Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature: Deleuze and Health 2020050841, 2020050842, 9781793631329, 9781793631336
Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature is a fresh and needed intervention into the study of postcolonial literature and the
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Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.
Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature
Johnston, Don. Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature : Deleuze and Health, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Johnston, Don. Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature : Deleuze and Health, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature Deleuze and Health
Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.
Don Johnston
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Johnston, Don. Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature : Deleuze and Health, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. Chapter Two Epigraph: Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) Copyright © 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Originally published as Critique et Clinique, copyright © 1993 Les Editions de Minuit, Paris. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Johnston, Don, 1970- author. Title: Diagnosing postcolonial literature : Deleuze and health / Don Johnston. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature explores how Deleuze’s notion that literature is an enterprise of health and that great authors are consequently diagnosticians of their culture can be applied to postcolonial literature. This genuinely interdisciplinary work breaks new ground both for the study of postcolonial literature and applications of Deleuze and Guattari”— Provided by publisher. Identifers: LCCN 2020050841 (print) | LCCN 2020050842 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793631329 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793631336 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Postcolonialism in literature. | Social history in literature. | Postcolonialism | Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. | Guattari, Felix, 1930-1992. | Pepetela—Criticism and interpretation. | Sa¯lih, al-Tayyib—Criticism and interpretation. | Literature and society—Africa—History—20th century. | Literature and society—Africa—History—21st century. Classifcation: LCC PN56.P555 J64 2021 (print) | LCC PN56.P555 (ebook) | DDC 809/.93358—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050841 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050842 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Johnston, Don. Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature : Deleuze and Health, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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Dedication For my wife, Kelly, without whose love and support this book would not have been written. For my father, for passing on a lifetime of curiosity. For my sons, David and Sandino, the lights of my life.
Johnston, Don. Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature : Deleuze and Health, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Johnston, Don. Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature : Deleuze and Health, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Contents
List of Tables and Figures
ix
Acknowledgments xi 1 Postcolonial Theory’s Heedlessness to Health, “D”evelopment’s Disregard for Postcolonialism
1
2 Elaborating a Postcolonial Symptomatology
39
3 Those Excluded by the City: Pepetela and Angola’s “Savage Capitalism”
67
4 Becoming-Witness: The Conflagration of the Arab Community and the Sudanese Arab Writer Tayeb Salih
127
5 Conclusion 191
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Appendix 201 Bibliography 205 Index 221 About the Author
225
vii
Johnston, Don. Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature : Deleuze and Health, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Johnston, Don. Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature : Deleuze and Health, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
List of Tables and Figures
Caption to photo on the cover: The “Karl Marx”: Praia do Santiago, Angola: 2003—photo credit: Marie-Hélène Mayrand
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Figure 3.1 Health and Capabilities Rubric: Angola and Australia. Source: Created by author 89 Figure 4.1 Health and Capabilities Rubric: The Sudan and Australia. Source: Created by author 165 Figure 5.1 Health and Capabilities Rubric: Angola, the Sudan, and Australia. Source: Created by author 193 Table A.1 References and Page Numbers for the Health and Capabilities Dashboard. Source: Created by author 201 Table A.2 Data Used for Objective Graphs. Source: Created by author 202 Table A.3 Data Used for the Radar Charts. Source: Created by author 202
ix
Johnston, Don. Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature : Deleuze and Health, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Johnston, Don. Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature : Deleuze and Health, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Acknowledgments
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I would like to thank Paul Patton and Chris Danta for their critical guidance and the assistance they provided over the course of writing this book. I am grateful to Simone Bignall who, when I was foundering midstream, helped me to formulate the questions that came to shape this work. I am extremely grateful for Emily Eros’s expert assistance in developing the infographics.
xi
Johnston, Don. Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature : Deleuze and Health, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Johnston, Don. Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature : Deleuze and Health, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Chapter 1
Postcolonial Theory’s Heedlessness to Health, “D”evelopment’s Disregard for Postcolonialism
Yo no quise escribir una obra objetiva. Ni quise ni podría. Nada tiene de neutral este relato de la historia. Incapacaz de distancia, tomo partido: lo confeso y no me arrepiento. Sin embargo, cada fragmento de este vasto mosaico se apoya sobre una sólida base documental. Cuanto aquí cuento ha occurrido; aunque yo lo cuento a mi modo y manera. I did not want to write an objective work. I neither could nor wanted to. There is nothing neutral about this telling of history. Incapable of distancing myself, I took sides: I confess it and I do not regret it. However, every fragment of this vast mosaic is supported by a solidly documented base. What I recount here has occurred, though I tell it in my own style and manner.1
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—Eduardo Galeano (2001, xi)
It is not common practice for either postcolonial theorists and literary critics or development professionals and humanitarian aid workers to page through a novel seeking out the specifc details of the societal diagnoses many postcolonial authors make within their works. Accordingly, many health and development specialists fail to recognize the socio-structural effects of colonialism that yet impinge on the lives of those with whom they work. Similarly, much of the disparate work found under the aegis of postcolonial theory does not consider the lived experiences of bodies within their material environments to be fundamentally a question of health and capabilities. Yet, this book is situated at that uncommon—and potentially fruitful—intersection, where health, development,2 and literary studies meet. This work is written in the belief that there is both room and the need for a methodology at this interdisciplinary 1
Johnston, Don. Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature : Deleuze and Health, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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confuence that actively enables socio-literary interrogations into how postcolonial relations of force3 limit many people’s powers to act. Though containing a certain formalist orientation as it mines works of postcolonial fction seeking to identify and tabulate that which separates postcolonial bodies from what they can do along the seven axes of a Health and Capabilities Rubric, this methodology is at its heart a symptomatology. The French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, developed this concept to describe the aspect of a literary work whereby an author, writing with the eye and sense of a clinician, “dissociates symptoms that were previously grouped together, and links up others that were dissociated [thus] build[ing] up a profoundly original clinical picture” of a society (Deleuze 1991, 14–16). This methodology understands health as a person’s capability to realize her or his maximum affective capacities (this is developed in chapter 2, sections 2.1 and 2.2)—that is, the social capacity to experiment, with the potential for new perceptions and affects. (Affects are not to be confused with emotions: affects are rather the changes and variations that occur and the intensities that pass between bodies.) This symptomatological methodology enables readers of postcolonial texts to identify symptoms of poor health rendered visible in a work of fction; and it supports readers of postcolonial works of fction to isolate and conjoin the impinging relations of force with the impingements themselves and to situate those impingements geopolitically and historically. This symptomatological methodology assists readers to isolate, disaggregate, and group those various impingements-cum-symptoms into a symptomatological table and so identify the greater disease or syndrome negatively affecting what postcolonial bodies can do. Lastly, this multidisciplinary4 manner of reading a work of postcolonial fction affliatively links the tabulated symptoms with extraliterary, quantitative evidence—thereby corroborating or qualifying the details of an author’s diagnosis and thus indicating ways that this socio-literary methodology could complement current qualitatively based, postcolonial literary analyses. This work’s analysis of Sudanese Arab health via Tayeb Salih’s muchlauded Season of Migration to the North, the collection of short stories included in The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories, as well as his masterful but virtually unknown work, Bandarshah, concludes that several sets of Sudanese Arab people are prevented from realizing their maximum affective potential by what I have identifed as the Bandarshah Syndrome. The symptoms of the Bandarshah Syndrome include: widespread anomie among many Sudanese Arabs; Sudanese Arab women’s potential for new affects and perceptions being straightjacketed within rigid, neopatriarchal Islamicist mores; educated men being indoctrinated into desiring materialist- and prestige-oriented bureaucratic positions within the Khartoum government, rather than Suf-inspired peace and community; revered traditional authorities
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Postcolonial Theory’s Heedlessness to Health
3
revealed to be neopatriarchal, nepotistic and corrupt; and a corrupt, spiritually bankrupt, neopatriarchal government in Khartoum that calculatedly employs fundamental Islamism as a means to maintain its own privileged access to power and possessions. In analyzing the state of Angolan health through a study of books selected from the span of the contemporary Angolan writer, Pepetela’s, works: Mayombe; Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent; Predadores; Yaka; The Return of the Water Spirit; and A Geração da Utopia, this book fnds many Angolans to be suffering from what I have named the Bunker Syndrome. The symptoms of the Bunker Syndrome are several: endemic and savage greed among the nation’s urban elite, themselves descendants of those families favored by both Dutch and Portuguese colonialists; a one-party state apparatus controlled by the president of the republic through an omni-level, petro-diamond fuelled patronage system, a secret police, and pervasive media censorship; and a vast mass of civil war-affected poor struggling for survival in Luandan slums. Before I can begin those endeavors, though, I must frst situate the ethics and practice of humanitarianism5 that buttress this methodology and show how this humanitarian orientation redirects, reorients, and re-coordinates postcolonial theory’s understanding of, and interaction with, “D”evelopment.6 This will involve establishing the areas of consonance this symptomatological methodology shares with Marxist, feminist, anti-imperialist, globalization and world-systems theoreticians, as well as with postcolonial and post-human critical theorists. I will also address the representational theory of literature that grounds this approach and outline its aesthetic, political, and ethical position. This book is an extension of my ethical and political commitment to the belief that all people have equal right to protection and assistance and to have basic conditions of life with dignity. It is the critical and theoretical supplement to a decade-and-a-half’s active solidarity with disaster- and confict-affected communities around the world.7 As a humanitarian aid worker, I have found that, across country and context, a people’s or community’s precariousness and vulnerability refect a common position vis-à-vis inequitably structured societies that often, even in the best of times, were incapable of supporting its citizens with a minimum suite of social services. Thus, as I show many Sudanese-Arab’s and Angolan’s potential to experience new perceptions and affects to be restricted by the Bandarshah and Bunker syndromes, I will also draw upon my experiences working in those countries. It is my hope that the postcolonial, symptomatological methodology elaborated in the pages that follow could prove a useful addition to literary theoreticians’ and humanitarian, development, and public health specialists’ panoply of diagnostic and evaluative tools. Such a method of critically reading postcolonial fction could assist in the (“d”evelopment) endeavor to work with those
Johnston, Don. Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature : Deleuze and Health, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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negatively affected by postcolonial relations of force so that they could more fully realize their affective capacities. The details of an author’s diagnosis could be compared with the objectives of ongoing programs, whether governmental, national or international, to improve the health and capabilities of particular society or people. Pending receptivity, any subsequently identifed areas of discrepancy between the development and literary-diagnostic methodologies could be discussed with appropriate program or portfolio managers to evaluate if an author’s diagnosis might indicate the need to consider other causal factors, or if a particular area for intervention should be prioritized over another.
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1.1 POSTCOLONIALISM, GLOBALIZATION, CAPITALISM More than ffty years ago, Frantz Fanon—eminent socio-diagnostician of the psychopathologies caused by colonialism—warned of the inequality and oppression that even then was coming to exist in the post-independence, post–World War II, Cold War conjuncture (Fanon 2004, 56).8 Despite being well-ensconced within the twenty-frst century, many decades after both the heady days of independence and the short-lived optimism that accompanied the end of the Cold War have subsided, many in former colonial countries now live as vulnerable and precarious an existence as those in previous generations. Vestiges of previous colonial interventions are visible in the skewed political, cultural, socioeconomic, and patriarchal structures in not only Angola and the Sudan but throughout many contemporary postcolonial countries. Many who live in such countries are not able to fully realize what their bodies can do; nor are they capable of achieving the life they value. Yet, to isolate the colonial relationship as the problem affecting many formerly colonized countries today would be to disregard what economist, Ha-Joon Chang, calls the “defning feature of our time.” These are the “processes of globalization”: the greatly increased cross-border fows of virtually everything, for example, capital, technology, goods, and services (Chang 2015, 321). The myth of postlapsarian progress that preceded and accompanied the earliest colonial endeavors has been reworked by theorists of globalization to promote the commodity fetishism of instantaneous communication, continuous technological development, cycles of credit, and the insatiable desire to consume that perpetuate the global mass-market economy (Deckard 2010, 13–14). Critical theorist Pheng Cheah writes that the disenfranchised in postcolonial countries have been increasingly caught in the embrace between predatory international capitalism and indigenous capitalism seeking to internationalize (Cheah 2007, 164). Certainly, my examination of Angolan health bears Cheah’s observation out.
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Postcolonial Theory’s Heedlessness to Health
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An overly narrow focus on colonialism would also obviate two important facts. First, that in spite of the recent global fnancial crisis, the thinking behind the processes of globalization (i.e., that “protectionism is always bad, free capital fows will ensure that the best managed companies and countries will get money, [postcolonial countries] have to welcome Trans-National Companies with open arms,” etc.) still dominates our world. Second, the processes of globalization were not “inevitable”: the world has become “globalized” in the way it has over the past three decades “only because the powerful governments and the business elite in the rich world decided they wanted it that way” (Chang 2015, 322). Yet, it must be emphasized that the processes of globalization are not necessarily so distinct from colonialism’s relations of force. Many noted theorists identify the processes of globalization as the contemporary incarnations of the capitalist world system within which, for the 400 years spanning the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, colonialism previously played a signifcant part.9 Situating the processes of globalization within the greater capitalist world system highlights the connection the relations of force that impinge upon the lives and bodies of those living in formerly colonized countries have with their colonial antecedents.
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One person in nine in the world is hungry, and one in three is malnourished. About 15 million girls a year marry before age 18, one every two seconds. Worldwide, 18,000 people a day die because of air pollution, and HIV infects 2 million people every year. At an average of nearly 24 people displaced per minute, today there are 65.6 million people who have been forcibly displaced from home. Among them are nearly 22.5 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18. (UNDP 2017, 5; UNHCR 2017)
The results have been both apocalyptic and profane: some of us live in pockets of unprecedented opulence, while many others live lives marked by deprivation, destitution, poverty, violence, hunger, disease, and oppression. The necropolitical processes (Mbembe 2003, 39) of globalization distribute misery (Povinelli 2011, 162) unevenly around the world; they have created globally obscene (Eisenstein 1998) disparities in terms of the degree to which large swathes of people around the world are capable of living the life they value. 1.2 POSTCOLONIAL THEORY, HUMANITARIAN ACTION, INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT10 By defnition, postcolonial criticism intellectually engages with evolving links between the colonial period and contemporary inequalities in postcolonial countries by focusing “on the forces of oppression and coercive domination”
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(Young 2001, 11) in the pursuit of liberation, political intervention, activism, and social transformation after political independence (Hiddleston 2009, 4). Yet, as postcolonial scholar and critic, Bart Moore-Gilbert notes, postcolonial theorists and critics tend to privilege the analysis of cultural forms over more direct investigations into the somatic effects of material conditions and relations of force (Moore-Gilbert 1997). Even agential, postcolonial philosophers who have made the ontological commitment to “view the self as embedded and embodied” within a material context have tended to view the self as “socially constructed, organised and signifcantly” constituted by the cultural context within which a person lives (Bignall 2010, 6). Defned as a “set of largely unacknowledged assumptions, held by a loosely outlined group of people, mapping negotiations between the sacred and the profane and the relation between the sexes” (Spivak 2013, 30, 123, 465), there is no doubting the omnipresence and formative importance of culture in the lives of every human being. As expressed through novels, poems, songs, plays, paintings, sculptures, mosaics, murals, stories, customs, traditions, music, and flm, culture mediates, challenges, and/or refects relations of power and economic, cultural, and political subordination. Such a focus on culture has led Development specialists to criticize the feld of postcolonial theory for its “failure to connect critiques of discourse and representation to the realities of people’s lives” and for its “inability to defne a specifc and ethical project to deal with material problems,” such as poverty (McEwan 2009, 1). This line of critique is common within the feld itself. Neil Lazarus faults the “narrowness” of many postcolonial theorist’s and critic’s research base (Lazarus 2011, 22). Similarly, Lazarus’s colleague at the University of Warwick, Benita Parry fnds an “incuriosity about the enabling socio-economic and political institutions and other forms of social praxis” (Parry 2004, 26) to be prevalent in the work of prominent postcolonial theorists.11 Likewise, Parry notes that within the feld of postcolonialism there is an “insistence on the absolute primacy of discourse” which—without a “sober, concretely grounded and historically-sensitive analysis of the specifc forms assumed and generated by the global restructuring of capitalist class relations” (for which Lazarus calls) (Lazarus 1998/9, 106)—is marked by a “preoccup[ation] with the generation of meaning within textual forms” (Parry 2004, 55, 11, 56). Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes that “discursive categories [. . .] must be grounded in and informed by the material politics of everyday life, especially the daily life struggles for survival of poor people—those written out of history” (Mohanty 2003, 53). That some postcolonial theorists and critics have tended to favor the examination of cultural forms over more “material” investigations may be partly due to the fact that, since its establishment in the 1970s, postcolonial theory has remained largely an “academic”
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Postcolonial Theory’s Heedlessness to Health
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discipline, housed in universities around the world at the intersection of cultural studies, comparative literature, and literary theory. Yet, on the other hand, an acknowledgement of culture or a consideration of the role cultural works play in a society is virtually absent from even the most left leaning of economists or development specialists. However, when postcolonial theorists consider Development, the tendency is to decry the unexamined imperial, neocolonial, and ethnocentric aspects found within both the ideological foundation and implementation strategies of development specialists.12 Gayatri Spivak’s repeated criticism of Development and UN programs is certainly not without justifcation (Spivak 2013, 100, 150, 188, 208, 1999, 388). Similarly, the scholars who together compose the Warwick Research Collective (WReC)13 criticize the
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“aid mechanism” according to which metropolitan elites administer resource allocations to and for peripheralised regions outside of these localities’ own state apparatuses and electoral procedures—a mechanism that has been rightly and extensively criticised by participants, activists, and scholars of “aid and development.” (Deckard et al. 2015, 45)
Political scientist Christine Sylvester is right to point out that most of those working in development scarcely mention or apologize for the colonial period; indeed, she notes they rarely even use the term “postcolonial” (Sylvester 1999, 717). Observations common within the postcolonial feld—such as that “globalization [i]s quasicolonial, a condition at once old and new,” or that “postcoloniality is a salutary reminder of the persistent ‘neo-colonial’ relations within the ‘new’ world order and the multinational division of labour” (Bhabha 1994, xxi, 9)—are rarely made by humanitarian, public health, or development specialists. V.S. Naipaul’s controversial and unsympathetic scrutiny of colonialism notwithstanding,14 postcolonial-sensitive analyses of the world system and its components of the type called for by Neil Lazarus (such as that carried out by Arif Dirlik [1994]), though relatively commonplace within the feld of postcolonial studies (even if focalized through and, some would add, overly focused on cultural works), seem to be the exception rather than the rule among mainstream humanitarian, development, and public health specialists. It seems important to note at this juncture that attempts to group under one “analytically reductive” (Mohanty 2003, 30, 34) banner what are in fact disparate theories put forth by many critics in related but distinct felds may fall fat, as there are economists and doctors who inculpate colonialism in the formation of the inequalities in the contemporary world. For instance, Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz has observed that the International
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Monetary Fund’s (IMF) “approach to developing countries has the feel of a colonial ruler”; and he writes that the conditions imposed by the IMF are “seen as the intrusion by the new colonial power on [a] country’s own sovereignty” (Stiglitz 2003, 46, 40). One of Dr. Paul Farmer’s most important works, The Uses of Haiti, utilizes theories of colonialism set out by Cuban writer Antonio Benitez-Rojo to situate the public health of contemporary Haitians within its historical and geo-political context (Farmer 2006). Yet, on the occasions when colonialism is referred to by eminent thinkers of development, public health, and humanitarianism—such as Ha-Joon Chang, Amartya Sen, Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stiglitz, Jim Yong Kim, Rony Brauman, and Bernard Kouchner et al.—it is largely treated as an epoch whose terminus was reached half-a-century or more ago. That being said, it must be noted that political economists, historians, and writers such as Samir Amin, Eduardo Galeano, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein, who wrote on dependency and underdevelopment theory in the 1960s and 1970s, now posit their examinations of international capitalism in terms of a world system. Colonialism fgures prominently within their analyses of the components and structures of the contemporary capitalist world system within which many of the “developed” countries were—non-coincidentally— former colonial powers. For these scholars, “Development” is actually the “development of underdevelopment.” That is, the renewal of the structurally adjusted relations of force established under colonialism and by which the now “developed” countries of the global North perpetuate the asymmetrical domination of “underdeveloped” countries (Amin 1976, 191, 287). Though not concerned with Development as such, Micheal Hardt and Antonio Negri claim that sovereignty has taken a new global form. Composed of a series of national and supranational organizations united under a single logic of rule that is decidedly postcolonial and postimperialist, they write that to the degree that this global form of sovereignty considers health and vulnerability it does so only in so far as an individual’s well-being coincides with the logic of the global system (Hardt and Negri 2001, xii, 86, 284). Across the felds there is only partial acceptance, mixed with outright rejection, of the neoliberal creed ascendant in “D”evelopment today: that (unchecked) capitalism, privatization, and the (free) market will bring prosperity to all, and that the condition of the poorest in the world can be ameliorated via aid. Some claim that the “vital function” of state aid to underdeveloped countries is to “maintain” this asymmetrical “status quo” (Amin 1976, 182). Others have gone further and shown that current policy orthodoxy of the Washington Consensus amounts to “kicking away the ladder” that developed countries used to achieve wealth and stability. By not allowing developing countries to utilize the institutions and policies which were vital to their rise, the global North actively prevents developing countries from
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“catching up”15 and thus changing the asymmetrical relationship that favors developed countries in the global North (Chang 2006).16 There is no shortage of theories as to why failing states fail or why poor states remain impoverished. Poor governance and economic policies, faulty institutions, the presence of confict and natural resources, or both, as well as the misfortune of being landlocked, are all commonly cited. Nor is there a dearth of suggested remedies. These include conservatorships, privatization, military intervention, micro-credit, trade agreements, contingent aid packages, structural adjustment programs, greater democratization, signature of transparency charters, technical assistance, disease eradication, the elimination of corruption, infrastructure improvements, debt relief or cancellation, closing the knowledge gap, reversing the brain drain, implementation of the Millennium Development Goals, empowering women and protecting the environment. It is noted that the support and aid provided to the newly independent nations following the end of the Cold War has not been nearly proportional to that provided to the countries of antebellum Europe by the Marshall Plan, which quickly put them back on the path to prosperous stability. Commonly, a country’s sovereign right to determine what policies or interventions are or are not implemented on its lands is cited as an impediment to the successful implementation of a humanitarian aid program, contingent aid package, or structural adjustment program. “Poorly” informed nationalist leaders who attempt to lower poverty and illiteracy levels by implementing them (such as Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran) are often cited by those in the Washington Consensus as being the deciding factor that engineers or plays a part in a state’s collapse (Rotberg 2004). Defned by whether a country can guarantee the physical security of its citizens and whether it can provide the environment by which poverty can be reduced (through quality regulation of private economic activity and supplying public goods) “D”evelopment economist (and former head of research at the World Bank), Paul Collier, lists nine countries as failing or at the borderline of failing: Angola, the Central African Republic, Haiti, Liberia, Sudan, the Solomon Islands, Somalia, Zimbabwe, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Collier 2007, 69). Struck by the fact that all nine of these countries were formerly colonized,17 I consulted the Index of Failed States and found that of the sixty-six countries for which this index has issued either the “Alert,” “High Alert,” or “Very High Alert” ranking, only four had never been colonized (Peace 2015).18 Given that 94 percent of the poorest and most precarious states in the world are countries that were former colonies, I will re-posit and reframe the assertion with which I began this introductory chapter. We live within a world system in which imperialism and capitalism are two sides of the “same coin,” that being “historical capitalism”: colonialism
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“created,” institutionalized, internationalized, and perpetuated asymmetrical relations of force between the center and periphery that continue to prevail in the contemporary, postcolonial globalized present (Amin 2014, xxix, 1976, 187). These relations of force are negatively implicated in the impoverishment and unviability of postcolonial states, the conditions of which impinge upon the bodies and lives of those who live in these countries. There is a virtual one-to-one correspondence when comparing the sixty-six “most fragile” states—those most likely to catastrophically fail—with the sixtysix countries that rank lowest on the United Nations Development Project’s (UNDP) Human Development Index (HDI),19 which ranks countries in terms of human development, for example, its people’s capability “to be” and “do” what they value (Jahan and Jespersen 2016; Peace 2018). A history of former colonization is the transitive constant expressing and equivalating the relation between the states most likely to fail and those in which their people have the lowest quality of life. The term “postcolonial” signposts colonial relations of force as a causal factor, a pathology that continues to affect contemporary relations of force that impinge upon the lives and bodies of those living in countries which were former colonies and limits what they can do and be. As one of Dany Laferrière’s characters comments in The Enigma of the Return: “For them [the true masters of Haiti] the story has been running without a break. A single straight line [. . .] since the end of the colonial period. It’s always been the same business: one group replaces another, and so it goes” (Laferrière 2011, 177). Public health, humanitarian, and development experts monitor multiple causal indicators that contribute to the wealth or poverty and stability or instability of a country. Many of these indicators span the transition through the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial years. These are social, economic, and political indicators, such as infrastructure, trade, level of education, confict, mortality, and morbidity rates, levels of corruption, presence, or lack of natural resources, good or poor governance, levels of malnutrition. Yet, despite the fact that 94 percent of the poorest and most fragile and poorly functioning states in the world were once colonies, there is no “D”evelopment analysis that employs specifcally postcolonial-sensitive indicators in an effort to understand why failing states fail. Perhaps this is understandable. In the past 50+ years, since the age of great independence, as has happened since the beginning of history, empires have receded and others emerged. The revolutionary fervor of the 1960s has faded away. Times have changed. American imperialism and Islamist forces, infuencing and infuenced by transnational, neoliberal, and globalized relations of force, have modulated postcolonial forces, structures, and practices. In the process, many of the material conditions, forces, organizations, institutions, ideologies, and agencies that act
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upon the actions of others have metamorphosed and are continuing to metamorphose. Prominent leaders and revolutionaries have died or passed out of offce; new leaders have emerged. The centrality of nation-states appears to have waned before the waxing ubiquity of transnational corporations. What colonial links there are to the poor health and well-being of the populations of contemporary failing states appear ever more attenuated in the evanescence of the receding past; and so some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. Less charitable others might claim, rather, that strategies of deliberate sabotage have been employed, in place of lost. Or they might substitute the phrase “obscured,” or show that aspects of history have been presented in a “peculiarly ahistorical” manner: facts as to how countries in the global North attained wealth and stability have been “whitewashed”; “illusions” have been presented as history (Chang 2006, 7, 12). Though colonialism proper vanished years ago, it would seem that imperial structures and systems, recognizable through the global North’s continued asymmetrical domination20 of the planet and the deleterious effects of contemporary institutions, acquisitive actions, practices and policies, yet abide, change and shift through the decades though they have. The current situation is twofold. Many working to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger or who work with vulnerable populations to ensure they have potable water, shelter, and access to health care, primary education, and economic opportunities do not see that colonialism’s legacy in the relations of force that exist within postcolonial countries is a signifcant driver in both people’s level of vulnerability and their ability to realize their maximum affective potential. Meanwhile, postcolonial theory, despite the fact that its focus on the primacy of “textual forms” has arguably come with a corresponding lack of engagement with the “material politics of everyday life,” has not lost sight of the fact that colonialism’s effects are still negatively impinging upon what postcolonial bodies can do. That being said, despite the differences between the disciplines of Development and Postcolonial Theory, there is much that is consonant and common in the sets of the relations of force referred to as postcolonialism by literary theorists and globalization and the world system by Marxist-infuenced scholars and economists. Both examine the relations of force that work to produce the “contemporary global condition” (Spivak 1999, 172), and do so from a common point of view that sees globalization as the form that imperialism takes in the twenty-frst century (Brennan 2004, 127). The multidisciplinary, symptomatological manner of reading postcolonial fction that will be elaborated over the course of this book aims to reconceptualize the postcolonial situation in a way that will address those blind spots and will attempt to construct a bridge over the divide between the two felds.
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1.3 SITUATING A HUMANITARIAN-ORIENTED POSTCOLONIAL SYMPTOMATOLOGICAL METHODOLOGY VIS-À-VIS THE POSTCOLONIAL FIELD: ETHICS, POLITICS, AESTHETICS, REPRESENTATION Some postcolonial critics and theorists analyze cultural forms with an emphasis on discourse analysis, or ideology, hegemony, gender, cultural criticism, sexuality, race, aesthetics, deconstruction, post-modernism, or post-structuralism. Others do so from Leftist, Humanist, post-Humanist, anti-Humanist, feminist, ecological, psychoanalytical, Marxist, anti-Marxist, or post-Marxist perspectives. Some, like Gayatri Spivak, combine multiple approaches.21 The orientation grounding this work’s symptomatological methodology is the praxis of humanitarian action. Though not commonly employed within the cultural studies or critical theory felds, the theories and practices of contemporary humanitarian action, loosely known as humanitarianism, share signifcant areas of consonance with key Deleuzian concepts, as well as postHumanist, feminist, and Marxist perspectives. From the earliest days, societies around the world have set rules to minimize the suffering caused by wars; however, humanitarianism as we now know it began on a June day in 1859 when the Swiss businessman, Henry Dunant, came upon thousands of wounded soldiers on the battlefeld of Solferino. Together with nearby townspeople, Dunant spent the next days tending to the wounded with no regard as to which side of the FrancoSardinian/Austrian confict they had fought on (Dunant 1986). This event led to the formation of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and later to the various Geneva Conventions, and to bodies of International Humanitarian, Refugee, and Human Rights Laws. Cumulatively, this engendered what we know today as humanitarian action. Humanitarian action is not only an expression of international solidarity, but it is an ethics—part deontological, part principlist, part consequentialist—that assesses disasterand confict-affected people’s situations and ways of being in the world and actively works to save lives and prevent and alleviate suffering. Humanitarian action—a practical expression of the principle of humanity that all people have equal value by virtue of their membership in humanity—endeavors to protect the lives and health of vulnerable peoples around the world. It endeavors to do so voluntarily, neutrally, independently, with no discrimination as to nationality, race, gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, class, or political opinions. Guided solely by the needs of those affected by disaster or confict, humanitarianism gives priority to the most urgent cases of distress. The humanitarian feld is composed of a “messy” assemblage of principles and actions, actors and activities, treaties and laws, individuals, states,
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institutions and civil society organizations, governmental, nongovernmental, and intergovernmental organizations: humanitarianism is both a network and a system. The becoming-humanitarian occurring in the world—that is, the growing sensitivity to disaster- and confict-affected people’s distress and the corresponding endeavors to prevent and alleviate their suffering neutrally, independently, and impartially—like all becomings have not been “deliberately engineered.” It has been evolving “organically,” heterogeneously, over the past century-and-a-half (Stoddard et al. 2015, 10). Humanitarianism operates in a contradictory, sociopolitical space. This space is contradictory, because humanitarianism operates precisely because the cosmopolitan, postnational, sociopolitical space philosophers like Rosi Braidotti call for does not yet exist (Braidotti 2006) and because it operates in that space as if it existed. With the Deleuzian concept of “becoming” describing the production of difference and movement in people and the world, the concept “becominghumanitarian” connects with the people and processes seeking to assist those in distress. By providing shelter or protection or food, humanitarians establish a human’s right to be sheltered, to be safe in home and body, to be nourished. The concept “becoming-humanitarian” and the actions it engenders create, call into existence, particular, context-specifc rights and ways of being in the world that maximize the power and possibilities of life. Acting in a postnationalist, sociopolitical space that does not exist—because it does not exist—humanitarianism is actively engaged in bringing this space into existence. Whether expressed in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh; the Isle of Lesvos, or the hamlet of Idomeni, Greece; or Dohuk, Kurdistan, humanitarian actions show the connection between humanitarianism and egalitarian, hospitable cosmopolitan versions of democracy. In response to the question of “what it means to be on the Left?” Deleuze noted that, as that “justice doesn’t exist, [the] ‘rights of man’ do not exist,” being on the Left means to “act for freedom” in response to particular “abominable cases” (Deleuze and Parnet 2004, G as in Gauche). The areas of consonance common to humanitarianism and egalitarian, hospitable and cosmopolitan versions of democracy are visible when UN agencies, international and national NGOs, the Red Cross Movement and governments alike act to ensure and protect each and every life equally. Indeed, I would argue that these are acts of cosmopolitan jurisprudence on the part of international civil society. The community-based, participatory approach to consulting with disaster- or confict-affected people as to what is most needed and involving them in every stage of program design and delivery exemplifes the case-by-case “jurisprudence” favored by Deleuze. Expressed in every humanitarian action, the humanitarian imperative effectively establishes the “rights of life” of each and every life equally.22 Cosmopolitan, international civil society, an extension of humanitarianism,
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effectively brings those “rights of life” into existence, thereby creating, inventing the law. By acting impartially, neutrally, independently and with little regard for borders, humanitarianism is in effect extending an egalitarian, hospitable, and cosmopolitan version of democracy to the most vulnerable. Though its end-state is unknown, the becoming-humanitarian that has taken place in the world can be identifed by the distance travelled and the changes in processes, systems, attitudes, and actions that have taken place in the world since the event of Solferino. The becoming of becoming-humanitarian is evinced in a greater concern throughout the world for the well-being of the most vulnerable. Becoming-humanitarian is the mounting processes in the world endeavoring to remove that which most negatively impinges upon disaster- and confict-affected people’s social capacity to experiment with the potential for new perceptions and affects. It does so, so that they can more fully realize what Spinoza via Deleuze might term their vis existendi and potentia agendi, their force of existing and power of acting (Deleuze 1988b, 97–104): their capacity to act and think and feel: their capacity to affect the world and be affected by the world. Becoming-humanitarian is the change in those humanitarian processes so that they are more impartial, less infuenced by foreign policy, more respectful of culture and custom; so that humanitarians build on local capacities, and to a greater degree hold themselves accountable to, recognize the dignity of, and involve benefciaries in program development and management of relief aid (IFRC 1998). This becominghumanitarian causes people not only to actively and voluntarily seek out those living unseen, precarious existences (regardless of whether they are located in the plains of Darfur, the mountains of Afghanistan, or camping before the gates of Europe), often at great personal risk and with few customary comforts. For this, some policy analysts consider humanitarians to be “the last of the just” (Rieff 2002, 333). It seeks to enhance the power, capacities, and possibilities of life of people they have never met—the “wholly other.” Dedicated to contesting inhuman relations of force, a humanitarian-oriented, postcolonial, symptomatological methodology has signifcant area of consonance with postcolonial theorists, such as Ella Shohat (1992, 106) and Arif Dirlik (1994, 331), who see in the structures and structuring principles of contemporary global capitalism the presence, continuation, and hegemonizing regeneration of aspects of colonial assemblages.23 Principle among the theorists to which this methodology is indebted would be the cosmopolitan, Humanist theorist, Edward Said, whose Orientalism is a foundational text in the feld of postcolonial studies. Well-versed in the offenses of empire and Eurocentrism, Edward Said was critical of Humanism’s universal, secular chauvinisms, while remaining attuned to developing voices, many emerging from exile or territories not their own (Braidotti 2013, 31, 47). Said’s project was to connect “two centuries of Western writers’ representations of
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the cultures of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East,” which together composed a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” with the “imperial process of which they were manifestly and unconcealedly a part” (Said 2004, 3, 1994, xiv). Said’s work showed how Orientalism: a “network of interests,” a “system of thought,” a “bin [. . .] into which all the authoritative, anonymous, and traditional Western attitudes were dumped unthinkingly,” essentialized and “set itself off against” the East as distinct from (and inferior to) the West (Said 2004, 3, 96, 102). With no need for applicability to reality, Said showed how such “knowledge” of the “ontological inequality” of the “Orient compared to the Occident,” this “habit of speaking for the natives,” this “set of structures inherited from the past,” a “system of representations” designed to “produc[e] certain kinds of statements,” got passed along “uncritically,” “silently, without comment, from one text to another” (Said 2004, 117, 150, 263, 203, 275, 123). Linking canonical texts to their historical and socioeconomic contexts—a practice which he called reading “contrapuntally”—Said showed how this “code by which Europe could interpret both itself and the Orient to itself” “hardened” into “truth” and became both cultural hegemony and “political doctrine” which ran through, indeed “aided and was aided by” Western imperialist domination of the Orient (Said 2004, 253, 254, 204). The symptomatological methodology being elaborated in this book has several areas of affnity with Said’s work. Where Said’s work was mainly concerned with examining canonical works of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during classical European imperialism, I examine works produced by authors in newly independent countries whose lives and works span the colonial and postcolonial divide. Said placed canonical fgures historically and culturally and showed how their writings articulated and were linked to the historico-cultural milieus in which they were produced. There is much that resonates between Said’s belief that culture is a “battleground” connected to history and the material realities of the “everyday world” and a humanitarian-oriented, symptomatological approach to reading postcolonial literature. As an aesthetic object “fundamentally tied” to middle class society, novels are plugged into the entire system of social reference that depends on the institutions and practices of the world system (Said 1994, xiv, xii, 70, 71). Rather than seeking to trace a novel’s narrow line(s) of descent from other texts, Said’s work has shown us to read novels contrapuntally and affliatively—as “nodes” intertwined within “affliative” networks. Identifcation and examination of the features of the multiple, interacting histories (and the various perspectives within them) that yet exert considerable infuence in the present allow readers to recreate and give materiality back to the strands that bind author, society, culture, and text together (Said 1994, 51, 1983, 21, 174, 179, 197).24 Despite the shift in focus to time (to the postcolonial present),
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point of view (authors from postcolonial countries), and structures analyzed (the transformation of colonialism into globalization), this work similarly seeks to “release a very specialized form of textual discovery” (Said 1983, 182). Said did not state his project in the explicitly symptomatological language this book employs; yet, his work established diagnoses of the colliding material, cultural, social, economic, political, and historical forces within a society as distilled and articulated through the nodal point of a novel. Before Said, Frantz Fanon established the practice of reading literature as a way of examining aspects of the world. Fanon used many texts as symptomatologies. Throughout much of Black Skin White Masks, Fanon uses various literary works in his socio-literary diagnoses of the psychopathologies and affective disorders wrought in black men and women by colonialism to show the psychological effects of racism (Fanon 2008, 46, 54, 114, 115). Indeed, reading The Wretched of the Earth’s chapter on “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness” while contemplating the postindependence avarice, venality, violence, corruption, and inequality of contemporary Angolan and Sudanese societies gives the reader a sensation akin to what the surviving citizens of Troy must have felt as they regarded the ruins of their city, Cassandra’s unheeded prophecies ringing still in their ears. With regard to representation and aesthetics, this book’s postcolonial symptomatological methodology starts with several propositions common to the postcolonial feld. First, though external concerns are represented in a novel, we cannot learn about people other than ourselves solely by reading international novels, or mutatis mutandi, sociohistorical documents. Second, the line between politics and aesthetics is “neither frm nor straight” (Spivak 2013, 67), and the relationship between art and the empirical world is conficted, complex, and highly contested (Bahri 2003, 110). Nevertheless, being essentially connected (Said 1994, 13) to the historical world, a novel “registers” aspects of the “collective whole, context, or situation” (Said 1983, 15).25 Yet, the collective social forces that appear in a postcolonial novel do not emerge mimetically, like some historical and cultural guidebook, but rather are necessarily represented in “refracted form, transformed and reinterpreted in literary terms and with literary instruments” (Casanova 2004, 86). The access postcolonial novels provide to the nefarious cartographies mediated therein are necessarily imprecise, oblique, allegorical, and semiotic; they are presented, represented, and created through language. This is even truer of translated works, where access to already refracted, transformed, and literarily interpreted relations of force have been further refracted as they pass through a translator’s hands and come to be represented and communicated via another tongue. As I read many of Pepetela’s works in the original Portuguese and translated the lines from those works that appear in this work, I am especially sensitive to how the choices a translator makes affect and alter the meaning and representation
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of that which she or he is translating. Yet, a way—tortured, imprecise, and approximate though the doubly mediated translation process may be—can be found. This book’s symptomatological methodology utilizes a referential theory of literature whereby literature can refer to the real social and political situation of a nation’s experience; postcolonial novels functionally mediate “essential or underlying” (Williams 2009, 99, 101, 108) aspects of hegemonic relations of forces and so diagnose the “pathologies of power” (Farmer 2005) present in the formerly colonized world (Said 1994, 223).26 This is a clinical and exemplary “use of representation” (that Deleuze writes of in Logic of Sense and further develops in Essays Critical and Clinical) “without which representation would remain lifeless and senseless” (Deleuze 1990, 146). This is the “power of the false,” the special form of a free indirect discourse discovered by the Italian director Pasolini that became a “free, indirect subjective” where “objective” and “subjective” lose both distinction and identifcation, contaminate, decompose, and recompose each other and are replaced by a new “circuit” (Deleuze 2013, 154). This work adheres to the standing practice of reading literature both representationally and symptomatologically that has been established within the felds of literary and postcolonial theory. Over sixty years ago, Fanon established the practice of reading literature as a way of examining aspects of the world—of being referred back from the individual to the social structure and to her or his environment via a literary text. Replete with literary references, Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks is as much a work of literary theory as it is a psycho-sociological analysis of the racist-infected syndrome afficting colonized peoples around the world. Subsequently, postcolonial theorists and critics, following Fanon and the foundational fgures of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabha, variously employ similar manners of reading literature in their work and have continued, as I shall show, to read postcolonial texts with an eye to diagnosing aspects of the conditions found in countries which were formerly colonies. The affliative reading practice—that is reading postcolonial novels within the “complex matrix to which they pertain” (Hamilton 2011, xiv)—is a key component of the symptomatological methodology elaborated within this book. Reading affliatively enhances a reader’s understanding of the relations of force within which previously unimagined people and communities live; it can be said to make the “statistics,” whether contained in philological, historical, philosophical, sociological or anthropological texts, “come alive” (Patterson 2014, 240). Reading postcolonial literature symptomatologically enhances a reader’s knowledge of the material conditions surrounding the production of a text. Not only that, functioning as an empathy machine, the reading of postcolonial
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novels improves a reader’s ability to attribute mental states and experiences of others to oneself, while at the same time comprehending that others have experiences, thoughts, desires, feelings, and beliefs that are different from one’s own (Mar et al. 2009; Premack and Woodruff 1978). Edward Said writes:
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The reader and writer of literature [. . .] no longer needs to be tied to an image [of the identity of the subject that is] isolat[ed], secure, stable, national in identity, class, gender or profession, but can think and experience with Genet in Palestine or Algeria, with Tayeb Salih as a Black man in London, with Jamaica Kincaid in the white world, with Rushdie in India and Britain, and so on. (Said 1994, 317)
Mediated through the work of imagination via literature, encounters with such postcolonial relations of forces can transform people even as it connects them with the lives of unknown others and their local and inter- and transnational political and ethical concerns (Appadurai 1996, 10). The humanitarian-tinged postcolonial symptomatological methodology of this book contains both a purpose and a hope. The frst is that by reading postcolonial novels symptomatologically, the reader will grow more aware of the relations of force impinging upon the health of a group of people. This will necessarily (re)situate the reader vis-à-vis others and their placement within the geo-political, socio-cultural, economic, and historical relations of force in which they are situated. The hope is that the humanitarian orientation of this manner of reading and the syndromes identifed by Diagnosing Colonial Literature’s symptomatological methodology (and the symptoms isolated and disaggretated therein—see chapter 3, section 3.4.3 and chapter 4, section 4.3.2) will provide literary scholars with an additional, post-Marxist means of analyzing the literary worlds of writers from the Global South. Additionally, it will enable those working with vulnerable communities in the Global South to better design and implement specifc programs that would enable them to more fully realize their maximum affective capacities. It is here at this socioliterary confuence that the humanitarian infections of the symptomatological methodology come positively into play. Sensitive to the most vulnerable and dedicated to the well-being of an enlarged sense of community, humanitarianism’s deontological and consequentialist ethics modulate the unacknowledged imperialist, Eurocentric, patriarchal chauvinisms found both within Marxist Humanism and Development specialists alike.27 (The incorporation of key Deleuzian concepts into this methodology, which I shall do in the next chapter, serves to further modulate the classical Humanist norms common in those who work in development and introduce alternative, open-ended, experimental, and
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additive ways of conceptualizing the human subject in ways that are consonant with recent posthumanist thought [Braidotti 2013, 37, 39].) The aesthetics and the ethics of a humanitarian-infected, postcolonial symptomatological methodology reinforce each other. They cohere with the aspects of Pascale Casanova’s work on the inequitable regime of the international literary-world system outlined in The World Republic of Letters and which are consonant with the work of world-system theorists such as Samir Amin, Immanual Wallerstein, and Andre Gunder Frank. They also fall within the ample postcolonial mantle cast by Edward Said’s and Gayatri Spivak’s work. Casanova’s work renders visible the “structural ethnocentrism of the literary world” (Casanova 2004, 155). It shows the world literary system, exercised and rendered visible in the power the world’s publishing centers have to “declare writing literary [and] to consecrate a foreign production as Literature,” replicates and reinforces the “global structure of dependence” between center and periphery (Thorne 2013, 61). Though Casanova goes to great length to aver the difference and distance between the political/economic and literary spheres, it is not a stretch to see Paris’s continued domination of literary-world space as an aesthetic isomorphism of contemporary postcolonial relations of force. As such, the “distinctive patronage” system Casanova describes, and which is, as Christian Thorne points out, no republic, but rather a “literary world-system, neocolonial in effect” (Thorne 2013, 59, 60) is related to the system of cultural representations Edward Said set out in Orientalism. Casanova’s work indicates that the world literary system is a two-part structure: those who write from the periphery and those who write from the center (Casanova 2004, 178). Casanova describes the countries on the periphery as “small nations” and the literature that comes from them as “small literatures” (Casanova 2004, 185, 200). Using “literary modernity as a standard of measurement” (Casanova 2004, 199), Casanova expresses her valuation of depoliticized, autonomous, abstract, “purely literary” literature—produced at the core of the world literary system, over nationalist, political, dominated, functionalist literature—produced at the periphery. According to Casanova, in politically dependent, “emerging literary spaces,” in which the “emergence of a new literature is indissociable from the appearance of a new nation,” a writer with little accumulated literary inheritance at her or his disposal does not know the “laws of world literary space.” She or he fnds recourse in a “functionalist aesthetic” (such as naturalism or realism) and employs “the most conservative narrative, novelistic, and poetical forms” (Casanova 2004, 104, 109, 199). Such writers are “condemned” by their geo-temporal literary location to the national, historical, social, and politically dependent function of promoting their country as a nation (Casanova 2004, 191). However, this
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theory is not unproblematic: Casanova’s aesthetic preference is for abstract, autonomous, modernist, High Literature, either from European authors located at the core, or from those second-phase authors writing from the periphery but who have received the consecrating benediction bestowed by the literary center (via translation and republication), involves a “false universalization imposed by the bibliometropolis” (Thorne 2013, 61). It risks reinscribing colonial cultural valuations throughout the globalized present. Viewed via a postcolonial or poststructural lens, such an approach appears a relic of a tenacious yet arguably increasingly outmoded form of literary valuation from which concepts such as the estimation of and protection of the canon still have unquestioned validity and in which critically evaluating the “literariness” of a work is the primary function of a literary critic. Not only that, as Christian Thorne contends, the validity of Casanova’s “nationalist realism v. internationalist modernism” aesthetic antithesis is undone by the fact that “realism is every bit as international as modernism.” Thorne points out that it is further invalidated by the reality that “modernism is every bit as national as realism,” and by the fact that the “nation repeats at the level of content [:] at the straightforward level of setting and character [. . .] modernist novels [. . .] are no less nation-bound than [. . .] realist” novels (Thorne 2013, 63–64). According to Casanova’s classifcation, in the periphery, a writer from a “small,” “dominated,” “peripheral” country, due to the “ontological condition of belonging to a literarily disinherited country” (Casanova 2004, 183), is (as Chinua Achebe asserted) the “sensitive point” (Achebe 1965), the (to quote Fanon out of context) “glowing focal point” of their communities (Fanon 2004, 40). Casanova describes writers of “small literatures” as having a dual function: both “historian” and “poet”; they produce politicized works in which they are “engaged in elaborating a national literature” (Casanova 2004, 189, 191, 196). Though writing on postcolonial rather than “small” literature, Deepika Bahri similarly emphasizes the value of “native intelligence” as a “mode of perception relevant within its own context.” Sliding between “solipsism, informance and apprehension,” Bahri writes that postcolonial writers, even though not representing extant relations of forces in a mimetic or “transparently transformational” manner, nevertheless offer a “noumenal truth gleaned from the phenomenal” world (Bahri 2003, 20, 21, 198, 197). Casanova goes on to explicitly divide literature produced in “small nations” into two phases. As described earlier, writers from “small countries” that have not yet generated suffcient literary inheritance so as to free their writers from historical, political, and national concerns operate as a “national vates” (Casanova 2004, 200). Yet, in discussing the “depoliticization of literature” that occurs in the “most literary countries” (Casanova 2004, 199), Casanova indicates that there is a second phase of writers from “small countries” that
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have accumulated a suffcient amount of “literary tradition” which frees their writers from the “obligation to help to develop a national identity.” In this second phase, “improbable” (Casanova 2004, 185) as it may be, Casanova writes that “formal experimentation [. . .] detached from political purpose” can emerge from writers who are “unencumbered by non-literary conceptions of literature.” Casanova writes: Formal preoccupations, which is to say specifcally literary concerns, appear in small literatures only in a second phase, when an initial stock of literary resources has been accumulated and the frst international artists fnd themselves in a position to challenge the aesthetic assumptions associated with realism and to exploit the revolutionary advances achieved at the Greenwich meridian. (Casanova 2004, 199–200)
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For Casanova, those who write from the periphery and who belong to a subsequent literary generation that is no longer dominated by the core and thus no longer condemned to repeat national themes, writing after an “initial stock of literary resources has been accumulated,” are not obliged to resort to a “functional aesthetic” such as realism or naturalism. She writes that there are “second generation writers [who] exploit [. . .] national literary resources that for the frst time are regarded as such [and] break away from the National and nationalistic model of literature and inventing the conditions of their autonomy, achieve freedom” (Casanova 2004, 325). They can operate beyond the domain of “inspired prophecy”; they do not have to function as a “collective messenger” and so can produce “purely literary” writing free from historical, political, or social purposes, concerned only with formal experimentation (Casanova 2004, 200). Casanova writes that where: the frst national intellectuals refer to a political idea of literature in order to create a particular national identity [. . .] second-generation writers [. . .] become the architects of the great literary revolutions: each using his own weapons, they fght to change the established literary order. (Casanova 2004, 325–326)
Casanova does not explicitly equate “peripheral,” “small nations,” and “small literatures” with postcolonial nations and postcolonial literature. However, given her description of the nation-building role of frst-generation writers from small nations often in the immediacy of independence, the correspondence between “small nations” and “small literatures” and postcolonial nations and postcolonial literature is clear. Given their location on the economic, political, and literary periphery, I contend that postcolonial nations and postcolonial literature can be regarded as, if not directly equivalent to at least pertaining to the subset of the sets of nations and literatures
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considered “small” by Casanova (but which are never explicitly enumerated). Progressing via logical extension, if Casanova’s “small literature” and “small nations” are equivocal to postcolonial literature and postcolonial nations, as I contend, then this aspect of her work effectively indicates the presence of a two-phase aesthetic theory of postcolonial literature yet in its incipience. Thus, the aesthetic theory of the world literary system’s two-part structure Casanova’s work describes effectively encompasses an aesthetic theory of postcolonial literary progression. This provides a useful model, fawed though it may be, for considering works of postcolonial literature within the larger world literary system to which they belong. There are various theories about “representation” within the feld of literary theory. Raymond Williams wrote that Marxist literary theoreticians saw fction as offering “imaginative truth[s]” (Williams 2009, 50). By this, Williams is indicating that art, a province of human skill, imagination and sensibility, aesthetics as a specialized perception of beauty and artistic quality in the world, and literature as the repository of fction, can portray, reveal, preserve and bear ideas, properties, relations, or cases faithful to or in accord with reality. However, a more post-structuralist-oriented literary critic, such as Grant Hamilton, sees a writer, rather, as “an inextricable singularity of the people” who does not “simply represent” experiences but rather “creates non-preexistent relations between multiplicities, singularities, and becomings in order to demonstrate new possibilities of life” (Hamilton 2011, 165). Due to its pragmatic focus on developing a tool that can play a part in bringing greater social justice into the word, this work examines more “realist” representations of existing relations of forces. However, as I will argue (in chapter 3), the positions represented by Williams and Hamilton are not mutually exclusive: some works of literature can function in both modes. Though it may be quite diffcult (if not impossible) for one text to function in both aesthetic registers simultaneously, it is possible that a work produced by a writer at one point in her or his career might function as Raymond Williams describes, while other works produced at other times and in other circumstances might function much in the way outlined by Hamilton.28 Deleuze and Guattari write that one of the characteristics of “minor literature” (partly defned as literature produced by a writer writing from within the power struggles of a people positioned within “asymmetrical power relations” [Bogue 2010b, 170–171]) “is that everything in them is political” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 17). The “social milieu” no longer serves as the background or setting behind which the action takes place. “Indispensable,” the background links every “individual concern,” no matter whether it be “commercial, economic, bureaucratic, [or] juridical,” directly with the political (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 17). Not only is everything in works of minor literature political, Deleuze and Guattari write that it is also collective. Bob
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Dylan described what went into the songs he wrote over the turbulent years of the late 1960s and early 1970s in “minor” terms: “I felt it all over America. Wherever in America you went you felt that things were happening in an Olympian type of way.” He continued: “In taking all the elements that I’ve ever known to make wide, sweeping statements which conveyed the feeling that was the general essence of the spirit of the times, I think I managed to do that” (Scorsese 2005). Expressed in lyrics and performed in real time, Dylan’s work identifed, isolated, condensed, and musically (re)presented the particular relations of force at play in the United States and the world at that time (e.g., relations of antiwar + generational + lifestyle + racial and sexual minorities + women’s movement + environmental forces vs. State forces). It assisted those of his generation to perceive the forces affecting them and which they in turn were affecting. Rolling Stones lead singer, Mick Jagger, has described the apocalyptic song “Gimme Shelter”—often referred to as a “product of its time”—in similar terms: “It was a [. . .] piece about the world closing in on you [. . .]. When it was recorded, early ’69 or something, it was a time of war and tension, so that’s refected in this [song]” (Jagger 2012). The Syrian composer, Zaid Jabri, commenting on Abdelrahman Munif and his trilogy, Cities of Salt, claims that in writing of the sociopolitical transformations that came with the discovery and development of oil in Eastern Arabia (though set in the 1930s), Munif “prophesied” the Gulf wars that would come in the 1990s (Jabri 2015). The Pakistani writer and historian, Tariq Ali, credits Munif’s “creative intelligence” for this capability, claiming that it allowed Munif to concentrate “the intellectual and popular in characters who were neither” (Ali 2002, 81). Munif has written that he composed his works so, because he believed that the novel can give a profound reading of a society that can be more important than political history and certainly than any offcial history. So my aim is to write novels that would open the eyes of the people of the region and also help [them and those in Western countries] to understand the nature of our societies, the period in which we live, the character of our people. (Ali 2002, 322)
Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari and J. Hillis Miller fnd that much of Kafka’s writing foreshadowed the Jewish experience to come under Hitler.29 Hillis Miller argues that for an artist to testify to the confagration of his or her community, “intersubjectivity” must exist: the writer must have “some form of access to what his or her neighbour is thinking and feeling” (Miller 2011, 103). Whether it is through “creative intelligence, “some occult telepathic premonition” (Miller 2011, loc 65), or by an “animalesque sensitivity, like snakes that know when earthquakes are coming” (Probyn 2010, 82), or as some “shamanic” ability to tap into the Jungian “collective unconscious”
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of a people (Scorsese 2005), a “minor” writer internalizes the relations of forces inscribed on his or her body. They somatically and psychically sense and ingest existing political and socio-cultural attitudes and relations of force to such an extent that this identity emerges in an author’s writings (Gilman 1995). Similarly, the Sudanese Arab writer, Tayeb Salih, observed that the literary writer must absorb and observe as much as he can of everything in general, not only literature, but in politics, sociology, and history. All these things provide him with a good background. The literary man, in a way, is a historian and a thinker who needs to shed light, no matter how little, on the problems of his society. (Berkley 2014, 138)
Writing on Tayeb Salih, Khartoum University English professor, Ali Abdalla Abbas, writes:
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Salih anticipates the confict between (Suf-inspired) Islam [. . .] and the kind of Islam in whose name Sudan is being run today [. . .]. Salih [is able] to discern such undercurrents before they become visible to others [. . .]. [I]n 1977 (i.e. at a time when no one in his right mind would have thought that Sudan would one day be governed by a Muslim fundamentalist government) a civil servant goes back to his village, Wad Hamid, and announces he has been pensioned off because he did not perform his morning prayers in the mosque. What this fctional character says in a novel published more than 18 years ago has become literally true. More than 20,000 civil servants have been pensioned off; some precisely because they do not or did not perform their morning prayers in the mosque. This is not a case of life imitating art, rather it is a question of a writer’s ability to discern trends and to highlight them as potentialities. If we go back to the Wedding of Zein, we see in the fgure of the Imam the progenitor of all those who are ruling the Sudan today. (Berkley 2014, 273)
J. Hillis Miller contends that the “truth correspondence” of literature—as “the imitation, or refection, or representation of community, the construction of cunningly verisimilar miniature models of community” to an existing community (Miller 2011, 15)—enables literature to serve as testimony—as témoignage. He believes that literature’s “constative” value makes it equal to the weighty task of bearing witness to the confagration of communities. Deleuze and Guattari write that due to its political nature, minor literature “constitutes a common action.” They denounce the primacy of “narrator and character,” “author and hero.” They claim that aspects of the solitary writer connect with the aspects of the community about him or her; subsequently, the work that emerges functions as a “collective enunciation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 17–18). Thus, that which is depicted within a work of minor
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literature does not pertain only to the individual characters portrayed. Minor literature attests to portions and aspects of the lived experience of the greater collective of human beings living within a society. Given their position within the asymmetrical relations in global power, people subjected to empire are in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of the term “minor” people. Thus, it is arguable that postcolonial literary works, almost by defnition, have a minoritarian aspect. Though writing from more of a Marxist than post-structuralist orientation, the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa speaks of the postcolonial author’s task in terms that resonate with the political and collective aspects Deleuze and Guattari attribute to “minor literature”: “Words are acts,” Vargas Llosa says,
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Imagine the ‘50s, when I was very young and began to write. A young Peruvian, Chilean, Colombian lived in a country where literature meant very little. [. . .] So if one had a certain social conscience of the problem in countries where there were enormous inequalities, well, many times that young man with a literary vocation would ask himself, what is the point of writing if I am Peruvian, if I am Chilean, if I am Colombian? Well, there Sartre was incredibly important, because Sartre had some ideas about literature that ft perfectly with a muchacho in an underdeveloped country. He had the idea that literature has a social, political, historical function, and that of course you could change things through literature. You could affect reality. (Valdes 2018)
According to the two-part world literary structure outlined by Casanova, the novelists analyzed within this book would clearly belong to those who write on the literary periphery. Tayeb Salih’s and Pepetela’s works spans pre- and post-independence Sudan and Angola, respectively. Thus, both authors are situated at the very beginning of the long historical process through which literary creation frees itself from political and national dependencies, and so can become free to progressively and autonomously invent itself (Casanova 2004, xii). Indeed, the analyses of Pepetela’s and Tayeb Salih’s works in the chapters that follow overtly explore (and problematize) their position as peripheral writers who might be deemed to be solely concerned with elaborating their nations. Frantz Fanon highlighted that in this “nationalist” phase “combat,” “revolutionary,” and “national” literature emerge as writers “proclaim their nation [,] portray their people, and become the spokesperson of a new reality in action.” The Angolan writer Pepetela certainly covered the arc described by Fanon, “press[ing] on [to] that place of bubbling trepidation from which knowledge emerged” (Fanon 2004, 159, 161) as he chronicled frst the early guerrilla days in the jungle, and then the subsequent betrayal of the Angolan revolution. Reading with rather than against the grain,30 this methodology endeavors to expose the fne details often contained within the background
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or setting of a postcolonial novel, and then to connect these details with the affliative networks into which they are plugged. Therefore, in its acceptance of literature as mediating social, economic, political, cultural, and historical relations of force, and with the goal of parsing out points that impinge upon the health and well-being of a people or society, this symptomatological methodology admittedly belongs to what Bahri has typifed as the “practical discipline of postcolonialism” (Bahri 2003, 46–47, 54). That being said, an examination of Salih’s later work (chapter 4) will indicate that in a manner reminiscent to that of the Irishman, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka (from a German-speaking, Jewish family in what is now the Czech Republic), and not unsimilar to that of the South African, J. M. Coetzee, the Sudanese Arab writer Tayeb Salih “accumulated” suffcient literary capital over the span of his career to escape the aesthetic tidal lock of “frst phase” nationalist postcolonial literature. Indeed, I will argue Salih’s phantasmagorial and fractured examination of the anomic turbulence in a recently independent Sudan in Bandarshah, his last, unfnished, and virtually unknown work, should be considered as occupying both phases of literary development. As I shall show, the aesthetic logic of Bandarshah is inseparable from, indeed isolates, recomposes, reinforces, and magnifes political, historical, cultural, and ethical aspects of this magnifcent novel. Even if the Angolan author Pepetela’s works might not quite achieve Salih’s later aesthetic sophistication, Salih is not alone in such an accomplishment. It can be argued that J. M. Coetzee’s more “realistic” works indicate that postcolonial novels function at the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and ethics. Coetzee’s more realistic works seem to problematize Coetzee’s own division of novels into those that “supplement” and those that “rival” history, as well as his stated preference for those novels that are more than “imaginative investigations of real historical forces and real historical circumstances” (Coetzee 1988). Indeed, these works demonstrate (contra Casanova’s proffered aesthetic antithesis) that postcolonial novels do communicate (or represent or mediate, albeit not according to the logic of some transparent or reductive social function of témoignage) political and historical “truths” or “facts” (Worthington 2011, 126) even as they aesthetically transform and recompose them into an entirely other order or mode (Bahri 2003, 230, 236). The methodology elaborated in this work shares many areas of consonance with Gayatri Spivak’s variegated and interdisciplinary project, which is pedagogical, theoretical, critical and practical, Marxist, feminist, deconstructivist, and ultimately ethical. Spivak’s work teaches us to “read,” that is to acknowledge the impossible gap between ourselves and the quite-other even as we respectfully and humbly attempt to learn from those who are most unlike ourselves and who, like us all, produce their own texts even while they are “written in and by a text not of [their] own making” (Spivak 1996, 59, 2013,
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122, 152). This book’s methodology shares Spivak’s belief that a novel is an effect within a larger text. Similarly, it believes that a text functions not only as a concept-metaphor for the web of what is called a life but also as a tool with which one can apprehend aspects of the complex of “individual-insociety” (Spivak 2006, xvii, 167). Spivak believes that an aesthetic education in the humanities can train the imagination, create new habits of mind, and uncoercively rearrange desires (Spivak 2013, 111, 125). Spivak hopes that this “transnational literacy” can function as a disruptive praxis that interrupts globalization from within and bring about greater (redistributive, social) justice under capitalism (Spivak 2013, 105, 152, 289). As has been previously highlighted, Spivak is highly critical of capital “D” Development. Though the distinction between Development with a capital “D” and development with a lower case “d” occurs orthographically only twice within Spivak’s oeuvre,31 such a distinction can be read retrospectively into the span of her work. Critiques of capital “D” Development, where she reads colonialism’s “civilizing” mission as the genetic predecessor of the neocolonial-cum-contemporary-neoliberal-world-economic-system’s modernizing mission of Development, are common throughout her work (Spivak 2013, 188, 98). She writes that “transnational capitalism determin[es] itself through [D]evelopment, as in a prior dispensation through imperialism” (Spivak 2009, 288, 361). Spivak’s assertions are consonant with the work of Marxian economists such as Samir Amin, as well as with more mainstream “D”evelopment economists such as Ha-Joon Chang, who has argued that “developed” countries are actively preventing “developing” countries from using the very interventionist economic policies they used to get rich so as to maintain the global equilibrium which asymmetrically favors them (Chang 2006, 139). Yet, Spivak’s work is replete with and driven by the praxis of lower case “d” “d”evelopment, which might be loosely coded as “ethicalpolitical” action (Spivak 2013, 103). Spivak insists that we work hard at gaining some knowledge about others whose positions may be completely closed to us. She asks that we attempt to learn their language, to speak with them; that we strive to learn from them and to unlearn our privileges; that we remain vigilant to and acknowledge both the specifcs of our own position and the fact that the gap between us and others is unbridgeable (Spivak 1996, 5). Importantly, this humanitarian-oriented, postcolonial, symptomatological methodology shares Spivak’s position that the solutions to a particular problem cannot come from international civil society but rather must come “from below”; they must be generated by and in consultation with the people in the affected communities to whom humanitarian and “d”evelopment workers are accountable. Such action is based in an ethics of refusal: Spivakian ethics, humanitarianism, and this humanitarianoriented symptomatological methodology refuse to accept the world system
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as it is currently ordered; they endeavor to mitigate the effects of its most egregious failings. Affrming the value of all human life equally, this methodology expresses civil society’s refusal to accept either political failures or “active or passive assault[s] on the other” (Orbinski 1999). Seeking to act in spaces of political failure, this methodology, in accord with both Spivak’s position and that of principled humanitarian action, refuses to displace the responsibility of states: it refuses to be co-opted into co-managing the misery of millions alongside states and UN organizations. Rather, it would call on states to both assume their responsibilities (Orbinski 1999) and to transform their ways of being so as to remove that which impinges a person’s capability to most fully know their potential—in short, to concretely redistribute the social conditions of personal capability in a manner consistent with justice (Spivak 2013, 289–295, 1996, 160). Though in one register it calls upon states, this methodology is specifcally geared to the individual. The desire for social justice and a restructuring of both humankind and the world, common to Fanon, Spivak, as many other Marxist, Humanist, and Posthumanist theoreticians, is rooted in the secular belief in “the sacredness of human life” (Spivak 1996, 275). The deontological32 aspect of a humanitarian-oriented symptomatological ethics corresponds with Spivak’s belief that by virtue of being human we are “intended,” “angled” toward others, “always and already inserted into a structure of responsibility” (Spivak 2013, 98, 338, 1996, 277). At the same time, this methodology is impartially sensitive to the constitutive vulnerability of human beings and to the points of attachment where relations of force that impinge upon a body’s generative vitality become embedded and embodied. As such, this methodology’s humanitarian orientation shares Spivak’s prioritization of the need to become sensitive to the relations of force imbricated and implicated with gender, race, and class. Though certainly a novel is not a “blueprint for action” (Spivak 2013, 301, 322), this book believes that perceptive reading practices can be a tool by which to better understand the world and that this practice might bring about changes in the reader and her or his relation to the world. Conceptualizing desire as the “ontological drive to become” (Braidotti 2013, 134); health as the capability to creatively experiment with one’s body and life’s intensities; an education in the humanities as a way to bring about an “uncoercive rearrangement of desires”; and micropolitics as being about the “formation of desire in the social feld” (Guattari and Rolnik 2007, 182), this work is an aesthetic, micro-political (“d”evelopment) tool designed to assist people to identify and contest dehumanizing relations of force in the world so that they and others may more fully know what their bodies can do. Bruce Baugh puts this simply in his essay “How Deleuze Can Help Us Make Literature Work”: “Changes in the reader’s disposition, attitudes and behaviors [. . .] may link up with other forces affecting the reader,
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particularly social and political forces, and in such a way that [. . .] readers are able to put those forces to work to overcome the inhibiting and restrictive effects of the dominant social forces” (Baugh 2000, 166). While the symptomatological methodology I am elaborating here is more humanitarian- than Marxist-infuenced, there are many concerns and areas of interest that this methodology shares with Aijaz Ahmad’s quasi-orthodox Marxist project that he set out in his 1992 work In Theory. Both are concerned with political economy and the actuality of world structures/people/assemblages that affect people’s lives and capacities and play signifcant roles in people’s actuality. Second, there is a shared approach to literature and the world and the political, historical, representational aspects of the world in literature: neither of us believe literature to be “detached” from the “crises and combats of real life” (Ahmad 1992, 53). Also, there is a common placement of the human within material conditions as being a greater focus than on the literariness of a work. However, this methodology does not share Ahmad’s asperity; at times, Ahmad’s vitriol obscures aspects of what is in the main a coruscatory critique. Graham Huggan rightly notes that when Ahmad accuses Said of interchangeably commodifying disparate experiences (Ahmad 1992, 217), Ahmad overlooks that for Said the practice of reading postcolonial literature affliatively, by demanding that the analysis include the material conditions in which a book was written and which it represents, overtly depoliticizes and implicitly de-exoticises the work (Huggan 2001, 19).33 However, this allies aspects of my work with that not only of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Aijaz Ahmad but also with that of Neil Lazarus, Benita Parry, and their collaborators in the WReC: Sharae Deckard, Sorcha Gunne, Stephen Shapiro, Nick Lawrence, and Graeme Macdonald. They are among the postcolonial critics decrying what they feel to be the overly discourse analysis-oriented vein of postcolonial criticism and who advocate for a more materialist-centred approach to postcolonial theory and criticism. In addition to sharing common causes with both Edward Said (and Pascale Casanova’s ancillarily related project), we share an interdisciplinary, quasiMarxian understanding that world literature registers the combined and radically uneven development of the capitalist world system. However, WReC “treats the novel paradigmatically,” as the literary form in which “combined and uneven development is manifested with particular salience due [. . .] to its fundamental association with the rise of capitalism and its status in peripheral and semi-peripheral societies” (Deckard et al. 2015, 16). In contrast, this book’s symptomatological methodology treats postcolonial novels “exemplarily.” Though it considers the aesthetics and form of the postcolonial novels it analyses, this book prioritizes content in order to identify, isolate, disaggregate, and use the “barometric indications of invisible forces” (Deckard et al. 2015, 17) present within some postcolonial novels to establish
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an indicative symptomatological table of aspects of the syndrome impinging upon what particular postcolonial bodies can do. The result of this work’s humanitarian orientation is that its ultimate concerns, instead of being paradigmatic and world-oriented, are rather localized, national, and exemplary. This book is driven to develop a tool by which the details of the societal diagnoses contained within some works of postcolonial literature become visible to both literary theorists and development and public health specialists. By utilizing this methodology, a reader will become more sensitive to and overtly knowledgeable about the factors that infuence distant or unfamiliar (though always localized and national, even if inter- or transnational in scope) relations of force. The hope is that such literacy will uncoercively contribute to the rearrangement of reader’s desires and incline and better enable them to contribute to the clearing or releasing of that in the world which blocks movement toward greater health, well-being, and social justice.
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1.4 HEALTH The anthropologist, Elizabeth Povinelli, uses the term “enfeshment” to emphasize the “cruddy, cumulative, and chronic lethality” constraining the lives of those who, within a world system of “distributed misery,” lack entitlement to adequate food, clean water, sanitation, shelter, health care, education, and social and economic opportunities (Povinelli 2011, 146, 162). Informed as her materialist politics of post-human difference is by the anthropological and the postcolonial, the Deleuzian philosopher Rosi Braidotti similarly insists on “accounting for the embedded and embodied nature of the subject” (Braidotti 2013, 102). Without falling into the biological, the terms “embedded and embodied” and “enfeshment” corporeally connote one of the principal mediums through which the material and immaterial forces present in postcolonial countries function: the human body. It is the apprehension and interrogation of the embedded- and embodied-ness—the enfeshment of the myriad, quotidian relations of forces acting on, in, and through human bodies and that enable postcolonial bodies while simultaneously impinging what they can do—that the methodology elaborated in this book seeks to examine. Von Uexküll’s concept of umwelt is useful when considering the components of postcolonial communities and environments in an ethological (if not completely nonanthropocentric) manner (Uexküll 1992). That is, the environment, surroundings and the outer world as variously perceived by organisms within it. Deleuze and Guattari utilize the term “haeccity”—where the social context, material conditions, and relations of force present in a society are “concrete individuations that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and subjects” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 288)—to conceptualize a
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body-in-its-environment. Rosi Braidotti alternately posits this as the “natureculture continuum in the very embodied structure of the extended self” (Braidotti 2013, 65). Replete with all these connotations, it is via a reimagined concept of health as what a body can do that the methodology I am attempting to formulate will be elaborated over the course of this book. Though health as concept and practice will be modifed as Deleuze and Guattari’s work is brought into the discussion (chapter 2), let us begin with the standard defnition. The World Health Organization (WHO) defnes health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infrmity” (Organization 1946, 2). Health, then, is situated at the confuence of the material, the biological, the political, the economic, and the socio-cultural. Yet, despite being the indicator par excellence of whether a person is thriving, maintaining, or diminishing, to date health—long a signifcant indicator for development and humanitarian professionals—has been at best an ancillary consideration among many postcolonial theoreticians and literary critics. The notable exception is, of course, Frantz Fanon, whose materialist, socio-literary diagnoses of the effects of racism’s inferiority complex on the mental and physical health of colonized peoples, as well as the effects of the various psychopathologies connected to colonialism, not only deals directly with health but exemplifes the type of symptomatological approach I am elaborating in this work. As rigorous, inventive, and indeed foundational as much of the aforementioned postcolonial theorists’s engagements with the postcolonial world have been, the focus of much of their work has certainly been cultural, epistemological, and ontological. Yet, if health were to be reconceptualized as what a body can do—where health is not only biological or psychological, but comprised of a confuence of individual, community, environment, agency, and capabilities—this would engender more materialist-oriented analyses of the relations of force that either increase or decreases a person’s capability to realize her or his maximum affective capacities. Indeed, defned so, I would hold that most postcolonial theorists are actually investigating aspects of postcolonial health. This can be amplifed by focusing postcolonial investigations—even those partly conducted via a novel—through the lens of a Deleuzian sense of health as what a body can do. This opens analyses of postcolonial texts to more empirically inclined examinations as to how the material conditions and relations of force mediated through a novel affect a person’s capability to realize her or his maximum affective capacities and to live the life she or he values. The results are threefold. First, employing such a symptomatological methodology to read a work of postcolonial literature reveals the particular impingements, illness, or disorder the writer has identifed as negatively affecting the health of a people. By reconceptualizing health bio-affectively as the degree to which a person is capable of realizing her or his maximum
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affective capacities, this methodology plugs Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptions of health, of art as symptomatology, minor literature, and Deleuze’s concept of becoming-democratic directly into the relations and material conditions found within postcolonial societies. This symptomatological methodology groups the various symptoms of ill-health that affict various peoples in the Sudan and Angola to be part of larger syndromes: the Bandarshah Syndrome (the Sudan) and the Bunker Syndrome (Angola) are affect-impinging aspects of their respective colonial pasts that have metamorphosed over the years, become endemic, and persist in the globalized present. Deleuze and Guattari created many important concepts in the elaboration of their “political philosophy” (Deleuze 1995b, 170). Many of these concepts have been extended by their mediators into more comprehensive understandings of macro- and micro-political practices and formations in social felds throughout the world. In that spirit, this book extends aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s literary and political philosophy, with the interlocutorial assistance of the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Amartya Sen, into the feld of postcolonial health. Therefore, this mediation of their work extends the connection between minority peoples and minor literature to the postcolonial milieu. In turn, this reveals the common orientation of Deleuze and Guattari’s microand macro-politics: a healthy society is replete with the social capacity for experimentation and with the potential for new perceptions and affects. The third and what may be the most unconventional result of this symptomatological methodology (at least within the felds of postcolonial and literary theory) is the development of a sevenfold Health and Capabilities Rubric. As will be developed in detail in chapters 2 and 3, this rubric is formed via a selective amalgamation of Amartya Sen’s and Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach to Human Development and Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s concept of becoming-democratic. I have developed the specifcs of this methodology by bringing my very specifc background as an international humanitarian worker to bear on a consideration of the constellation of texts and countries considered in this book. This methodology is subjective and experimental. Yet, hopefully, by disaggregating, tabulating, and visually representing the components of the authors’s diagnoses along the seven categories of the Health and Capabilities Rubric, a certain type of knowledge of the literary worlds of Tayeb Salih’s Sudan and Pepetela’s Angola will obtained. The Health and Capabilities dashboard—a visual representation of an author’s literary-clinical evaluation of the health of their society—aids us in considering the syndromes these authors have captured and rendered discernible in their texts. The metrics by which the key data points of the Health and Capabilities dashboard are determined, tracked, analyzed, and displayed will be discussed in detail in chapter 3 as Pepetela’s diagnosis of how the “Bunker Syndrome” impinges upon Angolan health is developed. Cumulatively, this methodology proposes
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a possible manner with which to bring the felds of postcolonial, literary, and cultural theory, as well as those of philosophy, public health, and international and human development into greater proximity with each other. This introduction makes up chapter 1 of this work. In the second, explicitly theoretical chapter, I will establish the three pillars upon which such a methodology is founded: health, symptomatology, and literature. Chapters 3 and 4 consist of two cases studies. In chapter 3, I will examine six works written over the ffty-year span of the Angolan author’s (Pepetela’s) career. This chapter will show that Pepetela has identifed Angola as suffering from the effects of what he has termed as “savage capitalism” (Pepetela 2013, 374). In identifying particular symptoms, disassociating them from others, in turn juxtaposing them with another, Pepetela has composed the fgure of a new syndrome afficting contemporary Angola—the “Bunker syndrome.” I will show that in his works, which together comprise a comprehensive symptomatology of Angola, Pepetela has captured what the prominent Deleuzian theorist, Anne Sauvagnargues, would describe as the “composite of force relations” (Sauvagnargues 2013, 21) that differentially produces what Angolan bodies can do. In chapter 4, I will consider works by the Sudanese Arab author, Tayeb Salih, in order to trace the multi-generation evolution of the anomie and neopatriarchy he isolates as afficting the Sudanese people. This examination will conclude by showing that in diagnosing Sudan as suffering from a common disorder, the “Bandarshah Syndrome,” Salih foresaw the confagration of the Arab community we are witnessing today. Both authors unequivocally show that both the Bandarshah and the Bunker Syndromes are postcolonial syndromes. I will show that these two radically different symptomatologies identify postcolonial relations in the contemporary, inequitable production of both Angolan and Sudanese Arab peoples’ powers to affect and be affected by the world. Anticipating that few readers will be familiar with either the recent history of these countries or with the writers and works examined here, the analysis in each of these two chapters will be preceded by a brief authorial biography and a synopsis of the works to be examined. This will be accompanied by a succinct historical summary. In the ffth and concluding chapter, I will consider the theoretical and political ground that has been covered, summarize what has been learned, and indicate fruitful paths for future applications of a humanitarian-oriented, postcolonial symptomatological methodology. NOTES 1. With the exception of Tayeb Salih’s work (written in Arabic and translated by Denis Johnson-Davies—chapter 4, or where noted in the bibliographic reference) all translations that appear in this book are my own.
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2. Development broadly refers to anything which affects ontogeny (the origination and development of an organism). Thus, development encompasses biology, economics, public health, and in times of large-scale disasters, humanitarianism. 3. By relations of force I mean the open list of variables expressing a relation of between forces by which material conditions and/or individual or collective agencies act upon the actions of others: provoking, inciting, restricting, prohibiting, making more or less probable, etc. (Patton 2000, 56) 4. Though the disparate felds treated in this work may be unfamiliar or unsettling to some readers, there is some precedent for such interdisciplinarity within the feld of postcolonial studies. Gayatri Spivak writes: “The doctoral study of colonial and postcolonial discourse and the critique of imperialism as a substantive undertaking cannot be contained fully within English [. . .] this study should yoke itself with other disciplines [which] will allow the student to read critically the production of knowledge in the other discipline [. . .] a transnational study of culture” (Spivak 2009, 312). 5. Humanitarian action is typically referred to as the frst or “emergency” or disaster-management or confict-response phase of development. 6. Majuscule “D” “D”evelopment refers to the forms of economic assistance and foreign aid offered by many high-income, developed countries and organizations in the Global North to un/underdeveloped, third-world countries with the (explicit) aim at promoting both democracy and the market economy within those countries. By contrast, miniscule “d” development refers to participatory programs established in consultation with and largely implemented by the affected communities acting in partnership with international organizations. 7. I regularly provide surge support to the International Federation of the Red Cross Red Crescent societies (IFRC) assisting those affected by confict (the Ivory Coast, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Liberia, and refugees in Greece), epidemics and pandemics (Chad), and large-scale natural disasters (Haiti, Mozambique, the Solomon Islands, and the Philippines); previously I worked for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) providing medical assistance to people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Darfur, South Sudan, Angola, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Iraq. Deleuze or Galeano might say this is a way of being “on the Left.” “G comme Gauche.” Deleuze and Parnet 2004. This engagement is perhaps of a type with that of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, whose theoretical work informed and was informed by their respective engagements with the Palestinian cause and educational endeavors in rural India. 8. Such warnings can be found throughout much of Fanon’s work, see (Fanon 2004, 87, 93, 101, 111, 128, 133, 143) and (Fanon 2008, 121). 9. Gayatri Spivak, one of the foundational fgures in postcolonial theory and criticism, structuro-temporally locates the processes of globalization by referring to them as “micro-electronic post-industrial world capitalism” (Spivak 1999, 84). Similarly, postcolonial critical theorist Aijaz Ahmad highlights that the processes of globalization should be seen as the current phase of the capitalist world system “undergoing [. . .] vast global restructuring” (Ahmad 1992, 312). Postcolonial and transnational feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty refers to the “triumphal rise and recolonization of almost the entire globe by capitalism” (Mohanty 2003, 2). 10. A note on terminology: I employ the unhyphenated postcolonial (instead of postcolonial) as I believe it graphically indicates the continuity of colonial relations
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of force into the times we currently live in better than the hyphenated postcolonial. At the risk of eliding distinctions between imperialism and colonialism, due to their signifcant commonalities I use the terms interchangeably throughout this work. When I do shift from one to the other it is an effort to accentuate either the in-country machinations of colonialism or the more comprehensive multicountry fows of imperialism. The term globalization carries with it implications of both colonialism and imperialism. As it has lost largely lost its second world reference, I use the term “third world” infrequently; however, I fnd the term tri-continental to be clunky. I tend to prefer the term global North and global South over listing countries as developed, undeveloped or developing, for its lack of economics tinge, even though all terms indicate the continued primacy of the former colonial countries. Humanitarian assistance has typically referred to short-term life-saving measures supplied in the immediate aftermath of a large-scale disaster. Development specialists have tended to focus on longer-term structural issues; and public health has encompassed maintaining and improving the health of a people both during an emergency and in the long-term, while working with government, UN agencies, I/NGOs, and private organizations. However, in recent years this distinction has increasingly eroded into phases or a (reversible) continuum. Recovery and development issues are being incorporated into emergency programming from the outset; disaster-preparedness, -mitigation, and -management measures commonly form part of development programs; and public health has increasingly spanned the two. Therefore, again at the risk of eliding signifcant differences, I will employ these terms interchangeably throughout this book. When I wish to indicate the entirety of the spectrum I will use all three; however, I will occasionally use each term singly according to which aspect of the health-humanitarian-development continuum I wish to highlight in relation to the issue at hand. 11. Parry has Homi Bhabha specifcally in mind. 12. Cheryl McEwan’s Postcolonialism and Development is an excellent primer, and is one of the few works to consider the two felds. 13. They are Benita Parry, Neil Lazarus, Pablo Mukherjee, Sharae Deckard, Sorcha Gunne, Stephen Shapiro, Nick Lawrence, and Graeme Macdonald. 14. I am thinking of such works as The Middle Passage, Among the Believers, An Area of Darkness, and India: A Wounded Civilization, which certainly qualify as overt symptomatologies of the postcolonial feld. 15. Today the US threatens to punish the East African countries that have raised import tariffs on used garments (which are being dumped in their countries in large quantities) in order to protect nascent local industries by threatening to remove four of the six countries included in a preferential trade deal (Freytas-Tamura 2017). 16. See Frank 1996; Amin 2014; Frank 1998; Galeano 1997; Chang 2006; Sachs 2005; Wallerstein 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011d; Collier 2007; Pignare and Stengers 2011; Hardt and Negri 2001; Stiglitz 2003; Amin 1976. 17. Though perhaps not colonized in the traditional way, those living in the country that came to be known as Liberia were very much subjugated and colonized by the freed slaves, the Americo-Liberians, in the many decades that followed their arrival upon Liberian shores. As a humanitarian aid worker, I have deployed to seven of the nine failing states.
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18. This is controlling for countries that were former members of the USSR. Out of the most precarious sixty-six states, Afghanistan, Nepal, Iran, and Bhutan are the only countries that have never been colonized. This index has subsequently been renamed the Index of Fragile States. 19. The Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite index in which life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators are used to rank countries in terms of whether its people are able “to be” and “do” what they value. 20. As measured by control over the global fnancial and monetary system, the media, weapons of mass destruction, technological development, natural resources (Amin 2014). 21. Spivak, who holds that that “sexual difference unevenly abstracted into gender/gendering [i]s the chief semiotic instrument of negotiation” within culture, is an example of a critic who combines multiple approaches (Spivak 2013, 123). 22. The humanitarian imperative extends the principle of humanity (to prevent and alleviate human suffering wherever it may be found) to include the right to provide and receive assistance. 23. I am thinking in particular of (Shohat 1992) and (Dirlik 1994). 24. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffths, and Helen Tiffen give concise explanation of the differences between “fliation” and “affliation.” Moreover, they link “affliation” explicitly with Said’s practice of “contrapuntal reading” (Ashcroft et al. 2007, 96–97). Along those same lines, the chronological table in which “date” and “political/historical event” are juxtaposed in line with the “literary and other writings” that appeared in the same year, with which the Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies begins, indicates that such a view of the connectedness between literature and politics and history is now commonplace in the feld of postcolonial literary studies (Lazaraus 2004). 25. However, Spivak stipulates that “we cannot ‘learn about’ the subaltern only by reading literary texts, or, mutatis mutandis, sociohistorical documents” (Spivak 1999, 142). 26. For the source document from which Dr. Farmer’s public health investigations into the pathologies of power originated, see (Ahmad 1981). 27. The principles of impartiality; humanity; independence; neutrality; the commitment to do no harm; to involve those who would beneft from possible programs in all aspects of the program; to respect a community’s structure, culture and custom and the dignity of all involved; to build on local capacities and in a way that not only meets immediate reduces future vulnerabilities; and to be held accountable both to those who are assisted and to those from whom resources are accepted (IFRC and ICRC 1995; Casanova 2004). 28. Though space does not permit me to develop this here more fully, J.M. Coetzee’s works might provide such an example. It could be argued that Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Foe function in the way Hamilton describes; whereas aspects of Disgrace, Age of Iron, and Life and Times of Michael K function more along the lines described by Williams. 29. Given Casanova’s aesthetic preferences, it is no wonder that she opposes Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Kafka and their concept of minor literature:
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“Deleuze and Guattari in reading Kafka’s text, diminish the specifcally literary character of literature by applying to it—particularly in connection with the highly ambiguous notion of ‘minor literature’—a crude and anachronistic interpretation that deforms his meaning.” Casanova goes on to state that their interpretation of Kafka “is further proof that anachronism is a form of literary ethnocentrism used by the center to apply their own aesthetic and political categories to texts” (Casanova 2004) (pp 203, 204). Casanova’s aesthetic preference for the “pure literariness” of international modernism free from political and national resonances does not allow for a theory of literature that focuses on the political and collective nature of a literary work and which has no interest in evaluating the literariness of a work, whether it is from an emerging or emerged nation. I have found Casanova’s work useful in situating the postcolonial writers I address in length in chapters 3 and 4. However, as I have discussed elsewhere (pp 65–66), the faws in her aesthetic antithesis of national realism versus international modernism render her two-part aesthetic structure-cum-geo-temporal timeline problematic. Moreover, as I fnd Casanova’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of minor literature and their treatment of Kafka to be unconvincing, it does not detract diminish my argument that they enable me to elaborate a symptomatological methodology by which a postcolonial author’s diagnosis can be discerned. 30. Any resonance this phrase has with the reading practice Timothy Bewes outlines in his essay “Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Criticism,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (21) 3 2010: 2–33, is coincidental. Bewes develops the practice of “reading with the grain” to examine the approach of “symptomatic reading” that Althusser developed in reading Marx in order to propose a more “generous” reading practice specifc to a world in which the novel form has emerged alongside dominant forms of cultural and literary engagement. Reading so, Bewes argues, is faithful to the spirit of Benjamin who enjoined us to “brush history against the grain,” and is “always, in part, a reading of ourselves reading.” The symptomatological methodology developed in this book is similarly positioned vis-à-vis the “counterintuitive” close reading method of “reading against the grain,” which, as Bewes notes, has become almost an axiom in literary studies over the past half century. However, this book’s methodology is overtly connected to the “distant reading” practices of Franco Moretti and his colleagues at the Stanford Literary Lab (see pp 99, 100). The utilization of the phrase “reading with rather than against the grain” is intended to indicate the historical-political nature of the techniques of quantitative formalism used to establish the details of a postcolonial author’s diagnosis. As such, in the context of this thesis, the phrase is unconnected to the reading practice developed by Bewes. 31. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p 371; An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, p 188. 32. For more on the deontological and consequentialist aspects of humanitarian principles, see Francois Pictet’s commentary on the Principles of the Red Cross: http: //www.ifrc.org/PageFiles/40669/Pictet%20Commentary.pdf; or my article on the practical utilization of these principles (Johnston 2015). 33. Unlike Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik, Gayatri Spivak (and other postcolonial theorists), this methodology does not consider the postcolonial critical feld itself or
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Chapter 1
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postcolonialism in the Academy as its feld of inquiry. Nor, though I will use Pepetela’s and Salih’s texts as a means to consider the Angolan and Sudanese states, does this symptomatological methodology consider nationalism, the nation, or the nation-state, as such. Neither, despite its sympathies and areas of consonance with socialism and Marxism, will either be considered directly. Similarly, though not inconsiderate of either the environment or of other species with whom we humans share the planet, or unaware of the negative impact on both that humankind’s industrial activity has had, this humanitarian-oriented postcolonial symptomatological methodology’s principal solidarity is with other humans. Accordingly, this methodology could be rightly charged with anthropocentrism (see Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman), as well as with neglecting environmental concerns and those of other species (see Hellen Tiffn’s and Graham Huggan’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment). Neither does this work incorporate recent work by postcolonial theorists on disabilities (see Claire Barker’s Postcolonial Fiction and Disability), paradise discourse (see Sharae Deckard’s Paradise Discourse, Imperialism and Globalization), the postcolonial exotic (see Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins), or the Caribbean (see Michael Niblett’s The Caribbean Novel since 1945, and the book he coedited, The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics) to any signifcant degree. Though sharing not only a common feld but a similar outlook on the world, literature, and humankind with these writers, I am unable to incorporate these veins of contemporary postcolonial theory and criticism within the methodology being elaborated here. Many of these currents (name-checked here in endnotes), as deep and valuable as they are, run parallel to rather than intersecting with this methodology’s humanitarian-oriented symptomatological concerns. I have engaged at length only with those whose concepts are either immediately useful to my symptomatological concerns or against which I can more clearly defne my project. Despite Homi K. Bhabha’s status in the feld of postcolonial studies, his work appears only occasionally throughout this book. I recognize the value of the praxes of hybridity, ambivalence, liminality, and mimicry. However, the postcolonial concerns of a humanitarian-oriented, materialist-focused, symptomatological methodology which are directly concerned with social and political problems and which utilizes literature principally for its representational/mediational qualities only rarely intersect with Bhabha’s post-structuralist, discourse-oriented psychological investigations.
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Chapter 2
Elaborating a Postcolonial Symptomatology
The writer [is] a physician of himself and of the world. The world is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. Literature then appears as an enterprise in health.
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—Gilles Deleuze (1997, 3)
For a great portion of the three decades preceding the 1993 publication of Critique et Clinique,1 Deleuze had long considered health, illness, and what separates a body from what it can do.2 Deleuze initiated this line of inquiry in the examination of nihilism, active and reactive forces, and ressentiment3 in Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962).4 Deleuze frst developed the concept of symptomatology (whereby an author, as clinician of society, “dissociates symptoms that were previously grouped together, and links up others that were dissociated [thus] build[ing] up a profoundly original clinical picture”) in 1967’s Le Froid et le Cruel (Deleuze 1991, 14–16).5 Deleuze further developed the concept of symptomatology in 1969’s Logique du sens (Deleuze 1990, 237)6 and mentioned the practice again in 1990’s collection of interviews, Pourparlers (Deleuze 1995b, 142).7 The schizo-analytical consideration of psychoanalysis and capitalism’s normatively impinging effects on human subjectivity, developed with Felix Guattari in the two volume: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, L’Anti-Oedipe (1972)8 and Mille Plateaux (1980)9 ultimately has a therapeutic aim, which is to counteract the paralyzing neuroses endemic to capitalist society (Tynan 2012, 20). Certainly, the thread of Deleuze’s nosological considerations of bodies and the “contingencies that befall a body, impinging on it from the outside [and which act and in turn are acted upon by a body’s] internal conditions of possibility” (Grosz 1994, 142), runs throughout the span of his philosophical investigations. 39
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This book’s principal concern is the elaboration of a postcolonial symptomatological methodology. Deleuze’s concept of symptomatology provides a method of reading literature politically and diagnostically; however, it lacks the socioeconomic factors of analysis necessary to specifcally evaluate postcolonial well-being or to diagnose specifcally postcolonial syndromes. To diagnose the syndromes that affect the health of a postcolonial society and the people who live within and form it via its literature, its novels must be read not only symptomatically and politically but also socioeconomically. This book aims to construct such a social-literary methodology based on philosophical and socioeconomic indicators. This involves two steps: frst, as introduced in chapter 1, it will be necessary to conceive of health differently from how it is commonly conceived by public health offcials; second, it requires supplementing the practice of symptomatology as it is currently confgured with postcolonial-sensitive points of attachment. The capabilities model of human development provides such points of attachment. To do so, this chapter consists of three sections: the frst section will examine the conceptualization of health that Deleuze elaborated via a theory of literature. In the second section, I will examine the work that has been done at the confuence of Deleuze, health, and postcolonial criticism. This section will also situate my work in relation to that of those working in the same feld. The third and fnal section will supplement the Deleuzian symptomatological praxis with key components from the capabilities approach to human development.
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2.1 DELEUZE, LITERATURE, AND HEALTH Despite the utilization of many of the concepts within Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical panoply within a variety of postcolonial investigations, the potential for a Deleuzian conceptualization of health to be an incisive tool in postcolonial literary theory remains largely untapped. That being said, the extant body of work that considers aspects of health from a Deleuzian perspective is signifcant. As I shall show below, this work builds upon Deleuzian conceptualizations of health and symptomatology which have been developed by prominent philosophers, public health researchers, sociologists, and literary theorists.10 For Deleuze, there is a fundamental connection between literature and health. This connection can be found in his early essays on Masoch and Proust (of which he wrote that a work of literature can be “a symptomatology of different worlds” (Deleuze 1995b, 142–143)). It is there in the later examination of Lewis Carroll in The Logic of Sense and in Deleuze and Guattari’s work on Kafka (Deleuze often referred to Kafka’s work as a diagnosis of “all
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the diabolical powers around us”). It is there in the chapter in Dialogues with Claire Parnet on “the superiority of Anglo-American literature” (Deleuze and Parnet 2002), as well as in the majority of essays included in Deleuze’s collection: Essays Critical and Clinical (1995). Ian Buchanan and John Marks point out in their introductory essay to Deleuze and Literature that for Deleuze, literature was a way to explore the event by which the self is dissolved. This dissolution of self, or experimentation and assembling with aspects of the world and others in novel manners—what Deleuze and Guattari term deterritorialization—is involved in the processes of becomingother:11 “Perhaps deterritorialization can best be understood as a movement producing change. In so far as it operates as a line of fight, deterritorialization indicates the creative potential of an assemblage. So, to deterritorialize is to free up the fxed relations that contain a body all the while exposing it to new organisations” (Parr 2010, 69). As such, these metamorphoses and the conditions which propitiate them are indicative of both a person’s and a society’s health. Marks and Buchanan write that for Deleuze, great art creates and identifes “affects” and “packets of sensations”; works of art isolate “collective,” “political,” “public,” and “pre-individual singularities” (Buchanan and Marks 2000, 1–11). These are all part of the changeable composite that interacts and connects with the multiple material forces that fow through society and culture and which together assemble with the human body to form human subjectivity. Deleuze believed art was able to capture or detect invisible forces that are not normally perceptible (Deleuze 2004, 48–51). Deleuze writes that one of the tasks of an artist is “to render visible forces that are not themselves visible” (Deleuze 2004, 48). That is, an artist can detect and capture the invisible forces that affect people and society and depict them in her art. The artist compresses the complicated array of material forces, be they historic, economic, cultural, or social, into over-determined images. Once read, they speak to those forces and the result of their interplay through the span of time, while simultaneously infusing the reader or viewer with their corresponding pathos. Reading a symptomatological work of art affliatively enables one to match effect with causal condition and so addresses a weakness Ian Buchanan identifes in Deleuze’s “clinical” project (Buchanan 2012, 111). This practice extends the felds of Deleuzian and literary theory into empirical investigations of postcolonial bodies, while indicating the diagnostic utility of literature for philosophers, literary critics, and public health and development specialists. Picasso’s Guernica was a response to the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. Camus’s La Peste was an existential response to living with the Nazi threat. Nadine Gordimer’s The Late Bourgeois World12 and Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country depicted life in apartheid South Africa. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace presents race relations in post-apartheid South Africa.
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Deleuze writes that Francis Bacon “paint[ed] the visible horror less and less, since the scream [portrayed on canvas] captures or detects an invisible force” (Deleuze 2004, 58). Like Bacon’s fgures, the novel pertains to the ordinary individual of the anybodies depicted in them. It depicts the forces, fows, and relationships that shape, enable, and constrain the bodies, days, and destinies of regular people and the greater society in which they are imbricated. By capturing the effect of invisible forces on “ordinary bodies in ordinary positions of constraint and discomfort” (Deleuze 2004, xxix), the writer renders those material relations of force visible. This aspect of art is as diagnostic as it is political. Indeed, Deleuze contended that Bacon’s paintings showed the “violence of Ireland, the violence of Nazism, the violence of war” that had passed through the painter (Deleuze 2004, 34). Despite his studies of painting and cinema, Deleuze privileged the novel for its diagnostic capacities. He wrote: “It seems [. . .] that an evaluation of symptoms might be achieved only through a novel” (Deleuze 1990, 237). There are three components to Deleuze’s conceptualization of health: a Great Health (Deleuze 1983, 1990, 173); symptomatology (Deleuze 1991, 14, 1990, 237, 1983, 3); and literature as health (Deleuze 1997, 1–6). Each can be found in Deleuze’s critical and clinical use of literature. Gregg Lambert summarizes the latter two succinctly: First, certain writers have invented concrete semiotic practices that may prove more effective than psychoanalytic discourse in diagnosing the constellation of mute forces that always accompany life and threaten it from within. Second, as a result of this diagnostic and critical function, certain works of modern literature can be understood to produce a kind of “symptomatology” that may prove to be more effective than political critique in discerning the signs that correspond to the new arrangements of “language, labour, and life” [. . .]; third, perhaps most importantly, literature offers a manner of diagramming the potential forms of resistance, or “lines of fight,” which may be virtual to these new arrangements. (Lambert 1998, 1)
Deleuze’s conception of a Great Health upends the conventional, biologically oriented view of health by depicting good health as sickness and sickness as a type of health. Aiden Tynan writes in Deleuze’s Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms that for Deleuze sickness is a type of health “we are not healthy enough to embody while health is always a kind of morbid regime of normality repressing the emergence of new forms of health” (Tynan 2012, 10). For Deleuze and Guattari, the Great Health that a writer-physician (à la Nietzsche) possesses, like some sort of inverted “affective athleticism,” consists of a robust vitality combined with a fragile
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health (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 173). For instance, in refecting back on what it took to write The Famished Road,13 Ben Okri wrote that it “required [. . .] a kind of unknown spiritual health” (Okri 2016, ix). So composed, a writer is consequently buffeted by affects and experiences “too big” and “too strong” for him or her. His or her delicateness/illness-cum-health allows the “mobility” to realize becomings, passages of the impersonal life previously imprisoned by and within a person, which are inaccessible to one blocked by virtue of possessing a stronger health. So confgured, Deleuze sees illness as potentially enabling and liberating. For Deleuze, in some cases, exhaustion (Deleuze 1995a) or ill-health can serve to liberate the life that the normalizing and organizing forces, which have come to compose “normal” good health, block and limit. Deleuze holds that as a symptomatologist, a writer diagnoses the health of the society to which he or she belongs. Deleuze’s writer-“clinician” looks at the world as a “set of symptoms whose illness merges with man” and diagnoses the “chances of health” he or she sees there (Deleuze 1997, 3). The novelist-cum-“clinician of civilization,” cognizant of a societal malaise, recognizes, evaluates, and in effect organizes a table of particular, although disparate, symptoms afficting a society (Deleuze 1990, 237). In doing so, he or she forms a new syndrome—much as was the case in the eponymously named Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Hodgkin’s, and Huntington’s diseases. Deleuze writes:
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Authors, if they are great, are [. . .] like doctors [. . .]. We mean that they are themselves astonishing diagnosticians or symptomatologists. There is always a great deal of art involved in the grouping of symptoms, in the organization of a table where a particular symptom is dissociated from another, juxtaposed to a third, and forms the new fgure of a disorder or illness. Clinicians who are able to renew a symptomatological table produce a work of art; conversely, artists are [. . .] clinicians of civilization. (Deleuze 1990, 237)
Eugene Holland writes that Deleuze’s view was that “literature often diagnoses syndromes” for which a feld dedicated to improving the health of a population “ascertains the causes and proposes appropriate treatments” (Holland 2000, 251). A Deleuzian reading of literature transforms “conventional” approaches to reading literature in two important ways: frst, that literature is diagnostic, rather than expressive; and second, that the syndromes it diagnoses are social rather than individual ills (Holland 2000, 252). Third, as developed by Gregg Lambert (1998, 9), Réda Bensmaïa (2003, 22), and Ronald Bogue in Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History (2010), Deleuze holds that the fabulatory aspect of literature (Deleuze 1997, 4) creates health when it invokes the ceaselessly stirring, impersonal,
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nonorganic vitality that is life. The writer as fabulator, by writing “for the beneft” of a “people yet to come,” assists in the “birth of a new man.” The Deleuzian concept of fabulation has two sides: “creation and prognosis” (Lambert 1998, 10). A novel can bear witness to and diagnose the conditions that entropically imprison the vital organismic and nonorganic life germinal to each individual (Pearson 1999, 50). Frantz Fanon established the practice of using literature as a socio-literary diagnostic tool for examining the psychopathological aspects of the colonized world (Fanon 2008, 46) over ffty years ago.14 Moreover, by inventing and invoking new ways of being in the world, literature can resist the present and that in it which binds, constrains, blocks, diminishes, and set this vital, germinal life free. The key question literature helps us formulate (regardless of whether we live in the Global South or the Global North) is: “Do we live? Or are we merely existing within the semblance of a life?” (Pearson 1999, 104). For Deleuze, “Health as literature, as writing” (Deleuze 1997, 4) consists in fabulation, the ultimate aim of which is “to set free, in the delirium, this creation of a health or this invention of a people, that is the possibility of life” (Deleuze 1997, 4). Though the Spinozist refrain “we do not yet know what a body can do” echoes throughout much of Deleuze’s work, Deleuze never referred to health qua health in those specifc terms. There is precedent for such a move, however, and it can be found at the points where aspects of Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s philosophy confuence with and infuence Deleuze’s philosophy. Bodies are kinetic and dynamic. They have the capacity to affect and be affected: bodies have a high degree of plasticity. All traits and behaviors of an organism, whether “adaptive or temporary, permanent or temporary,” are responsive, fexible, and capable of change or variation in form, state, movement, or rate of activity in different environmental circumstances (West-Eberhard 2003, 32, 33). Bodies are defned by the affects of which they are capable in the ethological manner developed by Jacob von Euxküll. The environments in which bodies live are uncertain felds of forces, some of which can separate a body from what it can do, while others can affrm and enhance a body’s power of acting and its perseverance in being. No one knows in advance what affects a body is capable of, what a body can do. Bodies are subject to considerable variation: a body’s force of existing and power of acting can be increased via composition with power-enhancing relations or it can become diminished when it enters into a relationship or becomes composed with something that brings about a diminution in its affective capacity. Affects are these intensities, these passages to powerenhanced or power-diminished states. The Spinozan concepts of joy and sadness and the Nietzschean concepts of active and reactive forces underpin an evaluative sense of health as an ethics, which, in turn, implies a sense of justice. Freedom is related to a body’s degree of power, in that a person is free
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to the extent to which she or he comes into possession of her or his power of action. Experimentation, movement, and becomings exhibit a body’s degree of freedom and affrm the creative and unknown possibilities of life (Deleuze 1983, 40).15 Health, conceived not only as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being but as what a body can do, is a body’s capability to realize its potentia agendi, or power of acting, and vis existendi, or force of existing (Deleuze 1988b, 96). Health is the degree to which one can realize one’s maximum affective capacities. Good health is when a body, by composing with or entering into a relationship with another body or force, can increase its power of acting. Poor health is when a body’s force of existing is diminished through decomposition with a body or opposing force that limits, blocks, or constrains what it can do. Rather than thinking of ourselves and the other human beings on this planet as subjects endowed or born with a particular static, closed identity, Deleuze and Guattari posit that each human body is open, combinatory, and in relation with the world and other people, intensities and relations of force within it. Rather than thinking of individuals as subjects with a fxed identity, Deleuze and Guattari would speak of processes of ongoing individuation in which bodies achieve various states of metastable equilibrium. Incorporating a Spinozo-Deleuzian conceptualization of affects and percepts into reconceptualizing what health and a healthy society is, means that a healthy society is one that enables its citizens’s bodies’s capacities for experimentation and ensures the potential for new percepts and affects. This move enables one to shift Deleuze and Guattari’s work from considering the “regimes of opinion” and “tyrannies of the majority” (à la Rorty and J. S. Mill) such as are present now in liberal democratic societies, to considering how such good health is suppressed by other regimes and societies. The concept of structural violence, which has been employed by thinkers as diverse as the German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, Latin American liberation theologians, Leonardo Boff and Gustavo Gutiérrez, as well as the prominent medical anthropologist, Paul Farmer (Farmer 2005; Farmer et al. 2006), envisions health on just such a continuum (Borradori 2003, 35). Habermas, Boff, Gutiérrez, and Farmer use this term to describe the “unconscionable social inequalities, degrading discrimination, pauperization, and marginalization” prevalent not only in Latin American countries in the 1960s and 1970s and Haiti at the turn of the twenty-frst century, but in contemporary peaceful, “well-to-do” Western societies. This term captures the particular relations of force that impinged upon what El Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Nicaraguan bodies could do. It captures the relations of force that constrain what many European and North American bodies can do. Moreover, the term structural violence describes these different societies as having similar functions: each
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functions as a particular type of ill-health assemblage. The effects of structural violence are manifested in the capacity of all those who cannot live the lives they value: structural violence impinges upon their health and capabilities. The utilization of the term “structural violence” makes the relations that inequitably modulate the lives, health, and capabilities of many throughout the world perceptible to those deleteriously affected by them. It also implicates those who beneft from the realization of these ill-health assemblages. As an assemblage, structural violence is a purposeful realization of a “distinctive plan,” it executes a “map of destiny” according to a particular “diagram” (Foucault 1995, 205) that benefts someone or something outside of it (Deleuze 1988a, 30–36). By looking at the aspects of societies identifed by postcolonial writers specifcally as “ill-health assemblages,” we can better see the effects of the “impingements” which have become “infolded” (Massumi 1995, 91) into the bodies they represent. These infolded impingements have then determined a tendency within those bodies themselves. As a body is “never separable from its relations with the world” (Deleuze 1988b, 125), to examine the health of a people is to make “an empirical study of bodies [and the environment in which they live] in order to know their relations, and how they are combined” (Deleuze 1992, 212). The transformable nature of identity is especially visible in recently formed postcolonial nations. With the dissolution of East Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, Bangladeshi’s adjusted from the vision of joining other Muslims of South Asia to create the homeland of Pakistan in accordance with an Islamic sense of order, to being animated by more a regional identifcation in a new society ordered in accordance with Western principles. Bangladeshi’s image of themselves shifted from being Muslims frst and Bengalis next to that of being Bengalis frst and Muslims next. This remarkable shift from being Bengali Muslims to identifying themselves as Muslim Bengalis occurred in just twenty-fve years (Schendel 2009, 183). Simone Bignall writes that in experiencing differences in kind, “a body changes qualitatively from one kind of assemblage to another when its constitutive elements shift and combine in alternative ways” (Bignall 2010, 104, 110). (Deleuze and Guattari conceive of such shifting arrangements as assemblages, which can be thought of as ongoing processes of working or musical arrangements composed of “people, materials and actions” organized according to a “distinctive plan” (Buchanan 2015, 383, 385)). Christoph Brunner and Jonas Fritsch write that the body is an “open-ended construct of transductive16 (as well as affective and expressive) forces.” Thus, each person’s individuation—his or her intrinsic modalities of being—is not only in a state of continuous change, but it relies on a “collective unfolding with its material and immaterial environments” (Brunner and Fritsch 2011, 122). Keith Ansell Pearson explains that
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this is because [an individual] exists as a certain kind of unity, namely a “transductive” one that is capable of passing out of phase with itself, perpetually breaking its own bounds in relation to its centre. Individuation is not a synthesis requiring a return to unity, but rather the process in which being passes out of step with itself. This is to think invention as involving simply neither induction nor deduction but always only transduction. (Pearson 1999, 91)
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Ian Buchanan stresses that to properly evaluate health, the body must be investigated within the social, political, cultural, and economic arrangements of which it is a part and into which it is plugged. Buchanan writes that “health is not the body itself but [it is] the nature of the assemblage that is healthy.” Buchanan defnes health as the “happy union of a capacity to form new relations and the new relations themselves, which in their turn permit the body to go on and form other new relations” (Buchanan 1997, 82). Buchanan indicates the rubric or “a priori code” by which the health of a body in society, by virtue of being an “a posteriori product of newly connected capacities,” can be measured and evaluated is actually Deleuze and Guattari’s ethics. He writes: “A healthy body [. . .] would [. . .] have numerous affects and an equivalent number of relations.” Thus, Buchanan contends that a society could be considered healthy and evaluated to the extent to which it “ensure[s] an open future [by] promot[ing] the formation of new compounds.” On the other hand, societies whose “relations [. . .] lead to the decomposition of old compounds and are not accompanied by the elaboration of new ones [would be] considered unhealthy” (Buchanan 1997, 75, 82). Though she employs the vocabulary of agency rather than health, Simone Bignall concurs: An individual’s capacities [. . .] are an expression of the forms of sociability that constitute and defne individuality. Subjective capacity may therefore be enhanced when the embedding societies strive to maximize opportunities for established truths to be contested and transformed. A society that encourages the becoming of its established ways of being is a society that facilitates the development [. . .] of its subjects. Conversely, a society that stultifes critique and resists challenges to its existing way of life limits the capacities of its citizens to exercise their subjective agency of social transformation. (Bignall 2010, 189)
Where, as Ronald Bogue points out, affects are becomings-other (precisely, “non-human becomings of man” (Bogue 2010a, 16)), health then is a process of transformation and metamorphosis. Health is a mutually implicative process of becoming, not an outcome. As such, health depends on interiorizing relations which are to some extent exterior to the body. These can be with food, the sun, the wind, rain, landscapes, with ideas, elements, and other
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bodies and relations of force—with “his or her birthplace. His or her land. His or her city, or Umwelt” (Bensmaïa 2003, 34). A healthy becoming will be an active, felicitous, unforeseen, creative augmentation of what a body can do. Health, then, is the extent to which a person can maximize his or her affective capacities; whereas illness “is not a process, but a stoppage of the process”—a fxing of the body in its local form. Poor health is a blockage in or diminution of a body’s affective capabilities (Deleuze 1997, 3). This amounts to another Deleuzian conceptualization of health. Conceptualizing health as what a body can do, expressing a relationship in which both the body and the society in which it is embedded and embodied are mutually implicated, is based on a conceptualization of the body as open to the world it inhabits. It is an ethological defnition: as the “capacity for being affected,” manifested as a “power of acting” and a “power of being acted upon,” (Deleuze 1988b, 27). Such a defnition of health modulates the idea of a biologically predetermined human form by emphasizing the varying intensities that fow through and are created as a person enters into different relations and compositions with the world. Moreover, it brings the body’s capacities and intensities as it relates with the world to the fore. Defning a human ethologically, by what affects she is capable of, of her capacities for affecting and being affected, stresses, as Deleuze notes, that a human, like any other animal, is “never separable from its relations with the world” (Deleuze 1988b, 125).
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2.2 DELEUZE, HEALTH, AND POSTCOLONIAL LITERARY CRITICISM There is no doubt that Deleuze’s utility in thinking (with) the postcolonial is widely recognized within the feld of postcolonial theory and criticism. This is unsurprising, given that from early in their partnership Deleuze and Guattari explicitly named the structures that “corner,” “cut,” “reduce,” “entrap,” and “arrange [human subjectivity] in advance,” and the institutions that “pre-form” and “cod[e] the uncodable [. . .] codif[y] what eludes the codes” as colonial (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 260, 265, 173). They write that the forms of “social sovereignty” that “subjugate” and “effective[ly] reduc[e] the forces of desire”—what Mark Seem calls the “internalization of man by man”—are “always colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony, and we shall see that even here at home . . . it is our intimate colonial education” (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 265, 170, 171, Seem 2009, xx). Initial reluctance to utilize Deleuze and Guattari’s work to engage with postcolonial issues and theory (caused in no small part by Spivak’s stinging critique of Deleuze and Foucault in her seminal essay, Can the Subaltern
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Speak) has largely been overcome in the intervening thirty years.17 Indeed, Gayatri Spivak has recently revisited (and signifcantly revised) her celebrated essay and substantively engages with various aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts in her later work.18 Paul Patton’s analysis of the landmark 1992 Mabo v Queensland (2) decision by the High Court of Australia stands as one of the most important attempts to analyze the issues of colonization and Aboriginal land rights from a specifcally Deleuzian perspective (Patton 2000, 126–128). Robert Young’s (1995, 2001, 2004)19 and Peter Hallward’s (2001, 2006, 2007) work,20 along with Simone Bignall’s (2010), and Réda Bensmaïa’s (2017, 2003) engagements with Deleuze and Guattari’s work attest to the widespread infuence of Deleuze and Guattari’s work throughout the postcolonial feld. As do the twenty-four essays included in the works edited by Simone Bignall and Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Postcolonial (2010), and Lorna Burns and Birgit Kaiser, Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze (2012). This has served consequently to largely reverse the previous position held by many (principally Marxist-oriented critics) in the postcolonial feld that
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rather than enabling the authentic expression of the subjective agency of formerly colonised peoples, [Deleuze’s] concepts are perceived to contribute to the demolition of consistent expressions of selfhood and structures of common identifcation—including human rights—widely understood as necessary platforms for co-ordinating strategies of resistance. (Bignall and Patton 2010, 2)
Yet, if judged purely on the quantity of work being done at the confuence of Deleuze, health and postcolonial literary criticism, this aspect of the feld of postcolonial literary studies might be considered to be yet in its nascence. Grant Hamilton briefy considers the a-personal aspect of health in his work on Deleuze, Coetzee, and the colonized subject (Hamilton 2011, 26). Kathrin Thiele and Rick Dolphijn think through the concepts of “elemental Health” and a “Great Health” in their Deleuzian-oriented analyses of Michel Tournier’s Friday (Thiele 2012, 69; Dolphijn 2012, 208–210). Gregg Lambert uses examples from Fanon’s work to illustrate Deleuze’s concept of fabulation in his essay On the Uses and Abuses of Literature for Life: Gilles Deleuze and the Literary Clinic (1998).21 However, it is Lorna Burns’s monograph, Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze (2012), in particular the fnal chapter entitled “Postcolonial Literature as Health,” that attests to the maturation of work being done at the confuence of Deleuze, health, and postcolonial literary criticism. Lorna Burns outlines two tasks for the postcolonial feld, both of which are related to health. The political task for postcolonial literatures is “creative.” Burns writes: the “question of how newness enters this world is a measure of
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[postcolonial] health.” The “philosophical” task of postcolonial criticism is to “survey [the worlds created by postcolonial writers] and the new symptomatologies they establish and in turn to evaluate the ways in which they might connect with our own, actual world” (Burns 2012, 188). Burns emphasizes “the productive forces” of postcolonial literature—its capacity to generate unforeseeable futures. Her work underscores postcolonial Caribbean literature’s role in “providing the conditions for becomings and newness” (Burns 2012, 5, 7, 12). Highlighting the “parallel evolution of thought” common to Deleuze’s conceptualization of literature as health and contemporary postcolonial Caribbean writing, Burns’s work accentuates the newness, creativity, and creative experimentation and the essential quality of immanence found in the works of Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Édouard Glissant, Robert Antoni, and Nalo Hopkinson. Burns highlights that the new, unpredictable futures found in their works correspond with Deleuze’s conceptualization of literature as health (Burns 2012, 28–29, 67, 69). Additionally, holding that the “task for the postcolonial writer is to uncover the lines of fight and deterritorialization that break the status quo,” Burns holds that Walcott, Harris, Glissant, Antoni, and Hopkinson “challenge majoritarian identities through a process of counteractualization22 ‘that can dissolve’ forms and initiate new lines of becoming” (Burns 2012, 92, 102). Burns writes that “creation, becoming and newness [and] the production of the new must be understood as a symptom of the predominance of active forces, as health” (Burns 2012, 166). Positing literature as health, newness in literature as health, and newness and creativity as health, as Burns does, all have established precedent in Deleuze’s work.23 Deleuze and Guattari consider how a person can free him or herself (albeit never completely) from the formative and limiting relations of force and institutions (such as the state, the family, etc. that stratify, “organ”ize, and territorialize bodies) in a process directed toward a course of continual becoming. Thus, even if a person cannot break away entirely (or at all) from the system from which she or he desires to escape, given that a body is open and combinatorial, were the feld of forces in which it is imbricated to change, it would be capable of becoming-other and coming to rest at other states of being. One can never know what a body can do once and for all. As Burns’s work makes clear, experimental becomings “fabulated” in fction or flm but which nevertheless pertain to specifc historical and political contexts that show the human to be neither fxed in form nor determined in function but open to an affective becoming with human, nonhuman, and/ or extra-human assemblages, necessarily involve the creation of the new (Pearson 1999, 195, 221, 202). The creation of the new indicates good health. Similarly, North American philosopher Richard Rorty felt that literature served a role in creating a healthy society by “provid[ing] examples of the
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kind of courageous self-transformation of which we hope democratic societies will become increasingly capable—transformation which is consciously willed” (Rorty 1998, 122). An author, then, in a sense having become a “relay for collective forces,” contributes to the “propagation of new forms of collective life through the invention of new modes of subjectivity” (Tynan 2012, 154). This work’s symptomatological methodology deploys a similar, though compound conceptualization of health: a body’s capability for creative experimentation with the possibility for new affects and percepts, combined with the extent to which a society ensures an open future for its citizens and promotes the formation of new combinations of being. This compound conceptualization of health coincides to a great extent with Burns’s conceptualization of (good) health as creation, becoming, newness, the production of the new—the “predominance of active forces.” By extending the area of inquiry past investigating ressentiment, or by including ressentiment among (or as an after effect) of the limiting (reactive) relations of force that separate a body from what it can do and reduce its power to act, this book’s symptomatological methodology investigates ill-health assemblages within the greater concept of postcolonial health. The theory of the aesthetics of postcolonial literature implicit in Casanova’s structuring of the world literary system, which I have both adumbrated and critiqued above, enables me to situate the Sudanese and Angolan authors considered in chapters 3 and 4 in relation to the Caribbean authors Burns examines in her monograph, in which she fnds newness and creation. Casanova indicates the Nobel Prize in literature as being the ultimate proof that a writer and her or his work has received the “critical benediction” of the core: “Works deserving of the Nobel Prize—of being universalized—were stipulated to be ones whose national character was neither too pronounced nor too much insisted upon” (Casanova 2004, 156, 149). As such, according to the indicator of being awarded the world’s most prestigious literary prize, according to the previous elaboration of Casanova’s taxonomy, Nobel Prize-winner writers from “small nations” would be exemplars of “small literatures” written “in the second phase” of literature produced by writers from the periphery. Thus, I contend that the Caribbean writers analyzed by Burns, while undeniably located in the peripheral portion of the two-part structure of the world literary system, might be considered as pertaining to the second phase of postcolonial literary development. It is true that Casanova frmly locates the work of V.S. Naipaul within the periphery. Yet, the Nobel Prize—Casanova’s own standard of measure of the literariness of a work— was awarded to Naipaul (2001), and before that to Derek Walcott (1992). Casanova’s virulent protestation against awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize in Literature24 does not invalidate my proposition that considers Caribbean
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literature to be in the second phase of postcolonial literary progression. This is of interest to my argument because it enables me by extension to consider, taking newness and creation into account, whether Pepetela’s works should be considered as belonging to the frst phase of postcolonial writing and whether Salih’s work could be judged as bridging the two phases. Contemporary Caribbean writers arguably have a greater literary inheritance at their disposal than do Angolan and Sudanese Arab writers. In Fanon, Lambert fnds a “diagnostic and therapeutic narrative [which] structures the dialectical stages that the creator (and [a postcolonial] people’) must pass through in order to arrive at the synthesis of collective political and cultural expression” (Lambert 1998, 11). Certainly, contemporary Caribbean writers occupy a different temporal-artistic place in relation to the project of the political elaboration of their country than do contemporary Angolan and Sudanese Arab writers. It is thus arguable that contemporary Caribbean writers’ preoccupation with “formal” that is to say “literary” concerns enables them, à la Kafka, Beckett, or Joyce, to bring literary newness into the world and so incarnate much of what Deleuze meant when he writes that “literature is health.” Casanova’s and Fanon’s are not the only words on the subject of postcolonial aesthetics, however. In concluding his monograph Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb, Réda Bensmaïa qualifes Casanova’s description of postcolonial aesthetics along similar, but specifcally postcolonial, lines: We are witnessing the reversal of a situation whereby those who were dominated in the past regain strength and gradually relearn the importance of what making and relating history means; relearn what narrating, fabulating, and fctioning mean. To reproach intellectuals for being subservient to European methods, to say that what they do depends wholly on a problematic that is foreign to them, is automatically to place oneself in a position where it is impossible both to write one’s own history and to fght against the history that was written for one. It is as if one had asked the Algerian independence fghters not to use modern weapons because the machine gun, the canon, and the grenade were invented by the French! [. . .] They have had to adapt, fnd the means of rebuilding a life, as well as the means of “thinking differently, otherwise” [. . .] They have had to fnd the means of understanding what was happening to them and, at the same time, what was happening to their own country. In other words, their work is also the symptom of what has happened to their country, their people, their culture. (Bensmaïa 2003, 162–163)
Though it predates Christian Thorne’s critique of Casanova’s universalizing aesthetic antithesis by a decade, Bensmaïa’s work shows “fabulation”—regardless if it comes in “frst phase” postcolonial literature—to be
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indispensable to the task at independence of “produc[ing] a national entity or identity.” Bensmaïa claims that at the time that independence came to the three countries of the Maghreb, though there existed “no possibility of freeing the desired—or imagined—nation” from the chains of its colonial past, nonetheless: “Writing was contemporary and synonymous with the laying of the foundation of the nation to come [. . .] art, poetry, creative imagination were called upon to promote an Algeria in the making, an Algeria to come [. . .] to write (the fction) of Algeria was to write Algeria” (Bensmaïa 2003, 22–23). Bensmaïa’s point, that laying the foundation for the nation to come through works of fction, flm or theatre, is a creative, experimental act which contributes to an invention of a people and a country, is consonant with the “properly philosophical” task of creativity and newness as health that Burns identifes in contemporary Caribbean writers. Bensmaïa’s engagement with Aijaz Ahmad’s rejoinder to Frederic Jameson’s claim that “all third world texts are necessarily [. . .] allegorical” (Jameson 1986; Ahmad 1992, 95–122) takes a similar approach. Bensmaïa indicates that “reducing” postcolonial texts to only “one political-allegorical dimension” provides no means to appreciate their “inventive” and “constitutive” instability (Bensmaïa 2003, 72, 75, 79, 81). Bensmaïa’s and Lambert’s work indicates that even so-called frst-phase postcolonial literatures, wanting though they may be when judged in terms of canonical literary worth25 (and correspondingly in becomingsother), can nonetheless be read in terms of health. Such literature is concerned with health both in regards to the creation of a new people and the establishment of symptomatologies of the relations of force that separate postcolonial bodies from what they can do. The humanitarian logic—the practical ethics—behind this book’s symptomatological methodology is a probabilistic measuring (Clough 2009, 50) of the positive modulation in a postcolonial people’s affective capacities that a symptomatologically targeted intervention would bring about. In seeking proof of the existence of affects, we are not subject to some sort of Heisenbergian principle, whereby it is not possible to identify both affect and the conditions that enable or disable potential affects at the same time. Rather, more like hypothesizing the existence of dark matter from otherwise inexplicable absences of mass or changes in gravitational felds, the existence or nonexistence of affects can be inferred from the material conditions that we know to be propitious or inauspicious for their existence, as well as what we know about the developmental plasticity of human beings. Affects coextend to a great extent with capabilities, though, as intensities, affects are considerably less tangible and encompass a much larger terrain than coarser capabilities. Affects depend upon the felicitous concord of conditions that contribute to a body’s good health. Bio-affective health is found in harmony and equilibrium that can be diffcult to achieve and impossible to
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sustain even in the most economically developed of societies. Michel Serres notes that healthy bodies have an “unstable equilibrium.” In order for the bioaffective health of a body to be maintained “every force must be combined.” However, even the “slightest discomfort” “suffces to destroy” that balance. Serres writes that “local pain occupies and recruits the totality of the body, while pleasure [. . .] requires its complete collaboration, without so much as an irksome speck in the heel of the shoe” (Serres 2011, 45). Works which bring newness into the world represent instances of the delicate, multimodal harmony required for a body to be capable of engaging with the world and other bodies in power-enhancing unions. The impingements that separate a body from what it can do haunt the pages of works which mediate stasis and the obstruction of pure life, the new and creative experimentation. Such works are nosological cartographies of a body’s degree of negative freedom that render the social, economic, cultural, and political points of fxture and arrest that actively limit the bio-affective health and capabilities of people visible. Where creativity and newness are signs of good health, the symptomatological aspect of some works of postcolonial literature details the particular points of stoppage that impinge upon a body’s capacity to realize new affects. That is, as a symptomatology literature can render visible and tabulate the conditions of stasis; illness, as that which limits, is also, of course, a matter of health, albeit poor health. If good health is newness and creative experimentation, in literary worlds where the possibilities of life are blocked, the very act of rendering the impinging conditions visible and gathering them into a syndrome is also a health act. Burns writes that “literature is health insofar as a writer diagnoses certain pathologies or ills, and, in doing so assesses the chances of health [and] the mechanisms by which ressentiment prevails” (Burns 2012, 182). Burns fnds that the Caribbean writers Walcott and Hopkinson “diagnose a range of social, political and economic ills that affict the contemporary Caribbean (poverty, lack of education, poor health care, and so on), but both also demonstrate how majoritarian constructs (neo-/ colonialist ideology, government and the Church, for example) function as reactive forces” (Burns 2012, 175–176). I share Burns’s conceptualization of (good) health as newness entering the world: “In posing the question of the world the aim [is] to determine the conditions under which the objective world allows for a subjective production of novelty” (Pearson 1999, 131). However, an investigation into Pepetela’s Angola and Tayeb Salih’s Arab Sudan, similar to aspects of Walcott’s and Hopkinson’s work on the Caribbean, shows stasis, capture, and impingement, rather than creative becomings. These too are aspects of health: “Actual being is a point of fxture or arrest, when mobile and fexible relations of force between parts acting upon each other become consolidated into defnite and rigid relations that defne the form of
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the emergent body” (Bignall 2010, 110). Diagnoses of societal or individual states of being, like those of Parkinson’s or Lou Gehrig’s disease, Cystic Fibrosis, or the anomie which Tayeb Salih identifes as a component of the Bandarshah syndrome (chapter 4) that is afficting Sudanese Arab society, detail a person or society’s health at a point of stasis or degradation. It is important to remember that lines of becoming pass between and through points (Bensmaïa 2003, 51)—states, stases—and come up through the middle (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 293). These points of stoppage indicate chances for health, ill though they may be at the temporal and geopolitical points of impingement and stasis. Symptomatologies are nosological cartographies on which a person’s or society’s points of fxture or arrest are mapped in relation to the conditions or impinging relations of force. One of the central tenets of this work is that symptomatologies can be taken up by and incorporated as an integral component within the assemblages of people, processes, knowledge, materials, and institutions dedicated to working with people in the Global South so that they can live healthier lives—more fully know what their bodies can do. As a component of such a good-health assemblage26 that endeavors to precipitate the becoming-healthy of a person or people, symptomatologies may come to be components in what Deleuze and Guattari infelicitously called a “war machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 351–423). Patton explains that the object of such an assemblage “is not war but the conditions of creative mutation and change” (Patton 2000, 110). Given that becoming-healthy is also a kind of metamorphosis, if taken up within such a “metamorphosis machine” as a good-health assemblage, symptomatologies can assist in propagating the production of a different state of health. Symptomatologies, then, can become components in assemblages whose functions are to engender spaces in which “new connections between different forces are possible” (Patton 2010a, 38) and which are opposed to regimes repressing the emergence of new kinds of health. “Literature does not merely refect social forces. It is itself an important force in contesting existing hierarchies in the struggle to remake the unequal world created by capitalist globalization” (Cheah 2016a, 58). Composed within the metamorphosis machine of a good-health assemblage, symptomatologies are instruments of political transformation. Thus, the ultimate aim of symptomatologies is the removal of that which impinges upon bodies and hinders them in their efforts to realize their maximum affective capacities. As components of good-health assemblages, postcolonial symptomatologies also are involved in the effort to alter the relations in the felds of force that exist in the Global South so as to catalyze movement, becomings, creation, experimentation, and newness. With its sensitivity to those who live vulnerable and precarious of lives, this methodology’s humanitarian orientation extends the Deleuzian concept of symptomatology to examining that which separates bodies from what they
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can do in literary worlds into which nothing new comes into being. Despite its geographical intension toward Africa, this work’s symptomatological methodology is situated within the aesthetic and intensive compass of the affnities for health Burns fnds between the contemporary postcolonial literature being produced by Caribbean writers and Deleuzian thought. As such, by virtue of being directed to Southern African and North African authors who might be considered by some critics to be located temporo-artistically within or at the bisagra, that is the aesthetic hinge of the nationalist, frst phase of the “world republic of letters,” this methodology’s humanitarian orientation extends Deleuzian investigations into postcolonial health both aesthetically and geographically. Works of postcolonial literature produced within the political and literarily limiting frst phase of literary development may perhaps be only inchoately capable of producing becomings. Nonetheless, through their symptomatological survey of the relations of force that separate the bodies of their fellow countrywomen and men from what they can do, these works contribute to the production of the new—of a new country, of a new people. In doing this, these texts engage directly with the “state of crisis in the ability to imagine frameworks for a good life alternative” to the “shared global moment” in which we fnd ourselves (Bahri 2017, 133). Accordingly, this book’s postcolonial symptomatological methodology is a tool which can contribute to a “differential actualization of the (virtual) past [of a particular country which] enables the emergence of a genuinely original present/future in which the colonial past coexists as a disjunctive factor mediated by a caesura or break” (Burns 2012, 5).
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2.3 UPGRADING THE CONCEPT OF SYMPTOMATOLOGY In formulating the capabilities approach to human development, Nobel Prizewinning economist, Amartya Sen, and the political philosopher, Martha Nussbaum have taken up John Stuart Mill’s 150-year-old project to “remove [the] obstacles which stand in the way of [a person’s] well-being” so that a person could “increase any of their capabilities of comprehension, or action, or enjoyment” (Mill 1962, 248, 210).27 The capabilities approach to human development has effectively operationalized Mill’s project of human efforescence so that it can examine the tyranny of the “material conditions and relations of force specifc to the contemporary global South.”28 This section assembles the fve freedoms Sen has identifed as fundamental to human fourishing—the core of the capabilities approach—with Deleuze’s concept of symptomatology. Creating such an assemblage upgrades this Deleuzian
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concept so that it can serve as a social-literary methodology specifcally calibrated to extract the details of a postcolonial literary diagnosis of a people’s health. Once isolated, this assemblage of a literary-philosophical concept with a cutting-edge approach to human development enables the tabulation of the key symptoms identifed by an author-cum-clinician along a detailed symptomatological table. This has the potential to be of great import for both postcolonial literary criticism and development studies because postcolonial literature as “the concern of the people” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 18) can also be, as Greg Lambert notes, “a vital concern of public health” (Lambert 1998, 18). The capabilities approach considers the quality of a person’s life in relation to his or her placement within fve key relations of force: political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security (Sen 1999, 38). The capabilities approach does not equate the quality of a life solely with a person’s relative wealth or poverty (as is commonly done in approaches that use Gross Domestic Product or Gross National Product as indicators of well-being).29 The capabilities approach examines quality of life from the perspective of to what degree a person is capable of living a life he or she values. Capabilities—understood by Sen and Nussbaum as the alternative combinations of functionings that are feasible for a person to achieve—are in fact substantive freedoms to achieve different lifestyles or the life one values (Sen 1999, 75). The core focus of the capabilities approach is on whether individuals have the freedom—the agency—to be what they want to be, and do what they value; for example, to be literate and diseasefree, adequately nourished, to be happy, have self-respect, to participate in the community, to live to old age, participate in political life, engage in economic transactions, etc. A person’s capabilities (i.e., the number of sets of possible combinations of ways of being and living in the world available to someone) correlate signifcantly to that person’s freedom to live well and be well. Thus, a person’s quality of life can be assessed in terms of his or her capability to achieve valuable functionings—the agency a person has to live in a manner of his or her choosing, to do and be what he or she values (Sen and Nussbaum 1993, 31–38). The capabilities approach to human development highlights the key material relations that impinge upon what all bodies, but especially what bodies in the Global South can do. While capability-deprivation comes in many forms, such as poverty, oppression, ignorance, lack of access to adequate nutrition, shelter, basic education, and health care,30 Sen holds that capabilities equate to instrumental freedoms to lead one kind of life or another. Sensitive to human fecundity and fnitude, the capabilities approach is geared both to the “constitutive vulnerability” and to the “generative vitality” of human beings (Braidotti 2013, 120). However, its Humanist focus on development as a
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means of enhancing a person’s freedom, agency, and sets of possible functionings, though coherent with the goals of both classical and posthumanist humanitarianism, would seem to indicate that Sen and Nussbaum might be better placed to serve as philosophical foils to rather than collaborators with Deleuze and Guattari’s poststructuralist project. Rosi Braidotti criticizes Nussbaum because “there is no room for experimenting with new models of the self” in the classical Humanist foundations (Braidotti 2013, 38–39) in which her and Sen’s work and the capabilities approach is based. However, to dismiss the capabilities approach en toto for its limitations when viewed from a poststructuralist or posthumanist perspective would be to miss its substantive effects in realigning social policy so as to enhance what many people in the Global South are able to do and be, and for its bricolagelike utility for symptomatological readings of postcolonial literary-worlds. This would be especially grievous given that the capabilities approach’s over-arching concern is to empower women in the Global South and enhance their agency.31 Ashmita Khasnabish has identifed “intersections” between the capabilities approach and Spivak’s theory of subaltern identity. As has Spivak, she refers to Sen’s work approvingly several times in one of her more recent books (Spivak 2013, 327, 333, 340). Khasnabish writes that “any theory of ethics and political philosophy has to decide which characteristics of the world we should focus on to pass a judgment about a society and determine justice and injustice.” Importantly, she notes that within the rubric of ethics and political philosophy, the problem of subaltern identity and the theory of capability have certain goals in common (Khasnabish 2014, 123, 94). Simone Bignall’s examination of how the material conditions and relations of force that prevail throughout much of the Global South effect postcolonial agency indicates that linking Deleuzian health to postcolonial realities would be productive. She writes that “agency primarily [. . .] refer[s] to action that is both causal and purposefully directed, although never free from constraints.” While “agency may be partially constituted by the agent,” Bignall notes that “agency is always performed under constraints, within a determining structure.” Bignall writes that the material conditions and social forces in postcolonial societies are simultaneous, co-composing elements and, along with subjectivity and “an individual’s degrees of capacity,” are essential components to consider when examining the “bodily coincidence” of postcolonial agency (Bignall 2010, 12–13, 151). Bignall writes that “the crux of the problem is [. . .] the way systemic inequality has come to be established and maintained through historical processes of social formation” (Bignall 2010, 115). Bignall’s work shows the capabilities model’s aim of improving a person’s capabilities—increasing his or her agency, so that, from a “point of fxture,” he or she becomes more capable of positively transforming herself and her
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life—is consonant with the aims of Deleuze’s critical and clinical project. As Bignall notes, “For Deleuze and Guattari, the reasoned activity of assemblage entails there must always be a subject who thinks, and that accordingly, for such subjects, it is possible to provide the guidelines for action” (Bignall 2010, 233). Thus, it is eminently practicable to combine elements of Deleuze and Guattari’s work with elements of the capabilities approach to provide pragmatic and context-sensitive tools by which to investigate conditions in postcolonial countries. Brian Massumi sees metamorphoses that happen in a person as an “increase in [his or her] body’s degrees of freedom.” By removing a concrete “unfreedom” that impinges upon a person’s life, this person will experience “an exponential expansion of [her] body’s repertory of responses” (Massumi 1996, 100). Bignall writes that it is proper to identify freedom (Sen’s book is called Development as Freedom) “as a practice of creation and transformation, as a practice of effective power.” She continues that “freedom exists as the practice of experimentation [. . .] with the self [and] with actual bodies, in order actively to transform them” (Bignall 2010, 168). It is important to note that the capabilities approach does not have a theory of the virtual at its disposal. In Deleuze’s philosophy, the virtual refers to an aspect of reality that is real but not actual, ideal but not abstract. The virtual is generative; it is a kind of potentiality that can become fulflled in the actual— while it is not material, it is nevertheless real. The virtual is like an idea that exists only in a person’s head or perhaps on paper, but whose effects are real, and may also be actual. Without a theory of the virtual at its disposal, the capabilities approach would look to bring about the enhancement of the functions of a person or people within the closed realm of the possible rather than endeavoring to bring about non-linear becomings actualized in a new state of affairs specifc to open systems. Similarly, the ethics of Deleuze’s ethological approach involves experimentation in affect, not the transformation of a body in terms of its functions but rather the changes and variations that occur and the intensities that pass between bodies and their capacities for affect and being affected (Pearson 1999, 185, 179). Yet the differences between Deleuze’s poststructuralist project and the Humanist-oriented capabilities approach are not insurmountable: both are commonly dedicated to bringing about new possibilities of existence. Oriented both to the individual and institutional levels and aimed at the actual lives of the least-advantaged members of “developing” societies around the world, the capabilities model is very much concerned with providing ways to resist the present conditions as they are constituted throughout the Global South. Importantly, Sen purposefully leaves open the conception of what the “actual livings” are that people value. In his elaboration of a “developmental ethology,” RMIT Research fellow Cameron Duff proposes that a Deleuzian perspective, “characterized as a
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discontinuous process of affective and relational encounters,” be taken when examining human development (Duff 2010, 619). Though consonant with choices and capabilities, Duff argues that “human development is advanced in the provision of new affective sensitivities and new relational capacities.” Yet affect is not incompatible with capabilities. Duff notes that the variability of the valuable functionings of Sen’s capabilities model is consistent with how a person’s affective capacities are in a state of “continual modifcation,” “sometimes in ways that involve an increase or addition of those capacities, sometimes in ways that involve a decrease and sometimes in both senses at once” (Duff 2010, 622). The body is not a singular “ontological essence” (Duff 2010, 625) As it is always open to its surroundings, the body “emerges in a series of affective and relational ‘becomings,’ each of which shape a body’s distinctive capacities or ‘powers’” (Buchanan 1997, 75). Duff notes that a body’s parts extend past the “anatomical and physiological systems” (Duff 2010, 625) to coextend with the world around them. Yet, as “byproducts of encounters” with other bodies and the material world in which we live, Duff notes that “affects are more than a feeling or emotion. [They] are also potential for action, a dispositional orientation to the world” (Duff 2010, 627). Through its interactions with the world, its various forces and the people within it, a body’s power of action may be increased so that it is more capable of thinking, doing, acting, perceiving, and feeling. Naturally, the obverse is true, in that encounters with the world can result in a relative and/or absolute diminution of a body’s power. If “development is nothing other than a perpetual change of form” as Keith Ansell Pearson claims (Pearson 1999, 39), then it is possible to infuse the concept of freedom in the sense utilized by the capabilities approach with a Deleuzian sense of freedom. That is freedom as metamorphosis, transformation, and the capacity for change manifested at the critical state or point where some state or condition passes over into a different state or condition (Patton 2010b, 118). Changes in any of the fve sets of relations of force identifed by Sen could precipitate lines of fight that exceed Sen’s humanist concepts of positive or the negative freedoms, and bring about shifts in a person’s quality of life, or intensities which he or she could experience. Informed as to which intersections in the relations of force impinge most upon what postcolonial bodies can do by a symptomatological reading of a postcolonial work of fction, a postcolonial good-health assemblage would migrate to those sites and seek to adjust the material conditions and relations of force in order to enhance what postcolonial bodies can do. Amartya Sen identifed political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security, because these fve sets of relations of force statistically confgure either the greatest enhancement or impingement in “profles in bodily capacities [that] indicat[e] what a body can do now” (Clough 2008, 18).
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Sen’s capabilities approach is based on the assumption that positive interventions along these fve sets of relations of force will produce the greatest beneft in terms of what human bodies in the Global South will be capable of doing. The felds of public health, humanitarian action, and human development look at enhancing human capabilities and quality of life in the aggregate. Typically, these felds do not think of capabilities, health, or quality of life in terms of affect. Similarly, the felds of public health and human development are largely off the radar of most contemporary affect theorists (with the notable exceptions of Cameron Duff and Nick Fox).32 Yet, as affect is not concerned with emotions per se, but rather with intensities, with a body’s capacity to affect and be affected—its power to act and force of existing— this work makes the argument that public health and human development ft within the greater feld of affect studies. Patricia Clough writes that as a:
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probabilistic, statistical background [a people, or a population is] open to the modulation of its affective capacities. Sociality as affective background displaces sociality grasped in terms of structure and individual; affective modulation and individuation displace subject formation and ideological interpellation as central to the relation of governance and economy. As such, the probabilistic measuring of sociological methodology shifts from merely representing population, even making populations, to modulating or manipulating the population’s affective capacities. (Clough 2009, 50)
Pointing out the “increasing signifcance of pre-emption or anticipation in social life,” Celia Lury adds that “one of the reasons that affect is seen as having social and political signifcance is that it points to the societal investment in the generative potential of indeterminacy, including possibility, randomness, and contingency” (Lury 2015, 238). Sen’s position is that a public health or social intervention targeted to a particular nodal point within the fve sets of relations of force detailed by his capabilities approach will increase a group’s affective profles to the greatest possible statistical effect—even approached as an unknowable aggregate to be actualized in the future. The capabilities approach’s fve freedoms can be ftted to the driver of Deleuze’s posthumanist conception of health around the commonality of human agency, freedom, and their mutual desire to resist that within the present ordering of societies impinges upon what human bodies can do. Like a set of sockets attaching to a posthumanist ratchet, each of which is attuned, like different sized metric or imperial sockets, to grasp postcolonial bodies in situ, Sen’s freedoms enable the Deleuzian concepts of symptomatology and health as what a body can do to grasp postcolonial bodies in the social, economic, political, and literary worlds in which they are embedded. Philosophically sophisticated torque can then be applied at the primary point of postcolonial
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relations of force’s application: human subjectivity. So assembled with a Deleuzian conception of health and subjectivity, the capabilities approach enables “a [socio-literary,] empirical study of [postcolonial] bodies in order to know their relations, and how they are combined” (Deleuze 1992, 212). Indeed, this assemblage of concept + approach produces a methodology capable of trawling a rich but as of yet largely untapped source of health diagnoses: postcolonial literature.
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NOTES 1. Critique et Clinique, was published in English translation as Essays Critical and Clinical in 1995. 2. Deleuze mentions the need for a “critical and clinical” approach to literature and illness in his introduction to Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (1967). 3. Ressentiment is the negative, the reactive, the weak, inferior and jealous which is hostile to and denies everything that is different to it, blaming it for its frustration. 4. Nietzsche et la philosophie was frst published in English as Nietzsche and Philosophy in 1983. 5. Le Froid et le Cruel was frst translated into English and published as SacherMasoch in 1971. 6. Logique du sens was translated into English and published in 1983 as The Logic of Sense. 7. Pourparlers was published in English as Negotiations in 1995. 8. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, L’Anti-Oedipe was frst published in English as Anti-Oedipus in 1977. 9. Mille Plateaux was published in English in 1987 as A Thousand Plateaus. 10. Principal among those are: Holland (2000), Pearson (1999), Smith (1997), Lambert (1998), Buchanan (1997, 2012), Bogue (2010a), Tynan (2012), Fox (1999, 2012, 2011, 2002), Fox and Ward (2008), and Duff (2014, 2010). 11. Deleuze and Guattari themselves warn deterritorializations are an uncertain and potentially dangerous affair. As such, they caution that such work should be carried out both partially and prudently (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 508–510). 12. I am indebted to Andrea Spain of Mississippi University whose work on Gordimer, Deleuze and postcolonialism showed me that Deleuze’s work on Bacon could be applied to an examination of literature. 13. The Famished Road is celebrated, dreamlike tale of postcolonial Nigeria that was awarded the Man Booker prize for fction in 1991. 14. For more examples of the extent to which Fanon used literature as a sociodiagnostic tool, see also pp 50, 54, 114, 115 in (Fanon 2008) 15. Deleuze’s affrmation of how experimentation and becomings affrm the unknown possibilities of life are especially prevalent in his works on Nietzsche and Spinoza, see pp: 54, 57, 61, 62, 66, 100, 163, 188 in (Deleuze 1983) As well, see pp: ii, 18, 19, 27, 70, 71, 73, 78 in (Deleuze 1988b)
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16. Transduction refers to the processes by which signals are converted from one kind of signal or stimulus to another or the processes by which energy is conveyed and changed within a cell. 17. Spivak raised fve principle claims against Deleuzian philosophy in this essay: The frst claim is “that Deleuze and Foucault covertly reintroduce the transcendent European subject by making their own position ‘transparent’ and by means of overly general conceptions of the subject of power and the subject of oppression. The second is that they lack a theory of ideology and, consequently, a theory of interest. The third is that they foreclose the need for counter-hegemonic ideological production and dialogue with the other, by assuming the other can speak for itself. The fourth is that their points of reference, the problems they seek to solve and the texts they refer to are entirely caught within a self-contained West or Europe. The ffth is that their refusal of constitutive contradiction reintroduces an undivided subject and is essentialist.” These claims have been countered by Deleuzian scholars such as Andrew Tormey and Simon Robinson, whose essay is referred to above, and with which Patton and Bignall commence their collection of essays on Deleuze and the Postcolonial (Robinson and Tormy 2010). 18. See pp 197, 251, 252, 263-264, 269, 271 in (Spivak 1999) See also, p 197 in (Spivak 2013) 19. In White Mythologies (2004), Young argued that Marxist philosophies of history, while anticapitalist, were really only Eurocentric histories of the West. One of the frst books to name postcolonial theory as a feld unto itself, White Mythologies identifed Said, Bhabha, Spivak, and the Subaltern Studies historians as forming the core of postcolonial studies. White Mythologies also pointed to the role the Algerian War of Independence had on many French philosophers of that generation. Young highlights in this work that post-structuralism itself was in many ways an anti-colonial critique of philosophy as practiced in the West. In Colonial Desire (1995), Young examines the history of the term “hybridity” and explores the evolution of racial theory. Importantly, Young brings Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of minor literature, nomadism, and desire into the examination of postcoloniality (cf. pp 171, 172, 180, and footnotes to chapter 7: 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29). Young’s Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001), traces anti-colonial thought throughout the various liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which eventually led to the formation of what we now know as postcolonialism. Young again includes Deleuze and Guattari’s work among that of postcolonial thinkers (cf. pp 24, 410) (Young 2004, 2001, 1995). 20. With recent works on Deleuze, postcolonial literature and theory, and Haiti to his credit, a consideration of Peter Hallward’s work has become de rigueur for many postcolonial theorists and critics. Indeed, since the publication of Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and Specifc (2001), that work has been cited over 500 times. In commencing this project (which originally held a chapter on Haiti and the Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière), noting the signifcant overlap between my symptomatological project and the span of Hallward’s work, I read through his texts eagerly. Hallward’s work on Haiti, Damming the Flood, is as thorough an account of the history of Haiti and of the US’s neo-Imperialist domination
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of a country in its sphere of infuence as you’ll fnd. However, I found it curious, as thoroughly researched as it was, that (at least at the time of its publication) Hallward had actually never stepped foot in the country itself. Nor, despite his subsequent investigations into postcolonial literature and theory, did Hallward consider Haitian literature, either alone or vis-à-vis Haiti’s history (cf. Vicker’s account of Indonesian history, which begins with a consideration of Pramoedya Toer’s novels countered by an examination of Louis Coeperus’s novels on colonial life (Vickers 2013, 3–15)). Even with Hallward’s frst book, I saw that despite the similar interests our projects were distinct, as Hallward’s engagement with works of Haitian literature was neglible. This feeling was reinforced when I read Hallward’s book on Deleuze, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. I found his “spiritual,” “extraworldly,” “non-political” Deleuze to be a skilful but arguably willful misinterpretation (a la Badiou and Žižek) of many of Deleuze’s key concepts. Time and again I returned to Deleuze’s works to check whether Deleuze had actually meant what Hallward claimed he meant. I agree with Lorna Burns: Hallward certainly misapprehends Deleuze’s conceptualization of the virtual/actual. Though thought provoking, I remain unconvinced by Hallward’s arguments—Deleuze is very frmly in this world; however, like John Protevi, I found that Hallward’s work obliges us to reconsider Deleuze anew, with “fresh” eyes (Protevi 2007). Similarly, this methodology’s utilization of literature’s representational capacity for societal diagnosis, which highlights the indissociability of the political from the literary, shares little with Hallward’s views of the “postcolonial” as an ultimately singular, subjective, and non-relational category. Like Protevi, Lorna Burns’s Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze highlights Hallward’s misapprehension of Deleuze’s concept of the virtual (p 20). She does not subscribe to Hallward’s “deeply problematic” (p 117) account of Deleuzian singularity as “virtual-as-substance,” preferring rather to defne singularity as “newness or originality,” engaging with rather than transcending the world (p 55)—a position to which this methodology is aligned. Burns highlights that Hallward’s “non-relational account of singular substances” which leads out of this world, does not square with Deleuze’s “constructivist” and “relational philosophy of life relating to another life of the same nature” (p 113). Even as Hallward’s work stakes a “claim for literature apart from the specifying contexts and material conditions that Marxist postcolonialist insistently evoke without arguing that literature should have ‘nothing to do with society or culture’” (p 162), Burns points out that Deleuze’s work reveals the “persistent issue with Hallward’s celebration of the specifc as a value-neutral appraisal” (p 166) (Burns 2012). By contrast, Spivak is at the other end of the range of postcolonial theorists who deal with Hallward, commenting only that Hallward’s work “carries the mark of a dissertation, and is contained within a specifc academic debate, unrelated to the concerns of [her book: An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization]” (p 581) (Spivak 2013). Similarly, as Hallward’s work is distinct from this work’s concerns, which are more diagnosticatory and political than literary (at least in the traditional use of that term), this note is the only time his work will be considered in this book (Hallward 2001, 2006, 2007). 21. Lambert writes (quoting Deleuze): “Health as literature,” as writing, consists in fabulation, which Deleuze defnes as “the invention of a people who is missing”;
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thus, the ultimate aim of literature is to set free, in the delirium, in this creation of a health, in this invention of a people, the possibility of a life” (Lambert 1998). 22. Paul Patton writes: In What is Philosophy? this orientation toward an open future is transposed into philosophy itself. Deleuze and Guattari call the process of inventing concepts that extract events from existing states of affairs the “countereffectuation” of those events: “The event is actualized or effectuated whenever it is inserted, willy-nilly, into a state of affairs; but it is counter-effectuated whenever it is abstracted from states of affairs so as to isolate its concept” (What is Philosophy?, p 159). In counter-effectuating events, we attain and express the sense of what is happening around us. “To think philosophically about the present is therefore to countereffectuate the pure events that animate everyday events and processes. Conversely, to describe current events in terms of such philosophical concepts is to relate them back to the pure events of which they appear only as one particular determination, thereby dissociating the pure event from the particular form in which it has been actualized and pointing to the possibility of other determinate actualizations.” Patton continues: “The task of philosophy, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the countereffectuation of present historical states of affairs through the creation of new concepts or modifcations of old ones” (Patton 2010a, 59, 184). 23. The Deleuzian centrality of the “question of how newness enters this world” (and its connection to literature) has been highlighted in the work of other notable interlocutors of Deleuze. Keith Ansell Pearson notes “Deleuze suggests that in posing the question of the world the aim is [. . .] to determine the conditions under which the objective world allows for a subjective production of novelty” (Pearson 1999). Daniel Smith highlights “artistic creation” (along with molecular biology and differential calculus) to be an area Deleuze identifes where one can to go to search for conditions of “real experience, that is for novelty itself” (Smith 2008, 8). 24. Casanova wrote “Le Nobel donné à V. S. Naipaul est en contradiction fagrante avec l’histoire et la tradition de la plus grande distinction littéraire du monde. C’est un contresens et une trahison de l’esprit même de ce prix [. . .]. Pascale Casanova (2001) “Le prix du reniement.” Le Monde Diplomatique. December 2001, p 32. Available at: https://mondediplo.com/2001/12/13naipaul, Accessed: January 29, 2019. 25. Though, in contrast, Deleuze and Guattari fnd “scarcity of talent [to be] benefcial” to constituting a work of (minor) literature that expresses common, collective political action (Deleuze and Guattari 1986). 26. I am indebted to Nick Fox’s work on ill-health assemblages for the concept of good-health assemblages (Fox 2011). Health assemblages will be discussed in greater detail in chapters 3 and 4. 27. The expansion of capabilities is an element Mill returns to at various times throughout his essay “On Liberty,” see also pp 211, 191, 198 in Mill (1962). 28. Sen and Nussbaum coedited The Quality of Life. Amartya Sen developed the capabilities model in Development as Freedom and Inequality Re-examined. Martha Nussbaum expanded on that work in Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. 29. For a detailed analysis of the defciencies of in measuring quality of life according to GDP see Stiglitz et al. (2010).
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30. The key relations of force elaborated as minimum standards in the Sphere Project’s Handbook: protection; water supply, sanitation, and hygiene promotion; shelter, settlements, and nonfood items; food security and nutrition; and health action correspond with aspects of many of the instrumental freedoms identifed by Sen. Humanitarianism defnes itself as essentially apolitical and calls up governments to assume their duties vis-à-vis ensuring the health and well-being of its citizens. The capabilities approach is largely directed at governments and international organizations that work with governments, being that a country’s government is the only entity that can bring systemic change to these key areas over wide areas. Therefore, the capabilities approach’s fve freedoms have been selected as comprising the most appropriate relations of fore to assemble with Deleuze’s concept of symptomatology. This will be elaborated in greater detail in chapter 3 with the introduction of the Eightfold Health and Capabilities Rubric. See Damerell et al. (2016). 31. Enhancing women’s agency underpins every aspect of the capabilities approach, see especially pp 112, 113, 115–116, 118–119, 131–140, 189–203, and 217–210 in Sen (1999). 32. See Stage and Knudsen (2015), Massumi (1995), Gregg and Seigworth (2010), and Clough and Halley (2007).
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Chapter 3
Those Excluded by the City Pepetela and Angola’s “Savage Capitalism”
Homo homini lupus est.
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—Plautus
In the forty-six-year arc that spans the Angolan writer Pepetela’s twentyone-book oeuvre, Pepetela has utilized multiple literary genres to write about many different facets of Angola. He has described the guerrilla war against the Portuguese colonial army. He has written multigenerational histories, Marxist-oriented learners for young readers, Brechtian plays, and scathing social commentaries. He has written satires, detective novels, fction, myth, allegories, science fction, and love stories. Just as his works have travelled across multiple aspects and epochs of Angola, so too he has written from numerous positions. Pepetela has written as an engineering student in Portugal and an exile studying sociology in Algeria. He has written as a Marxist-guerrilla in the Cabindan forests in Northern Angola and as the vice minister of education in the capital of Luanda. He has written as a private citizen, as visiting scholar at respected German and California universities, and as a professor of sociology in Angola’s Agostinho Neto University. Through these disparate works and from these distinct locations, Pepetela has woven together a vibrant, comprehensive, literary patchwork covering over 500 years of the Angolan experience. Regarded Lusophone literary critic, José Ornelas, writes that Pepetela should not be considered simply as having written about Angola. Ornelas claims that Pepetela should be regarded as having written Angola (Ornelas 2012, 147). Despite his increasingly biting criticism of Angolan’s ruling class, in “writing” Angola Pepetela evinces little of the ambivalence toward
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the idea of the nation of Angola prominent in the work of several postcolonial theorists.1 Rather, out of its colonized, divided, and bellicose past and its uneven present Pepetela articulates and invokes an as-yet-unrealized Angola in a manner reminiscent of Whitman’s, Neruda’s, and Eduardo Galeano’s efforts to write the Americas.2 Imbricated as he is within the very fabric of contemporary Angola, while also having viewed Angola from various perspectives, Pepetela is well placed to literarily mediate the relations of force that affect what and how (and how) many Angolans can do and be. Pepetela’s mediation of angolanidade (Angolanness, a sense of national identity) refects the precariousness that marks the lives of the majority of Angolans. His works show that this endemic precarity is not just the natural state of a formerly colonized country emerging from decades of cold warfuelled civil war. Pepetela has diagnosed that the health of Angolan society is negatively affected by the phenotype of “savage capitalism” (Pepetela 2013, 374). His works isolate this phenotype and show the deleterious effects it has on all members of Angolan society. His novels also speak to causality. They indicate how centuries of colonial, political and economic deformation of an Angola divided along sociolinguistic, tribal, regional, and class lines combined with decades of brutal, cold war-fuelled civil war over access to vast petroleum and mineral wealth has resulted in a corrupt and highly inequitable society. Pepetela’s works refect that the widespread vulnerability present in contemporary Angola is structural, engineered by an intricate, opaque, and corrupt system of patronage that cascades down from the President of the Republic via the elite, ruling party. In diagnosing that Angolan society is deformed by the symptoms that together compose the “Bunker Syndrome,” Pepetela shows the concerns of individual Angolans to be inextricable from collective political concerns. Angola ranks 149th (out of 186 countries) in its ability “to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives” (UNDP 2015). Compared to Australia, which currently ranks second in the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI), the average life expectancy of an Angolan is 51.9 years; whereas, each Australian can expect to live an average of 82.5 years. The average Angolan receives 4.73 years of schooling; an Australian averages 12.8. Though it is diffcult to disaggregate by community, class, or geographical location, the HDI reveals great disparity exists within Angola. Healthier Angolans can expect to live 46.2 percent longer than the least fortunate; the more educated Angolans can expect to receive 34.6 percent more education than those less fortunate. On average, the better off make 49.9 percent more money than poorer Angolans. Though Portuguese is the offcial language, Angola is an ethnically diverse country, composed of the Ovimbumdu and Ambundu peoples, which compose over 60 percent of the
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overall population. Additionally there are the Bakongo, Chokwe, Ovambo, Ganguela, and Xindonga peoples, each with their own language, as well as mestiços of mixed African and European heritage. The social-literary evaluation of Angolan health outlined in this chapter will show that a Deleuzian conception of health as what a body can do enables us to consider both the material conditions and environment in which people live and the sociopolitical institutions by which a people are governed. Indeed, Pepetela’s diagnosis suggests that the prefx “post” in postcolonial theory should be read not as later, after, or subsequent to but rather as continuing to affect society to some degree despite having mutated to another form. Thus, examining the health of a society according to the extent it enables the creative augmentation of what each of its citizens can do and be—their capacity to affect and be affected—read as a multiwork symptomatology, Pepetela’s novels mediate the colonial-era relations of force that yet deform contemporary Angolan society in the globalized, yet undeniably postcolonial, present. To use only six of Pepetela’s novels to make the claim that Pepetela has identifed and isolated the key elements in the syndrome which afficts contemporary Angolan society is to run the risk of overlooking the considerable historical, ideological, and literary distance Pepetela has travelled to arrive at this diagnosis. This is addressed in the frst section of this chapter precisely because those travels and the span of that historical and literary distance are what give heft to Ornelas’s claim and weight to Pepetela’s diagnosis. Additionally, this approach runs the risk of eliding pertinent aspects of the larger Angolan case history within which the “Bunker Syndrome” is but the globalized incarnation of the relations of force that have long impinged upon and stunted Angolans’s health and capabilities. Therefore, before I proceed to adumbrate the details of Pepetela’s indictment of the institutionalized and dehumanizing venality with which Angola’s governing party rules, I shall frst situate Pepetela both biographically and historically. After synopsizing the six works, this work will consider the role style plays in Pepetela’s symptomatological analysis. The fourth section will establish democratic ethics as a component of societal health. This is done by combining the fve “unfreedoms” of the economist, Amartya Sen’s capabilities model of human development with the philosopher, Paul Patton’s elaboration of Deleuze’s tripartite concept of becoming-democratic. In the ffth section, the details of Pepetela’s diagnosis are disaggregated, tabulated, and represented infographically in the resulting sevenfold Health and Capabilities Rubric. The sixth and penultimate section establishes the role Portuguese colonial-era structures and relations of force yet play in impinging upon the health of Angolans both at the individual and societal levels.
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3.1 BIOGRAPHY OF PEPETELA, SUMMARY OF CONTEMPORARY ANGOLAN HISTORY Born Artur Carlos Mauricio Pestana dos Santos in Benguela, Angola, in 1941 to descendants of Portuguese and Brazilian immigrants, Pepetela’s biography, literary and otherwise, is inextricably bound within contemporary Angolan history. The nom de plume, Pepetela, originated as Artur Pestana’s nom de guerre from his time as a guerrilla fghting the Portuguese colonial army as a member of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) in the early 1970s. “Pestana” is eyelash in Portuguese; and “pepetela” means eyelash in the Kimbundu language (Ornelas 2012, 132). By the 1970s, the Portuguese had been ruling Angola for several centuries. They established the capital city of Luanda in the sixteenth century and began annexing sections of the country and ruling Angola as a colony from 1655. Angola was incorporated as an overseas province of Portugal in 1951. Dealing in the slave trade and exporting rubber, ivory, and then later agricultural products, the fruits of Angola fuelled Portugal’s rise to international prominence in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. However, the Portuguese invested little in Angola or its people, and in the last years of its rule, Angola suffered a decade of confict as three separate guerrilla groups strove to overthrow the colonial regime. Following the collapse of the Salazar regime, Angola achieved independence in 1975. Yet, independence did not bring peace: the following twenty-fve years saw a brutal civil war over which party would control this diamond- and oil-rich country. This civil war pitted the governing MPLA party, composed largely of urban Creole elites led by Agostinho Neto, against two other revolutionary groups: the União Nacional para a Independencia Total de Angola (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, UNITA) and the Frente National de Libertação de Angola (the National Liberation Front of Angola, FNLA). UNITA was composed largely of rural Kimbundus and led by the charismatic Jonas Savimbi. The FNLA, led by Holden Roberto, splintered and disappeared in the frst years of the confict, leaving UNITA to contest MPLA rule. The Angolan Civil War was fuelled by proft from diamonds on one side (UNITA) and oil on the other (MPLA); it was a deadly proxy battle in the Cold War. South Africa and the United States supported UNITA. Along with France and Israel, the United States supported the FNLA, as well, until it faded into virtual irrelevance. The USSR and Cuba supported the ruling MPLA, which took power as a Marxist-Leninist party. However, as their ideological orientation changed, refecting the implosion of their patron, the USSR, the MPLA dropped socialism and embraced
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free-market capitalism in 1990. The civil war fnally ended in 2002 with the assassination of UNITA’s Jonas Savimbi. In the quarter century of confict, it is estimated that a third of the Angolan population was displaced, over 1.5 million people were killed, and over 15 million landmines were laid. Decades have passed since Pepetela frst represented the utopian ideology, struggles against regionalism and tribalism, and the revolutionary aspirations of the MPLA partisans fghting the Portuguese colonial army from deep within the northern Angolan forests in Mayombe. He has twice received the National Literature Prize of Angola. In 1997, he was awarded the Camões Prize (the most prestigious literary award for Lusophone literature) for his entire body of work (Ornelas 2012, 132). Additionally, he has received the Prize of the Association of Art Critics of São Paulo. In 1999, he was awarded the Dutch prize Prinz Claus (Orsi 2004). Pepetela has grown disillusioned and dissatisfed with the ever-more-entrenched turns away from the equitable society he and his fellow revolutionaries envisioned (one of his novels is entitled The Utopian Generation). The moves to “Afro-Stalinism and then to petro-diamond capitalism” (Hodges 2001) caused him to resign his position as vice minister for education in the MPLA government, a post he had held for the seven years following independence. He has been a faculty member in the Sociology Department in Agustinho Neto University in Luanda ever since. The hopeful, utopian element that marked his frst works has long since receded from his writing. Pepetela’s recent works are cutting, ironic, dystopic, and satirical. They refect an abiding dissatisfaction with the state of Angola and the ruling class maintained by José Eduardo dos Santos,3 Africa’s third-longest serving (thirty-four years) and richest president (with a fortune estimated at $20 billion) (LifeStyle 2014). Maria Grazia Orsi comments that “Pepetela’s literary work is a refection on the historical events that brought Angola to independence, and on a country lacerated by civil war and the incurable corruption of the ruling political class” (Orsi 2004, 411). José Ornelas writes: More than any Angolan writer, Pepetela has addressed the problematic issues of his country, including race, ethnic division, class division, the war for independence, and the civil war between supporters of [. . .] MPLA and UNITA. In some of his novels, Pepetela also connects Angola’s past, which dates back to the sixteenth century, to the present day, presenting a comprehensive, farreaching, and coherent examination of all cultural, social, religious, political and economic aspects of Angola in order to illustrate the nation’s history, and to explain how past events are interrelated with the country’s present conditions, including its myths, symbols, religions, and hybrid culture. (Ornelas 2012, 367)
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Ornelas goes on to note, however, that Pepetela’s “later works are a radical departure from the hopefulness and the utopian vision that characterize his frst novels.” He writes that Pepetela’s current vision of Angola as a “disintegrating nation” is much darker. This vision “emphasizes a dystopic environment, where despair, corruption, abuse, disillusionment, and hopelessness are the norm” (Ornelas 2012, 367).
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3.2 THE FUNCTION OF STYLE WITHIN SYMPTOMATOLOGY Literature is political. Ronald Bogue notes that in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor” literature the “individual concern” is directly connected to a “political immediacy.” Such a work “engages” with “social and political issues” so as to challenge, deviate from, or otherwise transform “dominant power relations” (Bogue 2010b, 171). Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari assert that in “minor” literature “everything takes on a collective value” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 17). They claim that a work of “minor” literature is a “collective assemblage of enunciation” (even the “parable-art,” as W. H. Auden referred to it, of those such as Franz Kafka, whose work, while addressing contemporary problems, did so, modernist scholar, Pericles Lewis notes, as if from an “alternative universe” [Lewis 2007, 226]). Minor literature articulates the concerns of those who are not in power, those who are not the heterosexual, white, male “norm,” with the hopes of participating in bringing about a change to the society that it describes. As a “minor” author producing “minor” literature, “Pepetela” is both nom de plume and nom de guerre. More than that, rather than being seen as pertaining to a particular subject (Artur Carlos Mauricia Pestana dos Santos), “Pepetela” should be considered as an agent unto itself. “Pepetela” is a particular, symptomatological, minor author function in a post-Barthian/Foucauldian sense. “Far from functioning as a label for a pre-existing entity,” the proper name Pepetela “traces the new coordinates for a cartography” (Sauvagnargues 2016, 26) of specifcally Angolan bodies. The proper name “Pepetela” does not (just) refer to a person, but rather to a transformed conception of an author as the “nexus of the effect” of Angola, thus indicating the political function of postcolonial literature. Pepetela’s works “invent a capture of forces that [are] produc[ing] a new individuation” (Sauvagnargues 2016, 26) that is specifcally Angolan. The various styles employed by Pepetela are related to their symptomatological functions, which transduce Angolan relations of force into the individuations that appear on the pages of his novels. In his portrayal of the details of ordinary Angolan lives, Pepetela has isolated the symptoms affecting
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what postcolonial Angolan bodies can do and be and rendered them visible. The Bunker, both as assemblage and syndrome, is the “symptomatological composite that refers to [a] typology of forces” (Sauvagnargues 2016, 27) specifc to Angola. It is in this sense that as works of minor literature Pepetela’s works are both collective and political. Edward Said highlighted “the connection between texts and the existential actualities of human life, politics, societies, and events. The realities of power and authority [. . .] are the realities that make texts possible, that deliver them to their readers” (Said 1983, 5). Thus, what Pepetela depicted as affecting the lives of his characters in the literary world of Angola is a condensation of that which he, as clinician of contemporary Angola, has apprehended as synecdochally coursing through society. Deleuze writes that “ethics is a set of optional rules that assess what we do, what we say, in relation to the ways of existing involved. We say this, do that: what way of existing does it involve?” (Deleuze 1995b, 100) This indicates an area of commonality where Deleuze’s particularist ethics (as a function of a way of existing) overlap with the universalist ethics of critical humanitarianism. Evaluated via the universalist ethics of the critical, humanitarianoriented cosmopolitanism employed by this symptomatological methodology, Pepetela’s fction mediates and disaggregates the profoundly unjust relations of force that form contemporary Angolan society. Utilizing the conventions of the detective or crime novel “only [as] a pretext in order to analyse [Angolan] society,” Pepetela believes that the “role” of “the writer [is] to call attention to, to bring people to refect on certain things” (Chaves and Macêdo 2009, 37). Pepetela has stated that “the general climate [of Jaime Bunda] is more or less representative of Angolan reality [. . .]. In this book, the part of the police [. . .] is the least important. What was important was to lead the reader to Luandan society, or at least some sections of Luandan society” (Chaves and Macêdo 2009, 45). Pepetela has cycled through many different styles over the course of his literary career. Yet, when considering the differing styles he has variously employed to articulate and invoke Angola—magical realism, playful postmodernism, satire, and realism—it is satire, perhaps counterintuitively, that indicates the symptomatological function of his literature. The humor with which Pepetela has written both The Return of the Water Spirit and Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent is obvious from the outset. After all, the irony involved in having the main character, an incompetent, junior secret agent with an “abundant arse” (Pepetela 2006, 3) whose nickname is “bunda”—Portuguese for “arse”—is hardly subtle. Every time the secret agent Jaime Bunda introduces himself, the reader hears echoes of: “I’m Bum, James Bum.” Similarly, the unscrupulously social-climbing principal character of The Return of the Water Spirit is Carmina-Ass-Face. (Carmina Cara de Cu is much more felicitously alliterative in Portuguese.)
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Pepetela has indicated that he believes that the reason his Jaime Bunda novels are reaching a much wider national and international audience than previous or subsequent works is due to their para-literary genre and satirical style. The online bookseller Amazon is not wrong when it describes Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent as a “satirical crime novel [that] pokes fun at the James Bond genre while offering humorous insight into contemporary Angolan culture” (Amazon 2014). However, viewed within the wider body of Pepetela’s work, Jaime Bunda can be taken as a light-hearted spoof of classic detective fction only by those unfamiliar with the blood-drenched history and the institutionalized corruption of contemporary Angola, or Pepetela’s literary and biographical history. This unfamiliarity may leave one deaf to the “mirthless” quality of the laughter Pepetela’s fction evokes and which Lewis notes is a feature of modernist satires (Lewis 2007, 231). Pepetela’s works may be separated from modernism by a continent and a century. Yet, despite that geo-temporal distance and the presence of postmodernesque narratorial intrusions, Pepetela’s works share an important element common to many modernist works and to late modernist satires: that is, the desire to transform the “unhappy world” around them (Lewis 2007, 231). Even as he writes an Angola that is increasingly formed by the “aggressive amoral machinery of global capitalism,” the arc of his works is yet infected by the unrenounced “utopian dream of a postcolonial state” (Hamilton 2013, 348). Pepetela’s utilization of magical realism (The Return of the Water Spirit) allows him to create equivalences between realist sections of his work and allegorical messages about Angolan’s lack of awareness of spirit and economic modernization, capitalist acquisition, and the failed nature of Angola’s national project (Qayson 2009, 164, 169). As a component within his overall cycle of works and used alongside other modes of writing, his strategic and selective employment of magical realism contributes to his overall diagnosis. To mistake satire for comedy would be to miss the fact that Pepetela has chosen to employ “a mode of writing that exposes the failings of individuals, institutions, or societies to ridicule and scorn” (Baldick 2008, 299). Satire renders parodic portrayals of the Angolan elite to be cutting societal diagnoses. As such, Pepetela’s utilization of satire must be seen as a key element of the symptomatological and political remit of his fction. 3.3 METHODOLOGY This methodology is based on two tenets intrinsic to Deleuze and Guattari’s work: frst, the health of an individual, the health of a people, and the health of a society and people are inextricable. The second principle is that once the historical, societal, and economic forces that capture and constrain
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affective capacities are identifed, subsequently, work can begin—strategically, prudently, and bit-by-bit—to undo that which constrains an individual or group, so as to enable them to realize new affects and move into greater health. Similarly, the ethics behind this book’s methodology is that, properly equipped, it is not only possible, but imperative, to bring about positive change in the relations of force that inequitably distribute vulnerability, precariousness, and limit many people’s capabilities to more fully realize their affective capacities. Though Deleuze and Guattari’s works assist a person to combat the largely invisible, cultural, psychological, economic, and sociohistorical forces that fx his or her subjectivity to limited identities, much of the promise of their work has yet to be fully operationalized in postcolonial settings. This work’s methodology aims to provide the means by which several of Deleuze and Guattari’s key concepts can be brought to bear on analyzing the postcolonial relations of force that impinge upon a postcolonial people’s health. Amartya Sen’s endorsement of democracy as the type of governance best suited to enable its citizens to live the life they have reason to value provides a means to use Deleuze to examine the overlap between individual and societal health in postcolonial countries. Patton has shown that Deleuze’s work has areas of overlap with the liberally normative political concept of democracy found in the work of North American political philosopher, John Rawls. Indeed, by suggesting possible components of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-democratic” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 113) in his work on Rawls and Deleuze, Patton introduces mobility into Rawls’s thought and shows a practical, utopian affnity to exist between the two philosophers (Patton 2010a, 137–210). Using Rawls as a bridge, Patton’s work suggests areas of consonance between Deleuze’s political philosophy and Sen’s work on “development as freedom.” Their ethics of “being on the left,” (Deleuze and Parnet 2004, "G" comme gauche) of being concerned for those who are “excluded and for those who are defned as inferior and kept there” (Williams 2005, 6) indicates that the three philosophers’ work originates from a common ethical starting point. It also allows a provisional chain of conceptual equivalences to be established between Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-democratic” and Sen’s capabilities model of human development. As I shall show, when combined with the capabilities model’s “substantive” freedoms, the concept of becoming-democratic enables the transmission of philosophically sophisticated torque to an evaluation of a postcolonial country’s health via the construction of a Health and Capabilities Rubric. As part of his theory of “justice as fairness” Rawls postulates two principles of justice—the liberty and difference principles—by which each citizen would enjoy liberty and equality. Using the social contract tradition as his model, in his search for a “perfectly just society” Rawls fnds that
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according to his principles “justice as fairness” can be guaranteed only in ideal democratic practices and institutions (Rawls 2001). These, of course, do not exist in Angola, the Sudan, or indeed anywhere on our planet. Positing that Deleuzian philosophy is not inimical to democracy as such, but rather is critical of its contemporary incarnations, Patton notes in examining Rawls’s project that “Deleuze’s insistence on the mobility of concepts and on political philosophy’s role in the creation of new forms of life suggests a way of understanding Rawls’s principles of justice as open to the ever-present possibility of new forms of becoming-democratic and new expression of the pure event of democracy” (Patton 2010a, 185–186). Patton writes that “becomingdemocratic” points to ways of criticizing the workings of actually existing democracies in the name of the egalitarian principles that are supposed to inform their institutions and political practices.” He points out that while the “philosophical concept of democracy is a means to counter-actualize what passes for democracy in the present [. . .] ‘becoming-democratic’ is a means to counter-actualize movements or processes of democratization” (Patton 2010a, 156). Patton suggests that “becoming-democratic” might consist of three components. They are frstly, an “opening-up of decision-making procedures throughout society.” A second vector would be how minoritarian becomings—defned as the “variety of ways in which individuals and groups fail to conform to the majoritarian standard”—“extend the scope of the standard,” “broaden the subject of democracy,” and thus “reconfgure the majority” and are continually transforming society. Patton writes that “processes of minoritarian becoming will always exceed or escape from the confnes of any given majority. They carry the potential to transform the affects, beliefs and political sensibilities of a population in ways that amount to the advent of a new people” (Patton 2008, 191). Patton proposes that a third vector of “becoming-democratic” might involve “efforts to achieve a more just distribution of material social goods” (Patton 2010a, 192–193). He concludes that applying “Deleuzian conceptual constructivism” to Rawls’s conception of justice “allows us to see it not as defnitive and fxed but open to future modifcation” (Patton 2010a, 210). Given Sen’s advocacy of democratic practices, it is not diffcult to see that Patton’s conclusion might equally apply to Sen’s open-ended project based in the lives that people can actually lead. Inducing mobility into Rawls’s utopian philosophy by bringing it into proximity with Deleuze’s concept of “becoming-democratic,” Patton shows how Rawls’s conception of justice can be extended to encompass “resistance to the present.” Sen, with his focus on improving the situation for the most vulnerable in developing countries, has critiqued Rawls’s work on a perfectly just society precisely because he fnds that it does not redress real-world inequality. Oriented both to the individual and institutional levels and aimed at the actual lives of the least-advantaged
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members of developing societies around the world, the capabilities model is very much concerned with providing ways to resist the present. However, Patton’s work suggests that, via engagement with Deleuze’s concepts, Rawls’s work can indeed be helpful in resisting the present. In so doing, Patton has, in effect, addressed one of Sen’s principal critiques of Rawls. For many political philosophers, not least of whom are Sen and Rawls themselves, the distinctions between the two are substantive and signifcant. Sen deems that Rawls’s orientation is in a social contract, that Rawls’s preference is for transcendental institutionalism, and that his work is a thought experiment. Sen, more of a consequentialist, favors an idea of justice based in social choice. He believes justice should be based on an examination of the actual lives that people are able to lead, and he advocates for an approach that is comparative and feasible. However, from a symptomatological point of view, the affnities between the two greatly outweigh that which distinguishes one from the other. Both start with a conception of justice that extends differentially to include the least advantaged in society. Both end at the same place: democracy. Rawls determines that only democratic politics guarantee the achievement of justice as fairness while ensuring a stable and well-ordered society (Rawls 2001, 135–140). Similarly, Sen’s embrace of the practices of democracy as a “government of discussion” is a central and recurring theme in both Development as Freedom and The Idea of Justice. Like Rawls, Sen is unequivocal in his endorsement that, judged by the standard of “substantive freedoms that the members of [a particular] society enjoy” (Sen 1999, 18), democracy is the form of governance that enables its citizens to be maximally capable. Sen initially criticized Rawls’s concept of “primary goods” as “things needed and required by persons seen in the light of the political conception of persons, as citizens who are fully cooperating members of society” (Rawls 2001, 58). Yet, Sen admitted that his preference for capabilities over Rawls’s concept of primary goods is not a “foundational departure” from Rawls’s program but “mainly an adjustment of the strategy of practical reason” (Sen 2009, 66).4 Rawls’s rebuttal of Sen’s critique of the infexibility of his concept of primary goods shows that Rawls’s view of justice as fairness, which highlights the value of political freedoms and civil liberties, economic facilities, public health and medical care, and equality of opportunity in education and training, concords almost point-by-point with Sen’s view of “development as freedom” (Rawls 2001, 168–176). In many regards, the differences between the two are negligible. A host of economists and academics concur that the two resemble each other. Keith Dowding fnds that Sen just “provid[es] a different language in which to discuss the [same] issues” (Dowding 2011, 86). Sebastiano Maffettoni fnds it “diffcult to understand wherein lies the true difference between the two” (Maffettone 2011, 121). James Sterba believes that “Sen’s
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and Rawls’s theories of justice are much more compatible than Sen allows” (Sterba 2011, 142). Dowding concludes that he cannot “truly identify what aspects of the world Sen wants—institutionally, procedurally or substantively—that would not fnd favour with John Rawls” (Dowding 2011, 97). The Economist, in evaluating whether Rawls’s focus on just institutions or Sen’s on good social outcomes as what matters, fnds that “strictly both could be right” (Economist 2009). By the end of The Idea of Justice even Sen seems to fnd the two largely similar. Sen concludes by noting the path he took is “parallel” to that of Rawls, and even though he (Sen) “succumbed” to the temptation “to concentrate on distinctions and highlight contrasts” between his and Rawls’s work, what was of greater importance was their “shared involvement in being concerned with justice in the frst place” (Sen 2009, 413). Ultimately, Rawls’s approach, with its concern for contracts, institutions, “organizational propriety,” and “behavioural correctness,” arrives at the same destination as Sen’s with its concern for what emerges and how, and the lives that “people are actually able to lead” (Sen 2009, xv): this is democracy. Sen’s work might be able to provide “useful readjustments” (Maffettone 2011, 120) to the Rawlsian paradigm, yet similarities between the two indicate that the benefts Patton fnds in using “becoming-democratic” to draw out aspects of Rawls’s work on justice as fairness might equally apply to Sen’s human development project. The processes of “becoming-democratic” are not asymptotic. For Deleuze, democracy is not an ideal that can be reached. Deleuze is not critical of contemporary democracies because they do not live up to some sort of “Ideal Democracy.” Rather, as Patton’s work shows, “becoming-democratic” identifes core processes by which societies can become ever more equitable. These processes have no set end: they are open to those that compose them. Such a society would continually vary and transform. Combined with the fve “freedoms” Sen has identifed as being instrumental for a person to live the life she or he values: political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security, the three indicative components of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-democratic” overlap with and supplement Sen’s Global South-sensitive capabilities approach. Sen is decidedly non-utopian and purposefully leaves the conception of what are the “actual livings” that people value open and undefned. Sen indicates that capabilities have a “direct relevance to the well-being and freedom of people” and thus they have an “indirect role” in “infuencing social change” (Sen 1999, 196). He highlights the “two-way relationship” between “the direction of public policy” and the “participatory capabilities” of the public (Sen 1999, 18). Albeit in an inchoate form, this is consonant with Deleuze’s idea of minoritarian becomings infuencing the modifcation and transformation of society. The human development approach is dedicated
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to “enabling all human beings to realize their full potential” (Sen 1999, 75). Such a commitment to “multiple,” “fuid” identities,” each with their “alternative combinations of functionings” (UNDP 2016, 51, 92), indicates a rich overlap with the “creative potential” of the minoritarian becomings component of becoming-democratic. Much as Patton contends that “becoming-democratic” introduces needed “mobility” to Rawlsian thought, a Deleuzian sense of “freedom” introduces an element of indeterminate dynamism into the residual structuralism of Sen’s generally “secure knowledge” (Williams 2005, 1) of what human bodies in well-functioning democracies can do and be. It is a freedom that is incompatible with a stable subject, with past ways of thinking and acting. It is agential vis-à-vis relations of force and power. It is a freedom that can lead to transformations in both what a person can do and be and to existing political institutions and forms of democracy.5 The freedom that Sen refers to throughout his works—the “freedom to achieve actual livings that one can have reason to value” (Sen 1999, 73)—is purposefully and decidedly nonnormative and open-ended. The freedom of movement found at the source of creative transformations, when fxed relations of force are “freed up” or deterritorialized, and that can lead to minoritarian becomings is what this book defnes as good health. It is in this sense that a Deleuzian conception of “health” and Sen’s conception of human development as “freedom” express the same sense. When combined with Deleuze’s notion of symptomatology and his concept of literature as health, the result this work has arrived at is a sevenfold Health and Capabilities Rubric.
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3.3.1 The Health and Capabilities Rubric The Health and Capabilities Rubric contains seven axes along which the various aspects affecting the overall health and well-being of a people have been disaggregated and upon which they are visually represented. (This section and the subsequent four sections refer to the infographic located in section 3.4.) It has been fashioned by combining Sen’s fve fundamental or substantive freedoms: political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security, with the three components Patton suggests might fll out Deleuze’s concept of becoming-democratic. They are: an opening-up of decision-making procedures throughout society, minoritarian becomings that transform society, and a more just distribution of material social goods. Given their overlap, Sen’s category of “political freedoms” has been combined with the Deleuzian (via Patton) “opening-up of decision-making procedures throughout society.” Similarly, “economic facilities” has been combined with a “more just distribution of material goods.” The resulting fve categories have two aspects, an objective as well
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as a subjective component, which is captured on the sixth axe of the rubric. With no aspects in common with any of Sen’s fve freedoms, “minoritarian becomings” stands by itself as the seventh and most purely philosophical category in the Health and Capabilities Rubric. Franco Moretti’s quantitative formalism uses particular aspects of a large number of works of literature across the digital archive (such as the number of words spoken by a character) and mines and tabulates them via computational algorithms. Literary elements serve as quantitative, empirical data in themselves. Unlike quantitative formalism, this work’s postcolonial symptomatological methodology records the details of the authorial diagnosis and then opens to extra-literary sources to corroborate or modify the socio-literary diagnosis. Yet, in a manner that is reminiscent of formalism, this methodology has brought the seven external axes of the Health and Capabilities Rubric to bear on a socio-literary analysis of postcolonial novels. This rubric sieves postcolonial texts, sorting and identifying the various symptoms that impinge upon what Angolan and Sudanese bodies can do. It functions as a symptomatological table on which to tabulate those symptoms. This reveals patterns behind various symptoms and speaks to causation. The disaggregation, isolation, and tabulation of the various symptoms affecting the health and capabilities of a society on the rubric allow us to consider disparate symptoms next to each other, as a whole. By quantifying and visually representing the various points at which a society’s good health is impinged upon and the extent to which it is impinged, the rubric facilitates the identifcation of larger syndromes to which the hitherto seemingly unrelated set of symptoms might pertain. In this regard, this methodology operationalizes Edward Said’s concept of affliation (that refers to cohering processes or networks of identifcation that fow or work through culture, rather than through direct flial descent) which he developed in his analysis of how Mansfeld Park expresses the link between the plantations of the English empire and the “disposition” of English upper-class households (Said 1994, 104). Similarly, it shares aspects in common with Franco Moretti’s concept of “operationalizing,” that is, building a bridge from a theoretical concept to measurement in the world via literary texts (Moretti 2017, 98). Additionally, this postcolonial symptomatological methodology shares affnities with a structuralist or formalist approach to reading literary works in terms of dividing the spectrum of bio-affective health into seven general categories and analyzing postcolonial novels according to that sevenfold rubric. A clinician would not make a defnitive diagnosis based on the presentation of symptoms alone. Rather, while making a diagnosis, she or he would combine a direct observation of symptoms with a complete medical and family history. The clinician might run blood, urine, or imaging tests, while also considering possible environmental and genetic triggers, in order to
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narrow down what diseases or conditions may be causing such symptoms. Employing a similar logic, the syndromes negatively affecting the health of the Angolan and Sudanese peoples are displayed along a symptomatological table and linked to studies done on the various elements by expert sources. This operationalization of Edward Said’s concept of affliation quantifes the “cultural associations between forms, statements and other aesthetic elaborations and institutions, agencies, classes, and amorphous social forces” into which Pepetela’s and Tayeb Salih’s works are plugged (Said 1983, 174).
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3.3.2 The Health and Capabilities Dashboard I have developed the Health and Capabilities Rubric in the search for a certain kind of knowledge about the health of postcolonial countries, such as the emergence of patterns, structure, order, or corroboration of a previously hypothesized condition. This rubric pulls novelistic elements out of context and re-presents them in completely different manners, effectively severing the connection with the “lived experience of literature” (Moretti 2007, 295).6 Though isolated, condensed, and rendered visible as a component on the Health and Capabilities dashboard, each symptom opens back onto the text from which it is derived. The text in turn mediates and opens onto the world, indicating linkages between effect and causation. It is in this “minor” sense that this work considers the literary worlds of Pepetela and Tayeb Salih. At once political and collective, the Angolan and Sudanese literary worlds created by these two authors are not point-by-point equivalences of the countries of Angola and the Sudan. Rather, they are verisimilar “circuits” in which aspects of Angolan and Sudanese society have been isolated and condensed, and in which the “objective” and “subjective” recompose each other. These literary worlds mediate the invisible forces present in Sudanese and Angolan societies at their points of impingement with ordinary Sudanese and Angolan bodies. Situated at the confuence of several distinct disciplines, this symptomatological methodology introduces aspects of various elements common to one feld but which are uncommon to another. To the feld of postcolonial literary criticism, it brings visual representations of datasets common to empirical, quantitatively analytic felds; to the felds of public health and development it brings the diagnostic utility of postcolonial literature. Though graphic representations of literary elements are not commonplace in literary criticism, neither are images completely absent in works of this genre. Indeed, postcolonial literary theorists and critics Pheng Cheah and Réda Bensmaïa both include graphs and schemas in their recent analyses of various postcolonial novels.7 Cheah uses graphics to show the direction of two sets of various romantically charged pairings among eight characters in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry
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Tide. Each pairing variously expresses socially inappropriate sexual desire, which provides much of the dramatic tension that drives the novel’s plot and subplots. The graph showing the movement between the various pairs of Ghosh’s characters is a key component in Cheah’s analysis that Ghosh’s work reveals an otherness that “resists the calculations and desires of capitalist modernity” (Cheah 2016, 277). Bensmaïa includes two diagrams in his work, Experimental Nations. The graphs show how the musical fragments in Assia Djebar’s flm, La Nouba, instead of unifying narrative coherence, work rather to “unhinge or derail” the meaning of the flm’s various sequences. These graphs, which demonstrate the juxtaposition of image/dialogue versus music/sound versus cinematic series, are central to Bensmaïa’s claim that these particular elements of Djebar’s flm and their relation to each other make it possible for Algerians to mourn and reconcile themselves with their painful history (Bensmaïa 2003, 77). Similarly, the frst thirty pages of The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, edited by Neil Lazarus, consist of an extended table upon which a chronology of political and historical events occurring during and topical to the postcolonial era is matched with the date that they occurred and the texts that appeared during that same year. This extended table enables Lazarus to precisely situate postcolonial texts in relation to the signifcant events and historical epoch in which they were located. It also allows Lazarus to concisely trace the span of postcolonial literary studies across the centuries; and it serves as a quick reference to which readers of this Cambridge Companion can refer as they make their way through the analyses of myriad postcolonial texts contained in the book’s various chapters. The various graphs, schemas, and tables employed in these postcolonial literary analyses serve as points of condensation. The most economical manner to present an aspect of an analysis of a text or texts may not always be textual. The visual logic of crafting and utilizing graphs and tables within the genre of a postcolonial literary analysis is one of supplementary economy. The value of this approach is that graphic representations of textual elements do not displace, but rather supplement, these theorists’ complex literary analyses; they are a tool that allows these postcolonial literary theorists to more precisely and concisely craft their detailed analyses of postcolonial literary works. Franco Moretti has moved through the years from producing eloquent, sociologically nuanced and arguably symptomatological readings of individual canonical works8 to elaborating “distant reading” techniques and establishing the feld of quantitative formalism. Quantitative formalism uses computers and algorithmic methods to “mine” the digitized database of books in the public domain to measure specifc aspects of works, such as the volume of specifc words, number of interactions between characters, etc. Images summarizing the fndings of those computational analyses have increasingly
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flled his works (and those of his colleagues at the Stanford Literary Lab). Mathew Jockers, also a trailblazer in the feld of quantitative formalism and a co-founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, writes that such analysis rarely involves breakthrough discoveries; mostly it tests, rejects, or reconfrms knowledge that readers of literature already possess. Jockers emphasizes that the complementary, corroborative type of evidence provided by such “distant reading” practices often confrms what theorists have come to believe using far more speculative methods (Jockers 2014, viii). Similarly, dashboards (which provide snapshots, at-a-glance visual representations of key performance indicators) are commonly used by public health, humanitarian, and development agencies and organizations to capture and report specifc data points, and thus to gauge how well these agencies and organizations are performing. Analytical dashboards support strategic decision-making and analysis; accompanied by contextual analysis and history, these dashboards support drilling down into the underlying details. Those used for monitoring and reporting constantly change as they are updated to refect the status of ongoing activities; they assist in identifying specifc gaps or shortfalls in the overall, multivalent response to a crisis vis-à-vis the pre-established needs of a community or goals of a program. Literary critics and postcolonial theorists may fnd the presence of a dashboard in a literary work jarring. There may be resistance to the idea that quantitative data can be derived from “qualitative” sources. Similarly, development, humanitarian, and public health practitioners, most of whom tend to be technicians skilled in specialized subfelds of their professions who regularly interface with such infographic dashboards, may be uncomfortable both with the qualitative nature of the categories and with the speculative nature of the sources of this knowledge. Nonetheless, each will fnd elements familiar to their respective felds. Supported with the requisite academic and theoretical rigor, the Health and Capabilities Dashboard will support conceptual forays from distinct and distant starting points into mutually unfamiliar territory. Unlike computationally-based quantitative formalism, the postcolonial symptomatological methodology being elaborated in this work does not utilize algorithms or computers to produce the textual analyses visually captured on the Health and Capabilities Dashboard; rather, that coding and sorting work was done manually. The introduction of a graphic dashboard to a socio-literary analysis provides a familiar means for development and public health specialists to interact with the details of a symptomatological analysis of a postcolonial society. Similarly, this dashboard provides a method whereby postcolonial literary critics and theorists can consider the granular, society-specifc aspects impinging human development and freedom in a specifc country. The visualization of the symptomatological table serves as a graphic interface, a limen via which literary critics and development, public health, and humanitarian
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specialists alike can access knowledge about a country that had been heretofore out of their professional purview. Disaggregating and visualizing aspects of the health of a people diagnosed through the spectroscope of a novel along the axes of a symptomatological table enables us to see the individual symptoms that collectively form the syndromes affecting a country.
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3.3.2.1 Objective Data The visual logic that best represents the state of health of countries where freedoms are few and lack is abundant dictates that lack be represented positively. Thus, each of the categories has been posited in terms of lack and unfreedoms, despite the terms’ unwieldiness. Sen’s category of “political freedoms,” combined with the Deleuzian “opening-up of decision-making procedures throughout a society” becomes “political unfreedoms and the opening-up of decision-making procedures throughout a society”; “transparency guarantees” was renamed “lack of transparency guarantees”; Sen’s “economic facilities,” which is combined with the Deleuzian “a more just distribution of material social goods throughout a society” becomes “economic constraints and a more just distribution of material goods throughout a society”; the category “protective security” was renamed “lack of safety net”; and “social opportunities” was renamed “lack of social opportunities.” Correspondingly, (with the exception of the category “lack of a safety net”) the objective values and the ranking scales from which those values were derived have been inverted. Each of the fve numerable categories of the Health and Capabilities Rubric has both an objective and a subjective component. The height of each bar (see section 3.4) represents the quantitative value in a particular category given to a country according to evaluations conducted by internationally recognized, extra-literary sources using transparent methodology available for public scrutiny. Some of these rankings were derived from reports based on broad studies covering a wide range of indicators across a particular feld. Others are rankings based on the value assigned a sole, key performance indicator representative of a broader category at large. Values for Australia have been included to provide a point of reference by which to evaluate the scale and intensity of the deprivations and inequalities in Angola and the Sudan. Australia was chosen because it ranks second only to Norway as the country that provides the highest quality of life to its citizens. Australia’s values thus represent what “developed” countries have achieved in terms of human development. Due to space constraints, this rubric was not applied to Australian novels. Therefore, as there is no subjective data with which to compare the objective data represented in the bar graphs, there is no radar graph for Australia (again, see section 3.4).9
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A chain of three sets of equivalences is involved in representing and quantifying novelistic elements on the Health and Capabilities Rubric. The frst involves the nature of minor literature and its political, collective, representative, and clinical functions vis-à-vis the society which engendered it. Subsequently, particular textual elements represent a broader category on the Health and Capabilities Rubric, for example, instances of bribes or corruption within Pepetela’s novels represent the level of corruption within Angolan society at large. This in turn corresponds with the category of “transparency guarantees” that Sen highlights as playing a large role in creating the substantive freedom a person has to realize a life of value. The third equivalence involves utilizing the value assigned to a particular country that corresponds to a specifc category of the Health and Capabilities Rubric by a qualifed, extra-literary source to quantitatively represent where a country ranks in a particular category on the Health and Capabilities Rubric.
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3.3.2.2 Subjective Data In addition to its objective rankings, the Health and Capabilities Dashboard contains a subjective element that qualifes the quantitative ranking given to each category. The practices of authorial economy necessitate that each novelistic element serve a purpose. Thus, the very inclusion of a particular element within a novel indicates a priori that it serves a purpose within the broader world of the novel. The reappearance or prevalence of elements that speak to the health and capabilities of a country is indicative of the priority the author as clinician of society has judged that particular relations of force play within the broader diagnosis. Commonality indicates priority. The radar graphs on the Health and Capabilities Dashboard represent the rank an author has assigned the various relations of force that impinge upon the health and capabilities of a society or a people, and which an author has mediated in his or her literary world, along the fve numerable categories of the Health and Capabilities Rubric. The subjective values are graphed with a solid line. These values can then be compared to the objective rankings for each category, previously displayed in bar graph form above and represented on the radar graph by the dotted line. The radar graph ranking renders visible the priority an author has accorded each aspect of his or her socio-literary diagnosis as a ratio of frequency of occurrence compared to the overall number of pages of a text or texts. This graph assists us to evaluate the relative importance an author has accorded a particular symptom vis-à-vis its correlating objective ranking. It graphically represents the nuanced, precise, specifcally creative expression of a diagnostician’s sensibility. (See the appendix for a more detailed explanation of the process by which the values in the objective columns were derived.)
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3.3.2.3 Minoritarian Becomings Using becomings as a seventh indicator of societal health, the category of minoritarian becomings in the Health and Capabilities Rubric registers the presence or absence, as well as the nature, of the becomings that occur in a postcolonial text. In contrast to the rich feld of datasets from which the values for the other fve indicators were drawn, there are no studies that quantify the extent to which a society creates the conditions propitious for minoritarian becomings. No datasets exist by which to measure the commonality of transformational, positive deterritorializations within a people, or the extent to which those positive becomings-other are prevented due to environmental conditions and societal restrictions. Therefore, the value for “minoritarian becomings” is derived solely from the texts. As the most purely philosophical category of the Health and Capabilities Rubric, the category “minoritarian becomings” represents to what extent individuals or groups in postcolonial literary worlds can deviate from the standard. Deleuze and Guattari develop the concept of “becoming-minoritarian” in order to express the sense that no individual or society every entirely conforms to the standard but exists rather in a process of constant variation. Patton proffers this concept as an indicative component of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-democratic because it expresses not only their opposition to the majoritarian tendencies of contemporary democracies, but in political terms, it introduces movement into the confguration of a specifc democracy’s relations of force. Becoming-minoritarian recognizes the process by which an individual’s or group’s noncoincidence with the standard introduces difference into democracies, reconfguring and broadening the majority and introducing change in what it means to be a subject of democracy through means which are both legal and democratic. In searching for a category to represent to what extent a society provides the relations and environment propitious to an individual or a group realizing their transformative potential—what this book defnes as good health— minoritarian becomings offers the best, most philosophically rigorous measure of the healthiness of a society. By the properties of its very nature, literature is a medium via which it is possible to identify instances of minoritarian becomings, which are otherwise near ineffable occurrences.10 The very properties of literature also make it possible categorize instances of minoritarian becomings or to identify their absence. Though perhaps rare, instances of minoritarian becomings that bring creativity and newness into the world clearly indicate the presence of good health both on an individual and societal level. In considering how to best capture the absence of minoritarian becomings as also representative of a society’s health, it became clear that a society, by limiting, obstructing, or failing to provide the conditions or opportunities propitious to the actualization of an individual’s or group’s transformative
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potential, exhibited tangible signs of ill health. Furthermore, according to this measure of health, any society that supported relations of force or contained environmental conditions that actively degraded their citizen’s abilities to realize their affective potential—so that which their bodies could do actually decreased—was even further down on the scale. When combined with the related concepts of positive and negative deterritorializations (processes of transformation that undo social structures, processes, and relations of force such that in the new reconfgurations of relations of force an individual or a group is capable of more—positive deterritorializations, or less—negative deterritorializations), “minoritarian becomings” as a category became capable of indicating a society’s health. This category has three options: the presence of joyful, experimental, transformational becomings that connect with other elements in such a way that expand affective capacities and show the human to be neither fxed in form nor determined in function are indicative of good health. The absence of minoritarian becomings in a postcolonial literary work indicates that movement and the transformative potential of human beings is blocked or limited within that society: this absence is an indicator of moderate ill health. As Fanon (2008, 199) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 508–510) have noted, any society in which all movement is blocked, limited, or obstructed is unhealthy. The third possibility is the presence of negative deterritorializations in a postcolonial literary work. Instances where the affective capacities of an individual or a group are tangibly diminished and reduced over time are indicators of the ill-health of a particular society. In addition to joyful, power-enhancing becomings that participate in bringing newness, difference, and variation into the majoritarian standard, the category of “minoritarian becomings” can also represent relations of force that block and limit movement and obstruct health or which deteriorate and bring about a diminution in a body’s affective capacities. 3.4 ANGOLAN DEMOCRACY, ANGOLAN HEALTH To diagram the relationships within the arrangement of Angolan bodies, objects, fows, forces, institutions, spaces, practices, and structures, as Pepetela has, is to map the grim “destiny” of the majority of Angolan people. The health of individual Angolans, like that of all human beings, is imbricated within and to a large extent determined by the geo-historical, sociocultural environment, and political institutions within which they live: geography is destiny. This is true, regardless of which arbitrary colonial borders one grows up within, which were often constructed with little regard to ethnic and religious differences or cherished social arrangements (Ibrahim 2016, 100), with effects that are unintended, unanticipated, and long-term (Schendel 2009, 96, 103). Therefore— regardless of context or nation—health as a concept is both dual and broad. To
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speak of health is to speak of both the individual and the society in which he or she lives; health speaks to the individual as she or he is located within society. Using the Deleuzian concept of health as what a body can do, a person can be deemed healthy to the extent he or she is capable of realizing his or her maximum affective capacities. Health then is the capacity for realizing power- and joy-enhancing relations with other beings and the world, whereby both things and bodies positively and additively vary, become, and become altered. Though this conception of health necessarily includes biological health and well-being as it is commonly understood, it extends beyond the biological body to incorporate all transitory aspects of a person interacting with the world and the bodies within it. Health then includes emotions, thoughts, and intensities. It is the body’s force of existing and power of acting. Health is what a body can do. By this Spinozo-Deleuzian ethological metric, a society can be deemed successful not only to the extent that it establishes the conditions under which the bodies of its members are emotionally, intellectually, and physically sound in the common socio-biological conception of health. By this standard, any nation—be it Australia or Angola—may be evaluated according to how it actively facilitates positive inter-, intra-, and extrasomatic, affect-enhancing transformations in each citizens. Pepetela’s works map what social scientist Nick Fox terms an Angolan “illhealth assemblage.” By juxtaposing the presidential palace’s network, practices, and lifestyles against the shantytown reality of many Angolans, Pepetela has moved the focus beyond ill-health understood as “an attribute of an individual body.” His works consider Angolan health as part of a wider “phenomenon of body organization and deployment within social and natural felds” (Fox 2011, 360). “Health and illness [are] assemblages of the relationships and connectivities that constitute [. . .] networks that may incorporate other bodies, inanimate objects, institutions, and ideas.” Conceptualizing health in this way means that the inability of many Angolans both to live the life they value and to more fully realize their maximum affective capacities is a result of the many “disseminated effects” of the assemblages to which they pertain. The health of Angolans and Angola is not just the somatic property of Angolan bodies; health is, rather, an “emergent feature [. . .] of relationships between bodies and other elements” (Fox 2011, 360).11 The details of Pepetela’s diagnosis are disaggregated and displayed on the dashboard below (Johnston, 2021). 3.4.1 Political Unfreedoms and the Opening-up of Decision-Making Procedures throughout Angola This category on the Health and Capabilities Rubric represents an amalgamation of the capabilities model’s “political freedoms” and the concept of becoming-democratic. Due to its affnities with political freedoms, the
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Figure 3.1 Health and Capabilities Rubric: Angola and Australia. Source: Created by author.
category “opening-up of decision-making procedures throughout a society” has been combined with “political freedoms.” The category “political unfreedoms and the opening-up of decision-making procedures throughout a society” corresponds to the opportunities people have to determine who should govern and on what principles, as well as to scrutinize, express dissent, and criticize public authorities. It is freedom of the press, the presence of political parties, and democratic political entitlements. The “becoming-democratic” component injects an evaluation into to what extent Angola is opening decision-making forums to more and more diverse Angolans with a creative, experimental, transformational dynamism.12 This category captures not only the importance of civil liberties to the good health of an individual and
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society but also injects movement toward ever more democratic processes by which individuals can actively participate in their own governance. These can be conceived of as “negative freedoms” or “unfreedoms” if a person’s ability to fulfll their potential is restrained. Positing that impingements to the political and decision-making freedoms of Angolans affect their capabilities to realize their full affective potential, this component of the Health and Capabilities Rubric examines the specifc role the Bunker’s relations of force play in Angolan health. Bunker offcials, many of whom hold no offcial position, wield more power than even government ministers (Pepetela 2006, 214). The Bunker polices government ministries and the police themselves (Pepetela 2006, 280). It monitors all of society. Jaime’s colleague, Honório, “the censor” “pass[ed] a fne toothed comb over everything written in the press, hunting for subliminal messages against the regime” (Pepetela 2006, 30, 38, 112, 53, 73). Bunker offcials scan the “independent newspapers” (Pepetela 2006, 72, 211) for anything they might bring “to the attention of the public” which “denigrate[d] the regime” (Pepetela 2006, 31). In Predadores, the press is fettered by powerful business interests. Journalists are fred, unfavorable stories are retracted, and apologies printed. Pepetela writes that a prominent newspaper “folded up before [Caposso’s] economic power [which] ended freedom of expression” (Pepetela 2007, 311). The case of the businessman-becomediamond dealer, Antonio, whose military partners break Jaime Bunda’s leg at the end of the novel resounds with the case of Rafael Marques de Morais. (Morais is an Angolan journalist who, having previously spent forty-three days in jail for publishing a criticism of the Angolan president, is now facing a $1.6 million dollar libel suit brought about by the seven generals he exposed in his work: Blood Diamonds: Torture and Corruption in Angola [Cummings 2015].) The Bunker keeps Hooveresque fles on everyone: “In the archives of the Bunker, people had been classifed in a very precise manner: businesspeople, priests, intellectuals, directors, functionaries, those in opposition” (Pepetela 2006, 71). There are “special fles” in the “top drawer” of the “special archive” for “heavyweights” or those “who know something about the heavyweights” (Pepetela 2006, 75, 72). With multiple references to how Jaime Bunda’s colleague in the Bunker, Honório “the censor,” scrupulously monitors the press, Pepetela highlights control of the press as being one of the key means by which the Angolan president and his inner circle maintain their grip on power. Freedom House writes that: media in Angola operate in a restrictive environment [. . .]. State-run media continued to be the principal source of information, as the government maintained tight control over private outlets through legal, political, and security-related
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means. [. . .] Defamation and libel are crimes punishable by imprisonment, and politicians enjoy immunity from any reporting deemed to be “offensive.” [. . .] The president and certain ministries have the right to censor media content. [. . .] Journalists continued to be harassed, intimidated, attacked, and imprisoned [. . .] especially for covering sensitive subjects like antigovernment protests [. . .] or widespread corruption among government offcials. [. . .] Authorities [. . .] occasionally seize and destroy entire editions of newspapers that carry stories critical of the government. (House 2014)
Freedom House is not the only organization to report on the limits and constraints to which the Angolan media is subject. The organization Reporters without Borders (which monitors attacks on freedom of information worldwide) notes that in regards to the standard of a free press Angola has “noticeable problems.” It ranks Angola 128th out of 180 countries in its World Press Freedom Index (Borders 2014). Tony Hodges’s investigations corroborate Freedom House’s and Reporters without Borders’s evaluations of the Angolan press as being “not free.” He writes that:
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the media continues to face state interference and harassment which limits the emergence of a truly independent media. Journalists are driven to self-censorship by the threat of dismissal, detention or other forms of harassment by the authorities. [. . .] The national media is dominated by the state [. . .]. (Hodges 2004, 9)
By showing Bunker offcials seizing and beating suspects, as well as monitoring and censoring the press, Pepetela indicates that Angolans do not have the “political freedoms” or civil rights, which Sen identifes as being one of the most instrumental freedoms necessary for people “to live the way they would like to live” (Sen 1999, 38). On multiple occasions throughout Jaime Bunda, Pepetela shows that Angolans do not have the freedom to “scrutinize and criticize authorities,” express contrary political opinions, or to “determine who should govern and on what principles” (Sen 1999, 38). Yet, if anything, Angola has become less democratic in the years since Pepetela wrote Jaime Bunda and Predadores. Changes to the constitution in 2010 mean that the president will no longer be directly voted into offce by the populace; instead, the president is to be selected by the party who is victorious in the parliamentary elections. Mr. dos Santos now appoints the vice president directly, as well as controlling the electoral machinery and the selection of all the party’s parliamentary candidates. Mihaela Webba, a law professor at Methodist University in Luanda, states that “the accountability in [Angola] is nonexistent. Now the president controls everything” (Dugger 2010). In an article on recent Angolan elections entitled: “By Hook or by
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Crook: Lacking Faith in its Popularity, the Ruling Party Bribes and Bullies its Opponents,” The Economist magazine reported that the MPLA government used “the crudest of cudgels” in order to guarantee victory in the elections of 2012:
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The MPLA would probably have won the election without beating or bribing voters. It has a frm grip on the media, both public and private. Offcial newspapers are handy for propaganda, especially for disparaging UNITA. Should it feel so inclined, the government certainly has the ability to rig the polls. The electoral commission is dominated by the MPLA and voter lists have not been audited externally. (2012)
Censorship of the press is one of the novelistic elements representing the larger category of “political freedoms and the opening-up of decision-making procedures.” It expresses the diagnosis that the Angolan state is actively limiting access, rather than opening-up decision-making procedures, to a greater and ever more diverse set of Angolans. The value of 76/100 (100 being least free, 0 being most free) represented on the Health and Capabilities Dashboard above was derived from the score of 24/100 that Angola received in the most recent edition of the Freedom in the World report put out by Freedom House (2017a).13 The ranking of 33/100 on the radar graph represents the priority Pepetela assigned the state of political unfreedoms in Angola in his overall diagnosis of the state of health of contemporary Angolan society. This ranking represents the number of references in Pepetela’s texts to common Angolan’s access to the political process, as well as political rights, civil liberties, and freedom of the press: 76, over 1,532 pages of text. Each symptom of a disease such as Parkinsons14 does not have equal value in the overall diagnosis of the progressive degeneration of nerve cells in the brainstem. Similarly, not all elements of the Bunker Syndrome impinge upon Angolans’ capacities to realize their maximum affective capacities equally. In other societies, due to the different composition of environments, similar objective ranking along a particular category may have different effects. In this regard, the details of the texts within which a diagnosis is made assist in situating the effect a symptom plays within the overall syndrome. The ranking of 33/100 represents the priority that Pepetela assigned the relations of force constituting Angola’s level of political freedoms and openness of decision-making procedures (or lack thereof) compared to the effects other elements of the Bunker Syndrome have on the overall health of Angolans and Angolan society. It is intended to be taken alongside the objective ranking of 76/100 Angola received in this same category and compared with Australia’s ranking. This gives perspective as to where Angola ranks
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in comparison to other countries in the world. It also captures the clinician’s evaluation as to the prominence this particular symptom plays in the overall syndrome negatively affecting Angolan health and capabilities. This in turn qualifes the objective ranking of the degree to which the relations of force involved in the political “unfreedoms” and limitations on access to decisionmaking procedures impinge upon contemporary Angolans’s capabilities to creatively experiment and live and be and do and feel and think close to their maximum affective potential. 3.4.2 Lack of Transparency Guarantees Amartya Sen has highlighted the importance that having guarantees that each person in a society will deal with each other with tangible evidence of trust and rights to access of information has on that individual’s capability to live a full life. He writes that:
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transparency guarantees deal with the need for openness that people can expect: the freedom to deal with one another under guarantees of disclosure and lucidity. When that trust is seriously violated, the lives of many people—both direct parties and third parties—may be adversely affected by the lack of openness. Transparency guarantees (including the right to disclosure) can thus be an important category of instrumental freedom. These guarantees have a clear instrumental role in preventing corruption, fnancial irresponsibility and underhand dealings. (Sen 1999, 40)
Sen believes that such guarantees create a space that enhances the possibilities for life, for movement. As a component in his equation of development as freedom, they are one of the guarantors, an opener of a quasi-smooth space that removes a structural element common to many societies throughout the world that limits what a people can do or be or think or feel. Yet the opposite is true in Angola. Pepetela writes that everyone is an informant (Pepetela 2006, 41): everyone polices their neighbors (Pepetela 2006, 184). Corruption in all levels of Angolan society—from the lowliest police offcer in the street to ministers in the highest echelons of government—becomes increasingly prevalent in Pepetela’s more recent works (Pepetela 2006, 19, 82, 122, 214, 280, 2007, 22, 23, 27, 376, 377): People of [Vladimiro Caposso’s] age constituted a new generation of those responsible for state-run businesses. Those of the previous generation, who had fought for independence, remained in the highest posts as political and economic leaders. Those of his generation, well trained in the Youth league, had taken mid-level managerial or accounting courses and entered these state-run
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businesses and banks. It was these who interested him, they had the same references, the same dreams, and above everything, the same ambitions, to rise rapidly in life, even if that meant climbing over the backs of many others. [. . .] He learned that every individual has a price, except the saints and heroes, who were rarer every day. In order to get rich, you had to pay the accepted minimum. If the gasosa was too much, people became habituated to demanding more and profts fell. The art was to pay only and always the minimum, never infating the bribe. Of course, others used the same means but without the same rigor. (Pepetela 2007, 376–377)
The omnipresence of the Bunker in Pepetela’s Jaime Bunda novels is what gives the syndrome its name. One of the features of the Bunker as the primary component in the ill-health assemblage negatively affecting Angola and Angolans’ is the institutionalization of patronage networks cascading hierarchically down from the Bunker. Though there is no doubt that the President of the Republic of Angola is the “boss,” the Bunker is not completely coextensive with the government: it is the extra-governmental party apparatus that gives the real power by which the President rules. The narrator of Predadores informs the reader exactly when and how the “Bunker” assemblage came into being:
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That [MPLA party] congress that would stand out in History as the most orthodox of all the congresses15 that they had had and which saw the culmination of the internal battles for the absolute centralization of authority. Some of the most daring analysts date that it was then that the hitherto semi-hidden religious denomination in the interior of the party, with all of the religious rituals designed to worship the boss, appeared in broad daylight, while some of the frustrated ones began to call it the “usurpation-of-power-congress.” (Pepetela 2007, 245)
The Bunker is unmonitored, off the books. The salaries of those working for the Bunker are “fve times higher” (Pepetela 2006, 19) than those with corresponding positions in one of the government’s ministries. Those who work for the Bunker are the “privileged ones” who “aren’t paid out of the state budget” but out of “the blue bags, the parallel system” (Pepetela 2006, 19). Like Vitor and Malongo in A Geraçâo da Utopia and Mr. T in Jaime Bunda, Caposso uses his MPLA connections as a “trampoline” to success (Pepetela 2007, 227). Pepetela details the origins, the economic functionings, and the state provenance of the Bunker assemblage: Don’t forget, this was the epoch of ration cards. Every head of family [with MPLA connections] had a card that gave them access to a particular store
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where they bought a basic food basket suffcient for a month, with the special right to buy many crates of beer. These were important, decisive even, in the initial accumulation of capital, as some families did without drinking them all and the leftover crates were resold at the door of the store at prices twenty times higher than the price at which they had been purchased. The proft allowed for the accumulation of money, later changed to dollars on the black market so as to guard against depreciation, or used to buy supplementary assets, or to buy plane tickets so that they could go acquire cheap goods in Europe and promptly resell them in Luanda at highly elevated prices, always cashing in. (Pepetela 2007, 370)
Jaime Bunda’s driver, Bernardo, informs Jaime “that it’s the parallel that provides, for the markets, for the police, for the church. [People] have to slip a ‘soft-drink’ to the police or lose their driver’s license” (Pepetela 2006, 19). Bernardo intimates that wages for everyone except those working for the Bunker are kept low so as to ensure corruption and thus reliance on the “parallel system.” Angola’s ranking of 81/100 (100=highly corrupt, 0=very clean) in the category of “Lack of Transparency Guarantees” is derived from (and the inversion of, to better present lack visually) the score that Transparency International awarded Angola on its annual Corruption Perceptions Index, or 167th out of 180 countries (International 2017a).16 Angola’s 2017 ranking does not appear to be an aberration: Angola consistently ranks as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. In 2002, Transparency International ranked Angola 98th out of 102 countries. In 2014, despite a greatly expanded feld, Angola fared little better: 168th out of 178 countries. Transparency International writes in the summary of a recent report on Angola that “corruption manifests itself through various forms, including bureaucratic, political and grand corruption, embezzlement of public resources, systematic looting of state assets, and a deeply entrenched patronage system that operates outside state channels” (Chêne 2010, 1). Excerpts from the rest of the report confrm the correspondence between the pictures of the Bunker assemblage drawn by Pepetela with Angolan reality: Power in Angola is concentrated around the head of state, José Eduardo dos Santos, who [. . .] is at the center of a deeply entrenched patronage system that operates outside state channels and undermines the effcacy of these normal channels. The benefciaries of this system are collectively referred to as the “Futungo,” named after the Presidential palace, and control much of the opaque fnancial dealings of the state, using a signifcant proportion of government resources outside the state budget in a parallel system of state revenue deployment. (Chêne 2010, 4)
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Referring to reports from Human Rights Watch and Global Witness, Transparency International’s report goes on to state that Angola’s: Reliance on oil rents rather than direct tax revenues provides unique opportunities to the ruling elite for corruption and self-enrichment [. . .]. The government has mismanaged the country’s mineral wealth, using its control over oil resources to strengthen its political and economic power over the country. [. . .] Over $1 billion dollars per year of the country’s oil revenues—about a quarter of the state’s yearly income—has gone unaccounted for since 1996. [. . .] In addition to resource diversion, offcials are known to enrich themselves by receiving bribes. [. . .] government offcials, particularly from the presidential inner circle, are the main business people and private investors in the country. (Chêne 2010, 4–9)
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Angolan analyst, Tony Hodges, describes the mechanisms by which this happens. Oil revenue is made available to the well connected at artifcially low exchange rates. This enables the benefciaries to make large profts through “round-tripping” between markets. The privileged have access to rationed credit from state banks at real interest rates. With “no clear rule for tenders,” state contracts are awarded to businesses owned by top families. Hodges notes that negotiation is conducted “under the table,” with healthy commissions, etc. He writes that what he calls the “oil nomenklatura” make up the emergent Angolan bourgeoisie. As Pepetela details in his fction, diamonds, diamond trading, and diamond concessions have been instrumental in the accumulation of prime real estate and the acquisition of privatized assets (Hodges 2004, 46). Hodges goes on to state that: dos Santos has astutely cultivated his political base and built alliances through forms of patronage [. . .]. The privatization of small businesses and property was one of the main methods employed. The benefciaries went far beyond the elite to include tens of thousands of urban families [such as Jaime’s uncle] who obtained legal title to previously state-owned apartments for token payments. (Hodges 2004, 58)
Hodges writes that, in effect, President dos Santos has “creat[ed] a class which believes that its property rights derive from the current regime” (Hodges 2004, 58). Hodges notes that the president has signifcant “leverage” over “all members of the establishment.” His list is extensive: “Ministers, vice-ministers, provincial governors, senior military and police offcers, presidential advisors, party leaders, deputies in the National Assembly, senior civil servants, magistrates, and others” receive “Christmas bonuses.” Noting that in some years what Pepetela refers to as “end of the year hampers” have
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been as high as $30,000 USD, Hodges confrms that this amount dwarfs their annual salary (Hodges 2004, 61). Hodges also confrms the existence of a complete system operating in parallel with the offcial system. He writes that there are parallel government fnances and parallel police and governing structures that work in coordination with parallel fnancial markets (Hodges 2004, 130). Hodges also notes the “preoccupation of the offcer corps with business activities.” He describes how the majority of the security forces are engaged in “criminal activity,” and that, as Pepetela notes on several occasions, the children of the elite have access to state scholarships to study abroad (Hodges 2004, 74, 86, 46). Given the immense effort the ruling party has gone through to establish and maintain a wide network of patronage, the question must be asked: why does the MPLA not just deliver public services in a manner more effective than their rivals and so gain political support for their party? Everywhere throughout Angola, roads and basic infrastructure that had been serviceable in colonial times now lie in disrepair (Pepetela 2006, 87). For the development economist, Paul Collier, that answer is simple. Given an abundance of natural resources and the absence of a free press, the embezzlement and subsequent diversion of public funds to those in the patronage networks is simply a more cost effective method of “winning” elections than having to provide acceptable services and working infrastructure throughout the country and thus earning voter’s loyalty (Collier 2007, 44). Indeed, Collier calls this law “survival of the fattest” (Collier 2007, 46). Pepetela describes the spokesperson of the Bunker accordingly: He was a tall sort and had a history of being thin but now was leaning towards being very fat, as with all the high-ranking offcials in the Bunker, incapable of containing themselves in front of the sumptuous meals in which they became engrossed. A greed well exploited by foreign diplomats, who spent their lives inviting him to carefully planned lunches and dinners, where mouths full of food are opened and secrets are revealed with the greatest simplicity. (Pepetela 2006, 91)
Angola has immense oil wealth. In a 2010 article entitled “Oil, Glorious Oil,” in which The Economist magazine extolled Angola as an increasingly attractive site for investors, it reported that: Angola’s vast oil reserves [are] estimated at 13 billion barrels. [. . .] Production rose from 172,000 barrels a day in 1975 to 800,000 in 2002. Today, it stands at 1.9m, making Angola sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest producer after Nigeria. Oil accounts for more than half of the country’s GDP, 80% of the government's revenues and 90% of export earnings. [Yet] Luanda is one of the world's trickiest
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places to do business in. It is sticky, dirty, chaotic and hugely expensive [. . .]. The ports are clogged. The rubbish-strewn streets, potholed and still usually made of mud, are jammed with traffc. Red tape snags almost every activity. Electricity is patchy. Corruption and nepotism are pervasive. (Economist 2010)
The Economist goes on to note that many “see the president and his friends as the source of many of Angola's problems.” Much of Angola’s oil wealth goes missing. Reporting on Angola’s economic performance during the years 2007–2010, the IMF highlighted that $32 billion USD was unaccounted for. However, in a subsequent mission to Luanda, IMF offcials were able to track most of the unaccounted $32 billion: “Preliminary data indicate that quasi-fscal operations undertaken by the state oil company on behalf of the government, fnanced out of oil revenues but not recorded in the budgetary accounts, can explain a large part of the discrepancy” (Wroughton). Gasosas are the novelistic elements—the symptomatological “objective correlative”—representing the endemic and institutionalized parallel system of endemic corruption that cascades down from Angola’s president. Nonliterary analyses of the scale and depth of corruption in Angola corroborate Pepetela’s socio-literary diagnosis that corruption deleteriously affects the capacity of many Angolans to live the life they value. The quantitative value of 81/100 assigned to the element “transparency guarantees” corresponds to Angola’s ranking on Transparency International’s most recent Corruption Perceptions Index. Transparency International is an international, nongovernmental organization whose purpose is to combat global corruption. Based on assessments by experts in the feld, Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) measures the perceived levels of public sector corruption worldwide. The CPI is calculated by averaging the standardized score available for that country from at least three, and up to and thirteen, different data sources from credible institutions that capture perceptions of corruption, rounded to whole numbers (International 2017b). Following the same logic as the category “political unfreedoms,” when applied to the Health and Capabilities Rubric, a country’s CPI score is subtracted from 100 to better present lack visually: 100 = highly corrupt, 0 = very clean. The subjective value of 56/100 represented on the radar graph portion of the Health and Capabilities Dashboard captures the priority Pepetela assigned “lack of transparency guarantees” as an element-cum-symptom of the Angolan literary world in his diagnoses of the pathologies affecting Angolan health. This value is derived from 133 instances of corruption that appear over 1,532 total pages of text. There are nearly twice as many references to corruption as instances of “political unfreedoms”; and it is the second highest (behind “economic constraints and a more just distribution of material goods
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throughout a society”) of any of the fve numerable categories of the Health and Capabilities Rubric. 3.4.3 Economic Constraints and a More Just Distribution of Material Social Goods throughout Angola
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Jaime’s mother complains that life in the shantytowns is diffcult: “It’s hard, it’s hard,” she laments (Pepetela 2006, 180). Without access to the employment opportunities typical to more developed, democratic-capitalist countries, many Luandans survive by “pilfering” goods from the port or by selling “stolen” or “smuggled” goods in the market (Pepetela 2006, 79, 154, 223, 226). They, like Jaime Bunda’s brother, Gégé join the “other unemployed” in “accosting the motorists stopped at traffc lights” in order to hawk “radios or small electrical products” (Pepetela 2006, 181). Meanwhile, those like Vladimiro Caposso, living on the other side of the Gini coeffcient, “have a lot of money stashed away in foreign accounts.” They waste it on “expenses both pharaonic and in bad taste” (Pepetela 2007, 355). Though the elite fourish, there is nothing left for those at the bottom. Jaime Bunda’s brother, Gégé summarizes the situation succinctly: “In this country of greed [. . .] whoever apportions never reapportions because they are left with everything” (Pepetela 2006, 181). The extremity of the societal divide represented in Pepetela’s texts has a palpable correspondence to reality. The Economist reports that: the petrodollar infux has yet to improve ordinary Angolan lives very much. On paper, GDP a head (at purchasing-power parity) has more than doubled since 2002, to $6,300 in 2008, lifting its IMF ranking to 98th out of 181 countries measured, just above China. But last year’s UN human development index put Angola near the bottom in almost every category: life expectancy is 46 years; infant mortality is 180 per 1,000 live births (against less than ten in America and Europe); one-third of adults are illiterate. While the new elite lives sumptuously, two-thirds of the 17m Angolans survive on less than $2 a day. Civil and political liberty is limited. (The Economist 2010)
Tony Hodges’s analysis of the effects the current social, political, and economic arrangement of Angolan society has had on different sets of Angolans corresponds to Pepetela’s representations of how the realities of those living in the gated communities of Avalade and Miramar differ from those living in the shantytowns of Sambizanga: Years of economic decline and under-funding of the social sectors, along with rapid population growth, population displacements and urbanization, have
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pushed millions of Angolans to the borderlines of survival, while at the opposite extreme the dismantling of the former socialist system since the late 1980s and its replacement by a form of unregulated capitalism, distorted by cronyism, have created opportunities for enrichment on a fabulous scale by a small, politically favoured elite. (Hodges 2004, 20)
Hodges writes that if Angola’s “resources were managed properly, Angola’s economy would be among the most dynamic in the developing world. Its people would be among the best fed, educated, and healthiest on the African continent. The opposite is true” (Hodges 2004, 1). Amartya Sen has highlighted the important role opportunities to utilize economic resources for the purposes of consumption, production, or exchange play in determining to what extent a person is capable of living the life she or he values. Sen’s work emphasizes that those concerned with human development must consider livelihoods and income distribution, as well as the availability of and access to fnance. Similarly, Patton’s work on the political aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy and on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-democratic indicates that a more just distribution of material goods throughout a society could be considered an indicative element of that concept. Here, I would highlight the artifciality of the endeavor to isolate and separate one component of an (ill-health) assemblage from another. The various elements of such relations of force are interlocked. They reinforce each other, and often register in multiple categories. Economic considerations are inseparable from and enmeshed within the greater social and political fabric. The previous two sections analyzing corruption and the state of political unfreedoms and the opening-up of decision-making decisions throughout Angolan society have already provided indications as to where Angola stands in terms of economic facilities and constraints and the justness of the distribution of material goods throughout Angola. Angola’s ranking of 94 on the “economic constraints and a more just distribution of material social goods throughout Angolan society” component of the Health and Capabilities Dashboard is derived from Angola’s gross national income (GNI) per capita of $6,291 (expressed in 2011 PPP$) (UNDP 2016, 200). A country’s ranking on the “economic constraints and a more just distribution of material social goods throughout society” component of the Health and Capabilities Dashboard is measured in terms of a country’s per capita GNI as expressed in purchasing power parity dollars (PPP$). PPP is measured frst by fnding the value of a common basket of consumer goods available in each country (e.g., pencils, orange juice, fuel, bread, milk, etc.). By determining what each basket costs relative to the GNI, it becomes possible to create a more representative index of the relative purchasing power of the currency in each country by what people in different countries are able to
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purchase, regardless of the level of their GNI or gross domestic product. 2011 PPP$ or international dollars are a hypothetical unit of currency that has the same purchasing power parity that the US dollar had in 2011. PPP$ is used in macroeconomics because it equalizes the purchasing power between currencies by accounting for differences in infation and costs of living. It is similar to the “Big Mac Index” which measures the PPP between different nations by measuring the cost of this ubiquitous hamburger. Converting currencies to PPP dollars allows one to make “apples-to-apples” comparisons. However, it must be noted that using estimated per capita GNI, even when adjusted to take into account PPP, as an indicator of economic facilities, constraints, and distribution of material resources and services in a country, presents a fat economic picture of that country. Nor does it allow for an intra-country disaggregation of economic data by region, sex, age, or ethnicity. Yet, while imperfect, it allows us to compare pricing and economic constraints and facilities between different countries with differing currencies (Hall 2017). Other macroeconomic tools such as the Quintile, Palma, or Gini ratios (which variously quantify the inequality that exists within a country) more accurately indicate the economic inequalities that exist within societies around the world and which are mismeasured or papered over by gross macroeconomic measurements, such as GNI or GDP (UNDP 2016, 206–209).17 Despite the depth and richness of the Human Development Index’s (HDI) many datasets, some datasets are not available for each country. I found this to be the case when evaluating the availability of datasets representative of the Seno-Deleuzian category of “economic constraints and a more just distribution of material social goods throughout a country” and which were available for Angola, the Sudan, and Australia (as a point of reference). For instance, data was not available for the Sudan in the categories of “Inequality in Income (%),” or the “Inequality-adjusted Income Index,” both of which may have presented a more nuanced picture of economic facilities/constraints and the in/justness of income distribution within Angola. However, data from all three countries was available in the category of “Gross National Income (GNI) per capita (2011 PPP $).” Thus, this dataset was chosen to represent the economic constraints and the meagerness of the economic facilities to which the majority of Angolans and Sudanese have entitlement. The per capita GNI fgures for Angola, Sudan, and Australia were taken from UNDP’s HDI (UNDP 2016, 198–200). (As per the logic used to calculate the preceding objective scores, the GNI fgures for each country are rounded, made to correspond to a 100point scale and then subtracted from 100. The per capita GNI of Australia has been provided as a point of reference.) Pepetela’s works indicate the difference in the economic facilities and material resources to which residents of Sambizanga—those “excluded by the city”—have entitlement to, and the economic facilities and material
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goods those favored by the Bunker can command. Pepetela’s texts and contemporary political and economic analyses of Angola make clear that, given the quantity of wealth accumulated by those favored by the Bunker apparatus (and which greatly skews the measures of average income), the income that those “excluded by the city” must be able to command is much less than the median income of $6,291 per year. With 215 references to jobs, income, livelihoods, economic facilities and constraints, and distribution of income throughout Angolan society over 1,532 pages of text (compared to 76 mentions of political unfreedoms and 133 instances of corruption), Pepetela prioritizes this category above all others. His diagnosis that the “savage capitalism” of the Bunker Syndrome negatively impinges upon what Angolan bodies can do to a greater extent than any other symptom is represented on the radar graph by the value of 91/100.
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3.4.4 Lack of a Safety Net With the third greatest number of landmines laid on its territory in the world (UNICEF 1996), and no functional system to assist landmine victims, the effects of the civil war are everywhere visible throughout Angolan cities. War amputees—both military veterans and civilians—are as equally omnipresent in Pepetela’s works as they are begging for alms on the street corners of Luanda. They are an integral component of the set of people Pepetela refers to as “those excluded by the city” (Pepetela 2007, 360). One of the core freedoms that Amartya Sen emphasizes as being integral to the fourishing of a people are the protective security measures that can prevent the most vulnerable people in a society from being reduced to misery, starvation, and even death. These can be either institutional arrangements, such as unemployment benefts or income supplements to the poor, or ad hoc arrangements, such as cash-for-work emergency public employment programs designed to generate income for the destitute, or food, hygiene, and shelter packages, such as are commonly provided by humanitarian organizations (Sen 1999, 10, 38, 40, 53, 127, 184, 185, 187). These protective security arrangements are the last line of support that can buoy the most vulnerable members of a society and prevent them descending into multidimensional poverty, misery, starvation, and death. Preoccupations about the lack of such arrangements in Angola began to appear in the pages of Return of the Water Spirit: “How much lower can we sink?” people asked while standing in the queue, either for the bus, or in front of the store with goods that few of them could afford to buy, or at the hospitals that had neither medicine, cotton nor gauze, or in the schools that had no books and no desks. Luanda was flling up with people
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feeing from the war and hunger—at a rate that was as fast as it was suicidal. Thousands of homeless children loitered in the streets, thousands of youths sold and resold things to those who drove past in their cars, countless numbers of war amputees begged for alms at the market. At the same time, important people had luxury cars with smoked glass. No one ever saw their faces. They drove past us and perhaps they didn’t even look so as not to have their consciences made uneasy by the spectacle of all that misery. (Pepetela 2002, 84–85)
Jaime Bunda notes that “their numbers are increasing, the amputees are now coming to Uptown instead of staying at the principal crossroads” (Pepetela 2006, 119). Predadores marks a shift in how they are presented in Pepetela’s texts: now the poor and the war-wounded have names, histories:
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Sometimes people remembered, Luanda should be a beautiful city, trash can’t be seen on the streets. And military police would come, pick up [Simão Kapiangala, a decorated war hero] and the other mutilated ones proliferating on the city streets, take them like trash to some gullies far from the city center where they gave them two days of military rations and then forgot about them, leaving them to die slowly. Those that had prostheses or had only lost one leg were the frst to return to Luanda’s streets. Simão, curling up so he could roll over the incandescent asphalt took longer, he was always the last to arrive at work, as they said. Can anyone imagine how a person can move about having only one arm? (Pepetela 2007, 167–168)
There is another important shift in Pepetela’s later work in the relation between the elite and the most vulnerable members of Angolan society. The rich no longer drive silently by the beggars on the street without regarding them as they did in The Return of the Water Spirit. In the later work, Predadores, Ivan “the Work-Hater” (Imbumbável) Caposso, the most worthless of Vladimiro Caposso’s children, runs over Simão Kapiangala like “a dog” as he begged for alms in the street (Pepetela 2007, 161). Nevertheless, the result for Caposso’s child is the same as for the murderer of Catarina Kiela Florência in Jaime Bunda: a minister in Vladimiro Caposso’s circle of connections interferes in the case to have the charges against his child dismissed. Angola has experienced disasters whose effects have disrupted the functioning of society and caused human, material, economic, or environmental losses that exceeded its ability to cope using its own resources. By defnition, such disasters, whether natural, or as in the case of Angola’s civil war, man-made, overwhelm the local, regional, and national arrangements in place to care for the most vulnerable people in a society. In such instances, international humanitarian organizations and UN agencies provide life-saving assistance
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to the most affected people. The international, medical NGO, MSF has been providing such medical assistance as it could to Angolans affected by the civil war, since the war’s earliest days. Founded jointly by journalists and doctors in the wake of the Biafra crisis, since its inception MSF has defned its role as providing both medical assistance to people affected by disaster and confict, and témoignage, or bearing witness to the conditions negatively affecting a people’s health. The February 2002 assassination of Jonas Savimbi brought the civil war swiftly to an end. Improved access to many previously inaccessible areas revealed that Angola was in the middle of a massive famine. UN agencies, members of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, MSF, and other NGOs began providing nutritional and medical assistance to tens of thousands of people. MSF interviewed those who began to arrive in areas accessible to humanitarian groups in order to better understand the reasons for their “catastrophic health condition.” These interviews were collected and published as reports in the fall of 2002. Angola, After the War, Abandonment and Angola: Sacrifce of a People testifed to the fact that after years of abuse as instruments of war (both the MPLA and UNITA unhesitatingly used forms of violence and terror to dominate the civilian population, including depriving them of food and other basic resources needed to survive) the Angolan population was simply abandoned in peace. These témoignages also contained corresponding epidemiological data on malnutrition and retrospective mortality rates. MSF bore witness to the absence of institutional protective security arrangements in Angola, without which there was nothing to keep the poorest and most vulnerable people in Angolan society from starving to death. Despite an exhaustive international humanitarian intervention, thousands died from hunger in those months. MSF’s reports directly inculpate the government of Angola, not only for failing to provide a safety net for all Angolans, but for sacrifcing and deliberately abandoning the Angolan people (Frontières 2002a, 2002b). Previously, on November 11, 2000, MSF had published a special report entitled “Behind the Façade of Normalization: Manipulation, Violence, and Abandoned Populations.” In this report, MSF again bore witness to the insuffciency of the protective security arrangements and aid being giving to the Angolan people by the Angolan government (Frontières 2000). In this special report, MSF detailed the high price, in terms of demographic and health data, (e.g., elevated mortality and malnutrition rates, as well as needlessly recurring epidemics), that common Angolans were paying as a result of their dependence on political parties completely indifferent to even their most mortal of concerns. Seeking to maximize its effect, MSF timed the release of this report to correspond with the twenty-ffth anniversary of Angolan independence: November 11, 1975. Pepetela employed the same symbolic logic in his frst Jaime Bunda novel. The rape and callous strangulation of the young girl, Catarina Kiela Florência, by the son of a high-ranking Bunker offcial—the
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act with which Jaime Bunda opens and whose subsequent investigation sustains the action of the entire novel—occurred on the same day MSF released its report: November 11, 2000. Each with its different sense bears witness to the same event: on the day of Angola’s silver jubilee, rather than celebrating the achievements of the independent nation of Angola over its frst quarter of a century of existence, the nascent Angolan state was doubly indicted for the violation, murder, and deliberate neglect of its people. In both instances, the culprits are clearly identifed: those who emerged victorious in the civil war and their heirs. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nicholas Kristof, in a recent article on the ethnic violence being perpetrated by the state of Myanmar on the Rohingya, and French academic, Gérard Prunier, in his investigations into the Darfur crisis in western Sudan, have both described state strategies that are applicable to strategies employed by the state in post-bellum Angola. In what is an era of “slow motion” genocides, Prunier and Kristof point out that states no longer have to kill their internal opponents . . . just to let them die (Kristof 2018; Prunier 2008). Whether in Darfur, Rhakine State, or Angola, the failure to provide services such as access to health care or arrangements by which the most vulnerable members of a society, can shelter and feed themselves and their families eliminates them just as implacably as more sudden and spectacular forms of violence. That MSF released a report detailing the abandonment of the Angolan people by the Angolan state on the same day that Pepetela allegorically mediates the rape and murder of the young Angolan nation by the predatory elite class (embodied in the young girl: Catarina Kiela Florência, and the perpetrator: the feckless, unnamed, and untouchable son of an infuential politician) shows the coincidence to be more than simply corroborative. Both entities, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning medical NGO and an author who has been writing on Angola for several decades, identifed the pathologies negatively affecting the lives of the Angolan people. Using the resources and tools particular to their distinct felds, both diagnoses implicated the same causal factor: the dehumanizing effects of “savage capitalism” combined with preexisting, virulent, colonial-era caste, tribal, and class racisms. These ways of being and thinking and doing were further solidifed via Cold Warfuelled support of opposing military, political, cultural entities: UNITA and the MPLA. The dire struggle for economic and political power, coupled with immense petro-mineral wealth, resulted in the formation of a Stalinist state apparatus, which, with the turn to capitalism, has become the neopatrimonialist network of the Bunker. The result is an immensely wealthy country in which the most basic arrangements to prevent the most vulnerable Angolans from succumbing to poverty, misery, and starvation are completely absent. Pepetela’s texts highlight the indifference of many of the ruling Angolan elite
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to the lives of their fellow citizens. He has diagnosed this as a pathology: it is a singular, sociocultural deformation pertaining to the extreme form of poorly checked, less-than-democratic, postcolonial capitalism. The Bunker Syndrome’s life-negating necropolitics favors a few on the opposite end of the spectrum from the life-affrming praxis of humanitarianism that sought to mitigate the worst effects of the Angolan state’s deliberate neglect of its people. Sen’s work highlights the role that a country or society’s social safety net plays in preventing the most vulnerable members of a society from slipping into poverty, misery, starvation, and death. Whether ad hoc local or regional arrangements, or federal protective measures, such as the army and police, or unemployment insurance or relief assistance after disaster has struck a community, the presence of such measures are the last arrangements a society has to keep its poorest and most vulnerable from abject misery and death. When refecting upon what quantitative measure would most accurately capture the extent to which a society succeeded in preventing its most vulnerable members from slipping into misery and death, I had to consider which members of any society were typically the most vulnerable to social, political, or economic shocks. The most vulnerable groups of people are similar in virtually every society around the world: children under fve and their lactating mothers, as well as the old, the infrm, and the disabled. Not only that, as it is widely known by most humanitarian organizations and development agencies that children under fve are typically the most vulnerable members of any society, there are many programs throughout the developing world that specifcally target children under fve to make sure they receive adequate nutritional assistance and the appropriate vaccinations, etc. A result of the widespread presence of such programs, along with the need to monitor and evaluate their success or lack thereof, is that data on the health and well-being of infants and young children is captured in virtually every country around the world. Vulnerability varies from country to country and is much more extensive than just infants and young children. However, the percentage of malnourished or stunted children present in a society was chosen to represent the broader category of “lack of a safety net” because this fgure captures either the absence of, or the extent to which, existing protective security arrangements fail to prevent its most vulnerable members from slipping into poverty, misery, starvation, and death. The WHO defnes stunting as: the impaired growth and development that children experience from poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation. Children are defned as stunted if their height-for-age is more than two standard deviations below the WHO Child Growth Standards median. Stunting in early
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life—particularly in the frst 1000 days from conception until the age of two— has adverse functional consequences on the child. Some of those consequences include poor cognition and educational performance, low adult wages, lost productivity and, when accompanied by excessive weight gain later in childhood, an increased risk of nutrition-related chronic diseases in adult life. Linear growth in early childhood is a strong marker of healthy growth given its association with morbidity and mortality risk, non-communicable diseases in later life, and learning capacity and productivity. It is also closely linked with child development in several domains including cognitive, language and sensorymotor capacities. (Organization 2018)
I have taken the values for the rates of stunted infants in Angola and Sudan (and Australia as a point of reference) from the 2016 HDI (UNDP 2016, 206, 208). Angola’s ranking of 19 on the “lack of safety net” category is derived from the percentage of Angolan children under the age of fve who are malnourished to the extent that they are moderately or severely stunted (UNDP 2016, 228). The percentage of malnourished children present in a society was chosen to represent the broader category of “lack of a safety net” because it captures the extent to which the most basic of protective security measures function to sustain the life of the most vulnerable Angolans, such as those mutilated by war and landmines. That today almost 30 percent of Angolan children are moderately or severely malnourished indicates the signifcant extent to which Angola lacks a social safety net to support the most vulnerable members of Angola society and prevent them from slipping into poverty, misery, and death. The value of nineteen on the radar graph corresponds to the priority Pepetela assigned to the “lack of safety net” affecting the health and capabilities of Angolans. This ranking corresponds to the 44 instances where “lack of protective security” appeared over 1,532 pages of text. The majority of these references are to war amputees who, with no substantive program to provide them with prostheses, job training, or disability payments, migrate to Luanda’s central streets where they are forced to beg in order to survive. As the subjective ranking indicates, these war-wounded are almost as omnipresent in Pepetela’s works as they are on the streets of Luanda. Their presence not only on the streets of Luanda but within Pepetela’s literary world is an indictment of the Angolan government’s indifference to the lives of the most vulnerable of its citizens. 3.4.5 Lack of Social Opportunities Theoretical biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard has documented the role the environment and the organization of societies play as agents of human
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development, both constituting and constraining an individual’s potentia agendi, vis existendi, and the production of variation (West-Eberhard 2003, 20, 24). The arrangements a society makes for education and healthcare (as well as land reform, etc.) instrumentally establish a person’s force of existing and powers of acting, as well as infuencing the percepts, affects, intensities, and relations that she or he can experience and form. Social opportunities represent positive and negative freedoms. That is, societal arrangements are both real opportunities and freedom from constraints and impinging interference, both of which contribute to an individual’s participation in the social, cultural, economic, and political activities of his or her community and country. The capabilities model of human development highlights that social opportunities are a component of a broader, comprehensive approach that is interlocked with and facilitated and reinforced by other instrumental freedoms (Sen 1999, 11).18 Importantly, social opportunities are instrumental preconditions constitutive of a person’s agency and voice that make it possible for a person to participate, not only directly in the political and economic processes of his or her country, but to do so critically. Life in contemporary Angola is diffcult for the majority of people. With over a million people internally displaced during the war, few could return to the land they left: the land is “full of landmines and empty of people” (Pepetela 2006, 37). Much that existed at the time of Angolan independence—roads, basic infrastructure, arrangements for health care and schools—fell into neglect and disrepair with the precipitous departure of the Portuguese and the ensuing forty years of civil war. Everywhere, roads and basic infrastructure that had been serviceable in colonial times now lie in disrepair (Pepetela 2006, 87). Today, many of “the disinherited of the disinherited” (Pepetela 2006, 30) create lives for their families in shantytowns such as Sambizanga, or other giant, informal slum settlements (musseques). Many such peri-urban settlements are built in environmentally risky, foodprone areas, “without authorization or planning” (Pepetela 2006, 178). Most Angolans have weak or informal tenure over the land their shelters are built on; in actuality, many are unable to avail themselves of the tenure rights that might formally be theirs. Joining the war-displaced in these shantytowns and peri-urban townships around Luanda are those who have been forcibly removed from properties proximate to the sea or deemed prestigious and upon which gated communities and “restaurants or cafés” are constructed (Pepetela 2006, 48, 30, 37). “In a city with no water,” the mayor of Luanda orders the plants on the street to be watered, yet does not provide drinking water to its residents (Pepetela 2006, 187). There is no electricity. The typical facilities in these musseques consist of “the latrine [which is] a hole dug in the ground, hidden from view by woven reeds and without a cover” (Pepetela 2006, 179). A
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family is considered well off if it has managed to fnd a few corrugated iron sheets to complement the wooden planks, cardboard, plastic sheeting, and bricks with which the walls and ceilings of their shelters are constructed, and if less than thirteen people sleep under its roof (Pepetela 2006, 35, 179). In these townships, children and the old die from preventable and easily treatable diseases, such as cholera, tuberculosis, and yellow fever (Pepetela 2006, 52, 30). All have experienced great hunger, which is still pervasive (Pepetela 2006, 40). Political and economic inequities are reproduced and reinforced in the social arrangements prominent in Angolan society. Those in Sambizanga all have children or brothers killed in the war (Pepetela 2006, 180); while those close to the Bunker do not: As [Vladimiro Caposso] couldn’t immediately get a scholarship for his son he spoke with a business associate who was a general and who guaranteed that when his son was called up for the troops speak with me, I will solve it. And in fact the general made good on his promise. He was called two times and there were postponements, it was enough for the general to call a friend from the recruiting service and then Caposso would do the rest, that was, pay the respective gasosa. There it was, resolved [. . .] none of their two sons would go to war, let the sons of others go [. . .]. (Pepetela 2007, 277)
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Responding to his possible conscription, Jaime Bunda’s brother Gégé (who Jaime deems “is most defnitely a subversive” for being “forthright”) declares: If I’m conscripted I’m not going. I’ll stay here in the township, who’s going to come look for me? I’m not going to the army, even less to war. First let the sons of ministers, generals, businessmen go [. . .] those who go off to study overseas as soon as they reach the age of having to give their names to the army, and always escape. We’ve already lost a brother in the war, that’s enough. We, who don’t have parents to organise scholarships so we can go and study far away, are the ones who die or get mutilated. And then they tell us to go beg on the streets because they don’t pay pensions to amputees. (Pepetela 2006, 180)
The lives and fortune of the Angolan elite, which includes those that historians refer to as the “100 families,” the “old” and “new creoles,” the oil “nomenklatura,” (Hodges 2004, 42, 46) or the novos ricos, look quite different. Pepetela’s texts show the path to wealth and infuence lies through skilful and sycophantic manipulation of party affliation to leverage subsequent social and economic “opportunities” afforded to those in party positions, and which allows them to rise ever higher through the MPLA party ranks. Subsequently, party loyalists receive preferential access to scholarships so
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their children can study abroad (Pepetela 2006, 216). The houses of the Portuguese who had fed at independence are made available to those favored by the regime for “nominal,” “symbolic” prices (Pepetela 2006, 135, 48, 2007, 360). Additionally, they receive “a good hamper at the end of the year,” as well as items that improve their “quality of life.” These include “kitchen items” and “cars from work when [they are] taken out of service after a few years” (Pepetela 2006, 48):
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The real salary was the blue or green or pink card which granted access to different shops where one could stock up on beer and food. The card issued by the Bunker was that of the privileged, one could take away plenty of beer with it, as it granted access to the Leader’s Shop, better than the Technocrats Shop, which in turn was incomparably better than the shop of the Bureaucrats, a paradise compared to that of the ordinary People. T began to live like one of the well-off. With the resale of beer from the shop he accumulated wives and houses, these evidently provided by bureaucrats who lived in fear of his courtly intrigues. (Pepetela 2006, 62)
That which largely determines whether a person advances within Angolan society—but which does not guarantee security there—is his or her connection to the “Bunker.” Those deemed “heroes in the fght for independence” were rewarded “with important positions, which enable [them] to earn a lot of money” (Pepetela 2006, 215). When “occasional changes” force them out of these “positions of distinction owing to [their] role in some swindles,” they soon fnd business opportunities, “some legal, others not even more or less” by which they “can enrich [themselves] like Midas” (Pepetela 2006, 215). “Well connected” businessmen, with “bigwigs in [their] pocket” (like Vladimiro Caposso) are “protected” (Pepetela 2006, 112, 117). The two principal activities of those within the Bunker are to “guess what will please the Bunker and especially its commandant” (Pepetela 2006, 90), and to surveil their colleagues and competitors. If one can fnd “skeletons in [his opponent’s] closet,” or catch a rival “with his hand in the cookie jar,” he “can get served on a tray to the commandant,” thereby consolidating and advancing one’s own position (Pepetela 2006, 103, 217). As Carmina Cara de Cu (Return of the Water Spirit), Vladimiro Caposso (Predadores), Vítor Ramos (A Geraçâo da Utopia), and Mr. T and the DO (Jaime Bunda) know, everyone “has to be attentive to his career, ethereal as rising smoke which the slightest breeze could break up” (Pepetela 2006, 63). If not, they will get “fucked over” (Pepetela 2006, 103) by a rival looking to take what is theirs. The few social opportunities open to most Angolans are precarious and largely emanate from one source: the extra-governmental, mineral wealthfuelled patronage system Pepetela calls the Bunker.
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The score of sixty-three Angola received for “social opportunities” in the bar graph component of the Health and Capabilities Dashboard corresponds to the average years of education that an Angolan child receives: fve (UNDP 2016, 198–201). Years of education was chosen as the data set representative of the larger category of “lack social opportunities.” This is due to the direct correspondence between years of education and poverty levels, infant mortality, and birth or fertility rates in peoples throughout the world (Sen 1999, 41).19 The availability and quality of health care throughout a society is, of course, another social arrangement with immediate and quantifable benefts to a people’s levels of health and capability. However, as education levels closely correspond to the availability of health care throughout a country, are easy to quantify and which provide readily available data sets, years of education has been chosen to represent the broader category of “lack of social opportunities” in the Health and Capabilities Rubric. To represent this as a percentage, the years of education that each child receives on average, as per the fgures found in UNDPs HDI, was converted into a percentage when compared to the years of education children around the world receive. The 13.4 four years of education enjoyed on average by children in Switzerland, which has the highest education rate in the world, was equated with 100 percent. Angola’s (the Sudan’s) and Australia’s scores were derived as a percentage from this standard. The value of 28 on the radar graph is the visual representation of the 65 instances social opportunities are referenced over 1,532 pages of text in the six novels examined by this work.
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3.4.6 Minoritarian Becomings in Angola “Minoritarian becomings” is the purest literary-philosophical category of the seven categories that together compose the Health and Capabilities Rubric. Included by Patton as an element that could indicatively contribute to the Deleuzian concept of “becoming-democratic,” this category contains no quantitative aspect to it other than to represent either the presence or absence of minoritarian becomings. This component of the Health and Capabilities Rubric also registers the presence of what Deleuze and Guattari call “negative deterritorializations.” Deterritorializations occur when fxed relations of force within which an individual or people are imbricated become freed up. However, negative deterritorializations do not lead to new, positive organizations and power-enhancing relations that prevail over whatever new, secondary situations and relations of force an individual or society comes to fnd itself in, such as is the case with minoritarian becomings. In negative reterritorializations, rather, a body’s capabilities become immediately obstructed and reorganized (reterritorialized) in forms that impinge upon the transformations among bodies that such a freeing up brings. Instead of
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releasing new capacities in bodies to act and respond, bodies involved in negative territorializations become capable of less and have their powers for doing and being reduced. The category of minoritarian becomings has three registers on the Health and Capabilities Rubric. It can note the presence within a postcolonial author’s works of minoritarian becomings that could transform a society. Minoritarian becomings are a sign of good health in the dual, Deleuzian terms employed by this book: both on the individual bio-affective level and at the social, collective level. Such good health is represented on the Health and Capabilities Dashboard with a sun. This category can also register stasis, obstruction, constraint, and the absence of movement, transformation, change, or newness in a postcolonial literary world. Represented on the dashboard by the graphic of a rip current or dangerous surf warning, this book equates the absence of minoritarian becomings with ill health. The presence of negative deterritorializations, in which changes in conditions of life not only separate bodies from what they can do but actively and decisively bring about a diminution in a body or bodies’ power to affect and be affected, indicates poor, deteriorating health. This is represented on the Health and Capabilities Dashboard by the biohazard sign. With the possible exception of The Return of the Water Spirit, none of the six works analyzed here contain any instances of characters that fail to conform to the norm, thereby extending the scope of the majoritarian standard either qualitatively or quantitatively. Grant Hamilton has laid out a convincing argument in his analysis of The Return of the Water Spirit that the movement of people dancing naked in the streets (Pepetela 2002, 100) in protest of the same “gangrenous practices of the ruling elite” (Hamilton 2013, 349) that are causing Luandan high rises to collapse is an example of a liberation of desire. As such, it constitutes a “pure” revolution. This may be so, and there are decided similarities between the movement described by Pepetela and Argentina’s Cacerolazo’s and the United States’s Occupy movements. Each was a leaderless, quasi-anarchist movement expressing popular dissatisfaction with the inequitable concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority of the elite class. Unlike the Arab Spring revolts, these three movements were not subsequently reterritorialized within re-formed oppressive state apparatuses. Rather, failing to create the machinery necessary to transform their respective societies, or to plug into existing machinery dedicated to that proposition, these electrifying civic movements gradually lost steam; and over time, their members were soundlessly reabsorbed into the same societies they had mobilized against. Perhaps these examples serve to elucidate the difference between liberation of desire and minoritarian becomings. Minoritarian becomings may originate with a liberation of desire, but to transform an individual or society even
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slightly affects and percepts must be deterritorialized and come to be reorganized in power-enhancing and sustainable relations. It is impossible to know if the aforementioned liberations of desire will take root at a later time and participate in summoning forth a new world or new people. Nevertheless, highlighting the naked, joyful, leaderless movement described by Pepetela in The Return of the Water Spirit is an example of the way in which reading literature as indicator of health allows us to identify a precondition of minoritarian becoming. However, it seems signifcant to note in passing that, having named a member of this Proudhonian leaderless movement, Honório, several novels later (in Jaime Bunda) Pepetela gives the same name, Honório, to the Bunker offcial whose job it was to monitor and censor Angolan newspapers for messages subversive to the regime. Read against the dystopic arc of Pepetela’s oeuvre, it is hard not to view this fantastical movement as a spike of wishful, utopian optimism that, failing to establish any sustaining relations, was crushed under the evolving Bunker assemblage. From the point of view of this book’s methodology, the question of whether this movement in Pepetela’s literary world will call into being a people yet to come or not is separate from the novel’s symptomatological value; for both are endeavors in health. For all the constraints that limit and block the possibilities of Angolan lives, the presence of inextinguishable, pure life is variously mediated in Pepetela’s works, as well. In his essay, “Immanence: A Life,” Deleuze uses a passage from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend to illustrate the distinction between the immanence of “a life” and the life of an individual. At one point in Dickens’s novel, a rogue lays dying. For the moments that this scoundrel hovers between life and death, stripped from the particularities—his subjectivity—which made him an (unsavory) individual, bare, his rescuers feel warmth for that life. At that moment, the life of this individual gave way to an impersonal yet particular life freed from the internal and external conditions and accidents which formed him as a particular (contemptible) individual. And while he lingered there—a life in play between living and dying, the hearts of those around him softened; however, as he is restored to life, the hearts of those gathered around him grow hard as he once again becomes the villain they despised. This instance illustrates for Deleuze the value and grace of a life—impersonal, prepersonal, apersonal, yet singular—that coexists with the coincidences and catastrophes of the particular life to which it corresponds (Deleuze 2001, 28–29). Deleuze writes: “Pure life” refers to the “impersonal yet singular,” (Deleuze 2001, 27) germinal, powerful, vital, nonorganic immanence of a life that coexists with the particularities and accidents of the life to which it corresponds but to which it is not reducible (Patton 2010a, 132). Immanent, indefnite life is everywhere, not only at moments near death or birth. Pepetela represents life as differentially obstructed in both the shantytown of Sambizanga and the gated communities
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of Avalade; however, his works show pure life to be ceaselessly stirring within the open-air market of Roque Santeiro:
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total confusion and chaos [. . .] reign. [. . .] a hundred thousand people there together at the busiest time of day [. . .] and a million passed through every day. [. . .] the market grew in open clandestinity in front of everyone’s eyes. Not a day went by without a bench appearing, with new products. [. . .] They were certain to fnd everything, even what didn’t appear in any shop, cheaper than anywhere else. [Roque Santeiro has]: bars, restaurants, prostitution, drug selling, thieves, killers for hire, illegal immigrants, forgers of passports and driving licenses, casinos. (Pepetela 2006, 79–80)
Indefnite, immanent life roils in this massive, unregulated market. Pepetela’s description of life teeming in this market functions much like the rave scene in Zion in the Wachowskis’s 2003 flm, Matrix Reloaded. Taking the opposite route of this example from Dickens who rendered perceptible the immanent impersonal life at the level of a single individual, the Wachowskis and Pepetela dissolve individual subjectivity into the larger humanity to which they belong, pulsing, as an aggregate. Panning over masses of close-pressed, quasi-copulatory bodies throbbing to rhythmic dance music, the Matrix Reloaded’s camera shows the last pocket of free humans perpetuating their species even in the face of the existential threat posed by the Machines. Similarly, Pepetela shows life erupting in the uncontrolled area outside of Luanda. Individual characters dissolve into roiling humanity, inhabiting any and all professions equally: forgers, restaurant owners, prostitutes, thieves, mechanics, killers, sales-men and -women, dealers, whatever that will enable their individual survival and their propagation as a people. In these instances, across the genres, macro and micro lenses of focus serve the same purpose: they dissolve, strip away the particularities of subjectivity and render visible the immanent, impersonal, indefnite life that coexists with the life actualized in individuals.20 It is important to note that Pepetela shows pure life to be stirring only outside the margins of regulated Angolan society. While Pepetela’s works mediate the “impersonal life that is expressed in all [Angolan] lives” (Patton 2010a, 133), it is visible only in the black market. Pure life exists in Angola only in inchoate form, churning against the fringes of a society that impinges upon the Angolan people’s affective capabilities under the necropolitical strictures of “savage capitalism” and prevents experimental, creative, powerenhancing relations via the Bunker’s neopatrimonialist arrangement of forces. In the main, rather than embodying the potential to transform the affects, beliefs, and political sensibilities of Angolans, Pepetela’s works show that life is static for most Angolans: molarly captured, for many, life is
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a foreshortened struggle for survival. The absence of minoritarian becomings in Pepetela’s works effectively states that the arrangement of contemporary Angola is not conducive to the coming-into-existence of new ways of being in the world. The lack of affective intensities, power- and joy-enhancing relations, and newness coming into Pepetela’s literary world is symptomatic of an Angolan society that functions as an ill-health assemblage. Pepetela’s works indicate that the Angolan context does not provide for the positive, additive, transformative, affective, capacity-enhancing relations that this work defnes as good health. On the contrary, Pepetela shows transformation to be blocked on several levels. The previous fve sections have detailed at length how the conditions in shantytowns such as Sambizanga make living a matter of survival for the majority of Angolans. Pepetela’s works show that in terms of bio-affective health, it is hardly better for the novos ricos and those well placed within the party apparatus. His works show the Angolan elite to be deformed by the very fows of the “savage capitalism” they are simultaneously producing and consuming. Knowing the precariousness of their position, the elite are as consumed with survival in their predatory, neopatrimonialist milieu as the peri-urban, shantytown dwellers are in theirs. Pepetela shows the rapid oil wealth derived from resource extraction to have brought nothing but continued misery and impoverishment to the broad masses of Angolans. Importantly, his portrayal of Angolan novos ricos—deformed by the very ideology of “savage capitalism” by which they beneft—actively contests the widespread view that the processes by which businesses operate on an international scale are even good for a small elite (UNDP 2016, 32). Pockets of pure life and instances of liberated desire appear in Pepetela’s works, but they do so in isolation. Principally, Pepetela’s novels mediate the myriad, material realities of contemporary, postcolonial Angola that make new ways of being in the world impossible, potential processes of becomings-other unsustainable. None of Pepetela’s principal characters undergo any sort of becomings: Not the patriarch, Alexandre Semedo (Yaka); not the social climbing, Carmina Cara de Cu (Return of the Water Spirit); or the bumbling detective, Jaime Bunda, in the eponymous novel. Neither do the ex-revolutionary turned party offcial Vitor and the businessman Malongo (A Geraçâo da Utopia), or the businessman, Vladimoro Caposso (Predadores), undergo any sort of becomings-other. Nor do the characters who are urgently concerned with changing Angola for the better. Some attempt to do so via armed revolution, as in the case of the guerrilla commandant, Fearless (Mayombe) and Joel Semedo (Yaka) and Anibal/Sábio (A Geração da Utopia). Others, like Gégé, Jaime Bunda’s brother, endeavor to bring about change through journalism. Sara tries to do the same as a doctor in (A Geração da Utopia) and Sebastião Lopes through legal action (Predadores). However, even in their resistances, Pepetela’s
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characters remain frmly enmeshed both within their established identities and the possibilities allowed within the prevailing political-economic system. Though some of his characters are revolutionaries, Pepetela’s works show no processes of revolutionary-becomings by which groups that by “fail[ing] to conform to the majoritarian standard” contribute to “extend[ing] the scope of the standard,” “broaden the subject of democracy,” and change the “nature of political institutions or procedures” (Patton 2010a, 192). What Pepetela’s texts do is render the Angolan manifestations of the relations of force of the world system visible. In terms of ideology, Pepetela’s works have shown the conditions and effect of the constitution of Angolan subjects over the centuries—that which each group has taken to be “natural and self-evident” (Spivak 2006, 161). Using the relations of force in Angola much like an epidemiologist tracing the evolution of some extremely resilient XDR pathogen21 would, Pepetela’s works have traced the morphology of the capitalist world system as it mutated from its colonial manifestation to its contemporary, postcolonial, globalized incarnation. Importantly, WestEberhard has shown that “environmental elements are responsible for the [. . .] nondevelopment of a phenotypic trait” (West-Eberhard 2003, 15). In terms of health, Pepetela’s works have diagnostically detailed the relations of force in the Angolan umwelt that impinge upon Angolan bodies and limit and obstruct their affective capacities. It may be that the reason Pepetela’s works contain no becomings-other and bring no newness into the contemporary Angolan literary world is related to his geo-temporal location as a frst-phase postcolonial writer. Yet, (as was developed in the second section of chapter 2) a symptomatology that details the aspects of the syndrome negatively affecting a people is a component of a good-health assemblage: it is a necessary diagnosticatory step in precipitating positive metamorphoses in the social and political arrangements of a country. Importantly, symptomatological analyses serve such a purpose even when applied to decidedly second-phase postcolonial works, such as those produced in countries such as Australia, Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Though this book has focused on developing a symptomatological methodology aimed at rendering visible the diagnoses contained within works of postcolonial literature, the use of this methodology is not restricted to the genre of literature. It can be fruitfully employed to analyze postcolonial cultural works in other genres, such as flm. For instance, a symptomatological examination of the Australian director Ray Lawrence’s flm, Jindabyne, shows that instead of encountering, pure life, good health, newness, and processes of becoming-minoritarian in a wealthy, “D”eveloped country, in this Australian flm, we fnd rather a stunting of capabilities and affective impingement that shares much in common with Pepetela’s evaluation of Angolan health.
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Jindabyne portrays four white fshermen who are unmoved at fnding the body of a murdered Aboriginal woman in the stream in which they are fshing.22 After discovering the body of the young woman, not only do the four men not report the murder, but they keep enjoying fshing for the rest of the weekend. Ian Buchanan’s symptomatological analysis of Jindabyne, examined through the lens of the National Apology offered to the “Stolen Generations” in 2008 by then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, argues that Lawrence has diagnosed life in contemporary Australia to be blocked by an entrenched and unexamined racism.23 In his article “Symptomatology and Race Relations in Australia,” Buchanan writes that this failure to be moved by the death of another—the other—is an indictment of the state of race relations in Australia. Buchanan writes “the men’s inaction says [. . .] the dead Aboriginal woman did not count to them—she was dead to them before she died.” Not only that, in the days following their return to town, even when confronted by the condemnation of their loved ones and the Aboriginal community, the men do not understand what they did wrong. Lawrence does not attribute this failure to respond as a “quirk of character”; rather, Buchanan reads it to be “symptomatic of [. . .] the society that produced the four men” (Buchanan 2012, 115). Buchanan fnds the fact that the four men neither grieve the death of the Aboriginal woman, nor, more tellingly, even notice their absence of grief, to be indicative of the hollowness of the National Apology (Buchanan 2012, 119, 122). Buchanan’s point is not that Lawrence’s flm has shown that hegemonic white Australians treat Aboriginal Australians poorly: as he notes, there is nothing novel in pointing that out. It is known throughout Australia that indigenous Australians are: at the very top, or bottom, of every social indicator available: top of the medical statistics for diseases they didn’t exhibit as recently as thirty years ago— coronary disease, cancer, diabetes, respiratory infections; bottom of the life expectancy table, at 50-55 years or less for males and around 55 for females; with much greater rates of unemployment, much lower home ownership and considerably lower per capita income; an arrest and imprisonment rate grossly out of proportion to their numbers. (Buchanan 2012, 113)
Buchanan’s point is that Lawrence’s flm has diagnosed a causally profound malaise imbricated within these affectively damning indicators that has gone largely unremarked upon to now: that white Australian’s do not think “they have anything to apologize for and are waiting for someone to tell them what they did wrong” (Buchanan 2012, 122). Read so, the fact that there are no instances of becoming-minoritarian in Lawrence’s flm, neither in the white settler community, nor in the Aboriginal community, is indicative
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that something profound lies unaddressed behind the high quality of life enjoyed by many white Australians. Jindabyne shows white and Aboriginal Australian peoples to be imbricated within different, though differentially related, relations of force, the effect of which is that neither are able to fully realize their potential as human beings. Lawrence’s flm isolates the factor causing both sets of Australian peoples to live sub-optimalized lives: they are constrained by racism and the ill effects of the institutionalization of that racism throughout an Australian society, aspects of which function as an illhealth assemblage. Buchanan’s identifcation of the phenotype of racism endemic to contemporary white Australia conducted via a symptomatological analysis of Ray Lawrence’s flm shows two things. First, it demonstrates that “developed” postcolonial countries are not necessarily healthy. Second, and arguably a more valuable point, it shows the utility in using a symptomatological methodology to analyze not only “frst phase” but also “second phase” postcolonial cultural works that render the ill-health assemblages present in their respective societies visible. These diagnoses are endeavors in health. A postcolonial symptomatological methodology does not automatically equate health with good health. Rather than being a function of the methodology, the ranking of good health or ill-health is a result of how health is represented in the literary world being analyzed. Symptomatological analyses can reveal the good health of a literary-country by showing the presence of minoritarian becomings and newness being brought into the world. However, in other contexts, other literary-worlds, symptomatological analyses can also render visible the relations of force of the ill-health assemblages present in postcolonial societies which prevent movement and minoritarian becomings. Pepetela’s works detail an Angolan society that functions as an ill-health assemblage. The very nonexistence of lines of fight or methods of deterritorialization in Pepetela’s work indicates that the Angolan context does not provide for the positive, additive, transformative, creative, and experimental relationships that this work defnes as good health. On the contrary, Pepetela shows transformation to be blocked on several levels. The conditions in shantytowns such as Sambizanga make living a matter of survival for the majority of Angolans. From the point of view of affective capacity, it is hardly better for the novos ricos and those well placed within the party apparatus. Pepetela shows the elite to be deformed by the very fows of the savage capitalism they are both producing and consuming. They are as consumed with survival in their predatory, neopatrimonialist milieu as the peri-urban shantytown dwellers are in theirs. The fact that neither Pepetela’s nor Lawrence’s works show the subject of democracy to be broadening, or the majority to be reconfgured in a continually transforming society, is represented by the dangerous
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surf icon on the “becoming-minoritarian” component of the Health and Capabilities Dashboard. 3.5 HOW PORTUGUESE COLONIALISM INFLUENCES CONTEMPORARY ANGOLAN HEALTH
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Identifying, as Pepetela has, that contemporary Angolan society is an illhealth assemblage, the health of which is affected by the Bunker Syndrome, is a tide-changing frst step. An assemblage’s arrangements of force are always purposeful, deliberate. Assemblages always beneft someone or something outside the assemblage, and they do so as a realization of a deliberate plan that is the cause of the assemblage that executes its relations of force. There is little doubt as to who or what that is: even as he participated in and represented the overthrow of Portuguese colonialism and the formation of an independent Angolan state, Pepetela’s works have marked the continuity of colonial pathologies present in contemporary Angolan society. The pathologies isolated and rendered visible in Pepetela’s works bear more than a passing resemblance to the strain of “savage capitalism” (Osava 2018) identifed by Karl Marx a century-and-a-half ago. Marx noted that “the inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, moving from [Europe], where it assumes respectable form, to the colonies where it goes naked” (Marx 1853). Pepetela has stated in an interview that: there are many aspects of Angola of today and Angola of tomorrow for which you can fnd an explanation in [colonial society]. Because, despite the fght for liberation, in spite of Independence, etc., many things remained fundamentally the same in terms of what can be very generically called culture, including social behaviour, preconceptions, etc. There is a series of reactions that can only be explained by colonial history. Independence was a rupture, a trauma from which one recovers in a new society, but with much that comes from behind. (Chaves and Macêdo 2009, 35)
Jaime Bunda and his cousin, the DO, come from autochthonous, bourgeois families that rose to wealth and prominence during the Dutch occupation of Angola in the seventeenth century. They have “400 year old,” “centuriesold,” “illustrious” last names such as Van Dúnem24 or dos Santos (Pepetela 2006, 11, 12, 30, 48, 94, 101, 194, 196). Many are descendants of former “important slave owners” (Pepetela 2006, 94). Being from “one of the families,” Pepetela writes that they knew how to “negotiate [the] politicking” during the times of outright colonialism and have thrived since independence. “Opportunists,” colonial “collaborators,” they are described by Pepetela of
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operating “with a foot in two opposing camps” as “part of the struggle to survive.” “What is certain is that after independence those who were protected came out better” (Pepetela 2006, 101). Often they become high-placed MPLA offcials, parliamentarians, generals, or well-connected businessmen who work together (Pepetela 2006, 50, 259) to fnd their angle, the means for their own enrichment. Jaime Bunda’s “centuries-old,” “illustrious” family names indicate the continuity of the contemporary Angolan bourgeoisie to their forebears who rose to prominence and wealth under the pre-Portuguese era of Dutch colonization and who survived and thrived in the centuries of Portuguese control. Pepetela’s works represent the privilege this class of Neder-Luso-African progenitors have passed down through the centuries to their descendants as if via a socio-genetic structural strand of DNA. The mechanisms by which such extra-biological, specifcally postcolonial inheritance—what Nigerian Novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, calls the “muddled sludge of colonial history” (Adichie 2018)—passes from one generation to the next has been described by Aijaz Ahmad, Ankie Hoogvelt, and Mahmood Mamdani.25 Their works have argued that the selective co-option and nurturing of an indigenous elite, who continue to use not only the metropolitan language but to work within the same post-independence systems of administration, education, commerce, and communication, serves to almost “genetically” link Westernized elite to their colonial forbearers.26 David Birmingham and Tony Hodges describe how an indigenous class of black bourgeois families, the old creoles, many bearing Portuguese and Dutch names, “such as Dos Santos and Van-Dúnem,” rose to prominence and wealth in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Angola. Bearing the cultural legacy of Europe that had given them their names and mother tongue, Birmingham notes that they looked down on Africans, convinced they were the true sons of Africa, and so heirs of the future. Birmingham records that the resentment felt by the old creoles at having their envisaged destiny thwarted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by colonial policies that gave preference to Portuguese immigrants—to the detriment of culturally assimilated Africans such as themselves—emerged in political form through the formation of the MPLA in the 1950s. The descendants of the old creoles fused with political activists from a more recent Portuguese-speaking urban group: the new creoles—colored, mestiços, and assimilated Angolans who had been educated at mission schools and were likewise competing for jobs with settlers who were often less educated then themselves. Both Birmingham and Hodges note how the Creole elite in Luanda—against the backdrop of a menacing, rural-based UNITA—saw the MPLA as their best protection against an uncertain future. Importantly, the departure of the Portuguese settlers at independence gave these families new opportunities. Hodges writes “the Portuguese-speaking
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creoles acquired a virtual monopoly of state employment and protected their position not only by running the army and the police but also by preserving often redundant bureaucratic positions and salaries for themselves and their clients” (Hodges 2004, 42–43).27 David Birmingham concludes that there is little change from the Angola in the last years of colonial rule to the Angola of today. He writes that “politics in 2000 was as unresponsive to public opinion as it had been in 1969, though the dictator who balanced the powers of the several factions of the propertyowning class was now a member of the home-grown Luso-African elite of Luanda rather than of Portugal’s imperially oriented haute-bourgeoisie” (Chabal et al. 2002, 184). Birmingham accents that “now [2000], as then, the army kept an eye on political decision-making and a fnger in the economic pie.” Birmingham records that “wealth was as sharply polarised in 2000 as it had been in late-colonial times, but the city slums have grown from half a million [. . .] to two million” (Chabal et al. 2002, 184). He documents that with independence the colonial class of 300,000 privileged Portuguese was “replaced by a similar number of black Portuguese-speaking Angolans who retained many of the old colonial attitudes of social and moral superiority and who worshipped in the same Catholic churches that had sustained Salazar’s brand of authoritarianism.” He writes that “the Angolan press of the 1990s was as circumscribed in its news and opinions as the censored, fascist press of the 1960s had been and Angolan citizens who held political views were as wary of the political police as colonial subjects had been” (Chabal et al. 2002, 184). However, Lusophone literary critic Philip Rothwell is right to declare that: Angola’s plight today, and the injustices perpetrated on the vast majority of the Angolan people bear only a trace of Portuguese intervention on the continent. To identify the colonial relationship as the problem, to focus on the vestiges of what effectively became a poor imitation of the more effcient and ruthless colonial systems [misses] the overpowering arrival of international capitalism. (Rothwell 2004, 199)
Rothwell writes that Angola’s current situation is “no longer defned in terms of the colonial relationship; it is something more discrete and all-embracing” (Rothwell 2004, 199). Yet, even as the world capitalist structure has shifted through the centuries, the results have remained static: a globalized, social minority (who have no need for the excluded, impoverished majority) beneft. Pepetela has equated the approach of Angola’s autochthonous, modern businessmen with the rapacious, racialist mindset of their colonial predecessors. His works show both to be (or have been) members of the globalized core—part of the 20 percent of the world’s population who are enriched via
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a “deepening integration into the global charmed circle” (Hoogvelt 2001, 256). “For them [the true masters of postcolonial countries] the story has been running without a break. A single straight line. They’ve been keeping watch over things since the end of the colonial period. It’s always been the same business: one group replaces another, and so it goes” (Laferrière 2011, 177). 3.6 CONCLUSION Pepetela concludes Jaime Bunda by writing:
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in the days of [Portuguese rule] the young people went to the bush, took up arms to fght colonialism and dreamt of creating a better society, a more just society. That time has passed. Later, other young people went to the bush, took up arms to fght the regime which [they] had helped create. That time has also passed. Now, I’m taking up the pen to tell the truth to my contemporaries. Only the truth is important. It’s our time. [The people in the townships] have a [writer] to make the world hear and see everything which the eternally marginalised population feel and want. (Pepetela 2006, 294)
Pepetela’s works demonstrate that art can be of “great social consequence”; that it “could, and should, make common cause with politics” (Levenson 2011, 281). Not only has Pepetela shown that those living in peri-urban shantytowns such as Sambizanga are part of the world majority effectively excluded from the global system, he has linked the fght for social justice with the literary endeavor. The details of the Bunker Syndrome captured on the symptomatological table of the Health and Capabilities Rubric support what general readers of Pepetela’s fction come to know: life in Angola is contained within established identities. Paths to new relations and transformations that could precipitate the release of new powers to act or respond are obstructed. A comparison of Angola’s objective values with the subjective values derived from Pepetela’s texts shows that Pepetela’s diagnosis similarly identifed “economic constraints and the more just distribution of material resources” as being the primary feld where impingements to what Angolan bodies can do affected Angolan health. Not only does Pepetela’s fction detail the workings of an Angolan society that functions as an ill-health assemblage, Pepetela’s subjective, socio-literary diagnosis corroborates that captured by the Health and Capabilities Rubric’s objective values. Both means of analyzing Angolan health and well-being are unequivocal in their diagnosis: the lack of economic facilities and the inequitable distribution of material resources
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throughout Angola is the principle factor negatively affecting the health of both the Angolan people and Angolan society. This diagnosis will not come as a surprise to Angolans or those working in the public health sector in Angola: corroborative diagnoses rarely are. However, when faced with the many ways Angolan society functions as an ill-health assemblage, this diagnosis clearly prioritizes addressing the economic feld. Read so, Pepetela’s work also shows the interconnections between the various felds that impinge upon Angolans’s health and their capabilities to live the life they value. In so doing, this analysis has shown not only the richness of the intersection between the postcolonial and development felds, hopefully it has demonstrated the practicality of how a Deleuzian conception of health can combine with the ethics of humanitarianism dedicated to improving the lives of the most vulnerable.
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NOTES 1. I am thinking specifcally of Homi Bhabha’s introduction to Nation and Narration and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Both share an ambivalence to the concept of nationalism and the idea of the nation. Anderson writes: “The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness. [Few] things were (are) suited to this end better than the idea of nation. If nation states are widely considered to be ‘new’ and ‘historical,’ the nation states to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past and [. . .] glide into a limitless future. What I am proposing is that Nationalism has to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which—as well as against which—it came into being” (Anderson 2006). Bhabha writes: “The nation’s ‘coming into being’ as a system of cultural signifcation, as the representation of social life rather than the discipline of social polity emphasizes this instability of knowledge. [. . .] In Hannah Arendt’s view, the society of the nation in the modern world is ‘that curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public signifcance’ and the two realms fow unceasingly and uncertainly into each other ‘like waves in the never-ending stream of the life-process itself.’ No less certain is Tom Nairn, in naming the nation ‘the modern Janus,’ that the ‘uneven development’ of capitalism inscribes both progression and regression, political rationality and irrationality in the very genetic code of the nation. This is a structural fact to which there are no exceptions and ‘in this sense, it is an exact (not rhetorical) statement about nationalism to say that it is by nature ambivalent’” (Bhabha 1990). 2. I am thinking specifcally of the epic poems, Leaves of Grass and Canto General, as well as Eduardo Galeano’s trilogy: Memoria del Fuego. 3. Dos Santos succeeded Neto as head of the MPLA and President of Angola upon Neto’s death in 1979.
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4. A comparison of capabilities to primary goods reveals them to be different, complementary, and supplementary ways trying to arrive at the same endpoint. Sen highlights fve substantive freedoms (political freedom, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, protective security); Nussbaum, ten central capabilities (life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses, imagination and thought, emotions, practical reason, affliation, other species, play, control over one’s material and political environment). Rawls’s primary goods are natural: imagination, health, intelligence, and social; social: civil and political rights, liberties, income, and wealth, social basis of self-respect. 5. Patton emphasizes the point that individual becomings can involve political becomings at various points throughout his work; see pp 43, 54, 77, 144, 150–151 in (Patton 2010a). 6. Moretti also makes this point on pp 297 and 302. 7. See p 262 in (Cheah 2016b) and pp 95, 96 in (Bensmaïa 2003). 8. See Moretti’s readings of Frankenstein and Dracula in which he isolated Mary Shelley’s and Bram Stoker’s diagnoses of race, class, socioeconomic and sexualpsychological structures (Moretti 1988) pp 87, 91, 104. 9. Certainly, a measure of the health and capabilities that different peoples in Australia enjoy could be provided via a symptomatological analysis of the works of Australian writers such as Gerald Murnane, Peter Polites, Ellen van Neerven, Luke Carman, Claire G. Coleman, Richard Flannagan, or Kim Scott, among others. Such an analysis would certainly problematize and provide a much more nuanced reading of the health of various Australian peoples—Aboriginal Australians importantly among them—that is obscured, or whose story remains untold by the high average values accorded to Australia in overall human development. 10. Patton’s work examining David Lurie’s “becoming-dog” in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace is exemplary in this regard, see p 128 in (Patton 2010a). Also see Grant Hamilton’s discussion of the Magistrate’s “becoming-nomad” in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (Hamilton 2010). 11. Fox’s work draws upon and overlaps with Ian Buchanan’s article, “The Problem of the Body in Deleuze and Guattari, Or, What Can A Body Do? and with Cameron Duff’s article: “Towards a Development Ethology: Exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s Contribution to the Study of Health and Human Development.” 12. An example of what an “opening-up of decision-making procedures throughout a society” might look like, albeit taken from another context, might be found in the city-based attempts currently being made throughout Europe and the United States to use new media technology to improve participation in local democratic processes, for instance. 13. Freedom House is an independent watchdog organization that has been analyzing freedom in 195 countries around the world since 1973 and which produces annual reports based on its fndings. The “freedom” score Freedom House awards each country is based on analysis provided by a team of both in-house and external analysts and expert advisers. Their analysis is based on evaluations of on-the-ground fulfllment over the previous calendar year of a country’s performance along the following categories: political rights (electoral process), political pluralism, and participation,
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functioning of government, civil liberties (freedom of expression and belief), associational and organizational rights, rule of law, personal autonomy, and individual rights. The values Freedom House awarded the countries of Angola and Australia have been subtracted from 100 when placed on the “political unfreedoms” category. The table listing all the values depicted on the bar graph is located in the appendix. 14. Which manifests itself via such symptoms as anxiety, slowness of movement, rigidity, or stiffness of the limbs, and tremors in the arms, legs, or jaws. 15. From the date of the chapter heading, this occurred in December of 1985. This was the congress at which the young, rising, and ambitious Vladimoro Caposso (in return for a promised membership on the all-powerful Central Committee) served as a hatchet man for another high-ranking minister and publicly (and falsely) leveled accusations of treason at his opponent. With his job done, the minister’s opponent’s rise derailed, Caposso was informed that his membership was postponed, and if he found that unsatisfactory then all the illegal businesses dealings he was engaged in and which were known by “those up there” would be brought to the light of day (Pepetela 2007, 226–245). 16. Transparency International is an international, nongovernmental organization whose purpose is to combat global corruption. Based on assessments by experts in the feld, Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index measures the perceived levels of public sector corruption worldwide. 17. For a thorough investigation of the limits of macroeconomic measures such as GDP see Stiglitz et al. (2010). 18. For more information on how social opportunities are interlocked with other freedoms, see also pp 42, 127, 143. 19. For more on the positive knock-on effects years of education have see pp 128–129, 144, 294. 20. Similarly, the post-human aspect of becoming-humanitarian which orients this book values each immanent, impersonal life equally for being a life, regardless of the individual to which it pertains. 21. XDR stands for Extensively Drug Resistant and is applied to pathogens that are not only drug resistant to frst line drugs, but to second and third line options, as well. 22. Jindabyne is an adaptation of the Raymond Carver story, So Much Water So Close to Home, to the contemporary Australian context. 23. Rudd offcially apologized for the Australian federal and state policies of forcibly removing children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent from their families during the sixty years spanning 1910–1970. 24. It is inferred that Jaime Bunda’s last name, “two surnames of illustrious families in Luanda circles” (4), is a combination of dos Santos and Van Dúnem. Stephen Henighan reports that Pepetela is certain that, even though he doesn’t use the name, President José Eduardo dos Santos, whose origins are “murky,” is actually a scion of the powerful Van Dúnem dynasty, which established itself during the pre-Portuguese time of Dutch infuence in Angola (Henighan 2006). 25. I am thinking in particular of Hoogvelt (2001, 26), Ahmad (1992, 74), and Mamdani (1996).
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26. Indeed, contemporary historians trace the resurgence of racism in Germany today to the racist, globally expansionist, Nazi vision that itself was a condensation and expression of Germany’s colonial history and which it shared in common with the French and the English (Eligon 2018). 27. This point is also made on pp 149–150 in Chabal et al. (2002).
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Becoming-Witness The Conflagration of the Arab Community and the Sudanese Arab Writer Tayeb Salih
Where did these people come from? Weren’t they breastfed by mothers and aunts? Didn’t they listen to the wind blowing from the north and the south? Didn’t they see the lightning on the plateau rising and ebbing? Didn’t they see wheat growing in the felds and the dates heavy on palm trees? [. . .] Didn’t they hear the old voices and feel the yearning of old; don’t they love the fatherland as we love it? So why do they love it as though they hate it and work on building it as though they are employed to destroy it? [. . .] Are the people of the South still migrating to the North and the people of the North escaping to any country which accepts them? [. . .] Do they still dream of establishing on Sudan’s poor corpse an Islamic Sudanese caliphate [. . .]?
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—Tayeb Salih (1990)
For many in Sudan, the decades since independence have been flled with sorrow, war, and want. The recent formation of the independent country of South Sudan has done little to ameliorate the land’s seemingly endless and man-made misery, or its remorseless bellicosity. Viewed from the point of view of the most vulnerable—with South Sudan again at war and the “slowmotion genocide” in Darfur still unresolved more than a decade on—the contemporary situation in the Sudan is as catastrophic as it has ever been.1 Though their countries are “quiet,” around them the wrathful fres of the Arab Spring spark and smolder still. The forces of discontent that emboldened multitudes to brave the violence meted out by the very same governments whose authoritarian ways, corruption, and inequitable socioeconomic policies they had gathered in the streets to protest—unquenched four years on—yet feed the fames of those fghting for regional ascendancy, and existence. 127
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Though he fnished with fction over 40 years ago, Sudan’s preeminent author, the recently deceased Tayeb Salih, captured and rendered visible many of the forces that today wrack the land and modulate the lives of the people he loved so. As the fows of capital, Marxism, socialism, Pan-Arabism, and nationalism swirled through the Sudan in the years following independence, Salih’s works showed Sudanese Arab people’s capabilities—not only their well-being, but also their agency and autonomy—to be stunted by corrupt governments and the very ideology being invoked to sustain them. Yet, the fundamentalist Islamist orthodoxies espoused by the followers of Rashid Rida, Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab,2 despite functioning as Pan-Arab revalorizations of Arab-Islamic identity contra Western imperialism and “orientalist” discourse, did not re-moor all of those whose worldview had been unsettled by Western hegemony. Indeed, their thought offered only different constraints for many. Salih’s texts show how the postcolonial and increasingly neopatriarchal arrangement of Sudanese society shuttered women within fundamentalist, Islamist stricture. Not only women suffered: arranged so, Salih’s works mediate how, alienated from the practices of popular, Suf Islam, which came to be societally reimagined according to Sunni orthodoxy, the pathless present boxed in and defeated educated Sudanese and those with high social standing. Salih’s works show the postcolonial outlook to be no better for those who endeavored to live as they traditionally had, nor for their children and grandchildren, for whom tradition was both lodestar and psychical anchor in a changing world. With no path away from the confagration that comes upon the community of Wad Hamid—the fctional village Salih chronicled his entire career—Salih shows all Sudanese Arabs, even the remote and venal elite, to be battered and beset by the forces of both tradition and change. Though better known for his two previous works, The Wedding of Zein and the seminal Season of Migration to the North, it is in his powerful yet seldom-read novel, Bandarshah, that Salih’s dark diagnosis of Sudan-present and -future takes form. As he fabulates the phenotypically recursive archetype of Bandarshah within Sudanese society’s genetic makeup, Salih captures and renders visible the anomie fracturing contemporary Sudanese society. Incorporating elements of magical realism within a complex, fragmentary style that disorients the reader and destabilizes the text, Salih shows no way forward for the Sudanese people. Leaving the text unfnished, Salih leaves reader and narrator alike twisting in the grips of a growing maelstrom of chaos, confict, and ever-greater fragmentation. Salih links his readers to the compound of anguish and despair that comes in knowing the regional slide to chaos and confict to be inevitable.
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In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari claim that “a great novelist is above all an artist who invents unknown or unrecognized affects.” By creating “compounds of sensation,” Deleuze and Guattari insist that artists “make us become with them, they draw us into the compound” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 174–175). That is not in- and of-itself positive: becomings, affects, and deterritorializations can be destructive (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 510). By affectively composing the reader with the sensations of anomie, despair, and defeat experienced by the narrator as he comes to comprehend the totality of that which is affecting his community, Salih co-composes the reader and the narrator within a mutual compound of “becoming-witness.” Just as writing is not autotelic, Salih’s readers come to realize that neither the phenomenon she or he is becoming-witness to, nor the corresponding sensations of anomie she or he is experiencing, are individual effects; they are rather political effects, and thus collective. Reading Salih against current events in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, the reader comes to comprehend that the pathologies Salih diagnoses as affecting the health, capabilities, and wellbeing of the Sudanese people and society are not limited to the literary world he is mediating, but extend to the larger Arab world. To show how the diagnosis Salih made thirty years ago captured the currents fowing throughout postcolonial Sudan at their confuence and to such a degree of accuracy that he can be read as having foretold the current regional confagration, this chapter is divided into fve sections. The frst will provide a brief biography of Tayeb Salih. It will affliatively locate Salih within the historical moments, networks, and range of circumstances in which his texts were produced. This will causally situate his diagnosis that the autocratic, fundamentalist, Islamist arrangement of postcolonial Sudanese society limits the health and capabilities of many Sudanese and functions as an ill-health assemblage. Salih’s works will be synopsized in the second section. This synopsis will include an examination of the themes and techniques Salih used to unify and transform the lives of a minority people—that of the riverine, northern Sudanese Arab villagers he portrays—within a greater narrative cycle, thus rendering their concerns immediately collective and political. This section will also examine how and to what ends Salih both juxtaposes and incorporates Sufsm within the entropic darkening of Salih’s magically realist style. Since his earliest works, Salih’s works have incorporated elements of magical realism within them. However, in contradiction to writers such as Miguel Ángel Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie, Salih attributes the source of magical realism in his works to the syncretic mysticism of the Sufst practices common to many areas of Sudan. Yet, the very nature of that magical realism changes over the course of Salih’s works as the forces
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of anomie begin to fracture and darken Salih’s literary world of Wad Hamid and the greater Sudan. Using the seven components of the previously developed Health and Capabilities Rubric, the third section disaggregates the health of Sudanese society and the Sudanese people along the axes of the “Bandarshah Syndrome.” They are frst, the role fundamentalist Islamic stricture plays in the ill-health of Sudanese Arab women; second, Sudanese leaders’ seemingly genetic, pathological predilection to patriarchal tyranny and corruption; and third, how the entrenched structures of authority render the highly educated and those with high social standing impotent to live lives they value. An examination of the effects of the bloc of sensation that is the “becomingwitness” Salih co-composes both reader and narrator in by the end of Bandarshah completes the third section’s examination of Salih’s works as an “enterprise in health” (Deleuze 1997, 3). The penultimate section and the conclusion propose that some thirty plus years avant la lettre, in diagnosing Sudan and the Arab world as being afficted by the Bandarshah Syndrome, Salih in fact foresaw the chaos and upheaval of the recent Arab Spring. This section will propose that Salih’s work indicates that the current crises in the MENA region should be seen as a continuation of the Muslim-Arab world’s postcolonial struggles to establish viable social, political, economic, cultural, and theological systems in countries whose destinies are imbricated with the forces of neoliberalism, globalization, and Western hegemony. Salih’s works capture the fact that the postcolonial—in its complex, dark entirety—is not yet past. It also shows that, much like Pepetela, Salih is an able clinician of the pathologies stunting the health, well-being, voice, and autonomy of many who live in the Arab world.
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4.1 BIOGRAPHY OF TAYEB SALIH, BRIEF CONTEMPORARY HISTORY OF THE SUDAN Al-Tayyib Salih (December 2009) was born in the agricultural village of Karmakol, near al-Debba, in northern Sudan in 1929, at “the heyday of British colonial occupation of the Sudan” (Fluehr-Lobban 2009). Tayeb Salih studied biology at Gordon Memorial College (subsequently the University of Khartoum) before leaving to study political science at London University in 1952 as “part of the frst generation of Sudanese educated in Britain in preparation for independence” (Flood 2009), which came in 1956. Though benefting from this education, Salih suffered no illusions as to the nature of the colonial relationship nor of colonialism’s continuity as it became internalized in the postcolonial era. Salih writes: “The schools were started so as to teach us to say ‘Yes’ in their language” (Salih 2009, 79). Indeed, later in life,
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Salih refected on what was ground-breaking about his work: “I have redefned the so-called East-West relationship as essentially one of confict, while it had previously been treated in Romantic terms” (Fluehr-Lobban 2009, 3). After completing his schooling, Tayeb Salih worked frst as head of drama for the Arabic section of the BBC and then later for the United Nations Educational, Scientifc, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris. In 1965, he married a Scottish woman, Julia Maclean, with whom he had three daughters. Except for the years 1974–1980, when he was a high-ranking offcial for the Ministry of Information in Doha, Qatar, Tayeb Salih lived principally in London. Like the Angolan writer, Pepetela, and the principal narrator that unites Salih’s works, Meheimeed, Tayeb Salih’s life and fction spanned both sides of the colonial divide. Like them, both Salih’s life and his fction were marked by his encounter with the West (Flood 2009; Hassan 2003a). Additionally, as the Saudi Arabian literary critic Haifa Saud Alfaisal notes, as a Muslim-Arab from dominant northern Sudan, which, since independence has repressed both the multiethnic South and the Muslim population of Darfur to the West, Salih is doubly positioned (Alfaisal 2006, 53).3 Despite his relatively slim output, Salih’s literary reputation is illustrious. Edward Said ranked Salih’s 1966 novel Season of Migration to the North as among the six fnest novels written in modern Arabic literature. In 2001, the Arab Literary Academy called Season of Migration to the North the most important novel of the twentieth century (Flood 2009). Season of Migration to the North was preceded by the novella, The Wedding of Zein (1962) and was succeeded by the two-part Bandarshah (1971, 1976), with which for all intents and purposes Salih terminated his literary endeavors. Additionally, Tayeb Salih published nine short stories in various magazines over the years. Though having abandoned fction with the unfnished Bandarshah, Salih continued writing, albeit within the genre of literary journalism, and from 1988 on he regularly wrote a column on literary, political, and cultural topics for the London-based Arabic weekly magazine Al Majallah. As Laila Lalami notes in her introduction to the 2009 edition of Season of Migration to the North, the fact that Salih’s texts are being read over forty years after he wrote them testifes to their literary merit. Those who read Salih in translation may not be familiar with the history of British colonialism in the Sudan through the peculiar formation of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium. Or with Sudanese independence from Britain in 1956, and the succession of military coup d’états: 1958, 1969, 1985, and 1989, that installed military leaders and rolled back the nominal and intermittent attempts to establish a working parliamentary democracy in the Sudan. They may not be conversant with the confict-torn topography of contemporary Sudanese history. Regardless, Salih’s works stand on their literary merit. Nevertheless, there is no doubting their political nature: the conficts
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between Western modernity, neopatriarchal practices, Sufsm, fundamentalist Islamism, and the social, cultural, and economic productions of colonial and postcolonial identity drive the plots of much of Tayeb Salih’s work. Yet, it would be widely known by Salih’s Arabic-speaking readers that for the past century the scions of the primary, theo-political dynasties have employed versions of political Islam in order to veil the bulwarking of their advantageous political and economic interests (Holt and Daly 2011, 65). So, when Salih writes that “the new rulers of Africa” are a “pack of wolves,” that they are “perfumed,” “corrupt,” “smooth of face, lupine of mouth,” “with hands gleaming with rings of precious stones” (Salih 2009, 98–99); or asks “Where did these people come from? [. . .] Why do they love [the Sudan] as though they hate it and work on building it as though they are employed to destroy it? [. . .] Do they still dream of establishing on Sudan’s poor corpse an Islamic Sudanese caliphate?” (Salih 1990), there is no need to mention the descendants of Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi, the “Father of Sudanese Independence” by name until the fnal pages of his fnal work of fction. This riverine Arab leader of the Ansar sect (Suf) declared himself in 1851 to be the incarnation of the expected Mahdi.4 He united the northern Arab tribes5 in a revolt against Turco-Egyptian rule and defeated the British, killing General Gordon in the taking of Khartoum in 1885 (Holt and Daly 2011). There is no need for Salih to mention the Mahdi’s son, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi, the great sectarian and nationalist leader; nor his grandson (both prominent politicians and proponents of Sudanese independence). Nor for him to mention his great-grandson, two-time Prime Minister of Sudan (1966–1967, 1986–1989), Sadiq al-Mahdi, who today continues as Imam of the Ansar and is the long-standing head of the powerful Umma political party. Similarly, there would be no need for Salih to mention Ali al-Mirghani, scion of the venerated Khatmiyya dynasty, head of the largest Suf sect in Sudan, descendant of the Prophet Mohamed, supporter of the Ashigga party and rival of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi and his family. Nor would Salih need to mention his son, Ahmed Uthman al-Mirghani, president of the Sudan from 1986 to 1989 (Holt and Daly 2011, 144). When he fnally does refer directly to them, despite their eschatologically tinged importance to Sudanese history, Salih’s indictment of their and descendants’ descents into secular despotism (Holt and Daly 2011, 79) is as unequivocal as it is ominous: “When Moslem princes are flled with vanity and are seduced by the transient world, and their dominant positions [. . .] God smites them [. . .] and will fght against them till [all] are annihilated and become as particles of dust scattered by the wind on the day of desolation” (Salih 1996, 111). Salih does not stop at condemning the venal hedonism of the regime’s elite. In Bandarshah, he indicts the Sudanese government
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for the facile employment of “religious morality and principles” in what Abdel Salam Sidahmed calls the “shameless pursuit of partisan interests” that for the past three decades has been “legitimised” and “endorsed” by the “Sudanese Islamist Movement” (Sidahmed 1996, 224): “‘They pensioned me off because I wouldn’t perform the dawn prayers in the mosque.’ [. . .] ‘In Khartoum now we’ve got a religious government’” (Salih 1996, 25–26). The defeat the narrator Meheimeed speaks of is neither individual, nor specifcally Sudanese; nor is Khartoum’s “political and inquisitorial” utilization of Islam, which Meheimeed derides (Alfaisal 2006, 214). Moreover, Salih indicates that the colonial confict should not be considered as having ended, even years after independence came to most of the Arab world. Many scholars of Arab independence, looking at both the internal and regional levels, share Salih’s view that the work of Arab independence is incomplete. Moroccan-born academic and cultural critic, Jaafar Aksikas, argues that Arab independence is more “rhetorical and formal in nature” than actual. He writes that “for the masses, there [is] essentially no difference between their life during and after colonialism” (Aksikas 2009, 23). Sidahmed’s explanation of the working arrangement of Sudanese society established by the British echoes Salih’s evaluation: “Hoping to direct our affairs from afar, [the British] have left behind them people who think as they do” (Salih 2009, 45). Sidahmed writes that in the Sudan the British colonial system partially reproduced the “pre-colonial social stratifcation in a new form.” Subsequently, those of higher social standing were able to join the economic elite through the “utilization of their prestigious and strategic positions.” Seeking the support of religious and tribal leaders, the British reciprocated by providing these leaders with “material and moral awards.” As a result of this policy, the aforementioned leaders emerged after colonialism not only as economic giants but as outstanding leaders of popular Islam who were able to extend their patronage networks to include other infuential groups (Sidahmed 1996, 18–19, 25, 27). Sociologist and development studies specialist, Ankie Hoogvelt, explains that, due to the “interwovenness” of “Muslim elites in the Third World with the core of the Western capitalist system,” the gap “between them and the masses of the population who they rule and who are dispossessed” increasingly widened after independence (Hoogvelt 2001, 210). As for collective defeats, at the regional level, there is Palestine: partitioned at the time most of the Arab world became independent, today Palestine remains the Arab world’s unhealed wound. With the creation of the state of Israel (and the changes that have occurred in multinational capitalism with the fnish of the colonial epoch and the rise of transnational globalization), the confict between the Arab world and the colonial powers
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has shifted to a set of adversaries both more proximate and omnipresent: the United States and Israel. Salih has claimed elsewhere, without a sense of hyperbole, that the “creation of Israel” was “the single most catastrophic act in Modern European history” (Amyuni 1985, 16). In so doing, he gives voice to the Pan-Arab resentment at losing lands claimed by and holy to Islam, as well as the outrage and grief felt by the Arab world that today more than a million Palestinians remain as refugees, expelled from their homes. The Arabic words for the creation of Israel and the Pan-Arab defeat by Israeli forces are eminently descriptive. The 1948 Arab-Israeli war that led to the formation of the state of Israel is called al-Nakba: “the catastrophe”; and the 1967 Arab defeat by Israel (in the Six-Day War) is known as al-Naksa: “day of the setback, or calamity.” Indeed, Bandarshah is centered around “that catastrophe that defes description” (Salih 1996, 9). When reading the frst pages of Bandarshah, the reader is led to believe that when the narrator speaks of “that catastrophe that defes description” he is referring to the effect of Wad Rayyes’s murder and Hosna’s suicide on the community of Wad Hamid (recounted in Season of Migration to the North). Yet, many lines later according to the narrratological logic specifc to the text at hand, it seems that the narrator is in fact introducing the murder of Isa Dau al-Beit/Bandarshah and his grandson Meryoud by Bandarshah’s sons. However, when examined symptomatologically, in light of the anomie Salih has diagnosed as suffusing through the Sudan and many Middle Eastern Muslim-Arab nations after independence, it becomes clear that this “catastrophe that defes description” is al-Nakba: the catastrophe. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that this catastrophe “also” is al-Nakba. As will subsequently be discussed, Salih links epochs and traumatic events together, aggregating their emotional impact. The “catastrophe that defes description” is the murder/suicide of Wad Rayyes and Hosna; it is the murder of Bandarshah and Meryoud by Bandarshah’s sons; it is the defeat of the Arab nations by Israel in al-Nakba. The “catastrophe that defes description” is each of these; and it is also all of these. By aggregating these singular catastrophic events, Salih interrelates them one to the other: the nation, national pride, and identity; patriarchy; governance and tyranny; religion—each are components of the as-yet-unresolved event of Arab Muslim, Middle Eastern nations in the postcolonial present. Aksikas identifes the Pan-Arab defeats by Israel, especially their defeat in the Six-Day War, as the key moments that ushered in the return to Islamic religious tradition “as a political system.” Aksikas and others claim that these defeats dealt a “serious blow” to the existing political alternatives of Arab state capitalism, Pan-Arabism, and “all liberal, nationalist and socialist ideologies.” This had the effect of leaving fundamentalist Islamism as “the ‘only’ remaining revolutionary ideology in Arab Societies” (Aksikas 2009,
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28, 29).6 The regional turn to fundamentalist Islamism as a political system was reinforced popularly through the narrative that related the Pan-Arab defeat to the region’s abandonment of tradition and religion. The wealth derived from oil has been used to reinforce and extend the scope of neo-fundamentalist Islam as a political alternative to Western hegemony over the past decades. Sudan’s neighbor, Saudi Arabia, has spent “billions of its oil dollars” to spread their strict, Sunni version of Islam throughout the world (Hubbard and Sheikh 2015). The geo-political importance granted to countries possessing massive oil reserves, combined with Western subscription to “the myth of authoritarian stability”7 (Gause 2011), has ensured the place of the sectarian Saudi Arabian and secular Egyptian regimes as allies of the United States. Alliances with these regimes buttressed the United States against three postcolonial threats: that of the Soviet Union and its communist ideology; the threat to US hegemony posed by secular nationalism (Ali 2002, 85); and subsequently, the rise of radical Islamist groups. Oil, both in- and of-itself, but also vis-à-vis fundamentalist Islamism as a political system, has played and continues to play a signifcant role within the history of the two Sudans, as well as in the greater MENA region. In 1978, Chevron discovered oil deposits in what soon came to be disputed territory (Yongo-Bure 2007, 77). Almost immediately, President Nimiery, who came to power in the military coup d’état of 1969, began to redraw internal boundaries to give the North favored access to these areas—further fuelling the Southerners’ distrust of Khartoum. Subsequently, trying to stay atop the growing groundswell of both grassroots and political Islam, Nimiery allied himself with the charismatic leader of the Muslim Brotherhood (present in the Sudan since 1949 as the National Islamic Front), Hassan al-Turabi. Nimiery even went so far as to recast himself as Imam of the entire Sudan. Nimiery’s move toward fundamentalist Islamism was a regional strategy implemented by many. The existential and ontological crisis brought on in large part by the Pan-Arab defeat by Israel spurred a widespread ground-level renewal and return to Islam by many in the Arab community in recent years. Middle East expert, Vali Nasr, writes that today: the aspirations of the middle class have [. . .] fuelled the embrace of traditionalism—the Islamic world’s version of old-time religion. The prospect of launching oneself, one’s children and one’s society out into the competitive, globalized economy has increased rather than decreased interest in tradition—religious tradition very much included—because of the belief that enduring sources of standards and values are needed to help navigate the currents of change. (Nasr 2009, 184)
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Nasr writes that governments in many MENA countries “sought to emulate the growing piety of their societies, and their claims to be putting into practice the mandates of fundamentalists made Islamic parties redundant.” Nasr notes that through this move “they co-opted fundamentalism”: he comments that it “was a feat of genius” (Nasr 2009, 142). In 1983, Nimiery applied a severe form of shar’ia law (replete with foggings, hangings, and amputations for petty offenses) throughout the entire country, even in the non-Muslim south, rekindling the devastating north–south civil war in the process. However, these transformations were not enough to keep Nimeiry in power, and he was overthrown in 1985 (Holt and Daly 2011, 139). Meanwhile, in response to the universal imposition of shar’ia law on all Sudanese—even the non-Muslim population—and fearing their oil would be taken, the second Sudanese Civil War had started in 1983 with the formation of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) under Colonel John Garang. Under the government led by the great-grandson of the Mahdi, Sadiq al-Mahdi, using food as a weapon, the war in the South intensifed. With a government more interested in “Islamization than reconciliation,” over 500,000 people were killed with many additional hundreds of thousands of casualties. While a good number of these were direct results of the confict, many more deaths were caused by famine and disease (Holt and Daly 2011, 144, 146). Holt and Daly note the “ideology and organization of [the Khatmiyya and Ansar sects-cum-political parties] refected the outlook and aims of pious devotees.” However, the actions of their leaders—the scions of the al-Mahdi and al-Mirghani theo-political dynasties—have advanced the “economic and political interests” of the riverine tribes they head and to which for the past century the “fruits of conquest” have continued to fall (Holt and Daly 2011, 65, 73). In 1989, the Saudi-sponsored National Islamic Front (NIF), having become increasingly powerful, overthrew the government in a military coup d’état. Sidahmed writes that the “NIF emerged as a political party with a rather fuid religious agenda [. . .] whose target was primarily to control power as the most effective tool of Islamicisation rather than the indoctrination of the individual.” Noting that the NIF used sha’ria law as the “symbol” and “embodiment” of their “cultural authenticity,” Sidahmed writes that the “NIF regime seemed to have deployed Islamic injunctions8 primarily for symbolic purposes, rather than being engaged in the construction of a new system that is both different from and superior to the secular ones” (Sidahmed 1996, 215, 217, 224). With the NIF’s Hassan al-Turabi at frst at his side, Omar al-Bashir, the leader of the National Congress Party (the political branch of the NIF), has been president of Sudan—the frst Sunni Islamic state in the world—since the
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coup brought him to power in 1989. Though he oversaw the end of the war with the South and its emergence as a separate nation-state, al-Bashir is the only sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity (for his alliance with the Janjaweed in the civil war in Darfur). Seeking to preserve natural resources and to further entrench access to power, privilege, and wealth for its own— despite lacking political legitimacy (Kushkush 2015)—the Sudanese Islamic state under al-Bashir has presided over a regime intent on ethnic cleansing through policies of rape, torture, murder, and famine. Horn of Africa expert, Gérard Prunier, has described it as a “twenty-frst century” or “ambiguous” genocide: it is no longer necessary to kill a people to eliminate them, it is only necessary to let them die (Prunier 2008). In so doing, the Republic of the Sudan has destroyed the people of the badly desiccated region of Darfur (for valuable land) and decimated the people of the South (over water and oil) (Holt and Daly 2011, 166–167). Importantly, especially considering the repetitive, open-ended cycle of tyrannous rule Salih diagnoses as integral to the Bandarshah Syndrome, veteran Sudan researcher, Alex de Waal, estimates this to be the third time that history repeats itself in these lands (Waal 2007). Though many of the events summarized here occurred after he fnished with fction, there is little doubt that Tayeb Salih sensed the pattern of the past repeating itself. Moreover, in looking both to the future and to the conditions in his country, I contend that he foresaw—as inevitable as his diagnosis was apocalyptic—that the past would continue repeating itself in the future. He diagnosed the Sudan (and by extension the greater Muslim-Arab world) as being afficted by the Bandarshah Syndrome. Six decades on from having gained independence from colonial Britain, the Muslim-Arab world has not yet created a “viable and legitimate form of government” (Hassan 2003b, 134). Salih writes: I have chosen the name Bandar Shah because our problem is the search for the City (that is the Bandar), and also the search for a form of government that suits us—authority (Shah). The novel investigates those two things. [. . .] We have two fundamental problems in the Arab world, which are building the City and [creating] the authority which governs it. (Hassan 2003b, 134)
And so, having not yet created a “form of government that suits” a MuslimArab world only partially integrated into the globalized fows of the twentyfrst century, Sudan continues to be ruled by those who govern the country “as though they hate it and work on building it as though they are employed to destroy it.”
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4.2 UNIFYING THEMES AND DEVICES, THE BANDARSHAH SYNDROME, STYLE AS SYMPTOMATOLOGY, THE DISREGARDED SUFI ALTERNATIVE This section will show that via a fctional representation of the community of Wad Hamid, Salih mediates the societal working arrangements that today affect many contemporary Sudanese. Following Salih’s extra-diagetical direction, I have named the syndrome that emerges from a symptomatological reading of this “continuous narrative cycle” (Hassan 2003b, 666) for its principal characteristic: the autocratic tyrant, Bandarshah. Second, I will show how the shift from a “‘reliable’ tone” more typical of magical realism (Baldick 2008, 194) to an increasingly unsure, dark, and phantasmagorical magical realism serves to imbue Salih’s readers with the narrator’s growing sensation of anomie. This section will also examine the panacea—theopolitically marginalized though it may be—Salih juxtaposes against the Bandarshah Syndrome: the autochthonous way of the Suf path.
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4.2.1 Characterization, Politics In order to demonstrate how Salih develops the three axes of the Bandarshah Syndrome (the ill-health of both Sudanese Arab women and the social elite: the effendi, as well as Sudanese leaders’ phenotypical tendency to tyranny, patriarchy, and corruption), I will focus on his key novels and stories. Accordingly, I will examine the works in which Salih, through relating the lives and history of a common set of characters, creates what might best be described as a modernist roman-feuve or Sudanese saga through which he explores a variety of concerns, principal among those: “spirituality, colonialism, resistance, tradition, modernization, patriarchy, and authority” (Hassan 2003b, 32). These are the novella (The Wedding of Zein (19669)); the early short stories (“A Date Palm by the Stream” (1953), “A Handful of Dates” (1957), “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid” (1960), and the later “The Cypriot Man” (1972)); as well as the two novels: Season of Migration to the North (1966), and the two-part Bandarshah (1970, 1976). (With the exception of “The Cypriot Man,” each of these works is set in the fctional community of Wad Hamid, located on the shores of the Nile to the north of Khartoum.10) Character, place, and theme unify these works in which Salih portrays the lives of a common set of characters, all of whom live in the village of Wad Hamid. From the early novella, The Wedding of Zein, in which the village idiot, Zein, comes to marry the most beautiful girl in the village, the guardians of the village of Wad Hamid: the “Mahjoub gang,” are a constant in Salih’s
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works.11 As he describes village life over the course of several generations, Salih returns to revisit the theme developed in “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid,” which details the confict between villagers resistant to the advances of Western technology and government intrusion into their lives and the government’s lack of sensitivity to local beliefs and wishes. Salih adds further continuity to his works by employing a common narrator who is also a character. Though he goes unnamed until Salih’s last novel, Meheimeed frst appears as a young boy sickened by the cruelty of his beloved grandfather’s needlessly usurious practices in “A Handful of Dates.” As a young man returned from a seven-year sojourn studying in England, Meheimeed reappears as narrator and principal character in Season of Migration to the North. The short story “The Cypriot Man” is focalized through someone akin to Meheimeed. Beset by a Mephistophelian character, the narrator is confronted with the issues affecting many in the Arab world: the Pan-Arab defeat by Israel, the death of his father, and the plight of Palestinian refugees. In Bandarshah, set twenty years after the end of Season of Migration to the North, Meheimeed returns to Wad Hamid a defeated bureaucrat forced into early retirement by the government. At the end of his days, he seeks peace, and “to learn the truth of the matter before it was too late” (Salih 1996, 57). In Bandarshah, Salih indicates that the narrator of “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid” is in fact one of the Mahjoub “gang.” This early story fnishes with a message that resounds ever more tragically as Salih’s readers become cocomposed along with Meheimeed in a prophetic becoming-witness to the confagration of the Arab world. The message is that there is space to accommodate the disparate components of contemporary Sudanese reality: “What all these people have overlooked is that there’s plenty of room for all these things: the doum tree,12 the tomb, the water-pump, and the steamer’s stopping place” (Salih 1999, 19). Salih does not stop at plumbing the lives of a familiar cast of characters throughout many of his works; he repeats scenarios, creates identical characters, and gives multiple characters the same names, all of which span both generations and texts. As Arabic literary critic Rania Ali M. Al-Nour points out, the idea of the stranger who comes to Wad Hamid and changes people’s lives is a trope common to Salih’s works (Al-Nour 2010). In Season of Migration to the North this role is played by Mustafa Sa’eed (through whom Salih brings the violence of British colonization to the fore). In Bandarshah, Dau al-Beit functions in this role (and through whom Salih references the earlier era of Ottoman rule in the Sudan). Similarly, after years of fruitful intercourse that materially improve and enrich the lot of the community of Wad Hamid, both fgures meet their ends in the same way: mysteriously disappearing in the Nile at food, despite being excellent swimmers.
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Salih creates parallels among the female characters, as well.13 Fatima bint Jabr Al-Dar, Ni’ma, and Maryam each go to study with boys at school before being forced to quit at puberty. Each dedicates herself to her love as if to “produce all [the] nation” of Sudan herself (Salih 1996, 115). Fatima bint Jabr Al-Dar (who marries the Ottoman soldier, Dau al-Bait, after he is washed up—memoryless—in Wad Hamid three generations prior to Meheimeed’s return to Wad Hamid); Ni’ma (who marries the village fool, Zein); and Maryam (Meheimeed’s childhood love) are identical characters: “headstrong and independent-minded,” yet selfess, intelligent, and spiritual (Salih 1999, 108). There is also a parallel between the deaths of the Sudanese Arab woman, Hosna bint Mahmoud, and the Englishwoman, Jean Morris, both of whose deaths (as will be developed in section 3.3.2.3a) result from sexualized, colonial, and neopatriarchal violence. Additionally, Salih repeats the situation where various women are forced to marry men against their will: Hosna (to Wad Rayyes, after the death of Mustafa Sa’eed) and Maryam (to Bakri, after being abandoned by Meheimeed) (Al-Nour 2010, 38). Salih extends this repetition by giving different characters the same set of attributes, placing them in parallel situations, having them repeat similar actions, and by giving different characters the same name. Salih has commented that “a writer may deal with two or three characters all through his life. This is because the place remains constant. The unity of place imposes the idea of the succession of generations. [. . .] Time is not important. In the end, the name becomes a collective name which does not denote a particular individual” (Berkley 1979, lii). Out of rural, riverine Sudan, Salih has created Homeric archetypes: “This business of names is extraordinary. Some people’s names are just right for them, ftting them to the life” (Salih 1996, 20). Meryoud, meaning “the one who is loved by others,” is the name of Isa, Dau al-Beit’s grandson, as well as being the nickname by which Maryam refers to Meheimeed. Meryoud is also the grandson of Bandarshah, the king who ruled the region in days past. Both are at the center of many uncertain and confictual legends and are each other’s likeness: “The grandson, in appearance and behaviour was a complete replica of his grandfather [. . .]. Imagine twins [. . .] when you stood between them, it was as though you were standing between two mirrors placed opposite each other” (Salih 1996, 10). Dau al-Beit’s son, Isa, who becomes Bandarshah, is paired with Dau al-Beit: “We looked at his [Isa’s] eyes and see an exact replica of Dau al-Beit” (Salih 1996, 80). Tureif is paired with his uncle and father-in-law, Mahjoub: “[Meheimeed] was struck by the similarity between [Tureif] and Mahjoub: the way of standing and sitting, the laughter, the expression in the eyes, the gestures” (Salih 1996, 58–59). Meheimeed, in turn, is paired with his grandfather, Hajj Ahmed: “[Hajj Ahmed] would say proudly, as he did at every opportunity, ‘Meheimeed is the exact replica of me, the spitting image’” (Salih 1996, 89):
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“Passing over all his sons, [Hajj Ahmed] had chosen [Meheimeed] to be his shadow on earth [. . .] they were like twin brothers; it was as though the two of them had divided between them the sum of their ages: he was no younger than his grandfather, the grandfather no older than his grandson” (Salih 1996, 84). Salih parallels aspects of the legendary tyrant, Bandarshah, and his life with several of the key inhabitants of Wad Hamid. Indeed, the legend frst becomes enfeshed in the fgure of Isa Dau al-Beit, who rose to wealth and prominence in Wad Hamid some 80 years before Sudanese independence. As a boy, he appeared one day before his playmates clothed in exotic dress: “When I frst saw him I shouted, ‘Bandarshah,’ and we all began repeating, ‘Bandarshah, Bandarshah,’ and we chased after him till we made him go into his house. From that day no one called him anything but Bandarshah” (Salih 1996, 20). References to Bandarshah and the characteristics that will come to mark him as both syndrome and archetype can be found in the earlier Season of Migration to the North where the equivocal, Mephistophelean character, Mustafa Sa’eed, is linked to the legendary dictator (Salih 1996, 7–8). As vision, dream, hallucination, nightmare, or childhood memory of communal trauma, Meheimeed comes to see the legend of Bandarshah as both infecting and refected within the reality of Wad Hamid: “The name [Bandarshah] had started to foat on the surface and would continue to recur in this way without warning until things became real” (Salih 1996, 37). Salih links many characters and equates them with the fgure of Bandarshah by painting them with the same character combination of strength and weakness. Tureif, the young proto-communist who overthrows his uncle and father-in-law, Mahjoub, to become the new leader of Wad Hamid, is described similarly (Salih 1996, 54). All who are paired are also paired with Bandarshah. First, there is Meheimeed’s grandfather, Hajj Ahmed (as recounted in a vision or dream of Meheimeed’s): “‘We welcome our son, Meheimeed,’ said the voice, the very voice that had previously called to me [Meheimeed] and had guided me there, the voice, that of my grandfather—there was no doubt about it—the face of Bandarshah” (Salih 1996, 30). Second, there is Sa’eed the Owl/Asha ‘l-Baytat, who, through extortion, comes to have great power in Wad Hamid: “I heard with my own ears the winds of Amsheer echoing my call to prayer, as though I the miserable, puny Sa’eed was the Bandarshah of my time, saying to the people of this world and the next ‘Come to perdition. Come to success. Come to error. Come to Salvation’” (Salih 1996, 41–42). Third, there is Mahjoub: “Directing his words at Mahjoub, Asha ‘l-Baytat said laughing, ‘Have a fear of God, Mahjoub. Do you want to make yourself a Bandarshah in the place?’” (Salih 1996, 37). And there is Tureif: “Sa’eed said, ‘Bakri’s son Tureif is trying to make himself into a Bandarshah’” (Salih 1996, 26). Tureif, through another of Meheimeed’s hallucinatory visions, becomes further cemented with Bandarshah: “And the voice said to you:
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‘Welcome to Tureif, the son of Bakri. Welcome to the new leader of Wad Hamid.’ [You] and Bandarshah were holding the threads of chaos, in the middle of it and above it” (Salih 1996, 58). Salih also links his contemporary characters with the mythical character of Bandarshah by having the contemporary characters not only embody attributes of Bandarshah, but participate in a repetition of those Bandarshah’s actions. At the center of the Bandarshah legend is the great, wealthy, sadistic tyrant, Bandarshah, who, along with his grandson, Meryoud, enslaved his eleven sons and had them whipped at nightly banquets until one day they rose up and killed both Bandarshah and Meryoud: Bandarshah’s greatest pleasure was to sit on that throne [. . .] order his slaves to be herded in shackled in irons. He would order his executioners to fog them with thick whips made of hippopotamus hide [. . .]. Then he would clap his hands and naked slave-girls would enter the hall [. . . .] Bandarshah carried on like this [. . .] till the night they rebelled as one man and fell upon him and killed him. (Salih 1996, 106)
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The reader learns that these actions had become embodied in the community of Wad Hamid many decades before when, as Meheimeed comes to remember the day in his childhood when Isa Dau al-Beit/Bandarshah and his chosen grandson, the precocious Meryoud, were killed in a repetition of the legendary tyrant’s end: “It’s said,” I [Meheimeed] said to them, “that they tied the two of them up with ropes [. . .].” “It’s said that they beat them with whips made out of sant roots,” I said to them. My grandfather suddenly sat bolt upright and said, “Meaning to say it wasn’t by strangulation or stabbing?” [. . . . ] Bandarshah, with Meryoud on his right—would sit on two high chairs placed on a dais in the centre of the diwan. They would give judgement together and the punishment would be fogging. (Salih 1996, 46–47)
Meheimeed begins to comprehend that through its repetition in the community of Wad Hamid the doom-tenored legend of Bandarshah is twined within their days and destiny. He then recalls how he, too, as an advanced adolescent, and at his grandfather’s bequest, in a repetition of an aspect of the Bandarshah legend, had cast one of his uncles out of the family (Salih 1996, 85). The continuity of characterization, repetition of characters, names, and actions throughout the generations of Wad Hamid, as well as the creation of
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identical characters, all of which carry across Salih’s principal works, are elements by which Salih crafts the lives of northern Sudanese Arab villagers into the grand stuff of an epic narrative. These techniques enable Salih’s fction to also function as a typology capturing the forces coursing through the Sudan. Haifa Saud Alfaisal notes that Salih “populates Wad Hamid with characters who personify basic ideological strands” present in the Sudan (Alfaisal 2006, 207). These ideological strands fall within two larger groupings: those who adhere to “worldliness” (the root of Sudanese political problems (Alfaisal 2006, 218)) and those who follow the Suf path. Within the group seeking worldly power, there are various subcomponents: corrupt, yet-village-sustaining authorities, represented by Mahjoub and Tureif; fundamentalist, Islamist orthodoxy, represented by Abdul Hafeez and the village Imam; Meheimeed represents those of high social standing in Sudanese society: the “effendi”; while Bandarshah and his grandson, Meryoud, representing both the past and the future, personify “authoritarianism,” “brute force,” “irreverence towards life,” and “tyrannical patriarchy.” Against those worldly characters, Salih sets the holy fgures of the devout slave, Bilal, the blessed idiot, Zein, the two Suf mystics: Sheikh Haneen and Sheikh Nasrullah Wad Habib, and Meheimeed’s father. Following the Suf path, they show that true devotion to God and living a truly spiritual life involves love, devotion, inclusion, tolerance, peace, and harmony (Salih 1996, 122). Meheimeed’s father and Bandarshah’s sons represent the present. Overshadowed by the past, destroyed by the future, in Salih’s vision of a Sudanese society afficted by the Bandarshah Syndrome, they represent the plight of the present generation, neglected and dominated by those in thrall to worldly power (Alfaisal 2006, 160–162). As Cairo was for Mahfouz, Macondo for García Márquez, Yoknapatawpha County for Faulkner, and fn de siecle Paris for Proust, Salih’s multi-work exploration of Wad Hamid and its inhabitants allows him to show how the Sudan is “affected by the tides of history,” and thus “paint a portrait of an age” (Hassan 2003b, 16). Arabic literature expert Mona Amyuni concurs. She writes that those living in the Arab world and indeed the third world at large “experienced a shock of recognition when [they] listened to Salih’s voice. The sensibility of a whole epoch seemed condensed into this short novel [Season of Migration to the North]” (Amyuni 1985, 8). Even while expressing the futility of a writer’s task when he believed what his country needed were rather “doctors, engineers, and teachers” (Amyuni 1985, 14), Salih has confrmed this sweeping intention to reveal collective and deeper truths: “in my own way I tried to create an Iliad” (Berkley 2014). The conficts and relations Salih’s works portray are neither individual nor idiosyncratic; as minor literature, though comprised of heterogeneous elements, everything has collective value, and the individual concern is directly
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connected to a political immediacy (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 17). Through them, Salih has captured and rendered perceptible the forces fowing through contemporary Sudan. His works function as an ethology, a symptomatology, wherein Salih, as clinician of Sudanese Arab society, captured and rendered perceptible heretofore imperceptible, yet nevertheless real, existent forces. Literature “capture[s . . .] imperceptible forces while producing new forms” (Sauvagnargues 2013, 33): it “make[s] visible, [. . .] give[s] materiality back to the strands holding the text to society, author, and culture, [and] release[s] a text from its isolation,” (Said 1983, 175).
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4.2.2 Against the “Bandarshah Syndrome”: The Sufi Way The conficts between traditional life, colonialism, “Western style modernity,” the “peculiar call to modernity”14 that is fundamentalist Islam (Nasr 2009, 6), and each of their removes from the Suf-infused path of “popular” Islam, unify Salih’s works. Salih portrays offcial fundamentalist Islam and all who are intolerantly concerned with the outward trappings of faith (e.g., performing ablutions, going to mosque) negatively. Salih makes it clear that outward displays have little to do with true faith. Taher Wad Rawwasi directs the following advice to Meheimeed: “Keep well away from people with beards and prayer-beads—you’ll get nothing but trouble from [those in the ‘piety trade’ who] want to start Islam off again from the beginning” (Salih 1996, 7–8, 33). Salih emphasizes that these avenues and those concerned with the form devotion takes, rather than its substance, to be devoid of true spiritual expression. Accordingly, Salih groups the Imam and the orthodoxly devout Abdul Hafeez with those preoccupied with the worldly order. Sa’eed the shopkeeper reminds the deputy of the Imam that “the wages and reward” of “those who pray and those who don’t” equally “are [not with him but] with God” (Salih 1996, 8). In pointed contrast to all those who, like Bandarshah, think of themselves “as inheriting the earth and all that [is] on it” (Salih 1996, 41), Salih shows preference for “Moslems who are not fanatical on the question of religion” (Salih 1996, 67).15 Contra those who desire worldly power, Salih extolls the virtues of those who like Meheimeed’s father “dream the dreams of the meek and part[ake] of the provisions of the poor” (Salih 1996, 122). Though these moments become increasingly rare and splinter before the confagration that comes to Wad Hamid in Bandarshah, Salih’s earlier works are suffused with instances of inclusive, communal, nondogmatic Suf spirituality and harmony between the people and their environment. Instances of this can be found in each of his longer works: Zein’s wedding (Salih 1999, 110–120); the caravan’s spontaneous celebration in the oasis (Salih 2009, 93–95); the arrival of Dau al-Beit, his conversion and subsequent marriage to
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Fatima, and the love between Bilal and Sheikh Nasrullah (Salih 1996, 70–77, 101–113). Each exemplifes the inner, mystical dimension of Islam in which ethnic, political, and religious contradictions are resolved in a harmonious connection to place. Sufsm diverges from orthodox Islam, in that it emphasizes the ethical, spiritual, and social teaching as being the “essential message of Islam” and it views the practices and regulations that Muhammad put into effect as “ephemeral aspects of Islam relevant primarily to a particular society at a certain stage in its history” (Ahmed 1992, 13). The spirituality Salih espouses sees as many paths to God as there are individuals; it is connected to the immutable earth all about his characters and with which they reconnect only occasionally. Salih identifed the “confrontation between the Arab Muslim World and the Western European one,” as being responsible for destroying the preexisting harmony: “[The Wedding of Zein] is a celebration of this specifc harmonious environment. The place is therefore the thing for me. Even Season is related to the place and the village is the constant thing. It was in a state of harmony in the Wedding, then a foreign alien element gets injected into it in Season and the results are tragic” (Amyuni 1985, 16). Against the path of popular, Suf Islam, Salih’s fction shows the Arab Muslim world’s negotiations of the East-West relationship—that is, modernity —to be unsuccessful. In the story the “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid” Salih shows the community’s link to its founding Suf spirituality (the doum tree) to be threatened by the modernization efforts of both colonial and postcolonial governments alike. Even though the narrator indicates that there is room for them all, the older generation is unable to incorporate modernity into their worldview, while those seeking to bring technological advances to the village are unable to integrate the villagers’ beliefs with their own goals. In Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih deepens the exploration of the confict between traditional Sudan and Western modernity he had begun in “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid.” This confict occurs against the backdrop of, and at the expense of, the previous inclusive, pastoral, quasiutopian, Suf-harmony-with-place Salih depicted in The Wedding of Zein. Salih contrasts the narrator’s increasing alienation in postcolonial Sudan with the harmony Meheimeed momentarily fnds in which he experiences oneness with and regains hope in the land and those around him: “To the good health of the Sudan. To the good health of the Sudan” (Salih 2009, 95). This harmony is irrevocably broken by the murder/suicide of Wad Rayyes and Hosna bint Mahmoud. The shaken community tearlessly buries its dead; the tears come later, in Bandarshah. The harmony which suffused the earlier novella, The Wedding of Zein, and which sparked into existence on several occasions in the prior novel, Season of Migration to the North, is completely absent from the narrative time (1970s) of Bandarshah. The only references to that
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Suf tolerance and harmony in Bandarshah are brought in as memories of prior times, which are then juxtaposed to the worldly hubbub of Bandarshah.
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4.2.3 Narratology, Sufism, Magical Realism, Politics, the Bandarshah Syndrome In Season of Migration to the North, Salih amplifes the community’s sense of epochal dislocation by complicating the simple, linear progression with which he had constructed his previous short stories and novella. The forward progression of narrative time within which the narrator Meheimeed returns to Wad Hamid, meets Mustafa Sa’eed, moves his family to Khartoum, and returns to Wad Hamid to investigate the murder/suicide of Wad Rayyes and Hosna bint Mahmoud is interrupted by multiple analepses. These take the form of remembered conversations or memories, which serve to inject the story of Mustafa Sa’eed’s past life into the events of the ongoing present. These are common and basic narratological manoeuvres. Nowhere within Season of Migration to the North is a careful reader disoriented or temporally stranded. The same cannot be said for Bandarshah. Yet, despite its narratological complexity, the value of Suf love and devotion is again emphasized. This pure love has two incarnations: in the love between the Suf saint, Sheikh Nasrullah wad Habib, and his slave Bilal, and in Hawwa bint al-Oreibi’s “devotion known only to single-minded Sufs” to her son (by Bilal), Taher Wad Rawwasi, and with which she “flled [Taher’s] heart with love until [he] became like an inexhaustible spring” (Salih 1996, 101–113). Salih reinforces his proposed alternative—the virtue of nonworldliness—through his syncretic utilization of magically realist Suf practices. Interspersed within and rendered equivalent to the realistic elements16 that add grit to his stories, Salih relates “supernatural” (Salih 1999, 77) events17 and creates characters such as Dau al-Beit, Mustafa Sa’eed, and Bandarshah, whose surfeit of spiritual, intellectual, economic, agricultural, and tyrannical powers overpower their fesh-and-blood credibility. They function more as composite symbols of incarnated forces. Despite their inexplicability, these magical events and characters shape the days and destiny of the inhabitants of the community of Wad Hamid, often to a greater degree than those who are and that which is more “believable.” Salih claimed not only that had he walked the path of magical realism before many others, but that he had not invented anything magical: he insisted that he wrote what “exists in [his] environment” (Alfaisal 2006, 39). The popular Islam practiced in the Sudan and mediated in Salih’s works contain aspects of animism or indigenous paganism, as well as orthodox Islam. Popular Islam is flled with mysticism: the worship of saints and places, even
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trees and stones, is common. This practice gives access to and connection with miracles and the supernatural (Nasr 1980). Salih scholars Nasr, Alfaisal, Hassan, and Amyuni all agree that the widespread and inclusive practices of popular Islam (and which are in many regards, indistinguishable from Sufsm) are refected in Salih’s work, precisely because they can mediate between virtually any ideological position. The exception is orthodox, fundamentalist Islam: “On the question of the Imam [Zein] made a camp all on his own. He treated him with rudeness and if he met him approaching from afar he would leave the road clear for him. The Imam was perhaps the only person Zein hated [. . .]” (Salih 1999, 93). In Salih’s early works, the magical or supernatural elements are related to the Suf order. For example (in the novella, The Wedding of Zein), all of Sheikh Haneen’s miracles are attributed to the fact that he is a “saint of God” (Salih 1999, 75). Mirroring Salih’s symptomatology of a devolving Sudan, the instances of miracles and corresponding harmony brought about by popular Islam, disappear almost completely in the postcolonial Sudan portrayed in Season of Migration to the North. Unaware of being overtaken by fundamentalist, neopatriarchal discourse responsible for the tragedy of Hosna’s murder/suicide, society has cracked. The prior harmony has been darkened, destroyed. Returning to his village after the murder/suicide, the narrator—though fnding familiarity in the sights, sounds, and smells of his village—notes, “Yet, the world has changed” (Salih 2009, 107). The virtual absence of the supernatural in Season of Migration to the North stylistically reinforces Salih’s vision of a community that has lost its (mystical) connection to place. Unsettled by its unsuccessful negotiations with colonial and postcolonial modernity, Wad Hamid has lost its foundation. As harmony is replaced by alienation, tears, sorrow, and anomie, so too, when it reappears, does the tone of Salih’s magical realism darken. The marked shift in Salih’s later utilization of magical realism in Bandarshah, the force of which is exacerbated by an ever-more-fragmented style, stands in contradistinction to the at times whimsical use of magically realist techniques employed by writers, such as Gabriel García Márquez or Salman Rushdie. As such, Salih’s employment of a phantasmagorical magical realism is indissociable from his diagnosis of the confagration that is upon an Arab Muslim world that has politically and collectively devalued the path of popular, Suf Islam, and which Salih intimates could successfully negotiate the East-West confict. Like the works of García Márquez, Rushdie, and Miguel Ángel Asturias, the elements of magical realism in Salih’s works function in both the political and spiritual registers (see section 2.2). Salih credits what he believes to be his contribution to Arabic literature—that is, a “constant plea for toleration”—to this aspect of his Sudanese, Muslim-Arab identity (Amyuni 1985, 16).
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However literarily valuable the “supernatural” elements of Suf spirituality are for Salih, utilizations of popular Islam in cultural works brings its social, cultural, and political value. Functioning much like an Islamic version of négritude, the “epistemological paradigm” (Alfaisal 2006, 235) of Sufsm serves as a cultural reservoir in Salih’s works: popular Islam reasserts an integral, autochthonous, anticolonial source of identity and values. It also offers an alternative to the particular combination of worldliness, fundamentalism, and the phenotypic predilection to tyranny that Salih has diagnosed as being at the core of Sudan’s political problems. In Wad Hamid, previous generations had seen miracles and prosperity brought about by local saints. However, by the 1970s—the time of Bandarshah—the community had been reshaped by decades of colonialism and postcolonialism, as well as by the various regional reactions to Western European modernity. The supernatural elements that Salih reintroduces into this period’s fction have undergone a corresponding change. Suf mysticism has been replaced by the legend of the great Bandarshah. The supernatural has changed from signifying connection to place, benefcence, love, harmony, abundance, and communion centering around a “man blessed by God” (Salih 1999, 82) such as Zein, or Sheikh Haneen. The “inverted divinity” of Bandarshah has come to preside over Wad Hamid: “[Bandarshah] is sitting on the throne of that hubbub, gripping the threads of chaos in both hands, amidst it and above it at one and the same time, like a resplendent and destructive ray” (Salih 1996, 12). Depicted thus, Bandarshah symbolizes the false sacredness of the materialism and worldly power that is wrapped within the religious discourse of contemporary Sudanese leaders (Alfaisal 2006, 227). The supernatural has become dark, uncertain, malign—flled with sorrow and ill portent. No longer bringing the community together in harmony, the supernatural has become entwined with the worship of worldly power. It phantasmagorically rends asunder the fabric of the community while troublingly reshaping it as liminally in thrall to the forces of the coming confagration. Salih creates the sensation of dislocation and chaos felt by the narrator by complicating the prior “reliable” tone with which the narrator had “objectively” related the natural and “supernatural” events in previous works. Having subsumed Suf mysticism within darker “supernatural” elements, Salih relates events, memories, history, visions, and dreams with purposeful narratological obfuscation. Bandarshah is told in both third and frst-person points of view, with changes to that frst-person coming with dizzying and barely announced abruptness. Bandarshah skips from Meheimeed’s frst-person narrative to third-person narrators who introduce other narrators who then narrate their story in the frst-person: “This is what Abdul Khalek said, as narrated by his son Hamad Wad Haleema, years and years later” (Salih 1996, 78).
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The juxtaposition of varying frst-person with semi-omniscient thirdperson narration in contiguous sections of the narrative disorients the reader both as to who is speaking and at which point in time they are located. This disorientation is exacerbated by the fact that the same scenes are often described multiple times from multiple points of view, rarely in narrative time, but more often through unannounced and abrupt analepses in the form of memories that Meheimeed, the narrator, is incapable of organizing. These scenes are themselves often uncertain visions (the visions of Bandarshah by Meheimeed, Tureif, and Sa’eed the Owl), or barely remembered dreams, or various versions of the one story (the origin of Bandarshah). The shared dream in which Bandarshah and Meryoud install Tureif “as the new leader of Wad Hamid” (Salih 1996, 58) and place Meheimeed as witness to it all is described so as to be indistinguishable from “reality” (Salih 1996, 57–59). Uncertain and dark, it is not clear whether it is vision or dream. Additionally, Salih has different characters (Taher Wad Rawwasi, Sa’eed Asha ‘l-Baytat, Mukhtar Wad Hasab ar-Rasoul, Hamad Wad Haleema) recount the parts of the history of Wad Hamid to which they are privy, using the frst-person to do so. Occasionally, these intra- to extra-diegetic shifts in narration, and back again, are clearly announced: “Hamad Wad Haleema recounts that one day, when they were still young lads, Isa Wad Dau al-Beit came out and joined them dressed up as for the Feast, though it was not the time of the Feast” (Salih 1996, 20). However, in Bandarshah, metaleptic transgressions between the boundaries of the levels and times of narration become the rule. The textual anchors by which the reader can discern which “I” is speaking, to whom they are speaking, and in which epoch the action to which the narrators are referring took place, must be guessed at or inferred. They often come mid-narrative. Additionally, Salih switches from chapter to chapter between frst-person narration to that of an omniscient third person. This switch in narrators often corresponds to an unannounced jump in time. Moreover, Salih returns to describe several events multiple times (the dawn service, the murder of Bandarshah and Meryoud, Maryam’s funeral) from different perspectives, at different times and in slightly different ways. Voices from dreams addressing a character are portrayed as evenly as the voices of those standing next to him: “Meheimeed.” Meheimeed turned toward the voice and called out: “Yes.” Wad Rawwasi was surprised and said to him, “Who are you answering?” Immediately Meheimeed realized he had been immersed in a dream and had answered a call no one had made. (Salih 1996, 25)
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Even when it is obvious when Meheimeed is narrating, Salih obscures whether he is relating a dream, a vision, a childhood event, or an event that occurred to someone else. This narratological sleight-of-hand disorients the reader and composes him or her within the sensation of anomie that comes to envelop the narrator. Two of Salih’s principal critics concur on two points: frst, the narratological diffculty and lack of clarity of Bandarshah render the text inaccessible to many and have caused most of the few who have read it to dismiss it. Second, for just those reasons, they agree that it is the most masterful and worthy of Salih’s texts (Alfaisal 2006; Hassan 2003b). Waïl Hassan writes that: inventor[ying] Arab consciousness after the collapse of the nationalist project [,] Bandarshah lacks any [. . .] linear direction: it is an incomplete, episodic novel whose achievement lies precisely in the expression of discursive rupture. In that sense the unfnished novel may be seen in a larger cultural and historical context as the expression of ongoing, unresolved crisis. (Hassan 2003b, 134, 133)
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Moreover, Hassan sees Salih’s abandonment of literature without completing Bandarshah as indicative that Salih decided that journalistic writing “with its directness and immediacy is more effective for dealing with events than allegory, symbolism, or myth making” (Hassan 2003b, 175). Alfaisal agrees with Hassan, in that by seeking to create a myth of Bandarshah and by having the ideologically representative inhabitants of Wad Hamid engaged in intergenerational confict, Salih is not only recounting the contemporary history of the Sudan, but he is foretelling its destiny. Salih’s pointed comments on the “homegrown rulers”—who are “a tough bunch” and who are “like us and better than us” (Salih 1996, 9), but who, not treading the path to Truth, are phenotypically and mythically imbricated within a recurring cycle of despotism—are an explicit engagement in political evaluation. In so doing, Salih captures past and present conficts and encapsulates them in cultural memory: In Bandarshah all forms of political and social authority are in crisis; thus the Bandar remains no more than the embodiment of the tyranny of the power, Shah. This situation accurately describes socio-political life in the contemporary neopatriarchal Arab world—nearly three decades after the publication of Meryoud [the second book of Bandarshah]. (Hassan 2003b, 167)
Alfaisal goes further than Hassan, in that she asserts that Salih’s use of magic realism allows him to incorporate the mysticism that is part of the Sufsm or popular Islam in Sudan. Asserting that the supernatural or the magical aspect of Bandarshah is connected to the corresponding historical and political context, Alfaisal writes:
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the elevation of the representative of the worldly order (Bandarshah) to the level of the sacred, provides strong commentary on the ability of the worldly power to falsely present itself as a sacred context. This is a fair assessment of Sudanese history, where religious discourse has often been exploited by power seeking entities—for example Nimeiri or Turabi. (Alfaisal 2006, 227)
Salih portrays Bandarshah as an “inverted divinity” in order to present his alternate vision, which has its basis in indigenous spirituality. Salih’s work condemns worldliness and the fght for power in whatever the form it comes in equally, whether it be rural and traditional (Mahjoub, Tureif); urban and national (effendis, ministers); or Islamist (the Imam, Abdul Hafeez). All are shown to be equally corrupted. Alfaisal asserts Salih offers the story of the indigenous saint, the slave Bilal, because his holiness offers an alternate vision, a sociopolitical alternative to the doomed paths of the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood and worldliness. Bilal’s master says “your scale will outweigh mine in the balances of the Truth [. . .]. My scale outweighs yours in the balances of the people of the world, but your scale, O Bilal, will outweigh mine in the Balance of Justice” (Salih 1996, 102). The sum of the exploration of common themes, characters, and place through the modulation of stylistic and narratological techniques over the course of Salih’s work is threefold: frst, it involves the reader in the block of confusion, alienation, despair, and phantasmagorical, whirling chaos experienced by the narrator. (This will be examined in section 4.3.2.4.) Second, it establishes Wad Hamid as a quasi-mythological place, and in so doing lifts its characters from their riverine life and embeds them and the place they inhabit within an epic narrative. And third, in Salih’s hands, magical realism symptomatologically captures the forces (de)forming the Sudan. The entropic fragmentation of the linearity of the narrative works to render Salih’s parallelism at once polysemous and pathological. The rendition of the equivocal fgures of Bandarshah and his grandson, Meryoud, that is, the past and the future of Sudanese Arab leadership—“the homegrown rulers” who “are a tough bunch” (Salih 1996, 52)—fnishes as pathology. As such, Bandarshah comes to represent the phenotype of worldly behaviors Salih has diagnosed as afficting his literary world. Though exceptional men, Salih sees this syndrome of “worldliness” as not only corrupting their leaders but as heralding the coming confagration of their community. Like Pepetela—who experienced two devastating wars but did not lose his faith in the world nor in art to represent that world—Salih’s work too, though uncompromising in its darkness, is based in a desire shared by many modernist writers to transform the “unhappy world” (Lewis 2007). Salih diagnoses an almost socio-genetic predisposition to moral corruption, tyranny, and cruelty among Sudanese Arab rulers to be the principle pathology from which Sudanese Arab society suffers. As was established in section
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2.2, a diagnosis that a society functions as an ill-health assemblage is one of functions of “literature as health.” As the next section on health will show, Salih has drawn an intensive map of the working arrangements of Sudanese society. Tabulated and disaggregated on the Health and Capabilities Rubric, Salih’s works diagnose the effects the pathologies of the Bandarshah Syndrome have had on the health of the Sudanese Arab people and link those effects to their causal conditions.
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4.3 SUDANESE ARAB SOCIETY AS ILL-HEALTH ASSEMBLAGE This section will examine the effects of the principal morbidity, personifed and fabulated in the fgure of the autochthonous autocrat, Bandarshah, which Tayeb Salih diagnosed to be afficting the Sudan: neopatriarchy. As this section will show, Tayeb Salih did more than just identify and indict the colonial occupation of the Sudan as being the causative factor in producing Sudanese ill-health. His works indicate, frst, that the effects of the colonial rearrangements of the political, administrative, and socioeconomic workings of Sudanese society carry through into the postcolonial present. This can be seen in the local and federal patronage networks through which Sudanese Arab life is governed, as well as the bureaucratization of the lives of the effendis, Sudanese society’s elite. Second, Tayeb Salih’s portrayal of what Sudanese Arab women can do opens on to an investigation of how, in a society ontologically and epistemologically threatened by colonialism, Sudanese Arab women’s gendered bodies came to be incorporated within fundamentalist Islamists’ strategies of theocultural revitalization. Salih shows the result of his tripartite diagnosis to be the brutal, étatist, neopatriarchal arrangements of contemporary Sudanese Arab society by which the illness of the Bandarshah Syndrome “merges” with the bodies and lives of Sudanese Arab men and women. In the sections that follow, the negative modulations of what Sudanese Arab bodies can do will be analyzed via the seven categories of the previously developed sevenfold Health and Capabilities Rubric. Subsequently (in section 4.4), I will show that Salih co-composes both the reader and the principal character, Meheimeed, within a bloc of sensation that is at the same time a becoming-witness composed variously of: love, defeat, anomie, impotence, growing awareness, confusion, and grief. I will show that the becoming-witness that suffuses both reader and narrator at the end of Bandarshah—each comes to comprehend the reality behind and the destiny of Sudanese Arab society—is an affect, as well as an effect of both Sudanese society as an ill-health assemblage and Salih’s works “as an enterprise in health” (Deleuze 1997, 3). However, before beginning this analysis, I will
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summarize the theoretical work upon which this examination of Sudanese health and capabilities rests.
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4.3.1 The Health Outcomes of the Bandarshah Syndrome Using this work’s postcolonial symptomatological methodology, elements of Salih’s diagnosis have been isolated, verifed, and quantifed by independent, third-party expert sources, and visually represented on a dashboard that tracks Sudanese health against key health and capabilities performance indicators. This symptomatological table is derived from Salih’s works and it captures the poor health and capabilities outcomes produced by contemporary Sudanese society, as well as the forces and relations that produce them. Additionally, his work historically contextualizes—in a manner which neither international development specialists nor any index of failed states can—how the working arrangements of the Sudanese neopatriarchal assemblage function and how it came to be. This is of great importance. Public health practitioners must take into account the “large-scale social forces” at work in a country in order to incorporate a “biosocial understanding of medical phenomena” into their clinical practices (Farmer et al. 2006). So too, international and human development specialists must comprehend the forces that have produced a certain outcome in order to successfully design and implement programs aimed at improving a people’s health and well-being. The foremost assertion of this work is that, read symptomatologically, certain pieces of postcolonial literature can provide that understanding, whether for cultural and literary theorists, philosophers, or public health and international and human development specialists. Certainly, as the next section in which Salih’s diagnosis of the effects of the Bandarshah Syndrome on Sudanese Arab women’s health will demonstrate, by raising their everyday actions and passions to their noematic attributes, and by rendering them immediately both collective and political, Salih’s portrayal of Sudanese Arab women does just that. 4.3.1.1 Literature as Health: Social Opportunities, Economic Constraints, and an Inequitable Distribution of Material Social Goods throughout the Sudan Access to employment outside the home, education, health care, as well as to social and any other services that assist all citizens to be productive members of society are not gender-specifc freedoms. Yet, Salih’s work attentively mediates a reality in which a Sudanese Arab woman’s ability to more fully realize her capabilities as a person—not only in terms of well-being but also in terms of voice and autonomy—is stunted by restricted and limited access to
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fundamental social opportunities, such as education and health care (UNDP 2016, 32). Nor is it a coincidence that not one of the references to economic transactions and facilities in Salih’s works involve a female character. Gender is not independently controlled for within any of the seven categories of the Health and Capabilities Rubric. However, Amartya Sen’s foundational work emphasizes women’s agency to be the crucial crosscutting theme that must be taken into account when considering a people’s capability to live the life they value. For much of the past ffty years, Sen has advocated for the crucial role that access to education and economic facilities play in the lives of girls and women. He emphasizes that not only do advances in these two categories reduce fertility and childhood mortality rates but that they are intrinsic to the economic and human development of every society in the world as a whole. He writes: “Nothing, arguably, is as important today in the political economy of development as an adequate recognition of political, economic and social participation and leadership of women” (Sen 1999, 203). Most of the references to social opportunities indicate the possibilities of life in Wad Hamid to be restricted by the lack of schools and hospitals in the region: “Let them build the schools frst,” said Mahjoub [. . .] “Aren’t we human beings? Don’t we pay taxes? Haven’t we any rights in this country? Everything’s in Khartoum. The whole country’s budget is spent in Khartoum. One single hospital in Merawi, and it takes us three days to get there. The women die in childbirth—there’s not a single qualifed midwife in this place.” (Salih 2009, 118)
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“On the day it happened we were preparing to travel in a delegation to ask for the building of a large hospital, also for an intermediate boys’ school, a primary school for girls, an agricultural school [. . .].” (Salih 2009, 121)
Yet, limited as the educational opportunities are for most Sudanese (Sudanese children enjoy 3.5 years of schooling on average: 165th in the world (UNDP 2016, 200)), Salih’s works reveal that a girl’s access to education is even more severely curtailed because of her gender: “School’s for boys, [Meheimeed and Mahjoub] said to [Maryam]” (Salih 1996, 117). By disguising herself as a boy, as a young girl, Maryam had managed to go to school for a few years, where “she used to learn as though she were remembering things she had known long ago.” This ploy worked until the day “nature gushed forth, with Maryam’s body beginning to yield to the deepest call of life. [. . .] transform[ing her] into another creature. [. . .] Overnight, by dint of a plot of nature and social convention, Maryam was changed into a female and no more” (Salih 1996, 86). Mahjoub, the representative of neopatriarchal
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authority in Wad Hamid, reminds Maryam, his sister: “That’s how the [. . .] system is.” Limited access to education and economic facilities is part of the “disparate, concurrent and heterogeneous” (Sauvagnargues 2016, 149) relations of the forces of social subjectivation that converge on Sudanese Arab women’s bodies and which produce them as individuals less capable than, and subservient to, the males in their lives:
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“Anyway if the woman’s father and brothers are agreeable no one can do anything about it.” “But if she doesn’t want to marry? I [Meheimeed] said to him [Mahjoub]. “You know how life is run here,” he interrupted me. “Women belong to men, and a man’s a man even if he is decrepit.” “But the world’s changed,” I said to him. “These are things that no longer ft in with our life in this age.” “The world hasn’t changed as much as you think,” said Mahjoub. “Some things have changed—pumps instead of waterwheels, iron ploughs instead of wooden ones, sending our daughters to school, radios, cars, learning to drink whiskey and beer instead of arak and millet wine—yet even so everything’s as it was.” (Salih 2009, 83)
Wad Rayyes reminds Meheimeed of the reality of women’s position within Sudanese society: “She’ll [Hosna] marry me whatever you or she says or does. Her father’s agreed and so have her brothers. This nonsense you learn at school won’t wash with us here. In this village the men are the guardians of the women” (Salih 2009, 82). Though Hosna did not want to marry Wad Rayyes, she had no choice: “Her father said he had given Wad Rayyes a promise—and they married her off to him. Her father swore at her and beat her; he told her she’d marry him whether she liked it or not” (Salih 2009, 101). Salih’s fction not only mediates the system of guardianship by men over women, but it also represents the objectifcation of Sudanese Arab women’s gendered bodies. According to their sexual-social desirability, women are to be bartered and traded between men in return for access to increased social position and wealth (cf. Sa’eed Asha ‘l-Baytat’s acquisition of the Headmaster’s daughter). Women give men acceptance into or higher status within a community (cf. Dau al-Beit and Fatima, Zein and Ni’ma). Women are there to provide carnal pleasure to their husband (cf. Wad Rayyes). Salih’s work shows the practice of female circumcision—perhaps the ultimate somatic marker of control over women’s sexuality—to be a common custom among the tribes living in northern Sudan. Salih’s works show that the practice is doctrinally wed to the fundamentalist version of Islam that has come to be practiced in northern Sudan:
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“I swear to you, Hajj Ahmed,” said Wad Rayyes, “that if you’d had a taste of the women of Abyssinia and Nigeria you’d throw away your string of prayer-beads and give up praying—the thing between their thighs is like an upturned dish, all there for good or bad. We here lop it off and leave it like a piece of land that’s been stripped bare.” “Circumcision is one of the conditions of Islam,” said Bakri. “What Islam are you talking about?” asked Wad Rayyes. “It’s your Islam and Hajj Ahmed’s Islam, because you can’t tell what’s good for you from what’s bad. The Nigerians, the Egyptians, and the Arabs of Syria, aren’t they Moslems like us? But they’re people who knows what’s what and leave their women as God created them. As for us, we dock them like animals.” (Salih 2009, 68)
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Bint Mazjoub tells Meheimeed upon his return from London: “We were afraid you’d bring back with you an uncircumcised infdel for a wife” (Salih 2009, 5). The international medical NGO, MSF, reports that about 69 percent of females in Sudan and 80 percent of females in Red Sea State had undergone some form of Female Genital Cutting (FGC). In [some areas in northern Sudan] 98 percent of females [had] undergo[ne] some form of Female Genital Cutting (FGC). Type 3 or pharaonic FGC [is common in northern Sudan]. This involves the removal of the outer female genitals, and infbulation or the stitching of the remaining outer vaginal labia, leaving but a small hole for urine and menstrual fow to pass through. The painful procedure of FGC and infbulation is often performed on babies as young as seven days old, and it affects a female from childhood into puberty and adulthood, with serious consequences during motherhood. [. . .] Female children and adults who have undergone this procedure may face fatal bleeding, and infections such as tetanus. Also they are likely to develop cysts, experience painful menstruations and recurrent urinary tract infections. Many women will suffer acute pain during sexual intercourse. If they give birth, their labours are likely to be prolonged, increasing medical risks for the newborn. (Frontières 2010)
Given that “an ill-health assemblage is constituted from the myriad physical, psychological and social relations and affects that surround a body” (Fox 2011, 364) and which contribute to the diminution in a body’s affective capacity, it is clear that the larger, societal arrangements that produced this arrangement can be described in such terms. As was discussed in section 3.6, an assemblage’s arrangements of force are always purposeful, deliberate: assemblages always beneft someone or something outside the assemblage. They do so as a realization of a deliberate plan that maps out and diagrams the destiny of the people who both compose and are affected by it and which is the cause of the assemblage that executes its relations of force (Buchanan
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2015, 385). Having become embedded within the contradictory ideologies and power relations of the Sudanese national project, even if a woman were to resist being used in one system of power, it is diffcult for her not to “take on behaviours and roles that harm their health and well-being” in another (Lock and Kaufert 1998, 73). Despite Mahjoub’s assertions to the contrary, the literary world of Wad Hamid has changed. Salih’s mediation of female agency in Wad Hamid over time captures and renders visible the Islamist, androcentric consolidation of power that over the span of several generations had merged into and became “tradition.” What neither Mahjoub nor anyone else in the community of Wad Hamid can see is that Sudanese Arab women’s agency was not always so limited. They do not sense how, using strategies similar to those by which the British created “traditional” native authorities, contemporary, neopatriarchal, fundamentalist, Islamist practices over the years have merged with and coopted the practices of popular, Suf Islam to create the traditional (Mamdani 2009, 1996). It has been identifed by MSF as one of the principle pathologies of power in the Sudan.18 Moreover, Salih shows that this shift to ever-greater control over women’s bodies has been imbricated within a reinforcement of the networks of patronage, tribalism, and patriarchy through which the likes of Mahjoub ran the village of Wad Hamid. During the epoch described in The Wedding of Zein (circa 1920s), Salih’s texts represent women exercising much greater agency freedom than that enjoyed by subsequent generations of Sudanese Arab women: It is however, more likely that [. . .] Ni’ma, headstrong and independent-minded as she was, and perhaps prompted by pity for Zein, or intrigued by the idea of making a sacrifce—something very much in her character—had made up her mind to marry Zein. It is likely that a ferce battle had raged in Hajj Ibrahim’s house between the father and the mother on one side and the daughter on the other. As her brothers were away, they were written to; the two elder brothers, it is said, refused absolutely to give their consent, though the youngest agreed, saying in his letter to his father: “Ni’ma was always headstrong and now that she has chosen a husband for herself, let her have her way.” (Salih 1999, 108)
Ni’ma’s was not a singular case: This was Salama [who is ululating at Zein’s wedding] who was beautiful and pronounced her “y’s” thus. A woman of great sensitivity, her beauty had brought her no happiness, for she had married and divorced, and married and divorced, settling down with no man and bearing no children. She was amusing and full of fun and had shared many a laugh with Zein. She ululated because she loved life. (Salih 1999, 109)
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What is notable is that in this era, gender relations had not yet concretized into the grim map of destiny that they were soon to become. Salih shows that the religious practices of previous generations were tempered: “Dau alBeit, we are Moslems, but we are not fanatical on the question of religion. Every soul has what it has gained and God is He who chooses amongst His servants” (Salih 1996, 67). In that previous epoch, northern Sudanese Arab woman had much greater agency and were able to realize their affective capacities to greater or similar degree to that exercised by Sudanese Arab women of the mid-1920s and 1930s: “Suddenly Jabr ad-Dar asked her, ‘If he asked you to marry him, would you accept him? [. . .] Whether you say yes or no, the matter rests in your hands’” (Salih 1996, 76). Tracing the line of health, capabilities, and agency that runs from Fatima, through N’ima and Maryam, to Hosna, Salih’s work renders visible the diminution that took place over the course of three generations in a Sudanese Arab woman’s capability to live the particular life they valued. The diagram of the theo-politicized diminution over time of Sudanese Arab women’s health and capabilities functions by composing them within a modern strategy to combat and resist the existential, ontological, and epistemological threat the West is seen as posing to the Muslim-Arab world. Even as the initial, colonial threat has passed, transformed into one posed by the contemporary, transnational, secular, Western structures of globalization, this strategy resonates arguably with more affective power today, even in the Muslim-Arab diaspora, than it did when Salih was writing four decades ago.19 Though organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood were founded decades before, it was in the post-1967 years that political fundamentalist Islamists really emerged in the Sudan. Their authority rested on claims of a return to an unambiguous Muhammadian purity. A centerpiece of their agenda to establish the Quran as the sole reference point for the ordering of the Muslim family, community, and state was and continues to be a neopatriarchal understanding of gender relations. Yet, many of the patriarchal traditions associated with Islam, such as male privilege and control over women, are not Quranic in origin. This is a point Salih makes: “‘Women and children are the adornment of life on this earth,’ God said in his noble book.” “I said to Wad Rayyes that the Koran did not say ‘Women and children’ but ‘Wealth and children’” (Salih 2009, 78). Such practices were frst institutionalized and codifed by the Mesopotamian state which, in order to guarantee the paternity of property-heirs, vested in men the control of female sexuality (Ahmed 1992, 12). The Egyptian American writer, Leila Ahmed, asserts that prior to Muhammad’s life, the veiling and confnement of women were ordinary, social practices showing patterns of male dominance, and that “Mesopotamian, Persian, Hellenic, Christian and then eventually Islamic
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cultures” contributed to these practices that both “controlled and diminished women” (Ahmed 1992, 18). Certainly, Wad Rayyes’s attitude toward women is not dissimilar from the concrete, practical defnition of woman during the Abbasid caliphate that ruled from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries: “slave, object purchasable for sexual use.” It exemplifes the inevitable blurring that must have occurred throughout the years in men’s minds with regard to the distinctions between woman and “concubine, woman for sexual use, and object” (Ahmed 1992, 85). Ahmed emphasizes that this does not exemplify the practices sanctioned by Muhammad, but rather that of the “ferce misogyny” found in Mediterranean and Christian societies in the centuries preceding the rise of Islam (Ahmed 1992, 35). Ahmed shows that the “already well-articulated misogynist attitudes and practices” prevalent throughout the Middle East came to be codifed over the centuries as the “infallible expression of divine law.” This cultural codifcation was done by men who not only interpreted Quranic laws so as to consecrate their favored position; it also established and ossifed into orthodoxy awesome interdictions (apostasy) to questioning this interpretation (Ahmed 1992, 87, 90). The strategic response to colonial discourse and domination in the Arab world inextricably linked issues concerning women with nationalism, national advancement, and cultural change. The social meaning of the concepts of gender, nationalism, and culture became “permanently forged” in postcolonial Muslim-Arab societies. Gender became “encoded” and imbricated with issues of class, culture, and politics, matters of “far broader political and social import” (Ahmed 1992, 128, 129). Ahmed writes that the “Victorian colonial paternalistic establishment appropriated the language of feminism in the service of its assault on the religions and cultures of Other men, and in particular on Islam, in order to give an aura of moral justifcation to that assault while at the very same time it combated feminism within its own society” (Ahmed 1992, 152). According to the colonial narrative of women and Islam, “The veil and the treatment of women epitomized Islamic inferiority” (Ahmed 1992, 163). So, when Sharabi contends that “the radical fundamentalist form of patriarchal reaction was to a substantial degree a product of European imperialism and modernization” (Sharabi 1988, 65), the ramifcations for women in Muslim-Arab societies are signifcant: The veil came to symbolize in the resistance narrative, not the inferiority of the culture and the need to set aside its customs in favour of those in the West, but on the contrary, the dignity and validity of all native customs, and in particular those customs coming under fercest colonial attack—the customs relating to
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women—and the need to tenaciously affrm them as a means of resistance to Western domination. (Ahmed 1992, 164)
Though fundamentalist Islamist orthodoxy is “intolerant of all understandings of religion except its own” and is “authoritarian, implacably androcentric, and hostile to women” (Ahmed 1992, 223, 225), its reversal of the resistance narrative came to be integral to the “revitalized and reimagined” “establishment Islam” of the politically powerful. Sharabi writes that “militant Islam (fundamentalism) ought to be interpreted not simply as a rejection of foreign values and ideas but rather as an attempt to give a new Islamic content to the meaning of self and society by reformulating a redemptive Islamic dogma” (Sharabi 1988, 65). Redemptive though aspects of fundamentalism Islam may be, Salih’s work illuminates that girls and women were substantively affected by being held back from school at a higher rate than boys, especially in rural areas, as well as by being forced to submit to the “full panoply of [Islamism’s] unmitigatedly androcentric doctrinal and legal rulings” (Ahmed 1992, 211, 230). Salih’s work does not examine to what extent Sudanese Arab women were obliged to adopt Islamic dress. Yet, affectively speaking, as a visible indicator of Muslim women’s socio-gendered identities, today throughout the world, the veil is the Elotian objective correlative above all others. It signifes the erasure of women’s humanity to some and the reclamation and validation of a denigrated identity to others. The veil indicates the affective power of the strategic revitalization of the fundamentalist Islamist identity, even while it modulates women’s gendered bodies within its neopatriarchal structure. Women’s gendered bodies continue to be an integral component of a larger strategy of resistance by a community that has considered itself under ontological, epistemological, and existential assault for centuries. Muslim feminist scholar, Homa Hoodfar, highlights in her article: “The Veil in Their Minds and On Our Heads: The Persistence of Colonial Images of Muslim Women,” that many contemporary uses of external forms of female, Muslim identity are agential. Importantly, she insists that they are sites of resistance against the ongoing “Orientalist and colonialist” framework in which many Westerners view Muslim women (Hoodfar 1993). Lawrence Grossberg describes how this works: Hegemonic leadership has to operate where people live their lives. It has to take account of and even allow itself to be modifed by its engagement with the fragmentary and contradictory terrain of common sense and popular culture. This is where the social imaginary is defned and changed; where people construct personal identities, identifcations, priorities and possibilities; where people form
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and formulate moral and political agendas for themselves and their societies. It is here that people constantly reconstruct their future in the light of their sense of the present, that they decide what matters, what is worth investing in, what they are, can be or should be committed to. (Grossberg 1992, 247)
Ahmed writes that today the history of colonial domination and the struggle against it is inscribed in the continuing and contemporary “discourse on women and the veil.” She notes that those struggles—“the interconnected confict between the culture of the colonizers and that of the colonized”—are still very much alive today (Ahmed 1992, 130). Salih’s works capture the Sudanese variation of this. Hosna bint Mahmoud’s story mediates the effects of the transnational, fundamentalist, Islamist project that “controls and subordinates women, marginalizes them economically, and arguably conceptualizes them as human beings inferior to men” (Ahmed 1992, 242). As Salih’s representation of Sudanese Arab woman’s agency within the popular Islam practiced in northern Sudan at the end of the nineteenth century shows, it wasn’t always this way. Contemporary Muslim-Arab women’s experience from Sudan’s neighboring and similarly fundamentalist Islamist society corroborates this phenomenon:
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My life as a Saudi woman is very different from that of my mother. My experience as a female is very sad. I cannot go out of the house unless my older brother gives me permission, as if I were a prisoner. I cannot go to the market or any recreational place—not even to the hospital. In comparison to my mother’s life, in the past, women had it better. They didn’t have to deal with guardianship because there was no such thing at that time. (Takenaga 2018)
An examination of recent Suf teachings on Islam and gender and the Islamist response to them highlights the difference between the tolerance and harmony of the Suf ethos championed by Salih and fundamentalist Islamist dogma. The journalist, George Packer, describes a contemporary, young Sudanese woman’s reaction to reading a work20 by the Sudanese Suf mystic, Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, in which he established a doctrinal basis for the equality of women: By the time she had fnished it, she was weeping. For the frst time, she felt that religion had accorded her fully equal status. “Inside this thinking, I am a human being,” she said. “Outside this thinking, I’m not.” It was as if she had been asleep all her life and had suddenly woken up: the air, the taste of the water, food, even the smell of things had changed. She felt as if she were walking a little off the ground. (Packer 2006)
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By establishing a doctrinally sound deconstruction of one of the bases of the Islamist orthodoxy invoked by Sudan’s leaders as part of their ruling strategies, Taha quickly gained a powerful public following throughout postcolonial Sudan. The response by the Islamist establishment was the same in both cases. Maintaining the relations of forces that actively modulated women’s “capacities to act and to persevere in their being” (Bignall 2010, 149) has become such an integral component of the ontological arrangement of Sudanese Arab society that perpetuating this ill-health assemblage is a matter of life and death. Taha was publicly hanged for “apostasy” by Sudanese president-cum-Imam, Gafaar Nimiery, in 1985. Hosna’s and Taha’s demises show the map of destiny the Sudanese Arab neopatriarchal diagram has drawn for Sudanese Arab women to be a map of affective doom. Salih shows that this ontological and affective reconfguration, this partial de-Sufcation of Sudanese society, erased and replaced generational memory according to the neopatriarchal epistemology within which the northern Sudanese Arab community had come to operate. Tracing women’s health and capabilities through his cycle of works shows that this operation was subtle, sophisticated, and deadly. So much so, that a Muslim woman’s capability to realize her affective capacities has come not only to be negatively linked to Western modernity but to be a central pillar of Islamist identity, resistance, and resurgence. Salih’s focus in Bandarshah concerned the two central problems in the Arab world: “How to build up the city (bandar)?” and “Who should rule it (shah)?” (Berkley 2014, 111). Salih narratologically imbricated the sensations of anomie, impotence, disorientation, and chaos felt by all of Wad Hamid at the murder of Isa Dau al-Beit/Bandarshah and Meryoud with the effect on the community of the event of the rape/murder/suicide of Wad Rayyes and Hosna bint Mahmoud. With this technique, Salih equated the seismic effects these two ontological tremors produced in the community’s epistemological edifce. Moreover, he diagnosed that addressing women’s health was integral to addressing the problems of how to build up the city? and who should rule it? After her “awakening,” Hosna refused to let her gendered and politicized body be “properly inserted” into the “dominant system of economic and social relationships” (Grossberg 1992, 177). “The word [acceptable] no longer had any meaning and [. . .] that mysterious thing that makes a son submit to his father, a woman to her husband, the ruled to the ruler, and the young to the old, had vanished” (Salih 1996, 27). Hosna’s refusal to submit to the neopatriarchal arrangements of Sudanese Arab society struck sharply at one of the key epistemological and ontological pillars on and by which Sudanese Arab society has come to be arranged. Her refusal, by revealing the androcentric violence upon which Sudanese Arab society had come to be founded, threatened the integrity of the entire ill-health assemblage. In Anti-Oedipus,
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Deleuze and Guattari note societies “repress desiring-production” (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 173).21 Certainly, the Sudanese Arab society portrayed in Salih’s works functions much as the neocolonized society Deleuze and Guattari describe in the Anti-Oedipus, which “socially and psychically repress[es]” multiple subject groups’ attempts to live differently (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 260). Hosna’s refusal to accept her familial and societal position—her “noncoded fows of desire”—threatened to “introduce disorder and revolution” (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 173) into the Sudanese Arab society of Wad Hamid. Deleuze and Guattari write that all societies are haunted by “the displacement of the limit[:] what all societies dread absolutely [i]s their most profound negative: [. . .] the decoded fows of desire” (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 177). Salih’s Sudan is no different. The event of Hosna’s resistance produced tellurian tremors which threatened to undo the affective cartography by which the people of Wad Hamid lived their lives. So central a pillar is the fundamentalist Islamist’s production of woman to the entire Sudanese national project, the possibility of defance showed the mutability of every destination on the fundamentalist Islamist diagram. Aidan Tynan writes that “if desire constitutes a socio-political objectivity which it also disrupts, then the fows of desire are strongest at the points where they are the most damned up, where the blockages are greatest” (Tynan 2012, 122). Deleuze maintains that there are powers of the body that are only actualized in states of sickness or weakness. Deleuze writes that “illness [. . .] separates me from what I can do [. . .] it narrows my possibilities and condemns me to a diminished milieu [. . .] but, in another way, it reveals to me a new capacity, it endows me with a new will that I can make my own, going to the limit of a strange power” (Deleuze 1983, 66). Deleuze fnds that sickness itself reveals a kind of health or vitality not accessible to the kind of good health typically associated with “normality.” However, here at this limit, where Hosna had exhausted all possibilities of life, we fnd, instead of the creation of a new subject, rather, the event of her destruction. Though Hosna has exhausted all possibilities, hers is not the fatigue Deleuze fnds in Becket (Deleuze 1995a). There is no opening into pure potentiality: nothing truly new comes about. We do not fnd any formal or literary innovation (not at least at this juncture in Salih’s oeuvre: Season of Migration to the North—see section 4.3.1.4) capable of capturing experiences to which Hosna’s organic body is inadequate (Tynan 2012, 45). Nor do we encounter inorganic life that is both within Hosna and in excess of her, at what Deleuze calls the “proper limit of sensibility” (Deleuze 1994, 237). There is no creativity here, no new direction for a health to come. Hosna’s force of existing, which causes her to resist, powerful as it is, is not stronger than the sociopolitical form within which she lives. Here, where life is strongest, Salih shows no promise of a health to come so esteemed by Deleuze. We do not fnd the mobility between
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sickness and health that for Deleuze is a sign of superior, “great” health. Rather, all discussions of health and capabilities engendered by Salih’s work remain at the level of what bodies can do within the dark regimes of what is “normal” and what is “possible” in that society, complexes Deleuze and Guattari’s work aimed to counteract.22 Thus, the following analysis, which examines the health and capabilities of the Sudanese Arab people depicted in Salih’s literary world, does so not from within the form of a “great” health favored by Deleuze and Guattari. Rather, it examines Salih’s diagnosis of what Sudanese Arab bodies can do within the clear opposition between what is considered good and bad health in keeping with the qualitative and quantitative framework laid out in chapter 3. (Salih’s diagnosis is displayed on the dashboard situated on the next page (Johnston, 2021.) There are 61 references (over 421 pages of text) to the “lack of social opportunities” available to the inhabitants of Wad Hamid in Tayeb Salih’s works. Along with “economic constraints and the more just distribution of social material resources throughout Sudanese Arab society” (with 69 references over 421 pages of text), the radar graph shows that Salih’s work has isolated and prioritized these two categories above all others as impinging upon what Sudanese Arab bodies can do. Salih’s prioritization of these two categories concords with the objective rankings of 74 and 96, respectively, the Sudan received in these categories. The objective value of 74 for “lack of social opportunities” in the Sudan was derived from the mean years of schooling per person expressed as a percentage (with Switzerland’s 13.4 average years of schooling serving as the maximum according to which the percentage of each country was determined) (UNDP 2016, 198, 201). The objective ranking of 96 on the “economic constraints and a more just distribution of material social goods throughout Sudanese society” category was determined by the per capita GNI of the Sudan expressed in purchasing power of thousands of 2011 PPP$ (UNDP 2016, 206, 209). The table of symptoms that together comprise the Bandarshah Syndrome shows that Salih has diagnosed the two primary areas impinging upon Sudanese Arab peoples’ capabilities to realize their maximum affective capacities. These are, above all others, the “lack of social opportunities” and “economic constraints and the inequitable distribution of material social goods” throughout Sudanese society. Though not holding secular Australian society up as exemplary, a look at the health outcomes produced by the Australian system shows that much healthier societies exist. Linking symptoms with their causal relations of force, Salih’s works show that the articulation of Muslim faith in the Sudan has been increasingly modulated according to the rigid fundamentalist version of political Islam. His works mediate how the practices of the fundamentalist, political Islam of
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Figure 4.1 Health and Capabilities Rubric: The Sudan and Australia. Source: Created by author.
the politically powerful have encroached upon and over-coded preexisting, tolerant, open, inclusive Suf practices. Salih’s “Wad Hamid cycle” of works capture and render visible the reality that with the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial era, generations of Sudanese Arab women have come to be capable of less and able to exercise less and less “agency freedom” to realize their affective capacities and live they life they value. They represent the trend toward an increased shuttering of what Sudanese Arab women can do within fundamentalist stricture that has occurred over the past four generations. To say that Salih’s works have “signalled” beyond themselves is “high praise.” It indicates their usefulness for training in an activism that comes with “concrete suggestions” as to interventions that might remove the specifc
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unfreedoms that deleteriously affect Sudanese health and capabilities, such as this book’s methodology aims at catalyzing. It is part of a training in imagining the other—a “necessary, impossible, and interminable task”—which is a component in constructing the other as an object of knowledge, of listening to the other as if it were “a self,” of learning from the “singular and unverifable” (Spivak 2013, 367, 373, 374, 444). Salih has not only represented Sudanese Arab women’s limited access to various speaking positions, but his works have captured and rendered visible the relations of force that have prevented them from being heard, or taking up or speaking other discourses (Grossberg 1992, 369). Though one of Wad Rayyes’s other wives, Mabrouka, trills happily upon learning of her husband’s murder: “Good riddance [. . .] Wad Rayyes dug his grave with his own hands, and Bint Mahmoud [Hosna], God’s blessings be upon her, paid him out in full!” (Salih 2009, 109), the community pays her no heed. Powerless to prevent her husband from taking another wife, her complaints, like the years of her life, dissipate into the air around her. To say that “the situation of [Sudanese] women does not favour literary productivity” is to say that it is almost impossible for them to write (Minh-ha 1989, 7). It is a manner of saying that they cannot speak. Indeed, there are few Sudanese Arab women writers. In a recent anthology of Sudanese short stories, only one of the sixteen stories is written by a woman, a fact that the editor, Osman Hassan Ahmed, notes is “fairly representative of the Sudanese short story at present” (Ahmed 1981, 3). Here, it seems important to call to attention Tayeb Salih’s subject position as a Sudanese Arab man; and mine, as a male of European descent, writing from Australia on Salih’s writing on Sudanese Arab women, in order to bring a self-refexively critical relationship toward both the material and this work’s endeavor to “resonate with” and write close to the other. The subalterns in any society are “irretrievably heterogeneous”: subalternity is a position “without identity,” where social lines of mobility, “being elsewhere, do not permit the formation of a recognizable basis of action” (Spivak 1999, 273, 2013, 431). Regardless of the empathetic or anthropological perspicacity one possesses, or the race, gender, or class position one writes from, it is impossible to open up the other, to know the “doubly effaced” positions of the Sudanese Arab women about whom Salih and I are writing. Salih himself said: “I do not understand the feelings of the Sudanese woman. [. . .] when I write about her, I look at her from the outside” (Berkley 1979, lxxx). Yet, inaccessibility or opacity of position, recognition of a subject position that we know that we don’t know—and can never know enough about—cannot be an excuse for not writing. It is with humble resolve before the patterns of domination we are engaging with that I note the positions from which Salih and I write, and that our work is directed at the historical indifference to
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gendered oppression that earlier in her career Spivak had summarized with the phrase: “the subaltern cannot speak.” Writing from where we are, we are engaging with the enduring problems of subjectship (wherever national borders may fall) and agency: it is part of a greater call to build up health-, affect-, and capability-enhancing, civil society infrastructures so that agency can emerge (Spivak 2013, 438). A half-century after Salih fnished his last work, the anomic whirlwind foretold in Bandarshah has yet to hit the Sudan: the relations of power governing life in Arabic Sudan remain as they were during the times in which Salih wrote. Two months ago, a Sudanese court sentenced nineteen-year-old, Noura Hussein, to death by hanging for stabbing and killing her husband. Ms. Hussein was forced to marry when she was sixteen years old. After a ceremony that involved the signing of a marriage contract by her father, she was held down by three members of her husband’s family and raped. During a scuffe that erupted when he tried to rape her the next morning, she fatally stabbed him with a knife (Yeginsu 2018). Notwithstanding the fact that Ms. Hussein’s sentence has subsequently been reduced to a substantial fne and fve years in prison, the Sudanese relations of force mediated in Salih’s fction remain much as Salih described.
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4.3.1.2 Literature as Health: Lack of a Safety Net, Political Unfreedoms and the Opening-up of Decision-making Procedures throughout the Sudan, and Lack of Transparency Guarantees Salih describes “the new rulers of Africa” as a “pack of wolves.” He writes they are “smooth of face, lupine of mouth, their hands gleaming with rings of precious stones.” They are “corrupt and take [. . .] bribes [. . .] acquire [. . .] whole estates [,] set up businesses and amass [. . .] properties [and] vast fortune[s] from the sweat” of others (Salih 2009, 98–99), while the Sudanese people are “treated like slaves” (Gettleman 2010). Local leaders, such as those who forced Hosna to submit to Wad Rayyes, are described as similarly omnivorous and avaricious: “‘Mahjoub’s gang’ was controlling everything in the village: they were members of the hospital committee and the schools’ committees, and the agricultural project committee was entirely made up of them. [. . .] How was this accomplished? Mahjoub has special methods of his own in extreme situations” (Salih 1999, 101, 95). Salih’s works represent members of Sudanese society as unable to effectively participate in deciding who or how they are governed and on what principles. Nor do his works show that they can scrutinize and criticize the authorities who govern them and who proft from their advantageous positions. This seems an accurate mediation of reality. During the 2010 elections, for example, there was little attempt on the part of Sudanese authorities to preserve any veneer of fairness and
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impartiality or to demonstrate a lack of political pressure in the “democratic” process. On the eve of those elections, twenty-six-year president, Omar al-Bashir, publicly threatened the international observers who had come to monitor the elections: “Whoever tries to insult us, we will cut their fngers off, put them under our shoes, and throw them out” (Center 2010, 57). The Carter Center,23 reported that: it was hoped that the participation of Sudanese citizens as voters, election workers, observers, and members of political parties and civil society would build momentum toward further democratic consolidation. The limited competitiveness of the presidential and assembly elections, coupled with the subsequent arrest of a major party leader and a number of journalists, however, indicate that democratic space has not increased. (Center 2010, 59)
Freedom House, an NGO that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom, and human rights fnds that:
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Sudan’s political system is dominated by an authoritarian president, Omar al-Bashir, and his national Congress Party (NCP), which rely on a combination of repression and inducements to remain in power. The regime violently represses—including through attacks on civilians—groups representing regions, religions, and ethnicities that do not share its narrow nationalist vision. Civil society encounters severe restrictions, religious rights are not respected, and the media is closely monitored. (House 2017b)
An examination of the “existential actualities of [Sudanese] life” and the “historical moment” (Said 1983, 5, 174) in which Salih wrote confrms his diagnosis that Sudan is being run as modern, étatist sultanate. In actuality, it shows the effects of the Bandarshah Syndrome were far more bellicose and bloody than Salih had anticipated.24 Salih does describe the villagers of Wad Hamid as involved in the process by which Tureif and the Bakri boys defeated Mahjoub for leadership of Wad Hamid. Yet, by naming Tureif as the next Bandarshah, Salih clearly indicates that changes in regimes (Tureif replacing Mahjoub in Wad Hamid, which echoes the overthrow of Ismail alAzhari by Gaafar Niemiery in 1969, who was overthrown by Sadiq al-Mahdi in 1985, and who was in turn ousted by Omar al-Bashir in 1989) should not be mistaken for any kind of working electoral democracy. The people of Wad Hamid did attend the town hall meetings where Tureif worked to swing community sentiment to his side. However, effectively, the only voice the people of Wad Hamid had in their own governance was that of a crowd being worked up to back a rising populist autocrat bent on overthrowing the current regime.
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Salih’s works do not portray any opening-up of decision-making procedures whatsoever. Yet, Bashir’s supporters believe that “without him this country would turn into Somalia. He’s the only one who can hold it together. No Bashir, no Sudan” (Gettleman 2010). The socio-mythical aspects of the phenotypically and genetically recursive legend of Bandarshah indicate that the Sudan will continue to be ruled as it has been in the past, by a succession of similar tyrants. Five years on, the political situation remains the same. In an article on the 2015 Sudanese presidential elections entitled, “May the Only Man Win,” The Economist described the elections as “patently unfair” (Economist 2015). These were elections in name alone, designed to cover Sudanese autocracy with a skein of respectability. Freedom of the press is an integral component of the “political unfreedoms and an opening-up of decision-making procedures throughout a society” category of the Health and Capabilities Rubric. It is a requirement of a healthy society that is able to open itself to new relations and transformations. Investigating whether the Sudanese people can proft from an uncensored and independent press and use the press to choose between political parties and voice dissent (Sen 1999, 38), the Carter Center found that, rather:
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Sudan’s media landscape is dominated by government-owned print, radio, and television outlets, with a legal framework that limits the freedom of speech, including provisions granting the security services broad powers of censorship and the right to review campaign materials. Observers noted signifcant imbalances in access of political parties to the media. Journalists operated within a climate of intimidation that hindered their work. (Center 2010, 64)
Indeed, just earlier this year, Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Service arrested seven journalists covering economic protests there (Gladstone 2018). The objective ranking of 94/100 (0=most free, 100=least free) on the “political unfreedoms and the opening-up of decision-making procedures throughout a society” category on the Health and Capabilities Dashboard is derived from Sudan’s Freedom in the World Score of 6/100 (the scale of which has been inverted to better visually represent lack) (House 2017b). Freedom House awarded this score based on the recommendations of more than 100 external analysts and 30 expert advisers who evaluated how Sudan was trending in terms of political rights (electoral process, political pluralism and participation, and functioning of government) and civil liberties (freedom of expression and belief, associational and organizational rights, rule of law, personal autonomy, and individual rights).
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Not surprisingly, Salih’s works show that those in power profted from their positions of power: [Mahjoub’s gang] were the men who wielded the real power in the village. Each of them had a feld to cultivate, generally larger than those of the rest of the people, and a business in which he was engaged. [. . .] They were the men you came across in every matter of moment that arose in the village. (Salih 1999, 91) They began to say openly the things that people had been saying in secret or not saying at all. [. . .] This gang—Mahjoub and his group [. . .] have robbed the village for more than thirty years. (Salih 1996, 27) \
Again, extra-literary sources confrm this aspect of Salih’s diagnosis. In 2012, the international, anticorruption watchdog organization, Transparency International, reported that in Sudan: “Corruption permeates all sectors, and manifests itself through various forms, including petty and grand corruption, embezzlement of public funds, and a system of political patronage well entrenched within the fabric of society” (Martini 2012, 1). In 2017, ranking Sudan 175th out of 180 countries on its CPI (International 2017b), Transparency International found that:
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corruption is present in all sectors and across all branches of government: public servants are known to demand bribes for services that all individuals or companies are legally entitled to; government offcials hold direct and indirect stakes in many enterprises, which distorts the market through patronage and cronyism; and the head of state and government is believed to have embezzled up to US$9 billion from oil revenues. (Martinez and Kukutschka 2017)
In a link to political unfreedoms, their research also indicates that countries with the least protection for the press and nongovernmental organizations also tend to have the worst rates of corruption. Accordingly, the Sudan ranks 84/100 (0=very clean, 100=highly corrupt) on the objective “lack of the transparency guarantees” component of the Health and Capabilities Dashboard. This value measures to what extent a society prevents corruption, fnancial irresponsibility, and underhanded dealingsthat are detrimental to every person’s being able to achieve the life they value. This value was derived from (and is the inversion of the score and the scale, for similar reasons: to better visually represent lack) the score of 16/100 that Transparency International awarded the Sudan on its CPI (International 2017b). Though the Sudan offers few political freedoms to its citizens, or opportunities to participate in the decision-making processes that affect them, as
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well as being highly and thoroughly corrupt, neither category fgures prominently within the symptomatological table upon which the components of the Bandarshah Syndrome are adumbrated. There are 15 references over 421 pages of text to political unfreedoms and the opening-up of decision-making procedures throughout the Sudan and 14 references to corruption over the same 421 pages of text. (By comparison, there were fve times more references to economic constraints and lack of social opportunities in Salih’s oeuvre.) The radar graph shows the disparity between how Sudan scores objectively in these two categories: alarmingly high, while they barely register within Salih’s subjective, literary-clinical diagnosis. The same phenomena is even more evident when examining the extent to which Salih’s texts register that the lack of any safety net adversely affects the health and well-being of Sudan’s citizens. Though lack of a functioning safety net fgures prominently in the objective values of the Health and Capabilities Dashboard, in Salih’s work there are only 2 references (over 421 pages) to protective security measures. (Protective security refers to the safety net that would ensure the safety and survival of the most vulnerable members of Sudanese society: that which would prevent them from sinking into misery or death. This could be via either government sponsored measures or ad hoc arrangements for relief or disaster support, unemployment insurance, or via the police or military.) With no safety net to speak of in place in the Sudan, over 35 percent of Sudanese infants under the age of fve are moderately or severely stunted (UNDP 2016, 228). While a few other similarly fragile or failing countries have stunting rates in their “under-fves” of up to 50 percent, by comparison about 2 percent of Australia’s “under-fves” are stunted. Many countries in the world have no malnourished children whatsoever. Despite barely registering in the subjective portion of the symptomatological table constructed via Salih’s works, there is little doubt that objectively the Sudan provides few measures to prevent its citizens from slipping into misery and death. Yet subjectively, Salih’s literary-clinical diagnosis evaluates the effect of these three categories as negligible when compared to the negative effects the lack of social opportunities and economic constraints and the inequitable distribution of material resources throughout Sudanese society have on Sudanese Arab health. It is possible that Salih’s diagnosis is incomplete. Even those writers who are astute clinicians of a particular society cannot be equally sensitive to everything that affects the health and well-being of a people. Though it lies beyond the constraints of this work, if one were to seek a veritable second opinion, or wanted to test or verify the details of Salih’s diagnosis, this symptomatological methodology could be extended to the works of other Sudanese novelists, such as Amir Taj al-Sir, Hammour Ziada, Jamal Mahjoub, Leila
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Aboulela, Malkat ed-Dar Mohamed, Mansour El Souwaim, and Ra’ouf Mus’ad. This could be done as I have, noting in the margins of a text when a particular category is referenced and then compiling and comparing the results for each category. Or, if the works were available in digitized form, it would then be possible to apply the computational, quantitative formalist methods of textual analysis developed by Franco Moretti and his colleagues at the Stanford Literary Lab to conduct a more extensive clinical-literary analysis of Sudanese health and capabilities using the set of all Sudanese authors.25 The results of such an endeavor could serve to verify or modify Salih’s diagnosis. The discrepancy between the subjective and objective values awarded to each category could also indicate a lack of concordance between the categories, or a discrepancy between the two scales upon which they are ranked. Certainly, context matters. In some societies, a particular category (or categories) may play a bigger role in enabling or impinging upon a people’s health and capabilities than another in a different society. Also, as Sen has pointedly emphasized, the negative freedoms that make up the capabilities model are intertwined. Removing impingements to a person’s or people’s freedom along one category would have positive, knock-on effects in others. Another possibility is that Salih’s diagnosis is both perceptive and prescient. He has prioritized the lack of social opportunities and the economic constraints and the inequitable distribution of material social goods throughout Sudan as being the two principal areas that impinge upon Sudanese health. Disaggregated so, his diagnosis clearly indicates that any agency or organization looking to craft a program that would best address the most pressing Sudanese public health issues should focus on improving the economic facilities and social opportunities for Sudanese Arab girls and women. It is also possible that both possibilities could be true: that Salih’s diagnosis is both prescient and incomplete. There is no reason to expect that Salih or any given writer would address all the measures contained in the Health and Capabilities Rubric. A skilled chess player does not consider every possible move on each and every turn, rather she or he prioritizes some key options and considers them in detail. By not spending time considering the set of inconsequential moves, a skilled player can proceed to play with greater rapidity and focus their attention on the prioritized areas. Similarly, a skilled literary-clinician, sensitive to the key conditions of a society or people she or he is literarily mediating, will pass over the nonessential in order to focus their efforts at exploring the most impactful relations of force in their works. Thus, it is not incompatible that a work can be both incomplete, at least in terms of treating each and every category on the Health and Capabilities Rubric, and extremely accurate in terms of diagnosing that which impinges upon the health of a people. That is the position to which this book holds.
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Thus, the authorial economy and symptomatological skill of Tayeb Salih reinforce his diagnosis that the principal two areas of constraint and limitation to what Sudanese bodies can do lie in the areas of “lack of social opportunities” and “economic constraints and a more just distribution of material social goods” throughout Sudanese society.
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4.3.1.3a Literature as Health: Minoritarian Becomings in the Sudan—Women Salih’s works mediate the violence the societal forces of the fundamentalist Islamist diagram direct toward Sudanese women. They render perceptible not only the bio-affective diminutions in women’s health and capabilities that have occurred over the last several generations but also their social determinants. These relations of force, apprehended at their extremities not only by Salih, a writer, but by doctors and criminal prosecutors,26 form part of a Sudanese society that functions as an ill-health assemblage. Like molds that over time have progressively formed bricks less and less capable of bearing a load, Salih’s works show that the Islamist rearrangements of Sudanese society have produced women who are less capable of realizing their affective capacities than their mothers and grandmothers. In the literary world constructed by Salih, the answer to Michel Serres’s question: “What is a body capable of?” is not “more” or “almost anything,” but rather: “less.” It is possible to estimate to what extent Sudanese women’s bodies have infolded the effects of these modulatory impingements such that, rather than emerging, their tendencies, their potential, their affective capacities, have diminished. Holding that gender inequality is one of the major barriers to human development, the HDI looks to expose the differences that exist in a country in the distribution of achievements between women and men. This is captured by one of the subindexes which together compose the larger HDI: the Gender Inequality Index (GII). The GII measures gender inequality in three aspects of human development: reproductive health;27 empowerment;28 and economic status.29 The higher the GII value, the greater the disparity between the degree females and males can live the lives they value. The GII value of a certain society quantifes to what extent women in that society are less capable of realizing their potential affective capacities than men. Perfect gender equality does not exist in any country in the world. Yet Norway, whose citizens enjoy the highest quality of life of any country in the world, not coincidentally is one of the most gender equal countries in the world. In Norway, women are only 5 percent less capable of living the life they value than men. By comparison, women in Australia, which ranks second in the world in terms of quality of life, are 12 percent less capable of living the lives they value than Australian men. By the same measure, Sudanese women are
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almost 58 percent less capable of living the life they value than Sudanese men (UNDP 2016, 214, 216). As with the HDI, the GII was not designed to measure affective capacity, at least not understood in the explicitly Spinozan and Deleuzian way used in this book. As with the HDI, it is entirely possible that the indicators used in the GII might fnd female bodies in a certain society to be quite healthy both biologically and according to the categories for which they are measuring. Yet those bodies might experience few becomings-other, or be without the social capacity to experiment, live creatively, or positively augment their affective capacities. For affective capacity to be a useful indicator of health in the postcolonial world, it is imperative to acknowledge that the environmental conditions and the societal relations of force that enhance, constrain, or impinge upon what bodies can do are expressed through corresponding modulations in a body’s affective capacities. Given the body’s plasticity, modulations in what a body can do can be expressed through an almost infnite variation of phenotypes. These enhancements or impingements can be perceived via a corresponding expansion or diminution in a body’s tendencies, potential, and relations. Bodies infold and express these enhancements or impingement long after those particular relations or conditions have ceased to affect them. For example, the positive affects of adequate nutrition during an infant’s formative years are expressed through a corresponding augmentation in cognitive capacity through the rest of that person’s life. Inversely (and epigenetically), it has been shown that a body’s exposure even in utero to harsh environmental conditions lingers long after the environment has changed and continues to adversely infuence a person’s health across his or her entire lifetime (Lumey et al. 2007). Though affects are ineffable, a work of literature can apprehend affects and percepts and represent them as intensities and as corporeal and incorporeal transformations. This can be seen in the transformation precipitated within Hosna via her relation with her husband, Mustafa Sa’eed: After thinking for a while in silence, he [Mahjoub] said, “It’s true, though, that Mahmoud’s daughter [Hosna] changed after her marriage to Mustafa Sa’eed. All women change after marriage, but she in particular underwent an indescribable change. It was as though she were another person. Even we who were her contemporaries and used to play with her in the village look at her today and see her as something new—like a city woman if you know what I mean.” (Salih 2009, 84)
Grant Hamilton draws on Homi Bhabha’s theory of ambivalence, as well as Julia Kristeva’s and Jackie Stacey’s work on abjection (that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rule [. . .]
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that which reminds us of the impossibility of fxing permanent or immutable boundaries between self and other.”) to posit that Mustafa Sa’eed functions as an “abject-hybrid” in Season of Migration to the North (Hamilton 2005, 58). Seeking revenge for the colonial rape of the Sudan, Mustafa Sa’eed brought about the destruction of his English lovers by infecting them with the same “deadly disease” the English colonialists had brought to the Sudan. Hamilton shows that Sa’eed’s minor program of re-colonization effectively brought about “variation” in the major structures of British imperialism. Though he does not do so, Hamilton’s argument could be proftably extended to the movement Mustafa Sa’eed brought about in his Sudanese wife, Hosna. It could be argued that after his sojourn in England, Mustafa Sa’eed continued to function as the “abject-hybrid” upon his return to the Sudan. More “English than the English,” Sa’eed’s Westernized relations with his wife worked to unsettle the “certitude” of Hosna’s identity within the neopatriarchal, fundamentalist Islamist discourse that had come to modulate Sudanese life. Coming to see herself as equal, as human, through her proximity to Mustafa Sa’eed, Hosna’s ontological position became fractured, reshaped. Having become other than what she was, Hosna became capable of resisting and transgressing the “unwritten yet institutionalized and internalised cultural boundaries of [the] dominant [fundamentalist Islamist] discourse” (Hamilton 2005, 60) that demanded she submit to Wad Rayyes. Yet, as we know, the movement to produce change that was Hosna’s attempt to live differently, creatively, to leave the territory she and the women of Wad Hamid inhabited, ended tragically. As hers was a solitary line of fight, Hosna was unable to connect with or forge new relations with other elements of society that had also freed up the fxed relations that contained their bodies (there were no others) and thus extend her capacities and alter her life’s trajectory and come to rest within a new societal arrangement. Rather, the line of fight she embarked on was obstructed, negative: the encompassing, necropolitical, neopatriarchal, fundamentalist social overcoding of life present in Sudanese society prevailed. Her line of fight turned into a line of destruction and death (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 510). Rendering visible the tendency of violence present in the temperament of a Sudanese society that functions as an ill-health assemblage, Salih’s depictions of women show that in the seventh category of the Health and Capabilities Rubric, minoritarian becomings, the Sudan ranks negatively. The biohazard symbol on the Health and Capabilities Dashboard represents the fact that Salih’s works show women’s efforts to fail to conform to the majoritarian standard of Sudanese society to be unsuccessful. Not only do they not extend the scope of the standard and broaden the subject of democracy in the Sudan, their efforts have not changed the nature of Sudanese political institutions or enfranchised other members of society to participate in the
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political process on equal terms. Unlike the example of Angola examined in the previous chapter, which showed life to be constrained within established identities, Salih’s works show that a Sudanese woman’s capability to more fully realize her affective capacities has been actively diminished over time: her possibilities of life have been reduced by the various moments of change that have occurred in contemporary Sudanese history. Evaluating societal health defned as the social capacity to experiment with the potential for new perceptions and affects, the minoritarian becomings component of the Health and Capabilities Rubric registers the Sudan as unequivocally negative.
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4.3.1.3b Literature as Health: Minoritarian Becomings in the Sudan—Effendi as Ill-Health It is not only women whose possibilities of life are obstructed and reduced by a society that functions as an ill-health assemblage. Salih’s work represents that, drawn and guided by the affective magnet of worldliness, the lives of Sudanese society’s favored—the effendi—are without movement. (In Turkey, effendi is a title of respect or courtesy. Throughout Mediterranean and Arabic societies, the term indicates a man of high education or social standing.) Through his multi-work portrayal of Meheimeed, Salih shows the elite to aspire and be directed to this life by the same neopatriarchal system that then capriciously bureaucratizes and administers their lives. Meheimeed is biologically healthy and highly educated: he exercises power and prestige. According to the neopatriarchal rubric of success, Meheimeed is maximally healthy and capable. Yet, Salih shows that Meheimeed was never capable of living the life he valued and did not enjoy the life he lived. Meheimeed is a subject within what is effectively an étatist reconstitution of a medieval sultanate, rather than a citizen of a free republic. Patriarchally directed by his grandfather since childhood, Meheimeed’s life has been marked by impotence, anomie, and defeat. Though not forced like Hosna into a marriage against his will, Meheimeed was prevented from marrying, Maryam, the girl of his heart: “Perhaps everything would have gone on as it was had it not been that he had fallen in love with Maryam and that his grandfather had said no” (Salih 1996, 90). In an earlier passage, Mahjoub commented: “‘His [Meheimeed’s] grandfather, though had made up his mind and said not a bit of it [quitting school], he should go along with school till he saw the end of the road.’ [. . .] ‘After that everything went wrong,’ said Meheimeed. ‘One has to say no from the very beginning’” (Salih 1996, 51). From that point on, Meheimeed was not able to live the life he desired (Salih 1996, 51). Meheimeed’s life is marked by impotence. He could have remained with Maryam and redeemed both their lives, but he “hesitated” (Salih 1996, 121).
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He could have saved Hosna’s life; indeed, she pleaded with him to, but he did not: “I did nothing. I sat on where I was without moving and left her to weep alone to the night till she stopped” (Salih 2009, 80). Mahjoub asks, “Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you marry her? You’re only good when it comes to talking” (Salih 2009, 108). Though a member of the ruling class, Meheimeed’s professional life played out similarly: “Civil servants like me can’t change anything,” I said to him. “If our masters say ‘Do so-and-so,’ we do it’” (Salih 2009, 100). All this contrasts markedly with the way of living that Meheimeed wanted for himself as a young man: “I want to give lavishly, I want love to fow from my heart, to ripen and bear fruit. There are many horizons that must be visited, fruit that must be plucked, books read, and white pages in the scrolls of life to be inscribed with vivid sentences in a bold hand” (Salih 2009, 6). After nearly thirty-fve years living otherwise, defeated at sixty, pensioned off before his time for having refused to perform the dawn prayers at the mosque as the new Islamist government had demanded, Meheimeed returns to Wad Hamid empty-handed. As such, Meheimeed represents the many brilliant minds in Sudan and the contemporary Arab world who, as members of a small middle class, were consumed by their “proximity to the state” (Nasr 2009, 113). Availing themselves of the few opportunities there were in society as clerks or teachers, members of the judiciary, military, police, or diplomatic corps, effendi like Meheimeed functionally supported the ruling “political autocracy.” Like Meheimeed, many members of the Sudanese elite who were not members of the NIF lost their jobs when the NIF came to power (Berkley 2014, 94). In regards to the effendi, Salih’s diagnosis extends past indicting the corrupt, autocratic, political system of the Sudan and the bureaucracy within it that eats one up from within (Berkley 2014, 94). Salih shows the lure of worldly success within such an autocratic system—empty though it may be— to exert the pull of a powerful affective magnet. Through Meheimeed, Salih shows how this magnet of worldly success—pre-structured according to the Sudanese neopatriarchal diagram—modulates the bodies and lives of those who rise within the system. The effendi are quantifably healthier and more capable than the majority of Sudanese society. Yet, consumed with worldliness and living in way incompatible with the love and Suf piety that Salih indicates is the path to successfully “ruling the city,” Meheimeed’s destiny is modulated along a different axe of the same neopatriarchal cartography that doomed Hosna’s attempt to live differently, creatively. Though a mid-level civil servant, like Bandarshah, Meheimeed sought power, status, and privilege. Meheimeed announces in the opening pages of Season of Migration to the North: “I want to take my rightful share of life by force” (Salih 2009, 6). Years later, in the concluding lines of the same novel, Meheimeed reaffrms this approach to life, vowing “I shall live by
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force and cunning” (Salih 2009, 139). Salih uses this phrase, verbatim, to describe the manner in which Bandarshah and his grandson Meryoud rule: “The two of them ruled with force and cunning, without love” (Salih 1996, 46). This phrase is highly signifcant. As Meheimeed and his grandfather, Tureif, Mahjoub, and Sa’eed Asha ‘l-Baytat are all refections of the tyrant Bandarshah and his grandson, Meryoud, this phrase refects on all of them. It signals the unhealthy dedication to worldly success these men exhibit and which is antithetical to the Suf search for the inward meaning of the Quran and proximity to God. To live by “force and cunning, without love” is to live according to the dictates of a society oriented to worldly success and modulated according to the puritanically righteous “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” that “Sunni fundamentalism equates with divine favour” (Nasr 2007, 58–60). At the end of his days, Meheimeed realizes that he has lived his entire life impotently, without love or true friendship. The predetermined joys of his successes were empty, without intensity or joy. He comes to comprehend that, as the vision of Maryam tells him, having chosen and been chosen by his grandfather to be the “most weighty in the scales of the people of the world,” at the end of his days he is “nothing,” “no one.” He is “a person and not a person. [He is] not any person or anything” (Salih 1996, 122, 120). Salih’s work shows that the life of even those favored within Sudanese society is constrained within established identities. There are no becomingsother and certainly no minoritarian becomings. The paths to new relations and transformations that could precipitate the release of new powers to act or respond are obstructed. Salih’s works represent the effendi as another form of ill-health produced by a Sudanese society that functions as an ill-health assemblage. They show that effendis are not the site from which minoritarian becomings emanate; rather, they are the majoritarian standard from which, given the extreme form Sudanese society has taken, no deviations are possible. If Sudanese health were to be represented based on the case of the effendi alone, the icon on the minoritarian becomings component of the Health and Capabilities Rubric might be that of the dangerous surf warning, which indicates obstruction and limitation. However, when combined with the health of Sudanese women, the result is overwhelmingly negative and so is contained within and better represented by the biohazard icon, which signifes active diminution of affective capacity over time. 4.3.1.4 Literature as Health: Becoming-witness Meheimeed returns to Wad Hamid seeking to comprehend what has caused anomie and impotence to haunt the days of his life: “One of my reasons for my return was to learn the truth of the matter before it was too late, for I too had crossed that bridge and had buried well-loved things” (Salih 1996, 57).
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Though he comes to realize he, too, is a refection of Bandarshah, unlike the others, Meheimeed realized that he is not called to be Bandarshah’s inheritor. In one of his visions of the great tyrant, Meheimeed is placed not on Bandarshah’s right but on his left: “I wanted Bandarshah to explain to me the signifcance of what had happened, but he said nothing and I fnally realized that the voice had called me solely that I might be a witness” (Salih 1996, 32). His friends see Meheimeed’s role clearly: “From the time he returned to Wad Hamid, Meheimeed has been asking questions—you’d think he was wanting to write histories” (Salih 1996, 91). In the fnal passages of Bandarshah, the vision of Maryam tells Meheimeed that his “sign is to remain wide awake to the end of time” (Salih 1996, 121). And in a meta-commentary on both Meheimeed’s function as a witness and writer of histories and Salih’s own purposes as a writer of histories, Salih has Taher Wad Rawwasi say: “Perhaps what’s happened is all for the good. Who knows? As this sort of chat we’re having gets acted out on the radio, is made into flms and printed in books, why don’t you get down to work and record it, Meheimeed? Who knows, it might be a lesson to those who would take heed” (Salih 1996, 100). The form this “taking heed” takes is that of a bloc of sensation consisting of particular affects and percepts shared between Meheimeed and the reader. Here in this zone, co-composed in a becoming-witness, the reader’s position merges with that of Meheimeed’s. The grief that overwhelms Meheimeed at different points in Bandarshah comes from comprehending much more than the truth of his own existence; it is a result of becoming aware of the truth of all their existences. It is this particular grief-drenched sensation that corresponds to Meheimeed’s and the reader’s becoming-witness. Meheimeed, and the reader, through Meheimeed, become aware of the corruption at the heart of the neopatriarchal structuring of Sudanese society. Through the examples of Fatima, Ni’ma, Maryam and Hosna, we recognize the fact that this hegemonic organization of daily life modulates the lives of girls and women so that they are less healthy and capable than they might otherwise be. We apprehend that this modulation is a result of selective, doctrinally-unsound Quranic interpretations, which are at odds with both modern conceptions of gender equity and with the deeply felt, autochthonous Suf ethos with which his people had traditionally lived. We appreciate that instead of realizing the hopes and dreams Meheimeed had for living a productive life, rather, his life has been one of mediocrity, emptiness, and anomie. Meheimeed becomes aware that, twinned with his grandfather-as-Bandarshah, and as a favored member of the neopatriarchal elite, his impotence before the theo-political organization of daily life does not forgive his complicity in the national project that has modulated their lives so. He comes to see that Mahjoub and Tureif, as well as his grandfather and himself, like Bandarshah, all “want to assert [their] presence in the world.” He realizes that
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“the germ of destruction is inherent” in this shared character trait (Berkley 2014, 188). Meheimeed comprehends that the opacity, patronage, and iron will with which Mahjoub has ruled Wad Hamid is of the same kind as that with which the corrupt dictators rule from Khartoum. Meheimeed becomes conscious of the fact that with no alternative, viable means of governance by which to discover the wish of the majority, upward cascading socio-cultural arrangements culminating in autocracy hold back the forces of chaos and confagration. Finally, Meheimeed becomes aware that the phenotypically recursive pattern of cruel tyrants that rise to oppress and sacrifce the present and those around them before being overthrown themselves and replaced in subsequent generations by their exact replica is the foreseeable destiny of the Sudan. Deleuze defnes literature as health to the extent that a literary work both portrays and causes to come into being in the reader new affects or blocs of sensation. Deleuze writes of “literature as health” in a utopian and immanent manner, conceiving of new affects, blocs of sensations, intensities, and becomings that a text in its relation with the reader precipitates into being such that it invokes a world and a people yet to come. Though there is nothing utopic in Salih’s later works, by the end of Bandarshah, “the truth of the matter” that Meheimeed has become aware of is composed with the sensations of a particular set of percepts and affects. Through Salih’s symptomatological, narratological, and archaeological skills, the intensity of the bloc of sensation that foods Meheimeed comes to suffuse the reader as well. Like Meheimeed at the end of his life, Salih’s readers emerge from his works to fnd their souls have become imbued with a hue of despair and profound sorrow. Looking about us, we fnd that we, too, are at the end of our days: our hearts ache with the knowledge of the inevitability and unavoidability of weakness and loss, knowing that we’ve paid the price and will live out what remains of our lives in anguish and despair. Defeated, having wasted our days, lost what we’ve loved, we see about us only ruinous portents for the land and its people that are as much a part of us as our souls, bearing malice against those we’ve most loved and were not strong enough—never destined—to defeat, and who are as much to blame as ourselves. This is the bloc of sensation that both Meheimeed and Salih’s readers come to experience. By showing the Sudanese—who have gone from being subject to Empire to being subject to internal colonization—to be a minor people, Salih’s postcolonial works forge a connection between a minor people and minor literature. Salih’s works provide the majority an outside perspective on Sudanese Arab society’s dominant affects that they did not previously possess. Salih’s readers become witness to a country that—through various, purposeful arrangements of relations of force which do not produce a society whose citizens possess with capacity to experiment and is without the potential for
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new perceptions and affects—prevents virtually all of its citizens from realizing much of their affective capacities. In apprehending the components of the Bandarshah Syndrome, Salih’s readers become witness to how daily life is specifcally produced by a contemporary Sudanese Arab society that is a very particular ill-health assemblage. It is a becoming-witness to the ill-health of Sudanese women and the lives of Sudanese society’s elite class. Not only that, it is a becoming-witness to the reality of “an ethnically and religiously mixed African country, with an egalitarian brand of Sufsm as its dominant form of Islam, [that has been] mobilized by intellectuals and soldiers to create a militaristic, ideologically extreme state whose main achievements were civil war, slavery, famine and mass death” (Packer 2006). Salih’s works bring life in the Sudan into a reader’s circle of awareness, while ensuring that the reader can never again be incognizant of or benignly consider the Sudan. Yet, it is not only that. The recursivity of the Bandarshah phenotype signifes that the becoming-witness the reader is involved in is not only historical but prescient. The reader becomes composed in a prognosticatory témoignage to the coming confagration of not only the Sudan, but that of the greater Arab world. Emerging from Salih’s works today, we see that that confagration is already upon us.
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4.4 SALIH, THE ARAB SPRING, AND THE “THREADS OF CHAOS” For the past four years, waves of mass protests have swept throughout MENA with unfagging tenacity. Deep-seated, long-simmering dissatisfaction not only with the state but with the states of their lives and the way they have been ruled, gave protesters the stamina to endure the violence meted out to them by the very autocratic governments they sought to unseat. The world has watched as multitudes have gathered, regathered, and regathered yet again in streets and public squares as the shifting political topography was claimed and reclaimed by factions of the very forces these multitudes sought to supplant. As the sparks of dissent spread across national borders, fres kindled within others who were similarly dissatisfed with the quality of their lives and the authoritarian regimes who rule them. These protests have morphed into widescale social unrest and launched devastating civil wars. They have toppled long-standing rulers, overthrown unpopular regimes, and have contributed to catalyzing Daesh30 into prominence. They have brought chaos and mass murder of civilians to heretofore well-functioning autocracies and dictatorships. The future of Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria hangs in the balance. Daesh still controls large swathes of both Syria and Iraq. Daily, deadly
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bomb blasts rock Iraq’s yet-unestablished, Shia-led democracy. Turmoil roils through Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, Palestine, Jordan, Turkey, Iran and much of the Maghreb. Millions of refugees are fooding into Europe and neighboring countries. With all this, the gathering of a common being-against being ruled thus called the Arab Spring has succeeded in overthrowing many of the region’s long-abhorred autocrats. Nonetheless, with the departure of Saleh, Gaddaf, Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Hussein, so too went the onerous yet longstanding peace they had enforced. Despite the magnitude of the regional discontent being expressed, scholars, political scientists, policy makers, dictators, opposition parties, Islamists, and traditional civil society authorities alike all failed to see the coming of the Arab Spring. These revolutions have destabilized the entire region and precipitated the turmoil that Jean Salloum, Security and Protocol Advisor to the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent societies (IFRC) in Beirut has called a “Third World War” (Salloum 2014). This confagration would have come as no surprise to Salih. His prognosis went far beyond predicting that Muslim fundamentalists would rise to rule the Sudan (as unbelievable as that was at the time he wrote). Salih saw the Arab world’s destiny was to oscillate in some sort of infernal, Manichean recursion between two unconscionable basins of attraction: dictatorship and chaos. By Bandarshah’s end, with Mahjoub having been overthrown by Tureif and Sa’eed Asha ‘l-Baytat and the community of Wad Hamid in tumult and despair, Salih leaves no doubt that the attractor toward which the community is tending is chaos and dictatorship. Like Kafka before him, Salih’s writings function as a “prognostics of social forces and currents [. . .] that in his epoch were only beginning to knock on the door” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 55). The anguished hubbub of Bandarshah indicates that the overthrow of Mahjoub will unleash the “threads of chaos” (Salih 1996, 12). With Wad Hamid representing the greater Arab community, and Mahjoub the patriarchs, both regional and local, great and small, the portent is clear: the destruction of their community. Looking to the region today, we see clearly that authoritarian stability has given way to the chaos, societal fragmentation, and despair that envelopes Meheimeed at the end of Bandarshah. What is also of importance is Meheimeed’s personal and professional dissatisfaction with his life. We know that as a “collective assemblage of enunciation” Salih’s characters’ experiences are both immediately political and collective. Though the chaos that is upon the Arab world is predicted in Salih’s fction, the question is whether Salih’s readers discern the compounding of the effects of collective impotence, anomie, and dissatisfaction felt by two or three subsequent generations of administrators and bureaucrats. Jaafar Aksikas writes that with the failure of “modern Arab neoliberalism31 [. . .] the Arab population have found themselves subject to a system that [. . .]
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only deepened their suffering, both at the material and psychological levels” (Aksikas 2009, 31). Writing well before the Arab Spring, the political economist, Ankie Hoogvelt, noted the frustration felt by numerous “young educated people who cannot fnd positions or professions that correspond to their expectations.” Additionally, her work highlighted the anger the “dispossessed masses” felt at the corruption, cronyism, clientelism, and “lack of separation between institutions of rule and surplus appropriation,” all of which “widened the gap increasingly between them and the masses of population whom they rule” (Hoogvelt 2001, 210–213). Dr. Mona Amyuni fnds that Salih’s narrator “stands for the young Sudanese man at the dawn of independence, but also for the young, educated, Arab man of the early sixties, of the waning Nasserite euphoria, the Algerian victory, the beginning of the Palestinian resistance movement.” Amyuni writes that the transformation in the narrator over the course of thirty plus years of professional and personal mediocrity represents the changes in the Arab pysche that these decades have brought (Amyuni 2000, 100). She writes that Meheimeed’s becoming-witness corresponds in part to the collective realization that all “young men and women will be crushed by a worn-out patriarchal system that curbs their will, and desires, from birth to death” (Amyuni 2000, 101). The political scientists, Michelle Pace and Francesco Cavatorta, argue that autocratic governments in the MENA failed to deliver jobs, education, and opportunities to the majority of their citizens and thus neither distributed wealth widely or fairly.32 They also postulate that the distinctly antipolitical air and leaderless nature of the uprisings highlight the people’s lack of trust in leaders and representatives and in their political options. They claim that the uprisings clearly show the Arab community’s dissatisfaction with traditional modes of political representation and channels of policy implementation available to them. Pace and Cavatorta believe that over half-a-century of lives less than optimally lived within these structures resulted in a groundswell of dissatisfaction that targeted the very ossifed, authoritarian structures of power that unfairly distributed wealth and opportunities. Their anger was also fuelled by widespread corruption and repressive political unresponsiveness (Pace and Cavatorta 2012). The sudden surge of Syrian refugees into Europe indicated the precise, epiphanic moment in the civil war at which collectively Syrians lost all hope that a political or military resolution could be found. So too, the collective precipitation of the Arab Spring revolutions indicated the tipping point at which collectively Arab citizens could take no more. Yet, despite the presence of kindling—a repressive, autocratic regime that has been in power for twenty-three years; a dire economic crisis; heavily armed insurrections in various corners of the country; and a fred-up protest movement (Gettleman
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2012)—there has been no Arab Spring, no awakening, in the Sudan. Unlike in Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli, or Sana’a, the clamor for change in Khartoum’s squares and streets has only been sporadic. When dissent has surfaced it has been disorganized, and quickly stifed. Why is that? Sudan observer, Elfadil Ibrahim, believes that decades of civil war combined with increased dependence on the state have tempered the demands for change (Ibrahim 2011). He writes that in the Sudan many from the reservoir of the young urban, middle class who have spearheaded the revolts in other MENA countries have migrated abroad in search of better socioeconomic opportunities. Many of those from the “shrunken middle class” who remain and who might have been tempted to resist have been “adroitly” co-opted by fnding employment within Sudan’s “massive civil service” or bureaucratic positions within the sizeable national security apparatus. Additionally, the violence the state has meted onto the residents of Darfur and the new country of South Sudan has quieted any who might contemplate dissent. Apathy and a desire for stability reign. There is none of Egypt’s, or Libya’s, or Yemen’s, or Tunisia’s, or Syria’s chaos in Sudan: mainly silence. The “new master’s” key, which has kept the door to change in the Sudan locked for twenty-fve years now, continues to maintain stability in Sudan, even as the regional tumult currently reforging the MENA rages all around. For now, Bashir reigns. However, Salih’s vision indicates that he, too, shall be brought down. However, the presaged chaos that has “rise[n] like a food” in many neighboring countries prevents me from rejoicing outright at the thought of his downfall. Though Salih offers glimpses of another way—that of Suf spirituality and acceptance—his remorseless diagnosis offers no hope. Vali Nasr maintains optimistically that current events demonstrate that the strategy of dictatorships using force to impose the will of the minority over that of the majority “is not a lasting formula nor one that will survive political openness” (Nasr 2007, 253). Yet: In Libya, armed militias have flled a void left by a revolution that felled a dictator. In Syria, a popular uprising has morphed into a civil war that has left more than 100,000 dead and provided a haven for Islamic extremists. In Tunisia, increasingly bitter political divisions have delayed the drafting of a new constitution. And now in Egypt, often considered the trendsetter of the Arab world, the army and security forces, after having toppled the elected Islamist president, have killed hundreds of his supporters, declared a state of emergency and worsened a deep polarization. It is clear that the region’s old status quo, dominated by imperious rulers who fxed elections, ruled by fat and quashed dissent has been fundamentally damaged, if not overthrown, in the three years since the outbreak of the uprisings optimistically known as the Arab Spring. [. . .] Most of the uprisings have devolved into bitter struggles as a mix of political powers
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battle over the rules of participation, the relationship between the military and the government, the role of religion in public life and what it means to be a citizen, not a subject. Middle East historians and analysts say that the political and economic stagnation under decades of autocratic rule that led to the uprisings also left Arab countries ill equipped to build new governments and civil society. (Hubbard and Gladstone 2013)
Writing two years ago, at a time when the regional outlook was much more positive than it is today, veteran journalists, Ben Hubbard and Rick Gladstone, surveyed the current terrain with a much more pessimistic conclusion.
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4.5 SALIH’S UNHEEDED VISION Looking through the region today, we see either a consolidation of power by those Bandarshahs who have maintained control over their country: Al Khalifa (Bahrain), Salman (Saudi Arabia), Al Bashir (Sudan); or the installation of a subsequent generation of Bandarshahs, such as Morsi and Al Sisi in Egypt; or chaos, as contemporary Bandarshahs bring destruction down upon their own countries rather than cede control: Bashar Al-Assad (Syria), Gaddaf, (Libya). Just as Salih saw no path toward the tolerant harmony portrayed in The Wedding of Zein, nowhere, Aeneas-like, can the kernels of Dubai’s imperfect promise be glimpsed in the capitols and town halls of any of these countries. Perhaps this harrowing outlook is the reason Salih lost faith in fction’s ability to infuence the world; certainly, his later works evince an ever-deepening metaphysical pessimism about the state of the Arab world. Yet, the fact that he kept writing (as a creative journalist) even after abandoning fction indicates that, even if he could or would not fnish Bandarshah, perhaps, like the Chinese writer, Lu Hsun, neither could he “refute [the] assertion that [hope] might exist” (Hsun 2003, 5). That possibility, combined with the palpable perceptual and affective transformation an engagement with Salih’s cycle of works produce in his readers, seems of importance as I write these concluding words. The fact that Bandarshah composes the reader in a bloc of becoming-witness indicates that, having brought a type of newness into the world through that bloc of sensation, Salih does not ft comfortably within the category of “frst-phase” postcolonial writers. Salih’s work strides the divide between frst- and second-phase postcolonial writers. Certainly, The Wedding of Zein and arguably Season of Migration to the North are written from a politically dependent, emerging literary space where his works were linked with the appearance of the nation of Sudan. Season of Migration to the North marks a turning point in Salih’s literary career: it shows the literary
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inheritance Salih has as his disposal and it clearly shows that Salih knows the laws of world literary space. Bandarshah, on the other hand, evinces formal, specifcally literary concerns, and challenges standing aesthetic conventions, such as that of realism, which marked Salih’s frst works. Similarly, in terms of newness and creation, the bloc of sensation that is the becoming-witness both the narrator and the reader become composed within, identifes and is aimed at dissolving the majoritarian identities negatively affecting the health of the Sudanese people. Even as it expresses the anomie, anguish, and impotence that accompany its diagnosis, Bandarshah dissolves previous forms and initiates a new line of becoming. Even as it fragments before the confagration to which it is witness, Bandarshah produces something new. Bandarshah must be understood as, if not the predominance of active forces, at least a projection of active forces that have not yet been completely vanquished. As such, the becoming-witness it catalyses is an act of newness and creation and should be considered a symbol of good health. The fact that thirty to forty years avant la lettre Salih captured and rendered visible the very ailments in their incipience that today fuel the confagration threatening to engulf much of the Arab world shows postcolonial literature to be a feld where the diverse felds of literary theory, philosophy, and international and human development can mutually and proftably engage. At the same time, a consideration of that world also tempers my confdence in literature’s symptomatological, prognosticatory, and elucidatory functions. Salih’s cycle of works has not informed any analyses33 of the working arrangements of MENA societies by the leaderless multitudes who precipitated the fall of so many dictators. The Syrian poet, Ali Ahmad Said Esber,34 another insightful clinician of the Arab world, believes that the promise of the Arab Spring revolutions remains unfulflled because those carrying them out failed to address the very relations of force isolated in Salih’s works. He writes that “the Arab problem is not to have separated religion from politics” (Altares 2015). Moreover, he fnds that the activists who precipitated the Arab Spring: dreamed only of overthrowing the established powers without placing suffcient attention on the question of institutions, education, the family, on the liberty of women and of the individual. What is in fact missing is a refection on the manner to found a civil society [. . .]. The result: in place of destabilizing the dictatorships, they have destroyed their countries. [. . .] There is no word, not one word on the liberation of women. Can one speak of an Arab revolution if women remain prisoners under shar’ia? (Adonis 2015, 11–13)
Perhaps my belief in the symptomatological and political aspects of postcolonial literature is misplaced. Certainly, with a divide yet separating the literary, public health, humanitarian, and development felds, postcolonial literature’s clinical potential remains untapped. Salih isolated the relations of force
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widely acknowledged as having brought about the Arab Spring revolutions. Salih’s diagnosis is unequivocal; he prioritized two categories as deserving the most attention: “Economic constraints and a more just distribution of material social goods” throughout the Sudan and the “Lack of social opportunities” available to the Sudanese and especially to Sudanese Arab women. He highlighted these two categories to the virtual exclusion of the other three relations of force. In these two aspects, his diagnosis corresponded almost exactly with the objective evaluation of how Sudan ranks in these two categories. Indeed, his diagnosis prioritized the lack of social opportunities to be a causal factor in Sudanese ill-health to a signifcantly greater extent even than the objective ranking in that category would indicate. This does not mean that, as the objective evaluations of Sudanese health indicate, the Sudanese would not beneft from an increase in political freedoms and transparency guarantees or that arrangements to prevent the poorest and most vulnerable in Sudanese society from slipping into extreme poverty and misery would not be extremely benefcial. Rather, the areas of divergence between Salih’s diagnosis and the objective diagnosis indicate that Salih has prioritized the relations of force involved in “Political unfreedoms” and “Economic constraints” above all others as being the principal points impinging upon what the Sudanese can do and be. Yet, like Cassandra before the fall of Troy, unheeded yet prescient, his works accurately foretold the chaos currently consuming many Arab countries. It is precisely because the future is unclear that my hopes are fourfold. First, I hope that readers of this work will appreciate the extent of Salih’s literary genius; second, that they will have an enhanced understanding of how colonial and postcolonial arrangements and forces continue to shape current events in the MENA region. Third, having seen the value of the postcolonial symptomatological methodology I have elaborated here, they will fesh out Salih’s diagnosis via an engagement with the works of other physicians of the Arab world, such as Mahfouz, Munif, Adonis, and Kamel Daoud. Lastly, I hope that this will lead to a reconceptualization of health as the social capacity to experiment, with the potential for new perceptions and affects. Combined, this could lead to concrete, interdisciplinarily-informed plans of action outlining programs elaborated in collaboration with the most vulnerable people in societies around the world in order to more fully realize their affective capacities.
NOTES 1. Today there are more than 3.1 million displaced people in Sudan, with over 2.5 million displaced persons in the Darfur region alone. Refugees in Sudan number 168,000 people, plus an additional 127,665 Southern Sudanese refugees who
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have fed the recent fghting. Thousands of measles cases have been reported in recent days; 2 million children have been identifed as suffering from Severe-Acute Malnutrition. (Sudan 2015a). The situation in South Sudan is similar: 1.9 million people require nutrition support in order to survive; 2.8 million people have no means of making a living; 2.3 million are without basic shelter and household items; over 3 million people require physical protection so as to be free to move and live without being subject to violence. (Sudan 2015b) 2. The intellectual architects behind the Muslim Brotherhood’s and the Wahhabis’ version of neo-fundamentalist Sunni Islam. 3. Salih’s liminal position—both oppressed and oppressor—is a commonality he shares with the Angolan writer, Pepetela, given Pepetela’s extensive history with the MPLA government. 4. The Mahdi is the “divine leader chosen by God at the end of time to fll the earth with justice and equity” (Holt and Daly 2011, 64). 5. In an act that would reverberate a century later as the Janjaweed militia wrought death and destruction on the people of Darfur on behalf of the regime in Khartoum, the Mahdi’s policies in the latter years of the nineteenth century attached the nomads “closely and permanently to the regime, turning them from casual raiders into a standing army.” 6. Abdel Salam Sidahmed writes that “apart from the strong roots of Islam in Sudanese society, the recourse of Nimeiri to Islamic ideology may be viewed within both the context of domestic politics as well as the wider context of Middle Eastern politics. In the latter, although a number of radial secularist regimes had come to power in several countries during the late 1960s, Nasser’s defeat in the 1967 war with Israel and then his death in 1970 were heavy blows to the whole of radical Arab politics” (Sidahmed 1996, 121). Haifa Saud Alfaisal concurs, she writes that this “devastating military defeat led to the demise of the ideologies that had taken root since the 1950s, including Arab nationalism and socialism” (Alfaisal 2006, 56). 7. The tenets of which are: authoritarian Arab allies are “stable bets,” and democratic Arab governments will not cooperate with US regional foreign policy goals (Gause 2011). 8. Such as Shar’ia law, the veil, feminine subordination, etc. 9. This, as well as all subsequent dates, are the dates in which Salih completed writing the stories, as indicated in Edibiyat, the Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures. Vol. 10:1 (1999). 10. This chapter will not examine several of the short stories that appeared disparately throughout Salih’s career and which were not set in Wad Hamid or did not represent Salih’s familiar cast of characters. These short stories are “A Letter to Eileen” (in which a man returning to visit his native village from abroad relates the sense of alienation from those he once felt so close to he feels in a letter to his to his wife [1960]); “If She Will Come” (in which, through recounting the unsuccessful effort of three friends to open a travel agency, Salih’s criticizes the provincial young for failing to recognize the progress and modernization that have come to their country (1961); “That’s the Way It Is, Gentlemen” (1961), and the six stories in “Preludes” (all of which deal with the East-West encounter through recounting relationships between
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Eastern men and Western women [1962]); and “A Blessed Day on the Umm Bab Shore” (in which a family outing to the beach and encounter with a herd of camels is described mystically [1993]). 11. The “gang” consists of Mahjoub, Taher Wad Rawwasi, Sa’eed the shopkeeper, and Abdul Hafeez. Other characters common to these works are Zein, Tureif, Meheimeed, and his grandfather, Hajj Ahmed, Bakri, and Hamad Wad Rayyes. 12. The village is home to the patron saint for which it is named, the eponymous Wad Hamid, who represents the region’s Suf heritage. 13. Fatima bint Jabr Al-Dar (who marries the Ottoman soldier, Dau al-Bait, after he is washed up—memoryless—in Wad Hamid three generations prior to Meheimeed’s postcolonial time [B]); Ni’ma (who marries the village fool, Zein [WZ]); and Maryam (Meheimeed’s childhood love [B]) are identical characters: “headstrong and independent-minded,” yet selfess, intelligent and spiritual (Salih 1999, 108). 14. Like Hisham Sharabi, Jaafar Aksikas claims that Islamism should not be considered a reaction against modernization, but “the product of it” (Aksikas 2009). 15. Examples would be the members of “the Mahjoub gang” who built the mosque with their own hands though they never enter it, and the villagers of previous generations. 16. Such details include water pumps, agricultural communities, date palms, uncomfortable donkeys, crude sexual jokes, schooling, farming, and the like. 17. Some of these supernatural events are the saint embodied in the Doum Tree who cures those who come before it, Sheikh Haneen’s role in bringing about the toothless, village idiot Zein’s marriage to the “best girl in the village” Salih T. (2010) The Wedding of Zein, New York: New York Review of Books. And in effecting the “miraculous change” of the ne’er-do-well Seif ad-Din and bringing prosperity to the village of Wad Hamid for the following year. Ibid. As well as the arrival and disappearance of Dau al-Beit in Wad Hamid. 18. The institutionalization of the mass rape of Darfurian women by the government sponsored militia, the Janjaweed, is an extreme example of the large-scale misogynist social forces at work in the Sudan (Frontières 2005). 19. Katrin Bennhold’s account of the strategies employed by ISIS to lure three young Muslim Longon girls to Syria in 2015 captures the affective power of the contemporary, postcolonial Islamist strategies of resistance to the West (Bennhold 2015). 20. The book she read was Taha’s: The Quran, Mustapha Mahmoud, and Modern Understanding. 21. Rosi Braidotti understand’s Deleuze and Guattari’s term “desiring-production” as a person’s “ontological drive to become” (Braidotti 2013, 134). 22. I have previously enumerated the four defnitions of health found in Deleuze and Guattari’s work in section 2.1. This, and the previous chapter’s quantitative framework, is situated frmly within the “4th” defnition of health. 23. The Carter Center, an independent observer of elections around the world, was founded and is run by former United States president Jimmy Carter. 24. I am referring to the effects of the civil wars in Darfur and South Sudan.
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25. When I contacted the Stanford Literary Lab about the possibility of using their facilities to conduct just such an analysis on either Sudanese or Angolan literature they indicated that due to the back log of current work they were not accepting any new projects at the moment. 26. The ICC has charged Al Bashir with fve counts of crimes against humanity; two counts of war crimes; and three counts of genocide. 27. This is measured by maternal mortality rates and adolescent birth rates. 28. This is measured by the proportion of parliamentary seats occupied by females and the proportion of adults with at least some secondary education. 29. This is expressed as labor market participation as marked by participation in the labor force by males and females over the ages of ffteen. 30. Daesh is the acronym of ISIL’s Arabic name: al-Dawlah al-Islamiyah f l-‘Iraq wa-sh-Sham. 31. This itself is a result of “the series of nationalist, political and economic reforms [instituted at independence] aimed at reinforcing rather than breaking with imperialism” (Aksikas 2009, 22). 32. It is beyond both the pale of my expertise and the literary, academic limits of this essay to explore to what extent this was due to the neoliberal reforms imposed by Western institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank which have impoverished the masses as part of the integration of Arab economies into the world economy; yet in anticipation of the point to follow and in reference to the postcolonial orientation of this essay it is important to highlight not only the authoritarian nature but both the anti-representational character of the colonial machine left in place after independence and the foundational proclivity for wealth extraction and its subsequent societally inequitable distribution to the elite. 33. The sociologist, Kurt Lewin, developed Force Field Analysis as a way of analyzing the pressures for and against change. 34. Esber writes under the pen name Adonis and has been called “the greatest living poet in the Arab world” (Jaggi 2012).
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Conclusion
Having said that, individuality is the same thing with development, and that it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce, well-developed human beings, I might here close the argument: for what more or better can be said of any condition of human affairs than that it brings human beings themselves nearer to the best thing they can be? Or what worse can be said of any obstruction to good than that it prevents this?
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—John Stuart Mill (1986, 73)
When contemporary Mayan K’iché priests invoke: U k’ux kaj, U k’ux ulew1 they are acknowledging that none of us exist on our own. Every time we step outside, we are involved in a relation with the sun, the earth, the sky, rain, food, the wind, fows of money and disease, kindness, war, each other. What a body can do is infected by and refects the relations between a body and its environment. Like a Möbius strip’s non-orientable surface where one plane transforms into the other, so the conditions external to human bodies become internalized and in turn become exteriorized again as phenotypes, capabilities, and affects in those bodies’ relations with the environment about them. Over forty years ago, Gregory Bateson wrote that “mind” does not pertain solely to the brain, or even to the body, but rather is “immanent in the larger system—man plus environment” (Bateson 2000, 317). Several recent studies have addressed the correlation Bateson wrote of between what bodies can do and their environments. Columbia professor of Neuroscience and Education Dr. Kimberly Noble’s study on how poverty shapes children’s brains has found a direct correlation between income level (especially on the lower end of the spectrum) and brain structure. Highlighting the plasticity of the mind 191
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and the reversibility of levels of cognitive development, Noble’s study shows a dollar-for-dollar correlation between children’s cognitive capacities and their parent’s income levels (Noble et al. 2015). Similarly, biologists Eppig, Fincher, and Thornhill’s study on national IQ levels has established a negative correspondence between endemic, high levels of infectious disease, and national intelligence. Their study indicates that in countries rife with disease, when children under fve are obliged to divert a signifcant amount of energy that would have gone toward brain development to fghting infection and parasites in order to survive, this disease burden demonstratively lowers cognitive ability (Eppig et al. 2010). A recent study of Holocaust survivors and their children, led by Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry, Rachel Yehuda, has found that trauma’s effects extend past negatively impacting the lives and health of those exposed to trauma. Yehuda’s study has observed signifcant mental health issues in the children of parents exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust who themselves were never exposed to any such trauma. They also found “biological alterations” in these offspring; that is, parental trauma transformed the DNA of their children (Yehuda et al. 2015). It is clear that adverse environmental conditions correlate to a quantifable, intergenerational, epigenetic, logarithmic diminution in cognitive and perceptual capabilities. Bodies are not distinct from their environment.2 Anthropologist Barbara Glowczewski urges that “human experience” should not be “reduced” solely to the “effects of colonial history” (Glowczewski 2015, 152). Nonetheless, the examples of Angola and Sudan bear out Glowczewski’s observation that “colonial history has created its own ontology, which continues to fnd it diffcult to accept all humans as ‘human’” (Glowczewski 2015, 18–19). Colonial-era ontology has affectively anchored societies to certain identities, policies, and institutions, enabling such ideological relations to be internalized, and thus naturalized (Grossberg 1992, 80–83). This is true even if those “good policies and good institutions” have a negative impact overall and separate bodies from what they can do: something acknowledged by senior IMF offcials with their recent admission that instead of delivering development, growth, and durable expansion, neoliberal policies have, rather, increased inequality (Ostry et al. 2016). Ideas and policies, once institutionalized, have materiality long after the originating relations of force have been transformed into something new. This occurs even when opposing social forces, arising even as the material conditions that gave rise to them change, struggle to achieve social, ideological, and political dominance (Hoogvelt 2001, 12). Yet, similarities in outcomes can reveal commonalities that exist between working arrangements that appear outwardly distinct. Specifcally, the dedication to “ensur[ing] wealth transfer to the rich and powerful,” reveals globalization’s “almost genetic” (Ahmad
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1992, 74) link with its “transcolonial progenitor” (Ahmad 1992, 74; Hoogvelt 2001, 26; Venn 2009, 224). This means that the continuing structural connection responsible for the continuation of postcolonial, core-periphery polarization is no longer geographic, but social. There are several benefts that can be derived from applying this work’s subjective and experimental socio-literary methodology to an examination of public health in the postcolonial world.3 Analyzing the health outcomes of the Bandarshah and Bunker Syndromes disaggregated next to each other on the Health and Capabilities Dashboard (see below) can facilitate the identifcation of commonalities and differences between syndromes and
Figure 5.1 Health and Capabilities Rubric: Angola, the Sudan, and Australia. Source: Created by author.
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countries (Johnston, 2021). It also can allow us to identify the areas where an author’s literary-clinical diagnosis corresponds with objective rankings. The Health and Capabilities Dashboard also highlights areas of divergence, either where an author may have prioritized an area to be of greater import on the health of a people than the objective ranking might indicate; or inversely, areas an author may have prioritized to a lesser degree than might seem to be warranted given its objective ranking. Lastly, given serious levels of impingement to the health and capabilities of people across several areas, the dashboard provides an avenue that allows us to see which areas have been specifcally prioritized by the author’s subjective diagnosis. This postcolonial symptomatological methodology has produced a very specifc knowledge about the health effects the modern world system has had on contemporary Angolans and Sudanese. Importantly, though this methodology separates us from the typical pleasures of reading literature, it has directed us toward the most vulnerable members of Angolan and Sudanese societies. Experimental and subjective though it may be, it has allowed us to think about the Angolan and Sudanese other (Spivak 2013, 338) and reduce our “cognitive blind spots” (Parry 2004, 111). Both Salih’s and Pepetela’s diagnoses have highlighted the category “economic constraints and the more just distribution of material social goods” throughout their societies as being a primary area of impingement upon their citizen’s health and capabilities. The radar graphs show that the objective rankings of each country in this same area correspond with that subjectively prioritized by both writers. Though it is diffcult to imagine from the literary worlds mediated in Pepetela’s and Tayeb Salih’s works that either Angola or Sudan has any sort of safety net to prevent its most vulnerable citizens from descending into misery and death, their works clearly do not prioritize this area as a site for intervention whatsoever. Their evaluation is matched by correspondingly low objective rankings in the “lack of safety net” category. It is also perhaps surprising, given the prominent negative rankings that a lack of political freedoms, the inability to participate in society’s decision-making procedures, and rampant corruption have in the objective evaluations of the health of Sudanese and Angolan societies that neither author’s diagnosis prioritized the categories of “political unfreedoms” and “lack of transparency guarantees.” References to the negative effects on Sudanese’ and Angolan’s health and capabilities in these areas appeared in each author’s works, but certainly not to the extent that might be expected given each country’s abysmal objective ranking in these two categories. While objectively both countries also register poorly within the “lack of social opportunities” category, lack of social opportunities hardly plays a role in Pepetela’s diagnosis. His diagnosis is
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clear: there are no minoritarian becomings extending the scope and standard, and thus broadening Angolans’ political enfranchisement. Rather, Angolan life is constrained within established identities. Paths to new relations and transformations that could precipitate the release of new powers to act or respond are obstructed primarily by economic constraints and the unjust distribution of material social goods throughout Angolan society, and secondarily by rampant corruption. In Sudan, Salih has also highlighted the negative role that “economic constraints and the inequitable distribution of material social goods” play in Sudanese health. Yet, his diagnosis has highlighted that the “lack of social opportunities” plays nearly as great a role in Sudanese ill-health. Indeed, his subjective prioritization of the lack of social opportunities exceeds the objective ranking, which is substantive. Cross referenced with his texts, Salih’s mediation of the neopatriarchal, fundamentalist Islamist arrangement of Sudanese society clearly indicates his diagnosis considers women’s health and capabilities—their well-being, voice, agency, and autonomy—to be the most urgent area of focus. His works render visible the diminution in Sudanese Arab women’s affective capacities that has occurred over the past several generations. Moments of change, such as colonization by the British, independence, and successive military coups, have altered the successive “working arrangements” of Sudanese society in ways that have reduced the possibilities of life and impinged upon what many Sudanese Arab women were able to do. Salih’s works equally show educated men and those of high social standing in Sudanese society to be constrained within those established identities. Any paths to new relations, creative experimentation, or powerand joy-enhancing transformations are blocked. Salih’s literary world contains no minoritarian becomings. Necropolitical, life is denied, depreciated: there are no democratic becomings in Sudanese society: there are no quantitative or qualitative transformations in institutions, political procedures, or enfranchisement of new members of the polity. In creating the bloc of sensation, that is, becoming-witness to the unrest, instability, and anomie in many Arab countries within which the reader becomes composed, is something wholly new that Salih’s works have brought into the world. As such, his works foresee a possible future for the Sudan and the Arab world; however, Salih’s is not a transformative vision: his is rather an uncertain, anguished glimpse of the confagration from within the eye of the hubbub. This work has approached the texts examined in the previous chapters with four Deleuzian defnitions of health in hand, three of which were explicitly found in Deleuze and Guattari’s work: a Great Health, symptomatology, literature as health; and a fourth, gathered under the concept of “what a body
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can do.” Pepetela and Salih’s works diagnosed the forces that accompanied and threatened Angolan and Sudanese Arab life. Their works produced a symptomatology of those arrangements, detailing the Bunker and Bandarshah syndromes’ deleterious effects on the health and capabilities of the Angolan and Sudanese Arab peoples. Yet, their works did not diagram potential forms of resistance, new arrangements, or virtual “lines of fight.” We did we not fnd instances of a “great health,” Deleuze’s conceptualization of a delicateness or illness as a type of health that allows the fexibility to realize passages of the impersonal life previously imprisoned by and within a person, unreachable to those possessing a stronger constitution. Nor did we fnd examples of the fatigue, the exhaustion of all options and opportunities, such as Deleuze fnds in some of Becket’s characters, essential to the creation of something genuinely new. Despite the fact that there are no minoritarian becomings or positive deterritorializations in either author’s works, their intricate diagnoses suggest by what means or where newness and good health may enter the postcolonial world. Reconceptualizing health as the social capacity to experiment with the potential for new percepts and affects actively unites the literary feld with those of humanitarianism, development, philosophy, and public health. In literary worlds where all movement is blocked, the isolation and prioritization of the specifc societal working arrangements impinging upon a people’s efforescence is a necessary component in providing the conditions for becoming and newness. In these instances, as we have seen, social and historical contexts emerge as full as any character or active element in the ill-health assemblage that obstructs the metamorphosis of a person or society.4 In these literary worlds, the artistic practice of representation becomes imbued with and affrms the “powers of the false.” “Objective” and “subjective” lose their distinction as they decompose and recompose each other and are replaced by a new “circuit,” that of the diagnosis, a component in the assemblage dedicated to bringing about “new possibilities of life” (Deleuze 2013, 154, 1983, 103, 185). A postcolonial writer may be prevented from bringing newness into the world due to being geo-historically located during the nationalist phase of his or her country’s (literary) development. Conditions in that literary world may limit or constrain movement. Nonetheless, to the extent their works capture and render visible the relations of force that constrain movement or impinge upon a people’s health and capabilities, their works can be considered an enterprise in health. As a component in a good-health assemblage, (those arrangements of people, materials, knowledge, fnance, and technology such as are found in NGOs or government or UN agencies) diagnoses such as Salih’s and Pepetela’s actively participate in bringing about new ways of
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being into the world. As a Deleuzian critique of the effects of international capitalism in the postcolonial world, this methodology represents the utility and fecundity found at the interdisciplinary confuence of postcolonial literary theory and development. The medical anthropologist, Paul Farmer, understands the quotidian, somatic effects the elements of structural violence can have, given the body’s permeable, plastic receptivity to its environment. Correspondingly, he and his colleagues at Partners in Health have implemented simple structural interventions (e.g., clean water, formula, cooking fuel, and transportation fare) to reduce poverty’s and social inequalities’ enfeshments, such as infant mortality in Rwanda, pediatric AIDs in Haiti, and socioeconomic disparities in HIV outcomes in poor areas of the United States (Farmer et al. 2013, 2006). The symptomatological methodology developed in this work is a postcolonial-sensitive tool by which the health of a people can be assessed and diagnosed via its literature. As in the case of Pepetela and Angola, the knowledge it produces may simply corroborate extant expert opinions as to what impinges the health and capabilities of a people. Yet, that already is something. It may cast a light on particularly grievous and previously disregarded relations of force within societies that function as ill-health assemblages. A symptomatological exploration of Salih’s works certainly casts such a light on contemporary Sudanese Arab women’s health, well-being, and agency. This methodology could serve as an additional tool in the full panoply of a public health or development specialist’s toolkit. Moreover, it could incline those in the postcolonial literary feld toward both development specialists and vulnerable populations in countries around the world. Equally, this methodology could bring the force of literary-theoretical investigations to bear on what have hitherto been considered as development or public health issues. Applying the Health and Capabilities Rubric to an examination of Pepetela’s and Tayeb Salih’s works has increased our knowledge about the Sudan and Angola. It may be more accurate to state that this methodology assisted in the identifcation and isolation of sets of knowledge about these two countries that existed in other felds and included them within postcolonial literary analyses. The specifc knowledge about the health of Angola and Angolans and Sudan and the Sudanese Arab people produced via the application of this work’s postcolonial, symptomatological methodology may not be completely novel, but rather more corroborative. Even if principally corroborative, this knowledge seems to be both useful and actionable across the various felds it encompasses. Yet, it would be a mistake to consider the postcolonial, symptomatological methodology elaborated in this work to be in its fnal form. If this methodology or components of it are to be useful for future interdisciplinary analyses, it may
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be necessary to further refne particular aspects of it. If so, this would mirror the processes most of the world’s most useful diagnostic tests have undergone in order to arrive at their current form. From X-rays and MRIs, to tests for diabetes, malaria, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as the varieties of cancers, and potentially pandemic diseases, etc., the history of diagnostic tests is one of fortuity, experimentation, and trial and error, combined with technological advancement. Similarly, the means for analyzing literature has changed greatly not only throughout the centuries but even over the span of the last several decades. To the extent that the postcolonial, symptomatological methodology elaborated here is useful to future interdisciplinary, socio-literary examinations of postcolonial health, it may be necessary to continue experimenting with various aspects of the Health and Capabilities Rubric, or to trial other categories or datasets in the Health and Capabilities Dashboard. Much as I mixed and matched concepts, categories, and indicators, testing to see what new avenues of thought or analysis might be arrived at by variously combining Deleuzian concepts with the work of writers, economists, humanitarians, and development and public health experts in the course of elaborating this methodology, further experimentation may produce other, differently fruitful types of knowledge. The dashboards developed in this work treat a handful of texts by two authors. Unlike Moretti’s quantitatively formalistic work, no algorithms were used to extract quantitative data from any of the works. This book and the dashboard representing Angolan and Sudanese Arab health along the seven axes of a Health and Capabilities Rubric could serve as an intermediary step. It is possible to imagine an instance in the future when the digital archive of publicly available books has expanded to include works of contemporary postcolonial fction. Then, works written by multiple contemporary postcolonial writers could be analyzed according to the algorithms designed to mine the texts for aspects of a country’s health along the seven axes of the Health and Capabilities Rubric. Such an approach would be more in line with Moretti’s work in computational formalism and would effectively triangulate the socio-literary diagnoses of multiple diagnosticians of a particular society. This would provide the veritable second or third opinion sought by patients and donors alike. Either of these possible avenues would cement the value and utility in regarding postcolonial literature as health.
NOTES 1. This phrase translates as “Heart of Heaven, Heart of Earth.” 2. Indeed, this is a central tenet behind Mary Jane West-Eberhard’s Developmental Plasticity and Evolution and microbiologist Carl Woese’s revolutionary work on horizontal gene transfer.
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3. I highlight this methodology’s subjective nature because the rubric’s categories and the specifc combinations of categories, which do not necessarily or easily combine, have their origins in my background as an international humanitarian aid worker; and experimental in that this methodology has been fabricated via a synthesis of diverse felds and disciplines that do not, again, necessarily or easily combine. 4. Many of the theorists referenced throughout this book emphasize that the social and historical context of a novel are as active an element as any character. In particular, see Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 288), Glissant (1999, 105), and Burns (2012, 185).
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Appendix
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Table A.1 References and Page Numbers for the Health and Capabilities Dashboard
Source: Created by author
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Table A.2 Data Used for Objective Graphs
Source: Created by author
Table A.3 Data Used for the Radar Charts
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Source: Created by author
The “objective” columns represent the value assigned to each category displayed on the bar graphs above. The “# of references” columns contain the total number of times a particular category was referenced across an author’s works. The total number of pages of text is displayed along the bottom row of the bottom table. The “%” columns measure density; it represents what percent of the pages in an author’s oeuvre reference a particular unfreedom. The percentages have been calculated by taking the number of references and dividing by the total number of page numbers for that literary world, for example, there were 76 references to political unfreedoms in Angola out of 1,532 pages of text. That means roughly 5.0 percent of the pages made reference to political unfreedoms. These density percentages were necessary because the literary worlds of Pepetela’s Angola and Tayeb Salih’s Sudan have very different total page counts; in order to make comparisons between the two, we need to account for the fact that there was
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greater opportunity for references in the much longer Angolan text. That meant normalizing or rescaling the number of the subjective scores for both countries to get them onto the same scale so that they could be compared one against another. The percentages themselves are very low (which is as one might expect, an author cannot hammer on about the same topic page after page after page or no one would want to read his or her works). The result is that the scales for the subjective and the objective references are very different; it is not possible to compare the score of 76 for Angola’s objective political unfreedoms to a score of 4.8 percent for the subjective data. Experimentation revealed that the same multiplier (6.5) worked for both Angola and Sudan; it adjusted the subjective scores so that they topped out in the 1990s, similar to the range of the objective scores. So the subjective scores were normalized or rescaled using the multiplier of 6.5 so that the subjective scores would have a similar range on the radar graph as the objective scores.
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Index
Achebe, Chinua, 20 affects/affective capacity, 2, 53, 60–61, 75, 87, 108, 114, 152, 156, 162, 167, 173–73, 175 affliation. See Said, Edward, affliation Ahmad, Aijaz, 29, 53, 120, 192–93 Amin, Samir, 8, 10, 18, 27 Angola, 3, 4, 16, 32, 67–71, 81, 84, 87, 88, 90–94, 99–100, 102–7, 193–95, 107–11, 113–15, 118–22, 193–98; corruption, 93–98, 103; Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), 70–71, 92, 94, 97, 104, 105, 109, 120, 121; Portuguese rule, 70, 97, 108, 119–21; União Nacional para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA), 70–71, 104, 105, 121 Bahri, Deepika, 16, 20, 26, 56 Bateson, Gregory, 191 becoming-humanitarian, 13, 14 Bensmaïa, Réda, 43, 48, 49, 52–53, 55, 81 Bhabha, Homi, 7, 17 Bignall, Simone, 6, 46, 49, 54–55, 58–59, 162 Bogue, Ronald, 22, 43, 47, 72
Braidotti, Rosi, 12, 14, 19, 28, 30, 31, 57–58 Buchanan, Ian, 41, 47, 60, 117 Bunker, Bunker Syndrome. See Pepetela, Bunker, Bunker Syndrome Burns, Lorna, 49–51, 54, 56 capabilities approach. See Sen, Amartya with Martha Nussbaum, capabilities approach capitalism, 4, 6, 8, 14, 105–6, 121, 133 Casanova, Pascale, 16, 19–22, 25, 26, 29, 51 Chang, Ha-Joon, 4, 5, 8–9, 11, 27 Cheah, Peng, 4, 55, 81 colonialism, 5, 7, 11 cosmopolitan, 13, 14 Deleuze, Gilles, 12, 17, 18, 39, 40, 41, 45, 46, 48, 59, 62, 73, 113, 130; health, 163, 180; literature, 42–44, 50, 52, 152; and Nietzsche, 42, 44; and Spinoza, 14, 44, 88, 174; symptomatology, 39, 40, 42, 55, 56, 72, 79, 196, 116–17, 144 Deleuze, Gilles with Félix Guattari, 30, 32, 39, 42, 50, 55, 57, 59, 75, 84, 87, 129, 162–63, 195–97, 175; assemblages, 46, 47, 55, 59–60, 221
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Index
156–57; becoming democratic, 32, 69, 75–79, 88–89, 100, 195, 111; deterritorialization, 41, 87, 196, 111–12; health, 42, 43, 44, 58, 195; and Kafka, 40, 72, 182; minoritarian, becoming-minoritarian, minoritarian becomings, 75, 78, 86–87, 195, 111– 13, 115, 178; minor literature, 22–24, 72, 73, 85, 143–44, 180 democracy, 14, 75–77, 86, 91–92, 118 development, 3, 6–8, 10–11, 17, 27 Fanon, Frantz, 4, 16, 17, 20, 25, 28, 31, 44, 49, 52, 87 Farmer, Paul, 8, 17, 45, 153, 154, 197
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globalization, 4, 5, 10, 121, 130, 137, 158 Glowczewski, Barbara, 192 Hamilton, Grant, 17, 22, 49, 74, 112, 174–75 health, 30, 31, 39–43, 45–50, 53–55, 62, 68, 74–75, 79–80, 84, 87–88, 92, 116, 122–23, 129–30, 152–79, 187, 193–98; ill-health assemblages, 46, 51, 88, 94, 100, 197, 115, 117–19, 122–23, 129, 152, 156, 162, 176, 181 Health and Capabilities Rubric, 32, 79–89, 92–104, 111, 119, 122–23, 130, 152, 154, 164–73, 175, 193, 197–98 Hoogvelt, Ankie, 120, 122, 133, 183, 192–93 humanitarianism, 3, 12, 17, 18, 27, 58, 72, 103–4, 106, 123, 196 ill-health assemblages. See health, illhealth assemblages Laferrière, Dany, 10, 122 Lambert, Gregg, 42–44, 49, 52, 53, 57 Lazarus, Neil, 6, 29, 81
magical realism, 73, 74, 128–29, 138, 146–47, 150–51 Marxism, 12, 18, 26, 29, 128 Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), 28, 104, 156–57 Mill, John Stuart, 56, 191 Miller, J. Hillis., 23, 24 minor literature. See Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, minor literature Moretti, Franco, 80–82, 172, 198 Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA). See Angola, Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) Parry, Benita, 6, 29, 193 Patton, Paul, 49, 55, 60, 69, 75–79, 86, 100, 113, 114, 115 Pearson, Keith Ansell, 46–47, 50, 54, 59–60 Pepetela, 3, 16, 25, 26, 32, 33, 52, 54, 67–74, 81, 90, 93–94, 101–106, 107– 111, 113, 114–123, 130, 131, 151, 194–97; Bunker, Bunker Syndrome, 3, 32, 33, 68, 69, 90, 92, 94–95, 106, 119, 122–23, 193, 196 postcolonial/postcolonialism. See postcolonial theory postcolonial theory, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 17, 57, 68, 69, 81, 83 press, freedom of, 90–91 Rawls, John, 75–79 Red Cross, 12, 104 Rorty, Richard, 50–51 Said, Edward W., 14–17, 18, 29, 73, 131, 144; affliation, 2, 17, 25, 41, 80–81, 129 Salih, Tayeb, 2, 24, 25, 26, 32, 33, 52, 54, 55, 81, 127–197; Bandarshah Syndrome, 2, 3, 33, 130, 137–38, 144, 152, 164, 168, 171, 181, 193, 196
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Index
Suf, Sufsm, 2, 129, 132, 143–49, 151, 157, 161, 165, 177–78, 184 symptomatology. See Deleuze, Gilles, symptomatology Uexküll, Jakob von, 30, 44 Warwick Research Collective (WReC), 7, 29 West-Eberhard, Mary Jane, 44, 107–8, 116 Williams, Raymond, 17, 22 World Health Organization (WHO), 31, 106–7 world system. See capitalism Young, Robert, 6, 49
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Sauvagnargues, Anne, 33, 72, 73, 144, 155 Sen, Amartya, 8, 32, 56, 57, 59, 69, 75–79, 84, 93, 100, 102, 106, 111, 154, 172; with Martha Nussbaum, capabilities approach, 32, 40, 56–62, 75, 78, 88, 108 Spivak, Gayatri, 6, 7, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 26–28, 48–49, 58, 116, 166–167, 194 structural violence, 45 Sudan, 2, 4, 16, 26, 32, 84, 127–37, 154, 156–57, 161, 167–78, 181–87, 193–98; British rule, 152, 157; Islam ist/Islamism/fundamentalist/politic al Islam, 10, 128, 130, 132, 135–36, 143, 151–52, 155–64, 173, 175, 177, 195
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About the Author
Don Johnston has a BA and an MA in English Literature from the University of Colorado and Colorado State University, respectively. He received his PhD in English Literature from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is an independent researcher and consultant, a veteran international humanitarian aid worker, and founding partner of Socorro—Global Humanitarian Consultants. He is best known for his research-based policy work on disaster recovery, urban and rural vulnerability, and international humanitarian action. He has published on emergency health, humanitarian shelter and settlements, confict-caused migration, and the principles-based ethics undergirding humanitarian response. His research, with its health- and vulnerability-focused, interdisciplinary methodology, also has crossover impact in the felds of postcolonial literature and humanitarian/development action. He is the sole author of one scholarly monograph and three chapters in edited collections and is the lead or coauthor of eleven guidelines and research-based policy papers outlining international humanitarian programs in response to natural disasters, pandemics, and confict in countries, such as Sudan and South Sudan, Rwanda, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Haiti, Greece, the Ivory Coast, Chad, Mozambique, Nigeria, the Solomon Islands, Iraq, Liberia, the Philippines, Uganda, and Angola. He has led post-disaster recovery, disaster risk reduction, and humanitarian operations in twenty-two international emergencies. He has presented papers at multiple international conferences. His op-ed and newspaper articles have appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald; and he has been interviewed by the BBC, Canadian Television, SBS, Sky News, The Daily Telegraph, and the Australian Broadcasting Company. He currently resides in New South Wales, Australia, where he lives with his wife and their children.
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