Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film 9780367369491, 9781003009696

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Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film

This book investigates how the intersection between gendered violence and human rights is depicted and engaged with in Africana literature and films. The rich and multifarious range of film and literature emanating from Africa and the diaspora provides a fascinating lens through which we can understand the complex consequences of gendered violence on the lives of women, children and minorities. Contributors to this volume examine the many ways in which gendered violence mirrors, expresses, projects and articulates the larger phenomenon of human rights violations in Africa and the African diaspora and how, in turn, the discourse of human rights informs the ways in which we articulate, interrogate, conceptualise and interpret gendered violence in literature and film. The book also shines a light on the linguistic contradictions and ambiguities in the articulation of gendered violence in private spaces and war. This book will be essential reading for scholars, critics, feminists, teachers and students seeking solid grounding in exploring gendered violence and human rights in theory and practice. Naomi Nkealah is a Lecturer in English in the School of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Obioma Nnaemeka  is Chancellor’s Professor of French, Africana Studies and Women’s/Gender Studies at Indiana University, Indianapolis, USA. She is the President of the Association of African Women Scholars and CEO of the Jessie Obidiegwu Education Fund that is dedicated to the education of girls in Africa.

Routledge Contemporary Africa Series

Death and the Textile Industry in Nigeria Elisha P. Renne Modern Representations of Sub-Saharan Africa Edited by Lori Maguire, Susan Ball and Sébastien Lefait Narrating Human Rights in Africa Eleni Coundouriotis Higher Education and Policy for Creative Economies in Africa Developing Creative Economies Edited by Roberta Comunian, Brian J. Hracs and Lauren England Decolonisation of Higher Education in Africa Perspectives from Hybrid Knowledge Production Edited by Emnet Tadesse Woldegiorgis, Irina Turner and Abraham Brahima Everyday Crisis-Living in Contemporary Zimbabwe Kirk Helliker, Sandra Bhatasara and Manase Kudzai Chiweshe Media, Conflict and Peacebuilding in Africa Conceptual and Empirical Considerations Edited by Jacinta Mwende Maweu and Admire Mare Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film Edited by Naomi Nkealah and Obioma Nnaemeka

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Contemporary-Africa/book-series/RCAFR

Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film Edited by Naomi Nkealah and Obioma Nnaemeka

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Naomi Nkealah & Obioma Nnaemeka; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Naomi Nkealah & Obioma Nnaemeka to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-36949-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00969-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

To all the astute women and men of Africa and the African diaspora who through their scholarship continue to challenge gendered violence in all its forms. and To Pius Adesanmi, who embodied human rights values.

Contents

Notes on contributors Introduction: exploring the nexus between gendered violence and human rights

xi

1

OBIOM A N NA E M E K A A N D NAOM I N K E A L A H

PART I

The language of violence in gendered spaces 1 The public-ation of domestic violence in Calixthe Beyala’s Le Christ selon l’Afrique

9 11

GL OR I A ON Y E OZ I R I - M I L L E R

2 Gendered violence and narrative erasure: women in Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi and Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi

26

K AT W I WA M U L E

3 Exploring the language of violence and human rights violation in selected Nigerian dramatic literature

43

OLU T OBA GB OY E GA OLU WA SUJ I

4 Women on the move: the construction of the woman migrant’s story in African cinema K E N N E T H W. H A R ROW

57

viii Contents PART II

Sexualities, cultures and exclusions 5 “Putting her in her place!”: gender and sexual violence in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good will Come and Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives

75

77

A SA N T E LUC Y M T E NJ E

6 Human rights in spaces of violence: exploring the intersections of gender, violence and lesbian sexuality in selected African fiction by women

93

J E S SICA M U R R AY

7 Gender, disruption and reconciliation in the Ugandan short fiction of Beatrice Lamwaka

109

SA L LY A N N M U R R AY

PART III

Subverting stories of war 8 Women and violence on the Algerian screen: documenting les années noires in Yasmina Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida and Djamila Sahraoui’s Barakat! (Enough!)

127

129

VA L É R I E K . OR L A N D O

9 “A strange combination of femininity and menace”: re-thinking the figure of the female soldier in Nadifa Mohamed’s The Orchard of Lost Souls

147

LY N DA GIC H A N DA S PE NC E R

10 Domestic violence in China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier

163

T OM I A DE AGA

11 Gendered spaces and war: fighting and narrating the Nigeria-Biafra war OBIOM A N NA E M E K A

175

Contents  ix PART IV

Re-reading trauma and dehumanisation

195

12 Politics, narrative and subjectivities in Fanta Régina Nacro’s The Night of Truth

197

F R A N K U K A DI K E

13 Crime, punishment and retribution: the politics of sisterhood interrupted in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable

210

J E N N I F E R T HOR I NGT ON S PR I NGE R

14 Male violence, the state and the dehumanisation of women in three South African novels by women

223

NAOM I N K E A L A H

15 “Here comes the dress”: daily resistance in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker

241

M E RC E DE Z L . T HOM P S ON

Index

257

Notes on contributors

Tomi Adeaga  teaches African literature at the Department of A frican Studies, Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna, Austria. She is the author of Translating and Publishing African Language(s) and Literature(s): Examples from Nigeria, Ghana and G ermany (2006). She has published several short stories, including “Marriage and Other Impediments” published in African Love Stories: An Anthology (2006). She translated Olympe Bhêly-Quénum’s C’était à Tigony into As She Was Discovering Tigony (2017). She serves on several editorial boards, including the Journal of African Gender Studies (JAGS) and Stichproben: Vienna Journal of African Studies. Kenneth W. Harrow  is Distinguished Professor of English at Michigan State University, now Emeritus. His work focusses on African cinema and literature, Diaspora and Postcolonial Studies. He is the author of Thresholds of Change in African Literature (Heinemann, 1994), Less Than One and Double: A Feminist Reading of African Women’s Writing (Heinemann, 2002), and Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism (Indiana UP, 2007). His other book, Trash: African Cinema from Below, was published by Indiana University Press in 2013. He has edited numerous collections on topics such as Islam and African literature, African cinema and women in African literature and cinema, including most recently with Carmela Garritano, A Companion to African Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018). Asante Lucy Mtenje  holds a PhD in English Studies from Stellenbosch University. She currently teaches courses in African literature, creative writing and oral literature in the Department of English at the University of Malawi. Her current research interests include gender and sexualities, dress studies, Afro-diasporic literature, religion and gender, popular culture and Malawian oral literature. Her research has been published in academic journals such as Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of the African Literature Association, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society and Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies.

xii  Notes on contributors Katwiwa Mule is Associate Professor of comparative literature at Smith College, Massachusetts, where he teaches various courses in the Program in World Literatures. He holds a PhD in comparative literature and women’s studies from Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Women’s Spaces, Women’s Visions: Politics, Poetics and Resistance in African Women’s Drama. His works include essays and book chapters that have appeared in numerous collections, including Meridians, Kiswahili: Journal of the Institute of Kiswahili Research, and Mapping Africa in the English-Speaking World: Issues in Language and Literature. He was also the guest editor of the special issue “Translation in Africa” of Metamorphoses: Journal of the Five College Seminar on Literary Translation. Jessica Murray is a full professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of South Africa (UNISA). As a Commonwealth scholar, she obtained her PhD at the University of York. The first strand of her research explores representations of violence, in its varied manifestations, and gender in contemporary writing, and the second focusses on how queer lives are represented in literature, with specific emphasis on accounts of lesbian experience. She is a National Research Foundation of South Africa rated scholar and she was awarded the UNISA Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence in Research in 2012. Sally Ann Murray is a professor in the English department at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She served as chair of the department from 2015 to 2020. Her current research tends to engage questions of life writing, gender, sexuality and place, and she is inclined towards a hybrid critical-creative discourse, as evidenced by her contribution to the Routledge volume Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies (2019). She is the recipient of numerous awards for her poetry and fiction, most notably for the novel Small Moving Parts (Kwela, 2009). Her most recent book is the poetry collection Otherwise Occupied (Dryad Press, 2019). Naomi Nkealah  is a lecturer in English in the School of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her research specialises in the re-theorisation of African feminisms for contemporary African women and the exploration of representations of gender violence and women’s empowerment in African women’s literature. She has published widely on these subjects in South African and international journals, including English in Africa, Gender & Behaviour, Journal of Literary Studies and Research in African Literatures. She has chapters in various edited books published internationally. Obioma Nnaemeka  is Chancellor’s Professor of French, Africana Studies and Women’s/Gender Studies at Indiana University, Indianapolis. She has held numerous distinguished visiting professorships in North America and Europe. She is the President of the Association of African Women

Notes on contributors  xiii Scholars (AAWS) and CEO of the Jessie Obidiegwu Education Fund that is dedicated to the education of girls in Africa. Her extensive global engagement has taken her to five continents and thirty-eight A frican countries. She has published extensively in numerous fields—French/ Francophone studies, women’s/gender studies, African/African Diaspora studies, development and human rights. She is the author/editor of twelve books and author of over sixty journal articles and book chapters. Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji is a postdoctoral research fellow at Walter Sisulu University, Mthatha, Eastern Cape, South Africa. His research interests are cultural studies, gender studies, performance and film studies. Gloria Onyeoziri-Miller  is Professor Emerita of African and Caribbean Literatures in French at the University of British Columbia. She has published La Parole Poétique d’Aimé Césaire (1992) and Shaken Wisdom (2011) as well as studies on Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Calixthe Beyala, Léonora Miano, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche and other African and Caribbean authors. Valérie K. Orlando is Professor of French and Francophone Literatures in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of six books, the most recent of which are The Algerian New Novel: The Poetics of a Modern Nation, 1950–1979 (University of Virginia Press, 2017), New African Cinema (Rutger’s University Press, 2017), and Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society (Ohio University Press, 2011). She has written numerous articles on Francophone writing from the African diaspora, African Cinema, and French literature and culture. In 2019–2020, she was Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair of Francophone Literatures at the Université de Lyon II and a fellow at the Collegium, Institut d’Études Avancées, Université de Lyon. Lynda Gichanda Spencer is an associate professor and head of the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University. She has also taught in the field of English and African Literary Studies at Stellenbosch University, the University of South Africa and Vista University. Her research interests include contemporary women’s popular writing, popular culture in Africa, African women’s writing, Eastern African fiction, African cultural studies and transnational literatures. She is the principal investigator of Urban Connections in African Popular Imaginaries, principal investigator of Contemporary Africa Texts and Contexts: Decolonising the Archive, Genre and Method, and editor of Eastern African Cultural and Literary Studies. Jennifer Thorington Springer is a professor of English at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and associate dean of Student Affairs. She formerly served as the founding director of the RISE

xiv  Notes on contributors Program, which focusses on transformative pedagogy including high impact practices and experiential learning. Born and raised in Barbados, her background as a transnational subject directly influences her areas of study: Caribbean and African American Literatures as well as Africana and Gender Studies. Springer’s research primarily examines literary constructions of black diasporic identities and how race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality further complicate these identities. Mercedez L. Thompson teaches at the University of Nevada, Reno, in the English department. Her thesis titled “Herstory: Female Artists’ Resistance in ‘The Awakening’, ‘Corregidora’ and ‘The Dew Breaker’” examines female characters in women’s literature who seek the erotic via their art of choice and, in doing so, resist disempowerment and explore the life-giving nature of female connection. Her research interests include 20th-century multicultural women’s literature and gender/sexuality studies. She has been a member of the Hoosier Writing Project since 2016. Frank Ukadike,  until his death in August 2018, was a professor in the Department of Communication, Film Studies and Africana Studies in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. His research areas were cinema and film history, African cinema, and film and media of the African diaspora. His published books included Black African Cinema (University of California Press, 1994), Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), and African Cinema: Narratives, Perspectives and Poetics (University of Port Harcourt Press, 2013).  

Introduction Exploring the nexus between gendered violence and human rights Obioma Nnaemeka and Naomi Nkealah In this book, we are interested in the multifarious ways in which gendered violence mirrors, expresses, projects and articulates the larger phenomenon of human rights violations in Africa and the African diaspora, and how in turn the discourse of human rights informs the ways in which we articulate, interrogate, conceptualise and interpret gendered violence in literature and film. Admittedly, there is no shortage of research articles on gendered violence in African and African diasporic literature and film, as this has become an increasingly rich area of research for many feminist and gender scholars. Similarly, there is a fairly substantial corpus of scholarship on representations of human rights in literature and film. Joseph Slaughter’s book chapter “The Novel and Human Rights” (2016), for example, provides a detailed study of the evolution of human rights discourses in the African novel since 1950. What is not explicitly addressed in literary and film studies is the intersectionality between gendered violence and human rights violations. This intersectionality opens up new avenues for understanding gendered violence and human rights as interconnected concepts, for the prevalence of gendered violence indicates a gross neglect of human rights values. For us, the starting point is gendered violence: what do instances of gendered violence reveal about understandings and misconceptions about human rights? This approach makes this edited volume stand in contradistinction to other social science enquiries into gendered violence and human rights. The chapters of this book demonstrate intricate ways in which the question of human rights is directly implicated in the practice of gendered violence and conversely the way in which gendered violence disrupts human rights practice. By combining both literature and film, the book illustrates how both written and visual texts participate in enacting discourses on human rights violation in the context of gendered violence. Such violence inevitably abrogates, usurps, distorts, denies and delegitimises the human rights of people, especially women, children and minority groups. This book’s combination of literature and film adds to its epistemological value as it generates new knowledge on women’s films in addition to their literatures, as well as on diasporic African literatures. The book therefore documents the

2  Obioma Nnaemeka and Naomi Nkealah nuanced ways in which literature and film from Africa and the African diaspora engage with gendered violence and human rights. The contributions from scholars around the world unravel complex ways in which different institutions – family, state, religion, politics, and culture  – collude to perpetuate, condone or ignore gendered violence and human rights violations. They question gendered spaces like the military which allow women access to male privileges but deny them the human rights associated with those privileges. The four parts of the book present chapters which speak to each other within their specific sections and across sections, pointing to the convergence of ideas around the book’s central theme.

Part I: The violence of language in gendered spaces A key concern for feminist scholars is not just what we say about gendered violence but how we say it and the intent to which we say it. Part I of this book is therefore titled “The language of violence in gendered spaces” to reflect the contradictions and ambiguities around representations of gendered violence that the four chapters included herein address. Chapter 1, “The public-ation of domestic violence in Calixthe Beyala’s Le Christ selon l’Afrique”, by Gloria Onyeoziri-Miller looks at the multiple ways in which domestic violence against women is brought into the public forum solely for the purpose of condemning women, not helping them. Katwiwa Mule’s chapter, “Gendered violence and narrative erasure: women in Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi and Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi” (Chapter 2), examines the South African novel Tsotsi by Athol Fugard alongside its film adaptation by Gavin Hood, arguing that the two texts enact a narrative erasure of women’s subjectivity and through this they engender a normalisation of the gendered violence the women characters experience. Chapter 3 (“Exploring the language of violence and human rights violation in selected Nigerian dramatic literature”) by Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji interrogates not how we speak about gendered violence, but how we speak about humans (women and men), which is itself a gendered act. Kenneth W. Harrow’s chapter titled “Women on the move: the construction of the woman migrant’s story in African cinema” (Chapter 4) concludes Part I of this book, with its focus on how violent language reduces women migrants to goods and services. All four contributions address language as a gendered act but do so in very unique ways.

Part II: Sexualities, cultures and exclusions One of the most notorious mechanisms for enacting gendered violence is through sex, because as Kopano Ratele notes, in nearly every part of the world manliness is closely associated with sexual prowess and “sex is used to construct a particular form of masculinity and manliness” (Ratele 2011: 399). Sexual acts between men and women are often expressions of

Introduction  3 masculine power and dominance, with the result that violent sex becomes a double measure for ensuring heteromasculine domination of the female body. Thus, studies of sexual violence are most dominant in studies of gendered violence and human rights, where feminist and gender scholars are hard-pressed to find new ways of theorising sexual violence that do not commonise the subject by its very repetition. In their book Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation, Zoë Brigley Thompson and Sorcha Gunne (2010: 2–3) note that “sexual violence in literature presents feminism with a dilemma that goes to the core of its aims and objectives”. In other words, feminist literary scholars find themselves in a dilemma where talking about rape, on the one hand, seems to glamourise it for perpetrators and not talking about it, on the other hand, both erases the subjectivity of the victims and enforces silence on a gross human rights violation. In the contributions appearing in our book, engagements with representations of sexual violence are evident across almost all the chapters. We have, however, isolated three contributions which speak directly and extensively to the nexus between sexual violence and human rights, and these three contributions constitute Part II of this book bearing the theme “Sexualities, cultures and exclusions”. Asante Lucy Mtenje’s chapter “‘Putting her in her place!’: gender and sexual violence in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come and Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives” is a lucid reading of two significant contemporary Nigerian women’s fiction in which Mtenje makes the argument that the novels’ depictions of the prevalence of rape and other forms of sexual violence in patriarchal societies point to the close link between sexuality and social power configurations, where male hegemony as a structure of dominance confers on men power and a right to access women’s bodies even without their consent, and often with impunity, for the violator. Jessica Murray extends the discussion on sexual violence and the violation of women’s human rights by bringing in the angle of patriarchy’s repression of women of non-normative sexualities. In her chapter “Human rights in spaces of violence: exploring the intersections of gender, violence and lesbian sexuality in selected African fiction by women” (Chapter 6), she looks at the complex ways in which gender interacts with lesbian sexuality, race and tradition to shape women’s experiences of violence in various African contexts. Sally Ann Murray in her chapter “Gender, disruption and reconciliation in the Ugandan short fiction of Beatrice Lamwaka” (Chapter  7) analyses selected short stories by Ugandan writer Beatrice Lamwaka, looking at the ways in which the stories draw attention to varying forms and degrees of gendered violence practised during wartime in Uganda. She also explores the link between gender and ethnicity in the stories, where gender expectations are tied to ethnicity as an identity marker. The three chapters by Mtenje, Jessica Murray and Sally Ann Murray speak to each other by illustrating how patriarchal cultures and spaces seek to exorcise women’s sexualities through practices of exclusion which

4  Obioma Nnaemeka and Naomi Nkealah delegitimise women’s sexual rights, as well as the multiple mechanisms women are exploiting, including writing, to resist this delegitimisation.

Part III: Subverting stories of war Stories of war have typically been written by male writers who offer masculine perspectives that grant little space to women’s presence within the narratives, or to their voices. The fiction of Nurrudin Farah, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Zakes Mda and, most recently, Helon Habila is notable for zooming in on conflicts as a meta-space for addressing issues such as colonialism, ethnicism, racism, authoritarianism, genocide and militarism. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun is one of the most impressive stories of war which recentres the marginalised voices and experiences of women in the genre of war narratives. In seeking to unpack the multivariate levels of gendered violence and human rights violations in literature and film, it is therefore important to look at women’s works to decipher the particular angles from which they depict war and conflicts. It is important to engage in robust discussions on the ontology of gendered violence within the context of war, women’s responses to it and the implications of war itself on global efforts to engender human rights. Part III of this book therefore brings together four contributions which focus exclusively on women’s war narratives, offering feminist perspectives that complicate much of the criticism around war narratives. We have themed it “Subverting stories of war” precisely because the chapters present multiple ways in which women’s narratives subvert the conventional war story. Part III opens with a chapter titled “Women and violence on the Algerian screen: documenting les années noires in Yasmina Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida and Djamila Sahraoui’s Barakat! (Enough!)” (Chapter 8). In this chapter, Valérie Orlando revisits the Algerian civil war of 1992–2005 through films made by Algerian women filmmakers, films which represent the war from a feminist perspective that acknowledges the violence wrought on women’s psyches and bodies by the war. Lynda Gichanda Spencer expands the discussion on how contemporary women’s creative works subvert familiar tales of war in her chapter “‘A strange combination of femininity and menace’: re-thinking the figure of the female soldier in Nadifa Mohamed’s The Orchard of Lost Souls” (Chapter 9). This chapter looks at the ambiguities and contradictions surrounding the figure of a female soldier through an analysis of the representation of a female soldier in the novel The Orchard of Lost Souls by Somali woman writer Nadifa Mohamed. Tomi Adeaga’s chapter “Domestic violence in China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier” (Chapter 10) expands on the concept of subverting familiar narratives by bringing in the perspective offered by child soldier narratives. In analysing the text, Adeaga shows how it subverts the familiar child soldier narrative: rather than the child being forcibly recruited into the army, Keitetsi chooses to join the army in order to escape domestic violence. In

Introduction  5 the last chapter of this part titled “Gendered spaces and war: fighting and narrating the Nigeria-Biafra war” (Chapter 11), we get to understand the silenced stories of the Nigeria-Biafra War through a critical discussion by Obioma Nnaemeka which highlights the agency of Igbo women during the war and show how the writing of Igbo women foregrounds this agency. In all four chapters in this section, it is clear that feminist re-readings of war stories are necessary for subverting dominant narratives which deny women agency during war or conflict.

Part IV: Re-reading trauma and dehumanisation To talk about gendered violence and human rights through this edited book is to revive discussions around female trauma and dehumanisation. Trauma can be said to have a gendered agenda since violent acts – sexual and otherwise – are often enacted towards femininities, with a view to re-programming them into patriarchal subjects through mental self-torture and displays of self-blame. In the context of sexual violence, the effects of rape are massive and timeless. Trauma becomes a lasting experience for the victim, and even for those who witness her victimisation in close proximity (at the time of rape) and in mediated time (through a later court case). Contemporary feminist readings of African and African diasporic film and literature do not only identify trauma as a social consequence of gendered violence but also demonstrate how these texts re-write history to include marginalised subjectivities. These readings ask difficult questions of the readers: whose trauma is being sympathised with in the texts and whose is being trivialised? The focalisation on women’s personal narratives of trauma seeks to unearth narrative gaps in texts, which point to the complexity of writing trauma. The contributions included in Part IV of this book suggest that trauma cannot be reliably conceptualised in isolation – that any conceptualisation has to look at trauma in tandem with other factors such as dehumanisation, loss and bereavement. It has to decipher what it means to deny a person the basic recognition of them as a human being. Trauma and dehumanisation are therefore key constructs of gendered violence. Human rights violation on the scale we see today is the product of a long history of colonial violence, of civil wars and genocide, of racial and ethnic conflicts, of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, of western imperialism and neo-colonialism, of global capitalist exploitation and of patriarchal domination. These historical tragedies are underpinned by violent ideologies which deny othered persons their humanity. Mike Odey (2012: 479) asserts that slavery and slave trade are “the oldest inhuman institutions in human history” still thriving today in modern forms. Human trafficking and the gross mismanagement of Africa’s resources, which force its populations to live in abject poverty in many countries, are only some of the modern forms of slavery and slave trade that continue to engender dehumanisation. In his celebrated book Ethics and

6  Obioma Nnaemeka and Naomi Nkealah Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature, Chielozona Eze (2016: 151) states simply, “ethnic thinking and patriarchy are ideological; both of them diminish the humanity of the other”. We extend this argument in this book by noting not only how these abstractions (i.e. ethnic superiority and male superiority) are exploited to execute gendered violence but also how they function as institutionally organised structures of power by means of which gendered violence inevitably rolls out in pogroms. The four contributions in this part re-read trauma and dehumanisation in all their layered complexity. The first contribution by Frank Ukadike titled “Politics, narrative, and subjectivities in Fanta Régina Nacro’s The Night of Truth” (Chapter 12) looks at trauma and dehumanisation within the context of genocide, as portrayed in Nacro’s film. Jennifer Thorington Springer in “Crime, punishment, and retribution: the politics of sisterhood interrupted in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable” (Chapter 13) examines Caribbean literature as it exposes the trauma women inflict on each other through acts of violence and violation. Naomi Nkealah’s chapter “Male violence, the state and the dehumanisation of women in three South African novels by women” (Chapter 14) provides an extended discussion of dehumanisation in times of crises by focussing on the state’s implication in the perpetuation of gendered violence and the resultant dehumanisation of women, as represented in a selection of South African women’s writing. Mercedez Thompson in her chapter “‘Here comes the dress’: daily resistance in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker” (Chapter 15) highlights the subtle ways Haitian women resist oppression and how they cope with their traumas through expression and creativity.

Gendered violence and human rights: charting the terrain Traversing a disciplinary area such as gendered violence and human rights in literature and film is like walking through a mine field: no matter how carefully you walk, there will always be a potential for explosion. The scholars who have contributed chapters to this book have treaded carefully in acknowledging that talking gendered violence and human rights means not only calling black and white by their names but also identifying grey as an ever-present reality, even in its most subtle appearances. In other words, not only do the authors present unabashed criticisms of violence and violations, but they also highlight instances of volition where violence is self-inflicted and its course is chosen voluntarily. The explosion of ideas in the essays included in this book indicates the contributors’ depth of knowledge in their varied genres and subject matters. Their expertise in their various specialist fields and the finesse of their scholarship leave the reader with much material for contemplation. The worth of this book thus lies in the enriching quality of its contributions. In looking ahead, it is tempting to pronounce that in Africa and the African diaspora, gendered violence will experience a decline as the global

Introduction  7 world invests more resources in engineering respect for human rights. However, the concerns emerging from African and African diasporic literature and film, as seen in the essays here, do not grant us the luxury of entertaining such dreams, at least not yet. In the final parts of his book Human Rights in Africa, Osita Eze (1984) predicted that if the world became more socialist, then there will be more chances of economic equality between nations and consequently more hopes for human rights in Africa. In contrast to this prediction, we have witnessed a world that has become more capitalist oriented and in which social and economic inequalities thrive, forcing developing and underdeveloped nations to rely even more on developed nations (the United States, the UK, China, Germany and South Africa) for capital injection to sustain their economies. As capitalism drives development, so does Africa continue to experience waves of civil wars, tides of genocides, an increasing rise of militarism, mass migrations and a cauldron of ethnic and religious conflicts. These developments precipitate, enable, permit, condone and exacerbate gendered violence, with the result that human rights in Africa continues to remain largely a dream. Whether in rural or urban spaces, family or state, politics or economics, workplace or home, courtroom or jail cell, suburb or refugee camp, city or barracks, law or legislation, the presence of gendered violence complicates the process of living human rights. We hope more scholarship will emerge from this fertile territory.

References Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2007. Half of a Yellow Sun. London: Fourth Estate. Eze, Chielozona. 2016. Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature: Feminist Empathy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Eze, Osita. 1984. Human Rights in Africa: Some Selected Problems. Lagos: The Nigerian Institute of International Affairs. Odey, Mike. 2012. Africa and the Development Question: 200 Years after the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. In Doki, Ama Gowon and Ayakoroma, Barclays Foubiri (eds) Difficult Dialogues in Development. Ibadan: Kraft Books, 479–504. Ratele, Kopano. 2011. Male Sexualities and Masculinities. In Tamale, Sylvia (ed.) African Sexualities: A Reader. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press, 399–419. Slaughter, Joseph. 2016. The Novel and Human Rights. In Gikandi, Simon (ed.) The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 198–213. Thompson, Zoë Brigley and Gunne, Sorcha. 2010. Feminism without Borders: The Potentials and Pitfalls of Re-theorizing Rape. In Gunne, Sorcha and Thompson, Zoë Brigley (eds) Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation. New York: Routledge, 1–20.

Part I

The language of violence in gendered spaces

1

The public-ation of domestic violence in Calixthe Beyala’s Le Christ selon l’Afrique Gloria Onyeoziri-Miller

Le Christ selon l’Afrique (Beyala 2014) is a sustained parody of public discourse in a semi-fictional city of Cameroon. Religious, political and cultural views collide openly in the presence of a vociferous, opinionated, though impressionable, crowd of onlookers. In Beyala’s postcolonial city, corruption, demagoguery, authoritarianism, charlatanism and rhetorical persuasion come before the court of public opinion, while at the same time passing through the prism of protagonist-narrator Edeme Boréale’s ironic gaze. Not only are violence and misogyny deeply embedded in Beyala’s African polity, but they are also being perpetuated and reinforced by the religious discourse of the day. Pan-Africanist movements of various forms, often citing Egyptian origins of African civilisation, present competing visions which Edeme considers without fully embracing. But imperfectly hidden behind this public forum is Edeme’s personal experience of domestic violence, beginning with paternal abandonment, followed by maternal neglect and inculpation. Her mother inflicts on her constant verbal violence, unjustifiably blaming the daughter for abuse that she herself (the mother) has suffered: She waited for my birth to transfer her bitterness and frustration onto me. As far back as I can remember, I’d always heard her saying that I was the spitting image of my father, and that I was as mean and deceitful as he was. 151 This family situation reaches its climax when a childless relative, M’am Dorota, coerces Edeme into a role of surrogate motherhood. When Edeme refuses to honour the “contract” and insists on keeping her biological child to whom she has given the first name Christ, she is arrested and exposed to a strange and highly public trial. A central argument of African women’s engagement with feminism has been the assertion that African women have always been ready and able to speak for themselves, to theorise their positions on patriarchy and violence and to act on those positions. In the context of a discussion of third-world

12  Gloria Onyeoziri-Miller women taking action to support battered women, Juliana Makuchi NfahAbbenyi (1997: 10) states that before feminism became a movement with a global political agenda, African women both ‘theorized’ and practiced what for them was crucial to the development of women, although no terminology was used to describe what these women were actively doing, and are still practicing, on a day-to-day basis. Specifically addressing the issue of the representation in literature of sexual violence towards women of African origin, Lorna Milne (2007: 211) demonstrates that Gisèle Pineau’s novel Espérance-Macadam “underlines the victim’s power to seize her own destiny and to act, for while there may be little one could do to counter a cyclone or a supernatural curse, a mere human criminal can be apprehended and condemned”. It is my contention that Beyala’s portrayal of sexualised violence in Africa and the diaspora is part of a larger pattern of African and Caribbean women writers who theorise through their fiction both the causes of violence towards women and women’s ability to respond critically to that violence. Beginning with a reflection on Beyala’s previous representations of domestic and public violence, I argue in this chapter that for Beyala, the growing preeminence of an aggressive public discourse of the sacred in postcolonial African societies is responsible to a large degree for both the concealment and public-ation (bringing into the arena of public debate and judgement) of sexual violence and oppression. Public discourse is used on the one hand to hide sexual violence by normalising and legitimising its practice as t raditional, authentic and/or religiously orthodox. On the other hand, public discourse is used to shame women by bringing their struggles for sexual and personal freedom into the open where those efforts may be condemned by a group of judgemental spectators. Beyond this analysis of public and private spaces, however, Beyala projects a potential for resistance that spans the personal will of her protagonist and the multiple voices of African society, never fully silenced by any claim to moral authority. Both sexual and domestic violence have been recurring central themes of Beyala’s fiction from her earliest to her most recent works. This focus was clearly established in Tu t’Appelleras Tanga (1988), as Nfah-Abbenyi (1997: 85) explains: Tanga’s story is an indictment of human depravity in African urban slums, of a patriarchal society that condones child abuse, child slavery, and child prostitution – a society that is not only oppressive to women, but one in which women also act as oppressive agents toward other women.

Domestic violence  13 The most egregious example of domestic violence appears in Amours Sauvages (1999) where a white woman is strangled to death by her white lover, Jean-Pierre Pierre. Her body is deposited on the doorstep of his African neighbours to suggest a racist practice in France which attributes to immigrant communities a long-standing tradition of sexual violence. After an improvised “funeral” for the body of Mlle Personne, the narrator Ève-Marie concludes, Then we scattered, touched by sadness but reassured that Mlle Personne would find herself again among the real French people that smell of fleur-de-lys and lavender, rose and clover, those who benefit without being suspect from welfare payments and enjoy a good reputation. Beyala (1999: 44)2 Ève-Marie represents the funeral service as a repatriation of a body that symbolises endemic violence to the apparently stable and self-assured community that generates that violence. In Le Roman de Pauline (2009), the adolescent narrator of African origin growing up in a Paris suburb begins by thinking that having an abusive macho boyfriend is a source of pride. When she soon learns that her own fate depends on her rejection of his authority over her, she tells him, “Now it’s my turn to answer you, Nicolas. Go shit yourself. I’ve no wish to be the heroine of a documentary on convicts’ wives” (Beyala 2009: 159).3 The pervasive atmosphere of sexual and social violence is not only a representation of the misogynist and racially charged culture of the Paris suburbs but also the testing ground for a young woman’s experimentation with self-worth. One of the most troubling scenes of sexual violence in Beyala’s fiction appears in a church service near the end of Les Arbres en Parlent Encore (2002). A religious elder in an indigenous charismatic church publicly strikes and mortally wounds his wife for testifying publicly to the sexual corruption of the church leadership. This shocking incident is strangely incongruent with the overall thrust of a novel in which the heroine Édène violates all the norms of “traditional” African society by publicly attacking and beating an abusive husband. The stark incongruity of the church scene, which is barely connected with the main plotline of the novel, suggests that Beyala was already concerned about the possible relationship between traditional and colonial patriarchy, with its deeply anchored acceptance of violence against women, and public religious discourse. We find in Le Christ selon l’Afrique a complex tapestry of public discourse in which Beyala has embedded multiple references to misogynist violence. There are public attacks on women, such as the shaming of sex-trade workers and a probable arson attack on their premises. There are also instances of the groping of women in public, where the victim’s reaction is condemned by onlookers in the name of tradition. With respect to Edeme’s own family,

14  Gloria Onyeoziri-Miller different men have abused her mother with moral, physical and emotional violence, treating her like a slave: Mom had to her account a marriage – without a divorce, three cohabitations followed by abandonment, a few snacks in between, all of which left her a married single woman. Each of the men had beat her up seriously, and not one of them had ever apologised to her for physical or moral damages. 674 Yet Edeme’s mother systematically blames Edeme for her problems and neglects her in favour of a more sexually attractive sister. The arrangement forced on Edeme by her aunt, M’am Dorota, for Edeme to bear M’am Dorota’s aged husband’s child reflects a violence imposed within the family through economic power. Edeme’s own mother admits that she would not have neglected Edeme had she known that Edeme’s imposed sacrifice through child-bearing would enrich the family: “To think that I always thought you were worthless, and now you’re my old age security. God forgive me” (75).5 The violence Beyala represents in Le Christ selon l’Afrique is not unique to African women, for Edeme works as a housekeeper for a French woman who was raped by her own father: […] Sylvie went through a thousand experiences. She experienced the railroad workers’ strike […] fought as a union organiser, and yet none of those occupations made her forget that memorable initiation. She burned her childhood pictures, spat on her father’s tomb the day he was buried, burned her bridges with her mother and hated the members of her family. But nothing could ever erase that bruise on her soul. 566 Sylvie’s experience suggests that the climate of violence towards women, though fuelled by many contradictory ideas about what exactly are the “traditional African values” swirling around a postcolonial African city, is a world problem, perhaps even more horrifying in other cultures less forthcoming about their reality. As Suzanne Gauch (2010: 217) points out in her analysis of transcultural relationships in Le Petit Prince de Belleville, “Beyala highlights the multidirectional, if unequal, circuits of transculturation and actualizes a cultural globalization that destabilizes the colonial binary of oppressor and victim without, however, substituting for it easy new relational categories”. Although violence towards women is not the only form of violence represented in Le Christ selon l’Afrique, as men are both secretly murdered and publicly lynched, it is a central narrative problem because the story is told from the perspective of a young woman whose life has been characterised by antagonistic sexual encounters between men and women, with women themselves, such as her own mother, acting in self-destructive and patriarchal

Domestic violence  15 roles, closely mirroring the experiences of Édène in Les Arbres en Parlent Encore. The contractual sex, supposedly (or ironically) leading to the conception and birth of Christ, and the breaking of that contract by the child’s mother at the cost of public condemnation bring these antagonistic relationships into focus. At the same time, the suggestive nature of the child’s name, as well as the probability that the actual father is a white man met in a chance encounter rather than M’am Dorota’s husband, lead us to suspect that Beyala is seeking to confront a postcolonial society highly preoccupied with the political and social status of the sacred, with the underlying violence of its varying, often contradictory, claims to truth and justice. Claire Mouflard (2011: 178) states that for Beyala, “no voice is almighty or void of trauma”. Mikhail Bakhtin, in describing Dostoevsky’s novels as polyphonic, provides an apt description of the way that competing voices form the fabric of novels that defy unifying authority: The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue. Bakhtin (1981: 276) Le Christ selon l’Afrique is an eminently polyphonic text. Bakhtin defines polyphony as “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses” (Bakhtin 1984: 6). Beyala highlights this polyphonic structure by presenting sequences of speakers, such as Homotype, Prophet Paul, Madame Foning, Bola Achao and Doctaire Modeste, who debate openly, barely stopping to hear the voice of others. The discourse of the sacred is not content, however, to be only one voice among many striving to be heard through the words of Edeme’s narrative: this discourse, whether its claim to the sacred is valid or not, seeks to dominate, challenge and control every facet of social life, but especially the sexuality and sociability of women. As the novel’s title might suggest, all the voices represented in the novel respond in one way or another to the challenge of the discourse of the sacred. Despite the association one might tend to expect between the sacred and the religious conventions prevalent in a given society, a brief discussion of the theoretical positions of Mircea Eliade (1959) suggests that the concept of the sacred is difficult to define, generally foreign to conventional thinking, and in fact troubling for established social conventions. In his discussion of Eliade’s thinking, Stanislas Deprez (1999: 90) explains that the sacred “arises with every crisis, with every evolution of human life, as soon as man wants to go beyond his situation towards a state that in his eyes offers greater value”. According to Deprez (1999: 87), Eliade borrows from Rudolf Otto (1923) the idea of the sacred that is “completely other” and “comes from elsewhere”. Even if the members of a given society think that they know what is sacred in the world around them (one thinks of the

16  Gloria Onyeoziri-Miller crowds of followers in Le Christ selon l’Afrique who know all the psalms and choruses they need to punctuate public pronouncements by their leaders), even if they know all the special places and voices in which the divine may manifest itself, once lived experience overflows this knowledge, one is once again confronted with the sacred, something that continuously puts into question reality as it has always been understood. Thus, the historical events that form the backdrop of Le Christ selon l’Afrique, such as colonisation, neo-colonialism and globalisation, do not fit neatly into a meta-narrative of human progress or regression in relation to some earlier state of pure spirituality, whether in African or any other world culture. Gauch (2010: 218) reminds us that Beyala’s writing career has been “profoundly shaped by French and African cultures and yet resistant to their claims of particularity and exclusivity, resolutely outside renarrativization as a writer of African or French national literatures”. Beyala’s insistence on “uneasy, yet essential, questions only obliges us to reconsider the ideological entanglements and material economies that shape our reading and interpretive practices” (Gauch 2010: 218). In Le Christ selon l’Afrique, historical entanglements have their place as moments of rupture that reveal the sacred as an enigma and as a sign of loss. Michel Carrier brings us back to this way of thinking in summarising his critique of both what he calls the conservative and postmodern approaches to the sacred: The equivalency of the idea of the sacred and the question of the order needed for people to live together that we find at the heart of both conservative and postmodern interpretations of the sacred raises questions of a political nature: What if the sacred was rather that which disturbs order? What if the sacred was in some way opposed to familiarity and knowledge, non-knowledge to be exact? Carrier (2005: 108)7 If the recognition of inexplicable and untouchable elements, existing outside of the control of human beings, constitutes the sacred, then the traumatic events that rob communities of their foundations are likely to generate new sources of the sacred. They empty out the former certainties and beliefs, leaving a place for something sacred that one was not aware of and that will have to be learned for the sake of the community. In that case, the sacred is what one thought one knew but which one suddenly needs to look for again. Through Prophet Paul and his followers on the one hand, and Homotype and his friends on the other, loud claims to knowledge of the sacred reverberate in Edeme’s ears. Rather than simply rejecting their claims, Edeme draws them into her own search for the sacred as a memory that must reflect justice in her own life and her own relations with family and community.

Domestic violence  17 Augustine Assah (2005), writing on Beyala’s novel La Petite Fille du Réverbère (1998), suggests that Beyala has recourse to the sacred to affirm matriarchal African traditions, through the veneration of the protagonist’s grandmother. Le Christ selon l’Afrique, by contrast, represents a postcolonial moment (the early 21st century) when different religious groups are competing and where it seems to suffice to quote a bible verse, some “sacred” formula, to resolve all the problems facing one’s self or others. The sacred in this context becomes a claim to transcendent moral authority based on a cultural tradition, canonical text or trans-historical belief system. This 21st century version of the sacred is confronted by Edeme’s systematic questioning of such claims as she forges her own voice and viewpoint on what they really mean for her as a young woman subjected to them. In the context of Edeme’s story, it is the claim to moral authority that continually invades the lives of women, dragging them into the open, or on the contrary, telling women to keep their experience of sexual abuse to themselves. The discourse of the sacred is a competing voice in the public fora of Beyala’s polity that a young woman like Edeme has to challenge and work through in order to understand herself and her life experience. In Le Christ selon l’Afrique, the words of a prophet – le prophète Paul – are one of the centrepieces of Beyala’s display of polyphonic public discourse. He is the leader of a cult who uses end-time biblical images to press home his points. Although he is faced with considerable competition and resistance from many other viewpoints, such as Doctaire’s rationalism, Madame Abeng’s progressive feminism and Homotype’s pan-Africanism, he seems to enjoy the support of a large and vociferous crowd, making his voice a dominating, though not always triumphant, one in Beyala’s great town hall of postcolonial society. Prophet Paul’s favourite target is women, yet women seem to make up a large part of his following. When wives pray, apparently in vain, for divine help in repairing failed marriages, prostitutes accuse them of being witches with dried up sexual organs. The pious women reply only by calling their accusers “agents of the devil” (24), but whether they are right or wrong, they are still left with the hidden problem of being mistreated by their husbands. At the same time, the narrator seems to have inside knowledge that Prophet Paul regularly uses his prophetic authority to abuse women. She says that he locks up his wife and six children in an upper floor, while using a secret space attached to his office to “get it on with the women of his patients, to jump on top of their daughters” (122–123).8 Public discourse of the sacred becomes in Edeme’s eyes a system of concealment through which truth and lies are tied together: They sang psalms, sure to be sheltered from the Most High. I followed the group without feeling protected by the sacred text. I was aware of the fact that I was living in a world of alternative truths and marbled

18  Gloria Onyeoziri-Miller lies. I was clear sighted enough to understand that African identity – like the identity of all peoples – was being built with half-truths and half-lies. 1179 Not only does the discourse of the sacred function as a marbled pattern of half-truths and half-lies, but it aims at and feeds on constant public exposure of women’s sexuality as a scandalous crisis that merits divine indignation and punishment. This is illustrated by Prophet Paul’s public verbal assault on Bola Achao’s brothel: You will all burn in hell! I see Armageddon coming! And I hear Yahweh thundering against you, women of vices and curses! I hear Yahweh’s voice from the heavens in His great anger. The wind is flowing from His nostrils. He hurls his arrows in all directions! The waves of death are flowing toward this place, you sinning women, if you do not give your lives to the Lord. 6310 Prophet Paul through this declaration has made himself God’s mouthpiece, connecting women’s participation in the sex trade with a fundamental violation of the sacred. Defended at this moment by Homotype, Bola Achao is soon faced with a partial fulfilment of this violent prophecy when her house is mysteriously set on fire (with suspicion falling on Prophet Paul and his followers). The crowd putting out the fire is described by Edeme as both euphoric and hypocritical: “when one of [the prostitutes] ran out, the [pious women] were so disappointed that their foreheads contracted, which did not prevent them from crying out: ‘Thank you my God’, and then signing themselves” (112).11 By making Bola Achao and the women she employs a subject of public condemnation, Prophet Paul and his followers perform the double speech act of exposing women’s sexuality to censure while concealing the violence embedded in the social structures on which their version of the sacred is founded. Beyala is not suggesting, however, that the discourse of the sacred represents the only discourse of sexual oppression. When Edeme forcefully resists sexual harassment by slapping the offender on the same bus that she is taking to work, multiple voices arise to accuse her of betraying so-called traditional African values: The bus passengers took pleasure in the undergrowth of the past, went foraging in piles of dead leaves and found blessed times when a fellow could beat his wife like a rug to the applause of the public. […] They whined about the effects of modernity. They moaned at these absurd laws of sexual equality that allow girls to hoist their sales while the guys’ ships are taking in water. 3112

Domestic violence  19 According to Edeme’s analysis, the issue is not tradition or culture per se, but a fantasy of tradition that seems to take on, in her vision of discursive space as a court of public opinion, a sense of shared reality that from time to time comes to dominate the public face of society. Opinions such as those represented in this scene seem to catch fire quickly and spread through crowds spontaneously without reflection. The same lynch mob dynamics lead to the death of Doctaire, beaten to death by Prophet Paul’s supporters: Doctaire is suspected of Prophet Paul’s murder simply for having opposed him in public fora whereas the real assassin remains unidentified. The crowd’s voice on the bus sways back and forth looking for a focus, digging through piles of dead leaves looking for a time of blessing, and finding, without ever realising the paradox, further layers of violence and oppression. In this climate of verbal violence and exploitation, elements of one discourse or another undergo a splintering effect: the biblical language not only buttresses the misogynist diatribe of Prophet Paul but also makes its way into the language of people such as M’am Dorota who are driving forward their own agendas. M’am Dorota has an unusual penchant for citing the book of Ecclesiastes. She is perhaps attracted to this book by its evocations of spectacular socio-economic ascendancy. When she cites the “time for every purpose under heaven” passage as she conducts Edeme into the bedroom where her husband awaits, and then when the husband himself gleefully echoes the passage, Edeme recalls, “I suddenly caught on that the book of Ecclesiastes was part of their erotic code” (170).13 The discourse of the sacred is used to call women out as evil-doers in the public arena and at the same time it supplies individuals with their own sub-codes of sexual exploitation in the private sphere. This fluidity of discourses as they flow through public and private lives helps to explain Edeme’s internalised response to the public discourse of “tradition”. In the bus scene, she associates her public condemnation for resisting sexual violence with her private humiliation at the hands of Homotype: Their words rattled in my ears like old pots hanging from the ears of a mad pig. I considered myself to have already paid my dues to the mystification and demagogy of love. I once loved Homotype. I hated him today with the same intensity I used to cherish him with, just to think that I would have become under his crook one of those women whose only concern is to keep the house clean and cook nice little dishes. 31–3214 The comparison of the crowd’s words to old pots hanging from the ears of pigs indicates that Edeme’s resistance to the misogynist and condemning attitude of the crowd around her is one of disdain rather than indignation. At the same time, her refusal to compromise is motivated not only by Homotype’s infidelities but also by the domination that her relationship with him implied. The polyphonic structure of Edeme’s narrative is such

20  Gloria Onyeoziri-Miller that Homotype embodies in her mind patriarchal oppression while acting as the public voice rising in defence of women such as Bola Achao and ultimately of Edeme herself. The ambiguities of Edeme’s relationship with Homotype emerge more clearly when we realise that the confrontation on the bus is only a prelude to Edeme’s central struggle over the maternity of her son Christ. From the beginning of the novel, Edeme is under pressure from her aunt M’am Dorota to be the surrogate mother of a child to be fathered by M’am Dorota’s wealthy husband. Edeme’s unwillingness to take part in this arrangement is countered by pressure from M’am Dorota, other relatives and even from her own mother to profit from the promised material benefits. When Christ is born, M’am Dorota and her husband claim the child even when the child’s physical features make it clear that he is the offspring of another man. Edeme’s refusal to give up the child leads to the public violence of her arrest and trial. She is exposed to a brutal and humiliating arrest watched by everyone in the neighbourhood. Four ferocious soldiers armed to the teeth come to take her and Christ away. When her mother questions the legality of the arrest, one of the soldiers violently throws her across the room. It is M’am Dorota and her husband’s social standing and political influence that make this public display of police violence possible. In the face of this public condemnation of Edeme’s refusal to give up her maternal rights, the only advocate to come forward on her behalf is Homotype. He asks for pardon on Edeme’s behalf, attributes her behaviour to a general moral crisis in contemporary society, and invents “atrocious suffering, horrible childhood wounds and nauseous psychological disorders” (256). Oddly enough, Homotype’s histrionic claims are not far from the truth of the domestic violence that the narrator has experienced. As the judge finds himself amused, lost and confused by Homotype’s neo-baroque plea, he declares the court incompetent to hear Edeme’s case. Although Edeme walks out freely, hand-in-hand with Homotype, she maintains to the end her claim to being Christ’s mother, the only person charged with participating in the multiple possibilities of his future: “I’d send my son to school, who knows, maybe he’d go to university” (259).15 The trial scene is the culmination of the violent attack on Edeme’s claim to sexual independence, as reflected by the public spectacle, and especially by M’am Dorota’s words filled with images of violence. But Homotype’s intervention also underscores the continued presence of an alternative A frican worldview embedded in the polyphonic representation of contradictory notions of African tradition that has been unfolding since the beginning of the narrative. All the voices represented in Edeme’s public forum position themselves in relation to the sacred. For example, James Owona, who opens the debate, complains about the cancer of selfishness instilled in Cameroonian society by television. He preaches a traditionalism of fraternal ideals: “Honour your ancestors by holding up the torch of solidarity and fraternity,

Domestic violence  21 16

for individualism is foreign to our culture” (16). But he also connects the erosion of traditional values with the distraction of religion, claiming that people are spending their time praying instead of working together for positive change. Madame Abeng, cameo representation of an emancipated modern woman, expresses disdain for Owona’s traditionalism. While she does not directly challenge Homotype or Prophet Paul on their visions of the sacred, she implicitly associates Homotype’s pan-Africanist religiosity with traditionalism by supporting Doctaire’s “scientific” discourse. It is only when Doctaire’s praise of the wonders of modern medicine reaches the point of claiming the power to give life, as when he declares “I respect and give life” (20),17 that Prophet Paul’s indignant voice rises from the crowd: “Only the Lord, the almighty God, the Lord of hosts, gives life” (20).18 Homotype’s vision of the sacred is founded on various pan-Africanist narratives, including the notions that all civilisations derive from that of pharaonic Egypt, that all gods are variants of Amon Rê and Osiris, and that all sacred writings are plagiarised versions of the Book of the Dead. He also joins a group of friends who practice a form of Rastafarian devotion. While Homotype defends women like Bola Achao and Edeme from various forms of violence, the belief system that underpins his efforts offers small comfort to Edeme in her quest for security and support. His principal argument in support of Bola Achao is that without sex trade workers “our young men wouldn’t know where to turn to learn the intoxicating mysteries of the woman” (64).19 Just as sex trade workers’ existence is justified by the needs of men, Homotype argues that his infidelity towards Edeme is a normal and necessary aspect of men’s lifestyle. When she expresses her shock at his explanations, he tells her that she is actually the problem: Because you so-called modern African women want so much to fit into the system of white thought, white dialectics, white Cartesian thought, that finally you’ve become hybrids. You don’t belong to anything. You are meaningless. A true African woman wouldn’t ask such questions. She wouldn’t be so rational. 6720 He is in fact denigrating the Africa he claims to treat as sacred by attributing everything to western influence and excluding African women, despite their well-established centrality in Egyptian mythology, from his own vision of the sacred as African, by transforming them into mindless followers of a secular and inherently foreign philosophical system. When Homotype tells Edeme that her mother (who, ironically, vigorously rejects him as a poor, useless suitor), is a “real African woman”, Edeme is thrown back into the memories of what she suffered as a child because of the abuse her mother suffered at the hands of men and of the way that abuse was transferred to her through her mother’s unkindness and indifference towards her. Ultimately, even though she continues to rely on Homotype’s

22  Gloria Onyeoziri-Miller support to resist the assaults of a judgemental public, Edeme realises that Homotype’s vision of the sacred conceals, behind its ritual face of panAfricanist value, the return to the same circle of abuse that she has already known from childhood. Edeme’s experience and lucidity clearly place Le Christ selon l’Afrique within a continuity of Beyala’s fiction that Mouflard (2011: 178) traces back to her earliest works such as Tu t’Appelleras Tanga: “Beyala effectively creates a space where her narratives linger along the bodies of those who have been disillusioned by history”. This continuity hidden within what sometimes appears in the novel as a struggle between competing discourses of the sacred leads to incongruous situations where Prophet Paul and Homotype take turns at verbally abusing Edeme. When she has dressed seductively to make her first visit to M’am Dorota’s home, she is suddenly accosted by Prophet Paul and his followers: “He concluded that I was losing nothing to wait because the Almighty wouldn’t fail to stick it to me and seriously screw my destiny, hallelujah! Amen!” (165).21 Their attacks (and Edeme’s account of them) are so hyperbolic that we are not really told if they are reacting to the arrangement with M’am Dorota or simply moved by Edeme’s appearance. Edeme herself is somewhat at a loss to understand “a dishonour of which she wasn’t able to explain the source” (166).22 Just as she is trying to understand this prophetic intervention, Homotype himself jumps out of the shadows, lavishly (perhaps sarcastically) compliments her on her alluring presence in the neighbourhood and sings Brassens’s “Filles de joie” (167). Edeme interprets this gesture as “a chirping insult”, “a humming mockery” (167) that adds to the indignity she suffered that day, which presumably includes the crass opportunism of the family members and neighbours who sent her on her mission of “insemination” (166). Homotype uncharacteristically omits from this scene any reference to Amon Rê or Osiris, but indirectly proves that otherwise polyphonic voices achieve harmony when it comes to the public shaming of a woman for a sexual act that has essentially been imposed on her by her own community. Edeme is a witness to the violence that women experience at every stage of life in African society and elsewhere. She is also aware of the fact that the dominant discourses for or against the authority of tradition offer little to women struggling to improve their own lives. Most voices that she hears are condemning and judgemental or presumptuous and ultimately rather cynical. Compared to a text like Leonora Miano’s Les Aubes Ecarlates (2009) that, after evoking all the horrors of postcolonial dystopia, places an African woman like Epupa at the forefront of the recalling of the sacred in African culture through and beyond its historical traumas, Le Christ selon l’Afrique, true to its polyphonic and dialogical premises, refuses to posit any way forward outside of the hopes that Edeme places in her own Christ. She concludes by saying, Maybe he would bring about a more just world when human beings would be at the centre and the rest at their service. Maybe he would

Domestic violence  23 study the secret of successful coups d’État and overthrow corrupt regimes. Maybe he would become the saviour of the Africas, he already had the first name for it, he now just had to make a last name for himself, and I would help him to do it. 259–26023 Beyond the play on words associated with her son’s name, is there a messianic intention? On the one hand, onomastic strategies are crucial to Beyala’s work (see Miller and Onyeoziri 2014). On the other hand, it seems unlikely that after consistently questioning the credibility of male prophets of African descent such as Homotype and Prophet Paul, Edeme would abdicate her role as a rebel woman (see Cazenave 1996) in favour of a new male anointed. A more convincing interpretation of the book’s conclusion is that Edeme’s resistance to domestic violence (and all violence towards women) is itself a generator of the possible and thus carries its own moral authority, whether sacred itself or as an ever-dissident discourse playing against the backdrop of all other claims to the sacred in the postcolonial African city.

Notes 1 “Elle attendit ma naissance pour déplacer sa rancune et sa frustration sur moi. D’aussi loin que je m’en souvenais, je l’avais toujours entendue dire que je ressemblais à mon père comme deux crachats d’une même personne, que j’étais aussi fourbe et méchante que lui”. All translations from the French in this study are my own. 2 “Puis nous nous éparpillâmes, marqués de chagrin mais rassurés quant au fait que Mlle Personne allait se retrouver chez les vrais Français qui puent la fleur de lys et la lavande, la rose et les trèfles, ceux-là qui bénéficient sans soupçon des allocations et jouissent d’une bonne réputation”. 3 “C’est maintenant à moi de te répondre, Nicolas. Va chier. J’ai pas envie d’être l’héroïne d’un documentaire sur les femmes des prisonniers”. 4 “[M]aman avait à son actif un mariage – sans divorce –, trois concubinages avec abandon, des casse-croûte entre, ce qui faisait d’elle une femme mariée célibataire. Chacun l’avait sérieusement bastonnée et jamais aucun homme ne s’était excusé auprès elle pour préjudices physiques ou moraux”. 5 “Dire que j’avais toujours cru que tu ne valais rien, alors que c’est toi qui es mon assurance vieillesse. Que Dieu me pardonne”. 6 “Sylvie vécut mille expériences. Elle connut des grèves de cheminots […] milita en tant que syndicaliste, sans que ces occupations lui fassent oublier cette mémorable initiation. Elle brûla les photos de son enfance, cracha sur la tombe de son père le jour de son enterrement, coupa les ponts avec sa mère et détesta les membres de sa famille. Mais rien jamais ne réussit à gommer cette meurtrissure de son âme”. 7 “La mise en rapport de l’idée du sacré et de la question de l’ordre nécessaire au vivre ensemble que nous trouvons au cœur des interprétations conservatrices et postmodernes du sacré mène à une série de questions de nature politique: et si le sacré était plutôt ce qui bouscule l’ordre? Et s’il était en quelque sorte contre la connaissance et le savoir, le non-savoir par excellence?” 8 “… fricot[er] avec les femmes des malades, s’expédi[er] en l’air avec leurs filles”. 9 “Ils psalmodiaient, sûrs d’être à l’abri du Très-Haut. Je suivais le groupe sans pour autant me sentir protégée par le texte sacré. J’étais consciente que je vivais

24  Gloria Onyeoziri-Miller

10

11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23

dans un univers de vérités diverses et de mensonges marbrés. J’étais assez clairvoyante pour comprendre que l’identité africaine – comme celle de tous les peuples – était en train de se bâtir sur des demi-vérités et des demi-mensonges”. “Vous brûlerez tous en enfer! Je vois venir Armageddon! Et j’entends Yahvé tonner contre vous, femmes de vices et de malédictions! J’entends Yahvé donner de la voix depuis les cieux. Sa colère est énorme. Le vent souffle de ses narines. Il décoche ses flèches, les disperse! Les flots de la mort déferlent vers ce lieu, pécheresses, si vous ne confiez pas votre vie au Seigneur”. “Lorsqu’une d’entre elles [les prostituées] s’en sortait, elles [les dévotes] étaient si déçues que leur front se plissait, ce qui ne les empêchait pas de clamer: ‘Merci mon Dieu’, puis de se signer”. “Les voyageurs s’égaillèrent dans les sous-bois du passé, fouillèrent dans les amas des feuilles mortes et retrouvèrent les époques bénies où un type pouvait battre son épouse comme natte sous les applaudissements du public […] Ils larmoyèrent sur les conséquences de la modernité. Ils geignirent face à ces lois absurdes sur l’égalité des sexes qui permettaient aux gonzesses de hisser leurs voiles tandis que le navire des mecs prenait l’eau”. “J’ai compris l’espace d’un cillement que l’Ecclésiaste faisait partie de leur code érotique”. “Leurs mots claquaient à mes oreilles comme des vieilles casseroles suspendues aux oreilles d’un cochon enragé. J’estimais avoir déjà payé ma quote-part à la magie et démagogie de l’amour. J’avais aimé Homotype. Je le détestais aujourd’hui avec la même violence que celle que j’avais mise à le chérir, à penser que je deviendrais sous sa houlette une de ces femmes qui ont pour seul souci de tenir leur maison propre et de cuisiner des petits plats”. “J’enverrais mon fils à l’école, qui sait, peut-être irait-il à l’université”. “Faites honneur à vos ancêtres en portant haut le flambeau de nos valeurs de solidarité et de fraternité, car l’individualisme est étranger à notre culture”. “Je respecte et donne la vie”. “Seul le Seigneur, le Dieu tout-puissant, L’Éternel des armées, donne la vie”. “… nos jeunes ne sauraient vers quel saint se tourner pour s’initier aux mystères enivrants de la femme”. “Parce que vous, les Africaines soi-disant modernes vous voulez tellement vous intégrer dans le système de la pensée blanche, de la dialectique blanche, du cartésianisme blanc, qu’à la fin, vous devenez des hybrides. Vous n’appartenez à rien. Vous êtes un non-sens. Une vraie femme africaine ne poserait pas ces questions. Elle ne serait pas si raisonnable”. “Il conclut que ne perdais rien pour attendre car le Tout-Puissant finirait bien par couillonner ma vie et m’enculer sérieusement le destin, alléluia! Amen!”. “… un déshonneur dont [elle] n’arrivai[t] pas à expliquer l’origine”. “Peut-être ferait-il advenir un monde plus juste où l’homme serait le centre et le reste à son service. Peut-être s’instruirait-il sur le secret des coups d’État réussis et renverserait-il les régimes corrompus. Peut-être deviendrait-il le sauveur des Afriques, il avait déjà un prénom, ne lui restait qu’à se faire un nom, et moi je l’y aiderais”.

References Assah, Augustine. 2005. Veneration and Desecration in Calixthe Beyala’s La Petite Fille du Réverbère. Research in African Literatures 36(4): 155–171. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination (trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Domestic violence  25 ——— 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (trans. Caryl Emerson). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Beyala, Calixthe. 1988. Tu t’Appelleras Tanga. Paris: Stock. ——— 1992. Le Petit Prince de Belleville. Paris: Albin Michel. ——— 1998. La Petite Fille de Réverbère. Paris: Albin Michel. ——— 1999. Amours Sauvages. Paris: Albin Michel. ——— 2002. Les Arbres en Parlent Encore. Paris: Albin Michel. ——— 2009. Le Roman de Pauline. Paris: Albin Michel. ——— 2014. Le Christ selon l’Afrique. Paris: Albin Michel. Carrier, Michel. 2005. Penser le Sacré: Les Sciences Humaines et l’Invention du Sacré. Montréal: Liber. Cazenave, Odile. 1996. Femmes Rebelles: Naissance d’un Nouveau Roman Africain au Féminin. Paris: L’Harmattan. Deprez, Stanislas. 1999. Mircéa Éliade: La Philosophie du Sacré. Paris: L’Harmattan. Eliade, Mircea. 1959. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (trans. Willard Trask). New York: Harcourt Brace. Gauch, Suzanne. 2010. Sampling Globalization in Calixthe Beyala’s Le Petit Prince de Belleville. Research in African Literatures 41(2): 203–221. Miano, Leonora. 2009. Les Aubes Écarlates. Paris: Plon. Miller, Robert and Gloria Onyeoziri. 2014. Ironic Onomastic Strategies of Calixthe Beyala and Chimamanda Adichie. In Ankumah, Adaku (ed.) Nomenclatural Poetization and Globalization. Bamenda: Langaa Research and Publishing, 83–98. Milne, Lorna. 2007. Sex, Violence and Cultural Identity in the Work of Gisèle Pineau. In Milne, Lorna (ed.) Postcolonial Violence, Culture and Identity in Francophone Africa and the Antilles. Oxford: Peter Lang, 191–212. Mouflard, Claire. 2011. Haunted Bodies and Haunting Memories: Transference and Transcendence of “h/Histoires” in Calixthe Beyala’s Tu t’Appelleras Tanga. Romance Notes 51(2): 171–178. Nfah-Abbenyi, Juliana Makuchi. 1997. Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality and Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Otto, Rudolf. 1923. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational (trans. John Harvey). London: Oxford University Press.

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Gendered violence and narrative erasure Women in Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi and Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi1 Katwiwa Mule

In an important book, Violence in Capitalism: Devaluing Life in an Age of Responsibility, James Tyner (2016) poses several intriguing questions: what is the connection between the murder of a runaway young woman of colour with disabilities and the death of a low-income white male due to anti-poor government policies? How are everyday forms of violence rendered invisible and thereby normalised? Stated differently, by what mechanisms or rationalities, as Zygmunt Bauman (2004) asks, are certain segments of society deemed disposable? Why is violence “although seemingly self-evident … not always as it appears?” (Tyner 2016: 2). Tyner provides a nuanced view of violence within the context of capitalism by examining the role of the state in upholding policies that guarantee or deny its citizenry certain fundamental basic rights, arguing that “[t]oo often, theories and models have fetishized violence, thereby obfuscating the fundamental socio-spatial relations and processes that give violence its meaning” (Tyner 2016: 3). Moving beyond binary thinking that places emphasis on what is decipherable, normative and/or spectacular, Tyner interrogates the broader forces that produce violence or render the rights of certain segments of the citizenry wasteful.2 Though his work is grounded in a specific geopolitical context, it seems easily applicable to other sites where invisible/normalised forms of violence and violations of human rights occur in both obvious and subtle ways. His work proves especially useful when we attempt to read human rights discourses into and out of literary texts which demand what Edward Said (quoted in Sidiqqi 2007: 67) calls “contrapuntal reading” in order to expose, critique, and resist the horrors and cruelty of state sanctioned v iolence.3 Furthermore, it forces us to re-examine politically normalised, if contested, notions of what is, or is not, acceptable as violence. Although Tyner (2016) does not extend his critique to other spaces of engagement – for example nationalist anti-colonial struggles – he, nevertheless, demands of his readers a consideration of contexts or spaces in which violence goes unexamined or is normalised in ways similar to these capitalist modes of thought that his work so sharply engages. This chapter is based on Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi and Gavin Hood’s 2005 adaptation of the novel into a highly successful commercial film, which

Gendered violence and narrative erasure  27 transplants the original narrative from its 1960s apartheid South African context to the post-apartheid, post-Mandela era. Although Fugard and Hood’s texts inhabit different temporalities, they are linked by a particular kind of white liberalism that speaks to what Jacqueline Maingard (2007: 1) terms “contested terrain of nation and identity in South Africa”. I read both the novel and film as Bildungsroman, a genre which, in its idealist form, as Joseph Slaughter argues, “names an achieved state as well as a process of humanistic socialization that cultivates a universal force of human personality … naturally inclined to express itself through social media of the nation-state and citizenship” (Slaughter 2007: 93). Focussing on the relationship between the female characters and Tsotsi, the protagonist and titular character in both novel and film, I want to demonstrate that in both, the subjectivity of black South African women is narratively erased, violence against them is normalised, and the citizen whose rights are violated by both the colonial and the post-colonial state is decidedly male. Thus, the normative, positivist and affirmative ideologies of the genre to which these two texts conform, and to different degrees affirm, neither imagine black South African women as rights-bearing citizens nor elevate the violation of their bodies to the realm of human rights violations. I pay particular attention to what I see as the “subtle but recognizable shifts in the discursive control” (Berger 2010: 35) that Fugard and Hood assert over their texts. Such control results in a pessimistic, gender-insensitive “vision of brutality … emphasized in the reversal of standard progress narrative” in the case of the former, and in the case of the latter a discourse that is “tainted by, and thoroughly complicit, with the colonial and apartheid system in South Africa” (Goldberg 2007: 125). I frame my argument around two related concepts: on the one hand, around what Goldberg (2007: 6) calls “the cipher.” The cipher, according to Goldberg (2007: 6), should be seen not as “the zero of nothingness, void, but rather … ‘a symbol or character of no value by itself, but which increases or decreases the value of other figures according to its position’”. On the other hand, I look at both texts through the narrative tropes and ideologies of the idealist Bildungsroman, a genre of the novel that revolves on issues of progressive individual development and “a closure that avoids openness but [which] in new settings and through new perspectives reveals its usefulness for the representation of … postcolonial subjectivities” (Bolaki 2011: 9). Thus, in approaching both texts from these two concepts, I open them up to the ways in which they reveal the material conditions of the emergence of Tsotsi’s subjectivity (or lack of it) and what they conceal or suppress in his path to development. It is precisely what they conceal that opens up the epistemological gaps that erase women’s subjectivity within the narrative and permit human rights violations against them to be narratively normalised. Fugard’s novel is set during the 1960s, a period that was marked by some of the most egregious human rights violations in apartheid South Africa ever recorded in human history, even as the rest of the African continent

28  Katwiwa Mule was afire with the agitation for independence and restoration of, at the very least, the basic rights that had been taken away through colonisation. It is a period that witnessed the disenfranchisement of non-whites and the increasing abuse of state power to secure South Africa for whites. As David Mario Matsinhe (2011: 301) observes, “following the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, citizenship and nationality were ‘Whites Only’ categories”. Following the ascendancy to power by the National Party in 1948, South Africa became a de jure apartheid state. From then onwards, legally sanctioned state violence became one of key methods of constituting apartheid social space and geography – touching on every aspect of life, from the privacy of the bedroom to the brutal murder of people perceived as enemies of the state.4 By this time also, according to Jonathan Kaplan (2006: x–xi), “tsotsis had become the scourge of people’s already straitened lives in the townships. They preyed on their fellow Africans, robbing, murdering, and raping with impunity” [emphasis added]. Literature of this and subsequent decades in South Africa was marked by what we might call insurgent impulses as direct response to the excesses of the apartheid state, which were expressed differently in the writings of black and white South Africans. Whereas liberal progressive white writing was defined by moral indignation which led to white anger and revolt, it, nevertheless, derived from a privileged, “naive, sometimes self-interested efforts to tinker with the edifices of apartheid from within” (Nixon 1987: 80) and from an intellectual rather than a visceral experience.5 This is the period that, for example, gave birth to the Sestigers, a group of dissident Afrikaner writers whose work sought to imaginatively break away from the tyranny the apartheid state exercised on cultural production, while at the same time staking a claim to South Africanness.6 Parallel to white writing was a vibrant tradition of black writing that, though not eschewing intellectualism, nevertheless, charted its own path through a direct challenge to the oppressive and dehumanising system. The commonplace heuristic method for representing human rights abuses in black South African literature and film was through narratives of spectacularity. Njabulo Ndebele, in a now classic essay, “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary,” authoritatively states: “The history of Black South African literature has largely been the history of the representation of spectacle …. The symbols are all over: the quintessence of obscene social exhibitionism” (Ndebele 1986: 143). For Ndebele, the spectacular operates within the realm of the obvious. This approach, however, is not unique to South Africa. Putting forth a similar argument with regard to narratives about human rights abuses, Goldberg (2007: 1) argues that for those “who have survived the purposely inflicted wounding of torture, rape or genocide, injury itself takes on an outsized proportion of causal root for ideas, speech, and actions that follow”. Apartheid and its dehumanising instincts and enduring legacies is the subject matter of Athol Fugard’s novel and Hood’s visual narrative. Critics agree that both the novel and film are rewriting and revisioning the

Gendered violence and narrative erasure  29 ideologies of the idealist Bildungsroman within the context of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, respectively.7 A novel whose thematic focus is the atrocities and brutality committed on individuals and communities by the apartheid system – forced removals, racial segregation, criminalisation of blackness, and extreme material deprivation – Tsotsi deals with the dehumanisation and atrocious violation of the dignity of Africans as human beings. As Rita Barnard (2008: 549) asserts, the novel is “in essence, a meditation on the socio-political preconditions for coherent subjectivity and narration”. Tsotsi, the titular character, is a violent gang leader, a psychologically damaged young black man whose identity speaks to his condition more than his humanity; a type rather than an individual.8 Tsotsi is devoid of any memory and humanity, a “man entirely outside the orbit of the human” (Lamming 1992: 110). As a young child, Tsotsi aka David Madondo, runs away from home for fear that the apartheid police who have just arrested his mother have come back. By coincidence, his father comes home shortly after the arrest and Tsotsi, mistaking his father for the apartheid police, runs away to become a homeless child, malala-pipe.9 From then onward, his life is defined by poverty and criminality. David becomes a tsotsi and his identity becomes his name. He heads a violent youth gang that robs, rapes and kills without any sense of remorse. After a violent encounter with one of his gang members, Boston, who constantly pricks his conscience, Tsotsi goes out into a white suburb and through a chance encounter with a young black woman whom he attempts to rape, he comes into possession of a baby, whom he names after himself. This baby then becomes a mirror into his own life and the impetus for the recovery of his memory and humanity. Eventually, Tsotsi is violently killed by a bulldozer that is demolishing the freehold township of Sophiatown in a futile attempt to protect the baby David. With impressive cinematography, Hood’s Tsotsi provides a thoroughly revised visual narrative that transplants the story from its 1960s context and adapts it for a new domestic and international audience, providing a direct commentary on some of the most contentious public debates following the demise of apartheid: Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), poverty, crime prevention, and HIV/AIDS interventions. While the film retains some key elements of the original story, including the plot and social location of some of the characters, Hood makes several transformations in the visual narrative which are key to my arguments in this chapter: the setting of the story is slightly a decade after the formal end of apartheid; Tsotsi runs away from home for fear of his father’s savage temper which, the film suggests, is a result of anger with his wife’s (and perhaps his own) HIV/AIDS status; some characters such as MaRhabatse and Rosie are dispensed with; Tsotsi’s journey to the recovery of his memory and selfhood is instigated by a chance possession of a baby from an affluent black family – John and Pumla Dube – whom he violently robs of a BMW only to find a baby on the back seat; at the end of the film, Tsotsi returns the baby, only to be arrested by the police in one of the three alternate endings.10

30  Katwiwa Mule The novel and the film demand to be read as allegories of a condition: the state of black selfhood under apartheid, and post-apartheid neoliberal failures.11 Fugard and Hood’s texts are about Tsotsi’s (or David Madondo’s) journey to selfhood but not about the people, especially women, whose rights, it seems, must be delegitimised in order to create the requisite conditions for Tsotsi’s transformation and identity. In both texts, it is Tsotsi’s precarious – even questionable – humanity that is constantly in view; yet other people, especially women, whose rights are violated are like a zero of nothingness added to a numeral: “the zero itself does not gain value but occasions the prodigious leap in value of the number” that precedes it (Goldberg 2007: 6). In the first three chapters of the novel, for example, we are given elaborate descriptions of the background stories of all the principal characters, their social and economic motivations, their psychological dispositions, and, in the case of Tsotsi, the rules by which he operates as well as his movements through space. No such narrative space is accorded to the two female characters in these chapters, Soekie and Rosie, who are only important to the extent that they are part of the social setting of Tsotsi’s story. As the narrator tells us, they [Tsotsi and his gang] were drinking at Soekie’s place. There were many places to drink in the township …. The choice was big. You could drink with the men or you could drink with the girls …. You could drink with a picture on the wall or no picture at all. You could drink comfortable in a club easy, or sitting on a wooden bench, you could even drink standing up in backyard …. Soekie’s place had a table with chairs around it, and a few more along the walls, which were bare. Fugard (1980: 13–14) In this narrative rendition, place takes precedent over character. Soekie’s place, like Soekie herself and her friend Rosie, is one among alternatives that this freewheeling gang has: they could come to Soekie’s place or they could find women like Rosie. Place and woman are interchangeable. Indeed, a few pages later, the violent circumstances of Soekie’s birth would be rendered satirically in a brief paragraph: She was a coloured woman in her fifties and her story was that she had been born in the best bed, in the biggest house of the best European suburb in the city, but her mother never loved her and that was why she lived in the township. (17) This description stages the mise en scène of an insidious yet invisible gendered violence perpetuated by the state – the criminalisation of sexual relationships across colour line – that might enable Soekie and Tsotsi to mediate their mutual identity. They are both denied motherly love, both

Gendered violence and narrative erasure  31 criminalised by the state by virtue of their ancestry and skin colour, both economically disenfranchised, and both denied of their citizenship. Yet all we will ever know about Soekie is that her mother never loved her. Are Rosie and Soekie to read as nothing other than allegories of a human condition and situation which lack an individualised sense of self or subjectivity as that which is accorded Tsotsi and his gang? What is Rosie’s background? Is there any possibility of Rosie and Soekie transcending their conditions or situation, or becoming anything other than the condition to which apartheid has consigned them – shebeen queens or prostitutes? Is theirs only a state of existence that can be appropriated and narratively exploited for the purpose of Tsotsi’s psycho-social development? What makes Soekie’s mother disavow her child? Indeed, where Tsotsi is able to recover his memory and humanity before he is killed, Soekie will never know her birthday: ‘I wrote regular’, she always said at the end of her story. ‘I have got the address, but I get no replyings.’ What do you write Soekie, they asked her. ‘My birthday,’ she said. ‘I want to know my birthday’. 18 This narrative problematic is further reinforced if we compare Rosie, a prostitute at Soekie’s shebeen, to Gumboot Dhlamini, a migrant labourer, who is gruesomely murdered by Tsotsi and his gang in the early scenes of both the novel and the film. Dhlamini, whose first name, Gumboot, like Rosie’s, resonates with his assigned station in life as a labourer, is set up in the narrative as an incarnation of the resilience of Africans in the face of colonial displacement, dehumanising migrant labour practices, and apartheid brutality. Having travelled “a thousand miles” on foot to find mining work in the city in order to support his pregnant wife (8), Fugard writes of Gumboot: “measured in hope he stood in his shoes tall amongst men” (7). Because several pages are devoted to describing his character, his backstory, and the minute events leading up to his brutal murder, the death of Gumboot is hauntingly memorable. The final “explosion of darkness in the eyes” (12) when he dies is a painful and poignant illustration of the brutality that marks the setting of the novel and film. The group’s second victim, Rosie, is not accorded the same humanising treatment in the narrative and is completely left out of the film. Whereas Gumboot was “measured in hope” (7), Rosie is measured in a “head slumped forward, legs outstretched,” and in features that are “puffy as well-kneaded dough” (14). The gang happens on Rosie in a shebeen where they go to relax after their successful night’s work. From the moment Rosie is introduced, every description of her is a description of her body rather than her social experiences. Nowhere in the narrative is she accorded any human agency – her background, her fears, her thoughts, her memories, her aspirations – the way Gumboot is. She is nothing more than an object of sexual gratification, a piece of human furniture in the shebeen, and a helpless victim. The text grants her no agency, even of

32  Katwiwa Mule intent, as her consent to sex is neither clearly granted nor denied: “Don’t be so hard Jonny,” Rosie says, apparently to the room at large, “Come and give me a kiss” (15). Whether this declaration is an indication of sexual desire, or merely the incoherence of intoxication, is never revealed or even explored by the text. Later, when Die Aap and Butcher (two members of Tsotsi’s gang) clearly intend to assault Rosie sexually whether she consents to it or not, her only incoherently expressed wish is, “Not in here. Please. Not in here” (23). Die Aap and Butcher accede to her wish, taking her outside, so do they rape her? The narrative ambiguity of Rosie’s assault erases her subjectivity, agency and humanity. Whether Rosie is raped or consents to sex should dictate the tone and subject of that scene entirely, but instead the narrative treats Rosie’s motivation or consent as completely irrelevant. By erasing Rosie’s subjectivity, the text participates in her violation. The next sentence on the subject describes “a cry from the night where the other two had taken the woman” (23). But by the time she cries out, the narrative focus has shifted away from her to address a continuing argument between Tsotsi and Boston. Once Boston hears Rosie scream, he folds her into his fight with Tsotsi, demanding to know whether Tsotsi feels any empathy for “[t]hat poor bitch out there” (24). Thus, Rosie’s pain is quickly subsumed into the more central narrative plot of Tsotsi’s missing humanity, which ties into the wider symbolism of the novel: the impact of apartheid on the humanity of black men. Within two more pages Rosie’s rape is forgotten altogether. She is never mentioned again. As Goldberg (2007: 121) reminds us, “one of the greatest challenges for a theorist of gender and human rights … is to make legal, cultural and political sense of the crime of rape in its various forms and contexts”. She further notes: The struggle over whether and how to define rape as individual (private) crime or mass (public) breach of human rights continues to vex international legal and human rights actors, as does the effort to alleviate the weight of gender norms in interpreting and addressing the act of rape. Goldberg (2007: 121) Rape in the context of the cultural phenomenon of tsotsism is in the texts constructed as normal. Rosie’s body is degraded and her sexual desire is subsumed by the cultural marking of her body as that of a prostitute, thereby normalising violence against her. The erasure of Rosie’s subjectivity inscribes her rape into the text; the text participates in Rosie’s rape. Moreover, the text treats Rosie’s rape more cheaply than Gumboot’s murder because it assigns a higher value to Gumboot’s humanity than to Rosie’s life. By exclusively describing Rosie in terms of sexual vulnerability while leaving the violence against her ambiguous, the text erases her identity. If in the novel the relationship between Tsotsi – an allegory of the black condition – and the apartheid state reduces Tsotsi to what Barnard (2008:

Gendered violence and narrative erasure  33 549) aptly terms “white man’s rubbish and living in rubbish”, then it is also about the contingencies of everyday survival under dehumanising material conditions and the impossibility of the emergence of African personhood under such conditions.12 Yet the more pernicious element of this allegorisation is the condition of women who are confined to a permanent state of redundancy. According to Bauman (2004: 11–12), redundancy whispers permanence and hints at the ordinariness of a condition. It names a condition without a ready-to-use antonym. It suggests a new shape of current normality and the shape of things that are imminent and bound to stay as they are. Such is the condition of Rosie, Soekie and, in a more egregious way, MaRhabatse who, like Tsotsi, is a victim of apartheid brutality but is introduced into the narrative almost for comic effect and only to the extent that she helps move Tsotsi’s narrative along and serves as an allegory of the dying township of Sophiatown. The very description of her physical attributes speaks to her redundancy: MaRhabatse had grown to a big age because when the time came to leave her room, and climb onto the lorry she had hired to take her some place else, they found the door too small for the woman who in ten years had not left her room because of swollen ankles. The demolition men were forced to take the door away, and parts of the wall as well, before the big soul emerged to great cheering and many tears. Her passing down into the distance, statuesque in her chair on the lorry, made the real whisper that one day the town would die. Emphasis added (55) This description, replete with allegorical correspondence to Sophiatown itself, forecloses any possibility for MaRhabatse to develop into a full human being who is entitled to any civil rights. She is reduced to the level of a thing and her fate mirrors that of the entire community. MaRhabatse’s role in the novel makes sense only if we read her as the clichéd trope of motherland. Yet, in ending the novel with her removal and the inevitable destruction of Sophiatown, Fugard decisively stages the encounter between a cannibalistic state and its marginalised citizens and thus negates the positivist aspects of the idealist Bildungsroman, while at the same time negating any possibility of MaRhabatse accessing any subjectivity. This condition is not any different from that of the “young woman, a Black woman” (39) whom Tsotsi attempts to rape in the middle of the night. Her appearance and disappearance in the narrative is similar to that of MaRhabatse and she is important only to the extent that within the narrative architecture, she enables Tsotsi’s reconnection with his memory, his past, and eventually his humanity through the baby that she throws at him. Her condition, like that of MaRhabatse, is permanent.

34  Katwiwa Mule Miriam is the only female character given any meaningful presence in the novel. The widowed mother of baby Simon, Miriam’s husband may as well have been a victim of Tsotsi and his gang. Her encounter with Tsotsi happens when he forces her to feed the baby David, an encounter which falls into the previously established pattern of women’s representation in the novel. First, her character-defining maternity is clear in her interactions with her son Simon and with the baby David: “The baby was going to sleep …. The little body relaxed and the shape of him … seemed to merge into that same mysterious obscurity of the months in your womb” (131–132). Her equally dehumanising sexual vulnerability is clear when Tsotsi approaches her: “Miriam pressed herself up against the wall so that he had to drag her by her wrist to the bed. She began to moan softly” (137). Miriam’s constricting maternity and sexual vulnerability are tied together when “with one wrench” Tsotsi “[tears] open her blouse, exposing her breasts” (137) in an act of sexual violence intended to force her to feed the starving child. Of course, the child is a symbol of Tsotsi’s own humanity, so his violent demand of maternity from Miriam is partly an act of self-preservation. “The thought of that greedy, decrepit, foul-smelling bundle in the rags on the bed at her breast filled her with horror,” Fugard writes, and the narrative goes on to condemn Miriam as selfish for considering herself entitled to bodily autonomy: “It was a violation of her body that brought to a sharp pitch the possessive, miserly twist in her nature” (137). Later, Miriam apologises, saying, “Yesterday I  was jealous about my milk and it was wrong …. Feeding him makes me happy” (180). Miriam is able to be happy once she accepts her role as both a selfless source of maternity to be fed from and a whore to be violated at the command of a man with a knife. After Tsotsi has ripped away Miriam’s shirt and threatened her child’s life should she refuse to offer her body to Tsotsi’s intended use, Fugard writes, With the first pull of his greedy mouth on the nipple a sudden wave of erotic feeling passed through her body. With an imperceptible movement her thighs relaxed. If Tsotsi had meant what she had first thought to be his intentions and had taken her at that moment, she wouldn’t have fought him for long. The baby had had that effect on her, and before long his alien, rapacious sucking opened the deepest reservoirs of her milk. Emphasis added (138) This eerily eroticised response to sexual violence is cinematically reproduced in Hood’s film without much updating. I will return to this issue later. Before Miriam, there is a bizarre treatment of sexual violence around the probable mother of the baby David. Tsotsi’s self-discovery begins when this unnamed black woman presses her infant child into his arms. Tsotsi first sees her running through the night and grabs her: “[a] second move forced her against a tree and there, with his body pressed against hers, a knee already between her legs and his hand still on her mouth, there he

Gendered violence and narrative erasure  35 looked into her eyes” (41). When Tsotsi is distracted from his intention to rape this woman by the sound of an infant crying, the woman shoves a shoebox containing the child into his hands and runs away. Why does she choose to hand Tsotsi her baby? Where is she going before she runs into Tsotsi? What is she running from? What will happen if it catches her? Of all the myriad possible reasons she might have to put her child in a shoebox and run into the night, which is her reason? The text asks none of these questions about this nameless woman in the night; it is interested in her, not because she illustrates the ubiquity of sexual violence against women, but because she is a landmark in Tsotsi’s journey to selfhood. In abandoning her child, she provides the impetus for Tsotsi’s psycho-social growth as well as for his rejection of Morris Tshabalala’s offer of “the most beautiful thing he knew: the knowledge that mothers love their children” (115). Because Tsotsi has seen one woman throw her child away, he responds firmly with “They don’t. I’m telling you, I know they don’t” (115). Tsotsi’s confidence that mothers do not love their children is shattered when he re-accesses memories of his own loving mother, Tondi. The language describing Tsotsi’s memory of Tondi communicates safety and love rather than eroticised vulnerability: “[t]he soft, unfaltering tones enfold the listening child in the warm security of one thought: Mother” (142). In Tondi’s case, the novel substitutes sexuality for maternity. Instead of being sexually objectified, Tondi is objectified as the symbolic mother. Unlike most of the text’s female characters, Tondi is not openly sexualised by the text, but she is still reduced to a symbolic significance which erases her humanity. “[T]here he sees his mother on her knees before the porridge pot,” Fugard writes, “and because she is beautiful and young and gentle he rushes to her and she catches him up in her arms” (144). Where Rosie’s irrelevant, ambiguous assent to violent sex locks her into the literary trope of whore, Tondi’s domesticity and asexual beauty relegate her to the stereotypical role of the mother. Sexual vulnerability is substituted for maternal availability. Tondi, in her “soft, unfaltering tones,” in her gentle beauty and “warm security,” represents the lost innocence of Tsotsi’s childhood. The destruction of her life at the hands of the apartheid police is the catalyst for the creation of a violent thug, a tsotsi. Thus, Fugard uses Tondi to explain, in the fashion of a parable, the genesis of tsotsism. Tondi’s sole relevance to the narrative is to help Fugard indict apartheid for creating the violence of tsotsism. The text reduces Tondi, and with her the black South African mothers she symbolises, to tokenised victimhood. The destruction of the mother as the cause of brutality among tsotsis is foreshadowed when Tsotsi stalks the crippled beggar Morris Tshabalala with intent to kill. Morris wonders, as he flees, “Hasn’t [this man] got a mother? Didn’t she love him? Didn’t she sing him songs? [Morris] was really asking how do men come to be what they become” (88). The text’s answer to Morris’s final question is through women. In Tsotsi, men are created through their interactions with two archetypal forms of woman; through love or loss of the mother and through

36  Katwiwa Mule desecration or mercy for the whore, boy children develop into their hardened adult selves. In his introduction to the 2006 edition of the novel, Jonathan Kaplan emphasises the instrumentality of apartheid injustices in the formation of Fugard’s consciousness which, Fugard avers, was born out of his experience as a clerk in the Native Commissioner’s court: “Seeing the machinery [of the apartheid system] in action taught me how it works and in fact what it does to people” (Fugard quoted in Kaplan 2006: xii). What apartheid “does to people” is the central theme of Tsotsi. Similarly, Barnard (2008: 556) underscores the imbrication of Hood’s experience in the thematics and ideologies of his film, arguing that “[i]f Fugard’s job at the Native Commissioner’s Office in Johannesburg shaped the form and the subject matter of his novel, Gavin Hood’s early career is similarly relevant to his cinematic reinterpretation of the story”. She notes that Hood “was originally trained as a lawyer, and his abiding interests in the law, fairly conservative ones … leave a mark on his directorial and screenwriting oeuvre” (Barnard 2008: 556). Hood’s work in writing and directing HIV/AIDS educational dramas for the Department of Health in South Africa is equally influential in his unequivocal endorsement of the mainstream, if melancholic, public discourse on HIV/ AIDS (Accomando 2006). It is therefore possible to read Hood’s film as a direct intervention, to use Susan Andrade’s words in a different context, into “the emerging public civil sphere” (Andrade 2007: 85) in post-apartheid South Africa. If Fugard distorts and rewrites the conventions and ideologies of the idealist Bildungsroman in order to delegitimise the apartheid state and to reclaim the genre as “an appropriate site for the negotiation of a number of enduring and contentious tensions” (Bolaki 2011: 11), then Hood recycles the ideologies of the genre and appropriates and distorts Fugard’s novel to a different end: to buttress the neoliberal state ideologies of social containment. Although the film keeps the title and maintains the basic structure of the plot, it is a radical re-writing of the narrative, both in terms of temporality and its re-imagined ideological critique of the post-apartheid racial and economic geography. Hood sets his film in the supposedly rainbow post-apartheid, post-Mandela era and radically transforms both the subject matter and the political tenor of the novel.13 Tsotsi violently carjacks an upscale black woman, Pumla Dube, whom, as viewers, we are supposed to see as a beneficiary of the neoliberal post-apartheid state’s affirmative action programmes, and inadvertently takes her baby boy with him, and through caring for him begins a complete journey to the selfhood that Fugard denies him in the novel.14 Forced to care for this child, Tsotsi, in the visual narrative, as in the novel, begins to recover his memory, even re-naming the child David. In the film’s publicly screened ending, Tsotsi returns the baby and surrenders himself to law enforcement, which underscores the film’s overriding motif: Tsotsi is essentially a good kid. It is instructive to take note of Simon Gikandi’s argument that “the moment of

Gendered violence and narrative erasure  37 closure in a story or a novel is always privileged and contains the code that explains the meaning of the whole narrative” (Gikandi 2000: 44). This ending performs the very symbolic function of the affirmative Bildungsroman: rather than be killed or escape to continue to perpetuate his criminal acts (the two alternative endings in the bonus features of the film that were abandoned in favour of his surrender and arrest), Hood rehashes the ideals of the genre, namely, the mutual accommodation between the individual and the society. In other words, Tsotsi submits himself to the norms of supposedly democratic society and is thereby assimilated into putatively egalitarian and legitimate post-apartheid social order. In this sense, the film becomes, in Slaughter’s words, “a technology for making the institutional abstractions of both the human person and nation-state formation (individually and collectively) sensible” (Slaughter 2007: 92). If Tsotsi’s surrender gives the state legitimacy, the erasure of women’s subjectivity speaks to the ways in which Hood is unable to imagine women as citizens with full rights, as is demonstrated by several female characters that populate the narrative. There are several visually memorable characters that the film recycles: the beggar Morris Tshabalala, permanently crippled as a result of an accident in the gold mines and whose disfigured body is held up as the very embodiment of the inhumanity of capitalist extraction; Gumboot Dhlamini, who leaves his rural home to find work in the city and is brutally murdered by Tsotsi and his youth gang; the David duo, a baby with an uncertain future in the case of Fugard or full of possibility in the case of Hood, and a man shaped by his past trauma, both of whom symbolise the complexity of African life under apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, respectively. It is instructive, as noted earlier, that no female character is given such memorable presence in the film, save for Miriam Ngidi whose striking beauty, sexual charm and maternal instincts seem to over-determine her visual representation in Hood’s film. As in Fugard’s novel, Miriam is represented in Hood’s visual narrative as a seductress and sex symbol through her charming beauty, revealing dress, and, in a rather awkward Hollywood formula, the hint of sexual attraction between her and Tsotsi, despite the fact that Tsotsi forces her to feed the stolen baby at gunpoint. Miriam’s response to Tsotsi’s violence echoes Rosie’s erotic response to her rape in Fugard’s novel. As in the novel where the narrator tells us that if Tsotsi intended to rape Miriam, “she wouldn’t have fought him for long” (138), the film reinforces an inaccurate social conception of rape by using Miriam as an object in the development of Tsotsi’s personality and further buttresses sexual violence as somehow sexually satisfying. Rosie’s reaction to the threat of violent assault, like Miriam’s, is arousal in the face of violent threats, which constructs a narrative of rape as sex rather than a humiliating assertion of power and dominance. Both the novel and film perniciously re-inscribe the patriarchal assumption of female sexuality that women are aroused by male dominance and sexual aggression. In reality, there is nothing erotic about fear for one’s physical safety, nothing alluring about sexual violence.

38  Katwiwa Mule Hood’s mother/whore structure contrasts with the traditional Eu ropean dichotomy of virgin/whore, wherein the archetypal virgin is confined and repressed but also protected and untouchable. His twist on this old trope leaves no woman untouchable: maternity and sexuality are the twin methods through which black women are visually represented, and the possibility of impending rape or violence looms large in Miriam’s encounter with Tsotsi. This pervasive threat of sexual violence reflects a reality of tsotsism, a subculture which Glaser (2000: 4) identifies: “[y]oung township women, as objects of subcultural prestige, as trophies of masculinity, were subjected to astonishing levels of sexual violence. Male power and control in the gang subculture were underpinned by rape and the threat of rape”. But by confining Miriam in the visual narrative to the impact of her maternity and sexuality, by portraying the threat of sexual violence against her as normal without giving her a voice through which to express her subjectivity, the film participates in a discursive economy in which violence against her is normalised and her humanity as a rights-bearing citizen is erased. In this sense, the visual narrative, like its novelistic precursor, enacts the very violence it sets out to expose. The simultaneous objectification of Miriam and the erasure of her subjectivity results in a narrative in which she is reduced to an object that is to be possessed, consumed, and easily dispensed with. Fugard and Hood’s portrayal of women’s response to the threat of sexual violence is a serious misrepresentation of the experience of women who live under the constant threat of sexual assault, one that normalises and incentivises violence against women.15 Like other women, in the novel and the film, Miriam serves as a landmark in the emotional landscape of men and as a figure of aporia; a body subjected to “needless pain and privation” (Eze 2016: vi) but without the means to express the pain; a figure who is present but narratively defined by her lack of subjectivity. In contrast to the prominence of male characters, Miriam’s symbolism is restricted to her maternity and sexuality: she is locked into a literary dichotomy of “mother” and “whore”. Both texts are obsessed with violence against women as a defining aspect of masculinity and state violence against Africans as a defining element of African selfhood. The bulldozer that ends the novel illustrates how state violence defines the lives of African men, but this leitmotif amplifies state violence against women in allegorical form while simultaneously minimising their experience of violence by African males. Women – mothers and whores alike – are expected to provide unrestricted supplies of maternity and sexuality. When they refuse to give, they are violated, and little distinction is made between the voluntary giving and the violation. Rosie’s rape construes violation as seductive; Miriam’s assault takes that misogynist argument a step further and construes violation as instructive. In a novel and film built of epiphanies and life-changing discoveries, the texts teach women a lesson: their bodies are not their own; their bodies are things, objects, resources that everyone else has a right to. This lesson is as

Gendered violence and narrative erasure  39 colonial as it is misogynist. Thus, in the ruling ideologies of both narratives, Tsotsi can represent the ever-present threat of rape, not because he is a bad person, but because he is a victim of the crime of apartheid; Die Aap and Butcher can rape, not because they have cultural power over their victim, but because apartheid has given them no meaning in life; Boston is to be pitied as a victim of an unfair bureaucracy rather than a criminal who attempts to rape a fellow student teacher. By way of conclusion, it is necessary to return to Said’s theory of contrapuntal reading which demands a total accounting of all the processes that go into the making and interpretation of a text in order to make sense of the argument I have been sketching so far. Both texts, I would like to suggest, are remarkable in their failure to imagine a gender-sensitive, decolonial narrative of de-marginalisation through which African subjects, and especially women, can find agency within the structures and institutions of modern democracy. Thus, what they offer is a bleak vision of the future that is neither post-apartheid nor egalitarian, a vision in which South Africa cannot imagine a way out of the colonial past, and one in which economic segregation is entangled with racial segregation in insidious ways. The novel is preoccupied with the impossibility of personal transformation, while the film affirms such a possibility. Both are, however, united not only by their equivocations about gender equality but also by a liberal formula that can neither imagine rebellion nor offer legitimation of African claims to subjectivity. Within such a formula, black South African women are denied any means by which they can “negotiate agency, autonomy, and self-knowledge and their sexuality” (Eze 2016: 21). As such, both texts demonstrate the ways in which white liberalism inadvertently negates the very regime of human rights it seeks to uphold.

Notes 1 Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi is a film remake of Athol Fugard’s novel of the same title. 2 See Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (2004), for further discussion. 3 According to Said, contrapuntal reading involves “a simultaneous awareness of the metropolitan history that is narrated and those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts” (quoted in Sidiqqi 2007: 67). Said’s argument is germane here to the extent that in a literary text, different themes, even contradictions, can co-exist and it is up to critics to bring to the surface the complexity of such texts, especially what is suppressed. 4 Read contrapuntally, the novel could be seen as offering a scathing critique of several laws that came to be known as the pillars of apartheid: the Group Areas Act, the Population Registration Act, and the Pass Laws. The violent destruction of Sophiatown, a freehold black township in Johannesburg which was also the centre of black music, art, and political organising, is the essential background of Tsotsi. In the 1950s Sophiatown was “rezoned” as a white suburb and renamed Triompf: its buildings were razed; its population was forcibly removed. Tsotsi takes place against the backdrop of this state violence against the township. The text describes “demolition squads” carting people “away in lorries … so that one

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day the township would be no more” (Fugard 1980: 53). The bulldozer that kills Tsotsi and his namesake infant is a symbol of this systemic state violence. JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is the best example of this type of writing. Coetzee’s novel is considered a fable that tells the story of an abstract, imaginary, timeless and universal empire which, within the context of South Africa, resonates with the apartheid moment. Although Njabulo Ndebele attributes spectacularity to writing by black writers, what distinguishes this period among the white liberal and black radical literary establishment is the psychic crisis of the former and what Rob Nixon (1987) elsewhere terms the mood of optimistic outrage” among the latter. Both can in fact be characterised as such. Ndebele’s argument is, of course, flawed because the spectacular is not limited to black literature. White writers of this generation who saw themselves as liberal used similar representational tropes. Andre Brink’s A Dry White Season, though focussed on white psychic crisis, is a good example of a text depicting what is spectacular in what matters. See Rita Barnard’s argument (2008) that while Fugard’s novel equivocates on the affirmative aspects of the Bildungsroman, Hood’s film affirms both the state legitimacy and the possibility of mutual accommodation between the state and its black subjects. According to Clive Glaser in his book Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, a ‘tsotsi’ was “a young man who … imitated American ‘city slicker’ clothing styles, spoke tsotsitsaal [a hybrid of Afrikaans, English, Xhosa and Zulu], indulged in some kind of criminal or quasi-legal activity, and generally moved around in gangs” (Glaser 2000: 47). Glaser notes that “[o]pen defiance of the law was ‘natural’ to the tsotsi subculture,” and quotes William Carr’s observation that crime “is a way of attempting to get one’s own back against a hostile society,” namely, against the violently racist system of apartheid (Glaser 2000: 47). Tsotsism was a subculture with its own language, values and style of dress, and yet, in his fascination with violent black masculinity, the only aspects of the tsotsi subculture that Fugard chose to appropriate for his novel were its violence, criminality, and sexual aggression. The term malala-pipe is a derogatory term used for people “who huddle in drainpipes at night, ‘homeless ruffian children’” (Nyamende 1996: 194). See Daniel Gover, “Tsotsi: From Fugard to Film” (2010) for further discussion of this. The film is often read as a direct intervention into some of the most contentious public issues in South Africa: high crime rates, lack of decisive intervention to arrest the high incidents of HIV/AIDS, and black economic empowerment programmes. Daniel Lehman (2011), for example, sees the film as a direct indictment of the Thabo Mbeki presidency for its failure to inject enough resources into the health sector to deal with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, while Rita Barnard (2008) sees it as, among other things, a commentary on crime in post-apartheid South Africa. Lindiwe Dovey (2007: 151) argues that while the film offers “a critique of a variety of forms of contemporary violence: domestic abuse, the systemic violence of epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, and particularly violent crime (such as hijackings and burglary)”, it is made purely for commercial and ideological reasons. About the black condition, Achille Mbembe in his book, Critique of Black Reason, reminds us that [t]he noun ‘Black’ … first designated not human beings like all others but rather a distinct humanity – one whose very humanity was (and still is) in question. It designated a particular kind of human: those who, because of

Gendered violence and narrative erasure  41 their physical appearance, their habits and customs, and their ways of being in the world seemed to represent difference in its raw manifestation. Mbembe (2017: 46) For Mbembe, this constructed difference became the basis for separation: Precisely because they were not either like us or of us, the only link that could unite us is – paradoxically – the link of separation. Constituting a world apart, the part apart, Blacks cannot become full subjects in the life of our community. Placed apart, put to the side, piece by piece: that is how Blacks came to signify, in their essence and before all speech, the injunction of separation Mbembe (2017: 46) 13 See also Daniel Lehman, “Tsotsi Transformed: Retooling Athol Fugard for the Thabo Mbeki Era” (2011). 14 The film has three alternate endings: the publicly screened one where Tsotsi surrenders to the police and the other two where he is either killed or escapes back into the township. For a thorough critique of these endings, see Barnard (2008). 15 For a detailed discussion of the prevalence of sexual violence against women and public responses to it in South Africa, see Pumla Dineo Gqola’s book Rape: A South African Nightmare (2015).

References Accomando, Beth. 2006. Tsotsi and an Interview with Gavin Hood. Available at http://www.kpbs.org/news/2006/mar/24/tsotsi-and-an-interview-with-g avinhood/. Accessed: 13 November 2017. Andrade, Susan. 2007. Rioting Women and Writing Women: Gender, Class, and the Public Sphere in Africa. In Cole, Catherine, Takyiwaa Manuh and Stephan Miescher (eds) Africa After Gender? Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 85–107. Barnard, Rita. 2008. Tsotsis: On Law, the Outlaw, and the Postcolonial State. Contemporary Literature 49(4): 541–572. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Oxford: Blackwell. Berger, Roger. 2010. Decolonizing African Autobiography. Research in African Literatures 41(2): 32–54. Bolaki, Stella. 2011. Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi. Brink, Andre. 1979. A Dry White Season. New York: William Morrow & Co. Dovey, Lindiwe. 2007. Redeeming Features: From Tsotsi (1980) to Tsotsi (2006). Journal of African Cultural Studies 19(2): 143–164. Eze, Chielezona. 2016. Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature: Feminist Empathy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Fugard, Athol. 1980. Tsotsi. Johannesburg: Ad Donker. Gikandi, Simon. 2000. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Glaser, Clive. 2000. Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935–1976. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson. 2007. Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

42  Katwiwa Mule Gover, Daniel. 2010. Tsotsi: From Fugard to Film. Journal of the African Literature Association 5(1): 122–129. Gqola, Pumla Dineo. 2015. Rape: A South African Nightmare. Johannesburg: MF Books. Hood, Gavin. 2005. Tsotsi. South Africa: The National Film and Video Foundation of SA. Kaplan, Jonathan. 2006. Introduction. In Fugard, Athol Tsotsi. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. Lamming, George. 1992 [1960]. The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lehman, Daniel. 2011. Tsotsi Transformed: Retooling Athol Fugard for the Thabo Mbeki Era. Research in African Literatures 42(1): 87–101. Maingard, Jacqueline. 2007. South African National Cinema. Oxon: Routledge. Matsinhe, David Mario. 2011. Africa’s Fear of Itself: The Ideology of Makwerekwere in South Africa. Third World Quarterly 32(2): 295–313. Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason (trans. Laurent Dubois). Durham: Duke University Press. Ndebele, Njabulo. 1986. The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies 12(2): 143–157. Nixon, Rob. 1987. Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest. Critical Inquiry 13(3): 557–578. Nyamende, Abner. 1996. Martha Has No Land: The Tragedy of Identity in The Marabi Dance. In Darian-Smith, Kate, Liz Gunner and Sarah Nuttall (eds) Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia. New York: Routledge, 189–200. Sidiqqi, Yuma. 2007. Edward Said, Humanism, and Secular Criticism. In Ghazoul, Ferial (ed.) Edward Said and Critical Decolonization. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 65–88. Slaughter, Joseph. 2007. Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press. Tyner, James. 2016. Violence in Capitalism: Devaluing Life in an Age of Responsibility. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

3

Exploring the language of violence and human rights violation in selected Nigerian dramatic literature Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji

Introduction Language is a matter of feminist concern, owing to its potential for enacting violence on women’s bodies and forcing a violation of their human rights. Feminist scholars working in the field of feminist linguistics have stressed the importance of language in constructing gender identities and negotiating status hierarchies. Sara Mills (2012: 9) notes that “for many of these feminist linguists, rather than seeing language as a simple cause of discrimination, they see language as a site of struggle”. This suggests that beyond enacting gender discrimination, language is a strategy for gaining, exercising and maintaining power through depriving, violating, denigrating, threatening or insulting others. Feminist theorists have argued that language is a site for sexual politics and a vehicle for enacting power and dominance (Cameron 2006; Mills 2008). Deborah Cameron (2006: 3) uses the term “sexual politics” to refer to the everyday struggles that exist between men and women, as they use language to negotiate hierarchy. Language use in the home, workplace, classroom, church, public transport and streets indicates how sexual politics is experienced daily. The concepts of power and dominance are central in the discourse of sexual politics, as evident in the work of Cameron (2006) and Mills (2008). The power and dominance approach serves as an appropriate lens for analysing sexual politics in this chapter. It is an approach that visualises that any gender can become either oppressive or oppressed. Enongene Mirabeau Sone (2016: 43) avers that the power approach “interprets linguistic differences in women’s and men’s language in terms of dominance and subordination”. Such a viewpoint emphasises that women, as well as men, play a part in sustaining and perpetuating dominance and oppression. An individual may use language to suit their own purpose. Language can be used to degrade or elevate. Praise singing, for example, can elevate a ruler to the status of a demi-god, whereas negative utterances by the same praisesinger can denigrate the ruler to the status of a tyrant. Language, in many instances, can be used to avoid responsibility for an action, thereby making someone else the transgressor.

44  Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji Linguistic violence can result in objectification, degradation and erasure of the dignity of people considered to be “others”. Speaking about shaming as a violent practice, Christiane Sanderson (2015: 19) argues that “individuals or groups who are perceived as a threat to the dominant group, be that due to their gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs or ethnicity, are shamed and excluded in order to silence them and render them invisible”. Such shaming is done primarily using language as a vehicle of exclusion and othering. The result is that “such shaming experiences produce a deep sense of alienation from self and others in which the sense of self becomes inextricably linked to shame” (Sanderson 2015: 19). From this perspective, one can discern the extent to which language can be used to instil in a person negative perceptions of self; one can see the degree to which the language of shame violates other people’s rights to personal dignity. It is therefore evident that language is a powerful force that enacts violence on the human body and mind through its propensity to dehumanise. In fact, violent language makes women vulnerable to physical violence and physical violence is often preceded by linguistic violence. The two share a relationship of complementarity. It must, however, be emphasised that the language of violence and violation is not an attribute of a specific gender; both men and women are capable of expressing this language, depending on their contexts. Within the context of political violence, “violence is typically defined as masculine” (Hamilton 2008: 140). However, with more and more instances of civil wars, terrorism, genocide and liberation wars around the world, it is becoming more evident that violence can also be feminine as “women’s capacity to commit violence” in the context of war becomes more visible (Hamilton 2008: 140). Linguistic violence, the focus of this chapter, can be committed by both men and women, on the bodies of women and men. Feminist scholars have acknowledged woman-on-woman violence as one of the greatest challenges to feminist discourse concerning gendered violence. Jessica Murray (2017) posits that the persistence of patriarchal views about women is embedded in not just the way men construct women’s bodies as leaking vessels but also in how women shame other women for sexual activity. In analysing the fiction of Joanne McGregor, Murray notes that in Macgregor’s novel, we see a literary representation of how one character’s distaste for women’s genitals leads to various violent crimes against them, and we also see how the shame that women often internalize contributes to a conspiracy of silence that exacerbates their bodily vulnerability to gendered violence. Murray (2017: 28) Thus, patriarchal values and structures continue to be sustained through the use of violent language by both men and women – language that erases women’s subjectivity and violates their very sense of humanity.

Violence and human rights violation  45 It is from the perspective that violent language is not the attribute of one gender that this chapter explores the language of violence and human rights violation in selected Nigerian dramatic literature. The chapter interrogates the level at which both women and men can be at the receiving end of abusive language in the community, and conversely the extent to which both men and women perpetuate the language of violence. The argument centres on how both genders inflict violence on each other through language use. Hence, the first part of the chapter looks at how masculinist language enacts its own form of violence on women’s bodies by reducing women to objects that can be used and discarded at will. The second part then looks at how women also unleash violence through language in their quest for power. The analysis uses two Nigerian plays, Ahmed Yerima’s Mojagbe (2008) and Sunny Ododo’s Hard Choice (2011). These two plays are selected because they saliently illustrate how violence is encoded in the way in which powerful men speak about vulnerable women, and the way powerful women speak about vulnerable men. In both cases, violent language becomes the norm, because the characters in their quest for power place their personal interests above concerns for human flourishing.

The playwrights and the context of their writing Ahmed Yerima and Sunny Ododo are both published playwrights whose plays address themes ranging from ethnic identity to love, war, kidnapping, environmental pollution, marriage, politics, relationships, and oral tradition. In Rantimi Adeoye’s classification of Nigerian playwrights, both playwrights fall into the category of third generation writers in Nigeria (Adeoye 2013). The reason for this is their treatment of current issues in Nigeria which leads them to write based on an “individual search for a spiritual solution to the country’s socio-political problems and of self-survival in the midst of the nation’s numerous crises” (Adeoye 2013: 3). With subject matters in the works of both playwrights which include leadership crisis, military misadventure, national disunity, political and ethnic rivalry, and state oppression of the people – all of which dent the country’s public image, and references to themes on corruption and poverty, inadequate healthcare, environmental problems, and other socio-economic problems, Yerima and Ododo have strikingly shown that the Nigerian socio-political scene is one plagued by multiple crises. Both Ododo’s Hard Choice and Yerima’s Mojagbe explore the relevance of tradition in solving political conflicts in the community. Using specific characters in the plays, both playwrights suggest that the socio-economic crisis in Nigeria is a result of the failure of political leaders to respect the tradition of their people which demands absolute reverence for spirituality and respect for the superhuman powers governing them. Yerima and Ododo are both fascinated by the way in which national unity can be achieved through a return to African tradition. Although this can be read as an idealistic and a nostalgic proposition, it seems a reasonable one considering the failure of

46  Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji leadership that shuns African traditions. In their respective plays, Yerima and Ododo highlight communities rocked by political instability, caused largely by the corruption of their leaders. The plays portray leaders’ fear of death and the extent to which leaders can go to avert the scourge of the inevitable. Yerima comments, in the introduction to Mojagbe, that two things inspired writing Mojagbe. One is “the fear of death and its place within the Yoruba culture”, and humans’ ability to forget about the greatness of death until death strikes (6). The second is the type of leaders Nigeria has had and how they search for inner peace which they have destroyed themselves in the first place. Yerima wants the reader/audience to learn from history and understand that the mistakes of leaders often repeat themselves, and leaders often refuse to learn from their own errors of judgement. Leadership error is also depicted in Hard Choice with the characters of two kings from different ethnic groups, both of whom fail to protect their people from the calamity that results when there has been a transgression of the spiritual values of the community. The characters in both plays are therefore prototypically human and easily recognisable in society. According to Yerima, “Mojagbe – as persons – are scattered all over the world” (6). Although Hard Choice and Mojagbe focus on male dominance and its effects on the female world, in both plays there are women who either counter such dominance or accept the status quo. For example, in Hard Choice, Queen Amaka’s character contrasts that of Olori Adeola in Mojagbe, in the sense that Amaka is dominant in nature while Adeola is submissive. While Adeola takes all that is thrown at her and becomes an acquiescent wife, Amaka exercises her dominance over the men she encounters. Besides these two women, all the other female characters are victims of verbal abuse and emotional torture. The characters experience violence irrespective of their social class. Purna Sen (2008: 213) notes that “violence against women has become known not only as an attack on a woman’s body or mind but also as an assault against her social or economic location”. Thus, women experience violence on multiple levels, and this is evident in the two plays where gender inequality is a prominent theme. In both Hard Choice and Mojagbe, the council of chiefs in the three fictional villages of Igedu, Mojagbe’s village, and Emepiri kingdom consist of only men. Consequently, only men make communal decisions and enforce laws in the villages, at the expense of women. This is in contrast to contemporary Yoruba and Igbo communities where there are women chieftaincy roles such as Iyalaje, Iyaloja, Iyalode and Iyaegbe which are Yoruba and Nne Ora, Onoenyi, Odibeze and Akunwefi which are Igbo. These women roles are tellingly absent in both plays. This visible weakness in character construction is in itself evident of literary gendered violence that relegates the women in both plays to housewives and maids, only useful in their role of performing service to men. Effectively, the two plays can be seen as cultural productions that not only portray gendered violence as linguistically expressed but are deeply rooted within a male literary tradition that maintains the gender hierarchy.

Violence and human rights violation  47

Violent language in Ahmed Yerima’s Mojagbe Mojagbe is based on Yoruba mythology, symbolising what took place in a Yoruba community that migrated from the Oyo Empire to a location that is not mentioned in the play.1 Mojagbe highlights the dilemma of a king who through evil acts claims for himself the status of an immortal. In his quest for power, King Mojagbe kills at will and gives orders for executions as he pleases.2 The play commences with Mojagbe, the principal character in the play, experiencing a nightmare. In this dream, four women, regarded as “Yeye”, a generic term for telluric (Earth) mothers, invoke the spirit of Layewu, a frightening masquerade, to take the life of the king. Mojagbe wakes up from his nightmare and questions why anyone would want him dead, only for subsequent events to reveal the reason for his recurrent dreams. While he is struggling to understand their significance, Abese, the king’s messenger, rushes in to inform the king about a white calabash that has been placed on his throne. This calabash signifies that the villagers reject Mojagbe’s tyrannical rule; but, instead of taking heed, he smashes the calabash in the presence of his chiefs whom he calls “Old fools” (27).3 Mojagbe’s tyranny results in social disorder that affects the village’s political structure and harmony. The disorder includes the threat of war from the people of Igbo Odo and those of Oyo Empire. Rather than listening to advice from his personal diviner, Isepe, Mojagbe becomes tyrannical and kills Isepe. He even kills his nephew, Esan, whereas it is an act of sacrilege in his culture to kill someone of royal blood. Conditions continue to deteriorate in his kingdom, owing largely to his deliberate neglect of the yearly Ogun festival and his poor treatment of women. In the end, his death is orchestrated by a woman, which signifies divine justice. A striking aspect of Mojagbe is the way in which Mojagbe disrespects women using belittling words. Kristin Anderson and Jill Cermele (2014: 280) refer to this as a “humorous, ironic or playful use of sexist language”. This is evident in the way Mojagbe jokingly refers to his wife as a “child”. Mojagbe’s comments on women’s mental competencies in the play allude to how weak he thinks they are. He sees his wife as merely a “child” who should keep silent and watch him perform his duties as a king. The extract below is evidence of this point: olori:

(Raises her head, still sleepy.) Kabiyesi. The noise … I thought I heard … mojagbe: Nothing. When the mother fish senses danger in the belly of the sea, it opens its mouth for all its children to swim in, and yet no one single tiny fingerling is hurt or even scratched. Mine is mine to keep. Sleep, Olori … this fight is mine. Sleep child …. 13

Using the word “child” to qualify his wife Adeola, the Olori (queen) of the kingdom, shows that Mojagbe believes that women are powerless and do not have anything meaningful to contribute to the leadership of the community.

48  Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji In other words, language is used here to position women as passive observers of politics while men are projected as active players. Such positioning deepens gender binaries. Anderson and Cermele (2014: 277) affirm that “language is an important resource for the construction of gender identities and for the negotiation of status hierarchies”. Mojagbe employs this resource effectively to construct women as being of lower mental status to men. To refer to someone as a child means that the person knows nothing and he or she is not mature to think like an adult. Therefore, Mojagbe thinks lowly of his wife and her capacity to think like an adult, particularly when they both hear a disturbance in the palace. For Mojagbe to have referred to his wife, who is not just his partner but also a queen to his people, as “child” and not as an equal is evidence that he denigrates women. This is linguistic violence at its best, since the image of a child consigns women to a state of perpetual vulnerability to physical harm. This form of gendered violence is further entrenched by the fact that Yerima does not include women as part of the village’s lawmakers, but simply represents them as wives and mothers of children. In spite of her status as the Olori, Yerima does not make Adeola a woman with voice and agency in the play, which conveys a double layer of gendered violence against women: from the male protagonist and from the author himself. As Murray (2017) argues, linguistic violence is often a precursor to physical violence. In Yerima’s play, Mojagbe not only uses violent language against women but also violates their right to life. He sees the women in his village as “sacrificial lambs” whom he can use to prolong his life and acquire immortality from the gods. He made use of his wife’s womb as a ritual for immortality, and when Isepe reminds him of the action Mojagbe mocks his wife and refers to her as a poor child, again. He says of her, knowing that he had sacrificed her womb: “and that one, too. She now wants children …. I see her drinking concoction and whispering incantations in my room before coming to bed. Often she cries in her sleep. Poor child” (23). Although this might sound like he is sympathetic, Mojagbe is not regretting his action but rather glad that there is nothing his wife can do to change the situation. Using the words “poor child” is a mockery of the wife’s inability to change the situation. “Poor child” can also imply a helpless Olori who can try her best but can never conceive because her womb had been used to “elongate Mojagbe’s life”, according to Isepe (23). Mojagbe’s collaboration with his personal diviner to inflict physical violence on women in the play by using their reproductive organs for the ritual of immortality can be linked to his misuse of power in the community to violate the women’s right to live, as depicted below: mojagbe:

Haa. Now you pour cold water on my troubled soul. Because I have done everything you asked me to do. You said I am tied to life forever. I cannot die. isepe: Go to sleep Kabiyesi. With your mother’s head, I blocked the passage which death takes to come to the world. With your first wife’s

Violence and human rights violation  49 blood, I wet the throat of death, got him drunk. Whenever your name comes up … in a stupor like a child with his first keg of palm wine, he shall forget your name. Thus confused, he shall take the neighbour’s children, not you and your own, Kabiyesi. 23 This conversation between Mojagbe and Isepe illustrates physical violence against women. More than just sacrificing women’s wombs, Mojagbe kills them and uses their blood in rituals to prolong his life. This shows that Mojagbe does not value the lives of the women around him. He is heartless and regards women as mere objects to be used to achieve his purposes. Besides using the language of violence against women, Mojagbe violates these women’s right to life. Mojagbe can be likened to what Deirdre Byrne (2011: 155) describes as the “dragon” possessing masculine features. The manner in which Mojagbe speaks of women, insults them, disrespects them and kills them makes him a fitting human representation of the “dragon”. Byrne’s description of the “dragon” as “aggressive, marauding and possessed of an insatiable greed” (Byrne 2011: 155) suits Mojagbe who, through his language and actions, violates both women and men in the community. Since it is a feature of the “dragon” to consume people with fire, the words that emanate from Mojagbe are like a furnace. For example, Mojagbe refers to the protest by the women as a deliberate attempt to provoke his fury. He states, “why do my mothers trouble a bedevilled Egbere child … who is determined to give them hell in the first place … why?” (31). This suggests that Mojagbe is capable of unleashing “fire” – vengeance – on these women. The violence of his language portrays him as an arrogant, disrespectful and tyrannical king who will go to any length, including killing, to squash any opposition to his rulership. Some scholars have argued that perpetrators of linguistic violence tend to deny responsibility for inflicting the violence either by “minimizing or blaming the victim or claiming that they lost control” (Anderson and Cermele 2014: 279). In Yerima’s play, Mojagbe falls into this category of people who shift the blame to others or claim that they lost control of the situation. Owing to Mojagbe’s disrespect of tradition and degradation of the women to mere objects in the community, the women in Mojagbe approach the gods of the community to deal with the tyrannical king. They start a protest at the king’s palace to show that they have rejected him as their king. Rather than giving the women audience, Mojagbe requests his chief of staff to “take a few palace soldiers and cut them all down” (31). This command is a clear indication of Mojagbe’s violent disposition towards women. To “cut them all down” suggests that the lives of women mean nothing to him; they can be chopped down like trees. The violence embedded in his choice of words point to a masculinist denigration of women that renders them disposable. Here men exercise power and dominance to the extent that they take away human life.

50  Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji After the council of chiefs beg Mojagbe to attend to the women, Mojagbe makes use of several direct verbal attacks on the women. Mojagbe insinuates that he will kill them if he is obliged to come out to attend to them. He tells Abese: Abese, ask them from which village they have come … a damned village where the women appear half-naked … half mad … and half-witted that they do not recognise even the obvious smell of death … and the impending foam of their own blood. 32 He refers to the women as people who have lost their minds and are insignificant in the community. When Mojagbe finally gets the chance to meet with the women led by Yeye, he shifts the blame to the faction in the council of chiefs and the fact that some people did not support him. He submits that “he needed to survive” (34) because what he met at the palace after his coronation is different from what he envisaged as a new king. This shows a masculine evasion of responsibility that makes a mockery of women. When Yeye queries Mojagbe’s commitment to the community and his infliction of physical and emotional pain on the villagers, Mojagbe replies using a series of derogatory words. For example, he uses phrases such as “little girls playing pranks” and “mere singers of false alarm” (36) to refer to the women. He refers to their actions as “cheap accusation” (36). In another instance he calls the women a “pack of little children” (38), and metaphorically describes them as “cracked spent water mugs” (38). These derogatory expressions used against women precede his threat to release slaves to defile these spiritual mothers. Thus, Mojagbe’s encounter with the women demonstrates the way in which violent language reinforces physical violence against women and the violation of their bodily integrity. Threatening to release “virile slaves” (37) on the protesting women encourages physical violence that can lead to rape and the violation of women’s bodies (see Murray 2010). Thus, Yerima’s play highlights sexual politics in the way Mojagbe combines linguistic violence and physical violence to exercise power and dominance over women, both as a man and a king.

Violent language or “defensive othering” in Sunny Ododo’s Hard Choice Ododo’s Hard Choice presents the situation of a marital communion between the Igbo community of Emepiri and the Igedu community of Yorubaland in Nigeria. This is achieved by instituting a traditional royal marriage ceremony between the families of Eze Okiakoh of Emepiri kingdom and King Iginla of Igedu. Sadly, the traditional wedding ceremony between Azingae, the Princess of Emepiri, and Oki, the Prince of Igedu, is interrupted by the sudden appearance of three men in masks who seize

Violence and human rights violation  51 the crown of King Iginla and disappear. Due to the missing crown, King Iginla, the father of the groom, and his entourage are unable to return to their Yoruba community. The theft of the crown causes tension in Emepiri kingdom as both communities divert attention to locating the royal crown. In their refuge in Emepiri, the Yoruba monarch and his chief warlord, Bashorun, plan to wage war on Emepiri if the Emepiri rulership fails to retrieve the crown. It is during their conversations that it becomes evident how gendered violence operates through specific kinds of language that enforce gender hierarchy. King Iginla’s use of language after his crown is stolen reveals a direct attack on the mental competence of women. His choice of words in the extract below shows that he, like Mojagbe in Yerima’s play, does not see the relevance of women to the progress of his community. Desperate for his crown, King Iginla wants his son Oki to act like a “man” and restore the Igedu pride: king iginla: My son, I know it has been very terrible for you because your wedding ceremony was the platform exploited by God-knows-who to embarrass our royalty and throw our kingdom into chaos. oki: But your highness, my loyalty has been questioned here and … king iginla: Sheee. I don’t doubt you, my son, but in state matters, domestic emotions cannot be accommodated and don’t grudge Bashorun for his standpoint on this matter. Oki, stand up and be a man. (Oki looks at the king wandering [sic].) Yes, stand up and act. This is a moment of crisis, only women run their mouths and weep up emotions instead of their limbs and energy. Or was I wrong in supporting your wedding to the princess of Emepiri Kingdom? oki: No, your highness. king iginla: Then rise and recover my crown and your bride. Only that singular manly valour would qualify you to rule over two most important kingdoms in this region. If I die without my crown you will never qualify to rule over Igedu kingdom; with the princess as your wife, you shall become the crown prince of Emepiri Kingdom. 21

As this extract illustrates, Oki is constantly encouraged to embody characteristics of “manly valour” (21). Reference to such “valour” suggests that Oki needs to be transfigured into an aggressive masculine character to be able to rescue the stolen crown. It is important to note the use of the word “man” as a synonym for strength and courage, which is also a reference to “masculinity – such as explosive, strength, and aggressiveness” (Gilenstam, Karp and Henriksson-Larsén 2008: 236). King Iginla persuades Oki to “stand up and act” (21), which means to take on the masculine courageous nature of someone who is ready to use violence to achieve his aim. Oki’s bravery is triggered when the king reminds him that he will never be qualified to rule Igedu if the king dies without his crown. The king requires

52  Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji Oki to “rise and recover” the crown and his bride, reminding him that being a strong man would qualify him to rule over “the two most important kingdoms in this region” (21). Oki is told that in “a moment of crisis, only women run their mouths and weep up emotions instead of their limbs and energy” (21). In this manner, Ododo presents direct sexist language that is used by men in power to emphasise gender difference. In other words, when a man acts like a woman, he is considered weak and useless. In her book Language and Sexism, Sara Mills (2008) identifies two ways in which language can be used to enact gender violence, namely, through direct and indirect sexism. She explains that direct or overt sexism entails using a straightforward linguistic marker to analyse or give proposition about another gender, while indirect sexism refers to using humorous, playful or ironic terms to qualify the opposite sex (Mills 2008). Mills goes on to argue that while direct or overt sexist language use is often identified easily with particular expressions of discriminatory opinions about women, the indirect use appears in the form of sexist jokes or the playful relegation of women to inferior roles (Mills 2008). In addition, Sone (2016: 45) perceives such direct or overt sexism as “another stereotype about women as frivolous, flippant, and not to be trusted with serious matters”. In King Iginla’s case, the linguistic marker is direct in referring to women as talkers rather than doers, and it presents a patriarchal world where women are seen as an inferior group in relation to men because they do not possess the ability to act in times of crisis. No part of the play mentions anything regarding King Iginla’s wife or Queen. There is no stage direction in Hard Choice that mentions that King Iginla consults his wife or a female chief about the problem of the missing crown. It is evident that he regards women as mere property and not partners in leadership. The sexism conveyed by his words are therefore the manifestation of a masculinist erasure of women’s subjectivity. In this context, gendered violence seems to validate masculine authority. What is striking about Ododo’s play is his portrayal of women’s equal potential to use violent language for their own selfish interests. Similar to Mojagbe’s description as a fiery dragon who asserts his political dominance and presence through harsh words is Queen Amaka’s portrayal as a dragon queen. Deirdre Byrne (2011) argues that the “dragon” feature can relate to females and not just males. She states that “the dragon’s love of shiny and costly objects is clearly similar to women’s well-known love of expensive jewellery as bodily decoration: the pejorative labels ‘a golddigger’ or, more contemporarily, ‘a bling baby’, are never applied to men” (Byrne 2011: 157). Queen Amaka is a vivid example of this in Hard Choice. Her inordinate quest for power and dominance in the village shows that she does not want to, at any time, lose the authority she has. Because of her love for “bling”, she kills her husband’s brother, Uchenna, before he could be enthroned as the Eze. During Queen Amaka’s confession, she tells Eze Okiakoh: When your coronation activities as the Eze of Emepiri were suspended twenty one years ago, because of the sudden appearance of your step

Violence and human rights violation  53 brother who was thought dead, I couldn’t stand the agony and shame it would have brought upon us not to be crowned as king. I had to do something. 45 Her love for power overshadowed any concern for human life and she had to kill Uchenna. Uchenna, the Eze’s stepbrother, being the only possible opposition to the throne, appeared a few weeks before the coronation and contended with Eze Okiakoh for the kingship stool. As Eze Okiakoh’s elder brother, Uchenna qualifies to be the king of Emepiri. Unable to stand the shame of Uchenna becoming the Eze in her husband’s stead, a pregnant Queen Amaka approached the god Oguguru to eliminate any opposition to the throne. Oguguru grants the queen’s demand in exchange for the fruit of her womb. Queen Amaka agrees to the god’s request that the unborn child will return to Oguguru on her wedding day. She also dedicates the princess’s life to Oguguru in the belief that she was going to give birth to other children, which unfortunately does not happen. Oguguru succeeds in killing Uchenna before the coronation of the new king, thus enabling Eze Okiakoh to become the monarch, to the satisfaction of Queen Amaka. She regards her action to be a “courageous step” and referred to her husband as too “polished for traditional politics” (45–46). Thus, Queen Amaka traded the fruit of her womb for the Emepiri throne. She does not intend to sit on the throne herself but does everything in her power to make sure that her husband, whom she refers to as a “weakling”, occupies the throne (43). Effectively, Queen Amaka displays violence not only by killing Uchenna and sacrificing the life of her unborn child but also by speaking contemptibly about her husband. This is another instance that illustrates that linguistic violence and physical violence are inextricable. As noted earlier, the use of violent language can be as a result of status negotiation. It is either a man trying to prove that he is higher in hierarchy than a woman or vice versa. Michael Schwalbe et al. (2000: 435) state that “people also use language to gain status and power in a more defensive fashion, in which they position themselves as members of a high-status category by distancing themselves from a stigmatized category”. In Hard Choice, Amaka’s choice of words during her confession in the palace shrine symbolises her intention to work on Eze Okiakoh’s emotion by referring to men as cowards. She lashes out: What has become of our men? Hardly can you find one again that can fight for a cause to logical end. It’s either they cave in when they come under pressure or they’re victims of banana peels. Chief Ubanga betrayed Emepiriland, our ancestors will never forgive him … I did it for us and for your kingdom, your highness. 42 The reference to men becoming “victims of banana peels” is a direct attack on men which castigates them as weaklings. The expression suggests

54  Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji that they are not strong enough to fight a battle and win, but rather lose to people beneath their status. In addition, stating that there is hardly any man in Emepiri who “can fight for a cause to logical end” supposes that men are easily manipulated, just like the way she manipulated Chief Ubanga to collaborate with her in her mission to steal King Iginla’s crown and offer it to Oguguru in an attempt to save Princess Azingae’s life. Queen Amaka wants the Eze to join her in her plot to prevent her daughter from being sacrificed to the village god. She tries to manipulate Eze Okiakoh into thinking that his action of accepting Igedu’s war threat is a sign of weakness. Anderson and Cermele (2014: 278) explain this as a process whereby “abusive partners use specific linguistic strategies to objectify, degrade, and tear down the dignity of their victims”. Asking the Eze to stand up and act as a king indicates that Queen Amaka expects Eze Okiakoh to act under the banner of kingship by disregarding the feelings of others. She also refers to Chief Ubanga’s betrayal of their agreement as a sign of cowardice. Thus, Queen Amaka employs what Anderson and Cermele (2014) as well as Michael Schwalbe et al. (2000) refer to as “defensive othering”, as she uses words to position herself as superior to the men in Emepiri, including her husband. Such defensive othering disregards the dignity of the other gender and reduces their lives to objects that can be disposed at will. Just as Mojagbe employs violent language to objectify women, so too Queen Amaka resorts to language in ways that rob men of their human value. Either way, language is used to violate other humans’ right to life and respectable treatment.

Conclusion Used jokingly or seriously, language is a powerful tool for enacting power and dominance. The feminist analysis of the two plays, Mojagbe and Hard Choice, in this chapter has illustrated that the performance of violence – linguistic and physical – is not limited to one gender; both men and women are capable of enacting violence on the bodies of other human beings, thereby violating their rights to life, dignity and bodily safety. By examining the characters of Mojagbe, King Iginla and Queen Amaka in the two plays, it is shown that the use of violent language is often orchestrated by status construction, where one gender wants to position itself as superior to the other. It is also argued in this chapter that most times, verbal attacks result in physical abuse. Language thus plays an important role in how we understand relations between women and men. Encoded in the language of violence is the power to dominate. Both plays demonstrate how the quest for dominance is the pursuit of both men and women, though the strategies may be different. Cameron (2006) asserts that language is a salient matter in the politics of everyday life. The way men and women in society speak about each other reveals the extent to which they embody the dragon symbol that Byrne (2011) speaks about. In the two plays, while Queen Amaka is a “bling queen” who seeks to remain powerful at all cost, Mojagbe and King Iginla

Violence and human rights violation  55 are “dragons” spitting out fire by the aggressiveness of their actions and intense sexism of their language. Thus, both Yerima and Ododo suggest in their writing that gendered violence is inevitable once people occupy positions of power, and such violence is enacted not only through physical acts but also through speech. In this context, human rights violations become a norm.

Notes 1 Yerima does not mention the name of the town where the play is set. This may be an intentional means to underscore the universality of dictatorship which permeates most African countries. He subsequently uses names of other locations that are in Yorubaland, such as Oyo Empire, to trace the migration of the people from the Old Oyo Empire. 2 Yerima often refers to King Mojagbe simply as Mojagbe. This shows how language, through omission, enforces the degradation of a dignitary. 3 Yunusa Salami (2006: 70) explains that the traditional Yoruba society could be said to be monarchical, yet the monarch does not enjoy a sole authority of the society, and while the King occupied the highest seat of the society, there existed an elaborate organization of chiefs. He adds: “Hence the affairs of society were transacted by the King in full consultation with the chiefs and other palace officials which can conveniently be classified as the council of society” (Salami 2006: 70). This means that the council of chiefs serves as adviser to the king and acts as checks and balances on his power. This council is further divided into categories that highlight the roles of the chiefs in the community. As Salami (2006) notes, there are civil chiefs, military chiefs, ward chiefs and heads of extended families. Thus, the conversation of the chiefs in Mojagbe allows the reader/audience to determine their roles within the community. For example, Balogun is a military chief, while Osi and Otun are civil ones.

References Adeoye, Rantimi. 2013. The Drama of Ahmed Yerima: Studies in Nigerian Theatre. Doctoral Thesis, Leiden University. Anderson, Kristin and Jill Cermele. 2014. Public/Private Language Aggression against Women: Tweeting Rage and Intimate Partner Violence. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 2(2): 274–293. Byrne, Deirdre. 2011. Woman↔Dragon: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Transformations in Tehanu, The Other Wind and Tales from Earthsea. Mousaion 29(3): 154–165. Cameron, Deborah. 2006. On Language and Sexual Politics. London: Routledge. Gilenstam, Kajsa, Staffan Karp and Karin Henriksson-Larsén. 2008. Gender in Ice Hockey: Women in a Male Territory. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports 18(2): 235–249. Hamilton, Carrie. 2008. Political Violence and Body Language in Life Stories of Women ETA Activists. In Alexander, Karen and Mary Hawkesworth (eds) War & Terror: Feminist Perspectives. London: The University of Chicago Press, 137–158. Mills, Sara. 2008. Language and Sexism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

56  Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji ——— 2012. Gender Matters: Feminist Linguistic Analysis. London: Equinox. Murray, Jessica. 2010. “The Recidivist Tongue”: Embracing an Embodied Language of Trauma. Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies 36(3): 488–503. ——— 2017. “And They Never Spoke to Each Other of It”: Contemporary Southern African Representations of Silence, Shame and Gender Violence. English Academy Review 34(1): 23–35. Ododo, Sunny. 2011. Hard Choice. Ibadan: Kraft Books. Salami, Yunusa. 2006. The Democratic Structure of Yoruba Political-Cultural Heritage. The Journal of Pan African Studies 1(6): 67–78. Sanderson, Christiane. 2015. Counselling Skills for Working with Shame. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Schwalbe, Michael et al. 2000. Generic Processes in the Reproduction of Inequality: An Interactionist Analysis. Social Forces 79(2): 419–452. Sen, Purna. 2008. Book Review of From Mathura to Manorama: Resisting Violence against Women in India by Kalpana Kannibiran and Ritu Menon, Indian Feminisms: Law, Patriarchies and Violence in India by Geetanjoli Gangoli, and Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary by Veena Das. Signs 34(1): 213–218. Sone, Enongene Mirabeau. 2016. Language and Gender Interaction in Bakossi Proverbial Discourse. California Linguistic Notes 40(1): 40–50. Yerima, Ahmed. 2008. Mojagbe. Ibadan: Kraft Books.

4

Women on the move The construction of the woman migrant’s story in African cinema Kenneth W. Harrow

Introduction: globalisation stages a genre The politics of representation brings us to the question of how women are generally treated in recent African films dealing with immigration under the current conditions of globalisation. I want to treat these terms, “immigration” and “globalisation”, very broadly, and in particular I am interested in what patterns of narrativisation and characterisation are emerging. By globalisation, I mean the current “neoliberal” turn as well documented by Akin Adesokan (2011), and especially by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff in their work on millennial capitalism in their well-known essay “Millennial Capitalism in an Age of Globalization”.1 This work helps form the grounding for reflections on the broad conditions created by the ascent of globalisation in the 1980s, and as reflected in films dealing with immigration in the past 20 or so years. I want to push the term “immigration” so as to encompass a wide range of conditions that have attracted the interest of filmmakers. The narrow sense of the term will be reflected in stories involving the travel of immigrants from their homelands to their new countries of reception. Expanding on this, I also intend the term to refer not only to economic migrants but refugees, and additionally anyone who has decided to undertake the departure from home to new lands. The refrain “no jobs, no work, no future” provides the grounding for many films, such as Moussa Touré’s La Pirogue (2012). The broader designation of “refugee” generally applies to those who might be put at risk were they to remain at home. An example might be seen in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002), where the protagonist Okwe is portrayed as being framed for the death of his wife in Nigeria. In Moustéfa Djadjam’s Frontières (2001), the characters struggling to get north, to cross from Africa to Europe, include those fleeing the authorities as well as those seeking a loved one in Spain, or following after a husband who already had left for the north, or simply looking for work. Between migrant/immigrant/refugee there might be legal distinctions of great consequence for those seeking permanent residence or refugee status in the EU, while in Frontières (Djadjam 2001), as in the lives of most migrants, it is a

58  Kenneth W. Harrow meaningless distinction. Those fleeing the war zones of Syria, the police of Eritrea, the violence in Yemen, the desolation caused by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, or the loss of jobs as fishermen in Senegal, become identical when their bodies are washed up on the shores. It is only afterward, when the authorities require of them a justification for coming, and are indifferent to the risks they undertook to come, that the story has to be shaped so as to justify the demand. The journey is dangerous, and thus young men are the largest group w illing to undertake it, except under conditions of great duress, as in Syria, Iraq or Yemen. It is no coincidence that women, most endangered by the journey, form a smaller percentage of those directly engaged in the conflict when warfare is prevalent. But they too become migrants, flee home, and feel they must leave. And to give fuller attention to the accounts generated by the violence in the past few years on the continent, it is necessary to attend to narratives involving devastating combat. In particular, I am thinking about child soldier stories that concern not only the boys – the boys as victims in Sudan becoming emblematic of that conflict – but also the female child soldiers who are kidnapped and coerced into becoming combatants, even at tender ages. Films on this theme include Blood Diamonds (Zwick 2006), Ezra (Aduaka 2007), Johnny Mad Dog (Sauvaire 2008), War Witch (Nguyen 2012) and Beasts of No Nation (Fukunaga 2015). The typical account of the girls captured by militants takes on the form of a predictable narrative that gets replicated in new iterations, whether made in films by African directors, like Newton Aduaka in Ezra (2007) where the female protagonist is seen as the “wife” of the militia leader and becomes a daunting combatant herself, or where the principal protagonist plays out the same drama of being kidnapped, drugged, forced to kill her parents, taught to become a warrior, and eventually rebels against her commander, as in the Canadian film (in)appropriately titled War Witch (2012) – a title as sensational as the narrative, and curiously rendered in French as Rebelle. In all these versions, the child originally seen as victim is transmogrified into the child-murderer maniac, and girls become central players in the new scenarios involving sex along with drugs and violent anti-social actions. Gendered violence in this context becomes a very complex discourse. Ultimately, there is repentance and re-integration to conventional social roles as mothers, sisters and daughters, in which case gender remains the ultimate determinant of women’s futures in African cinema. The pattern is slightly different in the stories that focus more on the migration, like Socrate Safo’s film Amsterdam Diary (2005), where the protagonist, as in Ken Bugul’s novel Le Baobab Fou (1984), leaves for Europe, is corrupted, loses her innocence, and becomes a drug addict or prostitute, but eventually returns home to a safer, better life. One version of that migrant story is the Nollywood film Ije: The Journey (2010) where almost all of those elements are to be found. The theme of departure, for women in African cinema, goes back practically to its beginnings, as with Jean-Pierre

The migrant’s story in African cinema  59 Dikongué-Pipa’s film Muna Moto (1975), where the father compels the daughter to marry against her will. In others, the patriarchy drives her out, as in Ousmane Sembène’s early novelette, Vehi Ciosane (1965), where the father has impregnated his own daughter. Stories of departure, like Fatou Diome’s novel Belly of the Atlantic (2006), are marked by conditions of oppression at home, compelling Salie to leave her native Senegalese island of Niodior for France. In other instances, women who had fled home because of the patriarchy now do so out of desperation or compulsion: women fleeing, joining the men, surreptitiously slipping on board leaky boats, as in La Pirogue (Touré 2012); women pretending to be men, as in Frontières (Djadjam 2001) and Bamako (Sissako 2006), until they are discovered, and then become the wrench in the works, disrupting the community of the men who start to compete for the woman’s attention; women presumably compelling men to yield to their baser instincts; women daring to take on the challenge of the desert, only to die, like the Ghanaian woman in Sissako’s Bamako (2006); women on the move; compelling stories of women taking up the challenge to seek their husbands, as in Dyana Gaye’s Des Etoiles (2013), or Djadjam’s Frontières (2001). This chapter is not just about the ways women have experienced, mitigated and escaped gendered violence in African literature and cinema, but it is about how that story now has a certain configuration where elements that recur attest to tensions and anxieties that are never very far from the compulsions of an economic and social order itself undergoing vast mutation. The mutation that has changed the way films are now being made, and the kinds of films that are getting made, has been the result of globalisation and its neoliberal features that mark dominant modes of production and distribution (Lobato 2012). Starting with the late 1980s in Ghana and then Nigeria, the stories about women’s departure, and what follows, have begun to include components formerly seen in melodramatic forms of cinema that were very far from African cinematic genres with their serious, politically committed forms of Third Cinema. The latter could not be divorced from foundational questions like “where is our nation going?” Instead, the question becomes: what is happening with our children, as shown in Tunde Kelani’s Abeni (2006)?; what is youth turning into, as prefigured in Souleymane Cissé’s Finye (1982)?; what is happening to the morals of current generations, such as the tsotsis in Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Aristotle’s Plot (1996)?; what is the role of intimacy and love, formerly shunned when Cote d’Ivoire’s Henri Duparc made his famous romances, especially Bal Poussière (1989), and in Désiré Ecaré’s Faces of Women (1985)?. Before, it was the question of women forced to marry, or to undergo excision (Finzan, Sissoko 1989), or forced to re-marry (Wend Kuuni, Kaboré 1982). Now it is the story of women being left behind to mind the family, while the husband has departed for the north (La Pirogue, Touré 2012), or more compellingly when she herself leaves and becomes the story (Amsterdam Diary, Safo 2005).

60  Kenneth W. Harrow Finally, after all the drama of the departure – the dangers, the loves, the Road Movie components – we move on to the story of the arrival and its consequences, with the example I gave before of Bugul’s Le Baobab Fou (1984), turned into a genre of Nollywood films dealing with the story of the immigrant (see Haynes 2016, particularly Chapter 10 titled “The Nollywood Diaspora: Nigerians Abroad”). One of the key examples for this chapter can be seen especially in Chineze Anyaene’s Ije: The Journey (2010). It might be compared with the less polished Amsterdam Diary (Safo 2005). In both, the woman is put at great risk when she accepts the condition of being transplanted to a new land where she will either fall to its dangers and vices, as in Amsterdam Diary (Safo 2005), or will be threatened with its legal system, even to become unjustly accused, as in Ije (Anyaene 2010). Interpellated by the prospects of advancement, wealth, accomplishment, independence and love, as in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah (2014), she might find that the prospects of being the new transplant, the migrant turned green-card carrier, turned American girlfriend or wife or lover, will require a price too heavy to pay, a price entailing loss of self and soul. The violence she experiences as a migrant is as psychological as it is physical. And so the journey might end, either with “black magic” or death, as in Kunle Afolayan’s The Figurine (2009), where the returnee is either a man willing to destroy what stands between him and the one he loves, or a woman willing to play the marriage game at all cost. The roles for the returnees, as for those departing, are already fixed ahead of time: in the Ghanaian series An African City by Nicole Amarteifio (2014), we see in the initial episode “The Return” an Afropolitan returnee seeking to find her love at home. Like Sembène’s film Faat Kine (2000), we see the portrayal of the “modern African woman”, as shown in the beginning of this excursus into migration, in terms defined by globalisation and its visible face of consumer capitalism, with the new Afropolitans. It is this one feature that gives meaning to the larger pattern of the migrant films of departure, by continuing the cycle of films anticipating life in the embrace of the wealthy global north, and then completing the cycle with the story of the return.

The migrant’s story Films that tell the stories of women on the move are about people as goods – new goods, used goods, re-used goods – and what is finally made of them: dehumanised subjects. The economics of neoliberalism account largely for emigration. With the diminishment of African state sovereignty following Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) and the increase in freewheeling capitalist commerce, regional militias have been able to overpower state forces in vast regions, resulting at times in enormous conflicts. The ascendancy of neoliberal policies since the 1980s when SAPs were imposed on African states led to indebtedness, with greater economic stress placed

The migrant’s story in African cinema  61 on the entire neo-patrimonial system. Economic and political refugees have multiplied in vast numbers. Comaroff and Comaroff (2001) describe how, under neoliberalism, consumption has become accepted as a right. In addition, the value placed on commodities has superseded ties associated with family or community, fostering new “occult” beliefs in the acquisition of wealth (Geschiere 2009). The acquisition of wealth in this time of rising Pentecostalism in Africa came to be attributed, especially in early Nollywood films, to pacts established between the rising urban millionaires and satanic forces. Capitalism was understood more in mystical than scientific terms, with occultism rising as a predominant genre in contemporary films. Films such as The Figurine (Afolayan 2009) and War Witch (Nguyen 2012) all are heirs of Living in Bondage’s (Rapu 1992) turn to the occult. The gap between the powerful and the wealthy, the “big men” and the poor, has become increasingly visible with neoliberal globalisation. But its patterns resembling slavery, and its ties to the oceanic Middle Passage, were established before the onset of industrial capitalism when it was slaves who were transported in ocean vessels from the 16th to 19th centuries. Now we can extend the trope of the slave ship to multitudinous vessels transporting migrants from the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, or the west coast of Africa, to southern Europe. When the human cargo arrives, the desperate arrivants sell their labour on a market that enables the continued production of more commodities at bargain rates. The dangers do not cease with the arrival, but often are multiplied by the illegal status of the migrant whose labour is sold at the cheapest price, and for whom sanctuary is often needed. The journey begins with the flight, especially for those seeking asylum. For women, it is often a flight instigated by some form of gendered violence, leading to a quest for what Ousmane Sembène features as “Moolaadé” in his 2004 film Moolaadé (Sembène 2004). According to Allocine in its review of the Cannes Festival 2004 in which Moolaadé premiered, Sembène explains what “Moolaadé” is by stating: “Moolaadé is an old Fulani word, whose equivalent exists also in Mandinka and Wolof. It expresses the notion of the right to asylum. Moolaadé is the protection given to someone who is fleeing” (Allocine 2005: n.p.).2 The film Moolaadé (Sembène 2004) is marked by a double motion. The first is the drama of the girls in the village fleeing their initiation – the genital cutting that would make them “purified” and acceptable for marriage to the men in the village. Of the six girls who flee, two drown themselves in a well, while four find refuge with a village woman Collé who calls out a Moolaadé to keep them safe from being restored to their mothers and the excisors. One of the four is eventually stolen from Collé’s house and taken to the excisor by her own mother, and dies from the bleeding. The girls pay the price for not finding asylum and protection, but they are young girls, after all, and can barely be expected to know exactly what they were fleeing from and what resistance might have meant. Their attempt to escape excision is more of an attempt to escape early marriage than a conscious resistance against human rights violations.

62  Kenneth W. Harrow The other direction of the journey in Moolaadé consists of the return, this time from France, and is most striking for its projection of women and men’s resistance of patriarchal norms which enforce violence against women. Ibrahima is the son of one of the village leaders, and his father expects him to accept an arranged marriage, a marriage certainly not to any of the girls in town who had not undergone female circumcision. When Ibrahima states that his choice of wife is a private matter, his father gets furious and strikes him, threatening to disown him if he disobeys. Ibrahima has returned bringing considerable goods to the town, to his family and many others. He is dressed in an immaculate western suit, and has brought a television and radio. He is modernity embodied, come back to show the face of success to the village. But if Ibrahima is rich, he is no longer the obedient son that his father had expected him to be, and when the final choice between the old patriarchy and the newly rebellious women has to be made, he chooses Amasatou, the uncircumcised daughter of Collé, at the risk of being disinherited. In the end, the older men are broken as the women sing of their triumph: the old rule, symbolised by the repressive gestures of taking the radios from the women, by honouring the anthill that signifies the ancient tomb of the village’s patriarchal founder, and finally by the mosque whose phallic minaret stands in for the male rulers, all figuratively go up in smoke as the men’s threats and whippings are successfully resisted, and the traditional excision is brought to an end. Moolaadé is thus the journey of modernity – undertaken by women who refuse the ancient practice of excision, and by the returned son Ibrahima who brings money, modern media and modern thinking into the men’s ruling council, the family and the entire town. This is presaged when he goes to pay the ambulant salesman Mercenaire, and complains that Mercenary is, as his name suggests, mounting an “arnarque”, a con game, against the gullible villagers. They trade words after Ibrahima accuses Mercenaire of overcharging the villagers for stale bread and cheap goods. But the travelling salesman knows what his costs and profits come to, and justifies his practices on the grounds that he too is part of the economy on which modernity is based. He says: “toi qui a fait l’Europe, tu sais ce que c’est le mondialisation and liberté de prix” [you who have been to Europe, you know what globalisation and free trade mean]. Ibrahima can only respond with insults: “quel bonimenteur celui là, tu es vraiment un mercenaire” [what a bullshit artist you are; you are really a mercenary]. Later, Mercenaire is killed trying to flee the village, and his money and goods are all stolen by the villagers who chased him out for supporting the women. The freedom of the market, like the freedom of the women, comes at the cost of blood, and it is paid in the village with whippings and excision, just as it is paid in the journeys up north with the fees charged by passeurs – those who arrange for the travel. The women in Moolaadé are not presented with the option of migrating north, not with any prospect of leaving, like Anta in Djibril Diop’s Touki

The migrant’s story in African cinema  63 Bouki (1973) and Linguere Ramatou in Hyènes (1992), both films dealing with postcolonial Senegal and globalisation. The Moolaadé women are not living with the freedom of women in the city: they are not free of the rule of the men, and not able to up and leave like the young pregnant daughter in Sembène’s Vehi Ciosane (1965) who heads out for Dakar after the patriarchy does nothing. The women rely on each other, and when the outsiders come in to playfully flirt with them, as Mercenaire does, or to marry them, as with the greatest of prospects, Ibrahima, they can only respond, laugh or mock, but not leave home. Or jump into a well, as do the two rebellious girls. Thus, the irony is that their only power lies in passive resistance – as in Collé’s locking the girls in her compound, not freeing them; and in her submitting to her husband’s whipping, not in picking up the rifle, as the princess does in Ceddo (Sembène 1977) when she shoots the imam in his genitals. Their fight ultimately is with each other: the traditionalist excisor, an elderly woman, and the rebellious Collé. When Ibrahima returns, chooses the uncircumcised Amasatou and supports her cause, she has accomplished as much as a woman can do: she has been chosen by the modern returnee. In that regard, she might be thought to embody something of what the nation, and its turn to indigeneity in Africa under globalisation, has come to mean (Geschiere 2009): she wins by being chosen by the modern wealthy son, the figure of the New African, not to talk of the modern-day Afropolitan. The passage to that position of the modern spouse can be reconfigured by the slight twist in the plot, so that Amasatou’s impurity, her compulsion to turn away from the traditional past, her embrace of the role of the New African, is fraught with incredible violations, violence, and destruction – like the whipping of her mother, Collé, by her father. The word for rape in French contains the same root for violence: violentia, as vehemence or impetuosity, and violer, to rape. In War Witch (Nguyen 2012), the full-blown split between the nation reborn under the watch of the New African woman – like Faat Kine and her sisters (Sembène 2000) or Colle and the mothers (Sembène 2004) – and the rebellious daughter is realised in the form of violence. When the violence is good, she is “the rebel”. But she is “the witch” when the global north spectator has his Africa served up to him full of its spices. Or when evangelical puritanism has its say. Both rebel and witch must be realised by the ultimate act of violence in freeing the nation from its past. In Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), that act of freedom came positively in the form of the rebel President, who refused his ex-colonial masters, only to be assassinated by them.3 Patrice Lumumba was replaced by Mobutu Sese Seko so that the past could continue to hold sway, so that there could be no new present in the Congo. In War Witch (Nguyen 2012), the daughter, Komona, must kill off her parents to obtain her new magical role as war witch. But the film’s violence is all the more retro as her figure reiterates images proper to past colonial discourses, even harking back to Joseph Conrad’s vision of the “magnificent”

64  Kenneth W. Harrow African queen glimpsed in the forest with the journey upriver (Conrad 2018 [1902]). Komona must become a wife of the rebel chief since she is a seer gifted with magical vision that enables the rebels to anticipate the enemy army’s traps, and that even permits her to see the dead who appear as zombie-like spirits. She sees in order for the rebels to kill and to rule better. The pattern of child soldier movies is followed faithfully throughout War Witch, despite the director Nguyen’s claim to have spent some years in the eastern Congo where militias have been prevalent. Nguyen follows faithfully the generic script, despite the innovative role of Komona and the zombie parents. Thus, the beginning: a quiet village, our heroine innocently balancing on a teeter-totter, her hair and dress like a child’s, emphasising her youth. Then the invasion of the “rebels”: the abduction of the children; the orders to Komona to kill her parents (with them begging her to do it, so that they die a less painful death, and her act viewed as having been coerced); her ties to home broken; and her recruitment to the rebels forced and unconditional. Immediately after this comes the march through the forest, the violence that terrifies the children, with the weakest killed, the survivors traumatised and compelled to accept the new order, the introduction to drugs, with the chief now becoming their new parent and guardian. The question of gender enters immediately into these narratives, as the role of the boys is marked by their sexualisation at pre-nubial age, while girls become sex slaves to their new masters. The dreadful accounts of Boko Haram captives – young girls impregnated by the male militia – is replicated continually in these cinematic patterns, and in War Witch we learn from the beginning that Komona is pregnant as she addresses her unborn foetus. The first intertitle gives her age as 12 years, so she is immediately identified as yet another child subjected to cruel sexual abuse. The Tiger rebel chief who takes her as his concubine is the same one who had told her: “If you don’t shoot your parents I will kill them with a machete”. After she does this, the children captives are thrown in a pirogue where they lie like loose rags on the bottom of the boat, taken like slaves with new masters standing over them with guns. Every detail of these scenes is etched into the pattern established by the genre, that is, by the constitution of compulsion under globalisation. There is nothing of the nation-state, of an organised political force, of an opposition to which the word rebel might be meaningfully attached. The qualifier “African” is violently etched over the children, and eventually over the girls, as the pattern of militarisation, with its blood diamonds, coltan, and fetishisation of the weapons brandished by children, all conform to the child-soldier genre where Africans are presented to the global north as uncivilised and incapable of having qualities other than the most base. In the past, the discovery of colonial discourses and their systems of representation might have awakened the filmmaker’s desire to demythologise the dominant ideology, as with Jean-Marie Teno’s Afrique, je te Plumerai (1992). But in a film like War Witch, we are dealing with a new age of World

The migrant’s story in African cinema  65 Cinema, where the Vietnamese-Canadian filmmaker Nguyen enters into the global north’s ideological framing so smoothly, reiterating all that reinforces the crude imagery on that circuit of cinema, that instead of being chastised for returning us to the newest version of Heart of Darkness, his star Rachel Mwanza is awarded the Berlin Silver Bear for best actress, and the film is awarded a special jury mention, and an Academy Award nomination! Rachel Mwanza’s role as the war witch Komona culminates when she turns her vagina into the ultimate war weapon to be used against the militia commandant. She inserts into herself a sharpened avocado nut so as to cut his penis when he seeks to have intercourse with her, and after succeeding in the castration, she flees the rebels for good. The extreme acts and zombie figures augment the “African” exoticism of the genre, while at the same time aligning the film with the rising popularity of zombie films. They account for the binary naming of the film as “War Witch/Rebelle” in that both terms become generic signifiers for the girl child-soldier where the abject would seem to be without limit in the darkness of the Congo. In this, they are the flip side of Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Les Saignantes (2009), the women of the future who will go up against the Minister and destroy him in combat, trading on the power of their sexuality in the ritual use of clitoral power, the power of mevoungou.4 Komona’s “mevoungou” power is turned against the Tiger commandant, the patriarchal leader, as she runs off with the albino youth dubbed Magicien, who has defected from the rebel camp. They are now a couple, endangered by the militia they rejected. Komona is positioned between the young man she loves and the older man who had kidnapped and forced her to become his “wife”. The pattern involving a young woman positioned between an older man who is imposed on her, and a younger man she loves, is as old as African cinema, as we can see in Dikongue-Pipa’s Muna Moto (1975), and many other classic texts. What is striking here is that the woman in question has entered into the male universe – the world of the military, of war, violence and killing. If girl soldiers have become common enough, it is typically not as combatants but as concubines, as we have seen so tragically in the cases of Boko Haram or most militias that have appeared in recent decades in African conflicts. The story of the girl, ripped out of her family’s home, forced to serve new masters, has been intrinsic to the history of slavery. But now it is a new set of servants and masters, a new set of traffickers and cargo handlers, who trade goods, money and sexual favours for transportation across borders; in the process those transported become increasingly precarious as they are depleted of their funds, and fail to provide labour or other favours to their new masters. The migrant journey then is a journey into slave labour in the age of globalisation. What kind of a reception might these new age slaves expect when they arrive? All the political rhetoric of those states on the border of their routes is either unwelcoming or much worse. An example can be seen in statements

66  Kenneth W. Harrow by the Hungarian head of state whose remarks could be echoed across many of the east European states. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary warned that his country was being overrun: Immigrants are now not just pounding on our doors, but are breaking them down on top of us. Not just a few hundred or thousand, but hundreds of thousands – indeed, millions – of migrants are besieging the borders of Hungary and Europe. Orbán (2015: n.p.) In another media outlet, he reportedly stated, “Our borders are in danger, our way of life built on respect for the law, Hungary and the whole of Europe is in danger” (Goldet and Cantekin 2015: n.p.). Underlying the anti-immigrant rhetoric, the anti-Muslim sentiments, and the rising tide of nativism, of far-right nationalism, lies the insecurities and consequent fears and hatred. Films like Socrate Safo’s Amsterdam Diary (2005) and Kingsley Ogoro’s Osuofia in London (2003), popular Ghannywood and Nollywood classics, warned Africans against the dangers of immigration. In Amsterdam Diary, Abassa is convinced to leave Accra to accept a marriage proposal by a Ghanaian living in Amsterdam. She undergoes great hardship in the journey, having lost her mobile phone, her contacts, money and identity papers, and winds up condemned to prostitution and drugs. Eventually, she is able to return home, broken, having lost her sanity. In cinematic terms, she returns like a zombie, unable to speak or to move naturally. She returns, like War Witch, from her close encounter with the dead, with their world of evil and danger, having lost everything of value. Similarly, when Osuofia goes to London to recover the wealth he inherited on the death of his brother, he also encounters corruption and antipathy towards him as an African whose naiveté signals his “village” ignorance. His brother’s elegant, beautiful blond girlfriend/fiancée plays up to him when it is clear that he will be receiving the inheritance, and she returns with him as a second wife to Nigeria. There, in desperation, she tries to poison him, her plot is thwarted, and she repents when his open forgiveness makes her feel guilty. She learns about the goodness and generosity of Africa, gives up on her evil European greed, and returns home where she belongs. Again, a woman functions to carry the weight of the cultural conflict, either to be broken by it when inappropriately seeking wealth and fulfillment in Europe or learning to become a “normal woman”, a good mother, as in War Witch where Komona will cease being a rebel, cease being a warrior, and learn to birth her child and to raise it properly. There are moments in Bamako (Sissako 2006) and La Pirogue (Touré 2012) that convey the quintessential elements of this journey narrative, and are marked by the role of difference introduced by complicated gender portrayals. In both films, a young woman with short hair, dressed like a man, attempts to join the group of men who are braving the voyage. She succeeds

The migrant’s story in African cinema  67 far enough to reach the point of no return. Most dramatically in La Pirogue, the smuggler, Lansana, furious that Nafy has no way to pay for her voyage, threatens to throw her overboard. More conventionally in Frontières, Amma has to sell her body to the smugglers in order to be able to continue. In Bamako, the young nameless Ghanaian woman’s story is compressed into a single, death-bound moment after the group of migrants are thrown back into the desert by Moroccan authorities where most of them die. The young woman’s death is the one that is shown. The story of the young woman who dies in Bamako is recounted by Madou who describes how the migrants died in the desert. “There was a woman with us, a Ghanaian”, says Madou. “We didn’t know she was a woman. She was disguised as a boy”. Madou says she was exhausted, and nothing could be done for her. The fellow travellers in the desert were helpless. Madou repeats the words of the woman: “I can’t go on. There’s no sense in you waiting with me”. As with La Pirogue and Frontières, the figure of the young woman in Bamako is marked by her vulnerability. As Madou stares disconsolately, remembering, we see what he recalls: a bottle of water placed next to the Ghanaian woman lying, apparently immobile, on the desert floor. No longer cargo, she becomes another figure, that of death whose story transfixes and transforms the listeners. For Sissako, her dying becomes the occasion for a testimony intended to inculpate World Bank policy makers. All three of these accounts portray the presence of the woman as a disruptive factor. The dangerous journey is often depicted as one to be mostly undertaken by young men who are courageous or foolish enough to defy the odds. The woman who hides in the hold, only to be discovered, is the intruder, the outsider to the community of men. Without her we have jokes about men managing to cook on their own, with some men assuming the more feminine role. Without her the men can use the “facilities” without inhibition, can exhibit typical qualities of male behaviour, and can curse, belch and joke. They form a brotherhood, face the risks together, overcome their differences in language and religion or nationality, and find a way to bond. Without her the men have their story, to live out, tell, bring back home, tell to their wives, and recount to their children. It is like the football match viewed at the beginning of La Pirogue: all male, all male bodies, all male discourse, all male adventures. Then comes the stowaway, the grain of sand that disrupts the natural flow of the adventure. When Lansana first discovers they have an extra person on board he tells Baye to stop the motor, that they have “un intrus” [an intruder]. Nafy’s disguise as a man cannot be sustained for long. She was caught when Lansana did a headcount their first day on the high seas. When she is discovered on board, the day after their departure by sea, the viewers are as surprised as Lansana, the passeur. Her close relationship with her protector Kaba is only developed after they are on board the pirogue. The rivalry begins as Lansana discovers her and asks Nafy who aided her in

68  Kenneth W. Harrow stowing away. She answers, no one, and he accuses her of lying – a woman manifestly could not have managed on her own. When she denies this, he then accuses Kaba. Their rivalry commences from that point as each man courts her in the course of the voyage, despite her being married, like Amma in Frontières, and having two children. When Lansana tells her, you pay immediately or else we throw you in the water, she admits she has no money. When another asks what is to be done about the apportioning out of rations, Kaba says he will share with her. As the dispute accelerates, the boat’s captain Baye intervenes, asking if she can pay after they arrive; she says she has a connection and work awaiting her in Paris. Lansana begrudgingly accepts the arrangement, telling her she will cook for everyone else. The disrupted order is gingerly repaired. Nafy thus becomes a servant to the men in the “cargo” who have paid their fares and are customers. The “normal” heterosexual order is restored. The journey can go on.

The migrant’s arrival Although I have focussed on the journey, the struggles faced by migrants on their safe arrival continue. While in earlier years some of the migrants travelled without such dangers, and opted to return, as in Ainsi Meurent les Anges (Absa 2001) and Les Noms n’Habitent Nulle Part (Loreau 1994), many have remained in Europe, facing xenophobia and the rising fear-mongering of right-wing political parties increasingly focussed on the term “illegal” as designating not only actions but people. They were fragile cargo, assimilated with disposable wealth, and became imperilled people whose humanity was disparaged and who experienced the limits of dispossession – especially women whose stories required a more dramatic form. Ije: The Journey (Anyaene 2010) is a Nollywood film whose protagonist, Anya Opara, stays on in the United States, after having married Michael, only to learn the price to be paid for her mistake. She is the opposite of Sophie in Des Etoiles (Gaye 2013) whose loss of home and hopes for a mar ried life with Abdoulaye are replaced when she finds a new love in Italy, and learns the new language of adaptation and cultural insertion, without becoming a prostitute or going crazy, like Abassa in Amsterdam Diary (Safo 2005). Sophie does turn to the edges of criminality, precarity and loss, but prevails despite all the dangers, prejudices and obstacles. In short, she is not a victim of globalisation, and nothing supplants her determination. She is the obverse side of films that exist to provide warnings of the dangers of the journey, and the risks of ontological loss. Belonging no longer thwarts her; she assumes it. In that regard, unlike many recent films where the global economy is offered in terms of prison, enslavement or moral loss, she manages to turn its movement to her advantage. Ije: The Journey is quite different. Chioma and Anya are sisters. Anya, the older sister, goes to the United States where she marries Michael Michino, a wealthy white music producer, who runs in questionable circles involving at

The migrant’s story in African cinema  69 times musicians and gamblers, and who is willing to furnish his clients with Anya’s services. Her life of upper middle-class glamour represents success and corruption, as often seen in the dominant versions of journey narratives where success is associated with occult practices (e.g. Living in Bondage). Anya is an aspiring singer; her sister a banker. With success comes guilt, and Chioma, the chi or spirit side of the sisters, has to come to the States from Nigeria to rescue her sister when she has presumably been falsely accused of murdering her husband and his two musician clients. The two sisters can be said to represent two sides of this paradigm for the immigrant woman: one falls into the traps of the evil Michael Michino and the other becomes attracted to the good African American lawyer, Jalen Turner. The equivalence of the two sisters is established in the opening shots. In the first, they are children, playing in the field, with Anya the older teaching Chioma a game involving hopping and hand-clapping. Then we cut to the present where Anya gives her account to the police about that evening when she defended herself with Michael’s gun. “I am alive”, she proclaims, and her confession merges into the account given to Chioma, as Anya says, “Don’t tell Papa”. Immediately following this account, we see Chioma on a plane, told to raise her seat by the flight attendant: she is in need of being corrected, despite her cosmopolitan appearance and wealth enabling her to fly to America sans impediment. On her arrival she is pulled out of the line, her papers checked, while simultaneously, in multiple scenes with eyeline-match shots, her account is crosscut with Anya’s experience of being arrested and booked. Both sisters are photographed in simultaneous crosscutting, as if the events were parallel, suggesting that Chioma’s arriving legally in the United States and being treated as a criminal is the same as her sister’s being arrested for murder and being put at great risk. The truth would not save either of them from being implicated: the risk is fundamental to the situation experienced by the Nigerian migrant, even the wealthiest, coming to the States. Both are found to be innocent; both live another day so that they could safely return home; both are represented by the same African American lawyer who must quit working for a powerful white woman’s legal firm and become independent, so as to be able to adequately defend them.5 In short, before the return, the dangers of the voyage – of traveling when African to the global north, regardless of one’s status or wealth – have to be played out fully. And for this drama to be completed, two sides must be shown: that of the good sister and that of the bad sister; that of the one who is independent of the patriarchy and that of the one who fears Papa. Both sisters are at risk because what underlies the story is not morality, but the grounding of power in the global north and the west’s desire to protect its borders, to keep the “barbarians” out, to prevent their invasion, even when one is a “good sister”, even under the condition that the bad sister had to marry her master in order to come in. This is the meaning of “Americanah”:

70  Kenneth W. Harrow the racial politics of “America” now encompass all people of colour; pretending to be “Ethiopian” will no longer get a black person off the hook.6 When Chioma first hears Anya’s account, she is indignant: “Their tests are wrong. Your lawyer will prove it. This is America”. Anya then sends Chioma to her house to get the beads their mother had given Chioma as a child, the beads signifying their competition. Anya’s decision to send Chioma into the house puts her at danger, getting her mixed up in her own entanglement with the legal system. In fact, Anya’s own desperate situation is what first draws Chioma to the States to help her. At every point, as the foreigner, Chioma is put at risk. When entering the country, she is pulled out of the line by airport police. Her lodging at a seedy establishment is run by an apparently racist Asian woman whose son mugs her when he gets the cash for her rent. Eventually, she is accused of flushing her sister’s drugs down the toilet, and is arrested. The first reading of her experience is that she is experiencing the immigrant’s story, where “they” presumably cannot keep out of trouble, no matter the injustice of the charges or the best efforts they make to establish justice. The second reading is that they also cannot keep the homeland and diaspora selves separated, without risk to both. However, Chioma refuses to accept this predetermined script, and despite the impediments only sees the positive side: “Anya, you won’t go to prison for your husband’s impetuousness”. To this, Anya only groans. Chioma, however, insists on her belief in justice: “Do you believe me?” Then Chioma repeats herself speaking un-subtitled Igbo. The languages double, like the figure of the two sisters. Combining the two languages brings together the self and other, the two sides of the Opara sisters, now separated by bars and the guard. When a prison guard comes for Anya and calls her “Opara”, it is as if they were one. When Chioma goes to fetch Anya’s beads hidden in Michael’s house, she drops them and they break, as if she has undone their bond. A noise scares her and she calls out, “I’m with the police”. Looking outside, she sees a little girl who will provide the thread leading to her unfolding the true story. She picks up the beads, finds a locket with a picture of the Virgin, which the little girl identifies as belonging to the maid next door. Her chi is operating, Chi being her sister’s nickname for her, and, of course, her own spirit. In my reading of the sisters as two sides of the African immigrant woman, the chi would be the spirit for Opara (a name she affirms by showing the hotel manager her passport so as to distinguish her name from Oprah’s). At every point we are confronted with diaspora and indigenous self – split by the corrupt desire to make it big in the States, at the price of abandoning those remaining back at home. When Anya pleads her case to the jury, she begins by affirming this split in her person, that is, in her name: “in Nigeria I am known as Anya Opara; in America I am Anya Michino. I am both women”. Anya’s problem, like Chioma’s, is ontological. At every point the question of identity arises, and for the American is answered differently from the way the Nigerian understands it. For Anya’s first pragmatic American woman

The migrant’s story in African cinema  71 lawyer, Anya is “a case” involving what Chioma describes as “an African immigrant and a rich man’s wife”, and not only did Chioma flush her sister’s drugs down the drain, but Anya was apparently a user of drugs, a drinker and her husband’s sexual tool. When Chioma asks the woman lawyer if she believed Anya, the answer she receives is, “It doesn’t matter what I believe”. For the “chi”, however, the question of morality and spiritual values is all that matters, which is justified when the black lawyer Janel succeeds in mounting a defense that permits Anya to get out her story, be heard, and receive a just sentence. The film’s message is thus mixed. Nigeria is the beautiful but dangerous homeland where the culture of shame and a woman’s subservience to her husband is something the immigrant woman flees, as if a refugee from danger. “America” is the land of opportunity, but also of oppression to black people. It is the land of immorality, without a chi, where only the black outsider can restore justice. The ambiguities of both lands offer an ontological scape for the immigrant from the global south, including the Mexican Carolina whose testimony helped save Anya – Carolina herself being at risk as an “illegal”. It is, after all, “Americah” that presents the risks and the chances for a new life, which might work out, after all, in the end. The film’s music is melodramatic, with the final scene of the sisters running on the beach. The story ends before the final return home. For that, we have to turn to the last African film to be considered, the Nicole Amarteifio’s TV serial An African City.

The return home: end of the journey An African City (Amarteifio 2014) begins with Nana Yaa returning to Ghana. As she passes customs entering the country, the official mistakes her for an obroni, and she corrects him. After all, she says, look at my name on the passport. Her credentials are in order; she is a Ghanaian – but not quite. He was correct in figuring her for a foreigner. After all, we learn, she had left for New York when she was seven, and now is returning to get “big government contracts”, or for love, as we learn at the end of the episode. Episode 1 of this TV series, titled “The Return”, is filled almost entirely with Nana Yaa’s table conversation with her female friends, who are, like her, modern Afropolitans – suave, beautiful, sophisticated, well-turned out, like the stars in Sex and the City (Star 1998). They are there to see and be seen. Their entire dinner conversation could be viewed as a stream of consciousness intended to exhibit virtually all the conventional, now stereotypical, clichés about what the modern African jetsetter thinks and says on returning home; that is, a demonstration of the encounter among members of the wealthy class as both outsiders and insiders – indeed, as obroni personas. The flow of their exchanges need not be refined into conversation between different characters, although they are indeed presented as separate individuals: the naïve USAID Nigerian, the wealthy businesswoman who ships

72  Kenneth W. Harrow containers to Minnesota, and the divorcee lawyer. What matters more for us is the mise en scène: how the melodramatic dialogue is presented, alongside the expensive ambience of the restaurant, and the nighttime urban glints of African modernity. In short, the genre of globalisation is presented here as quintessential globality. Pieces of the dialogue that present this can be seen here: “Welcome home, the African continent finally has you back”. “It’s nice to be home, but scary. I don’t know how I am going to survive without Starbucks coffee for the rest of my life”. “The water outages, same as Sierra Leone, Kenya”. “The ‘help’, the house help stealing my bras”. “Why do you get returnees to bring you Pepto Bismal of all things?” “I don’t buy medication here, I don’t trust it. It’s all fake crap from China, from India”. The first episode in this polished romcom calls for an urban audience to find here its vision of the successful modern African woman. It concludes with tears, but we know what will follow because it has already crossed the threshold that had originally been set up by Third Cinema’s revolutionary theorists to bar the African filmmaker from indulging in sentimental, private, emotional indulgences. The poster of Nkrumah in Nana Yaa’s bedroom, which we glimpse on her return home, is now cast in postmodern vein, like a Warhol painting of Marilyn Monroe, marked by style, not intellectual or political substance. To deny this film because it lacks the seriousness of “African cinema” would be to be like the cineaste E.T. in Bekolo’s Aristotle’s Plot (1996) who embraced the dead history of the fathers of African cinema, mocked by the tsotsis. The age of container ships, of consumer capitalism, neoliberalism, the Global and its Afropolitan women marks the end of the journey out and back. Starting with death on the high waters, it concludes with the death of a cinema of engagement. If the outbound journey was represented en gros by the daring of young men, it has to conclude with the dating, the heartbreak, the loves and tears of the women. The trick is to see these two chapters of the journey as one, as episodes in one series whose name “The African City” is only a cover for the larger issues of African globalisation, commerce, and the feminine that are now driving the politics of representation.

Conclusion This is the African migrant woman’s story for today: its narrative arc conforms to the contours of its neoliberal context, and if it is not merely a reflection or representation of the times, its broad lines tell us about the urgent need to attend to how women’s migrancy now has forced us to reconstruct the notions of African cinema that had long been devoted to representing the man’s version. Perhaps it can best be summed up in this piece of table

The migrant’s story in African cinema  73 conversation from “The African City” that resituates the perspective from which the story is now to be told: “You’ll be fine. And then there are the men. Yes, seriously, dark and chocolatey, yum”.

Notes 1 The full version of this crucial essay is worked out in their introductory chapter “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming” in their volume Millenial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). 2 “Moolaadé est un vieux mot pulaar [peul] mais dont l’équivalent existe aussi en mandingue et en wolof. Il exprime la notion de droit d’asile. Le Moolaadé est la protection accordée à quelqu’un en fuite” [http://www.allocine.fr/film/ fichefilm-56868/secrets-tournage/]. 3 Same story in Burkina Faso as well, with Thomas Sankara. 4 In the opening scenes of Les Saignantes Mevoungou is associated with the female spiritual presence. In Cameroonian Beti practice, it is a cult of mature women whose evocation of the powers of “evu” are centred in the clitoris and the clitoral force of Mevoungou is translated into the actions and comportment of two sexy young women (Harrow 2008). 5 Anya, charged with murder, is given a sentence for involuntary manslaughter, the judge effectively accepting the plea that she shot in self-defense. 6 A common practice, or trope of such practice, in the early 20th century for A frican Americans travelling in the American South.

References Absa, Moussa Sene. 2001. Ainsi Meurent les Anges. Senegal: MSA Productions. Adesokan, Akin. 2011. Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2014. Americanah. New York: Anchor Books. Aduaka, Newton. 2007. Ezra. Nigeria and Austria: California Newsreel. Afolayan, Kunle. 2009. The Figurine. Nigeria: Golden Effects. Allocine. 2005. Mooladé. Available at http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_ gen_cfilm=56868.html. Accessed: 30 November 2019. Amarteifio, Nicole. 2014. An African City. Ghana: Naa Amerley Productions. Anyaene, Chineze. 2010. Ije: The Journey. Nigeria: Xandria Productions. Bekolo, Jean-Pierre. 1996. Aristotle’s Plot. Cameroon and Zimbabwe: Jean Pierre Bekolo. ——— 2009. Les Saignantes. Cameroon: Quartier Mozart Films. Bugul, Ken. 1984. Le Baobab Fou. Dakar: Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines. Cissé, Souleymane. 1982. Finye. Mali: Souleymane Cissé. Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 2001. Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Conrad, Joseph. 2018 [1902]. Heart of Darkness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dikongué-Pipa, Jean-Pierre. 1975. Muna Moto. Cameroon: Cameroun Spectacles. Diome, Fatou. 2006. The Belly of the Atlantic. London: Serpent’s Tail. Diop, Djibril. 1973. Touki Bouki. Senegal: Cinegrit. ——— 1992. Hyènes. Senegal: California Newsreel.

74  Kenneth W. Harrow Djadjam, Moustéfa. 2001. Frontières. Algeria: Centre National du Cinéma et de L’Image Animée. Duparc, Henri. 1989. Bal Poussière. Côte d’Ivoire: Focale 13. Ecaré, Désiré. 1985. Faces of Women. Ivory Coast: Désiré Ecaré. Frears, Stephen. 2002. Dirty Pretty Things. United Kingdom: BBC Films. Fukunaga, Cari Joji. 2015. Beasts of No Nation. Unites States: Red Crown Productions. Gaye, Dyana. 2013. Des Etoiles. Senegal: Andolfi. Geschiere, Peter. 2009. The Perils of Belonging. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldet, Antoine and Laura Cantekin. 2015. Hungary Defends Border Fences Blocking Migrants. France24, 30 September 2015. Available at https://www.france24. com/en/20150930-hungary-defends-border-fences-blocking-migrants. Accessed: 30 November 2019. Harrow, Kenneth. 2008. A Question of Beginnings. Canadian Journal of African Studies 42(2): 467–477. Haynes, Jonathan. 2016. Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kaboré, Gaston. 1982. Wend Kuuni. Burkina Faso: California Newsreel. Kelani, Tunde. 2006. Abeni. Nigeria and Benin: Dove Media. Lobato, Ramon. 2012. Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution. London: Bloomsbury. Loreau, Dominique. 1994. Les Noms n’Habitent Nulle Part. Belgium: Centre de l’Audiovisuel à Bruxelles. Nguyen, Kim. 2012. War Witch. Canada: Métropole Films. Ogoro, Kingsley. 2003. Osuofia in London. Nigeria: Kingsley Ogoro Production. Orbán, Viktor. 2015. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Address to Parliament before the Start of Daily Business. Website of the Hungarian Government, 22 September 2015. Available at https://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/ the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-minister-viktor-orban-s-address-toparliament-before-the-start-of-daily-business. Accessed: 30 November 2019. Rapu, Chris Obi. 1992. Living in Bondage. Nigeria: Kenneth Nnebue. Safo, Socrate. 2005. Amsterdam Diary. Ghana: Movie Africa Productions. Sauvaire, Jean-Stéphane. 2008. Johnny Mad Dog. France: MNP Entréprise. Sembène, Ousmane. 1965. Vehi Ciosane. Paris: Présence Africaine. ——— 1977. Ceddo. Senegal: Filmi Domireew. ——— 2000. Faat Kine. Senegal: Filmi Domireew. ——— 2004. Moolaadé. Burkina Faso: Filmi Domireew. Sissako, Abderrahmane. 2006. Bamako. Mali: Archipel 33. Sissoko, Cheick Oumar. 1989. Finzan. Mali: Kora Films. Star, Darren. 1998. Sex and the City. USA: HBO. Teno, Jean-Marie. 1992. Afrique, je te Plumerai. Cameroon: Raphia Films Production. Touré, Moussa. 2012. La Pirogue. Senegal: Les Chauves-Souris. Zwick, Edward. 2006. Blood Diamonds. USA: Bedford Falls Production.

Part II

Sexualities, cultures and exclusions

5

“Putting her in her place!” Gender and sexual violence in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good will Come and Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives Asante Lucy Mtenje

Introduction It is now common knowledge that the process of socialisation is mostly implicated in the formation of gendered identities whereby male hegemony is emphasised and lauded. Socialisation is understood in this chapter as “the process by which society’s values and norms, including those pertaining to gender [and the imagining and expressing of sexuality], are taught and learned” (Renzetti and Curran 1999: 61). Gender, for example, is co-i mplicated in a range of socialised norms. It is through socialisation that the infant gradually becomes a self-aware, knowledgeable being, embodied in the ways of the culture in which she or he was born. Socialisation is therefore a critical means by which societies formulate, preserve and, indeed, change their cultures and identities. It is also through socialisation that girls and boys are taught about the kind of behaviours that are appropriate for females and males. The body, as Pumla Dineo Gqola (2005: 3) posits, is centrally located in “many of the lessons girl and boy children imbibe about aesthetics, value and being-in-the-world”. How women and girls carry their bodies, how they dress, how they conduct themselves sexually – all become markers that determine their conformity (or not) to modes of respectability and received ideas of “proper” femaleness. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie argues in her seminal talk “We should all be Feminists”, girls are taught to associate their bodies with shame: “Close your legs. We make them feel as though by being born female, they are already guilty of something. And so girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. Who silence themselves” (Adichie 2014: 14). These restrictions that are placed on female bodies and are enforced by institutions such as family, culture, religion and schools are further extended to body comportment and movement “which is learned as the girl comes to understand that she is a girl” (Young 1980: 153). By contrast, through the same institutions, boys are taught ownership to presence in public space and entitlement to female bodies. Such varieties of co-related, controlling institutions aim to reinforce gender hierarchies

78  Asante Lucy Mtenje and to inculcate socially desired appropriate gendered behaviours, which, in practice, disadvantage female bodies and sexualities. However, since certain behaviours performed by females are not usually considered respectable, this potentially positions such behaviours as purposefully transgressive for women, a locus of resistance to hegemonic codes. The implication is that some forms of supposedly undesirable femaleness may be wilfully premised on denigrated notions of unrespectability in order to subvert categories of approved femaleness and the associated normative behaviours. Patriarchal sexual discourses often times impose “hegemonic notions of sexual behaviour and heterosexist expectations”, while simultaneously “reinforcing the deeply embedded cultural taboos and claims that define sexual pleasure and freedom as ‘dangerous’ and ‘irresponsible’” (McFadden 2003: 52). As Patricia McFadden (2003: 52) argues, “a fundamental premise of patriarchal power and impunity is the denial and suppression of women’s naming and controlling their bodies for their own joy and nurturing”. Patriarchal societies raise men and women to believe that this is the function of women’s bodies: to please men sexually and symbolically (Gqola 2005: 8). In a similar vein, Melissa Steyn and Mikki van Zyl (2009: 4) argue that “women’s sexual autonomy is constrained by discourses that ‘fix’ them in terms of a natural disposition towards emotion – romance, nurturing and maternity, as closer to nature and nurture”. Those women that challenge these notions by embodying some forms of sexual freedom and making independent sexual choices are perceived as transgressing cultural and social boundaries and therefore have to be subjected to some punitive measures through physical or psychological violence, such as rape, in order to put them back in their place. In this chapter, I am interested in representations of forms of violence inflicted on female bodies in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2006) and Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2010). I argue that the prevalence of rape and other forms of sexual violence in patriarchal societies as portrayed in the two novels, which feature such violations on women’s bodies and integrity, evinces the close link between sexuality and social power configurations whereby male hegemony in its dominance confers power and a right to access women’s bodies even without their consent, and often with impunity for the violator. My analysis is framed within Gqola’s argument that “rape is the communication of patriarchal power, reigning in, enforcing submission and punishing defiance” (Gqola 2015: 21). Rape and other forms of sexual violence are extreme acts of “aggression and of power, always gendered and enacted against the feminine”, even though “the feminine may not always be embodied in a woman’s body” since sometimes sexual violence maybe “enacted against a child of any gender, a man who is considered inappropriately masculine and any gender nonconforming people” (Gqola 2015: 21). My textual examples demonstrate that “rape is an exercise of patriarchal violent power against those who are safe to violate” (Gqola 2015: 14), in this case, mostly women and girls.

Gender and sexual violence in fiction  79

Sexuality and respectability in Everything Good will Come Spanning the turbulent years of 1971 to 1995 in Nigeria, a context characterised by civil war and despotic military regimes, Atta’s novel tells the story of two girls, Enitan Taiwo and Sheri Bakare, who forge a life-long friendship in spite of the family prohibitions (and physical distance) which might impede their friendship. The novel, which Atta herself describes as a story “about a girl/woman at odds with patriarchy” and “reads like an angry rant in part” (Women Writers’ Round Table 2008: 112), is also a story of female growth, of increasing awareness of the patriarchal restrictions which govern all aspects of women’s lives. Here, Atta parallels “the woman’s battle at home against the men in her family who rule her” with the fight against military dictatorial rule (Sy 2008: 102). As Enitan surmises at one point in the novel, “even if the army goes, we still have our men to answer to” (196). The women in Atta’s novel encounter oppression on two fronts: domestic patriarchy in the home and family, and the patriarchal repressions of the state. As Marilize Pretorius (2013: 139) argues, in Everything Good “the dictatorship of men in the home thus becomes an allegory for the dictatorship of a group of elites, predominantly male, in the country as a whole”. However, both Enitan and Sheri undertake subversive gender actions: one manipulates the traditional patriarchal system from within, and the other attempts to refuse it via rebellious defiance of sexual norms. Ayo Kehinde and Joy Mbipom (2011: 69) argue that “in demythologising and deconstructing the stifling structures in a male-oriented society, Atta instructs women on the way out of retrograde patriarchal domination through the practical actions of gender-assertive Enitan, Sheri”, and other bold women in the novel. Atta’s narrative thus “constructs realities that recreate a formidable women’s world” (Kehinde and Mbipom 2011: 69). The narrative depicts this challenging behaviour in the context of a continued oppression against women via “certain socio-cultural and economic factors that collude” to secure “their victimisation in post-independence Nigeria, which is defined by multiple drudgery” (Kehinde and Mbipom 2011: 69). As Rita Nnodim (2008: 328) explains, Everything Good offers “viable spaces from which women can and do formulate empowering identities”. Among these empowering identities are expressions of sexual identity among women. In Everything Good, Sheri Bakare’s mere presence in Enitan’s family house, her dressing, her behaviour and her freedom to speak, completely unsettles Enitan’s sensibilities of what it means to be a good girl. Enitan’s mother, Arinola, deploys her socialising techniques to replicate the habits and lineations of female respectability by ingraining “proper” notions of behaviour and (non)sexual conduct in her daughter. The arrival of Sheri in Enitan’s life unsettles all this. Sheri is the biracial daughter of the polygamous family of Chief Bakare who lives next door to the Taiwos. On the first day Sheri and Enitan meet, Sheri is wearing “a pink skirt and her white top ended just above her navel. With her short afro, her face looked like a

80  Asante Lucy Mtenje sunflower. I noticed she wore pink lipstick” (14). Sheri’s bold dress style, which casually snubs respectable female gender codes, prompts the obedient Enitan to question the responsibility of the girl’s parents: “Didn’t anyone tell her she couldn’t wear high heels? Lipstick? Any of that?” (16). Enitan concludes that Sheri has had no “proper home training” (16), and assumes this is because she comes from a Muslim polygamous family, an arrangement contrary to Enitan’s own nuclear, Christian family. For the child, educated into monogamy as the only proper marital relation, polygamy implies a deviation from the norms of sexual morality which can therefore never produce a respectable, morally upright child, even though such marriages may be customary and shaped by relations she cannot understand. As Kehinde and Mbipom (2011: 68) note, Enitan’s meeting with Sheri is of “great significance, as it marks her transition to an entirely new stage of life”. It is from Sheri that Enitan learns about different aspects of her sexuality, and this sets her on a path of growth and discovery. It is from the sexually precocious Sheri that Enitan learns about her body and about sex. The complex confluence of pragmatic clear-sightedness and female longing for possibilities which characterise Sheri’s young life corroborates Harry Olufunwa’s description of Sheri as “fearless, garrulous and supremely self-confident” (Olufunwa 2015: 10). Sheri “proffers a set of alternative attitudes and visions of the world that tantalises the more reticent Enitan” (Olufunwa 2015: 10), and coaxes her to explore aspects of her sexuality that have been clothed in taboo. Because of her mother’s policing of who she can talk to and what she can read, the naïve Enitan is ignorant about even the physical lineaments of sexual intercourse. Her knowledge is limited to “blurred images of a man lying on top of a woman” (24) and because of this she is unable to decipher the relationship between Bisi, their “house girl” and Akanni, the Bakare’s gardener. She thinks Akanni is simply visiting Bisi, until Sheri enlightens her. Using casual popular phrasing, Sheri tells Enitan that “he is doing her” (32). She then more graphically elaborates: “Sex. Banana into tomato. Don’t you know about it?” (32). Sheri’s remarks scandalise Enitan’s “good girl” sensibilities. Enitan covers her mouth when Sheri first talks about sex, underscoring sex as a secret, even unsayable issue, one not to be spoken about, especially by children. The action of covering her mouth and subsequently being left open-mouthed – speechless – demonstrates Enitan’s shock at Sheri’s scandalous revelation and emphasises her perception of Sheri’s actions as transgressive. This incident in the novel clearly marks the distinction between the girls’ respective socialisation. Enitan’s mother has instilled in her daughter the association of shame and secrecy with any evidence of sex, never mind actual sex. Sheri, though, tells Enitan that “my grandma told me” (32) about sex. Alhaja’s educative role with regard to issues about sex, in contrast to Arinola’s, is more accommodating to a growing girl’s nascent sexuality, acknowledging the potentials of her sexuality and the need for her to know about human sexuality.

Gender and sexual violence in fiction  81 As young adults, the trajectories of Enitan and Sheri’s lives continue to take different directions in terms of their social interactions with the opposite sex as well as their self-perception. For example, Enitan’s lack of female voluptuousness excludes her from local norms of attractiveness; her skinny body is even demeaned for signifying the inappropriate, alien standards of Western female beauty. On the other hand, Sheri is described as “the Nigerian man’s ideal: pretty, shapely, yellow to boot, with some regard for a woman’s station” (105). Despite Sheri’s strengths, though, these physical-cultural features leave her vulnerable to male objectification. Let me discuss this a little, given that I have previously emphasised Sheri’s transgressive attitude to received notions of female sexuality. In Atta’s fiction, different aesthetic values are deliberately attributed to Sheri’s and Enitan’s bodies. Ventriloquising societal expectations of female bodies and sexuality with regard to dressing and conduct, Enitan says of the 14-year-old Sheri: “Sheri was no longer a yellow banana. She could easily win any of the beauty contests in my school, but her demeanor needed to be toned down. She was gragra. Girls who won were demure” (57). In other words, Sheri’s beauty vis-à-vis her dressing and her public conduct do not neatly coincide with the demure behaviour that is socially praised and rewarded in beautiful women. Sheri’s position with regard to the place of women is an ambiguous one. On the one hand, she has “some regard for women’s station”; on the other, her indecorous attitude and behaviour thwart the respectable limits that are placed on women’s bodies. However, Sheri’s taking charge of her sexuality exposes her to misogyny, since her frank agency can be mistaken as an expressly erotic invitation to men. Her presence at the beach picnic and her close interaction with the boys runs the risk of positioning her as loose, a girl who must be taught her proper place en route to becoming an obedient woman. In this respect, I also notice something of Sheri’s vulnerability. Consider Enitan’s remark that “Sheri already had a boyfriend in school. They had kissed before and it was like chewing gum, but she wasn’t serious because he wasn’t” (55). Again, as in the earlier reference to tomatoes and bananas, the analogy between gum chewing and kissing marks the relative youthful inexperience, sexually, not only of Enitan but also of Sheri, who has told her friend what kissing is like. Also, Enitan’s observation implies that some of Sheri’s apparent nonchalance towards sexuality is not a mark of any female sophistication and experience, but is shaped by the casualness with which boys, as men in the making, habitually treat potentially intimate relationships. Sheri performs her relationship with her boyfriend as uninhibited, non-possessive and non-committal, because the boy has himself been taught to prefer independence and sovereignty as his male right. Sheri’s vulnerability as a girl is visibly conveyed through her sexual violation as she is raped by the neighbourhood boys. The narrative states, “Sheri was lying on the seat. Her knees were spread apart. The boy in the cap was pinning her arms down. The portly boy was on top of her. His hands were clamped over her mouth” (62). The author’s criticism of the violence is

82  Asante Lucy Mtenje unmistakable. It is a violence executed on Sheri’s body but not condemned by the society as her actions prior to the rape are interpreted as inviting. Enitan and Sheri are close female friends, yet Enitan’s private thoughts aptly convey the normative public indictment of Sheri: Yes. I blamed her. If she hadn’t smoked hemp, it would never have happened. If she hadn’t stayed as long as she did at the party it certainly would have never happened. Bad girls got raped. We all knew! Loose girls, forward girls, raw, advanced girls. Laughing with boys, following them around, thinking she was one of them. […] It was her fault. (65) Echoing Adichie’s observation of how some “Nigerians have been raised to think of women as inherently guilty” (Adichie 2014: 14), Enitan blames Sheri for not embodying appropriate female behaviour, thereby inviting the assault. As a result (so the perverse logic would have it) of her own range of socially transgressive behaviours – drug use, being out too late in a potentially dangerous context, being bold, being unrefined, being convivial, being insufficiently feminine, and overly matey – she provoked the boys to rape her. Enitan seems to find Sheri responsible simply in the very fact of her being, a being in the world which does not conform to female codes. This echoes patriarchal society’s views which place the blame of sexual violence on women’s actions, dress and interactions, where deviations from established standards of propriety for women are believed causally to justify the force that men might subsequently perpetrate on women’s bodies. These views are premised on the assumptions that women’s self-assertion, manifested in their gestures and body movements, as well as “women’s sartorial agency” are always directed at men and “held to be an invitation to an erotic encounter that might often lead to unwanted consequences” (Bakare-Yusuf 2011: 117). The underlying assumption is that female bodies should be “disciplined and protected from any potential masculine sexual terror that acts under provocation” (Bakare-Yusuf 2011: 117). Policing female bodily agency and investing dress choices with sexual meaning “appears to be a matter of logic that regulation should follow in order to protect women from the inevitable masculine desire and terror that is provoked by exposed flesh” (Bakare-Yusuf 2012: n.p.). Bakare-Yusuf (2012: n.p.) explains that such a position “tacitly reaffirms the normative power of heterosexuality as the only legally, theologically and culturally legitimate form of sexuality”, and yet the image of heterosexual desire presented within this discourse is “one of potential threat and abusive power relations, which women must both subscribe to and be protected from”. Thus, Enitan’s statement underscores the gender differentials that are placed on sexual freedoms and performances. As a girl, Sheri should not have stayed out as long as she did, and she should not have exercised the same freedom of mobility that is accorded to the boys. In this framework, the rape is an act of disciplining and punishing her

Gender and sexual violence in fiction  83 transgressions; an ideological as well as physical technique for putting her in her proper place as a girl who is becoming a woman. And Enitan agrees. However, the instability of the collective pronoun “we” in the expression “We all knew!” (69) also hints at the fear which shapes Enitan’s judgemental response: is “we” a gender-undifferentiated social collective? Does it refer to the group of all women whose bodily identity names them female and “thus” puts them at potential risk, or does it refer especially to the young female-gendered cohort of schoolgirls, in whose circles Sheri and Enitan move, and whose behaviour is defined in relation to that of the boys? The small, unsettling contingencies associated with this pronoun prise open a space of narrative questioning, enabling a variety of other possible responses to the rape of Sheri. Sheri falls pregnant from the rape. At around the same time, another military coup occurs, and although Enitan at this stage blames Sheri for the rape, she, nevertheless, sees parallels between the rape and the violence enacted by the military on civilians: “As if the picnic hadn’t done enough damage that summer … there was a military coup” (69). She concludes resignedly that “our world was uniformly terrible” (69). In the above ellipses, I deliberately omitted Enitan’s other remark – “as if the rains hadn’t added to our misery”. This statement seems a mere gripe, and sits oddly with the seriousness of the rape, and the coup, implying Enitan’s continued, youthful inability to distinguish degrees of seriousness. That said, we might counter that Enitan’s indiscriminate jumbling together of the rape, the weather, and the coup attests both to the taken-for-grantedness of intersecting forms of violence, social and climatic, and also to the naturalising power of ideological systems in which individuals feel unable to enact agency. News of Sheri’s rape is only made public when she is hospitalised after a failed abortion, which she attempted herself using a metal coat hanger. The botched abortion – which means a continued pregnancy – compounds the damage to the reputation that Sheri experiences after the rape. Sheri names Enitan as a witness in the rape, and Enitan’s parents are angry that their daughter’s name and image are tainted by association. Arinola is particularly livid about this: “‘Your friend is pregnant,’ my mother said. ‘She stuck a hanger up herself and nearly killed herself. Now she’s telling everyone she was raped. Telling everyone my daughter was involved in this. She patted her chest” (68). The idea that Enitan is being implicated in such disreputable events infuriates Arinola (as well as Sunny), not only because it slurs her daughter’s good girl image but also because it reflects badly on her mothering skills, publicly seeming to disavow her maternal efforts to (re) produce a respectable daughter. Arinola’s solution is to subject Enitan to a cleansing ritual at her church. The Taiwos’ reactions to the news of Sheri’s rape, as well as the wider community’s reactions, reinforce the habituated practice of blaming the female victim for the violence inflicted on her body, and indeed of assuming that no rape happened, merely careless consensual sex for which the girl should be held responsible. In this case, because of

84  Asante Lucy Mtenje her perceived licentious femininity, Sheri is placed in the category of people who are “impossible to rape” (Gqola 2015: 31). Her story of being raped is not credible as she is labelled as sexually deviant because of forwardness and bodily comportment, which implies a readiness for sex and therefore an inability to say no to sex. She is impossible to rape because she seems always willing to have sex (Gqola 2015: 31). In her article, “Too Ashamed to Report: Deconstructing the Shame of Sexual Victimisation”, Karen Weiss (2010: 287) argues that “cultural narratives regarding gender, sexuality, and sexual crimes themselves contribute to victims’ own definitions of their situations as shameful”. She adds, “victims who are ashamed or anticipate disapproval from others will be hesitant to disclose sexual victimisation and especially reluctant to report their incidents to the police” (Weiss 2010: 287). In line with this thought, Sheri fails to report the rape to the police or even to her family. Neither does she discuss it with Enitan. They only speak of the rape years later, when they are women in their twenties. Instead, thrown back on her own already suffering body by social mores which further wound her via responses that encompass condemnation, disapproval and lack of support, she attempts to terminate the pregnancy on her own. In effect, the rape is protected by a series of layered secrecies, which unreasonably turn the victim into a form of complicit “perpetrator” in her own shame. She cannot reveal what has so evidently happened to her, despite there being witnesses, either because the social context does not construe the sexual encounter as rape, or because the rape is not construed in terms which hold the males responsible. Jane Bennet (cited in Gqola 2015) explains that women’s stories of having been raped are deemed credible or doubtful depending on the relationship between plausibility and credibility. She argues that when “a rape closely resembles what the hearer expects a rape to look like, then the survivor’s tale is plausible” (quoted in Gqola 2015: 29). In this case, Sheri is dismissed because she is “impossible” to rape. The rape becomes her painful female secret, aggregated by the attempted abortion, and then the inescapably female-embodied public visibility of pregnancy, which she cannot conceal. In effect, Sheri is obliged to grow further into the damaged, iconic representative of sexual promiscuity. In defining the notion of shame as an imbued response of rape, Weiss (2010: 288) argues, [A] sociological understanding of shame suggests that individuals define and respond to situations according to both the reflected appraisals received from particular audiences during social interaction and from the anticipated or imagined reactions from society in general. Therefore, individuals can experience shame without ever having received negative feedback but simply from the assumption that if others were to know what happened, they would react with condemnation, disapproval, or disdain.

Gender and sexual violence in fiction  85 The shame of Sheri’s rape and attempted abortion cause the Bakare family to move away to another neighbourhood, hoping to put a spatial and emotional distance between their daughter, the tainted friendship, the place where the rape happened, and the projected negative associations on their local reputation as a family. As Weiss (2010: 289) notes, the pervasive belief in many patriarchal cultures is “that women’s modesty and purity is a direct reflection of the family’s reputation and honor”. In moving away, therefore, the Bakare family attempts to rescue its reputation from the shame and dishonour that their daughter’s supposed impurity and immodesty has plunged them.

“Pounding” and sexual violence in The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives Set primarily in 2001, The Secret Lives of Baba’s Wives is a story about a modern-day Nigerian polygamous family. Ishola Alao, also known as Baba Segi, is a boisterous, vain and illiterate patriarch with four wives: in order of seniority, Iya Segi, Iya Tope, Iya Femi and Bolanle. Shoneyin cannily constructs her cast of female characters not only to produce the necessary narrative tension which often hooks a reader but also to introduce into established cultural norms a perplexing, contrary element which cannot easily be reconciled with arguments for or against polygyny. She unsettles her readers, whatever the views of polygyny they might bring to their reading of the novel. The first three wives, for example, are illiterate women, and they enter into the marriage because of their constrained financial and social circumstances. It is not quite by force, and yet their life situations seem to oblige them into marrying Baba Segi (or a man very like him). In comparison Bolanle, the youngest wife, is a university graduate. To the dismay of her mother, she chooses to marry Baba Segi. However, this is because of her traumatic secret: she was “ruined, damaged, destroyed” (149–150) after being raped at the age of 15 years by a stranger who had given her a lift from the bus stop, and as a consequence she felt that no man could really want her. At 15, she is “the daughter every parent wanted” (110). She is a well behaved and obedient girl, head girl of her secondary school and head of her school’s literary and debating society. On the day that she is raped, “it rained so hard that birds’ nests fell from the trees” (110). She is stranded in the rain as buses are unwilling to pass through that road. When a strange “Mercedes screeched to a halt, reversed and parked about a yard away” (111) and she sees an unfamiliar face as the driver, she is hesitant to get into the car for “[her] mother had warned [her] about kidnappers” (111). She has to be vigilant in order to protect herself from men who kidnap and rape innocent young girls like her. Girls grow up knowing that they may experience some form of gender violence in their lifetime and one of these forms of violence is rape. Here, Gqola’s concept of the “female fear factory” comes to mind (Gqola 2015: 78). The female fear factory is “spectacular in its

86  Asante Lucy Mtenje reliance on visible, audible and other recognisable cues to transmit fear and to control” (Gqola 2015: 78). Moreover, “the female fear factory constantly reminds women that they are not safe and that their bodies are not entirely theirs” (Gqola 2015: 79). The combined visible presence of the strange man and the car in an isolated environment incites fear and discomfort in Bolanle, for she “took two steps back” (111) in order to create a distance from her subject of fear. In this context, Bolanle’s isolation from her friends and other potential passengers on the empty road leaves her vulnerable to male violence. The car, driven by a male stranger, prompts her to recall her mother’s warning to be vigilant, a warning which is constantly reiterated to remind her of her vulnerability as a girl child. As Jessica Murray (2011: 38) argues, “rape and the fear of rape act as a social control mechanism that controls even the most mundane daily choices of women”. Lemanski (2004) notes that one way women allay these fears is by modifying their daily lives through the restriction of their spatial movements. Marion Iris Young (1980: 154) further argues that an essential part of the situation of being a woman is that of living the ever-present possibility that one will be gazed upon as a body, as shape and flesh that presents itself as a potential object of another subject’s intentions and manipulations, rather than as a living manifestation of action and intention. 154 As a result, women are constantly anxious about positioning their bodies in a way as not to invite objectification. As a defence mechanism, Bolanle ignores the stranger when he asks her where she is going. Through her body language by “taking another step back” (111) and by diverting her gaze “in the direction of the passing cars” (111), hoping that “maybe he’d drive on if I looked away” (111), she communicates her disinterest in talking to him as well as in joining him in his car. The stranger, in his male entitlement, deliberately chooses to ignore her non-verbal communication. He offers to give her a lift to the next junction where there were lots of taxis. Bolanle accepts the offer. There are several factors that mediate Bolanle’s decision to get into the car with the man. She re-assesses her fears of violence because of the man’s appearance and performance of masculinity. By looking at the expensive car in “Awolowo Road … a place where rich, decent people lived” (111) and his handsome face, perfectly filed nails, fresh cologne and clean jeans, she decides that “he looked respectable, not like the thugs [her] mother had described” (111). Besides, he does not have a brash personality but rather a soft, gentle voice. For Bolanle, the threat of violence is embodied in particular masculine bodies, those that are at the margins of society, underprivileged and not “respectable”, handsome, rich men. Bolanle’s assessment, which further illustrates the concept of the female fear factory, reminds

Gender and sexual violence in fiction  87 one of the myths that “rapists come from a certain background, race, class location or religion” (Gqola 2015: 4). The man “Thomas” plays along to this stereotype and myth that men like him are not capable of any violence. For example, when he takes a different turn from the one he had promised Bolanle, he claims that he wants to go and quickly make a phone call to his sister who is sick in the United States, obviously a ploy which is intended to portray a compassionate version of himself apart from impressing on her that he actually does come from a privileged background since his family can afford to travel and stay oversees. However, his reactions when Bolanle complains against this move betray his chivalrous persona. He sniggers, revealing a patronising attitude towards her when he accuses her of “sounding like a baby” (112) because she mentions her mother “in every sentence” (112). Furthermore, he objectifies her and sexualises her with his gaze by looking at her breasts to dispute her claim that she is fifteen but also to prove his point that she is not a baby since her physical attributes are not like that of a baby. He tricks her into getting into his house and while she is admiring the luxury of the home which she had never seen before he creeps up behind her: ‘So, how about a little fun before you go?’ He had taken his shirt off … I covered my eyes. I perceived something uncompromising in his tone. […] ‘Come on, don’t waste time. Isn’t this what you came for? You think I don’t know your type? You just came to fuck. Didn’t you? You want to be fucked!’ 114 For Thomas, a woman standing alone is an open invitation for male attention and sexual advances. Even more so, accepting the lift and entering his house is an unspoken code of complicity which further grants him open access to her body. In other words, she asked for sex. In his perverted mind, he reduces her to a stereotype, a licentious woman who meets well-to-do men on the streets and goes to their houses for sexual escapades, so why is she denying him what he is entitled to? Even his language changes to that of violence and aggression when he accuses her of wanting “to be fucked” (114). “You … came to fuck” (114) implies some degree of agency on Bolanle’s part, some kind of mutual agreement which in a way then lessens the power that he supposedly has on her. “To be fucked” by him consequently puts him in the position of power, the power and ability to coerce her into satisfying his perverse desires, whether she consents to it or not. “To fuck” her then emphasises his entitlement to her body, his ownership of and his power over her body, thereby putting her in her rightful subordinate place. To limit her mobility and to prevent her from escaping, he incapacitates her by hitting her. When she resists him by “clamp[ing] her legs and plead[ing] for him to stop” (115), he is annoyed and places a pillow in her face to silence her protests and to weaken her. He even threatens her with death if she does not comply: “If you don’t want to die,

88  Asante Lucy Mtenje lie still with your legs apart!” he barked (115). He rapes her while she is in an unconscious state, and when he is done he feels no remorse, for he tells her “not to exaggerate. It was not that bad” (115). By claiming that it was not that bad, he is acknowledging his forceful actions which is permissible to him as a man but exempts himself from responsibility of the damage of his actions. His lack of remorse is also exemplified in his statement to her: “You should be happy. You are a woman now. You should be thanking me” (116). Not only does he feel entitled to her body, but he expects her to be thankful to him for helping her attain a state of womanhood which she previously did not possess. Like Sheri in Everything Good will Come, Bolanle fails to report the rape to the police or her family. The trauma of rape drives her into a cocoon where she shuts herself from the rest of the world, feeling shameful and damaged. Bolanle perceives herself as damaged goods and when the polygynous Baba Segi approaches her with a marriage proposal, she obliges. In this marriage, she also encounters forms of sexual violence from Baba Segi who does not take her feelings and desires into consideration. Baba Segi’s notions of masculinity derive from closely intertwined assumptions about male virility, sexuality and sexual performance. As Iya Segi, his first wife reveals, “[w]omen are my husband’s weakness. He cannot resist them, especially when they are low and downcast like puppies prematurely snatched from their mothers’ breasts” (103). Women, for Baba Segi, are weak subordinates to men. Vulnerability in women – which supposedly exemplifies their gender subordination – appeals to his male ego as it offers him the space to perform his masculinity by providing for women and taking care of them. And yet, this is also marked by inconsistencies since his insatiable sexual desire for women is what causes him to marry another woman, Bolanle, despite the fact that he already has three wives. His belief in the superiority of men over women extends to his (un)imaginative conceptualising of a woman’s body and sexual agency, and his own prowess during sexual intercourse. Of his new young wife, for example, he remarks, It annoyed him that Bolanle was the reason he had come [to consult Teacher, his mentor], when just two years ago he had boasted of his conquest: how Bolanle was tight as a bottleneck, how he pounded her until she was cross-eyed; and how she took the length of his manhood on her back – splayed out and submissive. He didn’t quite know how he would tell the men that all his pounding had proved futile. 4 The passage shows how Baba Segi conflates various forms of male authority; even the intercourse is instrumental, since sex must produce children. Bolanle’s failure to conceive by implication casts aspersion on Baba’s potency. His boasts, in effect, have come to nothing. In a patriarchal

Gender and sexual violence in fiction  89 society where sexual potency gives social potency, value and self-esteem to men (Silberschmidt 2005), and where sexual pleasure for women tends to be erased as unnecessary or inconsequential, the combination of Baba Segi’s ejaculations, thumping and procreative futility with Bolanle becomes an embarrassment for him. It is his own guilty secret, to be concealed from “the men” (4), although his young wife’s still slender, unfruitful body will, as it were, betray him again, announcing exactly that which he hopes to hide. Despite performing all the most virile of reproductive actions, according to the dominant social script, and despite ostensibly proving time and again his manly authority, this very same authority is repeatedly undermined because his virility is called into question by the failure of Bolanle to conceive. For all its demonstrable iterations in the bedroom, through physical actions which are often subsequently re-circulated in boastful male conversations, Baba Segi’s prolonged “sexual prowess” after two years has not produced the desired results: a child. Baba Segi is described by his wives as being very well endowed: his “penis was so big that two men could share it and still be well hung” (132). The size of his penis also functions as a supposed marker of his dominant masculinity and power over women. For Baba Segi, “pounding” (4) “proves” his sexual prowess; he must pound in order to produce – for himself and his wives – his proper sense of masculinity. The sexual pounding is a physical assertion of the socialised demand for a husband to demonstrate patriarchal dominance over his wives, because they are women. Ironically, though, this numbing action not only denies mutual pleasure but also does not produce the supposedly ultimate desired effect, which is a child. Since Baba Segi’s focus is not on pleasure – neither his own, really, nor that of his wife – the sex does not entail sensual joy, and for all its repetitive, performative “reproduction” of socially dominant codes of maleness it still does not allow him to reproduce in terms of the offspring that would credentialise his masculinity. Baba Segi knows no more than to repeatedly treat the female body – in the varied embodiments of his different wives – as a vessel to be filled with socialised expectations. In the above quotation, he not only disregards Bolanle’s sexual pleasure but also pays no attention to the pain he inflicts on her through his incessant battering. Additionally, it seems that sex with Bolanle, the university graduate (when he himself is illiterate), is shadowed by his own insecurities, which require that he reminds her of her proper place as a woman. Kopano Ratele (2008: 2) argues that sex is sanctioned to “reaffirm aggressive heterosexual masculinity and to assert control over women”, especially in contexts where “the ruling form of masculinity supports the idea of females being subjected to males”. The corollary of this is that female sexual pleasure will “be subsumed to male sexual pleasure” (Ratele 2008: 2). Jennifer Oriel (2005: 392) corroborates Ratele’s ideas by arguing that while “sexual rights advocates recommend that sexual pleasure should be recognised as a human right … the construction of sexuality as gender-neutral

90  Asante Lucy Mtenje in sexual rights literature conceals how men’s demand for sexual pleasure often reinforces the subordination of women’s sexual enjoyment”. These discussions are illustrated in Baba Segi’s intimate relations with his wives. Although Baba Segi celebrates his sexual prowess as part of his manhood, he denies his wives any sexual fulfillment through his clumsily driven, even violent “lovemaking”. For Bolanle, having failed to fall pregnant after two years of his ministrations, Baba Segi’s blunt, aggressive sexual technique reminds her of the debased feeling of being raped as a teenager: It must have been my vulnerability that aroused him because he returned at midnight to hammer me like never before. He emptied his testicles as deep into my womb as possible. It was as if he wanted to make it clear, with every thrust, that he didn’t make light of his husbandly duties. He wanted to fuck me pregnant. If there was ever a moment when the memory of being raped became fresh in my mind, that was it. 44 The language that Bolanle uses to describe the sexual relationship – instrumental, workmanlike, and premised on power – conveys the traumatic nature of the intercourse between them, a bodily onslaught which summons the repressed memories of pain and objectification she experienced during the rape. The language highlights the emotional disconnect between the husband and wife, the lack of intimacy as a couple which disallows mutual sexual fulfillment. In Baba Segi’s mind, sex for women is merely a means to procreation; emotional intimacy and pleasure are not part of the encounter. I also note, though, that this misconception is so deeply entrenched in his mind that he even disallows the possibility of his own pleasure with Bolanle, insisting instead on a desperately emphatic performance of male sexuality on Bolanle, which translates into his performance, externally and within her, of his “husbandly duties”. The sex is at once driven by and constrained by social discourses which demand reproduction, linking it to status and cultural authority. For both man and woman, then, the only reciprocity envisaged is that of biological transaction: the husband is “naturally” obligated to impregnate the wife who in turn is “naturally” expected to conceive. Interestingly, not only is it Bolanle, the inexperienced young wife, who uses verbs such as “hammering” to characterise Baba Segi’s forceful sexual technique, but the other wives refer to sex with Baba Segi as “pummeling”, for example – another term which connotes a physical drubbing, an insistent beating. For instance, Iya Tope confesses that “[a]fter a night with Baba Segi, the stomach is beaten into the chest by that baton that dangles between his legs” (50). The “baton” evokes a weapon of police control, a device of force used to discipline and quell unruly crowds. This is how the wives experience sex with their husband. Certainly, sex with Baba Segi is not “figured as pleasurable, supportive, loving, and empowering” and not characterised by “mutual desire and participation” (Norridge 2012: 28). It is an act of

Gender and sexual violence in fiction  91 physical domination, which also attests to Baba Segi’s own internalisation of dominant codes of proper masculinity.

Conclusion In conclusion, female sexuality is a social construct whose rules are encoded in male-centred discourses which seek to (re)produce preferential, subordinate subject positions for women. The two novels analysed in this chapter expose patriarchal hegemonic sexual discourses which bequeath men with power and access to women’s bodies at the expense of their own rights to consent or not. Furthermore, Atta demonstrates how expressions of female sexualities which are perceived as transgressive are met with patriarchal hostility, punitive measures to put them back in place, thus emphasising the tensions arising from the pleasures and dangers of female sexuality.

References Adichie, Ngozi Chimamanda. 2014. We should all be Feminists. New York: Vintage Books. Atta, Sefi. 2006. Everything Good will Come. Cape Town: Double Storey. Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi. 2011. Nudity and Morality: Legislating Women’s Bodies and Dress in Nigeria. In Tamale, Sylvia (ed.) African Sexualities: A Reader. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press, 116–129. ——— 2012. Of Mini-skirts and Morals: Social Control in Nigeria. Available at https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/bibi-bakare-yusuf/of-mini-skirts-andmorals-social-control-in-nigeria. Accessed: 15 April 2015. Gqola, Pumla Dineo. 2005. Yindaba kaban’ u’ba ndilahl’ umlenze?: Sexuality and Body Image. Agenda 19(63): 3–9. ——— 2015. Rape: A South African Nightmare. Johannesburg: MF Books. Kehinde, Ayo and Joy Mbipom. 2011. Discovery, Assertion and Self-Realisation in Recent Nigerian Migrant Feminist Fiction: The Example of Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come. African Nebula 3: 62–77. Lemanski, Charlotte. 2004. A New Apartheid?: The Spatial Implications of Fear of Crime in Cape Town, South Africa. Environment and Urbanization 16(2): 101–111. McFadden, Patricia. 2003. Sexual Pleasure as Feminist Choice. Feminist Africa 2: 50–60. Murray, Jessica. 2011. “She Had Agony Written All over Her Face”: Representations of Rape in the Work of Rozena Maart. Journal of Literary Studies 27(4): 36–49. Nnodim, Rita. 2008. City, Identity and Dystopia: Writing Lagos in Contemporary Nigerian Novels. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44(4): 321–332. Norridge, Zoe. 2012. Sex as Synecdoche: Intimate Languages of Violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love. Research in African Literatures 43(2): 18–39. Olufunwa, Harry. 2015. Notions of Motions: Rites of Passage in Everything Good will Come”. In Collins, Walter (ed.) How Sefi Atta Illuminates African Culture and Tradition. New York: Cambria Press, 59–80. Oriel, Jennifer. 2005. Sexual Pleasure as a Human Right: Harmful or Helpful to Women in the Context of HIV/AIDS? Women’s Studies International Forum 28: 392–404.

92  Asante Lucy Mtenje Pretorius, Marilize. 2013. The Transnational Intellectual in Contemporary Nigerian Literature. Unpublished MA dissertation, University of the Free State. Ratele, Kopano. 2008. Masculinities, Maleness and (Illusive) Pleasure. Available at www.arsrc.org/downloads/features/ratele.pdf. Accessed: 14 September 2015. Renzetti, Claire and Daniel Curran. 1999. Women, Men, and Society. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Silberschmidt, Margrethe. 2005. Poverty, Male Disempowerment, and Male Sexuality: Rethinking Men and Masculinities in Rural and Urban East Africa. In Ouzgane, Lahoucine and Robert Morrel (eds) African Masculinities: Men in Africa from Late Nineteenth Century to the Present. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 189–203. Shoneyin, Lola. 2010. The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives. London: Serpent’s Tail. Steyn, Melissa and Mikki van Zyl. 2009. The Prize and the Price: Shaping Sexualities in South Africa. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Sy, Kadidia. 2008. Women’s Relationships: Female Friendship in Toni Morrison’s Sula and Love, Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter and Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come. Doctoral Thesis, Georgia State University. Weiss, Karen. 2010. Too Ashamed to Report: Deconstructing the shame of Sexual Victimisation. Feminist Criminology 5(3): 286–310. Women Writers’ Round Table. 2008. Of Phases and Faces: Unoma Azuah Engages Sefi Atta and Chika Unigwe. Research in African Literatures 39(2): 108–116. Young, Marion Iris. 1980. Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality. Human Studies 3(2): 137–156.

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Human rights in spaces of violence Exploring the intersections of gender, violence and lesbian sexuality in selected African fiction by women Jessica Murray

This chapter explores how female characters in selected fictional texts insist on their human dignity and seek access to the often slippery ideal of hu man rights in spaces where their agency is severely constrained by physical, psychological, discursive and epistemic violence. Although identity is always shaped by multiple markers of difference, my focus in this chapter is on the complex ways in which gender interacts with lesbian sexuality, race and tradition to shape women’s experiences of violence in various African contexts. My analysis demonstrates how women’s access to discourses of human rights is limited by the shame, violence and fear that continue to structure understandings of lesbian sexuality in the different contemporary African spaces that serve as the settings for my selected texts. Literary texts offer rich analytical opportunities for deconstructing our most deeply entrenched ways of thinking for, as Karen Martin and Makhosazana Xaba (2013: vii) explain, in “imaginative spaces, dominant narratives hold less sway; possibilities we haven’t considered suggest themselves. We are confronted with our prejudices and preconceptions”. These preconceived ideas about gender and sexuality are myriad and they range from lesbian sexuality being unnatural to it being immoral, against the dictates of Christianity, tradition and so-called African values. Feminist theorists such as Stevi Jackson (1999) have long argued that the normative regime of heterosexuality would make no sense without gender. Heteronormativity, and the various forms of violence that accompany any deviation from this norm, must be challenged by attacking its very foundation, which is the gendered, patriarchal power structures that govern the societies depicted in my selected texts. Substantive access to human rights for characters that refuse to be slotted into their “proper” heteronormative gender slots will remain elusive, these texts suggest, as long as patriarchal social orders structure their lives. This chapter utilises founding and contemporary feminist and queer theory to shed light on how conventional assumptions about gender constitute the bedrock of the violence the female characters experience when they dare to acknowledge lesbian desire. It is not enough to allow spaces where

94  Jessica Murray women’s stories of violence and sexual oppression can be articulated. Real change will only become possible after a much more thorough critique of prevailing gender power structures. Here I follow the cautionary words of Jackson (1999: 181) when she argues that “seeking to undo binary divisions by rendering their boundaries more permeable and adding more categories to them ignores the hierarchical social relations on which the original binaries are founded”, and these are fundamentally gendered. Jackson (1999: 181) goes on to explain that such a superficial critique “fails to address the ways in which heterosexuality and gender are sustained at the macro level of structures and institutions as well as the micro level of our everyday social practices”. This chapter thus explores how the intersections of gender, sexuality and violence are represented in the short story collection Happiness, Like Water (2013) and the novel Under the Udala Trees (2015) by Nigerian writer Chinelo Okparanta; the novel The World Unseen (2001) by Shamim Sarif, which is set in apartheid South Africa; the post-apartheid novel Oktober (2012) by Réney Warrington; and the short stories “Sethunya Likes Girls Better” by Wame Molefhe from Botswana and “Jambula Tree” by Monica Arac De Nyeko from Uganda. My selection of texts does not claim to be representative in any way. I have selected these specific texts because the authors offer insights into the gendered structures and politics of shame in a variety of African contexts and the texts reveal how these dynamics function to constrain female characters’ access to full human rights and dignity. In addition, these texts avoid narrow depictions of victimisation. Rather, they also focus on the exercise and celebration of agency, regardless of how limited and dangerous this may be for the characters. Before proceeding with the analysis, it is crucial to sound some cautionary notes that must come into play when one embarks on feminist and queer critiques of gendered and sexual constructions in the context of the global South. We treat terms such as “gender”, “queer” and, indeed, “human rights” as self-evident at the peril of our own theoretical rigour. The concept of “lesbian” is a particularly loaded one. Scholars have proposed alternatives such as “women who have sex with women”. According to Kopano Ratele (2011: 410), such “terms are supposed to obviate the cultural and political baggage freighted by the terms homosexual, lesbian and gay”. His conclusion regarding these terminological manoeuvres is as follows: “But they [the terms] are, I am afraid, lifeless” as they “fail to fully represent the array and dynamism of sexual relating” (Ratele 2011: 410). I agree with him that “the uncritical use of terms gay and lesbian in many places in A frica is no less problematic” (Ratele 2011: 410), but I maintain that the selected authors in this chapter are representing what can, even given all these necessary caveats, be referred to as lesbian desire. Aihwa Ong (2010: 503) notes that “[m]antras from the North like ‘women’s rights are human rights’ propose global human standards without regard to other moral systems and visions of ethical living”, while Anjali Arondekar (2013: 551) problematises the notion of “some avatar of global queer solidarity”. While this chapter

Gender, violence and sexuality in fiction  95 cannot treat the socio-historical specificities of the very different settings of Nigeria, South Africa, Botswana and Uganda in any great detail, I start my analysis from the recognition that the differences matter and that my goal here is not to “find a universal solution to the plight of women across the world” (Ong 2010: 503). Like Ong, I am aware that “postcolonial situations are dynamic sites of change” (Ong 2010: 504) and my selected texts are illuminating precisely for what they reveal about the changing dynamics that structure female characters’ experiences of gender, sexuality and violence within the particular spaces they find themselves. As noteworthy as the differences are, however, the ubiquity of heteronormativity and unequal gendered power structures as facilitating factors of gender violence cannot be ignored. In addition to the complexity of applying discourses (of human rights, gender and sexuality) that have significantly been shaped by western voices to various African contexts, we are faced with another challenge: “Finding ways of lifting the shroud of secrecy, taboos and silences that engulf sexuality matters and breaking through the hegemonic moral code that associates sexuality [especially same sex desire] with shame and guilt requires skilful creativity and resourcefulness” (Tamale 2011: 611). In this latter regard, my selected authors have done the creative and innovative work and my task in this chapter is to shed light on their fictional constructions through the rubric of theoretical frameworks of gender, sexuality and human rights. Given the complexity and sensitivity of the subject matter, I pledge to proceed with caution, but I maintain, despite the risks and challenges, that this is a conversation worth having. Makau Mutua (2011: 452) argues that “[a]t the core of the human rights project … is the humanist impulse to re-affirm faith in our common humanity, both as individuals, but also as members of the many groups to which we belong”. In Chinelo Okparanta’s 2013 collection of stories, Happiness, Like Water, the power of heteronormative assumptions and their capacity to strip female characters of even a semblance of belonging and rights is explored in the short story “America” (85–108). In this story, the female narrator’s love affair with Gloria, who is visiting Nigeria from America, is depicted with all the complexity of a relationship where women are shamed for the very nature of their sexual desire for one another, even as they revel in their intimacy. In addition to the social pressure that accompanies their deviation from the heterosexual script, they are experiencing their love in a space where the denial of basic human rights for queer individuals is institutionalised in the country’s legal system. The narrator notes the following: Mama reminds me every once in a while that there are penalties in Nigeria for that sort of thing. And of course, she’s right. I’ve read of them in the newspapers and have heard of them on the news. Still, sometimes I want to ask her to explain to me what she means by ‘that sort of

96  Jessica Murray thing’, as if it is something so terrible that it does not deserve a name, as if it is so unclean that it cannot be termed ‘love’. 89 The narrator expands on the nature of these penalties by explaining that they were invariably “harsh” and could include “[j]ail time, fines, stoning or flogging, depending where in Nigeria you were caught” (92). The element of shaming is very much a part of the disciplining forces that are used to police queer desire as the story notes that “you could be sure that it would make the news. Public humiliation” (92). By placing these two words alone in a short, stark sentence, Okparanta conveys the gravity of this aspect of the punishment. The phrase “that sort of thing” is repeatedly used in the short story as a euphemism for homosexual desire to indicate that this is truly a love that dare not speak its name. The reader learns that “[m]obile policemen were always looking for that sort of thing – men with men or women with women” (92). The narrator’s mother refuses to validate her relationship with Gloria by dismissing it as “that silly thing with that Gloria friend of yours” (92). While the penalties that are meted out to gay couples constitute an explicit refutation of their human rights, the discursive violence that underlie the refusal to recognise the narrator’s relationship as one that is sexual and loving should also be read as a violation of their rights and as a violation that has far reaching effects. Adrienne Rich (1979: 199) explains this as follows: Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language – this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable. [emphasis in original] In Okparanta’s 2015 follow-up to her collection of short stories, it seems that the unspeakability of homosexual desire that accompanies female characters’ sexuality is as pronounced as ever. Under the Udala Trees narrates the story of Ijeoma and Amina as their friendship develops into sexual attraction and love. Both Ijeoma and her mother refer to the “behaviour” that Ijeoma and Amina “engaged in” as “that other thing” (74) and her mother orders Ijeoma to “ask God for the forgiveness of all your sins, but especially for that one particular sin in you” as she insists that “[n]o child of [hers] will carry those sick, sick desires” (86). When their grammar school teacher walks in on them making love, they note that “it was rare that such cases were spoken of. So taboo the whole thing was, anathema, unmentionable, not even deserving a name” (125). The profoundly gendered extent to which a woman’s sexuality and larger identity are constructed in relation to those of men is articulated by Ijeoma’s mother when she tells her that a “woman without a man is hardly a woman at all” (181).

Gender, violence and sexuality in fiction  97 This is where fiction can play a vital role in exposing the myriad denigratory assumptions about homosexuality and ensuring that experiences of same sex desire are spoken about and made visible. Martin and Xaba (2013: viii) describe the impetus behind their collection of short stories, Queer Africa, as one that seeks to “confront the noisy political rhetoric that positions queerness as unnatural, amoral and un-African with intimate stories about individual lives, deeply embedded in the complexity of their contexts …”. In “Sethunya Likes Girls Better” by Wame Molefhe, the author describes the experiences of a young girl in Botswana who struggles to fit into the appropriate gendered mould of “good Batswana women” (141) as she yearns to play football with the boys and finds herself longing for the kiss of her girlfriend. Despite her desires, she is taught how to “sit like a girl” in the “frilly dresses with tiny flowers her mother dressed her in” and that “good girls played netball” (144). As Sethunya grows older and agrees to a heterosexual marriage, she finds herself surrounded by women who share the “same conviction that marriage was a good woman’s trophy” and she quells her fears with the knowledge “that married women were going to tell her what society expected of a good Motswana wife” (142). In the story there is some conflation between deviation from expected gender norms and non-conformity to conventional heteronormative sexuality. Sethunya and her mother seem to believe that adherence to “proper” feminine behaviour in terms of dress, comportment and socialising, will “normalise” her sexual desire. Theoretically, the concepts of sexuality and gender are both distinct and intrinsically interwoven. Jackson (1999: 5) reminds us of this as follows: At the level of social structure, sexuality is socially constructed through the institutionalization of heterosexuality bolstered by law, the state and social convention. The institution of heterosexuality is inherently gendered, it rests upon the assumed normality of specific forms of social and sexual relations between men and women. Crucially, she adds that sexuality is also socially constructed at the level of meaning, through its constitution as the object of discourse and through the specific discourses on the sexual in circulation at any historical moment; these discourses serve to define what is sexual, to differentiate the ‘perverse’ from the ‘normal’ and, importantly, to delimit appropriately masculine and feminine forms of sexuality. Jackson (1999: 5) In Sethunya’s reflections in this story, as well as in the experiences of the other female characters to which I refer in this chapter, it is undeniable that sexual behaviour is “‘socially scripted’ in that it is a ‘part’ that is learned and acted out within a social context” and, while “different social contexts have

98  Jessica Murray different social scripts” (Jackson 1999: 31), there appears to be significant continuity across contexts in terms of both the restriction these gendered scripts place on women’s life choices and the threat of violence that lurks just beneath the surface in cases of deviation from these scripts. There is, of course, nothing other than socially constructed and policed forces that would prevent Sethunya from rejecting frilly dresses and still preferring boys as objects of sexual desire. Yet, the story implies that the project in the inculcation of her proper gendered role that began in her girlhood, with her mother insisting on dresses and netball, would end with her eventual acquiescence to a heterosexual marriage. By linking gender and sexuality in such a rigid alignment, the stakes are raised immediately and this helps to explain why childhood gender behaviour is often monitored with such ferocity. For Sethunya, there is no reprieve from the vigilance that is required to maintain her gendered role as a “good [Mot]swana wom[a]n” (141), and the potential consequences of letting her guard down in this regard are suggested in the following extract that describes her thoughts while she is on public transport and thinks she sees the friend whose kiss made her “feel warm in places that good girls only whispered about” (145): One of the passengers said he hated women who pretended to be men. ‘Look at that one over there,’ he said, and then he laughed. ‘That one, all she needs is a real man to teach her how to be a woman.’ The man in front of her laughed, so did the woman sitting next to her. 146 Although the story gives no indication that the man is referring to Sethunya, her reactions speak volumes: “Sethunya shrank into her seat and took out a lipstick from her bag, smearing mauve over her shame” (146). For this man, a lack of conformity to stereotypical feminine behaviour amounts to pretending to be a man. He does not seem able to allow for the possibility that expressions of identity for a woman can legitimately extend beyond his own assumptions about femininity. Pretending to be a man is also equated with deviation from heterosexual desire and he invokes the chilling spectre of so-called corrective or curative rape as a way to “remedy” such a perceived defect in a woman. The laughter of the other men and the female passenger serves to remind us that Sethunya cannot expect assistance from other members of her community when she is confronted with the “[v]iolent practices and stigmatizing language against women who dare to love women rather than men …” or with the related “violent and stigmatising sexual and gender discourse [that] applies when women are seen to be too unlike [what] women should be” (Ratele 2011: 407). The fact that Sethunya feels shamed by the comments and reacts by shrinking in her seat and hiding behind make-up suggests how effectively society has inculcated the self-perpetuating gendered script of female inadequacy as she polices herself by performing one of the “public

Gender, violence and sexuality in fiction  99 acts of femininity” (Chapkis 1988: 6), namely, applying make-up. By altering her appearance, she attempts to camouflage her “real” self as she hides her feelings of sexual desire for a female friend. Neither her undisguised gendered self nor her uncensored sexual being is regarded as acceptable, or safe, in her community and she protects herself by altering both to fit in with expectations. Janice Irvine (2009: 70) explains that shame has “become one of the quotidian forms of power governing sexuality”, and she argues that the “politics of shaming do more than simply denigrate the humanity of those being shamed – they also draw on existing social norms for their power and operate to strengthen those norms”. Cathrine Norberg (2012: 172) similarly notes “shame’s function in upholding social power structures”, and her research identifies “the female body (closely related to sexuality) as a source of female shame”. In Monica Arac De Nyeko’s story “Jambula Tree”, her narrative about two girls falling in love reveals how the disciplinary power of shame is deployed to re-insert these female characters back into their proper place in the heteronormative status quo. After their relationship is exposed, the narrator, Anyango, reflects that their “names became forever associated with the forbidden. Shame” (91). The shaming extends beyond the two girls to include their mothers, and the narrator tells her lover that her mother “should start to hold her head high and scatter dust at the women who laugh after her when she passes their houses” (91). In her thoughts, the adult Anyango tells Sanya, “after all these years, I still imagine shame trailing after me tagged onto the hem of my skirt” (93). She is not meant to forget the shame and she recalls how “Mama Atim says this word ‘immoral’ to me – slowly and emphatically … so it can sink into my head” (96). For Anyango, the shame of being identified as immoral in her sexual desire does indeed become a part of her identity, but it does not negate her memories of intimacy with Sanya: “She wants me to hear the word in every breath, sniff it in every scent so it can haunt me like the day I first touched you. Like the day you first touched me” (96). The echoes of this gentle reciprocal touch reverberate throughout Anyango’s life and her refusal to disavow them becomes some form of agency that she is able to assert even though her feelings are not recognised as meaningful or valid in her world. The struggle to assert one’s identity and sexual agency in spaces of structural gender oppression where heteronormativity is the only acceptable status quo is also explored in the context of an Indian and coloured community in apartheid South Africa in Shamin Sarif’s The World Unseen (2001). The main characters in this novel are Amina and Miriam who fall in love and have to deal with tremendous odds when they try to find comfort in each other and their relationship. Miriam’s marriage to a man introduces space for a discussion of bisexuality in the analysis of this novel. I agree with Steven Angelides (2013: 61) that “the category of bisexuality has been pivotal to the construction of the hetero/homosexual opposition”, and I concur that it thus has a role to play in the “deconstruction of hetero- and

100  Jessica Murray homosexuality” [emphasis in original]. My focus in this chapter, however, is on the dynamics of the female characters’ lesbian desire. I maintain that this is both a valid and important avenue of scholarly inquiry and it is in no way intended to contribute to what Angelides refers to as the “palpable marginalization at best, and erasure at worst, [that] surrounds the theoretical question of bisexuality” (61) in canonical queer theory texts. Amina is represented as defiant of the gendered roles that define acceptable femininity for an Indian girl and she is used to being judged for this. In her important research on this novel, Cheryl Stobie (2003: 124) also uses the admittedly problematic term “lesbian” when she notes that Amina “to top it all is a lesbian”. When Amina is stared at in a disapproving manner, she “immediately understood, of course, that the offence lay in her clothing, her attitude, her way of carrying herself” (14). As a girl, she reflected on her mother’s hurtful comment that she “should have been born a boy” as follows: She thought deeply about it, as she thought about everything. She liked to play sports with the boys at school, and she was good at her schoolwork … and she wanted to work at a business of trade when she grew up. Why were these attributes only fit for a boy? 15 This is a character that interrogates rather than simply accepts prescribed gender roles and expectations. We are told that “Amina was entirely lacking in any semblance of the expected attributes of docility and of self- effacement ….” (18). Amina is initially known to Miriam only as “the subject of so much gossip” (27) and, when they first meet, Miriam regards her with some “curiosity [as well as] with an underlying sense of disapproval” (28). Miriam’s sister-in-law, Farah, and her friends trace Amina’s deviance back to her grandmother who “steered that girl [Amina] wrong from the start. Taught her to be too proud and above herself” (28). Pride and ambition are, of course, traits that are cultivated in boys but, in girls, they are regarded as an aberration that will come to no good. The background story of Amina’s grandmother, Begum, is particularly revealing of the insidious ways in which constructions of gender and sexuality conspire to render women vulnerable to violence and how this violence can be shrouded in such layers of shame that access to justice becomes elusive. Although the novel, and my analysis thereof, focusses on Amina and Miriam’s experiences, it is worth pausing to consider the “thorough work [Farah and her friends do] of blaming Amina’s dead grandmother for the sins of her granddaughter” (28) since it speaks to the transgenerational transmission of shame as well as the persistence of gendered judgements. In a section of the novel that is subtitled “Pretoria, 1892” (135), Amina tells Miriam about her grandmother to enable her to understand why “she is so important to [her]” (134). Her narration starts with the ominous line: “And it all began with the beatings” (134) before the text moves on to Begum

Gender, violence and sexuality in fiction  101 as the third person narrator of her own story. We learn that “Begum had ceased to feel anything at all after the eleventh or twelfth blow to her back” and that she “couldn’t hear their curses any more; that much at least was a blessing” (135). The beatings and the curses are from her mother-in-law and her family: “Slut, slut, whore, bitch, they had chanted as they moved in on her, taunting and angry” (135). This is all happening while Begum is trying to shield her two-week-old baby and it emerges that it was the birth of “the child that had started all the problems” (135). Given how the viciousness of the attacks on Begum is represented, however, the reader gets the distinct impression that the birth only made the gendered violence in Begum’s life more explicit and unapologetic. When the child is born, Begum’s Indian family immediately notices that the child’s hair was “dark and thick and curly” and that her complexion was “darker than her own or her husband’s” (136). Begum realises that the child is the product of a rape that had happened nine months earlier and that she “had buried … so deeply that in her mind it was almost as though it had not occurred” (137). She recalls that, in the aftermath of the assault, “[t]here was nothing she could do, and no one she could tell. Even if they had believed she had been raped, she would be worthless to her husband now, a damaged thing …” (138). After much violence, Begum is sent back to her family in India with her daughter but without the son she had given birth to two years earlier. In 1952, when Farah and her friends discuss Begum more than 50 years later, their judgement is as harshly racialised and gendered as that of her in-laws after the rape. They argue that “[i]f you mess with the blacks, you can expect a hard life …” and they are particularly horrified that Begum continued to insist on her right to basic human dignity: “She didn’t even feel any shame. Imagine. No shame. And this girl [Amina] is the same” (28). It does indeed seem quite remarkable that, in the face of such tremendous obstacles, Begum refused to acquiesce to the gendered shaming that society ascribed to her, and Amina recalls how her teachings shaped her own life: “Her maternal grandmother spoke to her of pride, of self-reliance, and of courage. These were the things to cultivate, she had told her granddaughter, and not a slavish attitude to duties and traditions that were built on subservience and pain and fear” (16). It is through these lessons from her grandmother that Amina learns to take her place in the world, regardless of what society expects from her, by running her own business with a black man. For a woman, taking up one’s place in the world does not come easily or without a price. Miriam, who is represented as a ‘good’, subservient wife and mother, describes this sense of cowering into tiny literal and figurative spaces as follows: She had the double mattress to herself, but remained on her own side, not used to spreading herself out, or taking more room than she needed. Expansiveness did not come naturally to her, in her movements, her speech, her thoughts. 127

102  Jessica Murray The impulse to make one’s self small, hide and draw no attention is typical of the cringing compulsion that is a typical physical manifestation of shame. Miriam is clearly stifled in this confined world she shares with her husband, and when he finally hits her the understandable shock is also accompanied by a sense of inevitability. In Miriam’s marriage, the unequal power relations have been so stark that physical violence seems to have been the unavoidable conclusion to her husband, Omar’s, patriarchal dominance. Miriam notes that he “hit her four times and it was a shock to her, that he had come to this at last” (219). The phrase “at last” suggests that Miriam had somehow anticipated the physical violence and this is further signalled in her reflections on the first beating: She had always dreaded this moment; not out of physical fear, though certainly she had been scared. But because she knew it would be a terrible thing to have to understand about your husband, that he would really hit you, and she had always thought when she was younger that hitting was the one thing that she would never tolerate. But now it had happened and she knew that she would go upstairs [to the bedroom they shared] when he had calmed down. What else was there to do with the children in their beds, and no other place to go? 220 This passage is revealing in a number of ways, in addition to how it demonstrates that the possibility and even inevitability of gender violence is something that had always been on the periphery of Miriam’s consciousness. Significantly, she had begun to negotiate, in her own mind, how she would handle the violence, even as a much younger woman. Despite a lifetime of making herself as small as possible and diligently performing the roles of good mother and wife, she could not avert the violence and her planned tactic of not tolerating it seems void as she simply has no place to go with her children. When a woman’s life choices are structured by gendered inequality and the ubiquitous threat of violence, her options are profoundly circumscribed and it is never simply a matter of tolerating or not tolerating domestic violence. After her years in this marriage, she hardly seems able to conceive of an alternative before she gets to know Amina. The confined spaces that women occupy, and the ultimate uselessness of that as a way of avoiding violence, is something that is all the more familiar to lesbian women who are forced to deal with the gendered epistemology of the closet. Amina has chosen to accept the risks and the shaming of her community and she is now in a position where she can even joke about it when she says that she has “had plenty of practice with the closet” (189) and she is used to people talking about her and to being labelled a “[s]tinking queer” (186). When her paternal grandmother dies, her mother suggests that the grandmother had a heart attack because a prospective husband’s parents “told her that [Amina was] not … not feminine enough” (239). The

Gender, violence and sexuality in fiction  103 broken speech indicates that this is such a taboo that Amina’s mother struggles to articulate it. Amina is not granted the right to mourn for this loss of a close family member, and even though she makes light of it in the following exchange with Miriam she is denied a very basic human emotion simply because she refuses to perform conventionally expected femininity. When Miriam and Omar visit her to offer their condolences, Amina says in “an ironic tone” (246): “That’s kind. Nobody else came especially to see me. Probably because they all think I killed my own grandmother with my trousers and my lifestyle” (246). In their conversation, it becomes apparent just how powerful social gender expectations are in determining the life choices a female character ends up making. Amina phrases it mildly when she suggests to Miriam that “what people think puts pressure on you to accept things” (248) before asking her why she got married. Miriam admits that after Omar saw her a few times he proposed and her family accepted the proposal on her behalf. She goes on to reflect: “But it never occurred to me, Amina, to question it. I got married because everyone expected me to” (248). Amina responds by saying: “Well, it occurred to me to question it” (248). This questioning of the status quo governing gender and sexuality allowed Amina to choose a life that Miriam finds difficult to imagine, and after a lifetime of gendered socialisation it is almost impossible for her to accept that she too can choose differently. As Amina and Miriam’s relationship grows closer, Amina helps Miriam to explore the possibility of exercising more agency in her life, albeit within the severely constrained structure of her marriage to Omar. She offers her a morning job cooking for the small business she runs in town and she teaches her to drive. It is during such a driving lesson that they share their first kiss, and their increasing physical awareness of each other is represented with a gentle intimacy that could not be further removed from the relationship between Miriam and Omar. She is so conscious of Amina that the “scent of the girl next to her was no longer an ephemeral thing to be caught at passing moments, but had turned into the very air around her” (293). By the time Amina tells Miriam that she is in love with her, Miriam realises that the answer to the following two questions is “Amina”: “Whose is the first face that appears before you when you wake in the morning?” and “Who is the last person you think about before you sleep at night”? (314). Amina asks Miriam to bring her two children and come away with her but Miriam finds this proposition impossible. Even though she is unable to take this step, she does manage, with great courage and against significant opposition, to carve out some space for resistance in her stifling marriage by insisting on working mornings in Amina’s café, and she is also adamant about continuing her driving lessons in order to be able to get to her job independently. In the fight that ensues when Miriam counters Omar’s objections and refuses to acquiesce to his demand that she remains a stay-at-home wife and mother, his beating of her and throwing of a glass and furniture cause such a noise that their young daughter, Alisha, wakes up. Even as she is negotiating some

104  Jessica Murray space for herself in this marriage to get out of the house and work for two mornings a week in the face of violent resistance from Omar, she does additional emotional labour by protecting their child from the knowledge of her father’s violence as follows: “It’s okay… Your father dropped his glass, that’s all. Go back to bed” (342). She stands her ground and the novel ends with her penning a letter to Amina accepting the job she had offered her. Even though she stays with a man who beats her while she is in love with Amina, accepting the job offer represents a major victory for Miriam. Miriam is working within what Wendy McKeen (2001: 39) refers to as the “nexus of agency (the choices and opportunities actors make for themselves), and structure (the limitations and opportunities provided by existing conditions)”. The structure she works within is as profoundly racialised and classed as it is gendered, and my analysis has demonstrated how constructions of normative gendered and sexual identities shape the space in which she and Amina must make their choices and create their opportunities. The fact that these are severely limited, constrained and inflected with violence does not prevent them from taking great risks as they insist on some semblance of self-determination. The final text considered in this chapter, the mainly Afrikaans novel Oktober (2012) by Réney Warrington, is set in the context of post-apartheid South Africa where a discourse of human rights has been enshrined in a constitution that continues to be hailed as one of the most progressive in the world. Yet, as will emerge in my analysis, the difference between formal and substantive equality and access to human rights for individuals of all genders and sexual orientations remains profound. Indeed, such access is still determined by deeply embedded assumptions about gender and sexuality, and their impact on the life experiences of individual characters is as damaging as in the settings of the novels and short stories I explored at the beginning of the chapter. Despite the guarantee of access to human rights in our constitution, Pumla Dineo Gqola (2007: 115) notes that “discourses of gender in the South African public sphere are very conservative in the main: they speak of ‘women’s empowerment’ in ways that are not transformative and, as a consequence, they exist very comfortably alongside overwhelming evidence that South African women are not empowered”, and she cites “raging homophobia [and] the very public and relentless circulation of misogynist imagery, metaphors and language” as examples of the disjuncture between constitutional and substantive human rights. The novel Oktober centres on the developing relationship between two women, Jo and Leigh, as well as the struggles they face in their own families. For Jo, her primary attachment is to her niece and nephew, Jonathan and Ruby, and her greatest suffering emanates from her forced estrangement from them. At the start of the novel when Leigh asks Jo whether she would consider moving abroad, she answers as follows: “I can’t. I have responsibilities here … Family. I have a niece and nephew that mean the world to me. How can I miss out on them growing up?” (17–18). In the text, Warrington places the word “Family” in a

Gender, violence and sexuality in fiction  105 single line as a one-word, stand-alone sentence, thus indicating the importance that Jo’s character attaches to her family. As the plot unfolds, it is all the more poignant that this family, which she so uncompromisingly prioritises, rejects Jo and she does miss out on the children’s childhood. This turn of events is fundamentally linked with her lesbian identity and her family’s homophobic rejection thereof. The novel begins with the meeting between Leigh and Jo and their tentative coming out to each other. Leigh is a singer and Jo is a photographer and, during one of their conversations, Jo finds that she admits her sexual attraction to women. In her reflections, she describes this as a love that is only sometimes acceptable, that is mostly judged and that causes an inexplicable discomfort. The judgement is something that Jo has learnt how to negotiate in her daily interactions with people and she does so in various ways that often include silence and passing as straight. She describes a trip to Amsterdam where she finds herself in the company of a fellow tourist from South Africa. In reference to a gay monument in Amsterdam, the woman asks Jo whether she saw what this place is with disapproving expression on her face. Jo makes a mental note to return later but she says nothing to the woman because she is her only acquaintance in a strange city and they will have to spend the day together. This type of heteronormative micro-aggression seems to be something that Jo is used to and, in a conversation with another friend, she notes that she has also been able to accept the fact that her father has rejected her and that her sister calls her abnormal. What she is, however, unable to accept is that she is no longer allowed to see Jonathan and Ruby and she describes this as her greatest sorrow. When her brother-in-law tells her that he and Jo’s sister, Simone, have decided that she may not see the children again, Jo realises that her life has changed irrevocably. When she asks why, he simply says that he does not owe her any explanation and she thinks to herself that her lesbianism is regarded as contagious. When she tries to talk to the rest of her family about the matter, she meets the same rejection from everyone but her mother. Her father tells her that she should understand why she is no longer allowed to see the children, meaning that it is because she is gay, while Simone tells her that she is abnormal. Although Jo wonders who made Simone the referee policing the lines between normality and abnormality, she has no recourse and the family she has prioritised prohibits her from seeing the children she loves the most. She has no choice but to leave and the chapter ends with her placing the gifts she had brought for the children in a box marked with large black letters “Jonathan and Ruby” (54). After this, Jo moves to London in an effort to place some physical distance between herself and her pain, and it is here that she reconnects with Leigh and their relationship develops. She explains to Leigh that her sister woke up one morning and decided that she was contagious and, it appears, the hurt that was inflicted on Jo was just that arbitrary. Yet Simone, as the children’s mother, has every legal right to inflict her homophobia on Jo. Leigh has had to deal with her

106  Jessica Murray own family’s rejection. She tells Jo that her parents “kicked [her] out when [she] was fifteen” (110) after she was caught kissing a girl. Both have been hurt so much that they are only able to move towards each other hesitantly and haltingly and Jo’s friend, Denise, has to remind her that not everyone is going to kick her where it hurts. As Jo and Leigh grow to trust each other and share more of their life experiences, the reader learns just how perverted and deeply embedded in gendered constructions Jo’s banishment from Jonathan and Ruby’s lives is. While Jo is represented as a gentle, loving presence, Jonathan and Ruby’s father is described as the real threat as Jo recalls his temper, how he shoved Jonathan, how Jonathan has had to stand in front of his mother to prevent his father from hitting her, and how he feels like he has to protect his little sister Ruby. Yet this man has the legal and, in the opinion of many, the moral right to refuse the children’s contact with Jo because of her sexuality. Jo also remembers an event that she described as a “gender crisis” (186) when she won a small rugby ball and a coloured lip balm in a competition. She herself seems to have perpetuated conventional gender stereotypes by giving the rugby ball to Jonathan and the lip balm to Ruby. Half an hour later, however, Ruby was kicking the ball around while Jonathan had painted his lips red with the balm. She remembers that their father was furious and insisted that Jonathan wash his mouth immediately. Gender boundaries in children’s behaviour are as strictly policed as in the case of adults and this is the same man who later cannot accept the so-called abnormality of Jo’s lesbian sexuality near his children. For Jo and Leigh’s relationship, the novel ends on a happy note as Leigh admits her love for Jo on international television, despite the harm this could potentially do to her career as a pop singer. The pain of losing Jonathan and Ruby, however, remains and the final scene is set in a tattoo parlour where Leigh has taken Jo to have a heart with the names of her niece and nephew permanently inscribed on her body. Even in a country where nondiscrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is inscribed in the constitution, this is the closest that Jo will be able to get to these children. According to Sylvia Tamale (2011: 611), “a human rights perspective provides an excellent framework for contextualising African sexualities” and, as an aspect of human rights, sexual rights include, among others, “respect for bodily integrity; protection from violence; the right to privacy, … equal protection of the law and non-discrimination”. Importantly, Kate Sheill (2009: 65) reminds us that “[i]f we are to realize the full promise of sexual rights, we also have to move beyond the violation-based protectionist model of human rights”, by which she means “the focus only on the negative articulation of rights – the right to be free from rather than free to …”. In the context of the fictional texts I have explored in this chapter, I would argue that both these aspects are crucial if we are to gain insight into the rich nuance of the negotiations women engage in, in terms of the exercise of their human rights as lesbians in Africa. In other words, we need to focus

Gender, violence and sexuality in fiction  107 on the myriad ways in which structural gender equality violates their rights without losing sight of the pleasure and intimacy they manage to access in their relationships, often in spite of enormous odds. To put it another way, it is important to recognise how the texts analysed in this chapter articulate how female characters struggle to be “free from” homophobic and misogynist violence in other to be “free to” celebrate the sexual connections they find with other female characters. This dual focus remains crucial if we are to avoid the risk of “reinforcing the image of the woman as victim subject … [which] fails to reveal the complex reality of women’s lives, telling us only the different ways in which women experience violence” (Sheill 2009: 66). As necessary as it is to expose and critique the structural and physical violence these characters risk, the textual representations of the gentle tenderness of Jo and Leigh’s lovemaking (Warrington 2012), the “feather touch” of Amina’s lips on Miriam’s (Sarif 2001: 294) and Ijeoma and Amina’s “bodies being touched by the fire that was each other’s flesh” (Okparanta 2015: 117) are as important as these characters being told that their desire is an “abomination … something disgusting, disgraceful, a scandal” (Okparanta 2015: 75). What runs like a leitmotif through the stories of all these female characters is the complex ways in which the social rejection and denigration of their lesbian sexuality are mapped onto traditional assumptions about “proper” gender roles and the appropriate performance of femininity. The heteronormative structures that govern their lives in very different contexts shape the extent to which they are able to exercise their life choices and, ultimately, these gendered structures also circumscribe and determine their access to even the most basic human rights, including freedom from violence.

References Angelides, Steven. 2013. The Queer Intervention. In Hall, Donald and Annamarie Jagose (eds) The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 60–73. Arac De Nyeko, Monica. 2013. Jambula Tree. In Martin, Karen and Makhosazana Xaba (eds) Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction. Braamfontein: MThoka’s Books, 91–105. Arondekar, Anjali. 2013. Border/Line Sex: Queer Postcolonialities or How Race Matters Outside the U.S. In Hall, Donald and Annamarie Jagose (eds) The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 547–557. Chapkis, Wendy. 1988. Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance. London: The Women’s Press. Gqola, Pumla Dineo. 2007. How the ‘Cult of Femininity’ and Violent Masculinities Support Endemic Gender Based Violence in Contemporary South Africa. African Identities 5(1): 111–124. Irvine, Janice. 2009. Shame Comes out of the Closet. Sexuality Research and Social Policy 6(1): 70–79. Jackson, Stevi. 1999. Heterosexuality in Question. London: Sage. Martin, Karen and Makhosazana Xaba. 2013. Preface. In Martin, Karen and Makhosazana Xaba (eds) Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction. Braamfontein: MThoka’s Books, vii–ix.

108  Jessica Murray McKeen, Wendy. 2001. The Shaping of Political Agency: Feminism and the National Social Policy Debate, the 1970s and early 1980s. Studies in Political Economy 66: 37–58. Molefhe, Wame. 2013. Sethunya Likes Girls Better. In Martin, Karen and Makhosazana Xaba (eds) Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction. Braamfontein: MThoka’s Books, 139–148. Mutua, Makau. 2011. Sexual Orientation and Human Rights: Putting Homophobia on Trial. In Tamale, Sylvia (ed.) African Sexualities: A Reader. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press, 452–462. Norberg, Cathrine. 2012. Male and Female Shame: A Corpus-Based Study of Emotion. Corpura 7(2): 159–185. Okparanta, Chinelo. 2013. Happiness, Like Water. Boston: Mariner Books. _____ 2015. Under the Udala Trees. London: Granta. Ong, Aihwa. 2010. Sisterly Solidarity: Feminist Virtue under ‘Moderate Islam’. In McCann, Carole and Seung-kyung Kim (eds) Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 503–520. Ratele, Kopano. 2011. Male Sexualities and Masculinities. In Tamale, Sylvia (ed.) African Sexualities: A Reader. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press, 399–419. Rich, Adrienne. 1979. On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978. New York: W.W. Norton. Sarif, Shamim. 2001. The World Unseen. London: The Women’s Press. Sheill, Kate. 2009. Losing Out in the Intersections: Lesbians, Human Rights, Law and Activism. Contemporary Politics 15(1): 55–71. Stobie, Cheryl. 2003. Somewhere in the Double Rainbow: Queering the Nation in Recent South African Fiction. Current Writing 15(2): 117–137. Tamale, Sylvia. 2011. Interrogating the Link between Gendered Sexualities, Power and Legal Mechanisms: Experiences from the Lecture Room. In Tamale, Sylvia (ed.) African Sexualities: A Reader. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press, 606–621. Warrington, Réney. 2012. Oktober. Pretoria: Protea.

7

Gender, disruption and reconciliation in the Ugandan short fiction of Beatrice Lamwaka Sally Ann Murray

Beatrice Lamwaka is an important female voice in contemporary Ugandan literature. Her short fiction, much of it collected as Butterfly Dreams and Other Stories (2017), emerges from Acholi experience, and is embedded in the wider context of Africa’s many armed conflicts and political insurgencies, and the ruptured societies and vulnerable populations to which these give rise. From the vantage of Northern Uganda, Lamwaka’s fiction suggests how war exacerbates existing forms of gendering and inequality that subordinate and damage minoritised, second-order subjects like women, children (prominent among them girls) and those of non-conforming orientation. Lamwaka’s narrative foci are given credence by Pauline Uwakweh’s concern that “the psychological toll” of youths’ experiences in war “has [not] been sufficiently examined”, an omission compounded by a failure to consider “the gender implications” of young people’s wartime lives and “the impact of war on their socialized gender identities” (Uwakweh 2012: 82). Uwakweh sees these multiple omissions as “part of [the] ‘muted index’ in African literature” that needs urgent address (see also Honwana 2005, 2011). My chapter considers Lamwaka’s stories as complex representations of individual and social trauma in relation to gender, yet I avoid “identify[ing] Africa solely as a place of suffering” (Eaglestone 2008: 75) and “continental ‘gender trauma’” (Tamale 2004: 50). Instead, I am cued by the author’s own uneasy negotiating of the relationship between suffering, endurance and resilience in the narrative labour to which her fiction puts gender. This imaginative authorial labour powerfully intervenes in and disrupts “the ideology of domesticity in Africa” that naturalises female domestic labour, stifling female potentialities, social isolation and vulnerability to abuse (Tamale 2004: 55). In Lamwaka’s fiction, “gender” is invoked as a habituated identity category (male/female), and it manifests as a more liminal space of challenge. Lamwaka’s stories frequently emphasise “the female in contexts of crisis” (Uwakweh 2017: 10), linking gendered war violence to pre-war and post-war lives. Significantly, her stories do not simply conflate “gender” with femaleness. Lamwaka’s fiction avoids this error, which would inhibit the stories from developing relational, intersectional understandings of influential African

110  Sally Ann Murray private/public power dynamics. While her stories may highlight instances of female subjugation and entrenched male prerogative and authority, they also attempt to depict the difficulties of gender allegiances and disaffiliations that striate the interactions of female, male and non-binary individuals. One story may attend to the vulnerable life of a returnee girl child soldier abused by male commanders; yet, in another, we may find suggestions of empathy for a man traumatised by militarised masculinity, and indeed murdered in the conflict. Similarly, a story may depict the challenges of gender non- conformism for an individual, but also give attention to the range of perplexities, hostilities, tolerances or affections for this person that circulate among gender normative villagers. Influenced by Lamwaka’s commitment to fictionally representing gender as it bears on the lives of minoritised subjects, my discussion suggests that her stories embody Elleke Boehmer’s “restorative aesthetics of queerness” (Boehmer 2003: 146). This aesthetic, beyond queerness per se, is moved by an ethical imperative to recuperate African masculinity and femininity from the disabling parameters which typify hegemonic masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity, in effect, genders the shape of Ugandan citizenship, systemically working to reduce women and similar others to spaces of “alienation, frustration, hostility and hopelessness”, marginalised from public influence (Tamale 2004: 54). Lamwaka, though, clearly feels a passionate obligation to treat the story space as one of ethical resolve, exploring avenues towards social justice for those whose gendering limits their belonging to subordinated and exploitable groups. Yet, her characters and scenarios also generate an ethically consequential questioning that does not resolve but eludes closure, for her fiction repeatedly places many received gender ideas and practices under narrative-conceptual pressure. The implication is that the author speculates about gendered identities and roles as both limit and possibility. She invites a reader to ponder “gender” as informed by aspirational dreams and cultural customs, creating a space of mobile representation uneasily between African and Western forms of gender understanding. Lamwaka’s is an ambiguously agentive rendering of gender: her stories rend, as in rip, tearing away the damaging sediment of received norms in the hope of showing damage and restriction; but in this process the stories also seek imaginatively to restore, creatively rendering in ways that search out ethically just and experiential hopeful re-thinkings of gender, possibilities that have been de-legitimised by inherited social categories and naturalised assumptions. As I will discuss later in the chapter, this restorative impulse occurs in tension with conventional ideas of short fiction as offering resolution; Lamwaka’s is a restless, questioning, uncertain energy, even while her stories revert into familiar narrative synthesis. Lamwaka’s imagination takes on the difficult task of envisaging the interstitial and the liminal as they relate to the gender roles and expressions associated with vulnerable identities, and in these dissonant spaces she sets out to consider the extent to

Gender, disruption and reconciliation  111 which hospitable (re)connection is possible. Given the brutal rifts, violence, psychological trauma, social disruption, displacement and poverty that characterised Northern Ugandan life under 20 years of war (a legacy which has continued since the 2006 ceasefire), it is consequential that her stories imagine relationality. This author is driven not only to give fictional remembrance to the lasting psycho-social traumas provoked by military conflict but also to re-member, tentatively envisaging fiction as a way of bringing lives together, linking individuals and communities. Also important, however, is that the stories in Butterfly Dreams conjecture this relationality as neither easily imagined nor easily accomplished. Lamwaka effectively de-centres assumptions about the “universal subject” of trauma through a dedicated focus on the local particulars of a severely traumatised and destabilised (post)war Northern Ugandan society in which gender categories and gender relations are disturbed, struggling to find alignments that do not reprise the naturalised inequalities of what was, before the war. Lamwaka was born in the village of Alokolum in Gulu, the northern part of Uganda known as Acholiland. This intimate local knowledge permeates her fiction, which depicts the debilitating routinisation of war and the legacies of post-war trauma in the conflict between Joseph Kony’s rebel faction (the Lord’s Resistance Army or LRA) and the government’s UPDF, the Uganda People’s Defence Force.1 “Kony and much of his army are ethnic Acholi, and the majority of crimes by the LRA and the UPDF have been perpetrated upon the Acholi people” (Stratford 2015: 14), provoking a split between north and south in Uganda, with rampant suspicion and tension between Acholi and non-Acholi. Danson Kahyana (2014: 159) suggests that Lamwaka’s fiction “shows a nation divided into two: the suffering part (northern Uganda, particularly the war-ravaged Acoli sub-region) and the peaceful part (southern Uganda)”, a division between margin and centre, respectively, which isolates a politically and financially influential southern Uganda from the traumas of ostracised northern groups. In addition, the conflict caused a “fracturing of the Acholi community” itself (Stratford 2015: 14), a protracted pattern of displacement and unsettlement from the late 1980s to roughly 2007 (Stratford 2015: 14). This makes it complex to determine exactly the ambit of war, and post-war, and such overlap is apt for understandings of trauma: trauma endures in effects on the body and the psyche, rather than being amenable to once-and-for-all healing, or reconciliation. Lamwaka’s fiction highlights not only spectacular militarised war violence against girls and women but also day-to-day systemic oppressions that constrain these groups. They are vulnerable due to female bodies which bear the brunt of various forms of systemic, institutionalised masculine power, whether in the context of discriminatory state policies, or severely unequal domestic and legal authority (see Tamale 2004). Such taken-for-granted subjection, Lamwaka’s stories suggest, particularly under conditions of war, becomes commonplace for several vulnerable populations: returnee child soldiers (especially girls who have borne the

112  Sally Ann Murray rebels’ children), older women left without male family support, and young people who eschew normative gender identification.2 In an ethnic civil war, violence may take especially horrifying forms – rape, forced conscription, mutilation, abduction, torture, and the forced murder of family. These violations are most widely experienced by the socially vulnerable, those subject to casual systemic marginalisation due to their relatively low or dependent positions in cultural hierarchies. Being of the female gender, for example, has been identified as an influential risk factor for war violence, and is associated with the likelihood of suffering severe trauma stressors such as rape, as well as low social support, insecure socio-economic integration, poor health and poverty. Women, girls and the gender non-conforming are among “war’s overlooked victims” (Bleasdale 2011: n.p.), and become further minoritised when, post-war, their marginality is indifferently sedimented as the status quo. As I said earlier, though, Lamwaka also casts a sharp light on forms of mundane trauma which precede masculinised military violence, refusing to allow a reader the complacent assumption that trauma is generated only by social disruption. Trauma can be characteristic of the everyday, and even prescribed in both customary and state law, and this further complicates any simple hopes for post-war healing: prejudice against same-sex relations, and homophobic laws which proscribe against queerness; educational ceilings for girls; and the ostracism of childless women. Lamwaka’s stories show that in the Ugandan context, both physical and discursive violence are “a routine part of women’s sexual and domestic lives” (Herman 2015: 28), as well as “an assimilated facet of ordinary life” (Horvitz 2000: 15). Vulnerabilities characteristic of peacetime are aggravated by the disruptive authority of military conflict: villages become sites of suspicion and aggression around gender roles, allegiance and difference. Practices of self-sufficient homesteading are shattered, replaced by the dangerously unsustainable density of more than two million people relegated to displaced people’s camps. In such conditions, girl children are especially exposed to gendered physical violence, and women become increasingly responsible for chores and provisions, even with the extreme scarcity of resources. Notable in Butterfly Dreams and Other Stories are the narrators, who tend to narrate either their own experiences or to reflect on the experiences of family and friends in a dispassionate, matter-of-fact way that attests to the enduring effects of traumatic experience for individual and community. The changeable, unpredictable narrative voices of the stories – especially the many stories with young female child narrators – affectively give credence to forms of trauma so variable and multi-directional as to elude simple solutions, generating a volatile narrative ambience of fatigue, suppressed anger, perplexity, anxiety, repressed memory, and fear of ongoing threat, even as the stories also describe the remarkable ability of damaged subjects to endure, even thrive, under apparently hopeless conditions, and to shape longings for better horizons. The voices of the stories embody the workings

Gender, disruption and reconciliation  113 of trauma – how it permeates body and psyche and a disrupted collective, leaching into and from ravaged individuals, families and communities. But the narrative voices also attest to exceptional emotional strength, personal animation, and resourcefulness. Additionally, a reader’s knowledge of Lamwaka’s lived experience offers an informing filter through which to read her narrators’ voices, releasing an auto-ethnographic inflection into her writing of voices. The scenarios, settings, narrative trajectories and thematic concerns of Butterfly Dreams bear more than a passing resemblance to Lamwaka’s biography: the Northern Ugandan family plot becoming an IDP camp; the village destroyed by the LRA; a child abducted; families separated; the girl grown into a writer who sedulously endeavours, in the service of justice, to produce an animated imaginative archive of the war. In “Silver Fish”, Aya, a struggling young female author is reduced to eating mukene, the cheap little fish that smell of the lake; she rings obliquely true as an autobiographical avatar of “Beatrice Lamwaka”. The author-character in this story is beset by financial and public pressure to write a bestseller or a Mills and Boon, anything but the “boring … war, corruption, AIDS” that “[s]he wrote about … in her stories” (89). She is also unmarried, and childless, but writes a transgressive female authority that carries her beyond the traditional female domestic space and into the wider world, where she engages with questions of gender inequality and injustice, subjects customarily not made public, and certainly not by women. “Silver Fish” lurches between hope and despair, dreams of a future and weary resignation in the face of the limited opportunities that still characterise many African women’s realities (see Tamale 2004). Consequential here is that since her third year at university, Lamwaka was mentored into writing by FEMRITE, the Ugandan Women’s Writers’ Association founded in the University of Makerere’s English Department with the aim of creating a collective of Ugandan women writers (Bwogi 2015; Stratford 2015).3 For Candice Taylor Stratford, “Lamwaka’s engagement with the traumatic effects of war, privation, and violence mirrors the preoccupations of much of FEMRITE’s published works”, with their emphasis on forms of female-gendered abuse such as “rape, domestic violence, incest, sexism, poverty, and political injustice” (Stratford 2015: 3). These are significant narrative-thematic lines of female voicing established by early FEMRITErs such as Mary Karooro Okurut, Goretti Kyomuhendo and Violet Barungi. Yet, Lamwaka also extends these emphases to new account, with her stories being “rooted in the particularities of Acholi experience” (Stratford 2015: 3). In foregrounding the war-torn upheavals of her home district of Gulu in Acholiland, Lamwaka represents the challenges of a specific, politically marginalised Ugandan geographical area and ethnic group treated as stigmatised, even reviled, by the central government. The Acholi are then vulnerable to the violent vicissitudes and militarised masculinities of both the rebel forces and the government troops, as the conflict sows distrust and fear around questions of allegiance.

114  Sally Ann Murray In her short life writing piece “The Garden of Mushrooms”, Lamwaka is most revealing about being Acholi. The memoir outlines the irrevocable changes wrought on Lamwaka’s birth homestead by war, when it became a displaced people’s camp. Lamwaka also recounts the ostracism she felt at university due to her ethnic group being equated by Ugandans with the LRA, Joseph Kony, the rebels, and “the bush”. In the story “Village Queen”, Lamwaka again reworks questions of Acholiness in Uganda, depicting a young female Acholi student being mocked by the sophisticated cool girls for wearing old-fashioned “Sunday best” (19) on campus, and for pronouncing “chips as sips” (20). Both the fiction and the memoir essay suggest that Lamwaka has internalised Acholi ethnicity as a traumatising, often socially-alienating, imperative. The writing conveys a pervasive ambivalence about Acholi identity: on the one hand, it is fundamental to her sense of female self as the narrator of the memoir longs to marry an Acholi man, assuming that he might understand her; on the other hand, she is repelled by the idea of being identified with a community whose members are infamous for extreme male military violence, even against their own, in coercive displays of political loyalty. Overall, the stories in Butterfly Dreams indicate that Lamwaka is eager to give a subtle textual life to Acholiness, beyond the well-known fact of war trauma. Sometimes she does this by venturing into the risky territories of gendered ethnicity, setting her preferred Acholi gender customs in relation to those of another Ugandan ethnic group. “The Missing Letter in the Alphabet”, for example, concerns the letter C, which refers to the young wife’s lack of a clitoris, excised in female circumcision. This is “the ordeal” (102) “that every woman has to experience” proudly (101), “every girl in Kapchorwa” (101), though for the narrator it becomes “the pain that will never leave” (101). But we learn that the female narrator is of the Sabiny group, which practises female genital mutilation against “the source of evil” (101), while her husband is Acholi. The narrator claims that “among the Acholi the C was never a problem and it was left to grow as long as it could. Some people even said they could reach the women’s knees” (103). But in this odd combination of euphemistic reticence and boast about supposedly superior sexual cultural customs, a reader also hears the author’s shadow voice discrediting the rumour upheld by the narrator, the story censuring exaggerated myths of ethnic differences around sexuality as being a dangerous pretext for political division, gender hierarchies, and perhaps genocide. On the wedding night, when the husband discovers what is missing, a gap that presents as an unavoidable limit to both his wife’s sexual pleasure and his perceived sense of male sexual prowess, he leaves her alone in the honeymoon suite in dismay. She is overwhelmed by a welter of emotions: the possible “truth” (as her friends have warned) of irreconcilable ethnic differences, the sorrow of spousal abandonment, the acutely re-awakened physical pain of the girlhood clitoridectomy, and the emotional dismay occasioned by an unceremonious quashing of her romantic fantasies. But Lamwaka ends the

Gender, disruption and reconciliation  115 narrative with the husband’s return; he is “willing to give it a try” (103). For the happy wife, who is purportedly writing the very story we are reading, the “word husband comes easily on paper again” (103). Through the disrupted, yet tentatively re-established intimacy of the newly-weds, Lamwaka gives shape to the discovery of mutual understanding that might be possible in persistent contexts of inter-ethnic hostility and of female circumcision. Significantly, while Lamwaka is Acholi, like the husband in the story, she does not blithely endorse the Acholis being opposed to female genital mutilation as evidence of an innate superiority vis-à-vis the cultural practices of the Sabiny. Instead, the collection as a whole engages the entrenched gendered hierarchies of the Acholi, and several stories draw on an Acholi lexicon and cultural ethnographic repertoire to unsettle the established, often female-damaging, gender norms of Acholi life. “Bonding Ceremony” is another story that involves a marriage, and the narrator makes us aware of the customary constraints on an Acholi woman: she can be married off without even being present, and should the bride have “contributed some money for [her] own dowry” (83), it is not advisable to publicise this among wedding guests. Even a financially independent Kampala woman like the bride, who marries a man with “top government” (85) ties, is unkindly suspected of being money- and status-hungry. (The bride’s mother and brothers were killed in the war; her distant relatives come to the ceremony from far-flung IDP camps; senior male relatives like father and uncle disagree about the dowry; she has been nominally engaged for ten years; and she suppresses thoughts of seeing her fiancé with another woman.) The story brings together the gender inequalities of customary practices and of popular culture, with the DJ at the ceremony constantly playing songs which urge “women to take care of their families” (84). Six weeks after the ceremony, the husband tells his new wife “there is another woman” (84). The narrator’s observations of the wife’s response effect a sanguine mediation of self-agency and social constraint: [Y]ou decide that you won’t be married to Akena. You don’t mind when people call you wife of Akena. You don’t want to say otherwise. He has placed a stamp on your life and everyone has seen it. You will always be wife of Akena. You wonder why he placed the stamp on you. You never get the reason and you may never because you know Acholi marriages never end. 84 The second person voice of the story is intriguing, volatile with multiple contradictory effects of distance and proximity. The voice situates the female protagonist, “you”, as the close object of evaluative narrative scrutiny: she is constantly being watched and commented on, as an Acholi woman. However, before a reader also settles into this role, joining the wedding community in its range of speculative judgements, the voice also

116  Sally Ann Murray swings a reader discomfortingly close to the bride’s conflicted emotions: her enduring sorrow over her murdered mother and brothers; her naive romantic hopes; and her prosaic, adaptive disappointments that attempt to move beyond mere resignation in a transactional marriage economy. The story brings “you” and “I” extremely close, the second person summoning the unshakeable features of customary lore which “you” cannot topple, even as the voice simultaneously imagines what it might mean for an absent “I” personally to “dismantl[e] reified African culture” (Nyanzi 2013: 952) by refusing to live the marriage even as she must remain married, marriage being an emotional-material space that troubles Acholi women’s circumscribed opportunities. This too, Lamwaka implies, is a subtle, enduring form of trauma that a woman needs to survive, however indifferent society may be to its workings. Lamwaka’s fiction risks the implication that even a desirable peace, stability and social reconciliation after 20 years might be associated with an undesirable hardening of the dominant gender norms that have historically governed the Acholi, in terms of which women (and related minoritised “others”) are broadly disempowered. Equally telling is “Chief of the Home”, which through the narrator’s account of Lugul centres on gender orientation as a potentially queer category of Acholi experience for individuals who do not conform to inherited social norms governing male and female behaviours. In his work on queer acceptability in Ugandan short fiction, Edgar Nabutanyi (2015: 245) observes that the fiercely “entrenched and polarised camps in regards to [current] discourses on same sex sexuality” have ensured that “there is no middle ground in Ugandan discourses on homosexuality”, with the hostilities of war having aggravated intolerance. Nabutanyi (2015: 245) reminds us that stories may offer a “nuanced and subtle depiction of same-sex relationships [that] evokes [the] public’s empathy for the depicted subjects” rather than necessarily providing “counter narratives to the polarising discourses on the subject”. He suggests that because stories work at the level of the emotional and not only the ideological, a story that depicts the lives of queer characters as at once rightfully unremarkable and a notable refusal of homophobia in a Ugandan context where same sex rights do not prevail may invest a reader’s energy in a complex, shifting space. The very act of reading performs the difficulty of desire, the movement of thwarting and hope that gender identification and expression in Uganda entail. This framework allows me to read “Chief of the Home” as a story of trauma set in relation to hesitant optimism, because there are multiple elements in the story that preclude easy settlement. Lugul is depicted as gender eccentric; he is called “a mad man”, “possessed by cen, spirits” (160). His socially queer behaviour has made him something of an outcast in the region as “a female-behaving young man” (De Souza 2016: 15). A drunken male villager in Alokolum sneers that Lugul “obedo dako ma lacoo”, meaning that he is “a woman man” (16).4 The implied gender hierarchies entail that a man with an affinity for female roles and work is diminished in his masculinity.

Gender, disruption and reconciliation  117 Yet, in some respects, Lugul arrives and experiences the village as a receptive space, one in which “different sexual orientations – heterosexual and homosexual – peacefully co-existed” (Nabutanyi 2015: 245). Lugul turns up in a pre-war Alokolum where traditional conditions of hospitality towards strangers and those considered strange still prevail. Lugul does cause unease, but he is accommodated, because people know his reputation for “wander[ing] from town to town helping people” (De Souza 2016: 15). For the women of Alokolum, he carries water and wood, sets the cooking fires, and makes peace between arguing spouses – roles not traditionally assumed by an Acholi man. Lugul has no home of his own, and no marriage prospects, which renders him socially unattached, but he is welcomed as a child of the house by the narrator’s mother. Later, with as little explanation, he moves on, and is last heard of in Gulu, still homeless, still sweeping and picking up rubbish, vaguely helping out. Until he is murdered. “Chief of the Home” stages the “performance of sexual instabilities”, inviting us to “read[ ] for dispersed possibilities of queer figuration as alternatives to prevailing expressions” (Osinubi 2016: xviii) which insist on labelling non-conforming sexualities in binary terms. Lamwaka “reclaims the value of imprecision, indirection, and indecision in the communication of nonconforming” sexualities (Osinubi 2016: xviii). The story is one of “queer indirection” (Osinubi 2016: x) that through its very instabilities of naming, indeed its refusal of fixed categorisations, attempts the tricky responsibility of unsettling received descriptors and labels.5 In Osinubi’s terms, Lamwaka “eschews a definite coming-out-narrative” (Osinubi 2016: x), positioning gender as never in unmediated association with sexuality and sexual expression. This, then, is a shadow reminder of powerful but often opaque archives of local knowledge which do not neatly coincide with western vocabularies of queerness. In storying Lugul, Lamwaka shifts the focus to Lugul as a person, exploring through the narrator’s account of this character what he meant to her when she was a child who felt odd, and lacking in friends. Lamwaka shows through the narrator’s tenderly assertive witnessing of Lugul’s life how his unsettled “meanings” percolated, clustered and dispersed, throughout the increasingly war-torn, disrupted village community. Lamwaka uses Lugul’s radically inconclusive social position – evident in respect of his non-binary orientation and his transgressive gender expression – to embody what Keguro Macharia calls the “indifferent native” who “simply wanders off and away from the conundrums” (quoted in Osinubi 2016: xiii) that preoccupy debaters of western (gender) theory. Unfortunately, however, Lugul does not escape the volatile material effects of militarised masculinity: he is killed by soldiers in town, a narrative decision reflecting Lamwaka’s understanding that since the gender marginalised threaten borders of institutionalised gender behaviour, they are liable to be eliminated by agents of patriarchal normativity. The narrative grafts elements of a personal gender-queer story onto a story that includes long cultural traditions set violently in conflict with the pressures of a civil war.

118  Sally Ann Murray The resulting “unfulfilled project of reconciliation” (Osinubi 2016: xi) far exceeds ethnic-national parameters, indeed precedes them, in that the story challenges, and leaves deliberately unresolved, questions around received norms of gender and sexuality. Much is left unsaid, unclear, invisible, a difficult space in which a reader must orientate. What can we really know about Lugul, other than what the narrator recalls? What is the adult narrator’s gender identification – is she also gender-queer? Alternatively, is it even more consequential that, whatever her orientation, she feels an enduring bond with Lugul and his very different expression of masculinity? For me as a reader, such questions remain, after the story ends. This inclines me to extrapolate to questions of queerness Marie Kruger’s comments about “the understanding of… gender in East African women’s literature” (Kruger 2011: 13). An understanding requires a collocation of “simultaneous concern”, for a reader must be cognisant of multiple claims on a writer’s imagination: the liberatory promises and material constraints of the postcolonial nation-state; mobile networks of transnational thought; geographies of social displacement in eastern Africa; and “local cultural practices that determine the intimate details of gender identities and relations” (Kruger 2011: 13). Such claims enter Lamwaka’s stories unevenly, and may elude a reader’s own habituated cultural optics. As a result, the stories are wavering spaces, ambivalent, marked by gaps variously intriguing, and frustrating. Yet, this erratic textual space is also productive, for it resists easy assimilation, offering a destabilising fictional meeting place which combines moments of imaginative estrangement, of projection, and of reassurance. Lamwaka’s stories imply “new ways of imagining gender” that draw on tradition and on modern inflection, offering “multidimensional, and often ambiguous… scenarios” that might “rewrite the potentialities” of inherited gender norms (Kruger 2011: 13). Lamwaka takes the risk of writing the “conflicted narratives” of gender associated with war conflict, and with the post-war context (Kruger 2011: 13). She does not simply “situate gender outside … of colonial” and “African versions of authority” (Kruger 2011: 14); she tries to imagine difficult links between historically competing cultures. “Chief of the Home” embeds questions of gender fluidity and orientation (and fluid thinking on such questions) within the contemporary pressures at work on traditionally normative codes of masculine and feminine in the ruptured Northern Ugandan situation. If the gender non-conforming Lugul is homeless, peripatetic in the extreme and subject to vilification and violation on the merest pretext, he is also not an exception. He may potentially be read as an extreme version of the vulnerabilities of “fragile citizenship” (Oosterom 2011: 396) that, as a result of war and displacement, mute many Ugandans’ will and agency for reconciliation and change, even while these shifts are desired. Consider, for example, that war placed traditional Ugandan masculinities and femininities under duress. Men moved around the countryside less, for fear of being forced into the rebel army. They remained

Gender, disruption and reconciliation  119 close to home, and this tempered their long-standing cultural sense of what it meant to be “properly” male and able to provide for their families. Men’s enforced constraint shifted the burden of movement onto women, who went to tend crops that had habitually been men’s responsibility. This, in turn, made women, often with their children, more susceptible to rape, murder and abduction. Lamwaka’s stories tussle with complicated points of intersectionality between imperilled, gendered, embodied, socially-prescribed and socially proscribed behaviours of femininity, as practised both by her biologically female characters/narrators and by Lugul as a differently identifying young person. Pertinent to “Chief of the Home” is the informing backstory of war and its effects on gendered behaviours. This is not to claim that war has produced Lugul’s orientation, but to speculate that war-changed gender relations in the community influence the responses of female and male villagers to this character. War and displacement “had a rapid and drastic impact on power structures within the household”; men experienced a “loss of control over household material provisioning and decision-making”, meaning the erosion of any embodiment “of a ‘positive’ male presence”, and a damaging attachment to the already destructive powers of traditional hierarchies of authority based on masculinity, and on seniority (Sengupta and Calo 2016: 290). The negative wartime attributes that were often associated with Acholi masculinity – “alcoholic, violent, abusive, dominating, and neglectful – to name a few, have over time become normalised” (Sengupta and Calo 2016: 290). Sengupta and Calo (2016: 293) observe “the link between the upsurge” of domestic, gender-based violence (as featured in “Chief of the Home”) and “negative emotions among men such as deep shame or humiliation, anger, and frustration”. Dolan, citing Moore, explains that much domestic violence is due to “thwarting”, meaning “the inability to sustain or properly take up a gendered subject position, resulting in a crisis, real or imagined, of self-representation and/or social evaluation” (Dolan 2013: 205). The loss of male identity as family provider and protector has led men to abuse alcohol and drugs, and to victimise “minorities considered inferior or weak” (Esuruku quoted in Sengupta and Calo 2016: 293). Even within gender-violent contexts, Lamwaka’s narratives do gesture in the direction of peace and reconciliation between minoritised subjects and more powerful social groups. Her imagination is eager to offer a healing “good news story” that ameliorates trauma, outlining the shapes of individually storied lives in relation to the ongoing (re)storying of Ugandan society. Informing her fiction is a narrative ethical drive to imagine how responses to traumatic situations have the potential to provoke agency, however tentative or yet incoherent, and she clearly perceives the power of fiction to prompt change, her stories illustrating a nexus of variable liminalities in which othered individuals become further othered others, yet reach towards integrated, coherent selves. To this end, Lamwaka does not reify either custom or the contemporary in relation to gender; she explores the uncertain consequences of their fraught encounter, often asking the

120  Sally Ann Murray reader to pause and consider what “reconciliation” or “resolution” might mean for different characters. Take Lugul and his non-conforming identification. For the soldiers who randomly shoot Lugul using the excuse that he is a spy, these words are not positively invested; they are euphemisms for murder, elimination. The words mean something very different than they do for the narrator of “Chief of the Home”, who has her entire life cherished the memory of Lugul as a kind person who happened to be gender nonconforming, and in adulthood she retrospectively honours him through a story that accords Lugul the traditional male title “chief of the home”. At the level of narrative structure, part of the story energy wants to push towards hopeful resolution. Despite having been variously mocked, stigmatised and jokingly tolerated by the men of the village (the narrator’s wife-beating father among them), Lugul is abruptly accepted by the father, with no reason offered for this change of heart. In the end, the two lie buried alongside each other, like father and son, in the narrator’s family plot. Somehow, we are meant to accept the shared burial ground as a symbol, not only of narrative resolution but also of ethical resolve, the reconciliation of major differences in expressions of gender. In other words, patriarchal masculinity has found peace with elusive gender expression. The author’s ethical impulse of reconciliation wishes to override the othering vectors that mark Ugandan cultures, but the story has already been experienced by the reader as riven with unease, and even polarity, which undermines any longed-for hope of emergent shared spaces of gender understanding, whether burial plot or thought space or emotional bond. Lamwaka’s narrative plotting throughout the story has thoroughly complicated simple notions of tolerance, accommodation, forgiveness and reconciliation. The yearning, utopian impulse is compromised in the context of a Uganda still marked by ethnic tension, violence against women, damaged masculinities and legalised homophobia. In terms of equivocal resolutions, consider also “Butterfly Dreams”. The girl Lamunu is abducted at age ten and forcibly conscripted into service by the rebel army. She returns home at 15, but home is scarcely to be recognised as it has been turned into a camp for displaced people and is culturally ruptured, with many people dead or missing. As the narrator emphasises, Lamunu is both visibly scarred and emotionally and verbally deadened. How is the reader to process this? Lamunu seldom speaks, and perhaps this silence is partly to be interpreted as a therapeutic interstitial space en route to healing and lived resilience, since Lamwaka’s fiction not only documents trauma but also imagines alternative, mitigating outcomes that attest to the fortitude of people otherwise too easily designated victims. Lamwaka assigns the female ex-child soldier incredible agency, a fictional illustration of the psychiatric evidence that a child may prove extremely resilient, despite catastrophically adverse experiences. Without her mother’s knowledge – and with no father to intervene on her behalf, as is customary – Lamunu eventually goes to the local school, speaks to the

Gender, disruption and reconciliation  121 principal, and enrols to begin the long journey of fulfilling her youthful aspiration of one day becoming a medical doctor. This is where the story leaves us, arrowing a harmed yet strong, capable, bright girl towards a bright future. Lamunu’s sister, who is the narrator, expresses confidence that Lamunu’s “dreams will come true” and she will “be a doctor some day” (59). This may be a FEMRITE vector in Lamwaka’s story, for despite the many forms of individual and collective silence, isolation and helplessness induced by the violence of the war, FEMRITErs see the writing and the reading of fiction as an “attempt[ ] to narrativize the trauma … in order to arrive at a satisfying degree of healing” (Stratford 2015: 26), hoping to “promote a profound optimism in the possibilities of healing through narrative recuperation” (Stratford 2015: 28). It is often claimed that trauma fiction seldom ends on a celebratory note, and Lamwaka’s fiction wishes, in part, to prove the happy exception: Lamunu is a survivor, and she will realise her “butterfly dreams”. However, as the title hints, given the pervasive damage she has suffered, it is difficult to credit that Lamunu will achieve the sustaining reconnection with ordinary life that psychotherapists associate with successful psychological re-integration. Even as the ending of this story invites us to hope, it simultaneously nudges us to acknowledge precarity. Not only does Lamunu not speak, but she looks away at the assumption that she is weeping tears of happiness to be home, and when government planes fly overhead, her actions indicate that she still identifies with the rebels. Lest terrible news sabotage her homecoming and resettlement, Lamunu’s siblings are also silent on the fact that their father has been murdered by the rebels she served. At several points in the story, the narrator repeats a litany of names, returnee child soldiers who have already shared their testimonies, witnessing for the villagers the traumas about which Lamunu remains resolutely still: We did not ask questions. We have heard the stories before from Anena, Aya, Bongomin, Nyeko, Ayat, Lalum, Auma, Ocheng, Otim, Olam, Uma, Ateng, Akwero, Laker, Odong. Lanyero. Ladu, Timi, Kati. We are sure your story is not any different. 51 The list is disturbingly long, and gives the lie to any likelihood of full disclosure. It becomes a palimpsest authority of trauma experienced by abducted village children, and a proxy for the collective trauma of the ruined community. Lamunu’s silence creates some intentional distance from the murderous perpetrator-victim narrative in which she has been ambiguously embroiled, and such an emotional-spatial interval may enable her to gather a sense of re-integrating self. But the silence is also a spectral hauntology of a girl child’s multiple losses over the years of her abduction, losses not yet properly acknowledged by her family, and yet still constantly present in her thoughts and fears. These losses ghost her future, and are prefigured

122  Sally Ann Murray in the tipu that her family has already buried, having assumed during the protracted period of her absence that she was dead. Lamwaka has said that “Butterfly Dreams” was “one of my most difficult stories to write. I was dealing with emotions and questions that I didn’t know answers for. How do you deal with a formerly abducted child?” (Lamwaka and Anyole 2015: n.p.) Even the language here is unable completely to carry meaning – can a child ever be “formerly” abducted, given that return does not equate with the erasing of abduction trauma? Additionally, the questions Lamwaka is processing are residues of her own familial trauma, as her “brother was once abducted by rebels and when he returned home, he wasn’t the same again” (Lamwaka and Anyole 2015: n.p.). Nyeko was taken by LRA soldiers, and while he managed to escape to the village after several months, he then fell ill and died, largely because the family was too afraid of the rebel violence to leave the house and seek medical help at the hospital (see Stratford 2015). The shift in focus in “Butterfly Dreams”, to a female ex child soldier, evinces an authorial tactic of transference, Lamwaka seeking to use writing to think through the harrowing unknowns of her brother’s violent military kidnapping. The shift comprises a complex scriptotherapy – writing used to work through trauma. On the one hand, Lamwaka processes her own autobiographical, lived loss of her brother: the story “was inspired by the way my family never talked about traumatic experiences and one was left to imagine what could have happened” (Lamwaka 2011: n.p.). On the other hand, the fictional shift specifically to a female protagonist carries the author’s ethical desire to engage with the wider social complication of gender as it played out in the Ugandan conflict. “Butterfly Dreams” seeks to visibilise, through Lamunu, the suffering of thousands of girls kidnapped by the LRA precisely because their femaleness was vulnerable to use, and abuse. As already-habituated social subordinates further diminished in status by ethnic conflict, these girls served as camp wives, sex slaves and domestic workers. In deliberately attempting to work through “the trauma of her own brother’s abduction by creating a story about another abduction” of a girl (Stratford 2015: 26), the narrative arc leads us further away from the certainty of wholeness, bending towards persistent knowledge gaps and displacements that highlight the vast unsaid about female inequality in Ugandan culture.6 This is a ravelled deferral which does not sit easily with the author’s concurrent desire for a hopeful ending to the immediate story, and to the larger story of the Ugandan conflict. Thus, even when Lamwaka’s short stories conclude with some rather sudden, narratively unmotivated resolution that is meant to signal hope in the lives of her marginalised characters, this is seldom credible in terms of either persuasive imaginative plotting or the associated ethical affiliation of better futures for ravaged, minoritised lives. Here, there is a tension between the formal expectations of fictional dénouement and the irresolvable traumas engendered by the Northern Ugandan conflict. In Lamwaka’s stories, I experience the difficult process of the author’s tussling with competing

Gender, disruption and reconciliation  123 options. She wants to achieve the morally persuasive endings and insightful epiphanies conventionally a generic feature of what has been taught as the “good short story”. (Recall the all-too-familiar dramatic structure of the Freytag Pyramid: a trajectory of exposition and rising action, on to variations of crisis, epiphany, climax and then slowly down towards satisfying revelation and closure.) Despite the unassimilable subjects of her stories – Lugul not only queer but dead and Lamunu hesitantly attempting re-integration into a broken system – in order to “end” the stories, Lamwaka can be inclined, at the last narrative minute, to fall back on the reassurances of the “formulaic plotline” (Osinubi 2016: x). This is understandable: the inclination towards resolution represents an authorial investment in creating animated portraits of characters and experiences that cast light on difficult questions of gender inequality, social cohesion, the rebuilding of community and the re-establishing of sustainable life possibilities for those damaged by violence in Northern Uganda. And yet, there is another more centrifugal force at work, one which foregrounds a story’s contradictions and dissenting impulses, and eludes narrative certainty. Pumla Dineo Gqolo’s remarks are astute here: the ending of “Chief of the Home” “reclaims without exaggerating its dues” since “there is no closure, no absolute clarity” (Gqolo 2013: 7). The “histories of violence” of the civil war conflict, as well as the intimate violence of the domestic, family space and of village life, “are interlinked through the persistent production of ‘subjectivities of violence’” (Osinubi 2016: xi) which destabilise any assumptions of peace and reconciliation. What a reader obliquely experiences, in these stories, is an analogy of the ongoing challenges of an Acholi author who, undertaking the writing of fiction as a mode of social life writing, is exerted to discover how to treat the fraught material that derives from her life as a girl and a woman in a wounded culture. In any single story which deals with the war, she seems to be pushed by conflicting impulses. In part, she hopes the story will show the possibilities, “in the end”, of overcoming the damage of inflicted trauma: there might occur a mysterious, even unprecedented, change of heart, or a leap of faith. Here, a stroke of the authorial pen imaginatively wills into being narrative opportunities that in reality seem implausible, even impossible. However, Lamwaka herself seems only partly convinced by such high hopes, for in the stories both personal and historical trauma weigh heavily on the plot, and desolate life circumstances raise their insistently blighting influence, especially when it comes to the lives of girls, women and the gender queer. My preferred reading of Lamwaka’s authorial equivocation around resolution, then, is not to emphasise fault or lack, but to give credit to this author’s determined desire to explore her personal embeddedness in a challenging cultural situation with resolve rather than predetermined resolution, using fiction to address possibilities and limitations. It has also helped me, as a reader of Lamwaka’s stories, to grant my uneven familiarity with their cultural repertoires and referents, and to activate my openness towards uncertainty in the reading process. This has allowed me to

124  Sally Ann Murray accept the author’s inconsistent signalling of both hope and hopelessness in ongoing cycles of social and gender violence, the desire for reconciliation easing the persistence of unhealed political and psychological wounds, but never able to erase them. This brings to mind the suggestion that “the most appropriate literary mode for representing trauma is a ‘middle voice’ – something between the active and passive, the transitive and intransitive – articulated from a stance of … ‘empathic unsettlement’” (LaCapra 2001: 41). In understanding Lamwaka’s fiction, it is precisely this in-between that proves valuable. In terms of the focus on gender and minoritised groups, and her wish to reconcile and to retain provocative gaps between reader and story, Lamwaka’s fiction does important work in addressing questions of gender and trauma.

Notes 1 Rationales for the conflict are complex, with various power-mongering cliques, but do seem to involve the perceived illegality, by the northern guerrillas, of Yoweri Museveni’s continued government power bloc which privileges and enriches southern ethnic groups over their northern counterparts. 2 Lamwaka has a BA (with Education) and an MA in Human Rights, both from Makerere University. She is thus well placed to write fiction which blurs the discursive boundaries of the empirical documentary and the powers of imaginative projection as witness and agency for change. 3 FEMRITE offers workshops and residencies, and publishes books, among them the Caine Prize anthologies which feature Lamwaka’s fiction. Lamwaka’s brief memoiristic tales “The Garden of Mushrooms” and “My Father’s House” were also written under FEMRITE’s mentorship, for the anthology Farming Ashes: Tales of Agony and Resilience (Lamwaka 2009). She participated in the third FEMRITE Residency for African Women Writers in 2011, and was among twenty young African women whose writing skills were developed in a 10-day creative non-fiction workshop organised by FEMRITE in mid-2014, where the theme was “Writing for Social Justice”. 4 Among the Acholi, unmarried youths lack social esteem (Oosterom 2011). According to Ben de Souza (2016: 11), “when a male conducts himself contrary to the prescribed gender roles, he is considered an oddity”. 5 Beyond any explicit “transgender” frame of reference, there are many and shifting terms, contextualised in different African cultures, to denote forms of queer difference. 6 There is much more to be said here about representing trauma and the generic strategies of imaginative fiction in relation to life narrative and autobiographical memory. See, for example, Douglas (2015).

References Bleasdale, Marcus. 2011. Violence against Women: War’s Overlooked Victims. The Economist, 13 January 2011. Available at www.economist.com/node/17900482. Accessed: 4 May 2017. Boehmer, Elleke. 2003. Tropes of Yearning and Dissent: The Troping of Desire in Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38(1): 135–148.

Gender, disruption and reconciliation  125 Bwogi, Andrew Latimer. 2015. FEMRITE, 23 January 2015. Available at www. femriteug.org. Accessed: 29 January 2017. De Souza, Ben. 2016. Homosexuality in African Fiction: Characterisation in Homophobic Culture, Law and Religion in Selected Short Stories. Unpublished BEd dissertation, University of Malawi. Available at www.slideshare.net/ BenSouza/ben-souza-homosexuality-in-african-fiction. Accessed: 1 June 2017. Dolan, Chris. 2013. Social Torture: The Case of Northern Uganda 1986–2006. New York: Berghahn Books. Douglas, Kate. 2015. Ethical Dialogues: Youth, Memoir, and Trauma. a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies 30(2): 271–288. Eaglestone, Robert. 2008. “You Would Not Add to My Suffering if You Knew What I Have Seen”: Holocaust Testimony and Contemporary African Trauma Literature. Studies in the Novel 40(1): 72–85. Gqolo, Pumla Dineo. 2013. Introduction. In Martin, Karen and Makhosazana Xaba (eds) Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction. Braamfontein: MaThoko’s Books, 1–7. Herman, Judith. 2015. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books. Honwana, Alcinda. 2005. Innocent and Guilty: Child-soldiers as Interstitial and Tactical Agents. In Honwana, Alcinda and Filip de Boeck (eds) Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa. London: James Currey, 31–52. ——— 2011. The Ethnography of Political Violence: Child Soldiers in Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Horvitz, Deborah. 2000. Literary Trauma: Sadism, Memory and Sexual Violence in American Women’s Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kahyana, Danson. 2014. Negotiating (Trans)national Identities in Ugandan Literature. Doctoral Thesis, Stellenbosch University. Available at www.hdl.handle. net/10019.1/86498. Accessed: 5 February 2017. Kruger, Marie. 2011. Women’s Literature in Kenya & Uganda: The Trouble with Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Lamwaka, Beatrice. 2009. The Garden of Mushrooms. In Barungi, Violet and Hilda Twongyeirwe (eds) Farming Ashes: Tales of Agony and Resilience. Kampala: Femrite Publications, 45–53. ——— 2011. My Caine Prize Experience. Daily Monitor, 6 August 2011. Available at www.monitor.co.ug/LifeStyle/Reviews/-/691232/1213926/-/clmjl1/-/ Accessed: 4 March 2017. ———2017. Butterfly Dreams and Other Stories. Kampala: Lakalatwe Books. Lamwaka, Beatrice and Manu Anyole. 2015. The Short Story Interview: Beatrice Lamwaka. The Short Story, 1 December 2015. Available at www.theshortstory. co.uk/the-short-story-interview-beatrice-lamwaka/. Accessed: 3 May 2017. Nabutanyi, Edgar. 2015. Writing Queer Acceptability in Ugandan Short Stories. Conference Proceeding: African Literature Association 41st Annual Conference, 245. Available at www.ala2015.com/pdf/ala_2015.pdf. Accessed: 3 March 2017. Nyanzi, Stella. 2013. Dismantling Reified African Culture through Localised Homosexualities in Uganda. Culture, Health & Sexuality 15(8): 952–967. Oosterom, Marjoke. 2011. Gender and Fragile Citizenship in Uganda: The Case of Acholi Women. Gender & Development 19(3): 395–408.

126  Sally Ann Murray Osinubi, Taiwo Adetunji. 2016. Queer Prolepsis and the Sexual Commons: An Introduction. Research in African Literatures 47(2): vii–xxiii. Sengupta, Anasuya and Muriel Calo. 2016. Shifting Gender Roles: An Analysis of Violence against Women in Post-conflict Uganda. Development in Practice 26(3): 285–297. Stratford, Candice Taylor. 2015. “Healing a Hurting Heart”: FEMRITE’s Use of Narrative and Community as Catalysts for Traumatic Healing. Unpublished MA dissertation: Brigham Young University. Available at www.scholarsarchive.byu. edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5435&context=etd. Accessed: 5 February 2017. Tamale, Sylvia. 2004. Gender Trauma in Africa: Enhancing Women’s Links to Resources. Journal of African Law 48(1): 50–61. Uwakweh, Pauline. 2012. (Re)Constructing Masculinity and Femininity in African War Narratives: The Youth in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Gorretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War. Journal of the African Literature Association 7(1): 93–106. ——— 2017. Introduction: Exploring African Women and the War Experience – A Critical Update. In Uwakweh, Pauline (ed.) African Women under Fire: Literary Discourses in War and Conflict. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 3–22.

Part III

Subverting stories of war

8

Women and violence on the Algerian screen Documenting les années noires in Yasmina Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida and Djamila Sahraoui’s Barakat! (Enough!) Valérie K. Orlando

Introduction Recent 21st century films such as Sofia Djama’s Mollement, Un Samedi Matin (Softly one Saturday Morning, 2012), Nadia Cherabi’s L’Envers du Miroir (The Otherside of the Mirror, 2007) and Fatma-Zhor Zamoun’s Z’har (Unlucky, 2009) all announce a new generation of Algerian women filmmakers who are making groundbreaking films that move women into the forefront of social progress and, at the same time, document the violence of the Algerian civil war of the 1990s to early 2000s. Women overwhelmingly were the most victimised in communities across the country during the conflict. In particular, the films Rachida (Bachir-Chouikh 2002) and Barakat! (Enough!, Sahraoui 2006) are two excellent examples that explore the violence inflicted on women during the rise of the Front Islamique du Salut (Islamic Salvation Front) and the ensuing war waged between these radicalised Islamists and the Algerian government’s military forces. During Les années noires, the “Black Decade” as it is now infamously known, almost 200,000 people lost their lives. This chapter explores these two films as salient examples documenting the conflicted and complicated roles Algerian women had to negotiate in society during the civil war. They also allude to what women face currently in the post-années noires, as they seek ways to heal physically and psychologically from this trauma. Sophie Belot (2015) names these films as part of le cinéma d’urgence (crisis cinema) that has developed in Algeria in the 2000s. This particular genre “challenges the official discourse” provided by Algerian authorities by offering other versions, or untold stories, about the Revolution and the more recent Civil War (Belot 2015: 59). These cinematic counter-narratives, often written by women filmmakers, focus on privileging the “individual Algerian woman” and the heroic acts she takes as she seeks to change her fate and fight for her rights and those of her community (Belot 2015: 59).

130  Valérie K. Orlando The films made within the framework of “crisis cinema” have emerged as a response to the Black Decade which has witnessed little documentation, scrutiny or prosecution of the persecutors for the crimes that were committed. The Algerian civil war remains a 15-year period cast in shadow and silence. Very little has been revealed about the violence that ripped apart the entire country. These films are interesting for what they communicate about the civil war years with respect to women and their enduring trauma: first as victims who survived and persevered (Rachida) and second as negotiators (Barakat!) of their own feminine identity in a country whose own past and future are obscure. Additionally, they explore the important roles that women play in public space, and how they are integral to healing the wounds of contemporary Algeria. The films considered here also dispel the “consensus that Algerian women have not moved forward after the War of Liberation” of 1954–1962 as mistresses of their own destiny, owing to the various socio-cultural and political barriers to women’s emancipation that have been enacted since independence (Belot 2015: 58). The most noticeable of these repressive official barriers was the legislation of the Code de la famille (the Algerian Family Code) in 1984. According to Belot (2015: 50), “the Family Code [is] a piece of legislation that decrees men’s superiority and codifies women’s subordination. The code makes women minors under the law, treats them as non-citizens and defines their role primarily as daughters, mothers, or wives”. In reality, the Code sanctioned state repression of women and later offered a political opening for the fundamentalist, Taliban-like Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) to gain political significance in the late 1980s to early 1990s. As women filmmakers have become more vocal about overturning the repressive socio-cultural and political barriers of the country, I would posit here that philosophically their works reflect Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe’s view that women in African millennial societies engender “the promise of another body and of another life” for the societies of the continent (Mbembe 2006: 171). Mbembe’s philosophy, dedicated to exploring the agency of women as contributors to the socio-cultural and political challenges and changes that must take place in African societies across the continent in the new millennium, rings true for Algeria in the 2000s. In general, his feminist views as expressed in two seminal works (Mbembe 2000, 2006) stress the importance of women’s active participation in African society as a means to advance new socio-political agendas in African nations in our contemporary globalised world. These agendas contribute to what Mbembe (2006: 172) stipulates as “other historical alternatives” to postcolonial master narratives of postcolonial states. Mbembe’s framework, promoting alternative narratives for African postcolonial nations, is appropriate for analysing the cultural production of Algeria in the wake of the 1990s civil war. With respect to the roles created for women in films made since 2000, the cinematic works discussed in this essay demonstrate a new “idiom of female power” (Mbembe 2006: 171) in the

Women and violence on the Algerian screen  131 aftermath of the incessant violence witnessed in the 1990s and early 2000s in Algeria. The roles women play on screen exemplify that women today in Algeria can no longer be “reduced to the position of object” (Mbembe 2006: 171) as they often were in earlier films where they were silenced mothers or martyrs for the state. Women’s noticeable presence on the screen in recent Algerian films has also influenced the way filmmakers are depicting the other, alternative stories of Algeria which have often been sidelined or simply left untold, primarily those of ethnic minorities (particularly Berber communities in rural areas), women and youth which were silenced in the cinematic and historical past.1 The “idioms” of female power articulated in these films challenge the overdetermined, masculine narratives of Algerian post-revolutionary cinema written immediately after independence in 1962. Bachir-Chouikh’s and Sahraoui’s films also wrestle the art form from the nation’s ruling, one party, dogmatic Front de Libération Nationale’s (FLN) master narrative which dictated the storylines of Algerian cinema for decades, sidelining the inherent ethnic and linguistic diversity of the country. These feminine contemporary films challenge postcolonial “mechanisms of representation” that were constructed immediately after Algerian decolonisation (Khanna 2008: 12). Women have become the linchpin for progress and social change, both on screen and behind the camera, as they challenge the “construction of the Nation-Image” that held them hostage to the patriarchal status quo in the 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s, a status quo that defined all “gender relations in Algeria” (Hadj-Moussa 2014: 156). In films of this century, women are no longer depicted as reproductive agents and “the guardians of deeper Arab-Islamic values” (Hadj-Moussa 2014: 156). Rather, they are, in this rebuilding moment of Algerian cinema, questioning what Mbembe states is “the phallus … and the birthing of manhood”, rooted in the “birthing of the nation” in the narratives of African postcolonial states (Mbembe 2006: 174). Like western feminists of the past, a new generation of Algerian women social-activist filmmakers in the post-années noires years are questioning the phallocentric frameworks of Algerian national cinema. Underscoring the hurdles and mixed messages women confront daily in contemporary Algeria, 33-year-old filmmaker Sofia Djama notes: The rights of women in Algeria are such that you can’t be feminist in the traditional sense. There are things you can’t even discuss or negotiate …. On one hand, I consider myself totally free … I have a right to wear a skirt, to go to the beach – the law doesn’t ban me from doing so. If I don’t want to fast during Ramadan, the law doesn’t oblige me to. But from the perspective of social morality, it’s absolutely forbidden. The Guardian (2012: n.p.) Rachida and Barakat! are salient examples of some of the films that have emerged in the early 2000s as a response to the cloaked violence against

132  Valérie K. Orlando women committed during the Black Decade, but that has rarely been revealed for scrutiny in the national documentation on the civil war. Although these films were made in the first decade of the 21st century, each evokes interesting possibilities for women as well as, symbolically and metaphorically, for the nation of Algeria as the country moves forward in the new millennium. Despite the socio-cultural and political adversity which compromises women’s total enfranchisement in Algerian society, both films demonstrate their heroines’ resolve and commitment to building a liveable country for the future.

The masculine stories of the Mujahidin: the FLN’s master narrative on screen In general, millennial Algerian films also mark a significant break with the highly masculinised and dogmatic themes of the past that grounded cinema of the 1960s to 1990s. Contemporary films give birth to a new Algerian cinema that has emerged from the trauma of the 1990s, a timeframe during which cinema was “overwhelmed by the social, political and human events of the civil war that destroyed in a tragic manner the entire country” (Tesson 2003: 5). The rebuilding of the cinema industry in Algeria has also led to the re-thinking of the genres held dear by filmmakers immediately following the Algerian revolution of 1954–1962. The most important of these genres was the “cinema of the mujahidin” known for its overarching trope of the hyper-masculinised freedom fighter who liberates the nation from the coloniser. This particular genre contributed to maintaining the one-sided story of the Algerian postcolonial nation for decades after independence. One of the interesting aspects of both films considered here is how they disassociate their narratives from the Front de la Liberation (FLN)’s hyper-masculinised, didactic and dogmatic themes of the past in order to present a truer picture of Algeria as a country that is multi-facetted, diverse and inclusive, most certainly of the roles women played and the adversity they had to negotiate during the past revolution (1954–1962) and the later civil war (1992–2005). Early revolutionary films promoted “nationalist imaginary” devoted to mythological scenarios that grounded the “cinéma moudjahid or ‘freedom fighter’ cinema of the 1960s”, glorifying the men who contributed to the revolution (Austin 2011: 196). This unifying message from the outset of the postcolonial period marginalised three “particular identities” to the sidelines: Berber, women and youth (Austin 2011: 196).2 Historian Benjamin Stora (1994) underscores that the FLN’s narrative was responsible for effacing any dissent from minority groups or competing, alternative stories. Films made in the wake of the famous neo-realist film, The Battle of Algiers (1965) by Italian Gillo Pontecorvo, considered one of the first films to celebrate Algerian “male heroes as the martyrs of the revolution” as well as the unifying messages of FLN dogma, fostered a stylised masculinecentred narrative that was reified constantly during the late 1960s and early

Women and violence on the Algerian screen  133 1970s in films such as Tewfik Fares’s Les Hors-la-loi (Outlaws, 1968), Ahmed Rachedi’s L’Opium et le Bâton (Opium and the Stick, 1969), Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina’s Le Vent des Aurès (Wind of the Aurès, 1966) and the later Chronique des Années de Braise (Chronicle of the Years of Embers, 1974) (Sharpe 2015: 450). This era is known mostly for “how directors … represent male identity in mythical, hagiographic and demiurgic terms” and, consequently, how they repeatedly disavowed any questioning of “patriarchal ideology” as the mainstay of the one-party state (Sharpe 2015: 450). In early films, women were cast in the background, as silent and passive, despite their heroic depictions in Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers as active members of the maquis (participating as les porteuses de bombes), tortured by the French military, and ultimately responsible equally with men for helping to bring the war effort to its fruition. In indigenous Algerian films, however, scenarios of the 1960s and 1970s depicted women overwhelmingly as mothers and wives of men lost in the war, as victims without voices. Even Pontecorvo’s film casts women in ways that made it difficult to find alternative representations in film scripts later in the decade (Khanna 2008: 124). One of the first films to counter the staid depictions of women as silenced and victimised was the stylised documentary La Nouba des Femmes de Mont Chenoua (The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua) made by celebrated author and member of the Académie Française, Assia Djebar. Her 1977 film took two years to make and traces the forgotten voices of women who participated in the struggle for independence in the rural mountain communities of Algeria. Fragmented by numerous stories told from different perspectives, the film leaves audiences perplexed about the outcomes of women’s post-revolutionary lives. The nebulous female accounts portrayed mirror the socio-political confusion of the postcolonial Algerian nation which offer no “unifying theme” but rather a “universe that … invites us to contemplate … a world in progress, in gestation” (Bensmaïa 2003: 84). Djebar’s early films, such as La Nouba, and the later La Zerda, ou les Chants de l’Oubli (Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting, 1982) began to mark a slow break from the nationalist, overly masculinised histoire-fiction of the 1960s’ “mujahidin cinema” genre, as more women filmmakers contributed films to the nationalised Algerian film industry.3 The social discourse of Algerian films changes in the late 1970s to early 1980s to focus on women who rebel against paternal authority in order to pursue individualistic goals of education and emancipation. Films like Rih al-Janub (Wind from the South, 1975) by Mohamed Slim Riad and the later Houria by Sid Ali Mazif (1986) are viewed as offering positive social commentaries on women wanting to pursue individual betterment for themselves as well as the “economic development needed to emancipate and educate [them]” in general (Discacciati 2000: 37). Ironically, these emancipatory films furnished alternative scenarios for women in a decade which was marked by the repressive reform of the 1982 Algerian Family Code, legislation that greatly restricted women’s rights in public and domestic

134  Valérie K. Orlando spaces in Algeria (Lazreg 1994). The Family Code was a legislative concession to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism that had been steadily increasing since the late 1970s. Islamists called for strict adherence to Shari’a law as a means to thwart what was perceived as the growing westernisation of the country. The year 1988 was “a watershed year” for the social unravelling of the country during which the people lost faith in the narrative of the nation and its ideologues of the FLN (Austin 2012: 13). This loss of faith escalated the easy rise of the Islamic front, Le Front Islamique du Salut (FIS).4 Austin (2012: 13–14) notes the following about 1988: The disjuncture between the Algerian people and the state reached a nadir in Black October of 1988 …. For the first time in the history of independent Algeria the violence of the regime became undeniably explicit as the army fired on the people, with hundreds of protestors killed and many survivors tortured in incarceration. Since most of those slaughtered were the young of Algeria, born after the revolution, the significance of their deaths had a lasting impact on the psyche of the nation, as journalist Benamar Mediene notes: “In October 1988 [the deaths of] Algerian youth neutralized or cancelled out the founding, legitimizing sign of nationalist power, its symbolic payment, namely the ‘blood of the martyrs’, was paid by its own blood” (quoted in Austin 2012: 14). The FLN-led state’s slaughter of hundreds brought the FIS to power. Their legitimate win in elections in 1992 was followed by the suspension of these same elections and the declaration of a state of emergency during the following years as the civil war escalated. At the end of the bloodshed in 2005, when an Armistice with the FIS was signed, some estimated 200,000 people had been killed (Austin 2012).

Uncovering the postmemory of collective Algerian trauma Efforts to heal collective memory about the Algerian civil war, and even the more distant trauma of the Algerian War of Revolution, have been slow and painful for Algerian filmmakers. The burden of how to depict and remember past traumas –historic and more recent – has fallen to those who can construct a process, or a framework, for healing. Scholar Marianne Hirsch (2012) terms this the postmemory process. Postmemory is a p ertinent concept for discussing how the films Rachida and Barakat! can be viewed as integral components to the healing of Algerian collective trauma. Art forms constructed within a postmemory framework aid in describing the relationship that ‘the generation after’ bears to personal, collective and cultural trauma of those who came before – to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among

Women and violence on the Algerian screen  135 which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation. Hirsch (2012: 5–6) Films by Algerian women filmmakers in the late 1990s to early 2000s have been particularly successful at telling the stories of the recent past through postmemory narratives. Algérie: La Vie Quand Même (Algeria: Life all the Same, 1998), Djamila Sahraoui’s first film, documents the filmmaker’s return to Kabylia whereupon she gives the camera to her cousin in order to give a voice to disenfranchised youths. Habiba Djahnine’s 2008 filmdocumentary, Lettre à ma Sœur (Letter to my Sister), tells the story of the filmmaker’s sister, Nabila Djahnine, a feminist civil rights advocate working in Tizi-Ouzou who was killed in 1996 by the FIS. Djamila Sahraoui’s more recent film Yema (2012) also depicts the civil war and how the atrocities committed during the conflict affected women’s lives. All these women’s films, in addition to Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida and Sahraoui’s Barakat!, depict women’s roles and actions in society as key to resistance during the civil war and, presently, as healers of the nation. As Belot (2015: 59) underscores, since “Algerian women are still seen as the carriers and transmitters of national identity” their visible presence on screen and behind the camera is imperative to contributing to the well-being of the nation’s psyche as the country moves forward in the new millennium. Not only do films of the 2000s centrally locate women as the generators of memory and change, challenging the silence surrounding the civil war of the 1990s, but they also engage the hyper-masculinised master narrative of the FLN in order dismantle it.5 Film has become, therefore, the perfect medium through which to scrutinise the civil war for what has not been said or admitted to by either the government or members of the Islamic Salvation Front since the armistice charter was signed in 2005. Contemporary Algerian female filmmakers’ films are the place of postmemory: a hybrid space where the silences of the past are exposed in the cinematic voices of women working in the present to make sure that the Algerian history of men and women is equally remembered. Rachida Yamina Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida (2002) depicts women’s resistance to the Islamic fundamentalism of the FIS in the 1990s. Rachida is a young schoolteacher and the victim of a gunshot to the stomach in the streets of Algiers. The young man who shoots her is her former student and now a member of a local terrorist gang associated with the FIS. Rachida is shot because she refuses to carry the terrorists’ bomb to the school for their radical Islamic cause. Subsequently, she and her mother, Aïcha, escape to a remote

136  Valérie K. Orlando village so that she may recover psychologically from the post-traumatic stress resulting from her experience. Rachida’s perseverance as a woman who refuses to wear the hijab (veil), and who, after deciding to remain in the village indefinitely to teach grade school, determined even more to instruct the little girls there, becomes a symbol for justice for so many Algerian women who were silenced or even killed during this time (Brahimi 2009).6 Bachir-Chouikh is one of the first cineastes to go on record as specifically articulating the role of film in national healing and, thus, generating a postmemory process that would also document the civil war. She remarks in a 2003 interview that Rachida struck a chord with whole families who went to see it: Cela n’était pas arrivé depuis La Bataille d’Alger, depuis 1965. C’est le même phénomène : des gens viennent voir leur histoire, la première représentation des dix dernières années de leur vie. Plus de dix ans en fait car on est dans cette violence depuis 1988 (That hasn’t happened since The Battle of Algiers, in 1965. It’s the same phenomenon: people came to see their history, the first representation of the last ten years of their lives. We have been in this violence since 1988). Lequeret and Tesson (2003: 31) Bachir-Chouikh emphasises that Rachida “n’est pas une histoire sur le terrorisme. Mais … j’ai fait un film sur une violence, un peuple, sur le non-sens de la violence, et sur ce qui la nourrit” (is not a story of terrorism. But … I made a film on violence, a people, on the nonsense of violence and what nourishes it) (Lequeret and Tesson 2003: 31).7 Despite risking the lives of her crew and her own as they filmed in the streets of Algiers, Bachir-Chouikh persevered and added that she also achieved the film with no help from official state funding sources (Lequeret and Tesson 2003). Rachida is an interesting film on many levels. Denise Brahimi (2009: 153–54) called the film a “tragedy” for its portrayal of a “heroine overtaken by the events of the time which overwhelm her” as she flees one violent space for another. Rachida is also lauded for her resistance as she “revolts against her victimization” by returning to teach the day after the massacre in the village (Brahimi 2009: 155). The film’s ending suggests that Algeria will come out of the violence to see a better day. This sentiment is conveyed in the last minute of the film when, standing in front of her class of students who have obediently taken their seats in the ransacked classroom, Rachida writes on the board “today’s lesson” in Arabic and then looks directly into the camera with a face filled with resolve. Bachir-Chouikh’s most daring messages evoked through dialogues between the women in the film centre around several salient messages. First, that obscurity surrounding perpetrators – who is killing whom (qui tue qui?), a question constantly asked by authors, journalists, filmmakers and the Algerian people during the 1990s – is a piece of the civil-war puzzle that remains unsolved. The filmmaker is careful not to, at any point, name killers by faction. Those who wield guns and terrorise are simply called

Women and violence on the Algerian screen  137 ­

138  Valérie K. Orlando order to be at the disposal of their husbands at all times …. Their mere presence in public was described as ‘seditious’ and they were required to don the Islamic hijab, covering them from top to toe and to return to the home. Ahmed (1992: 232) Despite her physical victimisation, Rachida refuses to give up on her country. Bachir-Chouikh makes a third point about the extent to which people were invested in staying in Algeria, despite the violence raging around them. Rachida even professes that she prefers shoes “made in Algeria” rather than Europe. When hiding out in the village, her only means of entertainment to take her mind off her situation is to listen to popular Raï music which at the time was banned by the FIS for its sexually suggestive themes. It is known as music listened to clandestinely and is present in films such as Bab el-oued City (Allouache 1994) as a symbol of resistance. In Rachida, BachirChouikh blends traditional and modern scores. Cheb Hasni, Cheb Akli, Reinette l’Oranaise, S.O.S. and El Anka (popular groups and singers of the 1990s Raï scene) give Rachida the sustenance to continue living. Music and dance performed by women, either Rachida by herself in her garden, dancing to her radio, or women dancing in a wedding held in the village despite the turmoil, are all performances of resistance to the staunch hard-line dogma of the FIS. A fourth important point the filmmaker transmits is the clear demarcation between the FIS’s corruption of Islam and a notion of the religion as pure and without reproach. Rachida’s secular views and individualism are contrasted with her mother’s devout beliefs rooted in the pure tenets of Islam. When Rachida is shot, Aïcha runs out into the street, screaming “what is this religion that allows them to kill people?” Yet, at no time does her pious commitment to true Islam waver. She is seen praying five times a day, and she emphasises to Rachida that to heal they must all forgive using the parameters of spirituality. With the daily killings listed in reports on the radio, including the one depicting the 1996 slaughter of the 11 French monks of the Abbey of Tibhirine, it is not only Muslims who are victims but also Christians and innocent villagers caught in the crossfire.8 The most poignant message Bachir-Chouikh makes in her film is about the variety of women present in the country, as she notes in an interview: “I wanted to show the diversity of women in the country. Women with the hijab and without” (Lequeret and Tesson 2003: 30). However, we cannot discount the staunch feminist interpretations of socio-political realms that are constants throughout the film. At no time does Rachida brush aside her commitment to secular and emancipated views. She refuses to wear the hijab, even when threatened, and jokes to the conservative women in the village with whom she teaches that she does not need it to “buy a husband”. The young woman is resolute and will not comply with the radical Islamisation influencing women’s dress codes taking place in Algiers and later in

Women and violence on the Algerian screen  139 the village. In the opening scenes of the film, the camera focusses up close on her lips as she carefully applies bright red lipstick. Her hair is wildly beautiful and full, curly and worn loose most of the time to indicate that she is corporeally free in public space. Played by Ibtissem Djouadi, appearing here in her first film, Rachida walks defiantly in the streets of Algiers. She wears pants and tight-fitting skirts which accent her willowy frame, refusing to kowtow to the traditionalism of the hijab and conventional interpretations of the Qur’an. When the village school’s principal gropes and harasses her by demanding “what’s a beautiful, young single girl from the city doing in a village?” she shrugs him off and defiantly states: “all children have a right to an education”. The very idea of locking women up behind doors and interior spaces is constantly challenged in Bachir-Chouikh’s film. Once recovered from her gunshot wound, Rachida briefly returns to Algiers to see her fiancé who has had no news of her. They swim freely in the ocean, and lie in the sun on the beach. Their relationship is “modern” and unencumbered for a brief moment by the war raging around them. However, despite his wishes, Rachida refuses definitively to come back to the city to marry him, at least for the present time. Their relationship is left openended. The young woman’s first and foremost concern is for the children whom she teaches. Bachir-Chouikh’s overall focus on the protection of children as necessary for the future hope of the country is constantly reified in scenes throughout the film. There is innocence to be found in the ruins of war, thus caring for children, whose “mothers are in prison and fathers are terrorists”, becomes the mission of all the women in the village. “Those kids didn’t choose their parents”, Rachida quips, suggesting that the hundreds of orphans of the war will have to be taken care of if the future is to be brighter. After the massacre in the village, it is the children who defiantly return to the school with Rachida to start a new beginning. Produced in 2002, Bachir-Chouikh’s film marks a cautious opening to the period of healing that weakly continues in Algeria to this day. In 2005 an Armistice with the FIS was signed with the FLN government.9 Rachida encapsulates the first stage in a process of socio-cultural healing that will hopefully lead to finding ways for Algerian society to contextualise its postmemory. Barakat! Djamila Sahraoui’s 2006 first feature-length film, Barakat! (Enough!), follows several excellent documentaries she made in the 1990s. These include La Moitié du Ciel d’Allah (Half of God’s Sky), Algérie la Vie Toujours (Algeria, Still Life), and Et les Arbres Poussent en Kabylie (And Trees Grow in Kabylia). As film critic Olivier Barlet (2006: n.p.) notes, Djamila Sahraoui wanted to shift to fiction in order to explore the limits of what cannot be said in front of a camera with respect to how the violence [of the civil war years] acts as a cancer within Algerian society.

140  Valérie K. Orlando Her film literally says “basta!” (Barakat! in Arabic) to the silences of both the civil war and the earlier revolutionary period during which women made enormous sacrifices but were rarely credited for having contributed significantly, sometimes with their lives, to the FLN maquis (Barlet 2006). Barakat! is set in the early 1990s just as the civil war between the Islamic fundamentalists of the FIS and the Algerian army began their slaughter. The film is the story of two women, both significantly emotionally scarred by war and violence. Amel (Rachida Brakni) is a young doctor, defying the civil war everyday as she drives to the hospital to try to save the wounded and dying who have been the victims of the senseless violence raging across the country. Amel turns to her co-worker, Khadija (Fettouma Bouamari), an older former nurse and freedom fighter in the mujahidin who fought the French during the revolution (1954–1962) and who is also living with her own scars and wounds from this violent past. Khadija literally lives with physical pain from the revolution (her knees have been damaged) and, although strong-willed, must contend with the ghosts of the war which she chases away by excessively chain smoking and popping pain pills. When Amel’s husband, Mourad, a journalist for a leftist (Francophone) newspaper particularly bent on denouncing the government and its failure to secure the country for its people, goes missing, Amel makes it her mission to find him. After days of searching around in the village on her own, Amel finally divulges to Khadija that her husband has disappeared. Khadija volunteers to help find him. The film sets up an intimate dimension of female solidarity through the portrayal of two women who not only combine their efforts to find Amel’s husband but also bring two bloody moments in Algeria’s postcolonial history into the same time span to create a milieu of collective postmemory. Their efforts, at least on screen, rectify the collective amnesia of a country that has never come to terms with either its bloody colonial history or postcolonial reality. Using her contacts and networks of former freedom fighters (some of whom are now members of the FIS), Khadija uncovers information about the whereabouts of Amel’s husband. In order to find Mourad, the two women must venture into the mountains, known to be favoured hideouts of the FIS. In a region where the FLN’s freedom fighters used the advantageous mountains, with their concealed caves, woods and unforgiving terrain, to fight against the French army, the area is now exceedingly dangerous for women and the innocents caught in the “faux barrages” (fake barricades) and sniper bullets of the roving GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé), the armed military wing of the fundamentalists. The mountains, like almost everywhere else, are a forbidden, outside space dangerous for women. Sahraoui’s film is interesting for its gendered spaces and messages. Curiously, although men are overbearing and brutish, several are also effaced and victimised. For example, we never see Mourad who is not found until the end of the film; he is found alive, but not revealed to the audience. And “Le Vieux”, the old man who befriends the two women on their quest

Women and violence on the Algerian screen  141 to find Mourad, speaks little about the horrific events through which he has lived from the time of the revolution to the present chaos of the civil war. These rare exceptions though are consumed by the more general depictions of men who are hostile, vicious, blood thirsty and as unforgiving as the aggressive terrain. Men are overwhelmingly perpetrators of atrocities and responsible for the chaos of random violence that plagues the country. More than a simple commentary on the brutishness of men and their power, Sahraoui’s film evokes the idea that violence has increased because of the hyper-patriarchy of radical Islam, left to fester slowly in the country for years. This radicalism emerged from earlier legislation such as the 1984 Code de la famille, legislation drafted by the FLN postcolonial government. Although Amel defies the gender divisions between public and private spaces, using her profession as a doctor to drive her car (even sometimes at night) to attend to the sick and wounded, she is still constantly reminded of her fragile status “outside”. When she and Khadija dare to penetrate a café where only men are seated at tables, they confront hostile stares, remarks and bodily harm. It is only when Amel pulls out a gun, threatening the men surrounding them, that they are able to escape. Khadija with her short hair and make-up refuses to bend under the will of the fundamentalist politics that have overtaken the country, claiming that women have always fought to free Algeria, why should they hide now? As the women drive openly on a deserted road up the mountains to look for the FIS camp where Amel suspects her husband is being held, Khadija becomes increasingly nervous. When a lone car tries to run them off the road, the man behind the wheel shouts at the women, “sluts get off the road, let working men pass”, thus implying that women have no place on desolate mountain passes. Khadija responds to him, shouting: “tell that to your mother, we are respectable women”. He replies, “respectable women are not on the road”. Khadija claims her right to be there, stating that “the road is as much mine as yours”. The entire incident leads Amel to quip “pays de merde” (in French), thus equating the entire public space of the state as inhospitable to women. Khadija then makes Amel stop the car. She gets out and proceeds to put on the traditional haik and niqab, covering her face and body from the nose down. These are the garments of the past, used to “cloak” women in the streets. “We’ll give those bastards respectable women”, she affirms, getting back in the car. In cloaking herself in the traditional garb, Khadija also calls on audiences to think in terms of collective memory with respect to the haïk and its use during the Algerian War of Independence. Often worn by women during the revolution to pass arms and munitions to the freedom fighters fighting the French, the dress was anything but a passive tool for respectability. The haïk again brings back memories of Gillo Pontecorvo’s iconic film La Bataille d’Alger (1966), depicting scenes of Algerian women (and men) using the heavy coverings for body and face to move guns and ammunition in the back streets of Algiers in order to plant bombs as they fought the French army. Amel, much younger, does not understand

142  Valérie K. Orlando Khadija’s reasoning for putting on the repressive covering, telling her: “Take off your ‘muzzle’, so that I can hear what you’re saying”. Incongruous with the traditional attire, Khadija’s face hidden underneath the niqab is made up, complete with lipstick, leading Amel to ask her: “why are you dolled up like that?” Khadija responds: “to be respectable”. Amel asks her again to “take it off”. There is no place for either make-up or traditional dress in the inhospitable mountains. Climbing up into the FIS-held enclaves means looking and acting like a man for Amel, much like it did for the women rebel fighters of the FLN during the war of liberation forty years in the past. For the younger woman, born after the revolution, the history of how to survive as a female maquis fighter is obscure; it is information of a former era about which she is not familiar. The disconnect between Amel and Khadija is one of a generation, resulting, as Marnia Lazreg notes, from a “depth of resentment and difficulty of communication between women belonging to different time frames. The development of time has drawn young women further from their mothers, without necessarily bringing them closer to men’s time” (Lazreg 1994: 181). Once the women find the FIS hideout, Khadija produces a gun from her handbag, switching into freedom fighter mode, her modus operandi from her time in the maquis. Yet, the women are quickly overpowered by other members of the gang with bigger guns. They are taken to their headquarters. Miraculously, the women are not raped or killed because the gang members need Amel’s medical expertise to patch up one of their wounded. Her husband, Mourad, is nowhere to be found. Interestingly, the dialogue between all characters takes place in French, thus taking the idea of healing and “Hippocratic oath”, which Amel must obey as a doctor, to an extra-diegetic space that is not divided by public or private gendered views. The men leave Amel to tend to their wounded soldier. Khadija is taken to speak to the head of the GIA camp. She discovers he is an old comrade in arms named Slimane with whom she fought during the revolution. He tells her: “you haven’t changed, you are still blowing with the wind”. She responds: “like during the war of revolution?” He answers: “That’s in the past, I’m talking about this war”. He chastises her for coming in “that getup” (meaning her traditional haik and niqab) and she reminds him that “in the past, [he] liked it … it was certainly good for planting bombs against the French”. Khadija thus exposes the hypocrisy of the present civil war spurred on by beliefs that are full of religious fallacies and hypocrisies. The leader attempts to discount their prior relationship, stating that it was a thing of “the past”. For Khadija, the past evokes “des bons souvenirs”. This former female mujahidin reminds audiences that “history isn’t made with memories, we make it with reality”. She further tells Slimane that he has forgotten the past and what it stood for in terms of the freed country of Algeria: “you have forgotten freedom”. It is difficult to fathom how he could not remember, since he has been physically maimed by the 1954–1962 revolution. His legs are “scarred” and he walks with a limp. She defies him,

Women and violence on the Algerian screen  143 alluding to the fact that it was she, as a nurse in the maquis, “who healed [his] leg, the bullet in [his] back, in [his] shoulder, and in [his] neck”. In short, the violence meted out on his body by the French was wiped away by her Algerian feminine hands and nursing skills. These wounds “must still hurt you from time to time”, she notes. The past for Khadija cannot be forgotten; it is ingrained in the very wounds of the former freedom fighters. However, Slimane has chosen to lay this same past aside for a corrupt new cause that is damaging and wounding by its violence. On the way back down the mountain after being released from the thugs, the two women come on a farmhouse occupied by an old man (played by Zahir Bouzrar). He speaks little, but gives them food and shelter for the night. He is effaced and unassuming. They later learn that he also has been a victim of this war with no name. He has lost his wife and two sons. He ends up helping the two women, using his cart and horse to take them back to Aïn Sbaa. Like Khadija, the Old Man (we never learn his name) also is of the era of the revolution. He shares her dignity and disgust over what Algeria has become. Together the three form a reconstituted family solidified by Amel referring to Khadija as “petite mère” and the Old Man referring to Amel as “daughter.” This reconstituted family conveys to audiences what Algeria could be: a country where there is respect and dignity shared between men and women. Sahraoui’s film does end on a somewhat hopeful note. Amel finds her husband tied up in her neighbour’s garage, a victim of the local FIS gang of Aïn Sbaa. In the closing scene from her balcony, the younger woman observes Khadija and the Old Man standing on the beach as ocean water rolls in over their bare feet. Khadija takes Amel’s revolver from her rucksack and throws it in the sea, shouting “barakat!” (enough!). “Barakat”, echoes the Old Man, as they both turn to walk away down the beach. Two women from different generations and one man have come together to unite in their solidarity against violence and war, thus demonstrating that both genders can rise “to the word in post-colonial Algeria” in order to combat the threat of “violent silencing” (Lazreg 1994: 226). This silence keeps undocumented atrocities, in Hirsch’s words, “in the past”, allowing thus for their “continuity” in the present (Hirsch 2012: 6). The present of Sahraoui’s cinematic text opens up these silences, forcing them to be heard and read anew.

Conclusion Rachida and Barakat! mark a new era in Algerian filmmaking by women cineastes. Not only do these films probe the untold stories of women during the civil war, but they also delve further back into the past of the War of Revolution to reveal how women contributed to Algeria, socially and politically, as the postcolonial nation emerged. These films articulate the healing process that must take place in a country that also must find ways to negotiate the traumas of this same past if it is ever going to assure the future generations of young people who are now facing the challenges of

144  Valérie K. Orlando our globalised era. In the past, the nationalism of the emerging postcolonial nation conceptualised, as Mbembe states, “power as a masculinist prerogative … firmly inscrib[ing] resistance in the framework of a war between men” (Mbembe 2006: 171). The FLN’s master narrative allowed for only one story, thus sidelining the many others that should be told as the country seeks to rebuild itself in the post-civil war era. The insular, singular script that has dominated the nation’s revolutionary and postcolonial history is no longer applicable for the external, international pressures of global markets. Nor is it appropriate for internal, national calls for equality between men and women and recognition of the diverse populations that live in the country. Algeria, as elsewhere on the African continent, must form new ways of thinking about its national representation. Its cultural production, specifically cinema, is key to contributing to meaningful debates concerning history and the 21st century present. Additionally, filmmakers’ conception of cinema as representing the actuality of their time means both challenging the socio-political nepotism of state authorities and giving voice to the voiceless of the country: women, children and Berber communities. A lgerian films in the post-années noires are documents for witnessing the past as well as proposing the “what ifs” and the “could bes” of a new generation.

Notes 1 International critical acclaim for the now iconic Berber films from the late 1990s, La Colline Oubliée (The Forgotten Hill, 1997) by Abderrahmane Bouguermouh and La Montagne de Baya (Baya’s Mountain, 1997) by Azzedine Meddour, has led to historically silenced groups in Algerian film becoming more visibly present in films of the 2000s. Other Berber films include Machaho (1994) by Belkacem Hadjadj, Mimezrane (2007) by Ali Mouzaoui, and La Maison Jaune [The Yellow House, 2008] by Amor Hakkar. 2 There are four Berber groups in Algeria: Kabyle, Chaoui, Mozabite and Toureg. 3 In addition to Assia Djebar, from the late 1970s onward women contributed films to Algeria’s cinematographic industry. Yasmina Bachir-Chouikh, Fatma Zohra Zamoun, Djamila Sahraoui, and the young documentarist Safinez Bousbia have all added films to the growing oeuvre of female works. 4 Founded in 1989, the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) won regional and local elections in June 1990 and the first round of parliamentary elections in December 1991. Before the second round of elections scheduled for January 1992, the oligarchic pouvoir (military and technocratic power establishment) deposed President Chadli Benjedid and terminated the elections. In March, the government declared the FIS an illegal party. These events provoked civil strife that claimed 150,000–200,000 Algerian lives. The FIS’s military wing, the Armée Islamique du Salut (Islamic Salvation Army) disbanded, taking advantage of the government’s 1999 Civil Concord Law’s amnesty programme. 5 In addition to rethinking genres and styles, film critic Ahmed Bedjaoui (2015: 136) notes that “filmmakers have organized themselves into production companies and are trying to find the financing that the film market is incapable of generating” at the state level. Attesting to this transformation of Algerian cinema at all levels, an article entitled “Algerian Cinema: A New Wave is Emerging” by Djamila Ould Khettab (2016) focusses on new and upcoming cineastes, many of whom are women. Khettab (2016: n.p.) notes that

Women and violence on the Algerian screen  145 this new generation of self-taught Algerian filmmakers … [grew] up without ever having seen the inside of a cinema. Their enthusiasm for cinema has paid off with some already making breakthroughs in the festival circuit, and they all wish to see Algeria’s once-celebrated cinema flourish again.

6 7 8

9

Increasingly, Algerian filmmakers coming of age in the new millennium are working across mediums, genres and styles with diverse funding possibilities. Young cineastes such as Yasmine Chouikh (daughter of Yamina Bachir-Chouikh), born in the early 1980s, are multi-talented, working as writers, journalists and film directors. The absence of style, genre and training lead, most of all, to a free-flowing concept of what cinema should be and do in Algerian society, thus opening up new channels, unfettered by traditional cinematic paradigms. During the civil war, the FIS slaughtered many women schoolteachers, most particularly those who refused to wear the hijab. Bachir-Chouikh’s own brother was killed by assassination. Mention of this incident is particularly noteworthy since mystery has surrounded it for years. As reported in the French and Algerian press, the circumstances of the monks’ kidnapping and then killing are controversial. It was first believed and reported in the 1990s that the Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armé) wing of the FIS claimed responsibility for both. However, in 2009, then retired General François Buchwalter reported that the monks had been accidentally killed by the Algerian army. Again, the discrepancy between accounts demonstrates the extent to which reporting on the details of the civil war, as well as getting at the truth, needs to be rectified. By the time the exhausted country approved the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation in 2005, the violence had significantly waned (although Algiers suffered bombings in 2007). The FIS remains an illegal party, although moderate Islamist parties are permitted.

References Ahmed, Leila. 1992. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press. Allouache, Merzak. 1994. Bab el-oued City. Algeria: La Sept Cinéma. Austin, Guy. 2011. Spaces of the Dispossessed in Algerian Cinema. Modern & Contemporary France 19(2): 195–208. ——— 2012. Algerian National Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bachir-Chouikh, Yamina. 2002. Rachida. Algeria: Global Film Initiative. Barlet, Olivier. 2006. Barakat! by Djamila Sahraoui. Africultures, 1 June 2006. Available at http://africultures.com/barakat-4443/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_ medium=email&utm_campaign=459. Accessed: 27 July 2017. Bedjaoui, Ahmed. 2015. Sixty Years of Algerian Cinema. Black Renaissance/ Renaissance Noire 15(1): 126–139. Belot, Sophie. 2015. Algerian Women in Motion in Djamila Sahraoui’s Barakat! JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies 26: 45–63. Bensmaïa, Réda. 2003. Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bouguermouh, Abderrahmane. 1997. La Colline Oubliée. Algeria: Abderrahmane Bouguermouh. Brahimi, Denise. 2009. 50 Ans de Cinéma Maghrébin. Paris: Minerve. Cherabi, Nadia. 2007. L’Envers du Miroir. Algeria: Procom International.

146  Valérie K. Orlando Discacciati, Leyla. 2000. The Image of Women in Algerian and Tunisian Cinema. ISM Newsletter 5/00 No 37. Available at https://middleeast.library.cornell.edu/ content/image-women-algerian-and-tunisian-cinema. Accessed: 27 July 2017. Djama, Sofia. 2012. Mollement, Un Samedi Matin. Algeria: Praxis Films. Hadj-Moussa, Ratiba. 2014. The Past’s Suffering and the Body’s Suffering: Algerian Cinema and the Challenge of Experience. In Hadj-Moussa, Ratiba and Michael Nijhawan (eds) Suffering, Art, and Aesthetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 151–176. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Khanna, Ranjana. 2008. Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830-Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Khettab, Djamila Ould. 2016. Algerian Cinema: A New Wave is Emerging. Middle East Eye, 7 September 2016. Available at https://www.middleeasteye.net/features/ algerian-cinema-new-wave-emerging. Accessed: 27 July 2017. Lazreg, Marnia. 1994. The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. New York: Routledge. Lequeret, Elisabeth and Charles Tesson. 2003. Yamina Bachir-Chouikh. Cahiers du Cinéma 31: 26–31. Mbembe, Achille. 2000. De la Postcolonie: Essai sur l’Imagination Politique dans l’Afrique Contemporaine. Paris: Karthala. ——— 2006. On the Postcolony: A Brief Response to Critics. African Identities 4(2): 143–178. Sahraoui, Djamila. 2006. Barakat! Algeria: Les Films d’Ici. Sharpe, Mani. 2015. Representing Masculinity in Postcolonial Algerian Cinema. The Journal of North African Studies 20(3): 450–465. Stora, Benjamin. 1994. Histoire de l’Algérie depuis l’Indépendance. Paris: Editions La Découverte. Tesson, Charles. 2003. L’Etat des Lieux. Cahiers du Cinéma 31: 5. The Guardian. 2012. New Africa: The Film-maker Exploring Feminism in Algeria. The Guardian, 26 August 2012. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2012/aug/26/new-africa-film-maker-feminism-algeria. Accessed: 27 July 2017. Zamoun, Fatma-Zhor. 2009. Z’har. Algeria: CNC.

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“A strange combination of femininity and menace” Re-thinking the figure of the female soldier in Nadifa Mohamed’s The Orchard of Lost Souls Lynda Gichanda Spencer

Nadifa Mohamed’s second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls (2013), tells a story that centres on the “world of pain and discrimination” (Mohamed and Sheel 2015: n.p.) experienced by Somali women during wartime. Unlike her first novel, Black Mamba Boy (2010), this focus on women arose out of her realisation that her first novel follows the story of men: Black Mamba Boy is a semi-biographical narrative that chronicles her father’s life. In the novel, the protagonist Jama – a ten-year-old boy – embarks on a journey throughout eastern Africa in search of his father. Tina Steiner (2016: 176) describes the novel as an adventure tale and a historical narrative of “migration, loss and survival”. Mohamed admits – in an interview with filmmaker Iman Sheel – that Black Mamba Boy is a “book about men in many ways” (Mohamed and Sheel 2015: n.p.). In The Orchard of Lost Souls (hereafter referred to as Orchard), Mohamed turns her attention to the women in her family. Certain aspects of the narrative are based on the story of her grandmother who was paralysed and abandoned in Hargeisa at the beginning of the civil war in Somaliland and later died in a refugee camp.1 Put differently, Mohamed revisits the war in Somaliland to give an account of women’s experiences from a female perspective. Orchard is a fictionalised account of Somaliland on the brink of civil war. In 1981, the Somali National Movement, an armed oppositional group with a base in Ethiopia which was situated in the North West region, was formed to overthrow the Siad Barre regime. By 1986, freedom of movement was restricted in this region because of extreme violence such as rape and gang rape and the increasing membership of the Somali National Movement. By 1988, the Somali National Movement had captured the two major towns of Burao and Hargeisa. The Somali government responded by heavy shelling and aerial bombardment, as a result of which thousands of civilians lost their lives and thousands were forced to flee to Ethiopia. This is the historical period that Mohamed returns to in Orchard. In Orchard, Mohamed follows in the footsteps of other African women writers such as Maaza Mengiste, Zoë Wicomb, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,

148  Lynda Gichanda Spencer Buchi Emecheta, Yvonne Vera, Assia Djebar, Goretti Kyomuhendo, Mary Karooro Okurut and Lília Momplé who interpret and depict various historical wars in Africa through a gendered lens. This chapter focusses on Mohamed’s literary representation of an ambitious, yet reluctant, female soldier who inhabits a world of complexity, tension and ambivalence as she struggles to construct a sense of identity in her role as a soldier. My reading of Orchard suggests that in Africa, women are not only always victims of war but are also combatants deeply involved in active warfare. Sometimes women may act as guardians and defenders of the nation, but they also perpetrate violent acts, gross human rights violations and state-sanctioned terror to maintain control over civilians; in turn, they are complicit in propping up patriarchal structures. My feminist analysis of Orchard illustrates that this institutionalised violence is a structural weapon that silences and disempowers women, and this gendered violence disregards the human rights of women in Africa. My focus is on how the novel depicts Filsan as an ambiguous and contradictory female combatant who challenges patriarchal ideas of “‘masculine’ aggression and ‘feminine’ pacifism” (Moji 2014: 5). I am interested in re-thinking the elusive figure of the female soldier, who simultaneously experiences gendered abuse while inflicting violence on the vulnerable. Like Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story (2002), Mohamed’s contribution to narratives of conflict foregrounds the roles that women play as combatants. In David’s Story, there are a number of disruptive female figures who include Sally, a former Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) cadre, and Dulcie, an MK commander.2 While Wicomb’s narrative is a fictionalised account of the participation of female guerrillas in the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), Mohamed offers us a new perspective in her portrayal of Filsan, a female soldier actively involved in the armed forces of the nation-state of Somaliland. This female-authored revisionist account of conflict in the Somali region encourages us to reflect on the various roles of women and children during wartime. By focalising three female protagonists from different generations, Mohamed represents diverse perspectives of the conflict in Somaliland. Through her portrayal of a woman warrior and two survivors, Mohamed delves into the connections, intricacies and intimacies that women forge during wartime. Although most war narratives tend to chronicle the conquests of male soldiers, Mohamed’s depiction of a female soldier simultaneously explodes the myth that war is a “totally male affair” (Cock 1994: 153), while presenting a complex understanding about strength, honour and equality in the army. By proffering a reading which destabilises and disrupts the dominant narratives and perceptions on war, the novel suggests that the battlefield can no longer be regarded as an exclusively masculinised terrain. Put another way, Mohamed’s concerns with women in war, women at war and the war on women allows me to interrogate the representation of gender and the military from a feminist perspective. My feminist perspective draws on theories of gender and nationalism, women in the military, gendered violence during times of war and the role of women in the nation.

Re-thinking the female soldier  149 Elsewhere, I have argued that Anne McClintock contends that all nationalisms are gendered, invented and dangerous (Spencer 2015), while Cynthia Enloe claims that nationalisms have “typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope” (quoted in McClintock 1995: 353). Unsurprisingly, over an extended period of time, the nation begins to construct a history that creates particular kinds of masculinities and femininities of its citizens. As a result, nationalist struggles embody an unmistakeably courageous male figure whose brave sacrifices during war allow him to claim citizenship of the nation at the end of the conflict. The same narratives “celebrate iconic images of women in their symbolic roles as mothers, wives and custodians of the nation. In such representations, women are elided from the arena of action and denied any direct relation to national agency” (Spencer 2015: 111). Meredeth Turshen (1998) interrogates the relationship between wars, the military and issues of masculinity. She mentions two aspects: first, that wars tend to create militarised societies, and second that there is an “ideology of gender roles [that] links masculinity to militarism” (Turshen 1998: 5). Feminist analysts describe the armed forces as an “archetypical patriarchal” institution: The military is a male preserve, run by men and for men according to masculine ideas of male bonding, male privilege, and militarist values derived from definitions of masculinity. This observation is not based on biological traits of men, not on sociobiological attributions of behaviour, but on cultural constructions of manliness and the social institutionalization of the military. Turshen (1998: 5) When it comes to war and armed conflict, modern society tends to locate women and men at “opposite ends of a moral continuum” (Turshen 1998: 7). Often, women are considered to be peaceful and passive, while men are seen as aggressive and active. “As war is so often associated with these generalised images of masculinity and femininity, women have become associated with life-giving and men with life-taking” (quoted in Coulter, Persson and Utas 2008: 7). Symbolically, the nation tends to be depicted as feminine, and therefore the image of women as symbols of the nation is used by men, who embody the nation, to limit women’s roles. These kinds of stereotypical dichotomies that demonise men in war as violent and hostile and valorise or depict women as innocent by-standers are problematic. Although there is an element of truth in them, they also conceal, negate and mute the reality that women are sometimes directly involved in the hostilities during times of war. Occasionally, this is through voluntary conscription into the national army; largely it is through forced conscription into rebellious armed movements. On the whole, war is not an exclusively male domain: women in various roles actively participate in its social, economic and political structures.

150  Lynda Gichanda Spencer Feminists and gender activists have drawn our attention to how sexual violence is integral to women’s experience of war (see Boyd 1989; Cock 1994; Goldblatt and Meintjes 1998; Turshen 1998; Modise and Curnow 2000; Pillay 2001; Sideris 2001). Gendered violence is widely used to intimidate and brutalise women and children, by institutions such as the military, rebel forces and, as recent reports have indicated, even peace-keeping forces. These discussions tend to focus on civilians, and rightly so. However, there is a “deafening silence” on violence inflicted on women by fellow combatants, whether it is on behalf of the nation-state, rebel movements, opposing forces or even peace-keeping forces. To reiterate, because we tend to associate war and combatants with masculinised entities, we run the risk of neglecting the experiences of female soldiers. Yet female soldiers are at a far higher risk of sexual violence from male counterparts within their own forces than they are from those among the enemy. For example, speaking about her experiences as a former commander in MK during the South African liberation struggle, Thandi Modise disclosed that in the ANC camps she had to fight a two-pronged war: “one against apartheid, the second against the misogyny of many of her male comrades” (Modise and Curnow 2000: 36). This is why revisionist accounts of war such as Orchard are extremely important. These literary representations offer an attempt to reclaim women’s voices from the margins of history and foreground their contribution during war, while underscoring the various forms of agency and resistance that women take on. In Orchard, Mohamed represents women’s experience of war and the disintegration of the home and the nation. In particular, the novel explores violence as part of women’s experience in war, both as civilians and as combatants. Second, Orchard interrogates how and why female combatants are complicit in the atrocities committed on civilians. My reading of the novel is interested in women’s subjectivities and the complex pressures on them, specifically in relation to Filsan. As a female soldier, Filsan is in a precarious position: on the one hand, she is seen as “a new kind of woman” (215) trying to carve a space for herself in the military; on the other hand, because the military is a highly patriarchal space, she is expected to conform to normative gender roles. According to Mohamed, Somalian society has drastically changed, from a nomadic way of life during pre-colonial times to new economics, opportunities and challenges that were ushered in by the colonial period and then to the post-independent era which experienced a dictatorship that had promised to change “the way men behaved and the way women are” (Mohamed and Sheel 2015: n.p.). Mohamed observes that Filsan’s character represents the women who were born in post-independent Somaliland and who were encouraged to take advantage of numerous opportunities open to them, such as education, which would allow them to enter the work place (Mohamed and Sheel 2015). Mohamed describes this as a dichotomy where you were not a traditional woman, but then you did not have the same rights as a man, so you are stuck especially in a male

Re-thinking the female soldier  151 world like the military where violence, authority and power are seen as male traits. Mohamed and Sheel (2015: n.p.) As a literary representation of women in and of the nation, Orchard illuminates important themes that have been analysed by critics such as Sylvia Tamale (1999), Patricia McFadden (2005) and Meg Samuelson (2007a). These critics have noted that there is a disjuncture between what women want from institutions such as the nation and the military and the continuing impact of patriarchal discourses within these institutions. When women move into the public domain, they expect to be offered egalitarianism and progress, but instead they encounter a masculinist and patriarchal environment that is extremely hostile and does not respect their human rights. Sylvia Tamale’s analysis of women’s political participation in Uganda begins with the pre-colonial era (Tamale 1999). She notes that although men dominated patriarchal spaces, it is inaccurate to surmise that politics was the exclusive domain of men. Tamale (1999) argues that there is a misunderstanding of what constituted the private and public spheres before colonialism. During the pre-colonial era, there was fluidity between the private and the public domain. Women were not confined to the domestic sphere; instead, “multiple responsibilities between and across spheres shaped their political history, the political/juridical spheres heavily depending on personal relationships that women could (and often did) influence” (Byanyima quoted in Tamale 1999: 5).3 Similarly, in her discussion on African women and citizenship, Patricia McFadden (2005) focusses on Zimbabwe and illustrates how the transition from a colonial to a post-colonial society brought about new socio-political challenges for women. McFadden (2005) argues that on the eve of independence, the Lancaster House Agreement offered many Zimbabweans limited social, educational and economic benefits, but it did not fundamentally change the structure of society, meaning that not all Zimbabwean citizens had equal rights.4 In her discussion on the transitional period in South Africa’s history, Meg Samuelson (2007b: 11) offers a critique of “narrative productions and performance of female subjectivity in and of the nation during the making of a new South Africa”. Using the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as an example, Samuelson (2007b) argues that the hearings were supposed to provide a space in which victims of violence during apartheid could give testimony, but women found that they were restricted, as they were simply reduced to their symbolic roles. However, even in these confined spaces, women were able to find gaps in which they inserted “alternative stories of the past and alternative self-constructions” (Samuelson 2007b: 9). To put it differently, the women demonstrated that they were not passive, submissive symbols but active subjects capable of articulating their concerns and demanding recognition for their sacrifices.

152  Lynda Gichanda Spencer Tamale (1999), McFadden (2005) and Samuelson (2007b) may be discussing events in three different countries, yet I notice a common thread that connects their discussions. They are making the point that even though women contributed to the anti-colonial or anti-apartheid struggles, this participation was erased, ignored or neglected after independence was realised. Women must take the authority that they derive from their involvement in liberation struggles as a right to claim ownership and citizenship of the nation. In the same vein, in re-imagining Somaliland and its military, Mohamed illustrates how the nation is appropriated by masculinist interests that are deeply engrained in patriarchal institutions. As mentioned earlier, through the eyes of three female protagonists from three different generations, whose lives accidently collide into each other, the novel offers us the intricate experiences of women from various sides of the conflict in Somaliland. Deqo is a nine-year-old orphan, while Filsan who is in her thirties is a corporal in the Somali Armed Forces and Kawsar is a widow in her late fifties. Mohamed also gives us a glimpse into the entangled lives of these three characters as they try to deal with intimacies in their complex worlds. In the novel, it is 21 October 1987, the 18th year anniversary of a military coup that ushered in the dictatorial regime of President Oodweyne. Every region in the country has to commemorate this auspicious occasion with elaborate celebrations. In the town of Hargeisa, the Military-Governor of the North Western Region, General Haaruun, has been tasked to oversee the ceremony. It is on this day through a twist of fate that the three protagonists first encounter each other. All the female residents of Hargeisa have been coerced by the Guddi – a neighbourhood watch unit that the regime uses to make sure that its citizens act in accordance with the rules – to assemble at the local stadium, where they are forced to participate in sham revelries: The mothers of the revolution have been called from their kitchens, from their chores, to show foreign dignitaries how loved the regime is, how grateful they are for the milk and peace it has brought them. It needs women to make it seem human. 7 One of the mothers of the revolution, Kawsar, is reluctant to take part in this façade, since she holds General Haaruun personally responsible for the death of her daughter Hodan. At the same time, Deqo, an orphan from the Saba’ad refugee camp, has been lured to participate in a traditional dance routine in exchange for a new pair of shoes. But when the synchronised dance begins, a nervous Deqo forgets the steps. This embarrasses the Guddi who yanks her out of the group and shoves her into a dark space between the stands and proceeds to punch and insult the young girl. Kawsar, who w itnesses this unwarranted thrashing, suddenly “feels something has broken loose inside her, something that has been dammed up – love, rage, a sense of justice even;

Re-thinking the female soldier  153 she doesn’t know what, but it heats her blood” (21). Kawsar’s repressed rage shows how women are required to suppress any experiences and emotions that contradict the dominant narrative of the nation. Ignoring the pleas of her friends Kawsar feels compelled to act out, and she rushes to rescue the child from her attackers. In the melee that ensues, Deqo escapes into the city streets. Kawsar is arrested for causing “a public nuisance during the celebration” (25) and taken to the central police station by Filsan who is the military officer in charge of that section of the stadium. While Kawsar is thrown into a filthy prison cell, which she shares with other women, Filsan returns to resume her duties at the stadium. By attempting to intervene on behalf of Deqo, Kawsar acts out of character and challenges societal expectations of women. The women’s attendance at this event is compulsory; they have been forced to participate because the military regime wants to put on a façade that it cares about its citizens. The novel suggests that the women get pulled out of their designated spaces in order to provide legitimacy to the military. When Kawsar attempts to defend Deqo and when Deqo escapes into the streets, both characters step out of their assigned roles, meaning they are not acting accordingly. Kawsar’s deliberate decision to break out, albeit momentarily, could be read symbolically. The novel seems to suggest that when women consciously choose to reject their given positions in society, they challenge paternalistic structures that seek to confine them, while violent reaction from the authorities means that they need to be disciplined. Adan Ali Filsan works for the Internal Security agency and is the daughter of Irroleh, a high-ranking military officer who works in the Ministry of Defence. At five years of age, her mother leaves her father for another man. Her father subsequently grants her mother a divorce on condition that he gets full custody of Filsan. She grows up under the strict guidance of her authoritarian father; in fact, her mother calls her “his hostage” (258).5 On the one hand, he is a conservative and controlling father who is afraid that she will follow in her mother’s footsteps; on the other hand, he wants her to “be a new kind of woman with the same abilities and opportunities as any man” (215). Filsan is caught in a dilemma: she respects her father, but she is also petrified of him. Her decision to join the military can be read as a desperate need for his approval. If she can succeed in this masculinised space, then she will have fulfilled her father’s expectations of being “a new kind of woman” (215). Irroleh’s vision is that as an educated woman, Filsan’s entry into the military will give her access to all the rights and privileges of a citizen. As a prominent male officer in an exceedingly hierarchal structure, his experiences of the army are completely different from hers. The complicated relationship between father and daughter resonates with the very problematic gender dynamics in the military. In the private space of the family and the public domain of the military and the nation, power and control are held by authoritarian men. In a different but slightly related context, Codou Bop (2001: 20–21) points out that the military symbolises force and power, and therefore to “become part of it means that one belongs

154  Lynda Gichanda Spencer to a dominant group”. The sense of authority that comes with belonging to a dominant group gives women soldiers the agency to transform how they see themselves, and how they are perceived by those in power and those subjected to their abuse. They begin to envision themselves as fighters and liberators of their country and not as wives or mothers. In Orchard, Filsan follows in her father’s footsteps, because her ambition is to be recognised as a highly competent soldier. Her relationship with the army becomes very problematic. Although she wants to demonstrate that she is a professional soldier, she is also constantly aware that she is expected to behave in a feminine manner. When we first encounter her, she commands authority and is portrayed as an officer in charge, determined to move up the ranks, but she is also acutely aware of her femininity: Filsan […] looks at the empty dais where General Haaruun will sit with the dignitaries and imagines herself placed in the centre, not as his companion but as his successor, waving down to her subjects. Her boots are polished beautifully, her khaki uniform clean and sharply pressed, and the black beret on her head brushed and angled just so. She has lined her eyes discreetly with kohl and pressed colour onto her lips with her fingers. She looks herself but a little better, a touch more feminine; she has resisted playing these games until now, but if the other female soldiers get noticed this way, maybe she can too. 9 Indeed, General Haaruun does notice her and sends a male sergeant to inform her that he would like her to accompany him to the Oriental Hotel where he is scheduled to meet the American attaché. As a soldier, she must obey orders from her superior. As an ambitious soldier, she convinces herself that she is being recognised “for the sharpness of her uniform, the straightness of her back, the smartness of her salute” (31). What she fails or refuses to see is that in this highly patriarchal and hierarchal institution, the lines between soldier and female soldier are intensified. She is forced to behave as a woman in a sexist culture rather than the competent and respected soldier her father expects her to be. At the hotel, in his conversation with the American attaché, the General applauds the Somali government for affording equal opportunities to women. In a show of national patriotism he sings the praises of Somali women who “work, […] fight in our military, serve as engineers, spies, doctors” (35). He continues to boast: “I bet you this girl can strip a Kalashnikov in a minute” (35). As if to demonstrate his point, General Haaruun grabs Filsan’s hand and raises it before twirling her around. “Look buddy … You’re going to tell me that American women can be trained killers and still look this good?” (35). Both men find this combination of femininity and menace interesting, but they are completely fascinated by Filsan’s sexuality, as the American responds: “Not bad, not bad. I wouldn’t want to meet her down a dark alley.

Re-thinking the female soldier  155 Or maybe I would if it was the right kind of alley” (36). General Haaruun clasps the attaché’s shoulder and hoots his approval before recovering himself. Filsan is completely humiliated by this exchange; contrary to what she has convinced herself to believe, namely, that she is a professional soldier, this misogynistic conversation shows that “[e]ven in her uniform [these men] see nothing more than breasts and a hole. He knows who her father is but still parades her like a prostitute” (36). In spite of the discomfiture of being defined in terms of her sexuality, when the General offers to give her a lift back to the barracks Filsan reluctantly accepts, because she “wants to salvage some of the hopes she had for the meeting, he might still offer her his patronage. Rearranging her features into an expression of gratitude, she nods acquiescence” (36). This inappropriate exchange may be at the level of suggestion, but it foreshadows what happens next in the car: ‘Take your hat off.’ The General’s voice is more sober now. Filsan unpins the hat from her head. Her hair is bundled up on top. ‘Let it out. Let me see it down.’ Filsan responds quickly to orders, she always has done, her father made sure of that. ‘Do it quickly and do it well,’ he instilled in her. 37–38 The General proceeds to caress her face and even entices her by offering to make her life easy in the military and to give her whatever she wants. She increasingly becomes uncomfortable with his sexual advances, because she knows this is the kind of behaviour that her father abhors, so she asks the General to stop his sexual harassment. But this only serves to infuriate the General. As a man with power and authority, he is used to getting what he wants. When he realises that his sexual persuasion is futile, he resorts to sexual coercion: Both his arms wrap around her, one hand padding around for her belt and zip. […] Filsan grabs General Haaruun’s hand and throws it away. ‘No! No! No!’ She hits his chest with both palms at each word. ‘Do not touch me.’ ‘Stop the car!’ he shouts. […] Reaching around to the door handle, he opens the passenger door and pushes Filsan out of the car. ‘Abu kinitiro, you cunt, you make your own way home.’ Filsan lands on her knees in plain view of maybe twenty soldiers, the jeep headlight making the scene as bright as day. […] She rises to her feet, her head whirring, and walks to the nearest light source. 38–39 Filsan is subjected to sexist behaviour that betrays her and her father’s hopes about the military. Although she refuses to become a victim of sexual violence, this image of her prostrate on her knees symbolises her complete abjection and humiliation, and this embarrassment in turn fuels her rage.

156  Lynda Gichanda Spencer Filled with indignation, she heads to the central police station and demands to see Kawsar whom she proceeds to interrogate, but a defiant Kawsar is unwilling to cooperate and this rebelliousness exacerbates Filsan’s anger. She contemplates that this “old woman, Kawsar, has not only cleared her mind but is kindling a fire in it; she thinks she is a gangster or something, refusing to look at Filsan and shrugging nonchalantly at questions” (43). Because Filsan feels that she is losing control, she begins to threaten Kawsar as a way of asserting her power and authority. She tells Kawsar that if “I want to I can make you disappear into Mandera or prisons that you have never heard of, where no one will find you” (44). When she does not get the answers she demands, she goes into a mad rage and begins to hit Kawsar – a blow to the ear, a punch to the chest. Caught off-guard and unable to protect herself, Kawsar falls off the chair, lands on her hip and immediately hears a crack beneath her and then feels a river of pain swelling up from her stomach to her throat, obstructing her breath. Resting her weight on one hand, she lifts an open palm to the soldier. ‘Please stop!’ she cries. The girl shakes her head, tears in her own eyes, and rushes out of the room. 46 This excessive use of force that should be aimed at the General is transferred to a defenceless woman, because Filsan feels denigrated and undermined as a female military officer. Filsan thinks that becoming a soldier should give her authority, but what she learns to her horror and by accident is that her power comes when she inflicts violence over vulnerable citizens. This is the antithesis of what a legitimate state should do. When state institutions claim control by force, it is to the interest of the military and this tends to impinge on the human rights of civilians. The real role of the “violence” practised in a masculinised military is to identify those to whom violence can be done with impunity. Filsan realises that as a soldier/perpetrator she has power over vulnerable civilians, but she is ambivalent about this undue influence. In this moment, as she inflicts pain on Kawsar, both women are crying. These two women are caught in an extremely violent exchange, but they occupy completely different positions. Filsan the soldier is in charge and enacting violence against Kawsar who is utterly powerless. However, they are both subjected to forces more powerful than them and they both seem to be forced into this situation. One understands that Kawsar’s tears are a result of the excruciating pain she is experiencing, but why is Filsan tearful? Is she crying because of her own humiliating experience or for who she is becoming in the army? I would like to suggest that it is the latter, for after the physical abuse she is unable look Kawsar in the eyes. Instead, she runs out of the room; she is afraid that she will recognise in Kawsar’s eyes the corrupted version of herself. I read this as a refusal to acknowledge that she is turning into a patriarchal woman, to borrow a phrase from Pumla Dineo Gqola.6

Re-thinking the female soldier  157 Literary reconstructions such as Orchard allow us to see the correlation between the gendered abuse of women and the violence performed by female soldiers. While conceding that gendered violence needs to be addressed persistently, my reading of Orchard insinuates that when women join the army, they access certain benefits but are still subjected to patriarchal pressures which they internalise, and eventually they begin to collude with this patriarchal power. As Turshen (1998: 5–6) argues, “[v]iolence is the most obvious of military values, and in recent investigations of women in the military, the extent to which this violence is turned against women startles the civilian observer”. After Filsan rejects General Haaruun’s sexual advances, she gets a transfer to the Mobile Military Court “to investigate returned sailors and café owners suspected of anti-revolutionary activities” (214). I read this transfer as a demotion of Filsan, to put her in her place, so to speak. In spite of her two years’ experience in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps and five years working for the green-uniformed enforcers, she is restricted to administrative duties at the Mobile Military Court. When Major Adow receives intelligence that the villagers of Salahley, which is close to the Ethiopian border, are providing the National Freedom Movement (NFM) rebels with food, water and shelter, Captain Yasin recommends Filsan to be part of the mission that, among other tasks, is instructed to destroy all the water reservoirs.7 Filsan, the only female soldier in a unit of thirty men, is given a FAL automatic rifle, although she is not a good shot. She says: “it feels good to hold a rifle again; [because] a gun makes a soldier even out of a woman” (222). This suggests that as a female soldier Filsan derives power from the gun, which is symbolically regarded as a phallic weapon that epitomises masculinity. Susan McKay (cited in Coulter, Persson and Utas 2008: 15) report on a study that “female fighters said that by carrying arms they gained power, status, and control, and that they felt pride, self-confidence, and a feeling of belonging”. Put differently, one cannot be a female or gender-neutral soldier: if you are a soldier you are a man; there is no space for women unless they embrace the masculinised traits of the army. Mohamed’s novel suggests that Filsan is in an impossible situation. She has to behave like a man and take on male power when she engages in military power. In other words, she becomes a patriarchal woman, while the men around her require her to act out her femininity and make herself available to their sexual demands. She represents “a strange combination of femininity and menace” (65), but she ends up hating herself for both of these positions. In the novel there is a second and fatal incident that illustrates Filsan’s desire to be regarded as a legitimate soldier. The soldiers on the mission to Salahley are given strict instructions not to get involved in military combat. Filsan is tasked to speak to the elders of the village, but she feels patronised when the elders overlook her and insist on speaking to the commander who is a man. Again, feeling that her authority is being undermined and ignoring all protocol, she resorts to coercion to assert her power. She wants to drag

158  Lynda Gichanda Spencer one of the elders “by the long tufts of grey hair skirting his bald pate and made him kneel at her feet” (226). Unable to do this, “[s]he catches up with him and shoves the barrel of her gun in the small of his back” (226). The use of the gun compels the elders to listen to her. Literally and symbolically, the barrel of the gun gives her authority; she feels in control. A heated argument ensues between her and the three elders when they object to the way in which the government has decided to destroy their water reservoirs. When one of the elders approaches Filsan waving his cane, she accidently fires her weapon at the three elders. This massacre happens in a sort of daze; it is as if she is watching someone else commit this horrific act. She whispers: “what happened? Who killed them?” (230). Completely immobilised, she cannot move until a young conscript leads her away as he tries to reassure her that she has done the right thing. What is meant to be a smooth, calm operation results in the reckless murder of three innocent people. Filsan is utterly shocked by her actions. She gradually begins to recognise that it is this extreme violence, this superior show of force, that secures her position as a woman in the military. Male and female soldiers commit violent acts, but society holds women to a different standard. They are regarded as more brutal, because this aggressive behaviour goes against traditional constructions of gender roles. Critics such as Elise Barth, Bridget Byrne and Vanessa Farr have pointed out that soldiering has been included in the moral universe of men in ways that it has not for women, fighting women are frequently considered by their very existence to be transgressing accepted female behaviour, and the very act of fighting by definition makes women and girls less feminine and by extension ‘unnatural’. Women who oppose or transgress female stereotypes in war will thus often be regarded as deviant. Cited in Coulter, Persson and Utas (2008: 8) Mohamed’s novel offers a slightly different view on this perspective as Filsan begins to realise that this unintended violence legitimises her position in the army. She does not face any repercussions for this horrendous act since the army gives her its full support. Instead of asking her to account for her actions, to her surprise she is treated as a heroine and finally gets the recognition that she yearns for. The Salahley raid propels her from anonymity to notoriety, as she becomes the poster girl for the army. She is invited to Radio Hargeisa where she is introduced as a Mogadishu girl who is serving her country in the armed forces, a remarkable young lady, […] who has put aside the usual desire to settle down with a family of her own […] and has taken up arms to defend the country. […] She is the first woman to engage the enemy in battle since the Ogaden War. 244

Re-thinking the female soldier  159 This, however, is not the acknowledgement she desires. She has waited so long to be noticed, and this is a false sense of achievement, constructed at the expense of the woman she imagined she could become in the army. Now all she wants is to “slip into the darkness with the cockroaches” (242) and go back to obscurity, because she knows that she is guilty of inflicting violence on innocent citizens. It is only when she becomes a murderer that she is celebrated on national radio. Her entry into the public domain as a female soldier can be read as an attempt at legitimising the army. In other words, the army needs women as a smokescreen to mask all the gross human rights violations that are being committed in order to prop up a despotic regime. Filsan is in a perilous state as she enjoys “the image created of her by Ali Dheere [the radio presenter]: it is heroic and martial and impermeable, a woman apart, giant yet ethereal, a jinn with a sword clutched to her breast” (247). Nevertheless, she is consciously aware that this recognition is a façade. Filsan is an optimist who trusts in the ideals of the dictatorship. When Filsan’s deepest desire to be recognised as a female soldier is finally realised, she begins to understand that she works for an authoritarian regime that is not interested in its citizenry. At the same time, she does not recognise the person she has become and she cannot continue to exist in denial. In order to regain a sense of self, she needs to sever her ties with the military with its toxic masculinity. Filsan chooses to desert the army, even though she knows “that she will probably be killed before the day is out, either as a deserter or as a lone woman in the middle of a battlefield, but she cannot remain, whatever the cost” (319). She is willing to risk death in order to regain herself. Throughout, the narrative seems to suggest that Filsan is not brave enough to stand up to authority, but by forsaking the army she begins to show signs of courage. After going absent without leave from the army, Filsan fortuitously reunites with Kawsar after Deqo saves Filsan from soldiers who are in pursuit of her. Filsan’s desertion of the army can be read as a rejection of her father and the patriarchal power that he represents. When the three women reunite towards the end of the novel, it is no surprise that they are able to construct a makeshift family. This family of three generations of women offers an alternative version to restrictive patriarchal structures. This family illustrates that women are not always passive victims; they can also be agents who act during times of repression. In conclusion, I have demonstrated in this chapter that dominant constructions of the nation are based on a gendered discourse that deliberately excludes the needs and concerns of women. In turn, this contributes to patriarchal structures, such as the military, which are highly masculinised spaces. A feminist reading of Mohamed’s Orchard has allowed me to show that men in the military advance when they are exploitative and exercise violence against civilians. Women seem to have two options: give in to the sexual advances from higher-ranking officers or adopt a hyper-masculinity that permits the use of physical force on vulnerable citizens. Through the representation of Filsan who is “a strange combination of femininity and

160  Lynda Gichanda Spencer menace”, Mohamed gives us a glimpse into how female soldiers who appropriate masculine discourses can be even more transgressive than their male counterparts. The novel suggests that in spite of the opportunities open to female soldiers, the military is still hostile to women who have to continually struggle for equality. In order to survive in this alienating and marginalising space, women have to embrace toxic masculinities. Often, their inability to embody simultaneously femininity and menace leads to their desertion of the army.

Notes 1 This civil war, which began in the mid-1980s, was a backlash to the tyrannical regime of Siad Barre. 2 Meg Samuelson (2007a: 835) observes that David’s Story is keenly aware of the powers and dangers of representation and of what is risked in writing about women in the war zone and its aftermath: a representational minefield in which women are cast as idealized warriors, silenced victims, and emblems of the domestic world toward which the male warrior ostensibly directs his efforts. 3 According to Tamale (1999), the second misconception about women’s political participation arises from historical accounts that ignored the roles that women played during the pre-colonial era. Although women did not participate in political discussion, their opinions were sought before any political decision was made. In other words, “women wielded social and political influence through indirect methods; physical absence did not equal political passivity” (Tamale 1999: 5). Women may not have been equal to men, but their marginalisation was reinforced by a capitalist economy. This fluidity between private and public spaces was erased by British colonial structures and policies when the British introduced an ideology that “perceived men as public actors and women as private performers. Colonialists worked hand in hand with African patriarchs to develop inflexible customary laws which evolved into new structures and forms of domination” (Tamale 1999: 9). 4 For example, because black farm labourers were not protected by labour legislation, they could not “register as citizens of the new state”, and thus were excluded “from the protection and entitlements of citizenship” (McFadden 2005: 3). Typically, the majority of these farm workers were women and children who were exploited to maintain the lifestyle of white settler families. According to McFadden (2005: 4), the idea of citizenship in Zimbabwe stems from the “colonial practice that attached citizenship to whiteness, maleness and the ownership of property”. 5 Irroleh, like Eugene in Purple Hibiscus (Adichie 2003) and Babamukuru in Nervous Conditions (Dangarembga 1988), is physically and emotionally abusive towards his daughter. He raises his daughter in an extremely rigid way. 6 In her analysis of gender-based violence in South Africa, Gqola refers to “(p) atriarchal women, opportunistic men, conservative men and women who think that claiming that there is a conspiracy justifies (sic) making Black women’s bodies expendable battlegrounds” (Gqola 2007: 122). My understanding is that patriarchal women refer to women who deliberately collude with patriarchal structures to rationalise the violent abuse of black women’s bodies. 7 Generally, during wartime, the military frequently uses terror tactics such as killing, torture, looting and burning of property, amputation of limbs,

Re-thinking the female soldier  161 disfigurement of body parts, and acts of rape. These psychological strategies of warfare are meant to instil fear into communities, subjugate people and annihilate the population.

Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Urban Connections in African Popular Imaginaries at Rhodes University, as well as to express my appreciation to Gabeba Baderoon and the anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions helped me to sharpen my argument.

References Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2003. Purple Hibiscus. New York. Anchor Books. Bop, Codou. 2001. Women in Conflicts, their Gains and their Losses. In Meintjes, Sheila, Anu Pillay and Meredeth Turshen (eds) The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation. London: Zed Books, 19–33. Boyd, Rosalind. 1989. Empowerment of Women in Uganda: Real or Symbolic. Review of African Political Economy 45/46: 106–117. Cock, Jacklyn. 1994. Women and the Military: Implications for the Demilitarization in the 1990s in South Africa. Gender and Society 8(2): 152–169. Coulter, Chris, Mariam Persson and Mats Utas. 2008. Young Female Fighters in African Wars: Conflict and its Consequences. Uppsala: The Nordic Africa Institute. Dangarembga, Tsitsi. 1988. Nervous Conditions. Harare: The Women’s Press. Goldblatt, Beth and Sheila Meintjes. 1998. South African Women Demand the Truth. In Turshen, Meredeth and Clotide Twagiramariya (eds) What Women do in Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa. London: Zed Books, 27–63. Gqola, Pumla Dineo. 2007. How the ‘Cult of Femininity’ and Violent Masculinities Support Endemic Gender-Based Violence in Contemporary South Africa. African Identities 5(1): 111–124. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. McFadden, Patricia. 2005. Becoming Postcolonial: African Women Changing the Meaning of Citizenship. Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism 6(1): 1–22. Modise, Thandi and Robin Curnow. 2000. Thandi Modise: A Woman in War. Agenda 43: 36–40. Mohamed, Nadifa. 2010. Black Mamba Boy. London: Harper Collins. ———. 2013. The Orchard of Lost Souls. London: Simon & Schuster. Mohamed, Nadifa and Iman Sheel. 2015. Dhaxalreeb – Redsea Cultural Foundation Films: HIBF2014. YouTube, 30 May 2015. Available at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=GCEJfexaqdo. Accessed: 12 June 2018. Moji, Polo Belina. 2014. Gender-Based Genre Conventions and the Critical Reception of Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (Nigeria). Literator 35(1): 1–7. Pillay, Anu. 2001. Violence against Women in the Aftermath. In Meintjes, Sheila, Anu Pillay and Meredeth Turshen (eds) The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation. London: Zed Books, 35–44.

162  Lynda Gichanda Spencer Samuelson, Meg. 2007a. The Disfigured Body of the Female Guerrilla: (De)militarization, Sexual Violence, and Redomestication in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 32(4): 833–856. ——— 2007b. Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Spencer, Lynda Gichanda. 2015. Visible Wars and Invisible Women: Interrogating Women’s Roles during Wartime in Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War. English in Africa 42(2): 109–128. Sideris, Tina. 2001. Rape in War and Peace: Social Context, Gender, Power and Identity. In Meintjes, Sheila, Anu Pillay and Meredeth Turshen (eds) The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation. London: Zed Books, 142–158. Steiner, Tina. 2016. A Vagabond on the Road: The Pressure of Genre in Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy. African Studies 75(2): 176–188. Tamale, Sylvia. 1999. When Hens Begin to Crow: Gender and Parliamentary Politics in Uganda. Boulder: Westview Press. Turshen, Meredeth. 1998. Women’s War Stories. In Turshen, Meredeth and Clotilde Twagiramariya (eds) What Women do in Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa. London: Zed Books, 1–27. Wicomb, Zoë. 2002. David’s Story. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY.

10 Domestic violence in China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier Tomi Adeaga

Introduction The term “gender-based violence” has broadened over the last couple of decades to include different forms of violence. It is now an “umbrella term for any harm that is perpetrated against a person’s will on account of gendered power inequities that not only exploit distinctions between men and women but also among men and among women” (Chinouya 2013: 499). Consequently, violence against human beings, either through race related crimes, domestic violence or in war zones, is globally recognised as an ignoble crime against humanity. Representations of gendered violence in war narratives, particularly violence against vulnerable people such as children, is not a new phenomenon but one that dates way back in time. However, war narratives have traditionally been produced by western authors who have detailed the lives of children in the wake of wars. The French author, Victor Hugo, is an example of one such writer who has presented accounts of children in wartime. His protagonist, Gavroche, in his 1862 novel Les Misérables is a courageous fighter who endures many challenges. Sarah Maya Rosen and David Rosen (2012: 306) state the following about the text: The classic nineteenth-century representation of the child at war is the street urchin Gavroche in Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Miserables. In nineteenth-century France, the child under arms was often thought to be a symbol or personification of class struggle. Armed children represented the lofty goals of popular insurrection, which drew people from all walks of life into the battle against monarchy and entrenched privilege. Hugo’s novel examines many events that flow from the July Revolution of 1830, although Les Miserables was written some thirty-two years after these events. This is one of the earliest novels to introduce the character of child soldiers in literature. Joseph Thomas Kehoe and EL Bacon’s The Fighting Mascot: The True Story of a Boy Soldier (1918) also centres on a boy who enlisted

164  Tomi Adeaga to fight for the British army in Belgium and France after lying that he was older than his 16 years. It was only later that African writers began to feature child soldiers in their fictional writing. Bakary Diallo’s Force-Bonté (1926), one of the earliest Francophone African novels published in France, “features a young Senegalese boy who fights on behalf of the French army during the First World War” (Mastey 2016: 147). Irrespective of the different backgrounds of the writers, what these three narratives have in common is their representation of children who fought in wars that exposed them – the least protected of citizens in their societies – to gendered violence. It is from this perspective that this chapter explores gendered violence in relation to domestic violence in the autobiographical novel of the former child soldier, China Keitetsi. As the narrative shows, Keitetsi experiences domestic violence from members of her own family, which dismantles the myth that the family is a safe haven for children. The following quotation attests to this point: The family is often equated with sanctuary – a place where individuals seek love, safety, security, and shelter. But the evidence shows that it is also a place that imperils lives, and breeds some of the most drastic forms of violence perpetrated against women and girls. Innocenti Digest (2000: 3) Keitetsi’s text provides a different narrative from other former child soldier narratives, such as Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007), in that it is the violence inflicted against Keitetsi by members of her family, which robs her of her childhood, that pushes her to join the Ugandan National Resistance Army (NRA), led by Yoweri Museveni, at the age of eight years. Keitetsi’s narrative is therefore worthy of examination for two reasons: first, it is distinct for its representation of the traumatic experiences of a female child soldier, as opposed to the male child soldier that dominates child soldier narratives; second, it suggests that not all child soldiers are forcefully conscripted into rebel armies but that some join voluntarily for personal reasons. The latter point is particularly significant in inserting into child soldier narratives the agency of women in wartime, thus dispelling stereotypical constructions of child soldiers as always victims. Arguably, in writing her autobiography, Keitetsi re-writes stories of war by centralising female child soldiers and their experiences as well as foregrounding their agency in the face of crippling domestic violence.

Women, children and domestic violence Keitetsi’s child soldier narrative is anchored in the domestic violence that is sometimes perpetrated against children in families across the world, one that has its origin in the type of disciplinary measures that have been prevalent for decades in different parts of the world. Domestic violence against

Domestic violence in Child Soldier  165 children as portrayed by Keitetsi has not yet been as widely discussed in African literary texts the way gendered violence against women has been generally discussed. Over the past decade, much attention has been given to battered women as victims of domestic violence, often perpetrated by their male partners or husbands. Extensive studies have been carried out on how this form of violence affects the family and women’s subjectivity. Studies by scholars such as Pumla Dineo Gqola (2007) and Zoe Norridge (2012) have explored literary representations of violence against women, showing how patriarchal understandings of gender and sexuality collude to create environments conducive to the abuse of women’s bodies. The prevalence of gendered violence across the world speaks to the gross human rights violation that plagues many societies today. The following quotation is worth noting here: Violence against women is present in every country, cutting across boundaries of culture, class, education, income, ethnicity and age. Even though most societies proscribe violence against women, the reality is that violations against women’s human rights are often sanctioned under the garb of cultural practices and norms, or through misinterpretation of religious tenets. Moreover, when the violation takes place within the home, as is very often the case, the abuse is effectively condoned by the tacit silence and the passivity displayed by the state and the lawenforcing machinery. Innocenti Digest (2000: 2) As noted here, the violation of women permeates the home environment, with the complicity of the state and its law enforcement agencies. This makes the fight against domestic violence a very complex undertaking. Nonetheless, African women have demonstrated agency in fighting against cultural practices and patriarchal norms which render them vulnerable to domestic violence. Notable is the story of Rebecca Lolosoli in Kenya who became famous for taking her fate into her hands as she launched public resistance against domestic violence. According to a report by Julie Blindel (2015), Rebecca Lolosoli was in hospital recovering from a beating by a group of men when she came up with the idea of a women-only community which she called Umoja. The beating was an attempt to teach her a lesson for daring to speak to women in her village about their rights. The Samburu of Kenya are closely related to the Maasai tribe, speaking a similar language. They usually live in groups of 5 to 10 families and are semi-nomadic pastoralists. Their culture is deeply patriarchal. At village meetings men sit in an inner circle to discuss important village issues, while the women sit on the outside, only occasionally allowed to express an opinion. Umoja’s first members all came from the isolated Samburu villages dotted across the Rift valley. Since then, women and girls who hear of the refuge come and learn how to trade,

166  Tomi Adeaga raise their children and live without fear of male violence and discrimination. Blindel (2015: n.p.) reports that the village of Umoja was founded in 1990 by a group of 15 women who were survivors of rape by local British soldiers. Umoja’s population has now expanded to include any women escaping child marriage, FGM (female genital mutilation), domestic violence and rape – all of which are cultural norms among the Samburu. Thus, these women came together when they could no longer bear the burden of gendered violence committed against them, by both their husbands and their society. What is missing in reports like Julie Blindel’s on the development of the Umoja village is the fate of the women’s children. This part of the story is hardly reported on because it is often assumed that it is only the mothers that suffered. How were these children treated by their families and communities? Were they also rejected by their fathers and their society? Were they beaten up and chased out of the villages along with their mothers? None of the interviews and other videos that have since been produced on the Umoja village and its satellites analyses domestic violence against the children involved in the move to the villages. Given that there is hardly any information on this aspect of gendered violence, it is difficult for one to determine the impact of domestic violence on the children that the women took with them as they fled their homes to the Umoja villages. John Fantuzzo and Wanda Mohr (1999: 22) aptly contend that “only recently have researchers focused on children affected by domestic violence. Although concern over battered women has been growing for nearly three decades, discussions about their children did not appear in the research literature until the 1980s”. Thus, children battered by members of their families right from an early age fell through the gaps in the past because they were thought to have been merely disciplined, which was presumably not a violation of their human rights. Despite the growing awareness about violence against children within the home, it is still an area of study that is relatively underrepresented in African literary studies. It is also hardly visible in feminist African literature, in part because of the minimal awareness of it. This is especially so because the beating of children by members of their families and the community is still seen as a way of disciplining them. The reason for this marginal engagement with domestic violence against children, as Fantuzzo and Mohr (1999: 28) argue, is that “many studies do not clearly define domestic violence or child exposure nor do they typically obtain independent corroboration that the violent incident occurred”. This underrepresentation of domestic violence against children may be seen to be based on the premise that children do not have the same rights as their parents. This approach is however problematic because all children have human rights, regardless of their age, gender, race, ethnicity or disability. These rights are clearly set out in the United Nations

Domestic violence in Child Soldier  167 Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. The convention is the most widely accepted human rights treaty ever … and commits governments to protecting and ensuring children’s rights. Children are often seen but not heard. Yet their voice is crucial to the development process. Save the Children Sweden (2005a: 7) However, children’s rights are still not always acknowledged in Africa and even in many parts of the world, probably because some of the perpetrators of domestic violence against children may not even be aware that such rights exist. This also explains the paucity of definitions on this form of domestic violence. The title of Keitetsi’s autobiographical narrative, Child Soldier, masks the relevant subject of domestic violence against children. This title places the text in the category of child soldier narratives such as Feuerherz (Heart of Fire, 2006) by the Eritrean-born former child soldier turned pop-singer Senait Mehari, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) by the Sierra Leonean Ishmael Beah, and War Child: A Child Soldier’s Story (2009) by the Sudanese Emmanuel Jal. Given the current “soft spot” that western countries have for former child soldiers and their narratives as a result of which they tend to treat them like pop-stars, as in Mehari’s case, the atrocities that they were made to commit in the armies they had served in are often forgotten. Mehari was a student of the revolution in the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) before she finally found her way to Germany through her father’s efforts. Apart from writing her child soldier autobiography, she also went on to become a pop-star, recording songs like Mein Weg (My Way) in 2005 and Wenn die Nacht (When the Night). Even though child soldier narratives may be attractive in the west today, this article identifies domestic violence as the reason behind Keitetsi’s subsequent life among the NRA. Set in war-ridden Uganda, the reader is invited to engage in the relationship between domestic violence as the catalyst to life as a child soldier and the brutality of life as a child soldier. The stage is set for this act in Keitetsi’s opening statement in the book: I could not know that I was only a poor kid left with a father who had more resemblance to an animal predator than to a human being. I was a nuisance, I suppose, having to be taken care of, every minute of the day, so my father got rid of me by sending me to the farm where his mother lived. 2 This opening statement offers clear insight into the subsequent events that led to Keitetsi finding solace among the NRA.

Domestic violence in China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier Domestic violence features as a form of discrimination in Keitetsi’s home because the main perpetrators are her father, grandmother and stepmother. Keitetsi and her siblings from her own biological mother are often beaten

168  Tomi Adeaga while those born of her stepmother are treated well. Keitetsi’s father’s preferred way of disciplining his daughter is through corporal punishment which involves acts of violence inflicted on her body. Corporal punishment includes violent acts such as “beating”, “hitting”, “spanking”, “paddling”, “swatting” and “caning”, all of which indicates an application of punishment to the body (Save the Children Sweden 2005a: 7). The subjection of a child to this type of punishment violates the child’s human rights. Keitetsi’s father’s violence towards his children may be seen as the result of masculine anxiety – his fear of being undermined by them through their actions towards him. Fathers such as Keitetsi’s are characterised as individuals with low self-esteem and a poorly developed sense of identity that results in neediness, dependency, a lack of trust in others, and an inability to see the impact of their violence on their children (Holt, Buckley and Whelan 2008:). Thus, Keitetsi’s father attempts to consolidate his power through the assertion of force on his family. Keitetsi’s father beats her not just at home but in public too, suggesting that domestic violence transcends private and public spaces. In some societies, physical punishment is accepted as an appropriate form of discipline, but the same behaviour is regarded as abuse from a rights perspective (Save the Children Sweden 2005b). In line with this thought, Keitetsi’s father is a violator of his own daughter’s human rights to safety and freedom from bodily harm. His excesses go beyond the physical punishment that is acceptable even in his own society. An incident to illustrate this is when he beats Keitetsi mercilessly in public view of her schoolmates. After Keitetsi has worked and earned money carrying a golf bag for a man called Johnson at a golf court, she buys three packets of sweets and gives them to half of her class. Her teacher finds this out and sends a letter to her father who comes to the school. He beats her so much in front of the class that “when he had left, my teacher asked me if the man who had been beating me was my real father …. That day, I came to realise that all his power came from others’ pain” (75). The fact that her teacher cannot believe that he is her real father shows the excessive nature of the violence Keitetsi’s father perpetrates against her. Similarly, Keitetsi’s paternal grandmother beats her up brutally for offences like wetting her bed at night. Keitetsi vividly describes one of such incidents: She grabbed my arm like an angry lion and threw me on the floor. I heard a sharp snap, followed by a strong pain tearing me apart from my elbow to my neck. Still I struggled to get up, but when I looked at my arm I stayed down. A white bone had penetrated my skin, but the worst shock hit me when I saw my own blood. 9 The grandmother who should be the one to provide a safe haven for her granddaughter is the one who sees her more as an enemy who should be

Domestic violence in Child Soldier  169 beaten at all times. The grandmother’s only reaction to Keitetsi’s dislocated arm is to shout at her “to keep quiet, and then set my bone in its right place” (9). The grandmother’s attempt to restore the dislocated arm is a further infliction of pain on the young girl: The pain came back as hard as before, but I feared the woman more than my pain, so I remained quiet. When she had finished, she took me to bed again, and without a word she left me alone to cry in silence. 9 To make matters worse, the grandmother tells Keitetsi to tell her father that she fell off the bed. This type of domestic violence against Keitetsi by her grandmother is part of Keitetsi’s everyday experience as a child. A child-like Keitetsi who is seen as having no rights in the family is subjected to such a treatment because the adults in the family feel that they have the authority to “discipline” her in whatever way they see fit. This is the case with Keitetsi’s stepmother who sees her as a rival to her own children and beats her up or makes her father to beat her for every offense she commits. Although Keitetsi finds out from her siblings that her own mother had been driven away and forbidden to see her children by her father, she still desires a mother in her stepmother: I went and sat alone for a moment, to think things over. I took myself back to the times of my mother’s mistreating, and still I found my heart too weak just to accept the fact that she was not my real mother, but despite my disbelief, I silently decided to change her name from mother to ‘step-mother’. 43–44 This shift from “mother” to “step-mother” does not make the pains that Keitetsi endures any less, but it creates an emotional space between her and her stepmother’s children. Like her paternal grandmother and her father, Keitetsi’s stepmother violates her human rights by subjecting her to extreme acts of violence, acts totally unexpected of a mother, whether biological or adopted. Thus, all three members of authority in Keitetsi’s family who should protect her as a child and ensure that she goes to school and grows up as a responsible member of the family are instead the agents of violence, both towards her and towards her mother’s children. Keitetsi’s narrative, like most autobiographical child soldier narratives, is no doubt related from memory. As a result, there is the tendency for some details to be left out or exaggerated. Maureen Moynagh (2011: 46) asserts that while former child soldiers have personal reasons for telling their stories, Euro-American publishers and journalists pursue them largely “because they [conform] or [are] conformable to cultural myths and literary

170  Tomi Adeaga traditions with an already established audience appeal”. Thus, there is no way for the audience to find out if the stories are true or merely made up. A former child soldier, Valentino Achak Deng admits that sponsors and newspaper reporters and the like expect the stories to have certain elements …. Survivors tell the stories the sympathetic want, and that means making them as shocking as possible. My own story includes enough small embellishments that I cannot criticize the accounts of others. Quoted in Eggers (2006: 21) Deng’s admission that some of the former child soldiers embellish their accounts of their experiences explain some of the inconsistencies in most autobiographical child soldier narratives. What should not be lost in these observations is the fact that these child soldiers often relate their experiences out of memory and some of them relate their stories according to the expectations of the NGO case workers assigned to them, as well as the publishers of their works who need them to be as sensational as possible to attract maximum sales. This has been the case of Senait Mehari whose narration of her life in an Eritrean rebel training camp in her memoir Feuerherz (Heart of Fire, 2004) has been called a fake narrative by the German media (see Deutsche Welle 2007). This doubt of the authenticity of the narration is what moved Mehari’s ghostwriter, Lukas Lessing, to travel with her to Eritrea to see the original locations where her story took place. According to Von Christian Schröder (2007: n.p.), “he taped interviews with Mehari and took her to Eritrea to find her childhood places”. In his writing, Lessing points at how Mehari was raped and abused by senior members of the camp as the most important part of her suffering as a child soldier. Only passing mention is made of her life as a child in which she was abandoned by her mother and subjected to harsh beatings by her father before he dumped her in the camp. Lessing’s focus on rape in the camp instead of the domestic violence in her family that occurred before she was abandoned in the camp points to gendered violence in the form of rape of children as being more marketable than domestic violence that is also quite a serious offence that is often committed by members of the child soldiers’ families against them. Despite the reservations expressed above with regards to child soldier autobiographies in general and Mehari’s case in particular, Keitetsi’s story is unique in her presentation of a balanced narrative that includes her life at home with her dysfunctional family that serves as a precursor for her life as a child soldier, fighting Musoveni’s war against the Ugandan government. While Keitetsi’s text may easily pander to the stereotypes of the child soldier narrative the west is eager to consume, there is no doubt that it also functions as a cultural tool for questioning violence against children within

Domestic violence in Child Soldier  171 the domestic space and for upholding human rights values. Keitetsi’s Child Soldier sets itself apart from other child soldier narratives in the manner in which it optimises memory to engage the discourse of domestic violence against children. Although the text includes certain elements of the child soldier narrative as constructed by the west, it also deviates from structural expectations of the genre. In Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, a 12-yearold boy and his friends leave their village of Mogbwemo to go to a town called Mattru Jong to take part in a rap and dance talent show organised by their friend. They end up getting caught up in the civil war that is going on in Liberia. Their friends and families are killed and they find themselves in the army. So, it is not their choice to fight in the war; they are forced to make use of all the available means of survival. The protagonist and his friends are forced into the government army after they are taken at gunpoint. Keitetsi’s experience is different from Beah’s because she searches for and finds solace in the NRA as a way of escaping the incessant violence that she was being subjected to at home. Thus, the NRA becomes much more of a family to her than her own biological family. Autobiographical narratives such as Keitetsi’s have removed the veil of silence that has covered child victims of domestic violence. While Keitetsi’s story is the story of many child soldiers – victims of war across the globe – it is equally exceptional in the sense that she becomes a child soldier to escape the cruelties perpetrated against her at home by the three main people of authority in her family. For her, the NRA is a training ground for her to learn how to use the gun, to acquire violent force with which to exact maximum revenge on those members of her family who forced her to run away from home. She actually comes close to doing so as she goes in search of her biological mother and gets stuck close to her home district of Mbarara. She confesses: With my gun I went to my old school, and looked up the hill at my father’s house, which was a fair distance from where I stood. My stomach was full of knots; my teeth were grinding and whenever I thought of any of them, my trigger finger would itch. My mind was now convinced to walk up the hill, shoot him and his wife. 143 Although learning how to use the gun is part of what makes Keitetsi’s text to conform to the norm of child soldier narratives, her narrative is remarkable because, as Maureen Moynagh (2011: 47) states, “with very little formal education, she has nonetheless written her own memoir”. Moynagh (2011: 47) adds that, “in fact, what is interesting about Keitetsi’s narrative is that it is ungrammatical, repetitive, and, singularly among the child-soldier memoirs, lacking the literary strategies that seek to make the reader sympathetic toward the narrator”. She provides a reason for her joining the Ugandan NRA

172  Tomi Adeaga that is diametrically opposed to reactionary narratives such as ch ildren being forcibly conscripted into wars that they do not understand, as in Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation. Moynagh (2011: 56) criticises Keitetsi’s account of her family life prior to her joining the rebel army at the age of eight as a “lengthy litany of abuse and of her childish, but spiteful attempts to take revenge for her unjust treatment”. She, however, misunderstands the underlying issue of domestic violence against children. The destruction of Keitetsi’s family as a result of her father’s cruelty should not be trivialised. Thus, recounting this experience the way Keitetsi does is by no means a childish litany of abuse but a way of making the audience understand the reason why a child of about eight years, who should have lived under the protection of her family, takes it on herself to go in search of a new family, which she ultimately finds among the NRA. This is part of what makes Keitetsi’s narrative remarkable. Moynagh (2011: 56) admits that the fact that Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army came to function for her, at least for a time, as not only a surrogate family – a topos of nearly all child-soldier memoirs – but indeed a somewhat better family, is a twist on the standard plot. Unlike the children in the NRA camp, who were either orphans or homeless, Keitetsi had family. She states: I was different, being with a different background, I knew where my parents were, and I just hoped to stay alive, so that one day I could return home and kill them. I had decided that they pay the price for the pain that I was now in. 123 Here, Keitetsi affirms that she knows where her family is and can go back there any time she wants to. She does go back and forth to the NRA whenever she is no longer able to live with members of her family, be it her mother or sister, Margie. So, why would any child willingly choose the army over her own family? Keitetsi’s autobiography points at domestic violence as one of those under-reported reasons why children sometimes join different rebel units to fight wars: they feel that they are better off there than with their families. Keitetsi’s text is thus significant in showing that not all child soldiers who are rescued in warzones were forced to join in the fighting; some of them willingly joined as a means of escaping domestic violence in their immediate or extended families. Poverty may also be a reason why mothers willingly send their children to the battlefield, knowing fully well, as Keitetsi has observed in her narrative, that they may never survive it.

Domestic violence in Child Soldier  173

Conclusion Keitetsi’s autobiography exemplifies the Mexican writer Yuri Herrera’s contention that literary texts give writers the “opportunity to intervene in the public sphere from a freer margin” (Foster 2016: n.p.). Autobiographical child soldier stories are a popular addition to contemporary literary genres. Keitetsi’s narration is an important addition to the genre because it diverts attention from gendered violence against men and women and shines some light on the often forgotten but no less important issue of domestic violence against children. Ultimately, it provokes a re-evaluation of children’s rights within the home and society.

References Beah, Ishmael. 2007. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Sarah Crichton Books. Blindel, Julie. 2015. The Village where Men are Banned. The Guardian, 16 August 2015. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/aug/16/ village-where-men-are-banned-womens-rights-kenya. Accessed: 20 December 2017. Chinouya, Martha. 2013. Ethnic Identities and Gendered Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Commentary. Ethnicity & Health 18(5): 499–503. Deutsche Welle. 2007. TV Report Stirs up Controversy Over Eritrea-Born Singer. Deutsche Welle, 16 February 2007. Available at https://www.dw.com/en/tv-reportstirs-up-controversy-over-eritrea-born-singer/a-2353225. Accessed: 01 December 2017. Diallo, Bakary. 1985 [1926]. Force-Bonté. Paris: Nouvelles Editions Africaines. Eggers, Dave. 2006. What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. New York: Vintage. Fantuzzo, John and Wanda Mohr. 1999. Prevalence and Effects of Child Exposure to Domestic Violence. The Future of Children 9(3): 21–32. Foster, Tristan. 2016. Eight Questions for Yuri Herrera. 3:AM Magazine, 6 July 2016. Available at http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/eight-questions-for-yuriherrera/. Accessed: 07 July 2016. Gqola, Pumla Dineo. 2007. How the ‘Cult of Femininity’ and Violent Masculinities Support Endemic Gender Based Violence in Contemporary South Africa. African Identities 5(1): 111–124. Holt, Stephanie, Helen Buckley and Sadhbh Whelan. 2008. The Impact of Exposure to Domestic Violence on Children and Young People: A Review of the Literature. Child Abuse & Neglect 32(8): 797–810. Hugo, Victor. 1862. Les Misérables. Brussels: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven & Cie. Innocenti Digest. 2000. Domestic Violence against Women and Girls. Innocenti Digest, No. 6, June 2000. Available at http://policeprostitutionandpolitics.net/ pdfs_all/GOVERNMENT%20REPORTS%20US%20Justice%20Dept%20 stats%20SEE%20ALSO%20TRAFFICKING%20ALL/Domestic%20Intimate%20Partner%20Violence/Domestic%20violence%20world%20wide.pdf. Accessed: 25 November 2017. Iweala, Uzodinma. 2005. Beasts of No Nation. New York: Harper Perennial Press.

174  Tomi Adeaga Kehoe, Thomas Joseph and EL Bacon. 1918. The Fighting Mascot: The True Story of a Boy Soldier. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company. Keitetsi, China. 2004. Child Soldier. London: Souvenir Press. Mastey, David. 2016. Child Soldier Stories and their Fictions. Interventions 18(1): 143–158. Mehari, Senait. 2004. Feuerherz. Munich: Droemer Knaur Verlag. Moynagh, Maureen. 2011. Human Rights, Child-Soldier Narratives, and the Problem of Form. Research in African Literatures 42(4): 39–59. Norridge, Zoe. 2012. Sex as Synecdoche: Intimate Languages of Violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love. Research in African Literatures 43(2): 18–39. Rosen, Sarah Maya and David Rosen. 2012. Representing Child Soldiers in Fiction and Film. Peace Review 24(3): 305–312. Save the Children Sweden. 2005a. Ending Physical and Humiliating Punishment against Children: Sudan. Available at https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/ sites/default/files/documents/2585.pdf. Accessed: 27 November 2017. ——— 2005b. Ending Corporal Punishment of Children in South Africa. Available at https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/sites/default/files/documents/2872. pdf. Accessed: 01 December 2017. Schröder, Von Christian. 2007. Everything has a Story. Panorama, 23 February 2007. Available at https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https:// www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/panorama/alles-hat-eine-geschichte/814526. html&prev=search. Accessed: 01 December 2017.

11 Gendered spaces and war Fighting and narrating the Nigeria-Biafra war Obioma Nnaemeka

Introduction Chidi Amuta (1988: 85) notes that in the past few decades, the genocidal Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–1970) has dominated Nigerian national literature: this dominance is so pronounced that it can safely be said that in the growing body of Nigerian national literature, works directly based on or indirectly deriving from the war experience constitute the largest number of literary products on any single aspect of Nigerian history to date. The war was unique in many ways, particularly its unfolding in the Biafran enclave populated mostly by the Igbo. Most accounts focus on the destruction, atrocities and inhumanity of the war, as they should. But I believe that a full and more balanced documentation of the war must take into account the agency, determination, resilience, ingenuity and creativity that prevailed in the enclave. The phrase I often heard in Biafra was “mobilisation for the war effort”. This all-hands-on-deck effort was sustained by an impressive coalition of scientists, scholars, engineers, teachers, students, public intellectuals, educators, doctors, nurses, traditional rulers, traders, farmers, journalists and media experts whose expertise and energy were harvested to make it possible for Biafra to survive 30 months of blockade, bombardment and starvation. The genius of the Biafran leader, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, and those he led was their ability to engage in nation building in the midst of war and in anticipation of the aftermath of war; the capacity to conceptualise, design and put in place the infrastructure for a quasi-functioning government with relevant agencies (research and production, education, health, information, agriculture and nutrition, foreign affairs and diplomacy). Biafra produced its own currency and postage stamps. Biafrans succeeded in establishing a semblance of order amidst the destruction and chaos of war. This chapter explores the significant roles women played in this regard. The discussion takes into account the usual vulnerabilities (sexual violence, displacement, etc.) of women in a war zone but also shines a light

176  Obioma Nnaemeka on women’s agency. In other words, what was done to women and what women did is discussed. The idea of the multiplicity and simultaneity of women’s battles in wars is echoed by lgbo women writers in their works on the Nigeria-Biafra War: Flora Nwapa’s Never Again (1975) and Wives at War and Other Stories (1980); Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1982); Rose Adaure Njoku’s Withstand the Storm: War Memoirs of a Housewife (1986); Phanuel Egejuru’s The Seed Yams Have Been Eaten (1993); and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2004). These war narratives by Igbo women also represent women “as beings laced through and through with sexual and maternal imagery, including the residues of an everlasting and often intimate combat and cooperation with men” (Elshtain 1987: x). Insisting that women were “fighting on all fronts”, these works disrupt notions of social identities and functions at wartime by interrogating the pervasive gender dichotomy and related myths in war narratives: male combatants/female non-combatants, female life givers/ male life takers, female peace-makers/male war mongers, female “Beautiful Soul”/male “Just Warrior” (Elshtain 1987: xiii) – dichotomies that fail to adequately capture the circumstances and reality of women and men in open conflicts. In Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra, for example, we witness the paradoxical gesture of pacifist Debbie donning full military gear as she embarks on her anti-militarist mission. By expanding the notion of war as armed conflict to incorporate the idea of war as a figure of violence against humanity and human dignity, these works also expand the notion of “war front”. For women in the Biafran enclave – from the gun-toting insurgents to the civilian victims of and warriors against hunger, indiscriminate air-raids, rape and other forms of sexual exploitation – the war front was everywhere. The air-raids and their aftermath of casualties (civilian and military) blurred the line between combatant and non-combatant; between war front and home front (safe haven), suggesting in effect that the battle field was a vast terrain that absorbed the war front and the home front. During the civil war, the more the Biafran territory shrank (making the military population increasingly coterminous with civilian population), the more the line between battle front (combatant) and home front (noncombatant) became blurred. Because of the numerous battles women had to fight on the home front, the battle front and the home front were similarly marked as terrains of violence. Describing her odyssey and travails during the war as “fighting on all fronts”, Rose Adaure Njoku (1986) aptly articulates the complexity of women’s predicament at wartime. Jean Bethke Elshtain (1987: 9) echoes the same sentiment: wartime’s Beautiful Soul is no ordinary wife or mother or secretary or nurse: she becomes a civic being; she is needed by others; she can respond simultaneously to what Jane Addams called the ‘family claim’ and the ‘social claim,’ for, she is told, without her unselfish devotion to country and family each would be lost.

Gendered spaces and war  177 The language of war is also the language of honour, sacrifice, compulsion and fear (fear of annihilation) that fuels commitment to victory by any means necessary. The myth of nation and the language of war emanating from both sides of the Nigeria/Biafra conflict paradoxically gave birth to and killed what could have been Biafra. Framing all these issues is the paradoxical context of war that simultaneously condemns war and casts a covetous glance at the (potential) spoils of war. Accounts of the Nigerian civil war by lgbo women writers centre on the constituency that is often marginalized in accounts of the war written by men, particularly the principals. Although the focus on women and children provides a point of convergence for the works by women writers, the distance between each writer and the war produces different narrative contexts. This study focusses on themes and narratology as it locates subjectivity and narrative voice in the selected texts. What roles do gender (of author) and location (physical and temporal distance) play in the unfolding of women’s war narratives? Furthermore, questions of silence, memory and forgetting (imposed or otherwise), particularly in the aftermath of the war, are addressed. In effect, this contribution seeks to investigate war as an institutional question and as politics – engineered and fuelled by external economic, imperialist interests and internal ethnic allegiances – and delineate the contours of rhetorical compulsions and narrative strategies constituted as epistemologies of war. The immediate aftermath of the January 1966 coup d’état saw the unleashing of Northern hordes, drunk with murderous rage, that slaughtered tens of thousands of Igbo residents in Northern Nigeria and forced millions more – bruised, maimed and broken – to flee to their homeland in the southeastern part of the country. A popular song I heard in Igboland in the immediate aftermath of the 1966 killings (pogrom) in the North was “Onye ajulu oga aju onwe ya? Onye ajulu aju okwelunu” (“Will a person who is rejected reject himself? No, he will not reject himself; he will accept”). I fight back tears each time I remember my mother and her friends, who fled the North, sitting on the steps of our backyard singing mournfully: “Onye ajulu oga aju onwe ya? Onye ajulu aju okwelunu”. I was crushed by the pain, rejection and dejection I heard in their mournful voices but I was also encouraged and strengthened by the resolve, courage and determination to survive I heard in those voices. I heard the same courage and resolve in the voices of millions of Igbo who rallied behind their leader, Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, and demanded a separation from Nigeria. On 30 May 1967, Ojukwu declared the independent State of Biafra. The Nigeria-Biafra War was fundamentally an Igbophobic, anti-Igbo war of unimaginable atrocities. General Yakubu Gowon’s dubious state creation (on 27 May 1967) that carved Nigeria into 12 states and gave the former Eastern Region 3 states (East Central, South Eastern and Rivers State) was a divide-and-conquer intervention designed to isolate the Igbo and fan animosity between the Igbo and their neighbours – ethnic minorities comprising

178  Obioma Nnaemeka Efiks, Ibibios, Ogoja, Opobos and Ijaws. Gowon’s strategy produced the desired result. As the war progressed and the territorial boundaries of Biafra shrank, the hostility of the ethnic minorities toward the Igbo, as well as their disavowal and even condemnation of the war, became more apparent. By the end of the war, the Nigeria-Biafra War of attrition had become the Nigeria-Igbo War. The Igbo were isolated in Igboland (mostly East Central State) and ostracised by the other two states carved out of the former Eastern Region (Rivers State and South Eastern State). The Rivers State government concocted the abandoned property policy that dispossessed the Igbo of their properties in Rivers State. Before the war, the capital of Rivers State, Port Harcourt (called the “Garden City)”, was one of the best cities in the former Eastern Region. Massive investments by the Igbo contributed significantly in making Port Harcourt a beautiful, thriving city. When the war ended and they went back to reclaim their homes and businesses, the Rivers State government classified the properties as “abandoned” and refused to relinquish them to the rightful owners.

Provocations Interpretations of what provoked the war abound. Numerous causes – some remote, others immediate – have been put forward. Some blame the Amalgamation of 1914; some locate the genesis in the 1962–1963 census and its aftermath; others claim that the 15 January 1966 coup d’état started it all. Many point to the 1966 massacre of tens of thousands of Igbo living in the North and others assert that the counter-coup of July 1967 was to blame. I argue that the fundamental cause of the war was resentment: resentment of the Igbo; resentment borne out of envy. The 1966 coup d’état was a moment that created the space for the resentment to explode. The coup d’état was an impetus for the resurgence of the resentment. I believe that if the coup d’état did not happen, something else would have occurred to create the space for the eruption of the resentment and accompanying atrocities. Chinua Achebe had raised this issue of resentment in his work, The Trouble with Nigeria: The origin of the national resentment of the Igbo is as old as Nigeria and quite as complicated …. But it can be summarised thus: the Igbo being receptive to change, individualistic and highly competitive, gave the Igbo man an unquestioned advantage over his compatriots in securing credentials for advancement in Nigerian colonial society …. Unlike the Hausa/Fulani, he was unhindered by a wary religion and unlike the Yoruba unhampered by traditional hierarchies. This kind of creature, fearing neither God nor man, was custom-made to grasp the opportunities, such as they were, of the white man’s dispensation. And the Igbo did so with both hands. But this kind of success can carry a deadly penalty: the danger of hubris, overwhelming pride and thoughtlessness, which invites envy and hatred. Achebe (2000: 46)

Gendered spaces and war  179 The plotters of the 15 January 1966 coup d’état were a group of idealistic young army officers who wanted to topple the Balewa Government that they deemed very corrupt. All the members of this group, except one Yoruba, were Igbo. But the officers that participated in the execution of the coup d’état came from diverse ethnic groups. Shortly after the coup, a widespread narrative of an “Igbo Coup” plotted to seize power and dominate took hold. The federal government’s account stamped an ethnic motive on the coup d’état and the origin of the war. But in reality, the 15 January 1966 coup d’état was an alibi for the explosion of anti-Igbo resentment. Why did the Northern murderous hordes target and isolate the Igbo for elimination? Why did they not attack the other ethnic groups (including Hausa/Fulani) that participated in the execution of the coup d’état? The invention of ethnicity, as the politicisation and manipulation of ethnicity to satisfy vested interests, is mediated by the human intervention that forces the leap from ethnicity to ethnic cleansing. In the Nigeria-Biafra War, the vested interest was economic and the human intervention was externally induced and internally executed. The government account focusses on two major issues – origin and motive, particularly the role ethnicity came to play. In the mould of other partisan (on both sides of the conflict) accounts of the war, the federal government’s document is flawed in its restricted ethnic interpretative grid and its myopic sense of history by claiming that “it all began on 15 January 1966”. The military coup of 15 January 1966 (the immediate cause of the war) was the culminating point of a long history of compulsions, contradictions, invention of ethnicity, divide-and-conquer, and tension brewing under imposed, artificial unity. The remote causes of the war, with roots in late colonialism, are crucial in understanding not only the event of 15 January but also the complexity of the tragic moment in Nigerian history that took millions of lives. Identifying the form of power that emerged at the end of the colonial period as “decentralised despotism”, Mamoud Mamdani’s work on the impact of the legacy of late colonialism on shaping contemporary Africa shows how colonial power sustained itself through hierarchies of relative privilege and containerised ethnic configurations (Mamdani 1996). The Nigerian war slogan, “to keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done”, in its unexamined imposition of unity, failed to take into account the precariousness of the unity that derives from the arbitrariness subtending the coming into being of the country: The Federation of Nigeria, as it exists today, has never really been one homogeneous country, for its widely differing peoples and tribes are yet to find any basis for true unity. This unfortunate yet obvious fact notwithstanding, the former colonial master had to keep the country one, in order to effectively control his vital economic interests concentrated in the more advanced and ‘politically unreliable’ South. Northern and Southern Nigeria became amalgamated in 1914. Thereafter the only thing these peoples had in common became the name of their country. That alone was an insufficient basis for true unity. Madiebo (1983: 3)

180  Obioma Nnaemeka Contrary to the federal government publication’s limited view of history, Emecheta’s lengthy discussion of immediate postindependence politics in Nigeria – from the first post-independence elections to the military coup and counter-coup of 1966 – as prelude to the civil war provides the historical and political canvas on which is vividly brushed the invention of ethnicity/ ethnic politics that provoked and fuelled the war – Nigeria’s war of unity and Biafra’s war of self-determination. As mentioned earlier, The invention of ethnicity, as the politicisation and manipulation of ethnicity to satisfy vested interests, is mediated by the human intervention that compels the leap from ethnicity to ethnic conflict/cleansing. In the Nigeria-Biafra War, the vested interest is economic and the human i ntervention is externally induced/encouraged and internally executed. In Emecheta’s novel, Destination Biafra, foreign interests (sometimes collaborative, sometimes competing) abound, but British economic interests  – from the plunder of cultural artefacts to the control of petroleum  – personified by the ubiquitous Alan Grey and Giles remain an overwhelming presence and a driving force, mapping ethnic boundaries, raising ethnic consciousness, procuring mercenaries, and instigating divisiveness. Biafra. Which Biafra? Biafra is a historical fact, but more importantly Biafra is an idea. The idea is kept alive by insurgent groups such as the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). Furthermore, there is the tendency to conflate Biafra and Biafra War. Often when we talk Biafra, we talk Biafra War. But Biafra War is not synonymous with Biafra. Chinua Achebe’s last work, There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, was published in 2012, the year before he passed. Achebe’s work was touted as a book on the Biafra War. I have argued against this limited reading of Achebe’s work. The subtitle of Achebe’s work is “A History of Biafra” not “A History of Biafra War”. As always, Achebe is deliberate and specific. Beneath the simplicity and elegance of his writing are layers of complexity and depth. Achebe’s works mandate a very close reading in order to unearth their complexity and profundity. The initial pages of Achebe’s book explore the Biafra that preceded the Biafra War. I see two countries (Biafras) in There was a Country: the Biafra before the war and the Biafra of the war. Achebe writes nostalgically and proudly about the former. It was the Biafra where education was at the centre of the lives of Biafrans (Igbo) as Achebe affirms: “I grew up at a time when the colonial educational infrastructure celebrated hard work and high achievement, and so did our families and communities” (Achebe 2012: 27). It was the Biafra of nmuta ka (education/learning is supreme). It was the Biafra of dedicated teachers who cared for students and took pride in their brilliance and achievements. The Biafra of the early part of Achebe’s work was the Biafra where schools were built in every community, village and town. It was the Biafra of quality, world-class education; it was not the Biafra of war. It was the Biafra where the emphasis on education provided the infrastructure that played a huge role in the survival of those

Gendered spaces and war  181 in the Biafran enclave. During the war, United Nations and International Red Cross tents did not dot the landscape. For the most part, refugees slept under a roof – in schools, churches and homes. In spite of the blockade and endless bombardments, children went to school in Biafra. Women played a major role in ensuring the education of children under those trying circumstances.

Fighting war/building a nation (6 July 1967 to 15 January 1970) You men make all this mess and then call on us women to clear it up. Buchi Emecheta, Destination Biafra (216) Without the women, the Nigerian vandals would overrun Biafra; without the women, our gallant Biafran soldiers would have died of hunger in the warfronts. Without the women, the Biafran Red Cross would have collapsed. Flora Nwapa, Wives at War, 13 In the Nigeria-Biafra War, Igbo women’s agency was on full display. Igbo culture gives women the confidence and independence to perform. In Igboland, women are relevant. Igbo women guard their autonomy jealously; they can be rebellious if and when necessary. After the 1929 Igbo Women’s War when Igbo women chased away the colonial warrant chiefs imposed on them by the British colonial administration, the colonial Governor-General in Nigeria, Sir Ralph Cameron, invited anthropologists to Nigeria to study the Igbo. One of the anthropologists, Sylvia Leith-Ross, noted in her 1939 work: “these people are not intimidated by us, and rather amused by us. They watch us and learn quickly what we know. God help us the day they climb the ladder” (Leith-Ross 1939: 152). Hinting at the Igbo Women’s War of 1929, Chinua Achebe asserts that when the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt. Achebe and Blackside Inc (n.d.: n.p.) Achebe goes further to explain the importance he accords to Igbo women: There is a certain increase in the importance I assign to women in getting us out of the mess that we are in, which is a reflection of the role of women in my traditional culture – that they do not interfere in politics until men really make such a mess that the society is unable to go backward or forward. Then women will move in. Achebe and Blackside Inc (n.d.: n.p.).

182  Obioma Nnaemeka A praise-name for women in Igboland is Odozi ngwulu (Caretakers of the homestead). During the war when the notion and boundaries of ngwulu (homestead) shifted and became more complicated, women never abandoned the praise-name, Odozi ngwulu. As the war progressed and the ngwulu became anywhere, women became caretakers of everywhere. During the war, women’s space (in terms of physical space and women’s bodies) was every space. Because the war was fought without any observance of international norms of warfare, it created an environment where the battlefield was everywhere. There was no safe zone – homes, churches, hospitals, schools and markets were bombed indiscriminately. Igbo women were victims of war; they suffered profound harm – physical and psychological – and death. To some extent, their bodies became the battlefield for settling ethnic and patriarchal quarrels. They were raped, maimed and abducted as “trophies” to humiliate Igbo men. But Igbo women were also actors whose interventions were transformative, life-saving and life-changing. They played significant roles in the following areas: education, health, food production, trade, paramilitary services, espionage and diplomatic service. Their vulnerabilities were there, but so was their agency. In addition to being members of the military and paramilitary, Igbo women had the onerous task of making sense of the “madness” of the war. They fought “on all fronts” in order to bring normalcy (or a semblance of it) to an abnormal situation – a task they saw both as a moral obligation and a civic duty. As the line between public and private, personal and political, individual and collective became blurred, women fought their daily battles by playing multiple roles. Their daily acts of heroism sustained Biafra. Women joined paramilitary organisations and participated in civil defense – a law and order group that protected the civilian population and forged good relations between the army and the civilian population. Women played a significant in the Biafra Organisation of Freedom Fighters (BOFF). They contributed to the operations of Research and Production (RAP) made up of scientists, engineers and skilled technicians who manufactured arms – from rockets and artilleries to land mines and bombs. They produced propaganda materials and functioned as morale boosters for the troops. The widespread notion that Africa is a continent of female farmers was evident in Biafra. Women joined the Biafran Land Army for the production of food to supplement infrequent food drops by relief agencies. Igboland is also a land of female traders and female teachers. Igbo women’s visibility in these spheres was apparent during the war. They planted, harvested and processed the crops for consumption and sale. Women were encouraged to put to use every vacant plot of land in their vicinity – around homes, schools, churches and refugee camps. Vegetables and essential crops that could be harvested short-term flourished everywhere. As the war advanced, many women abandoned their farms and gardens and fled to safety. But some of these fearless, determined women occasionally crossed enemy lines to tend their abandoned farms, harvest their crops, recoup whatever they could and return to wherever

Gendered spaces and war  183 they had taken refuge in Biafra. They sold some of the crops and used some to contribute to the feeding of their families and communities. Women’s ingenuity and creativity changed the food culture in Biafra. Normally, the Igbo are not cheese eaters but during the war relief agencies flew into Biafra tons of cheese. The women found creative culinary uses for this foreign curiosity. Christie Achebe (2010: 798) describes the innovation: Ogili, a condiment with a distinctive aroma that Igbo women use for making onugbu (bitter leaf) soup was in short supply in Biafra. When some women got slabs of cheese they threw them by the side. At some point, the aging cheese started to exude ogili-like aroma. Emboldened by this beckoning aroma, a group of curious and imaginative women soon gathered together. They consulted among themselves, and one of them was encouraged to take a wedge of cheese, scrape off the mold, and then submerge it in her soup, which immediately acquired the familiar flavor of homegrown onugbu soup! Thereafter, this use of cheese was easily sold to the women, and a ready source of protein and condiment became available. Brave Igbo women, some disguised as Nigerian market women, crossed enemy lines into occupied territories to procure food and other commodities and conduct espionage in the process. They battered their jewelry and clothing in exchange for commodities that were needed in Biafra. Women played a huge role in children’s education. They organised classes wherever they took refuge. Christie Achebe (2010) reports on her effort to run a school for children in Oguta, a town where her family took refuge. She converted their house into a school that was able to accommodate 84 children: School started very early in the morning before the Nigerian planes were out on their routine flights. It closed just before the planes were due back from their mission. The school was composed of children of diverse classes and ages – kindergartners to sixth grade and a few 12th graders. They were grouped according to the class they were supposed to have been in when the war started. Altogether there were about 12 different groups. The curriculum consisted essentially of reading, singing and arithmetic. Achebe (2010: 799) Trained nurses and other women volunteers attended to the sick and abandoned babies and orphans. Others helped to fly some of the children out to the Republic of Gabon (one of the countries that had recognised Biafra) for safety and medical treatment. One of the sad stories of the war was the fate of some of those children. Many were still in Gabon when the war ended suddenly and chaotically.

184  Obioma Nnaemeka

Narrating war: gender, temporality, and spatiality Perspective is that part of a poem, a novel, or play which a writer never puts directly upon paper. It is that fixed point in intellectual space where a writer stands to view the struggles, hopes and sufferings of his people. There are times when he may stand too close and the result is blurred vision. Or he may stand too far away and the result is a neglect of important things. Richard Wright (1994: 103) After the war, Igbo women writers produced a body of work that vividly captures the complexities of the human dimension and cost of the war. In their narratives, they bring unique insight and sensitivity that are rarely present in the works of male writers. By focussing on women’s vulnerabilities in the war, Igbo women writers reveal how women’s bodies became the battlefield for settling patriarchal and ethnic quarrels, as was the case between the Tutsis and Hutus during the Rwandan conflict in the 1990s. As “anthills of the savannah”, Igbo women writers have contributed enormously to keeping alive the memory of the traumatic event that occurred in Igboland about half a century ago. As storytellers, Igbo women are the purveyors of the story of the tragedy that happened there. It was the desire to break the silence and clear the shadow of her childhood – the Biafra War – that compelled Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to apply her fertile imagination to the memorialising of the traumatic event that ended seven years before her birth. In a speech titled “La Femme et la Création” (“Women and Creativity”), delivered in Japan in 1966, Simone de Beauvoir (1987: 27) linked creativity and distance to the metaphor of the war correspondent reporting from the sidelines of the battlefield (close but not in medias res) to discuss the privileged perspective of women on the margins of society: In order to create … it is necessary to want to reveal the world to others; consequently, one must be able to see the world, and in order to do so one must attain a certain distance from it. When totally immersed in a situation, you cannot describe it. A soldier in the midst of the fighting cannot describe the battle. But equally, if totally alien to a situation, you cannot write about it either. If somebody were to try to provide an account of a battle without having seen one, the result would be awful. The privileged position is that of a person who is slightly on the side-lines: for example a war correspondent who shares some of the risks of the fighting forces, but not all, who is involved in the action, but not totally; he is best placed to describe the battle. Well, the situation of women is akin to this. A similar argument can be made in the perennial insider/outsider debate in African literary criticism. Although the insider/outsider debate has

Gendered spaces and war  185 revolved around cultural knowledge (African) and theoretical grasp (foreign), I believe it is basically a question of distance. Reading, understanding and interpreting literature entails distance – how far or how close the critic is to the text and/or context. Both the myopic focus on the text that totally ignores context and the obsessive focus on context (theoretical or otherwise) that alienates the text undermine the integrity of the text and have profound implications for the interpretation of literature. Similar to creative writing, literary criticism involves creativity in light of the fact that the literary critic creates new mythologies and levels of discourse. The question of distance is equally crucial to the analysis of war narratives by Igbo women writers where physical distance seems to determine narrative distance. Two of the writers, Buchi Emecheta and Phanuel Egejuru, were resident in Britain and the United States respectively during the war, as opposed to Rose Adaure Njoku and Flora Nwapa who spent the war years in the Biafran enclave. Not surprisingly, Egejuru and Emecheta (to a lesser degree) focus more on the context of the war, while the other two writers discuss in varying degrees the immediacy of the war by cataloguing everyday occurrences in Biafra. Emecheta provides the pre-war historical, political, economic and imperialistic contexts that point to the inevitability of the war, while Egejuru provides the post-war cultural context (emasculation symbolised by the disappearance of yam/ji, the king of all crops) to explain the empowerment (economic at least) of women and reversals in gender roles. Following de Beauvoir’s categories of narrators, one can say that Njoku, fixated to details and oblivious to context (larger issues), is totally immersed in the situation; Egejuru and Emecheta try to provide an account of a battle without seeing one; Adichie defies de Beauvoir’s assertion. Adichie was born seven years after the war but she was able to produce a magnificent work by extensive research and the power of the imagination. Nwapa through her narrator, Kate, appears to be the closest to the “war correspondent”. On the one hand, she describes the details of the war without making the reader suffocate under them, as in Njoku’s work. On the other hand, she dwells on the context (cultural), but not as extensively as Egejuru and Emecheta. Although Egejuru and Emecheta “try to provide an account of a battle without seeing one”, I would not go so far as to say that “the result is awful”. As Ernest Emenyonu (1991: 104) rightly notes, distance is a crucial element in re-imag(in)ing and narrating the Nigeria-Biafra conflict: In the present circumstances, the Nigerian writers on the war must allow a reasonable period of time to lapse before they can objectively write about the war, no longer as active combatants in the conflict, but as writers who bring their imaginative vision to bear on the important events in the history of their people. The relevant pre- and post-war contexts – possible only from a distance – that Emecheta and Egejuru provide are crucial to increasing the reader’s

186  Obioma Nnaemeka understanding of the war. My interest here is not to hierarchise the different narrative strategies but rather to delineate the relationships among distance, perspective, knowledge and narratology In contextualising the war, Emecheta and Egejuru create protagonists whose physical distance from the war (as event not discourse) inflects narratology and impacts narrative outcome. Emecheta’s protagonist, Debbie Ogedengbe, returns to Nigeria and the Biafran enclave from England to witness and participate in the war. She joins the Nigerian army to assume the unique responsibility of traveling to the eastern enclave of Biafra to talk to the Biafran leader, Chijioke Abosi, out of waging war against Nigeria: “she was to give Chijioke Abosi the opportunity to back down without losing face” (120). Egejuru’s protagonist, Jiwudu, leaves Nigeria to study in the United States from where he talks about and works for the war. About a year after coming to the United States on scholarship to study agricultural engineering (spiced with a dose of existentialist philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin, Jiwudu “was getting ready to go to work [and] news came over the radio announcing a full scale war in his country between his tribe’s people and the rest of the country” (126). He joins the Biafran Students Union, the C250 Club, and through the activities of relief organisations – such as the Save-a-Child-for-the-Lord Organisation and Red Cross – is able to raise funds to support Biafra’s war efforts. His knowledge of the war comes from newspapers, radio and periodic letters from his family in the Biafran territory. The war ends by the time he returns to Nigeria. In effect, Jiwudu’s distant location peripherises war as event, while memorialising war as discourse. The physical distance between these two protagonists (Debbie and Jiwudu) and war as event is as different as the pre-war and post-war contexts Emecheta and Egejuru respectively provide, although both contexts are relevant in their own way. Igbo women writers have vigorously addressed the silences in Nigerian war literature, from war novels by Igbo male writers – Chinua Achebe (Girls at War and Other Stories, 1972) and Chukwuemeka Ike (Sunset at Dawn, 1976) – to the self-serving, narcissistic hagiographies by the principals in the war with titles that are marked by first person pronouns (I, We) and possessive adjectives (My) – Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu (Because I am Involved, 1989), Adewale Ademoyega (Why We Struck, 1981) and Olusegun Obasanjo (My Command, 1980). Igbo women writers’ discourse on sex and sexuality differs from its articulation in narratives by male writers. By insisting on women’s strength and relevance at wartime, Igbo women writers shift focus away from the pervasive portrayal of women as sex objects and “workers for troop comfort” in the works of male writers. In contrast to male writers who focus on consensual sex and raise moral questions about the promiscuity of girls during the war, women writers foreground painful and graphic depictions of sexual violence and rape as weapons of war. The sexual intercourse between Gladys and Reginald

Gendered spaces and war  187 Nwankwo in Achebe’s Girls at War was consensual and masterminded by wayward Gladys who was certainly in control: She gave him a shock by the readiness with which she followed him to bed and by her language. ‘You want to shell?’ she asked. And without waiting for an answer said, ‘Go ahead but don’t pour in troops!’ He didn’t want to pour in troops either and so it was all right. But she wanted visual assurance and so he showed her. 113 In Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn, sexual intercourse between Love and Dr Kanu is consensual and so is that between the man who dies during an air-raid and his mistress: A man who lied to his family that he had gone to work was killed on top of his mistress when enemy planes struck Orlu! Dr. Kanu had decided that he would not visit Love at any time enemy planes could possibly strike. He did not want to enrich the stock of war scandals. 185 Debbie, in Emecheta’s Destination Biafra, is raped twice and manages to articulate the hurt, humiliation and shame the traumatic experience brings upon her. But it is Egejuru’s graphic description of the Captain raping Rachael (a virgin) that captures in a brutal way the indignity, violence and trauma of war. Accounts of the Nigeria-Biafra War by lgbo women writers centre the constituencies (women and children) that are often marginalised in accounts of the war written by men. Although the focus on women and children provides a point of convergence for these works, the distance between each writer and the war produces different narrative contexts. By centring women and children in their narratives, Igbo women writers subvert prevalent, gendered dichotomies – combatant vs non-combatant, war front vs home front – in war writings in order to show the crucial role women play in armed conflicts and nationalist struggles and, more importantly, reveal how women and the society at large are irrevocably transformed. Unapologetic and unrelenting in exposing the pervasiveness of sexual violence in armed conflicts, Igbo women writers bring up for scrutiny and condemnation the use of rape as an instrument of war. Buchi Emecheta injected into the discourse on war the issue of intraethnic conflict. Emecheta’s parents were from Ibuza in present-day Delta State. Emecheta was therefore a “western Igbo” (Igbo west of the Niger). She succinctly articulates the often-ignored issue of intra-ethnic conflict among the Igbo. In her war narrative, Destination Biafra, she explores the complexity of ethnicity and ethnic politics during the war by elaborating not only on the inter-ethnic struggles within Nigeria but also on the intra-ethnic

188  Obioma Nnaemeka conflicts among the Igbo themselves. From her vantage position as an Igbo from the west of the Niger, Emecheta focusses on how the politics of location (east or west of the Niger) shaped relationships among the Igbo during the war. Changes in Biafra’s fortunes induced reconfigurations of ethnic allegiances and alignment. The recapture of Ore and Benin by federal forces and the push toward the east with devastating consequences for western Igbo territory flared the interrogation of ethnic boundaries and loyalty among the Igbo themselves. Suspicion and antagonism swelled on both embankments. With the Biafran forces pushed to the east of the Niger, the western lgbo, defenseless against the federal forces, castigated the “Igbo people” for dragging them (the western lgbo) into their war: “maybe the Western lgbos were going to be second-hand citizens in the new Biafra; maybe it would have been better for them to remain Nigerians” (Emecheta 1982: 138). Equally suspicious were the eastern Igbo who felt betrayed by the antagonistic “Hausa lgbo” (western lgbo) in their ‘collusion’ with the federal forces. Abosi, the Biafran leader, laments: What beats me are these so-called Mid-Westerners. Have they got no loyalty at all? Only a few days ago when we took Benin they were shouting and claiming that we had freed them from the shackles of Momoh’s Nigeria. Now with the fall of Ore they are screaming, ‘Kill Biafra and her lgbo people’. Emecheta (1982: 172) The notion of ethnicity (monolithic Igbo community) harboured by the federal forces differed markedly from the fragmented notion of ethnicity nursed by the lgbo under fire and threat of annihilation. Ethnic politics and loyalty feature in Emecheta’s work in various other ways. Equally crucial to an understanding of the war is the post-war context that Egejuru’s work, The Seed Yams Have Been Eaten, provides. Using the lgbo icon of masculinity and cohesion – yam/ji – as metaphor, Egejuru effectively captures the post-war dilemma of the Ara clan by showing how the war precipitated not only moral decay but also cultural shifts such as the reversal of gender roles. Symbol of royalty, prestige, power and masculinity (witness the male names – Ezeji, Osuji, Jiwudu), Ji (king of all crops) is as central and relevant to the Ara world as the protagonist (Jiwudu) is to the story. Egejuru’s novel is a story of the strength and weakness of “maleness”. On the one hand, male achievement is symbolised by Jiwudu’s meteoric rise and, on the other hand, by male violence (war). Obinna’s letter that Jiwudu receives at the end of the war bears stories of war horrors, one of which devastates Jiwudu: We young ones are happy now because we shall not go to the farm again as all seed yams have been eaten by the soldiers, both our soldiers

Gendered spaces and war  189 and enemy soldiers. We now eat cassava and women go all the way to Umagwo to collect cassava. 74 Jiwudu cannot put the letter down after reading it: “the seed yams have been eaten, the seed yams have been eaten” (74). Jiwudu chooses not to study medicine or law despite the respect and prestige that his people accord both professions; he chooses instead to study agricultural engineering in order to introduce mechanised farming in his town and improve the lives of his people. However, “the disappearance of the yams thwarted his ambitions, it also meant the end of further aspirations to improve the lives of his people” (185). More importantly, the disappearance of the yam and the concomitant demise of the New Yam Festival threatens communal cohesion as well as individual and collective identities, thereby presaging the demise of the protagonist, Jiwudu, who simultaneously infers a concern and articulates a resolve: “But I tell you, I shall not let my name be lost” (182). Jiwudu’s resolve to self-regenerate (through the planting of yam) is personal and collective (survival of the Ara clan/nation) and eminently masculinist (planting of yam – king of all crops) in its assertion of continuity and its inscription in another male name given by his people – Afamefuna (may my name not be lost). Yam is a symbol of cohesion and communal life because the communal labour it requires instils esprit de corps – “the children will never know the joy of team work as they clear the bushes and burn them” (192) – and the ceremonies that are organised around it mandate participation and discourage exclusion. The disappearance of yam as a result of the war indicts the war as a harbinger of disruptions and divisiveness; as the annihilator of the nerve centre of the community, and a threat to the generational renewal of collective identity. Attempts by the people of Araugo to purchase and plant yam seeds in order to ensure the generational renewal and the perpetuation of their tradition fail when thieves dig up and steal the yam seeds. The stealing of yams buried in the soil (an abominable act that signals the collapse of the moral edifice grounded in the reverence for mother earth) as an aberrant behaviour provoked by the war shows how militarisation not only ensures physical death but also disrupts the moral order and provokes reversals in gender relations and responsibilities. Most of the war writings by Nigerian women come from Igbo women living inside or outside Biafra during the civil war. Hovering above and around the feminine voices from Biafra is the problematic and deafening silence (during and after the war) of women on the Nigerian side. War literature produced by those on the Nigerian side of the conflict is predominantly written by men, thus making ineluctable the conclusion that the war was perceived as one of those “affairs of men”. Such troubling distance calls into question the issues of gender dynamics and alliance formation in national

190  Obioma Nnaemeka conflicts. While most studies that examine gender relations in nationalist struggles usually focus on the relationship between men and women in each of the warring camps, not enough attention has been paid to the relationship (if any) between women on both sides of the conflict. It seems to me that in the Nigeria-Biafra War (as in many such wars), the bonds of sisterhood stop at ethnic boundaries. It is important, therefore, to examine the ways in which intra-gender relations are subordinated to ethnic politics and loyalty as we continue to document the often-studied marginalisation of inter-gender relations and inequalities in nationalist struggles.

Silence, memory and forgetting The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (3) My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (41) The Czech/French writer, Milan Kundera (1991), powerfully articulates the link between the amnesia and annihilation, between power and resistance, and between memory and survival. War narratives by women have contributed greatly to resisting the silences and historical amnesia imposed by Nigeria after the war. Those who lived through the war were traumatised by the horror they witnessed and experienced. The Biafra war is buried in silence. My parents lived through the war. My father passed two years after the war a broken man. He did not say a word about the war. My mother passed two decades later. She did not talk about the war either. My parents and many Biafrans were traumatised into silence. Adichie (2014: n.p.) notes similar silences in her family: On the margins of my happy childhood, there was a shadow: the Biafran war …. The war was the seminal event in Nigeria’s modern history, but I learned little about it in school. ‘Biafra’ was wrapped in mystery …. My parents are still unable to talk in detail about certain war experiences. After the war, the Nigerian government engineered a massive project of erasure designed to ensure collective amnesia. Yakubu Gowon’s phony “no victor, no vanquished” rhetoric couched as magnanimity was designed to sweep everything under the carpet so we could all move on; so we could all get along. The Nigerian government’s unexamined slogan of the Three Rs

Gendered spaces and war  191 (“Reconciliation, Reconstruction and Rehabilitation”) was equally phony, hollow and problematic. There was no national conversation about what happened from July 1967 to January 1970. There was no truth and reconciliation initiative. Every attempt was made to wipe Biafra off the face of the map and impose collective amnesia. There is no mention of Biafra in the school curriculum. The Bight of Biafra was changed to the Bight of Bonny. There are no statues and monuments to memorialise Biafra. Everything Biafra was censured. The war ended in January 1970 but the great Igbo writer, Chinua Achebe, could not travel out of the country until late 1972 to accept a professorship at the University of Amherst because the Nigerian government revoked his passport as punishment for supporting Biafra. The Nigerian government was bent on marginalising the Igbo instead of harnessing the ingenuity and intellectual power that fuelled innovations in the Biafran enclave. Adichie notes that as recently as 2014, Nigerian government censors delayed the release of the film adaptation of Half of a Yellow Sun, because, according to them, it might incite violence in the country; at issue in particular is a scene based on a historically documented massacre at a northern Nigerian airport. Adichie (2014: n.p.) War narratives by Igbo women constitute an act of resistance, a struggle against forgetting. Their works are reminders of the pantheon of Igbo proverbs and wise sayings that underscore the importance of memory/remembering and sense of history: Ncheta ka (Remembering is supreme); Onye amaro ebe nmili bidolu maba ya, ama ama onye nyelia akwa oji ficha aru (If you do not know where the rain started to beat you, you will not remember who gave you the cloth with which to clean your body); until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. Chinua Achebe (Moyers 1988: n.p.) asserts that in order to survive, the Igbo must be storytellers/historians and purveyors of their story: It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have, otherwise their surviving would have no meaning …. Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum …. The story is our escort. Without it we are blind …. It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle …. It is only the story … that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. In his interview with Bill Moyers (Moyers 1988), Chinua Achebe discusses extensively the meaning of the title of his work, Anthills of the Savannah (1987). According to him, storytellers are the anthills of the savannah. Like the anthills, the storytellers endure. The anthills stand to remind the new

192  Obioma Nnaemeka grass of the fire that raged in the previous season. They stand as the memory the new grass needs in order to grow. Through their narratives, Igbo women have contributed to keeping alive the memory and lessons of the traumatic event that occurred in Igboland half a century ago.

Acknowledgement I thank Indiana University for awarding me the generous New Frontiers Research Grant that assisted me to research and write this chapter.

References Achebe, Chinua. 1972. Girls at War and Other Short Stories. London: Heinemann. ——— 1987. Anthills of the Savannah. London: Heinemann. ——— 2000. The Trouble with Nigeria. Enugu: Fourth Dimension. ——— 2012. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. London: Penguin Books. Achebe, Chinua and Blackside Inc. n.d. An Intimate Interview with Chinua Achebe. Available at https://www.pbs.org/hopes/nigeria/essays.html. Accessed: 14 March 2020. Achebe, Christie. 2010. Igbo Women in the Nigerian-Biafran War 1967–1970: An Interplay of Control. Journal of Black Studies 40(5): 785–811. Ademoyega, Adewale. 1981. Why We Struck. Ibadan: Evans Brothers. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2004. Half of a Yellow Sun. London: Fourth Estate. ——— 2014. Hiding from Our Past. The New Yorker, 1 May 2014. Available at https:// www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/hiding-from-our-past. Accessed: 14 March 2020. Amuta, Chidi. 1988. Literature of the Nigerian Civil War. In Ogunbiyi, Yemi (ed.) Perspectives on Nigerian Literature: 1700 to the Present. Vol. 1. Lagos: Guardian Books, 85–92. De Beauvoir, Simone. 1987. Women and Creativity. In Moi, Toril (ed.) French Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 17–32. Egejuru, Phanuel. 1993. The Seed Yams Have Been Eaten. Ibadan: Heinemann. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1987. Women and War. New York: Basic Books. Emecheta, Buchi. 1982. Destination Biafra. London: Heinemann. Emenyonu, Ernest. 1991. The Nigerian Civil War and the Nigerian Novel: The Writer as Historical Witness. In Emenyonu, Ernest (ed.) Studies on the Nigerian Novel. Ibadan: Heinemann, 89–105. Ike, Chukwuemeka. 1976. Sunset at Dawn. New York: Harper Collins. Kundera, Milan. 1991. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. New York: Penguin Books. Leith-Ross, Sylvia. 1939. African Women: A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Madiebo, Alexander. 1983. The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafra War. Enugu: Fourth Dimension.

Gendered spaces and war  193 Mamdani, Mahmoud. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moyers, Bill. 1988. African Author Chinua Achebe. In A World of Ideas, September 29. Available at https://billmoyers.com/content/chinua-achebe/. Accessed: 18 September 2020. Njoku, Rose Adaure. 1986. Withstand the Storm: War Memoirs of a Housewife. Ibadan: Heinemann. Nwapa, Flora. 1975. Never Again. Enugu: Nwamife Press. ——— 1980. Wives at War and Other Stories. Enugu: Tana Press. Obasanjo, Olusegun. 1980. My Command. London: Heinemann. Ojukwu, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu. 1989. Because I am Involved. Lagos: Spectrum Books. Wright, Richard. 1994. Blueprint for Negro Writing. In Angelyn Mitchell (ed.) Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 97–106.

Part IV

Re-reading trauma and dehumanisation

12 Politics, narrative and subjectivities in Fanta Régina Nacro’s The Night of Truth Frank Ukadike

The relationship between narrative, form and ideologies has, for some time, been understood as a vital constitutive element of African cinema. As evolving trends in contemporary African film-making have advanced beyond the contours of socio-political didacticism, it has become crucial, more than ever, to explore the medium’s provenance, its new media technologies and cultural formations, as well as its audiences and spectatorship, modes of distribution and, crucially, questions of meaning. Not surprising, in Fanta Régina Nacro’s The Night of Truth, a film depicting a fictitious nation’s search for truth and reconciliation after years of genocidal rampages, the director’s politically conscious but sensitive exploration of the relationships between experience, self, others and the community are framed through the fraught relationship between the past and present. This film works through the emotional scars of a blighted past, suggesting how the various ghosts that haunt the nation may be exorcised. Through deft use of flashbacks, for instance, Nacro explores the unspeakable, the silences, the gaps and the quandaries in the national imaginary. Crucially, nation, nationalism and ethnic chauvinism and their myriad facets become nodal points through which the director evokes haunting representational realms, not premised on spectacle but rather geared intricately towards fostering a critical discourse and evoking a contemplative consciousness in which humanism is central. As will be argued, The Night of Truth is a resounding human rights narrative, deeply entrenched in a context of biographical and broad historical circumstances, conceptual frameworks and representational paradigms, as well as narrative techniques, aesthetic embellishments and ideological vestiges that problematise gender roles in times of crises, with special tangents touching on rape, violence, bereavement, memory, trauma, healing and the search for transcendence. Specifically, this chapter emphasises the universality of trauma, humour and healing, and how Nacro’s The Night of Truth showcases the duality of human nature in a truly African-centric film. Fanta Régina Nacro’s first feature film, The Night of Truth, is a magnificent representation of trauma and atrocity, and reconciliation through the human healing process. It is set in a fictional West African nation that

198  Frank Ukadike shares many similarities to Burkina Faso, including a common language of French, the lingua franca. This film, which depicts the night two warring ethnic groups hope to finally come to a peaceful resolution after decades of warfare, is undeniably an African filmic experience. The film focusses on one fateful night during which the Nayaks and Bonandés gather together and attempt to reconcile a conflict that has led to genocide and caused severe pain for all the film’s characters. Amid the fear and distrust of the opposing groups, President Miossoune of the Nayaks and Colonel Theo Bogwanda of the Bonandés attempt to create peace after so much death and war. Although the film is not set in a specific African nation, it is clearly in Africa and the story itself mimics the history of many African nations which have struggled in recent times with brutal civil wars (Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Central African Republic, Liberia and Sudan) and the chaos wrought on some countries by Islamic insurgency such as Boko Haram (Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad), El Shabab (Sudan, Kenya) and ISIS (Mali, Burkina Faso). It also meets the most important qualification for it to be truly an African film: it has an African director who was able to craft an individualistic African feminine aesthetics and narrative. Yet, when people talk about the film, the director included, the quality of the film that is most important is not its Africanness but rather its universality. This is a film that resonates with people across the world because of its moving and relatable commentary on trauma and how people can move past it. As events play out in the film, they conjure many connotations of the history of Burkina Faso and memories of the prevailing struggles against the many societal wounds and human rights abuses experienced and, specifically, the injustices the Burkinabe have endured since independence.

Power, intervention and violence Since independence in 1960, Burkina Faso has teetered between constitutional and military regimes, with the latter staying longer years in power.1 As with other African countries that have seen their constitutional authority usurped, military regimes in their tenure have, in common, been autocratic, dictatorial, ruthless, inept and often fraught with abysmal violence and colossal violation of human rights. In Burkina Faso, however, the 1980s ushered in a brand of military intervention that some would argue was progressive – when the Conseil National de la Revolution (National Council of the Revolution) or CNR came to power under the dynamic and charismatic leadership of Captain Thomas Sankara. Analysts have pointed out that Sankara’s short reign, 1983–1987, began a new chapter in civilianmilitary relations in Africa in general and Burkina Faso in particular: The Sankara government deliberately mobilized the peasants, who constitute the bulk of the society, to participate in the democratic process. Civil society was also given a boost by the state in the form of the

Politics, narrative and subjectivities  199 empowerment of women, peasants, students, workers, and [civic organizations]. Never before were the basic needs of the ordinary Burkinabe as attended to as they were by the Sankara regime. Certainly it was not a representative democracy, but it was a participatory one. Busia (n.d.: 1) This undertaking exemplifies the sort of leadership Africa wanted: a progressive, incorruptible government by “real” people, for the people; an African brand of progressivism, one that could ultimately eradicate corruption, endemic poverty and hopelessness.2 Of course, history has proven that wherever a dynamic and progressive leadership has emerged in Africa there have been internal and external detractors hell-bent on dismantling it so as to keep the continent in perpetual dependency and underdevelopment. It is from this perspective that analysts have again pointed out that during Sankara’s regime, the intermittent cases of human rights abuses that occurred, including “cases of torture, arbitrary detention, and other violations”, were to keep in check acts of sabotage against the ruling oligarch’s revolutionary agenda (Busia n.d.: 1). In October 1987, Burkina Faso witnessed the bloodiest coup d’etat in the country’s history, staged by Sankara’s best friend, Blaise Campore, which ended the life of the charismatic president and his regime. With Sankara gone and his progressive agenda shattered, Campore ruled the country for the next 27 years with an iron hand suppressing opponents. His regime was marred by a systematic violation of human rights, including arbitrary arrests, political assassinations, hit squads and detentions without trial. Other human rights problems associated with his administration were judicial inefficiency, restrictions on freedom of speech, expression and assembly, intimidation and tortures, and disappearances of individuals – all accoutrements or “common features of Burkina Faso’s political landscape under Blaise Campore” (Busia n.d.: 1). The case of Burkina Faso ratifies the contention that a schizophrenic regime ruthlessly purges its society by using its mechanisms of power to destroy the political, legal, administrative, economic, social and cultural order of a country so as to intimidate and suppress, for the simple intention of perpetuating the powers of the ruling class and for the prospect of the regime’s head of state joining the society of Africa’s President-for-Life Club.3 In the case of Campore’s regime, it was crystal clear, as analysts have pointed out, that the flagrant violation of basic human rights principles created an atmosphere of terror, even undermining the judiciary it replaced with revolutionary tribunals which were used relentlessly to terrorise and persecute those deemed to be political adversaries. Many of these issues related to history, memory, politics and culture filtered through the lens of Fanta Régina Nacro in the making of The Night of Truth. They serve not only as a tapestry of reflecting actual history but also as a mirror image of societies in distress.

200  Frank Ukadike

Perspectives Fanta Régina Nacro of Burkina Faso is considered to belong to the second generation of African filmmakers. She has been very successful in her career and is largely considered one of the most progressive female filmmakers in sub-Saharan Africa. Nacro grew up in Burkina Faso where she studied at the African Institute of Cinematography in Ouagadougou, otherwise known as INAFEC in the 1980s. She later earned her Masters in Film and Audiovisual Studies from Sorbonne in Paris, France. Early on in her life, she expressed the desire to make films that tell an authentic story rather than serve the purpose of entertainment (Bisschoff and Van De Peer 2013). Thus, her strategy, rooted in a deep concern for exploring the consequences of the methods used for representing Africa in films, is to examine the social and cultural dynamics of gender and ethnicity in her [re]writing of history from a feminine perspective. I believe and will argue in this study of The Night of Truth that Nacro’s films, like those of other women filmmakers in Africa, reflect female empowerment and the contributions women make to African cultural institutions in socio-political settings and situations. Although these women filmmakers’ ostensible goals may be the same with regard to the representation of continental issues, such women’s films typically focus on humanising the portrayal of women and on asserting their voices to reflect the roles women play in society. Thus, films by such African women, including Nacro’s, have been increasingly portraying subjects hitherto avoided or considered culturally too sensitive – and sometimes even no-go areas for their male counterparts. For example, in some provocative works of women filmmakers, scenes of nudity and love-making, such as in Safi Faye’s Mossane (1996), represent a pattern of deviation from tradition as they fearlessly depict taboo subjects. The devastating effects of the AIDS epidemic and the problem of expanding orphanages as a result of this disease is the theme of Everyone’s Child (1995) directed by Zimbabwe’s Tsitsi Dangarembga, author of the award-winning novel Nervous Conditions (1988). In Femmes aux Yeux Ouverts (Women with Open Eyes, 1994), award-winning Togolese filmmaker, Anne-Laure Folly, presents portraits of African women from four West African nations – Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal and Benin. The film shows how African women are speaking out and organising around five crucial issues: marital rights, reproductive health, female genital mutilation (read: excision), women’s role in the economy and political rights. In Fanta Régina Nacro’s Le Truc de Konate (Condom vs Culture, 1998), the issue is condom use as, after a visit to the city, a young wife returns to her village with a special gift for her husband – a condom, which he refuses to use, mysteriously becoming impotent as a result. This film, in which a magical tree is decorated with innumerable prophylactics like Christmas tree ornaments, is a tool of enlightenment for women and men that warns about the consequences of unsafe sex. There are other African women’s films that are relentless and engaging in their narration of African concerns, including human rights abuses. And

Politics, narrative and subjectivities  201 like the films of their male counterparts of African film practice, these women’s thematic and aesthetic prerogatives are determined by specific social, political and gender objectives rather than the selection of conventional spectacles for commercial exploitation. As commentaries, they display cultural and ideological sensibilities and contradictions, especially as to how certain conventions are appropriated or subverted. Thus, the films suggest ways of interrogating African ideals and inherent natures, or, as I have stated elsewhere, they dramatise the dilemma of self-representation (Ukadike 1994). Nacro’s first feature film, The Night of Truth, deals with trauma, reconciliation, memory and revenge through a series of events and symbolism. It begins with Edna, the wife of the president, at the site of her son Michael’s grave. She has been traumatised by the violent death of her son, at the hands of the Bonandés. Michael was brutally massacred at the battle of Govinda where his genitals were cut off and stuffed into his mouth. He appears to Edna as a spirit running around on the grass around his grave. It is clear from the start that Edna has severe psychological scarring and resentment towards the Bonandés, the other ethnic group who are in conflict with the Nayaks. On leaving the burial spot, Edna promises she will not rest until Michael’s death is avenged. She then refers to the Bonandés as half-human snakes. Shortly hereafter, we meet a man called Tomoto, one of the Bonandés, who is on the side of the road with a machete screaming obscenities about the Nayaks by calling them “murderers” and “cockroaches”. Thus, in the first scenes we see the two ethnic groups positioning themselves against each other through the symbolism of deceitful animals. With this powerful motif, Nacro highlights the inhumanity that humans can display, by comparing the warring groups to the most detested and grotesque of animals, the snake and the cockroach. The attitudes of the opposing groups who hate each other prove that “annihilation of the other becomes the benchmark of success, however this is achieved” (Bâ and Higbee 2012: 75). This statement reinforces the understanding of the treatment of Fatu, the daughter of a mixed marriage between a Bonandés and a Nayak, who returns to the village after her family has been killed and she has been raped. Her belonging to the two ethnic communities notwithstanding, she is insulted, humiliated and dehumanised as Tomoto instantly calls her a spy and wants her murdered. Nacro portrays this woman as a victim of complex trauma, particularly in the form of domestic violence resulting from ethnic cleansing. The conflict has rendered her demoralised, betrayed by everyone, abused and objectified – and that is not something one gets over easily. In fact, even when someone in that situation is healed, the emotional scar still lingers on and the ordeal is never completely erased. Tomoto’s behaviour reveals the general fear and mistrust between the two communities, which explains the elusiveness of peace in this circumstance. Because of the extraordinary power of film to communicate, viewers can experience certain emotions intensely while watching. Every film serves a

202  Frank Ukadike purpose or purposes; whether these purposes are noble or needed is entirely up to the filmmaker. With a film like The Night of Truth, where the traumatic experiences never stop coming, Nacro enables the audience to keep feeling the emotional, heart-wrenching impact. For Nacro, the film grew out of a need for there to be an avenue for people to confront the horrific and incomprehensible trauma that fills the world. It is also a reflection on the process of reconciliation, memory and the possibility of peace after atrocities: “what I can say about The Night of Truth is that I really began to reflect on the subject when watching reports on the war in Yugoslavia …. I began to reflect on human atrocity” (Nacro and Scarlet 2008: n.p.). The war in Yugoslavia got Nacro thinking deeply about violence in Africa: Yugoslavia was the point of departure in the sense that the testimonies and reports of atrocities, in particular in cases of women being raped and having acid poured into their vaginas, women being made to watch the murder of their families and husbands, that provoked my thinking about atrocities in more general terms. After the war in Yugoslavia, I hoped that the whole world would realise this kind of violence is not restricted to the black peoples of Africa. Allardice (2005: n.p.) It was this understanding of how seemingly normal people could commit unspeakable atrocities that drove Nacro to reflect on this duality of human nature in her film The Night of Truth. What is interesting about her approach to this goal is that she chose to make the trauma that the film focussed on completely fictional. The country, the war, the ethnic groups and the plot that the film depicts all only exist in this film. It is not the director lending a critical eye to a specific trauma testifying to a specific painful experience and legacy the way many so-called truth and reconciliation films do (South Africa comes to mind here). Instead, the director created a world surrounded by and defined by a trauma that only exists in painful memories and flashbacks which themselves are not always accurate. Although it could be argued that having an imagined world and an imagined trauma distances the film from its own subject, ultimately this strategy makes the trauma more real for the viewer. As Martin Mhando and Keyan Tomaselli (2009: 40) have argued, film enables the viewing public to feel that they have participated in the past event. This experience permits audiences to undertake a mourning of sorts, and to imbue the filmic narrative with a socio-psychological status. Film and video generate interpretation in the minds of viewers, interpretation that can create a phenomenological sense of ‘being there’ or ‘having been there’. The audience of The Night of Truth live through the experiences of the films characters. They experience the same nervous anticipation as the night of

Politics, narrative and subjectivities  203 reconciliation comes up. They view the same horrific flashbacks. There is no distance between the audience and the people in the film’s relationship to the trauma. Unlike films that portray fictionalised accounts of actual traumatic pasts, there are no insiders for this film. Everyone goes into it with the same level playing field and is equally caught up in the drama of the film, and has the same stakes as any other viewer. The audience is as much a part of this world and this trauma as the characters themselves, and by being in an unspecified place with unreal events which, nevertheless, reverberate as documentary realism, the audience has no way to distance themselves from the events of the film because there is no world except this shared fictional space. The framing and composition, as well as the jerky hand-held camera which gives an on-the-spot realist observation of events as they happen, attest to the realism displayed on screen. What is interesting, I think, is that while characters may combust or die, we the viewer-experiencer can rise again and do something about the trauma. This strategy inspires and challenges us, and when we participate in a story like this one, we are doing so with hope for some kind of reward –not necessarily with a happy ending as in a Hollywood film, but with something that, despite all the sturm und drang, will be unquestionably, stanchly human.

Echoes of memory, violence, revenge and reconciliation One of the main themes in The Night of Truth is the reconciliation between two peoples. Both the Bonandés and the Nayaks have been exhausted by a decade marked by tragedy, murder and mistrust. They have come to a truce and the Nayaks visit the Bonandés to seal the peace with a celebratory feast. The night before the feast, Colonel Theo Bogwanda, the respected and fearless leader of the Bonandés, has a nightmare about the battle of Govinda. In a haunting and mesmerising scene, his nightmare depicts dismembered body parts in puddles of water, dead bodies, chopped off heads on the ground and streams of blood. Through the use of this graphic imagery Nacro gives the viewer a mental image of violence. The viewer experiences, … the painful process of traumatization. This painful process is as necessary for film viewers as for the witnesses themselves. They need to actively engage and confront the horrors of these many historical settings in order for each viewer to move on. Mhando and Tomaselli (2009: 48) In this manner, the viewer can relate to the trauma experienced through a memory. The following day, the feast is being prepared. In the kitchen there are fish and animals being slaughtered prior to being cooked for the evening’s meal. This creates a link with Theo’s dream of severed and butchered body parts described above, while also foreshadowing his near death (Bisschoff and Van De Peer 2013). The food is also a marker of cultural difference between

204  Frank Ukadike the two groups, a factor highlighted when Président Miossoune states: “our cooking is different but it all comes from nature”. He is expressing a desire to connect and foster peace and harmony and to remind the people that they are all from the same creator, and the same country, irrespective of ethnicity and language difference. As the night continues, both leaders give speeches to instill a sense of pride and peace. Colonel Theo Bogwanda begins by explaining that the Nayaks are welcome and received with dignity. Following this, President Miossoune’s speech offers the same connotation but is quite different. He states: “let’s forget the past. Look at our country, it’s in bad shape. Dreadful shape …. If we want the tree of peace and prosperity to grow, a single word is enough: reconciliation”. Through this film, Nacro attempts to showcase the concepts of reconciliation and peace but emphasises the idea that memory cannot be separated from forgiveness (Allardice 2005). President Miossoune may not be quite correct when he asks the people to forget because memory is an important part of reconciliation and prevention of future atrocities. Obviously, as the film makes clear, some of the individuals are not ready to forget the past. However, President Miossoune and Colonel Theo decide to plant a tree to represent the new relationship between the Bonandés and the Nayaks. If we accept memorialisation as “the practice whereby individuals, communities, and societies interact at sites of symbolically represented memory deriving from and impressing on an item or act” (Mhando and Tomaselli 2009: 34), then we can understand that the performance of planting a tree is a way to find peace in mourning the past. As the tree grows it will be a signifier in reminding the people why it was planted. The theme of remembrance and forgiveness is interspersed throughout the narrative structure of Nacro’s film. As the tree is being planted, Tomoto begins to play the drums to the beat that was played at the Battle of Govinda to recall horrible memories. When the people hear the drums, the atmosphere immediately changes and the memories of trauma and violence are haunting, most obviously to Theo and Edna. Edna realises that Theo was the killer of her son and is overcome with the urge for revenge, rather than forgiveness. Edna and Colonel Theo Bogwanda drift off to speak privately. Edna states: “in order to heal ourselves we must know what happened”. The colonel confesses to killing Michael and asks for Edna’s forgiveness. He is in tears when making the confession, and it is clear that he knows he is taking a huge risk. The confession ends up costing him his life, but it is clear that his intentions in making it were for peace. Instead of peace, Edna has him tied to a stick, marinated and roasted over a fire, like an animal. She refers to him as a “kind of marinade” as he dies. His animalistic and barbaric death alludes once more to meat as a central motif in this film, like the butchered body parts at Govinda and the victuals that are prepared for the feast. The most powerful sacrifice made in the film for the sake of peace is when President Miossoune kills his wife Edna after he realises that she has

Politics, narrative and subjectivities  205 marinated and cooked Colonel Theo. He realises that the only way that this conflict can come to an end is for a prominent figure’s life to be taken on both sides. Edna has ruined hopes for peace by murdering Colonel Theo, and the only way to even the playing field is for her to be murdered as well. This is related to the theme of love and marriage, a theme explored in the film. The film shows us two very different marital relationships: that of Edna and the president and that of Colonel Theo and Soumari. The former relationship is one that is unlikely to last because of the loss of their son. The latter is one which illustrates the strength and unity that accompany the institution of marriage, with Soumari often acting as Colonel Theo’s backbone and emotional support. It is undoubtedly easier for them to have a successful relationship because they did not experience the same horrific and humiliating loss of a child as did the other couple. There are other interesting parallels between the two women as well. Unlike Edna, Colonel Theo’s wife, Soumari, forgives the Nayaks for the deaths of her loved ones. She asks President Miossoune about the death of her father and he assures her that the man who tortured and killed her father is in jail. We see the two leading female characters in The Night of Truth in opposition, with Edna as instigator of more violence and Soumari as peacemaker (Chaudhuri 2015). The climax of the film occurs when Edna kills Colonel Theo and is then shot by President Miossoune for her wrongdoing. After the sacrificial deaths of Colonel Theo and Edna, it is obvious that “the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred” (Bâ and Higbee 2012: 76). Edna’s death is necessary in order for the Bonandés and the Nayaks to reconcile their ferocious past and to negotiate a peaceful future.

Analysis As described above, Nacro does a brilliant job of bringing the audience into the world of this film, to live through the traumas and become invested in the setting and what ultimately will unfold. The story, however, takes place one step removed from the war that has torn apart this community. The audience never gets to see the events of the war, and only hears the story in fragmented memories as the narrative of the night in question unfolds. The film is able to convey the horrors largely without having to subject the audience to the actual events. Although scenes from the war are not explicitly witnessed, the film is filled with the physical toll this war has taken on people. Although mental and spiritual traumas are undeniably present in this film, what is inescapable is how the human body is ravaged by war. The children of the community are missing limbs as a constant reminder of the physicality of war. Colonel Theo’s dreams are haunted by images of bodies and body parts that to him represent the horrors of war that he cannot escape. The war thus becomes a vague concept of the past that can only be understood through its dehumanising of people, turning them simply into

206  Frank Ukadike corpses or beings with missing limbs, leaving the survivors literally and permanently incomplete. The main conflict in the film is set into motion by the horrific physicality of the events of the war. It is the senseless physical violence that killed Edna’s son that leads her to believe that his spirit is restless and ever present and calling out for revenge. Not only was her son killed, but his genitalia was cut off and stuffed into his mouth in what is perhaps the most demeaning way to be killed possible. This death haunts not only Edna but also Colonel Theo since he was the one who committed this unspeakable act. This is ironic since this exact act of senseless violence that has Edna convinced that peace is not an option is what motivates Colonel Theo to finally seek peace. Thus, Theo and Edna represent the two ways a person can react to the same legacy of horrors: one can either be motivated by atrocity to prevent further damage to the world or can allow the wounds of the past to fester and perpetuate the cycle of violence. This is an intentional binary on the part of the director, considering her understanding of trauma and what she wished to examine in her film: “the duality of the human being” (Nacro and Scarlet 2008: n.p.). By binding these characters together by the same act of violence and showing how they were set on diverging paths from the same origin, the characters become foils to one another, each one representing a different duality of human nature. Edna is the loving mother who becomes the cold-hearted butcher of Colonel Theo, while Colonel Theo is the unfeeling monster who brutally murdered Edna’s child and the noble leader who now singlehandedly tries to create peace. Thus, in these characters and in the communities they come from, there is a sense that no one is entirely in the right. The strongest message the film portrays is that tragedy spares no one, everyone is capable of committing atrocities, and everyone will be haunted by their painful legacy. By foregoing the Hollywood trope of having a clear “bad-guy” or a definitive moral stance, The Night of Truth more effectively examines human nature and the absurdity of trauma in that it cannot be explained away with moral absolutes; rather, it must be examined in its entirety, no matter how unpleasant it may be. In this regard, there is only one consensus about trauma as portrayed here, and which might as well be explained in the words of the expert on trauma, Judith Herman, who wrote in her book, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, that “traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely [or frequently as in Africa], but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life” (Herman 2015: 33).

Conclusion: formal element as creative device The Night of Truth is remarkable for many reasons, but especially for its imaginative cinematic innovativeness. To elucidate Nacro’s directorial methodology, it is necessary to examine two sequences where mise en scène as formal element are creatively used to heighten emotional effect and to

Politics, narrative and subjectivities  207 convey a haunting commentary on the duality of human nature. Nacro uses classic elements of mise en scène, a French term which has to do with the arrangement of elements, the situational context of telling a story. It refers to the visual language of the scene through camera elements such as arrangement of the profilmic effect, composition, lighting, design and the overall feel. As we approach the site where the Bonandés live, we are bombarded by a series of murals depicting brutal scenarios, including the rape of women and people’s annihilation of one another. The depiction of white figures with deep red blood is particularly eye-catching against the brown background of the wall. The wall of murals becomes a symbol as it stands in the centre of the town and depicts the background and history of the Bonandés and Nayaks, while simultaneously giving the viewer background information about atrocities that have taken place in the community. We observe the effects of mise en scène once more when Fatu has returned and the children sit together sharing stories of the trauma inflicted on them and their families. The scene is set in a dark room and the camera is in a low angle position that gives a feeling of intimacy. Viewers feel like they are included in this private exchange and are sitting on the ground with the children. The framing and composition allow each child to take turns telling horrible stories about their physical pain and mental trauma as the camera patiently focusses on them and listens attentively, as do the viewers. This scene implies that the only life these children know is a life of violence. The images we examine here are reminiscent of the children in Canticle of the Stones (1991), a Palestinian film directed by Michel Khleifi where traumatised children are able to decipher from experience which type of bullet is more lethal than others and which type of rubber bullet hurts the most, as they narrate their ordeal living under incessant Israeli military operation in the West Bank and Gaza strip. The depictions of violent murals and bedtime stories reveal how violence has been normalised through everyday interactions in the community (Chaudhuri 2015). Through the stories we see that each individual has experienced savagery and violence in their own unique ways. As these scenes remind us, The Night of Truth is not only “about individual memories but also about recognizing oneself as a detail in the landscape that was and continues to be permanently subjected to violence, the impact of which the region will continue to engage with for decades” (Mhando and Tomaselli 2009: 39). It is through the individual acknowledgement of suffering and Nacro’s use of visual metaphors that she is able to show that violence penetrates the community. According to the director, her stylistic choice is deliberate: I had long struggles with my cinematographer to get him not to look for the perfect shot, the perfect light, the beautifully composed image – because that was not what I needed. What I wanted was the reality of things, to capture the immediacy of things even if they weren’t beautiful. Nacro and Scarlet (2008: n.p.)

208  Frank Ukadike By making a film that explores dark, pessimistic and difficult-to-stomach topics and images, and also having it imbued with strong appealing entertainment value, Nacro in The Night of Truth seeks to balance out the alienating images that would have otherwise disoriented and disengaged the audience. This is especially true since The Night of Truth is not a film whose sole purpose is to make people face an unpleasant reality. The director herself says her goal was not to make “a film on war, but rather on the fragility of peace” (Nacro and Scarlet 2008: n.p.). The Night of Truth is a hopeful film that is meant to show how healing can follow even unspeakable trauma. Thus, the film’s formal element helps to keep the audience engaged and emotionally capable of staying with the film to its tragic but hopeful finish.

Notes 1 The pressure for political change coming from civil societies and in particular from the country’s youth forced Campore to resign as head of state after 27 years in office. Following the squabble for power that ensued, the African Union gave Burkina Faso a three-week ultimatum which effectively ended military rule and a return to a transitional executive and legislative administration. 2 Sankara advocated transparency; he even changed his country’s name from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso which means “land of upright people”; his regime reflected a non-hierarchical ideology similar to creating a new society of responsible people, as in the Lusophone African situation immediately following their struggle for independence. 3 After 27 years as head of state, the people’s uprising stopped Campore from changing the Constitution to enable him to continue in office for life.

References Allardice, Lisa. 2005. The Dead Are Everywhere. The Guardian, 5 September 2005. Available at http://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/sep/05/1. Accessed: 20 November 2015. Bâ, Saer Maty and Will Higbee. 2012. De-Westernizing Film Studies. New York: Routledge. Busia, Nana KA. n.d. The Status of Human Rights Organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa: Burkina Faso. Available at http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/africa/burkina.htm. Accessed: 22 August 2017. Bisschoff, Lizelle and Stefanie Van De Peer. 2013. Art and Trauma in Africa: Representations of Reconciliation in Music, Visual Arts, Literature and Film. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Chaudhuri, Shohini. 2015. Cinema of the Dark Side: Atrocity and the Ethics of Film Spectatorship. Dundee: Dundee University Press. Dangarembga, Tsitsi. 1988. Nervous Conditions. Harare: The Women’s Press. ——— 1995. Everyone’s Child. Zimbabwe: Media for Development Trust. Faye, Safi. 1996. Mossane. Senegal: Les Ateliers de l’Arche. Folly, Anne-Laure. 1994. Femmes aux Yeux Ouverts. Togo: California Newsreel. Herman, Judith. 2015. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books.

Politics, narrative and subjectivities  209 Khleifi, Michel. 1991. Canticle of the Stones. Belgium: Centre de l’Audiovisuel à Bruxelles. Mhando, Martin and Keyan Tomaselli. 2009. Film and Trauma: Africa Speaks to Itself through Truth and Reconciliation Films. Black Camera 1(1): 30–50. Nacro, Fanta Régina. 2001. Le Truc de Konate. Burkina Faso: Les Films du Defi. ______. 2004. The Night of Truth. Burkina Faso: Acrobates Film. Nacro, Fanta Régina and Peter Scarlet. 2008. Interview with Fanta Régina Nacro on “The Night of Truth”. Youtube, 19 May 2008. Available at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=tHyrZjM0vSQ. Accessed: 22 August 2017. Ukadike, Frank. 1994. Reclaiming Images of Women in Films from Africa and the African Diaspora. Frontiers: Journal of Women Studies 15(1): 102–122.

13 Crime, punishment and retribution The politics of sisterhood interrupted in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable Jennifer Thorington Springer Traditional Womanhood is dead. Traditional women were beautiful … but really powerless. “Uppity” women were even more beautiful … but still powerless. Sisterhood is powerful. Humanhood is ultimate! Kathie Amatniek1

Introduction Kathie Amatniek’s concept of “sisterhood is powerful” (cited in Hole and Levine 1971) professed the power women have in numbers, successfully raised the consciousness of many and went mainstream when Robin Morgan edited the collection Sisterhood Is Powerful in the 1970s (Morgan 1970). In the 1980s, Sisterhood Is Global (Morgan 1984) came to life, and later in the millennium Sisterhood Is Forever (Morgan 2003) was born. Solidarity and unity among women with shared interests and a desire to challenge sexism while simultaneously creating equity for all women made sense then and continues to be viable now, but what happens when, as stated by Ti-Grace Atkinson, sisterhood “kills sisters?” (quoted in Morgan 1970: 497). Divides and ruptures evolve within communities of women due to exclusions and disparities – the western feminist movement being one of them. Extant scholarship by way of anthologies and edited volumes have addressed and attempted to amend the divides within the movement regarding the invisibility of women of colour, lesbian, bi-sexual and other queer women, women from smaller nations, women who are impoverished, and the turbulent relationship between second and third wave feminists (see Hull, Scott and Smith 1982; Moraga and Anzaldua 1983; Boyce Davies and Savory Fido 1990; Nnaemeka 1998). Calls for and explorations of a global feminism have also encouraged conversations about what connects/disconnects communities of women while simultaneously encouraging important conversations regarding gender disparities. Taking note of the fractures that have occurred is not done to further isolate the marginalised or to instil a sense of guilt among the privileged but to challenge traditional beliefs that sisterhood always

Sisterhood interrupted in Unburnable  211 easily translates into a bond among women where safe spaces are created to nurture and aid women in resisting patriarchal systems while simultaneously tapping into their individual agency. Questions that become relevant when fractures surface are, how and why do women abuse the power that mentoring and motherhood affords by violating the rights of young girls in their charge (mentally, verbally and physically), or inadvertently passing on the trauma they once experienced at the hands of other female offenders to their daughters? How do we reconcile with the actions of women who use their hands as healing tools (case in point being the “laying on of hands” often referenced in African American fiction) to save the lives of women and young girls, yet use those same hands to commit violent acts against other women and girls? Ultimately, why do women violate other women via horrific forms of physical violence? Through a close reading of Marie Elena John’s Unburnable and an examination of the ambivalent and ambiguous notions of the concept of sisterhood within feminist discourses, this chapter expands scholarship on gendered violence to include woman-on-woman violence – a blind spot in Caribbean literature, literary criticism and gender studies.2 Unburnable (2006) offers a literary representation of woman-on-woman violence within the Caribbean region, revealing how the idea of a Caribbean island paradise is affected when “doubly colonised” women use their limited power to empower and simultaneously destroy fellow women through violent acts. Negotiating and  navigating the tenuous terrain of sisterhood is ultimately challenged and replaced by a sense of “humanhood” (Amatniek cited in Hole and Levine 1971) among women that interrogates a fractured sisterhood ripped apart by identity traits (race, class, sexuality, etc.). In Unburnable, women become the judge and jury on how to reclaim a sense of humanity rather than a feigned sense of sisterhood.

Trajectories of sisterhood and the violence within: women’s space as a safe place? Gender-based violence has been defined and will be recognised here as harm inflicted on individuals that is connected to the imbalance of power often contextualised and aligned with normative representations of masculinity and femininity. Prototypes of gender violence include intimate partner violence, acts of intimidation and harassment, domestic abuse, politically driven war crimes and sexual violence. These and other forms of violence that violate women’s control over their bodies and/or health are at the centre of public health and human rights discussions, and are vividly represented in Africana and Caribbean literature. Unburnable, John’s debut novel, tells the narrative of three generations of women – mother, daughter and granddaughter – who are emotionally scarred, traumatised from mental and physical torture, and deemed mad due to their status as “outsiders”. Matilda, the grandmother and matriarch,

212  Jennifer Thorington Springer is both revered and scorned due to her known status as an Obeah woman/ priestess with healing powers; Iris, her daughter, is removed from her mother’s community to be raised by “well-meaning” middle class folks who make her their servant girl, becomes the mistress of a married man at age 14, and is later demonised as a prostitute; and, Lillian, Iris’s daughter, is initially also taken from her mother by a middle class family, and later sent abroad in fear that she was becoming mentally unstable. Set in Dominica and Washington DC, the novel provides an account of these women’s interactions among communities of women designed to protect them as long as they conform to traditional expectations of femininity and normative social behaviours. Various crimes are committed against these three women, from the grandmother who seeks retribution in honour of her daughter to the granddaughter who tries to re-trace the legacies of her predecessors in order to heal from childhood trauma and redeem them as sane women driven into madness. Iris is brutally harmed by her lover’s (Baptiste) mother-in-law; Matilda takes Baptiste’s life as a result, and is publicly shamed and hung for it. Lillian is tortured as a child by the scandal and secrets about these women, all of which continue to haunt her as an adult. This chapter is primarily concerned with how Iris and Lillian navigate the tenuous terrains of the ambiguous space of sisterhood where woman-onwoman violence is woven into the fabric of John’s Dominican community in raw, graphic and tortuous ways not evident in other literary texts from the region.3 For Iris, this means fighting to survive the violence she experiences from female perpetrators, her own perpetration of violence on other women as she fights to sustain an oppositional stance to the social injustices she suffers, and a will to exist on her own terms even from within her vulnerable subject position as the community identified prostitute. For Lillian, a return to Dominica allows her to reconnect with her foremothers and ultimately self-empower as she engages in efforts to revise the stories told about them so as to restore their reputations. The sparse number of critical approaches to gender-based violence represented in Caribbean literature which directly address woman-onwoman violence suggests that this violence is stimulated by the tensions resulting from problematic cultural, social and political tenets based on gender, all linked to a history of colonisation and patriarchal systems. The article “Uncovered Stories: Politicizing Sexual Histories in Third Wave Caribbean Women’s Writings” by Donette Francis aptly captures the ways in which the “‘unspeakability’ of intimate violence committed against Caribbean women encapsulates the major thematic concern of third wave Caribbean women’s writing” (Francis 2004: 61). Francis (2004: 62) argues that Caribbean women’s writing offers “fictional counter narratives that chronicle how empires, postcolonial states and patriarchal families have abused, exposed and compromised the sexed bodies of Caribbean women and girls”. Likewise, Chantal Kalisa’s Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Literature explores gender-based violence through the

Sisterhood interrupted in Unburnable  213 backdrop of the pain and trauma caused by historical, cultural, colonial and neocolonial exigencies (Kalisa 2009). Amy King’s “‘She had Put the Servant in Her Place’: Sexual Violence and Generational Social Policing between Women in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable” (King 2015) uses the trope of “imperial motherhood” to unpack the ways in which maternal figures of middle class social status use their subject positioning and political power to police the bodies of working class women through the enactment of brutal sexual violence, among other forms of gendered violence. She suggests that violence, and not nurturance, is at the “heart of the imperial enterprise and is consequently the common denominator of all ‘imperial mothers’ that the Empire spawned” (King 2015: 195). I am in agreement with these critics that gendered violence between women is aligned with and reinforced by patriarchal social codes; however, I also want to suggest that it is not these social codes alone that contribute to the graphic and unspeakable acts of violence committed by women against women. As women try to locate autonomy, agency and self-empowerment, no matter their social location, they sometimes find themselves competing with each other, internalising self-hatred and projecting negative energy – which is expressed in the form of anger – toward other women, while simultaneously naming those who should be identified as sisters as the enemy. Instead of resisting and challenging the systems that oppress them, they direct their anger to other women and physically violate them. The “subjective” critical thinking of scholars such as Audre Lorde (1984), Cherrie Moraga (1983) and other minoritised women scholars who have used their “personal” writing to consider the state of affairs among women of colour in a global context is used in this chapter as a theoretical framework to explore how women’s self-hate and anger influence the ruptures that occur within communities of women in Unburnable. In the essay “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger”, Lorde describes the sisterhood women seek but are unable to attain: We are African women and we know, in our blood’s telling, the tenderness with which our foremothers held each other. It is that connection which we are seeking. We have the stories of Black women who healed each other’s wounds, raised each other’s children, fought each other’s battles, tilled each other’s earth, and eased each other’s passages into life and into death. We know the possibilities of support and connection for which we all yearn, and about which we dream so often. Lorde (1984: 153) She continues by stating, “yet, positive relationships among black women are not automatic as we have not fully explored the angers and fears that keep us from realizing the power of real Black sisterhood” (Lorde 1984: 153). Lorde notes that the anger and resentment that exist among black women is “a piece of the legacy of hate with which we were inoculated from the time

214  Jennifer Thorington Springer we were born by those who intended it to be an injection of death” (Lorde 1984: 160). She adds, “But we adapted, learned to take it in and used it, unscrutinized. Yet at what cost? In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone, and now we bruise ourselves upon the other who is closest” (Lorde 1984: 160). This internalised hate and anger emanate not from what was done to “us by us” but from the overt violence that Black women have experienced due to subordination in systems of race, class and gender oppression (Hill Collins 1990: 177). Nonetheless, this anger and hatred is acted out by women violating other women. Occasionally, there is also self-inflicted pain from the internalised hate and contempt for self. Like Lorde, Moraga, too, in “La Guera” argues that it is the internalisation of our own oppression that manifests itself in our relationship with those who are “othered”: The bulk of literature in this country reinforces the myth that what is dark and female is evil. Consequently, each of us – whether dark, female, or both – has in some way internalized this oppressive imagery. What the oppressor often succeeds in doing is simply externalizing his fear, projecting them into the bodies of women, Asians, gays, disabled folks, whoever seems most ‘other’. Moraga (1983: 207) After discussing the fears of the oppressor who fears that he will discover the same aches and longing as those he oppresses, Moraga (1983: 207) writes that the oppressor’s nightmare is not exclusive to him: We women have a similar nightmare, for each of us in some way has been both the oppressed and the oppressor. We are afraid to see how we have taken the values of our oppressor into our hearts and turned them against ourselves and one another. The remainder of this chapter illuminates how the hate and anger, as well as the internalisation of them, hinder successful forms of sisterhood. I also go beyond them to suggest that it is not only women’s internalisation/emulation of patriarchal systems of oppression but also an attempt to escape binaries that suggest that “men are inherently evil” and women are not. Women, too, are fully capable of being violent, intentional or not, without the adage of mirroring stereotypical masculine characteristics.

Crime, punishment and retribution In Idle Talk, Deadly Talk: The Uses of Gossip in Caribbean Literature, Ana Rodriguez Navas explores gossip’s place in Caribbean literature, suggesting that it is a “political, contested, and potentially dangerous form” (Navas 2018: 7). Gossip is viewed not as a frivolous thing that women do but as

Sisterhood interrupted in Unburnable  215 instrumental in the creation of public narratives. Similarly, Carol Bailey (2008) has examined gossip as a narrative strategy used by writers to address issues such as class distinctions. In her view, gossip is used to expose society’s anxieties about differences in race, class and social location (Bailey 2008). The various calypso, folkloric and storytelling practices referenced in Caribbean literature illuminate the various tensions and ongoing warring within Caribbean spaces as they relate to politics and culture. Gossip has been used in such a way as to uplift particular persons at the expense of others and empower some while disempowering others. This trope of gossip is of great relevance in John’s Unburnable, in that the mental instability of the protagonist, Lillian, is initiated by the folklore songs that discredit and humiliate her female predecessors. “Matilda Swinging” and “Bottle of Coke” are two of the chant mas songs that tell the gossip of Matilda, the obeah woman from a village referenced in the novel as “Up There”, and her daughter, Iris, the half-crazy woman who is labelled a prostitute because of her sexual exploits and dies in jail after being arrested for “disturbing” the peace.4 Haunted by the scandal and secrets upheld in these songs and an inability to cope with the trauma she inherits from the pain and suffering her foremothers endured, Lillian is exiled to the United States. Her childhood trauma experienced in Dominica were triggered by privileged women’s efforts to use gossip to disempower women who exist on the fringes of society due to their social class, relative sexual empowerment and alternative religious practices (obeah) that countered Catholicism. Lillian must revisit Dominica and in fact re-live the alleged crime committed by her foremothers in order to heal and redeem the women before her. Understanding the actions of Matilda and Iris would offer a narrative that is different from the convoluted and disheartening gossip told about them to justify the violent acts they experienced and the injustice they suffered at the hands of the informal law of their respective communities and the formal law – the police. Both women were feared and revered. Matilda was revered and feared for her powers as an obeah priestess who leads a village comprising those who follow African medicinal practices and ways of life; and Iris is envied for her ability to escape the confines of traditional womanhood yet simultaneously judged harshly due to her unconventional ways of loving, sexuality and refusal to confirm to the codes of conduct stipulated for women.5 According to public narratives, Iris’s crimes include becoming the childhood mistress of a soon-to-be-married man of status, John Baptiste, and daring to believe that he would marry her, a servant, instead of Cecile, a daughter of the upper class. Heartbroken and jaded, Iris publicly humiliates and shames Cecile during Carnival, and is labelled a crazy sexual deviant until her untimely death. Lillian’s re-tracing of her mother’s experiences with physical violence and psychological torture reveals a counter narrative. The counter narrative uncovers a woman whose only crime was to go against the grain of convention. Iris charted an oppositional stance to traditional

216  Jennifer Thorington Springer representations of womanhood where she does not see her body as a commodity but a site of pleasure to be explored.6 John Baptiste did not subject Iris to becoming his mistress; she initiated the relationship and chose him despite her age, a teenager at the time: [John Baptiste] could not keep himself from looking back at the halfCarib servant girl with the gleaming skin … already anticipating what he would do to her, the bold little slut who openly propositioned him, who stood in front of the whole of Roseau, in front of his mother to put her hands on her hips and shove herself at him with that smile, a smile that no decent girl would make in public. 73 Here, we witness Iris’s recognition and acceptance of her sensual erotic energy, which she uses, not to “trap” John, but to “seduce” him in hopes of fulfilling her sexual desire and desire for companionship. She entertains the prospects of marriage/long-term commitment. Instead of a display of victimisation, we witness a young girl’s refusal to accept the conventional respectable behaviour expected of “decent girls”. In Iris, we see a young woman tapping into her source of “rebel consciousness” to challenge what her local community views as unacceptable and vulgar. The lovemaking between Iris and John is described as that which is enviable among those who witness it: love that was there for no reason, love that had no conversation, love that had not logic, love that you would die for, love that made rooms turn upside down, and put you flat on your back with your legs wide open. 76 Lillian’s account describes a connection between two lovers that would be broken once John married Cecile, the woman who matches him in status, leaving Iris heartbroken and maimed – John’s crime against her. To avenge the emotional trauma of a damaged heart that had suffered many blows, Iris uses the public space of Carnival to attack John’s wife, Cecile. Iris writhed up to her, “pelvis rocking back and forth, in and out, first one leg up, then the other, and with both her hands pulled off Cecile’s mask and then easily ripped off the man’s pajama suit Cecile was wearing” (116). With evil intent she “tore the top off the bottoms by the elastic, panties and all, Cecile going down on the tarmac … swollen, milk-dripping breasts springing out from between Iris’ hands” (116). It is here that we witness Iris’s internalisation of patriarchal values alluded to by Lorde (1984) and Moraga (1983) in their theorising of women’s anger toward and hate for other women. Instead of humiliating John, Iris directs her anger towards Cecile. Furthermore, this battle is based on the

Sisterhood interrupted in Unburnable  217 aggression, contempt and competitiveness we see in woman-to-woman relationships, all of which are supported by cultural productions entrenched in patriarchy.7 At the end of this warring, Iris is labelled a “whore”, and Cecile’s honour is redeemed by her mother, Mrs Richards, who tortures and brutally rapes Iris with a coke bottle. Interestingly, Iris does not resist the violence, as if in agreement that justice was being served: She did not raise a hand to protect her face when their knuckles had pulverized her flesh, tenderized it so that each new blow caused the spot upon which it fell to burst open, blood oozing or jettisoning out, streaming down to the wooden floor and collecting small pools. Not the smallest sound forced its way out of her windpipe when the pain began in earnest, when the knuckles and the feet began targeting internal organs, the kidneys, the spleen. Not even when one of them jumped on her chest and sent a rib into her heart …. And then it stopped being graceful as Mrs. Richards planted the jagged end of the bottle as far up into Iris as her hand would go. And then again, and then again. Until finally her hand came out empty, covered with blood midway to her elbow. 121 The above scene is quoted at length to illustrate the brutality with which the act is being done and the anger embedded. The violence of rape and the trauma it inflicts on those, primarily women, who experience it has been taken to task across disciplines. When the perpetrator is male, there is no immediate shock or horror as we seem to have become numb to the persistence of rape in our culture. It has been unfortunately normalised as something that happens to women and is done by men. What about when women rape and commit other violent acts, as Mrs Richards does in Unburnable? Based on how we have essentialised femininity, there is usually the disbelief and immediate denial that a woman could have done such a horrendous act. Women are viewed as more nurturing and peaceloving; we fear to admit that women can transgress these behavioural traits.8 John’s creation of this scene allows for appropriate questioning of why women commit violent acts in the first place, and maybe even allows for possible comparison between male and female acts of violence. While some women may choose to resort to violence for political reasons or in the name of resistance, Mrs R ichards’s act does not fit in this reasoning; it is not the result of “broken flawed femininity”. Instead, the calculated and premeditated act demonstrates her violent nature as an individual.9 Women, too, can be v iolent and harm others. Violence is not solely a male prerogative. Implicated in this “unspeakable act” of violence are not only those who aid Mrs Richards in harming Iris but also the washerwomen who witness it and do nothing. What has happened to the bond of sisterhood and solidarity

218  Jennifer Thorington Springer among women? How is it that these women are participating in the oppression of their own sister? Lorde (1984: 156) argues, It is not that black women shed each other’s psychic blood so easily, but that we have ourselves bled so often, the pain of bloodshed becomes almost commonplace. If I have learned to eat my own flesh in the forest – starving, keening, learning the lesson of the she-wolf who chews off her own paw to leave the trap behind – if I must drink my own blood, thirsting, why should I stop at yours until your dear dead arms hang like withered garlands upon my breast. For Lorde (1984), sexism and racism become the barriers that make it difficult for women to abstain from oppressing each other. The pain experienced from the abuse black bodies undergo can be viewed as deserving and/or normative. For sisterhood to be effective within black women’s circles, we must strive to unlearn sexism and racism (hooks 1986). The pre-meditated violence Iris experiences excludes her from the upper class and isolates her as a societal deviant. As the “Bottle of Coke” chant mas song, with its sexual metaphorical messages, goes, Iris is summed up as follows: A lady who enjoyed eating healthily. This lady … truly liked her cucumbers, her carrots, her bananas, even the long tubers of cassava, she had them all the time, daily and twice daily; she enjoyed them massively, and was in the fullness of health as a result. Then one day the same lady had a bottle of Coke and it nearly killed her. 112 The beating and rape is to “keep her in her place” as one who is (1) undeserving of the love of John; (2) undeserving of respect, civility and a safe space to explore her sexual agency without being labelled a whore; and (3) undeserving of the would-be gift of motherhood.10 Patterns of violent acts persist once Matilda discovers that her daughter, Iris, had been harmed by John and other privileged members of the Roseau upper class. She rescues and saves her daughter through her medicinal powers: [Matilda] worked on her daughter, drawing out the infections from every crevice of her body from her very blood; realigning joints that had been twisted out of their proper places, constructing complex traction devices with rope and stones for the limbs that had been broken, taking the needle and catgut to sew back together the gashes …. It was the punctured heart that would have killed her daughter, and it was the resulting infection that Matilda fought as if it were a personal enemy, not only with medical science but with the fresh blood of white chickens spilled up and down her child’s body, with oils and pig fat, with the

Sisterhood interrupted in Unburnable  219 lighting of black candles and the incantation of unintelligible words…. The fever broke and one could say that Iris recovered, although her heart had been permanently damaged, and nothing could be done about what had happened to her soul. 129 Disappointed by John’s inability to “take care” of Iris, protect her and ensure her safety, Matilda decides to seek retributive justice of her own. Justice in this instance is very different from that which was informally enacted when Mrs Richardson brutally “rapes” Iris. Matilda’s justice is grounded in west and central African cultural practices that survived the middle passage. In the village of Noir (Up There), Matilda is head of the governing body known as The Council. She is used to adjudicating crimes and deciding on the appropriate punishment. It was this very council that helped her to conclude that it was alright for Iris to become involved with John, though she was still considered a child. Matilda “came from a polygamous society. A place that was still operating like an eighteenth-century African community. Women married early. Second wives were usually very young” (275). In hindsight, through the research conducted when she returns to Dominica, Lillian discovers that Matilda should not be viewed as negligent or a perpetrator of the violence her daughter experiences: Matilda believed her daughter would have been the equivalent of a well-taken-care-of second wife of a powerful man, nurtured under the tutelage of a senior co-wife who would have assumed authority over her, treating her like a younger sister, training her well, teaching her. Matilda’s interest in the man’s wealth, and whether he was providing her daughter with her own home, were meant to determine what measure of financial independence he was willing to offer Iris. 275 It is apparent here that perpetrators can engage unintentionally in violent acts.11 Matilda did not try to deter or rescue her daughter from John because she trusted the council and governance of Noir. In her role as Magistrate and Judge, she believes that the retribution (the killing of John) for the crime of emotional violence committed against her daughter was appropriate. She was not a murderer but rather a judge who saw that justice was served. While Iris chose Carnival Monday to secure retribution, Matilda chose jouvert during a clash of the bands. She publically kills John. Her punishment? A public hanging; thus the chant mas song, “Matilda Swinging”. Matilda’s untimely and unfair death would have no doubt added to the emotional pain Iris undergoes once she leaves Noir and returns to Roseau. In the absence of those she loved – John and Matilda – Iris is given a chance to love again through motherhood when Lillian is born. However, due to her status as a sex worker, Iris’s stepmother, who was childless, takes Lillian

220  Jennifer Thorington Springer from Iris and cares for her with the help of her sister-in-law, believing that “God himself had chosen her, replacing the decoy in her womb with the gift of Lillian, the blessed child who had been delivered from evil, straight to her” (184). Nevertheless, she recalls “what a terrible day it had been, when Iris had come for her child and they had fought for Lillian, like the women in the Bible” (183). In her view, that was a sin for sure, to deny a child her own mother; it was one more sin on Icilma’s long list, but that sin could not compare with what happened to Iris, because of Icilma’s doing. She had called the police to throw her daughter’s mother in jail, where she had died that same night. 183 Such a separation of mother and daughter yet again reveals the cycle of woman-on-woman violence in Unburnable. The negative impact of allowing our own pain to be satiated by creating pain for another is paramount. Icilma’s own inability to weather her “barrenness” is appeased when she takes Lillian, the child fathered by her husband, Winston. Perhaps the pain she causes Iris by taking away her child is also Icilma’s way of seeking her own retribution because Iris sleeps with her husband. The ambivalent state of sisterhood continues to work in favour of those who are privileged due to class status (Icilma), destroying those who are continuously discriminated against through acts of violence (Iris). Iris tries to protest through her own attempts to retrieve her daughter but fails miserably when Icilma turns her over to law enforcement for disorderly conduct. Iris dies in jail without any justice. As Lillian rightly notes, her mother “wasn’t crazy, she was destroyed” (254). I would be remiss if I did not at least briefly address the progressive nature of Iris’s character in Unburnable. Prior to her death, she attempts to come to terms with her own trauma through sex work. As abused as her body has been, she locates her sexual agency and self-empowerment. The gossip and rumour mill may suggest that she is simply a whore, but Lillian’s uncovering of her mother’s will to live and offer love, if only to her child, offers a different perspective. Sexual encounters with male suitors serve as an outlet to her blues. However, she also becomes a perpetrator of violence where she physically abuses the men she is intimate with; this may be viewed as therapeutic or as a form of survival – a chance to “feel” rather than deal with the pain/emptiness of lovelessness and lost loves. Or perhaps this is yet another unintentional form of violence connected to sadistic sex meant to offer reprieve and individual restoration. Lillian inherited this desire for violent sex; Iris’s use of sexual activity for recreational and healing purposes resonates with Lillian in that she, too, uses intimacy in this way. Iris no longer bears the labels of “whore” or “insatiable deviant”; instead, her daughter begins to see her as sexually empowered. This new revisionist and more progressive perspective of both Iris and Matilda create an opportunity for Lillian to begin her own healing by embracing the bravery, strength and resilience of her foremothers.

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Conclusion Woman-on-woman violence is indeed alarming no matter what form it takes, be it physical, emotional, psychological or the intersection of all of these. Sisterhood as a concept that allows women, and specifically black women, to connect based on a collective consciousness fuelled by the various forms of structural and systemic oppression can offer solidarity. However, sisterhood can also be undermined by the various fractures that occur due to violent acts amongst women and the trauma they initiate. Based on the ambivalent nature of sisterhood, is it still relevant? Should efforts be made to revise the concept to make it address and acknowledge what unites us as well as our differences? Surely. The benefits far outweigh the disadvantages.

Notes 1 Kathie Amatniek, while a member of the Redstockings radical feminist group, coined the expression “Sisterhood is powerful” (cited in Rebirth of Feminism by Judith Hole and Ellen Levine 1971). 2 To date, woman-on-woman violence has been primarily examined from within the threshold of woman-to-woman sexual violence within same gendered relationships. 3 In other texts that explore gender-based violence, they may name the violent act and identify the trauma experienced by victims without detailed depictions of the act itself; however, in Unburnable, the imagery is graphic, detailed and chilling. 4 Chant mas is a folkloric song that usually tells a local story that depicts gossip, the conflicts that occur in people’s daily living, and the like, during Carnival season and beyond in John’s fictional Dominican community. 5 The village that Matilda oversees, Noir, is referenced in the novel as Up There as it is intentionally set apart from local Dominican civilian life and activities. This village is said to have been created by maroon women who were snatched from Africa and later ran away from their owners. A council of women was established to attend judiciary matters. Some of these women, like Matilda, were known for their healing powers through the religious practice of obeah. 6 See bell hooks’s essay “Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace” in her book Black Looks: Race and Representation (hooks 1998). 7 The essay “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women” by bell hooks (1986) engages with the notion of viewing sisterhood as a viable way to bridge differences among women. 8 See the introduction of the book Women and Violence: The Agency of Victims and Perpetrators (Widows and Marway 2015). 9 Prior to raping Iris, Mrs Richards visits her parish priest, not to receive forgiveness, but to legitimise her plans to harm Iris and buy time. She welcomes damnation happily. It is arguable that her violent acts are intentional; she wants to end Iris’s life and put her in her place. 10 The contempt reserved for Iris could very well be due to the ways in which she is envied by the very women who try to destroy her. For example, she enjoys sex and love-making whereas they, restricted by notions of respectability, view sex as the labour one endures as a wife or does for the sake of reproduction. Such frameworks further create divisions among women – the good girls and the bad ones. 11 In “Violence and Space: An Introduction to the Geographies of Violence”, Simon Springer and Philippe le Billon (2016) talk about violence as not always being intentional.

222  Jennifer Thorington Springer

References Bailey, Carol. 2008. Performing ‘Difference’: Reading Gossip in Olive Senior’s Short Stories. In Henke, Holgar and Karl-Heinz Magister (eds) Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean. New York: Lexington, 123–139. Boyce Davies, Carole and Elaine Savory Fido. 1990. Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Francis, Donette A. 2004. Uncovered Stories: Politicizing Sexual Histories in Third Wave Caribbean Women’s Writing. Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 6(1): 61–81. John, Marie-Elena. 2006. Unburnable. New York: Harper Collins. Hill Collins, Patricia. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Hole, Judith and Ellen Levine. 1971. Rebirth of Feminism. New York: Quadrangle. hooks, bell. 1986. Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women. Feminist Review 23: 124–138. ——— 1998. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press. Hull, Akasha Gloria, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith (eds). 1982. But Some of Us are Brave: All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men. New York: Feminist Press. Kalisa, Chantal. 2009. Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Literature. Lincoln, NE: The University of Nebraska Press. King, Amy. 2015. “She had Put the Servant in Her Place”: Sexual Violence and Generational Social Policing between Women in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable. In Herrera, Cristina and Paula Sanmartin (eds) Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text: Essays on Caribbean Women’s Writing. New York: Demeter Press, 195–214. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: The Crossing Press. Moraga, Cherrie. 1983. La Guera. In Moraga, Cherrie and Gloria Anzaldua (eds) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table – Women of Color Press, 22–29. Moraga, Cherrie and Gloria Anzaldua (eds). 1983. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table – Women of Color Press. Morgan, Robin (ed.). 1970. Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: Vintage Books. ——— 1984. Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology. New York: Anchor Press. ——— 2003. Sisterhood is Forever: The Women’s Anthology for a New Millennium. New York: Washington Square Press. Navas, Ana Rodriguez. 2018. Idle Talk, Deadly Talk: The Uses of Gossip in Caribbean Literature. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Nnaemeka, Obioma (ed.). 1998. Sisterhood, Feminisms and Power in Africa: From Africa to the Diaspora. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Springer, Simon and Phillippe Le Billon. 2016. Violence and Space: An Introduction to the Geographies of Violence. Political Geography 52: 1–3. Widows, Heather and Herjeet Marway. 2015. Introduction. In Widows, Heather and Herjeet Marway (eds) Women and Violence: The Agency of Victims and Perpetrators. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–12.

14 Male violence, the state and the dehumanisation of women in three South African novels by women Naomi Nkealah Introduction The South African Constitution is one of the most progressive in the world, progressive in the sense that it recognises the equality of all genders and advocates respect for all humans irrespective of their race, age, class, ethnicity, language or sexual orientation. As the first African country to legalise homosexual marriages, South Africa remains to the world a trendsetter when it comes to the transformation of thinking around sexuality. Equally profound is the state’s response to issues affecting women, the most widespread being gendered violence. Every year, the nation launches a campaign known as 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children to sensitise the South African public about the devastating effects of gendered violence. This campaign begins on 25 November, which coincides with International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and ends on 10 December, celebrated worldwide as International Human Rights Day. The campaign involves a series of activities in various communities around the provinces, including debates, workshops, roundtable discussions, peaceful marches, fun walks, and community cleaning campaigns. Since the advent of democratic leadership in 1994, the new government led by the African National Congress (ANC) has made efforts to bring to realisation the vision of the Women’s Charter signed in 1954. The Women Empowerment and Gender Equality Bill and the Prevention and Combating of Trafficking in Persons Act (Act No 7 of 2013) are only two examples of legislation that aims to redress the wrongs committed against women. Government departments have partnered with non-profit organisations, the media, and the private business sector to fight the spread of violence. Organisations such as the Sonke Gender Justice Network and People Opposing Women Abuse (POWA) are notable for their running of programmes aimed at both educating the public on the need for mutual respect of the human rights of both genders and empowering women to resist gendered violence. Regrettably, in spite of an advanced Constitution, several legislatures in favour of women, numerous campaigns promoting women’s rights, and

224  Naomi Nkealah countless channels for reporting women’s abuse, South Africa continues to experience one of the highest incidents of violence against women (VAW) in the world. According to Rosemary Mukasa (2008), statistics reveal a systematic pattern of women abuse, from sexual harassment to harmful traditional practices. Extreme acts of male violence, especially intimate partner violence, are rife, as borne out by increasing media reports (Isaacs 2016). In the black townships, so-called domestic violence is on the increase, the cause of which is often attributed to alcoholism (Mazibuko and Umejesi 2015). The result of all these forms of violence is the nefarious dehumanisation of women of all age groups – from infants to the elderly. A fundamental question to ask is: what is the state not doing to curb the tide of gendered violence in South Africa? Or perhaps it is more appropriate to ask what the state is doing to condone, even if subtly, and thereby proliferate this violence. About what the state is not doing to arrest VAW, Mukasa (2008: 111) notes that although a range of laws and policies have been developed to combat VAW across the departments, the implementation has been hindered by the lack of sufficient budget, the lack of appropriately trained and skilled personnel and the lack of provision of additional human and other resources. Other scholars have noted that the language in which cases of VAW are framed in the media and in state policies inevitably engender a culture of male dominance, because the language is profoundly masculine (Pease 2014; Isaacs 2016). All of this lends credibility to the view that “alongside the individual occurrence of violence, and potential state interventions to challenge or address it, the state also acts as a facilitator or perpetrator of gendered violence” (Gill, Heathcote and Williamson 2016: 1). This irony is borne out in the fact that so many senior agents of the state (including a former president) are allegedly guilty of or accused of sexual violence. The disparity between state policy and state agents’ actions is therefore something that demands more profound scholarly attention. Literature offers a microscopic lens through which to probe this disparity, recognising that literary texts are cultural products of society which bring into magnifying view the ailments afflicting society. In cultural and literary studies of gendered violence, scholars such as Pumla Dineo Gqola and Jessica Murray have alluded to some of the ways in which the state facilitates or perpetrates gendered violence. In her eloquently argued essay on how the “cult of femininity” and violent masculinities support endemic gender-based violence in contemporary South Africa, Gqola (2007) highlights the violent misogyny of the police force which adopts a rhetoric of female self-erasure to propose strategies for women’s safety in public spaces, for by asking women to not drive at night or to dress conservatively when using public transport, the police effectively tell them

Dehumanisation of women  225 to make themselves “as small, quiet and invisible as possible” (Gqola 2007: 121) to avoid being victimised by violent men. Gqola (2007: 121) states categorically: “these warnings do not work, and they are dangerous warnings at that, because they communicate quite unequivocally that South African public spaces do not belong to the women who live in this country”. Beyond the discursive violence embedded in the rhetoric that women have to stay off masculine spaces for the sake of personal safety, Gqola’s statement also points to state-induced epistemic violence which reduces women to invisible citizens, seemingly for their own good. Murray (2013) brings the matter home by looking specifically at representations of sexual violence in women’s writing. In her feminist literary analysis of various South African women’s texts, she hints on the state’s implication in the blatant sexual violations women experience in everyday life, though she does not address state violence directly. In her reading of Margie Orford’s crime fiction, Murray (2013: 75) notes that women and children are shown to be the victims of violent crimes that constitute crucial parts of the main plots of the novels and the texts reveal that they are also exposed to violence in their homes and to the misogynist attitudes of members of the police force. To some extent, her arguments point to a paradoxical relationship between the family unit, where young girls should ideally feel safe but where instead they feel perpetually unsafe owing to the constant near presence of a sexually violent male, and the police force, which aspirationally should protect women from violence but which realistically not only fails to meet this obligation but also unleashes its own violence on women’s bodies. The works of Gqola (2007) and Murray (2013) are significant investigations into gendered violence in South African cultural and literary studies which I build on in this chapter. My contribution centres on the intricate ways in which state patriarchy, in conspiracy with other patriarchies, perpetuates gendered violence and trauma for women, as borne out in literary texts. Contemporary South African women’s writing is profoundly critical of the role of the state in the perpetuation of gendered violence and the resultant dehumanisation of women. This is evident in the three novels selected for discussion in this chapter: Kagiso Lesego Molope’s This Book Betrays my Brother (2012), Carol Campbell’s My Children have Faces (2013) and Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra Crossing (2013). In reading these three texts, I identify three major ways in which the state engineers the dehumanisation of women: (1) the state’s failure to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor; (2) the state’s negligence of minority groups and their civil needs; and (3) the insensitivity of immigration and law enforcement officers to the plight of immigrant women. These three novels suggest that VAW continues to thrive, not only because the state has failed in its role as protector of the human rights of women but also because the state, with its own rule of state

226  Naomi Nkealah patriarchy, cannot empathise with women genuinely enough to take actions that will prevent gendered violence from happening. Not only is VAW a case of men acting against women, but it should be understood as the result of different socio-political structures coming together in varied combinations to establish and proliferate a systemic violence. In This Book Betrays my Brother, family patriarchy works in collusion with state patriarchy to both enact violence on women’s bodies and suppress their chances of getting justice executed on the perpetrators of that violence. In Zebra Crossing, family patriarchy again connives with state immigration officers and gangster organisations to dehumanise migrant women. My Children have Faces illustrates the interconnection between state negligence and white supremacy in the dehumanisation of women from minority groups. In all three novels, the state is culpable, wholly or partly, for women’s loss of dignity, with dignity conceptualised here as recognition for the humanity of women. In the analysis that follows, I use the term male violence as opposed to “VAW” as an endorsement of the view that VAW identifies the victims of violence while surreptitiously shielding the perpetrators (Pease 2014). Male violence here is a broad term encompassing different forms of male-induced violence, most notably sexual violence, physical violence and psychological violence. It is male violence because it is orchestrated and enacted by men as a mode of expressing power. In this context, the power of a woman is severely undercut through her inability to resist the forces of violence unleashed against her by a single man or group of men. Thus, male violence operates at both the individual and collective level as an instrument for subjecting women to the reprehensible whims of a male hegemonic class.

Sexual violence and the dehumanisation of Moipone in This Book Betrays my Brother Kagiso Lesego Molope’s novel deals with male violence, not only as it is underpinned by gender and race but also as it is influenced by social class and privilege. This Book Betrays my Brother presents a narrator who is only 13 years old and through whose presumed innocent eyes the reader gets exposed to the brutality of male sexual violence. Naledi witnesses her brother, Basi, rape his girlfriend in a backroom in their house. The shock of the experience paralyses Naledi to the point that she can neither rescue Moipone by screaming out for help nor penalise Basi by reporting to their parents. Even when Moipone suffers extreme humiliation from the community, Naledi remains silent, torn between her loyalty to her family and loyalty to a friend. The novel is written in retrospection and therefore Naledi’s reflections on the incident carry belated criticisms of a system that has severely wronged womankind. Moipone’s rape is an act of dehumanisation, because by forcing himself on Moipone despite her protestations, Basi denies her the right to protection

Dehumanisation of women  227 from bodily harm. It is a gross violation of her human right to dignity, thereby reducing her to an object that is designed for his pleasure. Significantly, Naledi’s report of the incident conveys in vivid terms this objectification of Moipone’s body as Basi forcefully penetrates her as if he were trying to outsmart his opponent in a sports game or a fight: His voice is a very strange cross between soothing and commanding. He is moving with a brutish force that I have only seen him in when he plays sports. He is so focussed, unaware of anything else around him. His eyes narrow as if he is facing an opponent in a game – or a fight. He seems unaware of her even as he places his hand firmly over her mouth. His face is up, looking somewhere above her, behind her. He doesn’t even take off his pants, just unbuttons his buckle and is swiftly on top of her, his hand still over her mouth. 135 The rape destroys Moipone not only physically as a result of the pain of being brutally dis-virgined but also psychologically since she becomes an object of derision within the Marapong community – ironically, not because she is a victim of rape, but because she claims to have been raped by a young man from a well-respected middle class family. Pervasive class differences among the people of Marapong have created a conducive environment for the dehumanisation of women, not only because the rich wield economic power over the poor but more importantly because the poor have accepted their lot and feel it is more advantageous for them to ally with the rich than to oppose them. In the most destitute part of Marapong named Silver City, the people lack even the most basic amenities of life such as running water: “the silver sea has no running water, no indoor toilets, only outhouses, no trees, only rocks and dust” (15). Towards the central part of the town, life seems to be more dazzling, as there are “many clusters of small houses painted in dazzling colours – the brightest brights – and small windows and chimneys protruding from the rooftops” (14). Yet, congestion is a major problem here, while smoke from the chimneys and the dust raised by speeding taxis, cars and buses “along the narrow dusty roads” (14) create pollution of the air and environment. In contrast to these parts of town, the extension, also known as the suburb, houses the nouveau riche whose wealth can be seen in the extravagance of their polished houses. It is with a keen eye of observation that the narrator points out the distinct differences between the lower and the middle classes in this community. She states, with some degree of irony: In all locations – and I think even in the suburbs – wealth follows the lay of the land. The higher you go up the hill, the larger, grander and farther apart the houses are, and the closer you get to cars, running water and indoor toilets. The boundaries get more pronounced: from wire fences to

228  Naomi Nkealah brick walls, and then the walls get higher and higher and you may start to think you’ve come full circle, that you’ve just driven back into town. 15–16 It is clear from this description of Marapong township that even the new black government of South Africa has not yet managed to dismantle class boundaries, particularly those cemented through separate living spaces and conditions. The hill therefore represents the challenge of economic inequality, while the glamourous houses located at the top of it are a constant reminder of the dreams and aspirations of the poor. While conditions deteriorate for the poor, the rich advance in wealth and move further away from the stench of poverty. This creates unequal power relations which impact on gender relations. As Pease (2014: 24) notes, “it is not possible to eliminate violence against women while unequal gender power relations remain intact”. While Basi and his family live in the suburbs, Moipone and her mother live in the location. While Basi and Naledi are driven to school and other places in Porsche cars, Moipone and her mother walk and use taxis. While Basi wears designer clothes sourced from expensive shops, Moipone wears the cheapest she can afford. And skirts are usually cheaper than jeans, even though they present little resistance to the violent hands of a determined rapist. Therefore, the disadvantage of lower-class deprivation renders Moipone powerless to escape sexual violence, while the privilege of class empowers Basi to extort sex from Moipone. Molope’s novel shows not only that the state fails to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor but that the state actively promotes the enrichment of a minority elite class which then exploits the poor masses. Basi comes from a middle-class family which has benefitted from affirmative action through its black economic empowerment programme. This being a novel set in the 1990s, in the heyday of black leadership in South Africa, we find that Basi’s father has worked his way to become a successful businessman who owns “the biggest and oldest supermarket in the location” (36). In fact, this shop played an important role in bringing the new black government into power because, as Naledi states, my father’s spacious office often served as a last-minute venue for location meetings, and had even been a voters’ education station in the year before the 1994 election, when both our parents arranged classes for people who had little understanding of voting. 65 This service to the state places Basi’s father among the elite of this community and in signification of his new acquired social status he moves his family from the township to the suburb up the hill where they live in a house with a fountain and a full-time housemaid. As a result of this upward social mobility, Basi and Naledi grow up enjoying the privileges of their class such as education in a private school in Pretoria

Dehumanisation of women  229 and private transport to school. Basi imbibes the privileges of his class and though he projects himself as a humble young man who sympathises with the underprivileged township folks and has never forgotten his roots, his success as a rugby player in a “white” school and his presumably good physical looks soon inflate his ego. Moreover, his privileged birth as the first son born in a long line of women from his mother’s side of the family further distorts his view of himself as a man. This explains why he feels threatened by Moipone’s friendship with the lesbian girl, Ole, and acts violently to claim what he thinks is rightfully his. His raping of Moipone is the externalisation of a fragile sense of class consciousness under threat from a poor girl in the township who is also a lesbian – an “outcast” in the community. In this novel, therefore, the project of black empowerment places men in a position of domination, control and manipulation, whether physically, emotionally or psychologically. While the project itself is a noble one as it is aimed at restoring the dignity of the black man destroyed by apartheid, its adverse correlative is the degradation of the black woman, because the more empowered the black man is, the more domineering he becomes and the more dehumanising his treatment of the black woman is. In Molope’s novel, besides the physical act of violation, a major part of Moipone’s dehumanisation is the fact that no one believes her story, except her mother and Ole, and this can also be explained as emanating from class inequality. Benefitting from the business of Basi’s father in the township which both provides goods for daily consumption and employs many township folks, the entire location sees Basi as incapable of rape. As Ole informs Naledi, “so many people have told [Moipone] that Basi would never hurt anyone” (163–164). It is not ironic that the township women spearhead the campaign of Basi’s innocence, since gender and poverty usually work handin-hand to rob women of a sense of self-worth. Nono who is the mother of Basi’s best friend, Kgosi, “said she was lying”, while Joyce who lives on the same street as Moipone mockingly tells her: “You should feel lucky! Raped by Basimane? You should have said thank you” (163–164). Johanna who works for Basi’s father in his shop tells Basi’s mother: “Not Basi. I won’t believe it. Sometimes girls do this to boys” (154). At this point, Moipone’s cycle of dehumanisation is almost complete, for when poverty robs women of sympathy for one of their kind and the fear of losing ties with the rich forces them to not speak the truth in their hearts, then there is little chance of redemption for Moipone. The cycle of Moipone’s dehumanisation is completed by Basi’s mother who questions the integrity of the family Moipone comes from, and with that the credibility of her story. Naledi reports her mother’s reaction to the family when Basi claims to only know Moipone casually: ‘Hao! Then why is she saying these things? Rape? Rape? Whose child is she?’ Mama said spitefully. This time, her words called into question the integrity of a family. 157, emphasis in the original

230  Naomi Nkealah By questioning the integrity of Moipone’s family, Basi’s mother questions the possibility of truth-telling being associated with underprivileged township folks. In other words, she insinuates that Moipone lies against her son to discredit their family image, possibly out of envy. Under these circumstances, the chances of Moipone exacting justice on her violator are nil. As it turns out, the police never apprehend Basi for rape. Although Moipone and her mother, along with Ole, report the incident to the Marapong police, Basi’s parents whisk him out of town on the same night with an alert from Five Bop who works for Basi’s father. Basi escapes the hands of the law, because he is a privileged boy whose family wields considerable power in the community. Moipone never gets justice for her suffering, because by reporting to the police she gives Basi a chance to run away. Besides, proving her case in court was going to be an impossible project for Moipone since her only witness, Naledi, refuses to talk except to acknowledge to Ole that her brother made a mistake. Naledi admits very sadly towards the end of the novel how the scales of justice were already tipped in Basi’s favour with the absence of an “objective” eye-witness: [Ole] was right in saying that Moipone needed someone to believe her. My words were as close as she could get to an admission by my brother, so she took that to the police. That didn’t do anything for her in the end though. 181 Therefore, where the state, in collusion with the family, actively engineers male violence through its direct and indirect sustenance of class and gender privileges for men, women are left with little option than to re-appropriate violence for their own self-preservation. This is what emerges in the novel My Children have Faces.

State negligence and the dehumanisation of Muis in My Children have Faces Male violence and state complicity are again subjects that present themselves for interrogation in Carol Campbell’s debut novel, My Children have Faces. Campbell posits the view that the persistent enactment of male violence results in the dehumanisation of women, whereupon women’s only means of escape from abusive men is to resort to murder. Murder in this context becomes an instrument for retributive justice, and is to be seen as an indictment of criminal law – the same law that denies women justice. In Campbell’s novel, the state’s lethargy in addressing the needs of minority ethnic groups creates this breakdown of law and order. In this heartrending story, Campbell brings to light the plight of Khoisan people, but especially the women whose vulnerability to male violence is exacerbated by the lack of proper identification documents to give them recognisable legal status as South African citizens. This civil deficiency not

Dehumanisation of women  231 only further entrenches Khoisan women’s marginalisation but also effectively renders them invisible. Muis is a Khoisan woman who comes to the town of Leeu Gamke as a young girl in search of employment, because the white farm owner for whom her parents work in Fraserburg can no longer keep her and her brother, Danie, as he deems them old enough to look after themselves. Muis finds domestic work cleaning for Jan and his brother, Miskiet, in their one-bedroom flat and soon enters into a sexual relationship with Jan. However, Muis’s newfound contentment is short-lived as Miskiet becomes jealous and attempts to extort sex from Muis in Jan’s absence. In his rage at her persistent refusal, Miskiet traps Muis under a tunnel one late afternoon as she returns from seeing Jan at the Ultra Shell garage where he works. Miskiet rapes Muis and kills Jan who catches him in the act of raping Muis, having promised to meet Muis by the tunnel. To cover his crime, Miskiet frames an anonymous black truck driver for the rape and murder. After some months, Muis gives birth to Jan’s son whom Miskiet wants to forcefully claim as his, but Kapok comes to Muis’s rescue by running away with her and the baby into the Karoo on his wagon. From here commences Muis and Kapok’s nomadic life together which spans many years and sees the birth of three more children after Jan’s son, Fansie. Written in a fine mix of English, Afrikaans and a Khoisan dialect and enhanced with a polyphonic narrative style, the novel calls into question the state’s gross neglect of the developmental needs of the Khoisan people who are fondly referred to in the novel as karretjiemense, literally translated as wagon people. This indigenous ethnic minority group is depicted as a people who suffer extreme deprivation. They live on their wagons with no water, no housing and no food – nothing to call their own in a country supposedly liberated from white supremacist rule. They are neither allies of the white economically empowered minority nor beneficiaries of the new laws of affirmative action favouring black, coloured and Indian people. They live for each day, their greatest desire being to find food for the day. Through Kapok’s first person narrative voice, we get to know the degree of their alienation as a group. Talking about his life with his first wife, Mina, Kapok states, We just went day to day, not worrying about tomorrow. When Mandela came I thought about going to Prince Albert to vote but then I said to Mina, ‘What’s the point? You vote for the darkies it’s going to be the same as if you vote for the whities. They are not worried about giving us karretjiemense houses and cars …. Mina was good that way; she agreed with me so we didn’t worry about going to vote for Mandela in the end. For many years Mina and I drove our karrietjie from farm to farm looking for work and we never went hungry. 28 Kapok’s narrative suggests that the Khoisan lack a sense of belonging within the new democratic South Africa since social conditions for them

232  Naomi Nkealah have not changed. His words are a direct criticism of the state’s negligence of their social needs. In a very profound symbolism, Campbell depicts the New South Africa as still only a “wagon” for many of its citizens – a slow, underdeveloped state that is still very old-fashioned, an indication that nothing has really changed with the passage of time. The state’s neglect of the Khoisan and its failure to meet their developmental needs create a state of affairs that is fertile for the subjection of women to violent treatment and subsequent dehumanisation. Throughout Muis and Kapok’s journey through the Karoo, thoughts of Miskiet hunting them down and taking Fansie away continue to haunt Muis. She is determined to keep on running. However, starvation in the Karoo pushes them to return to Leeu Gamke where Kapok hopes to find work on any of the white farms owned by his former employers. It is a journey back into a place Muis dreads, not only because it brings back traumatising memories of her rape and Jan’s murder but more importantly because it holds real possibility of Fansie being abducted by Miskiet. It is at this point that Muis begins to seriously consider legal options for protecting her children. Muis does not possess an identity document, an indication that she is not recognised by the government as a citizen. Her invisibility is triple as it operates on the basis of her gender, class and ethnicity. Without an ID book, Muis cannot access social grants from the government and in consequence cannot provide her children with even the most basic necessities. The children’s births are also not registered and they cannot go to school without birth certificates. From Witpop’s childlike narrative voice, we learn how severely destitute conditions of living are for this family. Witpop says of her mother, She could get All Pay but we aren’t registered with the government, so we don’t get anything. You have to register your children if you want to get pay. Mamma wants the money very badly but she doesn’t want to register us and she also doesn’t have an identity. I don’t know why, I just wish she would get All Pay so that I could have a lappie and a pink roll-on and pads. 43 Initially, Muis is not keen on obtaining an ID because she does not want her children to move away from her in the pursuit of education or employment. However, as time passes, she becomes ever more conscious of Miskiet’s diabolical plans to destroy her life. Moved by the instinct for sheer survival and the survival of her children, Muis determines to get an ID for herself and birth certificates for her children, to give them faces, as it were. The ID comes to represent her only protection against swift elimination by Miskiet, because with an ID her life will be on government records and her murder is likely to be investigated. She reasons as follows: I want my children to be registered and have an identity before he finds me again. I think about this all the time and I know government papers

Dehumanisation of women  233 can be my protection. If you have an identity, the police know when you are killed. They ask questions like: ‘Here is an identity, but where is the person?’ They say things like: ‘This person has gone but their identity is here, we must find this missing person.’ If you have no identity then they don’t know you are gone and they don’t look for you. 45–46 For Muis, then, possessing an ID will reverse her invisibility, because it represents her coming into being as a person. She truly believes in the government’s capacity to possibly protect her from murder by registering her existence and bringing justice to her murderer in the event that she is killed. Still, there is a problem for Muis achieving this embodied personhood. Out in the Great Karoo there are no government facilities for obtaining any kind of legal documentation. From her words above, it is evident that the structures for the government to visibilise the Khoisan are in place, but the government has not taken proactive steps to reach out to them in the remote areas which they inhabit. The nearest government post is in Oudtshoorn, a long distance by donkey cart from the Karoo. Although the Home Affairs mobile truck comes to Leeu Gamke every Monday to render services, Muis is not able to use its services because “she has no concept of years or days or months” (127). Therefore, she and Kapok are never there on the days the truck comes around. State complicity in the dehumanisation of Muis is conveyed, not only in the government’s provision of limited Home Affairs stations but also in its failure to provide basic educational facilities for the Khoisan which will empower them with basic literacy skills for accessing social services. This explains why Muis considers herself “a nothing person” (109). Muis’s self-construction as a nonentity is shared by Miskiet whose plan to kill Muis is motivated by the belief that no one will care about her death since she has no ID. As he plans to attack the family who have hitched camp just outside of Leeu Gamke in their search for work, his thoughts are particularly revealing: What I am looking forward to is taking a rock and bashing her face, and when the world finds her she will be a bloody, dirty, faceless nothing. She will lie for months in the Leeu Gamke mortuary and no one will know her name, and no one will know what her face used to be, and then she will be tossed like a dead dog into the ground so that the rest of us don’t have to live with the stink. Or, even better, no one will find her in this wasteland and the crows can pick her bones clean. 83 It is evident that Muis’s disadvantages as a homeless, illiterate Khoisan woman without identification plays to Miskiet’s advantage. Since Muis is already an invisible non-person, Miskiet’s killing her would only be the

234  Naomi Nkealah elimination of a pest. Thus, for male violence to be justified, women are first stripped of their humanity. Miskiet pursues his plan to kill Muis despite pacification from Kapok when he enters their camp. After drinking the coffee he is offered he attacks Muis with a knife and it takes Kapok all his strength to knock Miskiet out with his knobkerrie. Part of Miskiet’s boldness is his sense of white supremacy, as a result of which he perceives this Khoisan family as “rats running in the veld for food” (52). His reduction of the family to non-human creatures emboldens him to stage his plot in the view of all. However, as a fellow man, albeit severely disadvantaged, Kapok does not take kindly to Miskiet’s impudence and therefore acts to protect Muis from Miskiet’s savagery. He states with some degree of masculine pride: He comes into my camp acting like a grootmeneer, kicking my coffee over and not saying a word and then trying to stick a knife in my woman. If he got that right, what am I going to do with her children? 64 That male violence affects not only the women who are targeted but also the men in relationships with these women compels us to question the state’s failure to redress the deepening inequality between whites and other racial groups in South Africa, which, in the case of this novel, results in the persistent dehumanisation of Muis and her family. Miskiet does not relent after his first failed attempt at killing Muis. Having survived Kapok’s knobkerrie, he is even more determined to track Muis down on the Oudtshoorn road with its isolated paths which makes it “a good place for settling old scores without anybody to see” (87). He reckons that changing his strategy is the ultimate road to his success: In Leeu Gamke I was hungry for revenge and couldn’t stop my rage. There I made mistakes. Now I will stalk you slowly, like you do the buck you love to eat. This time I will creep up close, with Jan’s sharp blade ready, and I will cut my prey’s throat when she least expects it. So long waiting and watching, my brother’s life on her whore-hands, my son raised like a rat. 88 Miskiet’s actions espouse white patriarchy wherein Miskiet appoints h imself father to Fansie and the protector of his brother’s legacy, even though he is his brother’s murderer. He also acts from a distorted sense of masculinity by which he blames Muis for Jan’s death: “She trapped my brother and, because of her, he had to die” (106). As Muis herself notes, “all he wants is to teach me a lesson for not wanting him” (92). All of this portrays Miskiet as a man whose actions are motivated by a combination of factors – gender, class and race – working to his advantage.

Dehumanisation of women  235 Gqola (2007: 113) notes the legacy of apartheid in “systematically brutalizing Black people through various forms of impoverishment, displacement, disenfranchisement and military occupation”, by which it also “ensured that white South Africans were heavily armed through the enforced conscription that helped prop up apartheid South Africa, and maintain a low-level war between the state and comrades”. We see the remnants of the militaristic apartheid state in action in Campbell’s novel, with Miskiet armed with deadly weapons aimed at eliminating and not just displacing Muis. Miskiet forces Muis and her family on the run again and this time they are headed straight for Oudtshoorn. Witpop says “we have to run to Oudtshoorn for identities or else he might catch us first …. Without identities we can be killed and nobody would look for us or miss us” (93). Even Kapok is willing to sell his donkeys and cart and “walk to blerrie Oudtshoorn and find that place that will give us identities” (97). Resisting Miskiet’s violence has now become a collective effort for this family. It is no wonder that when Miskiet attacks the family for a second time in Oudtshoorn and puts a knife to Muis’s throat, they are ready to fight violence with violence. Kapok buys a gun with the R200 he gets from selling his donkeys and hands it to Fansie who in turn passes it on to Witpop when he goes hunting for food. When Miskiet arrives suddenly and attacks Muis, ready to slit her throat, neither Kapok nor Fansie are in a position to help Muis, leaving Witpop to perform the one act that sets her mother free from an obsessed Miskiet. It is quite significant that it is Witpop, and not Kapok, who kills Miskiet. Coming from a female character, this act of retributive justice signifies an assertion of women’s right to self-preservation. The gun, typically a symbol of state power, has been appropriated to become a symbol of female power: the power to end male violence and its abuse of women’s bodies. With Miskiet dead and drowned in the river, the family moves on to Home Affairs the following morning to secure identity documents that constitute them as persons. For the first time since Jan’s death, Muis experiences joy as she receives her children’s birth certificates. She states, “these papers are my children’s lives. They have faces because the government has written down their names on these papers and made them into people” (130). These words indicate the state’s potential to shield women from male violence, only in Muis’s case the government’s usefulness is coming after a murder has been committed. State potential then remains only that, for where Muis displays agency in seeking out government protection, the government displays lethargy in extending its services to Khoisan people. As in Molope’s novel, Campbell points out the need for the state to fulfil its mandate of protecting the rights of women to dignity, and to take more proactive steps in curbing male violence. Such an active step would make a huge difference to the present situation of gendered violence in South Africa. Besides women from minority ethnic groups within South Africa, immigrant women would benefit from the state’s fulfilling of its responsibilities.

236  Naomi Nkealah

Immigration practices and the dehumanisation of Chipo in Zebra Crossing In Zebra Crossing, Meg Vandermerwe puts the spotlight on immigrant women as another minority group in South Africa, and paints a bleak picture of state complicity in their dehumanisation. Chipo is a Zimbabwean albino girl who comes to South Africa with her brother George in search of a better life after their mother dies from HIV/AIDS. She and George settle in Cape Town, sharing a flat with two Zimbabwean brothers, Peter and David. Soon Chipo is caught in the get-rich-quick schemes of her flatmates, including her brother, and a quack witch doctor whom Chipo consults in her childish desperation to win David’s love. As things turn ugly, with criminal gangs and the police getting involved in the illegal business of making fast money, Chipo is abandoned to a slow death of starvation and eventual enslavement by a criminal gang. Like Margie Orford does in her crime fiction, Vandermerwe “is at pains to illustrate this ubiquity of violence against women and children and she repeatedly suggests just how deeply gender violence is embedded in various social institutions, including the family, the state and the police force” (Murray 2013: 69). Zebra Crossing captures the many ways in which corrupt immigration practices and unfair discrimination against immigrants work in consonance with black patriarchy and criminal organisations to inflict violence on women’s bodies and psyches. Here, male violence is not so much physical as it is verbal and psychological; it affects women’s selfperception and compels them to internalise inferiority and externalise selfdegradation. It is an epistemic violence that compels women into serving male interests in ways that cement their own dehumanisation. This happens to Chipo throughout the novel and it is through her experiences, narrated in her own first-person voice, that we get to deduce the state’s active role in the dehumanisation of immigrant women. The first instance of state denigration of immigrant women is when Chipo and George cross the Zimbabwean border into South Africa. They find a truck driver at the Beitbridge border post who is “willing to smuggle [them] for an agreed price” (17). Like contraband goods, Chipo and George are hidden under a mattress in the main cabin of the truck to escape the view of the border guards “searching for stowaways” (20). The filthy condition of the truck is symbolic of the degraded life that awaits them in Cape Town. Chipo notes that “the mattress under which we are buried smells of sweat, beer and unwashed bodies” and is littered with lice (20). Her narrative of the border encounter paints a picture of gross human degradation in which, as migrants, Chipo and George do not only have to endure a filthy life but also have to sacrifice their sense of human dignity in exchange for sheer survival. The truck driver’s illegal business of smuggling Zimbabweans across the border is in sync with the corrupt practices of the guards on both sides of the border who demand bribes from travellers, whether or not an offence

Dehumanisation of women  237 has been registered. Chipo says about the Zimbabwean guards searching their truck: “If we are found … we will have to fork out a hefty bribe. Two hundred South African rands” (20). The truck driver himself confesses to Chipo and George: “they say you need no entry documents at the moment, but the border police do not care. If you have no passport and no visa they will not let you through. Not unless you give them something in return” (19). This account highlights the insidious corruption that takes place at the border through which humans are criminalised merely for wanting to seek an improved standard of living. As Chipo and George “manage to pass through on the South African side as well” (21), it is clear that they are heading for a life of severe exploitation where corrupt government officials are only outmanoeuvred by ruthless criminal gangs. For Chipo, the prospects are even bleaker, with the widespread violence of the magumaguma gangs on both sides of the border: young men who “will take your organs, chop them out and sell them to the muti men” (19). As an albino on whom many superstitions revolve, Chipo’s life is endangered even before she enters South Africa. At a symbolic level, she is reduced to body parts weighed and valued at certain prices, the sale of which will enrich the lives of greedy men. In other words, she is not seen as a human whole but rather as the sum value of her body parts. The violence of language directed at Chipo is evident in references such as “monkey”, “animal”, “ghost” and “ape”, designations which rob her of her humanity by reducing her to the level of the non-human. Even George calls her “Tortoise”, a name he finds befitting in capturing the slowness with which she does things. Thus, male violence orchestrated through a violent language not only constructs Chipo as non-human but also effectively suggests a supposed need for her elimination. Ironically, the police are part of this mass extinction of albinos for personal gain. The maltreatment to which immigrants in South Africa are subjected further entrenches their dehumanisation. At the Home Affairs office in Maitland, they queue up for a whole day outside the building, enduring the temperaments of the harsh Cape Town weather, just to apply for refugee permits. Their forced refugee status constitutes them into pests, “like fleas that need to have their heads squeezed off” (36). Like the border guards, Home Affairs officials are corrupt, ruthless men who will ask for a bribe “but in the end they will do nothing for you” (36). At the same time, they ill-treat the Zimbabweans by bullying them. As Chipo notes, the official who comes to control the queue “doesn’t talk to us; he shouts” (36). With this persistent dehumanisation of the Zimbabweans, both women and men, it is inevitable that many among them will get involved in illegal activities just to make the kind of money that will allow them to pay agents to process their residence permits. Corrupt government practices enforce hierarchies among the foreign nationals such that “those who are rich enough to pay an agent on their behalf are lucky because those agents seem to have an arrangement with the officials”, which arrangement allows them to “pass directly through the doors

238  Naomi Nkealah to the front of the queues with their piles of passports and paperwork” (36). Thus, the deplorable state of affairs at Home Affairs, both visible and invisible, create a desperate need among immigrants to improve their economic conditions in order to access more humane treatment. Men, especially, are desperate to make money so as to restore their sense of dignity through the control of self-made empires. It is to such men that Chipo falls prey and eventually becomes the object of gross exploitation, which ironically is endorsed and spearheaded by her own brother. Chipo visits Doctor Ongani, supposedly a miracle worker, in order to obtain a love portion to win David’s affections. Ironically, she discovers soon afterwards that David is gay and Ongani has cheated her of 150 rands. Yet, in her naiveté she continues to consult with Ongani, accumulating a huge debt which Ongani exploits to rope her and her flatmates into a shady business in which consultations to the public are conducted from a room on the third floor of President’s Heights building. Chipo is central to this money-making scheme because her albinism represents good luck. People come to consult Ongani because he has an albino whose power to change their fortunes surpasses that of any other fortune-teller in the vicinity. The more their wishes for jobs, money, identity documents and other needs come true, the more they believe that the albino “can make any charm” (124). Ongani, however, is not satisfied with making just a small fortune out of Chipo. With the 2010 World Cup on the horizon, he launches a new scheme – using Chipo to predict success for different teams and charging people for his services. It is through this business that Chipo’s dehumanisation is cemented. Not only does Ongani control the money they make, but Chipo also has no say in how the business is conducted, while the men around her – Ongani, George, Peter and David – make all the decisions. The silencing of Chipo’s voice in spite of her being the instrument by which the group makes its money indicates the extent to which black patriarchy robs women of subjectivity. In the men’s masculine contest for self-enrichment, they re-construct Chipo as only an image of her physical self. She states, My job is simply to be in the back. Supposedly I am doing something to the muti. But I am not allowed to speak. The customers seem satisfied just to see my outline there. Near the jars of dried herbs and bits of bone and fur. 132 This fetishisation of the albino is an extreme form of male violence that not only highlights her dehumanisation by an exploitative group of men but also points to the subtleness with which women’s dehumanisation can be masked by black empowerment efforts within the context of nation-building through soccer solidarity. Significantly, the South African police aggravate the dehumanisation of Chipo, because the Tanzanians, known as the local drug lords, enjoy police protection which they now offer to Ongani and his team in exchange for 15% of the profit from the gambling rackets. Emboldened by

Dehumanisation of women  239 the fact they “enjoy impunity from the police, whom they bribe” (134), they approach Ongani to negotiate. During the negotiations, no one asks Chipo for her input. In fact, when Ongani attempts to make Chipo see the benefits of forming an alliance with the Tanzanians, George rudely interrupts and says Chipo “has no brain for business” and will do whatever she is told (136). And indeed, the two groups expunge Chipo from their business transaction, though she is the central player in their money-making scheme. Thus, one sees how easily black patriarchy colludes with gangster organisations backed by a corrupt police department to degrade Chipo, recasting her into an absented presence, a disembodied subject and a brainless albino. The ultimate degradation for Chipo is her permanent confinement to the consultation room in President’s Heights where she suffers extreme physical deprivation: “day or night my feet are as cold as ice in this forsaken building” (126). Her mobility is restricted and so is her access to basic amenities, cementing her objectification: I do not need to cook anymore or go out and run errands. For my own safety it is thought better that I not leave this one room, not even to go back to the flat. I must sleep, eat and shit here, in the place where Doctor Ongani and I see his clients and he is to now take my place in the flat with David, George and Peter. 143 How ironic that Chipo’s albinism becomes the source of her dehumanisation whereas her name means “gift” in Shona. This involuntary incarceration turns her into a ghost of herself, for as she confesses, with “every day that I am locked away, I feel myself fading, disappearing” (143). Male violence has not only rendered her invisible but has also effectively erased her from the living world of active citizenship. Like Muis, Chipo has been robbed of personhood. Her existence is unregistered when the police raid President’s Heights and arrest everyone, including David who had promised to rescue her that same night. After five days of starvation she is captured by the Tanzanians whose conspiracy with the police to take over Ongani’s business cannot be missed. Thus, as a result of masculine competition for social and economic domination as well as state complicity in crime, Chipo is condemned to a life of permanent servitude to a lot of greedy men. Ultimately, this novel suggests that male violence, in all its forms, fosters the disintegration of the female self and a loss of identity. Like Moipone for whom the law denies justice, Chipo suffers the brutality of male power, resigning herself to a fate she cannot control. Molope and Vandermerwe show the complexity of resisting male violence where it is energised by both black patriarchy and state patriarchy, as well as by a corrupt law enforcement system and criminal organisations. Therefore, to engineer women’s agency under the circumstances is to forge radical modes of resistance, which is what Campbell and Molope do in their novels by empowering female characters to

240  Naomi Nkealah take action against their oppressors. We do not see a similar kind of agency in Vandermerwe’s novel, which in itself suggests a difficulty in framing feminist resistance within a context where women are disadvantaged not only by race, class, gender, ethnicity, language and resident status but also by their inherent genetic composition: in this case, albinism.

Conclusion The three novels analysed in this chapter are unanimous in positing the view that the post-apartheid South African state has largely failed in its constitutional responsibility to protect the human rights of women, particularly their rights to bodily safety and dignified treatment. By not narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor, providing the developmental needs of minority groups (including promoting literacy among women of these groups), and eradicating corruption among the police and immigration officers, the state inevitably condones, legitimises and proliferates male violence in all its varied forms – both concrete and epistemic. Although some degree of women’s agency is discernible in the novels, the writers ultimately suggest that positive transformation in gender relations can only be achieved if the state itself undergoes transformation, shedding its patriarchal stateliness to acquire a more visible gender-sensitive, egalitarian identity.

References Campbell, Carol. 2013. My Children have Faces. Cape Town: Umuzi. Gill, Aisha, Gina Heathcote and Emma Williamson. 2016. Introduction: Violence. Feminist Review 112: 1–10. Gqola, Pumla Dineo. 2007. How the ‘Cult of Femininity’ and Violent Masculinities Support Endemic Gender Based Violence in Contemporary South Africa. African Identities 5(1): 111–124. Isaacs, Dane Henry. 2016. Social Representations of Intimate Partner Violence in the South African Media. South African Journal of Psychology 46(4): 491–503. Mazibuko, Nokuthula Caritus and Ikechukwu Umejesi. 2015. Blame it on Alcohol: “Passing the Buck” on Domestic Violence and Addiction. Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies 4(2): 718–738. Molope, Kagiso Lesego. 2012. This Book Betrays my Brother. Cape Town: Oxford University Press Southern Africa. Mukasa, Rosemary. 2008. The African Women’s Protocol: Harnessing a Potential Force for Positive Change. Johannesburg: Fanele. Murray, Jessica. 2013. “The Girl was Stripped, Splayed and Penetrated”: Representations of Gender and Violence in Margie Orford’s Crime Fiction. English Academy Review 30(2): 67–78. Pease, Bob. 2014. Theorising Men’s Violence Prevention Policies: Limitations and Possibilities of Interventions in a Patriarchal State. In Henry, Nicola and Anastasia Powel (eds) Preventing Sexual Violence: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Overcoming a Rape Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 22–40. Vandermerwe, Meg. 2013. Zebra Crossing. Cape Town: Umuzi.

15 “Here comes the dress” Daily resistance in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker Mercedez L. Thompson

In her essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” published in her book Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Audre Lorde (1984) theorises the erotic as a feminine source within us all, a creative and generative sense of power located in deep feeling. Lorde (1984) suggests that women can use creativity and female connection to imagine social alternatives and live more fulfilling and self-actualised lives. For Caribbean women in the diaspora, marginalised not only for their gender and race but also for their immigrant status, this source of female power has been repressed on multiple levels, but not obliterated. To access the erotic – “that creative energy empowered” (Lorde 1984: 55) – is to endure and resist patriarchal oppression. Edwidge Danticat answers the call for new representations of female consciousness as she re-imagines women’s resistance via oral literature, braiding together the voices of exiled women in a dialogue that may not offer a solution but does constitute agency.1 Whereas Danticat’s predecessors were interested in writing against a male literary tradition in order to write women’s voices into national histories, Danticat writes beyond historical victimisation and transcends simplistic coming-to-voice to situate female diasporic resistance amongst the complexities of transnationalism and transculturalism in a globalised world. In The Dew Breaker (2004), Danticat’s braiding of voices mirrors the work of Beatrice Saint Fort, the bridal seamstress who accesses creative female power and community through dressmaking. The Dew Breaker, a novel-in-stories, weaves together nine accounts of exiled Haitians to offer a plurality of perspectives that converse with one another and speak to the legacies of historical and political trauma haunting generations of the Haitian diaspora. The stories within are linked by the arbitrary violence of the Duvalier dictatorship and the lingering traumas caused by one torturer’s particular cruelty. The sixth story focusses on a retiring bridal seamstress whose life and identity have been dominated by the torture she experienced in Haiti. She has spent most of her adulthood either running from or working through her traumatic experiences. In “The Bridal Seamstress”, Beatrice chooses to create in a world that has cast her as invisible, to express herself from a place of systematic silence.

242  Mercedez L. Thompson Because she uses her work to feel deeply within her body, connect with other women, and cope with her traumas, dressmaking becomes a space of artistic empowerment. Beatrice’s daily seamstress work, then, is an active seeking of the erotic, a means to thwart invisibility and silence through creative feeling and female connection. Through her occupation as a seamstress, Beatrice re-establishes an identity as the “Mother” of her clients – Haitian American brides-to-be – and cloaks the female body – exposed, even tortured – in beautifully stitched fabric, metaphorically stitching herself back together. Beatrice, knowingly or unknowingly, seeks the erotic through her creative work, and in doing so resists disempowerment and explores the life-giving nature of female connection. Yet, what partially frees Beatrice partially confines her as well. We meet Beatrice at the close of her occupation when Aline Cajuste, a Haitian American journalism intern, arrives at Beatrice’s home to write about her impending retirement. Beatrice is retiring from dressmaking and moving because she is exhausted by the required effort of her resistance and hoping to outrun her imagined persecutor. She tells Aline that “it’s become too hard” (126). By cutting herself off from her community of brides, Beatrice is reassured that the prison guard who tortured her (presumably the eponymous dew breaker) “won’t find out where [she] is” (137). Through Aline, the reader becomes aware of the enduring impact of the dew breaker’s violence. Beatrice is haunted by the memory of the man who arrested her, “tied [her] to some type of rack in the prison and whipped the bottom of [her] feet until they bled” (132). She believes that he continues to follow her: “This man, wherever I rent or buy a house in this city, I find him, living on my street” (132). By opting out of her creative work and her community, Beatrice is ultimately failing to endure, choosing to discontinue this form of artistic resistance. Since Beatrice comes from an oral culture in which women’s voices have been historically erased, the opportunity to tell her story to Aline could yield empowerment, both for herself and Aline. Maria Rice Bellamy (2012: 189) suggests that “[w]ithout speaking [their] traumatic experiences” the characters in The Dew Breaker “can neither resolve them nor build a bridge to understanding” for posterity. Together, Beatrice (born in Haiti and knowledgeable of its oral traditions) and Aline (born in the United States and representative of the written word) have the power to re-write history, to revise and contribute to the national record of female experience under the Duvalier regime. Beatrice’s testimony would not only give voice to her experience and help her confront a difficult past, but it would also serve Aline, a young Haitian American who struggles with her own lesbian identity, social isolation and disconnection from her parents and who yearns to write meaningful stories. Yet, Beatrice relays a partial story, omitting the violent sexual nature of the dew breaker’s crimes. In failing to pass down a full story, Beatrice does not voice her truth, which might help her cope with her traumatic past and aid in her continued resistance, but instead traps herself in agony and alienation.

Daily resistance in The Dew Breaker  243 The denial of healing or wholeness for Beatrice represents Danticat’s insistence on fragmented postcolonial subjectivity. In her retirement and failure to pass down a complete story, Beatrice effectively cuts herself off from her female community, her art, and thus the erotic. Beatrice’s resistance via dressmaking initially gives her power to endure, but ultimately fails. What continues to differentiate Danticat from her precursors is her refusal to grant a clear path towards recovery, an acknowledgement of an irreducibly fragmented postcolonial subjectivity. In Danticat’s narratives, female agency and the metaphor of voice are sites of contradiction rather than unidirectional tropes of power and authority. Instead of narratives whose central preoccupation is the unproblematic … coming to voice of women, her novels generate questions around the fraught process of voicing, self-determination, agency, and the production of cultural and national identity. Mardorossian (2010: 42) Her characters do not work towards wholeness or experience outright healing but resist disempowerment through female creativity, community and storytelling. Stories, and female expression more generally, refute silence and censorship. They empower us to cope with our histories and traumas, and they grant visibility that withstands erasure. Moreover, stories offer insights for future generations on how to live, love and work in a world where cultures cannot be conceived of as separate entities but exist in constant interaction. Still, there is no promise of wholeness; instead generations of traumatised diaspora live and endure from the margins, carrying their scars forward. The Dew Breaker testifies to social injustice, historical violence and generational traumas, while exploring how people survive after experiencing, perpetuating and inheriting violence. The text forces us to re-consider the dichotomies of victim/perpetrator and wounded/recovered. While the eponymous torturer is never excused from his actions as a tonton macoute under the Duvalier dictatorship, he is, nevertheless, complicated and humanised, anguished by the memories of his crimes and constantly reminded of his guilt and isolation. His daughter’s perception of him varies from a nightmare-ridden “prisoner father [she] loved as well as pitied” (31) to “a praying mantis, crouching motionless, seeming to pray, while actually waiting to strike” (26) to a more nuanced, penitent figure with “more choices than being either hunter or prey” (24). In Ka’s memorable statue, a cracked rendition of her father “naked, kneeling […] his back arched like the curve of a crescent moon, his downcast eyes fixed on his very long fingers and the large palms of his hands”, (6) we glimpse the intricacy of the dew breaker’s character. He is both perpetrator of violence and victim of shameful nightmares, a reformed torturer masking one version of himself with another, trying and failing to cover the jagged scar that spans one side of his face.

244  Mercedez L. Thompson Beatrice, on the other hand, confronts her past and the life she was denied – marriage, motherhood and children – on a daily basis but never fully escapes her terror, nor undergoes healing. She employs dressmaking as an artform to access female power, using it as a mechanism for limited resistance and to cope with trauma, both in her past and marginalised present. Her work – a metaphor for her stitching together of self in the creation of wedding gowns that symbolise female virtue and mask imperfections – acts as a creative outlet for female expression and empowerment, provides female community, and allows her to momentarily reclaim the feminine beauty and unmarred sexuality that were stolen from her. There is, of course, a paradox in Beatrice’s seeking of female empowerment as a bridal seamstress since weddings celebrate a profoundly patriarchal relationship. Similarly contradicting, she exercises control over her body through constant relocation, moving and removing herself in a way not possible in her former Haitian community where her body was the property of the tonton macoutes. Yet, her mobility is, at the same time, a confused flight from a past trauma. She is both wounded and recovering, running from and breaking free of her living nightmare. Beatrice’s resistance is limited and eventually overpowered by patriarchy: she loses her “daughters” and fails to relay a full testimony. It is Aline who offers Beatrice a not-so-tragic end. “The Bridal Seamstress” closes with Aline staying with Beatrice, allowing her a final chance to shape how her story will be told. Hence, my analysis aligns Aline’s determination to write the stories of others with Danticat’s own creative resistance, her writing and its influence on her social activism. Danticat’s fiction is intimately tied to her non-fiction, her interviews, and her documentaries.2 With a careful sense of duty, Danticat records female experience and expands the voices of history, crafting stories that can be passed on and employed as tools of resistance. She calls it “creating as a revolt against silence” (Danticat 2010: 11), and sees her work and the work of other immigrant artists as both dangerous and urgent: dangerous because it disobeys systems of oppression that silence and erase, and urgent because it is both memorial and insurgent – a testimony to those stifled and annihilated under the legacies of colonialism and dictatorship and a tool to resist further erasure. Danticat’s attention to a collective dialogue – expressive art, performance, and storytelling – bears witness to historical and ongoing injustice, resists disempowerment, and problematises any single understanding of the past. I agree with the critics who interpret the disjointed structure of Danticat’s novels as a mirroring of the fragmented psyches of her characters who have “pieces missing from them” (Pressley-Sanon 2016: 19) and those who insist that the dialogical tension prevents a dominant narrative voice and a hierarchy of perspectives (Fuchs 2014). I contribute to this conversation by exploring Danticat’s insistence on a fragmented postcolonial subjectivity, the contradictions inherent in agency and resistance that do not and cannot yield an uncomplicated sense of self or wholeness.

Daily resistance in The Dew Breaker  245 The Dew Breaker’s distinction lies in its reverberation of oral traditions and its loyalty to a multiplicity of perspectives. The novel’s structure “mimetically represents the traumatized person’s inability to integrate the traumatic experience into his or her existing framework” (Pressley-Sanon 2016: 19). Josef Raab (2018: 269) expounds on the structure: “[e]ach story or episode appears distinct, and the reader understands only by the very end of the book that the nine narratives are interlaced and that the fragments of the past patchwork have been quilted into a cycle”. The novel’s nine stories, existing separately but in conversation with one another, symbolically correspond to Haiti’s historical nine districts. Danticat has said that her country is one of uncertainty – sometimes understood as Haiti, other times as the United States – but that she feels “as an immigrant and as an artist” to belong to what is called “the tenth department” (Danticat 2010: 49). Historically, Haiti has had nine geographic departments and the tenth was “the floating homeland, the ideological one, which joined all Haitians living outside of Haiti, in the diaspora” (Danticat 2010: 49). Danticat describes a transcultural space, a space of displacement where people are neither one nor the other but both, unique but connected by an ancestral heritage. This tenth space is not always friendly. Displaced peoples are strangers both in their new homes and in their native countries. Yet, the tenth space simultaneously highlights difference and universality, the individual and the collective, constituting a space for a more complex subjectivity to form outside the dichotomies of United States/Haiti, male/female, and hunter/prey. I suggest here that, in giving her novel nine separate sections, Danticat envisions the novel itself as a tenth space, a community where her characters and their stories meet and overlap, where the diaspora is not outside of home and host culture but situated in both. In choosing to structure the text this way, Danticat challenges the idea of an official historical record in favour of call and response and prevents a hierarchy of perspectives. In “The Bridal Seamstress”, the reader encounters Beatrice through her interactions with journalist intern Aline, a Haitian American recent college graduate who has arrived at Beatrice’s home to write about her retirement. Some time after Beatrice was tortured by the dew breaker, she moved to New York and made a living as a bridal seamstress. Evidently, Beatrice has experienced enough professional success to warrant a newspaper article on retirement. Yet, Aline finds a “petite, wasp-waisted woman” with curved shoulders bent over “as though she’d spent too much time searching for things on the ground” (121), who is full of agony and “chasing fragments” (138) of herself. The reader is quickly exposed to Beatrice’s contradictions. She is a bridal seamstress who is cynical of marriage. She forms a community, even a sense of family, with her clients, making them call her Mother, yet she requires isolation, saying she “[n]ever could stand having anyone in my house for too long” (126). She disconnects herself from other p eople in hopes of drawing all attention away from herself but uses her art to move from the margins to centre stage: “I am that dress. It’s like everyone’s looking at me” (126).

246  Mercedez L. Thompson Beatrice resists debilitation and accesses the erotic through the art of dressmaking. She not only finds a creative outlet that provides a means to live, but she has dedicated her life to female beauty and the sanctioning of family, continuously confronting the life she was denied. We know from her testimony that Beatrice had a boyfriend when she rejected the dew breaker’s advances. What happened to that boyfriend after her torture is never revealed, but it is suggested that she never married. When questioned about a husband, Beatrice replies: “I’ve never wanted to be asked that question” (127). If we presume that her torture made her unmarriable – perhaps because of the injuries and trauma or because she was marked as property of the macoutes and therefore too dangerous to court – then Beatrice routinely confronts her torture and its implications in the creation of bridal gowns. Furthermore, she establishes a network of female clients, a community around her creative work. Because Beatrice’s work invites her to (re)formulate an identity as Mother and explore the sacredness of female connection, her resistance stems from the erotic. After all, as Lorde (1984: 58) suggests, it is through deep feeling and community that we “become less willing to accept powerlessness”. Thus, daily women’s work such as sewing and threading can represent a mode of female expression and creativity that ultimately work to destabilise structures of oppression. To create from a space of marginalisation, to express yourself from a space of silence and to make yourself seen in a world that casts you invisible constitute resistance. And while I maintain that Danticat purposefully does not offer resolution or wholeness for her characters, Beatrice’s work is an act of resistance that enables her endurance. Caribbean literature has long relied on the theme of restoring identity to exiled immigrants (Glissant 1989). Danticat complicates this theme by refusing to offer self-actualisation. Instead, in The Dew Breaker, Beatrice employs the art of dressmaking, just as Danticat employs writing, as a tool to refute negation, subvert systems of oppression, and cope with trauma – to “purge the pain” (Adisa 2009: 353) – without the promise of a happy ending. Beatrice’s resistance is limited in part because of the nature of her work. Marriage, after all, is a traditional celebration of patriarchy and the subordination of women. Beatrice recognises its shortcomings: “I’m not going to sit here and tell you what a great institution it is” (126). Her hope for healing is further complicated because her inherited life abroad comes with its own systems of oppression. Like many of the novel’s characters, Beatrice is an exile, existing transnationally between home and host country and transtemporally, situated simultaneously in the past and present, attempting to come to terms with her traumatic experiences while battling new forms of disempowerment and marginalisation. She is both fleeing and facing oppression. While Beatrice uses the power of the erotic to cope with her sense of loss and resist complete debilitation, there is no going back to the youthful beauty and innocence she imagines. Just as her colonised nation can never reclaim its pre-imperial authenticity, Beatrice can never recover her pre-tortured body or subjectivity.3

Daily resistance in The Dew Breaker  247 Like her art of choice, Beatrice’s mobility provides only temporary agency. Haunted by horrific memories of Haiti, Beatrice moves from place to place to evade her imagined persecutor. For her, the dew breaker is a ghost on her heels, a phantom never far off. Beatrice is not alone in her flight. Many of the novel’s other characters use movement somewhat unsatisfactorily to escape their pasts and pursue a better life. After killing his final prisoner despite orders to release him, the dew breaker flees: “He had escaped from his life. He could no longer return to it, no longer wanted to” (237). In the United States he lies about where he is from in Haiti “even though thirty-seven years and a thinning head of widow-peaked salt-and-pepper hair shield him from the threat of immediate recognition” (28). Dany, whose parents were murdered by the dew breaker, moved to the United States to “be as far away as possible from the people who’d murdered his parents” (115), yet he ends up renting a room in the dew breaker’s basement. Freda, a funeral singer who flees Haiti after refusing to sing for her father’s killers, fails her English classes and contemplates joining a militia even though she is certain it will mean her death. Estine, the aunt who raised Dany before sending him to the United States, remains in Haiti but moves to the countryside, distancing herself from the terrors of Port au Prince. For Beatrice and the other characters, mobility presents an opportunity for escape, refuge, a new start, or educational/economic advancement but often fails its promise. Movement becomes, for Beatrice, a mode of self-destruction. Regine Michelle JeanCharles (2010: 63) suggests that [b]eyond the problems of language, belonging, and longing for homeland, the immigrants in Danticat’s texts find themselves confronted by the demons of their pasts no matter how much distance they seek to place between the traumatic experiences from home and their new lives in the United States. As with other characters, movement does not free Beatrice’s body; it manifests her constant fear. She flees her memories, relocating across New York City’s immigrant neighbourhoods in hopes of maintaining a semblance of control over the body she continuously interprets as under threat. Beatrice’s trauma infiltrates every aspect of her life, tearing her away from her community, nation, and selfhood. When Aline interviews her, she immediately recognises the extent of Beatrice’s alienation and traumatic memories. When Aline asks how long Beatrice has been a seamstress, Beatrice replies “since Haiti” (126), as if Haiti is a time, an event, as much as it is a place. For Beatrice, there is simply before and after the dew breaker. Her life is a daily toil of blurred survival, marked only by her incessant movement and her art – a weaving of threads into wedding gowns that, for Beatrice, embody feminine beauty and virginity and signify human connection and family – casualties of her torture. Beatrice, then, attempts to reclaim what she understands as stolen from her in her creative work.

248  Mercedez L. Thompson We cannot ignore her work’s reliance on patriarchy. Her dresses connect her with creative power and allow her to share feeling with her “daughters”, but simultaneously foretell their coming marriages and re-alignment with patriarchal power. Her “daughters” become wives, and in designing and constructing their gowns Beatrice participates in the exchange of female bodies. If we understand Beatrice’s work of dressmaking as an artform, which she employs in her unending quest for self-actualisation and empowerment, then we can conceive of her sewing as an active and even literal attempt to thread herself back together. Yet, her participation in and profit from patriarchy ultimately diminishes her resistance and wears her down, signifying the complexities of exercising female power from the grips of repression. Her work’s reliance on patriarchy begets her retirement – an opting out that disconnects her from the erotic – but does not annul the creative resistance that for so long nurtured her survival. While readers may view her participation in patriarchy as problematic and complicit, I interpret it as unavoidable and representative of opposition that must come from within the very system it hopes to dismantle. The stitching motif pervades the novel. When Dany returns to Haiti to tell his Aunt Estina that he has found the man who killed his parents, he learns that she, a village midwife, had always wanted to be a baby seamstress. Although Estina’s “burn marks had smoothed into her skin and were now barely visible” (97), the fire, started by the dew breaker after he shot Dany’s parents, had left her blind and therefore unable to sew. Like Beatrice, Estina had once dreamt of marriage and children, and like Beatrice she lost these aspirations to the dew breaker’s violence. Yet, unlike Dany who “was still back there, on the burning porch, hoping that his mother and father would rise and put out the fire” (108) and unlike Beatrice who finds her torturer on every street, Estina was seemingly able to re-integrate into her Haitian community and preoccupy herself with life, the delivery of babies. She “had treated her burns herself after the fire, with poultices and herbs” (115), an indication that she confronted her wounds, literally healing her scarred skin in a way Beatrice cannot heal hers. For both characters, the marred and disfigured female body plays an integral role in identity formation, and interestingly both women are portrayed as motherly figures despite not having families of their own. On foreign soil, Beatrice’s defaced body dominates her sense of self, and she experiences new forms of trauma. Her displacement further imperils her. Estina’s scars remain visible but not crippling. She is empowered by her role in the community and quite literally treats her own wounds. Still, when Estina hears Dany recounting his parents’ death in his sleep, she regrets her unwillingness to let him tell his story and acknowledges her repression of the memories, saying that Dany is young and strong enough to return to that day, but for her “it would take a lot more time and effort” (109). She echoes Beatrice in her exhaustion at confronting the past: “All I know is I’m very tired now” (109), a sentiment that yields a quiet but unexpected death in her sleep.

Daily resistance in The Dew Breaker  249 Anne, mother to Ka and wife to the dew breaker, is the true mother within the story. Her likeness to Beatrice and Estine goes beyond her identity as a mother to a more indelible sewing scene. After colliding with the dew breaker outside the prison where her stepbrother was being held captive, Anne mistakes him for a prisoner. In reality, his grotesque face wound is retaliation from her stepbrother moments before his murder. After applying honey, ginger and yerba buena to the dew breaker’s face, Anne watches as “the doctor pulled a silver thread in and out of his skin”, warning him that he might “heal in a way that would make him look like a monster” (238–239). Once again, the novel indicates the limited healing that comes from stitching and sewing. The dew breaker’s most noticeable trait is the “blunt, rope like scar that runs from [his] right cheek down to the corner of his mouth” (5). Here, the inability of stitching to undo the past becomes evident. Hence, stitching as both a method of expressive coping and as a way to conceal wounds re-appears several times. Interestingly, the characters all share a similar fate in that their sewing cannot undo or fully mask their scars. In the case of the dew breaker, stitching literally highlights a traumatic past, suggesting that he is particularly haunted by his acts of violence. Raab (2018: 271) aligns Anne’s religious devotions “that block out memory and thought” with Beatrice’s compulsive stitching. I disagree, interpreting Beatrice’s dressmaking as creative work that grants her female expression and allows her to cope with her trauma rather than ignore it. Instead, I align Anne with Beatrice through their failure to relay a complete story. I allege that Beatrice relays a partial story, neglecting to acknowledge the sexual nature of her torture, and so misses an opportunity to confront her traumatic memories and pass down her experience for the next generation. Beatrice’s story would be useful for Aline who recognises her own incomplete sense of self and history and acquires a personal responsibility to record the stories of people like Beatrice, “men and women whose tremendous agonies filled every blank space in their lives” (137). Similarly, “Anne does not offer her history to Ka and continues to bear her losses and guilt alone, revealing the isolating and stagnating consequences of trauma held within” (Bellamy 2012: 193). When Ka calls her mother to inquire about the past, Anne finds it “impossible to explain” (238), using her husband’s words instead of her own: “What he told you, he want to tell you for a long time” (240). When all Anne wants is “[a]nything to keep them both talking”, she continues the silence that has marked her marriage and finds that “her daughter was already gone” (242). The novel ends with Anne feeling as if there is “no way to escape this dread anymore” (242). Interestingly, her failure to share her story with Ka calls to memory the stepbrother who was murdered and burned “leaving behind no corpse to bury, no trace of himself at all” (242). In this way, the novel equates silence with erasure. Like Anne, Beatrice reveals too little, falling back into her routine of silence and isolation. They share coffee and Beatrice tells Aline of the dew breakers who’d “come before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves, and

250  Mercedez L. Thompson they’d take you away” (131). She displays the wounds on her feet as evidence of the prison guard’s cruelty, saying after he whipped the bottom of her feet until they bled, he made her “walk home, barefoot. On tar roads. In the hot sun. At high noon” (132). When Aline asks if Beatrice is sure that she’s seen this same man in New York, Beatrice replies: “No one will ever have that much of your attention. No matter how much he’d changed, I would know him anywhere” (132). After a neighbour assures Aline that nobody lives in the house that Beatrice claims belongs to the dew breaker, Aline returns to Beatrice, who “said nothing” at first and then insists that her retirement will make it harder for the dew breaker to find her again (137). Beatrice sticks to her incomplete story, failing to acknowledge her own hallucinatory terror or reveal the truths that could fill up the silences. The torture (re)memory recalls a rape in the explicitly sexual domination and wrecking of Beatrice’s body that eradicates her sense of female agency and sexuality and destroys her sense of self. When Beatrice refuses to go dancing with the dew breaker, he arrests her, ties her to a rack inside the prison, scourges her body, and makes her walk through the community exposed and barefoot at midday. We must recognise Beatrice’s torture as a direct response to her refusal of the dew breaker’s sexual advances. Her kidnapping and mutilation occur only after she declines the man’s offer to go dancing. Essentially, the dew breaker avenges a perceived emasculation by tying Beatrice up and ravaging her body. The dew breaker himself affirms later in the novel that rape was common practice in the prison, saying that if Anne entered the prison, “the men would make her all kinds of false promises, then have their way with her” (232). The dew breaker’s revelation to Anne indicates that all women who see the inside of the prison are raped. Although the novel does not explicitly state it, it is likely that Beatrice was raped by the dew breaker and her partial testimony fails to confront the highly sexualised nature of her torture. Beatrice’s walk of shame is further evidence of the rape. She describes a painful and vulnerable walk home with her body exposed for all to see. Afterwards, she not only associates heterosexuality with choicelessness but also sees the consequences of female agency and voice as patriarchal punishment, corporeal violation, and community denunciation. After being publicly shamed, Beatrice is likely to be deemed, at best, property of the macoutes and therefore untouchable, or perhaps utterly spoiled and unvirtuous, explaining her hesitancy to discuss why she never married. Furthermore, her insistence that she would know her defiler anywhere, that nobody would ever have that much of her attention, is reminiscent of rape trauma. Beatrice’s self-hatred and suspicion of her sexuality, both consequences of her torture, prove effective tools of oppression and re-voice Lorde’s discussion of the suppression of the erotic in which male models of power vilify sources of female power (Lorde 1984). Another story within the novel confirms the prevalence of rape by the tonton macoutes. In “The Funeral Singer”, Rezia was raped as a young girl:

Daily resistance in The Dew Breaker  251 “One night when she was sleeping, a uniformed man walked in. She dug herself into the bed, but it did no good, so she passed out” (173). Later, Rezia’s aunt confessed that this man had threatened to imprison her if she tried to stop him from raping her niece. Presumably, if the aunt had refused, both she and Rezia would have been subjected to further violence and rape. Furthermore, women in Danticat’s other texts, most notably Martine Caco in Breath, Eyes, Memory (Danticat 1994), have also testified to the sexual brutality of the tonton macoutes. Even Martine’s language mirrors that of Beatrice. Martine, pregnant with another man’s child but haunted by the rapist who caused her first pregnancy, considers abortion, saying: “I look at every man and I see him […] Him. Le violeur, the rapist. I see him everywhere” (Danticat 1994: 199). At the close of Danticat’s first novel, Martine stabs her stomach 17 times, giving in “to her pain, to live as a butterfly” (234). Martine’s suicide reveals two things: the immeasurable pain of living with the memories of the horrific sexual violence of the macoutes, and the possibility of interpreting her withdrawal not as a surrender but as an act of agency. Both Martine and her daughter Sophie assert that the suicide marks a new beginning, a chance for freedom. To accept the likely possibility that Beatrice was raped by the dew breaker is to further understand her paranoia as a reaction not unlike Martine’s post-traumatic tendency of “seeing” her persecutor everywhere. And, like Martine, Beatrice, in retiring and eschewing communication with others, chooses to stop seeing him, a choice I interpret as ultimately self-destructive, but a choice, nonetheless. Just as there exists limited agency in daily endurance and female creativity, there exists also limited autonomy in Beatrice’s refusal to participate. While, of course, her artistic cessation and isolation manifest as very different forms of opting out when compared to Martine’s suicide, it follows that if suicide can be interpreted as a freedom from systems of oppression and traumatic memories, then Beatrice’s withdrawal can also be viewed as liberating. Beatrice, understandably overcome by her fear, uncertainty and constant flight, rejects the demands on her to endure. Because her creative passion for seamstress work allows her to access the erotic and her brides comprise her sole sense of community and female connection, the fact that we meet her on her last day as a seamstress becomes particularly significant. Add to her impending retirement the fact that she re-directs her interview into a testimony, and we see the import of the oral motif. Yet, Beatrice, like Anne, fails to pass down a complete narrative, passing down half-truths with more questions than answers. To situate Beatrice’s testimony, I first submit the fact that she erases any sexual undertones from her retelling – even the dew breaker’s sexual advance is subdued to a simple request to go dancing. Furthermore, in targeting her feet, the dew breaker effectively insists that if she won’t dance with him, she won’t dance with anyone. He robs her of dancing – a performative female expression that is oftentimes a space for female sensuality and celebration of the female body. If dancing is a stand-in for sexual intercourse, or at least a suggestion of it, then the dew

252  Mercedez L. Thompson breaker violates Beatrice’s body to dominate and control her sexuality, to prevent her from having sex with other men. The dew breaker’s gendered violence forces Beatrice to detest her own body and associate her sexuality with a loss of control, a complete repression of her erotic power. I agree with Raab’s assertion that Danticat’s texts “reveal that trauma can never be totally left behind, that no liberation can be accomplished in the promised land without the individual’s ability to tell the truth about the past and to find a way of accepting that truth” (Raab 2018: 267). I further suggest that even in voicing the past there is no liberation in a traditional sense. Certainly, telling one’s story, giving a full testimony, is crucial in coping with trauma and expelling pain, but it yields endurance more than healing. Whereas Raab (2018) suggests that The Dew Breaker’s characters work through their trauma, I contend that they continue to work with their trauma. Complete recovery and relief from her terror remain elusive for Beatrice. She is necessarily fragmented, a reflection of the very nature of postcolonial experience and migration, but her art exists as a daily means of convalescence and reclamation. And the opportunity to tell her truth presents not an uncomplicated path to recovery but a paradoxical, and often limited, opportunity to face and absolve pain. I also agree with Jean-Charles (2010: 58) that for Danticat’s female characters, “subjectivity is informed by the multiple positions they occupy as women who are usually poor, black, immigrant, second generation, and inhabitants of a country that is not their own”. Racial, gender, national and even cultural identities are challenged as stable points of reference. Instead, identity formation exists as a relational and fluid process for displaced women who are transnational and transcultural, constantly withstanding the ambiguities and contradictions that make up their sense of self. In an essay, Danticat states: “[o]ne of the advantages of being an immigrant is that two very different countries are forced to merge within you” (Danticat 2010: 112). In withholding wholeness, Danticat suggests that survival for the postcolonial, diasporic woman consists of daily toil and negotiation with conflicting conceptions of self, and that this convergence is not necessarily negative. The transnational subject – those inhabiting the tenth space – must cope with old and new traumas, coming to terms with the scars that can both hold them together or rip them apart, and they must voice those traumas as testament to the voiceless, contribution to the record of history, and a bridge for the next generation. Aline, struck by the seamstress’s disclosure and eager to write “a bigger story” (134), investigates the house Beatrice believes to be occupied by the dew breaker. When she realises that nobody lives in the house and that Beatrice is running from a ghost, Aline decides to stay with her and attempt to write her story. Ka’s character grants insight into how Aline might fare whether Beatrice remains silent or decides to share her secrets. Ka, after all, hears her father’s confession but is denied her mother’s version. While Ka asserts that “confessions do not lighten living hearts” (33), she also acknowledges that her father is more complex than the hunter/prey

Daily resistance in The Dew Breaker  253 narrative he presents. Whereas her mother fails to offer her “something tender and affectionate” (242), her father declares that he is still her father and “would never do these things now” (24), a reassurance she needs to begin processing his confession. Ultimately, the text suggests that father and daughter become closer as a result of his testimony: “With each step forward, he rubs the scar on the side of his face, and out of a strange reflex [Ka] scratch[es] [her] face in the same spot” (32). When we leave the two, Ka feels as if she knows her father better, but her mother is still a mystery. Bellamy (2012: 189) suggests that while the dew breaker’s confession leaves Ka affirmed, Anne’s censorship leaves Ka feeling betrayed. As such, we can assume that Aline, and others, would benefit from hearing Beatrice’s unmuted experiences. Aline, taking on a role as immigrant artist at the close of “The Bridal Seamstress”, wants to write the stories of people like Beatrice. She understands the power of testimony and the responsibility of the artist in recording history. In accepting this responsibility, she considers returning home to “let her parents learn who she was” (138) and visiting her girlfriend in Florida to avoid more lonely nights. She, like Danticat, senses that stories empower, that she can use them to develop a better sense of herself and reconnect to her community of family and friends. And so she sits down, with Beatrice sewing on her porch, and waits. Beatrice’s self-censorship does not allow Aline to interpret and use her story in a meaningful way. Rather than integrating her voice into the communal story, Beatrice continues to mask her wounds, leaving it to Aline to (re)imagine the extent of her trauma. Just as Ka struggled to create a sculpture of the father she did not know, Aline will fail to record Beatrice’s experience unless Beatrice takes advantage of this second opportunity to relay a full story. Hence, Aline’s undertaking echoes the objective of the novel and its writer-activist author. Female creativity and storytelling exist as resistance both within the novel and as an aim of the novel. Danticat correctly suggests that the postcolonial self is fragmented, irreducibly tainted by the histories of imperialist conquest. She encourages the voicing of trauma, the passing down of memory throughout the novel, though she does not award it the lofty status as procurer of wholeness and reconciliation it has been given in earlier women’s novels. This same pattern resonates in Danticat’s authorial endeavours: her storytelling gives voice without offering restoration. This reading engages with the text as a cultural practice to reveal the connections between Danticat’s fiction and its cultural grounding. Aline, at the close of “The Bridal Seamstress”, consents to the same project as Danticat herself – unsilencing. The price of voicing experience is high: to confront, to relive, to remember, to pass down, all without the promise of resolution. And so it goes for the marginalised, exiled, black, third-world woman who attempts to express herself across nations and cultures that diminish her very existence: “to create dangerously is also to create fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us, then bravely moving

254  Mercedez L. Thompson forward even when it feels as though we are chasing or being chased by ghosts” (Danticat 2010: 148). Danticat’s activism suggests that she sees a direct connection between her writing and social justice. Toni Morrison (2009: 1) famously said that “writers – journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights – can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace; and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to”. Like Toni Morrison, Danticat places a responsibility on the artist to subvert social oppression and remove the blindfold from the public consciousness. In Create Dangerously, Danticat (2010) explores what it means to be an immigrant artist. She finds hope in the immortality of artists, those who wrote the words that, regardless of how hard he tried, Papa Doc Duvalier could not erase. For her, the only thing unbearable is silence. Although many critics of Danticat question how she targets a white, English-speaking audience from her own position of relative renown in the United States, Danticat answers this accusation by stating: “[t]he immigrant artist shares with all other artists the desire to interpret and possibly remake his or her own world” (Danticat 2010: 18). In telling the stories of the silenced, Danticat offers her people interpretation, healing, and validation. In directing them towards a western audience, she demands the world’s attention and links her personal writing to social justice. She keeps people and their memories alive. She bears witness, forcing others to do the same. Most of all, she refuses to keep quiet. Indicative of this refusal, Danticat wrote and narrated Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy, a 2009 film. In the film, Danticat braids together the stories of five Haitian women who live and work under the gendered violence of neoliberal globalisation. One struggles to earn in a day’s work what it costs to send her child to school. Another describes how economic instability has fuelled violence against women. Women unify in grassroots campaigns against gendered violence and in support of unions. The film interviews activists, scholars, government officials and factory owners to portray the complexity of gender, class and industrial exploitation in Haiti. Danticat’s storytelling voice couples with repetitive images of hair braiding and the call-and-response krik krak, the language a Haitian griot uses to gain an audience’s attention and elicit its collaboration in storytelling. The imagery of hair braiding intimately connects generations of women and emphasises female agency in the passing down of stories and experience. In her collection of short stories entitled Krik? Krak!, Danticat writes: You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother. Your mother who looked like your grandmother and her grandmother before her. […] When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring

Daily resistance in The Dew Breaker  255 them unity. […] In our world, if you write, you are a politician, and we know what happens to politicians. Danticat (1995: 219–221) Here, Danticat testifies to the life-giving nature of stories and the personal aspect of the political for those who have never had the privilege of art for art’s sake. When the very personal and particular becomes emblematic of a wider and far-reaching social injustice, the power of literature becomes clear. Though there will always be those who insist on the aesthetic value of art as its sole objective, for women, for minorities, for immigrants, and especially immigrant women of colour, the role of art has always been political. As Danticat suggests, artists of the oppressed have always had the further responsibility of advancing the interests of the people. Danticat cannot afford to tell stories for the love of telling stories, especially when there are so many Haitians whose personal histories go unheard. And so, we see in her fiction her own resistance, her own sense of enduring, and her commitment to changing the future through storytelling. Danticat brings together the stories of those who were not able to voice their own experiences and bears witness to the pain, loss, negation and persisting fragmentation, all without hope of a reclaimed wholeness, but hopeful in the power of storytelling itself to save lives. In its ability to voice female experience and create female community, Danticat’s storytelling accesses the erotic, momentarily uncurling the “energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all [our] experiences” (Lorde 1984: 57). Danticat, a rebel woman herself, writes the stories of other rebel women, creating a female space to combat erasure and cope with transnational and transgenerational traumas. The Dew Breaker is a novel about enduring trauma, suggesting that there is no straightforward path to healing and wholeness: “Danticat concludes her novel in much the same way that she begins it: with fragmentation and disjuncture, reflective of the complexity of trauma and its effects” (Pressley-Sanon 2016: 23). Like Anne at the very close of the text, the black, postcolonial woman must continue to “hang up and try again” (241).

Notes 1 I differentiate The Dew Breaker from other examples of oral literature by its separate chapters that speak to and inform one another. The text itself is engaged in call and response. 2 See Danticat’s collection of essays Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010) and the films The Agronomist (Demme 2004) in which she was producer, Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy (Bergan and Schuller 2009) in which she was writer and director, and Girl Rising (Robbins 2013) in which she was writer. 3 See Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1997) for an examination of Creole identity as constructed in relation and not in isolation.

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References Adisa, Opal Palmer. 2009. Up Close and Personal: Edwidge Danticat on Haitian Identity and the Writer’s Life. African American Review 43(2–3): 345–355. Bellamy, Maria Rice. 2012. More than Hunter or Prey: Duality and Traumatic Memory in Edwidge Danticat’s ‘The Dew Breaker’. Melus 37(1): 177–197. Bergan, Renée and Mark Schuller. 2009. Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy. Haiti: Tèt Ansanm Productions. Danticat, Edwidge. 1994. Breath, Eyes, Memory: A Novel. New York: Soho. ——— 1995. Krik? Krak! New York: Soho. ——— 2004. The Dew Breaker. New York: Knopf. ——— 2010. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. New York: Vintage. Demme, Jonathan. 2004. The Agronomist. USA: HBO/Cinemax Documentary. Fuchs, Rebecca. 2014. Caribbeanness as a Global Phenomenon: Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, and Cristina Garcia. Trier: Bilingual Press. Glissant, Edouard. 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ——— 1997. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jean-Charles, Regine Michelle. 2010. Danticat and the African American Women’s Literary Tradition. In Munro, Martin (ed.) Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 52–72. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. New York: Crossing Press. Mardorossian, Carine. 2010. Danticat and Caribbean Women Writers. In Munro, Martin (ed.) Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 39–51. ——— 2005. Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Morrison, Toni (ed.). 2009. Burn This Book. New York: Harper Collins. Pressley-Sanon, Toni. 2016. Wounds Seen and Unseen: The Workings of Trauma in Raoul Peck’s ‘Haitian Corner’ and Edwidge Danticat’s ‘The Dew Breaker.’ Journal of Haitian Studies 22(1): 19–45. Raab, Josef. 2018. Liberation and Lingering Trauma: U.S. Present and Haitian Past in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker. In Mehring, Frank, Hans Bak and Mathilde Roza (eds) Politics and Cultures of Liberation: Media, Memory and Projections of Democracy. Leiden: Brill, 265–284. Robbins, Richard. 2013. Girl Rising. USA: The Documentary Group.

Index

Accomando, Beth 36 Achebe Chinua 178, 180–181, 183, 186, 191 Adeoye, Rantimi 45 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 4, 60, 77, 147, 176, 184 Algerian civil war 4, 129–130, 134 Algerian Family Code 133 Allocine 61 Anderson, Kristin 47–49, 54 Angelides, Steven 99–100 apartheid 27–34, 36–37, 39, 94, 99, 104, 150, 152, 229, 235 Arondekar, Anjali 94 Assah, Augustine 17 Austin, Guy 132, 134 Bachir-Chouikh Yamina 5, 129, 131, 135–138 Barlet, Olivier 139 Barnard, Rita 29, 32, 36, 41 Belot, Sophie 129–130, 135 Berger, Roger 27 Biafra 5, 175, 177–178, 180–183, 185, 188, 191 Biafra Organisation of Freedom Fighters (BOFF) 182 Biafran Students Union 186 Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) 29 Boehmer, Elleke 110 Boko, Haram 59, 64–65, 198 Bolaki, Stella 27, 36 Byrne, Deirdre 49, 52 Calo, Muriel 119 Cameron, Deborah 43, 54, 181 Carrier, Michel 16 Cermele, Jill 47–49, 54 Chapkis, Wendy 99 Chaudhuri, Shohini. 205, 207 Cheryl, Stobie 100

Chinouya, Martha 163 Christianity 93–97, 100, 102, 116–118, 123, 211 colonialism 4, 151, 179, 244 Conrad, Joseph 63–64 Danticat, Edwidge 251–254 De Beauvoir, Simone 184 De Souza, Ben 116–117 Democratic Republic of the Congo 63 Diaspora 1, 6, 12, 60, 70, 241, 234, 245 Discacciati, Leyla 135 Djadjam, Moustéfa 57, 59 Dolan, Chris 119 domestic violence 2, 4, 11–13, 15, 20, 23, 102, 113, 119, 163–169, 171, 173, 201, 224 Eaglestone, Robert 109 Emecheta, Buchi 181, 185–188 Emenyonu, Ernest 185 Eritrea 58 ethnicity 3, 44, 114, 165–166, 179–180, 187–188, 200, 204, 223, 232, 240 Europe 57–58, 61–62, 66, 68, 138 Eze, Chielezona 38–39 female genital mutilation 114, 166, 200 female subjugation 110 femininity 4, 84, 98–100, 103, 107, 110, 119, 147, 149, 154, 157, 158, 211–212, 217, 224 feminism 3, 11–12, 17, 210 Francis, Donette A. 212 Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) 130–132, 134–135, 139–142, 144 Fugard, Athol 30–32, 34–38 Gauch, Suzanne 14, 16 gender-based violence 119, 160, 163, 211–212, 221, 224

258 Index gendered violence 1–6, 31, 44, 46, 48, 51–52, 55, 58–59, 61, 101, 148, 150, 157, 164–166, 173, 211, 213, 223–226, 252 genocide 4–7, 28, 44, 114, 198 Geschiere, Peter 61, 63 Gikandi, Simon 36 globalization 14, 16, 57, 60–65, 67, 72, 254 Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson 27–28, 30, 32 Gqola, Pumla Dineo 78, 84–87 Groupe Islamique Armé 140 Gunne, Sorcha 3 Hadj-Moussa, Ratiba 131 Hamilton, Carrie 44 Herman, Judith 112 heteronormative 93, 95, 107 Hirsch, Marianne 134–135, 143 homophobia 105, 116, 120 Honwana, Alcinda 109 Hood, Gavin 2, 26 Horvitz, Deborh 112 Hugo, Victor 163 human rights 1–7, 26–28, 32, 39, 43, 45, 55, 93–96, 104, 106–107, 148, 151, 159, 165–169, 197–200, 211, 223, 225, 240 Hungary 66 hyper-masculinity 159 Igbo 5, 46, 50, 70, 175–181, 183, 190 Igbo women 5, 176, 181–183, 187, 191–192 Igbo Women’s War 181 Iraq 59 Irvine, Janice 99–100 Islam 138, 141 Islamic fundamentalism 134–135 Islamic Salvation Front 129, 135 Jackson, Stevi 93–94, 97–98 Kahyana, Danson 111 Kaplan, Jonathan 28, 36 Karp, Gilenstam 51 Khanna, Ranjana 131, 133 Khoisan 230–234 King, Amy 213 Kony, Joseph 111, 114 Kruger, Marie 118 Lamming, George 29 Lamwaka, Beatrice 3, 109, 113 Lazreg, Marnia 134, 142–143

Leith-Ross, Sylvia 181 lesbian 93–94, 100, 102, 105–107, 211, 229, 242 lesbianism 105 Lobato, Ramon 59 Lord’s Resistance Army 111, 113 Maingard, Jacqueline 27 Martin, Karen 93, 97 masculinist language 45 masculinity 2, 38, 51, 88–90, 110, 116–117, 119–120, 149, 154, 157, 159, 188, 211 Matsinhe, David Mario 28 Mbembe, Achille 41, 130–131, 144 McFadden, Patricia 78, 151–152 McKeen, Wendy 104 Middle Passage 61, 219 Mills, Sara 43, 52 Morgan, Robin 210 Mouflard, Claire 15 Moynagh, Maureen 169, 171–172 Murray, Jessica 44, 48, 50, 86, 236 Mutua, Makau 95 Nabutanyi, Edgar 116–117 nationalism 66, 144, 148, 197 Ndebele, Njabulo 28 neo-colonialism 14, 16 New York 71, 245, 247, 250 Nigeria-Biafra War 5, 175–176, 179–181 Nixon, Rob 28 Njoku, Rose Adaure 176, 180–181, 185 Norberg, Cathrine 99–100 Norridge, Zoe 90, 165 Ong, Aihwa 94–95 Oosterom, Marjoke 118 Oriel, Jennifer 89 Osinubi, Taiwo Adetunji 117–118, 123 pan-Africanism 17 patriarchy 3, 6, 11, 13, 59, 62–63, 69, 79, 141, 217, 225–226, 234, 236, 238–239, 244, 246, 248 Pentecostalism 61 racism 4, 218 rape 3, 5, 14, 28, 32–33, 35, 37–39, 50, 63, 78, 82–86, 88, 90, 98, 101, 112– 113, 119, 137, 147, 161, 166, 170, 176, 182, 186–187, 197, 201, 207, 217–218, 226–227, 229, 231–232, 250–251 Ratele, Kopano 2, 89, 94 Rich, Adrienne 96

Index  259 Sanderson, Christiane 44 Schwalbe, Michael 53 Sen, Purna 46 Sengupta, Anasuya 119 sexism 52, 55, 113, 210, 218 sexual politics 43, 50 sexual violence 3, 5, 12–13, 34–35, 38, 41, 77–78, 82, 85, 88, 150, 155, 175, 186–187, 211, 213, 224–225, 228, 251 Sharpe, Mani 133 Silberschmidt, Margrethe 89 sisterhood 6, 212–214, 190, 217–218, 220–221 Slaughter, Joseph. 1, 27, 37 slavery 5, 12, 61, 66 Sone, Enongene Mirabeau 43, 52 Stobie, Cheryl 100 Stora, Benjamin 132 Stratford, Candice Taylor 111, 113, 121–122 Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) 60 Syria 58

Tamale, Sylvia 95, 106, 109, 151 Tesson, Charles 132, 136, 138 Thompson, Zoë Brigley 3 trauma 5–6, 15, 22, 37, 88, 109, 111–113, 116, 119–124, 130, 134, 143, 187, 197–198, 201–204, 207, 211 Tyner, James 26 Uganda People’s Defence Force 111 Ugandan 3, 94–95, 109–114, 116, 119–123 Ugandan National Resistance Army (NRA) 164 Ugandan Women’s Writers’ Association 113 Uwakweh, Pauline. 109 white liberalism 27, 39 Wright, Richard 184 Xaba, Makhosazana 93, 97 Yemen 58 Yoruba 46–47, 51, 178–179