African(a) Queer Presence: Ethics and Politics of Negotiation [1st ed. 2021] 3319612247, 9783319612249

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African(a) Queer Presence Ethics and Politics of Negotiation

S. N. Nyeck

African(a) Queer Presence

S. N. Nyeck

African(a) Queer Presence Ethics and Politics of Negotiation

S. N. Nyeck Vulnerability and Human Condition Emory University Atlanta, USA Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation, CriSHET Mandela University Port Elizabeth, South Africa

ISBN 978-3-319-61224-9 ISBN 978-3-319-61225-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61225-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Praise for African(a) Queer Presence

“With surgical precision, S.N. Nyeck cultivates a scholarly masterpiece extracted from the narratives of two important films, Proteus and Karmen Geï . Proteus explores the interracial relationship of a gay couple held prisoners on Robben Island in the 18th c. Faced with death by drowning, the couple represents for Nyeck an epistemological departure from the inviolable rituals of colonized brutality to a place of prominence in the articulation of a self-determined fate. Karmen Geï , the first African Carmen, exposes the prolonged and arduous fight for freedom of desire. Situated in the women’s prison on Goree Island, this film offers Nyeck a character who transcends sexual boundaries. Nyeck exposes the sanguine temptress as an unethical player whose sexual prowess denigrates queerness because it is void of ‘commitment.’ This book develops the metaphysics of queerness using Senghor’s practical humanism, nego-feminism, and game theory applied to scenarios in colonial Africa as well as the ‘postcolony.’ Weaving in the wisdom of Audre Lorde as a theorist, with religious symbolism such as the Sankofa bird and artistic forms such as music and dance analyzed over against the deep theoretical symbols that form ontological meaning under various oppressions, Nyeck skillfully enunciates African(a) Queer Presence: Ethics and Politics of Negotiation as a philosophical rendering that transforms

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the forlorn scripts of negation, which denigrate queerness, to positivist narrations of queerness as hope through transcendental relational ethics.” —Rev. Dr. Teresa L. Smallwood, Associate Director, Public Theology and Racial Justice Collaborative, Vanderbilt Divinity School “African(a) Queer Presence: Ethics and Politics of Negotiation is a very timely, compelling, and lucid analysis that probes the ethical dimensions of ‘queer politics’ in contemporary Africa. This is the first book of its kind. It breaks away from conventional analyses of identity politics and offers a refreshing counter-cultural perspective. This pathbreaking study from a humanistic perspective, is destined to have a major impact on the way we look at identity politics not only in Africa but in general.” —Edmond J. Keller, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Political Science, University of California Los Angeles “S. N. Nyeck was rattled. This book is her labor-intensive response – both literally and figuratively. You don’t rattle a great mind within a beautiful black African queer body without some priceless result. What a labor of love for Africa and humanity! This is a groundbreaking book of what must be African(a) futures.” —Eunice Kamaara, Professor of African Christian Ethics, Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies, Moi University, Kenya “In Africana Queer Presence Nyeck splices together a sustained meditation on queer ethics, theories of queer identity, dialectics, strategic game theory and queer Africana intellectual potential to arrive at a new understanding of queer identity. This book is field changing and field forging; Nyeck invites the reader to engage with a new queer ethics. Her extended questioning of Africana queer existence is thus a multilayered, intellectually inclusive and critical examination of what an African-centered queer studies can become.” —Kathleen O’Mara, Emeritus Professor of African History, State University of New York, Oneonta “African Queer Presence is a compelling multidisciplinary articulation and affirmation of African Queer identity as a lived reality that is constantly under negotiation especially through artistic representation of human and sexual dignity in light of queer philosophy, theology, and the arts.

PRAISE FOR AFRICAN(A) QUEER PRESENCE

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These representations invite us to imagine a new humanism and the queer humanity that embodies it. S.N. Nyeck’s dialogical and thoughtful style invites readers to engage in a reasonable dialogue and that makes this book a must read for all concerned about human dignity.” —Elias Kifon Bongmba, Harry and Hazel Chair in Christian Theology and Chair of the Department of Religion, Rice University “S.N. Nyeck’s new book on queer living in African societies is as groundbreaking as powerful. It talks about the pains of discrimination against LGBTIQ communities and individuals in African societies, while crediting the longstanding practice of intervention and resistance that keeps shaping African worlds and visions as expressed in politics and the arts. Thus tuned, SN Nyeck’s book is about negotiation as a mode of futuremaking that remembers, while advancing the now into new realms of possibilities beyond social inequality. In a nutshell: S.N. Nyeck’s book is a bomb and a must have read for everyone who cares about the mattering of queer lives, in Africa and beyond.” —Susan Ardnt, Professor of Languages and Literatures, Bayreuth University, Germany “Nyeck’s work on Africanizing queerness opens up new possibilities in ethics. Drawing from an array of resources crossing African studies, queer theory, game theory, and Christian theology, she reframes assumptions in each of them. This is a book about embodying hope.” —Rev. Dr. Ross Kane, Director of Graduate Programs, Virginia Theological Seminary “African(a) Queer Presence opens a vista where limitations and possibilities are not mutually exclusive but intimately connected and coproductive, liberating cultural imagination from the straitjacket of binaries. Nyeck shows in challenging ways how the possibilities of ambiguity and, hence, the politics of negotiation constitute the territory of all scholarly work. This book creatively articulates a sensible approach to ethics, audaciously contributing to a variety of fields, such as religious studies, queer studies, film and media studies.” —Rachel Spronk, Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of Amsterdam

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“S.N. Nyeck envisions Africana queerness not as the narcissism of new ideal types nor the simple negation of old hegemonies, but as fundamentally interpenetrative and interrelational. The question is not who queers are, but what queers are doing: negotiating, strategizing, and struggling, in transformative mutuality, forming active ‘constellations’ instead of ‘lone stars.’ Readers are therefore invited not just to ‘learn from’ this book but to place themselves in deep mutuality with it.” —Michael Chwe, Professor & Chair Ladder Faculty, Political Science, University of California Los Angeles

Contents

1

Introduction

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2

Dialectics, Simulacra, and Identity Negotiation Framework

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3 4 5

Proteus: (Am)bushmen and the Theology of Queer Presence

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Queer Rattling: The Postcolony and Blasphemous Displacements

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Conclusion: Muntu Through a Glass Queerly/Darkly

117

Bibliography

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This introductory chapter lays out the background story that prompted me to write this book. It particularly highlights the difficulty of engaging in scholarship on queer issues from a non-Western standpoint in the context of Higher Education in North America. I share my experience in the classroom to highlight the epistemic violence that is still very much present against queer subjectivities and epistemologies even in the so called “progressive countries.” Keywords Africana · Ethics · Queer agency · African studies · Queerness · Negotiating identity · Postcoloniality · Non-Western · Identity politics · Leopold Ségar Senghor · Virtual presence · Strategy · Nego-feminism · Proteus · Karmen Geï

This book is informed by more than twenty years of interest in queer politics and practices in Africa as an activist, a scholar, and a participant observer. It grows out of specific realizations. First, that gender diversity and sexual orientation are now legitimate sites of political and intellectual interventions in Africa. Second, that by and large, efforts to integrate a human rights framework as a major communication strategy for queer organizing have prioritized state-centered approaches and legal challenges to discriminatory laws. While NGO activism is getting more and more © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. N. Nyeck, African(a) Queer Presence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61225-6_1

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diverse, its main-focuses remain state-centered. Third, that while activism and scholarship on queer issues in Africa is on the rise, a non-standardized examination of everyday life as a practice of queer agency and theorizing is also emerging. That is, corporatist views about human rights, gender, and sexual identities assume that the state, or political power alone, is sufficient to achieve equality and individual freedom. This is a modern liberal premise that often underestimates non-state actors’ powers in culture and society. Fourth, that queer writing and theorizing is yet to intellectually and politically engage with mainstream paradigms in African studies. The periphery or the margins, however, are not destiny when everyday life and practices of queer agents are put in context. Rather than “queering” Africa, there is a need to “Africanize queerness” in ways that engage with contemporary modes of being and becoming queer, including those that affirm and transcend sexuality. Normative approaches that dictate what “ought to be” or “should be changed” do not always come with a user-friendly road map to show “how” or “when” to make things happen. Put differently, normativity always works best in the abstract and in solitary confinements because it has nothing but itself as a reference. In real life, however, when and how to effect change is not always a given prior to social interactions, which hold prisoners the enigmas of the future. Hence, beyond the level of ideas, change that matters is encounter-bound and the very idea of its possibility predicated upon the discovery of the conditions and instruments of its negotiation with people, cultures, and institutions.

The Materials I was drawn to visual arts, especially film, as a powerful tool to engage in debates about identity performance, politics, and culture at Vassar College in mid-Hudson, New York, in 2004. I was then a student in Exploring Transfer, a summer program that brought to Vassar College high-achieving students from community colleges around the United States. A few months prior to the summer program, I had registered as a non-matriculating student at LaGuardia Community College (LaGCC) in Long Island City, N.Y., after leaving my law training in Cameroon the previous year and fleeing to the United States as an asylum-seeker. I had landed in the United States in 2003 with no money, no transcript, and no references. Upon winning the contest for the best essay for the freshman class of 2004 at LaGCC, just a few months after I started school in the United States, I was invited to attend the summer 2004 Exploring Transfer program at Vassar College. I signed up for two classes, Sociology

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Through Literature and Visualizing Identity where film was used as a lens through which students analyzed how individuals and communities negotiated identity during captivity from the Nazi camps in Europe to the prison cells in Latin America. These two courses stuck with me and I promised myself I would replicate the format if I ever were in a position to impart knowledge. The openness of the students to identifying and commenting on the differences and similarities of situations and people they would probably never meet, fascinated me. My own ability to see connections in seemingly unrelated stories in the various films we watched in class made me wonder about the types of conversations a course based on films depicting queer life in the non-Western world might inspire in the context of the United States. The opportunity presented itself when upon completing graduate studies at the University of California Los Angeles in 2013, I accepted a tenure-track position at a private engineering university in upstate New York. The opportunity to teach a writing intensive class to freshmen in my first semester led me to design Negotiating Identity, a course that explored culture and its representations in the construction of queer identities and practices in the non-Western world. Through film, we were poised to discover how specific subjects negotiate identity and how sexuality intersects and reshapes social and gender hierarchies, political perception, and citizenship. Legal negotiation theories provided the theoretical backbones of the course. Other texts in addition to film ranged from cultural critique of the gay movement in the United States to interdisciplinary reappraisals of Eurocentrism in film studies. To my surprise, my semester did not go well. I was accused of “shoving homosexuality down the throats of my students,”—these were the exact words of the chair of the department. While fascination with sex and sexuality caused discontent among my students, the administrators, and parents, the point of the course was lost on all. That is, not only personal and collective fears of queer subjects and their depiction as hypersexual dominated the imagination of my students, their parents, and the chair of my department in the United States, one could also see the dangerous transfer of assumptions that happened. It was assumed that sex and sexuality alone traverse all queer subjects regardless of their positionality in the world. Put differently, issues of importance to non-Western subjects in general, and to non-Western queers in particular, such as colonialism and postcoloniality, economic exploitation, forced migration and marriages, and religious fundamentalism, just to name a few, did not matter. What mattered was the perceived “graphic content” of the films, despite the

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fact that they showed no innovation in sexual intimacy unseen in American heterosexual blockbuster films other than the intimacy was between same-sex or same-gender individuals. No film was R-rated and all the course materials were age appropriate. It wasn’t just a matter of perception linked to the assumed visual content of the films; the non-Western focus that challenged Western understanding of queerness and belonging also rattled many. The backlash indeed was a dialectical moment, whereby an institution that employed me as the only black queer faculty at the university solved its diversity problem on paper by incorporating my Otherness in its structure, but never relinquished its own identity and mind-set to render possible my effective presence on campus. I could enter the classroom as a professor because of my academic qualifications, but not as a thinking non-Western subject antithetical to institutional theses of diversity without divestment of a prejudiced mind-set. I could be paid to be an empty signifier of myself under the invisible institutional homophobic and xenophobic clauses that forbid references to things, people, and situations that mattered to me. Queer subjectivity informing my personal and intellectual journeys could not enter the classroom because it provoked indignation and discomfort. I could not elicit connections as an African, an immigrant, and as the only black woman holding a faculty position at this institution. At the end of the semester, I decided not to teach anything related to gender or queerness as long as I stayed with the institution that employed me even if research on queer Africa remained (and still is) the bulk of my scholarship. After parting ways with the institution three years after my failed attempt to teach a course on queer negation and negotiation of identity in non-Western contexts, I am now returning to some of the materials of the course and more in this book to reflect on my own journey as a witness to African queer histories unfolding and to think about possibilities and real limitations of queer negotiation as a concept provided the sense of self is not reduced to the life of an avatar, a sign no longer anchored in any real self. My aim here is not genuflection to a particular school or theory, but rather to construct conversations around themes that speak to the relational dimension of everyday African queer life and belonging. Although not autobiographical, this book is intended to share my perspectives on themes that have preoccupied my mind for more than a decade now. As a political scientist and theorist, I claim no exceptional expertise in film studies or the uniqueness of my interpretation of the materials. In fact, I deliberately let the characters in the films under study inform my theorization of the everyday interactions of African queer subjects. Though

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INTRODUCTION

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I rely on specific theoretical works to be discussed later, external theory is kept to a minimum beyond the framing of the book. Put differently, this book is not about “queering Africa,” but more about retrieving the queer voices and performances from within and their contributions to conversations within and beyond identity politics today. These conversations are organized by themes and chapters can be read separately with the introduction. This book aims to satisfy two objectives. The first objective is to offer a theoretically grounded contribution to African queer studies through the lens of the Senghorian concept of politics as présence virtuelle, a strategic and ethical approach to belonging and negotiation. This is not to say that negotiation is the only way to be or act politically. Rather, it is to recognize that as long as the socio-political field is made up of other (willful) subjects, strategy can be overtly or covertly subversive in many ways. Queer characters in selected films do not just subvert power, they also make power and negotiate socially informed new realities and knowledge. The point here is that African queer writing can and should feel confident in its ability to offer grounded theoretical and practical contributions to modes of being and becoming that have cognitive resonance. The choice of film and “characters” as media is intended to ease identification with the substance of the argument without any other requirement. The second objective is to theorize the strategic behavior of queer characters in selected African films in ways that transcend regional boundaries. Claims are made about strategic behaviors and their implications for political and ethical mobilization today and lend themselves to comparative analysis beyond queer identity. While the social sciences have contributed to unpacking queer dynamics in Africa, the humanities, especially film studies, are starting to gain some ground. Thus, the pedagogical value of the book rests on its “modulated shift” from and institutional/state-centered approach to an interactionist-people-centered approach to appreciate the unique contribution of queer (fictional and real) characters to Africa’s possibilities of being and becoming. Beyond these introductory notes, one finds in Chapter 2 the theoretical foundations of the book. Chapters 3 and 4 provide analyses of Proteus and Karmen Geï , respectively, and scrutinize the ethics and challenges of queer negotiation in colonial and postcolonial contexts. The concluding Chapter 5 reflects on the practical implication of queer negotiation in light of what some might call “more pressing issues” related to politics and economics. This book stresses the Africana dimension of

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queer struggle by turning to ethicists and theologians, artists, and scholars in the African diaspora to inform much of my understanding and contextualization of queer Africana struggle as embedded and partaking in larger conversations about global racism. Many have contributed and supported me in different ways in the process of writing this book and I thank them all. All the pages of this book will not suffice to name all those who have contributed directly or indirectly to this work. Still, I thank the late Rabbi Harold Salzmann, Audrey Salzmann, Debra J. Bender, Ariel Salzmann, Joshua Salzmann, Peter Geschiere, Rachel Spronk, Rev. Albert Ogle, late Richard Parkins, late Rev. Shamo Vincent, Kathleen O’Mara, Sara Arthur, Mayleen Cumberbatch, Kyoko Toyama, Gail Green-Anderson, Debra Shuger, Richard Weiner, Pat James and Karin McGowan, Judy Petersen, Bee Scherer, Charlotte Romain, Barbara Hagan, Virginia Theological Seminary, Zethu Matabeni, Emilie Townes, Jennifer Lee, Christolyn Williams, Susan Ardnt. This book is the outcome of research conducted within the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany is Excellence Strategy – EXC 2052/1 – 390713894.

CHAPTER 2

Dialectics, Simulacra, and Identity Negotiation Framework

Abstract This conceptual chapter lays out the argument of the book and the ethical framework it proposes. For one, the idea of queerness is defined as encompassing but also transcending sexuality. The chapter weaves different theoretical materials from game theory to negofeminism, to strategic thinking and the invention of hyperreality. It takes seriously the many possible ends of queerness as identity-based politics only to call for an ethical consideration of the ways and means of negotiation that restore not just particular identities to some groups but the wholistic destinies of a people also. Keywords Dialectics · Simulation · Simulacrum/Simulacra · Negotiation · Symbolic interaction · Queerness · Asymmetric relations · Game Theory · Decision-making/strategy · Sankofa · Ontology · Reciprocity · Nego-feminism · Metamorphosis · Out of Order · Relational possibilities · Negation · Homonormativity · Commodification · Intersectional · Intercontextual · Queer Presence · Ideal/Non-Ideal Reason · Orphic · Pygmalion/ic · Positive Plane · Negative Plane · Queer Negation · Colonial · Culture/Imperial · New Humanism · Négritude · Decolonization · Presence · Cosmos · Teilhard de Chardin · Evil (Second problem of) · Animation/Suranimation · Audre Lorde · Anti-dialectical · Negative dialectics · Game · Spiritualized Violence · Moral aspiration · Speculative moment · Rhythm · Encounter-bound · Seduction · Hyperreality · Phallic/Non-Phallic © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. N. Nyeck, African(a) Queer Presence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61225-6_2

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structure · Feminine/Masculine Principles · Misery (discourse of) · Relational · Colonial (territory-body) · Ruination (empire) · Postcolonial · Theology · Desire (depth of) · Cluelessness · Strategy (as manipulation) · Decision (edge of) · Spiritual · Ethics · Homonormative · Heteronormative

Birds of all kinds end up landing Egyptian proverb

This book reflects on queer identity struggles through selected African films, Proteus (2003) by John Greyson and Jack Lewis, and Karmen Geï (2001) by Ramaka Gaï. It focuses on the symbolic interactions, negotiation styles, and strategies of the key characters in each film to develop a framework of African(a) presence as an ethic of negotiation. In these selected films, queer characters negotiate desire, power, and belonging in ways that embody and exhaust context-bound conditions of pain and rejection. Simultaneously, symbolic social interactions, even restrictive ones, provide all queer characters with the strategies and instruments of emancipation within and beyond queerness. That is, characters deploy strategic behavior in everyday interactions to stretch the boundaries of the permissible in gender relations to negotiate embodiment and the boundaries of power in asymmetric relations. The idea of change as a bounded concept emphasizes the fact that the self is not alone, nor does it by itself fulfill all the conditions for its own articulation. The self is always in precession negotiating its own representation as simulation, testing and projecting itself onto new materials, and reinventing the real beyond materiality. Another way to put this is that the journey undertaken by queer selves in this book is necessarily incarnational. That is, it could be likened to the slow gyration of bodies and spirits spinning around socio-political, cultural, and spiritual axes to shift collective appreciation of vulnerability and resilience. The very idea of negotiation, or wrestling with society within and beyond one’s materiality, is nested in the experience of embodiment of ideal and non-ideal tendencies as a prerequisite to understanding and hopefully, transforming power in asymmetric relations. From queer embodied experiences emerge an ethic of belonging that is deeply incarnational but whose social values can either be transformational, or purely transactional. Arguably, the universe

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of possible outcomes in any given social interaction is always going to be potentially multiple. Yet, the binary premise of value creation considered here allows one to effectively scrutinize epistemologies that treat queer subjectivities and destinies as if distinct from Africa’s histories, conventionalities, and futures. Change as a bounded concept therefore suggests that ethical safety is not primarily or exclusively located in any identity claim per se, but rather in a movement toward relationality and reciprocity with the full spectrum of categories claimed, counter-claimed, unclaimed, and acclaimed. The idea of change as encounter-bound has received a lot of attention in decision sciences and more specifically in strategic choice literature formalized in game theoretic models of human interactions. The basic premise of bounded encounters is that irrespective of parties’ strength, dependence on each other to fulfill relational goals when a unilateral decision is neither possible nor desirable, provides the conditions for strategic behavior, the art of swaying the hearts, minds, and actions cooperatively. A close reading of the strategic decisions and performances in the selected films provides the foundation for theorizing the practical imperatives for reciprocity in queer encounters with African societies in multivariate contexts. Reciprocity is taken as foundational to the art of gaming1 and bending conventions, and to the process of navigating tradeoffs in the imagination of queer being and becoming. The book presents an interactionist and intersectional approach to understanding and thinking queer agency. It rests on an ethic of negotiation proper to African cultures to give a queer edge to what Obioma Nnaemeke terms “Nego-Feminism,” or the feminism of negotiation. Central to Nego-Feminism is the idea of a modulated shift in focus of the intersectionality of race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, religion and culture…and so forth from ontological considerations (being there) to functional imperatives (doing what there)

1 The term “game” is used here in a similar way as noticed in game theoretic literature. “All situations in which at least one agent can only act to maximize his utility through anticipating (either consciously, or just implicitly in his behavior) the responses to his action by one or more other agents is called a game. Agents involved in games are referred to as players.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Game Theory.” https://plato.sta nford.edu/entries/game-theory/#Mot, accessed 2018. Presentation of Chwe’s contribution to game theory in this chapter underlines the kinds of amendments the book suggests in terms of some agential assumptions in the theory.

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and speak to important issues of equality and reciprocity intersecting and border crossing…to focus more on the history of now, the moment of action that captures both being and becoming, both ontology and evolution.2

To link ontology and evolution suggests identity is both backward and forward-looking; a Sankofa-like metaphor for metamorphoses, rotations, and (dis)orientations that queer embodiment provokes in Africa’s consciousness. Sankofa is a mythical bird in Akan (in Ghana) cosmology that flies forward while looking backward with eggs in its mouth. Notwithstanding preoccupations with the past and the future that dominate interpretations of this Akan concept, it is suggested that the figure of Sankofa adds another relational possibility to understanding negotiation in society: stillness in the present moment; a respite from directional thinking and the recognition of Africa’s humanity in the moment and in all forms; an engagement with Africa’s already present transformations. A moment of deep contemplation where all directional aspirations collapse in the realization of the puzzling complexity that the image of Sankofa itself evokes; a present fecund with necessary (re)turns and life-bearing transformational paradigms for individuals and communities. In keeping with the central contribution of Nego-feminism to African studies as a “theology of nearness grounded in the indigenous”3 and with contextual temporalities in selected films under review, this book maps queer turns in practicing Africa and returns in Africanizing queerness. Hence, the queer agency found throughout these pages is forwardlooking, that is to say, it is in search of its own realization. It is also explained as a relational theology of the body, the body of love, a theology that inflects power, death, and resurrection with queer meaning. Queerness is metamorphosis; it is love and body-centered, death and resurrection affirming. That is, it knows no love with the struggle only, and no love without a struggle also. It affirms no sustainable relationship without freedom and none without the freedom of love. The preview of queerness is not confined to feminist theorizing of new relationalities, it

2 Nnaemeka, Obioma. “Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way.” Signs, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2004): 357–385, 361. My emphasis. 3 Nnaemeka, Obioma. “Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way.” Signs, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2004): 357–385, 378.

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has always been provocatively situated within African cosmologies4 and encounters with the world.5 Negotiation with others and with the self beyond ontological claims necessarily leads the queer self to be fully present in the present in terms similar to what Senghor calls présence virtuelle,6 the emotive and substantive presence that initiates a different relational paradigm predicated upon one’s willingness to give up all cosmetic referential, including self-idolatry, the éminence grise of modern consumerism. It is, as my friend Sheillah Nyanzi once put it, a “presence that is not mere existence, but intentional availability, visibility, and audibility. It is not self-sustaining, but works to be present.”7 Thus, African queerness is not satisfied with simple ontological pursuits. And beyond functional imperatives, it remains appreciative of negotiation with history, including the history of postcolonial queer negations and possible futures in the now.

Definition of Terms and Mapping of the Argument Queerness and Queer The term queerness simply means “out of order,” something that if it previously existed is no longer recognized or needed as such; it has ceased to be in line with expected dominant conventions regarding matters of taste and (re)presentation. It is the pestilent garbage that reminds the housemaster of yesterday’s feast but one that none, not even his servants, can dispose of totally. Queerness is the stink that pokes its nose into everybody’s business while remaining untradeable. Queerness is evanescing and freakish, it annoys. It is something that gives itself to no-thing(s), things that object to captivity pressed upon them by accident or design, or inadvertently self-imposed.

4 Kaspin, Deborah. “A Chewa Cosmology of the Body.” American Ethnologist, Vol. 23, No. 3 (August 1996): 561–578. Martin, Denise. “Maat and Order in African Cosmology: A Conceptual Tool for Understanding Indigenous Knowledge.” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 38, No. 6 (July 2008): 951–967. 5 Fanon, Franz. Black Skins, White Mask. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952. 6 Senghor, Léopold Sédar. “Ce que L’Homme Noir Apporte.” In Liberté 1: Négritude

et Humanisme. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964. 7 Personal conversation.

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Queerness speaks of categories that have ceased to be ordered around. It is something that does something to the objects/subjects it encounters and chooses to respond by flight, confrontation, or further cooperative engagement. Here, deliberate movement is given to queerness, and fixity, or at least contentment, to the objects/subjects of its encounters presumed normatively dominant. Queerness pulls itself toward things, places, and subjects. It is not invited and cannot elicit movement of any sort in other things, places and subjects, prior to initiating its own movement toward relational possibilities. These relational possibilities may be viewed as “coming out” rituals or simply understood as encompassing different ways—some less spectacular than others—of bending conventions through the enactment of conscious and strategic behavior that brings new meaning to otherwise a monotonous queerless existence. The characteristic of being “out of order,” of claiming positionality and subjectivity seen as something to be dealt with either by force or negotiation constitutes queer annoyance in this book. In the language of decisional tree models, queerness occupies the root node that anchors interaction in encounters under study while permeating and transforming the conceptual architecture of the model itself as well as the meaning of decisional payoff inferences. I will come back to this later. This book is nonexclusively concerned with encounters of erotic and sexual nature that elicit both dialectical negations and anti-dialectical affirmations of African queer characters in selected films. The term queer refers to characters that embody queerness as defined above and whose erotic and sexual attraction to other characters of the same sex or gender makes them identifiable as homosexuals in a broad sense of the term. This is not to say that all homosexuals embody queerness as defined in this book. As Duggan previously argued in her deployment of the idea of homonormativity, the commodification of identities, including homosexual identity does not necessarily mean active and conscious undoing of one’s ordered behavior or consciousness in society. In this book, it is also not implied that characters in the film self-identify as homosexuals, lesbians, transgender, or any other type in the acronym LGBTQI. In fact, such identifiers are absent in all the films under analysis. Thus queerness, while certainly grounded in same-sex/same-gender desire, is treated here as a container/content for intersectional and intercontextual yearnings and modes of belonging, sexuality being only one of them. Moreover,

2

Positive Plane (1)

DIALECTICS, SIMULACRA, AND IDENTITY …

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Negative Plane (2)

Hegemonic Identity Self-Affirmation

+ Ideal Reason Colonial/Imperial

Anti-colonial/Anti-Hegemony Postcolonial Self-Affirmation Heteronormative

–

+

Difference

Anti-colonial Hegemony

Non-identity Contradiction/Other

No Self-Affirmation

–

Simulation

+/– Queer Negation

Queer Annoyance

Out of order/ing

Self-Awakening

+/– Anti-postcolonial Hegemony

Simulation

No Self-Affirmation

Strategic Plane (3)

–

The second problem of evil

• Arrogant simulation • Spiritualized coercion • Subjectless rationality • Homonormative

+

Orphic

Pygmalionic Ethics

• Evanescent • Fugitive • Sensible animation • Speculative subjectivity

Simulacra • Relinquishing of the referential • Thinking theologically • Emotive presence -présence virtuelle • The body of love

Fig. 2.1 Profiling African(a) Queer Dialectics and Politics

although sexuality is the stage that sets in motion techniques and strategies for being and becoming for queer selves, it is not the seat of the soul of this book. Freed from the confines of a reductionist libidinal analysis, queerness broadens the appreciation of “identity” as not just mere difference, but also as a monitored territory of dialectical dissent. African( a) Queer Presence critically reflects on the premise and contradiction of a dialectical approach to identities and the perspectives that queerness adds to the understanding of subjectivity and social transformation. It identifies three planes of queer negotiation as positive, negative, and strategic schematized in Fig. 2.1.

Plane One The first plane is positive. It is positive in the sense that it consolidates African(a) solidarities against colonialism and imperialism. Colonial/imperial ideas and images of/about Africa and her history work

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as metanarratives that encircle all colonized/postcolonial subjectivities including queer subjectivities. These metanarratives create contingency for queer agency in Africa, an agency which inherits the contradictions of a continent’s exploitation by external forces. Here, self-affirmation operates by opposition to that which is alienating and disgusted by its difference, namely, the imperial and colonial. From the Civil Rights Movement in America to the Anti-Apartheid resistance in South Africa, history is replete with queer subjects fighting nationalist wars under different banners but the defense of queerness as such. This plane is predominantly positive because it is dominated by concerns about collective freedom, the kind of freedom that requires some sort of sacrifice from all members of society even though it regrettably subsumes and sometimes footnotes queer presence as such.

Plane Two The second plane is negative identification of the queer subject with African criticism, simulations, and certainties. Achille Mbembe recently observed that Black criticism inherited the contradictions and paradoxes that colonial/imperial encounters have engendered. While Black identity seeks to refute its assigned inferiority in the colonial library, it tends to rehabilitate its humanity in a discourse that while “seek[ing] to confirm the cobelonging of Blacks to humanity in general, does not—except in a few rare cases—set aside the fiction of a racial subject or of race in general.”8 With regard to tradition, Mbembe elaborates, a particular rhetoric of cultural difference often translates into “either rejection or fetishization of the foreign, and in some cases even the retranslation of everything new into old terms–which serves only to deny or neutralize.”9 What is lost is positive difference that can only be “difference that is lively and interpenetrating…fundamentally an orientation toward the future.”10 Thus what Mbembe detects as a problematic and paradoxical reasoning is discourse that often seeks to refute the colonial library but ends up deploying the fiction of its own inception to restructure self-interpretation

8 Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, 89. 9 Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason, 94. 10 Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason, 94.

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in ways that make it hard “to distinguish between the original copy [library], from its simulacrum [Black criticism].”11 The point being generously noted, where can we begin to anchor the subject that is and simultaneously becoming a positive rehabilitation of difference in a “vast reservoir of affinities”12 that Mbembe sees? It is proposed that queerness is a bump on the road that reorients identity discourse provided its own differentiation embraces the profundity and transformational demands that the self as a simulacrum of negotiation imposes on its being. That is, a critical commitment to turns and returns that transform queerness from the status of a social metaphor of negation to one of negotiation is a practical imperative that governs this plane, it is the “here and then and the here and there” of Nego-feminism’s postulates.

Senghor: Streaming a New Humanism Senghor is foundational in my understanding Mbembe’s critique of cultural Black Reason as well as the shifts needed to bring about “difference that is lively and interpenetrating”13 in Plane 2 (Fig. 2.1). “Ce que l’Homme Noir Apporte,”14 Senghor’s foundational essay to critical theorization in this book was first published in 1939 at the onset of World War II, which historians consider one of the deadliest conflicts in human history. Although the battlegrounds were primarily located in Europe, African troops participated in the war on the Allies’ side as colonial conscripts. The conscription of African troops did not start with World War II. Since at least 1857,15 colonized Africans were enlisted to fight European wars as part of the French Army and became known as Tirailleurs Sénégalais (Senegalese Riflemen). The identification with Senegal was owing to the fact that Louis Faidherbe, a French colonial 11 Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason, 94. 12 Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason, 94. 13 Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham:

Duke University Press, 2017, 94. 14 Senghor, S.L. “Ce que L’Homme Noir Apporte.” In Liberté 1: Négritude et Humanisme. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964. 15 Sarr, Amadou-Lamine. “The Senegalese Tirailleurs (1914–1918): African Soldiers in the Service of France.” In Bellicose Entanglements 1914: The Great War as a Global War. Edited by Maximilian Lakitsch, Susanne Reitmair, Katja Seidel. 247–271. Zürich: Lit Verlag GmbH & Co. KG Wien, 2015.

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governor of Senegal (1861–1863), conceived of the project of conscription and recruited there the first battalion after his arrival in the colony in 1852. At the onset of World War I and II, this battalion was conscripted from all over Africa to secure various French military interests. Thus, when Senghor was born in 1906, he was born into French colonial domination and occupation of Senegal. As one of the first-rate African intellectuals of his time, Senghor devoted his life to the pursuit of freedom, articulating what it entails for Africa and for humanity. He became the first president of Senegal after its independence in 1960 and served until 1980. Yet, it is not his life as a statesman that continues to be debated but his intellectual and philosophical contribution to African political and spiritual imagination, especially the frame of Négritude, a humanistic approach to liberty based on the worldly and inner experiences of all African people everywhere. Buried deep within Africa’s interior life is an understanding of what it means to be human and to relate to the world that need not be reinvented but rather assumed, lived, and deepened. With regard to Africa’s precolonial past, Senghor heavily relied on the work of the German ethnologist, Leo,16 to trace the blooming of Africa’s creative imagination within the various continental indigenous civilizations and wisdom that the German scientist documented. Senghor was known to have been a Catholic Christian in a country that remains predominantly Muslim. He frequently wrote in conversation with Catholic theologians such as Jacques Maritain and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and these influences are important because they help us appreciate Senghor as an ethicist and theological anthropologist of the first hour in the struggle for freedom in Africa. Emphasis here is on Senghor’s articulation of the present as freedom time.17 Contextually, this freedom time was a time for the decolonization of African(a) existence in the world, and his vision of freedom remains relevant to current moral and political debates on identity claims and counter claims. Work undertaken here unpacks for the purpose of queer imagination, the kind of humanism Senghor intends to clothe the freedom seekers with; humanism that draws strength from the inner and outer storages 16 See the Senghor Introduction to Frobenius, Leo. Leo Frobenius on African History, Art and Culture. New Jersey: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2014. 17 Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time: Négritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

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of existence. Engagement with Senghor is renewed to establish a conversation and relevance with queer imagination by drawing insight from his understanding of humanity as a dance of the soul guiding the freedom seekers in search for meaning and relationships with the outer world. To Senghor, this understanding, a kind of presence that animates Africa’s interiority (soul/spirit), is quintessential to the imagination of freedom not just as a thing to be grasped but as a way of being also; not as a one-time linear process, but as an ongoing unfoldment of experiential and dialogical perspectives that safeguard the wholeness of being in time inside/out and around. To Senghor, the dance of the soul was crucial in the decolonial struggle of the 1960s. The idea of an animated interior presence as the foundation of freedom alludes to all artificial and political horizons because it is panAfrican, pan-human, indigenous, and diasporic in essence. Put differently, Négritude as the deepening of the dance with one’s soul/spirit was set to triumph over all reductionisms (tribalism, colonialism, and even Afrocentrism because this spirit blows life into the world without pre-conditions but not without concessions). Thus, Négritude is a heavily trafficked avenue of negotiation with large and narrow lanes. In its broader form, Négritude is pan-human and therefore worldly. In its practical form, Négritude essentially trades in Self-giving and Other-receiving hearts, spirits and bodies committed to the animation of worlds through effective presence. The Négritude’s self and its Others speak of the wholeness of humanity as a secure ground for decolonial freedom through confrontation, participation and communion, but never through the negation of the real. What would this wholeness consist of? It entails the preservation of Life and the contagion of Life only; it resists the death impulse and all that kills the heart and spirit (through political and spiritualized violence or otherwise). From a queerness perspective, Négritude provides us with an ethical attitude, one that theorizes nobody’s existence as a dead end but always as a life-bearing contagion that animates every being communally kindled to full presence. On the long road to freedom, Négritude covers the first miles with the condition and experiences of Black men and women in the world.

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Three Levels of Presence In “Ce que L’Homme Noir Apporte,” Senghor provides a clear definition and outline of what he calls “animated presence.” Different chapters of the book will expand on this work of animation. Still, a brief exposure to the meaning of the term and its major components is in order here. Senghor offers three definitional frames of presence. Death-Dealing Participative Presence As previously mentioned, “Ce que L’Homme Noir Apporte” was written before Senegal’s independence and at the onset of World War II in which African troops were conscripted. Senghor starts the essay by acknowledging this reality. “That the Negro is already present in the elaboration of a new world, it is not the African troops engaged in Europe that provide this proof; they only prove that he is participating in the demolition of the ancient order, the old order,”18 Senghor remarks. He starts not with denial but with acknowledgment of the real against the backdrop of what he holds as true: The African Negro is already a builder of new worlds but as a conscript; s/he is not drawing from the storage of things already given to him/her but is acting as a negated subject in a racialized world. Presence in the war theatres of Europe enlisted the Negro as a death-dealing agent confined to the deconstruction of the old (that is not even his) only. A hired presence in a world of all kinds of proxy wars negates the already ongoing work of building a new life without over-obsessing about the old to the point of transforming oneself into an agent of death. Death does not need extra hired hands. The death-dealing theatre distracts the Negro from life. Creative and Revelatory Actual Presence “It is in the singular works of writers and contemporary artists that the Negro reveals his actual presence…It is not only of this presence I want to discuss here,” Senghor adds. So, despite the general condition of war and death, Senghor clarifies the realm of his approach to humanism: it is creative imagination that “reveals” and actualizes the 18 Senghor, S.L. “Ce que L’Homme Noir Apporte.” In Liberté 1: Négritude et Humanisme. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964, 22. Personal translation.

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Negro’s presence in the world. To say revelation is to suggest some kind of disclosure of an unknown fact or idea as the first pillar in the building of a new humanism as Négritude. Revelation is what affirms that life or the real, is always irrupting and it does not constantly take its marching orders from conventional and dominant postulates. Political convention as wrestling of powers at the time of this essay engulfed the world in a destructive war of annihilation to which Senghor opposes self-revelation as a creative presence. Self-revelation needs no placement in a foreign theatre of violence and destruction to make sense; it is securely folded and entrenched in Africana’s interiority. Revelation cannot be outed; it is given and received. It is the gift of the unfamiliar, the not-yet-routinized or encountered in the world; revelation enhances the world by adding to it. This revelatory principle in Négritude is counterpoint to a political paradigm of takings operating primarily through dispossession and alienation of Black bodies reduced to a status of war commodities in a racialized world. Disclosure that animates revelatory imagination is the substratum and constitution of Senghorian new humanism; revelatory disclosure announces the next disclosure and the one that comes after, defying and rendering all conclusions at best provisional only. All Virtual Presences Senghor firmly anchors his vision of wholeness in a perennial stream of self-disclosure as the lifeblood of a discerning actual presence to get us to the shore of his thinking. We are paddling toward something, “…but more and specifically [toward] all virtual presences that the study of the Negro allows us to glimpse,”19 (entrevoir) Senghor concludes. What needs to be rediscovered is the Negro’s culture by which he means, the spirit of civilization, the unitary spirit of human inventiveness. Key to entering the realm of not one, but all possible presences is a method and attitude that protects the reader against hasty trivialization of the exercise. Virtual presence is caught as a glimpse but that is not because it is insignificant or because the freedom seeker is preoccupied with other things. Senghor uses the verb entrevoir (entre = between and voir = see) to dismiss any attempt to randomize the engagement. To “see between” suggests that one can only catch a glimpse of what is seen because the field

19 Senghor, S.L. “Ce que L’Homme Noir Apporte,” 22.

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between the observer and the observed is not presumed neutral, empty, or without history. Here, it is the humility of the method of piercing into freedom imagination that is appreciated. To see as if looking through and in-between is to understand that all knowledge, including knowledge of the self, is partial, always to some extent provisional. Humanity is thus theorized as wholeness not when it explicates everything under the sun but whenever imagination and experience play their part well enough to breathe life into the within and without of things and find a transit through them. To “see between” also means that one has to be aware of the nonneutral betweenness from which one is framing one’s gaze of possibilities that are no longer limited to or by the material pronouncements of the subject. Already in 1939, Senghor planted the seeds for reimagining Black presence in the world and he maintained some affinities with Marxist ideology. To the extent that Négritude opposes all kinds of alienation of the matter, it initially found common cause with Marxism, but Senghor later distanced himself from this direction after observing the pain that the Nazi’s misplaced pride inflicted on humanity. In 1962, he describes his disillusionment as scandalized illumination20 that led him to look for depth in things,21 and that meant figuring out a way to rediscover the matter anew, a way out of material determinism. In the works of the Catholic French theologian and scientist, Pierre Teilhard the Chardin, Senghor found a culmination of this own thought and reformulated Négritude as “simply the sum of all civilizational values of Black people. It is not racism, it is culture: it is condition understood (situation comprise) and dominated to understand the cosmos to live in harmony with it.”22 If Négritude is rooted in the symbiosis of the cosmos by giving it a specific style, it does so only to “transcend [its style] as life transcends the matter out of which it is borne.”23 Such an understanding of matter is Teilhardian in concept and Senghor acknowledges 20 Senghor, S.L. Cahiers Pierre Teilhard de Chardin no. 3. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin et la Politique Africaine. Paris: Seuil, 1962, 19. Personal translation. 21 Senghor, S.L. Cahiers Pierre Teilhard de Chardin no. 3. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin et la Politique Africaine, 19. 22 Senghor, S.L. Cahiers Pierre Teilhard de Chardin no. 3. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin et la Politique Africaine, 20. 23 Senghor, S.L. Cahiers Pierre Teilhard de Chardin no. 3. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin et la Politique Africaine, 28.

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this. Confronted by the negation of colonial violence on the one hand, and French assimilationist policies on the other, the way out of the negation of Black presence in the world required a change in method. Far from recoiling with a laissez-faire attitude, Senghor prioritizes history as the making of selves and that means treating Black individuals and collectives as matter conscience (conscience matière)24 imbued with possibilities of transformation and not as dialectical pawns in the echo chambers material determinism. Alienation is never of totality when matter ceases to be rigidly defined. Thus, in its mature formulation, Senghorian Négritude presents us with a style of freedom modeled after specific relational sensibilities springing from African(a)’s interiority and experiences to reconceptualize the world, the religious and social life, through the creative imprint of reason and the affect, of rhythm and music, of dance and writing, and of everything that rehabilitates intuitive reasoning. The spirituality and ethics of Senghorian postcolonial animation of matter and its relation to Teilhardian theology will be further explored later. The next chapters differentially draw from this Senghorian ethic to explore the inclusive dimensions of queer affirmations and negations in selected films. For now, suffice it to say that the sensibilities of Senghorian Négritude so outlined are pertinent to the imagination of queerness, especially their articulation of freedom as sustained self-disclosure and social communion. They offer ethical responses to queer negation in postcolonial contexts. In this second negative plane, heteronormativity is positioned in simple terms as queerness negation purging ambivalence from Africa’s postcolonial modes of self-presentation. In rejecting queerness as alien, postcolonial heteronormativity negates its relational plurality and in so doing necessarily becomes blind to differences within same-sex/samegender erotic ecology. The idea of an erotic ecology rests on the premise that to “fully be alive is to be loved. To allow oneself to be fully enlivened is to love oneself.”25 Erotic ecology is not new to African imagination and social practices. It was/is primarily embedded in the so-called “animistic” indigenous conceptions of the world and of human relations in cultures that recognize “complex embeddedness of different 24 Senghor, S.L. Cahiers Pierre Teilhard de Chardin no. 3 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin et la Politique Africaine, 27. 25 Weber, Andreas, and John Elder. Matter of Desire: An Erotic Ecology. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017, 5.

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temporalities … and different epistemological perspectives within the same historical moment.”26 Africa’s performances of sameness out of metaphorical/ritualized enactments of social and spiritual metamorphoses fundamentally affirm a relational gift and permission to desire, co-create, co-imagine, co-transform the present for animated subjects beyond the human/non-human, gay/straight dichotomies and irrespective of shapes and forms. Trust in single multitudes and multiple singles conveyed in the philosophy of Ubuntu and the exploration of trans-species cosmology in Voodoo practices are a few examples of yearnings that defy the idea that African interiority is closed to inclusive imagination. Hence, what is interrogated in the plane of negative identification is power and seduction as power in its specific structural articulations. The hybridity of negation within this plane produces queer annoyances as queerness engages in the double task of its own deconstruction out of double victimization by colonial hegemonies and postcolonial certainties. While self-affirmation may occur in this plane, it is only partial as the ever-looming presence of a double negation condemns queer subjects to seasonal schizophrenia. Thus, where categories are positioned dialectically is important. But positioning alone is incomplete without delineation of their relationship with the third plane, the matrix of ethical directions that speak of the possibilities of (in)dwelling and repositioning as either arrogant normativity of a selected group, or as evanescing presence of animated wholes. But to get there, one has to overcome negation as the dialectical mill of anti-colonial and postcolonial hegemonies in Plane 2 (Fig. 2.1).

Plane 3 The third and last plane is strategic as it renders possible the positioning of queerness as the sculptor of its own destiny no longer ordered around by or limited to resistance against colonial and postcolonial negation only. It is strategic because it is premised on individual and collective choices that may, on the one hand, lead to transformational overtures or self-righteousness and non-invitational closures on the other. This plane canvasses the challenges of Africa’s queerness to define and experience

26 Garuba, Harry. “On Animism, Modernity/Colonialism, and the African Order of Knowledge: Provisional Reflections.” E-Flux Journal 36 (2012). https://bit.ly/3sjBhaY, accessed January 2021.

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itself beyond identity-nonidentity dichotomies. The strategic choice is an ethical one between at least two alternatives. First is the pygmalionic current, or a manic production and replication of cosmetic reason and values that cultivate soulless, rigidified subjects and indexed (homonormativized) consumerism. Pygmalionics is arrogant simulation, a negative entrapment of identity in pursuits of materialism only—and other isms—as an end in itself. It gears identity toward a “plasticized sensation”27 that reifies relational negation through endless pursuits of possessive individualism.28 It is the inhibiting power of hyper self-refraction, the suranimation of egos and self-absorbed impulses leading to a paradigmatic self-adoration. Pygmalionics is simply the art and science of turning the self into an idol.29 The other choice is of an orphic/erotic presence; a sensible animation of the trapped souls of fossilized materialism from the consumerism underworld. One has to envision an African(a) queer Orpheus emerging from the substratum of African(a) consciousness, knocking on the door of postcolonial reflexivity, and asking to be let in and dine. It is out of this rhythmic ethics and erotic encounter with the self and the world that a different kind of presence of interpenetrating transformations emerges. This instance is a Senghorian/Theilhardian moment of metaphorical eucharist, where queerness takes hold of self-giving (queer and Africana) bodies communally eaten in présence virtuelle (virtual presence). This, is the theophany of the body-love, fully restored to its careful sensibilities away from the temptation of hegemonic pursuits, window-dressing imperatives, stressful (re)presentations and appearances, and arrogant simulation of both African and homonormative subjectivities. Here resides the erotic as “depth of feeling…a well of replenishing and provocative force to [whomever] does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough”30 as poet Audre Lorde put it. This is a moment of reckoning for body-queerness, the apophatic body-Nyango in Werewere Liking’s ritual theatre that gasps not just for re-animation from the underworld of Africa’s invisibilities, but also for 27 Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. California: The Crossing Press, 2007, 53. 28 McPherson, C.B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 29 D’Huy, Julien. “Il y a plus de 2000 ans, le Mythe de Pygmalion Existait en Afrique.” Préhistoires, Méditerranéennes, Vol. 4 (2013): 1–15. 30 Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. California: The Crossing Press, 2007, 53.

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cross-examination of the economy that bartered its creative energies with death in the first place. If indeed “seuls les corps des gens ‘vendus’ disparaissent/only the bodies of the sold disappear,”31 the orphic/erotic strategic choice articulates not the inevitability of death, but an ethic of shared responsibility in invisibilizing—albeit selectively—and giving up on the erotic in Africana’s cultural and political paradigms. African( a) Queer Presence is about the necessity and limitations of debating or legislating queerness and gender identity in Africa from the perspective of putting an end to or solving the seeming contradiction between African and non-African mores. The book rests on two prefatory foundational claims upon which the pillars of argument and references are erected. First, the problem in a world heteronormatively constructed as dominant is the problem of queerness negation. Second, heterosexuality becomes a problem—not because it is different from homosexuality— but only when it compulsively claims sovereign prerogatives over bodies whose death it renders inevitable as a means to paradigmatically realizing its ideal. This negation of queerness and queer subjects through compulsive death, be it by overt or covert rejection, operates as a messenger of retribution for desire/presence that sets itself apart from heteronormative gender and sexuality. Negation then is the first problem of evil because it systematically and subliminally reproduces misery thus perverting the foundation that sustains us as human beings: our need to be relational. In the dyad identity-difference, queerness negation also calls to mind what William Connolly terms the second problem of evil. That is, “the evil that flows from the attempt to establish security of identity for any individual or group by defining the other that exposes sore spots in one’s identity as evil or irrational.”32 To understand both the interiority and the material life of evil, an epistemology and ethic of presence rooted in the Africana indigenous framework centered around the Sankofa image is explored. The third plane above-described is the seat of meditations on nego-feminism as a theology of non-egotistic nearness in the now, then, and there. The soul of this plane is sensible to African American womanist ethic and theologians’ invitation to “begin to see, hear, and

31 Liking, Werewere. Orphée d’Afric. Paris: Harmattan, 1981, 16. My translation. 32 Connolly, E. Williams. Identity Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political

Paradox. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, 8.

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appreciate the diversities in our midst as flesh and blood rather than as cloying distractions within the hegemonic imagination.”33 In addition to Senghorian Négritude, the third ethical plane of orphic nearness with Africa’s Diaspora is what gives this book its Africana’s edge. In the heterosexual-homosexual/identity-difference dialectics, queerness is engaged for the sole purpose of punishment resulting in its erasure in a triumphant heteronormalized world. Today, this temptation to secure one’s identity by ascribing evil in others hovers around postcolonial elitist boardrooms and in contemporary queer strategies and (re)presentations, including those framed by human rights discourse and neoliberal marketbased consumerism. Strategy that matters in this book is primarily one that overcomes the first and second problem of evil, a litmus test for relational praxes intended to rescue individuals and whole selves from the temptation of groupthink as an end to propose a more grounded and sustainable possibilities for realization.

Theoretic Muses African( a) Queer Presence is positively anti-dialectical and negatively dialectical, that is to say, it is “out of ordering.” It reflects on the usefulness of queer negation in African films through character performance analysis to render possible a (re)discovery of an ethic of belonging centered around the idea of emotive presence, an affirmation of relational sameness within everyday interactions. The theoretical underpinnings of this book are indebted to Adorno, especially his treatment of orthodoxies in Negative Dialectics (1973), Baudrillard’s characterization of the postmodern condition in mass reproduction in Simulacra and Simulation (1994), and Michael Chwe’s unconventional reading of folk wisdom as game theory in Jane Austen, Game Theorist (2013). Familiarity with these works is assumed. Taken together, these works provide the means and strategy to identify and code elements constitutive of an Africana/postcolonial queer dialectics as both positive and negative identification. Against this backdrop, critical analysis is primarily (although not exclusively) informed by conversations with Obioma Nnaemeke, Audre Lorde, Werewere Liking, and Leopold Sedar Senghor whose imagination provide materials for the inner texture of this book. 33 Townes, Emilie. Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. New York: Palgrave, 2006, 8.

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Adorno: A Player Without a Play? The book draws from Negative Dialectics (a) its critical treatment of dialectics as an order of domination in a system of games, (b) its creative reassessment of negation, and (c) its qualitative proviso on strategies for change as speculative moments. If dialectics is a systemic game, it is one that Negative Dialectics is not playing, at least not according to the rules. Adorno captures very well the inherent violence of dialectical encounters in his critique of Hegel and the tradition that defined dialectics as “achiev[ing] something positive by means of negation.”34 Interest in Adorno values his critique of dialectics as a tool of domination, and more importantly, his unveiling of its structure as a “game.” He “put[s] his cards on the table—which by no means is the same as playing the game.”35 Put differently, Adorno is a cardholder who refuses to play the dialectical game as designed. That is, a game that does not pay its dues to heterogeneity; a game driven by concepts that allegedly exhaust the conceptualized; a game so totalizing and violent that “whatever happens to come into the dialectical mill [is] reduced to the merely logical form of contradiction, and that…the full diversity of the non-contradictory, of that which is simply differentiated, [is to] be ignored.”36 The Hegelian dialectics premised upon a demand and command of an absolute and totalitarian impulse is entrapment of nonidentity reduced to a bare form and drained from its nuanced reality and content. It is a non-identity simply differentiated and distanced from the dominant identity. Thus, Adorno casts ideal dialectics as a non-cooperative game modeling of power-laden interactions. Non-identity is first swallowed up by enchanted idealism, and then it is vomited out as the “diversity” of the ideal. By way of reconcilement, the dialectical telos dismantles the trace of its coercion by unfolding “the difference between the particular and the universal dictated by the universal…spiritualized coercion.”37 The game of dialectical encounters in its strategic and extended forms has no dominant move for the non-ideal, which remains sublimated, then dominated. Adorno has many identifiers for this non-ideal type in Hegelian discourse: 34 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: Routledge, 1973, x. 35 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics, xix. 36 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics, 5. 37 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics, 6.

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it is the “quantité négligeable/negligible quantity,”38 the “indissoluble”39 and things dismissed as transitory, insignificant, downgradable; categories eliminated by abstractionist mechanisms, and reality that is not yet “a case of the concept” (non-conceptuality). It is the subalterns and subalternity; it is the “lazy” category. That Negative Dialectics holds the cards while objecting to the idealdialectical game makes it a “minority category,” perhaps even a lazy one that mirrors clichés that African subjectivities recognize in the continent’s history of colonial encounters with foreign powers. It is also a type of laziness stamped on gay/black men said to be on the “DownLow,” queers accused of downgrading masculinity because while holding the male card, they are not making sexual plays and moves in ways that conform to heteronormative rules and structures. In this book, the nonideal “quantité négligeable” and “négligée” (neglected) is the category of “sexual minority,” a term which conveyance of pre-categorization of certain kinds of sexualities as negligible, already betrays its hegemonic intent. A term of endearment and of quantitative fictitious reassurance that hides heteronormative fragility and denies (albeit virtually or otherwise), queer presence as substantive and qualitatively significant. What results from this heteronormalized assault on nuances, Adorno argues, is “sovereign freedom in the midst of unfreedom,”40 whereby the non-ideal still attached to the system of its oppression serves the purpose of “diversity” for that system without any hope for self-realization. This qualitative violence of abstraction is one that the African continent knows very well; it is one that survived the independence era and conferred de jure sovereignty to ex-colonies but little respect from the colonial masters. As postcolonial African states emerged with legitimate political, anti-colonial, and anti-hegemonic moral aspirations, they also fell prey to the second problem of evil: the temptation to (re)invent the self by assigning evil or immorality to others. Postcolonial African States invented queerness as a new non-identity and used legal systems to turn nuances about human sexualities into political and institutional heteronormative certainties. Negative Dialectics does more than point to discriminatory and incapacitating power of ideal reason over its non-ideal types; it offers a strategy

38 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics, 8. 39 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics, 135. 40 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics, 8.

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out of this order in two steps. First by validating the non-ideal’s “experiences independent of the idealistic machinery,”41 taking aim at the loss incurred when methodological pursuits are engineered at the expenses of “substantive insight” in social encounters. Hence preceding the work of deconstructing the hegemony of the ideal self-referencing is the understanding that “to unseal the nonconceptual [non-ideal, non-conforming, the indissoluble] with concepts, without making it their equal” is indeed “cognitive utopia.”42 Equality matters in theory. Thus, in conversing with queer characters in the selected films, interest is in unpacking their meaningful speculative momentum, and playful deconstructionist moves that theorize belonging. Second, and more relevant to the use of the term strategy in this book, is the importance of the speculative moment in the process of unmasking incapacitating abstractions, be they of the political or cultural order: incapacitation that bewitches the non-ideal, the queer subject in its post-awakening as annoyance. This speculative moment has a proviso: The material construction of productive reality in society (mainly through politics) is different from its theoretical constructions. When answering to objects of mental experience, the non-ideal initiates a speculative moment whose goal is to “retranslate” its experience within the antagonistic system of the ideal. Thus, freedom as a speculative process starting with the examination of antagonism in the realm of ideas shines a bright light on human rights as an equality discourse premised upon certain norms and fundamental principles. This equality, though fundamental, is not sufficient as it has to grapple with idealism in society, “the epitome of subjects as it is of their negation.”43 While abstract totality may be opposed on the basis of unconstitutionality—that is, “by convincing it of nonidentity with itself”44 as does human rights law based on the condemnation of the inhumanity of certain actions against the ideal of humanity, dealing with society is trickier. Identity and non-identity as established by barter are products of particular historical circumstances and special interests. While one may undo the theoretical contradictions, it does not necessarily follow that

41 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics, 7. 42 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics, 10. 43 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics, 10. 44 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics, 147.

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the operative system that sustains them disappears. Conversely, while a change of systems (human rights, cultural rights … etc.,) may remove the technological apparatuses of domination, such a realization may not put an end to contradiction. Hence, the political game of identity barter is often a game in which payoff is “equal in principle-unequal is reality; equality before the law-inequality in use.”45 This state of affairs makes dialectics perennial. With this realization comes the impulse to reconceptualize freedom beyond dialectical endless contradiction and system. Negotiation matters in society, but still may not lead to deep transformation. Beyond politics and identity, the speculative moment takes on a new vision: to restore the playful elements of the non-ideal as a qualitative instantiation of intersectional rationality and relationality. This new rationality is not one of domination for it “yields[s] to the object … to do justice to the object’s qualitative moments.”46 In this book, the new rationality is queerness-centered because difference is qualitative even when it hides under quantitative aggregations. This act of yielding to what is, or what has been made different as the beginning of restorative non-violence thinking, is one that is embedded in the articulation of Négritude. It is as Senghor recognized, an “attitude rythmique/rhythmic attitude;” a presence that yields to the objects of its mental and social encounters, a virtual presence freed of ontology and willing to animate Africana’s life. Thus, the use of strategy to depict queer performance goes beyond the traditional models of choice among sets of preferences for the maximization of individual interest only. Strategy is mostly referenced here as an ethical journey of discernment. Queer subjects in the film are strategic to the extent that they contribute to the advent of restorative speculations, and resist commodification and arrogant simulations of identity.

Baudrillard and the Strategy of Appearances If Adorno criticizes dialectic as domination, Baudrillard changes the traditional way of understanding model formation. Before proceeding with a perspective on simulation and simulacra in a non-Western queer context, engagement with the Baudrillardian model starting with Seduction (1979)

45 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics, 147. 46 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics, 43.

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is in order. Because of the attacks that he directed at the women’s/sexual revolution/feminist movement in Seduction, this work remains relevant to any analysis of simulation and simulacra, or of the hyperreality principle in gender, sexuality, and postcolonial politics. However, unlike previous critique47 that overwhelmingly scrutinizes Baudrillard on the basis of a political contention alone, it is the scaffolding of the thought-structure in Seduction that is queerly deconstructed here. Seduction provides a good point of entry for discussion because it represents a “loss of every referential principle”48 in the phallic/nonphallic order of things. The problem with sexual liberation, Baudrillard thinks, is that the female/woman subject enclosed within the phallic/non-phallic structure said to be discriminatory, could never really escape it without risking condemnation to either derision when the structure is weak, or discrimination when it is strong. He sees repression, not in the phallic/non-phallic structure itself, but the in narratives of women’s victimization; “narrative[s] of women’s sexual and political misery, to the exclusion of every other type of strength and sovereignty.”49 Thus differentiation safeguards the institution of sexual distinction, which alone prevents a return to the chaos of non-existence. Consequently, “there is no use seeking, from within this structure, to have the feminine pass through to the other side, or to cross terms. Either the structure remains the same, with the female being entirely absorbed by the male, or else it collapses, and there is no longer either female or male— the degree zero of the structure.”50 Thus, rather than addressing the female/woman malaise, if any, within the phallic/non-phallic structure, Baudrillard prefers to leave the structure intact and shifts to the plane of principled abstractions to propose an entirely new model based on a few assumptions. First is the extraversion of the feminine principle as simulation. Presumed outside of the phallic/non-phallic structure itself, the “feminine principle” cannot be invited in, lest it leaves us with zero structure. The feminine, Baudrillard writes, “has always been, somewhere else. 47 Grace, Victoria. Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading. New York: Routledge, 2002. 48 Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Translated by Brian Singer. Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1979, 5. 49 Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction, 7. 50 Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction, 6.

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That is the secret of its strength…not found in the history of suffering and oppression imputed to it—women’s historical tribulations.”51 It also cannot initiate its own movement toward the structure, pass through or reverse the terms assigned to the female/woman in it. Adjacent to and competing with the extraverted feminine principle is social critique as a “narrative of misery,” which seeks to awaken the female/woman within the phallic/non-phallic structure to her victimization only excluding every other type of strength and sovereignty per Baudrillard. At this first level of abstraction, Baudrillard postulates that the “strength of the feminine is that of seduction”52 but where do its sovereign attributes come from? They are elements of the second level of abstraction. Second is the epiphany of enchanted misery. In order to counter the threats of sexual politics of the women’s movement, Baudrillard builds on “discourse of sovereignty and other types of strength” to reassure the female/woman in the real phallic/non-phallic structure that there is an alternative to “perceived” negation within the structure. He does so by creating outside of this structure, a comparable principle to the male/phallus and calls it the “masculine principle.” Although only one body part is referenced as the phallus, knowledge of the other element of the structure’s new mental structure is implied as its nonidentity derivative: its absence. Thus, in the universe of principled representations already stripped of embodiment stand three appearances: the discourse of misery, the feminine and masculine principles. In this epiphany of forms, the discourse of misery stands side by side with the feminine and masculine principles. It annoys both as a non-constitutive element of their theoretical makeup and as such, escapes total absorption into either: a fate only reserved for the female/woman within the phallic/non-phallic structure of the first order. The survival of a discourse of misery at the second level of abstraction is a thorny issue in Baudrillard’s model of simulation/simulacra. To solve this problem, he proposes “another parallel universe,” a third-level abstraction, in part to respond to the decline of psychoanalytic referential structure. He even insists that the two universes (second and third orders) never meet. Third is sovereign seduction as necrophilia. This third universe can no longer be interpreted in any other way but as “play, challenges, duels, and

51 Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction, 6–7. 52 Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction, 7.

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the strategy of appearances—that [are] the terms of seduction. A universe that can no longer be interpreted in terms of structures and diacritical oppositions, but implies a seductive reversibility—a universe where the feminine is not what opposes the masculine, but what seduces the masculine.”53 Feminine and masculine appearances lose not just their structures, but also their diacritical opposition because in the third level of abstraction, Baudrillard permanently puts to death the discourse of misery or social critique (in this case led by the women’s movement). Here is the tour de force of a triumphant simulation and simulacrum: sovereignty in the seductive reversibility of principles devoid of any misery or critical conscious embodiment. This is the realm of self-enhancing, self-justified, self-referenced, selfreproduced abstractions, whose primary function is to appear as if they had never encountered social critique in the first place. This is the realm of imperial impulses that while keeping the pretense of responsiveness, forecloses all deepest relational feelings toward its non-ideal and its critics. This is the seduction of sovereignty as denial of the possibility of its own decay. This is sovereign seduction of endless self-reproduction, for there is no death but the death of death itself in the third order of abstraction. There is no thought but the thought that thinks never to think where it is. There is no production but the production that is never where it thinks it is produced. Put differently, “the sovereignty of seduction is incommensurable with the possession of political or sexual power,”54 the power that speaks to and of the misery of structures, including Baudrillardian post-referential hyperreality. Above all and despite its sophistication, the model spectacularly fails nego-feminism by ungrounding thought and pain from their corporeal dwelling and dueling as Nnaemeka55 sees it, and by condemning them to a vampiric existence. For how can one begin to respond to functional imperatives of African feminism if one is unable to identify where the “here and there” are located in the first place? Seduction emerges out of this post-misery universe as an unparalleled game strategist, a faceless and

53 Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction, 7. 54 Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction, 8. 55 Nnaemeka, Obioma. “Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s

Way.” Signs, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2004): 362.

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desire-numb poker player with an irresistible hand. The capacity immanent to seduction is to deny things their truth and to turn them into a game, a pure play of appearance, and thereby foil all systems of power and meaning with a mere turn of a hand. The ability to turn appearances on and against themselves is enchanted vulnerability. The issue is not one of falsification, but one of ruse. Truth is not replaced with untruth; it suffices that it be entertained as a game. In this seductive universe, there is no truth, just the game itself. In this universe, Adorno plays, but never realizes he is seated at the table in the first place. The game has been played and replayed before Adorno realizes he is holding a card. Denial is important in the reproduction of Baudrillardian games; first to exhaust any liminal residue of nonappearance (self-truth) in a hyperreal order, and second to cannibalize the body as its own object of narcissistic consumption. Simulation and simulacra in this sense never give themselves up to something; they pull in everything: all references, all systems, and all non-relational desires. They are regenerative, not restorative; uni-dimensional, not relational. This Baudrillardian simulacrum is, indeed, the “desert of the real itself.”56 All pygmalionic idols are enchanted simulacra because they hide the fact that there is no reciprocity of desire and that the relational depth has long been turned into a narcissistic contemplation of the self by the idol-maker. Seduction from this perspective makes Baudrillard the irony of his own simulacrum. That is, he has turned into the proverbial iconoclast through qualitative confinements of his appearances and the body’s appearances. Descriptively, Baudrillard speaks to certain parameters of modern societies. Analytically, he is in love with a sovereign idol. In this book, Baudrillard’s simulation and simulacra are referred to as pygmalionics and as such become useful in understanding and deconstructing homonormativity in an era of unbridled market consumerism. Having found much lacking in the modeling of the abstract principles and sovereign contours of Seduction, attention is now given to Baudrillard’s later formulation of simulation and simulacra. If Seduction mainly reacted to the emergence of Western feminism and its corollary demands, the refinements of simulation of simulacra are tuned up to colonial and imperialistic encounters and as such, become relevant to postcolonial subjectivities that this book examines. In the treatment of 56 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2004, 2.

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Simulation and Simulacra (2004), attention is given to the future restatement of politics and dialectics as simulation and simulacra beyond debates about gender equality. If any, concern is given to gender as a metaphor of the body-territory and its predicaments in Baudrillardian hyperreality. The colonized and postcolonized enter Baudrillard’s simulacra blindfolded and with bound feet. The colonial territory is to the empire what the real is to the simulacrum of pure appearances. Equivalences between the work of empire and the work of Simulation and Simulacra are stark. The empire’s pride is its (referential) map through which it draws up details about the colonial territory-body. The empire in simulation is one of decay. Its idea-map is falling into ruins. Yet, one should not hastily conclude that the fraying and ruins of the map augur retrenchment of the empire and its hegemonic pretenses. One notes that it is the death principle, not social critique (of the misery-spitting empire principle) that is regenerated here. The referential pride of empire does not vanish, but returns to the colonial territory-body, “rotting like a rotting carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging.”57 Turns and returns of empire to spread rot and confusion in the historical present of the colony while seeming to advance itself in futuristic simulation are hostile to Sankofalike orientations. The fertilization of the colonial territory-body with rot, even as the cognitive and technological pretenses of empire are decaying, is colonial simulation and enchantment of the highest order. In the colonial territory-body so fecund with rot, the ruined map survives as “the most beautiful allegory of simulation…and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of the second-order simulacra.”58 If the map is the link that holds the empire and the colony together, its death does not bring about the desert of the real that pushes for independent evolutionary trajectories of ruined empires and independent colonies. Rather, simulation is initiated through (re)penetration of the territory with invisible, yet “discernible shreds.” In the second order of things, the simulacrum gives a new identity to the territory as post-territory of its own self by doubling its reality with the empire’s rotten, decaying, and aging abstractions. It is this doubling that allows the simulacrum to sort out and permutate fiction and reality in the colony according

57 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, 1. 58 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, 1.

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to its own requirements leading to confusion as a default outcome for the (post)colonized. In a territory so possessed with ruination, empire resurrects as simulacrum, but not before it hides the trace of its ruse. Colonial simulation and simulacra are not just allegorical, they are real. That is, today (in the postcolonial moment), simulation is no longer of a territory, which has long ceased to exist as such. Simulation is no longer of referentials, the postcolonial has burned down some of the shreds of the idea-map. Simulation is no longer of the substance, the postcolony has already been infected with rot. “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it…today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map.”59 Here, Baudrillard is consistent in his commitment to erasing any residual difference and agency in the colonial territory without accounting for the process. Still, discriminatory choice in the accounts of imperial-colonized’s death and resurrection within the order of simulation and simulacra does not escape the inquisitive mind. Empire sheds its map spontaneously and purposely upside-down; it resurrects through the insemination of the colony with rot. It is the charm of the second order of things. The territory’s slow rot is pronounced; its symptoms are made real, but they cannot be accounted for. Baudrillard is silent on the fact that it is the infection of the territory-body in the first order of simulation that gives potency to the simulacrum in the second order. Furthermore, while the fraying map of the empire is given directional intentionality in its intercourse with the territory-body for the purpose of imaginative permutations, the shreds of the territory are scattered “here and there in the desert that is no longer that of the empire, but ours. The desert of the real.”60 We, as a body-individual-collective are being sold to the highest abstract permutations and are disappearing. Put differently, after the infection, the rot of the territory is spiraling and scattering; every work of the hyperreal is for the deterrence of every real process of witnessing and speaking about the ruse. There is no resurrection, no discernment of the territory-body in the simulacrum stylized as sovereign triumph of necrophilia. Thus, Werewere Liking’s assertion that only sold bodies disappear takes a deeper meaning here.61 Baudrillard’s simulacrum is inimical to an

59 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, 1. 60 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, 1. 61 Liking, Werewere. Orphée d’Afric. Paris: Harmattan, 1981.

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Africanist understanding of death, not as a desert, but as moment(um) for witnessing different ways of being and belonging: death as a ritual space where everybody is welcomed and from which nobody can be barred. As Werewere Liking might emphasize, there is in death no death of the bodyimagination whose reality always is, only the exposure of the hollowness of false and misinformed transactional pretenses. Baudrillard’s enchanted body-territory has no social utility for Africana feminisms/womanism. The (post)colonial quarrel with Baudrillard goes beyond the ordering of appearances in his model to interrogate the denial of survivability of concept-bearing subjects. For the colonized, it has always been the case that empires, be they of the mind or material production, precede themselves in one form or another. What is of interest to the postcolonial subject in general, and to the queer subject in particular, is the discernible survival of the colonizer’s shreds even in the so-called desert of the real. Although it may not be its final dwelling, survival is a preoccupation of the colonized/postcolonial. As Audre Lorde once articulated it, colonized (racial, sexual, economic) subjectivities are “never meant to survive”62 irrespective of their order of appearances in hegemonic systems. They may lead diversity rallies from the front or from the back, from the pews or from the streets, from the breakfast tables or nightlife performances, but what matters is their survival/resilience wherever they are located. If the simulacrum survives by precession, difference and non-ideal subjectivity cannot subsist by preceding the survival imperative to any simulacrum. Survival is anti-necrophilia politics. Baudrillard’s simulacrum only masks the passing of an empire ushering in an era in which, we as individuals are allegedly fully in charge, not the system. This is quite a proto-anarchical conceptualization of world order. The only things that matter in this conceptualization are the machines, miniaturization, and operational takeovers by cyborgs, the new simulators of the hyperreality. Thus, diverting attention from the system to the simulators, Baudrillard unsuccessfully attempts to do away with the empire principle within hyperreality, the problem of power and domination. He nevertheless concedes, “it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their

62 Lorde, Audre. The Black: Poems. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. See “A Litany for Survival,” 33.

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models of simulation.”63 Thus, as one enters the hyperreality of manageable and malleable signs devoid of relational depth, signs orbiting beyond rationality and negativity, politics is short-circuited and dead. The reign of simulators extricates contradiction from the simulacrum. Unlike the “feminine principle” in Seduction, the territory-body of the colonized/postcolonial difference is denied seduction. Spiritual violence of the order of sorcery sustains the operational strategies in hyperreality and they are easy to locate: First, extirpate the “charm” and “magic” of the colonized/postcolonial territory-body by way of doubling and permutation of meanings. The beautiful becomes ugly, the not-yet-born is aging and dying. The hyperreal is metaphysical loss that pre-emptively sacrifices all colonized/postcolonial imaginations. It is a model of death and anticipatory death leaving no social relations but the sorcery of production as endless resurrection of simulated appearances. The simulation of the narrow and conventional, the calculated and consequential becomes the only way credibility can be restored to the political; social action in this context becomes a struggle in itself. Thus, the territorybody must die, vanish because it has been made the domain of “‘sovereign difference’ and ‘because it is the difference [of the territory] that constitutes the poetry of the map…the magic of the concept and the charm of the real.’”64 What is lost in the hyperreal is desire; the depth of desire as anti-necrophilia65 politics. Baudrillard’s simulacrum is faulted for its intersectional tactlessness, for its denial of any non-ideal agency in the real, scenarios after scenarios. It is criticized on the basis of its erasure of the discourse on misery in the conceptualization of sublime seduction. It is questioned on the basis of the survival of the empire principle in hyperreality without accountability of the power of metaphorical or real territory acquisition. It is criticized on its pronouncement of death in the real colonized/postcolonial territory-body without an autopsy of the cause of death or an interrogation of the economy of unidirectional fateful barters. It is censored for exorcizing magic and charms from the colonized/postcolonial territorybody-imagination. It is finally rejected on the basis of its artificial theology

63 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, 2. 64 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, 2. 65 Mbembe, Achille, and Libby Meintjes. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, Vol. 15, No.

1 (2003): 11–40.

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of life as simulated death and resurrection and as a game of appearance without relational depth. Yet, despite all the faults in the model, its real threat resides in the possibility of a “twisted advent, a perverse event”66 of indefinite incarnations. As Baudrillard notes, “simulation can last indefinitely, because, as distinct from “true” power—which is, or was, a structure, a strategy, a relation of force, a stake—it is nothing but the object of social demand, and thus, as the object of the law of supply and demand, it is no longer subject to violence and death. Completely purged of a political dimension, it like any other commodity, is dependent on mass production and consumption.”67 In the event the colonized/postcolonial subjects concede that they are already in the simulacrum, they can only exit it through backward deconstruction of its simulation as a way to invent a different kind of politics of the real. The objective of this new politics is not renunciation of social demands, but the enunciation of an ethic based on a comparable but alternative theology of life and death. This new identity politics will claim a stake in reality by reinvesting it with relational strategies that speak, not of force or rational self-idealizations only, but also of a new theology of emotion and magic; a new discourse of misery differentiated from that which derives poverty from scarcity to one premised on the fallibility of rationality without relationality. This is a different kind of politics imbued with the social magic of self and collective transformations. While Baudrillard mobilizes biblical and Christian signs to construct his simulacrum, he does so by emptying them of their inclusive meanings and ethics. He shares very little with good theology that first seeks to impart relational hope. His simulacrum is always “anticipated resurrection” but with no magic, no witness, no angel or demon, no gardener, no speculative inspection, no tomb, nobody. Thus, his play with the principle of the feminine as seduction runs counter to another simulacrum: that of the angelic principle in the New Testament. “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the

66 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, 26. 67 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, 26.

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resurrection” (Luke 20:34–36),68 Jesus told a crowd wondering who of the seven brothers will get the woman they married after they have all died. If the seductive power of a woman justifies risking men’s death in the institution of marriage, in resurrection, Jesus suggests, there will be no seduction, no marriage and this is quite a revolutionary perspective on phallic/non-phallic relations. Thankfully society does not have to wait for the Christian resurrection day to transform gender relations and the political institutions that sustain them. Still, one has to imagine other possibilities of being and resurrecting, even in the simulacrum. Thus, in the Christian simulacrum, the angelic body is not one that turns against itself (as in Baudrillardian structure) for the sake of generative (re)production. In the New Testament, male and female resurrected appearances are of a cosmic order and in service to a higher order. Resurrection therefore is not an end in itself, but a foretelling of the survival/resilience of the body-meaning; the bodyimagination in death. It speaks not of resuscitation of a transactional desire, but of a transformative journey toward possible futures in the depth of desire. These futures are not at the service of domination but surrender to the here and now, to love, and to life-transforming possibilities. The use of the term simulacra/simulacrum in this book is different from its Baudrillardian inflections. It denotes a postcolonial/African(a) orphic and speculative moment of queer presence and resilience. In lieu of Baudrillard’s pygmalionic hyperreal, this book proposes an orphic conceptualization of queer resurrection grounded in Senghorian notion of présence virtuelle, of postcolonial/Africana difference as body-animé with musicality for relational ends, not endless permutations. The next chapters build on this Africanist concept of présence virtuelle to reflect on the strategy of survival of different queer characters in selected films to show how they bring new challenges to Africana’s imagination and criticism. These characters speak of the resurrection of the body as an inquisitive moment. “Where have they put it?” Mary Magdalene asked after the crucifixion of Jesus. With Mary Magdalene one may also ask: “where have they put the body-Lord, the body of the crucified minorities/postcolonial/non-ideal?” In Africana queer negotiations,

68 The Bible, The New Revised Standard Version.

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resurrection is a speculative act and one that does not put blockages on future trajectories of the body. While one may not recognize the bodyresurrected, it is ethically important that one believes in its resurrection and ascension to futures possible of becoming and belonging. Resurrection is orphic. It descends and ascends in the depth of meaning inviting touch, defying death in the colonial prisons of the Cape of Good Hope in Proteus and on Gorée Island in Karmen Geï . Resurrection is queer. It is a discourse of the body-stigmata surviving the stigma of artificial death inflicted through shame, disgrace, and humiliation.

Chwe: Folk Game Theory and Strategy as Depth of Desire? Michael Chwe69 provides a middle ground for framing the non-ideal as a strategic subject in asymmetric relations. This position addresses the concerns of Adorno—who remains suspicious of modeling—and the rigidity of Baudrillard, who is all about modeling from the perspective of power only. Game theory has been criticized as elitist, a Cold War model that primarily serves the interest of dominant groups, says Chwe. Still, he challenges this assumption through an in-depth qualitative analysis of different characters in Jane Austen’s novels, not mathematics. He shows that “Austen’s novels do not simply provide ‘case material’ for the game theorist to analyze, but are themselves an ambitious theoretical project, with insights not yet superseded by modern social science.”70 How exactly Austen does it is a matter of choice of perspectives. Hence as a mental process, the model needs not precede the subject as in the Baudrillardian simulacrum. A game theoretical perspective emphasizes the precession of subjectivity and strategy. But, strategic thinking, though important, is not something that can easily be acquired. From a folk perspective, it is a creative process highly determined by the context. Thus, the boundary of power and preferences are always in the story being told. With regard to social norms, Chwe contends that Jane Austen shows “game theory has more diverse

69 Chwe, Michael. Jane Austen: A Game Theorist. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. 70 Chwe, Michael. Jane Austen: A Game Theorist, 2.

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and subversive historical roots.”71 Folk subjectivities can be subversive in unpredictable ways without violating the core concepts of game theoretical models, which are choice and preference. That is, (a) the ability to choose is power; perhaps not power to command, but power nevertheless; (b) a subject’s preference is best represented through its choices; (c) rational choice is preference with a higher payoff than its alternatives. This payoff is usually represented as a numerical quantity. (d) while strategy maintains the same axioms of rational choice, it may take many forms depending on the context. In some cases, strategic choice may be prospective or take a retrospective form in other situations. Chwe posits that Jane Austen pays attention to details not habitually examined. Her characters are often marginalized and they understand the need for strategic behavior for survival and freedom. In giving central stage to marginal perspectives and performances, Austen is able to discover how the non-ideal in society often manipulates the dominant ideal through strategic exploitation of the superior’s cluelessness. For instance, in the game of status, “the superior remains clueless about the inferior to sustain the status difference, even though this prevents him from realizing how the inferior is manipulating him.”72 Consequently, strategy from below often requires a set of skills and not the least is the ability to penetrate and anticipate one’s opponent/adversary/partner thinking (the precession of reasoning under contingency). Cluelessness inviting strategic penetration and subversion from below has two implications. The depth of folk games unmasks cracks in the ideal and renders utopian, the characterization of dialectical encounters as absolutely hegemonic, one-dimensional, and predicated upon the total absorption of the non-ideal as differentiated diversity only as Adorno would have it. Exploitation of cluelessness from below in strategic maneuvering further reminds us about the uniqueness and the reverence of experience. Lived experience makes strategic subjects the exclusive custodians of the type of knowledge that is not contented in playing the game 71 Chwe, Michael. Jane Austen: A Game Theorist, 2. 72 Chwe, Michael. Jane Austen: A Game Theorist, 5.

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only. It is not even satisfied with only bending or changing the rules of the game. Lived experience sees cracks and incompleteness in other players as well. If Baudrillard designs a play of appearances, it is only because each appearance thinks it is unique and playing with non-ideal types. His model is oversaturated with its own knowledge and endless self-generative images. The first appearance thinks it is better than others and would likely win any game. Soulless appearances don’t know about their emptiness because they never take their focus off the rules of the game to look into each other’s eyes. The discovery of cluelessness in the dominant ideal, cluelessness about the other’s joys and pain is indeed a reversal of order. It is the realization from below that, overattribution of (intentional) superior power to others is as enslaving as underacknowledgment of value and resilience in others and the self. This finding, however, is not credited to game theory as much as it is to Jane Austen, Chwe contends. The principle of cluelessness also speaks of the betrayal of hyperbolic pretenses. Though it may be borne out of high-tension moments and circumstances, strategic thinking from below reasons against the puffiness of dominant, dubbed, self-inflated, hyper-realized, over-floated, over-rated narratives, and rules. Through Chwe’s reading of Jane Austen, one appreciates the uses of cluelessness by non-ideal categories to challenge social hierarchies as strategic recalibration of the depth of desire and power. Cluelessness is the gap between what one knows and what one’s reality is and experienced as such. The (re)equilibration of power relations within society is the purpose of cluelessness discovery and its strategic deployment by non-ideal groups and persons. In the films to be discussed in the next chapters, strategic performance is seen in the queers’ ability to appropriate and exploit cluelessness in their socio-political environment. The depth of desire is the game that changes subjectivities because the real is always larger than all simulacra. This book is indebted to Chwe’s sensibility in modeling decisionmaking processes and strategic thinking. The use of the term strategy is closely aligned with Chwe’s perspective on “folk game theory.” That is, this book takes the view that non-ideal types in socio-political encounters do not just offer case material but theory also. Queer subjects to be encountered in this book, however, further push the limit of game theory when seen not just as self-interest maximizers, but also as agents of social change. While game theory from below undoubtedly reveals the subversive and possible diverse uses of modeling decision-making, the question

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of social change beyond crude individual interests is one that calls for an expanded review of the demands on strategy itself; the strategy of the individuals and of the system, or the structure of the game itself. The first hiccup with game theory apparatus is the problem of “self-confirmation.” Chwe recognizes that this problem is linked to a view of strategy as manipulation of others when he writes, It becomes clear how mutual love and mutual hatred both can be created out of nothing, and in what sense exactly this creation is against their wills. It becomes clear how one person’s action can be provoked by nothing more than her own expectation of the other person’s action. And that once provoked, each person’s action can in turn respond to the other’s action, resulting in an unexpectedly good or bad outcome, a virtuous or vicious cycle…influencing the expectations of each person about the other in a way becomes self-confirming.73

Self-confirmation is a problem for social change and strategic interactions. While it may speak of individual successes, it is not very effective in ending vicious cycles in society. Viewed from this angle, preferences asserted through the manipulation of others therefore run the risk of turning into soulless Baudrillardian appearances that project themselves onto the future without transforming anything, not themselves, not the other players whose will is purely instrumentalized. Change of attitude toward other players, not simply the realization of their independently conceived/identified preferences, is a tougher demand on society and one that queerness enunciates in this book. Audre Lorde poetically refers to what Chwe calls expectations as fear as “a faint line in the center of [the] foreheads” of those who “live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision.”74 While folk game theory has masterfully expanded our understanding of strategy from the standpoint of socio-economic edges or the situations of agents, theorizing and mapping the “edge of decision” itself and its implication for the concept of choice is still needed. Thus, looking at revealed preferences, but also underneath and beyond their appearances at the edge of

73 Chwe, Michael. Jane Austen: A Game Theorist, 24. 74 Lorde, Audre. The Black: Poems. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. See “A Litany for

Survival,” 33.

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queer negotiation with society expands our appreciation of folk-centered approaches to strategic interactions. The second problem is the preference-reward gap. Queerness equally interrogates the logic of reward itself in game theory. For marginalized groups, the problem is not just constraint on choice, but the inequality of reward even when they are choosing and choosing optimally. Love in the abstract may be hailed in society while a single mother may love her child and still be punished and taxed for that love. Marriage comes with tax bonuses, rewards, and punishments for some, but not for others. Objective measures of performance may make non-ideal groups competitive, yet they are not those who get promotions even after they “provoke” the right reaction to their candidacy by getting hired. Because game theory takes payoff as a given, it would not effectively explain subpar outcomes, vicious cycles of hatred, and bigotry when the strategic processes of choosing among alternatives is flawless. Thus, the reward of preferences for non-ideal groups can still be problematic even when choice itself becomes an equalizer. The reward of choice raises questions about the durability of individual preferences when the matrix of the game, the community, remains unchanged. Here concern is less about a revelation of a person’s preferences, and more about the parameters of sustainability of individual aspirations within antagonistic systems. Strategy as treated in folk game theory is confined to the manipulation of the revealed preferences. By manipulating preferences, one manipulates co-players. Alternatives are theoretically treated as undeserving attention in the understanding of the sources and potency of strategy. The imputation of strategic intentionality to revealed preferences alone amputates alternative choices of their tactical and reward potential. As will be explored in this book, especially in reviewing Karmen Geï , freedom of choice may sometimes lie on the non-preferential (because not revealed) sphere of alternatives and queer subjects sometimes violate the assumption that maximization of interest is always in what is seen (revealed). African(a) Queer Presence is interested in the manipulation of alternatives as strategy also. It treats alternative choices as non-revealed preferences, but not as fugitives from strategy. Sometimes, it is in the alternative that queerness reinvents strategy as depth of desire; an interplay of revealed and undercover preferences, stated and implied choices. Finally, it is posited that the erotic as depth of desire does not just offer a lens through which negotiation takes place in society, it is in

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itself an entirely different game theoretic model because the transformation of decision-makers, measured by the depth of their feelings toward each other, is its ultimate goal. Audre Lorde delineates both the sociopsychological and spiritual requirements of a depth-desire-centered model when she writes that the erotic is “power within” and who we are, not just what we seek to accomplish through rational processes. Furthermore, the erotic is a source of “power and information” that lies deeply in “the spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpected and unrecognized feeling,”75 suggesting a continuous openness to the mystery in and of others as a prerequisite to developing an ethical orphic intersectional consciousness and social practices. Here the experience of internal fulfillment in the depth of desire precedes the observation of capabilities that bring one closest to the fullness of that fulfillment in society, not the reverse. Finally, the erotic is, a demand [that] incapacitates everyone in the process. [It is] an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire…to encourage excellence…Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can observe which of our various life endeavors bring us to that fullness.76

Thus, the starting point is not capacity building, but incapacity affirming. Negotiation is only relevant in situations where unilateral action is not possible or desired. Queer subjects in the films under review therefore engaged in erotic politics, the first movement in its Lordian articulation as a contemplative process of naming and reorganizing internal and social turmoil. Politics is expressed in the ability to feel deeply and to reconnect with emotion as a spiritual bridge between senses of the self and the creative chaos that their presence bring into a heteronormativized world. Politics is primarily about the discovery and metamorphoses of the self in dialogue with or resisting against the spiritualized/abstracted violence that the queer characters encounter in various settings.

75 Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. California: The Crossing Press, 2007, 54. 76 Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider, 54–55.

CHAPTER 3

Proteus: (Am)bushmen and the Theology of Queer Presence

Abstract This chapter analyzes Proteus to show how queerness wrestles with colonial entanglements and colonial Christianity. Equally subject to critique is a certain kind of nativist anti-queer solidarity that is deconstructed through a return to Africana indigenous sensibilities and cosmologies. Keywords Theology · Bushmen · Proteus · Blackness · South Africa · God’s typewriter · Colonial law · Sodomy · Indigenous · Theophanies · Privatization · Prison-industry-complex · Settler colonialism · Sexuality · Historical erasure · Emotion · Sankofa · Canonical · Convict leasing · Cosmology · IKaggen · Khoisan · Trial (of the subject) · Faggot · Colonial sublime · Christian white supremacy · Pain

The concept of humanity itself is simultaneously an epiphany and an ecumenical gesture, a concept without which the world, in its thingness, would signify nothing.1 Achille Mbembe

1 Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, 180.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. N. Nyeck, African(a) Queer Presence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61225-6_3

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Faites donc l’expérience: taisez-vous! Bouchez vos oreilles, et écoutez à l’intérieur. Le bruit est en vous. Il aspire à la vie.2 Werewere Liking Since on their own they are crucifying again the Son of God and are holding him up to contempt.3 Hebrews 6:6 We always become what we behold; the presence that we practice matters.4 Richard Rohr

In the previous chapter, queerness was defined as that which is “out of order” but whose unavoidable presence annoys because it gives itself to nothing(s), or subjectivities that say no to captivity as a model of human and social encounters. By interpellating itself forward and animating objecting categories as a donative critical presence, queerness scrutinizes and transforms categorical negation in the ideal/non-identity traumas of colonial encounters. I now turn to the first film of interest to account for the ethics and techniques of negotiation through which queerness ambushes ideal reason in the context of settler colonialism in Africa. This setting is particularly germane to situating queer objections at the center of Africana’s meditative wrestling and bruising with colonialism and imperialism. In so doing, aim is at repairing a relational agency with a negated category frequently tagged for collusion with foreign expansionist powers instead of germination of Africana’s critical imaginary. This chapter focuses on the colonial and dialectical configurations in the film Proteus (2003), the performative and discursive strategies of queer deconstruction of knowledge and objection against the spiritualized, epistemic, and material violence. Situated in eighteenth-century colonial Cape of Good Hope (now in South Africa), Proteus (2003) tells the story of a love affair between an indigenous person, Claas Blank (henceforth CB), and a Dutch settler,

2 Liking, Werewere. Orphée D’afric. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1981, 20. “Try this: shut up! Plug up your ears and listen to the interior. The noise is in you. It hopes for life.” My translation. 3 The Bible, The New Revised Standard Version. 4 Rohr, Richard. The Divine Dance: Trinity and Your Transformation. Kensington:

Whitetaker House, 2016.

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Rijkhaart Jacobsz (Henceforth RJ). Based on real fragments of court reports, the film reconstructs the historical trial of the two homosexuals in colonial Cape of Good Hope to show the danger and annoyances that a relationship between a Dutch settler and a native provoked in the eighteenth century, and the disturbances that led to the execution of the couple as criminals.5 Proteus , a film by John Greyson and Jack Lewis, is historically situated within the positive dialectical plane according to our model in Fig. 2.1. Recalling Adorno, queerness is embedded in colonial dialectics where imperial ideal reason differentiates itself from its colonized people and territories through hegemonic self-affirming postulates. The objective of the ordering of reason and knowledge in this plane is the rationalization of the white colonizer’s superiority as a God-given inalienable right over the colored people and their lands. Thus, the dominant context is one of colonial encounters, dispossession, exploitation, and criminalization of the native black people. So construed, Proteus is dialectical in ways that bring forth conversations about colonial knowledge, indigenous people, nature, and the techniques of its production. Central to these techniques is the colonial administrative apparatuses put in place to ensure that on one hand, internal class hierarchy among the white settlers is preserved, and on the other hand, the servitude of the natives is treated as perennial. Religion and law in particular, are the pillars of colonial administrative apparatuses, the system against which queerness wrestles in Proteus . Same-sex desire and eroticism thus serve as multidimensional and multifocal lenses through which one appreciates the double task of deconstruction that queer subjects must undertake in order to survive negation as non-identity: (a) the deconstruction of the spiritualized violence in religious and legal indoctrination that perpetually assaults the colonized’s image of the self, and (b) the deconstruction of the material violence that robs the colonized black body of its productive energy through territorial encroachment, forced labor, and other types of corporal punishments. This work of deconstruction centers on the production of meanings that counter the hegemonic assumptions impressed on the soul, land, and

5 Reflection here is not primarily concerned with retrieving the historical archives on the convicts let alone investigating their historical accuracy. Proteus is engaged with as a work of art and imagination that first and foremost “restores Claas Blank to the record.” See Newton-King, Susan. “History and Film: A Roundtable Discussion on ‘Proteus.’” Kronos: A Journal of Cape Town History, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2005): 6–33.

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bodies of the colonized. Thus, queerness staged in Proteus is a larger project in the imagination of Africana subjectivities that cannot be understood outside of the systemic and institutionalized contingencies that it must confront. Proteus is situated mainly in the positive dialectical plane of Fig. 2.1 because, in it, queer characters totally feel the brunt of colonization as any colonizable territory irrespective of its sexual landscape. The implication is that neither queerness, nor the colonized statuses are exclusive or sufficient to exempt the queers from history. Eschewing a differentiated archeology of queer history, colonialism is treated here as a dialectical system that primarily collapses all possible differentiations between the colonized into a single unit: that of categories negated. This is not to say that colonialism effectively succeeds in erasing all differences or all pre-colonial identities. It is rather to recognize that if anything survives colonialism, it is primarily because of the objection strategies that the oppressed deploy within colonial legal and religious institutions to reclaim their dignity. CB, the main indigenous queer protagonist in Proteus is, as his fellow colonized, looked down upon as an uncivilized “bushman,” that is to say, a sub-human in the colonizer’s hierarchical classification of species. Yet, it is through embracing his “bushmanity” and more specifically its cosmic and spiritual frames of references, that CB is able to ambush the colonial masters through acts of resistance, objections, and feigned collaboration. Although I place Proteus in the positive plane of colonial ideal reasoning against non-European subjects in the eighteenth century, the film also speaks to contemporary politics in South Africa raising concerns proper to the strategic plane in our model. John Greyson and Jack Lewis use the technique of anachronism to situate queer experience within the Anti-Apartheid movement with references to 1964, a year when South Africa was suspended from many international organizations, a year when Nelson Mandela’s original five-year sentence was extended to life in prison on Robben Island. This gesturing toward the future from its location in eighteenth century Cape of Good Hope extends the breadth of queer negotiation of identity and belonging to themes that resonate with the negative and strategic planes of Fig. 2.1.

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God’s Typewriter: The Simulacrum of Damnation The two preludes in Proteus set up the colonial and dialectical tensions between law and nature drawing from old debates about the classification of natural species. The first prelude starts with the first scene of the film. The year is 1735 on a criminal roster written in Dutch. Pages flipped one after the other as background music accompanies the blooming of protea flowers. Images fade in and out. Just as the secret of the protea flowers is revealed through blossoming, so is the content of the criminal roster. There is a synchronized alternation of appearances, one is a dictate from a script, the other a product of nature partially veiled by the dew and smoke. The sound of a typewriter is heard, then seen. The machine is in use. Three white court clerks seated side by side take diligent notes; the one in the middle appears to be the youngest. A page is read…a confession is recorded: “a full confession was made with the filthy and abominable words: “Send mij maar op, ik het hom in’t gat geneukt,” RJ is heard repeating the confession. The untranslatability of the statement then prompts debate among the court clerks. What is the appropriate meaning of “Send mij maar op, ik het hom in’t gat geneukt ?” How does one translate it? What is the appropriate language? Afrikaans or Dutch? The female clerks debate meanings. Middle-seated clerk: Gat geneukt? That is not Afrikaans… to hit to strike. Right-seated clerk: Fucked! In Dutch geneukt could only mean fuck. Middle-seated clerk: But that makes it so modern, Betsy? Left-seated clerk: Very contemporary. Right-seated clerk: Fucked! I looked it up. Left-seated clerk: But it sounds so modern, Betsy! Right-seated clerk: Hang-on, mind you. Here it is. “Fuck, to strike.” That is perfectly good sixteenth century Middle Dutch. “ik het hom in’t gat geneukt,” “I fucked him up the ass.” Left-seated clerk: No. What about buggered? Middle-seated clerk: “We could use that slang from ‘gat geneukt’… ‘to sow a hole.’ That’s a nice euphemism.” Left-seated clerk: How about “I used the native against nature?” Middle-seated clerk: Wait … “I performed…an offense against God, men, and luck”? Right-seated clerk: Fucked, darling. Injunctive male command (voice-over): “Silence, please! Let us proceed.”

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That the film begins not with CB, but with the confessional administrative apparatus symbolizing the epitome of settlers’ assimilationist power in the colony, is telling. RJ is said to have confessed to doing something so abominable that it makes the colonial court pause in search for meanings and connotations that support the logic of domination; the only way a white settler could make sense of his/her presence in the Cape of Good Hope in the eighteenth century. Hence before the viewer encounters the indigenous blacks, colonial legal reasoning must assign meaning to what RJ has done to the natives, as the eventuality of him doing something intimate with the natives could not be entertained. If the criminal act itself could not be prevented a priori, it is important that interpretation be fixed (ex-post) within the parameters of domination where sexuality is circumscribed and regulated as pleasurable only between civilized ideal bodies. The traditionalist left-seated clerk is willing to consider defilement as the only possible rendering of the confession. RJ may have committed an act, but the crime is not where one might locate it. His actions may still find meaning and a resting place in the historical archives of proper colonial behavior if only he defiled the native. How about “I used the native against nature?” the left-seated clerk proposes. Confessing to defiling and infecting the colonizer is a lesser crime that would not have prompted a search for transcendental meanings. Or would it? The position of colonial modernity that Betsy, the right-seated clerk, unsuccessfully defends is interesting. Betsy is the only clerk to entertain the possibility that RJ’s confession may be an admission of a sexual act, albeit violent. If “to fuck” is interchangeable with “to hit to strike,” one might have expected a coalition building between the left and rightseated clerks. Yet, they disagree vehemently. The voice of modernity via Betsy seems to contradict its own identity as progressive and civilizational. RJ can turn the native against nature, but he will not be allowed to turn modernity against itself. Lest Betsy forgoes the discourse of misery and wretchedness within colonial modernity, she cannot win the legal interpretative contest. The juxtaposition of “fuck” and “strike” invites legal reasoning to conduct a deeper review of itself, a more critical introspection of its codified history. Betsy has looked up the definition and found evidence of a contradiction. Yet, Betsy’s translation is defeated because it entails coming to terms with the immorality in the hermeneutics of progress as slavery, and “jouissance” as an expropriation of the non-ideal bodyterritory from its natural entitlements. Thus, unable to reconcile RJ’s

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statement with institutionalized registers of racial superiority in the Cape of Good Hope, and recognizing that his statement exhausts all linguistic referents, colonial reasoning turns to the sacramental order of euphemistic proportion. The play of interpretation, discriminating among various alternatives, finds quiescence in the transcendental God. As long as it remains unconscionable within the parameters of colonial law and politics alone, RJ’s statement is not anointed with permanent meaning. His utterances are simulated within the legal-political apparatuses of colonial occupation and remain potent enough to unmask the contradiction and desperate, yet failed, attempts to harness superiority where it is not. That is, in the intimate and deep feelings of human beings, feelings that certainly speak of interracial queerness as a dented enthusiasm in the zeal to raise colonial binaries to the level of sacrosanct edicts. Colonial contradictions find resolution in the invocation of God and in the simulacrum of damnation. The middle-seated clerk presents the winning argument: “I performed…an offense against God, men, and luck.” God rescues the empire from itself and invests the institution of men and randomness with a theological mission. That is, to erase any representation of contradiction, any objection of the real while ensuring the perennial recycling of damnation aided by the typewriters of the day. In the simulacrum of damnation, spiritualized death precedes surveillance in the carceral system in the film. In God’s typewriters, we find new meanings to what escapes men’s understanding. In God’s typewriter, new typologies are invented and damnation reproduces itself character after character. In God’s typewriter, RJ’s statement loses its speculative potential and enters the realm of a self-assured, self-referential hyperreality. The gendered imperatives of colonial theophanies are unambiguous. When God enters the courtroom, the voices of white women debating the possible meanings of RJ’s statement are commanded to silence, white men lead the direction of future thought. The simulacrum of God as présence virtuelle (virtual presence) anointing hegemonic ideal with selfaffirmations within the colonial order is intended to control the spiritual, the institutional, and the imaginative resources of the territories it occupies. Thus, a dialectical framework allows one to unpack the processes and techniques through which queerness often exhausts institutional reasoning, and the ways in which theology is differentially mobilized to hide violence and contradiction within socio-political considerations of

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gendered binaries. Understanding how queer negation acts on and upon artificial hierarchies is essential to the work that wrestling with negation imposes on non-ideal bodies and communities. Proteus exemplifies the out-of-order/ing postulates of queer negative dialectics. Queerness, in order to articulate and reclaim the fullness of presence, must dare to dive farther and deeper into the hermeneutics of negation and find cracks in the symbolic constructs of damnation be they of religious or cultural order. Overcoming the second problem of evil, however, would require that queerness finds beyond a political end, ways of being and sharing effective animated presence firmly anchored in knowledge of itself and of the communal imagination that sustains it.

“The Company Says No”: Privatization as Corporate Objection The second prelude introduces the viewer to background contingencies and makeup of CB, the indigenous character whose association with RJ has preemptively rendered necessary a theophany of damnation as an efficient tool to manage internal contradictions within colonial reasoning and settler violence in the colony. At the injunction of a male voice, the journey continues. A vast ocean is revealed as the camera distances itself from the coast. Superimposed on the dark ocean are two historical and future references that appear on a 5-cent coin: “1735 Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus names the King Sugarbush ‘Protea Cynaroides’” and, the inscription “1964 Protea Cyranoides is proposed as the National Flower of South Africa.” A blossoming giant protea flower out of frame takes hold of the screen and, as it fades away, a black body handcuffed and chained is slowly revealed in the bird’s-eye view, the type of angle that reduces individuality to its most basic expression. Passing through the gates of what looks like a fort, a white man (Mister Willer) in uniform tailgates the handcuffed black body and pushes it as if to hasten its march toward its ominous fate. The white man in a security uniform wears sunglasses and enters the last compartment of the building; a guard locks the door up behind him. On the left side is a stair ascending to the second floor. On the right side is a drowning cell, which on the surface looks like a black hole. Toward it, the chained black body moves. In the blink of an eye, the black body has vanished. Something or someone is inside the drowning cell pumping water. The viewer sees Mister Willer’s khaki shirt. His hands grasp the

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edge of the pit and from his high angle perspective, the laboring black body is showed pumping water out of the pit. Sergeant Willer: “Say it. What you did.” The uncooperative indigenous prisoner’s eyes lock on Sergeant Willer, but his lips remain sealed. Sergeant Willer: “More, more, more…more water,” the domineering figure enjoins, but still, the nameless black body refuses to “say it.”

The year is 1725. Another blossoming protea flower clutters the screen and fades out to cede the view to the same black body racing toward no specific place in an open field of blooming protea flowers being harvested by white settlers. One can hear the sound of a gunshot coming from where the black body is trying to flee. The flight from the yet-to-berevealed threats to life toward open-ended fields of blossoming protea flowers serves as a background from which the title of the film is revealed. Proteus, the shape-bending Greek god, stands in the middle of the field of blooming protea cynaroides, a species native to South Africa known for its diversity and adaptive resilience to wildfires. Thus, the scene of an emerging, then fleeing, black body is the background through which strategies of resilience are cast in a protean-like manner. Fear and hardiness are both reflected in the flight of a black body. The appearance of proteus, the Greek sea-god, brings to bear on the frightened and fleeing black queer body as the target of colonial fires— figuratively and literally speaking—the soothing comforts of a god-like impression. The image of proteus, though Western, converses with the best that the indigenous Hottentot land has to offer in the figure of the protea to lay the ground for the ingenuity of the black body. As it is noticed throughout the film, the main indigenous character combines wit and strategic thinking, blending and commanding both the settlers’ rhetorical tools and indigenous knowledge to get what he wants in various encounters. He, like the non-ideal characters in Jane Austen, does not passively partake in master–servant games but exploits cluelessness within the system itself to make unconventional choices to survive. Ending his flight into the experimental territory of horticultural entrepreneurial ventures belonging to Niven Virgil, a contractor with the East India Company, the black body first attempts to hide as cargo among the harvested flowers. Ill-fated among colonial properties, the black man’s

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hiding place is eventually discovered just as two armed white farmers interrogate the entrepreneurs about a fugitive. He had just escaped them a day before after they massacred his entire village. The black fugitive, the viewer learns, is the last survivor of his village, which the Boers (Dutch settlers in South Africa) refer to as “a pack of Hottentots.” Just as the black man is being hauled out of sight, he screamed his way out of imminent death. Caught between two logics of settler colonialism, the rule of the bayonet and of the market, both of which expropriate the natives, albeit with different means, the black fugitive appeals to the East India Company’s contractors against the will of the Boers. The black fugitive: Let me be! I’m the servant of these gentlemen! Virgil’s business companion and secret lover: We certainly don’t know him! The black fugitive: Dear sir, I beg you. Don’t let them take me! Tell them I am your servant for they’ll kill me dead. Virgil Niven: Wait! Wait! Stop! You should let me take him to the Magistrate. Company laws say “no”!

The plea of the black body leaves the Boers unmoved. Convinced of their own righteousness, they keep hauling the black body to the slaughterhouse; at least until a Scottish botanist invokes the sovereignty of the law. The typewriter is back, always heard before it is seen. The still-unnamed black man stands in court to defend himself against his captors. To the accusation of being a cattle thief, the black man retorts, “they were originally stolen from our people.” The magistrate reads from the plaintiff’s affidavit the awful things they have done to the black man’s people: “Seven Hottentots dead; women and children. Half of them mutilated and a dozen huts burned to the ground.” What is the Boer’s excuse? They were attacked and outnumbered; a situation tantamount to self-defense against “vicious cattle thieves…He’s a thieving heathen, Governor. He’d eat your children and your shit, rather than speak the truth.” Although the court of the East India Company finds no legal basis for an offense that warrants death, although it attests to his impeccable record of service, the court nevertheless condemns the black man. Having found that “the circumstances of his case and the good character of the accused dictate leniency, the court sentences him to ten years of hard labor on Robben Island,” the impassible magistrate reads. The black man’s name is revealed for the first time at sentencing as “the accused Hottentot Claas Blank.” He is found “not guilty of cattle theft (the charges brought

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against him), but guilty of assault and insolence on a Dutch citizen (the unstated, yet real charges against his kind). Prejudice has a way of pegging guilt to the souls of the oppressed. CB is punished for the crimes he was never charged with because they need no legal classification as such: they were indissoluble bigotry and prejudice, Adorno identifies. This is where Virgil Niven’s corporate human rights vision—without the need to know its subjects—leads to as it enacts its own chains of servitude based on the consolation of having saved the hunted black man from sudden death. The black body is condemned for an offense whose stain can never be redeemed; compensation is always beyond the pay grade of his good character. It did not matter that CB was born a servant and had, with his mother, paid more than his dues to the colonial system. There is no voucher strong enough to wash away the stain of his condition as a black indigenous man conscious of the genesis of colonial sins in his native land. CB is sentenced to ten years of hard labor in a privatized prison for insolence. Impertinent indeed he is, when he remembers and actively retrieves the archeology of imperial thieving and short-circuited memory of legal reasoning in his defense: “they were originally stolen from our people,” he objects at trial…He says “No.” He is treated as less than a thing, a cannibal who eats children and shit, yet he becomes through rhetorical protest, a no-thing, or a “thing” that objects to being ordered around. With his native impertinence, CB opposes the arrogant colonial simulation and negation of his history, the generative reproduction of a kind of legal reasoning intended to turn the natives into artifacts of European hunting games only. He is condemned to forced labor because he refuses to become a soulless appearance in a window-dressing trial of a colonial legal simulacrum. Though as he signed the prison register, CB distinguishes himself from other entrapped black and colored souls. Whereas prisoners who came before him signed the register with an X, renouncing any personality and individuality as they entered the notorious prison on Robben Island, CB is the only one who signs his name leaving an indelible trace of a presence on the colonial register. Here is the difference in privilege between RJ and CB. Although queer in his own sense, RJ belongs to the dominant group of settlers in the Cape of Good Hope. His sexuality is discursively condemned in strong terms. Yet, legal reasoning is simultaneously invested in rescuing his humanity, in shielding it from committing suicide; from turning against himself; a self that represents hegemonic pretenses coded as racial, cultural, and political norms. As a member of a dominant group, the legal apparatus is

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simultaneously invested in sacrificing his body if needed, but not before rescuing his soul; not before ensuring his resurrection as a colonial settler in a “weak” body. In contrast to RJ, no such attention is given to CB whose death is intended to be total annihilation. Gun fires have killed his entire village, his moral character has been assaulted in a chimera trial, and his bodily productive forces outsourced to the prison industry. Yet, the strategic choices CB makes in his encounters with the colonial system prior to meeting RJ in prison already show a subject determined to maintain a visible trace of his existence in the colonial Cape of Good Hope. He births a conscious subject out of himself through subversive acts of resistance. Let’s now return to his escape from a premature death at the hand of the settlers to further unpack CB’s struggle with epistemic and historical erasure. When CB is apprehended, he makes a choice to resist premature death by invoking freedom of being and servitude. The black fugitive: Let me be! I’m the servant of these gentlemen! Virgil’s business companion and secret lover: We certainly don’t know him! The black fugitive: Dear sir, I beg you. Don’t let them take me! Tell them I am your servant for they’ll kill me dead.

Indeed, as a colonial subject, CB’s choices for a dignified existence are limited. He can either be put to death by the colonial brutes or to servitude by the more sanitized version of the brutes, the colonial entrepreneurs. Colonial contractors object to the Boers’ brutality on black bodies on the basis of form only, not because they intend to upend the conditions that render black bodies homeless and hunting targets in what is their homeland in the first place. It is with certainty that those conditions are presented as “unknowable” to the entrepreneurs. So, when they invoke corporate proto-sovereign law, objection is only made against informal dehumanization of indigenous black persons in favor of a rationalized corporate formal violence in the prison industry that benefits them. But the ensnaring logic of sympathy for profit does not move the fugitive who quickly but masterfully scans the scene of his arrest to ambush the brutes and the sanitized brutes with game-changing self-affirmations. From a game theoretic perspective, CB is strategic as his end-goal is to survive another day. By offering servitude to escape death, he could be said to be maximizing his chance at survival and repositioning his imagination of freedom. Yet, the situation does not lend itself to simple game theoretic postulates for the offer of servitude is not just

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about maximizing individual interest; it is also one that disrupts the game itself. CB’s offer of servitude is not just about escaping death; it pits the brutish and civilizational (development/entrepreneurial/ commercial/progress) colonial logics against each other but not before cloaking himself with the enchanted spell of an assertive and secure humanity. “Let me be!” He first commands, fastening the rest of his bargaining lines on the very being whom colonialism intends to render invisible. Second, he states the obvious, “I am the servant of these gentlemen” only to enjoin, “tell them I am your servant!” It takes indeed great openness of one’s consciousness to accurately estimate and distinguish genuine freedom from the crumbs that circumstantial (dis)solidarities may offer. In a territory occupied by a logic of captivity, freedom is not synonymous with the absence or invisibility of the shackles. By ordering that his personhood be repeatedly acknowledged as such, CB firmly grounds himself in the fullness of his everyday reality and preemptively against the false hope that insincere colonial sympathy may instill in him. CB is not a spontaneous strategist armed with mental models only. He is queerness as history of negation. Presumably, CB is nobody’s servant at the moment of his arrest. Yet, he claims servitude as a communal experience that makes his personal successes or failures irrelevant to the game he is about to enter. “I am the servant of these gentlemen,” he insists, and in so doing overcomes the second problem of evil: the temptation to erect one’s individual freedoms and unfreedoms as canonical in contemptuous judgment of one’s community. It is from this standpoint that “by recovering a ‘people’s history of game theory’ we enlarge its potential future.”6 One way of enlarging this potential is by paying full attention to not just the agent’s revealed preferences, but more importantly to the parameters of sustainability of these preferences in antagonistic systems. For CB, community is his mother who sustains his reality and with whom he coshares the experience of colonial servitude. “I was born on Gordon’s farm (in Stellenbosh) … we were his favorite servants, I my mother,” CB later reveals in court with utmost pride. Thus, there is never an “I” that is also not a “we,” in CB’s understanding of queer survivability as an oppressed category.

6 Chwe, Michael. Jane Austen: Game Theorist. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013, 4.

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Servitude is nothing new to CB. What is new and consequential is that he raises its banner paradoxically and gives the marching orders paradigmatically when no one expects such a move from him. He thereby ambushes and throws off the “bad colonizer/benevolent colonizer” false dichotomized game in which the circumstances of this arrest force him to arbitrage. Hence in saying “I am,” queerness that transcends tribal heresies and arrogant simulations of selfhood also says, “we are,” a secure spell of an assertive humanity and everything else from this standpoint is considered tributary extraversions. Virgil Niven rejects the offer of servitude not on moral grounds (inequality is already pervasive), but because its acceptance would have implied acknowledgment of CB as an entrepreneur who negotiates freedom on his own terms. The black man’s offer renders possible a contractual relation which future may be subject to renegotiation or retraction. Thus, by deflecting CB’s appeal and by invoking colonial law, Niven Virgil attempts to pacify the Hottentot whose proposition reveals the fragility of truth in colonial systems. From the perspective of the colonized, settler colonialism is a system of hyperreal domination. The master can have as many servants as he wants through regenerative power of endless aggressions of micro and macro proportions. CB’s choice therefore is not about maximizing personal interest only; it is choice that extracts him as a unit of violence or compassion within the captivity of a colonial order. In choosing and choosing powerfully, CB’s proposal unsurprisingly encounters inertia within the parameters of his own choosing. Unable to satisfy this request, Niven Virgil turns to the Roman-Dutch law tradition with pre-fixed reasoning on non-ideal persons to decide. The outcome is the imprisonment of CB and further exploitation of his labor. Thus, the viewer is reminded that the choices of the oppressed do not always follow intended trajectories because they often reveal contradictions within the oppressive systems they live in that those in power are unwilling to recognize. Having overcome the second problem of evil, the colonized queer body works toward a new relational paradigm of sensible animation. Effective presence deconstructs violence encircling queer personhood beyond materiality. As a prototype of Black Orpheus, the Hottentot reclaims effective presence through the rekindling of a new “relation

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of the self with the self; the source of all poetry;”7 the poetics of the body constantly under colonial assault. The advent of this protean subjectivity instantiates Négritude as a new theology of the black soul; “Black poetry is evangelic, it announces good news: Blackness has been discovered.”8 From this perspective, soul-centered Négritude as a theology of effective presence is meditative and prophetic in essence, donative and anti-dogmatic in practice. In this universe, “the harbinger of the black soul, the herald—half prophet and half follower –who will tear Blackness out of himself to offer it to the world; in brief, […] will be a poet in the literal sense of the ‘vates’.”9 Although the Black Orpheus’ awakened consciousness is nested in the soul, the deconstruction of colonial reality begins with prophetically reclaiming the body exiled from that which in nego-feminism is its dwelling place because it holds the keys to exorcising alienation in the soul. Accordingly, “the exile of [the] body offers a magnificent image of the exile of [the] heart.”10 In “Ce que l’Homme Noir Apporte,” Léopold Sédar Senghor theorizes the black soul as one that resists ontological violence understood as denied presence and denied self-revelation. The African Negro is the object of negation because he is perceived as essentialized violence. Relying on horticultural metaphors, Senghor speaks of self-affirmation as “floraisons humaine/the blossoming of the human” out of “gerbes de richesses /sheaves of wealth.”11 Thus, the black interiority needs not claim deification; it is already working in the realm of animation as a simulator of a kind of humanism that rests on présence émotive (emotive presence), an animated presence that restores humanity in things encountered. Emotion is important to Senghor in articulating the parameters of effective presence as the colonized moves from wanting the demolition of the colonial order to working toward the construction of a new humanistic whole. Thus, the Senghorian émotion speaks of humanism and theology of the body beyond sense and sensation as references. 7 Sartre, Jean-Paul, and John MacCombie. “Black Orpheus.” The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1964): 13–52, 18. 8 Sartre, Jean-Paul, and John MacCombie. “Black Orpheus,” 20. 9 Sartre, Jean-Paul, and John MacCombie. “Black Orpheus,” 20. 10 Sartre, Jean-Paul, and John MacCombie. “Black Orpheus.” The Massachusetts Review,

Vol. 6, No. 1 (1964): 13–52, 20. 11 Senghor, Léopold Sédar. “Ce que L’Homme Noir Apporte.” In Liberté 1: Négritude et Humanisme. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964, 23.

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First, Senghor distinguishes pain from émotion. Pain is the physical and epistemological violence done to the colonized. For instance, when the black body’s labor is harvested before maturity, colonialism creates real heavy-laden material black poverty, the work of modern sorcery. Thus, the tale of fallen bodies is also the tale of defeating winds and forces beyond their control. Yet, in this arborescent metaphor, the roots of the black soul speak of profundity, self-restoration, and imagination. They are the sites of émotion dissociated from pain. Rooted in a reclaimed presence of self, émotion refuses to be tamed by any system that promises alleviation of violence. This émotion is queerness because it can and does keep its distance from certain kinds of pain; it can and does refuse to be ordered around by pain (the problem of violence solved by the state in theory). It is from this interiority of self-rootedness that the black soul embodies experiences as real as the reality of its existence. From the mystery of its roots, the black soul carves a strategy for community building and identification. When émotion encounters objects, hyper-personality, and hyper-reaction, it responds with rhythm, a type of gravitational strategy based on undulated action and modulated shifts with a ripple effect on systems of domination. From the deep roots of its being, émotion, the “mysterious forest”12 of queerness as presence-multiple initiates intersectional movements within itself and with the outer world. It draws in; it lends itself to things and persons, but it cannot be pulled in or out. Emotion so conceived is the tabernacle of out-of-ordered modulations in the black interiority, its colonized body-territory and worlds. It is the power that unseats rationalities of domination in order to pursue an alternative relational ethics based on the celebration of the body and its emotive content, sensibility, and fecundity. This affirmation of the colonized body and its “non-idealness” stigmatized under colonial systems has one goal: the deconstruction of oppression through humor, imagination, and performative metamorphoses. In essence, the Senghorian anti-mechanistic stance is useful in understanding colonial and postcolonial queer overtures in Proteus . Although the body remains central to postcolonial critique of colonial systems of domination, queerness as émotion in the Senghorian sense of the term, needs further consideration. For if “music is the expression of the possibility that all might be

12 Senghor, Léopold Sédar. “Ce que l’Homme Noir Apporte,” 23.

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well,”13 rhythm is the reassurance that all will be well in the black body that wrestles with the alienation of its labor. Having presented the dialectical conundrums in Proteus informed by the constraints of the first plane in the model, interest is now turned to unpacking the ethics of negotiating of queer presence confronted with epistemic and spiritualized violence against its being. Such an ethical negotiation outlines the work of queerness as depth of desire confronting physical captivity and labor alienation in the remainder of the film. Here focus is on demonstrating how Plane 1 relates to Plane 3 and on identifying the specific forms of ethical negotiation enfleshed therein. Once CB signs his name on the prison’s roster and enters Robben Island, conventional readings of Proteus center on the nature of his relationship with RJ: whether they were occasional or long-term homosexual lovers or not, and the nature of criminal evidence about the sexual acts that cost them their lives.14 While some scholars point to historical criminal records in the Cape of Good Hope as silent on “feelings or relationship,” other treat such silences and gaps in court convictions for sodomy as inviting an effort of imagination to “read meaning into the text…long-lasting emotional homosexual relationship between Jacobsz and Blank.”15 Indeed, reflection on the historical, present, and future significance of Proteus need not be circumvented. There is no doubt that John Greyson and Jack Lewis have set up a stage for thinking queerly through backward induction and forward deduction with their use of anachronism and experimentation in Proteus . However, by forcing a camel (wholeness of presence) to go through the eye of sexual needling only, backward-forward deliberations about Proteus restrict rather than enlarge the appreciation of the film. My reservation here is not with sexuality per se, but with its attributed perspective and purpose. Existing perspectives and counter-perspectives then have a common aim: to prove or disprove sustained romantic entanglements between the 13 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: Routledge, 1973, 306. 14 Newton-King, Susan. “History and Film: A Roundtable Discussion on ‘Proteus.’” Kronos: A Journal of Cape Town History, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2005): 6–33. Especially on page 30–33. 15 Newton-King, Susan. “History and Film: A Roundtable Discussion on ‘Proteus,’”31.

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two main protagonists and in so doing leave one hanging for at least three reasons. First, sexuality-driven concerns tend to negate the queer body as a social cluster of intersecting meanings and agencies, to solely focus on the body as a repository of impersonal libidinal impulses that may be expended in conventional or transgressive ways. Second, the search for homosexuality in the sexual acts in Proteus silences the queerness of womanist love, especially the love of a mother for her son, which becomes a paradigm shifter at critical moments in the film: first when CB enters subcontracted servitude in prison and second, when he exits Robben Island feet first. Third, answers given or withheld reflect the common politics of fixation on sexuality to ontologize queer subjectivities unfolding in Proteus and in so doing fail to account for non-sexual yet queer care between men in the film, namely, !Nanseb-CB’s friendship. The notion of queerness deployed in this book is concerned with the body as a monitored territory of negative dialectical dissent and ecumenical possibilities. It is not concerned with sexual acts (or sodomy as it were) as queer subsidies. While sexual acts may set in motion techniques and strategies for being and becoming queer selves, attention here is on the moves and choices that relationally make and sustain presence as émotion-multiplier. CB’s journey toward self-knowing, selfunderstanding, and self-love as a black indigenous African man brings in not just lavender flowers, but sheaves of imagination, wisdom, and resilience too profound to be limited to the benefit of specific groups only. Thus, overcoming the second problem of evil further requires elaboration of a robust model of ethical engagement with possible worlds. The black subject must now be tried by itself in its own interiority to second gaze the values of its strategies and the depth of the transformation proposed, if any at all. In the previous chapter, it was suggested that the metaphor of Sankofa, the mythical bird in Akan (in Ghana) cosmology that flies forward while looking backward with eggs in its mouth, anchors further elaborations of queer ethics in its transformational and relational dimensions. The metaphor is useful here not because of mind/ful/less mythical turns and returns, but because of the stillness it brings to bear on our knowledge and the praxis of relational modes of being present with the self and with the outer world. For CB, carceral time is a time of trial after his first trial for theft ended with a conviction for insolence. The second trial which ended with a conviction for sodomy has dominated conversations about Proteus even if it does not last the time of the two preludes discussed

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in this chapter. Between both trials though, unfolds a third and much longer trial of CB by himself: a trial that makes carceral time a moment of great transformation and authentic self-discovery. It is a trial that takes him on roads less traveled for the refinement of his subjectivity in ways that further test his ability to overcome the second problem of evil in the vast interiority of his being. Thus far, CB has succeeded in avoiding the canonical citation of his pain in contempt of his community, thus giving personal and collective imagination their right dues in the struggle against colonial oppression. Still, he is yet to confront what Sartre calls “the exile of the heart”16 for an animation of his being as a forest of relational possibilities and sensibilities. “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”17 : Building on the Indigenous from Near and Far The context which facilitates the meeting of CB and RJ is one of colonial convict leasing. Outsourcing prison labor entered colonial historical records in the 18th -century Cape of Good Hope prefiguring what Blackmon Douglas has called Slavery by Another Name in the postemancipation era in the Southern United States.18 In Proteus , a few convicts are selected out of the East India Company’s prison to work for free for Mr. Niven, a contractor who “hopes to popularize the sugarbush in the gardens of Amsterdam,” the motherland (The Netherlands). “As they say, what’s good for the motherland is good for the colony. Or rather vice versa,” says Nevins’s secret lover. The point here is that in the “ideal garden” one can turn the impossible into a possibility with “free labor and a scant budget,” Niven reasons. The East India Company has corporatized native land to make it available to European entrepreneurs, but not all its gardens are fertile to Niven’s satisfaction. He wants to wander farther toward coastal virgin lands to build his acclimatization garden and he does become successful with the help of CB. It is in this garden that

16 Sartre, Jean-Paul, and John MacCombie. “Black Orpheus.” The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1964): 13–52, 20. 17 Armstrong, Louis. “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” In Louis and the Good Book. Decca DL 8741 [12 tracks], 1958. 18 Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II . New York: Anchor books, 2008.

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RJ is first exposed to the naked chest of CB and to his longing gazes that suffer no interruption. When presented with the opportunity to share his knowledge of the names of the indigenous plants with Mr. Niven, CB is a swift bargainer who turns knowledge gaps into monetary reward. As a leased convict, CB displays his hybrid heritage with pride to the colonial entrepreneurs. He is a “bushman” because his grandfather was a bushman and a Hottentot on his mother’s side. He is of two indigenous groups that have historically clashed over lifestyles and economic organization of society, but who also have, over time, learned to risk intimacy with each other. CB then appears as an indigenous, not because of a mythic past, but as the sum of new hybrid interactions that have acquired respect and authentic forms of expression as the foundation and content of development strategy among his people.19 As such, CB casts himself as a non-dualist negotiator who knows exactly where the colonial trap lies in identity classification in the process of looting his homeland’s resources. He does so by choosing to put an end to early denial and present himself as a bushman with intimate knowledge of the native plants and to tell the story of their cosmic, cultural, and therapeutic significance from the perspective of his mother, a Hottentot. In volunteering (cheap) information for pay, CB deploys mimicry to outbid the colonial system. Niven exploits cheap labor and land to develop a garden whose plants are intended for consumption in the motherland. Similarly, CB volunteers cheap knowledge of the plants (calling them cunt and fart) to protect his land and its resources from theft through commercialization, but his real goal is to protect his mother. In the prelude to the film, CB is presented as the only survivor of the massacre of his village. During his first trial, he reveals he had been in servitude to the white colonists with his mother. By the time he is a leased convict, he is made aware of the fact that his mother also escaped the village massacre. This news singlehandedly emboldens CB to bend the arc of his people’s history of alienation with the full strength that a womanist strategy provides. Here is how CB enters negotiation for information exchange for pay to carve out resources for himself within the economics of convict leasing schemes designed to keep profit between the East India Company and its contractors to the peril of the prisoners. 19 Aké, Claude. “Building on the Indigenous.” In International Conference on Popular Participation in the Recovery and Development Process in Africa. Addis Ababa: United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, 1990.

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Niven, East India Company: I hope to record the bushman’s names. CB: But you see, sir, I know them all. My grandfather was a bushman, sir. So, I know all the plants. I’ll tell you everything I know for a reward, sir. Niven: You are a Hottentot and he is a bushman. CB: Yes, sir on my mother’s side. Niven: Can you tell me what these figures are? CB: That’s IKaggen, the Mantis…He is very mysterious, sir. He is always changing shape. Turning into…into a bird from a shoe…foretelling the future, sir. Niven: And this flower? CB: King sugarbush. It is used for making tea…healing the throat…I’ll tell you everything I know for a reward, sir. The money is not for me, it is for my mother. She is up North, sir. She escaped from the kraal before it burned, sir. She got the protection of the three Zebras, the three stars, sir. She has three marks (moles), right here, sir (pointing to his naked left breast). I’ll bring her the money when I get out. Niven: Your sentence is ten years! CB: But I’ll get out, sir, even sooner. But I’ll get out!

Through intertextual and intercontextual symbolic awakening of CB’s memory of his mother’s voice, he offers an exegesis of a colonial and besieged time from a womanist perspective centered on a black woman’s experience and wisdom in the world. Precisely because womanism is committed to valuing voice and representation of the whole community without privileging some members, storytelling through CB takes the allure of an open trial of the undergirding sentiments that colonial entrepreneurs hold toward the colonized. Wilda Gafney rightly notes that a “womanist interpretation makes room at the table of discourse for the perspectives of the least privileged among the community and the honored guest of any background.”20 Niven, the contractor, is not the only character with concerns for the motherland. Lurking in the background of an all-male prison and in CB’s lines, moves, and actions,21 is a woman, a black mother-hood-home-land; the unmistakable ground on which hope for freedom away from the carceral system is rooted. CB is not just an individual prisoner, but a motherless prisoner also. Just as

20 Gafney, C. Wilda. Womanist Midrash: Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne. Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017, 7. 21 Goffman, Erwin. Strategic Interaction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969.

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he could not survive the experience of servitude to the white colonists without his mother, CB summons her spirit to guide his negotiations with Niven through storytelling. More importantly, whatever knowledge he chooses to share for pay, he shares it consciously and parsimoniously with the intention to confuse the colonial entrepreneurs vested in the ideal taxonomies of ordered binomial categorizations of species as either male or female only. To outbid the universalizing pretenses of a dualistic order of knowledge, CB unveils another invitingly creative worldview of queer connections, metamorphoses, fluidity, shape-changing, and bending relationships. Negotiation here is not mere exchange of goods and services. It is from CB’s viewpoint and one that the theologian James Cone would acquiesce to, an unveiling of “a dimension of life beyond the reach of the oppressor, [a worldview of] spiritual beauty and maturity that transcends [colonial] Christianity.”22 In this cosmology of constant movement and transformation, “IKaggen,23 the mantis, always changing shape and turning into among many things…a bird foretelling the future” outwits the colonial logic of (im)possibilities. CB: My mother said that my grandfather said, If you look at IKaggen the moon would get angry and hurl us into the smoke (make all the sugarbush blossom bitter). The moon is red because it is the shoe of Mantis who is IKaggen who threw his shoe up into the sky. The mother is shown making the necklace that CB wears in prison and will later offer to RJ as a sign of peace and reconciliation. In this flashback moment, she talks to CB. CB’s Mother: Your grandfather said, when our bodies are exhausted, when the earth is wet and red, then the smoke from our blood will come and hide us. The memory is too painful. CB stops abruptly and says the following to Niven before resting his bargaining moves. CB: That is all, there is no more.

Most of what CB says remains gibberish to Niven who nevertheless records the story as if told by an impersonal narrator. He fails to read 22 Cone, James. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. New York: Orbis Books, 2013, 161–162. 23 The literature identifies /Kaggen with different spelling. In this book, the form IKaggen is preferred.

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the sadness in CB’s eyes as he tells the legend of the king sugarbush. Despite all his obsession with horticultural binomial taxonomies, Niven is unable to grasp the difference between a happy and bitter blossoming nor will he get that his disrespect for the land and people has already thrusted upon them a time of exhaustion and bitterness. Cluelessness and cold voyeurism are indeed strategic indifference of the (over)privileged who become collectors of stories of the underprivileged without interrogating their own responsibility in perpetuating injustice. In Niven’s repertoire of tales from the jungle, just as with Baudrillardian secondorder simulacrum, the critical discourse of misery is muted in favor of endless cataloging of signs that bear anything but the signs of their time. But precisely because the colonial plantation is not interested in seeing the anger of the moon, the fury of IKaggen, or the exhaustion of black bodies toiling and smoking their blood under its economic policies, it is destined for a bitter harvest. This is what CB’s mother says, this is what a black woman’s experience with the pain of incarceration of black bodies foretells. Worth noticing here is the authoritative memory of the mother’s tale not just because CB remembers, but also because it leads to imagining the possibility of freedom as solidly grounded in community wholeness. The future is imagined as freedom because she who speaks is free. She knows about what it takes to flee from the fires of hatred. Second, she who foretells is protected by the three cosmic zebras who have marked her left breast with three stars, special symbols for a noncompetitive animal–human relational epistemology. Mathias Guenther observes that the Khoisan religious imagination is profoundly therianthropic and its inhabitants are presented so that “they are neither animals nor not animals, nor are they humans nor not humans, both surrendering and retaining one another’s identity and being.”24 Physiology and ecology are in intimate embrace and rock art/body art is the material manifestation of ambiguous mediation between the visible and the invisible nature and nurture. Put differently, dialectical reasoning through negation premised upon dueling ideals and their non-ideal types as immutable categories are unwelcome in this indigenous cosmology. Indigenous cosmology fertilizes imagination with epistemologies and ethics of participative and ecumenical mutability; invitations into not just 24 Guenther, Mathias. Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gathering Cosmology, Volume 1, Therianthropes and Transformation. New York: Palgrave, 2009, 34.

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shared identity but also shared vulnerability. As such, this wisdom is anti-structural and open for the emergence of multiple reconfigurations and transformations into wholeness and interconnectedness of being, and nobody and nothing is exempted from participation. Hence CB’s mother’s body, the zebras, the stars, the moon, IKaggen and even CB’s own body (adorned with a necklace gifted to him by his mother) are not separate discrete units but connective and co-monitored entanglements for mutual transformation. A black mother’s escape from the Boers’ assassination attempt sends hopes of freedom to CB, who was sold to the prison industry system of the day. It is this underlying participative interconnectedness as a lived experience that makes CB affirm in the strongest terms possible and against all objective reasoning, “I will get out, sir, even sooner.” Thus, neither wisdom nor the body which CB inhabits belongs to him alone as an independent, self-sufficient individual. CB, the indigenous, is entangled in a web of relationships that are not imposed on him but that he voluntarily appeals to and relies upon as he enters the merciless territory of trade negotiations with colonial developers. Indigenous cosmic entanglements are not his to make or unmake but his to remember, contemplate and experience. For the spiritual movement of his indigenous cosmology renders impotent the idolatry of names as an end in itself to privilege the dynamics of vulnerable relationships and the mutual reliance sustained therein. In the worldview of colonial appropriation, nomenclature is power. Exclusionary classification by sex and sexual organs is discursively forced upon the indigenous worldview and mind, and CB is expected to accept this new norm without question. This colonial expectation of indigenous acquiescence comes to full view with the dismissal of CB’s description of the three marks on his mother’s breast as a protective covenantal relation between her and the cosmic three zebras, the three stars. Nivens’ secret lover and partner in colonial entrepreneurial ventures, entrepreneurial ventures, emphatically reclassifies the three marks as “Moooles!” as if reprimanding CB for his lack of scientific understanding of his own mother’s body marks. Expectedly, colonial dismissive arrogance relegates to simple epithelial phenomenology which contests its universal dichotomy as representative of all human and non-human life trajectories and experiences. But the issue here is not one of scientific fitness in nomenclature as such, but of (in)difference in perception and affordability of degrees of freedom to the real. In CB’s motherland, nothing and everything is neither this/that

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or not this/that. Affordability of variation, change, modulated shifts, and mutability is a lived reality. Names don’t just do things with words; they are the reality that is (un)done or resting; they are invasive real movements of life and multiplicities that organically attune to the Other. In the world of the colonial developers, sex and sexual organs are categorized and given singular destinies in situ; nothing shifts, everything is deterministic from its genesis. Consequently, the dismissal of CB’s ritualistic invocation of his motherland-cosmos-breast is an epistemic desacralization that turns her body into a meaningless thing open to Baudrillardian paradigmatic rot by design or accident. Cosmically, the dismissal of the life forces that mark her reality cannibalizes indigenous animism, an ecological theology of nearness that celebrates the “mutability […] manifested by hybrid beings and […] transformation that brings them into and out of being, to varying degrees of explicitness, from incipient stirrings of sympathy or attunedness to the animal, through different forms of mimesis, to complete metamorphosis.”25 The horticultural, biological, and evolutionary selection of species in Niven’s colonial garden has no provision for a solidarity outcome between the powerful and the vulnerable, no antidote that “counters the fangs and claw of genetic evolution as well as its two basic movers, chance and law”26 in the Cape of Good Hope. Interestingly, CB strategically chooses to go around the sacrilege by setting aside the work of cultural brokerage and choosing the most important task at hand against fate and law: to get out of physical mental imprisonment sooner rather than later. The Trial of the Subject: Backward-Forward Perspectives and Roads Less Traveled Even when it embodies queerness as defined in this book, the objecting self only involved in disputations with the outer world remains incompletely realized. To restore its sensibilities distorted by oppression, it must travel another road to self-knowledge and retreat (albeit momentarily) from the outer reality that previously called for objections. CB, the prisoner who enters the colonial prison industry complex, is someone whose 25 Guenther, Mathias. Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gathering Cosmology, Volume 1, Therianthropes and Transformation. New York: Palgrave, 2019, 4. 26 McFague, Sallie. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, Press, 1993, 171.

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historical memory and conscious objection to spoliation resonates with African pride and with progressive liberal and nativists viewers alike. In the extraversion of the being, one is said to find solace in challenging inequality in society. But the circumstances that lead to the death of !Nanseb, CB’s playmate, show at best the incompleteness of character; someone who does not easily take responsibility for this action, or is too afraid to do so because of the personal risk and at the expense of his friend and fellow indigenous prisoner. Although CB is very good at challenging the external world of colonial oppression, bravura alone in that arena is incapable of conferring heartfelt insight that enlarges the empathy circle for peer-to-peer acknowledgment as prisoners of the same order of dehumanization. In the outer world, colonial racism is a fatally imperfect language of “‘surface simulacra’… unable to distinguish the outside and inside, between envelopes and their contents.”27 But, in order to secure survival, CB will have to descend into the inner parts of his community of prisoners to build mutually supportive alliances. Upon entering Robben Island, Jacktie is assigned to CB as a guide “to teach him the routine” of prison life. In this role, Jacktie mediates CB’s relations with the other prisoners and with the prison guards. The first lesson that CB learns is that Robben Island is a messy place, and one has to know where the mess is to protect oneself. The second lesson is Jacktie’s true name, !Nanseb, but “the shitface (meaning the white guard) calls everybody Jacktie.” As for CB who refuses to reveal his indigenous name, preferring to be known as CB, his Dutch name, !Nanseb delivers the third lesson as a warning: “You better scrub harder if you want to be ‘blank.’” Arguably, for !Nanseb and CB, the initially nonconsensual pairing of the mentor-mentee turns out to be perspective-changing. For !Nanseb, the first survival lesson is to protect one’s indigenous name against the denial of personhood and authenticity in the imperial world of rigid binary oppositions. CB on the other hand is quick to call himself Jacktie (the generic name given to all prisoners), and to deny within the same breath his bushman identity when pressed by other prisoners. But CB’s generic interpellation of the self and denial of his root worries !Nanseb because the dualist mindset he knows the prison to be modeled after is unforgiving: it is the world of the white settlers against the world of the rest. Moreover, some shit in prison is harder to decipher than other because not all shit is in one’s face and not all shit has a face, !Nanseb 27 Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, 10.

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knows. With this knowledge, he moves to upgrade his role of a mentor to become the protector of CB against the overflow of shit in the “shitdom” of colonial Robben Island. !Nanseb: CB: !Nanseb:

Watch out for the faggot! He is a two-sexer? No, no, just a Dutch faggot.

CB’s identification of RJ as a “two-sexer” is at best polysemic.28 But !Nanseb’s warning is more than a mere display of contempt for RJ; it is profoundly reductionist. That RJ is a two-sexer or faggot does not matter as much as he is said to be just that, just a Dutch faggot. Here then emerges a complication in the indigenous vision of resistance and decolonial freedom: that in fighting imperial macro and microaggressions, !Nanseb feels the need to defend the view that his and CB’s safety exclusively and paradigmatically resides in their ability to fence off the world and its total shit, leaving the mentor-mentee in fellowship with no one else but themselves. Nothing else but cluelessness and self-idolatry as pygmalionic enchantment can be expected to take hold of such a fortified space. This is a very expensive paradigm to construct just for the sake of countering a fleeting glance, a gaze of sameness in the Other. With this strategy, the mentor–mentee may have, by a tour of imagination, discouraged, but certainly not overcome, the totality of the outer world’s expectation—for their presence is still very much required in it. Yet this kind of paradigmatic enclosure could hardly lead to the blossoming or eclosion of worlds29 very much constitutive of the mentor-mentee’s histories, including the history of playfulness even amidst great dangers. The second problem of evil is not just one of blame; it is fundamentally one of foreclosure of the mind and heart. Sartre does well to remind us that “the selfish scorn that white men display for black men is aimed

28 Munro, Brenna. South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle. Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2012 (see page 67). Strobie, Cheryl. “‘Di ta go; ons het dit gedoen; we did it’: Khoekhoe Ethnicity, Sexuality and Temporalities in Proteus.” Critical Arts, Vol. 30, No. 6 (2016): 915–930. 29 Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

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at the deepest recesses of the heart.”30 So, it is within this enclosure of a wounded heart that essentialisms construct fragile solidarities bound to become costly over time lest they turn their subjects into soulless appearances in the emotionless simulacrum of rigidified tribal identity claims. Hence for a little while, the mentor-mentee friendship accommodates habits that over time proved fatal for !Nanseb, who had perfected the art of poaching wild eggs as well as wild anti-queerness conspiracy theories. Just before stealing RJ’s wholeness by making him a Dutch faggot and only that, CB nicknames !Nanseb a “prick” after he catches him poaching penguin’s eggs in the field. When necessary moments of separation from the outer oppressive reality turn into negativity and anti-moments only to solve the problem of political negation of differences, the decolonial venture is in danger of becoming the nightmare it opposes and it may not always see or take this threat seriously. Thus far, poaching wild penguins’ eggs has proven to be mutually beneficial for CB and !Nanseb, and has even secured them a caring leadership role among fellow black and colored prisoners. Dinners have changed from sour to tasteful. The black prisoners’ ward is transformed into a respite from the carceral surveillance apparatus and into an interiority of comfort for the non-ideal forced laborers vindicated by their strategic ability to fool the prison guards who remain clueless about their subversive methods for obtaining healthy food supplies. Still, wild narratives about queerness invasion sustain the solidarity of the prisoners who have managed to evade the prison guards and imagined gay demons. But, over time, smuggling led to excessive self-reference, a form of cluelessness that “efface[s] the preferences of others,”31 therefore calling for a paradigm shift in the restoration of sensibilities, a return of the heart in exile. For it is not just !Nanseb who keeps RJ at bay, CB does too, and in the most violent manner when he finds out that RJ has also been strategic in securing parallel sources for protein. Although CB shares without judgment the eggs that !Nanseb poaches from the field, he calls RJ’s catch “rotten” and disgusting for delighting in his wild games. Although CB is invited to share the secret meal, he prefers to forcefully grab the meat, leading RJ to call him a “cannibal,” a racial slur that 30 Sartre, Jean-Paul, and John MacCombie. “Black Orpheus.” The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1964): 13–52, 20. 31 Chwe, Suk-Young Michael. Jane Austen, Game Theorist. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013, 202.

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provokes more than anger in CB who yells “you stink” at RJ while kicking him in the groin before leaving the scene. To this insult, RJ simply replies, “everybody stinks.” Worth noticing is that this kind of cluelessness toward another that takes place while the grand strategy of resisting and conning the colonial system—at least as far as the food supply goes—seems to be succeeding. But the mental enclosure in which CB has cloistered himself weighs on him as he becomes increasingly careless and a liability for the very model of self-protection based on queerness bashing that !Nanseb so passionately defends. Overconfidence in his self-righteousness turns deadly when CB attempts to humiliate RJ one more time by stripping his butt naked during a routine morning prayer gathering with the prisoners and the guards in attendance. This time, things do not go well. In his defense, RJ strikes back at CB and misses hitting !Nanseb’s chest (heart), where he has been hiding the secret of this smuggling strategy: two penguin’s eggs worn as breasts over his male chest under the rags that cover his body. The image of an exploding male chest revealing leaky breasts provides the colonial masters with an excuse to set !Nanseb as an example for all the prisoners who might be tempted to circumvent law and order in the prison plantation. “Fifteen strokes for stealing food, ten for conspiracy, fifteen for insubordination, and twenty strokes for insulting an official” landed on !Nanseb’s back until he expired after a long and agonizing death. It appears that !Nanseb dies a futile death and the colonial prison masters did not care whether he was guilty or innocent. They never bothered to find out. Still, one cannot help but note the irony that a staunch opponent of queerness on the basis of an exclusivist/purist decolonial project dies so “queerly.” !Nanseb’s leaky chest alone counted as evidence of disrespect, conspiracy, and insubordination against imperial theology, creeds, and prayers. But as Adorno puts it, “in concentration camps it [is] no longer an individual who died, but a specimen…Genocide is the absolute integration.”32 Hence the punishment is complete negation of !Nanseb’s individuality and a hegemonic resolution of the dialectical opposition that leaky male breasts present to the notion of sacredness in imperial theological imagination of the body during the morning recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Earlier in the film, a prison guard encounters both 32 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: Routledge, 1973, 362.

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CB and !Nanseb just after they have returned from poaching wild eggs. Both men hide the eggs under their shirts, giving themselves the allure of queer breasted males, but although the scene looks odd, it did not trigger more than mere puzzlement from the white colonial guard. But once an imperial Christianity enters the scene in contradistinction to the spirit of the Lord’s Prayer, black male leaky breasts reverse the order of terror that assails the Cape. Their revelation amidst mumbled incantations becomes a hyperbolic offense requiring the complete sacrifice of such a body-conspirator as a burned offering to the altar of colonial selfrighteousness; an absolute negation through complete integration of the body and blood of the colonized as the bread and cup of colonial sublime salvation in what is now the Cape of No Hope. !Nanseb dies not for his ideas (a blend of self-protective epistemologies infused with queer evictions), but as an innocent black man lynched on a tree of Christian white supremacy’s arbitrary violence. Still, the poaching game that consolidated indigenous solidarities has turned into a trial of consciousness as it becomes clear that it is CB’s provocation that leads to the death of his friend, playmate, and fellow indigenous prisoner. What then ensues is guilt and a sense of disappointment that render imperative the use of imagination as a new foundation for self-realization after things fall apart. The sight of !Nanseb’s flagellated body hanging over a tree sends CB over the edge and he runs in the field, perhaps as a remorseful Judas about to hang himself, or perhaps as a wretched being in search of wholeness. In any case, !Nanseb’s death instantiates a crisis of contemplation,33 for the whip that claimed his breath also cracked open CB’s world, leaving him without immediate community to rely upon in the corporate prison of the East India Company’s outsourced labor camps. This flight toward oblivion, unlike the first flight in the prelude, will not end by turning CB over to someone else as cargo. There is no hiding place from his tortured conscience, which all of a sudden makes him realize something about himself, something he had previously heard from RJ: everybody stinks, CB included. What a shocker! But it is important to note that CB has fallen neither above nor below anyone else’s expectations but his own, because his universe traumatically ceased to be worldly a long time ago. The tragedy is that CB now locates within himself, what 33 Holmes, Barbara A. Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church. 2nd edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017. See Chapters 1 and 2.

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he thought was a feature of unfit and weak categories kept out of the mental enclosure that he and !Nanseb built for themselves. In the flight to oblivion, he is becoming the things and ideas he left behind as a result of trauma: a foregone conclusion in matters related to sensible presence in the depth of black/African(a) interiority. If there is negotiation, it is of necessity to underscore beyond pygmalionic insecurities, “the concept of humanity itself (as) simultaneously an epiphany and an ecumenical gesture, a concept without which the world, in its thingness, would signify nothing”34 to CB. The epiphany that rescues CB from the despair of the wretched is Sankofa-like and its spiritual basis is more than a mere play of metaphors. For in death, !Nanseb accomplishes more than he did during his anxious physical life in at least two ways. First, on the night his body is nailed to the merciless tree, all prisoners stayed awake, and for the first time in the film, are shown in a panoramic view sharing one space during the impromptu vigil. No prisoner, black, white, or colored, remains indifferent to !Nanseb’s agonized screams every time the whip sends pieces of his flesh flying into the air. Second, CB is shown for the first time crying in a recoiled fetus-like position as he refuses to be consoled by RJ whom he assails once again with a punch in the nose. But, just as he is about to close the relational gate on himself, a ghost-like presence is revealed following him from the back and (barely) touching CB on the right shoulder. Here the black body and soul make another important realization: that it will find in the very thing that the colonial encampment has trivialized—and that is to say in sensible relationship—restoration to wholeness no longer ordered around by the fear of death or the pursuit of pygmalionic essentialisms. As Emilie Towns observes, the deep work of exorcizing structural evil often demands that we write the present in ways that “help us ‘see’ things in tangible ways and ‘feel’ things through intangible means.”35 The mystical here is in the presence that touches, not with the ghost that remains indifferent. The viewer is able to recognize in the invisible hand, made suddenly manifest for a fleeting second, !Nanseb’s gentle hand so powerfully felt that CB forsakes his fetus-like mourning position and tilts toward his 34 Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, 180. 35 Townes, Emilie. Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. New York: Palgrave, 2006, 5.

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back, in the direction where he left RJ with a bleeding nose. But when he turns, all CB sees is a barbed wire fence from the stillness and speechless position he holds as a backward-looking subject. The epiphany of a gentle touch has led to a mystical quickening of the black interior. At last, the black man has shifted position to appear neither as the Greek god proteus we encountered in the prelude, nor as a revolutionary permutating essences or interiorizing manners of conduct, but as a Sankofa sign with the ecumenical depth and breadth necessary to make his relational world a thing. The gentle hand of a friend, now an ancestor, invites CB to second gaze the beaten tracks and to find therein roads fenced off, roads less traveled and yet to be paved. It initiates and guides the cataphatic penetration in the depth of being to birth a different kind of relational presence in the world of multivariate presence. This is rightly a time for cataphatic gestures when “black people ‘stretched their hand to God,’ because they had nowhere to turn”36 and more importantly, a time they stretch their hands as God because they have relationships to invent and build upon anew. That the invisible but relational and caring hand wants CB to take a second look at his footprint is indicative of the ethical demands the discernment it instantiates is supposed to embrace. That is, as Saint Thérese of Lisieux once put it, the willingness to “serenely bear the trial of being displeased with oneself.”37 The only aim here is to provide a needed shelter and permission to the black man to rigorously and gently reexamine his own subjectivity. It is the enactment of negative dialectics, of self-reflection thinking against itself and appreciating ways of knowing and thinking and acting “by the extremity that alludes [each] concept”38 to do justice to all the victims therein. It is indeed an orphic moment when queer resurrections lay the groundwork for the serenity of realistic self-examinations for persons or communities. Recalling the properties of queerness given in the preceding chapter, !Nanseb’s gentle queer touch is relational because it has ceased to be ordered around, it does something to the subject it encounters, it pulls

36 Cone, James. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. New York: Orbis Books, 2013, 23. 37 Peck, Scott. Further Along the Road Less Traveled: The Unending Journey Toward

Spiritual Growth. New York: Touchstone, 1998, 188. 38 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: Routledge, 1973, 365.

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itself toward CB and initiates its own pivotal movement toward relational possibilities. Queerness is indeed a participatory handy craft in the imagination of real possible worlds. Queerness, an undying gentle and adhesive touch at the edge of the competency of essence. !Nanseb’s gesturing hand is ecumenical queer extension because it now encourages greater awareness of CB’s possible worlds and intimates an exegesis of a subject/presence who/that, now more than in the past, “better scrub harder if [it] wants to remain Blank.” But the whole point is counterintuitive as it entails failing, and failing harder, at remaining anything that does not restore wholeness to all in Africana bodies, interiority and worlds, anything that robs it of what Senghor calls a “mysterious forest” of presence possible. From a Sankofa-like perspective, pirouetting might be valuable in the dance for identity negotiation, but it is what lies in the mythical bird’s mouth and its ability to lie there serenely in the first place that qualifies as victory over the second problem of evil. Stillness amidst gyration then suggests an ethical praxis of being and becoming that beholds the rhythm and movement of time without surrendering to its caprices. Stillness in the mouth suggests, through a discourse of the “real” self, the mythical queer subject is always present as self-knowing, self-giving, and life-birthing in Africana’s consciousness and in every generation and context. Ethical stillness is not the end of protest, but the realization that to effectively address the sinuous complexities of the second problem of evil, the objecting self cannot afford to derive its subjectivity solely from without, from the intrusion of life no matter how excitable that life might be. It is the softening up of the colonized’s interiority that blossoms a kind humanity of self-care no longer ordered around by the sheer need to be this and not that. Here, effective presence in one’s body and interiority is the gentle trial of one’s subjectivity with an open mind and heart to the possibility that not every finding will confer personal or collective pride. Indeed, failing to find pride tout court, may just lead to the kind of realistic dissatisfaction that finally places one’s interiority not above or below anyone else’s but on the same footing as one’s practice. Solidly grounded in the present moment, cataphatic serenity unmasks the trappings of ontological and eccentric manipulation of identity claims to initiate an authentic epistemology of the here and now that nego-feminism and womanist ethics envision. Stillness is contemplative in the sense that it allows CB to see himself reflected in the world and the world in him and to realize that the story

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does not have to be the same; at least not when it comes to the depth of desire, because his desire is fundamentally ecumenical. Counterintuitively, the queer hand of !Nanseb refocuses CB’s energies not on the fall (irrespective of how low he might have been), but on the breeze of an evanescing presence and silence as the beginning of a new relational depth. In Werewere Liking’s African adaptation of the myth of Orpheus, it is a similar silence that allows Orphée-D’afric to feel the queer presence of Nyango as a breeze that cajoles his neck, thereby giving him the conviction that though she may have disappeared, Nyango is not dead and needs to be met in the underworld.39 “Why was it that I was able to act upon vaguely felt emotions?…That I had managed to keep myself alive…[and that] had evoked in me vague glimpses of life’s possibilities,” Richard Wright,40 one of the most renowned African American novelists once asked. James Cone, the acclaimed African American theologian, has found these true vaguely felt emotions as glimpses of possibilities in black religion and the blues when blacks were cornered by the double and paradoxical terror of the cross and the lynching tree in the U.S. Thus, when “despair seems to close down the future [,]…the bluesman stubbornly clings to hope…twisting and turning […] sweaty bodies to the ‘low down dirty blues.’”41 Queerness is indeed evanescing and freakishly bluesy. In the colonized Cape of Good Hope, as will be observed in colonial America many years later, it is the crucified who restores sensibilities to humanity by navigating love and loss. Accordingly, !Nanseb then appears as Jesus (anachronistically) blown out of Louis Amstrong’s spellbound quantum trumpet as animated presence for black souls anywhere in a time called “nobody knows the trouble I have seen.”42 Invisible as it is, !Nanseb caring touch is not a transitory appearance in the simulacrum of Baudrillardian constructs for it returns spirit, not infections, to the soul of black bodies, imagination, and territories. !Nanseb’s hand is not “mere survival calls for coldness”43 for it is animated presence in boldness that 39 Liking, Werewere. Orphée D’afric. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1981. 40 Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Harper Collins, 1993, 413. 41 Cone, James H. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. New York: Orbis Books, 2013,

14. 42 Amstrong, Louis. “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” In Louis and the Good Book. Decca DL 8741 [12 tracks], 1958. 43 Adorno, W. Theodore. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: Routledge, 1973, 363.

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resists absolute destruction and integration of the non-ideal into idealtype of hegemonic despair. Perhaps as Nina Simone once put it, !Nanseb’s hand has survived the Devil’s workshop and “gone to and back from hell” so that black men and women created in hell live for eternity wherever they are as life-bearing and giving presences.44 Thus where the journey begins is as important as where it leads. In a breeze and gentle touch, CB begins a new journey that unsurprisingly leads him to rediscover RJ and later unite with him in death, but not before he reunites with this mother in memory. A Drink to !Nanseb as We Jump Ship Accounting for the centrality, pivotal role, and hermeneutical abundance that non-sexual queer care brings to Proteus is not a denial of sexuality, but rather the affirmation that sexuality in the film is but one stem in the sheaves of human blossoming and character development. It is enveloped in a process of negotiating belonging and wrestling with institutional captivity. CB emerges as a reconciled subject ready to second gaze relational possibilities not considered while !Nanseb was physically alive but that he can now facilitate as an ancestor. !Nanseb is the one who initiates CB’s reconciliation with RJ. In the first confrontational scene between the two, CB enjoins RJ to celebrate the memory of !Nanseb: “Drink to !Nanseb. Go on, say it.” A praying mantis (IKaggen) appears in the same scene as if to reassure the couple of the support of nature and of the cosmic forces in favor of reconciliation; IKaggen is a guilt-releasing presence that ritualizes and sacralizes what is said and what goes unsaid in erotic encounters of this sort. Here one sees CB determined to acknowledge the wholeness of his being and belonging by celebrating the memory of those who previously opposed intimate rapprochement between him and RJ. But even as he does, the community of black prisoners shuns him after this affair with RJ is made public: “You can’t sit with us. Fuck off!” they rebuke him. But the couple has found in the strategy of “not confessing” any wrongdoing, a shield against legal persecution and internal misrecognition by other prisoners. What is remarkable about CB is that he never loses sight of his ultimate goal: to get out of prison. In the reconciliation scene with 44 Simone, Nina. “Go to Hell.” In Silk & Soul. Written by Morris Bailey. RCA Studio B [10 tracks], 1967.

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RJ, a toast to !Nanseb is followed by a reminder of what really matters: “You don’t have to worry about me…I will escape next week. I am telling you.” And he came close to leaving the prison to finally reunite with his mother in the North. Except tensions between the settlers and the natives had only intensified and without CB’s knowledge had claimed his mother’s life. Unlike the first village massacre narrated in the prelude, this time settler colonialism has turned black women’s skin into commercialized pouches and CB’s mother breasts are one of those adorning items that land on the Cape governor’s dining table during CB’s and RJ’s trial for sodomy. This time the strategy of the oppressed to not cooperate by submitting a confession to the colonial roster will not be enough. First, RJ defects. Psychological pain has overpowered any physical strength he may have had left. CB, who mentally and physically has resisted the colonial system until the end, also decides to confess to being guilty of sodomy. I submit that this is not primarily out of love for RJ, which is not to say he had none, but only out of the realization that death alone could truly free him. Niven had swayed the court into thinking that CB is immune to unnatural acts such as sodomy, and without his confession, RJ was going to be sentenced to death and CB to a lifetime of servitude on Robben Island. But between the hearings and the sentencing, CB learns from Niven about his mother’s death and is given the pouch made out of her breasts with her three distinctive skin covenantal stars in full view. The scene of CB holding his mother’s breasts turned into a vulgar pouch of colonial advertisement is one the most dramatic scenes in the entire film. Unable to speak, CB only moans, and this sound is what guides the viewers to his unspeakable pain. From this moment onward, CB’s life will never be the same. Colonialism has crushed every hope of freedom by foreclosing a return to the motherland-imagination-cosmos. The convict leasing system has claimed the lives of both his friend !Nanseb and his about-to-be-killed lover, RJ. CB and his people have become in the end a collection of natural history curiosities, monstrous skeletons in the colonial museum, and trendy exotic items in the market of fads. The pouch made out of a mother’s breasts will have to be recycled in the hyperreality of colonial market transactions without its original. CB confesses, because jumping the ship of hyperreal enslavement is the only road to freedom. The sentencing terms are such that legal fees incurred during the sodomy trial will be invoiced to the convicts’ families; which in the case of CB have been murdered by the white settlers and, as

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far as the viewer knows, RJ is an orphan. The public-viewer will have to foot the bill. CB confesses in order to hold onto RJ, who is his only real community left after the death of his mother and !Nanseb. In doing so, he dares the colonial system to deny him companionship and community in his physical death. In their final act of presence on earth, CB and RJ jump the colonial ship of carceral death and marketized fads bonded in chains but looking in each other’s eyes and in the same direction. To the sea they commend their spirits—and this, too, is !Nanseb’s gift to CB. In the end, what the lives of CB and RJ show us is that “whether in birth or death, life is a journey. Part of the journey is on well-worn life paths traversed by ancestors; other roads must be carved out of impossibility.”45 The African proteus, the sea-god, returns to the sea to prophetically animate the world from there.

45 Holmes, Barbara A. Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church. 2nd edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017, 38.

CHAPTER 4

Queer Rattling: The Postcolony and Blasphemous Displacements

Abstract This chapter takes on the analysis of Karmen Gei and the context of the postcolony to leverage a critique of not just homophobia, but of specific modes of queer presentation that are equally problematic also. Counterintuitively, the chapter shows how queerness works paradoxically and with strange bedfellows. Religion in general, and the Catholic Church in particular, is cast in new lights that show openness to fulfilling its highest call to serve and love humanity first. Keywords Queer rattling · Postcolony · Blasphemous displacements · Karmen Geï · Catholic Church · Commandemant · Sufi/Islam · Negation (hybridity) · Operatic · Monumental citation · Religious texts · Identity/non-Identity · Negation (reification) · Carmen principle · Transcendental · Queer conscription · Evangelic · Futuristic spirituality · Divine milieu · Queer discernment · Involution/Evolution · Homeletics · Queer Diaphany · Religion · Kenosis · Self-discernment/Self-aggrandizement

There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling…Within the celebration of the erotic in all our

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. N. Nyeck, African(a) Queer Presence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61225-6_4

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endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision – a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.1 Audre Lorde Somewhere deep within was a ‘place’ beyond all faults and virtues that had to be confirmed before I could run the risk of opening my life up to another. To find ultimate security in an ultimate vulnerability, this is to be loved.2 Howard Thurman Theology, formally defined, has the task of enlarging the borders of our language. A theology that could wrest land away from the sea of speechless death would be a theology worthy of that name.3 Sölle, Dorothee Black poetry is evangelic, it announces good news: Blackness has been discovered.4 Jean-Paul Satre

If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.5 Psalm 139:9–10 O God, take away the words of the devil That mix with my prayer— If not, then take my prayer as it is, devil and all.6 Rabi’a Al- ‘Adawiyya

1 Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider and other Speeches. Freedom: Crossing Press, 200X, 53. Emphasis added. 2 Emphasis added. 3 Soelle, Dorothee. Suffering. Fortress Press, 1975, 7. 4 Sartre, Jean-Paul, and John MacCombie. “Black Orpheus.” The Massachusetts Review,

Vol. 6, No. 1 (1964): 13–52, 20. 5 The Bible, The New Revised Standard Version. 6 Upton, Charles. Doorkeeper of the Heart: Versions of Rabi’a. New York: PIR press,

2003, 13.

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The previous chapter examined how queerness scrutinizes and transforms categorical negation in the ideal/non-identity traumas of colonial encounters. We now turn to the postcolonial context, which corresponds to the second and negative plane (Fig. 2.1) of the analytical model proposed in this book. Queerness in this plane wrestles with a double negation emerging from, on one hand, the contradictions and paradoxes that colonial encounters generated (anti-colonial hegemony), and on the other hand from the politics of singular difference (heteronormativity) in postcolonial modes of self-affirmation. The hybridity of negation in this plane threatens queerness with alienation because the hand that wounds here is paradoxically the one that heals also, or at least the one whose participation in the healing process is desired. One cannot imagine a future outside of the postcolonial/decolonial fellowship even as one suffers at its hand. This chapter explores the contours of effective queerness presence at the intersection of these two negative modes of sociopolitical and religious encounters Karmen Geï (2001) by Joseph Gaï Ramaka. I begin by situating the film in light of the debates and analytic model proposed in this book. Second, I provide an interpretation and critique of the film in conversation with the theoretic muses outlined in Chapter 2, always holding the first and second problem of evil as a litmus test for queerness in relation to and in negotiation with the postcolonial milieu. In each case, an ethic of engagement is outlined based on relational depth as either transformational or simply transactional and therefore pygmalionic.

Karmen Ge¨i: The Operatic Thing and Its Advent Carmen by Georges Bizet is one of the best-known operas in the world, and its success has been moving upward since the first performance in 1875 in Paris. In the original opera, Carmen, a young gypsy, is a femme fatale whose power of seduction leaves trails of tears in the hearts of men who fall in love with her in Seville. Hers is not a relational depth with men as she is unable to reciprocate love, affection, and respect. “If you do not love me; I love you; But if I love you, if I love you, beware!” is the leitmotiv score of Carmen as a rebel. Carmen is finally killed by Don José, a jealous corporal she had unceremoniously abandoned for Escamillio, a toreador. Karmen Gei is the first adaption of Bizet’s Carmen in Africa and as such, a monumental undertaking by Joseph Gaï Ramaka. While Ramaka’s adaptation safeguards the rebellious and unruly character

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of Carmen in Karmen, the African heroine’s seduction strategies involve both women and men to get what she wants. She starts with Angélique, the warden at a prison where Karmen is detained, and follows up with Corporal Lamine Diop, whom she later abandons for Massigi, a rising artist. Angélique commits suicide and Lamine kills Karmen at the end to salvage his honor. Despite its acclaimed reception in the West, Karmen Geï became the proverbial mountain that gave birth to a mouse in Senegal. Several weeks after its release in 2001, Karmen Geï (henceforth KG/Karmen), was banned in Senegal following the outrage and protests about its lesbian plot and more specifically about the use of a sacred Muslim song during the scenes that depict the Catholic funeral of Angélique, Karmen’s female lover. Ayo Coly has concluded that the contention was not about the representation of nonheteronormative sexualities but rather what was perceived as an inappropriate use and blasphemous displacement of religious texts: the use of Muslim praise poems in a Catholic church to accompany the burial of a lesbian. Without this “misappropriation” of religious texts, Karmen Geï may have enjoyed a very smooth and uneventful run in Senegal.”7 Coly further posits that “queerness in the postcolony is an inside job…an intrinsic postcolonial modality of power relations.”8 From this perspective, Ramaka’s innovation is at least twofold. Firstly, he reinvents Carmen as a “bisexual libertine” in a context of heteropatriarchal hegemonies informed by an “increasingly radicalized, Moslem majority and a nascent, yet burgeoning, homophobia.”9 So conceived, KG fits the model outlined in Fig. 2.1 and grounds social and religious tension between ideal and non-ideal sexuality as the backbone of dialectical encounters that queerness provokes in Senegal. Secondly, by queering Carmen in the postcolony, Ramaka’s film suggests that “the

7 Coly, Ayo. “Carmen Goes Postcolonial, Carmen Goes Queer: Thinking the Postcolonial as Queer.” Culture, Theory and Critique, Vol. 57, No. 3 (2015): 16. 8 Coly Ayo. “Carmen Goes Postcolonial, Carmen Goes Queer: Thinking the Postcolonial as Queer,” 1. 9 Coly Ayo. “Carmen Goes Postcolonial, Carmen Goes Queer: Thinking the Postcolonial as Queer,” 1.

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queer is organic to the postcolonial”10 as a sign of specific power modalities in the postcolony, namely, resistance and subjectivity. Thus, if in Coly’s first claim non-ideal sexuality introduces a socio-cultural negation, dialectic is erased in the second assertion by moving queerness inside the belly of the postcolonial heteronormativized ideal (following our model). In fact, queerness is not moved as if by an invisible hand, it effortlessly and unidirectionally goes in the postcolony and arguably, “it takes itself” there as if irresistibly attracted to or recognized by postcolonial internal self-disruptive logic of contingency. Hence, by taking itself to the interiority of the postcolony, queerness becomes a player in the “fair game for poaching,”11 making it sometimes an accomplice of structural oppression and other times a signifier of critical meanings embodied in everyday practices. Thus, by reformulating the terms of engagement between queerness and the postcolony beyond a binary trap of a dialectical model, and by attending to possible complicit power alliances with queerness inside the belly of the postcolony, Coly concludes that it is prudent to approach KG not as “an identity location but rather a modality of postcolonial power relations. As such, queerness in the postcolony does not predate or outlive its enunciation […] The film [KG] appropriately frames Karmen as an irruption, an unplanned event, whose occurrence interrupts, diverts, directs and confounds.”12 Hence, Coly successfully “houses” queerness within the power structures of the postcolony as a subcategory of “indigenous repertoires” primarily constituted of nonidentitarian assemblages of counter hegemonic multiplicities of affect, feelings and information (following Puar). Still, even if one concedes to Ayo Coly the non-centrality of identitarian pursuits per se, conscripting queer subjectivity into modes of resistance and/or complicity only raises ethical concerns. One implication is that following this logic, one can only derive queerness values through the lenses of the multivalent assemblages/discourses and performances of disruption that traverse the postcolony, but queerness is not understood for its own sake. Setting aside identitarian pursuits by way 10 Coly Ayo. “Carmen Goes Postcolonial, Carmen Goes Queer: Thinking the Postcolonial as Queer,” 2. 11 Coly Ayo. “Carmen Goes Postcolonial, Carmen Goes Queer: Thinking the Postcolonial as Queer,” 4. 12 Coly Ayo. “Carmen Goes Postcolonial, Carmen Goes Queer: Thinking the Postcolonial as Queer,” 5.

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of domestication/indigenization/conscription of queerness this way does not lend itself to considering identity as a possible source of grounded ethics (of dis/location and power)—even if the perspective effectively rescues queerness from artificial construction of its presence as alien to the postcolony. Symbolically, queerness is consumed but there is no depth of communion with the postcolony given the looming threat of complicity and/or betrayal. Even where queerness is given an inside job, such a construct may only soften some binaries, but it does not eliminate suspicion. “Beware!” indeed remains, a constant chorus in the postcolony queered this way. Finally, by not raising questions about the qualitative attributes of queerness that go postcolonial in the first place, authoritative pronouncements within the postcolony are maintained as heteronormativized prerogatives. The queer that goes postcolonial is, from an ethical perspective, simply in the state of receivership and the question of its future trajectories is simply not raised. In KG this queer, primarily embodied by Karmen, is given perverse incentives, saving only itself without regard to any other person or community. This queer that goes postcolonial is a saboteur and slayer of one’s fellows’ feelings in the postcolony itself now turned into a passe-temps of senseless manipulations. Gone postcolonial, the actions of this queer, through intimate betrayal and arrogance, are worse than when it was deemed “foreign,” hanging out there as a curious happenstance in postcolonial homophobic imagination. Karmen, she who creates havoc,13 is said to be in search of freedom, but this freedom is mistakenly construed as queer and does not rise to the ethical expectation of queerness articulated in this book. Resistance may be her brand name, but Karmen resists extremely and singularly, not even her shadow survives her recklessness. Consequently, the inside job of queerness so construed is ethically a dirty and dangerous job generation after generation. Prabhu points to the scandalous character of Karmen noting the “monumental” mode of representation of the heroine as “impermeable to interpretation and resistant to critical discourses.”14 Female agency so construed as iconic and monumental is hermetically sealed as magnificent 13 Stobie, Cheryl. “She Who Creates Havoc Is Here”: A Queer Bisexual Reading of Sexuality, Dance, and Social Critique in Karmen Geï.” Research in African Literatures, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer 2016): 84–103. 14 Prabhu, Anjali. “Female Agency in Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen Geï.” Cinema Journal, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Summer 2021): 66–86, 66.

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and does not easily lend itself to the hermeneutics of being and practice. Karmen’s struggle is not knowable because she has no emotional connection and her erotic encounters never acquire meaning beyond the specific circumstances. Moreover, even if the heroines of Senegal’s past lend their aura to Karmen, “there is no gesture to indicate any meaningful female society in terms of reality or myth”15 that is formed as a result of Karmen’s seduction games. In fact, Karmen announces the end of intentional and lasting solidarity among Black women and the advent of perpetual traumatization of Black men. The omnipresence of the death imperative in KG has made some wonder about the meaninglessness of the film’s queer edge. For Ekotto, queerness is introduced in KG just to give it an indecent burial and on this observation, the film fails to engage in meaningful conversation about gender diversity and sexual orientations in Senegal. From this perspective, the film “illustrates the filmmaker’ underlying reestablishment of the patriarchal order, which shows how difficult it continues to be to confront the oppression, marginalization and alienation of women in West Africa and around the world,”16 Ekotto contends. Put differently, while KG exhibits queer desire as subject to reckless consumerism, it imperfectly provides us with an ethics of presence beyond the subjectivity of resistance; KG has no path out of the double victimization in Plane 2 (Fig. 2.1). In some ways, KG encloses queer presence in a Baudrillardian seduction game within a phallic/non-phallic structure by casting the heroine as a bisexual femme fatale who dissociates from the pain and misery of her fellow human beings by way of interpersonal negation, microaggressions, and by way of an unqualifiable disrespect of public institutions. Unlike the actual feminine principle in the model that Baudrillard proposes (Chapter 2), Karmen passes through to the other side of postcolonial erotic sexual frontiers and crosses the social taboos of its ideal norms. Yet, Black Karmen carries the burden of strength hyperbolically and hers is not a critique of sexual norms for the sake of their transformation. Karmen’s

15 Prabhu, Anjali. “Female Agency in Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen Geï,” 72. 16 Ekotto, Frieda. “The Erotic Tale of Karmen Gei: The Taboo of Female Homosexu-

ality in Senegal.” Xavier Review, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2007): 74–80. Print.

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seduction leaves the structure of hierarchical and dichotomous postcolonial queer domination intact while operating on the sublimation of desire for egoistic ends only. Karmen, the character, is the epitome of a sovereign hyperreal construct of desire and eroticism through the illusion of a parallel universe of non-structural enactment of limitless power as an epiphany of form only, without the depth of feeling or presence. Moreover, noncommitment to (any) critical identity and to transformational critique of sociopolitical structures enacts sovereign seduction as necrophilia. Karmen knows no other way than to duel or challenge and, even when she faces death, she is irreversibly allergic to social critique let alone selfexamination. Self-enhanced, self-justified, and self-referenced, she denies the possibility of her own decay by foreclosing relational ventures with non-ideal categories defined as subjectivities (men and women) who submit to, rather than dominate, the stirring invitations of the love impulse. “If you do not love me; I love you; But if I love you, if I love you, beware!” betrays the premise of nego-feminism and cannot fully represent the idea of queerness as defined in this book. In the endless game of “if yes then always no/if no then always yes with a surplus threat,” Karmen violates a fundamental principle of queer erotic as power, namely, the affirmation and conviction that “the erotic is not a question of only what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing…[because] the aim of each thing we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible.”17 Karmen, the character, cannot enrich queerness because she does not give herself permission to feel in the first place. The implication is that sex and sexuality alone, without an ethical commitment to something beyond the particular circumstances, lack depth to holistically address the problem of double negation of queerness in the postcolony. Mine then is not an ethic of libidinal overflow; it is a relational search for commitment to identity that does not save us from social institutions but instead transforms them through effectively embodied wholeness. The African heroine, Karmen, makes her own rules and takes none. Her parallel universe of non-commitment to any identity (sexual or otherwise) is antithetical to ethical queer relationality, imagination, and possible future.

17 Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. California: The Crossing, 2007, 55.

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The African Karmen hyper-realizes negation as a noncooperative power game against the self and society that ends with everybody irreversibly mutilated one way or another. Lamine’s marriage is broken, public taxation is evaded due to the illegal smuggling activities Karmen organizes; insecurity increases everywhere but only she breaks in and out of prisons at will; trust in public institutions is nonexistent in her parallel universe; misallocation of public resources for private ends is her idea of governance; and the rise of mental illness among the men who come in contact with her is irreversible. Lamine’s wife desperately tries to reason with her husband under Karmen’s spell just to be told: “laisse moi comprendre ce qui m’arrive/Let me understand what is happening to me!” But of understanding Lamine will acquire none; he is the victim and executioner of a hyperbolic tragedy. When Lamine’s wife pleads with Karmen for the release of her husband, her lamentation and supplication fall on deaf ears. Later, Karmen will attempt to repair the damage by sending Lamine off with a bag full of money, because in Karmen’s world, everything and everybody is a transaction and the highest bidder always wins. Angélique, Karmen’s first female lover, is also the first to die. All this havoc unleashed is better appreciated as systemic disruption rather than minority pain, the suicide of Angélique included. Karmen is a hyperreal seduction principle that aggregates power so that it can mutilate and incapacitate individually. Game theory does not prepare us to encounter “the Carmen principle” of all-out strategies of “if yes then always no,” and then “always yes” augmented with anxiety. Dealing with Karmen is no guesswork; she preemptively announces herself as a player whose tactics modify not only the cooperative/noncooperative forms of the game itself, but the behavior of the other players as well. Whereas game theory makes the assumption that choice is all about optimal identification of available options, it does not query the possibility of behavioral modification in the course of the game that is not explained by the rules of the game itself. While it may consider the manipulation of options, it does not account for the manipulation of agency itself. Karmen’s manipulation game helps clarify this observation. Her decisional tree is a very simple one. Let’s consider the options: If person A falls in love with Karmen, Karmen will reject person A (Accept-Reject). The problem is, the story will still not end here, and even if it did, one is left to deal with the negative feelings of rejection. But Karmen’s rejection is never polite, it takes place only when her partners are in the most vulnerable position in the relationship. Rejection turns all

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of them insane. If person A does not fall in love with Karmen, Karmen is in love with person A but only as a threat that would be foolish to downplay (Reject-Accept as neither yes nor no, but as a warning). Any choice after Karmen’s love loses its integrity. Her warning introduces a behavioral modification that complicates the quality of choice to stay or leave and the immorality of the game leaves no one standing. Whether through acceptance or rejection, no one is able to play a “fair game” with Karmen. It is obvious that at the societal and individual levels, characters are overwhelmed by Karmen. But even focusing on strategy as an option between alternatives does not help us see anyone else but Karmen as strategic. It is an impossible manipulation game that characters play nevertheless, and they seemed to be locked in only two outcomes: self-destruct, or destroy Karmen. There is, however, a third possibility that works counterintuitively toward the transformation of the game itself by invoking a higher principle of transcendental relational ethics that bends or softens the rough edges of Karmen. For other queer selves, strategy from this third space is a question of locating within oneself the resources needed to meaningfully survive one’s encounter with Karmen in a context of double victimization in the postcolony. For neither the hatred of, nor the love for Karmen is affordable. Responsive negation is not the disappearance of the thing negated. Quite the contrary, it is the widening of the staring eyes of the object of hate; eyes that cannot be ignored because they are always producing the permanence of a reverse perspective. Alternatively, to confuse Karmen’s manipulation for love is to acquiesce to unsustainable anxious queer futures. Transcendental relational ethics then has to take both self-destruction and Karmen’s ruin as partial solutions that must be brought together under a new strategy with a new challenge: the preservation, not the distortion, of life. There is no paradox here. The transcendental relational ethics would abhor “civil war” while recognizing that something needs to be given up in order for something else to take place. The strategy of self-annihilation only brings desolation to Karmen’s lovers and the same holds with the outcome of Karmen’s destruction. Either way, without a transcendental overture, life and death with or without Karmen brings no consolation because it is condemned to meaninglessness. A third strategy would then seek to uphold and rise higher than destruction-bound options to safeguard the human spirit so conflicted. To get there, however, requires willingness to see with new eyes what is, and what is seen and unseen in the depth of the strategy, the depth

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of feeling starting with the discernment of thoughts and dreams that stir imagination of futures possible. Here it is important to recognize not just the choice of characters, but what hangs over them, their sources, and inner movement toward transformation.

Angélique: Queer Conscription and the Deconstruction of the Thing As Adorno would put it, Karmen diversifies pain without the hope of individual healing/realization/redemption. Karmen is absolutization of chaos, lamentation, fragmentation, and the automatization of autonomy in the postcolony. Yet, queerness as posited in this book is very much present in the film, but not necessarily where it has been assumed to be. The figure of Angélique provides us with a richer perspective on KG, not owing to her sexuality per se, but precisely because of what she is not or refuses to be in contrast to Karmen, who goes literally and figuratively postcolonial. Angélique’s queerness is evangelic in the sense that it announces the good news of social, spiritual, and institutional transformation by preceding their enactment through effective and struggled presence. In Karmen Geï , it is argued that narrowing the idea of queerness to the opening scene where sexuality is displayed as a “private” act that unleashes havoc on persons and society is problematic. Here, attention is given to not just the opening scene, but also to the contrasting ways in which the lives of Karmen and Angélique evolve and end to unpack the ethical premise of negotiating a soulful animated presence in the postcolony and within the larger Africana communities. It is noteworthy that scholars and commentators have underappreciated the depth of the character of Angélique and have treated her as a postcolonial conscript in two ways: either as yet another casualty of Karmen’s recklessness, or as part of the hegemonic instantiation of postcolonial power needing to be challenged. In the first instance, the status of a victim elicits sympathy with Angélique who, like Karmen’s male lovers in the film, is deeply wounded by the feeling of rejection. But this sympathy is short-lived as Angélique has primarily been presented as a negation of freedom, which Karmen incarnates in the postcolony. To use a game theoretical analogy, Angélique is the first node in the decisional tree of Karmen’s choice of entrance in the postcolony, and Karmen’s leading choice is to reject the warden and escape to the other shore, the “mainland” of postcolonial existence. Here then is the paradox

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of queer conscription without ethical consideration in the postcolony: it turns queer subjects against each other as long as affinities and possibilities of betrayal remain tangible and dominant in the matrix of postcolonial power relations. If KG, the film, is what goes postcolonial, what do we make of Karmen’s rejection of Angélique in her movement toward problematic self-emancipation? In contrast, if only Karmen, the character, goes postcolonial, where do we park the queerness of Angélique along with the other possibilities such a character offers to imagining queer futures in postcolonial/decolonial moments and spaces? To envision where these questions could lead us is to commit to restoring wholeness to Angélique in the first place. The choice of the name “Angélique” (angelic/angel-like) as a lover of Karmen sets up an encounter with two rationales of seduction and presence; two possible ways of understanding the place and function of love and affect in the making of the postcolonial/decolonial moment whereby the thing to be confronted is not a person or political system of oppression out there, but our own sensibilities in here. One rationale is self-centered, the other self-discerning and reflexive. One is irruptive and the other evolutive. Angélique does not hold a claim to a particular position as much as a commitment to moving and being moved, learning, failing, discerning, falling, maturing, living, dying, and resurrecting. Angélique is not about a goal to be attained as much as a road to be taken. Vulnerability is the practice of everyday higher queer awareness and presence drawing from and negotiating with everything that is, seen and unseen in postcolonial/Africana spaces and futures. Angélique is a lesbian but also a metaphor for the search for grounded presence through meaning-making that responsibly restores the low and high tides of existence, possibilities, dreams, and futures to the Africana’s soul. While Karmen Geï ’s setting in Senegal gives a contextual accent to the heroine’s name, Angélique is a minority perspective that brings to mind the minority status of the (Roman Catholic) Church in a predominantly Muslim country. Angélique is, from this perspective, a minority within a minority. Consequently, complementing the sociopolitical analyses of KG, the spiritual/transcendental significance of the names that Angélique bears is worth considering in the elaboration of a higher Africana ethics of presence and relationality. She is not just any desire, but eroticism channeled and catalyzed toward higher humanist ends. If as previously stated mine is not a concern about libidinal overflows, a higher ground for relationality is intended to rekindle sensible wholeness as animated kenosis or

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what Obioma Nnaemeka terms the “pruning of Africa’s way” in everyday settings and decision-making processes. To be like a thing, is to be not quite there or here only, but to be somewhere in-between; to be in a third space. This third space is crucial to the politics of negotiation with Africana’s critical consciousness because it is life-centric. As Obioma Nnaemeka puts it, “the work of women in Africa is located at the boundary of where the academy meets what lies beyond it, a third space where the immediacy of lived experience gives form to theory, allows simultaneous gestures of theorizing practice and practicing theory, and anticipates the mediation of policy.”18 Angélique, through the embodiment of her name’s significance, her queries, failures, silences, and choices, draws us closer to the shores of this third space of theory and practices of queerness as conscious harmony with the cosmos. By restoring the transcendental principle and by divinizing everyday encounters as theory worthy, Angélique personifies Négritude as a spiritual awakening of matter as critical consciousness. In his homage to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Senghor explains that he speaks neither as a Christian nor a politician, but as a black intellectual and a believer (croyant ) in search of truth. After being scandalized by Catholic bourgeoisie in France and by the impasse of the nothingness of conscience of material determinism, Senghor found in the Jesuit scientist’s futuristic spirituality, elements of clarification of the Négritude project.19 In his most famous work, Teilhard de Chardin “offers an optimistic future-focused spirituality that, when translated into daily attitudes and behavior, shows [us] how to live consciously and constantly in the divine atmosphere that he calls the divine milieu. He teaches [us], first how to see with new eyes not only the visible dimensions of God’s love, which anyone can see, but the invisible dimensions at well; then second, to see not only what is present but also what is to come.”20 One of the characteristics of the divine milieu, or the center of centers, is “the

18 Nnaemeka, Obioma. “Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way.” Signs, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2004): 357–385, 377. 19 Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Éloge de Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Enregistrement Historiques. Présentation de Philippe Sainteny. Vincennes: Librairie Frémeaux, 2016. 20 Savary, Louis W. Teilhard de Chardin: The Divine Milieu Explained: A Spirituality for the 21st Century. New York: Paulist Press, 2007, xvi.

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ease with which it assembles and harmonizes within itself qualities which appear to us to be contradictory… Without the least confusion.”21 Teilhard de Chardin has been rightly called a mystic and his “emphasis on the importance of scientific knowledge with its insistence on experience of the physical world sets his mysticism apart. Yet, despite the predominance of scientific imagery and content, Teilhard was not trying to propose a scientific theory or system. Instead, in his religious essays he was attempting to share his mystical experience so that he could ‘propagate … a certain taste, a certain perception of the beauty, the pathos, and the unity of being.’”22 One of the greatest ideas that Teilhard de Chardin brings to science, philosophy, and spirituality is that matter continually divides and differentiates. Added complexity does not distort the center of life that animates matter. Put explicitly, “matter suggests a unity (one that is only apparent) in which all distinction is lost. But the living cell has unity wherein the particular quality of each element – its form – is further intensified. The living organism does not dissolve the specific character of its elements, it needs this character, it accentuates it, into a more complex whole.”23 The descent and ascent between complexity, differentiation, and unity are predicated upon the transformation of species whereby object and subject emerge simultaneously in a circle of coautonomizing surrenders kindled by transforming energy-consciousness, understood as Christ, the transcendental principle. Teilhard de Chardin’s contribution was to show that evolutionary matter actually matters in any spiritual/conscious process, a view that was received with suspicion within the Catholic Church while he was alive. Evolutionary spirituality meant that it is the world in which we live in now and its transformation that become central to understanding God’s presence in the world, not some imaginary sinful past. Teilhard’s innovative spirituality only gained recognition after his death and has since spilled over to ecumenical movement beyond the Catholic Church.

21 Chardin (de), Teilhard. The Divine Milieu. New York: HarperCollins, 1960, 84. 22 Duffy, Kathleen, SSJ. Teilhard’s Mysticism: Seeing the Inner Face of Evolution. New

York: Orbis books, 2014, 1. 23 King, Thomas. Teilhard’s Mysticism of Knowing. New York: The Seabury Press, 1981,

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Savary24 notes that not many writers have attempted to translate Teilhard de Chardin’s understanding of evolution of the matter as a spiritual process of transformation into practical exercises. This observation certainly stands true in the continent of Africa with one exception. It is Senghor who drew from Teilhard de Chardin’s mysticism practical implication for Black cultural imagination in his later rendition of Négritude as new humanism of animated persons, and he found in Black rhythm a corresponding transcendental principle to Teilhard’s Christian Christ. Senghor, however, did not draw up a specific method as “exercises”25 following the Jesuit tradition that Teilhard de Chardin belonged to, but instead laid out the qualifiers and sources of vitality for Africana wholeness and futures. Senghor hailed Teilhardism as a way out of the contradiction of Marxism with respect to Africa’s quest for freedom. Senghor put mind to (Africana’s) matter not by way of invention, but by showing via a Teilhardian reformulation of Négritude, its ever-expansive presence as radial energy that animates Black interiority and futures. Where Teilhard de Chardin sees matter as imbued with the presence of the cosmic Christ, Senghor conceives of matter as Black bodies animated with lifegiving consciousness that feeds the world. By giving flesh to reason, Senghor, in his deployment of émotion as vital energy, presented a prerequisite to the realization of a divine milieu. To be complete, unification through the kindling of spirits must descend from the head to the heart…It is faith in progress, progress that is neither about raising the quality of life nor the sweetness of living, but a movement that carries Humanity, and in it, individuals realizing their more-being (sur-être)”26 without distortion or depersonalization. What Teilhard de Chardin terms the divinization/sanctification of everyday activities27 is to Senghor the 24 Savary, Louis W. Teilhard de Chardin: The Divine Milieu Explained. A Spirituality for the 21st Century, xvi. 25 Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Personal Writings. Translated by Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean. New York: Penguin Classics, 1996. See pp. 281–359. 26 “L’unification, par échauffement des esprits, doit, pour être, complète descendre de la tête au cœur … C’est la foi au Progrès, en un progrès qui n’est ni l’élévation du niveau de vie, ni la douceur de vivre, mais le mouvement qui porte l’Humanité et, dans celle-ci, les individus, vers toujours plus-être” Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Cahiers Pierre Teilhard de Chardin no. 3 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin et la Politique Africaine. Paris: Seuil, 1962, 55–56. 27 Chardin (de), Teilhard. The Divine Milieu. London: Williams Collins & Co., 1960.

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socialization of love, the evolution of love, the meeting of the hearts, the technical and spiritual organization of societies toward a panhuman convergence. Thus, scientific and cultural values of the heart that eschew (religious, racial, sexual …etc.) hatred are the wreath of Senghorian practical humanism which requires that we work hard to uproot the forces that inferiorize Africana’s personhood, and this means becoming aware of and accounting for our diverse complexity and orientations through co-reflections (palaver). This is clearly love at the Omega point of wholeness as the matrix of freedom that trans-humanizes and that is to say, renders transparent and intelligible other human beings’ worthiness and goodness. Love, as Gary Wilner notes, is to Senghor well-being and more-being.28 The implication for sexuality is, one might say that evolution depends on healthy sexuality. The love between persons creates a thread of passionate energy that winds around the embrace of persons and enters into the heart of the cosmos, contributing to the energetic movement of universal convergence. Love is what “makes the world go ‘round.’” It is fundamental to the forward movement of evolution and cosmic personalization. It is the whole of every whole, the open, dynamic field of energy that seeks greater wholeness within every star, leaf, plant, and galaxy. The sheer power of energy of personal/sexual love must reach out to the wider realm of humanity that includes love of the neighbor, friendship, and love of the stranger. Love, sex, and cosmic evolution are intertwined in a field of integral wholeness; to deny, avoid, or negate any of them is to thwart the process of deepening life.29

Involution/Evolution as Queer Discernment Commentators and scholars alike have not taken notice of the fact that of all characters in KG, Angélique is the only one who barely has a voice; she is almost mute. She has but a few seconds of oral communication and this economy of words invites the viewers to relate to her primarily through the depth of feeling. Angélique’s presence in the film can be divided in four important moments: (a) the opening scene which ends with Karmen 28 Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time: Négritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. 29 Delio, Ilia. The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love. New York: Orbis books, 2013, 51.

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leaving the island for the mainland, (b) Angélique’s visit to the shore of the mainland to plead with Karmen’s mother, (c) Angélique’s attempts to find a replacement for Karmen, (d) and finally Angélique’s death and eulogy. Each of these moments accounts for the evolution of the character wrestling with hybrid negation of Plane 2 (Fig. 2.1). In discussing Karmen Geï , existing commentaries and analyses have overdrawn from the opening scene inferences about what constitutes queerness and its inner work in the postcolony. The homoerotic sbar dance of the opening scene is said to “point to a repertoire of tactics that the dominated use to clear for themselves spaces of corporeal autonomy,”30 as well as a subversive moment of commandement (state power/command) disenchantment. In this scene, the dance sbar is said to be “theatrical performance of erotic autonomy … The successful seduction of the khaki-clad and stiff female warden by Karmen.”31 For Strobie, “the seductive dance performed by Karmen interpellates the viewer into succumbing imaginatively as Angélique does physically, crossing the borders of country, class, gender, or sexuality.”32 That Angélique works as a prison warden within a structure of containment is not what is contested here, but her exclusive association with dominant power as an accomplice. Angélique thrust in a subversive dance of her own deconstruction as an alleged personification of commandement is far-fetched. Mbembe painstakingly defines commandement as a specific way of imagining state sovereignty rooted in the violence of (post)colonial founding moments, that of self-legitimation, and in the violence of selfreiteration in search for permanence.33 In fact, the character of Angélique violates the constitutive premises of commandement in several ways, starting with the dance sbar. In theorizing commandement Mbembe writes, “one characteristic of commandement in the colonies was to

30 Coly, Ayo. “Carmen Goes Postcolonial, Carmen Goes Queer: Thinking the Postcolonial as Queer.” Culture, Theory and Critique, Vol. 57, No. 3 (2015): 8. 31 Coly, Ayo. “Carmen Goes Postcolonial, Carmen Goes Queer: Thinking the

Postcolonial as Queer,” 8. 32 Strobie, Cheryl. “‘She Who Creates Havoc Is Here’: Queer Bisexual Reading of Sexuality, Dance, and Social Critique in Karmen Geï.” Research in African Literatures, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer 2016): 91. 33 Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Los Angeles: California University Press, 2001, 25–26.

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confuse between the public and the private; the agents of the commandement could, at any moment usurp the law and, in the name of the state, exercise it for purely private ends.”34 Angélique exhibits no such confusion, and her body language communicates, as others note, caution and reserve. Although not omnipotent, commandement is omnipresent in the postcolony. Yet, the dialogical distribution of oral presence in the African interpretation of Carmen makes Angélique the figure who least personifies the idea of commandement . She is a one-line character. Furthermore, it is not Angélique who initiates the dance but Karmen. Unlike Karmen, Angélique’s erotic desire is always mediated in this opening scene, by silence. She is not heard but felt with the help of a nameless prison guard to whom she nods to approve the sleeping arrangement for the night that frees Karmen. How Angélique comes to this decision of allowing Karmen in her bed is revealing about the ambiguity cast around her agency. About five minutes into the film, Angélique is shown standing alone by the edge of the fort with a cigarette. She is clothed in red, and in the background are the voices and music coming from the women prisoners’ quarters. Twice, the lighthouse illuminates her silhouette from left to right and once from right to left. The swing of light and shadows coupled with the slow movement of the camera reveals no more than half of Angélique’s face to capture a decision-making moment. The viewer cannot see what Angélique sees but is rather invited to breathe with her and feel the ambivalence of the thinking and feeling processes. Although she stands on high ground, Angélique has no other voice in her head but Karmen’s. Thus, the sbar dance ends up being a polarizing experience for Angélique. Intimacy between the two women has set the mainland and the island further apart. Even before Karmen is released, Angélique is cast as a failure, herstory does not begin with the tale of independence but with a challenge to turn failure into new directions of (un)being and (un)becoming.35 The second time Angélique appears in the film, she is traveling to the mainland to speak with Ma Penda, Karmen’s mother, in a desperate attempt to win back Karmen. Angélique is shown riding the waves and through her eyes, the viewer scans the sea, noticing the sounds of the waves and a murmuration of birds circling an abandoned ship cut in

34 Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony, 28. 35 Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University, 2011.

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half yet still floating between Gorée island and the mainland, a queer sight indeed. On the shore, Karmen and Massigi appear among the fishermen preparing their nets. For the first time in the film, Karmen in white clothes gestures toward the other side of the shore waiving a red flag as if greeting “her women…and her jailer. They are there, just there. In that lousy prison.” But when Massigi tells Karmen, “You are really quite a woman,” she responds, “no more than the others, Massigi. Only, they don’t show it. So as not to make waves.” What is interesting about this scene is that Karmen is actually facing Angélique whom she cannot see because Angélique is still quite distanced from the shore. Thus, the viewer discovers something in Karmen that softens her quest for autonomy: In some ways Karmen sees herself in all women she left behind, but hers is the complete extraversion of desire in contrast to other women who are less vocal and blunt than she is. Quite telling also is Karmen’s distinction between the “women” and her “jailer,” the warden. Yet, she also sees all these women as prisoners of Kumba Kastel, “that lousy prison.” As a shallow critique of systemic oppression, Karmen is a very relevant voice inside the postcolony. Still, there is a difference between describing a thing and devising its transformation, and one is always partial without the other. To be complete, partial truths as mental impressions, Senghor would argue, would need to travel from the head to the heart in order to provide the vital energy for more, not less life and relational possibilities that matter. Transformation requires not the denial of polarity but a movement between poles, another swing of the lighthouse along the shoreline of postcolonial mainland. Angélique and Karmen come close to facing each other, but there is so much fog between them that they cannot see each other. In some ways, both women are trapped in a Baudrillardian desert of the real as misrecognition except there is no such a thing as the “desert of the real”—only deserts of borrowed time and forced conditions, aggressive lending of burdens, and spiritualized violence. Because in every desert in one’s life, one’s presence in it cancels out the speculative exhaustion of the real. There is always the possibility of another reality not distinct from the self and not of the self, revealed as another presence. On the shoreline of the mainland, this presence is a blind voice that initiates movement between the high and low tides of postcolonial imagination. She is in the third space that takes holds of operatic operations that reorient the depth of being. Here then resides the brilliance of Ramaka Gaï in hiding queerness where it is not expected. Queerness lies not in the puffiness of partial

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affirmations, but in the quest for convergence building “from” and that which “is” the most indigenous and vital to Africana’s interiority: rhythm. Every day, the blind woman griot (played by Yandé Codou Sène) stands by the shoreline and faithfully sings to the ocean a simple song about birth and convergence of matter: “A star is born. The moon met the ocean.” It seems as if, in the grand scheme of things, vital energy and imagination is always present, bending the cosmos and helping the postcolony realize its fundamental journeys toward a higher integration of human complexity without distortion. From the banks of postcolonial mainland, Ramaka Gaï sculpts voice and rhythm out of blindness. The convergence of elements here demands accommodation of aggrandizement and diminishment tropes in KG. When Angélique finally meets with Ma Penda, she is told that her type of love only brings suffering. Clearly Karmen’s mother is only concerned with the type of suffering that Karmen or she herself might experience if this relationship with Angélique succeeds, but not with the suffering her daughter inflicts on individuals and society. Later in a dialogue with Samba, Karmen confesses, “I’m in love, I’m in love […] It’s true. I could have loved her. But her [Angélique’s] love was sad,” giving credence to the point that sadness and nothing else was central to talks about Angélique on the mainland. “I love her deeply” is all Angélique could say in a firm voice, and this is the first time she speaks in the film. Ma Penda wants to exclude certain kinds of pain and sadness from the postcolony, yet she speaks as a differently abled person whose presence is the cornerstone of social networking in the film. Yet, Ma Penda praises the blind woman whose vision of Africana futures and the inner working of the universe is more accommodating of non-distorted difference than the postcolonial state she lives in. Hence from the shoreline and in the third meeting space of possibilities, characters remain complex in their self-perception and political agenda. Still, it is only at the shore that we have a convincing proposal that lays down the foundation of an ethical way out of the polarity of negation in Plane 2. The shoreline is a holy ground buoyed with scenes and movements of all sorts: birds that fly by, idle nests, artifacts of nautical ingenuity gracefully baking under the sun. Mobility and reduced mobility share the sand, all is present. In Angélique’s third appearance in the film, the background music is ominous and the noise that fills her head hints at her anxious inner state. When Marie-Augustine, the prison guard, reports to Angélique, the warden in black thanks her not as a commander but as a discerning

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person with her eyes lowered to the ground. Angélique may have a position of authority, but her vulnerability more than her strength is what overwhelms her presence on the screen. “Thank you, Marie-Augustine,” Angélique said to the prison guard. This is the second and last time Angélique speaks in the film. But a few minutes before she is told “it’s ready, madam,” Angélique is shown alone in her office with a cigarette, and she can hear from there the chatter of women prisoners commenting about her and Karmen. Everybody misses Karmen, but the women prisoners think the warden misses her more because “She was in heaven and can’t force herself to live anywhere else.” Without Karmen, Angélique is believed to have descended into hell itself, but since “All slits look alike,” as one woman prisoner notes, all women prisoners must “do something with the warden.” “I’d put her here, and then here!” exclaim one woman prisoner. “Let her taste mine!” says another because as far as they are concerned, and following Karmen’s precedent, “The charms free you.” It is noteworthy that Angélique’s appearance in the film is always bracketed between long scenes that start in the dormitory of the prisoners. Put differently, half-way into the film, Angélique has no voice, she does not initiate dialogue or perspective. Music and camera movements alone invite the viewer to undertake the guesswork of figuring out what is going on with her. Still, we have gotten to know Angélique a little better by how she is described, “she can’t force herself to live anywhere else,” meaning she is very much rooted in her own being. Living elsewhere to her is self-inflicted violence that she cannot afford. Still, even with Karmen gone, the women’s chatter and mockery are not veiled to Angélique, and they significantly inflict pain to her very soul. Her challenge is to figure out a way out of the double victimization on the mainland where Karmen has fled and on the island where she is seen only as a “sugar warden,” a bridge to freedom. Halberstam notes that “in order to inhabit the bleak territory of failure we sometimes have to write and acknowledge dark histories, histories within which the subject collaborates rather than always opposes oppressive regimes and dominant ideology.”36 The opportunity presents itself to Angélique. Overpowered by the desire for Karmen, she entertains the idea of a simulacrum, a replica, another woman prisoner willing to replace

36 Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University, 2011, 23.

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Karmen, but she quickly refuses to submit her desire to such a permutation of her own fantasy. The staged performative sbar dance has no real musician, no artist, no creativity. In fact, the unnamed replica first appears as a giant shadow on the wall before revealing itself to Angélique. Here, queerness is wrestling with its shadow sides, the temptation to submit oneself to the instrumentalization of desire as an end in itself, or what this book identifies as pygmalionics. Yet, it is only through this wrestling with her own shadows, along with Karmen’s, that the queerness of Angélique begins to turn her being around. This self-restraint is significant because unlike the men who fall in love with Karmen, only Angélique has sufficient and available alternative choice of sexual partners. She discerns herself out of the proposition by sending the unnamed female prisoner back to her quarters and by letting herself falls to the ground in tears, pain, shame, and embarrassment. In the opening sbar dance and what unfolds, Angélique fails to awaken the love impulse in Karmen’s heart. This time, she falls down, admittedly failing to carry through the project of erecting a phantasm into a reality, but she fails differently. She chooses her depth over the surface of things. Unlike Karmen, Angélique refuses to instrumentalize her desire in the absence of a depth of feeling by falling to the ground, and letting herself lie flat on the sand, matter used as a divinatory medium in the West African region, Senegal included. Descending to the ground, Angélique falls deeper into the darker abysses of her being, except this time she might not be alone in those regions. For where love is, there too is present the transcendent principle that Senghor calls rhythm to animate and complexify matter. For in objecting to an arrogant and domineering simulation of queerness, Angélique has triumphed over and transcended, per our model, the second problem of evil by preferring to donate herstory and body to the depth of the sea. To speak of Angélique from this moment forward is unavoidably to speak from the perspective of the depth of things. She sculpts queerness on the pillars of the Church as foundational to transforming the dimensions of faith and sociability.

Homiletics as Queer Diaphany Angélique’s death initiates the fourth important moment of her presence in the film. The previous paragraphs have identified the blind woman singer by the sea as a revolutionary character who provides a credible way out of the double victimization that queerness faces in the postcolony. In

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the fourth appearance of Angélique, the Catholic Church is another queer entity that provides a credible ethical message for the transformation of the postcolony. Here, then, lies the ingenuity of Ramaka Gaï who hides queerness where it is expected the least: he manages to give queerness an institutional edge, merging politics and religion in ways that redeem the ethical mission of religious institutions as partakers in the imagination and transformation of Africana futures. In so doing, Ramaka Gaï places the queries and puzzles of queerness in the postcolony as everybody’s business, not just those who are gender/sexually non-conforming. In life and death, Angélique is the one who reminds us of a now and a beyond it; she grounds us in the immediacy of a queer lived experience, as well as its theorization and practice. No other moment in the film powerfully captures her gift to queer mediation and meditation than her funeral. Angélique’s death is not the end, but another opportunity for the meeting of strange bedfellows. Her funeral service is the only scene where everything and everybody comes together for the first time in the film. When news breaks that Angélique is dead, Karmen is a wanted criminal. Her most recent smuggling operation did not go well as the police intercepted her crew before they could celebrate. While other members of the crew are arrested and beaten up to extract information, Karmen escapes to hide at Massigi’s home where she receives the news of Angélique’s death. In the meantime, a procession of women is shown carrying Angélique’s casket on the Island of Kumba Castel (the prison) where a priest lights a white candle as he prepares the venue for the celebration of Angélique’s life. In the meantime, Karmen, who is wanted by the police, manages to reach the chapel in time for the funeral, but slips into the sacristy, as that is the safest hiding place for her. Locking herself in, she quietly sings “A star is born. The moon met the ocean” (I’ll return to this later). To her right side is another clerical vestment and to her left is a censer, or thurible. The priest celebrant who was already at the altar hears Karmen singing but can’t go back into the sacristy. He sees her through the keyhole but decides not to denounce her to the police in attendance at the funeral. By forgoing adversarial action, the nameless priest offers theological insight and practice that grounds an ethical and institutional approach to queer annoyances in the postcolony. The sacristy is a storage room for vestments and sacred objects used in the celebration of religious rituals within the Christian tradition, and, in most church buildings, is usually the closest space to the altar. That Karmen lands there to hide

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and attend the funeral of Angélique is no small detail in the film because it is highly symbolic. Accepting Karmen’s presence there, even though she was not officially admitted into the space, meant that the priest also had to forgo some elements of his funeral ritual. The thurible usually contains incense, which symbolizes the prayers of the believers rising to the heavens. Allowing it to remain close to Karmen rather than with the priest near the altar is revealing about the priest’s own theology. He acknowledges Karmen’s presence as sacred among other sacred things in the sacristy but also elevates her own sacredness beyond that of the things only. He makes the space for the viewer to understand and accept “A star is born. The moon met the ocean” not just as nice poetry but as prayer that expresses the core of Christian ethics at its best. By forgoing denunciation, the priest accepts that the funeral will be celebrated without a thurible. At the same time, he also accepts that he will wear only the vestment that he is already wearing for the ceremony. That is, he agrees to stand before his God and (wo)men clothed only with righteousness, justice, and mercy, the true vestments of his vows. Attending to the people, and indeed the whole postcolony assembled for Angélique’s funeral, is far more important to the priest than taking sides over the socio-political disputes that pit Karmen against every political authority in town. Queerness in the sense developed in this book is fully embodied and enacted in the actions and message of the priest who, as Dorothee Sölle puts it in the epitaph in this chapter, “enlarges the borders of our language [through] a theology that could wrest land away from the sea of speechless death.” The force of practice and imagination in operation here is the energy of love steered toward relational possibilities that do not require the postcolony or some of its members to bleed to death to grab our attention. Inside the church one notes not only light, but angelic statues, and people called to hold each other in sacred reverence and fullness of presence. His homily beautifully extends the hand and heart of mercy and compassion. The priest: (holding together all in all) Angélique, Your daughter, your lover, your warden. Angélique, A monument of granite and froth, Is no longer under the cold eye of the prison Cyclops, but the eye of God. Thanks to you, she never was deprived of love. Let us pray for our Angélique.

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Note the practical situatedness of the homily, its relational and liberatory intent. Throughout the film, Angélique was speechless, she was this and that, but she was yours; she is ours, the priest says. But what does it mean to claim Angélique as ours? For the Church and society, it is simply to recognize that there is no province of excommunication that is devoid of relational history. We do not know much about Angélique as a daughter (although we could derive by her name that she is the daughter of the church), but we know something about her as a warden and (queer) lover. Has the postcolony embraced all three dimensions of Angélique’s relational life? Has the postcolony been the cold eye of a Cyclop in Angélique’s existence? Postcolonial rigid binaries, single stories/visions, and self-images must be examined if meaningful inclusion of all is to take place. God in this homily is a multi-eyed presence that probes not just the surface of our conveniences but also the depth and multicolored realms of our being. Angélique’s life is no single story. She is a monument of contemplation and meditation because she combines strength (granite) and vulnerability (froth), and these are the virtues the community is invited to pray for and as it prays for the Angélique, it proudly rediscovers her wholeness without fragmentation. Here then lies the trade of queer blasphemous displacement: to reveal the entanglement of strength in vulnerability and vulnerability in strength as a moral duty to protect and the necessity of ongoing mutual listening and welcoming. Howard Thurman echoes this idea of meaningful love as the meeting place of ultimate security and ultimate vulnerability, a beyond virtue or fault-based theology and humanity. In giving back Angélique to her community through vocal acts of appropriation, rehumanization and prayers, the priest instantiates an incarnational dispersed moment and movement of hope inspired by his ability to vulnerably encounter and reflect upon that which is reshaping his public ministry because it has taken refuge in the sacristy. Dorothee Sölle notes that “every attempt to humanize suffering must begin with the phenomenon of experienced powerlessness and must activate forces that enables a person to overcome the feeling that [s/]he is without power.”37 What better animation of the human spirit/being than its restoration to the community that birthed its name? The word religion is made up of two syllables, re (again) and legere (read), thus meaningful 37 Söelle, Dorothee. Suffering. Translated by Everett R. Kalin. Philadelphia: Fortress, Press, 1975, 11.

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religion irrespective of its form is one that always invites us to take a second look at our thoughts, visions, assumptions, practices, and creeds, and it does so in prayer appealing to a higher order of things as a sign of humility and hope for the future as well as a recognition of the imperfection of the moment. At its best, the Christian message takes the whole community of witnesses to a place where they start looking at each other anew. What better animation of the being in time and space than the restoration of a feeling of belonging, of unity again, of friendship again, of understanding again, of reverence of the sacredness in all and everything again? At its best, Christianity in the film invigorates the vital bonds for the sake of community enrichment. But as Dorothee Sölle stresses, the activation of enabling forces and relations goes hand in hand with the acknowledgment of powerlessness. It is not the role of religion to put an end to alienation, but to point to vital paths of activation of new relationship fostering personal and collective experience of fullness of presence. It is noteworthy that the priest encounters such an opportunity to feel, reflect, and act from the position of powerlessness. By barricading herself in the sacristy, Karmen forces the priest to experience an edge to his capacity. The door to the sacristy does not yield to the physical force of his muscles and the priest is wise to let it be. By surrendering here, he is able to open up the hearts of many, or at least find the appropriate words that invite hope in simple gestures: the acknowledgement that Angélique is “ours” secularly and religiously speaking. One should not minimize the physical, psychological and social derivatives of such a recognition of queer bodies as belonging to the Church and society. That the Roman Catholic church is not there yet does deter Ramaka Gaï from showing the possibility in “the movements of [the human] spirit: movements that descend into the depths of being to exorcise the effects of dualistic and vampirized discourses about the Africana’s self; and movements that re-member the [Africana] household as neither this nor that, but as meaningful wholes.”38 If blasphemy there is, it is one directed against the forces of alienation that suggest humanity is heading toward separate destinies based on the politics of guilt fixing and indecent displacement of the best of 38 Nyeck, S.N. “Poetics: Queer Recesses of the Heart and the Spirit of Intimacy Within the Africana Household.” The African Journal of Gender and Religion, Vol. 26, No.2 (December 2020): 106.

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our relational capability: the ability to take a second look at things. How ugly indeed is “affection that lays a stone on one side of a field, that revives us for a day and stuns us for an age!”39 The homily is a vision for an age. When Ramaka Gaï brings in Sufi music in the context of a Christian funeral, the issue is not one of mere juxtaposition of Islam and Christianity, but one of assembling the depth of things seen and unseen to rediscover ourselves anew. “O God, take away the words of the devil that mix with my prayer—If not, then take my prayer as it is, devil and all,” said Rabi’a Al- ‘Adawiyya (~714–718 CE), one of the early saints of Islam and a pivotal figure in Sufism. What a beautiful image of the transcendental principle as a radical mixer! The Roman Catholic priest in KG does nothing more than affirm love and plurality as grounds for rescuing queerness from spiritualized violence. Ramaka Gaï’s brilliant mixture of Christianity and Islam during the funeral of Angélique is a proleptic move that reminds us of possibilities when Islam and Christianity, or any other religion for that matter, ceases to be an object of ideology only to become a partner in spiritual and social transformation. The social controversy that condemns the film because a sacred Muslim song is used at a Catholic funeral of a lesbian is clueless about the depth of things beyond their appearances. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. told us, “any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men [and women and the queers] and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, the social conditions that cripple them, is a spiritually moribund religion in need of new blood.”40 The Roman Catholic priest in KG lays bare the conditions that made Angélique less than a fully present, included, and embraced person—and then calls for their acknowledgment and reform. Still, one might think the message comes a bit too late. No, it does not. For it is not the role of any religion to prevent death. But it is the role of religion to help us find and celebrate life abundantly and meaningfully in the state of more-being, more-possible as Audre Lorde once put it.

39 Gibran, Kahlil. Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil Gibran. Edited and translated by Anthony R. Ferris. New York: Citadel Press, 1962 (no page number in the original). 40 King, Martin Luther. “Address at the Religious Leaders Conference on 11 May 1959, Washington, D.C.” https://stanford.io/3t6mCBT, accessed January 2021.

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The Erotic as Kenosis: Beyond the Way of the Fish and Flies Already mentioned in this chapter are the attributes of the divine milieu as a convergence and harmonization of contradictory impulses, impression, and qualities. In addition to the priest, the politics of hope in the film are seen in the ways in which Karmen is depicted in the scenes about Angélique’s funeral. From the sacristy, Karmen is not just “like” the blind woman on the shoreline as Ma Penda once put it to Angélique. Here, Karmen also becomes a prophetic voice that sings movement and convergence of all elements of nature toward the imagined Omega point that Teilhard de Chardin calls the divine milieu and whose rhythm Senghor claims, is animation of Africana presence in the world and animation of the world by Africana presence. In addition to the attributes of convergence and harmonization of contradiction, certain operations of the divine milieu are worth expanding on. In the words of de Chardin, the divine milieu, Vast and innumerable as the dazzling surge of creatures that are sustained and sur-animated by its ocean, it nevertheless retains the concrete transcendence that allows it to bring back elements of the world, without the least confusion, within its triumphant and personal unity...In it, development culminates in renunciation; attachment to things yet separates us from everything disintegrating within them. Death becomes a resurrection. God reveals himself everywhere, beneath our groping efforts, as a universal milieu, only because he is the ultimate point upon which all realities converge…This focus, this source, is thus everywhere. It is precisely because he is at once so deep and yet so akin to an extensionless point that God is infinitely near and dispersed everywhere.41

Noting the problematic exclusive use of male gender for imagining the transcendent and setting that conversation aside, Teilhard de Chardin’s theology is unconventional and revolutionary in many ways. With regard to its message to the world, it stresses the work of harmonization of the seemingly contradictory. In the deep work of sur-animation of worlds, one can never overstretch commitment to non-distortive inclusion to a point where the ocean of life forces runs dry. Our efforts at convergence against alienation from one another can never stretch to a point 41 Teilhard, Chardin (de). The Divine Milieu. New York: HarperCollins, 1960, 84–85.

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past divine ordination by the source of all things, the source that is manifested and dispersed everywhere. Although both secular and ecclesiastical institutions may wish to excommunicate some categories to unfathomable existence, exclusion is never wide enough to overpower the integrative forces of the divine milieu. As the psalter once put it, there is simply no place to hide from divine embrace. Neither the sky, nor the depth of the seas are vast enough to contain closets of bigotry that are not known or contained within a larger and higher reality of companionship, guidance and embrace of that which is omni-restorative and omnipresent. However, confidence in our efforts at meaning-making, understanding, and acceptance rests not only on the ultimate source that wishes and ordains it, but also in our ability to commit to letting go of that which augments confusion and rigid dualistic thinking. Thus, properly understood, the divine milieu is a challenge to our societal and ecclesiastical institutions gripped with fear, sclerosis, and apathy when they become overinvested in erecting boundaries between worlds as opposed to undertaking the work of sur-animation of persons and humanity without distortion. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has reflected on the meaning of creative evolution in the context of African Christianity and in light of Teilhard de Chardin’s theology and concluded that “nothing that is important for us can be of no concern to God. Our natural ambience is the divine, and so Teilhard de Chardin could speak of what he called le milieu divin. We are always in the presence of God.”42 Still, before de Chardin could articulate this theology, Senghor, in 1939 had already approximated the term and positioned Africa as the “daughter of the milieu” harnessing what Tutu terms “natural ambience” to seat a spirit-filled vision of practical humanism without distortion to the black soul. In “Ce que l’Homme Noir Apporte,” Senghor discusses the spirituality of Négritude with references to the Negro’s soul, his worldview (religion and social life), and the arts (particularly music and sculpture). He presents Africa and her American diaspora as daughters of the milieu, further characterized as the seat of sensible, stripped (dépouillée) and stripping (dépouillante) action that valorizes what is essential in all things. This movement toward deep knowledge in Senghor’s view explains both religion and society. Senghor’s understanding of the transcendental principle is never devoid of politics and when invoking God, he praises the 42 Tutu, Desmond. An African Prayer Book. New York: Image/Doubleday, 1995, 117. My emphasis.

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spirit of his grandmother ancestors, the sérères (serer people of Senegal), who in times of crisis, would cross-dress in suits of armor to address the divine, firing arrows toward the sky and cursing in French to get what they wanted from their God. These grandmothers, as all ancestral spirits, are emanations of the highest transcendent spirit that animates the world. In practice, cross-dressing, gender-bending, and gender-role breaking, Senghor suggests, are very much embedded in the Africana ways of knowing and rising up to challenges. Senghor’s ancestral serer grandmothers did not hesitate to strip themselves of some roles to unconventionally take up others in order to restore what was essential in the fight against both Islam and French (Roman Catholic) colonialism: wholeness to Africana’s humanity. Morality, Senghor notes, “consists in the communion of the living, the dead, the genies, and God, maintained through charity.”43 Senghorian practical humanism and ethics emerge from the substrata of African cultures,44 histories, and futures as “natural ambience” of relational possibilities, objective and objecting forms of engagement that rescue the fundamental of more-being from the rubble of colonial and spiritualized violence in the postcolony. Hence, a spirituality devoid of struggle for more-being/more-possible informed by animated loving Africana spirits is not worth its name. In discussing Africana art and more specifically sculpture, Senghor undertakes a soul journey back to matter to appreciate the political and spiritual work of the Black artist as a modeler of conscience. Senghor likened the Black artist to the Creator and a 3D modeler and his preferential choice of wood is for the maximization of the common good. Wood is present almost everywhere in Africa and its virtue resides in its pliability, openness, and containment of the extreme edges of human spirit as well as the nuances in between. Sculptural art, Senghor contents, is spiritual in the sense that the artist submits to the high and low of human face and to the ordaining power of rhythm, the constitutive energy and vitality of style in Senghorian practical humanism. Whenever he writes about music or sculpture it is always to celebrate that which is revealed at the core of the being where action is always particularly sensible; where primitive light stripped of clutter is simultaneously steering effective presence away 43 Senghor, S.L. “Ce que L’Homme Noir Apporte.” In Liberté 1: Négritude et Humanisme. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964, 26–27. 44 Ndiaye, Cheikh M. “Histoire Et Mythes Du Pays Sérère Dans La Poésie de Léopold Sédar Senghor.” Nouvelles Études Francophones, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2006): 23–32.

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from all non-essential concerns or anything that keeps the African spirit bogged down to a moribund status. Sculptural work is rhythm as spiritual exercises where the act of breathing is freed from monotony as inspiration (life) and expiration (death) only. The Africana modeler breathes neither as repetition nor restatement of the same (inspiration/expiration) but scandalously as displacement and combination of both and always from a different plane to emancipate variance, timber, intonation, and accent. Rhythm is queerness at work because it is life-giving and integrative of humanizing nuances. Senghorian practical humanism as rhythmic presence/presence rythmée is the spirituality of the matter that is better related to with a corresponding self-emptying attitude, the kenosis of the heart. Rhythm is interpellation of the Other in a deep communion of sensibilities; it is a cosmic dance, it is incarnational; it is animation against mechanized individualism. Rhythm is the re-membering of the human and semblance, binding the flesh to the spirit, the stone to God, the real to the surreal. Rhythm is finally Afro-Diasporic in its ritualized and secularized enactments; it is knowability of inner strength as the building blocks of Black queer presence in the world.45 This is not mere reliance on the modern self, and absolutist image of the self that ethicists have rightly criticized, for guidance. Rather, it is a praxis, a method of discernment, a way of catching glimpses of relational possibilities as neither a game nor as esthetics only; of seeing between and underneath things as an act of both presentation and submission to animation that calls us to part with all ways that neither embrace the high and lows of the human face, nor soften its rough edges. Sufi legend has it that “one day Hasan of Basra saw Rabi’a down by the riverside. He came up to her, spread his prayer-rug on the surface of the water and said: ‘Come sit with me and pray.’ ‘Do you really have to sell yourself in the market of this world to the consumers of the next?’ said Rabi’a. Then she unrolled her own prayer-rug in thin air and sat on it: ‘What you did any fish can do, Hasan, and what I did any fly can do. Our real work is far beyond the work of fish and flies.’”46 Here, the authoritative ground of being, reflecting, and relating to sameness and difference is not a well, 45 Senghor, S.L. “Ce que L’Homme Noir Apporte.” In Liberté 1: Négritude et Humanisme. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964, 35. 46 Upton, Charles. Doorkeeper of the Heart: Versions of Rabi’a. New York: PIR press, 2003, 20.

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but an ocean in African(a)’s interiority and histories that renders possible speculative and practical undertakings in the examination of postcolonial double negation of queerness. The quest is not for supreme beings, but for more-being/morepossible radically, relationally, and intersectionally dependent. In making Christianity and Islam intersect in a moment where their outcasts are said to be “no more” because taken by death, Ramaka Gaï leads us to query the meaning and practice of religion when the human therein is no longer marketized and transacted; no longer treated as a sign sold and bought/redeemed for the sake of performative hegemony. Rabi’a understands it well and provides some wisdom. What could happen is that religion might save its own soul, and more importantly transition to a “full house”47 picture of our complex cosmic system in a post-anthropomorphic celebration of life/energy/rhythm, complexity and simplicity, convergence and dispersion. Perhaps the way to get there is for both Christianity and Islam to listen wholeheartedly to their respective mystics. Ramaka Gaï gestures toward this possibility by centering Angélique’s precariousness and vulnerability to invigorate the Catholic Church’s rediscovery of itself and Islam’s Sufi sacred blessings as the deceased warden’s body is hauled out of the church for burial. What one appreciates further is that Angélique’s funeral hides another: the end of competitive rivalry between this and that kind of religion when queerness takes hold of imagination and spiritual practices. Both Angélique and Karmen die in KG, but neither dies the same death, nor do they participate in the same sculptural work. One is a discerning modeler of a kind of queerness embodiment that facilitates social metamorphoses, the other is mostly caught up in self-aggrandizing pursuits. One is pygmalionic and primarily transactional, and the other is orphic, (ev)angelic, and transformational. Still, we will err if we embrace this distinction uncritically and without committing to conversations and practices that ground an ethic of effective transformational presence in Africana’s interiority and in ways of becoming more worldly.

47 Gould, Stephen. Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. New York: Three Rivers, 1997.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: Muntu Through a Glass Queerly/Darkly

Abstract This last chapter addresses one major possible objection to my claim that Africana’s interiority is fecund with queer imagination. The claim often takes the form of negation that insists there are other priorities to Africana’s life than identity-based claims. The chapter addresses this potential objection by engaging with one of the foremost thinkers of African philosophy, Eboussi Boulaga, showing that there is more to the binary interpretation of his work than previously recognized. Rather than countering the claim by way of objection, I demonstrate how interiority provides us with mature and necessary synergies that need no hierarchization in Africana’s modes of presentation. Keywords Muntu · Crisis time · Africana personhood · Ethnologism · Philosophy · Discourse (of authenticity) · Maturation · Africana multiplicities

Once in a museum I stood at the entrance to a room looking at Matisse’s Dance A man walked in front of me, stopped. He tilted his head, as though. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. N. Nyeck, African(a) Queer Presence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61225-6_5

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listening more than seeing. and, for a moment, I saw the dance pass through his whole body.1 Gabeba Baderoon

One must still go farther, by maintaining traffic to and from that language to others in order to avoid cliché trivialities and keep thinking…In all this, dialectic will be actively playing off multiplicity against reduction to one. Thereby, we have passed to another chapter.2 Fabien Eboussi Boulaga Am ready to let the rivers wash over me.3 Tracy Chapman

In the previous chapters, the idea of negation has been explored to show how it puts conversations about queer presence within the Africana experience at the intersection of larger histories and struggles. To achieve something by way of negation is not just to state a difference. It is to impose a certain kind of violence and domination on things so ordered around for the sake of epistemic, religious, or political expediency also. The notion of queerness presented in this book takes the view that the process of conceptualizing selves “out-of-order” is fundamentally anti-dialectical, negotiated, political and spiritual. Queerness negation manifested as a form of colonial and postcolonial epistemic and political violence defines reality as the clash of ideal and non-ideal categories. The demand to achieve something by way of negation that dialectics imposes on itself is costly because it treats negation as inevitable. From an anti-dialectical standpoint, analyses of the films Proteus and Karmen Geï dealt with the processes of freeing queer selves from colonial and postcolonial negation. In so doing, the book reflected on the conditions and possibilities of affirmation of queerness as an ethic of presence grounded in the politics of negotiation following the proposition of nego-feminism and the practical humanism of Senghor. 1 Baderoon, Gabeba. The Dream in the Next Body Poems. Cape Town: Kweka/Snail Press, 2005, 14. 2 Eboussi Boulaga, Fabien. Muntu in Crisis: African Authenticity and Philosophy. Cape Town: African World Press, 2014, 138. 3 Chapman, Tracy. “I Am Ready.” In New Beginning. Elektra [12 tracks], 1995.

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Focus on ethics allows us to shift questions about who the queers are to queries about how and what they are doing and to what end. What the queer subjects in this book offer is an ethical and embodied vision of what is already possible for individuals and communities within the Africana world. What they offer is an ecological depth of feeling and will as foundational to relational possibilities. As a negated subject tries to break free from its condition of assigned non-idealness, the temptation to reify the dialectical model of necessary negation becomes real. At stake in this struggle is the first and second problem of evil, or the endless ordering of Otherness as victims and perpetrators. The performances examined show the many ways in which this struggle is enfleshed in queer subjects. In Proteus , the temptation of dialectical negative reification is seen in Claas Blank’s first denial, then embrace, of his indigenous personhood as knowledge-bearing and worldly. The struggle is also seen in his violent suppression and denunciation of the homoerotic currents that traverse his being, an attitude that precedes consequential acceptance of his wholeness. Furthermore, powerfully compelling is the metamorphosis of !Nanseb from the position of a staunch nativist to that of an ancestor whose blessing and felt presence bridge the past and present to position queerness as a critical and convincing filter of visions of socio-political and spiritual transformation within the Africana world. Carceral time is a shared experience of queer characters in Proteus and Karmen Geï , but reification and explosion of dialectical negation is more complex and nuanced in the latter. Karmen Geï took us to a context of postcolonial independences where the political and religious commands reorganized solidarities along gendered lines leading to a crisis of belonging. While men and women break the law in postcolonial Senegal, mostly women’s faces feed the prison industry. In this context the reification of dialectical negation takes the allure of a protest. For the character Karmen, the postcolony is the domain of extractive relations par excellence. Economic and non-economic goods are subject to the same extractive logic and the law of attraction brings together opposites for dysfunctional ends only because love is excommunicated a priori. The game of “If you love me, I don’t” is the epitome of dialectical negation and reification. But even the character Karmen leaves a window of hope open in a musical rendition of “A star is born. The moon met the ocean,” as a pre-figuration of things that are already happening and those

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to come. The rebel Karmen senses things to come even if her bankrupted ways cannot lead us where change is (w)holistically realized. What we need are not lone stars but constellations playing off multiplicity against reductionism. Angélique’s life and legacy, in contrast, provide us with multiple paths to realizing the meeting of seeming differences: the moon and the ocean in Africana’s imagination. All these paths are sustained by love rediscovered. The way out of negation is self-donative and resists not just that which takes queer love away, but also and more importantly, that which condemns it to narcissistic ends only, or what this book identifies as the order of pygmalionics. In Karmen Gei and Proteus , the queerness worth paying attention to is informed by commitment to negotiation, struggle and presence drawing from the moonlight that illuminates Africana’s interiority and sensibilities and from the vast ocean that is Africana history and corresponding waves. These two movements are not contradictory but complementary and critical to binding flesh and spirit, the human to the semblance as Senghor puts it, in Africana-informed relational ethics. Engagement with nego-feminism and its possible queer articulations has been explored in conversation with Senghor’s practical humanism, which is committed to the interiority of the Africana experience and from there rises up to meet the world effectively. As noted earlier, Senghor was a controversial figure among the theorists of Africana’s liberation and the nature of these controversies have been set aside to privilege a fresh engagement with Senghor from a queer perspective. There is, however, one aspect of the critique that is important to engage with since it remains relevant to the discussion about ongoing strategies of queer engagement in Africa: whether or not political action by way of human rights violation claims and documentation is more recommended than the longer process of social and cultural transformation. For society, this question often takes the form of a concern about “what is pressing, or more important” based on the assumption that queerness is about nothing else but meaningless navel-gazing identity deserving no prioritization in Africana’s futures. Following this logic, it is said that consideration should be given to time (history) and its precariousness in the now; time primarily characterized by the crisis the Africana personhood is confronted with as a result of colonial miseducation. It follows that Africana’s interests are better served by a discourse of the self that is less grounded in the poetics of identity, and more in a self-making discourse of historical reason. (Any) Africanaladen identity, from this viewpoint, necessarily passes through history as

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loss of self and return to the self in crisis owing to the colonial experience of the Africana world. This is the substance of Eboussi Boulaga’s critique of a certain kind of African ethnologism as a philosophy of self-making.4 Although Eboussi Boulaga was mainly responding to trends in philosophical discourse about African personhood with regard to the role of cultures in providing a critical discourse against colonial negation, he remains relevant to any conversation about identity-based claims. Thinking of queerness as a kind of ethnologism of the self does well to take seriously the challenge that Boulaga presents. That is, to articulate the place and function of queerness in the present as an acte accompli and as history not just as singularity of a condition. But, to use Karmen’s metaphor once again, what appears as divergent visions between perspectives that emphasize the poetics of the moonlight (interior/subjectivity) versus the fury of crashing waves (historical/political exteriority) as primary sources of Africana imagination, is from a queer perspective false dueling and dualism. Priority-setting concerns are only as useful as synergy-birthing visions and as rising constellation-memory, sensibilities, and history in order to realize the wholeness of the Africana personhood: Muntu. For instance, the cosmology of IKaggen, as we have seen, is a constellation, not the monopoly of a lone star. Through a glass darkly, the meeting of the moon and the ocean for the sake of birthing constellations and critical multiplicity is what queerness, as presented in this book, dreams of. But the realization of this dream is labor-intensive. The search for grounding within Africana’s interiority is not synonymous with complacency or the neglect of other timely concerns as some see it. As discussed in Proteus , to road to self-examination sometimes leads to the kinds of disappointment that are as shocking as the crises in the world “out there.” Yet, as Claas Blank’s life shows, the ability to serenely bear the trial of being dis/satisfied with oneself is as challenging as transforming the world “out there.” Thus, dichotomizing the interior/exterior, the private and political on the basis of crisis distribution alone is faulty. The interior (as self or culture) journey in this sense is as history-making as any history originating anywhere else. For one cannot quench one’s thirst and remain healthy by attempting to drink clean water from a cup whose inside is perfectly dirty and whose outside is perfectly

4 Eboussi Boulaga, Fabien. Muntu in Crisis: African Authenticity and Philosophy. Cape Town: African World Press, 2014, 138.

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clean. Either way the cup, the water, and time are wasted and the thirst unquenched. Conversely, history as a non-essentialist articulation of Muntu is not devoid of sensibilities. For one, Eboussi Boulaga’s crisis time is only opposed to other times as disinterested allergic abstractions. He emphasizes that “a dialectical self-recuperation” after being negated by the colonial master’s philosophy, is achieved by reintroducing that which philosophy is supposed to reject into the outer dark, namely, location, body, color, history, and accident. As a result, it becomes permissible to discuss how to creatively benefit from tradition, while avoiding the pitfalls of ethnology, by projecting it as a form of critical utopia capable of mobilizing minds in the present. It is likewise possible to use and reuse philosophy with a view of emancipating the needy and the alienated. Becoming free unfolds through speech, being, doing/asking and feeling. The dialectic of authenticity faults those as being tied up and necessary moments of its own. It requires rigorous thinking far beyond prevailing slogans and abuses.5

Muntu then, as a critical discourse of an Africana ethical presence in the world, is first and foremost inclusive because its primary concern is to meet up and give speech to that which has been rejected in the “outer darkness” of imperial philosophy. It does not shy away from normative and nonnormative categories, accident included. Its primary work is the labor of freedom as long as the condition identified as needy and alienated exists because they embody negation not as a concept but as a real incarnation of systemic domination in time. But Muntu also puts a serious challenge to any discourse on authenticity: to untie certain modes of appropriations of language as necessary moments of authenticity-making and pay attention not so much to the answers one gives in the process of self-recuperation/presentation but instead to reflect on the possibility that any given answer may stand for a question suppressed.6 The ethical challenges for such counter-intuitive imagination would ask: what sorts of questions are suppressed in the process of Africana queer construction of a discourse on authenticity? What modes of appropriation of language should be untied and unnecessitated? Raising such questions 5 Eboussi Boulaga, Fabien. Muntu in Crisis: African Authenticity and Philosophy, 3. 6 Eboussi Boulaga, Fabien. Muntu in Crisis: African Authenticity and Philosophy, 3.

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can only help clarify and demonstrate the usefulness of a synergetic rather than hierarchical prioritization in the critique of Africana queerness and queer ends. Thus, in his philosophical grounding of the politics of authenticity, Eboussi Boulaga turns crisis time into depth of understanding, a point that makes his and Senghor’s practical humanism complementary and cross-pollinating with the tenets of nego-feminism. “Self-limitation, indeed, implies the recognition of other’s action, the networking of one’s emancipatory action to those of others,”7 writes Eboussi Boulaga, thereby rendering the process of queer negotiation developed in this book a mutually enveloping process of history and identity-making. As Eboussi Boulaga sees it, this process arrives at maturation in three steps when Africana’s imagination understands the imperative of moving from a discourse of “being—‘in-self’ through being — ‘for-self’ to being — ‘foranother.’”8 Each step is meaningful because rooted in the concreteness of being and doing in the world. Each step forces us to consider our ability to respond to each other consequentially with actions leading to either pygmalionic ends or to an orphic revival of wholeness. Consequential ethical actions would emerge out of relational choices to commit to that which cannot be destroyed by politicking: the queerness of existence. It may as well be that we are not each other’s instincts, but we are certainly each other’s responsibility within the Africana world. Epistemic, political or spiritual queer negation cannot erase this fact even if it may delay the realization of Africana wholeness a little bit. It is telling that in order to go from “being in-self” to “being foranother” one must pass through “for-self.” This intermediary self, capable of self-donative performance to the other in the third stage of imaginative maturation is not self-centered, it is rather a through-self because it is relation-enabling; it is transparent if you will. Thus, Muntu queerly affirmed holds that we get to realizing our highest call to affirm and protect Africana personhood by appreciating the musicality and forms of animation that pass through our whole being. Africana personhood is not just our intellect and political structures, but also our very bodies, our streets, our workplaces, our villages, our environment, our lands, our air, our forests and deserts, our ways of telling stories, our festivals, our

7 Eboussi Boulaga, Fabien. Muntu in Crisis: African Authenticity and Philosophy, 228. 8 Eboussi Boulaga, Fabien. Muntu in Crisis: African Authenticity and Philosophy, 219.

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spirituality, our languages, our economies, our waters and other natural resources, our slums and cities, our youths and elders, our dead. Both queer political activism and postcolonial tactics of queer negation are very good at constructing a discourse on the self as “being in-self” only. What we need though, is a different paradigm of mature recognition, one based on the ethics of being for another predicated upon our willingness to become inter-being/interpenetrated presence that witnesses one another’s depth. In rhythm, Senghor found a great aggregator of Africana’s creativity and musicality. The Africana world cannot afford to be a museum of life forms to be gazed at only. Muntu queerly affirmed is a dance that requires a slight change in posture, new ways of listening rather than objectifying and classifying only. Muntu so queerly animated is, as Gabeba Baderoon poetically puts it, the end of singular and unidirectional gazes; it is the unfreezing of the dance of interpenetrative and negotiated discourses (in and for the whole body) that nego-feminism grounds. It is the art of letting the movements of Africana’s life wash over rather than away our collective imagination for a better integrated and inclusive present. Queerness is not just relevant to Muntu as a mental object,9 it is essential embodiment and animation of wholeness against political and spiritualized violence in the first place. Muntu so queerly contemplated is a Sankofa-like presence fecund with necessary (re)turns and life-bearing transformational gestation of Africana multiplicities.

9 Eboussi Boulaga, Fabien. “L’Homosexualité Trois lectures pour Commencer,” Terroirs Vol. 1, No. 2 (2007): 13–44.

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Index

A Africa multiplicities, 124 Africana, 5, 6, 19, 23–25, 29, 36, 39, 48, 50, 79, 95–97, 99, 100, 104, 107, 110, 112, 114–116, 118–124 Africana personhood, 100, 120, 121, 123 African studies, 2, 10 a monumental undertaking, 87 Animation/suranimation, 17, 18, 21, 23, 60, 61, 65, 109, 110, 112, 115, 123, 124 Anti-dialectical, 12, 25, 118 Asymmetric relations, 8, 40

B Blackness, 61 Blasphemous displacements, 88, 109 Bushman, 48, 50, 66, 72

C Canonical, 59, 65

Carmen principle, 93 Catholic Church, 88, 98, 107, 110, 116 Christian white supremacy, 76 Cluelessness, 41, 42, 55, 69, 73–75 Colonial/imperial, 5, 13–16, 21, 22, 27, 33–35, 40, 48–55, 57–62, 65–73, 75–77, 80, 82, 83, 87, 101, 114, 118, 120–122 Colonial law, 53, 60 Colonial sublime, 76 Colonial (territory-body), 5, 34, 35, 37 Commandement , 101, 102 Commodification, 12, 29 Convict leasing, 65, 66, 82 Cosmology, 10, 22, 64, 68–70, 121 Cosmos, 20, 71, 82, 97, 100, 104 Crisis time, 122, 123 Culture, 2, 3, 9, 19–21, 114, 121 D de Chardin, Teilhard, 16, 20, 21, 97–99, 112, 113

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. N. Nyeck, African(a) Queer Presence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61225-6

129

130

INDEX

Decision (edge of), 43 Decision-making/strategy, 42, 97, 102 Decolonization, 16 Desire (depth of), 8, 12, 22, 24, 33, 37, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 49, 63, 80, 87, 91, 92, 96, 102, 103, 105, 106 Dialectics, 25–27, 29, 34, 49, 54, 78, 89, 118, 122 Discourse (of authenticity), 122 Divine milieu, 97, 99, 112, 113

E Emotion, 38, 45, 61–63, 80, 91 Encounter-bound, 2, 9 Ethics, 5, 9, 21, 23–25, 38, 48, 62–64, 69, 79, 90–92, 94, 96, 108, 114, 118–120, 124 Ethnologism, 121 Evangelic, 61, 95 Evil (second problem of), 24, 25, 27, 54, 59, 60, 64, 65, 73, 79, 87, 106, 119

F Faggot, 73, 74 Feminine/masculine principles, 30–32, 37, 91 Futuristic spirituality, 97

G Game, 9, 25–27, 29, 32, 33, 38, 40–45, 55, 57–60, 74, 76, 89, 91–95, 115, 119 Game theory, 9, 25, 40, 42–44, 59, 93 God’s typewriter, 51, 53

H hermeneutics of being and practice, 91 Heteronormative, 24, 27 Historical erasure, 58 Homonormative, 23 Homonormativity, 12, 33 Hyperreality, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37, 53, 82

I Iconic/monumental Iconic/Hermetically sealed, 90 Ideal/non-ideal reason, 27, 48–50 Identity/non-identity, 2–5, 8–10, 12–16, 23–29, 31, 34, 38, 48–50, 52, 66, 69, 70, 72, 74, 79, 87, 89, 90, 92, 120, 121 Identity politics, 5, 38 IKaggen, 67–70, 81, 121 Indigenous, 10, 16, 17, 21, 24, 48–50, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 64–66, 69–73, 76, 89, 104, 119 Intercontextual, 12, 67 Intersectional, 9, 12, 29, 37, 45, 62, 116 Involution/evolution, 10, 71, 99–101, 113

K Karmen Geï , 5, 8, 40, 44, 87, 88, 90, 95, 96, 101, 118, 119 Kenosis, 96, 112, 115 Khoisan, 69

L Lorde, Audre, 23, 25, 36, 43, 45, 86, 92, 111

INDEX

M Maturation, 123 Metamorphosis, 10, 71, 119 Misery (discourse of), 24, 30–32, 34, 37, 38, 52, 69, 91 “monumental” mode of representation, 90 monument citation/monument of contemplation, 109 Moral aspiration, 27 Muntu, 121–124

N Negation, 4, 11, 12, 15, 17, 21–26, 28, 31, 48, 49, 54, 57, 59, 61, 69, 74–76, 87, 89, 91–95, 101, 104, 116, 118–124 Negation (hybridity), 22, 87 Negation (reification), 119 Negative dialectics, 26, 27, 54, 64, 78 Negative plane, 21, 87 Nego-feminism, 9, 10, 15, 24, 32, 61, 79, 92, 118, 120, 123, 124 Negotiating identity, 3 Negotiation, 2–5, 8–13, 15, 17, 29, 39, 44, 45, 48, 50, 60, 63, 66, 68, 70, 77, 79, 87, 97, 118, 120, 123 Négritude, 16, 17, 19–21, 25, 29, 61, 97, 99, 113 New humanism, 15, 19, 99 Non-Western, 3, 4, 29

O Ontology, 10, 29 Operatic, 87, 103 Orphic, 23–25, 39, 40, 45, 78, 116, 123 Out of order, 11, 12, 25, 48

131

P Pain, 8, 20, 32, 42, 62, 65, 69, 82, 91, 93, 95, 104–106 Phallic/non-phallic structure, 30, 31, 39, 91 Philosophy, 22, 98, 121, 122 Positive plane, 50 Postcolonial, 3, 5, 11, 14, 21–23, 25, 27, 30, 35–39, 62, 87–92, 95, 96, 103, 104, 109, 116, 118, 119, 124 Postcoloniality, 3, 5, 11, 14, 21–23, 25, 27, 30, 33, 35–39, 62, 87–90, 92, 95, 96, 103, 104, 109, 116, 118, 119, 124 Postcolony, 88–90, 92, 94, 95, 101–104, 106–109, 114, 119 Presence, 4, 8, 11, 17–24, 29, 45, 48, 52, 54, 57, 60–64, 73, 77–81, 83, 87, 90–92, 95, 96, 98–100, 102–106, 108–110, 112–116, 118–120, 122, 124 Prison industry complex, 58, 70, 71, 119 Privatization, 54 Proteus , 5, 8, 40, 48–51, 54, 55, 62–65, 78, 81, 83, 118–121 Pygmalion/pygmalionic, 23, 33, 39, 73, 77, 87, 106, 116, 120, 123

Q Queer agency, 2, 9, 10, 14 Queer conscription, 95, 96 Queer Diaphany, 106 Queer discernment, 100 Queer negation, 4, 11, 21, 25, 54, 123, 124 Queerness, 2, 4, 8, 10–15, 17, 21–25, 27, 29, 43, 44, 48–50, 53, 54, 59, 60, 62–64, 71, 74, 75, 78–80, 87–92, 95–97, 101,

132

INDEX

103, 106–108, 111, 115, 116, 118–121, 123, 124 Queer presence, 13, 14, 24, 25, 27, 39, 63, 80, 91, 115, 118 Queer rattling, 4 R Reciprocity, 9, 10, 33 Relational, 4, 9–11, 21–25, 32, 33, 37–39, 48, 60, 62, 64, 65, 69, 77–81, 87, 92, 94, 103, 109, 111, 116, 120, 123 Relational possibilities, 10, 12, 65, 79, 81, 103, 108, 114, 115, 119 Religion, 9, 49, 80, 107, 109–111, 113, 116 Religious texts, 88 Rhythm, 21, 23, 29, 62, 63, 79, 99, 104, 106, 112, 114–116, 124 Ruination (empire), 35 S Sankofa, 10, 24, 34, 64, 77–79, 124 Seduction, 22, 30–33, 37–39, 87, 88, 91–93, 96, 101 Self-discernment/self-aggrandizement, 96, 116 Senegal, 88, 91, 96, 114 Senegal’s past, 91 Senghor, Leopold Ségar, 11, 15–21, 25, 29, 61, 62, 79, 97, 99, 100, 103, 106, 112–115, 118, 120, 123, 124

Settler colonialism, 48, 56, 60, 82 Sexuality, 2, 3, 9, 12, 24, 30, 52, 57, 63, 64, 81, 88, 89, 92, 95, 100, 101 Simulacrum/simulacra, 15, 29, 31–40, 42, 53, 57, 69, 74, 80, 105 Simulation, 8, 23, 29–35, 37, 38, 57, 106 Sodomy, 63, 64, 82 South Africa, 14, 48–50, 54–56 Speculative moment, 26, 28, 29, 39 Spiritual, 8, 16, 21, 22, 37, 45, 50, 53, 68, 70, 77, 95–100, 111, 114–116, 118, 119, 123, 124 Spiritualized violence, 17, 49, 63, 103, 111, 114, 124 Strategy, 1, 5, 25, 27–29, 32, 38–44, 62, 66, 73, 75, 81, 82, 94 Strategy (as manipulation), 43, 44 Sufi/Islam, 111, 114–116 sugar warden, 105 Symbolic interaction, 8 T Theology, 10, 21, 24, 37, 38, 53, 61, 71, 75, 108, 109, 112, 113 Theophanies, 23, 53, 54 Transcendental, 52, 53, 94, 96–99, 111, 113 Trial (of the subject), 71 V Virtual presence, 19, 23, 29, 53