Exit : Endings and New Beginnings in Literature and Life [1 ed.] 9789042032521, 9789042032514

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Exit

Endings and New Beginnings in Literature and Life

C

ROSS ULTURES

Readings in Post / Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English

130 SERIES EDITORS

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Bénédicte Ledent (Liège) CO-FOUNDING EDITOR Hena

Maes–Jelinek

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

Exit

Endings and New Beginnings in Literature and Life

Edited by

Stefan Helgesson

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Cover image: Gordon Collier Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3251-4 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3252-1 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2011 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents

Illustrations Introduction: Exit

vii ix

PART I SOUTHERN EXITS RICHARD K. PRIEBE

Some Thoughts on the Idea of Exit in Recent African Narratives of Childhood

3

MARIA OLAUSSEN

Generation and Complicity in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

27

KENNETH W. HARROW

“Let Me Tell You About Bekolo’s Latest Film, Les Saignantes, But First…”

45

DAVID BELL

Tradition and Creativity in Zakes Mda’s Cion

57

BERNTH LINDFORS

Paton’s Discovery, Soyinka’s Invention

69

STEPHANIE NEWELL

Writing out Imperialism? A Note on Nationalism and Political Identity in the African-Owned Newspapers of Colonial Ghana

81

STEFAN HELGESSON

After Exit: Exile, Creativity, and the Risk of Translation

95

PART II ENDING UP AND OPTING OUT IN THE NORTH ECKHARD BREITINGER

African Presences and Representations in the Principality/Markgrafschaft of Bayreuth

107

GERALD PORTER

Taking Flight and the Libertarian Crow-Scarer

147

CATHERINE SANDBACH-DAHLSTRÖM

“In my end is my beginning”: The Death of Virginia Woolf

161

ELISABETH MÅRALD

Following the Race Track? Chinese, Scottish, Irish, Swedish in Diamond Grill by Fred Wah

187

J. HILLIS MILLER

Literature and Scripture: An Impossible Filiation

203

LARS-HÅKAN SVENSSON

“Gazing into the future”: Beginnings, Endings, and Midpoints in Paul Muldoon’s Why Brownlee Left

219

PART III GLOBAL EXIT? SVERKER SÖRLIN

Exiting the Environmental Trap: Knowledge Regimes and the Third Phase of Environmental Policy

237

PART IV VOICING THE EXIT WILLY BACH

The End of the “Earth”

265

JANE BRYCE

Myself as a Puff of Dust: A Ghost Story

289

JANICE KULYK KEEFER TIXE YLNO

Contributors

or Redefining Identities

301

313

Illustrations

Page 142 F I G U R E 1: F I G U R E 2:

F I G U R E 3: F I G U R E 4: Page 143 F I G U R E 5: F I G U R E 6: Page 144 F I G U R E 7:

St. Mauritius (c.1250), Magdeburg Cathedral (©Constantin Beyer, Weimar) Hans Suess von Kulmbach (attrib.), St. Mauritius (retable, c.1517/18), Pommersfeldener Filialkirche, Limbach (Oberfränkischer Ansichtskarten, Wolfgang Bouillon) Coat of Arms, Council Room, Schauenstein, Upper Franconia (photo: Eckhard Breitinger) Coat of Arms, Naila, Upper Franconia (photo: Eckhard Breitinger) Albrecht Dürer, Head of a Negro (c.1508), charcoal drawing (22 x 32 cm), Albertina, Vienna (Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin) Albrecht Dürer, The Negress Katherina (1521), silverpoint drawing (20 x 14 cm), Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Alinari Archives, Florence) Antoine Pesne, Wilhelmine of Prussia and Her Brother Frederick (c.1715), Schloss Charlottenburg, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Walter Steinkopf)

Page 145 F I G U R E 8: Margrave Christian Ernst, Markgrafenbrunnen Bayreuth (1699) (photo: Eckhard Breitinger) F I G U R E 9: The Monarchies – Africa, Markgrafenbrunnen Bayreuth (1699) (photo: Eckhard Breitinger) F I G U R E 10: Triton with conch, Ebrach (photo: Eckhard Breitinger) F I G U R E 11: Neptune, Stadtkirche Mary Ascension, Hollfeld (photo: Eckhard Breitinger)

Introduction Exit

S TEFAN H ELGESSON

Exeunt

I

in human existence, it is the exit. Before the universal yet radically singular event of death, however, history leaves its mark on us by determining which exits are possible, necessary or desirable. Under apartheid, a South African intellectual chooses exile in the U S A to find room for writing and thinking. In the middle of a world war, a celebrated English author drowns herself. A Ukrainian family chooses to start anew in Canada. An Irish poet deals with the problem of ending a poem about a man who suddenly disappears. These individual events are shaped by larger cultural and geopolitical conditions. Exit as such, moreover, may often assume vast collective dimensions which then become the groundwork for exceptionally durable and exceptionally fraught identities. Think of Exodus; think of genocide; think of the Middle Passage. The collective forms of exit may also be historical and political rather than spatial: at a given moment, it becomes necessary for a society to leave its long-established forms of governance, production, and discourse behind. Collectively, at no less than a global level, the search for an exit from the dual ecological and economic crises of our time – the search for a new beginning – is urgent or even too late. Is there or is there not still an exit available to us as F ANYTHING IS CERTAIN

x

EXIT



a species? Are we even intellectually capable, as Dipesh Chakrabarty asks in a recent essay, to imagine humanity, faced with global warming, as one?1 This book deals with the wide and varied phenomenon of exit, along with its cluster of related concepts: exile, displacement, suicide, endings, and, indeed, beginnings. After all, “In my end is my beginning,” as one of the contributors, Catherine Sandbach–Dahlström, quotes T.S. Eliot, and beginnings may be the surest way to end something else. The collection was first conceived as a conference volume, intended to document the “Exit” conference held at Umeå University (Sweden), 29–30 January 2007. The theme was philosophical but also topical, insofar as the conference had been organized by Professor Raoul Granqvist as his farewell to a long working life as an employed academic. Although he started out as a Donne scholar in the 1970s, Granqvist was for many years virtually the only Swedish academic conducting research in African literature. Later, he would do pioneering work in such diverse – if related – fields as postcolonial theory, cultural studies, translation studies, and travel writing. Given this unusual context of the conference, the volume quickly became something rather different from a collection of proceedings. A call for papers was sent out to colleagues and former students of Granqvist. The result is in your hands: a collection of essays from an international range of scholars and writers reflecting, kaleidoscopically, the plethora of interests, as well as political commitments, of Raoul Granqvist. If the volume at first appears unwieldy in its structure, this should instead be read as testimony to the wealth and density of a genuinely intellectual life – transcending divisions between academia and activism, and reaching far beyond the packaging of ‘profiles’ that many current-day university administrations advocate. I would like to take this opportunity, moreover, to thank all the contributors for making this volume possible. Special thanks go to Sverker Sörlin, for his support throughout the process, and to David Bell, for helping out with the language editing. Without wishing anxiously to police disciplinary boundaries, then, I have grouped the essays in four main sections according to commonalities of interest: Part I , “Southern Exits,” is broadly concerned with literature and film from the Global South, mostly Africa. R ICHARD K. P RI EBE looks at some recent narratives of childhood in Africa. Bracketed by Camara Laye’s L’Enfant Noir 1

Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222.

 Introduction

xi

and Ishmael Beah’s Long Way Gone, published half a century apart, Priebe’s essay looks into the two exits typical of these childhood narratives: the exit from childhood, and the exit from Africa. Over time, and looking at a vast range of African literature from South Africa to Algeria, Priebe traces a gradual shift from optimism to pessimism, in respect of the exit. The second contribution, M A R I A O L A U S S E N ’s “Exit and Passing in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light,” investigates the treacherous domains of racial identity and skin colour in apartheid South Africa, as addressed in Wicomb’s fiction about a woman who on the behest of her parents passes as a ‘white’ after being born a ‘coloured’, but for whom this game, this ‘playing in the light’, is a false exit from a racialized predicament. One way of phrasing Olaussen’s question is this: what are the limits to human agency in a racist society? In the third essay, K E N N E T H H A R R O W shifts our attention to a radically different set of aesthetic and social concerns by deconstructing the borders of the Cameroonian director Jean–Pierre Bekolo’s controversial film Les Saignantes. What is the relation between the beginning of this satire and the rest of the film? Where do we locate the border between the social and political reality of Cameroon, theoretical pronouncements on the abuse of power in Cameroon, and the film itself? If there is no exit from the text, as Derrida once claimed, how can this ‘text’ be said even to begin? D A V I D B E L L ’s timely chapter, “Tradition and Creativity in Zakes Mda’s Cion,” introduces the reader to key themes and transformations in the work one of the most prominent South African writers to have emerged since the (perhaps incomplete) exit from apartheid. In his recent turn to American settings, we find yet another example of an African writer in effect leaving Africa – or returning to it by diasporic mediation. B E R N T H L I N DF O R S and S T E P H A N I E N E W E L L both move back in time, Lindfors to an early play by Wole Soyinka, Newell to colonial Ghana during the First World War. In these essays, simplistic assumptions concerning divisions between ‘white’ and ‘black’ writing in Africa, on the one hand, and the teleological necessity of nationalist, anticolonial activism, on the other, are challenged. The historical archive will always offer alternatives to conventional wisdom. S T E F A N H E L G E S S O N ’s essay, finally, asks why literary exile has such different outcomes. If, as Edward Said once argued, exile is a harrowing loss, why have, in fact, so many writers from the global South embraced it? In order to answer that question, the very meaning of the word ‘exile’ in a literary context, and its conventional polarity with ‘home’, needs to be unsettled.

xii

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Translation theory, Helgesson argues, offers a methodology suited to this task. Part I I , “Ending Up and Opting Out in the North,” not only shifts the geographical coordinates of this book, but also broadens its disciplinary range. We move here from cultural studies and biography to literary close reading. E CKHARD B R EI TI NG E R provides a bridge from South to North by looking at the long history of public representations of Africans in north-eastern Bavaria. The symbolic role of black Africans in the culture of this European region is shown to have varied greatly through the centuries, stretching from images of saints to representations of the wild Other, offering a spurious exit from local cultural constraints. G E R A L D P O R T E R ’s essay offers a rare glimpse of a forgotten form of oral poetry in rural England which speaks of an equally forgotten social function. Crow-scarer songs show how social critique as well as a distinct childhood experience could be transmitted across generations. C A T H E R I N E S A N D B A C H –D A H L S T R Ö M ’s contribution focuses on representations of Virginia Woolf’s suicide. She argues that, although there is a likely medical explanation for the suicide, the numerous representations tend to transform it into a literary event – a ‘fittingly’ tragic end to Woolf’s life as a writer. E L I S A B E T H M Å R A L D looks into the hybrid enunciations of identity in the poet Fred Wah’s work, which negotiates a Swedish-Chinese background in twentieth-century Canada. J. H I L L I S M I L L E R asks, in a reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, whether Sethe’s act of infanticide is possible to forgive as a means of exiting the inhuman conditions of slavery. L ARS –H Å K A N S V E N S S O N , finally, ends this section by looking at – endings and beginnings. Paul Muldoon’s poetry offers numerous examples of both which surprise the reader and, instead of defining or closing the poem, leave it bafflingly open. Notably, the poem in focus here –“Why Brownlee Left” – is all about a vanishing act that remains unexplained. Part I I I , “Global Exit?,” consists of one long essay in which S V E R K E R S Ö R L I N offers a survey of the historical development of environmental policy. Even when there is a strong consensus on the reality of global warming, the policy options are by no means clear-cut. Sörlin’s constructive contribution to this debate is to specify the fundamental choices we need to make in terms of how we approach the crisis. Part I V , finally, leaves the academic mode of delivery behind to bring divergent experiences of exit up close, through narrative and personal memory. In other words, “Voicing the Exit” ends this book by reducing the enforced distance so characteristic of academic writing. W I L L Y B A C H ’s “The End of

 Introduction

xiii

the ‘Earth’” makes some of Sörlin’s perspectives vivid in the form a travel narrative. Leaving the Earth-summit in Johannesburg in 2002, Bach travels north through Africa to Uganda, traversing a number of the extreme differences in our world that must be addressed by any viable environmental policy. In “Myself as a Puff of Dust,” J A N E B R Y C E returns to regions close by – in Tanzania – and asks what remains of a world that she once left as a child. The Canadian writer J A N I C E K U L Y K K E E F E R , finally, discusses the vicissitudes of growing up as a diasporic Ukrainian in Canada. What does it mean to have a displaced national sense of self? Should this be preserved, or is there a way of leaving the rigidity of such identities behind without betraying them? Having addressed these questions, this book, with gratitude for the attention that you as reader have shown it, makes its own exit.

|

Part I  S OUTHERN E XITS

Some Thoughts on the Idea of Exit in Recent African Narratives of Childhood

R ICHARD K. P RIEBE

I

S H M A E L B E A H , a young man now living in the U S A , has recently written a memoir of his years as a child soldier in his native Sierra Leone. His book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, was published in 2007 and details six years of his childhood between 1992 when he was twelve years old and 1998 when he was eighteen. In the course of those six years, Beah lost his family in the fighting that took place, fled with other orphaned boys from the rebel army, got picked up by the government army, fought with them against the rebels, and was eventually saved from the fighting by U N I C E F workers. At thirteen he had learned to kill with an A K 47 and with a knife and to participate in the torture and execution of prisoners. At sixteen he was in a rehabilitation centre overcoming drug addiction and learning how to cope with post-traumatic stress syndrome. Beah dedicates his work “to all the children of Sierra Leone who were robbed of their childhoods.” There are essentially two exits in his narrative, one at the beginning where Beah abruptly leaves his childhood behind while still a child, and then at the end when he leaves Africa. Over a half century earlier, the first important modern African narrative of childhood appeared, and it, too, is also structured around an exit from childhood and an exit from Africa, but the significance of these two sets of exits is as different as the details of the two narratives and reflects the relative optimism and pessimism of then and now in Africa. Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir appeared in 1953. In this autobiographical novel we find a fairly simple story of growing up in Guinea in a markedly different era from what we find in A Long Way Gone. At the end of L’enfant

4

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

noir, a young Laye is leaving Guinea for advanced studies in France, having completed his childhood education in Guinea. The adult narrator of the novel also makes us aware of another exit, an exit from the traditional world into which the young Laye was only partially initiated. Education through the acquisition of literacy, first in Africa and later in Europe, insured a fairly abrupt and rather complete exit from the traditional oral world of Africa. The implied hope at the end of the novel, however, is that the multiple exits will ensure Laye’s return to Africa and be an entrance into an adult life where he can help to shape a new Africa. His dream unfulfilled, Laye died in exile from his home in Guinea, but between the time he wrote L’enfant noir and when Beah wrote A Long Way Gone we see a profound shift in what exiting childhood and exiting Africa signify in African narratives of childhood of the past fifty years. As the concepts of childhood and exit are extremely context-dependent, I wish, for heuristic purposes, to stick to rather simple operational definitions of each term. ‘Childhood’ is here employed to cover the stage of human development between infancy and adulthood. Such a stage may not be recognized, or only partially recognized in a given culture, as children can be put into varying degrees of economically productive work on leaving infancy. Thus, the actual biological age of children in this stage may vary greatly, depending on how much the process of education delays entrance into adulthood, but in contemporary global terms the stage of childhood is thought to last roughly between the ages of three or four to somewhere between eighteen and twentyone, a period from first consciousness to fully productive membership in a society, and partly encompassing a period sometimes referred to as ‘youth’. It is a period marked by the individual’s most rapid mental and physical growth, and ideally it is a period of both play and education that affords some protection from life’s hazards and exemption from productivity to enable the child to learn skills necessary to function well and productively as an adult. The term ‘exit’ in general has to do with the passage and process of moving from one area to another. It implies both an end and a beginning and is used here to mark the end of one stage and the beginning of another. In narratological terms, it has to do with a character’s leaving one stage in life as well as the process that gets the character to that point of departure that implies a crossing into a new stage of life. The concept of ‘exit’ here is to be distinguished entirely from the conclusion of a narrative. An implication I will return to is that narratives of childhood generally end with an exit but without any clear conclusion. The exception to this is the narrative that stops at a failed or false exit,

 Some Thoughts on the Idea of Exit

5

a huis clos, essentially a non-exit for the child in terms of his or her development. Such an exit in these narratives has to do with either the destruction of childhood or the death of the child, or with both. Some literary history is now called for. Forty years ago in Stockholm, a small group of African and Scandinavian writers met and discussed a wide range of topics. The papers and discussion by the African writers were gathered and edited by the conference organizer, Per Wästberg, and published in 1969 under the title The Writer in Modern Africa, an important seminal work at the time, as it introduced to the academic world a number of young writers who would later become quite famous. One, Wole Soyinka, returned to Stockholm three decades later to be honoured with the Nobel Prize in literature. Wästberg’s work is now out of print and rarely referred to anymore, an unfortunate fact, as it remains a rich storehouse of material, especially chapter five, where four African writers discuss childhood, mostly in autobiographical terms. Collectively, in terms of where they were born and where they passed their childhoods, these four writers cover all but one of the cardinal points of the continent and are a racially and ethnically diverse group: Dan Jacobson and Dennis Brutus from South Africa, James Ngugi (now Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o) from East Africa, and George Awoonor–Williams (now Kofi Awoonor) from West Africa. No writers from North Africa or Islamic Africa were included in this section and there were no African women at all represented at the conference, glaring omissions by today’s standards. Even after discounting these omissions, we can see that the four writers offer representations of childhood very different from what we now find. Why there was a section under the rubric “African Childhood” in the conference has always been something of a mystery to me. I can only hazard a guess that it was because a number of African writers had already written well-received narratives of childhood (including two by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o) and perhaps because of the Western notion that one could better understand the mature writer if you had a ‘portrait of the artist as a young man’. Years ago, when I discovered The Writer in Modern Africa, it was a revelation: I drank in virtually every word on the “The Writer in a Modern African State,” “Individualism and Social Commitment,” and much more, and I quite ignored the section on childhood. Now, at the exit from my own career in the academy, I wish to honour the appearance of that collection and the exits of two Scandinavian scholars who have aided and enriched my understanding of African literature, Professors Bernth Lindfors and Raoul Granqvist, individuals who helped me to be in a position where I may have some insight into

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the broad significance of African narratives of childhood. Here I’ll be looking at the change in the experience of childhood and the exits from childhood that the most recent narratives convey in relation to those that appeared several generations earlier. In almost every case, the change is as striking as what I noted in my brief comparison of Laye’s novel and Beah’s memoir, and in every case we find the narratives are as much about the state of the continent as they are about the specific situation of an individual. As I have noted, childhood may be thought of as a period between the complete dependency of the infant and the relatively autonomous state of the adult. One exits infancy when one has achieved a certain level of cognitive awareness and biological development; one exits childhood when one has developed cognitively and biologically enough to be recognized by one’s culture as having the ability to contribute to all that is needed for society to have and support children as well as the sick and the elderly. All African narratives of childhood are politically charged reflections on how the child would become, or fail to become, the adult man / woman. Regardless of the geographical area in Africa, regardless of the ethnic background of the author, and regardless of gender, most of these narratives can be read allegorically with the child standing in as a figure for an entire society in transition and moving towards an exit from the current state (though often desiring a prelapsarian world) or finding a huis clos. Covering a period of more than fifty years, African narratives of childhood fall into roughly three phases. Phase one includes childhood narratives from the 1950s through the 1980s where the classroom (Western education/ literacy) was the key to the exit from childhood (as well as from colonialism and the traditional world) into an adult identity as a modern African (modern African state). In phase two, the classroom continues to be central, but the idea of education as the key to the future is interrogated as well as the new identity education promised by way of the classroom experience. In phase three, the gun (or some other emblem of violence) all but replaces the classroom as the key to enter adulthood, a fact most clearly witnessed in the narratives about child soldiers. And in virtually all recent narratives of childhood, even in those where the gun is not the most visible emblem of violence, childhood is lost and destroyed or simply reduced to a state of terror. (The gun is more central to narratives by male writers; the state of terror is something we find in narratives by female writers. See, for example, Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl.) Increasingly, in the narratives from phase one through phase three, the death of the protagonist (or of other children in the

 Some Thoughts on the Idea of Exit

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narrative) or an exit from Africa signifies a huis clos in Africa for those who remain there. In any art and in any culture, the child is generally figured as a natural image of potential, of hope for the family’s future and that of society at large, no less than for the individual. Thus, where the child’s well-being is threatened, so is the potential and hope for the larger society. In short, most of the phase-one narratives, including those in the Wästberg collection, can be read as allegories of hope, while most of the more recent works can be read as allegories of despair. While this is admittedly something of an oversimplification, it does point to changes in the cultural landscape on which the narratives are commenting, and these changes have had an important impact on the structure of the narratives. In general, the narratives do not really conclude but merely stop at a natural transition-point, the end of childhood, the exit that puts one on the point of entering adulthood. The narratives of fifty years ago stop at the end of childhood and show the liberating potential of education. Keep in mind that across Africa this historical period was marked by recent exits from the colonial experience, an exuberant entrance into the postcolonial world, and more subtle transitions from closed ethnic traditional oral cultures to open, hybrid writing cultures. At the end of this essay I’ve included a selected bibliography of texts that contain African childhood narratives in addition to texts that are solely childhood narratives, most of the latter being autobiographies or novels. While not inclusive, the list is fairly representative and could serve to illustrate the above points in greater detail, as they do in a book I am in the process of completing. The age-span of the children in these narratives is roughly from five to eighteen, and in the phase-one narratives we see the child leaving the traditional world of the parents for the hybridized world of the classroom. This shift is generally accompanied by a move from the agrarian countryside to an urbanized environment, from a monocultural world to a multicultural, transcultural – even transnational – world. At the least, there is in each narrative the child’s exit or impending exit from the world of his parents. With Okonkwo’s son in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart going off to the Christian missionaries, we have a shortened version of this narrative pattern, while in the longer versions the child exits his or her primary or secondary education with the promise of some sort of higher education. Life makes art, as well as our lived experience, ironic. The hopeful exits of the early childhood narratives promised a temporary exile leading to a heroic return. It is hard not to read these narratives as commentary on how education

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would be the key to the emergence of successful multi-ethnic, transcultural postcolonial nation-states that might also encompass a pan-African vision of the postcolonial period. Bernard Dadié’s Climbié, Francis Selormey’s The Narrow Path, William Conton’s The African, as well as the childhood sections of Ezekiel Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue and Peter Abrahams’ Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa, among many other works, can be read in this manner. In reality, the promise of exit, along with self-imposed exile, and return, gave way to a reality of death, imprisonment or permanent exile for most of the phase I writers. Ezekiel (Es’kia) Mphahlele is one of the rare exceptions, as later in life he made a permanent return to South Africa, in the 1980s (prior to the end of apartheid), having spent most of his adult life as a nomadic wanderer. Kofi Awoonor is another, having returned to Ghana in the late 1970s. However, the returns have been few and the positive postcolonial state of the peoples and cultures of Africa that education appeared to promise has hardly been realized. Looking closely at Ngũgĩ’s contribution to the childhood section of the 1967 conference, we see something that clearly adumbrates the changes that would soon take place in the recounting of childhood in Africa. Ngũgĩ’s contribution is the only one of the three that does not appear to be overtly autobiographical. What one could not know then was that he was drawing a sketch that would be used later that year (1967) in the publication of his novel A Grain of Wheat. And in that novel, as is well known, Ngũgĩ makes a sharp shift away from the unqualified hope in education as being the panacea for postcolonial Africa he had articulated in his two earlier childhood narratives, The River Between and Weep Not, Child. The focus on education and literacy in the phase-one childhood narratives shows an exit from childhood marked by an exit from traditional, oral culture. Traditional culture may be depicted with some nostalgia, as in L’enfant noir, but increasingly these narratives become more overt in rejecting aspects of the past, though seeking some accommodation of the past in the present. Consider the way the protagonist often views his home as ‘dirty’ when he returns to it and finds everything and everyone in that world is out of order in the system of order and ‘cleanliness’ of his new world. In the traditional world, moreover, there were no choices in what one became as an adult. In effect, one left childhood only to become a replication of one’s mother or father. In The Torrent, a first-rate novel now out of print and almost forgotten, Joseph Abruquah details this rejection of tradition that was taking place as a result of the classroom as well as the evolving hybrid culture that was being shaped by

 Some Thoughts on the Idea of Exit

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children in secondary school. As we see more women writing narratives of female childhoods in the 1980s and 1990s (phase two), a more overtly hostile attitude emerges towards the ‘tyranny of tradition’, from which it is especially difficult for young women to escape. This critique of tradition emerges sharply in the démontage of patriarchy we find in novels such as Assia Djebar’s L’amour, la fantasia and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, though as early as 1956 we see it in Ferdinand Oyono’s Une vie de boy. The shifts, however, are quite complex, and even the increasing critique of traditional culture comes with an increased awareness of what is being lost and the acceptance of a new hybridity. Most of the phase-one narratives of childhood are filled with the exuberant optimism of youth and the longing for independence that the young generally feel as they approach their exit from childhood / entrance into adulthood. And almost always there is an implicit if not overt connection with the colonial status of Africa at the time, a suggested parallel between the child’s emergence from childhood into adulthood and his or her country’s emergence from colonial subjugation into an independent nation-state. Such a parallel is particularly clear in Nervous Conditions, a phase-two narrative. By way of some contrast, two phase-one narratives, Oyono’s novel and Cheikh Hamadou Kane’s L’aventure ambiguë, are the clearest exceptions to the early optimism. The deaths of the young protagonists intimate the pessimism of the most recent childhood narratives, which suggest that there are no viable exit strategies from either childhood or the postcolonial African state other than death, exile, or a hasty initiation into a brutal and brutalizing adulthood. In fact, the most recent works often suggest that there is no viable childhood possible in the postcolonial African state, and while they make implicit connection between the child and Western subjugation, they question the possibility of a positive exit for either the child or his society from the problems of postcoloniality. Before considering exits in this third and most recent phase of childhood narratives, I wish to offer a little more about the second phase of the 1980s and 1990s, an intermediate phase represented by novels such as Assia Djebar’s L’amour, la fantasia, Nuruddin Farah’s Maps, and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. The theme of the child moving between two or more cultural worlds and into a new world of hybridity has been central to the African narratives of childhood even in the phase-one narratives. The troublesome aspects of this condition were for the most part mitigated by the promise of education and literacy, and these works tend to be in the straightforward linear

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form of nineteenth-century European realism, however much that realism is altered by distinctively African stylistic elements. I find, in contrast, more formal and stylistic variation in the second phase, with an increased edginess that comes with a realization that being caught betwixt and between the demands of different cultures, languages, and identities is not necessarily positive. Questions of ethnicity, gender, and politics are now in the forefront of the child’s development and identity, and there are no easy answers for this new African child. Whatever was left of the stable old order of monocultural traditional society is mostly gone, and the child is now caught in an interregnum. In the phase-two narratives, cultural hybridity is a fact of life for the child, but it has produced a very unstable order. One, if not both, of the parents or guardians is now literate, and the parents may even come from different ethnic backgrounds, but the new child lacks the immediate ties to the past that the parents had, and at the end of these narratives there is no clearly defined exit into an orderly future. Past, present, and future are not connected into a neat linear narrative as they are in phase-one narratives or in the patterned life of traditional oral cultures. Francis Selormey, a Ghanaian writer mentioned earlier, published an interesting childhood narrative in 1967, The Narrow Path, a novel that falls into the phase-one group. The trope in the title is clear and is built on the commonplace Christian metaphor of life as a journey, with the moral dictum that sticking to the ‘narrow path’ is the way to a good future. By contrast, Ben Okri’s phase-two narrative, The Famished Road, has a title suggesting that his protagonist faces a wider passage, a road that is ‘famished’ and thus waiting to swallow the child, a danger already suggested in the poem “Death in the Dawn” by Wole Soyinka, to which Okri’s title alludes. Moreover, ‘path’ in the African context suggests a passage for movement in the traditional world where ‘road’ suggests the technological innovations afforded for mobility in the new ‘order’ in Africa, dysfunctional as that new order might be, given the possibilities for disorder and destruction that come with ‘progress’. In her autobiographical novel L’amour, la fantasia, Djebar examines the ‘road’ laid out for her central protagonist in relation to those of several other female characters and in relation to a history of violence against her native Algeria. There is little that is linear in this narrative; in fact, there is no single ‘road’, but only multiple roads with multiple disruptions and re-connections across time and space. The protagonist is born of parents from two different ethnic groups and falls in love with a language that is not the first language of either parent. The novel opens with the father taking the protagonist off to her

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first day of school and hints at a positive future with an image of the grown protagonist going off at dawn with her daughter in hand. The novel ends, however, rather ominously with references to unexpected travels, shores, paths, and ‘hands’ that are not so helping as those of a mother or father. Throughout the book there is a haunting image, a leitmotif of a mutilated hand and yet another of a death cry, and on these notes the novel ends. In Farah’s Maps we have a young orphan in Somalia raised by an aunt and uncle and torn between conflicting desires to be a scholar or a soldier. The conflicting desires, however, run deeper than this surface phenomenon and have to do with basic issues of gender versus sex, affiliation versus filiation, individual versus collective responsibility, and the claims of the past versus those of the present. The novel is essentially an interrogation of these issues as the young man tries to map out his sense of self and course in life. In the end, we see him on trial and are left without any clear sense of his guilt or innocence. Ironically, there are no clear maps, no clear routes, nor any clear exits. The novel concludes with the protagonist in a cul-de-sac. Having passed through a very troubled childhood, he is unable to find any meaningful way to be an adult. Good maps show well-defined borders, at least to the extent that such borders are known. Okri’s The Famished Road is set in a shadowy town in an illdefined land, vaguely, allusively connected with Nigeria. The ethnicity of the people is vaguely Yoruba (though interestingly the author is not Yoruba) and the central character, Azaro, a young boy, is an abiku, a child torn between his presence in the ‘real’ world and his desire to be with his friends in the spirit world. More accurately, he lives in both worlds simultaneously, a state not unlike being on a Möbius strip where being on one side means always being directly connected to the other side. Even in the ‘real’ world of Azaro’s town there are phantasmagoric beings and happenings that defy any connection with the natural world, alongside the kinds of political corruption, poverty, and ecological degradation that are all too common in Africa today. In the end the child and his family have gone through a series of epic struggles, and the family, especially the father, have survived the struggles with incredible resilience. The entire novel is narrated through the child’s consciousness, and his final words, the final words of the novel, are about his dream-world:

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In my sleep I found open spaces where I floated without fear. The sky was serene. A good breeze blew over the road, cleaning away the strange excesses in the air…. A dream can be the highest point of a life.1

The words are rather odd in relation to what was appearing to be a happy ending for the child and his family. In Azaro’s dream, the road no longer appears to be ‘famished’ and threatening, but this after all is only in a dream. There is neither conclusion nor exit of any kind in this novel, and in the end Azaro is still a child. The final line seems to float without a clear point of reference, but if it does refer to Azaro’s life, it is a rather sad comment on a life apparently choked off from further development into adulthood. Not surprisingly, the narrative does not end here – Azaro comes back, in one of the very few sequels to a narrative of childhood in Africa, Songs of Enchantment. The sequel, however, does not resolve anything and appears to be only an extension of the earlier work. In the final words of the second novel, Azaro wonders: “Maybe one day we will see that beyond our chaos there could always be a new sunlight, and serenity.” Any exit from the present reality is deferred to an indefinite future with Azaro’s “maybe.” It is easy, perhaps even too easy, to view the children in these phase-two narratives as allegorically representing the state of the modern African state, torn between old traditions born of homogeneous worlds and new realities born of the intersections of those old worlds with transnational and transethnic influences. These influences appear to be effectively absorbed and integrated into children with hybrid identities (see, for example, Soyinka’s Aké), but not all are entirely comfortable with the new identity (see L’amour, la fantasia). Collectively, the influences are absorbed by society, but they are not entirely integrated into any well-functioning social reality. The children in the narratives of the first phase exit childhood with the uncertainty that all growth has for us, but with a strong sense of their individual and collective identities and the clear promise that education would lead them into a brave new world. The children of the narratives in this second phase have seen the brave new world and all its wonders, and they appear more insecure in relation to what those wonders hold for them and their futures, young Soyinka in Aké being an exception, and the child in Maps being closer to the rule. With the new millennium comes the phase-three childhood narratives, in which the landscape darkens considerably as the social construct of childhood in Africa is horrifically threatened if not destroyed. The dominant content of 1

Ben Okri, The Famished Road (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991): 500.

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childhood narrative over the past decade or so has dealt with the reality of child soldiers in Africa or, more broadly, the child with a gun or machete in his /her hand, the situation we find in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah n’est pas obligé and Monénembo’s L’aîné des orphelins. The children in these novels have lost their families through war and genocide and have found new ‘families’ of orphans who must learn to kill to survive. In Monénembo’s novel, the young protagonist has killed to protect his sister from sexual abuse, but in the end he is, ironically, facing his own execution as a genocidist. The protagonist in Kourouma’s novel finds an exit from the child army in which he was trapped, but the exit is merely a deus ex machina salvation, an exile to another land after seeing many of his young soldier friends meet very violent ends. As in the case of Okri’s novels, however, exit is merely deferred and the child protagonist appears again in a sequel. Kourouma’s last work before his death, Quand on refuse on dit non, appeared in 2004 and reprises the young protagonist of Allah n’est pas obligé. Another very rare case of a sequel to a childhood narrative, it merely serves to underscore a concern with the reality of violence that is destroying childhood in Africa. With all the children in these recent narratives, we see their childhood lost, destroyed or, at the least, heavily mutilated. The child soldier reflects a reality today in many parts of Africa, and the clear implication of this reality is that a whole generation of children exist who have not been in school for much, if any, of their formative years. At the very least, among the many problems thus created there is a whole generation of lost literacy in Africa. Emmanuel Dongala is the most positive of the writers in this most recent phase of childhood narratives, and in Johnny chien méchant he explores the nature of the child soldier in relation to an essentialist position on the nature of good and evil, with two contrasting protagonists dominating alternating chapters. One character, a teen-age boy soldier, personifies evil in his wanton rape and destruction; the other, a teen-age girl, holds on to her humanity despite the brutal destruction of her family. The boy, “Mad Dog Johnny,” is a product of pop-culture violence where the play of childhood transforms into deadly reality. Playing the role of a Rambo, but with a real gun, Johnny makes an abrupt exit from childhood along with the other child soldiers in this novel. The ‘play’ here means becoming a Rambo with all the worst elements of male-dominant globalized pop culture that such a move entails. Johnny dominates with his gun and his penis; both are his exit passports from the world of childhood to a world of rape and killing. The girl, like Johnny, is also forced to exit the classroom and childhood, but she moves towards the

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adulthood thrust upon her by accepting responsibility for the care of her remaining family. What holds her together and keeps her moving forward is a blend of traditional and literate intellectuality along with an inchoate belief that the best of the oral past, preserved in education in the new literate world, can offer the possibility of a humane future for her and her society. In the end, as the two stories come crashing together in a powerful denouement with no small amount of poetic justice, the girl triumphs over the boy. The future, however, is less clear than the certitude of this conclusion. For all the hope the girl still has, what Africa has lost here, as in all these recent narratives, goes beyond the loss of childhood and individual lives: the broad hope afforded through literacy and education for the children in the phase-one narratives. Dongala tries to get around the pessimism of a cul-de-sac ending for the girl by having a benefactor intercede and offer the possibility for the girl to escape to another country where she can have an education and a future. It is, however, but another deus ex machina solution, and it is important to note that her place of exile will not be in Africa. The childhood narratives of Dongala, Beah, Kourouma, and Monénembo afford some of the clearest examples of the problematic exits from childhood that we find in the phase-three narratives. However, two of the very best recent African childhood narratives are not about childhood soldiers, although guns and violence figure in both. While between them they offer somewhat different views on the future of Africa, they both show dislocated children in dysfunctional families and dysfunctional states from which the protagonists escape through exile from Africa. One of these narratives is a novel, Chris Abani’s Graceland, and the other, a memoir, Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood. Fuller’s story is an autobiographical narrative about a white girl’s childhood in Zimbabwe after U D I (Unilateral Declaration of Independence, 1965) and from there through the fighting that finally led to majority rule. Fuller, a third-generation European African, was born in England during her parents’ brief stay there but spent all her early childhood in Zimbabwe, finishing her teenage years in Malawi and Zambia. In several ways, this narrative is very different from most of the other African narratives of childhood over the past fifty years: the narrator is a white female who was not born in Africa but passed her childhood in three African countries; the structure of the narrative is very episodic and includes photographs of the child and her family as well as historical details of her African countries. Fuller’s narrative, however, is an exception that proves the rule regarding the centrality of social allegory to all African narratives of

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childhood and marks them with this defining generic quality: the personal health of the child is linked to the political health of the state. Moreover, the transcultural, trans-ethnic, and transnational aspects of her narrative are squarely in line with the other childhood narratives of phase three. Another recent childhood narrative of a white African, J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood, is a memoir that could stand in for Fuller’s in making these points. It should also be noted that both Fuller and Coetzee, Africans by virtue of roots and childhoods lived in Africa, have exited the continent to live elsewhere. I’ll return to Fuller’s narrative, but it will help to consider first a more immediately powerful illustration of the above linkage between child and state as it plays out in almost all of the third-phase African narratives of childhood, Graceland. The main setting for Abani’s novel is a poor quarter of Lagos, Nigeria in 1983. From the opening we are bombarded with images of rust, decay,and dirt, and with oppressive smells. The land of the opening is extended across time and space in alternating chapters, set in the town of Afikpo in Eastern Nigeria, that take us back to 1972 and even a few years before, with detailed references to Biafra and the horrors of the Nigerian civil war. The title looms with heavy irony, as there is little grace in this land, but it connects with the aspirations of the protagonist, whose name is Elvis, a boy who has just turned sixteen and wants to dance like his namesake and dreams of realizing his potential by going to the U S A . The cover to the novel gives us an apt image of the boy –we see a child trying to be a man with cigarette dangling from his mouth in the mode of an old fashioned American movie tough guy. Angry (or is he scared?), the manchild glares off to the side at something in the direction to which his cigarette is pointing. The image of the cigarette is foregrounded, making the face of the manchild look relatively smaller. Elvis lost his mother to breast cancer when he was very young and lives with his father, whom he hates. In the course of his sixteenth year, however, Elvis will also lose his father and come to understand and respect him. He is a gifted child who reads Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and the poetry of Rilke. We see him in a market buying second-hand books, and while he buys a copy of Crime and Punishment and Another Country, he also looks over a pile of chapbooks and gets a copy of Mabel the Sweet Honey That Poured Away (a Nigerian chapbook from the 1960s with a cover that pictures a young, white, European-looking woman). A random reader, he is also a naive kid who thinks he can do something with his dancing, loves the manicheean generic world of good guys and bad guys he finds in old American cowboy and gangster films, and is intrigued by makeup and cross-dressing. For Elvis and

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his friends, the good guys are always “John Wayne” and the bad guys are always “Actor,” regardless of who is really playing the part. Elvis lives in a world of ‘copies’ and appears to have few clear and authentic African models for his identity. From the chapters that take us back to his earlier years in Afikpo we see that he lived there in a world that was more homogeneously Igbo, though traditions such as rites of passage rituals had changed so much as to be meaningless. And while he had a stable and loving relationship with his grandmother, he is witness to the sexual abuse of a cousin, and he is himself raped by the uncle who is abusing his cousin. At fourteen, Elvis is forced to quit school for economic reasons. Both his parents were well-educated; the mother had been a school teacher and the father a school inspector, but with the mother now dead the father falls on hard times after losing his job for political reasons and turns to alcohol. The father and son go to Lagos, where they have relatives, but the father finds no work and continues to drink and fight with Elvis. Any understanding of the manchild’s story demands that we pay attention to both the style and the structure of the narrative, no less than to the unfolding of past events in Afikpo. The dominant narrative mode is realistic, and this realism is maintained in chapters that turn to the child’s past. Events recounted in the past and present are horrific, but those in the present are progressively more and more bizarre and touched with surreal qualities similar to those that dominate in Okri’s The Famished Road. Fired from a job in construction for reasons beyond his control, Elvis finds work with an unsavory character, Redemption, and moves through jobs that arc towards no good end: first as a dance-hall gigolo, then as a drug smuggler, and finally as a worker for a slave trade that turns out to be a trade in people to be used for their body parts. Towards the end of the novel, the chapters cease to alternate between past and present, Afikpo and Lagos, and shuttle instead between Lagos and other parts of Western Nigeria, specifically the Yoruba towns of Abeokuta and Ijebu. While Elvis is on a road trip through Western Nigeria, fleeing from the military men who are involved in the drug smuggling and the sale of human body parts, Sunday, his father, is taking a stand behind barricades in the Lagos ghetto where they live to keep it from being razed by the military for development. The father is killed in the abortive resistance and is transformed in the process into a hero of legendary proportions, as is another man, the King (of Beggars), whom Elvis had earlier befriended. Elvis is captured and tortured by the military, and when he is released he is barely alive. He

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survives by living with a group of beggar children in the most degraded conditions imaginable, including horrific sexual exploitation. Almost dying of fever, Elvis is nursed back to a semblance of health by an eleven-year-old girl called Blessing. At this point he links up again with Redemption, who gives him his passport with a valid visa for travel to the U S A . At the end of the novel, Elvis is in Murtala Mohammed International Airport drinking a coke, musing about his parents, and waiting to exit Nigeria with his new identity as Redemption. Such a bare-bones accounting makes the novel appear transparently allegorical, but it is not very clear how the names lock into any stable allegory: Redemption (a friend who bribed his way through school, becomes a petty criminal, and provides the passport Elvis needs to leave Africa), Jagua (a dreadlocked spiritualist with a python called Merlin), Sunday, Beatrice (his mother), Caesar (aka the King of Beggars), Felicia (an aunt), Conrad (a slaver), the Colonel (the head of the military gang of criminals), Kansas (a cowboy-movie-buff friend of Elvis’s), Comfort (his father’s girlfriend in Lagos), Freedom (a neighbour in Lagos who is a teacher), and Confidence (another neighbour). A quality of the individual is sometimes but not always caught in these names, and they do not interconnect with any other level of narrative, except indirectly. They appear to serve as connecting links to other texts and other narratives, while also serving to undercut all sense of Ibgo, Nigerian or even African identity, as most of the names are Western. Consider that the bottled soft drink, Coca-Cola, appearing as it does throughout the text, serves as a link to a larger narrative of globalization. Coca-Cola, not only here but also in some of the other recent African childhood narratives, serves as an interesting image of the globalized economy that is contributing to the destruction of childhood. The name of the drink has its origin in the coca plant of South America and the kola nut of West Africa, two narcotics mixed with sugar from the Caribbean to make a drink that has little nutritive value in helping children to grow. In fact, it is not unlike the cigarettes that are also a constant with Elvis. One apparent exception to all the non-African links is Chief Okonkwo, a corrupt politician. One cannot help but think of Achebe’s character and the idea that the past, along with traditional names, has been lost or corrupted. Oye, another of the few characters with a Nigerian name, provides a clue for our understanding. Also referred to as “Granny,” she is the nurturing maternal grandmother of Elvis. An illiterate in Afikpo, she is closer to the old traditions than anyone in the novel, but in her youth she worked for a Scottish missionary couple from whom she learned to speak English, though

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with a Scottish accent. She has pen-pals around the world but needs others to read and write the letters. She is thus, like all the characters in the novel, a product of powerful forces of transcultural, transnational change about which she has little understanding and with which she is ill-equipped to deal. Now consider Jagua, an individual whose confused mysticism proves of little use against the forces that want to bulldoze the homes in the slum at the end of the novel. Early on we are told that Jagua is not his real name and that nobody thought to find out what his name really was. At the head and end of each chapter there are more links in this hypertext, short notes and quotations that seem at first disconnected from the narrative: notes on Igbo customs, recipes, notes on Nigerian medicinal plants, the Islamic call to prayer, a psalm from the Bible, lines from Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and two letters from the chapbook Mabel The Sweet Honey That Poured Away. However, Elvis always wears a Fulani pouch around his neck, and in it he carries his mother’s Bible and her journal. The headings, we are led to surmise, come from what he carries in that pouch as well as from his own eclectic reading. He takes this pouch off as he is about to exit for America, as he does not wish to attract unwanted attention from either Nigerian or American customs officials; but it will go with him as part of his attended luggage. Every chapter opens with two headings, the second of which is in italics and often appears to be a commentary on the first heading. All of the headings are about Igbo life, and most are primarily focused on rituals around the use of the kola nut, but we come to understand that the only kola Elvis now has any connection with is the globalized kola used in the formula to make CocaCola. The non-italicized heading of the final chapter makes an absolute and ethnocentric claim, “There is only one history: Igbo,” that the life-experience of Elvis has totally undercut.2 Perhaps being Igbo is still the first claim on Elvis’ identity, but he will take it with him to America only in the history his mother’s notes provide. It is at best a very fragmented history. The italicized heading of the final chapter appears less a commentary on the heading about Igbo history than a commentary on all the preceding chapter headings dealing with ritual: “But there are things that cannot be contained, even in ritual. The Igbo have a saying: Oya but uto ndu. That is the joy of life.”3

2 3

Chris Abani, Graceland (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004): 299. Abani, Graceland, 299.

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Ritual serves to contain and maintain our identity within a particular homogeneous group. Born Igbo but raised in heterogeneous Lagos and identified first by the name of an American pop icon, and now by the name on a borrowed passport, Elvis cannot be ‘contained’ by his birth identity. While he carries remnants of that identity with him in exiting Africa, he is leaving a place where that identity and his family connections have been effectively destroyed. In Nigeria he has mostly used English, and he will have even less reason to use and maintain the Igbo language in his new home. He has become a transcultural, transnational, trans-ethnic nomad. And here I see links with Alexandra Fuller’s childhood narrative, a work that in terms of content seems quite different from Graceland. Fuller, too, has become a transcultural, transnational, trans-ethnic nomad. At the end of her story she has left Africa, married an American, and established a new home in the U S A , though insisting on her African identity, as she does in a postscript to the memoir. Fuller’s narrative of her childhood in Africa (Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi) has little of the extreme violence we have seen in the other phase-three narratives, but along the edges violence is always a presence. While her family is poor by white African standards, the economic discrepancy between her family and the families of the Africans who worked for them is great. What they share most immediately is a lack of stability in their jobs, and their family lives are born most immediately of the violence that surrounds them all. Everything in the Fuller family is always on the verge of collapsing, and the most apparently visible sign of this to the young child is the fact that only two of the five siblings survive their infancy. Like Graceland, Fuller’s narrative may also be seen as a hypertext. Both have titles that resonate with other stories beyond those of the central character. Graceland is the home of the original Elvis, but a land with grace is also the opposite of the Nigeria that Elvis is leaving and the imagined community he feels he is moving towards. Fuller’s title comes from A.P. Herbert, an English humorist, but the words resonate chillingly here, as her family is always on the verge of “going to the dogs” and her mother, in her drunken bouts, is already there. The subtitle, “An African Childhood,” refers to Fuller’s own childhood but also, however implicitly, childhood in general in Africa. The title-page also has a photo of a young child (Alexandra?) with two adults whom you see only from the waist down, with the result that the focus is clearly on the child, who, with the headless adults, stands behind three dogs. After a dedication page (the work is dedicated to her parents, her living sister, and the memory of the deceased siblings), there is a page with the quotation from Herbert fol-

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lowed by a page with a map of the three countries she lived in, and a smaller map of Africa with the detailed area in Africa blocked out. The map is followed by a page with the title minus the subtitle. The first chapter is headed “Rhodesia, 1976” and includes a picture of Bobo (Alexandra) aged seven loading shells into the cartridge of a gun that is leaning nearby. Linearity in the narrative is disrupted by the photos that appear throughout the text, but also through the back-and-forth movement between the personal story and the history of the regions in Africa where Fuller lived. To anyone unaware of what was going on in Rhodesia in 1976 (black African resistance to minority white rule following U D I ), there is probably a complete disconnect with the contents of the first chapter, which essentially deals with the fears of a young girl getting up to pee in the middle of the night, having to go to the toilet in the dark and being told by her parents not to creep into their bedroom, as they sleep with loaded guns at their sides and could shoot her by mistake. The fourth chapter is headed with a picture of the residents of an African village. This chapter bears the title “Chimurenga: The Beginning” and connects family history with African history, specifically the colonial history of Rhodesia that led to rebellions culminating in the formation of a postcolonial state. Chimurenga, Shona for ‘war of liberation’, refers to the independence struggles that led to the modern nation-state of Zimbabwe, but that beginning is hers as well. Going back to Cecil Rhodes’ conquests in the nineteenth century, Fuller details the Mashona rebellions and ends the chapter with a question the rest of the text serves to answer: “how can we […] hope to win against this history? We wazungus. We white Africans of shrugged-off English, Scottish, Dutch origin” (29). The implicit answer on one level is that they can’t ‘win’, but on another level Fuller’s narrative is about ‘winning’ by identifying with Africa and all who live there. Fuller’s narrative ends inconclusively with a number of issues unresolved. The young Alexandra has come to understand her identity as an African, but she leaves the continent, and thus her story, so carefully tied to that of her region in Africa, appears to sever connections. She leaves behind her the dysfunctional family, the violence, and the unravelling communities. And she leaves behind an echoing question of how you can continue to be African when you are no longer in Africa, a question of identity also implicit in Graceland and the other phase-three narratives where surviving childhood has come to mean exiting Africa. These narratives, however, with their hypertext qualities, their lack of linearity, and indeterminate, inconclusive endings, connect most strongly with what is arguably the most African of traditional

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verbal art forms, the dilemma tale, a narrative that has a beginning and middle but lacks an ending. Instead, the dilemma tale, like the riddle, poses a question, but unlike the riddle there is no clear-cut answer. Like a hypertext, the tale continues in a potentially endless mode of narration as the audience picks up the thread and argues multiple conclusions. The childhood narratives may show a desire on the part of the protagonist to return to Africa, but the narratives extended in the lives of the authors have shown exile to be permanent. I wish to examine briefly one other recent childhood narrative, The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeymi, a Nigerian writer who has lived most of her life in England. This stunning first novel fits all the general characteristics of African narratives of childhood: like most of them, it appears to be somewhat autobiographical, the protagonist is a precocious child (and in this case a very bright eight-year -old girl) who is significantly different from her parents, classroom education is a significant element, and the novel ends with no clear conclusion, though there is an important exit for the child. In its details, however, The Icarus Girl appears to be unlike any other African childhood narrative from any of the three phases. Jess (Jessamy), the protagonist, was born in England to a Nigerian (Yoruba) mother and an English father. In the course of the novel, she travels to Nigeria for the first time to meet her relatives, particularly her Yoruba grandfather, and a second time to get help for a problem she is having. In Nigeria she learns of her Yoruba name, Wuraola, but is further confused when she finds herself referred to as oyinbo (white person), though she is clearly black. On one level, the problem would seem to be her sense of difference from both parents and a need to adjust to the transcultural reality not just of her home life but in her school and with her friends. The question of how she can be both Jess and Wuraola at the same time is paramount in her mind. She comes to have a friend that no one else can see. The friend has a Yoruba name, Titiola, which Jess cannot pronounce, so she calls her friend Tilly (or Tilly Tilly). Jess would seem to have a multiple-personality disorder, but that is challenged by the fact that she learns things from Titiola that she could not have found elsewhere, including the fact that she had a stillborn twin. Titiola wants to take over the body of Jess and appears to succeed, as witnessed by the fact that Jess suddenly can converse in Yoruba, a language she knew little about, as she rarely heard her mother use it, and she could not even pronounce Tilly’s name. Tilly is clearly a doppelgänger, common enough in all literatures, but here coupled with Yoruba belief about the threatening nature of ibeji (twins). Among the Yoruba, the nature of twins is closely aligned with

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the idea of the enfant terrible, the Yoruba abiku, the child who is caught in a cycle of death and rebirth. While living, such a child is constantly called back by spirit friends in the world of the unborn. The idea of the abiku is common with most African ethnic groups and works as an implicit trope for the child who is between worlds, the child we essentially find in all African narratives of childhood, and occasionally as an overt trope, as in The Famished Road (where the main character is an abiku) and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (where Alexandra sees herself as having potentially been “a coming back baby”). Beneath the apparent differences there are important similarities between The Icarus Girl and the other narratives of childhood, the first being the connection between the narrative (whether it be fictional or autobiographical) and the life of the author. Unlike any other African narrative of childhood, The Icarus Girl opens outside of Africa and ends in Africa, seemingly reversing the exit from Africa one finds in most African narratives of childhood. However, when we turn to the biographical details of Helen Oyeyemi we find that while she was born in Nigeria she has lived in London since the age of four and has recently completed her university education at Cambridge. Unlike other recent African narratives of childhood, The Icarus Girl has nothing to do with the overt violence of war, but it does focus in on the narrower range of petty violence among children and in their families that results from dealing with larger questions of transnationalism and transculturalism, violence that can be much harsher in its mental manifestations than in its physical effects. Moreover, the novel ends with a horrific car accident outside Lagos, an area of the world that has more such accidents than possibly anywhere else. Aside from this accident, the end is rather indeterminate, and we are left to ask what the family could hope to find in coming to Nigeria. The father, who is not African, understands little about Yoruba culture, and his attempt to protect his daughte r results, ironically, in the road accident. The mother, Nigerian by birth, has been away from Nigeria too long to negotiate the elements of the traditional world that still exist there. And Jess is haunted by her spiritual connection to Nigeria in the form of her dead twin. After the accident, Tilly exits the body of Jess, but it is not clear what this exit signifies. We are not even left with the secure knowledge that Jess will survive the road accident and live to exit Nigeria, though it is clear that she and her parents would have no reason to stay. All African narratives of childhood are profoundly political, saying as much about countries as about individuals. Here the political is buried deeply beneath the personal, but if we look closely, it is

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there behind the hum of quotidian details, not unlike what one finds in that early African narrative of childhood, L’enfant noir. But, unlike that reflection of a more hopeful era, this work ends without any clearly defined exits for the protagonist and is closely connected with other recent works of this African genre ending with a huis clos. While the Yoruba idea of the abiku sets up one trope of no escape, the title points to another, the fatal turn made by a youth in Greek mythology, with both implying that Jess cannot escape from her situation. Earlier, I noted that the idea of exit in the early narratives of childhood could prompt a reading of these narratives as allegories of hope in the emerging postcolonial landscape. The story of the child going off to school provided a framework where the old authority of both the traditional oral culture and the colonial order could be critiqued while showing a positive new order based on the authority of the emerging literate African. The trans-ethnic, transcultural, and transnational elements in the phase-two and phase-three narratives are defining characteristics that increasingly replace the critique of traditional and colonial authority in the phase-one narratives and are increasingly the elements that shape the development of all the child protagonists, whether fictional or autobiographical. These elements are not there to be critiqued but to be understood in relation to a new sense of African identity that is quite different from the new identity we find in the phase-one narratives. Add the all-engulfing reality of globalism and these elements serve to set up violent conflicts that destroy childhood if not the child, leaving the child scarred by the experience, if he or she manages to survive. What positive spin can any author put on such destruction? Whatever hope is invested in a productive future for the central character is gained only by having the protagonist exit the scene of the devastation. If we look at the realities of the African continent, it is hard to find much that might undercut the evident pessimism of these narratives, as, in fact, all of the narratives closely reflect much of what has been happening on the continent. Even if, as in the exceptional case of The Icarus Girl, the work does not end with an exit from Africa, its conclusion indicates there is no viable exit in Africa from childhood into adulthood, a view that is hard to counter, given the fact that virtually all of the authors currently reside outside of Africa in what seem to be a permanent state of exile. Paradoxically, I think it highly likely that very few of the writers I have considered have a pessimistic view of the future of Africa, nor, even, that they think of their childhood narratives as being pessimistic. Most of the scientists

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who are concerned with the issue of global warming are very optimistic about the future because they believe that recognizing the problem is the first step to bringing about change. The violence in Africa and the attendant destruction of childhood and the classroom (literacy) are, like global warming, the results of human actions and are thus reversible. Likewise, these authors would not be publishing their works if they could not imagine an Africa to which they might return. Childhood, both real and imagined, is a phase of possibility, and collectively the African narratives of childhood allow consideration of a range of possibilities for Africa and those who live there. Laye’s narrative, along with all the other phase-one and phase-two narratives where the classroom is central, allows for an exit from childhood leading to a potentially productive outcome for the individual and society. Beah’s narrative, along with the other phase-three narratives where the classroom is absent, do not allow for any such exit. In these narratives, there is no reasonable alternative to the child exiting Africa. Emmanuel Dongala is perhaps the most optimistic writer imaginable, despite the fact that he is living in exile, having had to flee the violence of the Congo. The two children in Johnny chien méchant, the violent boy and the education-driven girl, are his eloquent testimonials to the diametrically opposite possibilities for exiting childhood with which Africa and the world must now come to terms.

NARRATIVES OF AFRICAN CHILDHOOD Abani, Chris. GraceLand (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004). Abrahams, Peter. Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954). Abruquah, Joseph W. The Torrent (London: Longman, 1968). Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart (African Writers Series; London: Heinemann, 1958). Anyanike, Ike. “Reflections on a Biafran Boyhood,” in Boyhood: Growing Up Male: A Multicultural Anthology, ed. Franklin Abbott, Jr. (Madison & London: U of Wisconsin P , 1993): 22–30. Atta, Sefi. Everything Good Will Come (Northampton M A : Interlink, 2005). Awoonor, Kofi. This Earth, My Brother… (Garden City N Y : Doubleday: 1971). Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). Bedford, Simi. Yoruba Girl Dancing (New York: Penguin, 1991). Ben Jelloun, Tahar. L’enfant de sable (Paris: Seuil, 1985). Tr. by Alan Sheridan as The Sand Child (London: Quartet, 1988).

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Beti, Mongo. Mission terminée (Paris: Corrêa, Buchet–Chastel, 1957). Tr. by Peter Green as Mission to Kala (African Writers Series; London & Ibadan: Heinemann Educational, 1964). Biebuyck, Daniel, ed. & tr. The Mwindo Epic (Berkeley: U of California P , 1971). Bok, Francis. Escape from Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003). Camus, Albert. Le premier homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), tr. by David Hapgood as The First Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). Coetzee, J.M. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (New York: Viking, 1997). Conton, William. The African (London: Heinemann, 1960). Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions (London: Women’s Press, 1988). Dadié, Bernard B. Climbié (Paris: Seghers, 1956). Tr. by Karen C. Chapman as Climbié (African Writers Series; London: Heinemann, 1971). Diallo, Nafissatou. De Tilène au plateau: Une enfance dakaroise (Dakar: Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1975). Tr. by Dorothy S. Blair as A Dakar Childhood (Harlow, Essex: Longman Drumbeat, 1982). Djebar, Assia. L’amour, la fantasia (Paris: Jean–Claude Lattès, 1985). Tr. by Dorothy S. Blair as Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (Portsmouth N H : Heinemann, 1993). Djoleto, Amu. The Strange Man (African Writers Series; London: Heinemann, 1967). Dongala, Emmanuel. Johnny chien méchant (Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 2002). Tr. by Maria Louise Ascher as Johnny Mad Dog (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005). ——. Le feu des origines (Paris: Albin Michel, 1987). Tr. by Lilian Corti & Yuval Taylor as Fire of Origins (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2001). ——. Les petits garçons naissent aussi des étoiles (Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 1998). Tr. by Joel Réjouis & Val Vinokurov as Little Boys Come From the Stars (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001). Equiano, Olaudah. The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, ed. Paul Edwards (1789; Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1989). Farah, Nuruddin. Maps (New York: Pantheon, 1986). Fuller, Alexandra. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (New York: Random House, 2003). Gatheru, R. Mugo. Child of Two Worlds (London: Heinemann, 1966). Huxley, Elspeth. The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood (1959; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962). Iweala, Uzodinma. Beasts of No Nation (New York: HarperCollins & London: John Murray, 2005). Kane, Cheikh Hamadou. L’aventure ambiguë (Paris: Julliard, 1961). Kourouma, Ahmadou. Allah n’est pas obligé (Paris: Seuil, 2000). Tr. by Frank Wynne as Allah Is Not Obliged (London: William Heinemann, 2006). ——. Quand on refuse on dit non (Paris: Seuil, 2004).

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Laye, Camara. L’enfant noir (Paris: Plon, 1953). Tr. by James Kirkup as The Dark Child, intro. William Plomer (London & Glasgow: William Collins, 1954). Lessing, Doris. Martha Quest (New York: Viking, 1952). Mahfouz, Naguib. “Half a Day,” tr. by Denys Johnson–Davies in The Time and the Place and Other Stories (1991; Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1992): 55– 58. Matabane, Mark. Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa (New York: Macmillan, 1986). Mezlekia, Nega. Notes from the Hyena’s Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood (New York: Picador, 2000). Monénembo, Tierno. L’aîné des orphelins (Paris: Seuil, 2000). Tr. by Monique Fleury Nagem as The Oldest Orphan, intro. Adele King (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004). Modupe, Prince. I Was a Savage, foreword by Elspeth Huxley (London: Museum Press, 1958). Reissued in a revised ed. in the U S A as A Royal African (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969). Mphahlele, Ezekiel (Es’kia). Down Second Avenue (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1971). ——. Father Come Home (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1984). Mzamane, Mbulelo Vizikhungo. The Children of Soweto (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1982). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The River Between (London: Heinemann, 1965). ——. Weep Not, Child (London: Heinemann, 1964). Niane, D.T., ed. Sundiata: an epic of old Mali (London: Longman, 1965). Oyeyemi, Helen. The Icarus Girl (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 2006). Oyono, Ferdinand. Une vie de boy (Paris: Julliard, 1956). Tr. by John Reed as Houseboy (African Writers Series; London: Heinemann, 1966). Okri, Ben. The Famished Road (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991). ——. Songs of Enchantment (Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1993). Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North, tr. Denys Johnson–Davies (London: Heinemann, 1969). Selormey, Francis. The Narrow Path (London: Heinemann, 1967). Soyinka, Wole. Aké (London: Rex Collings, 1981). ——. Ìsarà, A Voyage Around “Essay” (New York: Random House, 1989). Tutuola, Amos. The Palm-Wine Drinkard (London: Faber & Faber, 1952). Wästberg, Per, ed. The Writer in Modern Africa: African-Scandinavian Writers’ Conference, Stockholm, 1967 (New York: Africana, 1969). See ch. 5, “African Childhood,” narratives by Dan Jacobson, Dennis Brutus, James Ngugi (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o), and George Awoonor–Williams (Kofi Awoonor), 85–118. |

Generation and Complicity in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

1

M ARIA O LAUSSEN

Z

1.

W I C O M B ’ S N O V E L Playing in the Light is set in present-day Cape Town and depicts the consequences of the Population Registration Act of 1950 for South Africans of different ethnic backgrounds who came to be classified as coloured during the apartheid era. The novel uses a protagonist who, because of her age and her life-experience, does not see herself as directly involved in the politics of apartheid, and it thereby approaches the concerns of the generation who were caught up in the turmoil of the early 1950s from a distance. Through this distance, the novel continues to address a central concern in Wicomb’s earlier fiction, that of conflict between generations. Generation is, in Wicomb’s work, not simply a concern for individual families but deeply connected to and reflective of the political legacy of coloured identities. In her introduction to the volume Coloured by History, Shaped by Place, Zimitri Erasmus defines coloured identities as formed at the Cape through the colonial encounter of Dutch and British colonists, conquered indigenous peoples, slaves from South and East India and East Africa. Sexual relations between European traders, adventurers, and colonial administrators and indigenous and slave women took place within deeply unequal power structures. The time of European expansion also saw the development of scientific 1

OË

This essay, here revised, first appeared in Social Dynamics 35.1 (March 2009):

149–61.

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racism with the aim of creating a hierarchy of races based on an ideology of purity. According to Thiven Reddy, the idea of separate races is created in the aftermath of the European arrival, and it is this arrival that “gives meaning to the word ‘native’. European colonization makes ‘nativeness’ and ‘mixed race’ categories possible.”2 In relation to ideals of racial purity, coloured identities have therefore been “negatively defined in terms of ‘lack’ or taint, or in terms of a ‘remainder’ or excess which does not fit a classificatory scheme. These identities have been spoken about in ways that associate them with immorality, sexual promiscuity, illegitimacy, impurity and untrustworthiness.”3 Another aspect of the legacy that Wicomb addresses in her fiction, and which is articulated through generational conflict, concerns the issue of complicity. Erasmus traces this complicity to the fact that coloured identities are formed in hierarchical relations to both white and black African identities; they are experienced and constructed as less than white and better than black. On the one hand, the meaning of being coloured is shaped by the lived experience of white domination. On the other hand, it is shaped by complicity with these racist discourses through its creation of an inferior black African Other as one if its “constitutive outsides” and complicity with the exclusion and subordination of black Africans. 4

What Erasmus identifies here is the fact that the association of whiteness with superiority, and the very real privilege granted to persons classified as white under the Population Registration Act, worked within a racial order that marked coloureds with dark skin as inferior. ‘Playing white’ gains its particular meaning within this legacy of complicity. Wicomb’s earlier works of fiction, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) and David’s Story (2000), both address the question of coloured identities in relation to racist discourse, often depicted as the values of an older generation viewed from the point of view of their children. You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town consists of short stories which all share the same protagonist, Frieda Shenton, a young coloured woman who grows up in Little Namaqualand and who moves to Cape Town and later to England. In the last story, 2

Thiven Reddy, “The Politics of Naming: The Constitution of Coloured Subjects in South Africa,” in Coloured by History: Shaped by Place, ed. Zimitri Erasmus (Cape Town: Kwela, 2001): 71. 3 Zimitri Erasmus, “Re-Imagining Coloured Identities in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in Coloured by History: Shaped by Place, ed. Erasmus, 17. 4 Erasmus, “Re-Imagining Coloured Identities,” 24.

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the previous ones are revealed to be the written work of the protagonist herself, work she is asked to defend against her mother’s harsh criticism on her return to the village. The political differences between the generations are concentrated on the ambitions that the parents have for their daughter, and that can be achieved through an acceptance of racist power-relations. The stories focus on issues of language, education, and domesticity as the arenas in which the political differences are played out. Wicomb’s novel David’s Story is the most experimental of her works. The narrator presents a story that is in many ways “jumbled,” as she puts it. She expresses this in the context of an ongoing discussion with the protagonist David, whose story she has been asked to write, and admits that this is not the way David would have wanted his story to be told. The form of the novel, with the sceptical amanuensis who in the end takes over the narrative and moves it in a direction of deliberate misinterpretation, draws attention to the problem of representing coloured identities. David’s ambition is to see himself and his own political activism in the context of the nineteenth-century Griqua leader Andrew Le Fleur, who wanted to create a pure Griqua nation in order to avoid the charge of miscegenation and degeneration associated with coloured identities. The novel further addresses the question of representation by involving characters from Sarah Gertrude Millin’s novel God’s Stepchildren, which builds on the idea of colouredness as a tragic flaw traceable through generations. Narrated from the point of view of women, and involving the story of David’s fellow comrade Dulcie and her torture at the hands of both the security forces and the liberation movement, the story develops in a direction that David disapproves of and that makes the narrator finally wash her hands of the story entirely. In David’s Story, the theme of complicity in relation to conflict between generations is presented through the characters of David’s father, his motherin-law, and, to a certain extent also Andrew Le Fleur. The narrator’s decision to include the voices of this generation, with their harsh racism and naive inability to comprehend the choices of their children, further complicates David’s efforts to produce himself as a political activist. David’s father sees his entire life’s work destroyed by his son: “Look what it’s taken your mother and me, sweat and blood, to shake off the Griquaness, the shame and the filth and the idleness, and what do you do? Go rolling right back into the gutter, crawling into all kinds of dirty

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hovels to speak with old folks about old Griqua rubbish, encouraging the backwardness.”5

David finds the views of the mother-in-law too embarrassing to include, but as the narrator perseveres, the ideals of domesticity and decorum that the mother envisages for her daughter – and which are seen as an integral part of the racist ideals of this generation – are suddenly revealed as part of David’s agenda as well. 2.

Playing in the Light continues to address the question of complicity through conflicts between generations, in the sense that the parents’ solution to racial oppression is depicted through the experiences of their daughter. The novel tells the story of Marion, a young, successful woman of Afrikaner background, who finds out that her parents, Helen and John, did in fact come from a coloured community and were reclassified as white during the apartheid period. The story is set in post-1994 Cape Town and focuses on Marion’s discovery of her family background. This story is interspersed with a narrative depicting Marion’s parents, set in the 1950s. The overall theme of the novel concerns the consequences of the parents’ decision to apply for identity documents as white persons and thereby to distance themselves from their families in the coloured community – to live as ‘play-whites’. Although the idea originates with Marion’s father, it is the mother who is most determined to pursue this possibility and to keep both John’s family and her own at a distance. She sees both the past and the future as something within her control and it is only after her death that Marion, the daughter, is confronted with her family history as well as with a legacy of complicity and deception. The title evokes both the expression ‘play-white’ and Toni Morrison’s essay collection Playing in the Dark,6 which deals with the African-American presence in American literature, and the title thus produces a link, present also in Wicomb’s earlier work, between histories of literary representation and the material realities within which these representations are formed. The discursive realm is further present specifically as the aesthetic through the use of ‘play’ in the title as well as in the expression ‘play-white’. Sue Kossew’s 5

Zoë Wicomb, David’s Story (New York: Feminist Press, 2001): 23. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992; London. Picador, 1993). 6

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reading of the novel7 focuses on this use of ‘play’ in relation to racial passing and makes use of Judith Butler’s work Gender Trouble,8 on identities as performance. In what follows, I will be looking at the use of play in the novel in a slightly different way, through the aesthetic theory of the German philosopher Hans–Georg Gadamer, and will focus on two concepts, ‘attentiveness’ and ‘contemporaneity’ (Gleichzeitigkeit), both related to the concept of play, which Gadamer uses to express “the mode of being of the work of art itself.”9 The concept of ‘attentiveness’ presupposes an understanding of history in relation to individual subjectivity that sees the individual not as an owner of his or her biography but, rather, as someone who is constituted by the materiality and the meaning of the past. This approach can be extended beyond the strictly aesthetic to a reading which focuses on the implications of the metaphoric use of ‘play’ for our understanding of changing subject-positions and their interaction with history. 3.

The narrative strategy employed in Playing in the Light, whereby the story of John and Helen is told in retrospect interspersed with the story of Marion’s discovery of their secret, presents their successful mastering of the game of whiteness as a dead end and a failed exit. Marion is presented as the child who was to benefit from their sacrifices but ends up with a legacy of confusion and shame which she finds hard to deal with. She finds out that she, also, has been playing in the light but that the rules have changed because apartheid legislation is no more: Is the emptiness about being drained of the old, about making room for the new? Perhaps it’s a question of time, the arrival of a moment when you cross a boundary and say: Once I was white, now I am coloured. If everything from now on will be different (which is also to say the same), will the past be different too?10 7

Sue Kossew, “Repositioning the Borderlines of Race: A Reading of Zoë Wicomb’s Novel Playing in the Light,” Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 39.2–3 (2006): 197–206. 8 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York & London: Routledge, 1990). 9 Hans–Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. Joel Weinsheimer & Donald Marshall (Wahrheit und Methode, 1960; tr. New York: Continuum, 1994): 102. 10 Zoë Wicomb, Playing in the Light (New York & London: New Press): 106. Further page references are in the main text.

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I will return to this question of how the past is seen in the present but first look at how the presentation of the ‘play-white’ can be read through the metaphoric use of play. When Marion discovers the truth about her family she characterizes her parents as ‘play-whites’ but then goes on to discuss the term: Play-whites: a misnomer if ever there was one. There was nothing playful about their condition. Not only were they deadly serious, but the business of playing white, of bluffing it out, took courage, determination, perseverance, commitment. (123)

This reflection on the meaning of play-white and its opposition to seriousness is placed within the context of Marion’s attempts at finding information about play-whites in South Africa. She seeks the assistance of a librarian, but in the library filing system they discover that “there are no entries for play-whites” and therefore go on to look for information about whiteness: “Play-white, they imagine, must be a condition of whiteness; but whiteness itself, according to the library’s classification system, is not a category for investigation” (120). In a situation reminiscent of the scene in A Room of One’s Own11 where Virginia Woolf discusses her discovery of a great many library entries on women but none on men, Marion and the librarian discover “hundreds of entries on coloureds” (120). Play-whites, people like her parents, are nowhere to be found in the official documents, and, Marion concludes, therefore did not exist. Thiven Reddy points out how the classification through the Population Registration Act was from its inception designed as a way of shaping individual identity within a particular life story: Minister of the Interior Dr T.E. Donges, who initiated the Bill, described the basic principle behind a population register. He saw it as a somewhat grand dictionary of state. […] The state would henceforth compose the life story of every subject while ensuring that his/her identity remained politically unchanged. The individual is in a way chained to his/her classification.12

Against this idea of fixed and unchanging identities determined by the state, Helen and John discuss the entry into whiteness in terms of play, a self-determined forming of the self where the player would always be in charge.

11 12

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929; London: Bloomsbury, 1993). Reddy, “The Politics of Naming,” 74.

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According to Helen, “there was bound to be some stumbling and swaying until they found their feet, fixed the lineaments of the new roles; fluidity was precisely what they needed” (123). Instead, they experience the need for constant vigilance: “they learned to use the vocabulary of the master race, were the first to note with distaste the traces of native origins in others” (124). Instead of undermining the system of racial classification, they are perpetuating it and being shaped by it. Hans–Georg Gadamer sees the opposition between play and seriousness as a result of a one-sided focus on the player rather than the play itself as subject: “We can certainly distinguish between play and the behaviour of the player, which, as such, belongs with the other kinds of subjective behaviour. Thus it can be said that for the player play is not serious.”13 In the case of Marion’s parents, playing in the light is indeed a serious game, but it builds on the idea that the players are in control of the game. According to Gadamer, “the player knows very well what play is, and that what he is doing is ‘only a game’; but he does not know what exactly he ‘knows’ in knowing that.”14 Helen and John appear to have “history on their side” (131) as the Population Registration Act allows them to take advantage of being mistaken for white. They believe it possible to play the game of whiteness as a re-invention, “a slow process of vigilance and continual assessment” (131). Their experience shows, however, that the subjectivity involved in play is not what determines the outcome but that play needs to be understood through the mechanisms of play itself. According to Gadamer, a study of precisely this metaphoric use of play will reveal the predominance of the mechanisms over the players: If we examine how the word ‘play’ is used and concentrate on its co-called metaphorical senses, we find talk of the play of light, the play of the waves, the play of gears or parts of machinery, the interplay of limbs, the play of forces, the play of gnats, even a play on words. In each case what is intended is to-and-fro movement that is not tied to any goal that would bring it to an end. […] The movement of play as such has, as it were, no substrate. It is the game that is played – it is irrelevant whether or not there is a subject who plays it. The play is the occurrence of the movement as such. Thus we speak of the play of colors and do not mean only that one

13 14

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 102. Truth and Method, 102.

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color plays against another, but that there is one process or sight displaying a changing variety of colors.15

These insights into the metaphoric uses of play, especially when it comes to how the play of light and the play of colours are used, find echoes in the novel. Outa Blinkoog, with his cart full of Beautiful Things, teaches Marion and Brenda about the importance of light and colour. He makes objects out of shiny tin with settings of coloured glass: “Light, he says, that is what we take too much for granted; coloured glass helps us to remember the miracle of light” (89). He leaves them a lantern as a farewell present: “Then the last hour of candle-light is sweetened with bright colour, so there’s no place for sadness” (91). During the encounter with Outa Blinkoog, Marion also finds a new freedom with respect to words: “Words are fresh, newborn, untainted by history; all is bathed in laughter clean as water” (90). In the last chapter, we learn that the lantern is what makes it possible for Brenda to start writing and that she writes Marion’s father’s story. The metaphoric use of play thus suggests that play itself is what has primacy, not the players. Gadamer argues that “in cases where human subjectivity is what is playing, the primacy of the game over the players engaged in it is experienced by the players themselves in a special way.”16 This is relevant for a discussion of how to understand the novel’s use of the concept of play in relation to whiteness. In a discussion of the metaphoric uses of play in this context, Gadamer points out that the expression ‘playing with possibilities’ involves both risk and seriousness: This suggests a general characteristic of the nature of play that is reflected in playing: all playing is a being-played. The attraction of a game, the fascination it exerts, consists precisely in the fact that the game masters the players.17

What Playing in the Light therefore points to through the use of the concept of play is the inevitability of the movement of the game itself, and the way in which this movement masters those who are involved despite their attempts at remaining in control. It is this decision to ‘play in the light’ that turns out to constitute a dead end rather than an exit from racialized oppression in apartheid South Africa. 15

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 102. Truth and Method, 106. 17 Truth and Method, 106. 16

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Marion’s parents succeed in securing the privileges reserved for persons classified as white, but they do this at the cost of leading a life estranged from their own family history and the possibility of continuing that history. The failed exit is due to a miscalculation of the mechanisms involved in playing in the light. They enter the game on the premise that the players control the game rather than the other way around, but this turns out to be a misconception. The game they are playing makes them complicit in the power-structures of apartheid South Africa – a complicity that ties them to the history of human-rights violations during the apartheid era as well as to the legacy of perceived shame and immorality of coloured history. Both these aspects are present in the way in which the past is revealed to Marion, who, perhaps to a greater extent than her parents, comes to discover the consequences of their game. Marion’s premonitions and childhood memories are linked to ideals of whiteness formed within a discourse of racism where denial of the legacy of slavery and the sexual abuse of slave women are central. Marion is expected to “grow up in ignorance, a perfectly ordinary child who would take her whiteness, her privileges, for granted” without the knowledge and fear that haunted her parents (125). Instead, she is deprived of relatives and family, unable to make sense of her parents’ behaviour, their loathing of each other, their fear of strangers, and their obsession with race. Her childhood consists of “endless rules and restrictions and excessive fears” (60). She grows up in a house where there are no visitors. They could not have anyone come to the house until they acquired decent things, from decent furniture to decent teaspoons, although, no sooner would they get a coveted object than it would be superseded by something even more desirable, more decent. Decency, it transpired, was an endlessly deferred, unachievable goal. (167)

Family members could only visit if they were fair-skinned and able to live up to Helen’s ideas of proper behaviour. She bars John’s sister Elsie from visiting because of her lack of table manners and she allows her own mother to visit only in the guise of a servant. The game of playing in the light thus comes to involve their family members in ways that they had not expected. Marion’s childhood memories revolve around the conflicts between her parents and her mother’s obsession with whiteness as racial purity. John’s nickname for Marion, “mermaid,” is also something that Helen turns against. Mermaids, she says, are ashamed, “as they should be, of being neither one

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thing nor another. No one likes creatures that are so different, so mixed up” (47). She changes her last name from Karelse to Charles, thereby distancing herself from a significant part of her family history and the history of slavery in South Africa: “She realised within days that to anglicise her name would rid it of the nasty possessive. Could it be that these Afrikaans names that ended with –se spoke of an unspeakable past, of being the slave of someone called Karel?” (128). The most important part of Helen’s process of re-invention concerns the perceived shame of miscegenation; the whiteness she wants to attain has nothing to do with an attempt at claiming her European ancestry: Helen would settle for no less than respectable whiteness, certainly not for a destiny determined by the vagaries of their distant European ancestors. If that lot could sink so low as to consort with hotnos and slaves, as to fuck with hotnos – as she took to saying in a lowered voice after the business with the identity cards – she would redeem them, and naturally in such a crusade there would be suffering involved, sacrifices to be made. (131)

The fact that Helen has to endure sexual harassment in order to obtain an affidavit which defines her as a white person places the story of her transformation within the history of sexual shame that she is trying to escape. She admits that she had not counted on this degradation and that she is no longer in control of the process but is willing to play along with whatever Judge Carter demands of her in exchange for the chance to secure identity cards as a white person. The sexual degradation places Helen’s story within a tradition where the misplaced social ambitions of women are expressed through a manipulative use of their sexuality. The convergence of sexuality and social ambition is created to express a forbidden female desire to escape a situation which she finds unacceptable. Helen’s act is, however, also presented as one of complicity with a racist society – the identity she wants to attain can be reached only through an act which feeds into racist stereotypes where concupiscence and blackness converge in the white imagination. In her article “Shame and Identity,” Zoë Wicomb discusses the return and burial of the remains of Sarah Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’, and sees this as a way of opening up a discussion about the perceived shame of miscegenation: Perhaps the more pertinent question is whether her burial would also bury the black woman as icon of concupiscence, which is to say bury the shame of having had our bodies stared at, but also the shame invested in [those]

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females who have mated with the colonizer. Miscegenation, the origins of which lie within a discourse of ‘race’, concupiscence, and degeneracy, continues to be bound up with shame, a pervasive shame exploited in apartheid’s strategy of the naming of a Coloured race, and recurring in the current attempts by coloureds to establish brownness as a pure category, a denial of shame. We do not speak about miscegenation; it is after all the very nature of shame to stifle its own discourse.18

Helen’s experience with Judge Carter – designed to remove her from colouredness – is what instead forces her to repress “the nasty unspoken question of concupiscence that haunts coloured identity” (93). Playing in the Light expresses complicity along a gendered trajectory. The short story “My Sister Was a Playwhite,” a rather moralistic and incongruous story written by Richard Rive under the pseudonym Mary X and published in the journal Africa in 1955, expresses female complicity in similar ways.19 Both narratives are focused on the mothers and their ambitions, both for their daughters and for themselves, while the fathers remain passive bystanders and ultimately victims of their wife’s ambitions. The changed relation between the ‘play-white’ and his or her family is in both narratives expressed in terms of an employer–servant relation. In Wicomb’s novel, it is the grandmother who sits in the backyard like a servant; in Rive’s story, the entire family is turned into servants. In Rive’s story, the narrator, Mary, tells the story of her sister Lucille, who, at the initiative of their mother, enters white society at the expense of the rest of her family. Mary describes them as “a respectable Coloured family living in a pleasant cottage in William Street, Cape Town.”20 She goes on to point out that “District Six did not then bear the unsavoury reputation it now has, and a respectable White family, the Jordaans, lived next to us.”21 The focus on respectability here is remarkable, given the context in which District Six has become known after the forced removals of 60,000 people in 1965 when it was declared a white area under the 1950 Group Areas Act. This description 18

Zoë Wicomb, “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge & Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998): 91–92. 19 I am grateful to Shaun Viljoen for drawing my attention to this short story and for providing me with a copy of it. 20 Richard Rive, ”My Sister Was a Playwhite, by Mary X,” Africa (July 1955): 27. 21 Rive, “My Sister Was a Playwhite,” 27.

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of the neighbourhood as respectable, stressing the proximity to white families, could be read as a protest against apartheid legislation and the reservation of privilege for the white minority. But it also contains a much more complex idea of racial difference, created along the lines of respectability, and present, as in Playing in the Light, as an elusive goal rather than as a lived reality. The mother in Rive’s short story is, however, not content with respectability but encourages her fair-skinned and blue-eyed daughter to create a social life in a different context. The opportunity is offered by a “distant cousin” who had “married a White man.”22 Throughout the narrative, Mary places the stress on the consequences her mother’s ambitions for Lucille have for the rest of the family, her father, her brother, and herself. The story is written with a clear moral message where misplaced ambitions have both immediate repercussions for the rest of the family and lead to a personal tragedy for Lucille. Mary works in a factory in order to pay for her sister’s education and extravagant social life but is treated as a servant in front of Lucille’s white friends and her fiancée. Lucille’s tragedy comes when she finds herself pregnant and “would have to get married to Arthur.”23 Only at this stage does the mother realize that Lucille’s birth certificate would reveal her classification and that the Immorality Act would make a marriage to a white man impossible. Arthur abandons Lucille and she moves back to her family and gives birth to her child, Jimmy. Mary’s narrative ends with a changed, loving Lucille and her baby back together with the family, but first she stresses the fact that Jimmy is a “nutbrown coloured thing” who would have “ended up in a home or some other place,” had Lucille married Arthur.24 Marion’s parents live with a similar fear when it comes to having children and it is also through children that history re-emerges and challenges their game. 4.

The novel is constructed around Marion’s confrontation with the past through a series of premonitions which undermine the idea of a successful, self-made woman in control of her own life. It also raises the question of complicity and

22

Rive, “My Sister Was a Playwhite,” 27. “My Sister Was a Playwhite,” 31. 24 “My Sister Was a Playwhite,” 31. 23

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points to the difficulties involved in engaging with the past. The novel explicitly places history and whiteness in a relation of opposition: The pursuit of whiteness is in competition with history. Building a new life means doing so from scratch, keeping a pristine house, without clutter, without objects that clamour to tell of a past, without the eloquence – no, the garrulousness – of history. (152)

In this definition of history we find an active world which steps in and interferes with the life that the parents have carefully built up and which they think can be controlled through vigilance. The parents therefore conclude that “they must raise the child without the burden of history” (152). Whiteness is further defined as a desirable emptiness which can be threatened by the interference of history: “If the whiteness they pursue is cool and haughty and blank, history is uncool, reaches out gawkily for affinities, asserts itself boldly, threatens to mark, to break through and stain the primed white canvas that is their life” (152). Gadamer’s aesthetics provide us with an understanding of history where the past is active in the present. The presentness is achieved in the process where imitation is no longer in control of the players because “the aesthetic attitude is more than it knows of itself. It is a part of the event of being that occurs in presentation, and belongs essentially to play as play.”25 It is this approach to history and to their own being that Marion’s parents think they have successfully escaped and which they have also instilled in Marion. Marion’s life as a young professional woman in the new South Africa could be read as an indication of her parents’ success. She owns a small travel agency and takes her privileges for granted. Marion is oblivious to the fear of being discovered that haunted her parents, and, with the dismantling of the apartheid state, this is no longer an issue. It is, nevertheless, precisely the fear and secrecy that her parents lived with throughout her childhood that come to determine her relationship to them. The third-person narrative is focalized through Marion, who feels nothing but relief at her mother’s death: “Thankfully, her mother is dead, has died a self-willed and efficient death, and after that marriage of bitter bickering John has become her dear Pappa” (4). Marion keeps up a dutiful relationship with her father and does not question his version of their family history, according to which “his family members, unlike other

25

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 115.

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people’s, all disappeared into the jaws of the city or died young or, for all her father’s easygoing bonhomie, fell out with him years ago” (4). This unquestioning attitude towards her father’s version of their family history is paralleled by a similar approach to South African history. Marion prides herself on what she sees as a no-nonsense stance. She manages to see herself as someone who “never really supported apartheid” although she “voted for the Nationalists” (28). She dismisses the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and avoids newspapers: Marion doesn’t usually bother with newspapers. The tired old politics of this country does not divert her. She has no interest in its to-ing and fro-ing, and is impatient with people in sackcloth and ashes who flagellate themselves over the so-called misdemeanours of history. (48)

The truth about the past is not therefore something that Marion expresses an interest in, but something she is forced to encounter, and through this forced encounter her attitude to history changes. As a result of her parents’ play in the light, the events of apartheid South Africa are, to Marion, represented as something that belongs to the past and that can have no relevance to her life in the present, even though the manifestations of the past are brought to her attention through the T R C hearings. Gadamer makes the distinction between simultaneity and contemporaneity to indicate a difference in involvement and relevance when the past is brought into the present. Through simultaneity, “several objects of aesthetic experience [Erlebnis] are all held in consciousness at the same time – all indifferently, with the same claim to validity.”26 In Marion’s discovery of the family secret, the remoteness of history is replaced by an experience of past events that changes her life in fundamental ways. Gadamer thus defines contemporaneity in opposition to simultaneity as a process whereby this particular thing that presents itself to us achieves full presence, however remote its origin may be. Thus contemporaneity is not a mode of givenness in consciousness, but a task for consciousness and an achievement that is demanded of it. It consists in holding on to the thing in such a way that it becomes ‘contemporaneous’, which is to say, however, that all mediation is superseded in total presence.27

26 27

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 123. Truth and Method, 123.

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Marion’s changed attitude to history can be described in terms of total presence; history therefore demands her active involvement. Neil Turnbull stresses this aspect of Gadamer’s definition of history, where understanding of the significance of historical events comes about through the attentiveness and participation of those who seek to interpret these events. The historical world is not a repository of facts but rather a vital world that ‘throws things’ to an interpreter who can only ‘catch’ I T by remaining open to its sense and significance.28

There is no understanding without a prior concern for the world. Understanding is not a state but an event – a happening in history that stirs us to wonder – where the world is brought to life by being ‘made present’, and with this, one’s awareness of one’s own historical subjectivity is brought into play.29

According to Gadamer, it is not primarily thinking or understanding but attention that is guided by the work of history. In order to understand what is being thrown out by history, there has to be vigilance, attentiveness on the part of the person who wants to reach the truth about a particular historical event. “True understanding is more akin to a historical and worldly ‘awakening’ than conceiving.”30 Another important aspect of the focus on attentiveness that Turnbull points to is that it entails dialogue – that stories must be seen not as assertions and truth claims but as responses to a question. Marion’s discovery of the family secret changes her view of history from a repository of uninteresting events to a vital world which demands her attention. The novel opens with the description of a speckled guinea fowl which falls dead on Marion’s balcony. Marion’s recurrent nightmares are also mentioned at the beginning of the novel, and these become more pronounced and focused when Marion accidentally comes across a newspaper article with a picture of a T R C witness, a woman tortured by the security police, whose features she finds disturbingly familiar. It is through these premonitions and her persistent nightmares that Marion decides to start looking for Tokkie, the old

28

Neil Turnbull, “Making ‘It’ Happen: Philosophy, Hermeneutics and the Truth of Art,” Theory, Culture and Society 21.6 (December 2004): 173. 29 Turnbull, “Making ‘It’ Happen,” 173. 30 “Making ‘It’ Happen,” 176.

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family servant she is reminded of through the T R C story. In the dream, the old woman is defined through her absence: In the dream, Marion wanders through the house. It is still; there is no one. But in the kitchen there is the smell of coffee beans just roasted and the palpable absence of a woman who threatens to materialise. (30)

In another version of the dream, Marion is trying to reach the old woman but is being held back by her mother: This time, all the doors and windows are shut; the woodwork is painted black. When she looks up, the loft door bangs, although there is no wind. She climbs up the ladder. Her mother is at the foot of the ladder, pleading with her to come down, giving the ladder a gentle shake to frighten her. But Marion carries on; she climbs the ladder because there is no other course to follow. When her head reaches the height of the loft door, she pushes it wide open so that a broad shaft of light falls across the floor. An old woman sitting on a low stool is illuminated; the light falls on a white enamel basin on her lap. Her face, sunburnt and cracked like tree bark, is framed by the starched brim of a white bonnet. […] Marion waits to be invited into the loft, but eventually gives up and starts going down the ladder, one foot guardedly following another in a backward descent so that the old woman disappears slowly in bands of darkness. (31)

In the dream, Marion’s childhood memories of the old woman are compressed into a movement between light and darkness, as well as between staying in the house and ascending to the loft. The secret is here revealed in the light that Marion brings to the room in the loft, a place that she can only reach through exerting herself by climbing and by going against her mother’s wishes. The dream about the old woman triggers memories of Tokkie, who did not perform the tasks of a servant but sat in the backyard and spent her time with Marion, her “angel child” (32). This dream turns into a nightmare where Tokkie’s features, resembling those of the torture victim in the T R C newspaper story, keep haunting her. Marion thus sets out to confront history, not because of her political conviction or even through political opportunism but, rather, because she carries with her the confusing sense that her childhood memories do not quite add up. The confrontation with history is also a result of chance rather than premeditation, and it does not come about in the dramatic form of exposure that the parents feared. It is also significant that Marion’s discovery takes the form of a journey. She chooses as her companion one of her employees, Brenda, the first “young

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coloured girl” she has employed (19). They travel to Wuppertal in the belief that Marion is an adopted child and that Tokkie’s family would be able to give her some information about her biological parents. The revelation that Tokkie was in fact Marion’s grandmother, and that Marion’s parents were therefore ‘play-whites’, comes to them only when they are about to give up the search. The community that they find in Wuppertal is described by their hostess as “decent coloured people” who “voted for the Nationalists” (96). Marion’s journey back to the coloured community is thus complicated by the fact that the representatives of that community share the values of her parents. At a time in history when Marion’s discovery of her coloured family background could be affirmed without fear of repercussions, she comes across another legacy, that of reactionary supporters of white supremacy. It is, nevertheless, their hostess in Wuppertal, Mrs Murray, who discovers Marion’s secret in an act which resembles the discovery of Ulysses’ identity on his return to Ithaca. Marion is forced to let Mrs Murray take care of her swollen foot before they can continue on their journey: Mrs Murray lifts the swollen foot out of the hot water, places the packet of frozen peas on it and looks up at Marion to check her face for reaction. Then she gasps loudly and drops the foot as if it’s on fire, so that water splashes on her dress and onto the floor. Her eyes are wide with recognition. (97)

It is thus the legacy of complicity that Marion has to encounter rather than the question of race. In Brenda’s simplistic interpretation, Marion is only a “coloured, from a play-white family,” and she tries to give Marion the opportunity to claim blackness: “It’s not such a tragedy being black, you know, at least you’re authentic” (102). Marion’s concern, by contrast, is for the legacy of her parents’ actions: “How am I to bear the fact that my Tokkie, my own grandmother, sat in the backyard drinking coffee from a servant’s mug, and that my mother, her own daughter, put that mug in her hands?” (103). History thus appears to Marion in the form of the grandmother who, in her role as domestic servant, also participates in her daughter’s game, where whiteness is perceived as domesticity, purity, and possession. By playing in the light, Marion’s parents envisaged an exit that would constitute an escape from the burden and interference of history. They found themselves in a situation where the understanding of play as imitation was soon replaced by a game beyond their control. The legacy of privilege and self-determination that they wanted to leave to their daughter turns into a legacy of complicity and deception. Marion is now faced with the task of

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approaching the past anew. The novel closes with Marion and Brenda sharing Outa Blinkoog’s lantern, allowing the play of colours and light to inspire a new version of history in Brenda’s rendering of Marion’s father’s story.

WORKS CITED Erasmus, Zimitri. “Re-Imagining Coloured Identities in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town, ed. Zimitri Erasmus (Cape Town: Kwela, 2001): 13–28. Gadamer, Hans–Georg. Truth and Method, tr. Joel Weinsheimer & Donald Marshall (Wahrheit und Methode, 1960; New York: Continuum, 1994) . Kossew. Sue. “Repositioning the Borderlines of Race: A Reading of Zoë Wicomb’s Novel, Playing in the Light,” Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 39.2–3 (2006): 197–206. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992; London: Picador, 1993). Reddy, Thiven. “The Politics of Naming: The Constitution of Coloured Subjects in South Africa,” in Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town, ed. Zimitri Erasmus (Cape Town: Kwela, 2001): 64–79. Rive, Richard. “My Sister Was a Playwhite, by Mary X,” Africa (July 1955): 27–31. Turnbull, Neil. “Making ‘It’ Happen: Philosophy, Hermeneutics and the Truth of Art,” Theory, Culture & Society 21.6 (December 2004): 171–78. Wicomb, Zoë. David’s Story (New York: Feminist Press, 2001). ——. Playing in the Light (New York & London: New Press, 2006). ——. “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge & Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998): 91–107. ——. You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (London: Virago, 1987). Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (1929; London: Bloomsbury, 1993).

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“Let Me Tell You About Bekolo’s Latest Film, Les Saignantes, But First . . . ”

K ENNETH W. H ARROW

T

to a longer work which will never be written. The longer work would have taken Derrida’s work on prefaces, titled “Outwork” in Dissemination,1 to show that Jean–Pierre Bekolo’s latest feature film, Les Saignantes2 (2005), is marked by two prologue moments that stand in relation to the film as does a preface to a book. It would have shown how the line between the preface and the book is a complicated one; how Hegel’s notion that the book contains its own argument, rendering the preface unprofessional for philosophers or, we might say, unscientific for psychoanalysts, reduces the preface to a chatty, postmodern excrescence or supplement – what Hegel would term mere conversation, and which Derrida, referring to Hegel, images in terms of the kinds of classificatory systems employed in a grocery store, a (Chinese) pharmacy, a museum of natural history; how it participates in the dissemination of meaning rather than adding to an already coherent whole. And then, how there is no such thing as a coherent whole, because, if there were, there would then exist the extra-whole, ex-centric material of the outside, of that which lies outside the 1

HIS ESSAY IS A PREFACE

Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (1972; Chicago: U of Chicago

P , 1981). 2

Jean–Pierre Bekolo, dir. Les Saignantes [aka The Bloodiest] (Quartier Mozart Films, é4 Television, M G I International, France / Cameroon 2005; digital betacom, 92 min.). This Cameroonian filmmaker previously directed the feature films Le complot d’Aristote (1996) and Quartier Mozart (1992). He has, since Les Saignantes, directed the South African T V reality-show series Imagine Afrika (2007).

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preface, that which lies outside the text, and yet which is necessary for it to exist. Derrida’s argument is that there is nothing outside the text, and that is our starting-point for a preface that can’t have a beginning point or an end point without itself being a whole, a hole in the logic of dissemination. The hole is unattainable, and Bekolo turns women into holes and wholes in order to promote his logic of the preface, a new and ultimately failed attempt to reach the larger African audience. Let me start again, clearer this time. The real problem Bekolo faces is the way in which the problem of the real is perceived in African circles as lying outside the text. In a sense, this is part of Simon Gikandi’s warning that the reading of ethics in African literature,3 and culture, requires a re-evaluation of the concept of difference so as to stabilize rather than destabilize the centre, the presence, required for moral engagement, for political engagement, in our times. That the price of turning to a destabilizing notion of Derridean différance would be too great under the current circumstances. Those circumstances are what is meant by the outside, that which is hors-texte, something whose existence or independent meaning Derrida will not concede. The reasons are not that Derrida believes there is no outside, but that it is already inscribed with the same writing that defines the text. Writing, outside, supplement, diffusion, dissemination – all terms that have engendered strong, negative reactions from the community of concerned African writers and critics, from our Ceddo warrior community for whom the good fight is more than ever needed to save the continent. Let me begin again, quoting Derrida: If there is nothing outside the text, this implies, with the transformation of the concept of text in general, that the text is no longer the snug airtight inside of an interiority or an identity-to-itself (even if the motif of ‘outside or bust’ may sometimes play a reassuring role: a certain kind of inside can be terrible), but rather a different placement of the effects of opening and closing.4

The placement of the effect of opening is what marks the point where Western theatre audiences stop talking, in recognition of the fact that the film is about to begin. The audience recognizes that moment because the opening 3

Simon Gikandi, “Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations,” Research in African Literatures 32.4 (Winter 2001): 1–18. 4 Derrida, Dissemination, 36.

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credits have stopped rolling, and the story starts. The images and music shift, the real story takes over with its entry into the diegesis, its mise-en-scène, its establishing shots, its catchy moment that grips our attention, its suturing of the audience by the use of a camera that inhabits the characters’ points of view. In short, the opening pre-credit shots are a warm-up that introduces the film without beginning the story. They set the story in place, as it were, so that we are ready to accept the opening of the story at the right moment. The opening is placed there for us, so that the audience can move inside the real world of the film, enter into the magic of the world of cinema, enter into its reality. The fantasy of being in a realm of fantasy, one that is always outside of reality, that precedes reality, is moved by this placement of the opening in the right spot. The question I have is where to place the spot now – where to spot the right place. Where does the opening and closing shot for the entry into the real Africa take place? Is it in a film that asks: How can we change Africa? How can we change the corruption, the abuse of power, the male chauvinism, the sexism, the exploitation of resources, the trading of guns for diamonds, the continued use of torture? And when the film asks those questions, are they to be placed outside the film? Does the border of representation seal off what is inside the text from what is outside? Or do we seal it off when we say: It’s only a movie? Of course, we all know that Derrida is using text, writing, difference, in his own way. Barbara Johnson presents that key phrase “il n’y a pas de horstexte” [there is nothing outside the text] as a claim that “our very relation to ‘reality’ already functions like a text.”5 But we also know that texts are safe, and that our lives are not; that our understanding of the situation Africa is currently in demands that we move to action, demands, as Bekolo’s film states, that “il fallait que ça change” [things must change] – that statement of adherence to a committed course of action: that we must intervene in the current state of affairs, so that the children of tomorrow, children for whom the year 2025 is on their horizon, must not have to face what we are facing today, must not face what Bekolo puts into his film as a vision of the Cameroon for the next generation. But when we make the critique of that situation that we are living, when we look at the corrupt minister who sells out his country for sexual adventures, power, personal self-aggrandizement, and wealth, we have to ask at least two questions. The first is, in as concrete a fashion as possible: 5

Cited in Derrida, Dissemination, xiv.

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How do I read the Biya government of today, the one that provides the palimpsest for the film about the country in the year 2025, especially in the light of Mbembe’s characterization of the autocrat, the one he and the writers of Le Messager delight in calling Popaul?6 Do I read what they write as somehow not being a text; do I read their words as not obeying the same logic of words and difference as they would if it were a question of another kind of text – say, a fantasy text dealing with the country in the year 2025? Do I read the codes that Le Messager deploys in depicting a gross, burlesque ruler as being different from some other representation that allows me to approach better the burlesque, grotesque form that Paul Biya has taken for his critics, for so many of the intellectuals in his country? And, most importantly, if I decide that I am not going to read the text that reveals to me the real Biya as a text, but as reality, then how am I positioning myself differently as I produce that more real reading? Because the key question, it seems to me, is, always and inevitably: Where am I standing as I produce a reading and, more to the point, how am I disguising the fact that I am standing in a particular place as I produce a reading, how am I concealing that positionality? How do I get to the point where I am saying, ‘this is how it really is’ and hiding ‘this is how I produce this reading of reality’? If I talk about what makes my own reading possible, have I destroyed the quality that makes the outside, the real world, the real Africa, real? Or is it just the opposite – as I make the claim that this is what is real, am I concealing the textuality necessarily ensconced in the act of producing the reading? What don’t we see when we see what is real? The production of the real, the writing of the real, the position assumed in order to generate the conditions that make the writing possible. And, to follow this logic to its conclusion, the position I am now assuming to make this argument is also concealing its own act of production in order that the argument itself may be seen, may be made present before our eyes, may turn us – turn our heads – so that we can see what I mean and not see what I don’t want said, what I don’t say in order that I can say what I am saying. This is what people mean when they say that deconstruction leads us down an endlessly textured speculative path, one that engages with nothing real, and that therefore undoes the process of bringing about change. So, to escape this 6

Achille Mbembé, On the Postcolony (Notes provisoires sur la postcolonie: Essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine, 1992–95; Berkeley: U of California P , 2001).

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trap, I want to start again, start with the film. But where to begin? With the opening footage or the opening of the story? There is an easy way to settle the question: since the line that is forged between the preview footage and the story footage is arbitrary, I will try to begin with two simultaneous moves: the one involves actually showing the real opening moments, and the second involves asking what this opening is producing, by which I also mean: what is producing this opening. What relation to the text is this hors-texte producing, what produces it as hors-texte; and since il n’y a pas de hors-texte, what do we produce in reading this pré-texte as hors-texte: i.e. what do we produce in reading this filmic text as not real? The reality is, that in Africa this beginning is unacceptable. When the film received its African premiere in Dakar on 20 December 1966 at the Sorano Theatre, members of the audience walked out at the sight of Majolie dangling over the Secretaire General du Comité Central, the S G C C . Her vaginal nudity, her open eroticism, and perhaps the insouciance with which she proclaimed her dominant position within a sexual relationship, her ‘chevauchée’ [ride – with the woman on top], was viewed as a violation of several taboos. When I was interviewed a few weeks later by a Cameroonian journalist, she averred that Africa was not ready for such overt and, she would fain add, europeanized sexual images. We both knew that Bekolo lives in Paris, which has been his base for years. We both knew that he has set his films in Africa and is concerned with issues that are based in Africa, particularly in Cameroon. We both knew Bekolo was an exciting, challenging filmmaker – or at least, I knew it. I knew that there were others who stayed, and I knew, above all, that this woman, living in Dakar herself for some years, had no more right to speak for Africa, for Cameroonian audiences, or for me, for that matter, than I did. She put herself inside, and without my wanting became my native informant. I resisted, revolted against being placed outside, and refused to construct an African universe with its own transcendental rules, much less universal norms. Where was I when I saw that opening footage? Wasn’t I in Dakar, or was my heart still in East Lansing, my eyes somewhere in Paris, my sexual norms somewhere hidden from the public view(ing)? How could she possibly know how I was reading the film, how could she determine the real reading of the film for the others, for the Senegalese she was not, for the Africans who never appointed her as their spokesperson? In writing about postmodernism, Ihab Hassan once stated: “the public world dissolves as fact and fiction blend, history becomes derealized by media into a happening, science takes its own models as the only accessible

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reality, cybernetics confronts us with the enigma of artificial intelligence, etc.”7 So, how can we re-establish the feminine real in a country given as 2025 where the misrule of today seems all the more extended, where the public world is Adobe-Photoshopped into cinematic images of fantasy encounters, of magical powers? Africa, the site of fantasy for the West – what better place to begin than with magic, especially the magic of the clitoris? In Cameroon, the Mevoungou is a rite that purifies and restores Beti women who protect each other in admitting their thefts or adultery. A secret association, forbidden to men but tolerated by them, the Mevoungou knits women together into a society grounded in moral commitment. The head of the association should possess a powerful evu, a magic gland that provides clairvoyances, and that each woman develops in the base of her stomach when she is “awakened.” This entity of ambiguous power, a melange of sorcery and clairvoyance, is represented by a prominent female sexual organ which plays a role in the final part of the ceremonies. In Les Saignantes, the Mevoungou is regularly evoked by a discrete female voice-off. If he readily develops the ritual in his mise-en-scene, including the sexual games invented by the ‘saignantes’, Bekolo only makes explicit reference to the entity of power transmitted by the guardians. Only the moon is on the screen when“the Mevoungou invites itself down.” On that day in 2025, Yaounde saw only nighttime and the Mevoungou extend its invitation to “join the dance.” Majolie offered her body to an official to make a deal, but here we have the man kicking the bucket under the galloping moves of Zingaro, the beautiful horseback rider. How was she to get rid of such a compromising corpse? In cutting it into pieces. But it is unthinkable in this country to cut short the funeral of such an important person: a corrupt ‘undertaker’ restores the body with the head supplied by the two ‘matchmakers’. Outside of the widow, everyone would only see the deceased and, in any event, everyone would be satisfied. The transporting of the body to the cemetery is the occasion for the two ‘saignantes’ to approach the minister, played by Émile Abossolo, for a new deal, but the latter is harder to scam than his predecessor.8 7

Ihab Hassan, “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” (1987), in A Postmodern Reader, ed. Joseph P. Natoli & Linda Hutcheon (Albany: State U of New York P , 1993): 282. 8 Au Cameroun, le mevungu est un rituel purificateur et réparateur des femmes beti qui se protègent en reconnaissant leurs vols ou adultères. Association secrète interdite aux hommes mais tolérée par eux, le mevungu soude la société des femmes autour d’un engagement moral. La chef de l’association doit

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Charles Guebogue adds to Vincent’s observations the notion that Mevoungou celebrates the clitoris and female power. Ultimately intended to ensure and protect the sources of fertility for the community, its rites played on an explicitly sexual set of practices involving masturbatory stimulation of the clitoris by mature women.9 If Bekolo’s film attains the levels of the neoposséder un puissant evu, glande de magie et de clairvoyance, que chaque femme développe au fond de son ventre quand elle est “éveillée.” Cette entité de puissance ambiguë, mélange de sorcellerie et de clairvoyance, est représentée par un sexe féminin proéminent qui joue un rôle dans la partie finale des cérémonies. Dans Les Saignantes, le mevungu est régulièrement évoqué par une discrète voix off féminine. S’il développe volontiers le rituel dans sa mise en scène, y compris dans les jeux sexuels inventés par ces saignantes, Bekolo ne fait explicitement référence qu’à l’entité de puissance transmise par les gardiennes. Seule la lune est à l’écran quand “le mevungu s’invite.” En ce jour de 2025, Yaoundé ne vit que la nuit et le mevungu invite “à rejoindre la danse.” Majolie offre son corps à un dignitaire pour obtenir un marché, mais voilà que l’homme trépasse sous les cavalcades à la Zingaro de la belle chevaucheuse. Comment se débarrasser d’un cadavre aussi compromettant? En le découpant en morceaux. Mais il est impensable en ce pays de couper court aux funérailles d’une telle personnalité: un “morguier” corrompu restaure un corps à la tête fournie par les deux entremetteuses. En dehors de la veuve, tout le monde n’y verra que du feu et de toute façon, tout le monde s’en contente. La levée de corps est l’occasion pour les deux saignantes d’approcher le ministre interprété par Emile Abossolo pour un nouveau coup, mais celui-ci se révélera plus dur à cuire que le précédent. Olivier Barlet, “Les Saignantes de Jean–Pierre Bekolo (Cameroun),” Africultures (8 August 2005): http://www.africultures.com/index.asp?menu=affiche_article&no =3943 (accessed 20 July 2010). In his review of the film, Olivier Barlet is citing the review of Jeanne–Françoise Vincent’s study Femmes beti entre deux mondes: Entretiens dans la forêt du Cameroun, prefaces by Françoise Héritier & Denise Paulme (Paris: Karthala, 2001). 9 http://semgai.free.fr/doc_et_pdf/Gueboguo_memoire_maitrise.pdf (accessed 20 July 2010). The role of Mevoungou rituals is described as one of “protection et d’élimination des maléfices aux yeux de tous” [protection and elimination of evil curses in the eyes of all] (cited by Guebogue, 50). Women who were or had been married repair to an isolated ‘case’ (hut) where they remove their clothes and dance around a fire to celebrate the powers of the Mevoungou. The ‘mother’ of Mevoungou is recognizable by the size of her clitoris.

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baroque in which the image exceeds the frame, and destabilizes the relationship between the fantasmic and the real, the Beti women’s practices, as described by Laburthe–Tolra10 (cited by Guebogue), far exceed Bekolo’s imaginary excesses. Yet the real to which Guebogue, Laburthe–Tolra, and Vincent allude is given automatically, scientifically, anthropologically, as if there had never been a history of the invention of such a discourse, as if it were untouched by its frame, its own conditions of possibility, its own hidden, unrevealed mechanisms of production of knowledge. Guebogue writes that “throughout the cursory description of this ritual, it seemed that it is nothing other than the celebration of power and of the female sexual organs.”11 The textuality, the writing, l’écriture, becomes a ‘description’, one that is therefore beyond perspective or point of view; the meaning of the rite, if rite it must be, is that which is self-evidently presented, since it is “rien d’autre que” [nothing other than]. The problem here is not that the events described by Laburthe– Tolra or his women informants do not take place or mean what Guebogue says, but that they take place for someone, mean for someone, and are described by someone for someone. There is no unmediated recording of reality; only a construction, a textualization, of movements and actions that are really too bizarre to pass the Cameroonian censors – but that can get published in great detail when presented as a maîtrise mémoire in sociology at the University of Yaounde. In other words, the real is never pornographic, even when hidden from public sight, and the fantastic is never real, even when its pornographic excesses are only specular and suggestive. The preface precedes the serious business introduced by the story. Or it introduces the seriousness with which the story deals. In the case of the opening prefatory scene, where we see Majolie suspended in a harness over the S G C C , a number of gestures and events in the sequence might be taken as foreshadowings whose meaning only emerges in later scenes. Or we might read the later scenes as postscripts to the initial event that sets the plot in motion. But we have to decide which is the event that sets off the chain of signifying images. On the one hand, Majolie’s movements evoke her dominant 10

Philippe Laburthe–Tolra, Initiations et sociétés secrètes au Cameroun: Essai sur la religion Beti (Paris: Karthala, 1985). 11 “À travers la description sommaire de ce rite, il apparait que celui-ci n’est rien d’autre que la célébration de la puissance et des organes sexuels féminins”; Laburthe– Tolra, 51.

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position in the coupling: she pushes off the old man’s hands, she dangles herself over him rather than his manipulating her; she teases and finally pushes the act forward with her pelvic motions like a man pushing a virile member in and out. She is not the man; she is the vagina that commands, the maternal superego that decides without constraints. However, at a given moment, the last moment, she pounds on an empty corpse, a hole in the living man that expands into his death. And she collapses with that realization. Thus we can move from open sexuality, from vagina-monologic power, to the loss of the object of desire: i.e. the phallus, in death. She needs to have her power restored; the preface only parades it in front of the lens, losing it with the realization that it was only a game, a Freudian Fort–Da game, in which what seems to be here is soon gone; and if it is to be recovered, it is only because that which is recoverable is susceptible to loss, to absence, to lack, to deferring, dissemination, and difference. We need to start again. The credits roll, but only in part, only in presenting the lesser names, the less important figures in the drama. The moon appears on the edge of a dark sky; the voice off, spoken by a mature woman, is now heard. The story begins, again. “Mevoungou était là” [Mevoungou was there]. We hear the voice inscribing this new presence, not as an ‘être vivant’, not a living being, not an object, a place, a moment, desire or state of mind. Rather, she, that is ‘il’ – it – is a hole in the signifying chain: “a thing that one sees and that one saw without, for all that, being able to define it.”12 If Freud’s grandson thought he could recall what was lost with his tiny string, his puny ‘Da’, his control over the power of the thing, little did he know that the power to recognize the true site of what was lost to him did not lie within his grasp; he did not know that “one doesn’t decide to see Mevoungou, Mevoungou appears before you, Mevoungou invites itself.”13 He did not know, and we did not then know, either, that it had to be in a ‘case’ hidden from sight that Mevoungou would make its appearance, that the dance of the extended clitoris would begin, that the malefic influences would be conjured. He was involved in the conquest of reality; he was learning that this country (“ce pays”) must become better, that its institutions would count, and that we would have to bring pressure on them to change. Meanwhile, out of his sight, far from the hole in his imagination which the absent ‘Fort’ figure had opened, leaving a 12

“une chose qu’on voit et qu’on vit sans pour autant pouvoir la définir.” “on ne décide pas de voir Mevoungou. Mevoungou vous apparaît, Mevoungou s’invite.” 13

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place for the repressed, fearful sight of the phallic-clit to inhabit, she had rejoined the fantasmagoric coven of witches who were to guide our Majolie and her friend Chouchou in their match against the Ministre d’État for control of the country’s future. But I am getting ahead of myself. The first preface ends with death, and the future of “ce pays,” which must change, is written virtually entirely at night, in terms of an abjected order. The light of the moon then appears, giving voice to our Mevoungou and her magic. The magic becomes incarnate, in the form of two sexy, saucy, uninhibited, indomitable young women, Majolie and Chou. We barely follow an incredibly implausible plot to the point where they stand over the Minister of State, the arch-villain, having mastered him with the martial, sexual arts, the ultimate weapon being their orgasms. There is nothing here to foreshadow. We are told at the outset that “Mevoungou made its assignation with us,”14 and after that it was only a matter of time before the initial death of the S G C C would be resolved with the final triumph of the new generation of saignantes. The bloodettes, as Bekolo called them, strutted their wares on the stage for a bare hour and a half, and then left us in anticipation of a new, changed future, of that “ce pays” we had to have because, as the last line of the narrative voice-over has it, “this country couldn’t stay like that without a future. Things had to change.”15 But then, we knew that from the start, even before Majolie appeared in her harness over the horny old man. Let me begin again. Bekolo ends with a billboard bearing the words, “How can one look at a film like that and do nothing afterward.”16 But the questions remains: Where do we begin?

14

“Mevoungou avait porté son dévolu sur nous.” “ce pays ne pouvait pas rester comme ça sans avenir. Il fallait que ça change.” 16 “Comment regarder un film comme ça et ne rien faire par la suite.” 15

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WORKS CITED Barlet, Olivier. “Les Saignantes de Jean–Pierre Bekolo (Cameroun),” Africultures (8 August 2005): http://www.africultures.com/index.asp?menu=affiche_article&no =3943 (accessed 20 July 2010). Bekolo, Jean–Pierre, dir. Les Saignantes [aka The Bloodiest] (Quartier Mozart Films, é4 Television, M G I International, France / Cameroon 2005; digital betacom, 92 min.). Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (1972; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1981). Gikandi, Simon. “Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations,” Research in African Literatures 32.4 (Winter 2001): 1–18. Guebogue, Charles. http://semgai.free.fr/doc_et_pdf/Gueboguo_memoire_maitrise.pdf Hassan, Ihab. “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” (1987), in A Postmodern Reader, ed. Joseph P. Natoli & Linda Hutcheon (Albany: State U of New York P , 1993): 273–86. Laburthe–Tolra, Philippe. Initiations et sociétés secrètes au Cameroun: Essai sur la religion Beti (Paris: Karthala, 1985). Mbembé, Achille. On the Postcolony (Notes provisoires sur la postcolonie: Essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine, 1992–95; Berkeley: U of California P , 2001).

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Tradition and Creativity in Zakes Mda’s Cion

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of his sixth novel, Cion, in 2007, Zakes Mda, the South African playwright and novelist, changed the setting for his work and his critical focus from South Africa to the U S A . Previously, Mda had consistently used his output of over thirty plays and five novels to address critically developments in contemporary South(ern) Africa. Given this almost exclusive focus previously on the countries of his birth and upbringing, South Africa and Lesotho, Cion marks a distinct break in Mda’s writing that can be considered almost as significant as the transition from playwright to novelist which came with the publication of his first novel, Ways of Dying, in 1995. On the premise that Cion denotes the beginnings of a distinctly new period in Mda’s writing, his work can be seen to fall into three distinct phases: an initial phase of short plays characterized by the struggle against apartheid and a critique of neocolonialism; a second phase of novels dealing with the state of post-apartheid South Africa; and, finally, a third phase yet to be defined but which is ushered in with a novel about a multi-racial W I N community in the Appalachians. This latest distinctive shift of focus is reinforced both by Mda’s own physical presence, exile, in the U S A , where he works, and by his re-location of the main protagonist of his first novel, Toloki in Ways of Dying, to the U S A , where he plays a key role in Cion. In this brief essay, I wish to situate Cion in the wider context of Mda’s work by exploring continuity and contrast in terms of tradition and creativity, and thereby seeing this novel in terms of its Janus-like qualities preserving elements of the past, yet presaging the future. ITH THE PUBLICATION

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Mda’s approach to theatre has consistently built on his experience of theatre for development, in particular the Maratholi Travelling Theatre with which he worked in Lesotho from 1985.1 In this context, Mda has considered theatre for development to be a theatre for democracy incorporating and applying indigenous performance techniques. He has argued that theatre involves “the production and communication of meaning in the performance itself,”2 and he has seen his theatre for development productions as a means to “arouse the people’s capacity to participate and decide things for themselves.”3 Mda’s theatre practice incorporates an argument concerning the need for a transition from state to action and the achievement of salvation through human community gained through political action which endows those involved with a means of empowerment. Mda’s published plays, which mostly cover the period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, have focused on two main themes: the struggle against apartheid and the challenge of neocolonialism.4 The plays which are specifically concerned with raising consciousness against apartheid in South Africa include “Dead End” (1979), “Dark Voices Ring” (1979), “Banned” (1982), and “Joys of War” (1989), all of which demonstrate a close affinity with political developments as the anti-apartheid struggle intensified from awareness of the iniquities of the system to active, military, resistance against it. To these plays must be added “The Road” (1982), where Mda specifically addresses and articulates the ideology and hypocrisy of the apartheid system. In a much 1

Mda’s ideas have been expressed in a number of publications, See When People Play People: Development Communication Through Theatre (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand U P ; London & New Brunswick N J : Zed, 1993); “Marotholi Travelling Theatre; Towards an Alternative Perspective of Development,” Journal of Southern African Studies 16 (2) (1990): 352–58; “Learning from the Ancient Wisdom of Africa: In the Creation and Distribution of Messages,” Current Writing 6.2 (1993): 139–50; and “Current Trends in Theatre for Development in South Africa,” in Writing in South Africa: Literature, apartheid and democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge & Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998): 257–64. 2 Mda, “Marotholi Travelling Theatre: Towards an Alternative Perspective of Development,” 352, and Mda, When People Play People, 45–46. Emphasis added. 3 Mda, “Marotholi Travelling Theatre,” 354. 4 For publication details of the plays mentioned here, see the select Mda bibliography below. For a more detailed discussion of Mda’s theatre, see my article “A Theatre for Democracy” in Ways of Writing, ed. David Bell & J.U. Jacobs (Scottsville, S.A.: U of KwaZulu–Natal P , 2009): 15–37.

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later play, “The Bells of Amersfoort” (2002), Mda explores the complexities of reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa by raising issues of corruption, greed, and betrayal among the new elite, and by drawing attention to the need for grass-roots democracy and activism accomplished through a genuine willingness to cooperate between previous enemies. “You Fool How Can the Sky Fall?” (1995) is a grotesque study of how governments of newly liberated states become hijacked by corrupt, opportunistic, and power-hungry groups, and, although it is not specifically about South Africa, it is of particular relevance to that country. The group of Mda’s plays that address neocolonial issues consists of “We Shall Sing for the Fatherland” (1979), a study of postindependence betrayal and neocolonialism in an unnamed African state, “The Hill” (1980) and “The Girls in their Sunday Dresses” (1988), both set in Lesotho and disclosing the destabilizing influence of apartheid South Africa on its neighbouring countries. His critique of corruption and greed in Lesotho is continued in “The Mother of All Eating” (1992). Mda’s South African novels to date, Ways of Dying (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), and The Whale Caller (2005), have a number of features in common.5 Most notable is his use of non-fictional events as the foundation for his storytelling and the means by which he transposes, almost verbatim at times, the ‘factual’ text into his imaginative writing. By incorporating the discourse of history and the media into a fictive narrative, Mda’s novels raise a number of questions about the nature of the interaction of past and present – the dialogue with the past – that is a feature of recent South African fiction.6 In terms of narrative structure, he generates a point of departure in a contemporary narrative which is linked to past events. In the case of Ways of Dying, the contemporary story is the meet5

For the publication details of the novels mentioned here, see the select Mda bibliography. Mda’s novel on Lesotho, She Plays with the Darkness (1995), is not included in this discussion. A more detailed overview of Mda’s South Africa novels is included in my article “The Teller of Tales: Zakes Mda and the Storifying of Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 39.2–3 (2006): 157–75. The nature of death and dying in Mda’s first three novels is discussed in my article “The Intimate Presence of Death in the Novels of Zakes Mda: Necrophilic Worlds and Traditional Belief,” in Readings of the Particular: The Postcolonial in the Postnational, ed. Anne Holden Rønning & Lene Johannessen (Cross / Cultures 89; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007): 93–106. 6 See my article “The Persistent Presence of the Past in Contemporary Writing in South Africa,” Current Writing 15.1 (2003): 63–73.

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ing and reconciliation of the former home-village antagonists Toloki and Noria in the week between Christmas and New Year, which is played out against a background of violence primarily in the period between the unbanning of the A N C and the first democratic elections in 1994, but also stretching back to the apartheid years. In The Heart of Redness, Mda intertwines the story of the appearance of the protagonist, Camagu, an urban intellectual, at the village of Qolorha-by-Sea and the struggle of the villagers to avoid being swamped by a commercial development with the story of Nongqawuse and the Cattle Killing episode of 1856–57, with its devastating consequences for the Xhosa nation. In The Madonna of Excelsior, the contemporary story revolves around the visit of Popi, the main character and a ‘boesman’, to the studio of Father Frans Claerhout to revisit the scenes of her childhood in order to gain insight into her mixed racial background and her own sense of identity; the historical narrative is based on the infamous events in the Free State town of Excelsior in 1970–71 when local Afrikaner dignitaries and black women were accused of infringements of the Immorality Act. The Whale Caller deviates from this pattern by not providing a specific historical event against which to read the contemporary story but, rather, relies on the contrasting of the disruptive nature of short-term human intervention with the age-long processes of Nature in the life of the Southern right whale. All of these novels maintain the ideological themes that have been apparent in Mda’s work since his early plays: the struggle against apartheid and the betrayal of the revolution through corruption and neocolonial practices. Allied to these is an emphasis on grass-roots democracy, also stemming from Mda’s period as a playwright and, latterly, a distinct preference for environmental issues which originate in Mda’s own interest in eco-development. Finally, Mda makes use of creativity as an ameliorative process and one that leads to a better future, whether it is the art of imaginative writing and drawing, as in Ways of Dying; split-tone singing, as in The Heart of Redness; expressionist painting, as in The Madonna of Excelsior; or the music of the kelp horn, as in The Whale Caller. In Cion, Mda resurrects Toloki, the male protagonist of his first novel, Ways of Dying, but transports him to a new environment in the U S A . Although the setting and people are new, as are the issues discussed, this novel employs many of the stylistic devices and narrative strategies of Mda’s earlier work. The features Mda has mentioned in relation his own writing practices – place and people, past and present, creativity and performance, African heritage and local folklore – are readily discernible in Cion. Yet, crucially for my

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argument for a paradigmatic shift, he engages in metafictional discourse on the nature of the subject and the relationship between the subject of the novel and the power of the author. The point of departure for Cion is place and the people who inhabit that place. In this case, the place is the hamlet of Kilvert, situated about twenty miles from Athens, Ohio and its inhabitants. Kilvert is a depressed, former coal-mining area that now survives to a large extent on welfare and charity and the resident population, referred to as the W I N , have a mixed heritage from runaway African-American slaves, Native-American Indians, and various European indentured labourers, slaves, and immigrants. Toloki arrives here, as a result of a chance meeting at the Halloween celebrations in the town of Athens, Ohio in 2004. He is warmly welcomed by the people, and spends a year in Kilvert learning about the place and its people, their past, and the problems they confront today. In terms of structure, Cion employs the narrative strategies Mda has developed in his previous novels, among them the paralleling of a contemporary story with an historical narrative. The former deals with current issues and has a love-story element, while the latter provides a source for, in part, a discussion of the raison d’être of the current state of affairs, and in part an interaction between past and present, a replaying of the past in the present. In Cion, the historical account consists of a primary trope of fugitive-slave narratives, both African-American and European, while the contemporary story revolves around one family in Kilvert, the Quigleys, consisting of Ruth, Mahon and their children Oprah and Obed, who claim descent from Abdenego, a fugitive African-American slave, and from Niall Quigley, an Irish immigrant, former slaver, and slave who settled in the area after escaping across the Ohio River in the years prior to the Civil War. The genealogical links between the characters in the parallel narratives occasion an interaction of past and present, while the issues of freedom and creativity act as thematic links. The historical narrative focuses on the story of an African-American female slave, the Abyssinian Queen, and her two sons Nicodemus and Abednego. Inspired by their mother’s stories of freedom and helped by her preparations, including the stitching of special quilts, Nicodemus and Abednego flee across the Ohio River to freedom. For Nicodemus, this freedom is short-lived, as he is killed by bounty hunters in a house in Athens, which he is rumoured to haunt thereafter. Abednego settles in Tabler Town, the original name of Kilvert, and marries a Native-American woman, thereby beginning one branch of the Quigley family tree. The second branch is composed of the descendants

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of Niall Quigley, a former slaver and slave who also arrives in the area after escaping from slavery in the South. He, too, eventually marries a NativeAmerican woman. Mda’s concern with the ancestral tree of the Quigley family is in essence a critique of notions of racial purity and emphasizes the importance of the values of love and human compassion in social interaction, rather than those of race and colour. Mda makes use of readily ascertainable historical events and personalities linked to his story; there was a George Fitzhugh, who wrote Sociology for the South (1854), and there was an ‘Underground Railroad’ with ‘conductors’ and ‘stationmasters’ who helped fugitive slaves to escape northwards. This central trope of the historical narrative is one that largely repeats the story of degradation, violation, and trauma that is a feature of fugitive-slave narratives, as dealt with both in historical accounts and in literature. More importantly, Mda uses this trope to explore elements of African-American creativity in terms of the oral tradition of storytelling and the artistic qualities of colour and meaning in the craft of quilting. Here, Mda stakes a claim for the African tradition of oral narrative, fused in generations of mothers and grandmothers telling stories around the fireside to the children of the family and village. The Abyssinian Queen becomes the expert storyteller, imbuing her children and other slaves with a desire to escape to a better world, but also enchanting the sons and daughters of the white slave owners with her narrative skills. The Abyssinian Queen is also portrayed as being responsible for developing the craft of quilting into a higher art form by introducing new and mystical patterns that can also be used to tell stories and pass messages. The quilt as a site of meaning becomes a key to the novel. Here, however, it must be argued that Mda is on less sure historical ground and his approach is not uncontroversial. Close adherence to Tobin and Dobard’s Hidden in Full View (2000) ignores the substantial critique of their methodology and the limited historical evidence for their findings.7 The point at issue here is perhaps not Mda’s historical accuracy but the celebration of myth and the fact that the creativity associated with myth is a vital inspiration for the way people live their lives. This argument would have some support in the novel – as both Nicodemus and Abednego discover, the quilts their mother has sewn with all kinds of images and patterns are not maps of the journey but 7

There is major criticism of this position by Patricia Cummings, some of which is available on-line at http://www.quiltersmuse.com/underground_railroad_and_quilts _blocks.htm (accessed 19 May 2007).

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Quilts were like sayings [. . . ] they were like adages and proverbs learnt from the elders and were effective in jolting the people’s memory and in recording the values of the community for present and future generations. Quilt designs did not map out the actual route to the Promised Land but helped the seekers to remember those things that were important in their lives.8

Seen from this perspective, the novel is less about history than about the liberating qualities of the creative process. As Karen Armstrong has pointed out, “mythology is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.”9 Such a reading would appear to be substantiated by the nature of the contemporary story. The creative skills of the Abyssinian Queen, in both storytelling and quilt-making, devolve onto several members of the Quigley family, which links the two narratives in terms both of genealogy and of the creative process. The key trope of the contemporary story is the freeing of the Quigley children, Obed and Oprah, both adults, from the domination of their mother, Ruth Quigley. The latter is a fiercely independent woman with a deep trust in the Bible and George W. Bush, and who uses her moral strength to dominate the lives of her children. This smothers Oprah’s creative abilities and denies Obed his manhood. Toloki’s presence is used not only to induce instability in the power-relationships in the family, but also to act as a conciliatory force mediating between the stubborn mentalities of both mother and children. His presence acts as a catalyst that initiates a process by which the members of the Quigley family can come to terms with their reality. Both Ruth and her husband Mahon function as partial repositories of the creative traditions explored in the historical narrative. Ruth makes quilts but, by adhering to strictly traditional patterns, represses freedom of expression and thus makes tradition a constraining, not a creative, process. This has economic repercussions, as her quilts, however well made, do not sell. It also has personal repercussions for Oprah. Convinced of the superiority of her biblical fundamentalism, Ruth destroys anything of a creative nature produced by her daughter, thus denying her self-expression. In contrast, Mahon, Oprah’s father, is portrayed as a creative force who engages in uncanny night-time episodes of imaginative storytelling with his daughter, for which he employs a full range of fancy dress. It is thanks to Mahon that Oprah is able to create and 8

Zakes Mda, Cion (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2007): 109. Further page references are in the main text. 9 Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005): 3.

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produce imaginative drawings and patterns. Ultimately, she is able to apply her skills in quilt-making openly, thanks to the help she receives from Toloki, and Toloki is able to reconcile her to her mother. Once Oprah is reinstated in the family and Obed finds a girl to love him, Mahon also rediscovers his creative energies, and a garden that was once filled with figures made of concrete begins to blossom with flowers and plants. Toloki’s role in this domestic drama is to act as mediator and to initiate change. As an outsider with a strange occupation, that of professional mourner, he gains credence on both sides; as Oprah’s future lover, he is instrumental in showing that her creativity can come to some good. By the end of the novel, Toloki and Oprah have agreed to join forces, and travel the countryside in a trailer in search of other creative souls in the business of professional mourning. In contrast to his practice in previous novels, Mda does not use a collective, communal narrator, which, he has consistently argued, is a hallmark of African storytelling traditions, but instead uses the main character, Toloki, as a narrator, using first-person narration in the contemporary story and thirdperson in the historical narrative. The effect of this shift in narrative voice is to transfer the mediation of events and perception of place from the Greek chorus of the local inhabitants to the gaze of the visitor from South Africa. Kilvert is, thereby, mediated through the eyes and voice of an itinerant professional mourner as Toloki makes social anthropological observations on his new environment. The result, as might be expected, can be interpreted as a reversal of the colonial gaze. Furthermore, Mda plays with the author/ narrator distinction by including an omniscient, omnipotent authorial presence, whom Toloki, the narrator, perceives as the orchestrator of the tale. It is through the ‘I’ narrator that Mda enacts a dialogue between the subject of the narrative, Toloki, and his creator, Mda, referred to in the novel as the “sciolist” – defined in the O E D as a superficial pretender to knowledge – whom Toloki declares “has delusions of Godness” (1). The novel opens with a rhetorical device whereby Toloki discusses how he has been brought to Athens, Ohio at the time of the Halloween festivities by the “sciolist” and left to fend for himself. At this stage, the narrator is dependent on the author for his future: “he brought me here; he will have to provide the answers” (9). However, as the novel progresses Toloki distances himself from his creator as he seeks his own freedom both as a person and as a character. The novel ends with Toloki, the subject and narrator of the novel, freeing himself from his creator and author:

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The sciolist is in the God business. And like all Gods he lives his life vicariously through his creations. Like all Gods he demands love from his creations. That’s why he creates them in the first place [...] so that they can shower him with love [...] so that they can worship him and praise him [...] so that they can bribe him with offerings. Creation is therefore a self-centred act. I need my independence from him. (286)

With this final statement of the novel, Mda plays with the author/ character dichotomy and severs his fate from that of the character around whom his first novel was written. With the publication of Cion in 2007, Mda has shifted the focus of his writing from South Africa to the U S A . However, while place and people may have changed, Mda has persisted with many of the key features of his narrative technique. He employs the same structure of historical narrative and contemporary story as in the past and he also focuses on the lives of poor, marginalized people. There is, as in his earlier novels, an emphasis on the recuperative powers of artistic creativity, on creativity itself, and on performative modes of aesthetic creation. Yet the very shift of location with new people, new histories, and new issues would indicate a more significant break with Mda’s previous work. The role of Toloki, Mda’s first novelistic character, is symbolic in this break. First, as a character he frees himself from his previous role of professional mourner to the dead of South Africa and seeks contact with other professional mourners in the world; secondly, as subject he frees himself from the dictates of his creator/author. I would suggest that Mda’s metafictional discourse on the relationship between author and subject is indicative also of his own freedom from the constraints of his previous writing. In an interview with Benjamin Austen published online in December 2005, he stated: I am free now. And the end of apartheid has freed the imagination of the artist. I tell stories now. But these stories come from an environment that is highly politically charged. [ . . . ] But my main mission is to tell a story, rather than to propagate a political message.10

10

Benjamin Austen, “An Interview with Zakes Mda,” nat creole.magazine. arts. culture. life, http://www.natcreole.com/features.htm#title1 (Part i accessed 16 December 2005; Part ii accessed 19 January 2006): Part i.

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WORKS CITED Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005). Austen, Benjamin. “An Interview with Zakes Mda,” nat creole.magazine. arts. culture. life, http://www.natcreole.com/features.htm#title1 (Part i accessed 16 December 2005, Part ii accessed 19 January 2006). Bell, David. “The Intimate Presence of Death in the Novels of Zakes Mda: Necrophilic Worlds and Traditional Belief,” in Readings of the Particular: The Postcolonial in the Postnational, ed. Anne Holden Rønning & Lene Johannessen (Cross / Cultures 89; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007): 93–106. ——. “The Persistent Presence of the Past in Contemporary Writing in South Africa,” Current Writing 15.1 (2003): 63–73. ——. “The Teller of Tales: Zakes Mda and the Storifying of Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 39.2–3 (2006): 157–75. ——. “A Theatre for Democracy” in Ways of Writing, ed. David Bell & J.U . Jacobs (Scottsville, S.A.: U of KwaZulu–Natal P , 2009): 15–37. Cummings, Patrica. “Quilters Muse,” http://www.quiltersmuse.com/underground _railroad_and_quilts_blocks.htm (accessed 19 May 2007). Mda, Zakes. Cion (Johannesburg & New York: Penguin, 2007). ——. “Learning From the Ancient Wisdom of Africa: In the Creation and Distribution of Messages,” Current Writing 6.2 (1993): 139–50. ——. “Marotholi Travelling Theatre: Towards an Alternative Perspective of Development,” Journal of Southern African Studies 16.2 (1990): 352–58; repr. in Politics and Performance: Theatre, Poetry and Song in Southern Africa, ed. Liz Gunner (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand U P , 1994): 203–10. ——. When People Play People (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand U P ; London & New Brunswick N J : Zed, 1993).

THE WORKS OF ZAKES MDA: SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Novels Ways of Dying (Cape Town: Oxford U P , 1995). She Plays with the Darkness (Johannesburg: Vivlia, 1995). Melville 67: A Novella for Youth (Johannesburg: Vivlia, 1998). The Heart of Redness (Cape Town: Oxford U P , 2000). The Madonna of Excelsior (Cape Town: Oxford U P , 2002). The Whale Caller (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2005). Cion (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2007).

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Drama “Dark Voices Ring,” Sketch (Winter 1979). We Shall Sing for the Fatherland and Other Plays (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1980). “The Hill,” Scenaria (1981). The Plays of Zakes Mda, intro. Andrew Horn (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1990) And the Girls in their Sunday Dresses: Four Works [“And the Girls in their Sunday Dresses,” “The Final Dance,” “Banned” and “Joys of War”], intro. Bhekizizwe Peterson (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand U P , 1993). “Broken Dreams,” scripted by Zakes Mda (Johannesburg: Market Theatre Laboratory, 1995). “The Nun’s Romantic Story,” in Four Plays, compiled, ed. & intro. Zakes Mda (Johannesburg: Vivlia, 1996). “Dankie Auntie,” in Preserving the Landscape of Imagination: Children’s Literature in Africa, ed. Raoul Granqvist & Jürgen Martini, Matatu 17–18 (1997): 145–75. Let Us Play, ed. Zakes Mda (Johannesburg: Vivlia, 1998). Fools, Bells and the Habit of Eating: Three Satires [“The Mother of All Eating”; “You Fool, How Can the Sky Fall?” and “The Bells of Amersfoort”], intro. Rob Amato (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand U P , 2000).

Poetry “Dance of the Ghosts,” “A Sad Song,” “Sad Times,” in New South African Writing (P E N ) (Hillbrow: Lorton, 1997): 12–19. “Birth of a People,” Staffrider 3.1 (1980): 17. Bits of Debris (Maseru: Thapama, 1986). “Bloodless Philosophies,” “In the Arms of Loving Fire” and “My Desolate Kinsman,” Staffrider 10.3 (1992): 12–13. “Blossoms and Butterflies,” in Soho Square V, ed. Steve Kromberg & James Ogude (London: Bloomsbury, 1992): 102–103. “Mamane,” in The Heart in Exile: South African Poetry in English, 1990–1995, ed. Leon de Kock & Ian Tromp (Johannesburg: Penguin, 1996): 227–28. “Slaughtered Gods” and “Uninspired Graffiti,” Staffrider 12.1 (1996): 70–71.

Articles and Scholarly Works “Marotholi Travelling Theatre: Towards an Alternative Perspective of Development,” Journal of Southern African Studies 16.2 (June 1990): 352–58; repr. in Politics and Performance: Theatre, Poetry and Song in Southern Africa, ed. Liz Gunner (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand U P , 1994): 203–10. When People Play People (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand U P ; London & New Brunswick N J : Zed, 1993).

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“Learning From the Ancient Wisdom of Africa: In the Creation and Distribution of Messages,” Current Writing 6.2(1993): 139–50. “Another Theatre of the Absurd,” in Theatre and Performance in Africa: Intercultural Perspectives ed. Eckhard Breitinger, Bayreuth African Studies 31 (1994): 105–12. “Theater and reconciliation in South Africa,” Theater 25.3 (1995): 38–45. “Politics and the Theatre: Current Trends in South Africa,” in Theatre and Change in South Africa, ed. Geoffrey V. Davis & Anne Fuchs (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996): 193–218. “Introduction,” Four Plays, comp. & intro. Zakes Mda (Florida Hills: Vivlia, 1996): i– xxvi. “Theatre for Children in South Africa,” in Preserving the Landscape of Imagination: Children’s Literature in Africa, ed. Raoul Granqvist & Jürgen Martini, Matatu 17– 18 (1997): 137–44. Acceptance speech for the Olive Schreiner Prize (1997), English Academy Review 14 (1997): 279–81. “Current Trends in Theatre for Development in South Africa,” in Writing in South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge & Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1997): 257–64.

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Paton’s Discovery, Soyinka’s Invention B ERNTH L INDFORS

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S O Y I N K A is an eclectic reader and, like all the rest of us, some of what he reads rubs off on him. He has occasionally admitted this, frankly acknowledging specific texts that have served as sources of inspiration for his own imaginative works. The Bacchae of Euripides is the most transparent example of this kind of indebtedness, carrying in its very title the name of the author whose drama sparked Soyinka’s creative fires. Opera Wonyosi also clearly owes its operatic organizational structure and underworld ambiance to Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, which was itself a reworking of John Gay’s eighteenth-century Beggars’ Opera. In Die Still, Reverend Godspeak, it was Jonathan Swift and Nigerian newspaper reportage on the profitable prophetic activities of Dr Godspower Oyewole that provided both the satirical form and the comic content of his drama. A Play of Giants bears the imprint of Jean Genet’s The Blacks, and King Baabu carries the ancestral genes and genius of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. One could cite many other examples as well, ranging from the incidental – e.g., the borrowing of the subtitle of Isara, A Voyage Around “Essay” from John Mortimer’s play A Voyage Round My Father – to the incremental – e.g., the absurdist theatrical elements in such zany philosophical puzzlers as A Dance of the Forests, The Road, and Madmen and Specialists. Soyinka once said that Bale Baroka in The Lion and the Jewel was inspired by his reading of the marriage of the elderly Charlie Chaplin to his fourth wife, the eighteen-year-old Oona O’Neill,1 and he has even confessed to there 1

OLE

James Gibbs, “Soyinka in Zimbabwe: A Question and Answer Session,” Literary Half-Yearly (Mysore) 28.2 (July 1987): 67.

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being Buddhist “reference points and mythologies” in his poetry.2 Clearly, Nigeria’s first Nobel laureate was a veritable super-sponge soaking up whatever spirits – foreign and autochthonous – that he happened to come across, blending them together, and producing syncretic essences that drew their miscegenated vigour from the variety of disparate creative juices that spawned them. He squeezed out a whole host of these oddly begotten offspring. This was not an unprecedented bastard enterprise. All the best authors engage in adventurous affairs of this sort, entangling themselves with predecessors whose beguiling legacy of beautiful forms and elegant wordplay they most admire. The trick is not to replicate but to emulate that beauty, that elegance, that originality, so that one’s own mind-sprung progeny can withstand the test of time without being regarded primarily as an offshoot of somebody else’s literary D N A . One must absorb influences, not flaunt them. T.S. Eliot put it well when he said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”3 To this hypothesis we might add a small corollary: that the best thieves take only what is of most value and safest in their own set of circumstances. There is no point in stealing something that can too easily be traced. Soyinka is certainly aware of this. As a young man he once excoriated Camara Laye for having modelled The Radiance of the King too closely on Franz Kafka’s The Castle,4 for he believed that most intelligent readers like their Kafka straight, not geographically transposed [. . . ]. It is truly amazing that foreign critics have contented themselves with merely dropping an occasional ‘Kafkaesque’ – a feeble sop to integrity – since they cannot ignore the more obvious imitativeness of Camara Laye’s technique. (I think we can tell when the line of mere ‘influence’ has been crossed.)5

2

Interviews with 6 Nigerian Writers, ed. John Agetua (Benin City: the author, nd): 46. T.S. Eliot, “Philip Massinger” (1920), in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975): 153. 4 Adele King, in Rereading Camara Laye (Lincoln: U Nebraska P , 2002): 5, has alleged that The Radiance of the King was written not by Laye but “is primarily the work of [Francis] Soulié, a Belgian with a passion for Africa and an unsuccessful literary career. Another Belgian, [Robert] Poulet, who had a reputation as an excellent literary critic and stylist who would help authors revise their manuscripts, gave advice on the manuscript.” 5 Wole Soyinka, “From a Common Back Cloth: A Reassessment of the African Literary Image,” American Scholar 32.3 (Summer 1963): 387–88. 3

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Few writers relish being branded as imitators, debtors or thieves of others’ cultural property. Most would prefer to be recognized as unique creative innovators, even when their works resemble a collage of purloined materials. Some of them may not even be fully aware of the extent of their borrowings from forebears whose verbal virtuosity shaped their own efforts at artistic communication. And they may not wish to be reminded of what they owe, perhaps unconsciously or subliminally, to past craftsmen. But this need not deter those of us who, rather like lawyers in paternity suits, are interested in tracing the lineaments of literary genealogy in order to determine, beyond reasonable doubt, who begat whom. Hunting for genetic sources can be an enjoyable academic exercise for critics, if only for the pleasure that comes from identifying a plausible connection between one text and another. To illustrate this point, I intend to draw attention to a debt that one of Soyinka’s first plays, The Invention,6 may owe, at least in part, to a poem by Alan Paton. This may seem an unusual attribution, for Soyinka has been dismissive of Paton’s achievement in Cry, the Beloved Country, saying that this novel “simply debases the gift of sympathy”7 and displays the “visionary piety”8 of its all-too-Christian author. One wouldn’t have expected Soyinka to have drawn any sustenance whatsoever from such a despised source. But The Invention, which appears to have been written shortly after his student years at the University of Leeds, was staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London in November 1959, and was finally published in 2005, both as a book in South Africa and as part of a Soyinka number of a new annual called African Theatre,9 has the peculiar distinction of being set in South Africa and of dealing in a satirical manner with what was half a century ago the underlying cause of the most intractable of South Africa’s political problems: the racism institutionalized by the government’s official policy of apartheid, or separation of the races. 6

All quotations are taken from Soyinka, The Invention and The Detainee, ed. Zodwa Motsa (Pretoria: U of South Africa, 2005). 7 Soyinka, “Back Cloth,” 395. 8 Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1976): 65. 9 Soyinka, The Invention and The Detainee, and “The Invention,” in African Theatre: Blackout, Blowout & Beyond: Wole Soyinka’s Satirical Revue Sketches, ed. Martin Banham, Chuck Mike & Judith Greenwood (Trenton N J & Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2005): 176–99.

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The Invention is built on a simple joke: an atomic bomb launched by the American government on 4 July 1976 goes astray and explodes in South Africa, changing the skin colour of everyone in the country to a “pasty [or] sickly greyishness” (20). The drama is centred in a laboratory where a team of South African scientists are working to discover means of distinguishing between the races in this accidentally deracialized world. As one of them says, “When human beings became so mutated that it becomes impossible to distinguish between black and white – is that not the end of the world?” (27). To avoid such a monochromatic catastrophe, one member of the team studies nasal hairs, another body odours, a third tastes urine, a fourth grinds the body parts of natives into a “soap of truth” that he imagines will enable users to regain their original colour, at least temporarily. But none of these approaches to the problem works. The administrators of the lab and the team members themselves are pinning their hopes on the research being done in another room offstage by a secretive scientist who is inventing a machine that is going to be far more discriminating. At a press of the button, it will distinguish between the Wog, the Nigger, the Dago, the Jew, the half-breed, the half-caste, the semi-breed, the inter-breed, and their several components, and any other permutation and combination of the aforementioned races, right back to the sixth or seventh root of the individual’s genealogy. (29)

Unfortunately, this lone mad scientist blows up his lab and himself just before a small foreign delegation arrive to acquaint themselves with the promising work being done in South Africa to develop foolproof methods of racial identification.10 The male delegate introduces himself as the Envoy Extraordinary from the Federation of the United Southern States of America. The female delegate represents the Union of British Landlords, Landladies and Landowners. Both are ready to provide funding to support the lab’s pioneering pigmentary research, but the lab has nothing to show them, because the explosion has destroyed the invention and its inventor. By setting the drama in such a race-mad world, Soyinka was playing upon the absurdity and inhumanity of institutionalized codes of racial discrimina-

10

In his latest memoir, You Must Set Forth at Dawn (New York: Random House,

2006): 37, Soyinka describes this play as “wish fulfillment by the theatrical route” and

recalls that “to make matters worse [. . . ] the explosion refused to occur on cue.”

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tion in South Africa and the West. Abiola Irele, in a perceptive foreword to the South African edition of the play, notes that Beyond its attack on apartheid, the interest of this play resides in the intimations it provides of the dark irony of Madmen and Specialists, perhaps the most disconcerting of Soyinka’s plays. One cannot help but wonder about the possible lingering power in the playwright’s mind of the words spoken by one [of] his characters in The Invention: “Independence of thought only leads to madness.” It would indeed be instructive to establish parallels between the two plays, and to observe the development that Soyinka gives to the moral reversal that is the basis of the action in both, the curious subversion in situations of mass hysteria of positive systems of knowledge, in such a way that they are transformed into life-denying principles.11

Madness was destined to become a major metaphor in Soyinka’s subsequent political satires. The Invention thus presages the direction of much of his later work. So, how does Alan Paton fit into such a racially dystopic vision of the South African world? He, too, addressed the systemic evils of apartheid, but in his works there was often an offsetting optimism that restored some balance, some health, to a deranged society. The subtitle of his Cry, the Beloved Country was “a story of comfort in desolation.” As a deeply committed Christian, he apparently believed that good would ultimately triumph over evil. This no doubt is what Soyinka meant when speaking of his “visionary piety.” But Paton also had a sense of humour that he sometimes employed to get at the ironies and absurdities of life in apartheid South Africa. A good example of this puckishness can be found in his poem “My Great Discovery,” which was published in 195712 during Soyinka’s last undergraduate year at the University of Leeds. One may assume that Soyinka read it there or in London. Here is how this amusing poem goes:

11

Soyinka, The Invention and The Detainee, xi. Alan Paton, “My Great Discovery,” Africa South 1.3 (April–June 1957): 94–97. In Alan Paton: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1994): 313–14, Peter Alexander cites the wrong date (August–September 1958) and page number (18) in Africa South for this poem. The issue that carried the poem also included three poems by Langston Hughes, but these were not listed in the table of contents, perhaps as a ploy to avoid censorship. 12

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BERNTH LINDFORS My Great Discovery After much exploratory Work in my laboratory I made an epoch-making Breath-taking Discovery. Can you not picture me? Can you not see me there, Wild eyes, disordered hair, With fanatical persistence And white-robed assistants In masks, And flasks Smoking, choking Everywhere? I cannot give to such as you The reasoning which led me to This epoch-making Breath-taking Discovery. Well this discovery Was simple as could be Five straight injections Position, lumbar In colour, umber Taste, very like cucumber Effect, inducing slumber And if I may remind you Five in number – These five injections could erase In just as many days The pigmentation From any nation. I sat astounded Completely dumbfounded By the epoch-making Breath-taking Discovery.

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 Paton’s Discovery, Soyinka’s Invention Being a scientist, delighted Being South African, affrighted In Great Britain, knighted. I seized the telephone And in a voice unlike my own (Not through dissembling But through trembling) Government, I said The girl said, what division? I said, no divisions any more. She said, I mean what section? I said, no sections any more. She said, I’ll report you, (Or deport you, I can’t quite say I’m not au fait With recent legislation) I said, you go ahead Or I shall plunge the nation Into a conflagration. I know that shocked her She said, you need the Doctor I said, Yes get the Doctor And all the Cabinet, For I can change the pigmentation Of any nation. To cut the story short She gave a kind of snort And got the real big Boss Who said, of coss, of coss, Come up at once. It is no kind of pret To face a Cabinet They were astounded And dumbfounded. One said, Good Lord And hummed and hawed And one was suave Just like the papers say. And one was gay

75

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BERNTH LINDFORS And said this is the day For if the pigmentation Of any nation Can suffer alteration Why the whole fact of race Takes on another face. But another Minister Looking quite sinister Just like the papers say Said this suggestion Requires digestion Let’s meet another day. And so again I met The Cabinet And this same Minister Still looking sinister Said, does this alteration Of the pigmentation Of any nation, Just work from black to white Or do you think it might Change also white to black? And I replied All full of pride The recipe can be supplied For any shade In beige or jade In snow or jet Or violet. Then sir, he said, I here submit A list of those to be Changed with this recipe. He pushed the list across To the big Boss. My eyes are fine A shiver went right down my spine The leading name was mine. I rushed into my pocket And pressed the radar switch That sent the radar rocket

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Which Blew up the laboratory And all work exploratory Plus my assistants Whom at this distance I spared the degradation The gross humiliation Of working for a caitiff Who had gone natiff.

Paton’s “Discovery” may seem a good distance from Soyinka’s Invention, but note the close analogues: a laboratory, a mad scientist working alone, a pigmentary panacea, a rocket, a lab explosion bringing a cataclysmic end to racechanging research. There are even some motifs that look suspiciously like direct borrowings. Soyinka’s play opens with a description of the setting: “The laboratory is a gleaming piece of futurization. Researchers are in white overalls [...] For the rest, the usual equipment of a laboratory, tongs, scales, crucibles, burners, beakers, flasks on tripods and tubes leading to and from bubble burping beakers” (20). This is not too far from Paton’s fleeting reference to ...white-robed assistants In masks And flasks Smoking, choking Everywhere. (94)

But it is in the vaunted curative powers of the new discovery / invention that we find the nearest resemblances. Paton’s ... recipe can be supplied For any shade In beige or jade In snow or jet Or violet. (96)

Soyinka’s invention, as mentioned earlier, is far more discriminating. At a press of the button, it will distinguish between the Wog, the Nigger, the Dago, the Jew, the half-breed, the half-caste, the semi-breed, the inter-breed, and their several components, and any other permutation and combination of the aforementioned races, right back to the sixth or seventh root of the individual’s genealogy. (29)

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This appears to be an imaginative conflation of Paton’s recipe. Indeed, it could be argued that the whole of Soyinka’s Invention was little more than an elaborate expansion of Paton’s far-fetched fable of race-erasing science. True, there are also significant differences between the poem and the play, and perhaps it is claiming too much to assert that Paton’s “Discovery” planted the seed that led to the germination of Soyinka’s Invention. One may need a much fuller sperm-count to prove possible paternity. After all, there may have been other seeds as well, one of which is suggested in brief prefatory remarks in the Soyinka number of African Theatre: namely, that The fifties saw a number of nuclear tests and some experiments with rockets, a proportion of which went spectacularly wrong. For example, during 1956, the relevant United States agency had lost contact with a Snark missile that was still ‘lost’ when Soyinka was writing. In The Invention Soyinka brought these ‘scares’ together with his concern about apartheid.13

Maybe so, but an errant nuclear rocket was only a precipitating factor in Soyinka’s play. Race science was the primary and paramount focus throughout the drama, and here is where Paton may have provided an appropriate lens through which Soyinka could sharpen his attack on the lunacy of apartheid. A preponderance of the available evidence seems to suggest that Soyinka’s discovery of Paton’s “Discovery” may have enabled him to concoct the working parts of his own madcap Invention.

WORKS CITED Agetua, John, ed. Interviews with Six Nigerian Writers (Benin City: John Agetua, n.d.) Alexander, Peter. Alan Paton: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1994). Eliot, T.S. “Philip Massinger” (1920), in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975): 153–60. Gibbs, James. “Soyinka in Zimbabwe: A Question and Answer Session,” Literary Half-Yearly (Mysore) 28.2 (July 1987): 50–110. Irele, Abiola. “Foreword,” in Soyinka, The Invention and The Detainee, ix–xi. King, Adele. Rereading Camara Laye (Lincoln: U Nebraska P , 2002). Paton, Alan. “My Great Discovery,” Africa South 1.3 (April–June 1957): 94–97. Soyinka, Wole. “From a Common Back Cloth: A Reassessment of the African Literary Image,” American Scholar 32.3 (Summer 1963): 387–96. 13

African Theatre, 176.

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——. “The Invention,” in African Theatre: Blackout, Blowout & Beyond: Wole Soyinka’s Satirical Revue Sketches, ed. Martin Banham, Chuck Mike & Judith Greenwood (Trenton N J & Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2005): 176–99. ——. The Invention and The Detainee, ed. Zodwa Motsa (Pretoria: U of South Africa, 2005). ——. Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1976). ——. You Must Set Forth at Dawn (New York: Random House, 2006).

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Writing Out Imperialism? A Note on Nationalism and Political Identity in the African-Owned Newspapers of Colonial Ghana1

S TEPHANIE N EWELL

S

O C I A L H I S T O R I A N S of Africa and the British Empire often suggest that the First World War was a seminal moment that stimulated anticolonial networks in the colonies and led, ultimately, to the emergence of country-specific nationalisms in the 1930s and 1940s, and to the end of imperialism in the late-1950s. In the words of Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin–Coetzee, “empires crumbled, monarchies collapsed, cherished assumptions faded, all victims of this intensive conflict.”2 Similarly, in his recent study of the war, Hew Strachan insists that “the first world war ranks alongside the slave trade in terms of its impact on Africa,” affecting and transforming traditional social patterns at a profound level.3 In colonial Ghana, however, as this brief essay will argue, the significance of the First World War to the reformation of social and political identities was rather more multifaceted and nuanced than suggested by these scholars’ stark overviews. Focusing on the first two decades of the twentieth century, I ask to 1

Research for this project was made possible by a grant from the British Academy. Some of the ideas in this chapter also appeared in Stephanie Newell, “An Introduction to the Writings of J.G. Mullen, an African Clerk, in the Gold Coast Leader, 1916– 1919,” Africa 78.3 (June 2008): 384–400. 2 Frans Coetzee & Marilyn Shevin–Coetzee, “Introduction,” Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War, ed. Coetzee & Shevin–Coetzee (Providence R I & Oxford: Berghahn, 1995): vii–xxii. 3 Hew Strachan, The First World War in Africa (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004): viii.

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what extent the African-owned newspapers in Ghana started to imagine the end, or exit, of British imperialism. With particular attention to the First World War, I discuss the political manoeuvres of different members of the literate West African community. What were the networks and identities that mattered to literate ‘Gold Coasters’ during the war? What texts did these communities produce and consume as part of the process of developing their identities as elites and political actors? In what ways do their newspaper commentaries comply with, resist, or contest recent scholarship on nationalism in the colonial period? West African soldiers and carriers were often reluctant recruits who had been forcibly enlisted by chiefs with heavy mobilization quotas to meet.4 While British propaganda emphasized their loyalty to Empire, desertion rates were high among conscripts, and the scaling-down of a visible colonial presence in many parts of West Africa sparked local disturbances and powerstruggles that were anything but patriotic.5 Troops were poorly equipped and undernourished, and sickness claimed the lives of more men than did military engagement.6 They faced terrain that made trench warfare impossible, and casualty figures were high: by the conclusion of the Cameroons campaign between February and April 1916, for example, 4,600 battle casualties had been recorded, and 35,000 men had been admitted to hospital suffering tropical diseases.7 In spite of these victims of war, the fact that mass carnage on the European scale was out of the question in West Africa caused several European commentators to liken the region’s role to that of a ‘side-show’, with 4

See David Killingray, “Military and Labour Policies in the Gold Coast during the First World War,” in Africa and the First World War, ed. Melvin E. Page (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987): 152–70; Strachan, The First World War in Africa. 5 David Killingray, The British Military Presence in West Africa (Oxford Development and Records Project Report 3; Oxford: Rhodes House Library, 1983; Mahir Saul and Patrick Royer, West African Challenge to Empire: Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War (Athens: Ohio U P & Oxford: James Currey, 2001). 6 Strachan The First World War in Africa. 7 Howard E. Gorges, The Great War in West Africa (London: Hutchinson, 1916): 262. Contemporaneous accounts of the conflict repeatedly describe the problems posed by the dense forests and mountains of Cameroon, in which sniper tactics proved more successful than conventional warfare. East Africa, with its savannah, provided opportunities for Western-style warfare using heavy artillery and troop movements, and in consequence the casualties were a great deal higher on the East African front. See also Charles Lucas, The Empire at War, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1924).

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campaigns and casualties on the Western Front determining the course of events in the main ‘theatre’ of war.8 West African newspapermen faced a host of contradictions in their coverage of the war. Interestingly, in the African-owned newspapers of colonial Ghana, the conditions faced by African soldiers on the ground were rarely discussed, and the issue of forced enlistment was ignored. Rather, what one finds is the assertion of a vigorous pro-imperial identity in the press. “From the seat of British Administration/ Flows the water of Freedom and Liberty,” opens one such vocalization, a poem entitled “Preference of British Rule” by “Headockey of Togoland,” published in the Gold Coast Leader after Togoland was taken by the Allies in the swift campaign of 1914. “That’s why we prefer Thee O Britannia / Under thy flag there’s much contentment,” the patriotic poem continues: “At thy left there’s freedom and liberty / At thy right true [sic] and justice to all / Ever our supplication to God will be / To remain always with Great Britain.”9 If one sets African nationalism over against European imperialism in an oppositional relationship in order to understand the politics of this period, or if one privileges European imperial manoeuvres over ‘local’ interpretations of the First World War, one runs the risk of rendering vital areas of the past unintelligible, and of being forced to dismiss swathes of African-authored material from the archives, including Headockey of Togoland’s blatantly jingoistic poem. As Frederick Cooper points out in Colonialism in Question, however, ‘ways of thinking’ in the past should not always be filtered through the normative categories of later historical periods. For Cooper, this warning applies especially to the category of anticolonial nationalism, for, he writes, “we tend to weave all forms of opposition to what colonialism did into a narrative of growing nationalist sentiment and nationalist organization,” with the consequence that “we lose sight of the quest of people in the past to develop connections or ways of thinking that mattered to them but not to us.”10 With Cooper’s critique of teleological, nation-centred versions of (post) colonial history firmly in view, this discussion of colonial Ghanaian news8

See Gorges, The Great War in West Africa, 17; A.J. Stockwell, “The War and the British Empire,” in Britain and the First World War, ed. John Turner (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988): 42. 9 Gold Coast Leader (30 January 1915): 7. 10 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: U of California P , 2005): 18.

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paper culture seeks to re-visit, and re-read, the story of the First World War through the perceptions and interpretations of different sections of the literate West African community, as published in the Ghanaian press at the time. The First World War enabled prominent political leaders like J.E. Casely Hayford and J.P.H. Brown, editor and manager-proprietor of the Gold Coast Leader respectively, to use their printing presses to reinforce and refine the links, forged by members of the Gold Coast elite in the previous two decades, between Africans’ imperial, regional, and pan-African identities.11 In the years immediately before the outbreak of war, these newspapermen expressed unhesitating loyalty to the British Crown. In adjective-laden prose, they declared: “the Gold Coast native is highly sensible of and deeply grateful for the great and various benefits, moral, social, religious and political which contact with the whiteman has brought to him.”12 This unsigned editorial was probably written by Casely Hayford, remembered today as a great nationalist leader in colonial Ghana: “No primitive nation ever rose or came to anything without contact with a higher superior power or nation,” the editorial continued, offering a perspective that was repeated many times in subsequent years. This model of imperial subjectivity appears anachronistic by contemporary standards, especially if West African ‘nationalism’ is defined by default as anticolonial nationalism. L.H. Ofosu–Appiah describes the tensions that emerge in the politics of men like Casely Hayford, whose use of the word ‘nation’ did not appear to compete with their loyalty to the British Empire: “the idea of Empire as a noble achievement was accepted by all the Gold

11

The Government Gazette for the Gold Coast colony gives a circulation figure of

57,200 for the Gold Coast Leader in 1912 (Wrangham, “The Gold Coast and the First

World War”). The only other newspaper in production during the first world war in Ghana was the Gold Coast Nation, rival of the Leader and mouthpiece of the Aborigines Rights Protection Society (A R P S ) in Cape Coast. Immediately after the cessation of war, several new and influential journals appeared, including the Voice of the People (later Vox Populi) of Accra, and the Gold Coast Independent, also produced in Accra. See K.A.B. Jones–Quartey, History, Politics and Early Press in Ghana: The Fictions and The Facts (Legon: University of Ghana, 1975). 12 “Editorial: The Gold Coast Native Not Ungrateful,” Gold Coast Leader (8 July 1911): 3.

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Coast nationalists of the period [...] the question of independence outside the British Empire did not arise.”13 Members of the Gold Coast intelligentsia appeared to believe that the British Empire had a moral responsibility and a political obligation to nurture their emergent ‘nations’. Such beliefs need not be regarded as an example of the mental colonization of the intelligentsia, nor as a manifestation of the tragically split, alienated identity of elite West Africans in this period.14 Rather, each time they use the discourse of imperial fealty in their newspapers, Casely Hayford and his colleagues make the same vital move: they hold the British administration to account for the misrule and exploitation of African nations, and make use of print to insist that the imperial power should take responsibility for political reforms and the education and enfranchisement of its subjects. The First World War subtly altered these tense imperial relationships. As the war progressed, the powerful editors of African-owned newspapers and other members of the Gold Coast intelligentsia swore increasingly fervent loyalty to the British Empire as imperial citizens. So patriotic and anti-German were the commentaries and poems in the Gold Coast Leader at this time that the editors seemed to have voted for their newspaper to become a vehicle of British propaganda. The following poem, a popular rhyme by J. Smedley Norton entitled “The Kaiser’s Nightmare,” was cut-and-pasted from the British press: I’m called the Crazy Kaiser In the East and in the West To break the peace of Europe, I have done my level best. … Imagine little Belgium

13

L.H. Ofosu–Appiah, Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford: The Man of Vision and Faith (J.B. Danquah Memorial Lectures; Accra: Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1975): 3; see also Kweku Larbi Korang, Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa: Nation and African Modernity (Rochester N Y : U of Rochester P , 2004). 14 Several recent histories of elite culture in colonial Ghana dwell on the “Faustian predicament” of an Afro-Western intelligentsia caught in an inescapably dualistic identity. See Korang, Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa, 13; Roger S. Gocking, Facing Two Ways: Ghana’s Coastal Communities under Colonial Rule (Lanham M D , New York & Oxford: U P of America, 1999).

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Making such a stand; She quite surprised the forces Of our mighty Fatherland. That fiery French Republic On the land and on the sea, Are going to make things awkward For the Fatherland and me. … Without a friend in Europe Though Austria may be true We look like getting beaten By the Old Red, White and Blue. — Gold Coast Leader (21 November 1914): 5

Alongside the expression of overt pro-British patriotism, “The Kaiser’s Nightmare” summarizes recent events in Europe: the poem thus serves a double purpose, simultaneously affirming the “Old Red, White and Blue” and offering West African readers a simple geography of the far-off theatre of war alongside potted biographies of key military figures such as Kitchener and the Kaiser. Numerous other anti-German poems and articles were culled from the British press and republished in West African newspapers, including a pamphlet entitled Proof that the Kaiser is Anti-Christ by Samuel George (Gold Coast Leader [2 October 1915]: 5–6). Items such as these were not simply the consequence of the political pressures to appear patriotic, caused by wartime conditions. Colonial administrators were certainly quick to try to rein in and redirect local readers, particularly when particular types of printed text seemed to trigger the expression of political complaints and economic grievances at a local level. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, British administrators were faced with a wealth of locally-owned newspapers whose editors declared, confrontationally, “Having expressed our opinion on any public matter, others who hold opposite opinions must of course air theirs too, and then Public Opinion will judge.”15 Missionary and colonial archives bulge with paperwork on the subject of how to reign in this local ‘opinion’. As a consequence, in the archives we can find a wealth of information about official attitudes towards reading and readers in various parts of the British Empire. Indeed, the ar15

Gold Coast Leader (2 May 1903): 2.

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chives often give the impression of an Empire in hot pursuit of an activity that evaded official control. Alongside dutiful patriotism, however, other political agendas rose to the surface in West African newspapers during the war, and were conveniently attached to the rhetoric of imperial loyalty. African political leaders made use of their primary affiliation to the British Empire as supporters of the war in order to develop a complex set of local power-relations. In particular, they used their identity as wartime patriots to consolidate their status as ‘national’ leaders with international influence over the war effort. For example, shortly after the outbreak of war, prominent newspapermen in the Gold Coast, alongside chiefs and members of political organizations such as the A R P S in Cape Coast, established charitable ‘war funds’ to assist the British war effort. In September 1914, an announcement in heavy type appeared in the Gold Coast Leader declaring the establishment of one such fund, “A Relief Fund for Widows and Orphans of the British Soldiers who Perish in the Present War.”16 Other adverts for funds followed swiftly on the heels of this one, publicly backed up by African ‘unofficial’ members of the Legislative Council, including the Hon. T. Hutton–Mills and the Hon. J.E. Casely Hayford.17 Prominent men in the Gold Coast made conspicuous, generous contributions towards this and other funds, raising a total of over £80,000 for the purchase of aeroplanes and other supplies to help the Allies between 1915 and 1917.18 Recording each generous contribution for all to see, the Gold Coast Leader and its rival, the Gold Coast Nation, published detailed lists of donors, donations, and official responses.19 So great was this fund-raising activity in the newspapers that the Gold Coast Leader was singled out for praise by Sir Charles Lucas in The Empire at War.20

16

Gold Coast Leader (19 September 1914): 2. Lucas, The Empire at War, vol. 4: 46–50. 18 The Empire at War, vol. 4: 35. 19 In total, eleven aeroplanes were purchased using subscriptions from Gold Coast donors. By 1918, however, accusations of embezzlement were rife, when the editors at the Gold Coast Leader insinuated that the Hon E.J.P. Brown of the A R P S had pilfered funds, and called for the publication of the A R P S War Fund accounts; “Editorial: An Open Letter to the Hon. E.J.P. Brown, M L C ” Gold Coast Leader (5–12 October 1918): 3–4. 20 Lucas, The Empire at War, vol. 4: 50. 17

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These donations can be regarded as acts of political self-assertion taking place within the framework of Imperial identities and colonial networks of power. In their role as benevolent gentlemen, the Gold Coast intelligentsia made use of their newspapers to exercise public patronage over their supposed Imperial masters. They reversed the conventional “charity-for-Africa” model, and showed a philanthropic impulse to assist (darkest) England in her darkest hour. In so doing, they demonstrated their absolute equality in wealth, morality, status, conscience, and humanity. Each donor simultaneously displayed his economic power, his ‘national’ leadership potential, and his rightful place as a citizen of the Imperial world. The press recorded these displays for all to see. In conjunction with these charitable donations to the war effort, as early as May 1915 the call went out, in harmony with India, “for a larger and fuller political life and the right to enjoy in the particular country of their birth the full benefits and privileges of British citizenship.”21 “The Gold Coast Press […] has shown a wise restraint in their criticism of local affairs,” ran one editorial in the Gold Coast Leader: [But] our interest and concern in the great war in Europe should not blind us to the realities of our political life in West Africa [. . . ] The question of the recognition of our rights to better, more responsible and more lucrative appointments in the Government Service of our country is as acute now as it ever was.22

The intelligentsia’s demands for civil and constitutional rights were therefore woven into the very fabric of their wartime Imperial relationships, and their wartime relationships were, literally, ‘bound up’ in the press. The Gold Coast newspapers, and the wider print cultures they generated, were inextricable from the African elite’s sense of political subjectivity: print was vital to the entire process of their self-definition. In addition to the domestic political manoeuvres described above, the war generated opportunities for colonial West Africans to reflect, in newspaper commentaries and poems, on abstract political concepts such as freedom and justice. Thus, increasing numbers of articles were published in which antiGerman sentiment was conveyed through a critique of German imperialist 21

“Editorial: India’s Aspirations,” Gold Coast Leader (24 April 1915): 4. “Editorial: Natives Under British Rule in West Africa,” Gold Coast Leader (21 November 1914): 3. 22

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policy. As the war progressed, however, this critique melted into a critical assessment of imperialism per se, and it is here that the other, more confrontational side of the African elite’s apparently ‘pro-imperialist’ standpoint is revealed, bringing us round, full circle, to the issues raised by Cooper in his critique of nation-centred readings of the colonial past. In an article on “The Kaiser,” the prominent ‘man of affairs’ J. Essilfie Wilson objected to German imperialism, using an ethical-cum-political language to comment on the “violation of private rights and personal liberties of natives of Togoland.”23 Within a month of this article, an editorial in the Gold Coast Leader on “Coloured Subjects – French and British” expanded these ethical concepts to compare British West Africans unfavourably with French West Africans, pointing out that the latter “will enjoy full citizenship as ‘metropolitan citizens’” after the war, whereas the former will be returned to colonial subjection.24 Declarations of Imperial patriotism – including antiGerman tirades, and overtly jingoistic material such as Headockey of Togoland’s poem, cited above – were therefore used in a subtly political manner to host qualitative and critical comparisons, from the point of view of the colonized, between German, French, and British colonial policy in West Africa. If these Gold Coast newspapermen did not overtly demand the exit of Britain from West Africa, then the comparative framework they employed exposed serious flaws in British notions of the relationship between colonizer and colonized. After the First World War, the colonial authorities became increasingly suspicious of the power wielded by local newspaper elites. As part of the wider consolidation of British imperialism in the 1920s and 1930s, colonial governments overhauled native administrations, systematized the policy of indirect rule, formalized taxation, and opened new secondary schools to train clerks, teachers, and civil servants for roles in the expanding administration. Mass education campaigns were part of the effort to address the 23

J. Essilfie Wilson, “The Kaiser,” Gold Coast Leader (2 October 1915): 5–6. “Editorial: Coloured Subjects – French and British,” Gold Coast Leader (30 October 1915): 4–5. British West Africa did not have its own Blaise Diagne to persuade the metropolitan government to give Africans political rewards for serving in the war, and to allow African soldiers to fight on the Western Front. See Joe H. Lunn, “Kande Kamara Speaks: An Oral History of the West African Experience in France, 1914–1918,” in Africa and the First World War, ed. Melvin E. Page (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987): 28–53. 24

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problem of ‘native’ literacy too narrowly confined to controversial and politically active local elites who were increasingly assertive in their criticisms of colonial rule. On the one hand, officials believed that literacy would liberate the ‘native’ from a long night of savagery and launch him or her on the path towards European ‘civilization’. Reading would thus bring modernity to the African, introducing what Simon Gikandi describes as “temporality, subjectivity, reason, and agency” where previously, according to colonial administrators, there had existed only passion and irrationality.25 Yet, on the other hand, British educationists and administrators regarded print as having dangerous properties when placed in inexperienced or malevolent hands. Colonial governments throughout the British Empire were swift to introduce censorship and libel laws to prevent the ‘wrong’ type of text from falling into readers’ hands and to stifle anticolonial or pan-Africanist articulations. For all of the literature-producing groups in colonial West Africa in the early-twentieth century – the editors, colonial administrators, African professionals, newspaper correspondents, missionaries, and, increasingly, members of educated local sub-elites – reading and writing were inextricable from the issue of personal and collective empowerment. In response, and with increasing fervour as the twentieth century progressed, officials attempted to prevent readers in the colonies from falling under the spell of ‘bad’ books. They seemed genuinely to believe that the Empire’s carefully trained readers were capable of having their literacy exploited and misused. Worse still for the authorities in British West Africa, especially during the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, newspaper readers were increasingly exposed to pan-Imperial articulations of resistance and revolution, including newspaper reports about the rise of Gandhi’s protest movement in India, articles on the Irish campaign for Home Rule, and columns containing communist revolutionary rhetoric. Colonial officials watched with mounting concern as supposedly ‘seditious’ (because fiercely anticolonial) newspapers and race-conscious publications were imported into the colonies by black migrants from other parts of Africa, the U S A , and the Caribbean. Ghanaian newspapers in the period before the 1930s are characterized by the heterogeneity of genres they contain: material ranges from serialized travel and exploration narratives to works of West African history, news re25

“Cultural Translation and the African Self: A (Post)Colonial Case Study,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 3.3 (2001): 360.

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ports, short stories, poems, lists of proverbs and literary quotations, reprinted articles from British and West African newspapers, and details of the comings and goings of prominent coastal families. This generic multiplicity differs in one seminal way from the general heterogeneity that characterizes all newspapers in Benedict Anderson’s description of print culture. The Ghanaian press lacks the central pivot of ‘homogenous national time’ which, for Anderson, makes the newspaper (and the nation) possible in the first place.26 Until the 1930s, Ghanaian newspapers oscillated between a sense of the ethno-regional ‘nation’, the British West African ‘nation’, the pan-African ‘nation’, and loyalty to the British Empire. They did not require the homogeneous national temporality which, in Anderson’s view, newspapers simultaneously generate and depend upon in order to be coherent. Faced with the jamboree of genres and styles in the Gold Coast press of the early-twentieth century, it would be easy to regard these newspapers as ‘emergent’, ‘nascent’, and ‘proto-nationalist’, rather than substantial textual commodities in their own right. Indeed, several media historians describe the press in this period as preparing the way for the ideologically coherent newspapers of the later nationalist period.27 Others regard the early press as already inherently nationalist.28 Such teleological interpretations of Ghanaian history override the sheer dynamism and difference of the earlier decades, and fail to recognize the possibilities presented by the polygeneric format for writers and readers at the time. Following Cooper’s lead, we should perhaps try to develop a more sensitive periodization of the newspapers which, first, takes anticolonial nationalism into consideration without over-centralizing it; second, develops an understanding and an aesthetic appreciation of the polygeneric format of the early Gold Coast press; and third, attempts to discover information – albeit biased, textualized and fragmented – about the values, attitudes, aspirations, and articulations of diverse readerships in colonial Ghana. Some of these areas of research are not intelligible within the framework of anticolonial nationalism. This is not to deny or oppose Gold Coast nationalism in the early-twentieth 26

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 27 See Jennifer Hasty, The Press and Political Culture in Ghana (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U P , 2005). 28 David Kimble, A Political History of Ghana, 1850–1928 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963): 506–528.

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century. It is to suggest, however, that a rich array of further affiliations and possibilities can be woven into our account of Ghanaian print culture in the fifty-year period before the exit of imperialism.

WORKS CITED Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Anon. “Editorial: Coloured Subjects – French and British,” Gold Coast Leader (30 October 1915): 4–5. ——. “Editorial: The Gold Coast Native Not Ungrateful,” Gold Coast Leader (8 July 1911): 3. ——. “Editorial: India’s Aspirations,” Gold Coast Leader (24 April 1915): 4. ——. “Editorial: Natives Under British Rule in West Africa,” Gold Coast Leader (21 November 1914): 3. ——. “Editorial: An Open Letter to the Hon. E.J.P. Brown, M L C ,” Gold Coast Leader (5–12 October 1918): 3–4. Attoh–Ahuma, Samuel R.B. The Gold Coast Nation and National Consciousness (1911; London: Frank Cass, 1971). Baku, D. Kofi. “An Intellectual in Nationalist Politics: The Contribution of Kobina Sekyi to the Evolution of Ghanaian National Consciousness” (D.Phil thesis, University of Sussex, 1987). Casely Hayford, Joseph Ephraim. Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation (1911; London: Frank Cass, 1966). Coetzee, Frans, & Marilyn Shevin–Coetzee. “Introduction” to Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War, ed. Coetzee & Shevin–Coetzee (Providence R I & Oxford: Berghahn, 1995): vii–xxii. Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: U of California P , 2005). Dane, Edmund. British Campaigns in Africa and the Pacific (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1919). Essilfie Wilson, J. “The Kaiser,” Gold Coast Leader (2 October 1915): 5–6. Gikandi, Simon, “Cultural Translation and the African Self: A (Post)Colonial Case Study,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 3.3 (2001): 355–75. Gocking, Roger S. Facing Two Ways: Ghana’s Coastal Communities under Colonial Rule (Lanham M D , New York & Oxford: U P of America, 1999). Gorges, E. Howard. The Great War in West Africa (London: Hutchinson, 1916). Hasty, Jennifer. The Press and Political Culture in Ghana (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U P , 2005).

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Headockey of Togoland (pseud.). “Preference of British Rule,” Gold Coast Leader (30 January 1915): 7. Jones–Quartey, K.A.B. History, Politics and Early Press in Ghana: The Fictions and The Facts (Legon: University of Ghana, 1975). ——. “Press and Nationalism in Ghana,” United Asia 9.1 (1957): 55–60. Killingray, David. The British Military Presence in West Africa: Oxford Development and Records Project Report 3 (Oxford: Rhodes House Library, 1983). ——. “Labour Mobilisation in British Colonial Africa for the War Effort 1939–46,” in Africa and the Second World War, ed. David Killingray & Richard Rathbone (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986): 68–96. ——. “Military and Labour Policies in the Gold Coast during the First World War,” in Africa and the First World War, ed. Melvin E. Page (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987): 152–70. Kimble, David. A Political History of Ghana, 1850–1928 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963). Korang, Kweku Larbi. Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa: Nation and African Modernity (Rochester N Y : U of Rochester P , 2004). Lucas, Charles. The Empire at War, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1924). Lunn, Joe H. “Kande Kamara Speaks: An Oral History of the West African Experience in France, 1914–1918,” in Africa and the First World War, ed. Melvin E. Page (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987): 28–53. ——. Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (Portsmouth N H : Heinemann, Oxford: James Currey & Cape Town: David Philip, 1999). Ofosu–Appiah, L.H. Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford: The Man of Vision and Faith (J.B. Danquah Memorial Lectures, February 1975; Accra: Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1975). Page, Melvin E. “Black Men in a White Men’s War,” in Africa and the First World War, ed. Melvin E. Page (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987): 1–27. Saul, Mahir, & Patrick Royer. West African Challenge to Empire: Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War (Athens: Ohio U P & Oxford: James Currey, 2001). Smedley Norton, J. “The Kaiser’s Nightmare,” Gold Coast Leader (21 November 1914): 5. Strachan, Hew. The First World War in Africa (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004). Stockwell, A.J. “The War and the British Empire,” in Britain and the First World War, ed. John Turner (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988): 36–52. Wrangham, Elizabeth. “The Gold Coast and the First World War: The Colonial Economy and Clifford’s Administration” (D.Phil thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1999). |

After Exit Exile, Creativity, and the Risk of Translation1

S TEFAN H ELGESSON

I

Edward Said insists that although compelling to think about, exile is terrible to experience: “It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.”2 Indeed, exile thwarts desire. Its rupture is thrust upon the individual. Even when chosen, the need to choose exile is not of the individual’s making but rather a product of vast, intractable historical forces. Loss, dissolution, and silence inevitably follows in the wake of opting for the exit. What, then, do we make of the Barbadian writer George Lamming’s contrary proclamation that “To be an exile is to be alive”?3 This complicates Said’s entropic perspective. Exile may not be anyone’s first choice, but Lamming seems to suggest that, in our less than perfect world, it could be far better than the alternative. As both Lamming and Said point out, it has been the choice of many writers; it has accompanied an important if not dominant strand of literary creativity in the modern era. Is exile undesired even in such 1

N ONE OF HIS MOST FAMOUS ESSAYS,

I wish to thank the Swedish Research Council for funding the research that went into this essay, and Mångkulturellt centrum (in Fittja, Stockholm) for inviting me to the symposium “Exile as a creative state of mind” in Istanbul in September 2008. 2 Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Said, Reflections on Exile (London: Granta, 2001): 171. 3 George Lamming, “The Occasion for Speaking,” in Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, foreword by Sandra Pouchet Paquet (1960; Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1992): 24.

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cases? Yes and no. No and yes. Language fails us as we try to address the complexities of this question. Exile may be undesired on one level, but becomes desirable under certain circumstances. These remarks indicate the workings of a sacrificial economy. When an element of choice or agency is involved, the loss experienced in exile, it is hoped, will trigger reparation for a previous loss or lack. Certainly for someone like V.S. Naipaul, sacrificing his belonging in Trinidad at the age of seventeen, when he left for England, exile was from the very outset an act intended to secure for him a life as a writer. Of course it was a gamble; he succeeded. Others – this must be stressed – have failed. Such is the uncertainty of sacrifice. The example of Naipaul reveals, however, an instability at the heart of this discussion: namely, in the very distinction between ‘home’ and ‘exile’. He himself has never stopped deriding what he regards as the smallness and cultural paucity of Trinidad and the ‘Third World’ generally. His home, the home of his heart, had always been England as it had been evoked by its literature. But, paradoxically, it was also at the very moment when he realized that his own subject as a writer must be the Caribbean of his childhood that he came into his own as an artist. This revelation, which he recounts so powerfully in The Enigma of Arrival, came to him in exile in England. Feeling increasingly miserable and drained of creative initiative after his arrival in London in 1950, he reached a point where to keep true creative curiosity alive […] it was necessary for me to make a pattern of the knowledge I already possessed. […] I wrote very simply and fast of the simplest things in my memory. I wrote about the street in Port of Spain where I had spent part of my childhood, the street I had intently studied, during those childhood months, from the security and distance of my own family life and house. Knowledge came to me rapidly during the writing. And with that knowledge, that acknowledgement of myself (so hard before it was done, so very easy and obvious afterwards), my curiosity grew fast. I did other work; and in this concrete way, out of work that came easily to me because it was so close to me, I defined myself, and saw that my subject was not my sensibility, my inward development, but the worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in.4

This describes a homecoming. But where, in that case, do we locate home, and what is exile? Is home where you happen to grow up? Or is home the 4

V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (London: Viking, 1987): 134–35.

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place, the setting, in which you can pursue your innermost creative longing? The word ‘exile’ comes apart before our very eyes as we contemplate this oscillation between various and changeable and even irreconcilable levels of identification. It is these complications that make the topic of exile and literary creativity particularly worthy of our attention. How do we resolve the contradiction that exile can be both harrowing and rewarding? Are individual differences just that – individual and hence irreducible – or are there structural patterns, particular dynamics, that it is possible to theorize? Towards the end of this essay, without forcing the issue, I wish to test the latter option by way of translation theory. I draw particularly on Lawrence Venuti’s terms ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’, which inscribe a polarity between divergent strategies of translation in a given cultural context: domestication is the process whereby a foreign text is adapted to suit the receiving culture; foreignization does the opposite, by challenging given norms and values in the receiving – or ‘target’ – culture. This apparently simple polarity is, as we shall see, surprisingly subtle and well suited to an analysis of exile. For a long time, literary critics favoured a brief phase of modernism as a paradigm of exile. Key names in this narrative were the male Europeans James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Celan, and Walter Benjamin.5 Later in the twentieth century, the European (but not the masculine) bias was challenged by a different category of diasporic experiences. Among the more prominent of these were the exilic histories of South African and Caribbean authors, histories that usefully but sometimes detrimentally have been subsumed under the term ‘postcolonial’. Especially in the postwar decades, both regions were net producers of literary exiles whose motives for leaving home and relocating either to Europe or the U S A afford intriguing comparisons with the European modernists. A common theme that ties the modernists and the postcolonials together is that they abandon home to function more fully as writers. Exile equals, it is hoped, a more literary life. In Said’s words, James Joyce “picked a quarrel” with Ireland so as “to give force to his artistic vocation.”6 Beckett abandoned Ireland and started writing in French on similar grounds: to enter the realm of pure writing, without the baggage of home tying him down. Walter Benjamin 5

Said, “Exile”; Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Mapping World Literature (London: Continuum, 2008): 75–85. 6 Said, “Exile,” 182.

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and Paul Celan, of course, were driven out of Germany by Nazism. In their struggle to function as intellectuals, they were forced to abandon a state system that defined and reduced them to the ‘racial’ identity of Jewishness. Along similar lines, scores of South African writers under apartheid were compelled to abandon home simply to be able to concentrate on their writing. In the case of black South Africans, not unlike the Jewish writers from Central Europe, there was also the critical and fundamental need to escape racial reduction, let alone pursue their artistic ambitions. An important difference between European modernists and the mid-twentieth-century postcolonials nevertheless lies in their relative distance from and magnification of western Europe and/or the U S A as cultural metropolises. Joyce, Benjamin et al. could assume a European identity that was out of bounds for black Caribbean and African writers. On top of this, one should also stress the differences between various postcolonial (or late-colonial) histories. The anglophone Caribbean authors who moved to London in the postwar decades weren’t traumatized in the same way as the South Africans. There is even pride in Lamming’s voice as he describes cricket teams from ‘home’, the West Indies. Whereas the English and Indian teams have their common ethnic look, when a West Indian team takes the field at Lords, Lords itself is bewildered […]; Indian, Negro, Chinese, White, Portuguese mixed with Syrian. […] Just imagine for a moment, if possible, an official South African team imitating the West Indian example. Try to imagine it in 1960 [the year of the Sharpeville massacre]; and you will get some idea of where the West Indies stand in relation to the future.7

And yet, Lamming writes: “We had to get out.”8 Who are “we” in this instance? Above all the postwar West Indian writers such as Sam Selvon, Naipaul, and Lamming himself; the inventors, by Lamming’s description, of the Caribbean novel. They had to get out because of a lack of readership. They were creating a Caribbean literature for a Caribbean that, to them at the time, seemed indifferent to their ambitions. Another way of putting it is that they were using genres and techniques – notably the novel – that had little popular grounding in the Caribbean. As they had turned to writing, they had already, to some extent, exiled themselves. 7 8

Lamming, “The Occasion for Speaking,” 37. “The Occasion for Speaking,” 41.

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This is evident in most of Naipaul’s writing. Lamming’s assessment of his cultural background is strikingly similar: “The West Indian’s education was imported in much the same way that flour and butter are imported from Canada.” The importation was, moreover, “deliberately and exclusively English.”9 This created a paradox for the West Indians. Nurtured by English literature, they “had to leave if they were going to function as writers since books, in that particular colonial conception of literature, were not – meaning, too, are not supposed to be – written by natives.”10 This is where the painful aspect of exile becomes clear in Lamming’s case. He is committed to a vision of literature as rooted, as the expression of a particular time and place. Yet “a writer cannot function; and, indeed, he has no function as writer if those who read and teach reading in his society have started their education by questioning his very right to write.”11 The understated sorrow and rage of these words weigh heavily on the reader. Literature as a form of exile in itself applies also under conditions of outright oppression, only now the stakes are raised. In South Africa, an entire generation of writers, including such names as Peter Abrahams, Ezekiel (later Es’kia) Mphahlele, Can Themba, Dennis Brutus, Nat Nakasa, Bloke Modisane, Dan Jacobson, Breyten Breytenbach, Arthur Nortje, and Lewis Nkosi, left the country in the 1950s and 1960s. The reason behind the exodus was obviously the political situation, but one shouldn’t mistakenly assume that these were all political writers. Rather, it was the apartheid system as such that politicized every facet of life. Love was politicized by the prohibition of ‘interracial’ sex. Education was politicized, as access to qualitative education at any level was reserved for the white population. The job market was politicized, since no black worker could be promoted to a leading position. The very act of expressing one’s views publicly became increasingly politicized, subject to censorship. Under these circumstances, and particularly for black authors, writing acquired a peculiar duality: it was a way of escaping – mentally, symbolically – the constraints of their situation, but eventually it also drove them to escape South Africa physically. Tell Freedom by Peter Abrahams, Down Second Avenue by Mphahlele, and Blame Me on History by Modisane are some of the classic autobiographical accounts of this need to escape because of the need to write, to create. 9

Lamming, “The Occasion for Speaking,” 27. “The Occasion for Speaking,” 27. 11 “The Occasion for Speaking,” 27. 10

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The exilic nature of a life in writing was compounded for most of these authors by the fact that their work was banned in South Africa. Until the political tide turned in 1990, there was, in other words, a rift between what in the outside world was read as ‘South African literature’ and what was available for reading in South Africa proper. Out of this double, or even triple, exile would emerge both silence and writing. An example of silence which affords a striking contrast to George Lamming is Nat Nakasa. Nakasa, who in the early 1960s had made history by virtue of contributing regularly to a ‘white’ newspaper and having been the founding editor of the ambitious literary magazine The Classic, left South Africa on an exit permit in 1965 to study journalism at Harvard. A few months later, he jumped off a skyscraper in New York. The ultimate truth of Nakasa’s suicide is inaccessible to us. We may merely conclude that it coincided with his exile. More than that: it put an end to his exile, forcing silence on what was meant to be the flowering of his talent. In her tribute to Nakasa, who was a close friend of hers, Nadine Gordimer makes some trenchant observations concerning his exit: One of the reasons why he hoped to go to Harvard was because he wanted time to read the great poets and imaginative writers; he felt strongly that he needed a wider intellectual context than the day-to-day, politically-orientated, African-centred one in which he had become a thinking person, and on which, so far, even his artistic judgments must be empirically based. I wonder if he ever did find time to read; somehow, I don’t think he did. Too many well-meant invitations to speak here and there about Africa, too many wellmeant requests to appear on television programmes about Africa, too many requests to write articles about how an African looks at American this and that. Nat remained trapped in the preoccupations of his time – the time measured by those multiple clocks on airports, showing simultaneously what hour it is at Karachi, Vladivostok, Nairobi and New York, and not the dimension in which one can sit down and read.12

Gordimer’s conjecture is richly layered. It implies, to begin with, entrapment. Exile for Nakasa locked him into a particular identity, a vacuous mode of ‘Africanness’ that met the needs of the receiving American culture, but hardly fulfilled his own need to develop further as an individual and as a writer. 12

Nadine Gordimer, “One Man Living Through It” (1966), in Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, ed. & intro. Stephen Clingman (1988; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989): 82–83.

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Exile as the fate of being stuck in a cliché: it brings to mind Tayeb Salih’s elusive protagonist Mustafa Sa’eed in the novel Season of Migration to the North, a brilliant intellectual from Sudan who tailors his stories from home to suit British fantasies.13 Analogously, Nakasa fell prey to the production and maintenance of difference. The image of Nakasa being trapped in a particular version of time, a single, airport-clock ‘now’, speaks volumes. As we transpose these contrasting exits of George Lamming and Nat Nakasa to the vocabulary of translation theory, a brief exposition of key concepts is needed. In translation studies, everything begins with the terms ‘target’ and ‘source’. These are used in composite terms such as ‘source text’ and ‘target text’, ‘source language’ and ‘target language’, and ‘source culture’ and ‘target culture’. In the simplest and least ambiguous sense, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in English is a source text, whereas Stolhet och fördom, the Swedish translation, is a target text. The source culture of the novel is located in England; the target culture of the translation is to be found in Sweden. By exploring the intricate relationship not only between source and target texts, but equally between texts and cultures, translation studies has developed a rich vocabulary to describe cultural transfer across geographical and linguistic borders. In the act of transferral, translation is perhaps above all a cultural process, and one of the means by which cultural change occurs. This has been the great theme of translation scholars from the 1980s onwards. Gideon Toury, Susan Bassnett, André Lefevere, and Lawrence Venuti are among the more important figures in this development by way of which the dialectic between translation and the target culture is emphasized. For Toury, translations are “facts of target cultures.”14 Instead of offering us direct access to the work of Jane Austen, Stolhet och fördom is produced in a Swedish idiom for Swedish readers. Paradoxically, however, every translation is received with the expectation that it somehow does give us access to the source text. It is this ambiguous nature of translations that has prompted Lawrence Venuti to assess them in terms of ‘foreignization’ and ‘domestication’, concepts that he has derived from the German Romantic philosopher Friedrich

13

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, tr. Denys Johnson–Davies (London: Heinemann, 1969): 38. 14 Gideon Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995): 29.

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Schleiermacher.15 A given translation can, according to Venuti, be placed somewhere along a scale running between the poles of foreignization and domestication. A domesticating translation is what Venuti also calls a “fluent” translation. It sounds just right. It fits perfectly into the linguistic and ideological expectations of the target culture. It reads as if it wasn’t a translation at all! Some of the more extreme historical examples of this translational ideal can be found in France in the seventeenth century and in England in the eighteenth, where the classics were heavily modified to suit local tastes. A foreignizing translation, by contrast, is a translation that takes the risk of sounding odd. The choice of words, turns of phrase, perhaps an unconventional choice of source text – all combine to produce a sense of strangeness in target-culture readers, making them aware that this novel is coming from somewhere else, but at the same affecting the target readers’ own language. A writer in exile is tightly implicated in such a process of cultural translation even without switching languages. Crucially, he or she is both object and agent of translation. The agent, because the act of writing across different readerships and cultural settings forces/ enables the author to negotiate elements of cultural specificity through language and narrative. The object, because moving to another country means that you obtain (or try to obtain) recognition from another circle of people than before. Whether an exile succeeds or not has everything to do with the balance between objectification and agency. But to complicate matters even further, in colonial and postcolonial contexts translation precedes physical exile. George Lamming and Nat Nakasa moved, as embodied individuals, from a source culture to a target culture, from home to exile. But they also moved from target to source. Under British imperialism, the West Indies and South Africa were the target of British cultural expansionism. Under postwar American imperialism, both regions were in different ways the target of American cultural hegemony. In Nat Nakasa’s case, the classic example of American influence would be Drum magazine in Johannesburg. In a cultural sense, Lamming’s and Nakasa’s transfers to London and New York, respectively, were also a way of moving home from exile. What easily disrupts the process and can cripple the creativity of the writer, however, is the inability of the target culture to perceive this doubleness or what Said calls the contrapuntal nature of exile. The otherness assigned to Nat Nakasa as an interpreter of Africa in America was a way of domesticating the 15

Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995).

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young South African making him fit the pre-existing American role of an ‘African foreigner’. Domestication, hence, is a form of othering. To allow Nakasa room to approach and internalize what America could offer would, in effect, have been to foreignize the American target culture. This seems to have occurred successfully with Nakasa’s fellow South African Lewis Nkosi, as well as with Caribbean writers such as Lamming and V.S. Naipaul. In their writing, they managed to negotiate a space for themselves in the target-and-source culture of England – certainly by demonstrating their credentials as properly educated British subjects, but also by offering what Edward Said would have called their own contrapuntal vision of the world, transforming and foreignizing English literature in the process. This is something we take for granted today. English literature, as demonstrated by the history of the Booker Prize, has long since ceased to be just the literature of the U K . Although Graham Huggan, among others, has provided a trenchant critique of the Booker Prize as a means for the old imperial ‘centre’ to appropriate its others – to domesticate them – I would suggest that he underestimates the inevitably compromised nature of any translational act.16 In its transferral, a text, a book, a literature, can never remain unchangingly authentic, irreducibly itself. If, added to this, we are referring to postcolonial writers (such as Naipaul and Lamming) who have had to deal with the vicissitudes of cultural translation already in their ‘authentic’ locations, then the extended process of which the Booker Prize is a symptom may be conceived in more dynamic terms than just ‘centre trumps margin’. Or is it possible to argue that anglophone literature has not been foreignized by the exilic translation processes of Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, and others? One conclusion to draw from what I have said is that exile should not be thought of as the responsibility of the individual alone. The chances that the creative potential of exile is realized depends equally on the receiving environment, the target culture. We can hardly predetermine how such conducive conditions may arise, as they depend on chance encounters and contacts. This is one reason why translation is always a risk – and why one should cultivate a cultural preparedness for foreignization. A key intellectual task in our day is to reiterate that the stranger may be one of us and that we become other to ourselves when the stranger becomes familiar.

16

Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001): 105–23.

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WORKS CITED Abrahams, Peter. Tell Freedom (London: Faber & Faber, 1954). Bassnett, Susan, & André Lefevere. Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998). Gordimer, Nadine. “One Man Living Through It” (1966), in Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, ed. & intro. Stephen Clingman (1988; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989): 79–86. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). Lamming, George. “The Occasion for Speaking,” in Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, foreword by Sandra Pouchet Paquet (1960; Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1992): 23–50. Modisane, Bloke. Blame Me on History (1963; Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1986). Mphahlele, Ezekiel. Down Second Avenue (London: Faber & Faber, 1959). Naipaul, V.S. The Enigma of Arrival (London: Viking, 1987). Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). ——. “Reflections on Exile,” in Said, Reflections on Exile (London: Granta, 2001): 171–83. Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North, tr. Denys Johnson–Davies (London: Heinemann, 1969). Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Postcolonial Literatures (London: Continuum, 2008). Toury, Gideon. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995). Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995).

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Part II  E NDING U P

AND

O PTING O UT

IN THE

N ORTH

African Presences and Representations in the Principality/Markgrafschaft of Bayreuth

E CKHARD B REITINGER

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H E T O P I C O F T H I S E S S A Y – the presence of Africans in northeastern Bavaria – might appear at first sight ‘exotic’ or parochial, but I will show that on the level of the official iconography of both state and church, as well as in popular religious practice and folk traditions, Africans had been visible in this stretch of German-speaking Europe since the early Middle Ages. It is also interesting to see the differences between official iconography and the popular responses, and the differences between the exactitude of some of the portraits of Africans and the wild and phantasmagorical fantasies of early ‘scholarly’ representations.1 The image of Bayreuth and north-eastern Bavaria has been determined by its political marginalization as a result of the Second World War. The area

1

For the broader European context of late-medieval and Renaissance visual representation of Africans, see, for example, Hans Joachim Kunst, Der Afrikaner in der europäischen Kunst (Bad Godesberg: Inter Nationes, 1967), Jean Devisse & Michel Mollat, ed. L’Image du Noir dans l’art occidental, vol. 2: Des premiers siècles chrétiens aux “grandes découvertes”, Part 2: Les Africains dans l’ordonnance chrétienne du monde (X I V e–X V I e siècle) (Fribourg: Office du Livre & Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1976), Peter Mark, Africans in European Eyes: The Portrayal of Black Africans in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century Europe (Syracuse: Syracuse U P , 1974) and “European Perceptions of Black Africans in the Renaissance,” in Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory, ed. Ezio Bassani & William B. Fagg (New York: Center for African Art, 1988): 21–31, and Peter Ericksen, “Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance,” Criticism 35 (Fall 1993): 506–15.

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was enclosed by the ‘Iron Curtain’ – to the East the border with the C S S R , to the North the G D R . For two generations, the area found itself in an extremely marginal situation at the very end of the ‘Free World’, in a frontline position facing the ‘Communist East’, confronting the ideological ‘Other’. Two hundred years earlier, the principality or Markgrafschaft of Bayreuth had occupied a very different position. Not that it could pride itself on ostentatious centrality, but the principality – and the other little self-governing territories in the area – profited from its strategic position on a major trade route that connected the imperial town of Frankfurt, the Bohemian capital city of Prague, and the Jagiellonian capital city of Cracow on an east–west axis; a north–south trade route connected the trading centre of Nuremberg with the rich mining cities in Saxony and then on to the seaports on the Baltic, where Nuremberg merchandise connected with the maritime trading network of the Hanseatic ports. The Bayreuth territory was not rich compared to the mineral wealth of Saxony or the ‘white gold’ (salt) of Salzburg, Hallein or Berchtesgaden. But the “high mountains” – das hohe Gebirg – (today Fichtelgebirge) yielded a little gold and slightly more silver and tin, but also provided granite and quartz, raw materials for the production of glass. The mountains were rich in timber that could be turned into charcoal, fuel for the melting of glass, and later also for the iron furnaces of the Upper Palatinate (Oberpfalz), which was then one of the most important production centres for the European arms industry from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The cannons and field pieces, the muskets, the helmets, breast plates, swords, halberds, and lances of the many armies that haunted central Europe were forged in the Upper Palatinate with the charcoal fired in Franconia. But the forests of the High Mountains also furnished high-quality timber, which was rafted down the white water of the mountain streams into the Main, then the Rhine, and on to the shipyards in the Netherlands. There is, of course, no definite proof but a high probability that the ships of the East or the West Indian Trading Companies were built with logs from the Franconian High Mountains, that Jan van Riebek sailed to the Cape, sighting Table Bay as he stood on planks from the Franconian forests, that Peter Stuyvesant sailed up the Hudson river to New Amsterdam in a ship built from Franconian timber, or even that the Dutch vessels that landed the first African slaves in Charlesville in 1609 were constructed in part of Franconian timber. Provinciality and the isolation of mountain recluses appear to be one aspect only of the Franconian situation. The other side of the coin is the worldwide presence of goods and materials originating in this area.

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The principality of Bayreuth was also important genealogically. It was the original power-base of the House of Hohenzollern, whose members became Electors of Brandenburg, Kings of Prussia, and eventually, in 1871, Emperors of the resurrected German Empire. When Hohenzollern/ Prussia became a European middle power, serving as Festlanddegen (the sword on the continent) for the United Kingdom against France, the strategic importance of the ‘little brother’ in Bayreuth increased once again, because the territory occupied a key position right in the middle of Habsburgian and allied territories. As with many small and economically underdeveloped principalities, Ansbach–Bayreuth gained a substantial part of its revenue from lending troops to allied, related or befriended rulers /principalities who were fighting wars on the Continent or even in the Americas. There are indications that engineers from the Bayreuth garrison /army assisted in the short-lived colonial adventure of Brandenburg/ Prussia in the seventeenth century, when the Dutcheducated Elector (Kurfürst) Frederick bought or built half a dozen slave forts along the Gold Coast. When Napoleon’s revolutionary army marched through Bayreuth territory, the Hohenzollern cousins in Berlin took this as an act of aggression and declared war on France, only to be wiped off the map of Europe as a significant military or political power. As a consequence, Bayreuth had to be ceded to Napoleon’s ally Ludwig I of Bavaria (recently made king by Napoleon). Fifty years earlier, Bayreuth had been a major cultural centre in Central Europe. The Marchioness Wilhelmine, elder sister of Frederick II, King of Prussia, was terribly disappointed when she had to marry her second cousin, the Elector Frederick. Originally, she was meant to marry the Prince of Wales – her mother’s favourite, since she came from the House of Hannover – or the Tsarevitch – her father’s favourite. Wilhelmine compensated for her frustrations by involving herself in a myriad cultural activities. She built and renovated palaces, added parks and gardens, built an opera house that is unique in splendour even today, and hired artists, sculptors, painters, musicians, and singers from all over Europe, who were also to perform her own musical compositions and operas. Following the fashion of courtly etiquette at the time, Wilhelmine demonstrated her metropolitan and universal inclinations by employing a number of Hofmohren or court Africans as a sign of her universality and importance.

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African Martyrs and Healers The peoples of Central Europe first encountered images of Africans in their religious practice, particularly in the veneration of the saints. St Augustine, a leading figure among the Early Fathers, came from North Africa. He was described as dark-skinned, though representative ‘iconographic portraits’ of the great saints show him as Caucasian. Like the Early Fathers, some of the early Christian martyrs hailed from Northern Africa. One of the most important groups of saints, whose veneration is still strongly practised in Franconia, were the Vierzehn Nothelfer (the fourteen healers). They are supposed to help with a broad assortment of mental and physical diseases ranging from falling sickness, epilepsy, and depression to stomach ailments and inflammations. They, too, are represented exclusively as Caucasian, but the known images are paintings from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries: i.e. their visual representation dates from a thousand years after their actual lifetime and follows the style of the late-medieval period. In these 1,000 years, the figures of saints had also shifted from a Mediterranean to a Northern European phenotype, since the centre of gravity of the Christian Church had also migrated north with the expansion of Christianity to Central and Northern Europe. It is a matter of pure speculation as to whether these representations are the result of the absence of a concept of the ‘racial Other’, reflecting, rather, the presence of a strictly religious intentionality that prioritizes the idealized iconographic saint figure over the individualized figure with racial distinctness. For painters, sculptors, and carvers living in a Central European ethnic environment and working within a centuries-old pictorial tradition that placed European physiognomies at the centre, these faces and figures would logically be conceived of as the norm. Therefore, saints that respond to the prayers and needs of ‘normal’ pilgrims would logically be represented as conforming to the same physiognomic norm.

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The Three Magi, the Three Parts of the World, and the Holy Trinity The most striking and certainly the most persistent African presence in Christian iconography is that of the three Wise Men or Magi.2 Although the scriptures provide no evidence of the ethnic origin of the Magi, popular religion conceived one of the three as African, initially Balthazar. Nor do the scriptures mention names or numbers, but Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar became a fixed entity in popular religion.3 Late-medieval paintings, sculptures, and altars invariably promote the image of Balthazar as African, very much so in the works of Lucas Cranach (father and son), Albrecht Dürer, Veit Stoss, Adam Kraft, Mathias Grünewald, and Tilman Riemenschneider, the most renowned artists of the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries; all hailed from the Franconian region: Kronach, Nuremberg, or Würzburg.4 The gifts of the Magi were gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Gold stands for material, secular values, frankincense for spiritual or religious powers, and myrrh for physical well-being. According to the Golden Legend, gold was the offering to Jesus as King, frankincense that to God the Father, and myrrh to Jesus as a mortal human being. Myrrh foretells Christ’s destiny as salvator; with myrrh, his body will be embalmed, and he will be buried and resurrected. But myrrh was also referred to as a medical ointment that would strengthen the limbs of the baby Jesus and prevent worms or parasites.5 2

A good general study is Paul H.D. Kaplan, The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art (Studies in the Fine Arts: Iconography 9; Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1985). 3 Peter Bräunlein, “Von Mohren-Apotheken und Mohrenkopf-Wappen,” Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 41 (1991–92): 219–38; Die Heiligen Drei Könige – Darstellung und Verehrung, ed. Rainer Budde (exh. cat.; Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, 1982): 97–111. The descriptive catalogue in Budde’s collection is particularly informative with respect to representational programmes: many artists do not differentiate ethnically between the three Magi; others show ‘Maghrebi’ or Spanish-Moorish (i.e. not noticeably Negroid) features; among the black Balthazars are notable paintings by the Master of Alkmaar, Bartholomäus Bruyn the Elder (at least four pictures), Martin Schaffner, The Master of St Severin (two pictures), the Master of Ghent, the School of Master E.S., Wolf Huber, and a Northern French Adoration. Several other Balthazars feature him as European but with a black servant in immediate attendance. 4 Michael Baxandall, Die Kunst der Bilderschnitzer: Tilman Riemenschneider, Veit Stoß und ihre Zeitgenossen, tr. Brigitte Sauerländer (Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, 1980; Munich: C.H. Beck, 1985): 12. 5 Legenda Aurea, cited in Budde, Die Heiligen Drei Könige, 14–15.

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Myrrh was considered as a kind of patent medicine, one of the original pharmaceutical products. As such it could represent the totality of pharmaceutical / herbal products at the time. Thus Balthazar, the African among the Magi, became the patron saint of apothecaries and, from the sixteenth century onwards, Mohrenapotheken became popular in the area covered by Franconia, Thuringia, and Saxony. Again, a strange transposition must have occurred – from the name and person of the patron saint (the Magus Balthazar) to the ethno-racial baseline (Mohr or Moor) which he seemed to represent. The other popular tradition that has developed from the Epiphany and the Adoration of the Magi concerns the so-called Sternsinger, young people dressed as the three Magi with a guide, carrying a staff topped by the star of Bethlehem. They walk through the village, knock at the doors, sing Christmas carols, and ask for small gifts which used to be distributed to the poor members of the community. The black-faced Balthazar is always the attraction of the procession. Today, the Sternsinger have become a huge charity enterprise. Under the patronage of the State President and the Catholic and Lutheran bishops, thousands of young people all over Germany march through towns and villages, dressed as Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, to collect money that is donated to aid organizations for children in Africa.

The Magi and Saint Maurice One of the early paintings of the Adoration of the Magi nicely illustrates the combination of the veneration of Maurice and the Magi, as well as the signifying qualities of the so-called ‘Maurice Flag’. Stephan Lochner’s Dreikönigsaltar (c.1430, Cologne)6 shows the Magi (or Three Kings) not as representatives of their three continents but, rather, as the three ages of man: youth, full manhood, and old age. Balthazar, standing for youth, occupies a place at the centre of the painting, but slightly towards the background. Next to him we see an African, standing proudly under the Maurice Flag featuring the black-faced, silver-armoured Christian knight. In this particular painting, the usual representation of Balthazar as African was modified to become a more indirect expression that only associates Balthazar with Africa through his retinue and his company. It also relates the veneration of the Magi to the veneration of Maurice.7 It has been suggested that the African in Lochner’s 6 7

Hans Joachim Kunst, Der Afrikaner in der europäischen Kunst, 12–13, 35. It is commonly argued that ‘Mauritius’/’Maurice’ derives from Latin maurus ‘Moor’.

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retable could be St Gereon (although most representations have him as European), whose shrine is housed in Cologne cathedral, as is that of the Magi. St Gereon was one of the officers in the Theban Legion (Roman troops from Thebes in Egypt), which Maurice commanded, and one of Maurice’s fellow martyrs in the punitive massacre ordered by Emperor Maximian Herculeus in 287 A D .8 The veneration of the Magi as represented in medieval painting had been shaped into one of the key icons of the imperial ideology of the Holy Roman Empire: namely, the parallel and mutually supportive roles of imperium and sacerdotium. The Magi as the representatives of the three known parts of the world: i.e. the entire geocentric universe, expressed with their gifts their allegiance to Jesus as king, as the prime spiritual and secular power of the universe. In the scene of adoration, Jesus represented precisely the role that the emperor claimed for himself and his institution within the medieval worldpicture. According to Percy E. Schramm’s seminal study Herrschaftszeichen und Staatsymbolik (1986), the claim to political and spiritual supremacy needed to be supported by strong and powerful symbols, viz. relics of saints. This explains in part the tremendous impact the transfer of the shrine of the Magi from Milan to the cathedral in Cologne in 1164 had on the Christian community. The person behind this political act of submitting Lombardy to the sovereignty of Emperor Barbarossa was Rainhard von Dassel, Chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire, the chief of staff of Barbarossa’s Oval Office, so to speak. He thus succeeded in bringing under imperial control the most spectacular and influential insignia of the imperial idea, which could be now exploited politically to promote the imperium/ sacerdotium idea north of the Alps. The political interpretations of the Adoration of the Magi through their 8

See, for example, Wolfgang S. Seiferth, “Saint Mauritius, African,” Phylon (1941): 370–76, Jean Devisse, “Un Noir sanctifié: Maurice,” in L’Image du Noir dans l’art occidental (ed. Ladislas Bugner), vol. 2: Des premiers siècles chrétiens aux “grandes découvertes”, Part 2: Les Africains dans l’ordonnance chrétienne du monde (X I V e– X V I e siècle), ed. Jean Devisse & Michel Mollat (Fribourg: Office du Livre & Paris:

Bibliothèque des Arts, 1976): 149–204, 241–54, Donald F. O’Reilly, “The Theban Legion of St. Maurice,” Vigiliae Christianae 32.3 (September 1978): 195–207, David Woods, “The Origin of the Legend of Maurice and the Theban Legion,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45.3 (1994): 385–95, and Jean–Jacques Aubert, “L’insignificance de la négritude: Maurice le Maure,” in Mauritius und die Thebäische Legion / Saint Maurice et la légion thébaine, ed. Otto Wermelinger, Philippe Bruggiser, Beat Näf & Jean–Michel Roessli (Paradosis 49; Fribourg: Academic Press, 2005): 57–66.

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pictorial representation, the display of their shrine, and the veneration of their relics as a goal for popular pilgrimages all combined to enhance the supremacy of the emperor.9 It became more or less obligatory for the German emperors to worship at the shrine of the Magi after their coronation in Aix-laChapelle, but William of Holland, Richard of Cornwall, and Baldwin of Luxemburg also paid homage to the Magi in Cologne.10 The Adoration of the Magi was also interpreted as the recognition of the supremacy of Christianity over the other religions; the Magi were therefore also considered as the patron saints of the Christian mission, which at that time and in that geographical location meant the Slavonic mission.

Black Maurice – Patron of the Holy Empire A statue of St Maurice (c.1220/30 A D ) in Magdeburg Cathedral marks a new beginning in the presence and representation of Africans (see Figure 1).11 This statue is significant for a number of different reasons – aesthetic (it marked a new phase in medieval sculpture), and political /genealogical (Maurice had become the patron saint of the new imperial dynasty of Saxony). The statue thus shaped the iconography of three mutually supportive forces in the medieval Holy Roman Empire: the ruling imperial dynasty; their territory as power-base; and their patron saint as the ritual and spiritual link between genealogy and territory. Finally, the Magdeburg sculpture of St Maurice gained additional importance in the context of the expansion of the Church of Rome in middle and north-eastern Germany and the adjoining regions. Magdeburg Cathedral was founded as a missionary bishopric to solidify the status of the Roman Church but also to promote the Christian mission to the East. The founding of Magdeburg also functioned as a strategy for structural development which would give rise to new urban or monastic centres fostering 9

Albert Brackmann, Die politische Bedeutung der Mauritius-Verehrung im frühen Mittelalter (Sitzungsberichte der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.hist. Klasse 30; Berlin, 1937): 37. See also Martin Kuhn, “Sankt Mauritius mit der Lanze, der ottonische Reichspatron, an der Schwelle zwischen Franken und Thüringen,” Geschichte am Obermain 7 (1971–72): 51–76, and Dione Flühler–Kreis, “Mauritius: heiliger Ritter, Mohr und Reichspatron,” Kunst + Architektur in der Schweiz 54.3 (2003): 16–22. 10 Die Heiligen Drei Könige, ed. Budde, 40–42. 11 See Aubert, “L’insignificance de la négritude: Maurice le Maure,” 58–59.

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trade and agriculture: i.e. the economy in general. But the most important factor is certainly Magdeburg’s role as the logistical centre for the missionary activities in the various subaltern dioceses of Meissen, Pozna etc. St Maurice the African thus became the patron saint and the protector of the missionary campaigns in east-central Europe, today’s Poland, as far as and including the Baltic territories of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The Magdeburg statue of Maurice occupies a unique position in the history of European religious sculpture. At first glance, it seems to have retained the essence of Romanesque sculpture, the architectural and tectonic qualities that make him look like a pillar supporting the ceiling of the nave of the cathedral. This static quality radiates an atmosphere of immobility, but also of solidity. The statuesque typification of the martyr figure is further emphasized by the chain-mail and cloak that cover his entire body, falling in straight perpendicular folds. The position of his arms that once held the shield and lance (now missing), close to the body of the statue, underline its static expression. Thus, the gaze of the spectator is attracted to the face of the Maurice figure, peeping out from the chain-mail headpiece. This face clearly reveals African features expressing strength, determination, composition, and calm alertness. Originally, the figure must have been polychrome with a blackened face. The whole posture of St Maurice, with the shield, lance, sword as external signs, signifies the physical properties of the Christian Knight; the face, however, conveys the Knight’s spiritual properties. In this respect, the Magdeburg Maurice remains within the tradition of early-medieval sculpture, but one cannot ignore the geographical proximity to the (subordinate) cathedral of Naumburg with its statues of the founding donors, Ekkehard and Ute. Together with a number of other statues in the ‘mother cathedral’ of Bamberg, Ekkehard and Ute represent the transition from the idealized and typified figures of saints, martyrs, and secular founders / donors to a more personal style of sculpture that endeavours to reflect individual traits in facial expression, clothing, physical comportment, and bodily representation. As patron saint of Saxony, of the ruling dynasty and its most important Episcopal see and cathedral in Magdeburg, Maurice became an official figure in the iconography of medieval statehood and the symbol of dynastic aspirations. Maurice became the favourite name for the firstborn: i.e. the future ruling princes of the Saxon family of Wettin. And he became the patron of castles, palaces, defence works, and towns. Maurice thus became the icon, the trade-mark, of the principality of Saxony.

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According to the legend, Maurice was the commander of the Theban Legion in the fourth-century Roman army. The soldiers were recruited from the region of Thebes in Upper Egypt, on the border with Sudan. The legion was transferred to the province of Gallia (France) to suppress an uprising. The emperor and supreme commanders, Diocletian and Maximinian, demanded that all the troops participated in sacrifices to the ‘heathen’ god Jupiter before going into battle. Maurice, his officers Candidus, Gereon, Vitalis, and Exsuperius, and their soldiers assured the Roman emperor of their loyalty but refused to take part in the heathen rituals – they insisted on their freedom of religion. The Theban Legion was surrounded; troops and officers were executed near the shores of Lake Geneva. Although the historical records do not fully confirm the events as they are conveyed by legendary lore, the cult of St Maurice spread rapidly from its origins in Burgundy along the Rhine valley to Cologne. The figure of Maurice continuously appears as a symbolic asset in medieval strategies for legitimizing succession, from the Frankish imperial house of Charlemagne to the Ottonian /Saxon house around 900, from Salier to Stauffer around 1100, and to Habsburg and Luxemburg in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The migration northwards of the Maurice cult also reflects the shift in the centre of gravity within the empire towards the north and north-east. Two of Maurice’s accessories and attributes, the flag and the lance, played an important role in the appreciation of the imperial patron saint. The flag with the black-faced knight in silver armour is self-referential, but the Mauritian Lance reveals how insignia, relics, and symbols are transferred, relocated, from one particular symbolic or cultic action /personality to another. |

The Mauritian Lance had previously been known as the ‘Holy Lance’ or ‘Longinus Lance’. It was one of the most precious relics in Christianity because it was directly connected to the Passion of Christ. Medieval legend ascribed the name Longinus to the Roman soldier who cut open Christ’s breast with the tip of his lance to verify his death. From the wound flowed blood and water. Blood was the symbol of the transfiguration of the Eucharist as the central mystery of the Christian Mass. Water was the sign of baptism and renunciation of Original Sin through Christ’s death. The two together, signifying the death of Christ, thus stand for the consummation of Christ’s sacrifice as salvator mundi. Thus, Longinus’ Lance represented the central

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mysteries of Christian religion; it represented in essence the road to salvation. But Longinus as Roman soldier and his lance were also then associated with the idea of the Christian soldier, the Miles Christianus. According to legend, the Holy Lance came into the possession of the kings of Lombardy / Milan. As a sign of allegiance to the Emperor, the Holy Lance was given into the possession of Charlemagne, thereby becoming one of the imperial insignia. Another incident in imperial history underlines the importance of the Holy Lance within the concept of the universal supremacy of Christianity. Emperor Otto I led the Christian troops into the battle against the heathen Hungarians (Huns) in 955, wielding the Holy Lance as sign of the certainty of a Christian victory. Thus, what had been achieved with the Lance at the Crucifixion of Christ – the ultimate victory over death and the achievement of salvation – was repeated in the confrontation with heathen aggressors. This scene of the battle of the Lechfeld (near Augsburg) was later depicted in a painting by the historicist artist Gaudenz von Rustige in the late-nineteenth century, when the issue was the legitimization of the Second German Empire as the true successor to the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Lance was, however, a multi-purpose relic. Welded into the blade of the lance was a piece of metal, allegedly one of the nails from the Holy Cross. Thus, yet another of the cherished relics of the Holy Cross was incorporated into the Holy Lance, thereby increasing the symbolic power of this piece of Christian relic-veneration. If St Maurice was invested with the most important relic in Christianity, the Holy Lance/ Longinus Lance as his personal insignia, this can only mean that the official ideology of Empire attributed a high rank to its patron saint, St Maurice.

Local Veneration of the Patron of Empire So far, we have described the centre of the veneration of St Maurice as lying in Thuringia, adjacent to the Franconian territories. But the importance of the St Maurice cult and its remarkable role in the representation of Africans in medieval Europe can also be found in the immediate neighbourhood of Bayreuth. There are distinctly more local and regional references to St Maurice than those we have outlined so far. Again, we are delving into a situation where historical proof for the legendary details is very slim, but legend and popular religious practice established a level of credibility that turned legend into a living and real force of popular and official religious practice. Legend has it that the Duke of Andechs–Meranien (the regional dynasty preceding the

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Hohenzollern, whose territory bordered on the bishopric of Magdeburg) ‘found’ the cranium of St Maurice in Constantinople when he participated in the crusade. On his return, the duke donated this precious relic to his monastery in Langheim (30 km west of Bayreuth), which he had founded and richly endowed with lands, titles, and rights. From Langheim, the cranium relic and its reliquary were donated to the cathedral in Magdeburg. This ostentatious procession from Langheim to Magdeburg (the prince of Andechs–Meranien logically wanted to profit from the public-relations potential of this important gift) first stopped at the town of Coburg (centuries later, the home of Prince Albert, prince consort of Queen Victoria). As a consequence of this visit – this is what the legend says – the central church in Coburg was dedicated to St Maurice. The head of St Maurice to this day figures in the coat of arms of Coburg. Since Coburg adopted the Reformation at an early stage, the cult of St Maurice was secularized and ‘folklorized’. The figures of St Maurice and Balthazar of the Magi obviously enjoyed an enormous presence in medieval society, but this was not based on any actual physical encounter with Africans. It merely reflected a religio-spiritual tradition, albeit one of tremendous popularity. Thus, the pictorial representation is not recognizably founded on any encounter with actual persons and does not achieve, or aim at, a true-to-life portrait of a real person. Rather, it reflects idealized conceptions of the Christian Knight, the ‘exotic’ image of the sage or spiritual ruler which documents the universal validity of Christianity. The legends surrounding Maurice reveal that much of the African presence in this part of the world goes back to the ‘clash of cultures’, the confrontation of the Christian Occident and the Islamic Orient. During the crusades – really ‘armed pilgrimages’ to the Holy Land – the Christian knights encountered African soldiers in the Muslim army of Saladin. There are countless stories of crusaders bringing back oriental or black lovers, servants and musicians. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s black queen Belakane in his epic Parzival became part of medieval world literature (Eschenbach lies sixty km west of Bayreuth). Parzival’s father, the crusader Gahmuret, married Belakane in the Orient and fathered a son, Feirefiz (heraldically chequered black and white), who, trying to trace his father, ends up at King Arthur’s court together with his half-brother Parzival.12 A similar legend explains the presence of an

12

Hans Werner Debrunner, Presence and Prestige: Africans in Europe – A History of Africans in Europe before 1918 (Basel: Balser Afrika Bibliographie, 1979): 29–31.

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African in the coat of arms of the small mining town of Schauenstein (see Figure 3).

African Presence in Local Lore Real physical encounters with Africans were mostly associated with the religious conflict with Islam, when the ‘armed pilgrims’ were for the first time confronted with troops, soldiers, and knights of African descent in the Muslim armies in Palestine. Emperor Frederick I I dedicated most of his attention to the administration of his territories in Sicily and Naples. When he toured the Germanic parts of his empire north of the Alps in 1234, he created a sensation because a number of African soldiers figured prominently in his spectacular entourage.13 This presence of Africans was meant to demonstrate the universal aspirations of his ideology as imperator mundi, reaching beyond the confines of Europe well into the realms beyond the Mediterranean and way into the fabulous Orient.14 Frederick’s visit to Germany with his African entourage was widely reported in the official chronicles of the day. But encounters with Africans in those days were also recorded at the local level and found their way into the coats of arms of several towns, where even today they document an African presence. 15 Whether these reports were based on historical facts is questionable, but as legends they quickly acquired a quality of veracity in the local oral traditions. One such legend from the small mining town of Schauenstein records that the local knight – no name given – was taken prisoner by Muslim troops while crusading in the Holy Land and sold into slavery in Africa. There, he teamed up with an African fellow sufferer. The two of them managed to es13

Debrunner, Presence and Prestige, 260. Peter Martin, Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren: Afrikaner in Bewusstsein und Geschichte der Deutschen (Hamburg: Junius, 2000): 41–43. 15 For armorial notes on such representations not discussed in the present essay, see, for example, M.F. Schlamp, “Der Mohrenkopf im Wappen der Bischöfe von Freising,” Frigisinga 7 (1930): 9–19, Adolf Wilhelm Ziegler, Der Freisinger Mohr: Eine heimatgeschichtliche Untersuchung zum Freisinger Bischofswappen (Munich: Franz Xavier Seitz & Valentin Höfling, 1976), and the following somewhat amateurish but informative website: Mario de Valdes y Cocom, “S I G I L L U M S E C R E T U M (Secret Seal): On the Image of the Blackamoor in European Heraldry,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages /frontline/shows/secret/famous/ssecretum.html (accessed 24 July 2010). 14

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cape and make their way from Africa back into Upper Franconia, where they took up residence in the knight’s castle. It was the nameless African who, on one of their exploratory tours into the mountains, discovered a wonderful stone and exclaimed “schau den Stein” (look, this stone), which then became the name of the small community – Schauenstein. Implicitly, the legend suggests that it was the African, through his discovery of that stone, who established the tradition of mineral mining that became the economic base of the entire area. Accordingly, the Schauenstein coat of arms shows a black figure in a feathery loincloth (highly inappropriate for the climate of the area) brandishing a stone in his right hand. Throughout Germany, one encounters stories of knights and pilgrims who brought back “sable maidens” or dark skinned boys from their pious military pilgrimage to the Holy Land.16 The small town of Naila, a few miles from Schauenstein, also includes an exotic figure in its coat of arms: a dark-skinned male in a loincloth like a miniskirt (see Figure 4). This figure, however, is said not to be an African but ‘The Wild Man’. Der Wilde Mann is a common figure in folktales but also in popular iconography.17 The Wild Man is represented either as a hairy ape (e.g., at the entrance gate to the administrative compound or alte Hofhaltung of the bishop’s palace in Bamberg or in the Tax House of Kronach in Upper Franconia) or as a dark-skinned figure like the Wild Man of Naila. His lack of proper clothing signifies his otherness as the unrefined child of nature. Both Wild Men and Africans are subject to the same kind of heraldic abstraction that makes them practically look-alikes. Again, these representations of Africans are not ‘drawn from nature’ but spring from the imagination of the artists. The medieval iconography of Africans was highly ambiguous: fervent veneration or even idealization of Maurice and Balthazar, on the one hand; on the other, Christian colour symbolism providing counter-images of blackskinned devils and evil spirits, but practically never with African physiognomic features. Blackness equalling sinfulness and evil plays a dominant role in late-medieval painting but, at first sight, this colour symbolism signifies moral 16

Eugen Schöler, “Wie kommt ein Schwarzer auf den Helm und in den Schild?” in Schöler, Fränkische Wappen erzählen Geschichte und Geschichten (Neustadt/Aisch: Degener, 1992): 96, 100. 17 Schöler, “Wie kommt ein Schwarzer auf den Helm und in den Schild?” 95. See also, for example, Mario Valdes, “The Black Wiseman in European Symbolism,” Journal of African Civilizations 3.1 (1981): 67–85.

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and religious attitudes only. In this respect, the images of Balthazar, Gregorius, and Maurice stand out as exceptional. How easily this religious deprecation of blackness is later on incorporated into attitudes towards race is another and highly complex topic.

Fantasies of Otherness versus Empirical Portrayals With the beginning of the Renaissance and the prevalence of humanism as an intellectual, philosophical, and scientific attitude, and with the age of Portuguese naval explorations of the African coast and Columbus’ daring voyages into the open ocean to the West, a new era opened in the iconography of Africans. Africa ceased to figure as a purely abstract concept of the Biblical ‘three parts of the world’ – paralleling the concept of the divine Trinity. It now had to be regarded as a geographical fact. Geographical exploration and cartographic documentation required scientific equipment. The imperial city of Nuremberg (sixty km south of Bayreuth) became one of the major centres of humanist modernity – empirical experimental scientific research, technical / engineering know-how, combined with artistic expression and well-developed structures to publicize and commercialize this rapidly growing production of knowledge. We have already seen that the most prominent artists who revolutionized artistic expression (e.g., the invention of perspective painting) hailed from the Franconian area, with Nuremberg as its most productive centre. Albrecht Dürer, Adam Kraft, Veit Stoss, Peter Vischer (father and son) from Nuremberg itself, Hans Süss von Kulmbach (see Figure 2), Lucas Cranach (father and son) from Kronach, Tilman Riemenschneider and Mathias Grünewald from Würzburg – all were based and trained in the area, but produced internationally, as is illustrated by Veit Stoss’s famous Marienaltar in the Jagellonian capital of Cracow. Nuremberg further offered splendid business opportunities for technicians, engineers, and inventors. It became the centre for the development and production of precision instruments and of astronomical or nautical equipment. Johann von Gemunden’s astrolabe was one of the Nuremberg products sold all over the world, as were compasses from the workshop of Erhard Etzlaub. The production of high-tech equipment went hand in hand with research into cartography and cosmography. The mathematician Johann Stöffler, the cartographer Johann Werner, and the technician Erhard Etzlaub experimented with

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different systems of geographical projection.18 Nuremberg merchants were always willing to invest in new technological developments in the hope of creating new markets. And they financed the publicizing of new knowledge. Nuremberg became one of the important centres for the printing industry and the drawing and printing of topographical and nautical maps. Martin Behaim employed artisans and artists, cabinet-makers, and graphic designers to produce his Erdapfel, probably not the first globe to be designed, but definitely the oldest surviving one.19 Part of the funding for the production of the Erdapfel came from members of the Nuremberg city council. As merchants involved in the Levantine or spice trade, they were only too willing to invest in innovative and progressive projects with the potential of opening up new fields of business. The most spectacular enterprise to originate in Nuremberg was the Schedelsche Weltchronik or Nuremberg Chronicle, a monumental compilation of the existing knowledge at the time (1493) about the history, topography, cartography, but also the sociology and economy of the world.20 The Nuremberg Chronicle was also a monumental endeavour as far as book production and printing technology are concerned at the very beginning of the Gutenberg Age. Dr Martin Schedel, the general editor of and master-mind behind this encyclopaedic masterpiece, did very little of the actual writing himself, but he organized contributors who collected information from all the available written and oral sources and put them together into a coherent form. Schedel organized the funding for this project together with Sebald Schreyer, councillor, publisher, and finance manager, and his in-law, Sebastian Kammermeister as main sponsors. Schedel contracted Anton Koberger to print the work. Koberger ran the largest printing business at the time, with a hundred presses.21 Schedel commissioned artists who produced hundreds of illustrations as woodcuts which had to be matched to the set text in a complex page design, an unprecedented achievement in printing technology, typography,

18

On Mercator’s projection, see Leo Bagrow & Raleigh Astilin Skelton, Meister der Kartographie (Berlin: Safari, 1963): 150–59. 19 Bräunlein, “Von Mohren-Apotheken und Mohrenkopf-Wappen,” 68–70. 20 Adrian Wilson, with Joyce Lancaster Wilson, The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle, intro. Peter Zahn (Amsterdam: Nico Israel, 1965 & 1976): 28. 21 Stephan Füssel, “Einleitung,” in Hartmut Schedel: Weltchronik (Cologne: Taschen, facs. ed. 2001): 14.

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and layout.22 The Nuremberg Chronicle was famous for its accuracy in the pictorial depiction of European cities. The views of overseas cities, however, were based on scanty information, on legendary narratives, perhaps rumours, but were carried out in as detailed a style as the European city views – only that the details were pure invention. The person in charge of the illustrations was Michael Wohlgemut, along with his son-in-law Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, who ran a huge and commercially successful graphic-design studio in Nuremberg. Albrecht Dürer was an apprentice in Wohlgemut’s studio at the time the chronicle was produced. Dürer contributed a number of woodcuts or xylographic illustrations.23 Here, another of the contradictions and ambiguities of the new humanistic scientific world-view becomes apparent. One of the most memorable parts of Schedel’s Chronicle is the map of the world drawn by Hieronymus Münzer and Erhard Etzlaub.24 The map is framed by a column showing the most fantastic figures that allegedly inhabited those strange and unknown parts of the world: bird-men, one-eyed polyphemic figures, and creatures with a huge single foot; an assemblage of the weirdest concepts of otherness and exoticism. The Nuremberg Chronicle conveys fundamental contradictions which reflect the Zeitgeist of the late middle ages. The chronicle claimed to be the technologically most advanced and economically most daring enterprise, yet its content, particularly its historical approach, reflects the conservative medieval, Biblical approach to the philosophy of history. The Chronicle deploys a teleological / eschatological concept of history based on the theory of the tres etates mundi – the sequence of the three empires; therefore genealogies play an important role as explanation of historical developments. For our purpose, the genealogy of Noah and his son Ham is of particular interest. Ham became the father of the people of (Northern) Africa, but he figures as a white person. It is only his great-grandson Dadan, the very last offspring listed in the genealogical chain, who is represented as dark-skinned with African features. Earlier genealogies had shown Ham’s son Kusch as dark faced, but Kusch’s son as white again. Thus Ham’s family tree in the Nuremberg Chronicle suggests that there is an awareness of Africans and their difference, but this does not

22

Wilson & Wilson, The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle, 28. Leonhard Sladeczek, Albrecht Dürer und die Illustrationen zur Schedelchronik: Neue Fragen um den jungen Dürer (Baden–Baden & Strasbourg: Heitz, 1965): 67. 24 Bagrow & Skelton, Meister der Kartographie, 158. 23

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seem to be based on a concept of race as a genetic fact. It almost appears as if Dadan’s blackness were seen as something accidental and incidental.25 The map of the world in the Nuremberg Chronicle, Behaim’s globe, and Gregor Reisch’s incunable map of Ptolemy (1504) nicely illustrate the European concept of Africa at the very beginning of the Age of Discovery. The coastlines of the African continent are drawn with reasonable accuracy, but the treatment of the interior of the continent – ‘the heart of darkness’ – betrays the lack of empirical knowledge and the unrestrained desire to fill that gap with wild speculation. Most of the maps follow Ptolemy’s classical Greek descriptions, with the Nile running right through the entire continent practically from ‘Cape to Cairo’, and with vague indications of the “Great Lakes” and “the Mountains of the Moon” from which the great river springs. The rest of the continent, particularly West Africa, appears as an enormous blank, sometimes covered with explanatory captions such as “Hunc sunt leones” (here are lions) or “Hic reperiunt elephantes albi, rhinocerontes et tigrides” (Here one can find white elephants, rhinos and tigers).26 This image of the African continent as drawn at the very beginning of physical contact with Africans seems to have persevered to this very day: a continent as a vast expanse of open space, remarkable for its wildlife and scenery, but whose inhabitants remain either invisible or entirely insignificant to the European exploratory gaze. If ever inhabitants of Africa are mentioned, described or depicted, they testify to their origin in weird fantasies of otherness. They appear either as figures fit for a geek-show, as in the Nuremberg Chronicle, or as humongous monsters such as Camoes’ Adamastor. Albrecht Dürer, by contrast, created quite different images of Africans. As a young man, he contributed to the historical (biblical) part of the Nuremberg Chronicle: i.e. he was operating within the confines and horizon of Schedel’s world-view, as was his master and neighbour Wohlgemut. Dürer, Schedel, Wohlgemut, the printer Koberger, and even Sebald Schreyer, the main sponsor of the Chronicle, all lived in the same block below the walls of Nuremberg castle.27 The first sign of a changing mind-set can be detected in the coats of arms. Dürer, Schedel, Schreyer, and Sixtus Tucher, as part of the aspiring bourgeois class of the city, created their own coats of arms, which used to be the prerogative of the patrician class. The coats of arms of all four 25

Hartmann Schedel, Weltchronik (Cologne: Taschen, facs. ed. 2001): XV. Bagrow & Skelton, Meister der Kartographie: 126. 27 Sladeczek, Albrecht Dürer und die Illustrationen zur Schedelchronik, 67. 26

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display the heads of Africans. One of the explanations given was that these were significations of professional orientation: the Tucher family were originally dyers; Dürer, Schedel, and Wohlgemut, as printers and engravers, were dealing with dark ink and colour; hence St Maurice comes into the picture again as the patron saint of all those involved in the dyer’s and printer’s trades. The most significant change in the perception of Africans between the Tutuolan monsters of the Nuremberg Chronicle and the new scientific era can be seen in Dürer’s drawings and etchings. His Mohrin Katharina (1521; see Figure 6) is drawn from life. Catarina was a domestic servant in the household of Dürer’s host in Amsterdam, the Portuguese ambassador João Brandão. This portrait signals a range of quantitative shifts in attitude towards Africans. The drawn-from-life/ true-to-life approach of the drawing of Catarina ranks on an equal footing with other characters that figured in Dürer’s portrait paintings. Two features of the portrait are worth noting. First, the usual essentialist tropes of Africanness – kinky hair, full lips, and broad nose – seem to have been played down. Secondly, Dürer makes us look at Catarina from a slightly elevated angle. He thus conveys an expression of meekness and modesty, but also composure and calmness. Catarina’s features do not yet show the traces of a harsh and long life like the famous portrait of Dürer’s mother, but it projects the same expression of seriousness and individuality. He characterizes Catharina as a woman, in her personal uniqueness as she was formed by her life as a servant, according her the same attention as he shows in the delineation of wealthy merchants or fellow artists.28

Dürer’s earlier Head of a Negro (see Figure 5) dates from c.1508, only fifteen years after the publication of the Chronicle, yet there is a world of difference between Dürer’s portrait and the grotesqueries of the Chronicle. Already this early drawing must have been based on a drawn-from-life/ true-to-life portrait session. As with the portrait of Catarina, the essentialist Africanness is clearly toned down. The universality and the generalities of blackness in the allegories are replaced by the individuality of a particular, unique personality. The view of the African’s head in half-profile lends the face a seriousness of expression that matches Dürer’s self-portrait from the same period. The Nuremberg circle of artists, and of promoters, distributors, and entrepreneurs

28

Gude Suckale–Redlefsen, Mauritius: Der heilige Mohr – The Black Saint Maurice (Munich, Zürich & Houston T X : Menil Foundation, 1987).

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of art, demonstrates how the concept of Africans and the African continent changed completely within the short span of fifteen years.

Africans as Fashion: Die Hofmohren It might well be that the uniqueness of the African presence in Nuremberg and its vicinity at the beginning of the sixteenth century conditioned the individuality of pictorial representation. A hundred and fifty years later, when the baroque princes with their urge for self-representation discovered the ‘decorative qualities’ of Africans, thereby giving colour to their court society, it is again the typical, rather than the individual, that is in great demand in pictorial representation. David Dabydeen drew a comprehensive picture of Africans/ images of Africans in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England in his classic work Hogarth’s Blacks.29 From Peter Martin’s Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren we learn that small groups of Africans were able to establish themselves in Germany, but it was invariably in the immediate vicinity of one of the princely courts. There were the military bands of black musicians, the special guard regiments, the drummers and trumpeters, but also the coachmen, footmen, valets, and stewards – everyone of ‘liveried employment’. The museum at Arnstadt in Thuringia displays a full set of dolls-houses dedicated exclusively to the life of Africans at the court of the local prince.30 Full-figure portraits of the ruling prince, the spouse or the children of the ruling family with African valets became an absolute must in every princely residence. A new type of painting genre was created with a fixed programme of composition and representation. Antoine Pesne created a set of paintings conforming to the expectations of the princes commissioning these works and was accordingly appointed court painter (Hofmaler) in Berlin. His painting Wilhelmine of Prussia and Her Brother Frederick (c.1715) illustrates nicely the formula of this genre (see Figure 7). We see Frederick, the crown prince of Prussia, and his elder sister Wilhelmine, later the famous Marchioness of Bayreuth, splendidly attired at the centre of the painting. The darkish back29

David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1987). On the wider European perspective of the attendant African, see also, for example, Paul H.D. Kaplan, “Titian’s ‘Laura Dianti’ and the Origins of the Motif of the Black Page in Portraiture,” Antichità Viva 21.1 (1982): 11–18 and 21.4 (1982): 10–18. 30 Peter Martin, Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren, 347.

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ground suggests a typically baroque landscape garden with fake Roman ruins surrounding a chateau. The crown prince and princess are caught in a moment of dynamic movement forward, Frederick pulling his sister out into the garden to play. This dynamic movement is further enhanced by their pet dog, leading the way to the outside in wild leaps. On a diagonal line from the dog towards the middle ground, immediately behind the children, we see the African valet, a young boy of thirteen or fourteen. He too, is richly dressed in Oriental fashion, holding a parasol protectively over the children in his right hand, while in his left hand he carries the falcon for the outdoor entertainment of the two. He looks admiringly at the two royal children. His posture is purely static and immobile, in sharp contrast to the dog and Frederick, both of whom are in dynamic movement. His position within the composition of the painting and his posture and physical comportment indicate the prescribed role he fulfils within that type of painting. His entire appearance in the picture is geared towards supporting the central role of the royal children. He is not only depicted as a servant, he is clearly marked as a figure with a subservient role within the composition of the painting. His immobility in the half-shade of the halfbackground should be perceived as purely functional, serving to enhance the brilliance, the splendour, and the youthful and enterprising dynamic of the royal children. His black face against their white faces further reinforces his functionality within the composition. .

‘Court Moors’ and Commoners Whether Prussia–Brandenburg’s short-lived excursion into the slave trade (the Brandenburgische afferikanische Companie, 1683) significantly increased the presence of Africans in the ‘lesser’ Hohenzollern territories such as Ansbach or Bayreuth has not been proven. It is, however, documented that among the merchants involved in the Levant trade, it became fashionable to add one or two Africans to the household. Members of the feudal class and the new capitalist bourgeois class saw African domestic servants, coachmen, and footmen as a demonstration of their wealth, influence, international connectedness and worldliness. Walter Rodney writes that Africans were supposed to add distinction to their masters rather than distinguish themselves: they were evaluated not on the basis of their common

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humanities, but as oddities to be incorporated in a life-style that was always ostentatious, often bacchanalian and not infrequently bizarre.31

The centres for the importation of Levantine goods and spices, and for intercontinental trade generally were Lisbon and Amsterdam. All the important merchant houses in cities such as Nuremberg had their representatives in Portugal and the Netherlands. It is from there that many of the Hofmohren were imported. The legal status of Africans in Europe was highly ambiguous; it differed from the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, but they did not enjoy the legal status of citizenship. They were the (material) property of their owners and thus could be given away or sold. Anton Wilhelm Amo, for instance, the first African to be awarded a doctoral degree at a European university, in 1707, was as a young boy presented as a gift by the Dutch West Indian Company to the Duke of Brunswick Wolfenbüttel.32 The presence of Africans was seen very differently by the common people. In Germany, it is customary to give nicknames to communities and their inhabitants. These nicknames are part of a culture of teasing among neighbours. The monicker for the people of Bayreuth is ‘Mohrenwäscher’. Legend has it that when the first African appeared in town, the locals were so astonished about his skin colour that they took him to the river to try to scrub off his blackness with sand and ash. The assumption was obviously that black skin was so abnormal that it could only be explained as dirt and a thorough wash would bring out the ‘normal whiteness’. The legend is not very specific about factual details; no date is given for this initial ‘intercultural encounter’, but the subtext suggests that it must have happened in the late-seventeenth century. The legend also fails to explain who that African really was, where he came from, whether he was part of the Margrave’s court or perhaps a member of a touring circus group of jugglers, acrobats, and wrestlers. The message, however, is very clear: the locals have a clear and fixed idea of what is ‘normal’ and the need to reinstate that normality, to reinforce ‘their’ norms. The farcical components of the Mohrenwäscher story link it to other farcical tales of the times, in particular, of course, the many stories about the foolishness of the citizens of Schilda. The Mohrenwäsche, in all its absurdity, is meant to illustrate the mind-set of the citizens of a small town that is not in the least affected by the international connections or the worldly splendour of the 31

Walter Rodney, “Africa in Europe and the Americas,” in The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 4 (London: Cambridge U P , 1975): 584. 32 Peter Martin, Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren, 309.

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Margrave’s court in the middle of the town. The Mohrenwäsche demonstrates the stifling atmosphere in the town, the limitations in outlook of the people of Bayreuth, and their inability to deal with or accept ‘otherness’. They endeavour to bring everything down to their level and the limitations of their small minds. The Mohrenwäsche thus also makes clear that the common people and their feudal masters were worlds apart. The presence of Africans evoked diametrically opposed reactions from the two groups. For the princes, the dukes and margraves, possession and the public exhibiting of Africans underlined their openness, worldliness, and international connections, but also their cultural superiority over both their own people and their African servants. The princes acted as agents in this type of show-business; the Africans were mere objects. With the commoners, the public showing of Africans worked in precisely the opposite manner. It revealed their backwardness, parochialism, and ethnocentric limitations, and the story also reveals that neither the people of Bayreuth nor the Africans were ever in control of events as agents. This intercultural encounter in the Bayreuth marketplace just happened to them, and whatever agency the people of Bayreuth developed in the circumstances – white-washing the black man – proved ineffective and ill-advised. The spheres of commoner and court society, however small and modest, were clearly separate. But there were situations and occasions in which the two met, one such occasion being church functions. The Bayreuth records document the baptism of a young African of fifteen in 1664. The Elector of Saxony had given him as a present to his in-law in Bayreuth. This boy served for “many years as a kettle-drummer in the court orchestra” – a highly typical career for an African at a German court. Another baptism of an African is recorded on 13 December 1668, this time a woman. In the most respectable presence of his Highness, the Margrave Christian Ernst, the baptismal ceremony was performed by the Church Superintendent of the principality, Caspar von Lilien (Hochfürstlich Brandenburgischer Geheimer Kirchenrat und Oberhofprediger). The woman was christened Sophia (name of the Marchioness) Magdalena.33 Caspar von Lilien referred in his sermon to Jeremiah 13:23 – “Can the Nubian change his skin?” (Kann auch ein Mohr seine Haut wandeln?) – and then speaks about the ridiculous futility of the Mohrenwäsche. These two examples suggest that Africans appearing at public functions were not a complete novelty in the second half of the seventeenth cen33

Hans Lauterbach, “Mohrenwäsche in Bayreuth,” Heimatbote 1 (Bayreuth, 1954).

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tury in the little town of Bayreuth, but they certainly caught the attention of the local community. The baptism of Sophia Magdalena, in particular, reveals how, on occasions like this, the institutions of state and church interacted with the commoners. Sophia Magdalena’s baptism was performed by the highest church representative of the duchy. And even the ex-officio head of the Lutheran Church, the Margave himself, honoured the function with his presence. Caspar von Lilien cites in his sermon the passage in Jeremiah that states racial difference, but at the same time pleads for tolerance within the Christian community.

Africa Paying Homage to Margrave Christian Ernst Another area where commoners encountered Africans, at least in the form of officially projected images of Africans, was in public buildings, in monuments and public fountains, which were utilized by the princes for self-promotion. A wonderful example of this is the Markgrafenbrunnen, today standing in front of the Neue Schloss. Stories like the Mohrenwäsche signify the baseline in the perception of Africans as they are articulated among the broad population of commoners in public spaces. Paintings like Antoine Pesne’s portrait of Marchioness Wilhelmine and her brother Frederick stand for the personal perceptions of Africans within the ruling feudal family, as it is presented exclusively in the closed spaces of the palaces, accessible only to the members of the princely court. The ruling Margrave and the Marchioness conveyed their ideas about their own personal role as well as their inherited institutional role as deo gratia rulers to the general public of commoners and their fellow aristocrats through architecture, palaces, gardens, town-planning and the layout of new towns (e.g., the Huguenot settlements in Erlangen or the St Georgen settlement for crafts specialists in Bayreuth). Some of the favourite genres in visual communication were monuments and fountains. These fountains could be purely utilitarian, satisfying basic needs, or highly decorative and representative structures that aimed essentially at the production of symbolic values. One such fountain is Bayreuth’s Markgrafenbrunnen. In 1699, Margrave Christian Ernst commissioned his court sculptor (Hofbildhauer) Elias Räntz to erect a fountain in front of his chateau that “showed him life-size on horseback in his capacity as the victorious commander of the imperial cavalry in the battle of Kahlenberg (1683) against the Turks.” The instructions given to the sculptor were precise:

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the sculptor selected, Räntz, is commissioned to represent His Serene Highness seated in armour on horseback above a prostrate Turk, these three elements to be carved life-size from one block of stone. On the four sides of the pedestal, the four monarchies, each image mounted life-size on an animal peculiar to it and spouting water from its throat.34

The purpose of this fountain was expressed clearly in the contract with Elias Räntz: he was meant to celebrate the greatest military achievement in the life of the ruling prince. The Battle of Vienna is one of the decisive battles in world history. It stands for the turn-around in the military conflict between the Islamic Orient and the Christian Occident. By the second half of the seventeenth century, Muslim armies had occupied the whole of the Balkans; under the command of Kara Mustafa, they laid siege to Vienna. By September 1683, the Turks had dug tunnels under the battlements of the city walls and prepared to blow them up. Vienna in the hands of the Muslim army would have opened the rest of Central Europe to an Islamic invasion. If Kara Mustafa and his troops had been victorious in 1683, the conflicts raging in the former Yugoslavia today – Bosnia and Kosovo - would be instead located in Bavaria, Bohemia or Westphalia. Kara Mustafa could have easily pushed forward to the borders of France. The Battle of Vienna/ Kahlenberg is thus an event of universal historic importance – and Christian Ernst’s ambition to celebrate appropriately his merits in this event are understandable. Together with Field-Marshall Count Rbatta, Christian Ernst was commander of the Imperial cavalry.35 The term ‘imperial troops’ is misleading: it does not mean the supreme command of the entire forces of the Alliance; it means only those troops which the many imperial knights, imperial cities or abbeys had to provide to assist the Emperor. The 34

Heinrich Thiel, “Markgraf Christian Ernst des heiligen römischen Reiches Generalfeldmarschall,” Heimatbeilage zum amtlichen Schulanzeiger des Regierungsbezirks Oberfranken 5 (October 1962): “hat erwelter Bildhauer Rentz übernommen seine Hochfürstliche Durchlaucht zur Pferdt im Harnisch sitzend, nebst einem darunter liegenden Türcken, und diese drei Stücke, aus einem Stein allesamt in Lebens groß / Umb das Postament vier Bilder, an denen vier Seiten, die vier Monarchien, jedes Bild uff einem absonderlichen Thier, so dazu qualifizieret, in Lebensgröße sitzend, und Wasser aus dem Rachen speyend.” 35 Georg Maria Jochner, Zur Geschichte des Türkenkrieges im Jahre 1683 (Bamberg: Historischer Verein für die Pflege der Geschichte des Ehemaligen Fürstbistums Bamberg: Bericht, 1883): 77.

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Franconian cuirassier regiment amounted to 486 horsemen only.36 In the Battle of Vienna, the credit for the strategic planning goes to Prince Karl of Lotharingia, the credit for bravery in the execution of the strategic plan to Jan I I I Sobieski, the Jagiellonian king of Poland /Lithuania with his 14,000 Hussars. Christian Ernst’s contribution to the defeat of the Turks was very moderate (“Compared to the strength of the Polish cavalry, Christian Ernst’s cuirassiers were able to make only a rather insignificant contribution” 37). In spite of this, his image on the fountain had to be that of the victorious Generalfeldmarschall. There seems to have been an understanding between the prince and the artist as to the style and genre of the statue. The format of the victorious monarch / general / commander as equestrian statue leaning back triumphantly on his horse while the defeated enemy cries for mercy before being crushed under its hooves was firmly established as a visual trope in public monuments. Fifteen years after the battle, Elias Räntz could draw his inspiration from two sources: on the one hand, in 1607 the sculptor Hans Werner had already realized an equestrian statue of Margrave Christian (Christian Ernst’s grandfather) to decorate the armoury gate of the Plassenburg in Kulmbach, the seat of the Margrave’s court in the early-seventeenth century; it is allegedly the first equestrian statue in Central Europe to master the static challenge of having a mounted horse rearing on its hind legs. Elias Räntz used the defeated Turk under the hooves and the figure of the court jester (a self-portrait?) to support the weight of the statue (see Figure 8). On the other hand, Räntz drew on an engraving of “Christianus Ernestius Marggrav zu Brandenburg: Der Röm: Kayserl: Mayest: General über die Cavalleria, und der Aliirten General Feldmarschall Leutenandt”38 that depicts the Margrave in exactly the desired pose of the victor. Räntz deviated from his models in two respects. One alteration was prescribed in the original contract: “His Serene Highness seated in armour on horseback” – Räntz militarized the figure of Christian Ernst, underscoring his military action and his function as comman36

Hermann Helmes, Übersicht zur Geschichte der fränkischen Kreistruppen, 1664–

1714 (Munich: Lindauer Verlag, 1905): 20. 37

Karl Müssel, “Das Türkische Gebetbuch des Markgrafen Christian Ernst,” Archiv für Geschichte Oberfrankens 63 (1983): 78–79. “Verglichen mit der polnischen Kavallerie konnten die Kürassiere Christian Ernsts schon rein zahlenmässig nur einen ziemlich unbedeutenden Beitrag leisten.” 38 Karl Sitzmann, Der Bayreuther Hofbildhauer Elias Räntz: Zur 300. Wiederkehr seines Geburtstages (Bayreuth: Ellwanger, 1949): 9.

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der. Instead of the parade uniform with the broad hat and ostrich feathers, Räntz’s Christian Ernst is clad in full armour with breastplates and plumed helmet (like the Sobieski monument in Warsaw). The artist added an ironic touch: his Margrave is distinctly overweight, sitting on his horse well-fed and self-satisfied. He looks as if he were in charge of provisioning rather than in command of the cavalry. And the sculptor added the figure of the court jester, whose smallness underlines the tallness of the Margrave but, at the same time, suggests that this is all an exaggeration. In the original contract, the sculptor was requested to surround the victorious prince with “the four monarchies,” riding on an appropriate animal, and to display on the base of the statue an array of martial arms, cannons, lances, flags.39 Thus, Christian Ernst was seen riding high above the four parts of the world, “the monarchies” of Asia, Africa, America, and Europe. The iconography of the four ‘monarchies’40 follows the established patterns: Europe, riding on the bull, is the only female figure who displays no martial attributes. America is represented by the feather-crowned warrior riding on an eagle, Asia by the ‘oriental’ turbaned soldier, brandishing his lance, Africa by a ‘Sudanese’ astride a lion. Why Europe should be represented by the figure of an unarmed young woman and in a monument that celebrated the historic victory over the Muslim heathens from the Orient can only be explained by the fixed iconography of the times. This also explains the similarity to the equestrian statue of Jan Sobieski in Warsaw and to an historical painting of Sobieski by Jan Kossak. The figure of the African also obeys the conventional patterns of ‘geographical iconography’: head-tie, feathered loincloth, bare torso, and riding barefoot on an unsaddled, bridleless lion (see Figure 9). In his left hand he holds his bow (the bow was repaired a week after I took my photograph), and has a quiver of arrows on his back. Comportment, posture, and body-language express aggressiveness and determination – as do those of the other two ‘foreign’ warriors. His facial expression reenforces the impression created by his bodily posture. Riding on a lion evokes wildness, closeness to nature, and unrestrained willpower in subduing the king of animals. The simplicity in visual expression becomes obvious when one compares the figure of Asia 39

Martina Hörig, “Die Steinplastik im Oeuvre des Hofbildhauers Elias Räntz” (M A thesis, University of Munich, 1999). 40 Sabine Poeschel, Studien zur Ikonographie der Erdteile in der Kunst des 16.–18. Jahrhunderts (Beiträge zur Kunstwissenschaft 3; Munich: Klein, 1985): 45–47.

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with that of the defeated Turk. The Turk under the hooves of Christian Ernst’s horse seems to be in great pain: his body is twisted and he pleads for mercy, whereas the representative of Asia, although nearly identical in dress (turban and caftan) conveys the same spirit of martial aggressiveness as Africa and America. One also notices the discrepancy in posture between the Prince on his horse and that of the ‘four monarchies’. Christian Ernst appears to be sitting casually in the saddle and easily riding over that desperate Turkish soldier. The African, Asian, and American warriors seem to explode with martial zeal. The ease with which the victor of the Battle of Vienna rides along and dominates the four monarchies illustrates the ideological message conveyed by this fountain: the supremacy of the European Christian princes over the entire world cannot be disputed. The sculptor Elias Räntz seems to be continuing the iconographic tradition as we have seen it in medieval paintings dealing with the Adoration of the Magi. The medieval painters suggested the spiritual supremacy of the Christian Occident. The baroque sculptor Räntz shows a Christian ruling prince as a force owing his superiority mainly to superior military technology. Christian Ernst is shown in full armour, with the sill of the fountain abounding with military insignia and weapons, while the African, American, and Asian warriors are practically naked, without defensive arms or protection. Their bows and arrows or lances are way behind the military technology displayed at Christian Ernst’s feet. Thus, we can see that the basic attitude of supremacy, as revealed in the missionary urge signified by the Magi, has been replaced, by the late-seventeenth century, by an urge for military domination and political subjugation. The spiritual supremacy that justified the bringing-together of the ‘monarchies’ under the protecting canopy of the salvator mundi has now been replaced by a spirit of military submission. Mission and submission seem to be practically synonymous. The attitude has been secularized and materialized. Elias Räntz’ Margrave Fountain was removed from its original location in the court of the old residence and transferred to the Neue Schloss in 1748. Many of the iconographic links that were part of the original design were now lost. In its original location, the fountain related to another fountain, that of Fama – the spirit of historical fame. The statue of the historical hero Christian Ernst and the statue of the allegory of his historic fame created a figural constellation of panegyric quality. The constellation of the two fountains highlighted the ideological message projected into the public space, worship of the ruling prince as the Saviour of the Occident – second only to the salvator

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mundi of medieval times. In addition, the fountain also corresponded to the decoration of the chateau façade. Here, Elias Räntz had already created a series of bas-relief medallions representing the famous philosophers, leaders, and heroes of classical Antiquity from Aristotle to Seneca, Alexander to Caesar. Thus, Margrave Christian Ernst on his horse is positioned at the centre of a most illustrious assembly – a victorious military hero surrounded by classical political and military heroes and communing with the spirit of historical fame; all this proclaims Christian Ernst as the incarnation of Idealgeschichte (ideal history) This monument to Christian Ernst celebrated the personality of the baroque prince while the base of the fountain linked the person of the prince to the physical territory over which he ruled. With the reference to the local territory of the principality of Bayreuth, Elias Räntz established another iconographic relationship which today figures as ‘the local and the global’. The fountain refers to the four rivers which spring from das hohe Gebirg. These are the river Eger, flowing east into Bohemia, the Saale, flowing north into the Elbe, the Main, flowing to the west into the Rhine and eventually into the Atlantic, and the Naab, flowing to the south into the Danube and the Black Sea. Thus, the pictorial programme of the fountain links the territory with its rivers to the four ‘monarchies’ of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, all of them arranged symbolically with the victorious prince as the focal centre.

Ruling the Waves and the Coastlines This reference to the local rivers draws attention to yet another topic that was typical of baroque feudal ostentatiousness – the combination of territorial and maritime supremacy, personified by the figure of Neptune. It was the idea of the sea-god’s lordship over land and sea that made Neptune fountains so attractive to baroque princes as decorative elements for both public marketplaces and private royal gardens, even if their territory was landlocked and hundreds of miles from the sea. The ideographic programme of Neptune fountains concentrated mostly on Neptune as ruler of the waves. He is represented as a triumphant figure brandishing his trident, like the victorious prince on horseback, governing an assembly of maritime creatures, dolphins, mermaids, and nereids, and a wild mixture of wingèd and fish-tailed creatures. The alternative motifs chosen for Neptune fountains are the deity’s other major achievements. Poseidon / Neptune was notorious as a womanizer, no better than his brother Zeus. One of Poseidon’s gallant deeds provides the

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theme for the fountain in the baroque gardens of Ebrach Abbey, which shows Poseidon taking possession of the reluctant Amphitrite. Why the abbot of this Cistercensian monastery, hidden away in the solitude of the forests of the Steigerwald, should fancy a heathen god raping a woman as the main attraction for his baroque garden remains a mystery. But the sexual conquest of Amphitrite has more bearing on our topic than the mere fascination with physical strength and sexual violence. Amphitrite hailed from Libya and tried to escape Poseidon’s persecutions by fleeing to Morocco. Poseidon’s ruling of the waves meant that he also ruled over the lives and bodies of the inhabitants of the Mediterranean coast. Neptune and Amphitrite signified in yet another way the aspirations of European rulers to extend their dominion beyond the limits of old Europe. Poseidon’s marriage to Amphitrite resulted in the birth of Triton, a semihuman, partly zoomorphic creature (see Figure 10). Triton is depicted with an athletic Schwarzeneggerian torso and a fishtail instead of legs, and as riding on wingèd horses with fins from Poseidon’s submarine stables, or toying with dolphins and Nessie-like sea snakes. Since he represents the African coastline, the sculptors tend to carve him with ‘moderately’ African features – curly, not kinky hair, full lips, broad facial features which distinguishe him clearly from the ‘European’ mermaids who also populated the Neptune fountains. Triton plays the conch – the shell trumpet – thus signalling the brewing-up of storms. The Neptune fountain in the garden of Schloss Fantaisie (five km from Bayreuth), designed and executed by Elias Räntz’s sons, connects up with an element that we have seen in the Margrave Fountain – a tension in physical expressiveness between the central figure – the Margrave or the god Neptune – and the surrounding supplementary figures, the African / American /Asian warriors or the Tritons. The central figure of the ruler radiates an atmosphere of sedateness, calmness, and composure, while the warriors and the Tritons explode with dynamism, suggesting energetic movement. Composure on the one hand and hyperactivity on the other – this signals yet another sphere of the superordinate/ subordinate dichotomy characterizing eighteenth-century society and the assumed hierarchies within the universal family of nations.

New Christian Views of Africans After these excursions into the symbolic meanings of classical mythology in relation to the baroque cults of dynastic rule in the eighteenth century, we return once more to the representation of Africans in a religious context. In

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1769, Frater Alvarious from Ostheim carved the pulpit of Saint Mary’s

Church of the Assumption in Hollfeld, from a design by Bernhard Kamm.41 While the corpus of the pulpit is decorated with the figures of the evangelists, the most widespread decorative element for pulpits, the highly ornamented canopy, takes up the trope of Christian supremacy in all parts of the world. Frater Alvarious squeezed Africa into a marginal position, close to the wall, while Europe and America (in a distinctly colonial version) occupied the more prominent central parts of the canopy. Frater Alvarious’ rendition of the continent of Africa reflects the changes in the allegorical treatment of the four continents from a secular to a religious context, from a medieval/ Renaissance to an eighteenth-century context (see Figure 11). Alvarious’ Africa figures as a handsome youth in festive mood, and with festive and decorative dress. He wears the indispensable headband with a decorative crown of feathers and a short feathered skirt. Naked upper torso and athletic build betray the essentialism behind this visual perception of the African continent. Physical appearance, in both body and clothing, is almost identical with Elias Räntz’s African warrior in the Markgrafenbrunnen. While Räntz’s Africa appears to push forward relentlessly with grim mien, demonstrating his manly, martial strength, Father Alvarius’ Africa is seen in a joyful posture, reclining backwards, holding his head at an effeminate angle, his arms and hands indicating dance movements. His legs are bent casually and crossed in an alluring manner, which is even further underlined by the elaborate sandals he is wearing, with leather Roman straps to the knees. The African’s entire appearance, his physical build, posture, facial expression, and dress, speaks of playfulness and of happiness at being within the Christian fold. Compared to the medieval or Renaissance representations of Africa, Father Alvarious’ figure assumes distinctly more of the characteristics of the Noble Savage. The image conveys more of the secular or philosophical concepts of the Enlightenment than of the religious spirituality of the older images. While the Magi foregrounded the universality of the Christian community in the Three Parts of the World, the eighteenth-century allegory of the continent underlines difference and distance. The impression made on the spectator depends, of course, on nuances of portrayal and the spatial context (church, public space or private interior) 41

Katholisches Pfarramt Hollfeld, Kirchen von Hollfeld (Passau: PEDA – Kunstführer, 1995): 14. An almost identical figure of Africa can be seen in the pulpit of the late-baroque St Mary’s church in Oradea, Romania – the ideogram of the missionary continent was generally accepted in the whole of Europe.

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that combine to create a particular spirit or atmosphere in the picture. With the allegorical figure of Africa in St Mary’s Church of the Assumption at Hollfeld, one can sense a new direction within the Christian community, where the concept of ecumenical universality has been replaced by a paternalistic missionary attitude towards the ‘poor heathens living in foreign climes’. Christian Ernst’s domineering posture, signifying military and material superiority over the Sudanese warrior, seems to be one side of the coin, the gentle and subservient posture of the African youth in the Christian church mirroring the paternalistic attitudes towards poorer nations, the other. It preempts or at least foreshadows the missionary paternalism as expressed in the great missionary figures of David Livingstone and Albert Schweitzer.

WORKS CITED Aubert, Jean–Jacques. “L’insignificance de la négritude: Maurice le Maure,” in Mauritius und die Thebäische Legion / Saint Maurice et la légion thébaine, ed. Otto Wermelinger, Philippe Bruggiser, Beat Näf & Jean–Michel Roessli (Paradosis 49; Fribourg: Academic Press, 2005): 57–66. Baxandall, Michael. Die Kunst der Bilderschnitzer: Tilman Riemenschneider, Veit Stoß und ihre Zeitgenossen, tr. Brigitte Sauerländer (Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, 1980; Munich: C.H. Beck, 1985). Bitterli, Urs. Die Entdeckung des schwarzen Afrikaners, Versuch einer Geistesgeschichte der europäisch-afrikanischen Beziehungen an der Guineaküste im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Zürich: Atlantis, 1970). Brackmann, Albert. Die politische Bedeutung der Mauritius-Verehrung im frühen Mittelalter (Sitzungsberichte der preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.hist Klasse 30; Berlin, 1937). Bagrow, Leo, & Raleigh Astilin Skelton. Meister der Kartographie (Berlin: Safari, 1963). Bräunlein, Peter. Martin Behaim (Bamberg: Bayerische Verlagsanstalt, 1992). ——. “Von Mohren-Apotheken und Mohrenkopf-Wappen,” Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 41 (1991–92): 219–38. Budde, Rainer, ed. Die Heiligen Drei Könige: Darstellung und Verehrung (exh. cat.; Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, 1982). Dabydeen, David. Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1987). Debrunner, Hans Werner. Presence and Prestige: Africans in Europe – A History of Africans in Europe before 1918 (Basel: Balser Afrika Bibliographie, 1979). Devisse, Jean. “Un Noir sanctifié: Maurice,” in L’Image du Noir dans l’art occidental (ed. Ladislas Bugner), vol. 2: Des premiers siècles chrétiens aux “grandes décou-

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vertes”, Part 2: Les Africains dans l’ordonnance chrétienne du monde (XIVe–XVIe siècle), ed. Jean Devisse & Michel Mollat (Fribourg: Office du Livre & Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1976): 149–204, 241–54. ——, & Michel Mollat, ed. L’Image du Noir dans l’art occidental (ed. Ladislas Bugner), vol. 2: Des premiers siècles chrétiens aux “grandes découvertes”, Part 2: Les Africains dans l’ordonnance chrétienne du monde (X I V e–X V I e siècle) (Fribourg: Office du Livre & Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1976). Erickson, Peter. “Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance,” Criticism 35 (Fall 1993): 506–15. Fauser, Alois. Ältere Erd- und Himmelsgloben in Bayern (Stuttgart: Kat. Nr. 31, 1964). Flühler–Kreis, Dione. “Mauritius: heiliger Ritter, Mohr und Reichspatron,” Kunst + Architektur in der Schweiz 54.3 (2003): 16–22. Friedman, John Block. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1981). Füssel, Stephan. “Einleitung,” in Hartmut Schedel: Weltchronik (Cologne: Taschen, facs. ed. 2001). Helmes, Hermann. Übersicht zur Geschichte der fränkischen Kreistruppen, 1664–1714 (Munich: Lindauer Verlag, 1905). Herzberg, Adalbert Josef. Der heilige Mauritius: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Mauritiusverehrung (Forschungen zur Volkskunde 25–26; Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1936). Hörig, Martina. “Die Steinplastik im Oeuvre des Hofbildhauers Elias Räntz” (M A thesis, University of Munich, 1999). Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen & Württembergischer Kunstverein. Exotische Welten, Europäische Phantasien, ed. Senta Evers–Grigat, Hermann Pollig et al. (exh. cat.; Stuttgart: Cantz, 1987). Jochner, Georg Maria. Zur Geschichte des Türkenkrieges im Jahre 1683 (Bamberg: Historischer Verein für die Pflege der Geschichte des Ehemaligen Fürstbistums Bamberg: Bericht, 1883). Kaplan, Paul H.D. The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art (Studies in the Fine Arts: Iconography 9; Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1985). ——. “Titian’s ‘Laura Dianti’ and the Origins of the Motif of the Black Page in Portraiture,” Antichità Viva 21.1 (1982): 11–18 and 21.4 (1982): 10–18. Katholisches Pfarramt Hollfeld. Kirchen von Hollfeld (Passau: P E D A – Kunstführer, 1995). Kehrer, Hugo. Die Heiligen Drei Könige in Literatur und Kunst (1908; Hildesheim & N Y : Georg Olms, 1985). Kuhn, Martin. “Sankt Mauritius mit der Lanze, der ottonische Reichspatron, an der Schwelle zwischen Franken und Thüringen,” Geschichte am Obermain 7 (1971– 72): 51–76.

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Kunst, Hans Joachim. Der Afrikaner in der europäischen Kunst (Bad Godesberg: Inter Nationes, 1967). Lauterbach, Hans. “Mohrenwäsche in Bayreuth,” Heimatbote 1 (1954). Mark, Peter. Africans in European Eyes: The Portrayal of Black Africans in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century Europe (Syracuse: Syracuse U P , 1974). ——. “European Perceptions of Black Africans in the Renaissance,” in Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory, ed. Ezio Bassani & William B. Fagg (New York: Center for African Art, 1988): 21–31. Martin, Peter. Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren: Afrikaner in Bewusstsein und Geschichte der Deutschen (Hamburg: Junius, 2000). Meisen, Karl. Die Heiligen drei Könige und ihr Festtag im volkstümlichen Brauch: Eine volkskundliche Untersuchung (Cologne: Rheinische Gesellschaft für Volkskunde, 1949). Müssel, Karl. “Das Türkische Gebetbuch des Markgrafen Christian Ernst,” Archiv für Geschichte Oberfrankens 63 (1983): 73–83. O’Reilly, Donald F. “The Theban Legion of St. Maurice,” Vigiliae Christianae 32.3 (September 1978): 195–207. Poeschel, Sabine. Studien zur Ikonographie der Erdteile in der Kunst des 16.–18. Jahrhunderts (Beiträge zur Kunstwissenschaft 3; Munich: Klein, 1985). Ravenstein, E.G. Martin Behaim, His Life and His Globe (London, 1908). Rodney, Walter. “Africa in Europe and the Americas,” in The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 4 (London: Cambridge U P , 1975): 578–622. Ruepprecht, Hans–Ulrich, Freiherr von. “Der Mohr als Wappenfigur,” Kleeblatt: Zeitschrift für Heraldik und verwandte Wissenschaften (2001): 6–13. Schedel, Hartmann: Weltchronik (Cologne: Taschen, facs. ed. 2001). Schlamp, M.F. “Der Mohrenkopf im Wappen der Bischöfe von Freising,” Frigisinga 7 (1930): 9–19, Schöler, Eugen. “Wie kommt ein Schwarzer auf den Helm und in den Schild?” in Schöler, Fränkische Wappen erzählen Geschichte und Geschichten (Neustadt/ Aisch: Degener, 1992): 94–100. Seiferth, Wolfgang S. “Saint Mauritius, African,” Phylon (1941): 370–76, Sitzmann, Karl. Der Bayreuther Hofbildhauer Elias Räntz: Zur 300. Wiederkehr seines Geburtstages (Bayreuth: Ellwanger, 1949). Sladeczek, Leonhard. Albrecht Dürer und die Illustrationen zur Schedelchronik: Neue. Fragen um den jungen Dürer (Baden–Baden & Strasbourg: Heitz, 1965). Snowden, Frank. Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopeans in the Greco-Roman Experience (1970, Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1979). Steuer, Heiko. “Die Heiligen drei Könige und das Wappen der Stadt Köln,” in Die Heiligen Drei Könige – Darstellung und Verehrung, ed. Rainer Budde (exh. cat.; Cologne: Wallraf–Richartz-Museum, 1982): 97–111.

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Suckale–Redlefsen, Gude, & Robert Suckale. Mauritius: Der heilige Mohr – The Black Saint Maurice, tr. Genoveva Nitz, foreword by Ladislas Bugner (exh. cat.; Munich, Zürich & Houston T X : Menil Foundation, 1987). Thiel, Heinrich. “Markgraf Christian Ernst des heiligen römischen Reiches Generalfeldmarschall,” Heimatbeilage zum amtlichen Schulanzeiger des Regierungsbezirks Oberfranken 5 (October 1962): np. Valdes, Mario. “The Black Wiseman in European Symbolism,” Journal of African Civilizations 3.1 (1981): 67–85. Valdes y Cocom, Mario de. “S I G I L L U M S E C R E T U M (Secret Seal): On the Image of the Blackamoor in European Heraldry,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages /frontline /shows/secret/famous/ssecretum.html (accessed 24 July 2010). Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. African Presences in Early Europe (1986; New Brunswick N J & Oxford: Transaction, 1990). Wilson, Adrian, with Joyce Lancaster Wilson. The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle, intro. Peter Zahn (Amsterdam: Nico Israel, 1965 & 1976). Woods, David. “The Origin of the Legend of Maurice and the Theban Legion,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45.3 (1994): 385–95. Ziegler, Adolf Wilhelm. Der Freisinger Mohr: Eine heimatgeschichtliche Untersuchung zum Freisinger Bischofswappen (Munich: Franz Xavier Seitz & Valentin Höfling, 1976).

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F I G U R E 1: St. Mauritius (c.1250), Magdeburg Cathedral (©Constantin Beyer, Weimar)

F I G U R E 2: Hans Suess von Kulmbach (attrib.), St. Mauritius (retable, c.1517/18), Pommers

F I G U R E 3: Coat of Arms, Council Room,

Schauenstein, Upper Franconia (photo: Eckhard Breitinger)

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feldener Filialkirche, Limbach (Oberfränki scher Ansichtskarten, Wolfgang Bouillon)

F I G U R E 4: Coat of Arms, Naila,

Upper Franconia (photo: Eckhard Breitinger)

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F I G U R E 5: Albrecht Dürer, Head of a Negro (c.1508) charcoal drawing (22 x 32 cm), Albertina, Vienna

(Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin)

F I G U R E 6: Albrecht Dürer, The Negress Katherina (1521) silverpoint drawing (20 x 14 cm), Galleria degli Uffizi,

Florence (Alinari Archives, Florence)

143

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F I G U R E 7: Antoine Pesne, Wilhelmine of Prussia and Her Brother Frederick (c.1715)

Schloss Charlottenburg, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Walter Steinkopf)

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F I G U R E 8: Margrave Christian Ernst Markgrafenbrunnen Bayreuth (1699)

F I G U R E 9: The Monarchies – Africa Markgrafenbrunnen Bayreuth (1699)

(photo: Eckhard Breitinger)

(photo: Eckhard Breitinger)

F I G U R E 10: Triton with conch, Ebrach

(photo: Eckhard Breitinger)

F I G U R E 11:Neptune, Stadtkirche

Mary Ascension, Hollfeld (photo: Eckhard Breitinger)

Taking Flight and the Libertarian Crow-Scarer

G ERALD P ORTER

T

H E T I T L E O F T H I S E S S A Y is not a description of Raoul Granqvist, although it could well be. One of his most enduring commitments, both in his writing and in his wider activity, has been to the rights of the individual. This essay takes as its theme a group of individuals who remained without such a defence: the bird-scarers, children who were employed or simply ordered into the fields to keep crows and other birds off newly sown crops. Typically for such a numerous but marginal group, the rights of these child labourers were never codified, let alone protected. Although today largely displaced in industrial countries by new types of seed, automatic cannon, and deep-planting techniques, they were, within living memory, a group of very young and often nameless individuals who have, almost by definition,1 been among the most powerless and isolated in the communities where they work. I explore the way that their songs, like the birdscarers themselves, are metaphors of dispersal, of escape, and of desire. While they qualify formally as plotless narratives in Juri Lotman’s formulation, I suggest that these orts and slarts of song, repeated numerous times, are in fact narratives of release and liberation.2

1

When the politician George Edwards, a farm labourer who became an MP, wanted to emphasize his rise from insignificance to the seat of power, he called his autobiography From Crow-Scaring to Westminster (London: Labour Publishing, 1957). 2 Yuri [Jurij] M. Lotman, “On the Metalanguage of a Typological Description of Culture,” Semiotica 14.2 (1975): 97–123.

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Materials for studying the cries are not plentiful, for reasons connected with the subject of this essay, the subordination of non-narrative song.3 Although early collectors sometimes noted down children’s songs, those of children at work were not systematically recorded by collectors such as Alice B. Gomme in the nineteenth century, and Iona and Peter Opie in the twentieth.4 It was only in the 1990s, when the actions of multinational companies in using child labour were exposed, that the first studies were made.5 This essay also diverges from studies of work songs such as sea shanties and songs by clothworkers, in that its subject is singing by solitary children.6 While urban and extractive child labour was an essential instrument in setting in place the new structures of the Industrial Revolution, young children had been employed to keep the fields clear of birds from earliest times. The practice of scaring birds has been depicted since Egyptian times and documented since the Roman period – in Virgil’s Georgics, for example. In England, the first circumstantial accounts of the practice date from the eighteenth century onwards, but it was clearly an early practice: a ‘scarecrow’ was always a living person before the word was applied to a straw dummy.7 ‘Rook starving’, as it was called, or ‘bird-clapping’ or ‘crow-keeping’, used to be a first step into working life for many children in rural England, like the critic and civil-rights activist William Cobbett, born in Surrey in 1763:

3

David Atkinson, The English Traditional Ballad: Theory, Method and Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 4 The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland, ed. Alice B. Gomme, 2 vols. (London: David Nutt, 1894–98); Iona & Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959; London: Oxford U P , 1973), and The Singing Game (1985; Oxford: Oxford U P , 1988). 5 Gerald Porter, “ ‘ Work the old lady out of the ditch’: Singing at Work by English Lacemakers,” Journal of Folklore Research 31.1–3 (1994): 35–55; “The Other Child Ballads: Narrative Songs by English Child Labourers,” in Folklore: New Perspectives, ed. Jawaharlal Handoo & Reimund Kvideland (Mysore: Zoon, 1999): 51–61. A recent estimate is that, worldwide, 10% of all children under 14, 248m in all, are in paid work (Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, Helsinki, 26 February 2005). 6 Shanties from the Seven Seas, ed. Stanley Hugill (1961; London: Routledge, 2nd ed. 1984); Betty Messenger, Picking up the Linen Threads: Life in Ulster’s Mills (1978. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1988). 7 Compact Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 2nd ed. 1991): 1667. The earliest use of ‘scarecrow’ to describe a living scarer is 1553, for a straw figure, 1592.

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My first occupation was driving the small birds from the turnip seeds, and the rooks from the peas. When I trudged afield, with my wooden bottle and my satchel over my shoulders, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles, and, at the close of the day, to reach home was a task of infinite labour.8

Since the socio-cultural records of this marginalized work are scarce, the prominence of narratives of birdscaring in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a way of enforcing adult working norms is significant. In Henry Fielding’s pre-industrial novel Joseph Andrews (1742), for example, birdscaring is the protagonist’s first occupation, yet it is offered as evidence of his intimate relation with the natural world. Later non-fictional accounts increasingly emphasize the way such work would integrate the child into a lifetime of work. Alfred Williams (b.1877) earned his keep as a human scarecrow on a local farm in Wiltshire from the age of five, and was therefore only able to attend school part-time. He eventually left school at eleven in 1889.9 Henry White of Bagendon, Gloucestershire, in central England began ‘crow-keeping’ in 1832 at the age of ten. His wage for a twelve-hour day was threepence. Not only were the long hours tedious, but working alone was also a source of fear for a small child. Within living memory, ‘rook starving’ still went on in the area at sixpence a day, while at Winchcombe nearby the rate was only a penny or tuppence plus a swede (Swedish turnip).10 The work often also involved collecting stones from the fields and piling them up in cairns.11 The long hours meant, of course, that school education was neglected or lost altogether. At the end of the nineteenth century, George Nobes of Blockley, in Gloucestershire, had, like Alfred Williams, to absent himself from school to work in the fields for twelve hours a day. He scared birds from the beans, and then chased them from young wheat.12 Even in the apparently timeless world of these children, the human lifespan was linear, but, paradoxically, it offered the chimera of a later return to childhood: because the work was considered suitable for those without strength for active farm labour, it would occasionally be carried out by the 8

Quoted in The Painful Plough, ed. Roy Palmer (1972; Cambridge: Cambridge U P ,

1976): 11. 9

Alfred Williams ed., Folksongs of the Upper Thames (Wakefield, Yorks: S.R. Publishers, n.d): v. 10 Roy Palmer, Folklore of Gloucestershire (Stroud: Tempus, 2001): 211. 11 Bob Copper, A Song for Every Season (St Albans: Granada/Paladin, 1975): 87. 12 Palmer, Folklore of Gloucestershire, 211.

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old, like those in a Somerset village in the west of England who were sent out into the fields “after they had finished their normal life’s work, and with a pipe of tobacco and a jar of cider.”13 In the same way, the young Bob Copper accompanied his crippled grandfather into the fields on the English south Downs.14 The completion of the life-cycle in this way offered an exit from a life of physical labour in the same way as it had offered an entrance. The children would drive the birds away with shouts and cries: in addition to the songs quoted in this essay, examples have been recorded in German, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and other languages.15 The songs of the rook clappers are solitary, often self-reflexive, like the field hollers of field workers in the southern American states. As documented, they are mostly short, but because they were functional, they were constantly repeated. Typically, they have a simple or at most a cumulative structure. They generally start explosively, as in this cry from Yorkshire in the north of England: Gowa! Gowa! Wheea teea? Wheea teea? Bagby Moor, Bagby Moor. What ti dea there? What ti dea there? Seek an au’d yeo, seek an au’d yeo. Is she fat? Is she fat? Gloor! Gloor! Gloor!16

[go away] [where to?] [what to do there?] [seek an old ewe]

Juri Lotman mapped out what happens when, as in this case, narrative appears to be largely absent.17 Plotless texts affirm a particular world and its ordering: in Gramscian terms, they operate hegemonically. They are organized according to a principle of binary oppositions which establish fixed frontiers and affirm immobility. Categories of evaluation are expressed by means of spatial orientation and oppositions such as ‘top – bottom’, ‘front – back’ etc. Plotted texts, on the other hand, cross boundaries and are thus both literally and metaphorically transgressive. Events take place whenever a character leaves the

13

Bob & Jacqueline Patten, Somerset Scrapbook. ([n. p.]: I N A Books, 1987): 63. Bob Copper, A Song for Every Season (St Albans: Granada / Paladin, 1975 [1971]): 87–88. 15 Faber Book of Popular Verse, ed. Geoffrey Grigson (London: Faber & Faber, 1986 [1971]): 336. 16 Faber Book of Popular Verse, 361. 17 Lotman, “Metalanguage,” 97–123. 14

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space which is his or her own and enters some alien space. Personae can cross the forbidden border both physically and mentally, and they can also be moved to spaces which are not their own. Movement within the character’s own space and changes which do not involve boundary-crossing are not considered events. By Lotman’s criteria, the cries used by boys (only very rarely girls) to scare crows and other birds away from newly sown fields in England may be considered almost defining examples of the plotless narrative. The performers belonged to one of the most powerless and exploitable sections of the community – as the word ‘scarecrows’ came to be reserved for the inanimate figures of straw and rags that took their place. The boys were confined to a clearly defined space from which they were not allowed to stray, so their songs were determined by the work-process, forming a functional subtext to the vigorous clapping which offered a kinetic accompaniment. This means that their cries largely consist of short outbursts which are constantly repeated with a minimum of changes. Nevertheless, this essay suggests that the cries of the living scarecrows are closer to Lotman’s second category, the plotted narrative: they, too, have dynamic and transgressive elements that reveal the structure of the world of the established culture. One example is this cry recorded from an unknown singer in Evesham in the west of England: O, you nasty black-a-tops [blackbirds], Get off my master’s radish tops, For he’s a comin’ with his long gun, And you must fly and I must run Hello o-o-o-o, Hello o-o-o-o.18

The tone here is not complicit and static but argumentative. In the course of only four lines, the call for the “black-a-tops” to remove themselves before they are shot by the farmer turns to feelings of solidarity with them, since when he arrives with his shotgun, “you must fly and I must run.” The songs give many indications that the assumption that the birds must be driven away or killed was not accepted, and that it was resisted not only because birdscaring was thankless work but because the young scarers sympathized with the birds and in many cases identified with them. This was recognized by Thomas Hardy’s tragic novel about the frustration of working-class aspira18

The Painful Plough, ed. Palmer, 9.

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tions, Jude the Obscure (1895), where Jude Fawley empathizes with the birds he is paid to drive away: “Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much resembled his own.”19 In the Evesham example, the hegemonic human / animal opposition is deconstructed by a perception of shared powerlessness, setting up a realignment of loyalties which questions the dominant discourse by suggesting a joint exit from the farmer’s territory. This is a constantly recurring theme. A song from Yorkshire specifies a rival parish as a suitable target for their greed: Car woo! Car woo! Yow owd black crow, Goo fly awa’ to Sutton; If yow stop hee’t’ll cost ye so dear, I’ll kill yow as ded as mutton.20

While the flight of the crow is here linear, corresponding to Lotman’s boundary-crossing plotted narrative, to “fly awa” was often only a temporary leavetaking, involving a rapid return as soon as the scarer’s attention was distracted. In a “Bird Starver’s Cry” from Somerset, collected by Cecil Sharp in 1904, the birds move repeatedly, settling on every field in the village to eat their fill before returning to where they have started. The local farmers are named one by one as they are robbed in a relentless and eternal cycle: Hi! shoo all o’ the birds Out of my master’s ground into Tom Tucker’s ground , Out of Tom Tucker’s ground into Tom Tinker’s ground. (2nd time) Out of Tom Tinker’s ground into Luke Collis’ ground. (3rd time) Out of Luke Collis’ ground into Bill Vater’s ground. (4th time) Out of Bill Vater’s ground back to my master’s ground. Hi! shoo aller birds. Kraal! Hoop!21

Fields are often named in the songs in this way (Fair Maid’s Mead, Colonel’s Piece, and Keeley’s Hollow), as are those who farmed them (Tom Tucker, Luke Collis, Bill Vater).22 The repetition suggests not only the circularity of the agricultural round but also the futility of the work. 19

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1997 [1895]): 9. A Yorkshire birdscarers’ song, quoted on John Goodluck’s LP Speed the Plough (Culpho: Tin Shed Media, 1976). 21 The Idiom of the People, ed. James Reeves (London: Heinemann, 1958): 76. 22 Oxford Book of Work, ed. Keith Thomas (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999): 231; Roy Palmer, Folklore of Gloucestershire (1994. Stroud: Tempus, 2001): 211. 20

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As the work of Amnesty has constantly emphasized, the loss of human rights is inextricably tied up with issues of poverty and control. The young birdscarers were almost invariably drawn from the weakest and most marginal members of the rural community. Although the boys were not subject to the same constant control and observation within a domestic setting that characterized the work of young girls, they had no autonomy within their work, which was policed within strict limits of territory, time, and efficiency. However, in his important study of oral poetry, Paul Zumthor writes that “more than the tale, […] oral poetry constitutes, for cultural groups, a field of experimentation of self, making mastery of the world possible.”23 Thus birdscaring was also an apprenticeship to adulthood, and so represented by the Georgian poet Wilfrid Gibson in “The Plough” (1917), where he describes a birdscaring boy watching his father ploughing on a neighbouring hill, and Oedipally planning to supplant him. Gibson comments on the young boy’s feeling of satisfaction at his control over nature: [He] gripped his corncrake rattle tight And flourished it above his head Till every bird was out of sight, And laughed when all had flown and fled To think that he, and all alone, Could put so many thieves to rout.24

Moreover, many of the young crow-clappers celebrated physical strength, as in this cry by Austin Wookey in 1976 in Somerset, south-west England: Shoo all you birds, Shoo all the birds, I’ll up with my clappers, And I’ll hit thee down back’ards, Shoo all the birds, Shoo all the birds.25

There is linear movement here, too, as the weapons move from the verbal to the kinetic and finally to the ballistic, and birds are even brought down as a result. However, the last line makes clear that there is no final closure or resolution, but once again an eternal circularity, resisting the narrative development. 23

Paul Zumthor, Oral Poetry, tr. Kathryn Murphy–Judy, foreword by Walter J. Ong (Introduction à la poésie orale, 1983; tr. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1990): 129. 24 Oxford Book of Work, ed. Thomas, 232. 25 Bob & Jacqueline Patten, Somerset Scrapbook, 63.

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The utterances of young children are not constrained by the same cultural codes as those of the dominant discourse. As Terry Eagleton remarks, The child is a type of the critic in all kinds of ways: because of its incessant questioning, because it is parasitically dependent on a language it none the less finds baffling and alien, because, being an outsider, it can see both more and less than the insiders, because it is an isolated ‘intellectual’ not fully conversant with common practices of feeling yet also more emotionally sensitive than most, because its social marginality is the source at once of its blindness and insight.26

Some of the songs have dynamic subtexts which explore more complex aspects of power and powerlessness, and with them the possibility of disrupting established hierarchies through solidarity with the birds rather than a wish to destroy them. As Jude Fawley experienced it, “Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much resembled his own.”27 The songs become transgressive and, like the birds, cross forbidden boundaries. Thus several songs, instead of regarding the birds as adversaries, make common cause with them, like the cry sung by John Rogers in Dorset in southern England in about 1935: Gee, hallo, hallo, blackie cap, Let us lie down and take a nap, Suppose our master chance to come? You must fly and I must run. Gee hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo! Gee hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo!28

The re-appearance of lines which I have already identified with the subversive – rejecting work-discipline and identifying with the birds – problematizes the discussion of oral narratives in terms of a single performance. In Norfolk in 1978, for example, Walter Pardon sang a different cry, but made use of one of the same lines, where all pretence of enmity between bird and boy has gone, and the crows are openly, and in a spirit of resistance, invited to eat their fill: Here we sit and do not care Pick, crows, pick, and do not spare

26

Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain (London: Verso, 1986): 150. Hardy, Jude the Obscure: 9. 28 The Painful Plough, ed. Palmer, 10. 27

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If old Colman he should come You must fly and I must run.29

This openly oppositional text is far from the quiescent acceptance of the status quo suggested by the plotless narrative. Turning away from the human towards solidarity with the birds who are his enemy is not only a questioning of the established hierarchies of nature but also a sign of the emergence of an autonomous personality which Paul Zumthor, quoted earlier, identified as one of the ways that song culture works. There were many ways of driving birds away, or attempting to do so. They included clapping, throwing stones, and firing guns to drive birds away from the fields in sowing time. Often a clapper would be employed to make more noise. The clapper consisted of two pieces of wood, but sometimes took the form of a clacker or a rattle which was vigorously rotated: the device, and the word used to describe it, varied from place to place.30 This was followed by a hail of stones or slingshot, which, as a seventeenth-century writer put it, “showte in the open and plaine feldes hittie missie,” giving rise to the familiar proverb ‘killing two birds with one stone’.31 The throwing of stones, however, had to be done judiciously, as it often worked against one of the other tasks for which crow boys were employed, removing flints from the fields.32 A song collected at the end of the nineteenth century from Handsworth, near Birmingham, suggests that the work of bird-clapping sometimes took on the features of a blood-sport: Coo-oo! I’ve got a pair of clappers, And I’ll knock e’ down back’ards, I’ve got a great stone, And I’ll break your backbone.33

29

Personal email, April, 2005. I am grateful to Roy Palmer for passing this on to me. Walter Pardon learnt it from his grandfather, who was born in the middle of the nineteenth century. 30 “Clacker” (Dorset), “clapper” (Somerset), “rattler” (Somerset). 31 Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique 47b (1553). 32 Bob Copper, A Song for Every Season, 87–88. 33 G.F.Northall, English Folk-Rhymes (1892), 360. From the Birmingham Weekly Post (October and November 1881). I am grateful to Roy Palmer for drawing my attention to this reference.

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The hardheaded, antagonistic stance of the singer here is in some ways disturbing because it displaces the Romantic construct of the child, a displacement which the praxis of child labour, of course, had already achieved, leaving no space for pathos. Despite their improvised appearance, the rookstarvers’ cries were not isolated or ephemeral but part of a complex discourse which spread far beyond the particular farm or the individual performer. For example, the line addressed to the birds in the Evesham cry quoted above, “You must fly and I must run,” has been noted in various forms between the 1840s and the 1970s in four widely separated counties of England.34 Such extensions, in both place and time, suggest that they may have followed the migration patterns of agricultural workers. They also emphasize the importance of what E.P. Thompson called the “secret verbal tradition” in transmitting the ideas of the counterculture.35 Bird-clapping was thus a rite of passage to adulthood. Many rural autobiographies, such as Joseph Arch’s, describe the way that birdscaring was a preparation, not only for the rigours of the much heavier farm work to come, but also for the structures of the market. First, the work imposed a sense of time. Since children are time-rich, they have to learn where the boundary comes between working and ‘free’ time. In the 1830s this was still not appreciated, as Joseph Arch, who founded the first National Agricultural Labourers Union in 1872, warmly records: “if those days spent in the field were rather monotonous, they were at any rate wholesome, and I throve apace.”36 Fifty years later, times had changed, as George Nobes found. Even though this was not (yet) the time-discipline of the clock or the factory bell, it was no less present: “so that he did not eat his meal of bread and cheese too early he made himself a little sundial from a stick and some stones to keep in touch with the passage of time.”37 Secondly, bird-scaring imposed work discipline, as Joseph Arch remembered from his own childhood: 34

Letter from Walter Pardon to Roy Palmer, Knapton, Norfolk, May 16, 1978; The Painful Plough, ed. Roy Palmer (1972. Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1976): 10; Notes and Queries, 12th Series 5 (June 1919): 160. 35 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971): 539–41; 652–54. 36 Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s, ed. John Burnett (London: Allen Lane, 1974): 30. 37 Roy Palmer, The Sound of History (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1988): 211.

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I was born at Barford, in Warwickshire, on 10th November 1826. I was a youngster of nine when I began to earn money. My first job was crowscaring, and for this I received fourpence a day. This day was a twelve hours one, so it sometimes happened that I got more than was in the bargain, and that was a smart taste of the farmer’s stick when he ran across me outside the field I had been set to watch. I can remember how he would come into the field suddenly, and walk quietly up behind me; and if he caught me idling, I used to catch it hot.38

Like time discipline, this intensified with the rise of industrial capitalism. Since socio-cultural records of this marginalized work are scarce, the prominence of birdscaring in the literary system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a way of enforcing adult working norms is significant but not, of course, conclusive. For example, in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, the practice has become an instrument of human control, not over the environment (as in Wilfrid Gibson’s later, romanticized view), but over the child. Jude becomes a birdscarer for sixpence a week, and is physically assaulted by the farmer when he neglects his job.39 His experience initiates a lifetime of poverty and lack of opportunity. More circumstantial evidence comes from the repertoire of a twentieth-century traditional singer from Norfolk, Walter Pardon (1914–96). One of his songs, “An Old Man’s Advice,” was a version of a popular nineteenth-century parlour song, “My Grandfather’s Clock.” Pardon’s song called on farmworkers to join the National Agricultural Labourers Union, which was set up nationally in 1872. It opens: My grandfather worked when he was very young And his parents felt grieved that he should To be forced in the fields to scare away the crows To earn himself a bit of food. The days were long and his wages were but small And to do his best he always tried. But times are better for us all Since the old man died.40

Pardon described in a letter (here printed verbatim) the harsh experience of his grandfather when a boy in the mid-1800s: 38

Joseph Arch, quoted in The Painful Plough, ed. Palmer, 9. Hardy, Jude the Obscure: 9. 40 Walter Pardon, Put a Bit of Powder on it, Father (C D booklet; Stroud: Musical Traditions, M T C D 305–306. 2000): 14–15. 39

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Well known was the brutal treatment My Grandfather John Pardon went scaring Crows no schooling could not read nor write. And had thrashings from the Farmer. Bruised with a stick. . . I can remember my Grandfather as an old man. My Father told me most of what I know about him. This was his piece of Crow Scaring: “Here we sit and do not care Pick Crows Pick and do not spare If Old Coleman he should come You must FLY and I must Run.”41 (original punctuation)

Pardon knew what he was singing about: his family had been farmworkers for as far back as he could remember, and many of his songs relate to aspects of rural work of this kind. However, “My Grandfather’s Clock” has a refrain which sets such conditions in their social context: “For the union is started, unite, unite.”42 He was well aware that there can be no individual rights without a social contract, and the reworking of “The Grandfather’s Clock” song appears to be part of a local attempt to make the union and its work better known. Its clear implication is that a child has to do the tedious and exposed work or starve, and that birdscaring is work which the union should be concerned to put an end to, or at least to make more humane. Although birdscaring has been practised in England within living memory, it has, of course, been almost wholly displaced by the seed-drill, which buries the seed deep below the surface, and the use of automatic cannon fired at regular intervals. That displacement can hardly be lamented: because of the introduction of the adult and, indeed, market-capitalist principles of time-andwork discipline, the task of birdscaring, like other child labour, represented a loss of childhood and its sources of pleasure. Yet this essay has tried to show that it was this loss that the songs appear in some way to restore. Unlike other children’s songs, such as the lacemakers’ tells or counting rhymes,43 these brief songs appear to have been the children’s own compositions. However, they failed to find a new function in the way that traditional courtship games were transformed into the skipping and clapping games of the school playground. 41

Letter from Pardon to Palmer, Knapton, Norfolk, 16 May 1978. Pardon, Put a Bit of Powder on it, Father, 1, 14–15. 43 Gerald Porter, “The Other Child Ballads. Narrative Songs by English Child Labourers,” in Folklore: New Perspectives, ed. Jawaharlal Handoo & Reimund Kvideland (Mysore: Zooni, 1999): 51–61. 42

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Lotman’s plotless narratives, it will be remembered, show no movement outside boundaries, and are based on binary oppositions. Such a typology is text-based, and does not take into account the thick context demanded of the analysis of songs in performance. First, as we have seen, the relative autonomy of the child’s world-view displaces binary oppositions of the kind set up by the Enlightenment, opposing the human to the animal. In this sense, they are transgressive. Secondly, these songs are not ephemeral ‘make-ups’ that spring into existence, to be immediately forgotten. Rather than regarding these songs as one-offs, a case could be made for seeing them as a large hermeneutic intertext – moreover, one with little in common with other vernacular song: none of these lines, and none of the melodies that have survived, seem to have analogues elsewhere. They have both temporal and spatial extensions. Leaping and lingering, they explore power-relations in a way that the specific function and brevity of the songs could hardly lead us to expect. Finally, the crow-scarers themselves, far from being at one with their landscape, have a Brechtian distance from it. The amateurishness of their performance is the sign of their childhood, and once they lose this badge, becoming (in Aristotelian terms) fully at one with their setting, they also lose that childhood.

WORKS CITED Arch, Joseph. The Autobiography of Joseph Arch (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1969. Atkinson, David. The English Traditional Ballad: Theory, Method and Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Burnett, John, ed. Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s (London: Allen Lane, 1974). Copper, Bob. A Song for Every Season (1971; St Albans: Granada/Paladin, 1975). Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain (London: Verso, 1986). Edwards, George. From Crow-Scaring to Westminster (London: Labour Publishing, 1957). Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1977). Gomme, Alice B., ed. The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2 vols. (London: David Nutt, 1894–98). Goodluck, John. Speed the Plough (LP; Culpho: Tin Shed Media, 1976). Grigson, Geoffrey, ed. Faber Book of Popular Verse (1971; London: Faber & Faber, 1986). Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure (1895; Oxford: Oxford U P , 1997).

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Hugill, Stanley, ed. Shanties from the Seven Seas (1961; London: Routledge, 2nd ed. 1984). Lotman, Yuri [Jurij] M. “On the Metalanguage of a Typological Description of Culture,” Semiotica 14.2 (1975): 97–123. Messenger, Betty. Picking up the Linen Threads: Life in Ulster’s Mills (1978; Belfast: Blackstaff, 1988). Northall, G.F. English Folk-Rhymes (London: J.M. Dent, 1892). Opie, Iona, & Peter Opie. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959; London: Oxford U P , 1973). ——. The Singing Game (1985; Oxford: Oxford U P , 1988). Palmer, Roy. Folklore of Gloucestershire (1994; Stroud: Tempus, 2001). ——. The Sound of History (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1988). ——, ed. The Painful Plough (1972; Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1976). Pardon, Walter. Put a Bit of Powder on it, Father (C D booklet; Stroud: Musical Traditions M T C D 305-6, 2000). Patten, Bob, & Jacqueline Patten. Somerset Scrapbook. (s.l.: I N A , 1987). Porter, Gerald. “The Other Child Ballads: Narrative Songs by English Child Labourers,” in Folklore: New Perspectives, ed. Jawaharlal Handoo & Reimund Kvideland (Mysore: Zooni, 1999): 51–61. ——. “ ‘ Work the old lady out of the ditch’: Singing at Work by English Lacemakers,” Journal of Folklore Research 31.1–3 (1994): 35–55. Reeves, James, ed. The Idiom of the People (London: Heinemann, 1958). Thomas, Keith, ed. Oxford Book of Work (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999). Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class (1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). Williams, Alfred, ed. Folksongs of the Upper Thames (1923; Dialect Reprints; Wakefield, Yorkshire: S.R. Publishers, n.d). Zumthor, Paul. Oral Poetry, tr. Kathryn Murphy–Judy, foreword by Walter J. Ong (Introduction à la poésie orale, 1983; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1990).

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“In my end is my beginning” The Death of Virginia Woolf

C ATHERINE S ANDBACH –D AHLSTRÖM

Introduction: The Event Itself

O

M A R C H 1 9 4 1 , Virginia Woolf put on her coat, slipped out of the house unseen, filled the pocket of her coat with stones, walked into the River Ouse near Rodmell in Sussex and drowned. Her body was found three weeks later. She left three notes, two to her husband, Leonard Woolf, and one to her sister. In each of these she explained that she felt that she was going mad again and would not recover this time. Some children found her body wedged against the bank of the river three weeks later. The coroner subsequently declared that she had taken her own life while the balance of her mind was disturbed. She was fifty-nine. These are the facts; the rest is narrative and speculation. Of the possible reasons biographers offer for this suicide, one stands out in all its banality: it was simply biochemical. “Perhaps Woolf died for nothing more meaningful than the fact that the biochemistry of aging bodies changes and intensifies depression,” writes Thomas Caramagno in his study of the connection between Woolf’s art and her mental condition.1 Or perhaps, he adds, it was a seasonal change – there is an increase in suicide rates in the spring – or the biochemical change was triggered by the misuse of alcohol that is common in manic depressives. But although these suggestions come 1

N 28

Thomas Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf and Manic Depressive Illness (Berkeley: U of California P , 1992). Since only about twenty percent of depressive kill themselves, it is often argued that the reasons for any one suicide must, in fact, be complex.

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upon an appeal to readers and critics to abandon their “need for narrative unity” and accept that, essentially, suicide, like any other form of death, is simply an expression of biological realities, this view has mostly fallen upon deaf ears. Theories and explanations that represent Woolf’s death in terms that make it a fitting end to the life that preceded it were many at the time and have proliferated since. It is possible to see this proliferating text as a symptom of what Jean Baechler describes as the essential mystery of suicide.2 Leaving aside altruistic suicide – such as that of Captain Oates – or fatalistic suicide when the individual’s choice is rational, given the circumstances, the world of the suicide has its own particular logic; one that is scarcely accessible to others.3 Moreover, despite the extensive work of sociologists and psychiatrists, the meanings to be attached to individual suicides remain extremely fluid. As Wittgenstein pertinently noted, writing of suicide is like “investigating mercury vapour in order to comprehend the nature of vapours.”4 Biographers may suspect that the suicide of their subject was not inevitable – that any number of factors could have changed the course of events. “There is the thinnest of membranes between what we might do, and what we actually do,” as Victoria Glendinning has perceptively remarked, adding: “Step through it, and there is no going back.”5 Once a suicide has occurred, however, it takes on the appearance of the inevitable outcome of what preceded it. Indeed, within the conceptual universe of the suicide, Jean 2

“Chaque suicide concret est un mystère insondable,” quoted in Thomas Anderberg, Suicide: Definitions, Causes and Values (Lund: Lund U P ): 494. 3 This is to make use of a couple of Durkheim’s categories. Captain Oates is the archetypal altruistic suicide, walking out into the snowstorm so that the remaining members of Captain Scott’s polar expedition might have a chance of survival. An example of fatalistic suicide would be the young women in rural China who frequently take their lives to avoid the misery that awaits them in marriage. See Christie Davies & Mark Neal, “Altruistic and Fatalistic Suicide,” in Durkheim’s Suicide: A Century of Research and Debate, ed. W.S.F. Pickering & Geoffrey Walford (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought; London: Routledge, 2000): 36–52. Durkheim’s other two categories are anomic suicide, which can be a consequence of lack of social norms or regulation, and egoistic suicide, when lack of social integration means that the individual sees no point in existence. 4 Quoted in A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971): 185. 5 Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf: A Life (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2006): 364.

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Baechler has argued, there is no other solution: “For the subject knows no alternative solution to the problem in which he finds himself enclosed other than that he should kill himself.”6 As a response to a seemingly insoluble existential dilemma, any suicide will, he insists, also have a history – the subject will have previously tested other ways of escape, depression, mental illness or some deviant form of behaviour. The factors leading up to the willed death will necessarily have left traces in the life-course of the subject, thus producing what will seem like a convincing narrative of cause and effect. Biographers, then, naturally enough, fear reductive readings of Virginia Woolf’s life and writing in terms of her death – as if “that was the most interesting or significant thing about her.”7 But within the logic of biographical narrative which depends, despite recent attempts by biographers to break the mould, on chronology, the story also moves inexorably towards this conclusion. Jack Douglas has pointed out that suicide is often envisaged as “an individual’s summing up for himself of his whole life, its worth to him.”8 The final act thus becomes a statement about the subject’s “substantial self” which it is hard for the biographer to avoid. Every biographer is aware from the start of the project of the tragedy at the end of this particular life-course, and this awareness engenders a response – if only in the form of a denial of the connection between Woolf’s death and the life that preceded it: it was “an unprecedented failure of an imaginary voyage.”9 If this were not enough, the biographer also faces the limitations of discourse itself. The language of science, sociology, psychology, and biochemistry, as well as the linear narrative of history with the conventional patterns of cause and effect usually employed by life-writers, lacks words that are adequate in this context. In his critique of Foucault, Derrida maintains that the relationship between madness and language is – and must be – one of mutual

6

Jean Baechler, Les Suicides (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1975): 79. “Pour le sujet, le problème où il se trouve enfermé ne connaît pas de solution alternative, sinon il ne se tuerait pas.” (My tr.) 7 Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: A Hidden Life (London: Allen Lane, 2005): 395. 8 Jack D. Douglas, The Social Meaning of Suicide (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1967): 285. 9 Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1984): 281.

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exclusion.10 While I do not wish to equate suicide with madness, a parallel can nonetheless be drawn, insofar as it is quite possible to read the innumerable books and articles written on suicide without, as Alvarez puts it, “once realizing that they are concerned with that shabby, confused, agonized crisis which is the concrete reality of suicide.”11 In his attempt to come closer to the experiential realities of suicide, Alvarez turns to literature, which, like no other form of writing, is “concerned […] with the business of living.”12 Similarly, many of Woolf’s biographers turn – as, indeed, did Leonard Woolf – either to her texts or to literary representation, in the hope not just of uncovering the mystery of her death but also of finding words adequate to the task. The effect is, I shall argue, not so much to get closer to the intensity of Woolf’s suffering as to reduce its pain by aestheticizing it. I should make it clear that it not my intention here to add to the innumerable interpretations of Virginia Woolf’s mental state in the weeks and days leading up to 28 March 1941. Nor is it to add new elements to the narrative of her death that, as we shall see, her letters initiated, but to consider how this event has been converted into narrative, starting with the suicide notes themselves and moving on to consider the role of this narrative in biography, including psychobiography. Finally, I will look at how Woolf’s chosen method of death has become an aestheticized exemplar in biographies as well as in the film version of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.

1.

“In my end is my beginning”: Virginia’s Narrative

Unlike Mary Queen of Scots, Virginia Woolf presumably did not expect her exit from the world of the living, her extinction as experiencing subject, to herald her rebirth into eternity. However, “To take one’s life is to force others to read one’s death.”13 Thus, Woolf’s end does mark another form of beginning: namely, the birth of the subject of biography. The death of the author 10

Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” tr. Alan Bass, in Derrida, Writing and Difference (“Cogito et l’histoire de la folie,” in L’écriture et la différence, 1967; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1978): 31–63. 11 Alvarez, The Savage God, xii. 12 The Savage God, xii. 13 Margaret Higonnet, “Speaking Silences: Women’s Suicide,” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1986): 68–83.

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marks the birth of the text; in this case a text which has its starting-point in the letters that Woolf left but which also feeds upon her other writings. In other words, the letters offer the first of many interpretations of an event that has been continuously rehearsed ever since, lifting it out of time and denying the closure death seems to provide. Virginia Woolf’s explanation is actually so minimal that it invites rewriting and expansion. In what, it is now agreed, was the first of two letters to Leonard Woolf, Virginia states that she is going mad again; that she is hearing voices; she cannot concentrate; she cannot write, and she is sure that this time she will not recover. She insists that she is spoiling her husband’s life and that he will be better off without her. In writing these letters, Woolf establishes three intertwined narrative threads. First, facing an unendurable situation – oncoming madness – death seems the only way out. Secondly, believing that she is going mad again, she sacrifices herself to save Leonard. Thirdly, suspecting that she will not recover from this attack, she makes a rational decision to end her own life. Dearest, I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that. But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. Nothing anyone says can persuade me. You can work, and you will be much better without me. You see I can’t write this even, which shows I am right. All I wish to say is that until this disease came upon me we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No one could have been so good as you have been from the very first day till now. Everyone knows that.

V.14 While many biographers use this as a starting-point for an extensive narrative, others choose to end their accounts with Woolf’s own words, more or less without comment – at least as regards the immediate cause. 15 This is partly an aesthetic choice, a response to the powerful rhythms of Woolf’s text, and it 14

Virginia Woolf, Letters, vol. 6, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth, 1980):

486–87. 15

Cf Mitchell Leaska, Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life, Peter Daly, Virginia Woolf: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (London: Robson, 1999).

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can certainly be read as showing respect for the deceased by not questioning her reason; one that, interestingly enough, is very close to the banal biological explanation with which I started and accords with the family’s view of her illness.16 Virginia Woolf’s narrative, however, offers her reader not just a reason, but also a justification for the act. Hers is not just a case of egoistic suicide, flight from a situation that is perceived as unbearable, but a considered and altruistic move. She is dying, both her letters insist, so that Leonard can live fully: “without me you could work. And I know you will […]. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.”17 This justification is also, as we shall see, often accepted at face value as a generous move rather than as a symptom of a common trend among suicides to wish to control the survivors even after death.18 The ambiguity of the evidence offered by Woolf’s letters is evident from biographers’ response to her messages. The clarity and control of the writing, particularly in the letter quoted above (which is apparently a revised version of one written about ten days earlier), are qualities cited both by those who accept that her suicide was an expression of her disease and by those who are convinced that at the moment of her death, at any rate, Virginia Woolf was not ‘mad’ in any sense. Roger Poole puts an extra twist on this, arguing that Woolf, suffering not from madness but from existential despair, chose the only rhetoric that Leonard Woolf (the rationalist) would be able to understand (“the terms he habitually used: ‘mad’, ‘terrible disease’ ‘hear voices’”). In Poole’s view, then, the letter is “the most generous fraud, and the most magnificent deception, in modern literature.”19 16

Despite his use of the word “neurasthenia” when writing to The Times, Leonard Woolf was convinced that his wife was manic depressive and that this was a physiological disease, not a neurosis – the equivalent of cancer, as in Quentin Bell’s interpretation. How Virginia herself viewed her mental condition is less clear, but her lack of interest in Freudian analysis implies that she, too, regarded her disease as genetic rather than existential. Several diary entries show her considering her symptoms as if they happened to another. See, for example, “A State of Mind,” in Virginia Woolf, Diary, vol. 3 (London: Hogarth, 1984): 110. 17 Virginia Woolf, Letters, vol. 6: 486. 18 See Erwin Stengel, Suicide and Attempted Suicide (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992): 43–44. 19 Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1978): 258.

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“We live without a future […] with our noses pressed to a closed door.”20

The assumption that suicide need not be an expression of madness but a rational response to an impossible situation informs another common narrative strain in the tale of Woolf’s suicide. It was the war that did it. Even if Leonard Woolf wrote to The Times on 1 April 1941 saying that his wife had always suffered from ‘neurasthenia’ and that this was, in effect, the cause of her death, in a letter to Vita Sackville–West immediately after the event he introduces this new element into the narrative: it might have been, he speculated, that the strain of the war and of finishing Between the Acts accompanied by an inability to rest or eat that had pushed her over the edge.21 A couple of days later, writing to Margaret Llwellyn Davies, the “strain of the war” and finishing the book explanation have become fact.22 The war, as explanation, figured prominently in the aftermath of Virginia Woolf’s death. A causal connection was soon made between her exceptional sensitivity and her civilized values, in line with the common, but tautological, assumption that the suicide is an exceptionally fragile individual.23 An attack by a bishop’s wife in the Sunday Times accusing Woolf of cowardice when confronted by difficulties that other sensitive individuals were called upon to face, and overcome, prompted angry reactions, not only from Leonard but also from friends and acquaintances. (The Bishop’s wife later apologized.) Nonetheless, this exchange helped to reinforce the narrative connections being made between ongoing events and her decision to die. Many intellectuals at this time were writing as if the war – whatever its outcome – heralded the end of civilization as they knew it, and this is reflectced in their response. Shena Simon (with whom Woolf had shared her pacifist convictions) described her death as a “condemnation” of war itself, adding that the death of someone “so sensitive and civilized” was proof that to survive “the present horror” demanded a coarsening of the affective life.24 Writing to console Leonard, Gerald Brennan remarked, in a similar vein, that “Virginia Woolf 20

Virginia Woolf, Diary, vol. 5, ed. Ann Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth, 1984): 355. The Letters of Leonard Woolf, ed. Frederic Spotts (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989): 250, 253–54. 22 The Letters of Leonard Woolf, ed. Spotts, 253–54. 23 See Anderberg, Suicide, 164. 24 Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf, ed. Sybil Oldfield (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 2005): 28–29. 21

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made a great contribution to the civilization of [her] age: her work was over. I can understand that she wished to escape from the agonizing suspense of this war and not drag on in hopes of better times.”25 When Leonard Woolf returned, unwillingly, in 1969 to the events of 1941, the build-up to and early years of war cast their shadow over the suicide narrative. The first chapter of the fifth and final volume of his autobiography takes up more than one third of the book and is entitled “Virginia’s Death.”26 Although the representation of the act itself, and the days leading up to it, only take up a few pages at the end of the chapter, the events described – the outbreak of war, air raids over the Sussex Downs, the Blitz – and Leonard Woolf’s sense that they were witnessing the demise of civilization – force the narrative forward towards this seemingly inevitable climax. Even though his narrative is full of inconsistencies, structurally, it seems, the war killed Virginia. This theme, the conviction that an invasion was imminent and that the Woolfs had no hope of a future, recurs in the biographies.27 The exile from and destruction of London is also a significant factor, as Julia Briggs suggests.28 She also offers a more profound interpretation in comparing Woolf’s death to those of a number of contemporaries, including the feminist pacifist Helena Swanwick, Walter Benjamin, and Simone Weil. This spate of suicides among intellectuals indicates that “For those who had set out to study or change society or culture, to think or to write, whatever they believed, in worked for and celebrated seemed to have vanished: human ideals had been emptied, and abandoned.”29 In a similar vein, Alex Zwerdling argues that Virginia Woolf had simply lost hope in the future. Her idealism, which had aimed not merely at a change in social institutions but in human nature itself, her faith in the possibility of a radical transformation of masculine and feminine identity – this could not survive a war which demonstrated that “her old faith in human betterment had been facile and could not be sustained in the

25

Afterwords, ed. Oldfield, 53. Leonard Woolf, The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (London: Hogarth, 1969). 27 See George Spater & Ian Parsons, A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1977): 181, and Herbert Marder, The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf’s Last Years (Ithaca N Y & London: Cornell U P , 2000): 324–25. 28 Briggs, Virginia Woolf, 396. 29 Briggs, Virginia Woolf, 399. 26

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face of present realities.”30 Not only does this argument provide narrative closure, but it is also a fitting end to a seminal work which demonstrates, at length, that writing that had earlier been understood as representing an unworldly aesthetic was actually profoundly anchored in social and political concerns. It also gives Woolf’s suicide ‘meaning’ by inserting it in a specific historical moment. Ironically enough, this is an excellent example of the difference between popular and statistical knowledge of suicide – in fact, suicides decrease radically in wartime; and Woolf’s earlier recorded unwillingness to end her life if Hitler invaded is presumably more typical than her death.

3.

“This trough of despair”31

The problem with this kind of explanation is that, while it gives narrative satisfaction, it does not accord entirely with the evidence. Although the Woolfs were confronting “a great catastrophe of history, the death and destruction of a civilization,” Virginia was, according to Leonard, in good spirits.32 In May 1940, facing invasion, she did not want to die from car exhaust fumes in the garage; she wanted ten more years to write in.33 Thus, even if the structure of Leonard Woolf’s 1969 narrative focuses on the war effect, thematically his account shifts away from the war back towards the individual and the psychiatric. His wife’s suicide is read as an ultimate expression of a pathological obsession with death that had nothing to do with particular events. In support of this thesis, and with the aid of references to her diary, he revisits the depression that he only observed rather too late. He cites one passage in particular where the misanthropy that characterized such periods is evident. Here Woolf compares women in a restaurant to “fat white slugs” and wonders if she will ever write a satisfactory sentence again.34 Following Leonard’s lead, biographers continue to trawl the available material for evidence of an ongoing breakdown, often quoting from the 1941 diary: “I mark Henry James’s sentence: Observe perpetually. Observe the out30

Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: U of California P ,

1986): 326. 31

Virginia Woolf, Diary, vol. 5, ed. Ann Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth, 1984): 354. Leonard Woolf, The Journey, 46. 33 Virginia Woolf, Diary, vol. 5: 285. 34 Virginia Woolf, Diary, vol. 5: 357. 32

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come of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency.”35 The most thorough, here as in most other respects, is Hermione Lee, who, in hunting for gobbets that reveal depression, has left no textual stone unturned and embroiders her narrative with various quotations from unpublished fragments, such as “‘It is strange that the sun shd [sic] be shining, and the birds singing. For here it is coal black: here in the little cave in which I sit’.”36 Nonetheless, within the cause-and-effect logic of (auto)biographical discourse, even a psychiatric disorder must have a cause. Like suicide, it must be explained and given meaning. Biographers readily conclude that, as it was writing that gave substantive meaning to Woolf’s life, any failing here will inevitably result in existential anxiety – in a sensation of meaninglessness. Leonard also initiates this trend, evoking Woolf’s dissatisfaction with her biography of Roger Fry and associating this feeling with her despair on finishing The Years some years earlier. The period between her handing in the proofs in May 1940 and her death in March 1941 were, he tells his reader, “a headlong and yet slow moving catastrophe” and “the most terrible and agonizing days of my life.”37 Curiously enough, this conflicts with other remarks; a few pages later we learn, for instance, that writing Between the Acts in 1940 went well, giving less trouble than other books, and on finishing it Virginia Woolf was immediately “thinking of the first chapter of her next book.”38 This qualification, however, has had little effect on some later biographers. Phyllis Rose, for instance, reminds us that finishing a novel always initiated a period of depression and that, despite her successes, Woolf still doubted the value of what she wrote.39 In writing of Virginia Woolf as a potential suicide, Katherine Dalsimer quotes a diary entry from 1929: “‘Directly I am not

35

See Phyllis Rose, Virginia Woolf: Woman of Letters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978): 240; Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life, 28; Peter Daly, Virginia Woolf: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 177. 36 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996): 755. 37 Leonard Woolf, The Journey, 44. 38 Leonard Woolf, The Journey, 74. This may not mean much; Woolf was in the habit of thinking of her next book the moment she completed one, probably to stave off depression. She was, however, working on two texts around the time of her death: her autobiographical “Sketch of the Past” and a book on reading entitled either Anon or Reading. 39 Rose, Virginia Woolf, 240.

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working, or see the end in sight, then nothingness begins’.”40 Leaska, however, puts it most poetically: as Woolf finished Between the Acts, “Once fertile tracts of feeling and fancy were now pressed dry. She had trouble writing, and without writing Virginia’s world suddenly became unreal, menacing, and she herself reduced once more to a state of helpless passivity.”41

4.

“In her beginnings was her end”42

Biographers are usually agreed that Octavia Wilberforce, the Woolfs’ doctor in 1941, was ill-equipped to deal with a psychiatric problem. Her commonsense ‘pull yourself together and do something practical’ approach was disastrous.43 However, Wilberforce’s account of her meetings with Virginia Woolf in the weeks leading up to her death introduces another important narrative strain: namely, the ill-effects of Woolf’s increasing obsession with her parents. Most biographies of Virginia Woolf accept her earlier assurances that writing To the Lighthouse had effectively laid the ghosts of her parents. However, Wilberforce narrative indicates that writing her memoirs and reading her parents’ letters to one another as well as sorting through her father’s library had, it appeared, effectively and threateningly brought them back. She “could not leave the dead and go on. It was as though they signaled with an authority that made the present day unreal,”44 as Gordon notes, adding: “the dead had always claimed Virginia more completely than anyone living.”45 Gordon’s remarks echo Freud’s argument that depression, as opposed to normal grief, is a pathological response to loss.46 But there is another dimen40

Katherine Dalsimer, Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 2001): 193. 41 Leaska, Granite and Rainbow, 433. 42 Rose, Virginia Woolf, 248. 43 This is well-documented in Wilberforce’s correspondence with her partner Elisabeth Robins which is reprinted in Herbert Marder, The Measure of Life, which movingly records the meeting of two completely opposing world views. Wilberforce is also responsible for the suggestion, picked up on by Thomas Caramagno, in The Flight of the Mind, that Virginia Woolf may have had an alcohol problem at this time. 44 Gordon, Virginia Woolf, 275. 45 Gordon, Virginia Woolf, 282. 46 See Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (“Trauer und Melancholie,” 1917), tr. Joan Rivère, in Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, ed. Philip Rief (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1963): 164.

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sion to Wilberforce’s report: namely, that Virginia felt that her father’s excessive demands on her after Julia’s death “accounted for many of the wrong things in [her] life” The additional remark “I never remember any enjoyment of my body” is frequently quoted.47 With the exception of Marder, however, biographers omit the context for this remark (which indicates that Virginia was referring to the lack of physical activity and over-intellectuality of her life in the Stephen household after Julia’s death), leaving their readers to fill in with more or less prurient speculation. Apart from this omission, biographers’ responses to Woolf’s increasing immersion in the past vary considerably and are, in effect, coloured by the basic assumptions behind their narratives. Some, commencing with Leonard Woolf, simply ignore the whole issue.48 Roger Poole neglects this aspect, too, presumably because it would complicate his thesis that Virginia’s mental suffering was rooted in her marriage, in having to live with someone who could not understand her affective life.49 For Caramagno, committed as he is to the biochemical and genetic, any Freudian and post-Freudian interpretations, notably those employed by Alma Bond in Who Killed Virginia Woolf, are not only outdated but also little more than fictional narratives that “[assume], arbitrarily and destructively […] that the depressed view is the ‘true’ expression of the patient’s deepest, most authentic feeling.”50 However, for those who look to Virginia Woolf’s childhood for explanation, her return to the primal scene is significant. For Alma Bond, death was the only way for “Virginia to unite her discordant selves,” which had been torn apart by, among other things, “the untimely interruption of the symbiosis with the mother.”51 For Louise De Salvo, to whom Woolf’s life and work is an heroic record of incest-survival, the reinvestigation of her parents’ lives, combined with a reading of Freud’s reinterpretation of incest as fantasy, was enough to tip the balance. Not only did Woolf discover that she had been an unwanted child, she could also no longer rely on the validity of her own

47

Lee, Virginia Woolf, 755. See Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth, 1972), and Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World. 49 Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf. 50 Thomas Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind, 61. 51 Alma Bond, Who Killed Virginia Woolf: A Psychobiography (New York: Human Sciences, 1989): 19. 48

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memories. Thus: “She had no fight left, she had taken too many blows.”52 For Mitchell Leaska, who interprets Woolf’s life as a failure to mature fully, resulting in a persistent search for the lost mother, the memories of the family home at 22 Hyde Park Gate – where her parents’ bed was both “‘sexual centre’ and ‘the death centre’” – were “like a malignancy that would not go away.”53

5.

“She died courageously on her own terms”54

The belief that, since it is natural to want to live, suicide must be an expression of insanity has been prevalent since the nineteenth century and lies behind the paternalism that forbids the citizens of Britain and most of the U S A , for instance, to aid or abet the suicide of others. But, despite this, the JudaeoChristian / Islamic moral condemnation of suicide, and the views of a number of philosophers, notably Kant, in society at large, there seems to be a tacit acceptance of people’s right to take their own lives.55 This is not only a consequence of decriminalization, but was also apparent even before in the way many suicides, or attempted suicides, were classed as accidents by police or coroners.56 With the exception of Thomas Szasz, then, who claims that Woolf’s suicide was the act of a “relentless self-dramatizer” and designed both to enhance her fame and enable her to escape her fear of the future, I know of no biographer who takes an ethical stance against Virginia Woolf’s choice.57 For all his insistence on Virginia’s insanity, Leonard Woolf believed

52

Bond, Who Killed Virginia Woolf, 128–33. Mitchell Leaska, Granite and Rainbow, 434. Statistics reveal that suicides have often suffered from the early loss of a parent, just like Woolf. 54 Nigel Nicolson, “Introduction” to The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 6 (London: Hogarth, 1980). 55 On the whole, biographers do not blame Leonard Woolf for his lack of action or vigilance, even when – as in Poole’s case – they consider the failure of communication between the Woolfs to be a cause. One slight exception is Hermione Lee, who suggests that he was somehow paralyzed by indecision; see Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996): 758–59. 56 This is a problem that bedevils any attempt by sociologists to get an accurate picture of the frequency of suicide. Alvarez recounts, humorously, how the police cajoled him into agreeing that his attempt to take his own life was an accident; see Alvarez, The Savage God, 231. 57 Thomas Szasz, in My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia 53

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that if people suffered enough they had a right to take their own lives.58 Moreover, as I have already observed, many biographers actually resist any tendency to view her decision as mad or irrational. Indeed, from the start the deed has more often than not been celebrated as an act of exceptional courage. “I consider her action fully justified,” wrote Arthur Lord Ponsonby to Leonard Woolf, adding: “it is a matter of thankfulness that she found the courage to pass from the scene leaving such a simple and moving message.”59 Insofar as they read her death as an expression of disease, the psychobiographers seem to regard the issue of the rightness or otherwise of Woolf’s decision as irrelevant. According to Peter Daly, Woolf lacked rational control: “much of her thinking was delusional,” even if she could appear normal.60 Caramagno, arguing a similar point, also questions the commonsense belief in the hegemony of free will, which, in his view, is “only one element in a complex configuration of forces interacting in ways that are often beyond our understanding.”61 However, most biographers resist this epistemological complication and present Woolf’s suicide as an act of autonomous choice. Indeed, Ponsonby’s celebration of Woolf’s death as a considered and brave act unintentionally sets the tone for the majority of the biographies to come. “Woolf made the decision her own, and enacted her last defiant act of free will,” writes Madeline Moore, for instance.62 She died,” writes Gordon, “in this civil manner with graceful words on her lips.”63 Her suicide, “though an act in extremis, was rational, deliberate and courageous.”64 “Was there not a

Woolf (New Brunswick N J : Transaction, 2006): 88, argues against the medicalization of the reasons for suicide, wishing to see it as part simply of the human condition. His moralizing is directed towards Virginia Woolf’s existential choices and does not imply a condemnation of suicide per se. 58 See Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf: A Life (London: Simon & Schuster 2006): 365. 59 Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf, ed. Sybil Oldfield (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 2005): 132. 60 Peter Daly, Virginia Woolf: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 182. 61 Thomas Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind, 62. 62 Madeleine Moore, The Short Season Between Two Silences: The Mystical and Poetical in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (Boston M A : George Allen & Unwin, 1984): 174. 63 Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life, 282. 64 Lee, Virginia Woolf, 757.

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certain valiancy in choosing death in the hope that Leonard […] might continue his?”65 “When life, on her own terms, had become too painful and burdensome she decided to end it with all the courage and dignity with which she had lived.”66 “Her decision was deeply courageous: although she would not be able to write about death, she would actually face the experience itself.”67 So powerful is this narrative, in fact, that Virginia Woolf figures in Margaret Pabst Battin’s extensive consideration of the ethics of suicide as an exemplary case of the rational choice of an autonomous subject.68 This acceptance of the verity of biographical accounts of Woolf’s death is witness, I think, to the “stabilizing generic conventions of the traditional, unified self” that is characteristic of biography.69 Despite the apologies so typical of present-day biographers with their awareness of their own subjective involvement, it remains a problem that the intellectually dubious notion of an autonomous subject continues to dominate the modes of life-writing. As Liz Stanley puts it, “Modern biography is founded upon a realist fallacy […] that that the text is precisely referential of the person” and that, likewise, “there is a coherent, essentially unchanging and unitary self which can be referentially captured by its methods.”70 Another problem is that modern biography hovers uncomfortably between science (history) on the one hand and fiction or fabulation on the other – as Woolf herself was only too ready to point out. The extensive note apparatus of scholarly biographies in our time only partly conceals the elements of selection and reconstruction that serve to create a coherent narrative out of what (even given a belief in an autonomous subject) inevitably is an incomplete documentation of the confusion and flux of the individual life and death.

65

Ann Olivier Bell, “Editor’s Preface” to The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol 5 (London: Hogarth, 1984): vii. 66 Jane Dunn, A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf (London: Pimlico, 1990): 300. 67 James King, Virginia Woolf (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994): 622. 68 Margaret Pabst Battin, Ethical Issues in Suicide (Englewood Cliffs N J : Prentice Hall, 1995): 141, 150. 69 Mary Rhiel & David Suchoff, “Introduction” to The Seductions of Biography (New York & London: Routledge, 1996) 3–4. 70 Liz Stanley, The Autobiographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 1992) 8.

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What is less often observed is the survival of nineteenth-century hagiography, if in perverted form. Biography is almost exclusively concerned with the exceptional individual and “casts that exceptionality as role model” or, I would add, as warning example.71 It would seem to be this logic that determines many accounts of Woolf’s last days; it is the interest and significance of her life as a writer that places the onus on the biographer to construct a compelling narrative of Virginia Woolf’s last moments. It is often not only a question of providing closure and aesthetic satisfaction within the conventions of the genre, however. Virginia Woolf’s position, in recent criticism, as an exemplary woman writer and feminist role model who stoically endured the “slings and arrows” of grief and illness compels those biographers who not only appreciate Woolf, the writer, but also admire the woman to figure her death in terms of heroism and the courageous choice of an autonomous, selfdetermining subject.

6.

“Half in love with easeful Death”

While the suicide of anyone we know is usually acknowledged to be merely tragic – and in a young person likely to be represented as a meaningless loss of potential – literary suicides and, by extension, the suicides of celebrities (Marilyn Monroe) or authors, from Chatterton on, are readily romanticized and given a more general significance. Once again, this tendency was present from the start. Picking up on Freud’s concept of the death-wish, if only to reject it as pathological, Leonard Woolf set the tone for later biographers by evoking the Romantic connection – between poetry and Thanatos, between genius and madness. “Death, I think, was always very near the surface of Virginia’s mind, the contemplation of death. It was part of the deep imbalance of her mind. She was ‘half in love with easeful Death’.”72 Notably, a similar sense of a pathological longing for death is highlighted in the film version of The Hours when Nicole Kidman as Woolf fixes a voracious gaze on a dead bird, and this theme permeates the representation of Virginia in the film. The same theme is endemic in the biographies. Katherine Dalsimer has noted 71

Paula R. Backsheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999) 150. Leonard Woolf, The Journey, 73. In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, published by Leonard Woolf in the Collected Works (London: Hogarth, 1940): 148, Freud finally committed himself to the notion that there were only two “basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct ,” whose “final aim is to lead what is living into an inorganic state.” 72

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Woolf’s obsessive rewriting of Tennyson’s “Tithonus” with its theme of death as release.73 Following the death of her mother, Virginia Woolf “would often feel that she belonged to the world of the dead,” as Lee puts it.74 Some biographers, however, take a further step, representing Woolf’s death itself as an expression of desire reminiscent of Edna’s death by drowning in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. “Water” is suggestive, Rose argues, “particularly the sea,” suggesting a unity with all life either beyond or beneath individual consciousness – the world without a self, in which individuality is dissolved in the eternal rhythms of collective life […]. The ocean suggests escape into the impersonal, a comforting and protective element.75

Or, as DeSalvo puts it, “This was the place she now ‘wanted to be, […] deep under the sea’.”76 According to Marder, Woolf’s imagery “pictured drowning as a merciful end, a dreamlike sinking towards darkness, softened by the rippling of water and the rhythm of the waves, which must surely be benign.”77 Drowning was not the only choice, however. Adrian Stephen had provided the Woolfs with morphine to be used in the event of an invasion and they had also kept enough petrol to poison themselves with carbon monoxide in the garage if necessary. But to orchestrate one’s own death is to some extent to control ensuing narratives; thus, in her choice of medium as in her farewell letter, Virginia Woolf essentially sends her biographers back to her previous life or texts for illumination – though the results might have surprised her. Her minimal yet powerful explanation, with its echo – particularly in the first letter – of her earliest novel, The Voyage Out (“No two people have ever been so happy as we have been”), has, in the event, provided many biographers with an irresistable dramaturgy.78 “These words were long rehearsed,” writes Gordon, convinced that they are proof that Virginia wanted to console Leonard.79 73

Katherine Dalsimer, Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer, 63–64 Lee, Virginia Woolf, 133. 75 Rose, Virginia Woolf, 248. 76 Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work (Boston M A : Beacon, 1989): 133. 77 Herbert Marder, The Measure of Life, 344. 78 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992): 334. The letter reads: “I don’t think two people could have been happie.” 79 Gordon, Virginia Woolf, 282. 74

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Julia Briggs reads Woolf’s words “I don’t think two people could have been happier” as a recognition of the grief Leonard would feel, but they are perhaps more insidious.80 In the novel, the evocation of happiness does indeed follow on the death of the heroine, Rachel Vincrace; but there is a suggestion that it is her very death that enables her fiancé to feel a happiness he could not experience so long as she was alive. Then their relationship had been fraught and painful, filling both of them with a sense of their own separateness. Leaska, whose thesis is that Virginia felt abandoned by both Leonard and her sister, Vanessa, in the days leading up to her death, picks up on this. His account of Woolf’s suicide parallels a biographical reading of Rachel’s death as a punishment for having turned from Helen Ambrose (Vanessa) to Hewet (Leonard), and we are encouraged to see both these deaths, in Freudian terms, as expressions of repressed aggression. Natural enough, then, that that other fictional death, Septimus Smith’s suicide in Mrs Dalloway, should be evoked for explanation – with sometimes dramatic results, as in King’s version: This would be another intense and mystical ‘moment of being’ in which the truth behind appearances would stand revealed. She would confront the hidden force to which she had so long been drawn. The ending of her life was very much in the manner of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, where his suicide was ‘defiance’. Death was an attempt to communicate […]. There was an embrace in death.”81

This narrative is an extreme case, being more obviously fictional than many – there is no way that we can know that Woolf expected death to be an intense mystical moment. King’s interpretation is, however, a very clear example of a conceptualization typical of the Western world, whereby death is “thought and felt to be a permanent transformation of the substantial self from the realm of the time-bound, worldly, everyday meanings to the realm of the timeless, infinite, other-worldly meanings.”82 It is, moreover, only one version of a general tendency to rewrite the events surrounding Woolf’s death into literary figuration – as if in opposition to any form of sociological or psychiatric hermeneutic.

80

Briggs, Virginia Woolf, 399. King, Virginia Woolf, 622. 82 Douglas, The Social Meaning of Suicide, 285. 81

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King’s appropriation of Woolf’s own words to a greater or lesser extent in order to fill out or round off the narrative is also a common strategy. Roger Poole, for instance, quotes extensively from Between the Acts in an attempt to prove that Woolf’s state of mind was such that suicide was the natural choice: “The sky was ‘drained of light, severe, stone cold. Shadows fell’ It is a lunar effect […] emphasizing that all life and hope is passing from the world.”83 Or perhaps Woolf was like Rhoda in The Waves: “no renewal after middle age, simply a rounding-off of her life, like a drop falling.”84 More affirmatively, De Salvo quotes the diary: “I will go down with my colours flying.”85 Inevitably, the use of these quotations skews the narratives in directions that reproduce the biographers’ preoccupations. Julia Briggs, for instance, ends her biography with a quotation from “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1940), Woolf’s last-ditch attempt to use her pen against militarism. True to her belief that Woolf’s despair was the concomitant of a particular sensitivity, Briggs reads her death as “a final bid for peace,” in much the same way as the essay represents a final bid for release from the “desire to dominate and enslave,” “the subconscious Hitlerism” that permeates human society.86 The choice of quotation – in a text written in 2003 under the shadow of the invasion of Iraq - collapses the difference between Woolf’s moment and our own in its last sentence. The guns may have fallen silent over Sussex but “The Huntsman are up in America.”87 Thus the biographer takes over the story, making it her own by omitting Woolf’s own more self-reflexive conclusion with its echo of Hamlet’s “to sleep, perchance to dream”: “And, now in the shadowed half of the world, to sleep.”88 Apart from the biographers’ appropriations of Woolf’s words for their own ends, what is most striking, as I have already indicated, is the literariness of the representations. We have observed King’s fiction; here is another:

83

Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf, 244. Gordon, Virginia Woolf, 283. 85 Virginia Woolf, Diary, vol, 5: 358; quoted in DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf, 133. 86 Virginia Woolf, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993): 169; quoted in Briggs, Virginia Woolf, 402. 87 Virginia Woolf, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” 169; quoted in Briggs, Virginia Woolf, 402. 88 Virginia Woolf “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” 172. 84

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A crisp, clear spring day. The path shone, muddy under her gum boots. Time passing …. She had dispensed with hours, but there were still minutes and seconds, which subdivided, invited her to number every bud on the tree, and divided again, a never-ending steam of motes. Her sensations had been reduced by the same process, growing narrow and acute, as they approached the vanishing point.89

7.

The Hours

In what reads like a valorization of Virginia Woolf’s last minutes, Marder’s text might well have provided the model for the final scene of The Hours when Nicole Kidman, as Virginia, pauses against a background of glittering water. It is perhaps needless to point out that this film is anathema to many Woolf scholars, not only because of its factual inaccuracies and omissions but also because of its “one dimensional” misrepresentation of Woolf’s personality as “a fragile, victimized woman burdened by her writing and kept going by those around her” – an “insular aesthete.”90 However, as a comment on the nature of suicide – with Woolf as a reference-point – the film highlights the culture’s tendency to deflect the pain and confusion of actual suicides by aestheticizing her death in much the same way as some biographers have done. The film also underlines the theme of this essay; Virginia Woolf’s death in the prelude, rather than providing an ending, heralds the beginning of the triple narrative. The sense that suicide is not the end, but a beginning, is enhanced when the first scene recurs at the end of the film. On this occasion, we do not see Woolf drown, as previously; instead, she turns her head towards the light shining on the water and her last words are an evocation of life quite as much as of death. The quick cuts across time and space with which the film starts also serve to mark the affinity of the characters’ seemingly so different lives, but this kaleidoscope also marks suicide as a condition of being rather than simply an existential dilemma in individuals – and also takes away its sting. In doing so, the film resists the simple medicalization of suicide that is a feature of the sociological and psychological discourse of our age, where to be suicidal is either deviant behaviour or a deviant aspect of personality, or a question of

89

Herbert Marder, The Measure of Life, 341. Anna Snaith, “Introduction” to Palgrave Advances in Virginia Woolf Studies, ed. Snaith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 2. 90

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belonging to a ‘high-risk group’.91 For the experts, even if killing themselves is something that people have always done, to be suicidal is, by definition, abnormal. The Hours, however, presents suicide as a question of informed individual choice – a word often repeated in the sound track. It is not the voices he hears that persuade Richard to throw himself out of the window, but the recognition that he no longer has to go on living to satisfy another. Laura turns back from the edge, partly because she cannot take the life of the unborn, and partly because she can envisage another life than the one she leads, a life that may not be happy but will be bearable. Virginia Woolf in 1923 must choose between the living death of life in Richmond and the dangers of a life that may force her over the edge. The underlying message, in all three cases, would seem to be that in the end the subject owes a duty only to him/ herself: “to look life in the face” and then, if necessary, to put it away, as Virginia is made to say in the final sequence. In other words, the film clearly figures suicide neither as sin nor as illness, but as one life-choice among others. As suggested above, the film also makes suicide beautiful, a transcendent gesture rather than a desperate attempt to escape the unbearable. In this, there is an ethical problem, because, while Clarissa and Laura are simply characters in a novel / film, a Virginia Woolf once existed as a living, breathing sentient subject. Her pain, though inaccessible to us, was real. Her last moments were probably not beautiful. As Juliet Nicolson indignantly observes, the banks of the river Ouse are bare and it is normally “grey, sluggish, unfriendly, nothing at all like the meadowy nonsense that Nicole Kidman floats into, Ophelia like.”92 (In fact, in March the river will be often swollen and certainly very cold. To make a ‘pilgrimage’ to the place is – and I have had a similar experience – to feel Virginia Woolf’s ‘deadness’.)

Conclusion: “O Death” Writers on suicide often observe that suicide is not so much a move towards something as an attempt to escape the unbearable.93 In “Mourning and Melan91

See, for instance, the description of potential suicides in the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for the U K , http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics /Publicationspolicyandguidance/D H _074134 92 Juliet Nicolson, “Getting to Know Virginia,” Virginia Woolf Bulletin 27 (September 2007): 23. 93 Anderberg, Suicide, 53.

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cholia,” Freud argued that the ego could not agree to its own destruction and thus suicide was only possible if the ego was split – could view itself as an object.94 If he was right, we cannot imagine our own death and thus suicides may know intellectually what it is to be dead, but cannot actually envisage the consequences of their acts except in terms of release from the pain inflicted on us by this other self. To figure Woolf’s death in positive terms, as reunification of a split self, as a return to the maternal waters or as a “mystical moment of being,” is to elide this aspect of suicide; it is an act of faith, not an epistemology. Put slightly differently: as life-writing, figurations of this kind are ‘untrue’, in that they deny the reality of the subject’s death. On another level, as part of literary culture, however, in suggesting some kind of continued being, biography offers an appropriate response to the survival of Woolf in her writing – the continued presence of her idiosyncratic voice – and to the manner in which her texts represent death as resistance and affirmation. “And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back [...]. What enemy do we now perceive […]? It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man’s […]. I strike spears into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”95 I wrote the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity & intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice […]. Anyhow I have been sitting these 15 minutes in a state of glory, & calm, & some tears thinking of Thoby […].96

Thus, just as the waves evoked by Woolf break on the shore over and over again, so biography returns over and again to the ultimate mystery of her death, attempting to understand what is incomprehensible and to control what is uncontrollable.

94

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia.” Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931; Harmondsworth. Penguin, 1992): 229. The last sentence of this quotation was on the plaque Leonard attached to one of the trees at the bottom of their garden. See Gordon, in particular, for the connections between Mrs Dalloway and The Waves and Woolf’s own death, and Dunn for a link between The Waves and Between the Acts and Woolf’s final depression. 96 Virginia Woolf, Diary, vol.4: 10. 95

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WORKS CITED Alvarez, A. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971). Anderberg, Thomas. Suicide: Definitions, Causes and Values (Lund: Lund U P , 1989). Backscheider, Paula R. Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999). Baechler, Jean. Les Suicides (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1975). Battin, Margaret Pabst. Ethical Issues in Suicide (Englewood Cliffs N J : Prentice Hall, 1995). Bell, Ann Olivier. “Editor’s Preface” to The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5 (London: Hogarth, 1984). Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf, vols. 1 & 2 (London: Hogarth, 1972). Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: A Hidden Life (London: Allen Lane, 2005) . Bond, Alma. Who Killed Virginia Woolf: A Psychobiography (New York: Human Sciences, 1989). Caramagno, Thomas. The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf and Manic Depressive Illness (Berkeley: U of California P , 1992). Dalsimer, Katherine. Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 2001). Daly, Peter. Virginia Woolf: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (London: Robson, 1999). Davies, Christie, & Mark Neal. “Altruistic and Fatalistic Suicide,” in Durkheim’s Suicide: A Century of Research and Debate, ed. W.S.F. Pickering & Geoffrey Walford (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought; London: Routledge, 2000): 36–52. Derrida, Jacques. “Cogito and the History of Madness,” tr. Alan Bass, in Derrida, Writing and Difference (“Cogito et l’histoire de la folie,” in L’écriture et la differénce, 1967; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1978): 31–63. DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (Boston M A : Beacon, 1989. Douglas, Jack D. The Social Meaning of Suicide (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1967). Dunn, Jane. A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf (London: Pimlico, 1990). Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia” (“Trauer und Melancholie,” 1917), tr. Joan Rivère, in Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, ed. Philip Rief (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1963): 164–79. ——. An Outline of Psychoanalysis, tr. James Strachey (Abriss der Psycho-analyse, Collected Works, vol. 23; London: Hogarth, 1940). Glendinning, Victoria. Leonard Woolf: A Life (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006). Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1984).

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Higonnet, Margaret. “Speaking Silences: Women’s Suicide,” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1986): 68–83. King, James. Virginia Woolf (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994) . Leaska, Mitchell. Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998). Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996). Marder, Herbert. The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf’s Last Years (Ithaca N Y & London: Cornell U P , 2000). Mepham, John. Virginia Woolf: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1991). Moore, Madeline. The Short Season Between Two Silences: The Mystical and the Political in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (London & Boston M A : George Allen & Unwin, 1984). Nicolson, Juliet. “Getting to Know Virginia,” Virginia Woolf Bulletin 26 (September 2007): 19–26. Nicolson, Nigel. “Introduction” to Leave the Letters till We’re Dead: The Collected Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 6: 1936–41 (London: Hogarth, 1980): i–xviii. Oldfield, Sybil, ed. Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 2005). Poole, Roger. The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1978) . Raitt, Suzanne. Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville West and Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). Rhiel, Mary; & David Suchoff. “Introduction” to The Seductions of Biography (New York & London: Routledge, 1996): 1–8. Rose, Phyllis. Virginia Woolf: Woman of Letters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). Snaith, Anna. “Introduction” to Palgrave Advances in Virginia Woolf Studies, ed. Anna Snaith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 1–15. Spater, George, & Ian Parsons. A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1977). Spotts, Frederic, ed. The Letters of Leonard Woolf (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989). Stanley, Liz. The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 1992). Stengel, Erwin. Suicide and Attempted Suicide (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980) . Szasz, Thomas. My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf (New Brunswick N J : Transaction, 2006). The Hours, dir. Steven Daldry, perf. Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore (Paramount Pictures, Miramax, Scott Rudin Productions, U S A / U K 2002; 114 min.). Woolf, Leonard. The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (London: Hogarth, 1969) .

185

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Woolf, Virginia. Diary, vols. 3, 4, & 5, ed. Ann Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth, 1984). ——. Leave the Letters till We’re Dead: The Collected Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 6: 1936–41, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth, 1980). ——. “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1941), repr. in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, ed Rachel Bowlby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993): 168–72. ——. The Voyage Out (1915; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). ——. The Waves (1931; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: U of California P , 1986).

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Following the Race Track? Swedish, Chinese, Scottish, Irish, Canadian in Diamond Grill by Fred Wah

E LISABETH M ÅRALD

D

U R I N G A L L T H E Y E A R S I studied Canadian immigrant literature, I searched in vain for an outstanding Canadian writer of Swedish origin. Then, in 1996, I learnt that Fred Wah Jr, a renowned Canadian poet, the recipient of the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1985, had included comments about his Swedish grandparents in Diamond Grill.1 As “half Swede, quarter Chinese, and quarter Ontario Wasp,” Wah is a multi-racial, multi-cultural individual.2 Diamond Grill was the name of the Chinese restaurant which his father, Fred Wah Sr, owned in Nelson, B.C. in the 1950s. Diamond Grill is also a piece of ‘biofiction’, with Fred Wah Jr as the first-person narrator(184). By using the anecdotes, stories, poetic texts, analyses, theoretical comments, and extracts from encyclopedias and scholarly studies that make up Diamond Grill, Wah has said that “I hoped to explain myself to myself” (185). To him, biofiction is “the sometimes necessary ‘making up’ (even ‘dressing up’) the memory and images of a life, texting the ‘bio’, hence ‘biotext’, the story of the cell(f)” (184). His “faking it” or writing fiction is juxtaposed to stories written on, or registered by, the body (F I 62). 1

Fred Wah, Diamond Grill (1996; Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest, 2006): 42. Further page references are in the main text. 2 Fred Wah, Faking It: Poetics & Hybridity; Critical Writing, 1984–1999 (Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest, 2000): 47. Further page references are in the main text with “F I .”

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The main purpose of writing Diamond Grill is to identify his own, and his Chinese and Swedish relatives’, place in Canada. By writing “hyphen” in bold letters in “ChineseH Y P H E N Canadian” (178), Wah foregrounds the enormous importance of the hyphen in his life as the site of “mixed blood,” poised between race and citizenship (F I 74). For it is in the liminal space of the hyphen that many voices can be heard, questioning, in Homi Bhabha’s words, the ”master narratives of duality, multiculturalism, and apartheid”3 But the hyphen also opens up new combinations, new vistas, as well as cultural hybridity, which, as Bhabha explains, “gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation.”4 Wah claims that writers use a “hybrid borderland poetics” to materialize what has otherwise been “denied knowledges.”5 This essay will investigate instances of this hybrid “borderland poetics” in Diamond Grill. Another reason for Wah to write Diamond Grill is to interrogate “the roots of [his] own anger as racial – genetically and culturally” (F I 72). To investigate his cultural and genetic legacy, “the migrant metaphor” as discussed by Bhabha will be applied. ‘Migrant metaphor’ refers to the transmission of racist oppression from the European empires to their settler colonies. Bhabha states that the history of the West as a despotic power, a colonial power, has not been adequately written side by side with its claims to democracy and solidarity. The material legacy of this repressed history is inscribed in the return of postcolonial peoples to the metropolis. […] By implication, it also suggests that the language of rights and obligations, so central to the modern discourse of citizenship, must be questioned on the basis of the anomalous and discriminatory legal and cultural status assigned to migrant and refugee populations who find themselves, inevitably, on the other side of the law.6

Canada’s colonial legacy can be traced both in its anti-Chinese legislation to prevent Chinese immigration to Canada and in its measures to encourage Europeans to settle there. 3

Homi Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” in ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1986): 175, quoted in Wah, F I 74. 4 Jonathan Rutherford, “Interview with Homi Bhabha: The Third Space,” in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 211. 5 Bhabha, 175, quoted in Wah, F I 74. 6 Rutherford, “Interview with Homi Bhabha,” 218–19.

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How does Diamond Grill depict the consequences of the Canadian Immigration Acts for Wah’s extended Chinese family? One blatant example is the head-tax, the purpose of which was to stop Chinese immigrants from settling on Canadian territory. The head-tax prevented Wah’s Chinese grandfather from bringing his wife and three children to Canada in 1904 (55). Furthermore, the author claims that “Chinese head tax paid out land grants to European settlers of the prairie marsh pre-1923 fingered for slant-eyed yellowed family vista visa” (130). Thus the Canadian authorities broke their promise of land to the Chinese to promote European immigration to the prairies. Wah’s anger at this racial discrimination fuels his response to a photograph of his Scottish ancestor: That would be my great-great-grandfather, taken nearly one hundred years ago, swooped into Canada, hungry for his land of god-given rights and Canadian Pacific opportunity.[…] Not pissed off, but righteous, inheritor of his railroad earth. And no head tax either! (81)

While the Canadian authorities granted Wah’s Scottish ancestor, as a member of the master-race, land-rights in Canada, the cynical immigrant authorities temporarily let Chinese navvies into the country to work on the risky construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Many Chinese workers died. But Wah’s grandfather, nicknamed Lucky Jim, survived, since he worked as a cook on the C P R (58). Although his family called him a “bastard” because he was a gambler, Wah’s enumeration of Canadian nicknames for Chinese men illustrates the fact that they were also exposed to sheer racism: “a yellow peril, […] a Royal Commission cuckoo, […] a depraved opium addict, a slant-eyed devil, a Mongolian, a heathen […] – just another hungry ghost, just another last spike” (59). The last two phrases, however, convey empathy for the fate of the individual victims of racism. By placing “(Exclusion)” within parentheses in the “Chinese Immigration (Exclusion) Act,” Wah suggests that one reason for denying Chinese women entry was to prevent the emergence of Chinese communities in Canada (10). The result was a unisexual, Chinese class society in Canada. The male dishwasher at the Diamond Grill worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day: “no wife, no children, an entire life of jobs in back rooms and kitchens” (113). The price for immigrating to Canada was the loss of a normal family life. Those Chinese immigrants who could not afford to return to China gathered in “the ubiquitous Chinese store […] part of a geography, mysterious to most, a migrant haven edge of outpost, of gossip, bavardage, foreign tenacity” (111).

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This Chinese store in Canada was the closest many Chinamen could come to returning to China. Since the Chinese were discriminated against, they preferred to marry within their own ethnic group. Owing to the lack of Chinese women in Canada, however, Wah’s grandfather went “against the grain for Chinamen” by marrying a Scots–Irish woman and fathering seven mixed-blood children (5). Although the purpose of the Chinese Immigration (Exclusion) Act was to protect the purebred Anglo-Canadians, the outcome was, ironically, the reverse. The author recounts a recent reunion of the extended Wah family. Some cousins were one hundred percent Chinese, others fifty percent, and the author himself twenty-five percent (83). Also last names such as “Chow, Freschi, Gee, Prysiaznuk, Yee, D’Andrea, Leier, Lyon, Wah” reflect the hybridity of the Wah descendants (84). The outcome the author proudly baptizes as “our own little western Canadian multicultural stock exchange” (83). Wah uses metaphors from the market economy to criticize big business for exploiting Chinese immigrants to increase their own profit: The return on these racialized investments has produced colourful dividends and yielded an annual growth rate that now parallels blue-chip stocks like Kodak and Fuji […]. Unexpected developments (like Immigration Acts) could knock estimates for a loop. (83)

Wah’s hybrid borderland poetics not only reveals that Anglo-Canadian strategies to separate races were subverted by interracial / intercultural marriages, but also that mixed-blood individuals spoiled profits based on racialized investments set up by market economists. To recompense his Chinese wife for his bigamy, the author’s grandfather sent two of his Canadian children, Ethel, nine, and the author’s father, Fred, aged four, to China. There they worked as semi-slaves for eighteen years. In 1934, when Fred, aged twenty-two, tried to re-enter Canada, the Canadian authorities jailed him. He was not allowed in until his parents could prove that he was a Canadian citizen (10). The Chinese Immigration Exclusion Act was not repealed until 1947. The right to vote was granted to “orientals” as late as 1948. This included Fred Wah Sr, although he was born in Canada (110). Like any ethnic group discriminated against, the Canadian-Chinese immigrants helped each other. Thus, on his return to Canada Fred Wah Sr soon got a job by “knocking on the kitchen doors of Chinese restaurants” (17). During his first years in Canada, these Chinese cafes were havens to him:

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pretty much languageless except for the cooks in the cafe, this cold, dry prairie after lush and humid Cantonese landscape, no friends, strange music, white farmers in coveralls and white bankers in business suits – screw that. (17)

He experienced not only the landscape but also the white population in Canada as hostile and strange. When the Diamond Grill restaurant is depicted, its swing door is given a very symbolic meaning: it “is a hyphen and the hyphen is the door” (16). This is because the door metaphorically “swings between the Occident and the Orient,” between the white guests out front and the Chinese staff at the back (16). When the author as a young waiter experiences “the meaningless but familiar hum of Cantonese and away from all the angst of the arrogant white world out front,” he registers that the Caucasians have the upper hand (63). His reaction reveals that the swing door divides the cafe into two unequal parts. However, the hyphen cannot be taken “as a centre but as a provocateur of flux, floating, fleeting” (F I 103).This is illustrated by the waiters who kick the swing door open with a “whap,” making it a “noisy hyphen” breaking up the staid positions of social patterns (F I 104). While Cantonese is “meaningless” to the author, his father is fluent in both English and Cantonese. His advantage allows him to ”move between these two tongues” as a hyphenated individual (61). It also means that monolingual speakers depend on Fred Wah Sr as a translator to transmit the correct message. Another hyphenated individual is the author’s Chinese grandfather, who speaks pidgin English, based on code-switching between two languages. A speaker of pidgin English: “lays claim to a form of cultural power: the power to own but not to be owned by the dominant language.”7 Since the pidgin speakers inhabit the liminal space of the hyphen, they alone have the power to translate and distribute meaning to monolingual speakers. This is done by Wah’s grandfather, who enjoys mouthing the dissonance of encounter, the resonance of clashing tongues, his own membership in the diasporic and nomadic intersections that have occurred in northwest North America over the past one hundred and fifty years. (68)

7

Mary Louise Pratt, “ ‘ Yo soy la Machine’: Chicana Writers and the Poetics of Ethnonationalism,” in Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Text to Context, ed. Peter Verdonk (London: Routledge, 1993): 177. Pratt is quoted in Wah, Diamond Grill, 68n.

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Thus, communication between people in Canada at times depends on the otherwise “denied knowledges” such as pidgin English. Already as a child, Fred Wah Jr knows from movies, comic books, and classmates that “the Chinese are yellow (meaning cowardly), not-to-be-trusted, heathens, devils, slant-eyed, dirty, and talk incomprehensible gobblydeegook” (98). At that time, he went fishing with a kind old Chinaman. The moment other children started screaming “chinky, chinky, Chinaman,” Fred immediately stopped being seen with the old man (98). Fred’s behaviour reveals that he has internalized the racist discourse. Another sign of this is his desire for camouflage. In other words, since he does not want to be bullied as a Chinaman, he chooses to pass as white. The impossibility of certifying his racial origin is strikingly illustrated by the recurrent request at school for him to fill in an official Canadian form under the guidance of a teacher: When I was in elementary school we had to fill out a form at the beginning of each year. […] The problem was the blank after Racial Origin. I thought, well, this is Canada, I’ll put down Canadian. But the teacher said no Freddy, you’re Chinese, your racial origin is Chinese, that’s what your father is. Canadian isn’t a racial identity. That’s turned out to be true. But I’m not really Chinese either. Nor were some of the other kids in my class real Italian, Doukhobor, or British […] Quite a soup. Heinz 57 Varieties. There’s a whole bunch of us who’ve grown up as resident aliens, living in the hyphen. (53)

Fred’s defining himself as a Canadian arises from the conviction that citizenship is based on consent, while citizenship based on descent would permanently relegate all mixed bloods to being ‘resident aliens’, never citizens. One way people at the top of the social ladder mark their superiority is by using their privilege of recognition. According to Charles Taylor, there is a link between identity and recognition: our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.8

8

Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Charles Taylor & Amy Gutman (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1994): 25.

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This privilege of recognition is what Wah enjoyed as a schoolboy. Thanks to his light-coloured hair, he passed as white. However, one day he was abruptly relegated to a racialized space: “Until Mary McNutter calls me a Chink I’m not one” (98). It is the performative act of naming him a Chink that makes him one, in accordance with “Althusser’s concept of interpellating the subject, particularly in a racial context,” according to Wah (186). That the ideal of a pure race is also preferred by the Chinese explains why the author relates how Chinese waiters “eyeball” his father “with a little contempt” when he enters Chinese restaurants with his fair-haired family (122). When the author visited China for the first time, his looks and his last name created confusion. You were part Chinese I tell them. They look at me. I’m pulling their leg. So I’m Chinese too and that’s why my name is Wah. They don’t really believe me. That’s o.k. When you’re not “pure” you just make it up.9

The bottom line is that people with hybrid genes fall outside the norms of any society. To Chinese tourist guides in China, the author’s Caucasian looks and Chinese name contradict each other. Another instance when the author’s multiracial origin caused trouble was his failure to enter the U S A in 1968. Owing to his Chinese surname, he was refused entry and told to apply ”under the Asian quota,” which indicates that the anti-Chinese legislation was still in force (189). Ironically, when Wah pointed out that he is half-Swedish or ”less than fifty percent” Chinese, he was immediately granted a visa (189). This incident , too, reveals how Wah Jr sidestepped North American racist discourse by passing as white. The author’s multiracial genes mean that he harbours the enemy within himself. Although he identifies himself as Chinese while eating a delicious Chinese meal, immediately after leaving the restaurant he changes into the white version of himself: On the street, all the ambivalence gets covered over, camouflaged by a safety net of class and colourlessness – the racism within me that makes and consumes that neutral (white) version of myself, that allows me the sad privilege of being, in this white world, not the target but the gun. (138)

9

Fred Wah, “epigraph” of Diamond Grill.

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The latent message of the phrase “safety net of class and colorlessness” is that Chinese individuals are discriminated against. To be white or colourless is automatically to be placed higher on the social ladder. The duplicitous phrase “that neutral (white) version of myself” suggests that given his Caucasian looks he can join “this white world.” He thereby has the power, metaphorically speaking, to fire guns at targets such as his Chinese relatives. The fine balance between being the target and being the gun is illustrated in an episode where Fred Wah Sr is upset on hearing that his son had made fun of a white businessman. As a reminder of the colonial legacy, Fred Wah Sr, with his Chinese looks, has to be polite to whites. If it is revealed that the nasty boy is his son, the businessman might get back at Fred Wah Sr (101). Another example of how he has to accommodate to the dominant Canadian discourse is the fact that both Salisbury steak and foong cheng are served at the Diamond Grill (141), and White Christmas and Chinese New Year celebrated (167). Like old-style restauranteurs in all of the settler colonies, Fred Wah Sr has learned how to adapt and incorporate the customs of the dominant culture. On the basis of Bill C-93, the 1988 Act for the preservation and enhancement of multiculturalism in Canada was passed, the purpose of which was “the recognition and promotion of cultural and racial diversity.”10 As Wah points out, there is one big problem with ‘multiculturalism’: there’s a difference between a race and a country […]. Race makes you different, nationality makes you the same. Sameness is purity. Not the same anything, when you’re half Swede, quarter Chinese, and quarter Ontario Wasp. (36)

Multiculturalism in Canada presupposes pure ethnic groups that preserve their specific food, customs, and language. To Wah, with his multicultural, multiracial genes, two generations removed from his ancestors’ immigration, there is no option: “But stop telling me what I’m not, what I can’t join, what I can’t feel or understand. And don’t whine to me about maintaining your ethnic ties to the old country” (54). In fact, Wah claims, “that hyphen is a real problem for multiculturalism; it’s usually a sign of impurity and it’s frequently erased as a reminder that the parts, in this case, are not equal to the whole” (178). As Sneja Gunew claims, 10

Linda Hutcheon, “Introduction” to Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions, ed. Linda Hutcheon & Marion Richmond (Toronto: Oxford U P , 1990): 13.

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In Canada, phrases such as ‘visible minorities’ were developed to categorize non-European immigrants who formed part of mass diaspora […]. Hence multiculturalism is often perceived as a coded way to indicate racialized differences.11

Wah’s conclusion is: “Their Canada isn’t. For me […]. My hybridity obliges me to locate by difference, not sameness” (FI 47). The pronoun “their” distances Wah from the dominant Anglo-Canadian discourse of sameness. Wah’s reaction as a mixed-blood individual is to subvert the hypocritical façade of Canadianness: That’s the mix, the breed, the half-breed, metis, quarter-breed, trace-of-abreed true demi-semi-ethnic polluted rootless living technicolour snarl to complicate the underbelly panavision of racism and bigotry across this country. (53)

Through such hyperbole, Wah shows that most Canadians are the product of métissage, and that the underbelly of Canadian multiculturalism is racism. The author’s ironic prediction of Canada’s future is that interracial marriages will dilute all the purebreds: “The Race Track? Swedish, Chinese, Scottish, Irish, Canadian. You bet. But somewhere in that stable the purebreds dissolve into paints” (36). The hyphen is both a sign of the disappearance of the purebreds and the advent of hybridity. One of Wah’s provocative strategies as a multiracial, multicultural writer is to critique how mainstream Canadian literature appropriates stories belonging to ex-centric groups like Native Canadians and /or immigrants (F I 46–47). After quoting Margaret Atwood’s well-known statement: ”We are all immigrants to this place even if we were born here” (F I 52), Wah speaks his mind: I don’t want to be inducted into someone else’s story, or project. Particularly one that would reduce and usurp my family’s residue of ghost values to another status quo. Sorry, but I’m just not interested in this collective enterprise erected from the sacrosanct great railway imagination dedicated to harvesting a dominant white cultural landscape. (125)

Wah suggests that Anglo-Canadian literature, by assimilating immigrant stories into the mainstream, reduces their significance. He finishes off by

11

Sneja Gunew, Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimension of Multiculturalisms (London: Routledge, 2004): 16.

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comparing the immigrant stories to a whole forest and the cultural theft to whining chainsaws. So what about Wah’s attitude toward his Swedish roots? This is how he comments on his mother’s background: But I’m half Swedish. My mother was born Karin Marie Erickson in Sala, Sweden, a little west of Uppsala, historical royal seat of the Vikings. In 1922, at the age of six, she and a brother and sister emigrated with their parents to Swift Current […] her father got work as a carpenter. He spent most of his life on the prairies nailing up grain elevators […]. My mother’s parents did not speak Swedish at home so the kids would learn English quickly. (42)

In the 1920s, many people in Sweden were poor and unemployment was high. Both Wah’s Swedish grandparents and his Chinese grandfather were economic migrants. But economic considerations alone did not determine the attitude of the Canadian authorities to immigrants; selective hospitality demonstrated that the racist colonial legacy still applied, as witness the following observations in Diamond Grill: What about Sweden and Scotland and Ireland and Ontario? […] Bottomed? Oceaned? The whole country, Canada, the States, everywhere, Europeans. At the same time Chinese were prevented from coming here, white families, sons and daughters and everybody, could get boat passage and even more. The government wanted those people to come here so badly they even offered land. As if that fold in the tectonic plate along the west coast was like a crack where the yellow peril could sneak in. (85)

The “migrant metaphor” can readily be applied to the way the Canadian authorities received the Swedes and the Chinese. When Wah’s Swedish grandfather got a steady job in Canada, returning to Sweden was no longer an option for him. His Swedish grandmother, by contrast, never stopped longing to return. In an imagined dialogue with his Swedish grandfather, the author tries to communicate with him: And you, old, mumbling to yourself Swedish Grampa, what madnesses of northern Europe in 1922 drove you across an ocean to Saskatchewan? Uprooted, lost or new? […] What sour images immigrated with you to that horizon, that languagelessness? His answer full of angst and sadness. No. They weren’t sour. Up there nailing nailing, the pictures of Uppsala and Vastmanland, my father cutting cordwood in the forest, the old city, streets and friends, this is erased slowly and softly […]. This sky is the world now.

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[…]. This sky is different: larger, bluer, farther. Maybe it will be different here. Maybe I will be different. (117)

The discourse underpinning his grandfather’s answer is that of the American Dream of a second chance in life, characteristic of cultural hybridity. By discarding the old ways, they could begin something new. Typically, English and not Swedish was spoken in the Ericksons’ home (42). Another example of the Ericksons’ new life in Canada is how Wah’s mother, Karin /Coreen, describes life in Swift Current in her youth: ”everyone was from somewhere else in the world and little attention was paid to race and ethnicity. Difference was common” (42). Rosi Braidotti’s definition of a nomadic personality applies to the situation obtaining in Swift Current: In so far as axes of differentiation such as class, race, ethnicity, gender, age and others intersect and interact with each other in the constitution of subjectivity, the notion of the nomad refers to the simultaneous occurrence of many of these at once.12

Braidotti’s description fits the situation of the diversified immigrant population in Canada. Needless to say, immigrants living in a strange country want their children to marry fellow countrymen. Even Fred Wah Sr suggested to his son that he “should look for a good Chinese wife” (80). The acid test for the Ericksons came when their daughter Coreen wanted to marry Fred Wah Jr. Since the Ericksons felt that their daughter was disgracing their family, they broke with her: “now that she’s living with that Chinaman, nobody’ll speak to her, the little hussy” (8). The Ericksons’ expulsion of Coreen can be seen as the racist “logic of the ‘natural’ linking family, community, nation […] maintaining the apparent homology and cohesiveness of such ‘natural’ ties.”13 There were often generational conflicts. A case in point is Coreen’s reaction to her parents’ racism towards her husband: “I was hurt, but I loved your dad and that was it. So I made my choices and I wasn’t sorry. I never felt bad about that” (13). Coreen’s tone is sad, but she was convinced that she had done the right thing. 12

Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia U P , 1994): 8. 13 Ruth Frankenberg, White Woman, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P , 1993): 140, repr. in Gunew, Haunted Nations, 24.

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What kinds of discourse, then, can be gleaned from the following imagined statement by Granny Erickson, made as a reaction to Coreen’s plans? Dirty heathens, Granny Erickson thinks of the Chinese, the whole bunch of them, in their filthy cafes downtown. Just because that boy dresses up and has a little money, she throws herself at him. (8)

Granny Erickson’s generalization about the Chinese comes close to racism, defined as “prejudice and discrimination directed towards minorities characterized by colour and other forms of supposed difference by more powerful and established groups.”14 This interpretation of Granny Erickson’s attitude toward her future son-in-law is confirmed by Coreen’s analysis of her parents’ reaction to her marriage: “They were really mad you know, because they were bigots, they were racists. Scandinavians are generally fairly racist, at least they were in those days. Not all of them, but a lot of them are. They see themselves as a pure race, something like the Germans, Aryan. And of course my brother-in-law made things worse because he really shot his mouth off, he really antagonized my father and mother against your father. That wasn’t any help. He refused to let me see my sister, you know, he wouldn’t let me in their house. He said I disgraced the whole family, all that stuff.” (13)

Most newly arrived immigrants who stand on the bottom rung of the social ladder in their adopted country tend to bully those whom they regard as below them in rank. Inherent in her brother-in-law’s claim that she “disgraced” her family is the assumption of superior and inferior races, in accordance with the racial discourse of the 1930s (as expounded, in its most extreme version, by the Nazis). Coreen’s reconciliation with her parents occurs at the author’s own birth: “my blond hair and blue eyes enough to ease her parents’ anxiety about the colour of their grandson’s skin” (43). The latent message is that they had feared their grandchild would look Chinese. So what does Wah identify as his own Swedish legacy, apart from his Scandinavian looks? On my Swedish side I feel more gloom that anger […]. And poor old Grampa Erickson always seemed to be caught under her dark cloud at home […]. My wife […] observes to me my doom and gloom, my fretting, fur14

Tim O’Sullivan, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin Montgomery & John Fiske, “Race,” in Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994): 256.

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rowed brow, my blond old-world becoming habit grouchiness, my Scandinavian Lutheran chronicle looms Leif Eriksson’s wintered worrying treaded L’Anse Aux Meadows Vinland map Atlantic treed horizon Europe treeless after all. (49)

Wah recycles foreigners’ stereotypes about Sweden, including the Viking heritage, which is seldom part of the Swedes’ sense of Swedish identity. Gloom, doom, winter worries, old world, and Lutheran are negatively loaded words, indicating the author’s biased attitude to his Swedish heritage. However, considering the Ericksons’ initial racist misdemeanour towards Fred Wah Sr, the author might not have been so keen on learning about Sweden, its history, and its culture. The author’s dissociation from the Ericksons is also demonstrated in his descriptions of their bad habits – drinking, snoozing, arguing in public – and their disgusting food. In the following episode, the empathy is all for his father, antipathy for his grandmother: “Your scowl of incredulity at how to gulp quickly Granny Erickson’s Christmas pickled herring while her beaknosed challenge sat in the kitchen chair opposite your dark bird-eyed defiance” (156). Wah’s depiction of Granny Erickson is vicious. Since Chinese food in Diamond Grill is a means of recalling loving memories, Wah’s dismissal of Swedish food is telling. According to Étienne Balibar, there is racism without races, “whose dominant theme is […] the insurmountability of cultural differences […] the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions, in short […] a differentialist racism.”15 Judging from the comments on Swedishness and Swedish customs in Diamond Grill, the narrator seems to be a differentialist racist. Interestingly, the author’s appreciation of his Swedish relatives seems to have deteriorated in the course of time. In Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985), there is a comment on how “Erickson, Wah, Trimble, live next to each other,” and how “you got Grampa Erickson to build us our own house with maple floors at 724 Victoria.”16 Living next door and even building a house for your daughter’s family indicate that the Swedish grandparents and Fred Wah’s family socialized, the house being a symbol of that good-will. As the following statement reveals, however, Wah’s empathy is all for his Chinese side: 15

Étienne Balibar, “Is there a ‘Neo-Racism’?” in Étienne Balibar & Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, tr. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991): 21. 16 Wah, Waiting for Saskatchewan (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Turnstone, 1985): 3, 71.

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“Half-bred poetics as a game of reaction from within the egg-yolk of my own cultural ambivalence (white on the outside, yellow on the inside).”17

Conclusion Using the migrant metaphor as a tool to analyze Diamond Grill, my readings show that Wah’s racial and cultural anger is triggered by Canada’s unjust treatment of its immigrants in the twentieth century. The migrant metaphor clearly illustrates how the Canadian Immigration Acts privileged European settlers at the expense of Chinese immigrants. The effects of the Acts on Wah’s Chinese relatives were families split between China and Canada, jobs in semi-slave conditions in ghetto-like buildings, racism hidden under the cloak of multiculturalism. Diamond Grill is written as a tribute to Fred Wah Sr, who, despite a bad start in life, managed to own and run the Diamond Grill and to be a good husband, father, and respected citizen. His successful life is the most striking instance of how, in the liminal space of the hyphen, racial and social borders were overcome and how some of his descendants, notably the author, live on a par with the Canadian establishment. The importance of the hyphen as a site of mixed blood is illustrated by incidents in the author’s life. His choice between passing as white and standing up for his Chinese descent either results in belonging comfortably to the dominant class or being misrecognized. Although Diamond Grill contains several instances of how the master-discourse is subverted by, for instance, interracial marriage or by “denied knowledges” such as pidgin, the moment the author chooses to pass as white he becomes the gun, his Chinese relatives his target. However, the narratives in Diamond Grill indicate that Wah sides with his Chinese family. Not surprisingly, Wah directs his racial anger at his Swedish relatives because of their initial racist attitude toward his father in trying to prevent their daughter from marrying him. As a residue of that conflict, the author’s estrangement from his Swedish family extends to the Swedish way of life and to Sweden tout court, to such an extent that it comes close to differentialist racism. So, although I found an outstanding Canadian writer who was halfSwedish, he unfortunately seems to have a highly ambivalent attitude toward his Swedish relatives and a shallow knowledge of Sweden. 17

Smaro Kamboureli, “Fred Wah,” in Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature, ed. Kamboureli (Toronto: Oxford U P , 1996): 158.

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WORKS CITED Balibar, Étienne. “Is there a ‘Neo-Racism’?” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Étienne Balibar & Immanuel Wallerstein, tr. Chris Turner (Race, classe: les identités ambiguës, 1988; London: Verso, 1991): 17–28. Bhabha, Homi. “Signs Taken for Wonders,” in ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1986): 163–84, repr. (extract) in Fred Wah, Faking It (2000), 74. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia U P , 1994). Frankenberg, Ruth. White Woman, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: Minneapolis U P , 1993), repr. (excerpt) in Gunew, Haunted Nations (2004), 24. Gunew, Sneja. Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (London: Routledge, 2004). Hutcheon, Linda, & Marion Richmond. Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions (Toronto: Oxford U P , 1990). Kamboureli, Smaro. “Fred Wah b. 1939,” in Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature, ed. Kamboureli (Toronto: Oxford U P , 1996): 158. O’Sullivan, Tim, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin Montgomery & John Fiske. “Race,” in Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994): 256. Pratt, Mary Louise. “ ‘ Yo soy la Machine’: Chicana Writers and the Poetics of Ethnonationalism,” in Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Text to Context, ed. Peter Verdonk (London: Routledge, 1993): 177, repr. (excerpt) in Fred Wah, Diamond Grill (2006): 68n. Rutherford, Jonathan. “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 207–21. Taylor, Charles. “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Charles Taylor & Amy Gutman (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1994): 25–74. Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill (1996; Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest, 2006). ——. Faking It: Poetics & Hybridity; Critical Writing, 1984–1999 (Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest, 2000). ——. Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985; Winnipeg, Manitoba: Turnstone, 2004). |

Literature and Scripture An Impossible Filiation1

J. H ILLIS M ILLER

T

H E C E N T R A L E V E N T of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the event around which all the narration circles, is Sethe’s murder of her baby daughter and her attempted murder of her other three children. She does this in order to keep her children from being captured, under the Fugitive Slave Laws, by the posse from the Kentucky plantation, “Sweet Home,” that has entered her front yard. She kills her daughter so that daughter will not be sent back into slavery from the free state of Ohio to the slave state of Kentucky. As she says, “I took and put my babies where they’d be safe.”2 The central question of the novel is: Did Sethe do the right thing? Abraham’s willingness, in the Book of Genesis, to obey Jehovah’s command and sacrifice his beloved only son offers a Scriptural analogy to Sethe’s act. This essay asks what the relation is between these two stories, the Scriptural one and the

1

This essay was written several years ago. It was presented on 18 October 2007, as a lecture at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In the interim, some pages have appeared as pp. 196–206 in J. Hillis Miller, For Derrida (New York: Fordham U P , 2009), copyright Fordham University Press. Other segments will appear in a different form in the chapter on Beloved in J. Hillis Miller, The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz (forthcoming from Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2011), copyright University of Chicago Press. I am delighted to have my essay now appear in integral form in a volume honouring Raoul Granqvist. 2 Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987; New York: Vintage, 2004): 193. Further page references are in the main text.

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literary one. I take this association as illustrative of the general relation between Scripture and literature. In Morrison’s vision, what is called “the other side” (254), the unseen other world of the dead, impinges with physical presence and even violence on the world of Cincinnati’s African-American community in the period just before the Civil War. These are the place and time of Beloved. Accepting that for these people the existence of the other side is a given is essential to understanding the behaviour of Beloved’s African-American community – for example, in the episode of their collective laying of Beloved’s ghost. The novel leaves it strategically uncertain whether it is really Beloved’s ghost, or her “haint,” her “fetch” that has taken residence in the body of a fugitive slave girl, or whether it is that slave girl taken as Beloved’s ghost. That girl, it appears, has horrible memories of the ‘Middle Passage’ from Africa to the U S A in a slave ship and of her subsequent captivity and abuse in the U S A by a white man. This uncertainty is reinforced by the intricate complexity of the narration. Morrison employs the full gamut of modernist narrative strategies: timeshifts, changes in narrative perspective from one character to another, odd forms of interior monologue, and so on. The meaning of the novel, with all its ambiguities, is generated by this narrative complexity. Taking the black community’s beliefs as givens is nevertheless essential to understanding the behaviour of individuals within that community, as in Sethe’s decision to cut her baby daughter’s throat with a handsaw so she can get her to safety on the other side: that is, her decision to kill what she thinks of as the best part of herself. In order to keep itself safe, unscathed, pure, exempt from danger, the black community of Cincinnati must first ostracize Sethe and thereby lose Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law, as its maternal centre. That community must then eventually exorcize Beloved, apparently the returned ghost of Sethe’s baby, then gradually forget her, in order to re-assimilate Sethe and Denver, the survivors, into the community. It could be argued that the surviving community has only temporarily secured its safety by expelling what is other to it. The apparent celebration of that successful forgetting, that completed mourning for the dead, in the last two pages of the novel, is ironized and undercut by the final word, “Beloved.” That word, for the reader at least, remembers once more. It also exposes the safe enclosure once more to the other side.

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The double logic or illogic of immunity and auto-immunity, as it is worked out by Jacques Derrida in “Faith and Knowledge,”3 governs Sethe’s behaviour in relation to Beloved and to her other children. On the one hand, she wants safety, enclosure, purity, indemnity, immunity from harm, for herself and for her children. She wants this according to her presumption that their lives in safety and freedom are worth more than anything in the world to her, that their life is beyond price, priceless. On the other hand, just because they are priceless, she is prepared to sacrifice them in order to save them, to get them to a place of true safety. That sacrifice, moreover, is explicitly described as an act of suicidal, auto-immunitary self-sacrifice. Sethe repeatedly says, in justifying her act to herself, to her lover, Paul D, and to Beloved, that her children are the best part of her, the only pure and clean part, her “best thing,” her life beyond life. Therefore she must kill them when their purity and cleanness are endangered. “She just flew,” Sethe thinks to herself when she is getting ready to try and explain her act to Paul D: Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe. (192)

Much later in the novel, Denver imagines Sethe’s reasons for fearing Beloved might leave: The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing – the part of her that was clean. (296)

Calling Beloved a “thing” is a powerful irony, since it is because she is Sethe’s best thing, the only clean part of her, that Sethe turns her into a thing – a dead body. In killing Beloved, Sethe kills, according to her own assertions, herself. As Morrison stated, “And I thought, it’s interesting because the best thing that is in us is also the thing that makes us sabotage ourselves.”4 Sethe’s 3

“Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (“Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison,” 1996: New York & London: Routledge, 2002): 42–101. 4 Gloria Naylor & Toni Morrison, “A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison” (1985), in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor–Guthrie (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1994): 208.

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motives and action follow strictly the double auto-immunitary logic that Derrida claims is a universal, the double source of morality and religion, the impulse toward saving pure and clean life and the impulse toward sacrificing it. Can we approve of Sethe’s act, can we see it as ethical, as something we could, as Kant puts it, make a universal law for all mankind? On the one hand, it almost seems as if I have asked the wrong question. If Sethe acts according to the mechanical compulsions of auto-immunitary logic, then she would seem to be beyond praise or blame. She does what she must do. On the other hand, Sethe says she “decided” (190). She takes responsibility for what she has done by saying defiantly, of the way she escaped from slavery with her children, “I did that” (190). She claims she later acted spontaneously to get her children to safety on the other side. “She just flew.” Though the community blames her, she never blames herself. I think we must have it both ways, illogically or according to the illogical logic of auto-immunity. Although in the body the workings of the immune system are not voluntary, in the social world auto-immunitary acts take place as a response to a demand to decide in some particular situation. Often we must decide in a moment, spontaneously, but that does not make us the less responsible. Sethe affirms this by iterating her willingness to take responsibility for what she has done. One might even argue that what Sethe does, like Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his dearly beloved only son, is an exemplary ethical act, precisely because programmed by no moral or community law. These acts, literary and Scriptural, are beyond the law, or outside the law. They exemplify an ethics beyond ethics, or they are religious as opposed to ethical, according to the distinction Kierkegaard makes. The autonomous solitude of Sethe’s decision, its uniqueness, makes it exemplary of all true ethico-religious acts. Such decisions cannot be justified by any appeal to pre-existing standards. Judged by such standards, Sethe is guilty of that horrible crime, infanticide, just as Abraham is guilty of being willing to cut the throat of his only beloved son. The community is right not to condone what Sethe has done, and Beloved is right not to forgive her mother’s treachery. It is not the case that what Sethe does can be made the basis of a universal law for all mankind. What would a community be that made infanticide a universal ethical law? On the other hand, Sethe’s act provides a model for the solitude and uniqueness, the singularity, the incommensurability with moral law, the terrifying invidiousness, of all true ethical decision and act. Jacques Derrida, in The Gift of Death, expresses with striking hyperbolic force this dilemma of all ethics beyond ethics or all religio-ethics:

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As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the other, I know that I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others. I offer a gift of death, I betray, I don’t need to raise my knife over my son on Mount Moriah for that. Day and night, at every instant, on all the Mount Moriahs of this world, I am doing that, raising my knife over what I love, over those to whom I owe absolute fidelity, incommensurably.5

It is important, however, to note the differences between Sethe’s story and the Abraham and Isaac story, as well as the similarities. Beloved is more a radical rewriting and transformation of the Genesis story than a repetition of it in modern dress. The Abraham and Isaac story is about father–son relations; it is a founding document of Western patriarchy. Beloved is about mother–daughter relations. That focus not only makes Beloved a feminist work, it is also part of the shadowy presence in the novel of African matriarchal social structures and religious beliefs. Another such feature is Baby Suggs’ role as a charismatic shamanistic religious leader. She can preach the leaves off the trees. Women alone perform the exorcism of Beloved’s ghost. Another difference: Abraham hears and is ready to obey Jehovah’s command. He could always say, ‘Jehovah commanded me to do it’. Sethe acts on her own in murdering her daughter. She defiantly asserts her responsibility when she says, of her rescue of her children from slavery: “I did that.” She cannot blame anyone else. No divine voice commanded her to do what she did. Yet another difference: the angel of the Lord stays Abraham’s hand at the last minute, whereas Sethe really does murder her daughter. Perhaps the most important difference, however, is that the two texts make radically different demands on the reader. On the one hand, Beloved is just a novel. You can take it or leave it alone. Nobody can blame you for not reading it. This is embodied in the novel itself in the insistent theme of remembering and “disremembering.” The narrator on the last two pages repeats, insistently, “It was not a story to pass on,” “It was not a story to pass on,” and “This is not a story to pass on” (323, 324). Of course, as Katrina Harack has

5

Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, tr. David Wills (Donner la mort, 1990 / 1992; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1995): 68–69.

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observed,6 saying “This is not a story to pass on” can also mean ‘This is not a story to pass by, to give a pass to. You ought to read it and pass it on’. Neither Morrison, nor the novel itself, nor the institution of secular literature in the West, however, suggests that you ought to organize your whole life around Beloved. The Bible, conversely, makes the most urgent demand to be read, to be believed, to be institutionalized in churches, to be acted on, to be made the centre of existence for individual and community. The Bible promises nothing less than salvation and eternal life. These are quite some differences! The differences are essential, not superficial, even though the similarities do nevertheless invite us to think of Sethe in relation to Abraham. In Sethe’s case, the combination of treachery and fidelity might be expressed by saying that by transporting Beloved safely to the other side, she is faithful to Beloved and to her boundless love for her baby, but she is faithful only to her baby as dead, as sacrificed, as the recipient of the “gift of death.” Toward that baby as alive, she has committed the worst treachery and betrayal. Beloved cannot forgive her for that, for being, as she thinks to herself, “the woman who took her face away, leaving her crouching in a dark, dark place, forgetting to smile” (296). In order to act right, to save Beloved from slavery, Sethe must act wrongly. She does not hesitate for a second to make her choice and to send Beloved to safety on the other side. That unquiet, spiteful, and unforgiving “familiar” comes back to “fix her” (300), to reproach her for the irredeemable, infinite debt of her crime against the sanctity of life in the living, her disobedience of the prime Biblical injunction, “Thou shalt not kill.” Faced with an impossible choice between a live baby in slavery and a dead baby safe on the other side, Sethe decides for the dead one. She chooses to give Beloved the gift of death. “It was the right thing to do, but she had no right to do it,”7 according to a formula Toni Morrison herself proposed in an interview with Bill Moyers. (She says “someone” “gave” her the line.) Sethe pays, inevitably, for that doing. Is it unforgivably irresponsible of me to talk about a fictional character as if she were a real person? Morrison’s Sethe is based on an historical personage, true enough, though Morrison changed the historical facts in crucial 6

Katrina Harack, “The Heterological Writer and the Gift of Art: Writers on Writing, Performativity, and Ethics in Twentieth-Century America” (doctoral dissertation, University of California at Irvine, 2008). 7 “A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison,” 272.

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ways, as a novelist is privileged to do. Just what does it mean, in any case, to say “based on an historical personage”? Sethe is, in spite of that relation to history, a fictional construction, a virtual person created through language. She can be met only on the pages of Beloved. The words about Sethe are references without referent, like literary language in general. It is irresponsible to confuse kinds. Derrida’s chief example in The Gift of Death of what he calls “irresponsibilization” is Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac in response to Jehovah’s secret command. In order to be responsive, to respond responsibly, to Jehovah’s command, he must act with criminal irresponsibility toward social and religious laws, such as the Ten Commandments’ injunction “Thou shalt not kill,” even though Moses’ receipt of the Ten Commandments happens later in Biblical history than the Abraham and Isaac story. Abraham’s decision to obey Jehovah’s command seems in many ways analogous to Sethe’s murder of her baby daughter. What is the difference between these three kinds: an historical example, a literary example, and an example from a sacred text like Genesis? Derrida, in the second essay in the second edition of The Gift of Death, “Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation,”8 distinguishes more or less sharply between a sacred text and a literary text, though asserting their “impossible filiation,” and though seeing each as always contaminated by the other. What are the differences among these three kinds of writing? I need to know, since it would be irresponsible to confuse them. On the one hand, a literary text, such as Beloved, is referentiality without reference. As Derrida puts this in “Literature in Secret,” Every text that is consigned to public space, that is relatively legible or intelligible, but whose content, sense, referent, signatory, and addressee are not fully determinable realities–realities that are at the same time non-fictive or immune from all fiction, realities that are delivered as such, by some intuition, to a determinate judgment – can become a literary object.9

A literary text hangs in the air, like something unearthly, revealing itself in a flash, in an instant of illumination, and then disappearing, like a meteorite, to

8

Jacques Derrida, “Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation,” in The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, tr. David Wills (“La littérature au secret: Une filiation impossible,” 1999; Chicago: University of Chicago P , 2008): 119–58. 9 Derrida, “Literature in Secret,” 131.

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borrow Derrida’s metaphor.10 It is impossible to be sure, with a text taken as literature, who is the signatory, who is speaking, to whom, and just what is being said. I say “taken as” because, as Derrida often asserts, nothing identifiable in grammar, diction, syntax, or rhetoric distinguishes a literary text from a referential one, such as a newspaper story. Any text can be taken as literature, though it might in some cases seem perverse to do so. A literary text keeps its secrets, whereas you can, at least hypothetically, find out whether the newspaper account is lying or not by checking it against extratextual facts. It is impossible to do that with literature. For Derrida, this connection of literature with the secret, “if there is one” (as he often says), is fundamental, as many assertions by him attest. Here is one categorical assertion. Speaking of the enigmatic phrase he uses as a leitmotif in “Literature in Secret,” “Pardon de ne pas vouloir dire” (“Pardon for not meaning [to say]”),11 Derrida says: “And being up in the air is what it keeps its secret of, the secret of a secret which is perhaps not one, and which, because of that fact, announces literature.”12 If you cannot figure it out, decipher its secret, or even tell for sure whether or not it hides a secret, it must be literature. On the other hand, a sacred text, such as the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis, or the infinitely moving story of Mary Magdalene’s recognition of the risen Christ in John, is, believers assume, historical fact. These events really happened. We know they really happened because they are the word of God. Moses may have written the Pentateuch, which includes Genesis, but he wrote it at God’s dictation. God guarantees the historical truth of the Abraham and Isaac story and the rest of the Bible. “Jesus loves me. This I know. / ’Cause the Bible tells me so,” as the hymn I was taught in Sunday School as a child puts it. Jesus’ disciple John wrote the Book of John, so believers assume, as an act of bearing responsible witness to what really happened and what he knows really happened. Derrida nevertheless asserts an “impossible filiation” between literature and the Bible. What is the connection, the filiation, the sonship, the affiliation? The answer is that both depend absolutely on the secret. No one among the human characters in the story, including Abraham, has any way of knowing just what was in Jehovah’s mind when he spoke to Abraham, just what was his motive or intent in demanding that Abraham sacrifice Isaac. Abra10

“Literature in Secret,” 133, 139–40. Or even with an overtone of ‘I beg your pardon for not wanting to say anything’. 12 Derrida, “Literature in Secret,” 132. 11

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ham, in his turn, as the sacred text affirms, keeps both Jehovah’s command and his (Abraham’s) intention to obey it secret from his wife Sarah, from the rest of his family and retinue, and from the destined lamb for the sacrifice, his beloved only son Isaac. Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling, makes much of Abraham’s silence. Jehovah is “wholly other.” He cannot be fathomed. He keeps his secrets. Abraham keeps his secrets, too. The Abraham and Isaac story is a story of secrets, in the strict sense of the secret as something hidden that may not by any means be told. Literature, however, if Derrida is right, even a strange linguistic meteorite like “Pardon de ne pas vouloir dire,” taken as literature, also depends on the secret and keeps its secrets. The difference is that literature illicitly borrows from Scripture, in order to compose secular texts, as religious people call them. Secular texts, what we call literature – novels, poems, and plays – exploit the possibility of writing in such a way that the words hang in the air and keep an impenetrable secret or secrets. After having said that a mark of literature is that it hides its secret, Derrida goes on to ask: Literature? At least that which, for several centuries, we have been calling literature, what is called literature, in Europe, but within a tradition that cannot not be inherited from the Bible, drawing its sense of forgiveness from it while at the same time asking forgiveness for betraying it. That is why I am here inscribing the question of secrecy as the secret of literature under the seemingly improbable sign of an Abrahamic origin. As though the essence of literature, in its strict sense, in the sense that this Western word retains in the West, were essentially descended from Abrahamic rather than Greek culture.13

Derrida says “Abrahamic” rather than “Biblical” to be faithful to his claim that all three “religions of the Book,” Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, depend equally and absolutely on the Abraham and Isaac story as their foundation. All three, it follows, would have the same conception of literature. This is a quite specific historical and cultural assertion. It supports Derrida’s claim about the “impossible filiation” of literature and the Bible. It is perhaps worth noting, in passing, that this would disqualify any conception of ‘world literature’ that assumes the word ‘literature’ is univocal and means the same thing when applied to Chinese or Indian poetry as it does when applied to Hamlet, “Tintern Abbey,” or Bleak House. It would be irre-

13

Derrida, “Literature in Secret,” 132.

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sponsible to assume such univocity. Considerable consequences for pedagogy, in these days of globalization and the proliferation of textbooks and courses in world literature, would follow from this heterogeneity. Derrida’s enigmatic or cryptic phrase, “Pardon de ne pas vouloir dire,” is more or less untranslatably idiomatic, resonant, and full of shimmering contradictory implications. It may mean ‘I beg your pardon for not meaning anything’, but also ‘I beg pardon for not wishing to speak’. ‘Vouloir dire’ literally means ‘to wish to say’, but it really, strangely enough, means ‘means’ in French. ‘Je veux dire [so and so]’ means ‘I mean so and so’. Derrida proffers his odd phrase as a miniature example of literature. The word “pardon” in the phrase suggests, according to Derrida, that literature, as the betrayal of Scripture, sacred texts, the Bible, must continually, in one way or another, beg pardon (from whom? from God? from constituted authorities? from the reader?) for falsely imitating Scripture, for pretending to be what it is not. Or, on the contrary, literature must beg pardon just because it does, blasphemously, succeed in being Scripture, in hiding secrets just as Scripture does. The first great text in the vernacular in Western early modernity, Dante’s Divine Comedy, great-grandfather of its filial descendants, all those works of modern Western literature, both does and does not pretend to be Scripture, or like Scripture. In the “Letter to Can Grande,” Dante distinguishes categorically between ‘allegory of the theologians’: i.e. the Bible as read by Scholastics, and ‘allegory of the poets’: i.e. what we today call literature. Dante scholars have been arguing ever since about which the Divine Comedy is. The great Dante scholar Charles Singleton claims it must be allegory of the theologians, and is therefore a form of Scripture, not poetry like, say, Wordsworth’s Prelude, also a long autobiographical poem. No one, to my knowledge, has claimed that The Prelude is Scripture, though why not? A good case could be made, as good as the claim that the Divine Comedy is scripture or scripturelike. In the case of the Divine Comedy, it is an impossible to choose. On the one hand, unless the experiences Dante’s pilgrim claims to have had really happened, in visionary reality, the poem loses all validity. Who cares what Dante Alighieri imagined, on his own hook, so to speak, hell, purgatory, and heaven to be like? That would make the Divine Comedy an early example of science fiction, which perhaps it is. On the other hand, if the Divine Comedy is granted, uniquely among texts in modern Western vernaculars, status as allegory of the theologians, then it is a blasphemous imitation of the unique, the one and only sacred text, the Bible.

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The Abraham and Isaac story in Genesis and Morrison’s Beloved are two quite different uses of language, albeit strangely affiliated. That seems clear enough. Matters are made somewhat more complicated, however, by a feature of the Abraham and Isaac story that Derrida (so far as I had remembered when I began to write this essay) nowhere mentions in all his lengthy analysis in The Gift of Death of the story and of Kierkegaard’s analysis of it in Fear and Trembling. Derrida emphasizes that Jehovah’s eternal secret from Abraham, and Abraham’s silence, his eternal secret from his family and from Isaac, are essential to the event. The Biblical text, however, gives away both secrets by writing them down. Readers over the centuries of all three of the religions of the Book have been in on the secret. The reader is told that “God did tempt Abraham” (Gen. 22:1), something God does not say to Abraham himself, though after the event God tells Abraham that “because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son” (Gen. 22:16), he will hyperbolically bless him and all his descendants and give them great power and sovereignty: And the Angel of the Lord called unto Abraham out of heaven the second time, And said, By myself have I sworn, saith the L O R D , for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son: That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice. (Gen. 22:15–18).

Wow! That is quite a promise! The careful reader will note at least two peculiarities of this text. 1) In Gen. 22:1 God speaks directly to Abraham. In the verses just quoted, it is the Angel of the Lord as intermediary who speaks to Abraham, even though he speaks in the first person, as Jehovah. ‘Angel’, etymologically, means ‘messenger’, from Greek angelos. Why the change? Can it be that we mortals, even Abraham, can only hear the voice of God indirectly, by way of some intermediary, some messenger of the word of God, an angel, or Moses, or whoever wrote Genesis? 2) Jehovah explicitly gives away an oath that he says he has secretly sworn for himself alone. He says, “By myself I have sworn.” This is another way this text gives secrets away. God’s oath is a speech-act. For mortals, a felicitous speech-act must be in some way publicly attested, and it must be based on something outside itself, a sovereign authority, as when someone swears an oath with her or his hand on the Bible. A secret engagement to marry is no valid alliance. Perhaps only

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God, or a god, can felicitously swear an oath in secret, or swear an oath “by himself,” on his own, not basing the oath on anything outside himself who swears it. It is true that the Biblical text says nothing whatsoever about what went on in Abraham’s mind. The Bible reader, however, is told that God called out Abraham’s name and that Abraham answered, “Behold, here I am” (Gen. 22:1). Abraham keeps absolutely silent about this exchange both to his wife Sarah and to Isaac, the destined sacrificial lamb, just as only the reader of the Bible knows what Abraham said to Isaac when Isaac asked “where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” (Gen. 22:7): “And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering” (Gen. 22:8). This is a wonderful double irony, since Abraham tells Isaac the truth without divulging the truth, whereas, though it is a secret from Abraham at that moment, God does provide a lamb for the burnt offering in the form of that ram caught by its horns in a nearby thicket. Some of my sympathy goes out to the ram, by the way, which might well have said, ‘Why does it have to be me?’ Some Biblical scholars claim that this story marks the moment of the shift from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice. The Bible does not say that Abraham, or Isaac, or the two young men Abraham brought with him, ever said anything to anyone about this strange double event. Abraham, at Jehovah’s command, raised his knife over Isaac’s throat. No reader can doubt that he would have fulfilled God’s command. Abraham then stayed his hand and substituted the ram at the command of the Angel of the Lord. Abraham and Isaac kept all this secret. We only know about it because someone – God, or Moses as amanuensis of God, or whoever wrote Genesis, betrayed the secret, gave the secret away, as we say, and told the story on which the three great religions of the Book are based. Anyone who can read the Bible in any language, or who can hear the story read aloud in church, can know the secret that even Abraham did not completely know. Although I thought I had seen something in the Biblical text that Derrida missed, I was wrong, as I might have expected. In a forceful passage in “Literature in Secret,” Derrida compares Kafka’s “Letter to His Father” to the Abraham and Isaac story. Kafka never meant his letter to be seen by his father, nor by anyone else. It was imaginary, a fiction, a literary work meant to remain secret. One remembers that Kafka commanded his friend Max Brod to destroy all his manuscripts after his (Kafka’s) death, something happily (or unhappily) he did not do. Kafka’s “Letter to His Father” contains, moreover, a

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fiction within a fiction, an imaginary letter from the father to the son holding the son responsible for all his own troubles and for the father’s troubles, too. Derrida takes evident pleasure in formulating the vertiginous exchanges of imaginary accusations and pardons. The son imagines the father pardoning him for his transgressions in a fiction within a fiction, but this is really Kafka pardoning himself for, or accusing himself of, forever unpardonable filial ingratitude. All this, however, is done in secret, in a letter that Kafka had no intention of sending to his father and no intention of having published so all the world could read this amazing fiction or literary work. In a similar way, it is only by a kind of accident that Jehovah’s secrets, Abraham’s secrets, and Isaac’s secrets are given away, turned, one might even argue, into literature and published in innumerable languages where all who run may read. Here is what Derrida says. The whole page and a half should be responsibly read and commented on at length, but I, more or less irresponsibly, cite only the essential sentences of the comparison, and I cite them in English translation: This secret letter becomes literature, in the literality of its letter(s), only once it exposes itself and risks becoming something public and publishable, an archive to be inherited, still a phenomenon, one of inheritance, or a will that Kafka doesn’t destroy. For, as in the sacrifice of Isaac, which took place without witnesses, or whose only surviving witness was the son, namely a chosen beneficiary who saw his father’s tortured visage at the moment he lifted the knife over him, it all comes down to us only in the trace left by an inheritance, a trace that remains legible but equally illegible. This trace left behind, this legacy, also represents, whether by design or by unconscious imprudence, the chance or risk of becoming a testamentary utterance within a literary corpus, becoming literary just by being left behind.14

Does writing down God’s, Abraham’s, and Isaac’s secrets, “abandoning” them to public language, necessarily and inevitably turn the story into literature? It is not entirely easy to answer that question, as Derrida’s formulations indicate. It is only a “hazard” or a “risk.” Derrida stresses the way literature depends on making public a text that has meaning, but that is detached from any ascertainable referent. The Bible makes the Abraham and Isaac story public, therefore perhaps turns it into literature. Matters are not quite so simple, however. One distinction between the Bible and secular literature is that the latter is freely open to translation into any language, whatever the losses may be in doing that, whereas the former 14

Derrida, “Literature in Secret,” 144.

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was for centuries kept in the original languages and was considered by the Roman Catholic Church to be bound to those languages, as though we know for sure that Jehovah spoke Hebrew. Theologians puzzled for centuries over that question. This notion of sacred languages holds, however, even though the Book of Acts asserts that the worldwide spread of Christianity depends on the gift of tongues bestowed on the apostles at Pentecost, giving them the ability to spread the Word everywhere in every language. God’s Word, the Gospel, the Good News that the Messiah has come, was, the New Testament implies, translatable without loss into any language, just as American book publishers, even ‘academic’ ones, tend to assume that anything, including all literary works, can be translated into English without loss. For Roman Catholicism, nevertheless, Hebrew (or Aramaic) and Koinê Greek were viewed as the only faithful carriers of the word of God, with Latin translations having a secondary authority. That meant the Bible was unreadable by all but the learned, in effect the priests and clergy. Mass was said in Latin, a language many members of the congregation did not understand. Only within my lifetime have Masses been allowed to be said in the vernacular. For many ordinary parishioners, for almost two thousand years, it could be said that the Bible and the Mass were Greek to them. The faithful had to take it on trust that the priests were truthful reporters, in their sometimes vernacular sermons, of what the Bible says. The great revolution performed by the Protestant Reformation was not only a new stress on the direct relation between the believer and God, bypassing the intermediaries of all those priests, saints, and icons, but also the systematic translation of the Bible into all the world’s vernaculars, so any literate person could read the Bible for herself or himself. Those vernacular versions included, signally, Luther’s great German translation, but also the early English translations, including the Wycliffe Bible, Tyndale’s Bible, the ‘Breeches’ Bible, and ultimately the King James Bible, from which I have been making my citations, for I am not a learned man. If we think of the Abraham and Isaac story for a moment as ‘literature’ in our ordinary Western sense of the word, then it has that peculiarity, essential to literary narrative, that the storyteller knows more than the characters do, even implausibly more. An example from literature proper is the episode in Remembrance of Things Past in which Proust’s narrator, Marcel, is endowed with miraculous knowledge of what was going on in Bergotte’s mind at the moment of his death. Bergotte is the distinguished writer in Proust’s novel. Bergotte dies in a Paris museum sitting on a bench looking at the little patch

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of yellow wall in Jan Vermeer’s great painting, View of Delft, and thinking that he must make his own writing style more like that, more chaste and pure. Marcel claims to know what Bergotte was thinking and feeling even though he was not there. He would not have been able to penetrate Bergotte’s mind even if he had been present. It is certainly irresponsible of Marcel to pretend to secret knowledge he could not possibly have had. It is, moreover, one might argue, irresponsible of Proust, by a ‘literary fiction’, to ascribe to his narrator such knowledge. Only Bergotte knew what he was thinking at the moment of his death, and he took that secret to the grave. In a different narrative register, the convention of free indirect discourse in third-person narration presupposes the quite implausible transparency of the characters’ minds to the narrator’s telepathic clairvoyance, even though the characters are not shown as being aware that the narrator is spying on them. Literature and the Bible may keep their secrets, but they also abundantly, and perhaps irresponsibly, give them away. The reader of Genesis knows more than Sarah or Isaac knew, even more than Abraham knew. If we think of the Genesis story as being written by Moses under Jehovah’s dictation, then a reasonable explanation for how the text knows all those secrets is given. It still, nevertheless, remains an impenetrable secret as to why Jehovah would have chosen to make public, where anybody can read them, the secrets that, if Derrida is right, remain eternally secret, hidden by the silence of God and the echoing silence of Abraham. Jesus promised his disciples, in his explanation of the parable of the sower, that they would learn God’s secrets. The disciples ask, “Why speakest thou unto them in parables?” And Jesus answers: “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given” (Matt. 13:10–11). A little later Matthew says, echoing Psalms 49:4 and 78:2: All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not to them: That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world. (Matt. 13:34–5)

The New Testament, and especially the parables of Jesus, can be defined as giving away the secrets that the Old Testament had already kept secret by giving them away – for example, in the readable/ unreadable story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis. Thinking of all this boggles the mind just a little, my mind at least. Does giving away God’s secret, along with Abraham’s and

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Isaac’s, make the Abraham and Isaac story literature? It would be grossly irresponsible of me to say so. Courses in ‘The Bible as Literature’, although they are taught with the best will in the world and do much good, are nevertheless subject to a double danger: either to smuggle in too much religion along with the ‘literature’, or to falsify the Bible by treating it as if it were a mere literary text, not sacred Scripture that makes special demands on the reader. But how can you, or should you, avoid doing both if you read the Bible stories seriously? And yet ... . And yet .. . . I believe Derrida is right to say that all Occidental literature is the unfaithful or perjuring son of the Bible. This means literature uses the Bible’s ways of storytelling. All allegory of the poets is perhaps a guilty, unpardonable, form of allegory of the theologians. Dante irresponsibilized himself when he walked into this double bind by writing the Divine Comedy, even though the Commedia, like all Western literature, has an “impossible filiation” with Scripture.

WORKS CITED Derrida, Jacques. “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (“Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison,” 1996; New York & London: Routledge, 2002): 42–101. ——. The Gift of Death, tr. David Wills (Donner la mort, 1990 / 1992; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1995). ——. “Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation,” in The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, tr. David Wills (“La littérature au secret: Une filiation impossible,” 1999; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2nd ed. 2008): 119–58. Harack, Katrina. “The Heterological Writer and the Gift of Art: Writers on Writing, Performativity, and Ethics in Twentieth-Century America” (doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2008). Morrison, Toni. Beloved (1987; New York: Vintage, 2004). Naylor, Gloria, & Toni Morrison. “A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor–Guthrie (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1994): 188–217. Originally as “A Conversation,” Sewanee Review 21.3 (Summer 1985): 567–93. Vermeer van Delft, Jan. “View of Delft,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vermeerview-of-delft.jpg (accessed 25 July 2010). |

“Gazing into the future” Beginnings, Endings, and Midpoints in Paul Muldoon’s Why Brownlee Left

L ARS –H ÅKAN S VENSSON

“E

/ Aquí concluye” (‘The poem does not begin. / It ends here’).1 The Mexican poet Eduardo Lizalde’s admirably concise poem, suitably entitled “Opus Cero” (‘Opus Zero’), wittily makes the foundations of all verbal and poetic composition collapse like a house of cards. The poem claims that it ends before it has even begun; in the process, it seems to render redundant the idea of a midpoint, a middle space in which the matter introduced at the outset can be treated at some length before leading up to a conclusion. If a poet is a machine for producing poetry, this one misfires. And yet, of course, the poem does begin just as it does end, and, for a few moments, whether we read it aloud or silently, we are in the middle of it although it is difficult to describe or delimit this middle area in terms of content or syntax. Lizalde’s sophisticated epigram draws attention to terms that we tend to bandy about without really clarifying what we are talking about. For surely we have all of us at some point or other written or spoken about such entities as ‘the beginning of Paradise Lost’ or ‘the ending of the Aeneid’ without specifying to what entity we are referring. What, then, do we mean when we talk of the ‘beginnings’ and ‘endings’ of poems? What, for example, is the beginning of Paradise Lost? And what is the ending of the Aeneid?

1

L POEMA NO EMPIEZA.

Eduardo Lizalde, Nueva memoria del tigre: poesía 1949–1991 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993): 164.

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Quite apart from the fact that beginnings (as the physical coming-intobeing of a text) might be localized to a point in time well before the actual writing-down of the first word, beginnings and endings are often complex conceptual and syntactical structures. Paradise Lost is a case in point. Its opening twenty-six-line ‘paragraph’, divided into two complex, literally breath-taking thirteen-line sentences, is followed by another complex twentythree-line segment, introducing the action and stating its cause; together, these forty-nine lines make up the invocatio, which is in its turn followed by an exordium providing the stage directions for the opening scene until the action proper begins in l. 84 as the ianua narrandi is crossed. In trying to work out the chronology of the events involved in the process described here – and the similarities and differences between the Christian narrative and its pagan analogues as well as the difference between the writer addressing the Muse and the Muse speaking to and through the writer – we are involved in very complicated intertextual, rhetorical, and syntactical work.2 And what is the ending of the Aeneid? Is it the very last line (xii.952), or the last sentence (xii.951–52), or the last eight lines (xii.945–52) describing Aeneas’ hesitation while Turnus is lying defeated before him, or is it the last thirty-eight-line paragraph (xii.919–52), identified as such by the poem’s modern editors? Or does the ending begin when Aeneas and Turnus begin their duel at xii.887 after Jupiter and Hera have agreed that Turnus must lose? Or does it begin even earlier? And what are we to make of the fact that the last two lines (xii.951–52) repeat lines which have occurred in identical form on two separate previous occasions?3 Perhaps it might be helpful to approach the tricky issue of beginnings and endings by considering neither very long nor very short poems but a midsize specimen which in addition has the merit of having a very carefully defined structure: a sonnet. In this brief article, I will discuss beginnings, endings, and midpoints in relation to Paul Muldoon’s sonnet “Why Brownlee Left.” It might be argued that “Why Brownlee Left” is not a regular sonnet and so not 2

For a convenient if necessarily summary introduction to these aspects of Paradise Lost, see John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (1968; Harlow: Longman, 2nd ed. 1998): 56–65 (notes to lines I.1–84). For an analysis of the poem’s numerological patterning, see 25–29. 3 For a recent survey of ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ interpretations of the ending(s) of the Aeneid, see Theodore Ziolkowski, Hesitant Heroes: Private Inhibition, Cultural Crisis (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2004): 9–33.

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ideal for my purposes. It is true that Muldoon takes certain liberties with metre and rhyme-pattern in this sonnet, as in so many of his sonnets, but I do believe that the poem is well suited to a discussion of beginnings and endings, and I hope to show that, despite its metrical irregularities, it does observe some of the basic formal and structural properties typical of conventional sonnets. Moreover, it forms part of a larger thematic pattern – that of Muldoon’s third collection, Why Brownlee Left (1980)4 – which is very much to do with beginnings and endings (and midpoints). Finally, I hope to show that the poem, through its subtly modulated linguistic register, recalls a wellknown specimen of the pastoral tradition, and so reaches out of the poetic context to which it would at first seem to limit itself. In this sense, arguably, it has a beginning outside itself. Before considering these claims let us first consider the sonnet as a format. Sonnets, we are told, are fourteen-line poems that rely on a very strict, largely predetermined structure. The octave of a Petrarchan sonnet – and Muldoon’s sonnets usually follow the Petrarchan pattern – presents us with a proposition, an idea or an experience, which is then completed, modified or contradicted by the sestet. The sestet usually introduces a volta, a ‘turn’, which may be said to provide a thematic, if not arithmetical, mid-point. The sestet usually leads up to a strong endline, which often has the incisive ring of finality, constituting “something after which nothing else follows,”5 and thus producing closure. This last point is worth elaborating somewhat. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith reminds us,6 a person familiar with the sonnet as a generic form will, on hearing a sonnet read for the first time, be able to anticipate the exact point at which it will end, and so will not be surprised by the ending as such. Insofar as a surprise effect is a vital element of the sense of closure – and I believe it is – a successful sonnet must therefore surprise the reader by doing something unexpected at an expected moment, which in this case means in the last line. To take an example: in the first sonnet of Astrophil and Stella, Sir 4

Paul Muldoon, Why Brownlee Left (London: Faber & Faber, 1980). Aristotle, “Poetics,” 1450 B in Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and tr. by Stephen Halliwell; Longinus, On the Sublime; translation by W. H. Fyfe, rev. Donald Russell; Demetrius, On Style; ed. and tr. by Doreen C. Innes based on W. Rhys Roberts. Second edition (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1995). 6 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Closure and Formal Conventions: The English Sonnet,” in Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1968): 50–56. 5

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Philip Sidney has the Muse point out to the poet–speaker that in his attempts to find the subject-matter that will persuade Stella to love him he has overlooked the fact that it has been waiting for him all the time where he least expected it – in his heart: “‘Fool’, said my muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write’.”7 The surprise effect is due not only to the nature of the Muse’s message but also to the simple, almost conversational tone in which she upbraids the speaker – in strong contrast to the rhetorical and discursive elaboration of the sonnet’s first thirteen lines. Many Petrarchan sonnets rely on similar effects, particularly on a strong final line, their first and last lines being powerfully implicated in the creation of ‘beginnings’ and ‘endings’. Petrarch’s first sonnet, “Voi ch’ascoltate” (‘You who hear’), whose volta begins with an adversative conjunction (“Ma,” ‘But’), ends with the proverbial statement “quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno” (‘whatever pleases in the world is a brief dream’), while sonnet 224, “S’una fede amorosa” (‘If faithfulness in love’), which unusually has no volta but consists of a long series of conditional clauses, ends with a time-honoured, judicial-sounding sentiment borrowed from a Provençal troubadour: “vostro, Donna, ’l peccato, et mio fia ’l danno” (‘yours will be the blame, Lady, mine the loss’).8 The Sidney sonnet just mentioned begins with a famous example of the rhetorical figure of climax, has a clearly marked volta (“But words came halting forth”), and ends, as we have seen, with a strong injunction from the Muse which closes the discussion very effectively. Baudelaire’s “À une passante” begins with a single sentence (“La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait,” ‘The deafening street around me screamed’), has a clearly identifiable volta (“Un éclair … puis la nuit,” ‘lightning … then night’) leading up to the emotional outburst of the last line (“O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais,” ‘Oh you whom I might have loved, oh you who knew it’).9 Mallarmé’s sonnet to Méry Laurent, “M’introduire dans ton histoire” (‘To introduce myself into your story’) begins appropriately and ironically by introducing itself, and its author–suitor, into the recipient’s history, and ends, equally appropriately, with metapoetic references to its unfulfilled amatory mission (“Comme mourir pourpre la roue / Du seul vespéral de mes 7

Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan–Jones (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1989): 153. Francesco Petrarca, Rime, ed. Guido Bezzola (Milan: Rizzoli, 1976): 89, 397. The Provençal model is the thirteenth-century troubadour Richart de Berbezilh, who concludes a poem with the following line: “Mos ert lo dans et vostre ert lo peccaz.” 9 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857; Paris: Éditions de Cluny, 1933): 159. 8

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chars”; my italics; ‘as if dying in purple the wheel / of the only vesperal one among my chariots’).10 Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” opens with a dramatic event (“A sudden blow”), wavers for most of its fourteen lines between the perspectives of the rapist swan-god Zeus and the innocent victim, the Spartan princess Leda; the volta climactically depicts the moment of orgasm, whereas the last line contains a question articulated by the poem’s speaker from his own historical knowledge: did Leda realize that her sexual congress with Zeus would result in the birth of Helen, the cause of the Trojan war?11 Although “Leda and the Swan” is a regular sonnet, many of Yeats’s earlier sonnets are not, and in fact have a distinctly Irish character with regard both to form and to content. This has been seen as a conscious reaction against the traditional subject-matter and cultural weight of both the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean sonnet. After Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh used the sonnet to deal with local subject-matter (most famously, perhaps, in “Epic,” whose tercet ends with Homer’s ghost whispering, a little like Sidney’s Muse: “I made the Iliad from such / A local row. Gods make their own importance.”),12 and it figures prominently in the work of Muldoon’s elders – such as Heaney and Longley – and in the work of his friend and contemporary, Ciaran Carson, who has translated sonnets by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud and, like Muldoon, has put the form to new uses.13 Even though it is now some time since the sonnet was naturalized by Irish poets, it probably still exudes a special aura – if not of a slightly archaic format, at least of a formerly prestigious genre now self-consciously appropriated to express, among other things, non-prestigious matter. The sonnet’s high status and the technical difficulties it presents are factors to be considered in this context. It seems significant that both Heaney and

10

For the text and a discussion of this sonnet, see Paul Bénichou, Selon Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 329–37. 11 For the text and a recent discussion of this sonnet, see Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P /Belknap Press, 2007): 174–77. 12 Patrick Kavanagh, The Complete Poems (1972; Newbridge: Goldsmith Press, 990): 238. 13 Ciaran Carson, The Alexandrine Plan (Loughcrew: Gallery, 1998). Carson’s For All We Know (Gallery, 2008) consists exclusively of fourteen-line poems, a format retained in On the Night Watch (Gallery, 2009) and, together with ten-line poems, in his most recent volume, Until Before After (Gallery, 2010).

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Longley began writing sonnets seriously only as they entered the fully mature stage of their careers, and something similar may be said about Muldoon’s use of the form. His first collection, New Weather (1973), contains no sonnets; however, over a third of the poems in his second, Mules (1977), are sonnets, some of them, such as “Ma,” among his finest achievements. From his third volume, Why Brownlee Left (1980), onwards, sonnets have been a persistent ingredient in Muldoon’s increasingly varied assortment of complex poetic forms. Not only has he written a vast number of individual sonnets (in addition to many poems aspiring to the condition of the sonnet14) – two of his collections, Mules and Hay (1998), close with sonnet-sequences, and his most recent major volume, Horse Latitudes (2006), begins with a series of sonnets and, for good measure, contains a corona, a crown of sonnets. Eleven out of the twenty-five poems making up his most recent collection (Plan B, 2009) are sonnets. In conclusion, it seems important to stress Muldoon’s interest in arranging his poems – and entire volumes – in sequential form. As is well known, very few of Muldoon’s sonnets, despite his technical versatility, are regular ones. Individual lines do not very often contain the requisite number of syllables; nor are they iambic, nor is the rhyme-scheme usually that of the Petrarchan or the Shakespearean sonnet. Typographically, they differ from the conventional pattern as well: some are made up of 4 + 3 + 3 + 4 lines. The rhyme-pattern does not correspond to the patterns usually found in conventional sonnets, nor are the rhymes pure; there are many halfrhymes, assonances, and near-rhymes, many of them made possible only because of the liberties Muldoon takes with enjambement.15 The result is often that, when the poems are read aloud (even by Muldoon himself), the rhymes tend to disappear; it should be added, though, that the structural effects – in particular, closure – that I am interested in here are not affected by such deviations from the standard sonnet-pattern. |

Although Muldoon’s poetic output is by now considerable, running to some two hundred pages and comprising some three hundred individual poems 14

I am thinking of thirteen-line poems or fourteen-line poems made up of couplets. Muldoon’s – and other Irish poets’ – seemingly unorthodox rhyming habits should be seen in the context of rhyming in Gaelic poetry; see, for example, Bernard O’Donoghue, Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (New York & London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994). 15

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(some of them very long), there can be no question of the centrality of the sonnet “Why Brownlee Left” to his oeuvre. The title-poem of his third volume, it epitomizes that book’s thematic concern with fortuitous departures, unexpected exits, and mysterious disappearances – themes by no means neglected in his other collections; moreover, it expounds its subject-matter in a strikingly ambiguous way, so that the explanation seemingly promised by the poem’s title is effectively counteracted by the poem’s first sentence, which transforms initial seeming certitude into one of life’s many mysteries. Or does the poem provide two competing explanations for Brownlee’s absence, as some critics argue?16 Whatever reading we prefer, we can at least agree that the poem begins with a rhetorically complex first sentence17 and that the last line provides closure of a very Muldoonian kind: the speaker exits from his text leaving us with a very potent image, a kind of poetic equivalent of cinema’s frozen image – two black horses gazing into the future – which, however, does not suggest how we should interpret this emblematic picture: Why Brownlee left, and where he went, Is a mystery even now. For if a man should have been content, It was him; two acres of barley, One of potatoes, four bullocks, A milker, a slated farmhouse. He was last seen going out to plough On a March morning, bright and early. By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future.18

16

See Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon (Chester Springs PA: Dufour, 1996), 68–69, and Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), 77–78, for classic discussions of the poem. See also Jefferson Holdridge’s treatment of the sonnet in The Poetry of Paul Muldoon (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2008): 51–52. 17 Technically, the repetition of the title in the first line is an example of what ancient rhetoricians called plóke. 18 Why Brownlee Left, 22.

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To fully grasp the implications of Brownlee’s disappearing-act, it is necessary first to take a look at the entire collection, also titled Why Brownlee Left, in which this poem occurs. Like all the other major nine volumes Muldoon has published to date, Why Brownlee Left can be divided into two sections: the first consists of a sequence of twenty-seven short poems, the second of a long narrative poem, “Immram,” which is thematically related to the first section – and even contains a fair number of intertextual references to it – but basically forms a unit of its own, not least stylistically, for the thirty stanzas making up “Immram” constitute a free rendition, or ‘translation’ into the hard-boiled idiom of Raymond Chandler, of the medieval Irish poem Immram Mael Duin, ‘The Voyage of Mael Duin’, in which the hero, Máel dúin, sets out on a sea-voyage to avenge his father. In Muldoon’s version, the anonymous protagonist embarks on a quest for his father in Los Angeles and learns, eventually, after a series of hilarious surrealistic episodes, that his father was a ‘mule’, a drug trafficker. Interestingly, the title-poem, “Why Brownlee Left,” is found at the exact midpoint of the first section, flanked by two sets of thirteen poems. In fact, the collection as a whole is based on a numerical and thematic pattern. The first and last poems correspond to one another, as both address the political and cultural history of Ireland. The first poem, “Whim,” describes how a young man picks up a young woman at Belfast’s Europa Hotel by suggesting to her that Kuno Meyer’s translation of a medieval Irish text to do with Cu Chullain, which he happens to have at his home, is superior to Standish O’Grady’s oldfashioned version, which she happens to be reading. They do not quite make it to the young man’s place, however, but end up in Belfast’s Botanic Gardens, where they make love with unexpected consequences: “Once he got stuck into her he got stuck / Full stop.” The poem ends with the couple, united in canine fashion, being “manhandled onto a stretcher / Like the last of an endangered species.” This opening poem, which mixes sex and history in a manner typical of many other poems in Why Brownlee Left, corresponds to the last poem of the first section, a sonnet titled “The One Desire,” also set in Belfast’s Botanic Gardens. Though the lovers have now departed, their preoccupation with sex and history is still indirectly present. Reminding us that the palm-house was built before Kew “In the spirit that means to outdo / The modern by the more modern,” the poem catalogues the ways in which the palm-house, despite this ambition, has “run to seed”; and while the lovers in the first poem got stuck in each other, the only instance of penetration in this sonnet is that of “some delicate tree” which “Would seem at last to have

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broken through” “a missing pane,” led by “kindly light,” an ironic reference to Newman’s well-known hymn “Lead, Kindly Light.” The poem ends with a disillusioned but rhetorically apt line that gives closure through its ironic verdict on the competing nationalist discourses referred to in the first poem and elsewhere in the volume: “We have excelled ourselves again.” While these two poems begin and end the twenty-seven-poem sequence, they also embed a minor series of pseudo-biographical poems tracing the various phases of the Bildung undergone by the narrator–protagonist of the poems, a persona presumably not entirely unrelated to Muldoon himself. Thus, the second poem is a sonnet entitled “October 1950,” a reference to the month of the poet’s conception. Thematically, this poems links up with the sexual congress described in the preceding poem by affirming that “Whatever it is, it all comes down to this; / My father’s cock / Between my mother’s thighs.” At the same time, the last line of this sonnet, “Whatever it is, it leaves me in the dark,” in its turn looks forward to the next poem, “The Geography Lesson,” which transports us to the speaker’s early schooldays and in which “unremembering darkness” characterizes the space in which the greenness of innocence turns into the dubious gold of experience. (The deceptive meaning of gold is a lesson learnt from Robert Frost’s “Nothing gold can stay.”) Similar links connect the whole sequence, which traces, in rough chronological outline, the various stages of the protagonist’s development from boy into young man and end with a number of poems depicting the dissolution of a relationship in the final phase of which spiritual death merges with memories of actual deaths. The last of these poems, “Come into My Parlour,” provides a terrifying, surrealistic vision of the graveyard at Collegelands, the poet’s native village, and serves as a transition to the more general image of cultural stasis symbolized by the sorry state of Belfast’s Botanic Gardens in the very last poem. Muldoon himself points out in an interview with John Haffenden that many of the poems in the collection mirror one another in this fashion, constantly creating new contexts and meanings for each other: I’ve become very interested in structures that can be fixed like mirrors at angles to one another – it relates to narrative form – so that new images can emerge from the setting up of the poems in relation to each other: further ironies are possible, further mischief is possible.19

19

John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation (London: Faber & Faber,

1981): 136.

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It might be added that this technique is quite common in Elizabethan sonnetsequences, in which poems often seem to grow out of some aspect of the preceding poem at the same time as subtle intertextual play links poems not immediately placed next to one another, too. In view of this, it might be interesting to look more closely at “Why Brownlee Left” in the context of the sonnets immediately preceding and following it and to enquire into its position at the exact midpoint of the sequence, looking back to the first part dealing with childhood and youth and looking forward to the second half, which, as I have pointed out, is largely taken up by poems relating the beginning and the break-up of a relationship (which is ultimately related to the sad state of Northern Irish politics and culture in 1980). This is, of course, not to say that meaning is automatically transferred from one poem to another; but it is obvious that in those cases where a similarity of language, situation, and mood is at hand, the character of one poem spills over into the next and causes the reader to respond more strongly to details in a later poem paralleled by similar features in a preceding poem (and, conversely, to re-read previous poems in a slightly different light). Thus, for example, the main protagonist Coulter’s eerie preoccupation with graveyards in “Come into My Parlour” is likely to colour the reader’s perception of the decrepit state of the palm-house in “The One Desire.” |

“Why Brownlee Left” occurs in a series of sonnets which cannot but affect each other, given Muldoon’s habit of recycling phrases and creating thematic and linguistic links between poems. The preceding poem, “Anseo,” is technically an assemblage of three sonnets. It is a seemingly straightforward tale of a former schoolmate who deliberately puts himself in the position of oppressed victim at school and later becomes a Commandant in the I R A , treating his subordinates to the same kind of discipline that he himself was subjected to at school; whereas “Immrama,” the poem that follows “Why Brownlee Left,” is a sonnet in the form of a modern version of the medieval voyage-poem that Muldoon ‘translates’ in the volume’s long final poem. It is a fantasy in which the speaker imagines that his father emigrates to South America where he associates with people who might be refugee Nazis; his children, of whom the speaker is now conspicuously not one, are tainted by implication. This intricate sonnet is in its turn followed by “Promises, Promises,” which, like “Anseo,” is made up of three linked sonnets. “Promises, Promises” appears to take place on two time-planes. The speaker lies “stretched

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out … On a farm in North Carolina,” smoking marijuana; at the same time, however, he describes himself as an English soldier who has travelled to America with Sir Walter Raleigh. A reference to Raleigh’s returning “years afterwards, / To wonder where and why / We might have altogether disappeared” would seem to identify him as one of the ill-fated colonists who unaccountably disappeared on Roanoke Island in the late-1580s. At the same time, the third sonnet-stanza speaks of a farewell “to one slender and shy” whom the speaker has left in Bayswater, thus actualizing the idea of a love affair gone wrong which was introduced in the first poem and occupies most of the second half of the twenty-seven-poem sequence. In view of the strong political implications of the poems preceding and following upon “Why Brownlee Left,” the silence as to why Brownlee left and where he went takes on an ominous dimension, which seems worth considering. In the interview with Haffenden, Muldoon states that “the name itself, Brownlee, suggests a brown meadow, a ploughed field, and so – in a strange sort of way – his end is in his name; he has fulfilled his purpose even before he begins.”20 While this seems to suggest that Brownlee is one with the soil he works, it is worth noting that Muldoon’s emphasis on Brownlee’s nearidentity comes in response to a question which mentions “the possibility that certain figures might have been the victims of sectarian killings or might just have opted out,” to which Muldoon actually says “yes.” The first possibility is rendered stronger by the poem’s position just after “Anseo,” while the second is supported by the poem following it, “Immrama.” (Both alternatives are strengthened by the reference to the last rig being unbroken, which suggests that the disappearance was hasty and unplanned.) Part of the poem’s appeal is that it oscillates between these two options; we have no way of determining which of them is the more likely. In both cases, however, Brownlee’s escape is not innocent but tinged with suggestions that he has defected from a settled, responsible life and associates with politically undesirable and suspicious elements. This negative view of Brownlee’s absence is further reinforced by the mention in l. 10 that he absconded just as he was about to finish ploughing a field (“with the last rig unbroken”) and also by Muldoon’s emphasis on Brownlee’s near-identity with his land, another factor contributing to making his disappearance seem questionable. Such a reading is also strengthened by a number of voices evoked by the octave. The poem exploits clichés of various kinds: it echoes sentiments prevalent in 20

Haffenden, Viewpoints, 140.

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Brownlee’s community (“For if a man should have been content / It was him”), citing his modest abundance in a factual enumeration of his possessions which almost imperceptibly turns into the language of a police report or news item (“He was last seen”) before ending on a ballad-like note (“on a March morning, bright and early”). All these clichés invest Brownlee with an Everyman-like, drab ordinariness associated with the quiet, peaceful pastoral life which Brownlee has abandoned. The sonnet in fact enlists yet another voice which turns it into an elegy for the renunciation of such a traditional life through the verbal affinity with a classic celebration of the values of pure pastoral existence, Alexander Pope’s “The Quiet Life”: Happy the man, whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound, Content to breathe his native air In his own ground. Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread, Whose flocks supply him with attire; Whose trees in summer yield him shade, In winter fire. Blest! who can unconcern’dly find Hours, days, and years slide soft away, In health of body, peace of mind, Quiet by day, Sound sleep by night; study and ease Together mix’d; sweet recreation, And innocence, which most does please, With meditation. Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; Thus unlamented let me dye; Steal from the world, and not a stone Tell where I lye.21

The similarities between the two poems are both verbal and thematic. Pope’s farmer is “content,” as Brownlee is clearly not, with his simple lot, which is summed up in similar though slightly more classical terms (Pope’s poem is an 21

Pope, “Ode on Solitude” (c.1700), in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963): 265.

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imitation of the first half of Horace, Epodes 1, 2, “Beatus ille”):22 “a few paternal acres,” “herds,” and “flocks.” There is another striking point of contact between the two poems: both farmers disappear. However, Pope’s farmer does not finally disappear until his day’s work is done; only then does he “steal from the world” as “unseen, unknown” as when he lived, without “a stone [to] Tell where [he] lie[s].” He, too, in a sense desires to become one with his soil; Brownlee, however, achieves paradoxical fame for disappearing from the land he would seem to be identical with. While Muldoon’s octave provides a fairly straightforward selection of various types of everyday speech, the syntax of the sestet is more convoluted and the rhythm more elaborated. The less-than-half-rhymes (with / wife; bullocks/ black; foot to /future), made possible by bold and conspicuous enjambements (hardly noticeable when the poem is read aloud),23 help build up a tension that underlines the motivic content: Brownlee’s fame is due to his inexplicable (and unexplained) absence. The speaker at first continues to report at secondhand (“they had found all abandoned”) but gradually asserts his own I-am-acamera-like presence through the striking comparison of the pair of black horses to “man and wife,” and the emphasis on the horses shifting their weight from foot to foot and gazing into the future. The “man and wife” reference might make the horses stand in for Brownlee’s parents, abandoned by their son and now having to gaze into a very uncertain future without him. The nature of that future is hinted at through the approximative yet emphasized rhyme “foot to” / “future,” which suggests, with bitter irony, that stasis and waiting is all that the future has in store. Nor is that all: in the last poem but one, “Come Into My Parlour,” there is an eerie enumeration of fields and grave plots, which chillingly calls to mind the list of Brownlee’s possessions. There is, in fact, yet another and even more chilling similarity: the graveplot

22

Ironically, the praise bestowed on pastoral life in the first sixty-five lines of Horace’s epode turns out in l. 66 to be spoken by a money-lender, Alfius, whose interest in the countryside is entirely of a financial nature. The phrase “happy the man,” “beatus ille,” conjures up the powerful tradition of the makarismós, pronouncing somebody happy, which has yielded many well-known passages in Greek, Roman, and later poetry. 23 However, in the recording currently available on the Official Paul Muldoon Homepage the poet goes out of his way to emphasize the words “foot to / Foot” so as to identify the rhyme.

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that Coulter inspects is described as the place “Where a neighbour had met his future.” As punctuated, the poem consists of four complete sentences. The first three of these seem to convey sentiments and information bandied about by members of Brownlee’s community, sentiments which also, I have argued, coincide with the sentiments and vocabulary of a well-known specimen of pastoral poetry, Pope’s “The Quiet Life.” In the fourth and last sentence, which in fact makes up the whole of the sestet, it is possible to hear the voice of a reporter (“By noon Brownlee was famous”), but, as the poem proceeds, another, more individualized, intimate, and lyrical voice emerges (though the affinity with Pope’s pastoral vision is still demonstrable). What are we to make of this? Pope’s modest farmer disappears gracefully at the end of his day’s work; can Brownlee have done likewise? The fact that the poem occupies the exact midpoint between youth and adulthood in the collection might just warrant the hypothesis that Brownlee’s disappearance is a lucky and honourable one. On the other hand, if we consider the poem’s position between two thoroughly obnoxious forms of disappearance, we may have to form another idea of Brownlee’s erratic and possibly enforced abdication from his rural kingdom. The ending of “Why Brownlee Left” with its brooding, ineffectual stare into the future differs from the endings of the sonnets before and after it in seemingly offering only a mystery, no explanation; and yet the nature of the unspoken future of “Why Brownlee Left” cannot but be coloured by the perspectives of the other poems, for, judging by all the other poems, there are no happy endings in Why Brownlee Left.

WORKS CITED Aristotle. “Poetics,” in Aristotle, Poetics, ed. & tr. Stephen Halliwell; Longinus, On the Sublime; tr. W.H. Fyfe, rev. Donald Russell; Demetrius, On Style; ed. & tr. Doreen C. Innes, based on W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2nd ed. 1995). Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal (1857; Paris: Éditions de Cluny, 1933). Bénichou, Paul, Selon Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). Carson, Ciaran, The Alexandrine Plan (Loughcrew: Gallery, 1998). ——. For All We Know (Loughcrew: Gallery, 2008). ——. On the Night Watch (Loughcrew: Gallery, 2009). ——. Until Before After (Loughcrew: Gallery, 2010). Haffenden, John. Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation (London: Faber & Faber, 1981).

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Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. “Closure and Formal Conventions: The English Sonnet,” in Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1968): 50–56. Holdridge, Jefferson. The Poetry of Paul Muldoon (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2008). Kavanagh, Patrick. The Complete Poems (1972; Newbridge: Goldsmith Press, 1990). Kendall, Tim. Paul Muldoon (Chester Springs P A : Dufour, 1996). Lizalde, Eduardo. Nueva memoria del tigre: poesía 1949–1991 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993). Milton, John. Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (1968; Harlow: Longman, 2nd ed. 1998). Muldoon, Paul. Hay (London: Faber & Faber, 1998). ——. Horse Latitudes (Faber & Faber, 2006). ——. Mules (London: Faber & Faber, 1977) ——. New Weather (London: Faber & Faber, 1973). ——. Plan B (London: Enitharmon, 2009) ——. Why Brownlee Left (London: Faber & Faber, 1980). O’Donoghue, Bernard. Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (New York & London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994). Petrarca, Francesco. Rime, ed. Guido Bezzola (Milan: Rizzoli, 1976). Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963). Sidney, Sir Philip. Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan–Jones (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1989). Vendler, Helen. Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P /Belknap Press, 2007). Wills, Clair. Reading Paul Muldoon (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998). Ziolkowski, Theodore. Hesitant Heroes: Private Inhibition, Cultural Crisis (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2004).

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Part III  G LOBAL E XIT ?

Exiting the Environmental Trap Knowledge Regimes and the Third Phase of Environmental Policy 1

S VERKER S ÖRLIN

W

1.

H O E V E R T A K E S a good, hard look at our world just a few short years into the twenty-first century has no difficulty discerning a number of serious problems, many of them concerning the environment and sustainability in broad terms, often combined with questions of security and conflict resolution. A rapidly expanding (if gradually subsiding) population is taxing the planet’s resources. Even more burdensome is the increased concentration of this population in certain regions and cities. 1

I would like to acknowledge the inspiration for the ideas expressed in this essay that I have received in over a quarter-century of friendship from my colleague Raoul Granqvist, whose restless and ever-ex(c)iting personality has never ever caused his exit from my existence. His work and life demonstrate that intellectual effort and the attempts to achieve the common good are always neighbours in a good conscience. I would also like to thank my colleague, the historian Lars J. Lundgren, whose keen eye and editorial opposition has made earlier versions of this essay gestate into something much more readable than it would otherwise have been. Its genesis goes back to ideas I first began developing during the latter half of the 1990s, particularly when, at the behest of the then Minister of the Environment, Anna Lindh, I gave several talks on environmental policy, including one at the Rio +5 conference in the Old Parliament’s Second Chamber Room in Stockholm on World Environment Day, 5 June 1997. I hope my thoughts of gratitude reach her in her heaven.

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Increased economic returns per capita change the conditions for environmental policy. Each new incremental rise in industrial production is indeed ‘cleaner’ than yesterday’s, particularly as far as the release of toxins and pollutants into the atmosphere is concerned. But the production results themselves, and the material returns necessary to fulfil them, increase with greater speed than does so-called ‘eco-efficiency’ – what has been termed the ‘rebound effect’. And so the ecological footprint of mankind grows larger.2 Hitherto it has grown primarily as the result of the production-rate of the industrialized world. If the profoundly justified efforts to accomplish rapidly expanding industrial production in the densely populated developing countries is realized – and it looks like they will – even greater parts of the world’s population will add to the ecological footprint. The rapid economic growth of countries such as India and China merely hints at the scale of the processes of which we speak. This course of events is new and unique in significant ways. Our earth has never been home to a population of this size, the world’s collective financial enterprises have never been greater, technology never so sophisticated, and mankind’s activities never this threatening – to everything from the planetary climate to the fate of individual species, many of them microscopic in size. The situation is also unique, insofar as these changes are occurring more rapidly than ever. As the global dilemmas grow, one must ask whether there is a cure for this disease. Is there an exit? Spaceship Earth – Buckminster Fuller’s congenial metaphor – reminds us of Géricault’s raft, where we are all bound to a common, seemingly fatal destiny – restoration of the Biblical Ark in the modern era, but without any rejuvenating livestock on board, only the harsh prospect of endless deterioration under a merciless, ever hotter heaven. Maybe the exit, when there is no exit, is to change the perspective and look at the world as a place where you need not part but can play a part, come what may. There is another narrative. |

2

Mathis Wackernagel & William Rees, Our Ecological Footprint (London: New Society, 1997).

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A hundred years ago, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the world population had just reached two billion – less than a third of today’s – and the scope of the world economy was but a fraction of today’s. The growth of the ecological footprint in the past century has been exponential. While it cannot continue forever, if the stress on our surroundings becomes more linear during the twenty-first century, even this growth will imply an enormous change in the conditions of the life of mankind and the scope for political intervention. These changes concern the whole world. More than ever before, different parts of the world have become mutually dependent. The environmental effects of this interdependency likewise know no borders. Social conditions, health, culture, democracy, and matters of security, survival, and the environment are interwoven in a grand panorama of regional and worldwide dependency. This indicates that the work of dealing with future environmental challenges will be even more deeply integrated with political processes than it already is. This state of affairs should come as no surprise to us. Man’s interaction with his surroundings is ancient – eternal, in fact – and debates and political conflicts about questions which in practice were environmental problems (though they were not called that) were pretty common during the nineteenth century before being exacerbated in the first half of the twentieth. The nineteenth century saw the advent of what has been called ‘the Anthropocene’, the era when mankind is the chief agent of environmental change.3 And yet the fact remains that the environment only made its grand entry onto the political stage in the latter half of the twentieth century. And it did so under a variety of names – environment, ambiente, Umwelt, miljö – which emphasized the fact that it was a place apart, an extreme, perhaps the extreme, condition of human existence. A sign of things to come was the international conference “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth,” held at Princeton in 1955 and published in book form under the same title the following year. However, questions and warnings about natural resources were recurring features in the postwar debate, at times bearing traces of neo-Malthusianism.4

3

Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind: The Anthropocene,” Nature 415 (2002): 23. Björn–Ola Linnér, The Return of Malthus: Environmentalism and Post-War Population-Resource Crisis (Isle of Harris: White Horse, 2003). 4

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This first phase of environmental policy was also characterized by the fact that the environment announced itself as a question sui generis. This status was confirmed through the establishment of new ministries and departments. Environmental Protection Agencies were established in some countries in the 1960s – both Sweden and the U S A started out early, in 1967 – and others followed. Several agencies soon proved themselves aggressive actors willing to challenge municipalities and businesses. The term ‘environmental policy’ itself emerged roughly simultaneously, even if the more restrictive term ‘conservation policy’ still tagged along for a while. Initially, the older form of conservation – national parks, coastline preservation, landscape protection – found itself on the periphery of environmental concerns, but eventually moved closer to the centre; or, rather, the concept of environmentalism expanded. Legislation and the regulation of effect-levels were important instruments. The perspective was national, but also very local. It was a policy designed for municipal sewerage plants, beaches, industrial emissions. Environmental protection was territorially grounded. In the late-1980s, environmental policy entered a new phase, urged on by the momentum of increasingly vocal public opinion. Emphasis shifted from regulation to cooperation. The effect of society on the environment would not primarily be restricted to drawing up rules, but would, rather, turn its attention to technical development and efficiency. The password was ‘ecological modernization’, a term that gained currency with the publication of Maarten Hajer’s book The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process (1995). The environment was linked to economic development and thereby entered the ‘B-list’ of politics, though failing to make the ‘A-list’: defence, economics, employment, welfare. Another key word was ‘accountability’. The results of environmental policy were to be registered in the form of indicators, and the conflict between economic growth and the environment was toned down. Significant components of the intellectual and political framework of this development were put in place during the 1980s by the Brundtland Commission’s work, under the rubric of ‘sustainable development’.5 Brundtland’s move globalized the agenda of environmental policy and brought ecological questions closer to the spheres of diplomacy and security. Yet, to all intents and purposes, the project of ecological modernization remained national, even 5

World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1987).

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though it was attempted in numerous countries, to the accompaniment of increasingly grandiose international summits. Ecological modernization continues with full force and is being applied in an increasing number of countries. Still, it seems obvious that the most lofty hopes invested in it will hardly be realized. The ecological footprint continues to grow, although perhaps more serious in the long term is the fact that the utopian energy which fuelled the vision of increased welfare in an increasingly improved environment seems no longer in evidence. Science and politics are fighting an unequal battle against the billions and billions of daily decisions made with negative consequences for the planet. Whether this war will end in a treaty with a truly long-term perspective no one knows; what we do know is that it is much more difficult than we understood more than a decade ago, when it was first declared. Thus, as the most creative wave of ecological modernization more or less ebbs away, we are poised for a new, gigantic step in the evolution of environmental policy. It will be a policy for confronting the global nature of the ecological footprint, one that makes new demands on international political cooperation. It will entail a far more profound integration of environmental questions into other political fields, and touching on security, liberty, and welfare throughout the world. It will also be a policy for the preservation and securing of the environment that touches and engages people. Thus the comprehensive and common security we seek requires deepened democracy. It is this ‘third era of environmental policy’, its current status and some of its possible future forms and elements, that this essay will now address. 3.

What should characterize a new phase of environmental policy such as this? And what are the conditions under which it can take shape? These questions are huge and naturally impossible to cover comprehensively in a brief essay. One way to make them more manageable is to connect the various phases of environmental policy to different knowledge regimes. By this I mean the scientific displine(s) and scientifically founded assumptions that exercise a hegemonic influence on the policy pursued. The term ‘knowledge regime’ has begun to spread, almost like an expansion of the term ‘knowledge interest’, and as a cousin to the term ‘information society’. In the former, there is a built-in power dimension which is a central

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component of the modern knowledge project.6 This can be national, dealing with how the political agenda of a particular country is rooted in different scientifically informed models of thought, as has been convincingly argued in Norway, for example.7 But the power dimension can also be global and is then bound to implications within modern Western science and its institutions. This is how the concept is applied in the document prepared by the African nations for the international summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg in 2002: “The existing technologies and knowledge regimes must be changed.”8 Such knowledge regimes have displayed regional and national differences, but on the highest level of generalization certain patterns nevertheless emerge. In the first phase, the natural sciences dominated, often in combination with physical geography, which reflected the essentially territorial framing of environmental policy. Ecology set the tone, especially the ‘old’ ecology, which taught that nature was a system which in its essence was in balance, en route to a so-called ‘climax state’. Nature was beautiful and harmonic – until Industrial Man destroyed it. After the Second World War, and during the grim ideological climate of the Cold War, it was not difficult to accept this idea. Stable and ingenious Mother Nature stood in bold contrast to mankind’s world of violence, decay, nuclear arms races, and economic competition. On such an understanding, man was a disturbance and nature needed protection. This is how the message, drastically summarized, could be interpreted in ecological science, which, with its roots in the work of the Dane Eugen Warming and the American Frederic Clements at the beginning of the twentieth century, found its orthodox form, via Arthur Tansley and Aldo Leopold, in the classic textbook by the brothers Eugene P. and Howard T. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, whose first edition was published in 1953 and which in time was translated into over twenty different languages. That book, along with Eugene Odum’s Ecology (1963), repeated again and again how 6

Sheila Jasanoff, “Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society,” in States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order, ed. Sheila Jasanoff (London: Routledge, 2004): 13-45. 7 Rune Slagstad, “Shifting Knowledge Regimes: The Metamorphosis of Norwegian Reformism,” Thesis Eleven 77 (May 2004): 65–83. 8 Report on the African Civil Society Forum, Nairobi, Kenya on the 15th to 16th October 2001: An African Civil Society Position, http://www.worldsummit2002.org /texts/AfricanCivilSocietyForumOct1516.rtf

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complicated and sensitive nature’s relationships were. The sum of the whole is greater than its parts. It is “the preservation of the ecosystem” which is truly interesting, not the protection of individual species. Words like these were gospel in the early days of environmental policy.9 The next step, the phase of ecological modernization, opened an economic perspective. The economy already exercised an enormous influence on different areas of politics; now it expanded to include the environment. One can say that this was the period of environmental policy’s mainstreaming. Inspiration and concepts were borrowed from political economy, business economics, and management theory, the last of which was a sphere whose significance grew enormously during the 1980s. By speaking about the environment in accounting terms – ‘green national accounts’ – and by using the terminology of the production sphere – ‘quality’, ‘standards’, ‘certification’ – the environment could be linked to the type of incentives and measures of success (and these words were indeed used) that had long been common in the business world. This breakthrough was particularly notable in the fastgrowing Swedish Society for the Protection of Nature, which both popularized and legitimized the use of economic terminology and the new, green individualism; its book Handla miljövänligt! (Shop ecologically!) of 1988 became a best-seller.10 In this way, a number of the ideological complications concerning regulation (socialism) and conservation (conservatism) could be neutralized and ever-freer free-market ideas incorporated into the mainstream of environmental policy. The picture becomes more complicated in the third phase of environmental policy. Scientific and economic perspectives have not lost their significance. At the same time, it is apparent that a new scientific vision is responsible for innumerable ideas and concepts which, during the first decade of the twentyfirst century, have successively been transformed into environmental policy. This includes concepts from the social sciences and international diplomacy such as ‘threat’, ‘risk’, and ‘security’. But it in no way means a shift toward hegemony of the social sciences.

9

Eugene Odum, Ecology (New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963). Jonas Anshelm, Det vilda, det vackra och det ekologiskt hållbara: om opinionsbildningen i Svenska naturskyddsföreningens tidskrift Sveriges Natur 1943–2002 (Umeå: Skrifter från forskningsprogrammet Landskapet som arena 8; Umeå Universitet, 2004): 145. 10

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As long as conservation, later environmental, policy has existed, the natural sciences, at least some of them, have been cited in support of its measures. Scientists stood at the forefront of the older conservationism and have had a significant, if perhaps more indirect, role in the environmental movement of recent decades. The natural sciences have also supplied most of the expertise drawn on by environmental authorities. The pattern repeats itself in numerous countries. For example, the Norwegian parliament determined that Norwegian environmental policy should be based on scientific knowledge. Environmental policy, perhaps more than any other kind of policy, has become science-based. It may even, in a practice-oriented and ‘performative’ analysis, be stated that nature is today defined in terms of environmental policy and interpreted differentially via the categories created by the policy’s own minimum requirements, emission goals, and ‘sensitive’ areas. In this way, the ‘technologies’ of environmental policy, emanating from active intercourse with the results and advocates of the natural sciences, in effect created the episteme of the nature/natural environment that was current in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Society’s nature is a political product.11 The technology of environmental policy blossomed in the 1960s and for several decades to come. In Sweden, the Environmental Protection Board was probably its foremost organizational expression, hitherto far too scantily studied from this perspective. A pattern of far greater complexity and increased tensions is now emerging. Scientific knowledge can no longer easily be used to support demands for the protection of individual species, regions, or even entire ecosystems. While a study of the application of Norwegian environmental policy showed that it functioned performatively and in practice constructed the view of nature that had been its political object, it also showed how hard it is to translate scientific ‘facts’ into politically realizable decisions.12 Environmental policy as an assumedly value-free technology is nowadays a project burdened with an 11

Kristin Asdal, “The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-Constructivist Challenge to Environmental History,” History and Theory 42 (December 2003): 60–74; Andrew Barry, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (London: Athlone, 2001). 12 Kristin Asdal, “Politikkens teknologier: Produksjon av regjerlig natur” (dissertation, University of Oslo, 2004).

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increasing number of anomalies and problems of actualization. Research results, in themselves often uncertain, must be combined with social research and are inevitably confronted with ethical questions and conflicts of interest. Rarely is a single scientific standpoint raised above every other opinion; when it is, it risks being rendered trivial. Even in those cases where the scientific front is more or less unbreached, as is increasingly the case with the climate issue,13 there is as a rule no consensus about the measures to be taken.14 Are there any other reasons for defending a certain condition in the environment other than that it is something originary, something that natural scientists recommend we protect, or something that the technologies of environmental policy have brought about, thereby acquiring political status? Actually, there are already answers to be found in the past, of which Swedish environmental history provides some excellent examples. As the historian Lars J. Lundgren has shown in a number of studies, one can distinguish two traditions in early-twentieth-century Swedish conservationism. One he calls ‘the green line’ (green for the earth and its flora). The question asked by green conservationism was ‘Where?’ – Where was nature most valuable? The green line concentrated on the conservation of natural areas, the creation of wilderness preserves, and the preservation of species. It was also more patriotic and, it might be added, enjoyed the support of nationalist values.15 The other tradition, ‘the blue line’ (blue for air and water) asked the question ‘How?’ It was more interested in production processes and their consequences for the air and the water, health and hygiene. Sewage pipes and smoke-stacks were regulated, industry was made more effective, and conditions in the workplace were improved.16 Both of these traditions thrived in the environmental debate of the latetwentieth century. At the beginning, the patriotism of the green line had the advantage. But we now see that the greatest victories for environmental 13

Sverker Sörlin, “The Global Warming That Did Not Happen: Historicizing Glaciology and Climate Change,” in Nature’s End: History and Environment History, ed. Sverker Sörlin & Paul Warde (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 93–114. 14 Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2009). 15 Sverker Sörlin, “Monument and Memory: Landscape Imagery and the Articulation of Territory,” Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 2 (1998): 269–79. 16 Lars J. Lundgren, “Sveriges gröna historia,” in Människa och miljö: Om ekologi, ekonomi och politik, ed. Bert Bolin & Hans Strandberg (Stockholm: Tiden, 1995).

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questions have actually been won by the blue line. Restrictions on industrial emissions and improvement in the quality of air and water have indeed been achieved, despite the fact that the economy and material turnover in society have grown. The paradigm of ecological modernization fitted the blue line perfectly. The concept of sustainable development contains the possibility of combining an improvement in the quality of the environment with increased welfare, especially in developing nations. Nor can critics of environmental protection have any objections to this type of environmental improvement. The third phase of environmental policy will fail to be effective if the green line is not given a greater role. At the same time, it cannot be supported by a nationalist ethos as before. Herein lies the challenge. The green line has not enjoyed the same straightforward road to success and has been easier to criticize, which is evident in the debate of the last few years. The old era’s national, conservative ethical norms have been undermined by the successes of the welfare state, and, in the face of continued prosperity, green questions, which are not so easily connected to matters of public health, have been forced to retreat. It has not been easy to exempt nature from economic activities; protected acreage in the Swedish forestry industry, for example, is relatively low on any international agenda. It has been perceived as economically risky; valuable natural resources might be discovered on preserved land which cannot then be put to use. If the area lies on private land, the landowner must be compensated. And, perhaps most importantly, despite the successive development of conservationism – from the law of 1909 through the laws of 1952 and 1964 and the national physical planning of the 1970s to the planning and construction laws, natural resources law, and cultural environment legislation of the 1980s – norms for what is to be preserved and protected have remained diffuse.17 The landscape has been turned into a negotiable mosaic of areas, so that each and every one of these interests may be expressed in a designated zone. These values also appear as objective features of nature, which can be ‘identified’ and ‘discovered’ by scientific specialists. The problem of evaluation has thus been transformed into a “knowledge problem,” writes the political scientist Johan Hedrén in his analysis of the structure and management of con17

Bosse Sundin & Sverker Sörlin, ”Landskapets värdefrågor: kring miljö- och kulturmiljövård som historiskt problemfält,” in Miljön och det förflutna: Landskap, minnen, värden, ed. Richard Pettersson & Sverker Sörlin (Skrifter vol. 22; Umeå: Department of History of Science and Ideas, Umeå University, 1998): 3–19.

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servation legislation, which is surrounded by an aura of pseudo-scientific rhetoric and ritual.18 However, in the final analysis it is naturally a question about something which people have agreed is worth protecting, e.g., forest, meadowland, or breathtaking mountain ranges. There is no single, universally recognized motive for why certain areas are to be protected and others not, something that the above-mentioned critique also rather handily demonstrates. In practice, things are not actually carried out in the manner dictated by law. Natural values and cultural environments are not merely ‘discovered’. A lot has gone on before a county administration recommends an object for protection: i.e. that it be granted a different formal status. The object has most likely already achieved a greater status than its surroundings, a status which it has gained by entirely different means. It would be remarkable if that fact did not influence legislation, even if we so far lack the research necessary to demonstrate how exactly it is done. However, we do know some things. Recent findings indicate that status in a landscape is ascribed to areas and localities via a cultural process I have in a previous work termed ‘the articulation of values’. We may also, to borrow a term from the sacred realm, speak of ‘canonization’.19 Certain signs over the past few years suggest that a change in practice may be on its way. 5.

Not long ago, environmental policy was all about finding technical and organizational solutions to ‘the problem of the environment’. But what existed beyond these solutions? Had anyone conceived of an environmental policy without environmental problems? Probably not. In his dissertation on the development of environmental policy up to the early 1990s, Johan Hedrén has shown that this policy has essentially been pursued under what he calls “the criteria of technological policy.” This means that the vocabulary is dominated by technical metaphors, that scientific use of knowledge dominates, that values are ‘scientized’ and subordinated to conventional economic evaluative

18

Johan Hedrén, Miljöpolitikens natur (Linköping Studies in Arts and Science 110; Linköping University, 1994): 71–74. 19 Sverker Sörlin, “Monument and Memory”; Henrik Ernstson & Sverker Sörlin, “Weaving Protective Stories: Connective Practices to Articulate Holistic Values in Stockholm National Urban Park,” Environment & Planning A, 41.6 (2009): 1460–79.

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norms, and that a high degree of conformity reigns: i.e. the parties’ agendas resremble each other with regard to environmental policy more than is the case in other matters. That this is not only true for Sweden has been confirmed by recent post-constructivist analyses conducted in Norway.20 Until a culture of experts and bureaucrats filled this political vacuum, the environment did not have much of a place in politics. These experts have been knowledgeable, well-intentioned, useful, but not really political. However, this concerned primarily what I have called the first phase of environmental policy. Already during the period of ecological modernization, bureaucratic dominance was being challenged by new groups of specialists, and this tendency has merely persisted into the present. The circle of individuals who can make responsible, legitimate, and relevant statements about environmental policy has grown appreciably, which in itself is an indication of the complexity of the field. Environmentalism has undergone a process of differentiation, so that today there are a number of parallel professional cultures – interestingly enough, with connections to various ministries and authorities. The fifteen Swedish “environmental quality goals” established by the government can, in and of themselves, be said to represent a “micro-professional culture.”21 The need for a comprehensive way of thinking is acute. In order to function in the third phase of environmental policy, this new mind-set must involve a deeper understanding of democracy and must integrate people and societies all over the planet into itself. Fortunately, there is no lack of material upon which to base it. 6.

One can pursue a simple legal argument to justify the premise that man ought to have the right not only to live reasonably safely in as sound an environment as possible, but ought also to have the right to live a normal life without harming the environment and thereby other individuals.22 However, a rich personal and social life, which should be the ultimate goal of a civilized society, 20

Johan Hedrén, Miljöpolitikens natur, 190–91, and Kristin Asdal, Politikkens teknologier. 21 Government Bill 1997/98:145, Svenska miljömål: Miljöpolitik för ett hållbart Sverige (Stockholm). 22 Sverker Sörlin, “Transnational Scientific Interest,” in Research for Development: S A R E C 20 Years, ed. Karin von Schleebrügge (Stockholm: S A R E C , 1995): 49–63. See also Human Rights Dialogue 11 (2004), a theme issue on “Environmental Rights.”

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implies – particularly with the legitimate variety of desires characteristic of a free and open society in mind – a large and differentiated supply of products and services and a need for freedom of movement. All of this requires an environmental space. If this environmental space is large, citizens might be burdened not only with a bad conscience but also with what objectively can be called a personal environmental debt. Simply by living in our type of society, an individual in the wealthy part of the world would be forced to claim an environmental space which is many times the size of what is required by the average person in one of the nations of the Third World. Such rights might be expressed as follows: A citizen has the right to a decent standard of living (a concept already defined) without taking up more than a certain, limited environmental space (which can be determined according to the size of the ecological footprint or energy equivalents or in some other manner). Even a standard of living which is more than decent can, of course be maintained – but at the price of a limited environmental space. In other words, the goal is to reduce the size of the environmental space, but with responsibility shifted from the individual to society: i.e. from the market to politics. If the third phase of environmental policy were to be characterized by the ideas of citizenship, there might emerge a reinforced connection between environmental policy and the politics of global justice as a positive side-effect. Given that environmental space is limited (if not, then there would hardly be any need for environmental policy), one can speak of the distribution of this space. It hardly seems reasonable, at least to me, to demand of the poor countries that they forgo environmental space for the benefit of the further expansion of environmental influence among the rich nations of the world. An environmental policy which manages to reduce the average environmental space claimed by a wealthy country must therefore be a contribution to providing opportunities for growth in less fortunate countries. Politically, there ought to be a vast difference between trying to achieve a levelling out of environmental influence by appealing to the feelings of global solidarity of national citizens (a solidarity which in terms of distribution has never exceeded one percent, not even as a goal) and trying to achieve it by satisfying the goals of public environmental rights. Increasing the resource efficiency of a national economy is something to which the public might reasonably object. Responsibility ends up where it belongs: namely, in the hands

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of the politicians in the country where the results of the policy are accounted for. This last aspect adds yet another dimension to future environmental policy concerning international cooperation – partnership for the environment. Perhaps the most serious threat to the global environment in the long term would be a large-scale modernization of the developing countries using outdated or environmentally unsound technology. Naturally we want to see rapid economic growth in these countries, but it ought to be a common concern to see that this occurs with the aid of ‘green’ technology, in some cases the most advanced technologies, in others local, small-scale technology. Regardless, it would undoubtedly be beneficial to the environment that such technologies replace the ‘grey’ and ‘black’ technologies of the past. In order to achieve this, a change in research and educational priorities is required, and this demands that universities in both the North and the South be involved. 7.

The task of environmental policy ought to be to develop better forms of applying the values created through what I have already called social articulation. This means giving these values a language and a voice, in parity with (perhaps even in competition with) the universal value norms which economic language already employs with such great success. It does not necessarily mean that one ought to dress up these other values in economic language, such as ‘a price on the environment’, even if these can also be meaningful. The essential, and difficult, task is, rather, to allow these values to be expressed in numerous registers in order to achieve as multi-faceted a base for comparison as possible. Values differ, depending on who one is, where one stands, and when one speaks. Developing these voices and listening to them is a political task. The importance of the multiplicity of voices is also apparent in the fascinating new literature populating the field. From the same biological (chaos ecology), philosophical (social constructivism, ethical relativism), and socialscientific (practice and performative studies) points of departure which functioned as platforms for criticism against environmental protection and preservation, there now emerge completely different conclusions. One of them has been formulated by William Adams, a geographer at Cambridge University.

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Adams, in Wasting the Rain (1992), studied how people in Africa administer their water resources. One observation he made was that agriculture was good for the environment. The use of precipitation in irrigation and tillage resulted in a good standard of living while maintaining ecological diversity. When society achieved this task the resources were put to good use. Other researchers have reached the same conclusions from empirical evidence gathered in Africa.23 Adams also formulated ideas about how ecologically based development could be realized in Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in the Third World (1990). Wildlife preserves of the kind created by colonists, especially in Africa, prove to be obstacles to a balanced development in which people can participate. At the same time, Adams studied rural development and conservation policy in Great Britain; Nature’s Place: Conservation Sites and Countryside Change (1986) was an early foray. Adams proved that, throughout the twentieth century, wildlife preservation policy had advanced its position. For a long time in Great Britain, the role of the government was modest and many local and regional organizations were established; but so was the National Trust. Ecological ideas received heightened status through the work of Arthur Tansley, among others. After the Second World War, the government took planning more resolutely in hand, and the number of national parks and sanctuaries increased. But in precisely the same period that wildlife preserve policy was enjoying success, nature deteriorated sharply. Biological diversity was lost, sensitive environments were sacrificed. And most of all, the faith of the general public in environmental protection was undermined, not least because local interests were affected when new sanctuaries were established. Not even these worked; they were too small to avoid being affected. Adams understands that there is no point in calling for more sanctuaries. Instead, interweaving his lines of research, he has formulated an idea that is as simple as it is revolutionary: let us use nature more, so that we will take better care of it. Preserving nature is not about looking backward and clinging to the past. On the contrary, preservation is about looking forward. The task is to formulate “the nature of the future” and then try to make it happen. Adams calls this “creative conservation.” He develops his vision of future landscape practice mainly in his book Future Nature: A Vision for Conserva23

Mary Tiffen, Michael Mortimore & Francis Gichuki, More People, Less Erosion: Environmental Recovery in Kenya (Chichester: Wiley, 1994).

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tion (1996). One fundamental idea in this book is that nature is everywhere. It does not begin somewhere ‘out there’ and stop short when it gets ‘here’. It is our world. Thus, taking responsibility for nature implies a much more comprehensive duty than the proponents of conservation ever realized. Adams would also like to see a greater natural presence in the places where people today live; in cities, neighbourhoods, schools, and the workplace. While not actually citing Thoreau – “In wildness is the preservation of the world” – he basically cherishes the same perception. Nature is necessary both because it is a part of us and because it is different from us – an inexhaustible source of wonder. Adams’s ideas are about nature, but they are social rather than ecological. He formulates a nature for mankind. This message was already evident in Future Nature, but, if anything, his empathy for mankind has increased in later books such as the anthology Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Postcolonial Era (2003) and in Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation (2004). The latter is nothing less than a history of global conservation, with an emphasis on mammals and big game. Conservation, wildlife sanctuaries, and big-game hunting were part of colonialism. The native population was used as trackers and bearers. They were forbidden to hunt in sanctuaries like the Kruger National Park in South Africa. It is understandable that the new, independent nations should have displayed an ambivalent attitude toward the natural monuments of their old oppressors. Conservationism must emerge from the shadows of colonialism. The way forward is the same for both the Third World and Great Britain. In fact, the people in developing countries have even more to gain if the entire world can formulate a less dualistic and more integrated view of nature and society. Adams calls this a “society with nature.” In Against Extinction, he asks whether the effort to preserve biological diversity can be harmonized with human rights and the struggle against poverty. Normally these would be seen as antithetical, but Adams proves that they are actually dependent on each another. Biological diversity and climate stability are more necessary to people in developing countries, where both ecology and the economy will be harder hit by global environmental disruptions. A destabilized nature will particularly circumscribe living conditions for the poorest of the poor. Therefore, it is in their best interests that a new and better mode of conservation be developed. |

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I have used William Adams as an example – one of the most interesting in my opinion – of a significant tendency in the search for better ways to organize the administration of landscapes and natural resources in developing countries. Others have also made important contributions, including the American political scientist Elinor Ostrom. Her theory of the administration of “common-pool resources” has demonstrated that the economic doctrine of “the tragedy of the commons,” promulgated in a famous 1968 article by Garrett Hardin in Science, should not be universally applied.24 Ostrom’s theory rests on a sounder empirical base than the theories of social action which dominated the postwar period. Not only Hardin but also the influential game theorists placed individual utilitarian maximization at odds with the collective, and regularly drew pessimistic, if not hopeless, conclusions. One of the best-known of these theories, presented in Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action (1965), proposed that collective action was empirically rare and theoretically unlikely compared with the ‘free-rider problem’. As a rule, these theories were based on a view of the active individual which was more or less taken from neoclassical (or simply classical) economic doctrine. The pessimistic view of reasonable collective action engendered by these theories garnered great political credence and probably contributed to the fondness for regulation and centralism which characterized the first phase of environmental policy. Since the 1970s, extensive empirical research has shown that these theories of collective action were built on sand. It also showed that a number of forms for the creative administration of resources already existed in different parts of the world; Ostrom and her successors show that they can be developed further. Others have concurred with these hypotheses from postmodern and constructivist perspectives.25

24

Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 1990); Elinor Ostrom, Roy Gardner & James Walker, Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1994); Protecting the Commons: A Framework for Resource Management in the Americas, ed. Joanna Burger, Richar B. Norgaard, Elinor Ostrom, David Policansky & Bernard D. Goldstein (Washington D C : Island, 2001). 25 Edella Schlager, “Common-Pool Resource Theory” (August 2000), in Environmental Governance Reconsidered: Challenges, Choices, and Opportunities, ed. Robert

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9.

The ways of thinking about mankind and the environment presented in the preceding pages comprise but a small selection from an expanding portfolio of research-based political ideas. Central government and regulation, which characterized the first phase, or market-mimicking initiatives, which burgeoned during the second, are beginning to be complemented by mediation, actor participation, public panels, deliberative democracy, user influence, selfadministration, and a number of other instruments. Many of these come from other policy domains or have been inspired by traditional societies. Not only do these amount to new ways of approaching environmental and conservation policy in a global context; through their emphasis on public involvement, the struggle against poverty, and conflict resolution, they also have the potential to contribute to thinking about global security. Matters of global security have been given a new, eerie significance since September 11, 2001. No one can doubt any longer that conflicts which affect distant, poor areas of the world can infringe on the daily life of prosperous Western nations in a very concrete manner – and vice-versa. We have finally arrived at that very awful and very wonderful world Charles Darwin captured in that profoundly prophetic statement in his “Transmutation notebook” (c.1838): “we may be all netted together.”26 Even if recent events also have religious overtones, discussion of the ‘war on terror’ and the maintenance of global security will eventually place questions of poverty and development high on the international agenda – not that this would be the first time, but because a new impetus has emerged.27 Before this happens, we must ask ourselves: are we really combating terrorism with all possible means? Are we really pulling up the forces of evil by their very roots? Much has been done, most of it counterproductive; much more remains to be done. The window of opportunity which the events of 9/11 opened has so far not been used in a way that raised questions of justice and sustainability. F. Durant, Daniel J. Fiorino & Rosemary O’Leary (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 2004): 145–76. 26 Charles Darwin, Notebook B: [Transmutation of species (1837–1838)]. CULDAR121, transcribed by Kees Rookmaaker (Darwin Online, http://darwin-online .org.uk/): 232. 27 Gareth Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate (London: Profile, 2004).

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The ‘war’ – an unfortunate term – that was declared against terrorism has become a necessity partly because the once-declared war on poverty was a failure. The wealthy world underestimated the need for common security. Large regions have not been sufficiently integrated economically. In their isolation, premodern, antidemocratic ideas have gained a foothold, just as an isolated Soviet Union could only be modernized with colossal losses of human and ecological life after decades of heightened global tension. One point of departure can be found in the security policy thoughts expressed in the so-called ‘North–South dialogue’. In the report of the U N Palme Commission, Common Security: A Blueprint for Survival (1982), the title phrase (actually first formulated in the 1970s) was given pride of place. The subsequent Brandt and Nyerere Commissions continued to develop this doctrine, as did the Brundtland Commission of 1987. However, discussions after the Rio summit of 1992 have successively distanced themselves from the original core of this global thinking: namely, welfare and security for all nations, regardless of their level of prosperity. While the Brundtland and Rio meetings indeed united environmental and economic growth via the concept of ‘sustainable development’, growth and the environment were never related clearly enough to security. It is now once more clear, and clearer than twenty years ago, that the environment and security are branches of the same tree.28 These must be dealt with in the framework for a common political strategy which includes the raising of people’s welfare throughout the world at the same time as the values and productive elements of the environment – primarily the so-called ‘ecosystem services’, a guarantee for long-term welfare – are maintained. The number of poor people is increasing rather than decreasing in many parts of the world, and poverty, due to the acute pressure it puts on local resources and biological diversity, is in itself a major threat to the environment.29 The connection between development and the environment has received an established status in theoretical discussions of security. More recent literature

28

Bas de Gaay Fortman, “Environmental Security Revisited: A Civilisational Perspective,” in Sharing the Planet: Population – Consumption – Species, ed. Bob van der Zwaan & Arthur Petersen (Delft: Eburon, 2003): 186–205. 29 Jack M. Hollander, The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, not Affluence, is the Environment’s Number One Enemy (Berkeley: U of California P , 2003).

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in the field of international relations speaks of ‘comprehensive security’.30 However, its practical realization is a different matter altogether, and traditional, predominantly military security thought has to a great degree also survived the end of the Cold War. Internal scientific discussion has been conducted in diverse disciplines, and politically these matters have been dealt with by various ministries (primarily defence, trade, the environment, external affairs, and education). International environmental diplomacy has doubtless made significant advances and there are now nearly two hundred agreements, some soft, others harder, some binding, others voluntary.31 But even a list of the ten most successful ‘international environmental regimes’ reveals that this is global environmental policy work done between states and with a minimum of public participation, from the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling of 1946 and the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 via the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer of 1985 and the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992) to the Convention to Combat Desertification (1994) and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and its compromised follow-ups negotiated in Bali 2007 and Copenhagen 2009. The same regimes constitute necessary and welcome advances and they have been established for the sake of the citizens of the world. But at the same time, they are manifestations of a form of politics which in the global arena is reminiscent of the “technological form of politics” which, as stated above, reigned in national landscape policy. And even if these regimes have indirect significance for welfare and security, it is clear that they restrict themselves to dealing with questions of resources and the environment. This distribution of labour, both scientifically and politically, has most likely contributed to the fact that ‘sustainable development’ has never been directed toward the struggle against poverty and construction of security, as was originally intended. In practice, sustainable development has had political support and appreciable public participation in only some of the prosperous countries, not least the Northern European welfare democracies with a lively engagement in Agenda 21. In the vast majority of countries, the results have been negligible 30

Globalism and the New Regionalism, vol. 1, ed. Björn Hettne, Andreas Inotai & Osvaldo Sunkel (London: Macmillan, 2000). 31 Gary C. Bryner, “Global Interdependence,” in Environmental Governance Reconsidered: Challenges, Choices, and Opportunities, ed. Robert F. Durant, Daniel J. Fiorino & Rosemary O’Leary (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 2004): 69–104.

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and in those countries who would benefit mostly from the measures, there is hardly any corresponding development at all. The main idea of the Palme Commission, integrating the world economy in a more equitable manner in a new, postcolonial situation and laying the foundation for global stability, has been largely absent from the itinerary. A further reason for actualizing a policy with this goal is that it could provide the U S A with a defensible motive for approaching the global environmental mainstream anew, after the Kyoto debacle. Combining questions of poverty, the environment, and global security into a global security complex would divulge the undeniable long-term relationship between the U S A ’s own security interests and the logic of global welfare and environmental policy. A prime task is to re-establish the credibility of the concept of ‘sustainable development’. If development is a prerequisite of economic growth, which no one (i.e. no government) officially denies, then it must be possible to show in a credible manner that growth can be made sustainable (so-called ‘decoupling’). However, the current state of knowledge is that this connection does not exist. Growth is not as negative for the environment as it was before and the ecologically parsimonious service industry’s share of the economy is on the increase. Still, on the whole, the strain on the environment is increasing and, for the moment, there is nothing to indicate that its relationship to growth will even begin to cease. This is an urgent warning to the prosperous countries of the world and a viewpoint often ignored in the first Rio decade. Many of the most difficult problems are political and require democracy and functioning civic institutions. The sometimes very active ‘civic environmentalism’, which has been significant in many industrialized nations – Love Canal 1970, the tree-battles of Kungsträdgården in Stockholm in 1971, the Alta River Valley conflict in northern Norway in 1980–81, etc., in a long and ongoing tradition – has fewer opportunities for succeeding in developing countries, for the simple reason that civic structures there are flimsy.32 Protests against exploitation easily turn to criminality or terror, with pipelines, mines, and the felling of the rainforests appearing as symbols of destructive presences. Thus, creating civic structures emerges as a matter of the first priority, and though this is naturally a matter for the developing nations themselves, aid and international cooperation can mean a great deal. 32

John DeWitt, “Civic Environmentalism,” in Environmental Governance Reconsidered: Challenges, Choices, and Opportunities, ed. Robert F. Durant, Daniel J. Fiorino & Rosemary O’Leary (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 2004): 219–54.

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10.

This discussion of the conditions of environmental policy shows that the history of this field has by no means come to an end. On the contrary, there is a vitality in research and debate which testifies to the youth of environmental policy, and therewith its malleability. The variety of scientific explanations, democratic methods, and political measures is almost infinite. It is a policy area that is developing rapidly and that in all likelihood will continue to do so. Limitations, alliances, maybe even detachments, might be appropriate. However, a pattern can be discerned in this burgeoning diversity: Environmental policy can no longer be unilaterally legitimized by the natural sciences. Research on the strain on the environment, critical thresholds, supporting capacity, resilience, biological diversity, and many other concepts which have been used to legitimize regulation and other measures still remains essential. Their information can sometimes be decisive for how we choose to perceive the use of a chemical, the ventilation of a workplace, or the protection of a biotope. It is of the utmost importance that we continue to gain access to the best possible scientific knowledge available. And it is fundamental that we develop an understanding of what science is and what it can do. Political ideology, writes Bruno Latour, is about dethroning the interpretative monopoly of Science, and instead placing sciences, in plural and with a small ‘s’, at the centre of democratic discourse.33 There might even be a place for the humanities here, and for the creative arts. The time when the discoveries of science could dominate the environmental agenda has most likely passed. Around the hard core of science, a zone in which a broad social discussion must take place is growing. This discussion thrives when conducted on firm, objective grounds, but it must in every essential way be ethical and built upon the equal worth of all participants. In other words, it must be democratic. It will make environmental policy resemble other areas of politics, at the same time as it will remain unique in its complexity. A democratic conversation on the future of the planet has not yet been initiated, but its contours can be discerned. It is a task of historic proportions. The most profound lesson of research in environmental history may simply be that nothing is decided in advance. Mankind and its surroundings are deeply and eternally bound to one another. The road that brought us here has placed 33

Bruno Latour, Politiques de la nature (Paris: La Découverte, 2003).

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limits on our freedom of action. Borrowing a term coined by the social historian Charles Tilly, we can speak of ‘path-dependency’: “Social processes are path-dependent. That is why history matters.”34 And environmental processes are essentially social processes. It is in society that we perform those acts which influence our surroundings. It is in society that we formulate and perform the interplay which creates the environmental conditions of the future. In this sense, mankind is always co-creator. Path-dependency is the governing factor, but politics is about the tension between freedom and necessity, about what individuals and institutions can do together. The task of environmental policy is to set its sights on the future with respect for our dependency on the past. At every single point in history, we have the opportunity to act. Our human predicament resides in finding ourselves in the moment between path-dependency and freedom. Environmental policy is thus both about setting realistic limits and about formulating the ideals of freedom. It requires that nature be seen not as mankind’s opposite but, rather, as a unique and singular component of society that it is our destiny to form. Half a century ago, Roland Barthes put it thus: This myth of the ‘human condition’ rests on a very old mystification, which always consists in placing Nature at the bottom of History. Any classic humanism postulates that in scratching the history of men a little, the relativity of their institutions or the superficial diversity of their skins…, one very quickly reaches the solid rock of a universal human nature. Progressive humanism, on the contrary, must always remember to reverse the terms of this very old imposture, constantly to scour nature, its ‘laws’ and its ‘limits’ in order to discover History there, and at last to establish Nature itself as historical.35

“Progressive humanism must establish nature itself as historical.” These are still compelling words, yet to be brought to fruition. Nature is our creation. It ought to be part of democracy.

34

Charles Tilly, “Future History,” Theory and Society 17 (1988): 703–12. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers (Mythologies; 1957; London: Jonathan Cape, 1972): 101. 35

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WORKS CITED Adams, W.M. Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation (London: Earthscan, 2004). ——. Future Nature: A Vision for Conservation (London: Earthscan, 1996). ——. Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in the Third World (1999; London: Routledge, 2001). ——. Nature’s Place: Conservation Sites and Countryside Change (London: Earthscan, 1986). ——. Wasting the Rain: Rivers, People and Planning in Africa (London: Earthscan, 1992). ——, & Martin Mulligan, ed. Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Postcolonial Era (London: Earthscan, 2003). Anshelm, Jonas. Det vilda, det vackra och det ekologiskt hållbara: om opinionsbildningen i Svenska naturskyddsföreningens tidskrift Sveriges Natur 1943–2002 (Skrifter från forskningsprogrammet Landskapet som arena 8; Umeå: Umeå Universitet, 2004). Asdal, Kristin. Politikkens teknologier: Produksjon av regjerlig natur (dissertation, Oslo University, 2004). ——. “The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-Constructivist Challenge to Environmental History,” History and Theory 42 (December 2003): 60–74. Barry, Andrew. Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (London: Athlone, 2001). Barthes, Roland. Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972). Burger, Joanna, Richard B. Norgaard, Elinor Ostrom, David Policansky & Bernard D. Goldstein, ed. Protecting the Commons: A Framework for Resource Management in the Americas (Washington D C : Island, 2001). Bryner, Gary C. “Global Interdependence,” in Environmental Governance Reconsidered: Challenges, Choices, and Opportunities, ed. Robert F. Durant, Daniel J. Fiorino & Rosemary O’Leary (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 2004): 69–104. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962). Crutzen, Paul J. “Geology of Mankind: The Anthropocene,” Nature 415 (2002): 23. Darwin, Charles. Notebook B: [Transmutation of species (1837–1838)], CULDAR121, transcribed by Kees Rookmaaker (Darwin Online, http://darwin-online .org.uk/). De Witt, John. “Civic Environmentalism,” in Environmental Governance Reconsidered: Challenges, Choices, and Opportunities, ed. Robert F. Durant, Daniel J. Fiorino & Rosemary O’Leary (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 2004): 219–54. Ernstson, Henrik, & Sverker Sörlin. “Weaving Protective Stories: Connective Practices to Articulate Holistic Values in Stockholm National Urban Park,” Environment & Planning A, 41.6 (2009): 1460–79.

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de Gaay Fortman, Bas. “Environmental Security Revisited: A Civilisational Perspective,” in Sharing the Planet: Population – Consumption – Species, ed. Bob van der Zwaan & Arthur Petersen (Delft: Eburon, 2003): 186–205. Government Bill 1997/98: 145 Svenska miljömål: Miljöpolitik för ett hållbart Sverige (Stockholm). Hajer, Maarten A. The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Hedrén, Johan. Miljöpolitikens natur (Linköping Studies in Arts and Science 110; Linköping, 1994). Hettne, Björn, Andreas Inotai, & Osvaldo Sunkel, ed. Globalism and the New Regionalism, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 2000). Hollander, Jack M. The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment’s Number One Enemy (Berkeley: U of California P , 2003). Hulme, Mike. Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2009). Human Rights Dialogue 11.2 (2004). Theme issue on “Environmental Rights.” Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues [Palme Commission]. Common Security: A Blueprint for Survival (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). Jasanoff, Sheila. “Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society,” in States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order, ed. Sheila Jasanoff (London: Routledge, 2004): 13-45. Kennedy, Paul. Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 1993). Latour, Bruno. Politiques de la nature (Paris: La Découverte, 2003). Linnér, Björn–Ola. The Return of Malthus: Environmentalism and Post-War Population-Resource Crisis (Isle of Harris: White Horse, 2003). Lundgren, Lars J. “Sveriges gröna historia,” in Människa och miljö: Om ekologi, ekonomi och politik, ed. Bert Bolin & Hans Strandberg (Stockholm: Tiden, 1995). Odum, Eugene. Ecology (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963). Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1965). Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (New York: Cambridge U P , 1990). ——, Roy Gardner & James Walker. Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1994). Proposition 1997/98: 145. Svenska miljömål: miljöpolitik för ett hållbart Sverige. Report on the African Civil Society Forum, Nairobi, Kenya on the 15th to 16th October 2001: An African Civil Society Position (2001), http://www.worldsummit2002.org /texts/AfricanCivilSocietyForumOct1516.rtf Schlager, Edella. “Common-Pool Resource Theory” (August 2000), in Environmental Governance Reconsidered: Challenges, Choices, and Opportunities, ed. Robert F.

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Durant, Daniel J. Fiorino & Rosemary O’Leary (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 2004): 145–76. Slagstad, Rune. “Shifting Knowledge Regimes: The Metamorphosis of Norwegian Reformism,” Thesis Eleven 77 (May 2004) : 65–83. Stedman Jones, Gareth. An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate (London: Profile, 2004). Sundin, Bosse, & Sverker Sörlin. “Landskapets värdefrågor: kring miljö- och kulturmiljövård som historiskt problemfält,” in Miljön och det förflutna: Landskap, minnen, värden, ed. Richard Pettersson & Sverker Sörlin (Skrifter vol. 22; Department of History of Science and Ideas, Umeå University, 1998): 3–19. Sörlin, Sverker. “The Global Warming That Did Not Happen: Historicizing Glaciology and Climate Change,” in Nature’s End: History and the Environment, ed. Sverker Sörlin & Paul Warde (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 93–114. ——. “Monument and Memory: Landscape Imagery and the Articulation of Territory,” Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 2 (1998): 269–79. ——. “Transnational Scientific Interest,” in Research for Development: S A R E C 20 Years, ed. Karin von Schleebrügge (Stockholm: S A R E C , 1995): 49–63. Thomas, William L., Jr., & Carl O. Sauer, ed. Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth [International Symposium [organized by the] Wenner–Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research [held at the Princeton Inn, Princeton, New Jersey, 16–22 June 1955] (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1956). Tiffen, Mary, Michael Mortimore & Francis Gichuki. More People, Less Erosion: Environmental Recovery in Kenya (Chichester: Wiley, 1994). Tilly, Charles. “Future History,” Theory and Society 17 (1988): 703–12. Wackernagel, Mathis, & William Rees. Our Ecological Footprint (London: New Society, 1997). World Commission on Environment and Development. Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1987).

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Part IV  V OICING

THE

E XIT

The End of the “Earth” W ILLY B ACH

T

E A R T H S U M M I T in Johannesburg had come to a sad and apprehensive end. Many of us felt that the corporate world had dealt the death-blow to all hope of saving the planet’s environment and biodiversity; turned their backs on the world’s poorest people, and would soon plunge us all into war in Iraq. The Australian government had put in a shameless performance; Tony Blair had only attended so that he could promote the British firm that planned the privatization of drinking water in South Africa and Mozambique; and, embarrassingly or not, George W. Bush refused to attend the conference. Coming down from Kampala, Uganda, Johannesburg certainly gave us a lot to think about regarding sustainable societies and sustainable cities. In many ways it exemplifies neither of these concepts. McDonald’s, shopping malls, freeways, vast (former gold-mining) wastelands, a dilapidated and poor ghetto city-heart are all here. It sometimes looked and felt disconcertingly similar to an Australian city. There are also homeless people, beggars, including some unemployed whites, in the middle of the road, holding up signs with the words “labourer wants work.” There is still a two-speed economy and some sort of noblesse oblige toward black housemaids and gardeners on the part of middle- and upperincome persons of fairer complexion. Sandton and Randburg are examples of the B M W life-style, the smart address, the leafy streets, and walls topped with razor wire. Here there are no public phone boxes and no public transport. Those who serve the lunches, do the vacuum cleaning, and blow away the leaf litter have to walk out for considerable distances to reach the minibus taxis. HE 2002

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Yet there are gardeners who are blind and get paid for just being there, like a friend of the family. Alexandra is one of the most ‘notorious’ shantytowns of Johannesburg. There are people living there who are treated very badly by their fellow black Africans. There are many black people who still live in the darkest days of apartheid, by virtue of what smug exponents of economic rationalism like to call their ‘locational choice’ of residence. I don’t know who would choose to live in Diepkloof, but Soweto reminded me of low-income suburbs of Brisbane. Here the unemployment rate is around ninety-five percent, where many have not worked for more than a few days at a time for more than five years and where I am told that women are raped at the phenomenal rate of one every twenty-six seconds. South Africa holds the world record. Hillbrow is another inner-city low-income area we passed through, where a form of gangster capitalism is practised by Nigerian immigrants and many Jo’burgers fear to tread the streets.

Thursday 5 September As we prepared for the long return journey to Kampala, it was with mixed feelings that Rowan and I said farewell to our extremely generous and patient hosts in Johannesburg. John and his wife Karen (aka Kaz), their fourteenyear-old daughter Skye, and their nine-year-old son Shane, had put us up in their ‘spare’ (read: almost derelict) house for almost two weeks. Living with this white family in the heart of Rosettenville, eighty percent black with a strong Portuguese population, had given us a unique experience of Johannesburg, and especially its sprawl and its lack of public transport. Taking two hours to make a fifteen-minute journey requires a great deal of patience. The children speak with this all but incomprehensible clipped Afrikaans accent. We had learnt the hard way that a ‘black’ minibus does not always respond positively to ‘white’ hails. But we now knew the unique system of secret signals that tell the driver where you want to go. Rowan and I organized a farewell dinner the previous evening at the cosy little Portuguese restaurant in Rosettenville with blue/ white gingham kitchen curtains. It worked out very well and was a delicious seafood meal, full of wonderfully aromatic garlic. This was a token of our appreciation for our two very different white families, who had welcomed us to Johannesburg. They were getting into the Earth Summit spirit by welcoming radical advocates for the environment, peace, the poor and dispossessed. Perhaps they wanted to

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know what Australian aid workers really thought, even if our outlook was very different. Simon is a professional agricultural engineer who frequently drives his crisp new powder-blue Pajero up to Lusaka for business. His wife Colette takes charge of the South African office. Their children had other engagements, so did not join us for the dinner. Simon and Colette have a large bungalow nestled among the leafy razor wire in the almost exclusively white suburb of Randburg. It was Simon who had given us a lift from the Zimbabwe border at Beit Bridge to his home on our first night in Johannesburg. Then we met John and Kaz at a restaurant, mainly because of John’s Glasgow accent and Rowan’s having grown up there. John and Kaz insisted that we stay at their place in Rosettenville, and so we did. John was a keen scuba diver who worked in the oil industry and Kaz had her own swim school complete with indoor pool in the backyard. The combination of the two families went better than expected. As a final supportive act, John had given us a lift into town to the intercity bus terminal, to catch the city-to-city double-decker luxury bus to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. I have to say we would never have found it without his help.

Friday 6 September This bus journey was also a voyage from a place that has one foot in the First World, back into the Third World, where we had come from, back to where things were old, broken, dilapidated, not working. It was hard to envisage that people are in danger of starvation and the country’s economy is in an advanced state of collapse. This is a culture shock, especially after the neo-Australian life-style of whites in South Africa that we were leaving behind. As we sped along the toll-ways to Beit Bridge and dawn broke, Rowan was singing “Senzenina,” which was sung during the struggle against apartheid (what have we done, our only sin is to be black) – one passenger said it took her back to some very bad memories, as they sang it at funerals, of which there were too many. Another, a man in his early thirties, remarked bitterly, “Yes, we sang all those songs, but they brought us nothing.” I got a bit of a lump in my throat as I rewound my memories of the ten-kilometre march from Alexandra to Sandton, the spirited singing of these songs on the bus, the ‘toyi-toyi’ (the chanting, clapping and dancing that the women did). The same toyi-toyi that swayed the Volvo double-decker bus as we headed for the Alex sports stadium to see Thabo Mbeki tell the poor that he was with them. This was the same Thabo Mbeki who is buying a personal twenty-

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eight-seat jet, building naval submarines, and trying to restart South Africa’s nuclear industry. At 6 a.m. we disembarked at Beit Bridge, on the Zimbabwe border, and found ourselves sitting on a dirty concrete step in a large open shed, where all the baggage had to be taken out and made ready for inspection by customs officers. We also had to go through the immigration process. Rowan sang “Vamudara,” a Shona song of welcome, perhaps to help make the immigration officers a little friendlier toward us. There was a permanent notice saying that most of the immigration officers were at a training seminar and “we regret any inconvenience.” I expect they are studying customer service, I mused. Back in the shed, the covered trailer has been unloaded. Cooking oil is so precious in Zimbabwe that some passengers have brought twenty-litre jerry cans of it. Some of these have leaked over the floor of the trailer and all over peoples’ baggage. No one complains, this is just one of those things that can happen in Africa. Rowan’s pack is one of the unlucky items. The customs officer is busy asserting his importance to all the other African nobodies. He picks on passengers at will and asks them brusquely to open the zip and show him the contents. He pores for minutes, admiring a young woman’s shoes. You’ve got two pairs, Yes, she murmurs, And what are these, Knickers, she blushes. He enjoys her embarrassment for a moment before moving on to his next victim. We left Beit Bridge at about 10:45 a.m., wondering whether we would have to stay the night in dreary Bulawayo, not knowing when we would get a berth on the next train to Victoria Falls. The bus arrived in Bulawayo at 4:30 p.m. Rowan and I had to get to the travel agent and collect our train tickets, eat, and get to the station. The bus pulled into a compound not much bigger than the bus, with a high-security fence around it. There were security men with sjamboks, long rubber whips, keeping the thugs, taxi drivers, and ‘riffraff’ out and, it seemed, keeping the passengers in. One elderly woman with a walking stick inadvertently walked out through a gate, which was promptly padlocked, leaving her luggage inside the compound. She pleaded with the guy to allow her back in, but was ordered to walk around to the next gate. Whoever would want to come to a place that was so dangerous that you could not leave the bus compound and walk around the streets normally? Rowan and I were not going to stay cooped up like this for a moment longer; we needed a taxi – one with doors and a starter motor, preferably.

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Bulawayo had clearly not been like this for all of its history. There are wide streets, on a grid system and with traffic lights, banks, department stores (sort of). Vehicles are driven in an orderly manner – not like in Kampala. We reached the travel agents, where we had been so kindly helped on the way down. We had a very comfortable and somewhat quaint night ahead of us in a first-class sleeper at ridiculously cheap Zimbabwean prices. Anything you want to buy from the Zimbabwe government is dirt-cheap because of their collapsed currency. It would make up for the previous night spent on the bus, albeit that city-to-city buses are a whole lot more comfortable than those awful Tawfiq and Taqwar ‘Al Qaeda’ beasts that got us (eventually) from Kampala to Lusaka on our way south.

Saturday 7 September Daylight arrived early and I was wide-awake, combing the landscape for wildlife. Suddenly a herd of around fifty buffalo came into view; Rowan was still fast asleep with a pair of black Balinese shorts over her face to keep out the intruding light. Of course, I got told off for not waking her up to see the buffalo – but then she would have grumbled about being woken early. 7:30 a.m., and the town of Victoria Falls comes into view. Everyone knows exactly where they are going and they pour off the train with mountains of Chinese tartan woven plastic bags, bundles of cloth, and babies strapped to their backs. The station still has plenty of ‘colonial charm’ and some of the original stationery, too. There are a couple of seriously businesslike African women with mobile phones on the platform keeping a watchful eye open for lost souls like us; they are touting for several backpacker hostels, taxis, safaris, or money changers. The first question you get asked in Vic Falls is: Do you want some of their gorgeous collapsing dollars, would you like a carving or perhaps it must be bungy jumping you came here to find? We will take the easy way, let these women refer us to Pat’s Place, go by taxi (special hire) – help the driver pushstart it (pretty routine, really). We even managed to get in a quick confirmation call to Fawlty Towers Backpackers in Livingstone, Zambia while the phone was available. Pat’s Place is pretty laid-back, in a sort of middle-income white suburb that has gone downhill a bit in recent years; it’s got a big garden and a trampoline, with a collection of angelic blonde-haired little girls playing on it. They look like something out of a very old, very sad movie about colonial times in

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Africa or perhaps Picnic at Hanging Rock – in which iconic Australian film they would have mysteriously disappeared at an Aboriginal sacred site. The place thankfully lacks the noise-addicted ‘funster’ crowd of Irish nurses and German daredevils we found inhabiting Shoestring – and we have our own tiny bathroom. We notice a couple of feral-looking Japanese guys, who departed before we did (they turn up later in the story). Our room is also near a sort of indoor–outdoor kitchen with a floor of red-painted concrete with a mirror shine. An African woman in a 1950s dress buffs it daily on her hands and knees, keeping the traditions of Rhodesian working relations alive and well. African women haven’t got anything special to do all day long – so why not get them do useless things that are extremely hard work? Rowan and I have not touched the ground since the previous morning in Beit Bridge and a swift bit of money changing with a ‘spivvy’ guy at a very exposed pee stop, just south of Beit Bridge. We were also hungry and looking for somewhere quick to eat. The money-changers were ‘around’, as we say in Kampala, on the street and we ignored them for long enough to get up to the same office where we had changed money on the way down to Johannesburg. We were not in luck for the best deal ever, as the weekend was a time the banks were closed and the Zim could do a nosedive before Monday morning. The quick bite to eat turned out to be an African bar that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to deck out as an English pub. The rate in August 2002 had been fifty-five Zimbabwean dollars to the U S dollar – on the street, 620 Zimbabwean dollars. The rate on the street in February 2003 is said to range from 1,800 to 2,300 Zimbabwean dollars to the U S dollar. There is also very little fuel, and food is even scarcer. Better meals in more salubrious surroundings were to be had at the Illuka Inn. This is a five-star hotel that overlooks its own plot of bush. The scene comes complete with wart-hogs. We were told to look out for elephants, but ‘failed’, as we say in Kampala, to see any. Five-star restaurants are okay on backpackers’ budgets, when you have a collapsing currency. We also managed another trip to the salad bar at The Kingdom. This place, which is both a casino and a huge five-star hotel, should be noted in the world of architecture as one of the world’s most O T T buildings. Actually, a consortium of Arabs and none other than Michael Jackson own this place. One unique African experience not to be missed was a visit to the men’s toilets. There are marble tiles, brass taps, expensive lithographs on the walls – but the really O T T feature is the ‘presentation’ of the urinals, like great porcelain cocktail bowls on the wall, filled to the brim with clear cubes

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of deodorant that resembled ice. The effect is reminiscent of a row of giant margaritas. I thought this so hilarious that I specially invited Rowan into the Men’s to enjoy the joke. For reasons that I fail to remember, we never did make it for breakfast at the great dowager of them all, the colonial Graeco-Art Deco splendour of the Victoria Falls Hotel. In the lobby there are lots of oil paintings of the ‘superior persons’ of the Raj arriving with portmanteaux and hunting rifles. There are enough buffalo and kudu skulls on the wall to restock the Serengeti. There are no black guests sojourning in the Tiffin rooms. Nor were there any scruffy mzungus like us, in shorts and tee-shirts that don’t match. One more riveting experience awaited us before we left the imploding Zimbabwean heartland. We decided to take advantage of dirt-cheap postage costs and send some of the papers we had collected at the Earth Summit to our address in Kampala. So we arrived at the post office at 11:30 a.m. (because it closes at twelve noon on a Saturday). Of course, we had no box, paper, string, and tape – all the things you find at every Australian post office. We were ‘referred’ to the cluster of sharp dudes who were hanging around the entrance of the post office. Yes, no problem, we can wrap this lot up for you. Almost immediately, it seemed, they had rummaged some bins or simply found the essentials drifting in the street. No quote! That was a worry. I asked a few times while they furiously worked. It took three of them. They did a pretty good job and it was all ready to present to the postal clerk by 11:50. Just one problem! They wanted fifty U S dollars! Cut it out fellas! You mean five Zimbabwean dollars, don’t you? We ended up paying them ten Zimbabwean dollars and they were still offering us carvings, money change, and game safaris all the way up the road. Actually, they wore the disappointment pretty well – the fifty U S dollars was only a try-on.

Sunday 8 September We made the short trip to the border post and waited for the vehicle from Fawlty Towers to take us across the no-man’s-land and the bridge over the Zambezi River to the Zambia border and on to Livingstone. Fawlty Towers is a bit up-market, dressed out in Tuscan colours and run by a blonde Englishwoman called Sarah. I admit that I have no Kwacha and need to check my email. No problem: she promptly lends me 40,000 kwachas. Rowan and I are hungry and looking forward to our free dinner and, for me, a beer. The ambience of the walled garden and the mango tree and the moonlight are a great accompaniment to the rather slapdash cooking, not unlike

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Uganda in style, though not in content – the food was from somewhere in Spain; perhaps that is why it was cold. Rowan and I join a white South African couple and talk game parks and travel stories. And yes, the British I T and merchant bankers’ offsider from East Ham bungy jumping ‘funster’ mob love this place. It is all a bit surreal. Rowan and I had already seen Victoria Falls, locally known as Mosi o Tunya, from both the Zimbabwe side and the Zambian side, so we were just taking a spell.

Monday 9 September It is funny how meeting particular people in life leads to unplanned changes of direction. Having decided in advance that we would try the Fawlty Towers backpacker hostel on the return journey seemed to determine what followed. We met Marius, a wily and wise old white farmer from the old Rhodesia and the new South Africa. Marius has more African stories than you’d ever hear in a lifetime. He can tell you about the mysteries of the baobab tree, the thick coffee his grandmother used to make from the seeds, and the folklore story of how it got the appearance of growing upside down. Marius is patiently, if that is the right word, trying to get some scientific equipment through the obfuscating Zambian customs post. I tell him the story about what happened when the Zambian immigration officer told me that we would have to pay sixty-five U S dollars each for a visa, even if we were only back in Zambia for a day. After I told him that this was stupid, he threatened to have me locked up. Anyway, Marius has met an Australian guy with a vehicle that has taken two days, so far, to get through customs. The van needs the right papers, incountry insurance, a hazard triangle, and ‘whatever’, as it is being ‘imported’ from South Africa. Perhaps we would like to get a lift as far as Arusha, Northern Tanzania, for fifty U S dollars each. Our response was, well, why not? Marius capped the deal by giving Rowan and me a road atlas to Southern and Eastern Africa, which proved absolutely invaluable, as it turned out. I say “as it turned out” because we discovered after we had set off with Gavin that he did not really have a map, just a sort of ‘sense of direction’ and a lot of grit and determination – and that ain’t enough. Gavin showed up, short, paunchy at around twenty-five, with a torn and sweaty tee-shirt, board shorts, and sandals and an understandably harried look on his face. I don’t think Gavin had experienced anywhere near this amount of bullshit in his life (after all, he was born an Australian and never had to apply for refugee status).

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He had some more passengers at the Jollyboys Backpackers, which was run by an Australian couple, where Rowan and I had stayed on the way down. These included three feral Japanese guys (whom we had sighted previously), an older Scottish couple, and Gavin’s mate, Alex, a Kenyan, who had his own I T business in South Africa and in Kenya. Alex was moving two photocopiers and several computers, all second-hand, by road all the way from Pretoria, where he fortuitously met Gavin. Alex was heading for Nanyuki, north of Nairobi, close to where I had worked while in the British Army in 1968.

Tuesday 10 September We hung out at Fawlty Towers, waiting for Gavin to come and pick us up. We expected him at 9 a.m. – he came at 3:30 p.m. It was a Iveco Ford Transit diesel delivery van with sliding windows that didn’t lock. The kind of van that would do for parcel deliveries around Brisbane, re-badged as an Iveco, built in South Africa, a bit noisy and a hard ride for the highway. After collecting the rest of the passengers at Jollyboys, we were ready to undertake the first leg of the journey – Livingstone to Lusaka, 472 kilometres. It was already 4:30 when we were eventually on the road. I offered to help with the driving, but found out later that Gavin just loved to drive and drive and drive. No one else was allowed to sit at the wheel of his van. Gavin drove pretty solidly to reach Lusaka by 11 p.m. Luckily, we had already booked the Cha Cha Cha Backpackers by email. Rowan and I tried to have showers, but Lusaka (capital city of Zambia) was out of water – or just saving electricity by ‘load-shedding’ perhaps. We slept in Rowan’s tent, as they wanted high rent for their very average rooms. We left two of the Japanese guys and another Zambian guy in Lusaka. We also met a German adventurer with a tent and a bicycle, who had just been cycling through the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo, along footpaths between villages. He described the people as friendly and the ‘uniforms’ as unfriendly. I was pretty impressed with his sense of adventure, but somehow not quite ready to emulate his fearless approach to travel. Perhaps, if, like me, you carry things like a laptop and a camera with a telephoto lens, you become a little too protective of your personal belongings.

Wednesday 11 September We were up at 5 a.m. for a 6 a.m.start. As we headed for the road north, we all but mindlessly passed the Standard Chartered Bank and the Visa card

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A T M in the main street of Lusaka. As the idea of stopping occurred to me, it

quickly passed; after all, there must be another one somewhere in northern Zambia. Wrong! We passed the service station that had no diesel for our Tawfiq bus when we were on our way south. We drove under the tawdry ‘arch’ that celebrated ten years of declining Zambian independence – before one of the letters fell off the signage. The dry, dusty landscape opened up in front of us. Once more we witnessed the last remaining tree ready to become firewood on many of the subsistence farming blocks, the despair, the hunger, and the failed maize crops. Three and a half million Zambians are at risk of starvation, out of a population of thirty-three million. Once again, there were the corporate farms, with their lush green maize – and the electric fence to keep the hungry people out. The irrigators were busy chucking out their spray in the heat of the day – just like the ones between Brisbane and Toowoomba. I thought of Simon, selling irrigation equipment a thousand kilometres from his home in Jo’burg and those neat polystyrene packs of Zambian snow-peas in the Waitrose supermarket in London’s fashionable Kensington. We think about the G M maize that the U S A is trying to foist on Zambia and how the government is trying to refuse it, risking the lives of thousands of their people. In typical humility and tact, the Bush administration remind their expendable cousins that “beggars can’t be choosers.” Nice one, George W. – that will win a lot of new friends in Africa. Malawi, on the other hand, was ‘advised’ under some duress, by the I M F and World Bank, to sell off their surplus grain to pay off their debt. When the drought hit, they had no food and no money. Obviously, they will have to sharpen up their act if they are to become a structurally adjusted global ‘player’. Gavin plans to make it to Tunduma on the Tanzanian border tonight. But things can’t always go so smoothly on this continent. Just six kilometres north of Kapiri Mposhi, we missed the turn off for Mpika and drove all the way to Ndola in the copper belt, 128 kilometres in the wrong direction (unless we decided to go through the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a civil war is raging). The copper, once Zambia’s one big industry (and foreign-currency earner) is about to run out and the world price has collapsed. Thousands of Zambians will be losing their jobs in the next eighteen months. It is a harsh lesson in global economics. You can’t be dependent on one ‘we’ve got it made’ industry. We head back to Kapiri Mposhi and find our missing unmarked turn-off.

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More trouble awaits us. We can all smell diesel inside the van. We have to stop to check it out. Luckily, we are near Mkushi, just 86 kilometres along the highway. Gavin finds a garage and then, at another workshop, a welder to fix one of his injector tubes. We wander around, look in the Indian-owned supermarkets, and check some very ordinary food and wait. Gavin is covered with grease and oil but he is happy with the braising. Another 109 kilometres and Gavin is getting worried about laying his hands on some more kwachas and some more diesel, as we had lost some. Serenje is not much of a place to do your banking after 5 p.m. and there are certainly no A T M s, especially not for Visa cards. No luck in changing US dollars, either. So, it is now a race against the clock just to reach Mpika for the night. That still leaves us a 458-kilometre dash to Tunduma on the Tanzanian border the next day. The schedule is falling away badly. Mpika has, fortunately, a couple of service stations on the highway; otherwise we would have missed it. We ask for directions and get, from Rowan’s Lonely Planet Guide, the name of a Department of Agriculture Conference Centre. This is the most obscure location for a night’s rest, but we find it. The place has a number of buildings and some ‘Afropean’ huts. A British construction company built the camp, to house their workforce while building the road, then handed it over to the Zambian government. Rowan and I got ourselves a hut, with its own semi-functional bathroom, very romantic – and then shared it with Tako, who had nowhere else to go. We had to ask him to smoke outside, as he had no idea that smoking indoors was objectionable to non-smokers. Gavin and Alex slept in the van. In the morning, Rowan discovered that there were some attempts being made to introduce eco-tourism. She photographed “the appropriate-technology guest house” – a refreshing surprise after The Kingdom at Victoria Falls!

Thursday 12 September Gavin was keen on early starts, stopping for diesel at the highway service station. Rowan and I got out to stretch our legs and buy some peanuts from some local women. We suddenly realized that we were being surrounded. There were several police vehicles and about twenty policemen, armed with A K -47s. There was no explanation for this event, nor did they look directly at us. Gavin was mysteriously uninterested in buying peanuts and urged us to get back into the vehicle. As we were coming to realize, Gavin was one Australian with deference for authority to the point of heavy perspiration. We saw

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this on numerous occasions, when he was pulled aside at Zambian police roadblocks, where he became excruciatingly polite. We left Mpika, if a little nervously, and without peanuts, with Chinsali as our next target. Gavin was still losing diesel and running out of US dollars and kwachas. We found the small market town, nestling among hills and served by a small creek and wetland area. The only bank was on the main street and we were warned about the presence of some desperate characters. There was no A T M of any description. The only way to get money was to go into the bank and sacrifice the remaining US-dollar travellers cheques in my money belt. This could only be transformed into a huge pile of almost worthless kwachas. I had no more reserves that could be changed into Tanzanian shillings. It was still a bit of guesswork, calculating the distance to Dar es Salaam in relation to fuel consumption (as well as fuel losses) and unexpected expenditure. The last item proved to be as long ‘as a piece of string’. We passed Isoka and finally felt that the Tanzanian border-town of Tunduma was within striking distance. Fortunately, this time, getting through this border was not so difficult as it had been on the way down. Changing kwachas to Tanzanian shillings on the dusty street was just as unsafe and subject to ‘rip off’ rates. There was the famous Desert Storm Hairdressing, the Tawfiq bus office, with its laminated poster of the Hajj in Mecca and the insert of Osama bin Laden. Just up the road there were the second-hand stalls, selling Australian-brand clothes, and the derelict ‘sleeping bus’ – all the things we remembered from our overnight and all-day sojourn in this wild frontier town of porters, truck drivers, thieves, con men, and murderers. The final chapter of our departure from Tunduma had one more nasty surprise for us, when a ‘middleman’ refused to give back Gavin’s Australian passport and the Tanzanian vehicle documentation unless Gavin gave him fifty U S dollars. Gavin, showing great resourcefulness, offered him a fiveAustralian-dollar note, telling him it was worth the same amount. Somehow, Gavin got him to give up on the deal, and we left. It was unfortunate that on the way out of town I mis-remembered the road to Dar es Salaam, although Alex correctly picked the unmarked track. We lost ten minutes and Gavin’s patience got a bit frayed with all the delays. By 4:30 p.m. we were on our way to Mbeya, on a rugged downhill stretch of road with some deep, extensive, and unavoidable potholes. Gavin hit one and barely kept control of the van. We had a punctured tyre that would need to be changed by the roadside – another setback. One problem was that the spare was a different size from the other wheels, another was that Gavin

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carried an ‘under-whelming’ jack and no timber chocks. This was definitely not a very good lesson in Australian bushcraft. It was dusk when we got moving again, knowing that the cement-making town of Mbeya, 108 kilometres away, would be as far as we could get that night. At dusk, Mbeya, heavily ‘dusted’ with cement, came into sight, sprawled over several hills. Rowan combed the guidebook for places to stay. We decided to try the Swiss Lutheran backpackers hostel and miraculously found it in the dark. We were sharing the place with an amiable but inevitably noisy Kenyan football team. Rowan and I snuggled up in the tent. Gavin and Alex, as usual, froze in the van on its hard seats.

Friday 13 September The following morning we were looking for ways to change money and get some seriously overdue repairs done to the van. The Standard Chartered Bank staff member was polite and helpful, but acted as though they had never heard of kwachas. We had to hunt down a back alley for a moneychanger, who gave me an average, if not reasonable, deal. At last I was breathing easy and carrying some of the local shillings. What Gavin thought would take one mechanic an hour took three men, including himself, the entire day. The fuel injector had given up and so had a gasket; the spare tyre also had to be changed for one that was the right size. Gavin somehow got himself inside the engine bay and was covered in grease from head to toe – surely this would provoke him into having a shower. Alex helped with the repairs (on what turned out to be a very hot day). but emerged from the experience looking immaculate. Rowan and I explored the town, and searched for parts and tools for the van. We discovered a cauldron of tomato and chili ‘piri piri’ sauce by the roadside and scored one of the most delicious meals we have had in Africa. Mbeya, which I had unkindly written-off as an ugly and forbidding place, had a lot of charm and a certain multicultural aspect. The Indian business community seemed to have in-bred somewhat; some of these people had a not quite Indian look. Somehow we all met up at a café close to a Moravian backpacker place in the early evening, and agreed that we would all move and get an early start. We were not very familiar with the role of Moravian missionaries in former German colonies in Africa, but their backpacker hostels were okay.

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Saturday 14 September We awoke to the call to prayer at the mosque. At 5:30 a.m. we were all ready to strike out into the pre-dawn. Scores of people were on the move along the outer suburbs of Mbeya, waiting with their bundles and baggage in the chilly air for long-distance buses. We were making good time but had a long way to go – more than 800 kilometres to Dar es Salaam. This leg of the journey has some breath-taking scenery: mountain ranges, forests, savannah grasslands, a game park, baobab trees – and some surprises. We passed a 35-kilometre zone of radiata-pine plantation called Sao Hill, which looked exactly like the Beerwah State Forest, on the way to the Sunshine Coast, in Queensland, Australia. Once again, the corporate model of development had dissipated local communities and was producing a lowvalue product for the fickle world market. Whereever pine trees grow, nothing else will ever grow for a hundred years, because of the acidity of the pine needles. Sao Hill is huge. We also saw long lines of children pushing wooden scooters loaded with bundles of wood, along the roadside and up some steep hills. We reached Iringa and stopped at a near-derelict highway service station for a pee and fuel. As usual, the toilet was pretty gross. This part of the town was situated in a lush plain beside a very pretty river. There were lots of industrial sheds that looked long-abandoned. I wondered what had brought about their demise. Gavin needed to visit a bank, so we had to drive up a steep, winding, narrow road to the top of the mountain. We were surprised to find that Iringa had actually been moved to the top of the mountain at the turn of the twentieth century and is now a thriving town. According to the guidebook, the German settlers moved the town when they experienced / provoked a rebellion among the local tribe. It is said that 100,000 of these people died. The result is a charming German-flavoured town in southern Tanzania, though with a dark genocidal history. The old town hall, now standing empty, is a particularly nice example of German architecture. Iringa also boasts a madrassa – one of those schools of extreme Islamism that are alleged to be the starting-point for many Al Qaeda fighters. They all looked pretty friendly to me. Next we passed through some beautiful hilly savannah and bush, and spectacular mountain ranges. A free ride through the Mikume National Park, south of Morogoro; we were all spotting elephants, buffalo, giraffe, wildebeest, and several species of gazelle from the highway. That had been one of the highlights on our way down – but the return journey with Gavin was better. Moro-

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goro is also the turnoff for Dodoma, little known to outsiders as the capital city of Tanzania. We then had 84 kilometres to Chalinze, where we would be turning off for Arusha (the next leg of our journey). The 109 kilometres from Chalinze to Dar es Salaam would be repeated – after a final desperate dash to the A T M . At the service station in Chalinze, Gavin surveyed his leaking diesel and nearempty fuel gauge. He borrowed the last of Tako’s cash, the last of my cash, bought half a tank of fuel, and looked pretty worried. He had to get to the A T M in Dar es Salaam, back to Chalinze, on to Arusha, and then reach the Ngorogoro crater. We quietly thought to ourselves that we would probably have had enough for one day by the time we reached Dar. As it turned out, we reached Dar at 9:15 p.m., exhausted and hungry, having covered 893 kilometres in a bloody delivery van in one day. I remembered almost precisely where the A T M was in the centre of Dar. People must have thought we were doing some strange tribal dancing to celebrate our arrival at the sacred machine. Money– shillings – issued forth, all the way from accounts in Australia. Tako, Mick, and Sylvia were all leaving us at Dar, so it was left to Alex, Rowan, and me to persuade Gavin that he would do better to sleep for the night and make another 5 a.m. start. He was not very happy. Having driven for fourteen hours with no food, he wanted to do another eight to ten hours at night, to reach Arusha. We said we wouldn’t do it and wanted a refund. Gavin backed down, but the relationship was a bit frosty now. It was too late to track down any of the delicious food Rowan and I had enjoyed in Dar previously on our outbound journey. Food that reminded me of Malaysian curries still haunts my taste buds. We made do with a very mediocre curry and stayed at the same hotel we had brought Mick and Sylvia to, although it was expensive. The Indian Muslim woman who ran this place was like a tyrant to her African staff; but she agreed to reduce the price of our room if we agreed not to use the air-conditioner. Rowan and I were so tired we would agree to anything, but we didn’t want air-conditioning anyway. Meanwhile, Alex, who was anxiously watching all his expensive office equipment from inside the van (which could not be fully locked, as we discovered), was being hassled by several known criminals, who were sussing things out. Gavin and Alex were to sleep in the van, but it was now too dangerous on the street; they could not get the van into the lockable laneway of the hotel, so they took it around to a well-lit all-night

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Esso service station and slept in it there. This would be Gavin’s second night without a shower. We were counting. Dar es Salaam is the city I dubbed “I have a friend …” – a phrase that seems to precede every conversation and always ends up being a scam. It is well to be wary in a city of con men. Yet I love Dar and would definitely go back there for its Arab quarter, its Indian restaurants, its German architecture, its waterside, its almost Malaysian food, with coconut rice, spiced fish, and chilli sauces – and the proximity to the touristic ‘romance’ of Zanzibar.

Sunday 15 September We were up at 4:30 a.m., after a comfortable night. Our next night would be in Arusha. It was hard to believe that we would be saying goodbye to Gavin and Alex so soon. We were in for an eventful day, nevertheless. We would need a rest after this journey, but would be in striking distance of Nairobi and Kampala. After turning north, we were on our way to Segera, where we would be turning north again for Moshi and Arusha. We pulled over for a pee stop and Rowan’s own coffee at Lugoba, where there were some really good toilets and a large thatched barn-restaurant, where you could buy breakfast if you were so inclined. Rowan and I had our own. Gavin and Alex were having none, as usual. I stood for a few minutes looking up at a T V set, having seen none for quite a while. C N N was coming through from the satellite dish with a belligerent speech from George W. Bush. I commented to one of the waiters, who stood beside me, that this ‘war on terror’ was very bad news for Africa. We both wept together in a poignant moment that I cannot forget. The journey took us through some green, hilly areas adjacent to mountain ranges. As this flattened out to some arid plains, Rowan and I felt that we really had to insist on a pee stop. We had been going for over five hours without one. Reluctantly, Gavin stopped some way out of Mkomazi. From nowhere some women came running out of the bush, hoping to sell us some charcoal. We got Alex to interpret the Swahili. They were from a nomadic tribe we had never heard of. Their husbands kept goats, much as the Masai do in this region. The women are left to their own devices for weeks at a time. Could we photograph them? It was a perplexing moment, but Gavin had the answer. He had several cameras; one of which was an instant Polaroid. He would take a photo and give it to them straight away. Watching these women’s amazement as the photos gradually revealed their own images for the first time, probably, in

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their lives, was an experience that will stay with us. I managed several conventional pictures that I am very happy with. The really ‘old’ woman, whose grand-daughter was featured, turned out to be thirty-eight. She wanted to know how old Rowan was and why she had no children. Out of respect and a reluctance to encourage pure commercialism, I never did take any pictures of the many Masai we saw along the way. This included the ones in Arusha, with their Nokia mobiles tucked into their socks, Nike sneakers, watches, and traditional blankets, now made in China. When we reached a little town called Same (pronounced sarmay), it was time to get some more repairs done to that recalcitrant injector tube and some lunch, and to have a wander around the town. Same nestles in the shadow of the Mkomazi Game Reserve, which lies astride the Kenyan border, on about the same latitude as Mombasa, on the Kenyan coast. The women of the district, going about their marketing, made a most colourful sight. Rowan and I wandered through the town and its market for over an hour, expecting that Gavin’s repairs would take at least this long. We enjoyed this unexpected stop and were sorry to leave. Surely, we would be having a clear run now to Arusha. We had only gone about ten kilometres when we found that we had another puncture, just outside someone’s house. We stopped to ask if there were any tyre-repair places around. The man said he would show us and jovially came on board. Just a few hundred metres back towards Same, there it was, as though disguised as an ordinary house. The place was ably run by a fifteen-year-old boy, who jacked up the van, got underneath, got the wheel off, had the tyre off the rim, inflated and repaired the inner tube, tested it, reassembled everything, and then charged Gavin 1,500 Tanzanian shillings. The boy reminded me of the boys in the Laser Behaviour Management Centres in Brisbane. But he was so skilled, so in charge and confident about what he was doing. Tyre repairers in Australia would have been amazed to see the array of scrap that he had around him to enable him to carry out his work. Even his electrical equipment was tenuous, yet capable of doing what was required. As a bonus, Alex found a World War Two Austin Jeep, sat in the driver’s seat, and got me to take a photo. After this, it was straight on to Mwanga and Moshi and the ascent to Arusha, which sits in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. After some very pretty countryside, we saw some very ordinary areas, somewhat scarred by mining. The Arusha area is famous for tanzanite, a semi-precious stone, as well as for other metals and gems. We had been told that the demand for

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tanzanite had suddenly collapsed after 11 September 2001, when Americans also stopped coming (probably following advice about high-risk holiday destinations in Al Qaeda-infested areas of the world – all bollocks, of course). The economy of Arusha had suffered a great blow and many miners were aimlessly wandering the streets and turning to violent crime. We would tread carefully. Gavin ignored requests to stop and ask the way in Arusha and we finally found ourselves driving back into town from the far side. Rowan managed to get a good photo of the mountain in a rare cloudless moment. We noted a large sign for the United Nations Rwandan War Crimes Tribunal. It was dark, drizzling, and muddy. We found the Mochelle Guest House in what appeared to be a rough area of potholed streets, full of guesthouses and bars. We took a look at the room we were being offered at 3,000 Tanzanian shillings per night and agreed. The room was small, functional, and had two single beds, no mosquito nets, and no power point, or ‘socketi’, for charging the laptops. Saying goodbye to Gavin and Alex was a very perfunctory business. No sooner were we in the doorway of the Mochelle than we were being accosted and pestered by touts for various safari companies. This was to be the stock-in-trade for the whole week that we were there. I was recovering from a heavy cold, which I caught while we were in Johannesburg. Rowan was going down with the flu, it was cold and raining, and we were concerned about how much a safari might cost, whether we would get good value for money, how we might get some U S dollars.

Monday 16 September The next morning we were both keen to see the War Crimes Tribunal. We attended the military trial of Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and saw the expert evidence of Dr Alison Des Forges, a truly astonishing historian of the Rwandan Genocide and Human Rights Watch. She is also the author of Leave None to Tell the Story. One of the lighter moments came when the prosecutor pointed to the absurdity of complaints by the defence that the defendant was claiming to be defamed at his own murder trial. Not many people spend their holidays doing stuff like this, but we thought it was too important to miss. The defence lawyers included two American guys who, we realized, were Jewish. They were vigorously defending genocide perpetrators. That first day I was waiting outside the toilets and stood pinned to the wall, while Bagosora and his armed escorts came past. It was a moment I will always remember. The defendant was wearing a sombre dark civilian suit, business shirt, and tie;

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he was less than a metre from me. We watched for two-and-a-half days, before tearing ourselves away to arrange our onward travel and our safari. We caught a matatu minibus taxi to the bus-park and checked the Scandinavia Bus Lines office. There would be no seats available for Kampala till at least the following Tuesday. Reluctantly, we found ourselves in the office of Tawfiq buses, but with a tout for another company. We bought two Saturday tickets for Nairobi and were immediately hit for another 5,000 shillings for our packs. The tout wrote his name “Liesa” on the back of the tickets.

Tuesday 17 September More rain, more prosecution evidence, more courtroom drama. Lunch is quite good and very cheap at the canteen for the Department of Immigration. We managed a salad dinner at Max’s cake shop, which had been recommended to us. If it is not possible to buy good-quality chocolate, how can they produce the best death-by-chocolate cake Rowan has ever tasted? She doesn’t really need to know, but it certainly helped cheer up some pretty ordinary weather and thoughts of genocide. We also met Karen, a blonde Finnish woman, who lives on a sisal farm with her Tanzanian boyfriend. They are trying to get rid of the sisal because it is no longer profitable, but it is also hard to rip out and keeps coming back. We got some good advice from a New Zealander on how to choose a good safari company – but he was going about things in a way that would not have suited our budget.

Wednesday 18 September More rain, a faltering start to the defence cross-questioning of Alison Des Forges. The most robust defence lawyers were the two New York Jews; this was a pretty amazing sight to behold. There was also a Portuguese guy who seemed to put up vexatious objections and made the mistake of saying that the African President of the Court was “aggressive” towards him. That took nearly half an hour to sort out. Meanwhile, Alison Des Forges sat patiently while her reputation as a researcher was brought into question or, rather, torn to shreds. She had to explain, for example, that she sometimes got desperate phone calls in the middle of the night, when she was in Nairobi and the caller was somewhere near Kigali, Rwanda, and she had to listen carefully to their accent while unable to find a pen. Such as it is, admissible evidence or not, this is the work of an historian and human-rights activist, as I well knew from my experience in Uganda.

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Thursday 19 September Administration can be a lengthy business. The process of deciding which safari company, which story to believe, which combination of game parks to travel to took only a little more than that of sorting out our bus tickets. We wanted to change our departure from Saturday to Sunday, so that we could visit both Tarengiri and Ngorongoro Crater. We were now dealing with a fasttalking dude called Rick, who could easily have transplanted his business to Petticoat Lane and fitted into the scene. “We are so honest and friendly, we will give you the registration number of the vehicle on your contract and will drop you back at your guest house and bring the vehicle round later to show you. We will give you such a good deal, look, I tell you what: we have some more British people who have agreed to join you. We will give you a discount, but don’t tell them, because they are paying more.” We actually had two British nurses and then another British couple to join us. It transpired that Liesa was a known criminal, that the bus tickets were fakes, and that the bus company had been out of business for several months after having a number of accidents and killing hundreds of their passengers. No one wanted to admit that they had witnessed our purchase, nor was it any business of the bus company in whose office we were standing. I finally agreed to an ‘exchange’ of tickets for an outfit called Perfect Bus Company, and whose tickets looked as though they were from a 1950s primary-school exercise book. The time the bus would leave on Sunday morning was spelt out. The deal was witnessed, at my insistence, by two police officers, whose names and service numbers were recorded on the tickets. We never did catch up with Liesa.

Friday 20 September We set out for Tarengiri Game Reserve as early as practical, picking up our cook and other passengers. We soon discovered that our fellow ‘safarists’ had no interest in birds and very short attention-spans. After you have seen a couple of zebras and ticked them off the list you don’t have to stop and observe their behaviour when they are found together with wildebeest. They ran out of steam pretty early. All the same, we saw plenty of wildlife and the experience was well worth the hassles. We took our lunch at a spot where we could observe two lionesses taking a bath after eating their fill on zebra and where elephants came down for a lovely thick soupy mud-bath. There were also vervet monkeys that tried to

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nick Rowan’s lunch. I also managed to photograph a spectacular superb starling (nothing like the starlings in Britain). In the afternoon we were treated to a view of a leopard lying in a tree. This had been one our must-see animals for which the long-neglected telephoto lens came out of its battered case. At about 4 p.m. we started our trek in the direction of the Ngorongoro Crater. We were flagged down for a mzungu who wanted to negotiate a seat in our vehicle. I leapt out to participate in the negotiations. The guy’s name was Richard. He was from Melbourne. He recognized my “Free the Refugees” tee-shirt – he was also a refugee, about twenty years ago, from Poland. Richard was okay and tried very hard to win over everyone. He had been climbing Mount Kilimanjaro for the past six days with some American friends. Working, without dependants, in the I T industry allows you to spend money on some fairly expensive adventure holidays. The bizarre bit, that had us laughing ourselves silly, was the spare mountain climbers’ survival rations that Richard offered around. These Americans climb snowfields on multicoloured Smarties! On a serious note, the snowfields on Mount Kilimanjaro are diminishing because of global warming. There will probably be no snowfields on Kilimanjaro in twenty years time. We will be able to say that we saw them (from a distance), but they will disappear in our lifetime. Africa’s highest peak just won’t be the same for future mountaineers. The thousands of people who live on their subsistence farms will lose their irrigation and drinking water and will starve. It’s a bit more desperate for them.

Sunday 22 September At 7:45 a.m. I walked a little way down the muddy, potholed road from the Mochelle Guest House to find a taxi. The guy had been there since 2:30 and we were to be his first job for the day. The bottom has fallen out of so many businesses since 11 September 2001 (I refuse to call it 9/11) and the declaration of the ‘war on terror’. We got to the bus-park in good time and found that there was indeed a Perfect Bus and it was indeed going to Nairobi. It was a medium-sized bus, with our packs tied onto the roof-rack and pretty full inside. Rowan and I got the last two seats. As we left Arusha, we caught our last views of the great mountain as though the peak were floating above the clouds like something from Lord of the Rings. The Kenyan border was interesting, mainly because a spiv tried to change my Tanzanian shillings to Kenyan shillings at one-hundredth of the going rate. I declined his offer.

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Very soon we were entering Nairobi, and finished up very close to where we had been dropped at 4 a.m. on our way south. This time it was about 2:30 p.m. We needed some food and to replenish our drinking water. Rowan got out her U S -made water filter and soon had a crowd of fascinated onlookers asking her questions. Yes, we could get filthy water out of a puddle, if we really had to and we could make it drinkable. Wow! Where can we get one of those? Just for a change, we decided to take a break from the harsh conditions and the monotonous prison food. I stopped on the way to buy a pair of underpants, as I was on my last pair. This turned into a hilarious and entertaining experience for the two women on the street stall where I made my purchase. The Chinese underwear proudly declared to anyone who sees me in them (if I wear them outside) that I am an American. Yay! We walked a few blocks, past some of Nairobi’s colourful and very noisy rap / hip hop matatus (much more flashy than the dented and faded Toyota Hiace ones we get in Kampala). We entered the marble halls and hushed tones of the Nairobi Hilton and had a meal in a restaurant that was done out with old suitcases and hunting paraphernalia. We ate our meals (mine was sort of Thai) and managed to scrounge a heap more salad from the servery near our table. Next to this colonial area was a sort of homely Italian trattoria and the toilets – European-style, with real porcelain and more marble. Our waiter was a very articulate young man who was related to the former opposition M P Oginga Odinga, with whom I had a long meeting in 1968. As it transpired, the waiter was a nephew of the famous man, who also wrote Not Yet Uhuru (Not Yet Free). Things were just getting started for the Rainbow Alliance (who won the election on 27 December and beat the long-reigning and thoroughly corrupt Daniel Arap Moi). “This is not a democracy – it’s a dictatorship,” he whispered to me. “I know,” I replied. Rowan and I thought that the internet might be a good idea but the Hilton wanted sixteen U S dollars an hour – absolutely insane! We decided to spend the rest of our wait for the bus sitting by their roof-top swimming pool instead. At 7:30 p.m. it was time to go down to the Busscar bus that would arrive in Kampala by 10 a.m. the following morning. There was a sense of relief that we would soon be home but also a sad feeling that we might miss all this travelling and seeing new places… and I had to find a new organization to work with, as D A N I D A informed me in an email that they had no work for me, because the conflict in Northern Uganda had intensified while we were away saving the world.

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Monday 23 September There was lush, uplifting greenery as we crossed the Ugandan border, amused to see the olive baboons by the roadside. We were happy to be home, feeling the comfort of familiar surroundings, but apprehensive about what we might find. This was not without justification. As it turned out, our room had been miraculously opened and all our stuff was gone. Claire’s house-girl tried to explain. But we just had to sit tight and wait for a fuller explanation. Welcome to Kampala.

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Myself as a Puff of Dust A Ghost Story

J ANE B RYCE

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F T H E R E ’ S A L E A V I N G , there can be a return, even though the one who returns is not the one who left. This conundrum is at the heart of exile. Who left, and who returns, and how can they coexist? My feet asked this question when they carried me to the graveyard in Moshi, a town I lived but did not die in, a place I left but could never leave. For forty years, I haunted this place in my dreams. When I at last returned, very few of the living were known to me, and I was unknown to them. A ghost from an almost unremembered past, I went in search of those who had found a permanent way to stay, mingling their substance with the dust, releasing the spirit to join me in my wanderings. My feet led me down a dusty track to the cemetery, and entered a section laid out with graves from both world wars. This part was orderly and wellmaintained. In the First World War section, surrounded by a fence, I counted five neat rows of nineteen headstones, standing to attention just as their occupants would have done in life, in service with the King’s African Rifles, the East African Engineers, the Army Service Corps, the East African Military Labour Service. The headstones told a story of men conscripted to the cause from places far away, Moslem and Christian, from many different points of origin. I imagined that many had joined up in ‘British’ Kenya, to march on ‘German’ Tanganyika. Eronimus Omari, Mumbo Cheria, Felesiano Piason, Rajabu Ferrussi, Iddi Gongo, Ndoro Nduno, Bisiweki Dickson, Yozefu Uberti, Mika Onoka, Oloya Ogeno, Mwakera Kidemo and their eighty-four companions most likely died defending the railway at Voi or Tanga and were transferred here after the Armistice. Transferred – an army term. There were

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eighty-four more in the Second World War section, next door, where a gate with a padlock stood open and a solitary gardener worked between the rows. A workmanlike notice bristled with information. I learnt that 50,000 soldiers and porters, from Britain, India, and East, South, and West Africa, died in the First World War East African campaign, struggling across terrain unmarked by roads, plagued by tsetse fly, thirsty and hot and far from home. Most have no graves, but here in the cemetery the white headstones looked like sails mounted on invisible boats sailing in formation towards eternity. Compared to them, I was adrift like smoke on a windless day. Away from the war graves, the cemetery loses its military precision. It occupies a space between two roads, with no defining boundaries, no clear entrance or exit. There’s no building to give it focus, no sense of layout, no orderly rows or paths between the graves. The dead have built their own community here, extending the space they occupy one mound after another, an organic fellowship of baked earth, wooden crosses, and dust. The newer graves are nearer the road, their freshly painted crosses festooned with tinsel and brightly coloured plastic flowers. The dates of birth of many who have taken up residence approximate to mine, and fifty is a good age for dying. Standing upright in this place where everyone else is supine, the hot sun prickling my skin, the hum of a million infinitesimal insects in my ears, the scent of scorched dust in my nose, I feel acutely and foolishly aware of being alive. Why me and not them? is a question that defeats me. I move on, picking my way further and further in, and gradually the tinsel and pink plastic roses disappear and the graves are older, with carved headstones. The people buried here had the means to proclaim themselves for posterity, beyond the recording of a name and date on a wooden cross that would crumble to dust in a few years. Some of them were famous, even. The town has seen a stream of explorers ever since it was made known to the outside world that there was such a thing as a snow-covered mountain practically on the Equator. From then on, the mountain became a target for geologists, botanists, and climbers, despite the attempt of one William Desborough Cooley to deny the existence of snow. “The nocturnal fall of snow at the hottest time of the year below the Equator, at a height of 13,000 feet, is clearly a fabrication to confirm the fantastic assertion that permanent snow lies at 12,500 feet and lower on Kilimanjaro,” he proclaimed some time in the 1860s. Among those who continually proved him wrong was the man whose mortal remains now lie at my feet. I read the epitaph he must have written for

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himself in anticipation of his death, airborne between the coast, where he lived, and the mountain that he loved. To the memory of Clement Gillman 28th Nov. 1882–5th Oct. 1946 Who led a commonsense and therefore happy life Because he stubbornly refused to be bamboozled By his female relations By his scientific friends and by the rulers Spiritual and secular of the society Into which without his consent he was born.

Gillman’s recipe for happiness: total self-centredness, the ability to ignore other people’s opinions, carelessness of convention and social expectations. Pretty much par for the course, I think, for an early-twentieth-century adventurer in Africa, a man with the means to make choices and an Empire in which to exercise them. It certainly worked, propelling him to the summit of Kilimanjaro for the first time in 1921. What’s interesting is that he was still here, working as a geographer, twenty-five years later, at an age when he should have been cultivating a garden in the Home Counties. He came in 1905 as a surveyor for a German railway company, and stayed when the British took over. He wrote a book about the Tanganyika railways, but his real memorial is Gillman Point on the edge of the Kilimanjaro crater. He climbed often, sharing a bottle of champagne with his wife when they got to the summit. With the thin air up there and the alcohol in their blood, they must have floated back down the mountain – but what style, what disdain for scientific warnings about lack of oxygen. I can just hear his female relatives (not including his wife) tut-tutting over the contents of his backpack: what, no clean socks but a bottle of Bollinger? Really Clement, don’t you think… but Clement has gone, up the mountain, down the railway track, to wherever he can’t hear feminine, scientific, pious or political muttering. Clement wasn’t alone in his choice of a resting-place. A little further on, I stop and read: In Loving and Grateful Remembrance Before God of Albert Arthur Mangwall Isherwood, C M G , O B E . Born in Cumberland 1889. Died at Moshi 1957. A Colonial Civil Servant Who Served Tanganyika from 1917–1954.

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“For with thee is the well of life And in thy light shall we see light.”

I was six when Albert Arthur died, and living here, in Moshi. Our lives crossed, however tangentially. Where was he as I walked to school in my grey felt hat and purple-and-white-check school dress? Did he drive by and see me, child of the new generation of colonial servants who flowed in after the War? What made him stay after he had retired, rather than return home to Cumberland? Did he find here the well of life and stay to drink? Does his ghost wander, like mine, along the avenues of jacarandas, watching the light fade on that snowy summit on the Equator that according to Mr Cooley doesn’t exist? Not everyone chose to stay. In another spot, I find the small grave of a child. I remember this child, a little boy with white blond hair who rode his bike around the neighbourhood where we lived. One day, he was knocked off it by a truck and killed. I remember his mother, who was a friend of my mother, a young woman, the red-haired wife of the bank manager. She didn’t choose to leave part of herself in the ground here, but here it is. These are the colonials, the white people who intruded and rudely outstayed their welcome, refusing to go home when their time was up. They don’t know it, these remnants in their fellowship of dust, but what I feel for them is envy. They found a way to stay, while I was forced to leave. They take up a corner of the graveyard, surrounded by the people they intruded on, whose graves proliferate, pushing closer and closer to the road. But I’m in search of another intruder, the mother of a friend who was born and grew up and still lives here, but in spite of directions, I can’t seem to find the grave. It should be near the road, it should have flowers and tinsel, and also, because of who she was, a headstone. But people are stealing plaques from headstones and I find out later that the family took Peggy’s down to keep it safe. It was Seamus who told me the story of Peggy’s funeral, one day as we were driving down from Marangu. I sat in the passenger seat and concentrated on remembering every word, but of course it was impossible. Seamus was brought up among storytellers on the slopes of Kilimanjaro by a storytelling Republican Irish mother. When he tells a story, you have no choice but to inhabit it, so I duly became part of that great cortege that wound its way down from the mountain, led by Seamus driving the coffin. In the back, two young women from Peggy’s hotel, that her children now run, sat beside the coffin and sang all the way.

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I knew Marangu Hotel. My family used to go there for tea and to swim in the pool of icy water. We lived down the hill in Moshi, the town at the foot of the mountain. Once, when I was fifteen or so, as a treat before going back to school, my parents brought me for dinner in the hotel dining room. In the colonial style, grave uniformed waiters served one course after another as we spoke in hushed tones under the dim lights, basketwork shades casting shadows over the faded green table cloths, the napkins and white china, the dingy curtains and faded prints of Kilimanjaro on the white-washed walls, the red cement floor, the heavy wooden sideboard. Peggy came and sat and chatted with my parents, along with an eight-year-old version of Seamus. After her husband died, leaving her with three small children, she battled valiantly to bring them up alone. She was a staunch and ardent Catholic, friend to many priests and a benefactor of the Church. Born in Cork, she arrived with her husband and two children in the early 1950s, and discovered that Marangu was just like the Cork she’d left. She stayed for the rest of her life. Seamus, her youngest, who was born in Moshi, was thirteen the first time he went to England. It was 1969 and the country had been independent for eight years. It was two years since the president had made his famous Arusha Declaration, which affected the lives of the whole population. How it affected Peggy was that she never knew when she would lose the hotel, the only security she had, where she had lived and worked and brought up four children, losing one in the process – little Sean, who died of eating malaria tablets when he was two years old. Owning property was capitalist; being white and foreign and owning property was an affront to socialist Tanzania. After living from day to day for two years, when Peggy got to England she collapsed in the taxi from the airport and was in hospital with nervous exhaustion for two weeks. Peggy kept the hotel and ran it till she died, giving her famous briefing to climbers about to climb the mountain, organizing the guides, keeping order. As she became progressively more frail, her children started to gather around her, returning from wherever they had gone. She was close to a Catholic priest whom she irreverently called Father Pieta, an Irishman she nursed when he was sick and who felt he owed her his life. When she was dying, Fr Pieta was called, but couldn’t get there till the next day. Father Louis, a Chagga priest who lived in Marangu, gave her the last rites twice. She was still alive when Fr Pieta arrived, and he sat and held her hand for hours until she died. The family asked him to officiate at the funeral, but Fr Pieta said he didn’t trust himself, so Fr Louis did it. The Catholic Church at Marangu, named St Margaret’s after her, is built on land donated by Peggy. The funeral of such an

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important elder as Mama Brice–Bennett was a momentous occasion and the church was packed. Afterwards, according to the story, we all drove in procession down the mountain road, and, on the outskirts of town, more cars joined the queue which snaked its way to the cemetery. Peggy wanted to be buried in the same grave as Sean, her little son. This required a cousin of Seamus’s to break it open with a pickaxe the day before, hacking through the concrete slabs. When he had overcome his grief, a day or two later, Fr Pieta called the family together at the graveside for a small ceremony of his own. This is what he said to them about Peggy: Those who are dead are never gone: They are there in the thickening shadow: The dead are not under the earth: They are in the tree that rustles, They are in the wood that groans They are in the water that sleeps, They are in the hut, they are in the crowd, The dead are not dead. The dead are not dead. Those who are dead are never gone; They are in the breast of the woman, They are in the child who is wailing, And in the firebrand which flames. The dead are not under the earth: They are in the fire that is dying, They are in the grasses that weep, They are in the whimpering rocks, They are in the forest, they are in the house, The dead are not dead.1

Fr Pieta is a Catholic priest, but what he expressed here is the essence of animist belief. In this part of the world, ancestral spirits cohabit with the living. Something of the living being clings to the things that were hers, the air she breathed, the clothes she wore, the walls that sheltered her. The living being is body animated by spirit, which is perceptible as breath, or as shadow, which can be seen but not grasped. Because of this, the shade of a dead per1

As quoted in P. Van Pelt, Bantu Customs in Mainland Tanzania (1971; Tabora, Tanzania: T M P Book Dept., 4th ed. 1982): 53. Attributed to Birago Diop.

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son can continue to exist. It can take the form of an animal, a dream or a cloud of dust or smoke. It can take up residence in a river, a tree or a stone, and especially on a mountain. Fr Pieta, who owed his life to Peggy, knew this. He knew that a woman who had lived all her life on the mountain would remain there, and he was telling her children this to comfort them. Albert Arthur Mangwall Isherwood had likewise refused to leave Moshi. Standing by his grave in the blazing sun, all of a sudden I feel faint. I sit down and put my arms around my knees and rest my head on them. Bunched up on the ground like this, I must be invisible to anyone in the cemetery. I think: what if I die here, in a huddled heap? No-one can see me from the road, they won’t find my body till someone else comes looking for old graves. The insects will devour me bit by bit, and my bones will fall into dust, and they won’t even know who I was. In fact, the insects are starting to devour me already. As soon as I can, I get up and walk shakily through the graves towards the road. As I leave the cemetery something makes me look back. A figure is standing by Albert Arthur Isherwood’s grave, looking straight at me. I blink and look again. The sun is lower now, and shadows are spreading across the graveyard. I see nothing. I leave. Over the next few days, I do a lot of walking. I’m walking the roads I remember from childhood, unchanged and familiar, the old landmarks still in place. Julius Nyerere Road, known as Double Road because it has two lanes, runs directly North–South, pointing like the arrow of a compass at the mountain. Double Road is a catwalk for one of the most spectacular views in Africa, though it chooses when to reveal itself. At one end of Double Road is the clock tower, erected by Mulji, an Indian businessman; at the other, an unpaved roundabout, messy with signs. In this way, the two extremes of Moshi society are brought into contact: the polite, middle-class, colonial, and commercial end, and the busy, working-class, African end. Between the two, most of the town’s activities are carried out: all along the pavements, people are busy with sewing machines, mostly women, but some men. You can get something made ‘express’ in twenty-four hours, if you’re ready to pay. Away from the town centre, wide, tree-lined roads, laid out, I suppose, by German and British town planners, lead to the Moshi Club with its golfcourse and tennis courts, the police training school with its bugle calls and marching feet, the white Greek Orthodox Church, now inhabited by Baptists, the roundabout with the askari statue, gun at the ready to defend his country, the old hospital where we went for injections to keep all the tropical diseases at bay, the Anglican church where we went on Sundays, the primary school

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where I wore my purple-and-white-check dress, the kindergarten where I chanted the alphabet. The landmarks are familiar, but life has moved on. The primary school, built for sixty white children, now has two hundred black ones. The children kicking a ball around the rocks on the dusty playing field, the boy selling ices from a cart at the side of the road, the woman turning corn on a brazier, the man in a suit and hat having his shoes polished, see only a shade, or a puff of dust as I pass. Reality is the present, in all its pulsating vitality, not a wisp of smoke from the embers of a dead fire. But although I’m a ghost, I’m not alone. Sometimes, as I turn a corner, I catch a glimpse of someone who seems to be following me. I try stopping suddenly and turning round, but when I do there’s no-one there. When I turn back and continue, I can hear their footfalls behind me. When I stop without turning round, I can hear their breath a few yards behind me. I fancy I can smell their sweat. And there’s another ghost accompanying me – Mike, my first boyfriend from when I was thirteen years old. He calls me often on my mobile phone from far-away Cambridgeshire, sometimes as I’m tramping the roads, just to find out where I am and what I’m looking at. His disembodied voice in my ear reminds me of the time we each found we had a five-cent coin dated 1941, and promised to bequeath it to each other on our deaths. I’d forgotten, but he hadn’t, and his coin is safe and waiting for the day. (Mine too, I find when I get home.) Mike tells me many things I’ve forgotten, about how to find places and what to look out for. We last saw each other forty-odd years ago, but he, too, has visited in dreams and his spirit is being called back. Whatever I tell him, he understands. It takes a ghost to understand a ghost. My niece Polly, however, is far from being a ghost. She arrives with her mother, prepared to tolerate the trip down memory lane, but for her, this place is all surface, without associations, with no link to the past. Bouncing energetically or slumped with her iPod in her ear, it’s all the same to her, she’s along for the ride. Polly wields her movie camera like a search-beam in a concentration camp, while keeping up a running commentary that goes like this: If this is the Club where all the parties were, it’s sad. Where’s the life in this place? Now we’re on our way to an orphanage for kids whose parents have died of A I D S and other things – by the way, what other things? Here’s the house where my mum grew up, and oops, it seems to have been gutted, where are the walls? This is the railway station where my mum and auntie used to catch the train to school, but there aren’t any trains. It’s not a station any more, but there’s a bar on the platform, hey, let’s have a drink. This is my mum and auntie drinking Kilimanjaro beer, which is the nearest we’ve got to

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Kilimanjaro because it hasn’t come out once. This is the airport where they used to catch a plane to England, the sign says we can’t park and there are penalties for ‘disobeyment’, but, hey, we’re parking anyway. Planes don’t come here any more, either, except for the ones that take you skydiving over Kilimanjaro, so cool, I want to do that. These are the puppies at the house where we’re staying – aren’t they cute, aren’t they gorgeous, that’s their mum, give us a lick, ouch, I didn’t tell you to bite. And here are the people who work in the house, Jeremiah, Saidi, and Sarah. Give us a wave, that’s right, asante sana, kwaheri, we’ll be back, love you... While Polly’s around, the ghosts all slink into corners to hide from the noise. She’s the same age as I was when I left Moshi; was I this vibrant, this joyfully alive? After she leaves, I hear the susurration of the ghosts as they breathe a collective sigh of relief and re-emerge into daylight. Abdueli Mshiu isn’t a ghost, but he’s in contact with the spirit-world through his wife, who is very sick. I meet Abdueli at the Forestry Department, Utilisation Section office where my father used to work. He’s come in response to a call that Bwana Bryce’s daughter is here looking for people who worked with her father. More than that, I’m carrying a photograph of my mother and father, standing in line with four of his foresters. It was taken at their farewell party, a few days before my parents were deported by the Government for being British, colonial, undesirable, backward. Beneath the photo, in my father’s writing, are the names of the four men, and I’ve asked for them by name. Abdueli is seventy years old, and long retired. Now he’s gone back to the way of life that his people, the waChagga, have followed since they arrived in these parts, farming bananas on the mountain slope. When he came, at the age of twenty-two, looking for a job at the Utilisation Section, it was my father who interviewed him. The waChagga value education more than anything except their cherished bananas, and have found their way into professions the length and breadth of the country. So keen was Abdueli to work in a field requiring skills and mental agility that he thought nothing of walking two hours to work at arrive at 7 a.m. If it was raining, he’d warm up by the boiler when he arrived. Ten o’clock, tea, 12:30–2:00, lunch-break, work till four and walk two hours home again. At work, Abdueli did timber grading and drying, made calculations as to density, weights, and shrinkage. He was promoted to technical assistant, and did research on the right timber for transmission poles. By the time he retired, in 1992, he was Principal Laboratory Technician, Grade 2. But Abdueli never, unlike some of his colleagues, got chosen to go overseas for further training, or even to Olmotonyi, the forestry school in Arusha,

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in spite of his brightness and aptitude. When I ask why not, he says that he never had a mentor, someone to speak for him. He says this totally without rancour, smiling, his eyes alert and shining. His clothes are clean but old and worn, and he walks upright, in an old and much trodden pair of shoes. Abdueli strikes me as the most dignified person I have ever met. He is extremely articulate, speaking the careful correct English of the era before kiSwahili became the medium of education. Speaking of my father, Abdueli says the Utilisation Section changed after he left: there was less discipline and people became less hardworking. “Deteriorated” is Abdueli’s word. He suffered when it was privatized, after which research and commercial interests were separated, and Abdueli was made into a storeman. “I very much liked my previous job,” he says in a pained tone. Thankfully, after a while he was allowed to go back to researching the potential uses of pine from Rongai. I ask him how he sees life now compared with when he started work, and Abdueli tells how in those days, if you were ill, you took a sick sheet to the doctor, who signed it and your employer paid. Now, in retirement, he’s managing without any medical insurance, and it’s very difficult, because his wife has cancer and has been referred to the specialist hospital in Dar, but he can’t afford to take her. “We are managing with herbs,” he says. When Abdueli tells you something bad, you can see he isn’t looking for pity or sympathy or help. He’s quite simply telling you how things are. Abdueli invites me to visit him and meet his wife in Kidia, the village in Old Moshi where he lives, and I accept at once. We have tea together and say goodbye, and a few days later, I take a daladala to Kidia. Old Moshi, from which the town of Moshi takes its name, is a spread-out area of villages scattered on the lower slope of the mountain. On the way in the minivan, I hear Polly say: And this is a daladala, it’s supposed to take fifteen people. Now let me see how many are we? – eleven, twelve, eighteen, twenty-five… It’s hard to count because some people are sitting on other people – hello, how are you? Do you mind being in my film? Oh look, we’ve arrived, whew, now I can breathe again…When I get off, a passenger, with great courtesy, shows me where to sit down while he goes to call Abdueli. Abdueli arrives, in gumboots, fresh from his fields. “I don’t believe my eyes,” he exclaims. I missed the appointment we’d made and he waited all day for me. I have to do a lot of apologizing and explaining before I can convince him it was unavoidable. I had no way of contacting him, he knows that’s true. Abdueli, unlike most Tanzanians, has no cell phone. But his sense of propriety, of hospitality, has been offended. Eventually he relaxes, as if to

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say, at least you’re here now. He and the Executive District Officer, a relative of his, take me on a “tour of the environment.” Like everywhere else on this mountain, it’s lush with growth, the green of the banana trees brilliant against the red earth, a waterfall in the distance a cascade of white down a vertical slope of black rock, the sky a clear pale blue. People pass on foot, the women in bright khangas, the men in boots and shabby work clothes, exchanging elaborate greetings. They look curiously at me, but Abdueli is taking his mission seriously, and doesn’t stop to explain who I am. After the tour, Abdueli escorts me down a steep muddy path to his compound, a small unpainted block-house set in the middle of a neatly swept yard, surrounded by banana and coffee groves. We enter the front room of the two-room house. Inside, it’s dark, the windows the only light. Very softly, Abdueli calls his wife’s name. Leading me into the second room, he introduces me to “Mama.” She’s been lying in bed, but struggles to a sitting position as we enter, the sheet arranged over her head like the khanga women use as a headdress. In the darkness, her eyes glow. Her voice comes low and husky, speaking in kiSwahili. She wants to tell me about her illness, and Abdueli translates: cervical cancer, stage two, radiotherapy prescribed, but only available in Dar. Her husband goes all the way to a medicine man at the coast for herbs, which cost a lot of money and last for six months. She drinks them mixed with tea, which is what she mainly lives on. Tea, and a little sugar. Mama looks at me, as I search for an adequate response. She says something to Abdueli, who laughs and stands up. She says you look like your father, he says. “How does she know?” I ask in surprise. I follow Abdueli back next door, and in the gloom, I make out a photograph on the wall. It’s black and white, it’s the only picture in the room, and it has hung here for nearly forty years. He takes it down and shows it to me. The entire staff of the Forestry Department, Utilisation Section, stand behind my father, who sits in the front row, smiling broadly. It was the farewell photo after the government gave him his marching orders, and it must have been printed after he left because I’ve never seen it. The other picture, the one I have, Abdueli says was taken at the party, where he sat in the best chair. He says my father warned him that if he sat there too long he’d fall asleep. I look at my father and he grins at me, conspiratorial. His ghost, I see now, found a way to stay in this place where he had lived for twenty years, where he had his children, where he became the man I knew. His ghost greets mine now on common ground, the ground we could never find when he was alive.

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As I say good-bye to Mama, her face shines, and what I see is a young and beautiful woman, haloed in a white sheet. She glows in the semi-darkness of the room like an icon in an old church. Come back and see me before I die, she tells me. Abdueli and I walk back up the muddy track to the road, and into a bar where we order Tusker beer. We’re both quiet, thoughtful. I tell him my mother, too, had cancer, and died a year after we left Moshi. His sympathy is quick and heartfelt and I have to hold back tears, as if, by telling him, I made it happen. Abdueli comes to my rescue. “Mama told me to ask you for a little money to buy sugar for her tea,” he says, and we laugh. “This is from my father,” I say as I give him the money. In response, he shakes my hand, his grip warm, firm, solid, the grip of a man who loves his life but isn’t afraid of death. As I sit in the daladala heading back down the mountain, I feel the touch of his fingers, and a new sensation fills me. For Abdueli, the past I thought was dead is alive and present, and I am part of it. Not a dream, not a ghost, not a puff of dust: I am real.

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TIXE YLNO

or Redefining Identities

J ANICE K ULYK K EEFER

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O M E T I M E I N M Y E A R L Y A D O L E S C E N C E I developed a passion for a television series called The Man from U.N.C.L.E. From the ruins of memory, I can resurrect one of the spy-protagonists: a blond Russian defector called Ilya Kuryakin and a villain rejoicing in the devilishly cryptic name T I X E Y L N O . With my addiction to spelling words backwards, I swiftly figured out that this villain’s identity was rooted in the idea of terminal or at least uni-directional departure. Certainly when the men from U.N.C.L.E had finished with him, T I X E Y L N O would have discovered that his destination was nothing other than that lockbox, H T A E D . Forty years or more had gone by since I’d last thought of T I X E Y L N O , but a journey to Ukraine in the autumn of 2005 – I’d visited the country previously in 1993 and 1997 – summoned up his ghost for me, appropriately enough, while I was pondering the Ukrainian words for entrance and exit: Vkheed and Vykheed. Vkheed, apart from its pronunciation, is straightforward enough: charmingly, the word for housewarming is vkheedchyny, or entranceing. Vykheed, on the other hand, can mean not only the way out, but, confusingly, an entrance on stage (vykheed na tsaynu) as well as departure, output, and way out as in where there’s a will, there’s a way. The adjective vykheedniy suggests coming into a state of freedom as well as the attainment of a point of departure. All of this is far more encouraging in the context of retirement than the ‘exit only’ connotations which my Man from U.N.C.L.E viewing had imposed. Certainly, friends of Raoul Granqvist will know that his exit from academe is, among other things, an entrance into the tango halls of Argentina

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and elsewhere. But I would like to consider in this essay another fashion of exiting, one that pertains to what the Canadian writer Mavis Gallant has called a “national sense of self” and one that, for me, is integral to the experience of both personal and public identity. As such, it poses knotty questions: How fluid can or should a national sense of self be – one’s sense of oneself as Swede, Finn, Canadian, Ukrainian, or Ukrainian-Canadian, for that matter? Can one ever shed a national identity or, to revert to the image with which I began, can one depart from – ‘exit’ – an identity that one’s lived with for a lifetime? If so, is that departure definitive or open: an exit or an exit only? If the latter, need it be accompanied by feelings of guilt and loss, or accusations of betrayal? The answers to these questions are, for me, caught up with peculiar issues of language and history, as the following potted biography will reveal. I grew up in Toronto, Canada, in an immigrant family. My father was born in 1914, some four months after his parents got off the boat from Danzig: they had fled their Galician village in the eastern wilds of the Austro-Hungarian empire to keep my grandfather from becoming cannon fodder for a looming world war. In Canada, my father’s first language was Ukrainian; he did not go to school or begin to learn English until the age of seven. My mother left her Galician village in what was then eastern Poland at the age of fourteen, in 1936; on her arrival in Toronto she was placed in a kindergarten class to learn English, an experience of humiliation which left a deep impress on her character. None of my grandparents ever mastered the English language, and since I never mastered Ukrainian, it made our relations intellectually though not emotionally limited. One reason why my progress in Ukrainian was so slow was that my parents had stopped speaking it in the home due to the McCarthyite paranoia that had seeped even into our safe, suburban corner of Toronto in the 1950s. My father was refused entry into the U S A to attend a dental convention in Detroit on the grounds that he and his family had belonged to the Labour Temple, a left-wing Ukrainian community organization, in the orchestra of which he’d played the violin. Both my parents had grown up with the strong conviction that to make any kind of waves in their new country was to risk all manner of punishments, from surveillance to deportation. To speak Ukrainian – so often mistaken for Russian – as my older sister did on her primary-school playground was wavemaking of an appreciable order, and it was only after several years had elapsed, and McCarthy had been disgraced, that my parents sent us to Saturday-morning Ukrainian school. But since the teachers there, most of

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them refugees from Displaced Persons camps in Germany and Austria, would not concede the fact that Ukrainian could be a foreign language for any child born to Ukrainian parents, my linguistic progress at ridna shkola was negligible. Perhaps a word on the supreme importance of language to Ukrainian identity in the extra-Russian diaspora is in order. (The term ‘diaspora’ has traditionally been restricted, as far as Ukrainians abroad are concerned, to places like Canada and the U S A , Australia, and South America, although there are more Ukrainian emigrés and their descendants in Russia than anywhere else, the murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya, née Mazeppa, being a dramatic case in point.) At least half of the territory of the present country of Ukraine was once under the stringent control of Russia; it was deemed expedient, indeed imperative, by the imperial authorities, whether tsarist or Soviet, to eradicate any trace from ‘Little Russia’ of Ukrainian nationalist consciousness. The preferred method involved banning the Ukrainian language in any scholarly, literary or sometimes even basic form, in newspapers and publishing houses, the theatres, and the universities of the Russian Empire. Indeed, so emphatic was this proscription that notices of cholera outbreaks – printed in Russian only – were posted in unilingual Ukrainian-speaking villages. As late as the 1960s, Ukrainian artists and intellectuals were routinely shipped off to gulags for demanding the right to use and defend their native tongue outside the confines of the home. Even today, in a politically independent Ukraine, there is fierce contention over the issue of whether Russian should be elevated to the status of an official language, despite the presence of large numbers of unilingual Russian speakers in eastern and southern Ukraine. The debate about whether Ukrainianness is something earned or conferred by the language one prefers to speak, as opposed to being a donnée rooted in one’s birth and growing-up in the civic space of the country called Ukraine, is a major constituent of the ongoing political crisis – or at least, ‘instability’ – in today’s Ukraine. The persistent fear that Ukraine, which has suffered atrocious losses in terms of material culture and human life due, among other catastrophes, to the man-made famine and purges of the 1930s, and its occupation during World War Two, might one day disappear still haunts the first line of the country’s national anthem: “She is not yet dead, Ukraine.” Taking all this into account, it is hardly surprising that our teachers at Ukrainian school in the early 1960s should have been so uncompromising in

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their stance towards the language they were supposed to be teaching us. Their job, as they saw it, was not to introduce their pupils to a foreign language but, rather, to polish the mother tongue we already possessed and to give us the rudiments of Ukrainian history, geography, and literature, although they did make the concession of teaching us the Cyrillic alphabet. It is true that some of their students had no need of basic language instruction – these students were the children of the D P s themselves, children who had grown up in passionately patriotic homes in which only Ukrainian was spoken. Needless to say, a good many of these children, for all that they were born or grew up in Canada, believed themselves to be Ukrainian first and foremost, and were taught to regard the emancipation of Ukraine from the Russian / Communist yoke as their role and goal in life. Canada was a necessary and protracted launching pad, a stage, if you like, to be entered in order to make a secure and well-provisioned exit for their true and destined home. If I am deeply regretful that my parents didn’t teach me to speak Ukrainian as fluently and ‘naturally’ as they themselves did, I am, nonetheless, grateful that they taught me to think of myself as a Canadian first, and a Ukrainian second. Or at least, that I did not grow up in the feverishly nationalistic atmosphere that was mother’s milk to many of my diasporan friends and acquaintances. During my childhood and early adolescence, however, I felt unspeakably deprived, not only that I had so little of the language, but that I did not bear a Ukrainian name like Roxolanna, Oksana or Katrusia. There seemed to be something intensely romantic about being an émigré, if not a New Canadian, as the D P s were also called, an émigré being someone permanently stationed at a crimson E X I T sign, someone with one foot, at least half a tongue, and often a whole heart left in the homeland. When my mother thanked God, as she frequently, vocally did, that her father had got the family out of Europe before the start of the Second World War, I was far too ignorant to understand the import of her prayer. Because of my social and cultural formation within a thriving Ukrainian community in Toronto – church, youth club, Ukrainian school, Ukrainian summer camp – I felt less than a hundred percent Canadian, and because of my linguistic incompetence and my parents’ lukewarm attachment to the project of Freeing the Homeland, I felt insufficiently Ukrainian, an insufficiency that bred feelings of inexpungable shame that dogged my efforts to acquire facility in my parents’ and grandparents’ mother tongue. I spent a great deal of my adult life avoiding Ukrainianness, partly by studying English literature, and living in places where there was no Ukrainian

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community to reproach me – the south of England, Burgundy, and rural Nova Scotia. Apart from a few stories and a poem or two, my writing made no reference to my split or hyphenated sense of national self. It was only when I moved back to Ontario, the province where I’d been born, and when I settled close to Toronto, in which I grew up, that I began to re-acquaint myself with things Ukrainian. A catalyst for this process was the discovery of a number of artists of my own age – a painter, a film director, a writer – who hailed from the Ukrainian D P diaspora and had managed to make and practise their art out of their love for, and quarrel with, their origins. I began to attend selective events in Toronto’s Ukrainian community, and to write on subjects having to do with the Ukrainian diaspora post-World War Two. I published a novel, The Green Library (1996), and a family memoir, Honey and Ashes (1998), as well as a suite of poems to accompany the painter Natalka Husar’s exhibition dealing with post-Chernobyl emigration, Blond with Dark Roots (2001). I have just published a novel, The Ladies’ Lending Library set in a Ukrainian enclave in Ontario’s cottage country circa 1963. It would appear that I have successfully accomplished the feat of re-entry into a precarious, originary force-field: my vykheed from Toronto’s Ukrainian-Canadian community thirty years ago has been transformed into a means of vkheed or entry onto the Canadian literary stage. Is every exit an entrance elsewhere? Is every entrance a temporary or reversible exit from a previous ‘homeground’, or are there some exits that are exits only? I ask these questions not for the sake of easy paradox, but because I have come through an experience of spending the past two years immersed in affairs Ukrainian – not diaspora-Ukranian, or Ukrainian-Canadian, but Ukrainian of Ukraine. Via the award of a research grant to investigate the impact of the 2004 Orange Revolution upon my own sense of connection to Ukraine, I have discovered myself to have reached the exit doors of a lifetime’s sense of national identity. Having spent over fifty years believing myself to be defined, in some sense constituted, by my relation to this ancestral country, Ukraine, I now realize that that Ukraine does not exist, except in a particular version of what I’d call the diasporic romance. The question for me is not so much ‘can you belong to a country that doesn’t exist?’ as ‘can you continue to be defined by a sense of unbelonging, or of being stranded between two countries, two equally pressing realities, when one of those realities has become, definitively, a fantasy even more than a fiction?’ When I was finishing my family memoir, Honey and Ashes, I wrote that I had never felt more Canadian than when ‘back’ in the bosom of my ‘homeland’, Ukraine –

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in that case, strongly nationalistic western Ukraine. The feelings I have now, at the end of two years of studying and writing about contemporary, as opposed to ancestral, Ukraine, are conspicuously different and distinctly unnerving. I feel, in fact, as though I have fallen into the clutches of T I X E Y L N O , far from the saving reach of any man from U.N.C.L.E. English has a number of adjectives to express the kind of perception I now possess, or am possessed by, vis-à-vis not only Ukraina or Ukrainian Ukraine, but also the Ukraine of the diasporan romance as it exists in Canada, and those still heavily invested in her. Alien, foreign, strange, displaced, disoriented, disaffected, estranged…. For all I know, there may be just as many parallel Ukrainian adjectives, but the one that keeps thundering in my ears is chuzhiy, meaning foreign, strange, alien, borrowed, plagiarized…. One of the poems I memorized in Ukrainian school was a heartfelt and stern admonition by the national poet, Taras Shevchenko. Addressing his brothers-in-patriotism, he encourages them to study, read, and think, enlarging their minds as much as possible, but without abandoning Ukraine, their mother. Those who forget her, God will punish: foreign people will shun them, will shut their doors to them. The poem conjures up the image of an orphaned wanderer who has brought his fate upon his own head by his act of primal faithlessness or even matricide. My paraphrase doesn’t do justice to the power of the poetry, and the impress it is capable of making upon the mind of a child, even one who can only partly decipher the meaning of the curse it utters. What has it meant for me to enter the borders of post-Orange-Revolution Ukraine, a Ukraine now truly and precariously as opposed to nominally independent, as it became in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union? It has meant that I find myself in a country that is de facto bilingual (Ukrainian and Russian, not to mention the despised ‘surzhyk’, a mélange of Russian and Ukrainian) as well as multicultural: although the vast majority of its citizens are ethnic Ukrainians and Russians, there are lively minorities comprising, among others, Poles, Jews, Romanians, and Tatars. As well, notable religious divisions exist among the Christian population, Ukraine having, as state religions, not only the Uniate or Greek Catholic Church, owing allegiance to the Roman Catholic Pope, but also rival camps of Greek Orthodoxy, with clergy owing allegiance to, on the one hand, the Ukrainian and, on the other, the Russian, primates, based respectively in Kyiv and Moscow. Like Canada, Ukraine is geographically and regionally diverse, and always, seemingly, on the verge of splitting apart. Contemporary Ukraine’s deep political, linguistic, and ethno-cultural divisions were exposed by the Orange Revolution of 2004

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and by its dispiriting aftermath, which led to the powerful position of prime minister being occupied by the russophile russophone Viktor Yanukovych, while the hero of the Orange Revolution, the ukrainophone, pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, had to make do with the office of the presidency, an office whose powers were substantially reduced as a condition for the very accomplishment of the Orange Revolution. The dismaying political events propelled by this revolution, culminating in a parliamentary standoff and the now-forthcoming elections that will shape the future not only of Yushchenko and Yanukovych but, more importantly, of the forty million Ukrainians in whose name they govern, have trashed the paradigms cherished by the adherents of the disaporan romance, those who pledge allegiance to what I would call the Atavistic Ukrainian Nationalist Faith, or A U N F . The A U N F holds fast to the idea of Ukraine promulgated by the culture’s nineteenth-century intelligentsia: a largely agricultural country whose soul was to be found in the villages that had safeguarded the Ukrainian language and the cultural traditions and rituals of peasant life, both pagan and Christian, against the hegemonizing and homogenizing powers of the colonizers, whether Russian, Polish or Austrian. These Ukrainianizing villages were to be found largely in eastern Poland – today’s western Ukraine – as well as to the east of Kyiv. That city (spelled Kiev by russophiles) had long been controlled by Russia, both economically and culturally; some of its most famous citizens – the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, for example, the painter Kazimir Malevich, and the pianist Vladimir Horowitz – were Russian-speakers who identified with Russian and not Ukrainian culture (indeed, Bulgakov was a strong ukrainophobe.). Similarly, the western city of L’viv (Lwów in Polish, Lemberg to the Austrians, and Lvov in Russian) was one in which, until the Second World War, not Ukrainians but Poles formed the most prominent part of the population, dominating the city’s cultural life. Ukrainians, like other colonized people elsewhere, were repressed, assimilated or rejected – in their case by a variety of imperial powers who were markedly different in their treatment of the subjugated. The Hapsburgs, for example, permitted Ukrainian-language education and publications which the Romanovs prohibited, by and large, while interwar Poland engaged in a brutal campaign of ‘pacification’ against its Ukrainian minority. But when the borders shifted after the end of World War Two, a unified Ukraine emerged which included the eastern, mineral-rich, industrialized Donbas (the Donetsk and Luhansk regions) and the southern peninsula of Crimea, a ‘gift’ from Khrushchev in 1954 to mark the 300th anniversary of

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the Treaty of Pereislav, a treaty which created the conditions for Russia to absorb and dismantle the Ukrainian Cossack state established by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Though the A U N F has much to its credit in terms of the preservation of Ukrainian language and culture, it has also been tainted, in some of its manifestations, by antisemitic and fascistic ideology. The unilingual, monocultural motherland conceived by A U N F – the Ukraine cherished in the heart of the non-Russian diaspora, this lost yet never-abandoned paradigm institutionalized by Ukrainian schools when I was growing up, is thus dramatically at odds with today’s Ukraina, which is drawing less and less on the skills, patriotic devotion, and influence of its diasporans in order to survive and flourish. Time will tell whether the huge response of Ukrainian-Canadians to the call for international witnesses to monitor the unprecedented third round of presidential elections in December 2004 was an exception that proves the rule, a kind of collective swan-song on the part of diaspora activists. What my travels in post-Orange-Revolution Ukraine have made clear, however, is that to enter that Ukraine is to effectively exit the country mapped by the diasporan desire of an A U N F . Not only is the Ukrainian language rarely heard on the streets of the nation’s capital but, as importantly, American popular culture is mediated solely through translation into Russian, which is also the language of commerce in both the chic and the less sophisticated shops of Kyiv. While I was prepared for the fact that the polonized Ukrainian spoken by my family and their friends from western Ukraine would differ radically from the russianized Ukrainian of the east – for example, dog or pes in L’viv becoming sobaka in Kyiv; sklep or shop turning into kramnytsia, or even the French-through-Russian magazyn – I was shocked to discover that one of the iconic words in Yushchenko’s campaign slogans, the word tak or ‘yes’, was almost never used in the Ukraine I encountered, the Russian da being endemic. Why that substitution should have been quite so psychologically jarring is something I’m still pondering. However instructive and disconcerting my recent travels in Ukraina have been, it was only when I returned to Canada that I accomplished an ‘exit only’ from the country of diasporan romance. In November of 2005 – a full year after the staging of the Orange Revolution – I confirmed my new status of, if not foreigner, that harsh term, then outsider, vis-à-vis Ukraina. I enrolled in a night-class in intermediate-level Ukrainian offered by the Slavic Studies department of the University of Toronto, and I started attending lectures and

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conferences at the Petro Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Studies at that same university’s Munk Centre. The effect of the language classes was to offer me what my D P instructors had withheld from me so many years ago: systematic knowledge of that highly inflected, delightfully complex, and maddeningly difficult foreign tongue, Ukrainian. The results of my attendance at the Jacyk Centre lectures I attended were just as complicated and illuminating. One of the things I discovered through listening to Ukrainians themselves – an assortment of scholars, graduate students, and independent consultants born and raised in Ukraina – was that new paradigms for national identity were in the process of being forged, paradigms to which the desires of the diaspora were often irrelevant. Significant numbers of Ukraine’s ‘educated class’ were working towards a concept of nationalism based on civic values and democratic processes accessible to and championable by all Ukrainians, regardless of their mother tongue, religion, or ethnicity. To be a Ukrainian, according to this paradigm, one simply had to be a citizen of Ukraine, a citizen sharing a clearly defined set of common goals and values, one that can best be summarized by one of the slogans that appeared on the Maidan, or Independence Square, during the Orange Revolution: that slogan, ‘Democracy Spoken Here’, was an attempt to transcend the polarizing minefield of language politics in Ukraina. To return to the lecture series at the Jacyk Centre, I remember a crystallizing moment at a talk given on Ukraine’s chances of joining the European Union: during the question period, a woman whose age and accent identified her as a D P asked a question that seemed to have little to do with the lecture topic. “What,” she asked, “can the diaspora do to help today’s Ukraine?” The speaker – an ethnic Ukrainian teaching at the state university of Odessa – replied in what, to me, seemed a strikingly direct, impassioned way which I will paraphrase as follows: “If you truly want to help Ukraine, do not complain, as you walk along the streets of our cities, that you only hear Russian being spoken. Such comments only harm the chances of our country pulling and staying together.” It hit me with wonderful force: the disconnect between the diasporan romance still being projected by elderly D P s and presumably by their descendants, and the reality of post-Independence Ukraine, a reality complex, contentious, problematic, and, most importantly, dynamic as opposed to the ossified force of the A U N F . Later, while attending an international conference put on by graduate students in Ukrainian studies, and by doing my own research, I discovered that the lecturer from Odessa wasn’t a unique voice in his rejection of the

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A U N F , but that he is representative of a new generation of scholars and intel-

lectuals who are working to construct a truly inclusive paradigm of national identity for all Ukrainians. The current crisis of governance in Ukraine – one in which members of a presidentially dissolved parliament continued to sit and propose legislation, despite the calling of elections in September 2007, elections which many commentators believe will paper over rather than address the deep divisions within the Ukrainian state – shows how desperate is the need for such an inclusive paradigm to be adopted. In this context, the plight of a Ukrainian-Canadian who, having shouldered for a considerable period of time the burden of identity as dictated by the A U N F , and then laid down that burden in order to critically unpack it, is very small beer indeed. And yet, it seems to me to involve a considerable leap of imagination, not to mention a certain courage. To quit the stage furnished by the diasporan romance, to effect not just an exit but an exit only from the kind of Ukraine it has constructed, is to invite from the Ukrainian-Canadian community accusations of betrayal, heartlessness, even sabotage regarding the ‘sacred’ project of assuring Ukraine’s survival as a distinct and independent nation. It is to perform an exit whereby I would be pursued, not by a bear, but by the ghosts of my traumatized Ukrainian school teachers, and the shame in which their scorn at my inadequate Ukrainianness immersed me. More importantly, it would cost me the friendship and support of a number of diasporans whom I greatly admire, diasporans who are, for the most part, the children of the fiercely patriotic D P s who suffered and who lost so much in World War Two and the displacements that followed it. To some of these second-generation diasporans, any refusal to demand, on the streets of Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv, that Ukrainian be spoken first and foremost by all would be anathema. Oksana Bashuk Hepburn, for instance, a Winnipeg-based media personality and journalist who is president of an outfit called U * C A N Ukraine Canada Relations Inc., has recently written an article in which she argues that “Strong, independent republics like Ukraine are a check on Russia’s imperial designs” and a way to curb that oil-rich country’s “growing power and belligerence.” Playing the Canadian nation-building card and citing the heroic efforts by late nineteenth-century Ukrainian immigrants to settle and economically develop the Prairies, Bashuk Hepburn demands that “Canada, champion of democracy and Ukraine’s friend,” must actively and visibly support that country:

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It might start by using its formidable international reputation to ease Ukraine into western international institutions like N A T O , W T O and the E U . Integration will ensure Ukraine becoming what it has aimed to do since independence– a western democracy trading with the world and being part of Europe in more ways than just geography. Furthermore, Canada needs to convince others in the democratic family of the benefits of a more westernized Ukraine to world peace.1

My uneasiness with Bashuk Hepburn’s plea has to do not just with the naivety with which she measures Canada’s international clout as “formidable,” nor with the confidence with which she appears to equate contemporary Ukraine with the Galician province that formed the predominant site of emigration for the ancestors of the majority of Canada’s Ukrainian-Canadians in the Prairie provinces. My concern has to do with the fact that the Canadian Bashuk Hepburn, who does not live, work, or vote in Ukraine, speaks with a citizen’s authority of what is best for that country on the geopolitical stage. It is a speech-act that I no longer feel myself justified or willing to perform; moreover, the audience to whom she addresses her words is one on whom I am prepared to walk out, if they refuse to admit into their halls of discourse the possibility of new forms of national identity other than those based on what boils down to a ‘purity’ of blood, language, and historical credentials. For, in some ways, the position of someone like Bashuk Hepburn can be compared to that of Québécois nationalists of the ‘pur laine’ variety, whose Québec either does not include, or resolutely ignores, Quebeckers not only of the anglophone sort, but also those whose countries of origin or ancestry are places like Italy, Vietnam, Haiti, and Lebanon. The adjective vykheedniy – its nearest English equivalent being something like ‘exiting’ – suggests, as I have said, a coming into a state of freedom as well as the attainment of a point of departure. To effect my exit only from the diasporan romance of Ukraine is not to abandon my interest in Ukraina, my engagement with its complex history and my fascination with its language and literature, but, rather, to keep my distance from the spurious or facile notion of what José Saramago defines as the patriot’s “true homeland, the one that always has its arms wide open to receive those it can most easily clasp to

1

Oksana Bashuk Hepburn, “Seeking Friends in the West – Why Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Visited Canada?” (2 June 2007), http://eng.maidanua.org/node/732

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its bosom.”2 It is to envisage a Ukraine in which not just the hopak, or in its Russian variant, the gopak; not only the mazurka, or even the Viennese waltz, but even the tango, can be danced with grace and ease in the reception and embrace of the non-foreign, non-contaminating, non-rapacious Other.

WORKS CITED Bashuk Hepburn, Oksana. “Seeking Friends in the West – Why Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Visited Canada?” http://eng.maidanua.org/node/732 (accessed 2 June 2007). Saramago, José. Seeing, tr. Margaret Jull Costa (Ensaio sobre a Lucidez, 2004; Orlando F L : Harvest, 2006).

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2

José Saramago, Seeing, tr. Margaret Jull Costa (Ensaio sobre a Lucidez, 2004; Orlando F L : Harvest, 2006): 89.

Contributors

W I L L Y B A C H , Brisbane, Australia, is a former Human Rights volunteer in Uganda, member of F E M R I T E , Kampala, and contributor to Michael’s

Eyes: The War against the Ugandan Child, ed. Raoul Granqvist (2005). D A V I D B E L L is a free-lance translator and independent researcher. He has

worked as a Senior Lecturer and Head of Department at Mid Sweden University College and as a Visiting Lecturer at Lund University. His research interests include British working-class writing of the 1930s and contemporary South African fiction. He is currently co-editing a volume of critical essays on the South African writer Zakes Mda. E C K H A R D B R E I T I N G E R read English, History, and Archaeology and started teaching at the University of the West Indies/Jamaica in 1965. He has published on Gothic fiction, American film, radio drama, and campaign speeches, but is known mainly for his work on postcolonial literature, in particular postcolonial theatre. He also translated plays into German and has exhibited his theatre photographs internationally. J A N E B R Y C E was born and brought up in Tanzania, and lived in Italy, the U K , and Nigeria, before moving to Barbados, where she is Professor of Afri-

can Literature and Cinema at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill. She has published an edited anthology, Caribbean Dispatches (2006), and a short-story collection, Chameleon (2007). She is working on a memoir of Tanzania. K E N N E T H W . H A R R O W is a Distinguished Professsor of English at Michigan State University where he teaches African cinema, literature, and postcolonial studies. His recent work has been largely devoted to questions seeking to de-

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stabilize settled approaches to African studies. These include his work on feminism and African women’s literature, as well as his most recent publication, Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postcolonialism. S T E F A N H E L G E S S O N is an associate professor in the Department of English,

Stockholm University. Apart from his academic focus on southern African literature, postcolonialism, translation, and theories of world literature, he also freelances as a literary critic and recently published his first novel. He is the author of Writing in Crisis: Ethics and History in Gordimer, Ndebele and Coetzee (2004) and Transnationalism in Southern African Literature (2009). J A N I C E K U L Y K K E E F E R is the award-winning author of numerous works of

fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. She is a Professor of English at the University of Guelph and teaches as well in the M F A program in Creative Writing offered by the University of Guelph–Humber. Her latest publications are The Ladies Lending Library (novel) and Midnight Stroll (poems). B E R N T H L I N D F O R S , Professor Emeritus of English and African Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin, has written and edited several books on anglophone African literatures. His most recent publications are Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius (2007) and Early West African Writers: Amos Tutuola, Cyprian Ekwensi, and Ayi Kwei Armah (2010). E L I S A B E T H M Å R A L D is a lecturer in English in the Department of Lan-

guages, Umeå University. J . H I L L I S M I L L E R is U C I Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative

Literature and English, University of California at Irvine. His latest books include Speech Acts in Literature and Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James. His For Derrida appeared in 2009. His The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz is forthcoming (2011). S T E P H A N I E N E W E L L is Reader in English Literature at the University of

Sussex. Her recent books include West African Literatures: Ways of Reading, and The Forger’s Tale: The Search for Odeziaku. Currently she is working on a study of colonial newspaper culture in West Africa. M A R I A O L A U S S E N is Professor of English at Linnaeus University, Sweden. She holds a PhD from Åbo Akademi University in Finland and has held fellowships at the University of Cape Town and Princeton University. Her publications include Three Types of Feminist Criticism and Jean Rhys’s

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“Wide Sargasso Sea” (1992) and Forceful Creation in Harsh Terrain: Place and Identity in Three Novels by Bessie Head (1997). She is co-editor of Africa Writing Europe: Opposition, Juxtaposition, Entanglement (2009). G E R A L D P O R T E R is Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of Vasa, Finland. His main interest is in vernacular song and its transmission. His thesis, “The English Occupational Song” (Umeå, 1992), was completed under Raoul Granqvist’s supervision. R I C H A R D K . P R I E B E is Emeritus Professor of English and African Literature at Virginia Commonwealth University. C A T H E R I N E S A N D B A C H – D A H L S T R Ö M was formerly Associate Professor at the English Department, Stockholm University. She has published on feminist theory, women’s polemics, and extensively on Virginia Woolf. With Anka Ryall she edited the anthology Mary Wollstonecraft’s Journey to Scandinavia (2003). She is currently finalizing the monograph Virginia Woolf: Biographical and Political Conversations. S V E R K E R S Ö R L I N is an historian and a non-fiction author. He earned his PhD at Umeå University (1988) and is currently Professor in the Division for History of Science and Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and a senior researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. He has held visiting positions at Berkeley, Cambridge, and Oslo. His co-edited book Nature’s End: Environment and History (with P.S. Warde) appeared in 2009. L A R S – H Å K A N S V E N S S O N taught English literature for many years at Lund

University before taking up his present post as Professor of Language and Culture at Linköping University. His main research interests are Renaissance and contemporary poetry.

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