Narrative Shape-Shifting: Myth, Humor and History in the Fiction of Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing and Yvonne Vera 1847010121, 9781847010124

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All three reflect on the colonial and post-independence turmoil in their respective countries of birth – Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe. Together, they represent the evolution of a brilliant contemporary generation of post-independence voices. Arlene A. Elder is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of The Hindered Hand: Cultural Implications of Nineteenth-Century African-American Fiction and has published essays and articles on African, African-American, NativeAmerican and Australian Aboriginal literatures and orature. Contents: Introduction: writing as ase – Ben Okri’s narrative cycle: shape-shifting on the page – B. Kojo Laing’s linguistic journeying – Yvonne Vera & the womanist claims of history – Concluding and... – Short biographies: Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing & Yvonne Vera – Bibliography

An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester, New York 14620, USA

www.boydell.co.uk www.boydellandbrewer.com

BEN OKRI • B. KOJO LAING • YVONNE VERA

• Ben Okri is a religious writer steeped in the metaphysical complexities of a traditional symbiosis of physical and spiritual co-existence; • B. Kojo Laing’s humor grounds itself in linguistic play and outrageous characterization; • Yvonne Vera translates her eco-feminist hope in political and social transformation with a focus on the developing political actions of Zimbabwean women.

Narrative Shape-Shifting MYTH, HUMOR & HISTORY IN THE FICTION OF

Responding to many of the same neo-colonial concerns as earlier African writers, Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing, and Yvonne Vera bring contemporary, hybrid voices to their novels that explore spiritual, cultural, and feminist solutions to Africa’s complex post-independence dilemmas. Their work is informed by both African and western traditions, especially the influences of traditional oral storytelling and post-modern fictional experimentation. Yet each is unique:

ARLENE A. ELDER

BEN OKRI • B. KOJO LAING • YVONNE VERA

Narrative Shape-Shifting ARLENE A. ELDER

MYTH, HUMOR & HISTORY IN THE FICTION OF

Ben Okri B. Kojo Laing Yvonne Vera

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Narrative Shape-shifting

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Contents

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Narrative Shape-shifting Myth, Humor, & History in the fiction of Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing & Yvonne Vera arlene A. elder Professor of Women’s Studies University of Cincinnati

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James Currey is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9 Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF UK www.boydell.co.uk and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.boydelland brewer.com The right of Arlene A. Elder to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2009 1 2 3 4 5 12 13 11 10 09 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Elder, Arlene A. Narrative shape-shifting : myth, humor & history in the fiction of Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing & Yvonne Vera 1. Okri, Ben – Criticism and interpretation 2. Laing, B. Kojo – Criticism and interpretation 3. Vera, Yvonne – Criticism and interpretation 4. African fiction (English) – History and criticism I. Title 823.9'140996-dc22 ISBN: 978-1-84701-012-4 (James Currey cloth)

Typeset in 10.5/12.5pt Melior by forzalibro designs, Cape Town Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents Acknowledgements

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Introduction Writing as Ase

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Ben Okri’s Narrative Cycle Shape-shifting on the Page

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The Artist & Nigeria’s Identity Construction Overview The Famished Road Songs of Enchantment Infinite Riches

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying

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Critical Discomfort Search Sweet Country Woman of the Aeroplanes Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars

56 58 69 86

Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’

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Concluding and …

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Short biographies: Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing & Yvonne Vera Bibliography Index

151 154 165

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Acknowledgements As ‘they’ say, ‘The shrub with one root is not hard to pull up’; my own sense of rootedness relies on the many institutions and people that have and continue to nourish me. First, I am grateful to the Fulbright Scholar Program that provided me with the opportunity to live in Nairobi, Kenya, for a year and take my first classes in African literature and orature at the University of Nairobi under the tutelage of Okot p’Bitek, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Kimani Gichau. This eyeopening experience led to my change of research fields. I will remain grateful always to my friends and colleagues in the African Literature Association who have inspired me with their accomplishments and instructed me in ways of reading and thinking I could never have achieved on my own. Next, I would like to acknowledge the generosity over the years of the William Howard Taft Memorial Fund at the University of Cincinnati, without which not only would this work never have been completed, but I also would not have been able to try out its ideas at the annual conferences of the ALA. Additionally, I owe a debt of gratitude to a large number of graduate students in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, and to my colleagues in the African and African American Studies Department and the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati: the first, for their incisive comments and questions in our seminars together that made me rethink weak assumptions, and the second two for their intellectual stimulation and supportive collegiality. Of course, finishing this study would be worth very little to me without the continuing love and encouragement of my glorious daughter, Nadja, and my incomparable partner, Larry. A heartfelt asante sana to all.

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Writing as Ase 1

Introduction Writing as Ase In Yoruba Ritual, Margaret Thompson Drewal defines the term ase as ‘the power of performers to generate ritual spectacles, or rather spectacular rituals, that operate as style wars, for style is meaning and competing styles generate uniqueness, virtuosity, and inventiveness’ (27). The three novelists I study here, Ben Okri of Nigeria, B. Kojo Laing of Ghana and Yvonne Vera of Zimbabwe, while hardly at ‘war’ with each other, clearly demonstrate the ability of their variety of styles to communicate complementary meanings while revealing their artistic individuality. All three write about their own regions and of particular periods in the experiences of their countries and peoples, yet, while they criticise similar social and political problems in their colonised, and then, newly independent nations, they envision solutions not for Nigeria, Ghana or Zimbabwe alone, but for the entire continent, even the world. Okri’s interpretation is spiritual, Laing’s a symbiosis of the most progressive ideas from tradition with the most humane from modernity, Vera’s a trust in the validity of ‘re-memory’ as truth-telling and in the potential of eco-communialism to create a better world. While all three recognise the agency of politicians, none places the burden of progress on political ideology or leaders alone, but rather on the enlightenment of individuals, ordinary people, who themselves will create just societies. Despite the similarity of their critiques, like Drewal’s Yoruba performers, Okri, Laing, and Vera express their ideas in styles particular to each. Drawing most heavily of the three from orature, Okri, in his abiku trilogy – to which I am limiting my discussion of his work – creates a neo-myth with transcendent characters experiencing past, present, and future lives simultaneously. For all the action in his novels, his incorporation of the repetition of storytelling results in a stasis emblematic of Nigeria itself, struggling into independence painfully, through a slow, difficult, and uncertain birth. Laing, on the other hand, sets his comic novels in the period shortly after Ghana’s freedom and draws from both his oral traditions and postmodern narrative structures to comment on what he sees as the pitfalls for Africa of either abandoning or completely embracing either tradition or modernism. Of the three, his language is the most experimental and challenging, his characters the most humorous. Even more 1

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Introduction

so than Okri, Vera is a poet writing in prose. For this reason, her beautifully lyrical fiction turns out to be the most startling of that of the three writers, as it conveys in incongruously gorgeous imagery the most violent and appalling actions and scenes. While her primary concern is the oppression of Zimbabwean women before and after the second war of liberation, her final response to their ageold problems is the formation of a new cultural identity created not by warfare, but by personal enlightenment and bravery, which she suggests will lead to male/female mutuality and, ultimately, to the transformation of the entire society. Ben Okri’s trilogy re-creates traditional West African oral forms by his brave attempt to write ‘oraliture’,1 that is, through literary strategies, to recreate orature, the performance of the oral tradition, on the printed page. Moreover, his moral grounding in these works, all three of which reveal Nigeria on the cusp of self-government, derives from traditional cultural mores and ethics. The pervasive spirituality in Okri’s novels sets his work apart from Laing and Vera’s. Not only his abiku protagonist, but all his characters exist in layered ‘zones’ of natural, spiritual, and technological realities reflective of his country’s traditional, colonial, and post-independence identities co-existing; his characters’ confusion about their future and their vulnerability to political oppression depicts Okri’s commentary on the necessity but difficulty of ‘seeing’ clearly, a quality essential for both personal and social health. While Laing’s political concerns are similar to Okri’s, his primary mode is comic. His novels can be read as linguistic romps through recent Ghanaian ‘history’ that employ oral traditions as well as postmodern self-reflexivity to satirise political venality but also to insist on the importance of finding a place of moral purchase in a quickly evolving global world. Maintaining the best of the old and combining it with the best of the new is crucial to his view of progress. Vera’s novels, ranging in time from her people’s first attempt to overthrow the colonisers to their post-independence experience of ‘freedom,’ are the most historically grounded of the three, although she denies attempting to write ‘history’; therefore her fiction calls for an examination of her use of ‘official’ accounts of Zimbabwe’s turbulent liberation period and her creation of rememories based on ‘oral history’. Vera’s focus on women, of course, requires a feminist approach, particularly the tenets of ecofeminism, which she reflects in her last published novel. Significantly, all three writers depict extraordinary women either leading or impeding their countries’ progress. Each novelist’s strengths lead to particular problems with their texts, of course, for as the Kongo say, ‘[T]he key that opens is also

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Writing as Ase 3 the key that locks’. Okri’s re-creation of myth, monsters, and symbolic action has caused the disputed label, ‘magical realism’, to be stamped onto his trilogy. Moreover, his risky attempts to structure his lengthy narratives according to the patterns of episodic oral tales has led to charges of unnecessary repetition and lack of development. Laing’s linguistic play has resulted in complaints about obscurity and verbal trickery for trickery’s sake. Likewise, Vera’s poetic imaging of the violence in which women find themselves caught, and of the destruction associated with Zimbabwean independence, has called into question the historical accuracy and political purpose of her works. These critical judgments will be addressed in my study. While I was struggling to try to understand each writer and to communicate both his/her stylistic uniqueness yet common interpretation of their modern and contemporary African nations, I began to think, understandably, I suppose, of the similarities and differences between their creative task and that of critics of literature. Although the solitary act of writing criticism, that is, the academically authorised, yet individualistic application of theories to creative writing, has always struck me as the furthest remove possible from the exciting, communal performance of orature. The traditionally competitive performances Drewal describes made me envision our academic engagement as one that actually could be viewed as a ‘style war’. Critics, too, desire to appear to our peers to ‘generate uniqueness, virtuosity, and inventiveness’, as she notes of the Yoruba performers, while sometimes shielding ourselves behind opaque and esoteric terminology, striking down one interpretive claim while elevating another, by this struggle hoping to serve our authors fairly. Drewal goes on in her essay to emphasise the importance of ‘play’ to the Yoruba performers she studied, the intention they ‘exercise in transforming ritual itself’ (28). The theories and critiques of the critics I employ in this study, as well as my own efforts, should be received, paradoxically, as both a very serious scholarly business and a playful ‘stylin’ out’. Theorising and analysing literature are significant activities, for the purpose of such strenuous efforts is to illuminate the literature of writers we hold as significant because they delight us with their linguistic virtuosity and also help to clarify the meanings of our lives and times. However, writing criticism is also ‘play’, not only because it sometimes, unfortunately, represents rather esoteric battles of ‘gotcha’ among different schools of theorists, or because it thrives on trying one interpretation then abandoning it for another, but because criticism, too, is a ritual performance of honoring art, an intellectual ‘dance’ intent on shaping perceptions of our literary texts, even our cultural moments. By imaginatively reshap-

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Introduction

ing our literature’s meaning and significance, critics transform our understanding of it according to particular literary, psychological, historical, and philosophical ‘truths’. Additionally, of course, writing criticism can often be fun. One of the most enjoyable experiences I had while working on this study was the realisation that one has to know many ‘dances’ to perform criticism. Here is what I mean. Drewal and others correctly insist that the content of orature changes with each performance; she observes the resulting paradox that, ‘[U]nfixed and unstable, Yoruba ritual is more modern than modernism itself’ (20). Accordingly, the cyclic return of postmodern narrative theories to the traditions of orature has struck me, and for some time, as an amusing development. We should recall, that, speaking of intertextuality, T.S. Eliot, the ‘High Priest’ of Modernism himself, remarked in his 1919 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ on the transformation worked on our apprehension of the corpus of written art, which reads differently with the addition of the genuinely new poem, the actually new novel; ‘the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered’ (Eliot’s emphasis). While Eliot is observing continuous changes in what he terms the ‘monument’ of literature, like the Yoruba, he knows that ‘[N]o poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone’ (Heath 1994: 1442). In her study, Drewal is not reflecting backwards on the entire oral tradition, but is rather commenting on the organic nature of individual oral performances, or orature, and the immediate effect of each differing performance in the experience and understanding of its participants. It is especially with reader response or reception theory and its concept of the ‘virtual book’ that we gain an idea about writing truly akin to our understanding of the organic nature of oral narratives in performance and their changing psychological effects.2 Eliot and Drewal, as removed in time and interest as they are, emphasise the fluidity of both oral and literary performances, and therefore the mutability of art’s influence on both readers and audience-participants. Such ‘shape-shifting’ is especially clear in the works of dual-tradition writers like Okri, Laing, and Vera, who strive to employ aspects of their ancient oral traditions in very contemporary texts, thus creating a complex and indeterminate hybridity. What I have learned is that ‘shape-shifting’ of a similar sort is necessary for their critics as well. Because the writers I have chosen draw on different African and western narrative traditions, I too needed to employ an eclectic approach. While I recognise the history of western cultural distortions of African writers and writing that leads to Anthonia Kalu’s well-considered caution to other critics that ‘evaluation and analyses

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Writing as Ase 5 relevant to the African experience must be derived from methods intrinsic to African artistic traditions’ (2001: 1), because of the liminality of contemporary African literature, my own practice is somewhat more eclectic. I am closer to the understanding of Carole Boyce Davies who, when speaking of the variety of available critical approaches, remarks, ‘I want to engage all these theories as visitors’. Davies is creating a metaphor for her critical practice based on Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘model of offering courtesies to visitors, which comes out of several African and African-based cultures, [by which] the host goes a “piece of the way” with friend or visitor, the distance depending on the relationship’ (1994: 46). Ernest Emenyonu also calls for a similar pragmatic approach, ‘which is a synthesis of the sociological, the formalistic or aesthetic, and the moralistic critical approaches. Although there are also elements of the psychological approach present’ (2000: 23). The constant danger for us critics is the allure of essentialising theoretical paradigms often used to force works of literature into convenient shapes to serve as demonstration objects, supporting one approach or another; sometimes, as in a Procrustian bed, characters, commentary, and fictional events not fitting the chosen theory are simply ‘lopped off’ by not being mentioned. Additionally, to my taste, some of the worst writing that parades as ‘literary criticism’ has little to do with criticism or literature, but uses a creative text in its title and two or three other times and is really a philosophical exposition, an opportunity to set up a dialogue or ‘trialogue’ among theories. It is the fiction itself that interests me, however, much more than the theory, which I use only as an aid. While I employ a number of theoretical approaches in this study, I hope I have avoided such pitfalls as those I mention above and, in partial obeisance to Kalu’s axiom, have allowed Okri’s, Laing’s, and Vera’s texts to teach me the appropriate approaches to their work. As ‘they’ say, though, ‘[M]any words do not fill a basket’; the success or failure of my endeavor depends upon my readers’ responses to it.

Notes 1. To be clear, I use the term ‘orature’ to mean the actual performance of

elements from the oral tradition; ‘transcriptions of orature’ to identify written re-tellings of those epics, stories, praise songs, etc. to a transcriber and/or collector by an informant; and ‘oraliture’ to describe a creative writer’s attempt to incorporate not just the content or scenes of performances, but performance strategies from orature themselves (repetition of action, for example) into their text. Despite its general acceptance, I find the term ‘oral literature’ not just oxymoronic but con-

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Introduction fusing and apolitical and do not use it.

2. Among many others, the preeminent cultural concerns of Chinweizu et

al. (1983) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986) support this view. 3. Quoted in Lauter (1992: 1441-7, 1442). 4. I am referring here, of course, to the meaning of a text changing with

every reading, the concept stemming from the reception theories of Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, and Stanley Fish, among others, not to books available on the internet.

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Shape-shifting on the Page 7

Ben Okri's Narrative Cycle Shape-shifting on the Page

‘I think Ben Okri is a writer who works very hard to sing from all the things that affect him. I don’t know if he’s an African writer, a British writer. I never think of myself in terms of any classification.’ (Okri to Emeagwali, 1997)

The Artist & Nigeria’s Identity Construction Ben Okri’s self-analysis quoted above may raise the hackles of nationalists and identity politicians; it also may dismay the small band of scholars who had hoped to have settled the huge problem of defining ‘African literature’ by the end of the twentieth century.1 It may even lead the more cynical among us to smile knowingly when we consider the expatriate Okri’s lengthy residence in England. One response it surely should evoke is gratitude for his reinforcing our perception of his personal and artistic hybridity as an extremely useful key to his abiku trilogy. The Famished Road (1991), for which he won the prestigious Booker Prize, his Songs of Enchantment (1993), and Infinite Riches (1998) comprise a cyclic narrative that historicises the political situation in Nigeria on the verge of independence from Britain and predicts its turbulent future.2 More ambitiously, these novels seek to remind the reader of universal moral and political values that the novelist believes the West once shared with traditional African cultures and that, in his judgment, remain essential for human welfare. Paradoxes abound in Okri’s works, even in the fact that this particular Nigerian writer is their author. It is on their stylistic puzzles that this chapter will later focus, as I would like to begin with a brief consideration of the ways in which Okri’s personal experiences influenced the trilogy. I choose to delve very briefly into the writer’s background not because there are no excellent studies of his life (Robert Fraser’s 2001 biography, Ben Okri, is one), but for the purpose of establishing my view of the importance of his personal and artistic hybridity from the outset of my analysis. One seeming contradiction arising from his self-description, his residence in England, and his stated influence by canonical British writers is that Okri hardly seems to be a proponent of a romantic return to pre-colonial African traditions. Moreover, the very artistry through which he chooses to frame his culturally conservative, essentially religious message 7

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Ben Okri’s Narrative Cycle

seems oxymoronic, since he employs the performance aesthetics of orature to structure three lengthy and circular narratives dependent on the material reality of the novel itself; unlike indeterminate performance, material novels necessarily have both beginnings and ends, however meandering their plots, merely by virtue of there being a first page and a last. The larger issue I am raising with this point, of course, is the question of the possibility of transforming the performance mode into the textual. This chapter will analyse this artistic paradox in Okri’s trilogy by beginning with a consideration of his liminal identity as a key to his intentions and accomplishment in the abiku novels, the major works of his second period. The author’s educational hybridity itself accounts, in large part, for his message of universal unity. By ‘educational’, I do not, of course, mean his formal training in school alone, although those experiences are extremely important to him as a writer, but also his multi-cultural development as a youth in Nigeria and England. As has been well documented, Ben Okri’s birth in 1959 to an Igbo mother and an Urhobo father, in the Urhobo community at Minna, Nigeria, is his earliest but hardly his sole cultural grounding. Nevertheless, his family background and early childhood experiences seem to run deep, as suggested by his continuing family ties with the Secretary of the Urhobo Historical Society and his celebration as a ‘native son’ on the organisation’s website.3 Additionally, as with so many Nigerian writers, the personal trauma of the Biafra Civil War (1967–71) is evident in all his works, especially his short story collections, Incidents at the Shrine, Short Stories (1986) and Stars of the New Curfew (1988). As he reports, ‘[M]y education took place simultaneously with my relations being killed … and friends who one day got up in class and went out to fight the war’ (Fraser 18). Countering his sense of loss and awareness of violence that this conflagration imposed were even earlier models of methods for Okri to tell of such events. The oral quality of his rambling narrative pacing and his fascination with the power of traditional figures like the abiku and the masquerade may be traced to the effect of the folk tales told by his mother and the story-telling competitions in which he engaged with his young friends in Nigeria. ‘[A]nd it never occurred to us’, he remembers, expressing the uninformed context in which such youthful, artistic ‘play’ usually isolates itself , ‘that those stories actually contained a unique worldview. It’s very much like the river that runs through your backyard. It’s always there. It never occurs to you to take a photograph or to seek its mythology. It’s just there; it runs in your veins, it runs in your spirit’ (Emeagwali 1992). In the same interview, he cites Nigerian writers, too, as among his influences:

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Shape-shifting on the Page 9 Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and, especially, the poet killed in the Biafra Civil War, Christopher Okigbo. However, possibly even more formative for both his identity and his writing was England, where he was taken first at the age of three when his father traveled there to study law. As he grew older, he could not help but be influenced by the library of western ‘classics’ in his father’s imported collection and, of course, by his formal schooling in England and in Nigeria’s colonially structured secondary schools. ‘[s]habby genteel Peckham’ (Fraser 14), the racially mixed British suburb where the Okris settled in 1961 filled his ears with multiple British dialects. He began his studies at the age of five at John Donne Primary School, where he was one of two black students; attended Christ’s High School in Ibadan and Urhobo College, which he entered, aged eleven, in 1961; and in 1980 he entered the University of Essex in Colchester to study for a BA in comparative literature. Thus he was introduced to a western literary tradition which did not vie for prominence with African orature but, rather, complemented it to shape a culturally diverse, yet paradoxically unified, artistic heritage; ‘Aladdin was as African to me as Ananse. Odysseus was just another variation of the tortoise myth’ (Wilkinson 82). ‘Shakespeare is an African writer’, he has asserted boldly; ‘[H]is Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens’ characters are Nigerians’ (in Emeagwali 1992). As he reveals to Jane Wilkinson, when young, he never considered literature as a scholarly field for himself, but read science, intending to be a doctor or engineer; consequently, the diverse books in his father’s library became his ‘secret pleasures’ (78), no doubt, therefore, more exciting and a longer-lasting influence than they would have been as academic assignments. When he traveled back to England from Nigeria at the age of nineteen, carrying with him the manuscript of his first novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980), he was returning to the country he later was to consider ‘the home of literature’ (BBC interview 2001). Arguably, the most profound contributor to Okri’s hybridity is the English language in which he writes. However strongly we may agree with Chinua Achebe’s practical decision to compose in English rather than Igbo,4 it is impossible to deny the dilemma for previously colonised African writers reflected in Ngugi’s understanding that ‘[L]anguage carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world’ (Decolonising the Mind 16). Conversely, however much we may understand and appre-

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Ben Okri’s Narrative Cycle

ciate Ngugi’s well-considered 1977 choice, thereafter, to write his own fiction in Gikuyu, this debate has raged for a very long time, and each African writer has had to decide for him/herself whether or not to produce what Ngugi terms ‘Afro-European literature’ (27). The modern and postmodern periods have expanded and increased hybrid identities and not for Africans alone. It is Okri’s particular decision to reject the cultural implications of both language and birth and to internally construct his own identity as simply ‘artist’, just as he believes that ‘[L]iterature doesn’t have a country’ but ‘always lives in its own unique kingdom’ (Emeagwali 1992). This latter assertion demonstrates the writer’s western romanticism, just as the former reflects western individualism. Both suggest his deliberate removal of himself from the material demands of nationalists and the mundane understanding of writing as, first and foremost, part of the capitalist enterprise, in the sense that writing only ‘doesn’t have a country’ when it cannot find a publisher. Yet, in all his works, his concern focuses on the cribbed lives of ordinary people, even in his earlier books in which their semi-autobiographical, artistic protagonists are frustrated by corruption, a lack of understanding of their art, and the poverty around them that cannot be ignored. Moreover, despite Okri’s formal education in modern western values, The Famished Road (TFR), Songs of Enchantment (SoE), and Infinite Riches (IR) are spiritual to their core. They are also political in their author’s basic intent. Okri re-creates West African myths and rituals in order to assert traditional African cultural/spiritual values as the only resource powerful enough to combat modern political corruption and oppression world-wide. Such valorising of African tradition might appear to mire him in the morass of Negritudist essentialism.5 However, even a brief foray along Okri’s fictional road refutes any such essentialist interpretation. Like Achebe and Ngugi, he judges Africans as every bit as corruptible as their colonisers and the multinational profiteers taking the colonisers’ place. Personal and civic virtue does not begin in biology for Okri, but in a commitment to clear perception and the subsequent acceptance of personal and social responsibility, a critique that oral storytellers have always provided. Yet, here, too, his view is not simple. He complicates this allegiance to the tenets of the oral tradition by his understanding that only stories told without ulterior motives lead to genuine perceptions and inspire courageous action. The understanding that not all stories are helpful, not all storytellers trustworthy, appears throughout his work as a counterforce to any idealisation of traditional times and might account for his donning the ambiguous mask of the Trickster, the shape-shifting culture bearer for his own authorial persona.

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Shape-shifting on the Page 11 His books, then, while crowded with both myth and politics and appearing at once to be novels and transcriptions of orature, transcend conventional realistic generic boundaries separating religious, philosophical, and political writing to demonstrate a formal simultaneity of all three, just as many traditional stories do. However, the necessity, yet extreme difficulty, of humans acquiring clear perception, especially in confusing times when it is needed most, is one of the unifying themes of all three narratives, and adds a psychological aspect to his spiritual and political tales. Since Okri’s deepest sensibility is a religious one, Marxism, no more than materialistic capitalism, can be his solution to Africa’s modern woes. The mythic is the political for him, the mythmaker Okri’s true leader. Moreover, he creates his neo-myths in the language of the colonisers, and unapologetically.

Overview Although Songs of Enchantment has been considered by some critics a sequel to The Famished Road,6 Okri has made it clear that he doesn’t wish to be limited by such generic classifications; ‘It is not a sequel. It’s a continuation of the dream’ (quoted in Mitchell, no page). Intending, instead, for the three books to compose a continuing story cycle (IR, frontispiece], he unites them with the first-person voice of the abiku child,7 Azaro, who is not only their narrator and a participant in their action but also a symbol of modern Nigeria, even of Africa as a whole. He is an oral double of the Trickster/writer himself and possibly a symbol of the capacity for simultaneous spiritual and material existence in everyone.8 As we might expect from a cycle of stories centered on a controlling image of the interwoven existence of humans, animals, spirits, and nature, Okri’s three novels demonstrate significant formal unity with each other. True to their aesthetic and philosophical origin in the oral tradition, each contains multiple recreations and repetitions of characters, incidents, and themes. To appreciate these narratives, then, we must put to the side the aesthetic that expects round and developing characters and Aristotelian demands of plot progression. Not only is the trilogy lengthy and repetitious, but, for all its violent energy, surprisingly static. Due to Okri’s desire to incorporate rhetorical strategies of orature into his literature, his cycle becomes tedious to read, even for a readership comfortable with the subversions of postmodern fiction.9 These works actually demonstrate few postmodern narrative strategies and, as might be expected, can be analysed best by turning to the performance practices of orature

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itself. Further, and such is my primary point in this chapter, Okri’s brave attempt to incorporate into his texts not just the themes and subjects of orature but also to structure his works with the performance techniques that distinguish it from literature provides an excellent example of the reason we experience the two artistic modes differently. I argue that even Okri cannot successfully combine them. I hope to use this chapter to explain my rather harsh-sounding judgment on his attempt at such hybridity as well as to interrogate the political implications of his movement from foregrounding metaphysics in his first text to focusing on political action in his third. ‘So many things that will seem puzzling in the book are actually in the possibility of a life being lived simultaneously at different levels of consciousness and in different territories.’ (Okri to Wilkinson 1992: 82) I largely agree with other critics who have found Okri’s attempts at recreating orature in print neither pleasing nor successful. Conflating the novelist’s use of African animism with what he sees as an adoption of European magical realism and the western novel form, Adewale Maja-Pearce, for one, condemns both him and Amos Tutuola for ‘betray[ing] literature itself. The result can only be a tedious exercise in the fantastic for its own sake’ (103). As I indicated in my Introduction, I understand that orature, because of its existence in organic performance and literature with its dependence on ‘museumised’ stable print, are essentially incompatible, despite recent attempts to reconcile them. Moreover, I accept Maja-Pearce’s implication here that the repetitive action and recurring visions in The Famished Road are often wearying, even to those of us not expecting conventional narrative pacing. Nevertheless, I take issue with the critic’s implication that Tutuola or Okri’s works are driven by their self-indulgent commitment to the sensational. Further, and such is my primary point in this chapter, Okri’s brave attempt to incorporate into his texts not just the themes and subjects of orature but also to structure his works with the performance techniques that distinguish it from literature provides an excellent example of the reason we experience the two artistic modes differently. Ato Quayson also finds problematic and contradictory the writer’s ‘evocation of an orality paradigm within the space of a literary one, so that there are, properly speaking, two sets of expectations that it relies on for its conduct’ (129). Quayson is correct. Okri’s stylistic synchronicity requires us to read informed by two aesthetics. His narratives primarily derive their characters, action, and imagery from African oral traditions, not modern European narrative style, hence their possible appearance to us as overly long and repetitious,

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Shape-shifting on the Page 13 as Maja-Pearce complains, and as unsettling hybrids, as Quayson criticises.10 Their frequently static pacing, juxtaposed with violent action, is a characteristic far more irritating to critics of literature than to participants in orature, of course, where narrative is frequently repetitious and ‘action’ consists of the physical movement of the performer(s) and other participants as much as, or more than, the activities of the characters in the tales being told. On a different note, speaking of the discursive emphasis in Songs of Enchantment, Harry Garuba complains about Okri adhering to the common authorial response to an audience unaware of the conventions of oral narrative: ‘[W]hen an animistic narrative is explained at every allegorical or metaphorical point, it is the realism that suffers’ (157). Garuba’s complaint helps to demote the usefulness of the term ‘magical realism’ in favor of seeing the supernatural in works such as Okri’s as realistic in its cultural grounding. While I agree with much of the aforementioned criticism, my contention is that Okri is not writing novels at all, but creating ‘mythopoetic’ narratives that look like novels because they are offered to us not in performance, but in typography on pieces of bound paper. His continuously interlocking stories serve the same dual function as that identified by E.N. Obiechina for traditional legends, that is, ‘[F]irst, they give the members of the community a collective solidarity by linking their present with their past’, and ‘[S]econdly, legends and pseudo-history provide the legalistic basis for settling the problems of rights, and obligations within the social system; for, the doings of traditional heroes become precedents and norms by which present action can be judged’ (151). Okri’s cycle serves both oral functions but, in so doing, violates the cardinal rule of novel writing: keeping the reader’s interest. As the author observes, ‘[R]eading, like writing … is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they’ll only see their narrow range reflected in it’ (Mitchell, no page). It turns out, if one perseveres, he/ she will also detect familiar strategies in Okri from the written tradition, a large-scale example being the three works’ linear thematic progressions that are not apparent in the individual texts. Despite the repetition of his character types, for instance, over the linear time-period of the three works, the major protagonists develop an observable and functional self- and social awareness and a humbling understanding of the difficulty of creating a moral community to supplant their country’s chaos.

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All living things continue even when dead. … The world is full of superimpositions. The quote above, taken from Okri’s third text, Infinite Riches (331), expresses the thematic unity of Okri’s trilogy; the overall meaning of the entire cycle is grounded in this spiritual understanding of life. Nevertheless, The Famished Road is the most thoroughly metaphysical of the three narratives and introduces this concept of the simultaneity of time and space and hence, Okri realises, the elusiveness of his moral imperative to achieve clear vision for effective political action. Azaro’s story, meanwhile, develops a specific, political critique of an increasingly materialistic, corrupt Nigeria on the verge of independence. Through its subtle shift of focus from the abiku Azaro to his Dad, Songs of Enchantment, the second text, emphasises the public action necessary for legitimate personal power and social reform. Specifically, it argues for a return to traditional concepts of moral leadership as well as the courageous, communal action implied by the metaphysics and storytelling in the first book. Okri uses the title of the third work in his cycle, Infinite Riches, to reflect Nigeria’s contemporary lust for wealth and political power but subverts this materialistic quest by grounding true power and riches in the time-honored storytelling tradition that he, as Trickster/artist, is continuing. To reiterate, while its political purpose is to expose the developing crisis of authority in Nigeria on the eve of independence, ironically, The Famished Road foregrounds spiritual and philosophical beliefs. Azaro’s continually being overwhelmed by his perception of simultaneous physical and spiritual worlds serves as the repeated trope that represents, I believe, the author’s own spiritual sensibility and awe. Okri’s challenging task as storyteller is to find rhetorical methods to convince us of the links between these two apparently disparate realms. As other critics have noted,11 the structural setting of this book depends on a few omnipresent elements. Besides the young protagonist as omniscient narrator, Okri unifies his episodic narrative with his ambiguous symbols of the ‘road’ from Azaro’s compound, the animated forest it traverses, and its destination, Madame Koto’s bar. These liminal spaces create alternating loci of movement and stasis and serve as the primary venues for Okri’s symbiosis of the physical and the spiritual. Azaro’s progress to and through these multilayered spaces provides opportunities for the book’s political action to be combined with its philosophical themes.

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Shape-shifting on the Page 15 Songs of Enchantment, on the other hand, with its increasing emphasis on Dad, is more recognisably a political novel, albeit one reverberating with the metaphysical revelations and shifting timeless and temporal locations of The Famished Road. As descendant of the King of the Road and, like his abiku son, a recipient of visions and a traveler in dreams, Dad differs from Azaro in one extremely important way; he is an adult. As such, Dad would be expected in traditional times to perform necessary heroic action for the good of the community, as his young son would not. Okri’s shift of emphasis from the child to the adult protagonist is crucial for the development of his political message, as it moves our focus from metaphysics to the material, that is, from a contemplation on Azaro’s unity of physical and spiritual lives, as emphasised in the first book, to the search for appropriate and potentially successful moral action in his always multi-layered but, paradoxically, increasingly fragmented political world. Psychological complexity, too, is never far from the author’s concern. Okri is entirely aware of our desire for comforting dualities, especially our tendency to create a simplistic dichotomy of philosophical and political good and evil. Such binaries lead, of course, to more personal fragmentation and cultural conflict. Thus Okri’s belief, therefore, in the essential unity of all life – despite national, historical, gender, or religious differences – and in the significance of all human history, not one continent’s alone, is emphasised in Songs of Enchantment. Accordingly, the social action that proves most effective for him is not that of politics in the conventional sense, which is shown to be a disappointing, if not disreputable, activity in all three narratives. Instead, society advances for Okri from a clear-eyed perception on the part of everyone, not so-called ‘leaders’ alone; our understanding and embracing the rigours of traditional values, that is, communal cooperation; respect for all individuals, however lowly; and courageous action in the world. Appropriately, because of his age and gendered position in the family, it is Dad who is best suited to eventually perceive the continuing meaning of these age-old values and to act on them. Surprisingly, nevertheless, it is Mum who becomes the political catalyst, against her will at first, in Infinite Riches. Another paradox: despite this narrative’s distraction of the reader with conventional political activity (Mum’s success in freeing Dad; her inspiration to other poor women to organise; and the politicians’ continuing preparation for the long-awaited political rally that will establish the Party of the Rich at Independence), Okri’s third text resituates this political arena from the mundane world to artistic

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and spiritual spheres. It returns to a focus upon the ability of the universal curative expressions, narrative and myth, to transform human life, as conventional politics, on their own, cannot. Yet, surprisingly, Infinite Riches largely laments the vagaries, rather than praising the certainties, of storytelling itself. Okri’s reversals call to mind the Igbo proverb, ‘[W]herever Something stands, Something Else will stand beside it. Nothing is absolute’ (Achebe in Achebe 1 989: 94).

The Famished Road ‘Our country is an abiku country.’ (TFR 478)

The Famished Road superimposes the supernatural and natural worlds through its astonishing synthesising imagery. This literary device has been identified by some recent critics of Okri as ‘magical realism’,12 a designation Okri rejects as a-cultural: ‘I’m looking at the world in The Famished Road from the inside of the African world view … That is just the way the world is seen: the dead really are not dead, the ancestors are still part of the living community and there are innumerable gradations of reality …’ (Ross 337-8). Therefore, I prefer Harry Garuba’s designation of ‘animist realism’ (284). In response to an interviewer’s question, Okri denies that his writing attempts anything other than to accurately reflect the spiritually charged African landscape. ‘… what appears like surrealism or fantastic writing actually is not fantastic writing,’ he insists; ‘it’s simply writing about the place in the spirit of the place. I’m not trying in the slightest to produce strange effects’ (Ross 337). True to his embracing of paradox and his identification with the Trickster, Okri seems at once truthful and disingenuous with this claim. As he surely knows, his effects are nothing if not ‘strange’ for a present-day reader rather than a member of a traditional, primary-oral society, one grounded in the assumptions and modes of West African myth, ritual, and performance. I believe that it is only because he so strongly appreciates the rhetorical strategy of the Trickster to instruct obliquely that he would deny this obvious fact. His implication in the interview above is the same as the general theme of his narratives, that his fictional Nigeria would not seem so strange had contemporary people, African and Western alike, not lost touch with a spiritual understanding of life that would enhance our everyday perception of layers of reality beyond the mundane. As he says, ‘[T]hese are things that are always part of all societies. It’s just that we went ahead and forgot’ (Phillips 169). Okri’s is a world

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Shape-shifting on the Page 17 that continually ‘contains glimpses of others’ (TFR 10), a narrative landscape true, as he says, to the spirit of traditional, mixed West African culture.13 Azaro’s abiku sensibility and Dad’s visions and afflictions, as well as the actions and transformation of the increasingly monstrous, but ultimately morally ambiguous, Madame Koto, then, are more than metaphoric or metonymic. True, the images surrounding these characters appear as startling allegorical constructs, but, to paraphrase Garuba, their thematic purpose is to offer physical depictions of abstract understandings that reflect a real world; ‘[Okri’s] battle is to find a way of remembering in the midst of collective amnesia’ (279). ‘Your story isn’t going anywhere,’ Mum said …. ‘A story is not a car,’ dad replied. ‘It is a road, and before that it was a river, a river that never ends.’(SoE 226) A well-known West African proverb states, ‘[M]ay we never walk when the road waits, famished’; Ben Okri, like Wole Soyinka and Amos Tutuola before him, structures his vision of modern Nigeria through the image and directive of this axiom. Okri’s intertextuality with other African as well as European and South American writers was commented on extensively when The Famished Road gained widespread acclaim,14 and Wole Soyinka was often named as the novel’s most obvious influence. Okri himself, however, has denied the connection. When an interviewer pointed out the book’s apparent allusion to Soyinka’s play, The Road (1965), he replied unequivocally, ‘[N]o, there’s no connection. My road is quite different. My road is a way. It’s a road that is meant to take you from one place to another, on a journey, towards a destination’ (Wilkinson 83). While we might be inclined to dismiss this rejection of influence as the petulance of a young writer when considered derivative of a renowned predecessor, Okri’s distinction between his and Soyinka’s ‘roads’ rings true because it points to the moral, communal nature of Azaro’s journey on his cyclic road, as opposed to the self-serving manipulation of his road by Soyinka’s macabre Professor. It is worth elaborating briefly on this distinction, since a ‘road’ serves as the controlling metaphor in both works, as critics have noted. Understanding the difference between the older and younger writers’ use of this symbol might not answer the question of influence satisfactorily, but it will clarify Okri’s originality. The most significant contrasts between The Road and The Famished Road strike me as twofold: the different imperatives of age and youth that affect each writer’s protagonists and Soyinka’s emphasis on a third realm of experience, a linear, transitional state between life

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and death, in contrast to Okri’s understanding of the simultaneity of these different experiences of existence. In his play, Soyinka characterises Professor, his murderous ‘king of the road’, as a promoter of the mundane, manipulating, for his own mercenary purposes, the renowned traffic problems of Lagos. The playwright envisions a post-independence society in which even the dead are preyed upon, and his road leads nowhere but to death. By contrast, Okri’s liminal road, situated in a timeless moment of pre-independence, reveals the continuation of a mythic past that can be used for good or for ill; moreover, one’s fortunes on his road reflect a Nigeria in re-creation, a country moving inevitably and chaotically, even in its remotest corners, into the technological age. Soyinka’s task is to infuse Lagos’ actual treacherous paths with a Yoruba emphasis on transitional states of life and death15; Okri’s is to ground his mythic interpretation of Azaro’s travels in the reality of Nigeria’s political journey. Describing Agemo rituals she witnessed in West Africa in the 1980s, Drewal emphasises both the indeterminacy of the moral stance of the chief participants and the accepted, sometimes contradictory, variations in the apparent intent of their ritual action: Agemo ritual performances consisted of a multiplicity of mini dramas. The action surged back and forth between poles of joking and fighting, so that to get involved in Agemo was indeed to become a Trickster. The polarity is reflected in Agemo titles. Thus Ija, the title of one priest living in Imosan, means ‘fight’, while Serefusi, the one living in Igbile, means ‘Playful-BeyondMeasure’. (113)

Unlike the naive Azaro, Professor can be read as the Trickster of Yoruba Agemo celebrations, providing forged licenses for his drivers, switching road signs and so sending unsuspecting travelers off the road, and profiting from his ‘accident’ store. Paradoxically, he also creates a comic legend and social function for himself as a fastidious lay reader at the nearby Christian church (the funds of which he is alleged to have stolen) and a spiritual dimension for himself through his quest to discover the enigmatic Word, which he never defines, thereby reinforcing its mystery and allusive reference to the Old Testament. Oyin Obumba describes the Agemo priests to Drewal as ‘traditionally the intellectuals of Ijebuland’. Much like Soyinka’s devious Professor and Okri’s straightforward Dad, ‘they are usually found contemplating the principles of life and death and the inscrutable force which controls them; [T]hey appear to be close to the source of cosmic power or energy but they cannot tap it at will.’ This ability/ inability is particularly true of Dad. Like Dad, these priests also have an important social function, that is, encouraging cooperation for the

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Shape-shifting on the Page 19 success of all; yet, like Dad’s neighbors, their own organisations of followers are competitive, frequently allowing their rivalry to break out into open skirmishes on the days of Agemo celebrations. Echoing Dad’s frustration and melancholy is the almost tragic understanding that Drewal’s informant says these priests ‘feel acutely’ (113), namely, the gulf between their conviction that this world should thrive on co-operation and the negation of this very principle in their own organisations. Professor sleeps regularly in the graveyard in order to be in rapid contact with those newly killed in car accidents and believes, ‘the Word may be found companion not to life, but Death’ (159). If Azaro thought in abstractions, he would disagree, or at least significantly modify this dualist dictum in order to situate wisdom, not in death, or in life, for that matter, but in our awareness that these seemingly separate worlds overlap and co-exist. Possibly, because he is a child, Azaro is not on a search for ‘Truth’, a final ‘Word’, Biblical or otherwise. Instead, his quest, as an abiku who has renounced and rejoined worldly life many times, is for earthly experience, which, by its nature, is mutable and open to multiple interpretations, and not defined by a ‘terminal creed’.16 I situate The Famished Road on the same path as The Road, not to claim any direct influence, but to place the younger writer’s narrative cycle within an established lineage with in Nigerian writing that draws upon oral traditions to examine communal values as well as to criticise a developing African society in which such truths are under attack. Understandably, Amos Tutuola is another of Okri’s frequently mentioned literary forefathers. Clearly, uniting many of the episodes of The Famished Road are Azaro’s wanderings from the realm of the spirit children and almost back to it, echoing those of Tutuola’s palm-wine drinkard into the bush, moving from the relative emotional calm in the settled life of the compound to seizures of fear on the road through the bush. Like Tutuola’s protagonist, Azaro wanders into forests filled with frightening creatures that only his eyes (and sometimes his father’s) can see. Beyond the abilities of the palm wine drinkard, however, he also meanders in and out of the conflicted dreams of other residents in his compound. Tutuola and, through his own intertextuality, Fagunwa before him, seem clearer influences on the younger writer than Soyinka, if for no other reason than the fact that Okri himself has acknowledged that Tutuola ‘will provide generations of artists with inspiration’.17 All three of Okri’s narratives are replete with examples of this intertextuality with Tutuola: Azaro’s realisation that, like Tutuola’s Complete Gentleman of the market place, many of the customers in

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Madame Koto’s bar are not human beings at all, but ‘spirits who had borrowed bits of human beings to partake of human reality (TFR 136); the boy’s escape from the menacing Masquerade when he finds himself in a forest similar to Tutuola’s ‘bush of ghosts’, peopled as it is with unearthly beings, that dissolves before his eyes into an overcrowded marketplace frequented by humans as well as spirits: Songs of Enchantment’s well-dressed old man, blinded by a passing angel, who is the devious ‘master sorcerer’ (144), wandering ‘the streets, surveying his new domain, with the tentative gait of a perfect gentleman’ (145); the old man’s appearance in Infinite Riches as an ordinarily human, unmasked only by Azaro’s penetrating gaze, as he wails ‘with his yellow spectacles on his face, so that we wouldn’t see his eyes’ (294-5). Even more powerfully than Soyinka’s booby-trapped path, or Tutuola’s unmarked bush, however, Okri’s landscapes threaten sojourners both physically and psychologically by emphasising the life-giving/life-taking qualities of water with which his road is associated. The Famished Road is launched in Biblical cadences as an origin tale: ‘[I]n the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry’ (3). Rivers are natural sites of danger for humans who do not impose artificial standpoints on or over them – boats, bridges, temporary shores – or dredge them and turn them into walkable paths. Even transformed into seemingly solid ground, watery dangers are, literally, just below the surface. To propitiate this hidden force, travelers leave gifts at the crossroads. Okri’s road is also a location for the malevolence of both spirits and men; more than once, for instance, his protagonist and others are almost run down by Masquerades cursing riders on bicycles, and Madame Koto’s power-mad chauffeur. Moreover, the very road itself is tricky. Azaro is often led astray by its morphing during his attempts to travel the short distance between Madame Koto’s bar and his house: ‘I followed one path and it led me into the forest. I followed it back and I arrived at a place I had never seen in my life before’ (65). Formerly single roads fracture before his eyes into several puzzling possibilities; on more than one occasion the boy runs down twisted paths, their ends invisible, to evade monstrous pursuers. Actually in danger, of course, is Azaro’s ability to interpret his world and therefore his ability to reason and function in it: ‘I took another path to avoid [a monster], but further down I saw him approaching … I took a path and to my shock I saw myself approaching’ (75). This perceptual confusion, Okri’s repeated multiplying and mutating images, likewise affects the reader’s understanding and requires, on our part,

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Shape-shifting on the Page 21 the ‘creative act’ of reading he insisted on when being interviewed by Elizabeth Mitchell. We are further challenged by his road’s subversion of the usual oppositional duality of life and death, which also eliminates the significance of Soyinka’s moment of transition from one form of existence to another as well as the comfort of the palm-wine drinkard’s ability to rent his fear and sell his death. Okri’s world is one in which time and space encompass all experiences, and experience encompasses all times and spaces, thus negating distinctions among past, present, and future and so dissolving differences between corporeal and spiritual life. Instead, both Azaro and the reader are immersed in immediate moments of simultaneity. This repeated metaphysical and psychological indeterminacy and paradox replaces the static ‘terminal creed’ of Soyinka’s ‘Word’ with a disorienting, unavoidable experience of indeterminacy. Okri’s considerable poetic ability and adherence to African animism allows him to turn such a transcendental and psychological abstraction as simultaneity into compelling visual and kinetic imagery. I shall cite only one of many examples. In a dream-state, that universally experienced moment when conscious reality blends into subconscious, Azaro envisions Madame Koto’s run-down bar. Usually inhabited only by a few vagrants and one or two village people, the bar has begun its transition into a site of the spiritual and political unknown; physically, it has suddenly moved deep into the forest and is now frequented by animals and birds. When Azaro experiences the place at this time, the customers ‘were all invisible and [he] saw the air drinking palm wine’ (TFR 59-60). Linked in this instance with nature itself, Madame Koto’s bar momentarily becomes a sanctuary for the supernatural, but is soon transformed into a meeting place for very earthly, corrupt politicians, hopeful prostitutes, and the thugs who protect them, and thus into an ambiguous location, just as its proprietress is an ambiguous moral force in the community. Masks and Masquerades, intensifying Azaro’s physical danger and also his psychological and moral confusion, appear throughout The Famished Road. As Derek Wright notes, in Okri’s Nigeria, the jackal-headed masquerade is used as a ‘grand controlling’ image that ‘appears primarily to signify the naked aggression and brute political will of totalitarian power that … spreads itself contagiously through everything with the same intimidating menace’ (New Directions 166-7). Its menace also can be subtle, and reiterate the necessity of clear vision leading to appropriate action. Intelligent action, of course, is symbiotic with perception, for, as Chinua Achebe points out, ‘[Y]ou do not stand in one place to watch a masquerade’18 (‘The

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Igbo World’ 65). Participation, not passivity, is required in Achebe’s Igbo world and in Okri’s modern Nigeria, otherwise only ignorance, powerlessness, and confusion will result. To complicate the possibility of true vision, however, the obscuring ability of the material mask itself for those who adopt it, as well as for those who wish to identify its wearer, must be acknowledged. In Okri’s version of this reality, when Azaro, escaping from the menacing old man, hides behind a mask, he discovers that: [H]e was completely invisible. He was not there. I could not see him at all through the eyes of the mask … I took off the mask and saw the old man re-entering the anthill. I put it on again and was amazed to see not an anthill but a grand palace with beryl colonnades and jade green verandahs … (TFR 245)

We legitimately might wonder how this small, scarcely schooled boy has the language to think of ‘beryl colonnades and jade green verandahs’, much less the ability to identify them. Ato Quayson, citing the use of the preterit tense in the narrative, questions whether Azaro is still a child when he narrates The Famished Road. Quayson’s quarrel is not with Azaro’s sophisticated language but with the fact that ‘[H]e often launches into confident assertions and generalisations of a gnomic and proverbial character …’ (125). I believe, however, that Okri wishes us to keep in mind that this character has lived many times before and, as an abiku, he is not inconsistent when he expresses both the mundane knowledge and spiritual wisdom that an ordinary boy would not have. In Songs of Enchantment, Azaro fails at school because his teachers believe he is deliberately cheating when he blurts out information his spirit companions whisper into his ears (5). If Quayson’s notice of the preterit is intended to identify a stroke of realism in the narratives, that is, Okri’s use of a mature narrator looking back on his life, it strikes me as much more in keeping with the character to see Azaro’s knowledge as explained by his abiku status than by accepting that he could remember, in detail, the countless repetitions of his experiences on the road from the distance of adulthood. It is more likely that Azaro is recounting his adventures shortly after they occur, and Okri uses the preterit for the sake of clarity. We can only imagine the additional confusion for the reader if Azaro’s experiences were delivered in an even more fragmented and confused manner because he is in the midst of them! Accepting retentions from Azaro’s previous lives is only one of the suspensions of disbelief required of Okri’s readers. The author’s ‘play’ occurs again when he occasionally violates his established geometry of form by writing on the other side of the stylistic equation. The following passage of naturalism suggests his desire to insist on the significance of the mundane and the ultra-realistic, a stylistic shift

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Shape-shifting on the Page 23 that reinforces his theme of the interwoven nature of all experience, this time, on the narrative plane. The section reads: The wind swept harder through the passage. The mosquitoes fell on him. The silence deepened and the darkness became indistinguishable from the different rooms. A child started crying. Someone smacked it and it cried even louder. Other babies woke and cried and then one by one the crying ceased and the compound fell asleep. (TFR 98)

This excerpt subtly links Okri with well-known, realistic African novels, especially with the naturalist depictions of tenement life that, for example, exiled South African writer Alex la Guma employs to deliver his stark political messages in A Walk in the Night (1962). Surprisingly, Okri’s switch in style really does not jar the reader by its unexpected appearance in a ‘mythopoetic’ narrative; by the time it appears, the reader has been conditioned by Okri to expect all kinds of multiple experiences and also accept stylistic border crossings. Indeed, on one level, especially in the book’s insistence on the interchangeable motives and strategies of the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor, both of which exploit the people to create wealth and status for an elite few, Okri’s novel shares a similar political purpose with the Naturalist narratives of La Guma and others. However, while his political analysis is especially foregrounded in the second half of The Famished Road, it is clear that his continual narrative interest is not in politics alone, but in correspondences of the philosophical, psychological, and political – a conceptual and narrative simultaneity. Most narrative journeys are potential maturation tales. Like Huck Finn, to my way of thinking, Azaro seems both as wise and as uncomprehending after his many adventures as when we first meet him. His only new perception – his transformation of the frequentlyexpressed adage from ‘[T]he world is full of riddles that only the dead can answer’ to ‘There are many riddles amongst us that neither the living nor the dead can answer’ (TFR 45) – reinforces Okri’s layering of worlds and rejection of dualities, even in the knowledge of the living and the supposedly dead, rather than its serving as proof of Azaro’s maturation. Further, it posits the indeterminacy and mystery of the oral tradition. Azaro’s perceptions throughout The Famished Road, whether reflective of dreams, hallucinations, feverished misapprehensions, drunken imaginings, or actual occurrences, enable Okri’s development of a layered psychological and philosophical interpretation of human life by which he can reflect the slippery transitions of Nigerian rebirth as an independent nation in the confusions of his young abiku protagonist. Ironically, despite its grounding in the tenets of West African oral

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tradition, like texts deliberately written as postmodern exemplars, The Famished Road is also concerned with the construction of reality through narrative; in this regard, we must remember, however, the book also mirrors the self-consciousness of orature that re-creates meaning with each performance. Clear examples of the story’s creative ability are Azaro’s tales about his experiences with his spirit-companions; his frequent requests of his Mum and Dad to tell him stories of their lives; the village’s creation of Madame Koto as a larger-than-life legend through its telling and retelling of increasingly fearsome stories about her; the people’s awakening to the reality of their own existence, when they find stories about their experiences printed in the newspaper; and, especially, the emergence of the figure of the photographer. This character, a genuine artist, is made heroic in The Famished Road by circumstance, when he is hounded by political thugs and forced to flee and live the treacherous life of the road, returning to the compound only sporadically and disruptively, yet, in this book, often in triumph. Clearly, the photographer is a snapshot of Okri himself, an intensely visual writer who also shows his characters pictures in which it is impossible for them to ignore their own faces, whatever unearthly visages surround them, and who depicts frozen moments of their actions in a magic cabinet of images that both the photographer’s glass case and the author’s texts, unlike orature, ‘museumise’. In Magic Realism and West African Fiction (1998), Brenda Cooper emphasises the importance of the photographer; I will return to this character in my discussion of Infinite Riches, where he reappears to make explicit Okri’s fears of artistic co-optation and media falsehoods. The self-referentiality of The Famished Road, then, situates Okri’s first story in his cycle on the narrative path uniting the indeterminacy of African orature with similar rhetorical strategies in contemporary fiction, providing a bridge to the more self-consciously postmodern writing of B. Kojo Laing of Ghana.

Songs of Enchantment ‘That is why our road is hungry,’ Dad hollered. ‘We have no desire to change things!’ (SoE 451)

Songs of Enchantment has received less critical attention than its predecessor, and what notice it has been given has been comparatively negative. Cooper, for instance, charges Okri’s second narrative with being ‘a work that is far more conservative and less brave’ than The Famished Road; ‘[I]t has recourse to the myths of old at the serv-

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Shape-shifting on the Page 25 ice of the familiar nationalist project of cultural healing’ (1998: 110). For Cooper, the second book only repeats the earlier ‘formula’, thus creating ‘a paradoxical stillness’, unlike the exuberance she finds in the first text. She also complains about its ‘reactionary politics’ (111), by which I assume she means its espousal of traditional political wisdom and strategies over modern solutions like Marxism.19 Derek Wright, too, is disappointed by what both critics consider a lack of progress beyond the artistry and themes of The Famished Road. Wright charges that: after 800 pages of phantasmagoric metamorphosis tempered by hopeful millennial effusions, Okri’s superhighway began to look as if it had run itself into a cul-de-sac or was, indeed, more appropriately imaged as a river that goes on repetitively, incestuously around upon itself without ever breaking out into the open sea. (New Directions 161)

I argue that Cooper is correct in finding a conservative, however, not reactionary, political solution in Songs of Enchantment, but disagree with both critics in their assessment of the meaning of Okri’s structurally circular narrative as primarily static, turning back in on itself, and going nowhere. The text’s circularity contrasts thematically with Dad’s vigorous, if frustrated, attempts to move to a positive concept of nationhood by eliminating the apathy of his community and rallying the population to initiate political change. That his forward moving action is thwarted by his community’s lack of understanding and courage and failure of vision for the future is one of Okri’s primary points. The ‘cul de sac’ that Wright identifies will be the geography of the country’s future unless true awareness of their potential and acceptance of leadership by all can emerge. Narrated, as was The Famished Road, through Azaro’s naive point of view, Songs of Enchantment subtly shifts our attention from the son to the father; in doing so, Okri assumes he has already established the philosophical verities of The Famished Road and can move with this second installment in the series to their implied action in the mundane realm. Specifically, as Cooper complains, he posits a return to the communal ethical values of traditional culture and its spiritual and psychological resources as the only way to successfully combat contemporary political corruption. He considers standards such as personal bravery and communal responsibility not African alone, as will be made explicit in the third narrative, Infinite Riches. In addition, he calls for such bravery in the face of another traditional conviction, that ‘[T]he masquerade’s kingdom is a mighty one, its armies can never wholly be defeated. They are part of the world for ever’ (SoE 113). This statement is certainly a religious one, not a manifesto confidently urging class action to construct a secular

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utopia, and as such, it represents the paradox of Okri’s position as a political novelist. Moreover, in light of the self-serving historical use of Christianity by slave-masters and colonisers, it sets off alarm bells that he himself must hear. I argue that since he rejects any dichotomy between the spiritual and material, he attempts to demonstrate their symbiosis in his development of Dad in Songs of Enchantment as the book’s flawed agent for moral action. Like his abiku son, Dad is a recipient of visions, and therefore also a culture hero; significantly, as an adult, he is capable of heroic action in the political arena, as his young son is not. By the end of The Famished Road, Dad is thoroughly disillusioned with the people’s unwillingness to support his plans to build the school for the beggars, even to cooperate to clean up the rubbish in their own compound. In what appears at first to be a curious plot diversion towards the end of the first book, Okri moves from the contentious political settings of the compound’s streets and Madame Koto’s bar to a site of athletic conflict and entertainment, the boxing arena. Dad’s preference, as a young man, for his identity as Black Tyger rather than his expected leadership role as heir of the Priest of the King of the Roads accordingly diminishes his influence with the community he now wishes to lead. His intense training to get back into shape to defeat boxing opponents toward the end of The Famished Road thus represents not only the venting of his frustration at his failure as a conventional politician but also an intensification of his identity quest, even as his personal journey backtracks upon itself. Dad’s retreat into the immediate glory of physical prowess should also be read as the initiation rite he must complete successfully before beginning his more meaningful leadership role in Songs of Enchantment. Quayson suggests that Dad’s political fight ‘against poverty borders on a titanic struggle with elemental forces that would destroy man’s soul’ and links him, in his search for justice, with Ogun and Shango (140). I find these mythic connections somewhat tenuous, however, since Dad is neither a soldier nor a blacksmith, the two professions associated with Ogun, the god of war and iron, nor has he any control over elemental forces, as does Shango, the god associated with thunder and lightening. Nevertheless, he truly is a ‘fighter,’ first as a failed, but persistent, agitator for justice for the poor, then, toward the end of The Famished Road, one in the literal sense, a contender in search of personal wealth and fame when he reclaims his identity as the boxer, Black Tyger. A welcome acceleration in narrative pace occurs when Okri shifts from Azaro’s repetitious deaths and rebirths to Dad, who is furiously

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Shape-shifting on the Page 27 forcing his own ‘reincarnation’ as a legendary pugilist who can defeat the famous Yellow Jaguar who died three years before.20 It is worth summarising this part of the text in order to make a point about the stops and starts in Okri’s pacing. Left so wounded by his fierce battle with this spirit that he has to remain in bed for a week, Dad, like Lazarus, his son’s namesake, is reborn on the seventh day. In quick succession, he knocks out three thugs who attack him, causes four others to flee, and boxes and beats the Green Leopard, ‘the most feared fighter and terroriser in many of the ghettos’ (TFR 393). After this battle, he sleeps again for two days, while Azaro ‘stayed silently in the corner and watched them calling Dad’s spirit back from the Land of the Fighting Ghosts’ (TFR 404). My point is that this pattern of furious action followed by complete stillness exaggerates, yet imitates, the alternate pacing of Okri’s trilogy in general. Its repetitiveness, moreover, makes the scenes lacking physical action seem much longer than they actually are. When Dad is saved by his own father, the Priest of the Shrine of Roads, and goes on to defeat the animal-like man in the white suit, we have reason to hope that a turn in the plot is at hand. Nevertheless, again, he sleeps for three more days, dreaming of all the injustice in the world.21 It is impossible not to read these four physical trials and Dad’s subsequent psychic removes as the ordeals and ‘deaths’ necessary for his initiation into the new life that he will pursue in Songs of Enchantment. After traveling to different worlds in his trance, ‘powerfully, he rose from the bed as from death. His wounds had healed, his spirit had sharpened.’ Ironically, ‘his despair was deeper, he was a bigger man with a bigger madness’ (TFR 497). His naive political and selfish financial aspirations dashed after his lengthy dream of historical disasters, Dad must now confront the actual dangers threatening the entire world, not just his compound or Nigeria, not even Africa alone. Okri forges a global vision when Dad reports, ‘[O]ur gods are silent. Our ancestors are silent … Human beings are dreaming of wiping out their fellow human beings from this earth’ (TFR 498). His strategy, in the face of such Orphic knowledge is to assert what might appear only a moral platitude: ‘[S]o long as we are alive, so long as we feel, so long as we love, everything in us is an energy we can use’ (TFR 499). Understandably, it is didactic axioms such as this that dissatisfy many critics of Okri’s work. Wright, for one, judges Dad’s ‘born-again’ historical understanding unequal to the task of redeeming Africa. In his interpretation, the final meaning of The Famished Road is: the notion that the human spirit can somehow reclaim and repossess the world by inwardly ‘redreaming’ it … it is the idea that the altered forms of

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For all his suspicion of this conclusion’s political impotence, Wright correctly identifies our internal states as Okri’s loci for external change, rather than the public sphere. The novelist insists that: It is consciousness, it is the way we perceive the world, it is our mythic frame that shapes the way we affect the world and the way the world affects us. It’s these invisible things that shape the visible things. I’d like us to go back more often to our aesthetic and mythic frames, even while we’re moving into the twenty-first century. (Wilkinson 88)

Since Wright is analysing only The Famished Road, his mistrust of what appears to be Okri’s satisfaction with the ideals expressed in Dad’s ineffectual directives as a solution to the increasingly complex problems of Africa that Okri has been detailing for five hundred pages is understandable. Songs of Enchantment, however, in an unexpected and welcome series of actions, which I will discuss subsequently, makes a strong case for the possibility for political change inherent in Dad’s moral message. One useful way to understand Okri’s movement to Dad in the second book is to view Azaro and his father, both reborn many times, as manifestations of the same existence, as interdependent moral agents, just as both philosophy and action, in the author’s view, are necessary for social transformation; ‘There are many mirrors in the book,’ Okri acknowledges (Wilkinson 85). A corresponding interpretative doubling, then, would be to see Dad’s becoming the main protagonist as an inevitable displacement that fulfils the culturally based understanding that responsibility for meaningful action should be laid squarely on the shoulders of adults, rather than on children. Challenging our conventional literary expectations, it is the adult, as we have just seen in Dad’s many battles and ‘deaths’, who undergoes the maturation journey that provides the thematic transition from The Famished Road to Songs of Enchantment. Azaro, born and reborn many times, remains the same Azaro. While continuing as a less-than-omniscient narrator, the young storyteller’s voice recedes into the background of his tale and continues the repetitiveness about which critics complain. Five hundred pages after we first meet him, he is still expressing confusion, even when he has entered someone else’s dreams and is privy to their unconscious desires and/or conscious plans. We, of course, have long ceased to be surprised, or entertained for that matter, by Azaro’s many worlds of existence, through which he serves as our medium guide. In Songs of Enchantment, his value as narrator is the surprising one of tracing

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Shape-shifting on the Page 29 his father’s growth, recording his actions, and reporting his stories. In another sort of mirroring of his father, Azaro remains present to tell Dad’s story only because he continues to resist the lure of his spirit-companions to seduce him back into their realm, and thus he himself modeling a commitment to moral action and community over self-indulgence and escape. His explanation for fighting against the allure of his spirit-companions privileges both emotional and intellectual commitments: ‘they didn’t count on the love that made me want to stay on this earth. They didn’t count on my curiosity either’ (TFR 2). Azaro loves his Mum and Dad. His struggles to remain alive grow out of concern for his mother; by the second narrative, however, he identifies closely with his father, whom he discovers, ‘also had many people inside him’ (SoE 49), and whom he follows with great curiosity, even into his dreams. As indicated earlier, the social action that proves most promising for Okri is not that of conventional political intervention in the world, which is shown to be either ineffectual or disreputable in all three narratives. Rather, the healing of society, he insists, evolves from a clear-eyed understanding of the difficulty of even perceiving ‘truth’. This challenging enlightenment is the necessary first step towards the honoring of traditional values of cooperation and self-help, respect for individuals within the community, and courageous, selfless, public action that reflects and supports cultural principles. The burden of such understanding and action falls on Dad. While his social concerns are familiar to readers of realistic African fiction, the language the author uses to characterise them, and his solutions, is religious. Here, Okri is speaking to Wilkinson about The Famished Road: ‘[F]or me one of the central themes in the book is suffering, probably the only paradoxically democratic thing about our condition … a true invasion takes place not when a society has been taken over by another society in terms of its infrastructure, but in terms of its mind and its dreams and its myths, and its perception of reality’ (1992: 85). Okri compounds the necessity of suffering to earn redemption by showing Dad achieving his effectiveness as both a spiritual and a secular leader after a bout of literal and metaphoric blindness that is shared by the entire community. Significantly, the meaning of his ordeal is encapsulated in the salient and prophetic words of a person of no apparent importance – an old, decrepit woman who meets Mum in the forest, a location now threatened by the greed of the politicians: ‘[Y]ou people are all blind because you don’t use your eyes … A good man first has to be blind before he can see … He has a strange destiny and he is the only one who can stop the plague of blindness’ (SoE 241).

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Dad, too, often appears of no genuine importance, as only a failure as a hero. A modicum of tension and suspense is created in this excruciatingly slow narrative by dramatising Dad’s vacillation before he tries to thwart the seemingly inexorable momentum of the Blind Old Man, Madame Koto, the Party of the Rich, and the Party of the Poor. Okri’s huge task in this second text is to increase narrative interest by keeping us mindful of both the foreshortening of time until the ominous independence rally and by maintaining our sympathy with Dad’s slow, distracted growth into a worthy opponent of the politicians. The writer is more successful at the former than the latter because, at many points, Dad seems annoyingly unequal to the task ahead of him; our annoyance stems from his narcissistic selfdeception. Since Dad’s maturation is still a work in progress at the beginning of Songs of Enchantment, we can read his first response to the hellish changes Azaro reports as a retreat to the tried-and-true. When he puts himself forth in a conventional way as a liberal political theorist and social planner and, once again, makes thunderous speeches urging not only the construction of the school for beggars but also supporting the establishment of an educational system for all poor and illiterate people, the forest woman’s judgment of his blindness seems true. Predictably, unlike the Party of the Rich, that is, without money and promises to distribute, Dad again is unable to attract followers. That he is still in the infantile stage of his development, absorbed in a self-important egoism, is demonstrated on the personal plane when he abuses his wife and son for being insufficiently supportive of his plans, even driving Mum from the house. Dad’s aggression and egocentrism demonstrate his ironic similarity at this stage to the increasingly powerful political parties he wishes to confront. His analysis of the link between the common people’s lack of educational opportunities and their oppression, while accurate, is still evidence of his dealing with only symptoms, not causes. His storming into Madame Koto’s bar to deliver a speech against the very forces she represents reveals an immature recklessness and vanity similar to his bravado against the boxers. Appropriately, the resulting plague of insects that buzz around his and his son’s lips and eyelids suggests the ineffectualness of both his vision and voice and creates a slapstick scene that leads his listeners to contemptuously dismiss him as ‘both mad and amusing’ (126). Okri makes clear the deviousness of the forces Dad must combat, especially by the corruption of traditional rituals. Further rupturing the unity of the community, for example, are the terrifying Masquerades and other night-runners and phantoms conjured up by Dad’s

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Shape-shifting on the Page 31 nemesis, the Blind Old Man, the ‘master-sorcerer’ (144), that force people indoors and away from the public sphere. As Azaro explains, the Blind Old Man can see into the people’s minds and make material their deepest nightmares. The jackal-headed Masquerade, clutching its machete in one hand and the white flag of the Party of the Rich in the other, metonymically signifies the politicians’ subversion of a cultural icon traditionally associated with ancestral protection. Ironically, this misleading image of cultural values actually destroys those communal values. Okri’s message, then, is as psychological as it is political. Dad and the Blind Old Man, whose eyes look out through the Masquerade’s, are mirror images, struggling for the minds and hearts of the community and psychologically representing the conflicting forces for bravery and cowardice, perception and misconception within each person. It is only after he has undergone one more immersion into his own subconscious, connecting with powerful ancestors from the African past, that Dad can combat such a demonic yet all-toohuman force. Unlike Soyinka’s Professor, in quest of ‘the Word’, Dad connects, through his dreams, not with a text providing answers but with a plan of action; he connects with ‘The Way [to] attunement with all the higher world’ (169). This traditional African ‘Way’ ‘believes in forgiveness and generosity of spirit, always receptive, always listening, always kindling the understanding of signs, like the potencies hidden in snail tracks along forbidden paths; The Way that always, like a river, flows into and flows out of the myriad Ways of the world’ (169). Okri surely risks his readers’ exhaustion at this point by minutely delineating Dad’s epic dream, a rhetorical decision that brings the action to a standstill. Such stasis would be an even larger artistic problem in a conventional novel, but here it can be read as an expected narrative return to the lengthy origin tales in the oral tradition. The problem is that it is not being performed; it is in print. It does serve a number of purposes, however, Dad’s realignment with communal traditions, for one, an insistent attack on romanticism being another; for despite the chauvinistic implications of the quotation above about the African ‘Way’, like Armah in The Healers, Okri largely avoids the Negritude trap by presenting an objective portrayal of African failures as well as accomplishments. Another rhetorical purpose for this epic saga within his own ‘epic’ saga is to solve the problem of introducing historical content into his narrative, information necessary for a readership largely ignorant of the continent’s history and traditions. He chooses a method, albeit an imperfect one from the point of view of pacing, of skirting the charge of unnec-

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essary discursiveness. While, as I suggested earlier, the spirit-boy might be conceived of as knowledgeable beyond his present experience, it is a significant thematic shift to the moral authority of his father that Dad’s voice recounts this history. Unlike Armah in an earlier of his works, Two Thousand Seasons, however, Okri creates no Manichean version of indigenous heroes and foreign villains, but rather a picture of African history bloodied by the cupidity of Africans themselves. Instead of a glorious, African past destroyed by invaders and colonisers alone, Dad recognises in the teachings of the ancestors: [T]he Way which had since been corrupted by succeeding generations, by greed and decadence, blindness and stupidity, by vulgar kings and dim-witted chiefs, corrupted and turned into sinister uses in the eternal battle of ascendancies. (SoE 169)

I eat stones first thing in the morning. I eat rocks last thing at night. My hands are made of tree trunks. You can only conquer people who are afraid of you. (Dad’s praise-song to himself, SoE 210) As this toast to his physical prowess indicates, even though Dad has advanced to an adolescent stage of development where he has historical knowledge, he nevertheless still places his trust in his own persuasive power to organise the community. His feverish attempts to rally the townspeople to rebuild their houses and shops destroyed by the Blind Old Man’s marauding night-riders fails once again because he continues to be engaged in acquiring personal power. It is his underdeveloped personality that, at this point, leads him back to his previous life of individualism as Black Tyger. He even provides his own praise song, quoted above, that ironically reflects the politics of physical intimidation that is causing chaos all around him. Perhaps Okri couldn’t have indicated the difficulty of Dad’s development without depicting his repeated lapses of judgment, but the decision to do so clearly demonstrates the problem only following at length such a vacillating ‘hero’ and, more importantly for my analysis, of adapting the folktale tradition of short, episodic stories of the wanderings and musings of mythic figures to a continuous narrative focused on one or two main characters. Tutuola’s episodic structure in The Palm-Wine Drinkard begins to appear engagingly fast-paced in comparison. It is at this point, however, that Okri surprises us by displacing Dad (as if even the author is tired of waiting for him to develop) with another abiku child’s father, the carpenter, who becomes the catalyst for both communal morality and the action necessary to salvage Songs of Enchantment as a readable narrative. This subver-

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Shape-shifting on the Page 33 sion of reader expectation, as well as earlier deflections of narrative focus from characters whom we have accepted as primary protagonists to those who have never before appeared in the story, or who have had only minor roles, is a hallmark of Okri’s Trickster style. The intercultural and transhistorical intertextuality of his cycle are clear in Ade’s carpenter father’s echoing the biblical Samson by shouting, ‘TEAR DOWN THIS TEMPLE’ (211), as he attempts to destroy Madame Koto’s bar and avenge the murder of his son by her chauffeur. Implicit in this biblical allusion is Okri’s judgment of the bar as a profanation of the sacred and the abode of African Pharisees, since it is no longer a community meeting place and a source of nourishment and relaxation for the ordinary people. As it has literally moved farther and farther away, geographically, from the community, the bar has metamorphosed into the shine of those who plot and promulgate the exclusionary mystifications of the Party of the Rich. With its new, brightly blinking neon lights, it hearkens back to the whitened sepulchers of the New Testament while, at the same time, reflecting the false allure of modernism. Unwittingly, by murdering the carpenter, discarding his body by the side of the road, and then attacking Dad, who is once more struck blind, Madame Koto’s thugs bring about the unity in the community and a mature vision in Dad that none of his own speeches or visions heretofore effected. His mere physical bravado as the blind Black Tyger and his idealistic political proselytising are superseded at this point by a moral courage that indicates, at last, his genuine understanding of the uncorrupted African traditions he has envisioned in his dream. In another deflection of reader expectation, however, Dad’s most heroic stance occurs quietly, when he insists that the people of the compound unite to bury the corpse of Ade’s father despite the duplicitous threats of the thugs, who will accuse anyone who carries out this culturally required act of respect of actually being the carpenter’s murderer. Significantly, it is Azaro who is first chased by the corpse demanding burial, but, as a child, he cannot perform this necessary ritual. What he can and does do, however, is keep insisting that the burial take place quickly. Dad’s carrying of the decaying, screaming corpse into the forest and burying it not only unites the people behind him, as none of his urgent speeches have done, but finally establishes him as heroic. Again, insisting that moral action is dependent not on blind bravery, but on clear perception, Okri involves the entire community in understanding the significance of Dad’s act: … and we all wept with him for the dead man whom we had all refused so see. … an old man began impromptu obsequies, a prayer for the dead, for all

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Ben Okri’s Narrative Cycle the unjustly treated dead, a prayer of appeasement, begging God to forgive us for having failed a fellow human being. … And there were no festivities to mark our passage into a second sight, because now that we could see we were all ashamed. (286-8)

The fact that this traditional ritual of respect is not performed until the terrible, bloated corpse itself begins to sing, then scream, reinforces Okri’s metaphor of the deliberate spiritual blindness and cowardly inaction of the entire community. Their previous refusal to ‘see’ the corpse and perform their duty by it reflects their fear of oppressive authority as well as the selfish individualism of the modern day; Okri realises that all people will try to deny dangerous and/or irksome requirements. The cleansing ritual is surprisingly long in coming, however. Until forced to acknowledge the abomination in their midst, poisoning the very air they breathe, the town is ‘blind’ to the existence of the body and deaf to its frightening insistence on communal responsibility. Okri’s condemnation of moral cowardice and willful blindness is not directed at Nigeria alone, however, but at all of the modern world. Nevertheless, the writer must realise that after almost 800 pages of text, after all his protagonist’s false starts and lengthy stops, Dad’s quick and silent act will appear anticlimactic. Here is no tragic selfsacrifice while avenging evil; no satisfying slaughter of a host of evil doers; no action at all commensurate with the self-aggrandising fury of Dad’s adolescent phase; no dramatic reincarnation of Dad as Black Tyger or even as a charismatic political leader. Instead, we are presented with another deflection of expectations and are shown a determined, but silent and unannounced, performance of the burial that changes Dad’s life, even if it only temporarily improves the situation of his neighbors. Since Okri’s point is so quietly made, it is no wonder that the ritual performance blends almost unnoticed into his narratives’ many other actions. Ironically, after Dad’s courageous deed, the most ‘political’ action of the townspeople is actually their non-action, that is, their deciding, at least temporarily, to boycott the heralded political rally and to join neither of the political parties. In his idealism, his determination to improve the lives of the people, his capacity to love, even in his weaknesses, Dad represents no African ‘quest hero,’ defined by E.N. Obiechina, as one who ‘goes in quest of something or some ideal and usually undergoes harrowing ordeals before attaining his objective and then he emerges full of confidence and triumph’ (154). While Dad certainly undergoes ordeals, many of them self-inflicted, finally, and most significantly for Okri’s political view, he is simply a good, if flawed, man, representative of the ordinary citizen who must be depended upon to counter the corrup-

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Shape-shifting on the Page 35 tion being born in ‘the abiku country’. Unexpectedly, Dad’s strongest weapon against social corruption turns out to be his storytelling, which connects him with truths from the past and unites Songs of Enchantment with Okri’s third narrative, Infinite Riches.

Infinite Riches With the sweetest and most solemn vows, they pledged to create a civilization of light and justice. They pledged to initiate on earth the first universal civilization where love and wisdom would be as food and air. (Astonishing The Gods 131) Between the abiku texts of 1993 and 1998, Okri published Astonishing The Gods (ATG) (1995), a utopian fable of self-discovery and rebirth.22 The protagonist in this work is never named, apparently has no nationality, and, unlike Azaro, does not narrate his own story. Only a hint of his identity as African and/or as oppressed is offered in the controlling trope of invisibility, mentioned immediately at the work’s start. He ‘was born invisible’ (3), as were all his people, who are agricultural folk but not located in any historical period. The reader might be deceived into interpreting this invisibility as the well-known politically charged image in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), especially since the narrator says, ‘[I]t was in books that he first learnt of his invisibility. He searched for himself and his people in all the history books he read and discovered to his youthful astonishment that he didn’t exist’ (ATG 3). Very quickly, however, it becomes clear that such a close intertextual connection with the African-American novelist is not what Okri intends. His actual interest is not in ‘racial’ politics, but in redefining a universal spiritual and psychological state that thwarts individual happiness and communal fulfillment rather than in revisiting Ellison’s metaphor for Black oppression. As in the first two works of the trilogy, Okri, in the Zen-like Infinite Riches (IR), insists on correct perception as the necessary starting point for successful action. We follow the pilgrim protagonist to an otherworldly island where his understanding is challenged by his surroundings fading in and out of view. His predicted destiny of initiating ‘the new cycle of the invisibles’ (ATG 12) depends upon his learning to trust his heart rather than his intellect. Filled with fluid, synthesising images of buildings, sculptures, and cities merging in and out of sight, music heard from unknown sources, and trustworthy and untrustworthy guides, Astonishing The Gods preaches the difficult lesson for the modern age of our accepting the counterintuitive. Some of the most startling scenes of this sort – the protagonist

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needing to swim slower to reach the shore faster and walking rather than running to safely traverse a burning bridge – encourage us to divorce ourselves from our usually reliable common-sense perceptions and responses and, by implication, the frenzy of modern life. The result of this non-rational way of thinking and acting, Okri suggests, will be a new awareness of self and, ultimately, benign control over the world through enlightened self-discipline. Such a Zen-like message and technique clearly links the enigmatic Astonishing The Gods with Okri’s three-narrative abiku cycle, which appears relatively realistic in comparison. Dad’s quiet burying of the carpenter, the most significant action in Songs of Enchantment, prepares us for the transfiguration of the nameless protagonist of the 1995 text, in that we focus upon the courage of both Dad and the pilgrim in accepting the guidance of ancestral wisdom, even when such wisdom flies in the face of common sense. The society on the island in Gods, in contrast to the nation being forged by the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor, is one without hierarchies, where ‘[E]ach person was an equal participant and creator’ (130). Significantly, this utopia can be imagined only by Okri removing it from any mundane, day-by-day experience, isolating it from the rest of the world, and peopling it with figures and structures even more difficult to understand, or even see, than those found on Azaro’s road. In the end, Astonishing The Gods remains an idealistic fable, which, formally, strikes me as self-indulgent and irritatingly repetitive. It is hard to keep in mind while reading it that this work is actually less than one-quarter the length of The Famished Road. Nevertheless, the fable is informative for students of Okri’s thought, for it provides a clear, even prosaic, statement of the spiritual requirements for social change that his other works wish to encourage. I take power where I find it. (Madame Koto, IR 12) Mum took to fame very badly. She became loud-voiced. She talked of becoming a wrestler. She spoke of becoming a politician. (IR 36) Infinite Riches, Okri’s third installment of his narrative cycle, maintains the familiar characters of his first two books, Azaro, Dad, Mum, Madame Koto, and the Blind Old Man, and even brings back to center stage earlier figures omitted from the second book, the Photographer and Helen, the beggar girl. It also situates us in familiar surroundings: the road, the forest, the compound where Azaro and his family live, and Madame Koto’s bar. The familiar political and spiritual conflicts of the first two works also continue, but are even more encompassing; there is now a clash between the common people and Nature itself, on one side, and politicians and

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Shape-shifting on the Page 37 modernism, in the form of industrialisation and exploitive multinationals, on the other. The thematic concerns of Infinite Riches are also extended to emphasise the significance of storytelling itself as a change agent for both good and evil. The many pages devoted to this subject make explicit Okri’s implied theme in the earlier narratives that Africa’s true ‘riches’ lie in the oral tradition itself and that Okri considers language the creator and shaper of reality, a view uniting theories about the creative function of language in both orature and postmodern theory.23 This concept is one expressed by many artists writing from a deep awareness of their oral traditions. For example, Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday asserts that ‘the words of a charm or a spell are formulaic. They are meant to bring about physical change’ (‘Wordwalker’ 86); from a very different cultural perspective, but with the same understanding, theorist hans bertens explains, ‘[U]nder the pressure of Derrida’s arguments, and of Lacan’s psychoanalysis, which sees the subject as constructed in language, the autonomous subject of modernity, objectively rational and self-determined, likewise gives way to a postmodern subject which is largely otherdetermined, that is, determined within and constituted by language’ (6). While writing against them, homi bhabha specifies ‘the discourse of nationalism’ and the ‘cultural construction of nationness as a form of social and textual affiliation’ (140; original emphasis). Okri’s epigram to Infinite Riches, borrowed from Christopher Marlowe, ‘Infinite riches in a little room’, followed by Chapter One of BOOK ONE, which is titled ‘The little room’ and refers to the narrow habitation of Azaro and his parents, opens the book with an enigma. While many of this work’s scenes do occur in this familiar domestic location, many more take place on the endlessly moving road and in the forest, which is now being transformed and ‘modernised’ by having its ancient, sacred trees felled and its burial sites dug up for an asphalt road that will connect the rural areas with the urban. However, ‘the little room’ providing ‘infinite riches’ is actually a porthole to other worlds. Mum, the traditional figure of maternal domesticity in the first two books, mainly sleeps and cooks there, but Azaro escapes through its window as often as possible, to range far and wide in the lands of ‘visions he couldn’t understand’, while Dad sits inside, immobile on his three-legged chair (IR 10). When Dad awakens from his dream of the once-powerful old leopard with which he is identified, rushes from the room, ‘muttering something about seeing things for the first time’ (9), and then surreptitiously dumps a pail of excrement in Madame Koto’s front yard, he is performing the mirror image of his purifying action of burying the carpenter’s decomposing body at the end of Songs of Enchantment.

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It is not enough, Okri is saying, to acknowledge the importance of traditional rituals; one must also identify and act against contemporary corruption. Both actions are political rituals. Ironically, Dad’s silence during this performance enhances it and results in an awakened awareness in the community: ‘[E]veryone looked on, thinking about the dead carpenter. Thinking about his son, whom Madame Koto’s driver had killed’ (16). Nevertheless, individual and public understanding and responsibility, one of Okri’s repeated concerns, seem almost impossible to sustain. More often than not, he pictures people too beleaguered, confused, and afraid to act against the new oppression, a populace victimised by those whose ‘[P]ower [removed] them from the consequences of their own actions’ (11). Dad’s neighbors, for instance, despite their new awareness, do not protest when he is arrested for killing the carpenter, and when Mum reports the destruction of the sacred forest and Azaro’s almost being killed by a felled tree, ‘[N]o one paid much attention, and people began to speak of her as mad’ (103). As much as by their fear, the compound people are immobilised by the manipulative political stories they are told but, significantly, also by the paralysing legends they themselves propagate. Through their own susceptibility to false narratives and distortions of reality, then, they eagerly participate in their own mystification. Okri’s view of this common and self-imposed failure of perception leading to paralysis in the common people is one-hundred-and-eighty degrees away from Ngugi’s Marxist ‘enhanced’ trust in the workers and peasants to rise up and destroy their oppressors, as he shows, for instance, in Devil on the Cross.24 It is in this third part of his cycle that Okri focuses on women’s mythic and political roles. Many critics have noted that women’s images in earlier African literature written by men generally reinforce a rural Mother Africa/urban ‘good-time girl’ dichotomy.25 Our first impulse, then, in encountering Okri’s power-hungry Madame Koto and selfless, nurturing Mum might be to perceive the same essentialising binaries, but Okri’s mirroring precludes any such simplistic interpretation. Like many of his other characters, these two women are doppelgängers, but they experience Nigeria’s imminent independence differently because of their contrasting positions in society and contradictory symbolic functions: Mum as a storyteller and Koto, paradoxically, as a terrible story that is being told.26 Both, of course, are also contrasting representations of the complex nation to come. Like Dad, Mum, too, is a storyteller, and her apparent plot function seems a traditional one for a West African female character: nurtur-

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Shape-shifting on the Page 39 ing her family, protecting her child, selling her wares, and offering her husband and son practical advice – warning them against Madame Koto, for example. Moreover, her laments, like those of Buchi Emecheta’s Nnu Ego of The Joys of Motherhood (1979), voice the typical powerlessness of the fictional ‘good’ mother’s social and economic situation: ‘[T]his life! No rest. None. A woman suffers, a woman sweats, with no rest, no happiness’. Okri does not idealise such figures, however. Mum’s faults are all too human, as she succumbs to jealousy of Helen, the beggar girl with whom Dad is obsessed; to anger with Azaro, who repeatedly escapes from the compound and is always on the verge of leaving her altogether to journey back to the spirit world; to vanity in her temporary political accomplishments; and to despair about the difficulties of her existence: ‘This life is too much for me. I am going to hang myself one of these days’ (TFR 477). Helen Chukwuma notes that: the female character in African fiction hitherto is a facile lack-luster human being, the quiet member of a household, content only to bear children, unfulfilled if she does not, and handicapped if she bears only daughters. In the home, she was not part of the decision-making both as a daughter, wife and mother, even when the decisions affected her directly. Docility and complete subsumation of will was demanded and exacted from her. This traditional image of women as indeterminate human beings, dependent, gullible and voiceless stuck, especially in the background of patrilineage which marked most African societies. (1994: 215-27, 215)

Likewise, Christine Obbo notes the continuing influence of Negritude’s essentialising of women: [I]n the contemporary period the trope is ubiquitous, to be found in the works of most major men writers, where ... it follows two lines of development. One, following the model provided by Senghor analogises woman to the heritage of African values, an unchanging African essence. This line, which I call ‘the pot of culture’ strand, after Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Ayi Kwei Armah’s ‘An African fable’. The other, which I call ‘the sweep of history’ strand, revises the Senghorian analogy for woman now serves as an index of the state of the nation. (1980: 41)

Although she doesn’t mention Ben Okri’s portraits of women, certainly, his Mum and Madame Koto are complications of both these tropes. I wish to make clear that I am not subscribing in my reading of Okri to the ‘benighted male author/liberated female voice’ dichotomy of some recent criticism, as valid as it is in highlighting the deficiencies in past portrayals of women. Mary E. Modupe Kolawole is just one of many critics to point out that ‘most early African literary luminaries are men who logically presented a world of male heroism. This trend continues and some male writers on the con-

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tinent still maintain this attitude’ Kolawole cites Amadi, Ngugi, Ousmane, Rotimi, Armah, Chraibi, and Osofisan, however, as ‘male writers who are consistent in their positive attitudes to women while others are rather ambivalent in depicting women’ (1997: 94). Okri’s ambivalence, I believe, is not a misogynist distrust of women; rather, he presents a psychologically realistic complication of all his characters that also corresponds to his sense of simultaneity in every aspect of human existence. In Songs of Enchantment, Mum’s physical transformation when, against her best instincts, she goes to work at Madame Koto’s bar, warns us against the other woman’s profound power. Mum changes ‘from a woman full of love and suffering into a half-woman, halfantelope, her milk turning sour, her body wrinkling under the force of the night’(SoE 43). Soon after this monstrous transformation, however, Okri evokes orature’s portrayal of the wise woman, for, like the shape-shifting figures of myth, after leaving the bar and returning to the small room, Mum changes into a seer, able to imaginatively travel to ancestral times and to predict the future – about which she is guardedly optimistic. Azaro notes another change in her at this time, however, when he realises that her ‘luminosity had diminished. Only a terrible dignity, an anguished grace, and a curious fearlessness remained’ (120). Indeed, transformed into a prophet of the inevitable, it is she who convinces Dad to allow her to return to the bar to help in preparations for the long-awaited political rally because by failing to participate, ‘we are only holding back the future’ (179). Ironically, Mum’s function here, instigating action in this narrative seemingly mired in inaction, links her even more surely with the forward-moving, terrible Madame Koto than with Dad, subverting a typical female depiction, for, as Christine Obbo observes, traditionally, ‘[W]omen … act as mediators between the past and the present, while men see themselves as mediators between the present and the future’ (quoted in Stratton 8).27 Mum’s experiences in Okri’s second narrative may be read as spiritual preparation for the politically active role she plays in Infinite Riches as well as her closer tie to Madame Koto, whose voice she becomes; ‘in the classic manner of the powerful, through the agency of Mum’s ravings, [Madame Koto] sent word round that she had survived her nightmare ordeals and had made terror her ally’ (IR 185). It is only after the lengthy process of this terrible figure’s death that Mum’s ‘face softened, and her beauty returned’ (336). Demonic possession, such as Mum’s by Madame Koto, is a staple of traditional tales. Without a doubt, the most intriguing figure in Okri’s cycle is the ambiguous Madame Koto, who grotesquely mirrors the actions of

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Shape-shifting on the Page 41 the other characters, evil and good alike. Her political individualism serves as a counter to Dad’s communalism; she duplicates Azaro and the carpenter, for in a subversion of the abiku tradition, she too refuses to die and remain buried. Mirroring Mum, she serves, on the one hand, as Okri’s paradoxical ‘Mother’ of the country about to be born, a benevolent avenger of the wrongs against the poor (‘the people I have saved outnumber my enemies by five to one; people I have sent to school, mothers to whom I have brought justice, market women whom I have protected from thugs and gangs, unions that I have helped’), on the other, she proves a fearsome political power, driven mad by the responsibility of ushering in change: ‘but which one of you can give birth to a country and not die of exhaustion, eh?’ (29). Indeed, supporting her positive self-judgment, her funeral is attended by numbers of women she has aided.28 Madame Koto, in one of her manifestations, then, serves as a dedicated force for women’s liberation and a destroyer of misogynist patriarchal practices, hence, according to Quayson, her: literary inscription of some of the ambivalent attitudes to strong-willed and successful women in Nigerian society. … Because of their perceived independence, a process of demonisation of women is inscribed in Yoruba culture along with a great respect for their resourcefulness. (1997: 45)

According to this view, Madame Koto’s portrayal is benign, simply that of a larger-than-life verification of Yoruba male misogyny. However, Okri also instills in her demonic powers of ancient destruction that reach a level beyond the earlier interpretation, as her confession, born of loneliness and isolation, reveals: Madame Koto proceeded to confess to crimes committed in other continents, as an inquisitor who burned innocent women on oakwood fires, and made love to their cries. She confessed to murders committed hundreds of years ago in an Empire which flourished on the edge of a desert. She confessed to the deaths of children, to the destruction of villages, to driving men mad, like the husband who cut off three of his fingers under her hallucinative spells. (IR 31)

Derek Wright interprets Azaro’s fright when he sees her sleeping naked as ‘[M]ale terror of female power … Woman’s body reflects the sickness, health or potential for recovery of the nation … The nation’s unnatural greed, grotesque desires and immanent volcanic eruption into civil war are symbolically represented by female attributes grown monstrous’ (1997b: 112). Madame Koto, in this view, becomes an equally essentialist transformation of Senghor’s exotic ‘femme noir’. While I agree that, in the extremes of her duality, she is portrayed as a Negritudist counter-stereotype as well as an extreme explanation of the Yoruba ambivalence about women, Okri links her

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even more surely to his concerns with myth and storytelling. While his symbolism, as Wright asserts, constitutes her ‘body’, which in turn reflects ‘the nation,’ more to our point here, she embodies a literary construct of multiple codes that Azaro can read. She even demonstrates with her growing physicality the surprising destructiveness that can result from some story-telling.29 When we first meet her in The Famished Road, Madame Koto is simply an anonymous proprietor of a run-down, palm-wine bar, a typical West African businesswoman; by the time she appears in Infinite Riches, however, she has literally and figuratively become a massive figure, demonically omnipresent, aligned with the corrupt Party of the Rich, and pregnant with three abiku children, metaphors for a fragmented Nigeria refusing to be born. Her transformation is Okri’s clearest assertion of the power of myth and storytelling to shape reality for the worse. To illustrate this developing portrait, I need to return to her first depictions. In The Famished Road, Madame Koto first attracts the compound’s attention by stepping beyond her womanly role and physically attacking and humiliating a surly patron who won’t pay for his drinks; ‘[T]he crowd was so amazed at the woman’s performance everyone stared at her with their mouths wide open’ (TFR 37). Very quickly these mouths become active, highly embellishing the event through their continual retellings, for no discernable reason except to create a larger, entertaining scandal: [T]hat evening was the beginning of her fame. Everyone talked about her in low voices. Her legend, which would sprout a thousand hallucinations, had been born in our midst – born of stories and rumours which, in time would become some of the most extravagant realities of our lives. (37)

As her reputation thickens, Okri develops his purpose of her being mythologised by the compound people. She comes to signify the changes of colonialism and modernism on traditional life, as her bar abandons indigenous palm-wine for commercially produced beer and mysteriously moves deeper into the forest to become the secret meeting place not only for all kinds of spirits and monsters but also for the increasingly powerful Party of the Rich. Yet, true to his cautions about simplistic perception and interpretation, Okri complicates Madame Koto by making her a savior of women, as has been mentioned, and, off-and-on, a befriender of Azaro and his parents. Significantly, her meaning- and shape-shifts occur through storytelling. Azaro reports that she sometimes appears beautiful and other times hideous; more importantly, the less innocent stories put out by her political enemies, and by others, transform her from an ordinary bar owner, even from a mundane, self-enriching opportun-

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Shape-shifting on the Page 43 ist aligned with the corrupt, into a mythic, vampirish, omnipotent force for evil: ‘[T]he stories distorted our perception of her reality for ever. Slowly, they took her life over, made themselves real, and made her opaque in our eyes’ (374). With the purchase of her chauffeurdriven car, the only such vehicle in the village, she appears to have aligned herself with the forces of modernism that will ultimately cut down the forest and uproot the road. As a pregnant woman and an entrepreneur, she is at once traditional yet also the ‘bearer’ of a future Nigeria, which Azaro sees embodied in her womb as matricidal fetuses, ironically, abikus like himself: [T]wo of them sat upright and the third was upside down in her womb. One of them had a little beard, had wicked eyes. They were all mischievous, they kicked and tugged at their cords, they were the worst type of spirit children, and they had no intention of being born. (464)

In Songs of Enchantment, Madame Koto’s political, physical, and mythic growth have increased enormously, although she is so seldom seen by the ordinary people that they begin to doubt her existence. Such doubt, of course, indicates they must be questioning their own senses without interrogating their responsibility for creating her power in the first place. Their mistrust of perception and refusal of responsibility victimises them; it imprisons them in the stories they make up that are born of a disastrous combination of love of scandal, political intimidation, and fear of the future. Occasionally, Madame Koto not only fulfills the myths surrounding her but enhances them herself, thus further confounding and frightening the town, as she does when she kills the iridescent, white snake and appears ‘quite monstrous, part-bull, part-woman, with black lips, sagging double chin, hot staring eyes, a stocky figure, and a neck trembling with insane rage’ (SoE 184). Her simultaneous human/monster essence is reflected in her genuine sadness at the murder of Ade and the refusal to bury his father, thus unleashing the plague of blindness. Infinite Riches intensifies her isolation from the town both literally and figuratively. She is now feared and hated by the people and is unable to retreat not only from her legendary identity but also from the reality of her deeds. Dad’s dumping the bucket of excrement in front of her door finally leads to someone else taking moral action – the coffin of the dead carpenter is placed on the hood of her car by an anonymous protestor. Okri shows the effect of such symbolic political actions, as they directly provoke her unexpected torrent of confessions of her misdeeds, which, in its intensity, is at once a desperate effort to communicate, a paradoxical self-justification, and ironically serves as an implied accusation that places the

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blame for her ascendancy exactly where Okri believes it should be: on the people. Perhaps because her confession lacks contrition, the essential ingredient for forgiveness in any religion, she, like Dad, continues to be tortured by dreams, a strategy that gives Okri the opportunity to state flatly his theme of the necessity of clear perception for performing correct actions: [T]hen she dreamt that she was giving birth to a nation. An unruly nation, bursting with diversity. A bad dream of a nation, with potential for waste and failure as great as its enormous resources, its fabulous possibilities. … And because of her we took our dreams as realities, our realities as dreams. We read our omens as prophecies, which became facts. Those who cannot transform their bad dreams should be rudely awoken. (IR 201)

In another mirroring, after her murder, like the carpenter, she is not immediately interred. Instead, her great, rotting body, awaiting burial for seven days, becomes ‘the womb of worms and slugs, cockroaches and flies’ (287). While such images should reduce her from legend to undeniable physicality, hers is so repulsive and bizarre (‘Geckos mated on her brow. … When they found her on the fourth day, she had grown a beard’ (287)) that it only enhances her mythic status. Koto’s ‘life’ after her death becomes a grotesque political narrative of its own. Like Okri’s story cycle itself, her body continues to grow, so much so that the blind old man orders a coffin for her made of the hardest steel. If the carpenter’s rotting corpse is a pungent accusation against his neglectful neighbors, Madame Koto’s becomes a hideous, comic reminder of the insensitive exploitation of politicians. These representatives of the Party of the Rich, in their attempts to continue to mystify the populace, prop it up in her Volkswagen like a candidate for office and drive it through the streets. Like an overgrown, reverse abiku that will not die, her body is enthroned, ‘draped in red, wearing red sunglasses. … ghoulish with all the rouge, the red lipstick and leaking embalming fluid’ (318). Moreover, increasing the range of her image, the print media, which completely distorts the actual events at the political rally, gives her yet another, larger life with their multiple obituary notices. And for the first time I began to think of history as a dream rewritten by those who know how to change the particulars of memory. I began to think of history as fantasy, as shadow reality. Then I thought of it as the reality we never lived. Who lives our lives for us? (Azaro, IR 297) I have quoted at length from Okri’s development of Madame Koto because this important character, among its other uses, functions as a cautionary metaphor for Okri’s narratives themselves. Like his novels with their startling imagery, violent eruptions of action, and

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Shape-shifting on the Page 45 repetitious stasis, Koto, too, is the source of much of the action in the texts, and refuses to come to an expected end. With her ambiguous political significance – savior of women/oppressor of the poor – she can be read as emblematic of Okri’s view of the equivocal nature of storytelling and myth-making themselves. Despite the author’s sensitivity to the traditional, ethical purpose of stories as transmitters of wisdom and religious and social mores, despite, moreover, his own identity as a creator of neo-myths, his embrace of the Trickster persona’s truth-telling role insists on both the positive and destructive aspects of storytelling and on its transformative power for both good and for ill. As we have seen, Okri warns us of the penchant of the modern media to subvert truth: the newspapers crediting a western-educated lawyer with freeing Dad, even though Mum was the actual agent; their reporting that the political rally was an unqualified success, even though it actually ended in a riot of rejection by the populace; the Governor General’s invention of Africans as subhuman in his official report that is accepted as a true historical account of his time in the colony; and the Photographer of The Famished Road, now the ‘International Photographer’ (IR 41), befriended by a millionaire and so securing his job on a newspaper, taking pictures that support this distortion by showing ‘[O]ur faces beaming, our expressions intent and hopeful’ (297). The figure of the Photographer has evoked considerable attention from critic Brenda Cooper. While I agree with her that this figure, named Jeremiah in The Famished Road to indicate his prophetic role, represents the power of art to encourage self-consciousness and the construction of identity, and even represents Okri the artist, by the time of his reappearance in Infinite Riches, he and his art have been corrupted by the very people he opposed in the earlier narrative. His fall is worse than most, since, he had already been marginalised by the politicians, forced, as Cooper says, to become a ‘political refugee, hiding from the wrath of the rich and corrupt new class, whose excesses he exposes’ (1998: 96). By Okri’s third narrative, however, his camera no longer documents social reality but fabricates a version of the world in support of his bosses that becomes the reality by virtue of the visual text being privileged over oral and even written accounts. Thus, Okri recognises the possibility for distortion and manipulation this seemingly trustworthy technology actually represents. Their reality distorted and reinterpreted by those in various positions of authority, the people begin to doubt their own experience at the rally and even condemn their ability to interpret and remember what had happened:

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Such is the power of the ‘official’ text.30 Yet, all along Okri has suggested a possibility even more disturbing, that is, if the popular media often present persuasive, deceptive histories, traditional sources of ‘truth’ can be equally misleading. Azaro admits, ‘as always, we looked at the shapes of our ordinary reality … and we didn’t see the things perceived, but only the myths we brought to them. Each moment offered us clarity and liberation but we settled for the comforting shapes of legends, no matter how monstrous or useless’ (32). Through Azaro’s growing self-reflection, Okri reiterates his cycle’s unifying themes in a variety of allegorical figures: the necessity of accurate perception to perform appropriate moral action and its concomitant idea, the universal frailty of our vision. With this understanding, Azaro reaches momentary maturity, but it must be noted that after he experiences his epiphany, he continues to be manipulated by devious storytellers. Clearly, then, Okri neither romanticises the oral tradition nor blindly accepts its intentions. Nevertheless, Infinite Riches counters the Photographer and the politicians with another storyteller, one committed to weaving true tales, one with whom we can conclude Okri identifies. In another Trickster-ish deflection of reader expectations, this time a romantic rendering of the artist as ‘outsider’, the character is a monstrously deformed, old woman, ‘driven from society, isolated, avoided’, choosing to live as a hermit in the forest, away from ‘the wickedness and hypocrisy of human beings’, and existing in isolation as a ‘herbalist and benign witch’ (90). Her life-long occupation –the weaving of a story tapestry summarising Okri’s understanding of the mythic and lived history of humankind and warning against forces leading to destruction – is held before us as the ‘true’ visual. All of Okri’s themes are woven into this tapestry, a more universal source of history than even Dad’s dreams. Like Okri’s own narrative cycle, no doubt, ‘[T]he weaving was not yet complete, but the end was in sight’ (91). Refuting any charges of Negritudist fantasy, Okri acknowledges that ‘[S]imultaneous narratives of past, present, and future were also being woven in other places around the world by other people’ (105). An acknowledgement of the limited power of artists occurs in his statement that, despite her prescience, the old woman is not omnipotent and is ‘unable to alter the future in any significant way: the signs

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Shape-shifting on the Page 47 must be properly interpreted and acted upon. All she could do was divine and weave’ (IR 105-6). The storyteller’s genuine power seems to exist for Okri in countering the distortions of those who tell mystifying, self-serving tales, the Governor General and Madame Koto’s thugs, for example. Okri’s own individual narratives are verses in a much larger, universal song, ‘hinting that no one race or people can have the complete picture or monopoly of the ultimate possibilities of the human genius alone’ (IR 112). Such a conclusion repeats, almost word-for-word, the lessons of Astonishing The Gods. Unlike the utopian possibility of that fable, however, the stories in Infinite Riches, foreshadow an uncertain future. Its events, even more surely than in The Famished Road and Songs of Enchantment, demonstrate a world in transition with no clear end in sight. On the one hand, as the date for the country’s first election approaches, ‘a gentle change came over things. … An inexplicable pestilence had been lifted from our collective air’ (IR 337), and the prospects for moral action are hopeful. On the other, Okri’s mistrust in the understanding and courage of the people has already been expressed, for, ‘charged with the intoxication of the new god [of independence], we became chaotic gods ourselves’ (251). While the old woman’s tapestry depicts ‘a brief nightmare of colonisation, and an eventual, surprising, renaissance’ (113), through his knowledge of the imminent Biafra civil war and decades of coups and wasted resources, Okri can warn of ‘the re-emergence of an old deity, the great god of chaos, who would revel in decades of unprecedented rule, a new reign beginning with the birth of a nation’ (41). His counterpart, the old woman, envisions this time of suffering with a sense of fatalism, as an unavoidable period ‘which would either waken people to the necessity of determining their lives or make them dependents of world powers, diminished forever’ (208). The magical forest, reduced to timber by the end of Infinite Riches, demonstrates the triumph of modern technology and foreign capitalism and symbolises a lost homeland and hence a failed identity, ‘the dwelling place of mysteries and innumerable old stories which it embodies. … The forest was once a place where we saw the dreams of our ancestors take form’ (74). More specifically, Okri depicts the future rulers of Nigeria as dreaming of power and wealth, of their victories and their enemies, ‘dreaming their nation-destroying policies in advance. Tribal dreams of domination that would ignite civil war’ (11). Unlike Dad’s dreams that recall past events and posit communal action for the present, theirs are individualistic and rootlessly future-oriented.

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In a sense, the Minotaur cannot be conquered. It, too, is a part of life, of us, a part of life’s duality. … It represents something in us, something that has been ignored, or gone out of control. (A Way of Being Free 18) Although the still-blind people at the end of Infinite Riches anxiously await the elections that they have been told ‘would seal the fate of the unborn nation’ (337), Okri reveals that a pre-selected future Head of State has already been interviewed by the newspapers, with no one questioning his legitimacy. Okri’s inconclusive ‘conclusion’ of this massive three-volume cycle has frustrated many critics. Cooper complains of the novelist’s unrelieved cynicism about political parties and the ‘elusiveness of [The Famished Road] with regard to the possibility of change’ (1998: 89). While Wright admits Dad’s victories at the end of the first work, he judges that ‘in the absence of any close political analysis’, these triumphs remain ‘at the moral and spiritual level [and, thus, are] little more than ineffectual hopeful gestures’ (New Directions 160). John Hawley agrees that ‘Okri does not have that faith [of Achebe, Ngugi, and other earlier African writers] in a political possibility. He turns the problems of Africa into self-examination’. Okri’s juxtaposition of narrative styles offends some critics, since ‘there is no assimilation of one narrative mode by the other, or of one genre by the other’ (Ogunsanwo 45). In contrast, I argue that Okri’s politics and his formal structures are complementary and mutually explanatory. Drawing on the aesthetics of the oral tradition, he creates neo-epics, neo-mythologies of the birth of a recalcitrant Africa, emblematic of a modern world reluctant to learn from the wisdom and woes of the past, and whose future, therefore, carried in its own belly, is uncertain and could easily become monstrous. His mythic narratives, based on a general history of Nigeria rather than on a particular political ideology, serve to speculate about what he perceives should be the impetus for correct social action, that is, traditional ethics. It is true that his reliance on history (retold in Dad’s dreams, for instance) runs counter to any to conventional purpose, for, as Isadore Okpewho notes, ‘the further away a tale moves from the world of real-life experiences into that of fantasy, the more it liberates itself from the bondage to historical time and thus addresses itself to larger philosophical questions of existence’ (IR 3). The trilogy’s liberation from periodisation and topicality into the ‘rememory’ of African history frees it, to use Okpewho’s contention, to dwell in the realm of philosophical speculation, a narrative locus upsetting to those expecting a political ideology instead. For Okri, there exists no trustworthy political system, not

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Shape-shifting on the Page 49 socialism, Marxism, or Maoism, no ‘stand-point’ concept like ‘Negritude’ that will provide salvation from an exploitive, materialistic, mystifying modern world, of which Africa is only one part. Okri’s ultimate political hope, then, is a religious one; that, in the clear vision of worlds other than the material one, the selflessness and courage of individuals alone will transform societies. Sometimes his interpretation and solution seem completely spiritual, as when he says, ‘[W]e are now increasingly dissatisfied with the linear, scientific, imprisoned, tight, mean-spirited, and unsatisfactory description of reality and human beings. We want more because we sense that there is more in us. … We need ritual, initiation, transcendence of consciousness’ (Maggi Phillips 169). Other times, he speaks with a traditionally religious emphasis; he has commented of The Famished Road that ‘[S]uffering is one of the great characters of the book, the different ways people suffer. It defines the boundaries of self but also breaks down the boundaries of individual identifications’ (Wilkinson 85). Is Okri, then, a political writer at all? My answer is, of course he is. Frederick Jameson’s view of literature as, at once, philosophical, religious, and political supports Okri’s endeavor. Referring to Northrup Frye, Jameson (1974) observes: [T]he religious figures … become the symbolic space in which the collectivity thinks itself and celebrates its own unity; so that it does not seem a very difficult next step, if, with Frye, we see literature as a weaker form of myth or a later stage of ritual, to conclude that in that sense all literature, no matter how weakly, must be informed by what we have called a political unconscious, that all literature must be read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community (Obbo 70). Demonstrating not only the oft-discussed ‘unity of the arts’ of orature but also a simultaneity of purpose, all sacred oral performance from which Okri draws so heavily must be so interpreted. Mildred Hill-Lubin notes that ‘African religion produces the leader-artists of the community, and at their peak performance, they are ‘possessed’ by the spirit to whom they owe their special talents. The priest can also be the politician, orator, and artist. It is not difficult to see the evolution of the writer as a combination of all of these roles’ (199).31

Yet Okri is also writing about modern African material reality, one forged in a liminal site that Paul Gilroy terms part of ‘the Black Atlantic’, an organic locus of Black identity construction. By the very nature of its hybridity, Gilroy maintains, citizens of this fluid location must reject essentialist definitions of personality as well as separatist experiences of nationhood.32 Moreover, this political and psychological crucible of slavery and colonialism, and its aftermath in the modern world, obviously could not exist if only Black people inhabited it; the Self/Other dichotomy of modern racist

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identity construction encompasses everyone, as do Okri’s narratives. While I understand Wright’s conclusion that because of their self-indulgent style, Okri’s neo-mythologies are often read as though they are a ‘romantic artist’s solipsistic immersion in a world of his own making’ (1997b: 160), a surer appreciation of his accomplishment will result from taking seriously Okri’s return to the concept of art’s incorporation of a religious sensibility. ‘The enemies of poets,’ the novelist asserts, ‘are those who have no genuine religious thinking’ (A Way 3), by which, I believe he means, those who have no capacity for seeing beyond the material. As has been charged, his political vision is one of personal morality, his concern not nationalistic but universal, and his weapon multi-layered storytelling: ‘[T]o poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself’ (109); ‘Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals or nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations’ (112). Such ideas might appear ineffectual to a twenty-first century readership trained in the realist tradition of the protest novel and/or trusting of modern political analyses and solutions, but recent economic events should have shaken our trust in conventional political and economic ideology alone. Just as ‘Africa can’t be looked at truthfully through an external ideology,’ as Okri asserts in a 2007 statement to an interviewer, ‘[Y]ou can’t use Jane Austen to tell stories about Africa’.33 Having argued in favor of Okri’s style as symbiotic with his themes, I must conclude, nevertheless, that he faces an insurmountable problem of trying to transmit performance strategies of orature into text. Nevertheless, his aesthetic choice cannot be judged as simply an effort to interject his writing into the postmodern canon that encourages such formal hybridity, but as a consistent effort to be true to African experience and artistry.

Notes 1. The question of the appropriate language for African literature was

raised most famously at the 1962 Conference held at Makerere University in Uganda. For information about this Conference and their opposed stances on the language question, see: Ngugi wa Thiong’o, ‘The Language of African Literature’, in Decolonising the Mind, The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey, 1981, 4-33; Chinua Achebe, ‘The African Writer and the English Language’, in Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1975, 55-62.

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Shape-shifting on the Page 51 2. See, for instance, Wilkinson (1992); Emeagwali (1993); Caryl Phillips

(1997); Quayson (1997); and Fraser (2002). 3. http://www.waado.org/UrhoboCulture/Literature/BenOkri/BenOkri-

Page.html. 4. Achebe (1975: 93-103). 5. The ‘purest’ definition of ‘Negritude’ has led to Euphrase Kezilahabi’s

condemnation of it as ‘an idealistic philosophy of the Negro-African that has never really existed in Africa’, that is, the contention that the African alone is ‘a man of rhythm and charity, whose life is based on communalism, participation, hospitality, love, work, and human dignity’ (1985: 84). Other studies claim various developments of this theory that originated among Francophone scholars in the 1930s. Hal Wylie, for instance, remarks that ‘after 40 years negritude we now se [sic] that there are at least three ways to define the concept: historically, literarily and philosophically’ (1982: 44). A. James Arnold (quoted in Wylie 1985: 44) points out in Modernism and Negritude that the dialectics of blackness correspond to the dialects of the avant-garde in early 20th century Europe and in Surrealism. The black race’s role in world culture parallels the relationship of the surreal to reason. Both emerge as a critical counter-current to established rule and convention. Of course, it is necessary to mention Wole Soyinka’s well-known criticism of Negritude as Africans adopting ‘the Manichean tradition of European thought and inflict[ing] it on a culture which is most radically anti-Manichean’ (1978: 127.) 6. See Wright (1997); Cooper (1998). 7. Since the evocative figure of the abiku is so popular among contemporary African writers, this mythic concept and its literary manifestations have been widely discussed in recent studies of African literature. As critic Ato Quayson explains, ‘[T]he abiku phenomenon refers to a child in an unending cycle of births, deaths and rebirths. The belief in the abiku phenomenon is widespread in southern Nigeria with the name ‘abiku’ being shared by the Yorubas and Ijos while the Igbos refer to them as ogbanje. The idea of abiku is what may be described as a ‘constellar concept’ because it embraces various beliefs about predestination, reincarnation and the relationship between the real world and that of spirits. … the concept also implies a belief in the inscrutability and irrationality of the Unknown’. In Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing. Oxford: James Currey, 1997, 122-3. 8. Okri: ‘Isn’t it just possible that we are all abikus? I don’t say that of course, but why should there be some and not others?’ Jane Wilkinson (1992: 76-89, 84). 9. Wright terms such writing ‘literalist-Mimetic’ or ‘oral-intensive’ (1997: 139-53, 140); Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio call it ‘Oraliture’ (2001: 8-10, 9). 10. Our need to become bi-aesthetic (at the very least) is alluded to by Walter J. Ong, SJ, in his observations about the limitations of American readers, in particular. I believe his comments apply to most modern fiction

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readers. Ong says, ‘[M]ost Americans, even those who write miserably, are so stubbornly literate in principle as to believe that what makes a word a real word is not its meaningful use in vocal exchange but rather its presence on the pages of a dictionary. … In the world of the creative imagination, writing appears necessary to produce accounts of human life, that is, of what Aristotle calls “action”, which are closely plotted in the sense in which Greek drama is closely plotted, with a steady rise of complex action to climax, peripeteia or reversal, and subsequent falling action and denouement. Oral genres of much length treating human “action” are typically not tightly organised in this fashion but are looseknit and episodic.’ Ong’s essay goes on to discuss the artificiality of writing (1975: 1-7, 2). 11. See Wright (1997a); (1997b); Cooper (1998). 12. See Cooper (1998); Zamora and Faris (1995). 13. According to Wright (1997b: 150), Okri’s work ‘draws less upon the author’s own mixed Igbo and Urhobo heritage than the Yoruba worldview’. 14. See Maja-Pearce (1992); Ogunsanwo (1995); Cooper (1998). 15. As in Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), Soyinka, in this earlier play, wishes to foreground the inevitable transition from earthly life to the afterlife, or as he says, ‘from the human to the divine essence’ (TFR 149). In contrast to the dizzying pace and multiplying scenes of Okri’s book, Soyinka sets his action in a single, claustrophobic locale, the ‘AKSIDENT STORE’, crouching above the dead-end road. For a discussion of the playwright’s allusion in this work to the Yoruba Agemo rituals witnessed and reported on by Margaret Thompson Drewal in Yoruba Ritual, see Arlene A. Elder, ‘Narrative Journeys: From Orature to Postmodernism in Soyinka’s The Road and Okri’s The Famished Road’, in Multiculturalism and Hybridity in African Literatures, Hal Wylie and Bernth Lindfors (eds), Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 2000: 409-16. 16. This term is that of mixed-blood Chippewa writer Gerald Vizenor (1990 [1978]: x). He uses it to reject limiting, monologic, predetermined definitions of people and life. 17. This statement, which closes ‘Journeys Through the Imagination’, Okri’s 1983 review of Tutuola’s The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town, is quoted by Harry Garuba (1996: 277-85, 280). 18. Speaking of the Igbo Masquerade, Achebe (1989: 62-7, 65, 66) emphasises the kinetic essence of the performance: ‘The masquerade (which is really an elaborated dance) not only moves spectacularly but those who want to enjoy its motion fully must follow its progress up and down the arena. This seemingly minor observation was nonetheless esteemed important enough by the Igbo to be elevated into a proverb of general application: Ada-akwu ofu ebe enene mnuo, “You do not stand in one place to watch a masquerade.” You must imitate its motion’. He further states that ‘masquerades are of many kinds representing the range of human experience – from youth to age; from playfulness to terror … to the awesome ancestors that are enticed to the world by rare crises such

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Shape-shifting on the Page 53 as the desecration of a masked spirit … and the night-runner, ogbuzulobodo’. Okri’s jackal-headed Masquerade is his version of the fearsome night-runner. 19. As mentioned earlier, while Okri, by the end of his cycle, makes clear his rejection of individualism and emphasises the redemption of the entire society and shows throughout his concern with the hegemonic, increasingly materialistic and exploitive character of pre-independence Nigeria, it is true that he is not a Marxist thinker, at least not in the way we generally use that term as representative of a writer like Ngugi, who reflects Marxism as a coherent and systematic analysis of social forces. Nevertheless, Okri’s observations seem to respond to ‘Marx’s well known thesis on Feuerbach … that the philosophers have only interpreted the world while the task is to change it’ (Gugelberger 1995: vii, emphasis in original). 20 Here, Okri links Dad to another flawed hero, Achebe’s Okwonkwo, who wrestles and throws Amalinze the Cat in Things Fall Apart: ‘He was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old man agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights’ (Achebe 1958: 3). 21. Without progressing very far into The Famished Road, the reader becomes aware of Okri’s repeated combining of characters and incidents in threes and sevens. Usually, but not always, three represents positive characters and symbols, while seven is ominous. 22. Astonishing The Gods appears to me a mystical forerunner of Okri’s more realistic 2002 novel, In Arcadia. 23. Reflecting his Kiowa inheritance, N. Scott Momaday (quoted in Woodard 1991: 75-149, 86) remarks that ‘a word is intrinsically powerful. If you believe in the power of words, you can bring about physical change in the universe. That is a notion of language that is ancient and it is valid to me. For example, the words of a charm or a spell are formulaic. They are meant to bring about physical change. The person who utters such a formula believes beyond any shadow of doubt that his utterance is going to have this or that actual effect. Because he believes in it and because words are what they are, it is true.’ For a discussion of the postmodern performance artist as ‘shaman’, see bertens (1995: 74-5). 24. I use the term ‘enhanced’ because Ngugi’s own experience as a Gikuyu youth during the Emergency Period in Kenya, as well as the fact that many of his kinsmen (including one of his own half-brothers) joined the Land and Freedom Fighters in an attempt to expel the British colonisers, shows that he had first-hand, not just theoretical, experience of common people rising up to take political action. For his fictional treatment of this time, and its consequences for the rural population, see A Grain of Wheat (1967 [1968]), Petals of Blood (1977 [1978]), his play with Micere Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976), and Devil on the Cross (1982). 25. See Davies and Graves (1986); Chukwuma (1994); Stratton (1994); and

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Newell (1997). A female-authored theoretical study written that re-mythologises the Mother Africa image is Motherism: The Afrocentric Alternative to Feminism by Catherine Acholonu (1995). Stephanie Newell (quoted in Newell 1997: 170-90, 179) observes that ‘while Acholonu has not moved beyond the biologically essentialist conception of femininity which circulates in The Anatomy of Female Power [Chinweizu 1990], the metaphor she applies relates to elemental, organic landscapes rather than to besieged national territories. The motherland in her idealisation is a no-man’s land, beyond boundaries, filled with goddesses and earth mothers; in contrast, the womb in Chinweizu’s motherland is the centre of power for a cunning dictatorship which controls a scarcity economy’. 26. Even Dad and Mum are doppelgängers in their reversal of roles in Infinite Riches, as when ‘Mum was in the labyrinth, raging with a passion that belonged to Dad. And Dad was sweating in the homestead, performing the tasks that Mum did every day’ (109). 27. Florence Stratton (1994). 28. These individuals combine to create a catalogue of female oppressions: ‘[T]he innocent virgins who had fled from tyrannical fathers, from dreadful backwaters where people were thrown into brackish creeks to see if they were witches. Young women who had fled the rapes committed on them by uncles, or fathers’ friends. The girls who had escaped the stifling provinciality, the immemorial superstitions, the crushing negativity of isolated villages. Others who had fled from convents and were quickly trained in the art of seduction. All those who had fled from crude religions, from a life of drudgery to a life of city dreams’ (IR 312). 29. An historical example of story-telling used for negative political purposes is ZANU(PF)’s construction of a self-serving Zimbabwean ‘patriotic history’ that I will discuss in my section on the works of Yvonne Vera. 30. This historically based figure, representing both colonial myopia/ mendacity and the power of the official text to ‘invent’ Africa, is most popularly depicted in Achebe’s (1958: 187) Things Fall Apart with the District Commissioner, who intends to write ‘The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger’. 31. Hill-Lubin (1985: 199-212, 199) notes further: ‘African religious worship facilitates the intermingling of the spirit world with the material through symbolic rituals which involve perpetual creation and renewal. … The most tenacious of these rituals are found in an integrated drama which may include some or all of the following: music, singing dancing, art, speaking, spirit possession, food, and sacrifice.’ 32. Taking the syncretic musical styles of Africa, the Caribbean, the US, England, and Brazil as a significant example of modern liminality, Gilroy (1993: 199) asserts that ‘all of them are untidy elements in a story of hybridisation and intermixture that inevitably disappoints the desire for cultural and therefore racial purity, whatever its source.’

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Shape-shifting on the Page 55 33. Okri to Maya Jaggi, The Guardian, Monday, 13 August 2007. http://

books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,2146171,00. htm.

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying

[T]ravelling on the travelling earth proved the world belongs to all … (Woman of the Aeroplanes 60)

Critical Discomfort Of the three writers I discuss in this study, B. Kojo Laing proves the most eclectic, employing elements not only of oral performance but also contemporary literary strategies of linguistic hybridity and typological innovation. Yet, like Ben Okri’s fiction, his too is a comic blending of two imaginative and rhetorical sources that, at first glance, seem as far apart as we can conceive, both in terms of form and reception: orature and postmodern fiction. The major difference between the two writers is not that Okri writes of Nigeria and Laing of Ghana, for their general concern about their respective, formerly colonised countries is the same: the hazards of modernism. Humor provides the distinction between their approaches to this common subject. Laing, like Okri, weaves his narratives into the strong, organic web of African oral tradition and demonstrates through his marvelous1 characters and unexpectedly related geo graphical spaces the necessity of recognising similarities rather than differences. Moreover, his wide gaze, too, scans the world and is not fixed on his nation or continent alone. And like his Nigerian counterpart, Laing is a consummate Trickster, yet he is also consummately literary. His synthesis of oral and literary forms, a more jarring strategy than Okri’s flowing attempt at oraliture, guarantees that he will also be a difficult writer to read, but for very different reasons. I believe it is Laing’s joyous embracing of his double role as Trickster/author and his playful creation of risky comic elements in his texts that leads to much of our difficulty, not his attempts to reproduce orature, as with Okri. For example, while his novels’ hybrid language serves his thematic purpose by modeling his desired linguistic unification of peoples, the reader is so often required to turn to the glossaries filled with Ghanaian words and neologisms that one is distracted from the books’ narrative action. Not only are Laing’s characters’ dialogues convoluted, so too is that of his third-person narrators, 56

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 57 who also speak a ‘Laingian dialect’, hence the need for glossaries at the end of all his novels. It is part of his mischief that, for the most part, these glossaries mainly contain indigenous words for food and religion, entities not usually linked: a few neologisms are sprinkled in, but a few are left out. For instance, the author clearly conveys his satiric attitude toward western religions in Africa when, in Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988), a basket challenges Pastor Korner: ‘[S]o all this time that you ran your afro theological schools, you couldn’t bring yourself to unify your scattered beliefs into a coherent theological system of abenkwan! Shame!’ (94). When checked in the glossary, the word ‘abenkwan’ is said to mean ‘palm-nut soup’. Later, the basket accuses the Pastor of many sins, not least of which is his hiding his transgressions: ‘if there were other priests in Tukwan you would litigate with them tiik’ (95). As the word ‘tiik’ does not appear in the glossary, we may assume it is a rhyming vocable meaning ‘quick’. My point is not that the unlisted words completely obscure Laing’s meaning but that, because he has trained his readers (at least the non-resistant ones) to check his glossaries, this reading prompt is frequently intrusive, and occasionally even unhelpful. Laing wishes us to participate in the creation of his text by supplying our own meanings for some of his words, an aesthetic choice that deliberately violates the ‘constructed … space of the text as a unitary, homogenous space, determined by and organised within a given set of constants’ (Gibson 7). Of course, the Tricksterish fun of Laing’s wordplay, semi-helpful glossaries, and linguistic quirkiness may be read as an oblique response to the long-lasting debate about the ‘appropriate’ language for African writing, best known by the contrasting decisions for their own choices by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe and kept in critical currency by the continuing discussions of other scholars.2 While himself writing in his mother-tongue, Kikuyu, Ngugi proposes Kiswahili, the hybrid language of the east coast of Africa3 ‘to become the language for the world … symboli[sing] the dawn of a new era in human relations between the nations and peoples of Africa and those of other continents’ (Moving the Center 41). Laing’s linguistically mixed speech codes work toward the same cultural boundary crossings. As he explains in Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars (1992), ‘[I]t is usual in Ghana (with such a cosmopolitan mix of cultures) to intersperse one language with words from another. This ought to be done universally for the idea is to create one gigantic language’ (no page). Unfortunately, Laing’s innovative, sometimes socially directed, sometimes self-referential, wordplay, with its ‘deliberate nonfluency’ 4

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must necessarily distract us from his plots. It is this thematic, syncretic language that leads Brenda Cooper to complain about his texts that ‘… the medium becomes the message’5 and Derek Wright to conclude that Laing’s plots are: largely a distracting irrelevance, serving chiefly as a lightweight vehicle for the author’s imaginative flights of language and exuberant poetic invention, albeit one through which serious polemical inquiries – into Third World development, Euro-Africa cultural relations, the psychology of the Ghanaian intellectual – can be read. (Contemporary African Fiction 197)

Laing’s language may be considered self-indulgent, I agree, when it actually subverts communication, however I argue that both his linguistic experimentation and episodic action contain his themes. It is true that his plots require dedication from the reader, not because they are static and repetitious like Okri’s, quite the contrary, because they turn on such fast and fantastic action that one can easily be lost. Similarly, his outlandishly described characters, if easy to visualise because of their physical peculiarities, often are difficult to interpret and sometimes seem to have no purpose except to extend the comedy. Nevertheless, as with his Ghanaian predecessors – novelists like Ayi Kwei Armah and Kofi Awoonor, who are frequently discussed in literary histories as representative of the post-independence, social realist period of African writing6 – Laing is a serious, but not disillusioned, social analyst, intent on understanding the causes of the political/cultural condition of neocolonial Ghana and speculating about necessary steps for improving its future. However, unlike Armah, Awoonor, and others, he does not write realistic or naturalist prose; stylistically, his artistic compatriot would be Ama Ata Aidoo, with her syncretic novels Our Sister Killjoy (1979) and Changes (1993) that employ prose, poetry, unusual typography, even script-like dialogue; a textual ‘unity of the arts’, identified in Andrew Gibson’s postmodern terms as ‘a pluralisation of the narratological imaginary’ (Towards a postmodern theory of narrative 15).

Search Sweet Country Laing’s novel (1986), with its title’s ambivalent double imperative, creates a boisterous, crowded African world, rendered especially loud and fast-paced by the verbal and physical sparring among Ghanaians of all walks of life and also entertaining through its comic images of personal and social fragmentation on every level, from its caricatures of personal appearance to its satire on the lack of con-

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 59 nection between the government and the people. Despite its amusing language play and humorous characterisation, Laing’s intention is not just a satiric swipe at the country’s prospects two decades after its independence from Britain, but a celebration of the Ghanaian spirit coupled with a serious suggestion of how his countrymen and women might shape a successful national future. More specifically, Laing judges that the country’s ubiquitous energy, which in his book most often results in hilarious confrontations, is a positive characteristic of this Ghanaian character and should be channeled into finding a middle ground between the rituals of tradition and the new national activities supporting and supported by modernity. By the end of the narrative, he seems hopeful that a future generation will be more successful than the present one in uniting the binary opposites that his many comic characters and their actions depict. Adding to the energy in his work are his diverse comic styles, ranging from the slapstick humor of Dr Boadi’s illegally imported horses breaking out of their crates and defecating all over the airport floor and the gruesome farce of Aboagye Hi-speed’s ‘automatic funeral’ (164) to the satirically drawn physiognomies of the characters who people Accra and its environs and the witty repartee between both friends and enemies alike, linguistic calisthenics that energise much of the plot. With all of its entertaining distractions, Search Sweet Country (SSC) strikes me, nevertheless, as a deceptively humorous novel that is seriously interested in treating the important subject of Ghanaian political independence and its future, even that of the entire continent. It reflects, admittedly, in a sometimes seemingly impenetrable comic prose, Laing’s overall philosophical and political themes and conveys an ecofeminist understanding of the need for an ‘eco-community’, uniting apparent opposites in a middle ground that will allow for the development of individual as well as communal wisdom that could result in meaningful action. The question for the critic is whether the novelist’s particular style of humorous, postmodern narrative defeats his thematic purpose, happily entertaining us with its comic characters that sometimes seem to serve the purpose of ‘art for art’s sake’, while employing language so convoluted that, despite the glossaries, his prose becomes almost too opaque to penetrate, a self-defeating version of McHale’s ‘deliberate nonfluency’. These are natural questions to raise with Laing's work, but I hope to demonstrate that, like Okri’s attempt at oraliture, but more successfully, his use of a comic mode ideally suits his political purpose, at least in his first two novels. As I indicated above, Laing’s Accra in Search Sweet Country is as crowded as his prose. It would be easy to become exhausted with his

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cast of twelve major characters and host of supporting players, to whom he devotes a great deal of attention as well. His education in Scotland from the age of eleven, especially his study of comparative literature, acquainted him well with the British part of his hybrid cultural inheritance, just as formative years in Kumasi grounded him in Ghanaian oral traditions and culture. The British literary influences on Search Sweet Country are clear, as is his intent to conjure up the vitality of his city in all its quarters, the ‘slice of life’ provided by novelists in English since Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones (1746–1749). Following their strategy of revealing a society through the wanderings of a picaresque hero probing the varieties of eighteenth-century English life, from its brothels to its manor houses, Laing presents two protagonists, Okay Kojo Pol and Kowfi Loww, tricking us, I believe, into choosing the wrong one as our hero. In matters of comic tone and experimental style, however, Laing’s novel harkens back more surely to that most ‘postmodern’ of eighteenth-century British writers, Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy (1760–1767) shares his book’s delight in ‘mischievously perplexing’7 and indulging in irreverence and literary jokes while remaining of serious purpose. Somewhat like Sterne during his time, Laing, in his, appears to fit uneasily within the pantheon of celebrated novelists from his continent. Equally important as formal influences are his African oral and literary forbearers. I have already mentioned Aidoo, with whom, besides style, he shares a feminist concern. While Laing does not focus on a single, arguably tragic hero like Okonkwo, Achebe’s interest in explaining the varying responses of the Igbo to their nineteenthcentury world, which is ‘falling apart,’ is echoed in the Bakhtinian dialogic of conflicting opinions toward the post-independence turmoil in Search Sweet Country. Additionally, although the Ghanaian author does not present a Marxist analysis of his people’s woes like that of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Laing does recognise and satirise bourgeois corruption, that of academics in the person of Dr Boadi, for example, and of police officers who are paid by those above them to repress citizens’ freedoms. Clearly, his greatest difference from these two well-known authors and scores of other African writers is not in their subjects, not even primarily in their analyses, but in form, namely, Laing’s reliance on humor to convey his political messages. Even Mwangi Muheni (The Future Leaders 1973), one of the few comic satirists from the continent, while creating amusingly naive characters, does not risk, as Laing does, filling his novels with multitudes of the foolish and the knowing, all with the verbal ability to engage wittily with each other, and thus often confounding the

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 61 reader. Yet, his humor clearly strikes me as the ‘saving grace’ of his novels, providing an entry to the orature and daily life of Ghana. Laing’s ‘perplexing’ the reader occurs throughout Search Sweet Country, until his political purpose, ironically, is revealed almost at the end in prosaic lecture mode by Dr Sackey, the ‘good’ academic. I will return to Sackey’s explanatory passage later. For more than two-thirds of the novel, we are plunged, ‘sink or swim’, into an Accra vibrating with dozens of distinct, contentious characters who are loud with their strongly-voiced, opposing opinions. We receive the impression, however, that neither the vigor of the people nor of the bustling city seems to be leading anywhere. The novel is set in 1975, a year that marked the establishment of Lieutenant Colonel I.K. Acheampong’s Supreme Military Council following the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s first President, in 1965, and Kofi Abrefa Busia, the Prime Minister, in 1972. It was also a year of rural/urban conflict over scarce resources, the enrichment of government officials coupled with the impoverishment of ordinary citizens, new fees for university students, and a crackdown on opposition voices from the media and the public.8 To impose my own order on the chaotic scene Laing paints, I will focus on three subjects, feminism, the hope in future generations, and the continuing role of the Trickster, and examine the interaction of a triangular group of characters who carry the burden of Laing’s themes. His depiction of Ghana in 1975 expertly conveys its tumult. The country is spinning furiously, catching all in its current, but, like a whirlpool, not moving forward; this ‘stasis in motion’, essentially different from that created by Okri’s repetitions, is symbolised by Regional Planning Professor, Dr Sam Yaw Boadi’s poorly prepared lectures, which, like the fan in the lecture room, ‘moved in hopeless circles’ (88). Paradoxically, the widespread social stasis throughout the city and country is a macrocosm of, and created in large part by, the most furiously enacted fragmenting of relationships on the domestic level. Kofi Loww’s loss of his mother when she abandons him and his father for her lover, Dr Sackey’s abuse of his wife that ultimately leads to their separation, Araba Fynn’s choice of money and self image over love, Boadi’s lechery that amounts to an emotional abandonment of his wife, Oluwa ½ Allotey’s estrangement from his village and the rituals of his ancestors, even the mild conflict between Bishop Budu and the charismatic preacher, Osofo Okran, all add up to a society breaking apart into individualistic concerns that undermine communal well-being. Laing’s sympathy compels him to explain the motivations of most of these characters, an apology that might not convince us to excuse their actions, but reveals

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the author’s understanding of their psychological complexity. More importantly, never does he promote the false solution for post-independence problems as that of a simple retreat to ‘traditional’ ways, especially for women. Instead, he complicates the stereotypic notion of what is ‘traditional’ and hints at the possibility of a future elimination of discriminatory gender roles. For a feminist reading of Search Sweet Country, we only need to look at Araba Fynn, the third-generation member of a line of successful businesswomen. Admirable for her achievement of wealth, and her industry and business acumen, she serves a paradoxical dual role as a model exemplifying West African women’s entrepreneurship, but also as a cautionary illustration to warn of the loneliness inherent in her glorying in a larger-than-life self-image and devoting herself entirely to money-making to justify and verify this exaggerated self-regard. Like her mother and grandmother, Araba represents strong and successful West African market women; Adaku in Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (1979) is one of her foremothers. Like Adaku and her less successful co-wife, Nnu Ego, Araba’s mother and grandmother wind up with unreliable men as husbands. Nana Esi’s deathbed bequest to her granddaughter, Araba, that she receive her strong spirit, make even more money, and not marry Okay Kojo Pol, who reminds Nana Esi of the worthless men she and her daughter married for love, clearly may be read as a strike for female independence and self-sufficiency. After all, her grandmother and the reader alike suspect Araba sometimes sees herself as a romantic ‘heroine’, almost like the paragons found in European courtly love narratives, waiting to give herself to a ‘hero/knight’ who successfully performs some brave deed to prove his love. Unfortunately, the persona Nana Esi bequeaths to Araba with her last breath ironically reinforces this self-image even as it reverses it. She distinguishes her granddaughter from her softer mother but also from other women; as one of them complains, ‘the grand-daughter has taken the hardness. Do you see how she talks to us, like some queen mother in some town somewhere?’ (SSC 194). Like her grandmother, Araba will guard herself against the perceived softness of other women, including her mother, but will also, we are led to believe, isolate herself in the palace of her entrepreneurial success. In creating such a dynasty of businesswomen, Laing reflects the reality of Ghanaian women’s power, for ‘in our local market economies … women have long established their own places in the public sphere and are a power force to reckon with’ (cited in Nfah-Abbenyi, African Gender Studies 266); the grandmother’s power also represents the strong matrilineal cohesion of Akan society. Nevertheless,

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 63 Nana Esi’s dying insistence that Araba adopt a self-sufficient persona, which leads to her rejection of Pol, may also be read as promising a further fragmentation of the domestic sphere in which Laing insists both men and women need to be searching for compromise and unity rather than separation and individualism. His ambivalence here projects both admiration for the traditions and industry of women like Nana Esi and Araba, and also the awareness that, carried to an extreme, especially for reasons of a prideful self-image, these qualities will destroy personal happiness and social cohesion. To emphasise this fear, he depicts the regretful older woman earlier confessing, in tears, to a former suitor, ‘I did love you. I only thought you were not strong enough. And yet things turned out the opposite way!’ At her funeral, the suitor muses to Kojo Pol, ‘and here we are after these burning months! I am here, she is there … I’m vertical, she’s horizontal’ (197). However, despite a few characters’ awareness of the brevity of life and the consequent desirability of family relationships, there is little evidence in the author’s Accra and its environs that domestic accord is possible. Through most of the narrative, there are few congenial couples in evidence. Interestingly, one partnership that seems true is that between the Scotsman Dr Pinn and his African wife, Esi May, a relationship that foreshadows the national hybridity of the unions in Laing’s next novel, Woman of the Aeroplanes (WoA). Indicative, too, of the author’s feminist leaning, it is Esie May who, like Sofi Sackey, proves the more clever partner in her marriage. Although we see little of Sofi and less of Esie May, the scene in which they save their husbands from arrest after the incident at the border is sufficient to suggest they can think ‘on their feet’ and are more than capable of using trickery for important purposes. Yet Sofi’s husband is unaware of these qualities of hers; after his neglect forces her away, he wonders ‘whether she would even survive emotionally without him … for after all, the hand that bullied, was the same hand that also protected’ (227). Actual experience is never shown to challenge patriarchal self-images. Aside from the misdirected, self-absorbed Araba Fynn, the female character Laing devotes the most time to is Adwoa Adde, the precursor of Pakuua, protagonist of Woman of the Aeroplanes; Adwoa’s ability to fly transforms by the time of Laing’s second book into Pakuua’s more realistic promotion of airplanes for economic missions. Like Araba, Adwoa has been greatly influenced by her grandmother, who has pulled her ‘into magic and witchery’ (26), providing a contrast to the young market woman’s down-to-earth business dealings and establishing another of Laing’s many connections and counter-

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points as well as making an additional obeisance to the matrilineal tradition. Adwoa’s nightly excursions over Accra, which change into earth-bound therapy sessions with petitioners when she begins losing her powers of flight, seem created primarily to provide the author with an additional opportunity to crowd even more characters and their stories of typical Ghanaian life before the reader. Unfortunately, these pages of confessions to Adwoa and petitions for her aid with a multitude of mundane problems are the most tedious in the narrative, exhausting the patience of not only Adwoa but, I daresay, most readers as well. Her function in this section, of course, reminds us of the similar mother/advisor role occasionally filled by Okri’s Madame Koto. Such lapses of action, however, are rare in Search Sweet Country, and when the author returns to a similar demographic survey of the citizens of Accra later in the book, he guarantees its movement by having Okay Kojo Pol, who has become a photographer, literally speeding through the countryside. This ‘slice of life’ section occurs on Pol’s whirlwind motorbike trip through the highways of Ghana and the byways of Accra, creating a sense of mobility and discovery in the text in contrast to Adwoa’s static listening to personal complaints. Laing’s first version of this ‘travelogue’ was Adwoa’s fly-overs before she lost her powers, but, at that point, we are more interested in her and Sally Soon’s unusual abilities than in the ordinary life she sees below her. In terms of deliberate characterisation, both women’s extraordinary abilities seem afterthoughts and are not fully explored, since they lose them for an equally unexplained reason. This characterisation may be read as Laing adopting either the ontological assumption of the oral tradition or the subversion of realist fiction by postmodern narrative. In either case, Sally is developed a bit further toward the novel’s close when she becomes Dr Sackey’s sounding board for his political theories. Much more fully developed, Kojo Pol’s instructive journey, like that of any hero of a Bildungsroman, introduces both himself and the reader to the layers of his country’s society. Moreover, this humorous-looking character serves as the familiar type of the transitional, educated, young African moving out of his colonial imprisonment into a ‘brave new world’ where he must forge his own identity. As Cooper warns: [T]here are, however, limitations in working solely within a paradigm of identity be it Manichean or nomadic. First, at the core of the identity paradigm is the assumption that people passively and inevitably represent their one or their many roles. … But there can be no mechanistic equation between a person’s identities and their politics. (Magical Realism 8-9)

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 65 Certainly, such a simplistic view of personality as she describes would ring the death knell for a realistic novel, yet, even though he is not writing in that mode, nowhere in Laing’s fables is there this sort of equation; nor is there any evidence of Laing’s acceptance of the binary good/evil, oppressor/victim characterisation born of colonialism, of which Abdul JanMohamed and Frantz Fanon warn.9 Even the bourgeois inheritors of neo-colonial power in Search Sweet Country, Dr Boadi for example, are treated too comically to represent such dualism in a simplistic, schematic way. Certainly, the character type of the ‘man in transition’ is common enough in African fiction that such a figure might, possibly, suffer from the kind of ‘passivity’ Cooper notes, but Pol escapes this trap in two ways. First, he is a comic character whose nature is organic; second, he has become an artist, a recorder of his society, aligned, as was Okri’s photographer in the first saga of his abiku trilogy, to clarifying the identities of the common people, thus helping to define the true lineaments of his society. After failing to win the hand of Araba Fynn, then extricating himself from the clutches of Dr Boadi, and learning to utilise modern technology to enhance his understanding of his people, Kojo Pol appears as a member of a triumvirate of character groups who will become positive forces for the new nation. I must add that I cannot agree with Cooper’s complaint about Laing’s ‘distance, for one reason or another, from all of these characters’ (158) because Pol, even at his most misguided moments, is treated sympathetically. Moreover, it is he, not the melancholy Kofi Loww, as Cooper believes, who ‘has the aura of the author’s own persona, in his search for the meaning of his life and of that of the city, with all its diverse and disparate elements’ (160). The author’s love of indirection and narrative mischief delays our identification of the true ‘hero’ of the meandering tale, but once Pol mounts his motorcycle, camera in hand, we recognise Laing’s identification with this mistreated but good-natured young artist intent on learning about and recording the life around him. Moreover, Pol’s travels teach him an important emotional and political lesson that the writer asserts as a major theme throughout the novel, that is, ‘[A]ll the ordinary people were the real people: they lived beyond the slogans, they outlasted the politicians, even those that want to label and measure their very blood … there was the ruled blood, and there was the unruled blood that did the ruling’ (SSC 244). Tellingly, the photographer’s trust in common citizens as the genuine source of political power comes only after he leaves Accra, the reputed seat of the government. Authorial trickery, then, misleads the reader into thinking that

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the protagonist of Search Sweet County will be Pol’s friend, Kofi Loww. Loww is introduced first, therefore readers trained in the narrative strategies of the European Bildungsroman might expect that he, like Fielding’s Tom Jones, another motherless child, will lead us and himself into an understanding of his post-independence city through an anticipated ‘maturation journey’. However, Loww turns out to be a modern anti-hero. Although he pilots us in silent despondency throughout Accra and argues for his civil rights at the airport, Loww’s gaze, unlike Pol’s, ultimately continues to be inward; his wandering is aimless, and his inaction toward solving any of his problems results in a Hamlet-like brooding and stasis rather than a ‘Fieldingesque’ romp. Loww’s delayed self-awareness that he is ‘a quiet if rather odd man, struggling for his stomach and for his soul with touches of obstinacy at the temperament, with a slow but sometimes raging temper’ (41) leads to no change in his behavior. His return with Adwoa Adde to the university – already shown to be a questionable site for learning – might be interpreted as a new sense of purpose, but as Laing provides us with no explanation for this decision, it appears just another form of wandering, one motivated by his love interest, an expected turn in more realistic plots. Pol, on the other hand, has become not only the artist utilising modern technology, but, through it, the reader’s eyes on and recorder of his country too, a more heroic position than Loww’s. I would like to skip a generation at this point and argue for the thematic significance of Loww’s and Sackey’s young sons, Ahomka, like his father also without a mother, and Kwame, who defends his mother, Sofi, against his father’s verbal attacks. These small boys not only show none of the problems of the adults but, in contrast, also demonstrate a sense of justice and self-worth hard to find in the preceding generation. Ahomka and Kwame should be considered together, therefore, as the second corner of the triangle of positive character types I mentioned earlier. Ahomka, raised by his abandoned grandfather, exemplifies the positive results of the traditional valuing of a responsible extended family, and Kwame’s cooking for his father when his own mother leaves the household reveals his intuitive rejection of impractical gender roles. The twinning of these characters, then, reinforces Laing’s primary theme that Ghanaian, if not possibly all African, success depends on society’s ability to retain the best of the old and accept the best of the new. As Erzuah, Ahomka’s grandfather, asserts, ‘[C]hange everything except the roots that do the changing! And in change we must look both backwards and forwards’ (189). Erzuah is an old man; his wisdom is embodied in the two little boys who represent the future.

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 67 We can pair two disparate adult characters as the third aspect of the triangle: Beni Baidoo, the Trickster,11 and the irascible Dr Sackey, the first a traditional ‘culture bearer,’ the second a contemporary political analyst. While Beni Baidoo’s life-long attempt to found a village is greeted by others as foolish and probably only a ruse to beg from them, we are given sufficient assurance to believe the old man is sincere in his quixotic quest. Like all Tricksters, he appears disreputable, with his rags, his crippled donkey, and his scruffy, old dog; he is a moocher, a lecher, a liar, and a nuisance, whose ‘buffoonery ranged over the city’. However, not only is he blessed with ‘driblets of divination’ (26), he is steadfast in his goal, his utopian village reflecting the independent Ghana that Laing knows needs to be reconstructed. Baido dips one toe, no doubt facetiously, in the sea of modernity by pestering Adwoa to help him learn to fly airplanes, another foreshadowing of the modernism of Woman of the Airplanes. By his and the narrative’s ends, he is beloved by the main characters and, through his impending death, has provided the opportunity for others to express a communalism not previously obvious in their modern world. Even the selfish Dr Boadi agrees to replace Beni Baidoo’s donkey; Kofi Loww gives him a monthly allowance; and ½ Allotey agrees to bury him after he is found dead in his room by Pol, who has been bringing him his medicine. Thus he fulfills the most important function of the Trickster, that is, performing as the culture’s memory and conscience, reminding others of their traditional values. Beni Baidoo embodies the qualities Robert Pelton (1989) identifies as those of Ananse: He is the image of the openness of the passageway to transformation – an openness that again and again brings into relationship center and boundary, source and resource, and one sort of potency with another, and thus enables human life to be made and remade. … Ananse is the one whose special function it is to show that the passage to new life is also an ongoing story, a story that is, moreover, delightful at its very core. (The Trickster in West Africa 67)

At the other end of the spectrum from the easy-going, genial Trickster is Dr Sackey, who, nevertheless, is so thematically linked with Beni Baidoo that they may be viewed as two sides of the same coin of purchase for an independent Ghana. A more ‘professional’ professor at the university than his nemesis, Dr Boadi, Sackey, despite his own personal deficiencies, clearly condemns not only Boadi’s corruption but also the materialism and aimlessness of his country. Sackey provides Laing with the paradoxical opportunity to criticise self-satisfied academics and, at the same time, deliver a ‘lecture’ in academic language. When Sackey asks his corrupt colleague to stop harassing

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Kofi Loww, he mouths Laing’s analysis of the weakness of post-independence intellectuals confronting political malfeasance: ‘[Y]ou all become defensive about your education: you are either afraid of your advice being thought unrealistic, and mere showmanship, or you don’t want to be accused of being out of touch with people. So that your choice is either to be compensatingly tough, or to close your eyes to the excesses around you’ (SSC 90). Boadi’s unintentionally amusing grilling of Loww not only justifies Sackey’s condemnation, but his self-serving comments about Socialism also link him with Edusei, Kwame Nkrumah’s controversial Minister of the Interior. Coming as it does, at the end of the novel, Sackey’s political disquisition to Sally Soon sums up in surprisingly clear academic English Laing’s political response to the questions previously raised by the book’s many characters and events. Because of their linguistic contrast with rest of Laing’s prose, Sackey’s prosaic comments here take on a tone of authenticity. A few examples are necessary to convey the difference in this prose from the hybrid language recognised by many critics as characterising Laing’s style. Sackey recognises ‘[T]hat togetherness (a mere concept in many ways, for Ghanaians can be so un-together!), that so-called communality is really an inverted intellectual democracy, as well as an obstinate sort of preference for the earth, the rural earth’ (234). He sees the Ghanaian intellectual alternating between theories such as Marxism and what he calls ‘the onion’, a kind of ‘kitchen materialism’ that ‘pushes his pretensions down [and] reminds him of the vast rural stretches that have nothing to do with such alien concepts’. The most Eurocentric of neo-colonial influences, he judges, is educational ‘pettiness, rote learning, an unending positivistic gathering of data, data, data, with very little structuralising, very little shaping!’ Therefore, he calls such scholars ‘pedestrian labourers of the mind!’ (235). Yet Sackey trusts in the ultimate, clarifying ability of the Ghanaian intellectual’s synthesising ‘psychic territory’ with its ‘easy flow between abstract symbol, action and thing’ (234), an observation that easily could be applied to the multiple aspects of Laing’s own narrative that exhibits the same virtuosity. Observing Ghanaians as a whole, Sackey complains of ‘a relaxation and festival spirit just when there should be a work-ethic spirit, and the ease and stupor is wrongly justified as ‘true’ to one’s own culture, and left at that ridiculous junction of authenticity!’ (237). The image of the throng of revelers following behind the preacher, Osofu, immediately springs to mind. Sackey’s (arguably Laing’s) solution to Ghana’s paradoxically frantic stasis lies in his appreciation of the psychological virtuosity of the people themselves, not in the theorising of intellectuals like himself, politi-

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 69 cians, or those in any other valorised professions. His hope rests in traditional Asanti understandings ‘of a doubleness of life disclosed by maleness and femaleness, not as biological principles, but as ontological poles between which the world comes into being … so that the everyday flow of life reveals an ultimate order’ (Pelton 63). Ironically, Sackey considers ‘the Ghanaian [as] indestructible because he has got formed in his head, deep ravines of opposites’ (SSC 240). He even pities ‘[T]he poor tatale intelligentsia! They believe in very few single-minded cogitations, they think obsessions are alien – except as forms of defence or attack – they don’t want their relaxed minds to do a little crazy thinking, certainly not for its own sake! … forgetting that nature’s little obsessions are what have created the whole universe!’ (241). Both a risk-taking imagination and the discipline to work toward a material realisation of what one can imagine are qualities found in the novel only in the Trickster, Beni Baidoo with his life-long obsession with building his village. Finally, Laing uses Sackey to reassert his constant theme of the need to maintain the values of the past without being imprisoned by conventions that no longer work; echoing Kofi Loww’s father, he advises, ‘[Y]ou keep the form of symbol and you change the symbol in action. You keep the drum, you keep the paraphernalia, but all relationships with them must change. Must move …’ (241).

Woman of the Aeroplanes If, through Sackey’s lecture especially, Search Sweet Country warns against the social fragmentation Kojo Laing saw in newly independent Ghana, his next novel, Woman of the Aeroplanes, depicts an ideal of unity as well as a realistic acknowledgment of both the danger and the inevitability of change. Through an unlikely juxtaposition of doppelgängers, transnational economic alliances, animist and modern technology, and the physical and spiritual connections brought about by reincarnation, Laing offers in this work a comic vision that is based on, but goes far beyond, Dr Sackey’s urging of a practical syncretism of the traditional and the modern. His second novel is much more metaphysical than the first and much more attuned to material reality, especially the positive and negative economic potential of modernity. As in Search Sweet Country, however, Laing’s ‘yoking of opposites together’, Samuel Johnson’s condemnatory dismissal of what he saw as the contradictory imagery of seventeenth-century poetry he condemned as ‘metaphysical’,11 serves the novelist as a useful strategy, enabling him to propose his complex vision for Ghana’s future, for Africa’s development in general, and

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even to embrace the possibility for prosperity and harmony between post-independence Africa and post-colonial Europe. Laing’s metaphysical subject in this novel is Time itself, as it is manifested both linearly and cyclically in different cultures and religions; his political topic is the implications of the irreversible appeal of modernity, especially capitalism and technology; and, as before, he again is intrigued by the vagaries of the human heart. To thematise these topics, he employs many characters who may be recognised as developments of those in Search Sweet Country and action that involves, literally and figuratively, journeying beyond national and ‘racial’ boundaries. Doubling, twinning on every narrative level, serves as Laing’s controlling metaphor for national and international unity. Both Tukwan and its sister village Levensvale in Scotland are literally, as well as figuratively, invisible to the rest of their respective countries, since both have chosen to be completely different from their larger societies. Because, like ½ Allotey of Search Sweet Country, its citizens refused to accept unchanged the traditions of the ancestors, Tukwan is banished by the economic and legislative center of Ghana, Kumasi, and Levensvale is under a similar edict from London. Tukwan, then, appears the material realisation of Dr Sackey’s dreams, for ‘it was generally agreed that new things were as wise as the old at Tukwan, and that the opposition between the two was welcome and controllable’ (WoA 27). As evidence of the validity of this understanding, Tukwan’s Elders have given Kwaku de Babo, the town historian, the task of modernising the proverbs from all the different tribes inhabiting the town. In keeping with the new understanding of the relationship between tradition and modernity, Babo’s griot role seems contradictory to African tradition, since he writes rather than performs orally, thus creating a static, ‘museumised’ communal self-image. However, Tukwan is immersed in mutability even before its trade missions occur, since individual citizens are encouraged to develop their own religious rituals, as long as they are reassessed by the shrine once a year. The implication, then, is that Babo’s book of proverbs will undergo revision after revision as new aphorisms develop. Like Search Sweet Country, Woman of the Aeroplanes plunges the reader into another crowded and convoluted tale that ‘yokes’ together, through humor and, arguably, linguistic ‘violence’, historical periods and players from very different cultures and levels of power for the admirably presumptuous purpose of teasing out a viable political and spiritual agenda for Africa and Europe. Although I agree with Derek Wright’s conclusion that Laing is creating ‘a real and an imaginary Ghana, an actual place and an autonomous realm

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 71 of pure language’ (New Directions 200), I disagree with the critic’s conclusion that its ‘polemical possibilities are buried in [the novel’s] extravagant farrago of wordgames, metaphoric caprices, graphic effects and puns, and the final impression is, disappointingly, one of misplaced and sterile ingenuity’ (202). The following discussion will, I trust, explain my own appreciation of Laing’s style as a successful vehicle for his ideas. Because Laing’s mode is comic, even the profound metaphysical and the serious economic consequences of his belief in human equality appear in Woman of the Aeroplanes as absurd images, not logical arguments. In Levensvale, for example, where, as in Okri’s works, people can share each others dreams, the: Tukwan law of genetics was accepted … Now, since a snore in Levensvale could originate in Tukwan, and since an elbow in Tukwan could have its counterpart in Levensvale, everybody was free to be and to do what he or she liked. There was a blast of freedom from freely-mixed bodies and worlds, ampa.

Moreover: [O]ne hole from one nose measured exactly like another, some nostril metamorphosis. (66)

Supporting Laing’s insistence on the mutual benefit of global economic connections, these images suggest that, all along, there has been an invisible unity among people as apparently different as Ghanaians and Scots. He is deliberately playful, of course, even ironic, in envisioning this identity in physical terms, since it was largely the difference in African and European appearance (nose size, for instance) that allowed racism to be popularised in the service of imperialist economic goals during colonisation. Laing’s symbiosis of the two towns lands the novel squarely in postmodern territory, where space ‘is less constructed than deconstructed by the text, or rather constructed and deconstructed at the same time. … Spaces which real-world atlases or encyclopedias show as noncontiguous and unrelated when juxtaposed in written texts constitute a zone’ (McHale 45). In addition, since both oral tales and postmodern written narratives are ontological rather than epistemological, Laing creates an unnaturalness in both his towns that he never explains as well as a neo-traditional concept of people and parts of people being reincarnated from one continent to the other. As we will see, the spiritual connection of Ghanaians and Scotsmen will become manifestly material through the trade mission, only to be challenged by the memory of slavery and colonialism, as the world plunges even deeper into full-blown materialism and capitalist exploitation. If this idea of complementarity reminds us somewhat of the con-

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tentious concept of the ‘African Personality’ ‘filling out’ the potential for humanity of the ‘Western Intellect’, espoused by Leopold Senghor’s early version of Negritude (Prière aux masques c. 1935; Chants d’ombre 1945), Laing’s insistence on global unity seems much more surely to reflect postmodernism’s validation of multiplicity rather than homogeneity, in which each component is not only equal but participates in the essence of the other. Additionally, it acknowledges the oral tradition’s understanding of humankind’s need to reconcile apparent opposites. In the idea of the postmodern, hans bertens identifies what he calls one of the ‘controlling theses’ of the movement, the claim ‘that while modernization was a process of cultural differentiation … postmodernism is a process of cultural de-differentiation’ (the idea of the postmodern 215). Although from a different cultural starting point, Chinua Achebe famously has stressed that occupying ‘the central place in Igbo thought [is] the notion of duality: ‘[W]herever Something stands, Something Else will stand beside it. Nothing is absolute’ (Morning Yet 94). This oft-quoted proverb emphasises the importance in Igbo philosophy of acknowledging paradox and embracing apparent difference as a necessary part of life. While both sources, Western cultural theory and African philosophy, postmodernism and orature, reject modernism’s ‘master narratives’, it is true that the contemporary theorist often seems to value multiplicity for its own interesting sake, possibly indulging in the fallacy of imitative form to reflect the fragmentation of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century world. Laing, however, if I may say so without appearing to construct the very binary I argue he rejects, desires to achieve philosophical and political harmony through not just the complementarity but, ultimately, through symbiosis of such stereotypic opposites as the so-called ‘African Personality’ and ‘Western Rationality’. He recognises both categories as simply components of the human being rather than privileging essentialist geographic or ‘racial’ characteristics. Woman of the Aeroplanes seldom speaks directly about colonisation, and when it does, the comments are charged with a rather startling fusion of protest and humor. A vivid example is Kwaku de Babo’s surreal plunge down the Levensvale hill: There he was, having covered two decades already with his insane running, touching the fifties with the left thigh, bump, and grazing the sixties with the right thigh, thump. And they screamed under his thighs, especially those suffering murder, war, disaster and racism, those coffee skins being forced to arrange their skin over blackboards so that the pink mathematicians would decide whether one plus one equals humanity or not. (80) 12

The opposition of the calculations of Western science with the

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 73 demands of humanism is a contrast Laing returns to repeatedly, but usually in deflected, satiric ways. His direct mention of colonial history quoted above, with its implied protest, and comic image of Babo unable to stop his headlong plunge down the history-telling hill is one of only a few focused attacks in the text on western assumptions of superiority. Another is a much more direct condemnation by the Lord Mayor of Levensvale, who has difficulty believing that his ancestors were so ‘primitive’ as to be racists. This Scotish official’s optimistic view, despite his knowledge, is unexpected and contradictory to conventional Christian thought because, although he ‘weeps for [his ancestors’] damned and broken souls … since most of them have improved by reincarnating themselves into us here, then I have hope in the future’ (88). Aside from this ahistorical acceptance of the humanising effects of earthly immortality, the same spiritual belief as that of the Ghanaian visitors, Tukwan and Levensvale are connected in a more material way by both having suffered oppression by Britain. Significantly, Laing’s direct criticism does not focus on European colonisers alone; he slips in some angry commentary about post-independence Ghanaian rulers, specifically Nkrumah and Busia, who, he feels, continued the oppression England initiated. There is also a lengthy condemnation by the omniscient narrator of the actions of the Pope whom, the narrator claims, is supported by ‘the CIA, the KGB, the Mafia, the Broederbund, the Nazis, Amin, and the other genocidalists … the Press and all its barons whether in Accra, Siberia or Philadelphia, but above all by the Protestants’ (97). Elsewhere (144-5) Laing continues his attack on imported religious institutions in a more prosaic fashion, unfortunately halting the book’s action. For instance, Korner Mensah, the Tukwan minister, intensifies and lengthens Dr Sackey’s similar diatribe in Search Sweet Country by vigorously condemning the bloody history of Christianity to Canon Burns. However, these polemical passages stand virtually alone. Kwaku de Babo’s history-revealing lunge down the Levensvale hill, for instance, is rendered in Laing’s fabulist mode not only because, on one level, it is an amusing segment of slapstick or because it appears as a symbiosis of space and time, but also because the historian’s ‘fortunate fall’ is juxtaposed with Kwame Atta’s stupidity machine being paid homage by a succession of the curious including a ‘thingmy’, that is, an elephant reincarnated from a human ancestor, well-known historical figures from Scotland and Ghana, and all varieties of ants (96-8). My point is that Woman of the Aeroplanes may disappoint those looking for straightforward political attacks, whether in its dialogue or observations by the omniscient narrator, because, even when it is at its most direct

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in condemning colonial and neo-colonial atrocities, its images are humorously embedded in myth and comic fantasy. Therefore, the work’s most incisive analyses occur through Laing’s twinning technique, not only of towns but also of people. Like Okri’s boundary crossings, Laing’s reincarnations and syncretic characterisations also insist on the equal importance of the metaphysical along with the historical for achieving a just society. His use of doppelgängers to obliquely carry the book’s spiritual/ political theme of unity is clearest with twins Kwame Atta and Kwaku de Babo, the former a Trickster figure, a gin-swilling inventor, whose responsibility is to ‘invent more’ (4) – a requirement for Tukwan to move into the modern world, and the latter, the man of letters, not generally considered a creator of change, but a scholar and scribe, the town’s recorder of its history. According to Ghanaian myth, Onyame, the supreme deity of the Akan, Like Laing’s Sister Mansa, had two sons: Tano and Bia. Like Kwaku de Babo, Bia is responsible and obedient, while Tano is the Trickster, as is Kwame Atta. In one traditional tale, for example, Tano deceives his father into giving him land intended for the responsible Bia by disguising himself as his brother, as Kwame Atta often does.13 Folklorist Harold Courlander identifies Ananse, the spider, as ‘the paramount Trickster hero of the Ashanti and related Akan peoples’ (A Treasury of African Folklore 135). Similar to Kwame Atta, the inventor, Ananse is sometimes viewed sympathetically as wise, but is more often considered a buffoon; in an additional similarity, Kwame Atta, too, is ‘an adversary in endless contest with his community’ (135). Yet both figures are ‘culture bearers’, for as Robert Pelton explains, ‘Ananse’s movement away from order in the end creates order’ (1989: 36). Atta, then, is given a more central role than Beni Baidoo in Search Sweet Country, and the Trickster’s mythic duality is even more apparent in Woman of the Aeroplanes. Since his type is ontological, therefore not subject to the psychological probing of the realistic novel, we accept the character’s traits as they are presented. Nevertheless, Laing indulges in just enough explanation of Kwame Atta’s motivations to use him as an indicator of the dilemma of contemporary Ghana. For example, his resistance to the charge by Tukwan’s religious authority that he must invent more so the town will grow does not surprise us because resistance is a large part of the Trickster’s nature, but his reluctance is also explained as Kwame Atta’s simply not wishing to contribute to the progress of history; he is tired of human life and would like to break out of the cycle of reincarnation that he believes would continue if Tukwan were able to grow. Characteristically, he is of two minds about cooperating with

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 75 the aspirations of the town, comically symbolised by his ‘drinking from two glasses at once … sometimes his tongue [getting] stuck in between them’ (WoA 27). Nevertheless, such self-opposition, while ensuring a conflict with his society, is not a great psychological burden for him, as it would be in a realistic character, but representative of the Trickster’s continuous mutability. Kwaku de Babo’s humble and silent recording of Tukwan history is countered by Kwame Atta’s self-important belligerence: ‘[H]ow dare you accuse me of the truth! Of course I have been doing libilibi with your drinkable, but who are you to question the ethics of a distinguished akpokploto [tortoise]?’ (4). This ‘irreformable rogue’ (7) may be read as a younger, more devious and successful Beni Baidoo, who has been entrusted by the shrine, the religious authority of Tukwan, with the movement of the town, which exists outside time, into the modern world. The significance of this responsibility is emphasised by Laing’s insisting on the mixed consequences of this inevitable progress, for, although the inventor doesn’t know it, ‘the minute Tukwan struck a true balance of life, it would either be invaded or destroyed’ (46). Kwame Atta is the apostle of opposites, powdering concrete to create abstractions (94), working on a ‘truth machine’, but inventing instead a ‘stupidity machine’. It is our apprehension of the equivalence of all (matter/thought, wisdom/stupidity, ‘high’ religions and ‘low’), then, that appears to be the Transcendental significance of Kwame Atta’s outrageous, yet necessary, Trickster activities. In contrast to his exhibitionist brother, Kwaku de Babo disappears into his writing, surfacing only to inadvertently remind us of the bloody connection between Europe and Africa in his hill-running through history and to lament Pokuaa’s apparent preference for his twin brother. Nevertheless, ironically perhaps for the character most clearly related to textual, that is western, sources of knowledge, Laing places some of his clearest understandings in Kwaku de Babo’s mouth: ‘all the pain of history was a personal pain’, for instance. The omniscient narrator tells us that through his travels, Kwaku de Babo ‘was getting biased at everything except the single view … and that was because the single view simply did not exist except for the historically chosen fundamental issues, like the right to equal life, to equal love, and to equal skin. I lie?’ (98). When we puzzle through this last statement, we realise that it is another of Laing’s oblique assertions of the unity of all in a common humanity and a rejection of isolating dogmas, ‘terminal creeds’.14 Significantly, such an individual creation of proverbs like Kwaku de Babo’s completely contradicts their traditional function of express-

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ing collective wisdom, but it also creates Laing’s hybrid tradition reflecting the modern world of remembered wisdom along with individual interpretation. At the same time, since we realise that cultures are continually in flux, the only radical aspect to the enterprise is its being assigned to the scribe alone rather than developing in the usual historical way that demonstrates slow changes in cultural perceptions. Just the same, like Laing’s hybrid novel itself, Kwaku de Babo’s book of invented proverbs will respond to the heterogeneity and rapid pace of contemporary life. Paradoxically, they will be both culturally representative, derived from all the groups in Tukwan, yet individual, transformed by one person. Again, like two sides of the same coin, Laing’s twins are linked in this enterprise of reacting in their own ways to the changes of modernity. Kwame Atta, the inventor upon whom Tukwan is dependent for its growth, either refuses to invent or knows he will create machines that will subvert each other’s purpose; Kwaku de Babo, trusted transcriber of the town’s communal history and cultural truths nevertheless has the power to impress his individual understanding on its identity and future. The technician and the artist/scribe, the first refusing to progress in the expected linear, rational way, the other not just a transcriber of African oral tradition, but also its modifier, provide Laing with the ability to embody in characters his unifying vision of the traditional and postmodern ethics and politics that he judges necessary for society to function humanely in a neo-colonial, ‘technologised’ global economy. Laing’s habit of simultaneously constructing and deconstructing opposites, thus suggesting constant change in all things, injects itself into his well-established contrasts between the twins. While Kwame Atta is the amusing, if troublesome, embodiment of Ananse and the Trickster twin Tano, the more responsible brother, Kwaku de Babo, seems, at first, conventional and dull by contrast. It is only when we reflect that one of the attributes of Ananse as culture hero is that he owns all the tales and stories that are told – this repository of orature called anansesem (see Pelton 20)15 – that we realise the synchronicity of the twins bestowed by their mythic identity. Since the scribe will have recreated all of Tukwan’s stories himself, changing them to reflect modern life, in a real way, he functions as a post-independence Ananse, ‘owning’ them all. We have, then, the inventor and the artist as distinct, yet interchangeable figures reflective in their symbiotic interdependence of Laing’s vision of Africa’s relationship to the modern, neo-colonial world. There are further aspects of character hybridity. For one, although Kwame Atta is the ‘man of action’, not the historian, it is from his lips that we learn the mysterious history of Tukwan. Although Kwaku

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 77 de Babo is the truthful recorder, he momentarily becomes the Trickster who saves the travelers from the angry old men of the desert.16 The brothers’ shared identity, despite their misleading polarisation as the ‘bad twin’ (1) and the ‘good twin’ (2), appears early in the novel when we learn that, as a child, ‘Kwame would often borrow Kwaku’s hairstyle’; sometimes ‘ran off with his name out of sheer wickedness’; and would ‘chase his twin out of the story of his own life, and then misuse his absence small’. The omniscient narrator further observes, ‘the twins were a bigitive force in the town, even if it was suspected that they only had half a buttock each in common’ (2, 3). While Kwame Atta and Kwaku de Babo are Laing’s most obvious doppelgängers, twinning, even tripling, occurs among most of the characters. Most significant as dopple-, even ‘triplegängers’ are David Mackie/ Kofi Senya, the wise voices of their communities; Atta/Murray/ Bogey, amusing rogues and artisans responsible for much of the book’s slapstick comedy; Sala/Donald, the small boys, who, like their counterparts in Search Sweet Country, promise a more humane future; and the religious figures of Canon Burns and Korner Mensah, who steals the phallic, Anglican church tower and transports it to lie erotically in a shrine made up of a necklace of pine cones in the countryside. Among the myriad minor characters serving Laing’s theme of the need for recognising unity amidst apparent difference are the married Akyaa and the resolutely single Maimuna who ‘often heard the same music coming from the world’, (17) and used the same mouth, they are so close; Kwame Atta and Timmy Tale, the AfricanAmerican anthropologist; and Azziz, the pineapple farmer, and his wife, who ‘share the same shadow’ (35). Arguably, the most important figure in Woman of the Aeroplanes, however, stands alone in this catalogue of multiples: Pokuaa, the woman of the title, Laing’s reincarnation of Araba Fynn, and the successful business woman of Search Sweet Country. Since her entrepreneurial energy and previous travel experience to Scotland sparks the trade mission from Tukwan in the first place, Pokuaa, with her financial and importing skills, might be seen in realistic historical terms as the author’s latest version of the West African market woman, ‘a kind buy-and-sell woman’ (5). While this depiction is historically apt, and Laing develops Pokuaa, more than the other characters, as psychologically complicated, she appears, at one and the same time, mythic, realistic, and postmodern, a complexity that makes her unique and the bearer of much of the author’s ambivalence about modernity. Since Pokuaa is the love interest of Babo, Atta, Mackie, and Murray,

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she also plays the role of romantic heroine in a rather conventional subplot of ‘who will get the girl?’ However, her political acumen, spiritual power, and economic leadership make her the primary vehicle for the overarching subject of Woman of the Aeroplanes, namely, Laing’s questioning of the implications of African modernity, the continent’s transition into a western-oriented, capitalist economy in particular. Unlike young Araba Fynn, Pokuaa, when we meet her at the age of twenty-eight, is looking for some fun in her hard-working life. Nevertheless, she rejects Kwame Atta, her most obvious and persistent suitor, and, Araba-like, looks ‘at him with pity, at the foolishness that wanted to come into her life’ (30). Complicating her character and situation, however, Laing later presents her as a traditional West African woman, very similar to Emecheta’s young Nnu Ego, that is, defined by gender roles and subject to bouts of vulnerability and self-pity: … she damned herself for having no children yet, for she knew she had so much love to give to her child, so much freedom; she condemned herself for her material success, wondering where that hard part of herself came from; and at the worst moments, she even thought that she should apply to the ancestors to live in ordinary time again, to be removed from the sight of the new and the adventurous. (78)

In Pokuaa’s self-condemnation, Laing offers us a ‘post-shadowing’ of what Araba might experience if she continued to distance herself from human connections in her quest for more wealth and prestige. Araba, however, could never attain Pokuaa’s personal freedom; due to the latter’s spiritual inheritance from her father, Kofi Senya, the shrine master, she already has married a number of times in ‘traditional weddings that wedded her to any spirit she liked’ (5), once uniting with Kwaku de Babo without his knowledge. In one frame of mind, we are told that ‘she would have married one of the blue elephants … if de Babo hadn’t rushed to her at midnight to remind her that the only way to get the whole town to move along with her was not to be too free and too capricious’ (5). The actual limit on her freedom, then, is not that of real or imagined role restrictions for women or the demands of a fond grandmother on her death bed, but her ambition to lead Tukwan into modernity. Nor is Laing’s conception of Pokuua simply that of the heroine of a cautionary folk tale for self-sufficient African women such as the prideful heroines of the market place who refuse to accept their parents’ choice of marriage partners and end up with Skull, the ‘complete gentleman’, or some other dangerous, non-human suitor. Pokuaa’s political/entrepreneurial role as the ‘big beautiful woman boss’ (1) of Tukwan transforms the town when she conceives of, organ-

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 79 ises, and successfully completes the trade mission to Levensvale. Before examining Laing’s ambivalence concerning this capitalist enterprise, however, I should note that Pokuaa’s own reason for the trip is personal and, in a very real way, traditional: ‘[M]y confession is that I want this town built on love so that I can get some of this love transferred to me’ (25). Her business acumen and self-sufficiency aside, this admission of vulnerability reminds the reader, once again, of Nnu Ego’s ironic death, alone, by the side of the road at the end of The Joys of Motherhood as well as the educated Esi May’s disappointment and loneliness at the end of Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes (1993). Too many novels by women have revealed the precarious position of both the traditional and the modern African woman for us to view Pokuaa’s plan for gaining appreciation and love without skepticism about its fulfillment.17 Nonceba’s hopeful future as a modern African woman in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002), which I will discuss in the next chapter, seems grounded more surely psychologically than Pokuaa’s and is, therefore, a step forward in the realistic portraiture of female possibility. Our doubt about Pokuaa’s future is warranted, since, as noted above, we have heard from her own lips that she wishes her entrepreneurial endeavors for Tukwan to lead to love for her as a female benefactress, even though the reader has been told that there is long-standing grumbling against her as a female leader. Moreover, through her enterprise, the town will become more and more like other post-independence locales, that is, a site of capitalist competition and political rivalry instigated from abroad, and less-and-less a center of the ideal African values of generosity, gratitude, and honor. As we are soon shown, however, Pokuaa’s ultimate happiness depends less on her entrepreneurial accomplishments than on her spiritual powers. A significant, if subtly introduced, difficulty with her trade mission is its echoing of colonial economic exploitation. Pokuaa’s business partner’s wish for a margarine and starch industry to be established in Levensvale, with Tukwan supplying the raw materials, sends off alarms about a repetition of the former unequal business arrangement between Africa and the colonial European metropole. Because Pokuaa does not intend to become a corrupt ‘middleman’, however, the deal that results is profitable for both countries. Her endorsement of the trade mission, especially the requirement that she use modern, aerial technology for its success, shows her as more practical than Kwaku Tia in Search Sweet Country. In an understandable but self-defeating assessment of Ghana’s failure to make the most beneficial use of aviation, Tia declares, ‘all aeroplanes [should] be in the asylum: for they rose while this country was falling, and this

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was mad’ (SSC 248). Rather than attempt to demonise and imprison the technological tools of modernity, however, Pokuaa utilises aviation for Tukwan’s benefit by buying airplanes from Mackie in trust for the town, thus becoming the ‘mistress of the Aeroplanes’ (WoA 4). Yet, despite her alliance with technology, while within her aura, these particular anthropomorphic machines behave playfully, even willfully; she treats them like sentient creatures, adored pets, perfuming them every morning with frangipani, even powdering them. In another rather unclear and fabulist turn, Laing depicts the two airplanes as standing at the ‘level of her lips: one at the upper lip and the other at the lower lip’ (4). The image is not intended to suggest only a ‘planey kiss’, however, as Pokuaa’s lips are ‘aerodynamically useful, since the Aeroplanes could … be measured by the open mouth; one lip could heighten a plane, another lip could lower it’ (102). By humanising the planes and then mechanising Pokuaa, Laing flirts with postmodern cyborgian hybridity. Such a futuristic move, echoed by Kwame Atta’s willful ‘stupidity machine’, adds another imaginative space to Woman of the Aeroplanes by situating it in both traditional African animism, where sentience can be universal, and contemporary scientific experimentation in the post-human, where discussions have been taking place for some time around the ethical treatment of ‘intelligent robots, cyborgs made from a free mixing of human and machine parts, and fully organic, genetically engineered people who aren’t necessarily human at all’.18 The ‘posthuman is a techno-body … a hybridized version of pluralities’ (Woods, Beginning Postmodernism 220), and a surprise appearance in Laing’s text, perhaps, but one pointedly repositioning his questioning of colonialism’s ‘terminal creed’ that determined who is human, and who is not. In this regard, the author deconstructs the racial ‘certainties’ of much nineteenth- and twentieth-century ‘science’ in a similar fashion to feminist Donna Haraway’s discovery of the liberating force of the cyborg for women when she comments, ‘[P]erhaps ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos’ (The Haraway Reader 210). Speaking of the Protean capabilities of cyberspace and ‘virtual reality narratives’, Andrew Gibson asks, ‘[H]ow would it be possible to conceive of narrative in terms of monstrosity?’ (1996: 254) While Gibson is particularly interested in the hybridity of readers, texts, and computers, his question applies in a general way to Laing’s construction of narrative around Pokuaa with her symbiotic pet airplanes. If we take Pokuaa’s image and actions seriously, we could easily see he as ‘monstrous’ and participating in yet another

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 81 hybridity, that of technology and animism. Gibson goes on to assert that such an image in contemporary fiction constitutes a subversion of Modernist binaries, even of western philosophical and religious duality between Man and everything else: … opening up the fissures between the many, various and contradictory understandings of ‘the human’ in the Western narrative tradition. It would constitute a refusal too readily to conflate all our multifarious narrative ‘worlds’ and reduce them to our own terms. The result would necessarily be a Foucauldian exchange between or blurring of the distinct categories of the monstrous and the human. (257)

Nevertheless, because almost every entity in Woman of the Aeroplanes, be it human, vegetable, or mineral, exhibits intelligence and will, Pokuaa’s lip/airplane combination also fits the author’s animist world. Because her sharing of both mechanical and human qualities with her personified airplanes is never explained or justified, her and their cyborgian natures must be accepted as ontologically ‘reasonable’ in a work drawing from both the mythic and the postmodern. As in Okri’s trilogy, Laing’s world is not to be limited to epistemological examination, certainly not that, for instance, of a political nature, but to be appreciated as an imaginative recreation of post-independence Africa, which he envisions it as a prospective site positioned to impart deeper truths than could be revealed by ‘realistic’ analysis of either a literary or a political nature. Laing appears somewhat hopeful, yet deeply ambivalent, about Ghana’s necessary involvement in modern international commerce. Hovering over Tukwan’s timeless space is the troubling history of the Gold Coast as the center of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gold, ivory, and slave trade. The dangers of post-independence are not just economic but spiritual. Kofi Senya sounds the warning that ‘to break the barrier of ninety-nine houses was a mortal act; to travel for profit and renewal was also a mortal act; so that the gods were giving Tukwan a final choice: the more change it made, the more mortal it became, the lighter its being grew’ (WoA 31). The implications of mutability for Africa in its relationship with the West fuel the dilemma Kwame Atta experiences when, in a rare moment of serious self-reflection and analysis, he asks: [I]s it better to fill the void with an ascending world of spirits, ancestors, gods, sunsum [spirit], and owls, that is worlds that make it more difficult to touch the outer and dissect it: Or do you pretend that the spiritual is dead and then walk the wastes of the universe, spreading gadgets with some courage but leaving receding bits of yourself so that in the end there’s nothing left of you, but you leave a vast empire as a monument to nothing? (143)

Despite Kwame Atta’s straightforward ambivalence about the cusp on

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which Africa balances, his brother Kwaku de Babo expresses Laing’s deconstruction of the emotion/intellect binary: ‘if you are really human,’ he asserts confidently, ‘you don’t have to lose anything you have invented before you remember its human source, before … you realise that keeping your humanity is the supreme intelligence’ (34). His optimism seems justified by the mutually beneficial contact and contract between Tukwan and Levensvale. Their business arrangement, which results in more than one million pounds profit for each town, is not one of cold, calculating and competitive capitalism, but a socially-conscious investment in the present and future needs of both locales. For instance, ten per cent of their profits is intended for the African National Congress of South Africa, and one per cent is dedicated to mutual research to monitor the quality of each country’s inventions in order to counter the assumption that only the West has the knowledge and intelligence to move into the technological era. Nevertheless, even Levensvale’s Lord Provost is aware of the inevitable negative changes that will be occasioned by the trade mission, and his caution that ‘as soon as you reach outside yourself, you have the problem of keeping intact the soul you started with’ (149) echoes Kwame Atta’s concern. Moreover, Laing acknowledges the negative ecological and social consequences of twentieth-century commerce when the Levensvale crabs go on strike because of over-harvesting, and modern vulgarity, albeit comic, erupts like a blotch on the face of the sedate, little town with Levensvale’s newest business owner, a Pubic Hair Stylist aptly named Sheer Murdoch. As mentioned earlier, Pokuaa, the entrepreneur, exists on a mythic as well as a material plane. Wielding power over Time itself, she plays a crucial thematic role by interweaving Laing’s metaphysical thread into the political fabric of his tale. We have seen that Pokuaa’s intelligence and daring bring material wealth to both Tukwan and Levensvale; additionally, through her encouraging her countrymen and women to travel abroad, she forges connections that transcend ‘race’ and ‘history.’ Yet, she is also the initiator of ‘a creeping mortality’ which, ultimately, will eliminate reincarnation in both towns. This gradual change will result in ‘almost everybody laps[ing] into a narrowing consciousness – with immortality being slowly forgotten, journeys too, and even magic and sacred ducks, but especially the stupidity machine which had tragically become a trick-laden video screen’ (177). Politically ominous, as well, is the gradual triumph over Tukwan of Kumasi, Ghana’s center of political and economic power. The nature of this victory is telling; whereas in the past, Kumasi’s invading army was thwarted by the clever maze constructed around invisible Tukwan, the latest invasion is shown to be a cultural take-

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 83 over of ‘wealth and gadgetry’ (178), welcomed unthinkingly by the increasingly visible and materialistic citizens, and leading to Kwaku de Babo’s astute political analyses: ‘we are losing our world to something narrow, shallow, boastful and wasteful. And never forget that this is a second-degree invasion … more subtle for the reason that you may feel you are wrong if you fight against it. It is a phantom: ignore it and you look a fool, fight it and you look outdated!’ (181). Perhaps predictably for Laing, as a novelist, he emphasises the shrine chief, Kofi Senya’s solution to publicise Babo’s written account of Tukwan and its trade mission, thereby: ‘creat[ing] a new maze’, that is, a new kind of protection based on knowledge. After the citizens are educated about their recent history through reading Babo’s chronicle, ‘we must have an election to choose what to do, where to go with our spirit and morals and inventions, and to decide finally what we can tolerate and what we cannot!’ (181)

Senya’s trust in the people’s ability to understand the import of modernity and to appreciate democratic solutions to its problems places him in conflict, of course, with the increasingly dictatorial and materialistic impulses of Laing’s post-independence Ghana. The fact that, at the fable’s end, through Pokuaa’s spiritual agency, Tukwan will be granted another fifty years of immortality in which to work out its problems strikes me as an evasion of this conflict, since this ending neither answers Laing’s questions about appropriate social action in a ‘brave, new world’, nor resolves his metaphysical dilemma of keeping one’s ‘soul’ in an increasingly secular society. Of course, a novelist should not be required to produce solutions to such difficult issues; to attempt to do so would be to flirt dangerously with the ‘terminal creeds’ Laing is exposing. Nevertheless, the tidy ending of Woman of the Aeroplanes, while appropriate for a comedy where all the ‘right’ couples are together and harmony reigns once again, suggests authorial exhaustion and Laing’s desire to escape momentarily from the difficult political and spiritual issues he himself has raised. Since so many critics seem fixated on Laing’s style, sometimes to the point of being unable to get beyond form to probe its substance, I cannot leave a discussion of Woman of the Aeroplanes without commenting on its many instances of proverbial semiotics, typographical and orthographical play, and unusual characterisation that both delight and challenge us. Unlike Achebe’s well-known ‘Africanising’ of Things Fall Apart through the use of African syntax and rhythms to dialectically inflect English, and his inclusion of the many proverbs that introduce nineteenth-century Igbo culture to non-Igbo readers, the proverbs in Laing’s work might be overlooked because he

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reflects a cultural practice even more obscure to non-Africans, that of the visual axiom.19 The following image of the cloth of authority worn by Tukwan’s rulers demonstrates this visual rhetorical strategy: ‘[O]ne marvel that Nana and his elders had created under the direction of his senior linguist Nana Kofi Kasa was this: today they all wore one uncut continuous cloth, so that what Nana wore round his ample shoulder went round uncut to Nana Krontihehe, then to Nana Nifahehe, and to Nana Benekumhene’ (20). Appropriately, it is the linguist who devises a non-verbal semiotic that communicates Laing’s judgment that these honorific figures not only share authority but, comically, are all ‘cut from the same cloth’. The function of his typographical eccentricities, which I don’t believe are scattered throughout the text simply as examples of selfindulgent Trickster braggadocio, should be interpreted as supporting Laing’s themes in eye-catching, humorous ways. The frequent ‘word fractions’, for example, may be interpreted as figurative assertions of his insistence on unity: strange strange (1)

quick quick (4, 92)

sharp sharp (56)

They interest us at first because of their obvious difference from their typographical surroundings, then channel our knowledge of basic math to textual analysis, once we have identified these constructions as fractions of some sort and remember the different functions of numerators and denominators. Albeit in words, these particular numerators and denominators contain the same value in both placements, a formula we recall as indicating a whole number, not a fraction at all. With equal values both above and below the line, these ‘word fractions’ serve to unify both terms, thereby representing wholeness in the appearance of fragmentation, just as Laing’s Ghanaian and Scottish characters and towns do. Moreover, they challenge us to search for substance and not to be tricked by mechanical constructions, whether they are airplanes or mathematical figures. However, there are other such images that Laing uses with nonidentical words as numerators and denominators (12, 74, 183); these instances do represent difference and contrasts, or are puns for the sake of play. In one instance, deeply resenting others’ lack of appreciation of his accomplishments, Kwame Atta commits ‘alphabetical suicide’ (29), envisioning his name as: Atta = 0 A (29)

Laing also makes puns throughout the text and employs innovative orthography that frequently telegraphs the feelings of the character

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 85 being described. For example, ‘[T]here was a lookk [sic] of terror on Atta’s face as he had already released the wheels to land and was thus tttten feet from the earth but ssssaw no track’ (114), the k, t, and s repetitions echoing Atta’s fearful shuddering. The most visually striking and thematically meaningful typographical play is the lengthy comic formula on pages 150-1, which represents Pastor Korner Mensah’s attempt to ‘mathematicalise God sharp’, to which even the old spaniel objects as being filled with contradictions. Besides the comedy of this skeletal construct equating the Christian God and Jesus with doves, pigs, and pineapples, the figure also ironically serves Laing’s purpose of expressing the author’s Tricksterish deconstruction of his own quest for unity. While Scottish Christianity and Ghanaian animism might, in certain mythic towns, be homogenised, Laing seems certain that spirituality cannot be reduced to a universally accepted mathematical axiom. It is true that the novelist’s blending of the in medias res quality of experimental narrative with orature’s archetypal rather than realistic characterisation often renders his plot opaque. Characters from both traditions exist ontologically, with no explanations offered, creating an effect of alienation that is intellectually intriguing but emotionally distancing for some readers. This artistic decision might also create in some a similar exhaustion as experienced with Okri’s repetitions and narrative stasis. To counter this detachment, Laing wisely engages us with comedy. Besides his humorous characters, he frequently employs a textual self-referentiality that acknowledges his narrative’s insistence on supra-rational action and deliberate omission of information. He even makes the reader a vocal critic of his tale. Representing the reader, his omniscient narrator, for instance, becomes a Bakhtinian ventriloquist with Laing’s insertion into his mouth of exclamations of confusion or disbelief after a particularly odd bit of action or information: ‘[O]ccasionally Pokuaa would get married. What? She believed in traditional weddings that wedded her to any spirit she liked’ (5). The reader’s surprise and confusion, performed by the narrator’s ‘What?’, becomes part of the texture of the story, commenting on its unexpected revelations and also transforming the narrative, like orature, into a communal creative experience. Additionally, his insertion here of direct address to the reader breaks the distance between communicator and consumer in a particularly Bakhtinian way, that is, by creating a ‘dialogue’ encouraged by the narrator in which the assumed responses of the reader become part of the story itself. This stylistic intervention also reflects postmodern narrative experimentation. Laing is engaging the reader to deconstruct what Brian McHale sees as the limitations of ‘the physi-

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cal space of the material book, in particular the two-dimensional space of the page’ (Postmodernist Fiction 56), in this instance by stylistically ‘stepping off the page’, as though the reader and narrator had turned toward each other to question what they had just heard. Laing’s strategy here places Woman of the Aeroplanes legitimately within the postmodern canon in which discourses ‘reflect upon the worlds of discourse’, thereby corresponding to the contemporary suspicion that the world is ‘constructed in and through our languages, discourses, and semiotic systems’ (McHale 164), as posited by philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Foucault. I realise that by valuing Laing’s linguistic play, my response runs counter to that of other critics who condemn it, judging the ‘polemical possibilities’ of Woman of the Aeroplanes as subverted by such techniques. Wright’s criticism strikes me as much more apt for Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars (1992), where there is, actually, little linguistic ‘play’ in the sense of Tricksterish joy, but, indeed, a great deal of ‘misplaced and sterile ingenuity’ (Wright, New Directions 2002), intrusive slapstick, and even cartoonish action.

Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars In his first two novels, Laing’s chapters are entitled ‘Class[es]’, as if they comprise sections of a lesson, and simply ‘Chapter[s]’, respectively. However, in Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars (MG), which is entirely devoted to a terminal battle in ‘Achimota City’ between the heroic Major Gentl, whose oxymoronic name reveals his unexpected character, and the buffoonish, vulgar villain, Torro the Terrible, chapters are labeled ‘Zone[s]’, as in ‘war zones’, with subtitles identifying the specific subject of each. This nomenclature suggests a political gravitas the novel does not deliver. That he is still serious about language, however, especially the need for a unifying linguistic hybridity, is evident in Laing’s ‘AUTHOR’S NOTE ON THE GLOSSARY’, which I will quote in its entirety: The words listed in the glossary at the back of this book are the outcome of the world of Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars. The motive behind them is to internationalise the English. I believe that more parochial areas of the world need a broadening of vocabulary – hence many of the words are repeated in my novels and poetry. Some are invented, most are direct translations from Akan and Ga and sometimes Hausa. It is usual in Ghana (with such a cosmopolitan mix of cultures) to intersperse one language with words from another. This ought to be done universally for the idea is to create one gigantic language.

Despite such an optimistic desire for unity, Laing’s vision of a future

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 87 Africa in Major Gentl is a bleak one of continued conflict. By 2020, Ghana has ‘rooms’ on the moon and satellites hovering in space; however, these technological accomplishments are for individual and military use and are not beneficial to the Ghanaian populace as a whole. Europe’s isolation from less affluent areas of the world, and its abandonment of ‘language and humanity’ (MG 2), provides the political atmosphere for the book’s dog-eat-dog world. Major Gentl depicts a future in which science, primarily used to produce new kinds of lethal weapons, also has been harnessed in the service of genocide. Biological changes are underway in a still-apartheid South Africa to alter DNA in order to render some races incapable of mating with each other; small wars are being conducted by ‘the bosses abroad’ that go on unnoticed because ‘there are guns without hands, ships without captains, planes without pilots and camps without soldiers but with adequate food and weapons’ (156). The Africa of Laing’s first two books, struggling to establish itself as a global ‘player’, with not only economic but moral resources to offer the rest of the world has been defeated, for ‘the cybernetic superpowers … have declared Africa to be irrelevant to the modern world and humanly expendable, useful only as storage space, a nuclear sanctuary, a toxic dumping ground, and an experimental germ-andgenetic laboratory’ (Wright, New Directions 169). Immortality will soon reside only in the machines men construct that will outlast them. The most ironic ‘Dr Strangelove’ characterisation turns out to be Nana Mai the Grandmother Bomb, a mother who has abandoned two husbands but – more significantly for Laing’s 2020 Africa – who is a brilliant scientist always ready to create the next generation of weapons to defend Achimota City against its enemies. The irony deepens when we read of the Children’s War occurring at the same time the adults’ battle. To depict such a murderous world, it is not surprising that the war between the forces of Major Gentl and Torro the Terrible rages on the literary battlefield of a morality play of opposing symbols of good and evil, an essentialism Laing has carefully avoided heretofore. All in the work is not simplistic, however. The oxymoronic Major Gentl, protected by the snakes he trains, mythic because he orchestrated his own week-long birth, and legendary because of his victory in the first War of Existence, does not believe in war and is destined to be the reluctant, populist leader of Achimoto after peace is won. More simplistically representative of the flip side of this morality coin, the gluttonous, hugely obese Torro, formerly a minor crook in Rome, protected by his trained rats, and sponsor of the ‘brainthief machines’ (67) aimed at controlling the minds of soldiers in Achim-

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ota’s army, is in the pay of western capitalists wishing to appropriate the last of Africa’s resources. Such a neo-colonial dystopia sounds only too probable in our twenty-first century, unfortunately. While his setting in this novel is futuristic, Laing’s syncretic style still serves. He employs elements of myth (the super-human origins of the major characters, the vanishing of most of the land mass of Ghana, Torro’s return to life); animism (the warring rabbits and loyal camel); technological advances in warfare, even Einsteinian physics: ‘they were supposed to negate distance, mass, and even space itself, so that space occupied things as much as the other way round’ (5); and the rhetoric of science fiction, with dwellings on the moon. Yet the previous thematic significance of these disparate elements of tradition and modernity, even the dire worldwide conflicts Laing imagines possible by 2020, are subverted by his penchant in this book for comedy for its own sake. A few examples will suffice: Mr Cee, the ‘golden cockroach’, the inexplicable emblem of Achimota City and counselor to Gentl, who appears ridiculous and repulsive in his repeated attempts to have sex with the female characters; the Elders, who, despite their wisdom, are depicted as a conglomerate of absurdities; the tiresome, slapstick football match between Torro and Pogo; the vain carrot millionaire; a contest ultimately determined by Gentl’s loyal camel; and the burlesque antics characterising the actions of almost all the characters, even on the battlefield. The result is a text dominated by low and frequently grotesque comedy that subverts its own serious themes and, unlike Laing’s two earlier novels, provides no compensatory wisdom. My reading of Major Gentl completely opposes Wright’s, who believes that ‘Laing recaptures some of the seriousness and the polemical intensity of the first book in his third novel, though it is subtly disguised by the bizarre, comic-fantastical vein of the writing’ (New Directions 202). In contrast, I would say there is nothing subtle about the attempted humor in this novel; rather, it is so exaggerated beyond the satire and comedy of the first two novels that it creates a cartoon in which any ‘seriousness and polemical intensity’ is hard to discover. I should note, however, that the book’s animist-informed satire does come through, despite being largely crowded out by more physical types of humor. Significantly, this satiric commentary is most pointed in depictions of animals behaving as humans should, for example, the political ‘fairness’ of Elder Digi’s insistence, ‘we want a fish to be appointed as Minister of Fisheries’ (MG 81) allegorising the importance of voices of various constituencies being heard in positions of power, and the comic but logical reasoning of the pig president of the New Pig Experience (102). In addition to examples of ironic animal

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 89 allegory reminiscent, of course, of those in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), there are numerous instances of people and animals, even termites, working together as equals, which ‘couldn’t be ironic … for the simple reason that animals and human beings and everything else had a perfect balance in Achimota City, had an almost perfect whole’ (136). Achimota’s ideal ecofeminist culture is one of the causes of the attack by the West in the second War of Existence. Moreover, it is the animals that seal Major Gentl’s victory; Torro is dispatched for good by being torn to pieces by his rats, ‘and when victory finally came with the destruction of The Torro’s hub of computers and communications, it was the crows and the sparrows that carried the minute bombs to blow it up’ (176). Nevertheless, while suggesting an ecofeminist sensibility by Laing’s imagining humans and other creatures fighting together for mutual survival, the conclusion to the Second War of Existence remains ambiguous, since it also depicts birds being co-opted to participate in the human beings’ penchant for self-destruction in a novel, which, if it conveys any political message at all, is anti-war. Major Gentl’s guidance of Achimota after the war is fraught with the unresolved consequences of Africa’s history of slavery and colonialism that the author depicts in an ironic reversal of Gentl’s and our expectations, that is, the unwillingness of people of the Black Diaspora to return to Africa. Of course, Laing’s compatriot, Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy (1979), earlier warned of the danger to Africa of the brain drain of its intellectuals to Europe and the U.S. However, in Major Gentl, it is the ordinary people who are reluctant to go home again. Responding to the immigrant worker situation that intensified in the second half of the twentieth century, the book posits a complication for the West that it didn’t anticipate, namely, Africans still in touch with their humanity, despite their impoverished circumstances, but aware by 2020 that their return to Africa will not improve their lives. Laing’s idea of the capitalist powers wishing to use whatever means they must to rid themselves of the very people they have imported and exploited because diasporic Blacks had ‘not ceased to be human’ (105) is certainly an observable outcome of the attempted dehumanisation of slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism. In addition to the ‘brain drain’, this predicament also alludes to the questionable ‘back to Africa’ plans of Africans, the British, and Euro-Americans throughout the nineteenth century. Moreover, Major Gentl is surprised to discover that the one accidentally returned African he encounters sitting befuddled on his little bit of Ghanaian land is not at all happy to be back but, instead, howls out in despair, ‘[W]hy have they brought me back here? I was

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quite happy as a captured labourer in the cold lands, and there are thousands and thousands of us there’ (105). This twist in Gentl’s expectations also reflects an intensification of the dilemma of the ‘been-to’, a staple of Ghanaian fiction, Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1969), for example. The misery of the returnee, whom one would expect to be rejoicing at his homecoming, leads directly to a ‘shattered’ Gentl’s tortured self-examination about what the most effective governing policy would be after the war is over: … did you rejoice over the return of the land? Or did you grieve over the paucity and ravage of the few people that came with it? Did you just limit yourself to the city alone, or did you broaden your strategy in such a way that you hoped for the return and eventual success of those who left your shores long ago? Or did you just pray for the land, and hope the people would never return? (106)

Such basic questions have been asked in Africa ever since the disappearance of its colonisers. As his well-deserved self-doubt illustrates, Major Gentl is not to be considered a one-dimensional cartoon like Torro the Terrible. Gerald Gaylard even sees him as this third novel’s version of the Trickster, ironically manifesting satyagraha, the non-confrontational resistance successfully employed by Gandhi (After Colonialism 9). While I agree that the Major’s ‘strangeness and gentleness’ (7) and ‘cold and strategic humanity’ (160) provide a paradoxical characterisation reflective in some ways of the Trickster, if Laing intends him to be his latest manifestation of this powerful figure, Gentl’s general intellectual vapidity and meandering confusion mean that the author foresees a 2020 version of the ‘culture bearer’ as far less visionary and persuasive than Beni Baidoo, and as one who exhibits little of the intellectual energy of Kwami Atta. Gaylard seems on surer ground when he focuses on Laing’s use of his protagonist to reject an ideologically based military solution for Africa’s situation: ‘[I]mplicit here is a critique of ends-based Marxist political philosophies and stratagems, as those of “Grandmother Bomb”, which find “Gentl the major not aggressive enough …”’ (53). Yet, Major Gentl becomes Laing’s statesman ‘of the people’ at the end, a reluctant military figure destined to lead post-war Ghana. Our last view of him sharing his boiled groundnuts with his, Torro’s, and Achimota’s children who ‘loved the way he moved’ (180) re-emphasises the author’s trust in simplicity and unity, and in children as the world’s future hope; it also, however, interweaves a cautionary note about the development of a cult of personality, possibly warning against the expectations dashed with Nkrumah’s downfall. Nevertheless, the last words of the text are the omniscient narrator’s that beckon

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 91 the reader to share in such idolatry: ‘Ewurade, look at the way he moved in the year 2020 in Achimota City, so surrounded by fruit, animals and children’ (180). The narrator, who has seen it all, might be the true Trickster of the work, of course, seemingly offering praise and closing his story hopefully, but conveying by his tone that 2020 is a time when the self-sustaining ability of these traditional, bucolic entities has long passed. Laing’s 2020, is a post-independence, post-‘Second War of Existence’ world in which the problems that have plagued the continent since the European invasion and the ‘scramble for Africa’ have taken on a frightening new dimension because humans are now being transformed into machines for the benefit of the West. Moreover, the resulting cyborgs, unlike Pokuaa and her lippy planes, are being employed for military control, and even children, animals, and insects are now participants in the war machine. The mutually beneficial economic cooperation posited as a key to global unity in Woman of the Aeroplanes must have failed in the author’s mind, and Search Sweet Country’s hope of creating a workable synthesis of the traditional and the modern made to appear irrelevant. On his fact-finding stroll around Achimota, Major Gentl realises the consequence of the new century’s triumph of scientific materialism: ‘[W]e have decided that conceptually there is no difference between existence and nonexistence, hence we do not consider anything wrong when you no longer exist’ (166), exist, that is, as a moral being capable of choice and responsible for their behavior. Existence as a semi-machine is another matter, of course. The Africans and Scotsmen of the Woman of the Aeroplanes may have doubted their visibility to the rest of their respective countries but never their own existence; their dissenting from the materialistic goals of their rulers identified them as actually living in a significant oppositional way. By 2020, however, cyborgs offer more value than humans, as the Golden Cockroach reveals: [T]he most disgusting thing I’ve seen … is [the ‘bosses’’] greedy contemplation of discarded brain energy – they had suddenly decided that they needed less than was originally calculated, and highly sanitary scientists were busy poking about the flesh. Yes real flesh was the great surprise. Torro had been stealing real flesh with his brain machines. (155)

Even though the ‘good guys’ win the Second War of Existence, the Manichean world has become so sharply divided that such a military victory appears only a temporary guarantee of safety, especially for Africa. After all, like the promise of World War I, the so-called ‘war to end all wars’, Achimota’s First War of Existence shortly led to its second.

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As I have indicated, while admitting reservations about Laing’s indulgence in multiple comic characterisations that impede the pace of his narration, overall, I judge his humorous techniques to succeed thematically in both Search Sweet Country and Woman of the Aeroplanes. Unlike Wright, I do not condemn his style in these works as ‘misplaced and sterile ingenuity’, mainly reminiscent of ‘the lightweight, whimsical school of American postmodern fiction typified by the writings of Brautigan and Barthelme’ (New Directions 202). His third novel, Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars, however, while warning convincingly of future battles of ‘[E]xistence’, fails to engage this reader, and not because Laing’s apocalyptic premise is not believable, but because of the inappropriateness of his indulging in slapstick to treat his alarming subject. For the first time, his technique subverts his purpose. This halting of his works’ forward momentum sets him apart from Okri, whose Infinite Riches clarifies the themes and political analyses of the earlier two works in his cycle, and Vera, who, in her last novel, The Stone Virgins (2002), moves beyond her earlier books to express a new understanding, akin to Okri’s, of the negative, as well as positive, uses of storytelling and of the individual, personal growth necessary to transform a community.

Notes 1. I use this term in reference to characters from myth and stories, traditional and contemporary, who possess supernatural, miraculous, and wonder-working qualities and powers. 2. See Achebe (1975c: 87-9); ‘Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986: 4-33; 1993: 30-41);. Chinweizu et al. (1983); Owomoyela (in Epstein and Kole (eds) 1993) 347-68). 3. ‘The structure of Swahili is similar to that of all Bantu languages, but Swahili has borrowed to a greater extent from other languages, especially Arabic, Persian, Gujerati, Hindi, Portuguese, and English. The chief contributor has been Arabic. The extent of borrowing reflects the flexibility and adaptability of Swahili to the changing needs of its speakers over the centuries’. See Zawawi (1971:1). 4. McHale (1987: 154) uses the term to describe one of the hallmarks of postmodern narration. 5. Cooper (1998: 152). 6. See Wanjala (1973); Peters (in Owomoyela 1993); and Irele (2001). Critic Jonathan Peters speaks of this phase of African literature as one of disillusionment, when ‘many Africans … saw that their newly installed government officials were too preoccupied with feathering their nests to show concern for the poor and disadvantaged. Corruption was ram-

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B. Kojo Laing’s Linguistic Journeying 93 pant, and with it came violence and military coups’. 7. Witherspoon (ed.) (1951: 492.) 8. See ‘Ghana: Country Studies’, Library of Congress Country Studies, November 8, 2005. 9. See Abdul R. JanMohamed (1983: 14). 10. Another Trickster figure – but one less developed – is Ebo the Food, with his limp that recalls the Yoruba god, Esu. Ebo ‘became almost a moral force: when he misbehaved, he defined the world as of the lower half; and when he was good, he could hardly reach the higher half of his limp, his real world of value’ (SSC 18). Like Beni Baidoo, Ebo ‘enjoyed living under someone else’s sense of responsibility’ (20) and is himself susceptible of being cheated by the more hardened, modern version of the Trickster, the thief, Baby Yaww. 11. The similarity is stunning between contemporary criticism, such as Wright’s (quoted in Witherspoon (ed.) 1951: 594-5) censure of Laing’s style, and Johnson’s (1779: 81) condemnation of Abraham Cowley and his fellows: ‘The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour’; ‘Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found. But Wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough’; ‘If their greatness seldom elevates, their acuteness often surprises … and in the mass of materials which ingenious absurdity has thrown together, genuine wit and useful knowledge may be sometimes found.’ 12. This motif of ‘scientifically’ calculating the humanity of Black people appears as one of the most disturbing scenes of Sethe’s ‘re-memory’, when her ‘human’ attributes are listed against her ‘animal’ qualities by her new owner in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). 13. Harold Courlander (1996: 98). 14. ‘Terminal creeds’ is Vizenor’s designation for ideologies of every sort that people cling to, thus ‘terminating’ their intellectual growth and their acceptance of others (Bearheart 1990 [1978] 193). 15. ‘Ananse Owns All Tales That Are Told’ explains how Ananse came to be the keeper of all tales. See also Courlander (1996: 137-9). 16. This entire episode (107-12) appears extraneous, except to complicate our reading of Kwaku de Babo as the opposite of his twin and to establish the lineage of Woman of the Aeroplanes as going back to the works of Amos Tutuola, who sets his protagonists wandering in various ‘bushes of ghosts’. 17. We could also pair Mariama Bâ’s Ramatoulaye in So Long a Letter (1981) and Nyasha in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988). 18. Erik Baard’s (2003) report, ‘Cyborg Liberation Front’ recounts the first North American meeting of the World Transhumanist Association,

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sponsored by the Yale University Interdisciplinary Bioethics Project’s Working Research Group on Technology and Ethics in the summer of 2003. 19. Mineke Schipper (1991: 8-9) speaks of proverbs communicated ‘sculpted on wooden boards or pot-lids engraved in calabashes or woven cloth’; the use of ‘the proverb cord … to which all kinds of objects are attached – a chicken leg, herbs, a piece of cloth, and so on. Each object represents a proverb …’. See Wright (1997: 139-53), ‘Postmodernism as Realism: Magic History in Recent West African Fiction’, in Contemporary African Fiction. Derek Wright (ed.). Bayreuth: Bayreuth University, 1997.

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3

Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 95

Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’

Art is the telling of truth and is the only available method for the telling of certain truths. (Irene Staunton) I would like to be remembered as a writer who had no fear for words and who had an intense love of her nation. (Yvonne Vera)

It would be an exaggeration to claim that ‘history’ is ‘almost a character’ in Yvonne Vera’s novels; nevertheless, all of her figures, major or minor, have been profoundly affected by the turbulence in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe during its colonial takeover and occupation, one of its two Chimurengas (the wars for independence of 1896 and 1964– 1979), and/or their bloody aftermath. Male or female, her protagonists, even if not active participants in these upheavals, are marked by the violence of colonialism and the difficult transition from traditional to modern culture that it wrought, especially the socially and psychologically devastating decline of communalism. After independence, the Shona government’s genocide against the Ndebele, alleged political threats in Matabeleland, and its rewriting of what happened following the war of liberation in order to deny that this slaughter occurred ironically produced a condition for many citizens comparable to that of European imperialism: a silencing that continues to this day. Born in Zimbabwe in 1964, Yvonne Vera (d. 2004) lived through her country’s recent chaos and showed herself to be an acute observer and eloquent interpreter of it, particularly in the ways it has affected women. In this chapter, I intend to concentrate on two intrinsically related subjects: Vera’s own manipulation of ‘history’ to re-create meaning, and her developing movement from a focus on the dualities of gendered oppression to trust in ecofeminist concepts of modern, inclusive communalism. I hope to demonstrate this organic development in her thought by analysing the implications of Nehanda (1993), her first novel, and its conscious historical lacunae as well as the strategic inclusion of the known stories associated with the First Chimurenga and by speculating about the importance of the anti-dystopian closure of her last published novel, The Stone Virgins (TSV) (2002). Her final novel offers a sense of hope for the future, admittedly delayed until the book’s end and made all the more extraordinary in view of the so-called ‘Third Chimurenga’ still raging while Vera was writ95

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ing it. Her ultimate, if tentative, optimism leads her to a paradoxical return to the social unity against oppression in her first novel; by 2002, however, communalism is not a nationalistic enterprise but a sexually inclusive understanding of feminist modernity. I hope to touch on four major aspects of Vera’s interpretation of modern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe: her hybrid artistic choices leading to her construction, from orature, of her own ‘historical’ picture of the spirit medium, Nehanda (the inspiration for both Chimurengas); her ambiguous depiction(s) of Zimbabwe’s modern urban and rural locales; her insistence on a non-essentialist treatment of her male characters; and her appeal to ecofeminist values. Because of Vera’s own topical interests and her oblique style of referencing them, this chapter is, by necessity, more historically based than the preceding two. True to the forms of both traditional oral tales and postmodern narratives, Vera’s novels do not provide much ‘factual’ background to the Zimbabwean anti-colonial and internecine struggles; like ontologically shaped myth and much contemporary experimental fiction, her novels begin in medias res, implying an assumption of previous ‘historical’ knowledge on the part of her readers. Moreover, her books are character-driven, with only varying degrees of direct attention given to the political circumstances that help shape them. Such artistic choices are inspired, I conclude, by her preference for the re-memories of ‘oral history’ over recorded textual narratives; therefore, I am as interested in the effect on her fiction of what she omits as what she includes. Clearly, one assumption explaining her omission of much written background information might be the author’s expectation that both her African and non-African readers already will be knowledgeable about her country’s origin, colonisation, and struggle for independence. For instance, she does not see the need to explain, not even briefly, how the take-over of the area later to become Zimbabwe was determined by Lobengula, king of the Ndebele, being tricked into signing the Rudd Concession by emissaries of Cecil Rhodes in 1888, an agreement he incorrectly believed would allow the immigrating European foreigners only to mine gold in the Ndebele kingdom. The Rudd concession became the immediate political catalyst for the uprising in Nehanda. Lobengula’s agreement, we have been told in other sources actually opened up Mashonaland to an increasing influx of settlers, eventually leading to the Shona war with the Ndebele in 1893, only three years before the period in which Vera’s novel is set. With the Africans defeated in their first attempt to reclaim their land, European immigration increased immensely.1 In her works, Vera usually chooses only to refer by implication to this

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 97 early and continuing contact with duplicitous entrepreneurs like Rhodes and European powers supporting colonial settlement in her works, employing it as a ‘backdrop’ that restricts the movement of her characters or, to use another analogy, as ‘underpainting,’ mostly invisible itself, but shaping and coloring the images on the surface of her story. Sufficient knowledge of colonialism throughout Africa exists by now so that readers can understand the general economic and political tensions depicted in Vera’s works. Nevertheless, for her audience to fully comprehend the extent of particular instances of betrayal and oppression leading to her characters’ long-established attitudes of anger and mistrust towards certain groups, readers must understand the particular results of anti-native legislation in southern Africa. For example, readers would be helped by having at least a passing acquaintance with the 1930 Land Act in Rhodesia that forced Africans off their own smallholdings and rendered them ‘squatters’, many of whom labored for the new ‘owner’, in order to understand the irony of the cross-racial conflicts in ‘Crossing Boundaries’ (1-25), the first story in her collection Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals (WDYCOA) (1992). Of course, the resentments in this story resulting from that legislation may be generally understandable because African dispossession was a widespread result of European immigration during the ‘opening-up’ of the continent. However, the 1934 labor law that prohibited Africans from entering skilled trades and professions, forcing them instead to work for subsistence wages on white farms or in mines and factories, and led to clashes between urban workers and those from the rural areas (who were willing to accept the lowest of wages), is far less well-known and is instrumental in severely cramping Under the Tongue’s (UtT) (1996) Runyararo and her husband, Muroyiwa. The tension between them is exacerbated from their very first days as a couple because of the harshness of living in one of the hastily thrown-together black urban settlements. The same segregating and exploitative legislation also largely explains the long isolation of Fumbatha in Butterfly Burning (BB) (1998). These housing ordinances led, in both books’ locales, to ‘squatters’ and mine and factory workers growing increasingly discontent and ultimately turning to guerrilla action that echoes from the background in Vera’s narratives but is occasionally foregrounded in some of her most vivid scenes. However, despite the possible difficulty of interpretation that results for some readers, I am not objecting to the manner in which Vera subsumes these ‘historical’ details, for, by so doing, she insists on our more vigorous participation in understanding her narratives

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– an established value in both oral and postmodern storytelling. Her deflection of background information also gives her the opportunity to allow her characters themselves to inform us of their political situations and assumptions, a technique much more engaging than passages of expository prose. The often-documented arrogance and power of the colonisers,2 for instance, spews from the mouth of the British farmer, Charles, in Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals and explains both the religious condescension and cruelty of Nehanda’s District Officer, Mr Browning. Charles’s refusal to see the portents of change his wife already recognises, together with his all but literally digging of heels into the farm he has developed on land taken from its African owners testifies to the intruders’ sense of ‘racial’ and cultural superiority. ‘There is no truth except the one that we allow,’ he asserts confidently, ‘The natives cannot shape our history, or how we behave, or how we shall decide’ (‘Crossing Boundaries’ 21). It is possible, of course, if unlikely, that a reader new to African and postcolonial fiction might interpret Charles’s attitude as mere evidence of his own personality defects, not part-and-parcel of the disdainful arrogance that supported the privileges of colonialism. This brings me to a related issue, one that is perhaps more pertinent to the student of African fiction than to a general reader: having a sufficient literary background to recognise intertextual allusions also enriches one’s reading of Vera, these being even less possible to provide gracefully within a text than ‘historical’ references. Identification of the disagreement between Charles and his wife with that of other settler couples in African novels, such as Margery and John Thompson of Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat (1968) for example, allows the reader to view their marital rift as more than purely personal, it being but another depiction in African literary history of the inimical effect of colonialism on Blacks and Whites alike. The frequent fictional topic of European cruelty in suppressing African liberation attempts also appears briefly, but directly, in Nehanda, with Mr Browning’s deliberate targeting entire villages. Mazvita’s rape by a black rebel in Without a Name (WaN) (1994), Funbatha’s nightmare memories of his father being sped away in a government van to be hanged for his resistance activity in ‘Nineteen forty-six’ in Butterfly Burning, and the cruelties of the guerillas in The Stone Virgins synchronically foreground as well as background the violence of the Rhodesian era, even to the point of giving the dates of specific occurrences. These scenes situate Vera’s novels within the large body of African fiction that reveals and protests colonial-era brutality; their difference, however, is her lyrical but intense focus on its effect on her female protagonists.

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 99 While the author obliquely depicts the Second Chimurenga’s extended resistance to imperialism, she doesn’t explain its political origin any more than she takes time to inform us of the trickery and relentless usurpation by the European colonisers that led to the first war of liberation. Instead of choosing to provide background information that the large-scale guerilla resistance movement, begun around 1966, resulted from another betrayal, this time, the failure to deliver on the non-violent, constitutional change promised by the Rhodesian government to Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and Ndabaningi Sithole’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU(PF)), as a writer fascinated by character, not by ‘facts,’ instead, she concentrates on the personal reactions of those affected by these events. Vera’s narratives do fulfil the essential requirements of ‘historical’ fiction, depicting in their span ‘an age when two cultures are in conflict, one dying, and the other being born’ and ‘giv[ing] expression to the impact which the historical events had upon people living through them, with the result that a picture of a bygone age is given in personal and immediate terms’.3 ‘Personal and immediate’ are the keys to her manipulation of this genre, however. Because she draws her information primarily from the oral tradition of history, the ‘rememories’ of those in her community, her novels strike us with the vibrancy of stories told and retold by word of mouth, infused with political and psychological significance to contemporary Zimbabweans. She avoids retelling events either in the service of romantic nationalism or authoritative interpretation and emphasises instead the effect of what happened in her country on her characters’ lives. While she writes within the genre of ‘historical fiction’, distinguishing her books from a number of her contemporaries’ protest novels excoriating colonialism, Vera’s political world is not one of reverse Manichean dualities, simply or primarily anti-colonial.4 Her concern does not end with the overthrow of the Ian Smith regime and the hard-fought independence declared in 1980 that brought Robert Mugabe of the supposedly unified ZANU(PF) into power. Rather, it is disappointment in the results of independence and in the new government’s policies that underlies some of her most powerful scenes. At first, exuberance reigns among her war-weary characters. In Under the Tongue, for example, at the cease-fire ‘the women poured milk to the ground and welcomed the men home’ (222). Their gratitude for the rebellion’s end and hope that independence would initiate better times is poignantly present in Without a Name (WaN), where ‘no-one questioned the gaps in reality. If there was a gap anywhere, there was an opening too. Freedom was any kind of opening through

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which one could squeeze’ (26). For her characters, then, ‘1980 spelled the end of loneliness and unfulfilled desire long kept’ (26). Based on her own experience, however, Vera knows that independence did not end ‘loneliness’ and fulfil ‘desire’, but only ushered in curfews that endangered the lives of the townspeople and continued guerilla fighting in the countryside instead, and this time African against African. Continuing political resistance by dissidents against President Mugabe’s government led to the 1983–1984 curfew in areas of Matabeleland, where Vera eventually settled, and to the pacification campaign labeled ‘Gukuruhundi’ (‘strong wind’), during which an estimated 1,250 individuals were killed, ‘not including the many people who ‘disappeared’.5 I argue that her selective telling of events is directly related to her grounding in the strategies of her own oral tradition. A brief reference here to her last novel, The Stone Virgins, illustrates the tight bonding between factual content and the hybrid form in which she conveys it. With a storyteller’s performative knowledge of when to emphasise and when to simply gesture toward events, Vera sets the first section of this book on the cusp of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe’s struggle for independence, presenting only reports on the war raging in the bush, and brief considerations of the veterans suddenly appearing back in the village during the cease-fire, but no direct depiction of the battles. When she does focus on actual happenings during the liberation war, her interest is more in conveying the feeling of the experience than on the exposition of events. Combining an historian’s precision and a reporter’s attention-getting, staccato rhythm, she divides The Stone Virgins into ‘1950–1980’ and ‘1981–1986,’ with Chapter 5 (65) serving simultaneously as a one-page narrative transition between pre- and post-independence events as well as an historical recapitulation: ‘[T]he war begins. A curfew is declared. A state of emergency. No movement is allowed. The cease-fire ceases. … Every road out of Bulawayo is covered with soldiers and police, teeming like ants. Roadblocks. Bombs. Land mines. Hand grenades. Memory is lost. Independence ends. Guns rise. Rising anew. In 1981.’ Her monosyllables, simple, additive sentences, sentence fragments, and staccato movingly convey the ‘nervous condition’ of the ‘natives’ living in a continuous war zone. To reiterate, Vera’s fiction is replete with actual occurrences from the bloody emergence of Zimbabwe, but in most instances they appear only obliquely. Moreover, when events that happened during the war are directly presented, she frequently fashions them to replicate, as in the transition excerpted above, the oral and auditory effects of orature to recreate the emotional and psychological state of those caught up in these events.

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 101 The author explains her artistic goal to Jane Bryce in a comment that acknowledges both the possibilities and the limitations of the novel form, as well as the historical context of African fiction: I always say a novelist’s task is to be convincing, to convey something that enlightens. Sometimes the African novel suffers from being overtaxed, and a woman’s novel especially is given too many tasks to perform. There are many things a novel ought to do which don’t necessarily coincide with the expectations of all readers. (interview in Sign and Taboo 221)

Her self-appointed ‘task’, then, is to convey as powerfully as she can the impact that external action on the national scene has on the personal psychology and relationships of the ordinary characters who people her stories. She assumes historical knowledge as a necessary background for our understanding of her protagonists’ lives but spends little time rehearsing it, either as a protester or a reporter, except to artistically transform it to convey its emotional effect. As evidence of her disinterest in representing national political figures, the names Mugabe, Sithole, and Nkomo never appear on her pages. Only Nehanda, the nineteenth-century prophetess popularly recognised as the national icon of her country’s independence movements and, for Vera, a model of courage and determination for Zimbabwean women, who ‘merits’ a novel entirely devoted to her story. Nehanda illustrates many of her decisions about how to deal with the problems of re-creating ‘history’ in fiction and has inspired much critical debate about the philosophical and literary issues of how one determines and communicates ‘historical’ truth (Vekris 1997; Bryce 2003; Ranger in Muponde and Primorac 2005). Before beginning my analysis of Vera’s ‘historical’ method and accomplishment in Nehanda, I think it would be helpful to review briefly some of the methodological issues implicit in this discourse. Of first significance is the question about that immense store of ‘re-memories’ into which she taps – ‘the oral tradition’, and its necessarily fragmented transcribed version, ‘oral history’ – and whether they are valid sources for information about what ‘actually’ happened. The problem here is that both forms of communication rely on orature and, necessarily then, changes in performance from one teller to another over time; conversely, written ‘historical’ accounts, while individually unchanging because each version is ‘museumised’ in text, may refute each other and/or may be challenged due to their individual authorial intent, political assumptions, intended audience, or, even, intentionally or unintentionally incorrect information. Clearly, there are persuasive arguments for challenging the overall accuracy of both oral communication, the written media relying on it, and academic texts derived from personal observation and other written

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sources that purport to be ‘true’ historical accounts. Even if we grant the practitioners of both forms as being disinterestedly attempting to tell the ‘truth’, both orature and oral history are entirely reliant on periodic performances (in which I include narrations of informants to transcribers), with transcriptions of orature dependent on perhaps questionable recordings of individual performances, and a literary methodology that seldom takes into serious account the cultural traditions surrounding the events being investigated; each form is, therefore, suspect as to ‘accuracy’. When one adds a fictional genre, the ‘historical novel’, or Vera’s own character-driven, historically based narratives, the question is compounded and the over-wrought desire for ‘truth’ confounded. I have been emphasising oral communication and the ‘histories’ derived from it, but, as indicated above, I believe we should have the same skepticism about accounts canonised as ‘historical’ simply because they appear in print. Textual accounts and conclusions rely on earlier questionable texts, newspaper reports, letters, journal entries, previous ‘histories’, and so on, and sometimes even eyewitness reports and ‘oral histories’. To be clear, I certainly am not claiming that writings such as Terence Ranger’s body of work on Zimbabwean history are to viewed as untruthful or that President Mugabe’s ‘patriotic history’ is as valid as Ranger’s accounts; I simply am urging diligent caution in our acceptance of all ‘historical’ communication, be it oral, transcribed, researched from other texts, or any combination of these, as they might be closer to ‘historical fiction’ than we might believe. The following commentary is illustrative of the problem. In his introduction to Sunjata, A West African Epic of the Mande Peoples, David C. Conrad (2004: no page), explains, ‘[W]hile Manding peoples depend on their jeliw and the epic narratives for their perceptions of what happened in the distant past, many scholars from outside Manding society do not believe oral tradition is a useful source of historical information.’ Conrad accepts the validity of such scholarly skepticism, since, ‘according to the accepted standards of methodology, … stories that have been passed on by word of mouth for some seven centuries are bound to be seriously flawed in terms of genuine historical content.’ While he notes that some scholars scour Manding oral tradition in the belief that it can ‘yield evidence that has at least a reasonable degree of historical probability’, successful results would ‘require thorough knowledge of all aspects of the culture, including the social and spiritual values underlying the deeply ingrained sense of a shared history expressed through oral epic’, understandings few European scholars of orature and its transcriptions may

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 103 have acquired. Further complicating such an endeavor is the very essence of the oral tradition, the reality that it is organic and changes as it is passes along from performance to performance, not to mention century to century: most oral tradition is told by many people to many people. People hear performers and all the auditors have heard that message. Some tell it in turn to still others. Some who tell it have heard it several times from different people, and fuse all that they heard together in a single statement. Hence the transmission really is communal and continuous. (Vansina, 1985: 30)

Jan Vansina (1985) acknowledges the importance of rumor in this organic body of knowledge, as well as the selectivity of memory, fallibility of eyewitness accounts of events, and the transitory nature of orature, that is, orature’s actuality only during the time of its performance, in contrast to the continuation over time and space of a people’s multiple memories of it. He further appreciates the inventive influence of the individual artistry exhibited in orature and comments, ‘[I]mprovisation on an existing stock of images and forms is the hallmark of fictional narrative of all sorts. Such tales develop during performance. They never are invented from scratch, but develop as various bits of older tales are combined, sequences altered or improvised, descriptions of characters shifted, and settings placed in other locales’ (12). Finally, we would be wise to remember Walter Ong’s (1982) observation about the unverifiable nature of our auditory perceptions themselves: ‘[A]ll sensation takes place in time, but sound has a special relationship to time unlike that of the other fields that register in human sensation. Sound exists only when it is going out of existence’ (Orality and Literacy 31-2). While recordings may, in an incomplete way, reproduce the sound of a performance, the full import of that communal experience simply cannot be captured, except through our presence.6 Despite these multiple problems for those wishing to discover ‘historical’ information in Manding epics, Conrad believes, ‘it would be lamentably shortsighted to ignore the voices of Manding peoples themselves’, since their ‘ideas of what is most important in the past are markedly different from the kinds of history that are studied and appreciated by people strictly adhering to European standards of scholarship’ (2004: no page). It is this understanding of the significance of orature’s role in identity construction combined with its mutable existence in the telling and retelling (performance) of memories that leads Phillipe Denis (quoted in Draper 2003: 211) to comment on the significant difference between important occasions for performing such ‘re-memories’ from the oral tradition and the purposes of western scholarship for transcribing them: ‘[I]n a wounded

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country, one does not collect stories merely to satisfy one’s curiosity’. Indeed, as Vansina notes, ‘[P]erformances do not occur haphazardly. They appear at appropriate moments during institutionalised social action and their genre as well as their content is related to the occasion’ (95), an understanding that leads him to distinguish between orature, that is, oral traditions expressed in performance, and transcriptions of oral traditions, that is, oral histories’.7 I am contextualising Vera’s Nehanda within the scholarly discourse surrounding orature, epic, oral traditions, oral ‘history,’ and western historical methodology because this novel must be also read as a hybrid of all these facets of communication. First and foremost, though, it is an individual creation, a fiction. Although she does not attempt to write ‘history’, Vera’s reportage in this novel of the oral and written accounts of events that occurred in the area of southern Africa the colonisers named Rhodesia is the supporting structure that frees her to improvise with characterisation and tone, as the sarungano, the Zimbabwean oral performer charged with society’s voice: The sarungano is the ‘sensitive needle in his society and in the case of the communal narrator, the spokesman for the little people, the underprivileged. … In a communal society, the sarungano was the repository of cultural values for that society. … The stories provided the cultural rules that underpinned the community’s way of life, or the sum-total of their philosophical outlook.8

In her role as sarungano, Vera can depend on a collective memory within her African audience that might not contain all the details of Zimbabwe’s past but knows its broad outlines, especially as it has affected their immediate ancestors and themselves. Accounts of this experience came to her ears through contemporary oral storytelling, that is, orature. Through her use of a literary genre, the novel, her version of these stories will be added to the diverse oral accounts, official written reports, and transcriptions of ‘oral histories’, transforming this store of re-memories for her readers, since, as Vansina notes, ‘traditions must always be understood as reflecting both past and present in a single breath.’9 Vera’s dependence on legend in Nehanda responds, then, to theoretical questions about the function of myth in traditional Zimbabwean culture and presentday consciousness, the relationship of mythic ‘truth’ to historical ‘truth’, and the strategies by which an author translates an oral story to a literate mixed audience. It is Vera’s handling of these issues in her first novel that I would like to explore more fully. The spirit medium Nehanda gained iconic status as the spirit of nationalism during the war for independence of 1965–1979, when her legend provided positive identity construction for the colonised

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 105 Africans and reinvigorated their sense of unity with their land. Vera aligns herself with the oral tradition of Nehanda that she grew up hearing in her community, rather than the school textbook version of the woman who instigated the first Chimurenga and inspired the second. Nehanda remains vital and inspirational for the Zimbabwean construction of resistance to colonialism, although she was hanged on the 27th of April, 1898, at the age of thirty-six and therefore might be judged a failure. In her discussion with Bryce in 2000, the author explains, ‘[O]ur oral history does not even accept that she was hanged, even though the photographs are there to show it, because she refused that, she surpassed the moment when they took her body, and when they put a noose upon it, she had already departed’ (221).10 Interested in photography herself, Vera realises that the photos, as well as newspaper and ‘historical’ reports of Nehanda’s capture and execution, impose a finality, a visual verification of the ‘terminal creed’ that represses her continuing cultural significance, privileging only the factual events the Rhodesian government wished to have remembered. In her novel, then, Vera recounts neither Nehanda’s execution nor the Rhodesian government’s politically motivated account of her, but instead probes ‘the nature of that departure’ and the nationalist power of her iconic figure, understandings to be found only in the living oral traditions that inspire contemporary Zimbabweans. As she explains to Bryce, ‘[T]he legend, the history, is created in the mouth, and therefore survival is in the mouth’ (221). Paradoxically, she must convey this distinctly oral ‘legend’ and ‘history’, plus its organic relationship to her people’s ‘survival’, through writing. By analysing Vera’s method of shaping the events surrounding her important protagonist, so recreating Nehanda for her own aesthetic and political purposes, I will attempt to clarify the storyteller’s rhetorical strategies that are, by necessity, different in methodology from those of the historian, the politician, or the newspaper reporter. Of the novel’s variance from recorded accounts, Ranger has remarked, ‘[I]t’s all absolutely wrong and I love it’ (emphasis in original) because he appreciates the work as ‘a feminist re-writing of the history of colonial occupation and anti-colonial resistance’.11 My examination also attempts to illustrate and clarify Vera’s self-appointed role as a contemporary sarungano and storyteller. In an interview with John Vekris, Vera acknowledges that the individual events in Nehanda are not verifiable; nevertheless, she insists they are true to the oral tradition.12 As an example of her ‘true’ invention, she admits to conceiving of Nehanda’s naming ceremony … which I made up to feel African’, as well as imagining the water mixed with earth that Nehanda drinks in her ritual of vision

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and prophesying. The only officially recorded battle scene portrayed is the ambush in which men, women, and children, inspired by the seer’s vision, rain boulders and rocks down on a group of British soldiers on horseback they have lured up a narrow mountain path. Only the rock-throwing is historically ‘authentic’, but Vera elaborates on that remembered act of resistance to highlight the poorly-armed people’s communal dedication to fighting for liberation and their capability for effective military strategising, qualities certainly not emphasised in the official texts; fourteen soldiers are killed in this incident in Vera’s text, but no Africans. In The Shona and Their Neighbors (1994), a study of two thousand years of events in Zimbabwe, David Beach gives the following account of the First Chimurenga: The killing of the last of the Ndebele cattle by the BSAC in an ill-considered attempt to control the rinderpest pandemic of early 1896 led the Ndebele to put their resistance plans into effect. Almost all of them and their Shona subjects rose against the Rhodesians in March 1896. For some time they seemed close to victory, with the enemy being confined to a few towns, but by mid-year the situation was changing. A few months later Ndebele resistance was ending, either through negotiations in the Matopo range or through battle elsewhere. In June news of the earlier Ndebele victories reached the Central Shona, where tension was already high, and the result was a rising that spread through most of the central and part of the eastern Shona territories. This also confined the Rhodesians to a few towns, and the fact that the Shona managed to plant their crops in the summer of 1896–7 helped most of them to continue the fight until the middle of the latter year. Destruction of their crops was a major factor in forcing their surrender, as it had been with the Ndebele. (168)

Vera provides none of this background. By offering an ‘historical novel’ without much ‘history’, she is, in a way, transforming this form of storytelling for her modern, literate, audience. Isidore Okpewho remarks, ‘[O]ne of the most acknowledged uses of oral literature is in recording the historical experiences of a people, both the rulers and the ruled’ (African Oral Literature 118). Additionally, another historian of the African oral tradition, Ruth Finnegan, comments, ‘[A]mid all the theorising about the possible functions of stories there is one point which, it seems, is too often overlooked. This is the likelihood that within a culture stories are likely to have many functions. … Even more important are the details of the occasion on which a story is told – including the audience, the narrator’s state of mind, and recent events in the locality’ (Oral Literature in Africa 377). As a contemporary sarungano, Vera, then, is privileging her desire to add to the hagiography surrounding Nehanda not for her importance as a leader alone but because of Zimbabwean women’s

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 107 need for a role model in extremely difficult political and economic times over recounting ‘accurate’ ‘history’. She identifies with the multiple intentions of traditional singers; Vera explains to Jane Bryce that writing Nehanda felt equivalent to writing a folk song (220). Perhaps this sensibility leads her to include a particularly lyrical episode in Section 21 of the novel, not told in a third-person voice, but in indirect discourse through the eyes of a young boy who, from his perch in a tree, witnesses the British destruction of his village and murder of his friends and family. This section of the novel seems more akin to a discrete short story or an episode in an epic than to a chapter in a linear, contemporary narrative, even though it takes place in a tale that is chronological. The beautifully rendered, imaginary account also fits within certain oral modes recounting the development of nationalism, in its depiction of the unprovoked violence to be overcome; the good required to combat evil; and, most pertinently for arousing Nehanda’s connection with later resistance, the escape of the boy, the folk-hero, enlightened by what he has witnessed, into the forest from which so many rebels would emerge during the Second Chimurenga. Vera’s inspirational and honorific intent, as well as her great facility with language, are abundantly evident in this episode, which is, no doubt, based on many actual occurrences during both wars of resistance but tailored to depict one boy’s birth of consciousness, his unpredictable survival, and his representation of not only the suffering of his people under the oppression of the colonisers, but also the largescale resistance that came ‘out of the forests’. Improvisation, as Vansina emphasises, is a hallmark of the storyteller, and in her first novel we see Vera selecting, again and again, which aspects of both the recorded and the remembered tales of Nehanda to include in her praise-song, and, just as artistically important, which well-known figures and events to leave out. For example, there is no mention whatsoever of Nechombo, the spirit medium’s assistant who served as her intermediary with the people who appealed to her for aid when they could not approach her directly. An even more significant departure from the written records is Vera’s depiction of Kaguvi (Kagubi), one of Nehanda’s co-mediums and co-conspirators. In the ‘historical’ literature at the time of the European invasion into southern Africa, there are accounts of a man in the area named Gumboreshumba (‘lion’s foot’), discovered by the ancestor-venerating Shona to have been possessed by the spirit medium Kaguvi and known thereafter as Sekuru Kaguvi.13 He in western Mashonaland, Nehanda in Central and Northern Mashonaland, and another leader, Mukwati in Matabeleland (also absent from

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Nehanda), proclaimed the authority of the mhondoro, the lions possessed by the spirits of the original Shona seers, whose power was believed to be derived from a ritual act of incest between the daughter and son of Mutota, the leader living in Zimbabwe’s geographic location in the fifteenth-century.14 According to the legend, Nebedza, the son of the ruler, Mutota, consolidated territory and expanded his rule through this formerly taboo act and was commanded by his father to bestow a portion of his empire on his half-sister, who became the powerful oracle Nyamhika, the first Nehanda, or ruler of the Handa. It is her spirit at the end of the nineteenth century that possesses Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana, Vera’s protagonist. In Solomon M. Mutswairo’s Chaminuka, Prophet of Zimbabwe (1983), a novel based on oral ‘historical’ accounts of Chaminuka, reportedly the nineteenth-century Nehanda’s half-brother, the author writes of this figure’s unsuccessful attempts to forge peace between ‘his’ people, the Mbire, and Lobengula’s Ndebele, whom Nehanda is made to characterise in Mutswairo’s novel as ‘fighting forces who thrive on war, and whose lives are entirely spent on training to fight and kill. … They are a sadistic group of murderers!’ Mutswairo’s Nehanda goes on to condemn her own people as weak: ‘[A]ll they know is drinking beer, marrying wives and running away from their enemies … They’ve never learned to benefit from the experiences of others. They don’t even understand the high honor derived from death itself. Only my father, Mzaruri, who lies buried on that ant-hill behind us, knows what’s going to happen to us the day the Ndebele invade.’ Mutswairo’s interest is in the male figure, it is true, but he takes pains to portray Nehanda as limited by contemporary gender roles. When reminded that she, like her brother, possesses the spirit power of their ancestors and could therefore lead the Mbiri herself, Nehanda replies, ‘I am a woman … There is hardly anything I can do so long as my brother lives. Anything at all that I do must first be sanctioned and approved by him. But he will not. … No Ndebele will ever ignore his master’s orders to honor a woman’s word. A woman has no status among men. They are different from us’ (108). Her speech significantly shifts the locus of battle from that of the Mbiri versus the Ndebele to men versus women. That there may be truth to Mutswairo’s version is suggested by the fact that Chaminuka, who, according to this account, was forty-two years older than Nehanda, died in 1883, but she didn’t help organise the first rebellion until 1896. Even then, as noted in Mutswairo’s text, the male seer, Kaguvi, is recorded as having initiated the movement. Of course, this account is based on the ‘official’ one and may be further evidence of the bias of European male historians of the time than of Nehanda

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 109 finally feeling free of her brother and able to lead her people. Additionally, David Lan reports, ‘[I]n many of the new versions of old myths that grew out of the years of the struggle, this brother and sister pair are characterised as the original founders of the Shona nation. In recognition and perpetuation of this tradition two of the early ZANU operational zones in the north-east were named Nehanda and Chaminuka’ (Guns and Rain, Guerillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe 6).15 In order to focus on the significance of Nehanda as a revolutionary leader, Vera omits all of the distracting, potentially titillating, legendary, and mythic information about the act of incest and its expansionist purpose; additionally, she leaves out the official account that the charge against Nehanda at her trial was not specifically that she was one of the leaders of the first Chimurenga, but that she was guilty of ordering the murder of Native Commissioner Pollard, who was extremely unpopular with the Shona. A Bulawayo history website reports that: Pollard had created great resentment among her people by thrashing Chief Chiweshe for failing to report an outbreak of Rinderpest among his herds. He was captured at the outbreak of the Rebellion and an eye-witness reports as follows: ‘So they took him to Nehanda. She said ‘Bring him here.’ Then she came and knelt down and spoke with Pollard. I then heard Nehanda say to Watta, ‘Kill Pollard but take him some way of to the river or he will stink.’ They took an axe and they chopped of [sic] his head.’16

Attesting to the power of oral re-tellings to expand and transform legends, as I noted in the Okri chapter regarding Madame Koto, another account increases the mystery about Charwe Nehanda’s relationship with Pollard. This story claims that there were two links between them, the first originating in 1897 when she was hiding from the British government and appealed to Pollard’s father-in-law for refuge, which he granted. Notwithstanding the fact that the year 1887 was long after Pollard’s murder, one wonders why he would help her if she was guilty of his son-in-law’s death. One suggested reason is that this man knew she had been falsely accused, unless interpretation of this fact is that Pollard’s father-in-law knew she was not guilty. Why would he help her if she was responsible for his son-in-law’s death, ‘unless there was a much larger conspiracy in his death?’ Another theory posited on this site is that Charwe’s relationship with Pollard ‘went beyond that of an African woman subject to his rule as a British South African administrator’; possibly they had some kind of business connection. While this supposition may be true, it still leaves open a question about the father-in-law’s motives for helping her.

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The second link indicates she and Pollard might indeed have had a business relationship. The story is that sometime after the First Chimurenga began, Pollard began a journey to the north, accompanied by Nehanda’s carriers. This journey appears to have had several purposes; although the police reported it as a hunting trip, he was also investigating the death of a telegram operator near Mount Darwin, and there also seems to have been some kind of trade-related aspect to it. When, his group came across warring people, Nehanda’s carriers fled, and the local police and villagers seized Pollard and took him to her village. According to testimony at her trial, Nehanda: … asked what had happened to her carriers. When he replied that they had fled, she ordered her brother Hwata to kill him. It is important to note that in this version, she ordered his death because he lost her carriers, not because of his brutality with the Africans while carrying out his duties as a British administrator. In other words, even if Charwe [Nehanda] was guilty of his murder, his death was a result of their personal business. It had nothing to do with the Rising; thus, his death does not connect her to the Rising in any way and cannot be used as proof of her involvement. Rumors escalated quickly. By the time of her trial, the name of Nehanda was not only linked with Pollard’s murder, but the story was that she had kept him alive for 15 days, eating the flesh on his arms and legs.17

Nehanda’s alleged connection to the murder of Pollard remains disputed. Her insistence on her innocence is convincing, given her courage and apparent honesty about everything else. What is pertinent to Vera’s narrative, in any case, is that she ignored not only the official written accounts but much of the legendary re-telling, too. Vera’s decision to exclude this speculation and sensationalism was, once again, an artistic one. Despite the actual accusation against Nehanda that led to her hanging, Pollard is but a small fish to fry in a story centered on the spiritual and military trajectory of the female ancestor Vera wishes to show as inspiring her people’s first uprising. Moreover, the absence of any scenes involving these two, or even any reference to the charges, suggests Vera’s acceptance of Nehanda’s innocence and the reasons behind her hanging. Artistically, to have spent time on this issue, which was central to the then Rhodesian authorities, would have led to a weakening of the tight, fabulist structure she has created. Moreover, the inconclusive outcome of the case in the public mind would have left questions for readers about Nehanda’s complicity, truthfulness, and heroism, unless Vera had created scenes in which she is shown to have deliberately killed Pollard for a selfless reason, or in which it is clear that she had nothing to do with it. Instead, the narrative begins with Nehanda contemplating her death and progresses through the enclosed tale to the end of the frame story, where the spirit medium welcomes her ancestors

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 111 and enters their world. Tumultuous, uncertain political and military action appropriately devolves at the end into natural harmony and ancestral spirits peacefully asserting their power: ‘[T]he wind covers the earth with joyful celebration’ (Nehanda 118). The difference between Nehanda’s easy departure and Kaguvi’s conflicted one could not be more stark; it is true, though, that omitting the Pollard relationship opens Vera up to charges of hagiography, obviously an unavoidable danger when an author is more interested in creating a role model than a realistic human being. This risk Vera embraces. A supporting reason for Vera ignoring negative aspects to her protagonist’s story is that she is battling recent historical accounts that deny Charwe’s role as the primary military leader of the First Chimurenga, a role that historians have accepted for over one-hundred years. One such revisionist is African historian David Beach, whose research leads him to argue that Charwe: … the spirit medium for Nehanda, was an influential woman with a great deal of power in everyday life, but innocent of the charges brought against her by the British, just as she claimed. She was not responsible for the death of H.H. Pollard, the Native Commissioner whose murder resulted in her conviction and hanging. Nor, he argues, was she responsible, even partly, for the Ndebele/Shona rising. There was no conspiracy, no planned attack on the British that she was part of. Instead, because she was already assumed guilty for Pollard’s death before her trial, her part in instigating the struggle was also assumed. Rumours, alongside the accusation that the male spirit medium Kaguvi made against her, were strong enough evidence for the white settlers who judged her guilty.

Some historians built on these rumours and assumptions and the myth, according to Beach, was made.18 Beach also cites Terence Ranger and Julian Cobbing, writing in the Journal of African History,19 as providing ‘later research’ that throws into doubt the ‘influential attempt to make the 1896-7 risings a prefiguring of Zimbabwean nationalism of the 1960s’ (169). In opposition to Beach, however, quoting Daneel, Ranger (1996) writes: … after the defeat of the risings [of 1896], cult messages ‘emphasised the unique identity of the culture and entrenched a solid tradition of resistance to white interference’. As nationalist resistance stiffened in the 1960s there was ‘a revival of traditional religion’. In turn traditional religion ‘inspired the guerrilla fighters, in many cases informed and even gave direction to strategic operations at the war front and contributed greatly to close co-operation between rural communities and fighters’.20

Additionally, Lan notes that even the Rhodesian military were aware of the power of various spirit mediums as the Second Chimurenga intensified, and even resorted to the tactic of broadcasting from airplanes recordings of mediums, supposedly in trances, denouncing the

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guerilla war, and dropping leaflets claiming, ‘[M]hondoro, your tribal spirit, has sent a message to say that your ancestral spirits are very dissatisfied with you. As a result of this there has been no rain.’21 It appears that this controversy among historians is a prime example of written ‘histories’ and respected investigators coming to very different conclusions about the same figures and events. Vera’s decision might have been that if the ‘official’ accounts of Nehanda, her relationship to Pollard, her leadership role in the first Chimurenga, and her influence on the freedom fighters during the second war of liberation is in dispute with the ‘experts’, as a creative writer, she needn’t even attempt to ferret out and follow an accepted explanation but create a plot and action supportive of her creative purposes. Another narrative omission in the novel is, however, less easy to explain, namely, the particularity of Nehanda’s response to her conviction and the reported accounts of an unusual occurrence at her execution. Beach states that Nehanda’s reputation was made partly because of her unexpected actions at her trial; ‘[E]ven when sentenced to death, she refused to admit guilt or convert to Christianity. In front of her accusers, she began to dance, sing, shout, laugh. Until the last moment, until faced with the noose, she struggled. She refused to give in to these men who judged and sentenced her.’22 According to written accounts of the execution, there were two unsuccessful attempts to hang Nehanda. It was only when the hangman followed the suggestion of another African prisoner that he should remove a tobacco pouch from her belt that the subsequent attempt was successful.23 Vera depicts Nehanda, in our first image of her, as carrying ‘her bag of words in a pouch that lies tied around her waist’ (Nehanda 1). Since it is in her own interest to emphasise her heroine’s supernatural powers and the creative vitality of her words, Vera might have decided that showing the successful removal of her ‘medicine’ pouch would suggest that the spirit medium is no longer being protected by the ancestors, but reliant on her own human resources and therefore much less powerful than before. Another possibility is that her betrayal by a fellow African could be interpreted as evidence of a division in the manner in which she was perceived by the people, rather than merely self-interest on the part of the other prisoner, a reminder of actual political divisions at the time that Vera does not wish to intrude into her narrative. Maurice T. Vambe, for one, citing the research of Norma J. Kriger in Mutoko District of Zimbabwe published in her Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices (1992), notes the ‘internal contradictions of African resistance within the struggle for independence. [Kriger’s] book argues that there were social conflicts within African peasant communities that were based on

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 113 gender, generational and class differences. These conflicts occurred whether or not there was a war in progress’ (19).24 He reinforces his argument against Vera’s creation of a unified, cultural, nationalist resistance in Nehanda because ‘she threatens to suppress and exclude other counter-memories of resistance.’25 Possibly, these lacunae occur because the author wishes to avoid completely the official, textual records of her protagonist’s death, even if it means sacrificing an opportunity to demonstrate Nehanda’s supernatural powers; we are not shown her hanging, nor do we hear her oft-quoted prophesy, ‘[T]hese bones shall rise’. Instead, Vera chooses, to use the frame of her narrative to focus on Nehanda’s internal thoughts and feelings rather than reinforce the spectacle or the official finality of her execution. The violence, yet promise, of her death is presented imagistically, symbolised vividly in crimson and yellow in the opening frame of the book; at the end of the text, as at its beginning, nature embodies a synchronicity of time implying birth in death, imitated artistically by the cyclical structure of the narrative. In official written ‘history’, it was Kaguvi who first preached Mwari’s (God’s) demand that the Europeans be removed from the land and convinced Nehanda to join him to exhort the people and spearhead the first war of resistance.26 Their success resulted in the Shona and Ndebele, traditional enemies, joining forces in October 1896 to drive out the Europeans; Mukwati had already begun the rebellion in May of that year in Matabeleland. Mukwati never appears in Nehanda, but Gumboresdhumba, the hunter, is portrayed as he transforms into Kaguvi the spirit medium, blindfolded, spearing a bull, drinking its blood, even eating its raw heart: ‘[T]he people applaud him, and welcome the ancestors who speak through him’ (Nehanda 71). The scene is awe-inspiring and significant beyond the gruesome acts depicted. ‘I don’t suppose Kaguvi actually did that,’ Vera told Vekris (1997: no page), but she felt free to imagine what could have happened and based the rituals in Nehanda upon what she knew of Zimbabwean cultural traditions; ‘[T]he bull was always important in Shona culture. The idea of blood is always important. … I had to make [Kaguvi] cross a certain boundary like eating that heart etc. because he is an “Other” figure. Something “other” than the normal’. Vera’s other invention in treating Kaguvi is the humorous scene in the first half of chapter 23 where, after he surrenders, he is summarily condemned for the murder of an African policeman and is shown in his cell with a priest who is silently reading the Bible. It is largely through indirect discourse providing Kaguvi’s silent observations that the priest’s actions are described: [T]he fingers move slowly across the open surface of the book from top to

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bottom, twice, then rapidly to his mouth where they touch the tongue before returning to the corner of the book and turning a leaf. This rhythmic process is accompanied by a nodding motion of the head and upper body. But Kaguvi cannot see what is being put into the priest’s mouth, and although he watches for a long time there is no swallowing. Also his eyes are behaving strangely: unlike the rest of his body, their movement is quick and irregular. (103)

The comic dialogue that follows serves many purposes. First, it is a surprising but entertaining relief in a novel with no other lighthearted aspects; it also illustrates the doggedness of the missionaries to convert the Africans. Additionally, Kaguvi’s fascination with the priest’s facial expressions and body language in response to a book that can ‘lie with words’ (106) alludes to the people’s trust in the veracity of the oral tradition versus the written tradition, as discussed above. Additionally, the African’s common-sense attitudes toward foreign beliefs – ‘[I]t is better to know what governs the stranger’s world, and what secret fears he holds’ (104) – is juxtaposed in this scene against the priest’s ideological certitude: ‘[Y]our god is an evil god. … I am here to save you from the eternal flames’ (106). While one might view the end of their conversation as inconclusive, since Kaguvi seems impressed by the priest’s assertion of the resurrection of the body and confused by the ‘tenderness in his smile, and real concern in his voice’ (106), I am persuaded by the spirit medium’s incredulity, suspicion, and shock at the priest’s arrogance that he remains unconvinced by his ideology. The clearest evidence of his mistrust, of course, is that Vera never shows him accepting Christianity, although, as mentioned above, the ‘historical’ Kaguvi is reported to have converted before his death. Yet, in the second part of chapter 23, Kaguvi appears conflicted. Here, the confident, skeptical spirit medium who could evaluate the priest and question his doctrine appears defeated and frightened. He cowers before his endowing spirit, Mhondoro; ‘Kaguvi dares not look at the lion which is now crouched at the opposite side of the room, its mane raised angrily.’ Vera emphasises Kaguvi’s separation from his ancient spirit: ‘[I]t is as though they now live in separate ages of time, himself in the present, his spirit departing further into the past.’ The reader is left to wonder if ‘[A]ll the promises [that] have been broken’ (107) are those made by Kaguvi because Vera is well aware that he became a Christian at his end, or if Mhondoro is furious because of Kaguvi’s failure to inspire his people to gain their freedom. If the correct answer is the former, we must fill in the lacunae ourselves, since Vera offers no explicit depiction of his acceptance of the colonisers’ religion, only a blank space between the scene with the priest and this final incident, which suggests the

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 115 passage of time but little more. The official ‘historical’ explanation falls short of narrative evidence; we may therefore surmise that the novel suggests that Kaguvi’s failure of purpose to defeat the enemy is the cause of Mhondoro’s menace. Obviously, Nehanda, too, has been vanquished, but she appears in no such scene of condemnation and threat. My point here is that despite Vera’s desire to subvert the official written accounts of her protagonists’ last days, she seems to be influenced by what she knows of Kaguvi from these sources; because she wishes to use him to demonstrate African perspicacity and cultural pride, however, she does not depict him as converting. Nevertheless, she offers an ambiguous image of him, brooding on his ‘faults’ and cowering before his angry ancestor spirit. The problem here seems to be that Vera wishes to have her story both ways. On the one hand, to assert cultural nationalism, she wishes to maintain the value of traditional belief in contrast to the colonisers’ religion, thus, continuing Kaguvi’s trust in the Shona concept of the power of the ancestors. On the other, she is aware of the surrender and conversion of the ‘textbook Kaguvi’ and feels the need to depict his regret, not for the failure of the Chimurenga alone, it seems, but for what the novel shows as his temporary susceptibility to the old priest’s appeal. Therefore, she communicates his sympathy at the end of their discussion and the empty space/ time between the two contrasting scenes in order to reveal not only Kaguvi’s personal conflict but, ironically, her own artistic one. The result is a confusing narration that suggests Vera’s indecision, at this point, about how best to ‘recreate our history’, write convincingly, and ‘convey something that enlightens’ (in Bryce 221) with a character whose well-known actions run counter to her fictional intent. With the actual and imagined Nehanda, she has no such conflict, since even written accounts report that ‘there were numerous and strenuous attempts by a Catholic Priest to convert her to Christianity but she … remained defiant to the end.’27 Vera credits the writing of Nehanda to her feminist impulse to educate contemporary Zimbabwean women about the powerful female leader in their social and political re-memory whose value had been diminished by the way she was treated in official ‘histories’ (in Bryce 222). She wrote this novel at the time when the female guerilla fighters she would treat in detail in The Stone Virgins were returning from battle and being forced to once more accept the subservience imposed on them by the same patriarchal system they had left to fight for freedom.28 Nehanda’s significance as the subject of Vera’s novel at this time is, as she says, not only to be an inspiring, female role model but also a figure whose legend provides an opportunity

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for a revision of conventional gendered as well as racist ‘history’: I wanted ordinary women in Zimbabwe to know there was nothing new in what they were attempting to do. At that time (early 80s), women were coming back from the armed struggle and people were not even recognizing that they had gone. But a woman had led the first rebellion, not just physically but spiritually, which in fact was the basis of our entire armed struggle that followed – the Second Chimurenga. (in Bryce 222; emphasis in original)

More than a feminist model of courage and leadership alone, moreover, Nehanda serves as a reaffirmation of Shona culture as a whole in the wake of western materialism and Christianity; she represents ‘the centre of our spiritual belief as a whole nation’ (222). Vera is fortunate in her heroine. The consistency in Nehanda’s personality and actions provide the author with a heroine she could recreate without narrative silences or ambiguities. Unlike Kaguvi, Nehanda is coherent. As already indicated, Vera’s novel has been subject to criticism. In addition to Vambe’s faulting Nehanda in contrast to the diverse political opinions of the characters in Chenjerai Hove’s Bones (1988) by artificially imposing on her characters an identical attitude about the first Chimurenga, implying a non-changing homogeneity among Zimbabwean women; and romanticising traditional Shona culture, other critics dislike what they, too, perceive as the book’s distortion of ‘historical’ truth.29 Emmanuel Chiwome also insists that Vera’s presentation of traditional women’s lives is inaccurate and even asserts that by depicting what he judges ‘false’ and artistically unnecessary details of Shona life, she reinforces Self/Other racist fallacies. He explains, ‘[W]hile it is true that some old women are midwives, women would not generally gather in the hut in the big numbers that Vera suggests …. The midwife and her assistant are the only people normally permitted to occupy the labour hut.’30 Since Vera explained that she never intended to write with ‘historical’ accuracy, this argument about conventions strikes me as irrelevant. His political concern, however, has somewhat more weight: [T]he invocation of dreams to confirm the legendary birth of Nehanda could mislead the western cross-border reader by seeming to confirm the myth that Africans have a pre-logical or irrational way of understanding or anticipating events. This could be extended to confirm colonial anthropological fallacies about the quaint nature of the African mind.31

Lene Bull-Christiansen agrees with Vambe and Chiwome that Vera’s depiction of Nehanda’s influence on the first Chimurenga: … offers no role for other agents such as the different churches and other

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 117 civil society groups, which participated in the struggle on the side of the Africans … as they are silenced or ‘written out’. Similarly the Marxist aversion towards all kinds of religious practice, which caused difficulties in the co-operation between the liberation army and the spirit mediums (and the Christian churches) … is also written out of Vera’s spiritual narrative.32

Nehanda, obviously then, is unable to escape being labeled and judged as an ‘historical novel,’ although, as cited earlier, Vera explains to John Vekris that she had not, in fact, attempted to write such a work. Rather, she had invented aspects of Shona life because she herself, of course, had never lived in a traditional setting but nevertheless wished to make both the temporal and geographical venues of Nehanda reflect Shona culture of the time. To Bryce, she explained that she wrote the book ‘from remembrance, as a witness to my own spiritual history’ (220). Because she views the spirit medium as a trans-historical, feminist model of the warrior, whom she was depicting at a moment when female guerillas were returning from the Second Chimurenga, Nehanda serves as a contemporary, iconic figure who is not limited by periodisation. Chiwome’s fear that Vera’s recreation of Shona spiritual customs will enflame the prejudices of scientific/materialist readers and/ or racists against Africans leads us to the interesting issue of the western-educated, cosmopolitan Vera’s own sense of mystery, as she composed her novel. ‘It transformed me’, she reports to Bryce: I remember after I wrote that book, feeling physically so old because I felt so wise, I knew so much about the spirit world. I hadn’t traveled in it before in a concentrated fashion like that, and I felt as if I were a spirit as I wrote it. I felt in the end it came out of a state of possession. I had asked her in my traditional manner of asking – getting up before dawn to ask her guidance – and she had visited. And in the end I felt physically exhausted, and that I had lost my youth, because I couldn’t pretend to the world I was naïve, I felt a fierce sense of responsibility to tell this story, and to do so, I had to coexist with this Nehanda spirit. It really gave me a lot of strength as a woman. (222, italics in original)

Rather than simply worrying about a political or materialist conservatism on the part of her readers that might manifest itself in Self/ Other racial or cultural prejudices, Vera embraced her personal, sense of transformation while writing Nehanda and, in reality, revealed her own cultural ‘conservatism’, one that insists upon the felt reality of a world beyond the material. Her more political identification with Nehanda, which she wishes to inspire in other Zimbabwean women through recreating her story, is powerful and energising, as is her certainty about living in contact with a spiritual realm. Whether a modern readership judges such reported visitations as actual presences, wish-projections, or delusional visions, is irrele-

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vant here; what is significant is that Vera, along with other writers33 has experienced such a reality and have derived from this contact both personal inspiration and, she feels, the ability to transmit to readers the spiritual meanings of their ancestors. Surely, Vera was aware of the possible skepticism her account to Bryce would occasion but probably decided that to concern herself with any negative judgment of her own experience would be an intolerable self-denying self-silencing, exactly the kind of response she wished to urge her female compatriots to overcome. Vera’s spiritual experience was so powerful that it led her to view herself, if only temporarily, as the medium of Nehanda’s spirit and to understand that her richest communicative mode in which to tell her story was traditional song: ‘[I]t was much better to write it almost intuitively, out of my consciousness of being African, as though I were myself a spirit medium, and I was just transferring or conveying the feelings, symbols and images of that. I wrote it at a time when I could write it, the way one might write a folk-song’ (220). Through her ‘praise song’, as a Shona sarungano, she also revivifies the oral tradition in the present literate culture by inventing a ‘new’ Nehanda. As Vambe notes, ‘[I]n the ngano [narrative] tradition of the Shona people, oral artists adapt old forms for new content’ (African Oral Story-Telling Tradition 11). Nehanda is the heroine of the past whom Vera transforms into a patron of the Zimbabwean postindependence present, not through strict adherence to ‘historical’ records but to the cultural meaning she embodies in oral ‘history’. Traditional Shona poetic forms appeared during both Chimurengas to carry the guerillas’ appeal for ancestral intervention. Their recreation of these oral forms ‘strengthened the forces of “tradition”, while at the same time investing that ideology of tradition with political authority to legitimise and ratify the aims, ideals and political direction of the nationalist struggle.’35 Nehanda, although lyrical prose narrative, and not poetry, also, as Vambe notes, fuses the ‘power of traditional authority as an ideology of the nationalist struggle’ with the aspirations of the Second Chimurenga: ‘to realise modern aspirations such as industrialisation, equality, collective and individual freedom of expression’ (29). Having benefited personally, as she attests, from imaginatively recreating Nehanda’s iconic figure, Vera demonstrates in her subsequent novels why she judges the medium’s fighting spirit essential for all contemporary Zimbabwean women. While different in intent, period, and characterisation from her first novel, these ‘middle works’ also participate in Shona women’s oral tradition, for, in a subtle sense, they are feminist protest novels; ‘black women also used complaint

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 119 genres such as jikinyira, nheketerwa and mavingu to push black women’s rights into the public domain within households existing under African patriarchy’ (Vambe 23). When many critics discuss Without a Name, Under the Tongue, and Butterfly Burning – novels that move away from a single, largerthan-life figure to foreground the experiences of ordinary women – they emphasise Vera’s subversion of traditional/colonial/and postindependence gender roles that resulted in economic powerlessness for most of the country’s women as well as her depiction of the violent appropriation of their bodies, and the silencing of their voices.35 Since these novels have already been given considerable critical attention, I wish only to acknowledge, not revisit, what I consider their major themes and technique. Critics explain how her protagonists can be contextualised by ongoing feminist studies of female silencing and revisionist voicing and post-colonialism’s redefinition of agency and subjectivity. Unlike the eloquent Nehanda, her later protagonists are subject to extreme psychological as well as physical danger, are agonisingly voiceless, and often turn their rage and hopelessness upon themselves. Mazvita of Without a Name, so confused and frustrated that she commits infanticide; Zhizha, the brutalised child incest victim of Under the Tongue; and Phephelaphe, whose intelligence and determined ambition in Butterfly Burning result only in suicidal despair, all fit this negative feminist paradigm. Despite her violent depictions of their lives, Vera’s prose in these disturbing texts remains imagistic and poetic, even when she is describing infanticide, rape, abortion, self-immolation, murder, and mutilation. Katrin Berndt focuses on this stylistic paradox of Vera’s portraying her female protagonists’ intense and usually violent struggles with their societies, the men in their lives, and their own conflicted identities in the most lyrical language and with images so beautiful that, in my view, it takes the reader a moment or two to realise the horror of what the writer is describing. Vera’s frequent form/content contrasts lead to ‘shocks of recognition’ that intensify this hideousness. Berndt concludes that the novelist ‘has cultivated an experimental narrative style which is characterised by the aesthetic claim to detect the beauty of life beneath and beside all cruelty’ (‘Female Identity’ 213). When explaining her confusingly beautiful image of the bloody self-abortion in Butterfly Burning, Vera said to Bryce: ‘I want[ed] to do it without crudity, with a certain elegance, so you feel you can still endure it and see beauty in it. And this beauty can only be in the language, I don’t see where else it can lie’ (223). Since it is true that the ‘beauty’ of many of the scenes

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she depicts must necessarily reside in their description – it certainly does not exist in their desperate situations or bloody actions – her language renders these middle novels paradoxical in their form and content and leaves the reader intrigued but nearly despairing about the horrible lives of the women she depicts so vividly. Speaking in general about Vera’s experimental style, critics often turn to other art forms, like music or weaving, to find the language to analyse it. Jessica Hemmings likens her style to the patching together of discrete pieces of fabric to construct a quilt while Jane Bryce applies photography and film techniques to the novels. Charles Pfukwa and Lizzie Attree emphasise her auditory demands on the reader’s attention by her thematic interweaving of mbira and kwela music into narratives about women’s silencing, Pfukwa pointing out that ‘the artistic force of music lies in that it crosses the boundaries that constrict language’.36 These approaches, although calling upon different artistic contexts and methodologies, reflect the richness and variety of Vera’s imagery and are valuable keys to unlocking the multiple effects her novels produce in the imaginations and rememories of readers. Vera also expressed to Bryce a particular interest in creating a fictional portrait of her hometown, Bulawayo (226); accordingly, her three middle works make colonial and post-independence geography a powerful shaper of the identities of her characters. Much recent attention has been given to her depiction of the transforming effect of township life and the alluring, ambiguous freedom promised by Harare and Bulawayo.37 Although certainly not intended as such by the colonisers who constructed the minimally livable townships as convenient settlements for exploitable male labor, the large movement of Africans from the countryside to townships and cities could be read as a ‘maturation journey’ into modernity, during and after colonialism, that particularly affected the identities of African women. Arguably, the move of large numbers of the indigenous population, male and female, from rural to urban areas was one of the most visible late effects of colonialism. Indeed, between 1950 and 2000, African urbanisation increased from 15 to 37 per cent.38 As Sarah Nuttall points out, this journey, as journeys always do, created an unforeseen agency. Meg Samuelson’s eloquent essay centers on ‘the production and performance of urban modern subjectivity’ (‘Yvonne Vera’s Bulawayo …’, Research in African Literatures 22). Many critics also have discussed the particular difficulty African women had in achieving a positive identity construction and agency in urban settings, since, in so doing, they were subverting colonial purposes for developing these locales and also threatening African

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 121 patriarchy.39 Vera considers this issue worthy of mention in Without A Name, where a man on Mazvita’s bus complains, ‘[T]he city is corrupt. A serious woman will not manage to live there. A woman can lose her head. … If you marry a woman from the city, you will have made a fire and sat on it. She will even tell you to cook’ (61-2). Place and time co-exist, either as we live in these dimensions, in our memories, or in our imaginations, and Vera’s female protagonists in all of these three novels shape their identities in each of these realms. They live in gendered towns or in rural patriarchies, both redolent of traditional, colonial, and/or neo-colonial limitations, not by virtue of their being African alone, but by their being African women. Since her female protagonists are so richly drawn and appear to be her primary interest, less has been written about the men in these works. However, as far back as Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals, Vera revealed the male attitude toward, and treatment of, women as a major source of their oppression; nevertheless, she shows the assumption of male prerogatives not as a universal ‘given’ but often side by side with the male characters’ attempts to probe the sources of such an intense desire for gendered power. Two themes consistently appear in this regard: first, male identification with the land and the insistence on remaining on ancestral ground contrasted with women’s desires to move into urban centers that to them represent modern opportunities for their own and their children’s education, fulfilling work, and greater agency for themselves and their daughters; and, second, the continuation of male dominance in modern townships and cities, where women’s traditional communal support no longer exists. We should note, however, that Vera depicts certain men in all these works as complex, rounded characters, and even when she presents them as forces of antagonism. For example, of the demanding drunks in ‘An Unyielding Circle’ (WDYCOA), the youngest is capable of expressing sympathy for the maize-seller, although he is unable to stop the others from verbally abusing her and, ultimately, goes along with it. More fully drawn, and therefore more indicative of her refusal to stereotype, are Vera’s portrayals of Nyendezi (Without A Name), Fumbatha (Butterfly Burning), and even, surprisingly, Muroyiwa, the incestuous child-abuser in Under The Tongue. There is no denying the loving tenderness of Nyendezi’s treatment of Mazvita that is in direct contrast to her city lover Joel’s indifference to her desires.40 Nyendezi represents the best of the patience and constancy derived from the pre-colonial tradition of being in tune with the land, juxtaposed with Joel’s haste and mutability in Harare. Especially evocative of the peace and communalism Vera values in the rural life is the

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ritualistic scene of hand-washing between Nyendezi and Mazvita (WaN 45-6), just as Joel’s quick love-making conducted simultaneously with his reading a popular Hadley Chase novel encapsulates his and Mazvita’s city ‘love’. While the author does not probe the rural man’s reasons for not wishing to move with Mazvita to the city, she doesn’t need to; Nyendezi is a human manifestation of the values of the rural past, as exploited as the land itself, yet selfless in his dedication to it and to his concept of a traditional family. Fumbatha, despite his possessiveness that leads to his ‘imprisonment’ of Phephelaphe within their one-room shack while he is away for days at work, his complete failure to support her ambition to become the first Black woman accepted at the nursing school, and his angry withdrawal from her when he learns of her abortion, is also characterised so sympathetically early in the novel that, while the reader cannot agree with his later misogyny, she can understand the loss that motivates his selfishness. Cut off from his past by the Rhodesian soldiers’ destruction of his village, and semi-orphaned by the government’s hanging of his father as a political prisoner, he is as anonymous to those who exploit his labor as was the group of prisoners swinging scythes in unison or bobbing in their nooses from tree limbs in Vera’s first gorgeous/horrible images in the novel. His difference from those executed for their rebellion is that he has capitulated to the inevitable; ‘One side won. It is the nature of victory to measure triumph in the silence or death of the other.’ When he meets Phephelaphe, he has been part of the faceless mass of workers building Bulawayo, the European city (BB 25). Above all, he is a practical man, aware of his own ironic participation in the ‘progress’ his father was killed for opposing: [T]here is the pressure of survival, and money is needed for shelter. … He has built. When he is dead, his hands will remain everywhere. He does not know if he is part of the larger harm. He does not understand it at all except the lingering hurt which needs not to be understood to be felt. Sometimes the present is so changed that the past is linked to the present only by a fragile word. To build something new, you must be prepared to destroy the past. (25-6)

While he can recognise the validity of that insight into his own personal situation, he cannot muster the same acceptance of Phephelaphe’s need to take advantage of modern opportunities. Nor can he understand her desperation when her potential is destroyed by a pregnancy that would have stifled her even more surely than he does every day by insisting on her remaining in their one room. Nevertheless, Vera is careful to explain Fumbatha’s selfishness and weakness to us: his age, his loss of family and village in the liberation

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 123 struggle, his awareness of being exploited at the same time that he feels ambivalence in participating in the building of Rhodesia, and his genuine cherishing of young Phephelaphe as a miracle suddenly rising to him ‘out of the river like a spirit’. Moreover, because of his lengthy solitude, he cannot communicate these ideas and feelings; ‘Phephelaphe was unaware of the manner in which she had, by her presence, transformed him. They were strangers’ (26). Of course, the destructive consequences of his limitations become more and more apparent as the story unfolds. Nevertheless, Vera does not wish to demonise Fumbatha; she avoids doing so by acquainting us with his sufferings, fears, understandings, and hopes, just as she does with Phephelaphe. The most difficult male figure for us to sympathise with in any of her texts is Muroyiwa, the rapist and attacker of his own daughter, who maims her not only physically, but emotionally as well, driving away her voice. Vera’s creativity falters a bit with him; I consider her handling of this character ultimately insufficient to explain the great evil she shows him committing. Muroyiwa’s background, too, is one of loss and isolation: his peculiar birth, which should not have allowed him to live, and which causes him to feel ‘like an insect thrown defenselessly against the earth’; his sense of guilt for having survived, reinforced by the women in his village preferring his death, an attitude that ‘was clear throughout his early life’ (UtT 128); his blinded father’s hatred and older brother’s disappearance into the forest to join the rebels. These misfortunes, at first, lead to a prophetic ‘second sight’; since his mother struggled to ensure he lived after his death-like birth, he knows that ‘when next he died, it would be because he had succumbed to the will of another’ (127). Vera offers early warnings, however, about Muroyiwa’s confused state of mind – his inability to distinguish between any two emotions, for example – and his sense of inferiority and obsession with death. Yet, she also depicts him as ‘haunted by beauty’ (128) and travelling a long way into the mountains, where the war is raging, not on an unsuccessful quest for his brother alone, but, quixotically, to find butterflies, the images of which recur in the book in connection with Muroyiwa and soften his depiction. None of the revelations about his background or personality, however, explain his extremely brutal, repeated rape of his daughter; the inexplicability of this act is the book’s primary flaw. It is as though Vera herself is unable to understand this character. I believe an apparently small grammatical point in the following sentence reveals her own confusion about him: ‘Muroyiwa carried a calabash inside him, where his heart should have been, and

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there were no cobwebs of death in it, only an untarnished desire for living’ (129). The first part of this sentence seems about to characterise Muroyiwa as ‘heartless’ and empty, qualities explainable by his childhood experiences and possibly intended to account for his later ‘heartless’ violation of his daughter, Zhizha. However, Vera dilutes our comfort level with this explanation in the second part of this sentence by painting him as desiring and valuing life. Moreover, she connects these contradictory concepts with the conjunction ‘and’, rather than a more coherent ‘but’, ‘yet’, ‘nevertheless’, or a phrase such as ‘just the same’, all grammatical connections of subordination that would have required her to explain how such a paradox as having no heart but desiring life could coexist in one person. ‘[A]nd’ indicates the equality of the two parts of her description, an incoherence for which she fails to account, as though it is an ontological given. While my close attention to this one conjunction might appear pedantic, I argue that this small connector is a clue to the problem with Vera’s handling of Muroyiwa’s overall characterisation. We have responded to him as a confused, rejected, mistreated child who, as a young man, exhibits courage and sensitivity; however, later we must shift gears and consider him a brutal rapist of his own daughter, with no adequate explanation of how both personalities could co-exist within one man. I am not suggesting, of course, there could be no explanation, but that, for whatever reason, Vera does not provide one. As in the sentence quoted above, in the structure of the book as a whole she connects discordant pictures of Muroyiwa’s actions additively, juxtaposing contrasting chapters, but fails to provide us with a nuanced interpretation, a bridge between such incongruities. One possible, but somewhat improbable, explanation for this insufficient characterisation is that Vera is relying on the reader’s knowledge of the increase in male abuse of women in the worker compounds. Paraphrasing Diana Jeater in Marriage, Perversion and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1892–1930, Teresa A. Barnes observes that ‘transformations of sexual mores were as profound indicators of colonial change as the more commonly mapped shifts in politics and economics … . Women in the township were no strangers to the exercise of violence by men: rape and wife beating were familiar afflictions’. She further references Elizabeth Schmidt’s Peasants, Traders and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870–1939, saying that ‘male violence against women was not uncommon in the colony’s mining and railway worker compounds. On average, at least one case of rape was reported to the Salisbury native commissioner every month in the 1930s. In 1989, one interviewee shared a painful memory of being raped in the early

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 125 1930s when she was a teenager. She simply recalled, “Men just did that.”’ 41 However, since Vera in all other instances pays careful attention to motivation and, furthermore, knows she cannot count on her readers’ knowledge of such results of colonialism, and, as we have seen, does not herself rely on official reports of African life, this explanation seems far-fetched. I raise it only to emphasise her unusual silence about motivation in creating Muroyiwa’s character. However unsympathetic and selfish, even brutal, are her portraits of the male characters of her middle novels, Vera does appear genuinely interested in presenting them as intelligent and complex. While they are generally static and do not develop, they nevertheless prepare us for her increased interest in the male figures who do change, whom she depicts in The Stone Virgins, her last novel, published two years before her death at the age of forty in April 2005. Like her earlier works, The Stone Virgins also highlights the lives and deaths of Zimbabwean women caught in the consequences of the country’s turbulent history, and could seem, at first, to be an additional volume in her saga of misogyny and female victimisation. However, this equally lyrical work proves astonishingly different from its predecessors because it successfully complicates one male protagonist’s politically inspired brutality and convincingly offers another as a catalyst for change. Its ending is not only surprisingly hopeful but also posits an achievable social transformation that, combined with the growth in women’s self-regard – which Phephelaphe has already represented – should guarantee the end of women’s oppression and the eventual reshaping of society for the mutual benefit of both sexes. Irene Staunton, Vera’s publisher in Zimbabwe, provides a first-hand account of the social fragmentation, even dehumanising change of outlook, that became necessary in society in order for the guerillas to win the liberation war against overwhelming odds: Zimbabwe achieved its independence in 1980 after seventeen years of a civil war, a war in which – and estimates vary from 30 000 to 70 000 – men, women and children left the country to live in often appalling conditions in Mozambique and Zambia, hoping to return as guerillas to fight against a white regime of 250 000 people with all the advantages of a conventional army and air force and one which mustered all its men into the war. Both sides believed they had right on their side, both used propaganda to espouse their cause, and both sides had to engender a hatred of the opposing side because you cannot kill another human being unless he or she is perceived as your ‘enemy’. There was no one in Zimbabwe whose lives were not disrupted and changed by the war, no one who did not suffer its psychological consequences and no one who did not lose either friends or family. (‘The Seventeen-Year Civil War …’ in Postcolonial African Literature 1)

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Immediately after the war, and the refusal of many of the peasants to accept the new government’s resettlement plans42 came violent unrest in the countryside perpetrated indiscriminately by disillusioned ‘dissident’ guerillas. In Violence and Memory, One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests’ of Matabeleland, Jocelyn Alexander et al. report that guerilla bitterness resulted from a number of sources, including their weakened situation vis-à-vis the still-intact Rhodesian forces after the war and hence their fear of being attacked if they obeyed the government’s order to come to the Assembly Points, turn in their weapons and be demobilised: Though dissidents did not formulate a positive political programme, they were influenced by the pervasiveness of a tribalist discourse. … For them, the 1980s’ war [of the Fifth Brigade against them, labeled ‘outlaws’, ‘unruly elements’, ‘bandits’, ‘renegades’, and, later, the more politically-charged ‘dissidents’] had not only rendered the sacrifices of the liberation war meaningless, but dangerously sidelined ideological goals in favour of tribalism. (Violence and Memory 185)

As time passed, their war-time military discipline broke down, and they turned their anger, disappointment, and fear against civilians. As a civilian official in one of the villages the ‘dissidents’ attacked explained to the authors: [T]hey forced you to cook a good meal, they wanted meat and tea and bread. If you didn’t have these things, they would beat you. They were just taking young ladies. … Dissidents … couldn’t be controlled, they were like wild animals, they had just deserted from others, they were cruel, they were criminals … There was no control over them, not from a commander or a chairman. (211)

Then the 1983 internecine attacks of Mugabe’s Fifth Brigade were unleashed in Matabeleland on perceived Matabeleland supporters (the Ndebele) of Joshua Nkomo, his political rival.43 For over a year, the Fifth Brigade brutalised civilians in this area, their actions justified by Mugabe’s government in explicitly tribal and political terms. It targeted party chairmen and civil servants, civilians at large, as well as former ZIPRA combatants [Nkomo’s Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army], refugees, and anyone suspected of having crossed the border to Botswana in the course of the liberation war. Former ZIPRA combatants rarely survived an encounter with the brigade. Its violence played a key role in shaping the spread and character of dissidency (191-2). Although Nkomo’s former soldiers and local and state officials were targeted, the Fifth Brigade ‘killed people systematically in each home they visited’ (220). It is necessary to recognise, then, that in its temporal and geographical setting, The Stone Virgins reflects the

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 127 widespread violence coming from both the Fifth Brigade and the ‘dissidents’ and to also understand that her characters’ situations and fates were common in the real aftermath of the liberation war, despite their possible appearance to readers as uniquely horrifying. Vera’s condemnation is of war, in general, as a dehumanising exploit with widespread and long-lasting consequences; her novel’s surprise is the loving connections that she shows can exist in the midst of such destruction and bloodshed. As I have indicated, despite its unsettling depiction of grotesque attacks against civilians, I interpret The Stone Virgins, with its coherent, if atypical, conclusion, as departing from the hopelessness of Vera’s other books; it asserts the possibility of both sexes being capable of the personal development required for social reform. In terms of theory, we can identify the author’s hope for this necessarily symbiotic connection of ‘the personal and the political’ as an ecofeminist trust in the development of individual self-awareness. Ecofeminism offers a social, philosophical, and literary analysis of history and culture, affirming human unity regardless of sex, ethnicity, or nationality, and a humane connection with the natural world on which we depend. Further, The Stone Virgins also sees such a privileging of unity as an impetus for social action, as ecofeminism requires. Other critics of her earlier novels, of course, also make compelling arguments for the serious thematic function of Vera’s language and narrative style. The frequent result of their incisive analyses strikes me, however, is an over-emphasis of the self-contained nature of these gorgeous, shocking works, thereby raising questions about Vera’s political intent beyond the educative. Until her last work, we reasonably might ask if her novels could be read as political texts that do more than demonstrate and protest injustice, works, that is, which offer a credible, resistant vision for change. As Vambe asserts, speaking of the political and social function of African orature, ‘[W]e need to move away from perceiving resistance only in terms of military engagements’ (African Oral Story-telling Tradition and the Zimbabwean Novel in English 16). I argue that in The Stone Virgins we see exactly such a revision of ‘resistance’ as Vambe implies, one offering a credible prescription for conscious personal and social resistance against violence and destruction. While still invested in giving voice to women, silenced, mutilated, raped, even murdered, and doing so in non-linear narratives of ‘re-memories’, Vera offers, in what was to be her last published novel, her first hopeful prediction for the future since Nehanda. As stated earlier, I further argue that the theories of ecofeminism are useful here for understanding the philosophical basis of her optimism and the source of her vision of

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the intellectual, personal, and social changes necessary for its fruition. In contrast to her idealisation of a female nationalist icon in Nehanda, Vera moves in The Stone Virgins toward a cautious trust in the basic humanity and courage of ordinary people who have lived through the chaos of Zimbabwe’s militarism and genocide.44 I would like to take a moment to mention those aspects of ecofeminism I argue are applicable to The Stone Virgins. To begin with the basics, the word ‘ecology’, deriving from the Greek word ‘oikos’, meaning ‘home’, is interpreted by ecofeminists as a much more inclusive concept than simply the abode of the present-day, primarily westernoriented, nuclear family.45 Pertinent to our purposes, it also should be read as expressing a global, rather than a nationalistic, geographical concern. Moreover, ecological feminists recognise that intrinsic ‘connections exist between the treatment of women, people of color, and the underclass on one hand and the treatment of nonhuman nature on the other’ and that ‘any feminism, environmentalism, or environmental ethic which fails to take these connections seriously is grossly inadequate’ (Karen J. Warren. Ecofeminism, Women, Culture, Nature 3). Although the word ‘feminism’ is a crucial component of the title of this theory and movement because the term ‘ecofeminism’ was first introduced by François d’Eaubonne in 1984 to describe women’s potential to bring about an ecological revolution,46 its twenty-firstcentury assumptions are much closer to the unifying ideals of ‘womanism’ or ‘stiwanism’ 47 than to the present stereotypic vision of the middle-class, Euro-American concern for women’s issues alone. Theorist Ynestra King remarks, ‘[Ecofeminism’s] challenge of social domination extends beyond sex to social domination of all kinds, because the domination of sex, race, and class and the domination of nature are mutually reinforcing’.48 Karen Warren explains, ‘it includes in its analyses of women-nature connections, the inextricable interconnections among all social systems of domination, for instance, racism, classism, ageism, ethnocentrism, imperialism, colonialism, as well as sexism’ (‘Introduction’, Ecological Feminism 1). We have in ecofeminism, then, as it has evolved in the West, first, an holistic philosophy based on a perception of the unity of all life, human and nonhuman; second, an activist ethic recognising the requirement to work toward the development of just and lifesustaining societies; and, third, a political analysis that interrogates the imperialist oppression of all men and women and the destruction of nature, with a special emphasis on the effect of internal and external colonisation on women. As Andy Smith remarks, ‘[B]ecause Native people suffer the brunt of environmental destruction, it is

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 129 incumbent upon ecofeminist theorists to analyse colonisation as a fundamental aspect of the domination of nature’ (‘Ecofeminism through an Anticolonial Framework’, in Ecological Feminism, 24). In the years since its conception, critics of literature as well as of environmental and feminist studies have found in ecofeminism a useful approach toward understanding historical and social policy and literary responses to national situations such as Zimbabwe’s. The Stone Virgins tells the story of two sisters, Thenjiwe and Nonceba, and two men unknown to each other, Sibaso and Cephas, all of whose lives are conjoined by the violence of their time. An instructive way to interpret the overall intention in this text is to use Bull-Christiansen’s analysis to see Vera, once again, subverting official ‘history’: The Stone Virgins can be read as engaging the official narratives of Zimbabwean history on two levels; a straightforward level where the official silencing of the Matabeleland genocide is being challenged by Vera’s voicing of the atrocities; and a level where Vera rewrites her own grand narrative of the spiritual reality of the anti-colonial struggle. (Tales of the Nation 102-3) 49

In her study, Bull-Christiansen details the creation in post-independence Zimbabwe of a government-approved discourse of ‘patriotic history’, one that, for the declared sake of national unity, rewrites official ‘history’ to obliterate and deny the Matabeleland genocide and bestows the mantle of Nehanda, the warrior icon, upon President Mugabe. She asserts: The Stone Virgins Vera accounts for the way in which the government perpetrated the Matabeleland genocide. She describes in horrifying detail the manner of the Fifth Brigade and thus re-articulates the ‘ugly history’ that should have been silenced under the unity discourse. By refusing to forget these atrocities, it can be argued, Vera attempts to rewrite the official version of this part of Zimbabwean history. (103)

Vera’s last published novel may thus be read as completing the cycle of subversive ‘truth-telling’ that Nehanda began, and, in so doing, rewriting the government’s new ‘history’. At the same time, it shares the thematic concern of her middle novels, that is, the desire to provide voice to the silenced, and not only to women in this work, however, but, more significantly, to the powerless and destroyed, male and female. Each major character presents his/her own version of shared events through the function of an omniscient narrator’s indirect discourse or their own first-person voices. The recognition of the similarities, yet individualities, of those suffering from oppression is one of the key tenets of ecofeminist theory. Further, this philosophy accounts for several important differences between The Stone Virgins and Vera’s preceding novels, for

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if we stop with Bull-Christiansen’s helpful contextualising analysis of Vera’s rewriting the story of Zimbabwean liberation and its aftermath, we would be unable to explain the thematic significance of much of what happens either at the beginning of the novel or at the end. In addition, we would also have an inadequate explanation for the main character’s optimism at this book’s close in contrast with the bleak endings for the women in the middle works of Vera’s canon. After all, according to President Mugabe’s political discourse, the liberation struggle has continued; Zimbabwe continues to fight the Third Chimurenga, the final decolonisation, when the former colonialists will be stripped of any holdings and influence in the nation, and then become the model for other African countries (Bull-Christiansen 108). There would be no reason, then, to feel any happier about Nonceba’s move to the city at the end of The Stone Virgins than about Mazvita’s stunned retreat in Without a Name to the burned out countryside to bury the child she has murdered if we stop our interpretation with Vera telling the ‘true-true’ story of what actually happened in Matabeleland. What was still occurring throughout Zimbabwe as the time of the book’s setting was the horrifying genocide denied in the ‘official’ ‘patriotic history’. Moreover, we would have no hopeful surprise about the selflessness of Cephas, because we would know our trust in him might be betrayed, judging from the selfish behavior of the men in Vera’s other novels. We would not even be able to account for Vera’s extended description of the urban landscape at the book’s opening. I argue, instead, that it is her ecofeminist assertion of the often hidden power of Nature to ultimately overcome Man’s dominance; her belief in the fairness and courage in human nature that could lead to a male recognition and acceptance of the independent agency of women, and of their own nurturing abilities; and her trust in women to be able to risk throwing off the shackles of age-old gendered restrictions and requirements to explore their own desires that explain the beginning and ending of Vera’s last published novel. The majority of its sections offer the subversive counter-history of which Bull-Christiansen speaks. As I have argued, however, it could not be this counter-history that ends the novel optimistically, as its purpose is to expose the genocide and general destruction of the ‘Third Chimurenga’; rather, her plot movement reveals Vera’s philosophy, grounded in the power of life’s continuance and the possibility of human growth, ideas that ecofeminism espouses and views as the impetus for not only personal, but also social, action. In order to understand the context and causes of Cephas and Nonceba’s development and Vera’s trust in the continuation of Nature,

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 131 we must return to the beginning of the novel for a close reading of her depiction of the setting. Vera spends what might seem an inordinate amount of time mapping the geographic parameters of her tale. Like a tour guide, she takes us along the straight boulevards of the seemingly permanent, colonial city of Bulawayo, with its ‘luxurious but domesticated plantings and impressive, tall buildings. We move along the road Cephas and Nonceba will travel in reverse, away from the colonial order of the gleaming city to the village of Kezi, the Gumede sisters’ home, marked by its social center, Thandabantu Store, wild marula trees, anthills ‘melting’ in the rain, and crooked footpaths. In a real sense, of course, the author is visually mapping the contrasting spaces created by the colonialists that define, separate and largely contain the lives of the Whites and Blacks, whether urban or rural. It would be a mistake to conclude prematurely, however, that she is simply dealing here in static dualities, contrasting modern with traditional, colonial with indigenous, or urban people with rural. This entire first section is kinetic, as the reader moves rapidly with the narrator along the grandeur of Selborne Avenue onto the KeziBulawayo Road, following its crowded buses of Africans voluntarily escaping the city to enjoy, if only momentarily, the natural beauty of Kezi village. Moreover, with an ecofeminist perception, she depicts Nature reasserting its inexorable power, breaking through the thick concrete, spreading its roots to reclaim carefully planted Bulawayo. Her implication of a failed duality and subtle revelation of margins merging results in an ironic symbol of political fluidity, for, as hidden at first, but as indestructible as the roots eventually cracking Selborne Avenue’s concrete, the positively pictured female liberation fighters are reclaiming the land with their male counterparts and expecting to establish a new-found freedom for women after independence. However, when the war is over, the forests around Kezi will swarm with the ‘dissident’ guerillas, then with fighters of the Fifth Brigade bent not on liberation but on revenge, and, finally, on the imposition of a single discourse of that liberation. Bent on ferreting out ‘dissidents’, Fifth Brigade soldiers destroy the lives in and around Thandabantu store, while Simbaso, a ‘dissident’ on the run, changes forever the fortunes of the two sisters. Both locales, the city and the countryside, are subject to and shaped by colonial and post-independence political and military might and also by the organic, continuing mutability of natural forces, not least of which is Cephas’s slow understanding of the true meaning of love and Nonceba’s ability to regain her trust in others and to value her own possibility.

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Rhodesia’s colonial dominance is stamped sharply on the land, symbolised by the rigid grid that dissects Bulawayo. Colonialism’s permanence appears as unassailable as ‘straight and unbending’ Selborne Avenue, honoring the prominent British colonialist, that leads unerringly to suburban streets named after the English Romantic poets.50 Selborne Avenue tells the invaders’ story; it ‘offers a single solid view, undisturbed’ (TSV 5). This ‘single’ view, of course, represents not only the colonisers’ invented self-image of superiority but, ironically, President Mugabe’s post-independence insistence on encoding his own mystification of the past. Bull-Christiansen reminds us of the racist reactions of European archeologists who, when confronted with the magnificent stone ruins of the trading center known as Great Zimbabwe, allowed their self-serving evolutionist ideology to interpret and identify the site as the remains of a white civilisation that had occupied the area in biblical times, possibly the residence of the Queen of Sheba and the location of King Solomon’s gold mines. She goes on to explain that this ‘scientific’ conclusion provided a political cover for later invasion and occupation, since the Europeans could be viewed as only reclaiming their lost territory (Tales of the Nation 44-5). Even worse was the newly independent government’s appropriation of the iconic structures in the political service of one segment of the population: … the ZANU nationalist discourse mostly propagated Shona superiority. In a version of the Great Zimbabwe myth, it was claimed that the tribe which had inhabited Great Zimbabwe had in fact migrated from Ethiopia to form this great community. Through this rewriting of the white settler myth, the Shona claimed ethnic superiority over the remaining peoples in Zimbabwe, mainly the Ndebele… . (44-5)

Bull-Christiansen notes Peter Garlake’s quotation of Mugabe asserting that ‘Independence will bestow on us a new … perspective, and indeed, a new history and a new past’ and Garlake’s observation that ‘[D]espite these assurances, there is, at present, no sense of movement in Zimbabwe towards a re-examination of the pre-colonial past. As before, prehistory still has no place in any university department or any research institute’ (54). Obviously, Mugabe’s re-writing of Zimbabwe’s pre-colonial history replicates in political intent the mythologising of the Rhodesian regime the Second Chimurenga had overthrown: ‘[T]he Rhodesian Front regime of 1962–1979 acted to control or censor all museum display material, guide books and historical and archaeological writing that was accessible to the general public and might suggest that Great Zimbabwe was African.’51 Because her revisionary novel depends upon a contrast between the government’s ‘official history’ of post-independence Zimbabwe and

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 133 the testimonies of those who lived through its violence, her novel serves as a palimpsest, attempting to truthfully repaint their experiences based on ‘oral history’. Selborne Avenue ‘heads all the way to Johannesburg like an umbilical cord’ (The Stone Virgins 5), providing Bulawayo with the life blood of colonial energy and a semiotic of European military and technical might; ‘Selborne Avenue is a straight, unwavering road, proud of its magnificence’ (3). It is also proud of its assumed permanence that its military force sought to guarantee; yet, there is increasing natural disturbance and disruption along this route that, for a time, can remain unobservable. The roots of the carefully spaced Jacaranda trees that line Selborne Avenue have begun to bulge out of the ground, threatening the decorum of the landscape, and the Flamboyant trees, too, are outgrowing their confined spaces between the less vigorous Jacarandas. Like the freedom fighters in the countryside, Nature resists its artificial confinement. The village of Kezi, in contrast to the city of concrete and logical design, itself seems a part of nature and appears to be growing like a plant from the soil: … the huts spread evenly on each side of the dirt road, their grass roofs so low that they sag, spread, and fall over the mud walls. … The huts are flattened and, from a distance, form perfect circles of calm merged with the land … . After the rain, the top layer of wet, partly decomposed thatch is the softest scent of living things there is – it is life itself. (17)

Yet this bucolic image also proves deceptive, as the violent events occurring after independence demonstrate: Kezi being surrounded by ‘dissident’ guerillas, ‘their minds evaporating’ (135); the members of Mugabe’s Korean-trained Fifth Brigade burning down Thandabantu Store, torturing and cruelly murdering its owner;52 and Sibaso beheading Thenjiwe in front of her home, then raping and mutilating her sister. Richard P. Werbner explains that in order to subdue the ‘dissidents’ and any other civilians loyal to Joshua Nkomo: [E]arly in 1982, the government unleashed an army of mostly Shona-speaking soldiers, ex-ZANLA guerrillas who came from outside Matabeleland. Among them was the elite force known as the Fifth Brigade, with unswerving loyalty to [Mugabe]. … The unleashed army, if of the National Army in name, was quasi-national in intent and practice. It was a punitive army which, along with the police, behaved like an occupying force come down upon an alien people to strangle them into submission, and if need be by starving everyone, women, children, and the old indiscriminately. The terror brought back the most brutal methods of the Rhodesians but was more ruthless and far more devastating.53

After the Fifth Brigade attack on Thandabantu Store, in images that might be considered a pathetic fallacy in a completely realistic novel,

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but which, in The Stone Virgins, enrich and reinforce the symbolic texture of Vera’s narrative, Nature, too is disfigured and confused: ‘Nineteen eighty-two. … Last year again, the maize crop withered and left a starved and violated population even more bewildered. There is no harvest. Now this. The marula tree has been yielding and dropping fruit nonstop since the middle of the year’ (127). The politically inspired violence of ‘brother against brother’ not only subverts human connections and reinstitutes tribal enmities in a supposedly united independent nation, but is so unnatural that it disrupts Nature’s cycle, as well. The Stone Virgins, set in the land reclaiming its heritage by being renamed Zimbabwe, meaning ‘house of stone,’ is itself largely a work of stone and bone. In this formidable narrative, Vera seems less able to find language beautiful enough to transform the shooting, skinning, and burning of Mahlatini, the shopkeeper, into an aesthetically pleasing image ‘with a certain elegance’, or to keep the reader from flinching at the agonised screams of the woman forced to hack her husband to death to save her sons. These grotesque images are not imaginary indulgences in sadistic cruelty on Vera’s part. Ranger reports similar actions on the part of the ZIPRA ‘dissidents’ who targeted people who abandoned Nkomo’s ZAPU party.54 Remarkably, though, Vera is able to successfully fulfil her aesthetic desire to make some of the horror bearable, even when describing the ‘punishment’ Simbaso inflicts upon the two sisters. Thenjiwe’s beheading, as observed and reported by Nonceba, appears in her shocked eyes like a grotesque dance, while the movements of Sibaso (whose name means a flint to start a flame), as he then rapes Nonceba before cutting off her lips, are at first perceived by her to be so gentle and smooth that he either could have been making love to her or cradling her like a child. Through indirect discourse, Vera’s descriptions of these scenes reveal the impressions of the traumatised victim, not of a detached third-person narrator, and they creatively provide us entry into Nonceba’s usual sensitivity to beauty, juxtaposed with her simultaneous, shocked confusion, fear, horror, and attempt to survive the attack. Brief quotations suffice to indicate the paradoxical delicacy and power of her perceptions: [Nonceba] sees a silver bucket approaching from the bright blue of the sky, carried above the head, her sister’s arm holding it up along one side and her fingers curling over the rim of the bucket brimming with water; then the arm drops and the bucket approaches, steady, steady in that teasing blue. Now she can see the bucket leaning over, filled with water, the tiniest drops breaking like a spray, spilling; then the bucket crushes its contents to the ground; water breaks like stone. (73)

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 135 Because the horror of the scene is impossible for Nonceba to immediately acknowledge, she displaces Thenjiwe’s decapitation onto the bucket falling, its contents spraying out, rather than the blood from her neck. The danse macabre that follows is a literary strategy that extends this earlier necessary psychological deflection, to include both Nonceba’s and the reader’s gaze, this time onto the inexplicable actions of the murderer and his grotesque movements with the body of his victim: Nonceba sees the right arm pull back and grab the body by the waist, a dancing motion so finely practiced, it is clear it is not new to the performer. It is not the first death he has held in his arms, clutching at it, like a bird escaping. … He carries the body spread on his back, an arm limp on each shoulder, his motion forceful, true with blood. He is stepping sideways, and back, forward and sideways. On his back, the body presses down along his spine. He turns steadily, with the movements of a hunter who kills not because he is hungry but because his stomach is full, and therefore he can hunt with grace. (75-6)

Nonceba’s violation also imitates dance, a fatal fandango: [H]e presses down. He pulls her to him. She hesitates. He forces her down. She yields. She is leaning backward into his body. He holds her body like a bent stem. He draws her waist into the curve of his arm. (68)

Then, in one of Vera’s most startling suggestions, the violation imitates maternal nurturing: [H]e cradles her like a wounded child. … He offers words that could heal her, shield her with his body. He just could. Her legs hang, empty, within his parted thighs. Then his legs close and hold her tight. (71)

Simbaso’s actions mock a lover’s touch while he mutilates her: He holds her face close to his own. … His motion was simple. It was soft and almost tender, but I did not know that it was no longer his touch tracing my chin, not just a touch on my lower lip, but more than that. … He cut smoothly away. He had memorized parts of me. Shape and curve; lips unspoken. (79)

As so often in Vera’s novels, death and sex, and murder and rape are intrinsically linked. In order to allow these scenes to be bearable for the reader, Vera chooses, as she explained to Bryce, to make them ‘beautiful’ by describing them in the conventional language of romance: a lover’s dance, a mother’s cradling, a lover’s kiss. The incongruity of action and interpretation here is far more readily apparent than in her other writing, and her use of Nonceba’s first-person point of view, alternating with the narrator’s indirect discourse, places us within the experience of violation. Vera’s artistic bravery in this scene, then, generates a horrified response even more intense than the repulsiveness of her gruesome depiction of the shopkeeper’s murder and the equally dreadful sound of the anguished wife’s

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shrieks as she is forced to kill her husband. This juxtaposition of conventional romantic imagery and almost unimaginable violence transports the reader into the realm of extreme psychological discomfort that Vera wishes to sustain in order to create a similar rejection of not just what happens to the two defenseless sisters, but to Zimbabwe’s post-independence civilian population in general. Significantly, depending upon the contemporary, political point of view, the assaults of both the ‘dissidents’ and of the Fifth Brigade could be mystified rhetorically as ‘loving’ and nurturing of the new nation until their uncontrolled slaughter became completely evident to all, after which the government decided it was essential to try to erase the victims’ memories by labeling them ‘ugly history’ and to supplant them with a ‘patriotic’ version of events instead. Vera’s images subvert this mystification by forcing us to experience the personal consequences of such destruction of human life. In the earlier novels, readers are ‘slowly jolted,’ to use an oxymoron that I believe accurately describes our gradual, then sudden awareness as we realise what horrors Vera’s gorgeous language is describing. In those narratives, we view, like spectators, ‘through the window’, so to speak, from ‘behind the bush’, and ‘outside the door’, like spectators at Mazvita and Phephelaphe’s misery; we might even experience the sensations of a voyeur, fascinated, despite herself, with the third-person descriptions. Zhiza’s attacks by her father are more intimate, however; told through the eyes of the child, they prefigure this technique of ‘spectatorship’. Because we are forced to see through Zhiza and Nonceba’s eyes, we experience the same confusion they experience, and, once we realise what is actually taking place, cannot maintain our safe, sanitised distance. Vera has found her method for symbiotically conveying both horror and beauty. She has also found in ecofeminist theory the philosophy necessary to offer hope in the midst of destruction. By insisting on this turn in her thought, I am not, of course, implying that she is a student of ecofeminism and is applying it the way a critic applies theories to a writer’s work, only that her understanding of the healing approach necessary to heal personal and public relationships corresponds to the tenets of this philosophy. In a profound thematic shift from the earlier novels, The Stone Virgins insists on the necessity and possibility of gender mutuality, first introduced tentatively and awkwardly by the returned female guerillas who gravitate to Thandabantu Store, then posited much more surely and smoothly by Cephas’s and Nonceba's unexpected and mutually respectful relationship. Because she is aware of the continued subjugation to which the female freedom fighters returned, Vera’s depiction of the men’s con-

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 137 fused reaction to their women’s battle-hardened confidence and aura of liberation suggests there might remain an unchanging ‘othering’ of these women. The female soldiers, continuing to wear their camouflage fatigues and boots as a uniform that both binds them together and narrates their history as outsiders in traditional Kezi, exist in a third geographic and psychological space from the other inhabitants. They correctly judge themselves superior in knowledge and experience to the excited young women in petticoats who wind their way along the footpaths to the Store to meet the returned male veterans: T]hese women understand much better than any of the young women who have spent their entire lives along the Kwakhe River ever could understand about anything or anyone, and they tell them so, not with words, but they let them know fully and well; they let them speculate, let them wonder what those silent lips are about what those arms, swinging from hip to shoulder, are about. (56)

Like the adolescent boys with whom they seem to find wordless communication easiest, the returned women ‘purse their lips and whistle, and toss bottle tops and catch them and juggle corn husks, which they toss at the young boys, who leap to catch them before they touch the ground’ (57); thus, they perform their own ritual of self-validation and ‘difference’. This acting-out is partly unconscious because of their long experience of battle, away from normal society, partly a deliberate rejection of traditional gender roles; ‘[T]hey stay in their camouflage and pull out cigarettes and smoke while standing under the marula tree. They hold their faces up and seem amused either by the sky or by passers-by – their mothers.’ Although ‘[T]hey sit on empty crates, like the men’, they are different from their male colleagues because ‘[T]hey have no haste or hurry, no urgent, harrowing hunger to satisfy, no torment they would rather not forget.’ Moreover, while after years of battle, the ceasefire can be over in a day, these women understand that such a declaration of the cessation of fighting is actually just a welcome ‘respite from war; the mind may just rearrange itself to a comfortable resolution, without haste, at the pace of each day unfolding and ending naturally, and opening again like a flower’ (58). They are patient for peace. Vera was inspired to write this novel because of the dashing of these women’s hopes, explained in part by Lyons as the challenge of the ‘guerrilla girls’ to the politicians’ glorious ‘patriotic history’.55 She quotes women testifying to the severe lack of food in the guerilla camps, their inability to care for their sanitary needs, and the sexual intimidation by their male comrades. Former soldier, Freedom Nyamubaya, for example, reports, ‘[T]he armies were ruthless. There was

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sexual torture, seduction, co-optation and rape by any means’ (Guns and Guerilla Girls 256). Ingrid Sinclair, director of the controversial film, Flame,56 which is fictional but based on interviews with female ex-combatants over a seven-year period, remarks on the silencing of these women. Once they returned home: … the women didn’t have a very good reception … . Women during the war were given a great deal of freedom, far more than what they had back home, and when they came back society didn’t really welcome that, and in that respect … (women just stopped talking about it because it became synonymous with a bad experience) … they are too contentious; they are not part of the glorious history. (257)

Possibly because she wishes to emphasise the mutual suffering of men and women during the Second Chimurenga, Vera does not mention what Lyons calls the ‘rape debate’ (260). In her novel, the returned women do not seem scarred in a precisely sexual way; instead ‘they forget they are male or female but know they are wounded beings’ (TSV 58). Their isolation deep within their experiences, however, and their continued silence is furthered by the ambivalence and confusion of the Kezi and Bulawayo men, now displaced from the store’s verandah and forced to sit apart under the marula tree, ‘feeling tongue-tied and charmed and privileged’, admiring ‘these mighty and serene women’ from the corners of their eyes (59). Despite their curiosity and desire to hear the women’s ‘war stories’, they keep both their physical and psychological distance because of their now confused patriarchal position; ‘to owe a woman a destiny is more than their minds can deal with right now’ (61). Much less puzzling and threatening to the men of Kezi are the young women who ‘approach Thandabantu Store with a new and purposeful gaiety’, but made ‘a bit fearful, a bit dizzy, a bit excited’ by the faraway look in the eyes of the male soldiers they desire. The eagerness and sensuousness of their actions, the danger and desire of their expectations are described beautifully by Vera as a certain adolescent bravery, ‘as though they are sliding their hands in the cotton-soft coolness of ash, where, it is possible, a flame might sparkle and burn’ (53). Their speculation about the freedom names they will give the babies they hope to have with the returned soldiers appears poignant, even if foolish. Even their desires, however, as romantic and domestic as they are, reveal that a corner has been turned between the sexes, since their thoughts reflect a new way of selfregarding, an untraditional independence and modern expectation: [T]hey have no desire to be owned, hedged in, claimed, but to be appreciated, to be loved till an entire sun sets, to be adored like doves. … They want to know an absolute joy with men who carry that lost look in their eyes … ,

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 139 whose smiles … make the women weak at the knees and cause them to fold their arms over their heads. (54-5)

Despite their new self-regard, however, in contrast to the swaggering and wandering about of the female soldiers, the characterising arm gesture of these young girls is one of astonished submission. Moreover, it is a foreshadowing of the subordinate position society will force most of the ‘guerrilla girls’ to assume as well. While not pictured at Thandabantu Store, Sibaso is one of the returnees, like the others, reflecting in his eyes the war’s psychological destruction. Ironically at first, he is most like the idealistic young women, who are described as destined to be ‘frightened, excited, lost’ (56). However, he has been transformed, as he understands in one of his many moments of contemplation; ‘[D]uring a war, we are lifeless beings. … A part of you conceals itself, so that not everything is destroyed, only a part; the rest perishes like cloud’ (82). Later, as we see, he has become one of the furious, rampaging ‘dissidents’, hunted and hunting in return. It is to Vera’s credit that she portrays this man, who brings the carnage of the battlefield into the quiet home of Thenjiwe and Nonceba, as thoughtful, reflective, analytical, and intellectually curious. The ‘rest’ of him that perished during his war experiences was his humanity, his empathy, his sense of morality, his sense of purpose and hope for future good; what remains is his desperate sense of that loss, his uncontrollable rage, and his fury to survive. Like the instinctively self-protective spiders that he studied and consumed for survival during battle, Sibaso is a ‘postwar spider … fragile, like the membrane around dreams’. A particular arachnid he remembers is ‘almost transparent, its legs wisps of a dancing dark light, like pencil strokes’; like it, he also ‘knows how to live on a margin, brittle, like a shard of glass’. ‘Who,’ he pleads, ‘would want to eat such an already-dead thing’ (84-5). It is a fitting reflection, then, of his being trapped in his experience of battle that Vera involves Sibaso in static, repetitive action. Before his violation of the sisters, he and his fellow soldiers desecrate Mbelele cave, the ancient shrine of the virgins in the Matopo hills, a sanctuary, ‘this womb’, (101) where they leave ammunition and to which they return for refuge after months of fighting. His imprisonment outside the cave echoes from his entombed, internal voice that reveals his story to us by returning, again and again, and in minute detail, to his recent experiences, a fixed darkness he cannot escape. Vera emphasises Sibaso’s curiosity and analytic ability while using his personality traits to comment on the personal emptiness of the promises of independence. For instance, his thwarted desire for meaningful self-sacrifice, which, at first, he sees reflected in the

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images of the virgins on the cave walls in the pre-Ndebele Mwaro shrine in the Matopo hills, paintings of women who ‘walk into their own graves before the burial of a king’ (103), leads to his judgment that they deliberately chose suicide, since ‘sacrifice means the loss of life, of lives, so that one life may be saved’, and he now realises that ‘the life of rulers is served, not saved’ (103-4). His own nationalistic offering of his life for the ‘greater good’, inspired by his leaders’ rhetoric, now transformed into his judgment that he has committed psychological ‘suicide’, Sibaso can martyr Thenjiwe and Nonceba, also ‘stone virgins’, unmarried, childless, set apart, therefore, like the Matopo virgins, from traditional women. His murderous acts are those of self-verifying power and revenge. He realises he will never ‘rule’, not even in the limited way free citizens determine their own lives. The suffering and death of the sisters, while sacrificial, was not voluntary, unlike that of the shrine virgins memorialised on stone; he must therefore continue to kill until he finds a willing victim in order to assume some of the power of rulers for himself. Possibly, he allows Nonceba to live because she appears so docile in his arms. The crushing irony of his being returned Solomon Mutswairo’s Feso (1957) by the ‘cynical’ (TSV) new tenant of his lost father’s house literally stops Sibaso in his tracks, leading him to identify with the crushed spider in its pages, ‘weighted down by time’ (121). Feso, ironically, is the novel ‘in which Mutswairo articulated the utopia of a pre-colonial golden age that the nationalist movement seemed to envision as a social utopia for their own struggle’.57 It is when he, like so many other ‘dissidents’, is brought face to face with a mockery of his idealism that he, the philosopher-amateur entomologist-warrior, abandons his post-independence plans to rejoin society and flees, back to the Matopo hills, re-encountering the home of the doomed sisters on his way. It is his sense of betrayal and desire for revenge that turns the entire country into a sacrificial altar and drives him to spread the mocking lesson of the crushed spider abroad: ‘[T]his sort of weightlessness should be experienced at least once by each human being, and all the time by all nations’ (122). Reversing the flight of the Kezi villagers who hurry all the way to Bulawayo in one night after witnessing the torture and murder of Mahlathini, Sibaso is ‘in flight from a truth [he] had already encountered’ (134), wishing to ‘return to the past of the hills’; ‘I endure the war anew. I am an instrument of war. I lose all sight of pity for myself’ (141). Yet, he fiercely desires his own survival. While ‘unmanned’ by his understanding of the meaningless for soldier and citizens alike of the Second Chimurenga, he will not be a ‘sacrificial virgin’ himself. Therefore, his return to the cave in the hills is the instinctive

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 141 circling of a wounded animal or a threatened spider, not a retreat into either the mythic past or the promised future. His evaluation of the falsity of the ‘new nation’ must include a rejection of the past, of Nehanda’s formerly cherished promise of future liberation, for ‘[N]othing survives fire, not the voices of the dead. Nothing survives fire but rock’ (140). While Sibaso’s articulate despair, delivered only in interior monologues, and the incoherent violence to which it leads that is expressed outwardly against the sisters, fellow Ndebele, powerfully constructs Vera’s disturbing counter-narrative to Mugabe’s ‘patriotic history’, the author concludes The Stone Virgins optimistically through Cephas’s capacity for growth. This unexpected male character uproots the hardened concrete of traditional, gendered expectations about male/ female relationships in Vera’s middle works and facilitates Nonceba’s escape from her cocoon of pain, relieving not the agony of her wounds alone, but the wordless isolation into which she could have crawled for safety, like Sibaso to his silent cave. Cephas had already been tested for compatibility by Thenjiwe and failed. The older sister’s otherwise inexplicable, relentless questioning of him about everything concerning the mazhanje tree can be understood as stemming from a number of different personal and social insecurities. Thenjiwe needs to discover if his closeness to Nature is like hers; to determine if he is capable of change, that is, of being transplanted from Bulawayo to Kezi; it also expresses the author’s interest in meaningful, not just rhetorical, national unity, since Cephas is not from Thenjiwe’s people or rural area.58 When she persists in questioning him about the shape of the tree’s roots rather than asking him about himself, he responds with impatience; when she does not respond with an expected beloved’s gratitude when he offers the curious, if prophetic, romantic pledge that if she ever died, he would want her hip bone to carry with him forever, he hides his wounded pride by taking the bus back to Bulawayo. It is of roots, not fanciful, imaginings that she most wants assurance, as do we in this book of stone and bone. Nonceba’s own healing process leads to her sensing her connection with other living creatures: ‘[S]he thinks of the language of animals, which has no words but memory’; ‘She would like to know the language of all wounded beings’ (91). When Cephas finds her, returned to Kezi after her long hospitalisation, blended into the landscape, absorbed in listening to the doves, their touch is as true as Sibaso’s was false: ‘[S]he lets him take her hand and hold it, not wanting to say anything, preferring this language of silence that they have found. He turns her hand over, holding her as if she were the most

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precious thought in his mind, not wanting her to leave his mind at all’ (162). Of course, it is Thenjiwe and his guilt over leaving her to die as she did that is really on Cephas’s mind. Nevertheless, such gentle images lead the reader to believe that a romance will develop between the two, a conventional plotline we are used to, but we only receive another ‘slow jolt’ when we realise that Vera has a deeper love to project. Cephas’s completely undemanding relationship with Nonceba, his willingness to let her ‘decide both their lives’ (178), his acceptance of her finding her own job, without his help, his decision, even, not to protest her possible desire to move away from him if she wishes ends The Stone Virgins with a scene of female freedom and contentment impossible for Vera’s earlier characters, not even for Phephelaphe, for example, who is arguably an even more ambitious protagonist than Nonceba. ‘[Nonceba] lets herself fall onto the couch. Exhausted by joy. Happy. Free. A new path has opened for her; she will meet other people at work, build new friendships, have colleagues, discover qualities of her own. She has the strength for it, the resolve. [Cephas’s] mind travels. Hers is satisfied’ (174). It is no accident that Vera envisions Cephas as an archivist (in a real sense, a fictional replica of herself) working with photos and newspaper accounts of the time to document the actual occurrences of Gukuruhundi. His more significant action in the novel, however, is to demonstrate the possibility of personal transformation that could lead to a healthy understanding of male/female relationships, thereby promoting a nurturing community. In ‘Learning to Live with Differences, the Challenge of Ecofeminist Community’, Judith Plant (1997) notes the need for not just a community, but an ‘ecocommunity’: … because if it is anything less I believe we will simply repeat the same destructive patterns of the past in which someone is always better than or more deserving than someone else. Perhaps the most essential feature of ecofeminist thought is that all oppressions – whether men over women, First World over Third World, north over south, white over black, adults over children, human beings over other species, society over nature – have their roots in common. The basis of power-over, of domination of one over the other, comes from a philosophical belief that has rationalized exploitation on such a massive scale that we now not only have extinguished other species but have also placed our own species on a trajectory toward self-destruction. … It is a hierarchical structure that repeats itself over and over again, in political and economic organizations, in religious institutions, and in our most intimate relationships.59

Despite the dizzying breadth of its concerns, ecofeminism can be distilled down to two basic principles easily applicable to The Stone Virgins: the importance of all living creatures, assuring their right to development and freedom; and the necessity of each person continu-

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 143 ally being aware of the dangerous allure of the power game, requiring that we fight against tyrannically imposing our might in the natural, social, and personal realms. I read the sharp difference between The Stone Virgins and Vera’s other novels, excepting Nehanda, the quality that makes this last one a ‘novel of resistance’, to be not just her understanding of the value of these principles, but her articulation, through Cephas and Nonceba, that they can exist in praxis. The work corresponds, therefore, to Vambe’s explanation of clan poetry, Nhetembo Dzamadzinza, that this form of ‘Shona orature … invoked the power of departed revered ancestors … to intervene in the political struggles of the Shona people for survival’ (African Oral Story-Telling Tradition 20). Because Vera is thinking nationally, not ethnically, however, her ‘poem’ is for all Zimbabweans. Moreover, The Stone Virgins closes the fictional circle she began with Nehanda. While the spirit medium’s prophecy has proven true with independence, the sense of community that the united struggle against the oppressor should have guaranteed has not come to fruition. It was Vera’s hope, however, by the end of her last published novel that it will emerge, born from a contemporary understanding of gender mutuality.

Notes 1. See Thomas Pakenham (1991); David Beach (quoted in David W. Phillipson 1994). 2. See V.Y. Mudimbe (1988); Pakenham (1991); and Basil Davidson (1994). 3. This standard definition is taken from William Flint Thrall and Addison Hibbard’s A Handbook to Literature. New York: The Odyssey Press, (1960: 223). 4. For example: Shimmer Chinodya, Harvest of Thorns (1989), Charles Samupindi, Pawns (1992), and Alexander Kanengoni, Effortless Tears (1993). 5. Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000: 217). See also fn. 43 below. 6. Ruth Finnegan (1970) provides a detailed discussion of the difficulty of collecting and relying on the accuracy of orature, oral performance in her Introduction. 7. Quoted in Denis (in Draper 2003: 205-16). 8. Kabira, quoted in Vambe (2004: 9-10). 9. Vansina (1985: xii). 10. For an account of the labyrinthine nature of oral history in general, and the difficulty of verifying Zimbabwean oral accounts of the past in particular, see D.N. Beach (quoted in Phillipson (ed.) 1994: 247), who asks, ‘Is Shona oral tradition ever reliable? The answer is “yes”, provided that the researcher is wary.’

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11. Quoted in Bull-Christiansen (2004: 21-2). 12. John Vekris (1997:10-13). 13. Beach (quoted in Phillipson (ed.) 1994: 152) reports that the Ndebele ‘held a similar belief in ancestral spirits, amadhlozi, but these did not “come out” in mediums’. 14. David Lan (1985: 76). 15. Besides Chenjerai Hove’s Bones, other Zimbabwean novels touching on the military influence of Nehanda include Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns (1990) and Charles Samupindi’s Pawns (1992). 16. See http://www.bulawayo1872.com/history/nehandambuya1.htm. 17. See    http://www.zambuko.com/mbirapage/resource_guide/pages/culture/ mbuya_nehanda.html (Solomon Murungu & Zambuko Projects ®Unlimited, 2004). 18. Beach (quoted in Phillipson (ed.) 1994). 19. John Cobbing (1977). 20. Ngwabi Bhebe and Terence Ranger (eds) (1996: 45). 21. Beach (quoted in Phillipson (ed.) 1994: 7). 22. Ibid. 23. See http://www.bulawayo1872.com/history/nehandambuya1.htm. 24. Vambe (2004: 19). 25. Ibid.: 86. 26. See http://www.bulawayo1872.com/history/nehandambuya1.htm. 27. Ibid. 28. Vekris (1997: 10-13). For other studies and first-hand accounts of the Zimbabwean women guerilla fighters, see R.R. Mahamba (1986); Irene Staunton (ed.) (1990); N.J. Kriger (1992); N. Bhebe and T. Ranger (eds) (1996); J. Nhongo-Simbanegavi (2000); Zimbabwe Women Writers, Editor, Women of Resilience: The Voices of Women Ex-Combatants (Harare: Zimbabwe Women Writers, 2000); and, most recently, T. Lyons, Guns and Guerilla Girls (2004). 29. Vambe considers Bones truer to the realities of the multiple oral traditions present in the region at the time of the resistance, since: within the post-colonial space depicted in the novel there is no single memory, but several counter-memories constantly struggling to constitute themselves as the principal narrative authority with the power to assign meanings. Bones, therefore, addresses the issue of how the discourses of the collective and individual memories of resistance confirm and interrogate each other in the process of constructing a post-colonial idiom of resistance. (African Oral Story-telling Tradition and the Zimbabwean Novel in English 73) Additionally, he criticises Vera for participating in what he sees as the falsifying desire to: retrieve a pristine and unsullied spiritual essence of the African … based on the assumption of a unified reality within what is deemed ‘authentic’. The reality of pre-colonial Shona society was that there were differentiation of social roles between women and men as well

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 145 as within the social roles of women themselves. … This complexity of multiple voices with which pre-colonial Shona women fought back at their exploiters is, however, glossed over in Nehanda, whereby the possession of Nehanda is used to retrieve a stable and homogeneous life of the Shona women. (80) 30. Emmanual Chiwome (quoted in Muponde and Taruvinga 2003: 184). Other critics, too, dislike what they perceive as the book’s distortion of ‘historical’ truth. 31. Ibid.: 185. 32. Bull-Christiansen (2004: 41). For an extensive discussion of the role of missionaries, and of the Christian churches, in general, during the time of both Chimurengas, see Bhebe and Ranger 1996). 33. Other contemporary writers immersed in re-memory and the retelling of stories of their ethnic roots have mentioned a similar sense of connection with those who have passed on, notably Kiowa poet and novelist, N. Scott Momaday (1969: 51-2; 1971) and American novelist Alice Walker (1983: 356). 34. Vambe (2004: 29) 35. See Meg Samuelson (2007: 22-35); Katrin Berndt (2005: 155-213); Liz Gunner and Neil Ten Kortenaar (2007: 1-8). 36. See Jane Bryce (quoted in Muponde and Taruvinga (eds) 2003: 217-26); Jessica Hemmings (in ibid.: 39-56); Lizzy Attree (in ibid.: 63-82); Charles Pfukwa (quoted in Bettina Weiss (ed.) 2004: 251-260). 37. See Sarah Nuttall (quoted in Muponde and Primorac 2005: 177-92); Meg Samuelson (2007: 22-35). 38. Tacoli (2008). 39. See Maurice T. Vambe and Aquilina Mawadza (quoted in Vambe (ed.) 2001: 57-72); Teresa A. Barnes (1999). 40. For an insightful examination of Mazvita and Nyendezi’s relationship, see Felicity Palmer (2006: 27-44). 41. Barnes (1999: 145). 42. For a helpful explanation of the multiple problems in promised landresettlement the new government faced immediately after independence that account for some of the wide-spread resentment against it in the countryside, see Terence Ranger (1985: 284-334). Appendix 1 (pp. 334-8), briefly but clearly suggests that the determined resistance to President Mugabe’s resettlement plans in Matabeleland, Joshua Nkomo’s home area, was the source of much of the opposition to the government that may, in turn, have led to the attacks by the government-sponsored Fifth Brigade. 43. Richard Werbner’s Kalanga informants took the term ‘Gukuruhundi’ to mean ‘the sweeping away of rubbish’, interpreting themselves as the rubbish. See Alexander et al. (2000: 201). 44. In her collection of women’s stories (1991), publisher Irene Staunton provides the first-hand accounts of thirty Zimbabwean women who lived in the rural areas during the Second Chimurenga. 45. Judith Plant (quoted in Karen J. Warren 1997: 120-39, 133).

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46. Warren (1994: 1-7, 1). 47. See Alice Walker (1983) for a definition of ‘Womanist’ and Molara Ogundipe-Leslie (1994: 207) for her related, African-based concept of ‘Stiwanism’ – ‘Feminism in an African Context’. 48. Quoted by Andy Smith (in Warren (ed.) 1997: 21-37, 21). 49. Bull-Christiansen (2004: 108). 50. Vera makes it almost impossible here not to recall Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, mocking Ramesis II, the Egyptian pharaoh, whose gigantic statue was erected in his honor at Thebes, but found in the nineteenth century half-hidden in the sand and reduced to rubble. See: Alexander M. Witherspoon (ed.). The College Survey of English Literature, review edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951: 834. 51. Peter Garlake (quoted in J.D.Y. Peel and T.O. Ranger 1983: 1-19, 1). 52. Explaining the socially destructive results of the Fifth Brigade that have subsequently marked the exploitation of children in civil wars, Terence Ranger (quoted in Muponde and Primorac 2005: 217-43, 221) notes that ‘the youth were recruited as warriors into the “Third Chimurenga” …. They became a militia available to discipline their own parents; to attack MDC supporters; and to intimidate teachers and other educated civil servants in the rural areas.’ 53. Werbner (quoted in Ngwabi Bhebe and Terence Ranger 1996: 192-205, 198) states that the actual ethnic composition of the Korean trained Fifth Brigade remains unclear. Alexander et al. nevertheless emphasise its ethnic purpose: The Brigade’s operations were crucial in amplifying both a political and an ethnic interpretation of violence: the almost entirely Shonaspeaking Fifth Brigade regularly used an overtly tribal and political discourse, and its all-encompassing violence could not be explained as militarily motivated. (218)

Nevertheless, they mention in a footnote on the same page that, though it ‘was dominated by Shona speakers, civilians make repeated reference to non-Zimbabweans within their ranks. They are usually identified as Mozambicans, due to their use of Portuguese or Sena. Others refer to some soldiers having nose rings, a complexion which was darker than normal for Zimbabwe, or other strange features’ (218). 54. ‘[In] an infamous Lupane case, a headmaster’s wife was forced to cut off her husband’s head. In another instance, a son was forced to kill his father after the latter was accused of informing on a dissident. In a widely cited Nkayi case a second wife was forced cut off the hands of her husband. Civilians also testified to two cases of mutilation by cutting off lips or ears.’ See Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor, Terence Ranger. Violence and Memory, One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests’ of Matabeleland, in the Social History of Africa Series, Series editors, Allen Isaacman and Jean Allman (eds). Oxford: James Currey, 2000. 55. In her comprehensive study, Tanya Lyons (2004) treats much more than the experiences of the women who fought in the Second Chimuren-

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Yvonne Vera & the Womanist Claims of ‘History’ 147 ga. She also reports on the various resistance activities on the part of women before, during, and after Zimbabwean independence. 56. Flame also attempts to give voice to Zimbabwean women’s experiences, thus, subverting the official discourse about the Second Chimurenga and its aftermath, by following the very different lives after independence of two female freedom fighters. See: Kedmon N. Hungwe, ‘Narrative and Ideology: Fifty Years of Film-Making in Zimbabwe’, in Maurice Gweru (ed.). Orality and Cultural Identities in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe: Mambo Press, 2001: 73-85. Also, Guns and Guerilla Girls extensively treats the controversy swirling around the veracity of Flame, practically from its inception. See Tanya Lyons (2004). 57. Bull-Christiansen (2004: 99). 58. I am grateful to Felicity Palmer for the third interpretation, offered during discussion at the second WOCALA panel of the 2007 African Literature Association Conference in Morgantown, West Virginia. 59. Judith Plant (quoted in Warren (ed.) 1997: 120-39, 121).

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and …

Concluding, and … Form and content in discourse are one (M.M. Bakhtin, the location of culture)

Perhaps it is due to my embracing the continuing stories of the oral tradition; my being intrigued by postmodern narrative’s indeterminacy; and/or, my amusement with my brother ending every sentence in our conversations with ‘… and’, a verbal ploy to keep the exchange going that so marks his personality, that I recognise the validity of the well-known concept of aesthetic unity repeated in Bakhtin’s bare-bones version above. Its truth echoes from my every source for observation, literary and otherwise. Therefore, faced with the dilemma of ‘ending’ my own contribution to a vibrant and growing consideration of Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing, and Yvonne Vera, three giants of contemporary African fiction, I discover I have only two aims, the first being far more important than the second. In this ‘conclusion’ I would like to offer a brief statement that reiterates and highlights the ongoing ‘conversations’ I hear the works of my chosen writers having with each other, and, of lesser significance (except for my own sense of form) I thereby suggest my awareness of the artificiality of having divided my study, for the purpose of clarity, into separate chapters. After all, the story I have attempted to tell is as interwoven as the tapestry created by Okri’s old woman in the woods. In each chapter, I have attempted to demonstrate the ways in which these authors have embraced their nations' oral traditions and the rememories of oral ‘history’. Okri’s reinvestment of crucial lessons for the present in the common respect of his people for the significance of the Road as a dangerous, but necessary, internal and external path to understanding; his symbolic use of the abiku as a metaphor for the birth and possible choice of death for his nation; and his privileging of the ancient communication of the wisdom of stories to interpret and foretell make his spiritual messages a continuation of his ancient traditions. In a more explicit way, Laing challenges his contemporaries to forge a ‘golden mean’, not rejecting all cultural tools but recognising that all cultures change and must build on that which worked in the past and can be developed to reflect new and future conditions. His scribe is free to change proverbial wisdom to fit new situations; his Trickster, however, continues to force evaluations of behavior, 148

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Concluding and … 149 despite his selfish engagement in events; and even his examples of current technology – the airplanes and the ‘truth machine’, for example – evoke a humorous response from his characters and readers alike. Even though Vera’s primary interest is the condition and future of African women, she accepts the traditional understanding that their success cannot be achieved without improvements within the entire community as a whole. While turning to oral ‘history’ for the iconic figure of Nehanda as a model for women’s bravery and their ability to force change, she suggests in her last novel, through Cephas, that only when ordinary men and women recognise their responsibility to each other – a modern reworking of the gendered requirements of the old stories’ social instructions – will society achieve peace. Each writer employs the oral tradition differently, but for all three, this vast and deep repository of experience and wisdom serves as a grounding for modern literary depictions of neo-colonialism in Africa. The dialogic exchange among their voices clarifies each writer’s version of the long-held assumption that African writing displays a political acuity born of necessity. Nevertheless, Okri, Laing, and Vera contribute to the tradition of African literature by resoundingly rejecting oppression in complicating and individual styles that lead to contrasting and, arguably, even competing solutions. With notable exceptions (Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka being the best-known examples) in the chorus of African creative writers stretching back to the 1950s, Marxist ideology has been the most vibrant strain, with the paradoxical undertone of Negritude the most identifiable voice. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s passionate voice, both in his eloquent fiction and essays, serves as the touchstone for this political solution, of course. Both Marxism and Negritude as modern influences on African fiction, while conflicting in important theoretical and formal ways, ironically, result in a common tendency toward essentialism, inimical, it seems to me, to an appreciation of the multiple hybridities of Africa’s neo-colonial and diasporic experience. Unlike many second-generation African writers outraged by the same, or very similar, material conditions, Okri, Laing, and Vera lead their generation in placing little or no faith in political dogmas of any stripe. Neither, however, does any one of them despair of solutions to the continent’s and (this global extension being crucial for understanding their political messages) the world’s contemporary woes. Some of their catholic concern may be explained by their personal histories, that is, that their economic and civic understandings are enriched and complicated by their own intellectual hybridity and multi-continental social experiences. While not unique to their gen-

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and …

eration, their own situations as ‘been-to’s’ or ‘choose-not-to’s’ early in their development, as well as their distance from earlier political responses to neo-colonialism in Africa, has, it can be speculated, led them to broad political observations, with Africa as the center but not the limit of their concerns. A direct result of their liminality, it seems to me, is their fiction’s resolute avoidance of any sort of misleading reductionism either in rehearsing problems or offering solutions, hence their formal diligence, despite the differences in their styles, to accurately depict their countries as either struggling to overcome stasis or already far into transition. Both their indigenous and diasporic experiences infuse their fiction with understandings that exemplify homi bhabha’s rejection of the romanticism of cultural nationalism with its ‘claims to the continuity of an authentic “past” and a living “present”’ for what the critic terms, instead, the actual postcolonial perspective, ‘the transnational as the translational’ (the location of culture 172, 173). Realism is not abandoned, but is translated into mythic, humorous, and poetic styles in order to interpret old understandings and new imaginings felt and heard as the deep rumblings of transnational life. This observation is as true of Okri’s allegorical, spiritual focus as it is of Laing’s cultural hybridity, and Vera’s womanist departure from gendered stereotypes into poetic, holistic concepts of mutuality. In the end, they are African writers addressing, but from different aspects of African cultural consciousness, human problems that transcend artificial periodisation and ineffectual politicisation. Modernity and its impositions, that is, the political cause of the plights of their characters and countries, must reluctantly give way in their visions of a new era, that of the ‘cultures of survival’ (172) in which we are all included and for which these writers have found new tongues to interpret and celebrate. The greatest surprise, for me at any rate, is that their language, both in terms of the formal elements of their works as well as their philosophical and political understandings, re-creates some of the oldest humanistic recognitions; as recalled in the Oromo proverb ‘[B]y remembering the past, the future is remembered’ (Ibekwe 124).

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151

Short biographies Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing & Yvonne Vera Ben Okri Okri is a writer of fiction, a poet and an essayist. His works include eight novels, Flowers and Shadows (1980), The Landscapes Within (1981), The Famished Road (1991), Songs of Enchantment (1993), a rewriting of Landscapes entitled Dangerous Love (1996), Infinite Riches (1998), In Arcadia (2002); fables, Astonishing The Gods, (1995) and Starbook, a Magical Tale of Love and Regeneration (2007); two volumes of short stories, Innocents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the new Curfew (1989); three collections of poetry, An African Elegy (1992), Birds of Heaven (1995), and Mental Flight: An Anti-Spell for the 21st Century (1999); two books of essays, Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural and Political (1992) and A Way Of Being Free (1997); and the multi-generic Tales of Freedom (2009). Besides winning the Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road, Okri has been awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa, 1987, the Paris Review Aga Khan prize for fiction, 1987, the Chianti Antico Fattore International Literary Prize, 1994, the Premio Grinzane Cavour Prize, 1994, and The World Economic Forum Crystal Award, 1994. Okri is a former board member of the Royal Society of Literature, a vice-president of the Writers’ Association English PEN and a patron of the Caine prize for African literature; he was made an OBE in 2001, and is the sole novelist on the advisory committee that recommends honors in arts and media. He has also worked as a BBC radio broadcaster and Poetry Editor of West Africa magazine.

B. Kojo Laing Bernard Ebenezer Kojo Laing, the eldest son and fourth of six children of an educated, middle-class family, was born in 1946 in Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti region of Ghana. His father, Ekyem Ferguson Laing, an Anglican priest, was the first African rector of the Anglican Theological College. Laing attended Bishop’s Boy’s School in Accra until the age of eleven in 1957, when he was sent to Alexandria, Dunbartonshire, Scotland, where he finished primary and 151

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secondary school, and began to write poetry. His poetry has won the BBC’s University Notebook Award for Poetry (1967), a shared VALCO Literary Award (1977), and is collected in Godhorse (1989). Desiring to enter the Ghana Foreign Service, after a short vacation back in his country, Laing majored in political science and history at Glasgow University, graduating with an MA in 1968. After marrying a Scotswoman, he returned to Ghana and joined the Civil Service in 1969 and, except for a four-month stint in 1975 at the University of Birmingham for a training course in rural administration, served for ten years as a district administrative officer and chief executive in Offinso, Obuasi and Konongo, towns in the Ashanti region. His immersion in small-town and rural life ended in 1978 when he moved to Accra to work in government headquarters during the last days of General Frederick Akuffo’s Supreme Military Council and was there during the first Jerry Rawlings coup and the transition to the elected Linmann government. Leaving government service in 1979, he became administrative secretary of the Institute of African Studies from 1979 to 1984. Having separated from his wife, who returned to Britain in 1981 with five of their six children, Laing became head of Saint Anthony’s School in a suburb of Accra, a boy’s school founded by Laing’s mother in 1962. During this prolific period, he finished his three novels, Search Sweet Country (1986), which had been started while he was still at the University of Ghana, Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988), and Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars (1992). Search Sweet Country garnered the Ghana Book Award, the Ghana Association of Writers’ Kwame Nkrumah Prize, and received special mention for the David Higham Prize. Laing published Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters in 2006. (This information was obtained from The Companion to African Literature, Douglas Killam and Ruth Rowe (eds), Oxford: James Currey; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000; and M.E. Kropp Dakubu, ‘Kojo Laing’, Twentieth Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, Bernth Lindfors and Reinhard Sander (eds), Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1995, third series, Vol. 157: 140-9.)

Yvonne Vera Born in September 1964 in what was then southern Rhodesia, her mother a high school teacher, her father a businessman, Yvonne Vera grew up in Bulawayo, during the turbulent time of the national liberation struggle, when members of her family joined the resistance, and residential areas like hers were searched for guerilla fighters. She attended grade school in what she called an idyllic, rural area of

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Short biographies – Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing & Yvonne Vera 153 Matabeleland, then experienced a decided change when she entered higher grades in the townships of Luveve and Mzilikazi. This move ‘offered a contrast and introduced me more fully to the urban African milieu, with all its contradictions and spontaneity. This was in the seventies, and all the rumblings of an armed struggle were about.’ After graduating from Mzilikazi high school and training at a teacher’s college, she taught English literature for two years at Njube high school, Bulawayo, where she met her future husband, a Canadian, whom she married in 1987. Leaving Zimbabwe, she enrolled at York University in Toronto, Canada, to study English literature, art history, and filmmaking and earned a BA with Honors in English, an MA, and became the first Zimbabwean woman to be awarded a PhD. She was writer-in-residence at Trent University before returning to Zimbabwe. Vera told an interviewer, ‘I spent eight years in Toronto trying to grow up. I finally realised the necessity of my return to Zimbabwe and my hometown. I have never regretted it’ (Encyclopedia of World Biography, no page). Unlike a number of other Zimbabwean writers, Vera’s personal political involvement in the turbulence of her country was indirect. When she returned home in 1995, she was appointed Director of the Zimbabwean National Gallery in Bulawayo, where, from 1997 until 2003, she provided exhibition and performance space to local artists and workshops for women and children. Her efforts did not escape official disapproval, however; one Bulawayo installation, Say-So, when exhibited in the capital, Harare, in 2002, was condemned by the government. For a writer with such a short-lived career, Yvonne Vera garnered a remarkable number of awards. Her collection of short stories, Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals (1992), and her two novels, Nehanda (1993) and Without a Name (1994) were short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Africa region); another novel, Under the Tongue won the same award in 1997; Nehanda received first prize in the Zimbabwe Publishers’ Literary Awards in 1995, and Without a Name was similarly honored in 1997; Butterfly Burning (1998) was chosen one of ‘Africa’s Best 100 Books of the last century.’ For both personal and political reasons, Vera left Zimbabwe for Toronto, Canada, in 2004, where she began work on a sixth novel. That year, she was given the Swedish PEN Tusholsky Prize, an award to support writers who are threatened and in exile. Yvonne Vera passed away at the age of forty on April 7, 2005.

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164

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Index 165

Index abiku 1, 2, 7, 8, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 22, 23, 26, 32, 35, 36, 41, 42, 44, n51, 65, 148 Acheampong, Lieutenant Colonel I.K. 61 Achebe, Chinua 9, 10, 16, 21, 22, 48, n50, n51, n52, n53, n54, 57, 60, 72, 83, 149; Things Fall Apart n53, n54, 83 Acholonu, Catherine n54 ‘African personality’ 72 Aidoo, Ama Ata 58, 60, 79, 89; Our Sister Killjoy 58, 89; Changes 58, 79 Alexander, Jocelyn 126 Ananse 9, 67, 74 anansesem 76 animism 12, 80, 81, 85, 88 Armah, Ayi Kwei 31, 32, 39, 40, 58, 90; The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 90; The Healers 31 ase 1 Attree, Lizzie 120 Awoonor, Kofi 58 Bâ, Mariama n93 Bakhtin, M.M. 60, 85, 148 Beach, David 106, 111, 112, n143, n144 Barnes, Teresa A. 124 Berndt, Katrin 119 bertens, hans 37, 53, 72 Biafra Civil War 8, 9, 47 Bildungsroman 64, 66 Bryce, Jane 101, 105, 107, 117, 118, 119, 120, 135 Bull-Christiansen, Lene 116, 129, 130, 132

Busia, Kofi Abrefa 61, 73 Chimurenga(s) 95, 96, 99, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 118, 130, 132, 138, 141, n144, n145, n146, n147. Chiwome, Emmanuel 116, 117, n145. Chukwuma, Helen 39 Cobbing, Julian 111 Conrad, David C. 102, 103; Sunjata, A West African Epic of the Mande Peoples 102 Cooper, Brenda 24, 25, 45, 48, 58, 64, 65 Courlander, Harold 74, 93 cultural values 31, culture 5, 9, 11, 17, 25, 26, 39, n51, 57, 60, 67, 68, 70, 74, 76, 83, 86, 89, 90, 91, 95, 99, 102, 104, 106, 111, 113, 116, 117, 118, 127, 148, 150 culture bearer 85, 96, 119 culture hero 26, 76 cyborg 80, 81, 92 ‘Cyborg Liberation Front’ n93 Dangarembga, Tsitsi n93 Davies, Carole Boyce 5 d’Eaubonne, François 128 Denis, Phillipe 102, doppelgängers 38, n54, 69, 74, 77 Drewal, Margaret Thompson 1, 3, 10, 18, 19, n52; Yoruba Ritual 1, 52n. eco-communalism 1, 59 ecofeminism 2, 127, 128, 129, 130, 136, 142

165

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166 Index

Edusei, Krobo 68 Eliot, T.S. 4; ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ 4 Ellison, Ralph 35; Invisible Man 35 Emecheta, Buchi 39, 78; The Joys of Motherhood 39, 62, 79 England 7, 8, 9, n54, 72 Eso n93

Johnson, Samuel 69

Fanon, Frantz 65 Fielding, Henry 60, 66; Tom Jones 60, 66 Finnegan, Ruth 106, n143 Fraser, Robert 7; Ben Okri 7 Fry, Northrup 49

La Guma, Alex 23; A Walk in the Night 23 Laing, B. Kojo 1-5, 24, 57-93, n94, 148, 149, 150, 151-2; Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters 153; Major Gentl and the Achimoto Wars 57, 86-92; Search Sweet Country 58-62, 64-6, 69-70, 73, 77, 79, 91, 92, 153; Woman of the Aeroplanes 56, 63, 69-74, 77-8, 83, 86, 91, 92, n93, 158 Lan, David 109, 111 legend(s ) 13, 18, 24, 38, 42, 44, 46, 104, 105, 108,109, 115 legendary 27, 43, 87, 109, 110, 116 liminal(ality) 5, 8, 14, 18, 49, n54, 150 Lobengula 96, 108 Lyons, Tanya 137, 138, n146

Gandhi, Mahatma 90 Garlake, Peter 132 Garuba, Harry 13, 16, 17 Gaylard, Gerald 90 Ghana 1, 24, 56, 57, 58, 61, 64, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 79, 81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88, 90, 152, 153, 158 Ghanaian 2, 56, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 80, 85, 87, 89, 90 Gibson, Andrew 57, 58, 80, 81 Gilroy, Paul 49, n54 Great Zimbabwe 132 griot 70 Haraway, Donna 80 Hawley, John 48 Hemmings, Jessica 120 Hill-Lubin, Mildred 49, n54 Hove, Chenjerai 116, n144; Bones 116, 144 hybridity 4, 7, 8, 9, 12, 49, 50, 62, 63, 76, 80, 81, 86, 149, 150 Jameson, Frederick 49 JanMohamed, Abdul 65 Jeater, Diana 124; Marriage, Perversion and Power … 124

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Kaguvi 107, 108, 111, 113, 114-15 Kalu, Anthonia 4, 5 Kezilahabi, Euphrase n51 King, Ynestra 128 Kriger, Norma J. 112; Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices 112

magic(al) realism 3, 12, 13, 16, 47 Maja-Pearce, Adewale 12, 13 Manichean 32, n51, 64, 92, 99 Marxism 11, 25, 49, n63, 68, 149 Marlow, Christopher 37 masquerade(s) 8, 20, 21, 30, 31, n52, n53 McHale, Brian 59, 71, 85, 86, n93 modernism 1, 4, 33, 37, 42, 43, 67, 72 modernity 1, 37, 59, 67, 69, 70, 76, 77, 78, 80, 83, 88, 96, 120, 150 Momaday, N. Scott 37, n53, n145 Mugabe, Robert 99, 100, 101, 102, 126, 129, 136, 132, 133, 141, n145

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Index 167 Muheni, Mwangi 60; The Future Leaders 60 Mukwati 107, 113 Mutota 108 Mutswairo, Solomon 108, 109; Chaminuka, Prophet of Zimbabwe 108, 140; Feso 140 myth(ic) 3, 9, 10, 11, 16, 18, 24, 26, 28, 29, 32, 38, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, n51, 74, 76, 77, 81, 82, 85, 87, 88, n93, 96, 104, 109, 111, 116, 132, 141, 150 mythmaker 11, 45 mythology 8, mythologise 42, 132 mythopoetic 13, 23 naturalism 22, 23, 58 Nechombo 107 Negritude 31, 49, n51, 72, 149 Nehanda 95, 96, 98. 101, 104-13, 115-19, 127, 128, 129, 141, 143, 144, 149 neo-myth(s) 1, 11, 45, 48, 50 Newell, Stephanie n54 Ngugi wa Thiong’o vii, 6, 9, 10, 38, 40, 48, n50, n53, 57, 98, 149; A Grain of Wheat 98; Moving the Centre 57 Nigeria 1, 7, 8, 9, 11, 14, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 27, 34, 38, 42, 43, 47, 48, n51, n53, 57 Nigerian(s) 7, 8, 9, 19, 23, 41, 57 Nkomo, Joshua 99, 101, 126, 133, 134, n145 Nkrumah, Kwame 61, 68, 73, 90, 91, 153 Nuttall, Sarah 120

n53, n55, 57, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 71, 74, 81, 85, 92, 109, 148, 149, 150, 152; Astonishing the Gods 35, 36, 47, n53; A Way of Being Free 48; Flowers and Shadows 9; Infinite Riches 10, 14, 15, 20, 24, 25, 35-7, 42-3, 45-8, 92; Incidents at the Shrine, Short Stories 8; The Famished Road 7, 10, 11, 14-17, 19-29, 36, 42, 45, 47, 48, n52, n53, 152; Songs of Enchantment 7, 10, 11, 14, 15, 20, 22, 24-8, 30, 32, 36-7, 40, 43, 47; Stars of the New Curfew 8; Tales of Freedom 151 Ong, S.J., Walter 51 Onyame 74 oral history 2, 96, 101, 102, 105, 133, n143 oral literature n5, 106 oraliture 2, 5, n51, 57, 59 oral tradition 1, 2, 4, n5, 10, 11, 12, 19, 23, 31, 37, 46, 48, 57, 60, 64, 72, 76, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 114, 118, n144, 148, 149 orature vii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 24, 37, 40, 49, 50, 57, 61, 72, 76, 85, 96, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 127, 143, n143 origin tale 20, 31 Orwell, George 89; Animal Farm 89 Pelton, Robert 67, 69, 74, 76 Plant, Judith 142 Pollard, H.H. 109-12 postmodern 37, 57, 58, 59, 64, 71, 72, 76, 77, 80, 86, 92, 96 Quayson, Ato 12, 13, 22, 26, 41, 51

Obbo, Christine 39, 40 Obiechina, E.N. 13, 34 Ogun 26 Okigbo, Christopher 9 Okpewho, Isadore 48 Okri, Ben 1-4, 5, 7-50, n51, n52,

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Ranger, Terence 101, 102, 105, 111, 134, 145, 146 reader response theory 4 reception theory 4 re-memory 1, n94, n145

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168 Index

Rhodes, Cecil 96, 97 Rhodesia 96, 97, 100, 104, 123, 132, 153 Rhodesian(s) 98, 99, 105, 106, 110, 111, 122, 132, 133 Schmidt, Elizabeth 124; Peasants, Traders and Wives … 124 Senghor, Léopold 39, 41 Shango 26 Sinclair, Ingrid 138; Flame 138 Sithole, Ndabaningi 99, 101 Smith, Andy 128 Smith, Ian 99 Soyinka, Wole 9, 17-18, 19, 20, 21, 31, n51, n52, 149; The Road 17, 19, n52 Staunton, Irene 95, 125, n145 Sterne, Laurence 60; Tristram Shandy 60 stiwanism 128 technology 45, 47, 65, 66, 69, 70, 79, 80, 81, n94, 149 ‘terminal creeds’ 75, 83, n93, 105 tradition(al) 1-2, 4-5, 7-17, 19, 23-5, 29, 30-4, 37-42, 45-6, 48-50, n51, 57, 59-60, 62-4, 66-7, 69, 70-2, 74-6, 78-81, 85, 88, 91-2, 96, 99, 100-7, 111, 113-19, 121-2, 127, 131, 137-8, 140-1, 143, n144, 148-9 Trickster 10, 11, 16, 18, 33, 45, 46, 57, 61, 67, 69, 74, 75, 76, 77, 84, 85, 86, 90, 91, n93, n94, 151, Tutuola, Amos 12, 17, 19, 20, 32, n52, n93; The Palm-Wine Drinkard 32

119, 219; ‘Crossing Boundaries’ 97, 98; Nehanda 95-6, 98, 101, 104-13, 115-19, 127-9, 141, 143, n144, n145, 149, 153; The Stone Virgins 79, 92, 98, 100, 115, 125-30, 133-4, 136, 141-3; Under The Tongue 97, 99, 119, 121; Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals 97, 98, 121; Without a Name 98, 99, 119, 121, 130, 153 ‘virtual book’ 4 Warren, Karen 128 Werbner, Richard P. 133, n146 Wilkinson, Jane 9, 28, 29 womanism 128 Wright, Derek 21, 25, 27, 28, 41, 42, 48, 50, 51, 52, 58, 70, 86, 87, 88, 92, n93, n94 Wylie, Hal n51 Yoruba 1, 3, 4, 18, 41, n51, n52, n93 Yoruba Ritual 1 Zimbabwe 1, 2, 95, 96, 99, 100, 104, 106, 108, 112, 125, 128, 129, 132, 134, 136, n146, n153, 153 Zimbabwean(s) 2, 3, n54, 101, 102, 105, 111, 113, 118, 129, 130, 130, 143, n143, 144, 146, n147, 153 Zimbabwean women 2, 106, 115, 116, 117, 118, 125, n144, n146, n147, n153

Vambe, Maurice T. 112, 116, 118, 127, 143, n144 Vansina, Jan 103, 104, 107 Vekris, John 101, 105, 113, 117 Vera, Yvonne 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, n54, 79, 92, 95-143, n145, n146, n147, 153; Butterfly Burning 97, 98,

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Elder_ppcase_19mmsept2009_6:RootsPpbk3.qxd

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All three reflect on the colonial and post-independence turmoil in their respective countries of birth – Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe. Together, they represent the evolution of a brilliant contemporary generation of post-independence voices. Arlene A. Elder is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of The Hindered Hand: Cultural Implications of Nineteenth-Century African-American Fiction and has published essays and articles on African, African-American, NativeAmerican and Australian Aboriginal literatures and orature. Contents: Introduction: writing as ase – Ben Okri’s narrative cycle: shape-shifting on the page – B. Kojo Laing’s linguistic journeying – Yvonne Vera & the womanist claims of history – Concluding and... – Short biographies: Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing & Yvonne Vera – Bibliography

An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester, New York 14620, USA

www.boydell.co.uk www.boydellandbrewer.com

BEN OKRI • B. KOJO LAING • YVONNE VERA

• Ben Okri is a religious writer steeped in the metaphysical complexities of a traditional symbiosis of physical and spiritual co-existence; • B. Kojo Laing’s humor grounds itself in linguistic play and outrageous characterization; • Yvonne Vera translates her eco-feminist hope in political and social transformation with a focus on the developing political actions of Zimbabwean women.

Narrative Shape-Shifting MYTH, HUMOR & HISTORY IN THE FICTION OF

Responding to many of the same neo-colonial concerns as earlier African writers, Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing, and Yvonne Vera bring contemporary, hybrid voices to their novels that explore spiritual, cultural, and feminist solutions to Africa’s complex post-independence dilemmas. Their work is informed by both African and western traditions, especially the influences of traditional oral storytelling and post-modern fictional experimentation. Yet each is unique:

ARLENE A. ELDER

BEN OKRI • B. KOJO LAING • YVONNE VERA

Narrative Shape-Shifting ARLENE A. ELDER

MYTH, HUMOR & HISTORY IN THE FICTION OF

Ben Okri B. Kojo Laing Yvonne Vera