District 9 Helen Kapstein John Jay College of Criminal Justice the City University of New York
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The Hysterics of District 9 Helen Kapstein John Jay College of Criminal Justice The City University of New York A German, an Italian, and Van der Merwe were on death row. The war- den gave them a choice of three ways to die: to be shot, to be hanged, or to be injected with the aids virus for a slow death. So the German said, “Shoot me right in the head.” Boom, he was dead instantly. Then the Italian said, “Just hang me.” Snap! He was dead. Then it was Van der Merwe’s turn, and he said, “Give me some of that aids stuff.” They gave him the shot, and Van der Merwe fell down laughing. The guards looked at each other and wondered what was wrong with this guy. Then Van der Merwe said, “Give me another one of those shots,” so the guards did. Now he was laughing so hard, tears rolled from his eyes and he doubled over. Finally the warden said, “What’s wrong with you?” Van der Merwe replied, “You guys are so stupid. I’m wearing a condom.” Van der Merwe joke circulating on the internet very south african has a favourite Van der Merwe joke. Van der EMerwe, the archetypal thickheaded Afrikaner, has been the beloved brunt of South African humour for decades. Alongside the adoption of apart- heid as official government policy in 1948, Van der Merwe emerged as its foolish functionary, so it is no coincidence that the protagonist of Neill Blomkamp’s film District 9 (2009) is the bumbling Wikus van de Merwe (played by Sharlto Copley), a walking Van der Merwe joke (for more on ESC 40.1 (March 2014): 155–175 Van der Merwe, see articles by Sandra Swart and Deborah Posel). A petty bureaucrat (petty in every sense), he works in the Department of Alien Affairs at mnu, Multi-National United, the evil epitome of global corporate Helen Kapstein is a capital. But we like Wikus, despite his ineptitude, his nepotism, and his tenured postcolonial bigotry. So who is the joke on? In his director’s commentary, Blomkamp scholar in the English repeatedly tells us that he finds certain moments in the film humorous, Department at John and they are often the most gruesome or graphic moments that push the Jay College, cuny. She characters and viewers into heightening horror. Opinion varies on whether earned her doctorate in District 9 is funny: in Safundi’s roundtable on the film, Stefan Helgesson English and Comparative finds it “genuinely funny—the alien infatuation with cat food being just one Literature from example of its absurd humor” (174), whereas in her article on masculinity Columbia University. in District 9, Claire Sisco King writes, “Absent comic relief, District 9 pro- Her areas of interest duces a decidedly different sensibility … [T]he tone of District 9 remains include South African intense and stressful, inviting not laughter but anxiety, terror, and even literature and culture, disgust…. This visceral experience invites viewers to suffer (rather than cultural and media laugh) with onscreen characters” (83). Consciously or not, then, director studies, and tourism and Blomkamp is pointing out the fine, often vanishing, line that splits hyster- museum studies. Her ics between what is hysterically funny and real hysteria. Not coincidentally, current projects include the title of a government parody playing the comedy circuit in South A New Kind of Safari, Africa these days, “Mass Hysteria,” also collapses the distinction. Featuring on islands, tourism, and such faux leaders as the Minister Who Swears to Tell the Truth and the nation-building, and Minister of International Affairs and Pan-African Children, it is so titled research on Nigerian because, says the co-producer, ‘ “Mass Hysteria’ is what South Africans short stories as saboteurs are best at … whether it’s a penis or a march, we love a reason to scream of the petroleum and shout” (Gilbertson). industry’s agenda. This Since apartheid ended, South Africa has experienced a wave of inci- essay is one in a series dents of alleged mass hysteria, mostly among schoolchildren in under- of articles on hysteria as privileged areas (see Kapstein). If, under apartheid, South Africa was in a a mode of transitional state of panic, with professional agitators and members of the Third Force resistance. Her work has planted to spur on violent protests against the regime so as to be able to appeared in Safundi: represent black South Africans as out of control and with whites worrying The Journal of South about a “total onslaught,” then postapartheid South Africa is a nation in African and American hysterics. District 9 allows us to examine the distinctions between, and Studies, Studies in the overlaps among, the hysterically funny, hysterical anxiety, and mass the Humanities, and hysteria not only as they pertain to a South African sensibility and setting elsewhere. but to an emerging, specifically South African, breed of science fiction. Ultimately, District 9 suggests that both hysteria as condition and sci-fi as genre are transitional modes, sharing such characteristics as change, 156 | Kapstein excess, and fantasy, and that therefore they are fitting for South Africa’s transitional political period, its new interregnum.1 South Africans had plenty to “scream and shout” about circa the mak- ing of District 9, according to the Human Sciences Research Council’s second report on “South African Social Attitudes.” Published in 2010, it describes a period “marked by uncertainty and change” including con- cerns about a “systematisation of corruption” in government, high-profile fraud and corruption trials, political division, scandals pertaining to the misappropriation of resources, a wave of violent demonstrations and pro- tests over service delivery failures and over provincial boundary changes, mounting fear and frustration over crime and violence, the deepening impact of the hiv/aids epidemic set against international condemnation of apparent aids denialism, and concerns over South African involvement in conflict resolution in Africa (Roberts, wa Kivilu, and Davids 2). Find- ing something hysterically funny and speculating about what the future might hold are both means of channeling social anxieties such as these and releasing nervous energy about them. Accumulating evidence suggests that across Africa, filmmakers and fiction writers alike are starting to find in science fiction an appropriate outlet for capturing postcolonial absurdi- ties, extremes, and visions. As Andries du Toit says, in one of his blog posts on District 9, “postcoloniality is futurity.” In South Africa, in addition to Blomkamp’s output, we see futurity in Lauren Beukes’s dystopian novels Moxyland (2010) and Zoo City (2011) and the ecological imaginings of Henrietta Rose-Innes (“Poison” 2008) and Jane Rosenthal (Souvenir 2004).2 The current edition of the journal Paradoxa is called African sf (http:// paradoxa.com), and Bristol’s Arnolfini arts centre hosted the exhibition “Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction” in 2012. And yet, when Nnedi Okorafor, who herself writes sci-fi and fantasy often set around contested oil pipelines in the Niger Delta, wrote an essay asking “Is Africa Ready for Science Fiction?” Nigerian director Tchidi Chikere answered in it “no,” that [s]cience fiction will come here when it is relevant to the peo- ple of Africa. Right now, Africans are bothered about issues of bad leadership, the food crisis in East Africa, refugees in the Congo, militants here in Nigeria. Africans are bothered about food, roads, electricity, water wars, famine, etc, not spacecrafts and spaceships. Only stories that explore these everyday reali- ties are considered relevant to us for now. 1 This is Nadine Gordimer’s term. See “Living in the Interregnum.” 2 See Nick Wood’s history of South African sci-fi in The World sf Blog. The Hysterics of District 9 | 157 Chikere’s stance sounds like a perversion of Njabulo Ndebele’s influen- tial 1980s critique of the privileging of the spectacular in anti-apartheid protest literature and his call for South African authors to “rediscover the ordinary” (41–59). By this logic, fiction itself has no relevance for Africa. The ideas that sci-fi is a Western genre and that there is no room for sci-fi in Africa because of reality are two sides of the same coin. Equally trou- bling, though, is the suggestion that the reality of Africa is science fiction. We hear this from Blomkamp, who proposes in his commentary that the future is already here in places like Johannesburg, with its extremes of wealth and poverty, and from well-meaning critics, like Helgesson, who writes about the Global South as science fiction: “Whole populations in the Global South are in fact ‘living the apocalypse’ (from the perspec- tive of a once-dominant West), but even so, life goes on in a pragmatic, patchwork fashion” (174). Okorafor goes on to quote a Professor Naunihal Singh, who asserts that [s]cience-fiction will have to adapt itself to the local market…. I don’t think there’s the sensibility for it right now. I remem- ber seeing The Matrix in a mixed crowd of Ghanaians and Americans, this was in Ghana. Even though the room was dark, and there were some 40 plus people there, I could tell who was from where by their reactions to the movie. The Gha- naians just weren’t connecting to it. Bring the Terminator to West Africa, and he’d stop running in a day. He’d sit there and glitch. It’ll be hard to make people afraid of a future where computers take over the world when they can’t manage to keep the computers on their desk running. These are very western stories. On the other hand, classic science fiction, like space exploration stories, would probably work better … assuming it was adapted for the audience.