Men in African Film and Fiction 1847015212, 9781847015211

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Men in African Film & Fiction

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Men in African Film & Fiction Edited by Lahoucine Ouzgane Associate Professor of English & Film Studies University of Alberta, Canada

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James Currey www.jamescurrey.com is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620 USA www.boydellandbrewer.com © Contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by electronic, or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. 1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accurancy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Men in African film & fiction. 1. Men in motion pictures. 2. Masculinity in motion pictures. 3. African fiction—History and criticism. 4. Motion pictures—Africa—History. I. Ouzgane, Lahoucine. 791.4’36521’096-dc22 ISBN 978-1-84701-521-1 ( James Currey cloth) Paper used by Boydell & Brewer are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests.

Typeset in 9/11pt Melior by Long House Publishing Services, Cumbria Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

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LAHOUCINE OUZGANE

Part I M A N & N AT I O N I N A F R I C A

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1 The Anxious Phallus

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The Iconography of Impotence in Quartier Mozart & Clando J A N E B RY C E

2 The Homoerotics of Nationalism

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White Male-on-Male Rape & the ‘Coloured’ Subject in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples LINDSEY MICHAEL BANCO

3 ‘Wild Men’ & Emergent Masculinities in Post-colonial Kenyan Popular Fiction TOM ODHIAMBO

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4 The Anonymity of Manhood

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Unmasking Shadow Selves in Assia Djebar’s Ombre sultane N A J AT R A H M A N

5 The Rape Continuum

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Masculinities in the Works of Nawal El Saadawi & Tahar Ben Jelloun LAHOUCINE OUZGANE

Part II A LT E R N AT I V E M A S C U L I N I T I E S

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6 ‘Coming Unstuck ’

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Masculine Identities in Post-Independence Zimbabwean Fiction PAT R I C I A A L D E N

7 Imported Alternatives

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Changing Shona Masculinities in Flame & Yellow Card K AT R I N A D A LY T H O M P S O N

8 Ngugı wa Thiong’o & the Crisis of Kenyan Masculinity ~ ~

ANDREW HAMMOND

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9 Father Africa

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Counter-Narratives of Masculinity in Sembene’s Faat Kiné & Moolaadé TA R S H I A L . S TA N L E Y

10 The Eternal Other

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The Authority of Deficit Masculinity in Asian-African Literature JUSTUS K. SIBOE MAKOKHA

11 Recent Trends in the Treatment of Homosexualities in Literature & Film by African Artists

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MARC EPPRECHT

12 Re-membering the Last King of Dahomey 164 African Masculinities & Diasporic Desires WENDY KNEPPER Index

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Notes on Contributors

Patricia Alden is Professor of English and African Studies at St. Lawrence University. She wrote Social Mobility and the English Bildungsroman, coauthored a book with Louis Tremaine, Nuruddin Farah, and has published several essays on African and particularly on Zimbabwean writers. She coedited African Studies and the Undergraduate Curriculum. Lindsey Michael Banco has a Ph.D. in English from Queen’s University, Kingston, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan. In addition to an interest in postcolonial studies and gender studies, he has published articles on Paul Auster and postmodernism, on Flannery O’Connor and the American Gothic, and on Hunter S. Thompson and counterculturalism. In 2009 he published Travel and Drugs in Twentieth-Century Literature (Routledge). Jane Bryce was born and brought up in Tanzania, and lived in Italy, the UK and Nigeria before moving to Barbados in 1992, where she is Professor of African Literature and Cinema at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill. She was founder and Co-director of the Barbados Festival of African and Caribbean Film (2002-07), featuring prominent African and Caribbean filmmakers, and now curates the Africa World Documentary Film Festival at Cave Hill. Marc Epprecht is a Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University. He has published extensively on the history of gender and sexuality in Africa including Hungochani: The history of a dissident sexuality in southern Africa (winner of the 2006 Joel Gregory Prize from the Canadian Association of African Studies) and Heterosexual Africa?: The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS (finalist for the 2009 Mel Herskovits prize from the African Studies Association).

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Contributors Andrew Hammond is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Brighton, UK. In both teaching and research, he has pursued interests in cross-cultural representation, Cold War fiction and postcolonial writing and theory. His books include The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 1945–2003 (ed., Ashgate, 2004), Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict (ed., Routledge, 2006), The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (University of Wales Press, 2007) and British Literature and the Balkans: Themes and Contexts (Rodopi Press, 2010). Wendy Knepper is a Lecturer in English at Brunel University where she teaches literature and theory in the fields of transnational modernism and postcolonial studies. She has published widely in essay collections and journals, including contributions to Small Axe and PMLA. She is currently editing a special issue of Brunel’s EnterText on the work of Andrea Levy and working on a book-length study of contemporary Caribbean literature in a global context. Justus Kizito Siboe Makokha is DAAD doctoral research fellow at the Institut für Englische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin. He holds an M.A. (Literature) and B.Ed. (Hons) degrees from Kenyatta University in Kenya. He teaches courses on African, Caribbean and South Asian literature in the Institute for English Philology, Free University of Berlin. Makokha is the author of Reading M. G. Vassanji: A Contextual Approach to Asian African Fiction (2009). He has also co-edited a new volume of African literary criticism: Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore (2010) with Jennifer Wawrzinek. Tom Odhiambo studied for an MA and PhD in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He worked as a Researcher at the Witwatersrand Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) between 2003 and 2007. He now teaches in the Department of Literature at the University of Nairobi. He has research interests in African popular literature, culture and media. Lahoucine Ouzgane is Associate Professor and Writing Coordinator in the Department of English and Film studies at the University of Alberta, Canada, specializing in North-African and Middle-Eastern literature, postcolonial studies, masculinity studies, and composition and rhetoric. His publications include African Masculinities, co-edited with Robert Morrell (Palgrave, 2005) and Islamic Masculinities (Zed Books, 2006). Najat Rahman is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Montreal, with a specialty in modern Arabic literature and culture. She has a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the University of WisconsinMadison. She is author of Literary Disinheritance: The Writing of Home in the Works of Mahmoud Darwish and Assia Djebar (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008). She is co-editor (with Hala Nassar) of Mahmoud Darwish, Exile’s Poet: Critical Essays (Interlink Books, 2008). In addition to articles on

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Contributors gender and representation in literature and in cinema, she has managed the production of the documentary Ustura (Legend), directed by Nizar Hassan, for Mashad Cinema and TV Productions (Nazareth, 1998). She was Fulbright Scholar to Lebanon and is currently co-chair of the Middle East Caucus, Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Tarshia L. Stanley is an Associate Professor of English at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She teaches courses in African Diaspora, literature, film and media studies and developed the Film and Visual Culture minor in the English Department. In addition to authoring several articles on visual representations of Blackness in Caribbean, African and African American film, she edited the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Hip Hop Culture in 2008. She is currently at work on a manuscript examining the work of Octavia Butler as a model for African Diaspora literature and a book length study of the images presented of young Black girls by mass media called Mothering Our Daughters: Mediating the Messages. Dr Stanley received the A.B. from Duke University and the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Florida. Katrina Daly Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at UCLA. She specializes in African languages and identities with a focus on ethnicity, gender and sexuality in Zimbabwean and Tanzanian discourse.

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Introduction

LAHOUCINE OUZGANE The topic of men and masculinities in Africa is only a few years old (measured in published material) but is part of a much bigger and internationally significant focus on men which has gathered tremendous pace in the last few years. Some of the emerging scholarship on masculinities in Africa includes Robert Morrell’s pioneering work, Changing Men in Southern Africa (2001), an analysis of different forms of masculinity that foregrounds such categories as race and class during the years of political change from apartheid to democracy in South Africa. The next major work in this growing field, Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, edited by Lisa Lindsay and Stephan F. Miescher (2003), turns its historical lens on men and masculinities in subSaharan Africa. Co-edited with Robert Morrell, my volume African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present (2005), located more in men’s studies than in history, takes on a continent-wide focus and brings the story of men and masculinities in Africa to the present by addressing contemporary issues such as AIDS and globalization. In Heterosexual Africa?: The history of an idea from the age of exploration to the age of AIDS (2008), Marc Epprecht explores – and exposes – the various processes in academia and in public policy circles that have helped to construct a singular heterosexual identity for the entire continent. This rich and growing theoretical and analytical scholarship on men and masculinities in Africa fills a gap in the international literature on gender, especially because gender has often come to mean women, leaving men as the unmarked and unexamined category. Men in African Film and Fiction, an analysis of the depictions in literature and film of masculinities in colonialist, independence, and post-independence Africa, explores the ways in which a serious examination of the male characters in these different genres opens some key African texts to an even greater and perhaps more obviously politicized set of meanings than has ever been the case before. Africa is enormous and internally differentiated, geographically wide-ranging, but the masculinities that emerge in the pages of

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Introduction Men in African Film and Fiction are often seen as multiple, though historically contextualized and locally situated, and whose underlying presence is often marked by colonial procedures in Africa. Thus, we get to see the heterogeneity of African men’s experiences, but the book also provides a sense of the collective lot of men in Africa. The originality of the volume also lies in the fact that all of the essays anchor their theoretical discussions in social, historical, or political contexts; in other words, the discussions in the essays go beyond the literary and filmic texts at hand; and the localized particulars depicted in a text are often connected to broader issues germane to masculinity studies, thereby providing a genuine engagement with the fields of cultural and gender studies.

The Essays Man and Nation in Africa, the first section of this volume, acknowledges the fact that any study of African men cannot ignore the reality that patriarchal power is still in place across the continent. Men still, by and large, elect to exercise what Bob Connell calls the ‘patriarchal dividend’, chiefly at the expense of women. In ‘The anxious phallus: the iconography of impotence in Quartier Mozart and Clando,’ two Cameroonian films of the 1990s, Jane Bryce analyses the ways in which the loss of potency (a theme prevalent in a range of other African films) is a metonymic device for the representation of the unstable relationship between manhood and the state, and speaks to the question, not only of gender, but of power relations in the wider sense. These films, according to Bryce, ‘offer a critique, albeit in very different forms, of life under a President – who in this case happens to be Paul Biya but whose profile is replicated across the continent – whose reign implicitly contradicts inherited notions of “good leadership” and coincides with – colludes with, is a symptom of – the effects of millennial capitalism in Cameroon.’ Bryce then goes on to point out that ‘through representations of impotent or “feminised” men, or characters who are simply poor, socially excluded or politically oppositional, the films call into question dominant modes of masculinity and suggest the redundancy of the tyrannical leader as sexually dominant male, aggressive individualist and political predator.’ Thus, while the two films offer a representation of the dangers and shortcomings of dominant modes of power and masculinity in Africa, they also speak to the problems of reconciling powerlessness with manhood in postcolonial Africa. ‘The homoerotics of nationalism: white male-on-male rape and the “Coloured” subject’ in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples,’ Lindsey Banco’s meditation on the sexualized dimensions of South African nationhood, examines the ways in which Behr’s 1995 novel engages with a sexualized version of South African nationalism in order to negotiate the related concepts of homosocial bonding, homoerotic and racial oppression. According to Banco, the novel presents ‘an Afrikaner masculinity premised on homosocial practices, practices that are then cut off from homoeroticism through linking the white victim of a homosexual rape to the so-called coloured race. Behr’s

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Introduction linkage of the young male rape victim to the “inferior” feminized Other reveals the homoerotic terror necessary for this kind of South African “fatherland”; thus, the feminizing effects of the rape help inscribe the subordination of nonwhite subjectivity within consolidated white patriarchy.’ Sexuality, like many other aspects of the lives of colonized subjects, had been under immense surveillance and control by their colonizers. The attainment of freedoms – political, economic, social and cultural – resulted into great anticipation of and anxiety over the future of social and personal relationships in the ‘freed subjects.’ Sexuality and gender therefore became heavily implicated in this historic moment of the end of colonialism and the beginning of self-rule. Tom Odhiambo, in ‘ “Wild men” and emergent masculinities in postcolonial Kenyan popular fiction,’ traces the different processes through which postcolonial Kenyan popular fiction grapples with the social dynamics of the postcolonial times by narrating some of the sexual anxieties and tensions in the Kenyan male urban population in the 1960s and the 1970s. Maleness or being a man, according to Odhiambo, is thus related in an intensely sexualized manner in the stories found in the popular fiction of the time: ‘A kind of masculinity which seems to be derived from a form of “wild maleness” is one of the highlights of this fiction. Men who are “sexually wild” and have insatiable sexual drives, men who are unable to form emotionally stable relationships with women, and men who are seemingly perpetually in search of self-gratification form the majority of the characters in this literature, which is also coincidentally written by men. A kind of parallel between the triumphalist liberation struggle ideals of conquest – since liberation from colonialism has sometimes been depicted in anticolonial writing as some kind of re-conquest – of the (mother) land and the masculine tendencies of postcolonial men, which desires to define itself through the conquest of women, is suggested in the fiction.’ The essay argues that the “wild men” in the postcolonial Kenyan popular fiction suggests a fashioning of new masculinities as one response to a social and cultural environment where personal identities have to be reinvented. ‘Unmasking shadow selves in Assia Djebar’s Ombre sultane,’ by Najat Rahman, looks at the ways in which Djebar’s popular novel, ostensibly the story of two women married to the same man, raises important questions about the nature of masculinity and challenges the fallacy of equating masculinity with subjectivity. Rahman points out how this novel forces its readers to consider masculinity in terms of ‘structures of masculine identity and desire’, and not as masculine subjectivity. Djebar’s novel, Rahman argues, ‘interrogates the extent to which it is possible to have a quest for identity and for emancipation when there is a loss of subjectivity. For the anonymity of the man signals his own death, a true shade. Likewise, Isma has escaped the traditional confinement to have to contend with more internalized structures of seclusions. And Hajila finds herself between two worlds, that of Touma and that of the modern Algeria unable to find a comfortable space for the unprepared self. Clearly the active effacement of women also leads to a loss of self in man, in an increasingly modernized life.’ My essay on two other North African writers considers the processes through which hegemonic masculinities as depicted in the works of Nawal El

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Introduction Saadawi and Tahar Ben Jelloun reduce the notions of masculinity or roujoula to virility and to endless rivalries between men that finally reveal masculinities in these texts and their social contexts as perpetually fragmented, insecure, anxious and never stable. But the story of men and masculinities cannot be reduced to one of the power of men. The processes by which men enact their masculinities are complex and studies in Part II Alternative Masculinities, identify spaces for reinterpreting masculinity: masculine behaviours are not natural or unchanging; healthy (non-violent and non-oppressive) models are already emerging across the continent. Patricia Alden’s ‘ “Coming unstuck”: masculine identities in post-independence Zimbabwean fiction’ explores the depictions of intimate and personal feelings in three short story collections published in the 1990s by very well known Zimbabwean writers dealing with a shared local crisis as the gender order is being reconstructed. In the fiction of Charles Mungoshi, Shimmer Chinodya and Stanley Nyamfukudza, all roughly of the same generation, that came of age during the liberation struggle and came into middle age in the 1990s, Alden finds ‘certain preoccupations about the situation of men in contemporary Zimbabwe, preoccupations relating to economic and psychological vulnerabilities, aggressive feelings directed against women perceived as threatening, fear of and sometimes awe for women who seem to have more power than they do.’ Of all the stories in these collections, Alden argues, ‘Can We Talk?’ offers ‘the rawest psychological portrait of a male character struggling to define himself in a world far distant from the rural idyll of his past with its secure, albeit restrictive definitions of roles offered by parents, teachers, the bible. He directs verbal and imagined violence against an economically independent new woman and against himself. Alternative gender roles trouble his imagination; the role of adulterer is shameful, and in any case every sexual relationship is haunted by the specter of AIDS, ‘that shadowy third one who now walks always beside us’ (‘If God was a woman’, p. 125). At the end, facing ‘the fresh, lipless hole gaping for the body,’ he is only clear that he must keep on talking: ‘Talking is the basis of self-understanding. It’s the basis of understanding others’ (102).’ Writing about masculinities in Zimbabwean films, Katrina Daly Thompson concurs that filmmakers in Zimbabwe are also beginning to explore the possibilities for alternative, progressive, conceptions of masculinity through male characters who do not dominate women. In ‘Imported alternatives: changing Shona masculinities in Flame and Yellow Card,’ Thompson provides a close analysis of Ingrid Sinclair’s Flame and John Riber’s Yellow Card that challenges common notions of Shona culture as a strongly patriarchal society that posits women as its second-class citizens. ~ ~ Andrew Hammond, in ‘Ngu gı wa Thiong’o and the crisis of Kenyan mascu~ ~ linity,’ examines the strategies Ngu gı uses in his early novels to meditate not only on the horrors of British imperialism and the importance of collective resistance, but also on the effects of that resistance on gendered relations and hierarchies. The River Between (1965), Weep Not, Child (1964) and A Grain of Wheat (1967), a cycle of novels chronicling Kenyan history from the 1920s to

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Introduction independence in 1963, on the one hand critically investigates the links between nativist politics and hegemonic masculinities which, with their competition and aggression, repeat the iniquities of British colonials; and on the other hand, the early work which evinces a range of powerful female figures that frequently challenge male dominance and masculinist discourse. The underlying message of Ngu~ gı~’s complex characterisation of male and female, Hammond argues, is that there is no single, logical, and unquestionable idea of what is masculine, a point that foreshadows and dramatises the theoretical work on masculinity that emerged in academic scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s. The next essay turns its attention to two films, Faat Kiné and Moolaadé by Ousmane Sembene, the father of African cinema, also well known for the creation of powerful female characters in his films. Tarshia L. Stanley argues that although Faat Kiné is ostensibly about the titular character’s economic strength and power, as a female gas station manager raising her out-of-wedlock children, the film in fact provides a derisive critique of the men in Kiné’s life and by extension of masculinity in post-independence Senegal. Except for Mr Jean, the men in the film are trapped in the past, crippled by patriarchal ideologies of manhood – tribal, historical, and post-colonial – and are complicit in their own failure and the failure of the society as a whole, making the plight of the men in the film the plight of the nation itself. Asian-Africans are descendants of immigrant South Asian communities that settled in East Africa before, during and even after the twentieth-century European colonial era in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Although the presence of writing by people of South Asian descent is significantly recorded in East African history and dates beyond the 1900s, it has, until recently, been largely overlooked by East African literary scholars and commentators just as the community itself. Coming from a diasporic community that was never really part of the colonisers or the colonized, writing under the sway of postcolonial imperatives is a complicated task for Asian-African writers particularly when the issues of ‘Africanness’ in terms of race, cultural identity, masculinity, and nationalism are taken into consideration. According to Justus K. Siboe Makokha, in ‘The eternal other: authority of deficit masculinity in Asian-African literature,’ as one reads M. G. Vassanji’s fiction, Jagjit Singh’s poetry or even the plays of Kuldip Sondhi, one senses a strong crisis of an emasculated ‘deficit Africanness’, whereby the Asian-African man is recurrently revealed as being subordinate to the dominant masculine and patriarchal systems of indigenous African communities. While the essay provides a critique of the interstitial location of Asian-African masculinity – between Asian-African femininity and Black masculinity – its uniqueness lies in Makokha’s decision to base his reflections on a thesis presented by Shiva Naipaul in his critical tract, North of South (1978) – one of the most scathing attacks on the illusory nature of African nationalism and postcolonialism. Naipaul states that the Asian African, a being caught in-between the power struggles of the Whites and Blacks in colonial and post-colonial East Africa, will remain the ‘Eternal Other’, always the odd one out, the perpetual scapegoat in the masculinist power politics of post-independence Africa.

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Introduction In ‘Recent trends in the treatment of homosexualities in literature and film by African artists’ Marc Epprecht examines the explosion of writing about non-normative sexualities and gender role non-conformity in Africa, with gay characters beginning to appear in film and theatre by African directors who profoundly challenge longstanding clichés about African sexuality. Specifically, Epprecht traces ‘that trajectory through key works in literature and film since the 1990s. The goal is to ask, how do these works contribute to contemporary debates about sexual rights and sexual health on the continent, bearing in mind the very significant frustrations that continue to be encountered in struggles against gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS in much of Africa?’ He finds that depictions of same-sex sexuality in African fiction and film have both increased in frequency and changed in character since the mid1980s: ‘The change in tenor reflects the profound shifts that have occurred in Africa since the 1980s, including the spread of HIV/AIDS with all its attendant implications for hegemonic gender and sexual cultures, the rise of political homophobia and a gay rights movement in opposition, new historical and ethnographic research, and Africans’ increased exposure to globalized culture industries.’ African artists, Epprecht notes, ‘do not uniformly share the view that homosexuality and bisexuality are non-existent, insignificant, or always stigmatized in Africa south of the Sahara. Nor did they agree that homosexuality is an unalloyed threat either to the African family or to African dignity.’ Epprecht concludes that for a small but a growing number of artists, ‘diverse homosexual or bisexual characters facilitate a powerful critique both of contemporary African society and of Western presumptions about (and prescriptions for) Africa.’ Comparing Maryse Conde’s novel Les derniers rois mages (1992) to the film L’exil du dernier roi de Dahomey (1994), scripted by Patrick Chamoiseau and directed by Guy Deslauriers, Wendy Knepper’s essay ‘Re-membering the last king of Dahomey’ examines how the re-presentation of the last king of Dahomey functions as a complex art of re-membering, a way of performing black masculinities in a postcolonial and diasporic context. From a postcolonial perspective, the king is represented as someone whose erotic experiences are negotiated through exile and displacement as he confronts the shifting constructs of black masculine potency in face of colonial imperatives. This displaced subject is imaged and imagined as prefiguring, re-presenting and engendering the shifting multiplicity of black masculinities in contemporary Africa and its diaspora. Both the film and novel, Knepper argues, use the various figurations of the king to examine the imagined African diasporic community. Condé’s king seeks reincarnation in postcolonial Africa and Chamoiseau’s king becomes the voice for a new kind of postcolonial warrior. In so doing, both artists reproduce the image of the king as the subject of their own desires for a new African diasporic subject, a forefather of postcolonial fantasies about identity and black masculinities in face of globalization. Collectively, the essays in Men in African Film and Fiction provide space for re-thinking current theory on gender and masculinity: 1) how only some of the most popular theories in masculinity studies in the West hold true in African contexts; 2) how Western masculinities react with indigenous masculinities on the continent; 3) how masculinity and

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Introduction femininity in Africa seem to reside more on a continuum of cultural practices than on absolutely opposite planes; and 4) how generation often functions as a more potent metaphor than gender. In addition to offering new insights into the ways in which African men perform, negotiate and experience masculinity, the book is one of the first works to examine masculinities in literature and film from the entire continent. I hope the volume will stimulate further discussion and research because so much of African history and African literary and cultural productions has been read and analysed with African men as an unmarked category.

Bibliography Connell, R. W. Masculinities. University of California Press, 1995. Epprecht, Marc. Heterosexual Africa?: The history of an idea from the age of exploration to the age of AIDS. Ohio University Press, 2008. Lindsay, Lisa, and Stephan F. Miescher. (eds). Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa. Oxford: Heinemann, 2003. Morrell, Robert. Changing Men in Southern Africa. London: Zed Books, 2001. Mugambi, Helen Nabasuta, and Tuzyline Jita Allan. (eds). Masculinities in African Literary and Cultural Texts. Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd, 2010. Ouzgane, Lahoucine, and Robert Morrell. (eds). African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present. New York: Palgrave, 2005.

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I Man & Nation in Africa

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1 The Anxious Phallus The Iconography of Impotence in Quartier Mozart & Clando J A N E B RY C E

‘Witch stole man’s penis.’ ‘Benin alert over “penis theft” panic.’ ‘Seven killed in Ghana over “penis-snatching” episodes.’ Headlines such as these semaphore a recurring fear and an enduring phenomenon in West Africa, and no doubt other parts of the continent – that of the magical disappearance of the male organ as a result of contact with someone, generally a stranger, through the use of the occult.1 As the articles variously report: ‘Purported victims often blame penis shrinkage on handshakes with sorcerers’ (CNN); ‘It is widely believed in Nigeria that witches have the power to steal men’s sexual organs by an incantation or a handshake’ (Ananova). Often the accusation of penis-stealing is taken up by a crowd and escalates into mass hysteria, culminating in violence and death. The BBC attributes this extreme reaction to ‘superstition and illiteracy’, while CNN refers to a medical doctor who has ‘linked the phenomenon to fear’. It is evident from the tone of the reporting and the fact that one website, Ananova, transplanted the story from its original source to a section called ‘Quirkies’, featuring ‘eccentrics’, ‘quirky gaffes’, ‘strange crime’ and ‘sex life’, that such stories feed into western scepticism about African occult practices and reinforce stereotypes of primitivism, credulity and backwardness. Recent insights from cultural anthropology (the Comaroffs; Geschiere; van Binsbergen) offer another way of reading narratives of penis loss and their relationship to witchcraft, suggesting that, far from re-establishing the primitive, they are living symptoms of modernity itself, and not only in Africa. Millennial capitalism (or post Cold War neo-liberalism), according to the Comaroffs, is universally characterised by what they call ‘occult economies and new religious movements’ which come about precisely in response to the anomie of powerlessness, the impossibility for most people of ever participating in the fabulous riches of the global marketplace, and the inability of the state to maintain or protect civil society. So-called developed societies – those not marked, presumably, by superstition and ignorance – are equally subject to

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The Anxious Phallus ‘the allure of wealth from nothing’ (Comaroffs, 2000, 313), whether conjured through Pentecostal intercession, astrological calculation, or the rolling of dice. Furthermore, sociologist Robert Bartholomew points to several instances of western credulity resulting in mass panic, including the celebrated example of the 1938 USA broadcast of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds. If, then, neither postmodern moral confusion, political anomie nor occult practice is specific to Africa, why concern ourselves with African penis-loss stories? The degree to which they are inflected with a peculiarly African mode of perception or sense of value is arguable: examples from transcultural psychiatric studies show that a syndrome known as genital retraction or ‘koro’ occurs from China to the Middle East, Europe and America, invoking the fundamental Freudian concept of male fear of castration. What may, however, be particular to West Africa is the linking of this phenomenon to witchcraft, the belief in human agency as the means of penis disappearance, and its recurrence as a filmic trope. What this trope might mean, what it may tell us about African constructions of masculinity at the start of the twenty-first century, and how this is figured in the iconography of certain films by African film-makers, is the subject of this paper. I hope to show that the loss of potency/the penis in a range of African films is a metonymic device for the representation of the unstable relationship between manhood and the state in the countries concerned, and speaks to the question, not only of gender, but of power relations in the wider sense. The relationship between visible attributes of masculinity and their imagined or actual loss is heightened by the intervention of the occult. The bewitching of subjects and the need for propitiation and restoration function as a metaphor for ‘new inequalities’ brought about by social change, and the need for new strategies of survival and self-assertion. (Geschiere, 1997). What we learn most importantly from the new cultural anthropology is the normality of occult practices, their indivisibility from capitalism and politics in our era. To speak of ‘magic’ and ‘witchcraft’, therefore, is not so much to invoke the exotic, the primitive or the traditional, as to acknowledge the significance of such practices for all of us who participate in making meaning through film. A quick survey of African films since the 1970s produces many examples of impotence, and occasional images of actual penis loss. Who can forget the climactic moment in Sembene’s Ceddo (1976) when the princess Dior aims a gun at the material area of the Imam’s anatomy and shoots, implying rejection not only of a colonizing religion but of the imposition of a patriarchal power structure? Or the absurdity of El Hadji’s increasingly desperate attempts to recover his potency after his marriage to his third wife in the same director’s Xala (1974), the loss of which is so explicitly linked to political, economic and personal corruption? Or again, in Ngangura’s La Vie est Belle (1987), the sight of the Big Man, Nvaunda, who, acting on the diviner’s instructions, hops on one leg in a circle chanting ‘push, push piston’, to ensure his potency with the beautiful Kabibi, his young second wife. Other films, though less specific in relation to sexual potency/impotence and the penis as the source of power, nonetheless offer images of masculinity under interrogation, as it were. Mambety’s Touki Bouki (1973) features an androgynous couple and a gay man portrayed as the grossest sort of sensualist and buffoon. The purloining of his

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The Iconography of Impotence in Quartier Mozart & Clando car by the young couple so as to stage a parodic enactment of a presidential progress through the streets of the city mocks the ceremonial of extravaganza and ritual excess which, according to Eric Worby (cited by the Comaroffs), characterises the ruling class in those parts of Africa where ‘executive authority has become dependent on the performance of quotidian ceremonial, extravagant in its dramaturgy and improvisational content alike, to ensure the collusion of citizen-subjects.’ (Comaroffs, 328) Further, the response of these subjects, ‘a promiscuous hybrid of accommodation and refusal, power and parody, embodiment and detachment’ (328), precisely describes the relation of Mambety’s protagonists to their society, while the film as a whole suggests a failure of both masculinity and leadership. Two further films, set, like Ceddo, in the precolonial past, offer similar readings of the failure of leadership through the trope of masculinity, both with reference to Mali. In Cisse’s Yeelen (1987) the struggle between the komo cult leader, Soma, and his son, Nianankoro, perverts inherited (Bambara) cultural concepts of good leadership and the nature of fatherhood. The series of oppositions around which the film is structured – male/female, magic/ nature, wet/dry, sight/blindness, light/dark – couples Soma with the blind seer Djigui, as well as with the Peul king, as exemplars of ‘good’ leadership and fatherliness. Hence, when Nianankoro ‘cures’ the Peul’s king’s wife of infertility by impregnating her under the overpowering influence of his own magic, the king forgives him and allows him to leave with his wife. Here, impotence is transformed by the handing on of power, and a voluntary relinquishing of ownership to the next generation. Our prior knowledge that Cisse meant Yeelen to be a covert commentary on the dictatorship of Malian president, Moussa Traore, permits a reading of its tropes of masculinity in the light of the heroic qualities embedded in the epic/mythic structure of the film. The sexual potency of Nianankoro, therefore, is intrinsic to his purity of purpose as epic hero, and as such beyond his control. It is also necessary, even preordained, in order to produce the heir who will replace him after his death in the struggle with his father, pointing to the need for an end to a corrupt gerontocracy. Guimba, the Tyrant, which also addresses the abuse of power in Mali and the coup which rid the country of Traore in 1991, rather than impotence, dramatises uncontrolled male sexuality – the penis rampant – as a metonym of tyranny. Guimba and his son, Jangine, both prey on the women of the community, demanding sexual services from other men’s wives. There is even a hint of incest when Guimba takes over from his son the project of marrying the beautiful and aristocratic Kani, while Jangine insists he must have her mother, Meya. Meya’s husband enlists the help of a powerful magician, the hunter Siriman, to defeat Guimba through his own concupiscence. In this film, as in Xala, La Vie est Belle and Yeelen, magic, the occult, ‘witchcraft’ – whatever we choose to call it – is closely associated with sexual power and political potency. The invocation of traditional tropes of leadership, moreover, is not intended to posit a return to the past so much as a critique of the present in terms of a familiar narrative pattern, one instantly accessible to African audiences even from beyond Mali. With Xala, Touki Bouki and La Vie est Belle we move into a different

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The Anxious Phallus terrain from the so-called ‘calabash’ movies set in a predominantly rural precolonial past. These films with their city settings present us with an earlier vision of what, by the end of the century, had become the main focus of African filmic narrative – urbanization as the context for the drama of social interaction and personal survival. The cities represented here, Dakar and Kinshasa, are already templates of the effects of millennial capitalism in Africa, ‘the allegorical transfiguration of the nation-state, the assertive stridency of racinated adolescence, the crisis of masculinity, the apotheosis of consumption, the fetishism of civil society, the enchantments of everyday life.’ (Comaroffs, 334). The effect which interests us, the crisis of masculinity, cannot be disentangled from the other effects and is subject to the same implications. To quote the Comaroffs again: Occult economies are not reducible to the symbolic, the figurative or the allegorical. Magic is, everywhere, the science of the concrete, aimed at making sense of and acting upon the world – especially, but not only, among those who feel themselves disempowered, emasculated, disadvantaged. (318)

All three of the city films cited are concerned with magic as a solution to specific problems, be they impotence, poverty or the desire to escape. Underlying these is a whole nexus of associated conditions which, taken together, constitute the material and ontological universe of African urban life. This universe, overdetermined by millennial capitalism, is characterised by what van Binsbergen calls ‘virtuality’, or the detachment of the signifier from its signified, in a situation of ‘disconnectivity, broken reference, decontextualisation, through which yet formal continuity shimmers through’ (3).2 It’s easy to see how this might impact on masculinity, which retains its outer appearance while being emptied of traditional content – the hierarchical authority conferred in the village setting by age, by ownership of land, cattle, wives, children; or, in earlier versions of the city, by colonial education, employment by a state institution, wealth and political ascendancy. The crisis of masculinity is one symptom of the larger postcolonial ‘crisis’ in Africa – the breakdown of the state, from the mid-1980s onwards, under pressure of global economic imperatives, structural adjustment and internal corruption. In remarkably similar terms van Binsbergen, Mbembe and Roitman in their contribution to the Documenta anthology, Under Siege: Four African Cities (2002), describe this crisis as being, not a transitory and objective problem, but a condition which precipitates a further crisis of self-constitution: ‘…the series of operations in and through which people weave their existence in incoherence, uncertainty, instability and discontinuity…where individuals are taken aback, defigured and without stable referents…’ (Under Siege, 2002, 100) This crisis as both ‘lived experience’ (101) and ‘inscribed in the landscape’ (102) informs, for example, the city identities of La Vie est Belle. The opening sequence, in which Kourou (Papa Wemba) leaves the rural area for the city, breaking his traditional instrument as he does so, establishes the city as the site of lived experience, where a poor villager can remake himself as a rich nightclub patron simply by appropriating his employer’s suit and wallet; and again, a traditional musician can be reborn overnight as a popular culture superstar. The casting of this film in the form of a comic folk-tale and

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The Iconography of Impotence in Quartier Mozart & Clando trickster story appears to discourage us from reading it for ‘reality’, or to treat its representations as arising from urban actuality. It is clear, however, that the mise-en-scene of the city is intrinsic to the meaning of the narrative as a whole, and the city by and in itself is a key signifier. In his essay for Under Siege, Thierry Nlandu characterises Kinshasa as ‘a distorted, dichotomized city’, divided between Ville and Cité, urban and suburban, elite and popular. The Cité includes the district of Matonge, ‘the vibrant heart…where you find cheap hotels, lively bars, Congolese foods, and the musical groups on which the country stakes its reputation’ (Under Siege, 186). Each of these districts featured in La Vie est Belle – and the same pattern of colonial division (see also Frantz Fanon) is seen too in Xala, most dramatically when the beggars invade the residential district where El Hadji lives and thus transgress the boundaries which keep them confined to the margins of society and city. In particular, La Vie est Belle is faithful to the cultural dynamic which Nlandu summarises as, ‘Kinshasa is a big bar’ where, ‘hypnotised by light, music, colourful dress, and women, an individual can spend his daily earnings, even a month’s salary, in a single night’ (189). In this context, the criteria of successful manhood are inevitably reshaped, but money alone is not enough. Nvuandu’s visit to the diviner is an acknowledgement of the need for magic to ensure the proper performance of manhood. Kourou, however, has a stronger magic, one which is ultimately irresistible – the one on which the country stakes its reputation. The closing sequence stages a miraculous recovery by Kabibi, when, unconscious from shock and being treated by a traditional healer/medicine man, she obeys the call of Papa Wemba’s music, and walks like a somnambulist to the club where he is singing her name. In the contest for masculine supremacy and sexual potency, it is music, not wealth or magic, which wins. An enduring feature of African urban life, which forces itself as a signifier upon the city narrative in film, is the power of popular culture for redreaming the state of powerlessness which is the lot of most city dwellers at the millennial moment. As Nlandu puts it: The disco-bars and their musicians portray a society that vindicates the freedom and identity of the individual. They offer the illusion of an erotic world without structure or law…beyond the show of fashion, and his spending and sexual behaviour, the city-dweller’s strongest desire is to exist as a human being both in and outside of the bar. (190-191)

Onookome Okome, in his discussion of Lagos as ‘the anxious city’ of Nigerian home video, further elaborates on this phenomenon as ‘modes of interrogation’ which ‘operate outside the watchful eyes of the State’. For him, Lagos ‘as a catalytic site…positions itself as the local center of new ideas,’ offering ‘cultural forms of expression (which) can give us some profound insights into the debates that matter to ordinary people’ (Okome, 2003, 67). Okome’s work of demonstrating how such debates can be deduced from the Nigerian home video phenomenon invites a deeper engagement than I am able to offer here. I want, however, to pinpoint a fundamental contradiction between video as a popular, domesticated medium, and francophone narrative features with their multiple stylistic references: that of audience. At the same time, popular video and art-house film need not necessarily always be seen as

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The Anxious Phallus binary opposites, but rather as sharing a continuum, in which case what distinguishes them would be the degree of reflexivity they demonstrate – the way, for example, narrative features mobilize elements of popular culture while inviting the audience to reflect on and interpret them within a sophisticated narratalogical frame. While most of my own evidence is taken from examples of francophone ‘art-house’ film, I want, therefore, to signal my appreciation of the space occupied by Nigerian video in relation to the questions I’m raising about masculinity and magic.3 That we are dealing with similar issues and contexts is evident from, for example, the following: In Living in Bondage, Lagos is rendered masculine…The built city, the hard city, is strong and towering. Its repeated visual occurrence between scenes evokes the power of the phallus, linking one scene (part) of the city to another in a menacing manner and defining for the viewer the city’s inscrutability. Like the unconscious Freudian slip, Living in Bondage privileges the built up spaces of Lagos and insinuates the unequal relationship between the sexes in the city, enveloped in the spirit of an inescapable masculinity. (2002, 324-325)

Here, not only the ‘crisis’ but gender, and specifically masculinity, is ‘inscribed on the landscape’, or at least the virtual landscape of film. In a similar way, de Boeck speaks of the effect of American westerns on youthful urban gangs in Kinshasa in the 50s, who styled themselves ‘Billies’ after Buffalo Bill, taking nicknames such as ‘bois dur’ and ‘bois fort’ (hard wood, strong wood) (Under Siege, 262). Okome suggests a reading of the phallic tropes pervading both landscape and popular culture as projections of the unconscious, the return of the repressed, anxiety writ large. In terms of the theme of this essay – penis loss/impotence as metonymic of masculine anxiety about the nature of manhood – one could argue that the over-insistence on phallic imagery conceals a lack, in which substance has been replaced by sign. This invokes van Binsbergen’s ‘virtuality’, the disjunct between sign and referent, and the subsequent need to supply an alternative source of meaning. This is where witchcraft/magic steps in to fill the vacuum: Witchcraft has offered modern Africans an idiom to articulate what otherwise could not be articulated: contradictions between power and meaning, between morality and primitive accumulation, between community and death, between community and the state. (van Binsbergen, 1999, 14)

Here, too, popular cultural forms, as well as film, suggest a further refinement of virtuality. They can be seen as attempting to represent what cannot be represented, either because it breaks a taboo, or because of the failure of signification itself. Representations of masculinity in terms of what is missing, has disappeared, been stolen, is somehow absent, then begin to make sense. ‘Virtual reality’ makes something appear to be there which is not; stories of penis loss/impotence make something which appears to be there go away. What we end up with is reversal, refusal, withdrawal, cancellation, introjection as opposed to ejaculation. In short, there is a crisis of the self, whereby some sleight of hand is needed to suggest a way out. That sleight of hand is often couched in terms of the occult, whether it be the magical properties of

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The Iconography of Impotence in Quartier Mozart & Clando popular music, or the secret sacrifices offered by powerful men in return for wealth and status. I now turn to two Cameroonian films of the 1990s to illustrate this representational sleight of hand or reversal of virtuality: Quartier Mozart (1992), directed by Jean Pierre Bekolo, and Clando (1996), directed by Jean-Marie Teno. Taken together, these films offer a critique, albeit in very different forms, of life under a president – who in this case happens to be Paul Biya but whose profile is replicated across the continent – whose reign implicitly contradicts inherited notions of ‘good leadership’ and coincides with – colludes with, is a symptom of – the effects of millennial capitalism in Cameroon. Through representations of impotent or ‘feminised’ men, or characters who are simply poor, socially excluded or politically oppositional, they call into question dominant modes of masculinity, and suggest the redundancy of the tyrannical leader as sexually dominant male, aggressive individualist and political predator. Furthermore, they explicitly or implicitly invoke the occult as a metaphor for the hidden processes of acquiring power, wealth and influence in a millennial African society. A defining characteristic of witchcraft on which all the commentators agree is its essential ambiguity, and ambiguity indeed is the defining quality of Bekolo’s Quartier Mozart (QM). As Geschiere has it: Witchcraft is certainly related to the accumulation of power, but can also serve to undermine it. Witchcraft is both a resource for the powerful and also a weapon for the weak against new inequalities. (1995, 16)

According to van Binsbergen, this ambiguity originates in the world of the village and ‘is inherent in witchcraft as a boundary condition of the kinship order.’ As such, it arises from: …the continuous movement back and forth between the moral idea of community (through sociability, non-violence and the absence of witchcraft) and the embarrassing reality of individual assertion (through anti-social egoistic behaviour, leadership initiatives, challenges, physical violence – which all implied, and usually were cast in the secret ritualistic and symbolic trappings of witchcraft). (van Binsbergen, 1999, 10)

The new forms taken by the occult in the urban context, therefore, function as a way of trying to make sense of the new social disorder, either by personal access to power, or as a discourse to withstand power and to reappropriate it for the community. Both these forms are dramatised in QM. The film begins by explaining, through the use of on-screen text, that it ‘…uses traditional Cameroonian folk-beliefs to explore the sexual problems of an urban neighbourhood.’ It introduces us to each of the key characters: Queen of the Hood, ‘a proud young girl who doesn’t want to be taken advantage of by men’; the sorceress, Maman Tecla, through whose help she is enabled to enter the body of a young man, known as Mon Type – My Guy; the sorceress in turn takes on the body of Panka, ‘a comic rural character who has his own way of humbling arrogant men’. The others are Chien Méchant/Mad Dog, a local police chief; his daughter, Samedi; the bar-tender, who tells us to

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The Anxious Phallus call him ‘Good For Is Dead’; Atango, ‘Young Girls’ Candy’, sapeur and Sorbonne graduate; and Special Messenger, Samedi’s younger brother, whose catchphrase is, ‘I’ve got your file.’ By the time, we are told, My Guy and Panka leave, ‘the neighbourhood will never be the same again’. Thus prepared for a traditional morality tale, we are unprepared for the startlingly innovative, unconventional juxtapositions, playful editing and montage effects of the movie itself. The ambiguity inherent in the deliberate tension between style and narrative structure has led to dismissals of it as populist and morally conservative (Boughedir, 2000, 117) or emptily postmodern (Taylor, 2000, 144), as well as praise for being ‘a work of unparalleled imagination and stylistic and aesthetic virtuosity’ (Ukadike, 2002, 218). What characterises the film, beyond either moral simplicity or stylistic effects, is the doubleness of its narrative, both a folk-tale with supernatural elements, and a contemporary social critique. The witchcraft element is clearly spelt out by the narrating voiceover which reminds us that we are watching, above all, a performance – of gender, of masculinity, of different types of manhood, and of power. ‘Neighbourhoods like Mozart often talk of witchcraft,’ we are told, as the young girl sits with the sorceress by firelight, listening to her stories of shape-shifting and body-changing. She asks the sorceress what she would rather be, and she replies: ‘A woman in the body of a man.’ In the following sequence, the voiceover interprets the images on the screen. What we see is a truck, a naked man getting out of the truck, stealing clothes from a washing line. There is darkness, swirling smoke and an eerie soundtrack, behind the words: ‘I see the witchcraft happen. You see it too? She’s become a man.’ This is the first sleight of hand by which the film destabilizes our sense of the natural order, since we are now required to see everything from a double point of view: but is it that of a woman in a man’s body, or of a man who, by not conforming to standard criteria of maleness, becomes vulnerable and so feminised? The second magical sleight of hand is Panka’s ability to make people believe that he can steal their manhood by shaking their hand. He first shakes hands with the barman, who immediately accuses him of stealing his penis. This leads to a comic sequence with Mad Dog, the police chief, who arrests, interrogates and ends up hiring him as a watchman. What makes it comic is the way Mad Dog simultaneously sees advantage in using Panka’s powers to intimidate others, and fears their being used against himself. By keeping Panka in his household, he is able to claim: ‘You can’t touch me, I’m armoured.’ What is clear is that Mad Dog, in his desire for personal advancement and individual power, is ready to use whatever means come to hand, including witchcraft. This is borne out by his repudiation of his first wife, ostensibly to make way for the second, but which may also be read as the sacrifice of a member of the kinship group or close family requisite for the attainment of power: Extremely widespread in Africa is the belief that for any type of excessive, transgressive success – such as attaining and maintaining the status of ruler, diviner-priest or monopolist trader – a close kinsman has to be sacrificed or to be nominated as victim of occult, anti-social forces…these beliefs are eminently

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The Iconography of Impotence in Quartier Mozart & Clando understandable as ritual evocations of how these specialist statuses challenge the kinship order through their individual assertiveness, violence and denial of reciprocity and community. (van Binsbergen, 11)

Throughout the film, Mad Dog receives messages on his radio about the retirement of his superior and appointment of his successor. Although he is ultimately not appointed, it’s clear where his aspirations lie, and when he is disappointed, he acts true to form by hitting first his son and then his second wife. Within the double-voiced narrative, the form of masculinity Mad Dog represents can be seen both as the traditional villain of the folk-tale, and the posturing, self-regarding ruthlessness of the postcolonial leader. Lest we miss the point, Bekolo spells it out in a fascinating post-script, ‘Quartier Mozart, dix ans apres’, a short testimony in the issue of Cinémaction devoted to African cinema. Here, he testifies as to what Mad Dog has become in the ten years since he invented him: ‘…more and more complex. If he appeared at first sight to be a caricature of a black king, he is now a long way from that stereotype.’ Some people call him ugly, but ‘Mad Dog’s physique works, it permits him to play the role of village idiot while inventing an image which renders him more and more a charismatic and popular figure.’ To do so, he takes upon himself more and more wide-ranging roles: he officiates at religious ceremonies, he raises money for a football match between police and bandits for which the money is never seen again, he poses as a heavy played by Bruce Willis by the planes of arriving heads of state, he distributes lavish quantities of money gained from the corruption of the police to the supplicants who queue outside his house. Mad Dog, in effect: …takes advantage of every real event to establish himself as he who watches, counsels, educates and informs the Cameroonians. Every national and international event is pressed into service. All areas of life also. He appears by means of radio and television to explain how he could have prevented the eruption of Mount Cameroon, how he understands globalization, etc. He is present everywhere and even analyses the speeches of the Head of State. (Bekolo, 2003)4

Finally, says Bekolo, attitudes vary among Cameroonians between seduction, admiration and attribution of occult power to Mad Dog. Cameroonian society today can be divided into four categories: ‘Those who write the narrative of contemporary life, those who play a role, those who spectate and those who have no idea what’s going on.’ (201) What Bekolo does here is to treat the text of his film as ‘real’, moving from virtuality to reality in such a way as to reconnect the signifier to the signified from which it has been magically detached, thereby handing us the interpretative tools by which to make sense of the film. Mad Dog is Biya in microcosm, and the drama played out in Mozart is a representation of popular resistance through the carnivalesque techniques of parody, satire, mimicry, laughter, irony, masking and unmasking. My Guy, the most daring mask of all, represents the appearance of manhood masking the inability to ‘perform’ sexually. While the bartender and Mad Dog fear penis loss through magic, much humour is derived from the irony that My Guy magically acquires a

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The Anxious Phallus penis whose size is the envy of all. Atango remarks on seeing it, ‘My, that’s a big brother. If it could only be borrowed,’ while the radio trottoir of the water pump gatherings relays increasingly frenzied reports of My Guy’s sexual prowess. As far as Samedi is concerned, he is impotent, though she declares she loves him nonetheless. My Guy’s attempt to tell her the truth: ‘I am not as you see me’, mimics and reverses the dominant masculine pretence of mastery. His manhood, though visible, is virtual, exactly like that of Mad Dog, to whom appearances are everything. His only concern when he catches My Guy and Samedi is that he shouldn’t hear of them together – in other words, that his reputation should not be implicated in what they do. In sum, Bekolo demystifies power, and in the process he also demystifies his own text. In conclusion, My Guy reverts to being Queen of the Hood on leaving Samedi’s place and getting into a taxi driven by Panka. Immediately, we flashback – or is it sideways? – to Maman Tecla’s fireside, and Maman Tecla asking: ‘You a witch now?’ ‘You’re the witch,’ responds Queen of the Hood, ‘erasing men’s genitals.’ ‘It’s the only way to erase their pride.’ ‘In any case, from what I saw, before I go out with a boy, he must first prove that he loves me and truly.’ The closing sequence reprises the opening, with the difference that Queen of the Hood is now armed with knowledge which she lacked before, and is able to challenge each of the characters by refusing their construction of her identity and maintaining her autonomy. In the liminal state of pre-pubescence, she is ‘armoured’ against the surface appearance of manhood/power – ‘arrogant like a young girl who has never known men.’ But is this moralistic ending, so offensive to certain critics, all that is signified by the film’s double-voiced discourse? Or is the problem the desire by some critics to fit the film into pre-existing categories? Such a prescriptive tendency is evident in Clyde Taylor’s ‘imperative of reworking interpretative criteria’ unhindered by the distractions of postmodernism. He sees this imperative in terms of a ‘struggle’ in three directions: greater international popularity for African films, ‘more populist connections with African audiences’, and ‘maintaining the mission of conscientisation’, and concludes: ‘There is a need to sharpen critical principles in support of one or other of these directions…’ In particular, ‘A critical inertia postpones the finding that that the contribution of QM to the evolution of African culture is slight, beyond its engaging novelty as an internationally hipper type of crowd-pleaser than La Vie est Belle or Bal Poussière.’ (Taylor, 143-4) The demand for a foreclosure of interpretive possibilities leads to criticism becoming its own virtual world, one in which the object of criticism is either forced to conform or made to disappear. This overlooks the affinities between film and magic, the elements of ambiguity, virtuality and multiplicity which are intrinsic to the medium, mobilising what Geschiere calls ‘polyinterpretability’ (Geschiere 1997, 10) and Mbembe characterises as the power of transforming domination and fear into laughter. This in itself constitutes a form of political resistance, as: The division thus realized is precisely what permits the laughing subject to regain possession of self and wear the mask – that is, to become a stranger to this “thing” that exercises domination – and then to deride torture, murder and

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The Iconography of Impotence in Quartier Mozart & Clando all other forms of wretchedness. (Under Siege, 126)

In Bekolo’s own view of cinema, ‘imagination is very ideological’ and one way of undercutting an African reality is by denying its imaginative dimension. In his opinion: The main difference between Africans and the West is imagination. How can you believe in witchcraft? It relies on your imagination. In the environment in which I grew up, the imagination was really the essence of life…People would tell stories, and the truth didn’t matter. The idea of being a liar or not was not an issue, they just took you there, where their story was. (Ukadike, 223)

Bekolo reminds us here to respect the difference between a realist/ bourgeois liberal or even neo-realist/Third Cinema narrative approach and one which takes its significations, among other modes, from orature, refigured in a context of African modernity. In this respect, it’s possible that while it’s true that the film’s radical decenteredness, irony, and playfully pluralistic approach to point of view do resist co-option for a project of ‘conscientisation’, this may point less to postmodern relativism than to a deeply humanist engagement with people’s own ways of relaying their experience. Bekolo’s vision of the source of his cinematic aesthetic reveals: ‘…that the stories are actually the essence of the human being. They carry a big ideological charge, even religious, in the African ways and values…My way of seeing films has really changed based on that experience’ (Ukadidke, 2002, 223). While Jean-Marie Teno’s Clando deals far more explicitly with the politics of Cameroon, it would equally be a mistake to read it on one level only and to ignore the ways it too signifies through witchcraft and oral folk-tale elements. Released four years after QM, the film makes direct reference to the government of the country and the multi-party elections of 1992, which, like those of 1997, were boycotted by all three main opposition parties. The hero of the film, the young computer technician Sobgui, is victimised, tortured and imprisoned for three months for his minimal and reluctant support of a rival party. The film is structured in such a way as to withhold this information until he leaves Cameroon for Germany, where he tells his story to a group of exiles. For the first section of the film we therefore rely on the mise-en-scene for clues as to the narrative direction. Like many African films from Borom Sarret onwards, it begins with an extended establishing sequence featuring a vehicle driving along on a road. Such a sequence offers a rich semiotic field of signs of urbanization: a harried populace on the move, run-down cars vying to outmaneuver each other, hawkers, badly maintained roads, city architecture, a snap-shot, in short, of the daily dance of survival in an African city at the turn of the century. It is shot partly from the point of view of the driver of a car which we gradually come to identify as an illegal taxi – a ‘clando’ – and partly following the car from outside as it weaves through the streets. The context is established by a news bulletin over the car radio about a recent clash between legal and clando taxi-drivers and the police. In this establishing sequence Teno delivers a corresponding account of the city to that of Mbembe in Under Siege, who describes the effect of the ‘crisis’

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The Anxious Phallus in Cameroon as the crumbling of its ‘entire material and symbolic architecture’, most evident in Yaounde, the capital (103). Roads in particular, as ‘one of the city’s most distinctive signs of modernity’ testify to its dilapidation; so too do cars, another key ‘attribute of progress and modernity…And so the physicality of the crisis reduces people to a precarious condition that affects the very way in which they define themselves’ (104-5). The iconicity of the film conveys all this without recourse to words, but Mbembe’s essay provides useful contextualization. Describing in great detail the effect of the breakdown of state institutions (the civil service, the health system, education, etc) on the social fabric of Cameroon, Mbembe explains that the normalization of the abnormal – the routine nature of ‘a succession of instabilities, shortages, constraints and blockages’ – induces a reaction of ‘surprise’, ‘perplexity’, even a sort of ‘stupor’ (113), and what he calls ‘a form of protest by inertia…aggravated by new forms of urban violence… includ(ing) the lynching of thieves and presumed bandits by the citizenry, the repression of protestors and murder of taxi drivers by the police, armed attacks and highway robbery’ (124-5). This, then, is the context in which Sobgui operates as a clando. He is threatened not only by the police but by other taxi-drivers for stealing their territory. Stopped at a roadblock by a policeman who demands his papers, we hear that he has lost his job and now ‘helps’ people to get home. The policeman’s admonishment: ‘If everyone did like you, how would the government pay us?’ is ironic, since he is simultaneously demanding a bribe. At this stage we don’t know, but we find out later in Germany, the story of the car driven by Sobgui. We see it being fixed up and pushed to start, as the voiceover informs us: ‘With the crisis, a car has become very important.’ Later again, Irene, Sobgui’s German lover, asks for an explanation of his scars, and we witness at last the whole story of his arrest and torture. When he is released, he finds his car still parked at his workplace, but vandalized and immobile, and he has to walk home. There could be no more telling image of his reduced social status than his wreck of a car. From being a sign of class and power, it has become ‘a broken utensil; a vestige of a shattered career; a once prosperous commerce now bankrupt; and a social status from which one was seemingly ejected.’ (Under Siege, 105) The effect of his experiences on Sobgui is to render him impotent in every sense of the word, dispossessed, disorientated, a wanderer in a cityscape which has become a prison from which there is no escape. Despite its realist surface, Teno has conjured for us a ‘virtuality’ as ambiguous and slippery as that of QM. Sobgui’s release from prison best illustrates this, though this itself is preceded by a nightmare sequence of events without any apparent causality. A friend drops in at work and his boss warns him against ‘bad company’. He is kidnapped as he leaves the office after helping the friend print off election leaflets. He is taken somewhere and beaten on the soles of his feet. He wakes up in prison, where he is visited by a doctor friend who is nonetheless unable to help him get out. The other prisoners instruct him: ‘In order not to die, you’ve got to pay. It’s the same on the outside.’ Sobgui attempts at first to counter his ‘surprise’ and ‘perplexity’ by an insistence on who he is, by asserting his identity as a middle-class professional who is part of a network of other middle-class professionals.

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The Iconography of Impotence in Quartier Mozart & Clando Eventually however he succumbs to a form of ‘stupor’, realized in his total submission to unreality/surreality/unreason. Finally, he is taken from jail without any indication of where he is going. As in the opening sequence, the point of view alternates between Sobgui in the car and external shots of the car been driven through the streets, except that this time he is in the back seat and palpably disturbed by the loss of referential meaning in what is happening. At an intersection, his guards stop and let him out, with the admonition: ‘Go and sit over there and wait for us.’ Sobgui waiting, watching the road, not knowing when or if they will return, is no longer the free citizen he thought he was, but a perpetual prisoner under the panopticon of the state. Eventually he sees his boss, who takes him to his old work-place while informing him he has been replaced. A party vehicle passes, crowded with jubilant electioneers. The boss’s words: ‘Now they’ve won the election, they’re setting you free,’ is the nearest Sobgui will come to an explanation for what’s happened to him. It is an explanation he rejects. ‘You think I’m free?’ he asks bitterly, in the light of his new awareness of his relation to power. Sobgui’s transformation involves loss of his sense of himself as an autonomously functioning individual within a stable environment. Despite the ‘crisis’, he had a job and could therefore support some semblance of an ordinary life. Now, his eyes have been opened to the reality of his complete irrelevance, the absence of what he thought were his ‘rights’, his replaceability. His resultant loss of manhood – the ability to perform sexually – testifies to the power of the state to reach into the most intimate corners of his life. The transformation is so sudden and so total that it resembles witchcraft, ‘offer(ing) hidden means to grab power, but at the same time… reflect(ing) sharp feelings of impotence’ (Geschiere, 1995, 9). The state agents who spirit him away and return him like a ghost to haunt the landscape of his former life, function like occult messengers of a higher, unseen power. At the same time, the fact that he was betrayed by his own boss reflects another attribute of witchcraft – the sacrifice of kin, in the sense of someone close to you, part of your familiar and most trusted surroundings. According to Geschiere: ‘[Witchcraft] refers to hidden aggression by human actors, often acting from close by, from within one’s intimacy.’ (Geschiere, 1998, 815) For AbdouMaliq Simone, a change brought about in such a way is related to death, ‘of being able to completely transform oneself into something else, to go somewhere else’, which is typical of urban life in Africa. (Under Siege, 27) He takes the sort of disorientation which Sobgui undergoes as intrinsic to the millennial urban African experience, to the point where residents of Douala have given it a name: mapan, and made it into a strategy of survival. ‘The word refers to architectures of movement and dwelling where the layout of the quarter is meant to always confound and unhinge clear assessments about what’s going on in the face of the overwhelming threats of disappearance posed by both state and “mystical” authorities’ (Under Siege, 27). Sobgui himself invokes the Cameroonian expression ‘Il est parti’ (he has gone) to describe his predicament, ironically inverting it. People say ‘Il est parti’ when someone has been successful. In his case, the ‘threat of disappearance’ results in the total erasure of his old persona, to be replaced by a virtual existence contingent on unseen arbitrary forces.

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The Anxious Phallus In this situation, what is needed is some alternative magic to offer protection or to counteract the zombification which has been inflicted on the citizenry. Teno offers two such sources of alternative power. The first is the capacity of ordinary people to organise themselves into alternative forms of association, outside of corrupt or non-functioning ‘official’ structures of state. In the film there are two of these: the tontine, the co-operative circle or microcredit association to which Sobgui belongs, and the famille, the exile association in Cologne. At the former, he meets the old man who becomes his mentor and is instrumental in helping him find a new place in the world by sending him on a quest to find his son, Chamba. By sending him to Europe the old man performs a version of mapan, substituting the cityscape of Yaounde for that of Cologne, a device which might be said to ‘confound and unhinge clear assessments’ through a shifting of ‘architectures of movement and dwelling’. Cologne reproduces certain features of Yaounde but with significant alterations. For example, it offers a replacement for the kinship group, a selfdefining network of Cameroonian exiles which calls itself ‘famille’. Crucially, however, in Cologne Sobgui encounters the possibility of active political resistance and recovers the power of sexual performance, the one being a function of the other. The old man from the tontine is also the agent of the second form of indigenous magical power, as the teller of the hunter story which acts as a parallel narrative. The voiceover which accompanies the action (as in QM) embarks early on, in the opening sequence, on the story of the hunter who sets out from home accompanied by magic objects, with the intention of saving the village from famine. Like the action itself, the story is broken up, suspended for periods of time, and then returned to at a later point. The first time Sobgui meets his benefactor, he tells him to have ‘the spirit of the hunter’. When we later see Sobgui in a park in Cologne with Irene, before they embark on the search for Chamba, we hear that the hunter has set his traps and has fallen asleep. Finally, when Chamba is found and persuaded to rejoin the exile group he founded, he is connected to his father by phone, and we expect to hear the old man plead with him to come home. Instead, he tells him the end of the hunter story – that the hunter fails to catch anything and is afraid to return home, but meanwhile the village has recovered and is looking after itself. Chamba admits to Sobgui he feels he has failed. He wonders how he can return home where he knows his father is waiting for him to take over as chief, and meanwhile he couldn’t even keep his family together in Germany. A repeated flashback takes us to a prison van being driven through the countryside, and in the back, a prisoner with a gun trained on the driver. The driver laughs, and keeps on driving. The question posed by the flashback: ‘To shoot or not to shoot?’ faces Sobgui and Chamba in different ways. Will they return and take action, or will they wait forever for something to happen? Irene, the German woman, urgently persuades Sobgui that there is something he can do other than wait. The fact that with her he regains his manhood suggests that her words have acted on him, as the hunter story acts on Chamba. His last words as he and Chamba return home are, ‘I don’t want to wait any more.’ The older magic of the village cosmology and the oral tradition is taken over and transformed in the city in the service of the new

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The Iconography of Impotence in Quartier Mozart & Clando uses for which it is required. In a situation of broken kinship groups, urban associations create new forms of community, and the division between ‘city’ and ‘village’ is eroded. For de Boeck: The way in which the urban and the rural are constantly deconstructed in the postcolony necessitates an imaginative theorizing of that reality…The hunter’s landscape, which is a potentially dangerous, frontierlike margin, is thus constantly mapped onto the urban, and thus ‘central’ landscape…the hunter provides a model of identification and a figure of success and eminence’ (Under Siege, 265-6)

The old man’s story recalls Chamba to the first principle of the hunter’s quest – the importance, beyond individual success, of keeping the community together. It works in parallel with the political activism promoted by Irene to posit a way out of inertia and the acceptance of defeat – a way to recover manhood and regain a sense of self. These two films offer a representation of the dangers and shortcomings of dominant modes of power and masculinity in Africa. They also speak to the problems of reconciling powerlessness with manhood in the postcolonial African urban setting, where: ‘In effect this autocratic society is more an expanded prison than a closed arena for the megalomaniac power of an autocrat. It is a society in which the subject, a perpetual prisoner, becomes positively impotent…’ (Ngang, 2003, 212). For Teno, film-making is explicitly a form of resistance and transformation: ‘My contribution is to exert pressure at every opportunity outside the country so that in the end the situation can change in Cameroon’ (Pfaff, 2003, 208). Bekolo’s methods are more elliptical, but both virtualise the real, while simultaneously insisting on the materiality and political actuality of the image. In both cases, the film-maker brings back into view what had been rendered invisible, and, through metonymy offers an alternative reading or way of envisioning the social to that of the occult economy.

Notes 1 These headlines were taken from the following online sources respectively: www.ananova.com>; ; (June 17, 2005). 2 While Geschiere detaches modern witchcraft from the village and a traditional rural cosmology, asserting its autonomy in the new urban context, van Binsbergen gives a more modulated view. He maintains that the essential feature of witchcraft, its ambiguity, is equally applicable to village as to city setting, and that what continues to bind them together is the fact of kinship as the ground on which they operate. This kinship, however, has become ‘virtual’, a concept which has fascinating implications for the study of film. To quote van Binsbergen: What has been co-opted, appropriated, of ancient witchcraft beliefs into the modernist collective representations at the national and regional level, among elites and middle classes …are notions in which individual power is celebrated, and is adorned by imagery of extravagance, violence and transgression. In a modern social world where whatever is alien to the rural kinship order has gained ever greater dominance, witchcraft is no longer a boundary condition, but has become the central norm. Modern life is the kinship order virtualized: turned inside out, invaded by, subjugated

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The Anxious Phallus by, the outside world against which it was once a refuge. (12) 3 I’m not convinced this is true of anglophone African film in general, which, apart from in South Africa, has tended to be shaped partly by a developmental agenda. Two examples of recent anglophone films dealing explicitly with masculinity and the male social role – Zimbabwe’s Yellow Card and Kenya’s Babu’s Babies – create comedy out of men playing the female role in caring for babies, with the aim of changing social attitudes. Such films substitute didacticism for the complexity and ambiguity of the francophone ‘arthouse’ films, or the delirious but revealing political ‘incorrectness’ of popular narratives. While not all anglophone films are made to a developmental agenda (eg, God is African, Maangamizi), the fact that I found myself dealing exclusively with francophone films in this paper suggests at least a shared preoccupation on the part of these film-makers with the issues I want to address. I am of course aware of the anglophone complaint that all francophone films are overdetermined by French (or other European) production values. Over-sensitivity to such arguments, however, could lead to such a critical impasse that all discussion would be foreclosed. 4 ‘Chien Méchant se saisit de tous les événements d’actualité pour rester celui qui veille, conseille, eduque et informe les Camerounais. Tous les événements nationaux et internationaux y passent. Toutes les disciplines aussi. Il défile sur les antennes de la radio et de la television pour expliquer comment il aurait pu arrêter l’eruption du Mont Cameroun, comment il est conscient de la mondialisation, etc. Il est present partout et analyse même les discourses du chef de l’Etat’ (200). English translation mine.

Bibliography Bartholomew, R.E. Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-hunting Panics: a Study of Mass Psychogenic Illness and Social Delusion. North Carolina: McFarland Publishers, 2001. Bekolo, Jean-Pierre. ‘Quartier Mozart, dix ans après’. Pp. 200-01 in Cinémaction: cinémas africains, une oasis dans le desert? Co-ordinated by Samuel Lelievre. No. 106, 1er trimestre, 2003. Boughedir, Ferid. ‘African Cinema and Ideology: Tendencies and Evolution’. Pp. 109-21 in Symbolic Narratives in African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image. Ed. June Givanni. British Film Institute, 2000. Comaroff, Jean and John L. ‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming’. Pp. 291-343 in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, edited by Jean Comaroff and John L.Comaroff. Vol. 3, Millennial Quartet, 2000. Public Culture 12 (2). Documenta 11 Platform 4. Under Siege: Four African Cities – Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos. Editorial collective. Hatje Cantz Publishers, Germany, 2002. ‘The Visible and Invisible: Remaking Cities in Africa.’ AbdouMaliq Simone. 23-43. ‘Figures of the subject in times of crisis.’ Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman. 99-126. ‘Kinshasa: Beyond Chaos.’ Thierry Ndlandu. 185-99. ‘Kinshasa: Tales of the ‘Invisible City’ and the Second World’. Filip de Boeck. 243-85. ‘Writing the Anxious City: Images of Lagos in Home Video Films.’ Onookome Okome. 315-35. Geschiere, Peter. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. UP of Virginia: Charlottesville and London, 1997. First published as Sorcellerie et politique en Afrique – La viande des autres. Editions Karthala, 1995. ‘Globalization and the Power of Indeterminate Meaning: Witchcraft and Spirit Cults in Africa and East Asia’. Pp. 811-37 in Development and Change. Globalization and Identity: Dialects of Flows and Closures, edited by Birgit Meyer and Peter Geschiere. Vol. 29, No. 4, Oct. 1998. Ngang, Alain Patrice. ‘Jean-Marie Teno ou comment filmer une société autocratique’. Pp. 209-13 in Cinémaction: cinémas africains, une oasis dans le desert? Co-ordinated by Samuel Lelievre. No. 106, 1er trimestre, 2003. Okome, Onookome. ‘Writing the anxious city: images of Lagos in Nigerian home video films.’ Pp. 65-75 in Black Renaissance Vol. 5, No. 2, Summer 2003.

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The Iconography of Impotence in Quartier Mozart & Clando Pfaff, Françoise. ‘Entretien avec Jean-Marie Teno.’ Pp. 202-208 in Cinémaction: cinémas africains, une oasis dans le desert? Co-ordinated by Samuel Lelievre. No. 106, 1er trimestre, 2003. Taylor, Clyde. ‘Searching for the Postmodern in African Cinema’. Pp. 136-44 in Symbolic Narratives in African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image, edited by June Givanni. British Film Institute, 2000. Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank. Questioning African Cinema. University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Van Binsbergen, Wim. ‘Witchcraft in modern Africa as virtualized boundary conditions of the kinship order.’ 1999. http://www.Shikanda.net.ancient_models/gen3/witch.html 15 pages. (June 17 2005) Filmography Babu’s Babies. Kenya, dir. Ben Zulu, 2004. Ceddo. Senegal, dir. Ousmane Sembene, 1976. Clando. Cameroon, dir. Jean-Marie Teno, 1996. God is African. South Africa, dir. Akin Omotoso, 2003. Guimba, the Tyrant. Mali, dir. Sissoko Cheick Oumar Sissoko, 1995. La Vie est Belle. Zaire, dir. Mweze Ngangura,1987. Maangamizi. Tanzania, dir. Martin Mhando, 1999. Quartier Mozart. Cameroon, dir. Jean Pierre Bekolo, 1992. Touki Bouki. Senegal, dir. Djibril Diop Mambety, 1973. Xala. Senegal, dir. Ousmane Sembene, 1974. Yeelen. Mali, dir. Souleyman Oumar Cisse, 1987. Yellow Card. Zimbabwe, dir. John and Louise Riber, 2002.

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2 The Homoerotics of Nationalism White Male-on-Male Rape & the ‘Coloured’ Subject in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples LINDSEY MICHAEL BANCO

In his account of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South African Cape, William Beinart writes that ‘[m]asculinity is a slippery concept … because it is difficult to distinguish from class and race.’1 The apartheid South African Cape of the 1970s, the setting of Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples, is likewise a slippery staging ground for masculinities dependent upon discursive constructions of such aspects of identity as race and class, constructions that attempt to solidify a particular hegemonic South African masculinity (white, Christian, militaristic) while also determining the signifiers of others. When Robert Morrell notes that the diminutive ‘boy’ is an example of how ‘the relationship between white coloniser and black colonised involved emasculation,’2 he offers evidence for how such verbal castration, consistent with the prominence of discourse in even a material practice as visceral as sexual violence, can inspire, facilitate, or otherwise prop up instances of literal castration and other forms of sexual violence. In the rhetorical moves it makes to implicate racial oppression with sexualized violence, Behr’s novel reveals the importance of racial imagery to apartheid South Africa’s hegemonic masculinity and depicts the material practices that produce such hegemony. Specifically, the novel illustrates how same-sex, same-race, pedophilic desire can be redeployed in the services of imagining lower-class and non-white races as amenable to colonial subjugation. Behr’s novel, first published in Afrikaans in 1993 (as Die reuk van appels) and translated in 1995, has won numerous awards, and along with works such as Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf (1994) and Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying (1995), forms a prominent cornerstone of post-apartheid literature. Following Behr’s admission of his past role as a paid informant for South African security forces, The Smell of Apples became especially relevant to critical discourses of confessional literature in this period. As discussed in a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies entitled ‘South African Fiction After Apartheid,’ Behr’s novel ‘offers a veritable compendium of the sayings,

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Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples stereotypes, and justifications that made up the everyday banality of apartheid.’3 Such banality, the novel suggests, nonetheless provides the fertile ground of sexual violence in which to grow the aggressive masculinity and its concurrent racial subjugation that constitute hegemonic Afrikaner4 ideology. The Smell of Apples, set mostly around False Bay and Cape Town in 1973, is the story of eleven-year-old Marnus Erasmus. Perverting the usual bildungsroman teleology of a protagonist achieving individuality, the novel represents – in part through the short italicized passages Marnus narrates during South Africa’s war with Angola in 1988 – the boy’s interpellation as an agent of militant Afrikaner nationalism.5 In one of the novel’s early italicized passage, Marnus identifies one week of his childhood as what ‘ultimately determined it,’6 what ostensibly established his masculinity and what confirmed his role as defender of apartheid nationalism. As the novel unfolds, the reader discovers that the week in question features two complementary events: a racially-motivated attack on Little-Neville, the young son of the Erasmus’ Coloured servant, and Marnus catching sight of his father, Johan Erasmus, a general in the South African Defense Force, raping Marnus’ best friend, Frikkie Delport. Though Frikkie is white, that scene of homoerotic aggression, in addition to illuminating some of the equivocations in the nationalist masculinity exhibited by Marnus’ father, reveals through its echo with the attack on Little-Neville the presence of sexual violence in both metaphorical and literal processes of racial oppression. Apartheid itself, of course, relies upon both discursive and material racist practices. After the white minority National Party seized political control of South Africa in 1948, it began a systematic program of racial classification and marginalization. The Population Registration Act of 1950 proclaimed that all South Africans would be placed in one of four categories: White, Coloured, Asian, or Bantu. In spite of the arbitrariness and fungibility of these categories, of the absurdity of the concept of pure races, and of the equally arbitrary hierarchization implied by the Act, the power of the state lent these designations great force. The Act imagined a specific schema of racial classification, and its political enforcement produced a set of practices with clear effects on the material conditions of its subjects. As Sean Field notes, one racial category was especially fraught: ‘For the apartheid state one of the central goals of the category ‘coloured’ was to use it as a symbolic and literal dumping ground for the hybrid peoples who did not quite ‘fit into’ other pure apartheid classifications.’7 Since the establishment of the Dutch outpost in the 1650s, many societies – including Dutch, Portuguese, Khoisan, and Huguenot – have contributed to the ‘coloured’ race over 350 years of miscegenation.8 Such cultural heterogeneity results in a statutory designation of Coloured as primarily one of negation (not ‘black,’ not ‘white’), a designation that, in the context of the crude racial imagery of apartheid South Africa, largely divests ‘coloureds’ of the resistant potential Homi Bhabha often finds in hybridity.9 Histories of the development of the Coloured race tend to stress instead that the positionality produced by such a designation under apartheid ensures pervasive and oppressive stereotypes that, among other effects, legitimate a long tradition of feminizing this group. Coloureds as abject and peripheral can be instantiated as lazy, cheeky, drunken, lower-class, stupid, and effeminate.10

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The Homoerotics of Nationalism Such stereotypical traits, enshrined in the early twentieth-century South African fiction of John Buchan and Sarah Gertrude Millin (and contested in the late twentieth-century fiction of Bessie Head and Zoë Wicomb), are necessarily repeated again and again by the characters in The Smell of Apples as part of apartheid’s hegemonic masculinity. Existing criticism of the novel explores the nuances of apartheid ideology in effective and balanced ways. Michiel Heyns, for instance, acknowledges the power of middle-class apartheid dogma as filtered through intergenerational coercion11 but reminds us in another article that Behr’s novel ‘insists that the child is implicated in the structures which guarantee the privileged childhood.’12 Likewise, Rita Barnard focuses on the techniques of ideological indoctrination into the world of hypermasculine nationalism, techniques such as the repetition, slogans, clichés, and pedagogical truisms that Marnus’ naïve narration underscores. Barnard argues persuasively that by emphasizing the moments of recognition in the novel’s ‘scenes of hailing, recognition, and specularization,’ Behr ‘affirms the important idea that … an element of choice is at stake in any process of individuation and affiliation,’13 that one can choose to recognize one’s subject position or not. Barnard also attempts to introduce a significant criticism of Behr’s decision to place ‘a homosexual act at the very heart of apartheid’s darkness’ when she argues that he ‘diverts attention from the crucial political and economic to the psychological and sexual dimensions of apartheid’s power.’14 Such a remark seems possible, however, only if one overlooks the discursive echo between the rape of Frikkie and the attack on the Coloured boy, Little-Neville. To overlook that link is to miss the political and economic fruits acquired by apartheid when it marginalizes the Cape Coloureds through violently sexual white masculinity. Reinforcing that link between Frikkie and Little-Neville is the aim of the rest of this essay, because comparing the most overtly homoerotic moment in The Smell of Apples – the rape of Frikkie – to the metaphorical rape of LittleNeville reveals how closely sex and race intersect in apartheid South Africa. The ideological power of homosocial nationalism, exerted through the nuclear family, the glorification of the South African Defense Force, and other apparatus is evident in the surprising amount of descriptive similarity between the two events. Since Marnus, the narrator, eventually becomes a successfully indoctrinated subject of apartheid’s patriarchal ideology, his descriptions of the two events are so similar because they reflect that ideology. Marnus describes the attack on Frikkie and the attack on Little-Neville in analogous terms because raping Frikkie subjugates and feminizes him (and thus places him in opposition to Marnus’ dawning nationalist masculinity) in the same way that the attack on Little-Neville, part of the tradition of oppressing ‘coloureds’, reinforces the subordinate position of non-white subjectivity in consolidated white patriarchy.15 My understanding of patriarchal nationalism in this context is of course indebted to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who, in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, outlines a continuum of manly desire characterized by insistently heteronormative male bonding on one end and homosexual relations on the other. In many societies (including that of apartheid South Africa) the continuum is ‘radically disrupted,’16 in part by the

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Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples disciplinary effects of homophobia, because separating the two absolute versions of masculinity supposedly obviates the fact that ‘the reprobated version is surprisingly congruent with the prescribed version.’17 Separating the two forms of masculinity thus privileges certain forms of homosocial bonding that contribute to nation building. Sedgwick points out at length that homophobia helps prevent categorical crossover, but since overt homophobia plays a relatively muted role in The Smell of Apples (up-staged, as it were, by other forms of normative heterosexuality), a more essential concept for understanding patriarchal nationalism is homosexual rape as a means of controlling the racial other. While hegemonic Afrikaner masculinity insistently expels the homoerotic, displacing it onto abject racial groups, the representational link Behr draws between the rape of the white Frikkie and the attack on the Coloured Little-Neville metaphorizes the close relationship between the workings of imperialism and the production of the ‘reprobated bonds’ of homosexuality.18 As Craig Smith notes, ‘When we view colonialism through the lens of homosociality, we see it as the homosexual rape which satisfies, extends, and reveals the homosocial/homoerotic economy of the fatherland.’19 The Smell of Apples dramatizes how the intersections between reprobated homosexuality and indoctrinated racism produce, in this case, apartheid Afrikaner masculinity, a hegemony predicated upon the effacement of racial difference through the idea that subjugation can be enacted solely through white interchanges. Understanding South Africa as white fatherland requires a substantial ideological investment in the concept of patriarchy. By definition, a patriarchy – in addition to privileging masculinity – also requires a family, a generational bonding system through which it can function to ensure its perpetual maintenance. Patriarchal power transmits itself specifically and significantly through ‘the father-son nexus,’20 making filial bonding crucial to The Smell of Apples. Early in the novel, Marnus watches his father shaving and asks him if he is afraid of cutting himself: ‘No, my boy. When you start shaving one day, Dad will show you how.…’ ‘Did Oupa teach you how to shave?’ I asked while Dad wiped the last shaving cream from his face. ‘Oh yes, in this same bathroom.’ (15)

That quintessential father-son bonding ritual passed down through the generations reinforces the domestic space – the house Marnus’ father and grandfather built – as an ideological field, but along with separate moments in the novel in which Marnus will ‘comb [his] hair in a side parting just like Dad’s’ (63) or say ‘I’m glad I’m going to look like Dad one day’ (169), the ritual also foregrounds the fact that Marnus is a surface upon which his father’s masculinist ideology gets inscribed. Marnus is a way of ensuring the ‘dreams of the parents become the dreams of the children’ (185). One can see this process of inscription occurring when a visiting Chilean general, a symbolic double of Johan Erasmus, calls Marnus ‘‘a carbon copy’’ (35) of his father, and the puzzled Marnus asks his sister Ilse what a carbon copy is. ‘‘He says you look like a photocopy,’’ she replies, ‘‘A photocopy or a blueprint of Dad’’ (35).

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The Homoerotics of Nationalism As a carbon copy or a photocopy, Marnus reproduces Afrikaner patriarchy; as a blueprint, though, he is a means of actively constructing it, and the proximity of the two terms in Ilse’s response indicates the close relationship between the two processes. As the novel unfolds, Marnus then signals his successful indoctrination by parroting the assorted discourses of apartheid South Africa: the invasion paranoia that arose in response to black liberationist struggles in the 1970s, the anti-liberal and anti-Communist rhetoric that opposed intellectualist movements, the unyielding Calvinist morality characteristic of the Protestant Afrikaners, and the militarism with which they defended the ‘purity’ of South Africa. Central to the novel’s patriarchal ideology is also a particular brand of hypermasculinity, embodied, to the point of caricature, in Johan Erasmus: he is ‘six feet tall’ (15); his ‘whole chest and stomach are covered with hair’ (62); and his ‘chin is almost completely square and Mum says you can know by just looking at it, that a man with a chin like that should be in uniform’ (15). Marnus’ father is also associated with two traditionally masculine pastimes – fishing and boxing – because, as a number of critics have noted, sports play a significant role in Afrikaner masculinity.21 At one point, the novel places boxing quite literally side-by-side with republicanism: ‘Next to [the photograph of] Dad with the boxing gloves is another photograph of him with Uncle PW Botha’ (45), Marnus narrates, with the patronymic ‘Uncle’ emphasizing the fact that heteronormative masculinity and patrilineage is a vital part of nationalism, and vice versa.22 The Chilean general, whom Marnus is instructed to call ‘Mister John Smith,’ dramatizes the homosociality of international fascism by exhibiting similar hypermasculine signifiers. In addition to an awe-inspiring scar on his back, ‘his hair and moustache are almost pitchblack. His arms are also covered in black hair and there are thick veins running up his forearms. Almost like Dad’s’ (37). The two generals’ bodies become, in essence, penises writ large, even at the level of their names: ‘Mister John Smith’ echoes Marnus’ euphemisms for a penis – ‘John Thomas’ or simply ‘mister’ – and Marnus’ father’s first name is, of course, Johan. In a society in which, for example, male and female children are introduced differently by their father (‘‘This is Ilse, and this is my son, Marnus’’ [34]), the discursive prominence assumed by men, together with their insistent homosocial bonding, justifies and is justified by the hypermasculine traits they exhibit while simultaneously evoking the gaze that helps constitute such prominence and power. As phalluses in uniform, the generals embody a virility that, as we later find out, also relies upon a specifically specularized racial oppression to assert national identity and to groom Marnus to take the reins of patriarchy. Naturally, homophobia plays a role in the kind of normative masculinity represented in the novel. Marnus’ mother, Leonore, a former opera singer who subjugates herself thoroughly to her husband and thus exemplifies the femininity required by patriarchal nationalism, also embodies feminine signifiers off-limits to the young boy. Marnus narrates: ‘I sang in the school choir when I was in Standard One, but Dad said I didn’t have to sing if I didn’t want to. Dad never makes us do anything we don’t really want to’ (103). That statement, ironically foreshadowing the coercion of son by father, attempts to

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Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples foreclose any compromised masculinity Marnus might exhibit through his singing, and after Marnus’ short musical career ends, ‘[f]rom there on [he] called everyone who sang, poofters’ (104). Marnus’ mother ‘says you aren’t a poofter just because you sing, but Dad just laughs and says he’s not so sure’ (104). Coercing Marnus into homophobia helps his father secure the masculinity he wants Marnus to reproduce. Richard Dollimore, among others, points out that homophobia within a political or sexual power structure is often used primarily to prescribe ‘acceptable’ heterosexual masculinity and, consistent with the novel’s relative disinterest in ‘actual’ homosexuality, only secondarily to oppress homosexuals.23 Behr makes evident the tenuousness of ideal masculinity by also revealing the homoerotic tropism lying dangerously at the heart of homosocial bonding. Following an italicized passage in which the adult Marnus examines his penis in detail (‘With the foreskin completely back, the dark pink encirclement of the head turns darker till it’s almost purple …’ [65]), Behr returns to the 1973 narrative to depict Marnus and Frikkie becoming blood brothers, a scene constructed around the relatively elaborate discursive proximity of homosociality and homoeroticism. The ritual, an ‘oath like the voortrekker oath’ (76), supposedly secures the eternal (nationalistic) bond between the two males but is, in fact, coded homoerotically. To take the blood oath, the boys tie elastic bands around their fingers until their fingertips turn ‘a funny purple’ (78), with Marnus observing that ‘Frikkie bites his nails and now the skins are all curled up around the nail of his forefinger’ (78). They then prick their fingertips with the sharp end of a compass. With my free hand I push the compass against his finger that’s looking like a mulberry. ‘You’ll have to press harder, else nothing will come out. Stick it in.’ This time I shove harder and Frikkie jumps back when the point goes in too deep. ‘Ouch!’ he groans. ‘That’s too much.’ Almost at once, there’s a drop of blood on his fingertip. … I hold out my finger to him. I close my eyes as he comes towards me with the compass. I feel the jab and when I look again, there’s a drop of blood, pushing up from the skin. Then we rub our fingers together until it’s sticky. (78)

Connecting this sexually charged scene specifically to the militaristic bonding necessary for Afrikaner nationalism is a scene later in the novel that echoes the blood oath: General Smith, helping Marnus put Mercurochrome on his grazed knees, ‘presses gently against the grazes, so the red comes through the cotton wool and stains his fingertips’ (132). This surrogate blood oath between the General Smith and Marnus, like both Marnus’ examination of his penis and the blood brothers scene, emphasizes the juxtaposition between tough masculinity and fragile anatomy. More importantly, though, the scene solidifies their homosocial bond while also helping to compromise Frikkie’s masculinity by interposing Marnus between Frikkie and the hypermasculine general. Marnus’ indoctrination, his fighting as a soldier for the fatherland (‘just like Dad’), requires that some males, like some non-white races, be feminized and commodified so they can be exchanged, as women are, for the sake of

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The Homoerotics of Nationalism masculine nationalism. In this case, Frikkie becomes the feminized male and thus also stands in for the feminized Coloured race. The close proximity of male solidarity and homoerotic tropism, as well as the further subjugation of Frikkie, is also evident in scenes of father-son bonding. Marnus and his father shower and swim together, for example, with both activities involving a playfulness that hovers, like much male bonding behavior, between the homosocial and the homoerotic. While Heyns reminds us that the shower scene in which the father asks Marnus, ‘‘[D]oes that little man of yours stand up yet sometimes in the mornings?’’ (63), can be read as the ‘father’s playful impatience for his son to reach potent manhood, or as the general’s professional interest in the development of future soldiers,’24 it is important to remember that Frikkie is never far behind these exchanges. The word ‘stand,’ for instance, evokes Marnus’ young friend, who ‘always looks as if [he] is standing at attention when he speaks to Dad’ (73), and in much the same way that the hypermasculine General Smith touching Marnus’ bloody knees relegates Frikkie to a subordinate position, the swimming scenes also help dilute Frikkie’s masculinity. Marnus and his father run ‘completely starkers’ (50) toward the water before Marnus’ father ‘catches [him] from behind’ (50) and they crash down into the waves, but Frikkie initially refuses to join them. Frikkie’s fears are ambiguous, but Johan Erasmus, instructing Marnus ‘not to tease Frikkie’ (51), eventually convinces him to join them in the water. Marnus says, ‘I hang on to Dad’s shoulders and Frikkie hangs on to mine’ (51), indicating that while Frikkie participates in the bonding ritual, he is again once removed from the model of ideal masculinity – Johan Erasmus this time – and Marnus again mediates between Frikkie and hypermasculinity. Marnus as mediator facilitates the sexual relationship between his father and Frikkie while simultaneously learning his own role as filial reproducer of ideal masculinity. Frikkie is rendered inferior in a number of other ways. He uses un-Christian or ‘low’ swear words, for instance, and his mother once earned second place in a beauty pageant, to which Marnus’ mother objects privately that ‘it’s mostly a certain kind of woman who goes in for things like the Miss South Africa competition’ (16). Low class, as Ian Goldin points out, has long been inextricable from racial otherness in this South African context, and Frikkie’s lower class helps make him a ‘safer’ object of desire.25 Behr racializes Frikkie more explicitly, however, by aligning him with his Coloured servant Gloria (they use similar coarse language, of which Marnus disapproves) and by having him, in a crucial fishing scene, think Marnus has hooked a whale, a moment that, like the other references in the novel to Melville’s Moby-Dick, evokes complex networks of interracial same-sex desire. The fishing scene, in which Marnus in fact catches a shark from the beach, exemplifies the tropology that enables Frikkie to be raped by Marnus’ father. In this scene, Frikkie represents the terrifying potential emasculation against which Marnus must define himself. Marnus is loath, for example, to let Frikkie help him reel in the shark because he is ‘getting worried that Dad and the General will arrive while Frikkie’s holding the rod’ (94). The shark getting away or, worse yet, Frikkie gaining phallic power, would leave Marnus ‘standing here like a moron with the slack rod in front of the General’ (98). When the two paragons

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Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples of hypermasculinity finally do arrive on the beach, Marnus’ father offers encouragement such as ‘‘Pull, Marnus! Lift your rod, he’s coming’’ (97) but does not help bring in the shark. Frikkie’s role in this scene, in anticipation of his eventual rape, lays bare his inferior masculinity. Since fishing is coded as a supremely masculine activity in the novel, Frikkie is, of course, a poor fisherman. When Marnus says, ‘Good fishermen have patience [but] Frikkie gets impatient about everything’ (91), he implies that his friend’s masculinity is compromised, and when the shark takes the hook, Frikkie screams for Marnus to get out of the water. Frikkie’s unproductive turns with the rod, in addition to his poor swimming ability and his lower intelligence, help align him with women and infantilized racial others as needing the protection of hegemonic masculinity. He eventually demonstrates resignation to his subordinate position when he sits down passively on the sand. It is, however, the descriptive similarities between Frikkie’s rape and the attack on the Coloured boy, Little-Neville, that most strongly racialize Frikkie and that most powerfully implicate homoeroticism in tropes of racist and sexualized nationalism. Peering through the hole in his floor into the bedroom below, Marnus watches his father, whom he initially thinks is General Smith, raping Frikkie: He pulls Frikkie’s legs apart and it looks as if he’s rubbing something into Frikkie’s bum. Then he goes on to his knees between Frikkie’s legs and I can see his mister. It’s too dark to see everything, but it seems like he pushes his mister into Frikkie’s bum, and then he lies down on top of him. He starts moving around. It’s just like the Coloured with the girl in the dunes. He uses his one hand to hold himself up on the bed. With the other he keeps the pillow down over Frikkie’s head. (177)

Similarly, the men who caught Little-Neville at a railway yard apparently ‘took off his clothes and rubbed lard or something all over his back’ (130-31) before holding him up to the locomotive’s furnace. Visiting Little-Neville at the hospital, Marnus sees the young burn victim ‘lying on his stomach … completely naked and his arms are tied to the bed … . His legs are drawn wide apart so that they won’t rub together. Between his thighs, across his bum and all over his back it looks like a big piece of raw liver’ (189). Along with the visual similarities between Frikkie’s predicament and Little-Neville’s, other elements of these scenes clearly associate Frikkie with the Coloured race. The physical pain Frikkie experiences following his rape, pain that prevents him from riding his bicycle with Marnus, echoes the fact that Little-Neville’s ‘whole back, his bum and his legs are completely covered in burns’ (189). In the passage depicting Frikkie’s rape, the overt comparison between Frikkie’s predicament and ‘the Coloured with the girl in the dunes’ that the boys saw one day explicitly signals to readers that Frikkie is ‘like’ both a girl and a Coloured. Evoking a male penetrating a female reminds us that the penetration of Frikkie feminizes him, and because the couple in question is Coloured, these scenes also align Frikkie with the racial other. The act of watching is itself complicit in oppression. Seeing the couple in the dunes, and later seeing Frikkie in the room below, reifies what Kobena Mercer – paraphrasing Laura Mulvey – calls ‘the subject/object dichotomy

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The Homoerotics of Nationalism that associates masculinity with the activity of looking and femininity with the subordinate, passive role of being that which is looked at.’26 Likewise, as Rosemary Jolly points out, ‘[t]he spectator of a scene of atrocity is in a position of privilege: she or he is not immediately involved in the scene’27 and can thus mentally replay it as necessary. Frikkie and Little-Neville, arranged for voyeuristic inspection, become associated with one another in order to draw links between the oppressed males required for homosocial bonding and the oppressed races required for apartheid. Frikkie is raped immediately following a gruesome slideshow of tortured Rhodesian ‘terrorists,’ the spectacularized violence of racial oppression exhibited on the wall of the Erasmus home for the generals’ patriotic pleasure. The violence done to the non-white bodies in the slide show further facilitates the racializing effects of the masculine violence performed upon Frikkie’s feminized body, a violence resulting from Johan Erasmus’ prohibited desire for what is other. The novel’s rhetorical association of racial oppression and homosexual rape destabilizes (by admitting same-sex desire) the hypermasculine signifiers essential to homosocial bonding at the same time that it underscores (by producing another non-white subject) the importance of race in the construction of colonial masculinity. Unpleasant odour is also a component of both the rape and the attack, a component that brings the thematic significance of the novel’s title to the fore. Earlier in the novel, the motif of the smell of apples appears as a symbol for the divinely ordained colonial project: ‘And the country was empty before our people arrived,’ [Dad said]. ‘Everything, everything you see, we built up from nothing. This is our place, given to us by God and we will look after it. Whatever the cost.’ When we got back into the car, you could smell the apples everywhere. I turned round to look at the crates on the back seat, but it was already too dark to see them. ‘Dad, do you smell the apples?’ I asked in the dark. ‘Ja, Marnus,’ Dad answered … . ‘Even the apples we brought to this country.’ (124)

The smell of apples, at first part of the process of colonial expansion, later takes on other sinister connotations. As part of Frikkie’s rape, Marnus’ father ‘takes Frikkie’s one hand and puts it between his legs. His mister is standing up out of his pyjama pants. . . .[H]e’s moving Frikkie’s hand up and down his mister’ (175). Marnus narrates: ‘Frikkie has told me about jerking off. He says you do it when you get older. But Dad says it’s masturbation and it’s a terrible sin. Dad says it’s in the Bible: Rather leave thine seed in the belly of a whore, than in the palm of thine own hand’ (175). Following Frikkie’s rape, the boys are eating apples for breakfast: ‘These apples are rotten or something,’ says Frikkie, and he turns his apple around in his hand after sniffing at it. ‘They stink. Smell this,’ and he holds the apple to my nose. I smell the apple in his hand. It smells sour. ‘Ja,’ I say. ‘There’s something wrong with it. Take another one … .’ Frikkie brings the new apple to his mouth, but he pulls a face, and says:

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Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples ‘This one, too.’ ‘Let me smell,’ I say, and take it from his hand. It smells like ordinary apple. ‘No, this one’s fine,’ I say. ‘It’s not the apple, man. It’s your hand,’ and I take his hand and sniff the inside of his palm. It smells sour. He pulls his hand back. … I pour some Dettol into his palm, and he rinses it until it has all dripped through his fingers. He sniffs his hand. ‘What do you think it was?’ I ask. Frikkie’s eyes fill with tears, and he looks down at his bare feet and shakes his head, and now I know what it is. (179)

Frikkie’s tearful attempt to get rid of the smell from his palm points to the aggressive sexuality of colonialism formerly concealed by the bucolic and relatively benign symbol of imported apples, but odour in this context also points to Little-Neville’s attack. Frikkie has ‘heard that it smells terrible when human flesh burns’ (160), and Marnus, in the hospital room, is disgusted by the smell: ‘The medicines and the ointments and everything smell too terrible, and I put my hand over my nose’ (189). In an act that emphasizes the connection between the burning of Little-Neville and the colonial project, Marnus then immediately looks out the hospital window and sees the landscape: ‘Dad says the whole of the Cape Flats used to be one big stretch of marshland. It took decades of work to dry out the marshes. Right up to the hills at Kuilsriver the government filled in the marshland to make place for more people to live. That’s how we tamed the wilderness’ (189-90). By having Marnus think of his father while gazing out over the Coloured and black townships – in fact squatter camps occupied by displaced peoples – Behr uses the motif of foul odour, first of the terroristic sexual aggression intended to maintain hegemonic masculinity and then of the results of an overt racist attack intended to maintain racial supremacy, to demonstrate the implication of aggressive sexuality in apartheid ideology. The similarities between these two scenes speak to the fact that the ideology of nationalism and the ideology of patriarchy, in that they both require dominance over an oppressed group, are inevitably going to share some of the same mechanisms. The fact that these mechanisms take the shape of similar types of bodily abuse suggests that, in the nationalism of apartheid South Africa, corporeal discipline is necessary for the construction of (and necessarily constructs) the abject categories Julia Kristeva believes are required to solidify self-identity.28 Marnus’ father raping Frikkie has the effect of feminizing him for the terroristic consolidation of hegemonic masculinity. Marnus narrates: ‘Dad and Mum don’t want Ilse and me to travel to school by train. In one week two white women were raped by Coloureds at Salt River Station. It’s the most dreadful of dreadful disgraces if a woman gets raped. Mum says it’s even dangerous these days for young boys on the train, because you get exposed to all kinds of bad influences’ (45-6). What goes unsaid because of the euphemism ‘bad influences’ is the fear of the feminizing effects wrought upon young boys should they be raped and the conscious enactment of hypermasculinity required to avoid that taint. The rape of Frikkie is both the cause and the result of his compromised masculinity, and it serves as a metaphorical warning to Marnus to protect his own masculinity. Likewise, the attack on Little-Neville by three white men, as an act of terrorism similar to

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The Homoerotics of Nationalism most racially motivated violence, enforces non-white subordination for the sake of white nationalism. Marnus’ interpellation into this brand of nationalism is a foregone conclusion, since his participation in the Angolan war is established early in the novel. Not long after the rape, however, Marnus’ father employs a combination of physical abuse and tenderness – two key components in this kind of homosocial bonding – to convince Marnus to don his camouflage suit and accept General Smith’s gift of military epaulettes. Marnus then falls asleep holding his erection and dreams that he and Frikkie are riding horses along Muizenberg Beach: ‘I laugh and turn to look at Frikkie. But it’s not Frikkie on the horse next to me. It’s Little-Neville’ (199). Marnus now explicitly associates the rape of Frikkie with the metaphorical rape of LittleNeville, not simply because Behr has shifted focus to the psycho-sexual, but because Marnus has been successfully interpellated by nationalist ideology, an outcome foreshadowed by the repeated physical abjection of non-white races throughout the novel and signaled here by his first erection. Furthermore, Marnus is actually complicit in Frikkie’s rape, believing that if Frikkie ‘wants to tell someone something, something that he doesn’t want anyone else to know, then he tells me, and only me. If he didn’t even want to tell me about Dad, then he’ll never tell anyone. And it’s right that way’ (199). Marnus ‘providing’ Frikkie for his father secures the Erasmus males’ masculinity in much the same way that his father ‘providing’ Leonore Erasmus for General Smith (signaled by the reflection of her dressing gown Marnus glimpses in General Smith’s mirror one night) secures homosocial masculinity between the generals.29 Marnus’ complicity in the rape of Frikkie signals a new irrevocable distance between the boys, a now-mandatory disruption of the continuum between the manly Marnus, soldier-in-training, and the feminized Frikkie, necessary racial and gender counterpoint. The doubled generals and the mirroring of Little-Neville in Frikkie Delport – more broadly, the novel’s concern with repetition and (in)authenticity – allow Behr to explore how masculinity attempts to resolve its state of crisis. The apparent success of Marnus’ interpellation, however, seems to have encouraged primarily pessimistic readings of the novel. David Medalie, for example, believes that the novel ‘presents the extinction of belief, of anything to believe in, in the wake of the remorseless indoctrination of apartheid ideology.’30 Rita Barnard quotes the last line of the novel, ‘the Lord’s hand is resting over False Bay’ (200), to argue that the novel reaffirms Christian patriarchal nationalism and concludes with ‘a kind of moral airlessness that may be new in South African writing.’31 While there is no doubt that The Smell of Apples is a deeply disturbing work, and while it is true that attempts at resistance in the novel are often ‘overwhelmed by aggressive masculinity and thus implicated in the patriarch’s abuse of power,’32 Behr does grant space for opposition. Marnus’ sister, Ilse, for instance, while partially trapped under the edicts of ‘proper’ femininity, is nonetheless a voice of strong compunction and discomfort over what she sees going on around her.33 Likewise, the progressive and freethinking sister of Leonore Erasmus, Tannie Karla, while bracketed off in the novel by her banishment from the family and by the restriction of her

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Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples voice to flashbacks and a single letter to her sister, is nonetheless a source of ideological interrogation. It is also Behr’s decision to end the novel on the appropriately named ‘False Bay’ that emphasizes not so much ‘moral airlessness’ but the novel’s project of highlighting the notes of discontinuity within apartheid masculinity. Falsity tends to cut across representational schemas, problematizing racist ideology precisely by pointing to its inextricability from masculinity and its predication upon same-sex, same-race signifiers. As a fiction, the aggressive and oppressive masculinity embodied in the apartheid generals is subject to rewriting, to refusal, and to resistance; it contains (but cannot restrain) the purported objects of its violence (femininity, homoeroticism) and can thus prompt us to reevaluate its building blocks. As a novel about what Eve Sedgwick calls ‘whole societies in the service of fantasy needs,’34 The Smell of Apples helps us understand the rhetoric of sexual fantasy that operates in the service of imagined communities and imagined masculinities. The Smell of Apples is fundamentally about how normative discursive constructions of race and masculinity produce the material practices of race and masculinity, including real acts of violence. But through the novel’s tone, narration, and representational strategies, Behr also supplies ironic interventions into the racist and sexist processes of feminizing, commodifying, and exchanging one’s subordinated enemies under hegemonic masculinity.

Notes 1 William Beinart, ‘Men, Science, Travel and Nature in the Eighteenth and NineteenthCentury Cape,’ Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 4 (1998): 785. 2 Robert Morrell, ‘Of Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in Southern African Studies,’ Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 4 (1998): 616. In addition to Morrell, other critics confront the role of violence in African masculinities. See, for example, Rosemary Jolly’s Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing: André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J.M. Coetzee (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996). 3 Rita Barnard, ‘The Smell of Apples, Moby-Dick, and Apartheid Ideology,’ Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 1 (2000): 207. 4 I acknowledge that Afrikaans is the language spoken by many black and other nonwhite people in South Africa, but I use the word ‘Afrikaner’ in this essay to refer to white Afrikaans-speakers. 5 As with the other vocabulary of ideology in this essay, I use the word ‘interpellation’ in the senses outlined by Louis Althusser in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971). 6 Mark Behr, The Smell of Apples (New York: Picador, 1995), 31. Subsequent page references will be given parenthetically in the text. 7 Sean Field, ‘Disappointed Men: Masculine Myths and Hybrid Identities in Windermere,’ in Changing Men in Southern Africa, ed. Robert Morrell (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa and New York: University of Natal Press and Zed Books, 2001), 217. 8 With regards to terminology, the novel, consistent with the edicts of the Act and with Marnus’ mostly successful ideological interpellation, spells ‘Coloured’ with a capital C and, obviously, omits the scare quotes or the prefix ‘so-called.’ I will do the same when referring to the racial category as understood by apartheid law and ideology, but I will use the lower-case ‘coloured,’ in quotation marks, when I wish to indicate critical distance from the tropology of the racial category. The term ‘miscegenation’ is also problematic, not least because of its primarily negative connotations. I use it to indicate the

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The Homoerotics of Nationalism genetic mixing of races but with the acknowledgement that even a neutral use of the word problematically implies the existence in the first place of pure races that can then be mixed together. 9 See Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). For more on how Bhabha’s theories are problematic in the case of ‘coloured’ identity, see Zoë Wicomb, ‘Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa,’ in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995, ed. Rosemary Jolly and Derrick Attridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91-107. 10 A valuable source on the stereotyping of ‘coloureds’ remains Vernie February’s Mind Your Colour: The ‘Coloured’ Stereotype in South African Literature (London: Kegan Paul, 1981). 11 Michiel Heyns, ‘Fathers and Sons: Structures of Erotic Patriarchy in Afrikaans Writing of the Emergency,’ Ariel 27, no. 1 (1996): 81-104. 12 Michiel Heyns, ‘The Whole Country’s Truth: Confession and Narrative in Recent White South African Writing,’ Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 1 (2000): 53. 13 Barnard, ‘The Smell of Apples, Moby-Dick, and Apartheid Ideology,’ 223. 14 Barnard, ‘The Smell of Apples, Moby-Dick, and Apartheid Ideology,’ 210. 15 The symbolically feminizing effects of male-on-male rape are well documented. For instance, in her chapter on the homophobia of empire in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), Eve Sedgwick discusses T.E. Lawrence’s emasculating rape in some detail. And for his concision, I cite Ramón Gutiérrez, who notes that in the context of some forms of Spanish masculinity, ‘To be buggered was a symbolic sign of defeat equated with femininity; to bugger was an assertion of dominance and masculinity’ [‘‘Tell Me with Whom You Walk and I Will Tell You Who You Are’: Honor and Virtue in Eighteenth-Century Colonial New Mexico,’ in Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West, ed. Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau (New York: Routledge, 2001), 28]. 16 Sedgwick, Between Men, 2. 17 Sedgwick, Between Men, 186. 18 Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 185. I draw this link between racial oppression and the abjection of homosexuality with the awareness that oppressed homosexuals and oppressed racial groups are not necessarily in league one another. Being both homosexual and profoundly racist was not uncommon in South Africa of the apartheid era. 20 Craig Smith, ‘Every Man Must Kill the Thing He Loves: Empire, Homoerotics, and Nationalism in John Buchan’s Prester John,’ NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 28, no. 2 (1995): 183. 21 Heyns, ‘Fathers and Sons,’ 82. 22 For analyses of that role, see Sandra Swart’s ‘Man, Gun and Horse: Hard Right Afrikaner Masculine Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa,’ Glen Thompson’s ‘Making Waves, Making Men: The Emergence of a Professional Surfing Masculinity in South Africa during the Late 1970s,’ and Kobus du Pisani’s ‘Puritanism Transformed: Afrikaner Masculinities in the Apartheid and Post-Apartheid Period,’ all in Morrell’s Changing Men in Southern Africa. 23 Leonore Erasmus tells us that she was in Europe when she first met Johan, a ‘young Afrikaner officer with broad shoulders and handsome face’ (69), and fell in love with him because she was homesick. Here, his masculinity and his nationality are again implicated in the matrix of heterosexual desire. 24. Richard Dollimore, ‘Desire and Difference: Homosexuality, Race, Masculinity,’ in Race and the Subject of Masculinities, ed. Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 17-44. 25 Heyns, ‘Fathers and Sons,’ 92-3. 26 See Ian Goldin, Making Race: The Politics and Economics of Coloured Identity in South Africa (London: Longman, 1987). 27 Kobena Mercer, ‘Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary,’ in The Masculinity Studies Reader, eds Rachel Adams and David Savran (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002), 190.

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Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples 28 Jolly, Colonization, Violence and Narration, xi. 29 See Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 30 This insight into the reciprocity of sexual ‘gifts’ in the novel was first articulated by Heyns in ‘Fathers and Sons.’ 31 David Medalie, ‘‘Such Wanton Innocence’: Representing South African Boyhoods,’ Current Writing 12, no 1 (2000): 48-49. 32 Barnard, ‘The Smell of Apples, Moby-Dick, and Apartheid Ideology,’ 208. 33 Medalie, ‘‘Such Wanton Innocence,’’ 54-5. 34 Barnard makes note of the deconstructive potential inherent in, for instance, Ilse’s unconventional and defamiliarizing piano rendition of the South African national anthem, a move that reveals some of the hypocrisy and ignorance at the heart of nationalistic fervor (Barnard, ‘The Smell of Apples, Moby-Dick, and Apartheid Ideology,’ 216).

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3 ‘Wild Men’ & Emergent Masculinities in Post-Colonial Kenyan Popular Fiction TOM ODHIAMBO

The moment of independence from colonialism in Africa was a time of overwhelming emotion for the liberated subject. The attainment of political freedom affected whole facets of the native African populations in extreme and different ways. Socially, culturally and economically, formerly colonized and highly policed people suddenly found themselves free to do as they wished in matters pertaining to their daily lives. Sexuality, like all other aspects of the lives of the colonized peoples, had been under surveillance and control by the colonizers, a practice of ‘disciplining’ the body of the African male (see Cooper 2003; White 2003). Social control of the lives of African men and women began at home and ended at home. In most colonial African cities the African dwellers were restricted to single room housing which implied that most men who worked and lived in these cities remained unmarried for long stretches of time, had no access to the opposite sex or were forced to leave their wives in the countryside most of the time. The practice of enforced ‘bachelorhood’ also contributed to the control of the growth of African population within urban areas. Even illicit sexual relations between unmarried African couples or prostitution were highly monitored or outlawed outright in some places. Wherever institutionalized prostitution happened, in Nairobi for instance, it was mainly in the service of members of the privileged European settler and administrative community, as in the case of officially unacknowledged presence of African women prostitutes in Nairobi in the twentieth century who served the needs of the colonial White army officers (White 1990). It is therefore correct to state that the attainment of freedoms – political, economic, social and cultural – resulted into great anticipation and anxiety in the ‘freed subject’. Personal freedom created new identities and new subjectivities, especially in the liberated African man. It is significant to appreciate the extent to which sexuality and gender are implicated and inscribed in this historic moment of the end of colonialism and the liberation of the native African populations.

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Post-Colonial Kenyan Popular Fiction Yet this convergence of the politics of sexuality and liberation has not attracted due attention in African studies, especially in Kenya. Given the dominance and prominence of men in anti-colonial struggle groups and their subsequent occupation of high office in the postcolonial governments, it is not improbable to suggest that this gender imbalance did influence cultural and social perceptions about sexuality. In fact, different modes of popular selfexpression in Africa such as music, fiction and drama address themselves, in different ways to the question of the production and deployment of different sexual and gender identities in independent Africa. In Kenya, postcolonial popular fiction dramatizes the sexual anxieties and tensions experienced within the Kenyan male urban population in the 1960s and the 1970s. A major characteristic of this fiction is the subject of sexuality. ‘Maleness’ is depicted in an intensely ‘sexualized’ manner. A type of masculinity which assumes the characteristic of ‘wild maleness’ seems to be unapologetically celebrated in this fiction. Men who are sexually ‘wild’ and ‘insatiable’, or appear to be unable to form emotionally stable relationships with women, or are seemingly in perpetual search of self-gratification, and appear to be ‘out of control’, form the majority of the characters found in this fiction. In other words, a social universe in which the sexual needs of men are paramount and women are on its periphery is constructed. But beyond the personal or the ‘masculine world’ in general, this fiction also hints at some kind of a parallel between the triumphalist liberation struggle ideals of the conquest of the (mother)land from colonial occupiers and the masculine tendencies of Kenyan men, which desires to define itself through the conquest of women in independent Kenya. This essay therefore seeks to demonstrate and argue that the fictional characters who appear as ‘wild men’ in postcolonial Kenyan popular fiction – although not necessarily the mirror image of Kenyan men in general – are indicators and suggestive of a (re-)fashioning of new masculinities as one of the many responses to a transiting and transforming social, cultural and economic environments that have at the same time generated a sense of intense (male) anxiety.

The Rise of Kenyan Popular Fiction The rise of popular fiction in Kenya can be traced to the 1970s, although a culture of writing had been in existence in the country from the pre-colonial days. Anglophone popular literature became widely published and read in the 1970s for a number of reasons including the increasing rates of literacy in the country, a broader publishing industry compared to the colonial times and the emergence of new writers whose works addressed the problems experienced by Kenyans of different social, economic and cultural categories, among others. The group of writers whose works came to be designated ‘popular’ among the reading public is made up of Meja Mwangi, Mwangi Gicheru, David Maillu, Mwangi Ruheni and Charles Mangua (Lindfors 1991). The fiction of these writers has also been characterized as mainly concerned with the problems of the urban landscape in Kenya (Kurtz, 1998). A majority of Kenyan popular fiction is set in the cities and towns of the country with very

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‘Wild Men’ & Emergent Masculinities few texts focusing on the countryside. Nairobi, the economic and political capital of Kenya, features in most of these texts because it continues to attract thousands of Kenyans from the countryside and other urban centres who are in search of education, opportunities for employment, or generally socioeconomic self-betterment. The city of Nairobi has therefore assumed the characteristic of a symbol of Kenya’s own modernity and progress and connection to the rest of the continent and the world in this literature. There are obvious reasons that account for the centrality of the city in this fiction with the most important one being that Nairobi is the commercial and economic nerve centre of Kenya. Most big businesses, financial institutions and institutions of higher learning are located in and around the city. In a sense, therefore, it provides a rich backdrop for all forms of cultural and artistic production, be it music and dance, literature, or drama. The various genres of art and literature that result from this urban landscape articulate in different ways the modes and strategies adopted by many of Nairobi’s recent and old urbanites who are ‘entering’ or settled already in its postcolonial cosmopolitan world. The anxieties, fears, worries, hopes and dreams that are found in this popular fiction of the immediate post-independence period partly underline the difficulties that resulted from the multiple and complex processes involved in exiting the colonial experience and entering the era of freedom and independence. Sexuality, especially male sexuality, was and has continued to be a key ingredient of the matrices of power, authority and social transformation undertaken by various post-colonial governments in Africa. African writers, ~ ~ whether those whose works have been canonized such as Ngugı wa Thiong’o, Ayi Kwei Armah, or Ama Ata Aidoo, or those whose writing is taken as popular such as Cyprian Ekwensi of Nigeria, David Maillu of Kenya, or Asare Konadu of Ghana, have all at one time or another engaged with the problematic of sexuality in their works. In the case of Kenyan popular fiction, it is safe to suggest that its most ‘popular’ subject has always been formulated around the topics of sex/sexuality and manhood/womanhood. In the fictional works of Maillu, Meja Mwangi, Ruheni, Mangua, Genga-Idowu, and other popular writers in Kenya, sex is used as the key imagery through which the social and cultural dynamics around gender and sexuality can be discussed, debated and explained. In other words, the popular fiction that I analyse below not only depicts the urban landscape and its new social and cultural formations, in which new ideas and practices around masculinity can be observed, but it also suggests and highlights the tensions that arise from the entanglement of different cultural and social attitudes and practices surrounding sexuality and gender.

Decolonization and ‘Manhood’ in Kenya The struggle for the independence in Kenya was waged on many fronts including an armed war between Africans and the British army and settlers, civil protests in some of the urban centres mainly involving nascent labour movements and the sending of delegations to Britain to lobby for the granting

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Post-Colonial Kenyan Popular Fiction of political and economic rights/freedoms to native Africans. These efforts at decolonization mark a key point in the manner in which sexuality and gender were to be perceived in Kenya the years after the attainment of independence. Combined with social and cultural practices that clearly defined a woman, a mother or a daughter’s status within the community, and which have been described as the ‘politics of the womb’ (Thomas 2003), the marginal position that women occupied in the decolonization process dictated their future fate in postcolonial Kenya. Although women were in the ranks of the main anticolonial movement Mau Mau (White 2003) and were also involved in other non-armed struggles, they suddenly recede into the shadows of Kenyan public life after the attainment of independence. The men have a prominent public profile through the occupation of key government and political office, ownership and management of big businesses and generally influence the society’s affairs much more than women after independence. For instance, there was not a single woman elected in the 1957 Legislative Council elections for Africans (Ogot 1995). One of the inevitable consequences of this skewed representation of men compared to women in public life beginning in the immediate postcolonial moment is that both the gender and sex matrices have continued to influence social and cultural perceptions about the roles of men and women in the country. For instance, the status given to manhood or womanhood is at time defined in terms of how men ‘expect’ to benefit from these women. Consider for example that a woman could be accorded ‘respect’ primarily because she is a sister or daughter, and therefore an economic asset as she can bring wealth to the family/community in the form of bride-price; or because she is an aunt, and therefore a member of the family/community on whom males rely for advice in such situations as marriage where she is deemed to have experience and expertise; or as a wife because she is expected to be productive and ensure the continuation of the family, the immortality of the husband’s name or the creation of wealth within her marital name (see Thomas 2003). This dynamic is therefore an exploitative one in which the woman stands limited chances of personal independence so long as she is described as a sister, a wife or even a mother. If we refer back to the image of productivity, women are associated with the soil, the cultivable land, and therefore projected as guarantors of the community’s/society’s sustenance. The symbolism attached to women as mothers, guaranteeing food and sustenance in several of the ethnic communities that make up Kenya was not transferred to post-colonial Kenya. Kenya was, and is, hardly described as the ‘motherland’ as one would have anticipated. The politically sexualized image that became important in the postcolonial era in Kenya, as elsewhere on the continent, was that of the heroes of the liberation struggle, the men who sacrificed their times and lives, and the so-called founding fathers of the nation. It gained a powerful force within the country in the form of the first president of independent Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta came to be referred to as ‘mzee’ or ‘Baba wa Taifa’ – ‘old man’ or the ‘father of the nation’ respectively. Thus the anticolonial and postcolonial national rhetoric was partially instrumental in defining the state in gender terms with men claiming state power and authority for themselves and women granted token leadership by association with men. For instance,

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‘Wild Men’ & Emergent Masculinities whereas the ruling party Kenyan African National Union (KANU) was presumably open to all Kenyans, irrespective of gender, women had their own ‘non-political’ wing, ‘Maendeleo ya Wanawake’ (Women’s Development). This distinction where men were deemed to be ‘political’ and women assumed to be content with ‘developmental’ issues permeated all levels of the society and partly explains why there have been few women parliamentarians or women political leaders in general since independence. This trend replicates itself in most African countries including the Tanzania where Tanzania African National Union (TANU) had a women’s wing (Geiger 1997) and South Africa where the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has always had a Women’s League. Thus the public sphere in Kenya was essentially male dominated and inscribed with the wishes and demands of men. The everyday language of public social transactions and interaction in Kenya constantly places ‘women’ where they presumably belong, not necessarily in the home and kitchen as gender activists have generally assumed, but under the influence of men. It seems that it is some kind of taboo for a woman to be seen to be too influential if she is in a relationship with a man, even if it is within marriage. Consider recent widespread media reports in Kenya when the president’s (first) wife challenged media claims that the president had another (presumably illegitimate) wife. Many commentators felt that the president should take ‘control’ of his family’s affairs instead of allowing a wife to have the last word on the matter. But in a country where the founding president of the nation, Jomo Kenyatta had ‘set the example,’ so to speak, by having an ‘official’ wife and ‘other’ wives who stayed out of the public gaze, the general public attitudes towards male sexual behaviour and practices to do with sex, intimacy and marriage, could be seen to be derived directly from what is taken as ‘official’ examples. Yet this scenario is also quite symbolic, especially culturally and socially, as it could reflect very common attitudes and stereotypes that define manhood and womanhood prevailing within several ethnic and social categories in the Kenyan society. It is possible to argue that the anti-colonial struggle, the achievement of independence and the steering of the Kenyan nation-state into modernity were all defined in male terms. Given that in the traditional philosophies of many Kenyan ethnic groups it had been the responsibility of men to protect and defend the home, village, the community or the tribe, it has not been difficult to project men in a similar role in present Kenya. Struggles over power, resources, social space, and cultural practices have ended up being reformulated and waged in the landscape of gender and sexuality.

‘Hedonistic’ Town Boys and ‘Free’ Girls The 1970s can be described as the years of consolidation in postcolonial Africa. In Kenya, for instance, the process of ‘Africanization’ that allowed native Kenyans to be fast-tracked into government service, the business and commercial sectors and most public institutions was reaching its saturation point. Native African Kenyans, it could be argued, were in control of the country’s destiny economic and political. The country also enjoyed political

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Post-Colonial Kenyan Popular Fiction and economic stability during this period. The social and economic life of the country appears then to begin to be defined in material and consumption terms. The lifestyles of urban Kenyans, as depicted in the popular fiction referred to here, seems to suggest a strong yearning for material things and a social space in which the individual’s consumptive patterns mark him or her as successful or a failure compared to other members of the society. Patterns of behaviour that signal one’s sexual proclivities and gender biases also seem to take on similar consumptive tendencies. In novels such as Unfit for Human Consumption (1973), My Dear Bottle (1973) and After 4.30 (1974) by David Maillu; Son of Woman (1971) by Charles Mangua; Going Down River Road (1976) and Cockroach Dance (1979) by Meja Mwangi; and Mwangi Ruheni’s Future Leaders (1973) and The Minister’s Daughter (1975) the propensity by men to articulate their sense of manhood or masculinity through the characterization of ‘women as goods’, women as sources of pleasure for men or women as ‘consumables’ emerges forcefully. The freedom attained by political liberation and economic empowerment in postcolonial Kenya that I alluded to above mainly placed resources in the hands of men both as workers – government employees and in the other sectors of the economy – and the controllers of incomes that accrued to households in general. The urban working population in the immediate postindependence period was largely made up of many ‘unattached’, unmarried, bachelor or single men, partly deriving from the colonially imposed systems of regulating populations in urban areas. Some of these men were ‘single’ by choice, because they had not yet entered into relationships with women given the limited numbers of unattached women in the towns and cities of Kenya at the time. Others had been forced by various circumstances to leave their women in the countryside. These women were expected to take care of the rural ‘homes’ and families as the men left to work and earn money elsewhere. Inevitably, because these men had disposable income which they could use at their own pleasure, they indulged themselves in several ways. Generally these urban men had two significant modes of spending their time and money: they sought pleasure and leisure in alcohol and women. This is the group that is described as seeking ‘kula raha’ (Odhiambo, 2003). The literal translation of the phrase ‘kula raha’ is ‘to eat leisure’, and as Odhiambo demonstrates, this social group sought gratification in indulging in all manners of activities ranging from beer drinking, attending dances, wearing fancy clothes to the purchase of the latest models of material good such as gramophone players, motorcycles or bicycles, items that at the time indistinctly signaled the individual’s socio-economic position. But beer drinking and sex are the two key markers of the lot of early urban Kenyan men’s lifestyles, at least according to the fiction by Maillu, Mangua, Mwangi and Ruheni. In other words, these men’s gender identities became inscribed by their adoption of new forms of lifestyles that were predicated on their place within the socioeconomic structures of independent Kenya. The category of men that I refer to here is made up mainly of young individuals. They had secondary education or post-secondary level of education and even some had a university degree. The most analyzed of these characters is Dodge Kiunyu, the protagonist of Charles Mangua’s Son of

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‘Wild Men’ & Emergent Masculinities Woman. Dodge’s life mirrors a pattern of cyclic social degeneration that seems to be the fate of many underprivileged individuals in postcolonial Kenya. He is born of a prostitute mother. He does not know his father. He ends up cohabiting with a prostitute in a relationship that can only be best described as false marriage. His whole life revolves around two things: women and alcohol. His association with women begins and ends with a single word: sex. Dodge’s background in which the father figure is absent and a mother who shamelessly entertained male clients in his presence seems to have predetermined his future perceptions and dealings with women. For him, women are consumables, just like the beer that he drinks endlessly. In his words, ‘Son of Woman, that’s me. I am a blinking louse and I am the jigger in your toe. I am a hungry jigger and I like to bite. I like to bite women – beautiful women. Women with tits that bounce. If you do not like the idea you are the type I am least interested in’ (Mangua 1988:1). Dodge’s social life is marked by the women in his life including his dead mother, his neighbour’s daughter, Tonia (with whom he had his first sexual encounter). The same albeit ‘reformed’ Tonia becomes his future wife. Tonia too is a prostitute’s daughter. The whole of Kinama’s life is a study in serial sexual exploits. He appears as an individual whose desires for sex and alcohol are beyond his control. If Dodge likes to ‘bite’ beautiful women as he claims, Jonathan Kinama in David Maillu’s Unfit for Human Consumption imagines and carries himself as an expert in matters of women and sex (Maillu 1971: 5). Standing in a bank queue one day, this is the imagery that runs through his mind: Kinama’s eyes rested on one girl, yes, that one – a fat girl armed with huge breasts, and highly pronounced buttocks, obviously soft and comfortable, luxurious. There was something more of great interest about her. Her legs. Thickly set legs, beautiful of course, and enthusiastically polished by nature in chocolate brown. And she protected them in the latest fashion of stockings. A bird that fitted too well in her mini dress, a mahogany mini which matched very well with her body. Kinama calculated in his mind and passed her as a sexy bird. (5-6)

In a language and tone that is slightly differs from that used by Dodge in describing women, Kinama’s idea of the members of the opposite sex is one of edibles. Kinama’s obsession with female companions, sex and alcohol eventually leads to his death when he commits suicide. Prior to his death, he had been caught in a ‘love triangle’ in which he seduced his friend’s girlfriend. He is badly injured in the ensuing fight. Finally he hangs himself after he is found out to have been lying about his frequent absenteeism from work when his wife who is based in the country-side arrives in the city to look for him and unwittingly reveals that Kinama had never been to his rural home contrary to his claims. He has been avoiding going to work because of his sexual exploits and drinking binges. In an ironic twist, the novella’s title ‘unfit for human consumption’ makes a resounding warning about the dangers of excesses in the city. Compared to Kiunyu and Kinama the two protagonists of Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road, Ben and Ocholla calibrate their lives with two items,

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Post-Colonial Kenyan Popular Fiction prostitutes and cheap illicit liquor, continuing a very familiar pattern in these urban melodramas. Yet when Ben’s prostitute girlfriend Wini abandons him one day, he decides to repress the fact that he met her in a bar while she was soliciting for clients and that he knew well that one day she would surely depart when she found a better-paying client or a man who could take care of her needs. In a moment of alcohol-induced anger Ben swears, ‘Bitches! All women are dogs. They will lay with anybody for anything. Bitches, bitches… (Mwangi 1980: 115). The narrator aptly summarizes this life of alcohol and transactional sex when he describes the setting of one of the drinking houses frequented by Ocholla and Ben. He says: This is what the New Eden is all about. Since Adam fought for the only woman with the devil and lost, this is how far we have come. The women are determined to make a living. The men are out for a quiet evening away from the nagging wife. There are no rules, no holds barred in Eden. You use whatever you’ve got to get whatever you want. And the needs of the people are in the joint; a coin, a drink or a lay. (123-124)

There are plenty of ‘free’ girls such as Wini and the ones Ben refers to above in many Kenyan popular novels. I use the word ‘free’ here to connote several things. These women are partially independent and not under any control from any other persons. Free could also imply that they are unmarried, separated from their husbands or widowed. Lastly, I refer to these girls as ‘free’ because they are depicted as accessible to any man who is capable of offering them money in exchange for sex. The moral economy of this kind of society is dependent largely on men’s desires and their purchasing powers. Women are definitely pawns in this game which is controlled by men. The men arrogate themselves the opportunities to access these women whenever they desire whilst the women, as passive subjects remain eternally at the service of men. Promiscuous behaviour, serial and multiple sexual partners, several so-called girlfriends, beer and women are part of the daily routine of pleasure-seeking amongst most of these male characters; one’s identity as a man about town is measured in terms of how many women one can afford, and can have sex with, or even one’s ability to entice away women from male friends. In other words, manhood is characterized by ‘bullish’ behaviour or the desire to perform one’s virility to the maximum and attain the status of a ‘total’ man (Muriungi 2002) whilst what has been termed ‘proper’ woman is taken as a key feature of womanhood (Ogden 1996). The hedonistic indulgences of these men strips women of agency, almost de-humanizing them as in the case of Ocholla offering Ben one of his prostitutes: ‘Let’s go to Eden, Ben. My harlots are all there. You must have a woman too, Ben. How is your harlot wife? Oh, I remember she left … the baby. Hell, let’s hurry before they are picked by someone else. Those harlots are bastards’ (Mwangi 191). In a context where social life imitates political practices in the postcolonial Africa when men divided power amongst themselves, the likes of Ocholla and Ben selfrighteously imagine women as their subjects, to be conquered and shared sexually the post-independence period to the exclusion of women, they still share out women.

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The ‘Phallic Mentality’ and the Impulse to Self-Destruction The other category of the ‘wild men’ in this fiction is the middle aged group or older men, compared to the individuals in the age or socio-economic status of the group that I discuss above. These men are depicted in the fiction as generally well established managers, heads of government institutions or fairly rich individuals who have accumulated wealth after long periods of employment or through business. Most of them are married men. What typifies this lot within the discursive notion of ‘wild men’ is their seemingly unquestioned belief in their sexual prowess/powers and a pursuit of activities presumably meant to underscore their virility. It is therefore common to come across wealthy and supposedly happily married men whose pursuit of younger women is simply for the reason of having a sexual relationship. Without doubt, most of these endeavours are ill-advised and have dire consequences for the men. A typical example of such behaviour and its aftermath of self-destruct is narrated by David Maillu in his novella No! (1976). The blurb of the book describes the storyline in the following words: This is a terrifying story of a wealthy civil servant, Mr. Washington Ndava, the genius who makes hay while the sun shines, and one who knows how to play his cards very well. But one day Washington Ndava made a big move and was horrified to discover too late that he had sold his goods at an extremely cheap bargain. Else, Washington Ndava had tried to arrow a bird flying high above his head and had forgotten where the arrow had gone!

Ndava’s story details the most extreme fate of emasculation that can befall a man. As a matter of routine Ndava who is described as a man who ‘bought beer generously for everybody. And provided men for many men’ sleeps with one of his married subordinates. But when Ndava plans to meet her for sex one day but the woman’s husband, who also works under Ndava, suspecting the illicit arrangement and unable to withstand more humiliation of knowing that Ndava regularly seduced his wife colludes with her to thwart Ndava’s plans. The husband hires thugs who ambush Ndava at the rendezvous and chop off his penis! His whole world comes crashing down. This horrible act, in Ndava’s estimation, equals death. His social world, which is defined by his capacity and ability to seduce or manipulate women into sexual relationships using his wealth or position of authority, is no longer viable in the absence of his phallus. Ndava’s case is a natural progression from the type of male behaviour that Maillu depicts in his other most popular texts, After 4.30 and My Dear Bottle. The type of male character found in After 4.30, especially the Boss, is parasitic to say the least. It is instructive that in After 4.30 Maillu uses the voice of women to tell stories of male harassment, sexploitation and marginalization at home and the workplace. Lili, the main speaker in After 4.30, invites readers to journey with her through her whole life from childhood to the present. It begins with the father killing her mother when the latter complains about his harsh treatment of Lili. Then Lili’s husband and father of her two children

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Post-Colonial Kenyan Popular Fiction chases her away from home threatening to kill her without giving a reason for his behaviour. As a single mother of two children and employed as secretary, she silently suffers her harassment from her Boss who seek sexual favours whenever it suits him. She is not safe even from policemen on the streets who routinely arrest her on false accusations of being a prostitute only to assault her sexually. In frustration and anger, Lili condemns men, denouncing them as selfish, exploitative and inhuman. This is what she has to say about how men perceive their relationship with women: I don’t shake/when a man tells me/I love you/even drunks say that/all rogues and murderers/say that/when erect. I’ve seen many/one night loves. It touches me no more/when a man calls me/sweetheart, darling, and says/he loves me beyond bounds/in a love that dies with one fuck. (Maillu 1987: 3).

The words chosen by Lili to describe how men treat women, how they conceive of their relationships, or how they position themselves vis-a-vis women is devoid of reference to intimacy, love, companionship or emotional interest. The emphasis that she places on the parasitic and dominating nature of men in any form of sexual relationship with women reveals deeply ingrained male notions of control and exploitation of women. She says: ‘The world is made by men/for men/women live on the leavings/there is no democracy/between man and woman’ (20). The one thing ruling the universe of the type of men found in Lili’s life, is the penis. Throughout her narrative, she does not mention a single instance where a man contracts a relationship with her that could be described as mutually intimate, loving and respectful. It seems that all that the men seek from her is sex and more sex. Her body is objectified as pleasure-giving but nothing more. The male bodies appear as pleasure seeking and pleasure receiving. By virtue of their position in society, men can transact in women’s bodies or can evolve social, cultural and economic strategies that readily put female bodies at their disposal. One Dikison Ngoloma in No!, also known as Diki (dick) summarizes the (pre)occupation of most of the male characters when he proclaims: ‘My game? Kissing, fucking and drinking’ (34). Indeed My Dear Bottle is one man’s song of appreciation to alcohol which he claims enables him to indiscriminately indulge his sexual desires without inhibition. A study of prostitution in colonial Nairobi reveals a male determined world in which women are structurally relegated to the margins of the social, economic and political actions that impact directly on their lives (White 1990). Consequently the availability of their bodies as sexual objects was one of the few mechanisms through which they could re-enter the public social sphere. But even when women such as the prostitute entrepreneurs of Majengo slums that White’s study focuses on manage to penetrate the socioeconomic structures of Kenyan society, their position is still marginal when compared to men like Washington Ndava. Because they are privileged such men use their positions of authority and influence, their wealth or even at times the mere fact of being men (given that men are generally socialized in many societies as the active subjects in situations of intimacy), to coerce, intimidate, deceive or induce women into sexual relationships. Their access to women is smoothed by money and other material possessions and

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‘Wild Men’ & Emergent Masculinities heightened by the weak socio-economic position of most women. This pursuit of women even when they are married can reach suicidal proportions. As we have seen above, Ndava’s pursuit and sexual exploitation of Brigita, his personal secretary when he knows that she is married leads eventually to his horrible end. His unquestioned belief in his powers and riches drives him to an avoidable death. The obsession with sexual prowess and ability to form and maintain a string of sexual relationships points to two realities that the authors of this fiction seem to be suggesting. The first is the idea that a ‘true’ man is one who can control women. Historically the study of sexuality in Africa, especially in those societies where patriarchy orders social life, has identified male control over females as the key instrument of wielding power. The second is the association made between wealth and virility, a point that has been made by Nye (2005) in reference to another context. Virility and rampant sexuality dominate the social lives of many men in postcolonial Africa, especially those who have access to money. Because such men have freedom to choose women with whom to associate – considering that polygamy is still widely practised in Africa – cases of abandoned wives abound. For instance, in the texts that we have referred to the following examples illustrate this situation: Ocholla’s two wives live in the countryside whilst he wastes all the money that he earns on alcohol and prostitutes; Kinama equally drinks his salary or spends it on prostitutes whilst his wife lives alone in his rural home; Ndava has a wife at home even as he relentlessly pursues Brigita; whilst Lili’s husband throws her out of the matrimonial home. There is little doubt that the ‘other’ women are wanted mainly for non-intimate, sexual and temporary affairs, or to be ‘shown off’, or as adornments to the men’s public personalities. Generally it is the men who are in charge of such relationship and these women are not expected to enter into any other relationship with other men.

Conclusion Moments of transition naturally induce anxiety in individuals. New social and cultural contexts can be confounding and at times produce new modes of individual and collective behaviours. How individuals experience and react to such dynamics depends on several factors. Definitely identities are altered and new ones assumed in such times. Because men are generally in positions of advantage compared to women in many societies, they are likely to experience such changes faster compared to women. However, these changes can operate to highlight and entrench some of the inequalities in society, especially with reference to gender relationships. Postcolonial Kenyan popular fiction seems to suggest that, assuming that indeed art can mirror some social realities, Kenyan men in the post-independence period acquired identities that were mainly articulated in the imagery of hedonism, sexual conquest and the control of women. Although one would have expected that women would have enjoyed social freedom and choice in matters pertaining to their sexuality in the postliberation Kenyan society without the fear of institutionalized government surveillance or control by men, this does not

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Post-Colonial Kenyan Popular Fiction seem to have been the case, at least according to popular fiction. Instead it appears that liberty brought the Kenyan woman’s body under intense gaze of the man, consequently leading to new forms of sexual control and social discipline. Men on the other hand seem to have become ‘undisciplined’ indulging in excessive consumption of sex and alcohol. It is important to stress that analyses of masculinity in postcolonial African societies should seriously consider the many historical contingencies such as colonialism, new foreign cultures, globalization, traditional African practices, and such others that have always determined social life on the continent. Added to this consideration should be a subtler engagement with the constantly transforming moral landscape that has and continues to shape individual and group behaviours of most African men. The complexity and at times the confusion caused by the continued presence or reliance on residual traditional African modes of perception on subjects such as manhood on the one hand and the expectations of modern life which are dependent significantly on highly dynamic Western (Christian influenced) cultures, continue to impact in many varied and unexpected ways on men’s understanding of their manhood. For instance, the family in general – and women in particular – ends up highly destabilized. Kenyan popular fiction seems to point to family and social dysfunction as partly deriving from the overly masculine mindset among Kenyan men (Odhiambo 2003). The uncontrollable pursuit of sex and alcohol excesses although suggesting attempts by men to cope with an ever-changing social reality suggest a society at risk of moral collapse.

Bibliography Cooper, F. 2003. ‘Industrial Man Goes to Africa,’ in L.A. Lindsay and S.F. Miescher, eds, Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Geiger, Susan. 1997. Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism 1955-1965. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. Genga-Idowu, F. 1993. Lady in Chains. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. Kurtz, R. 1998. Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears: the Postcolonial Kenyan Novel. Oxford: James Currey. Lindfors, B. 1991. Popular Literatures in Africa. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press. Maillu, D. 1973. Unfit for Human Consumption. Nairobi: Comb Books ——. 1973 [Revised manuscript, 2001]. My Dear Bottle. Nairobi: Comb Books. Maillu, D. 1974 [1987]. After 4.30. Nairobi: Comb Books. Nairobi: Maillu Publishing House Limited. ——. 1976. No! Nairobi: Comb Books. Mangua, C. 1971 [1988]. Son of Woman. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. Muriungi, A. 2002. ‘The ‘Total/Real’ Man and the ‘Proper’ Woman: Safe Sex, Risk and Gender in Meja Mwangi’s The Last Plague,’ in English Studies in Africa 45.2 Mwangi, M. 1976 [1980]. Going Down River Road. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. ——. 1979. The Cockroach Dance. Nairobi. East African Educational Publishers. Nye, Robert A. ‘Locating Masculinity: Some recent work on men,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30.3 (2005): 1937-62. Odhiambo, A. 2002. ‘Kula Raha: Gendered Discourses and the Contours of Leisure in Nairobi, 1946-1963,’ in Andrew Burton, ed., The Urban Experience in Eastern Africa, c. 1750-2000. Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa. Odhiambo, T. 2003. ‘Troubled Love and Marriage as Work in Kenyan Popular Fiction,’ in Social Identities 9.3.

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‘Wild Men’ & Emergent Masculinities Ogden, J.A. 1996. ‘‘Producing’ respect: the ‘proper woman’ in postcolonial Kampala,’ in R. Werbner and T. Ranger, eds, Postcolonial Identities in Africa. London: Zed Books. Ogot, B.A. 1995. ‘Decolonization and Independence in Kenya: The Decisive Years,’ in B.A. Ogot and W.R. Ochieng, eds, Decolonization and Independence in Kenya. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. Nye, Robert. 2005. ‘Locating Masculinity: Some Recent Work.’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30, 3. Ruheni, M. Future Leaders. 1973. Nairobi: Heinemann. ——. The Minister’s Daughter. 1975. Nairobi: Heinemann. Thomas, L. 2003. The Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press. White, L. 1990. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2003. ‘Matrimony and Rebellion: Masculinity in Mau Mau,’ in L.A. Lindsay and S.F. Miescher, eds, Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

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4 The Anonymity of Manhood Unmasking Shadow Selves in Assia Djebar’s Ombre sultane N A J AT R A H M A N

Assia Djebar, the Algerian writer, filmmaker, and scholar, has gained wide international fame and recognition and has most recently, in June 2005, been admitted to the Académie Française. Her work addresses, in many forms, the quest for identity and for freedom for herself, for Algerians and for all women, and whose work tirelessly challenges oppressive elements of her tradition. This she does by inscribing women’s voices into the history of Algeria and the history of Islam. While much of the criticism written on Djebar’s work has justifiably treated her centering on women, little attention has been given to related aspects of her work, including the representation of masculine identity. Even if paternity figures prominently in such works as L’amour, la fantasia, and throughout her works in its concern for heritage, it is the role of the husband that is directly addressed in Ombre sultane. Likewise, it is interesting to note that the figures of the brother and the son are fleeting in her work. This is perhaps because the writing of Djebar is almost always foregrounded as a writing of a woman who has to contend with a dominant paternal heritage that has manifested its most social limitations for the narrator in the marriage of the couple. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ombre sultane, a story entirely dedicated to the failure of a marriage. In this work, it is not only the husband’s role that will be examined in relation to troubled masculinity but also that of Isma, the narrator. Isma partakes of the husband’s role in her relation to Hajila. Furthermore, she embodies both male and female identities, as she is both subject of the narrative gaze and object of its desire. The shadow to the solidarity story of sisters is precisely the reality of the rivalry, the complicity in a patriarchal system, and the internalization by Isma of its masculine structures of desire and of identity in her quest for self and for freedom. The shadow of masculine identity is revealed as its violence and moral impotence, but that identity is also revealed as a shadow, anonym, dead, empty, displaced. No longer anchored in homosocial relations, it seems to be free-floating. The

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The Anonymity of Manhood dangers that are highlighted by this masculine self do not escape being enacted by the narrator in her effacement of her characters. A structure of doubling, of androgyny, of internalization, and of rivalry through triangulation, reveals a complex treatment of masculine identity. This novel presents the story of troubled masculinity as it manifests itself in marriage, and it is marriage again that is proposed as a false solution to it. Most immediately, it presents the story of Hajila, the new wife whom Isma has chosen for her husband in order to replace her and in order to free herself from the marriage. Nothing significant is divulged about the husband, except for his destructive behavior. While he seems able to provide for his family as evidenced by the nice apartment and car, it is the husband’s increased drinking and violence against the wives that is of import. Hajila’s story centers on her confinement and her resistance to it, as she leaves the apartment without his authorization or knowledge, to the dismay of her mother. When she is forbidden to do so and is guarded by her mother in her illness and pregnancy, Isma intervenes by giving Hajila a key to the apartment to use. Hajila ultimately leaves and hurls herself in front of traffic, as Isma follows her, her fate uncertain. Isma leaves town with her daughter to begin anew in her native city. Through the story of Hajila, the husband is revealed as one lacking authority. Isma, the narrator, is a French-educated woman who has escaped the harem and has struggled to live a life of the intimate couple. Through her address to Hajila, she seeks to move beyond the confinement she carries within: she thought she had escaped the fate of her sisters only to discover that her quest for self and for freedom remain uncharted for women. Her narration reveals, however, charted male structures of effacement. The novel, which is essentially an address from Isma to Hajila, also structurally absents the husband. This is also the story of an absent husband who is present only in terms of the violence he has previously enacted upon Isma, and currently enacts on Hajila, a modern day Shahrayar. Unnamed, he is only identified in the role of ‘impotent’ husband or ‘the man’.

Textual Affiliations of Ombre sultane Ombre sultane is the first part of the quartet L’amour, la fantasia, Ombre sultane, Loin de Médine and Vaste est la prison, but it appeared second, however. Unlike the first novel, L’amour, la fantasia, which spans Algeria’s national history, Ombre sultane focuses more on the private realm: it explores the realities of Algerian women confined to the home. It also exposes the present reality of the men insisting on such confinement. In this novel, it is the space of the home that becomes the center of the struggle for women as Hajila resists her confinement and as Isma traverses the consequences of escaping this confinement through time. The novels of the quartet continue one another. It is in L’amour, la fantasia that Djebar addresses Algeria’s history from the actual war of conquest to after the war of independence. The historical account of this text begins with the capture of Algiers in 1830 and extends to the War of Independence of 1954-62. For covering the War of Conquest, Djebar relies on her archival research and

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Unmasking Shadow Selves in Assia Djebar’s Ombre sultane obscure fragments of eye- witness accounts written at the time by participants in the war who wrote either for publication or simply to their own families. The oral testimonies of the women who participated in the struggle form the basis for covering the War of Independence. In Ombre sultane, however, Algeria’s history is nonetheless present, particularly in reference to the men: Hajila’s father and ‘the man,’ as we know from L’amour, la fantasia, were in the resistance. However, the historical significance of Ombre sultane is its anticipation of the increasing confinement and exclusion of women with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. The novel was published in 1987 and ends on the ominous warning: ‘O, my sister, I who thought to wake you, I’m afraid … I fear lest we all find ourselves in chains again, in ‘this West in the Orient’, this corner of the earth where day dawned so slowly for us that twilight is already closing in around us everywhere’ (Djebar 1993: 160, I will be using this English translation of the novel for all that follows). The final image that Djebar leaves us with is the image that links Hajila to a younger Isma in L’amour, la fantasia, linking the two women and the two novels, the women escaping confinement, unprepared, blindly hurling themselves into the public space, in a desperate act before being hit by a tram or a car. And the man of the home has become a true ‘enemy,’ absent and destructive, while strangers are forced to intervene and face the damage. The image is connected to another image of ‘cutting [one’s self] adrift’ which recalls in L’amour, la fantasia the violent image of the invading colonial ships of the War of Algiers, so that individual emancipation is tightly linked to collective emancipation in this paradoxical image of severing, but also that this violent colonial legacy bears directly on this present social predicament that has refashioned tradition to its presumably more authentic gender relations. This novel is also a response to the prologue of A Thousand and One Nights. In this reinterpretation of the prologue, the emphasis is on the sisters, on the complicity of Scheherazade and her sister to escape nothing short of death and to manoeuvre this fragile balance between death and sovereignty over self. The sister in blood relations is not a permissible rival, Djebar emphasizes, since the sister is forbidden to polygamy. Isma is represented as sister, as ‘the impossible rival’ (Djebar 1993: 108). The novel is ultimately an addressing of the wound, the derra or co-wife, as Isma speaks to Hajila directly in her narration: it is an attempt to redress this wound, and therefore heal it (Djebar 1993: 91). In this rewriting of A Thousand and One Nights, the sultan is now truly in the shadows. In the prologue, the man is identified as Shahrayar. His source of authority is accounted for as sultan. We also know that he marries each night and kills each day as a vengeful act of a cuckold husband. We furthermore have a context for such behaviour: the visit of the brother that instigated the revelation, the wandering, the serial weddings/murders, and ultimately Scheherazade’s ‘reformation’ of the sultan. In Djebar’s rewriting, the source of this male authority is simply in tradition, but unclear in the present. And tradition relies on inherited myths that have translated into long overdrawn cultural practices. The novel itself invokes practices of polygamy as particular practices, for it seems to make a distinction between an Islam anchored in sacred text

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The Anonymity of Manhood and specific traditions of it. ‘And what about Sidi Maamar’s curse?’ another asked. ‘Islam is one...The law cannot change, it is the same everywhere from our town to faraway Medina; I don’t need any fiqh or learned doctor from the Zitouna to explain it to me!’ (Djebar 1993: 122) And in this textual instance, it is Sidi Maamar’s local brand of belief that wins over orthodox Islam in the practices of marriage. When speaking of polygamy, which was arguably sanctioned in the Qur’an with a competing set of qualifications of how the co-wives must be treated equally and of how it is impossible to do so, Djebar again presents the issue as particular to a place: ‘For, in our land, the man has a right to four wives simultaneously, as much as to say, four…wounds’ (ibid.: 91). The place of Islam as an ordering institution of ‘manhood,’ ‘masculinity,’ and ‘man-ness’ is undeniable, and Djebar treats this quite directly in her novels, Loin de Médine and L’amour, la fantasia, where disorder is written into paternity. The heritage of Abraham for Djebar is the heritage of Ishmael and his mother: exile and repudiation. (ibid.: 302). And this heritage is replayed in Islam for her. Political strife embedded in the Islamic community will have its familial roots. The multiple marriages of Muhammad never guarantee any unity or order in the household. She recalls specifically Fatima and her inability to inherit either spiritually or materially from her father. (ibid.: 78). While Djebar increasingly links the legacy of Muhammad to that of Abraham, locating Islam within this fixed paternal heritage of displacement and dispossession, she also points to the separations of traditions inherited. In focusing on the father-daughter relationship, Djebar recalls Muhammad’s own forgotten intervention on behalf of his daughter against polygamy. (Djebar 1991: 68-9). Djebar’s Ombre sultane also responds to orientalist fantasies of the harem. The husband’s pitiful state reveals its humiliating reality. It is only Touma who still believes in this male authority, in spite of the fact that she once ruled over her husband. The man is more anonymous than the women and ineffectual, for Isma leaves him, as does Meriem, as will Hajila on her daily outings, and he is almost passive in his own destiny, in his own marriage, in his own life. It is Isma in fact who is both Scheherazade and Shahrayar, in this rewriting, though she would highlight the Scheherazade/ Dunyazade sister dyad. It is Isma who tells the story and who sets it in motion, instigating its events through the formation of a second marriage for her husband. She actively conjures Hajila in her narration’[a]s if, in truth, I were causing you to exist’, while she actively effaces the man. In the prologue, Shahrayar is ever present as listener and potential menace (Djebar 1993: 82). In Djebar’s account, the man is also menacing in his violent indifference.

The Shadow of Male Identity in Ombre sultane While Djebar centers on the necessity of awareness, of solidarity, and of sisterhood in this novel, not only for the survival of women, as in A Thousand and One Nights, but also for self-realization, her emphasis on sisterhood is inextricably linked with her treatment of masculine identity in this text. Djebar seems to highlight masculine identity precisely in its generality. The

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Unmasking Shadow Selves in Assia Djebar’s Ombre sultane husband, referred to as ‘the man’, is nameless and presented in the role of every man. He is paradoxically devoid of identity, of history, and of context, even as we know of that national history in L’amour, la fantasia. Sparsely characterized except for his impotence, he is both literally so on the sexual level and metaphorically so, on a moral one. Such impotence culminates in his act of rape. His incapacity also relates to his social identity: He reveals a discrepancy between effective social presentation of his role as provider for his family and male-female relations that coalesce into a crisis in male identity and reveal an alienated self. He is the modern man who can provide for leisurely living but is unable to come to terms with the social transformations taking place, so that he is unable to continue with Isma and moves to a more traditional arrangement with Hajila, one that Hajila herself cannot accept. He is anonymous: certainly not named but possibly unable to be named or to be identified in his present. Implicitly, such anonymity can suggest the illegitimacy of authority and can also carry the meaning of a lack of acknowledgement, so that the modern Isma, like her more traditional sisters will only refer to her husband as ‘he’ or in more extreme form, as female tradition has it in the husband’s family in Vaste est la prison, as the ‘enemy’. Such representation of masculinity is carefully contextualized by Djebar in terms of dominant social reality and cultural history – whether that of A Thousand and One Nights, Algerian nationalism, colonialism, or patriarchy. In all contexts, Djebar focuses on the violent shadow of this performance of manhood. In this she highlights the socio-political dangers of such manifestations of masculinity. Isma on the other hand enacts some of these manifestations while identifying their dangers, as I will argue further. If manliness has traditionally been linked with virility and paternity in the larger Arab world, as Julie Peteet indicates, then his manhood raises further questions (Peteet 2000: 107). Not only is he already a father but he also proves his continued virility by fathering again. This manliness is of course complicated by the act of rape that presumably produces the possibility of fatherhood. It is also complicated by the possible abortion, an act that is entertained by Hajila and its possibility facilitated by Isma. In elaborating a general definition of manliness based on ethnographic work, Peteet further writes: ‘Arab masculinity (rujulah) is acquired … in …expressions of fearlessness and assertiveness. It is attained by constant vigilance and willingness to defend honor (sharaf), face (wajh), kin and community from external aggression and to uphold and protect cultural definitions of gender-specific propriety’ (Peteet 2000: 107). While the move to elaborate a general Arab masculinity and to apply it to specific cases such as Algeria may be problematic, it may be nonetheless provisionally useful to test out the constructions presented in the text. For the man diligently attempts to safeguard a sense of ‘gender-specific propriety’. The real problem with his manhood is of another order altogether, and that is in the moral realm. The rape complicates the paternity; and the defense of his honor is compromised by his decrepit state, which is manifested in the drinking, the beating, the jealous rages, and the indifference. This is what essentially leads Isma to leave him, Hajila to ignore him, and Meriem to seek shelter with her mother. This is what undermines his authority as husband, man, and father. And yet while Djebar includes a

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The Anonymity of Manhood section in this novel to show that such moral failures are not specific to this particular man, what she changes, however, is the women’s responses to it, in the form of Isma choosing a divorce and Hajila resisting such a home life. And the changes the women make will presumably hold the men accountable. What is less clear in the novel is the source of such moral decrepitude outside of the actual behaviour itself. The context is alluded to in the rewriting of the Scheherazade story, as an important cultural myth, in the allusion to colonialism, as legacy of violence and disconnection, to failed national promises borne out by Touma’s complaints, to contradictions between overdrawn traditional practices and modern life as lived out by Hajila. A displacement of maleness occurs within a triangular structure of (past) love and (present) rivalry in which the women orbit around the same man and in which ‘the man’, in the spirit of Shahrayar, fears being cuckolded by another man. Eve Sedgewick (1985) cites René Girard’s book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, which speaks of the dynamic of this rivalry: [I]n any erotic rivalry, the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved: that the bonds of ‘rivalry’ and ‘love,’ differently as they are experienced, are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent. For instance, Girard finds many examples in which the choice of the beloved is determined in the first place, not by the qualities of the beloved, but by the beloved’s already being the choice of the person who has been chosen as a rival. In fact, Girard seems to see the bond between rivals in an erotic triangle as being even stronger, more heavily determinant of actions and choices, than anything in the bond between either of the lovers and the beloved. (Sedgwick 1985: 21)

This rivalry can be seen not only between Isma and Hajila but also between Isma and ‘the man’ and between the man and the imagined male rivals, as evidenced by his episodes of paranoiac jealousies. He lashes out against Hajila, as he did against Isma. This male rivalry expresses itself in the fear of cuckoldry, a bond that necessitates the sharing of the woman as a medium: The bond of cuckoldry…[is] necessarily hierarchical in structure, with an ‘active’ participant who is clearly in the ascendancy over the ‘passive’ one. Most characteristically, the difference of power occurs in the form of a difference of knowledge: the cuckold is not even supposed to know that he is in such a relationship. (ibid.: 50)

This implied male rivalry is written in the man’s relation to women.

Doublings of Identities Djebar complicates the distinction between self and other through doubling, creating a mirroring effect between Isma and Hajila, but also between Isma and the husband and between Hajila and ‘the man’. In the case of Isma and Hajila, the resemblance between the sisters will forever separate them as rivals. Isma tells her story in telling Hajila’s. Although Isma’s story at the beginning is a love story juxtaposed to Hajila’s present, Isma’s end reaches the

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Unmasking Shadow Selves in Assia Djebar’s Ombre sultane same point as Hajila’s beginning. Their stories continue one another, while the husband becomes the tenuous other in this narrative. Hajila replaces Isma as wife and as mother of the children. Hajila is also the shadow of Isma’s voice, for it is Isma’s narration that names Hajila and hence creates her. Furthermore, Hajila is the object of study for the narrator; and in this ultimate examination of self, certain structures of the harem seem to be unwittingly retained. The silence of the second wife is maintained even in the narration. Hajila does not have her own voice in this text. She is narrated as an absent present so that her powerlessness is intact. The stark mediation of the narration points to her effacement and the attempt to bring her to presence through the intimate address of ‘tu’. In this she is not unlike the man who remains present only in his absence. But there is also another doubling of positions between the husband and the new wife: the man as ‘impotent’ doubles the powerlessness of the wife (Djebar 1993: 62). The doubling is more importantly, for the purposes of this paper, between Isma and her husband, since she chooses his second wife and becomes protective of her as a husband would. This is most striking in the last part of the novel when Isma follows Hajila (ibid.: 158). The first wife who assumes his role displaces the husband, as locus of authority. If the role of the husband in a patriarchal society is that of a protector, then the first wife takes on certain of his responsibilities. Isma gives Hajila advice and gives her the key to the apartment in the Hammam (ibid.: 153). She repeats his role with some reconfiguration, one in which she allows and encourages Hajila to have the possibility to exercise a certain freedom. The husband of many wives is always displaced, she writes. He is literally out of place, ‘with no fixed abode’ (ibid.: 91). The very structure of the harem, which privileges the man, also marginalizes and makes him an outcast in his own home. The man who wields social authority is henceforth doubly impotent and displaced in this novel, presumably by the harem tradition but also by the text itself: And the man with no fixed abode conveys himself each night from bed to bed, this chasse croisée continuing throughout the life of a male, from the age of twenty to sixty or seventy…For, in our land, the man has a right to four wives simultaneously, as much as to say, four…wounds. (ibid.: 91)

He is mostly displaced by Isma’s narration. Isma takes initiative on many levels. She leaves. She returns. She reiterates the initiative of the wives. The husband is henceforth featured as a lack. Isma, which in Arabic literally refers to name, is the marker of the husband’s absence of name. Her name points to the index of naming; so that the function of naming is maintained in full force, while an excess of naming in Isma and an absence of naming in the husband simultaneously exist. Furthermore, the title in the original French, Ombre sultane suggests this oxymoronic displacement of the husband, since ombre and homme resonate together in the French original, so that the unnamed man is relegated to a shadowy figure. She begins her narrative as follows: ‘A shadow and a sultan’s bride; a shadow behind the sultan’s bride. /Two women; two wives…’ (ibid.: 1). The women’s identities are simply as wives. While the two women

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The Anonymity of Manhood lead the reader to conclude that the shadow must be the sister, the other facet of the woman’s own identity, one ultimately reads the shadow as the man, the resonating homonym of shadow in the original French, homme/bre. On the other hand, ‘sultane’ is in the feminine form, so that true sovereignty is marked by the sultana and not by the sultan. The reformulation of the title in the first sentence is important. Distinction of ‘Ombre sultane’ and ‘ombre et sultane’ points to the relational power of the terms of the title: first a shadow then a sultane – highlighting the necessity and the possibility of gaining voice and establishing a sense of subjectivity; whereas the latter formulation is that of both shadow and sultane, a contradictory existence that nonetheless expresses that of Scheherazade’s, of Isma’s, and of the man’s. The narrator tells us that the shadow becomes a sultane and the sultan (e) a shadow. This is the doubling of the two women. Isma becomes a shadow to the other and Hajila a shadow to Isma. But the shadow also points to more imbrications of identity. Isma becomes the sultane and the husband the shadow, always uttering the name of Isma, incapacitated by her leaving, experiencing a sense of absence of purpose and identity, a shadow. While at the end of the novel, the implication is that both women break from the harem, one exposed to daylight and the other by plunging into the night, the beginning of the novel seems to deny that possibility, because all has already passed. Isma acknowledges that she was mistaken to think that she could easily let go of the past or intervene in the present in order to stop it: ‘While, I, Isma, am preparing to leave the city for good, why did I not foresee the tragedy?’ (ibid.: 75). The story Isma tells is set up as a paradigmatic narrative. It is Hajila’s story, but it is also the story of many women. The narrative begins with a third-person narration and moves to ‘I’ addressing ‘you’, forming an alternate ‘we’ in a traditional rivalry. Likewise the man is certainly paradigmatic in the role of the husband, and the relation of the women with him represents the painful absence of ‘we’. In fact, this ‘we’ will only be possible in a homosocial relation in the text of Djebar. In the absence of the husband’s contact with any other males in the novel, except for his own son, it is clear that the male-female relationships remain unable to constitute a couple, a community, or an identity for the man. It is as if he can only derive his identity not from his relationship with women but from his relationship with men. Even in the prologue, it is Shahzaman’s relationship to his brother Shahrayar, and his revelation to him, that launches the entire narrative and drama that call for Scheherazade’s cunning intervention and reformation. While the anthropologist Suad Joseph argues that patriarchy in the Arab world has its foundation in brother-sister relationships and not in the siblings’ relationship to the parents, which is to say that it is the brother who has a vested interest in protecting the family honor and learns his role as male from his relationship to his sister (Cited in Armbrust 2000: 214), one can still argue that while the sister may be necessary for the protection of the brother/family honor, she is not the ultimate source of his sense of identity. In this case, we only see the consequences of such male socialization in the husband’s response to Hajila’s outings.

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Unmasking Shadow Selves in Assia Djebar’s Ombre sultane

Collaboration with the Man or Incorporation of the Man? If we read Ombre sultane as an autobiography, which the novel leads us to do as part of a quartet, the question of masculinity figures as the impact of patriarchy on her life, one that has not only meant confinement for many women but also a loss of subjectivity. In such a reading, Hajila and Isma can only stand for one another rather than as rivals. However, there is nonetheless the nagging possibility of reading them as rivals, as proposed by the text itself and by Anjali Prabhu’s reading of it, which is telling in this regard, as she sees Isma’s role as one of ‘collaboration’ with the man, mainly in ‘sanctioning his gaze to validate her desirability – [which] is a significant obstacle to the sisterhood theme’ (Prabhu 2002: 79). Perhaps Isma’s role is not just simple collaboration, but more of an unwitting repetition or possibly an internalization of this masculine identity, so that a woman seeking her own freedom seems to have only the male model, where to be free translates to being a man. It is interesting to note that Djebar herself has alluded to this equation in an interview: French had liberated me from my body at the age of eleven. But it was also a Nessus tunic, meaning that I had been able to escape from the veil thanks to French language. It was evident that at the age of sixteen, seventeen, I conceived of myself, externally, as much a boy as a girl. (Accad 1996: 9-10)

This qualification of identifying herself equally as a boy – externally – only makes the unsuspected process of internalization all the more evident. In fact, the man was not only an ‘alter ego’ in the past, as Isma will relate, in the sense of coming to rely on him for her identity, but he continues to be so in the present as she internalizes that masculine self. Djebar writes: I shelter behind the silence of so many anonymous women ... Is it to mitigate the failure of my old defiance? A couple; the novelty of the illusion fascinated me … I was driven to seek so many new horizons! I grew to rely for support on the presence of the man I loved, I who had escaped from confinement by pure chance. He became my alter ego… (Djebar 1993: 79, emphasis in the original)

She in fact adopts a masculine self even as she resists the patriarchal implications of its assertion, thereby implying the absence of a liberated feminine self. Prabhu suggests in her reading that Isma enacts masculine violence in her depiction of Hajila: The constant violence that Isma’s discourse inflicts upon Hajila’s subjectivity is inscribed in the incomplete, fragmented, and static images, which, in the final analysis, record this eventual opacity and, thus perhaps paradoxically, vindicate Hajila’s autonomy. (Prabhu 2002: 75)

Isma also embodies the male gaze of a ‘voyeur’ according to Prabhu, a gaze whose object of seduction is primarily her own body. It is a gaze that will have as its focus Isma, and not the husband:

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The Anonymity of Manhood It is not only Hajila who is deprived of any sort of seductiveness, but the husband himself, evidently present in these scenes, is not granted a presence comparable to that of the narrator. He is lost in a kind of anonymity through a representation that is not far from being androgynous. (ibid.: 71, emphasis mine)

Here again, this androgyny may only mirror Isma’s and complicate the distinct separateness of male-female identities in the text. While Prabhu acknowledges the critique of patriarchy present in Ombre sultane, she nonetheless sees real limitations if not an undoing of this critique. She furthermore suggests that Isma’s narrative strategies necessarily implicate the reader in this problematic structure of desire: Heterosexual validation … underlies much of the force of Isma’s desire in the narrative act. Isma’s relentless pursuit of a desirable self generates … a receiving or reading position from which she can be desired. In this way, the reader’s complicity with the husband in this ‘consumption’ of a desirable … Isma suggests another unpalatable ‘we’ with which the reader must contend. (ibid.: 77)

While this is certainly the case in the sections in which Isma addresses her earlier self, and so such a representation is complicated by a discrepancy in the temporality of the novel, it is less so in sections addressing Hajila, where the structure of desire seems to emphasize the absence of the man. The fact remains that in a book so much focused on the trials of marriage of confined Algerian women, it is quite noteworthy that the sections on her marriage, which has ended, should emphasize the passion rather than the failures. In fact, the husband and Hajila are always absent – since neither has a proper voice in the novel – and what we have is Isma both as object of the passion and desire of the man and subject of the passion and of the gaze for the man and for Hajila. Prabhu nonetheless allows for ‘an ironic consciousness’ on the part of the narrator, for Djebar is a scrupulously self-conscious writer (ibid.: 79). What makes Prabhu’s reading of Djebar’s Ombre sultane so interesting is precisely the noting of the rivalry when critics have otherwise focused on the solidarity between women in her novel. She attributes the solidarity precisely to patriarchy while she attributes the rivalry to the very act of narration: They are sisters, these two pairs, because they are locked in a sorority created, in a way, in tandem with the patriarchal force that remains a threat to their very existence; they are rivals in that the creation of narrative, and the larger act of representation, as a solitary act, allows only one ‘I’. (ibid.: 81)

This rivalry is manifested in the omniscient narration for Prabhu, a narration that does violence to the subjectivity of the other and a ‘possessing’ gaze, which ‘comes, this time, from the Algerian woman herself, and it is directed toward herself and her more proximate other’ (ibid.: 84). More than complicity with patriarchal structures manifested through this sister rivalry, the narrator has incorporated some of these masculinist acts. Touma finds it quite strange that the first wife should search for a second for

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Unmasking Shadow Selves in Assia Djebar’s Ombre sultane her husband, a role traditionally for the husband, his mother, and the relatives of the husband. The reader is no less surprised by this, for Isma so vehemently rejects this oppressive and inequitable arrangement, and her role as a matchmaker for her husband is not that of a passive witness but as an active instigator of a problematic set up. It is no less curious that she guards a copy of the keys of the apartment and follows Hajila on that last day. While she is presumably spying on her own self, as Hajila replays the same exact scene from L’amour, la fantasia when the adolescent Isma hurls herself into the street, she nonetheless enacts more possessive qualities of a husband. This curious preoccupation is evident when speaking of Hajila’s name: ‘the name that I had so often murmured to myself when alone’ (Djebar 1993: 2). While she establishes filial relations between women around a legacy of patriarchal oppression, it is the internalization of the masculinist structures that she also manifests. It is interesting to note that the English translation will render Hajila, in Isma’s words, as ‘concubine’. For the concubine will be the ‘illegitimate’ one, always second to the first wife. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the concubine as the woman who either lives with the man without being his wife or the woman who is recognized by law but whose position remains secondary to the wife: When I come to kiss Miriem good-night, as she tosses about in bed, I muse on that kingdom to which you, the concubine, belong, and I draw new strength from addressing you so intimately: are you not, in your own way, familiar with these periods of waiting? […]. (ibid.: 79)

Hajila is in fact the only wife for ‘the man’, since Isma has already finalized her divorce. Perhaps one needs to ask again why this rewriting of the prologue of A Thousand and One Nights. The shadow to the solidarity story of sisters is precisely the reality of the rivalry, the complicity in a patriarchal system, the internalization of its structures of desire and of identity. Djebar writes: Did I intend to offer you up as a sacrifice to the man? Did I intend to model myself on the queens of the harem? These, by presenting a new bride to their master, were in fact liberating themselves at the expense of a pseudo rival…Was I, in my turn, reaffirming my power? No, I was cutting myself adrift. To be sure, you were the innocent victim whom I enslaved, from the day when, according to Tradition, your mother became my ally or my accomplice (ibid.: 1).

Isma’s ‘liberation’ as a woman has its limits in a patriarchal structure, so that the divorce does not seem to have set her free, even as we see her able to fight for her terms with her husband over Meriem. This view manifested in Isma’s quest for freedom and for identity, problematically finds recourse only in the literal rendition of harem myths, as if she can gain some freedom only in choosing another bride. And yet she announces that the choice was not hers: ‘I had imagined that her [Meriem’s] father would find a child-bride, who would bring with her a never-ending source of carefree gaiety!’ (ibid.: 81) This is a curious passage given how well she imagines the reality of these

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The Anonymity of Manhood marriages. For which is it, her choice or his, her act or his? At the heart of the problem is perhaps Isma’s refusal to see the places where women empower themselves even in their very limited lives and where women may also internalize this patriarchal structure to such an extent that it may appear not only not problematic but, in fact, desirable. Her reaction to the episode of the daughter’s outburst against the mother who complains of too much childbearing, while answering her husband’s call every time, is characteristic: ‘What I could not accept was the girl’s blazing outburst of stark hatred, expressed towards the too-submissive mother’ (ibid.: 133). And yet the girl has precisely seen room for agency and has implicated the mother in her own predicament. The girl has held the mother accountable, a view not unwarranted in the story’s rendition by Isma.

Concluding Notes The novel of Djebar is useful in raising questions about the nature of masculinity: it announces the fallacy of equating masculinity with subjectivity. The novel forces us to consider masculinity in terms of structures of masculine identity and desire rather than as masculine subjectivity. Certainly women such as Isma have internalized male tendencies when other emancipatory models have not presented themselves or been embarked upon. The novel of Djebar also interrogates the extent to which it is possible to have a quest for identity and for emancipation when there is a loss of subjectivity. For the anonymity of the man signals his own death, a true shade. Likewise, Isma has escaped the traditional confinement to have to contend with more internalized structures of seclusions. And Hajila finds herself between two worlds, that of Touma and that of the modern Algeria unable to find a comfortable space for the unprepared self. Clearly the active effacement of women also leads to a loss of self in man, in an increasingly modernized life. Finally, Djebar leaves the reader with the ominous warning of what is to come ahead for Algeria in the violent strife, and repression against women and against creative thought, one that ensues with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Algeria and as a result of the cancellation of the elections in 1990 after the Islamic Salvation Front wins majority vote in the local elections. The violence against women is closely linked to the violence against all forms of quests for freedom. It is with these words that the moral dimension, along with the political and the social ones, of a response to the past is highlighted and anchored in gender, where male violence remains an ever-present spectre, whether manifested nationally, religiously, or socially: O, my sister, I who thought to wake you, I’m afraid … I fear lest we all find ourselves in chains again, in ‘this West in the Orient’, this corner of the earth where day dawned so slowly for us that twilight is already closing in around us everywhere. (Djebar 1993: 160)

While Djebar depicts the harsh realities of gender relations in a traditional patriarchal system, she nonetheless seems to believe in the inevitability of the

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Unmasking Shadow Selves in Assia Djebar’s Ombre sultane quest for freedom, not only for women but also for men. She writes: ‘I am standing in broad daylight; my eyes are closed but behind me, out of the heart of darkness, a flutter of wings can be heard in the dovecote’ (ibid.: 11).

Bibliography Accad, Evelyne. ‘Assia Djebar’s contribution to women’s literature: Rebellion, maturity, vision.’ World Literature Today 70.4 (1996): 1-12. Armbrust, Walter. ‘Farid Shauqi: Tough Guy, Family Man, Cinema Star.’ pp. 199- 226, in Imagined Masculinities, edited by Mai Ghassoub & Emma Sinclair-Webb. London: Saqi Books, 2000. Ascarza-Wegimont, Marie. ‘Djebar’s “Ombre sultane.” ’ Explicator 55, no. 1 (1996): 55-57. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Djebar, Assia. Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. Paris: Albin Michel, 2002. ——. L’amour, la fantasia. Paris: Lattès, 1985. ——. Loin de médine. Paris, Albin Michel, 1991. ——. Ombre sultane. Paris: Lattès, 1987. ——. Sister to Scheherazade. Trans. Dorothy S. Blair. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993. ——. Vaste est la prison. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995. Donadey, Anne. ‘‘Elle a rallumé le vif du passé’: L’écriture-palimpseste d’Assia Djebar.’ Pp. 101-115, in Postcolonialisme et autobiographie: Albert Memmi, Assia Djebar, Daniel Maximin, edited by Alfred Honung and Ernstpeter Ruhe. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. ——. ‘Assia Djebar’s Poetics of Subversion.’ L’Esprit Créateur 33, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 107-17. Mernissi, Fatima. Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Childhood. NY: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1994. Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in AraboIslamic Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Mortimer, Mildred. ‘Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet: A Study in Fragmented Autobiography.’ Research in African Literatures 28, no. 2 (1991): 102-17. Murphy, Peter F. (ed.) Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities. NY: New York University Press, 1994. Ouzgane, Lahoucine (ed.) Islamic Masculinities. London: Zed Books, 2006. Peteet, Julie. ‘Male Gender Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada: A Cultural Politics of Violence.’ pp. 103-26, in Imagined Masculinities, edited by Mai Ghassoub & Emma Sinclair-Webb. London: Saqi Books, 2000. Prabhu, Anjali. ‘Sisterhood and Rivalry in-between the Shadow and the Sultana: A Problematic of Representation in Ombre sultane.’ Research in African Literatures 33, no. 3 (2002): 69-96. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Woodhull, Winifred. Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Zimra, Clarisse. ‘Writing Woman: The Novels of Assia Djebar.’ SubStance 21, no. 3 (1992): 68-84.

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5 The Rape Continuum Masculinities in the Works of Nawal El Saadawi & Tahar Ben Jelloun LAHOUCINE OUZGANE

For a man to be a man, he must have shoulders which do not droop but are straight and broad ... And he must have legs, each separate from the other so he could move each one on its own confidently and freely. That, for her, was the characteristic which distinguished masculinity from femininity. Nawal El Saadawi, ‘Man’ (93) To be a woman is a natural infirmity and every woman gets used to it. To be a man is an illusion, an act of violence that requires no justification. Tahar Ben Jelloun, The Sand Child (70)

Introduction In the last three decades, scholarly attention to gender issues in the Middle East and North Africa has been focused almost exclusively, sometimes obsessively,1 on a quest to understand Islamic femininity: what it is and how it is made and regulated – with Muslim women’s oppression, the question of the hijab, and the practice of female genital mutilation attracting most of the scrutiny.2 Some of the most significant literature in this well-established field includes Fatna Sabbah’s Woman in the Muslim Unconscious (1984), a critique of the contradictory messages which the Islamic legal and erotic discourses imprint on the female body; Fatima Mernissi’s The Veil and the Male Elite (1987), an indictment of the ways in which numerous Hadiths (or sayings by the Prophet) have been manipulated by a male elite to maintain male privileges; Fedwa MaltiDouglas’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word (1991), a mapping out of the relationship of woman’s voice in Arabo-Islamic discourse to sexuality and the body; Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam (1992), a study of the development of Islamic discourses on women and gender from the ancient world to the present; and Marnia Lazreg’s The Eloquence of Silence (1994), an analysis of the gender relations in Algeria from the pre-colonial times to the present. 3

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Masculinities in the Works of El Saadawi & Ben Jelloun By contrast, studies of Islamic masculinities are surprisingly rare. At a time when masculinity studies is experiencing a boom in the West,4 dominant masculinity in Islamic cultures has so far remained an unrecognized category that maintains its power by refusing to identify itself. There are very few studies that make Muslim men visible as gendered subjects and that show that masculinities have a history and clear defining characteristics that form an integral part of the gender relations in Muslim cultures. The only two books on the subject of Islamic masculinities are limited to examinations of homosexuality and homoeroticism in Islamic cultures and classical Arabic literature, respectively. In one form or another, the essays in Murray and Roscoe (eds) Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature (1997) aim to establish the fact that ‘Before the twentieth century, the region of the world with the most visible and diverse homosexualities was not northwestern Europe, but northern Africa and southwestern Asia’ (6); the collection offers ‘historical, anthropological, and literary studies and texts documenting the conceptions and organizations of homosexual desire and conduct in Islamic societies’ (4). For its part, Wright and Rowson (eds) Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature (1997), as its title indicates, examines the prevalence and significance of ‘homoerotic motifs in early Abbasid poetry, courtly letters, political satire, shadow plays, and dreambooks, from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries and from Persia to Andalusia’ (xiv). My essay offers a reading of key scenes of male sexuality in two major contemporary North African texts: God Dies by the Nile (1974), by Nawal El Saadawi, the Arab world’s best known feminist, and The Sand Child (1985), the novel that paved the way for Tahar Ben Jelloun’s winning France’s most prestigious literary award in 1987. I argue that when we focus our attention on the kinds of masculinities portrayed in these novels, we realize that, when masculinity is perceived and lived out only in terms of virile power, when such feelings as vulnerability, intimacy, and empathy between men are pushed aside, the men in El Saadawi’s and Ben Jelloun’s works find themselves engaged in what René Girard calls ‘mimetic rivalries’5 – where even the most private moments in men’s lives are marked and marred by sexual rivalry and violence. More importantly, we also come to understand that, contrary to Western discourses that posit ‘woman’ as the other of ‘man,’ in Muslim cultures, the opposite of masculinity is not necessarily femininity and that even misogyny is not the core of masculinity: the homosocial competition and the violent hierarchies structuring the relationships between men themselves constitute the core of what it means to be a man in the Middle East and North Africa. Because women are not the centre of men’s experiences (other men are), misogyny is actually fuelled by something deeper – by the fear of emasculation by other men, the fear of humiliation, the fear of being not so manly. This fear suggests that this kind of masculinity is inherently anxious, never stable. My focus on the relationships between men is in no way intended to marginalize women, reducing them to the symbolic space where men’s rivalries are played out. Women’s well-documented subjection underscores the fact that they are real targets of Islamic patriarchy, but, as Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne point out, ‘the ways in which men distinguish themselves and are distinguished from other men must be an

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The Rape Continuum important aspect of any study of masculinity’ (1994: 19). Because patriarchy is not only about male-female relationships, an understanding of the differential and diverse positions, not only in the interrelationships that have evolved between Muslim men and women, but between the men themselves is fundamental to the struggle for social change, to our ability to rethink masculinities and to imagine new modes of being male or female in Islamic cultures.

Nawal El Saadawi God Dies by the Nile (1974), which El Saadawi considers her ‘most significant novel,’ chronicles the never-ending struggles of the peasants of Kafr El Teen against the predatory sexual conduct of the village mayor and his sycophant cohorts – Sheikh Zahran, the chief of the guard; Haj Ismail, the village barber; and Sheikh Hamzawi, the Imam of the village. While these men are directly responsible for the suffering and victimization of the toiling class of the fellaheen of Kafr El Teen, no attention has been directed at the kinds of relationships that exist between the men themselves. The men in God Dies by the Nile are intensely competitive, rivaling each other for social power at every chance, so much so that a man’s substance – his identity, his personality, and his masculinity – derives from his place in society. For instance, the rivalry between the mayor of Kafr El Teen and his elder brother,6 the government minister, drives the novel’s main plot. When the mayor is first introduced in the second chapter, he is surrounded by his three stooges, each trying to outdo the other in winning the mayor’s favour, only to realize that today the mayor is so preoccupied and lost in his thoughts that he is unable to join in their daily rituals of gossip and laughter: ‘All day he had kept wondering why the moment he had seen his brother’s picture in the newspaper a feeling of inadequacy and depression had come over him’ (11). But this acute sense of inferiority has haunted the Mayor since he was a small boy, when he used to run to the bathroom and vomit all the food in his stomach. Then he would stand there examining himself in the mirror... His face was deathly pale, his lips almost yellow. ... He would wash his mouth several times to dispel the bitterness which lingered behind. When he raised his head to look into the mirror, it was his brother’s face that appeared before him. (11)

While God Dies by the Nile is interested in depicting the socio-economic conditions of its characters, El Saadawi seems much more intent on laying bare the psychological make-up of her male protagonists. Thus, while the Mayor’s authority and importance – symbolized by the big iron door of his palace – rest obviously on his power to imprison the villagers or to seize their property at will, the novel provides lengthy descriptions of the intricate workings of the Mayor’s psyche. Though he often used to think that he was superior to his elder brother, the Mayor knew full well that the feeling was just a disguise: ‘The truth was so overwhelming that it shook him to the marrow of his bones. It seemed to exude from every pore of his body.... It crept into his mouth and nose, reviving the taste of bitterness once more, dropped

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Masculinities in the Works of El Saadawi & Ben Jelloun down with it to his chest, then through a small hole into his belly. He would run back to the bathroom and vomit repeatedly until there was nothing left for him to vomit’ (12). In later years, the Mayor’s visceral reaction, his sense of defeat experienced in private, translates itself publicly into feelings of superiority to the other men of Kafr El Teen. As he reminds his cohorts, ‘‘Compared to me, you people are just nobodies. I am from a noble family...and my brother is one of the people who rule this country’’ (12). In the rigidly hierarchical social world of Kafr El Teen, such feelings have a profound effect on the other men, revealing what Bob Connell defines as the ‘relational’ dimension of masculinity. For instance, Haj Ismail cringes, ‘as though trying to make himself so small that he could avoid the eyes of the Mayor’ (12). Filled with a sense of shame, the village barber’s own eyes keep shifting back and forth between ‘the picture of the Mayor’s elder brother sitting in the midst of the most important people in the country.... and the small [barber] shop with its old, cracked shelves, covered in dust, and the few rusty tins standing dejectedly on them’ (12). The reality of his insignificance is so compelling that Haj Ismail ‘tried to tear himself away from the comparison only to find himself lost in the contemplation of the Mayor’s expensive cloak, while his hand kept fingering the coarse fabric of his own galabeya’ (12). When manhood is based on a particular relationship to property and on social power, Haj Ismail settles quite happily in his subservient position; he is even eager to play the role of pimp for his lord. Thus, when the Mayor, who has now caught a glimpse of the tall figure of Zeinab (Kafrawi’s younger daughter) along the river bank, exchanges jokes with him, Haj Ismail’s selfconfidence is restored enough for him to start laughing again: ‘Haj Ismail ... felt in high spirits again and was completely rid of the mood of depression which had weighed so heavily on him earlier.... Was he not joking with the Mayor as though they were equals...?’ (14). To curry favour with the Mayor, Haj Ismail will see to it that Zeinab is tricked into going to ‘work’ for the mayor, ensuring the sacrifice of yet another twelve-year-old girl to the mayor’s sexual appetite. The barber’s action is ironic in that, when he was only ten years old, he himself fell victim to homosexual rape by an older and stronger relative: [His cousin Youssef] had arms and legs covered in hair, and the muscles of his thighs looked like a swelling under the skin. When he saw them for the first time he was seized with fright, and tried to run away ... but Youssef caught him in an iron grip holding him by the back of his neck, threw him to the ground face downwards and wrenched his galabeya up over his buttocks. He felt the powerful, heavy body press down on him, and his nose hit the ground so that he could hardly breathe. (51)

This physical assault, which is still imprinted in Haj Ismail’s memory, dramatizes the ways in which brute force is applied to subdue a weak and powerless boy – initiating him into the violence of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell, 77) – just as the mayor exerts his social authority to rape the daughters of Kafr El Teen. Social power and physical force, the novel seems to suggest, are merely different sides of the same coin; in a sense, Youssef and the mayor belong to the category of men who feel the need to prove their

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The Rape Continuum roudjoula or manhood through their virility,7 impoverishing the scope of masculinity by reducing it to that one attribute. More importantly, however, such sexual encounters underline the novelist’s sense that, in a sense, heterosexuality is founded on rape. This collapse of masculinity into virility is also clearly dramatized in El Saadawi’s short story ‘Man’ (1987), in which Khadija arrives unannounced at her husband’s office and comes face to face with what the story calls ‘life, stark and real’ (91). Having earlier assumed that a man’s erect posture (straight, broad shoulders and strong legs) defined his masculinity, Khadija surprises Ashwami, her husband of ten years, being sodomized by his boss: The chief attorney was one of those men who believe they are more virile than any other man. He was possibly not quite so sure of that, but he always wanted to prove it. He did not know exactly what to do to achieve it, but he always felt, whenever another man appeared before him, a violent desire to subjugate him. Subjugation for him did not mean that ordinary type of subjugation which can take place between a superior and an inferior, but it was rather a brutish desire to annihilate him intellectually, mentally, even physically, so that nothing of him remained. (98)

Because of the inherent anxiety characterizing this type of masculinity, the chief attorney enacts this virility of the body as the ultimate expression of male sexuality, one that places him literally and figuratively at the top of the hierarchy. In God Dies by the Nile, even the spiritual leader of the village is a victim of the same obsession.8 Sheikh Hamzawi’s reputation, which depends entirely on what the village men think of him, rests on his success in forcing Fatheya, his fourth wife,9 to marry him ‘against her will, and in obliging her to live with him all these years even though Haj Ismail’s potions and amulets had been totally ineffective in restoring or even patching up his virility’ (27-28). What really concerns the Imam is his public image, the impression that he is a man in complete control of his household, so, on his way home, as soon as he spots his wife, Sheikh Hamzawi would call out to her, ‘asking for something in a loud throaty voice calculated to sound more throaty and virile than usual, then cough and clear his chest several times to ensure that the neighbours would realize that Fatheya’s husband, the man of the household, was back’ (103). While the men’s obsession with their virility – the mayor’s rapes of young girls, his son’s assaults of the servant girls, Youssef’s rape of his cousin, the chief attorney’s desire to annihilate other men, and the Imam’s preoccupation with his virility even as he conducts the Friday prayers – suggests the multiple ways of enacting and reinforcing their power over women and over other men, the violence structuring the social world of El Saadawi’s novel finds a temporary outlet in the sacrifice of Fatheya and her baby. When she decides to save and adopt one of the Mayor’s ‘illegitimate’ children abandoned on the doorsteps of the Imam’s house, the villagers, angry but unable to identify the causes of their suffering, deflect their frustrations onto Fatheya:

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Masculinities in the Works of El Saadawi & Ben Jelloun Hands moved in on her from every side. ... They sank into her breast tearing flesh out of flesh. Male eyes gleamed with an unsatisfied lust, feeding on her breast with a hunger run wild like a group of starved men gathered around a lamb roasting on a fire. Each one trying to devour as much as he can lest his neighbour be quicker than him. ... In a few moments Fatheya’s body had become a mass of torn flesh and the ground was stained red with her blood. (115)

Through its sexualized violence, the graphic spectacle, not unlike that of a pride of hungry lions at a kill, reflects the ways in which sexuality in this novel seems anchored in fierce male rivalries that turn sex into rape and murder. But in this depressingly bleak story, El Saadawi does provide a glimmer of hope, endowing her weak characters with enough agency to suggest the women’s resistance to the patriarchal power structures of Kafr El Teen. Before her death, as though driven by ‘a strange, almost insane determination,’ Fatheya, ‘soft, and rounded, and female,’ fights her attackers like a wild animal, ferociously ‘hitting at the men with her legs, and her feet, with her shoulders and her hips’ (115), turning her sexualized body into a weapon against the men. And, in another affirmation of women’s historical agency, Zakeya, the epitome of peasant victimization and the mother who has lost two nieces to the mayor, decides to strike at the head of patriarchy when she fells him dead with her hoe – using her instrument for sowing seeds to end the mayor’s excessive seed sowing. Zakeya’s action, like Firdaus’s killing of her pimp in Woman At Point Zero, indicates the severely limited nature of the power women can wrest from the oppressive systems operating in their lives. In a parody of the male obsession to be at the top of the social and sexual hierarchy, the novel introduces one of the most intriguing characters in El Saadawi’s writings: Sheikh Metwalli, the shadowy figure living in the village cemetery, who, drawn by the smell of new buried flesh, is in the habit of digging up the dead and raping them: If [the body] was that of a female, he would crawl over it until his face was near the chin. But if the body was male, he turned it over on its face, then crawled over it until the lower part of his belly pressed down on the buttocks from behind. (57)

Described as a worm, a cat, and a hyena, Sheikh Metwalli, the weakest and most marginal character in the story, emerges as the ultimate male, the last one on top, who will no doubt dig up even the Mayor’s body. However, when Fatheya is killed by the mob, we are told that ‘Only Allah and Sheikh Metwalli know that Fatheya’s body and Fatheya’s shroud both remained intact and unspoiled in the burial ground’ (117).

Tahar Ben Jelloun With more than twenty novels, two plays, and three poetry collections produced in the last thirty years, Ben Jelloun is undoubtedly the most prolific and best-known contemporary francophone North African writer. Though he

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The Rape Continuum had previously won several important literary awards, his rise to literary and public prominence began when he became the first African-Arab writer to be awarded Le Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, for his novel La nuit sacrée published in 1987. Since then a number of his works have been translated into over forty languages11 and The Sacred Night has recently been made into a film12 and his 1997 book, La Nuit de l’erreur, topped the bestseller list in France in 1997, even out-ranking the 1996-Prix Goncourt winner. Ben Jelloun’s fiction, like El Saadawi’s, repeatedly dramatizes the ways in which virility emerges as the essence of Arab masculinity. In ‘Un fait divers et d’amour’ from Le premier amour est toujours le dernier (1995), a happilymarried man with three children, Slimane, a taxi-driver, is accused of fathering the child of one of his passengers, but ‘The doctors were unanimous: Slimane could not be the father of that child. He was sterile. He had always been sterile’13 (58; my translation). His illusion of masculinity shattered, Slimane turns to alcohol and to spending the night in his taxi.14 In some respects, the wife is right when she claims that she had never cheated on her husband and that her actions had been motivated by ‘love’ for him, by her determination to make him happy in the eyes of his friends. In fact, at the beginning of the story, Slimane himself was full of praise for his ‘good’ and ‘wonderful’ wife, who had given him three beautiful children – a girl and two boys – and a great deal of happiness15 (56-57; my paraphrase). The wife’s collusion, her willingness to let her husband maintain the social pretense, suggests once again the only kind of agency available in such a rigid male structure founded on virility as the essence of manhood – the central theme of L’enfant de sable, Ben Jelloun’s best-known novel. The Sand Child is the simple but strange tale of a Muslim father in the city of Marrakesh who, feeling publicly humiliated, especially in his brothers’ eyes, for having produced only seven daughters, decides to raise his next child (who turns out to be yet another girl) as a boy, then as a man. A victim of her father’s aggression, Zahra may be seen as the embodiment of the gendering process prevalent in North Africa, one in which sexual violence seems to mark the very origin of gender itself. To illustrate this idea, the novel introduces us to the dramatic story of Antar, another tale of a woman disguised as a man, a ruthless warrior chieftain and an exemplary man of legendary courage: Sometime he would turn up veiled; his troops thought that he wanted to surprise them, but in fact he was offering his nights to a young man of rough beauty, a sort of wandering bandit... One night they fought, because, as they made love, she gained the upper position after forcing him to lie on his belly, and simulated sodomy. Though the man yelled with rage, she pinned him down with all her strength, immobilizing him, pressing his face into the ground. ... He began to weep. She spat in his face, kicked him in the balls, left ... and never came back; the wounded bandit went mad... (61)

What is most striking in this story of the soldier and the bandit, the most masculine of men, is the way in which it dramatizes the precarious nature of the dominant masculinity, and the way in which the ultimate fear of the heterosexual Arab male is physical penetration by another.16 The fact that Antar is a woman redoubles the injury and the humiliation in a social setting

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Masculinities in the Works of El Saadawi & Ben Jelloun contemptuous of the ‘passive’ homosexual.17 One’s sense of self, one’s masculinity, is grasped through the territoriality of the body. Projecting homosexuality onto the Other is meant to strengthen one’s virile status in the eyes of one’s friends, but as Daniel Vignal has remarked, For the majority of Africans, homophilia is exclusively a deviation introduced by the colonialists or their descendants; by outsiders of all kinds. ... It is difficult for them to conceive that homophilia might be the act of a black African. (74-5)

Malek Chebel, for his part, has observed that ‘Passive homosexuality being despised, it’s rare to find an Arab who will claim that identity’ (315; my translation).18 In Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley, Sheikh Darwish, a former teacher of English who acts as the novel’s slightly deranged chorus, explains that ‘[Homosexuality] is an old evil. In English they call it ‘homosexuality’ and it is spelled h-o-m-o-se-x-u-a-l-i-t-y. But it is not love. True love is only for the descendants of Muhammad’ (104). For Sheikh Darwish, even the word for homosexuality has no equivalent among Muslims. But perhaps nowhere in North African literature is the association of homosexuality with the colonial experience better rendered than in this central scene from Ben Jelloun’s With Downcast Eyes (1991), the story of a young Moroccan girl’s confrontation in Paris with the challenges of exile and immigration. Having been chosen by her grandfather (the family patriarch) as the future and sole saviour of her Berber tribe, Fathma returns to Morocco to fulfill her destiny. But, as we find out by the end of the novel, true salvation cannot be expected from a woman. In this scene, two old men, Ahmed and Mohamed, are comparing stories of their most cherished memories, memories (they hope) they will be given a chance to relive once they enter Paradise. Ahmed describes a ‘wonderful’ moment in his ‘young and vigorous’ days when Mme Gloria, the wife of his authoritarian French employer and colonizer, could not resist his North African ‘hot blood’.19 But Mohamed has a more compelling story, one in which the rhetoric of nationalist discourse and heterosexual masculinity are inextricably intertwined, but in which virility finally achieves its transcendent status: My sublime reminiscence is a simple tale of water and dignity. ... In this country you can own acres and acres, but if you don’t have water to irrigate them, your land is worthless! ... In those days, it was the caid20 who doled out the water. But Abbas – that was our caid, a wily, unfeeling little man – worked for the French colonials. ... We had a good and fertile soil .... [and] enjoyed the blessings of God and nature. Until the night that Abbas, to please and serve his foreign masters, sent a band of henchmen to divert the stream... toward the land of the colonialists. (143-4)

When he is confronted, Abbas dismisses the villagers – including the oldest man in the village, Mohamed’s father – as a ‘bunch of idiots’. But Mohamed, barely sixteen and calm and clear-thinking in the midst of all the political turmoil, will not be intimidated – as he explains to his friend:

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The Rape Continuum I am a religious man and I have nothing against prayers, but as you know, it wasn’t with prayers that we drove out the colonials. ... Abbas didn’t like women. I knew that he received boys at night. He would leave his terrace door open. I knocked. He said, ‘Is that Nordine or Kamal? Get your ass in here, you son of a whore, you’re late, hurry!’ I moved toward his bed in the darkness. He was naked, on his belly. I climbed on the bed and pounced on him full force, planting my knife deep in his nape. (145-6)

When the village is rid of the tyrant, the water resumes its natural course, and for half a century, no one knows who has killed Abbas: ‘You are the first person to know my secret. ... Now I am going to give you a present: here is the famous little knife of liberation’ (146). Mohamed has managed to restore to the village not only its water but its symbolic virility as well. However, the part of his story that interests him most, the moment that he would like to experience in Paradise, occurs later: The only part I want to relive is the day when the spring was liberated and the stream returned to our land. The children splashed water on themselves, the women, in sparkling dresses, danced along the edge of the stream, the men slaughtered an ox and sang with the women. It was an unforgettable day of festivities. I wept for joy ... In the evening I went down into the valley and, for the first time, I found myself between the legs of a beautiful prostitute. She taught me what to do and didn’t ask for money. (146)

Mohamed’s actions represent the pattern of a virtuous and desirable masculinity, an ideal self, of the kind other men struggle for. And Abbas becomes the recipient of all that is negative; he becomes pure Other: the tyrannical oppressor of his people, a threat to the heterosexual order of the land, a usurper, treating his own people as if they were an inferior race – all qualities that necessitate and legitimate his murder. In the specific context of the two men swapping stories, the exercise is clearly one of sexual rivalry: Ahmed offers a conventional story of sexual conquest, but Mohamed – armed with the phallic power of a ‘very sharp knife’, the kind used ‘for cutting up a sheep’ (145) – manages to lose two virginities in one day, as if to suggest that violence qualifies one for sex. In this manner, virility emerges as the act of penetrating other bodies, other spaces. But Antar’s example and Mohamed’s story also suggest that heterosexuality in North Africa is founded not only on rape but on prostitution as well. *** In March 1993, a senior Moroccan police officer was sentenced to death for the rapes, in the space of thirteen years, of close to five hundred women, including twenty minors.21 Serial rapist Hajji Hamid Tabet had even installed a hidden camera in his Casablanca apartment to film his exploits: before the rapes, in a sacrificial gesture, he would often pray and give thanks to Allah. So as to sustain his image of his own potency, the Hajji would often watch his previous performances before he went out on his street prowls – one more time. It was later revealed that the videos of the rapes were also meant for the international pornography trade.

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Masculinities in the Works of El Saadawi & Ben Jelloun Tabet himself was seen by some as a formidable virile sex machine. The man who turned to so many women while he had two wives and children at home was talked about with a kind of breathless awe for his ‘gluttonous appetite.’ In an interview, his lawyer Mohammed Afrit Bennani declared, ‘My client is not a criminal. He is perhaps unwell. He is perhaps even a sick man. He has powerful urges. He needs sex more than many men. Sometimes for four or five hours a day. For a man of 54, I admit that is unusual. But that does not make him a criminal.’ Bennani also denied that the violence on the tapes, where blood and beatings were abundantly evident, was anything other than ‘normal rough sex … but then, you know, some women like that’ (Rocco 1993: 7).

Conclusion A major international colloquium on love in Islam held in Paris in 1992 and attended by hundreds of writers and researchers from or of the Middle East and North Africa centered on the ways in which Arabs in the past celebrated love, pointing out, for instance, that Arabic has at least sixty different words to denote ‘love’. But most of the speakers also stressed that the region was currently going through a stage of dis-love: ‘un état de desamour’ (Amzallag 1992: 35).22 In 2000, at another conference held at Oxford University, sixty sexologists from the Arab world concluded that ‘sexuality... in the Middle East has less to do with the fantasies of a Thousand and One Nights and more to do with sex crimes.’23 El Saadawi’s and Ben Jelloun’s works clearly reflect cultural contexts where rape and female sacrifice embody the violence of a social structure that has established virility as its norm for manhood.

Notes 1 In a parody of this preoccupation, Fedwa Malti-Douglas writes: ‘The Arab woman is a most fascinating creature. Is she veiled? Is she not veiled? Is she oppressed? Is she not oppressed? Were her rights greater before Islam? Are her rights greater after Islam? Does she have a voice? Does she not have a voice?’ (1991: 3). 2 For an excellent essay on the subject of female genital mutilation, see Christine J. Walley (1997). But in the West, this attention to the practice of FGM in some Muslim countries often overlooks other forms of female oppression, like back-breaking labour, economic dependency on men, and prostitution, realities often exacerbated by Western economic policies. Such a concern may also serve as an alibi, as a way of pointing the finger at the pain and suffering of Muslim (and other third-world) women while at the same time overlooking other forms of pain and other forms of marginalization that Muslim women (and men) face in the West. 3 For an extended review of the recent scholarship on Middle Eastern women, see Beth Baron (1996). 4 In a recent issue of American Quarterly, Bryce Traister writes: ‘judging from the sheer number of titles published, papers solicited, and panels presented in the last ten years’, it would appear that ‘masculinity studies has emerged as a discipline unto itself’ (289). 5 With the dissolving of all social and religious prohibitions, Girard argues, men find themselves imitating and competing with one another, forever stuck in the world of ‘internal mediation’ (1965). 6 The brother as a sexual rival is a powerful motif in Arabic and Islamic literature.

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The Rape Continuum While most readers of The Arabian Nights remember Shahrazad’s narrative world of magic, few have considered the significance of the frame story or the original scene, so to speak, the one that goes to prove that sexual rivalry between the two kings constitutes the foundation of this collection that has enthralled western and eastern imaginations alike. When King Shahzaman, the younger brother, discovers the infidelity of his brother’s wife, we are shocked by his reaction: ‘His face regained color and became ruddy, and his body gained weight, as his blood circulated and he regained his energy; he was himself again, or even better’ (6; emphasis added). However, just a few days earlier, the younger brother himself had lost all will to live because his own wife had been unfaithful to him too, and ‘In his depression, he ate less and less, grew pale, and his health deteriorated. He neglected everything, wasted away, and looked ill’ (4). While Malti-Douglas argues that it is ‘the adultery of the royal wives, which [is] the initial principle of disorder in the medieval text [that begins the chain of disorders],’ I suggest that the adultery merely brings to the surface the uneasy relationship between the two brothers. Unlike his younger brother, Shahrayar is described as ‘a towering knight and a daring champion, invincible, energetic, and implacable’ (3). Hailed as a realistic portrait of a modern Maghrebian society, Lotfi Akalay’s controversial novel, Les Nuits d’Azed (1996) replicates the narrative technique of The Arabian Nights to recount the sexual adventures of and rivalries between the brothers Kamal and Kamil. 7 In North African Arabic, the words for manhood and virility are so closely related that they are almost interchangeable. 8 When Haj Ismail inquires, ‘But do you think you can keep [Fatheya] under control, Sheikh Hamzawi? Do you think a man of your age can take her on?’ the Imam responds, ‘I can satisfy not only her, but her father if necessary’ (28). 9 The other three wives had apparently ‘failed’ to give him a son. 10 My discussion in this section draws on my 1997 essay ‘Masculinity as Virility in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Work.’ 11 Zakya Daoud, ‘Le Goncourt pour Tahar,’ Lamalif 184 (Janvier 1987), p. 62. 12 In what might seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy inherent to the cult of male genius, some critics have even begun to refer to Ben Jelloun as a future Nobel Prize candidate: Jean-Pierre Ndiaye, ‘Ben Jelloun, un Nobel en puissance?’ Jeune Afrique 1404 (2 decembre 1987), p. 48. 13 ‘Les médecins étaient formels: Slimane ne pouvait être le père de cet enfant à venir. Il était sterile. Il l’avait toujours été.’ 14 Until that point in the story, Slimane’s life – his going through and enacting the norms of masculinity around him – and even his reaction to the incident recall the Butlerian notion of performativity: ‘a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject’ (1993: 95). In Slimane’s case, the normative subject is the empty macho type. 15 ‘Ma femme est merveilleuse. Elle m’a donné trois beaux enfants, une fille et deux garçons, et beaucoup de bonheur... Elle est très bonne, ma femme.’ 16 In his semi-autobiographical work, L’écrivain public (1983), Ben Jelloun dwells at length on his childhood memories of an illness that lasted more than three years and that kept him lying on his back and staring at the ceiling most of the time (‘J’ai passé plus de trois années sur le dos, dans un grand couffin, à regarder le ciel et à scruter le plafond’ (1993: 13). His deepest fear at the time was to be mistaken for a girl or sodomized by the men of the house: ‘Je ne voulais pas être pris pour une fille pour ne pas être un péché, ou plus exactement celui convoité à cause du péché’ (15). 17 This contempt is rooted in the culture’s understanding of homosexuality: the ‘passive’ homosexual is perceived as the one who ‘gives,’ who ‘surrenders’ part of himself to the active partner, the one who ‘takes’. Active homosexuality, assuming the top position, is widely tolerated; it is even regarded as further proof of one’s virility. 18 ‘L’homosexualité passive étant condamnée, il est rare de trouver un Arabe qui s’en réclame.’ 19 Some contemporary Maghrebian critics construe the relationship of the francophone North African writers to the French language in sexual metaphors: Abdellah

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Masculinities in the Works of El Saadawi & Ben Jelloun Bounfour, for instance: ‘Le rapport à la langue française est un ‘rapport d’adultère’; le français est ‘une prostituée torturante et frustrante’; elle est aussi la femme d’un autre qu’on razzie’ (1995: 921). Images of virility (stealing another man’s wife) and their concomitant sexism are too deeply entrenched to be easily relinquished. 20 ‘Leader’ in Arabic; equivalent to ‘mayor.’ 21 François Soudan, ‘Sexe, pouvoir et video,’ Jeune Afrique 1681 (Mars, 1993): 8-10. 22 Michele Amzallag, ‘Amour, es-tu là?’ Jeune Afrique 1666 (Decembre 1992):35. 23 Nick Pelham, ‘Battle of the Sexualities.’ June 27, 2000. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ middle_east/806642.stm

References Ahmed, Leila. 1992. Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven: Yale University Press. Akalay, Lotfi. 1996. Les Nuits d’Azed. Paris: Seuil. Baron, Beth. 1996. ‘A Field Matures: Recent Literature on Women in the Middle East.’ Middle Eastern Studies 32.3: 172-86. Ben Jelloun, Tahar. 1985. The Sand Child. Trans. Alan Sheridan. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1987. ——. With Downcast Eyes. 1991. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. Boston: Little Brown, 1993. ——. 1993. L’écrivain public. Paris: Seuil. ——. 1995. Le premier amour est toujours le dernier. Paris: Seuil. Bounfour, Abdellah. ‘Langue, identité, et écriture dans la littérature francophone du Maghreb.’ Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 35.4 (1995): 911-23. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ New York: Routledge. Chankou, Abdellah. 1993. ‘Silence, on tourne...!’ Maroc Hebdo 5-11 (Mars). Chebel, Malek. 1995. Encyclopedie de l’Amour en Islam. Paris: Payot. Connell, R. W. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cornwall, Andrea, and Nancy Lindisfarne. 1994. ‘Dislocating masculinity: Gender, power and anthropology.’ Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies. Ed. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne. London: Routledge. 11-47. El Saadawi, Nawal. 1985. God Dies by the Nile. Trans. Sherif Hetata, London: Zed Books. The original Arabic edition entitled Mawt al-rajul al-wahid ala al-ard (The Death of the Only Man on Earth) was published in Beirut in 1974. ——. 1975. Woman at Point Zero. Trans. Sherif Hetata, London: Zed Books. 1983. ——. 1989. ‘Man.’ She Has No Place in Paradise. Trans. Shirley Eber, London: Minerva. 91-101. Ford, Richard. 2000. ‘UK Women in terror as rape toll rises.’ The Times of London. February 18. Girard, René. 1965. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Haddawy, Husain. 1990. Trans. The Arabian Nights. New York: Norton. Lazreg, Marnia. 1994. The Eloquence of Silence. New York: Routledge. Mahfouz, Naguib. 1966. Midaq Alley. Trans. Trevor Le Gassick. New York: Doubleday. Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. 1991. Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mernissi, Fatima. 1987. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland, Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1991. Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe. Eds. 1997. Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature. New York: New York University Press. Ouzgane, Lahoucine. 1997. ‘Masculinity as Virility in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Work.’ Contagion 4: 1-13. Rocco, Fiammetta. 1993. ‘The Shame of Casablanca.’ The Independent (May 9): 2-7. Sabbah, Fatna A. 1984. Woman in the Muslim Unconscious. Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland, New York: Pergamon Press. Traister, Bryce. ‘Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies.’ American

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The Rape Continuum Quarterly 52/2 (2000): 274-304. Walley, Christine J. 1997. ‘Searching for ‘Voices’: Feminism, Anthropology, and the Global Debate over Female Genital Operations.’ Cultural Anthropology 12.3: 405-38. Wright, Jr., J.W., and Everett K. Rowson. eds, 1997. Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature. New York: Colombia University Press.

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II Alternative Masculinities

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6 ‘Coming Unstuck’ Masculine Identities in Post-Independence Zimbabwean Fiction PAT R I C I A A L D E N

In this essay I argue that in the fiction of three Zimbabwean writers we find evidence of new strains in gender relations, particularly in the representation of male subjectivity, during the first two decades after independence. Traditional Shona gender roles had been impacted first by over a halfcentury of colonization, followed by a relatively late and long liberation struggle (1967-80), which gave birth to a period of rapid modernization and uneven economic transformation in the context of globalization. Not surprisingly, Shona people who saw themselves as the primary subjects and who sought to be the agents of this history felt wrenched from traditional practices and plunged into circumstances that disrupted core notions of identity, including ideas about gender. Given that men assumed it was their role to direct the public life of the nation, the challenges to masculine identity were particularly intense. I sketch in some of the salient aspects of this history and then review a number of common themes and preoccupations in three collections of short fiction: Stanley Nyamfukudza’s If God was a woman (1991), Charles Mungoshi’s Walking Still (1997), and Shimmer Chinodya’s Can We Talk? & Other Stories (1998). I conclude by focusing on two stories which offer especially subtle, anguished character studies of men coping with profound changes in and threats to their sense of their own manhood. Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) was colonized by the British in the late nineteenth-century. In the first chimurenga, or war of resistance, in 1897-98, the Shona people were defeated. Rhodesia became a valued British settler colony with a government that overwhelmingly served the interests of whites. In the 1960s, as other African nations gained independence, white Rhodesians broke their colonial ties to Britain, unilaterally declaring their independence in 1965 to preserve the white-controlled state. The second chimurenga began in 1967 and continued to 1980. During this period, Rhodesia was regarded as a pariah state, comparable to South Africa; economic sanctions created an

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‘Coming Unstuck’ insulated, self-sustaining economy based on extraordinarily unequal participation by black Africans. Despite the brutality of the long civil war, the democratic election of Robert Mugabe in 1980 appeared to inaugurate an era of peace, stability, and economic revitalization. His socialist-leaning party ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union), with its base in the rural population on whose behalf the second chimurenga had been waged, promised more equitable income distribution, return of land to black Africans, and substantial investment in education and health services. At the same time the Lancaster House Agreement, which brought an end to the war, combined with the new government’s intention to avoid ‘white flight’, meant that economic conditions for white Zimbabweans remained advantageous. Initially, the economy grew, raising expectations in every sector and particularly among educated blacks who eagerly anticipated new employment opportunities. By the late 1980s, however, the economy began foundering, unable to sustain commitments to social welfare while attempting to develop industry and agriculture to compete in global markets. In 1991 the government adopted an economic structural adjustment plan (ESAP) which entailed further market-based reforms and further erosion of the struggling industrial base and of social services. Inflation, wage reductions, and growing unemployment followed. Initiatives to indigenize businesses and promote gender equity were soon discredited. Ironically, the government’s investment in education contributed to a growing unemployment problem, especially among the educated urban population, well-placed to see how the ruling elite was managing the economy in its own interests (Carmody, 2000 and Dashwood, 2000). By 2000, with the Zimbabwean economy in dire straits and with the real possibility of losing political control, Mugabe orchestrated a flawed land redistribution program, in an attempt to win back his rural base. Since then, the country has been in a vertiginous downward spiral. The Zimbabwean experience is located within a larger global transformation which catapulted many people from an intentionally underdeveloped ‘traditional’ world, often through a violent interlude of civil strife, into a ‘modernity’ conditioned by newly intensified globalization. In their article ‘Men in the Third World: Postcolonial Perspectives on Masculinity,’ Robert Morrell and Sandra Swart connect political and economic transformation to the forging of different notions of masculinity: The decline of the national-state and the end of colonialism also marks the concomitant historical crisis of the values it represented, chiefly masculine authority founded and embodied in the patriarchal family, compulsory heterosexuality, and the exchange of women – all articulated in the crucible of imperial masculinity. (2005: 92)

R.W. Connell proposes a ‘three-fold model of the structure of gender, distinguishing relations of (a) power, (b) production [and the division of labor] and (c) cathexis (emotional attachment)’ (Connell, 1995: 73). ‘Patterns of emotional attachment,’ Connell writes, ‘although often felt to be the most intimate and personal of all social relationships, are also subject to reconstruction by large scale social forces’ (2005: 79). While other disciplines are

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Masculine Identities in Zimbabwean Fiction well suited to analyzing changes in power and production as these bear on the construction of gender orders, I take fiction to provide a valuable register of cathexis, of ‘patterns of emotional attachment’ in turmoil as gender, and in this case masculinity, is transformed by social and economic forces. What happens to the gender order, and in particular to notions of masculinity, in conditions like those faced in Zimbabwe?i The short stories that are the focus of this essay suggest a range of responses. In the traditional construction of Shona masculinity and in the colonial era, men were presumed to belong in the public realm, to be capable of coping with a money economy and with other aspects of modernity, and to be the providers for the family. Women belonged to domestic spaces and child-rearing, and were expected to uphold and sustain traditional values (Shire, 1994). In post-independence Zimbabwe the uncertainty associated with a market-based, global economy becomes a source of great anxiety for men. The stories represent men who have lost their jobs or withdrawn from a competitive, commercial arena and who have therefore lost their ability to play the critical role of bread-winner. Women, on the other hand, are sometimes represented as embracing new opportunities to enter the public realm. In these stories, work is essential for men to maintain their dignity and their position as ‘head’ of the family. In the hitherto prevailing construction of gender identity, men were presumed to be rational and women irrational, men dominant and sometimes violent and women subordinate and passive. These stories show men losing control, becoming violent, and often directing their anger against women or becoming helplessly paralyzed, even self-destructive. By contrast, women often gain greater control and demonstrate ability to be comfortable in, even to take pleasure in and feel liberated by modernity. Unsurprisingly, in these stories men are threatened by and even come to dread women’s power. Finally, just a few stories confront two markers (in the minds of the characters) of this troubling condition of modernity, AIDS and homosexuality. These issues are attended to not in their own right but as additional factors which undermine the traditional notion of masculinity. Of the thirty stories in these three collections, nineteen are centrally concerned with male identity in relationship to women; six of the stories concern boyhood identity; only five are irrelevant to the topic of this essay. This rough count suggests in itself the degree of concern about issues of masculinity in these collections. While male identity is not entirely a new concern in the work of Mungoshi, Nyamfukudza, and Chinodya, their fiction from the 1990s overwhelmingly features a new kind of male subjectivity, located in predominately urban settings, confronting economic vulnerability, and showing heightened amounts of violence towards women along with paralyzing feelings of dread and inadequacy. What follows is a survey of this new experience of masculinity as developed in all three collections. The economic situation of a central male character is foregrounded in five of the stories. In Mungoshi’s ‘The Hare’ the protagonist Nhongo is disturbed by the loss of his accustomed role as provider for his family of four. He had worked as a manager in a textile company in Harare; ‘He was getting good money and he was a Party-card holder’ (6) until the company goes into liquidation and he finds himself out of work and his wife becomes the bread-

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‘Coming Unstuck’ winner. In Mungoshi’s ‘The Slave Trade’ Marara and his wife dine with his new bosses, an expatriate couple. Ravi, his wife, responds with discomfort to the unfamiliar power relationship disguised in this invitation to dinner; Marara’s reaction is to get drunk, becoming defensive, aggressive and also lucidly articulate in exposing the purportedly new, egalitarian relationship between him and his hosts as another form of imperialism. In the face of the cool condescension of the hosts, Marara struggles, albeit drunkenly, to assert his version of history and his dignity as an educated African but does so at the cost of losing his job. In Nyamfukudza’s ‘Posters on the wall’ the factory-worker husband Taku keeps a poster of Karl Marx on the wall, which his materially oriented wife surrounds with posters of Jimi Hendrix and Pele. She mocks him, ‘Taku don’t kid yourself, bourgeois to the bottom of your soul, you just don’t have any money’ (74). Taku sees ‘that the only guys who were having it easy were the chefs themselves, and their bosom friends in business’ (74), and so plots to steal his boss’s Jaguar, a political act which will incidentally gratify his wife’s expensive tastes: ‘In his view that was the only genuinely revolutionary act one in his position could commit, to take from the capitalist thieves what the workers had created with their labour’. … To take for oneself what belongs to the people. That’s what all the guys in government were doing’ (76). In another Nyamfukudza story Reverend Mutumwi, who willingly embraces his calling to serve the poor, is out-maneuvered at every turn by his statusconscious wife (‘Days without hope’). In Chinodya’s ‘Play your Cards’ Timothy is ‘an emergent young black bureaucrat [who] endorsed the socialist ideology as long as it respected his position in the very structure whose destruction he preached’ (55). He gambles and loses against a woman who is holding the winning cards as a European (i.e. white) and a doctor (of higher status). In two of the stories, Mungoshi’s ‘The Empty House’ and Chinodya’s ‘Can We Talk?’, the husbands are unemployed artists disaffected with the surrounding commercial world. Gwizo’s father is a ‘self-made man,’ an industrial magnate ‘as stiff and unyielding as a slab of concrete’ (84), and he has nothing but contempt for his painter son. The narrator-writer of ‘Can We Talk?’ disparages his wife’s efforts to climb ‘the ladder of success, clutching and slipping . . . always trying to climb up. Climb up to where, my dear?’ (96) In all of these stories the male characters are anxious about their economic status and feel inadequate in this respect in relation to their wives. The setting is the urban world of Harare, where money is to be made by sharp businessmen, especially those with Party affiliation, and where there is considerable pressure to climb the ladder of commercial success. But it is also an economically tough world of failing companies, anxious status-seekers, where ‘one had almost to be a thief to be able to buy a house or a new car’ (‘Posters’, 73), and it is a world in which angry black men are obliged to accept that whites still wield considerable social and economic power and that, as black Zimbabweans, they are vulnerable to economic forces beyond their control. The stories present a world filled with violence in several forms: men against women and children, men against themselves, and women against men. Given the traditional male role of patriarchal domination in Shona

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Masculine Identities in Zimbabwean Fiction society, it is not surprising to find numerous instances of men who feel psychologically vulnerable directing violence against women and children. Nyamfukudza’s ‘Posters on the Wall’ is the most extreme instance. After Taku and his wife Noma together steal his boss’s car, only Taku goes to prison for six years, during which time his socialist convictions are overwhelmingly displaced by hostility toward his wife: ‘He didn’t want to kill her, but he had to do something bad, something really mean, so that she would realize the intensity of his suffering’ (88). His desire for revenge is fed by additional threats to his sense of manhood. He is both repelled and fascinated when other prisoners compel the new arrivals, whom they call ‘girls,’ into homosexual relations. Taku ‘wondered if it was like some kind of ritual, the playing of roles, which they did it for. When he persisted [in asking questions], he was invited to ‘be a girl’ and find out’ (85, 87). Taku shuns any libidinal release in his waking hours, but his nightly masturbation is filled with ‘rich, detailed fantasies of how he would fix [Noma]. His dreams were now masterpieces of tantalized, baffled sex, as he seemed cured of any waking thoughts or yearnings about women, so satisfying and varied were his nocturnal dreams and nightmares. He became a hermaphrodite by day, thinking about how he would fix her’ (88). Taku’s sense of himself as a potent man is challenged by the homosexual activity around him, activity that he wishes were ‘more open’; as he becomes ‘a hermaphrodite by day’, his ambiguous sexual desires are channeled into his hatred for women, especially Noma. Released from prison, Taku returns home, ‘his hatred … burned clean, a pure blue flame, sharp as a stainless steel blade.’ Noma greets him dressed in ‘some stupid flimsy dress’ and he immediately attacks, yanking her by her hair and ‘smash[ing] his fist onto the startled, wide open mouth’ (90). Having beaten her senseless, perhaps lifeless, he smashes the three posters over her body, as if to indicate she is to blame for the ideological confusion, and the sexual ambivalence that burns at the heart of his being and which has turned him into a weapon against woman. Mungoshi’s ‘The Empty House’ also focuses on a man whose feelings of emasculation lead him to assault his wife. Gwizo, an unknown artist, is ‘discovered’ by a white American art dealer, Agatha, who succeeds in getting him critical attention and commercial success. Against his family’s wishes, they marry, and afterwards, Gwizo comes to feel in part as if he is ‘betraying his people’ (85), and in part as if he is ‘another commercial item [Angela had] picked up on [her] great romantic safari through Africa’ (88). Initially, however, Agatha was his muse; he paints her as ‘an explosion of benevolent expletives in colour and form, an ecstatic dance eulogizing liberated, liberating woman’ (89). As the title of the story implies, Gwizo becomes impotent in this marriage as artist and man; he ‘had inexplicably dried up after he got married’ (92) and despite their wishes, Angela fails to become pregnant, to fill their ‘empty house.’ Gwizo begins to drink heavily and stops even pretending to work in his studio. He ‘became aware of his growing fear of that blank canvas. It seemed to have acquired a life of its own, to be interrogating him. It looked like a black hole through which he would disappear forever – a yawning mouth, waiting to reveal the final truth’ (97). He contemplates suicide but can’t think of a form of death where his body ‘was in full control of itself right

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‘Coming Unstuck’ to its very last breath,’ a death that would be like ‘a cocked fist into her throat’ (100). Eventually, Agatha sleeps first with another budding artist-protégé, and then with Gwizo’s hyper-masculine father who recognizes in Agatha a smart business woman. She becomes pregnant, and in the final scene Gwizo believes the child is his father’s even as Angela insists it is simply ‘hers’, dismissing the question of paternity. Completely emasculated, Gwizo can think of nothing to do but encircle his fingers around her neck, in the closing sentence of the story. In addition to these stories of violence against women, five others include fathers who beat their wives or children; verbally abusive, drunken fathers and brothers; a woman impregnated and then jilted by a man who is now marrying another; a man who is so filled with nausea and disgust that he abandons his fiancée when she confesses she has had an illegitimate child; and a man who is so psychotically apathetic that he sleeps with his wife’s sister and then watches passively as his wife takes out her rival’s eyeball (Nyamfukudza, ‘No smoke, no fire,’ ‘The power of speech,’ and ‘Unkind monologue’; Mungoshi, ‘Singer at the Wedding,’ ‘Did You Have To Go That Far?’; Chinodya, ‘Brothers and Sisters,’ ‘Bramson,’and ‘Strays’). In addition to instances of male violence directed against women, the stories abound with motifs of paralysis and self-destructive impulses in male characters. In ‘The Hare’ the animal that Nhongo hits with his car becomes a symbol for the paralysis he feels and a moment of revelation of his suicidal impulse. Compulsive drinking accompanies feelings of worthlessness in Mungoshi’s ‘The Empty House’ and ‘The Slave Trade’ and in Chinodya’s ‘Can We Talk?’ and ‘Play your Cards’. Casual sex, used as an anodyne for pain, is a potential self-inflicted death sentence in the time of AIDS (Chinodya, ‘Can We Talk?’ and ‘Strays’; Nyamfukudza, ‘If God was a woman’). Gwizo contemplates suicide in ‘The Empty House’ and a family house servant kills himself in Chinodya’s ‘Bramson.’ Paternal violence contributes to Pamba’s drowning/ possible suicide in Mungoshi’s ‘Did You Have to Go That Far?’ In Nyamfukudza’s ‘Unkind monologue’, the husband experiences paralysis of any moral or affective impulse. In Nyamfukudza’s ‘Days without hope’ Reverend Mutumwi is rendered ineffectual, unable to accomplish any of his good intentions, because of his wife’s malevolence. His reflections could belong to most of these characters: ‘What was happening to him? Things, somehow, seemed to be slipping out of grip, the firm hold he ought to have had of them was no longer quite there, and the whole feeling of not knowing exactly where to turn next was exceedingly unpleasant, like being dumped blindfolded in a strange town and being reluctant for shame to ask the name of where one was’ (56). Along with the many instances of male violence directed against women by vulnerable, psychologically damaged men, there are numerous instances in which women intimidate men, psychologically, sexually, and sometimes physically. In Nyamfukudza’s ‘The power of speech’ a young woman has spent her girlhood catering to the demands of an alcoholic father and several brothers. Reacting to the power that men have had over her life, she now discovers that she has extraordinary power to annihilate, to make her lover ‘as if he had never been’:

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Masculine Identities in Zimbabwean Fiction She had gazed penetratingly at him, wondering at this manner of complete acceptance of whichever way she might respond; scream at him, spit at him or put a fist in his mouth, all were within her power. … So she had succumbed to the temptation of his surrender, allowing herself to view the act in the terms of his description, to hold him by the waist and to stuff him into herself, she would be doing the doing, so to speak, wielding the power’. (7-8, my italics)

The woman sees herself as the ‘penetrator’, the active agent who does ‘the doing’, who has the power to make this man ‘surrender’, to ‘put a fist in his mouth,’ and even ‘to stuff him into herself’, entirely controlling the sex act. This reversal is represented as liberating for the woman, almost a castration for the unnamed man who ‘desperately looked round, as if searching for something that belonged to him. … The haunted look in his eyes was deeply printed in her memory’ (10). In Chinodya’s ‘The Waterfall’ a cocky young businessman at a conference picks up two girls in a disco. After a night of drink and drugs, they fall asleep in his car, and in the morning the girls suggest having a bath in a waterfall. The setting is Nyanga, a place associated with supernatural events in Zimbabwe. Bathing in the water, the man suddenly notices ‘drops of blood on the rock … bloodied chicken feathers, and the remains of a dead fire. … The next moment there was Martha towering behind us, naked, gleaming wet and spread-eagled, brandishing a green stick. She cut Saru quickly on the back, thrice, then hit me in the crotch’ (51). The man tries to stop this Maenad, and then, unwilling to be a sacrificial victim, races for his car: ‘Now I knew I could not stop her. I could not stop them and I could not stop it, whatever it was, and I started running for dear life’ (52). The story shares with Nyamfukudza’s ‘The power of speech’ a fairy tale quality in which the normal order of male dominance is inexplicably inverted, putting the man into a looking-glass world of ‘witches’ conjured up by male terror at female power (‘The power of speech’, 7). Chinodya’s ‘Play your Cards’ has a realistic setting and a more equal contest between two people who like to gamble: ‘He too was shrewd, only a tiny little bit less than she was. For her too cards were a game of life and death, a ferocious contest’ (54). The players are Maria, a white doctor of a certain age, and Timothy, a black Zimbabwean civil servant who pretends to be widowed but is in fact married; he enjoys mooching off Maria while having an affair with her. When she discovers the truth and confronts him, he responds by attacking her, accusing her of using him to have his baby. He charges, ‘You’d caught me in your python-like grip and were swallowing me smoothly, slowly,’ and later he reflects that she ‘had a steely strength which he had never realized, never imagined. He was afraid to touch her – for the first time since he had known her, she terrified him … he felt clumsy and vulnerable, weak and helpless. … Something, the crooked root of his being, had been wrenched out and flung into the sun, discarded’ (60). Although the woman has been victimized by this freeloader who has drunk her beer, entertained his friends in her home, and damaged her car, she nevertheless has the ‘winners’ in her hand, being white, in a high status profession, and smart. Now exposed, the once-insouciant Timothy feels almost as annihilated

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‘Coming Unstuck’ as the male in ‘The power of speech’. The vagina is represented as terrifyingly powerful, with a ‘python-like grip’ that can swallow a man ‘smoothly’ (‘Play your cards’), capable of ‘swallowing’ the helpless male who is ‘stuffed’ into it (‘The power of speech’), or ‘a black hole through which he would disappear forever – a yawning mouth’ (‘The Empty House’). These strong women, intentionally or not, make the men they interact with feel annihilated, castrated, powerless to effect their desires. But there are two stories in which female initiative, specifically in the sexual realm, is represented as beneficent. While Nyamfukudza describes the most extreme male violence against a woman (in ‘Posters on the wall’), here he imagines role reversals which salve and even redeem the masculine ego. In ‘No smoke, no fire,’ the unnamed female narrator, disillusioned about what marriage is likely to offer, determines to seduce a younger boy who seems to her ‘innocent’ (92). ‘She would help him do it for the first time,’ she decides (98). While she takes the first steps in getting the boy to meet her in a lonely spot, she does not try to control him: ‘she would help him only so far. She wanted him to go for whatever he might for himself, so that whatever she gave him was something that he had asked for and really wanted… . This one memory she wanted to stay a good one for him’ (103-4). This possibility of positive encounter with a woman in control is explored more fully in the title story of the Nyafukudza collection, ‘If God was a woman’. The narrator is a male school teacher who, hearing a rowdy class, has casually asked an older female teacher if ‘she could do with some help’ (115). She responds warmly, saying ‘But not here. Would he come along with her.’ Immediately he ‘felt helpless, trapped, self-betrayed, yet compelled to smile too’ (115). She takes him to her apartment in a nearby building where he ‘found himself irresistibly carried along, unable to back off or back out. … He told himself it was not the unnatural thing or the unusual thing and sure enough it immediately felt natural. So he shrugged inwardly. It was OK. He was a prisoner, discovering that he did not really yearn to be free’ (116). The scene in her warm, attractively furnished apartment has a dreamlike quality for the man; without asking she brings him his favorite drink and then undresses before him unselfconsciously, ‘smiling with barely restrained relish. … Yet, in a way that he could not explain, he felt imperiled, entangled, unprotected’ (120-21). She, on the other hand, is absolutely confident and comfortable: ‘Isn’t it uncanny, how the Lord, in his infinite prescience, knows just who we are going to need?’ (121). The male narrator is intensely drawn to her yet remains ambivalent. He feels like a ‘fruit’ plucked ‘for others’ feeding’; their copulation is ‘an interminable freefall into a bottomless black pit of seething, steaming, corrupted anal flesh’ (122). Yet this is a corruption that is also life-enhancing. The following morning the narrator ponders ‘the delicious, delicate immediacy of one’s newly lost freedom. It generated such a sense of vitality. Therein perhaps lay the paradox, to find oneself by the reluctant, damnably difficult letting-go of one’s individuality. Analogous to the religious instinct perhaps. Only renounce yourself and you shall be free. What was love but a giving up, a renunciation, a surrender?’ (124-5). ‘If God was a woman’ suggests that the abandonment of control, the surrender to this middle-aged woman who is able

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Masculine Identities in Zimbabwean Fiction to command him to satisfy her needs even as she restores him, is ‘analogous to the religious instinct’, ‘a renunciation’ of individuality, of egoism, which brings a kind of rebirth of the self. What adds to the narrator’s uncertainty about whether to return to this woman – and it is an element introduced in only a couple of other stories – is the factor of AIDS. This disease, on the African continent and elsewhere, is a shameful secret, not to be spoken of or acknowledged. These collections suggest that its ‘undiscussable’ nature lies, at least in part, in its reconfiguring the most intimate experience of being male. In the time of AIDS the sex act, once associated with life and birth – and for males often with domination – is a likely death sentence. In the Nyamfukudza story, just at the moment in which ‘copulation with the unattainable woman was increasingly, tantalizingly at hand’, the narrator reflects, ‘How awful then, how terrible that in these dementedly awry days, one caught the terminal, fatal virus right at the heart of where it all started, the cancerous, poisoned apple. The ultimate, terminal, deadly bit; so the fucking cunt had teeth after all?’ (122). Having copulated with this stranger, the narrator continues to be haunted by the notion of ‘harakiri love. I love you and want to fuck for love despite that possibility, that shadowy third one who now walks always beside us, neither man nor woman but we now know who’ (125). The next morning as he wanders the city, he observes younger couples ‘seemingly in the prime of their tainted, doomed lives, strutting through the malls like peacocks, oblivious of the plague sweeping through their midst’ (126). This prompts him to wonder whether, if God was a woman, she would have ‘sent her only daughter to be so cruelly nailed upon the cross and raped and vandalized so that the suffering of man would be OK. Only a man could have such tortured, wasteful, convoluted logic. It was a soldier’s vision. …’ (127) . The conclusion of the story, which in many ways offers a positive vision of male surrender to female desire, is itself a kind of ‘convoluted logic’. The narrator returns to this mysterious woman: ‘Love’s triumph then, was not a fear of death but an embrace of it, not to be meek but to be bold, valiant, defiant, even warlike . … He knew now, now that there was nothing to fear, his return to her would be a second awakening, a second coming’ (127-8). What is convoluted here is not only his magical thinking that somehow he and the women are immune to AIDS but also his shift into the masculine imagery he associated with a cruel male god with a ‘soldier’s vision’. Despite his reflection on the difference between a male and female deity, he ends the story feeling ‘bold, valiant, defiant, even warlike’ – all as he hurries towards his goddess. Given how rapidly AIDS spread in Zimbabwe between 1980 and 2000, it is noteworthy that the issue arises so infrequently in these collections. AIDS is alluded to in Mungoshi’s ‘Did you have to go that far?’ and the only other story in which AIDS is mentioned is Chinodya’s ‘Can we talk?’ Here, as in the Nyamfukudza story, fear of AIDS contributes to the male narrator’s anxiety about his masculinity. These two stories, Nyamfukudza’s and Chinodya’s, are important in breaking the taboo surrounding AIDS and in foregrounding the even more deeply denied connection between the disease and male identity. Another taboo topic closely related to male identity is homosexuality, and this

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‘Coming Unstuck’ issue, like AIDS, is touched on only briefly in these collections, in Nyamfukudza’s ‘Posters on the wall’ (previously discussed), in Chinodya’s ‘Can We Talk?’ where it is another strand in the narrator’s ruthless interrogation of male identity, and in Mungoshi’s ‘Of Lovers and Wives’, where homosexuality forms the central theme. This story is narrated by a wife who, after eighteen years of marriage, is only now discovering that she has all along shared her husband Chasi with his best friend and lover Peter. The intimacy of the two men is represented as established, more marital than Chasi’s relationship with his wife. Ostensibly the ending seems to ‘police’ homosexual desire by having Peter commit suicide. However, even while the point of view is contained within the outraged wife Shamiso, the reader is aware that her action brings about death and separation, destroying the tender intimacy that she has observed between the two men. The unique feature of this story is the representation of a different and, to the reader, non-threatening version of masculinity. Thus far I have sought to show that these three collections of short stories reveal certain preoccupations about the situation of men in contemporary Zimbabwe, preoccupations relating to economic and psychological vulnerabilities, aggressive feelings directed against women perceived as threatening, fear and sometimes awe of women who seem to have more power than they do. I conclude with sustained attention to two stories which offer particularly intense, critical examination of a central male character, stories in which all of these preoccupations are at play: Mungoshi’s ‘The Hare’ and Chinodya’s ‘Can We Talk?’ The protagonists of both stories are married men and fathers at midlife. Both are unemployed and see the rapid social and economic changes as troubling, not solely because of the impact on their earning power. They recall the traditional world of their childhood with its well-defined gender roles, but find no guidance there for their own situations. Their wives have found strength and independence in careers which are tied to the economic changes. In each story the protagonist interrogates his sense of paralysis and struggles to understand what is happening to his marriage. What is admirable in these stories is not that the protagonists envision a different kind of masculinity (they don’t), but the courage to refuse old roles and the will to continue the risky business of exploring their feelings. The title of the Mungoshi collection, Walking Still, registers the mixed tone of frustration and determination, of qualified agency, felt by the protagonists in these two stories. On the one hand, there is forward motion, ‘walking’, and a sense of determination to push ahead conveyed by the adverb, as in ‘I am still walking’. On the other hand, positioning the adverb after the participle draws attention to the paradoxical yoking of motion (walking) and stasis (still), suggesting a slow motion dream in which one is forever walking and yet forever in the same place. In Mungoshi’s ‘The Hare’ the narrative is focalized through the central character Nhongo, who has lost his managerial job in a textile factory. He had been ‘getting good money and he was a Party-card holder…a careful, securityconscious family man…not one to take risks’ (6). Having entered employment in an industry that had been protected from competition up to 1980, Nhongo loses his job because of economic forces of global competition that rendered the Zimbabwean textile industry moribund. Now, eighteen months on, he

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Masculine Identities in Zimbabwean Fiction recalls his anxious concern at the skyrocketing prices for bread, the ‘suicidal amount of money’ that he owes on his home and car, the shame of having to cut back on meat and to deny his children. Ironically, the same forces that put the textile factory into bankruptcy have fueled the informal trade in secondhand clothing, an opportunity that his wife Sara has now seized upon. Nhongo sees that Sara ‘had become a new woman’ (12): ‘He had wanted Sara to have a job, to do what she felt she wanted to do. It was, after all, only what every woman was doing these days. But deep down, Nhongo was still a traditionalist, a tribesman’; ‘He belonged to a proud tradition that said the hunting is done by the man of the house’ (8, 13). While Sara ‘thrives’, Nhongo ‘became scared at the speed at which their life was traveling’ (11). He worries about his wife’s safety in her travel to South Africa, but ‘Sara always returned radiant and bubbling with energy; she seemed almost unable to sit still, until she could make yet another trip over the border’(11). Nhongo is so intimidated by his wife’s new self-confidence and initiative that he starts noticing ‘the word ‘castration’ each time he picked up something to read . … He would become aware of his whole body assuming a defensive posture – physically manifested by a slight forward stoop and his right hand dangling in front of his fly’ (14). At the opening of the story Nhongo, having seen his wife off on yet another trip to Johannesburg, makes an impulsive decision to drive that night with his two daughters and the housemaid Ella to his parents’ rural home. Watching Sara depart from the expensive downtown hotel, he feels she ‘belong[ed] more to [her new] friends than to him, and he had had a sudden desire to taste dovi once more, sitting in his mother’s pole-and-daga hut. A strange irresistible nostalgia to revisit the scenes of his childhood had assailed him’ (1). This nostalgia is amplified as eighteen-year-old Ella emerges, in contrast to Sara, as everything that a traditional wife should be. Upon their arrival, she kneels to offer traditional greetings to Nhongo’s parents. Indeed, she has become wellknown to them, because Sara has sent her often with foodstuffs for her in-laws rather than making the long trip herself. Learning that Sara has gone again to Joburg, the parents are even more inclined to value Ella, who immediately sets about the wifely tasks of putting the children to bed and preparing chicken and dovi. There seems to be an understanding between the parents and Ella to get Nhongo to consider taking her as a second wife. His father insists that ‘the city was all right if you were still young and had a job. But … the blackman’s wealth is a home out in the country, among his own people. But a home, a family, meant a good hard-working wife’ (24). Late at night Nhongo finds Ella bathing in his room, and the next morning, when he abruptly decides to leave, he asks his mother if she had encouraged Ella to come to his room, telling her firmly, ‘I love Mai Sekai’ – that is, Sara, the mother of daughter Sekai (23). The text is silent about what, if anything, Nhongo and Ella did after he found her bathing in the middle of the night, and yet by morning Sekai is clearly acting up about what she considers to be Ella’s usurpation of her mother’s role. As they prepare to depart, Nhongo finds in the trunk of the car the corpse of the hare that he had struck the night before. The scene is presented as an accident although Nhongo has ‘an instant of knife-like clarity’ when he recognizes that ‘he had wished both to hit and to avoid the hare’ (5).

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‘Coming Unstuck’ Wounding the hare (which is still alive when he first picks it up) is itself a challenge to his masculinity; he feels that ‘he had to do something. Something, at least, to show them [Ella and his daughters] that he still could’ (5). A bit later he feels ‘vaguely’ that ‘it isn’t my fault. … Somewhere deep within his tangled unexamined feelings: it was all Sara’s fault’ (6). The hare is a challenge to Nhongo’s sense of competence, but it also becomes a figure for his wounded self – blindsided by economic forces, paralyzed by the ‘speed’ of modernity, incapable of determining what actions he should take. His indecisiveness when he ‘wished both to hit and to avoid the hare’ permits the interpretation that he is similarly indecisive about his own existence. The story ends ambiguously, with Nhongo’s parents bidding Ella a farewell fit for a prospective daughter-in-law. Ella sits in the front seat, and Nhongo disciplines Sekai for insisting Ella sit in the back, because the front is ‘Mama’s seat’ (25). After a few moments Sekai complains that Ella is wearing ‘Mama’s perfume’ and then, when she asserts, ‘I saw you walking out of Mama’s room this morning,’ Nhongo almost loses control of the car: he ‘drove on as if someone were holding a gun to his head’ (25). Seeing Ella weeping, he puts his hand on her knee, and she bends to put her forehead on his hand. Sekai again challenges, ‘I saw your hand on Ella’s knee,’ and finally Nhongo pulls over and slaps his daughter. Ella grabs his hand to prevent a second blow and ‘instinctively [Nhongo] quailed. Ella’s grip on his arm … was vice-like and so steady his own arm shook . … Nhongo felt like pleading: Please you are hurting me’ (26). Appalled at what she has done, Ella slips out of the car and walks down the road, soon followed by Sekai who is now calling ‘Mummy! Mummy!’ Ella stops in the road ‘like a pillar of rock. And to [Nhongo] she seemed to grow taller and taller and he felt as if she was falling on top of him’ (26). He slumps against the steering wheel. The story ends with Nhongo, Ella, and Sekai all completely confused about what relationship they have or want to have. This submissive eighteen-year-old housemaid, the very type of a traditional wife, is able to dominate Nhongo, to fall on top and crush him; he feels as unmanned by her as by Sara. In his imagination, his manhood is to be found neither in the country nor in the city, neither in tradition nor in modernity, for it lies small, crushed, and lifeless in the trunk of his car, a thing he can neither revive nor drive away from. The final story to be considered is Chinodya’s ‘Can We Talk?’, the most lacerating self-examination about masculinity to be found in these three volumes. It opens with what can only be termed dueling rants between husband and wife. He begins: I hate the way you love medicines – the way you’ll stuff yourself with painkillers, lozenges, cough syrup, antibiotics, lemon, sodium bicarbonate, mouthwash and honey just for a common cold. The way for you every sneeze is an allergy, every itch an infection, every pimple a cancer and every twitch a stroke. Your incredible faith in doctors – no, specialists, the way you’ll let them feel you, pamper you, cut you up like a guinea pig, punch you with their metal pricks, while gloating over you and saying yes, you said so yourself, you look like raw beef . … I hate your silence and submissiveness, for I know it is a volcano that will one day erupt on me. I should crucify you for your other sins – your thrift, your envy, I know at the heart of your softness and humility is a

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Masculine Identities in Zimbabwean Fiction hard secret nut of Capricon [sic] ambitiousness, your straggler’s distance is only a ploy to outpace yourself, to outpace me. (85-6)

The husband’s diatribe goes on for two pages, the tone ranging from irritability over petty issues, magnified in a long, unhappy marriage, to the violent image of her rape by a doctor wielding a ‘metal prick,’ to the paranoid fear of her hidden capacity to ‘erupt’ on him like a volcano and to beat him in the rat race of modern life. Then, apparently, the wife speaks back: And I hate the way you never scrub your back and splash the bathroom floors and the walls when you take a bath, the way you leave hair all over the sink, the way you sit for hours in the toilet, blasting away like a motorbike for all the visitors to hear . … I hate the way you don’t eat my food after I have spent the whole afternoon cooking and you stagger back home from your drinking spree and claw me with your ice-cold feet and then crash out into a snore. … I just hate the way you think you can contain me and my career, the way you think my life should be molded to yours – the way you go on deluding yourself thinking I’m the same person I was ten years ago and that I will continue to put up with each of your emotional ambushes. No shaz, I will not!’. (87-8)

We quickly learn that the story is narrated entirely by the husband. ‘We don’t talk any more,’ he says, ‘so I have decided to write this. I know it is going to be a one-sided conversation but I will go ahead and talk, anyway’ (89). On the one hand, the male narrator, full of spite and voluminous rationalizations for his deplorable behavior, controls all the words on the page and thus his wife’s speech; on the other hand, his harsh, self-lacerating inquisition suggests that he is capable of entertaining her point of view, of seeing himself through her eyes. The couple is middle-class and welleducated, he a writer in a fallow period, in effect unemployed, and his wife successful in an unnamed career and evidently capable of supporting the family. They come from a rural world that, in his memory, seems simple, sensuous, and uncomplicated. With many others of their generation, they have chosen to move to the city and have aspired to upward mobility, choices that he now questions. He complains, ‘I don’t know you any more. I see you rushing off to work in the morning. You drive around in your new company car, wearing the expensive outfits paid for by your company. … Your life is crowded and mine is empty. … I have kicked down my ladders and deluded myself that I am in search of simplicity; but the vacuum is killing me. I feel sorry for you, craving sophistication and clutching the ladder of success’ (96). In the husband’s eye, the wife has become an artificial woman, stuffing herself with chemicals, lacquering her nails, fornicating with sterile ‘metal pricks’, wearing high fashion and driving a new car, relentlessly climbing the ‘ladder of success’. By contrast he figures himself as a drunken wastrel, slovenly dressed, a gross, unkempt, and unclean mountain of flesh. In contrast to her agency and efficiency, he has ‘tried simplicity. I have done away with shoes, socks, ties, suits, jackets and god knows what else. I have done away with watches, calendars, diaries and appointments. I have done away with newspapers, radios, televisions and phones. I have done away with jobs, careers and hobbies’ (95). He sees a marriage counselor who tells him, ‘You

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‘Coming Unstuck’ are stressed. You are between jobs. You are going through your mid-life crisis’ (92); these ‘readymade assurances’ (92) offer neither insight nor direction. His wife, he says, merely wants him to be like a ‘regular man’, but he seeks a soul mate who can ‘listen to my chaos’ (90) and appreciate ‘my irony and openendedness, my restless mind’ (86). But this narrator also mocks his weltschmertz: ‘I badly need somebody to impress’ (97). Where can the narrator turn for relief from his discontent? The two bitter opening verbal duels are followed by a brief lyrical recollection of his first visit to his wife’s rural home, the traditional foods and smells, bathing each other at night, their sexual bliss. This is the lost world of the rural past that the couple has intentionally moved away from. Now the narrator finds himself urban, educated, unemployed, ungrounded, directionless: ‘We thought we were beyond tradition, that we were educated and sophisticated, that we could manage our own conflicts. Now look where we are’ (94). He fully recognizes that the past does not offer a useful model of relationship: We were both raised on the culture of not talking. Our parents talked and we listened. Our teachers talked and we listened. The Bible talked and we listened. … Now without parents or Bibles or teachers to talk down to me I have truly come unstuck. I have no one, nothing to listen to. I have chosen to live with the terrible satisfaction that no one shall say unto me, ‘Thou shall not . ….’ I have become a law unto myself, despite even you. Only I can change myself. (92)

Writing this story is an attempt to communicate with his wife and to find a way out of his own ‘chaos’: When I am away from this story I feel the conviction to go on with it, the confidence that I might pull this off and say something valuable, but I come back and I wane with the fear that you might not understand this . … I wane with the fear that perhaps I am hopelessly lost, that I am indeed beyond salvage. But let me try again. (91) Strange, but writing this is like having sex with you, my dear. Writing is a kind of sex. A ruthless, obsessive sex. … Writing this story, I have switched out my life for weeks. … I have eaten, drunk, slept just so that I could reach the terrible orgasm of completing this story. The orgasm of this story has eluded me many times. I now realize that perhaps this is not even an orgasmic story. (106)

It is an important insight. Perhaps he must abandon the familiar masculinist metaphors of sexual conquest to grasp a different way of being a man. The story has no climax in any conventional way, nor even a conventional fictional structure. The first part, this ranting confessional, ends on this note of uncertainty about its own reception: ‘I wonder now when you read this what you will think and what you will say to me, and whether we will talk. Will you forgive me for this?’ (106). In the final section the narrator turns from his marriage to what is really a meditation on sex, death, and love, set in a bar and grill in a Harare suburb overlooking a cemetery. His interlocutor is a childhood friend named Alice, willing to listen but not to be a sexual partner: ‘Graveyards. Death. Alice’s sizzling pork and corpses rotting away in expensive coffins deep in the earth a stone’s throw away. Rumba blasting’; [the] walk out to where the earth mound lies waiting, the fresh, lipless hole

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Masculine Identities in Zimbabwean Fiction gaping for the body’ (109, 111). The reduction of the narrator from modern, urban, middle-class man to a socially-disconnected, slovenly drunk concludes with this anatomical image of the lipless hole that is his grave, an image that resonates too with the horrifying vaginas in other stories. ‘Can We Talk?’ has, like other stories in these collections, a salient theme of gender conflict and a psychological portrait of a disturbed, bewildered, hostile, shameful male protagonist. What distinguishes this story is the risktaking of narrator and author, risk-taking both in tone, style and structure, making this an especially challenging inquiry into masculine identity. First, the fiction repeatedly invites us to identify the unnamed narrator as the author Shimmer Chinodya. At one point the narrator meets a young woman who likes his books and asks, ‘Why did Godi or Farai or Benjamin do this on page so-and-so?’ (101), all characters from Chinodya’s fiction. He refers to his first novel Dew in the Morning. The children of the narrator have the same names and gender as Chinodya’s own. So not only do we have a narrator dissecting his psyche, but the author invites us to understand this as a real confession, perhaps even a real communication to his wife. The protection normally extended to a first-person narrator is deliberately set aside. Second, the narrator/author, much more powerfully than Nyamfukudza, breaks silence about how AIDS is changing Africa. ‘We are the AIDS generation. AIDS hit us where it hurts most. AIDS came to us and said, “Now you can’t eat …” Timothy Stamps [onetime head of the Ministry of Health] rushed over and said, “Wait, wait! Here are some condoms.” Condoms. Condoms. We are the condom generation. The plastic generation. For some it is no use. For some it is too late. We are dying like flies’ (103). He recognizes that the most urgent and basic relationship between the sexes has been changed utterly for his generation. Sex is linked with death, not life, with plastic, not human flesh. Third, the narrator/author touches, albeit lightly, on the still more forbidden matter in Zimbabwe of homosexuality, registering his own sexual complexity. His friends tell him, ‘You’ve watched too many films. … There is nothing like that in our culture. You’ve read too many books . … Maybe you need other men,’ to which the narrator responds with a strong denial, ‘How dare you say that? I think women are more beautiful than men’ (91-2). But then, startlingly, the narrative includes an imagined transgendered moment. He recalls how he used to love to shop for dresses for his wife (a way of controlling and defining her): ‘I was the artist shaping you, painting you, exploring textures, fabrics and colours on you. … I don’t sneak any more into lady’s shops to ask, “Do you think this will fit my wife?” When I travel out of the country I don’t squeeze my hairy clumsy body into trim lady’s dresses and prance in front of hotel room mirrors, smirking to myself, “This will definitely fit you. Wait till you see this!” There is nobody for me to squeeze into women’s dresses for. There is no body for me to please’ (96). The authorial emphasis on ‘nobody’ with the repetition, ‘no body’ conveys his psychic discomfort with his current masculine role where all choices seem equally deathly. There is no body, not a female body penetrated by a metal speculum, not a male body covered with a plastic condom, which he can inhabit or feel connected to. His nausea at both genders spills out. His selfdisgust extends to all males:

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‘Coming Unstuck’ Early in life, we men begin by relishing our sins and proudly cataloguing our exploits but after a while we get bored of our deeds. We get bored, but we don’t stop. Yes, we men are children. Yes, there is a polygamous streak in every one of us. … Yes, we have girlfriends tucked away in high-density houses. Yes, we have secret children mothered by teenage girls. Yes, we can’t feed ourselves. Yes, we don’t care for the children that we spawn. Yes, we are irresponsible. Yes, we are rapists. Yes, we are wife-batterers. Yes, we spread AIDS. … So, I’m a sell out, aren’t I? Blaming men. Writing this unthinkable story. Shaming myself like this. … It’s cathartic. (102)

Chinodya takes big risks in this story to communicate the pain, disgust, and powerlessness he feels about his disordered masculine identity that has ‘come unstuck’ and his despair about male and female relationships in this time and in this place. He has taken risks with the shape of this story, searching futilely for a ‘climax’, an ‘orgasm’ to end this perhaps fruitless attempt to establish intercourse with his wife, truthfully confessing his shame and frustration, not knowing what the consequences of confession will be, either to his wife or to his readers. Of all the stories in these collections, ‘Can We Talk?’ offers the rawest psychological portrait of a male character struggling to define himself in a world far distant from the rural idyll of his past with its secure, albeit restrictive definitions of roles offered by parents, teachers, the bible. He directs verbal and imagined violence against an economically independent new woman and against himself. Alternative gender roles trouble his imagination; the role of adulterer is shameful, and in any case, every sexual relationship is haunted by the specter of AIDS, ‘that shadowy third one who now walks always beside us’ (‘If God was a woman’, 125). At the end, facing ‘the fresh, lipless hole gaping for the body’, he is only clear that he must keep on talking: ‘Talking is the basis of self-understanding. It’s the basis of understanding others’ (102).

Note * This article was first published in Matatu, vol. 34 (2007). It is reproduced here by kind permission of the publishers Editions Rodopi. 1 One instructive analysis is Rob Pattman’s study of gender construction in a Zimbabwe teachers’ college in the early 1990s, one of the few ethnographic studies of contemporary Zimbabwean men. It is worth noting that at this one provincial college there were 40,000 applicants for 300 places; this underlines how intense was the interest of many Zimbabweans in advancement through education. Both male and female students came from rural, traditional homes and saw themselves aiming for the higher status and upward mobility offered by a teaching career. This aspiration towards modernity was, in the minds of male students, appropriate for themselves but inappropriate for their female counterparts. Pattman writes that ‘men experience the College education of women as a threat to male dominance – a threat manifested [in the discursive construction of] particular women students as ‘prostitutes’ and Western … the term ‘prostitute’ connoted a woman violating her culture as well as her body’ (227). ‘Men learn to be men by eroticizing and policing women students’ (233), and this is true both for the men who were ‘church-going’ and those who were ‘beer-drinking’. In short, while a range of behaviors was available to the males students, women were expected to remain ‘traditional,’ and the male students’ sense of their own masculinity was ‘maintained through misogyny’ (233).

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Masculine Identities in Zimbabwean Fiction

Bibliography Carmody, Padraig and Scott Taylor, ‘Industry and the Urban Sector in Zimbabwe’s Political Economy’ in African Studies Quarterly 7, no. 2&3: [online] URL: http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v7/v7i2a3.htm. Chinodya, Shimmer. 1998. Can We Talk? & Other Stories. Harare: Baobab Books. Includes ‘Hoffman Street,’ ‘The Man who Hanged Himself,’ ‘Going to see Mr. B.V.,’ ‘Among the Dead,’ ‘Brothers and Sisters,’ ‘The Waterfall,’ ‘Play your Cards,’ ‘Strays,’ ‘Bramson,’ and ‘Can we Talk.’ Connell, R. W. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. 2001. ‘Masculinities and Globalization,’ in M. Kimmel and M. Messner, eds, Men’s Lives. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon. ——. 2005. ‘Globalization, Imperialism, and Masculinities,’ in M. Kimmel, J. Hearn, and R. Connell, eds, Handbook of Studies on Men & Masculinities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dashwood, Hevina S. 2000. Zimbabwe: The Political Economy of Transformation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Morrell, R. and S. Swart. 2005. ‘Men in the Third World: Postcolonial Perspectives on Masculinity,’ in M. Kimmel, J. Hearn, and R. Connell, eds., Handbook of Studies on Men & Masculinities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mungoshi, Charles. 1997. Walking Still. Harare: Baobab Books. Includes: ‘The Hare’, ‘The Homecoming’, ‘The Singer at the Wedding’, ‘Did You have to Go that Far’. ‘The Empty House’. ‘Of Lovers and Wives’. ‘The Slave Trade’, ‘Sacrifice’, ‘The Little Wooden Hut in the Forest.’. Nyamfukudza, Stanley. 1992. If God Was A Woman. Harare: College Press. Includes: ‘The power of speech’, ‘Curious cows’, ‘Eaten promises’, ‘Days without hope’, ‘Unkind monologue’, ‘Posters on the wall’, ‘No smoke, no fire’, ‘Other people’, ‘If God was a woman’, ‘Having been someone’. Pattman, R. 2001. ‘“The Beer Drinkers Say I had a Nice Prostitute, but the Church Goers Talk about Things Spiritual”: Learning to be Men at a Teachers’ College in Zimbabwe’ in R. Morrell, ed., Changing Men in Southern Africa. London: Zed Books. Shire, C. 1994. ‘Men don’t go to the moon: Language, space and masculinities in Zimbabwe’ in A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne, eds, Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative ethnographies. London: Routledge.

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7 Imported Alternatives Changing Shona Masculinities in Flame & Yellow Card K AT R I N A D A LY T H O M P S O N

Writers and filmmakers in Zimbabwe have exhibited a great deal of ‘discontent’ in their representations of Shona men, often portraying them in highly negative terms. As Lahoucine Ouzgane and Daniel Coleman write, in discussions of masculinity ‘discontent is productive: it can motivate the search for change.’1 Negative depictions of Shona masculinity pervade Zimbabwean literature and film.2 For example, in her novel Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga critiques Jeremiah’s desire to possess Lucia through sexual conquest,3 Nhamo’s conformity to masculine ideals,4 and Babamukuru’s patriarchal attempts to control the women in his family. Likewise in her film Everyone’s Child (1996), Dangarembga criticizes the predatory and brutal shopkeeper, who sexually blackmails the teenaged protagonist, Tamari, and forces her to abandon her family. In Under the Tongue (1996), Yvonne Vera creates a father who rapes his daughter, Zhizha, as well as a grandfather who heartlessly derides his wife for failing to produce a healthy male child. Godwin Mawuru (director) and Tsitsi Dangarembga (story) condemn the domineering and greedy brother-in-law Phineas in Neria (1992), alongside the patriarchal Shona custom of kugadza nhaka, through which the brother of a deceased man takes possession of his property, often including his widow and children.5 Chenjerai Hove critiques Chisaga through the eyes of his female protagonist Marita in Bones (1990) and Shona patriarchy generally in Ancestors (1996). If such texts are examples of discontent with Shona masculinity, there are other texts in which the subsequent search for change is actually narrated. Alongside the frequent negative portrayal of traditional and hegemonic Shona males in Zimbabwean literature and film, occasionally one also finds characters who represent positive forms of masculinity. In these texts, rather than mere discontent with traditional ideas of masculinity, we find alternatives articulated. Two recent films, Flame (directed by Ingrid Sinclair in 1996) and Yellow Card (directed by John Riber in 2000), depict masculinities that are distinct from the hegemonic image common to Zimbabwean literatures

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Changing Shona Masculinities in Flame & Yellow Card and cinema. Ingrid Sinclair is a British filmmaker who moved to Zimbabwe in 1985 after marrying filmmaker Simon Bright, and John Riber is an American filmmaker who grew up in India and has lived in Zimbabwe since 1987. Sinclair’s and Riber’s films present, to varying degrees, a foreign (nonZimbabwean, non-Shona speaking) perspective on Zimbabwean cultures in general and on Shona masculinities in particular, an interesting counterpoint to the ruling government’s condemnation of foreign influences on the one hand, and its authorization of a culture of male violence on the other. My decision to focus on Shona masculinity is based on the fact that the majority of narratives produced in Zimbabwe feature Shona characters, which means that Shona masculinity is the dominant form of ‘cultural imagery of masculinity’ in Zimbabwe.6 This is to be expected since Shona people make up 82 per cent of the population. While Shona masculinities may vary, there are ‘dominant ideologies of masculinity,’7 clusters of traits which in the Shona language are called zvechirume¸ literally ‘the objects and activities of men’ or, as Shire glosses it, ‘male preoccupations.’8 An understanding of what traits are thought of as masculine will help us to see how these traditional masculinities are deconstructed, and alternatives presented, in Flame and Yellow Card. In accounts of Shona culture written by Shona speakers, men are commonly seen as the figurative owners of women, with the typical man ‘demand[ing] cattle in exchange for his sisters or daughters when they marry.’9 The fiancé is expected to pay the price of marrying ‘another man’s daughter or sister.’10 Though Shona speakers are quick to point out that such exchanges of cattle as roora ‘are not paid to purchase the bride’11 but rather to cement relationships between families, the language of ownership nevertheless pervades descriptions of male relationships to women. This sense of ownership extends to the masculine role of fatherhood: the children ‘belong to the husband, whether they are biologically his or not. He claims the children by virtue of the cattle he has paid.’12 Shona masculinity is defined in terms of heterocentric sexual activities addressed toward women, in which men are ‘active and in control.’13 Men are thus defined through their (sexual) relationships with women: as a character in Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns states, ‘A man is not a man unless he has a wife to sleep with him at night.’14 While a man must have sexual relationships with women to be a man, he must nevertheless avoid zvechikadzi, objects and activities associated with women. Exclusively female activities include cooking, gossiping, and childcare, and female objects include those used for cooking and cleaning.15 Women often police these domains to maintain their own female spaces, thereby perpetuating the gendered division of labor. Shona culture has absorbed influences throughout history, and masculinity too has not been static. Visual media such as film and television programs are a potential source for new ideas about gender. Andersen argues that while the majority of local visual media in Zimbabwe are authoritarian in content, ‘there are other possibilities and models stemming from foreign material, mostly [television] fiction. Images and models of that kind are stored and a potential reservoir of criticism, or, as a minimum, [make] it possible for the viewer to see that the way we do it here not necessarily is the only way or the best

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Imported Alternatives way.’16 It is in this framework that Flame and Yellow Card, both directed by expatriates, can be seen as exposing Zimbabwean viewers to alternative masculinities, what Ouzgane and Coleman call ‘new, non-toxic masculinities,’17 possibilities and models for constructing ideals of gender relations that, historically, have neither been part of Shona representations of masculinity nor of foreign representations of Shona masculinity, such as travelers’ or anthropologists’ accounts, that were not intended for a Zimbabwean audience. In Flame, various Shona masculinities are on display, ranging from the highly traditional to the hegemonic to the progressive. First we meet Florence’s father, Fredrick, a typical Shona patriarch, depicted as the stereotypical African male alcoholic. He spends his days at a local bottle shop and has drunk himself into debt, owing the shop owner, Chiwara, enough money to make Chiwara sell him out to the Rhodesian Forces in retribution. He is what the filmmakers call ‘too strict,’18 overprotective of his daughter, Florence, criticizing her for her interest in bringing food to the freedom fighters and attending all night pungwes. To control Florence’s behavior, he relies on the notion of male ownership of women: ‘You are my daughter,’ he tells Florence, a simple statement he believes carries enough weight to prevent her from following her own wishes. His attempts to control her extend to her clothing as well, as he criticizes her choice of short dresses, an echo of Babamukuru’s attempts to control Nyasha in Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. Later, Florence meets Danger, a liberation fighter the filmmakers intend to be ‘charismatic’,19 who consciously adopts a sexualized persona and uses his sex appeal to lure young women into the camps. At the pungwe, a meeting where freedom fighters used lectures and song to conscientize peasants, Danger draws on Shona gender stereotypes to invoke the sympathies of the villagers: he asks a man, ‘Why are you living in such a poor house?’ invoking male property ownership, and asks a woman, Mai Florence, ‘Where is the water for your clothes?’ invoking both female domestic work and concern with clothing.20 When he flirts with Florence after the pungwe, he draws on their shared understanding of the high cultural value placed on children: when Florence tells him that the war is important to her because she wants a better life for her mother, Danger adds flirtatiously, ‘And a better life for your children?’ to which Florence shyly assents. Danger is so appealing to Florence that she convinces her friend Nyasha to join her to Mozambique, where he is stationed, so they can train to be freedom fighters, assuming the pseudonyms Flame and Liberty. When Florence meets Danger at the camp, he tells her she should complete her training but not worry about the future: ‘I will take care of you.’ Given his reliance on conventional notions of Shona patriarchy, envisioning himself as Florence’s protector as well as future father of her children, he is understandably angry when he finds her leaving another man’s sleeping quarters, unaware that she has just been raped. To Danger’s mind, Florence has insulted his manhood and defied his sense of ownership of her. Sixteen years later, Florence and Danger are married with children. Danger acts out his anger toward Florence by again assuming the role of patriarch, but this time with that role culturally sanctioned through marriage. His character is highly stereotyped, and his similarities to Florence’s late father are meant to highlight his role as (failed) patriarch. When he comes home he greets

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Changing Shona Masculinities in Flame & Yellow Card Florence gruffly, ‘Where is my food?’ revealing his opinion of women as little more than domestic slaves. Like Fredrick, Danger has become an alcoholic, spending his days at the local beer shop and coming home drunk. When he loses his job for ‘being cheeky’ to his boss, his masculinity is doubly threatened by not being able to support his family and by Florence’s suggestion that she find a job in his place. Danger baulks at this proposal, arguing, ‘And I must accept your decision? Do you think I’m a woman?’ His question highlights his own fears of emasculation by a wife who assumed a leadership role during the war. Florence responds sarcastically, ‘No, you’re not a woman. You are a man. Just like my father,’ reversing conventional notions of men as superior to women and criticizing her husband for his traditional masculinity. If Danger represents both a sexualized and patriarchal, mostly negative, version of Shona masculinity, other freedom fighters, particularly male commanders, are symbols of the hegemonic masculinity of male elites. One of them, Che, is a complex character who at first draws the viewer’s sympathy. Initially he is presented as intelligent and caring. Brought to the camp as a new training officer, he explains to the other commanders that he hopes to motivate new troops: ‘if they’re going to risk their lives out there, they must be educated.’ His caring attitude marks him as a different man than Comrade Pfuti, with whom he is contrasted. In contrast to Che’s hope to educate new troops, Pfuti is verbally and physically violent, using his rank and physical strength to frighten and shame the troops and physically injure individuals. Unlike the ideal Shona male known for his verbal prowess,21 a skill we have seen Fredrick, Danger, and Pfuti all put to use to dominate women, Che is quiet and a bit aloof, standing in a corner during a party with the other male commanders and teased for not knowing ‘how to relax’. Despite the film’s initial portrayal of Che as a positive male figure, he surprises both Flame and the viewer by raping Flame. According to Shona folklore, ‘it is the prerogative of men in their own spaces to take whatever is placed before them.’22 a sentiment that helps explains Che’s actions toward Flame. The unexpectedness of the rape is heightened by the film’s use of blurred camerawork and menacing drum music, which stand in contrast to the rest of the film’s steady camerawork and soundscape of song and mbira music. The film suggests, through another commander’s attempt to sexually assault Liberty and the implication that male commanders ‘use food to get sexual favors,’23 that the sexual abuse of female freedom fighters was common in the chimurenga camps. In raping Flame, Che is being ‘active and in control’ of sex, behaviors expected of a Shona man. He represents a hegemonic version of masculinity put to use by nationalist leaders, an extreme version of the violent phallocentric male created by dominant ideologies of masculinity. Violence against women, both sexual and otherwise, is culturally sanctioned. Occasional wife beating, for example, is widely believed to remind women ‘who is boss.’24 Indeed, as Connell notes, there is often a connection of ‘the making of masculinity with the subordination of women’25; the film demonstrates that male violence, both verbal and physical, helps remind women of their subordination to men. The devastating effects of such masculinity are highlighted through the deep depression Flame enters after the rape. But the film’s critique of violence

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Imported Alternatives against women is muted when Che apologizes to Flame for raping her: ‘War changes everything, you know? Sometimes we forget that we are human beings. I am sorry for what I did.’ Despite Che’s following his apology with a dismissive command, ‘You can go. I said you can go,’ Flame forgives him and (it is implied) becomes his lover. The viewer is left with ambiguous feelings toward Che because of the rape, but Flame’s own forgiveness of him suggests that the viewer is meant to view him positively. Later, he treats Flame very tenderly, touching her leg lovingly and inviting her to go with him to a new base. Through his relationship with Flame, Che achieves paternity, a requirement of Shona manhood. The association of masculinity with ejaculation and fertility makes producing children a cultural obligation without which a Shona male cannot achieve adulthood and ‘become a social man’.26 As one would expect, not all Shona males achieve social manhood status. ‘Men with ejaculation difficulties during penetrative sex fall short of being “real men,” particularly if their fertility status is uncertain.’27 For those who do bear children, however, ‘becoming a father, particularly of a boy, bestows a sense of achievement, continuity and a sense of belonging.’28 Flame bears Che a son, whom she names Hondo, Shona for war. Although Che is away at another camp during the first few months of Hondo’s life, when he returns he exhibits the expected sense of achievement in being a father to a son. While Flame plays with Hondo, Rapo, another commander, announces Che’s arrival: ‘It’s Comrade Che – he wants to see his son,’ drawing the viewer’s attention to Che’s sense of ownership of Hondo, despite his absence from the child’s life. More so than Che, whose masculinity the film neither wholly condemns nor condones, another of the commanders, Rapo, is clearly a positive male figure. Even more quiet and reserved than Che, Rapo does not possess the verbal prowess associated with Shona masculinity,29 at least not in conversation. As a chorus leader, though, in song he achieves an even higher level of verbal prowess than the other men in the film. Rapo’s role as singer marks him as less masculine than other male commanders who wield rifles, classic symbols of the phallus and of violent masculinity. Rapo’s masculinity is also challenged by his willingness and ability to enter women’s domains. In two scenes he serves as a messenger between male and female freedom fighters, first when he is sent by the male commanders to the female sleeping quarters to bring Flame and Liberty to a party, and later when he meets Flame and Hondo in the bush to announce Che’s arrival. Also, when Flame gives birth to Hondo in the back of a truck, Rapo, the driver, is there to oversee the birth. While he stays at the periphery of the female domain of childbirth, standing by and smoking a cigarette, leaning on the truck while Flame gives birth, when he hears the baby cry, he steps over and smiles, winks at Flame and does a funny snap, indicating his pride in the baby. Later, when Che and Flame meet in the bush to discuss their future as a family, Rapo serves as babysitter, a highly atypical role for a Shona male. He plays with Hondo, singing and dancing with him. Moments later when both Che and Hondo are killed by a bomb, Rapo sings to the dead baby, holding his body tenderly and shaking his head sadly.

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Changing Shona Masculinities in Flame & Yellow Card In addition to his willingness and ability to enter female domains and participate in activities normally exclusively female, Rapo is also one of two males in the film who appreciate women’s contributions to the liberation struggle. Sixteen years after the war, when Florence goes to Harare to find Nyasha, they attend a party where they watch the Heroes Day festivities on television. While the film critiques the nationalist depiction of the war, which celebrates a weapons-based masculinity and ignores the contributions of women to the liberation struggle, Rapo and the commander who hosts the party both represent positive male characters who respect Florence and celebrate her achievements. Rapo stands up to welcome Florence and Nyasha with a song when they arrive at the party, offering the two women the respect the film argues they deserve but seldom receive. In addition to the range of masculinities found among the men in Flame, we are also presented with women freedom fighters who assume traits normally associated with masculinity. As Kathryn Holland argues with regard to Nyasha in Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions,30 I maintain that Flame is presented as ‘the most powerful masculine figure’ in the film, male or female, chiefly through her skill with weapons. Her assumption of masculine characteristics is gradual and uneven, however: at the end of the film she achieves a certain level of (temporary) independence from her husband, marking her as masculine as she emasculates her husband, but at the same time she achieves her childhood dream of owning red shoes and being ‘beautiful for the city’, validating the association of femininity with trivial concerns such as fashion. If in Flame, the image of Shona masculinity is broadened to include a range of men and women, in Yellow Card aspects of that image are turned upside down through humor. Immediately Yellow Card’s male characters are associated with their penises, a central association in dominant ideologies of Shona masculinity.31 We meet Tiyane and Skido while they urinate. Although the two young men are shown only from the waist up, their eyes are focused on their penises, drawing the viewer’s eyes there as well. T I YA N E . I need to take a piss. S K I D O . Hey, today’s your lucky day, man. Huh? T I YA N E . Why? S K I D O . Linda wants you, huh? T I YA N E . Ya, right. S K I D O . You can join the club, man. She’s begging for it. Be a player, man. He? T I YA N E . Come on, Skido, I’ve known Linda like what? since, KT? S K I D O . Ten years of foreplay! (Tiyane grabs Skido’s head playfully, pushing him away.) S K I D O . Hey, hey, hey, you’re making me wet my pants.

In addition to the sexual nature of their conversation, Linda’s longing gaze at Tiyane during this scene adds to the connections between urination, penises, and masculine sexuality. The conversation also highlights a particular form of masculinity in which Tiyane is encouraged to ‘be a player’: he cannot become a man until he has ‘joined the club’ of the sexually experienced. Urination and its association with sex is a motif that recurs throughout the film. Shortly after the opening scene, Skido surprises Tiyane in the bathroom,

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Imported Alternatives causing him to ‘wet his pants’. They talk while urinating, Skido complaining of painful urination and Tiyane teasing him for probably having contracted an STD. Connell argues that ‘[t]rue masculinity is almost always thought to proceed from men’s bodies – to be inherent in a male body or to express something about a male body,’32 an observation that holds true for Shona conceptions of masculinity generally and that is a source of humor in Yellow Card. We are presented with Tiyane, a teenaged soccer star, who repeatedly wins the ‘test of masculinity’ that organized sport provides.33 His athletic prowess associates him with masculinity, but also, paradoxically, makes him the object of female sexual desire, a unique theme for a Zimbabwean text. However, his own sexuality is sublimated in his sport, and he attempts to resist Linda’s advances. The film glorifies football as dangerous, with Tiyane repeatedly fighting with a teammate who also ‘invades [Tiyane’s] territory’ by talking to Linda during a match. The coach warns the team that ‘These guys are rough. I don’t want any injuries,’ and Tiyane in fact sustains a knee injury. Tiyane’s father associates football with ‘booze, women, injuries’ but still remarks with pride at Tiyane’s injury, ‘Like father, like son’, completing the connections between sport, sex, danger, paternity and masculinity. Linda’s own sexuality is depicted in masculine terms: taking the role expected of a Shona male, she is active and in control. She is the sexual aggressor and Tiyane merely responds to her advances, reluctantly, and then regrets doing so, telling his friend, Nocks, ‘this isn’t what I want. This isn’t my life. I want more than this.’ As I have shown elsewhere, her masculinity (as well as her failure to carry out the feminine role of mother) earns her the disdain of many Shona viewers.34 The film illustrates Connell’s observation that the association of masculinity with the male body leads, in many cultures, to the assumption that ‘men naturally do not take care of infants’.35 Yellow Card both plays on and, cautiously, critiques this assumption when Tiyane finds himself the caregiver to his son, Renaldo, left on his doorstep by Linda. Both Tiyane and Nocks initially respond to the baby negatively. When Tiyane sees the baby in a basket on his doorstep, he says, ‘Shit!’, then grabs the baby and runs so that his parents won’t learn that he is a father. When he shows up at Nock’s place, his friend reacts with surprised contempt, ‘A baby?! I don’t want a baby in my room!’ Like Flame, the film shows the Shona preference for male children. When Tiyane and Nocks realize the child is a boy, their initial negative responses become favorable. N O C K S . Hey man, congratulations! It’s a boy! TIYANE. Ya, he looks just like me. When the baby urinates in Tiyane’s face, Nocks laughs: ‘Ya, he behaves just like you!’ recalling the earlier scene when Tiyane and Skido wet their pants, a metaphor for their inability to control their own penile secretions, including semen, the ultimate symbol of Shona masculinity. Despite the traditional Shona association of fatherhood with masculinity, Tiyane’s sudden taking on of parenthood challenges his masculinity. As he and Nocks drive around with Renaldo, the baby cries with hunger.

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Changing Shona Masculinities in Flame & Yellow Card N O C K S . Shut that thing up. T I YA N E . It’s not a thing; it’s my son. N O C K S . Well, shut him up! T I YA N E . That’s a mother’s job. N O C K S . Well, I’ve news for you, pal – you are mother.

Here we see Tiyane defending his child on the basis of his gender, while simultaneously distancing himself from the role of caretaker by describing it as ‘a mother’s job.’ Rather than reminding him simply that he is now a parent, Nocks feminizes Tiyane by calling him a mother. As they stand by the car, Tiyane sees three women walking by with babies on their backs and realizes the secret to stopping Renaldo’s crying. In the grocery store, Tiyane ties him on his back. Visually, this scene suggests that a man can care for a child just as well as a woman. But Tiyane’s speech suggests otherwise: he uses a highpitched woman’s voice while talking to Nocks and to a store clerk. T I YA N E . Excuse me! Excuse me! What’s the best baby food you have in here? C L E R K . Anything in particular? T I YA N E . I don’t know. You’re the woman. You should know!

The clerk shakes her head and walks away, challenging Tiyane’s assumption that women are inherently motherly. Frustrated by Tiyane’s slowness, Nocks tells him, ‘Make up your mind, woman!’ again emasculating him, albeit playfully. When a female shopper asks to look at the baby, Tiyane responds proudly, ‘Ya, he’s mine!’ – the second time he simultaneously claims ownership of Renaldo while drawing attention to his gender. He does this a third time in the next scene while feeding him, remarking, ‘That’s my boy.’ We begin to see Tiyane as a capable caretaker. Moreover, he is a positive male character whose masculinity is firmly established through his participation in sport, and – forgiven by the viewer for his failed relationship with Linda (because she was the culturally transgressive aggressor) – he seems capable of having an egalitarian relationship with Juliet, his true love interest. Unlike those novels and films in which dominant Shona masculinities are critiqued, both Flame and Yellow Card go beyond critique to present alternatives: positive male characters who can nurture children and do not relate to women solely through sex, as well as masculine female characters. The progressive men they depict, however, do not represent radical alternatives to traditional Shona masculinities, but rather mixtures of traditional and alternative masculinities. In fact, the films might be critiqued for not going far enough in their pursuit of alternative masculinities. But it is precisely this concession to traditional Shona masculinities that makes the films, particularly Yellow Card, palatable to Shona audiences. A radical attempt to revise Shona ideals of manhood, particularly in films by expatriate directors, would likely be rejected by Shona viewers, given the current climate in which government comments on foreign conspiracies are a daily part of local media. By portraying traditional Shona masculinities while simultaneously exposing viewers to progressive alternatives, these films have a chance of influencing

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Imported Alternatives Shona young people’s ideas about masculinity and perhaps contributing to a public discourse concerned with, and opposed to, the growth of violent masculinity in the country. Recent research studies in the fields of sociology, policy studies, development studies, law, and gender have shown that male violence in Zimbabwe is escalating, particularly violence toward women. Sociologist Mary Johnson Osirim argues that the economic and political crisis has left Zimbabwean men feeling powerless, and that they act out their anger through violence toward women.36 One could extend this argument to say that men are not simply acting out anger but actually trying to regain power by exerting it over a group considered subordinate. Jane Parpart argues that the ruling party has encouraged a hegemonic form of violent masculinity as a source of power in the face of the perceived threat of foreign domination. She writes, … increasingly patriarchal authoritarian rule in Zimbabwe is being legitimated through discourses that identify ‘good’ leaders in highly gendered ways. Those who oppose the current regime are vilified as passive, subordinate males, who are subservient stooges of British imperialism. ‘Real’ men, those who fought in the nationalist struggle, support the nationalist cause and defend patriarchal prerogatives are awarded the status of hegemonic males.37

The so-called ‘real’ men Parpart refers to include not only nationalist leaders who fought in the chimurenga war of liberation, but also large numbers of urban male youth, masquerading as war veterans. Both groups, but especially the latter, are drawing on ‘the internalization of a masculinity based on war and phallocentrism’ and a ‘weapons-based masculinity’ that, according to Shire, was not a part of Shona culture prior to colonialism, but rather was both ‘embedded in British colonial discourse’ and in representations of Ndebele speakers as warriors who resisted colonial domination during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, representations which were emulated by Shona men.38 News coverage of Zimbabwe since 2000 has drawn attention to the ways Mugabe and his ‘self-styled war veterans’39 use this version of Shona masculinity, man as warrior, to sanction a culture of internal terrorism, with women, children, whites, Ndebele-speakers, and supporters of the opposition party as their victims.40 The rhetoric and practice of masculinity violence is not a new development, but rather a resurgence of the ‘aggressive expression of African masculinity as a counter to white racism and political violence’ of the 1960s and 70s.41 Male dominance over women and children is enforced through recurrent violence that is part and parcel of Shona dominance over other ethnic groups and the ruling party’s dominance over those with opposing political views.42 The rise of ‘state-sanctioned violence against women’ in Zimbabwe43 makes the critique of masculinities, and the search for alternatives, that these films provide, vital. That such alternatives should come from outside of Shona culture is not surprising. We have already seen the example, above, of Shona men adopting a weapons-based masculinity influenced by both colonial discourse and cultural imagery of Ndebele manhood. Similarly, Epprecht also offers several examples of words for homosexuality borrowed into Shona from Zulu/

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Changing Shona Masculinities in Flame & Yellow Card Shangaan and Chewa in the late 19th century.44 Both examples illustrate the role of foreign ideas in effecting change in ideas of Shona masculinities throughout history. However, despite being made by expatriates, these films are not entirely foreign, and are not perceived as such by most Zimbabwean viewers.45 Located at the liminal space between foreign and local, these films bring progressive, hybrid, notions of masculinity to a popular audience while framing them in narratives influenced by local people (informants, writers, and artists46) and further localized by viewers.47

Notes An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 2005 African Literature Association conference in Boulder, CO. I am grateful to Patricia Alden for her thoughtful comments on that version. 1 Lahoucine Ouzgane and Daniel Coleman, ‘Postcolonial Masculinities: Introduction,’ Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2 no. 1 (1998): 4th paragraph. 2 Such critiques are not limited to fictional representations of masculinity. Even in some of the essays included in the Shona Customs collection, which on the whole glorifies ‘tradition,’ one finds critiques of the effect of roora on male attitudes toward women: ‘When a man marries and is asked to pay for a human being a price he has never paid for anything else, he may forget that he has married a partner: rather he may think he has bought a slave.’ Jason Andifasi. ‘An Analysis of Roora,’ in Shona Customs: Essays by African Writers, eds. C. Kileff and P. Kileff 1992: 28-32. 3 For example, she writes that Jeremiah was ‘excited by the thought of possessing a woman like Lucia, like possessing a thunderstorm to make it crackle and thunder at your command’ (127). 4 The narrator, Tambudzai, tell us, that Nhamo ‘was doing no more than behave, perhaps extremely, in the expected manner. The needs and sensibilities of the women in my family were not considered a priority, or even legitimate’ (12). Cf. Kathryn Holland, ‘The Troubled Masculinities of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions,’ in African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present, eds. Lahoucine Ouzgane and Robert Morrell. 2005: 1-18. 5 D. M. Mandaza, ‘Traditional Ceremonies which Persist,’ in Shona Customs: Essays by African Writers, eds. C. Kileff and P. Kileff. 1992: 54-60.; P. Sango, ‘Some Important Shona Customs and Ceremonies,’ in Shona Customs: Essays by African Writers, eds. C. Kileff and P. Kileff. 1992: 71-83. 6 R. W. Connell, Masculinities: Knowledge, Power, and Social Change. 1995: 31. 7 Agnes O. Runganga, Johanne Sundby, and Peter Aggleton, ‘Culture, Identity and Reproductive Failure in Zimbabwe,’ Sexualities 4, no. 3 (2001): 318. 8 Chenjerai Shire, ‘Men don’t go to the moon: Language, space and masculinities in Zimbabwe,’ in Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, eds, Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne. 1994: 148. 9 D. H. Makamure, ‘Cattle and Social Status,’ in Shona Customs: Essays by African Writers, eds. C. Kileff and P. Kileff. 1992: 114. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. Cf. Runganga, Sundby, and Aggleton, 315-32. 13 Shire, 147. 14 Chinodya, 142. 15 Shire, 147-58. 16 M. B. Andersen, ‘The Janus Face of Television in Small Countries: The Case of Zimbabwe,’ in Perspectives on Media, Culture and Democracy in Zimbabwe, ed. R. Waldahl. 1998: 65.

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Imported Alternatives 17 Ouzgane and Coleman, 1998. 18 ‘Flame – Zimbabwe 1996,’ Avondale, Harare, Zimbabwe 6 March [cited 2005]. Available from http://www.zimmedia.com/flame/. Zimmedia is the production company owned by Sinclair and her husband, producer Simon Bright. Their website includes publicity materials for Flame. 19 Ibid. 20 The association of women with concern for clothing is invoked several times in the film, when Florence as a young girl talks about her desire for ‘children, some good land, and a new pair of red shoes,’ gazes longingly at red shoes and jewelry in a Harare shop after the war, and in the final two scenes, has finally attained red shoes. ‘You have to be beautiful for the city,’ Florence advises Nyasha early in the film, and at the end we see both women have achieved this goal. 21 Shire, 147-58. 22 Ibid. 147, 150. 23 Zimmedia Online, Flame – Zimbabwe 1996. 24 Chirume qtd. in Mary Johnson Osirim, ‘Crisis in the State and the Family: Violence Against Women in Zimbabwe,’ ASQ 7, no. 2 & 3 (n.d.) 25 Connell, 11. 26 ‘The ‘Unsaying’ of Indigenous Homosexualities in Zimbabwe: Mapping a Blindspot in an African Masculinity,’ in SEPHIS: South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development [database online], (2 February 2005). 27 Runganga, Sundby, and Aggleton, ‘Culture, Identity and Reproductive Failure in Zimbabwe’, 324. 28 Ibid. 29 Shire, ‘Men don’t go to the moon: Language, space and masculinities in Zimbabwe’, 147-158. 30 Holland, ‘The Troubled Masculinities of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions’, 1-18. 31 As Shire demonstrates, the Shona word for man, murume, is etymologically related to the verb kuruma, which he glosses as ‘to seduce or literally to sting, bite, stimulate’ (1994, 147-58). It is also related to the word for semen, muhurume, an etymology that helps explain Aschwaden’s observation that among the Karanga, a Shona group, ‘sperms are the source of life and the penis symbolizes the man and life itself. Among men, sex and its associated secretions signify the giving of life and the gaining of physical power’ (qtd. in Runganga, Sundby, and Aggleton 2001: 317 emphasis added). 32 Connell, 45. 33 Ibid., 30. 34 Katrina Daly Thompson, Viewing the Foreign and the Local in Zimbabwe: Film, Television and Shona Viewers, PhD Diss. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004. 35 Connell, 45. 36 Osirim, Crisis In The State And The Family: Violence Against Women In Zimbabwe, 1 March 2005. 37 Jane L. Parpart, Rethinking Hegemonic Masculinities from a Southern Perspective: The Resurgence of Patriarchal Authoritarian Rule in Zimbabwe, 2005. 38 Shire, 147-58. 39 Thabo Kunene, ‘War vets wreak havoc in Bulawayo,’ BBC News, 14 February 2002. 40 See, for example: Andersson 2004; Media Institute for Southern Africa 2003b; Media Institute for Southern Africa 2003a; Lamb 2002. 41 Epprecht, The ‘Unsaying’ of Indigenous Homosexualities in Zimbabwe: Mapping a Blindspot in an African Masculinity, 9. 42 Cf. Osirim, Crisis in the State and the Family: Violence Against Women in Zimbabwe, 1 March 2005. 43 Ibid. 44 Epprecht, n.p. Cf. Shire, 147-58. 45 Cf. Thompson, Viewing the Foreign and the Local in Zimbabwe. 46 According to its publicity materials, the film is ‘based on the accounts of women who joined the liberation war.’ Writers involved in the film include Charles Mungoshi,

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Changing Shona Masculinities in Flame & Yellow Card Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Thompson Tsodzo. 47 This process of importing new ideas into the culture via films made collaboratively by foreign and local artists is similar to the work done by translations from English into Shona, which I have described elsewhere as a vehicle for ‘new perspectives on subjects that have not yet been dealt with in the literature of the target language’ (Thompson 2005).

Bibliography Andersen, M. B. ‘The Janus Face of Television in Small Countries: The Case of Zimbabwe.’ In Perspectives on Media, Culture and Democracy in Zimbabwe. ed. R. Waldahl. Oslo: University of Oslo Department of Media and Communication, 1998, 45-68. Andersson, Hilary. ‘Zimbabwe’s Torture Training Camps.’ BBC News. 27 February 2004. < http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3493958.stm> (21 February 2005). Andifasi, J. ‘An Analysis of Roora.’ In Shona Customs: Essays by African Writers. eds C. Kileff and P. Kileff. Gweru, Harare, and Masvingo: Mambo Press, 1992, 28-32. Chinodya, Shimmer. Harvest of Thorns. Oxford; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann (1990), 1989. Connell, R. W. Masculinities: Knowledge, Power, and Social Change. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. Epprecht, Marc. ‘The ‘Unsaying’ of Indigenous Homosexualities in Zimbabwe: Mapping a Blindspot in an African Masculinity.’ in SEPHIS: South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development [database online]. (2 February 2005). Everyone’s Child. Film (35 mm). Directed by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Produced by John Riber, Ben Zulu and Jonny Persey. Harare: Media for Development Trust. With Nomsa Mlambo, Thulani Sandhla, Walter Muparutsa, Elijah Madzikatire, Chunky Phiri and Killness Nyati. 1996. Flame. Directed by Ingrid Sinclair. Produced by Simon Bright. Harare: Zimmedia. 1996. Holland, Kathryn. ‘The Troubled Masculinities of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions.’ In African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present. eds Lahoucine Ouzgane and Robert Morrell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 1-18. Hove, Chenjerai. Ancestors. Harare, Zimbabwe: College Press, 1996. ——. Bones. African Writers Series. Oxford and Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1990. Kileff, Clive, and Peggy Kileff, eds, Shona customs: Essays by African writers. Gweru, Harare, and Masvingo: Mambo Press, 1992 Kunene, Thabo. ‘War Vets Wreak Havoc in Bulawayo.’ BBC News. 14 February 2002. (21 Feb 2005). Lamb, Christina. ‘Mugabe Men ‘use Rape as Revenge’.’ Telegraph (London). 25 August 2002. < http://news.telegraph.co.uk> (21 February 2005). Makamure, D. H. ‘Cattle and Social Status.’ In Shona Customs: Essays by African Writers. eds C. Kileff and P. Kileff. Gweru, Harare, and Masvingo: Mambo Press, 1992, 14-16. Mandaza, D. M. ‘Traditional Ceremonies which Persist.’ In Shona Customs: Essays by African Writers. eds C. Kileff and P. Kileff. Gweru, Harare, and Masvingo: Mambo Press, 1992, 54-60. Media Institute for Southern Africa. ‘Zimbabwe alert update: Film producer’s home raided again.’ 2003. (7 March 2005). ——. ‘Zimbabwe alert: Film producer´s house raided, equipment confiscated, employees assaulted.’ 2003. (7 March 2005). Neria. videocassette (ca. 100 min.). Directed by Godwin Mawuru. Produced by John Riber. Harare: Media for Development Trust. 1992. Osirim, Mary Johnson. ‘Crisis in the State and the Family: Violence Against Women in

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Imported Alternatives Zimbabwe.’ African Studies Quarterly: The Online Journal for African Studies 7, no. 2 & 3 (n.d.). Ouzgane, Lahoucine, and Daniel Coleman. ‘Postcolonial Masculinities: Introduction.’ Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2, no. 1 (1998). Parpart, Jane L. ‘Rethinking Hegemonic Masculinities from a Southern Perspective: The Resurgence of Patriarchal Authoritarian Rule in Zimbabwe.’ Abstract of paper presented at Hegemonic Masculinities in International Perspective Conference. 6 May, 2005. (24 January 2005) Sango, P. ‘Some Important Shona Customs and Ceremonies.’ In Shona Customs: Essays by African Writers. eds C. Kileff and P. Kileff. Gweru, Harare, and Masvingo: Mambo Press, 1992, 71-83. Shire, Chenjerai. ‘Men Don’t Go to the Moon: Language, Space and Masculinities in Zimbabwe.’ In Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies. eds Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne. London and New York: Routledge, 1994, 147-58. Thompson, Katrina Daly. 2005. ‘From hybrid original to Shona translation: How A Grain of Wheat becomes Tsanga Yembeu. In Gonul Pultar ed. On the Road to Baghdad or Traveling Biculturalism: Theorizing a Bicultural Approach to Contemporary World Fiction, Washington, DC: New Academic Publishing. ——. 2004. Viewing the Foreign and the Local in Zimbabwe: Film, Television and Shona Viewers. Ph.D. Diss, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Vera, Yvonne. 1996. Under the Tongue. Harare: Baobab Books. Yellow Card. Directed by John Riber. Produced by Steve Smith and Sally Smith. Harare: Media for Development Trust. 2000.

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8 Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o & the Crisis of Kenyan Masculinity ANDREW HAMMOND

From the late nineteenth century, Kenya experienced a particularly brutal history of imperial occupation. During the so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’, the British empire spread rapidly across the eastern part of the continent and, establishing a protectorate over Kenya in 1895, subjected the region to ‘violence on a locally unprecedented scale’.1 Its appropriation of the ancestral lands of the Gı˜ku ˜yu˜ people is a case in hand. By the terms of the British Imperial Land Act of 1915, ownership of these fertile tracts was largely transferred to European settlers, displacing some 25 per cent of the indigenous population and forcing many others into forms of slave labour. In time, economic and political oppression produced organised resistance. Spearheaded by the nationalist movement known as the Mau Mau, the anticolonial struggle for land and rights drew reprisals from the British that, during the 1950s, included widespread detention, forced relocation, torture and execution, and resulted in the loss of some 10,000 Kenyan lives. It was out of this violent history that Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o, one of Kenya’s best-known novelists and political theorists, emerged. Born into a Gı˜ku ˜yu˜ farming family, Ngu˜gı˜ had first-hand experience of dispossession, the dispersal of villages and the horrific treatment of the indigenous population, with members of his own family being tortured and killed during the ‘Emergency’. His work naturally treats the injustices of imperialism and the importance of collective opposition.2 As importantly, Ngu˜gı˜’s fiction forms a fascinating analysis of the effects that imperialism has had on male identity in twentieth-century Kenya. In recent scholarship on men and masculinities, there has been a surge of interest in the forms and ideologies of postcolonial malehood. The current research into hegemonic forms of masculinity, for example, is starting to shift away from an emphasis on the Western framework and to pursue comparative analyses of the world-wide manifestations of male identification. The work has included study of the global reach of masculinism: that ideology which constructs and normalises a single model of masculinity within a culture and,

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Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o viewing that model as biologically-given, marks it off from subordinate masculinites through promoting strict notions of deviance, typically centred on the ‘unmanly’ or the ‘childlike’. As Arthur Brittan states, masculinism therefore becomes the ideology that ‘sanctions the political and dominant role of men in the public and private spheres’.3 The sheer ubiquity of hegemonic masculinity in global societies, with its codes of honour, competitiveness, assertiveness and physical and sexual prowess, can help to explain why ‘male dominance […] is still pretty much universal’.4 David D. Gilmore argues that the approved models of real manhood are not only remarkably similar in otherwise diverse cultures, but are also constructed through a very similar set of social practices. The pervasive demand upon male populations to participate in initiation rituals, trials of strength and acts of economic provision suggest that ‘there is something almost generic, something repetitive, about the criteria of man-playing […] in many societies’.5 As he goes on to discuss, the traditional cultures of East Africa, including those of Kenya, offer examples in kind. Here, the separation of male children from mothers, the tracking and killing of game in adolescence and the participation in such rites-of-passage ceremonies as circumcision have indicated the strength of masculinist influence upon men, particularly amongst social groups that have turned from hunting and gathering to agriculture, in which rigid gender hierarchies pertain.6 In the Kenyan context, hegemonic masculinity has also exerted an influence on modern political organisations, as illustrated by the discourses of anti-colonial nationalism. The support that Jomo Kenyatta, the nationalist leader, gave to female circumcision – as ‘an integral part of family and tribal solidarity’ – epitomised the patriarchal thrust of the movement as a whole.7 As commentators point out, however, the hegemonic mode of masculinity is always an impossible ideal: one for which the male strives, but never fully achieves. R.W. Connell’s point ‘that not many men actually meet the normative standards’ of masculinity can be extended even to those societies where the proscriptions on behaviour are most severe.8 Despite the masculinist desire for singleness, male identity has remained hybridised and contingent, vulnerable to the multiplicity of competing subject formations that circulate around male action and belief. The need for assertive maleness to perpetually prove itself through public display only serves to expose the anxieties that shadow the masculinist ethos. At the same time, there are wider fluctuations in the subject positions of patriarchal society, not least the fact that dominant notions of manhood alter through time. For Connell, masculinities are ‘historical’ categories that ‘come into existence at particular times and places, and are always subject to change’.9 As he argues elsewhere, hegemonic masculinity is particularly exposed to challenge or loss during periods of accelerated social transformation.10 Although many critics have exemplified the point through case studies drawn from the twentieth-century West, where gendered identities underwent notable shifts in response to technological advance, the era of high imperialism offers plenty of instances from other parts of the world. The imposition of alien social and economic structures across colonised regions, and the consequent destruction of traditional sources of male power, had a disruptive effect on indigenous

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The Crisis of Kenyan Masculinity hierarchies. Chenjerai Shire’s argument in the Zimbabwean context that displacement from land and traditional occupations resulted in ‘dramatic modifications’ to male identity has a broader resonance.11 The British occupation of Ngu˜gı˜’s Kenya, for example, led to a widespread ‘insecurity and subjection’,12 with those men who did not lose the role of provider altogether often being reduced to household servants (the domestic ‘boy’) or to drudges in factories and urban service industries, in which they performed a range of menial tasks. In other words, men who retained patriarchal privilege in the domestic sphere simultaneously displayed at work characteristics associated with marginalised or subordinated masculinities.13 Ngu˜gı˜’s fiction forms an extended meditation on gendered identity in the ‘contact zones’ of empire. I shall be arguing that the author, without displaying nostalgia for dominant masculinities, offers a powerful study of the crisis that white patriarchy inaugurated amongst the Gı˜ku ˜yu˜ population, and examines the experiences of oppressed, disenfranchised manhood. In this, Ngu˜gı˜ has diverged from many postcolonial novelists of his generation, whose portrayals of anti-colonial resistance frequently favour and idealise the figure of the male. Elleke Boehmer asserts that in Anglophone African literature, nationalism has been conceived as a contest between the indigenous male community and the imperial male elite, with the female marginalised and ‘the emancipation of women […] rated as of secondary importance’.14 She goes on to cite Ngu˜gı˜ as a prime example, singling out ‘the enduring patriarchal cast of his ideas’ and his ‘tendency to distance and objectify women’.15 While not denying that there are shortcomings to Ngu˜gı˜’s female characterisation, which is the focus of Boehmer’s study, I aim to show how his representations of the male serve to problematise the ideologies of male power and to contest the binarism on which such power is predicated. I shall be studying the theme in The River Between (1965), Weep Not, Child (1964) and A Grain of Wheat (1967),16 an early cycle of novels which analyses Kenyan history in its most turbulent phase from the 1920s to independence in 1963. The narratives critically investigate the links between nativist politics and hegemonic masculinities which, with their ‘competition and aggression’,17 can repeat the iniquities of British colonials. As I shall discuss, the early novels also reveal a profound scepticism with the nature of male leadership. At a time when Kenyatta, the ‘Black Moses’, was still viewed as the saviour of Kenyans from the malignancy of white rule,18 Ngu˜gı˜ expresses misgivings about the worth of any leader emerging out of patriarchal social structures. The underlying message of Ngu˜gı˜’s complex, questioning representations of the male is that there is no ‘single, logical, and unquestionable idea of what is ‘masculine’’19 and that the emerging post-colonial state must necessarily reject masculinist ideology for a more egalitarian gender politics. Although often considered an apprentice piece, The River Between already reveals Ngu˜gı˜’s concern with indigenous masculinities in times of social transformation. Set in the 1920s, the novel details a remote stretch of Gı˜ku ˜yu˜land, untouched by European settlement but experiencing the first effects of missionary activity. The protagonist, Waiyaki, is a young man educated in missionary schools who, desiring the liberation of his people from foreign influence, believes that improved education is the key to independence. The

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Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o local forces ranged against him, however, are powerful and tenacious, and offer the first indication in the novel of Ngu˜gı˜’s mistrust of male authority. On the one hand, there is Joshua, a demagogic and fiery Christian convert, and on the other there is Kabonyi, a zealous advocate of nativist tradition, the two engaged – like their villages – ‘in a life and death struggle for the leadership of this isolated region’.20 Despite symbolising the wider divisions between European and indigenous faiths, or modernity and tradition, both men share a belief in the aggressive, autocratic regulation of family and community. In contrast, Waiyaki appears to represent a more sympathetic style of leadership. The emphasis that he places on education leads to an advocacy of non-violent methods of political resistance, and his ambition to overcome local divisions through the promotion of tribal unity stands against the masculinist creeds of competition and self-aggrandisement. Yet it is through Waiyaki that the author pursues a more refined analysis of the problematics of leadership and of the ‘bitter struggles to achieve […] pre-eminence which leadership implies’.21 Waiyaki’s physical stature (‘tall, powerfully built’, ‘commanding’ (69)), his ability to gain ready obedience from associates and his proud participation in such manly rituals as circumcision, hunting and raiding, all suggest commonalities with, rather than differences to, Joshua and Kabonyi. More ominously, Waiyaki is a passionate devotee of Gı˜ku ˜yu˜ myth, with its idealised lineage of male seers, ‘heroes and leaders’ (2), and soon starts viewing himself as a warrior-hero responsible for the salvation of the tribe, an arrogance that further echoes the masculinism of his opponents. The prestige that this ‘Great Teacher’ (117) achieves after establishing schools in the region feeds his tendency towards messianic fantasy. During one daydream, for example, Waiyaki saw a tribe great with many educated sons and daughters, all living together, tilling the land of their ancestors in perpetual serenity, pursuing their rituals and beautiful customs and all of them acknowledging their debt to him. He felt grateful at the thought. Perhaps this was the mission, the mission that the Sent One would carry out […]. (87)

Although his fantasy includes ‘chas[ing] away the settlers and the missionaries’ (87), Waiyaki is shown to desire self-attainment before either political liberation or tribal rapprochement. Indeed, his focus on personal ambitions not only undermines his intention to ‘preach reconciliation’ (98), but also causes him to underestimate the political organisations developing in the community. Realising that many villagers have come to believe that ‘[e]ducation for an oppressed people is not all’ and that ‘new awareness wanted expression at a political level’ (138-9), he sinks into confusion and moral indecision, falling far short of the warrior ideal. As Gareth Griffiths concludes, Waiyaki embodies ‘the processes of self-doubt and inner questioning through which men falter in their purpose and visions are undone’.22 Waiyaki’s defeat at the end of the novel – he is put on trial by the traditionalist faction – is mirrored by that of the protagonist in Weep Not, Child, the second in Ngu˜gı˜’s interrogations of male authority. The period is now the late 1940s and 1950s, and the young Njoroge is growing up with evidence of imperial encroachment all around him, the European settlers having gained their monopoly of ancestral lands. It is a time of deep unrest amongst the

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The Crisis of Kenyan Masculinity dispossessed Gı˜ku ˜yu˜, but also of the ‘implanted sense of degradation and inferiority’ that Ngu˜gı˜, after Fanon, located in colonised populations.23 The novel accentuates early on that the possession of land is integral to the indigenous concept of malehood, a source of power, independence and pride. As Njoroge’s father believes, ‘land was everything’: ‘A man who went with tattered clothes but had at least an acre of red earth was better off than the man with money’.24 In this sense, the central struggle for the control of land between Njoroge’s father and Mr Howlands, a British farmer, is not only symbolic of the geo-political struggle for Kenya, but also of their respective desires to enact male privilege. It is Howlands’ absolute victory here that partly explains why the male characters of Weep Not, Child lack the confident assertiveness of those in The River Between. The menfolk in Njoroge’s family, for example, are broken, shattered entities: one son is killed fighting for the British Army in the Second World War; a second is traumatised in the same conflict and ends up enacting nihilistic vengeance on the colonials; and a third, a trainee carpenter, is constantly humiliated in his apprenticeship, even being asked by his master’s wife to look after her baby ‘‘as if she were a European woman and I her Ayah’’ (20). Most significantly, the father epitomises the anguish of lost patriarchal authority. Although his forebears once had dominion over the region, he is forced into being a servile ‘Shambaboy’ (29) for Howlands, and his initial inability to play a decisive role during the Emergency, combined with the beating that he gives his wife, engenders disrespect amongst his sons. A failure to act when some homeguards arrest members of his family directly outside their hut is the final ‘humiliation’: Was he a man any longer, he who had watched his wife and son taken away because of breaking the curfew without a word of protest? Was this cowardice? It was cowardice, cowardice of the worst sort. He stood up and rushed to the door like a madman. It was too late. He came back to his seat, a defeated man, a man who cursed himself for being a man with a lost manhood. (80)

In the scene, the father’s self-confinement to the domestic sphere is symbolic of a deeper powerlessness. Throughout the novel, the imperial authorities’ ability to master the male body – via execution, castration, genital torture and imprisonment – helps to facilitate a more extensive psychological mastery of the colonised population, in which insecurity and enervation are widespread. Again, one initially senses a source of hope in Njoroge, who shares Waiyaki’s determination to achieve tribal agency through the extension of native education. Faced with the political crises of the community, however, his response is vacillation and inactivity, with little attempt to transform his pedagogic principles into agents of change. In the light of this, his messianic dream of leading the community to freedom (‘he actually saw himself as a possible saviour for the whole of God’s country’ (82)) is revealed as deluded romanticism, especially as his feelings of inadequacy finally lead to a suicide attempt, a form of betrayal far greater than that of his father. In the two novels, the male characters remain the catalysts of narrative action despite their lack of volition under British rule. It could be argued that, as a consequence, Ngu˜gı˜ formally privileges the male, displacing female characters to the margins of the text in the same way that women have been

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Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o marginalised in many African societies. Yet there is a limit to the author’s reinstallation of gendered hierarchies. Just as Ngu˜gı˜’s portrayal of the broken, emasculated male problematises one pole of the patriarchal binary, so his characterisation of the female often deconstructs the denigratory evaluations that comprise the other pole, evincing powerful female identities that challenge male dominance and masculinist discourse. In The River Between, for example, Nyambura and Muthoni are intelligent and strong-willed sisters that both manage to defy the wishes of their father, Joshua, a personification of patriarchal Christianity. Muthoni’s painful death after undergoing circumcision, which her father forbade her to do, reads as a critical commentary on what Ngu˜gı˜’ once termed a ‘brutal’ custom,25 and certainly not as an endorsement of male-centred tribal mores. Indeed, her surrender to genital mutilation, an act which aims to marry her Christian beliefs with tribal custom, produces a martyrdom for the cause of unity that teaches Waiyaki a vital lesson.26 The example of the female is also apparent in Weep Not, Child, in which Njoroge is surrounded by intelligent, insightful women, if only he could heed them. Most importantly, his desire for personal apotheosis is undercut by the words of his mother, who opposes the notion of leadership by one ‘‘man’’ with the collective ideal of ‘‘people agreeing’’ and ‘‘stick[ing] together’’ (75). Similarly, Mwihaki, though submissive in some respects, shows all the ‘initiative’ (87) in her developing relationship with Njoroge, and at one point counters his cowardly suggestion that they flee Kenya with the comment: ‘‘Our duty to other people is our biggest responsibility as grown men and women’’ (134). It might be the case that sexual equality is not fully dramatised in Ngu˜gı˜’s early work. But when combined with his denunciation of male violence, through such figures as Joshua and Howlands, these strong female characters do much to address and censure African women’s ‘double colonisation’.27 Ngu˜gı˜’s twin concern with female agency and the broken male subject is most pronounced in A Grain of Wheat, the culmination of his fictional work from the 1960s. Advancing on earlier novels, the author’s condemnation of imperialism is now combined with criticism of native government, and a suspicion that the emerging postcolonial state could well prove itself ‘a major perpetrator of injustices’.28 The novel is set in a single village during the four days leading up to Uhuru, or independence, in December 1963. It concurrently charts, through a series of flashbacks, the protest marches, colour-bars, curfews, massacres, ‘detention-camps […] barbed-wire [and] death’ that marked Mau Mau insurgency of the 1950s.29 Although the broad, historical sweep of the narrative recalls realism’s focus on social documentation, A Grain of Wheat grounds itself more fully in the modernist technique of perspectivism. Rejecting his previous focus on a single male consciousness, Ngu˜gı˜ now depicts the inner lives of a diverse range of characters, passing rapidly from one split, contingent psyche to another to evoke the fractured quality of masculinist selfhood and the multiplicity of male identities. As Ben Knights argues, the major tenet of masculinism, that of ‘shared identity rooted in biological affinity’, is predicated on a disavowal of ‘the multiplicity of voices’ that comprise male self-fashioning, avoiding any reference ‘to contradiction, to inconsistency, […] to the points where the

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The Crisis of Kenyan Masculinity smooth surface of the discourse is fractured or rough’.30 It is this instability that Ngu˜gı˜ drives into the very core of the novel. Its male characters, beset by feelings of impotence, failure and guilt, are unable to maintain a unified, secure core to their identity, and consequently become victim to patriarchy’s insistence on untrammelled heroism. The ideal of hegemonic masculinity might appear on the surface to control the behavioural practices of rural Gı˜ku ˜yu˜ society. The world of Thabai village – so the narrator informs us – is organised around the authority of male elders and the warrior-ethos of tribal conflict, with the menfolk placing continual ‘emphasis on their manhood’ (91) and the typical village woman fearing to ‘disobey her man’ (176). The actions of individuals, however, rarely live up to masculinist premises. The point is made in an opening scene where government forces enter the village to round up Mau Mau revolutionaries, scattering the male population into hiding. One deaf and dumb man, Gitogo, is concerned that his mother is in danger and, believing that ‘[h]is muscles alone would protect her’ (for he is ‘handsome’ and ‘strongly built’), rushes out into the street only to be promptly shot by ‘a whiteman’, dying as the ‘bullet […] touched his heart’ (5). Based on the murder of Ngu˜gı˜’s own stepbrother, the scene underlines both the power of Western modernity (with its ‘guns […] and tanks’ (4)) and the powerlessness of indigenous men (whose typical response to the incursion is to conceal themselves behind ‘sacks of sugar and beans’ (4)). As the novel progresses, it is evident that the men of Thabai are all, like Gitogo, ‘wounded or destroyed […] by the revolution’.31 Mugo is a small farmer who, despite attempting to avoid involvement with the Mau Mau, is guilty of betraying one of its leaders to the British, and lives in constant fear of discovery. Like the characters in earlier novels, his dreams are moulded by hegemonic masculinity – Mugo wanting to be ‘a chief [that] would lead his people across the desert to the new Jerusalem’ (130) – but his reality is one of anxiety, social insecurity and sexual jealousy.32 The experiences of Gikonyo, a village carpenter, are similar. Outwardly, he is the model of successful enterprise, having risen through market trading (normally considered ‘a woman’s job’ (57)) into a position of status and influence. Inside, however, Gikonyo is a mass of debilitating emotions, riddled with shame at confessing his Mau Mau loyalties while in detention, with anger at his wife’s infidelities during his imprisonment and with impotence in the face of the new native bourgeoisie. Karanja is another character who feels that events have ‘conspired to undermine his manhood’ (120). A former government employee and homeguard leader, his collaboration with the imperial authorities has brought him the desired measure of prestige amongst other Gı˜ku ˜yu˜ , but only humiliation from the whites. Nevertheless, at the thought that the latter will soon be leaving Kenya, he is reduced to ‘[p]anic’, feeling like ‘a dog that has been unexpectedly snubbed by the master it trusts’ (156). Like Njoroge’s family in Weep Not, Child, the men of Thabai have been brutally treated by the British, with imprisonment, genital mutilation and ‘bottlenecks […] hammered into people’s backsides’ (179) being common. It is little wonder, therefore, that the majority of them are prone to secrecy and speechlessness. The novel is full of characters who ‘refuse […] to speak’ (45),

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Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o take ‘refuge in reticence’ (65), make ‘inarticulate noises’ (194) and sink into an ‘abyss of silence’ (97). With Ngu˜gı˜ viewing language as ‘the collective memory bank of a people’s experience’, such speechlessness not only signifies a loss of masculinity, but also of their linguistic ability to narrate indigenous history and identity, an indicator of both cultural colonisation and the breakdown of social intercourse within the Gı˜ku ˜yu˜ population.33 The one character who retains the power of speech, and the subsequent power to reunite the community, is Kihika, the revolutionary leader. His perennially ‘strong voice’ (15) is symbolic of a wider maintenance of male agency, as he inspires the growth of anti-colonial resistance and conducts fearless raids on the authorities, becoming known ‘as the terror of the whiteman’ (16). As with Waiyaki and Njoroge, however, his tendency towards ‘immense’ and ‘wellregulated arrogance’, and towards ‘visions of himself [as] a saint’ (84, 74, 82), raises doubts about his leadership, as does the power that he gains over the imagination of the people he supposedly serves. As John McLeod writes, ‘Ngugi recognises the necessity for figures around which collective action might be instigated and organised, but remains suspicious of the cult of personality that is often created in their wake’.34 He also expresses suspicion with the military elite that serves Kihika’s cause. In A Grain of Wheat, this is personified in General R., an obsessive, shadowy figure whose hunt for the man who finally betrays Kihika to the British advances ‘revolutionary justice’ (27) but eschews the communality and forgiveness which Ngu˜gı˜ is seeking to promote. At the same time, the native bourgeoisie which sweeps to power through the activism of Kihika and the General forms yet another stratum of leadership sunk in self-advancement and self-gain, a stratum that merely ‘replace[s] the colonial bureaucrats’.35 More specifically, the postcolonial triumvirate of revolutionary leader, militarist and businessman comprises a male elite whose practices reproduce the failures of white patriarchy. The point is made most effectively in Kihika’s endorsement of female circumcision during his time at a missionary school. In a charged scene, the young boy stands up to a teacher who condemns the practice as ‘a heathen custom’ (84), a brave gesture of opposition to imperial influence but hardly one that supports female emancipation. There is certainly no suggestion that the level of violence against women that is enacted or desired in the narrative – Mugo wanting to ‘strangle’ his aunt (7), Gikonyo’s father beating his mother (71), soldiers raping village women (139) – will decrease when Kihika’s movement comes to power. As this censure of male authority might suggest, A Grain of Wheat also reveals clear sympathy for the plight of women in a male-centred society. The obvious example of the author’s achievement in this respect is Mumbi, the wife of Gikonyo. Introduced to the reader as ‘one of the most beautiful women’ in the region (14), with the narrator emphasising her ‘well-formed body’ (28) and loyal service to her ‘master’ (29), she appears at first a rather stereotypical creation. As the sister of Kihika, however, Mumbi is the product of the same up-bringing as her legendary sibling, the daughter of a highranking village elder whose ‘name alone […] sent fear quivering among the enemy tribes’ (74). Rather than being cowed by the men around her, she has taken on many of the qualities of the warrior-hero. She has a ‘calm face’ and

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The Crisis of Kenyan Masculinity ‘proud carriage’ (28), and shows tremendous courage during the worst days of the Emergency, enduring Gikonyo’s detention and the forced relocation of her family. With her husband imprisoned, she is responsible for the ‘man’s work’ (136) of building a new hut in the designated zone (and with so many men in detention, there are plenty of ‘women [now] doing men’s work’ (182)). She proves to be sexually independent, succumbing in a moment of weakness to Karanja’s advances, with whom she has a child, and socially autonomous, leaving her husband when, through jealousy, he begins to physically abuse her and the child. Moreover, it is Mumbi’s dream of heroism that defines her personality for the reader. It is not sufficient for her that Kihika is leading the resistance movement; she dreams of her own ‘acts of sacrificial martyrdom’ (87), of ‘fighting hunger and thirst in the desert […], bringing glad tidings to her people’ (77). During one such dream, Mumbi’s imagination draws upon the image of a train – a symbol in the novel of the imperial penetration of the continent – to formulate her model of preferred identity: Mumbi often went to the station on Sunday. The rattling train always thrilled her. At times she longed to be the train itself. […] Her dark eyes had a dreamy look that longed for something that the village could not give. She lay in the sun and ardently yearned for a life in which love and heroism, suffering, and martyrdom were possible. She was young. She had fed on stories in which Gikuyu women braved the terrors of the forest to save people […]. (75)

There are many similarities here to the fantasies of power that plague male characters such as Kihika. Yet in contrast to her brother, who receives the censure of the narratorial voice, Mumbi is positively valorised for her ability to combine heroic action with demonstrations of kindliness, sensitivity and emotional maturity. Most importantly, her ambition is not for personal power but for communal action: ‘to reach out, to right the wrong, to heal the wounded’ (179). For example, on discovering that it is Mugo who has betrayed Kihika and brought about her brother’s execution, her decision to hide his deed from the village (as ‘she did not want anybody to die or to come to harm because of her brother’ (204)) demonstrates a level of charity that manifestly improves upon the vengefulness of village men. There are other female characters who manage to participate as fully in anti-colonial resistance. For Wambui, political involvement is a necessary duty for Gı˜ku ˜yu˜ women, and she believes in their ‘power […] to influence events, especially where men had failed to act, or seemed indecisive’ (175). During a strike by black factory workers, for example, Wambui is incensed by the passivity of the menfolk and demands that they ‘wear the women’s skirts and aprons and give up their trousers to the women’, a challenge that results in ‘all men stay[ing] away from work’ the following day (175). She also infiltrates the traditionally male sphere of military involvement. At a time when movement is restricted, she dares to smuggle information and weapons from the town to fighters hiding in the forest, once passing through a police check with ‘a pistol tied to her thighs near the groin’ (19), a clear appropriation of male symbolic power.36 The ending of the novel draws together the various strands of Ngu˜gı˜’s exploration of gendered identity, as well as his speculations as to the future of

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Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o Kenya after Uhuru. The final scene deals with the reconciliation of Gikonyo and Mumbi, two characters who have not always been central to the narrative, but whose names hint at their thematic importance. In Gı˜ku ˜yu˜ myth, Mumbi and Gikuyu (from which ‘Gikonyo’ derives) are the first man and woman created by God, and subsequently the figures who – one assumes – will ‘birth’ the new Kenya in Ngu˜gı˜’s modern allegory. Initially, Gikonyo seems a strange choice for the role, consumed as he is by jealousy and violence. Yet the carpenter retains a number of qualities resonant of his mythological namesake: most obviously, his willingness to make articles for his poorer clients for free and his love of traditional carving, particularly from native woods. The descriptions of him absorbed in the workshop – where his craft never fails to send ‘a thrill of […] wonder through the young man’ (72) – are some of the most touching in the novel. At these points, Gikonyo becomes a bearer of traditional value, and it is only for him to forsake masculinist practices for his potentiality to emerge. This begins during his time in prison, where he decides to declare his love for Mumbi by carving a traditional threelegged stool as a belated wedding present, the three legs sculpted in the form of three figures, all of them male. In time, however, with his desire for reconciliation and forgiveness growing, he decides on a different motif, one whose gendered symbolism has been altered: He changed the figures. He would now carve a thin man, with hard lines on the face, shoulders and head bent, supporting the weight. His right hand would stretch to link with that of a woman, also with hard lines on the face. The third figure would be that of a child on whose head or shoulders the other two hands of the man and woman would meet. Into that image would he work the beads on the seat? A field needing clearance and cultivation? A jembe? A bean flower? He would settle this when the time came. (241-2)

Avoiding naïve optimism (‘the hard lines on the face’), the carving exchanges a design centred around three men, an expression of the maledominated past, for one centred around the equal participation of male and female, thereby proposing more balanced relations for the future. The figure of the ungendered child is, of course, the generation of postcolonial Kenyans that will emerge from this equality (although it also symbolises the carpenter’s final acceptance of Mumbi’s son). A further change to the design – Gikonyo suddenly resolves to alter ‘the woman’s figure’ to one ‘big with child’ (243) in the concluding line of the book – might be interpreted as a patriarchal insistence on women’s maternal role, but could alternatively mark his belated acknowledgement of Mumbi’s contribution to Gı˜ku ˜yu˜ society. Certainly, the fact that the narrative terminates with Mumbi rather than Kihika serves to endorse the former’s adherence to communal action over the latter’s demagoguery. On this point, it is significant that Kihika, and the political elite that he represents, is actually a marginal presence in the text, vastly overshadowed by Ngu˜gı˜’s descriptions of common people. Through its egalitarian structure, with no hero or central figure emerging, the novel formally displaces the saviour-figure through an accentuation of multiple individuals, whose various perspectives are woven together to produce a collective view of village life and nationhood.37 The novel’s hero, it could be

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The Crisis of Kenyan Masculinity said, is the collectivity which struggles, endures and overcomes internal division. As the ending intimates, Ngu˜gı˜’s post-1960s fiction would take a more avowedly Marxist line, as well as a more feminist approach to characterisation, as illustrated by Warı˜˜ınga in Devil on the Cross (1982) and Gu˜thera in Matigari (1987). At the same time, this most famous of ‘native intellectuals’38 continued both his critique of masculinism and his dramatisation of malehood as a hybrid phenomenon prone to vulnerability, sensitivity and weakness. Clearly, such representation stood against the colonial discourse on African masculinities, which, portraying essentialised ‘images of rampant black male sexuality [and] rape of the white woman’, was deployed ‘to maintain ‘racial’ difference’ between subordinate populations and their imperial masters.39 It also departed from the attempts by negritude intellectuals to recreate black malehood as a fixed, unchangable and wholly virtuous entity diametrically opposed to Western depravity. In The River Between, Weep Not, Child and A Grain of Wheat, the depiction of colonised masculinities, and their multiple interactions with ethnicity, religion and social status, presented a gloomier view of the links between masculinist discourse and power. As Ngu˜gı˜ himself wrote, it is the structures of power ‘within nations’ as much as ‘between nations’ that his work wished to challenge, aiming to break down ‘the restrictive walls of nationalism, class, race and gender’.40 To this end, Ngu˜gı˜’s early analyses of Kenyan masculinities foreshadowed much of the theoretical work on the topic that emerged in academic scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s.

Notes 1

Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, 1992, 13. 2 Understandably, Ngu˜gı˜ has been most commonly studied for his anti-imperial thematics. In much of his fictional and theoretical work, the focus is on ‘the relationship between Afro-Americans and Euro-Americans’ and on the fact that ‘[t]he ruling robbing minority has always been Euro-American’ and ‘[t]he Afro-American has, by and large, been part of the robbed working majority’ (Ngu˜gı˜, Writers in Politics: Essays 1981, 125). 3 Brittan, ‘Masculinities and Masculinism,’ in The Masculinities Reader, eds Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett 2001, 53. 4 Lahoucine Ouzgane and Daniel Coleman, ‘Postcolonial Masculinities: Introduction,’ (accessed 14 May 2005). 5 Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity, 1990, 2-3. 6 Peter N. Stearns, Gender in World History, 2000, 11. 7 Stearns, Gender, 96. 8 Connell, Masculinities 1995, 40. 9 Connell, Masculinities, 185. 10 See Lahoucine Ouzgane and Daniel Coleman, ‘Cashing out the Patriarchal Dividends: An Interview with R.W. Connell,’ (accessed 14 May 2005). 11 Shire, ‘Men Don’t Go to the Moon: Language, Space and Masculinities in Zimbabwe,’ in Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, eds Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, 1994, 148. 12 Stearns, Gender, 95. 13 See Connell, Masculinities, 78-81.

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Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o 14 Boehmer, ‘The Master’s Dance to the Master’s Voice: Revolutionary Nationalism and the Representation of Women in the Writing of Ngugi wa Thiong’o,’ in Postcolonial Literatures: Achebe, Ngugi, Desai, Walcott, eds Michael Parker and Roger Starkey, 1995, 143. Dennis Walder, paraphrasing Kirsten Holst Petersen, talks about how ‘the ‘women’s issue’ has been ignored in the fight against imperialism’ (Walder, Post-Colonial Literatures in English: History, Language, Theory 1998, 17. 15 Boehmer, ‘Master’s Dance,’ 143. 16 The River Between was Ngu˜gı˜’s first novel, although it was not published until 1965, a year after Weep Not, Child. Along with A Grain of Wheat, these comprise what Patrick Williams calls ‘the first cycle of Ngugi’s novels covering the period up to the moment of Kenyan independence in 1963, all written in the 1960s, all written under the name James Ngugi, and all marked by a broadly liberal/humanist outlook’ (Williams, Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o (Manchester and New York: Manchester, 1999), 57). For an argument against this idea that Ngu˜gı˜’s early work pursues an ‘English aesthetic’ see Apollo O. Amoko, ‘The Resemblance of Colonial Mimicry: A Revisionary Reading of Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o’s The River Between,’ Research in African Literatures 36, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 34-50. 17 John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture, 2002, 17. 18 Williams, Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o, 50-51. 19 Niels Sampath, ‘‘Crabs in a Bucket’: Reforming Male Identities in Trinidad,’ in Masculinities Reader, eds Whitehead and Barrett, 330. 20 Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o, The River Between (Oxford: Heinemann, 1965), 1. Further references will be given in the text. 21 Williams, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 25. 22 Griffiths, A Double Exile: African and West Indian Writing between Two Cultures, 1978, 34. In the same way, David Cook and Michael Okenimkpe comment that Ngu˜gı˜ ‘tests in his fiction the manhood of his protagonists in the pursuit of certain goals. He asks how far these key figures, unpredictable as they are like all mankind, inevitably subject to psychological imbalance, can cope with the challenges which must accompany high aspirations’ (Cook and Okenimkpe, Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o: An Exploration of His Writings, new edn 1997, 31). 23 Oliver Lovesey, Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o 2000), 18. 24 Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child, new edn 1987, 19, 39. Further references will be cited in the text. 25 Quoted in Lovesey, Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o, 33. 26 When Muthoni disobeys Joshua, for example, Waiyaki thinks: ‘The idea that she had actually run away, actually rebelled against authority, somehow shocked him. He himself would not have dared to disobey [his father]. At least he could not see himself doing so’ (41). 27 Kirsten Holst Peterson and Anna Rutherford, ‘Introduction’ to A Double Colonisation: Colonial and Post-Colonial Women’s Writing, eds Peterson and Rutherford 1986, 9. 28 Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 6. 29 Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, new edn, 2002, 167. Further references will be given in the text. 30 Knights, Writing Masculinities: Male Narratives in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999), 5, 19. 31 Kathleen Greenfield, ‘Murdering the Sleep of Dictators: Corruption, Betrayal, and the Call to Revolution in the Work of Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o,’ in The World of Ngu ˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o, ed. Charles Cantalupo, 1995, 29. 32 In the latter half of the novel, Mugo is largely exonerated by two acts: the spontaneous assistance that he gives a woman being whipped by a homeguard and his public admission of guilt over the betrayal of Kihika. 33 Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey; Nairobi: Heinemann, 1986), 15. As emphasised in Weep Not, Child, such speechlessness is particularly poignant in a culture where the ability to ‘tell a story […] was considered a good thing for a man’ (20). The importance that the author has placed on the usage of native language was most famously displayed

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The Crisis of Kenyan Masculinity in the decision to alter his name from the colonial designation, James Ngugi, and to write in Gı˜ku ˜yu˜ rather than in English (see Ngu˜gı˜, Decolonising the Mind, 4-30). 34 McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 96. 35 Abdul R. JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa, 1983, 220. 36 Importantly, the doubts that Wambui expresses at the end of the novel about Mugo’s trial – she feels it to be ‘a terrible anti-climax to her activities in the fight for freedom’ (239) – suggest that she will also be a stern critic of postcolonial politics. 37 See Neil Lazarus, ‘(R)eturn to the People: Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o and the Crisis of Postcolonial African Intellectualism,’ in World of Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong'o, ed. Cantalupo, 19-21. 38 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, new edn, 1961, 178-80. 39 Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, ‘Introduction’ to Dislocating Masculinity, eds Cornwall and Lindisfarne, 8. 40 Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong'o, Moving the Centre (London: James Currey, 1993), 10-11.

Bibliography Amoko, Apollo O., ‘The Resemblance of Colonial Mimicry: A Revisionary Reading of Ngu˜ g˜ı wa Thiong’o’s The River Between,’ Research in African Literatures 36, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 34-50. Berman, Bruce, and John Lonsdale. Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa. London: James Currey, 1992. Beynon, John. Masculinities and Culture. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2002. Cantalupo, Charles, ed, The World of Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1995. Connell, R.W. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Cook, David, and Michael Okenimkpe. Ngu˜ g˜ı wa Thiong’o: An Exploration of His Writings. 2nd edn. 1983; Oxford: James Currey, 1997. Cornwall, Andrea, and Nancy Lindisfarne, eds. Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New edn. 1961; London: Penguin, 1990. Gilmore, David D. Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990. Griffiths, Gareth. A Double Exile: African and West Indian Writing between Two Cultures. London: Marion Boyars, 1978. JanMohamed, Abdul R. Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983. Knights, Ben. Writing Masculinities: Male Narratives in Twentieth-Century Fiction. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999. Lovesey, Oliver. Ngu˜ g˜ı wa Thiong'o. New York: Twayne, 2000. Mac an Ghaill, Máirtín, ed. Understanding Masculinities: Social Relations and Cultural Arenas. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1996. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. Ngu˜ g˜ı wa Thiong'o. Weep Not, Child. New edn. 1964; Oxford: Heinemann, 1987. ——. The River Between. Oxford: Heinemann, 1965. ——. A Grain of Wheat. New edn. 1967; London: Penguin, 2002. ——. Writers in Politics: Essays. London: Heinemann, 1981. ——. Devil on the Cross. Trans. Ngu˜ g˜ı wa Thiong'o. London: Heinemann, 1982. ——. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey; Nairobi: Heinemann, 1986. ——. Matigari. Trans. Wangu˜i wa Goro. Oxford: Heinemann, 1987. ——. Moving the Centre. London: James Currey, 1993. Ouzgane, Lahoucine and Daniel Coleman. ‘Cashing out the Patriarchal Dividends: An

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Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o Interview with R.W. Connell.’ (accessed 14 May 2005). Ouzgane, Lahoucine and Daniel Coleman. ‘Postcolonial Masculinities: Introduction.’ (accessed 14 May 2005). Parker, Michael, and Roger Stanley (eds) Postcolonial Literature: Achebe, Ngugi, Desai, Walcott. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1995. Peterson, Kirsten Holst, and Anna Rutherford (eds) A Double Colonisation: Colonial and Post-Colonial Women's Writing. Melbourne: Dangaroo, 1986. Stearns, Peter N. Gender in World History. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari. Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Walder, Dennis. Post-Colonial Literatures in English: History, Language, Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Whitehead, Stephen M., and Frank J. Barrett (eds) The Masculinities Reader. Cambridge: Polity, 2001. Williams, Patrick. Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999.

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9 Father Africa Counter-Narratives of Masculinity in Ousmane Sembene’s Faat Kiné & Moolaadé TA R S H I A L . S TA N L E Y

Ousmane Sembene was an auteur in the surest sense of the word. One of the defining characteristics of his film work is his constant reflection on, and depiction of, the African woman in post-independence society. Many of the theories written about Sembene’s films situate him as having a womanist/ feminist sensibility in his presentations and themes. While films like Faat Kiné (2000) and Moolaadé (2004) do indeed reflect Sembene’s understanding of a twenty-first century African political aesthetic which must include the African woman’s uplift as a means of reshaping society, Sembene’s foregrounding of womanist issues speaks significantly about the presence (and absence) of the African male in his critiques. This paper discusses Sembene’s depiction of masculinity in the films Faat Kiné and Moolaadé. As a Senegalese woman who raises her out-of-wedlock children, who cares for her mother and who manages a gas station, Faat Kiné is the model of success. As a small village mother bound by tradition and religion, Collé Ardo Gallo Sy must summon help stronger than both to fight a system that would mutilate little girls ‘for their own good’. Yet, for the presence of the women’s stories, both the films are a particularly derisive critique of the men in Faat Kiné’s and Colle’s lives and by effect masculinity in the society. If Faat Kiné represents what women can achieve and Collé what they have endured, then the fathers in the films denote what men have failed to achieve and what they have failed to prevent in the same societies. The men in the films are crippled by patriarchal ideologies of manhood— tribal, historical, post-colonial, and neo-colonial. They are complicit in their own failures and thus the failure of society as a whole. The plight of the men in the film is the plight of the nation, and like the nation, it is the failure of the men to adapt and change which Sembene presents as most damaging. Included in Carmela Garritano’s ‘Troubled Men and the Women Who Create Havoc: Four Recent Films by West African Filmmakers’ is a critique of Faat Kiné. In this analysis the author notes that the film fails to accomplish

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Father Africa what can be seen as the foundational objective of Sembene’s life work, that is the use of his literary and filmic talent to call to account black African perpetrators of neo-colonialism. Garritano writes that ‘Sembene, in the character of Kiné, creates a replica of the bourgeois individual empowered by the capitalist system that in his large body of work, spanning over 40 years, he has sought to condemn’.1 While this assessment does have some validity it is important to read Faat Kiné the film, and Faat Kiné the character, in tandem with the second entry in the Sembene filmic trilogy – Moolaadé . As Sembene intended, it is necessary to look at both films and all the characters before determining that he has strayed away from the tenets of his work. While Sembene is known for his ability to wield both cinema and literature as pens and prods delineating the state of womanhood in West African societies, he was from the beginning a master of Third Cinema heeding the call-to-arms of revolutionary filmmaking. As such one must take into account the body of his work alongside what may well be some of the last entries in his repertoire. The women’s trilogy remains among his last films. Thus, it becomes necessary to weigh Faat Kiné and Moolaadé together with the entirety of his work to discover what new revelations and revolutions may be lurking there.

‘The Heart of a Man,’ and the Mouth of a Sailor Beginning with his 1966 film Le Noire de, Sembene earned a reputation in celluloid for his womanist sensibility. Already an accomplished literary figure, Sembene boasted a discernible and sizeable body of work which featured complex and compelling women characters whose lives seemed to be euphemisms for post- and neo-colonial societies.2 He was so adept at utilizing the female African body as metaphor that it is possible to wonder if he learned his lesson from the colonizers themselves. Throughout Sembene’s work there is the invocation of Mother Africa and in his embraces she ultimately gives birth to the space for critique of both pre- and post-independence West African societies. Yet there is a pattern in Sembene’s work that reveals not only his fascination for Mother Africa but his dispute with Father Africa as well. The very framework of perhaps his best known film Xala (1966), cites the impotent body (and spirit) of the lead male character as indicative of the state of the Senegalese union. El Hadji is a newly installed government official, long corrupt in his business dealings and bereft of strength and leadership in his family. The longer El Hadji is physically impotent the weaker he becomes morally and socially. Through his corrupt business dealings, and because he arrogantly appeals to the tradition of a third and very young wife to flaunt his status, we see El Hadji abdicate his responsibility to his family, and his country. Even when his eldest daughter comes to speak to him about the state of his affairs she demonstrates more wisdom and insight than her father. At the end of the film El Hadji learns that it is his kinsman’s just revenge which is responsible for his xala [his impotence]. El Hadji’s half-brother (whom he has cheated out of inheritances and family rights) and the other beggars invade his home. Several of them drag his maid to the floor intimating

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Counter-Narratives of Masculinity in Faat Kiné & Moolaadé her rape while others make themselves comfortable in El Hadji’s family room. At the moment of reckoning they explain the nature of El Hadji’s crimes and offer to release him from the curse. Of course it will cost El Hadji his dignity, and the respect of his family. These are the only things he has left after he loses his government position, his business, and his second and third wives. The hopes of the audience that El Hadji will live with the xala rather than let his naked body be spat upon by the dozen or so beggars in his living room are thwarted. El Hadji chooses humiliation in front of his family and the eradication of the last shreds of dignity and thus the last hope that Independence patriarchs will rise to the occasion of nation building. It is significant that the film ends with the naked body of the lead character being humiliated. The last frame is frozen so that the spectator can dwell on Hadji’s position. It is as if the rape scene, which began with the maid in the kitchen, ends in the body of El Hadji. The men surround him and with wretched choking sounds catapult great pasty globules of mucus and saliva from their throats on to his body. To my western eye, the mess that clings to the body of El Hadji begs to be read as a ritual of ejaculation. This could signify the finish of the maid’s rape that began in the kitchen and is never resolved. Such a reading would necessitate holding all of the men in the scene accountable and not just El Hadji. As the men play out their scenario of domination and retribution, it is sill the women who suffer most. El Hadji’s wife and daughter, and the maid – like women in the society– are victimized as the men parlay the power back and forth. It is possible to see in Xala, Sembene’s visual paralipsis as both the male and female bodies end up signifying the violated and dishonorable position much of Africa found herself in after Independence. El Hadji’s willingness to castigate himself rightly makes reference to the fact that many African regimes were compliant participants in their own subjection. If Sembene’s auteur’s style includes making the filmic body synonymous with the social, cultural, and economic climate then we see the same theme occurring in Faat Kiné. Kiné is a successful Senegalese woman. She is deemed successful because despite being disowned by her own father and used and abandoned by the fathers of her children she has managed to work her way up to a management position, own her own home, send her children to school, take care of her mother, and employ a maid for the family. Within the very persona of Kiné is the idea of a kind of African achievement after Independence which occurs even in the face of neo-colonial corruption, the intrusion of modernity, and the traditional presence of Islam. However, it is an economic success, an educational success, but not a familial, cultural victory. The filmic history in Faat Kiné is presented as flashback employing what Manthia Diawara terms as the use of ‘classic Hollywood’ technique to frame narrative and build up expectation.3 Accordingly, the audience is able to gather how Kiné came to be the ideal Senegalese woman. Only a few months shy of secondary school graduation Kiné was expelled. Her crime was being impregnated by her teacher who, although he acknowledged paternity, did not marry Kiné, but left her to fend for herself in a Muslim society which (particularly for women) forbade premarital sex and consequently illegitimate offspring. Kiné is not only denounced by her father, but he attempts to burn the girl alive, as

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Father Africa retribution for her sin. Kiné is saved because her mother shields her from the canister of flaming coals, but Mammy is permanently disfigured. It is Mammy and Kiné who bind themselves together and raise Kiné’s children. Sembene is commenting on the ways in which the women of post-independence Africa have had to align themselves in order to survive, and although there is a long and rich tradition of African women’s communities, these women must now adapt in a space fraught with modernity and absentee men. As Kiné struggles to provide financially for her little family it is also noteworthy that she does not get a typical woman’s job. Instead of setting up shop in the market place or on the street corner Kiné gets a job managing a gas station. We see her go from pump attendant to station manager. Kiné is in charge of the men at the station, and she owns a car (which features prominently throughout the film). It is also significant that when Kiné’s maid compliments her she says that Kiné has the ‘heart of man’. In having to assume the role of provider and protector of her family Kiné has assumed some typically masculine traits. She is seen as fearless and brash, but also rude and crass. Kiné is constantly rebuked throughout the film for the harshness and/or directness of her language. Not only does Kiné curse and smoke, she speaks rather blatantly about sexual matters, she has a lover and boasts about paying him for his services. While a western mindset might see these traits as having been liberated from being classified as ‘male’, in this Senegalese context Kiné is acting like a man and Sembene seems to see it as one of the consequences of weak and corrupt male leadership in West Africa. Yet for all her accoutrements of maleness Kiné is still bound by tradition and Islam. When she retires to her home in the evening she is told by Mammy not to smoke because her stepfather is in the house. For all her sophistication there is still a struggle with modernity. After being reprimanded by her mother she is insulted by her daughter. Aby wants to go to Canada to study and reacts like a spoiled child when her mother explains the limitations of their financial situation. In addition to being moored to her home, Kiné is still fettered by a Senegalese economic system. As she moves about town in her little car we see many images of women still bound to the street and the poverty it entails. While Kiné is liberated and sophisticated, in many ways her environment is not. For Garritano, Kiné’s apparent liberation is still sculpted out of a capitalistic and hierarchical model – ‘the source of Faat Kiné Diop’s power is her wealth’. Garritano cites the moments in the film when Kiné is impatient with the poor women whose pilgrimage to the opposite side of the street halts Kiné’s progress. She also points out Kiné’s unwillingness to give money to a beggar woman.4 Her impatience with the poor may be seen as a coopting of the neocolonialist role, and neocolonialism is not the answer whether the neocolonialists are men or women. However it may be that like the earlier structure in Xala, Sembene is coopting the bodies and psycho-social spaces of both men and women to make his point. It may be that Faat Kiné’s penchant for imitating Senegalese masculinity, which itself was often imitating the colonialist oppressor, is a human response not a male one, and that his portrait of Kiné is representative of an elite few in Senegalese society who see the accumulation of personal wealth as liberation.

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Counter-Narratives of Masculinity in Faat Kiné & Moolaadé

Fathering Africa As interesting and arresting as the character of Kiné is in the film, it is also pertinent to look at Sembene’s presentation of masculinity. In a 1995 interview with Samba Gadjigo concerning his methodologies Sembene states: ‘Often, there is no main character in my films. They are group stories. At a given time, at a given hour, each character plays a little role and the sum of these roles makes up the physiognomy of the group.’5 If one is allowed to approach a reading of Faat Kiné in this manner then the character of the film is composed of his interpretations of Kiné, Mammy, Aby, all the fathers, and Kiné’s son. In this way the very presence of Kiné, a woman born in the year of independence, allows us a way to access the role of men in Senegalese society. We can look to the way in which the men have related to Kiné to see how men have functioned in post-independence society. In ‘The Silent Revolutionaries: Ousmane Sembene’s Emitaï, Xala, and Ceddo’ David Uru Iyam makes a case for the female characters in those films having strength and significance precisely because they were not depicted as such. He cites Pfaff’s seminal text on Sembene when he says ‘The silent revolutionaries in these three films are carefully thought out characters. The drama is structured around them, and the message of the story is a vindication of their ideals’ (Iyam, 1986).6 This is an important theoretical construct in any analysis of Sembene’s work. Sometimes it is what you do not see and what is not so obvious which is important to spectatorship. Kiné is so dynamic and charismatic it is difficult not to just dismiss the men in her life as easily as she seemingly does. However, Garritano astutely calls attention to ways in which Kiné is physically immobilized during her memories of her father and the fathers of her children.7 They still haunt Kiné, still arrest her, if only in her memories. It is important for the viewer to stop, as Kiné does, and remember. We must take a good long look at the both the specter and the current manifestation of the masculine presence. At first glance the power of Kiné’s femininity is reflected as the usurpation of masculinity. If we look longer it may be that she is so powerful because the men have no power at all. Kine’s difficulty begins when she is seduced by her philosophy teacher – Professor Gaye. Under the canon of Islam and traditional African culture we see the framework of community being violated. I do not mean to imply that the first violation of African cultural and religious community begins in this film, but it becomes clearer throughout the film that the Professor’s character is on trial and thus the character of masculinity in general. Well within his doctrinal, if not charitable rights, Kiné’s father attempts to kill or at least maim her in reaction to the position in which she has placed herself and him. As Mammy retells the event, Kiné is frozen, she does not move because she is caught in the pain of that time. This lasts until she gently pleads with her mother to release her from the memory. It is obvious that Kiné still suffers from the rejection of her father. To add insult to injury, Professor Gaye now wants to marry Kiné. Although Aby is a young adult and both she and her brother have passed their

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Father Africa baccalaureate and are on their way to the university, Gaye has returned to convince Kiné they should wed. He does not hide his true intentions. He only wants Kiné because as his third wife she would bring her wealth to his household. When Aby asks her father to help Kiné pay for her schooling, he recoils as if he has been insulted. His reply is that he has too many children to help Aby. Here is the opportunity to re-read Sembene’s film as a story about men in Senegal. As an educated man it can be presumed that Gaye has had even more opportunities than Kiné to be financially stable. However, Sembene seems to point out not only the deficiencies in Gaye’s character but his desire to engage in what are, at least for Sembene, outmoded traditional cultural practices. Rather than establishing Gaye as an economic and social force, polygamy has made him weak. His family is too large to be cared for on his retirement pension. The desperate way Gaye hangs around Kiné hoping to convince her to turn her wealth, her power, and her life over to him marks him as little more than a beggar himself. Throughout this film (as in his entire body of work) Sembene is scathing in his commentary on the African tradition of polygamy. Melissa Thackway observes in Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film that Sembene’s critiques of polygamy are concerned with exposing the ‘egotistical motivations for taking several wives’ and I would add that he tries to expose the economic and social futility of trying to bring certain customs forward into modernity.8 Alpha is a character in the film who wants to borrow money from Kiné because she has received her turn at the ‘tontine’. As he waits for her outside the gas station headquarters he tries to convince Kiné that he is a good risk and that she would be a good Muslim if she lent him the money. Several other members of the firm arrive including Mr Thiam. After an exchange where Alpha is rebuffed for scoffing at contributing money for a colleague’s new baby there is an interesting exchange between the two. Alpha: You know what it’s like to have a big family. It bleeds you dry. Thiam: No, I don’t know about big families. That was in my grandfather’s time. What I do know, however, is that you are inefficient and backward. Alpha: You are the embryo of free-market neo-colonialism. Thiam: You are an African from colonial times.

This is one of many highly theatrical moments in the film. Alpha represents a way of life too extravagant and archaic for modern times. He wants to borrow money because his first three wives have all given birth within two years and his fourth wife is pregnant. Although Alpha’s job may be that of a middle-class man his familial expenditures almost guarantee that he and his family will slip back down the economic ladder. The reappearance of the beggar woman who’d admonished Alpha and the rest of the group about giving, and who had wished that they would all share her lot, seems indeed to be an omen. Alpha collapses in defeat in front of the Total Petrol company sign. It seems he will lose his gas station no doubt due to skimming funds to accommodate his large family. Because Kiné has said that Alpha does not pay

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Counter-Narratives of Masculinity in Faat Kiné & Moolaadé his bills it is difficult to empathize with him as a struggling family man even if we were tempted to do so. We are left with little choice but to see Alpha as the dinosaur he is deemed to be by Mr Thiam. In most of his films Sembene returns to this theme of polygamy and paints it as one of the holdovers of a traditional system which strokes the ego of the man but which causes havoc for women, children, and society-at-large. In Faat Kiné Sembene leaves no room to assess polygamy as anything but the result of inflated egos and an inability to see which parts of tradition should make the journey into modernity. The body and ego of Alpha remind us of a nation that in reality has thousands of homeless women and children sleeping on its streets or begging for spare change. If Alpha cannot take care of his family a similar fate awaits them. The last time we see him, Alpha he is seated on the ground, his body lower than that of the beggar woman who walks away laughing and jingling her coins. Alpha looks a bit like Professor Gaye. They wear the same desperate, bewildered look on their brows. Boubakar Oumar Payane is Djib’s father and the source of the second significant betrayal in Kiné’s life. Unlike Professor Gaye, who at least has his retirement income, Boubakar is a penniless ex-felon. When Kiné sees him on the street she is held captive by the pain of his duplicity all over again. In yet another flashback we see that Boubakar, who had promised to marry her, took a very pregnant Kiné to a construction site where their home was supposedly being built. After a cleverly planned entrance by the construction foreman announcing how much more money would be needed Kiné naively writes Boubakar a check. In her attempt to help him prepare their home she wipes out her savings. Returning to the present, we learn that Boubakar was caught trying to flee the country and arrested. As Kiné sits in her little car furiously smoking a cigarette the audience cannot help but see the contrast between her and Boubakar. As he is dressed in clothing that is small, ragged, and dirty and reeking of street life there is a temptation to actually be pleased at his fate. It looks as if he has been punished for his treachery. Yet, although his status and station might be diminished, his ego is still intact. At the end of this exchange he is led away by Jean, a family friend and Kiné’s business associate, with the promise of a bath, a meal, and a change of clothing. It is not the last that Kiné will see of him. The graduation party for Aby and Djib is the beginning of the end of the film. In a characteristically climactic final scene both Professor Gaye and Boubakar Oumar Payane make their appearances. Rather than enter the celebration with contrite hearts both men come expecting to be honored simply for having fathered. According to Mr Sene, the man who accompanies Professor Gaye to the party, in Senegal (and in African societies in general) honor and homage are paid to the elders and the ancestors without question and both the absentee fathers see this respect as their due. Djib, who has the admiration and loyalty not only of his family, but also of all the young people present at the soiree, takes the fathers to task. After Djib rejects his father’s patrimonial advances Professor Gaye comes to Boubakar’s defense. As the two men try to shame Djib into his traditional position as a voiceless youth he fights back. In the spirit of the griot, Djib not only recounts the behavior of the father as reflective of post-Independence Africa, but

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Father Africa simply by virtue of assuming the role of historian he also prophesizes the future. As he lambastes the fathers for having abandoned Kiné and their children he asks an important, albeit rhetorical, question. He asks whether paternal rights also imply paternal responsibility. When Gaye attacks him physically for openly comparing him and Boubakar to a failed Africa, Djib still does not retreat. Djib becomes a compelling character because he is not only a product of an Africa which abdicated its responsibility toward its children, he is the new Africa – or certainly the new African Sembene had hoped to see. Gaye and Boubakar abandon their children, but their real world counterparts abandoned Africa. Their self-serving tactics resulted in short-lived pleasure for themselves and an enduring pain for Kiné and their children. It is also important to recognize the change their abdications engendered. Not only is Faat Kiné changed as a woman, the role of women has changed. If the men would not look after their children and their Africa, then the mother would (and will) have to do so. It is difficult to surmise whether Sembene laments this event. While he celebrates these new women he seems to mourn for the old ones as well. Although the women are rising to the occasion Sembene indicates that they are changed for having to bear such a burden and in that change there is inevitably loss.

‘Moolaadé is another thing altogether’ While at the National Endowment for the Humanities African Cinema Institute in 2005, I heard Moussa Sene Absa, director of Tableau Ferraille (1996) and Madame Brouette (2002), speak about his next filmic work being treated as a trilogy; I immediately thought of Sembene as well as Dijibril Diop Mambety’s Hyènes (1992) and La Petite Vendeuse du Soleil (1999). I pondered why it was so important for these Senegalese filmmakers to conceive of their work in trilogy form. Perhaps their visions are so large and intense that they cannot be whittled down to less than two hours, or it may be that the tradition of the griot in West Africa is too much a part of their psyches to conceive of an ending to any story. However complex their reasoning it is evident that the ideological constructs of their work stretch beyond the individual episodes. In an April 2004 interview with Samba Gadjigo, Sembene was asked what Moolaadé means to him: ‘No, I don’t know what this finished product means as an object. I can tell you that, based on its content, the film is the second in a trilogy that, for me, embodies the heroism in daily life.’9 This time instead of a single mother who has worked her way up in the man’s world and in an urban setting, Sembene explores village life. Collé Ardo Gallo Sy is a strong willed, compassionate woman. Having suffered through the ‘purification’ ritual and having had the life of her only child threatened at birth, Collé decided that her child would not be circumcized. Collé suffers from a critical consciousness due to exposure to the outside world. She is marked indelibly (both physically because of her cesarean scar and psychologically because she understands that it is the purification which complicates her ability to bear children) by her interaction with the doctor who delivered her daughter. As a result she is known throughout the village for her stubbornness and strange

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Counter-Narratives of Masculinity in Faat Kiné & Moolaadé ways. Perhaps she is even indulged because she is only a second wife and has given birth to only one child. Just as we get an opportunity to look inside the culture and climate of life for Kiné, we are allowed wonderful and horrible glimpses of what it means to live life in a village determined to disconnect itself from any modernity that threatens the familiar. However, the scenes can be a bit disconcerting as you watch women pound millet while chickens and children roam unimpeded about the compound juxtaposed against the mercenaire who comes bearing the urban marketplace into the little village. Mercenaire has colorful machinegenerated plastic bowls, cheap imported clothing, bikini underwear and condoms for sale. But there is both benefit and dissonance in this alignment. It is our first clue to the kind of pressure realized in rural life as it struggles to maintain its importance and integrity alongside modernity. It is clear the compound occupied by Collé and her co-wives is fairly harmonious. Although the third wife is young and quiet, Collé and the first wife seem particularly suited and Collé defers to the woman’s position as elder sister. The conflict of tradition and modernity which is just beneath the surface of the seemingly tranquil village life explodes when four little girls come screaming to Collé for help. They have come dressed in the uniform of purification and the small, dark-brown bodies draped in white loincloths look particularly vulnerable. When they explain that they have fled the purification ceremony Collé immediately invokes the Moolaadé or declaration of sanctuary. This is problematic because as Sembene notes the Moolaadé is ‘The other value, as old as human existence: the right to give protection to those who are weaker.’10 At the heart of Collé’s action is the conflict between traditional African values, religion and modernity. It is usually religion that is depicted as at odds with ancient African ideas of spirituality or culture. Yet in this case, the ways in which religion, in this case Islam, has been used to justify a bringing forward of those conventional but seemingly detrimental African practices and belief systems without questioning them is in play. At first Collé is only confronted by the women directly responsible for the ritual. Dressed in red, as if they are dripping with blood, the Salindana come to Collé and instruct her to remove the Moolaadé – which is symbolized by a colorful rope tied across the entrance to her compound. For several days as the struggle ensues the Salindana appeal to Collé’s sense of history and tradition and to her tribal pride, but it is obviously her sense of her own selfhood which causes her to resist the women. Heretofore the men of village have been silent. Collé’s husband has been absent but upon his return Ciré is informed of his wife’s behavior. At first Ciré seems to be a reasonable man; after all he has supported Colle’s decision not to circumcize their daughter, Amasatou. However, Ciré is influenced by the other men in the village, especially his brother, Amath, who intimidates Cire by appealing to tribal tradition and shames him into beating Collé if she refuses to release the Moolaadé. Like the majority of men in Faat Kiné, Ciré and the tribal council fail to see that their sovereign rights as men are in conflict with the rights of the women (and young girls) to simply live their lives in a manner that is healthy and safe. As much as the film is about Collé and the other women of the village

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Father Africa asserting power over their bodies, it is also about the position in which the village men find themselves. In addition to Ciré and his brother the important male characters include the tribal council chief and his son. Ibrahim has just returned to the village from France. There is a great welcoming celebration and Ibrahim, looking quite westernized and uncomfortable, climbs out of a vehicle laden with gifts. Among the things he has brought to this father is a large television set. As the women of the village take off their lapas and lay them on the ground to pave the way for Ibrahim to return to the village the clash of tradition with modernity is again foregrounded. Ibrahim is the ideal son returning from the heart of modernity to marry the wife his father has chosen for him. He is supposed to have returned bringing what is economically acceptable from the west. His gifts are not expected to include social ideas that clash with tradition. When because of Collé’s actions his father ends up forbidding him to marry Amasatou, (even though they have been betrothed for years) as spectators we are perhaps surprised the son does not protest. The spectator may even be disturbed that the alternative bride who is suggested for him is a prepubescent child. However, Ibrahim finds himself in a position similar to that of Collé. To make a stand against his father is to reject not only that line of authority but all the lines which distinguish this people from any other. The abandoning of tribal traditions is synonymous with becoming a different entity and Ibrahim is wary of that. It is clear that Ibrahim is in conflict. Although he has a fight with his father, he does not push too hard against him. Much of his battle is depicted as internal. Yet, the few scenes of Ibrahim first in his western clothing and then in native dress, standing inactive as if he can’t quite get his body to obey, should speak to us as loudly as does the turmoil on the face of Ciré as he beats Collé publicly in the market place. Although the defense of Collé, Amasatou, and the little girls should come instinctively to one of Ibrahim’s background, he too is torn. The audience may look for Ibrahim to be the hero, but it is clear that the heroes in the film are the women. Ibrahim’s father and Ciré’s brother are very like Professor Gaye and Boubakar Oumar Payane. Their identities are so tightly mired in tradition and custom that they never examine themselves to see if they are truly living up to the ‘honor the elders’ ideology they espouse. They not only excuse themselves for being self-serving but refuse to acknowledge the pain it inflicts. While women and children suffer the men sit under baobab trees declaiming that it has always been done this way. The men in the two films demonstrate not only an unwillingness to adapt to contemporary life but also a fear. Because their concept of self has been predicated on little more than their maleness they cannot conceive of how they fit into a society where women are given equal footing. It is clear that the male characters in the film struggle with the idea of evolving masculinities. In societies where the sense of identity has been necessarily stripped away in order to subjugate, men often react by holding tighter to their ideas of themselves.11 In the face of women who are adapting and thriving it must indeed be a challenge for men to reshape and reform their ideas of themselves, particularly when their sense of self was predicated upon relating to women from dominant positions. Moolaadé is careful to show how

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Counter-Narratives of Masculinity in Faat Kiné & Moolaadé women are active participants in their own subjugation. However even at the root of the women’s conflict is the men’s unwillingness to adapt and the men in Sembene’s films are archaic and lacking in forward vision. One of the most significant moments in Moolaadé is when Amath and the council demand that Ciré beat Collé. The whole village is there to witness the event. Collé refuses to speak the words which would revoke the Moolaadé and the frenzy grows. Tears flow down the face of both Collé and Ciré. The women who are with Collé chant encouragement, the women who are against her shout ‘tame her,’ ‘break her’. In the end Mercenaire steps in and stops the beating. It is the intrusion of modernity, but in the guise of a man, a black man, to whom the council should be able to relate. It is a watershed moment for the men of the village. Change offers itself not as a woman or as white western idealism, but as a man who is one of them. Unfortunately fear and selfishness prevent the men from accepting Mercenaire’s intrusion. As he tries to flee the village, all of his goods in tow, he is hunted down and killed. Not only do the men choose to reject opportunity to change, they destroy the women’s link to the outside world. The men determine that listening to the radio has encouraged their women to abandon customs. Subsequently, the men confiscate all of the radios and burn them. They hope to shut out the voice of the outside world and suspend themselves and their people in time. The shot of the radios next to the mosque and the sacred anthill represent the sources of power in the life of the village. There is Islam, there is African tradition, and there is modernity. At the resolution of the film the final shot is of the top of the mosque and then a television antenna. It is presumably the television set that Ibrahim brought to the village. This message is clear; those who would do so cannot hope to stop progress. All the people of the village will have to change and grow. Amasatou and Ibrahim face off at the end of the film. The characters of Ibrahim and Amasatou indicate that it is possible to adapt and bring forward the best of what tradition and religion have to offer. She says that she will never be circumcized; he does not speak but looks pleased. There is an indication that the young people will succeed where it has been so difficult for the elders.

Conclusion Ousmane Sembene lived and worked long enough to see colonialist, Independence, and post-Independence Africa. He was privy to the promises and witness to the ways in which the promises failed to be realized. He was a revolutionary filmmaker concerned with the survival of his people. As such, he knew that his people will have to adapt and change, and that it is possible to do so and still retain some sense of identity. In Faat Kiné and Moolaadé he demonstrated that even the new identities can be beneficial for the majority of people and still be uniquely African. In a society still struggling to gain its balance after colonial and civil wars he looked to the example of women. He did not see women as the progenitors of the new Africa because they are not men, but because they have been willing to change, adapt, grow and survive despite the compromises made to their gender roles. While Sembene readily

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Father Africa acknowledges that what is lost in the gaining is often sad, he is not too nostalgic to ask the men to follow suit so that all the people might survive.

Notes 1 Carmela Garritano, ‘Troubled Men and the Women Who Create Havoc: Four Recent Films by West African Filmmakers.’ Research in African Literatures 34, no. 3 (March 2003): 159-65. 2 Sonia Lee, ‘The Awakening of the Self in the Heroines of Sembene Ousmane,’ Critique 17, no. 2 (February 1975): 17-28. 3 Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. 4 Carmela Garritano, (ibid.). 5 Samba Gadjigo, ‘Interview with Ousmane Sembene,’ Research in African Literatures 26, no. 3(March 1995): 174. 6 David Uru Iyam, ‘The Silent Revolutionaries: Ousmane Sembene’s Emitaï, Xala, and Ceddo,’ African Studies Review 29. no. 4 (April 1986): 79-87. 7 Carmela Garritano, (ibid.). 8 Melissa Thackway, Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film. Oxford: James Currey; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. 9 Samba Gadjigo, ‘Interview with Sembene,’ New Yorker Films Press Kit, (2004): 4-8. 10 Samba Gadjigo, (ibid.). 11 Robert Morrell, ‘Of Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in Southern African Studies,’ Journal of Southern African Studies, 24. no. 4 (April 1998): 605-31.

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10 The Eternal Other The Authority of Deficit Masculinity in Asian-African Literature JUSTUS K. SIBOE MAKOKHA

Introduction Most national cultures in Eastern and Southern Africa are testimonies of multiracialism. In East Africa (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania) beside the White and Black races, exist substantial populations of the so-called ‘Brown’ race made up of migrant communities of South Asian origins and peoples of Arabic heritage. An attempt to categorize, for academic purposes, East Africans of Asiatic heritage, especially South Asian heritage, has given rise to the name ‘Asian Africans’ (See www.museums.or.ke/asian.html). Neither indigenous Asians nor indigenous Africans, the Asian African community in East Africa are the hybrid product of cultural contact between Asia and Africa over many centuries. However, to distinguish South Asian (Indo-Pakistani) communities from the Arabo-Persian ones, both captured by the general label ‘Asian Africans’, the Kiswahili terms Wahindi and Waarabu respectively, are popularly used across East Africa. In this chapter, we should understand ‘Asian Africans’ as descendants of a racially-distinct migrant community of South Asian heritage that settled in East Africa long before and during twentiethcentury European colonization of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Asian Africans, as a descriptive label, is used within this chapter to distinguish the Wahindi and Waarabu from a fresh wave of contemporary ‘investor Asians’. The latter are part of the transnational migrating labour/ capital, characteristic of the present stage of globalization, which made (and are still making) their maiden settlements in East Africa in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Historically, Asian Africans as a racially distinct socio-cultural community have had a difficult past in all East African societies (Mangat, 1969; Seidenberg, 1983, 1997). An analysis of this situation has focused on the experience of the community as a set of problems often referred to as the ‘Asian/Indian Question’ (Atieno-Odhiambo, 1974). These problems include political emasculation, socio-racial victimization and cultural marginalization. The

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The Eternal Other problems take place within a complex context of colonially-instigated ideas, attitudes, cultures, prejudices and philosophies which stress or rationalize racialized cultural difference. It is the necessity to understand cultural difference in a multiracial society that makes race and its inextricable partner, gender, powerful categories of analysis in East African postcolonial discourse. The literary practice of Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o, a prominent Kenyan contributor to postcolonial discourses, attests to this fact. In the nascent stages of East African postcolonial literary experience, Ngu˜gı˜ did point out openly that race is perhaps the most influential dynamic feeding East Africa’s literary imagination (Ngu˜gı˜, 1972a, 1972b). His contemporary, Taban Lo Liyong has gone a step farther to declare that East Africa is distinguished from other literary regions of the continent due to its three-tier racial society. This society comprises of indigenous Africa (Blacks), Caucasoid (Whites) and Asiatic (Browns) roots (Lo Liyong, 1991). Taban argues that contemporary East African literary traditions are anchored to its postcoloniality by these three important aesthetic roots: Negroid, Caucasoid, and Asiatic. The indigenous African roots, as is evident in the writings of Ngu˜gı˜, and the Caucasoid roots evident in the writings of Elspeth Huxley, are the most widely acknowledged aspects of East African literature. The Asiatic roots such as the literatures of Asian Africans such as M. G. Vassanji or Abdulrazak Gurnah remain the most forgotten aspects of East African literature, and indeed African literature (Elder, 1992; Griffiths, 2000; Makokha, 2004). Asian Africans in East Africa, as a cultural community, were never really colonizers or colonized in the manner of Whites and Blacks. They are, and have been even in the colonial dispensation, an interstitial migrant community, a greyarea, in the racially Manichean society that is East Africa. Because of this third-space location, writing under the sway of postcolonial imperatives would never be an easy task for Asian-African writers particularly when the issues of identity politics and realities are taken into serious consideration. M. G. Vassanji’s fiction, Jagjit Singh’s poetry or even the plays of Kuldip Singh reveal an enduring interpretation of Asian-African in-betweenness as a deficit location paradoxically with its own kind of authority. This is even more so when we delve into the in-between worlds of Asian-African writers, that the experience of manhood and masculinities is different from the masculinities of, say, the Whites or the Blacks in East Africa. Shiva Naipaul once cynically pointed out that the existence of the Asian African in East Africa can best be captured by the phrase ‘caught in-between the master and the slave’ (Naipaul, 1978). It is this awareness of the deficit location, epistemologically-speaking, that prompted Naipaul to criticize the relationships between the three races in East Africa: The African, if he wishes to, can dress like a European, talk like a European, affect European ideas, gain entry to European clubs. He can cultivate Western mannerisms and Western ideals to his heart’s content. He can never be Asianized in the same way. The Asian is the eternal ‘other.’ Consequently, the African demands his destruction – often expressed as a demand for his ‘integration.’ It is not accidental that the sexual inaccessibility of Asian African women excites so many rancours. Asian integration has to be physical, to be literal. Nothing else will do. (121)

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Masculinity in Asian-African Literature This chapter attempts a reading of selected Asian-African literature as kind of masculine protest – the tendency to compensate for feelings of inferiority or inadequacy by exaggerating one’s overt aggressiveness. It is argued that the authoritative interpretation of Asian-African interstitiality by Asian-African writers through creative imagination presents a fertile field for theorizing the contemporary trends in the study of men and masculinities in African literature. More than just signifiers of Asian-African social experiences, Asian-African literatures are a significant constituency of contemporary Africa’s cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism. We attempt to illumine certain synergies between masculinist discourses and literary production by a diasporic African community within the context of postcoloniality. The main theme of this chapter is to highlight the diversity of masculinities within African postcolonial spaces using the East African situation.

Rethinking Postcolonial Masculinities in Africa: What does the Asian-African Writer Want? Some scholars argue that East African literary tradition, like that of the rest of the continent, is mostly a masculine world (Stratton, 1995). However the ongoing revisioning of postcolonial notions of nationhood and nationness with particular respect to inter alia ethnic, gender, and racial diversity (Bhabha, 1994) leads to the awareness of Others, subaltern groups such as the Asian Africans (Makokha 2005a). These revisions ostensibly issue challenges to the idea of African masculinity or masculinity in Africa as a homogenous (and monolithic) category of social analysis. In this light, it appears that there is indeed a ‘crisis in masculinity’ characterized by postmodernist politics of fragmentation as foreshadowed by Connell (1995). The ongoing remembering and re-membering of Other social groups to the national body of the erstwhile negrocentric East African postcolonies has as its impetus revisionist thinking within postcolonial discourse. Bhabha has argued that a revisionist politics and theory of the margins of postcolonial nations is both theoretically innovative and politically crucial when it is informed by the need (and commitment) to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities (Bhabha, 1994). He maintains there is a need to focus on those moments and processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. In his view, it is these in-between spaces that provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of individual or collective selfhood. These strategies in turn initiate new signs of identity and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining society itself (Bhabha, 1994:1-2). The revisionist thinking within postcolonial discourses, seen from the perspective of literature, reveals that East African nationals are becoming aware of the culturo-racial ambivalence of their various nation-states. For instance the Nairobi-based Kwani? – the only significant literary journal in East Africa today – has been publishing a cross-racial and transcultural corpus of creative works from writers who come from White, Brown and Black communities (www.kwani.org). This integrative awareness that unites the national cultures in the wake of a strong globalizing process has a peculiar meaning. It

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The Eternal Other undercuts authoritative patriarchal roles and prerogatives within conservative spheres of the postcolony and thus carries a particular symbolic load. It in fact marks a disruptive beginning of the end of the radical thinking of postcoloniality as a Black Man’s metanarrative, signified by Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o’s, radical politics in the early 1970s (See introduction to Ngu˜gı˜, 1972b). This is a fact that African intellectuals and Africanists need to pay due attention to as a matter of urgency. The politics and practice of recognizing diversity within categories of postcolonial analysis such as class, race and gender was first experienced within East Africa in feminist discourses and critiques. Stratton (1995) has provided a remarkable feminist study of the politics of gender in contemporary African literary tradition. Her study is indeed a major challenge to the idea of contemporary African literary tradition as a masculine world, or more accurately, a negrocentric, masculine world. In their own statements, interventions, theories and critiques, feminist literary scholars in Africa have employed the politics of diversification in emphasizing the operation of monolithic male power over women. They have done so in tandem with other non-African(ist) postcolonial feminist thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who has provided influential interventions within postcolonialism by pointing, without discounting the importance of women’s oppression, to the racial, class, and ethnic diversity within the whole episteme of femininity (Spivak, 1990). This contrahegemonic tendency to fragment former unitary metanarratives such as postcolonialism and metacategories such as masculinity has important ramifications for Masculinity studies and Masculinity scholarship especially in multiracial ex-colonial worlds such as East Africa. It points to the reality that masculinity in East Africa is fragmented and reflects power imbalances among men. The conceptualization of masculinity in contemporary East Africa as simply ‘the masculinity of Blacks’ a la Heald, (1995), Ouzgane (2002) or Muriungi (2002) is indeed important but not sufficient. In this respect when scholars such as Muhomah (2002) talk about ‘versions of masculinity in Kenyan literature’ not just economic versions should occupy our mind but inter alia ethnic and racial versions of masculinity as well. When one considers the growing interest in the literatures produced by former marginal communities in the postcolonies such as Asian Africans, it appears that multiple masculinities are emergent or are asserting their authority within the context of East African literature. These masculinities encourage the idea that historically hegemonic forms of masculinity, such as the Black masculinity are undergoing crises requiring revision and/or revision. An example of this hegemonic view of African masculinity as the Blackman’s masculinity can be best seen in the person, figure and symbol, politics and practice of the late Nigerian maestro, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Stanovsky (1998) supplied a fascinating account of how the masculinity of Fela, as a postcolonial cultural icon was packaged for consumption in the West and why. Fela, the man and the artist, presented a typical case of African masculinity as perceived through (post)colonial lenses. His polygynous and mysogynist lifestyle not only assimilated him easily into popular expectations for Black men, but also perceived in him the embodiment of masculinity in the African context. Nevertheless, the question that arises is this: to what

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Masculinity in Asian-African Literature extent would the postcolonial masculinity in Africa typified by Fela be said to be the true post-colonial masculinity in Africa? In my view, that extent, whatever the scope, will only be giving the dominant hegemonic face/phase of postcolonial masculinities in contemporary Africa. This is because, just as the aesthetic roots of East African literature are diversified and hybrid, so is the category of masculinity as a site of/for personal and communal selfhood negotiations. Diversity in masculinities across the world is now a fertile ground of literature (Connell, 1995 [2005]). Some scholars do agree that it is now time for a recognition of diversity among men, by activists in the men’s movement and by theorists of masculinity (Nye 2005). In a special issue of the authoritative postcolonial journal, Jouvert, Ouzgane and Coleman (1998) have discussed at length what they call ‘postcolonial masculinities.’ Their solid discussion is crucial as a signal to gender theorists within African postcolonial studies. The two scholars, by imagining and asserting ‘postcolonial masculinities,’ participate in the politics of diversity reminiscent to that of Spivakian postcolonial feminism. The special issue of Jouvert edited by the two scholars can be read as a revelation of lessons to be learnt from masculine practices in postcolonial locations. These locations are diverse sites of intercultural conflict and negotiation that have emerged in the wake of European colonialism – practices that challenge and modify conventional understandings of men and masculinity. Ouzgane and Coleman (1998) discuss various ways what the study of masculinities reveals about the complex structures of relations between men, and between men and women in the postcolonies. The main question that they posit is: how might a new awareness of kinetic, hybridized masculinities inform postcolonial analyses of institutions such as colonial and nation-state patriarchies, neo-colonial paternalism, anticolonial machismo? It is this ‘new awareness,’ that we have invoked in this chapter to grapple with the nature of masculinities evident in the literature of Asian-African writers from East Africa. Masculinity studies in postcolonial spaces such as East Africa need to highlight and engage the ambivalences obtaining from the masculinities of the fissures and the margins. Seen from such a perspective, Ouzgane and Coleman (1998) argue that Masculinity studies have an important epistemological contribution to make to the general body of postcolonial thought. In their own submission, there are three main contributions that masculinity studies can supply to postcolonial studies in general or postcolonial criticism in particular. First, masculinity studies can contribute to feminist critiques, such as those offered by Spivak, of the sexist and homophobic practices that have often derailed movements towards liberation and decolonization. Second, masculinity studies bring a balance to the Marxian arrogation of class over gender, sexuality, and race as primary domains of social struggle. Third, the analytical apparatus of a hierarchy of masculinities – hegemonic, complicitous, marginalized, and subordinated – refines the accuracy of our understanding of the complex range of positions between dominance and resistance that characterize postcolonial societies such as East Africa. Ouzgane and Coleman (1998) submit that ‘the study of a diverse range of masculinities requires the simultaneous consideration of a whole variety of categories along with class – including race, gender, sexuality, physical ability,

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The Eternal Other age, and ethnicity.’ It is for this reason that I posit the inability of the four aspects of the hierarchy of masculinities they offer above, to sufficiently intellectualize the experience of Asian-African men. Can the Asian-African men we meet in the literary works of Asian-African writers from East Africa comfortably be considered under hegemonic, complicitous, marginalized or suboordinated masculinities? The answer is no. And the following discussion will highlight the reasons as to why this is the case. But first, given my position regarding the range of masculinities identified by the two scholars above, the term ‘deficit masculinity’ is used to refer to the interstitial, marginal and yet somehow privileged masculinity of Asian Africans of East Africa.

The Asian-African Writer and Interstitiality as the Index of Deficit Masculinity With the exception of Jameela Siddiqui, Sophia Mustafa, and Rasna Warah, most Asian-African writers from East Africa are men. In fact the three female writers only appeared on the East African literary scene as part of the new wave of third-generation East African writing that began a decade or so ago. Peter Nazareth, Bahadur Tejani, Jagjit Singh from Uganda and Kuldip Sondhi together with Pheroze Nowrojee from Kenya are all Ngu˜gı˜’s contemporary. Their presence in the East African literary scene spans the last half a century despite the fact that most scholarly commentary on East African literature never mentions their efforts. With the radical decolonization projects of immediate post-independence dispensation in East Africa that reached its (anti)climax with the famous Asian Expulsion from Uganda in 1972/3, to really reveal the racial politics underlying East Africa’s postcolonial thought. In his powerful and famous poem, ‘A Portrait of the Asian as an East African,’ Jagjit Singh (1971) demonstrated how independence was interpreted as the transfer of inter alia political authority from the White Male colonizer to the Black Male colonized. Singh employs an oral narrative technique to provide a lamenting Asian-African male persona regretting his racial identity in the changing Africa of the 1960s. This new Africa could only have a developed racial consciousness, only that this consciousness could only see the world in terms of Black and White. The persona laments, For I, too, would have liked to think Only the toes of Africa were infected. But the cancer of colour Has gathered fresh victims now. Black surgeons, too, have prescribed new drugs And we, Malignant cells, Must fade away soon. (156-9)

This vivid image of the Asian-African’s racial awareness on the dawn of selfrule in East Africa appears to be connected with the interstitiality of the community in the colonial past. Although indeed most of the forefathers of present-day Asian Africans were the oil that lubricate the colonial machinery

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Masculinity in Asian-African Literature and drove the British imperial project in East Africa (Seidenberg, 1997), their second-class stature made them more immediate to the Black Africans who interpreted the Asian African’s racial difference as Otherness. It is in this context that the interstitial sense of many Asian Africans captured by the alienation that Singh’s persona suffers above was mainly interpreted as a classic case of ‘fence-sitting.’ In his premier collection of critical essay, Homecoming, Ngu˜gı˜ made it clear that in the decolonization project in East Africa, ‘fence-sitting’ or any kind of interstitiality was not to be tolerated (Ngu˜gı˜, 1972: i- ix). One either was with the oppressive minority colonizer or with the oppressed majority colonized. What never occurred to this Ngu˜gı˜an line of thinking is that in any engagement between two conflicting spheres of influence, certain ambivalence is always in the offing. This ambivalence indeed alerts all to the existence of a third space in the Manichean relationship within the African postcolonies. In fact as Bhabha (1994:37) pointed out, ‘the intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People.’ Interestingly, the same affirmation of the Interstice as a location of selfhood to certain postcolonial peoples was made in an Asian-African play produced around the same time that Ngu˜gı˜ was making his declaration. This situation is aptly stated in a question posited by M. Majid, an Asian African character out of Kuldip Sondhi’s brilliant play, The Undesignated, ‘[I]sn’t there equal opportunities for all of us? I was a second-class citizen under the British. Am I going to remain a second-class citizen under the [Black] African as well?’ (30). In this short radio play, broadcasted in the African Service of the BBC in 1972, Mr Prem Guru, a seasoned guru is hosting a party in honour of one Solomon Ohanga. The latter is poised to take up the position of the General Manager (GM) in the Ministry of Transport under the ongoing Africanization (read negronization) programme, common in the first decade of East African self-rule. The incumbent GM is retiring and the most qualified person to replace him, if meritocracy was to apply, is definitely Mr Guru. Yet, this is not the case. Mr Majid, one of Mr Guru’s guests and subordinates contests and interrogates the authority of the decolonization logic that is being used in the postcolonial dispensation to Africanize the erstwhile White-dominated government. Although, Mr Guru agrees with Mr Majid, he scolds the junior engineer for his rabble-rousing attitude. Yet, we know the truth that Mr Guru and Mr Majid, although considered as beneficiaries of postcolonial spoils, unlike the White man who has to leave, cannot hold positions of authority such as the post of the GM. This is so because, although the two are considered as postcolonials and thus able to benefit from the fruits of independence, they are not African enough, at least their skin colour is not. In other words, the two Asian-African men are not racially potent, in fact masculine enough, to fully poses power within postcolonial masculine systems in Africa. Allegorically, this impotency to belong, or the ability to be undesignated within the

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The Eternal Other epistemological framework of postcolonial thinking, especially in East African literature replicates itself in many other forms throughout the intellectual terrain of Asian African literature. In the tragic years that followed the Asian Expulsion, Peter Nazareth writing from his new home in Iowa mused: One [a critic of Ugandan literature] must … consider the question of Amin’s expulsion of Asians in 1972. Does it follow that ‘Asians’ who left Uganda because of Amin’s expulsion are no longer Ugandan writers? Bahadur Tejani was teaching at Nairobi while I was working for the government of Uganda. Both of us had our Ugandan citizenship taken away, not for the novels we had published a few months earlier but simply because the decision was to take away the citizenship of Asians. Jagjit Singh was studying at Sussex University at the time and also had his citizenship taken away. Does this automatically remove Asian writing from the area of Uganda writing? Some writers of ‘Asian origin’ like Lino Leitao wrote stories in Uganda, which were published outside the country. Micheal Sequiera published one poem in the Howard Seargent anthology of Commonwealth poetry and now writes journalistic articles from Canada. Ganesh Bagchi wrote, produced and acted in Shavian one-act plays for Uganda’s annual drama festival. His own plays were published in Heinemann anthologies after he left Uganda to return to India (and later to England, where he now lives.) Where in the world does the serious critic of literature accept that the president of the country has a right to decide on literary matters? (1984:8) (Emphasis added)

In this thought-provoking reflection on the location of the Asian-African writer from East Africa in the postcolonial discourse Nazareth reiterates the words of Majid. He confirms to us that the price to be paid by being a dweller of in-between locations is usually dear, be they political or otherwise, especially when it destabilizes the ways through which we perceive the world and ourselves. The problem of perception, nevertheless does not just stop with the trauma of Nazareth’s self-examination, it goes deeper than that. It invites a critical eye to gaze at the whole question of representation through the lenses not of the object but of the subject gazing at the object. In the above instance, the question that is important is not the fact that Nazareth, Bagchi and Singh should find literary meaning but rather one about who decides where they should find their meaning as literary practitioners. In an interview with M. G. Vassanji, the answer to this question articulated itself when I asked him whether or not he is affiliated to the Black African dominated and patronized Associations of African literatures and their conferences (Makokha, 2005b). His response, which can be taken as representative of the unspoken shared feeling amongst Asian-African writers, was, I do not like academic conferences; and I find that most of these are organized by Europeans and Americans; to them (this is my feeling) an Asian just doesn’t belong to the Africa they have conjured up; they have their money and positions and their coteries of Africans. On the other hand, I go to my Dar or Nairobi, identify with the landscape, be it dry grass or a hut, enjoy speaking Kiswahili or simply drinking chai [tea] in a banda [café] and listening to banter; and no one there, especially in Dar, even asks me where I come from. And when I speak Kiswahili, the manner of my speech identifies me immediately as someone of the land. What need do I have of a conference?

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Masculinity in Asian-African Literature Vassanji’s feeling is not unlike the one articulated by Mr Majid above when he questions the ‘deficitness’ of his intersitiality and the uneasiness by both Blacks and Whites to acknowledge Other voices within the multiracial spaces they co-exist in. The fact that Vassanji does not fit neatly into already acknowledged framework within which the African writer; the male African writer and his authority are defined, makes a case for the need of an alternative authority with which to interpret and legitimatize one’s own identity and craft. Indeed the image of the Asian African in East African societies has always been of an unfavourable kind. This is not just because of the exclusivity that the Asian-African cultural heritage propagates. It is more because of the dominant image of the Asian African as nothing else but the stereotypical dukawallah always waiting for a moment to con the naïve Black African. Once more Jagjit Singh’s poem, ‘A Portrait of the Asian as an East African,’ supplies a vivid summation of the tension between the dukawallah and the Black African in the postcolonial dispensation, ‘Black blood of freedom/ Will soon break your bent shadow/ For you were the criminals of commerce/ That daily sucked their coins across the counter’ (158). The same victimage suffered by the entire Asian-African community because of its commercial proclivities based on the dukawallah stereotype led Naipaul (1978:111) to say, ‘nowadays, the Asian is portrayed as little more than a miserly duka-wallah who incessantly exploited and cheated innocent Africans. His past distorted, he is in the process of being eliminated from the present.’ Actually, Sarvan (1976, 1985) has argued that indeed, images of the Asian Africans, men mostly, in East African literature tend to be of a stereotypical kind. He supplies a critique of Black African writers from East Africa, showing how they enter the same Othering practices that they claim to be engaging. In one instance, Sarvan questions the limiting view employed by many Black Africans in representing the Asian Africans. Rather than seeing a migrant people, with complex identity crises struggling to adjust to the transfer of authority from a White Self to a Black Other, most Black Africans tend to see the dukawallah and his emasculating habit of emptying the Black man’s wallet and coffers. Yet, it is true as Bhabha (1994: 66) points out that stereotypes are a major discursive feature in the ideological construction of Otherness. The fact that most Black Africans understand (or attempt to do so) the Asian-African community through the dukawallah stereotype because of their veiled desire to name and therefore understand this other Other that is not white/not quite. This point is well captured in the following confession by Ngu˜gı˜, (1968), ‘I do not know very much about the Asian community, but I think they are also affected by the land (Africa). It is more than material; it is not just because of its economic possibilities, it is something almost akin to spiritual.’ What is clear from these two assertions is that the Asian-African man is indeed a part of the generic African manhood, only that whereas the Black African man is the potent part of that manhood, the Brown African man appears to be the deficit part of the same. However, it is a fact that Asian Africans are commonly or popularly known in East Africa as an entrepreneurial people with ancient commercial proclivities. This explains why the dukawallah image with its deficit masculinity is the most prototypical image of the Asian African peoples of East Africa. The dukawallah is actually

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The Eternal Other the window through which the culturally different Asian-African community is made knowable to the Black Africans. Bhabha (1994: 162) in fact points out that questions of cultural difference face us with a disposition of knowledges in a distribution of practices that exist beside each other and that have to be negotiated rather than dismissed. The authority of the deficit masculinity evident in the dukawallah image cannot be understood through a dismissal of its stereotypical usage. On the contrary, it should be understood as a disavowal of the tendency to employ it in its fixity and uncontextualized form. In other words, the cultural difference of the Asian-African community should not be wished away or ignored but built upon and demystified. It is for this reason that the authority of deficit masculinity is understood as a crucial point in attempts to surmount the incommensurable meanings and judgements produced within the process of transcultural negotiations between races in East Africa. It is with a sound knowledge of this that M. G. Vassanji has re-interpreted the disposition of knowledges founded on the dukawallah stereotype as a disjunctive site in his reputed literary works. Consequently, he has emerged in the recent past as East Africa’s most authoritative author of Asian-African deficit masculinity. Vassanji has pursued the same popular mode of representation subsequently creating perhaps one of the truest portrait of the dukawallah figure in East African literatures in the character, Nurmohammed Pipa. Pipa, a typical Asian-African male, straddles both the narrative worlds of The Gunny Sack, The Book of Secrets and to some extent Uhuru Street. He is a dukawallah figure but with a difference. He is not a flat, stock or fixed dukawallah like Karen Blixen’s Choleim in Out of Africa, and Ngu˜gı˜’s Ramlagoon Dharamashah in Petals of Blood. Pipa is a stereotypical but contextualized dukawallah figure whose actions and character cannot be isolated from the contexts that make him and his Asian-African community in Vassanji’s novels logical human beings. Although it is impossible to ignore the role Asian Africans as traders have played in the culture and history of East Africa as a geopolitical space, one crucial point must be acknowledged. Vassanji, as a member of that community in general, and a member of a specific trading sub-group beneath the homogeneous Asian-African umbrella, appears to be a more credible author of its cultural difference. The convincing and historicized Asian Africans who are the main characters of his novels are based on experiences of his own migrant Shamsi community that originated from Western India. It is this meticulous and ambitious literary agenda that forms the aesthetic road map of The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets. This is what Vassanji meant in the chapter two when he talked about his attempt to create a certain kind of East African Asian. His literary mission, seen in the creation of Pipa, is a mission to examine and illustrate the complex process that (in)forms the dukawallah-stereotype as a discursive site where transcultural (in)diferrence is negotiated using the categories of race and gender. Subsequently, Nurmohamed Pipa is imagined as an authoritative symbolic vehicle that articulates the various discourses of power, marginality, diasporality, migrancy, and dispossession. Vassanji then proceeds to authoritatively undermine simplistic depictions and knowledge of his community as a congenitally exploitative group of dukawallahs – a

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Masculinity in Asian-African Literature community out to emasculate Black Africa by putting tentacles of petty entrepreneurship in all areas where money can be found in East Africa. This narrative technique of creating truer images of the Asian-African community by reinterpreting the dukawallah character is crucial in two senses. First, it ascertains that indeed postcolonial writers such as M. G. Vassanji normally develop their artistic and social vision through re-casting misunderstood aspects of their personal and communal identities. Second, it excites the possibility that stereotyped characters such as Pipa are not only narrative agents but also discursive sites where the crystallization of the general deficit masculinity of migrant postcolonial communities take place. This is why although the narrative worlds of The Book of Secrets and The Gunny Sack are populated with many familiar Asian-African characters; women and men, children and adults, Muslim and Hindu, rich and poor, strong and weak, deficit masculinity embodied in Pipa appears to be an encompassing principle in all these categories of being. Pipa is also a useful case in point because as Vassanji points out below, this character attains his fullest meaning within his community of other Asian-African characters. Vassanji acknowledges that, ‘my stories are about individual characters, but they must be seen in the context of their community’ (Mutahi, 1991). Throughout his literary practice, this committed East African novelist has attempted to challenge their subjacent status within the postcolonial equation. They have realized that literature in the postcolony is a complex system; it defines relationships between different peoples, groups, and institutions. This realization is captured in Vassanji’s own self-defined literary agenda, ‘ I have tried to define a certain kind of East African Asian, to create a mythology which applies not to a nation as in Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o’s case, but to a minority which does not know where it belongs’ (ibid.). Vassanji alerts us to the fact that indeed there is a diversity of Asian Africans in East Africa. To hegemonize one image of the community – the dukawallah – is not sufficient. That image emasculates the complexity and variety of Asian Africans as an African community by propounding the generalization that all members of that community do nothing other than engage in commerce; malpractised commerce at that. Most of the Asian-African characters in East Africa have contributed in various ways in the making of East Africa as we understand it today. We have had nationalists such as the Karimjee brothers in Tanzania, Pio Gama Pinto in Kenya and Sugra Visram in Uganda. We have had astute trade unionists such as Chanan Singh who later rose to become a puisine. High court judge in Kenya. We have had renowned industrialists such as the Kalidas family in Uganda and the Chandaria family in Kenya. We have also had renowned scholars such as Yash Pal Ghai and Dharam P. Ghai from Kenya besides Issa Shivji of Tanzania and Mahmood Mamdani from Uganda among many others. Yet, the admirable achievement of these men remains an occluded if not silent voice in the narration of East African history or intellectual discourse. To what extent would the unfavourable Othering of the Asian Africans by Black and White Africans change if more and more of the Asian-African characters appearing in East African literary works were built on or drawn from the lives and times of Asian-African men like the ones mentioned above?

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The Eternal Other Such an endeavour would not be an unrealistic literary (ad)venture. There have been attempts to deconstruct the stereotypical and emasculating view of the Asian Africans as simply a money-loving migrant community in East Africa with no desire or need to belong. These attempts mainly by the AsianAfrican writers of the 1960s gave rise to such non-dukawallah characters such as D’ Souza, a government official in Nazareth’s In a Brown Mantle; Shamser, a teacher in Tejani’s Day After Tomorrow; Sunil, a motor mechanic in Sondhis’s Sunil’s Dilemma; Salim Juma, a teacher [of History] in Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack or Pius Fernandes, also a History teacher in Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets. The authority traditionally found, especially in the teachersubject position in African masculinist postcolonial literature is evident in the writings of Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o and Ayi Kwei Armah. While in Black African writings, the teacher-subject position contests the illiteracy and inferiority claims laid against the Black African, in Asian-African fiction it disavows the dominant populist perception of Asian Africans as just coolie-originated, conniving dukawallahs. By making both narrators in The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets teachers, the epistemological authority of the storytelling and the storyteller are celebrated. In this way, Vassanji emphasizes that truly post-colonial writers and their communities should use their own literatures both to understand their complex cultures and to create continuity with their pasts, a sentiment that also appears in the writings of other Asian-African writers. In other words, when the potency of History, written by the dominant, fails to record all the transcultural pastness of East Africa’s past and present, Literature becomes an essential channel for creating a historical consciousness.

Conclusion The articulation of diasporic experience in Asian-African literature, as is done throughout the literary works of M. G. Vassanji, can empower the masculinities present within that community. Insights into the deficit masculinity of Asian-African men can be found in the myths of their colonial past as Vassanji has recently demonstrated through the mercantilian Vikram Lall in his most recent novel, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. In keeping with this view, this chapter reiterates that the masculinity signified by the powerful dukawallah-stereotype is a central definitive aspect of Asian Africans in East African nations and narrations. This stereotype in East African literature, just as Ngu˜gı˜ admits serves the purpose of providing a kind of knowledge of the Asian-African man who is largely an enigma to the Black and White communities in East Africa (See also Ojwang’, 2005). In general, Asian African writers employed a variety of techniques to interpret their experiences at the interstice between the margin and the center of the colonial and post-colonial states in East Africa. Often they seek to express, through men with deficit masculine identities such as Nurmohamed Pipa, how the political and cultural hegemony of imperial Britain and later East African nation-states has affected their own psychology. However, these writers differentiate themselves from their Black African counterparts by going beyond fascination with

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Masculinity in Asian-African Literature British imperialism and its legacy. Rather, they commonly seek empowerment and newfound agency by setting up binarisms such as the center/margin pair and then using their works as authoritative vehicles to deconstruct such damaging assumptions.

Bibliography Atieno-Odhiambo, E. S., ‘The Political Economy of the Asian problem in Kenya 18831939.’ Transafrica Journal of History 4, 1(1974): 135-49. Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture.. London, New York: Palgrave, 1994. Blixen, Karen, Out of Africa. London: Jonathan Cape, 1964. Connell, R. W., Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Elder, Arlene, ‘Indian Writing in East and South Africa: Multiple Approaches to Colonialism and Apartheid.’ pp. 115-39 in Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora edited by E. S. Nelson. New York: Westport, London, 1992. Griffiths, Gareth. African Literatures in English: East and West. Essex: Pearson Educational Publishers, 2000. Heald, Suzette. ‘Celebrations of Masculinity: Circumcision and Male Gender Ideology in an East African Context.’ . (21 Jul. 2005). Lo Liyong, Taban. Another Last Word. Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House, 1991. Makokha J. K. S., ‘Unravelling the Critical Silence on Asian African Literature.’ Pp. 3-4 in Z. Rajan, ed. Awaaz: The Authoritative Journal of Kenyan South Asian History. Issue 2 edited by Zahid Rajan. Nairobi: Zand Graphics, 2004. www.awaazmag.com/ home.asp ——. ‘Tradition and Transition: The Tabanic Traditions and Asian African Writers from East Africa.’ pp. 43-63 in Across Borders: Benefiting from Cultural Difference, edited by Ruth Bett and Cay Etzold. Nairobi. DAAD, 2005a. ——. ‘Worlds In-Between: An Interview with M. G. Vassanji.’ Pp. 41-3 in Awaaz: The Authoritative Journal of Kenyan South Asian History. Issue 3 edited by Zahid Rajan. Nairobi: Zand Graphics, 2005b. www.awaazmag.com/home.asp Mangat, J. S., A History of the Asians in East Africa c. 1886 to 1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Muhomah, Catherine. ‘What Do Women Want?: Versions of Masculinity in Kenyan Romantic Fiction.’ English Studies in Africa. Vol. 45. 2(2002): 76-90. Muriungi, Agnes. ‘The ‘Total/Real’ Man and the ‘Proper’ Woman: Safe Sex, Risk and Gender in Meja Mwangi’s The Last Plague.’ English Studies in Africa. Vol. 45. 2(2002): 63-76. Mutahi, Wahome, ‘Memories of Yesterday’s Home,’ Lifestyle Magazine, Sunday Nation [Nairobi] 27 October 1991:13. www.kwani.org. Naipaul, Shiva. North of South. London: Andre Deustch, 1978. Nazareth, Peter. In a Brown Mantle. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1972. ——. ‘Waiting for Amin: Two Centuries of Ugandan Literature.’ Pp. 1-41 in Writings from East and Central Africa, edited by G. D. Killam. London: New York, 1984. Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o. ‘Interview with Aminu Abdullahi.’ Pp. 128,133 in African Writers Talking, edited by Dennis Duerden and Cosmo Pieterse. London, Ibadan, Nairobi: Heinemann, 1972a. ——. Homecoming: essays in Caribbean and African Culture Politics and Literature. London: Heinemann, 1972b. Nye, Robert A., ‘Locating Masculinity: Some Recent Work on Men.’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Vol. 30. 3(2005). (11 Oct. 2005). Ojwang’, Dan Odhiambo. ‘‘The Bad Baniani Sports Good Shoes’: ‘Asian’ Stereotypes and the Problem of Modernity in East Africa.’ Pp. 4-14 in Africa Inisght: East African Popular Culture and Literature. Vol. 35, no. 2 (2005). Ouzgane, Lahoucine and D. Coleman, eds. Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies,

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The Eternal Other Special Issue: Postcolonial Masculinities, 1 no. 2 (1998). Ouzgane, Lahoucine. ed. Journal of Men’s Studies. Special issue: African Masculinities. 10 no 3 (Spring 2002). Sarvan, Charles Pornnuthurai. ‘Asians in African Literature,’ The Journal of Commonwealth Studies XI 2(1976): 160-69. ——. ‘Ethnicity and Alienation: The African Asian and His Response to Africa,’ The Journal of Commonwealth Literatures, Vol. XX 1(1985):100-110. Singh, Jagjit. ‘Undesignated.’ Pp. 19-46 in Nine African plays for Radio, edited by Gwyneth Henderson and Cosmo Pieterse. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1968. ——. ‘Portrait of an Asian as an East African.’ Pp. 156-9 in Poems from East Africa, edited by David Cook and David Rubadiri. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1971. 156-9. Seidenberg, Dana April.Uhuru and Kenyan Indians: the Role of a Minority Community in Kenya Politics, 1939-1963. New Delhi: Vikas Press, 1983. ——. Mercantile Adventurers: The World of East African Asians, 1750-1985. New Delhi: New Age International, 1997. Sondhi, K.uldip. ‘Sunil’s Dilemma.’ In Short East African Plays in English edited by David Cook. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Essays, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym. New York: Routledge, 1990. Stanvosky, Dan. 1998. Fela and his Wives: The Import of a Postcolonial Masculinity. www.graduate.appstate.edu/orsp/proposal/awards/revisedresearchnews02.pdf 1998, (21 Jul. 2005) Stratton, Florence. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender. New York: Routledge, 1995. Tejani, Bahadur. The Day After Tomorrow. Nairobi: Kampala: Dar es Salaam: East African Educational Publishers, 1972. Vassanji, M.G., The Gunny Sack. London: Heinemann, 1989. ——. Uhuru Street: A Collection of Short Stories. London: Heinemann, 1992. ——. The Book of Secrets. Toronto: Mc McClelland and Stewart, London: Macmillan, 1994. ——. The In-between World of Vikram Lall. Toronto: New Day, 2003.

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11 Recent Trends in the Treatment of Homosexualities in Literature & Film by African Artists MARC EPPRECHT

By the early 1950s a diverse group of African authors pushed the limits of conventional representations of African sexuality by creating fictional African characters who engaged in same-sex practices or expressed same-sex desire. The first critical discussions of this literature by Daniel Vignal (1983) and Chris Dunton (1989) found that African novelists often treated same-sex sexuality in didactic or schematic ways. In this they largely conformed to the prevailing consensus among ethnographers and other experts developed over many decades, viz., homosexuality was a) non-existent or insignificant in African traditional cultures until b) introduced by Europeans or Arabs, and c) was a social pathology that Africans could and should resist as with other forms of imperialism or moral corruption. In Dunton’s terms, ‘homosexual practice is almost invariably attributed to the detrimental impact made on Africa by the West’ (Dunton 1989, 421). Both Dunton and Vignal, however, also noted exceptions and ambiguities in the texts that they analysed, and concluded that Africans artists were not consistently and dogmatically homophobic or heterosexist in their work. Indeed, Vignal went so far as to suggest an element of ‘homophilia,’ meaning that he discerned sympathy or respect in some authors’ treatment of the issue. Despite sometimes hamhanded ‘explanations’ of non-normative sexualities, authors such as Lanham and Mopeli-Paulus (1953), Ouologuem (1971), and Njau (1975) recognized the possibility of love, dignity and ‘moral honesty’ (Maddy 1973, 90) in samesex relationships. They also used homosexual characters to make critical observations of hegemonic gender relations and Eurocentric or African nationalist assertions about African-ness.1 The two decades plus since Vignal’s and Dunton’s essays witnessed the appearance and maturation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the rise of political homophobia in many African countries, and the emergence of an African gay rights movement. Along with these developments has come an explosion of writing about non-normative sexualities and gender role non-conformity in

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Recent Trends in the Treatment of Homosexualities Africa. Gay characters also began to appear in film and theatre by African directors who profoundly challenged longstanding clichés about African sexuality. In this chapter, I trace that trajectory through key works in literature and film since the 1990s. The goal is to ask, how do these works contribute to contemporary debates about sexual rights and sexual health on the continent, bearing in mind the very significant frustrations that continue to be encountered in struggles against gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS in much of Africa (see Johnson 2007, for example). *** Small, fractious gay rights groups first emerged in South Africa in the early 1980s. Then, in November 1987, future president Thabo Mbeki made an explicit promise that the ANC was firmly committed to combating homophobia along with all other forms of discrimination in a future democratic South Africa (Tatchell 2005). The stage was set for the emergence of what Elleke Boehmer (2005) has called a ‘restorative aesthetic of queerness,’ that is, fiction and film by African authors that aimed to heal African masculinity and femininity from the crippling stereotypes of hegemonic masculinity and antiracism conventions in the literature. As Vignal and Dunton observed, a staple of the latter was the portrayal of African men reduced to metaphorical boyhood or even raped by racist whites or Arabs. The ‘remasculation’ of African men in this literature was achieved through sometimes heavy-handed portrayals of African men’s virility, including through the sexual domination of white women. African women’s anti-colonial credentials were meanwhile asserted through virtuous maternalism that largely negated the possibility of erotic desire in women outside of service to – and penetration by – men (see Stratton 1994, among others, for a critical assessment of these conventions). The Invisible Ghetto (Krouse 1993) was a ground-breaking achievement in that respect, being the first book wholly devoted to gay and lesbian writing in Africa. As well as short stories and poems, it included a memoir by one of South Africa’s first black gay activists, Simon Nkoli, plus interviews with heterosexual men who enjoyed sexual relations with younger men or boys. This was followed the next year by Defiant Desire (Gevisser and Cameron 1994), a scholarly collection of histories, memoirs, and literary criticism. Among the editors’ most impressive accomplishments was to give voice to such a wide range of subjectivities by race, class, gender and sexual orientation. Several provocative chapters not only overturned received wisdom about sexuality in South Africa, but directly challenged conventions of euphemistic language that enabled the dominant culture to deny homosexualities (Achmat, McLean and Ngcobo, for example). The work of Tatamkhulu Ismail Afrika also represented an often discomfiting challenge to the ‘macho’ constructions of masculine sexuality in this period of political transition (Dunton 2004). A recurrent conflict in his short stories involves male characters who wrestle with self-doubt about racial identity and sexual desire. In ‘The Quarry’ (Afrika 1996) for instance, the narrator starts off explicitly refuting that he is gay but then spends the rest of the story obsessing about the love life of a younger, bisexual, coloured man (Buddy). It includes one startling scene where he gently probes the sleeping

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Literature & Film by African Artists Buddy’s anus, ostensibly to soothe Buddy’s aching hemorrhoids. In ‘The Vortex’ and its sequel ‘The Treadmill’ (1996) by Afrika, the white protagonist Colin is victimized (or is he saved?) by blacks, beginning with a vicious gang rape by black men in prison, followed by a long-running love affair between Colin and a black inmate. The re-assertion of approved white masculinity outside prison proves difficult for the confused Colin to achieve, however, and ultimately it takes another black man, Mjozi, to bring clarity. In a long and difficult process of developing the inter-racial friendship between Colin and Mjozi, homoerotic desire is hinted at constantly (shared showers, shared prostitutes, notably). The tension finally breaks when Mjozi learns of Colin’s prison past and takes that knowledge as license to roughly sodomize him. Outside South Africa, the 1980s and early 1990s also witnessed a wave of political transitions. The end of one-party regimes and military dictatorships took place in the context of economic neo-liberalisation which in many cases brought severe unemployment and a turn to ‘survivor sex.’ The tired and implausible machismo of so much of the first generation of post-colonial writing was vulnerable to a queer deconstruction in this context. Senegalese author Ken Bugul (pseudonym for Mariétou Mbaye) provides an early and startling example. In her semi-autobiographical novel first published in French as Le Baobab Fou (1983), she created a female Wolof character who reflects both on the traditional role of homosexual men known as gor-djigen and of female-female intimacy in her village. Ken Bugul describes such intimacy as indicative of the ‘healthier approach to sexuality’ in traditional culture compared to the confused homosexual and bisexual relationships in Europe (Ken Bugul 1991, 50, 58, 84-85). Calixthe Beyala’s Your Name Shall Be Tanga (1996) also takes pointed aim at some of the central tropes of African nationalist mythology around gender and sexuality. Not only does she portray her central character’s mother as abusive and exploitative, but she also shows Tanga, the African girl, as the active seducer in a lesbian encounter with a woman in prison. She adds the further twist of making the passive partner in that encounter European. Tanga offers sex to the humiliated Anna-Claude as comfort in the dismal aftermath of the latter’s failed relationship with an African man (Beyala 1986, 44-5). The real inspiration for the emergence of a queer African aesthetic outside of South Africa, however, was the emergence of wave of homophobic demagoguery by politicians to distract public attention from economic malaise and their own poor governance. The president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, launched a series of denunciations of gays and lesbians in July of 1995, soon echoed in Namibia and elsewhere with prominent leaders inciting citizens to vigilantism. In Zimbabwe this led to a number of gay-friendly interventions in opposition, including GALZ (1995), a collection of autobiographical accounts and short stories written by Zimbabwean gays and lesbians. The highly respected author Charles Mungoshi entered the fray the next year with a short story in the popular magazine Horizon (republished in Mungoshi 1997). At a time when the state-controlled press, political and church leaders were all attempting to construe homosexuality as an alien threat to the nation, ‘A Marriage of Convenience’ depicted an affair between two indigenous Shona men hiding behind the façade of marital respectability.

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Recent Trends in the Treatment of Homosexualities The rise of political homophobia drove many African lgbtis (lesbian, gay, bi, trans and intersex) deeper into the closet or to seek asylum in the West. Yet it also stimulated the formation of gay rights associations that coalesced in the late 1990s as a nascent pan-African sexual rights movement (Epprecht 2004, GALZ 2008). A proliferation of new scholarship and gay-friendly literature and visual arts both reflected and pushed these changes. The bulk of this material continued to come from South Africa, including several anthologies of lgbti writing, plays, magazines, and websites.2 However, it was two films from West Africa that broke the mold in the production of gay-positive cinema. Mohammed Camara’s feature film Dakan (1997), first, focused on a love affair between two young African men in Conakry, Guinea. Dakan is notable for its sensitive treatment of the theme as well as the first male-male erotic kiss ever to be shown in African cinema. But this is not a celebration of coming out in the Western sense. On the contrary, there is a strong affirmation of family in customary terms of marriage, children and extended family. So, while it is true that the lovers Manga and Sori eventually leave their respective wife and girlfriend, presumably to live the gay life abroad, there are long scenes preceding this that establish how difficult that break from family can be, including Manga shown affectionately cradling his baby. Woubi chéri (Brooks and Bocahut 1998) was released soon after. A documentary, it revolves around interviews with trans-identified individuals (woubis) in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. The focus is on their efforts to create an association to protect their rights, culminating in a big party and expressions of big hopes for the future. The anticipated political and social transformation away from homophobia is to be achieved, in the woubis’ view, in part by proselytising out gay lifestyles and identities in Africa. Woubi chéri was the first of a series of documentaries that questioned old orthodoxies about African essential heterosexuality. This cinema as a whole was often unashamedly didactic: to prove the existence of homosexual desire among blacks in the African past, or to stimulate open debate about the full range of human sexuality that might help in the struggles against HIV/AIDS.3 A common trope has been to demonstrate continuities and compatibilities between traditional extended family values (ubuntu) and new expressions of non-normative sexuality in Africa. In Dark and Lovely, Soft and Free, for example, both the mother of a transgender Xhosa man and the female co-wife of a transgender Mosotho polygynously married to a bisexual mine worker emphasize that family loyalty trumps sexual preference in African culture. The point is underscored that hatred and intolerance (rather than homosexuality) are the real offense against ubuntu (Alberton and Reid 2000). The play After Nines!, to give an example from another medium, was based directly on oral history gathered in the black township of Soweto and aimed to undercut the notion that African societies are intrinsically homophobic (Colman 1998). Here, the ghosts of historical African characters return to advise the modern parents to show charity, love and respect for their gay children. This, they suggest, would be truer to the spirit of African humanism than dogmatic and coercive notions of heteronormativity embedded in modern ideas around social respectability. Another milestone in the treatment of homosexuality in African cinema was when it moved beyond documentary and didacticism to entertainment, in

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Literature & Film by African Artists effect to normalize same-sex relationships in the pursuit of titillation and profit. Karmen Gei (Ramaka 2001) distinguishes itself in that way. Not only is it the first feature film by an African director to feature an African woman who is voraciously bisexual in her desires. It is also remarkable for the explicit eroticism depicted on screen – tasteful and discreet by Western standards but daring by African cinematic traditions. Karmen Gei casts two stunningly beautiful women in the roles of the primary lovers. Angel is a light-skinned prison warden hopelessly bewitched by the radiantly black but scheming Karmen. Karmen uses Angel sexually to escape from prison, and then dumps her in favour of a succession of men. When the broken-hearted Angel kills herself, however, there is no doubt that Karmen feels a deeper emotion than anything she displays for her male lovers. Homegrown lesbianism is also treated with ambiguity in a Nollywood film set in contemporary urban Nigeria but marketed throughout the continent and diaspora. The Nigerian film industry is characterized by its cheaply produced and heavily moralistic melodramas that set idealized traditional, patriarchal family-oriented values against modern, sexually loose and money-oriented values. Emotional Crack (Imasuen 2003) appears to be the first to use femalefemale sexuality as representative of the latter and as a hook to draw in audiences. The film centres on a sexual triangle between an abusive and philandering husband, his unhappy wife, and her bisexual seducer (also his lover). The title itself forewarns of a calamitous break (crack, chasm) or uncontrollable addiction (crack, the drug), and indeed, horror, anger and seeming insanity culminate in the lesbian seducer’s suicide. On the surface, heteropatriarchal norms are re-established. ‘Nonetheless,’ according to one Nigerian film critic, ‘the depiction of Camilla and Crystal’s affair tends to imply the possibility and potential of same-sex love, even when society disapproves so strongly’ (Oloruntoba-Oju 2008). The sound track adds to the effect by refusing to pull homophobic strings. Demurring musical comment or comparison between the different types of love affair, it seems to suggest that love is blind and can conquer everything. *** The cultural impact of Emotional Crack, and of the gay rights associations noted above, should not be overstated nor, conversely, should the damage and pain of homophobic backlash be minimized. Yet the growing profile of lgbti in public discourse does suggest that an audience has emerged in Africa that can appreciate relatively sophisticated treatments of same-sex issues. Indeed, the Caine Prize for best short story published in Africa in 2007 went to Monica Arac de Nyeko’s ‘Jambula Tree,’ a poignant love story between two young Ugandan women that casts a poor light on the neighbourhood busybodies who enforce propriety. This is not as surprising as might be inferred from the extreme homophobia of political and religious leaders in Uganda and some of its neighbours in recent years. The present generation, after all, is the first to have been born and to have come of age under the shadow of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and its imperative to talk about sexuality in ways that traditional taboos strongly discouraged. Moreover, migration to the West and observation of Western society are no longer the preserve of elites and intellectuals.

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Recent Trends in the Treatment of Homosexualities Satellite television now brings the foibles and frivolities of the West, along with serious debates about society and culture, directly into millions of African households daily. The first three novels by African authors to deal substantively and sympathetically with gay themes engage those debates as they play out in diverse contemporary urban contexts. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams, first, is set in post-apartheid Cape Town where a group of young people test the limits of inter-racial love and sex, drug use, fashion, and rapidly changing gender roles and identities. Duiker’s main character is a university-educated Xhosa man, Tshepo who, we learn, was anally raped at age 17 during a horrific act of gang violence that also resulted in the rape and murder of his mother. His abusive and homophobic father was complicit in the crimes. Tshepo’s confusion about his adult sexuality is exacerbated first by drugs, and then an infatuation with his coloured roommate, Chris. Chris, it transpires, is a volcanic stew of misogyny, homophobia, and class rage. Eventually he and two of his friends anally rape Tshepo, coming out as members of a notoriously violent homosexual gang. Up to this point, not much in the novel distinguishes it from the old associations of homosexuality with coloureds, foreigners, criminality and/or insanity, and the portrayal of Africans as victims of homosexual rape or exploitation. In a remarkable transition, however, the just-raped Tshepo takes up a job as a ‘stallion,’ the local term for a black male sex-worker at an elite massage parlour. There, he listens and learns about the meaning of masculinity from his diverse clients and fellow sex workers. There are loving, erotic scenes between many of the characters, as well as frankly commercial exchanges that the author presents in a non-judgemental manner. As Tshepo becomes more aware of his homosexual orientation, he also becomes emotionally liberated and stable. The first time he allows a client to penetrate him anally is a turning point, allowing Tshepo mentally to break from his family and the oppressive expectations of men in African culture. Duiker also uses some of these male-male sexual encounters to defend Africa against the assumption of primitiveness (atavistically, essentially homophobic) by Westerners. For example, one of the sex workers extols the absence of homophobia in rural, customary Xhosa society and blames the European missionaries for introducing the intolerance encountered today. In another scene, Tshepo pointedly chastises an African-American who condescendingly worries about ‘the whole tribe thing’ (which he incorrectly presumes makes it hard to be black and gay at the same time). Far from the kind of tragic end that sexually transgressive characters tended to meet in the earlier generation of African novels, Tshepo eventually experiences an epiphany that leads to a better life and the fulfilment of African humanist ideals. Significantly, this epiphany occurs while being penetrated by a gangster character who had picked him up wandering the streets of an impoverished black township. Tshepo decides to leave his life on the fringes of the mostly white Cape Town elite. He moves to Johannesburg where he takes up residence in the inner city district of Hillbrow. Duiker’s choice of locale for this conclusion is surely no accident. Hillbrow is the historical centre of black gay life in South Africa and, today, is the overcrowded slum that today provides refuge for economic migrants from all over

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Literature & Film by African Artists the continent. Tshepo finds a sense of happiness and self-esteem as an out black homosexual doing social work among poor, despised migrants from the rest of Africa. Femme nue, Femme noire (Beyala 2003) offers no such happy ending. The absurdist plot is little more than a vehicle to set up a series of more and more outlandish sexual adventures and hence to tear at the stereotype of African women’s passivity and subservience to men’s needs. The female characters here both enjoy and actively seek out clitoral orgasms even if excised, frequently independently of men, and by a wide variety of techniques described in frank, erotic, and quirky detail. The young narrator, Irene, is meanwhile sketched with both an aggressive, ‘masculine’ sexuality and a deep maternal instinct. This seeming contradiction allows Irene (and us) to reflect on oppressive gender roles and hypocrisies in African and Islamic culture as they exist (indeed are exacerbated) under contemporary neo-colonial conditions. Whites appear only by allusion, not for their homosexual decadence or exploitation of African sexuality, but for their role as the foreign experts who pushed structural adjustment on Africa. It is the consequent poverty and corruption that fuels the crises of sexuality and family dynamics which Beyala satirically deplores. Much of the eroticism in the novel is lesbian or bisexual, including tender encounters between Irene and her elder co-wife. But Beyala also includes one comedic scene that portrays a male-male sex act in a somewhat positive light. This involves a man who had once been a boy-wife to a career soldier but who is now married in proper fashion to a very beautiful woman. He deeply regrets that he is unable to make his wife pregnant. After many years of impotence, however, his virility is restored through the act of being anally penetrated by another man. The main male character, Ousmane, also recalls that boredom and frustration with his sex life within marriage was cured after discovering ‘the pleasures of sodomy’ among other unleashed passions. Irene watches, listens and to some extent inspires the various activities and unexpected confessions of the other characters. They, in return, regard her as insane or perhaps possessed by a powerful spirit. The danger lies in Irene’s ability to reflect honestly on the meaning of desire and not to impose moral judgments on others, exposing the mendacity of respectability in the process. It ends badly for her. Beyala seems to be saying that the achievement of pleasure and sexual self-knowledge, by whatever combination of partners or orifices, is a radical and necessary political act in the wider, insane context of postcolonial, AIDS-ravaged Africa. Finally, Jude Dibia’s Walking With Shadows is Nigeria’s first gay-themed novel (Dibia 2005). Dibia wrote it at a moment when Nigeria was starting to supersede Zimbabwe as the source of the harshest homophobic political rhetoric on the continent. Indeed, while the film Emotional Crack noted above raised a tentative element of doubt about heteropatriarchal certainties, the dominant discourse in Nigeria since the late 1990s had swung dramatically in the opposite direction. Competing Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms were not only demanding a return to imagined moral rectitude but represented a terrifying danger of civil war. Politicians scrambled to co-opt or to appease those fundamentalisms in part by scapegoating homosexuality (Gaudio 2009).

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Recent Trends in the Treatment of Homosexualities In such a context, Dibia’s novel is a bold, ambitious attack on many of the staples of homophobic politics and culture in Africa generally. Walking with Shadows keeps close to novelistic conventions of realism, making its almost systematic overturning of ‘common sense’ all the more powerful. The narrative follows the journey of Ebele Adrian Njoko from effeminate, confused, and persecuted boy to a man who, through tragedy, comes to understand and accept his adult sexuality. As a young man Adrian first discovers his capacity to love (and be hurt by) men. He then tries to hide and repress his desires within a normal-appearing marriage to Ada. He is successful to the extent of maintaining his fidelity to Ada for eight years and in fathering a child with her. A vengeful co-worker, however, plunges everything into turmoil by outing his secret from years ago. Much emotional pain ensues, but Adrian ultimately brings himself and his wife to a mature acceptance of the fact of sexual difference. True, he and Ada will still be getting divorced, but they promise to remain friends and to discuss the issue honestly with their one child together. It would be a triumph except for the fact that such honesty is not feasible in contemporary Nigeria. The novel ends with Adrian pondering whether to emigrate to England so that he can be true to himself as a person. Walking with Shadows is full of dramatic inversions and ironies. For example, rather than looking admiringly to the West, Dibia casts the main European character as a betrayer who is irrationally, recklessly and selfdestructively promiscuous. Rather than portraying Africa as an angry victim of foreign sexual intrigues, Dibia portrays a variety of African homosexuals and bisexuals comfortably at ease with themselves. This includes Abdul, a Muslim man in a mutual loving relationship with another man, Femi, plus several men who have sex with men but publicly claim to be heterosexual. Their wives either do not know or are not really bothered by it. The only significant foreign influence is Christianity, which, through the character of a Pentecostal minister and his followers, is portrayed as introducing a brutal homophobia (they attempt to beat the effeminacy out of Adrian). Even in conceding that many Nigerian homosexuals are promiscuous, Dibia pushes his presumably heterosexual audience to reflect on their role in creating that situation. Because homophobia in the dominant culture makes it almost impossible for homosexuals to share an enduring emotional attachment, they turn to multiple partners as ‘an emotional trump’ against expected disappointment. Adrian, the African homosexual, emerges in this way as an advocate for sexual monogamy and emotional stability, and as a powerful voice against the hypocrisies and intolerance of the dominant heteropatriarchal cultures.

Conclusion Depictions of same-sex sexuality in African fiction and film have both increased in frequency and changed in character since Vignal and Dunton first raised the issue. The change in tenor reflects the profound shifts that have occurred in Africa since the 1980s, including the spread of HIV/AIDS with all its attendant implications for hegemonic gender and sexual cultures, the rise

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Literature & Film by African Artists of political homophobia and a gay rights movement in opposition, new historical and ethnographic research, and Africans’ increased exposure to globalized culture industries. The fading of the pall of colonialism has also freed up African imaginations to move beyond anti-colonial conventions in the literature. Uzor Maxim Uzoatu puts this development succinctly in his foreword to Walking with Shadows. Summarizing three generations of Nigerian literature in its engagement with eurocentric constructions of African sexuality, he writes, ‘The grandfather [Chinua Achebe?] may have won his plaudits for his holy celibacy only for his son [Ayi Kwei Armah?] to earn his mark as a libertine of the heterosexual mode; then comes the grandson [Dibia] who sees no greater gain than homosexual love’ (Uzoatu 2005). For Dibia’s character Adrian Njoko, the gain is clear insight into both homophobia in contemporary Nigerian society and self-indulgence and recklessness in a Western gay identity. The African artists reviewed here do not on the whole portray same-sex desire as necessarily incompatible with conjugal and extended family obligations. On the contrary, most of the African men who have sex with men and women with women do so while maintaining heterosexual relationships, including marriage. They desire children and, significantly, do not always rupture from parents, children, friends or even wives and husbands on account of their same-sex preference. Some of the most sympathetically drawn gays and lesbians are also strongly family and child-oriented. In some cases (Beyala, Duiker, and Dibia, notably) they are seeking to recover from abusive and violent upbringings in heterosexual families by building healthy, loving families of their own or in surrogate. African artists, in short, at least in the principal English and French language publications and films that touch upon the topic, do not uniformly share the view that homosexuality and bisexuality are non-existent, insignificant, or always stigmatized in Africa south of the Sahara. Nor did they agree that homosexuality is an unalloyed threat either to the African family or to African dignity. For a small but a growing number of artists, diverse homosexual or bisexual characters facilitate a powerful critique both of contemporary African society and of Western presumptions about (and prescriptions for) Africa. In line with Boehmer’s notion of a ‘restorative queer aesthetic,’ this imagination of diverse sexualities may open the door to more creative and effective interventions against gender-based violence and sexual ill-health than evidently still prevail in so much of Africa.

Notes 1 This is also one of the arguments of Heterosexual Africa? (Epprecht 2008), from which this chapter is adapted. Here I owe a debt to the pioneering interventions on sexual rights in Africa by Mai Palmberg, notably Dunton and Palmberg (1996) and Palmberg (1999). See also critical assessments of non-normative sexuality in African literature and film studies by de Waal (1994), Hayes (2000), Migraine-George (2003), Veit-Wild and Naguschewski (2005), Eke (2007), Stobie (2007) and Hoad (2007). With respect to terminology, I use the short-hand lgbti, msm, and wsw in lower-case to refer to people whose sexuality does not conform to heterosexual norms. Further to this issue, see Steyn and van Zyl (2009).

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Recent Trends in the Treatment of Homosexualities 2 See Joint Working Group (2006) for an anthology of lesbian writing, and the Linx link on www.mask.co.za for some of the many gay-friendly websites out of South Africa. Key works of scholarship include Murray and Roscoe (1998) and Morgan and Wieringa (2005). 3 Achmat and Lewis (1999), Njinje and Alberton (2002), Ditsie and Newman (no date), and Tilley (2001), among many examples.

Bibliography Achmat, Zackie. 1994. ‘My Childhood as an Adult Molester: A Salt River Moffie,’ in Gevisser and Cameron, Defiant Desire, 325-41. Achmat, Zackie and Jack Lewis (dir/prod). 1999. Apostles of Civilised Vice. Muizenberg, South Africa: Idol Pictures. Afrika, Tatamkhulu. 1996. Tightrope. Cape Town: Mayibuye Books. Alberton, Paulo and Graeme Reid (dir.). 2000. Dark and Lovely, Soft and Free. Johannesburg: Gay and Lesbian Archives. Arac de Nyeko, Monica. 2007. ‘Jambula Tree.’ In Ama Ata Aidoo ed. African Love Stories. Banbury: Ayebia Clarke Publishing. Beyala, Calixthe. 1996. Your Name Shall Be Tanga. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann. ——. 2003. Femme nue, Femme noire. Paris: Albin Michel. Blair, Dorothy S. 1976. African Literature in French. Cambridge University Press. Boehmer, Elleke, 2005. ‘Versions of Yearning and Dissent: The Troping of Desire in Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga,’ in Flora Veit-Wild and Dirk Naguschewski (eds). Versions and Subversions in African Literatures I: Body, Sexuality and Gender. Rodopi, Amsterdam, 113-28. Bugul, Ken. 1991. The Abandoned Boabab [Le Baobab Fou 1983]. Trans. Marjolijn de Jager. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books Brooks, P. and L. Bocahut (dir). 1998. Woubi Chéri. Paris and Abidjan: ARTE France, 1998. Camara, Mohammed (dir). 1997. Dakan. Conakry: ArtMattan. Colman, Robert (dir.) 1998. After Nines! (unpubl. Play transcript and Oral History Research, Gay and Lesbian Archives, AM 2894). De Waal, Shaun. 1994. ‘A Thousand Forms of Love: Representations of Homosexuality in South African Literature,’ in Gevisser and Cameron (eds). Defiant Desire, 232-45. Dibia, Jude. 2005. Walking With Shadows. Lagos: BlackSands Books. Ditsie, Beverly and Nicky Newman (dir.). No date. Simon and I. Cape Town/ Johannesburg: See Thru Media/Steps for the Future. Duiker, Sello. 2001. The Quiet Violence of Dreams. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Dunton, Chris. 1989. ‘‘Wheyting Be Dat?’ The Treatment of Homosexuality in African Literature,’ Research in African Literatures, 20, no.3: 422-48. ——. 2004. ‘Tatamkhula Afrika: The Testing of Masculinity,’ Research in African Literatures 35, no 1: 148-61. Dunton, Chris and Mai Palmberg. 1996. Human Rights and Homosexuality in Southern Africa. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. Eke, Maureen Ngozi. 2007. ‘Woubi Chéri: Negotiating Subjectivity, Gender, and Power.’ In Ada Uzoamaka Azodo and Maureen Ngozi Eke eds. Gender and Sexuality in African Literature and Film. Trenton NJ and Asmara: Africa World Press. Epprecht, Marc. 2004. Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. ——. 2008. Heterosexual Africa?: The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS (Athens: Ohio University Press, Scottsville: UKZN Press) GALZ. 1995. Sahwira. Harare: Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe. ——. 2008. Unspoken Facts: A History of Homosexualities in Africa. Harare: Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe, and Ann Arbor: African Books Collective. Gaudio, Rudi. 2009, Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Gevisser, Mark and Edwin Cameron (eds). 1994. Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa. Johannesburg: Ravan.

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Literature & Film by African Artists Hayes, Jarrod. 2000. Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hoad, Neville. 2007. African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization in African Literature and History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Imasuen, Lancelot (dir.). 2003. Emotional Crack. Emem Isong and Bob Emeka Eze (story) and Emem Isong (screenplay). Lagos: RJP Productions. Johnson, Cary Alan. 2007. Off the Map: How HIV/AIDS Programming is Failing SameSex Practicing People in Africa. NY: International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Joint Working Group. 2006. An Anthology of Lesbian Writing from South Africa. Johannesburg: Triangle Project and Umzantsi Publishers. Krouse, Matthew (ed.) 1993. The Invisible Ghetto: Lesbian and Gay Writing from South Africa. Johannesburg: COSAW. Lanham, Peter and A.S. Mopeli-Paulus. 1953. Blanket Boy’s Moon. London: Collins. McLean, Hugh and Linda Ngcobo. 1994. ‘Abangibhamayo Bathi Ngimnandi (Those Who Fuck Me Say I’m Tasty): Gay Sexuality in Reef Township,’ in Gevisser and Cameron, Defiant Desire, 158-85. Maddy, Yulisa Amadu. 1973. No Past, No Present, No Future. London: Heinemann. Migraine-George, Thérèse. 2003. ‘Beyond the “Internalist” vs. “Externalist” Debate: The Local-Global Identities of African Homosexuals in Two Films, Woubi Chéri and Dakan,’ Journal of African Cultural Studies 16, no. 1: 45-56. Morgan, Ruth and Saskia Wieringa (eds). 2005. Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives: Female Same-Sex Practices in Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana. Mungoshi, Charles. 1997. ‘Of Lovers and Wives,’ in Walking Still. Harare: Baobab. Murray, Stephen O. and William Roscoe (eds). 1998. Boy Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities. NY: St.Martin’s Press. Njau, Rebeka. 1975. Ripples in the Pool. London: Heinemann. Njinje, Mpumi, and Paolo Alberton (dir.), 2002. Everything Must Come to Light. Johannesburg: Out of Africa Films. Nkoli, Simon. 1993. ‘The Strange Feeling,’ in Krouse The Invisible Ghetto, 19-26. ——. 1994. ‘Wardrobes: Coming Out as a Black Gay Activist in South Africa,’ in Gevisser and Cameron, Defiant Desire, 249-57. Oloruntoba-Oju, Taiwo. 2008. ‘A Lesbian Affair on Nigerian Video (A Film Review)’ in GALZ. Unspoken Facts: A History of Homosexualities in Africa. Harare: Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe. Ouologuem, Yambo. 1971. Bound to Violence. London: Heinemann. Palmberg, Mai. 1999. ‘Emerging Visibility of Gays and Lesbians in Southern Africa: Contrasting Contexts,’ in B.D. Adam, Jan Willem Duyvendak and A. Krouwel, (eds). The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics: National Imprints of a Worldwide Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 266-92. Ramaka, Joseph Gaï (dir.). 2001. Karmen Gei. Dakar: Les Ateliers de l’Arche. Stobie, Cheryl. 2007. Somewhere in the Double Rainbow: Representations of Bisexuality in Post-Apartheid Novels. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Stratton, Florence. 1994. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender. London and NY: Routledge. Steyn, Melissa and Mikki van Zyl (eds). 2009. The Prize and the Price. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council. Tatchell, Peter. 2005. ‘The Moment the ANC embraced gay rights,’ in Neville Hoad, Karen Martin and Graeme Reid (eds). 2005. Sex and Politics in South Africa. Cape Town: Double Storey, 140-47. Tilley, Brian (dir.). 2001. It’s My Life. Cape Town: Steps for the Future; New York: First Run/Icarus Films. Uzoata, Uzo Maxim. 2005. ‘Foreword,’ in J. Dibia Walking with Shadows. Lagos: BlackSands Books. Veit Wild, Flora and Dirk Naguschewski (eds). 2005. Body, Sexuality and Gender. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Vignal, Daniel. 1983. ‘L’Homophilie dans le roman Négro-Africain d’Expression Anglaise et Française, Peuples Noirs, Peuples Africains,’ XXXIII: 63-81.

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12 Re-membering the Last King of Dahomey African Masculinities & Diasporic Desires WENDY KNEPPER

In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai observes that the past ‘is not a land to return to in a simple politics of memory. It has become a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios, a kind of temporal central casting, to which recourse can be taken as appropriate, depending on the movie to be made, the scene to be enacted...’ (1996: 30). For postcolonial filmmakers and writers this remark is especially relevant as many choose to rewrite canonical works or critique the hegemonic ways in which history has been told by deconstructing and reconstructing its sources and images. In the French Caribbean, the last king of Dahomey (modern-day Benin), Ahidjere Behanzin who was exiled to Martinique by the French from 1894-1906, is a figure who has played an especially important role in the casting house of (post)colonial fiction. Exile in Martinique ended with the king’s return to Africa; instead of a return home, this marked another colonial displacement, this time to Algeria where he would die in 1906. In 1928, Behanzin’s son, Ouanilo, arranged for Behanzin’s ashes to be buried in Dahomey. Ouanilo died on his return trip from Africa to France, ‘called for, they said in Dahomey, by his father, Behanzin’ (Morton-Williams 1993: 115). During the lifetimes of Behanzin and Ouanilo, the events of the Dahomean wars, the king’s exile and his son’s career were the subject of popular interest in the French and colonial press (Leighten 1990: 610-13; Campion-Vincent 1967: 27-58), academic discussion (Reinsch 1905: 154) and archival collections (Frazer 1908). Often depicted as a warrior and heroic figure of colonial resistance, Behanzin came to be an important ideal of African masculinity within the AfroCaribbean diaspora. In particular, the literature of Martinique and Guadeloupe offers several examples of this ongoing fascination with the presence of an African king in the Caribbean. In Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) or Notebook of a Return to my Native Land, Aimé Césaire, a founder of the Negritude movement, contrasts the heroic African past with the unheroic Martinican history of slavery and servitude: ‘No we have never been amazons

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African Masculinities & Diasporic Desires of the King of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor doctors in Timbuctoo under King Askia the Great, nor architects in Djenne, nor Madhis, nor warriors’ (1995: 105). Edouard Glissant refers to Behanzin as the ‘mirror of exiles’ (1981: 18). He has also referred in ironic terms to African history in Tout-monde where he writes of what can be learned from the ‘tragedy’ of the ‘conquered conquerors’, the ‘useless visionaries’, such as Aska, Chaka and Behanzin (1993: 429). More recently, Maryse Condé as well as Patrick Chamoiseau and Guy Deslauriers have created fictions that explore the life of the king and his afterlife in the imaginary of the African diaspora. Comparing the novel Les derniers rois mages (1992) by Maryse Condé to the film L’exil du roi Béhanzin (1994) scripted by Patrick Chamoiseau and directed by Guy Deslauriers, this essay examines how these representations of the last king of Dahomey function to critique and re-envision the role and performance of black masculinities in postcolonial and diasporic contexts. Both Condé’s and Chamoiseau and Deslauriers’ interest in Behanzin marks a departure from previous representations of the king. They focus attention on the domestic life of the king in exile. Both the film and the novel attempt to imagine how the king’s relation to the entourage who accompanied him in exile changes with the forced move from Africa to the Caribbean. Historically, the group included five of Behanzin’s wives, his daughter, Kpotasse, his son, Ouanilo, his cousin, Ayizunon Adandédjan, and a translator. As will be seen, in both the novel and film, the act of ‘re-membering’ – putting the pieces of fragmented memories concerning Behanzin together again – draws on archetypes of the African warrior king as well as archival memories of Behanzin. Moreover, this fictive retelling involves a selective retelling of the past and a notable intervention in history. Both Condé and Chamoiseau describe the king’s loss of desire for his African wives when he is exiled to Martinique and invent an erotic liaison between the king and two local Caribbean women, named Hosannah and Régina respectively. Through strategic acts of ‘re-membering’ Behanzin as deposed king, diasporic subject, father and son, husband, lover and as a new kind of warrior, various masculinities are represented and examined. I will argue that both texts suggest that postcolonial Caribbean masculinity needs to critique (not simply idealize) African diasporic mobilities and affirm a more fluid, ambiguous self-engendering process. Fostering masculinities that traverse temporalities, spaces and gender lines becomes, as will be seen, an important strategy in this new Afro-Caribbean masculinity. These works pose questions about African masculinities. What happens to a hegemonic figure of masculinity when he is defeated and exiled to the Caribbean? Doubly marginalized by white colonials and local Caribbeans, how is African masculinity reconstituted in this diasporic situation? What legacies do such shifting visions and experiences of black masculinities produce? What fantasies of African diasporic masculinities are projected through such narrative acts of reconstruction? These are the questions I will explore by examining the image of the king projected through these fictions, the relations of the king to a Caribbean woman and the role of the king as a figure who is situated in relation to both past and present African diasporic masculinities.

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Maryse Condé – the Unstable Space of African Diasporic Masculinities Condé’s novel focuses primarily on the story of Behanzin’s male lineage in the Caribbean, born of Hosannah. The narrative traces the legacy of injustice, outrage, helplessness and impotence experienced by the king and his Caribbean male lineage as a result of French colonial interventionism. Spero (the great-grandson of Behanzin) suffers from a recurring dream of crabs that emerge from ‘every hole in the gray volcanic sand’ and plod over his thighs and ‘massive hump of his manhood’ (5) and head toward his throat, drawing blood along the way. Although he does not know what sorrow is causing this recurring nightmare, the reader is given plenty of cues as Spero wakens to glance at the image of his great-grandfather, which he had painted from a photo that adorned the family home for three generations. The following description of ‘the ancestor’ is presented: His great-grandfather had brought with him into exile five of the Leopard wives, his daughter the princess Kpotasse, his son Ouanilo, and his honton, his alter ego, the prince Adandejan. The ancestor’s eyes were hidden by thick sunglasses. His cheeks were eaten up by a beard that had not yet turned gray. In fact, all that could be seen of his face was a big triangular nose and a large forehead receding under his headdress, a mitre decorated with the traditional pearls. Djéré, Spero’s grandfather was cradled on the far left in the arms of the oldest queen; this blissful, apparently beloved illegitimate son, however, would be left behind together with other relics when they returned to Africa. This abandonment would drastically affect Djéré’s existence and that of his descendants. (5)

This textual description of a photo dated from 1896 serves as a fictional intertext to the historic photographs and postcards of the king, including a domestic photo of the king in Martinique and in Algeria (1906). Whereas the colonial images serve to domesticate the king within the French empire, Condé’s photo frustrates interpretive certainties. Notably, the king is wearing sunglasses, which serve to obscure Behanzin’s eyes and prevent Spero from gaining a complete vision of the king. Thus, the desire for vision is promised, but then frustrated through the inability to capture fully his image. This frustration of vision and desire is replicated for the reader in its ‘web of complicated, changeable, undecided relationships among Black men and women of Africa and the African diaspora, and among their histories’ (Smock 1995: 673). Such a narrative framework, which functions like a ‘photographic lens’ (Hewitt 1995: 644) offering a ‘multiplicity of viewpoints’ (Perret 1995: 664), serves to articulate and test various kinds of truths about African and African diasporic masculinities in various times, places, cultures and histories (Wa Nyatetu-Waigwa 1995: 554, 559) as well as to re-imagine the ‘relationship between identities and lands’ (Rosello 1995: 576). Ultimately, the effect is to undermine any single truth about black masculinity as the narrator seems to identify with, or appropriate, changing and often conflicting views

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Postcard of Behanzin and his family in Martinique, c. 1902

throughout the course of the narrative. Rather than present one true image, various interpretations of this warrior-king are presented, suggesting he is the forefather of indolent or negative masculinities. On December 10, 1906 (the date of Behanzin’s death), Djéré introduced a family ritual mass in ‘memory of the ancestor who had treated his Caribbean lineage so badly’ and of the ‘wicked French’ (6) who were to blame for the fact that they were not ‘rich and powerful and living in Africa’ (7). Spero’s mother has no use for this ‘nonsense of a royal ancestor that was merely an excuse for Justin’s idleness, as it had been for his father’s’ (7). In the opening pages of the novel, the narrator observes, ‘African king or not, Djéré’s papa had behaved like all the other black papas on this earth. He neglected his child. He left him behind in the care of his poor single mother’ (8). This essentialist view of gender is confirmed by the statement ‘Men are not fashioned the same way as women’ because in the ‘bottomless calabash of their heads they cultivate ambitious nonsense that makes their existence even more difficult for them to bear’ (8). This opinion reflects Marisia, Spero’s mother’s view of him as a ‘bad influence on his two brothers’ and a ‘good-for-nothing interested only in drawing and painting’ (8). This slippage from indirect speech to third-person narrative produces an ironic, distancing effect. The result is to frustrate any fixed view of African diasporic masculinities. The narrative discourse as a kind of testing ground for African diasporic masculinities is particularly evident in the cross-cutting of private and public, past and present responses to the king. From a historic, Caribbean perspective, the king is situated as a figure of ridicule. In Guadeloupe, the family’s claim to African royal lineage is subject to mockery (47). In Martinique, the king is presented as the object of laughter and mimicry. The narrator reports their

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Re-membering the Last King of Dahomey speech indirectly: ‘Whoever heard of kings in Africa? Those people boil each other in cauldrons’ (9). Thus, Martinicans echo the colonial, hegemonic view of African masculinities as popularized in the press: representing the African king as the ‘primitive Other’ (Leighten 1990: 610-13). When the king visits Saint-Pierre, he draws a crowd of onlookers who offer diverse opinions of the African king: People’s feelings were divided. ‘An African king? Whatever next!’ some scoffed. Others were curious. ‘What does he look like, this African king?’ And some were proud. ‘A nigger and a king! And they chose our tiny Martinque as a prison for him! It’s an honour for us!’ And others sincerely pitied him. ‘Po guiab!’ (Poor devil!) So far from his own country! And what’s more they say he can’t even speak French!’ Around nine-thirty a shout went up from everyone’s lips: ‘Bato la ka rivé!’ (The boat’s coming in!) (92)

Martinicans are ironically presented as repressing or disavowing the ways in which power, language and gender are constructed through cultural contact and the colonial order. Viewing the ‘African king’ as Other, Martinicans reflect on his position as well as their own within the hierarchy of the French colonial order. The need for confirmation by the ‘colonial order’ is repeated years later when Spero seeks to prove his claim to a French academic who dismisses him as Spero cannot produce a birth certificate. This need for recognition by hegemonic masculinity (i.e. the white French academy) is also evident in Spero’s art education in Lille where he learns to value Western art as representations of universal beauty. The issue of father-son relations is explored through the competing claims of an illegitimate paternity and the patriarchal order. Thus, the interpretation of the king’s image also becomes a means to critique communal and individual responses to power structures and colonial African diasporic identities more generally. Like the king, Spero as a desiring subject and object of desire is constructed through his relationship to the African diaspora - a domain that far from being unified is one replete with ‘others’. The view of the self as other, a characteristic of W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double-consciousness, is one aspect of this profound self-displacement, what might be termed diasporic consciousness. The sense of self-exile and self-objectification is evident, for instance, when the narrator reports Spero’s thoughts on his failing marriage: ‘It was only Spero Debbie had married, Spero, and not the ancestor’ (69). The failure of his marriage is tied to his failure to live up to Debbie’s desire for hegemonic African masculinity. Debbie reconstructs Spero’s African heritage as royal and privileged, inventing falsehoods to substantiate the history she desires (18). She pushes Spero to produce works that meet her aesthetic criteria of African diasporic art and then stages an exhibition ‘to mark his breakthrough in the American art world’ (66). The narrator asks: ‘How could Spero have contradicted such fantasies when the colors of reality were so somber?’ (18).

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African Masculinities & Diasporic Desires Debbie’s ‘room of her own’ is a shrine to ‘Black Americana’ in Spero’s view. He refuses to enter this space, which includes photos of Paul Robeson as Othello, Mahalia Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson and others along with first-editions of canonical texts such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (21-22). While Spero comes to view his wife as confined within the ‘prison of race’, briefly freed from it during their romance in Guadeloupe (69), he fails to see the ways in which he too is a prisoner of ‘race and gender,’ marginalized as Lydie Moudileno suggests because his art does not correspond to the desired representations of ‘the struggle of the black race’ in its ‘quest for an aesthetic of the Black diaspora’ (Moudileno 1995: 632). For Spero, the image of the father as African royalty (Behanzin), as French (the need for ‘legitimation’ by the colonial father) or as Caribbean (his father, Justin) shapes his diasporic masculinity: leaving him to struggle with often irreconcilable ideals of masculinity. Through the imagined lineage to Behanzin, he is marginalized and mocked in and by all of these worlds. A fictional counterpart to Ouanilo’s historic accounts of Behanzin’s life, Djéré’s notebooks trace the ways in which masculinity is constructed through ancestral memory, handed down from father to son. In ‘The Fire of Abomey,’ Djéré records how Behanzin confronted the colonial order as General Dodds took over the territory. He removes the remains of his father to a secret, safe place and then torches the palace inherited from his ancestors (167). Djéré offers his response to the story of the burning city as told to him by Behanzin: Every time my father described this nightmare, I started to cry. He would kiss my sticky, salty cheeks, and holding me tight he would say, ‘There is no need to cry. There is a need to avenge me. All my sons must avenge me.’ His words made me cry even harder. It was as if I could see the wretchedness of my existence and knew I would never be up to his expectations and that I could never avenge him. (168)

While the Caribbean male lineage struggles with a sense of impotency and purposelessness, Behanzin is presented as embracing a masculinity in which freedom is experienced when one is ‘stripped of everything’ and there are ‘no more victories to win’ (171). This counter-memory runs through Spero’s narrative, consisting of a fantastic retelling of fragments from Behanzin’s life, after-life and resurrection narrative. This shifting history, bringing together multiple temporal perspectives, reflects the uneven processes through which masculinities are constituted. R.W. Connell makes this point when he says: The history of masculinities, it should be abundantly clear, is not linear. There is no master line of development to which all else is subordinate, no simple shift from traditional to modern. Rather, we see in the world created by the European empires, complex structures of gender relations in which dominant, subordinated and marginalized masculinities are in constant interaction, changing the conditions for each other’s existence and transforming themselves as they do. (1995: 198)

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Re-membering the Last King of Dahomey While colonial history matters to the sons of Behanzin, the king is portrayed as not valuing the opinions of ‘white men’ (15). Instead, African masculinities and his ancestral duties are used as the measure-stick by which he judges his success or failure as a man. Whereas Spero finds a sense of liberty in forgetting the rituals of celebrating his African lineage, the narrator recounts the king’s desire to fulfill the funeral ritual of human sacrifices for his African father. Despite their differences, both Spero and Behanzin suffer from nightmares about their failures to live up to ideals of masculinity. Through the perspective of his wives, the narrator offers a ‘soft’ view of masculinity: ‘His wives, left untouched, heard him cry like an infant in the night’ (15). This contrasts though with the hard masculinity of the Behanzin who shows no tenderness in simply using Hosannah to gratify his sexual urges. Behanzin is depicted in the afterlife as reflecting on the multiplicity of images he engendered: ‘He knew that on earth he was at the heart of a heated debate. Some believed him to have been an example and a martyr. For others he had been a bloodthirsty monster, a prime example of a power that had no interest in common mortals’ (200). Dying of boredom in the afterlife, he decides to be reborn, reasoning that he was the ‘reincarnation of a formidable ancestor who loved combat and waged war against all his neighbours’ (200). Abebi, the woman he chooses to bear him reminds him of Hosannah, and he becomes enamored with her (201). The father, a lieutenant-colonel, is depicted as a ‘scoundrel of a husband’ who is unfaithful to Abebi (202). This fantastical and ironic rebirth of the warrior figure calls into question the ideologies of male reproduction or the ways in which sons and fathers engender and beget one another. Rather than a pattern for masculinities, the image of the king as the African father who abandons his illegitimate Caribbean son engenders a legacy of troubled masculinities that haunt the father-son dynamic. Caught up in writing notebooks whose aim is to recuperate the entire history of his father, Djéré forgets his own son, Justin. Justin hates Djéré for this until he discovers the notebooks after his death and is filled with belated remorse (35). Spero, the image of his father, ends up by wishing that he can have a son, which Debbie refuses given his inability to support the child. Nonetheless, he fantasizes about a father-son relationship that reflects his own desires for masculine rebirth: ‘He would not fill his head with stories about a royal ancestor. He would not read him the notebooks of Djéré. No! He would teach him straightway to look the present in the eye’ (204). Along with this fantasy, he also envisions taking his son to Guadeloupe to tell him this is where his race began, begat of ‘a poor beggar who thought he was the last of the African kings’ (204). He would choose the first mistress for his son, a Creole woman who is a ‘bo kayé negresse’ or ‘the salt of the earth’ (204). The son would not be a painter, writer or musician (he and his forefathers have chosen these roles, albeit in a dilettante fashion). Thus, Spero envisions a son who embraces his Caribbean origins without seeking identity in a return to Africa and takes a pragmatic view of life, traits that have consistently been associated with the women in his family. Finally, it is the approval and love of women – Debbie (his wife), Anita (his daughter) and Marisia (his mother) – that seems to mark the most compelling

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African Masculinities & Diasporic Desires absence. Indeed, Spero’s most successful artwork is the figure of Erzulie Dantor, a vodou figure who is typically presented as a goddess who is fiercely devoted to her daughter, but is depicted by Spero in ‘reality’ as a ‘formidable shrew that nobody could tame’ (205). Ready to castrate, whip and teach, this image embodies Spero’s perception of the woman who can affirm or threaten his masculinity. Another clue to the role of this Caribbean woman in shaping Spero’s masculinity may be that she is seen as the fierce protector of women and children, especially those who are abused, in danger or neglected. While Spero the boy belongs to this category of protection, Spero the man is threatened by Erzulie Dantor. In seeking to foster and engender a son who embraces Caribbean masculinities and femininities, Spero visualizes a new kind of postcolonial masculinity, formed and formulated through a revisionist New World African diaspora. Here, the man, like the boy, is no longer exiled, distanced and punished by marginalized and subordinate femininities. However, to become so, seems to require a step that is beyond Spero, that of recognizing he is heir to a lineage that has abused, abandoned, neglected and betrayed its wives and lovers. As Michael Kimmel puts it, we ‘come to know what it means to be a man in our culture by setting our definitions in opposition to a set of ‘others’ – racial minorities, sexual minorities, and above all women’ (1997: 224).

Patrick Chamoiseau and Guy Deslauriers: Fantasies of the Afro-Caribbean Warrior The award-wining and controversial film, L’exil du roi Béhanzin, also functions as a testing ground for African and African diasporic masculinities.ii Opinions of this cinematic representation of the king’s exile in Martinique vary widely. Some African viewers objected to the representation of Behanzin: ‘a powerful leader and national hero of resistance, was depicted in the film as a pitiable, broken man who lacked cultural credibility’ (Price and Price 1997: 23). Chris Bongie offers a damning critique of the film as propagating ‘sexual stereotypes’ and offering a ‘disturbingly limited understanding of diasporic Atlantic identity’ (2001: 221). By contrast, in ‘L’exil de Béhanzin ou la négritude revisitée,’ Jean Bernabé declares this is the first film of the Creolist movement (1995: 28). In his view, the historical episode of Behanzin played a determining role in the poetic imaginary of Aimé Césaire (Bernabé 1995: 30), inspiring the myth of a nègre-roi. Behanzin as an African king is able to reconcile Negritude with a creole identity that is slowly emerging as the process of an irreversible modernity (Bernabé 1995: 31). Like Stuart Hall who argues that ‘the classic postmodern experience turns out to be the diasporic experience’ (1996: 490), Bernabé sees the exiled, nomadic king as the symbolic heir to the postmodern condition (Bernabé 1995: 31). In his opinion, the film is both realistic and prophetic in its representation of the king as the ancestral figure who engenders a postmodern, Creolist masculinity (Bernabé 1995: 28). Given Bernabé’s views, one might argue that the film is a way of contesting another father-son relationship: namely, the relationship of Negritude to

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Re-membering the Last King of Dahomey Créolité. In their 1989 Eloge de la créolité, they proclaimed: ‘Nous sommes à jamais fils d’Aimé Césaire’ (Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant 1989: 18) / ‘We are forever Césaire’s sons (Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant 1989: 80).’ That masculinity (as sexual potency) is defined through one’s relation to African diasporic politics is also suggested by Chamoiseau in Solibo Magnifique when the narrator observes: ‘Negritude was a eunuch. And Antilleanity has no libido. They had lots of children (mostly illegitimate) but without any goddamn love’ (Chamoiseau 1997: 38). If Negritude is ideologically positioned as de-sexed and Antillean theory (that of Edouard Glissant) as sexless, it is rather strange that these ideas have nonetheless been so ‘reproductive.’ Somewhat ironically, the Creolists themselves are often referred to as the rebellious son of Negritude and children of Antillanité. These comments aside, it is noteworthy that gender has ideological implications in terms of diasporic identity. Gendered language and gendered identities offer ways of thinking about the affiliations of self in space and time as well as engendering new theories of cultural belonging. Ancestral memory can be self-fashioned through imagined or re-membered accounts that trace one’s lineage through archetypal or iconic masculinities. Just as Condé’s narrative offers multiple perspectives of the king, the film engages in a complex representation of the king through the vantage points of Caribbean, French and African perspectives. The film draws on the rhetoric of historic representations of the king, including archival images and ethnographic photographic techniques, such as those used to present inventories of objects or portraits of the family. Though some of the French recognize Behanzin as a worthy adversary and as ‘l’homme,’ others view him as ‘barbarous.’ References to contemporaneous media coverage are reported, and Régina is familiar with the custom of human sacrifice as popularized (and twisted) in the French press during the 1890s. The representation of the king, the king’s costumes and the montage shots of the family echo the colonial postcards that were taken in Martinique and later in Algeria. The meeting of the king and the journalist is a particularly compelling example of reproducing the image of ‘Behanzin as smoker,’ bringing to life the image presented in many images of the king circulating at the time. He holds a shell, given to him by Régina; thus, the fictional counter-memory enters the historic montage. The closing image of the film presents the historic Behanzin with his pipe, an image which serves to remind one that this ‘history’ leaves unanswered the enigma of the man gazing back at us. This final portrait discloses the fact that Behanzin, as played by the actor Delroy Lindo, is an idealized, tall and hyper-masculine version of the African king who was actually rather smaller in stature. However, one troubling aspect is the visual rhetoric of the film which might be characterized as reinforcing white, colonial hegemonic masculinity. The king is depicted amongst an inventory of objects, often in a pictorial, softfocus camera gaze that resembles the pictorial style of F. Holland Day’s ‘Nubian Series,’ however unintentionally. Shots of the king in a state of partial nudity are present, such as when he is in bed with his wives or with Régina. Like Holland Day’s ‘The Smoker’, such an approach presents a softer, more meditative kind of masculinity. The visual rhetoric of the film can be seen as engaging in a kind of colonial ethnographic fantasy, which is rather disturbing

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African Masculinities & Diasporic Desires when one considers that this film is being marketed to a French audience. In the words of Hazel Carby, does the film ‘reproduce the unequal relation of power and subjection’ (Carby 2000: 56)? Does it parallel the colonial processes of photography that served to bring about ‘the induction of beings and things into a huge archive that could be controlled and manipulated’ (Geary 1990: 152)? If so, what risks does a postcolonial director run when he engages in hegemonic colonial re-memberings of African masculinities? The risk of symbolic recolonization is particularly notable when one considers the ‘stills’ in isolation, some of which echo or bring to life colonial photos of the king. However, the dialogue plays an important role in bringing these images to life from a postcolonial perspective, thus replaying colonial images in new interpretive contexts. For instance, the governor is invited to hear Ouanilo play classical music. This demonstration of ‘civilised, European acculturation’ is ambiguously replayed through the commentaries of the king who says that European civilization has something good to offer as well as through the angry attitude of Adandédjan to this complicit behavior. Adandédjan as a figure of African resistance embodies a protest masculinity that comes into conflict with the complicit masculinity of the translator (Fano) who is a sycophant in the colonial system. In one scene, Adandédjan pins Fano to the wall and denounces him for losing his identity in French clothing and language. By contrast, Adandédjan chooses African garb and speaks only in Fon. The king’s strategic masculinity and meditations concerning his marginalization within the empire serve to offer another vantage point in this spectrum of black masculinities. The king’s masculine self-presentation is presented as tactical in that he pretends not to understand French in order to gain a better understanding of the enemy’s true opinions of him. Often, Behanzin’s face takes up the entire screen in an extreme close-up. Typically, such shots serve to express intense emotion. The overwhelming proportion of the image creates an intense sense of displacement, prompting the viewer to share in the king’s sense of grief, anger and even confusion. These reaction shots thus recast the role of the king as a sentient being rather than as an object to be consumed by the powerful gaze. In the face of colonial pressures and in view of a prophetic postcolonial masculinity, the film’s most complex representations of masculinity are negotiated via the mediating role of Régina who is essential to the articulation of the father-son relationship and definition of the warrior-writer as a new kind of masculine ideal. Like Condé’s novel, the film relies on an uneven, zigzagging temporality that functions to foreground the impact of ancestral memory. Whereas Condé’s king goes to Algeria in 1900 – a movement that defies history in order to explore the African diaspora more thoroughly – Chamoiseau’s narrative follows the historical timeline, but introduces moments of dramatic intensity and unexpected convergences that serve to highlight how postcolonial masculinity might be articulated. The year during which Mount Pelée erupted, 1902, is the year in which Behanzin dictated one of his many letters to Ouanilo. The tale of Régina brings these two otherwise unrelated moments together, infusing the plea to return to Africa with a distinctly Martinican appreciation of history. Her death, a result of the volcanic eruption, takes place while trying to bring about a reconciliation of

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Re-membering the Last King of Dahomey father and son (Ouanilo has run off, unable to accept the presence of the Martinican woman in the family). As in Condé’s novel, the film explores Afro-Caribbean masculinities by introducing the Caribbean woman as an object of desire for the exiled, impotent warrior figure. In the film, Régina’s presence serves to test and reveal various negotiations of Afro-Caribbean masculinities. The father-son relationship is challenged as the son struggles to understand the father’s desire for an Afro-Caribbean woman. For Régina, the marginalized but hegemonic African masculinity of the king is a more erotically appealing ideal than the protest masculinity of the Afro-Caribbean journalist. Yet, she cannot and will not play the role of an African wife; thus, the relationship serves to explore the ambiguous aspects of the Caribbean desire to embrace African identities. The presence of Régina serves as a touchstone for revealing the complicit masculinities of the king’s guardian whose loyalties are divided between his duties as a guard in the colonial system and his friendship with the king. She is also implicated in the power relations with the French colonial powers who seek to use her as a spy. Instead, she warns the king that the translator is a traitor and a spy. Symbolically, she bears witness to the confrontation of the marooned slave and the African king in a scene that affirms African diasporic identity while pointing out the folly of Caribbean attempts to inhabit an imagined Africa. Thus, the Caribbean woman serves to reveal and even transform a network of masculine power relations. Significantly, Régina’s female power and energy are effaced through the plotting of the narrative, which appropriates her Creole femininity as a way of engendering a new vision of masculinity. The king’s desire for Régina is mapped to the island itself through the music and cinematography. Richard and Sally Price observe that the lyrics of the theme song (written by Chamoiseau) express the heart of the plot, the redeeming power of créolité: ‘L’anmou rive fè’y oubliyé péyi Dahomé… I fini pa enmen’y pasé tout péyi-a i té pèd la’ (‘Love succeeded in making him forget the land of Dahomey… He came to love her even more than the country he lost’) (Price and Price 1997: 20). This new masculinity is envisioned through the marvelous realism of remembering Régina. She is part of the fantastical scenes and cues that signal to the viewer that the film is operating at a symbolic level as well as a pivotal figure in the articulation of the new Afro-Caribbean warrior figure. The film opens in a kind of apocalyptic vision of a black man, chest exposed, wandering through the hazy, smoking environment of Martinique in the wake of Mount Pelée’s eruption. This post-apocalyptic rebirth initiates Behanzin into a new form of consciousness. No longer able to coerce her into joining his wives in the compound and embracing an African way of life, he focuses his energy on lamenting the ‘burning wounds of an impossible love.’ Régina’s death leads to an apotheosis of ‘the world as a place that is no longer to be conquered, but to be inhabited.’ In this context, Ouanilo’s written plea to return to Africa (the letter dictated by the king in 1902) is ‘rewritten’ by the fantasy of the Creole woman as seducing both father and son with her vision of the Afro-Caribbean world. This recasting of Behanzin as a theorist of African diasporic identities presents him also as a media critic who teaches his son that writing is the ‘new field of battle.’ The new warrior is a reporter,

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African Masculinities & Diasporic Desires an activist, a figure of protest and a writer. Historically, Ouanilo became an activist and journalist, thus fulfilling the promise of this new warrior figure. However, this fantastic myth of origins entails a rewriting of history, which is more expressive of Chamoiseau’s own desires for a new kind of masculinity than it is representative of historical events (Egonu 1981: 247). The ‘burning’ desire for Régina is displaced by the idealized vision of the African diasporic world she comes to represent. Searching for her in the apocalyptic Martinican landscape, the king undergoes a spiritual return. This volcanic moment mimics Césaire’s poetics in its ‘retour au pays natal,’ but differs as the natal experience entails the gestation of a new warrior: the one who envisions ‘a world that is no longer to be conquered but inhabited.’ This vision is literally written across the screen in the closing of the film, thus emphasizing that the landscape of Martinique is symbolically a blank page to be inscribed and re-membered by the scriptwriter. Chamoiseau as Marqueur de Paroles or ‘Word Scratcher’ thus leaves his trace in repeating the words of the African warrior king. This strategic rewriting of history appropriates the volcanic poetics of Césaire’s Negritude in order to promote a postcolonial masculinity. The question of where the battlefield lies, who the true warrior is and what the Creole presence means are linked together by imaginative interventions that serve to link Régina to the space of writing and the Martincan landscape. She is the source of inspiration for this new masculinity. The film seems prophetic in more prosaic ways if we consider the intertextual links to Chamoiseau’s texts dealing with the ‘guerrier de l’imaginaire’ or warrior of the imaginary. In 1997, Chamoiseau presents the warrior figure in his autobiographical treatise, Ecrire en pays dominé. Like the African king, this warrior celebrates a vision of a world in which the alchemical Pierre-Monde (Philosopher’s Stone World) is initiated through a recognition of the volcanic forces of creolization: forces which are emblematic of the changes occurring in an increasingly globalized world. The imaginary is the new field of battle. In this work, Chamoiseau in the role of the writer as warrior no longer confronts the feminine presence directly but instead draws on his warrior for inspiration. This does not mean that the female warrior has disappeared, but rather her power is appropriated by the new masculinity. Already evident in the matadora figure of Marie-Sophie in Texaco, the feminine power returns as the cross-dressing warrior Déborah-Nicol and as the protectress, Man L’Oubliée (Man the Forgotten), in Biblique des derniers gestes. Writing becomes the terrain for the gestation for masculinity and the demonstration of masculine reproductive powers. Behanzin is not merely a subject to be defined according to the role he played in colonial history. He is also a subject ‘re-membered’ through the film director’s and author’s desire to replace the archetype of ‘Mother Africa’ with that of ‘La Belle Rebelle Créole.’ This Creole woman then is the symbolic, spiritual mother of the new warrior. To conclude, both Condé and Deslauriers/Chamoiseau participate in the long and ambiguous history of representing the African king, Behanzin. Both texts present the body and story of Behanzin as a site to be pieced together again through fantastical interventions and a-chronological narrative techniques. Masculinities are retold and newly created through the fiction of Caribbean ancestral memories. By embracing Creole femininities, both texts

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Re-membering the Last King of Dahomey examine the desire to engender a new self through local culture. Behanzin as the ‘conquered conqueror’ whose impotency is cured by the belle créole serves as a fantastical source for imaging postcolonial masculinities. Condé’s king seeks reincarnation in postcolonial Africa while Chamoiseau’s king becomes the voice for a new kind of postcolonial warrior. In so doing, both Condé and Chamoiseau/Deslauriers reproduce the image of the king as the subject of their own desires: a forefather of postcolonial identity and black masculinities who confronts and responds to diasporic displacement, forced migration, exile and other forms of mobility. Constructs of the African diaspora and masculinities prove to be highly interdependent. Whereas Condé’s postcolonial masculinity is ambiguously constituted through temporal and spatial displacements in the African diaspora, Chamoiseau’s postcolonial masculinity seeks to critique and renew the warrior tradition, situating him as a writer with a global audience whose members can be roused as troops to come to the defence of the right cause, namely the vision of the world as a more just social network. While claiming an attitude of openness and tenderness, this warrior figure, nonetheless, engages in active combat, using tactics of concealment, appropriation, surprise and attack in his textual and dialogic manoeuvres with the Other. In contrast to Condé who presents the rebirth of the warrior rather ironically or ambivalently, Chamoiseau and Deslauriers celebrate this new warrior figure. In re-membering Behanzin’s narrative, Deslauriers/Chamoiseau can be seen as creating new aesthetic strategies of masculine self-performance. Do they appropriate femininities in a gesture of self-affirmation? Are African diasporic masculinities a void, the impenetrable blackness with which Condé ends her novel? The answers are far from clear. What both texts do demonstrate, however, is that inherited gender concepts are inadequate in the shifting space of diasporic desires, experiences and identities. In seeking to fulfill her needs, protect her interests and satisfy her desires, the Creole woman takes on the role of an Amazon figure (perhaps a ‘rebirth’ of the Dahomean female warrior?). Whether desired, admired or feared, she serves to challenge the ways in which new African diasporic masculinities are articulated. It seems then that the answer may lie in a diasporic gender condition in which one can no longer fully inhabit or return to either the home of masculinities or femininities, but learn instead to survive and thrive through strategic re-membering or by remapping the cartographies of one’s own trans-gendered, creolized self.

Notes 1 Funding in support of research for this article was provided a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would like to thank Kathleen Gyssels for lending me her videotape of L’exil du roi Béhanzin. 2 The film won several awards, including the Prix Sacem awarded to Jocelyne Beroard for the title song ‘Ahidjéré’, FESPACO’s (Festival Pan-African du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou) Prix Paul Robeson in 1995 and the ‘Best actor’ award for Robert Liensol at the 1994 Namur International Festival for Francophone Film.

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References Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Bernabé, Jean. ‘L’exil de Béhanzin ou la négritude revisitée.’ Antilla 625 (March 24, 1995): 28-31. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant. Eloge de la créolité. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Bongie, Chris. ‘A Street Named Bissette: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Cent-Cinquantenaire of the Abolition of Slavery in Martinique (1848-1998).’ The South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 1 (2001): 215-57. Campion-Vincent, Véronique. ‘L’image du Dahomey dans la presse française (1890-95): les sacrifices humains.’ Cahiers d’études africaines 25, no. 1 (1967): 27-58. Carby, Hazel V. Race Men. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to my Native Land. Translated by Mireille Rosello and Pritchard. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1995. Chamoiseau, Patrick. Texaco. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. ——. Solibo Magnificent. Translated by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. ——. Ecrire en pays dominé. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. ——. Biblique de derniers gestes. Paris, Gallimard, 2001. Condé, Maryse. Les derniers rois mages. Paris: Mercure de France, 1992. ——. The Last of the African Kings. trans. Richard Philcox. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Connell, R.W. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Cornevin, R. Histoire du Dahomey. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1962. Deslauriers, Guy. L’exil du roi Béhanzin. Martinique: Série Limitée and France 2 Cinéma, 1995. Egonu, Iheanachor. ‘Les Continents and the francophone Pan-Negro Movement.’ Phylon 42, no. 3 (1981): 245-54. Frazer, J.G. ‘Statues of Three Kings of Dahomey.’ Man 8 (1908): 130-32. Geary, Christraud M. ‘On the Savannah’: Marie Pauline Thorbecke’s Images from the Cameroon, West Africa (1911-12).’ Art Journal 49, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 150-58. Glissant, Edouard. Le discours antillais. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981. ——. Tout-monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Hall, Stuart. ‘The formation of a diasporic intellectual.’ Interview by Kuan-Hsing Chen. Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1996. Hewitt, Leah D. ‘Condé’s Critical Seesaw.’ Callaloo 18, no. 3 (1995): 641-51. Kimmel, Michael S. ‘Masculinity as homophobia.’ in Toward a New Psychology of Gender, eds, Mary Gergen and Sara Davis. New York: Routledge, 1997. Leighten Patricia. ‘The White Peril and L’art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism.’ The Art Bulletin 72, no. 4 (December 1990): 609-30. Morton-Williams, Peter. ‘A Yoruba Woman Remembers Servitude in a Palace of Dahomey, in the Reigns of Kings Glele and Behanzin.’ Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 63, no. 1 (1993): 102-17. Moudileno, Lydie. ‘Portrait of the Artist as Dreamer: Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove and Les Derniers Rois Mages.’ Callaloo 18, no. 3 (1995): 626-40. Perret, Delphine. ‘Dialogue with the Ancestors.’ Callaloo 18, no. 3 (1995): 652-67. Price, Richard and Sally. ‘Shadowboxing in the mangrove.’ Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 1 (1997): 3-36. Reinsch, Paul S. ‘The Negro Race and European Civilization’ The American Journal of Sociology 11, no. 2 (September 1905): 145-67. Rosello, Mireille. ‘Caribbean Insularization of Identities in Maryse Condé’s Work from En attendant le bonheur to Les derniers rois mages.’ Callaloo 18, no. 3 (1995): 565-78. Smock, Ann. Maryse Condé’s Les derniers rois mages.’ Callaloo 18, no. 3 (1995): 668-80. Wa Nyatetu-Waigwa, Wangari. ‘From Liminality to a Home of Her Own? The Quest Motif in Maryse Condé’s Fiction.’ Callaloo 18, no. 3 (1995): 551-64.

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Index

Accad, E., 63 Achebe, C., 161 African diaspora, 168 African gay rights movements, 6, 153, 161 African masculinities, 1, 28, 123 Afrikaner masculinity, 2 Ahmed, L., 68 Alden, P., 3, 83 Amzallag, M., 77 Appadurai, A., 164 Armah, A., 10 Armbrust, W., 62 Asian-African masculinity, 5 Banco, L., 2, 28 Barnard, R., 30 Bartholomew, R., 12 Behr, M., 2, 28 Beinart, W., 28 Bekolo, J., 19, 21 Ben Jelloun, T., 3, 68-69, 73 Bernabe, J., 171 Beyala, C., 155, 159, 161 Bhabha, H., 29, 141, 145, 148 Boehmer, E., 115, 154 Bongie, C., 171

British imperialism, 4, 113, 151 Brittan, A., 114 Bryce, J., 2, 11 Bugul, K., 155 Carby, H., 173 Césaire, A., 164, 171-72 Chamoiseau, P., 6, 165, 175 Chinodya, S., 4, 83, 85-86, 88, 91-92, 94, 97, 101 Coleman, D., 100, 102, 143 Comoroffs, 11-14 Condé, M., 165 Connell, B., 2, 71, 84, 103, 106, 114, 141, 143, 169 Cornwall, A., 69 Dangarembga, T., 100, 102, 105 Dibia, J., 159, 161 Djebar, A., 3, 55, 57, 66 Du Bois, W.E.B., 168 Duiker, S., 158, 161 Dunton, C., 153-54, 160 El Saadawi, N., 3, 68-70 Epprecht, M., 1, 6, 153 Fanon, F., 15

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Index Garritano, C., 127-28, 130-31 Glissant, E., 165, 172 Guadio, R., 159 Geschiere, P., 17, 20, 23 Gilmore, D., 114 Girard, R., 60, 69 Gikuyu, 113 Griffiths, G., 116 Gurnah, A., 140 Hall, S., 171 Hammond, A., 4, 113 Head, B., 30 hegemonic masculinity, 5, 37, 119 heterosexual identity, 1 Holland, K., 105 homophobia, 6, 32-33, 156, 161 Hove, C., 100 hypermasculinity, 33, 35, 37 impotence, 11, 12, 14, 55-56, 59, 61 Jolly, R., 36 Knepper, W., 6, 164 Knights, B., 118 Kristeva, J., 37 Lazreg, M., 68 Lindisfarne, N., 69 Lindsay, L., 1 Maillou, D., 47-48, 50 Makokha, J., 5, 139 male subjectivity, 83 Malti-Douglas, F., 68 Mambety, D.D., 12 Mangua, C., 47 manhood, 24, 44, 55 masculinism, 114 Mau Mau, 45, 113 Mbembe, A., 20, 22 McLeod, J., 120 Mda, Z., 28 Mercer, K., 35

Mernissi, F., 68 Morrell, R., 1, 84 Mungoshi, C., 4, 83, 85-86, 88, 91-92, 155 Mustafa, S., 144 Muriungi, A., 142 Naipul, S., 140 Nazareth, P., 146, 150 Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o, 113, 115, 140, 142, 144-45, 147, 149 Nkoli, S., 154 Nlandu, T., 15 Nollywood film, 157 Nye, R., 52 occult, 11-12, 14, 17 Odhiambo, T., 3, 42, 47 Okome, O., 15 Ouzgane, L. 1, 68, 100, 102, 109, 142-43 Pattman, R., 98 penis, phallus, 2, 11, 13, 34 Prabhu, A., 63-64 prostitution, 42 Rahman, N., 3, 55 Riber, J., 100 Ruheni, M., 47 Sabbah, F., 68 Sedgwick, E., 30, 39, 60 Sembene, O., 5, 12, 127-28 Shire, C., 115 Shona masculinities, 102-103, 106107 Siddiqui, J., 144 Sinclair, I., 101 Smith, C., 31 Sondhi, K., 5, 145, 150 Spivak, G., 142-43 Stratton, 154 Teno, J-M., 21-22, 25

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Index Thackway, M., 132 Third Cinema, 21, 128 Thompson, K., 4, 100 Traore, M., 13 Uzoatu, U., 161

Vassanji, M. G., 5, 140, 147-49 Vera, Y., 100 Vignal, D., 153-54, 160 Warah, R., 144 witchcraft, 11, 16-18 Worby, E., 13

van Binsbergen, W., 17, 19

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Contents: Introduction by Lahoucine Ouzgane – PART I MAN & NATION IN AFRICA The Anxious Phallus: The Iconography of Impotence in Quartier Mozart & Clando by Jane Bryce – The Homoerotics of Nationalism: White Male-on-Male Rape & the ‘Coloured’ Subject in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples by Lindsey Michael Banco – ‘Wild Men’ & Emergent Masculinities in Post-colonial Kenyan Popular Fiction by Tom Odhiambo – The Anonymity of Manhood: Unmasking Shadow Selves in Assia Djebar’s Ombre sultane by Najat Rahman – The Rape Continuum: Masculinities in the Works of Nawal El Saadawi & Tahar Ben Jelloun by Lahoucine Ouzgane – PART II ALTERNATIVE MASCULINITIES ‘Coming Unstuck’: Masculine Identities in Post-Independence Zimbabwean Fiction by Patricia Alden – Imported Alternatives: Changing Shona Masculinities in Flame and Yellow Card by Katrina Daly Thompson – Ngu~gi~ wa Thiong’o & the Crisis of Kenyan Masculinity by Andrew Hammond – Father Africa: Counter-narratives of Masculinity in Sembene’s Faat Kiné & Moolaadé by Tarshia L. Stanley – The Eternal Other: Authority of Deficit Masculinity in Asian-African Literature by Justus K. Siboe Makokha – Recent Trends in the Treatment of Homosexualities in Literature & Film by African Artists by Marc Epprecht – Re-membering the Last King of Dahomey: African Masculinities & Diasporic Desires by Wendy Knepper

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620, USA www.boydellandbrewer.com www.jamescurrey.com

Men in African Film & Fiction

Lahoucine Ouzgane is Associate Professor of English & Film Studies, University of Alberta, Canada.

Edited by Lahoucine Ouzgane

Men in African Film & Fiction fills a gap in the international literature by offering new insights into the heterogeneous ways in which African men are performing, negotiating and experiencing masculinity. Through their analysis of the depictions in film and literature of masculinities in colonial, independent and post-independent Africa, the contributors open some key African texts to a more obviously politicized set of meanings. Collectively, the essays provide space for rethinking current theory on gender and masculinity: • how only some of the most popular theories in masculinity studies in the West hold true in African contexts; • how Western masculinities react with indigenous masculinities on the continent; • how masculinity and femininity in Africa seem to reside more on a continuum of cultural practices than on absolutely opposite planes; and • how generation often functions as a more potent metaphor than gender.

Editor: Lahoucine Ouzgane

Men in African Film & Fiction