cartographers were much influenced by the second-century efforts of Greco-Egyptian scholar Ptolemy, who gave an outline to the African continent and posited the placement of its lakes and rivers. Maps of great size were commissioned by wealthy families to fill a largely decorative function, and were

21 filled with strange beasts frolicking across the map, bearing cartouches in the margins festooned with exotic cornucopias of fruit, reclining ‘dusky’ maidens, and gold. Reference points such as rivers, lakes and kingdoms on these maps were inclined to move about, there being no European consensus as to their exact whereabouts. The free spaces were filled with approximations of elephants and big cats, and the surrounding waters broil with strange sea creatures. The land of these maps is by this time already being shown as a space of deviant bodies concealing a deeper racial or species slippage, a hidden threat across the threshold of Europe’s firm knowledge; but it is also one that is sexualized and rich with resources—like ivory, spices and gold.

The Desceliers World Map of 1550 shows a Europe ‘almost devoid of figures’ and the Americas as ‘sparsely populated’, while ‘Africa and Asia, by contrast, are full of bodies, representing the full range of “knowledge” of the regions and of recent European explorations of them’ (Cameron 211). Africa and Asia are depicted as being overpopulated because they are imagined as threats, revealing Europe’s racial fears of being ‘overrun’ by the strangely bodied inhabitants of outlying lands.12 Maps’ relative portrayals of population sizes speak to anxieties about which populations are seen as ‘excessive’ or uncontainable; mapping bodies also represented a means of collecting and displaying imperial knowledge of the Other. Cameron observes that:

Desceliers’ map was not intended for navigational purposes at all (at over 2 meters wide and being painted on vellum, it was hardly practical), but was made for Henri II of France to represent the sum total of European (and therefore of course Eurocentric) ‘global’ geographical knowledge at the time. There is, therefore, a significant disparity between the depiction of the known (Europe) and the becoming known (Asia, Africa and the Americas), with the latter being communicated through the bodies of those involved. […] Desceliers’ map is a collection of emplaced and embodied stories that together constitute an aggregated

12 Indeed, such fears are disturbingly resilient. Zygmunt Bauman observes that in the twenty-first century, ‘places where the “population bomb” is expected to explode are in most cases the parts of the planet where the population is currently the least dense’ (43). In the West there is a popular image of Africa as being overpopulated; however, while that may be true of individual cities in terms of the resources available, at the time of Bauman’s writing Africa contained only ‘55 inhabitants per square mile’, contrasting ‘1,100 in the Netherlands’ (43). This trend transmutes into its chilling conclusion in contemporary discourses on refugees and border control.

narrative of European superiority and exotic, orientalist otherness. (Cameron 212)

Contrasting the staid and stylised representations of European towns, ‘the embodied stories of exoticism [are] reserved for those regions beyond the settled urban landscape of Europe. Bodies, this suggests, are indicative of difference, disorder and unpredictability’ (Cameron 212). Orientalist discourses have been altered and compounded in the telling of stories about Africa. African bodies have been both sexualized and demonised; they have been shown as savage, indolent, Kipling’s ‘half- devil and half-child’: lacking initiative, but cunning in the way that a child is cunning.

Despite the maps produced by Europe’s prominent families, throughout the Enlightenment period Africa’s interior nonetheless remained a dark space on the face of the globe, unknown to Europeans. It was not until John Barrow of the British Admiralty recommended further explorations of ‘the great continent of Africa’—which represented ‘almost a blank on our charts’ (Barrow in Kennedy 12)—in the nineteenth century that a delegation of the Royal Geographic Society was dispatched to expand inward from the coasts (Short 147). The new approach, Dane Kennedy suggests, ‘was indicative of the new cartographical approach to the continent, an approach that emptied African space of prior political and ethnic identifications’ (12). Such European missions seeking cartographical knowledge about African terrain and geography were, of course, inseparable from military power.13 The nineteenth-century mapping of Africa created Africa as a blank canvas for Europe.

‘Africa and Africans,’ Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou has argued,

are the invention of a West that sees itself as a totality and creates outposts beyond its frontiers. Consequently Africa—or at any rate that Africa—does not exist, and nor does a literature orchestrating such a way of thinking. The problem for African authors is not their relationship with the Dark Continent. The problem is first and foremost a literary one,

13 Mohammed Bello, the Sultan of Sokoto in West Africa, reportedly supplied a map of the region to English explorer Hugh Clapperton, who sought to chart the Niger River. However, the map that Bello gave to Clapperton ‘shows the Niger River flowing from west to east, rather than north to south, into the Atlantic’ (Short 173). Bello’s misdirection may have ben intended to curb European knowledge of his sultanate, ‘on the correct assumption that the more Europeans knew about the local geography, the more this knowledge would enable them to take power over the region’ (Short 173).

as for any writer. Could the Africa they describe or sketch be an empty shell, a prefabricated object? (‘Immigration’ 86, original emphasis)

For in addition to being successively mapped out on linen, engravings and paper over the centuries as technologies and geographical knowledge improved, the African continent has been physically written onto by Europe. It has been crisscrossed with railroads transporting people and resources into the centre; its forests have been removed, its rivers dammed and shifted; and its cities have expanded in relation to colonial interest, leading to massive population shifts from rural to urban areas. Most significantly, the existing boundaries of nations and ethno-linguistic groups within Africa have been overwritten with new dividing lines for states delineated by European financial interests:

Colonial occupation itself was a matter of seizing, delimiting, and asserting control over a physical geographical area—of writing on the ground a new set of social and spatial relations. The writing of new spatial relations (territorialization) was, ultimately, tantamount to the production of boundaries and hierarchies, zones and enclaves; the subversion of existing property arrangements; the classification of people according to different categories; resource extraction; and, finally, the manufacturing of a large reservoir of cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries gave meaning to the enactment of differential rights to differing categories of people for different purposes within the same space; in brief, the exercise of sovereignty. Space was therefore the raw material of sovereignty and the violence it carried with it. Sovereignty meant occupation, and occupation meant relegating the colonized into a third zone between subjecthood and objecthood. (Mbembe ‘Necropolitics’ 25–26)

In addition to the continent’s being mapped out and ‘written onto’ throughout nineteenth and twentieth century ‘territorialization’ (and later neocolonial interests),14 a new Africa was also imagined, created and transported by Europeans in their literature

14 Including and complicated by earlier—sometimes reciprocal—incursions between Europe and Africa, such as the Romans in Carthage, Greco-Egypt, the Moorish conquest of Spain, Europeans in Maghreb and the Portuguese 1415 capture of the port of Ceuta, which some historians argue signals the world’s entrance into the era of modernity. 24 and media. Western adventure writers wrote the continent as an imaginary space in which Europeans could pit themselves against the forces of nature in order to make or break their fortunes: questing for gold and diamonds; hunting elephants for ivory;15 locating lost races (at times white civilizations);16 and sending home animal skins and stuffed game. Protagonists in these novels frequently warred with ‘savages’ in the process, were aided by foolish guides, and triumphed over adversity in what was perceived as the ‘natural’ superiority of whiteness over blackness: both the blackness of African bodies and, by metonymic extension, the ‘darkness’ of the continent.17 The European exploratory missions of the period also established Africa as a place that was dangerous for the European bodies who strayed into it: as famously in the disappearance of David Livingstone of the London Missionary Society in his search for the source of the Nile. This story has entered popular consciousness as an example of the white body sundered from ‘civilisation’, lost in Africa’s unknowable darkness. Africa was written as a site of deviance and difference, and a new pathological discourse arose around threats to the European body in Africa. Popular writers like H. Rider Haggard, Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen, and even crime fiction writer Agatha Christie contributed to this concept of Africa as a perilous land of adventure for white men to seek riches and glory, and to forge their own destinies. Africa is seen, Achebe conjectures, as ‘a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril’ (Hopes and Impediments 12). In this way Africa has been written as a

15 Hunting as a pastime proved popular even into the twentieth century. In 1909, departing US president Theodore Roosevelt infamously killed in excess of 10,000 animals on a big game hunt jointly organised with the Smithsonian Institute. The undertaking was so vast that it required teams of locals to bear the provisions, furniture, guns, trunks, and tonnes of salt needed to preserve the hides. Roosevelt and his son Kermit kept score of the 512 large game killed, a tally that included 15 common zebras shot by Roosevelt (four by Kermit), 13 oryx, 17 lions, 20 gazelles, four crocodiles and a host of other animals between them (Roosevelt 457–59). 16 The myth of beleaguered white races in Africa dates back to the Christian legend of Prester John, and transmutes into colonial adventure stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For example, in H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain (1885), Quatermain and Sir Henry investigate rumours about a white race in Africa and are astonished, at the end of a long journey, to encounter ‘a man and a woman, nearly as white as ourselves’ (127, original emphasis): ‘as white’, he then qualifies, ‘as Spaniards or Italians’ (127). Moving from these halfway people, they arrive at a safe harbour containing ‘certain ladies whose skin was of a most dazzling whiteness’ (135). There they find the ‘sister queens’ of Zu-Vendis, the sweeter one, fair, the other dark. 17 In his biting satirical piece ‘How to Write about Africa’ for Granta, Binyavanga Wainaina writes: Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. 25 stage, merely the backdrop upon which European actors were to perform.18 ‘In several respects,’ Mbembe argues in On the Postcolony:

Africa still constitutes one of the metaphors through which the West represents the origin of its own norms, develops a self-image, and integrates this image into the set of signifiers asserting what it supposes to be its identity. And Africa […] is one of those significations […] ‘that something invented’ that, paradoxically, becomes necessary because ‘that something’ plays a key role, both in the world the West constitutes for itself and in the West’s apologetic concerns and exclusionary and brutal practices towards others. (Mbembe 2)

‘Africa,’ Achebe claims, extending this idea further, ‘is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray—a carrier on to whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate’ (Hopes and Impediments 17). It is onto Africa as a body—a body deformed, demonic, exploitable—that Europe transfixes its greatest fears about itself.

The European Enlightenment posited Europe as a place of light and reason surrounded by darkness, carnality and primitivism. Descartes (1596–1650) had earlier posited the mind–body schism, in which the material body functions like an automaton or machine, separate from the nonmaterial soul. The mind controls the body, save when the body is able to influence the mind—as in weakness, passion, or conditions of hunger or thirst. To the bodily or ‘machine-like’ realm were also cast animals, perceived as having mechanised perceptions and instincts but lacking souls. The Cartesian dualism was to have an insidious impact upon subsequent European codings of race. ‘Enlightenment philosophy,’ explains Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze:

18 This is also true in other, more recent media, and is readily transmissible in film. For example, the popular 1951 adventure film The African Queen uses Africa and inscrutable Africans as the backdrop for the conflict between the main characters, played by Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, and their European conflict with a German warship. The plot presents their resistance as a triumph of Anglo-Saxon loyalty and presence-in-the-world even when displaced in the timeless backwater of Africa. Film versions of Haggard’s books also display Africans as merely the backdrop for a grander (whiter) narrative. Similarly, the gruesome plight of the Egyptians in Universal Studios’ 1999 adventure film series The Mummy (recently remade) literally reduces them to zombie-automata, causing us to question, in Butler’s terms, which lives are real and ‘mournable’ in film.

was instrumental in codifying and institutionalizing both the scientific and popular European perceptions of the human race. The numerous writings on race by Hume, Kant, and Hegel played a strong role in articulating Europe’s sense not only of its cultural but also racial superiority. In their writings, […] ‘reason’ and ‘civilization’ became almost synonymous with ‘white’ people and northern Europe, while unreason and savagery were conveniently located among the non-whites, the ‘black,’ the ‘red,’ the ‘yellow,’ outside Europe. (Eze 5)

With recourse to ‘a more technical discourse’ than that used by their classical forebears (Herodotus, Pliny and the like), ‘the Enlightenment defined the characteristics of savagery’ (Mudimbe 72).19 The eighteenth-century philosophers’ conjectures around race evolved into a new biological discourse in the nineteenth century, influenced by the writings of Darwin, Linnaeus (Carl von Linné), Cuvier, Morton, and Combe, and the creation of classificatory orders and tables preaching a hierarchy of races (Mudimbe 107). The new approach sought scientific evidence to support pre-existing prejudices, such that these ‘new forms of racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism offered biological explanations for the naturalness of human difference’ (Hunt 187). In these biological discourses, the white body became a battleground for racial purity, triggered by obsessions with heredity and the theory, prevalent in the nineteenth century, that social degeneration had its germ in genetic corruption. ‘Eighteenth-century thinkers,’ Lynne Hunt observes in Inventing Human Rights, ‘assumed all peoples would eventually achieve civilization, whereas nineteenth-century racial theorists believed that only certain races could do so because of their inherent biological qualities’ (190). The transfer to a biological discourse that saw races as irrevocably hierarchised aligned with the interests of colonial expansionism. Indeed, Hannah Arendt posits that:

It is highly probable that the thinking in terms of race would have disappeared in due time together with other irresponsible opinions of the nineteenth century, if the ‘scramble for Africa’ and the new era of imperialism had not exposed Western humanity to new and shocking

19 ‘As an animal,’ Mbembe observes, ‘the native is supposed to belong to the family of eminently mechanical, almost physical things, without language, even though endowed with sense organs, veins, muscles, nerves, and arteries through which nature, in its virginal power, manifests itself’; as such, the ‘native’ is ‘[p]laced at the margins of the human’ (On the Postcolony 236).

experiences. Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world. (Arendt 63–64)

European governments20 mustered and mobilised these discourses in order to stake and defend their claims to the labour of non-European bodies in the colonies. The effects of the Cartesian dualism had firmly established the colonies as labouring body to Europe’s rational brain: for ‘Friday is Crusoe’s slave and, even though he is able to ask some awkward questions of his master, he still “naturally” plays the laboring body to Crusoe’s reflective empire building, just as Caliban had done to Prospero’s in Shakespeare’s earlier work’ (Huggan and Tiffin 157). Racial exceptionalism was imbricated firmly with human exceptionalism, deliberately reading a slippage between ‘race’ as ethnicity and ‘the human race’ as species. ‘From the point of view of African history,’ Mbembe argues:

the notion of the native at first belongs to the grammar of animality. It is from this angle that it penetrates, later, into grammar of servility. […] From this point of view, the whole epistemology of colonialism is based on a very simple equation: there is hardly any difference between the native principle and the animal principle. This is what justifies the domestication of the colonized individual. (On the Postcolony 236)

Colonial discourses forged an unpalatable parallel between the labouring body of the African worker and the labouring body of the beast: under the ‘grammar of animality’ that obtains in relation to the colonised, both were employed to gather and produce resources to be shipped back to line the imperial coffers in Europe. Radhika Mohanram argues for the centrality of embodiment to postcolonial studies, observing that, following the perceived schism between primitive body and intelligent mind:

this understanding is also metonymically extended to the occupants of lands waiting to be colonized, waiting to be roused from inertia, from the torpor of primitivity. The black body is metonymically linked to the woman’s body in the power/knowledge system of Western

20 In particular, the businesspeople who composed their ranks, the lobbyists who targeted them, and those who owned shares in foreign mines and other prospects. 28

Enlightenment, progress and modernity. In contrast, black bodies and women’s bodies bespeak unevolved entities. (Mohanram 199–200)21

By these subversions African space is feminised, awaiting masculine Europe’s ‘phallic’ domination of Africa ‘imposed during both the slave trade and colonialism’ (Mbembe On the Postcolony 13). The phallus, as Mbembe has observed,

has been the focus of ways of constructing masculinity and power. Male domination derives in large measure from the power and spectacle of the phallus—not so much from the threat to life during war as from the individual male’s ability to demonstrate his virility at the expense of a woman and to obtain its validation from the subjugated woman herself. (Mbembe On the Postcolony 13)

Establishing its own power as phallic, Europe ‘demonstrates [its] virility at the expense’ of Africa. Where Europe understands itself as being masculine, rational, of ‘goodly’ physique, it classes Africa as feminine, denoting women’s perceived status as irrational, hysterical creatures of the flesh. Europe imagined itself as the rightful head of a global household, against which other regions must be feminised in order to undergird Europe’s own self-perception of noble masculinity. As such, Africans were deemed of a lesser order—like animals, women and children—in a paternalistic discourse that only ever imperfectly masked the economic motivations for European states’ overseas interests. Missionaries on ‘charitable’ missions to spread the word of God were despatched alongside entrepreneurs, soldiers and traders. The merging of the two objectives is total in imperial discourses and interests. V.Y. Mudimbe observes that:

Obviously, the missionary’s objectives had to be co-extensive with his country’s political and cultural perspectives on colonization, as well as the Christian view of his mission. With equal enthusiasm, he served as an agent of a political empire, a representative of civilization, and an envoy of God. There is no essential contradiction between these roles. All of them implied the same purpose: the conversion of African minds and space. (Mudimbe 47)

21 Indeed, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin have commented that ‘it is now commonplace to suggest that women and colonized subjects have been identified with the body and the animalistic, while the “natural” supremacy of men—and, by extension, male colonisers—is evidenced by their apparent transcendence of the body’ (158). 29

The violent acquisition of land and securing of labour formed modernity’s ‘hidden script’ of coloniality, which ‘enabled racial classification of human population, enslavement of non-European people, primitive accumulation, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid and neo-colonialism’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 19). This was only partially masked by a ‘“public script” that emphasised modernity’s ability to overcome all obstacles to human progress and promised emancipation, civilisation and development’ (Ndlovu- Gatsheni 19). This ‘public script’ provided ‘racism as the only possible “explanation” and excuse for [Europe’s] deeds’ (Arendt), claiming to bring civilisation, rigour and discipline to a lazy or childlike people, and exploiting misperceptions of ‘native’ morality (Mbembe 236) as an overt rationalisation of imperial conquest. This process, for Mohanram, traps the colonised into a Lacanian stasis:

The passage through the mirror stage coheres the body for the subject and gives them a sense of physicality in Lacanian thought. When psychoanalytic discourse is enmeshed with postcolonial discourse, the mirror stage and the Symbolic take on an altogether different emphasis. The colonizer functions as the Symbolic and the colonized is always suspended in the mirror stage, cohered by the master discourse of the colonizer. (Mohanram 200)

Where for Achebe ‘Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray’ (Hopes and Impediments 17), criticising ‘the desire—one might indeed say the need—in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest’ (Hopes and Impediments 2–3), for Mohanram colonisation always results in an arrested mirror stage, in which the image of the body staring back from the mirror is constructed as different, demonic. The result of such constructions of Africa under ‘the sign of a lack’ has resulted in a ‘grotesque dramatization’ and the continent being seen as nothing more nor less than ‘a great, soft, fantastic body’ to be exploited (Mbembe On the Postcolony 8).

Literature provides one of the most effective and enduring forms of this distorted mirror through which Africans have been invited to view themselves. Western portrayals of Africa, even those produced today, have commonly concentrated on its being a ‘dark’ place of primordial jungles and alien, inhospitable deserts filled with

30 savage Others. In colonial narratives these undisciplined African bodies tend to have been considered, largely, as puzzle pieces: proto-humans providing a link to common ancestors and a throwback to prehistory. European writers of the nineteenth century, Mudimbe explains, were anxious to cement differences between Africa and Europe; they fumbled to express ‘the complete lack of similarity between the two continents and attempted to prove that in Africa the physical environment, the flora and fauna, as well as the people, represent relics of a remote age of antiquity’ (Mudimbe 107).

This sentiment is nowhere more evident than in this much-quoted passage from Polish writer Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel, Heart of Darkness:

We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. (68–69)

The Africans of the above passage, defined through their ‘whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling’, constitute a collection of unruly body parts rather than whole human beings. Aligned with the ‘madhouse’ as opposed to the ‘sane men’ of Europe, this ‘black and incomprehensible frenzy’ threatens (though impotently) the passage of the white men down the river. Africans here are depicted as bodies outside time—where time represents European order and rationality, and timelessness a perceived prehistoric wasteland that threatens to infect the unwary European traveller (as, indeed, is the fate of Kurtz in the novel). The Africans’ timelessness is pitted against the march of European progress—the Africans relegated to stationary observers as the Europeans steam past them along the

31 river. Conrad repeats references to Africa as being ‘prehistoric’ (68), existing at ‘the earliest beginnings of the world’ (66) or ‘the night of first ages’ (69) in order to cast the continent as constituting a savage past that Europeans have outgrown, but which threatens to pull them back into a kind of pre-cultural infancy. In addition, Conrad explicitly records his character Marlow’s ‘thrill’ (69) of horror at ‘the suspicion of their not being inhuman […]—the thought of your remote kinship’ (69): the double negative revealing a morbid fascination with the Africans’ alleged humanity. Mohanram explains that, in Lockean philosophy:

The ‘man of consciousness’ has to separate himself from the bestial body, which transforms from signified to signifier to sign, so that he is primary in a hierarchy of man over beast, consciousness over body. The body as used by Locke is located in some primordial time where forms are necessary to separate man from beast. (Mohanram 35)

In separating himself from the remote spectacle of African ‘frenzy’ on the shore, Conrad’s Marlow must establish himself as existing in time and rational consciousness in order to distance himself from the body, both bestial and ‘located in some primordial time’. ‘The bestial, poor or black marked body,’ Mohanram goes on to observe, ‘cannot transcend itself to consciousness’ in this philosophy (38). Under such a ‘sign’, therefore:

African peoples were considered as instances of a frozen state in the evolution of humankind. They were defined as ‘archaic’ or ‘primitive’ human beings, insofar as they were supposed to represent very ancient social and cultural organizations which had been present in Europe several thousand years earlier. Nineteenth-century anthropology was firmly based on this hypothesis and produced scholarly works on the principles of humankind’s evolution to civilization, in which African peoples were considered signs of the initial primitiveness. (Mudimbe 107–108)

For Conrad, as for many other European writers of the period, Africans’ perceived fundamental difference was inscribed in the body: their physical dissimilarities from European bodies served but to signify a deeper perversion. As such, ‘[t]he body, more specifically here the African body, is not a fixed or static phenomenon to be portrayed 32 and analysed’ (Baker Expressions of the Body 2). European writers of the Middle Passage and colonial periods obsessed over the African body as a site of ontological difference that could not be controlled or regulated. Achebe reminds us of this almost pathological ‘fixation on blackness’ when Conrad provides the following ‘brief description: “A black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms”—as though we might expect a black figure striding along on black legs to wave white arms! But so unrelenting is Conrad’s obsession’ (Hopes and Impediments 13).

This has been the image of Africa that was packaged for European readers, and it is one that has found purchase in the colonial consciousness, being reproduced in numerous (even contemporary) popular works.22 The construction of Kipling’s ‘silent, sullen peoples’ described in ‘The White Man’s Burden’ bore clear economic benefits for European states with vested interests in African land and resources, and these attitudes have set the scene for the simultaneously exploitative and patronising agendas of the colonial machine in Africa.

‘Unfortunately,’ as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o observes, ‘this “knowledge”’ about the nature of Africa and Africans ‘did not remain in Europe’ (Globalectics 36). In the colonial period, Africans—in particular African children receiving colonial education— were exposed to an unflattering view of themselves and their cultures through the distorted mirror of European literature. Many writers have described their feelings of self-alienation upon recognising themselves in colonial novels. Achebe writes:

I read lots of English books […] I did not see myself as an African to begin with. I took sides with the white men against the savages […] But a time came when I realized […] I was not on Marlowe’s boat steaming up the Congo in the Heart of Darkness. I was one of those strange beings jumping up and down on the river bank, making horrid faces. […] That is when I realized that stories are not innocent. (Achebe in Msiska 79)

22 Contemporary depictions have been ‘updated’ to involve Africa as the sign of ‘all-pervasive’ war, where ‘[h]uman action […] is seen as stupid and mad, always proceeding from anything but rational calculation’ (Mbembe On the Postcolony 8). The Africa of contemporary popular texts from former colonial and neo-colonial powers is one largely of the vicious and their victims, set against a backdrop of indiscriminate bloodshed. Recent popular films like Tears of the Sun (2003), Hotel Rwanda (2004), The Constant Gardner (2005) and Blood Diamond (2006) fall into this category, even when sharing an important story: the point is that Hollywood does not set its romantic comedies in Africa, only those narratives dedicated to the representation of pointless rage and suffering. 33

The distancing mirror provided by European literature revealed ‘strange beings’ ‘making horrid faces’ instead of people. ‘If the European novel had been invented to represent the emergent European bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century,’ Mpalive- Hangson Msiska contends, ‘the new African elite of the twentieth century, such as Achebe, who could not see themselves in the image reflected back from Joyce Cary’s Mr Johnson, were perhaps, in a sort of Pirandelloan way, new subjects in search of an author’ (80).23 These subjects found their authors, of course, in the ‘first generation’ of African writers.

The body in African literature

Decolonising the novel

African literature, even that in European languages, starts with the rejection of the master’s narrative of history.

(Ngũgĩ Globalectics 41)

If the history of Africa’s representation in the West has been as a ghoulish, undisciplined body, then the project of African writers moving towards independence has been to show the African body as not monster or child, but as human. Before the state can be decolonised, the first space to be decolonised must be the African body: this

23 It is telling that the experiences of bestselling ‘third generation’ Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as she describes in her 2009 TED talk ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, are so similar. Although born half a century after the first generation of authors, she too describes a process of discovering herself excluded from the literature that was provided to her in her youth. She describes how she read voraciously as a child, and that:

when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Adichie ‘The Danger of a Single Story’)

The situation, she recalls, ‘changed when I discovered African books’ (‘The Danger of a Single Story’). 34 became the task of the literary realism of the 1950s and ’60s. ‘Realism,’ Bill Ashcroft observes, ‘was important for the African novel for the simple reason that its original task of representing an African society to a global audience was to convince them that in fact African life was just as real as that of its readers’ (‘Menippean Marechera’ 77). Africa had been the place of mystery and strange bodies in the adventure writing of Western writers and the sermonising discourses that cast them as demons, and it was the unique task of literary realism to overthrow this evocation of Africa, combating spectacle with the poignancies and mundanities of African characters’ everyday life. African characters were ‘rounded out’ with complex backstories: their lives ‘real’ rather than mythic or monstrous as the ‘new writers set out to celebrate and recover the African past on its own terms and from the perspectives of Africans themselves’ (Griffiths 113). These writers’ ‘daring project’ was ‘to present the African world much more decisively from an “insider” standpoint and to represent that world as functional and meaningful in its own terms, and not simply in terms of its engagement with or response to the outside world’ (113). Narrated consciousness is intrinsic to this project—for if Africans had in Western literature been shown as irrational bodies, it was crucial that these bodies be invested in the narration with rational selfhood.

In the seminal text of the period, Things Fall Apart (1958), Achebe, ‘the father of the realist tradition of the African novel’ (Ashcroft ‘Knowing Time’ 69), provides an ethnographic narrative centred on the community of Umuofia. He explicitly contrasts the everyday patterns of his characters’ lives against the reductive narrative planned by the District Commissioner at the end of the novel, after Okonkwo’s body has been found hanging from a tree. The Commissioner dreams of the book he will write:

Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. (147–148)

But Achebe is the author of this book, not the Commissioner: although the Commissioner wants to reduce Okonkwo’s complex life into a single paragraph,

Achebe has shown him as the rich study of a novel. Okonkwo is by no means a perfect citizen. However:

it is the very subtlety of Achebe’s description, his presentation of Okonkwo as a deeply flawed and complex man, and his exposure of Umuofian society as one that had its own share of ethical dilemmas, that underlies the transformative power of Things Fall Apart. Achebe rejects Marlow’s stereotyping in Heart of Darkness by confirming the complexity and even ambivalence of African culture. (Ashcroft ‘Knowing Time’ 70)

The worlds Achebe creates in his novels generate their own gravity, and it is through his exploration of a flawed society containing imperfect but compelling characters that he reveals his political project in making Africans real in literature. The strength of realism in this project is that it cultivates the reader’s empathy. ‘Both reading and writing require an imaginative leap,’ fellow realist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie observes,

and it is that imaginative leap that enables us to become alive in bodies not our own. It seems to me that we live in a world where it has become increasingly important to try and live in bodies not our own, to embrace empathy, to constantly be reminded that we share, with everybody in every part of the world, a common and equal humanity. (‘To Instruct and Delight: A Case for Realist Literature’ 4).

Further, literary realism for the pre-independence writers signified not only decolonising the novel for Africans, but also decided incursions into the literature of the imperial ‘centre’. Msiska explains that, contrasting earlier ‘racy’ novels and the Onitsha Market paperbacks, 24 ‘Achebe’s privileging of realism over the colonial “racial romance” may be seen as grounding the authentic African novel within the scope of the English literary tradition itself, a subversive occupation of the dominant tradition’ (Msiska 80; 81–82)—although the fact that these writers ‘were not writing in any

24 The Onitsha market paperbacks were themselves significant for Nigerian literature, ‘endorsing a sense of local identity. Their familiar setting and characters make the local world and the day-to-day life of its people coexist with the world of writing, familiarising and establishing that world as a legitimate subject of literary representation’ (Griffiths 97). Gareth Griffiths argues that: ‘The existence of a local audience for popular English writing also meant that popular writers were able to reflect local audience taste directly, rather than to accommodate an external view of what “real” African English writing could or should include’ (97). 36 simple sense from within the pre-colonial culture they celebrated, and which they sought to recover as a dignified and meaningful cultural heritage’ renders the ‘incorporation of local knowledge more complex and problematic than is sometimes acknowledged’ (Griffiths 113; 114). Msiska observes that:

modernism became an important marker of the avant garde quality of the emergent post-colonial African novel, as it distanced itself from a ‘romance-realism’ that had developed during colonialism. In this way, Things Fall Apart and novels such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between (1965) and Weep Not Child (1964) are a formal hybridity of realism and modernism.25

The ‘cultural nationalists’ (Cooper) of the so-called ‘first generation’ of African writers26 set about decolonising the novel and the African body in order to create this new literature. These writers also used realism to situate African bodies in time, rejecting the tendency in Western literature to display Africa as a throwback to a ‘primordial’ era, and proving that ‘African cultures’, ‘like traditional cultures in Europe, were equally threatened by a relentless modernity’ (Msiska 82). Reclaiming the body was central to the realist African novel.27 For such writers, ‘the novel was an item in the inventory of nation-building’ (Adesokan 15).28 The novel is political, the preferred mode of resistance in the era of colonial education, following on from the earlier

25 The link with modernism is, I consider, truer of Achebe’s than of Ngũgĩ’s works of the period, the latter’s more influenced by Marxist social realism.

26 This common appellation is a misnomer, for it does not recognise the centuries of African writing that came before Achebe’s generation. The narratives of slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries formed the first writing in English by black Africans (Griffiths 7). A strong tradition emerged later in the nineteenth century in West Africa. ‘As we might expect,’ Gareth Griffiths observes, these writers: concentrated their energies on the genres most appropriate to their task, which was to establish an African presence in the professional fields they had entered. This writing ranged from treatises on medicine and ethnography through travel writing, historical accounts, essays on social and cultural theory, and political polemic. The fact that such genres have often been excluded from literary histories has meant that this early body of writing by Africans has been unjustly neglected. (26) Griffiths goes on to record that similar traditions also emerged in East Africa, though later due to different social conditions such as the lack of a ‘group comparable with the nineteenth-century Creole communities of West Africa’ (42). 27 And yet, despite this strong history, ‘by and large, African representations of the body have been overlooked by cultural theorists’ (Baker Expressions of the Body 1). 28 Ngũgĩ recalls: ‘It was amazing to find that a novel could capture the drama of the colonial and the anticolonial while obeying all the aesthetic laws of fiction. It spoke directly to my experience. It was fiction that first gave us a theory of the colonial situation’ (Globalectics 15). Ngũgĩ’s concept of ‘fiction as theory’ (15) sees the novel as central to formulating resistance politics in literature.

37 determined resistance against the weapons of colonial rule.29 The structures of colonial rule extended into the postcolonial, or neo-colonial era, and with this change the political novel of postcolonial Africa transformed as well, taking as its revised subject the wrongs of the state.

‘African literature’

‘African literature’ is a huge term, as vast in scope as the fifty-four countries that make up the continent. Can we speak with any relevance and standing, even in generalisations, of anything comprising so large a category? Each national literature has its own unique traditions, and each country is composed of multiple ethno-linguistic groups (formed in many cases only in uneasy compromise into postcolonial unity). How relevant is even a state-based ordering to considering literary heritage?

In many respects, it is precisely this indeterminacy at the national level that creates the possibility of the field of African literature.30 Nineteenth-century African

29 Early anti-colonial resistance in Africa has a longer and more comprehensive history than is often covered. ‘To invoke sub-Saharan African resistance to colonialism alone, and to cite only some of the most obvious examples,’ Young reports:

there were wars or revolts in South Africa from 1799–1906 (the last armed uprising was by the Bambatha in Natal in 1906, by the Asante 1821–34, 1873–4, 1895–6, 1900, Ndebele resistance to the Boers 1837, Basutoland 1851–2, 1858–68, 1879–81, El Hajj Umar’s resistance to the French in West Africa 1854–64, Angola in 1869, 1902, 1907, 1913, Zulu resistance to the British 1870–1906, Barue resistance to the Portuguese 1870–1917, the Makuta rising of 1878, Abushiri’s rebellion 1880–90, the First and Second Mandinka Wars 1882–6, 1891–8, the Massingire rebellion of 1884, Somalia and Ethiopia 1886–1920, Samori Ture’s resistance from 1888–98, resistance to German expansion in East Africa from 1888–91, Baule resistance 1889–95, 1908–16, the Hehe War 1891–8, the Anglo–Ndebele war of 1893, Mozambique 1895–9, the Ndebele– Shona War 1896–1903, the Cambuemba Sena–Tonga insurrection of 1897, Sierra Leone 1898, Madagascar 1898–1904, Nandi revolt 1900, the 1901 Makanga rising, the Herero-Nama Rising (and subsequent extermination) 1904–7, the Cameroons 1904, the Shona rebellion 1904, the Maji Maji Uprising 1905–7, the French Congo 1905, Kenya 1905, 1908, 1914 (Ajayi 1989; Boahen 1985; Bute and Harmer 1997; Crowder 1971; Iliffe 1995; Robinson, Gallagher and Denny 1981). (161–162)

30 The members of each state differ widely in traditions according to language and culture: and yet, at the macro level, there remains across almost all African countries the shared experience of colonialism and its aftermath, the governmental structures (or power vacuum) it left behind. For this reason, in Africa the concept of the nation is both contentious and very recent. ‘Nationalism in Africa’, Robert Young observes, 38 writers near the beginning of the tradition, Gareth Griffiths observes, ‘were frequently inspired by a vision of Africa as a whole, and the nationalism they favoured was rarely merely local or regional. In this respect they challenged the artificialities of colonial constructs, and argued for a mutually supportive development towards independence for the peoples of Africa as a whole’ (27). These early generations of African intellectuals ‘made the modern African into someone who could conceive of a connectedness above and beyond local structures and allegiances’ (Griffiths 29).

This context led to the development of Pan-Africanism, one of the major intellectual movements that has shaped African politics. Although now habitually dismissed as too essentialist, during the period of the great independence push Pan- Africanism was a sincere and galvanising force in anti-colonial thinking. Its communal spirit remains an important component of writers’ intellectual heritage. Originating in Africa in the 1860s and growing in tandem with other African, African-American and Caribbean movements, Pan-Africanism was to become ‘the dominant ideology of those led by Nkrumah who were demanding decolonization for Africa after 1945’ (Young 236). Its thrust was towards continental unity, the ‘ultimate objective’ of which ‘was the formation of a United States of Africa’ (Young 240).31

The radical unity proposed by Pan-Africanists had solidarity at its goal: a statement not just of esprit de corps but of a practical and economically viable alternative to the relics of colonial statehood. The deep politics of Pan-Africanism have in many ways translated into the literary output of the continent, in which the subjects of the political novel are reproduced across vast geographical regions due to shared conditions in the wake of colonialism. This is evident not only in repeated motifs and allegorical structures, but in the intentions of the political novel. Indeed, Ngũgĩ observes that:

Outside the fact of language, writers from the colonial world always assumed an extranational dimension. We talk of African literature, for

was limited by the fact that it largely operated within the geopolitical framework of the historical arbitrary division of Africa into the different colonial states; the independent states that emerged from decolonization were neither African in form, nor, for the most part, economically viable. (240)

31 Although it was to become a casualty of the latter part of the twentieth century: ‘Only now,’ Young argues, can Pan-Africanism ‘be seen as a form of counter-modernity more necessary than its proponents could ever have envisaged’ (Young 241). 39

instance, without batting an eyelid. Africa is one of the largest continents in the world, containing within it, in terms of geographic space or land mass, Europe, North America, Australia, and China combined. In terms of nations, Africa has more than fifty. But African literature always saw itself as beyond the national territorial state, assuming, at the minimum, the continent for its theater of relevance and application. (Ngũgĩ Globalectics 54)32

Early generations of writers and future political leaders from different countries frequently met and exchanged views (political and aesthetic) through the colonial schooling system and, later, travel abroad for education: whether to a neighbouring country, to South Africa, or to the United States or Europe. In recent decades, literary ties between writers have also increasingly been facilitated by advances in technology. In his memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place, Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina recalls: ‘I meet online and make friends with a young Nigerian woman, Chimamanda Adichie, who is also trying to get published. We critique each other’s work. Soon, we are e-mailing every day’ (189). The heart of many aspects of political life across African countries are shared, and the categorial connections in the literature that address this experience must be allowed to resonate.

Rather than state-by-state, my methodology in this thesis involves reading by category across a selection of African literature. This approach yields flexibility and the ability to capture the poignant commonalities between writers of different contexts. It is undergirded by a recent (though divisive) trend towards observing the macro in literary studies, as in Franco Moretti’s now-famous argument for the need for ‘distant reading’: ‘where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems’ (48–49); he goes on to pre-empt his critics with the pragmatic statement that: ‘If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something’ (49). While my project is not Moretti’s, as I have devoted my study

32 Brenda Cooper contends that ‘there is a far greater unity between quite different African writers than has often been understood’, pointing to a ‘trend in Africa towards more nationalistic projects of recovery’ in the work of writers like Wole Soyinka, Sembène Ousmane, Ngũgĩ and Ayi Kwei Armah (Cooper 52– 53), while Ashcroft observes that an ‘expansive supra-national character’ is particularly noticeable in ‘the genre of utopian writing after independence’ (‘Post-colonial Utopianism’ 33).

40 to close readings,33 I suggest that the impetus to read across state lines is particularly necessary in postcolonial literatures, and perhaps even more so in the African context, in order to illumine the deep political solidarity that still exists in unique forms in African literature. It is my view that categorical readings across contexts are important as a supplement to geographically specific studies: we need both approaches. It is the combination of state-by-state and category-by-category studies that enables us to recognise, as Ngũgĩ has affirmed, the ‘extranational dimension’ of African literature that has taken ‘the continent for its theater of relevance and application’ (Globalectics 54).

The figural shift

The project of the first generation of African writers was to present the African body as a world, not merely as a perceived object in a white man’s world. The African body became, in the hands of these writers, the site of represented human experience— providing force to Merleau-Ponty’s comment that ‘[t]o be a consciousness or rather to be an experience is to hold inner communication with the world, the body and other people, to be with them instead of being beside them’ (96).

Following independence, hopes too often led to bleak disappointment as a new postcolonial elite stepped into the shoes of the departed colonials. ‘Post-independence nations have almost inevitably taken over the role of the colonial state and maintained its administrative and class structure’ (Ashcroft ‘Post-colonial Utopianism’ 31), further entrenching systemic flaws brought about by the disaster of the colonial machine in Africa. The formation of a neo-colonial elite as heir to colonial governance led to problems with corruption, poverty, inflation, crack-downs on political debate and dissidents, and harsh imprisonment for writers and intellectuals critical of the new regimes. The dream of independence had been betrayed. ‘The sons of the nation were

33 Close reading, Moretti writes tendentiously—yet characteristically compellingly—‘will not do’ because ‘it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon’ (48). 41 now in charge, after all,’ the protagonist of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born exclaims bitterly. ‘How completely the new thing took after the old’ (10).

This attitude is deftly outlined in the following passage from Achebe’s A Man of the People, published six years after Nigerian independence:

A man who has just come in from the rain and dried his body and put on dry clothes is more reluctant to go out again than another who has been indoors all the time. The trouble with our new nation—as I saw it then lying on the bed—was that none of us had been indoors long enough to be able to say ‘To hell with it’. We had all been in the rain together until yesterday. Then a handful of us—the smart and the lucky and hardly ever the best—had scrambled for the one shelter our former rulers left, and had taken it over and barricaded themselves in. And from within they sought to persuade the rest through numerous loudspeakers, that the first phase of the struggle had been won and that the next phase—the extension of our house—was even more important and called for new and original tactics; it required that all argument should cease and the whole people speak with one voice and that any more dissent and argument outside the door of the shelter would subvert and bring down the whole house. (42)

In Odili’s analogy, the bodies vulnerable to the elements are citizens of the country and the state forms the sheltering house—a house that is not equipped in its current condition to cover all its citizens, having been originally built for the colonial elite. Odili satirises the neo-colonial elite as ‘scrambling’ for the shelter ‘our former rulers left’, recalling Europeans’ very ‘scramble for Africa’ that left the citizens in this predicament. The bodies out in the rain, Odili suggests, are living under much the same conditions as when the ‘former rulers’ resided there: independence, in other words, has had little material effect upon their lives.

Writers of the period attacked the injustices they witnessed in literature. Novelists like Achebe, Ousmane Sembène, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Nuruddin Farah, Ayi Kwei Armah, Buchi Emecheta, Henri Lopès, Nadine Gordimer and Dambudzo Marechera explicitly criticise the corrupt structures of governance in their work, followed later by writers like Tsitsi Dangarembga, Sony Labou Tansi, Ahmadou 42

Kourouma and a number of South African writers against apartheid. Writers of the period, Brenda Cooper argues, have:

dedicated themselves to building such national cultures, within their concerted critiques of the corruption and betrayals of the class of African leaders that emerged after independence. They have all, from different political standpoints, and through varied fictional strategies and styles, described the disillusionments of post-independence African politics. They have all, in those different ways, attempted to offer hopeful alternatives to the betrayals and corruptions. (Cooper 52)34

This became the major new project of the novel, and heralded a figural shift in the use of the body in literature. I use Hayot’s sense of ‘figural’, derived from his phrase ‘figural metadiegesis’ which describes the function of diegetic objects that are ‘especially intense site[s] of interpretative force, one whose effects resonate beyond the immediate diegetic sphere’ (68).35 In this sense it follows more closely the literal meaning of figural (as interchangeable with figurative): ‘Representing by a figure or emblem; emblematical, typical’; ‘Pertaining to, or of the nature of, pictorial or plastic representation’; or ‘Based on, or involving the use of, figures or metaphors; metaphorical, not literal’ (OED), rather than its particular use in postmodern literary theory. Both terms (figural and figurative) emphasise the non-literal questions around the deployment of the body.

Where pre-independence writing focused on centring and ‘worlding’ the African body, as postcolonial disillusionment set in, post-independence writing gradually shifted to using the body in allegory, metonymy and satire as a means to address the injustices of the state. The body became the carrier for a different kind of political meaning: its new target was the mismanagement and violence perpetuated by the state, and its use

34 ‘In other words,’ Cooper continues, ‘out of a brave, concerted and consistent critique of the corrupt state, there has often emerged within African fiction, an unambiguous commitment and dedication to the nationalist project of political reform. National cultural strategies have been adopted with political and aesthetic consequences’ (52).

35 Hayot goes on to explain that: Each such figure establishes a different relation between the diegetic object and its metadiegetic significance. These differences powerfully shape the world of the artwork, either by adding a totally new dimension that dominates and to some extent obviates or overwhelms the diegesis (allegory), by adding a new dimension that parallels and sustains it (symbol), or by establishing, as in figura, a taut historical resonance between the sign and its signifieds. (69) 43 corresponded with a shift into allegory and symbolism. The figural usage of the body as a political symbol is common across national borders. My thesis is concerned with the figural uses of the body in post-independence literature, resulting in allegories, metonymy and harnessing the symbolic force of the body.

It is worth noting that while this project is concerned with the metonymising of the body—for nation, state or land—I have no wish to imply, with Fredric Jameson, that ‘[a]ll third-world texts are necessarily […] national allegories’ (69). My interest is in these writers’ use of the symbolic force of the body in their post-independence critique of the state, which is a decided trend in politically motivated fiction. However, I make no claim, nor desire to, that all texts fulfil this function.

The market and translation

Given that works of art exist as symbolic objects only if they are known and recognized, that is, socially instituted as works of art and received by spectators capable of knowing and recognizing them as such, the sociology of art and literature has to take as its object not only the material production but also the symbolic production of the work, i.e. the production of the value of the work or, which amounts to the same thing, of belief in the value of the work. […] In short, it is a question of understanding works of art as a manifestation of the field as a whole, in all the powers of the field, and all the determinisms inherent in its structure and functioning, are concentrated.

(Bourdieu The Field of Cultural Production 37)

Translation is the language of languages. It opens the gates of national and linguistic prisons.

(Ngũgĩ Globalectics 61)

The global literary market brings to bear a huge impact upon the kinds of African novels that are written, published, widely marketed and sold. In The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan argues compellingly that postcolonial writers ‘may still be seen, in spite of themselves, as more or less reliable commentators, and as both translators and exemplars of their own “authentically” exotic cultures’ (Huggan 26). The mediations and compromises associated in the global literary market, particularly in the academy and through awards institutions like the Booker, are seen as encouraging a commodified brand of ‘exotic nostalgia’ for colonialism, for: ‘in the overwhelmingly commercial context of late twentieth-century commodity culture, postcolonialism and its rhetoric of resistance have themselves become consumer products’ (Huggan 6).36

Brouillette, Sorensen and Lazarus observe that postcolonial fiction buoyed by the popular market tends to be postmodernist (what Lazarus terms ‘pomo-postcolonial’) rather than realist. However, this observation seems now to be dated when we consider the lists of bestselling contemporary postcolonial writers of realism—such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, Taiye Selasi, NoViolet Bulawayo, Chika Unigwe, among many more from African countries alone.37 Akin Adesokan argues that contemporary African writers, particularly those writing in English, must view their primary market as ‘the metropolitan West where, for all sorts of reasons, African otherness (or cultural difference in general) remains a serviceable idea’ (15). He concludes that commercially successful novels ‘tend to become popularly or critically acclaimed first in Western Europe and North America, whence, through the process of “reversed extraversion,” their influence radiates backwards to the historical contexts of their authors’ (2).

36 In her counter-argument to Huggan, Sarah Brouillette contends that she finds it:

more fruitful to understand strategic exoticism, and likewise general postcolonial authorial self-consciousness, as comprised of a set of literary strategies that operate through assumptions shared between the author and the reader, as both a producer and consumer work to negotiate with, if not absolve themselves of, postcoloniality’s touristic guilt. (7)

37 Lawrence Venuti observes, interestingly, that realist texts are more likely to be translated than formally experimental texts (126). He also observes that texts that are less ‘foreign’ to Western markets will be the more successful: ‘the foreign text becomes a translated bestseller because it is not so foreign as to upset the domestic status quo […] The translated bestseller must now be all things to many readers by permitting them to make what domestic use they will of it’ (Venuti 155–156). However, this stands in relation to all translated texts and not only to the ‘postcolonial exotic’. 45

The market is implicated also in unequal processes of translation. The ‘grossly unequal translation patterns’ that we see today, Lawrence Venuti points out in The Scandals of Translation, ‘point to a significant trade imbalance between the British and American publishing industries and their foreign counterparts. Quite simply, a lot of money is made from translating English, but little is invested in translating into it’ (Venuti 160–161).38 English is the dominant language on the global literary market. Huggan observes wryly that:

it seems worth questioning the neo-imperialist implications of a postcolonial literary/critical industry centred on, and largely catering to, the West. English is, almost exclusively, the language of this critical industry, reinforcing the view that postcolonialism is a discourse of translation, rerouting cultural products regarded as emanating from the periphery toward audiences who see themselves as coming from the centre. (Huggan 4)

Venuti goes further, arguing that:

The translation practices enlisted by transnational corporations, whether publishers, manufacturers, or advertising agencies, function in the same fundamental ways as those that underwrote European colonialism. The main difference is that translation now serves corporate capital instead of a nation state, a trading company, or an evangelical program. What remains unchanged is the use of translation practices that establish a hierarchical relationship between the major and minor languages, between the hegemonic and subordinate cultures. The translations enact a process of identity formation in which colonizer and colonized, transnational corporation and indigenous consumer, are positioned unequally. (Venuti 165)

Translation is an important consideration for this thesis, which primarily investigates anglophone African literatures. I also refer to some works translated from the French from francophone countries such as Senegal, Congo and Côte d’Ivoire, and francophone writing from Morocco: in these cases I have relied upon the expertise of the translator in

38 ‘Since World War II,’ Venuti observes, ‘English has remained the most translated language worldwide, but one of the least translated into’ (88). 46 publishing English translations. Additionally, I discuss the work of Ngũgĩ whose later works are written in Gĩkũyũ and translated into English by the author himself.

It is not without consciousness of the difficulties and pitfalls of working from translations, or fear of ignorance of the original, that I have treated the translated works. In the academy, particularly in a world literature context, there is a noticeable tension in the approach to translation. On the one hand, it is commonly proposed that academics must work together and build upon each other’s work to synthesise new knowledge, supporting the work of translators who bring valuable works into English—and, on the other hand, there is a deeply held belief that it would be folly to rely on another’s translation of any text.

The high symbolism of the body and its use in the political work of criticising the state is so widespread that I have elected, on consideration, to work from translations in a select number of texts where these expressions of the body are significant. This focus on the body prevails across languages, and on balance I consider that this project will have more to offer if it pays attention to literary use of the body for political purposes across the continent in a few translated works—with full disclosure and regret as to any complications, indeterminacies, and mediations that arise when working from any translation.

Outline of chapters

Recent renewed scholarly interest in the body has reminded us of its ethical function, particularly in literature of conflict and post-conflict zones: we need, Harcourt contends, ‘to move from the instrumentalizing of the body as an object, to understanding the body as a subject, central to power […] and thus bringing the experiences of bodies into political discourse’ (Harcourt 24). My study will address writers’ use of the body as a platform through which to criticise state politics after the post-independence figural shift in approaches to representing the body. This thesis will focus on novels, meaning

47 that other significant uses of the body, notably in theatre,39 but also orature, poetry or short stories will, for reasons of scope, not feature in this argument. The mode of my study will be close readings of the writers’ use of the human body in these texts.

In chapter one I will discuss the body of the dictator as national father: grotesque, exceeding his bounds, greedy and ever-consuming. The body of the potentate functions as a satirical symbol of the obscenity of overweening state power.

Chapter two proceeds to the body of the prisoner, the detained citizen. This chapter will include discussions on Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’ and the prisoner’s body as the testing ground of rights. The prisoners of the novels discussed here are subjected to biological weapons and a discourse of pathology that seeks to wound or mark the body with authority. I will also discuss, as a peculiar but highly visible sub- category of the prisoner body, the body of the child soldier.

Chapter three focuses on women’s bodies in African literature, particularly their co-option by nationalism. It is easier to speak of the other categories of body studied here—the dictator body, and even the prisoner body—as singular than it is to speak of ‘the woman’s body’, for in African fiction women’s bodies are multiple and diverse. Women’s bodies vary because the category is just too large: it covers half the population, rather than a functional category that one may step into. However, I have included this chapter nonetheless because despite the multitude of different figurations of women’s bodies, a common and sinister theme that writers have consistently addressed is the metonymising of the woman’s body for land, and its conclusion in sexual violence as metonymic claiming of that land.

In the final chapter, I will discuss the body of the beggar that is particularly prevalent in West African fiction, and its position as an imagined sore upon the body of the city. Beggar bodies contain the rejuvenating communal energy of the Bakhtinian grotesque—with, however, some attention to the nature of disability representation in relation to the grotesque. The chapter will explore the regenerative potential of beggar processions and, finally, it will discuss an instance of the solitary madman who is figured as abject rather than grotesque.

39 Such as the early writing of Wole Soyinka, or the significant communal theatre that emerged around events like Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion or in response to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 48

Chapter 1: The dictator body

African writers have consistently provided political commentary on the nation through invoking the metaphor of the body. Our metaphoric imagination readily reads the political leader as ‘head’ of a country that is regulated by the ‘long arm’ of the law, and where the masses comprise the ‘body politic’. This metaphoric valency between the nation and the body is reified in one body in particular: that of the totalitarian leader. At the moment of independence, the hope of the nation had been embodied in the new African leader, replacing the former figureheads of colonial rule (such as Queen Elizabeth II or Charles de Gaulle). The majority of African countries gained independence from European powers around the 1960s (with a number of controversial outliers, such as Egypt’s nominal independence from Britain in 1922, and Rhodesia’s transition to Zimbabwe in 1980).40 In too many cases, however, the anti-colonial nationalisms that pushed for independence failed to transition into functioning politics. The fledgling nations were beset with reams of practical difficulties with the abrupt withdrawal of the colonial powers, perhaps none more so than the corruption of the leader. In Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, the dictator dramatizes the idea of his divine correspondence with the nation by declaring: ‘Every Aburĩrian child knows that I am the Country and the Country is Me, which means that this Excellency, this Country, and this Nation are like the mystery of Three in One and One in Three creating the Perfect One’ (698). (Ngũgĩ continues wryly to observe that: ‘That was why when the Ruler spoke, the nation spoke, and when he sneezed, the nation sneezed’ [698].) The almost hypostatic relationship of the dictator with the nation renders him, in this imaginary, as the nation—as well as being its father, discipliner and protector.

The public relations machine of the one-party-state has historically proven adept at reinforcing this metonymy of the dictator body for the nation. Under a totalitarian regime and in the absence of a free press, the government controls the transfer of information, and it uses its channels to imprint the image of the dictator on the public eye. The dictator’s body fills the screen. His face looms down from posters, and his

40 Liberia gained very early independence through its relationship with the United States, and South Africa became independent in 1910 following the turmoil of the Boer War, but established its own oppressive settler colonial state. Two countries gained independence from other African countries: Namibia from South Africa in 1990 (recognised internationally, unlike South Africa’s attempts at creating independent ‘Bantustans’), and Eritrea from Ethiopia in 1993. 49 international visits are front-page news. His body is enlarged and raised as a statue to watch over the market square. His slogans flutter on banners in the streets; his portrait hangs in government offices and classrooms, where his teachings are set as prescribed texts; his voice booms from the radio; his opinions become the law. Armed thugs patrol the streets bearing his insignia. His head is emblazoned on postage stamps and the very currency that keeps the gears of the country’s economy operational. In short, he is established as the figurehead of the nation.

This metonymy is politically expedient for a number of reasons, chief among which is the dictator’s wish to render it inconceivable that another leader could ever fill his shoes—and at the same time, by showcasing his complete power over the country, to dissuade anyone else from endeavouring to do so. The political imagery of his body and the nation are so intertwined as to make one unimaginable without the other. He is cast as the embodiment of the nation, and when dissident opinions criticise the nation, he is personally wounded.

This ‘authoritarian’ figure controls the national script: his is a constant performance of power. The foundation of dictatorship is in speech and controlling the dominant narrative through the media, following the Latin origin of the word ‘dictate’, meaning ‘[t]o make a prescription, stipulation, or ruling; to lay down the law; to give orders, be in command’ (OED Online). The ‘authoritarian imaginary’ that Achille Mbembe has described in On the Postcolony as having taken hold during the colonial and independence periods (43) has led to ‘the massive deployment of violence required to restore authoritarianism almost everywhere, and the deregulation of the economy,’ in which ‘conditions for the establishment of private powers are gradually being realized’ (Mbembe 82).

In his recent contribution to the study of African dictator fiction, Unmasking the African Dictator, Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ observes that:

In centralized states the traditional rulers were shunted aside to make way for colonial governors who had enormous powers without corresponding accountability to the governed. The colonial state thus created the foundation for the centralized despotism of the colonial era. (Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ xix)

This ‘centralized despotism’ was shored up by the support of Western powers during the Cold War (Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ xxi), and has resulted in ‘undermining the postcolonial compromise, emasculating the traditional instruments of state power, and bringing about a profound modification of social structures and cultural imaginations’ (Mbembe 57). The disastrous revisions to local social structures that commenced with the early Arab and European slave traders and the establishment of a system of commerce (trading in slaves, palm oil, arms and ivory) that disrupted traditional rulers and replaced them with slaver barons controlling vast territories (Van Reybrouck), in combination with the subsequent centuries of colonialism and later Structural Adjustment Programs led, ‘in short, to partial or total transfer of what was public capital into private hands’ (Mbembe 78). The privatisation of assets in the postcolonial African state finds its aptest metaphor in the potentate himself, an individual who literally embodies the co-option of public power. Many states have since independence witnessed the siphoning of power away from the communal apparatus of the state into the sanctified body of one individual: the dictator. The dictator represents the total privatisation of power in the postcolony, and remains centre stage in the political memory of many nations.

Since independence, African writers—often at steep personal and professional risk—have consistently seized upon this performance by the dictator and used it to their own ends. If the dictator seeks to represent himself as indistinguishable from the nation, and his needs as the nation’s needs, writers have (often satirically) extended this idea and mobilised the icon of the dictator body to deliver political critique. Spotlighting the dictator body becomes a useful means of focusing on national problems in micro form: its defects mirror the ills of the nation. The corruption of the nation starts with the corruption of its leader following independence, and in the fiction this is symbolised in the corruption of the dictator’s body.

In this chapter we will consider some prevalent renditions of the potentate’s body as representing the nation in the genre of African dictator fiction, such as the dictator as ‘national father’, images of the dictator eating and being overweight or oversexed, and the mythic prowess of the dictator body that writers consistently undercut with motions towards the ambivalent and levelling power of the grotesque.

Deification of the leader

The enshrinement of political currency in the dictator’s body coincides with a process of staging and deification. One-party governments across the world have time and again demonstrated their understanding of the potent power to be found in harnessing the dictator body as an icon. In the propaganda of such regimes, the dictator body is vast. He dominates. The stance of the body is carefully articulated: at times thoughtful and visionary, as in Mao Zedong’s41 political posters, at times aggressive, as in Mussolini’s and Hitler’s. The staging of the leader’s body is central to the project of political unity. In posters, the dictator is frequently positioned not only as taking up most of the frame himself, but also as towering over his citizens, whose wishes and collective will he represents. He is the face of revolutionary struggle: be it against a former occupying power, or against enemies either internal or external. The iconography of political art in the one-party state is dominated by the dictator body.

The reverse is true when regimes fall, at which point the image of the dictator is desecrated. Soldiers and young people topple the statues, shoot holes in the murals of the leader, or burn effigies of him in the streets. The satisfying imagery of statues falling relies not only on its being state propaganda but, crucially, because he embodies a regime that belongs in the past, so his body must be destroyed, and the falling statue literalises the metaphor of the falling regime. This is why the image of the toppled statue or desecrated political image is so charged: because the superimposition of the country over the dictator body has been complete. This is particularly true of statues more than posters, because the seeming permanency of the fixture mimics the image of permanency put out by the regime. Susan Stewart explains that in centralised urban life: ‘[t]he gigantic is appropriated by the state and its institutions and put on parade with great seriousness’ (81). The dictator image is that of the ‘swallowing’ giant (Stewart 89). This correspondence occurs because: ‘The gigantic, occurring in a transcendent space, a space above, analogously mirrors the abstractions of institutions—either those

41 In posthumous aggrandisation the use of the dictator body functions slightly differently, where the dictator body comes more fully to represent an idea, one that forms a closed circuit and is perfectly complete. This may be aligned with a political philosophy that is viewed as being endemic to one country, as in the case of Mao, or with a deliberately supranational concept, as with Lenin. This often amounts more towards a true deification to ‘god-king’ (Young) status, as in the cases of Mao and Kim Il-sung, or the reduction to a single, relatively vague and delocalised idea, as in the revolutionary figure of Che Guevara. 52 of religion, the state, or, as is increasingly the case, the abstractions of technology and corporate power’ (Stewart 102).

The ‘personality cult’ (Weber) of the dictator is at the forefront of African dictator fiction. The dictator manifests as the nation’s ‘Providential Guide’ (Life and a Half), the ‘Ruler’ (Wizard of the Crow), the ‘Venerable One’ (The Last of the Empire), the ‘Father of National Resurrection’ (The Laughing Cry 54), the ‘Supreme Leader’ (Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote) and, shedding any ambiguity, ‘Daddy’ (The Laughing Cry). The recurring trope of the ‘President for Life’, a title claimed by many dictators, casts the potentate as a synthesis between president and king. Such aggrandisement parodies the real, usually self-bestowed titles of autocrats that illustrate the yearning both for adulation and for international credibility, offering ‘an enticing opportunity for writers to undermine the dictator using caricature to expose and ridicule the manipulation, repression and megalomania of these leaders’ (Baker ‘Necropolitical Violence’ 320). Mobutu Sese Seko changed his name in 1972 from Joseph-Désiré Mobutu as part of an Africanisation program known as ‘Mobutuism’, in which the Democratic Republic of the Congo became the Republic of Zaire. His new full name, Mobutu Sese Seko Koko Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, is said to mean: ‘The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake’ (Encyclopaedia Britannica). In some cases, however, such titles fall into the realms of the farcical. One of the best known for this faux-pas includes Idi Amin, the brutal ‘Butcher of Uganda’, whose full title eventually read: ‘His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular’.42 He also apparently declared himself to be ‘the last King of Scotland’, giving rise to a novel and film of that name.

African dictator fiction places the despot’s body centre stage. The dictator’s aesthetic is one of excess: he parades his ‘raw power’ over life and death in the vast terrain of his body (Mbembe 111). However, while it is his extraordinary body that sets him apart from ordinary citizens—his larger-than-life-ness, his energy, his extreme virility and feats of military prowess—it is nonetheless his body that exposes him as

42 Amin declared himself as having conquered the British Empire after the United Kingdom ceased diplomatic and trading ties with Uganda in a (much belated) protest to his rule. 53 vulnerable. It is this that lends the genre its egalitarian impulse. The dictator body represents the shared experience of mortality: while his iron will could live forever, he is dogged by the knowledge that his body is nothing but a giant target that could be finished off with one well-aimed bullet by a single dissident citizen. This contributes to his excessive mood swings and paranoia, rendering him the more dangerous to those around him.

The dictator we see in African dictator fiction is surrounded by sycophants who praise his every action in an effort to secure their own safety from political persecution, but in doing so they exacerbate the threat, because he becomes used to the idea that he is infallible. The slightest criticism against him starts to be seen as treason, even sacrilege. He becomes paranoid that people are criticising him behind closed doors, perhaps threatening to depose him. He lashes out because he is all-powerful; he also lashes out because he is afraid, because he knows he is not immortal. His regime of violence escalates. He cannot be controlled. The death penalty, carried out extra-judicially, becomes properly again ‘the reply of the sovereign to those who attacked his will, his law, or his person’ (Foucault The History of Sexuality 137–138). He is consumed by a vision of his own power, and yet haunted by its limits—even while peddling the myth to others and himself that his authority knows no bounds. He is represented in the fiction has having an excess of energy—either dangerously restrained, or bursting loose like a dam breaking. His rage is implacable; he bears a grudge; he surprises with his generosity and benevolence—which only serves to make him more frightening, because his actions cannot be predicted. He is constantly consuming; his body expands as the African ‘Big Man’. He sleeps with many women. He is excessively virile and yet plagued by the occasional insubordination of his masculinity. He pays close attention to his dress and the political statement he sends with it—perhaps striking a balance between the traditional garb of the nation and the western dress that is at times problematically associated with the elite. He has a short fuse, but sometimes he hides it well: his silence is also dangerous, because it conceals a deeper current of hatred. He is empty. He is larger than life. The Ruler of Aburĩria explains that:

what was important in any given country was not the quantity of political parties but the character of the person who personified the head, heart, arms, and legs of the state. There are no moral limits to the means that a

ruler can use, from lies to lives, bribes to blows, in order to ensure that his state is stable and his power secure. (Ngũgĩ 703)

Such is the typical dictator figure we see in fiction. The dictator’s power relies on a constant rehearsal of that power: if he appears to be weak, he is weak, and vulnerable to coups—hence the acceleration of violence. He must appear to be in control at all times, even losing his temper strategically in order to make an example of people, to punish those who could one day become resourced enemies. The dictator is an ‘almost hyperbolic figure’ (Agosin 328) who exploits the cultural currency of his body in staging performances of power.

Father of the nation

‘Listen to these ludicrous eulogies of the General,’ Soyaan said. ‘The father of the nation. The carrier of wisdom. The provider of comforts. A demi-god. I see him as a Grand Warden of a Gulag.’

(Farah Sweet and Sour Milk 15)

One of the dominant tropes through which the potentate embodies the nation in African literatures is through his office as national father. The dictator frequently styles himself as the ‘father of the nation’, borrowing from the more local hierarchy of the family unit and applying it to the scale of national politics. This translation of power structures from micro to macro adds legitimacy to his position: he appropriates the ‘natural’ authority of the male head of the house (Schatzberg; Huggan and Tiffin), in which the ‘house’ is the national space and its residents his dependents who rely on his goodwill. The language of the ‘father of the nation’ was commonly used in governments shortly following independence, when the new state was in its infancy (as in the cases of prominent figures such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah); however, the imagery of the national father has continued to be deployed in the public relations materials by successive leaders of one-party regimes.

If the dictator is the head of the family then, as the fictional president of Henri Lopès’s The Laughing Cry declares: ‘His subjects, sorry, his citizens are his children’ (Lopès 232). By co-opting the imagery of the father, the dictator positions himself both as benevolent guide, who must teach and lead his citizens, and as stern disciplinarian entrusted with punishing those who misbehave. This is particularly useful to leaders of one-party states. His is an economy of gifting: all resources are his to distribute (or hold back) as he chooses, establishing ‘familial/kinship structures of Big-Man/Small- Man/woman based on reciprocal gifts that re-energize the paternal hold’ (Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ ‘Performing resistance’ 203). This relationship casts citizens as reliant upon his favour for the delivery of infrastructure, in which citizens are required to behave in a manner that pleases him before he will consider ‘gifting’ them with services, rather than providing them as part of the state contract. The public coffers are under his personal jurisdiction. The dictator in this narrative enjoys his own generosity: Idi Amin, who liked being referred to as ‘Dada’ or ‘Big Daddy’, reportedly delighted in doling out the bundles of state cash he kept on his person at all times (Kyemba). However, he is required, for the good of the citizens themselves, to discipline them when necessary. The father figure is a canny shorthand because he commands loyalty and filial respect. Any criticism against the dictator’s actions may be viewed in with fatherly disappointment as displaying disloyalty. The dictator-as-father also dovetails with precolonial African social structures in many regions, centred around communal living arrangements presided over by a hierarchy of adults, culminating in the chief or ‘Big Man’ at the top.

Totalitarian leaders’ appropriation of the imagery of the national father has been marked, and many writers have dedicated themselves to (the often dangerous task of) highlighting and undercutting the father figure in African dictator fiction. General Bwakamabé, the dictator in Lopès’s The Laughing Cry, asks to be referred to, unambiguously, as ‘Daddy’—a title he suggests will reflect ‘the true politeness of our ancestors’ (Lopès 19). ‘Daddy’ summarises his approach to politics as such:

In a sound family, there was no place for a child who wanted to command in place of his father. If he was a real member of the family, not a snake or a slave, he wouldn’t be afraid to make his disagreement known. He would express it openly. What was all this nonsense about wanting to write on an anonymous paper, while hiding yourself in a 56

booth? We mustn’t encourage that kind of falsity. Against the education of our ancestors, dead against it. Of what should he be afraid, a son like that? Of what, tell me, if what he said to his father were just? Eh? If he needed the protection of booths, it was because he knew quite well that what he had in the back of his head was some filth which would anger his poor old father; some nastiness of no importance. Because, after all, the country was one big family.

‘I, I am the father. And you, you are my children. All the citizens are my children. You must advise me with frankness, or if you want to spare me, for fear of my reactions, you must keep a respectful silence.’ (Lopès 75, original emphasis).

Daddy condenses the relationship of the political leader with his citizen to that of a father and his son, and the in-built citizen protections in the anonymity of the ballot box are seen as encouraging only ‘nastiness of no importance’. Through a perverse and circular logic, he contends that the will of the dictator-father is always correct, meaning that criticisms must be either mistaken or simply too impolite to be voiced. This view is shared by the Ruler in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, who subsequently devises a ‘new system [that] would do away with secret ballots and introduce the queuing by which one openly stood behind the candidate of one’s choice. Direct democracy. Open democracy’ (Ngũgĩ 699). In such narratives, dictators frequently cast the vote as something alien to African countries, and which will not work in its current form:

Ever since Africa was Africa, the chief of the village, in our culture, had never been elected. To thirst nowadays for innovation in this domain was to be as uncustomary as asking a man to do the cooking or carry a calabash on his head. Notions of European pederasts! No. The chief, that was always the bravest, the wisest, the best orator, the man with the strongest fist. He imposed himself through the occult will of the dead, and everybody recognised him. Whoever dared question his authority was immediately called to public account and punished by the community, which crushed him like a cockroach. The vote was a hypocrisy of the white mentality. (Lopès 74)

As head of state, ‘Daddy’ consciously relies on patriarchal familial power structures to interpret politics. Allowing citizens to vote would be as strange as ‘asking a man to do the cooking or carry a calabash on his head’—that is, to perform tasks traditionally apportioned to women. Daddy makes the insidious suggestion, prevalent in dictator fiction, that there is something quintessentially ‘un-African’ about democracy, presenting the democratic ideal as merely another negative relic of colonialism. His own ‘might is right’ policy allocates power to him because he is the most dominant—in this case, not only having ‘the strongest fist’, but rather access to the largest number of loyal and resourced bearers of arms (authorised to wage violence).

The dictator-as-father image produces a narrative of national kinship, but one that in many states has been complicated by croneyism and tribalism. Tribalism manifests in the securing of preferential treatment for government ministers, soldiers and businesspeople of the president’s own tribe—and frequently the persecution of people from other ethnic groups.43 The problems of tribalism have been markedly inflamed by colonialism. At the 1884 Berlin Conference, the continent was carved up and parcelled out to European powers with no attention paid to the existing ethnic or national lines in the division of territories. ‘The problem,’ as Ashcroft has observed, ‘was that individual nations and the OAU itself, which might have done something about it, kept the colonial boundaries sacrosanct’ (31). Writer Binyavanga Wainaina contends that tribalism in Kenya has only been more starkly drawn since colonialism, particularly owing to British reliance upon the divide-and-conquer principles of Lugardian indirect rule. Tribalism may be read as nationalism at a more local level that competes with the administrative boundaries of the state, at times comprising a subnational monarchical structure centred around a chief or king. The state’s:

proliferation of internal borders—whether imaginary, symbolic, or a cover for economic or power struggles—and its corollary, the exacerbation of identification with particular localities, give rise to exclusionary practices, ‘identity closure,’ and persecution, which, as seen, can easily lead to pogroms, even genocide. (Mbembe 87)

43 For example, Charlotte Baker observes that while the self-styled ‘Guide Suprême de la Revolution’ Guinean president Sekou Touré ‘outwardly promoted cross-ethnic nationalism, in nationalizing land, businesses and farms he disproportionately favoured his own ethnic group, the Malinke, keeping others from the political process’, ultimately forcing an estimated ‘one in five Guineans […] to seek exile abroad’ (‘Necropolitical Violence’ 308). 58

In dictator fiction, tribalism poses an internal threat to the coherence and loyalty of the country by threatening the dictator’s narrative of national kinship. Dictators, fearing unrest from members of other tribes, promote people of their own tribe to positions of power and punish others through intimidation, ‘disappearances’ or openly extrajudicial executions. In doing so, they foster the very resentment and ‘disloyalty’ that they had pre-emptively feared. For example, in The Laughing Cry, Lopès’s dictator promotes unqualified people from the Djabotama tribe to positions of power, overlooking people from other tribes in the process. At a ceremony:

one of the traditional priests announced that all disquiet should be chased from our hearts; that the Nation was saved, because the sun of the shadows, which that night diffused its pale yellow light, had transmitted to us the message of the ancestors: they had chosen Bwakamabé Na Sakkadé to lead all the Djabotama and impose their will upon all the other tribes of the new country, as defined by the Uncles [white people]. (30)

Tribalism is significant in dictator fiction because as head of the nation, the dictator decides who may eat at the national table. ‘The process by which a national identity is consolidated and maintained,’ Mary Poovey advises, ‘is […] one of differentiation and displacement—the differentiation of the national us from the aliens within and without, and the displacement of other interests from consciousness’ (55–56). Even when reproduced to humorous effect, writers ensure we are aware of the acute horrors that tribalism can produce in the contemporary African state, to which even a cursory glance at twentieth century African histories (the Rwandan Genocide; the persecution of Acholi and Langi after Uganda’s Milton Obote was deposed; the Zimbabwean Gukurahundi; and the trauma of secessionist Biafra come readily to mind) will attest.

In addition to presiding over his citizens-as-children, the dictator’s position as father also delineates a clear authority over women, primarily imagined as a sexual authority. The dictator body is presented as being especially virile, providing the foundation for his claim to authority as a male ruler. In dictator fiction he exhibits his virility by sleeping with many women, in a parody of the European king’s jus primae noctis (‘the right of the first night’, or droit du seigneur, ‘the right of the lord’) over the

59 female citizens (who are more often imagined as ‘the wives and daughters of citizens’) of the country:

Since when could a male, let alone a Ruler, be denied the right to feel his way around women’s thighs, whether other men’s wives or schoolgirls? What figure of a Ruler would he cut were he to renounce his right to husband all women in the land in the manner of the lords of Old Europe, whose droits de seigneur gave them the right to every bride-to-be? (Ngũgĩ 6)

In African dictator fiction, many of these women are portrayed as being inappropriately young: in Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, the president ‘recruits his lovers from among the young girls who welcome him, who sing and dance his praises, his life. They are everywhere he goes, everywhere he stays’ (Kourouma 349), while in Wizard of the Crow, the Ruler angrily responds to his wife’s censure for his sexual predation of ‘schoolgirls’ which allowed him to ‘[renew] his youth with spring chicken’ (6). The Ruler indulges in his ‘appetite’ for ‘spring chicken’ not only out of enjoyment but also, ostensibly, to exert the appearance of power—and by maintaining its image, to retain power itself. His ability to bed whomever he chooses manifests as absolute power over the populace, a power mediated through the female body: a female body that is described in terms of something to be devoured, as in the Ruler’s ‘spring chicken’ above, or Koyaga’s women upon whom he ‘feasts’ (Kourouma 350). Mbembe explains that:

To exercise authority is, […] for the male ruler, to demonstrate publicly a certain delight in eating and drinking well, and, […] in Labou Tansi’s words, to pass most of his time in ‘pumping grease and rust into the backsides of young girls.’ The male ruler’s pride in possessing an active penis has to be dramatized, through sexual rights over subordinates, the keeping of concubines, and so on. (Mbembe 110)

African writers have seized on the image of the virile ‘father of the nation’ as begetter of many children, humorously exaggerating his prowess and its effects. The national father has been parodied as being literally the father of the nation, translated into his fathering an army of children. ‘I know you take the title Father of the Nation seriously’ (6), Rachael, the Ruler’s wife, tells him in Wizard of the Crow. (She goes on to say that 60 she takes no exception to his siring children with multitudes of women, only when he chooses schoolgirls ‘as young as the children you have fathered’ [6].) The fictional dictator’s sexual potency is such that he is not only figuratively the father of the nation but he is also the biological father of a significant portion of his citizenry as he single- handedly fertilises the country with his offspring.

In Kourouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, Koyaga ‘consorts with many women, consumes them in great numbers’ (349) and always ‘endeavours to bestow children on his partners. The huntsman, the veteran infantryman, believes that the purpose, the chief purpose of women is reproduction. He considers himself defiled, reproaches himself publicly, if he sleeps with a woman for several weeks without succeeding in impregnating her’ (349). Koyaga has so many children (sixty-six in total) that he establishes the School for Presidential Children to cope with the capacity. In a parade held in his honour, his children lead the phalanx in a ‘parody’ of power, his twelve-year-old son leading in a tiny copy of his own uniform pinned with ‘chocolate medals’. ‘The miniature,’ Stewart explains, ‘linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination’ (69). The parody of Koyaga is permitted, even encouraged benevolently, because they are his own ‘blood children’ creating a stage set in miniature (contrasting the vastness of the dictator’s mythic life), thoroughly ‘manipulable’ and therefore harmless.

Sony Labou Tansi takes up the theme even more extravagantly in Life and a Half, where the Providential Guide of Kawangotara, Jean-Heart-of-Stone, instigates the annual ‘Virgin Week’ in the first year of his four-decade reign:

Fifty virgins were ushered in, chosen from among the most beautiful in the country, freshly bathed, assembled, perfumed—they all had complexions the colour of white-hot metal, flat stomachs, nicely balanced hips, lush bodies and gestures, wild from their hair right down to the tips of their toes. Every one of them had the type of body that lingers in the memories of men. The scene was broadcast on radio and television, despite the intervention of the Pope, the United Nations, and a good number of Kawangotara’s allied countries. […] The virgins were undressed and laid on numbered beds that corresponded with the number

written on their stomachs, just above the navel. The Guide sported number 1. The virgins were numbered from 2 to 51. Jean-Heart-of-Stone drank a sap his father had recommended and began his retreat. He finished his first round of beds in three hours, twenty-six minutes, and twelve seconds. And the broadcast, ‘The Guide and Production’, lasted for the same amount of time throughout the reign of Jean-Heart-of-Stone. Thirteen months and seven days after the first broadcast of ‘The Guide and Production’, the fifty virgins gave birth to fifty boys, each of whom weighed four kilos, one hundred grams on the scale at Saint-Jean-Heart- of-Stone Maternity Ward, which was built expressly for them. (102–103)

The Providential Guide annually has sex with fifty virgins in his palace, all of them without fail producing boys, mysteriously born at the same time (after an extraordinary gestation period of ‘[t]hirteen months and seven days’) and at the same weight. His prowess is legendary, and so important is the performance to the undergirding of his power that he broadcasts his sexual marathon live to the nation ‘despite the intervention of the Pope, the United Nations, and a good number of Kawangotara’s allied countries’. The nation must see the evidence of his male vigour, in Sony Labou Tansi’s distinctly amoral universe, in order to be impressed by his political power, written into the bodies of the fifty women he beds and the new citizens these unions yield. His body is so potent that he produces fifty sons with fifty virgins each year like clockwork. The absurd spectacle is continued years later when each batch of children comes to name themselves:

National radio announced the names of the first fifty issuances-from-the- loin-of-the-Guide. There were Jean Cold-Blooded, Jean Calcareous, Jean Crocodile, Jean Carbon, Jean Connect-Head, Jean Cobra, Jean Corollary, Jean Cricket, Jean Carnivore, Jean Convex, Jean Concave, Jean Courrier, Jean Chloride, Jean Case, Jean Carton, Jean Cash, Jean Clarinet, Jean Combat, Jean Catafalque, Jean Chronic, Jean Crow, Jean Cattail, Jean Cold-Heart, Jean Copper, Jean Cashew, Jean Cardinal, Jean Crab, Jean Cataract, Jean Corsage, Jean Crushed-Stone, Jean Cave, Jean Cabin, Jean Capriole, Jean Codpiece, Jean Coffee-pot, Jean Contiguous, Jean Cannon, Jean Condom, Jean Carburetor, Jean Cleaver, Jean Classic, Jean Cuban, Jean Cane-Sugar … (103). 62

The surprisingly tender list of names that nine-year-olds have selected for themselves juxtaposes humorously with the obsession with and reiteration of improbable numbers and facts around their birth.

Sony Labou Tansi’s vision of dictatorship is one where everything is taken to excess. Jean Heart-of-Stone legitimises his position by becoming not only the metaphoric father of the nation but also the literal father of many citizens. However, the ‘two thousand little Jeans’ (103) that ‘the sex king’ (105) produces, fifty at a time across his forty-year reign, come to cause political problems when they separate into rival factions and vie for power. One such brother, Jean-the-Heartless:

developed a plan to eliminate [his brothers] one by one. He installed a bizarre cistern in his own bedroom where he had his brothers’ mistresses get ready. A mistress eliminated his prey and then Jean-the-Heartless came looking for the body to throw in the cistern full of acid. One thousand three hundred and sixty-six bodies were dissolved. (108)

It is said that ‘Jean-Heart-of-Stone shed bitter tears for his children’ (109) after their deaths. ‘At last, he’s learned how a cadaver weighs’ (109), his citizens ‘buzz’ to each other. He has populated so much of the country with his own blood children that at last, as president over his citizens, he feels the true responsibility of a father for his children (to which he has long pretended).

The dictator’s hyperbolic virility is parodied in his ability to produce scores, or in the case of Jean-Heart-of-Stone, thousands of heirs, rendering himself literally the father of the nation. His sexuality is the stuff of legend. And yet, there is a tension undergirding this massive fertility: writers often represent these fictional dictators as vacillating between virility and impotence. Jean-Heart-of-Stone himself relies on ‘a sap his father had recommended’ (102) before his annual bedding of the fifty virgins, while the Ruler in Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow and Butcher Boy (clearly referencing Sani Abacha) in King-Aribisala’s The Hangman’s Game both rely on Viagra in order to perform. If his function is to rule over the citizenry as ‘father of the nation’, enhanced through his personal production of citizens over whom to rule, he is at times unable to perform that function owing to a fundamental instability in his body. It is the tension between the two, with one foot in each category—of potency and impotence—that renders him grotesque: like Bakhtin’s ‘pregnant hags’, he is both fertile and infertile, 63 producing offspring at an alarming rate and yet rotten at the core, relying on a medicinal crutch in order to enable his excessive self-reproduction. The hyper-masculine figure who sleeps with countless women is a darkly comic fixture of African dictator fiction. ‘Most important,’ Ngũgĩ’s narrator observes, ‘all Aburĩrians should remember at all times that the Ruler was husband number one, and so he was duty bound to set an example by doing in the country what individual men were to do in their households’ (Wizard 622). The dictator projects his self-image as the sometimes stern, sometimes benevolent father of the nation; writers have infected this image with the subversive narrative of the dictator who produces so many offspring that he becomes literally the father of the nation—albeit one whose sexual performance, and therefore whose grasp on power, is unstable.

Mythification: The dictator’s extraordinary body

Your name: Koyaga! Your totem: the falcon! Soldier and president are you. You will be the President of the République du Golfe and its greatest general for as long as Allah (may he yet preserve us for years and years to come) does not take from you the breath that gives you life. You are a hunter. With Rameses II and Sundyata, you are forever one of the three great hunters among men. Remember the name of Koyaga, hunter and President-dictator of the République du Golfe.

(Kourouma 1)

In the national father’s own narrative, of course, a divine force inheres in his rule. The dictator is mythologized in the narrative of the totalitarian state. In African dictator fiction, his mythic prowess is anchored in his body: his sexual virility, his dangerous energy, and his ability to perform feats of strength and cunning. In satirical fiction, it is not enough for him to do great things: he must do extraordinary things. For example, in Kourouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, we learn that though:

The gestation period for a child is nine months; Koyaga’s mother carried her child for twelve full months. A woman suffers the pains of labour for two days at most; Koyaga’s mother suffered in labour for a full week. Human children are not born with the strength of a panther cub; Nadjouma’s child was born as heavy as a lion cub. (16)

Koyaga’s body is extraordinary even in its inception, carried by his mother for a year and emerging already with the ‘strength of a panther cub’. Koyaga has followed through from this illustrious beginning in a life of great feats of hunting and combat. Like a number of dictators in the genre,44 he distinguished himself in the colonial army in Vietnam with his extraordinary body. When under a raid by enemy forces:

Koyaga, using all the magic taught him by his mother, transformed himself into a powerful night owl. On his left wing, he carried the prostitutes; on his right wing, fifty mountain infantrymen and their weaponry. The Viets saw nothing but smoke. Near Hanoi airport, he unloaded his passengers […] (38)

His exploits are recounted in blow-by-blow accounts of thrilling fights with ancient animals that have been terrorizing the local countryside, including a panther, a buffalo, an elephant and a sacred caiman. Each time he performs his bodily magic to win, using his ability to transform himself into liquid, a piece of thread, a crab and an earthworm (73–77). Kourouma here provides an interesting mix of precolonial and contemporary satirical approaches to extraordinary behaviour. Koyaga’s exploits are also similar to the tall tale format, significant because its format is that of the exaggerated lie.

Similarly, in Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars, Kojo Laing’s Major (a warlord in epic battle against his opponent for the city) was:

born in bits when the whole of the country existed: head on Monday, torso on Thursday, and the popylonkwe on Friday. He could thus be named after his own genitals. […] As soon as Major Gentl was fully born, he gave an enormous salute which nobody could return. The salute broke a branch. (3–4)

44 This is particularly true of francophone African dictator novels. 65

The future military significance of Gentl, who was ‘only ten when he was made a corporal’ (4), is foretold in his extraordinary birth, mythologised and celebrated in his unusual body that was born in pieces. The branch-breaking ‘enormous salute which nobody could return’, coming after descriptions of the Major’s genitals, suggests an unholy erection and the foundation of his power as phallic. The whole novel, set in the year 2020, is a riotous satire about power’s investment in the body.45

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o also uses exaggeration in his satirical dictator novel Wizard of the Crow, in which the Ruler is so extraordinary that he is, in his official narrative, ostensibly immortal: ‘Aburĩria had never had and could never have another ruler’ (6). Unlike Koyaga, who places his beginning in history with as the extraordinary birth of the god-king or foretold savior, the Ruler insists upon a more complete deification by insisting that: ‘His rule had no beginning and no end’ (5), fully conflating himself with the mythic national space. This conflation extends also to the land itself. When the ruler is upset:

he would sob tearlessly, with even greater frustration and bitterness, his shoulders heaving and his body shaking, as did not only the building but the entire country, some people mistaking this effect for an earthquake or volcanic eruption somewhere. (518)

In this narrative, the eruptions of his body are mirrored in the eruptions of the country itself: there exists a physical link between the terrain of his body and that of the country.

In these fictions, the dictator’s myth originates in his body, his own origin mythic or otherwise extraordinary, establishing him as a chosen one. However, as we will see, the excessive nature of his body and the myths it generates become open for appropriation, and writers deliberately overstate and exaggerate these claims in order to leave room for disbelief.

45 The enemy of Laing’s Major Gentl, equal contender for the city of Achimota, is Torro the Terrible. Torro also has an extraordinary body, for after a confrontation with the Major, ‘Torro’s … head … fell … off’ (91). He is brought back to life but his neck has turned ‘septic’, covered by a white flag for surrender (142). It is said that ‘[s]mall moths came out of his anus when he was angry, and always went down the right leg of his shorts’ (34), a problem that he later addresses with ‘motorised buttocks from an instant machine installed in his anus’ (151) that he uses to speed along the ocean like a speedboat towards Major Gentl with a flag fluttering from his erect penis like a ‘pink personal torpedo’ (151). Laing uses the humorous potential of the body to bring absurdist humour to his novel, a humour that undercuts the enemies’ pretensions to grandeur even as it sets them apart.

Much African dictator fiction draws on elements of the absurd. The absurd holds a sinister significance in dictator novels. Not only does its inclusion level an accusation against the totalitarian narrative by ridiculing the leader and the state, but it also showcases the profound sense of illogic of life under dictatorship. The state becomes a ghastly dreamscape where citizens—ministers, nurses, shopkeepers, farmers, school teachers—must try to fly through life under the radar, doing their best to live with the murders, the disappearances and torture, the strange new powers for the army and military police, the beatings with impunity, the obvious lies, the bans on travel, the shortages, the crippling inflation: where everything is taken to excess and nothing seems real. The absurd events in these novels gesture to a place where logic cannot aid us in predicting or even understanding events—where the dictator, in Kyemba’s repeated words about Idi Amin, is ‘the master of the unpredictable’. The graphic and the bizarre merge in the satirical absurd to form a narrative where it is possible to laugh in horror at the astonishing violence authorised by the dictator. The politics of laughter is important to such texts, not only giving strength to those laughing but destabilising the object of the joke.

This has spurred some writers of the genre to turn to the satirical tall tale or magical realist mode. These modes lend themselves to writers who seek to satirise the propaganda of the one-party state, showing the ‘Providential Guide’ (Sony Labou Tansi) or ‘Supreme Leader’ (Kourouma) in a more humorous spotlight. They also draw on local precolonial tale formats that deal with magic, which can appear stylistically similar to the postmodern satirical style. Brenda Cooper explains that in magical realism an ‘ironic distance’ exists between the writer and what is being narrated:

There is tension between the skepticism of Western educated writers who assume an ironic distance from the lack of a ‘scientific’ understanding on the part of the ‘uneducated’ and their simultaneous celebration of the so-called authenticity of superstition, a celebration that is vulnerable to degeneration into the exotic. (Cooper 34).46

Writers like Kojo Laing in Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars and the works of Alain Mabanckou arguably fit into the tall tale category, whereas the work of Sony Labou

46 She contends, for example, that the precolonial story format used by Amos Tutuola in The Palm-wine Drinkard (1952) is not magical realist, though often mistakenly categorised so, because there is no ironic distance between the writer and the content of the story. 67

Tansi and Ngũgĩ arguably appear on the magical realism spectrum: this is because the ‘ironic distance’ provides a productive tension, as the distancing effect requires us to misbelieve the narrative of the dictator. This will be explored further. However, it is also important to note that a number of African writers, such as Ben Okri and Ngũgĩ himself, have rejected the label of ‘magical realism’, which Cooper suggests may be because the term ‘implies the slavish imitation of Latin America. It suggests a denial, in other words, of local knowledge and beliefs, language and rhetoric; it seems to perpetuate imperialist notions that nothing new, intellectually or spiritually, originated in Africa’ (Cooper 37). The choice of style and genre is imbricated in the deep politics of violence’s representation in literature. Baker observes, for example, that in extreme circumstances the ‘paradox between creative representation and the brutal reality of events […] raises questions about the relationship between poetics and politics’, rendering ‘the representation of violence, or rather violence in representation’ as ‘an act of political engagement’, for ‘[w]hile the fictional texts of these writers carry messages about the nature of tyranny and its consequences, they are also rooted in the reality they represent’ (‘Necropolitical Violence’ 322).

Demythification of the ruler’s body

If the official narrative casts the dictator’s body as mythic, counter narratives seek to displace it from its pedestal. The dictator’s body is the embodiment of political power, virility and energy: self-consciously mythologised, it is broadcast as the symbol of his government. Since this is the case, it is his body that must be attacked by writers, in order to unsettle the dominant narrative. Marjorie Agosin has described the importance, in a Latin American literary context, of the ‘demythification of the dictator’ (329). This ‘demythification’ is also, I argue, central to the tradition of African dictator fiction, deployed largely through gross and humorous depictions of his body that run counter to the official narrative of competence and prowess. If the narrative of his power is to be unsettled, this must occur through his body.

A chief element in the work of demythification is in making him grotesque. The dictator represents the id in that he is unrestrained and subject only to his basest urges; like a dangerous child, he succumbs to all his own wishes. ‘In the grotesque world,’ Bakhtin explains, ‘the id is uncrowned and transformed into a “funny monster”’ (Bakhtin 49), and it is this uncrowning of the dictator to which satirical writers aspire. Writers harness the regenerative power of the grotesque, which makes his body the citizens’ property. It is significant that:

the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The […] emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. (Bakhtin 26)

The grotesque body is one in the process of becoming: it is excess, transgression, the defiance of bodily limits in eating, copulation, defecation. The body is characterised by a ‘regenerating ambivalence’ (Bakhtin 21) and ‘is blended with the world, with animals, with objects’ (Bakhtin 26–27). Perhaps most significantly for political writers, the grotesque is always accompanied by (an at times ambivalent or amoral) humour, in which fear and ‘cosmic terror’ (Bakhtin 340) are ‘defeated by laughter’ (Bakhtin 47). Laughter is inherently destabilizing, and writers of satire have for thousands of years used laughter to pull officials ‘down to earth’. In African dictator fiction there is a clear association between the trope of the ‘African Big Man’ and the grotesque body with its belly and lustful copulation. Writers set about rendering this body grotesque: this is often achieved through burlesque humour about the overweight dictator who is voracious at table and in the bedroom. ‘Exaggeration, hyperbolism, excessiveness are generally considered fundamental attributes of the grotesque style,’ Bakhtin observes (303). A number of writers have elected to take the dictator at his word when he declares that he is the nation, translating the geography of the country into the vast terrain of his grotesque body.

Eating

The people themselves, as we have seen, had become even more cynical than their leaders and were apathetic into the bargain. ‘Let them eat,’ was the people’s opinion, ‘after all when white men used to do all the eating did we commit suicide?’ Of course not. And where is the all-powerful white man today? He came, he ate and he went. But we are still around. The important thing then is to stay alive […] Besides, if you survive, who knows? it may be your turn to eat tomorrow.

(Achebe A Man of the People 161–62)

One of the most prevalent and successful demythifying images of the ruler is that of his eating. The consuming dictator is charged with a readily interpreted metaphor: the dictator eats while his people starve; he is corrupt, he accepts bribes, he has appropriated public goods to bolster his own private wealth. Jean-François Bayart has observed that ‘the politics of the belly’ is a well-known phrase in Cameroon where eating and consuming is understood as political currency, one that is particularly in the hands of politicians. Achebe deploys this understanding in A Man of the People (1966). The narrator Odili, on considering making a statement at a rally, imagines people saying of him:

What a fool! Whose son is he? Was he not here when white men were eating; what did he do about it? Where was he when Chief Nanga fought and drove the white men away? Why is he envious now that the warrior is eating the reward of his courage? If he was Chief Nanga, would he not do much worse? (Achebe A Man of the People 155–156)

In the above passage, eating is understood as corruption and the private accumulation of public wealth, but one that can be endured. It is also in the chief’s case, somewhat complicatedly, seen as a rightful reward for past valour: the white people were ‘eating’ the country; Chief Nanga, having driven them away, is now ‘eating the reward of his courage’. Bayart’s ‘politics of the belly’ translates ‘eating’ as the privilege of those at the top of a pyramid economy. The importance of eating marks the primary significance 70 in grotesque imagery of the mouth, which: ‘dominates all else. The grotesque face is actually reduced to the gaping mouth; the other features are only a frame encasing this wide-open bodily abyss’ (Bakhtin 317). The eating dictator forms a particularly grotesque image: not only because, in Bakhtin’s language, it focuses on the mouth and the transfer of food into waste, but because he is displayed as feasting on the carcass of the nation.

In Wizard of the Crow, the greed of two characters, Tajirika and Vinjinia, results in their being transformed into ‘ogres’ of consumption. Ogres, in many cultures, are associated with excess and an uncontrollable appetite; as Gorfain and Glazier explain in their study of Mbeere mythology in Kenya: ‘ogre tales center on anomalous figures whose traits make them key symbols of disorder. Capable of assuming a variety of forms—human, animal, and plant—the ogre uses his protean energy to deceive human characters, whom he wishes to devour’ (931). While in public office, Tajirika’s lust for money has led to his corrupt acceptance of bribes as chair of a new national development project. He and his wife have commoditised their bodies, having undergone extensive elective cosmetic surgeries in Western countries. They now bear two mouths—one in the usual place, and one at the back of the head47 that they are forced to cover at all times with garments that are, ironically, ‘a special gift from the Global Bank […] a fashion in the West’ (Wizard 736). Their physical deformity and ogre-ish desire to ‘devour’ the country for private gain outlines a deeper otherness that marks their increasing alienation from their culture. ‘As an absolute anomaly,’ Gorfain and Glazier note, ‘the ogre poses a threat to his human antagonists not only on the physical level as a cannibal, but also on social and cognitive levels’ (932). The two have been rendered into consuming monsters through their insatiable greed. Tajirika is to become the new Ruler of Aburĩria by the conclusion of the novel, and Tajirika and Vinjinia’s corrupting influence, eating from both sides of their heads, threatens to spread throughout the populace.

The grotesque image of the eating dictator is taken to its extreme in Sony Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half, where the ‘carnivore’ despot’s excessive consumption is overtly linked with acts of brutality against his citizens. The novel opens with the

47 This is also a feature of the Devil in Ngũgĩ’s 1980 novel Caitaani mũtharaba-Inĩ (Devil on the Cross, English translation released 1982). 71

Providential Guide enjoying a sumptuous dinner prepared for him in his palace. A lieutenant enters leading a group of ‘rag-humans’:

‘Here is the man,’ said the lieutenant who led them all the way to the Providential Guide’s Green Room. He saluted and turned to take his leave. The Providential Guide ordered him to wait a moment. The soldier stood stock-still like a rod of khaki-colored meat. The Green Room was nothing but some sort of enclosure within the spacious dining room. As he approached the nine rag-humans the lieutenant had shoved along, while proclaiming his rancorous ‘Here is the man,’ the Providential Guide smiled innocuously and then plunged his table knife into him, the one he used to hack off a big piece of meat bought at the Four Seasons, the largest store in the capital, reserved for members of the government. The rag-father raised his eyebrows as the iron blade slowly disappeared in his throat. The Providential Guide withdrew the knife and turned back to his Four Seasons meat, which he cut and ate with the same bloody knife. The rag-father’s blood silently poured from his throat. (5)

Sony Labou Tansi buries the act of violence mid-sentence, going on to relate the provenance of the ingredients at the exclusive store for government officials, and announcing the execution in such unassuming language that it impels the reader to do a double take: we are forced to reread the paragraph in order to confirm what was actually seen. There is an incongruity between the shocking and the banal as the Guide ‘plunge[s] his table knife’ into a man’s neck. This extreme violence against the citizen body is exercised without shame, and is even rendered ordinary by the low-key narration and asides closing over it. The violence is normalised because it is not elaborated upon. The effect is heightened by the repetition of ‘Here is the man’, which creates a brief temporal confusion caused by overlap: the repetition transfers the past tense of ‘the lieutenant who led them’ to the pluperfect of ‘the lieutenant had shoved along’. Sony Labou Tansi purposely confuses the chronology by a few beats. The return to the past of but a few seconds prior destabilises the reader for a crucial couple of sentences, so that the plunging of the knife into the man’s throat is less assimilable into a pattern of events. Even the nondescript ‘him’ pronoun is deliberately vague, and it is unclear who has been stabbed until we read ‘the rag-father’ in the next sentence. The ‘rag-father’ is in fact the country’s leader of the opposition, Martial. 72

The paragraph also introduces a grotesque discrepancy in the Providential Guide’s relationship with food. His meal, which ‘usually lasted four hours’ (6), is piled with delicacies from the imported foods store: however, he does not clean his blade after stabbing Martial in the neck, and proceeds to eat with ‘the same bloody knife’, carelessly mixing the blood of his victim with his food. His dinner will be flavoured with his enemy’s blood: to him, the citizen body enjoys no more rights before its sovereign than an animal before the butcher. The totalitarian leader enjoys total control over the citizen body, and the shed blood of his opposition sustains him: he literally consumes it at his table, surrounded by the grand trappings of his hedonistic lifestyle.

This grotesquery is taken a step further with the gruesome punishment that he ‘cooks up’ after murdering Martial. He orders that the hacked up meat and intestines that is all that is left of the opposition leader, resembling a ‘termite nest’ (9) on the floor, be taken to the palace kitchens to be made into a pâté and a stew. When Martial’s family are brought back the next day it is to discover that:

Eight silver place settings and one gold were set out. Chaïdana and the Providential Guide, her mother and three brothers were seated facing each other. The pâté dish was placed amid the champagne bottles next to a fragrant, well-seasoned stew. In front of the gold place setting, smoke rose from the eternal meat sold at the Four Seasons, surrounded by four vessels of Providencia champagne, the only brand that passed the lips of the Providencial Guide, and which bore the message ‘Bottled by His Excellency Matéla-Pené Loanga.’ (9–10)

The Providential Guide orders them to eat the dishes of their cooked father by the end of the day, while he himself eats his usual delicacies, ‘the eternal meat sold at the Four Seasons’ and his privately bottled champagne, from the gold place setting. ‘Chaïdana recalled how they began with the pâté because it was easier to swallow than the stew, which was full of hair and morsels that defied both tooth and tongue with an offensive resistance’ (10). The ‘rag-family’ are forced to gag down the pâté and revolting stew that had been their husband and father. Sony Labou Tansi brings together the looser associations of ‘eating’, corruption, ‘the politics of the belly’ and violence by literalising them explicitly in the grotesque consuming dictator at table, where his raw power over life and death is realised: the body of his political opponent is literally

73 served up at his table. A chain of heady violence ensues. When the eldest child refuses to eat the cooked carcass of his father:

As if it were nothing out of the ordinary, the Providential Guide dug his table knife into Jules’s throat. Jules’s cadaver emptied itself of blood while they continued to eat. Chaïdana remembered that next her bare feet got wet in blood—she remembered the warmth. That evening, they finished eating the pâté and the stew. The Providential Guide congratulated them heartily before announcing that there was still some leftover pâté of the other one, and when they finished that, he would set them free. The next day, at noon, it was the rag-mother, Nelanda, Nala, Zarta, Assam, and Ystéria who refused to eat. The Providential Guide plunged his table knife in six times. Chaïdana and Tristansia ate the stew for seven days. (10–11)

Sony Labou Tansi’s brisk narration highlights the horror of violence: the comedy and over-the-top, exaggerated aesthetic does nothing to assuage the confronting image of the dictator at table, and his total power over the family of Chaïdana, where resistance is punished with death. However, she and Tristansia gained an unforeseen revenge:

On the evening of the seventh consecutive day of eating meat, they filled the room with a China black ink carpet of vomit, which the Providential Guide slipped and fell in. He stained the left side of his face with an indelible mark, similar to the one on his hands, a mark that he would carry until the day of the state funeral provided for by the constitution, a stain that people had good reason to call ‘Martial black’. (11)

The stain on ‘the left side of his face’ in a colour known as ‘Martial black’ (which will spill throughout the novel) marks the dictator for his crime. Despite having murdered his opposition leader, continuing to eat without wiping the bloodied knife, and having the remains turned into a reeking stew that he forces the man’s own family to eat, the Guide’s victory is bittersweet because the daughters’ bodies reject and regurgitate what he was trying to feed them. If citizen oppression is experienced in the body, so too, in this case, is resistance.

It is this persistent necropolitics (Mbembe), this death-in-life and life-in-death that renders the Providential Guide so grotesque.48 The novel represents an ‘alternative’:

age and space of raw life. […] First, it is a place and a time of half- death—or, if one prefers, half-life. It is a place where life and death are so entangled that it is no longer possible to distinguish them, or to say what is on the side of the shadow or its obverse: ‘Is that man still alive, or dead?’ (Mbembe On the Postcolony 197).

In the ambivalent image of the eating dictator, ‘we find both poles of transformation, the old and the new, the dying and the procreating, the beginning and the end of the metamorphosis’ (Bakhtin 24). Even in representations of sickening violence, the grotesque mode injects a dark humour, a humour that is both revolutionary and critical because it resists the official narrative.

Infection

You are intimate with her, feast on her as you might feast upon game killed that very day. She then becomes one of the President’s women. Even such unbridled debauchery is not exempt from lofty political concerns. You believe that to govern the republic well, you must ally yourself with every tribe in the country. You assign yourself at least one woman from each of the forty-three ethnic groups in the republic.

(Kourouma 350)

Just as the dictator is made grotesque through scenes depicting his excessive consumption, so too is his body unsettled through sex. The dictator’s enormous appetite for sex, as we have seen, results within the fiction in a humorously profligate quantity of

48 This is also the case in Martial’s black and blistered torso reappearing on the clean sheets whenever the Guide wants to have sex. 75 children.49 However, some writers also choose to focus on the risk entailed in the dictator’s extraordinary sex life. One such risk is infection. In Lopès’s The Laughing Cry the President contracts what is clearly a sexually transmitted disease, with syphilitic pustules bursting across his face. Interestingly, the unwelcome spots he finds ‘puckering’ (255) across him intrude upon the narration just as expectedly: ‘Those spots on his brow were intriguing me’ (221), the protagonist admits, out of nowhere, becoming distracted from listening to Daddy by the unsightly spots on his face. In an interview with a French journalist, Daddy had recently explained that:

he kept a select group of women in guarded residences around the town. Yes, yes, the stories peddled by radio grapevine were true enough. These petites mamams were for his private life. Nothing to be ashamed of. Even that Louis XIV of theirs, the queen wasn’t enough for him either. All those kings needed private lives. Mesdames de Maintenon, madams of the moment, what. And Daddy, warming to his theme, described his frolics and his exploits with a wealth of often spicy detail. Daddy, I assure you, was a blade in amorous performances, definitely a cut above the average. (236)

Daddy reveals officially what had already been common knowledge: that he has been sleeping with a large number of women, confident in his ability to control them and their environment in his ‘guarded residences’. However, his contraction of a venereal disease shows that his control over their bodies is not complete.

Moreover, his body has become diseased at exactly the same time that he has uprooted dissidence among his party faithful. This is significant, because it dovetails with his belief that his body is the inviolable vessel of his political power. When he discovers the spots, therefore, he does not look to sickness, but instead to his political enemies, suspecting them of having cursed him. After questioning them: ‘He pulled a mirror from his pocket. The spots were still sprouting all over his face’ (254). To Daddy, his body represents his power over the populace: his body is the country. It has ceased being just a body to him, subject to bodily ills, and is instead a symbol for the

49 This too constitutes the performance of his power: in Koyaga’s case, he ‘allies’ himself with ‘every tribe in the country’ by sleeping with women from each tribe. (This speaks also to the placement of women as cultural carriers and metonymy for land, which will be explored in Chapter Three.) However, the act of the ‘little death’ itself also exposes his body to ridicule and emphasises its mortality. 76 nation. If his body is out of control, this indicates to him that there is subversion in the ranks of his government.

In retaliation, Daddy has his suspected enemy, Captain Yabaka, captured and beaten. Yabaka is the only one who has publicly disagreed with Daddy over his policies. Daddy stands over him and exclaims:

‘Power! That’s what you want. Say it!’ A twitch. ‘As if you were capable of governing.’ He began shouting again. ‘Since when has a Djatékoué been fit to command? Eh? Savage! Son of a slave! It’s my Palace that you want, eh? To make you proud. To sleep in my bed. Kiss my wife.’ Suddenly foaming like an epileptic, Bwakamabé began giving a flurry of blows with his lion’s tail and unleashed a battery of kicks. ‘That’s why you gave me these spots.’ He pointed at his face. ‘Never!’ He raved like an angry dog. ‘You’ll never have her, never … you hear me? No one, no one will ever climb on top of …’ he seemed to be weeping, ‘… of Ma Mireille. Not even when I’m dead.’ (245)

Daddy reveals with this speech that he has only suspected a coup because of the appearance of the spots on his face. After leaving orders for the further torture of Yabaka—‘He has to pay for his treason with his skin now, you hear?’ (246)—Daddy ‘went to examine his face in one of the Palace mirrors. The spots were still there, like little purple anthills’ (246). He believes that only by flagellating the troublesome body of the rebel into a confession can he purge his own body of an illness that is directly indicative of sickness in the body politic. He searches for national causes of the symptoms he finds in his own body because he thinks he is the nation.

The Captain is accused of having:

gone to a fetish priest, to whom he had given wads of dollars—sorry, roubles!—even though it was the unusual aspect of the notes which had attracted attention. He had brought to him, by way of moonlight sacrifice in a cemetery, a white lamb less than seven months old. Plus a photo of Daddy. There, at least, they had proof. And they showed a picture of the Chief pierced by a hundred needlepoints. And those incurable pustules

had immediately popped out on his face. Exactly in the position of the holes in the photo … Could there be any better proof? (247)

The Captain is forced while delirious after relentless interrogation to sign a confession supplied by his torturers, a confession that, along with the photograph of Daddy pierced with needle marks,50 is enough to sentence him to death.

Unable to comprehend a sign of weakness in his body as a consequence of his own actions, Daddy is bullishly spurred into a rampage, accusing former allies of coup making and bewitching his body. He proceeds with a bout of depraved violence. Henri Lopès links rumours with the body and the narrative in The Laughing Cry, with Daddy Bwakamabé reading the sign of a coup in his syphilitic spots, the disease in his body read metonymically as a disease in the body politic. Daddy reads his own body as the state, where a healthy body signifies a healthy nation, but the pustules that spread across it as literally the manifestation of a coup. The narrator is at pains to position the official narrative as emanating from the dictator’s body, declaiming angrily the way ‘we, who lived on our knees at home, swallowing all the shit from Daddy’s backside without a single cry or protest’ (214). This view of the dictator’s rebellious body as representing an out-of-control populace, thanks to the association of the body with the body politic, is also deployed in other eruptions of the body—such as expansion.

Expansion

The grotesque body of the dictator, commonly highlighted through its exertions at the table and in the boudoir, also calls attention to itself through its sheer proportions. It is familiar to see evocations of the African ‘Big Man’ as physically large and overbearing—at times comically so. This is taken to its pinnacle in Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow. The Ruler of Aburĩria has consistently claimed that: ‘I am the Country’ (Ngũgĩ 513). However, as with General ‘Daddy’ Bwakamabé, the body of the Ruler comes to rebel against him. While on an official visit to New York, and in response to a

50 Needle marks that could, of course, have been placed just so in the work of observation after their appearance on Daddy’s face, rather than marking out the design before the fact. 78 traumatic blow—the Global Bank’s denial of funding for his pet development project— the Ruler’s body starts to change alarmingly. It begins ‘puffing up like a balloon, his whole body becoming more and more inflated, without losing the proportion of parts’ (469). His body was ‘visibly expanding before [the doctors’] very eyes’ (470). The Ruler swells ‘like a balloon’ to an enormous size, transformed into a ‘human monstrosity’ (532) (although the seriousness of his condition is undercut by Tajirika’s assessment that on his recent trip the Ruler ‘must have eaten a lot of steak in America’ [523]).

In addition to his ‘hypertrophy’, swelling almost to ‘the verge of bursting’, the Ruler ‘had also lost the power to speak’ (470). His condition is labelled by doctors as ‘self-induced expansion’ or ‘SIE’. When Western-trained doctors prove incapable of arresting the process, the Wizard of the Crow is flown to New York to cure him. Upon entering the hospital ward, Kamĩtĩ ‘was struck by a stench such as he had often detected in the streets of Eldares, except that now it seemed to be oozing out of the Ruler’s body’ (489). In this condition the Ruler’s body is more closely aligned with the country than ever before, ‘oozing’ forth the reek of the city slums from his sickbed.

The Wizard’s treatment brings a temporary reprieve, but the Ruler’s condition worsens again on his own turf in Aburĩria when he reads newspaper reports that undermine his confidence. At this point his vast body inflates even further and floats up towards the ceiling. Tajirika enters the chamber to find that:

The Ruler’s legs hung in the air, his head touching the ceiling and his whole body gently swaying.

‘Don’t just stand there with your mouth open—get me down,’ the Ruler told him. (650)

The Ruler has not only totally lost control over his body—implied in the newspapers scattered around him, as in the pen of an animal—but also the use of gravity. He now bobs ‘uncontrollably’ (651) against the ceiling, and relies on Tajirika, the doctors and other staff to restrain him with straps fixed to his chair.

Despite the blow dealt by his body’s comic loss of control, the dictator mounts an attempt at what we might term ‘remythification’: of reframing the narrative into one of triumph. When a doctor enters and asks where he can find his patient, Tajirika 79 gestures at the ceiling: ‘“Can’t you see that the Ruler has conquered gravity!” Tajirika said impatiently’ (651). The narrative of the Ruler’s loss of control is altered to one of domination: despite his bobbing around helplessly, he has ‘conquered gravity’. His staff have done ‘such a good job that it now looked as if the Ruler was actually seated on a high chair of authority, his voice reaching those seated below his feet as if it were God’s voice from above’ (651). On learning ‘that his Mightiness had suffered another bout of bodily expansion and was now floating in the air’ (654), an artist and faithful public servant, Kaniũrũ, visits the Ruler. He is so struck that he later dreams of the encounter:

The image that kept on playing in his head was that of the Ruler talking in a voice that sounded as if it came from Heaven. What besmirched the image was the ceiling that looked earthly, the walls that looked even more earthly, and of course the expanded Ruler, whose body, despite the straps, kept swaying slightly from side to side like a balloon in a light breeze. The fact that the straps and the platform were visible ruined the illusion of a deity in the sky. (656)

Spurred by his vision, Kaniũrũ dedicates his skills towards a masterful reassertion of dominance using the dictator’s extraordinary body as a prop:

The ceiling, painted white, blue, and gray, gave an impression of a sky with sun, moon, and stars. The walls and the canvas covering the Ruler’s tummy and extending outward to the walls and down to the carpet were painted green, yellow, and orange, a realistic rendering of an undulating earth. A staircase spiralled from the carpet and disappeared in a mist that also enveloped the head of the seated figure. The lamps that lit the stairs and the mist generated by a hidden smoking machine had turned the Ruler into a righteous deity looking down from the sky in judgment over a sinful earth.

The Ruler was pleased with the impact of the illusion on those who came to see him. Kaniũrũ’s wiles had […] changed a thing of shame and weakness into one of power and glory. (667)

Kaniũrũ paints a stage for the Ruler’s performance of power: under his brush, the ceiling is made to resemble heaven, while the Ruler’s girth represents the land, and his

80 head is now a ‘righteous deity looking down from the sky in judgment’. The Ruler’s inability to use his limbs, floating off helplessly into the ceiling, is literally painted over to picture him as an authoritative deity. The effect is so impressive that ‘[e]ven the police who ushered the Wizard of the Crow to the Ruler’s chamber in the State House knelt down and automatically crossed themselves before retreating to the door’ (667).

Ultimately, however, the triumphalist narrative that the Ruler has ascended to the celestial sphere as a deity who has conquered gravity proves weaker than the truth: that he has lost control of his body. If he is the country, as he frequently claims, his body represents the nation, and his loss of control over his body must be read as indicative of his loss of control over the body politic. Like Lopès, Ngũgĩ co-opts the imagery of the dictator body representing the country to take the idea to its logical extension: if the body represents the people, the people’s rebellion must be mirrored in the strange eruptions of the dictator body. A counter-rumour proves stronger than the narrative he himself has broadcast, and it is this loss of control over the national narrative, the populace, and his own body that combine to unsettle the Ruler from the heights of his power.

Official narrative and counter-narrative

There were many theories about the strange illness of the second Ruler of the Free Republic of Aburĩria, but the most frequent on peoples lips were five.

(Ngũgĩ 3)

The dictator body functions as a megaphone for his own official version of events. The official narrative trumpets his virtues and achievements, lambasts his enemies (real or imagined), and ever presents him in a positive light. The official narrative is out in the open, while the counter-narrative is subterranean, seen in the ‘underground’ printing of dissident pamphlets, recording of suppressed radio programs, and the whispering of subversion. The narrative of African dictator fiction often seems to record the official

81 narrative of the dictator; however, one of the fascinating features of the genre is the many ways in which writers supply a strong counter-narrative or set of counter- narratives to the reader.

African dictator fiction in the realist mode often injects the broadcast of a counter-narrative through recording the voices and publications of its dissident characters—often journalists, ministers or pamphleteers, who attempt to publicise the atrocities committed under the dictator’s regime and call for change. For example, in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987), set in a military dictatorship in the fictional state of Kangan, the journalist Ikem Osodi writes articles critical of His Excellency (known to his old friends as Sam). Ikem makes a political blunder when his social protest goes horribly wrong: his speech to a group of students is misreported the following day as having called for ‘regicide’ (162) to cure the nation’s ills. He pays for the blunder with his life, assassinated by a regime that had prowling for a solution to the problem he posed. Ikem represented a possible counter-narrative to the official thread, and his murder effectively quelled the critical story he was trying to share.

Similarly, in his novel Sweet and Sour Milk (1979), Nuruddin Farah’s character Soyaan, a senior public servant, dies mysteriously from ‘complications’. Soyaan worked in the General’s government but was secretly critical of the dictatorship, and is rumoured to have penned memoranda criticizing the General. The memoranda have gone missing, but his twin, Loyaan discovers scraps of writing in his pockets and scattered about his room: ‘Clowns. Cowards. And (tribal) upstarts: these are who I work with. The top civil service in this country is composed of them. […] The methods of the General and of the KGB are not dissimilar, I can tell you that’ (38–39). Soyaan’s political cynicism penetrates the text in the form of fragments and remembered conversations, sharpening his twin’s response and forcing him to assess situations and relationships in a less trusting light. Soyaan’s mother finds her dead son’s recognition of the danger in one of his pockets, and passes it on to his sister Ladan, who gives it to Loyaan:

Any person who spreads or takes out of the Somali Democratic Republic printed, reading, spoken or broadcast matter, or persons in the SDR who display, distribute or disseminate information aimed at damaging the

sovereignty of the revolution of the Somali nation will be liable to death. (52, original emphasis)

The text, which seems to be an extract from a legal article, serves as a chilling indicator of Soyaan’s own fate. It is the forcible repression of dissident narratives that makes Farah’s Somalia so dangerous. Soyaan describes Somalia as a prison, with the General’s role as that of: ‘Grand Warder. The Grand Jailer of Somalia’s Grand Prison’ (53), presiding over executions in which ‘the bodies collapse like mined buildings’ (53) before being dumped in unmarked graves. The ambiguous conclusion of the novel leaves us unclear as to whether Soyaan’s missing memoranda will see the light of day, and whether the family will survive Loyaan’s own increasingly rebellious behaviour after his discovery of the government’s role in his brother’s death. Farah’s novel provides the glimpse of a counter narrative that may lack the necessary conditions that would allow it to pierce through into public consciousness. As with Ikem Osodi, the state has here exploited the vulnerability of the citizen body in quashing a narrative that would prove damaging to its own reputation.

Another highly effective method of injecting a counter-narrative into the story is through the use of rumours. This is often deployed in non-realist writing, where the narrative itself may be called under suspicion in postmodern, magical realist or tall tale texts. Ngũgĩ uses rumours to destabilise the dominant narrative in Wizard of the Crow, in which the Ruler of Aburĩria is not only losing control of his alarmingly inflated body, but is simultaneously losing control of the dominant national narrative. This narrative about his own unassailable position of power is inseparable from his absolute identification with the country. The Ruler displays a genius for public relations. Having arranged for the assassination of his predecessor, he immediately sets about destroying all memories of the previous regime and establishing a replacement narrative about himself as embodying the nation: ‘he had sat on the throne so long that even he could not remember when his reign began. His rule had no beginning and no end’ (5). He legitimates his rule further by pretending to have been the first leader following independence. In this new narrative he is divinely placed as the only possible political leader: ‘Aburĩria had never had and could never have another ruler, because had not this man’s reign begun before the world began and would end only after the world has ended?’ (6).

However, as Robert L. Colson has observed, the point at which we meet the Ruler is not at the pinnacle of his undisputed power. Wizard of the Crow opens with a series of five rumours that gesture obliquely towards a mysterious illness. Thus, our introduction to the Ruler is already mediated by an expectation of illness and weakness (Colson 134). The rumours posit that the undisclosed illness may have been ‘born of anger that once welled up inside him’ (3); or, alternatively, ‘a curse from the cry of the wronged he-goat’ (4), his great age, his obsession with his wife’s tears (10), or ‘daemons’ (10) contained in the Aburĩrian State House. As Colson has observed, these rumours destabilise the Ruler’s authority by offering multiple subversive ways of reading against the dominant narrative; their placement at the very start of the novel opens up new ways of reading and unsettles the narrative even before its launch. This changes the way we read the Ruler, and primes our response to counter-discursive narrative interjections (such as those of A.G. or the narrator) in the novel.

The Ruler’s power is weakened not only by his illness, but by the very fact of its being recognised and debated by the populace. His power as a dictator relies on his ability to clamp down on the truth and supply his own version of events in its place. The bedrock of his authority lies in his control of the narrative. This is what makes the unstable narrative form of Wizard of the Crow so successful in undermining the Ruler’s power: the Ruler’s unstable body opens up a subversive dialogue of rumours to spread throughout the country.

The Ruler fears rumours in general, but one rumour in particular—one that was, however unwittingly, originated by the Wizard of the Crow himself. In a note to Machokali, Kamĩtĩ writes: ‘Take care of yourself. The country is pregnant. What it will give birth to, nobody knows’ (504, original italics). The comment about the country’s being ‘pregnant’ is ambiguous; however, the Ruler characteristically interprets this as a frontal attack upon his own (male) body. He orders Machokali:

‘Read it aloud and firmly like a man. Substitute the word Ruler for the country, as I am the Country.’

Machokali cleared his throat. He started reading the note. ‘[…] Take care of yourself. The Ruler is …’ Machokali stopped abruptly, like a person who finds himself on the edge of a precipice.

‘Go on. Read it,’ the Ruler told him impatiently. ‘Finish and tell me what’s so unclear about the meaning.’

‘The Ruler is pregnant. What he will give birth do, nobody knows.’

‘What’s not clear? Tell me!’ His Mighty Excellency said with mounting anger.

‘Oh, no,’ Machokali said when the full meaning and implications of the words struck him. (513)

The suggestion that he is ‘pregnant’ deeply offends the Ruler. Alarmed, he ‘grabbed the piece of paper, put it in his mouth, chewed it, and swallowed it’ (515) in an attempt to safeguard the note’s unsettling message. Despite his attempt to swallow the story, the rumours proliferate—largely through his own paranoia, which leads him repeatedly to let slip the secret, for:

the words in the wizard’s note still found a way of creeping into his mind—the Ruler is Pregnant—and, hearing them, he would start as if somebody were actually whispering the words in his ear. Rumors say that there was a time when he grabbed one of the army leaders who happened to be nearby and asked him, Did you dare to say ‘the Ruler is pregnant’? And the military man cried out, Oh, no, no, I have not spoken a word. When the Ruler realized his mistake, he claimed that it was a joke: I wanted to test that you are alert at all times. But still he warned the man never to repeat the incident to anyone, even himself. (518)

The Ruler’s remaining in office relies upon the appearance of power as constituting power: Ngũgĩ’s portrayal of the Ruler is one who fears, above all, losing the semblance of absolute authority. His newly uncontrollable body and the uncontrollable rumours that spread through the body politic are formed reciprocally: his unstable body gives rise to the rumours, and the rumours in turn destabilise his position and feed his anxiety, manifesting cyclically in his body’s ever-increasing expansion. If, as he constantly asserts, the Ruler and the country are one, then the country’s pregnancy must be his own. He sarcastically asks Machokali: ‘In all the books that you have read, have you ever come across the case of a pregnant ruler?’ (514), to which the minister responds: 85

‘A pregnant ruler? No! Unless he is a woman … Definitely not’ (514). It is precisely this association with womanhood that the Ruler cannot abide. He has constructed his public persona on the foundation of a virile (and Viagra-driven) manhood as head of the national house. His policies and philosophy as outlined in his booklet Magnus Africanus: Prolegomenon to Future Happiness, by the Ruler, stipulate that:

Women must get circumcised and show submission by always walking a few steps behind their men. […] Instead of screaming when they are beaten, women should sing songs of praise to those who beat them and even organize festivals to celebrate wife beating in honour of manhood. Most important, all Aburĩrians should remember at all times that the Ruler was husband number one, and so he was duty bound to set an example by doing in the country what individual men were to do in their households. (621–622)

The Ruler clings to hierarchies of all forms in order to place himself on the highest pedestal: he has consistently attacked women’s rights as citizens in his country in order to symbolise the divide between sovereign power and citizen. Women must be beaten and must ‘sing songs of praise’ to the honour of their attackers; masculinity is prized as being ‘naturally’ superior. Equally, what ‘individual men were to do in their households’ in the micro sphere, the Ruler is to do at the macro level ‘in the country’: if superiority rests with the masculine, then the Ruler is hyper-masculine and, in comparison with him as national father, all citizens fill the lesser role of women and must ‘sing his praise’, even when beaten. This formulation illustrates why the association with pregnancy is anathema to him, for it desecrates his self-conception as masculine god. Viewing the expansion as ‘a pregnancy of sorts’ (514) renders him womanly and, moreover, no longer the single phallic male, absolute and solitary, but two people at once; the construction is energised by the conflation of the fertile woman’s body with the land (to be explored further in chapter three) from which new citizens spring. The implication so erodes his confidence that it exacerbates his condition.

The ‘war of the rumors’ that open the novel reaches a tipping point, on which it ‘intensified day by day’ (670):

The principal vehicles for the claims and counterclaims were the state radio, nicknamed the Dictator’s Mouthpiece, and the people’s word of mouth, nicknamed the Bush Telegraph. When the Mouthpiece talked about the dictator’s birthday, the Telegraph talked about the dictator’s day of giving birth. When the Mouthpiece claimed that the man who had manufactured the lies about male pregnancy had agreed to make a confession before the People’s Assembly, the Telegraph countered with the claim that the Ruler had agreed to confess his pregnancy before the entire assembly. (670)

The dictator’s narrative is described in terms of bodily metaphor, ‘the Dictator’s Mouthpiece’, signifying one voice broadcasting one dominant story. By contrast, the ‘Bush Telegraph’ relies on communality, for a single telegraph machine in isolation cannot operate, but relies upon an active, and horizontally dispersed, network.

In addition to the Mouthpiece, the Ruler also develops the philosophical school of ‘parrotology’ (572), one that relies on spreading the Ruler’s own word. Kaniũrũ explains the doctrine of parrotology in his new education memorandum, explaining that as ‘the Ruler was the supreme educator. Teacher number one’, thenceforth ‘all institutions of learning, from primary schools to university colleges, would be required to teach only those ideas that came from the supreme educator’ (565). This involves ‘the Ruler’s mathematics, the Ruler’s science (biology, physics, and chemistry), the Ruler’s philosophy, and the Ruler’s history’ (565). If the students ask to learn about the world beyond their own country:

That was also quite simple. They would be taught the geography and demographics of all the countries the Ruler had visited or intended to visit. As for the books to read, this too was simple. In recognition of the fact that the Ruler was the number one writer, all books published in the country would carry the name of the Ruler as the original author. Anybody who aspired to write and publish could only do so under the name of the Ruler, who would allow his name only on those books carefully examined and permitted by the subdepartment of Youth Conformity. (565)

The Ruler’s desire, as evidenced in Kaniũrũ’s new education movement, is to become the sole information source in his country: to ‘produce students with a uniform knowledge streaming from the same source: the Ruler or those imbued with his thought’ (565). As such, media outlets are presented in the novel as a double-edged sword to the Ruler. On the one hand, he is adept at manipulating his own image in local media to enforce the official narrative, as demonstrated in his early religious excursion upon a donkey to church. However, the rumours foster media interest and bring foreign journalists—more difficult to control—to Eldares ‘to cover the widely circulating rumors that the Ruler was pregnant’ (577). The foreign journalists make camp:

pitching tents in the prairie among mounds of earth. These mounds were so many and so big that some discerning observers began to wonder what kind of ants had built them, and proceeded to report on the strange landscape of Aburĩria. So now, in addition to sex beaches and fauna and flora, monstrous anthills and an unnatural pregnancy had become tourist attractions. Despite his contribution to the dramatic rise in tourism, the Ruler was furious: in America they had managed to keep a lid on his condition, but in Aburĩria, where his word was law, his condition was the talk of the whole world. It was a terrible blow to his manhood […] (577)

The ‘monstrous anthills’ of the journalists’ tents recall the ‘white pests’ that had devoured the corrupted currency Tajirika buried in the ground, which when unearthed by the Ruler proliferated into an ‘infinitude of white termites making mounds of earth inside his palace!’ (561). The journalists armed with their questions, pens and rumours are portrayed as swarming on the source just like the white ants, gnawing at the Ruler’s house from inside, destabilising the terrain, and weakening the foundations of the stage on which he performs his ‘manhood’ as national authority.

Allegations that the Ruler is pregnant rear once more as his birthday (or ‘day of giving birth’) draws near. The Ruler cannot control his own body (which, as he keeps telling us, is the country), setting the scene for the further undermining of his dictatorship. Ultimately it is the nexus between his unruly body and the unruly population generating rumours that causes the Ruler to give birth to his phantom pregnancy. While watching the Wizard giving testimony on television, his doctors suddenly hear the Ruler’s: ‘sharp, anguished cry, his airborn body writhing in pain. The

Ruler groaned. Furyk and Clarkwell quickly climbed the ladder of Heaven to see what was happening. Had the hour of another mystery birth come upon them?’ (680). His ‘contractions were violent, excruciating’ (682). Still vainly attempting to orchestrate ‘the drama outside, like the signal for the helicopters to start dropping money from on high’ (686), the Ruler loses control both of the act he is ‘staging’ (Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ) and his own repressed ‘pregnancy’. The coterminous relationship between the country and the Ruler’s body is expressed in the painted artwork of Kaniũrũ, for, following ‘a strange sound’, the doctors see: ‘The cloth on which Kaniũrũ had painted the colours of the earth was splitting, and the belts that secured the body to the chair were breaking’ (686). The Ruler’s bodily explosion is reflected in the splitting of the painted country across his girth. The Ruler’s people no longer seem to believe in the story he is peddling: they believe instead in his pregnancy, which is about to come forth.

‘Suddenly,’ the narrator observes, ‘thunder split the sky. People felt the earth tremble’ (690). The Ruler’s pregnancy is a ‘malignancy’ (681) because it does not give birth to anything positive, only to black smog, explosions, and an encroaching stench that lasted for days, settling in the streets in a ‘thick, foul smoke bedevilling those fleeing in cars and on foot’ (691). The aftermath the following day is terrifying, casting the country into confusion:

Bloated corpses were strewn here and there. It was hard to tell whether the vile stench was from this decomposition or from the dark mist of the day before, issuing from the State House. The mist had spread across the sky, shutting out the sun, the moon, and the stars, plunging the whole country into darkness, and even later, when the sun, the moon, and the stars were able to penetrate the darkness, the whole country seemed enveloped in a sickening pollution. (691–2)

The mysterious pollution emanating from the State House has in fact spread from the Ruler’s own body, bloated beyond recognition and spewing forth a fog that was to linger for days in the streets over the ‘bloated corpses’. The pollution that has been building up inside his body and finally bursts forth reflects the corruption in Aburĩrian governance.

In a second attempt at remythification, the Ruler cobbles together a tale that foregrounds his own heroism, explaining that the local ‘Movement for the Voice of the 89

People, in collusion with fundamentalists from the Middle East, […] dropped bombs on the State House, but luckily the Ruler, aided by his experts, had managed to detonate them before calamitous harm could be done to the nation’ (697). This narrative is inadvertently undermined by the Ruler’s own official biographer, Luminous Karamu- Mbu, whose memory (unfortunately for him) proved too accurate, deviating from the history that the Ruler wanted to see set in stone:

One night [the Ruler] told Luminous Karamu-Mbu to read the section that dealt with his most recent triumph, and the biographer faithfully read how blasts of thunder like stealthy missiles had fired from each of his seven orifices and then exploded in turns; he had described in detail how the second blast of thunder had launched the foreign doctors sky high and how he, Luminous Karamu-Mbu, bravely hung on till he, too, was launched, a human missile, into the sky, by the fifth or sixth blast of thunder, and so had no details of the seventh but … The Ruler did not listen to the end, for his mind was occupied with the sudden realization that the loyal biographer knew too much (709)

Rather than adhering to the official narrative of the Ruler bravely saving the nation from terrorist bombs, the naïve biographer who ‘knew too much’ repeats what he saw with his own eyes that day. As a source of counter-narratives, the biographer must be removed. Rumours around the latter’s disappearance maintain, meaningfully, ‘that the man had been crushed under the weight of his huge pen and notebook’ (709).

Throughout, the Ruler has been adamant that he ‘is’ the country. Unhappily for him, his body has taken on that signifier even further by increasing in size, mirroring the vastness of the territory covered, and by stubbornly refusing to follow his will, reflecting the undisciplined actions of the people. The loss of control of the dictator’s body is reflected in the loss of control of the narrative and, with the narrative, the nation. Dictators sculpt narratives about themselves to help them retain their power, for they ‘thrive on fear’, as the Wizard of the Crow reflects. The insubordination of the Ruler’s body is therefore understood in terms of plots and rumours. He exclaims of the team of doctors: ‘If only they could stop his body from conspiring against him!’ (654). The ‘body’ that ‘conspires against him’ is both, we are intended to understand, the corpulent body that expands to fill the room, and the increasingly unstable body politic.

Just as in Wizard of the Crow the Dictator’s Mouthpiece is countered by the Bush Telegraph, so too do the residents of Moundié in Lopès’s The Laughing Cry rely on ‘radio grapevine’ as the people’s tool for broadcasting seditious or underground information. It is through radio grapevine that people come to hear rumours about ‘the absence of Captain Yabaka from all official ceremonies’ (238), indicating his capture and torture. The official narrative is broadcast as usual on the radio, which merely:

continued to make a great noise about the audiences and other activities of Bwakamabé; the messages he had received from his foreign peers; the ones he had sent them in return; the departures and arrivals of ministers; traffic accidents; tittle-tattle about the upper crust and their families; football matches and boxing. They added to these a bit of overseas news, well picked-over on the sortingboard of the censors. (237–8)

‘The first to spread the news,’ of the Captain’s disappearance, the narrator muses, ‘was doubtless radio grapevine of Moundié, closely followed by the whisperings of the diplomatic corps’ (238). Radio grapevine’s speculation is viewed by the party faithful as being ‘highly characteristic of the scandalous spirit that infects the Western capitalist press’ (238), rendering political dissidence as a disloyal, ‘un-African’ activity. Lopès’s official narrative is disrupted by the letters that intersperse the protagonist’s writings, letters from contacts abroad that criticise the dictator even at a time when the protagonist himself is not particularly critical of Daddy and his atrocities.

In a related move, Ahmadou Kourouma uses an interesting technique in Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote (En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages) to introduce a counter narrative. The prowess of the ‘Supreme Guide’ (79) is celebrated in a donsomana, an epic narrative performed by the sora (griot) and his koroduwa (the responder). The narrative celebrates the dictator’s extraordinary body and sings his praises, mimicking an oral narrative format. The narrative is set up as the sora speaking to his responder, with occasional interjections from the witnesses, the dictator himself, and one of his ministers. However, given that the purpose of the donsomana is in part that of ‘purification’ (3), not all crimes may be glossed. This establishes an uneasy balance between diegetic truth and fiction. While usually taking care not to enrage Koyaga, the sora is nonetheless permitted more ground than others in which to engage in criticism. The sora is therefore able to make statements critical of Koyaga, protected

91 by the traditional format of the storytelling structure. ‘I will tell the tale of purification; the story of your life, life as master hunter and dictator,’ the sora tells Koyaga (2). He warns: ‘We will tell the truth about your dictatorship, your parents, and your collaborators. The whole truth about your dirty tricks, your bullshit, your lies, your many crimes and assassinations …’ (2–3). The sora and the koroduwa are protected by the format of the story: they are required to tell about Koyaga’s ‘dirty tricks’, ‘bullshit’, ‘lies’, and criminal activity. While they must nonetheless step with care, the precolonial format of the narrative itself endows them with a liberating power to hold the dictator to account as part of the purification process. The sora is also able to point out the dictator’s personal shortcomings, casting him in a much less favourable light than his usual adulating broadcasts. When explaining Koyaga’s first brush with power, the sora concedes that:

people said he did not have the physical presence, the culture, the charisma to succeed President Fricassa Santos. Everyone believed that the only thing that the master hunter had learned, knew how to do, and do well, was kill. He was embarrassed that his arms were too long. To struggle through life with long arms makes one timid: he was timid. He spoke little, he spoke badly, he stuttered. He was a bad, a very bad, orator. His cheeks were marked with ritual and tribal scarifications. Such scarifications in modern-day Africa make people stare, make one neurotic. He was very neurotic. He read painfully slowly and wrote with difficulty; he was a simpleton. A neurotic, a simpleton, a poor orator, an introvert, cannot be Head of State. Koyaga knew this, accepted this. What he wanted was the Ministry of Defence. (111)

Only the sora in the specific context of the donsomana is permitted to reveal that the great dictator Koyaga was ‘timid’, a ‘neurotic’, a ‘simpleton’, with any degree of personal safety. The sora also repeatedly inserts counter-narratives into his narrative without being required to do so. This usually takes the form of repeating the official line of the narrative, which often contains magical or at least exaggerated feats of power from Koyaga, and subsequently undercutting the official narrative through the provision of a more-likely counter-narrative—careful to appear always to disparage the latter. For example, when describing the lead-up to deposing former president Fricassa Santos, the sora explains how Koyaga avoided police pursuit: 92

Koyaga recites one of the magical incantations the marabout has taught him; he transforms himself into a white cockerel. The Haoussa sees the white cock, thinks it has escaped from one of his baskets. Quickly, the merchant seizes the cockerel, stuffs it into a basket and closes it. He steps out onto the platform, leaves the station passing the plain-clothes policeman with his cargo of poultry. The version of the story which says that Koyaga stepped onto the platform disguised as a poultry merchant is simply not credible; there were too many observant policemen waiting for the train. The hunter could not have passed unnoticed if he had trusted to such a simple disguise. (96–97)

Similarly, when describing the way Fricassa Santos fled by turning himself into a whirlwind and then disguising himself as a gardener in order to flee the occupied palace, the sora goes on to observe of the former president that:

The uninitiated, in their ignorance, will question this version of events. They will say there was a tunnel between the President’s residence and the embassy compound. According to them, the President, disguised as a gardener, came down the tunnel in the dark and lay curled up on the back seat of a car all night. He stepped out of a Buick when the embassy gates were opened. Obviously it is a childish explanation for the White Man who requires reason to understand. (108)

In such cases it is unnecessary for the sora to interject with the ‘ignorant’ and ‘childish’ explanations for significant events by nonbelievers, but he includes them nonetheless, airing them even while appearing to disparage them.

In his descriptions of the disappearances and punishments meted out by the dictator, the sora is forced to describe many grisly scenes. Koyaga’s clan, the Paleo, believe that the tail of a slaughtered animal must be cut off and stuffed in its mouth in order to neutralise it: ‘The planting of the end of the creature (the tail) in its beginning (the mouth), destined the nyamas to circle endlessly within the remains of the beast, explains Maclédio’ (72). Tales abound of Koyaga heroically killing animals—panthers, caimans, elephants—and ramming their tails in their mouths. It becomes clear that Koyaga has the same view of men, in which the ‘tail’ (penis) must be cut off and stuffed in the mouth. Koyaga’s soldiers ‘run about the streets, fingers on their triggers, ready to 93 assassinate and emasculate anyone who might be tempted to defy their authority’ (206). Koyaga and his men persist in a frenzy of emasculation in the novel, on which they capture the enemy, ‘emasculate him and stuff his bloody penis between his teeth’ (109): their actions again reflect the dictator’s conception of political power as phallic (Mbembe On the Postcolony 13).

In addition to the many deaths ordered by Koyaga in which his victims are emasculated, the sora also tells of a number of citizens who, having fallen out of favour with Koyaga, spontaneously emasculate themselves before committing suicide. Although they walk on eggshells in their address to the dictator, we can feel the sora’s and responder’s disbelief. The format of the narrative as purification rite that shifts between second and third person invests authority in the speaker, allowing him to get away with voicing criticisms of the dictator. Such means of injecting a counter-narrative into the novels is significant, building hope into the framework of the novel for more widespread political change and the airing of different views in safety.

Conclusion

The deified dictator is, after all, in a sense nothing but his body, for his power lies in nothing but the belief in his power. His body is rendered as both a symbol for the nation and (pseudo-magically) coterminous with it; however, this very metonymic relationship opens his body to appropriation by those he seeks to control. If the body of the dictator represents the crowds of the country’s population, then the people’s subversive will, as these writers have attested, may be read in the rebellion of the dictator’s body against its controlling spirit (rehearsing again the Cartesian mind–body dualism that sees the body of the masses being ‘naturally’ subservient to the controlling mind). Citizens are, in a way, granted ownership and sovereignty over the dictator’s body because of its very substitution for the whole. Bakhtin explains that the grotesque body is communal, belonging ‘not to the isolated biological individual, not to the private, egotistic “economic man,” but to the collective ancestral body of all the people’ (Bakhtin 19). The communality of the grotesque dictator body is asserted in its downfall—its pitch 94 away from power, ceasing to be the ‘egotistic “economic man”’ and returning to ‘the people’—when the dictator’s body is assassinated and its political imagery desecrated in public space. African writers have consistently seized on the dictator body in political fiction, investing power but also a levelling weakness into its unstable form.

In this chapter we have discussed the dictator body as representing the nation. Next we will discuss the body of the prisoner of sovereignty in African literature, suspended in state power.

Chapter 2: The prisoner body

Imagining politics as a form of war, we must ask: What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?

(Mbembe ‘Necropolitics’ 12)

The body was exposed; in a way, it belonged to our captors, was in their power.

(Ben Jelloun This Blinding Absence of Light 46)

The body, Foucault reminds us, is: ‘directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (Discipline and Punish 25). This is most evident in the body of the prisoner, whose body becomes a text onto which state power is inscribed. The prisoner’s body is one that has competed with state sovereignty: in unstable states, this may or may not have comprised a transgression of the law. Gaols in African fiction are filled with a mélange of violent criminals, petty thieves, rally organizers, would-be assassins, innocent bystanders, dissident writers, businesspeople whose interests competed with those of a minister, minor government officials with beautiful wives, and so on. Literary representations of gaols in unstable states ‘reminds us, crucially, that power is not the same as law’ (Butler and Spivak 9). It is in the prisoner body that we find the most productive antithesis to the body of the dictator, for the prisoner body is suspended in politics, but powerless. While the dictator body is centre stage in the national drama, the paternal authority broadcasting his narrative of benevolence, the prisoner body by contrast is always absent, concealed from public view.

The prisoner is the victim of the ‘obscene excess’ (Žižek) of state power, which in despotism has its basis in the one-way flow of capital:

At the level of the law, the state power merely represents the interests of its subjects; it serves them, is responsible to them, and is itself subject to their control. However, at the level of the superego underside, the public message of responsibility is supplemented by the obscene message of the unconditional exercise of power. ‘Laws do not really bind me, I can do to you whatever I want, I can treat you as guilty if I decide to do so, I can destroy you on a whim’. This obscene excess is a necessary constituent of the notion of sovereignty. The asymmetry here is structural: the law can only sustain its authority if subjects hear in it the echo of the obscene, unconditional self-assertion of power. (Žižek 123)

The state mobilises the threat of violence and incarceration in order to ‘sustain its authority’ and control the body politic, concealing the ‘superego underside’ with the overt message of regulating the law. (This is the prerogative not only of unstable states but also successful ones, particularly those that are securitising.)

The legacy of colonialism, including corrupt structures of governance combined with the at-times acute interethnic tension produced by its carelessly mixed cocktail of many different nations into one artificially delineated state, has been exacerbated by predatory trade agreements, hot ‘proxy wars’ and the insidious funding and arming of local warlords by foreign powers, and a global mishandling of African countries’ ‘debt’. In such contexts, citizens are vulnerable not only to the officially sanctioned ‘obscene excess’ (Žižek) of violence mobilised by the state, but also to the outsourced violence of private militias and hired thugs; the establishment of a ‘shadow economy’ (Mbembe On the Postcolony 85) further destabilises the rule of law and renders each putative agent of that law as a rogue offshoot of disciplinary power, whose use of bribery and extortion for private enrichment while fulfilling public duties is normalised by a public service culture of turning a blind eye to ‘eating’ (A Man of the People). ‘In the postcolony,’ Mbembe reminds us, ‘fetishistic power is invested not only in the person of the autocrat but also in the persons of the commandement and of its agents—the party, policemen, soldiers, administrators and officials, middlemen, and dealers’ (111).

Several high-profile cases of state punishment of dissidents have reached international media over the past decades. Some, as in Nigeria’s 1995 execution of writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, have escalated into accusations, arrest, and ultimate execution. Others have met with detention under harsh conditions: this has included famous political figures, such as anti-apartheid activists Steve Biko, Ruth First, and ‘secular saint’ Nelson Mandela (Ashcroft ‘Constitution Hill’ 105), and many writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ahmadou Kourouma, Chris Abani and, perhaps most famously, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

Writers’ release from prison allows them to publicise stories of detainment: their own and those of detainees who lack the literacy and cultural capital to be able to do so—or those who were ‘disappeared’ or died in custody. The powers that contain the prisoner body—that ‘mark it’ and ‘force it […] to emit signs’ (Discipline and Punish 25)—seek to transform it into a script of state authority. ‘The signed body,’ Peter Brooks reminds us, ‘points to the deep implication of the body in narrative: the body as the place where central narrative meanings are inscribed or branded, and the place of the body within the narrative dynamic, its role as key narrative signifier’ (Brooks 73–74). The detained body, marked by torture and deprivation, is vital to the narrative of state authority: condensed and codified as a ‘key narrative signifier’ of ‘the obscene, unconditional self-assertion of power’ (Žižek 123). The flaying of the prisoner body extinguishes its autonomy and evacuates it of meaning, transforming existence for the prisoner into a narrative of the prison wardens’ torture and benevolence. By writing their own narrative of prison—as Ngũgĩ famously did while still incarcerated, writing Caitaani mutharaba-ini (translated as Devil on the Cross) on prison-issued toilet paper—writers reinvest themselves with authority.

Citizen bodies represent votes, and in strictly nominal democracies, controlling bodies means, quite simply, controlling votes. This understanding has led to outrages against citizen rights. In Sierra Leone in the 1990s, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) infamously sought to stop its citizens from voting for the ‘wrong’ party by amputating their hands. In areas where death is a daily threat, life itself becomes politicized, and the body is subject to maiming or the threat of death in the name of polling. In her work, Wendy Harcourt calls for:

a deeper understanding of bodies as a place for political mobilization interconnected with other sites of resistance and political action. The project suggests that bodies are not external to political processes but firmly enmeshed in them, even if they are not necessarily the defining site for action. The lived experience of the body, the identity and definitions attached to bodies, inform and are connected to all political struggles. (Harcourt 23)

This is nowhere more evident than in the body of the prisoner. The prisoner body holds significant resonance in African literatures, spread widely across a variety of novels (in addition to poetry, plays, non-fiction and shorter prose fiction). Novels about the prison emphasise the prisoner’s sense of powerlessness relative to the state that has imprisoned them, and the degradations of the body—lack of sleep, torture, proximity to other unwashed bodies, starvation, lice—as a lived experience of politics in action. This chapter will focus on instances of prolonged interrogation of the prisoner body in African literatures and the ways in which it is damaged, managed, and hidden. It will explore the prisoner body’s suspension within state and non-state power structures; the unusual sub-category of the child soldier; the symbolic resonance of scars upon the body as textual marks of authorship; and the revolutionary potential to be found in prisoner bodies unbelievably staying alive against all odds in African fiction.

Homo sacer, order-building and the right to exclude

Not simple natural life, but life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political element.

(Agamben Homo Sacer 88, original emphasis)

In his homo sacer project, Agamben discusses the implication of ‘bare life’ in Carl Schmitt’s analysis of the sovereign exception.51 ‘The paradox of sovereignty,’ Agamben explains:

consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order. […] [T]he sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity of the law, legally places himself outside the law. This means that the paradox can also be formulated this way: “the law is outside itself,” or: “I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law [che non c’è un fuori legge].” (Agamben Homo Sacer 15)

It is the sovereign exception that furnishes ‘the very condition of possibility of juridical rule and, along with it, the very meaning of State authority’ (Homo Sacer 17). Bare life—that is, ‘life that can be killed but not sacrificed’ (133)—is placed at the heart of politics; for Agamben:

The political sphere of sovereignty […] takes the form of an indistinction between sacrifice and homicide. The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life—that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed—is the life that has been captured in this sphere. (Homo Sacer 83, original emphasis)

Butler argues that the status of ‘bare life’ and the state of exception do not apply to the prisoner. In her discussion with Spivak in Who Sings the Nation-State? Butler argues that while it is in the state’s power to ‘bind’, it also ‘releases’ from that bind; however, this very release is often not delivered ‘through emancipatory means’:

it expels precisely through an exercise of power that depends upon barriers and prisons and so, in the mode of a certain containment. We are not outside of politics when we are dispossessed in such ways. Rather, we are deposited in a dense situation of military power in which juridical functions become the prerogative of the military. This is not bare life, but

51 Though Agamben contradicts, in the above quotation, Schmitt’s famous dichotomy of friend/foe as the basis of politics. 100

a particular formation of power and coercion that is designed to produce and maintain the condition, the state, of the dispossessed. What does it mean to be at once contained and dispossessed by the state? (4–5)

The prisoner who is ‘at once contained and dispossessed by the state’ is ‘released’ from that state into the prison, which in African states (contrasting several Western prisons in the twenty-first century) are usually held within state borders. The ‘release’ from the state does not constitute a geographical movement; rather, a shift in category. The prisoner is no longer one to be protected and disciplined by the law, but one who must be excised and held separate from the rest of the population. The prisoner body is punished, but the very fact of its being in detention signifies the loss of rights (however fragile) enjoyed by those outside the prison walls. ‘No one is ever,’ Butler advises, ‘returned to bare life, no matter how destitute the situation becomes’, because ‘this reduction and stripping of the prisoner, especially the prisoner of war, is a state actively produced, maintained, reiterated, and monitored by a complex and forcible domain of power, and not exclusively the act of a sovereign or the permutation of sovereign power’ (Butler and Spivak 10–11).

However, Agamben contends that the ‘camp—and not the prison’ functions as the prime state of exception classifying bare life, and suggests in this category the war prison, for ‘while prison law only constitutes a particular sphere of penal law and is not outside the normal order, the juridical constellation that guides the camp is (as we shall see) martial law and the state of siege’ (Agamben Homo Sacer 20–21).52 I suggest that the prison in unstable states constitutes just such a ‘juridical constellation’ of ‘martial law and the state of siege’, for in such contexts: the ‘distinction between a state of war and a state of peace is increasingly illusory’ (Mbembe On the Postcolony 89). Further,

52 Agamben notes that humanitarian agencies rely on the imagery suggesting bare life in their fundraising appeals for refugees, admitting that ‘there are certainly good reasons for’ the consecration of all human life in the case of Rwandan refugees as ‘sacred life’ (133). He observes:

The ‘imploring eyes’ of the Rwandan child, whose photograph is shown to obtain money but who ‘is now becoming more and more difficult to find alive,’ may well be the most telling contemporary cipher of the bare life that humanitarian organizations, in perfect symmetry with state power, need. A humanitarianism separated from politics cannot fail to reproduce the isolation of sacred life at the basis of sovereignty, and the camp—which is to say, the pure space of exception—is the biopolitical paradigm that it cannot master. (Homo Sacer 133–134)

101 unstable states in the postcolony in a large part prolong the administrative and juridical injustices enshrined under colonialism. Mbembe has shown that: ‘in modern philosophical thought and European political practice and imaginary, the colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law (ab legibus solutus) and where “peace” is more likely to take on the face of a “war without end.”’ (‘Necropolitics’ 23). The colonies, therefore, are ‘the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended— the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization”’ (‘Necropolitics’ 24). This suspension is carried forward under circumstances of corruption and mismanagement of state power into the postcolony. The space of the prison in Amin’s Uganda, Abacha’s Nigeria or apartheid South Africa more closely resembles the war prison or those post–9/11 examples of the state of exception, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib or Australia’s offshore detention centres, than it does the ‘particular sphere of penal law [that] is not outside the normal order’ of onshore prisons in the US and Australia. These ‘liminal sites’ (Salgado 208) are peripheral to the states that control them and operate under the signs of secrecy and torture.53

In the prisoner body of this literature we are invited to read not only the fate of the specific individual but also the implicit danger of detention to the body politic. In unstable states, if transgression of the law is not a prerequisite of detention (where leaders’ corruption and paranoia may lead to the incarceration of those who have never committed a crime), then anyone may fall, with little warning, into this category. The risk of imprisonment is greater in unstable states: both because the parameters allowing detention are hazy, and because the risk to the body in such prisons is greater than their equivalents in stable democracies. These ‘states and spaces of exception also constitute spaces where expression is suppressed, displaced and silenced and where bodies are

53 The distinction between onshore and offshore detention procedures suggests, of course, the evacuation of meaning from the phrase ‘universal human rights’. There are no human rights that are universally recognized: all rights are relative and created in a triangulation with location and citizenship (impacted by, for some, the additional categories of race and religious beliefs, or even the appearance of the latter). The prisoner within unstable states—and, as many have pointed out, securitizing states (Butler, Robbins, Bernstein, Ahuja among others)—presents the most drastic challenge to rights. The prisoner body is the space in which rights are tested, for ‘the jettisoned life can be juridically saturated without for that reason having rights, and this pertains to prisoners as well as to those who live under occupation’ (Butler and Spivak 32). In literature, the prisoner body is frequently the canvas onto which the violence (the violence of war, the epistemic violence of intimidation and uncertainty) to the body politic is reproduced in miniature.

102 made to disappear’, generating silences that may be ‘registered, marked and filled by literary texts’ (Salgado 209).54 The ethical project of representing the prisoner body refers both to the material conditions on the ground for detainees and also the cognitive violence of imprisonment. The prisoner is placed outside the law’s protection and yet suspended in its power. The prisoner of repressive governments, who is liable to be ‘disappeared’ at any time without official record, constitutes just such a life that may be killed but not sacrificed.

The management of life

[I]n its modern form—relative and limited—as in its ancient and absolute form, the right of life and death is a dissymmetrical one. The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the ‘power of life and death’ was in reality the right to take life or let live.

(Foucault The History of Sexuality 136)

In his landmark study of biopolitics, Foucault charts the effects of eighteenth-century Europeans ‘gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in

54 For example, Ndebele reflects that:

The stories of [South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission] expose not only previously silenced voices, but also methods employed in silencing them. That is why the revelation of these methods has received so much attention. The silencing of voices through various forms of brutality, torture, and humiliation induced anger and bitterness. In the end, particularly for the writer, the ugly reality of oppression became impossible to articulate. This is because it itself became the only story, but one which, once enacted, had to be denied. (22)

103 an optimal manner’ (History 142). This burgeoning conception of the management of life, both as a body and as a species, as properly a political project, fed into wider reaching circuits of knowledge and power production, with the result that:

Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body. (142–143)

It is in the prisoner that we find the extreme of this ‘taking charge of life’—as opposed to, or in tension with, ‘the threat of death’. It is the life, the biological life, of the prisoner that is subject to management by the state, which in a queer paradox promises to sustain and take responsibility for the prisoner even as he or she is punished. It is this management that constitutes state power over the unruly citizen. In his study of necropolitics, influenced by Foucault’s earlier work but more attuned to inscriptions of race and the ‘death-worlds’ of contemporary warfare, Mbembe agrees that:

the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power. ( ‘Necropolitics’ 11–12)

Thus the life of the imprisoned serves as the very demonstration of state power. The prisoner body is ground zero for the state’s expression of its sovereignty: it is the terrain upon which the state’s ability to manage life at its basest level is tested. The living body of the prisoner, suspended in state power, becomes the indisputable, biological evidence of that power.

The state is frequently read as an enlargement of the human body: the ‘head’ of government, the ‘long arm’ of the law. From this symbolic understanding, the wholeness and autonomy of the human body is brought into conflict with that of the state: we see here confusion in scale and category, in which the dissident body collides with the boundaries (geographical, legal, moral) of the sovereign state that contains it.

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The dissident body forms a potential threat within the state’s own borders. The useful citizen body is like a healthy blood cell tessellating into the matrix of cells forming the organs that run the body. The dissident acts like a virus within the larger host body of the state: it is an unruly life within a larger organism, one that would dangerously weaken the state’s enterprise, and which must therefore be excised. Neel Ahuja, who compellingly charts the conceptual movement between empire’s colonisation of land with viruses’ colonisation of bodies, explains that in the discourses of hegemonic power, ‘bodily vulnerability is transmuted into political urgency,’ encouraging a ‘proliferation’ of ‘techniques […] for managing the relations of populations and the living structures of species (human, animal, viral)’ (xi). The control of life is realised particularly starkly in correctional facilities, in which the prisoner is reduced to the level of life: the silencing of the dissident voice (or its removal from its audience) leaves merely the spark of life to be maintained in the body within the walls of the prison—a mouth to feed or starve, a body to shelter or torment.

Of course, it goes without saying that there are acute differences in prisoner experiences that arise from each specific context. Ngũgĩ’s detainment under Moi’s orders in Kenya was experienced differently from Ruth First’s imprisonment following the South African Treason Trials—and her punishment differed again starkly from the punishment of black women labelled as traitors by the future state authority of the ANC. However, in many obvious respects the similarities of detention outweigh situational differences, or at least allow us to draw connections between such experiences in order to discuss the effects upon the detainee’s body of state power and its exercise in the maintenance of life. What is left is humanity without rights, merely life. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt observes that:

The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. (Arendt 299)

The ‘abstract nakedness of being human’ is the condition of the prisoner, a condition ‘that render[s] the body a site of vital warfare’ (Ahuja 7). In the prison, the state exerts

105 its privilege not only to ‘take life’ but to ‘let live’ (Foucault History 136): that life may be subjected to degradations and torture, but nonetheless must be maintained. The prolonging of life in such circumstances may become viewed as a punishment in itself, for while imprisoned in unstable or securitizing states the prisoner is outside of the jurisdiction of the law.55 The choice of death is not one that is afforded to the prisoner, but only to their guards: that is, it is decision itself that is withheld. The confiscation of the choice to live or die underlines the state’s power: that choice is the domain of sovereignty, and its removal also serves to erode the differences between human and animal life.

Breaking the body

African writers of the prison have consistently focused on the material effects of imprisonment upon the body: overcrowding, poor sanitation, solitary confinement, insufficient nutrition and violence. The prison in the unstable state is established as operating differently from onshore correctional facilities in the Global North, for the degradations are both more extreme and less documented—and therefore less available to appeals or to the later punishment of the accusers. The body is also subject to constant surveillance. Ngũgĩ recalls the ‘brutal invasion’ of privacy during the time of his incarceration, when he was ‘daily trailed by a warder for twenty-four hours, in waking and sleeping. It was unnerving, truly unnerving, to find a warder watching me shit and urinate into a children’s chamberpot in my cell, or to find him standing by the entrance to the toilet to watch me do the same exercise’ (Detained 6–7). While he was minutely observed in the functions of his body, his observers were reduced merely to ‘two bodiless eyes fixed on me through the iron bars’ (7). Chris Abani was imprisoned for three years (of which six months was served in solitary confinement) as a teenager. General Vatsa was arrested for plotting a coup to overthrow Nigeria’s military

55 The ‘logic’ of countries such as the United States identifying potential terrorists as the targets of legitimate pre-emptive violence ‘takes the form of a “self-defense” argument—that we (that is, the United States) are justified in killing individuals if it is an act of self-defense, an act that is presumably required in order to prevent an “enemy” from attacking “U.S. persons and interests”’ (Bernstein). In unstable and despotic states, the ‘self-defense’ argument is also lodged against internal political dissidents. 106 dictatorship, and the young Abani’s first novel, a neo-Nazi coup thriller set in Nigeria, was found on his person (‘A Reading by Chris Abani’). In his TED talk ‘On Humanity’, Abani describes the death of his optimistic fourteen-year-old cellmate while on death row: ‘They killed him. They handcuffed him to a chair, and they tacked his penis to a table with a six-inch nail, then left him there to bleed to death. That’s how I ended up in solitary, because I let my feelings be known’. The body of the prisoner in these conditions becomes the property of the guards, who appear to act with little fear of retribution.

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), Kambili’s brother Jaja has confessed to having poisoned his violently abusive father in order to protect his mother, who committed the crime. By the conclusion of the novel he has been in prison almost three years. The strain has had a grave effect upon his personality and mental health. Jaja now seems harder, his clothes are always filthy, and he is ‘covered with scabs that look dry until he scratches them and the yellowish pus underneath seeps out. Mama has bribed all kinds of ointments in and none seem to work’ (304–5). The scabs all over Jaja’s body appear to be psychosomatic, resistant to medication. His eyes ‘have hardened a little every month he has spent here’ (305), destroying the ‘asusu anya, a language of the eyes’ (305) that he used to share with his sister. The cell that Jaja occupies is:

so crowded that some people have to stand so that others can lie down. Their toilet is one black plastic bag, and they struggle over who will take it out each afternoon, because that person gets to see sunlight for a brief time. Jaja told me once that the men do not always bother to use the bag, especially the angry men. He does not mind sleeping with mice and cockroaches, but he does mind having another man’s feces in his face. He was in a better cell until last month, with books and a mattress all to himself, because our lawyers knew the right people to bribe. But the wardens moved him here after he spat in a guard’s face for no reason at all, after they stripped him and flogged him with koboko. Although I do not believe Jaja would do something like that unprovoked, I have no other version of the story because Jaja will not talk to me about it. He did not even show me the welts on his back, the ones the doctor we bribed in told me were puffy and swollen like long sausages. (299) 107

The young Jaja has become hardened by the harsh conditions of his detainment, sharing his cell with ‘mice’, ‘cockroaches’ and human waste, too crowded for all the men to repose at once. In scenes of overcrowding, one body becomes less differentiated from its companions, its surfaces shared and boundaries threatening to dissolve; Jaja’s association with the ‘angry’ men of his cell is increased through the enforced bodily intimacies of incarceration. His body has altered from the Jaja his sister remembers, his shoulders sinking and his thighs and neck covered with weeping sores, his back covered in welts ‘puffy and swollen like long sausages’ that are the marks of subjection: his body now bears the marks of an experience he shares with his fellow inmates, rather than his family. Jaja holds onto his silence as a form of self-protection, and will not tell his sister why he spat in the face of the guard: these details remain part of the covert story of the prison, shared only among prisoners.56

The body of the prisoner is also, significantly, seen as the ‘access point’ to the soul. In their testimony, prison detainees from all over the world have rehearsed the mind–body dualism, viewing the mind (and illicit information, or simply one’s will or sanity) as being accessed through the breaking of the body. ‘The body is a traitor,’ a character in Sony Labou Tansi’s novel Life and a Half declares. ‘It sells you to the outside world. It puts you at the disposition of others. What’s left stands up for itself pretty well’ (24). The body is understood as a point of weakness whose torture ‘opens’ it for the accusers’ perusal or occupation. The common phrase that a prisoner is ‘a hard nut to crack’ illustrates this idea well: the body forms the shell, with the prisoner’s will, the meat of the nut, inside. It is the shell that must be broken. In This Blinding Absence of Light, the imprisoned narrator Salim explains that:

The only thing I possessed was my mind, my reason. I abandoned my arms and legs to our tormentors, hoping they would not manage to claim my spirit, my freedom, my breath of fresh air, my gleam of light in the

56 The body in detention is punished not only by the confiscation of liberty, but also in the prison’s poor conditions. This is reproduced time and again in African novels of the prison. The child narrator of Chigoze Obioma’s novel The Fishermen (2015) is imprisoned for six years for manslaughter. The cells are explicitly dehumanizing; while Adichie’s Jaja shares his cell not only with men but with vermin, Ben recalls: ‘they kept me in the empty, windowless cell with bars through which I could see nothing but other cells with men in them, sitting like caged animals’ (283). Kamĩtĩ in Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow exclaims wistfully: ‘The body is a prison for the soul. Why shouldn’t I cut off the chains that now tie me to it, let the body and the soul say good-bye to each other? That way my soul shall be free to roam across the land and all over this sky. Yes, to go wherever it wishes without the endless restraining demands of the body’ (Wizard 40).

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darkness. Ignoring their strategy, I threw up barricades around myself. I learned to renounce my body. The body is what is visible. They saw it, they could touch it, cut it with a red-hot blade, they could torture it, starve it, expose it to scorpions, to biting cold, but I strove to keep my mind out of reach. That was my sole strength. (Ben Jelloun 104–105)

Salim’s sole possession in the prison, which he must work to keep, is his sanity, while his body remains the property of the state that has imprisoned him.

In her novel Red Dust (2000), South African writer Gillian Slovo emphasises the relationship between the prisoner and the interrogator through torture. Slovo is the daughter of Ruth First, an anti-apartheid activist who was imprisoned during the Treason Trials and later assassinated by the South African Police when they sent a parcel bomb to her office in Mozambique in 1982. Slovo’s father is First’s husband, fellow anti-apartheid activist and later political leader Joe Slovo. Slovo writes at the start of the narrative that she cannot escape what happened to her parents at the hands of the state, and that it was this that motivated her to write the novel. Set at the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Amnesty hearings, the novel follows the attempt to uncover the fate of Steve Sizela who was ‘disappeared’ many years prior after his arrest as a member of the ANC. Sizela’s parents want to know what happened to him and to finally bury his body: the search for the dead black body and unearthing its story is a tragically common trope in post-apartheid South African literature. At the hearing, former police officer Dirk Hendricks is brought to the stand to give evidence of his torture of former-prisoner-now-MP Alex Mpondo in his suit for amnesty. Hendricks explains:

‘To be a good interrogator,’—he was staring at his feet—‘you must focus on your prisoner. You must get to know him. To understand not just his strengths or his weaknesses, but also the things he likes, the music that moves him, the smells that have special meaning for him, the people he cares about, the enemies he’s made. If you do your job properly he must become like your child.’ He looked up then, straight at her. ‘Or your lover.’ His grey eyes seemed to fill with tears then, but she couldn’t be sure of that because he blinked rapidly. ‘You must think only of him,’ he said. (Slovo 147)

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Hendricks acknowledges the necessity to break the prisoner, to ‘get inside his head’— the bodily metaphor for invading the mind. The prisoner is in the dubious ‘care’ of the prison guard and, Hendricks argues, ‘must become like your child’ or ‘your lover’. The extreme closeness fosters an intimacy that, of course, runs both ways, and the gaoler’s knowledge of the prisoner is reversed in the latter’s returned gaze on the policeman:

That was the worst of it—how well Alex had known his enemy, knowing him not only by his appearance but also more intimately. Even now he could summon it back, the corrosive sweetness of the other’s sweat, the tobacco-menthol fusion of his breath, the pressure of those blunt fingertips, strangely soft, his rasped demanding voice. (185)

Hendricks’ and Alex’s knowledge of the body of the other is enhanced by the claustrophobia of the small prison cells, and the dislocating strategies that meant Alex had nothing to focus on but his own pain, and the pain-inducing body of his interrogator. Now, during the hearings, Hendricks has become the prisoner being interrogated on the stage, and it is Alex who interrogates—the two drawn together by the awful bond forged during Alex’s imprisonment and torture. The trauma of this association threatens to yoke Alex, now a successful MP, back into the psychology of the victim who would do anything to ‘please his torturer. That moment, that feeling was burned into his heart’ (192). The two men, ‘who had stood on opposite sides of the race divide that had rent South Africa open, were joined together now. They knew each other not like enemies or strangers, but like intimates. Almost brothers’ (185).

In a performance for the Chair and audience of the Commission hearing, Alex attempts to strip Hendricks of his disguise as polite, repentant prisoner, and draw out the cruel bully who tortured Africans during the apartheid era. Questioning Hendricks about his own torture, Alex is drawn back into memories of the past. Watching Hendricks on stage, Alex’s lawyer Sarah sees ‘another man breaking free of the prisoner’s chrysalis […] His head lifted, his back straightened: he looked somehow more substantial and also much more dangerous. The shift was extraordinary’ (191). Hendricks licks his lips while remembering torturing Alex, and Sarah notes with alarm that ‘[i]t was Alex who was now diminished’ (191). Alex reacts with a traumatized, psychosomatic response: hurled back into the immediacy of a bodily memory, smelling ‘the rankness of his own

110 terror and its physical manifestations—his soiled trousers, the urine trickling down his leg, his foul breath as the bag was pulled away’ (192).

Alex recalls how, after ‘breaking’ during torture and revealing the desired information to his captors, Hendricks had said ‘softly: go wash now, as he patted Alex’s shoulder. Like a father—and Alex his compliant son’ (193). The figuring of Alex as ‘son’ to Hendricks invests both in the torturer-tortured relationship (where the torturer ‘creates’ his victim by destroying him) and the race history of South Africa in which grown African men were seen as ‘boys’ by whites. The sub-script of benevolence is one to which Hendricks clings eagerly, reminding Alex that he had taken him for a car ride and bought him Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Coke: ‘“Remember?’ he said. “We stopped at the foot of the mountain. You got out and you ran about, jirra, like a child you were, you were so enjoying yourself’ (193). Both men participate in the rendering of the torturer–victim relationship as one of paternal authority in which Alex has become the helpless child trying to please his father. The sadistic intimacy forged by state-sanctioned torture has lingered after the years apart, returning in savage force and casting Alex back in a bodily memory of fear and pain. In the Amnesty process, the prisoner–interrogator role has ostensibly been reversed: and yet, in attempting to unmask Hendricks, the two slip into bodily memories of the power relations in which they have been scripted, a relic of the intimacy of the former torture relationship. Slovo’s subtle and compelling narrative examines not only the state’s systems of power, but also the intimate material and psychological relations between its agents and their victims.

The prisoner and pathology

The detained body in African fiction is captured at the level of biology, erupting in sores, scabs and wounds, abjected by the ever-present effluvia of the other bodies sharing the cells, subject to malnutrition and disease. In this context the body is transformed into a script bearing the mark of state sovereignty, and properly the testing ground of the state’s management of life.

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Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun poignantly articulates this emphasis on the state’s micro-control of the prisoner’s body at the level of pathology in his novel This Blinding Absence of Light (2005) (Cette aveuglante absence de lumière [2001]). Narrator-protagonist Salim is a junior officer in the army who was involved in an unsuccessful coup against King Hassan II in 1971. He and twenty-two other soldiers have been incarcerated in Cell Block B of Tazmamart, a secret desert prison whose cells are concealed underground. The ceilings of the tiny cells are too low to allow the prisoners to stand, and they are provided with only a small amount of water each day containing ‘a deposit of silt and slimy filth’ (4). Having failed to destroy the body of the sovereign, the soldiers’ punishment in kind is to have their own bodies slowly destroyed in what Foucault has termed ‘the reply of the sovereign to those who attacked his will, his law, or his person’ (137–138). Salim understands that the terms of his imprisonment are that: ‘[t]he entire body had to suffer, every part, without exception. The tomb was arranged […] so that the body would experience all imaginable torments, endure them ever so slowly, and remain alive to undergo further agony’ (3). The harshest condition to endure is the deprivation of light, for the cells are immersed in utter darkness. The prisoners see light only when one of their number dies, and they are permitted briefly above ground for his funeral. In this way death becomes a mercy: not only for the deceased, but also for his cellmates who enjoy a brief resumption of sight, when ‘death turned into a superb ray of sunshine’ (11).

The withholding of all light is a cruel and efficient punishment, destroying the prisoners’ capacity to mark even the diurnal passage of time, a disruption that may artificially extend the term of their sentence (which, in any case, is for life). It does not permit them to watch their own bodies aging, to locate and identify pains; it also denies the comfort of viewing the faces of their companions. Most of all, buried in the underground cells that are repeatedly likened to ‘tombs’, with scorpions and cockroaches (the companions of death) providing the sole evidence of life, the lack of light increases the association with death: of death-in-life or life-in-death. The prisoners’ instinctive struggle to live becomes despairing when they are already, alive, embedded in the long death of their tombs. ‘As for me,’ Salim concedes:

I quickly discovered that the instinct of self-preservation would not help me survive. That instinct we share with animals was now out of order as well. How could one stay alive in that hole? Why bother dragging this 112

body, broken and disfigured, into the light? We had been placed in conditions designed to prevent our instinct from envisaging the future. I realized that time had meaning only in the movement of beings and things, whereas we were reduced to the immobility and eternity of the material world. We were in a motionless present. The unfortunate soul who looked back or peered into the future rushed headlong into death. The present left only enough space for its own unfolding. You had to keep to the immutable instant, and not think about it. A realization that doubtless saved my life. (29)

The darkness of the cell collapses timed life into the appearance of a timeless death, and Salim realizes that to give in to nostalgia or future dreaming will drive him mad with grief. In this way, the withholding of a conception of time during their life sentence becomes a crucial aspect to the soldiers’ punishment.57 Time may only be understood through the body, and its withholding destroys all hope. In this way Salim comes to understand time as ‘a giant hourglass, in which each grain of sand was a speck of our skin, a drop of our blood, a tiny breath of oxygen lost to us as time descended toward the abyss where we lay’ (1). Theirs is a punishment delivered through the manifestation of death even while life itself is prolonged, a condition intended to stage the sovereign’s total control over the bodies of his subjects. Ben Jelloun perfectly dramatises the citizen body’s vulnerability to sovereign power, and the latter’s conflicting objectives toward the body that transgresses its laws: the desire to maintain it (even for the purposes of torture) held in balance with wanting it destroyed. The soldiers are punished for the highest treason: an attempt on the sovereign’s life. Salim recognizes that the punishment is to be death, but a slow and hopeless death, in which:

The guards’ mission was to keep us on the verge of death for as long as possible. Our bodies were to endure a gradual decomposition. Suffering had to be stretched out over time, allowed to spread slowly, sparing no organ, no patch of skin, rising from the toes to the hair, circulating among the folds, between the wrinkles, insinuating itself like a needle seeking a vein into which to inject its venom. (11)

57 ‘Like the fence of the camp,’ Agamben observes, ‘the interval between death sentence and execution delimits an extratemporal and extraterritorial threshold in which the human body is separated from its normal political status and abandoned, in a state of exception, to the most extreme fortunes’ (Homo Sacer 159). 113

Even in the maintenance of life, the sovereign’s purpose is to inject disease into every ‘organ’, every ‘patch of skin’ in the prisoners’ bodies. The prisoner body is claimed as the property of the sovereign. Tazmamart functions by making of the prisoners’ own bodies their worst and most intimate prisons. Salim conjectures throughout the novel that the conditions of his imprisonment must have been carefully designed to destroy willpower and faith through attacking the body: ‘For instance, we were allowed five quarts of water a day. Who had specified this amount? Doctors, probably’ (4). He surmises that ‘the pit’ was ‘turned into a dying-hole’ by ‘engineers and doctors […] studying all the possibilities for prolonging suffering and postponing death until the very last instant’ (20). In a strange perversion of their bond to do no harm and to maintain life against disease, doctors here have assisted the sovereign rather in maintaining life as punishment, with the aim of fostering disease within the body. Foucault comments that the sovereign right to kill comprises ‘not […] simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on’ (Society Must Be Defended 256). Disease as another form of life becomes a bio-punishment, an intimate weapon set loose inside the body and allowed to take hold through the withholding of medical intervention:

No doctor. That was the rule. Doctors had no business there. Everyone knows the doctor’s job is to struggle against death, beat it back, even defeat it. There, the goal was precisely the opposite. If disease showed up, it was allowed to gain a foothold, develop, take over the entire body, contaminate healthy organs, do its work and inflict every aspect of suffering on the body. All medical attention was forbidden. Anyway, we had no one to speak or complain to (44)

In Homo Sacer, Agamben describes the horrifying fate of VPs or ‘Versuchpersonen, human guinea pigs’ (154) in the Nazi concentration camps, identifying them as belonging to homines sacres:

Precisely because they were lacking almost all the rights and expectations that we customarily attribute to human existence, and yet were still biologically alive, they came to be situated in a limit zone

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between life and death, inside and outside, in which they were no longer anything but bare life. (159)

Here, ‘in the biopolitical horizon that characterizes modernity, the physician and the scientist move into the no-man’s-land into which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate’ (Homo Sacer 159). The prisoners in Tazmamart, subjected to experiment n and in whom disease was ‘allowed to gain a foothold, develop, take over the entire body, contaminate healthy organs, do its work and inflict every aspect of suffering on the body’ (44), who lack rights and yet are ‘biologically alive’, are also, I argue, situated in this ‘limit zone between life and death’, constituting nothing ‘but bare life’. Their bodies have been transformed into the site of disease, in conditions designed by doctors, intended as ‘natural’ torture. The power to kill and the ability to maintain life are held in tortuous balance.

Disease is also, however bitterly, a companion: a smaller (and competing) form of life within the soldiers’ living tomb. It exists at the micro-scale but is networked throughout the body, able to take root and spread under these conditions from a single sore, deficiency or injury into proportions that threaten human life. Viruses as another form of life living within our host bodies take a plunge towards their own extinction, for the life of the human subject and the ambition of the virus are incompatible, and in gradually taking over and killing its host the disease drives itself towards a jouissance in death. The crypt in the novel is crawling with parasites: cockroaches, scorpions— creatures that feed on and are the companions of death. ‘Infectious disease,’ Ahuja explains: ‘is normally understood as a pathological state of hybridity in which microbial species occupy and reproduce within the bodies of larger species (including humans). From this perspective, a disease-causing microorganism is a parasite that threatens the body’s functions, even life itself’ (Ahuja 8).

The bodies of these political prisoners are becoming altered by their decades- long ordeal, and the loss of their human rights is manifested in the disturbing, less-than- human body these conditions produce. Salim is provided with a torch in order to prepare the corpse of one of his dead companions for burial, and for the first time is able to see the body. He reflects:

I had a lot of trouble washing the corpse. The folded knees had worn a hole in his rib cage, and the ribs had worked their way into the joints. 115

Impossible to unbend the arms or legs. His body was a ball, all bony. It probably weighed less than ninety pounds. He had become a curious little object so deformed by disease that there was nothing human about him anymore. (12, my emphasis)

Of another, he comments: ‘He had lost so much weight he did not seem human anymore. His eyes were bloodshot and bulged from their sockets. There was foam at the corners of his mouth. In that bony face you could read all the hatred and distress in the world’ (36, my emphasis). The punishment of death-in-life has attacked the humanity of the prisoners by attacking their very human form. The corpses are transformed into ‘a ball’, ‘a curious little object’, something that he emphasises is no longer human. The prisoners’ most deadly fights in their isolated cells are with parasites: viruses and insects. One man dies a terrible death by being eaten alive by cockroaches after he contracts gangrene:

The gangrene had spread rapidly. I saw worms come out of the soles of his feet. There were so many cockroaches it was hard to clear them off the body and get it into the plastic bag. We absolutely had to kill these thousands of roaches. A guard brought a poison used by the army against grasshoppers, a powder so dangerous that I had to wear a mask and gloves. In a few minutes, all the roaches had fallen to the floor in clumps from the walls and ceiling. The guard brought a shovel and a wheelbarrow to gather them up. (119)

In a reversal of human exceptionalism, here the prisoner Sebban’s body is transformed into merely the breeding ground for parasites: his body becomes the ground that sustains them and gives them life. The peculiar anecdote about the ‘poison used by the army against grasshoppers’ suggests a similar inversion of scale, in which the army of Morocco, a military body of human beings, must wage war against an ‘army’ of insects who threaten to overrun the country not with their size but through sheer numbers. Deprived of the usual conditions that mediate human success and survival, the insect world and ‘the temporality of dread life’ (Ahuja 9) dominate, inverting the normal structure of interspecies power, destabilising the soldiers from the pedestal of the ‘human’ to become the lowest and least able to survive in these conditions.

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Salim’s responsibility in cleaning the dead bodies illustrates his own position within the prison hierarchy. He is virtually without power, save for when he proves useful to the guards in cleaning the rotted bodies of his companions. The guards are so repulsed by the death-in-life of the prison-tomb that they do not want to enter: they are willing instead to delegate the task of disposing of the dead to Salim to avoid touching the infected, parasite-ridden, ‘no-longer-human’ bodies wholly subsumed in the realm of the abject. It is this very abjection of the corpses that assigns a modest power to Salim. He is not empowered to change their condition in life: however, in responding to the guards’ disgust and overcoming his own apprehension to prepare the bodies for a Muslim burial, he is able to reassert humanity for the corpses, and the memory they leave behind in those who remain underground.

The child soldier

I’m not some cute kid on account of how I’m hunted by the gnamas of lots of people. (Gnamas is a complicated Black Nigger African Native word that I need to explain so French people can understand. According to the Glossary, a gnama is the shadow of a person that remains after death. The shadow becomes an immanent malevolent force which stalks anyone who has killed an innocent victim.) And I killed lots of innocent victims over in Liberia and Sierra Leone where I was a child doing tribal warfare, and where I got fucked-up on lots of hard drugs.

(Kourouma Allah is Not Obliged 4)

The image of the prisoner, as we have seen, is one of incarceration: containment within a limited space, often in degrading conditions, and forcible segregation from the wider population.

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This is not the case of the child soldier.58 The child soldier retains a certain liberty of movement, moving with the camp, not conforming to the usual image of the prisoner behind bars. And yet, the child soldier is a prisoner: of the commanding officer, the military unit into which they have been conscripted, even the ideology they purport to defend. The 2007 Paris Principles59 defines the child ‘associated with an armed force or armed group’ as:

any person below 18 years of age who is or who has been recruited or used by an armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to children, boys, and girls, used as fighters, cooks, porters, messengers, spies or for sexual purposes. It does not only refer to a child who is taking or has taken a direct part in hostilities. (7)

There are tens—some sources estimate hundreds—of thousands of active child soldiers in the world’s armed conflicts. Children become soldiers under the harshest conditions. The United Nations60 reports that: ‘There are many ways for children to become associated with armed forces and groups. Some children are abducted and beaten into submission, others join military groups to escape poverty, to defend their communities, out of a feeling of revenge or for other reasons’. Children as young as eight years old are used not only in fighting, but also in ‘support functions’ such as ‘cooks, spies, messengers and even sex slaves’ or suicide bombers (UN).61 Many sources document instances where the child soldier’s loyalty is demanded (or forged) through the

58 ‘The African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1990) defines a child as a person younger than eighteen years of age and does not stipulate a different age for nonparticipation in armed conflict’; however, in African societies children are often perceived as ‘having the responsibility to contribute to the livelihood of their families’, leading to less ‘distinction between childhood and adulthood’ (Kearney 71).

59 The Paris Principles: The Principles and Guidelines on Children Associated with Armed Forces or Armed Groups. 60 The United Nations Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict. 61 The United Nations goes on to observe: No matter their role, child soldiers are exposed to acute levels of violence – as witnesses, direct victims and as forced participants. Some are injured and have to live with disabilities for the rest of their lives. Girls are also recruited and used by armed forces and groups. They have vulnerabilities unique to their gender and place in society and suffer specific consequences including, but not limited to, rape and sexual violence, pregnancy and pregnancy-related complications, stigma and rejection by families and communities. (United Nations) 118 desecration of familial ties, in which the child soldier is required to slaughter the members of their immediate family. This violence weds the child soldier to the militia that demands it: by sacrificing their parents in order to live, the child is christened in the most extreme way into bloodshed, numbing the impact of future murders. They also ‘prove’ their obedience to the militia while destroying the greatest threat to military loyalty in the natural kinship of the family. Perhaps most importantly, this violence corrupts innocence and makes the child soldier themselves a monster. No enemy force has killed their parents: they killed them with their own hands. No external person or body can be feared and despised, or prove the source of dreams for revenge: this activates a splitting of the self between past (child) and present (soldier). Following an often bloody inauguration to the unit, child soldiers move with the adult soldiers, witnessing violence, providing ‘support’ services, including sexual slavery, and committing atrocities against ‘the enemy’ (too often, civilians). For these reasons, the child soldier troubles the easy separation of victim and perpetrator, prisoner and agent of despotic power. The challenging figure of the child soldier represents a crisis in the global politics of empathy.

The child soldier is a relatively recent fixture in African war fiction. Frequent in the literature is the child soldier’s protest of a lack of choice, citing coercion into committing violence against others. The positioning of the child soldier as prisoner is related to the question of agency. While an adult soldier cannot, even under the same duress, be considered properly a prisoner, I contend that the child soldier is a prisoner due to his or her high vulnerability and, in particular, their manipulability. The question of the child soldier’s agency is fraught, and tied to the related problem of the imagined reader’s sympathy.

In fact, the child soldier is so problematic that they are in danger of becoming flattened out as a symbol, absorbed into a persisting negative discourse about Africa as the sphere of rampant violence and lack of human feeling, where ‘[h]uman action […] is seen as stupid and mad, always proceeding from anything but rational calculation’ (Mbembe On the Postcolony 8). Although child soldiering is all-too-common in

119 multiple regions,62 it is the body of the African child soldier that is most highly visible in Western public discourse:

There is, it seems, a place already prepared in the Western imagination for the African child soldier as a subject of violence in need of human rights intervention and rehabilitation—intervention that threatens to mimic colonial infantilising of Africans as needing the ‘protection’ of European powers. (Moynagh 41)

‘The consumption of stories of suffering and violence’ such as those of the child soldier, Allison Mackey observes, ‘has the potential to confirm pre-existing stereotypes about Africa as a savage, inhuman landscape full of unimaginable horrors’ (108).63 As such, Eleni Coundouriotis argues that the ‘abstracted figure of the child soldier cast against a background of the “dark continent” revisited has been commodified as the new authenticity out of Africa’ (203), supplying what is perceived as an insatiable western demand for images of sickening violence, poverty and depravity. The visual sign of the child soldier is more distressing than representations of adult soldiers precisely due to its prisoner status, for the child is implicitly understood by viewers not only as a threat, but ‘as much a victim of terror as its agent’ (Moynagh 39).64 The child soldier is a victim not only of the violence perpetrated against them, but also of the violence they witness and commit against others. Children are highly manipulable group for whom violence is easily game-ified, particularly at an age when their moral awareness is as yet immature.

However, within this framework, the child soldier is too frequently co-opted into a sentimentalising discourse that seeks to sanitise the child soldier of their acts of violence, lacking a nuanced appraisal of that violence and its ongoing effects on the child-as-perpetrator, laying blame with larger frameworks of structural violence and

62 Moynagh comments that ‘child soldiers have been found serving in Colombia, in Sri Lanka, in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in several countries in Africa’ (41). 63 Norridge, Baker and Boehmer contend that ‘such negative framings can be productively challenged, not by avoiding the aversive events of yesterday and today, but by seeking to explore them sensitively, specifically, and with new vocabularies’ (vii) 64 ‘In this way,’ Moynah continues, ‘the child soldier’s is the “sort of life [that] is implicitly or explicitly taken into account in the political work of humanitarian intervention” (Fassin 501), while the soldier’s life is presumably the proper object of military intervention. Yet just as it is sometimes difficult to separate humanitarian from military intervention, so is it tricky to separate the child from the soldier’ (Moynagh 39–40). 120 denying agency to the child itself (Coundouriotis, Mackey, Moynagh). Autobiographies by former child soldiers tend to be:

framed as victim narratives where responsibility for the committing of atrocity by the child soldier is largely disclaimed as either abuse the child has suffered, or the result of drug addiction from which the child must be rehabilitated. The recovery narrative allows for the problem of responsibility in the war to be shifted onto the task of recovery itself. (Coundouriotis 192)65

Within such narratives, ‘human rights discourse favours a plot of innocence corrupted and then restored, or at least one of reintegration into a social world—the plot of Bildung’ (Moynagh 40). The ‘return’ of the child soldier to childhood is at times deployed in such discourses to cover over the atrocities that the child, under whatever terrible circumstances, did themselves commit.

The child soldier raises difficult questions. In identifying with the child soldier as unwilling prisoner, do we implicitly negate or atone for their crimes? If the child soldier is a victim to be pitied, what is the status of the violence—and child soldiers are known the world over for their imaginative and shocking violence— they commit against unarmed civilians? ‘One of the difficulties that child-soldier narratives pose for sentimental social codes,’ Maureen Moynagh observes, ‘is that the child-soldier figure is only with some difficulty made into this virtuous protagonist suffering injustice. To effect this construction, writers have to bracket out the violence committed by child soldiers’ (44–45). This ‘bracketing out’ of violence is damaging in itself.66

The production of child soldier narratives, however in danger of being fetishised, do fill an important ethical role in representing child soldier experience

65 Child soldiers are often treated more sensitively as central figures in fiction than are adult soldiers. Moreover, a primary concern when the key character or characters are child soldiers is the problem of ‘reintegration’ (Mackey 107) and the resumption of lost or ‘arrested’ childhood (Coundouriotis), whereas the same such concern is not at the foreground in the fictional representation of adult soldiers. ‘It is not only a matter of renegotiating the terms for the child soldier’s reentry into their local communities: these narratives suggest that a very different understanding of global relationality—of the “human community”—is necessary’ (Mackey 108).

66 ‘The insistence on retrieving childhood innocence,’ Coundouriotis explains, ‘[…] carries a political danger in that it infantalizes the former child soldier and does not adequately address the effort of political liberation or empowerment where the demand for adult, active citizenship with rights is more pressing’ (196).

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(though the slippage between autobiography and narrative, and the never disinterested process of the memory of violence, remains an issue at stake). Memoir-writing creates the conditions under which ‘the former child soldier effectively becomes a human rights activist: the child who was wronged grows into a righter of wrongs through the act of writing (or narrating)’ (Moynagh 48). The child, in narrating the wrongs of the past, is seen to be ‘writing/righting’ them even as complicit agents of violence. The identities of prisoner and perpetrator are so intermixed in the child soldier as to complicate not only the motivation for but also the product of such ‘speech’: for ‘while a victim identity seems important to reclaiming childhood and some measure of innocence for the child narrator, victimhood also becomes by extension the condition of possibility for telling a story of perpetration that would otherwise be silenced’ (Coundouriotis 193–194). It is the victimised, prisoner status of child soldiers that unlocks their speech, and that generates market interest in their stories: the narratives of adult soldiers, however coerced into participating in violence, are less palatable because their narrators are less available to reader sympathy. The child soldier is both a prisoner and a weapon, and it is this dual action and the blurring of meaning between the two that creates such interest in the problem of agency.67

Narratives featuring child soldiers tend to focalise through them as the narrator, or by placing them as the (flawed) protagonist or antihero.68 The child soldier is at the centre of the narrative, but often functions as a witness narrator, swept up in a tide of violence in which their participation is obliquely drawn at best. Ahmadou Kourouma uses just such a device in his novel Allah is Not Obliged (whose intended ‘full title’, the narrator tells us on the first page, is ‘Allah is not obliged to be fair about all the things he does here on earth’), in which the narrator is carried along in the breathless format of the picaresque (Moynagh 51). Kourouma’s narrative is filled with crass language intended to shock, and meticulously detailed scenes of violence. However, markedly

67 The child soldier in fiction and autobiography creates an uncomfortable crisis in representational ethics: with whom are we as readers intended to identify? To what extent can we absolve the child soldier of responsibility for their actions, and if no responsibility is laid against them due to their youth and extreme vulnerability, what effect does this have on their agency and the mediations by which we ‘hear’ their stories? In many fictional accounts of child soldiering, child soldiers ‘are meant to represent no one real person, while at the same time representing many’ (Mackey 107). Mackey observes that many such narratives are produced ‘to a certain extent, from within the geographical and intellectual space of the global north’ (108) by writers living and writing abroad, whether voluntarily or in exile—in which case, she asks, ‘what do we make of the structures of address in these fictional testimonies of child soldier experiences written for Westernized readers?’ (108). 68 Indeed, Moynagh has argued for the child solder as contemporary incarnation of the pícaro (52). 122 absent are descriptions of violence inflicted by the narrator, the child soldier Birahima. Birahima tells us at the start of the narrative that he ‘killed lots of innocent victims over in Liberia and Sierra Leone where I was a child doing tribal warfare’ (4), but while we hear details of the violence committed by other child soldiers, the deaths of those ‘innocent victims’ who died at his own hands are curiously missing. The absence of the gory details of Birahima’s own crimes presents a challenge to interpretation: is Kourouma the author fostering our empathy with the child soldier by withholding his crimes? Or does it constitute Birahima’s own turning-away from culpability? Birahima repeatedly identifies himself as ‘your humble servant, the blameless, fearless street kid’ (187). His persistent claim to ‘blamelessness’ could read as ironic, but rather seems to suggest a nervous refrain, his bravado revealing the core of a poignant anxiety, the negation of which is to be found in the glossing of all violent events in which he takes part. In the final pages of the novel Birahima describes himself as standing in a small group around his aunt’s freshly dug grave reciting prayers for her soul. He is afraid that their prayers may not be heeded:

because out of the seven people around the mass grave where the aunt was buried, three of us were criminals. The seven people were: the doctor, the generalissimo’s aide-de-camp, Yacouba, Sekou, Saydou, Sekou’s coadjutor, and me, Birahima, the blameless, fearless street kid. The three criminals who feared neither God nor man on account of who Allah couldn’t accept the prayers were Saydou, Yacouba, and Sekou. That’s why we had to say more prayers, more suras, lots more prayers for the repose of my aunt’s soul. (213)

Birahima lists ‘three of us’ as ‘criminals’ at his aunt’s graveside, first seeming to identify himself in this rank but then backing away and notably omitting himself from this category. He seems to rely, with some self-consciousness, on his youth as testament to his innocence regardless of what terrors he commits.

Kourouma’s narrative belongs to what Coundouriotis has termed ‘the deployment of a less literal, more ironic and even allegorical method of narrative representation’ for child soldiers, ‘the ones that take this abstracted figure and parse it, examining it as an invented discourse about Africa’ (203). However, the ‘ironic’ shifting of blame in novels like Allah is Not Obliged is not evident in several other

123 highly effective child soldier narratives, which often rely on a sensitive realism in order to apply pressure to the question of child soldier agency and complicity. In Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Adichie shows the young, sympathetic character Ugwu participating in a gang rape after he has been kidnapped and forced into the Biafran military. Ugwu returns to a bar full of out-of-control soldiers angered by the lack of beer, to find that:

The bar girl was lying on her back on the floor, her wrapper bunched up at the waist, her shoulders held down by a soldier, her legs wide, wide ajar. She was sobbing, ‘Please, please, biko.’ Her blouse was still on. Between her legs, High-Tech was moving. His thrusts were jerky, his small buttocks darker-coloured than his legs. The soldiers were cheering. (365)

When the other soldiers jeer at Ugwu, nicknamed ‘Target Destroyer’, for being afraid to rape the girl, he responds aggressively to the peer pressure in order to protect his masculinity:

‘Who is afraid?’ he said disdainfully. ‘I just like to eat before others, that is all.’

‘The food is still fresh!’

‘Target Destroyer, aren’t you a man? I buwka nwoke?’

On the floor, the girl was still. Ugwu pulled his trousers down, surprised at the swiftness of his erection. She was dry and tense when he entered her. He did not look at her face, or at the man pinning her down, or at anything at all as he moved quickly and felt his own climax, the rush of fluids to the tips of himself: a self-loathing release. He zipped up his trousers while some soldiers clapped. Finally he looked at the girl. She stared back at him with a calm hate. (365)

Unlike Birahima, Ugwu recognises that what he has done is wrong, later feeling ‘stained and unworthy’ in the face of Kainene’s ‘magnificent’ loathing of sexual predators (398). But he cannot do anything to change what he has done. Returning to his hometown after the fighting, he is surprised to see the difference in his beloved, quick- witted sister Anulika: ‘Her face was covered in blackheads and pimples and she did not

124 look him in the eyes as she said, in tears, “You did not die, you did not die.” He was startled to discover that the sister he had remembered as beautiful was not at all. She was an ugly stranger who squinted with one eye’ (420). Ugwu is seemingly punished for his rape of the bar girl when he finds that his own sister suffered the same fate at the hands of soldiers like himself. Nnesinachi tells him that the five soldiers raped her near the stream:

‘They said the first one that climbed on top of her, she bit him on the arm and drew blood. They nearly beat her to death. One of her eyes has refused to open well since.’

Later, Ugwu took a walk around the village, and when he got to the stream, he remembered the line of women going to fetch water in the mornings, and he sat down on a rock and sobbed. (421)

In Adichie’s hands a scene that may have marginalised women’s experience by foregrounding their relationships with men—that is, offering Ugwu as sufferer of his sister’s rape, and feeling Freud’s ‘masculine’ guilt after the crime—in fact serves to highlight the pervasive nature of violence against women in conflict situations. Ugwu, Adichie makes clear, can never suffer sufficiently: he is always placed outside of that suffering, even when he is its witness and cause. Ugwu the child solder was a prisoner of the military that kidnapped him when he committed this crime; however, the crime occurred outside of the hours of his military service, voluntarily entered into at the bar to protect his own ego. Interestingly, Ugwu is revealed to have authored the narrative The World Was Silent When We Died, again suggesting that child soldier narratives— and the uncomfortable truths they reveal or conceal—are authorized by the joint status of prisoner and perpetrator.

Fellow Nigerian Chris Abani similarly focuses on rape committed by a child soldier, an act particularly challenging because it ascribes the adult crime of not only violence, but specifically sexual violence, to the child. In his novel Song for Night (2007), the child soldier My Luck is forced at gunpoint by his commanding officer to rape, on the confused battlefield of guerrilla warfare in which civilians become perceived as legitimate targets:

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‘Rape or die,’ he said, and I knew he meant it. As I dropped my pants and climbed onto the woman, I wondered how it was that I had an erection. Some part of me was enjoying it and that perhaps hurt me the most. I entered the woman and strangely she smiled. I moved, and as much as I wanted to pretend, I couldn’t lie, I enjoyed it. The woman’s eyes were tender, as if all she saw was a boy lost. She stroked my hair tenderly, whispering as I sobbed: ‘It’s all right son, it’s all right. Better the ones like you live.’ When I came, John Wayne laughed and put two rounds into the woman’s head, spraying my face with her blood. The woman died with that look of absolute tenderness in her eyes. (65–66)

My Luck is left at ‘thirteen, armed and lost in a war with the taste for rape’ (66). His commanding officer demands violence as a means of controlling the child soldiers, turning them into animals baying for blood. In this difficult narrative My Luck is ‘saved’ from is ‘taste for rape’ by Ijeoma, a fellow child soldier who cleans him in the river and teaches him consensual love.

The body of the child soldier remains in certain interesting ways unremarked or absent in the literature: the child soldier as narrator or protagonist typically seems to consider that their own body does not require mention within the narrative unless it is wounded. The child soldier is usually healthy, or at least commences the narrative as healthy and enters a plot of gradual wounding, starvation or disfigurement: as such, the child tends only to comment on their own or other child soldier bodies when they are wounded or dead, and reserving extended comment for adult bodies that are perceived as being in some way ‘Othered’, ugly or abnormal. Kourouma’s narrator Birahima, for example, describes in lengthy detail his mother’s disability, ‘crippled by the ulcer’ (6), and the limp of his adult companion Yacouba ‘the crippled crook’ (35), while his own body and those of his fellow soldiers go unremarked until injured or killed—most notably in his idiosyncratic funeral orations for his dead friends.

The wounding of the child soldier body is brought to the foreground in Abani’s Song for Night, in which the scars inflicted upon the narrator’s body hold a mirror to the scars of a divided nation. Nigeria has been torn apart by ‘three years of a senseless war’ (1). Abani tells the story of fifteen-year-old My Luck, a mine diffuser in a platoon of child soldiers in an unnamed civil war between Fulani and Igbo. The novel opens on

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My Luck’s separation from his unit following the explosion of a rogue mine that killed fellow child soldier Nebu, and the narrative follows his journey through an oneiric, corpse-strewn landscape and war-ravaged villages as he struggles to rejoin them.

Some of My Luck’s scars are self-inflicted. In the chapter titled ‘Memory is a pattern cut into an arm’, My Luck explains that he has carved a series of tiny crosses into the skin of his forearms, marking himself with the deaths of those he mourns on his left arm, and six ‘for each person that I enjoyed killing’ (21) on his right. ‘In the dim glow from the cigarette,’ he muses, ‘the crosses on my arm look exactly like what they are: my own personal cemetery’ (20). The ‘Braille cemetery’ (101) renders his body as the earth, a walking vessel for the nation’s unremembered dead, in which each cross connotes a dead body. Civil war is imagined as a savage blindness destroying Nigeria, writing a legacy of violence in Braille across the body of a confused and mutilated boy schooled in hatred, but who nonetheless strives to recall his dead loved ones and claim his humanity on the field of war. Thus marked by warfare, My Luck is both a character within a text and, by virtue of his marking, a text in progress authored by violence. The tradition of the marked body in literature, Peter Brooks argues, features bodies ‘marked with a special sign’ that ‘imprints the body, making it part of the signifying process’ (3). The string of crosses along My Luck’s arm marks his body’s entry into the novel as a text, one written onto by the divided authority of a state ruptured by civil war. However, in contrast to the marked bodies Brooks observes (in which marked bodies are unique and become recognized at narrative turning points), the orphaned body of the child soldier is merely one of countless others marred and forgotten in civil war. The string of ‘x’s across his arms, traditionally the mark of the illiterate in place of a signature, signals My Luck’s haunting anonymity as the ‘Braille cemetery’ fills his arms with the silenced testimony of the uncounted dead.69

69 My Luck (himself a dead child, we find by the conclusion of the narrative) is not empowered to share and circulate his story via the means of literary production: Abani places pressure on this tension in the novel, which My Luck opens with: ‘What you hear is not my voice’ (1). My Luck is speaking to us not in English, the language in which the novel is written, but in Igbo—and, moreover, in silence:

Of course if you are hearing any of this at all it’s because you have gained access to my head. You would also know then that my inner-speech is not in English, because there is something atavistic about war that rejects all but the primal language of the genes to comprehend it, so you are in fact hearing my thoughts in Igbo. But we shan’t waste time on trying to figure all that out (3)

Abani makes use of words like ‘atavistic’ in a language the child says he does not know in order to highlight this crisis of representation. Not only are we distanced from My Luck because he is a forgotten 127

My Luck’s own voice is silent because the cuts on his arms are prefaced by an earlier, larger deformity forced on him by the military. The platoon of child soldiers have been lied to, maimed and transformed into weapons:

One by one we were led into surgery. It was exciting to think that we were becoming bionic men and women. I thought it odd that there was no anesthetic when I was laid out on a table, my arms and legs tied down with rough hemp. John Wayne was standing by my head, opposite the doctor. I stared at the peculiar cruel glint of the scalpel while the doctor, with a gentle and swift cut, severed my vocal chords. (Song for Night 17)

The children’s capacity for speech has been removed ‘so that we wouldn’t scare each other with our death screams. Detecting a mine with your bare toes and defusing it with a jungle knife requires all your concentration, and screams are a risky distraction’ (Song for Night 17). The cut is also highly symbolic, literalising the schism between the Fulani north and the Igbo south, carving the national crisis of division into the geography of his child’s body. This is explicitly tied to his own complicated ethnic and religious identity: he and his mother were Christians, while his father, though Igbo, was an imam: My Luck muses of his dead father that ‘[i]t is a terrible thing in this divided nation, even in its infancy, for an Igbo man to be Muslim’ (72). My Luck witnessed the traumatic murder of his parents and the slaughter of countless Igbo; it was this that sent him, still a child, nursing deep hatred to the war. My Luck’s body is rendered a warzone replicating the interethnic tensions of the state and segregationist national politics on the map of his skin.

This is a ‘senseless war’ in which the platoon roams through the blasted terrain diffusing mines that they themselves may have armed, and laying more mines in their wake. My Luck remarks wryly that mines are ‘a particularly cruel way to take out an enemy, but since land mines are banned in civilized warfare, the West practically gives them away at cost and in this way they are cheaper than bullets and other arms’ (Song for Night 29). Bodies in this context are dismembered, blown apart or left to rot while covered in a storm of flies:

child soldier—and, of course, an invention—but because he has no access to the channels that would allow him to make his testimony available to a wider, particularly a western, audience.

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Counting the dead is not easy. It is rare to die intact in a war. Bullets and shrapnel from mines and mortars and shells can tear a body to pieces. An arm here, a leg over there in the foliage—all of which have to be retrieved and assembled into the semblance of a complete body before there can be a count. The worst thing about this job may be the irreconcilable math of it: Many of the parts don’t add up. (32)

The countryside is littered with corpses that have become torn apart like the secessionist dream itself. In this haunted narrative, the country is a vast dying-ground. Abani brings the narrative obsessively back to the body in order to invoke the materiality of war as experienced by those caught in conflict zones. My Luck describes the traumatic death of Ijeoma, the novel’s most sympathetic character, after she steps on a landmine:

she no longer had any arms or legs and wasn’t much more than a bloody torso, lacerated by shrapnel, body parts scattered in a way that cannot be explained or described. Instead I read her mind, or her eyes, or something, and understood everything—what she wanted, what she regretted—all of it, filling my head like a bad virus. (Song for Night 36)

The child soldier Ijeoma has been reduced to ‘a bloody torso’; her courage and brave kindness in the face of inhuman actions threaten to become subsumed by the spectacle of her death, filling My Luck’s head ‘like a bad virus’. He proves unable, even in his own thoughts, to articulate the damage the explosion causes to Ijeoma’s body, to ‘voice’ the violence ‘that cannot be explained or described’ (36).70

70 Mackey contends that child soldier narratives may serve as a challenge to western readers’ complacency about the global flows and exchanges that permit such atrocities:

The narratives summon readers as potential witnesses, holding them accountable (however imperfectly) for their own responses. While there are no guarantees, these indirect yet insistent narrative strategies succeed—at least potentially—in coaxing the reader into recognizing vast webs of power and complicity of which we all form a part. (Mackey 100–101)

Child soldier narratives, Mackey argues, ‘employ relational structures of address in order to place the reader as situated, and thus implicated, within unequal global cultural, social, and economic networks’ (Mackey 102). The narratives may suggest the very complicity of readers in the harrowing acts of child soldiers enmeshed in a global net of capitalism (Moynagh; Mackey; Coundouriotis). However instrumentalised, the child soldier figure is intended to collapse distances between the reader and the imagined child, and assist western readers in reinterpreting the global flows of capitalism. However insidious symbolic slippages between Africa and the brutal child that cannot help itself may be, the child’s very openness to sentimentality assists in the production of empathy: a further question may be 129

The child soldier as prisoner is not a:

reassuringly pure and innocent child, but a child who also commits terrifying acts of brutality—who has entered, under whatever coercive circumstances, the social world associated with adult life. Child-soldier narratives actually call into question the conception of the child enshrined in and guarded by human rights law. (Moynagh 47)

The child soldier narrative contributes a significant sub-section of African war fiction, in which the child soldier is both prisoner and weapon turned against its family or culture. The child soldier remains a challenging form of the prisoner in contemporary literature. While the crimes child soldiers commit always threaten to be occluded or effaced (in memoirs as in novels), when they are divulged they deliver an ethical challenge to the reader. The child soldier body, frequently commented on only when wounded, is an important addition to the category of the prisoner body, and has been mobilised as the largely absent centre radiating waves of violence in the texts, and as a tragic mire of innocence and complicity.

Survival as resistance

In unstable states where violence is endemic or directly targeted at certain communities, the burden of life itself becomes politicized. An interesting sub-category of the prisoner body in African fiction, particularly as a response to despotic violence, lies in the prisoner’s refusal to die: in short, upon survival beyond even the realms of possibility. This impossible survival becomes a form of resistance. The focus on the refusal to die, frequently darkly comic in these writers’ hands, constitutes the prisoner’s blanket refusal to submit to the excess of sovereign power.

In Sony Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half (1979), the gorging dictator discussed in chapter one humiliates and murders his subjects, drawing power from their weakness. whether this empathy is divested into a single fictional character, or into children in poverty in general, or into a larger set of referents.

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His primary victim is Martial, his former political opponent. The ‘rag-father’, however, refuses to die. Five pages at the opening of the novel are devoted to the Providential Guide’s attempts to kill him by stabbing, poisoning, slicing, shooting and dismembering—only to be countered with his would-be victim’s stubborn refrain: ‘I do not want to die this death’.

The Guide is infuriated by this response, which constitutes a direct negation of his authority. ‘What are you waiting for?’ (6), he demands, opening scenes of sickening violence:

The Providential Guide sliced his chest open from the solar plexus to the groin, just like you would open a shirt with a zipper. His dangling guts were bled white, the rag-father’s whole life hid behind his eyes, casting his face in such a harsh light that his eyelids seemed prisoner to a silent incandescence. The rag-father still breathed like a man who has just finished the act. The Providential Guide plunged his table knife first in one eye, then the other, and pulled out blackish goop that ran down the rag-father’s cheeks, forming two tears that merged in his neck wound. The rag-father continued to breathe like a man who had just finished the act.

‘Now what are you waiting for?’ thundered the exasperated Providential Guide.

‘I do not want to die this death,’ said the rag-father, still standing as straight as the letter I, blinking his eyelids in the vomit of his eyes (6)71

The Providential Guide slices into Martial ‘just like you would open a shirt with a zipper’, pulling out his ‘dangling guts’ and carving out the eyes. Seeking submission from his victim, the Guide appears to be searching inside Martial’s body for whatever it is that refuses to yield, as though planning to climb inside the cavity of the torso hunting for the defiant will. The rag-father is breathing ‘like a man who has just finished the

71 Translator Alison Dundy has the rag-father ‘still standing as straight as the letter I’ in English, representing proud self-awareness, contrasting the lieutenant who brought the family to be butchered who ‘stood like a letter i, ready to receive orders’ (9). This emphasis is an interesting product of the translation, as the French original reads that the rag-father was: ‘toujours debout comme un i, sourcillant dans le vomi des yeux …’ (13). 131 act’, merging life and sex into death. His refrain ‘I do not want to die this death’ leaves the Guide at a loss. Irritable and confused, the Guide recognises that his power is at an ebb, sucked away by Martial’s comic and ‘unreasonable’ refusal to die. The Guide is reduced to posing ‘like a beggar, pleading’ (7) and asking what death he would prefer:

‘Like this, Martial?’

He fired one clip while nervously repeating ‘Like this?’ He fired a second clip at precisely the spot where he thought the rag-father’s heart would be. The bullets whizzed through him and went all the way through the wall; the rag-father slowly opened his mouth and out came a sentence in a clear, calm voice. The Providential Guide dropped his beggar’s pose and launched into a long fit of rage. He had his long, gold-sparkling saber brought to him and began slashing the rag-father […] The rag- father was quickly cut in half at the height of his navel, his guts fell down with the lower half of his body; the upper half stayed put, floating in the acrid air, its mangled mouth repeating the same phrase. Then the Providential Guide calmed himself and once again assumed his beggar’s pose. Wiping the sweat that bathed his face, he kicked aside the lower half of the body, demanded that a chair be brought to him from the dining room, placed it in front of the upper half of the body, sat down, and smoked an entire cigar before getting up.

‘Come on, Martial. Be reasonable!’ (7)

Martial’s refusal to capitulate transforms the Guide into a ‘beggar’, suffering nervous confusion and ‘rage’. His refusal to die casts questions about the Guide’s hitherto total power over life and death. The Guide repeatedly begs Martial to ‘be reasonable’ and yield to the death that should logically have befallen him; however, Martial refuses to ‘be reasonable’ if this means legitimating the dictator’s reign of indiscriminate violence.72

72 Mbembe contends that colonial ‘commandement’ relied on three forms of violence: the first being ‘founding violence’; the second, violence of ‘legitimation’ to ‘help produce an imaginary capacity converting the founding violence into authorizing authority’; and thirdly, violence ‘designed to ensure this authority’s maintenance, spread, and permanence’. These forms of violence ‘then crystallized,’ he argues, ‘through a gradual accumulation of numerous acts and rituals—in short, played so important a role in everyday life that it ended up constituting the central cultural imaginary that the state shared with 132

Sony Labou Tansi insists on the materiality of the prisoner body under pressure. Martial is not a spectral ideal but a real body against whom violence is not only committed, but grotesquely exaggerated and wallowed in. His ‘guts’ are spilling out of his torso, his eye sockets swim with a ‘blackish goop’ of ‘vomit’, his neck wound gapes open, and ‘blood-black mud’ covers his torso ‘like tar’ (8). Partway through the violence he ceases to be an ‘I’ and becomes instead an ‘it’: ‘its mangled mouth repeating the same phrase’. We do not need to be told the phrase in order to hear the rag-father’s voice: by now we know his mantra (‘I do not want to die this death’), and it continues to bubble below the conscious level of the narration. The violence is cartoonish and yet its unflinching attention to the destroyed citizen body becomes a real appraisal of politically motivated violence in its distressing reality.

What are we to read into Martial’s refusal to relinquish life, even when there is no hope for survival because his body has been destroyed? Life and a Half is certainly not an idealistic book; and yet, Martial’s very resistance, his refusal to ‘be reasonable’, becomes a strong metaphor for citizen resilience. Even after his ‘death’ (because his body has been reduced to a ‘termite mound’ on the floor, and his cadaver has no mouth through which to speak), he returns bodily to continue to accuse his wrongdoers. Upon retiring to bed after his four-hour feasting:

the Providential Guide found the rag-father’s upper body was already there and had horribly sullied his excellential sheets with Martial black. The Guide flew into a rage and fired eight cartridges from his submachine gun at the torso. He made a big hole in the middle of the bed where he had seen the upper body. He stormed around the room for a long time, bellowing, cursing, hurling insults, threatening. Out of breath, he sat down on the nightstand and once again sank into his beggar’s pose. (11)

The spectre of Martial is no insubstantial spirit but an accusing blood-and-guts revenant returning to his status of life-in-death. The destroyed citizen stains and ‘blackens’ the sheets with his gore for many months in his ‘life and a half’. Martial’s imprisoned daughter, Chaïdana, confesses to a physician that ‘… They put a body and a half inside society, and thus had an authenticating and reiterating function’ (On the Postcolony 25). The Providential Guide re-enacts the third type of violence in the postcolonial state.

133 me’ (13), suggesting that Martial’s torso (that appears like clockwork to blacken the sheets of his executioner) has also given an extra half-life to her. His desire for revenge, too, lives on in Chaïdana. Martial returns to provide wordless advice to his daughter, advising her to flee by scribing on her hand in an indelible stain.

However, when Chaïdana exacts revenge for her father’s death by sleeping with a series of corrupt officials (in order to poison them with champagne):

Martial had such a temper tantrum that he beat his daughter like an animal and then slept with her, no doubt to administer an internal slap. When the deed was done, Martial beat his daughter again and left her for dead. He spit on her before leaving and all his writing disappeared from the room except for the writing on Chaïdana’s palms. It took two days and two nights after the internal slap for her to become herself again. Her vagina and stomach were sore, her heart was heavy, her flesh had passed to another stage of human emptiness. (46)

Martial has become a symbol for citizen resistance against a brutal dictatorship, but despite his underground endorsement, he is no perfect role model. His great anger has become misdirected, and the beyond-the-grave rape of his daughter is repeatedly glossed throughout the novel as an ‘internal slap’. After being raped by her dead father, Chaïdana is gang raped by ‘thirteen cascades of militiamen—the equivalent of three hundred sixty-three men. Her lower half was dead’ (49). She wants to drag herself to the river to commit suicide, but is thwarted because unable to stand for two weeks. Like her father, whose legs have been so cut away so that only his blackened torso visits the Guide’s bedchamber, Chaïdana’s ‘lower half was dead’. The excessive sexual violence against her is drawn in the same broad, excessive lines as the destruction of her father’s body, but here the comedic edge falls blunt. The novel features a strange, oneiric, amoral energy that denies straightforward interpretation. Women’s bodies in the novel are the receptacles of sex, from Chaïdana’s horrific experience to the orgiastic affair of ‘Virgin Week’. In Sony Labou Tansi, ‘the industrialized phallus (the phallus as figure and instrument for an industrialized state) requires women to be the repository of its waste’ (Butler 72). Contrasting Mbembe’s reading of Sony Labou Tansi, Butler suggests ‘a reconsideration of the centrality of the symbolization of the orifice in state theatrics’ (71). Sony Labou Tansi’s style produces a grotesque excess of violence in

134 which he implicitly criticises (with at times, a breed of despairing sarcasm) the conditions that allow violence to flourish. However, given many societies’ tendencies to trivialise domestic violence and sexual abuse, the attempted humour Sony Labou Tansi applies falls somewhat flat. Where the political violence written into Martial’s body has a rebellious, resilient quality (suggesting the endurance of willpower), Chaïdana’s fate as a victim of senseless violence seemingly without issuing any political comment is more difficult to digest.73 Mbembe explains that the kind of world Sony Labou Tansi describes:

is a place and a time of half-death—or, if one prefers, half-life. It is a place where life and death are so entangled that it is no longer possible to distinguish them, or to say what is on the side of the shadow or its obverse: ‘Is that man still alive, or dead?’ (Mbembe 197).

In Sony Labou Tansi’s novel, the characters live a ‘life and a half’: and yet, they simultaneously live less than one full life in a political terrain overshadowed by the threat of excessive violence mobilised in order to activate and secure despotism. Martial lives on in death as a destroyed cadaver in order to exact a wild and indiscriminate revenge upon the living. His is an amoral universe. His refusal to die despite the desecration of his body elevates his return above cartoonish violence. In this world, in which the Providential Guide secures power by killing and silencing his citizens, this citizen’s literal refusal to die shows survival for what it is: a resistance in itself.

Captain Yabaka of Lopès’s The Laughing Cry also performs his resistance to the dictator, Daddy, by simply refusing to die. Like Martial, he has been singled out as threatening the stability of the dictator’s government, in this case for his love of freedom of speech:

It was necessary to let every point of view in society find expression. The more one prevented the people’s right to criticize and protest against their leaders, whether justly or otherwise, he asserted, the more one

73 Chaïdana gives birth to triplets who may have been sired by her own father or may be the products of the 363 men who raped her. The excess of sexual violence that led to the pregnancy means that it is epic in all proportions, lasting ‘eighteen months and sixteen days’ (50). She becomes paralysed after having a caesarean section, again forced to repeat the ‘half’ body of her dead father. 135

increased either the potentiality for violence, or the inertia of the masses, either of which rendered the task of government more difficult. (72–73)74

Yabaka calls on his fellow members of government to ‘harken to the voice of the people, that great sound that swelled above their collective march, and which heralded their labours, their productions, their creations, their joys and travails’ in a ‘lyricism to strain the guts’ (72–73). Enraged, Daddy has Yabaka seized on trumped up charges and brought to the palace in the dead of night, ‘[t]ied up like a cassava’ (234–44). He resorts to abusing Yabaka’s body as a means of demonstrating his total control over the latter’s rights and freedoms. He shouts to his soldiers:

‘Go on, you there. Open his mouth for me.’ He lowered his voice a little. ‘Foul snout of a traitor. Villainous gullet of a Djatékoué bastard! Go on, open it for me!’ A yell from the soldiers. ‘Ah! the pig! You bite, do you? You bite? …’

A rain of blows fell on the Captain. They were aimed at his head, hammering and hammering at it till be became immobile. By the time they stopped, he must have lost consciousness.

‘Open it now, I tell you … yes, like that … wait a bit.’

And Bwakamabé pissed copiously into the mouth of the victim. The jet of yellow liquid fell noisily, like a nauseating beer. All the military men watched this scene without a word. (245)

The Captain’s dangerous ideas voiced in parliament have been the source of Daddy’s rage, and it is therefore into Yabaka’s mouth that he targets his stream of urine, exerting his own body over his opponent, humiliating his enemy by washing out the mouth with his own filth. Unlike his other ministers, Yabaka has not seized on and digested without murmur Daddy’s excesses and idiocies, and Daddy symbolically forces Yabaka’s body to accept his waste in order to reinstate the order of power.

74 Yabaka’s vocal consecration of democracy leads others to accuse him of being a puppet of the West. His detractors, sycophants eager to please Daddy, leap up to proclaim: ‘Don’t be afraid of words, we must have a dictatorship: a dictatorship expressed in the interests of the people’ (73), and ‘Democracy must be pursued, of course, but not by aping the whites’ (73).

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Yabaka, like Martial, is exhorted to ‘be reasonable’ (248) and give in to his torture, which is violent and increasingly sexual in nature, in which his captors ‘forced a bottle up his anus, commenting with obscene sarcasms, then they filled his mouth with water embittered with a soapy liquid’ (249) in their attempts to extract a confession:

But man, even if a hero, has his limits. It was in coming out of one of his comas, while he was still reeling in the swamps of delirium, that they succeeded in tearing a signature out of him. When, little by little, he managed to understand what he had done, he tried to retract it. But Daddy had the confession in his hands. (249)

The confession, of course, was the signing of the death warrant for the Captain who openly lauded the merits of democracy. The narrator tells us that there are many versions of the story of the Captain’s death, and proceeds to share two of them. In the first, Bwakamabé joins a firing squad (all of whom belong to his own tribe, the Djabotama), before whom: ‘The Captain was tied to a post in the form of a cross, with arms outstretched’ (253–254). The firing squad is instructed to aim first just to the side of Yabaka’s trussed-up body, then at the shins, thighs, arms, and then on the ‘fifth command, fire at will. Aim at his vital parts, to box him up as well. The head, the chest, the belly. The soldiers, stuffed to the gills with wee, emptied their magazines with great delight’ (253–254). In this first story, the multiple volleys of gunshots are explained as having prolonged the torture and death of Yabaka by drugged soldiers.

The second version, however, tells a more unsettling and subversive tale. It describes how:

Yabaka’s fellow victims were shot to death at the first salvo. As for the Captain, he raised himself three times. Not a drop of blood on his body. The bullets only buffeted him, at worst throwing him to the ground. Three times, he got to his feet, saying:

‘Didn’t I warn you, you Libotama? Ah, you are filthy. Filthy. Too filthy to have the strength to kill me. Never, you hear me, never will you be able to guide the people of this land. As for me, I am innocent. I can’t even feel hatred for you. You are too foul.’

[…] 137

The Captain had, after each of the first two salvoes, risen silently to his feet. After the third he began to laugh. A weird and icy laugh, as if the curse of the gods had suddenly electrified his reason.

“Ehéééé!”

A long, mocking ehéééé, difficult to describe. A long, mocking ehéééé, with his head on one side and his hand at his mouth.

“Ehéééé! You are really feeble … Go on, now. I give you permission … you can shoot … I authorise you to kill me … go on. But I shall haunt you over and over in your dreams.” (254–255)

Captain Yabaka is ‘electrified’ as if by a ‘curse of the gods’. He is merely ‘buffeted’ by the bullets that strike him, and dies only after he has chosen to do so, having ‘authorised’ the firing squad to kill him. He has established his own authority to live as higher than that of Bwakamabé to kill him. After his death, he is survived by an ‘echo’: ‘I shall come to you again and again in your dreams’ (255). Both versions of the story are careful to assure the listener that Daddy’s pestilential spots did not go away after the purging of the scapegoat.

In Life and a Half Sony Labou Tansi tells us unequivocally that Martial refused to die. His refusal is enabled by a satirical magical realism where the ordinary rules of nature are suspended, and his resistance lies in his literally refusing death. In The Laughing Cry Lopès offers a condition that is slightly more complex, in which resistance lies in the story one chooses to believe. Either the series of shots that those in the neighbouring village overheard were a form of sequential torture before death— shooting at his body parts in succession—or the shots struck home in Yabaka’s body, but he shook them off with a mythic force and continued to rise to his feet. Either he was murdered immediately, or he refused to die. We must make our choice. The choice itself becomes a political act, because belief in power perpetuates power. ‘A man can root out a mango tree,’ the narrator instructs us, ‘or even a plantation of mangoes, but never the species’ (256). Whether or not Yabaka resisted death, the other citizens’ choice to tell stories about his defiance forms new resistance. These stories destabilise the dictator’s supreme control over the body politic, for the rumours, like the species of mangoes, can never be rooted out.

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Conclusion

Bodies are ‘a place for political mobilization interconnected with other sites of resistance and political action,’ Harcourt contends. They ‘are not external to political processes but firmly enmeshed in them. […] The lived experience of the body, the identity and definitions attached to bodies, inform and are connected to all political struggles’ (Harcourt 23). The prisoner suspended by sovereign power but not offered its protections—whether the body detained in filthy conditions, or that opened to a weaponised pathology of disease, or the ambivalent body of the child soldier—is significant in African literatures not only for its prevalence, but also for its subtle modulation into suggestive metaphor. The prisoner suggests the fate of the ordinary citizen in unstable states. This does not operate as direct allegory, rather calling them up as spectres: as prisoners past or future. Detainment is a threat that comes part and parcel with citizenship in unstable or despotic states in which transgression of the law is no prerequisite for imprisonment. The imprisoned body also metaphorises, to an extreme extent, the condition of citizen powerlessness in relation to the state’s exercise of power. The citizen is geographically contained and controlled, merely less obviously, than the prisoner. ‘Sacredness is a line of flight still present in contemporary politics,’ Agamben reflects: ‘a line that is as such moving into zones increasingly vast and dark, to the point of ultimately coinciding with the biological life itself of citizens’ (Agamben Homo Sacer 115). The prisoner body is marked out not only in dissident action, for all ordinary activity may be politicised under unstable conditions.

The fictional prisoner’s survival as signifying resistance is illustrated not only in the comic-grotesque, but also in realist works. Ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light mirrors life in its evocation of the punishing struggle for survival at Tazmamart. It is based on the testimony of a survivor of the desert gaol, where prisoners were detained for eighteen years after the failed assassination attempt upon Hassan II. The prisoners were eventually freed when word of the prison’s existence became known and international pressure was brought to bear upon the king. In the novel, Salim is removed from the low ceiling of his cell on which he had banged his head ‘like clockwork’ when first imprisoned (4). On his painful return home:

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I lay down on the floor, under the table. I curled up like a wounded animal. I changed position, got up, banged my head against the low table and fell back onto the carpet, stunned, completely lost.

It was October 29, 1991. I had just been born. (187)

Salim is re-‘born’ from the dark, death-like womb of the underground cell by knocking his head against the table under which he huddles. Upon their release, the prisoners hear that Tazmamart ‘no longer exists’, the damning evidence of the prison grounds having been destroyed. While in prison Salim had held that memory paved the way for death: ‘[t]o remember was to die. It took me some time to realize that the enemy was memory’ (17). However, after his release, Salim reavows the power of memory in countering official denials of the prisoners’ experience: ‘Even if the soldiers manage to erase all trace of the dungeon, they will never erase from our memories what we endured there. Ah, my memory, my friend, my treasure, my passion! We must hang on. We must not fail’ (179). The novel concludes with the tentative promise of a multitude of stories and rumours that may destabilise the dominant narrative of the regime—a practice learned inside the prison walls. His mother asks: ‘Tell me … It seems that Tazmamart never existed?’ Salim responds in the narrative’s final paragraph:

So they say. It doesn’t matter. It’s true, it never existed. I have no desire to go and see for myself. Apparently, a small forest of old oak trees has moved over there to cover the huge pit. They even say the village is going to change its name. They say … They say … (190)

Ben Jelloun’s project in the novel has been to highlight the brutal potential of state power to manage the biological life of the prisoner. Tazmamart, the hidden gaol concealed from the world, is a necropolitical space in which the political prisoners are truly ‘subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe ‘Necropolitics’ 40). In a very different register from the unlikely survivals of Captain Yabaka and Martial (whose survival is partial or doomed, functioning largely to give hope to grassroots resistance groups), Salim and the ‘disappeared’ soldiers demonstrate their resistance by sharing their stories and, at a more basic level, by clinging to life.

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Chapter 3: Women, land and nationalism

The political self is not distinct from the body. Our experience of ourselves, our cultural, political and social identity, is an embodied one, determined by our relations to other bodies. In order to lodge bodies in their physical and social particularities, theoretically we have to move from the instrumentalizing of the body as an object, to understanding the body as a subject, central to power, gender and culture, by acknowledging the fleshly bodies of women—in birth, breastfeeding, menstruating, their material experience of sex, pregnancy, violation, rape—and thus bringing the experiences of bodies into political discourse.

(Harcourt Body Politics in Development: Critical Debates in Gender and Development 24)

The woman’s body is, and always has been, at the heart of the intersection between politics and aesthetics. Her body has been co-opted for nationalistic propaganda and is also, due to an ancient and persistent symbolic correspondence between women’s bodies and land, readily open to confusion with place. This chapter will explore women’s bodies as metonymy for the land in post-colonial African literatures, focusing on how writers have scrutinised the woman’s body in order both to recognise women’s often fraught position and to provide political commentary on the state. This chapter will explore significant figurations of the maternal body and land; weaponised rape as symbolic land claiming and its relationship with ethnic cleansing in conflict situations; and African women’s bodies overseas as metonymising an imagined ‘Africa’. Through these examples I will argue that African writers deploy the shorthand of woman-as-land in order to highlight prevalent social understandings of women’s bodies as a space to be claimed within nationalist or tribalist discourses, and to call attention to the continuing work to be done in ensuring women’s safety in conflict situations.

The strong association between women’s bodies and place is present in many cultures. The earth is watered by the sky and yields crops, mirroring feminine and 141 masculine roles in childbirth. The cross-cultural presence of this creation story heightens the symbolic credentials tying together women and land. In Nuruddin Farah’s novel Maps, the Somali child Askar learns: that ‘it was the earth which received the rains, the sky from whose loins sprang water and therefore life; that the earth was the womb upon whose open fields men and women grew food for themselves and for their animals’ (134). This ‘ancient metaphor equating land with women and women with land’ is also reproduced in Semitic religions, as in the Quran ‘(Surah II, verse 223: “Your women are a tilth for you [to cultivate] so go to your tilth as ye will”‘ (Faulkner 16) and the Bible: ‘Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground’ (King James Bible Deuteronomy 28:4).

The association of land as feminine also yields the correlated understanding of the woman’s body as terrain. Irigaray contends that women are imagined as a location inhabitable by men: ‘A doubling, sought after by man, of a female placeness. She is assigned to be place without occupying a place. Through her, place would be set up for man’s use but not hers’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference 52). A woman may be ‘entered’ and ‘occupied’ by men; the mother is a person and yet a place for the baby inside her. For Irigaray, this inseparability creates a confusion for men that is both destabilising and threatening.

The well-affirmed concordance between women and place has also contributed to the masculinisation of European space and the corresponding feminisation of non- European space, particularly in the colonies. The space of the New World is perceived as occupied by feminine nature to be tamed rather than masculine order and civilisation: European travellers coded themselves as rational and consequently masculine, whereas non-Europeans were cast as irrational and therefore womanly. Although ‘the rise of science (Wissenschaft) in the Enlightenment period had overthrown the biblical story of creation and replaced the authority of religion with that of reason,’ Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze explains,

nature was still conceptualized as a hierarchical system (the Great Chain of Being), in which every being, from humans down to fauna and flora, had a ‘naturally’ assigned position and status. […] At the top of the human chain in this general schema was positioned the European, while

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non-Europeans were positioned at lower points on the scale of a supposed human, rational and moral, evolutionary capacity. (4–5)

The roots of Enlightenment era racial hierarchisation thereby folded neatly into pre- existing discourses viewing women as irrational, creatures of the body rather than of the mind. Africa in particular became cast as the labouring body to Europe: a ‘dark’ space of feminine, strange, savage and emotional power, a ‘heart of darkness’ into whose ‘warm virgin forests’ traders and adventurers might ‘thrust’ themselves at their own risk (Wainaina ‘How to Write about Africa’). V.Y. Mudimbe observes that: ‘Nineteenth- century writers, focusing on differences between Africa and Europe, tended to demonstrate the complete lack of similarity between the two continents and attempted to prove that in Africa the physical environment, the flora and fauna, as well as the people, represent relics of a remote age of antiquity’ (107). Africa was viewed as being pre-masculine, existing prior to the imposition of logic and order. Mohanram explains that in such discourses:

there is an embodiment of blackness with a simultaneous disembodiment of whiteness, a disembodiment accompanied by two other tropes at the level of discourse. First, whiteness has the ability to move; second, the ability to move results in the unmarking of the body. In contrast, blackness is signified through a marking that is always static and immobilizing. (4)

Blackness, like womanhood, serves to mark the body as different from that viewed by colonisers and missionaries as the original body created in God’s image, the European male. At the same time, blackness renders the body ‘static’ and fixed in place, snared within boundaries that contain it and over which the white male body alone is authorised to trespass. New lands are imagined as slumbering women awaiting the voyaging male’s arrival to sew colonial seed and bring a rich harvest: land is Demeter and Persephone, Circe or Penelope, but the questing Odyssean conqueror is always male. ‘Images of the body of the Other,’ Boehmer argues, ‘are conflated with those of the land, unexplored land too being seen as amorphous, wild, seductive, dark, open to possession’ (269–270).

The association of women with place and immobility is also replicated in their symbolic timelessness. Just as the changing seasons are superficial, marking the 143 essential changelessness of land over time, so too does one woman symbolically reach back into history through the maternal line. ‘“Pre-” is woman’s time,’ Harry Brod explains:

Just as in the phylogenetic story of ‘mankind’, ‘prehistory’ refers to a more matrifocal era, before the linguistic law of the written record inscribed history as male by forgetting women’s oral history, so in psychoanalysis’s ontogenetic tale the ‘pre-oedipal’ designation obscures the central matrifocality of the early years of development, considering them as mere prelude to the ostensibly more crucial patrifocal period of gender formation. (Brod 238)

Women’s (or ‘woman’s’) apparent timelessness therefore recalls an unbroken link with an ancient past and justifies the claim of closeness with or ownership of the land, representing fixedness in one place and a set of cultural traditions. As ‘the main socialisers of small children’, Yuval-Davis and Anthias explain, women are often seen in the role of ‘ideological reproducers’ or ‘“cultural carriers” of the ethnic group […] They may be required to transmit the rich heritage of ethnic symbols and ways of life to the other members of the ethnic group, especially the young’ (9). These factors contribute to the woman’s body being ‘posited as unchanging, constant, and timeless, just as are notions of space. Women are positioned like the present continuous tense form of the verb, but are curiously devoid of the notion of time which is the fundamental purpose of tense in verbs’ (Mohanram 174). However, Mohanram goes on to conclude:

This construction of the woman’s body as embodying timelessness is a feint, in that her body shifts in meaning according to the needs of history, nation and men, and signifies differently according to race, imperialism, nation or decolonization. Her body is enclosed, incarcerated, in a space which has no meaning unto itself but functions to give meaning to others. (Mohanram 174).

The link with psychoanalysis through a ‘pre-oedipal’, ‘matrifocal’ time (Brod) is of course fruitful, as gender theories and body scholarship have roots in the early work of psychoanalysts in theorising gender difference: in particular, viewing girls as essentially different from, and envious of, boys’ sexuality. In The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), 144

Freud admits that: ‘We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent” for psychology’ (212). For Freud, not only is woman’s sexuality assigned a place, but specifically that place is Africa: the ‘dark continent’, a colonial space yet to be entered and encompassed by male travellers. Cixous responds in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, observing of girls that:

at the same time as they’re taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark. Dark is dangerous. You can’t see anything in the dark, you’re afraid. Don’t move, you might fall. Most of all, don’t go into the forest. And so we have internalized this horror of the dark. (Cixous 877– 78)

Cixous points to women learning to write their own bodies; in the African literary tradition, African women are in an important sense also, in writing their bodies, re- writing place. Like other feminist scholars, Cixous forges the link between black and women’s rights movements, explicitly likening women’s position to that of black South Africans under apartheid (877). However, as a number of postcolonial critics have pointed out, although movements for women’s rights and anti-colonial nationalisms would seem to have a common enemy in patriarchal imperialism, women’s rights are often downgraded and scheduled for attention once the ‘larger’ or ‘more pressing’ task of nationalism has been achieved. ‘In the women and the politics of place project,’ Harcourt reflects, ‘we found that oppressive experiences of the lived female body—the confinement, the violations, the invisibility—were often resisted in struggles for citizenship, environmental and land rights. Women engaging in broader ecological or political resistance were often in the process needing to challenge bodily violations, and legal or cultural discrimination’ (Harcourt 23). In part, Young explains, this has been a result of anti-colonial nationalism commonly being organised in an exilic space outside of the home country, while he observes that even those women ‘active in nationalist movements, [rarely] left, or were obliged to leave, their home countries’ (Young 178). In this sense, women’s very fixity in place serves to exclude them from nationalist struggle. ‘The rest, as they say, is history: postcolonialism has been in part driven and defined by the need to continue women’s liberation struggles after the first victories of national liberation’ (Young 178). 145

This has not precluded nationalist movements, however, from co-opting the symbolism of womanhood to achieve their goals. This has included scripting women’s behaviour to accord with more ‘traditional’ values perceived as resisting external impositions from the imperial power, for: ‘the nationalist framework […] thematizes its own priorities: the selective appropriation of the West and the safeguarding of one’s essential identity’ (Radhakrishnan 84). Women’s bodies are so easily conscripted to nationalist causes precisely because of the longstanding association of women with place. They represent home and hearth, land, tradition, place and community: their role in both producing and raising children, often teaching them folklore in the form of orally transmitted stories, secures their position as a timeless link with the (pre-colonial) past. However, ‘[w]omen do not only teach and transfer the cultural and ideological traditions of ethnic and national groups,’ Yuval-Davis and Anthias advise:

Very often they constitute their actual symbolic configuration. The nation as a loved woman in danger or as a mother who lost her sons in battle is a frequent part of the particular nationalistic discourse in national liberation struggles or other forms of national conflicts when men are called to fight ‘for the sake of our women and children’ or to ‘defend their honour’. (9–10)

Within nationalism the woman’s body, Mohanram argues,

functions as a mediator for the male citizens to experience the landscape and the nation as nurturing, comforting and familiar. Given that her body functions to mediate the connection between the male citizen and nation, a female citizen cannot experience the national landscape in an identical way to her male counterpart, in that her body functions to nurture him. But who would nurture her? (Mohanram 83).

In African contexts the co-option of women’s bodies for the purposes of nationalism, as I hope to show, is more complex. Whereas ‘nationalism in the West has been a central force in the development of the nation-state’, leading to a ‘tendency’ to equate ‘state’ with ‘nation’ (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 3), nationalisms in Africa have had a messier history. In Africa, European colonialism created states with no internal coherence, plotted out on maps from a desk in Berlin. These states forged in a test tube in the old imperial centres delineated borders according to European treaties regarding resource 146 distribution, and their boundaries contained multiple ethnic groups (many of which were now spread across multiple states). Colonialism exacerbated and, in some cases, created land disputes and ethnic tensions that would come to thwart the ability of future postcolonial states to achieve a sense of unity, a situation aggravated in British territories by the practice of indirect rule and the imputation and dissemination of ‘tribal personalities’ and labour roles (Wainaina ‘In Gikuyu’). The direct result is that in many African countries, ethnic groups function as competing nations within the boundaries of the state.

This means that while in some notable cases the nation is embodied as a woman, as in Somalia (discussed in this chapter) in which nationalism is tied to a perceived shared ethnicity, in the majority of African literatures the embodiment of woman as place and her relationship with nationalism is more complex, moving away from politicised amalgams used in other postcolonial regions—as in India’s Bharat Mata figure—and more towards the embodiment of specific cultural traditions and links to land. Where it may be uncommon to find a literary figure representing ‘Mother Nigeria’, for example, it is quite common to find women characters who seem to embody Igbo, Yoruba or Hausa cultural ideals and ancient ties to place. Significantly, in African fiction the woman’s body rarely represents a legal state, but rather the land on which the masculine structures of nationalism may rest.

In land disputes, uppermost in importance is a justifiable—and timeless—claim to the land. This signifies why women’s relationships with land (rather than nation or state) is crucial in the co-option of their bodies as political symbolism, particularly in areas riven by inter-ethnic tensions and land rights disputes. If women are perceived to be fixed in place, metonymically associated with the land, timeless (existing in the past, present and future through the matrilineal cycle of childbirth) and implied in the cross- generational sharing of knowledge, they represent not only the land itself but an ancient and immovable tie to the land: and, therefore, a justifiable claim to its title and use.

This has meant that women are often overlooked within nationalism even as they are used to propel nationalist discourses and land claims. ‘If woman is the scaffolding upon which rests the identity of the nation and its male citizens,’ Mohanram asks, ‘what do you do with her materiality? The figure of the woman is symptomatic of all that is occluded in the discourse of the nation’ (Mohanram xvii).

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The body is also, Harcourt argues:

an important political terrain or ‘place’ for feminist politics. Bodies are not separate from politics; indeed, their embodiment—their corporeal, fleshly, material existence—determines political relations. In calling attention to bodies as political subjects, feminists recognize that ‘we are our bodies’. The political self is not distinct from the body. (Harcourt 24)

In this chapter, I will explore significant instances of African writers’ post- independence engagement with women’s bodies’ metonymic association with land, paying particular attention to women’s bodies as place and the working out of racial or interethnic disputes through possession of the woman’s body in conflict and post- conflict situations. This chapter will first briefly explore early influential invocations of African women’s and girl’s bodies in nationalism, before moving to the maternal body as place; the violent occupation of the woman’s body as staking a claim to land title; and the metonymy of the African woman’s body internationally in the new transnational trend of African women’s fiction. First, I begin with a brief exploration of one of the most significant and influential twentieth-century thinkers of race and colonialism, Frantz Fanon, and his own positioning of women’s bodies in relation with anti-colonial nationalism.

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Fanon, women and nationalism

After each success, the authorities were strengthened in their conviction that the Algerian woman would support Western penetration into the native society. Every rejected veil disclosed to the eyes of the colonialists horizons until then forbidden, and revealed to them, piece by piece, the flesh of Algeria laid bare.

(Fanon A Dying Colonialism 42)

In his extraordinary Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs) (1952), Fanon’s project was the unmasking of black male anxiety and a moving portrayal of the bodily trauma and fracturing of the self that is activated by racism, presenting a shocking mirror to the colonial condition. Fanon write of ‘the internalization—or, better, the epidermalization—of this inferiority’ (13), acutely criticising the damage of colonial thinking on the psyche of the black man as his argument unfolds throughout the book. However, as has commonly been observed in recent criticism, psychiatrist Fanon was surprisingly blind to his own problematic positioning of women in this text. Fanon’s position is significant in articulating nationalism’s symbolic claim to women’s bodies and the desire to keep women, imagined as place, separate from and inviolable by the coloniser.

In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon reads the black man as neurotic and black woman as the intimate betrayer, the betrayer of black men from within the race. In many different contexts women have been seen as the access point to ‘race’, activating anxieties about their sexualities and the limits of patriarchal control over their bodies. These social fears are commonly reported in relation to protectionism of white women in fraught raced environments like South Africa, Britain during the post-war ‘reverse colonization’ period of the 1950s, and the United States on the slave plantations. In the United States, slavery was legislated to pass down through the maternal line, ensuring that the products of any sexual union with a slave woman would remain the property of the white master, and denying the usual patriarchal rights of the black man to his children. In Israel, the mother’s identity determines whether the child will be considered 149

Jewish, while in Egypt, ‘a child born to a Muslim woman and a Copt Christian man will have no legal status’ (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 9). Such laws seek to control women’s bodies reproductive potential ‘in ways which will reproduce the boundaries of the symbolic identity of their group or that of their husbands’ (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 9).

However, such protectionism of the woman’s body has also been experienced by black women when they have sought sexual partners across the racial line. When an outside element is introduced, women’s bodies become coded as common property within the race or ethnic group: because women are seen both as ‘cultural carriers’ (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 9) and as symbolising land, the racial other’s sexual ‘possession’ of women is perceived as access to property: all men in the group are symbolically uprooted and cuckolded when one woman elects to have sex across race lines.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon juxtaposes two readings of fictional black women, the semi-autobiographical character of Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise (1948) (I am a Martiniquan Woman) and the eponymous character of Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal (1954) (Nini, Mulatress of Senegal), a novel by Abdoulaye Sadji. In interpreting these novels, Fanon elects to claim absolute coincidence between the voice of Mayotte the narrator and the pseudonym of the author, and to read into these fictional women’s faults the faults of black women in general—augmenting his evidence with anecdotes he claims women have told him over the years. He claims there are two types of black women: ‘the Negress and the mulatto. The first has only one possibility and one concern: to turn white. The second wants not only to turn white but also to avoid slipping back’ (54), drawing on the novels to outline the women’s ‘ridiculous’, ‘ostentatious’, ‘calculated, theatrical, revolting attitudes’ (Black Skin, White Masks 57). He then questions bleakly:

Nini and Mayotte Capécia: two types of behavior that move us to thought.

Are there no other possibilities? (62)

Fanon reveals himself as being interested in black men as people, and in black women only as potential props to shore up black men’s fragile and usurped masculinity. Gwen Bergner reads his ‘scathing condemnation of black women’s desire […] as illustrative,

150 in part, of his own desire to circumscribe black women’s sexuality and economic autonomy in order to ensure the patriarchal authority of black men’ (81). While he finds no flaw in black men seeking sex with white women (as in his analysis of René Maran’s A Man Like Any Other [Un homme pareil aux autres] [1947]), black women by contrast must be preserved for black men’s sexual use, and must not be permitted to voluntarily sleep with white men.

In his second book, A Dying Colonialism (L'an V de la révolution algérienne) (1959), FLN member Fanon takes women’s embodiment of culture and place a step further in his exploration of the significance of the veil in Algeria. In his study, ‘Algeria, Algerian woman, and the veil are […] metonymically linked’—and become, moreover, ‘metaphors for each other’ (Mohanram 63). Fanon writes:

The occupier’s aggressiveness, and hence his hopes, multiplied ten-fold each time a new face was uncovered. Every new Algerian woman unveiled announced to the occupier an Algerian society whose systems of defense were in a process of dislocation, open and breached. Every veil that fell, every body that became liberated from the traditional embrace of the haïk, every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer. (Fanon A Dying Colonialism 42)

In this imaginary, ‘not only was Algeria imagined as a woman to be possessed, but possessing (conquering, penetrating) an Algerian woman was a step toward possessing Algeria’ (Faulkner 847). Diana Fuss extends this criticism to comment that:

in the discourse of colonial imperialism and in the discourse of national resistance, the veiled Algerian woman stands in metonymically for the nation. In both instances, the woman’s body is the contested ideological battleground, overburdened and saturated with meaning. It is the woman who circulates as a fetish—both the site of a receding, endangered national identity and the guarantor of its continued visibility. (Fuss 27)

Where in Black Skin, White Masks the black woman is bitterly accused as a race betrayer when she sleeps with white men and thus undercuts black men’s claim over her

151 body, in A Dying Colonialism in the context of Algeria, women’s sexuality is by contrast idealised and co-opted into anti-colonial nationalist discourse: however, Fanon’s deployment of the veiled woman as nationalist symbol both denies and occludes the real women he is writing about, their rights to their own politics and opinions. Fanon supports demands upon Algerian women to symbolically resist colonialism through traditional dress, implying that women who do not wear the veil are either shamed (in his deliberate confusion between unveiling, possession of the land, and rape) or in some sense not authentically Algerian. ‘A fetishistic logic of displacement operates in Fanon’s own text,’ Fuss explains, ‘as the veiled Algerian woman comes to bear the burden of representing national identity in the absence of nation’ (27). In placing the focus of women’s resistance on the wearing of the veil, Fanon also limits and delegitimises women’s more material contributions to the resistance effort. This supports Yuval-Davis and Anthias’s view that ‘[w]omen’s role in national liberation struggles, in guerrilla warfare or in the military has varied, but generally they are seen to be in a supportive and nurturing relation to men even where they have taken most risks’ (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 10).

Whether framed in negative terms (as in Black Skin, White Masks) or positively (as in A Dying Colonialism), Fanon lays excessive requirements upon women’s sexuality, demanding that they subsume their own political or personal needs to the nationalist cause, one that is deemed properly a masculine pursuit. Fanon remains a hugely influential thinker on the experience of colonial racism and African nationalism, and his peculiar misreading of fictional women as real women and, further, women’s bodies as the property of nationalism speaks to the heart of representational politics experienced by African women. Fanon’s demands upon women’s bodies in the name of anti-colonial nationalism, particularly the collective claim to ownership or possession of the black woman’s body, provides a significant frame for considering African women’s bodies in relation to the politics of place.

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The politicisation of the African girl’s body in fiction

‘This business of womanhood is a heavy burden.’

(Dangarembga 16)

The long literary history of representing African women’s bodies has been fraught with competing objectives. However, the decades post-independence witnessed a revolution spearheaded by African women writers investing in African women as interesting and believable characters in fiction. These literary interventions restage black women’s bodies as actively engaging in national politics (rather than acting as passive figureheads), while attempting also to reframe considerations of the politics of African womanhood. This project is also tied to its deployment of the girl-child, and the new politicisation of her problems and aspirations, particularly in regards to education—as was memorably seen in an earlier generation’s preoccupation with boys in pre- independence bildungsroman, such as Camara Laye’s 1953 novel The African Child (L'Enfant noir), and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The River Between (1965).

The black woman’s body has had a steadily growing base of critical attention, resurging in the 1980s and 1990s with African American women writers and theorists, largely in relation to the continuing injustices facing African American women in the twentieth century. This cross-pollination of African and African American scholarship continues a long tradition cemented in the era of African independence movements, in which the American civil rights movements and African Pan-African and post-war liberation movements drew momentum from each other (Young 219). ‘It would not be an exaggeration,’ Young contends, ‘to say that all colonized peoples drew inspiration from the active and vocal struggle of African-Americans against discrimination and oppression in the United States’ (221), with resistance ideologies and strategies shared by activists in exile in the colonial metropoles of London and Paris (Young 225).

Some African women, as in the case of other women throughout the world, have resisted what has been viewed as the imposition of a white western feminism that does not cater for their needs, calling for different paradigms for thinking about women’s

153 rights in local contexts. African womanism was also cultivated as a locally directed alternative to western feminism more attuned to African women’s needs. Womanism can be compatible with polygamy, and has its focus on sisterhood and strong, practical ties between women, including grassroots economic pragmatism such as contributing to a central fund and offering small interest-free loans for women to start their own businesses (Emecheta). A key feature of womanism is that it should support and sustain African women in their endeavours, ideally without prescribing what these endeavours should be. Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta put forward the concept of ‘feminism with a small “f”’:

I don’t deal with great ideological issues. I write about the little happenings of everyday life. Being a woman, and African born, I see things through an African woman’s eyes. I chronicle the little happenings in the lives of the African women I know. I did not know that by doing so I was going to be called a feminist. But if I am now a feminist then I am an African feminist with a small f. In my books I write about families because I still believe in families. I write about women who try very hard to hold their family together until it becomes absolutely impossible. (175)

She identifies ‘African feminism’ as being ‘free of the shackles of Western romantic illusions and tend[ing] to be much more pragmatic’ (177), arguing that ‘[t]he African woman has always been a woman who achieves’, whether this is in a professional setting or ‘by tending the crops or giving comfort. But she still will have higher aspirations and achieve more when those cleverly structured artificial barriers are removed’ (181).

As everywhere, discussions of feminism have met with resistance in Africa; in the region it is often viewed as a foreign import with no bearing upon African women’s lives or desires (in a similar way in which democracy is satirised as being a foreign import ‘not for Africans’ in Lopès’s and Kourouma’s novels). This is evident in some of the responses to Emecheta’s discussion at the Second African Writers’ Conference in Stockholm where she delivered the lecture in 1986. Ugandan former colleague of Ngũgĩ at the University of Nairobi, Taban Lo Liyong, responded to Emecheta’s comments:

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I suspect that feminism may destroy that which up to now has enabled Africa to withstand all the buffeting from other cultures. […] Let us have all of those women writers, African, Asian expressing their point of view. That is a good thing. But to say—I am going to be a feminist writer, I am going to take a position vis-à-vis this man, I am going to shoot him. That upsets me. (Liyong in Emecheta 183)

Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo gave a rejoinder, rebuking Liyong for his ‘oversentimentalizing’ the discussion, and warning against the idea ‘that feminism is something that has been imported into Africa to ruin nice relationships between African women and African men’ (Aidoo in Emecheta 183):

African women struggling both on behalf of themselves and on behalf of the wider community is very much a part of our heritage. It is not new and I really refuse to be told I am learning feminism from abroad, from Lapland. Africa has produced a much more concrete tradition of strong women fighters than most other societies. So when we say that, we are refusing to be overlooked we are only acting today as daughters and grand-daughters of women who always refused to keep quiet. We haven’t learnt this from anybody abroad. (183)

South African Lauretta Ngcobo added her own balanced view, arguing that it is:

undeniable that the movement in the West enlivens our own consciousness, but at the same time we are at the point when we have not decided fully to follow the line that the Western movement is taking. We feel that first of all, they have not sorted out their solutions well enough. And we think that they have not consolidated it through their own structures. We find that the movement is restricting itself to a certain class. They are failing all together to penetrate the working class. And for us that wouldn’t work at all. (184)75

75 She continues: We don’t think at this point that would be our line but that does not mean we do not recognize the fight that white women are putting up, that we do not recognize the possibilities that there are for us within the feminist movement. After all it was those struggles in the early part of the century which won us the vote. We did not have to 155

Ngcobo concludes that ‘we recognize the possibilities in the feminist movement and whilst we disagree on certain points we are not denigrating feminism’ (185).

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s more recent call that ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ in her excellent TED talk of that title makes a strong claim for international feminism. (The TED talk was sampled by African American singer Beyoncé in her song ‘Flawless’, securing Adichie a 2015 Grammy nomination.)76 Adichie combats the idea that feminism is ‘un-African’ in her exploration of gendered expectations in Nigeria and abroad. The star of the ‘Third Generation’ of African writers concludes:

I am a feminist. And when I looked up the word in the dictionary that day, this is what it said: ‘Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.’ My great grandmother, from the stories I’ve heard, was a feminist. She ran away from the house of the man she did not want to marry and ended up marrying the man of her choice. She refused, she protested, she spoke up whenever she felt she was being deprived of access, of land, that sort of thing.

My great grandmother did not know that word ‘feminist’, but it doesn't mean that she wasn’t one. More of us should reclaim that word. My own definition of feminist is: ‘A feminist is a man or a woman who says […] “Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it. We must do better.”’

Adichie’s argument resonates with that of Aidoo and with certain points of Emecheta’s in bringing the discussion of African feminism into the new century. However, it is important to note that Adichie is in a privileged class position and, as Ngcobo insightfully observed, class is a large—though often overlooked—element in the issue of postcolonial feminism. Alice Walker’s womanism, with its strong emphasis on culture, maintains its relevance in thinking gender relations in African countries.

In African literatures, early generations of writers strove to reclaim the black African body as a thinking human subject after decades of colonial stereotyping. The

argue for that. When independence was handed over the question did not arise whether black women would have to fight for a vote or not. (184–185)

76 The nomination was for ‘Album of The Year’ for the artist’s album Beyoncé. 156 majority of writers who gained access to colonial education in the ‘first generation’ of African writers were men, and the majority of their protagonists and well-rounded characters to whose thoughts the reader is privy were also men. However, early works like Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (1966) and the works of Bessie Head also carved a space for black women’s consciousness in fiction and for convincing African women characters with their own goals and complex motivations. This has, of course, only increased over the decades, and the tradition is strongly motivated by the desire to represent women’s lives accurately, and in turn to call for positive change in gender relations in contemporary African societies.

Before women are women, they are girls. It is in girlhood that their gendered subjectivities coalesce and cohere, forming their understandings of their place in the world. ‘From childhood,’ Buchi Emecheta observes, the girl-child:

is conditioned into thinking that being the girl she must do all the housework, she must help her mother to cook, clean, fetch water and look after her younger brothers and sisters. If she moans or shows signs of not wanting to do any of this, she will be sharply reminded by her mother. ‘But you are a girl! Going to be a woman.’ (‘Feminism with a small “f”!’ 179)

African women writers have increasingly used girls’ and women’s bodies as political symbolism, a trend that arguably started in the familial sphere. As we saw in Chapter 1, there is a strong symbolic association between dictators and the state of fatherhood. The association is deliberately strengthened by dictators who draw upon a narrative of the ‘natural’ authority structures of the family (Schatzberg) in order to locate and stabilise their own right to power. In fiction, particularly by women, we also see this relationship in the inverse: not only does the dictator figure recall the father, but also the father, surveying his small kingdom (in the form of the house, compound, village or community) actively calls up the dictator. The effect of this inversion is to widen the scope to include a more nuanced understanding of the gendered nature of power, and the way these power structures are established for girls from a very young age. Susan Andrade argues compellingly that ‘earlier female writers’ representations of national politics become most sharply visible through allegorical readings of familial structures and institutions and, more important, […] over time, female writers have changed their

157 writing style and now represent the national imaginary more directly’ (92). The girl child’s hierarchised experience of the house from the bottom, subservient not only to her father but also to brothers, uncles, male cousins, mothers, aunts and/or other wives, reflects the citizen’s position when contemplating the complex and varied power structures that organise their lives. While women are frequently objectified in fiction (worldwide), interestingly this tends not to be the case for young girls, even in fiction that otherwise sexualises, demonises or sidelines women characters. Why should this be so? I contend that though gendered as female, the young girl’s primary designator is ‘child’, and ‘the child’ is an archetype with whom we can all empathise. Childhood is a sexless state (though not blind to gender), and this contributes to why—even in novels in which women characters may be portrayed as one-dimensional, vapid, vicious, stupid or, equally damning, merely uninteresting—girl children, like boys, tend to be presented as acting subjects rather than objects. They are children first and this makes them available to be presented as experiencing ‘I’s: they are subjects who exist ever (within the endless moment of the novel’s timeline) in a state of endless possibility without tipping over the edge into finite womanhood. Physically more similar to boys, they are also not denoted, as are women, by their breasts, hips, buttocks—in short, by their bodies—as being different from males and therefore subaltern in society.

Though materially disadvantaged in many respects compared to boys, in fiction at least girl-children tend to enjoy the capacity of seeming (in a way that is frequently not open to women characters) universally relatable. Girl children are often imbued with the spark of curiosity and vivacity that comes with childhood, and which is rendered somehow more poignant by their relative vulnerability. While adult women characters may be vilified or merely marginalised in fiction, rendered as furniture around which the male action may take place, in general children are considered symbolically to represent hope, a sensitive subjectivity, and the potential for a bright future. This extends to pre-teen and, in some fiction, to teenaged girls. Violence against girl-children also increases empathetic power and shock value. We know that in prison a paedophile or child-killer will often be targeted by his co-prisoners while a rapist will go unmolested, because women are commonly considered legitimate targets for violence; by contrast, girl-children still exist in the Edenic state, before Eve ate the apple, and violence against them in fiction assures a stronger emotional response in readers. The trope of controlling fathers and sensitive, strong-willed daughters is prevalent in the

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African literary tradition, and their negotiation of authority is often mediated through the symbolism of the body, in which the young girl’s symbolic finding of herself and consequent rebellion against patriarchal authority is understood through the familial lens of the father.

The writer best known for politicising the girl’s sustained struggle for control over her own body, staking a deeply political claim for women’s rights within postcolonial nation-building, is Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga. In her now classic 1986 novel Nervous Conditions, Dangarembga evokes resistance to colonial ideals through a young girl’s struggle to maintain control over her body, activated through imagery of violence and eating, in which the ‘horribly weird and sinister drama’ (198) of Nyasha’s bulimia is allegorised as her inability to swallow the prescriptive gender requirements made of her by her father. Dangarembga consciously revises Fanon’s position, referring in her title and epigraph to Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth: ‘The condition of a native is a nervous condition’, in order to open a discursive space within nationalism for women and girls. Charles Sugnet suggests that:

there are amazing areas of overlap (and important areas of difference) between Fanon’s theory and Dangarembga’s novel, especially with regard to colonial psychology and the manifestation of resistance through physical symptoms. […] Note also that the epigraph from Sartre/Fanon, because it describes a point of contact between individual psychology and colonial politics, offers an opening for an experientially based feminism to insist that it be “deemed political” […] an opening Dangarembga makes full use of. (35)

Tambu opens the novel with the shocking statement that: ‘I was not sorry when my brother died’ (1). ‘In a way,’ Sugnet suggests, ‘the whole novel is the story of how Tambudzai came to be capable of writing this sentence’ (39). In Dangarembga’s influential novel, bearing ‘the poverty of blackness on one side and the weight of womanhood on the other’ (Dangarembga 16), Tambu and her cousin Nyasha struggle against their controlling fathers in order to be recognised as independent selves, a struggle whose battle lines are drawn along the young girl’s body at the very dynamic

159 moment when it changes from child to woman, set against the backdrop of the country’s transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe.

These themes are reprised fifteen years later in a new context in Adichie’s debut novel Purple Hibiscus (2003). In this novel, as in Nervous Conditions, the father’s desire for total control over his family (a manifestation of repressed pain and the stripping of his masculinity by the colonial missionaries who taught him, stealing him away from his own father, Papa Nnukwu) is activated through sinister, intimate torture behind closed doors. Outwardly a ‘Big Man’, respected newspaperman, businessman, philanthropist and churchgoer, in private life Papa is a monster. He is a vessel of rage, at times flying out of control—as when he hurls the missal at the figurines, or attacks his wife so badly that she loses her baby—and at times slowly and calculatedly, as in his punishment of Kambili when he pours boiling water over her feet. Papa targets his daughter’s feet because they represent her independence: by crippling her, Papa literally imposes his will onto her body, refusing her entrance to the world and tightening the already oppressive circle in which Kambili spends her time, now forced to shuffle painfully between a couple of rooms. The punishment is tacitly authorised by Kambili’s mother, herself a victim of Papa’s violence and with no recourse to escape to another life.

In Adichie’s novel, as in the case of Babamukuru in Dangarembga’s earlier novel, it is not a lack of access to education that perpetuates Papa’s problems but, in fact, the very access to an education tainted with the prejudicial teachings of colonial rule. Adichie deftly demonstrates the tender love that Kambili and her family feel for Papa even though he is a monster. Like Babamukuru, he is a complex monster, destroyed as an afterthought of colonialism and not the man he might have been, having internalised—or, following Fanon, ‘epidermalized’ (Black Skin, White Masks 13)—too much. A bully who inflicts pain on his family, a pain that is all the more difficult to bear because it must be worn privately, Papa’s is an inner wound and he spreads hurt all around him in the radius of his home. He is the most believable and horrifying monster because he is human and immediately recognisable.

‘Both Purple Hibiscus and Nervous Conditions,’ Andrade argues, ‘set their national dramas on the smaller stage of the family, and it is through the family that they make the most compelling case for political action’ (96). Both Nervous Conditions and

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Purple Hibiscus showcase the young girl’s body as the battleground: her father seeks to impose his will and contain her, contrasting her own struggle for selfhood and freedom of movement. In Dangarembga’s narrative, in particular, the young girl’s fight for her body is deliberately opened to political allegory, painted as it is against the backdrop of the national struggle.

The ‘Third Generation’ of African writers, such as Adichie, continue to make further inroads into representing young African girls and their sexuality, as in short stories like Taiye Selasi’s ‘The Sex Lives of African Girls’ and novels such as Adichie’s Americanah, Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail, Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street, and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, among other significant contributions. Explorations of adult women’s bodies and their own deep politics of course abound, as we will discuss in the next part of this chapter, but it is significant to observe the seed of arguably the single-most significant text in terms of politicising female African experience, Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, transformed the tradition through use of the girl-child.

Mother’s body as the earth

The maternal body is another crucial figure of womanhood exploited by nationalism for its relationship with place. Mothers are our entry into the world: their bodies provide our first home. The womb is the ‘place of the first sojourn in which we become bodies’ (Irigaray ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’ 41). In psychoanalysis, much has been made of the primal relationship with mothers, particularly as differing between girls and boys. And yet, the maternal body is too often ignored save in respect to her relationship to the child. ‘Mothers, and the woman within them,’ Irigaray contends, ‘have been trapped in the role of she who satisfies need but has no access to desire’ (‘Women—Mothers, the Silent Substratum’ 51).

‘Nalini Natarajan suggests that the heterogenous nature of the nation can be homogenized only through the figure of the woman who is essentialized and located as

161 prior to history. This unchanging quality attributed to woman also contributes to and legitimizes the construction of the definitive citizen, the ideal national subject’ (Mohanram 79).‘So the individual’s experience of his self,’ Mohanram declares, ‘is always in relation to place/the maternal body—either as part of it or separate from it. The woman’s relationship with place is fraught in that she is the place, separated from her own place’ (83). Mothers’ constitution as place for men and for the child leads to further confusions between the woman’s body and geography: indeed, Robyn Longhurst contends that a pregnant woman is ‘at times is no longer sure where her body begins and ends in relationship to the geographical space that she occupies’ (126).

The mother figure looms large in African literatures, and yet she is often placed at the sidelines of the narrative, save for the period of the protagonist’s childhood. In many classic West African novels set in rural or precolonial contexts the arrangement of domestic life is literally centred around the father in the father’s compound, with the women’s huts arranged to the side—and the narrative similarly told from the son’s perspective, in orbit around the father. If history is action and story, women in such narratives may be presented as passive and static, remaining in the home because they are the home: in effect, they provide the setting upon which the male child may write his story. Landmark texts such as Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (1966), Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (1979), Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1981) and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story (1991) shift the centre of gravity and make women—specifically, mothers—the complex and interesting subjects of these novels.

The familiar equation of women with land is heightened by motherhood, for just as the earth brings forth crops, the mother brings forth children with which to populate the land, leading to the conscription of mother identities in anti-colonial and proto- nationalist campaigns. Mothers afford a sense of timelessness because they connect an unbroken chain back into an imagined antiquity, inspiring a sense of community now on the basis of shared ancestral ties to culture and land. The fierce loyalty of a child to the mother is reproduced in the loyalty of a soldier to the mother country or nation. ‘The female body form,’ Boehmer explains, ‘that most fetishized and silent of body symbols, figures prominently in early nationalist/postcolonial representations. National wholeness, fusion with the maternal national body-land, suggests a hoped-for plenitude, a totality with which to subsume the denial that was colonial experience’ (273). Here we 162 will discuss the mother’s figuring as earth or ground for the child, and the pre-Oedipal structuring of the woman as world.

The mother’s body is brought into overwhelming clarity in Nuruddin Farah’s novel Maps (1986), the first novel in his Blood in the Sun trilogy. Maps focuses with incredible intimacy on the mother’s body and its association for the child with home, earth, land and, more complexly, with the idea of nation. Through this novel Farah, then living in exile under the threat of imprisonment should he return to Somali soil, transmutes the painful separation from homeland into a political allegory, in which the Freudian severing of the maternal bond between mother and child is used to comment on the trauma of international conflict and contested territory between Somalia and Ethiopia.

In the first part of the novel Misra, the surrogate maternal figure who has recovered the orphan Askar from the corpse of his mother who died in childbirth, is enlarged to fill the pages, encompassing ‘the cosmos’ for her small charge. Askar finds in Misra ‘a motherliness which reabsorbed’ him (5). His connection with Misra is instinctive and profound:

When agitated, you stretched out your hands in front of you like a blind man in search of landmarks and if you touched someone other than Misra, you burst instantly into the wildest and most furious convulsive cry. But if Misra were there, you fell silent, you would touch her and then touch yourself. It seemed to her that you could discover yourself only in her. ‘By touching me, he knows he is there,’ she once confided (6)

Misra raises Askar in the bodily intimacy of mother and child. Little children crawl and walk on their mother’s bodies as though they are the earth, their first earth before their feet touch the floor. The space of the infant’s play is the space of the mother’s body, contained within the radius of her arms’ reach. Farah observes the intimacy of the maternal bond with dazzling intensity:

There was nothing like sharing the robe the woman carrying you was wrapped in, nothing as warm, with the bodies, yours and hers, touching, oozing and sweating together—I naked and she not—and the rubbing

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together of the bodies producing itchy irritations, scratchy rashes and crotchy eruptions of skin. […] And so, for years, I contemplated the world from the safe throne carved out of Misra’s back, sleeping when I pleased, swinging from her back as a fruit the thorn which is its twin, making water when I had to and getting scolded for it; for years I viewed the world from a height slightly above that of a pigmy’s head. (78)

Borne in her arms or on her back, Askar views the world from the ‘safe throne’ of Misra’s maternal body. She is his gateway to the larger world. His child’s lack of respect for bodily boundaries and hygiene effects a total absorption with her body, ‘making water when I had to’ while strapped to her back, smelling of the sweat of her skin, and ‘producing itchy irritations, scratchy rashes and crotchy eruptions’. ‘If I couldn’t pluck a fruit off a tree,’ Askar observes, ‘Misra’s hand reached out and got it for me, and when I couldn’t soap the small of my back, her palm was there to scrub it. Likewise, when I couldn’t move my obstinate bowels, it was her applying massaging or kneading techniques which helped me to do so’ (79). Her body is an extension of his own, anticipating his needs—and, conversely, his becomes an extension of her: his body ‘her third breast or her third leg’ (79), sleeping together in the same maternal bed, in which ‘she smelled of your urine precisely in the same way you smelled of her sweat: upon your body were printed impressions of her fingerprints, the previous night’s moisture: yours and hers’ (10). Misra is everywhere defined as Askar’s ‘space’, and he ‘moved about her body in the manner an insect crawls up a wall, even-legged, sure- footed and confident’ (12).

Where women, particularly mothers, are often sidelined in narratives, Farah emphasises the importance of the mother figure by making her colossal in the eyes of the child—the child who has yet to be socialised into a patriarchal society that deems women to be of lesser importance:

Misra, who was his only world, the content and source of his secrets, the only one whom he trusted and in whom he confided; she whose arm, large as anything he had touched or seen, would extend upwards and with short fingers point at the heavens, naming it; the same fingers which cleaned his face or dried his nostrils and had the agility to point subsequently at the earth on which she sat, her thoughts, like a

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pendulum, going from the sky (God’s abode?) and the earth (feeder of man?) and then himself or herself. It was she from whom he learnt how to locate and name things and people, she who helped him place himself at the centre of a world—her own!

‘Where is the sky?’ she would ask him.

He would point at it.

‘And the earth, where is the earth?’

And he would point at her. (55–56, original emphasis)

Askar locates himself at the ‘centre’ of Misra’s world and, to her amusement, identifies her as ‘earth’ instead of ‘Mother’ (134). He surreptitiously eats the same earth when she is not looking. Askar believes with a child’s logic that by eating the earth he may grow tall as the tree that grows in the yard: in his pre-masculine state of childhood, he seeks endorsement from and full union with the mother body in order to be nourished and grow strong. Misra’s body as the earth becomes a ‘devourable’ shorthand for community belonging.

Misra, however, is unlike any of the other mothers in the community, and not simply due to her surrogate status (which at times places her in a precarious position). When she was a child of seven, she was stolen during a raid of her Ethiopian village and brought back on horseback by a Somali warrior as the spoils of war; when the warrior died, she was given over to a rich man who raised her as his daughter before forcing her to marry him—‘the man the little girl thought of and addressed as “Father” for ten years of her life’ (72)—at the age of seventeen. ‘In the end,’ Farah concludes, ‘the conflicting loyalties alienated her, primarily from her self. And she murdered him during an excessive orgy of copulation’ (72). Misra’s painful history of kidnapping and removal to a new place where she did not speak the language led to a series of traumatic dislocations, including a subsequent marriage and divorce from Askar’s own Uncle Qorrax, that have left her adrift on a tide of history dangerous for women. Uncle Qorrax continues to lay his sexual claim over Misra’s body, threatening to remove Askar from her care if she will not sleep with him.

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As a foreigner, Misra is forever out of place. Her body, Askar’s world, is a disputed zone of questionable loyalty, existing in the contested strip of land that is the Ogaden, an Ethiopian territory whose dominant population are Somalis. Her ‘status in the community’ is ‘a controversial topic’ (11):

To many members of the community, she was but that ‘maidservant who came from somewhere else, up north’ and they treated her despicably, looking down upon her and calling her all sorts of things. […] But who was she really? To you, she was the cosmos and hers was the body of ideas upon which your growing mind nourished. (11)

However, as he grows older, Askar becomes taken with the idea that he must separate from the maternal body by becoming a man. He becomes fixated on the desire to assert himself as a separate, and masculine, entity—rather than forming part of a woman’s body:

Now, if I were circumcised, I thought to myself, and I became a man, yes, if … ! What would become of our bodies’ relationship? Surely, I wouldn’t remain an obvious extension of Misra’s physicality? Surely I could no longer be her third breast or her third leg? Perhaps she would put me down on the dusty ground to fend for myself, play by myself, and the relationship which the years had forged between our bodies would cease to exist. (78–79)

Farah dramatizes the Lacanian moment of separation between mother and child: a time when she would cease being ‘the earth’ and he would be placed, like an adult, ‘on the dusty ground’ shared by the community. Circumcision and the entry rites to manhood only partially activate this separation due to his deep need for the comfort of her love, and it is fully effected only when he is sent away from the Ogaden to live with his Uncle Hilaal and Aunt Salaado in Mogadiscio. In order to get there, he must travel across the contested territory and habitually denied border into the recognised state of Somalia:

And so, for the first time in your life, you travelled away from where you were conceived and born and where your parents and your umbilical cord and your first teeth were buried. For the first time in your life, you

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would cross a border that has never been well spoken of among Somalis, for such borders deny the Somali people who live on either side of it, yes, such borders deny these people their very existence as a nation. (126)

The crossing of the unmentionable border constitutes a form of legal homecoming into the state of Somalia, and further, towards patriarchal roots: his father’s nickname is Xamari (102), referring to the city of Xamar or Mogadiscio, and in travelling to this place he symbolically returns to a patriarchal lineage, a homecoming to a retrieved masculinity.

As a child, Askar had declared to Misra on a number of occasions that he would have to kill her in order to be truly himself. ‘Kill me?’ asked Misra. ‘Why? But what have I done?’ (38). Askar believes that on killing Misra ‘only then, would I find myself, alone and existing and real—yes, an individual with needs of his own—no longer an extension of a maternal hand’ (38). In this childhood belief Askar is rehearsing a Freudian anxiety surrounding the identity of the child in relation to the mother’s womb. His confusion about the boundaries of his own body due to their extreme intimacy leads him to believe that, as an adult, he will not be able to exist separately from Misra unless she, like his biological mother, is dead:

‘To live, I will have to kill you.’

‘Just like you say you killed your mother?’

‘Just like I killed my mother—to live.’ (59)

In these repeated expressions of desire to cease functioning as an extension of the maternal body, Askar reveals his burgeoning understanding of his own power over Misra. He is increasingly aware of the power differential between men and women in their patriarchal society—at one point offending Misra when he declares he would rather be ‘sick’ than a woman (111)—and exacerbated by the fact that Misra is a kept woman paid to take care of him. Her position is rendered the more precarious by her foreigner status: specifically, an ethnic Other from the occupying state, actively viewed as an enemy, despite her own personal vulnerability. It is his nascent cognisance of these composite power structures that leads Askar to desire to kill Misra, though he

167 loves her, in order to become a man—intuiting that only in effacing the maternal body can the boy child share the earth with other adults.

Misra’s body’s concordance with land—contested land—is strengthened through regular reflections around gender and nation. As a child, Askar asks Misra: ‘Why are some countries referred to as “Motherland” and others as “Fatherland”?’ (102), positing himself that the distinction may be between ‘People of the heart, people of the head, if you know what I mean’ (102). Misra reminds Askar that ‘Somalia is seen by her poets as a woman—one who has made it her habit to betray her man, the Somali’ (102):

‘You know the poem in which the poet sees Somalia as a beautiful woman dressed in silk, perfumed with the most exotic scents, and this woman accepts all the advances made by the other men—to be precise, the five men who propose to her. She goes, sleeps with them, bears each a child named after its progenitor and has a number of miscarriages,’ she said, stopped—and wouldn’t look at him, as though she were apologetic.

He asked, ‘How do Ethiopian poets see the country?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said and was very sad. (102)

In Misra’s restatement of the poets’ story, Somalia is personified as a woman, a ‘Motherland’ who has betrayed through promiscuity, and who is seemingly punished for her betrayal with miscarriages. This strikes a chord in Askar. The ‘poets’ who write Somalia as betraying woman are, it is implied, men. Misra’s ignorance about her own native country’s self-projection is the direct result of the two countries’ warfare and her victimisation as a child; in her explanation to Askar, Misra encourages more nuanced a reading of the betraying mother than that afforded by the poets.

In Maps, as in much of his oeuvre, Farah is concerned with the deep imbrications between gender, land and nationalism. Farah enlarges the maternal body to highlight her significance to the pre-socialised child; he also draws complex associations between the mother as ‘cosmos’ and ‘earth’ to the child, complicating concepts such as birthright, community and territory by building the deep resonance between mother and place. Purposeful confusions between women’s bodies and land are often adopted in the political imagery of nationalism; more sinisterly, they also open up 168 confusion about the metaphoric meaning of the possession of the woman’s body. This has particularly wide-reaching implications in conflict situations.

Rape and land disputes

The symbolic association of women and land has had a disturbing effect in conflict and post-conflict situations across the globe, where possessing the woman’s body may intuitively be read as staking a claim to territory. In many African countries, the colonial portioning of land has led to tribalism’s becoming a material barrier to national coherence and belonging. Land and cultural disputes have ignited along fault lines: both between states, and within states between different ethnic groups. Tribalism, or ‘ethnic chauvinism’ (Wainaina ‘In Gikuyu’), contributes to instability and civil unrest. These tensions are particularly inflamed when one group is politically or economically dominant and perceived as perpetuating power structures through nepotism, as in the harrowing examples of the Biafran War (1967–70) or the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Médecins Sans Frontières reports that: ‘Wars leave women and girls particularly vulnerable. Women, girls and even young children are all too often raped, abducted and forced into sexual slavery as social and economic structures fall apart. Unfortunately, impunity is often the norm’ (MSF).

Operating at a similarly non-state level, a related problem is presented by militant cultural groups working across state borders, such as religious extremist groups like al-Shabaab operating in East Africa or Boko Haram77 in West Africa, recruiting young men in depressed economies marked by underemployment. Active since 2009, Boko Haram—a phrase commonly translated as ‘Western education is forbidden’—has become infamous for their abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok in 2014, of whom at time of writing 195 remain missing despite efforts by the Nigerian government to find them. At the time of the kidnapping the group issued a statement ‘saying it would treat them as slaves and marry them off—a reference to an ancient Islamic belief that women captured in conflict are considered war booty’ (BBC). Significantly, the mass

77 Full title Jama’atul ahl al-sunnah li da’awati wal jihad. 169 abduction of the schoolgirls roughly coincides with Boko Haram’s shift in strategy regarding land seizure, ‘starting to hold on to territory rather than retreating after an attack’ (BBC).

A campaign started by the families of the missing girls has been shared across the globe, calling on the government to ‘Bring Back Our Girls’. However, a joint 2016 report by International Alert and UNICEF finds that women and girls who have been abducted and raped by Boko Haram are often stigmatised upon their return to their communities:

As they return, many face marginalisation, discrimination and rejection by family and community members due to social and cultural norms related to sexual violence. There is also the growing fear that some of these girls and women were radicalised in captivity. The children who have been born of sexual violence are at an even greater risk of rejection, abandonment and violence. (Bad Blood 6)

The stigma experienced by the girls and women who return from captivity with Boko Haram results in their further victimisation, indicating that further support mechanisms are needed to safeguard their futures and those of their children. Women are particularly vulnerable in conflict zones, especially those related to the seizure of land. This holds for a number of reasons: firstly, because their bodies may be viewed as metonymy for the land, in which their seizure and occupation authenticates occupation of the land itself; secondly, because they are viewed as the property of a given group, and their possession as ‘war booty’ (BBC) indicates a defeat of the men of that group; and thirdly because a militia is usually made up of men, and women1 are required both to satisfy the short-term lust of soldiers and keep them fighting for the cause, and in the long-term to provide a social foundation by reproducing the new group in children. Women in such scenarios are seen both as property and place. Domination of women in conflict zones is understood as an assertion of mastery and appropriation of the homeland.

Further, violence against women, particularly weaponised rape, represents a literal conquering of the land through ethnic cleansing. This is compounded by the woman’s correlation with place, where each woman’s body is seen as a place that had been forbidden but which may now be occupied by force. Weaponised rape as ethnic cleansing is a human disaster that has been deployed in many conflict zones in recent 170 decades—perhaps most infamously in the Bosnian War in the 1990s, but also documented in Rwanda, Congo and Sudan.78 Gita Sahgal of Amnesty International explains that: ‘Women are seen as the reproducers and carers of the community […] Therefore if one group wants to control another they often do it by impregnating women of the other community because they see it as a way of destroying the opposing community’ (Sahgal in Smith-Spark). Women are ‘attacked as bearers of the next generation—their reproductive capacity is either destroyed or harnessed through forcible impregnation to carry the child of the enemy’ (Lives Blown Apart). Systematic rape in war zones has only in recent decades been recognised as genocide, and results in continuing trauma both for individual women and for communities, also increasing the risk of widespread HIV transmission. Amnesty International states in its Lives Blown Apart report (2004):

As a weapon of war, rape is used strategically and tactically to advance specific objectives in many forms of conflict. It is used to conquer, expel or control women and their communities in times of war or internal conflict. As a form of gender-based torture it is used to extract information, punish, intimidate and humiliate. It is the universal weapon employed to strip women of their dignity and destroy their sense of self. It is also used to terrorize and destroy entire communities. (Lives Blown Apart)79

Women pay for their gender in these conflicts, for associations with land and property mean that aggressions against them are intended also to wound their men: husbands, fathers, the collective community or ethnic group—on whom they cannot always rely for support.

As such, the association of women with land holds practical dangers for women, for it stands that disputed land may be claimed by conquering or possessing the woman’s body. The woman represents not only terrain but is also the ‘ideological reproducer’ (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 9) of the group. In conflict situations, women are

78 Weaponised rape was also deployed on a large scale in the Sino-Japanese conflicts and Japanese occupation in Asia until the cessation of World War II, and in the 1971 Bangladesh genocide (Lives Blown Apart). 79 The Report writers go on to observe: ‘Sometimes rape is committed by all parties to a conflict. But in some conflicts, Amnesty International has found evidence that rape is overwhelmingly committed by one side against the other’ (Lives Blown Apart). 171 usually not provided with arms with which to defend themselves, and are subject both to the universal horrors of warfare and those typically reserved for women, foremost among which is sexual violence.

African writers have consistently highlighted this violence against women in conflict zones, expressing it across multiple genres and in different contexts. Nnedi Okorafor describes the stigmatising effects of genocidal rape in her science fiction novel Who Fears Death (2010), while realist writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani and Achmat Dangor focus on trauma for individuals and communities, at times written from the perspective of the victim, and at times from the aggressor, to assist in understanding how soldiers can come to have ‘the taste for rape’ (Abani Song for Night 66). Writers’ metonymy of women’s bodies for the land is so effective and uncomfortable because the narrated violence reflects the horrific reality that millions of women face in conflict situations. Here I discuss some novels that foreground the articulation of territorial disputes through possession of the woman’s body. This involves the working out of community, ethnic or social problems upon the woman’s body, usually in violence.

Metonymising women for land in conflict situations

This use of the woman’s body as testing ground for land disputes is literalised in South African writer J. M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel Disgrace. Set against the backdrop of post- apartheid tensions and the ever-widening social gap, the novel follows David Lurie, an arrogant white university professor who retreats to his daughter’s farm in the Eastern Cape following scandal around his sexual harassment of a student. His daughter Lucy, although attuned to the politics of the ‘New South Africa’, is paradoxically a lover of ‘the old, ländliche way of life’ (113) that had rested on the shoulders of black oppression. While he is at Lucy’s farm, she is gang raped by three black men, while Lurie himself is set on fire and left to douse himself in water from the toilet bowl.

Lucy attempts to conceal the attack, refusing to report the crime to the police and filing a report only for property insurance purposes. She exhibits clear signs of 172 trauma, refusing to sleep in her own room or to leave the house for the market. Lurie is exasperated, accusing her of reticence in the hope of ‘safe conduct into the future, or a sign to paint on the door-lintel that will make the plague pass you by’, questioning her: ‘Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?’ (112). The rape has become, he observes, ‘Lucy’s secret; his disgrace’ (109), having absorbed the attack against his daughter as an affront to himself.

However, Lucy defends her right to view the rape as ‘my business, mine alone’, ‘in this place, at this time’ (112):

‘This place being what?’

‘This place being South Africa.’ (112)

Lucy’s response suggests she considers the violence she has experienced at the hands of these men is no more than equivalent to—and somehow, problematically, imagined as payment for—the violence inflicted on black Africans everywhere under white South African rule. She insists on the rape as being ‘a purely private matter’ (112) rather than one for the police or the judiciary. In doing so, she tacitly allows the men to code her body as the land on which her farm is built: in brutally possessing her body, the men attempt to reclaim their patriarchal control after a legacy of violence, displacement and white appropriation of land. In insisting on the rape’s being ‘a purely private matter’, she paradoxically politicises the crime against her body and connects it to a larger, national, context. However, her imputation of a political angle to the crime tends to ignore or exculpate gendered violence. Lucy has been victimised because she is a woman; and yet, she considers herself to be culpable because she is white. She increasingly takes on a comforting, motherly role, which increases when it becomes clear that she is pregnant. By not reporting the crime to the police, Lucy in retrospect seems to authorise the three black men’s intimate sexual violence against her—and the penetration of her body which is coded both as woman (land) and as white (an enemy formerly out of reach)—as justifiable retribution for past injustices.

This vision of women’s bodies as a metonymy for land appropriable through violence, and in retribution for past grievances, is also, though very differently, highlighted in Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera’s novel The Stone Virgins (2002). In this novel Vera also places the burden of disputed land on the woman’s body, this time

173 against the backdrop of civil war. The bulk of the novel is set between 1981–86, a period of shocking violence in Zimbabwe during the Gukurahundi, a Shona word generally translated as ‘the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains’. Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) engaged in warfare with dissidents from former partners Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) under their Ndebele leader Joshua Nkomo: this escalated into a period of ethnic cleansing of the Ndebele in Matabeleland. The violence that destroyed Zimbabwe during these years is focused and given weight through the specific violence levelled against two women’s bodies: sisters Thenjiwe and Nonceba, who live in Kezi, a rural village in Matabeleland South.

In the novel Sibaso, a Zimbabwean People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA)80 dissident, murders Thenjiwe and rapes and mutilates Nonceba. Sibaso embodies the ‘hysterical male’, a soldier whose mind has been shattered by the dislocations of warfare. In war, Sibaso says, a man’s ‘mind is perforated like a torn net and each event falls through it like a stone’ (82), and if a soldier ‘loses an enemy, he invents another’ (82–83). He sees himself as a ‘hero’ (84).81 He has ‘gone rogue’ and stalks the women as his rightful prey, feeling betrayed by the cause he has fought for: ‘Independence is the compromise to which I could not belong’ (97).

Sibaso becomes motivated to make his attacks while hiding in the hills of Gulati, in an ancient shrine forbidden to the local villagers, but into which he has trespassed for survival. Within the shrine he finds ancient cave paintings, and describes the women who are ‘hunting’ for ‘something eternal’ (103):

The women float, moving away from the stone. Their thighs are empty, too fragile, too thin to have already carried a child. They are the virgins who walk into their own graves before the burial of a king. […] Is this a suicide or a sacrifice, or both? Suicide, a willing, but surely a private matter? Sacrifice means the loss of life, of lives, so that one life may be saved. The life of rulers is served, not saved. This, suicide. […] I place my hand over the waist of the tall woman, on an inch of bone, yet forty thousand years gather in my memory like a wild wind. (103–104)

80 Associated with ZAPU and a participant in the Second Chimurenga liberation war against Rhodesia. 81 In the novel Sibaso repeatedly likens himself to spiders, an animal he admires: notably, a predator, but one who relies on a deceptive stillness. 174

These images of the ‘stone virgins’ and their sacrifice for the imagined male ruler plant the kernel for his future action. Sibaso positions himself as inheritor of a long history, one engraved in stone on the forgotten shrine walls in the ‘womb’ of the mountain. It is the women who capture his attention and forge the link with an ancient past and land, while he perceives himself, by contrast, as being ‘the embodiment of time’ (83). Emerging from the barren ‘womb’ of the ancient rock, Sibaso is reborn with a cold lust for killing. ‘Geographies are my only matter,’ Sibaso admits, ‘my absolute concern. Umhlaba. This earth’ (106). In the bitter fight for independence Sibasho has become unhinged by warfare, unable to let go of the violence. The new context is one of conflict between Ndebele and Shona;82 like the previous struggle against the Rhodesian government, it becomes a war for possession of the land and control of its laws.

In Sibaso’s madness, the context invites a quick and insidious metonymy claiming women as his victims, his ‘suicide’ or ‘sacrifice’. Possession of the woman’s body becomes the way in which Sibaso, enraged at the futility of war and impotent in the wake of the concessions of independence, can reassert his masculinity: simultaneously, he feels he is claiming a space for himself in the land he has fought for, making incursions on his imagined enemy’s home front, possessing the land through possessing women. He works out his own deep anger and hysteria on the bodies of the sisters as his ‘stone virgins’, beheading Thenjiwe and raping and mutilating Nonceba by cutting off her lips, carving himself into their ‘stone’ bodies and claiming possession of them in the most extreme way. His acts of violence are also acts of intimacy, which compounds the trauma for the survivor, Nonceba. He perceives the women as legitimate targets, though they are unarmed and isolated in their rural village which has not seen fighting. In Sibaso’s character, Vera highlights the damaging effects of war, and the ways in which violence establishes the conditions for escalating cycles of violence.

Farah also explores national struggle in relation to women’s bodies in conflict situations in Maps. As we have seen, Misra’s body is explicitly established as the ‘earth’ to Askar in the midst of the land dispute raging in the Ogaden. This leads us to the crux of Farah’s novel. The central political allegory that provides the novel its driving force lies in the association between Misra’s body and the divided and confused geographies of Somalia and Ethiopia. The Ogaden, a disputed territory between Somalia

82 In the narrative, this occurs after the Second Chimurenga independence struggle has concluded, when the country was transitioning into the Gukurahundi genocide period in Matabeleland. 175 and Ethiopia,83 officially belongs to Ethiopia (following its being ceded back and forth between Ethiopia and Somalia by Italy and Britain during the twentieth century). As a young man in Mogadiscio, Askar’s emerging nationalism is brought into crisis when he is informed by a former neighbour from Khallafo that Misra is a traitor to Somalia. Misra, Karin tells him, has sold secrets to the enemy Ethiopians (to whom Misra both belongs and does not belong) resulting in the slaughter of Somali freedom fighters. Askar’s crisis in loyalty is made apparent by the two notes on his table to which he must respond: the first from Salaado about Misra’s visit, the second from the Western Liberation Front Headquarters (48).

At this time in his life, Askar has replaced Misra, whom he viewed as ‘the earth’ (the earth that he used to eat, and which he associates with his homeland) with a new, all-encompassing mother who demands complete loyalty: Somalia. Following the poets whose teachings Misra taught him as a child, he imagines Somalia as a mother. Now that:

he was at last a man, […] he was totally detached from his mother-figure Misra, and weaned. In the process of looking for a substitute, he had found another—Somalia, his mother country. It was as though something which began with the pain of a rite had ended in the joy of a greater self- discovery, one in which he held on to the milky breast of a common mother that belonged to him as much as anyone else. A generous mother, a many-breasted mother, a many-nippled mother, a mother who gave plenty of herself and demanded loyalty of one, loyalty to an ideal, allegiance to an idea, the notion of a nationhood—no more, and no less. And his tormented spirit was calmed the instant he walked down the same steps as everyone else, to encounter this common mother, to be embraced by her in joyful reunion, to be breast-fed and helped to rediscover in himself the need for a mother of a general kind. (100–101)

Somalia promises to be not only a mother but also a cause: a ‘common mother’, ‘generous’, ‘many-breasted’, she will unite him with his fellow citizens and create a mutual allegiance to the national ideal. Somalia as a mother is divided and in great pain. Where Misra’s maternal body had made him a child, or simply an extension of herself,

83 The Ogaden also borders Djibouti and Kenya. 176

Somalia’s need of protection as a mother conversely renders him a man, emphasising masculinity and demanding arms to confront the national aggressors. This supports Radhakrishnan’s comment that, ‘[u]nable to produce its own history in response to its inner sense of identity, nationalist ideology sets up Woman as victim and goddess simultaneously’ (85). Askar acknowledges explicitly that Misra’s alleged betrayal requires a choice between loyalty to Somalia or to her accused traitor: ‘Somehow, I felt I knew I had to betray one of them. I had to betray either Misra, who had been like a mother to me, or my mother country’ (180).

The old idea of his being merely an extension of Misra’s maternal body becomes particularly repugnant to him when he is told she has betrayed: ‘It pained him to remember that he had once shared his life with her, it made him feel embarrassed to recall that he had been so close to her once, that he had been proud of her’ (58). He is rebuked for this attitude by Uncle Hilaal, who reminds him that there is no proof that Misra has committed a crime:

‘You behave as though you were a husband to whom a woman has been unfaithful,’ commented Uncle Hilaal, ‘as though you couldn’t bring yourself to touch the body which has betrayed your trust. It is unbelievable that you would avoid any physical contact with the woman who could justifiably say that “by touching me, it seems as though he were touching himself”!’ (61)

Now an adult, Askar has claimed a different form of ownership over Misra’s body: that of the husband, the definer of her rights—and, crucially, that of the nationalist against the alien. In both roles, he claims her body as something to punish. Her accused crime is so abhorrent to him that its very weight seems to negate the need for proof: mere hearsay is enough to taint and, therefore, convict her. When the land is lost, he wishes pain on her ‘unfaithful’ body:

She would double up with guilt, he hoped, and would suffer from the cramps of disgrace. The marrow in the cavities of her bones, he hoped, would congeal, due to the chill of exposure. Cursed she would remain, he prayed, and unforgivable too. May the tendons of her neck snap, he prayed to God, as should every traitor’s neck and may her blood, startled, rush to her eyes and blind her. May her mucus dry and may the pain this 177

caused, in the end, bring about her death. May the earth reject her, may the heavens refuse to grant her an audience. If and only if she had betrayed! (57–58)

If Misra has betrayed Somalia, his new mother, and led the strong young men to their deaths, then her punishment must be every imaginable form of physical pain. Her sacrifice of the masculine ideal of nationalism must be experienced as torture brought to bear upon her body. Askar returns to the intimacy of their bodily contact in order to re- engage his childhood fantasy of killing Misra, asking himself ‘whether, to live, he would have to kill her if he saw her in Mogadiscio—now that there were good reasons for him to do so’ (59). Misra, by virtue of being a foreigner (in ‘a territory of whose earth one didn’t eat mouthfuls when one was an infant’ [101]) ‘was not herself Somali and Askar by then knew what that meant’ (101). Misra is Oromo, from the occupying country and aggressors in the minds of Somali people: it means little that she came to this place as the child victim of warfare, the spoils of a Somali raiding party. In praying for her body to be ‘cursed’, ‘rejected’ by the ‘earth’ and ‘heavens’, Askar calls punishment upon her body. Mirroring the poets’ stories of Somalia as a betraying woman, Misra is seen as more likely to have betrayed the (masculine) nation because she is a woman—as well as being a ‘foreign body’ in a ‘foreign country’ (63). By purging the betraying female, Askar hopes, the Ogaden will again return to Somali people, with whom he now identifies.

Similar to Misra’s identification with the contested Ogaden strip, Lucy Lurie’s body in Disgrace is made to represent apartheid South Africa, symbolically attacked and reclaimed by the three black rapists. This fraught situation becomes more ambiguous when Lucy, a lesbian, decides to marry her neighbour Petrus after discovering she is pregnant. One of the perpetrators, a boy, is discovered to be Petrus’s relative, leading to questions surrounding Petrus’s involvement in the attack. South Africa has been known to be dangerous for lesbians who have been the targets of ‘corrective rape’.

Petrus, Lurie surmises, has always had an eye to gaining Lucy’s land. So, for Petrus, possession of Lucy’s hand in marriage represents not merely a general incursion into previously forbidden territory in the possession of a white woman’s body, but also explicitly the acquisition of land: of her farm neighbouring his own block. Thus, in her

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‘ample’ curves she represents not only a symbolic embodiment of land, but also literally brings land with her to enrich Petrus. Lucy has no illusions about his intentions in proposing marriage: ‘it is not me he is after, he is after the farm. The farm is my dowry’ (203). However, Petrus, like Lucy, remains ambiguous, as his actions are interpreted only through Lurie’s narrative point-of-view.

Pregnant with the child of rape, Lucy consciously decides to keep the child, ‘a child of this earth’ (216). She declares herself (quite politically) ‘prepared to do anything, make any sacrifice, for the sake of peace’ (208, my emphasis). She is committed to her farm to the extent that she will remain in ‘humiliating’ (205) circumstances, having relinquished the deed to her land to Petrus, rather than relocate elsewhere for a fresh start. Despite her commitment to the land, it is Petrus as her new husband who will reap the benefits and the title.

Lurie observes his daughter at work in the field and ‘the milky, blue-veined skin and broad, vulnerable tendons of the backs of her knees’ (217). He muses that she is ‘becoming a peasant’ (217):

The wind drops. There is a moment of utter stillness which he would wish prolonged for ever: the gentle sun, the stillness of mid-afternoon, bees busy in a field of flowers; and at the centre of the picture a young woman, das ewig Weibliche, lightly pregnant, in a straw sunhat. A scene ready-made for a Sargent or a Bonnard. (218)

Lurie places Lucy as the still, timeless figure in ‘a Sargent or a Bonnard’: an object in the landscape to whose thoughts we are not privy. She is subsumed in the landscape, the rights to which she has given away, rooted by carrying her ‘child of this earth’ (216), a child of rape and ‘three fathers’ (199). Lucy’s complicity in this novel is harrowing. Disgrace enacts a complex reckoning written in violence on the woman’s body. The burden of the past falls on Lucy’s shoulders. How to interpret Lucy’s motivations? She remains a mystery throughout the novel, to the reader as to Lurie, for her thoughts are never reported. She is not given voice within the function of the narrative, which ultimately renders her an inscrutable feature in the painting that her father subconsciously creates.

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Embodying the subject of trauma

By contrast, in The Stone Virgins, Vera centres the narrative in the women’s bodies and their experience of the world. Unlike in Coetzee’s Disgrace, where the act of rape is closed over by the narration, unwitnessed by Lurie and rendered problematic through the occlusion of Lucy’s experience,84 in Vera’s novel we are thrown immediately into the scene of the rape from Nonceba’s perspective. The scene opens with:

The man places his hand over her left shoulder. Her thoughts turn blind, ashes stirred by a small wind. He presses his hand down on her limp arm. He turns her body toward himself, looking for something in her he can still break, but there is nothing in her that can still be broken. For Nonceba, there is only the scent of this man, the cruel embrace of his arms, the blood brown of his shoes, the length of his neck, and the gaze bending close. The distance in her mind is infinite. No … no … no … (67)

This is our first introduction to Nonceba: we have no other knowledge of her save for glimpses of memories in Thenjiwe’s mind. The cumulative effect of this abrupt shift in perspective, the slowing down of time, and her own musings, creates the effect of tunnel vision. Vera gives the impression that this moment is Nonceba’s whole world, and there is nothing more to her existence than suffering. The anonymity of ‘he’ and ‘she’, lacking introduction, causes us to confuse Sibaso with the other ‘the man’: the lover of Thenjiwe from the novel’s previous section, later identified as Cephas. This purposeful confusion intensifies the sense of intimacy: the closeness between Thenjiwe and her lover is replicated in Nonceba and the rapist who has just murdered her sister.

The majority of the novel is delivered through stretch time, in which the novel seems to pan through scenes and landscapes, allowing for unhurried observations and digressions. The use of stretch time becomes particularly distressing when describing traumatic scenes such as Sibaso’s rape of Nonceba. Vera’s slowing down of time traps

84 Lucy says to Lurie, in one of Coetzee’s characteristic interjections troubling narrative totality: ‘You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You are the main character, I am a minor character who doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through’ (Coetzee 198). 180

Nonceba in the scene, making each moment pass despairingly slowly—and trapping us, as the readers, with her:

Has she lived before this moment of urgency and despair? Is there something whispered before a cataclysmic earthquake, sleep, before a frightful awakening to death? Is life not lived backward, in flashes, in spasms of hopeless regret? (69)

The descriptions of traumatic scenes are delivered out of sequence as Vera emphasises traumatic sight, memory, the resurfacing of experiences, and a kind of temporal claustrophobia, with Nonceba being trapped in the moment and unable to escape. Where in Coetzee’s novel the rape passes unobserved, and is covered very quickly by the narration, Vera uses stretch time to magnify the significance of every movement of the body—the positioning of Nonceba’s knee, her elbow, his hand. Vera focuses with excruciating detail on Nonceba’s experience. As time distends, Nonceba is reduced to pain, and she is nothing but her body, with no expectation that she will live into the future:

He enters her body like a vacuum. She can do nothing to save herself. He clutches her from the waist, his entire hand resting boldly over her stomach. He presses down. He pulls her to him. She hesitates. He forces her down. She yields. She is leaning backward into his body. He holds her body like a bent stem. He draws her waist into the curve of his arm. She is molded into the shape of his waiting arm—a tendril on a hard rock.

He is at the pit of her being. Her anger rises furiously. Her saliva is a sour ferment of bile. She would like to speak, to spit. She swings forward, away from him. He is close. (68)

Sibaso ‘is a predator, with all the fine instincts of annihilation. She, the dead, with all the instincts of the vanquished’ (69). He relegates her to ‘the dead’ and ‘portions her to a dead past’ (71), the past of the stone women in the mountain, and Nonceba refers repeatedly throughout the novel to the rape scene as the moment of her death.

During the terrible intimacy of the rape scene, the point of view starts to shift from Nonceba to Sibaso: 181

His fingers part her lips, dry skin, find her tongue. His fingers are on her tongue … move into her mouth … over her tongue. He curls his fingers and slides them over the top of her lips.

Her breathing between his fingers, her warm saliva. He bends his fingers farther into the warm spaces beneath her tongue. Nonceba tastes him. He is dried salt, a ferment—the dried, dead blood. He scoops her being, her saliva water to cleanse a wound. (70)

The above scene is experienced not only from Nonceba’s perspective and the taste of Sibaso’s fingers, but also what her tongue feels like on his fingers, her ‘breathing between his fingers, ‘warm saliva’ and the ‘warm spaces beneath her tongue’. Their intense physical closeness has opened a space in the narration for the point of view to shift: their hurt subjectivities become blurred and confused. In the extended traumatic moment Nonceba starts to confuse her body with that of the perpetrator, and existing a step behind in time, feels him ‘inside her body’ even when he is a few steps from her, for she has been rendered ‘inanimate, a receptacle for his dreaming’ (71). Nonceba’s confusion about the borders of her own body and consciousness and Sibaso’s is enhanced through Vera’s subtle shifts in perspective. Directly following the first description of Thenjiwe’s body on the ground, we see a startling shift to first person: ‘I am afraid to close my eyes. I am afraid of myself. I am darkness’ (72). The speaker may be Nonceba, or Sibaso, or it may even be Thenjiwe herself who has been beheaded and who lies with her eyes open against the ground. Thenjiwe’s blood soaks the dirt: she has become part of the ground they walk on, and the soles of Nonceba’s feet are stained with her sister’s blood.

Nonceba revisits the moment of traumatic sight in which she saw her sister murdered, when she ‘sees a silver bucket approaching from the bright blue of the sky’ carried on her sister’s head, before it leans and falls, ‘the tiniest drops breaking like a spray, spilling; then the bucket crushes its contents to the ground; water breaks like stone’ (73). Her mind ‘loose like a whip’ (73), Nonceba recalls the moment of the bucket’s fall:

‘Thenjiwe …’ she calls. A man emerges. He is swift. Like an eagle gliding.

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His head is behind Thenjiwe, where Thenjiwe was before, floating in her body; he is in her body. He is floating like a flash of lightning. Thenjiwe’s body remains upright while this man’s head emerges behind hers, inside it, replacing each of her moments, taking her position in the azure of the sky. He is absorbing Thenjiwe’s motions into his own body, existing where Thenjiwe was, moving into the spaces she has occupied. Then Thenjiwe vanishes and he is affixed in her place, before Nonceba’s eyes, sudden and unmistakable as a storm. The moment is his. Irrevocable. His own.

How did a man slice off a woman’s head while a bucket was carried above it? How did a man slice a woman’s throat and survive? (73)

The image is recorded as it appears to Nonceba in its stunning incongruity: she sees her sister walking home carrying a pail of water, and the shadow of a man approaching— then her sister’s head is suddenly replaced with the stranger’s head, and Thenjiwe seems to continue moving forward with his head in place of hers, before her body plummets to the mud (spilled by the pail falling from her head), and his body remains, triumphant, in the space hers had occupied a moment earlier. The stranger has stalked her, caught up and taken over her essence. Now Thenjiwe is no more: only Sibaso exists in that space, and Nonceba is unable to process what has happened. The visual trick of the beheading heightens the trauma for Nonceba because she sees Sibaso as having ‘floated’ in Thenjiwe’s body, inhabiting it before he killed her. This passage speaks to the failure of sight to record traumatic moments that pass by too swiftly, ‘a shock that appears to work very much like a bodily threat but is in fact a break in the mind’s experience of time’ (Caruth 61). The image has entered her mind before her conscious brain could process it. Trauma is ‘an event that […] is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor’ (Caruth 4). The falling bucket is a displacement of Thenjiwe’s severed head, which is too graphic for Nonceba to focus on; the bucket creates an arc and a splash as it falls to earth, partly concealing the damage to Thenjiwe’s body. Nonceba, the narration indicates, will now be left always with the image of the empty pail splashing down and the man’s head on her sister’s shoulders without really being able to comprehend what has occurred. The 183 repetitive, looping cycle of trauma is evidenced in the narrative: where originally Nonceba repressed the memory of Thenjiwe’s murder, once she allows it to return, it cycles repeatedly through her mind with an estranging force. She returns to the moment in which Sibaso catches and seems to ‘dance’ with Thenjiwe’s falling body, and ‘he seems to hold Nonceba’s body up, too, for it is impossible for her to continue standing, for her own mind to survive by its own direction. He holds both their bodies up. Frozen’ (74).

The rape scene returns in flashes for the rest of the novel—or, rather, it returns her to this traumatic scene, as it threatens to do for the rest of her life. Nonceba is left ‘unable to speak’ (123) in the hospital after the attack:

The skin on my mouth breaks and cracks like clay. I move a finger over the edges of my mouth. The skin peels off in small bits like a broken shell. I open and close my mouth. I suck air into my body. I move my mouth all night, in the dark. I am chewing the air. (124)

Nonceba is made into ‘clay’, like the bloodied mud outside her home; she is able to peel away what remains of her mouth ‘like a broken shell’, mute. The hospital card reads in its ‘staccato narration: “… inflicted as by a sharp object … could be a blade … victim did not see the instrument … grievous harm … lips cut off … urgent surgery required … skin graft.”’ (183–4).85

Nonceba’s path to recovery is long and complex, but she shows resilience and starts a new life in the city of Bulawayo. The working out of conflict upon women’s bodies provides the raw emotional centre of the novel and focuses the broader meditations on violence. Thenjiwe, into whose calm gravity the reader has been pulled in the first part of the novel, is blotted out of the story world without our even realising it: the shock of her death comes after the fact when Nonceba releases that information to the reader pages after it occurred, mimicking the function of trauma, which is ‘not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on’ (Caruth 4). Sibaso imagines the women

85 Like the narration itself, Nonceba is forced into a deceptive stillness: ‘The trees are rid of their leaves. My mind is quiet. Not rushing like the wind. Perfectly still. Like the leaf on the window, pressed down by the thoughts rushing against it. Raging against it’ (125). 184 as his enemies and sacrificial virgins: he places himself in an ancient position of glory and the women become the bloodied ground on which he satisfies his claims. His intimate possession of Nonceba’s and Thenjiwe’s bodies, raping one and ‘inhabiting’ the other, speaks to his masculinist fantasy of power and, experiencing the inertia of warfare after the guerrilla fighting has ceased, his desire to reach back into a grand past. The haunting power of Vera’s novel lies in her shift between perspectives: she does not make excuses for Sibaso, but explains the material conditions that create people like him. Similarly, though she does not spare Nonceba any pain, she invests this character with the strength and toughness required to survive. The novel follows, with devastating slowness, the broad contextual cues that lead to this violence. In The Stone Virgins Vera translates national trauma from an epic scale to the personal level, emphasising the tangible effects of conflict for women on the ground by representing—indeed, by rendering inescapable—their experience of violence.

Sacrificial lambs: Sacrificing the girl child

South African writer Rachel Zadok, in her very different novel Sister-Sister, similarly illustrates the trauma experienced by girls whose bodies are sacrificed to satisfy social disputes. In this dystopian novel, after the birth of twin girls, according to tradition, their grandmother believes that the younger twin, Sindisiwe, must die in order to avoid placing a curse on the local community. She tenderly fills the newborn baby’s mouth with earth to suffocate her, choosing ‘soil from the sugar-cane fields because I thought it would be sweet’, and ‘warm[ing] the clots of earth in my palms’ because ‘I did not want you to suffer cold on your tongue’ (130). ‘Then,’ she says, ‘I pushed them into your mouth. I plugged your nose before you could splutter and I hid your small body, swaddled in the blanket I had crocheted for you, under the bed’ (130). The grandmother tells Sindi that her ‘birth brought bad luck to our village’, lamenting that if not for Sindi ‘your father, a good man, would not be dead. […] Instead, like the chick that ate its sister, you grew fat while the flesh melted from our bones’ (131).

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The crisis of Sindi’s birth is positioned as a curse on the land that must be appeased through her death, and through ‘pour[ing] water on your grave to bring the rain’ (131). Her grandmother exclaims to her son, Sindi’s Uncle Jabu: ‘This thing that is wrong with me, that is wrong with you, that is wrong with this whole village of ghosts started the day these twins were born. Did I not tell you long ago that we must find them and appease the ancestors?’ (131). The illness of which her grandmother speaks is Z3, an autoimmune disease that is a clear equivalent of AIDS. Sindi, who stutters heavily and finds it difficult to speak, is traumatised by this story and imagines the earth falling back down her throat, choking her.

Thulisile, the older twin, is similarly made a victim of the rural community, sacrificed for the greater good because of her gender. The community believes that men can save themselves from Z3 by having sex with a virgin. Thuli is still a child when she is groomed for sex and raped in a public toilet by Jabu, who whispers: ‘You’re a good girl, Thuli […] a good girl to help your uncle’ (143). Thuli not only suffers acute trauma after the attack, but also dies of Z3. AIDS, an acute problem in South Africa—inflamed by the Mbeki era (1999–2008) of AIDS denialism—eats away the young girl’s body after she is used as a sacrificial lamb to cleanse the uncle and the community. The international AIDS crisis is personalised for Thuli and her family when she is scapegoated and reviled for being a child slut. Thuli is never informed of what is happening to her body or why she is becoming sick and ‘disgusting’ (221) in the words of her sister. She seems only partially and imperfectly to understand the crime that has been committed against her. Her mother screams at her: ‘Thirteen years old, thirteen! You dirty, dirty girl, what have you done?’ (290), calling the girls ‘little sluts’ (249). The most poignant tragedy is that the rape has forced a wedge of hatred and resentment between the twins, to the extent that Sindi attempts to steal Thuli’s soul—and as a result, it seems, loses her own in the process.

Thuli’s name means ‘she who made things quiet’ in Zulu. Characters suggest to the girl’s mother, Sizane, that Sindisiwe should have borne that name as it is she who has difficulty speaking. However, Sizane gave the name to Thuli because when the grandmother tried to murder her newborn sister, the baby Thuli did not scream or make a sound. As the girls grow older, and Thuli is first raped by her uncle and then forced to suffer the malice of the community as a stigmatised Z3, it is Sindi who says nothing: maintaining silence around the traumatic event that poisoned her sister’s life. Sindi’s 186 name means ‘saved’: however, while she was saved as an infant by the nurse who discovered her swaddled under the bed, it remains to be seen whether she will be saved from guilt over her sister’s death.

In Zadok’s novel, the community attempts to resolve its problems through sacrificing the two girls: one to death and one to child sex. The novel targets violence against women and girls that cripples communities and which spreads through lack of education. The girls’ personal traumas interweave effortlessly with social problems endemic in this dystopian South Africa. Much of the novel takes place on the streets and in an underground brothel run by a madam in the sewers: this is a geography that is much more difficult to navigate for girls, who are more vulnerable to its dangers. Thuli inhabits much of the novel as a revenant after her death, trapped in an eternal childhood. Her body that has been sacrificed to the community is in the ground, while her confused spirit lingers on in the dystopian cityscape.

Mapping conflict in women’s bodies

In Maps, Farah also illustrates the pinning of burdens on the female body. When Misra visits Askar in Mogadiscio, it becomes clear that their positions have reversed: Misra has shrunk in stature, while Askar has grown into an idealistic, headstrong young man—well-educated but young enough to be blind to his own privilege and the relative uncertainty of Misra’s position. ‘He was much taller, much heftier—he was her cosmos, he said to himself. Just the way she used to be his when he was a great deal younger’ (199). Forever a foreigner, Misra is doubly vulnerable because she is a woman. She lives in a state of exception not only as an Ethiopian in Somalia who has been sufficiently naturalised that she can no longer return ‘home’ (having forgotten the location of that home and the identity of her people), but because her very womanhood serves to underscore that original foreignness. ‘In the fight against the enemy from the outside,’ Radhakrishnan reminds us, ‘something within gets even more repressed and “woman” becomes the mute but necessary allegorical ground for the transactions of nationalist history’ (84).

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The war continues raging, and the Ogaden, which had once more been in sight, is lost again to Ethiopia. On the day of its loss, Askar is tremendously sick and likens the territory’s loss to Misra’s abortion:

I felt weak—almost as weak as Misra when she aborted. I remembered her lying in bed for days. The loss of the Ogaden was greater, of course. But I could only view it as a personal loss so as to understand its dimensions. It was as if my whole blood had been drained out of me— that was how weak I felt. To me, that was how tremendous the loss had been. (165)

He becomes similarly sick when Misra dies, and observes the taste of blood in his mouth, though there is no visible sign. Confused, he wonders: ‘had I underestimated my body? Was it seceding from me, making its own autonomous decisions, was my body forming its own government, was it working on its own, independent of my brain, of my soul?’ (233)

The Ogaden, the contested strip of land that is Askar’s place of birth and which contains his umbilical cord (126), is likened to an infant that must be reunited with its mother (101). When Misra is accused of having betrayed the liberation cause of the ethnic Somalis living in the Ogaden, resulting in the slaughter of the WLF soldiers, she is punished with gang rape by a group of young men, who trick her into an empty hut. The men claim ownership over her body as contested territory at the same time as punishing her suspected infidelity. Her punishment is rape, not a bullet or corporal punishment, as it would be for a man. In bearing her to the ground and exerting their power over her, enjoying her suffering and humiliation, the men symbolically assume control, transforming themselves from victims into warriors: if she, as an Ethiopian woman, is perceived as being out-of-place in the disputed territory, then the men stake their claim to both her and the land by possessing her body, exerting her extra-judicial punishment at the same time. When asked if she had reported the crime, Misra responds:

The story these young men circulated (and everyone who believed that I was a traitor had no difficulty accepting it) was that I had been raped by baboons. Thank God, they said, they happened to be there, these young men, these gallant youths. Otherwise, I might have been fed on by lions. 188

The baboons, said the poet amongst them (and one of them was a poet), smelt the beast in her and went for it; the baboons smelt her traitor’s identity underneath the human skin and went for it again and again. Thank God, we were there to save her body since, as a traitor, she had ransomed her soul. (195)

By claiming she was raped by baboons, the men deny Misra her testimony by making her a product of ridicule: where others may have sympathised with her, now they will only laugh. Her neighbours are presented with a choice of stories, and they will choose the easier story to accept: that it was she who betrayed them, because she is Ethiopian, and that she was raped by beasts who could smell her traitorous heart, and that the youths rescued her, despite her betrayal, out of ‘gallantry’.86

In Mogadiscio Misra becomes sick and is forced to undergo a mammectomy in hospital, her breasts as external sign of womanhood removed as Askar’s maternal loyalty shifts from her to Somalia. While she is there, a group of men collect her from the hospital. She goes missing, and is discovered dead days later in the stinking ‘Unclaimed Corpses’ section of the morgue. The men who kidnapped her mutilated her body before killing her, performing a ‘ritual murder’ (252) and removing her ‘traitor’s’ heart before throwing her to the sharks in the bay.

Misra’s divided, wounded maternal body provides a map of the conflict: the mixed genealogies, the tangled and yet harshly divided cultures vying for the strip of land that is the Ogaden. Farah invites us to view Misra’s body as a map for the painful stories of the region—and Askar’s body, an extension of hers, in a strangely maternal relationship with the land, ‘menstruating’ as a child and then suffering its loss like an abortion. ‘The body is perceived as origin and signifies the place of origin,’ Mohanram observes. ‘The loss of the maternal body constructs the subject within psychoanalytic discourse’ (200). Misra crosses the seemingly inviolable borders, but each border- crossing results in a new series of wounds—psychological traumas, rape, incest with a soldier discovered to be her half-brother (240), mammectomy, mutilations and death.

86 Askar, like her neighbours, does not believe her when she says she is innocent. He places the burden of truth upon the accused, so strong is the equivalence between women and lying, women and betrayal. The entrenched idea of women as property means that if a woman does anything to escape or undercut a man’s will, the man who perceives himself as controlling her actions, it comes as a surprise and a harder blow, a deeper betrayal than if it had been delivered by a man.

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Her very womanhood invites a reading of her body as the ‘earth’ or land. Misra’s status as a foreign national is complicated by the fact that she has had two Somali husbands, whose identities in some respect are seen as overwriting her own. Her body has been dominated by various men like warlords over territory: the Somali warrior, the father- husband, Uncle Qorrax, Aw-Adan, the rapists, the murderers, and even Askar himself: her body is possessed, carved open and rewritten in the name of masculinist nationalism. When a crisis of betrayal occurs within the community, it is Misra’s body that must be sacrificed to cleanse the wound.

The novel is narrated from three interspersed points of view: the third person and second person (Hilaal and Salaado speaking with Askar and the police officer), and the first person testimony of Askar. Notably missing, because she has been murdered, is the voice of Misra, the mother figure and ‘cosmos’. The novel is an excavation in search of Misra, one that will always fail with each reading, because she has always already been lost. Misra’s experience speaks to that of multitudes of vulnerable populations, particularly women, living in contested territories and conflict areas.

In a 2004 article, Médecins Sans Frontières reported of conflict zones that:

The incidence of rape and sexual violence in these situations not only increases but often becomes systematic. Rape becomes a weapon of war with women and girls the targets. Seen this way, sexual violence is not ‘only’ a consequence or side effect of war and displacement. It is, instead, a deliberate tool of war, used to destabilize and threaten a part of the civilian population, often a particular group. Women and girls are singled out because the harm and humiliation inflicted on them not only hurts them but also deeply harms and humiliates their families and often the entire community. 87 […] With the AIDS pandemic, rape has now become a lethal weapon. Immediate medical care, including the availability of Post Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP), is now a matter of life and death. More must be done to treat and support the victims of sexual

87 The report expands: Unfortunately, too often when even the war might have finished, rape hasn’t. MSF was first confronted with this in their programmes in the 1990s. In Bosnia, systematic rape was used as part of the strategy of ethnic cleansing. Women were raped so they could give birth to a Serbian baby. In Rwanda, systematic rape of Tutsi women took place during the genocide. Between 300,000 and 500,000 female survivors of the genocide are estimated to have been raped. (MSF) 190

violence and to prevent it from happening in the future. Silence, indifference and inaction have been the answer for too long. Enough is enough. (MSF)

African writers’ attention to rape in conflict situations highlights the dangerous association of women with land and as collective property, and demonstrates a potent understanding and criticism of the catastrophic effects of this widely understood metonymy.

African women overseas

African women’s bodies, as we have seen, have often been read as fixed in place. However, the work of the so-called ‘Third Generation’ of African writers has increasingly described the transnational realities of a new generation of Africans chasing opportunities in an international labour market, and a number of these novels explore of the significance of the African woman’s body ‘out of place’, and how it is read metonymically by foreigners as a piece of a distant, imagined ‘Africa’.

The term ‘Afropolitan’, devised by writer Taiye Selasi, describes ‘the newest generation of African emigrants’, who are ‘not citizens, but Africans of the world’ (‘Bye Bye Babar’). In her 2014 TED Talk ‘Don’t Ask Where I’m From, Ask Where I’m a Local’, Selasi challenged: ‘I’m not multinational. I’m not a national at all. How could I come from a nation? How can a human being come from a concept?’

The Afropolitan moment, however authorised by a degree of privilege, is a significant one for African writers, particularly in the evocation of transnational female subjectivities. The new trend in transnational novels, such as Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013), and particularly transnational bildungsroman for girls, such as Adichie’s Americanah (2013), and Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013), sets the scene for an exciting new period in representing convincing diasporic identities for African girls in an increasingly globalised world.

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This is particularly noteworthy when we consider that traditionally women have been associated with home, and have formerly been less likely to travel overseas. In earlier generations, if boys were sent away for education (as at the conclusion of Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir), girls were more likely to remain at home; the same, as Young has observed, was true in the case of exilic organisers of nationalist resistance during the pre-independence period (178). Now more than ever, African girls are shown as being mobile—though having to overcome all the travails of visa requirements and everything that entails.

However, there are many dangers for vulnerable women and girls and their relationship to place, as Nigerian-born writer Chika Unigwe demonstrates. In her novel On Black Sisters Street (2009), Unigwe reinvents old tropes in a new context, displaying black women’s bodies in Belgium as a new form of slavery directly related to the prior dislocation of people and resources through colonialism. Unigwe attacks a new predatory labour market in which the women in the novel find themselves transported as exotic products from their homes in African countries onto the international market, brought without legal visas to Belgium where they live in a state of exception, not able to report their entrapment as indentured sex workers to their authorities because they lack valid visas as ‘personae non gratae’ (183). The women are placed in glass display cases in the red-light district, each representing an exotic ex- colonial dream in Belgium, former imperial centre of the notoriously corrupt and precarious Congo. They are arrayed in ‘Vingerlingstraat to stand in front of the glass showcase, strutting in sexy lingerie, lacy bras and racy thongs to attract customers. It is a demanding job, their job, and not one that can be combined with grief’ (177–78).

In Belgium, the coding of their black bodies ‘On Black Sisters’ Street’ is one of a fetish of mastery, as the clients rove along, ‘looking for adventure between the thighs of een afrikaanse’ (178). Each individual woman is imagined to be, metonymically, a slice of ‘Africa’—Africa as a symbol and a dream rather than a continent of countries. Their very blackness underscores their perceived difference from the majority of their clients, who view them as a foreign space to be entered in a sexual conquest imagined as a conquest of land, a dream of racial superiority of the white male over a black servant who must perform his will. The women are marketed as somehow transporting their clients to another place and, crucially, another time: one in which Europeans were the local masters in colonial African countries. The women, who have nothing, are 192 forced to trade on ‘the trump card that God has wedged between their legs, dissecting the men who come to them (men who spend hours thrashing on top of them or under them, shoving and fiddling and clenching their brown buttocks and finally—mostly— using their fingers to shove in their own pale meat’ (26). In the novel, the acute fetishisation of the black woman’s body is contrasted with Unigwe’s nuanced and traumatic stories of these young women forced into the international sex trade by terrible circumstances, but whose strength and determination make them active agents in their own lives.

Black women in the novel are exhorted to become whiter. An overweight man who brings a seventeen-year-old girl into a salon shouts at the hairdressers: ‘Oya! Make am beautiful. She dey go abroad! Today! Beautify am!’, later specifying: ‘I tell you say she dey go abroad, you wan do shuku for am? Perm am. Put relaxer. Make she look like oyibo woman! I wan’ make she look like white woman!’ (31), while the character Efe’s neck ‘hints at the fact that at some point in her life she was darker than she is now’ (38). One of the characters is offered hair extensions boasted to be: ‘[s]traight from India. Not the yeye horsehair you see all over this city. I get 100 per cent human hair!’ (51). Just as the women are traded to Europe, they are in turn pressured to become consumers of human exports from India to serve a western aesthetic of beauty. Black bodies are reproduced as labour and chattel in a new economy that has its feet directly in colonialism, and Sisi hears of a ‘Nigerian man who died at the airport in some abroad country he could not pronounce because the bags of cocaine he swallowed had burst in his stomach’ (82). The girls dream of the interchangeable promise of ‘London. America. Londonamerica. Said with ease. Londonamerica. Americalondon’ (225).

When arriving in the brothel house in Belgium, the women are introduced quickly to how things will be:

the walls were the same blood red of the sitting room. and on them hung two pictures: a white girl, lying on her back, naked with legs splayed a tanned V. She sucked on a lollipop. The other picture was of an enormous pair of brown buttocks jutting out at the camera. Buttocks with no face; two meticulously moulded clay pots. (99–100)

The women from ‘Black Sisters’ Street’ are objectified and fetishized as parts: breasts, buttocks, and viewed as exotic products like ‘clay pots’, recalling a precolonial period. 193

Their bodies are ‘a commodity for sale, a slab of meat at the local abattoir’ (182), and they feel ‘like cargo with a tag: Destination Unknown’ (233). The women learn to commoditise themselves to make more money: Sisi makes herself ‘a swirling mass of chocolate flesh’, ‘a coffee-coloured dream’ (237) for her customers, a product to be consumed. Between customers, the women talk with their neighbours, a comfort that ‘meant someone still saw you as more than a toy to pass the time with’ (237).

When Alek/Joyce asserts that her former boyfriend’s selling her into sexual slavery was ‘nothing’, ‘nothing at all’ (214) compared with the horrendous violence she has witnessed in Sudan, Ama responds:

‘Of course it’s something. What he did to you is not NOTHING. Men are fucking bastards, you know. why did he take you all the way to Nigeria only to abandon you?

‘Why did your mother’s husband rape you?’ Joyce responds. Why do people do the stuff they do? Because. He did it just because.’ (241)

Alek/Joyce is too willing to place herself as insignificant in the greater scheme of war; Ama insists by contrast that ‘the personal is political’.

The women in their glass alley are likened to animals in a zoo. Sisi observes that: ‘She had not found anything particularly enjoyable in walking around a park, looking at animals locked up in cages. Animals taken away from their natural habitat, only for that habitat to be artificially recreated for them’ (283). Like the animal body, the ‘body-thing’ (On the Postcolony 27) of the colonised subject was deemed to exist only in what Agamben terms ‘bare life’ or ‘biological life’, without the enjoyment of reason or a true spirituality. The connection between non-Europeans and animals in European discourse gained strength through an increase in exotic public spectacles. Berger observes that ‘in the 19th century, public zoos were an endorsement of modern colonial power. The capturing of the animals was a symbolic representation of the conquest of all distant and exotic lands’ (21). More troublingly, world’s fairs frequently featured human exhibits such as groups of dancers or musicians. The Paris Universelle of 1889, for example, listed a ‘Negro village’ on its list of attractions, transforming people into objects or curiosities to be viewed from across the divide of the enclosure.

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The structure of the exhibit, whether zoo or world’s fair, manifested a boundary between the mobile observer, the European, and the stationary observed, the non- European or animal. The colonial subject as exotic product is produced for the west’s consumption. In one infamous example, Saartjie Baartman, a nineteenth-century Khoisan woman known in Europe as the ‘Hottentot Venus’, travelled with exploitative businessmen who ‘exhibited’ her body before a curious London public. After her death, her brains and genitals were held in a jar at the Paris Musée de l’Homme until as recently as 2002, despite Nelson Mandela’s formal request in 1994 that France return her remains for burial. The staging of the black women’s fetishized bodies in On Black Sisters’ Street provides an uneasy echo of such histories.

The women are saved from being flat victims in the novel by their personal stories and their ambitions. One of the women, Efe, who had wanted to become a writer, instead survives the brothel to become a madam herself, exploiting other young women. She becomes part of a cycle of violence against women, and enrichment through their bodies. After Sisi is murdered for trying to escape this life, she similarly contributes to a cycle of violence against women, cursing not Dele, the man who made her an indentured sex worker, but his daughters; the narration posits that when her soul was flying through, she whispered to these ‘chubby’ ‘angels’: ‘May your lives be bad. May you never enjoy love. May your father suffer as much as mine will when he hears I am gone. May you ruin him’ (296). The novel concludes with Sisi’s soul commencing ‘its journey to another world’ (296), explicitly recalling the Middle Passage but charting it in a new setting, the old imperial centre of Europe. The women, who have fled their homes rent by domestic violence, national violence, cultures of victim-blaming, and a lack of opportunities for women, even educated women, on a depressed labour market, come to different fates as indentured sex workers in Belgium: what they share is strong characterisation as complex characters, as Unigwe paints their lives in an all-too- realistic warning.

In We Need New Names (2013), Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo also renders the young girl’s body as land: specifically, and unusually, she makes of the young girl’s body the country of Zimbabwe.

Chipo, eleven years old, ‘used to outrun everybody in all of Paradise but not anymore because somebody made her pregnant’ (2). She is rendered mute by the trauma

195 of the rape until she witnesses another woman being sexually assaulted—then she tells the protagonist, Darling:

He did that, my grandfather, I was coming from playing Find bin Laden and my grandmother was not there and my grandfather was there and he got on me and pinned me down like that and he clamped a hand over my mouth and was heavy like a mountain, Chipo says. (40–41)

Like Ama’s rapist in On Black Sisters’ Street, Chipo’s grandfather is ‘heavy like a mountain’. Darling is able to ‘escape’ to the United States to live with her Aunt Fostalina, a dislocating experience in which she must negotiate the transnational and exilic space of America. Darling becomes black by being uprooted to America’s fraught race environment, and in which she is exposed to a number of influences (particularly of a raced and sexual nature) that impact upon her development into adolescence. Towards the end of the novel, she speaks to her mother back in Zimbabwe, and Chipo is put on the phone. Chipo has given birth to her baby while still a child herself, and is raising her daughter, having become a strong young woman in the process. Chipo accuses:

Why did you run off to America, Darling Nonkululeko Nkala, huh? Why did you just leave? If it’s your country, you have to love it and live in it and not leave it. You have to fight for it no matter what, to make it right. Tell me, do you abandon your house because it’s burning or do you find water to put out the fire? And if you leave it burning, do you expect the flames to turn into water and put themselves out? (286)

Chipo, who has borne the weight of a ‘mountain’ and birthed her grandfather’s child conceived in violence, has become a strong voice for nationalism. She evokes the idea of Zimbabwe as a burning house, placing responsibility on citizens to remain and ‘put out the fire’. The difference between the two characters is a potent reminder that, as Yuval-Davis and Anthias write:

it is important to remember that there is no unitary category of women which can be unproblematically conceived as the focus of ethnic, national or state policies and discourses. Women are divided along class, ethnic and life-cycle lines and in most societies different strategies are directed at different groups of women. This is the case both from within

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the ethnic collectively and from the state, whose boundaries virtually always contain a number of ethnicities. (7)

In Chipo and Darling, Bulawayo sketches sensitive portraits of two possibilities for young Zimbabwean girls born into poverty: one, a transnational experience that is one of privilege, but which introduces new insecurities and a sense of loss of the country that she fears can never be regained; and the other, that of the victim who has become a survivor, a grassroots voice for resilience and change.

Conclusion

The representation of women’s bodies varies hugely across African fiction, such that it is difficult to speak of ‘the woman’s body’ in the same way as ‘the dictator body’ or ‘the prisoner body’. Consistently, however, African writers have addressed and attacked the metonymizing of women’s bodies as land, and the correspondingly violent ‘possession’ of women’s and girls’ bodies in conflict situations. If women’s bodies are occupiable by men, transformed into a place, they are, more than any other body, the true site of politics. Harcourt observes that ‘hegemonic power has made the body a war zone’:

A wide range of violations map out the war zone: women raped in armed conflicts; denial of sexual and reproductive rights; racism that discriminates because of skin colour; ageism that stereotypes and uses young bodies. Body politics in these struggles emerges as a strong movement of resistance and expansion of rights linking the political dimension of the body with a radical form of democracy. (Harcourt 32– 33)

Women’s bodies have long been rendered the earth (or body) to men’s firmament (and thought). This is particularly compounded in the case of African women, who have doubly borne the weight of colonialism’s portioning of labour. It is only recently that investigations such as Harcourt’s into body politics have recognised this strong

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‘political dimension of the body’, particularly women’s bodies, and its natural affinity ‘with a radical form of democracy’.

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Chapter 4: The beggar body: Poverty, deformity and the grotesque

It is the work and function of the state to ensure the economic productivity of its citizens: in stable states this forms a reciprocal relationship in which protections and services are offered in exchange for labour and taxes. The ‘political investment of the body,’ Foucault insists, ‘is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; […] the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body’ (Discipline and Punish 25–26). The state relies on the ‘useful force’ of its residents in generating wealth.

What, then, of those groups within the state who neither materially contribute their labour to mainstream economics, nor benefit from the state’s contract of belonging?88 Zygmunt Bauman concludes that:

The production of ‘human waste’, or more correctly wasted humans (the ‘excessive’ and ‘redundant’ […]), is an inevitable outcome of modernization, and an inseparable accompaniment of modernity. It is an inescapable side-effect of order-building (each order casts some parts of the extant population as ‘out of place’, ‘unfit’ or ‘undesirable’) and of economic progress (that cannot proceed without degrading and devaluing the previously effective modes of ‘making a living’ and therefore cannot but deprive their practitioners of their livelihood). (5; original emphasis)

The state seeks to exclude this ‘excessive’, ‘redundant’ population of ‘human waste’ through the process of ‘order-building’. ‘Wasted humans’ commonly include the socially vulnerable or destitute, ethnic or religious others, and other ‘undesirable’ bodies, such as immigrants, particularly refugees; the homeless; slum residents; those unable (often in public discourse deemed ‘unwilling’) to participate in the workforce,

88 The state, Mehta suggests, is ‘the best and only means for assuaging’ the fear of death by violence, offering ‘some (however qualified) prospect of security’: ‘The fear of death and the concern with corporeal safety was thus the enduring and underlying basis of politics’ (Mehta). For this reason, ‘the state is supposed to service the matrix for the obligations and prerogatives of citizenship. It is that which forms the conditions under which we are juridically bound’ (Butler and Spivak 3–4).

199 such as people with disability or mental illness; those with criminal records; and terrorists or would-be terrorists. Internally displaced people also constitute a significant set of ‘wasted humans’, bearing highly visible markers of non-belonging. Displacement may be the result of fleeing from conflict or economic vulnerability, moving to the city in search of work. One important recurring theme in African fiction, particularly concentrated in West Africa, is that of the outcast: the madman or beggar. Frequently appearing in the margins of the literature of African cities, beggars signify the collapse of traditional social networks and pre-colonial livelihoods in the postcolonial state. In addition to these instances in which the beggar is peripheral to the plot, a significant subsection of the fiction features the beggar or madman at the heart of action in the novel. It is in these narratives that the outcast figure comes into its own, generating a discordant, highly visible spectre of unease within the urban space of the African city. The madman or beggar is always already disenfranchised, and their body is highly visible. These characters are not beneficiaries of the contract of the state, and as outcasts stand largely outside of its social framework. Holding virtually no political or economic power and with little to risk, the beggar in African fiction is free to express his or her disgust— which generates its own power. Of course, the madman or beggar is frequently rendered as an object of disgust in themselves in the novels, but owing to this ‘disgusting’ status they are imagined as an object of fear, not of pity. The beggar’s is usually a filthy, raggedly clothed and malodorous body—a body that provides the locus of social anxiety for other characters in the novel. This sinister figure exists outside of ‘normal’ society, and thereby obtains a transgressive power that can be used to generate change: for good or ill. African novelists have repeatedly invested in this unkempt body that is always out of place even in its home—its home being the unheimlich areas of the city, existing at the elision of borders between domestic and public space.

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The beggar and the city

The city within the postcolony is the site par excellence of ‘wasted humans’. It attracts both internal and external migrants looking for work, often from rural areas with depressed economies who are led to view the city as a space of imagined plenitude— only to find all too often that jobs and accommodation are scarce and the social networks they had relied upon already strained. Migrants to the city too often become, to borrow a term relating to China, a ‘floating population’: often undocumented, lacking resources. The city is a dream space and it is this schism between dream and reality that activates the uncanny: city-bound migrants all over the world imagine they will be more interesting, attractive and successful, walking taller in the shadows of the skyscrapers in an anonymous city: the city operates as the site of migrants’ social dreaming precisely because it decimates the social structures of the home where one is known, bounded and contained. However, such social dreaming presents its dark underside in the failure of many cities’ infrastructures to cope with fluxes in migration and escalating homelessness. The city, particularly the capital city, is also the seat of governance and the location of government buildings: it therefore often functions synecdochally to represent the state, and has been used to epitomise the site of corruption in the postcolony.

The city has always been the location of the uncanny:

rendered strange by the spatial incursions of modernity. […] [O]f course, the ‘uncanny’ is not a property of the space itself nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming. (Vidler 11)

The beggar in African fiction is frequently prophetic, drawing from an ambivalent power. It is often unclear whether their ‘deformity is an insignia of or indeed the cause’ of this power (Quayson 27). Indeed, the bodies of beggars in the fiction activate just such an elision of boundaries between ‘the real and the unreal’, provoking a ‘disturbing ambiguity’ about their social function. Vidler reminds us that, for Freud, the uncanny 201 must be understood as ‘something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light’ (Freud in Vidler 14): the beggar figure is often cast as unsightly and disturbing to behold, but who nonetheless refuses to disappear.

Beggars elide boundaries between public and private space by living and sleeping in the street; they disturb the economy by begging for food and money, but create a subsidiary economy through gifting and threatening to curse, trading on the fear of a hidden power. The beggar is often characterised as the repressed underside of the city: the glinting high-rise buildings bespeaking prosperity contrast the confronting poverty of bodies at street level. The impermeable surface of glass and metal is likewise contrasted with the organic bodily matter of the beggar. The beggar becomes a feature of the city’s geography, the usual haunt of the beggar a landmark fixed in place, beyond which the viewer will pass by. In fiction, the body of the beggar is revealed, to many of its residents, as the city’s open sore: if the city is imagined as a social body, the beggar symbolises its secret (moral and physical) disfigurement.

For example, Senegalese writer Aminata Sow Fall opens her 1979 novel The Beggars’ Strike (La Grève des bàttu, English translation 1981)89 with Keba Dabo’s acerbic observation that:

the streets are congested with these beggars, these talibés, these lepers and cripples, all these derelicts. The Capital must be cleared of these people—parodies of human beings rather—these dregs of society who beset you everywhere and attack you without provocation at all times. […] Oh! these men, these parodies of human beings, as persistent as they are ubiquitous! The Capital is crying out to be cleared of them. (1)

The beggars are described as a public nuisance demanding a ‘ransom’ (1) from innocent passers-by attempting to go about their business, and their presence deemed ‘harmful to the prestige of our country’ (2). Moreover, they are repeatedly referred to throughout the novel as ‘a running sore which should be kept hidden, at any rate in the capital’ (2), ‘a canker that must be hidden from sight’ (20), and ‘an obstacle to the hygiene of the City’ (17). The beggars are understood as a blight upon the social body, and a campaign

89 ‘The beggars, about whom this story is told,’ Dorothy S. Blair explains in the translator’s note, ‘are referred to by the author as boroom bàttu, literally, “holders of calabashes” or begging-bowl-bearers, as the bàttu which they hold out for alms is a little calabash’ (v). The beggars themselves have been metonymised to the empty vessel into which money is poured. 202 is waged against them as though against an enemy invasion, the beggars’ presence ‘marked in red’ on a map in the Department of Public Health and Hygiene office (13), against whom thugs are to be deployed like soldiers. Chris Abani highlights a similar coding of the beggar body into urban space in GraceLand (2004). The young protagonist Elvis is ‘accosted’ by the ‘King of the Beggars’ when the latter:

spring[s] out of nowhere, his one eye glittering insanely. The other socket, empty, gaped red and watery as his gnarled claws closed over Elvis’s hands and his mouth opened in a toothless grin. A long scar, keloidal and thick, ran from his neck, up across the empty eye socket and into his hairline. Against the man’s dark skin, it looked like a light brown worm. (30)

The scar, delivered during the Biafran War, maps the national conflict onto the Beggar King’s anti-authoritarian ‘monarchical’ body. Nationalist violence mars his face, creating the ‘empty eye socket’ that gapes ‘red and watery’. The destroyed eye socket metonymically links the Beggar King with Lagos’s slum communities, which are derided throughout as ‘a pus-ridden eyesore on de face of de nation’s capital’ (247): the wounds of the social body become the wounds of the Beggar King, and his body itself is rendered an open sore walking through the city, rendering its streets ‘unclean’.

The evocation of the beggar as the organic, ‘excessive’ underside of the rational city manifests as id to the city’s ego. The beggar is metonymised as a sore upon the social body, one to be repressed from consciousness and, ideally, eliminated.

The beggar’s ambivalent power

Even though in the modern world the notion of the proximity of the divine and metaphysical orders to the human life world is no longer predominant, such beliefs have still flared up from time to time in a variety of contexts. The idea of the proximity of the two realms has only

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been residualized as opposed to being entirely superseded. The relation between residuality and emergence is not to be seen as a cycle but rather as a dialectical mutation in which a variety of ‘old’ and ‘new’ ideas are sometimes reconstellated to produce new perspectives and realities.

(Quayson Aestheic Nervousness 12–13)

The literary emphasis on the beggar figure’s occupying a deviant space outside of society (both to be feared and reviled, the last resort of the desperate) is, of course, an ancient device. In Europe the beggar figure has often arisen from a nomadic or ‘gypsy’ population (such as the Romani) resisting assimilation, or of an indigenous group generally posited to be ‘dying out’ and closely related with nature, generating a productive tension in the city to which they have been forced to relocate by war, the effects of state paternalism, or industrialisation (such as, for example, the Sámi people in Scandinavia, or Circassians in Eastern Europe). In America the prophetic outcast figure is often associated with a Gothic curse: someone who has been wronged such as a Native American or, particularly in the south, an African American former slave or slave’s descendent. This recourse to typically ‘Othered’ groups trades not only on exoticism but also, as Robert Mighall has observed in his study of ‘New World Gothic’, on guilt: the United States ‘is a big paranoid country, guiltily aware that it has taken the land away from people, and taken other people away from their lands: hence the symbolic importance of land, and what lies beneath it’ (Mighall 58). The latter example of the former slave or slave’s descendent as keeper of ambivalent knowledge is more frequently seen in literature of the Caribbean, where this figure is often associated with the transportation of customs on slave ships from Africa. In English writing after the Cromwellian invasion up to the nineteenth century, the most common of such figures was arguably that of the old Irish woman, only partially integrated into the Anglo-Irish hierarchy (as a smallholder, laundress or seamstress—someone operating outside of the rational architecture of the Anglo-Irish great house), holder of threatening wisdom. Similar figures are to be found, though with less frequency and with less unsettling power, in literature set in Britain’s later colonies further from home, such as India and in African countries.90 In the Western literary tradition, such figures are typical of the

90 The outcast figure varies widely in settler colonies. Canada follows much the same pattern as the U.S. regarding Native Americans and Inuit people. In South Africa where black Africans have always formed the majority population and where whites lived in fear of being ‘overrun’ (both genetically and literally), 204

Gothic, which relies on the disjuncture between industrialised modern systems and ancient, often precolonial, knowledge. The beggar figure regularly entails a racial or genetic otherness that resists absorption to the social body of the host culture. The beggar is often outwardly dismissed as a charlatan while revealed to secretly possess a profane or demonic power. In these cities the dispossessed haunt the margins, particularly where the city is perceived as having been built upon illegally brokered ground. In shamanistic cultures, by contrast, the outsider may often be a wise and learned person with links to otherworldly sources of power that set them apart from the rest of their community.

Many African cultures have traditionally reserved positions for people who were held apart from the mainstream social group but who were highly valued for their work: these may be artists such as griots, storytellers or performers, or teachers and healers sought for their learning, such as marabouts, seers, gris-gris-men, sangomas and others invested with prophetic powers, often held to exist outside of the normal social conditions and restraints. The sources of such figures’ learning and power vary, from those indigenous to the area (such as local teachers, personal chi or ancestors), or merged with other cross-cultural ways of knowing, such as modernised Western tools or Semitic religious texts. In fiction these literary outsiders tend to inhabit a separate space from that of the main village, or live a wandering existence, making a living from the fear and respect that is offered them and the products of their work. These productive outsider figures operate within a parallel economy from that of the dominant social group. The association of the outcast with prophetic powers or magic aligns the outcast with an imagined other world from which they draw the source of their energy: the prophet’s body transgresses the invisible barrier between these worlds. In post-independence African literature of the metropolis, the new outcast figure often retains these qualities of ambivalent power while, following the cataclysmic shift engendered by the disasters of slavery and colonisation, and the period of rapid industrialisation that followed, moving closer to the European conception of the outcast figure as a body out-of-place: the organic flesh unable to assimilate with the there tends towards a wider distribution of unease rather than being focalised in one specific outcast figure. Writing of colonial New Zealand is also impacted by the relative population sizes of Europeans and Maori. In Australia during the colonial period the prophetic outcast figure is less strongly present (in a sinister representation of terra nullius): a Gothic presence often persists, confusingly both ancient and without history, seeming at times to be Indigenous Australian by rote and at times veering towards a more disembodied and almost absent persona or force of the land, often more ambivalent than malevolent.

205 increasingly mechanized world of the city, and reflecting the rupture between precolonial and postcolonial experience. The new outcast figure commonly possesses the ambivalent promise of otherworldly power while being at the same time ‘unfit’ for absorption into the mainstream functioning of the state. It is this productive disunity that engenders the energy and disruptive potential of the outcast. The magical association of the outcast is compounded when the character has a visible disability as the signifier of a deeper difference.

The beggar and disability

Most beggars in African fiction are portrayed as having disabilities or as being physically ‘deformed’ in some way. The question of how they came by their disability at times provides an outlet in the fiction for characters to blame the beggars for their condition: stories circulate about the deliberate maiming of children in the provision of begging as a trade. In Abani’s Graceland (2004) set in Lagos, Sunday tells his son: ‘Do you know why we have a lot of deformed children begging? Because their parents know dey have no future. So at birth, before de child knows pain, dey deform it because it increases its earning power as a beggar. Do you see de love? All dey have to give de child is its deformity’ (188). In Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), Alek, a newcomer to Lagos, is shocked by the vast numbers of beggars in the city, who emerge from their makeshift beds under bridges to:

harass passers-by for money, touting disability like a prized trophy. Every sort of illness known to man was present among the homeless under the bridge. Alek thought it was almost a freak show; an unabashed display. People with stumps for arms and legs sticking them out at passing cars and pedestrians; blind people rapping on closed car windows and singing for money, led by children with perfect sight; people with disfigured mouths, or eyeballs that were unnaturally huge, lepers with skin that looked plastered with coarse sand.

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Once Alek saw a man with only a head and a torso being pushed in a wheelbarrow by an old man with the frail body of an invalid. She felt sorry for both of them, so much so that she threw them a crumpled hundred-naira note from her window. (216)

Alek, a refugee from a small town in Sudan, is aghast at the ‘freak show’ of disability emerging from the repressed civic space beneath overpasses and under bridges in teeming Lagos. She is rebuked for giving money by local Polycarp, who snaps that the beggars are: ‘an eyesore. The government should get rid of all of them. Arrest them and shoot them […] If they don’t want to make use of the lives they’ve been given they should be cleaned up’ (217). Polycarp’s hatred of the beggars may issue from an internalised fear and rejection of their condition. It has been commented by disability scholars that a nondisabled person’s gaze upon a body marked by impairment underwrites a recognition that anyone can, by illness or misadventure, become impaired. This recognition ‘produces features of a primal scene of extreme anxiety whose roots lie in barely acknowledged vertiginous fears of loss of control over the body itself’ (Quayson 17).

The long history of the representation of disability has varied widely across cultures and contexts. Virtually constant has been the reading of the impaired or disabled body as bearing the mark of an otherworldly or divine power—either in punishment, or more ambivalently. The Greeks ‘saw disability and disease as punishment from the gods, while for the ancient Egyptians, disability and disease were no longer instances of punishment for sin but the signs of a metaphysical drama’ (Quayson 5). Leviticus in the Old Testament, meanwhile:

locate[s] impurity in leprosy: skin tumor, impairment of the cover that guarantees corporeal integrity, sore on the visible, presentable surface. [T]he disease visibly affects the skin, the essential if not initial boundary of biological and psychic individuation. From that point of view, the abomination of leprosy becomes inscribed within the logical conception of impurity […]: intermixture, erasuring of differences, threat to identity. (Kristeva 101)

Leprosy, commonly associated with beggars in West African fiction, bears the taint of this ‘logical conception of impurity’ and the ‘erasure of differences’, a ‘threat to 207 identity’ of the viewer. The leper’s visibly different skin marks them as a potential crosser of boundaries, refracting fears about urban hygiene and the city’s social body.91 ‘In all these instances,’ Quayson concludes, ‘the divine and metaphysical orders are seen to be proximate to the human life-world. Disability is then interpreted in various ways as a function and sign of that proximity’ (Quayson 6).

Western discourses on disability such as leprosy as marking the body (and rendering it subversively open to interchange, marking it as threatening to healthy white male normativity) have also been impacted by the bringing-into-knowledge of other ‘Othered’ bodies, such as those of women and Europe’s racial others. Quayson explains that:

The colonial encounter and the series of migrations that it triggered in its wake served to displace the discourse of disability onto a discourse of otherness that was correlated to racial difference. […] Disease provided a particularly supple set of metaphors to modulate some of the social anxieties that emerged in the colonial period around interracial encounters, both in Europe and in the United States, with the discourse on leprosy in the period being particularly productive. (Quayson 10–11)

Leprosy had long disappeared from Europe by the time it was rediscovered ‘as quite common in parts of the world that the Western nations were annexing and colonizing’ in the nineteenth century, instigating, with germ theory, ‘a new anxiety about race relations’ (Quayson 11) fed by pathological fears of infection and contamination of the racial pool. Expanding on the effects of germ theory upon securitizing states in his study of Bioinsecurities, Neel Ahuja describes the ways in which ‘disease outbreaks, medical technologies, and the relations between humans, animals, bacteria, and viruses galvanized racialized fears and hopes that determined the geopolitical form of US empire during the long twentieth century’ (ix). Conceptual imbrications between race and disease have endured. The Nazi response to purification of the social body in terms of race, seeking to preserve ‘the racial traits and hereditary health of the body of the

91 Kristeva ties leprosy conceptually with the ‘persecuting and threatening traces’ of the maternal body that subsist in the child’s body for ‘whom pre-Oedipal identification is intolerable’ (101). 208 people’ (Verschuer in Agamben 147),92 was also directly related to people with disabilities:

Even though there had always been people with disability in Germany, historically treated in similar ways to others elsewhere in Europe, the intense nationalist redefinition that took place during the Third Reich shifted the salience of disability as a socially meaningful sign. Disability ceased being a mere cipher of the proximity of the metaphysical realm to the human lifeworld and rather became the signal of danger to the purity of the nation as such. Joined to the presumed inalienable racial otherness of Jews, disability came to bear the burden of a moral deficit that was thought to threaten the national character as such and thus, along with Jews, had to be violently extirpated. (Quayson 13)

The significance of disability and disease representation has always been acutely political, particularly in relation to the social body of the nation: for in addition to a biological interpretation of purity or impurity, the insidious signification of the body with disability has led to the interpretation of people with disability as social signs. The nexus between biology and politics garnered momentum through ‘public health interventions’ as ‘the privileged state avenue for defending the national body in a world of expanding contact’ (Ahuja 3): Ahuja comments drily that ‘[t]he body’s transitional form—its plasticity that may be accelerated by disease and other forms of interspecies contact—is a significant cause of concern for securitizing states’ (9). In one fascinating study Ahuja interrogates the example of smallpox, ‘the world’s only eradicated infectious disease’, which:

literally exists in the suspended animation of laboratory culture; its absent presence and reanimation has been repeatedly staged in journalism, popular novels, and defense policy from the 1990s through to the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion. Represented as the world’s most

92 Agamben argues that: The link between politics and life instituted by these words is not (as is maintained by a common and completely inadequate interpretation of racism) a merely instrumental relationship, as if race were a simple natural given that had merely to be safeguarded. The novelty of modern biopolitics lies in the fact that the biological given is as such immediately political, and the political is as such immediately the biological given. (Homo Sacer 147–148, original emphasis)

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deadly and disfiguring virus, smallpox suggests the extreme potentials of disease emergence at the borders of empire, where unruly ecologies mingle with the monstrous visions of the rogue and the terrorist. (22)

Extant fears about the reanimation of the virus at the ‘unruly’ ‘borders of empire’ impacted the response to ongoing contemporary wars activated by the United States’ fears for the strength of its borders: the borders of empire are, such discourses suggest, only as effective as the sanctity of the bodily borders of its citizens. Through its vulnerabilities, the individual body collapses into the imagined body of the race or state. Thus racial fears were imbricated with fears of disability and disease, bespeaking a conceptual movement between the two in the colonial encounter.

Bodies with disabilities are too often perceived as being in some way ‘excessive’, bursting beyond the normal bounds of the body. Quayson is critical of this ‘implicit assumption that disability is an “excessive” sign that invites interpretation, either of a metaphysical or other sort’, going on to further clarify that:

the category of the ‘metaphysical’ is dissolved into that of an aesthetic problematic, sometimes figured in the form of an interpretative difficulty or impasse, at other times as something that is concealed from view but that has serious ramifications for how interpersonal relationships among the characters are conducted. (Quayson 14)

Disability as a sign of excess also, in these discourses, invites analysis of the body as telling a story that may be interpreted. ‘By its very presence,’ Rosemarie Garland Thomson observes, ‘the exceptional body seems to compel explanation, inspire representation, and incite regulation’ (Thomson in Quayson 4). The impaired body is a marked body and is therefore frequently seen as properly an object rather than the subject of fiction: the gazed-upon rather than the holder of the gaze. The marking of the body also, as Mohanram has shown in her study, renders the subject entirely of the body rather than of the mind or soul, a relationship that is also (particularly significant in the consideration of beggars) predicated upon capitalism and wealth:

Property grants invisibility—an ideal—to the body and poverty makes it visible. Poverty therefore is to be abhorred within liberal democratic discourse as it draws attention to the body. For the rich white man the

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mind spills over into the body, making it disappear altogether; for the black and/or poor man, it is the body that is highlighted. (Mohanram 37)

The marking of the body by disability is at times seen as inviting comment on impairment as a legitimate source of conversation; however, much more commonly, research suggests that the nondisabled person experiences intense avoidance anxiety,93 to the point where the elided impairment seems to be the only thing that can be talked about with the person with disability, and the one topic that must be avoided at all costs. Nondisabled people’s anxieties around conversing with people with disability ultimately paves the way for further entrenchment of social avoidance and isolation for the latter group. The marking of the body also creates the disabled-body-as-sign. Kristeva interprets Leviticus as suggesting that:

The body must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic. In order to confirm that, it should endure no gash other than that of circumcision, equivalent to sexual separation and/or separation from the mother. Any other mark would be the sign of belonging to the impure, the non-separate, the non-symbolic, the non-holy (Kristeva 102)

Any marks upon the ‘clean and proper’, ‘whole’ body other than those of separation from the maternal body must be viewed as degrading, scribing the body as impure. Brooks has argued that the marking of the body coincides with the signing of the body into narrative: with attention to Greek tragedies and the dramatic moment of recognition (as in Odysseus’s recognition by Eurykleia through his scar), Brooks contends that:

It is as if identity, and its recognition, depended on the body having been marked with a special sign, which looks suspiciously like a linguistic signifier. The sign imprints the body, making it part of the signifying process. Signing or marking the body signifies its passage into writing, its becoming a literary body, and generally also a narrative body, in that the inscription of the sign depends on and produces a story. The signing of the body is an allegory of the body become a subject for literary narrative—a body entered into writing. (3)

93 An effect to which Quayson refers in his study as ‘aesthetic nervousness’. 211

The marking of the body, for Brooks, renders it an object inviting interpretation: the body becomes ‘a signifier, or the place on which messages are written’ (Brooks 21). In the case of the body marked by disability, these messages may be of divine origin, as for classical antiquity, or, more sinisterly, messages that ‘signal of danger to the purity of the nation’ (Quayson 13). The marking of the body as providing its ‘passage into the realm of the letter, into literature’ (Brooks 22) prevails especially in characters with disability. Quayson suggests—he admits, ‘controversially’—that:

disability is a marker of the aesthetic field as such. Disability teases us out of thought, to echo Keats, not because it resists representation, but because in being represented it automatically restores an ethical core to the literary-aesthetic domain while also invoking the boundary between the real and the metaphysical or otherworldly. Along with the category of the sublime, it inaugurates and constitutes the aesthetic field as such. And like the sublime, disability elicits language and narrativity even while resisting or frustrating complete comprehension and representation and placing itself on the boundary between the real and the metaphysical. (22)

In African fiction, beggars are frequently interpreted as having access to an otherworldly source of power: that is, of transgressing boundaries, existing with one foot in the daily realm, and another in something beyond the reach of ordinary people. While regulated by context, the perception of disability as being related to the metaphysical is, as others have shown (Whyte and Ingstad; Quayson; Striker), common to many cultures’ interpretations of the disabled body. As such, the body marked with disability, Quayson argues, must be understood in relation to the sublime in literature. The placement of disability ‘on a continuum with the sublime’ is also suggested ‘in terms of its oscillation between a pure abstraction and a set of material circumstances and conditions’ (23), to the extent that such oscillation ‘ensures that the ethical core of its representation is never allowed to be completely assimilated to the literary-aesthetic domain as such’ (24). Quayson argues that represented disability in literature fuses the aesthetic and the ethical: ‘Because disability in the real world already incites interpretation, literary representations of disability are not merely reflecting disability; they are refractions of that reality, with varying emphases of both an aesthetic and ethical kind’ (Quayson 36). As represented in literature, disability: 212

serves then to close the gap between representation and ethics, making visible the aesthetic field’s relationship to the social situation of persons with disability in the real world. […] [T]he intervention of the literary representation is an intervention into a world that already situates disability within insistent framings and interpretations. The literary domain rather helps us to understand the complex processes of such framings and the ethical implications that derive from such processes. (Quayson 24)

There are, of course, ethical issues at stake in representations which veer strongly towards reading disability as a sign rather than as a nuanced expression of subjective experience. The symbolic representation of disability in this chapter, for example, largely adheres to the grotesque mode, which celebrates excess and deformity—two signs under which impaired bodies have long laboured. The problematic representation of disability in the grotesque is a consideration for further study. Geoffrey Galt Harpham observes that ‘[t]he grotesque occupies a gap or interval; it is the middle of a narrative of emergent comprehension’ (Harpham 18). The ‘emergent comprehension’ in relation to the marking of the disabled body is often that of the non-disabled—for, as Harpham further reflects, ‘what is commonly conceived of as an opposition between the sublime and the grotesque is often a mere difference of point of view’ (Harpham 22). While there is certainly a productive hinge in these texts between the ethical and the aesthetic, the symbolic functioning of the disabled beggar frequently shifts gears away from a nuanced understanding of living with impairment and towards the body with disability as a social sign under the mark of the grotesque.

Beggars and the grotesque

African novelists have used the solitary beggar as an ambiguous figure, whose out-of- place body forms a script of social unease within the text. In their single use, the beggar is deployed as a source of ambivalent wisdom, a figure who warns or threatens the protagonist, or represents a threat to wholeness and sanity. However, the beggar figure

213 becomes most interesting and unusual in its plural use. Significantly, African novelists post-independence have turned to the beggar in groups or processions, at which point the meaning of the beggar body as a signifier shifts. Where in literature the single use of one beggar body provides the highly visible focus for unease, their multiplication tends not to increase the threatening tension, but rather erupts through it in an extravagant, flamboyant grotesquerie.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais is well known for expounding on the category of the grotesque. The grotesque, for Bakhtin, arises from a medieval folk context and is characterised by the crossing of borders and a destabilising ‘confusion of hierarchy’ (Harpham 13). The grotesque body reveals itself most in carnival; it is a body born of excess, in a state of constant production and never whole or complete:

Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. […] The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body (26)

Above all, Bakhtin argues, the body is rendered grotesque by its orifices as apertures to the world: ‘the most important of all human features for the grotesque is the mouth. It dominates all else. The grotesque face is actually reduced to the gaping mouth; the other features are only a frame encasing this wide-open bodily abyss’ (317). The grotesque also mixes, imperfectly, elements of the high and the low, ‘marked by […] affinity/antagonism, by the co-presence of the normative, fully formed, “high” or ideal, and the abnormal, unformed, degenerate, “low” or material’ (Harpham 11). The grotesque ‘gathers but does not cohere or synthesize’, making abundantly clear at all times ‘the sickening jumble of its parts’ (Harpham 4–5; 5).

Because unfinished, the grotesque body reveals itself always to be both communal and ‘deeply positive’:

It is presented not in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all the people. […] The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological

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individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable. (Bakhtin 19)

This ‘grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable’ nature of the grotesque body is also, Bakhtin is at pains to assert, ambivalently positive. It is characterised by ‘abundance’ and ‘triumphant’ festivity, referring ‘not to the isolated biological individual, not to the private, egotistic “economic man,” but to the collective ancestral body of all the people’ (Bakhtin 19). Bakhtin associates the grotesque and its inversions with the carnival in medieval Europe, in which the peasants dress up as nobility and the nobility, peasants.

African writers have overwhelmingly exercised the carnivalesque grotesque mode in writing the transgressive potential of beggar communities in fiction. In the communal spectacle of their grotesque, border-defying bodies, the beggars paradoxically cohere into an ambivalent force that constitutes itself as intensely political. The interests of the ‘private, egotistic, “economic man”’ in the postcolony are set squarely against the collective carnival spirit of the beggars (Bakhtin 19).

Senegalese writer Ousmane Sembène memorably deploys a procession of beggars in his 1973 novel Xala. Its protagonist, El Hadji Abdou Kader Beye, is a wealthy and powerful businessman: however, upon being wedded to his third wife, the ‘young girl’ N’Gone, he finds himself unable to consummate the marriage (4). El Hadji suspects that he ‘has the xala’ (36), a spell laid against him to render him impotent. Becoming increasingly desperate, the businessman consults a seet-katt (seer), blurting out his desire ‘to be cured! Become a man again!’ (54). He suspects one of his existing wives, Adja Awa Astou or Oumi N’Doye, of having placed the xala on him out of jealousy.

In Sembène’s deft portrayal, El Hadji is ‘what one might call a synthesis of two cultures: business had drawn him into the European middle class after a feudal African education. Like his peers, he made skilful use of his dual background, for their fusion was not complete’ (Sembène 3–4). El Hadji has made use of his dual education and augmented his success with the social authority of one who has performed the hajj in pilgrimage to Mecca, giving him the mantle ‘El Hadji’. His economic and social power is constructed upon his masculinity and virility as a heteronormative male body. When afflicted with the xala and unable to perform sexually he proves incapable of laying a 215 husband’s claim to his wives’ bodies: he is rendered somehow less than a man, and symbolically unable to compete in business. El Hadji, we learn,

suffered greatly from his xala. His bitterness had become an inferiority complex in the company of his peers. He imagined himself the object of their looks and the subject of their conversation. He could not endure the asides, the way they laughed whenever he went past, the way they stared at him. His infirmity, temporary though it might be, made him incapable of communicating with his employees, his wives, his children and his business colleagues. (43)

News of the xala spreads quickly, causing competitors to scorn him. He is expelled from his elite Businessmen’s Group (94), and embarrassing legal proceedings are brought against him as he is forced to default on his loans and the rent for the villas of the women he supports. The women are reduced to looting their own houses and fleeing under cover of night to elude repossession by the bailiffs. El Hadji’s being not properly ‘a man’ sexually has, in a domino effect, caused his social and financial ruin. Respected marabout Sereen Mada is able to remove the xala, temporarily lifting El Hadji’s spirits, but Mada replaces it once more when it becomes clear that the bankrupt El Hadji is unable to pay for his service.

The beggar who sits outside El Hadji’s office promises he can remove El Hadji’s xala for him, advising the disgraced businessman’s chauffeur: ‘If El Hadji does what I tell him he will be cured. He will become a man like you and me’ (101). El Hadji, who had been a symbol of masculine vigour in his business and personal life and was therefore endowed to succeed in both arenas, is now seen as being of lesser standing than the lowly beggar and the chauffeur on the basis of their shared manhood.

The beggar fulfils his promise by bringing his companions with him to cure El Hadji, and their renegade procession’s entrance to the wealthy neighbourhood is greeted with alarm and horror:

Walking abreast across the entire width of the road came a procession of lame and blind people, lepers, legless cripples, one-legged cripples, men, women, and children, led by the beggar. There was something repulsive

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about the procession, which gave off a fetid smell of ragged clothes. (108)

It is at this point that the narrative, which has been decidedly realist throughout, falls away in a sudden shift into the carnivalesque grotesque. The narration pores over the bodies of the beggars and their expressive, chaotic difference from the healthy normative bodies of El Hadji and his family as they swarm into the villa, ‘crawling on to the verandah’ and ‘settl[ing] themselves down’ in the sitting-room ‘as if it belonged to them’ (108). The bodies of the beggars are defined by their deformity, and yet there is a strange power in their very difference as they impress themselves upon the house. One man, a:

legless cripple, his palms and knees covered with black soil from the garden, printed a black trail on the floor like a giant snail. With his strong arms he hoisted himself up into a red velvet armchair, where he sat with a foolish, triumphant grin that that revealed his broken teeth and his pendulous lower lip. (108)

This ‘cripple’ is likened to a snail from the garden, dissolving the difference between the human form and a shapeless slug in the horrible trail he sloughs across the floor; and yet, he has ‘strong arms’ by which he asserts himself by taking his place on El Hadji’s chair, smiling with his strange mouth that is both recognisably human and distancing Other. We learn that another man ‘with a maggoty face and a hole where his nose had been, his deformed, scarred body visible through his rags, grabbed a white shirt and putting it on admired himself in a mirror, roaring with laughter at the reflection of his own antics’ (108). This man is balanced precariously between life and death: his face is ‘maggoty’ and rotten, with a gaping ‘hole’ at the centre of his face; and yet he parades himself as a man as though it were a fine joke, pulling on El Hadji’s white western-style business shirt and miming participation in economics. One woman bearing twins is described as standing on ‘a foot with a cloven heel and stunted toes’ (108); others among the party bear a multitude of physical afflictions, including ‘lepers’, a ‘hunchback’, and a ‘cripple with a degenerate’s head and runny eyes’ who steals El Hadji’s crockery.

The spectacle of the carnival is dominated by laughter, and in the carnival atmosphere of the beggars’ parodic co-option of the wealthy man’s living room and 217 clothing, the beggars direct their laughter not only at El Hadji and his family, but also at themselves. This, Bakhtin asserts, is an ‘important trait of the people’s festive laughter: that it is also directed at those who laugh. The people do not exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world. […] The people’s ambivalent laughter […] expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it’ (Bakhtin 12).94 The ambivalent and dual-directed laughter of the beggars is what endows their mimicry with its productive, generative power. Their degradation95 is not solely negative, but also regenerative: ‘Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving’ (Bakhtin 21).

The beggars’ bodies are grotesque and belong to the regenerative life of the carnival. Where El Hadji and his family are transfixed in horror, ‘made speechless by the strange scene’ (108) in their sitting room, the beggars themselves are engaged in an unsettling laughter. Their flamboyant disabilities distance them from El Hadji and his polite neighbours, threatening to dissolve distinctions between human and animal (where the destroyed human subject is rendered merely the site for parasitic animal life), life and death. The beggars are aware of the transgressive power that is afforded them by the disgust they generate in people, and behave with impunity within El Hadji’s home: seating themselves on the furniture and smearing it with their slime, tearing apart the cushions, trampling things underfoot, and pocketing the ‘shiny objects’ (108). The beggars are so out-of-place in this bourgeois environment that they destroy it—either in the conscious exuberance of destruction, or in a parody of the normalcy that is denied them, as in the maggoty man’s donning of the white shirt whose purity he pollutes.

The beggars are also attributed with a lascivious energy. Adja Awa Astou and her daughter, Rama, are made the objects of sexual advances by the beggars: a ‘legless man’ fondles Adja Awa Astou’s legs, sending ‘a shiver of disgust up to the roots of her hair. Nausea spread through her whole body’ (109), while Rama, emerging in her nightdress to the loud confusion, ‘was accosted by two hideous fellows who eyed her figure with desire and refused to leave her alone’ (110). Proper to the grotesque, the

94 ‘This is one of the essential differences of the people’s festive laughter from the pure satire of modern times,’ Bakhtin advises, contrasting ‘[t]he satirist whose laughter is negative [who] places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it’ against communal, self-directed people’s laughter (Bakhktin 12). 95 Degradation is a key element of the grotesque, for: ‘To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. […] Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one’ (Bakhtin 21). 218 beggars have been ‘hurled’ ‘down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place’ (Bakhtin 21). The beggars display an over-the- top fertility and sexual aggressiveness: they bring not only children but twins, suggesting a kind of occult plenitude, and engage in general lechery, further underlining the distinction between their own mad virility and El Hadji’s unmanned status in hiding in his wife’s villa.

Mirroring El Hadji’s impotence and inability to unleash his sexual desire, the narrative has been thoroughly contained within the realist tradition, elucidated in Sembène’s spare, precise prose. It erupts in these final riotous scenes towards the end of the novel like an explosion outwards from the unconscious, where the beggars’ strange bodies trigger an unburdening of repression into a feast of communal energy.

Nigerian Ben Okri also harnesses the transformative energy of beggars’ bodies in his 1991 Booker Prize–winning novel The Famished Road. The novel follows the abiku or spirit child Azaro96 and the fortunes of his impoverished family. Azaro’s mother works gruelling hours at the market, but her situation there is precarious and she is cheated out of her stall. His father is a labourer and boxer who relies on the strength of his body for a living: he is also a gambler and an alcoholic, constantly depressed by their poor circumstances, and his weaknesses keep the family in penury despite his dreaming for social change. Dad wants to run for public office in defiance of the intimidation gangs deployed to control citizen votes. Okri’s trilogy, somewhat problematically, establishes impoverished Dad as the heroic but flawed heteronormative male figure fighting for a just cause against Madame Koto, the semi-magical, overweight and in every way excessive ‘economic’ woman representing the convergence of capitalism and politics.

In the midst of an ill-conceived party celebrating his entry to the democratic race, a family of beggars appear on a pilgrimage to see Dad and offer him their vote. The beggars arrive in a ‘procession’ of ‘about seven or eight’, ‘led by a hypnotically beautiful young girl’ (416): Some of the beggars had legs that were limp and pliable as rubber. Some had twisted necks. Others had both feet behind their heads. One of them

96 Abbreviated from Lazaro due to its uncomfortable closeness to Lazarus: the spirit child repeatedly dies and is born again. 219

had one eye much higher on his face than the other. Another seemed to have three eyes, but on closer inspection it turned out to be a wound like a socket with an eye missing. One was almost completely blind and could see only through pupils so scrambled up and confusing that they seemed like mashed egg yolk. It was when the girl got closer that we saw she was blind in one eye. All the beggars trailed along the ground, in filthy clothes, each with sticks and pads of cloth beneath the joints of limbs that scraped the rough earth. (416)

The bodies of these beggars are even more extraordinary than those in Sembène’s novel, bearing ‘feet behind their heads’, a ‘scrambled’ eye like a ‘mashed egg yolk’, and ‘twisted necks’. Okri’s use of magical realism,97 and specifically the otherworldly sight of his spirit child narrator, causes us to read the characters’ bodies differently, reflecting Quayson’s observation that representation of disability differs across genres.98 In the grotesque mode ‘stress is laid on those parts of the body,’ Bakhtin reminds us, ‘that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world’ (26). The beggars’ bodies seem to consist of wounds and deformities, the mixing of inside and outside and the trespass of the ordinary borders of the body. The beggars crawl upon ‘the rough earth’, increasing their distance from the normative bodies of the witnesses, and heightening their similarity with non-human animals. Their bodies are endowed with an almost religious significance. When the beggars arrive in the compound wearing ‘the bright faces of arrivants’ (416), Azaro sees that they:

97 Magical realism needs to be qualified here with reference to African writers, who have often distanced themselves from the term. ‘African writers,’ Cooper observes, ‘tend to reject the label of magical realism. One reason for this perhaps is that it implies the slavish imitation of Latin America. It suggests a denial, in other words, of local knowledge and beliefs, language and rhetoric; it seems to perpetuate imperialist notions that nothing new, intellectually or spiritually, originated in Africa’ (37).

98 Quayson observes that in comedy, for example:

disability takes on a pantomime character and is meant to generate laughter. Thus we have the perennial effective potential for comedy inherent in works in which blindness and deafness are used to establish dramatic ironies. A well-known example is to be found in Hergé’s Tintin series, where the scientist Cuthbert Calculus is given to hilarious malapropisms due to his hearing difficulties. […] Attending to the generic conventions out of which the disabled character is created then helps to highlight the nature of the contradictions that surround the representation of disability. (Quayson 35)

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were a family. The most deformed was the father. He seemed to have all their deformities. As the line went towards the youngest each member seemed to have a peculiar variation of a particular deformity. It ended with the clarity of the little girl’s blind eye. (416–417)

The beggars, as in Sembène’s novel, are united by kinship: however, here the union is more pronounced, with all beggars part of an immediate family. These first arrivals, most faithful to Dad, subsequently draw another group of beggars into the neighbourhood:

Two of them had malformed legs and dragged themselves on the ground like hybrid serpents, with the cushioning aid of elbow pads. The rest of them had twisted arms, elongated necks. One of them had only one arm, another had two fingers, and another, to my horror, seemed to have three eyes. I tried to run, but I was curiously rooted. (429)

The second collection of beggars are even more afflicted than the first, ‘dragging’ themselves ‘like hybrid serpents’, with ‘only one arm’ or ‘two fingers’ or ‘three eyes’. They carry with them ‘the smells of the gutters, street-corners, dustbins, rotting flesh, and damp nights’ (429)—the smells of death-in-life and life-in-death. They activate a grotesque disruption of hierarchy, particularly disturbing to the boundaries between humans and animals; when the youngest laughs ‘it seemed that a mashed insect fell out of his mouth’, undercutting human exceptionalism.99 Meanwhile, the language of their leader ‘seemed to belong to another universe’ (420) incomprehensible to Azaro: they are simultaneously transcendent, belonging to the stars, and bounded by their strange, reeking bodies: ‘oscillating’, in Quayson’s term, between the sublime and the material.

99 Azaro tells Madame Koto that the beggars will vote for his father, on which she replies that only ‘chickens’, ‘frogs’, ‘mosquitoes’ and ‘snails’ will vote for him (435). She likens the beggars to animals, significantly, animals that are of more liquid or uncertain form, those most different from humans. 221

The eating beggar

Both Sembène’s Xala and Okri’s later novel The Famished Road underscore the beggars’ bodily difference: this difference is found in its extreme form in their acts of consuming. Consuming, Bakhtin reminds us, is essential to the establishment of the grotesque body (as evident in Chapter One in the grotesque body of the dictator). This is because:

the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world […] This is why the main events in the life of the grotesque body, the acts of the bodily drama, take place in this sphere. Eating, drinking, defecation and other elimination (sweating, blowing of the nose, sneezing), as well as copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, swallowing up by another body—all these acts are performed on the confines of the body and the outer world, or on the confines of the old and new body. In all these events the beginning and end of life are closely linked and interwoven. (Bakhtin 317)

In the novels we witness this ‘positive exaggeration’ and ‘hyperpolization’ of body parts associated with eating, urinating and defecating (Bakhtin 317). Sembène’s beggars, having invaded El Hadji’s wealthy house, immediately throw themselves into consuming the food on his table, thrusting ‘hands eaten up with leprosy’ into the laden plates. ‘A legless man sucked a tin of condensed milk, his eyes closed’ in orgasmic concentration, while a leper mistakenly accuses the family of being ‘criminals! Alcoholics!’ (109) upon finding some bottles of mineral water. The beggars fan out into the domestic heart of the kitchen:

Near the large, opened fridge, an adolescent who moved along sideways like a pyramid crab grabbed a pot of yoghourt and pulled off the top. First he tasted it with his index finger. Convinced that it was edible, he lay on his back, his right hip sticking out, opened his mouth and poured the yoghourt greedily into it. Then he gestured to another lad to do likewise. The new arrival pulled his leg along as he walked. An infected sore on his shin, covered by a zinc plate held in place by a piece of

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string, gave off a smell of rotting flesh. He seized a packet of butter and hurried away from the fridge. (109–110)

Sembène focuses on the beggars’ orifices and wounds as, like the mouth, entry points to the body—and the body’s entry point to the world. Such ‘convexities and orifices have a common characteristic; it is within them that the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome: there is an interchange and an interorientation’ (Bakhtin 317). The boy who moves ‘like a pyramid crab’ not only puts the yoghourt into his mouth but first inserts his hand into the pot; meanwhile the narration focuses on the ‘infected sore’ on the other boy’s shin, imparting ‘a smell of rotting flesh’ not dissimilar to rotting food. This boy ‘seized a packet of butter’ to eat apparently by itself, a by-product at times liquid and at times solid, usually consumed as an accompaniment, but here to form the slimy, unpleasant staple of the boy’s feast.

The ‘official feast’ hosted by the powerful, Bakhtin reminds us, ‘was a consecration of inequality. On the contrary, all were considered equal during carnival’ (10). It is a carnival hunger that Sembène’s beggars display: a reassertion of equality at the wealthy man’s table. The beggars’ ‘gaping mouths’ are ‘related to the image of swallowing, this most ancient symbol of death and destruction’ (Bakhtin 325). The act of consuming, of destroying and creating, is central to the establishment of the beggar procession as grotesque: the simultaneous focus on eating and on wounds emphasises the transgression of the barriers of their bodies. Eating El Hadji’s food, like trying on his clothes and jumping on his furniture, is the beggars’ way of asserting themselves in the businessman’s house and pantomiming his lifestyle. If Bakhtin’s medieval carnival saw an inversion of the feudal relationship between peasants and their ruling class, the beggars’ postcolonial/neo-colonial feasting represents an inversion of accepted roles in twentieth-century capitalism.

The beggars in The Famished Road are also associated with eating as emphasising the beggars’ bodily difference. When they eat, the beggars seem not only to inhabit, but actively to take over and change the domestic space. Upon their arrival at the party, the beggar family reveals that they have been won over to Dad’s political agenda by their gnawing hunger: ‘“We are from a distant place,” said the girl, “and we heard that a famous boxer was throwing a party for people who are hungry. We have always been hungry and it took us a whole day of travelling to get here”’ (Okri 417).

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While the beggars’ hunger operates on two levels, one motivated by a desire for systemic change and one that is quite literally the bodily hunger of poverty, Dad, drunk and ‘very exuberant’, elects to read their hunger as being purely political, preaching ‘about political miracles’ (418). In the general chaos of the party Dad gives the beggars a whole chicken: in ‘a flash’, the beggar family ‘fell on the food, rushed it, dismembered the chicken, and ate like famished beasts’ (410). Dad proclaims ‘proudly’:

‘These are members of my party. This is my world constituency, the beginning of my road. Watch them. One day we will remember their hunger when we are as hungry as they are. These people are our destiny!’

No one listened to him. He went on with his political declaration, untroubled by the fact that no one listened. […]

‘THINK DIFFERENTLY,’ he shouted, ‘AND YOU WILL CHANGE THE WORLD.’

No one heard him.

‘REMEMBER HOW FREE YOU ARE,’ he bellowed, ‘AND YOU WLL TRANSFORM YOUR HUNGER INTO POWER!’ (419– 420)

The beggars are likened to ‘famished beasts’, ‘falling’ on and ‘dismembering the chicken’ in a ravenous tussle on the ground. Dad, their self-proclaimed champion, deliberately reads their hunger as largely politically motivated and uses them for sloganeering, despite the beggars’ undignified and unashamed feast in the dirt before his feet. The beggars are shown to be in a state of constant consumption, with the second comers memorably taking over Madame Koto’s bar and sucking it dry when, ‘discarding their crutches’, they:

fell on all the available food. The ones without legs propelled themselves up on powerful hands. The ones without hands leapt up and, with the expert grip of their teeth, seized the peppersoup bowls and drank. Soup ran down the sides of their mouths and on to their filthy clothes. […] Plates had been turned over; the beggars drank soup and ate the meat and bones from the table tops. […] Suddenly the thugs lashed out at the

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beggars, kicked them, threw plates at them. The beggars ate and drank as though untouched. When the wine had been emptied from the cups, the soup all consumed, the bones cracked, the marrow sucked out of them, the beggars—amazing, in the virtuosity of their incomplete limbs— jumped on the thugs. The prostitutes fled outside. The thugs also panicked and ran. (430)

The beggars use their strange power and ‘ferocious, unbending force’ (430) to consume all the food and drink in Madame Koto’s bar even while being attacked by her thugs. The food runs out over their famished mouths and distorted limbs as they consume everything, even the ‘bones’, like ants. They do not allow their disabilities to pause their consumption, ‘propelling’ themselves without the use of crutches and picking up the bowls with their jaws. Witness to panicked escape of the thugs, Azaro ponders that, in the face of the beggars’ indomitable will: ‘For the first time I noticed that the thugs and warriors of grass-roots politics were afraid’ (430). Okri’s unusual novel—oneiric, strangely episodic, shapeless and compelling—foregrounds the beggar bodies as a staunchly outsider community, one invested with the energy and commitment of communal power.

Outsider communities

The strange force of these beggar processions is used, frequently in the fiction, to agitate for political change. The beggars, placed already outside of society, are often positioned as having less to lose from dissident behaviour, and as more readily able to band together in community action.

In The Beggars’ Strike, Sow Fall mobilises the beggars as an outsider community against social injustice. In the capital city of a fictional West African country, the authorities are concerned that the number of unsightly beggars on the streets are discouraging tourism. Mour Ndiaye, the Director of Public Health and Hygiene, is charged with clearing the streets of beggars and evicting them entirely from

225 the Capital. The beggars are savagely beaten, treated with indignity and driven from their usual haunts: one well-liked man, the lame beggar Madiabel, is forced into oncoming traffic and grievously injured. He lies in a hospital bed for five days dying slowly of his wounds because he is unable to fetch his official pauper certificate that would entitle him to free medical care. Another beggar reflects bitterly that ‘when they get worked up like that, they seem to forget that we’re human beings’ (11). Gorgui Diop, whose ‘reason for living was always to bring a little cheer to men’s hearts’ (38), is killed in uncertain circumstances, suspected of having been bludgeoned to death by the Department of Public Health and Hygiene’s paid thugs. In response to Madiabel and Gorgui Diop’s loss, the beggars hatch a plan.

The beggars ‘have always considered themselves good citizens, practising a trade like everyone else’: they consider that ‘the contract that links every individual to society can be summed up in the words: giving and receiving. Well then, don’t they, the poor, give their blessings, their prayers and their good wishes?’ (21). Knowing that the citizens of the city need to give alms in the Islamic tradition in exchange for their prayers being heard, the beggars decide to go ‘on strike’, relocating from their regular haunts on street corners, beneath bridges, in the market places and outside mosques, to the house of Salla Niang. Salla Niang is one of their own, who previously worked as a maid before ‘tak[ing] up begging as a career the day she gave birth to twins’ (10); her house is in the Slum-Clearance Resettlement Area some distance from the centre of the city. ‘Listen,’ the blind beggar Nguirane explains:

we can perfectly well get organised. Even these madmen, these heartless brutes who descend on us and beat us up, even they give to charity. They need to give alms because they need our prayers—wishes for long life, for prosperity, for pilgrimages; they like to hear them every morning to drive away their bad dreams of the night before, and to maintain their hopes that things will be better tomorrow. You think that people give out of the goodness of their hearts? Not at all. They give out of an instinct for self-preservation. (22)

Salla Niang agrees, and delivers her revolutionary speech to the dispirited group:

Let’s all stay here! Do you hear, we’ll stay here! In a very short time you’ll see that we are as necessary to them as the air they breathe. Where 226

will you find a man who’s the boss and who doesn’t give to charity so that he can stay the boss? Where will you find a man who’s suffering from a real or imaginary illness and who doesn’t believe that his troubles will disappear the moment a donation leaves his hands? Where will you find an ambitious man who doesn’t think that the magic effects of charity can open all doors? Everyone gives for one reason or another. (39)

The beggars’ conception of ‘giving’ their blessings as part of the social contract is no naïve abstraction: in the Capital, the exchange of alms for blessings is revealed to be mutually beneficial, an exercise in power. Now that the beggars are on strike, in order to give alms citizens must travel long distances in uncomfortable public transport: they must also provide alms of a higher quality in order to show the beggars they are appreciated. In the safety of Salla Niang’s courtyard, the beggars await citizens, rich and poor, travelling to them to provide offerings each day, unmolested by the state’s paid thugs.

Meanwhile, the President, impressed by Mour Ndiaye’s skill in clearing the beggars from the streets, is deciding who to nominate as his Vice President, with Mour Ndiaye tipped as the likely candidate. He is desperate for this promotion and consults a marabout, who advises what he needs to do in order to ensure his promotion. Marabout Kifi Bokoul advises him that:

You will have what you desire, and you will have it very shortly. You will be Vice-President. To achieve this, you must sacrifice a bull whose coat must be of one colour, preferably fawn. The ground must be soaked with the blood of this bull which you must slaughter here in the courtyard of this house; then you must divide it into seventy-seven portions which you will distribute to the bàttu-bearers. (58)

The offerings must be made ‘as indicated, with three times seven yards of white, non- silky material, as well as seven hundred cola-nuts, of which three hundred must be red and four hundred white’ (59), and they must be made within the week. However, the meat must be offered to bàttu-bearers ‘throughout the City, to the beggars in every district of the City’ (58). It is then that Mour Ndiaye realises his predicament: in order to become Vice-President, he must make offerings throughout the city to the very

227 beggars he has ‘purged’ from its streets (59), and who now, realising their own worth, are living a pleasant exile beyond the borders of the Capital.

All of Mour Ndiaye’s power is rerouted to the lowly beggars: his fate rests in their hands. Mour Ndiaye travels all the way to Salla Niang’s house and attempts to bribe the beggars to return to their posts—in another character’s disgusted words, ‘to open a sore that has not yet healed’ (72)—but they trick him and do not acquiesce to his request. The beggars have their revenge, and the novel closes with the broadcast announcement of another candidate’s ascension to the Vice Presidential Office. The beggars’ strike has proven successful in demonstrating their worth—both their human worth and their legitimate contribution to the city’s particular economy. Sow Fall’s clean satirical realism suggests wryly the perverse unity that can be available to outsider communities.100

As in Sow Fall’s narrative, the beggars’ comedic procession in Xala is firmly political. Despite El Hadji’s assumption that is xala is the result of his wives’ jealousy, it is revealed to have been motivated by his business interests. Once ensconced in the rich villa, the lead beggar accuses El Hadji bitterly:

Our story goes back a long way. It was shortly before your marriage to that woman there. Don’t you remember? I was sure you would not. What I am now is your fault. Do you remember selling a large piece of land at Jeko belonging to our clan? After falsifying the clan names with the complicity of people in high places, you took our land from us. In spite of our protests, our proof of ownership, we lost our case in the courts. Not satisfied with taking our land you had me thrown into prison. Why? (110–111)

The beggar condemns El Haji for robbing them ‘with all the appearance of legality. Because your father was the chief of the clan and the title deed for the land was in his name. But you, you knew that land did not belong only to your father and your family’

100 Similarly, at the denouement to Abani’s Graceland, the King of the Beggars leads a procession singing freedom songs ‘[l]ike a strange pied piper’ (299) in revolt against to the 1983 Operation Clean the Nation and the planned demolition of slum communities. Following the Beggar King, the mob streams through the streets in a peaceful communal protest, calling for the cessation of the army state and the instatement of democracy. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the intended peaceful protest and the unexpected ‘canonisation’ of the Beggar King lend a new hope to communities decimated by state power.

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(111). The incomplete ‘synthesis of two cultures’ (3–4) has left El Hadji in the perfect position to exploit loopholes in the rendering of traditional social structures and land holdings into contemporary Senegalese property law: because the land deed was in El Hadji’s father’s name he was able to evict those considered to be its rightful tenants and whose interests the titleholder should have protected. El Hadji’s corrupt business practices have finally returned to haunt him: his exploitative approach is enabled by the imperfect merger between colonial and precolonial social structures. In appropriating the land of the beggars ‘with all the appearance of legality’, El Hadji has traded on his privilege in order to dispossess them: however, in doing so he has made a powerful collective enemy. The beggar tells El Haji simply: ‘it was I who caused your xala’ (112). The revenge is exacted for a crime not domestic but acutely political.

The beggar community has arrived in a grotesque parody, but their leader’s accusations reveal them as having been ensconced at the heart of all action in the novel, activated by legitimate grievances against the ‘economic’ Big Man El Hadji. Sembène politicises the beggars’ bodies—their missing legs and weeping sores—as a group both outcast and dispossessed, but uniquely positioned to comment on the wrongs of society. The leper declares to El Hadji: ‘I am a leper to myself alone. To no one else. But you, you are a disease that is infectious to everyone. The virus of a collective leprosy!’ (111). Sembène transmutes the language of infirmity and disease into the ‘collective leprosy’ of postcolonial corruption: it is El Hadji, and not the leper, who is revealed as the hidden sickness at the heart of the apparently healthy Senegalese social order.

The beggars advise El Hadji to ‘strip yourself naked, completely naked’ so that ‘each of us will spit three times on you’ (112) in order to cure his affliction. He submits reluctantly. The beggars, ‘cripples’ and lepers spit at the exposed body of El Hadji, who is forbidden from wiping the spittle from his face. His weeping wife and daughter are also instructed to spit on him to return him to manhood. The paper wedding crown is placed ironically upon El Hadji’s head as he submits to this degradation in order to reclaim his masculinity and dominant position in society. The crown again speaks to the ‘carnival idiom […] filled with this pathos of change and renewal’:

We find here a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the “inside out” (à l’envers), of the “turnabout,” of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties,

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humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings. A second life, a second world of folk culture is thus constructed; it is to a certain extent a parody of the extracarnival life, a “world inside out.” (Bakhtin 11)

In the ‘turnabout’ logic of the carnival, El Hadji must pay for his corruption with these ‘numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings’. As a member of the new elite of the postcolony, his punishment is to be spat upon by the beggars, the ‘human wrecks’ (112) whom he has wronged: they select this punishment that involves smearing him with their own excrescences, bringing him into close bodily contact with their waste products in a symbolic reversal of their conditions, to make him understand their suffering, and in a symbolic cleansing with impure water.

The novel concludes by stepping away from the scene and beyond the front door of the house, where the police have gathered. These ‘forces of order’, we learn, have ‘raised their weapons into the firing position’ (114). Sembène elects not to provide closure and leaves the novel at the height of tension: will his family, like the beggars, spit on El Hadji? Will he be cured of the xala? Will the police storm the house and, if so, who will be injured or killed? What will be the consequences of El Hadji’s, and the beggars’, actions—and who will be held culpable in the eyes of the law? Sembène withholds final knowledge, leaving the narrative radically open at its end, available to multiple interpretations but existing always at the point of uncertainty into the future.

The beggars in these novels, grotesque and border defying as they are, act in a communal structure to highlight the power of disenfranchised outsider communities. These processions harness ‘the positive regenerating power of laughter’ (Bakhtin 45) and work together to create a force that may be used positively or negatively for political change. Where a solitary beggar body can create tension and unease in the text, the group procession allows for political mobilisation of a higher order, and these ‘wasted humans’ are displayed as functioning members of an alternative social structure: an excluded class of humans in the city, but one that nonetheless has the potential to effect change.

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The madman as abject

Nigerian writer Chigoze Obioma also uses an outcast figure as the central driver of action in his 2015 novel The Fishermen. However, whereas in the earlier novels—Xala, The Beggars’ Strike, The Famished Road and Graceland—the clanship of outcasts was displayed as a transformative force for social change, in Obioma’s The Fishermen we see instead a solitary and threatening madman in Abulu. Bakhtin observes that when the individual body is cut off from the collective, the grotesque lower stratum becomes associated with the negative only, ‘losing almost entirely their positive regenerating force. Their link with life and with the cosmos is broken, they are narrowed down to naturalistic erotic images’ (Bakhtin 23). We see this in the solitary madman of Obioma’s narrative. In this difference we also witness a corresponding shift from the generative grotesque to the abject. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva positions the abject as ‘the jettisoned object’ that ‘is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’ (2). While ‘[w]e may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what treatens [sic.] it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger’ (Kristeva 9). The abject is constituted as a threat, a blurring of the borders between self and ‘jettisoned object’. Kelly Hurley observes that:

The primordial experience of abjection remains as a trace memory long after the proto-subject has constituted itself as a ‘full’ (discrete and integral) subject—not a repressed memory, because the experience occurred before the creation of the unconscious, but rather a body- memory of nausea and convulsion. This memory can be triggered by confrontation with anomalous phenomena: objects or events which spill over the lines of demarcation meant to contain them, and thus call into question the permanence and efficacy of any boundaries, most notably those erected by the ‘self’ to maintain itself as a distinct entity. (Hurley 43)

Obioma’s Abulu is revealed as just such an abject figure. The young protagonists first encounter him when they return from their elated and furtive fishing trip to the polluted 231 river. Kayode cries that there is ‘a dead man under the tree! A dead man! A dead man!’ (85); however, the ‘corpse’ is revealed to be the local madman Abulu. Abulu is a quintessentially abject figure, both drawing the boys in and simultaneously filling them with repugnance and horror; he is both alive and dead, smeared with human waste and rotting plant matter:

He was robed from head to foot in filth. As he rose spryly to stand, some of the filth rose with him, while some was left in patches on the ground. He had a fresh scar on his face just below his chin, and his back was caked with a dripping mess from some dead mango in a state of putrefaction. His lips were dried and cracked. His hair was unkempt; it stretched like tendrils, giving him the appearance of a Rastafarian. His teeth, most of which were blackened as if singed, reminded me of fire- blowing gypsies and circus players who blew fire from their mouths and probably, I thought, burned their teeth. The man lay bare before our eyes, stark naked except for a shred of rag which hung loosely from his shoulder down to his waist; his pubic region was covered with a dense foliage of hair in the midst of which his veiny penis hung limply like trouser rope. His legs were bursting with taut varicose veins. (86–87)

Abulu is ‘robed’ in ‘filth’, a filth that he distributes about his vicinity. His body is opened to the world through wounds and scars, and covered in decaying plant life. Although his blackened teeth remind Ben of a ‘circus performer’ who inhales fire, there is noticeably nothing of the carnival in Abulu. His is an exposed sexuality, phallic—and yet in other ways he is curiously feminized, as in his suffering from varicose veins (more common in women than in men) and made vulnerable through his exposure. He inculcates horror in the watching boys, a tense fear rather than the levelling quality of laughter in the Bakhtinian grotesque. His almost-naked body, clothed only in a rag and smeared with excrement and putrefying matter, is totally on display. Identified as a corpse, Abulu is at the defining limits of abjection. Kristeva contends that:

as in true theatre, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. […] There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until,

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from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled. (3–4)

Abulu, smeared in waste and redolent of the corpse, has been expelled from society and his own rational ‘I’ has, it seems, taken flight from his body. ‘The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection’ (Kristeva 4), and Abulu’s abjection draws in the watching boys even as it repulses them. In her study of the Gothic, Hurley observes that the nausea of abjection does not signify repression, but rather: ‘[t]he subject confronting the abject is torn between two ontological possibilities: one which is rigidly invested in the construct of a stable self-identity, one which is attracted to the turbulence, chaos, and indifferentiation associated with pre-Oedipality’ (44). The boys confronting Abulu’s livid abjection both desire to distance themselves from him and are, despite themselves, perversely ‘attracted to the turbulence, chaos, and indifferentiation’ he presents: they, like ‘so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims—if not its submissive and willing ones’ (Kristeva 9).

Abulu, reported to have killed his brother after raping their mother, represents the desecration of family structures. Kristeva links abjection to the separated child’s necessary disgust for the maternal body, stating that it ‘preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationships, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be’ (10). Abulu is either too separated from his mother’s body or not enough; he returns to the maternal body in incestual rape. He is a figure cut from tragedy (and Obioma’s novel is nothing if not a contemporary tragedy), dramatizing the pre-Oedipal/Oedipal split. He transgresses ‘the prohibition placed on the maternal body (as a defense against autoereoticism and incest taboo)’ (14): and it is this very transgression of sexual return to the mother’s body that instigates the remainder of his violence and extremities of madness in the narrative, after his witnessing her bathing ‘toss[es] many strange dice about in his brain’ (97). His underlying madness has been caused by a severe blow to the head during a catastrophic car accident while a teenager. Now ‘Abulu’s brain cells, Obembe said, had floated out of their compartments into foreign zones in his head, changing his mental

233 configurations and completing the awful process’ (96). Nothing with Abulu is as it should be or in its proper place. This quality of his being out of place and disturbing boundaries is also reflected in the spaces where he lives and sleeps:

For the first years Abulu walked and slept in marketplaces, unfinished buildings, refuse dumps, open sewers, under parked cars—anywhere, everywhere the night met him, until he came upon a decrepit truck a few metres from our house. The truck had crashed into an electric pole in 1985, killing an entire family. Abandoned because of its bloody history, the truck gradually atrophied into a kingdom of wild cactus and elephant grass. Once he found it, he set to work, dislodging nations of spiders, exorcising untamed spirits of the dead, whose bloodstains had left perpetual smears on the seats. He removed spattered glass fragments, weeding out wild tiny islands of moss that clung to the bare moth-eaten furniture of the truck, and annihilated the helpless race of cockroaches. He then stored his belongings—materials picked from garbage, discarded objects of various kinds, and almost anything that piqued his curiosity— in the truck. Then he made it his home. (97–8)

Abulu’s strange body activates a collapse of public and private space, and of stasis and motion—sleeping in thoroughfares, marketplaces, and particularly ‘refuse dumps’ and ‘open sewers’, the sites of human waste disposal that are both contaminated and contaminating. This boundary between waste and non-waste ‘oozes anxiety and strains the nerves. All boundaries beget ambivalence, but this one is exceptionally fertile. However hard one tries, the frontier separating the “useful product” from “waste” is a grey zone: a kingdom of underdefinition, uncertainty—and danger’ (Bauman 28). Abulu makes this realm of ‘uncertainty’ and ‘danger’ his home, before moving to a stationary truck that has been the site of violent death, a vehicle designed for movement but which has stopped still—not fulfilling the function for which it was designed, still stained with the blood and ‘untamed spirits of the dead’. He reclaims the truck from parasites and insects before claiming occupancy. Abulu is forever:

wandering about naked, dirty, smelling, awash with filth, trailed by a sea of flies, dancing in the streets, picking up waste from bins and eating it, soliloquizing aloud or conversing with invisible people not of this world,

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screaming at objects, dancing on street corners, picking his teeth with sticks found in dirt, excreting on roadsides, and doing all the things that stray derelicts do. He went about with his head forested with long hair, his face patched with boils, and his skin greasy with dirt. (98)

Abulu’s abjection is total: covered with filth, ‘trailed by a sea of flies’, sleeping and relieving himself in the streets and sewers, eating discarded waste from rubbish bins (voluntarily transgressing the dividing line between waste and non-waste), his skin opened by boils and scratches. His abjection ‘is a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego)’ and the reconstruction of a new self defined by ‘perversion’ (Kristeva 15). He is associated with a number of sex scandals and is repeatedly witnessed publicly masturbating.

However, like beggars in African fiction, Abulu has another, otherworldly function, and this is that of the prophet. His ability to prophesy is related both to the gaps in his mind and to his border-crossing body’s ability to permeate different spaces. When in the prophetic state:

he never completely left our world; he occupied both—one leg here, one leg there as if he were a mediator between two domains, an uninvited intermediary. His messages were for the people of this world. […] He became a Prophet, a scarecrow, a deity, even an oracle. Often, though, he shattered both realms or moved between both as though the partition between them was only hymen-thin. (100)

Abulu, whose brain ‘dissolved into blood after the near-fatal accident that left him insane’ (95), is left with ‘one leg here, one leg there’, the ‘mediator between two domains’. His ability to breach the barriers between two spheres, to puncture the ‘hymen-thin barrier’ between ‘realms’, places his disturbed and disturbing body at the heart of this partition. His body is an open wound. His madness and ability to prophesy provide him with safety and a relatively exalted position by the community from which he has been largely excluded: he is held accountable to different laws. As a prophet, he is feared, for his prophesies always come true—and yet, paradoxically, he is liked by some: ‘for he frequently helped people, too’ (102) by foiling criminal plans that had been cosmically revealed to him. Though transgressive, Abulu holds none of the communal groundswell of energy that activates social confrontation and change that we 235 see in the earlier novels, and instead he acts as a solely negative force in the narrative. The narrator, the young boy Ben, zeroes in obsessively on Abulu’s muck and his exposed penis: he is a symbol of hysterical masculinity, both violent and vulnerable.

In addition to his public masturbations and his desecration of the statue of the Virgin Mary, Abulu also defiles the body of a murdered young woman ‘killed early that morning—probably at dawn. Owing to the typical slow response of the traffic police in that part of Nigeria, the body had been allowed to remain on the spot for long, even until midday so that people who’d come that way had often stopped to see the body’ (217). Pushing through a crowd of spectators who have gathered, Nonso sees the corpse:

whose head lay on a nimbus formed by the blackened patch of her blood. Her hands were thrown sideways like he’d seen before, a ring glimmering on one of the fingers—the blood-soaked hair sticky and uneven in shape. But this time, it was naked, her breasts unclothed, and Abulu was on top of her, thrusting into her as the mob watched in horror. […] When he’d relieved himself, he fell asleep, clinging to the dead woman as if she was his wife until the police took her away from him. (218)

After sating his unnatural lust on his victims—his mother and the dead corpse—Abulu clings to each woman ‘as if she was his wife’. Abulu has no respect for borders: not only does he live in abjection within public space, but he does not respect the basic laws of his society, raping his own mother and ‘thrusting’ into the young woman even in her death. Obioma is careful to ensure that Abulu never becomes familiar or domesticated in the novel to the figure of the ‘friendly’ madman: he remains instead a catalyst for destruction.

Abulu’s prime function in the narrative is to impart the information that will drive a wedge between the young brothers Ikenna and Boja, and set the gears in motion for tragedy. He is Greek or Shakespearean in character, a prophet of disaster; and yet he and his excrescences are described more repulsively than we find in the older archetypes whom he most functionally resembles. In telling Ikenna that he ‘shall die by the hands of a fisherman’ (93), Abulu seals the boys’ fate. He makes the double-event

236 of Boja’s murder of Ikenna and subsequent suicide happen by foretelling it: he has power because the community, specifically Ikenna, believes it to be so.

Where the beggars of the earlier novels perform, through their grotesque bodies, a regenerative, ambivalent energy formed in the knowledge that, though outsiders, they may use their pariah status and ‘disgusting’ bodies to take the situation hostage and agitate for change, in The Fishermen solitary Abulu is abject rather than grotesque. In the previous novels, the beggars were outcasts for their bodily infirmities, but they (or at least, their leaders), while endowed with magical potential, were internally rational. Abulu by contrast is mad, and his body merely comes to represent the turmoil of that inner madness.

In revenge for the deaths of their two older brothers, Ben and Obembe decide to murder Abulu. The boys make a detailed plan and follow him to the polluted river. ‘Now up close and certain he would soon die,’ Ben says, ‘I let my eyes take an inventory of the madman. He appeared like a mighty man of old’ (229). He observes Abulu’s body, his hair and grimy fingernails, and its:

variety of odours, the most noticeable of which was a faecal smell that wafted at me like a drone of flies when I drew closer to him. This smell, I thought, might have been a result of his going for so long without cleaning his anus after excretion. He reeked of sweat accumulated inside the dense growth of hair around his pubic regions and armpits. He smelt of rotten food, and unhealed wounds and pus, and of bodily fluids and wastes. He was redolent of rusting metals, putrefying matter, old clothes, ditched underwear he sometimes wore. He smelt, too, of leaves, creepers, decaying mangoes by the Omi-Ala, the sand of the riverbank, and even of the water itself. He had the smell of banana trees and guava trees, of the Harmattan dust, of trashed clothes in the large bin behind the tailor’s shop, of leftover meat at the open abattoir in town, of leftover things devoured by vultures, of used condoms from the La Room motel, of sewage water and filth, of semen from the ejaculations he’d spilled on himself every time he’d masturbated, of vaginal fluids, of dried mucus. But these were not all; he smelled of immaterial things. He smelled of the broken lives of others, and of the stillness in their souls. He smelt of

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unknown things, of strange elements, and of fearsome and forgotten things. He smelled of death. (229–230)

In this scene before his murder, while still alive, Abulu smells of rot, stillness and lifelessness: ‘rotten food’, ‘unhealed wounds’, ‘pus’, ‘bodily fluids and wastes’, the aggravating ‘Harmattan dust’, ‘leftover meat at the open abattoir’, ‘used condoms’, ‘vaginal fluids’, ‘dried mucus’. In short, Abulu reeks ‘of death’ to the small boys who would kill him. Despite his otherworldly ability to evade death, surviving even when they feed him a huge quantity of rat poison, Abulu succumbs when the boys skewer him gruesomely with fish hooks, puncturing the flesh and peeling back the skin:

We jabbed the hook of our lines blindly at his chest, his face, his hand, his neck and everywhere we could, crying and weeping. The madman was frantic, mad, dazed. He flung his arms aloft to shield himself, running backwards, shouting and screaming. The blows perforated his flesh, boring bleeding holes and ripping out chunks of his flesh every time we pulled out the hooks. Although my eyes were mainly closed, when I opened them in flashes, I saw pieces of flesh unbuckling from his body, blood dripping from everywhere. His helpless cries shook the core of my being. […] The madman jabbered about, his voice deafening, his body in flustered panic. We kept hitting, pulling, striking, screaming, crying, and sobbing until weakened, covered in blood, and wailing like a child, Abulu fell backwards into the water in a wild splash. (254–5)

Abulu is abject even and perhaps particularly in death, the inner and outer parts of his body becoming confused upon the perforation of his skin, the ‘collapse of the border between inside and outside’ (Kristeva 53). His body merges with the polluted river with which he is symbolically associated, his corpse ‘ferried away spouting blood on the darkening waters, like a wounded leviathan’ (255).101 In Abulu’s death scene he is at his most sympathetic, seeming ‘frantic’ and ‘helpless’, ‘like a child’. The brothers assert their togetherness over the destructive force of Abulu’s solitary existence by destroying

101 The boys appear to have forgotten that it was Ikenna who originally suggested defending themselves against Abulu in this manner before the latter delivered the devastating prophecy that destroyed their lives. Ikenna had said: ‘If he comes any closer, we will tear his flesh with the hooks, just like we kill fish, and throw his body in the river’ (88), upon which the madman paused ‘[a]s if deterred by this threat […] his hands masking his face, making strange sounds’ (88)—as if foreseeing this moment described by Ikenna. 238 his body; however, this act of revenge serves to divide them even further, for even after his death Abulu continues to cause pain: one of the brothers is imprisoned in terrible conditions while the other is forced as a fugitive into exile.

Conclusion: The transgressive potential of the outcast

The beggar is a significant figure in post-independence African fiction, particularly in urban fiction. The beggar figure is so productive because it speaks not only to dispossession but also, in the hands of these writers, to the forging of a community of resistance. In his 1973 novel Xala, Sembène displayed the beggars as a grotesque procession placed outside of society and uniquely able to protest the corruption of the new African elite who had wronged them. Fellow Senegalese writer Sow Fall highlighted the potential of outsider communities as the producers of a subsidiary economy in her 1979 novel The Beggars’ Strike. Twelve years later, Okri reprised the beggar procession in urban Nigeria, turning to magical realism to display the beggars as a pseudo-magical force that becomes out-of-control, but ultimately desirous of wielding their strange power for social change. Fellow Nigerian Abani in Graceland thirteen years later also used the otherworldly, magical potential of the beggar procession in Lagos, transforming the King of the Beggars into a ‘prophet’ for political activism. In these novels, beggar communities are forged through their mutual exclusion on the basis of their unusual bodies, and it is from their investment in this shared fate that the beggars obtain their grotesque, transgressive power. The degrading ambivalence central to Bakhtin’s conception of the grotesque is at play in these novels that parade the disfigured, wounded and yet communal bodies of the clanship of beggars. In their grotesque bodies ‘we find both poles of transformation, the old and the new, the dying and the procreating, the beginning and the end of the metamorphosis’ (Bakhtin 24).

In 2015, Obioma also turns to the outsider figure in urban Nigeria, but in his hands Abulu is a negative force, a black hole in the narration that drives the story and yet is strangely absent: a body, crucially, that is abject rather than wielding the generative power of the grotesque, and which everywhere leads to destruction. Where 239 the earlier novels deploy the carnivalesque grotesque in the beggar processions, Abulu by contrast functions much more like a wound in the narrative: he represses nothing but is a livid mark that refuses to be contained and who transgresses boundaries (of waste, moral or spiritual) for no useful purpose. He is marked not by the carnival but by raw fear and ‘dread’ (218), like an exposed nerve. Abulu ‘has a solely negative character and is deprived of regenerating ambivalence’ (Bakhtin 21). The communal force of the grotesque makes itself available to politics, whereas the abject is always both fascinating and polluting. If the grotesque acts as an explosion in the narrative of carnality and deviant life, the abject by contrast functions as an implosion, like a collapsing star, sucking everything into its own negation.

Whether turning to the grotesque, as in the earlier writers, or the abject, as in Obioma’s more recent contribution, African writers post-independence have captured the outcast figure as both bodily and somehow otherworldly, inhabiting two separate spheres and consistently blurring moral and metaphysical boundaries.

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Conclusion

The body is as ‘political’ as the nation-state.

(Longhurst Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries 134)

The body is the site of politics, where joy and hardship are experienced. Today’s crises of precarity—the geographical urgencies of refugee habitation, offshore detention, and drone warfare comprising Mbembe’s ‘death-worlds’—highlight the high stakes of the body’s place in the world. More than ever before there exists a division between the experience (in Bhabha’s words, the ‘diurnal measure’) of bodies on the ground and the physically distant calculus of sovereign power that controls life. This is why the body needs to be considered at the forefront of politics and relational ethics.

In relation to postcolonies and, as I have hoped to show, to Africa in particular, the body is especially resonant. Africa was made the labouring body to Europe’s rational brain: it was the ‘carrier on to whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate’ (Achebe Hopes and Impediments 17). In response, African writers of the 1950s and ’60s made their project reinhabiting the African body, showing it as filled with intelligence and humanity, contrasting the former crass reductionism by writers of the colonial sphere. This move was intensely political at its core, associated with the decolonial push towards independence.

However, independence brought its own struggles and bitter disappointments. The task of the political novel then became declaiming (often at great personal risk for writers) the injustices perpetrated by the postcolonial state. This warranted a shift in the use of the body towards ‘figural metadiegesis’ (Hayot On Literary Worlds 69), where it retained its high symbolic valence while aligning with the ancient construct of the body as representing larger organisational structures. This shift rendered the body as metonymic bearer of criticism of the state: for, as David Williams observes, ‘the human body through its symbolic extensions as well as its physical structure, provides the most

241 complete paradigm for order and thus for the disorder that has precedence and priority in the monstrous configuration of reality’ (108).102

This ‘monstrous configuration of reality’ is nowhere more evident than in life under the dictator. The potentate in African dictator fiction is larger-than-life: a consuming ‘ogre’ (Ngũgĩ), expanding, oversexed and, at the same time, impotent. His body is the source of his power, representing the country in a hypostatic union. And yet, precisely because it represents the country, his body is also the source of his weakness: the people’s rebellion is time and again made to speak through the eruptions of his body, ushering in his fall from grace. Magical realism and satire are the natural fit for dictator fiction because he generates a world of unreality and horror—and yet, the situations described reflect real experience and are all-too-prevalent.

The prisoner body is recognisably the property of state power: imprisoned, tortured, concealed, made less than human through the sublimation of human rights. The prisoner is again a fictive marker of real anguish and powerlessness. African fiction focuses on the scoring and wounding of the body, rendering it a text describing state authority. The greatest triumph of the prisoner is at the level of life: survival and living to tell their story. The prisoner in African fiction emphasises the imperative of sharing stories under authoritarian regimes—not only their own, but also of others who did not survive. The child soldier, an interesting subsection of the prisoner body prevalent in recent works, wields a limited and disturbing agency. The child soldier body, strangely absent, commented on only when wounded or dying, is confusing to categories: not only between perpetrator and victim, but between child and monster.

Women’s bodies in African fiction is a vast category: here I have focused on the woman’s body as metonymy for land. This metonymic transfer has appalling resonance in everyday life. Women’s bodies are perceived as synchronic with space, immovable and ancient (while the male moves through time), and therefore inhabitable: the process is, as Mohanram shows in her study, doubled in the case of black women. This transfer undergirds an already dangerous situation for women in conflict zones, for if they are seen both as land and as the property of an ethnic group, then their domination and ‘possession’ through sexual violence signifies occupation of that territory, and staking a

102 ‘As the first construct we experience,’ Williams continues, ‘and as that one with which we remain most intimate—which, indeed, we love and nurture—our bodies provide, not only a model, but an original and continuing symbol of order itself’ (108). 242 claim to land. Writers activate this transfer to comment on the complex ways in which womanhood comes to stand in for land to be occupied and the home-like ideals that provide the foundation for nationalism.

The beggar is an interesting addition to African, particularly West African, fiction. The beggar body elides boundaries, marked by poverty and deformity and expressing the at-times belligerent exuberance of the grotesque. The organic tissue of the beggar contrasts the gleaming high rise of urban space, frequently read in the novels as a shameful ‘sore’ upon the imagined body of the city. The highly visible, apparently contagious (as though not only their diseases, but also social condition, is spreadable), frequently disabled, wounded, ragged or oozing bodies of beggars provide the source of narrative tension. However, in beggar processions their very status as outsider communities endows them with an unusual and transformative potential for change; this transcendence is contrasted by the solitary madman who, without companions, cannot strive for the regenerating spark of the carnival grotesque.

These four categories—the dictator, the prisoner, the woman-as-land and the beggar—comprise significant uses of the body in post-independence African fiction. I have selected these categories for my study because they are clearly delineated and widely mobilised by writers in different countries and contexts. The body remains an important signifier in African fiction—of increasing relevance with the new return to the ethics of the body, particularly in conflict zones and with regards to precarity and the politics of habitation in the post–9/11 world. The new form of empire on the world stage positions bodies and their relative ‘mournability’ (Butler) differently depending on race, gender, religion, class, but nothing so much as geography and citizenship. Empire now ‘appears not only as a process of territorial and economic accumulation across international divisions of labor and sovereignty, but also as a reproductive process managing bodies in unequal planetary conjunctions of life and death’ which must result in the recognition that ‘bodies are not empty containers of human political subjects, but are lively, transitional assemblages of political matter’ (Ahuja x). The body, in short, is ‘mediator of a world’ (Merleau-Ponty 145), and its representation in African literature speaks both to the history of Africa as ‘a great, soft, fantastic body’ (Mbembe On the Postcolony 8) and to the relational politics of the contemporary world.

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Coda: A transnational generation? Afropolitans and ‘postnationals’, cosmopolitanism and class

‘It was as I had suspected. History was real, cultures were real, but countries were invented.’

(Selasi ‘Don’t Ask Where I’m From, Ask Where I’m a Local’)

There has been a much-remarked thematic shift in the work of successive generations of African writers. The work of the so-called ‘first generation’ of African writers, most famously Ngũgĩ, Soyinka and Achebe, ‘for whom the novel was an item in the inventory of nation-building’ (Adesokan 15) was ‘for a long time associated with the national context in which they were produced as they embraced a tradition of resistance writing and struggled against controlling and often repressive governments’ (Mabanckou and Thomas 1). This has been compared with contemporary writers, the ‘third generation’, who have been described as displaying ‘post-nationalist’ (Habila viii) characteristics103 and reflecting more ‘cosmopolitan concerns’ (Attree 36).104 The perceived shift has been set squarely as a result of the increased transnational mobility of a number of contemporary authors. ‘Much contemporary African writing,’ Lizzy Attree explains, ‘emanates from writers living in the diaspora, living and working outside the countries in which they were born, so it is perhaps unsurprising that they are less concerned with nationalism than their forebears’ (Attree 36). Stephen Clingman asks ‘whether the national has lost its legitimacy in this new–old context’ (5), in the creation of ‘a migrant and migrating literature’ (Clingman 8), while Helon Habila welcomes a break from ‘the often predictable, almost obligatory obsession of the African writer with the nation and with national politics’ (viii).

103 Habila explains that he calls ‘this generation of writers the “post-nationalist” generation, whose inaugural sentiment can be traced back to Dambudzo Marechera’s famous line “If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you.”’ (viii) 104 ‘One of the outcomes of the phenomenon called “new African writing”,’ Adesokan explains, ‘is the unexpected manner in which it has figured as a critique of the nationalist contentions and pretensions in African postcoloniality. In other words, the features of the typology are notable for foregrounding thematic issues that an earlier generation of writers had mostly ignored, misrepresented, or anathematized—such as sexuality, gender, and cultural alienation or marginality’ (Adesokan 15).

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This approach has been further popularised by writer Taiye Selasi’s neologism of the ‘Afropolitan’, ‘the newest generation of African emigrants’: ‘not citizens, but Africans of the world’ (Selasi ‘Bye-Bye Babar’). A result of the ‘brain drain’ of educated Africans emigrating for western countries, seeking better employment standards and opportunities, Selasi’s Afropolitans:

grew up aware of ‘being from’ a blighted place, of having last names from to [sic.] countries which are linked to lack, corruption. Few of us escaped those nasty ‘booty-scratcher’ epithets, and fewer still that sense of shame when visiting paternal villages. Whether we were ashamed of ourselves for not knowing more about our parents’ culture, or ashamed of that culture for not being more ‘advanced’ can be unclear. What is manifest is the extent to which the modern adolescent African is tasked to forge a sense of self from wildly disparate sources. […] Brown- skinned without a bedrock sense of ‘blackness,’ on the one hand; and often teased by African family members for ‘acting white’ on the other— the baby-Afropolitan can get what I call ‘lost in transnation’. (Selasi ‘Bye-Bye Babar’)

In her 2014 TED Talk ‘Don’t Ask Where I’m From, Ask Where I’m a Local’, Selasi objects: ‘I’m not multinational. I’m not a national at all. How could I come from a nation? How can a human being come from a concept?’ She observes that in her lifetime countries had disappeared and new countries had been born, while her ‘parents came from countries that didn’t exist when they were born’ (‘Don’t ask where I’m from’). Selasi describes herself instead as being ‘multi-local’, having a relationship not with ‘Ghana, writ large’ but with Accra, and her mother’s garden there. She is ‘a local of New York, Rome and Accra’, and encourages her audience to consider: ‘In what city or cities in the world do shopkeepers know your face?’ (‘Don’t ask where I’m from’).

Implicit in this question, of course, is a certain class and privilege. Selasi seems to admit this truth when she notes the folly in calling ‘one student American, another Pakistani, then triumphantly claim[ing] student body diversity’ because this ‘ignores the fact that these students are locals of the same milieu. The same holds true on the other end of the economic spectrum. A Mexican gardener in Los Angeles and a Nepali housekeeper in Delhi have more in common in terms of rituals and restrictions than

245 nationality implies’ (‘Don’t ask where I’m from’). However, this is precisely the levelling out of class she describes in her Afropolitans, ‘coming soon or collected already at a law firm/chem lab/jazz lounge near you’ (Bye-Bye Babar). Between her two short texts about the transnational experience, speaking of Afropolitans and multi- locals, there lurks the an as-yet unanswered question of class, the requirements for visas and the privilege of the kind of travel she describes. Mpalive-Hangson Msiska argues that:

While the transnational, as a corrective to the excesses of nationalism, is to be welcomed, yet a transnationalism that does not recognize the reality of the national space as one of historical struggle, particularly in Africa, is a disembodied construct that is a negation of the national rather than a genuine sublation of the national into a meaningful cosmopolitanism. (84)105

In his recent rethinking of cosmopolitanism—and the multitudinous ‘cosmopolitanisms’ of previous decades—Bruce Robbins questions:

Were they cosmopolitans merely by virtue of their mobility, whether they had learned something from their mobility or not? Or were they also cosmopolitans in the more demanding sense of having fashioned their transnational experience and multiple loyalties in a worldview that, like Said’s, differed from that of any nations where they had lived, a worldview that was somehow more responsible to the bigger picture? (Robbins 12)

Following statements like Selasi’s, we can echo Robbins’ question whether the concept of the cosmopolitan has: ‘been evacuated of all ethical substance, leaving nothing more than a marker of transnational movement?’ (Robbins 14). Selasi’s comments have been popular among academics, particularly in the renewed age of world literature which inclines towards visions of barriers breaking down: however, the structural barriers to transnational movement tend to be lowered on one side only. The comments serve to

105 Whether referring to transnationalism ‘as the flow of people, ideas, goods, and capital across national territories in a way that undermines nationality and nationalism as discrete categories of identification, economic organization, and political constitution’ (Braziel and Mannur 8) or diaspora as ‘refer[ring] specifically to the movement—forced or voluntary—of people from one or more nation states to another’ (Braziel and Mannur 8), these terms interact and complicate instances of political exile, not uncommon for writers and dissidents. 246 highlight a term that is frequently evacuated from discourse about Africa, and that is class. Not every person can be a local of Rome, Paris and New York; not all passports are created equal (and indeed, not all can afford passports, or are permitted visas in the strange and often degrading visa application process). Selasi’s comments provide an interesting insight as they describe the fortunes and occupations open to her class— educated, wealthy enough to ensure ‘multi-locality’ and transnational mobility—but not open to the majority of Africans. Most Africans, overwhelmingly, are not Afropolitans: and, to be fair, Selasi never claims they are. Critics, however, seem at times to make that implicit extra leap, which causes problems in discussions of class, movement, and category.

The relative strength of passports can blind us to the difficulties, the structural impossibilities of others’ travel. Speaking endlessly of cosmopolitanism and an empowered Afropolitanism must not be permitted to deny the majority experience on the ground: that people are trapped within their borders by pieces of paper. Refugees are intercepted at checkpoints and hounded from place to place. Australia has brokered deals with island nations to ‘deal with’ its refugees: the logic being that if they never set foot on Australian soil, asylum seekers (or, as they are insidiously termed, ‘boat people’) need not be afforded the human rights Australia offers its residents. This means, of course, that the original meaning of human rights as originally dreamed up by the League of Nations and its successor, the (perhaps less idealistic) United Nations, is no longer true: human rights do not cross international waters or the no-man’s-land of state borders: they are strictly in place, bounded by the sanctity of the state, serving only those plots of soil where they are recognized—and where lives are deemed as ‘mournable’ (Butler). Arendt warned that we only have the right to human rights if others recognize that right. The right to rights is reliant upon how we are perceived by others, and where we are physically located. Though one often reads these days that ‘the nation is dead’, we must remember that this statement is only ever half-true, and if it is true at all it is based on class and privilege.

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State of the field: Postcolonial and world literature

What is ‘postcolonial’, and is the term indeed still relevant in a time when most countries to which it refers secured their independence from the imperial power forty, sixty, seventy years ago?

The disciplines of postcolonial studies, world literature and comparative literature (the latter mainly in the US) are at a curious crossroads. Many now feel that postcolonial literature as a field of study has had its heyday in the latter half of the twentieth century, and struggles to maintain relevance in a twenty-first century context so long after the majority of nations under British and French colonial rule became independent. (Eli Park Sorensen refers to this, the discipline’s sense of loss, as ‘postcolonial melancholia’.) Others, on the other hand, claim that postcolonial studies must maintain relevance moving forward into the new century by shifting its focus from what we might call ‘traditional’ colonialism to that of a new capitalist imperialism, highlighting modern injustices, arms deals, invasions and occupations implicitly rooted in capitalist motives in the race for natural resources (Bahri; Lazarus).

There have always been a number of issues with the term postcolonial. For example, in relation to Latin America or settler postcolonial countries like Australia, ‘where the original colonized indigenous peoples never went through an independence phase. Have they gone through a postcolonial period? The postcoloniality of the indigenous cannot be identical with that of its settling communities’ (Ngũgĩ Globalectics 50). Another major concern lies in the fact that:

the term postcolonial gives the impression that colonialism, its form and content, is something of the past. Whenever I have given courses in postcolonial theories and narratives, I always devote one seminar to the neo-in-the-post of postcolonialism. Neo-colonialism is not simply a continuation of the colonial, but it carries the sense of the continuities of colonial structures in changed political forms. It also raises the possibility […] that neocolonial relationships are developed not with the old colonial powers but with new ones […] (Ngũgĩ Globalectics 50–51)

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By contrast, the time of the discipline of world literature seems to be upon us (again)— though having altered significantly since the time of Goethe’s Weltliteratur. World literature is a growing discipline that has been spearheaded in recent years by David Damrosch, who defines the field as ‘a mode of circulation and of reading’ (5), rather than a ‘canon’ as such, and which focuses on ‘all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language […] [A] work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture’ (Damrosch 4). The world literature framework affords flexibility in reading works across different contexts, and can provide productive new readings from unexpected juxtapositions. The discipline focuses on translation and, in the twenty-first century, does not connote merely the study of a triangulation between English, French, and German, but encourages dynamic pairings from multiple cultural and temporal contexts. World literature is, nonetheless, grounded in the critical and pedagogical circumstances of its theoretical (re)birth: formed largely in the US academy out of the sinking zeppelin of Comparative Literature, a tradition with which it is still implicated and whose foundational premises we must at times find shaky.

The main concern about world literature’s being posited as a kind of successor to postcolonial studies lies in its essential rootlessness. While its flexibility is its strength, we may worry about the implicit danger in world literature’s approach that, by devolving away from an emphasis on context (allowing the pendulum to swing out along unexpected routes), the works themselves may lose their political edge. A work can only resist or provide political comment upon something if it is read against the context of creation. Musing on the two disciplines, Ngũgĩ suggests that:

At present, the postcolonial is the closest to that Goethian and Marxian conception of world literature because it is a product of different streams and influences from different points of the globe, a diversity of sources, which it reflects in turn. The postcolonial is inherently outward looking, inherently international in its very constitution in terms of themes, language, and the intellectual formation of the writers. It would be quite productive to look at world literature, though not exclusively, through postcoloniality. (Globalectics 49)

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Hence the critical hesitance in turning from postcolonial studies: not out of sentiment or a desire to return to the discursive battlegrounds of thirty years ago, but because it brings something that the other major categories of literary studies lack: the capacity to observe and engage with antagonisms—in short, it privileges politics. World literature inclines itself towards motions of relation, of sudden and illuminating connections across not only continents but even centuries. However, its primary political thrust is in regards to language death, appropriation and translation. This is both worthy and necessary (particularly in today’s academic climate, with language death forming an acute fear for sociologists and language custodians alike). But there are things it can’t do. The specificity of postcolonialism’s approach is, I argue, best suited to avoiding what Bourdieu has termed ‘a derealization of works: stripped of everything which attached them to the most concrete debates of their time’ (32).

A new hope: Postcolonial utopianism

Our country is an abiku country. Like the spirit-child, it keeps coming and going. One day it will decide to remain. It will become strong. I won’t see it.

(Okri The Famished Road 478)

In ‘Post-colonial Utopianism: The Utility of Hope’, Bill Ashcroft describes how, following independence:

the sombre realities of post-independence political life began to be felt. The post-colonial nation, a once glorious utopian idea, was now replaced in the literature, particularly in Africa, by a critical rhetoric that often landed authors in gaol. But gradually, in writers such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, or Ben Okri, and latterly women writers such as Chimamanda Adichie, Sade Adeniran, and Unomah Azuah, post-

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independence despair gave way to a broader sense of future hope. Post- colonial utopian thought now gains its particular character from its problematic relationship with the concept of the nation. The utopian vision takes various forms, but it is always a form of hope that transcends the boundaries of the nation-state, because that concept represents disappointment and entrapment rather than liberation. (30)

Ashcroft argues that there is a new optimism in African literatures even while writers do not shy away from representing the negative conditions of politics. This is evident in much recent writing from the continent, perhaps particularly women’s writing. This often presents as a determined re-investment in the African country. In her first novel Purple Hibiscus Adichie, at times (perhaps problematically) described as the inheritor of Achebe’s tradition, has Aunty Ifeoma, recently emigrated to the United States, write to the young girl Kambili:

She writes about the huge tomatoes and the cheap bread. Mostly, though, she writes about things that she misses and things she longs for, as if she ignores the present to dwell on the past and future. Sometimes, her letters go on and on until the ink gets smudgy and I am not always sure what she is talking about. There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if all the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.

Although I was interested in what she wrote, so much that I memorized most of it, I still do not know why she wrote it to me. (301)

Kambili is a new hope for her aunt, though she is too young to realise it. She is sensitive, intelligent and kind—and, thanks to Ifeoma bringing her out of herself, Kambili is much stronger than she had realised. Her resilience and youth cause Ifeoma to turn to her, seeking to nourish her as the new resident of Nigeria. Forced to leave after her university closed down, Ifeoma nonetheless provides the utopian push, woman-to-woman, via a letter from America, to a young girl still in place in Nigeria. Amaka, Kambili’s wonderful cousin so full of political potential and the energy to drive 251 change, is not the seat of the utopian drive at the conclusion of the novel. It is Kambili, and has to be Kambili, because she is still in Nigeria. Youth always maintains a utopian potential, because youth blooms into the future. Adichie’s choosing Kambili, and choosing her as a girl, is precious to this drive.

At the conclusion of the novel, Kambili and her mother have received word from their lawyer that Jaja will soon be freed from gaol. Adichie could well have concluded the novel with Papa’s death and Jaja’s arrest, or with the harsh details of Jaja’s incarceration and the sores welling across his body. However, by consciously allowing three years to elapse, Adichie both highlights the terrible conditions of the prison and simultaneously ends the novel on the cusp of his release with the invigorating renewal of hope. The interesting impact on the overall mood of the novel and its promise through her timing speaks to a desire to invest hope into contemporary African fiction. Elated, Kambili plans:

We will take Jaja to Nsukka first, and then we’ll go to America to visit Aunty Ifeoma. […] We’ll plant new orange trees in Abba when we come back, and Jaja will plant purple hibiscus, too, and I’ll plant ixora so we can suck the juices of the flowers. (306–7)

Rather than planning to move to America, Kambili plans the family’s new start in Abba, making arrangements for which plants to grow in the garden, symbolizing a lasting commitment. The novel ends on a promise: ‘Above, clouds like dyed cotton wool hang low, so low I feel I can reach out and squeeze the moisture from them. The new rains will come down soon’ (307). The sky is within reach for Kambili, and the fresh rains will water the garden she will plant. The investment in Nigeria is one that Adichie reprises in Americanah (2013), which stages a return to Nigeria after many years in America. This is Ifemelu’s choice, and it is a great moment in recent fiction. Emigration in African literature is often, for good reason, framed in terms of choicelessness: either characters are forced out by lack of work, as in Aunty Ifeoma’s dilemma, or an opportunity is too good to refuse, as in Elvis in Abani’s GraceLand—or, by contrast, a character desires above all else to leave, and is unable to obtain the necessary visa, as in Obinze’s denied US visa in Americanah. Here, in Adichie’s most recent novel, we also see the reverse: Ifemelu’s choice of the African country as home. This is a significant investment that speaks to the utopian character of recent African fiction.

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Conclusion

In their insightful study, Ballantyne and Burton argue that:

the body itself has been and remains a zone of management, containment, regulation, conformity, and resistance as well as of contact tout court. Under a variety of social, economic, and political constraints it has exhibited a remarkable flexibility and resilience as both a category and as the matériel of history, even while it has also been the site of suffering, the subject of humanitarian intervention and military invasion, and the object of violence and trauma. Far from serving as passive slates on which the past has written, bodies have consistently been agents in their encounters with history—agents that command our attention as much as war, migration, religion, dynastic succession, the environment, law, capitalism, modernity, or any of the other major rubrics through which we understand world history. (407)

We have a great need, they petition, for ‘original and innovative scholarship that takes bodies seriously as agents of global power and transnational identities’ (Ballantyne and Burton 419).

I have argued that writers have turned to the body in African literatures in order to express political criticism, and that the categories studied here—the dictator, the prisoner, the woman-as-land and the urban beggar—are strikingly prevalent across multiple contexts thanks to the shared history of colonialism. The body, moreover, ‘is a key sign in narrative and a central nexus of narrative meanings’ (Brooks 25). African writers since independence have consistently used the readily available language of the body as a symbol for organisational structures (Douglas, Williams), strengthened by the particular weight of the body in Africa. But, particularly in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, the political symbolism of the body is never divorced from its ethical imperative: the cognisance of the body as the site of fear, joy and pain, and subject to the ‘restless agony’ (Bhabha) of precarity. It is this that provides visionary force to writers’ use of the body: the dual category and conceptual movement between the individual body as local site of ethics and the body as symbol for organisations larger

253 than itself. In the body, the ethical is never subsumed or impaired under the mark of the political or political allegory: instead, it refracts and strengthens it, adding emotional weight to an intellectual concept.

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