Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature 9780367193102, 9780429201653

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Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature provides a new and wide-ranging appraisal of shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English. Bringing together young and established voices in postcolonial studies, these chapters tackle shame and racism, shame and agency, shame and ethical recognition, the problem of shamelessness, and the shame of willed forgetfulness. Linked by a common thread of reflections on shame and literary writing, the chapters consider specifically whether the aesthetic and ethical capacities of literature enable a measure of stability or recuperation in the presence of shame’s destructive potential. The obscenity of the in-human, both in the colonial setting and in aftermaths that show little sign of abating, entails the acute significance of shame as a subject for continuing and urgent critical attention. David Attwell is Professor of English at the University of York in the UK and Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. He co-edited and conducted the interviews for J.M. Coetzee’s Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. His monographs include J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing; Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History; and, most recently, J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing. Annalisa Pes is Senior Lecturer of English at the University of Verona. Besides articles and book chapters, her publications include Ex-centric Writing: Essays on Madness in Postcolonial Fiction (co-ed.); Sermoni, amori e misteri. Il racconto coloniale australiano al femminile; and Stories that Keep on Rising to the Surface. I racconti di Patrick White. Susanna Zinato is Associate Professor of English at the University of Verona. Besides articles and book chapters, her publications include The house is empty: Grammars of Madness in J. Frame’s Scented Gardens for the Blind and B. Head’s A Question of Power; Rehearsals of the Modern: Experience and Experiment in Restoration Drama (ed.); and Ex-centric Writing: Essays on Madness in Postcolonial Fiction (co-ed.)

Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures Series editors: Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney

Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently) colonized areas, and will include material from non-anglophone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures. 64 The Body, Desire and Storytelling in Novels by J. M. Coetzee Olfa Belgacem 65 Caring for Community Marijke Denger 66 A Century of Encounters Writing the Other in Arab North Africa by Tanja Stampfl 67 Rethinking the Victim Gendered Violence in Australian Women’s Literature Anne Brewster and Sue Kossew 68 Politicising World Literature Egypt, Between Pedagogy and the Public May Hawas 69 Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature Edited by David Attwell, Annalisa Pes and Susanna Zinato Related Titles: Postcolonial Life-Writing Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation Bart Moore-Gilbert For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature

Edited by David Attwell, Annalisa Pes and Susanna Zinato

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of David Attwell, Annalisa Pes and Susanna Zinato to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-19310-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-20165-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial

vii xi 1

David Attwell , A nnalisa P es , and S usanna Z inato

1 Writing in, of, and around Shame: J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K

43

David Attwell

2 Cursing the Fathers’ Curse: A Tragic Reading of White Shame in J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country and Age of Iron

57

S usanna Z inato

3 Dictator Games: On Shame, Shitholes, and Beautiful Things

91

R ita B arnard

4 “Unfinished Business”: Digging up the Past in Christine Piper’s After Darkness and Cory Taylor’s My Beautiful Enemy

106

S ue Kossew

5 Different Shades of Shame. The Responsibilities and Legacies of a Shameful History in Australian Fiction

122

A nnalisa P es

6 Contemporary Australian Refugee Policies and Shame as Reflected in A.S. Patric’s Black Rock, White City (2015) D olores H errero

138

vi Contents 7 American Postcolonial Shame, Fiction, and Timothy Bewes

159

David C allahan

8 “Like solemn Afro-Greeks avid for grades”: Individual and Historical Shame in Walcott’s Earlier Poetry

176

A ngelo R ighetti

9 Shame, Justice, and the Representation of Violence in Postcolonial Literature: The Case of Caryl Phillips

193

V incent van B ever D onker

10 Afterword: A Swarm of Locusts Passed By

209

T imothy B ewes

Index

225

List of Contributors

David Attwell (University of York) David Attwell is Professor of English at the University of York, where he has served as Head of the Department of English and Related Literature, and Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape. Born in South Africa, before moving to the UK he was Professor and Head of the English Department at the University of the Witwatersrand in ­Johannesburg. He co-edited and conducted the interviews for J.M. Coetzee’s Doubling the Point Essays and Interviews (1992). His monographs include J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (1993); Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (2005); and, most recently, J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (2015). With Derek Attridge he co-edited The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012). Rita Barnard (University of Pennsylvania) Rita Barnard  is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape. She is the author of The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance (Cambridge UP, 1995) and Apartheid and Beyond (Oxford UP, 2006), and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela (Cambridge UP, 2014). A new collection (co-edited with Andrew van der Vlies) entitled South African Writing in Transition is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2019. Among her recent chapters are “Relocating Gordimer: Modernism, Postcolonialism, Realism” in Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism (Oxford UP, 2018); “SEE PRETORIA WITH NEW EYES: Modernism, Memory, and the Apartheid City” in Image & Text; and “Ugly Feelings, Negative Dialectics: Reflections on Postapartheid Shame” in Safundi, a pioneering journal in transnational cultural studies, which she co-edited for ten years. Timothy Bewes (Brown University) Timothy Bewes is  Professor of English at Brown University and the author of Cynicism and Postmodernity (1997); Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (2002); and The Event of Postcolonial Shame (2011). He has edited or co-edited collections such as Cultural

viii  List of Contributors Capitalism (2000), Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence (2011), and a special issue of Novel: A Forum on Fiction entitled “Jacques Rancière and the Novel.” His latest book, Free Indirect: The Idea of Twenty-First Century Fiction, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. David Callahan (University of Aveiro) David Callahan  is Associate Professor of English at the University of Aveiro, Portugal. Author of Rainforest Narratives: The Work of Janette Turner Hospital and editor of Australia: Who Cares? and Contemporary Issues in Australian Literature, his articles on postcolonial issues have appeared in journals such as Interventions, Postcolonial Studies, Critique, Literature & History, and English Studies in ­Africa, along with book chapters on many postcolonial and other topics. Recently, his work has focussed on the reading of East Timor by outsiders, although his latest article is a Bewesian reading of American poet Li-Young Lee in Arizona Quarterly. Dolores Herrero (University of Zaragoza) Dolores Herrero  is Senior Lecturer of English Literature at the Department of English and German Philology of the University of Zaragoza, Spain, of which she has been the Head as of 2016. Her main interests are postcolonial literature and cinema, on which she has published extensively. She co-edited, together with Marita Nadal, the book Margins in British and American Literature, Film and Culture (1997), and, together with Sonia Baelo, the books The Splintered Glass: Facets of Trauma in the Post-­Colony and Beyond (2011) and Between the Urge to Known and the Need to Deny: Trauma and Ethics in Contemporary British and ­American Literature (2011). She was also the editor of Miscelánea: A Journal of ­English and American Studies from 1998 to 2006 and Secretary of EASA ­(European Association for Studies on Australia) from 2011 to 2015. Sue Kossew (Monash University) Sue Kossew is Chair of English and Literary Studies at Monash University, where she was Head of the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies from 2010 to 2013. Her research is in contemporary postcolonial literatures, focussing on J.M. Coetzee and contemporary Australian and South African women writers. Her books include Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink (Rodopi, 1996) and Writing Woman, Writing Place: Australian and South African Fiction (Routledge, 2004). She has edited Lighting Dark Places: Essays on Kate Grenville (Rodopi, 2010) and Critical Essays on J.M. Coetzee (ed.) (G.K. Hall, 1998), and co-edited Strong Opinions: J.M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction (Continuum, 2011). Her book, Rethinking the Victim: Gender and Violence in Australian Women’s Writing [please, put the title in italics], co-authored

List of Contributors  ix with Anne Brewster and based on an ARC-funded research project, is published by Routledge (2019). She is a Fellow of the ­Australian Academy of the Humanities. Annalisa Pes (University of Verona) Annalisa Pes is Senior Lecturer at the University of Verona, Italy, where she teaches English and Postcolonial Literature. Her main area of research is Australian literature, with a particular focus on the short story genre and on women’s writing. She has co-edited Ex-­centric Writing. Essays on Madness in Postcolonial Literature (2013) and Confluenze intertestuali. In onore di Angelo Righetti (2012). Her monographs include Sermoni, amori e misteri. Il racconto coloniale australiano al femminile. 1845–1902 (2009), a book on the short stories of colonial women writers, and Stories that Keep on Rising to the Surface. I racconti di Patrick White (2003), on Patrick White’s short fiction. She has written articles and book chapters on postcolonial issues in the works of (among others) Patrick White, H.H. Richardson, K.S. Prichard, Kate Grenville, Thomas Keneally, Sia Figiel, and Zadie Smith. Angelo Righetti (University of Verona) Angelo Righetti, former Professor of English and Anglophone Literature at the University of Verona, is the author of studies on Browning’s and T.S. Eliot’s poetry; editor of the annotated bilingual anthologies Browning’s Poems (1998) and Wordsworth’s Poems 1798–1807 (2016); and has written articles on Byron, Ruskin, Kipling, and Joyce. In the field of new literatures in English he has published chapters on Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton, Vance Palmer, Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, J.M. Coetzee, Patricia Grace and Es’kia Mphahlele, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, and Albert Wendt. He has edited The Brand of the Wild and Early Sketches (2002), uncollected early fiction by Vance Palmer; Theory and Practice of the Short Story: Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific (2006); and The Protean Forms of Life writing: Auto/ Biography in English, 1680–2000 (2008), and co-edited Byron e l’Europa / L’Europa di Byron (2009) and Drops of Light Coalescing: Studies for M.T. ­Bindella (2010). Vincent van Bever Donker (Northampton University) Vincent van Bever Donker  is a researcher in world and postcolonial literature, and is Associate Lecturer in English at the University of Northampton. He is reviews editor for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. His monograph Recognition and Ethics in World Literature: Religion, Violence, and the Human develops the structural and philosophical importance of recognition for engaging with both the ethical challenges and the commitments of world literature. His research interests also include the secular and the sacred in African literature, and the shifting forms of empire in popular science fiction.

x  List of Contributors Susanna Zinato (University of Verona) Susanna Zinato is Associate Professor of English at University of Verona. She has primarily researched the links between rhetoric, theatre, and libertinism in early-modern England (J. Wilkins, J. Vanbrugh, Rochester; Rehearsals of the Modern: Experience and Experiment in Restoration Drama, ed. 2010); the stylistics/rhetoric of fiction; the postcolonial roman fou (The house is empty; Grammars of Madness in J. Frame’s Scented Gardens for the Blind and B. Head’s A Question of Power, 1999); madness in colonial/postcolonial literature (Ex-­c entric Writing. Essays on Madness in Postcolonial Fiction, 2013, co-edited); and comparative studies (early-modern libertine literature between ­London and Venice; Ennio Flaiano and J. M. Coetzee). She has co-edited and translated V. Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol’ (2014) and Lectures on Russian ­Literature (forthcoming from Edizioni Adelphi).

Acknowledgements

Sue Kossew’s chapter includes part of her chapter originally published as “Revisiting the Haunted Past: Christine Piper’s After Darkness” in Australian Humanities Review 61 (May 2017), republished with permission. Available online at http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2017/06/13/ issue-61-may-2017/

Introduction Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial David Attwell, Annalisa Pes, and Susanna Zinato Premises The essays collected in this volume will provide a unifying framework for an appraisal of shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English. While drawing on the theoretical tools offered by postcolonial studies, the volume broadly engages the reader in the diverse, individual approaches proposed by contributors in essays that, by cutting in different ways, offer a reading experience informed by differences and tensions as well as by continuities. Giving up from the start any attempt at global, homogenizing representativeness, in terms both of literary geographies and of theoretical models, the editors’ investment has been that of blending critical investigations of the literary modes and rhetoric of shame, i.e. its poetics, with a view to putting the individual texts under scrutiny in their material-historical and ­cultural-ideological contexts, or, to use Fanon’s word, in their socio­ geny. Rather than being ready-made and superimposed the theoretical considerations advanced here invoke a self-reflexive and honed use of the critical-heuristic notion of shame. That said, the postcolonial side of the critique that has been embraced by all the contributors is the agonistic, reactive inspiration innervating their discourse and their ethical and political involvement. Before we engage with the question of shame, a necessary premise concerns the use we make of the word “postcolonial” in the title of this volume. As Robert Young has argued in his authoritative Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2016), the term presupposes that the extraordinarily global history of European expansion and land occupation between 1492 and 1945 marks a process that was both specific in its hegemonic power structures and problematic in its extension over a wide range of pre-existing cultures. The term “postcolonial”, which has been subjected to a plurality of theoretical discussions (to name but a few, see Appiah 1992; Hall 1996; Moore-Gilbert 1997; Shohat 1992; Slemon 1994), is a “dialectical concept that marks the broad historical facts of de-colonization and the determined achievement of ­sovereignty – but also the realities of nations and peoples emerging into

2  David Attwell et al. a new imperialistic context of economic and sometimes political domination” (Young 2016, 57). The postcolonial approach is of course intended as “challeng[ing] ­colonial ways of knowing, ‘writing back’ in opposition to such views. But colonial ways of knowing still circulate and have agency in the present” (McLeod 2000, 32). As Comaroff and Comaroff put it, Colonies were zones of occupation in which the European civilizing mission was countered by the dictates of control and profit – and by the need to secure the contested frontiers held to stand between order and chaos. Defending those boundaries in the name of progress often warranted the suspension of enlightened ways and means, even in the face of resistance and humanitarian outrage. The long process of decolonization that set the stage for a new Age of Empire has disrupted this spatial logic. […] It came undone when economies were deregulated and capital moved offshore, escaping state oversight, globalizing the division of labor, […] scrambling received relations between politics and production, leaving discarded people and landscapes in their wake. […] In the process, the structural and spatial separations of metropole and colony began to erode, […] wastelands, zones of occupation, and burning banlieus brought ­colonial conditions into the heart of Euro-American polities. (2012, 106–107) In point of fact, colonial exploitation has been reshuffled and re-­ conceptualized within an international framework in terms of a neo-­colonial system meeting the needs of the world market, needs camouflaged and protected by mantles of ideology and civilizational values. Due to the ongoing operations of imperialism the term “postcolonial” should be preferred to “post-imperial”. This explains why the terms ‘neo-colonial’ – first theoretically elaborated by Ghanaian politician and intellectual Kwame Nkrumah (1965), and later subsumed by Kenyan novelist and critic Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1981) – and ‘postcolonial’ are often alternately used with reference to contemporary economic systems primarily developed and controlled by Western colonial powers. In this light, the term ‘postcolonial’ is used together with ‘neo-­colonial’ in this volume when the economic and material dimensions are brought to the fore. That said, the postcolonial is meant to embrace and include “all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day”, as originally proposed by Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back (2002, 2). ***

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  3 A survey of the research devoted to shame in postcolonial literature to date encourages new and more specific contributions. We concur fully with Erica Johnson who has lately argued: the study of shame has flourished recently in the areas of literary studies and political theory, yet much remains to be done on the ways in which colonialism operates as a shaming ideology. The relevance of shame theory to postcolonial thought is evident in the very language of shame studies. (2013, 90) Apart from monographs and essay collections related to specific fields of the Humanities and Social Sciences, notably anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, or religion, the number of studies focussing on the theme of shame from a purely or partly literary perspective is surprisingly limited. In addition, they generally remain wedded to a relatively narrow range of Anglo-American works that, in their turn, include books on single authors or groups of authors, mainly in fiction and in drama (the early modern period being privileged), like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Conrad, Lawrence, Kafka, Faulkner, and Toni Morrison.1 Gender-specific books on shame, i.e. shame and female writing, and those centred on the politics of identity in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) literature should be added to the list (for example, Gay Shame, by Halperin and Traub 2015). Those publications which, though not having any programmatic relationship with the postcolonial, may be entered in the postcolonial-field rubric (by virtue of single chapters therein contained) are exclusively devoted to women writers (in particular, from Algeria, Australia, and America). Among them, the most relevant at present is The Female Face of Shame, edited by Erica Johnson and Patricia Moran (2013). Worth mentioning are also Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings by J. Brooks Bouson (2009), including American, Canadian, and English literature, and Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America by Melissa Harris-Perry (2011) on American African women writers, cultural stereotypes, and ethnic identities.

1 The most significant ones appear to be the following: Issues of Shame and Guilt in the Modern Novel: Conrad, Ford, Greene, Kafka, Camus, Wilde, Proust, and Mann, by D. Tenenbaum (Edwin Meller Press, 2009); Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing, edited by J. Adamson, H. Clark, N. Donald, State of New York Press 1999 (considering D.H. Lawrence’s, Faulkner’s, George Eliot’s, and Hawthorne’s writing); Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945, by P. Fox, Duke UP, 1994; The Phaedra Syndrome: of Shame and Guilt in Drama, by A. Gérard, Rodopi, 1993.

4  David Attwell et al. Apart from Timothy Bewes’s The Event of Postcolonial Shame (2011), to which we shall return, there are no other books covering our volume’s specific subject, i.e. shame in postcolonial literature tout court, with no exclusive focus on gender discourse2 . And yet, the theme of shame in postcolonial literature in English has been gathering momentum in academic discussions (through journal articles and single chapters in mainly interdisciplinary books), as well as in political and social commentaries to belated assessments of the crimes of colonialism/imperialism and its ongoing, shameful worldwide legacy. In point of fact, The Event of Postcolonial Shame remains to date the only book exclusively focussing on shame and literature and, more to our point, on shame in postcolonial literature, through a theoretical introduction and single chapters devoted to Caryl Phillips, V.S. Naipaul, Joseph Conrad, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Zoë Wicomb, and J.M. Coetzee. The study draws its argumentative tools mainly from philosophy (Lukacs, Adorno, Sartre, and Deleuze, to name the most relevant references), while keeping a solid and cohesive focus firmly on postcolonial literature and thought. Bewes’s seminal contribution can be inferred from the frequency with which our introduction retrieves and interacts with important assumptions of his, as well as from the contributors’ engaging with it at various stages in their discussions. That is why he has been entrusted with the Afterword of this volume as a way to acknowledge his ground-breaking role in initiating the critical conversation on postcolonial shame. *** Let us start from a general, working definition of shame, whose neuralgic points will be taken into consideration in these introductory pages. As Michael Morgan puts it,

2 There are, on the contrary, books dealing with the issue of shame, mostly from an interdisciplinary perspective. Among them, of noticeable interest are Queer Attachments. The Cultural Politics of Shame, by Sally R. Munt (2008), Temporality and Shame, edited by Ladson Hinton and Hessel Willensen (2018), and Shame and Modern Writing, edited by Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh (2018) – all of them sharing an interdisciplinary nature. In Munt’s work, tackling the shame theme from the perspective of cultural studies, narrative figures as the third term in a fruitful synthesis of cultural politics and emotions theory. Temporality and Shame is a positive addition to the study of shame from the interrelated fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and anthropology. As to Shame and Modern Writing, the wide perspective afforded by the contributions of scholars from the Humanities and the Social Sciences allows for intriguing forays into the writings of as diverse authors as Montaigne, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Conrad, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, with due attention to the race and gender issues. Nevertheless, the literary focus in it has no structural relationship with the postcolonial.

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  5 Shame is a complex state, emotional and evaluative and hence psychological and ethical at once. It is reflexive and yet social, requiring that we look at ourselves and at the way others view us, at once and dialectically. And while shame is akin to guilt, the two are not identical. We can be ashamed about what we have [or have not, we would add] done, just as we can feel guilty for what we have done, but in such cases shame is about who we are for having done what we did; we are ashamed for having been the one who did what we did. Guilt is related but different. We feel guilty for having done what we did but not for being who we are. (2008, 14–15, our emphasis) Now, it is unquestionable that we should and can […] feel shame about living in a world where genocide is always possible and where its prevention is continually negotiable, where genocide is only one matter among many, […] where Auschwitz can be forgotten and where it can be denied that what happened in Rwanda, for example, was genocide. (26–27) No doubt all of us ought to feel shame at our powerlessness to prevent human beings close to or far from us from becoming victims of atrocious power logics (we are thinking here especially of Primo Levi’s “vaster shame” in The Drowned and The Saved: “It is no more than a supposition, indeed the shadow of a suspicion; that everyone is his brother’s Cain, that everyone of us (but this time I say ‘us’ in a much vaster, indeed universal sense) has usurped his neighbour’s place and lived in his stead”, 1989, 62). Unquestionably, also, as insisted on by Bewes, shame is intrinsic to writing’s representational and ethical inadequacy in telling the dire times marked by colonialism, Auschwitz, and the biopolitics of post/neo-colonialisms. All that granted, how is the relation of postcolonial literature to shame to be qualified with respect to all other literature, assuming that literature not infected by shame can (shamefully, in Bewes’s view), exist at all? In other words, what value does the “postcolonial” qualifier bring to our understanding of shame? Undoubtedly, as underlined by Michael Rothberg, “the force of Bewes’s intervention lies in the hypothesis that it is precisely shame that serves ‘as an index of the inadequacy or the impossibility of writing’” (2012, 375). Nevertheless, one wonders whether post-Holocaust misgivings about representational adequacy can be glibly assimilated to postcolonial writing without running the risk of conflating crucial differences. Would not the merging of differences that arise out of violently imposed histories of material and discursive practices developed in the course of centuries, and still continuing, thus ‘blunt’ the critical and heuristic potential of the notion of shame?

6  David Attwell et al. While highly appreciating the aesthetic and critical depth that a “multidirectional” (Rothberg 2009) horizon can provide and the hermeneutic light coming from considering, side by side, the power theatres of the death camp and the colony (and post/neo-colony) – were it only for their sharing in the race branding politics and treating their subjects as different, inferior species, with no right to an equal standard of humanity – we feel the need to be cautious. Besides and, necessarily, beyond the ethical impasse entailed in the need to acknowledge and respect the unique and unassimilable character of each single victim’s suffering, what is at stake here is certainly not a discourse of ‘hierarchies’ or ‘gradations’ in human shame and suffering, but rather a wish for better understanding the kinds and shades of shame implied by time- and place-specific contexts and recognizing what specifically colonial heritage is to be acted against today. Needless to say, contextualizing also means taking into account the culture-specific dimensions of a complex emotion like shame. Therefore, while treasuring the invaluable reflections coming from writings on shame bequeathed to us by authors like Primo Levi or Vassily Grossman, to name only two devastatingly lucid witnesses and writers on the lager, or by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, we tend to believe that a critical approach to postcolonial literature should find it awkward conflating the Holocaust with, for instance, the Herero genocide or apartheid’s crimes in South Africa; or the assimilationist policies of Australia; or, to name the most appalling “event of postcolonial shame”, the Rwandan genocide. In a tragically obvious way, in all these given cases what we are faced up with, and what any literary writing about them puts us face to face with, is, in Levi’s words in The Truce, “the shame of being a man”. However, if our task as critics is to join authors in “searching for critical concepts” with which our approach “can be said to move beyond ‘colonial’ relations of perception to become truly postcolonial” (Bewes 8) or, to put it in Deleuze’s idiolect (1991), to create concepts that resist the present, to invoke a not yet existing land and people, we think that in such a painstaking and strenuous effort, the coordination ­between “every post-Auschwitz work, every postcolonial work – but also […] every novel tout court” (Bewes 45) should admit of such differences. Similarly, in tackling the problem of the “incommensurability” between “the formal possibilities open to the literary work and its ethical responsibilities” (Bewes 1) when dealing with shame, Bewes refers the reader to Gayatri Spivak’s by-now canonical considerations on the subaltern and speech in Can the Subaltern Speak? as an analogue of a discourse on the aporetic condition of the postcolonial writer and critic (Bewes 58). It is to Bewes’s credit and a mark of his candour that, from the start, he proclaims his own text’s aporetic position. Yet, in positioning his work as envisioning a postcolonial critical stance in the negative, rather than positive light of incommensurability between the ethical and the aesthetic, and in his awareness of his own shameful implication and

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  7 therefore interpretive frustration, one wonders whether Bewes’s radical dis-enabling of shame criticism may not run the risk of fetishizing shame under the rubric of incommensurability. In the same way, a totalizing use of Spivak’s argument is seen by Neil Lazarus to be liable of risking the fetishization of the subaltern’s “difference under the rubric of incommensurability” (11), to use Bewes’s own reference to Lazarus’s objection to Spivak’s thesis.3 Fetishizing, here, is used with a meaning close to ontological hypostasizing, in keeping with Bewes’s main philosophical thrust. Our approach, broadly, and the approach of the whole volume, is more on the side of the phenomenology and the politics of existence, to which literature can make a decisive and specific contribution.

The Phenomenological Approach The phenomenological approach is most effective in helping us to understand why the shame affect is not just particularly resonant in postcolonial literature but consubstantial to it and, therefore, obliquely and sometimes directly pervasive in it. Here it is Jean Paul Sartre’s ­existential-phenomenological scrutiny of shame in L’Ȇtre et le néant (1943)/Being and Nothingness (1956/2003) that turns out to be essential, as is already evinced in Bewes’s work, who elaborates from it suggestive applications of the gaze and body motifs. It is needless to underline the centrality of the concept of the Other, and Otherness, in postcolonial literature and studies, a concept set off in the colonial theatre by the encounter/clash between invaders and invaded, dominators and dominated, and necessitated by their ‘cohabitation’ according to its various inflections and through its various dispositifs, in Foucauldian terms. In Being and Nothingness Sartre describes a third type of self-consciousness (the first being pre-reflective and the second reflective), one that, with the Other as its condition of possibility, is intersubjectively mediated. Shame draws on this third kind of self-­consciousness since its ‘content’, or raison d’être, is constituted only and exclusively through the subject’s encounter with the Other: “shame is shame of oneself before the other” (Sartre 2003, 312). To Sartre shame is a crucial litmus test of our relationality, our “being-for-others”; it comes from, and bears on the ­intra-psychic/intra-subjective self-conscious and the inter-psychic/­intersubjective socially conscious. Let us rehearse Sartre’s words directly: Shame makes me aware of not being in control and of having my foundation outside myself. The other’s gaze confers a truth upon me that I do not master, and over which I am, in that moment, powerless. (2003, 260) 3 Neil Lazarus’s quote is to be found in Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the ­Postcolonial World, Cambridge UP, 1999, p. 115.

8  David Attwell et al. Another crucial indication in Sartre’s scrutiny of shame is that what is at stake is not so much whether the Other’s evaluation is positive or negative, i.e. not so much the tenor of the Other’s evaluation, as its shame-inducing objectification. Again, let us listen to Sartre’s own words: Pure shame is not a feeling of being this or that guilty object but in general of being an object: that is, of recognizing myself in this degraded, fixed, and dependent being which I am for the Other. Shame is the feeling of an original fall […] I have ‘fallen’ into the world in the midst of things and […] I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am. (2003, 302) Once transposed into the colonial context, Sartre’s arguments cannot but invoke Fanon’s phenomenological analysis of the psycho-political bearings of this fundamental working of human consciousness on the black subject’s objectified existence – in the colony as much as in the whites’ metropolitan cities: Shame. Shame and self-contempt. Nausea. When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into an infernal circle. (Fanon 2008, 88) Or in another unforgettable, pithy statement: “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (83). Fanon famously uses Sartre’s notion of overdetermination employed by the latter to describe the Jew’s overdetermined existence, only adding that the Jew, being a white man, “can be unknown in his Jewishness […] can sometimes go unnoticed” if he is not “determine[d]” by his behaviour. On the other hand, the black man (which, for our purposes, one might correct as the man who happens not to be white) is, as it were, always and forever announced and transfixed by the colour of his skin and bound to an epidermalized existence. Let us quote Fanon here: I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the “idea” that others have of me but of my own appearance. I move slowly in the world, accustomed now to seek no longer for upheaval. I progress by crawling. And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away slices of my reality. I am laid bare. (87) The worth in itself of the Other’s evaluation is again not the point, the point being the subject’s endorsement of it, as emphasized by Fanon.

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  9 Dan Zahavi,4 opportunely for our discourse, points out the “significant component of alterity” entailed in the existential alienation that gets involved in the subject’s experience of shame – that type of self-­alienation following exposure on which Sartre insists so much and which provides the condition of possibility for an identitarian re-orientation, or re-­ creation of identity, as we shall argue later. The heuristic potential deriving from the study of shame, especially in the postcolonial context, is maximally valourized by Sartre’s approach in which shame is the emotion “that best captures and most fundamentally characterizes our relation to others” (Zahavi 2014, 218). Remarking how “the feeling of guilt lacks the social dimension” required by shame, Morgan, too, underlines the “crucial consideration” that “we feel shame only when there is such other-judging of us” (2008, 46–47). It must be said that Zahavi’s line of reasoning, as espoused by us, differs from Gabriele Taylor’s, who, in her often-quoted, prominent study Pride, Shame and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment, sees shame as a mainly self-related affective dynamic in which others play no significant role, if not that of being instrumental to provoke a change in the agent’s view of himself/herself (1985, 66–67). In the same way, for Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni (2011, 201) the Other’s evaluation/glance is no sufficient condition to cause shame. However, as acknowledged by Phil Hutchinson (who substantially endorses her thesis), Taylor’s cognitive approach to shame, while criticizing Sartre’s need for an actual, or only imagined, audience, still conceptually rescues it by “offer[ing] us the notion of an audience which […] merely serves to differentiate between the observer and the participant perspective, or third and first person perspective” (Hutchinson 2008, 111). This “metaphorical” third-person space (Taylor 66) may instead turn out to be useful in depicting the role of literature with respect to shame. From our perspective within postcolonial literature, Sartre’s basic assumptions about shame as an Other-mediated form of self-experience, involving an alienation (othering) of the subject’s self, ring truer, and, with Zahavi, we believe that any “attempt to provide a non-social definition of shame is consequently bound to miss something quite significant” (2014, 221). As to the actual or imagined presence of this Other, a general and shareable endorsement has gathered around the moral philosopher Bernard Williams’s thesis, according to which this Other may not be present but his ‘gaze’ has nonetheless been interiorized. To Williams, too, “to overlook the importance of the imagined other is […] a silly mistake” (1993, 82). This “other may be defined in ethical terms” as a real other than me (88), otherwise we would be dealing with conventional concern

4 The line of discussion here adopted in dealing with Sartre’s phenomenological approach to shame has usefully availed itself of Dan Zahavi’s (2014).

10  David Attwell et al. for public opinion or, paradoxically, with assertive self-referentiality (“we should hope that there is an internalized other […] that carries some genuine social weight. Without it, the convictions of autonomous self-legislation may become hard to distinguish from an insensate degree of moral egoism”, 100). The shame we are dealing with transcends both, and is the only form of shame that, if it does not crush the self into paralysis, or shame-rage spirals, or annihilating depression, can help to “rebuild” (90) it. *** In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on. (Sartre, Preface to The Wretched of the Earth) The interplay between sight (seeing/being seen) and nudity, so strong in Fanon, and employed by Sartre as structural hermeneutic imagery, undoubtedly in virtue of its all-too evident literal corresponding reality, is venerable tradition, as we all know. In noting how shame is “straightforwardly connected with nakedness, particularly in sexual connections”, Williams reminds us that the word aidoia, a derivative of aidōs, “shame”, is a standard Greek word for the “genitals” and that “similar terms are found in other languages” (1993, 78).5 That the phenomenology of shame is played out in the dynamic of the gaze is proved by the fact that shame may be induced also by the Other’s meaningful refraining from looking, or by the denial of his/her gaze. To be able not to look is not the same as not being able to look. The perpetrator sent by the Empire, Colonel Joll, in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) – that superb novel on torture and shame – has the power to decide whether to look or not and whether to be looked at or not, and he adopts the habit of screening his eyes through sunglasses, thus keeping for himself the voyeur-like privilege of looking without being looked at. At the other side of this macro-­ metaphor of agency through visual asymmetry, we have the victimized barbarian girl who has been practically blinded by his tortures. The Magistrate, in fact, uncovers his own mature, flaccid body before her, relying on the fact that he cannot be vulnerable to her gaze, though symbolically, the fact that he is concerned about it at all, that he feels shame at his own nudity is a symptom of his disloyalty to the narcissism of Empire. Émmanuel Lévinas wrote unforgettable pages in his essay De l’évasion (2003), originally published in 1935, on the symbolic significance of the gaze (visibility/invisibility) and of nudity, depicting a body caught in

5 The Old High German term scama and the pre-Germanic skem, for instance, mean “to cover”.

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  11 the state of the total vulnerability of the object. Here the nudity brought by shame is characterized as the “fact of being riveted to oneself. The radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to the self” (2003, 64). Significantly, Lévinas takes nausea, beside nudity, as the physical equivalent of shame (as in Fanon): “In nausea – which amounts to an impossibility of being what one is – we are at the same time riveted to ourselves, enclosed in a tight circle that smothers” (66). To Lévinas too, shame’s source is the ethical encounter with the Other who puts the subject’s arbitrary invisibility into question, this being relevant to the question of white shame. The phenomenological argument emphasizing the gaze helps us to put into sharper focus the reason why, when characterizing shamelessness, postcolonial literature and its accompanying criticism have recourse to the obscene (on this subject, more later). Besides, there is obvious critical potential to the study of shame in literature in an approach in which the body plays a prominent role: the body in postcolonial/neocolonial ­literature – especially in the more recently included motifs of the gay, lesbian, and queer politics of identity – and, more broadly, in any literary text that invokes a bio-political discourse. In underlying the transformative/performative power of shame, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick keenly observes that “asking good questions about shame and shame/performativity could get us somewhere with a lot of the recalcitrant knots that tie themselves into the guts of identity politics – yet without delegitimating the felt urgency and power of the notion of ‘identity’ itself” (2006, 618).

Shame and the Colonial Relation An emphasis on the Sartrean paradigm of shame as corroborated by Williams’s and Lévinas’s reflections throws light on its quintessentially relational dimension. Another good reason for privileging this philosophical approach is that it calls for some points of contact with those non-­European/Western philosophies which, in a similar way, see any person’s foundation in a communal outside, in the others of the community one belongs to (as in the Ubuntu and Aboriginal philosophies). And if this may lead to the individual’s subjection to non-negotiable hetero-normative laws of public shame (think of Rushdie’s use of this dynamic in the Pakistani postcolonial context of Shame, a multidirectional ‘universe’ of postmodern/postcolonial shaming, with particular attention to the ways in which it dangerously turns into pride), it also implies that any diminution in human dignity I might inflict on my Other is inflicted on my own humanity too, which is one of the great truths taught by colonization. When transposed into the postcolonial context, Sartre’s ­existential-phenomenological model can explain why the phrase colonial relation is an established signifier whose signifieds may certainly

12  David Attwell et al. be given different accents but that is not vulnerable to being contested. The phrase is charged with centuries old history in its various stages of exploration, colonization, imperialism, and post/neo-colonization. And, as effectively recapped by Achille Mbembe, L’un des apports décisifs de Said a été de montrer, contre la doxa marxiste de l’époque, que le project colonial n’était pas réductible à un simple dispositif militaro-économique, mais qu’il était soustendu par une infrastructure discursive, une économie symbolique, tout un appareil de savoirs don’t la violence était aussi bein épistemique que physique. (2010, 76) The complexity of the planetary history of Empire and consequently of the colonial relation is reflected in the complex phenomenology of shames produced by it in parallel with the rich phenomenology of fissures, ambiguities, double-binds, connivances, compromises, revolts, and repressions characterizing it. Mbembe is programmatically reminiscent of Said and Fanon’s lectio on this subject: Du début à la fin, le regime colonial fut traversé de fissures, de fêlures, de brèches, qu’il ne cessa de colmater et de boucher. (80) […] L’un des objets privilégiés des “études postcoloniales” est justement l’étude des transactions matérielles et symboliques et des interactions intersubjectives qui, dans le context colonial, permettaient de constituer le lien colonial. (147) Such relation, therefore, was never, or simply, one-sided and both parts were “pris non seulement dans des rapport de production, mais aussi dans des relations de pouvoir, de sens et de savoir” (147). The colonizers needed this relation since, as repeatedly emphasized by Albert Memmi and Fanon in particular, it was constitutive of their own identity. As Paul Gilroy says, The ruthless binary logic of colonial government placed black and white, settler and native in mutually antagonistic relation. They were separated spatially, but conceptually their common racialization ensured that they were bound to each other so tightly that each was unthinkable without the proximity and hostility of the other. This distinctive geometry of colonial power is notable for the stress it placed on recognition and interdependency […]. (2005, 51) Now, to return to the question of specificity, can the word ‘relation’ be made to fit the context of the Lager? In the concentration camp there is an inside, inhabited by exploitation, violence, and programmatic killing,

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  13 and an outside – usually removed as far as possible – going on in its grotesque normality: […] we must remember that Auschwitz was, is, a city where there are restaurants, theatres, even a nightclub probably. They have some in Poland too. There are children, schools. Back then as now, alongside Auschwitz – a concept by now; Auschwitz is the Lager – this other Auschwitz of the living exists. (Levi 2007) The colony and its subsequent postcolonial extension has no outside; it is no hidden exception to some other world – the metropolitan centre is all-too happy to play the Doctor Jekyll of its colonial Mr Hyde. It is in itself the whole unhidden world, a whole parapolitical, raciological system that more often than not could be defined as a normalized state of exception, the quasi-legalization of apartheid being an extreme example. Gilroy recalls for us Fanon’s analysis of the colonial order/nomos of race: for [Fanon] […] the political as Europe knew it simply did not exist there. Instead, the emergence of race-coded duality marked the suspension of political relations and fostered their replacement by a rather different set of what we could call parapolitical technologies and procedures. This innovation helped to make a special brutality […] into the engine of imperial projects so chronically absurd and yet so total in their infiltration of everyday life that they dared to try and to parcel up the earth itself along racial lines. (50) It is worthwhile also retrieving Achille Mbembe’s characterization of colonial “commandment”, its sovereignty’s main features, i.e. weakness and inflation of the notion of right, and violence – the latter inflected into founding violence, self-legitimating and self-authorizing violence, and violence designed to ensure this sovereignty’s spread and permanence (2001, 25–26). In his influential study of the postcolony as potentate, Mbembe is keen on pointing to the extended simulacra of this exercise of commandment in most African postcolonies, and much of what he lists, such as the system of privileges and immunities, the muddling of commanding with socializing and civilizing, and the socialization of arbitrariness (26ff.), may reasonably be said to characterize many ex-colonial realities of today. Crucially, material violence and the unconditionality and impunity of power in the colonial (and, even more scandalously so, in the postcolonial) world, given its vocation to durability and permanence, have needed (and need) forms of authentication in the subjects’ eyes and of subjection of their imaginary that find no correspondence whatsoever in the Lager and that are a major source of ‘nourishment’ for the colonial

14  David Attwell et al. relations. The psychic and social phenomenon of mimicry, in Homi Bhabha’s now canonical meaning, could have had no place there; no civilizing assumptions could have ever presided over the Nazi project for which its victims, supposedly contaminating sources of abjection, were below any standard of humanity with no possibility whatsoever of being ‘rescued’. It goes without saying that, in pointing this out, we certainly do not mean to play down the brutality of colonization and the huge cost paid by the colonized peoples in terms of suffering, deprivation, pain, and death. The orgy of colonial and imperial brutality, including famine and genocides, is full of revolting examples from diverse places and phases. Nevertheless, the colony, as a parapolitical entity, needed a carefully gauged network of hierarchies and connivances, the latter to be engaged through the enticement of admission into the vicinity of the whites’ “very exclusive Club” of their “species” (in the language inaugurated by Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth 1967, 18). It was also run through by tensions and revolts, i.e. by intransigence on the part of the colonized. In any case, even admitting of single exceptions, the death camp and, more broadly, the Nazi eugenic project, in systemically excluding any inter-subjective relation between the Aryan master race and the non-Aryans, between the perpetrators and their victims, systemically excluded the conditions of possibility not only for the colonial psycho-political pathology so intensely analyzed by Fanon but also for the ethical implications entailed in the colonial relation. The structural nature of this relation is such that it is only in ‘relational’ terms that possibilities to dismantle the colonial legacies in the present can be realized. As Gilroy puts it: Repudiation of those dualistic pairings – black/white, settler/native, colonizer/colonized – has become an urgent political and moral task. Like the related work of repairing the damage they have so evidently done, it can be accomplished via a concept of relation. This idea refers historians and critics of racism to the complex, tangled, profane and sometimes inconvenient forms of interdependency. It provides a productive starting point for the work Fanon describes as “dis-alienation”, by which he meant the unmaking of racialized bodies and their restoration to properly human modes of being in the world. (2005, 42) Rwanda has provided history with an appalling extension of the colonial relational system into postcoloniality. In Mahmood Mamdani’s lucid and chilling words, “Whereas Nazis made every attempt to separate victims from perpetrators, the Rwandan genocide was very much an intimate affair. […] carried out by hundreds of thousands, perhaps even more, and witnessed by millions” (2002, 6, our emphasis). He warns

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  15 that “if the postcolonial pursuit of justice turned into revenge and built on the colonial legacy, one needs to be aware lest postgenocidial reconciliation also turns into an embrace of the colonial legacy” (18). Another compelling example of the relational economy of the colony and again of the “intimate affair” generated by colonial practices is to be found in the assimilationist policies affecting aboriginal people, and in particular people of mixed descent, in post-federation white Australia and throughout most of the twentieth century. The programme of assimilation was a social and cultural as well as genetic attempt to separate children of part-European descent from “full-blood” Aborigines while encouraging them to marry and couple with white people. The legislation regulating the relations between white and indigenous Australians was meant to lead to a genetic absorption of the Aborigines into the white population and was enforced by the so-called “Protectors of Aborigines” who were invested with the guardianship of all Aboriginal people in their jurisdiction. The aim to regulate and control the “shaming” and threatening spread of miscegenation by prohibiting certain relationships and encouraging others gives evidence of a well-constructed system of colonial relations based, in Gilroy’s words again, on “complex, tangled and inconvenient forms of interdependency”, still in force in the postcolonial context. To put it bluntly, shame in the concentration camp, paradoxically, is only experienced by the prisoners, and it concerns their relation to their inmates: if the death camp prisoner feels shame it is for the inhumanity “forced on” (Hutchinson 2008, 116) them, for not acting in defence of them, or if they feel shame towards those who have not survived, for having survived in their place (the so-called ‘survivor guilt’ as explained by Primo Levi, Bruno Bettelheim, and Elie Wiesel). As to the perpetrators, they were systemically ‘immunized’ from feeling shame before their victims by the consistent stigmatization of the latter, which, by depriving them of humanity, allowed no space for any ethical crisis (admittedly, and uncannily, this could be said of many perpetrators facing Truth Commissions, not only in South Africa). Significantly, the inmate’s shame of oneself before the Other, “the just man’s shame at another man’s crime” (Levi 2000, The Truce 188), is re-instated in the survivors’ encounter with the camp’s outsiders, and, from this point of view, Levi’s description of the Russian soldiers’ shamed eyes before the corpses and the barely alive prisoners left behind in the camp at Auschwitz remains a necessary and unrepressable reading (187–188). This “relational grammar” of shame is also what Liz Constable finds proposed, again and again, by the contributors to the 1999 monographic issue of L’Ésprit Créateur devoted to shame, where “states of shame” are seen to cut through “intrapsychic, intersubjective, transgenerational, intercultural or intracultural relations” (Constable 1999, 4). She observes opportunely for our purposes that “in order to think through the

16  David Attwell et al. work of shame as relational grammar, an affect which crosses between the social and psychic, and yet, to be able to undertake this work without resorting to an anthropological or sociological cultural determinism or reverting to a dehistoricized psyche, we need to work back and forth between the two levels” (9). Now, in approaching shame in postcolonial literature, having care to “work back and forth between the two levels” while avoiding culturalist determinisms, one cannot but meet with a complex and interrelated phenomenology of shame: the shame of blackness, the shame of miscegenation, the ‘white shame’ or the transgenerational shame tainting the colonizers’ descendants, the shame entailed in mimicry and assimilation, the shame of women resulting from sexual exploitation and double colonization, the shameful postcolonial biopolitics of migration – to name just a few, main types. As to the shame of miscegenation, which figures more prominently in the global context of postcolonial literatures, it is useful to quote Zoë Wicomb’s incisive words on the coloureds’ “condition of postcoloniality [seen] through the concept of shame”, and on the lasting shadow shed by miscegenation: Miscegenation, the origins of which lie within a discourse of ‘race’, concupiscence, and degeneracy, continues to be bound up with shame, a pervasive shame exploited in apartheid’s strategy of the naming of a Coloured race, and recurring in the current attempts by coloureds to establish brownness as a pure category, which is to say a denial of shame. […] shame, cross-eyed and shy, stalks the postcolonial world broken mirror in hand, reproducing itself in puzzling distortions. (1998, 92)

Shame and/in Postcolonial Literature Far from attempting to absolve our own criticism from inadequacy and implication with respect to the chosen object of scrutiny, what we intend to highlight, however, is the reactive potential of the shame affect. This dimension of shame is worth considering because it entails giving agency to postcolonial shame phenomenology and to its literary house. In saying that, we need to qualify and contextualize as well as offer a contrasting, perhaps counter-intuitive, view of the relationship between shame and literature that is being advanced; here we imply literature tout court, although the relationship is particularly cogent in its postcolonial inflections. For the relationship between shame and literature undoubtedly has high critical potential. For the sake of argumentation, let us return to Bewes’s assertion according to which, “in literary works, shame […] appears overtly, as the text’s experience of its own inadequacy” (2011, 3);

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  17 in addition, let us pick up his contention that “in the twentieth century it becomes possible to see the worthlessness or inadequacy of writing no longer as an interruption of, or a detraction from, literary creativity, […] but as precisely constitutive of its worth […] [its] truth value” (19). Now while we find the choice of the term “worthlessness” problematic, in what follows Bewes appears to us to be safeguarding the worth of the aesthetic effort in trying to deal with one, very simple and very true, fact: that, put in Levi’s words, “our language is human, born to describe things at a human level” (2001, in Cortellessa). And yet it is literature that takes upon itself the challenge of facing these conditions, including the measure of its own inadequacy. It is no coincidence that, when they approach the experience of shame, philosophers resort to literature (as is the case with Bernard Williams, Michael Morgan, and Phil Hutchinson, and of course Bewes himself as he compellingly follows in Deleuze’s steps in a ‘bifocal’ reading of shame through literature and film, both in The Event of Postcolonial Shame and in the chapter closing this volume). A visceral resistance to tell is constitutive of shame, of its desire for self-effacement – “it is after all the very nature of shame to stifle its own discourse” (Wicomb 1998, 92). Silvan Tomkins writes, “the shame response […] stands in the same relation to looking and smiling as silence to speech” (1995, 134). To communicate shame is always difficult: sometimes impossible and at other times excruciating. The characteristic struggle that takes place in the person experiencing shame is one between the urge to disclose and the impulse to conceal (Miller 1985, 36). Literature, or, to put this another way, the peculiar modalities of truth in literature, provide shame with the indispensable screen that reveals, that covers and uncovers at the same time. As Caitlin Charos has it, “with its unique possibilities for exploring ambiguities and elusive feelings”, it “may be the one realm where the potentially brutal or divisive effects of shame can be ethically imagined” (2009, 284). Our contention here is that the literary, and fiction in particular, can house the aporetic ‘double movement’ that characterizes the relation entertained by shame with language/speech, that is of avoidance and at the same time of urge to tell. This behaviour of shame in the locutory economy of fiction forges its poetics, which is a reason why it is fundamental and rewarding to study shame’s textual modes, its rhetorical strategies, and its fissured and fragile textures. Beautiful examples can be found, for example, in the fiction of two prominent authors and critics like South African Zoë Wicomb and Australian Gail Jones, where shame figures conspicuously. In the new South Africa haunted by the persistence of racial, sexual, and political shame, with her complex and crystal-like art treasuring the incandescent heritage left by Bessie Head in A Question of Power (1974), as well as Coetzee’s devastatingly measured intensity, Zoë Wicomb is among those writers (possibly also Achmat Dangor and Phaswane Mpe) who have so courageously given hospitality to it in their

18  David Attwell et al. works. As observed by Charos in her remarkable essay, “States of Shame: South African Writing after Apartheid”, their texts may be seen to share a narrative mechanism: the double discourse of shame [which] has a singular capacity to both expose and conceal, to probe what appears in discourse and what is suppressed […] it follows that shame would effect a kind of circular gridlock in language, resurfacing and then effacing itself whenever its subject comes to the brink of exposure. (280) In Wicomb’s acclaimed novel David’s Story (2000), this double movement is, as it were, simultaneously reinforced and complicated by the presence of a female narrator, the amanuensis of the Griqua protagonist, David, a former African National Congress (ANC) guerrilla. She should function as the ‘trustee’ of his memories/stories, but instead she appears to the reader more like the frustrated ‘midwife’ of his incomplete, interrupted, and deeply reticent narrative fragments which, when they resurface, cut like broken glass. Shame envelops David’s concern with his coloured (Griqua) identity and with his roots in coloured complicities. It envelops the persistence of a grammar of purity identifying Africanness with Blackness in the allegedly non-racialist Movement he belongs to. It also enfolds his resistance to fully acknowledge and denounce (having himself suffered from it) ANC’s shameful violence within its own ranks, in detainment camps, especially on women (a shame that, in reality, turned out not to be among the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s or TRC’s agenda of priorities), in particular on coloured Dulcie. After walking throughout the broken and recursive rhythm of David’s jagged stories, the reader is left with a strong sense of suspension and expectancy; with David’s incapacity to reconcile himself with his own shamingly green, beautiful eyes; and with his confused and aching feelings for Dulcie. As Dorothy Driver observes, For David, Dulcie remains at a stage of unrepresentability, not least because certain aspects of her treatment cannot be faced, since facing them would force him to confront his own past not only as victim but also as victimizer. Thus the notion of the unrepresentable, so fashionable a concept in postmodern and postcolonial debate, is deconstructed in Wicomb’s text: it is given a historical context and a political force. (2001, 232) Similarly, in the postcolonial Australian context, shamefully faced with the publicly denounced consequences of colonial exploitation and assimilation policies, the political force of “unrepresentability” also shapes Gail Jones’s Sorry (2007). The novel significantly states from its outset the unspeakability of Australian traumatic history:

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  19 A whisper: sssshh. The thinnest vehicle of breath. This is a story that can only be told in a whisper. There is a hush to difficult forms of knowing, an abashment, a sorrow, an inclination towards silence. (3) The story of Perdita, confronted with the horror of her father’s brutal violence and overwhelmed by unbearable shame turned into stuttering and memory loss, is an allegory of cultural forgetting (231). It represents the contemporary political inability to cope with a shameful historical past at a time when the much expected apologies of the government to the Indigenous people of Australia had not been given yet. The unspeakability and forgetfulness of Perdita’s (and of the Nation’s) past is given voice and memory through Jones’s writing. The fragmented structure of the narrative, the pervasive use of intertextuality, and the language of trauma allow Perdita’s shame and silence to speak loudly. The novel thus becomes a representative example of the literature of shame. It is itself an ‘act of apology’ proving that, as Sue Kossew argues, “writing is the only means through which it is possible at the very least to perform a communal act of ethical engagement” (2013, 181). On the accommodating, hospitable space that literature provides to the phenomenology of shame, Nicolas Martin-Granel is on point: literary language can “assumer la honte à la première personne … en absorbant la honte de tous” (1995, 743). This reflection is very close to our own view and fundamental to the essays collected here. The deeply visceral and inbred shame of saying/writing itself in any vulnerable or open, non-affective, non-fictional space (whether documentary, history, the media, etc.) is specifically addressed in the enunciative space of the literary. This happens not only because the latter, constitutionally, keeps the narrator’s voices separate from the author’s, even in autobiographical texts, but also because these voices are given collective and indeed universal resonance by that very statute. Importantly, however, Martin-Granel’s appeal to the Barthesian notion of the author’s death (“qui parle” in fiction?) and the seeming pact of irresponsibility triggered by the act of writing are not to be meant in any absolving sense, neither for the author nor for the readers. On the contrary, any literary text housing shame appeals to everybody’s belonging to humankind. The anonymity of the fictional voice becomes itself the Other or the “indispensable mediator” (Sartre, in Hutchinson 109), the witness figure, or the third person (to recuperate Taylor’s model). It resonates with more, not less, shameful and shame-inducing force, functioning, as it were, as the scapegoat that is charged with saying the unsayable, with the shame of calling inhumanity by its human name, without allowing for ethical shortcuts or shame-free zones. By doing so, its gesture enacts in author-readers a circuit of vicarious experience of

20  David Attwell et al. shame, “at once a measure of civilization and a condition of civilization” (Tomkins in Kosofsky Sedgwick and Frank 1995, 162). Martin-Granel is writing from within a discourse on shame in postcolonial African literature, in the aftermath of the failures of the so-called soleils des indépendances, and of democracy in the potentates. His scrutiny of L’État honteux (1981) and La Vie et demi (1979) by Sony Labou Tansi, from Congo-Brazzaville, is cogent and fascinating. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990) and Rushdie’s Shame (1983) are also among the texts he considers as he is perfectly aware of the “shame connection” offered by explosions of violence and inhumanity worldwide, to the point that he feels tempted to propose the phrase “world shame” in the wake of “world music” or “world fiction” (786): a provocative boutade that, for being sarcastic, is no less tragic: […] à mesure que l’écriture élargit l’horizon de l’humanité, dans la mesure où les guerres se font à la fois mondiales et civiles, où le “crimes contre l’humanité” touchent, indistinctement, toute “l’espèce humaine”, toutes les hontes particulières, nationales, finisssent par se confondre dans le mot d’une seule subjectivité: celui ­d’Hannah Arendt à un ami de jeunesse qui, au lendemain de la guerre, lui disait d’avoir honte d’être Allemande: “Moi, j’ai honte d’être de la race humaine.” (Martin-Granel 1995, 788) The relationship between shame and literature in the modes discussed earlier can also throw light on the undeniable fact that literature has the bitter ‘privilege’ of largely anticipating other discourses (of politics, philosophy, sociology, etc.) in acknowledging the dramatic urgency and need for sheltering and opening shame to inquiry. Often literature has been left alone in daring to tell the shame that was not to be told/denounced, to witness the inhuman. Indeed, Agamben’s following reflection on testimony and shame is worth mentioning here: “Human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the inhuman” (1999, 121). That shame is crucially revealing as to what it means to be human was a point also insisted on by Max Scheler when he famously wrote that it is so fundamentally a human emotion that neither God nor animals could experience it (1957, 91). It should also be pointed out that the literary treatments of shame have been made to pay their price in isolation: let us think of the all-too many authors who have been censored or persecuted, imprisoned, and killed by regimes that have so obviously and tragically failed to take Genette’s divide between récit fictionnel and récit factuel seriously. Rightly so, one might ironically add, since those persecutions and censorships are the powerful counterevidence of literature’s performative charge: of the fact that fiction’s ‘lies’ are truthful, that it can be a truthful and unbearable vessel of shame especially to the powerful.

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  21 This gesture of shame in literature – and particularly in postcolonial literature, given its reactive, political vocation – is a necessary stage of deep reflection, re-orientation, and change. This it does also by representing, and warning against, the dangerous use that can be made of shame when the subject experiencing it is not prepared for self-scrutiny and change, or when it ‘falls’ into the wrong hands, as it were. Not incidentally, psychologists have traditionally considered shame a negative affect for the all-too possible negative responses it can engender, such as depression, aggressiveness, violence, and extreme narcissism (see Tangney and Dearing 2002, among others). One may act responsibly on it, by owning it, but one may also deny acknowledgement to its voice and react destructively, and this may happen both at an individual level and at a collective/national level. The “shame-rage spiral” (Lewis 1987), i.e. the transformation or displacement of shame, especially when it shares in humiliation, into rage and aggressiveness can lead to other, even worse, (shaming) acts of violence or exclusion, with lasting, transgenerational effects, rather than contributing to prevent its return in the generations to come. It is a grim experience handed down to us by history that from the humiliation inflicted by conflicts and lost wars, the worst waves of new aggression have arisen. It is a strong argument held by the distinguished sociologist Norbert Elias that Hitler and the Nazi project could rely on the Germans’ inability to come to terms with the shameful humiliation in the aftermath of the First World War (1998). The present post/neo-colonial, neo-imperial contexts abound in tragic developments of the shame-rage spiral, especially when it is astutely and shamelessly exploited by the powerful ones. How crucial and decisive becomes the capacity to reckon with the colonial inheritance in a lucid, responsible, and constructive way can never be insisted upon too much. If one keeps in mind the fundamental link between the shame affect and identity, or identification/dis-identification, one is better equipped to better understand its possible effects on those who are unprepared for reflection and re-orientation and are easy prey to collective manipulation in those political scenarios in which questions of belonging and identity are played out cunningly by men of power. Here, facing the many postcolonial/neocolonial forms of exploitation and inhumanity, one cannot but go back to Fanon, as does Gilroy, and his insistence that political independence would not, by itself, assure freedom from the shame of the narcissisms of colonial grammar: The insight arises amidst [Fanon’s] consideration of a moment of danger in which the national liberation project can be hijacked and people moving out of alienation are offered back the spurious comforts of racial and ethnic differences in exchange for their human freedom. (2005, 53)

22  David Attwell et al. Governments, populist politicians, and various demagogic ‘tribunes’ mystifying and capitalizing on these promises of comfort are ‘democratically’ and shamelessly shared by ex-colonizing and ex-colonized countries nowadays. To the whites of Europe only others from former colonies can be “ethnic”, as Mbembe ironically remarks with reference to postcolonial France: L’utilisation répétée du qualificatif “etnique” pour nommer [les minorités] ainsi que pour designer leurs pratiques est de ce fait stratégique. D’une part, elle ne se comprend qu’en reference au nondit selon lequel ‘les Français blancs ne sont pas ‘ethniques’. D’autre part, elle cherche à souligner leur inassimilabilité 2010, 138–139 Or, the other way round, to the white Europeans, their own ethnos is the absolute virtuous paradigm against which any other cannot but prove itself largely inferior. On the construction of a “distinctively English ethnicity” that has fed the hegemonic and racist discourse of British imperialism and nationalism, we refer the reader to Stuart Hall’s classic essay “New Ethnicities” (1996). At the same time the ethnic tensions argument has been and still is being used nowadays by Britain and other world powers to depict conflicts in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. As if ethnic diversity in these regions and their related divisions had not been reinforced, if not caused, by colonial administrations and by border creation and partition in the aftermath of the two World Wars. Race, ethnic branding, and essentializing have not stopped with the formal end of colonialisms. In the same way, the shameful policies linked to them have not ceased working against establishing an authentically postcolonial future. Let us consider the most tragic, shameful extension of the raciologics of colonialism in postcolonial Africa: the Tutsi genocide in 1994. In trying to think politically the unthinkable horror of the Rwanda genocide at the hands of a criminal population, including a disproportionate number of the educated (politicians, doctors, teachers, nurses, judges, human rights activists, and clergymen), given to torture and utmost cruelty – this being the “true moral dilemma of the Rwanda genocide” (2001/2002, 7) – Mamdani convincingly contends that The great crime of colonialism went beyond expropriating the native, the name that it gave to the indigenous population. The greater crime was to politicize indigeneity in the first place: first negatively, as a settler libel of the native; but then positively, as a native response, as a self-assertion. The dialectic of the settler and the native did not end with colonialism and political independence […] It is in this context that Tutsi, a group with a privileged relationship to power before colonialism, got constructed as a privileged alien

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  23 settler presence, first by the great nativist revolution of 1959, and then by Hutu Power propaganda after 1990. […] This was not an ethnic but a “racial” cleansing […] Yet in defining the Tutsi as a foreign race, even if without knowing it, they were reaffirming the colonial legacy and construing themselves the same way that Belgian colonialism had construed them prior to independence. (14, 190) “Central to the operation of stigma is a dehumanization of the victim” (Nussbaum 2004, 221) that cancels the human individuality of the Other, who becomes a member representative of a shamed group. The Rwanda genocide is only one extreme example of the continuing dynamic of stigmatization of the ‘enemy’/alien/stranger that is strongly dependent on (shameless) policies of shame. In holding up a notion of “constructive shame” that, being the result of critical self-examination, entails an anti-narcissistic sense of common human vulnerability (213), Martha Nussbaum observes that people who inflict shame are very often not expressing virtuous motives or high ideals, but rather a shrinking from their human weakness and a rage against the very limits of human life […] Behind the moralism is something much more primitive, something that inherently involves the humiliation and dehumanization of others, because it is only in that way that the self can defend its fragile narcissim […]; the people who are likely to be targets of the shamer’s rage are […] anyone who reminds the ‘normal’ of his weakness, anyone who can become, as it were, the scapegoat of these weaknesses, carrying them out of the community (232–233; 235) Stigmatizing feelings and practices is the easy way to silence many a conscience in the ‘enlightened’ heart of old empire(s), notably contemporary Europe, where the arrival of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers is met with inconsistent, hostile, and more often violent and inhuman reactions. The absolute urgency of a reflection on postcolonial shame(s) is evidenced by what we are witnessing at present in Europe, with its cultural and political unpreparedness and false consciousness vis-à-vis the migrant crisis in the fading of an organic society, à la Comte and Durkheim, in which divisions of class and culture were contained, ideally at least, within national boundaries. […] On the rise is a rather different archetype: that of the state as citadel; of its territory as embattled homeland; of prisons as sites not of recuperation but of the warehousing of those deemed disposable, or exploitable at rock-bottom rates; of borders as elusive lines to be drawn and redrawn within the polity and beyond against the endless thereat of others who challenge its moral and corporeal

24  David Attwell et al. integrity. […] This […] is the world of Carl Schmitt, in which politics is not about democratic participation and redistribution but about securing the frontier between autochthon and intruder, good and evil, citizenship and subjection. (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 107) The present postcolonial condition, in point of fact, is substantially, and globally, characterized by the unprecedented rise of the so-called “reverse colonization”, or reverse pressure exercised by migrations on the old metropolitan centres since the end of the Second World War. In this context non-Western peoples, the descendants of the colonized and, more broadly, the communities of migrants or post-migrants are a continuous reminder of the tight connection linking migrations with the postcolonial condition and of the dire need for a continuous anti-colonial rejection of what Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, called “Manichean delirium”. The homeland of Human Rights has been and is denying shelter and hospitality to helpless human beings flying for their lives from civil wars, dictatorships, international ‘intelligent’ bombs, chemical weapons, ethnic cleansings and persecutions, torture, hunger, and famine. The photograph of Aylan Kurdi – the three-year-old refugee Syrian boy drowned and found dead on the shoreline of Bodrum – a shaming indictment to the West, has all too soon exhausted its shocking effect. Frontiers, functioning as the undemocratic dispositifs of democratic state-nation (Balibar 2004), have been re-sacralized by legislations promoting sanitizing expulsions and close borders. Walls, barbed wire, and refugee detention camps have re-emerged from recent history and multiplied. What Hannah Arendt remarked in 1966, with reference to the stateless produced and rejected like superfluous waste by nation-states, especially in the wake of the geo-political agreements established by world powers after the two World Wars, people who suddenly became “unfortunate exception[s] to an otherwise sane and normal rule” (1994, 267–268), holds even truer nowadays. “Since the Rights of Man were proclaimed to be ‘inalienable,’ irreducible to and undeducible from other rights or laws”, she wrote, “no authority was invoked for their establishment; Man himself was their source as well as their ultimate goal” (291). Yet it soon became clear that to stateless people, as well as to minorities, “the loss of national rights was identical with loss of human rights, that the former inevitably entailed the latter” (292). Cogently she later concluded that “the world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human”: “a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man” (299, 300). For “the scum of the earth” (287), for these legal freaks with no right to opinion or action, the concept of bare lives developed by Agamben in Homo Sacer has been opportunely invoked, uncannily and shamefully for all of us. However, this should not play down the force of reaction and resistance, and the challenge coming from them. The shame of

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  25 boats full of migrants stranded at sea, the shame of lifeless bodies on the shores of the Mediterranean sea turned into a tomb, the shame of the makeshift cemeteries for migrants without names, the shame of “hot returns” accompanied with police brutality, the shame of civil “immigrant hunters” (such as in Bulgaria), the shame of the mere existence of refugee detention camps for this economically superfluous and undesirable “scum” forced into a permanent ‘wait for life’: all this has become a political detonator, forcefully exploding the obviousness of the concepts of citizenship, belonging, territory, boundary/frontier, and materially disrupting the equation between political citizenship and national identity. This shame writes in capital letters the need for transnationally thinking not only justice (in the wake of the tragic need for international courts of justice, arising from crimes against humanity), but also citizenship itself, asking for a reconceptualization of the ius soli – all this while the ius sanguinis continues to seek worldwide for sacrificial victims. Postcolonial literature has been soliciting this re-conceptualization in advance, especially through the “multidirectional” technique of crossing and linking migrant or diasporic lives. Vicarious shame has been invoked as the reaction of decent people to the shamelessness of the powerful in the still-imperial world as well as in the African postcolony. On the latter, and on the “satraps”’ economy and stylistics of power, with obscenity as one of its main vectors, has written incisively Mbembe, in his seminal study on the postcolony (2001, ch. 3). Fascinatingly, the literature that has courageously taken inspiration from this shameful and grotesque obscenity has had to find adequate formal registers, to respond to the shameless with a shamelessly shaming strategy, as it were. Black Sunlight (1980) by Dambuzo Marechera was banned in Zimbabwe by the censorship board for obscenity and immorality, but this experimental, compelling parody of African racial essentialisms and of the corruption and power bulimia of its presidents-for-life is unequivocal as to where and to whom obscenity and immorality are to be attributed. Vicarious shame for our feeling of powerlessness in witnessing the shamelessness of those in power who rule the nation we belong to and who act in our name has been fuelled by the ‘obscene’ policies of diverse Western administrations. Their shamelessness is in direct proportion to their self-defining assumptions of democracy, liberalism, and humanism. Writing on the shame meted out to Americans by the use of shame in the tortures inflicted on the Abu Ghraib Muslim prisoners – a subject on which J.M. Coetzee has written his most explicit and outraged j’accuse in the tenth chapter of his Diary of a Bad Year (2007) entitled “On National Shame” – John Limon keenly argues that the shamelessness of the Bush Administration was perfectly “part of the strategy”, that the shame felt by thousands of Americans was built symmetrically into it (2007, 546).

26  David Attwell et al. Therefore, it should not cause surprise that in a world still so crossed through and through by exclusive inflections of identity, in a world witnessing the upsurge of old and new imperialistic policies and feelings, fundamentalism, and its shaming laws of belonging, can thrive: fundamentalism, … is not just a kind of belief system that chooses to return to fundaments, but also a strong shame culture where everyone tries to live up to the absolutist communal standards. This threatens to silence the internal voice, erasing entirely the authority [of conscience]. (Heller 2003, 1029) *** That said, it bears repetition that shame can have a powerful reconstructive or repairing effect. It is in this connection that, significantly, shame differentiates itself from guilt. “The structures of shame”, holds Williams, “contain the possibility of controlling and learning from guilt, because they give a conception of one’s ethical identity […] Shame can understand guilt, but guilt cannot understand itself”. Above all, “[guilt] cannot by itself […] rebuild the self […] and the world in which that self has to live. Only shame can do that, because it embodies conceptions of what one is and of how one is related to others” (Williams 1993, 93–94). It is exactly this power that makes of shame an index of humanity and hope, and it is also on shame’s healing power that the historically unprecedented experience of the TRC in South Africa made a hopeful bet, in the exceedingly vulnerable aftermath of the end of apartheid, as part of the negotiations that managed to avoid the menace of a bloody revolution. “If Rwanda was the genocide that happened, then South Africa was the genocide that didn’t”, comments Mamdani, singling out in the 1994 general elections the “defining event” making possible the transition to a postapartheid era” (2001/2002, 185). However, besides the political transition, the affective transition had to be as much, if not more, decisive, and the TRC took upon itself that task. This is not the place to present and discuss the varied and, at times, much contrastive, views on the Commission’s mixed results. However, there is no doubt as to the crucial role played by shame in the process of programmatic reconciliation, by the painful, shaming, and shameful, speaking out of the victims (much less shameful in the perpetrators’ case) in the public forum of the new Republic. That this form of “nation-building”, to quote Sara Ahmed, may run the risk of “re-covering” and archiving, or passing over, “in the very desire to move beyond shame into pride” (2004, 111–112), is difficult to be denied, as much as it is difficult to deny Mamdani’s admonishment. Yet, unfailingly and lucidly, literature is there to house the shame of rampant xenophobia and crime in multicultural new South Africa.

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  27 “[P]utting shame to work in the national narrative of ‘feeling better’” (2009, 278), in Charos’s words, and making a ‘constative’, rather than performative, use of shame is the actual risk run by legislated professions of shame that have been involving various communities and governments ‘tainted’ by the crimes of colonialism/imperialism, in order to start overdue reconciliatory processes and overcome transgenerational conflictual feelings and social disorders. Unfailingly, the doubt that shame is the cultural strategic policy resorted to when facing the all-too pragmatic problems due to the lasting effects of the past crimes in the present is perfectly legitimate, and the suspicion can only be dispelled by effective action, to be measured by political and material changes that contribute to creating new, and shared, symbolic horizons of humanity. The institution of Sorry Days as well as official apologies offered to the indigenous people for past actions of violence, discrimination, and wrongs have taken place only in few postcolonial countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Taiwan, but much more is still to be done, and other belated imperial powers, like Japan or Italy, are still coping with ambiguity and reticence. The ethics of reconciliation invoked and staged in various national contexts, and through various policies of national memory are powerful counter-evidence of the political urgency of shame. Wherever they have been proposed, official Sorry Days symptomatically have caused and are causing in their turn public refusals of repentance and vitriolic denunciations of “the tyranny of penance” (to quote the French essay-pamphlet La Tyrannie de la Pénitence. Essai sur le masochism occidental, by Pascal Bruckner 2006). For the telling difference between guilt and shame lies in the fact that shame cannot be forced on us, and we cannot decide to feel shame as shame is thrust upon us. Conservative or defensive reactions (and many other of similar nature elsewhere) are a clear sign of a dismaying lack of the necessary cultural conditions for its possibility. Despite multicultural policies, the real problem for the peoples involved in the legacies of planetary colonialism/imperialism is that of working through their history in order not to remain hostages to it. For the former colonized this means not to be able to overcome the colonial grammar, especially when the latter remains imbricated with a reactive reinforcement of the autochthonous absolutes of patriarchy and clanism. For the former colonizers this means to fully realize that the immigrant is now here because Britain, Europe, was once out there; that basic fact of global history is not usually deniable. And yet, its grudging recognition provides a stimulus for forms of hostility rooted in the associated realization that today’s unwanted settlers carry all the ambivalence of empire with them … the incoming strangers, trapped inside our perverse local logic of race, nation, and ethnic absolutism not only represent the vanished empire but also

28  David Attwell et al. refer consciousness to the unacknowledged pain of its loss and the unsettling shame of its bloody management. (Gilroy 2005, 100–101) It means to look in the face the nation’s silences or “lies about crimes” that the foremost historian of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill, in his 1989 Conway Memorial Lecture,6 bitterly lamented were being evaded. Three decades later, the revelations on the recent “Windrush Scandal” confirm that this evasion of responsibility for the past imperial crimes still continues.7 It means to abandon the “melancholic” syndrome analyzed by Gilroy, in order to “transform paralyzing guilt into a more productive shame that would be conducive to the building of a multicultural nationality that is no longer phobic about the prospect of exposure to either strangers or otherness” (99, our emphasis). This term, exposure, better than any other captures and valourizes the feeling of foreignness/alterity or unbelonging of ourselves to ourselves triggered by shame (“our inability not to identify with this being who is already foreign to us and whose motives for acting we can no longer comprehend”, Lévinas 2003, 63): in that space of foreignness and identitary vertigo the subject can redefine himself/herself and stop cultivating “le fantasme de ‘l’homme sans Autre’” (Mbembe 2010, 150). What, at present, is absolutely necessary, if we want to believe that a different world and a better humanity are possible, is that this dis-orientation/ self-alienation is accepted, that it is invited. Above all, that it is reciprocal, that it is conducive to a different, really postcolonial, relation. It is one of the lasting lessons of Fanon’s that humanity is not given once for 6 See Christopher Hill, “Lies about Crimes”, in England’s Turning Point (1998), pp. 189–195 (first published in The Guardian, 29 May 1989): Have we come to grips with these horrors in our past, as German historians are trying to come to grips with Nazism? The presence of descendants of slaves in our country today, in large numbers, poses social problems. They come here because the economies of the West Indies have not recovered from the concentration of slave grown crops to the detriment of other forms of economic activity. For this we are mainly responsible. Is this not something that a new curriculum might encourage children in British schools to think about?” (194) 7 The reference is to the apologies forced upon UK Prime Minister Theresa May and Home Office minister Amber Rudd following the “Windrush scandal” over the treatment of people from the so-called “Windrush generation”, Caribbean immigrants who arrived in the UK after the World War II to address labour shortages. Many of them had arrived as children on their parents’ passports and although they have lived in Britain for many decades – paying taxes and insurance – they never formally became British citizens. In recent months a multitude of reports have come out about most of them, now elderly people, being denied services, losing their jobs and even facing deportation. In reaction to all this, David Lammy, an opposition member of the UK parliament, on last April 12, launched a scathing critique of the government, telling parliamentarians that was a “day of shame”.

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  29 all and is not defined a priori. We are ‘thrown’ into it and unequally so.8 Still, it is not only given to us, it is to be created by us. As long as shame is possible, this re-orientation, re-creation, of our selves will be possible. Hopefully, it will entail a deep historical, philosophical, and ethical reflection on its reasons. In the meantime, literature will continue to give shame poetic asylum.

A Synopsis of the Book’s Chapters The book collects contributions offered by internationally distinguished and emerging scholars coherently integrated around the central theme of shame and postcolonial literature. They tackle different areas and ­authors – among them, J.M. Coetzee, Derek Walcott, Caryl Phillips, A.S. Patric, Christine Piper, Cory Taylor, Kate Grenville, and K.S. Prichard. Our choice for an edited collection, rather than a monograph, has entailed a multivocal approach to such a complex and thorny matter. While aiming at contributing to critical theory by problematizing and promoting discussion on the subject, the book devotes substantial space to close readings of significantly representative literary texts. In this way, a rich and engaging variety of perspectives is provided. Key-themes working as heuristic conceptual tools recur in the chapters and act as bridges, thus providing fruitful food for comparison and a cohesive, though variously inflected, ‘grammar’ of shame in postcolonial literature. In particular, the topic of shame has been investigated, in selected literary texts, in connection with the following issues: the incommensurability and incommunicability of shame; the ethical space of literature; shame and recognition; shame and agency in the condition of coloniality; shamelessness, vulgarity, and the possibility for realism in literature; racism and miscegenation in the colony/postcolony; individual and historical shame; white shame, complicity, and responsibility; willed forgetfulness, remembrance, and reconciliation; shame and the historical novel; the shameful effects of border laws and refugee policies; and shameful silence on neo-colonialisms. The volume does not seek to be fully representative of all the territories of the British Empire, and its chapters are coherently integrated around the three main areas of South Africa (a complex reality of both settler and exploitation colony), Australia (settler colony), and the Caribbean (exploitation colony). These are considered as most representative of the neuralgic phenomenology of shame, which is inbred in the raciologics of colonization and Empire, and of the black/white Manichean delirium that so preoccupied Frantz Fanon and that continues to do so

8 “We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights”, Arendt 301.

30  David Attwell et al. in the work of postcolonial thinkers like Achille Mbembe and Paul Gilroy. It is that specific power theatre that this volume intends to address in investigating shame in postcolonial literature. While the South Asian area of India and Pakistan is imbricated in the history of the British Empire and race in the context of the Raj and its consequences are clearly an important and cogent issue, still the primary source of shame in that context is the Dalit history and presence that pre-existed British colonization and that, though running parallel to it, was not, strictly speaking, directly consequent on it or dialectically engaged in it.9 While shame investigated in that specific context is certainly a powerful topic, it has not been included here. *** David Attwell’s opening chapter “Writing in, of and around Shame: J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K” compellingly strikes at the heart of the volume’s investigations by putting on the table cogent questions: “Can aesthetic and literary invention represent the condition of shame from the inside?”, “Are there ways of engaging with it that are both responsive to its social causes and aesthetically inventive?” Attwell explores these questions by delving into Nobel Prize winner, South African author J.M. Coetzee’s writing of shame in Life and Times of Michael K (1983). In preparing his ground for it, he first compares Bernard Williams’s (1993) with Timothy Bewes’s (2011) different accounts of the tractability and ethical productiveness and creativity of writing shame and, while leaning towards the former’s more positive and open position, he gives Bewes’s main arguments of intractability and incommensurability (between the overbearing legacies of colonialism and postcolonial writing) their historical and material due. He also gives examples of the “uncertain outcomes of political shaming”, intersecting with the problem of “moral double thinking” in settler/colonial societies nowadays as discussed by Coetzee in conversation with psychoanalyst Arabella Kurtz (Coetzee and Kurtz 2015). Still, having in mind Étienne Balibar’s thesis of how politics may, actually should, enact a conversion of violence into public-democratic discourse, he returns to consider how literature can creatively articulate, in a word, re-imagine, in its own aesthetic and ethical modes, intractable and inarticulate shame, thus circumventing the uncompromising deadlock of psychopathology. Bewes’s main discourse on how shame relates to form is discussed side by side with Coetzee’s discourse on how history relates to the characters 9 Symptomatically, the Dalit reality and Dalit literature have become a specific, separate branch of studies, especially thanks to Ranajit Gutha, the Subaltern Studies and G.C. Spivak, and, more recently, the essay collection edited by J.K. Abraham and J. Misrahi-Barak, 2016.

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  31 of his fiction: an almost parallel discourse bifurcating at the point where the South African novelist may be seen “to keep open the possibility of resistance to the seemingly overwhelming power of history”. Coetzee, holds Attwell, opposes writing to the unrepresentability of history and, by implication, of shame: writing as a space for testing out what history and shame would assume to be impossible or unimaginable. Here, it is the space that Michael K has crafted for himself, a space of imperviousness to the shame that has defined his ‘bestial’ life. It is in this frame of reasoning that Attwell invites us to enter the world of Michael K. Shame is present in the novel from its inception, from his mother’s reaction to his hare lip, through his position of excluded third, a figure “of difference and occlusion” in the violent, civil war-ridden context. His story is therefore one of resistance and freedom, but operating most powerfully at the metafictional level, by creating that very space in which the author has converted a shaming history into an affirmation of inviolability. Keeping the focus firmly on J.M. Coetzee’s shame-haunted fiction, Susanna Zinato’s chapter “Cursing the Fathers’ Curse: A Tragic Reading of White Shame in J.M. Coetzee’s In The Heart of the Country and Age of Iron” proposes a reading of white shame in these two novels from a perspective that valourizes the allusions to the ‘grammar’ of Attic tragedy sown by the author. Fruitfully relying on the light that can be retrospectively derived from some crucial passages in Diary of a Bad Year (2007) Zinato’s investigation highlights the tragic motifs of inherited guilt, defiling curse, atē, and hamartia, demonstrably brought into play in connection with Magda and Mrs Curren, the white protagonists born into their Fathers’ hubristic crimes of colonization and apartheid, whose tragic stature is directly proportional to their untimeliness (in a Nietzschean sense) and utter isolation. While suffering defilement and accepting to live with the shame of their γένος (‘race’/stock), they are not prepared to bow under its burden and, at the price of self-alienation and abjection, they courageously embrace the identitarian re-moulding and re-creation of self that the experience of shame can lead to. The challenge for Zinato is to see how far following the Greek clues concerning the quintessentially tragic motifs mentioned earlier allows her to go in connection with the shame theme, as well as with the relations entertained by these novels with the tragic genre. So, the critic contends, in the light of the Greek concepts of shaming curse and shameful pollution, the reader is better equipped to read Elizabeth’s cancer, Magda’s ugliness, as well as the alleged madness of both. The cursing of these ‘tainted children’ becomes their subverting action, the transformative power of which realizes the transformative potentiality of shame. The last stage of the chapter links this transformative power of shame to a discourse concerning the characters’ ēthos and Bildung, thus preparing the ground for some reflections on the crucial role played by the (exquisitely Aeschylean) generation theme, with the anguished anxiety

32  David Attwell et al. concerning “what is going to become of the children” (adopting the words of the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians), in Coetzee’s own inspiration, generally, and in these novels in particular – ­harrowingly so in Age of Iron. In this frame, through the unfailingly passionate but ever-questioning interpellation and dialogue weaved by the humanist Mrs Curren with the voices of Hesiod, Homer, Thucydides, Virgil, or Marcus Aurelius, cursing the Fathers’ curse can also be taken to mean cursing the latter’s soiling and betrayal of the anti-barbaric gist of the humanistic stance. Rita Barnard’s “Dictator Games: On Shame, Shitholes, and Beautiful Things” brings us to the question of shame as it operates in the current global scene of rising nationalism and authoritarianism as defined by the Trump administration. Her focus is on Ethiopian novelist Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears (2007), a title drawn from the final, relieving canto of Dante’s Inferno, and is concerned with the frontier effects and the processes of inclusion/exclusion created by migration and gentrification. Treating shame in its socio-­political dimensions, the novel shuttles between colonial/postcolonial sites of shame and the US, exploring the figure of the autocrat in its geo-political transmutation and inflections of shamelessness. The protagonist is Sepha Stephanos, a refugee from Addis Ababa who owns a failing convenience store in the run-down Logan Circle area of Washington, D.C., for whom shame is a daily condition governing his livelihood, movements about the city, loves, and friendships. Some relief comes from the dark comedy of a “dictator game” played by three African friends, one of whom names a dictator and the others have to name the country and the year. At the heart of the novel is a scene of reading, in which an older man and a young girl sit in a store on a winter morning reading a novel together, Dostoyevski’s The Brothers Karamazov, a text in which shame is also a common condition. While Bewes theorizes the relations between shame and writing, Barnard movingly and adroitly takes us to the question of reading, which mirrors and ameliorates the effects of shame insofar as it draws attention to the shared beauty of those “intimate processes of identification and blurring of distinctions between subjects in the grip of powerful affect”. With “‘Unfinished Business’: Digging up the past in Christine Piper’s After Darkness and Cory Taylor’s My Beautiful Enemy” by Sue Kossew we move to the Australian context. The chapter begins with the assertion that a frequently used metaphor in Australian national discourse is that of one or other ‘shameful’ or ‘dark’ chapter in its colonial past. Kossew argues that the notions of shame and guilt are associated with the idea of repressed and silenced memory, either through deliberate institutionalized forgetting or through the impossibility of fully articulating traumatic pasts. But, at the same time, quoting Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton, she points out that, “forms of remembering and

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  33 commemoration have become the central contemporary mode through which various constituencies understand history, including the national past”. The consequence of this apparently contradictory clash between a willed forgetfulness and a fascination with remembrance is to be seen in the popularity in Australian literature of historical novels, a sub-set of which she has termed ‘sorry novels’, and of literary works that may be regarded as participating in a process of “reconciliation as method”. In Kossew’s opinion, this concept is defined “not as an end-point in which consensus on history is achieved, but rather as sets of media, skills and processes that encourage the creative sharing of ideas and understandings about the past”. With these premises, she analyzes two novels that engage with the notion of “historical amnesia”: Christine Piper’s After Darkness (2014) and Cory Taylor’s My Beautiful Enemy (2013). Both novels focus on Second World War Australian civilian internment camps. Piper’s novel deals with two issues of historical responsibility that have been long suppressed: germ warfare and the internment in Australia of Japanese, Japanese-Australians, and “haafus”. Taylor’s novel thematizes the fraught but intimate relationship between a 17-year-old Australian army guard and a 15-year-old Japanese boy whose family has been interned in the Tatura internment camp. Kossew analyzes the way in which both novels deal with shame and explore the tensions and contradictions of historical memory, and she demonstrates how both authors are engaged with facing up to a shameful past in order to attempt to heal not just individuals but also the nation itself. Annalisa Pes’s chapter “Different Shades of Shame. The Responsibilities and Legacies of a Shameful History in Australian Fiction” continues in the wake of Australia’s shameful past and healing process. Starting from the premise that shame has been central to the definition of white Australian identity since early white settlement, due to the association with convictism and to “cultural cringe”, Pes investigates the literary representations of shame as specifically related to the history of atrocities and rights violation committed against the Indigenous people of Australia. In particular, she analyzes some short stories written in the 1940s–1950s by Katharine Susannah Prichard and a novel by Kate Grenville, Sarah Thornhill, published in 2011. Pes maintains that for both writers, though removed in time and context, the topic of shame plays a fundamental role in the definition of white Australian identity and in understanding the relationship between Indigenous and non-­ Indigenous Australians. Her point is to demonstrate how the examined texts’ engagement with a shameful history and its legacies determines the urgency of speaking shame and avoiding the risk of turning shame into silence and concealment. The reading of Prichard’s stories proves how a struggling identity, a sense of doubleness, and a profound humiliation may derive from an internalized experience of racial shame. But the courage and responsibility

34  David Attwell et al. of denunciation can restructure the relations of self/Other by giving them alternate positions of power. Therefore, in most stories, white shaming can be counteracted by the ashamed reactions of aboriginal pride that subvert the colonial hierarchical structure of white superiority and black inferiority by means of a counter-shaming rhetorical strategy. In Grenville’s novel, where shame is differently articulated in black and white characters, and in older and younger generations, the confrontation with shame involves self-awareness and self-transformation by means of exposure and denunciation. In other words, the solution is not to relieve or absolve the sense of shame, but to denounce what has provoked it, what has been concealed and what needs to be uncovered. Pes aims to prove that the literary representation of the two emotional paths of the shame of the oppressor and the pain of the oppressed may go in the direction of a political responsibility and response-ability, that is the capacity to concretely respond, to move a step forward in the process of reconciliation. Dolores Herrero’s “Contemporary Australian Refugee Policies and Shame as Reflected in A.S. Patric’s Black Rock, White City (2015)” takes us from shameful historical events to the contemporary treatment of “illegitimate others”. In particular, Herrero analyzes Serbo Australian A.S. Patric’s debut novel Black Rock, White City with a view to showing how the author denounces First World exclusionary border laws, in particular Australia’s harsh refugee policies, and the shameful effects that these can have on both sides of the divide. Herrero starts by noting that of all the problems that are haunting today’s convoluted world, one of the most difficult to digest and, by extension, the main source of shame for the so-called ‘First World’ (to which Australia clearly belongs) is, without doubt, that of the undeterred flows of population and the global refugee crisis. She argues that, now more than ever, these situations evidence the existence of two worlds apart: that of the desperate and dispossessed versus that of the safe and affluent. In order to interpret the shame deriving from such a division and to understand the issues presented in Patric’s novel, she begins by explaining the way in which several theorists have interpreted the concept of shame: both as an affect/emotion (Silvan Tomkins, Brené Brown, and Sara Ahmed, among others), and as form (Timothy Bewes). Following this theoretical overview of shame and its varied features, she offers a brief introduction to Australian refugee policies from the 1990s onwards, especially as regards the way in which they affected refugees coming from the former Yugoslavia, which is the specific case tackled by the novel. Finally, in close-reading Black Rock, White City Herrero focusses on the writing and erasing of graffiti, showing how they are used to denounce not only the damaged self-esteem and shame suffered by those asking for asylum, but also the identity crisis and anxiety gnawing at many Australians. In the case of Dr Graffito, shame can work not only as the feeling of being dispossessed of self-esteem, but also, Herrero demonstrates, it can be

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  35 the cause of a serious identity crisis that may consequently lead one to commit shameful acts depriving him of his own humanity. This position engages with Sara Ahmed’s analysis of the function of shame in forging the nations’ sense of collective identity; that is, either shame is brought onto the nation by illegitimate others, or the nation brings shame on itself by its treatment of others. And this is what eventually Patric’s novel suggests: the harder so-called First World nations try to shame those whom they regard as the “illegitimate others”, the more shame they bring onto themselves. David Callahan’s chapter on “American Postcolonial Shame, Fiction and Timothy Bewes” shifts the focus of investigation on postcolonial shame within the contextual frame of America’s history of dispossession and oppression and of its cultural flows by taking into consideration two literary examples: one taken from Indigenous writing and one authored by the invisible category of white Australian-Americans. Engaging with Timothy Bewes’s The Event of Postcolonial Shame, Callahan notes that Bewes’s examples do not include writers from the US and argues that the absence in the book of American postcolonial shame gives evidence of the incommensurability of the history of the US’s own invading and colonial past. He begins by referring to sociologist Jeffrey Olick’s idea that the politics of regret appears to be the major characteristic of our age, and understands that this has developed out of the changing nature in which national responsibility has been considered after Second World War. In the light of the revisionist impulse throughout all modes of considering the past, Callahan shows that Bewes takes this politics of regret further with respect to literature, undertaking to explore shame as “an event of incommensurability: a profound disorientation of the subject by the confrontation with an object it cannot comprehend, an object that renders incoherent every form available to the subject”. This approach has profound consequences for literature because, Callahan argues, whereas for many observers regret, guilt, or shame provide modes whose objective is to speak the wounds of history so as to be able to process them better and then move past them, however imperfectly, for Bewes “the substance of shame is fundamentally a gap, an absence, an impossibility”. The chapter then expands upon some of the determinate absences that emerge from Bewes’s thesis when applied to certain very differently commodified categories of American literature, and in order to do this he uses two examples: Hundred in the Hand (2007) by the Lakota author Joseph M. Marshall III, followed by March (2005) and Caleb’s Crossing (2011) by Australian-American Geraldine Brooks. ­A fter considering different critical positions on the appropriateness of the term “postcolonial” when applied to American Indians’ literature and white American migrant literature, Callahan analyzes the shame of the narrative forms of writers that, though not considered by Bewes, call forth responses to shame in different registers of postcolonial shame.

36  David Attwell et al. Angelo Righetti’s chapter, “‘Like solemn Afro-Greeks avid for grades’: Individual and Historical Shame in Walcott’s Earlier Poetry”, brings us into the West Indian section of the book by dealing with Derek Walcott’s earlier poetry up to 1973, the year of Walcott’s autobiographical poem Another Life (1972), which represents a watershed in the poet’s career. By reading Walcott’s earlier collections, Righetti observes the evolution of the author’s deep awareness of the unwanted inheritance of shameful and shaming racial prejudice, and, more painfully, of the racist blight of miscegenation cast by the colonizer on the colonized by faking scales of blackness in the multiethnic Caribbean. In his poetry’s intellectual agenda, Walcott not only copes as an individual with the impact of a racism inherent in the exploitative colonial project, but also gradually envisages that a communal response to and exploration of colonial and postcolonial history’s aporias and their shaming inhumanity  – either in lyrical-meditative poems or in meditative-narrative ‘epics of the ordinary’ – may help him reconcile ethical and aesthetic demands. The poems discussed in this chapter shed light on different implications of shame in a colonial context shaped by prejudice and discrimination. The shame imposed on educated black youngsters undergoing undignified treatment in colonial Caribbean permeates Epitaph for the Young, where the contagion of racial prejudice spread by the colonizer affects the descendants of the slaves in a now multiethnic community. The shame of miscegenation resonates in Erotic Pastoral, a poem addressed by a black would-be lover to his white ‘coy mistress’ for whom the match is anathema as it carries the taint of “miscegenation”. The shame inflicted on the black community by degrading poverty and ignorance imbues Letter to Margaret where the failed romance between a white blonde and a black Barbadian is told ironically to warn white women against the consequences of miscegenation. In his refined interpretation Righetti explores shame through Walcott’s imagery: images of disease, decomposition, and death in Ruins of a Great House, and images appropriated from Dante’s Inferno to transmit the shameful corruption of the current state of politics in the Caribbean in Another Life. Finally, Righetti observes that another way of facing shame in Walcott’s poems is by returning to the natives’ history with a renewed consciousness that involves some kind of redemption through a search for Arawak historical roots and through a recovery of the nation language. In “Shame, Justice and the Representation of Violence in Postcolonial Literature: The Case of Caryl Phillips” Vincent van Bever Donker agonistically confronts the understanding of shame developed by Timothy Bewes in The Event of Postcolonial Shame and its relationship to the questions of justice and ethics in literature more generally, and postcolonial literature in particular. Through a discussion of Derrida and Lévinas among others, he grapples with Bewes’s understanding of shame and his positioning of it as the figure of the relationship between aesthetics

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  37 and ethics in literature. In so doing, he opens up an alternative, nuanced approach to the ethical space of literature – namely one centred on the concepts of tragedy and recognition. He begins, therefore, with the more philosophical aspects of Bewes’s arguments, before turning more extensively to the latter’s reading of two works by Caryl Phillips, Cambridge (1993) and Crossing the River (2006), both of which are deemed by van Bever to sit uncomfortably within Bewes’s approach, thus asking for a different critical stance with respect to the ethics of literature. What van Bever is keen on highlighting is that the relationship (more often, the tension) between ethics and aesthetics, rather than being an event of shame, forcefully leads to a multifaceted ethical criticism. In his view, the nuances of Phillips’s citations and character development are not given enough relevance in Bewes’s analysis, centred as it is on incommensurability and failure. What van Bever finds particularly problematic in Bewes’s critical position is its attempt to de-personalize shame, which entails a parallel ethical de-responsabilization facing real failure or conflict. What is needed, instead, according to van Bever is an approach to the ethical difficulties of narrative – and in particular narratives representing historical violence like slavery or the holocaust – without erasing or reducing other ethical considerations in the process. In the chapter’s final stage the critic proposes two key-concepts that enable the sort of engagement invoked by him: tragedy and recognition. Taken together they are deemed to be able to open up a way of relating to the ethical space of the novel in a flexible, context based manner that can take into account a range of ethical effects and concerns beyond mimesis. Put in the critical frame advanced by van Bever, Cambridge and Crossing the River are deemed to reveal the failure of recognition that imbued slavery, and demonstrate this ethical failure through the citation of real historical voices which are consolidated into an effective, moving commemoration of past violence. Finally, in the Afterword to the volume, suggestively entitled “A Swarm of Locusts Passed By”, Timothy Bewes returns to his The Event of Postcolonial Shame (2011) in the light of the reviews and responses written to it – crucially, by Rita Barnard (2012) and Michael Rothberg (2012). The pioneering charge of that study, enhanced rather than diminished by the problematic character of its thought-provoking assertions, is reflected and confirmed by the contributors’ engaging with it at various points in this volume, in a circuital confrontation that, while fuelling its internal dialogue, sharpens its challenging and open-ended stance. Bewes begins by re-asserting the need to investigate the encounter between postcolonial studies (especially as represented by Gayatri Spivak’s configuration of the subaltern/postcolonial subject) and novel theory (with particular reference to Lukàcs’s theory) through the litmus test of shame, given the pervasive reference to it in the body of postcolonial

38  David Attwell et al. literature. He rehearses his book’s three preliminary theses: (a) that shame is ontologically inseparable from its formal manifestation, (b) that no explanation for shame could be sought at the purely subjective level, and (c) that the ethical significance of shame is thus negligible. His “functionalist” approach to Caryl Phillips’s two historical novels dealing with the transatlantic slave trade between Africa, Britain, and the Americas is called back from the book to re-assert his main argument according to which their real historicity lies in the time of the work’s composition, in the scene of writing, not only in the stories’ diegeses. The Deleuzian trope of the “crystals of time” is therefore seen, again, as perfectly suitable to render shame’s refusal “to adhere to the protocols of representation”. In evoking his comparison of Louis Malle’s film L’Inde fantôme with Michel Leiris’s L’Afrique fantôme (stimulated by B.H. Edwards’s recent English translation of the latter, 2017), Bewes keeps to his claim that the subjective positioning of the perceptual gaze is the main source of shame in postcolonial literature, and celebrates the liberation from the Western subject in Malle’s use of the camera. Pondering on this contentious point, however, he takes the opportunity of this Afterword to refine and recast his ideal of a cinematic, subject-less approach, “in which every residue of the colonial relation has been overcome”, in which any relation between subject and object has been forfeited. Such an ethically responsible approach is seen as depending not so much on the difference between fiction and nonfiction (which was the point risen in the book) but on the difference between speaking “directly in one’s own voice”, and refusing to do so. Also, Bewes likes to acknowledge that his recasting of Leiris’s ethnographic work in a more positive light, as a writing that, fiction-like, is internally dialogical and has no speaking subject, owes much to Edwards’s translation, which highlights its quality as a practice: a quality the critic would extend to the politics of postcolonial literature.

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Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  39 Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths Gareth, and Tiffin Helen. 2002. The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. (1989) New York and London: Routledge. Balibar, Étienne. 2004. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Barnard, Rita. 2012. “Ugly Feelings, Negative Dialectics: Reflections on ­Postapartheid Shame.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 13 (1–2, January–April): 151–170. Bettelheim, Bruno. 1979. Surviving and Other Essays. New York: Knopf. Bewes, Timothy. 2011, The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton UP. Bhabha, Homi. 1984. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28 (Spring). Rpt in The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994: 121–131. Bouson, J. Brooks. 2009. Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in ­C ontemporary Women’s Writings. Albany: State U of New York P. Brooks, Geraldine. 2005. March. New York: Viking Penguin. ———. 2011. Caleb’s Crossing. New York: Viking Penguin. Bruckner, Pascal. 2006. La Tyrannie de la penitence. Essai sur le masochism occidental. Paris: Grasset. Charos, Caitlin. 2009. “States of Shame: South African Writing after Apartheid.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 10 (3, July): 273–304. Coetzee, J. M. 1980. Waiting for the Barbarians. London: Secker & Warburg. ———. 1983. Life & Times of Michael K. London: Secker and Warburg. ———. 1990. Age of Iron. London: Secker and Warburg. ———. 2007. Diary of a Bad Year. London: Harvill Secker. Coetzee, J.M. and Arabella Kurtz. 2015. The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy. London: Harvill Secker. Comaroff, Jean, and Comaroff L. John. 2012. Theory from the South. Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving Toward Africa. Boulder, CO and London: ­Paradigm Publishers. Constable, Liz. 1999. “Introduction. States of Shame.” L’Ésprit Créateur, 39 (4), States of Shame/La Honte (Winter): 3–12. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. “Géophilosophie.” In Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie?, edited by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 82–108. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit. Deonna, Julien A., and Teroni Fabrice. 2011. “Is Shame a Social Emotion?” In Self-Evaluation: Affective and Social Grounds of Intentionality, edited by Anita Konzelman-Ziu, Keith Lehrer, and Hans Bernhard Schmid, 193–212. Dordrecht: Springer. Driver, Dorothy. 2000. “Afterword” to Zoë Wicomb, David’s Story, 215–271. New York: The Feminist P. Elias, Norbert. 1998. The Germans. New York: Columbia UP. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, Harmonsworth: Penguin (original ed.: Les damnées de la terre, Paris: Maspero, 1961). ———. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto P (original ed.: Peau Noire, Masques Blanc, Paris: Seuil, 1952).

40  David Attwell et al. Gilroy, Paul. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia UP. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “New Ethnicities.” In Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 441–449. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 1996. “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit.” In The Post-Colonial Question. Common Skies, Divided Horizons, edited by Ian Chambers and Lidia Curti. 242–260. London and New York: Routledge. Halperin, David M., and Valerie Traub. 2015. Gay Shame. Chicago, IL: Chicago UP. Harris-Perry, Melissa V. 2011. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Head, Bessie. 1974. A Question of Power. London: Heinemann. Heller, Agnes. 2003. “Five Approaches to the Phenomenon of Shame.” Social Research 70 (4), Shame (winter): 1015–1030. Hill, Christopher. 1998. “Lies about Crimes.” In England’s Turning Point. Essays on 17th Century English History, 189–195. London, Chicago, IL, Sydney: Bookmarks. Hutchinson, Phil. 2008. Shame and Philosophy. An Investigation in the Philosophy of Emotions and Ethics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, Erica, and Moran Patricia (eds.) 2013. The Female Face of Shame. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Jones, Gail. 2007. Sorry. London: Harvill Secker. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. 2006. “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel.” In The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900– 2000, edited by Dorothy J. Hale, 605–620. Oxford: Blackwell. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve and Adam Frank (eds.). 1995. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP. Kossew, Sue. 2013. “Saying Sorry: The Politics of Apology.” In Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres, edited by Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio, 171–183. London and New York: Routledge. Lazarus, Neil. 1999. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Levi, Primo. 1989. The Drowned and The Saved. London: Abacus (original ed. I sommersi e I salvati, Torino: Einaudi, 1986). ———. 2000. If This is a Man/The Truce. London: Everyman’s P (original ed. Se questo è un uomo. Torino: De Silva, 1947; La tregua, Torino: Einaudi, 1963). ———. 2001. The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961–1987. Edited by Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon, Cambridge: Polity P. Levi, Primo interviewed by Emanuele Ascarelli and Daniel Toaff in the TV Programme “Sorgente di vita” (25 January 2001). In La strada di Levi. Immagini e parole dal film di Davide Ferrario e Marco Belpoliti, edited by Andrea Cortellessa, 113–127. Venezia: Marsilio, 2007. Lévinas, Émmanuel. 2003. On Escape. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. (original ed. De l’évasion. “Recherches Philosophiques”, 5, 1935/36: 373–392). Lewis, Helen B. (ed.) 1987. The Role of Shame in Symptom Formation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial  41 Limon, John. 2007. “The Shame of Abu Grahib.” Critical Inquiry 33 (3, Spring): 543–572. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. When Victims Become Killers. Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: ­P rinceton UP. Marechera, Dambuzo. 1980. Black Sunlight. London: Heinemann. Marshall III, Joseph. 2007. Hundred in the Hand: A Novel. Golden, CO: Fulcrum. Martin-Granel, Nicolas. 1995. “Discours de la honte.” Cahiers d’Études africaines 140, XXXV–4: 739–796. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P. ———. 2010. Sortir de la grande nuit. Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée. Paris: La Découverte. McLeod, John. 2000. Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester: Manchester UP. Mengestu, Dinaw. 2007. The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. New York: Riverhead. Miller, Susan. 1985. The Shame Experience. London: Analytic P. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. 1997. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London: Verso. Morgan, Michael. 2008. On Shame. New York and London: Routledge. Nkrumah, Kwame. 1965. Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: Heinemann. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. 1981. Decolonizing the Mind. London: James Currey. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2004. Hiding from Humanity. Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton UP. Patric, A.S. 2016. Black Rock, White City. (2015) Sydney: ReadHowYouWant Limited (Large Print 16). Phillips, Caryl. 1993. Cambridge. New York: Vintage International. ———. 2006. Crossing the River. London: Vintage Books. Piper, Christine. 2014. After Darkness. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. ———. 2012. “‘Ensnared in Implication’: Writing, Shame, and Colonialism.” Contemporary Literature 53 (2, Summer): 374–386. Rushdie, Salman. 1983. Shame. London: Jonathan Cape. Sartre, Jean Paul. 1967. “Preface” to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, Harmonsworth: Penguin (original ed.: Les damnées de la terre, Paris: Maspero, 1961). ———. 2003. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York and London: Routledge Classics (original ed.: L’Ȇtre et le néant, Paris: Gallimard, 1943). Scheler, Max. 1957. “Über Scham und Scamgefuhl.” In Schriften aus dem Nachlass. Band I: Zur Ethik Und Erkenntnislehre, 55–148. Bern: Francke. Shohat, Ella. 1992. “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’.” Social Text 31/32: 99–113. Slemon, Stephen. 1994. “The Scramble for Post-Colonialism.” In De-Scribing Empire: Postcolonialism and Textuality, edited by Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, 15–32. London: Routledge.

42  David Attwell et al. Sony, Labou Tansi. 1979. La Vie et démie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. ———. 1981. L’État honteux. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti. 1985. “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice.” Wedge 7/8 (Winter/Spring): 120–130. Tangney, June Price, and Dearing, Ronda L. 2002. Shame and Guilt. New York: The Guildford P. Taylor, Cory. 2013. My Beautiful Enemy. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Taylor, Gabriele. 1985. Pride, Shame and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment. Oxford: Oxford UP. Young, Robert J.C. 2016. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. ­Oxford: Blackwell. Walcott, Derek. 1973. Another Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wicomb, Zoë. 1998. “Shame and Identity. The Case of the Coloured in South Africa.” In Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, edited by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jane Jolly, 91–107. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ———. 2000. David’s Story. New York: The Feminist P. Wiesel, Elie. 1985. Against Silence, 3 vols. New York: Holocaust Library. Williams, Bernard. 1993. Shame and Necessity, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P. Zahavi, Dan. 2014. Self & Other. Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford: Oxford UP.

1 Writing in, of, and around Shame J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K David Attwell The effects of shame quickly spiral into a malaise of constriction and paralysis. The catching at the throat, the hives on the skin, the downcast and averted gaze: since the difficulty is precisely that because these effects, and affects, are inimical to the subject’s creativity and autonomy, indeed often simply to thought, shame presents unique challenges in the domain of culture. The language of shame is notoriously blocked, recursive, and obsessive. To be released from it into a freer sociability involves a negotiation that may have to pass through abjection and rage. What does it mean, then, to enter this space as cultural practice? Can aesthetic and literary invention represent a condition of such severe diminution from the inside? Does the writing of shame inevitably follow its psychopathology, or are there ways of engaging with it that are both responsive to its social causes and aesthetically inventive? To explore these questions I follow J.M. Coetzee’s writing of shame in Life & Times of Michael K, but we might begin with Bernard Williams’s account in classical literature. In Shame and Necessity (1993), Williams shows that necessity was an ethical catalyst in Greek tragedy because the hero is propelled into action when shame, or even its prospect, enters the picture. Not paralysis then, but action or action to avert paralysis. In a world such as that imagined in Greek tragedy, where significant choice is understood to shape destinies and social relations, the triad of shame, necessity, and action springs from an absolute investment in ethical being. Whether the other from whom one desires respect is a social being, a divine body, or an internalized presence makes no difference because shame positions the subject in a relationship not just to other people but to the very idea of community. Where there is little distinction between social death and the thing itself, shame becomes a pre-condition for all ethics. This is all very different from the account of shame given by Timothy Bewes in his book The Event of Postcolonial Shame (2011). Bewes leans towards the view that the shame of colonialism is so overwhelming and intractable that it doesn’t or can’t lead to or necessitate (in W ­ illiams’s sense) ethically productive cultural endeavour. Like Williams he is

44  David Attwell concerned with absolutes, not those that drive us to acts of self-­definition but those that define the cultural-historical conditions under which we live and work as writers and critics whose world is that of postcoloniality. In theorizing from the situation of the postcolonial a­ rtist-intellectual, ­ illiams says, “shame Bewes is a long way from Greek tragedy, but as W continues to work for us, as it worked for the Greeks, in essential ways. By giving through the emotions a sense of who one is and of what one hopes to be, it mediates between act, character and consequence” (1993, 102). This would include literary transactions: the “act” as writing; “character” as the signature, style, reach, and power of an authorship; and “consequence” as the social life of the literary. As he broadly defines it, Bewes’s purpose is to reframe the problematic of postcolonial studies […] as a field defined not positively, by the presence of certain cultural motifs, identity formations, historical struggles, or emancipatory goals, but negatively, by an incommensurability that is materialized whenever such presences are produced or named as the object or the subject of a work. (2011, 7) By this measure, the resistant and liberationist aspirations of so much postcolonial cultural work will always be haunted by the impossibility of their being realized. If impossibility is too strong a judgement of Bewes’s implications, then the problem is that of incommensurability, which is the term he uses. It refers to the vast difference in scale between the overbearing legacies of structural violence, bodily suffering, and epistemic conquest, and the cultural work that goes under name of postcolonialism. The position is possibly Derridean insofar as Bewes is saying that an unreachable alterity will always be a factor driving postcolonial discourse, and in more concrete terms the position rings true. At the University of Cape Town in March 2015, when the statue of the university’s founding benefactor, the imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, was loosened from its plinth by a crane, and its huge bulk swung in weightless absurdity, the face still covered in faeces (the original act of shaming was performed by a student, Chumani Maxwele, who called in the media to witness his throwing shit over the statue from a township latrine), the scene being played out was undoubtedly that of incommensurability. One could even speculate that the reason the statue was targeted was because the students needed to scale up their protest to give it historical, epistemic, and monumental reach in the face of their dwindling life-prospects and the national shame of President Jacob Zuma’s corrupt administration. In his imperial bulk, Rhodes seemed to embody the whole sorry catastrophe from the colonial past through apartheid to the dystopian present.

Writing in, of, and around Shame  45 Bewes argues that the incommensurability of shame “is frequently apparent as a chronic anxiety towards writing itself” – “a situation in which the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical claims of literature is experienced subjectively” (2011, 7). Necessity comes into it but in a very different sense from that which we find in Williams as “the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of writing” (7). In other words, necessity is part of the debilitating stuckness of shame, the conundrum of writing only pouring more shame upon shame. Far from prompting the subject into action, shame is an historical limit so absolute that attempts to address it only double the shame of history. One is reminded of Fredric Jameson’s formulation, in which history, which “resists thematization or reification,” can be grasped as a form of Necessity that is “to be represented in the form of the inexorable logic involved in the determinate failure of all revolutions that have taken place in human history” (1982, 101–102). In Jameson, this bleak outlook is of course only one side of the classic Marxist paradox that is encapsulated in Gramsci’s famous dictum that pessimism of the intellect is to be matched by optimism of the will. In Bewes, revolutionary optimism seems to have poisoned at the source, and the problem seems to lie in shame’s effects on the body and psyche, which are intractable and un-negotiable: he writes about a “block, a residue of unprocessable material,” no doubt in deference to the psychological literature. The language of Sylvan Tomkins’s Shame and its Sisters (1995) is consistent with this perspective: If distress is the affect of suffering, shame is the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression and of alienation. Though terror speaks to life and death and distress makes of the world a vale of tears, […] shame strikes deepest into the heart of man. While terror and distress hurt, they are wounds inflicted from an outside which penetrate the smooth surface of the ego; but shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul. It does not matter whether the humiliated one has been shamed by derisive laughter or whether he mocks himself. In either event he feels himself naked, defeated, alienated, lacking in dignity or worth. (133) Dostoevsky comes to mind, or David Lurie in Disgrace (1999), or the condition encapsulated in novels like Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974) or Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002). If shame is dark and overpowering in such texts, we should acknowledge the paradoxical way in which they are also uplifting. The cumulative effect of such writing is often not to leave the reader hollowed out with exhaustion but in awe of the resilience it takes to enter such psychic spaces and survive. There is a Nietzschean will in such novels to face down the condition and its causes rather than to avert the face – we shall return to this.

46  David Attwell The fiction of Coetzee’s early and middle years is haunted by shame, culminating in the suitably titled Disgrace. As Youth (2002) attests, as he made his way to being a writer, following his emigration to London in his early 20s, the thought of coming from South Africa made his “soul cringe” (101); nevertheless, he knows that if he were to establish himself as a writer of fiction, as opposed to surviving on the abstract ether of modernist poetry, he would have to begin with “the country of his heart” (137). Coming from South Africa was shameful, but he had no choice but to start there. The result was Dusklands (1974), in which the points of departure, and modes of address, are the apologias of a violent frontiersman and a propagandist for an imperial war. In subsequent novels, we have the magistrate’s shame in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) as he realizes that in the eyes of his captive barbarian lover, he is no different from her torturers; there is Dostoevsky, the protagonist of The Master of Petersburg (1994), whose efforts to write his dead stepson Pavel into life involve recreating the confessions of the nihilist and rapist Stavrogin in The Possessed; and there is, of course, David Lurie, defiantly composing himself before a university inquiry into his sexual conduct. The power of such texts lies in Coetzee’s steely gift for exploring the language of shame as it enters the bloodstream. Bewes refers usefully to Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), where Sartre invites his French readers into an intimacy based on shame: Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your trading-centres and to the hired soldiers who defend them. They will see you, perhaps, but they will go on talking among themselves, without even lowering their voices. This indifference strikes home: their fathers, shadowy creatures, your creatures, were but dead souls; you it was who allowed them glimpses of light, to you only did they dare speak, and you did not bother to reply to such zombies. Their sons ignore you; a fire warms them and sheds light around them, and you have not lit it. Now, at a respectful distance, it is you who will feel furtive, nightbound and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; in these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies. (1967, 11–12) Bewes’s argument is that there are two forms of shame in Sartre’s text: one, the obvious shame of France’s actions in Algeria; the other, a performative shame that speaks not only to the feelings of shame that he is evoking but “to the materiality of Sartre’s own work” (2011, 5). What Sartre enacts “is not encompassable by its concept”; instead it is “an

Writing in, of, and around Shame  47 occasion of the suspension, even annihilation of the self in the aftermath of colonialism” (5) – Sartre’s “zombies” being apposite. We might observe that Sartre makes strong assumptions about (that is, takes liberties with) how shame works, psychologically speaking. Despite hinting at a general paralysis (we’re all zombies) he assumes that it is transactional, that is to say, those who are shamed (Fanon shamed by coloniality and its consequences for the colonized; Sartre shamed by Fanon and by coloniality and its consequences for the colonizer) can be freed from it by passing it on by shaming others (the French reader or the public). The problem – perhaps this is part of what Bewes means – is that the psychopathology of shame tells us that there is no economy of shame, that it is not transactable in any clear sense; rather, its intensities spiral, creating halls of mirrors, a nuclear amplification for which the word contagion might well be more appropriate than economy. We might turn again to events in 2015 in Cape Town to illustrate the uncertain outcomes of generally enacted, politicized shaming. After “Shackville,” an altercation with campus security following the students’ refusal to remove a shack built on a thoroughfare (it had been erected in protest against inadequate student housing), students burnt both the shack and the artwork pulled off the walls of neighbouring residences, proclaiming (in the words of one protester) to be “burning whiteness.” (The problem of incommensurability certainly surfaces again here.) Later developments involved a move on the artwork in the university library, including iconic pieces by well-known anti-apartheid artists that were defaced or covered over if they were judged to demean black subjects. When the university acted to prevent further damage by removing or covering the remaining art, some of the artists were outraged at what they saw as the university’s acquiescence to censorship in the name of an unreflective identity politics. One such artist was the poet-activist and former prisoner under apartheid Breyten Breytenbach, who wrote, I hereby declare my willingness to publicly put to the torch the three paintings that I had produced during the years of political blindness when I did not know what I was doing. I shall be naked, as behoves a penitent. I’m willing to grovel and kiss the smartphones of the revolutionaries. (I can’t promise to flagellate myself, being something of a coward.) … Yours in abject contrition.1 A spiral of shame and rage, rather than any kind of dialectical progress. A related question is taken up in the dialogues between Coetzee and the psychoanalyst Arabella Kurtz, which are published as The Good

1 www.groundup.org.za/article/probably-list-artworks-uct-has-removed/#letter-3 (­accessed 29 October 2018).

48  David Attwell Story (2015). Coetzee refers to the problem of moral “doublethink” that prevails in settler-colonial societies, in which, for example, white Australians tell themselves that the atrocities that were committed on the aboriginal people were possible not because their ancestors were inherently bad but because they were children of their times or prisoners of their Zeitgeist. It does not occur to them, says Coetzee, that future generations will find the actions of present-day Australian governments in relation to asylum seekers just as reprehensible as they find the actions of their colonial ancestors. There is therefore a split view of the past: we exempt ourselves from the values of our ancestors, who we regard as children, in order to preserve our continuity with them. The position is incoherent and surely must manifest itself in psychic terms, Coetzee argues. Kurtz’s reply is to say, “It may be a logical impossibility to imagine being born out of nothing, being without origins or history, but it is not a psychic impossibility.” Most people will hold a benign view of their forebears, while a minority will hold a “morbid preoccupation with another, more disturbing view,” a view that only a minority can sustain: “A split in understanding something of real importance to a social body is, I think, what produces subversion or an underground movement” (2015, 89–90). Where, following Bewes, what we are calling ethical incommensurability prevails as a normal condition of social life, a downward spiral to morbidity settles into the culture. Étienne Balibar provides a more hopeful account of such a situation in his Wellek Lectures, which were collected and published under the title Violence and Civility (2015). Balibar’s thesis is not well served by the term civility, commonly understood to mean politeness, nor even by his original French civilité, which, though similar, also carries the more accurate implication of public-mindedness. The thesis (which is close to Clausewitz’s dictum that politics is the continuation of war by other means) is that politics as social process involves the conversion of violence into public-democratic discourse, retaining the possibility and indeed the likelihood of civil conflict. Civility in this sense involves a conversion that is never wholly complete but that changes the way the various actors, who are certainly interpolated differently by their pasts, interrelate in the present. Such active citizenship is not non-violent but anti-violent in the sense that it seeks to render the conflict articulate; to bring it to language; and in that sense to render it civil, i.e. public and negotiable. What Balibar says of politics is surely applicable to literature, to the ways in which it acts on, works with, and makes use of direct, personal, and structural violence as a way of turning what seems incommensurable into that which can be creatively re-cast, re-assigned, and re-imagined. The conversions that literature enacts will of course be framed within the ethical and aesthetic possibilities that are germane to its forms. So too, surely, with shame. Can its inarticulacies undergo conversion in Balibar’s sense, that is, be made articulate in literary form? There

Writing in, of, and around Shame  49 is much to support Bewes’s uncompromising position if our points of reference are rooted in shame’s psychopathology, but the story surely doesn’t end there. When Bewes tackles the question of how shame relates to form, his point of departure is to argue that “Shame is ontologically inseparable from the forms in which it appears,” by which he means Shame cannot be studied as such, either theoretically, empirically, clinically, or sociologically; shame, rather, is a dynamic that helps us to rethink a number of conceptual relations — most notably […] the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical claims of the modern novel. When shame is communicated, what is communicated has no positive referent; the substance of shame is fundamentally a gap, an absence, an impossibility. Shame is not located primarily in the content of the work. It is, rather, a materialization of the discrepancy between content and form, of the inadequacy of form with respect to content. […] Insofar as it has any value for interpreting artistic or literary works, shame functions as a negative principle, alerting us to a lack, rather than to a presence. (2011, 39) Mutatis mutandis, his position is that the blocked language of shame maps directly onto the structures of narrative, where it becomes a distorting force-field rather than a subject of and for discourse. There would seem to be no relief from this recursive and obsessive power that casts a distorting shadow over any attempt to give it form and, thereby, reshape it. As it happens, the problem that Bewes, and now I, is wrestling with replays issues that come up in the dialogues in Coetzee’s Doubling the Point (1992). In one of those exchanges I put the following to him: Let me put this observation to you for comment: that while it is fairly common for writers in South Africa to try to represent history or historical forces, it is rare that history should emerge, as I believe it does in your fiction, as Necessity, as an absolute limit to consciousness. That is, history, in your work, seems less a process that can be represented than a force acting on representation, a force that is itself ultimately unrepresentable. Seen in this light, the productive freedom of the act of writing is at best qualified, or provisional. (66) The Jameson of The Political Unconscious does indeed lie behind the question, as is the case with similar formulations in Bewes, although in my case the comparison with Jameson’s account comes about through Coetzee’s tendency in the fiction (until and including Disgrace) to put a particular consciousness and mode of address into a given historical situation and to follow the psychic and ethical journey that develops from the encounter. History as an ineluctable given, in other words. What is telling and relevant to this conversation with Bewes is Coetzee’s response to this

50  David Attwell prospect, which is to resist the threat of confinement, to keep open the possibility of resistance to the seemingly overwhelming power of history. In his reply, Coetzee refers to Zbigniew Herbert’s extraordinary poem “Five Men”: “Five condemned prisoners spend their last night talking about girls, remembering card games. In the morning they are taken out and shot. Herbert writes: therefore, one can write poems about flowers, Greek shepherds, and so forth” (original emphasis, 67). Coetzee admires the “imperious and triumphant” force of Herbert’s “therefore,” adding that Herbert has a “deep humanistic faith” that he, Coetzee, lacks (67). The difference between Herbert and himself, he says, is that while in Poland it was possible to oppose totalitarianism with a humanistic literary tradition, in South Africa that tradition has no authority (a plight felt by Mrs Curren in Age of Iron and, of course, the Romanticist David Lurie). The result is that in South Africa (Coetzee says Africa) history “short-­ circuits” the mediations and “forces one’s face into the thing itself” so that “the only address one can imagine is a brutally direct one” (68). For the European writer in Africa a more tragic vision suggests itself here, but Coetzee doesn’t go down that path either; instead, he adds in conclusion, “the only address one can imagine” is “an admission of defeat. Therefore, the task becomes imagining the unimaginable, imagining a form of address that permits the play of writing to start taking place” (68). Herbert’s defiant therefore opposes humanism to terror; Coetzee’s therefore opposes writing to the idea that history – and, by implication, shame – is unrepresentable and unanswerable. Far from writing piling more shame on shame, as cultural practice it can be a space for testing out the possibility of freedom. As we enter the world of Life & Times of Michael K, we might do so with this question and its answer in mind. Was Coetzee speaking from experience by the time of the interview in Doubling the Point, a decade after he began to write Michael K? Of the South African novels in English that have responded specifically to the provocations of shame (of which there are many, including Nadine Gordimer, My Son’s Story, 1990; Mark Behr, The Smell of Apples, 1993; and Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit, 2001) Bewes discusses two: namely Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story (2000) and Coetzee’s Disgrace. Notably, most of the novels dealing with shame were published during the transitional years when the unburying of the apartheid past was a transformative undertaking and when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (which began its public hearings in 1996) became a paradigm for literary criticism. That is no longer the case, suggesting that when the writing of shame has a confessional impulse with some prospect of the culture providing relief, it has its historical limits. Dangor’s novel is indeed less optimistic than the others about the therapeutic potential of confession. But I turn to Life & Times of Michael K, which was published before there was any hint that democracy was imminent and because the text

Writing in, of, and around Shame  51 responds to shame in sharply inventive ways, and moreover, on the evidence of Coetzee’s archival records, Coetzee felt that he was writing about, into, and around a culture predisposed to acts of shaming. Here are the novel’s opening sentences: The first thing the midwife noticed about Michael K when she helped him out of his mother into the world was that he had a hare lip. The lip curled like a snail’s foot, the left nostril gaped. Obscuring the child for a moment from its mother, she prodded open the tiny bud of a mouth and was thankful to find the palate whole. (1985, 3) The midwife tells Anna, “You should be happy, they bring luck to the household,” but Anna “shivered to think of what had been growing in her all these months.” The child will not suck from the breast or a bottle. She resorts to feeding him with a teaspoon (a significant detail in the light of the novel’s closing paragraph). She keeps him away from other children by taking him to work where he grows up watching her, year after year, “polish other people’s floors, learning to be quiet” (3–4). So, it is Anna’s shame (shared by the midwife) that sets in motion the pattern in which Michael K becomes an internal exile, marked from childbirth as different and falling outside of society’s binary norms, and set on the path of becoming a gardener in a time of civil war. Shame is indeed the story’s point of origin. The challenge Coetzee set himself as he developed the novel was to transform K, as a figure shamed into difference and occlusion, into an exemplar of resistance and freedom while noting the historical contingencies of such an undertaking. This is not how the novel began in its early conception, however. 2 Far from being a story that develops from a mother’s shame, it was to be a vendetta in which a white, liberal-minded intellectual embarks on a campaign to secure justice, having been a victim of petty crime, who discovers that the police won’t help him because they are too busy keeping down a revolution. The novel was to be about a citizen’s helpless rage when faced with the withdrawal of the law, a metonym for the collapse of the state. The model for the story was to be Heinrich von Kleist’s novel of 1810, Michael Kohlhaas (hence the naming of Michael K). In Kleist’s novel, a sixteenth-century horse dealer is stopped on his way to market, and a pass is demanded from him; when he is unable to produce the necessary papers his horses are confiscated. When it emerges that the officials are corrupt, and the pass is not required, Michael Kohlhaas becomes an outlaw bent not only on regaining his property but on leading

2 A fuller account of the novel’s development is given in my J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing Face to Face with Time. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2015. Chapter 7, “Suburban bandit: Michael K as outlaw,” 129–147.

52  David Attwell a violent rebellion against all authority. Kleist’s novel is about the psychological disintegration of the protagonist when he discovers that the rule of law has no force; paradoxically, through his tragic fate, he comes to represent an ideal of bourgeois, universal freedom. Coetzee’s problem was that this story could not easily be translated into the South African situation if the protagonist remained white, ­middle-class and, moreover, an intellectual. The structure Coetzee pursued initially was to have his protagonist working on a translation of Michael Kohlhaas. The Kleist novel would provide a substratum of ideas and a formal touchstone, but the structure was implausible because the rebellion of a middle-class intellectual would look more like right-wing vigilantism than underclass resentment. So, Coetzee embarked on a series of experiments with the plot in which he tried to re-position his subject as socially abject while still preserving his intellectualism and the connection to Kleist. Thus conceived, the project pushed Coetzee into some difficult confrontations. One was with the realist mode, which he admired in Kleist for its fast pace and picaresque qualities, but which he also found banal: “What I need,” he wrote in his notebook, “is a liberation from verisimilitude!”3 He began to make better progress when he brought in another narrator who becomes the medical officer, a move that enabled him to clarify his own relation to his protagonist, making K more elusive. The most serious problem, however, was over his protagonist’s supposedly revolutionary status: by the logic of the model he had chosen to follow, Michael K should have become a violent insurrectionist. With the narrative well under way, Coetzee asked himself in his notes, “The book started with Kleist behind it. Is Michael K ever going to take to the hills and start shooting?”4 The tendency of the narrative as it unfolded was that Michael K became more and more independent of the historical conflict unfolding around him: “a pocket outside time” in which “Cape Town and the war and his passage to the farm slipped further and further into forgetfulness” (60). Having been a municipal gardener in the city, when he takes up residence in a makeshift shelter on the farm that he believes is the place of his mother’s childhood, K becomes a gardener of a different kind, growing pumpkins and melons less for subsistence than as a form of symbolic resistance to life in the camps. This is only indirectly a novel about ecology or the anthropocene; more specifically, it is an affirmation of Michael K’s ability to craft his own temporality and an ethical dispensation unique to himself that lies beyond the clutches of the war and its belligerents. In this space, K is impervious to the shame

3 J.M. Coetzee Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Notebook for Life & Times of Michael K. 2 March 1981. 4 J.M. Coetzee Papers, Notebook for Life & Times of Michael K. 8 August 1981.

Writing in, of, and around Shame  53 that defines his birth, upbringing, and underclass status. Having established himself on the farm, he is dismayed when one of the heirs of the owners, the Visagie family, turns up as a defector from the war. When he tries to recruit K into servanthood, K becomes self-conscious about his mouth and the long history of abjection that developed from it. K  yields the house to the Visagie son, moving the sacks on which he had been sleeping from the house to the hillside and feeling overwhelmed by “the old hopeless stupidity,” that is, by the whole sorry history of ­master-servant relations. By this stage, we have seen enough of K’s inner life to know that the stupidity is not his. Surviving the war with one’s personhood intact means becoming impervious to abjection: “What a pity,” K ­ruminates, “that to live in times like these a man must be ready to live like a beast” (99). K’s ability to detach himself from shame remains with him to the end of the novel, even when, while sleeping with a group of vagrants, he finds himself being treated to fellatio by a woman wearing a silver wig: “When it was over he felt that for the sake of both of them he ought to say something; but now all words had begun to escape him” (179). K realizes that throughout his life, when words have escaped him it is because he has resisted being the object of charity. “They want me to open my heart and tell them the story of a life lived in cages. They want to hear about all the cages I have lived in, as if I were a budgie or a white mouse of a monkey” (181). When he has finished telling them his story, he thinks, “people would have shaken their heads and been sorry and angry and plied me with food and drink; women would have taken me into their beds and mothered me in the dark” (181). “Whereas,” he concludes, “the truth is that I have been a gardener, first for the Council, later for myself, and gardeners spend their time with their noses to the ground” (181). The point of K’s gardening and in fact of his entire existence is that he has become a social miracle for whom, as the medical officer puts it, the garden “is nowhere and everywhere except in the camps … off every map, no road leads to it that is merely a road, and only you know the way” (166). K will not submit to the medical officer’s treatment, refusing food in ­particular – “I appeal to you, Michaels, yield!” (152) – which fuels a higher order of speculation about what he represents. In Sartrean terms, K exists in-himself rather than for-himself, without aspiring to become other than he is, and without being tormented, as the medical officer is, by “the suprasensual spinning of the gyroscopes of the Grand Design” (158). Around K’s head the officer imagines “a thickening of the air, a black whirlwind roaring in utter silence above your body, pointing to you, without so much as stirring the edge of the bedclothes” (164). The culmination of this bewilderment is the often-quoted passage that sums up K’s significance: Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory—speaking at the highest level—of how

54  David Attwell scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence within a system without becoming a term in it. (146) The passage clinches the metafictional tendency that has, in fact, been latent from the novel’s beginning, with the literal implausibility of Michael K building a makeshift cart and setting off on a journey of some 300 miles to take his mother to die on the farm of her childhood. The last ground of the text’s significance is therefore metafictional, and by implication, it contains Coetzee’s critique of a culture given over entirely to binary, instrumental thinking, a culture hostile to fictional reprisals and reinterpretations of its ideological premises. The magistrate’s interpretation of K is perfectly plausible and, I would argue, given without irony (despite the magistrate’s failures and insecurities) as a summation of the novel’s own last horizon of implication, even if, at this final stage, the point of all interpretation has also been cast into doubt. The structure of ideas that the novel creates is a black hole, like the one the medical officer imagines hovering over Michael K’s head, with all forms of politicized interpretation cast into question. What remains is a self-­ conscious fiction that affirms the possibility of an inviolable, alternative mode of being. Coetzee knew full well as he developed this narrative that it would be contentious. Judging by his notebook entries, he felt, or anticipated feeling, accused: So what is it all about? It’s just an evasion of social relations, past and future, by past relations dead and refusing future relations. I’m postponing all the justifications to the end, and I don’t know how to make them. Maybe the reasoning at the end should be as follows. There is a generation of damaged people who just want to live their lives and die without perpetuating themselves (no children). Private lives, private fates. They don’t want to justify themselves, they don’t want to write books about themselves immortalizing themselves. And therefore: “Why interview me? Why write a book about me?” How does the interview/writer justify himself?5 This is one of many such moments in Coetzee’s note-taking in which he records the insecurities and uncertainties that he is having to work through. The most politically sensitive of such moments was narrating K’s decision not to join the guerrillas when they pass through the farm during the night. K considers it, even taking pleasure in the folkloric, communitarian culture and tales of heroism that he imagines are

5 J.M. Coetzee Papers, Notebook for Life & Times of Michael K. 9 November 1981.

Writing in, of, and around Shame  55 part of the culture the guerrillas create for themselves. He refuses these temptations, telling himself that his role is to keep gardening alive for the time that comes after the war, although K is also dimly aware that all explanations of his actions are open to doubt. The only sure ground of the novel, and of Coetzee’s narration, is metafictional. The point is simply that as fiction, the novel does particular things, performs certain kinds of imagining in a particular place and at a certain time in history. Despite the recognition and the awards that Life & Times of Michael K received, including the Booker Prize, Coetzee remained touchy when faced with questions about its politics. In Doubling the Point and in his notes he returns to Nadine Gordimer’s review, which alluded to the novel’s “revulsion” against all political solutions (1984, n.p.). To return again to Doubling the Point, I asked Coetzee whether Michael K was a figure representing textual freedom or the freedom to narrate in a culture in which that freedom was curtailed. He didn’t disagree but clearly felt that the question replicated implicitly a pattern of accusations that were part of the culture he had to negotiate in the writing of the novel. After two pages of preliminaries, he addressed the question in confessional terms: “What kind of model of behavior in the face of oppression was I presenting? Why hadn’t I written a different book with (I put words in [Gordimer’s] mouth now) a less spineless hero?” To which he responds: One writes the books one wants to write. One doesn’t write the books one doesn’t want to write. The emphasis falls not on one but on the word want in all its own resistance to being known. The book about going off with the guerillas, the book in the heroic tradition, is not a book I wanted-to-write, wanted enough to be able to bring it off, however much I might have wanted to have written it—that is to say, wanted to be the person who had successfully brought off the writing of it. (207–208) The political nakedness of K’s refusal is explained by another moment of nakedness, recorded here: a case of shame being piled upon shame, as Bewes might have it. But, between these moments of shame, in the novel itself, Coetzee has left a permanent record of a different kind of imagining: the imagining of a being who is impervious to the depredations and degradations of shame. Bernard Williams speaks about the importance of a respected, internalized other before whom the response to shame is framed. In Coetzee’s case, this figure is the-one-who-writes.

Works Cited Balibar, Étienne. 2015. Violence and Civility. New York: Columbia UP. Behr, Mark. 1993. The Smell of Apples. Johannesburg: Queillerie.

56  David Attwell Bewes, Timothy. 2011. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Breytenbach, Breyten. Letter to the Editor, GroundUp. Cape Town. https://www. groundup.org.za/article/probably-list-artworks-uct-has-removed/#letter-3. Coetzee, J.M. 1974. Dusklands. Johannesburg: Ravan P. ———. 1981. JM Coetzee Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, U of Texas at Austin. Notebook for Life & Times of Michael K. ———. 1980. Waiting for the Barbarians. London: Secker and Warburg. ———. 1985. Life & Times of Michael K (1983). New York: Viking Penguin. ———. 1990. Age of Iron. London: Secker and Warburg. ———. 1992. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. ———. 1994. The Master of Petersburg. London: Secker and Warburg. ———. 1999. Disgrace. London: Secker and Warburg. ———. 2002. Youth. London: Secker and Warburg. Coetzee, J.M. and Arabella Kurtz. 2015. The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy. London: Harvill Secker. Dangor, Achmat. 2001. Bitter Fruit. Johannesburg: Kwela Books. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gordimer, Nadine. 1984. “The Idea of Gardening.” New York Review of Books, 2 February. ———. 1990. My Son’s Story. Cape Town: David Philip. Head, Bessie. 1974. A Question of Power. London: Heinemann. Jameson, Fredric. 1982. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1967. “Preface” to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tomkins, Silvan. 1995. Shame and its Sisters: a Silvan Tomkins Reader. Edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick and Adam Frank. Durham, NC: Duke U P. Vera, Yvonne. 2002. The Stone Virgins. Harare: Weaver P. Wicomb, Zoë. 2000. David’s Story, Johannesburg: Kwela Books. Williams, Bernard. 1993. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: U of California P.

2 Cursing the Fathers’ Curse A Tragic Reading of White Shame in J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country and Age of Iron Susanna Zinato “[Man] is moved, as though he remembered a lost paradise, when he sees […] a child, which as yet has nothing past to deny, playing between the fences of past and future in blissful blindness” (Nietzsche, 1980, 9): if Nietzsche’s words are true in a philosophically universal sense, they are dramatically so in the colony and post-colony. They are poignantly true for the uneasy consciousness of J.M. Coetzee’s white protagonists in the apartheid-ridden and post-apartheid South Africa of his early- and ­middle-year novels up to Disgrace. Elizabeth Curren’s anguished outburst may be given as representative of their malaise: At one moment I think: Let me hurry to put an end to it, to this worthless life. And the next I think: But why should I bear the blame? Why should I be expected to rise above my times? Is it my doing that my times have been so shameful? […] I want to rage against the men who have created these times. […] You know this country. There is madness in the air. (Age of Iron, 107, my emphasis) In point of fact, shame appears to be the scorching climax of the constant ethical urgency characterizing Coetzee’s oeuvre. In the well-known phrase used by J.-P. Sartre in his Preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, what takes place in his works is a “strip-tease of our humanism” (1967, 21), a dénouement and a questioning of the ‘capacity’ and adequacy of the European, Western claims to humanity facing the colonial/postcolonial Other but, also, facing the Other living close to us, and the Other who is in ourselves, asking for recognition – the Other meant in a broad, existential-philosophical spectrum. In this sense, and as I have already observed elsewhere,1 the critical discourse demanded by his texts is, and must be, philosophical and ethical, having to do with what being human means and with a phenomenological ethics of

1 Cp. Zinato (2016) on these preliminary remarks.

58  Susanna Zinato Otherness  that, while including it, still reaches beyond the colonial/­ postcolonial context. It goes without saying that the ethical urgency that innervates his texts is also, and necessarily so, political whenever the political context demands moral choices of his individual characters, and whenever, in the contest between politics and ethics, the latter is silenced in the service of the former. The colonial setting, much more so the apartheid regime, becomes the exemplary stage of the crumbling of humanity in the relationship between dominators and dominated that dehumanizes both. His narratives, as observed by Anton Leist and Peter Singer, “move the reader to a level of elementary human experience while taking away the usual armament of responses to these experiences” (2010, 7). Far from offering moral compromises or categorical imperatives, 2 in a consistent way his novels intensely explore the experience of shame that is possible for uneasy consciousnesses burdened by a history of ­domination – by a “crime antérieur qui se poursuit à travers la haine et la domination: celui de la race érigé en principe de pouvoir, pratique de separation et projet d’extermination. Le crime des Empires que Coetzee évoque à travers la guerre du Vietnam, la guerre colonial, l’apartheid et le genocide”, as Coquio puts it (2007, 98). And this experience is played out in a differential and qualifying interrelation with guilt and disgrace, both obliquely and ‘full-face’, as it were. Besides In the Heart of the Country (1977, henceforth: HC) and Age of Iron (1990, henceforth: AI), the novels discussed here, a particular mention is in order for Dusklands, Life and Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace, and, also, Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man, Diary of a Bad Year. Critical reflection on the concept of shame received new, tragic vigour at the end of the Second World War, following the horror of the Shoah and in the wake of the historical, philosophical, religious, and psychoanalytic discourses developed around the shame of those who survived torture and genocides (including colonial torture and genocides), a shame that – as seen in the Introduction – cannot be conflated with the feeling of guilt, as Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Lévinas, Gilles Deleuze, Martha Nussbaum, Giorgio Agamben, among others, have felt the need to underline (here the primary reference, of course, is in Primo Levi’s chapter entitled “Shame” in his The Drowned and the Saved). Shame is not something one can decide to feel. Perpetrators of torture may never know the experience of shame, while its victims are always devastated by it. Tragically, shame is common experience among the victims of atrocities, but this does not entail that they consider themselves 2 See Attridge (2004, 13): “Coetzee has used a variety of formal devices that disrupt the realistic surface of the writing, reminding the reader forcibly of the conventionality of the fictional text and inhibiting any straightforward drawing of moral and political conclusions”.

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  59 guilty for what they have suffered. The survivor’s shame has to do with not having acted for the other victim and with having survived him/her. More broadly, shame is often present in those situations in which one experiences his/her impotence in averting his/her own but, above all, the other’s victimization. This may be easily extended to the ashamed consciousnesses in the colonizers’ “exclusive club” of the liberals’ “species”, in Sartrean terms (1967, 18). Generally speaking, as contended by Nussbaum (2004, 207–209) and Gabriele Taylor (1985, 90) for example, guilt inhabits the legal and juridical context, it concerns single actions from which one can dissociate himself/herself (I may be judged guilty of something without feeling guilty); it concerns laws and norms, whereas shame has to do with values. It does not attach to single actions only, but invests my whole being, compels me to ask myself who I am, which is my standard of humanity. As anthropologists know rather well, being able to feel ashamed can be a crucial index of the levels of civilization of a community, no matter if in a culturally specific way, and may also become an apparatus for social control and punishment, in a Foucauldian sense, and here we enter the field of collective shame in its interrelationship with individual shame. It may be safely contended that throughout his oeuvre Coetzee appears to take side with Aristotle’s positive view of shame seen as a necessary pre-condition for the possibility of change and of repairing action (The Nicomachean Ethics 1128b, 10–35, p. 79), and, in its wake, with the Marxian and Sartrean view of it as a revolutionary feeling. The two dimensions, the collective and the individual, are strongly inter-­dependent in view of a real political change, with individual shame playing a crucially ‘propedeutical’ role. The latter, however, is bound to assure a tragic existence when it is experienced in isolation, indifference, or disparagement, which is what constitutes a substantial part of the stories of various characters in Coetzee’s novels – among them, of Magda in HC and of Elizabeth Curren in AI. The chapter entitled “On National Shame” in Diary of a Bad Year offers a strategic perspectival angle from which to observe the issue at work in his novels. The 72-year-old Australian writer J C, a scarcely oblique alter ego of Coetzee’s, 3 vis-à-vis the “extraordinary shamelessness” of Cheney and the Bush administration concerning the practice of torture on Guantanamo’s prisoners, with uncompromising, outraged voice proclaims that “the issue for individual Americans becomes a moral one: how, in the face of this shame to which I am subjected, do I 3 In their Introduction to the volume J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory (2009), the editors Elleke Boehmer, Robert Eaglestone and Katy Iddiols, in referring to Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, write that while “it is important not to confuse the author J. M. Coetzee with the author J C “, in particular as far the latter’s views on literary theory are concerned, “the attacks remain attacks”.

60  Susanna Zinato behave? How do I save my honour?” (2007, 39, my emphasis). And he qualifies this question by specifying that the object, not just for the Americans of conscience, but for individual Westerners in general, must be to find new ways to save one’s honour, which is to a degree the same as keeping one’s self-respect but it is also a matter of not having to appear with soiled hands before the judgement of history. (41, my emphasis) J C’s appeal is very close to Sartre’s, in the aforementioned Preface, in which shame – the shame his allegedly ‘enlightened’ French fellow-citizens should feel for what their government has done in contrasting the Algerian liberation war – is invoked as a spur to a much-needed and all-too-late decolonization of Western humanism. Advocating personal honour and self-respect has nothing narcissistic in it; on the contrary, these concepts are invoked as the sine-qua-non values to start from in order to counter the criminal narcissism of the powerful. Let us further pursue the track suggested in Diary of a Bad Year. In its 11th chapter entitled “On the Curse”, J C conjures up innocent victims of the American war on terror invoking the gods’ help against America that proclaims itself “beyond the reach of the nations”. He imagines these petitioners’ curse worded in the unmistakable ‘grammar’ of Attic tragedy: “let punishment be visited on the wrongdoer in generations to come” (48). The reader is then referred back to the hellenist J.-P. Vernant’s definition of “tragic guilt”, that takes shape in the constant clash between the ancient religious conception of the misdeed as a defilement attached to an entire race and inexorably transmitted from one generation to the next […] and the new concept adopted in law according to which the guilty one is defined as a private individual who has deliberately chosen to commit a crime.4 (229) J C then applies this concept to George W. Bush’s hubris, consisting in denying the curse and even in “assert[ing] that he cannot commit a crime, since he is the one who makes the laws defining crimes” (49). In a language perfectly attuned to the conceptual language of Attic tragedy, Coetzee comments on Bush and his administration’s hubris by saying that its shamelessness “will visit punishment upon the children and grandchildren of his house”. To enhance the concept, he also conjures

4 The source reported by Coetzee in his notes is J.-P. Vernant’s “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy”, in Myth and Tragedy (1990).

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  61 up young Germans protesting against the charge that they have “blood on [their] hands”, to whom the following answer is given: “Because you have the misfortune to be the grandchildren of your grandparents; because you carry a curse” (50, original emphasis). The closing remark of Coetzee’s alter ego, “The impious one brings down a curse upon his descendants, in return, his descendants curse his name”, is the source of the title of the present chapter and its fil rouge. Interestingly, in Coetzee’s quote from Vernant’s passage a phrase has been left out that, however, may be said to encapsulate substantial narrative fuel for his fiction: the inherited defilement is transmitted through generations “in the form of atē or madness sent by the gods” (81). Now, the leap from war-on-terror America to apartheid South Africa and to its Founding Fathers’ hubris is not difficult, and it finds substantiation in many a statement of the author himself. The most explicit one is, perhaps, that contained in the chapter mentioned above, “On National Shame”, which reads as follows: The generation of white South Africans to which I belong, and the next generation, and perhaps the generation after that, too, will go bowed under the shame of the crimes that were committed in their name. Those among them who endeavor to salvage their personal pride by pointedly refusing to bow before the judgement of the world suffer from a burning resentment, a bristling anger at being condemned without adequate reading, that in psychic terms may turn out to be an equally heavy burden. (44) Set against the backdrop of the existential-phenomenological view of shame discussed in the Introduction, my reading avails itself of the motifs of inherited guilt, defiling curse, atē, hamartia, afforded by the treatment of shame in Attic tragedy that, I will argue, is brought into play by the author. The main contention of this chapter is that Magda and Elizabeth, the female narrators of, respectively, HC and AI are fictional embodiments of those who, while suffering defilement and accepting to live with the shame of their γένος (race/stock) – while “carrying the curse” – do not bow under the burden and defilement inherited from their Fathers’ hubris but, instead, rage against it, cursing their Fathers’ curse. This is made possible by their courageous embracing of the identitarian re-moulding of self that shame can provide, that is by their letting themselves become an object of the Other’s glance, go through the abjecting self-alienation and, then, through the self-recreation involved in the “event” of shame (adopting Timothy Bewes’s compelling keyword, 2011) that has beset their existence. What Elizabeth Curren has to say in the final stage of her letter (coinciding with the novel) – her words ringing to us with the authority and pathos of the dying – what she says to an enigmatic, Etruscan-like smiling Vercueil contains all the truth

62  Susanna Zinato about these characters and the contest staged by the author in the world around them: A crime was committed long ago. […] longer ago than 1916, certainly. So long ago that I was born into it. It is part of my inheritance. It is part of me, I am part of it. Like every crime it had its price. That price, I used to think, would have to be paid in shame: in a life of shame and a shameful death, unlamented, in an obscure corner. I accepted that. I did not try to set myself apart. Though it was not a crime I asked to be committed, it was committed in my name. I raged at times against the men who did the dirty work […] So that when in my rages I wished them dead, I wished death on myself too. In the name of honour. Of an honourable notion of honour. Honesta mors. […] What I did not know, what I did not know – […] was that the price was even higher. […] Where did the mistake come in? It had something to do with honour, with the notion I clung to through thick and thin from my education, from my reading, that in his soul the honourable man can suffer no harm. I strove always for honour, for a private honour, using shame as my guide. […] For the rest I kept a decent distance from my shame […]. I did not wallow in it […] I was not proud of it, I was ashamed of it. My shame, my own. (149–150, original emphasis) To be born into a crime embracing the whole of European colonization and exclusive, aggressive settler policy having in apartheid its most inhuman expression, to be born already chained to your skin, to have been thrown into this world of substantial “unfreedom” (since “in a society of masters and slaves no one is free”, “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech”, 1992, 97), rather than into a different, better one that does not condemn all to socio- and psycho-pathology: this existential thrownness dictated by the chances of history and fascinatingly imbricated with the Greek sense of tragic fate is seen to affect the life of renegade Magda, the spinster daughter of the Afrikaner Patriarch, “marooned”, Miranda-like, “on the island of her Karoo farm as a castaway” (Kossew 1998, 169), as much as the life of Mrs Curren, the humanist, the retired Classics lecturer of the English-speaking community in urban Cape Town. There have been various important studies around these two intense female protagonists, among them certainly valuable have been those offered by the contributors to the volume David Attwell and Sue Kossew, who have opportunely insisted on their being “displaced” figures, “signs of difference”, “who resist pre-existing and more dominant modes of address” (Attwell 1996, 215), Magda, in particular, being a “deeply ­transgressive consciousness” (1993, 60); and on their problematic

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  63 positionality as white women both colonized (by patriarchal authority) and colonizing, i.e. sharing in the dominant position and guilt of the colonists (Kossew 1998, 168). Both critics have effectively underlined the contradictions, vulnerabilities, and ambivalences entailed in this positionality. The inadequacy of the colonial language for a project of reciprocity is also, and importantly, stressed by Kossew as something both Magda and Elizabeth are painfully aware of (169–171). Here, as previously anticipated, in giving hermeneutical weight to Coetzee’s several allusions and hints to the conceptual grammar of fifth-century Greek tragedy, I would like to contribute a further emphasis, one that links directly with, in Coetzee’s words, “the descendants’ cursing of their Fathers’ names”, i.e. with the re-active agency implied in not being prepared to bow, in rejecting that burden, at least, and with the generation theme. I believe this kind of emphasis is allowed exactly by the author’s assumption of the Greek paradigm, evidenced by his resorting to its tragic idiolect and, as far as the 1990 novel is concerned, by deriving from Hesiod’s mythological anthropology the title, together with its strong symbolic implications. Besides – witness Attwell’s recent critical biography of Coetzee for the part concerning HC on the one hand (2015, 73), and what the author says about Age of Iron in conversation with the critic in Doubling the Point, on the other (1992, 250) – we know that the gestation of both novels was thought of in exquisitely dramaturgical terms, as the author’s “staging” of a “contest”, “an agonal representation”, in which at stake had to be the possibility for these tragically displaced subjects to have their say. We will return on the latter point later on. It may be useful to briefly observe, at this point, that while the presence of the Greek intertext in Coetzee’s inspiration is most probably and primarily due to readings cultivated by choice, perhaps the irradiance of its implications may be better gauged when one considers it against the backdrop of the relevance and familiarity of Attic tragedy in the African cultural landscape. 5 As Kevin Wetmore puts it, “As part of the colonial education system it was forced upon colonized people along with other 5 On the educational “tradition” and relevance of Greek tragedy in Africa cp. especially Kevin Wetmore (2002, 30 ff.) and Astrid van Weyenberg (2013, XIX ff.). Both scholars have duly emphasized how the fact that it came to the African continent through colonialism has inevitably informed the cultural and political complexity of its cultural reception and adaptation, since the Greek and Latin classics were upheld as the cradle of civilization legitimately inherited by the British literary tradition and legitimizing Britain’s superiority and dominance. Wetmore, in particular, has examined “the relevant issues within Greek tragedy and myth which predispose Greek tragedy to be ideal for adaptation into the African cultural context” (34 ff., my emphasis). Indeed, the phenomenon of African adaptations of Greek tragedy is of ever growing interest to the critics in reception studies, African studies, postcolonial and comparative literature.

64  Susanna Zinato literatures and philosophies which were touted to be superior to indigenous forms”. And yet, he points out, classical culture, while part and parcel of colonial education, was not in and of itself generally regarded as colonial culture. The Greeks seemed to be separated from the British and French as a culture: the colonizers themselves had borrowed and appropriated the Greeks, but had not created them. Even while things European were rejected, Greek culture was and is still acceptable to many postcolonial education systems. (32) The “un-Englishness” of Attic playwrights in the African context,6 as pointed out, among others, by Wole Soyinka (1976) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986, 90), has kept it safe from the post-colonial/post-­ independence and Afrocentric rejection of the Western canon. Attic tragedy has been and continues to be ‘at home’ in Africa and, more to our point, in South Africa, where “staging Greek tragedy became a ‘safe’ way to present resistance to apartheid and to subvert the seemingly harmless European cultural origin of the plays” (Wetmore 35): be it enough to mention, here, The Island, the famous reworking of Sophocles’ Antigone by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona (1973, first performance), and the two different readings of the Orestes myth given by the playwrights Fugard (Orestes, first performed in 1971) and Tug Yurgrau (The Song of Jacob Zulu, 1993) – both drawing on actual events, and both using the Orestes narrative (for a white and for a black tragic protagonist, respectively) – in order to dramatize the desperately necessary7 but un-regenerative choice for an act of terrorist sabotage (planting a bomb in a crowded area) as a way to protest against apartheid.8 6 Independently of how much supportive one may be of the hotly-debated theories of Afrocentric classicism mainly represented by Martin Bernal’s three-volume Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization which, starting from the argument that the poleis of Greece were originally colonies of the Egyptians and Phoenicians, returns Greek culture to Afroasiatic roots, thus implying that Western civilization is African in origin. In his Myth, Literature and the African World (1976) Wole Soyinka has been among the first to argue in favour of the closeness between the African world-view and classical tragedy. 7 As put by Attwell in Chapter 1 of the present volume, and in tune with Williams’s arguments (1993), “necessity is part of the debilitating stuckness of shame”. 8 The cross-cultural and cross-temporal appropriation of Attic tragedy has not ceased with the end of apartheid, witness the Oresteia’s relevance for its post-apartheid rewritings by Mark Fleishman, in In the City of Paradise (1998, first performance, published in 2008), and by Yaël Farber’s, in Molora (2003, first performance), in which the house of Atreus with the twisted, disfigured relations within it, is the house of South Africa facing the dramatic challenges consequent on the end of the apartheid regime – above all, the tension-filled space between revenge and justice – and involving explicit references to the TRC.

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  65 Bypassing positivist historicisms and Eurocentric or Afrocentric essentialisms, and avoiding genealogical models of influence that, as aptly underlined by Weyenberg, are ultimately reductive (82) with respect to the rich, happily ‘impure’ amalgamation of different traditions, the most interesting adaptations, above all in Nigeria (starting from Soyinka’s)9 and South Africa, have drawn on Greek drama and capitalized on the dynamic of familiarity and difference triggered by a substantially hybrid matrix inclusive of indigenous myths and culture. The argument I am advancing at this point of my discussion is that the same may be said to apply to Coetzee’s use of Greek allusions in our two novels in that, far from being allured by presentist or historicist temptations, his writing relates to the Classics of Greek tragedy in a shuttling movement between classic partner and new context that is all but supinely unproblematic.10 In the light of Coetzee’s deep familiarity with the Classics, with Greek classic literature, above all Attic tragedy, as well as with authoritative critical studies from hellenists like J.-P. Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, E.R. Dodds, or René Girard, as evidenced by various references, critical and fictional, that can be traced in his oeuvre, it should cause no surprise that the implication of the Greek paradigm is particularly strong in connection with the shame issue and the shameful plight of crime inheritors. Of course, it might well be objected that HC and AI are novels, not plays. Still, it is a good challenge for us to see how far the Greek clues concerning the quintessentially tragic motifs of inherited guilt, curse, pollution/miasma, and of the agent regret or hamartia sown by Coetzee in them allows us to go, hermeneutically speaking, in connection with the shame motif, as well as with the relations entertained by these novels with the tragic genre. Fascinatingly, in fact, the dramatic perspective here espoused in its turn could leave room for intertextual comparisons with other suggestive tragic heroines brought on stage by African adaptations of Attic tragedy, which cannot be done here for obvious reasons of space. Let us think of the aforementioned Antigone of Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona, the Tegonni of Osofisan’s eponymous Tegonni, the Agave of Soyinka’s 9 If in his renowned Bacchae Soyinka coalesces the Yoruba cosmology and its god Ogun together with Euripides to re-create a Yoruba Dionysus that “can be best understood in Hellenic values as a totality of the Dionysian, Apollonian and Promethean virtues” (1976, 141), his Season of Anomy (1973), featuring Ofeyi and his beloved Iriyise, respectively the Orpheus and the Eurydice characters of the Greek myth, and set in Nigeria in the chaotic context that led to Biafra war, can function as a good example of African novel drawing on Greek material. 10 Elsewhere (forthcoming, 2019) I explore the interpretive proposal of reading in Magda a Cassandra figure, a proposal that stemmed from detecting in that novel audible echoes of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Trojan Women. Indeed, that chapter and the present one may be read as companion pieces, fruit of the same line of investigation.

66  Susanna Zinato Bacchae, who, as Weyenberg observes, “hold out a prospect of justice; yet the political future they bring about has no room for them” (148). Also quite relevant, for its focus on the issue of white shame, or the white liberal’s intolerable burden of responding to life under apartheid, could be a comparison with Fugard’s Orestes, Harris, “the young man with a large brown suitcase” full of entropic violence, “on a bench in a Johannesburg station concourse”, who is “not travelling anywhere” (Fugard 1979, 3). The nuanced complexity of Coetzee’s ‘heroines’ does not admit of selective readings of them for the sake of liberationist politics and ideology. That said, comparisons are especially possible whenever the intertextual and inter-contextual horizons evoked by the playwrights adapting Attic tragedy go beyond any merely anti-Eurocentric, or Afrocentric, or ethnocentric polemics, into the larger world of humanity, of which Africa is part and to which Africa, especially South Africa, has so much to tell. One reason for Coetzee’s interest in and fascination with the Greeks has most probably much to do with the fact that “Ancient Greece was a culture of intense boundaries monitored by fear of pollution” (Padel 145), and that curses cast by the gods on men due to their hubristic crimes (murders, especially) caused pollution (Padel 104). As explained by Dodds (1951, 31 ff.), Hesiod, much earlier than the Attic playwrights, makes atȇ the penalty of hubris, that “will fall on the sinner’s descendants if the ‘evil debt’ is not paid in his lifetime” (which is, perhaps, one reason for thinking that Magda eventually does succeed in breaking the curse on her house, by having her father pay his debt with his own life). In Hesiod’s Works and Days (eighth century bce), hubris, or arrogance in word, deed, or even thought, figuring as the antagonist of dike (justice), is the primal cause of ruin and death, and it continues to be “the primal evil” in Attic tragedy. It is impossible, here, to resist quoting from Coetzee’s Summertime (2009, 209): “Our presence was grounded in a crime, namely colonial conquest, perpetuated by apartheid”. One should also opportunely point out that the very first pages of that fictionalized memoir are on the “moral dilemma” of “how to escape the filth”, of “where in the world can one hide where one will not feel soiled?” (4–5, my emphasis). Right at the beginning of his study Guilt by Descent (2007, 1) the classicist N.J. Sewell-Rutter underlines how “inherited guilt, curses, Erynes, and decision making” are “prominent features of [Attic tragedy]” and how “it is very characteristic of [it] to trace the movement of guilt and transgression through the generations of a family”. The tragic house, he continues, “allows the inheritance of far more than material goods: tragic children may receive folly and doom for their portion no less than cattle and lands”, more often than not the doom fallen on the household encompassing the wholesale destruction of the γένος (15). Admittedly, the concept of the punishment of the offender in his descendants is “as

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  67 early as the earliest Greek literature” (19) but, he points out, it can be seen to qualify the post-Homeric, Archaic period mainly. To measure the distance between the two periods it is useful to follow Dodds’s invitation to compare “Homer’s version of the Oedipus-saga with that familiar to us from Sophocles. In the latter, Oedipus becomes a polluted outcast […] in the story Homer knew, he continues to reign in Thebes after his guilt is discovered” (1951, 36). It is in Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, above all in Agamemnon, that questions of guilt and responsibility figure most prominently. In Aeschylus, “wealth and power lead to pride which leads to trespass, and ruin is inescapable. This ruin is seen as contrived by a superior power, whose destructive action is inescapable as the final ruin itself” (Bremer 118–119). As Sewell-Rutter underlines, “However moral, immoral, or amoral we find [its] terrible bloody sequence – and opinions have varied – we cannot deny that a sequence does obtain and that heredity does come into question” (23).This, in its turn, sheds light on why kin-killing is such a crucial ingredient of Greek mythology and Attic tragedy, and killing your own child “a murder that is prototype of horror in Greek imagination” (Padel 207). (One is immediately reminded of Thyestes’ gruesome, unwitting eating of the flesh of his own children or of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia). The crimes of the Fathers cause miasma, i.e. infection or pollution in their descendants (this is attested by Hesiod and is still commonly accepted in the Classical Age), which is why catharsis, atonement, and purification are such important rituals. In Attic tragedy, where the poet, speaking through the Chorus, is able to detect the overmastering punishment of the Gods working itself out through atȇ, the characters see only a demonic world haunted by malignant forces. It is the Erinyes/Furies who most effectively haunt the descendants’ household (Cassandra ‘sees’ “these Furies, who are Family” sieging the Atridae’s house: a band of demons, drunken with human blood, jarringly “sing[ing] in praise of the primal ruin,” Aeschylus’s Agamemnon ll.1186–1190). Vernant helps me to make clearer this point: Mania, lussa, atệ, miasma, Erinys – all these nouns refer in the last analysis to one and the same mythical factor, a sinister numen that manifests itself in many guises, at different moments, both within a man’s soul and outside him. It is a power of misfortune that encompasses not only the criminal but the crime itself, its most distant antecedents, its psychological motivation, its consequences, the defilement it brings in its wake and the punishment it lays in store for the guilty one and all his descendants. (1990, “Tensions and ­A mbiguities in Greek Tragedy”, 35–36) That said, what turns out to be crucially relevant to Coetzee’s treatment of white shame in South Africa and, consequently, to my argument, is

68  Susanna Zinato the moral complexity that characterizes the Aeschylean inherited guilt, in that the latter cannot be said to fall on the wholly innocent. In Aeschylus, the children who inherit the family curse, that is, the inherited taint of their οικος (house, household)’/γένος’s crime, do not try to avert from themselves the impiety or the pollution attendant on that crime. In the same line of argument, Bernard Williams observes how “Miasma was incurred by unintentional as by intentional killing. It was conceived of as, simply, an effect of killing a human being” (59). In J C’s words, “Dishonour won’t be washed away. Won’t be wished away” (2007, “On Apology”, 108). The tainted children of Aeschylean tragedy go through the abjection11 of their family’s pollution/miasma, and that is the ‘passive’ side, as it were, of tragic heritable curse. Its performative charge is suffered by those who inherit it. So, it is the curse cast upon Atreus by Thyestes that sets off the action of the trilogy, the curse rhetorically ‘formalizing’ the deeds of former generations lying in the past, before the beginning of the trilogy. It is Cassandra, in Agamemnon, who recalls and highlights the  causative role of Thyestes’ feast. The ‘active’ side of tragic curse lies in the renewal of the crime, out of a spirit of revenge, in the chain-­ reaction of murder for murder to which the inherited curse is conducive. “Child, you don’t fear a parent cursing you?/No — you’re my mother, but you threw me out” (Aeschylus, Libation Bearers, ll.912–913): Clytemnestra, who has murdered her husband Agamemnon in vindication for his sacrificial murder of their daughter Iphigenia, is, in her turn, bound to meet her death at the hands of their son Orestes. It is by taking this tradition into account that Coetzee’s ‘adaptation’, if I am allowed to use this word, of the Greek inexorable paradigm or, less systematically, his allusions to its motifs can offer remove us an additional layer of meaning that poignantly affects the semantic economy of his texts. Coetzee is asking us to read in the Greek ‘criminal’ Fathers the South African Forefathers, the Founding Fathers of apartheid, the Afrikaner Patriarchs following in their tracks, and their white accomplices. Their first crimes, colonialism and apartheid, have assured that the descendants of their house will inherit defilement, entrapping them into a net of involuntary but inexorable complicity. As a “locust horde”, these Fathers and their tribe have “infested the country, munching without cease, devouring lives” (AI 25). As “boars that devour their own children” (AI 26), they have jeopardized a possibly different future for them in South Africa, a land raped of childhood, anyway – a land where only children of iron can ‘grow’, in Elizabeth’s Hesiodean vision.

11 Of the ‘filthy’ miasma unleashed from murder within the family Jean Rudhart (1992, 49) writes that it is a “souillure trop abjecte pour qu’on en parle”, my emphasis. Sewell-Rutter (30) drew my attention to this important source.

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  69 Of a piece with this is a further, crucial Greek motif powerfully reworked by Coetzee and patently confirmed by Elizabeth’s above-quoted words: scholars of Greek tragedy, in the wake of Bernard Williams (1993), call it “agent regret”, “that kind of ethical remorse that owns actions” – the Fathers’ actions, the actions of one’s ‘race’ – “and their consequences even when actions were not directly of the ” (Gill 263). Hamartia is the other term that might be used in this connection (though it continues to be a subject of sustained controversy what precisely Aristotle really meant by it), provided it is not assimilated to one possible Aristotelian conception of paying for an unintentional crime that would avert from the victim any complicity with it. Hamartia remains for this chapter’s purpose a compellingly usable concept as far as it stands for the circle which delimits the area of tragic possibility, where essential moral innocence coexists with active causal implication in the suffering which is the upshot of [tragic] plot. Somewhere in the space between [inherited] guilt and vulnerability to arbitrary misfortune. (Halliwell 220)12 Therefore, in my discussion I will stay with that meaning of hamartia that mainly involves a tragic ‘placedness’, the thrownness/fate dwelt on before, thus rescuing its etymological link with ‘erring’/wandering, with all the stigma attached by the Greeks to wandering and, more to our point, to mad wandering. In point of fact, defilement, or pollution, is made visible first of all on the body but the demons often resort to madness, too, for the grim doctrine of the supposedly Euripidean fragment according to which “quos deus vult perdere, prius dementat”13. As I am going to expound later, Magda’s and Elizabeth’s defiling curse does not lead them to extend the chain-sequence, it brings them to break it. Their own curse is not proleptic but analeptic, directed to their forefathers and their polluting crimes. Erinyes-ridden, they do not suffer their misfortune only; crucially, they act, by first acknowledging and accepting fate’s call, and by then appropriating and transforming this fate into deed and wilful choice. Though being doomed accomplices of crime they try to become agents of change. My main contention is that this is made possible by their experience of shame, their passing from inherited guilt 12 Also worth quoting is the following: hamartia is not, as much scholarship has presupposed, a discrete, technical term, designating a single, sharply demarcated formula of tragic potential, but rather an appositely flexible term of Greek moral vocabulary to signify the area opened up in Aeschylus’s theory by the exclusion of full moral guilt and of mere subjection to the irrational strokes of external adversity. (Halliwell 220) 13 On this see Padel (2005), 5–8.

70  Susanna Zinato into shame because, in Williams’s pithy words (93), “The structures of shame contain the possibility of controlling and learning from guilt, because they give a conception of one’s ethical identity, in relation to which guilt makes sense. Shame can understand guilt, but guilt cannot understand itself”. In a comparative view, one might say, perhaps, that unlike Coetzee’s heroines, Athol Fugard’s Harris/Orestes is not able to pass from guilt to shame, and that gives that play of the 70’s its bleak, deadend effect. The white liberal’s act of violence meant to curb the burden of guilt over his white Motherland/Clytemnestra’s crimes cannot be the beginning of anything. The Other’s glance (Hendrik’s and Klein Anna’s in HC, and Vercueil’s, Florence’s, Bheki’s, John’s, Mr Thabane’s in AI) precipitates these subjects’ awareness of a failure of their whole beings – to return to the existential-phenomenological view of shame espoused in the Introduction. Of its very otherness may be said what Attridge observes with particular reference to Vercueil’s and John’s in AI: that it “seems to exert a strong pull” on our protagonists, making them “exceptionally willing to allow [their] inherited values to be tested to the limit” (2004, 108). That glance is perceived because Magda and Elizabeth have become aware of it and are prepared to be its object. That glance has coalesced with their glance on their own selves or, if one prefers, on their internalized Other – on what they are and what they want to be – and, here, an important catalyst for change is their ēthos. The descendants, writes Vernant, are possessed by a daimōn, and “tragic man is constituted within the pace encompassed by this pair, ēthos [character] and daimōn [divine power]” (1990, 37). It is their ēthos that brings them to experience the need to act in that way. Williams resorts to ēthos in discussing shame mechanisms and “necessary identities”: the source of the necessity is in the agent, an internalized other whose view the agent can respect. Indeed he can identify with this figure, and the respect is to that extent self-respect; but at the same time the figure remains a genuine other, the embodiment of a real social expectation. […] these necessities are internal, grounded in the ēthos, the projects, the individual nature of the agent, and in the way he conceives the relation of his life to other people’s. (1993, 103) An integral part of one’s ēthos is one’s Bildung: so it is for both Magda and Elizabeth Curren, though it is especially with the latter, whom Coetzee has wanted to be a retired Classics lecturer, that this issue comes out most cogently and problematically, as discussed in the last stage of the present chapter. ***

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  71 In the light of the Greek concepts of shaming curse and shameful defilement explicitly called into play by Coetzee, we are better equipped to read Elizabeth’s cancer, Magda’s repulsive ugliness, as well as the alleged ‘madness’ of both (both are perceived as ‘mad’ by the world around them, both charge the world around them with infecting madness/insanity). Entering the discursive field of the body and, more to the point, the marked body means retrieving a key issue in Coetzee’s oeuvre, one criticism has duly lingered on. I would dare say that the inseparability or lack of distinction between body and soul in Attic tragedies may have been another cogent source of attraction to the Greeks for South A ­ frican ­Coetzee (revealingly, ‘in love’ with Beckett’s novels’ pitiless and, at times, side-splitting debunking of this Cartesian dualism). Asked by Attwell to comment on the importance of the body in his novels, Coetzee is adamant in translating that question into a question about power: If I look back over my fiction, I see a simple (simple-minded?) standard erect. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not “that which is not,” and the proof that it is is the pain it feels. […] Not grace, then, but at least the body, […] for political reasons, for reasons of power. And let me again be unambiguous: it is not that one grants the authority of the suffering body: the suffering takes this authority: that is its power. To use other words: its power is undeniable. (1992, 248) Intersecting with this discourse is the centrality given to the body by Fanon’s exploration of the signs on/in the body of the psychic phenomenology of colonial power politics. As we know, it is to his own body that Fanon addresses his final prayer in Black Skin, White Masks: “Oh my body, make of me always a man who questions!” (1986, 181). Now, as far as the relationship between the body and shame is concerned, there is no need, here, to insist on what all studies on shame emphasize, that is, their special, exclusive relationship (cp. Introduction). Lévinas goes as far as identifying shame with nausea in order to insist exactly on this sense of helpless captivity of the self to the self in shame, this radical impossibility of ‘hiding’ oneself that exposes the subject’s (the white subject’s, more to our point) arbitrary invisibility. As encapsulated by Timothy Bewes, “Shame, of any kind, is an intensity that is both felt on the body and physically oriented around it”, but this “corporeal dimension of shame […] takes on an especially dramatic significance in the colonial situation” (2011, 153). Now, Coetzee’s readers cannot but be familiar with his characters’ somatization of shame through their marked bodies. However, in his novels (let us think of Dusklands, Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace, Slow Man) the shamed, marked body is never experienced in a redemptive, para-Christian or simply ennobling perspective: “there is

72  Susanna Zinato nothing ennobling” (to quote the Magistrate of Waiting for the Barbarians, 115) in their own suffering, not even in the Other’s suffering body, and this, I believe, is due to the author’s strenuously keeping at bay the risk of fetishizing the victim’s suffering – in some way, the reference is to that kind of fetishism perceived by Elizabeth Costello in the Gothic body of the Christ dying in contortions that has been sculpted by Joseph in endless copies.14 As to the entropic and cannibalistic link between shame and the sick body in AI, Elizabeth’s own words are explicit enough: “You know, I am sick. Do you know what is wrong with me? I have cancer. I have cancer from the accumulation of shame I have endured in my life. This is how cancer comes about: from self-loathing the body turns malignant and begins to eat away at itself” (152). Elizabeth calls her cancer “cancer of the heart”, “caught by drinking from the cup of bitterness” (142). She warns the policemen inspecting her house in search for the 15-year-old black boycotter that she is hiding and protecting and that they will shoot in a few minutes, “you will probably catch it too one day. It is hard to escape” (142), though the reader is made to feel that these belong to the tribe of the shameless, of those for whom self-loathing is a moral impossibility. Throughout the novel cancer is experienced by Elizabeth in a grotesquely abjecting key that parodizes South Africa’s cancerous condition as a deathly “misbirth”, a “monstrous growth”, and a “sign that one is beyond one’s term. This country, too: time for fire, time for an end, time for what grows out of ash to grow” (59). In a ghastly cannibalistic imagery, she describes herself as having fallen pregnant with “these obscure swellings […]: children inside [her] eating more every day” and that she has “carried beyond any natural term” (59). A few years ago Fiona Probyn devoted an important article to the “cancerous body” in AI (1998), to the trope of shame as the infectious enemy within, eating away at one’s flesh from within. Elizabeth’s invocation of fire, “death by fire”, “purification by fire” of herself, as well as of her country, is something that foregrounds the motif of infection and the related need for a sort of ritual sanitation. Magda, too, Cassandra-like (the Euripidean Cassandra, who enters the stage shaking torches meant to announce her deathly, but crime-purifying, union with Agamemnon), fantasizes about fire, about setting fire. Concerning Mrs Curren’s language of infection, Probyn is certainly opportune in connecting it to the core of infecting irrationality in the European racist, Nazi, and the like ideologies and, more specifically, as far as South African apartheid is concerned, to the highly influential doctrines of the sociologist Geoffrey Cronjé – a Nazi sympathizer passionate about the myth of pure,

14 Cp. J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003), fifth chapter: “The Humanities in Africa”.

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  73 un-mixed and unmixable, blood – about whom Coetzee writes in “The Mind of Apartheid” (1991). As argued by Probyn, Elizabeth’s resorting to the rhetoric of infection and fire cleansing is part of her apocalyptic vision of a fate of complicity. Still, I would add that she is invoking fire not in submission but in rebellion to it, as a contrastive action meant to ‘disturb’ the inexorable fate, even at the price of one’s own death. Another effect worked on Elizabeth’s body by her ravaging illness is described by her as a hollowing out of it: “I am hollow, I am a shell. To each of us fate sends the right disease. Mine a disease which eats me out from inside” (103). Being hollowed, feeling a “hole” inside, is Magda’s continuous feeling, too. The sisterhood in shame shared by Magda and Elizabeth is evidenced by the fact that both experience their bodies as dry and hollowed out. Yet, while Elizabeth’s cancer has received much critical attention, as far as I know not enough attention has been paid to Magda’s ugliness as the qualifying feature that ‘epidermalizes’ (in Fanonian terms) her shame. From the start, when, almost mesmerized by her father’s “voluptuous […] big-boned […] full-lipped” second wife, she faces the body paradigm of the Afrikaner woman, and later on, when she is enraptured by Klein Anna’s breathtaking beauty, she percussively insists upon her own hopeless inadequacy and, even more, her repulsive ugliness: But who would give me a baby, who would not turn to ice at the spectacle of my bony frame on the wedding-couch, the coat of fur up to my navel, the acrid cavities of my armpits, the line of black moustache, the eyes watchful, defensive, of a woman who has never lost possession of herself? (11) From the start she gives herself as a daughter of her father’s absence and a figure of absence herself. “Instead of being the womanly warmth at the heart of this house, I have been a zero, null, a vacuum towards which all collapses inward” (2). She morbidly insists on introducing herself as a Gothic witch (8). She returns again and again to the percussive image of the hole, of herself as “a being with a hole inside her” (9), herself being the hole in the Fathers’ symbolic economy. Later on, she ponders on how “even decades of mutton and pumpkins and potatoes have failed to coax from [her] the jowls, the bust, the hips, of a true country foodwife, have achieved no more than to send [her] meagre buttocks sagging down to the backs of [her] legs” (21). The arch-Lacanian moment, that of placing herself (her lack) in front of the mirror “gives [her] no pleasure” (21), the mirror only precipitating her abjecting diagnosis: It is at times like this that I notice […] how thickly the hair grows between my eyes […] I have no cause to love this face, […] And might

74  Susanna Zinato I not soften my aspect too if I released my hair from its daytime net and pin, its nighttime cap, and washed it, and let it fall first to the nape of my neck, then perhaps one day to my shoulders, if it grows for corpses why should it not grow for me? And might I not be less ugly if […]. (22) The import of abjection in the recurring hair motif should not go unnoticed: here it is indirectly confirmed by the reference to corpses and to the repellent motif of organic, parasitic growth on a dead body (by way of association reminding the reader of “the blind panic of an organism that wants to live” (13), which is the way she describes her failure to attempt suicide by drowning, rather than by fire, as in Elizabeth’s case). More examples could be given of Magda’s obsessive insistence on the ugliness and repulsiveness of her body. We do not know whether she is actually ugly (or whether Klein Anna is really so beautiful, at that). The point is that she experiences her body, indeed, her whole being, as ugly, in self-loathing. That ugliness, here, has nothing to do with aesthetic worries, and everything with the white woman’s body’s epidermalization of self-loathing and shame receives intertextual confirmation from AI. Elizabeth, too, attaches the words “ugly” and “ugliness” to the “metamorphosis” worked on South Africans by the ugly times they are forced to live in: “[Mr Thabane]’s look had grown uglier. No doubt I grow uglier too by the day. Metamorphosis, that thickens our speech, dulls our feelings, turns us into beasts. Where on these shores does the herb grow that will preserve us from it?” (95). Circe-like, demonic atȇ works bestial changes in human beings but Odysseus’ herb, Moly, which could break the spell, is not to be found anywhere. Again, a bit later, she exclaims “How ugly we are growing, from being unable to think well of ourselves! Even the beauty queens look irritable. Ugliness: what is but the soul showing through the flesh?” (121) From what has been said and quoted thus far, the abjecting force of pollution/defilement in the two white women’s experience of shame should have clearly emerged. Still, it is worthwhile focussing our attention on a few scenes, on the two novels’ stages, that are intensely, devastatingly dominated by the abjection gone through by their protagonists. As far as Magda is concerned, one of them (n.101–106) coincides with a scene of infantile regression, when she implores her father’s attention from outside the door of his bedroom where he is having sex with his black “concubine” – the lawgiver breaking his own laws. The Patriarch is addressed as “daddy” (“Daddy […] can I say something?”); he denies his “child” words and, instead, orders her to bed. Urine, as well as tears, run over her body. This body, soon after, is lived as the “limp puppet-body” that has been squatting outside her father’s door and that the latter, once he has recovered his masterful control together

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  75 with his clothes, draws up and “steers down” the corridor. However, Magda’s pathetic regression and abjected body have nonetheless forced her father into fully facing his own shame, the greatest shame of all – in the Fathers’ ‘Tables’– which is at the root of his pitiless, hard dealing with her and, soon after, of his guilty, soothing tone, which feeds their ­double-bind relationship. Another shamefully abjecting scene (n. 144) is the one in which Magda, having followed the coloured couple into the ex-schoolhouse, spurned by the wish to protect Klein Anna from her husband’s fury, is caught by them while standing, in hesitation, outside, “a shape in the doorway”. Her eyes catch Hendrik “crouched over” his young wife “as if about to sink his teeth into her throat”, ready to rape her to confirm his manhood and possession of her. Magda catches his grin, his “grotesquely large” penis, and, above all, his words: “Miss has surely come to watch”. She is forced into the abject position of the white voyeur whose body vicariously enjoys the stereotypically racist projection of black hyper-sexuality (“grotesquely larger than it should have been, unless I am mistaken”, my emphasis) inhabiting the colonial white imaginary. A master scene of abjection for Magda is her room at night, when she is raped twice, and then repeatedly ‘visited’ by Hendrik. The latter, who does not recognize in Magda a substitute power position after her father’s death, has already shamed her in an episode in which, clothed in the best clothes of her father – an uncanny view for her, who implores him to take them off – he gestures towards unbuckling his trousers, laughing. His laugh perfectly seals Magda’s abject position. The rapes, then, receive their import of repulsiveness also by having been prepared by Magda’s insisted references to her own ugly smell (“the smell of an unused woman, sharp with hysteria, like onions, like urine”, 86). The body that is going to be raped is that of a “sinister old child full of stale juices”, with “scraggy knees”. A “dusty hole”. These rapes have been prepared, also, by scenes of self-abjection, of utter exposure of herself as a female animal body to be victimized, as when Magda is thrown to the kitchen floor and brutally beaten: “he kicks me in the buttocks, heavily, twice, a man’s kicks, catching bone. I flinch and weep with shame. ‘Please! Please!’ I roll over on my back and lift my knees. This is how a bitch must look” (104–105). When the rape comes, it is like “dull surgery”. Shame, in scenes like these, is searingly abjecting (“I am soggy, it’s revolting, it must have been with his spit, he must have spat on me while he was there. I sob and sob”, 107). As to AI, a piercing, abjecting scene for old, sick Mrs Curren takes place when, after John has been brutally shot in her house, she clasps a pink quilt around her and, “with her wild hair”, she goes out, starts walking, erring, on the road. She sleeps near the road, in the open, and she is awakened first by a child’s feeling inside the folds of her quilt for money or something:

76  Susanna Zinato His hand crept over my body. ‘There is nothing for you,’ I tried to say but teeth were loose. Ten years old at most, with a shaven skull and bare feet and a hard look. Behind him two companions, even younger. I slipped out the teeth. ‘Leave me alone,’ I said: ‘I am sick, you will get sick from me’. They stand, waiting; she needs to urinate, and does so, there and then, in their full view. Later on, she is again molested by the three children, who force a little stick in her mouth, harder and harder. “I could taste the grains of dirt it left behind. With the tip of the stick he lifted my upper lip. I pulled back and tried to spit. Impassively he stood up. With a bare foot he kicked, and a little rain of dust and pebbles struck my face” (145). Along with the defilement suffered through/on their bodies, madness – as previously anticipated – is another important face of atȇ, of the manifestation of their Fathers’ curse. Abjection and abjecting ‘madness’ (in the surrounding world’s eyes) are the price Magda and Elizabeth are paying for accepting to be inhabited by shame and for rejecting the kind of subjectivity entailed in the position they have inherited in the colonial code, exposing themselves to utter vulnerability and isolation. Coetzee’s un-glamorizing and nuanced use of the madness motif is particularly close to the Greek paradigm. In point of fact, madness, in Greek tragedies, not only does come from outside, from demonic persecution, as a manifestation of atȇ, but it is no blessing. It isolates, and it brings suffering and shame, owing to the social belief that madness is polluting (as underlined by Padel, “mainomai”, “I am mad”, is often close in Greek imagination to “miainomai”, “I am polluted”, 200). Both colonizers and colonized are psychically implicated in the biopolitics of the colony but, above all, existing in the colony – even more so in the apartheid-ridden state of exception – does not so much interrogate the binary opposition of “sanity” and “insanity” as, more fundamentally, it questions the very notion of the human, especially as advocated and endorsed by Western humanism (as strongly emphasized by Sartre’s Preface in the wake of Fanon). Magda’s and, more obliquely, Elizabeth’s dubious madness15 ironically interrogate the wider dementia of the apartheid nation considering that, directly (as in “The mind of Apartheid”) or indirectly, in fiction, the trope of madness has been used by Coetzee in portraying apartheid as a phenomenon of collective insanity, more specifically in focussing attention on the polluting force of the irrational in politics. His Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech comes 15 I am using “dubious” both to imply that the texts’ symbolic economies invite us to exclude that they are truly mad though they are easily perceived as such (by the novels’ readers, no less than by their internal world), and to valorize the charge of self-­ doubting and questioning entailed by their states of mind.

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  77 to mind, at the point where he says that “the deformed and stunted relations between human beings that were created under colonialism and exacerbated under apartheid have their psychic representation in a deformed and stunted inner life” (Doubling the Point, 98). They take their psychic toll. That said, to fully appreciate the madness motif in Coetzee’s texts one should avoid falling into the “common readerly or critical ploy in dealing with problematic fictions”, that of ascribing to the character’s madness their problematic challenges (Attridge 2004, 24), and be alerted to the fact that, as Attridge, again, observes in connection with Magda’s character “if everything we read could be the product of fantasy or insanity, the novel loses any grip on the real, and thus much of its narrative drive and engagement with the very real issues of family, gender, racial, and master-servant relations” (24). *** Cancer, repulsive ugliness, hollowness, and madness are being proposed here as the abjecting epiphenomena of the atȇ unleashed by the Fathers’ shameful and polluting curse. What they share in common is the erosion of these white women’s identity. Cancer, in particular, “problematizes the inside/outside, self/other distinction which constitutes or fortifies perceptions of a unified self because it is anomalous and abject” (Probyn 214). As explained by Julia Kristeva’s fundamental study on abjection (1982), abjection has exactly to do with the borders of the body, the boundaries of one’s identity. The disruption of these boundaries, their becoming permeable, causes the experience of abjection, which entails disgust and loathing. The abject is the unstable and uncontrollable source of loathing (and of fear of pollution) that disturbs personal or social identitarian systems. One might say that the self-loathing brought by shame and corroborated by its abjecting charge, which is a staple experience of Magda’s and Elizabeth’s, presupposes looking at oneself from a third-person position. It entails a dissociation leading to dis-­ identification. The crucial bearing of the identity discourse on abjection is what should lead us to prefer abjection to humiliation when describing this sort of ‘rite of passage’, this coming to terms with the shame of a tainted subjectivity on the part of the white liberal in Coetzee’s novels (the Magistrate being the perfect case in point). “Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other personal attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: “In reality who am I?” (Fanon 1967, 200). These words by Sartre are, as Fanon has been the first to claim, applicable, with obvious dramatic differences with respect to the colonized’s predicament, to the white colonial with an uneasy consciousness. Magda and Elizabeth already are lacking narcissistic

78  Susanna Zinato self-assurance because of their γένος’ patriarchal gender politics, and perhaps this makes of them subjects more eligible for a journey through shame that will make of them first lost, then new subjects. Not by coincidence, this approach to shame’s effects on identity receives support from the stress put by contemporary identity politics on everybody’s right to authenticity and difference. Identity politics is a new, enlarged version of Hegel’s philosophy and politics of recognition, holding that full consciousness of the self is to be reached only through the reciprocal struggle for recognition by the Other – the master-slave dialectic postcolonial studies have usefully reworked. Identity politics, however, as Sonia Kurks pinpoints (1996), owes much to Sartre’s treatment of the “Jewish question” (in Sartre 1976) and to Fanon’s compelling and critical re-appropriation of that study in dealing with black identity. What turns out to have a relevant bearing on my discourse, and, more to the point, on tragic hamartia in Coetzee’s two novels, is the emphasis first put by both on the phenomenon of overdetermination that takes place when our identity is determined from our being placed in a situation that we have not freely chosen (cp. Introduction), when we are not free not to be the ascribed identity expected from us. In explaining the dynamic according to which the Jew, in an anti-Semitic context, is never free not to be the Jew (77), Sartre in significant ways “anticipates more recent anti-essentialist constructions of racial, ethnic, and gender identities” (Kurks 124). In a parallel way, as we know, Fanon’s starting point in Black Skin, White Masks is the problem of authenticity or, better, of the impossibility for authenticity to be attained when the black man has internalized a psycho-existential inferiority complex. Not being a prisoner of one’s ‘in-born’ situation, not being overdetermined by it, and “not being a prisoner of history” in Fanon’s words (1986, 186) is what Magda and Elizabeth feel the existential and ethical urgency of, once they have ‘purged’, as it were, their subjectivity from the overdetermination of their Fathers’ law and from their Fathers’ curse. Fanon’s famous second part of the statement “the Negro is not. No more than the white” (180) acquires particular, problematic force from this point of view. “The white is not” might be taken not as the starting point but as the arrival point of a process made possible by shame: i.e. through the self-loathing set off by the experience of shame Magda and Elizabeth have become aware of the impossibility to live with their overdetermined selves; dis-identification or dis-association from their old/given identity follows, and this paves the way to a healthy (if painful) experience of unbelonging and of passing through the undifferentiated ground of abjection. The latter hopefully leads to a re-creation of identity/subjectivity carried out through wilful affirmation of agency: through cursing the Fathers’ curse. The tragic side of this process lies in the fact that it does not receive recognition from either party, i.e. neither from their white household/community nor from the blacks.

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  79 Judith Butler’s argument according to which subject-formation is the possible, though seemingly paradoxical, outcome of abjection and agency may be usefully called into play here: “the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside, an abjected outside, one which is, after all, ‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation” (1993, 3, my emphasis). Once Magda and Elizabeth have stepped out of the safe but inauthentic boundaries of their Fathers’ house and, unhoused and abjected, have set fire to that house, as it were, then they can have access to authenticity and honour. *** The eruption of this impossibility results in Magda’s and Elizabeth’s action, what I have called their “cursing”, radically subverting the law against itself. Perhaps, in this connection, it is worthwhile drawing attention to the dynamic nature of the Greek vocabulary concerned with madness. As underlined by Padel, at the end of a grammatical/semantic survey, “at the heart of madness language is the ‘verb’” (23), action. This coincides with an assumption of responsibility, certainly not with an escape from history. Not being a prisoner of history is not living outside history. It is exactly because they accept the terrible complicity of hamartia; it is from the bitter cup of their agent regret that they develop in themselves the urge to vomit (extending Lévinas’ imagery), to try to break the chain of the curse. Magda’s agency is all-too-evident in her killing of her father (whether she has actually axe-murdered and/or shot her father is not the point: she has killed him the moment she has chosen to try to be antagonistic to what he symbolizes, to be his Other in the house). At the beginning jealousy and resentment towards her father, on the one hand, and wish for freedom, equality, and reciprocity, on the other, co-exist in Magda. Then the former are left behind and dispelled by the sacrificial killing. The naked, wounded body of her father, this Patriarch who, god-like, has broken his own laws, will be left lying in abjection by his renegade daughter – the flies “crawling” on his face, clustering on his blood. Magda will refuse to play the respectful son of this Noah intoxicated by erotic and political hubris. The Biblical intertext is invoked (Noah’s name breaking surface several times) in order to be infringed in the agon. It will be her father who, “catching a corner of the curtain”, will “cover his sex”. Then it will be the father who will be left crying, asking for help, and “sitting in a pool of blood like a baby that has wet itself” (68). The scene of Magda’s abjecting infantile regression seen earlier coalesces with this one: urine coalesces with blood, with a keenly disturbing, uncanny effect. Abjecting, to her wounded father, is also the attention lent by his sexually unexperienced daughter to his sex, in the presence of the black servant Hendrik: her parodic and diminishing “tender look” at

80  Susanna Zinato it (“the sex is smaller than I thought to be […] poor little thing”, “this pale unprotected manhood”) rehearsing colonialist sexual fantasies to dis-empowering ends. As regards Hendrik’s serial ‘rapes’ of Magda, various interpretations have been advanced by criticism – as suggestive of Magda’s colonialist fantasy (Attwell 1993, 67), as even supporting this fantasy, given Magda’s progressive acceptance of them (Penner 1989, 67); as, on the contrary, an intensification of her ordeal (Head 1997, 59); or as the self-conscious “playing” into and parodying the colonialist fantasy of black-on-white-rape (Poyner 2009, 39). Still, not enough attention has been paid to what Robert Pippin (2010, 32) defines as Magda’s “deeply unsatisfying attempts (or imagined attempts) at abject subjection” that she “acts out” in countering the deep “pathos of […] distances” (HC, 97) of her father’s language. It is in this light I tend to read the unusual choice, on Coetzee’s part, of giving representation to the violence on the female body, which does not apply to Klein Anna’s coerced intercourse with the white master, nor will apply to Lucie Lurie’s rape by the gang of black rapists in Disgrace. David Lurie’s comment, that “a history of wrong” was speaking through Lucie’s rapists, may be taken to concern Hendrik’s first two rapes, too. But his following ‘night visits’ are more suggestive of a surgical wiping out of the emasculation and loss of male authority he has been enduring due to the master’s appropriation of his wife’s body, as well as of something like an acceptance of a necessary burden on Magda’s part. In dealing with the “ne plus ultra of colonial horror fantasies, the rape of a white woman” (Graham 2003, 433), here, too, not only in Disgrace, a subversion of “the black peril” narrative (433) may be said to take place. Paradoxically, there is a subtle element of agency in Magda’s decision to accept to have her body ‘invaded’ by Hendrik. In this case, abjection, subjectivity, and agency are made to precipitate into a knot of reciprocal implication. What I’m arguing is that Magda’s alleged ‘acceptance’ can be read as a paradoxical form of agency in her specific ‘placedness’, and is part of a project of an attempt at reciprocity in intimacy that is bound to sure failure. After killing her father, in fact, Magda’s agency is all in her awkward, pathetic, and contradictory attempts at establishing some kind of reciprocity and affectivity with the former coloured servants. Untimely as they are, politically/historically speaking, it is the lack of a common alphabet of reciprocity that condemns them to failure, an alphabet of gestures as well as of words. But there are no doubts on Magda’s ‘exposing’ her whole being in trying out her new subjectivity. As to Elizabeth Curren’s agency, it starts the moment she decides to do what she can (no matter if little, facing the overwhelming power of her ‘race’), to help and support Florence, Bheki, and John. She does not, only and simply, cut out for herself the role of witness: she feels she cannot wait and see, from her comfortable house in her white, ‘etherized’

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  81 residential quarter. She tears from herself her old self (in Lévinasian terms); drives Florence in search of her son Bheki; takes care of John, first at the hospital, then in his own house; and undertakes her journey through the Underworld of Guguletu township, where she accepts exposing her new self to the blacks’ distrust and resentment, and where she accepts, with understanding, being told that her words are “shit”. She is no longer prepared to just stay and watch; she needs to act; she even thinks of committing suicide by setting fire to herself in front of a governmental building as a demonstrative action of protest against the regime. She reaches the point where she wonders “where is home?” (134), and the reader is made to understand not only that the house of the Fathers is no more, but, also, that she doesn’t care any longer about having a house, about being housed at all. Her old house is now for Vercueil and for those, like him, that roam in the “uninhabitable” zones (Butler 3–4) of regimented South Africa. Yes, admittedly, Magda’s and Elizabeth’s cursing resonates in the void of their utter isolation. It is perceived as a mad cursing, repudiated and disparaged by the white tribe, and looked at with suspicion and incredulity by the blacks. This isolation makes of them two tragic characters. Shame has been for them an isolated and isolating experience, a revelation penetrating their consciousness autonomously, through their moral sensibility, the moral sensibility of the just man/woman who “experiences shame at another’s man crime” (in Levi’s words, The Truce). Their ēthos (moral character) has made it not only possible but necessary for them, in their situatedness, to “internalize the other’s voice” (in Williams’ view 1993) or the third-person’s perspective (in Gabriele Taylor’s 1985) that has invaded their bodies and their souls with self-loathing and outrage. Both Magda and Elizabeth, Ajax-like, at a certain point attempt at committing suicide, as we have seen, as a way to separate themselves from the burden of their shame but without evading taking on themselves their historical implication and in the hope to save their honour, anyway. This tragic plight finds a very intense iconic representation in the image of Magda that, left alone in burying her father, ‘embraces’ his body, wrapped like a big “larva” in the hole she herself has dug in “the petrified garden”, where she will stay, waiting for her own death. A castaway. Elizabeth Curren does not even think of leaving South Africa and joining her daughter, an emigrée in the States. To Vercueil asking “So, she is an exile?” she retorts, “No, she is not an exile. I am the exile” (69). *** Have Magda’s and Elizabeth’s ēthos a debt to pay to their Bildung? The German term includes meanings conducive to formation, cultivation, and education. Here Bildung is not meant, conservatively, as the

82  Susanna Zinato cultural transmission of traditional knowledge and values to be ­supinely received as a doctrine. The notion of Bildung here called into play is the one born with the Greeks and, broadly, with the Classics, and particularly upheld by the German philosophical tradition (Goethe, Hegel, ­Nietzsche, Gadamer) as the formation of a capacity to keep oneself open to what is Other through one’s experience of the unfamiliar and the alien in one’s encounters with people, and (but not necessarily) with texts. In this sense Bildung is not a matter of bookish learning, nor of inert and antiquarian addition of cultural data; on the contrary, what matters in Bildung is this transformative, open-ended process of becoming that results in a deepening and refining of one’s human sensitiveness, of one’s ethos. Magda, we know, is a sophisticated reader who can quote Engels and Hegel, and who is familiar with Attic tragedy as much as with Beckett, with Freud as much as with Sartre and Ricoeur. Elizabeth is a retired Classics lecturer who has the Classics in her bones, who reads the world around her through the eyes of Greek and Latin literature. She filters apartheid South Africa through Hesiod’s myth of the ages, experiencing it as an age of iron, a barbarous world in which hubris dominates over dike, children grow white on their temples, strength makes right, and trust and mercy are exiled. But do humanities “teach humanity”, as argued by Elizabeth Costello (2003, 151)? How to address Sartre’s all-too-legitimately outraged interrogation of our blood-stained “precious sets of values” (cp. 1967, 22–23: “[…] on closer scrutiny you won’t see one that isn’t stained with blood. […] Now, which side are the savages on? Where is barbarism?”). Shall we forget that “racialism created the underpinning for not only the Nazi conquest of Eastern Europe and South African Apartheid, but British and French colonial empire before either of these?” That “racial science is in fact part of the intellectual inheritance of the West and that it still has a life in the same sense that an unburied corpse may be said still to have a life”? (Coetzee, “The Mind of Apartheid”). Perhaps, Elizabeth ­Costello/J.M. Coetzee’s “humanity” asks to be read in a more critical, exquisitely tragic way, in the Greek perspective that sees man as a deinòn, i.e. a creature capable of the highest, sublimest things and, at the same time, of the most barbarous actions. It is in this perspective, I believe, that the humanist heritage entailed by the concept of Bildung given above would seem worth salvaging, as a homeopathic antidote to the shameful use of it as a criminal “ideology of lies” (Sartre 1967, 21). Above all, the part of Bildung that growing up and living in apartheid South Africa has made cogently true to our white misfits through the experience of shame is that we should refrain from upholding like a fetish a given, inherited ‘ideal’ of humanity, especially if it is betrayed over and over again; that humanity cannot be the exclusive precinct of any culture and of anybody; and that we constantly need to interrogate and take care of what we mean with humanity.

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  83 Coming close to concluding my essay, it is enlightening to turn to Coetzee’s own words and, namely, to his answer to Attwell’s suggesting his possible closeness to “the Dostoyevskian principle of Grace” in dealing with Elizabeth’s end (1992, 250, original emphasis): Elizabeth Curren brings to bear against the voices of history and historical judgement that resound around her two kinds of authority: the authority of the dying and the authority of the classics. Both these authorities are denied and even derided in her world: the first because hers is a private death, the second because it speaks from long ago and far away. So a contest is staged, not only in the dramatic construction of the novel but also within Elizabeth’s – what shall I say? – soul, a contest about having a say. To me as a writer, as the writer in this case, the outcome of this contest – what is to count as classic in South Africa – is irrelevant. What matters is that the contest is staged, that the dead have their say, even those who speak from a totally untenable position. So: even in an age of iron, pity is not silenced. What is of importance in what I have just said is the phrasing: the phrases is staged, is heard; not should be staged, should be heard. There is no ethical imperative that I claim access to. Elizabeth is the one who believes in should, who believes in believes in. Coetzee’s dramaturgical idiolect is unmistakable. It is to be found in ­Coetzee’s talking about HC, too; besides, in her placedness, untenable, to him, is also Magda’s truly “passionate” love for South Africa, imploded for lack of a language of reciprocation (“Magda is an anomalous figure: her passion does not belong in the genre in which she finds herself”, 1992, 62). Rhetorically speaking, this untenability is marked by the fact that our characters are consistently given the elevated language needed in tragedy: let us think of Magda’s high-culture references and quasi-philosophical discourse (often wrapped in Beckettian, self-­ consciously self-deflating complexity), and of Mrs Curren’s dense intertextual speaking through the Classics’ voices. I would contend that “untenable”, here, can be understood as meaning “untimely” in the sense given to it by Nietzsche in his Second Untimely Meditation, with which this chapter opened (“On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life”), as well as that ­Elizabeth and, ­ ildung, through her, Coetzee relate to the Classics and to humanistic B as Nietzsche does to classic philology when he writes: “I do not know what meaning classical philology would have for our age if not to have an untimely effect within it, that is, to act against the age and so have an effect on the age to the advantage, it is to be hoped, of a coming age” (8). In the same way, “the voices of history” against which Magda, no less than Elizabeth, engage their agon may be taken to

84  Susanna Zinato mean what Nietzsche means with the “blind power of the actual” (49), the tyranny of the actual, which they are no longer prepared to accept without experiencing abjecting shame. No matter how pathetically untenable Elizabeth’s actions and words may sound in the iron world of South Africa at its direst, she is no Quixote: her own bitterly ironic allusions to the down-at-heel Hidalgo and to Sancho, when depicting the freakish couple of herself and Vercueil, show that Quixote’s blissful unawareness is not for her, that she is perfectly aware of being a loser in it,16 and yet she courageously and movingly puts herself out there for a better world to come. The total untenability, or untimeliness, of Magda’s and Elizabeth’s position is exactly what makes of them intensely tragic heroines. “Our Bildung is formed in and through our life with others”, Phil Hutchinson points out (2008, 146), and to humanist Elizabeth these others include, along with the people who are part of her life, the Classics’ voices. Her Bildung is strongly complicit with her feeling of shame. The Classics’ voices that are evoked and involved in her text are not the dead voices retrieved by the erudite antiquarian, to be relegated forever in an idealized past. Hesiod, Homer, Thucydides, Virgil, and Marcus Aurelius have formed her ēthos and are live voices, continuously solicited, interrogated, and tested against the age of iron. They are not supinely used to confirm or to console: when she questions them, she is questioning her whole being, her relationship to the world. The same can be said of the voices of those intellectuals – philosophers, psychoanalysts, and writers – involved and interweaved in Magda’s soliloquy: even in the case of Beckett, she conjures up his characters (Molloy, Malone, and Winnie) but then dismisses their metaphysical exhaustion and isolation to forge a different fate for herself. “Elle ne rénonce pas, contrairement à eux, au sens et à l’histoire” (Campos 49).17 Adopting, again, Nietzsche’s idiolect, the Classics are here engaged in the service of life, for their bearing on actual life and justice, and humanity. Far from being “antiquarian” or “monumental”, or indistinguishable from myth (as our turning to past history should not be, in Nietzsche’s view, and as it 16 Patrick Heyes (2009)’s reclamation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote as an important intertext in AI that has not received enough attention is definitely to be appreciated. However, my tragic reading of the novel is patently at odds with his “jocoserious” vision of it: as it appears to me, the Quixotic trope is used by Mrs Curren with a bitterly ironic lucidity and critical self-consciousness that have nothing to do with Quixote’s unawareness of historical time. There is nothing, behind her, she might feel nostalgic about: her life is in her contingent now, her action is for a better future she will not be part of. 17 Worth quoting is Campos’s decisive observation according to which “[…] chez Magda la modalité de l’hypothèse vient mettre en doute non pas l’existence d’un dehors mais le juste rapport à ce dehors. C’est une autre manière de mettre en cause le contrat réaliste de la narration” (50–51).

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  85 has, instead, been for the Afrikaner ideologues, or for the ideologues of the Empire, any empire, at that), Mrs Curren’s relation to them is always “critical”. She continuously interrogates their capacity for the present and for the future. So, the Spartan matron’s iron-hearted pride in her ­warrior-son’s military honour (“Come home either with your shield or on your shield”, 46) is discarded in favour of Hesiod’s hymn to justice and peace. No matter how solitary and tainted, un-honoured, and unworthy of notice her private death may be, both dying Elizabeth and the dead are given their say, and their voices interweave and call to each other. Meta-fictionally speaking, this is what the author, J.M. Coetzee, has been constantly doing in his ways to relate to ‘his’ Classics – among whom (in particular, Kafka, Beckett, and Dostoevsky) we would like to put Attic tragedians. In so doing, I contend, Coetzee has been building for himself the stature of classic in the sense that, taking the side of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, he once gave to the word “classic” (“What is a Classic” 19): “what survives the worst of barbarism, surviving because generations of people cannot afford to let go of it and therefore hold on to it at all costs”– what resists the barbaric side of human history, in an ever-present agon, but, also, in the future, a future that, in Mrs Curren’s quintessentially pagan feel, is not to be meant eschatologically, as Blanche/Sister Bridget, Elizabeth Costello’s sister, would have it. Desperation is not for Magda, nor for Mrs Curren – nor for Coetzee, at that: “must we […] always only be ‘descendants’ because this is all we could be?” (Nietzsche 45). In Nietzsche’s quoted Meditation only the glance on the future, the urge towards the future makes valuable for humanity their judging of the past. That is, only if we care about the future, about those who will come after us, have we the right to judge the past, a belief that the author J.M. Coetzee appears to share. When he told Attwell “The feel of writing fiction is one of […] responsibility towards something that has not yet emerged, that lies somewhere at the end of the road” (1992, 246), I believe that is what he meant for his art to be, in form and content. This, anyway, is the feel permeating Coetzee’s own contest with the issue of shame. Not by any chance, HC, Waiting for the Barbarians, and AI (the novels that I see as most intensely engaging with it) are dominated by an profound anxiety about future generations. “What is going to become of the children?” (Waiting for the Barbarians, 153, original emphasis) is the suspended and most pressing question echoing in the 1980 novel about the Magistrate’s voyage in the dark, and in the light, of shame – a question that dramatically reaches in time and place beyond South Africa, into our shameful times. As a Classics lecturer, Mrs Curren never abandons her terribly serious apprehension for the Bildung of the young and, necessarily so, for their future in a better world.

86  Susanna Zinato Adrian Kempton has defined Age of Iron as a “thanatographie réfletant un sentiment profond de deuil personnel, ainsi que politique” (2007, 28). This personal grief owes much to the fact that the novel closely follows the death, in the years 1985–1989, of, in succession, his father; his mother; and, most dramatically, of his son Nicolas: to them is dedicated the novel. Revealingly, the name of Nicolas reappears, together with that of the author’s daughter Gisela, in the dedication opening Waiting for the Barbarians. Elegy cohabits with tragedy in AI: the sense of past and future generations, and the sense of begetting are very strong in the novel, and they have to do, partially at least, with those deaths, with his being no longer a son and his becoming a father who, most unnaturally and most painfully, has survived his son’s death. A tragic and elegiac suspension in between two generations, one gone and the other prematurely lost, is also reflected in the feral and chaotic suspension of the South African iron age, in which the old, dying teacher touchingly – or pathetically, from an unimaginative point of view which cannot be mine – believes that a new generation of whites and, broadly, a new generation of South Africans should be possible. From the abjecting experience of shame she has learnt a lesson of absolute trust in a taintless future, not her own future, but the future of all South African children. It is no coincidence, I believe, that, as Sewell-Rutter observes (2007, 72), “In metaphor and imagery throughout the [Orestean] trilogy, generation and parenthood are of paramount importance. The bereaved vultures and the pregnant hare in the parodos of Agamemnon18 help set the tone […] and many other generation metaphors are thrown out in the passing”: an intense motif of Attic tragedy that Coetzee must have found consonant with his own personal and political grief. In the light of the considerations made so far, cursing the Fathers’ curse also means cursing their betrayal and soiling of the humanistic heritage. In a complex way, the capacity for shame has much to do with that heritage, which can still play a crucial role and teach us something about Western criminal narcissism, about the need to save our honour, not to hand down our soiled hands to our children. It can also teach them that a “softer age”, an age of “clay” (AI 46), that is, of breaking and remoulding, is worth treasuring, though in the full awareness of its fragility and absolute need for constant care: shame, if worked through actively, can lead to it. And it can teach them that besides shame, pity, too – pagan, Virgilian pietas – is no dishonour. It befalls to the ashamed souls living in iron ages to take upon their shoulders the burden of their 18 The old men of Argos – left behind after the departure of the troops – talk about a bird omen witnessed by the army: two eagles, whose young have been stolen from the nest, ripping apart a pregnant hare. The omen is interpreted by the seer Calchas as the coming sack of Troy by the two sons of Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaus.

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  87 Fathers’ curses until the corpse of their crimes (to use Coetzee’s trope) has found burial, at last. For this to have any chance to happen, however, individual shame and private honour – the honour cherished in one’s soul, in the Western humanistic tradition – are not enough, though they are a necessary first step. Collective shame, and action, must follow to give a chance to “transfiguration” (“There has been no transfiguration”, Magda admits, 124). However, if it is not enough to say sorry in a self-defeating posture of guilt, it is also crucial, in Elizabeth’s words, not to “wallow in shame” and “not to be proud of it”, because one does not choose to be ashamed: shame chooses us.

Works Cited Aeschylus. 2016. Agamemnon, Libation Bearers. Translated by Sarah Rudens. In The Greek Plays. Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm, 51–99, 105–138, New York: Modern Library. Aristotle, 2009. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by David Ross. Oxford: Oxford UP. Attridge, Derek. 2004. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Literature in the Event. Chicago, IL and London: The U of Chicago P. Attwell, David.1993. South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Berkeley: U of California P. ———. 1996. “Afterword.” In Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee, edited by Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, 213–216. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ———. 2015. J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing. Face to Face with Time. Oxford: Oxford UP. Bewes, Timothy. 2011. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton UP. Boehmer, Elleke, Robert Eaglestone, and Katy Iddiols (eds.). 2009. J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory. London and New York: Continuum Literary Studies. Bremer, Jan Maarten 1969. Hamartia. Tragic Error in The Poetics of Aristotle and in Greek Tragedy. Amsterdam: Adfl M. Hakkert. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York and London: Routledge. Campos, Lucie. 2007. “‘Une Provision de Cailloux à disposer en figures’. Échos de la Trilogie de Samuel Beckett dans Au coeur de ce pays de J.M. Coetzee.” In J.M. Coetzee et la littérature europèenne. Écrire contre la barbarie, edited by Jean-Paul Engélibert, 37–54. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Coetzee, J.M. 1983. Life and Times of Michael K. London: Secker & Warburg. ———1984. In the Heart of the Country (1977). Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1990. Age of Iron. London: Secker and Warburg. ———. 1991. “The Mind of Apartheid: Geoffrey Cronjé (1907–).” Social ­Dynamics. A Journal of African Studies 17 (1): 1–35. ———. 1992. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Edited by David ­Attwell. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP.

88  Susanna Zinato ———. 1999. Disgrace. London: Secker & Warburg. ———.2001. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Johannesburgh: Ravan P. ———. 2002. “What is a Classic.” In Stranger Shores. Essays 1986–1999, 1–19. London: Vintage. ———. 2003. Elizabeth Costello. London: Secker &Warburg. ———. 2007. Diary of Bad Year. London: Harvill Secker. ———. 2009. Summertime. Scenes from a Provincial Life. London: Harvill Secker. Coquio, Catherine. 2007. “‘Comme un Chien.’ Coetzee et Kafka.” In J.M. Coetzee et la littérature européenne. Écrire contre la barbarie, edited by JeanPaul Engélibert, 89–106. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Dodds, Eric. 1951. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: U of California P. Euripides. 2016. Trojan Women. Translated by Emily Wilson. In The Greek Plays. Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm, 637–681. New York: Modern Library. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin (original ed.: Les damnés de la terre. François Maspéro, 1961). ———. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto P (original ed.: Peau Noire, Masques Blancs. Seuil, 1952). Farber, Yael. 2008. Molora. London: Oberon Books. Fugard, Athol. 1978. Orestes. In Theatre One: New South African Drama, edited by Stephen Gray, 81–93. Johannesburg: Ad. Donker. ———. 1979. “Orestes Reconstructed: A Letter to an American Friend.” Theatre Quarterly 8 (32): 3–6. ———, John Kani, and Winster Ntshona. 1993. “The Island”. In Statements. 45–78. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Gill, Christopher. 1996. “Mind and Madness in Greek Tragedy.” Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science 29 (3): 249–267. Graham, Valerie Lucy. 2003. “Reading Rape in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.” ­Journal of South African Studies, 29 (2): 433–444. Halliwell, Stephen. 1998. Aristotle’s Poetics. London: Duckworth. Hayes, Patrick. 2009. “Literature, History, and Folly”. In J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory, edited by Elleke Boehmer, Robert Eagleston, and Katy ­Iddiols, 112–122. London and New York: Continuum Literary Studies. Head, Dominic. 1997. J.M. Coetzee. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hutchinson, Phil. 2008. Shame and Philosophy. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kempton, Adrian. 2007. “‘Donner une voix aux morts’. L’antiquité classique dans l’oeuvre de J. M. Coetzee.” In J.M. Coetzee et la littérature européenne. Écrire contre la barbarie, 27–38 Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Kossew, Sue. 1998. “‘Women’s Words’: A Reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Women Narrators.” In Critical Essays on J.M. Coetzee, edited by Sue Kossew, 166– 179. New York: G. K. Hall & Co. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Rudiez. New York: Columbia UP (original ed.: Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Paris: Seuil, 1980). Kurks, Sonia. 1996. “Fanon, Sartre, and Identity Politics.” In Fanon: A Critical Reader, edited by Lewis Ricardo Gordon, Tracy Denean Sharply-Whiting, and Renée T. White, 122–133. Oxford: Blackwell.

Cursing the Fathers’ Curse  89 Lévinas, Emmanuel. 2003. On Escape. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP (original ed. De l’ évasion. Saint-Clément-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1982). Leist, Anton and Peter Singer (eds.). 2010. J. M. Coetzee & Ethics. New York: Columbia U.P. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. 1986. Decolonizing the Mind. London: James Currey. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1980. On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Translated by Peter Preuss. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing (original ed.: Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, 1874). Nussbaum, Martha. 2004. Hiding from Humanity. Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Padel, Ruth. 1995. Whom Gods Destry. Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Penner, Dick. 1989. Countries of the Mind: The Fiction of J.M. Coetzee. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Pippin, Robert. 2010. “The Paradoxes of Power in the Early Novels of J.M. Coetzee.” In J.M.Coetzee & Ethics, edited by Anton Leist and Peter Singer, 19–42. New York: Columbia UP. Poyner, Judith.2009. J.M. Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship. Farnham: Ashgate. Probyn, Fiona. 1998. “Cancerous Bodies and Apartheid in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron.” In Critical Essays on J.M. Coetzee, edited by Sue Kossew, 214–225. New York: G.K. Hall&Co. Rudhardt, Jean. 1992. Notions fondamentales de la pensée religieuse et actes constitutifs du culte dans la Grèce classique. Paris: Picard. Sartre, Jean-Paul 1967. “Preface”. In Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin (original ed.: Les damnés de la terre, François Maspéro, 1961). ———. 1976. “Anti-Semite and Jew.” Translated by George Becker. New York: Schocken. Sewell-Rutter, Neal J. 2007 Guilt by Descent. Moral Inheritance and Decision Making in Greek Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford UP. Soyinka, Wole. 1976. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Soynka, Wole. 1973. Season of Anomy: A Novel. London: Rex Collings Ltd. Taylor, Gabriele. 1985. Pride, Shame and Guilt. Emotions of Self-Assessment. Oxford: Clarendon P. van Weyenberg, Astrid. 2013. The Politics of Adaptation. Contemporary African Drama and Greek Tragedy. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. 1990. “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy.” In Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, edited by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Translated by Janet Lloyd. 49–84. New York: Zone Books. Yurgrau, Tug. 1993. The Song of Jacob Zulu. New York: Arcade Publishing. Wetmore, Kevin. 2002. The Athenian Sun in an African Sky. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers. Williams, Bernard. 1993. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P.

90  Susanna Zinato Zinato, Susanna. 2016. “Leggendo Flaiano attraverso Coetzee: Tempo di uccidere, Waiting for the Barbarians e il tema della vergogna.” Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate LXIX (3): 69–93. ———. 2019. “Seeing where Others See Nothing: J.M. Coetzee’s Magda, Cassandra in the Karoo.” In Reading Coetzee’s Women, edited by Sue Kossew and Melinda Harvey, ch.11. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming).

3 Dictator Games On Shame, Shitholes, and Beautiful Things Rita Barnard

During the primaries for the 2016 election in the USA, the South ­A frican-born comedian Trevor Noah aired a skit on The Daily Show suggesting that Donald Trump’s incessant self-glorification, xenophobic views, and disregard for the truth did not necessarily render him unpresidential. He was simply presidential for a different continent: Africa. The skit juxtaposed clips of Trump and various African strongmen, all making absurd claims about immunity, immigrants, and their own popularity in language as boastful and fatuous as Trump’s. In the image of him projected behind Noah, Trump’s appearance becomes increasingly gaudy: he accrues epaulettes, medals, a sash, and a gilt and braided cap to cover his dismal hair. Thus dressed, he could easily be the model for the cover image of the Congolese writer Henri Lopes’s classic dictator novel, Le Pleurer-Rire, if we forget for a moment about the anachronism and the skin color. Noah’s skit makes for somewhat uncomfortable laughter. The figure of the African dictator, especially Idi Amin and Jean-Bédel Bokassa, ­inevitably brings up the colonial stereotype of the continent as a political nightmare, its leaders incapable of reason, modernity, and restraint.1 To be sure, Noah invokes these stereotypes quite knowingly: his brand of humor, after all, arises precisely from his biracial identity and his position both outside and inside African culture. Here, for instance, he pauses to eat a banana – “just in case” Yahya Jammeh of Gambia’ s claim that this will prevent AIDS is true – and launches into a praise poem for Trump in fluent isiXhosa. In other words, Noah recirculates, even as he m ­ ockingly performs, the old script of Africans’ benighted superstition, as well as the newer grim theory that proposes passive laughter and conviviality as the quintessential modality of power and submission in Africa’s tyrannical

1 For a brilliant discussion of the déjà vu of African dictators in relation to Marx’s “history repeated as farce” passage in the Eighteenth Brumaire and the problem it presents to historians trying to speak accurately about the rule of these strongmen, see Bishop 1–2.

92  Rita Barnard postcolonies. 2 Satire is sticky and contagious, especially when the racial stereotypes it sets in motion closely approach historical reality. This said, Noah’s joke has come to seem more and more apt as we have seen accumulating evidence of Trump’s disdain for democracy and his malignant narcissism: a personality disorder often shared by dictators and associated with psychopathic tendencies and sadism. The condition is also linked – and this is what makes it interesting for this collective project – to the disavowal and projection of unconscious shame. We need not dig too deeply into Trump’s formative experiences to see that shame and its denial looms large with him: his public image, after all, was shaped in a self-aggrandizing TV show in which the public humiliation of “losers” was the central drama. Indeed, for the purpose of this chapter (which is to examine the dynamics of shame in a moving novel about immigration, gentrification, and race) it is important to focus not so much on the psychobiological manifestations of shame, but rather on its sociopolitical dimensions. After all, shame is never merely individual, even though it profoundly affects the capacity of the individual to perform as a self-presenting agent. One could even conclude, with Sara Ahmed, that shame precedes “inside” and “outside”: “it produces the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and social to be delineated as if they are objects” (2004, 30). Thus, events of shaming, densely productive as they are of identities and distinctions, function as “meaning machines” (Mendible 2016, 5). To “feel” shame, as Myra Mendible puts it in her invaluable reflections on the matter, is to participate, willy-nilly, in “a cultural economy of prescribed behaviors and expectation, cued responses and decodings; it is also to participate in the formation of that economy—to interpret, produce, and transact meaning” (10). Indeed, “culture” itself, as Frederic Jameson once declared, “could be viewed as the ensemble of stigmata one group bears in the eyes of the other group (and vice versa)” (qtd. in Mendible 9). This is particularly true in times of division and social conflict, or in situations and places where different groups suddenly find themselves rubbing up against each other.

2 I am thinking here, of course, of Achille Mbembe’s essay on vulgarity in the postcolony, but the idea has circulated earlier as well. See, for instance, V.S. Naipaul’s comments on Mobutu and his followers: “He speaks as the chief, and the people listen. They laugh constantly, and they applaud. It has been Mobutu’s brilliant idea to give the people of Zaire what they have not had and what they have long needed: an African king. The king expresses all the dignity of his people; to possess a king is to share the king’s dignity. The individual’s responsibility – a possible source of despair, in the abjectness of Africa – is lessened. All that is required is obedience, and obedience is easy” (1976, 29). Trump and his followers prove that this dynamic – dependency regression – is not exclusive to Africa.

Dictator Games  93 It makes sense therefore that, as the novelist Adam Haslett has proposed, shame has become the emotion driving present-day politics in the USA (2016, 16); and I would add that it is also an affective structure pervasive among the world’s many immigrants and refugees, who exist on both literal and psychological frontiers, who not only feel diminished by racism and out-of-placeness, but also by their inability to send home the expected remittances (Bauwens 2018). To be sure, practices of shaming and humiliation have long preceded the reign of America’s current “shamer in chief” (Haslett 2016). Indeed, I would argue that it is in this respect that the continuities between the USA and colonial and post-colonial societies are most evident: the fundamental political reality in both cases is what Mendible describes as a widespread erosion of human dignity by “biopolitical processes” (2016, 3), including slavery, genocide, forced removals, segregation, racism, sexism, mass incarceration, homophobia, and radical economic precariousness. But what has changed today is that shame has become so pervasive that it has infected not only the usual “them,” but also the mainstream “us.” A lack of security and declining prosperity, along with the humiliation of not being rich in America’s “second Gilded Age,” has become a common fate (Haslett 16): a condition that besets struggling young men in rural as well as urban areas, along with the usual candidates for scorn: “people of color, women, gays and lesbians, foreigners, and of course the poor” (Mendible 7). But instead of recognizing this “messy, volatile, and most often intolerable” (Haslett 20) affective structure as a shared predicament or even – going back in myth to the shame and self-consciousness that followed Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit of Good and Evil – our common human condition, Trump has “weaponized” it (Haslett 16). He shames his “loser” supporters and then invites them to identify with him, abolishing subjective boundaries in this sense, while simultaneously redrawing lines of distinction by a vicious stigmatization of others. Trump’s psychodrama – virtually indistinguishable from his political project – resembles that of “the Ruler” in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The Wizard of the Crow, who “chang[es] a thing of shame and weakness into one of power and glory” (2007, 667). Of course Trump’s penchant for autocracy in the “African” mode has not prevented him from slurring immigrants from “shithole” places like El Salvador, Haiti, and Africa, nor has it stopped his imitators from applying the same adjective to majority black cities in the USA (Weill 2018). The fact that African immigrants are the most highly educated immigrant group in America is irrelevant to the operations of his “national theater of shame” (Haslett 16). (Lying and gaslighting to protect the psyche from shame, after all, is a hallmark of the narcissistic personality.) Equally irrelevant are Trump’s own moral failures and ugliness. On the contrary, these qualities may be part of

94  Rita Barnard his  appeal to his followers, as Marie Rudden and Stephanie Brandt have hypothesized: Trump’s ability to mobilize extremes of anger and sadism are based on his providing his followers with the antidote to feelings of shame and impotence. He is not ashamed of being even worse than most of his followers. He is openly dishonest, misogynistic, corrupt, old, unattractive, has orange hair and a double chin and he does not care. He reverses a lack of social status for his followers by being […] without any class in the most elementary sense. Instead, he turns the usual shame response of hiding, fearing disclosure, embarrassment, etc. into a reason for pride, even superiority over those who feel shame at all. (2018, 46) This is a paranoid defense and one that is entirely familiar to readers of postcolonial literature. We might here recall J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians in which we see the Empire’s agents disavowing and exteriorizing their violence and guilt by projecting it onto the putative barbarians beyond their fortress walls. But I would like to suggest an even deeper literary connection, one that pertains not only to the thematic content but ultimately to literature’s ethical potentialities. There is something about the contemporary theatre of shame that resembles (though, of course, only up to a point) the strange transaction that is reading – with its intimate processes of identification and its blurring of distinctions between subjects in the grip of powerful affect. This suggestion arises for me from Deborah A. Martinsen’s 2003 study of Dostoyevski’s liars, Surprised by Shame: a work that clearly accrues new meaning in an age of Trump. Martinsen’s crucial point is that shame dynamics – unexpected, contagious, and paradoxical (in its capacity both to isolate and to connect) – can become narrative dynamics (12). The dramatic scenes of shame and shaming that proliferate in Dostoyevski’s work have, in her view, a particularly intense and complex effect on the reader. “Portrayed shame,” she posits, “overflows textual bounds” – especially since it “collapses the intersubjective distance between characters and readers” (1). “Just as lived shame disrupts individuals’ unexamined sense of self and their sense of the world” (and therein lies its cognitive function), “so portrayed shame disrupts readers’ sense of personal inviolability and their narrative expectations” (1). The crucial character here is Fyodor Karamazov, who, in Martinsen’s description, sounds exactly like Trump: “a shameless liar who defends against his shame with an aggressive shamelessness that marks him as Dostoyevski’s greatest violator of social norms and decorum” (xvi). And the psychodynamics, let me insist again, are here also social dynamics. Feeling himself to be out of place, a parvenu (not unlike Trump, the crude fellow from Queens among the Manhattan elite), Fyodor Karamazov responds with what

Dictator Games  95 Martinsen describes as the hyperbolic rhetoric of a buffoon: “a clown’s weapon” (8). But while novels like The Brothers Karamazov make us feel the intersubjective violence of the theatre of shame, they also put forward (through shame-sensitive characters, who recognize the outrage and suffering it produces) a possibility of reintegration, reform, and awareness. Shame can, in other words, operate in an ethical and pedagogical modality. For Dostoyevski the world holds, ultimately, a possibility of interpersonal, social, and metaphysical connectedness, to which reading might lead us. I will return at the end of the chapter to these issues and in a (loosely) postcolonial frame. For now, I will simply offer the suggestion that the contemporary political situation seems to demand a different conception of shame from that proposed in Timothy Bewes’s The Event of Postcolonial Shame, a work with which many contributors to this volume have engaged. While Bewes focuses on the shameful event of writing and the incommensurability of form to the painful realities it would encompass, it seems to me that our times demand instead an emphasis on the event of reading and its intersubjective, ethical, and political implications. Or, if not our times, then at least the literary work to which I will now turn: Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. A novel about immigrants from Trump’s “shithole” countries (Kenya, Congo, and Ethiopia) and set in a “shithole” city (Washington, DC), it has at its heart just such an intimate event: “an older man and a girl young enough to be the man’s daughter, sitting in a store on a winter morning reading a novel together” (2007, 103). That the novel in question should be The Brothers Karamazov makes the scene all the more resonant.3 This is because shame, especially in its manifestations of out-of-placeness, unexpectedness, and paradoxicality (the very qualities Martinsen sees in Dostoyevski’s understanding of it), is fundamental to Mengestu’s narrative negotiations of identity, race, and space. Indeed, the fact that this is a work that focuses not only on migration but also on gentrification and to some extent tourism is relevant here: all three of these socio-spatial phenomena create those “frontier effects” – contact across divides of nationality, race, and class – in which shame proliferates and does its work of differentiation and abjection. The narrator, Sepha Stephanos, a refugee from Addis Ababa, who owns a failing convenience store in the run-down Logan Circle area, observes that DC is already a place that by its small size seems to generate a 3 The novel’s other two crucial intertexts, Dante’s Inferno and Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (a dictator novel, arguably), are also deeply concerned with shame (see, for instance, Chiampi). We should note also the racial and ethnic jokes that pockmark the novel – its smaller intertexts, if you will. E.g., “How many Ethiopians can you fit into an elevator? All of them. What would you call an elevator full of Ethiopians? An oxymoron” (117).

96  Rita Barnard sense of inferiority. This is exacerbated by the impotence that its more marginal inhabitants are made to feel in the face of the city’s buildings, monuments, and other signs of power: the snipers on the White House roof, for example, gaped at by visitors to the city and recent immigrants alike are mentioned on the novel’s very first page. In a racially divided and polyglot city, Sepha, moreover, finds himself interpellated into various competing forms of identity: Ethiopian, African, black, and mainstream, rainbow American (as in the upbeat multiculturalism of a billboard for the college he briefly attends). But each invitation to belong is also fraught with the possibility of exclusion as well. Shame lurks in virtually every relationship and even seems to adhere to Sepha’s material surroundings of decayed urban space and the unappealing, inferior commodities that he tries half-heartedly to sell. This is true not only with regard to his more aspirational desires, most notably his relationship with his white neighbor Judith McMasterman, who moves into a grand newly renovated house next door to his. It even besets his interactions with other Ethiopians. Their vertical ghetto, a highrise building in Silver City, MD, is a place where he “feels measured for everything” (117) and perpetually hears “the tsking of sound judgment being passed” (118). And even in the historically black Logan Square area, where Sepha feels he can attain a certain comfortable anonymity, he also has to face exclusionary remarks, like that of his neighbor, Mrs. Davis, who accuses him of being oblivious to the fixed racial frontiers of urban America, because he is used to living in a hut that he can just pack onto his back (23). The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears is, in other words, a novel that meticulously records the shifting, but very real boundaries between Africans and African Americans, black and white people, mobile and immobile, rich and poor, and thereby alerts us to the “embodied conditions where shame does its work” (Mendible 2016, 2). The most traumatic event of shame in The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears is a remembered one, revealed to us right in the middle of the novel. We learn from the stream-of-consciousness narration that Sepha’s father was brutally beaten and taken off to his death during the Red Revolution in Ethiopia. Young soldiers jeer, taunt, and spit on the distinguished lawyer; they even sarcastically applaud his heroic efforts to raise his broken body and walk away from his family with dignity, rather than being dragged off. Sepha’s reaction is not only one of terror and grief, but also guilt (after all, the ostensible cause for his father’s arrest is a stack of dissident flyers that actually belong to Sepha) and a sense of humiliation so acute that he prays for “the ground to open and swallow us whole” (Mengestu 129). It is not far-fetched to suppose that Sepha’s acute feelings of shame in the ordinary spaces of the American city are exacerbated by his trauma (indeed, the affect theorist Silvan Tomkins provides ground for such psychological interpretations; see Martinsen 2003, xiv–v), and it is fair to say that the novel’s

Dictator Games  97 non-progressive temporality expresses the presentness of the past that is the singular mark of this condition. But shame of any sort (unlike guilt with its dynamics of confession, punishment, and redemption) lacks a clear narrative: it tends to recur, to be reanimated without warning. Besides, Sepha’s frequent feelings of a radical and sudden exposure are shared after all by his friends and are therefore also legible, sociologically rather than psycho-dynamically, as an expression of the way in which the power of shaming tends to be on the side of the powerful (Mendible 6).4 If we understand the sense of exposure as a fundamentally spatial matter (etymologically, the word, from the Latin “ex ponere,” registers a “positioning outside”) it is easy to see how it might attach to the migrant, the exile, the refugee, and the foreigner. Thus, in the subway car on the way to his uncle’s apartment building in Silver Springs, Sepha reflects on the ways in which people leave an empty space in the middle of a car, and how he can’t “bring himself to look” at the passengers facing him, because of “the embarrassment of being alone, the fear of being exposed, and the risk of one’s anonymity” (Mengestu 113). The experience could sound like an ordinary mainstream urban predication, like those recorded in Erving Goffman’s Relations in Public, but the racial dimension of Sepha’s feeling of exposure is revealed as soon as he leaves the subway and walks to his uncle’s apartment, feeling “sad” and “pathetic” (114); his sense that “the world seems entirely unfit to handle [his] skinny long-legged body” is confirmed by the “curious, often hostile glares” (114) of people driving by. He becomes, one might say, a “body-for-others” (Mendible 11), patently African, different, out of place. The journey culminates with a self-loathing contemplation of his reflection: I catch my reflection in the building’s door. Sweat is streaming down the side of my face. I look exactly like what I am: a desperate man, on the verge of middle age, with only the money in his pocket to spare. I have dark rings under my eyes, a nose and forehead damp with sweat. My shirt collar has an old coffee stain on it, and the sides of my pant pockets have a streak of dirt running down the side. I take a second to tuck in my shirt, pat down the edges of my hair, and wipe the sweat off my brow with the edges of my sleeve. I pray that I don’t run into anyone I know. (Mengestu 115) We have here a classic account of the lived experience of shame, replete with self-consciousness, hyper-awareness of others, negative self-­ assessment, and feelings of inadequacy, defectiveness, and dirtiness 4 It is worth noting, though, that Judith McMasterson’s beautiful house and opulent stuff does not prevent her from being harassed on the street by a young man who asks if she “like[s] to suck black dick” (32). Her arguments with her husband also seem designed to inflict shame.

98  Rita Barnard (Mendible 5). Though more ordinary and quotidian than Fanon’s “Look! a Negro!” moment (2008, 90), it has a similar effect of desubjectivization, paradoxically coupled with a lonely singularity. Many readers are no doubt tempted to read the (im)possible romance between Sepha and his white neighbour, Judith McMasterson, who restores a beautiful old mansion next door to him, as one of the key narrative threads in the novel. It is a romance that starts with her noticing his difference: he is wearing white embroidered Ethiopian clothes – so “stripped […] of all context” that he expects to meet with “taunts and stares” – to attend a wedding and she remarks on his “beautiful garment” (Mengestu 18). The relationship, one that strives to overcome, even as it ends up confirming social divides, however, is dogged by moments of perceived judgment. When Judith’s daughter, Naomi, first scrutinizes him, for instance, he feels “a hint of embarrassment and shame” (19). And at their first dinner party he is so beset with such physical awkwardness that he tries “to erase any sound of food as it travel[s] from the tip of [his] fork to his mouth” (55), fears that he will shatter the plate, and ends up lying – shades of Donald Trump or Fyodor Karamazov – about having read Emerson and de Tocqueville. But the relationship is finally shattered, when, in the face of the ostentatious Christmas gifts bestowed by Judith’s former husband, a Mauritanian academic, Sepha says he likes presents that are “small and cheap” and Judith makes a rather cruel, exclusionary retort: “you’ve gone and picked the wrong family” (134). We should note that the Christmas display is framed by recurrent observations about how “affluence […] needed exposure” (52) and wealth “makes a willing spectacle of itself” (52): it is from the start offered as the antithesis to poverty’s abject recoil. No wonder then that with this remark Judith seems to “hit that central nerve whose existence [Sepha] was reluctant to admit, but that when tapped, sent a shock of shame and humiliation beneath which everything else crumbled” (134–135). Again, Mengestu’s description of Sepha’s experience spans the whole gamut of the classic features noted by theorists of shame: the suddenness, the physicality, the devastation, and, not least, the comparative nature of the affect. Sepha realizes that compared to this absent husband, he will always fall short, fail to measure up at dinners and cocktail parties. Perhaps most importantly, the event displays shame’s cognitive force: Sepha realizes very clearly that he and Judith “have run out of roles to play” (137). But the “frontier effects” of shame in the novel extend far beyond this single relationship (Mendible 11) which we know from the backward looping narration will not work out in any event. Both of Sepha’s male friends, Ken, the Kenyan, and Joseph, the Congolese, are extremely careful with their public personae and, precisely for this reason, end up revealing the quasi-theatrical nature of shaming events, as well as the tricky social cartographies they must navigate as they try to perform their ideal

Dictator Games  99 selves. Ken, for example, doesn’t smile, except with friends, to conceal his brown-stained teeth (which, he says remind him where he comes from). He holds, furthermore, to the belief in “the power of a well-tailored suit to command the attention and response of those who might not otherwise give him a second thought” (2). This power – the power of costume to trump race – is, however, put in doubt in a poignant scene, recounted in the novel’s very first chapter, when Ken goes to a used-car dealership to purchase his first automobile. Second-hand though the car may be, its purchase is tacitly understood by the friends as a kind of overcoming of the “mockery and humiliation” of which they have all had enough “to last [them] well beyond their lifetimes” (11). Ken is therefore beautifully dressed for the occasion, in a suit and sunglasses, already performing an aspirational, unfamiliar, and “unadorned confidence” (11). One might say that he and Sepha sense the purchase is no mere transaction, but a kind of test of their qualifications as self-­presenting agents. Ken wants the white, middle-aged, brow-­mopping salesmen to come over to him to offer their assistance; when they don’t, refusing even to look over to where the two Africans are waiting, Ken hides his humiliation by declaring that “they don’t have what [he] want[s]” (12). This failed public validation is, as it were, predicted by the friends’ uncomfortable feeling as they arrive that “every minor gesture of [theirs] were being judged” (12). In other words, they sense their out-of-placeness on the lot, even as they wish to perform its overcoming. The exuberant Joseph, the flamboyant Congolese, is similarly self-­ conscious of his Africanness, which he tries to turn into a kind of epistemological privilege, always remarking on things, from chess, to sports, to politics, that only an African fully can understand. He would like to be a Parisian boulevardier, with the perfect phrase always on his lips, and fancies himself an intellectual, thence his insistence on sporting a University of Michigan sweatshirt, even though he never fulfilled his dream of attending the school. He thinks of himself, endearingly but vulnerably, as “a man of taste, not means” as one who, for example, drinks cheap wine, but reads Rilke in the German and loves the language with “all those harsh verts and gerts” (181) even though he does not speak it. One discovers, however, that his poses are also masks for humiliation: his preference for German, for instance, seems to arise in part from an embarrassing experience when yet another arrogant Mauritanian dismisses him as speaking “Negro French.” And for all his bravado about his workplace, the fancy Colonial Grill restaurant, where he always promises to entertain his friends like emperors, is revealed in one of the novel’s most devastating scenes as a site of humiliation. Even though Joseph mockingly calls the restaurant “the Colony” and jokes about the crazy behavior of the “natives” (171), he is utterly undone when Sepha, aimlessly wandering through the city, sees him in his role at work, serving three elderly white women, wearing a tuxedo

100  Rita Barnard and matching subservient expression. Somehow the exchange of gazes is devastating: it brings an end to Joseph’s elaborate staging of self. The scene, once more, displays the cognitive power of shame, its “profound disclosure of both self and situation” (Mendible 12). And its contagious effect also stands revealed. As Sepha ruefully observes, “there is no denying anymore who we are and what we’ve become” (Mengestu 171). A curious but consistent aspect of the shaming events in the novel and one that gives the work its wry wistfulness is that they all seem to touch on the keyword “beautiful” – as though beauty were a way of forestalling or repairing humiliation. This is clearly the case with Kenneth’s suit and with the rusty old Saab he eventually buys, with Sepha’s wedding outfit, and with Joseph’s many reminders throughout the novel of how skinny and beautiful he used to be in earlier days. Even small incidents foreground the word. One might think, for instance, of the scene where the three friends go to a topless bar, but end up finding their isolation in this public space so embarrassing that they can barely look the waitress in the eye when she comes over. Kenneth eventually tries to save the day – and face – by tipping the girls royally and calling them all “beautiful” (44). It is therefore no accident that the line of poetry echoed in the title of the novel should also evoke a context in which beauty and abjection are juxtaposed. Joseph recalls the final Canto of Dante’s Inferno, where the poet and his guide finally make it out of a dark tunnel where they encountered Satan himself: Through a round aperture I saw appear, Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears, Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars. (99) It is an experience that Joseph immediately wants to claim as quintessentially African, and it is not difficult to see the resonance of the lines for the three “children of the revolution” (8), displaced by political upheaval and denied the full material benefits of American life. This yearning for beauty, so poignantly captured in the European classic (a work, incidentally, where shame is pervasive, but ultimately serves a redemptive function), thus becomes symptomatic of what V.S. Naipaul once called the “African wound”: the continent’s long history of exploitation, poverty, and denigration that underlies its people’s desire for luxury and style (28). Another way of managing the pain of this wound is the recurring game the three friends play with each other, often in Sepha’s store, where there is a yellowed map of Africa on the wall for a prop. One of them names an African dictator, and the others then have to name the country and the year. The game sets into play some of the same ironic complexities as Trevor Noah’s skit with which I started this chapter. On the positive side, the game forges a bond between the three very different men as fellow Africans, an identity distinct from both racial or national identities,

Dictator Games  101 and it serves as a kind of displacement through ironic repetition of the stereotypical American notion of Africa as an undifferentiated zone of savagery. Just as Kenneth jokes knowingly about Africans being always late (even though he is always on time), the friends become joking experts on the ways of the strongmen; they even “love” them for their “absurd declarations and comical performances” – those “dictators who marry forty women and have twice as many children, who sit on golden thrones shaped like eagles, declare themselves minor gods, and are surrounded by rumors of incest, cannibalism” (98). One can readily see how the very excess of the dictators’ fetishes might symbolically and magically dispel the feelings of poverty and exclusion – the lack of access to beautiful things that the immigrants and the tyrants’ African subjects suffer. At the very least, the repetitive rituals of the game help keep at bay the humiliation that attaches to the basket case continent and of being associated with a mediascape of “starving children with bloated bellies and fly-covered faces” (7). It is telling, moreover, that every single time the friends play the game, it serves to deflect attention from embarrassing situations and lines of conversation, whether it be that slight about “Negro French,” an accusation of not understanding how America works, or, far worse, a threatened eviction for not paying rent. But finally the game can succeed only so far: the friends’ ostensibly dispassionate irony is undermined by the very fact that the game seems to be inexhaustible – there are so many of these coups, revolts, and strongmen – that the three somehow come to feel responsible. At one point Kenneth even utters the name of a country (“Gabon”) in such a way as to make it sound “like a crime” that Sepha, the initiator of this round of the game, is guilty of (7). The game, in other words, reanimates the bad feelings it is intended to exorcise. To understand the novel’s subtle political implications, it is important to see how the resonant figure of the dictator makes visible the continuities, rather than the disjunctures between Africa and the USA. The dictator, after all, does not only accumulate fetishes of power (those eagles and thrones); he is himself also a fetish: an objectification of the power of the state severed from civil society. While the point is never made directly, Mengestu touches on this idea at various points, such as Sepha’s many recollections of the “tyrant,” Haile Selassie (118). But it comes across most poignantly, in Ken’s recollection that all that his illiterate father owned at his death was a portrait of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s liberator and eventual authoritarian leader (186). The novel’s setting in Washington constantly begs the question of to what extent the alienating and humiliating power of the fetish also applies to the spectacularization of power in America. 5 The friends, at first impressed and

5 One must be very aware here of the term’s origins in a discourse that denigrates ­A frican systems of value (see Pietz 1985 and Stallybrass 2001).

102  Rita Barnard moved by the city’s monuments, especially the Lincoln Memorial, eventually come to associate them with disappointment and the awareness of their continual marginalization. The American leaders, to whom Sepha’s uncle Berhane writes such beautiful letters of concern, never respond; the president, Sepha tells us at one point, is nothing but “a great Santa Claus and father for adults” (76). The motorcades, in particular, generate a distinctly undemocratic awe: they circle Logan Square “like a lasso of black cars” (92), immobilizing other vehicles and pedestrians alike. They might as well, Sepha thinks, be empty, since their sole purpose seems to be “to remind people what they are up against” (92). The implied equivalence of fetishistic power in Africa and America is best captured by the connection Sepha makes towards the end of the novel between the marginalized African-American youths who protest against the gentrification of their neighbourhood and the African immigrants: “We all essentially wanted the same thing, which was to feel that we had a stake in shaping and defining what little part of the world we could claim as our own” (210). It is the lack of this important thing, I would argue, that underlies many of the novel’s articulations of racialized shame. Reconsider, for example, the case of Joseph. He is, after all, a man who wishes that instead of playing chess (the one site in Kinshasa where he could control what happens), he could have been present at Mobutu’s demise, dancing in the street, or carrying Laurent Kabila to the presidential palace on his shoulders (185). His servile proximity to the “District’s elite,” the “senators and lawyers and lobbyists” (168) at the Colonial Grill, is clearly no more of an affirmation of his personal validity than Ken’s father’s ownership of Kenyatta’s image. But let us return, as promised, to our narrator, Sepha, and the crucial scene of reading I described earlier. Unlike his friends, so concerned with their public personae, Sepha does his best to escape by avoiding the contact zones where shame does its work. His store on Logan Circle is shabby and full of unappealing, down-market, dusty, even abject products. Yet it provides him with exactly what he wants: a refuge from more extreme forms of exposure. His plan is both modest and outrageous, as he explains to his uncle: “I was going to sit in my high-backed chair behind a counter and read as silent as a god until the world came to an end” (146). One might for a moment take the simile seriously and point out that as a reader, Sepha, not unlike a god, has the power to judge, rather than be judged. But his engagement with literature becomes even more resonant over the course of the book, especially when he embarks on the project of reading The Brothers Karamazov to Judith’s ten-yearold daughter, Naomi. It is worth recalling once more Deborah Martinsen’s comments on the complicated psychological and ethical operations set in motion by reading, and particularly by the reading of shameful events, such as those that proliferate in reading Dostoyevski’s oeuvre.

Dictator Games  103 In real life, she argues, shame is intersubjective: it always involves testing out of the boundaries between subjects (and groups, as we have seen); reading about shame, uncomfortable and intense as it is, similarly tends to collapse “the intersubjective distance between characters and readers” (Martinsen 1). There is of course a sense in which this collapse and the transformations it sets in motion might be effected by any kind of reading, but we certainly see it very clearly in Sepha and Naomi’s intense absorption in their novel. Sepha, we are told, attempts to put on a show in exactly the way his father would have done, “slip[ping] into the characters as he read,” grumbling, waving, and doing voices (Mengestu 105). He tries to perform particularly well when he does Alyosha, the character with whom Naomi, we are told, “was willing to fall entirely in love” (105). It is not hard to see the reasons why these shared readings are so precious to Sepha: he is not only, as Martinsen would have it, abolishing the boundaries between himself and the personages of Dostoyevski’s fiction but also those between himself and the two people with whom he feels the strongest bond; he is, as it were, staging himself as a father to a girl, who in public would indeed pass for his biological daughter, thereby finding a way to yoke his traumatic past and a utopian (if always already nostalgically tinged) hope for the future. No wonder he feels capable, with Naomi’s help, to tidy and transform the store a bit over the course of these afternoon sessions, creating in the process that “elusive sense of the pride of ownership that Americans always speak of with such reverence” (110). If there is an ethical message to be had from these scenes of reading – and I think there is – it is not anything as simple as that reading is morally improving. Naomi, after all, even though she responds intensely to Fyodor Karamazov, the novel’s chief figure of shame and lying (“Oooh, I hate him” […] “He is such a moron,” 105), doesn’t seem to fully grasp the power of shame to inflict pain. When a middle-aged customer, an alcoholic called Mr. Clark, comes into the shop, Naomi rolls her eyes and mutters sotto voce, but loud enough for the man to hear, “Take a bath!” (106). She is the presumptuous agent, in other words, of a shaming event, which painfully marks out the distance between the middle-class comfort (symbolized by her pink cashmere sweater) and the vulnerability that the sad and disheveled Mr. Clark seems to carry with him. But The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears does, nevertheless, affirm the ethical power of reading. If, as Martinsen argues, Dostoyevski always presents us with shame-sensitive characters who model a sense of empathy and responsibility towards the humiliated, so too does Mengestu. Sepha is clearly such a character; his sense of inadequacy and exposure, makes him more, not less aware of others’ vulnerability, as in the deeply touching moment in the novel where he describes the sad private life of his ambitious friend Ken, alone in his bare suburban apartment and expensive socks, drinking and laughing hysterically (145). If such details

104  Rita Barnard move us, we are made aware of the intimate proximity to the lives of others that reading may effect. We might not all be immigrants from “shithole countries,” but as Mendible argues so persuasively, the witnessing of shame and the psychological anguish it generates, “makes it more difficult to ignore or justify” (3). The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, it must be said, ends in a puzzling, if extremely poignant way. At the end of his circular wanderings across the city, he looks at his store, “neither broken nor perfect,” his store from which he will certainly be evicted, with a new willingness to claim it as “entirely [his] own” (228). If we empathize with Sepha, even though we might not entirely understand his feelings, we are brought face-to-face with the paradox of shame and of bearing witness to it: we are, as Martinsen puts it, “made self-conscious of how we differ from others at the same time that we are made to feel our common post-lapsarian heritage” (xvi). It is therefore worth making the point – to return, like Sepha, to the beginnings of our journey – that Donald Trump, the “shamer in chief” with whom this chapter started, is not a reader. He might be capable of creating strange forms of identification and transference (in this respect, as I argued, his rallies share something with the mechanisms of reading), but he viciously short-­ circuits the cognitive and ethical operations of the affect, which we see so vividly in the novel, by projecting it onto others. He might dissolve subjective boundaries between himself and his socially humiliated and hating followers, but is incapable of feeling the shame of complicity in the suffering of others and therefore any sense of responsibility. It is precisely this insight that moves Adam Haslett to admonish: “we either find a way to acknowledge together what we suffer in common, or we live in [Trump’s] world” (21). One way of coming to that acknowledgment, as Mengestu’s beautiful and melancholy novel persuades us, is surely to read.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. Bauwens, Daan. 2018. “Migrants in Italy: Shame is Keeping Us Here.” Inter Press News. 30 July, 2018. www.ipsnews.net/2017/12/migrants-italy-shamekeeping-us/ Bewes, Timothy. 2011. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Bishop, Cecile. 2014. Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship. Oxford: Legenda. Chiampi, Joseph. 1997. “Dante’s Education in Debt and Shame.” Italica 7 (1, Spring): 1–19. Coetzee, J.M. 1980. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin. Dawsey, Josh. 2018. “Trump Derides Protections for Immigrants from ‘Shithole’ Countries.” Washington Post. January 12. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/

Dictator Games  105 trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-in-ovaloffice-meeting/2018/01/11. Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove P. Goffman, Erwin. 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books. Haslett, Adam. 2016. “Donald Trump: Shamer in Chief.” The Nation October 24: 14–21 Martinsen, Deborah A. 2003. Surprised by Shame: Dostoyeski’s Liars and Narrative Exposure. Columbus: Ohio State UP. Mbembe, Achille. 1992. “The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony.” Public Culture 4 (2, Spring): 1–30. Mendible, Myra. 2016. “Introduction: American Shame and the Boundaries of Belonging.” In American Shame: Stigma and the Body Politic, edited by Myra Mendible, 1–24. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Mengestu, Dinaw. 2007. The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. New York: Riverhead. Naipaul, V.S. 1975. “A New King for the Congo.” New York Review of Books. 66: 5. June 26: 19–31. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. 2007. The Wizard of the Crow. New York: Anchor. Pietz, William. 1985. “The Problem of the Fetish, I.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (Spring): 5–17. Rudden, Marie, and Stephanie Brandt. 2018. “Donald Trump as Leader: Psychoanalytic Perspectives.” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytical Studies 15: 43–51. Stallybras, Peter. 2001. “Marx’s Coat.” In Consumption: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, edited by Daniel Miller, 311–332. London: Routledge. Weill, Kelli. 2018. Daily Beast. 29 July. “GOP Candidate Corey Stewart’s Spokesperson called Majority Black Cities “shitholes.” www.thedailybeast. com/gop-candidate-corey-stewarts-spokesperson-called-majority-black-­ cities-shitholes

4 “Unfinished Business” Digging up the Past in Christine Piper’s After Darkness and Cory Taylor’s My Beautiful Enemy Sue Kossew The term “unfinished business” has particular resonance for Australians, linked as it is with an ongoing process of reconciliation, acknowledgement of the sins of the past and the hope of a shared future that is specifically related to Indigenous dispossession and to the Stolen Generations. The shameful past of colonial relations has led to a number of national apologies in Australia and globally: I won’t rehearse them here, but – for Australia – the pivotal apology was, of course, Kevin Rudd’s official Apology in Parliament to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for the Stolen Generations in February 2008, in which he used the phrase “to deal with the unfinished business of the nation,” followed by his Apology to the “Forgotten Australians” sent to Australia as child migrants in 2009. Prior to this, the refusal of the prior Prime Minister, John Howard, to formally apologise had led to an outpouring of informal apologies in the form of bridge walks, sorry days, demonstrations and cultural texts, and to the formation of a number of government and non-government bodies that were devoted to the issue of reconciliation. In other words, it was the shame felt by individuals and groups of people that impelled them to fill the gap of the official non-apology. Yet, as Judith Brett points out, the national shame felt by many Australians at the violence of Aboriginal/settler relations was not echoed in a sense of shame for the treatment of child migrants which, it was argued, was initiated by a foreign government (Britain). For Brett, “some past wrongs weigh more heavily on the conscience of the present than others” while “some more seriously threaten both the nation’s legitimacy and its worthiness as an object of loyalty and identification” (2011, 72). In this chapter, I want to explore the role specifically of literary texts in expressing this shame of “unfinished business” in a variety of contexts. What each of these literary texts has in common is the need to rewrite or revisit the past, not factually as history does, but affectively. This affectivity is sometimes linked to a skeleton in the family closet, to a sense of implication or complicity or to a sense of injustice or to a need to expose a past that has been suppressed by official histories. While I only draw on two such texts, it is striking how many contemporary Australian novels may

“Unfinished Business”: Digging up the Past  107 be labelled “historical novels” or novels that return to the past in order to “speak to” contemporary debates. A frequently used metaphor in Australian national discourse is that of one or other “shameful” or “dark” chapter in our past (Kevin Rudd in his Apology refers to wanting to “remove a great stain from the nation’s soul,” for example). Alongside the notion of shame and guilt comes the idea of repressed and silenced memory, either through deliberate institutionalised forgetting or through the impossibility of fully articulating traumatic pasts. At the same time, as Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton suggest, “forms of remembering and commemoration have become the central contemporary mode through which various constituencies understand history, including the national past” (2013, 371). This seemingly contradictory clash of a willed forgetfulness alongside a fascination with remembrance may account for the popularity in Australian literature of historical novels, a sub-set of which may be termed “sorry novels” and of literary works that may be regarded as participating in a process of what Tessa Morris-Suzuki et al. in East Asia Beyond the History Wars: Confronting the Ghosts of Violence term “reconciliation as method” (2013).1 This concept is defined “not as an end-point in which consensus on history is achieved, but rather as sets of media, skills and processes that encourage the creative sharing of ideas and understandings about the past” (13). The focus on “creative sharing” suggests that such texts may participate in uncovering “unfinished business” and in this way contribute to debates about understandings of the past. At the very least, the concept of “reconciliation as method” prompts us to consider how literary narratives (among other forms of cultural texts) provoke questions of historical responsibility, which necessarily involves shame and its corollary, guilt, on the part of non-Indigenous writers and a sense of injustice, and the need to expose the past on the part of Indigenous and minoritarian writers. 2

1 There have been a number of essays on the “apology novel” or “sorry novel” including: Frawley, Oona and Sue Kossew. (2011). “Irish and Australian Historical Fiction”; Kossew, Sue. (2012). “Saying Sorry: The Politics of Apology and Reconciliation in Recent Australian Fiction”; Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca. (2010). “The Sorry Novels: Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, Greg Matthews’ The Wisdom of Stones and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River.” In addition to the novels dealt with by Weaver-Hightower, these essays have considered novels including Gail Jones’s Sorry; Kate Grenville’s historical trilogy, including The Secret River, The Lieutenant and Sarah Thornhill; and Richard Flanagan’s Wanting. Historical novels, or novels that revisit the past, are favoured by Indigenous writers, too, including such examples as Doris Pilkington/Nugi Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance, Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise and Carpentaria and Larissa Behrendt’s Home. 2 See Australian Humanities Review 61 (May 2017) special section titled “­Unfinished Business: Apology Cultures in the Asia Pacific,” edited by Sue Kossew and B ­ eatrice

108  Sue Kossew In this chapter, I will closely examine two novels that confront the mostly neglected history of the Australian internment of so-called enemy aliens during the Second World War, both focussing on Japanese internment: Christine Piper’s After Darkness (2014) and Cory Taylor’s My Beautiful Enemy (2013), both coincidentally published within a year of each other. Piper has Japanese heritage, and Taylor was married to a Japanese man so both have a stake in exposing this forgotten (and shameful) chapter in Australia’s past and Piper at least may be considered “minoritarian.” Piper’s text, as will become clear, also engages with the shame of Japanese war history. The efficacy of expressing shame, whether in literary or cultural texts or by means of official apologies, is by no means uncontested. Timothy Bewes, for example, has drawn attention to the paradox of communicating post-colonial shame in particular, suggesting that it is impossible to find a form that is able to express shame, as “what is communicated in shame is precisely its incommunicability” (2011, 39). For Bewes, “an obligation to write coexists with the impossibility of doing so innocently” (42). He goes on to analyse the work of a number of writers whose awareness of this “double-speak” paradoxically enables them to communicate this. Similar arguments have suffused Australian cultural life both before and after the Apology. As Holmes and Ward suggest, “Artists, too, have inevitably become attuned to the tensions and contradictions inherent in publicly contested histories, and have explored these for creative effect” (2011, 6). Citing Hirst, they continue: “Others objected that it was ‘morally impossible for settler Australians to regret or apologize for the conquest on which colonial Australia was built’” (6).3 As a way out of this double-bind of competing memories of history, they turn to Michael Rothberg’s notion of “multidirectional memory” for what they call “intercultural, dynamic and multi-layered” memory that produces what Rothberg has defined as “visions that construct solidarity out of the specificities, overlaps and echoes of different historical experiences” (11).4 In other words, instead of being caught up in notions of winners and losers in the history wars, such “multidirectional memory” is able to productively harness “these same tensions to peace and reconciliation projects, borrowing freely from rival traditions of remembrance” (11). Both Piper and Taylor, I suggest, engage with the exploration of

Trefalt. This issue included my essay, “Revisiting the Haunted Past: ­Christine ­Piper’s After Darkness,” some of which forms part of this chapter and is republished with permission. Available online at http://: http://australianhumanitiesreview. org/2017/06/13/issue-61-may-2017/ 3 The citation from Hirst is from “How Sorry can we be?” in John Hirst. (2009). Sense and Nonsense in Australian History. Melbourne: Black Inc., 80–106, 80. 4 The citation is from Michael Rothberg. (2009). Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 16.

“Unfinished Business”: Digging up the Past  109 such tensions and contradictions in their novels that probe the ways in which historical memory may be suppressed or drawn on, depending on ­present-day circumstances. In both novels, it is the unfinished business of the internment of civilian “enemy aliens” in Australia that is revisited and excavated from a largely forgotten past. More typically, it is aspects of settler/Indigenous encounters that are addressed in Australian historical novels. As Sarah Pinto suggests, “Australia presents an intriguing case study for the consideration of the historical novel given the visibility, ubiquity and popularity of the genre” (2010, 190). Influential and prize-winning novels, such as Grenville’s historical trilogy, including The Secret River (2005), The Lieutenant (2008) and Sarah Thornhill (2011); Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010); Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008); Doris Pilkington Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996); and Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise (1997) (to name but a few), revisit moments in history where first encounters or intercultural relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians are narrated and problematised with the benefit of hindsight and contemporary understandings. For Pinto, such historical novels, or novels that deal with the past, are “a crucial way in which pasts are talked about, written and lived” (200) and in this way contribute to the posing of new questions about the past and engaging with the past “on emotional terms” (200). In similar terms, Dolores Herrero, in an essay on Gail Jones’s Sorry (2007), describes the novel as “yet another example of a recurrent phenomenon in contemporary Australian literature, namely the desperate attempt to heal the anxieties of (un)belonging that haunt settler culture” (2011, 286). She quotes Jones’s words in an interview with Summer Block: “I wanted to write about historical amnesia,” Jones says, “what it means to forget […] to have history with a gap in it” (288).5 The two novels discussed here, After Darkness and My Beautiful Enemy, both explore processes of historical amnesia and undertake to reinsert the memory of this chapter of history into the Australian historical record.

Christine Piper’s After Darkness (2014) It is precisely the workings of “historical amnesia” with which Christine Piper’s 2014 novel, After Darkness, engages. Winner of the 2014 Vogel Literary Award and shortlisted for the 2015 Miles Franklin Award, hers is one of the few novels that has as its focus the World War II Australian civilian internment camps that have been largely forgotten in the Australian national imaginary. Of interest to Piper is the experience of Japanese civilians – or enemy aliens, in the terminology of the time – in Loveday

5 Citation is from Summer Block. (2015). ‘Interview: Gail Jones’.

110  Sue Kossew internment camp in remote South Australia in 1942. The only other novel that deals specifically with Japanese and Japanese-Australian civilian internment and the intercultural relationships that developed in the camps is Cory Taylor’s My Beautiful Enemy (2013) – also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award – which is set in Victoria’s Tatura internment camp and which I’ll discuss later. There has, to date, been little critical commentary, beyond reviews, on these two novels, coincidentally published within a year of each other.6 Both novels deal with the question of “unfinished business” that relates to the still-largely unacknowledged experiences of civilian internees in Australia and Piper’s novel refers as well to a “dark chapter” in Japan’s war history that has been similarly repressed. Of course, there are clear parallels between this civilian internment and that of refugees and asylum seekers: something to which both writers refer. In a comment defining the concept of “unfinished business,” Tessa Morris-Suzuki suggests that “discarded or suppressed fragments of the past have a tendency to return as ghosts to haunt individuals, communities, nations and international relationships” (2013, 19). This ghosting metaphor is crucial to After Darkness, which poses for its readers the central question of how literary works, in this case, a novel, may confront the “ghosts” of violent pasts. It incorporates in its narrative the trope of haunting that, according to Avery Gordon, is able to register harm and loss in a process of “transformative recognition” (8) rather than of traumatic incapacitation, thus enabling a more affective sharing of past experience that may indeed open up a “potentially creative space for the rethinking of past violence” (21).7 Piper’s novel provides such a space. Narrated in the first person by Japanese doctor, Tomokazu Ibaraki, the novel deploys three locations – Loveday Internment camp in South Australia, Broome in Western Australia and Tokyo – across three different time-spans from 1934 to 1942, alternating among them. The apparently unemotional surface texture of the first-person narration (reminiscent of the understated narrative technique used by Kazuo Ishiguro in his 1989 novel, The Remains of the Day)8 slowly gives way to a more affective narrative voice. Eventually, the questions that arise regarding Dr Ibaraki’s past, hinted at throughout the novel, are slowly excavated through his reluctant remembering, as the different narrative strands are disentangled. The personal shame that Dr Ibaraki is bearing

6 Piper herself has published a prize-winning non-fiction article on this topic, “Unearthing the Past” (2014) and an article, “Japanese Internment: a Dark Chapter of Australian History” (2014). 7 Morris-Suzuki cites Avery Gordon. (2008). Ghostly Matters. 8 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who pointed out this similarity. Ishiguro presents the voice of his narrator/protagonist, the butler Stevens, as initially repressed, reserved and rigidly controlled. Later, he is shown as having moments of self-­ recognition as he confronts his past. Piper’s novel uses a similar narrational device.

“Unfinished Business”: Digging up the Past  111 as a traumatic burden, and that he ultimately faces up to, is linked in the novel to national shame (connected both to Japan and to Australia) that emerges slowly, despite efforts to suppress it. Near the beginning of the novel, there is a short description of the landscape that Dr Ibaraki sees on the train journey from Broome, where he has been stationed as a doctor, to the Loveday camp in South Australia where he is about to be interned: “Dead trees haunted its [the river’s] edges, their limbs stretching skywards, as if begging for forgiveness” (After Darkness 3). It is a telling image and one that shadows the novel, reappearing later: “The hollow trunks of dead trees haunted its edges like lost people” (139). This image of the trees as haunting the landscape and pleading to the heavens for forgiveness is reminiscent of the “postcolonial uncanny” or “postcolonial gothic,” marked by a haunted Australian landscape that has been most often associated with Indigenous dispossession and white guilt. Thus, Grenville, for example, writes in The Secret River of the place where a massacre of Aboriginal people has taken place: Something had happened to the dirt in that spot so that not as much as a blade of grass had grown there ever since. Nothing was written on the ground. Nor was it written on any page. But the blankness itself might tell the story to anyone who had eyes to see. (2005, 325) This Australian Gothic that “continues to shadow Australian cultural production” (Gelder 2007, 122) most often refers to the suppressed history of settler violence. In the case of Piper’s novel, however, the shadow is that of the hidden histories of both Japan and Australia during World War II. Jacqui Lo has pointed out that the trope of haunting has been deployed by a number of Australian critics (such as Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs (1998)) “to bring an awareness of history to the present, and to address concerns about ethics and justice in relation to the silenced and the hidden in Australian literature” (2013, 347). Gelder and Jacobs deploy this trope beyond literary works, applying it to the very process of reconciliation itself: “Reconciliation is a policy which intends to bring the nation into contact with the ghosts of its past” (1998, 30). For Avery Gordon, haunting is more than simply a Gothic phenomenon that triggers uneasiness and a sense of settler unbelonging. For, while haunting “always registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present” (2008, xvi), it is, she suggests, also “distinctive for producing something-to-be-done” (xvi) by means of its affective engagement that may lead to a “transformative recognition” (8). In other words, it may, by uncovering past wrongs, lead to some form of acknowledgement. In this sense, haunting and the notion of “reconciliation as process” may be seen as complementary. While Australia’s conflicted history of relations with its Indigenous peoples – that is, the main political focus of our nation’s Apology – is not

112  Sue Kossew mentioned in Christine Piper’s novel, the book does deal with two issues of historical responsibility that have been long suppressed and for which no apology, official or otherwise, has been offered.9 The first is a particularly grim moment in the officially unacknowledged history of Japan related to germ warfare; the second, the almost-forgotten internment in Australia of Japanese, Japanese-Australians and so-called “haafus” (“half-caste” Japanese-Australians) during the Second World War. The dead trees in the image I quoted earlier are a redolent image whose significance is only revealed as Piper’s narrative progresses: the novel revisits the secret history of Unit 731, a branch of the Army Medical College that developed biological weapons during World War II and tested them on living humans, “starting in 1932 in the Japanese colony of Manchuria, and later in Guangzhou, Beijing, and Singapore” (“Unearthing”). Disguising the unit as a timber-yard, the medical scientists referred to the subjects of their experiments as “logs” (maruta) in a bizarre and dehumanising “joke.” These subjects included infants, the elderly and pregnant women, many of whom were subjected to vivisection without anaesthetic to check the spread of diseases they had been infected with, including bubonic plague, anthrax, cholera, typhus, smallpox, botulism and poison gas. While in the novel Dr Ibaraki is not represented as a direct member of the Manchurian Unit 731, he is shown to have been involved in related germ warfare medical experiments in the Tokyo laboratory to which he is assigned. We discover during the course of the text that this, along with his marriage breakdown, is the source of Dr Ibaraki’s suppressed memory and the aspect of his past that continues to haunt him. Ibaraki’s guilt is somewhat contradictory, however, as he is both ashamed of his involvement in germ warfare and ashamed of his failure to properly perform his duty to his military superiors. So, the image of the “dead trees […] their limbs stretching skywards, as if begging for forgiveness” (After Darkness 3) – while describing the immediacy of the Australian ­landscape – has resonance in the novel for the histories of both Australia and Japan. Moreover, the ideas of guilt and forgiveness are represented as complex and conflicted, involving personal as well as national histories. Yet, as Piper shows in her novel, this suppression of guilt and complicity results in stunted relations and personal suffering. It results, too, in Dr Ibaraki’s sense of contamination, so that, on returning home from the laboratory, he tries not to think about what he has seen and focusses on “washing [himself] clean” (177). It is significant, too, that at the end of her novel, having lost his wife without ever being able to confess to her what was causing him such anguish and disassociation, Dr Ibaraki 9 In an article in The Conversation, “German experience in Australia during WW1 damaged road to multiculturalism,” Prof. Gerhard Fischer writes of the little-known apology that was delivered on September 26, 1999, by Governor-General Sir William Deane to members of the German-Australian community. He said:

“Unfinished Business”: Digging up the Past  113 writes a letter to the Editor, in which he discloses his knowledge of the so-called Epidemic Prevention Laboratory. The image of the page on which he writes is itself meaningful: I reach for my writing pad and turn to a new page. The paper, at first glance crisp and white, on closer inspection bears the indentations of my pen pressing onto the page before it – ghostly lines, the almost imperceptible grooves of the past. (294) This palimpsestic image reinforces the pressure of the past on the present and the impossibility of moral avoidance. While acknowledging the short-term shame this will bring on his family, Dr Ibaraki hopes that “in time, it will be worth the shame” (94) for, in the words of his letter, “there is something the Japanese people should know” (295). This knowledge to which Dr Ibaraki refers, and in which he was implicated during his time working at the laboratory, is based on a real-life unearthing of the past in July 1989 in what has come to be known as the Shinjuku Bones Affair: human remains that were excavated in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district by construction workers building a new National Institute for Health on the site of the old Army Medical College and adjacent to the Anti-Epidemic Laboratory, the institution responsible for Unit 731, also known as the Ishii Unit, named after its Director, Ishii Shirō. History Professor Keiichi Tsuneishi of Kanagawa University has shown that germ warfare experimentation on non-Japanese people went far beyond the involvement of the Japanese army. He writes: What is striking in my own recent research is that famous civilian physicians and professors of medicine actively sought data from the experiments, studied human tissue shipped back from overseas, and wrote up their conclusions for the army. Japan’s medical community still won’t admit this, but my research leaves no question. (Woodruff 1992) The official response to the bones was to order that they be disposed of immediately: it was only action by local people to resist this attempted wiping out of the past that enabled the bones to be preserved and the people to continue to demand the truth about their history. Today, the bones are stored in inside a special monument on the site of the former Army Medical College in Tokyo. The Shinjuku bones are therefore a key example of Japan’s continued suppression of its wartime past, and Dr  Ibaraki’s revelation of his involvement in this shameful chapter of Japanese history, despite the pressure to remain silent, is of particular significance. Like the Shinjuku bones, the ghosts of the past keep returning in the form of traumatic memory until they are revealed and acknowledged. By dealing with “perpetrator trauma,” Piper shows, through the character of Dr Ibaraki, how perpetrators may also be

114  Sue Kossew victims, challenging the assumed binary between the categories of perpetrator and victim.10 In this case, Dr Ibaraki is drawn into this act (that he has come to deeply regret) by his own cultural conditioning. But this is not the only suppressed history with which the novel engages. The Australian internment of German, Italian and Japanese nationals during World War II is not widely discussed in contemporary Australia, nor is it a prominent feature of our nation’s war memories. Like Australia, the United States and Canada interned their civilian “enemy aliens” after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, a “dirty little secret” from the past, as one commentator has described this period of American history (Wokusch 2011). In similar fashion, particularly after the Japanese bombing of Darwin, Australian authorities established civilian internment camps for three reasons, according to the National Archives of Australia: “to prevent residents from assisting Australia’s enemies, to appease public opinion and to house overseas internees sent to Australia for the duration of the war.”11 Not just Japanese, but Germans and Italians were interned, including those of these nationalities who were born in Australia. At its height in 1942, when Piper’s novel is set, more than 12,000 civilians were interned in what were purpose-built camps at Tatura in Victoria, Hay and Cowra in New South Wales, Harvey in Western Australia and Loveday in South Australia. To complicate the mix of internee-camp population, enemy prisoners of war were also sent to these internees’ camps from 1943. Legislation introduced in 1939 in the form of the National Security (Aliens Control) Regulations applied the designation of “enemy alien” initially to Germans or Australians born in Germany, some of whom were interned and all of whom had restrictions imposed on their travel. Between 1940 and 1941, Italians and Japanese Australians became enemy aliens and risked internment. After the war, there was mass repatriation of internees to Japan, even those who had been living in Australia for most of their lives and had no knowledge of the Japanese language. Exceptions included Australian-born Japanese, those married to Australians or British citizens and those certified unfit to travel (Nagata 1996, 193–194). So this simplistic designation of “enemy alien” was itself deeply problematic. Of the 4,300 Japanese civilians 10 See Tsutsui, Kiyoteru. 2009. “The Trajectory of Perpetrators” Trauma: Mnemonic Politics around the Asia-Pacific War in Japan.” Social Forces 87 (3): 389–422. See also Whitney Humanities Center Workshop Report, “The Trauma of the Perpetrators? Politics, Ethics and Representation” (10–12 December 2014), in which a definition is offered for perpetrator trauma and its cultural legacies, and the following questions are posed: “What is the relationship between the perpetration of violence and the witnessing and/or suffering of violence? What distinguishes perpetrators who suffer moral injury from colleagues who do not? Is it possible to disentangle the effects of violence suffered, witnessed, and wielded by someone who becomes a perpetrator?” 11 National Archives of Australia. ‘Wartime Internment Camps in Australia.’ http://naa. gov.au/collection/snapshots/internment-camps/index.aspx. 25 September 2015. Np.

“Unfinished Business”: Digging up the Past  115 interned in Australia, only a quarter had been living in Australia when war broke out with Japan; others were sent from Allied-controlled countries such as the Dutch East Indies and French New Caledonia. These included Formosans and Koreans, who’d been interned as “Japanese.” Thus, the entire notion of national identity is brought into question in the novel. By showing the effects on individual internees of the lack of a common language as well as any shared political outlook, Piper demonstrates conflict among the internees, all of whom have been lumped together as “enemy aliens,” including those, like her character Stanley Suzuki, categorised by the authorities as a “haafus” or “half-caste,” but who regarded themselves as proudly Australian and had little in common with the nationalist outlook and loyalty to the Emperor promoted by the Japanese leaders in the camps. It is clear that Piper, who was born in South Korea to a Japanese mother and an Australian father, and who thus has a personal stake in both these national histories, is interested in establishing empathy with these hybrid characters’ struggle with identity and belonging (“After Darkness.” Interview 2014). More broadly, however, she has suggested that her novel has contemporary relevance not just as a reminder of the past but as providing a parallel to contemporary cultures of fear. As she stated in an interview, she sees present-day refugees as subject to the same fear of “the other” as the enemy aliens of World War II: “Today’s refugees are viewed with the same suspicion and are victims of the same public hysteria that the Japanese civilians living in Australian once experienced” (Piper, Kossew Interview 2015). Present-day issues can both focus attention on comparable past events and can make past events seem more relevant to the present.

Cory Taylor’s My Beautiful Enemy (2013) Taylor’s novel, also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin literary award, deals with very similar issues, set as it is at the Tatura internment camp in Victoria and thematising the fraught but intimate relationship that develops between a 17-year-old Australian army guard, Arthur Wheeler, stationed at the camp, and a 15-year-old Japanese boy, Stanley Ueno, whose family, a troupe of circus acrobats, has been interned there. Taylor has said that she based his character on a photograph of “gorgeous” Japanese circus performers who were touring in Australia at that time and were interned when war was declared (Taylor, Interview 2015). However, in addition to exposing this often-hidden history of civilian internment, Taylor raises a further aspect of shame: Arthur’s suppressed homosexuality and his forbidden desire for Stanley, whom he sees as some kind of Hollywood “matinee idol” (Taylor 2013, 3) (Stanley had been “partly raised by a family in Chicago,” 9). Written in Arthur’s first-person voice, the novel has an older Arthur looking back over a life

116  Sue Kossew he “might have led” (1), had he been able to act on these desires instead of repressing them. In his words at the beginning of the novel, “For years I mourned the life I could have shared with Stanley if only the times had been different” (1). The implication is that this personal suppression, like that of this part of Australia’s national history, leads only to frustration, lies and self-loathing. Like Piper, the topic of Japanese internment and Australian attitudes at the time had a personal resonance for Taylor. She talks in an interview of her own parents unquestioning prejudice against Japanese people and of her awareness that her own children, who have a Japanese father, would have been considered enemy aliens and, very likely, interned in the Tatura camp, which was specifically set up for families and children. In the novel, Arthur expresses this national prejudice through his own original attitude prior to meeting Stanley: To my way of thinking the Japs were the enemy, before they were individual men, women and children, and that was something never to be forgotten. In those days, I was still something of a fanatic and held to the conventional fanatical view that all the local Japanese from places like Broome and Darwin had been locked up of necessity, as a defence against spy activity and sabotage. I also believed that they weren’t strictly human, which was a common enough opinion back then. Either you saw them as superhuman fighting machines, or as primitive beasts, but never as ordinary people. (6) Arthur relates his initial attitude towards the Japanese to his belief in the “superior culture of men like me, who’d had the great good fortune to be born British subjects” (23), adhering to “this ridiculous creed even after the British Empire had expired so spectacularly” (23) after the fall of Singapore. However, on first meeting Stanley, described by Arthur as “by far the handsomest boy I’d ever seen,” Arthur realises that he “would never again be able to take comfort in the common wisdom that the Japs were unlovely.” He continues: “In an instant I’d been converted to a new faith…I was like a blind man who has suddenly been given the gift of sight, and it struck me that I was in the presence of something wondrous” (5). This quasi-religious conversion (he calls Stanley’s “loveliness” a “kind of miracle,” 2) is, of course, socially and politically unacceptable on many levels, not least being Arthur’s failure to conform to the notion of masculinity embodied in the Australian troops and in masculinist constructions of Australian nationhood. Thus, he has to endure being called a “poof,” a “pansy” and being subjected to various other homophobic insults by his fellow troops, recalling the language that his bullying father, too, had used against him, recognising Arthur’s divergent sexuality even as a child and using it to abuse him.

“Unfinished Business”: Digging up the Past  117 The relationship between Arthur and Stanley remains somewhat ambiguous in the novel, though Arthur is clearly in love with Stanley. When he thinks back over this period of his life, he finds it difficult to separate the “imaginary” from the “real” Stanley (1). When the two men meet up many years later, Arthur confesses that his real life had ended after Tatura and his separation from Stanley, and that “everything after that had been a posthumous life” (3). Stanley’s response is to express empathy, “lacing his fingers through mine and squeezing so hard it hurt” (4). This hurtful and, for Arthur, confusing intimacy is emblematic of their relationship and of his inability to pin down Stanley’s character: “He kept you constantly off balance. It was like he had two different personalities, one cold and critical and the other passionate and temperamental” (27). Arthur’s unrealistic image of Stanley is conjured up in Taylor’s description early in the novel: The winter sun streamed into the room from the high windows beside him so that his face was sliced in half, one side blindingly white and the other side a black silhouette […] the steam billowed up through the light and made half a halo around the sunlit side of his head. I’d seen a similar effect in the cinema […] and I had a momentary vision of Stanley as a handsome villain in some spy thriller set in the perfumed Far East. (24–25) Here, Stanley’s split personality, mentioned by Arthur, and Arthur’s own confused attitude towards him is physicalised in the black/white imagery, which also, of course, recalls binary racist metaphors. At the same time, Arthur appears to be buying in to stereotypical cultural representations of the exotic East, with the contradictory half-halo, half-villain effect that harks back to Rudyard Kipling’s “half devil and half child” image in his poem “The White Man’s Burden.” This is particularly appropriate, given Kipling’s echoing of imperial anxieties about the “Other” as both “dirty” and effeminate: in other words, doubly “degenerate.” It seems that Arthur, despite his desire to let go of his prejudices, and despite his obvious physical attraction to Stanley, is still to some extent caught up in narrow imperial discourses of race and gender. Thus, he tells Stanley that he is “nothing like a Jap” even though Stanley had told him that “his face alone was the thing that defined him in the face of the world” (34–35). That his reading of George Orwell’s essay in Shooting an Elephant unsettles him, particularly Orwell’s use of the phrase “the dirty work of empire” (42), illustrates the beginning of his transgressive thinking. While he considers that he, like Orwell in Burma, may well be an object of loathing among the Japanese, he nonetheless regards Stanley’s kiss as negating this black-and-white thinking. This trembling on the edge of changing perceptions is captured in Arthur’s teenage discovery of photography and developing of photographic prints: “it was a

118  Sue Kossew revelation for me to learn that our perception of even the simplest things was not fixed or straightforward, but open to different interpretations” (49). It is, of course, significant that Arthur’s dark-room revelations are in the context of his relationship with Bill, an older man with whom he has his first homoerotic experience. The combination of guilt, shame and desire that Arthur feels in relation to Stanley is summed up in the following: Stanley had stirred longings in me that I’d desperately hoped to suppress, because I regarded them as sick. He, on the other hand, seemed to take my perversity for granted, planting a kiss on my cheek as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and making jokes about my love affairs. I’d ended up close to tears because all I really wanted was for Stanley to kiss me again. Even more than that I wanted to kiss him back. That I didn’t tell him at the time, that I tried to hide my feelings, is something I’ve regretted ever since. (45) Arthur’s own same-sex desire and “unmanly” reaction (his tearfulness and desire to be kissed again) is completely at odds with notions of Australian masculinity, in particular that endorsed by the armed forces, particularly in times of war. As Clive Moore suggests, while war “allows male intimacy at a level not possible in peace-time life, war service provides a counter-force to the feminisation of males, a remasculinisation of the Australian male” (1998, 12). Indeed, it was not until November 1992 that Australia overturned its ban on gays and lesbians serving in the Australian Defence Force. That Arthur pathologises his own desires as “sick” reinforces the strength of the pressure to conform to socially acceptable standards of masculine performativity. His later attempts to turn himself “into a blameless family man” are undermined by his wife May’s sense that he is “faking” (189) this role. He remains haunted by the need to reach Stanley before he is repatriated to Japan, feeling guilt at having sacrificed him “for the sake of my new respectability” (193). It is not until 1963 that Arthur manages to track down Stanley (now a successful businessman and restauranteur) and meet him in Japan, and Stanley advises him to “forget about the past” as “none of it matters any more” (255). As in Piper’s novel, Taylor deploys imagery of being haunted by the past and of the past as “a wound […] that refused to heal over” (13). In revisiting this period of Australian history, personal and national shames collide. While Arthur is obsessed with his private world rather than historical events, others in the novel voice a national shame, even at the time of the events. Thus, the enlightened Australian guard who starts a school for the Japanese children in the camp, McMaster, calls their internment a “crime” that was “committed in the name of liberty and justice” despite “not one shred of evidence” ever being found “to link any of these people with any act of sabotage or any breach of

“Unfinished Business”: Digging up the Past  119 national security” (86). For Arthur, silence was the way he dealt with his shame about falling in love with the enemy: “Needless to say, I wasn’t proud in the least – of my service record, or of my private feelings. The war, as I recalled it, had done me nothing but harm” (220). ­ ehind It seems that aspects of Taylor’s own family story, like Piper’s, lie b her rewriting of this historical moment.12 She was married to a Japanese man and yet she recognised that her own white Australian parents at the time of the war didn’t question that the “Japs” were the enemy and that, along with 200 children, they needed to be locked up. Her book, she suggests, wanted to look at their plight “through more humane eyes” (Taylor, Interview 2015) (Interview Books Plus Radio National Summer with Michael Cathcart). But can excavating the past in this way in a work of fiction perform a corrective function? Piper’s assertion that a novel may “aid reconciliation efforts by stirring interest at the grassroots” (Kossew Interview) provides, I think, similarly valuable insight into her own writerly motivation. By attracting interest, by informing and even inspiring readers, a novel (or indeed any other cultural text) can, she suggests, produce change by “forming a groundswell that ultimately forces governments to recognise the victims of war” (Piper, Kossew Interview 2015). It is in this sense that both Piper’s and Taylor’s novels may be said to effect Avery Gordon’s notion of “transformative recognition.” The process of “unearthing” the past, by refusing both silencing and forgetting, is potentially ongoing, for, to quote Morris-Suzuki again: […] the rewriting of history never ends, since the constantly changing vantage point of the present reveals constantly changing landscapes of the past. (Taylor 2013, 13) By adding to the plurality of national memory and by incorporating aspects of “unfinished business” that have not yet been included in the official remembrances of either Japan or Australia, these two novels function as a way of drawing attention to these ghosts from the past that insist on being seen.

Works Cited Behrendt, Larissa. 2004. Home. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Bewes, Timothy. 2011. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton, NJ: ­Princeton UP. Block, Summer. 2015. “Interview: Gail Jones.” January Magazine n.d. http:// januarymagazine.com/profiles/gailjones.html. 20 September 2015.

12 Sadly, Cory Taylor died in July 2016 aged 61, having just completed her final work, Dying: A Memoir.

120  Sue Kossew Brett, Judith. 2011. “Apologizing to the Stolen Generations.” In Exhuming Passions: The Pressure of the Past in Ireland and Australia, edited by Katie Holmes and Stuart Ward. 71–90. Dublin: Irish Academic P. Darian-Smith, Kate, and Paula Hamilton. 2013. “Memory and History in 21st Century Australia: A Survey of the Field.” Memory Studies 6 (3): 370–383. Fischer, Gerhard. 2015. “German Experience in Australia during WW1 Damaged Road to Multiculturalism.” The Conversation n.d. https://­theconver sation.com/german-experience-in-australia-during-ww1-damaged-road-to-­ multiculturalism-38594. 20 September 2015. Flanagan, Richard. 2008. Wanting. North Sydney: Knopf. Frawley, Oona, and Sue Kossew. 2011. “Irish and Australian Historical Fiction.’ In Exhuming Passions: The Pressure of the Past in Ireland and Australia, edited by Katie Holmes and Stuart Ward, 187–206. Dublin: Irish Academic P. Gelder, Ken. 2007. “Australian Gothic.” In The Routledge Companion to Gothic, edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. 115–123. London: Routledge. Gelder, Ken, and Jane Jacobs. 1998. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and ­Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Melbourne: Melbourne UP. Gordon, Avery. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological ­Imagination. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Grenville, Kate. 2005. The Secret River. Melbourne: Text. ———. 2008. The Lieutenant. Melbourne: Text. ———. 2011. Sarah Thornhill. Melbourne: Text. Herrero, Dolores. 2011. “The Australian Apology and Postcolonial Defamiliarization: Gail Jones’s Sorry.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47 (3): 283–295. doi:10.1080/17449855.2011.572660. 25 September 2015. Hirst, John. 2009. Sense and Nonsense in Australian History. Melbourne: Black Inc. Holmes, Katie and Stuart Ward (eds.). 2011. “Introduction: Poison and ­Remedy.” In Exhuming Passions: The Pressure of the Past in Ireland and Australia. 1–16. Dublin: Irish Academic P. Kossew, Sue. 2012. “Saying Sorry: The Politics of Apology and Reconciliation in Recent Australian Fiction.” In Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres, edited by Walter Goebel and Saski Schabio, 171–183. New York: Routledge. Lo, Jacqueline. 2013. “‘Why Should We Care?’: Some Thoughts on Cosmopolitan Hauntings.” Memory Studies 6 (3): 345–358. Moore, Clive. 1998. “Guest Editorial: Australian Masculinities.” Journal of Australian Studies 56: 1–16. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 2013. “Confronting the Ghosts of War in East Asia.” In East Asia Beyond the History Wars: Confronting the Ghosts of Violence, edited by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Morris Low, Leonid Petrov, and Timothy Y. Tsu, 1–26. New York: Routledge. Nagata, Yuriko. 1996. Unwanted Aliens: Japanese Internment in Australia. St Lucia: U of Queensland P. National Archives of Australia. “Wartime Internment Camps in Australia.” http://naa.gov.au/collection/snapshots/internment-camps/index.aspx. 25 ­S eptember 2015. Pilkington, Doris/Nugi Garimara. 1996. Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

“Unfinished Business”: Digging up the Past  121 Pinto, Sarah. 2010. “Emotional Histories and Historical Emotions: Looking at the Past in Historical Novels.” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 14 (2): 189–207. Piper, Christine. 2014. After Darkness. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin. ———. 2014. “After Darkness: 2014 Vogel’s Literary Award Winning Novel.” Interview by Robyn Williams. Okham’s Razor, August 3. Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio National. www.abc.net.au/radionational/ programs/ockhamsrazor/after-darkness—vogel27s-literary-award-­w inningnovel/5632382#transcript. 20 August 2015. ———. 2014. “Japanese Internment: a Dark Chapter of Australian History.” Sydney Morning Herald, August 15. www.smh.com.au/comment/­japaneseinternment-a-dark-chapter-of-australian-history-20140813-103ldy.html. 20 August 2015. ———. 2014. “Unearthing the Past.” Australian Book Review 360 (April): 32– 42. www.australianbookreview.com.au/faqs/114-april-2014-no-360/1898unearthing-the-past. 20 August 2015. ———. 2015. Interview by Sue Kossew (via email), unpublished. July 7. ­Q uotations used with permission. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the ­Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. Scott, Kim. 2010. That Deadman Dance. Sydney: Picador. Taylor, Cory. 2013. My Beautiful Enemy. Melbourne: Text Publishing. ———. 2015. Interview with Michael Cathcart, “Books and Arts.” ABC Radio National, April 23. Available online at: www.abc.net.au/radionational/ programs/booksandarts/cory-taylor-my-beautiful-enemy/4633094 Tsutsui, Kiyoteru. 2009. ““The Trajectory of Perpetrators” Trauma: Mnemonic Politics around the Asia-Pacific War in Japan.” Social Forces 87 (3): 1389–1422. Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca. 2010. “The Sorry Novels: Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, Greg Matthews’ The Wisdom of Stones and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River.” In Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature, edited by Nathaniel O’Reilly, 131–156. New York: Cambria P. Whitney Humanities Center. “Workshop Report: The Trauma of the Perpetrators? Politics, Ethics and Representation.” December 10–12, 2014. http:// whc.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Traumaoftheperpetratorworkshop2015. pdf 12 April 2016. Wokusch, Heather. 2011. “Internment of Americans of Japanese Descent during WWII.” YouTube. November 26. www.youtube.com/watch?v=­ WM5y9IcsOCQ. 23 September 2015. Woodruff, John E. 1992. “Remains Found in Japan may be of Victims of ­Wartime Experiments.” Baltimore Sun, December 27. http:articles.­ baltimoresun.com/1992-12-27/news/1992362018_1_unit-731-japan-germwarfare. 23 September 2015. Wright, Alexis. 1997. Plains of Promise. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

5 Different Shades of Shame. The Responsibilities and Legacies of a Shameful History in Australian Fiction Annalisa Pes Starting from the premise that in the Australian national context shame has been a central issue in the definition of Australian identity since early colonial times, the aim of this chapter is to analyze some short stories and a novel by two white Australian women writers, Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883–1969) and Kate Grenville (1950–), in which, in spite of temporal and contextual distance, the topic of shame plays a fundamental role in the definition of white Australian identity as well as in understanding the relations and intercultural encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Both writers engage with a shameful history and with its legacies, with the difference that if Grenville, as a contemporary writer, goes back to the historical past from a privileged position of understanding and knowledge, Prichard is ahead of the times of reconciliation and national apologies. However, in spite of their different historical perspectives and awareness, both writers strongly feel the need to express shame and to avoid silence and concealment, so as not to suppress historical memory and thus to engage with an ethical form of political responsibility. Since the late eighteenth century, Australian society has been stricken by a series of shaming conditions: a convict past; a colonial/inferior status; and a history of racism, discrimination, and assimilation inflicted on the Indigenous people. The original sin of convicts shamefully rejected by their mother country and transported “for the term of their natural lives” to the Antipodean penal colony generated what has been defined as Australia’s “birthstain,” which turned the country into “the continent of sin” (Hughes 1987, 44), deeply affected by the social shame of convictism. In this wake, the myth of British superiority and the myth of England as “Home,” created by the colonial mentality, provoked the shaming of Australian culture since the 1890s, giving rise in the following decades to a long debate on Australian cultural identity. The shame of embodying a colonial status deemed to be culturally inferior and therefore subservient to British and European models has been famously defined by A.A. Phillips “cultural cringe” in a homonymous

Different Shades of Shame  123 article published in Meanjin in 1950. But even long before that, shame had been identified and discussed as an Australian response to British cultural imperialism and to artificially constructed overseas standards (Dalziell 1999, 5, 22). Besides the shame of the convict past and of colonial status that have deeply influenced white settlers’ anxiety about origins and belonging, shame has always afflicted Australia due to the oppressive acts of discrimination and institutional racism perpetrated against Indigenous Australians since the time of white invasion. However, it was only with the Bicentennial, on 26 January 1988, celebrating 200 years of European settlement, that shame became a central issue in relation to the history of oppression and rights violation against the Aboriginal people of Australia. Indeed, as Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith point out, “prior to the Bicentennial, few Australians knew of the history of indigenous dispossession” (2004, 88). So, the Bicentennial provided them with the shaming awareness of the disparities in the lives of white and black Australians, and with the clear perception of the devastating effects of assimilation. The confrontation with this new version of history generated many unexpected counter-celebrations to the national event on every side. These forms of protest contested the patriotic tributes to a unified national (white) narrative and contributed to raising significant human rights issues. In other words, the Bicentennial offered white Australians not only the informed knowledge about the past, but also the moral, ethical, political, and aesthetic wherewithal to register Indigenous stories as stories of human rights violations (Schaffer and Smith 92, 94). In this way, the knowledge of past events and policies that had subjected Aboriginal people to shame increasingly became a source of shame for the dominant culture, thus creating complex dynamics of shaming and counter-shaming. This is evident in the words of the writer Patrick White, who argued that the Bicentenary celebrated the history of a “piffling country” (1994, 608) which tried to ignore so much that was shameful (603). Like many other intellectuals and writers, White refused to take part in the celebrations in the belief that there was too much to be ashamed about and with the intention of expressing his solidarity to the Aboriginal people: “If I am still alive I shall take no part in anything so shameful. I shall sit on the front veranda under the Aboriginal and Eureka flags” (613). The legacy of shame on contemporary Australians was even more strongly felt with the now well-known “National Inquiry into the Forced Separation of Indigenous Children from their Families” (1995–1996), and the publication of the Bringing Them Home Report (1997), that made the words “shame” and “shameful” thoroughly permeate the political, social, and literary background of Australia. Associated to the Stolen Generations’ testimonies on government policies of assimilation and to the atrocities committed against Indigenous Australians by earlier

124  Annalisa Pes generations, shame became at the end of the century a predominant issue in the revision and reconfiguration of Australian history, and an issue of confrontation for new generations of white Australians. In particular, the (in)famous refusal by Prime Minister John Howard in 1997 to officially apologize to Indigenous people for a past of violent dispossession and discrimination, on the grounds of the non-liability of contemporary Australians, opened an intense debate based on contrasting interpretations of history and different responses to the issues of shame and guilt. The importance of dealing with the issue of shame, and with the ethical implications of this condition, was certainly not diminished with the formal apology finally delivered to Indigenous Australians by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008. Especially in literature, and in the field of what Sue Kossew has defined “sorry novels,” shame has remained a thorny issue and a recurring emotion to be faced with and to be shaped into a form of cross-cultural communication and, using Kossew’s words again, into “a shared space of ethical understanding” (2013, 180). The distinction between shame and guilt has been an object of debate for psychologists and philosophers. Michael Morgan, for instance, argues that “we can be ashamed about what we have done, just as we can feel guilty for what we have done, but in such case shame is about who we are for having done what we did […] We feel guilty for having done what we did but not for being who we are” (2008, 14–15). In other words, guilt has to do with a direct involvement in something wrong, and is limited to what one has done, to the action committed; shame, on the other hand, is associated to one’s self, to the ontological condition of feeling wrong, even for something one is not directly involved in. By referring to this interpretation, we can say that Australian novels dealing with shameful events of the past attempt to express Australia’s sense of contemporary shame (feeling wrong, morally culpable for benefiting from the privileges of being white), emerging from a postcolonial condition of collective guilt (a communal, transgenerational guilt for the wrongs and injustices perpetrated on the Indigenous people). In this case, guilt and shame create the conditions for a direct connection between past and present and determine the nature of the close relations between those who have been shaming and those who have been shamed. In colonial contexts, where racism predominates and the power structure is determined by a dichotomic and hierarchical distinction between colonizer and colonized in terms of superiority and inferiority, shame represents, as Erica Johnson points out quoting Fanon, an essential quality of human relations (2013, 90). Colonialism operates as a shaming ideology by incorporating the Other into one’s self and, at the same time, the nature of colonial relations, based on self/Other dynamics, is itself shameful. Johnson also notes that colonial shame can work on two levels: it differentiates subjects into superior or inferior beings (the shamed colonized and the shaming colonizer), but it can also make

Different Shades of Shame  125 the shaming subject ashamed of his/her own behaviour while witnessing the consequences of a shameful act. Therefore, the confrontation with colonial shame forges a deep interconnectivity between self and Other by exposing a shared value system: one that determines both the ability to shame and the subjection to shaming (90). In this light, the fact that shame “can be rerouted across colonial binaries” makes it, as Fanon demonstrates, a significant form of colonial critique because the humiliating feeling provoked by shame inserts itself in the space between the colonizer and the colonized, bringing them into distance so that the self/ Other dynamic is deterritorialized (qtd by Johnson 91). This capacity of shame to “flow back and forth across colonial binaries” (90), and to provide a powerful critique of colonialism as a shameful institution, is explored well in advance of the late t­ wentieth-century reconciliation process in Australia by the writer Katharine Susannah Prichard. The novel Coonardoo and the play Brumby Innes (both written in 1927) represent Prichard’s unprecedented contribution in ­Australian fiction to the debate on colonial race relations based on social inequality and exploitation. If to contemporary sensibility Prichard may sound patronizing and sentimental, if not ambiguous, in her depiction of Aboriginal people and customs, and she may appear nowadays as a white writer speaking for the blacks, still her sincere and politically honest sympathy with native people, and her protests and statements against their unequal treatment, certainly show an awareness that her contemporaries did not have (Bird 2000, xxi). It is in particular in a group of short stories, written in the 1940s and 1950s, that Prichard’s denunciation of unequal race relations and her condemnation of the destruction of Aboriginal cultures is associated with an interesting emphasis on the feeling of shame: both the shame of the victims of oppression and the shameful treatment inflicted on them by white Australians. The story “N’goola” (1959) presents one of the earliest (possibly, the earliest) critiques, long before it was publicly denounced and became a topical issue, of the legitimized practices of removing children of mixed descent from their Aboriginal families (what will later be called “Stolen Generations”) and of the consequences on identity and self-esteem that the policies of assimilation brought along. The story tells about Mary, a half-Aboriginal woman, taken from her family as a small child and educated in assimilation in an institution. Mary grows up “trying to live like a white woman” (Prichard 1967, 122), but her lost past and origins continually haunt her and make her desire to belong “somewhere, and to somebody” (124) to the point that she is often accused of being “a crawler to the whites” (132). One day, on her way back home from work, Mary meets an Aboriginal man asking about a girl called N’goola, his non-­biological daughter that was taken when she was a baby, and that he had never given up looking for. In a rather melodramatic happy ending, Mary turns out to be N’goola, but the process of self-acknowledgement

126  Annalisa Pes and acceptance of her Aboriginal identity is depicted as a painful struggle out of shame, as she is continually confronted with her own and her own people’s sense of shame. For instance, when she first meets Gwelnit she immediately feels an affinity with the old Aboriginal man, but at the same time she is ashamed of this proximity: “She wanted no bond with this dirty old man, Mary told herself in a quick revulsion of feeling. She had lived too long among white people to go back to aboriginal ways and ideas” (125), proving in this way how much she has internalized the logic of shame imposed by assimilation and white education. ­Similarly, her consideration of the native settlement she watches from the safe position of her house indicates a sort of ashamed removal of her ­Aboriginality and a sign of her conflicting identity: Mary had little to do with the wild, gipsyish crew which forgathered there, although she was friendly with most of the older men and women […] [she was] trying to live like a white woman: keeping her home clean and tidy and herself respectable, as she had been taught to in a mission school. (121–122) With these words Mary proves she is a victim not only of annihilating policies of assimilation that have kept her apart from the natives’ world but also of racial shaming, having absorbed white standards of beauty and decency. Living like a white woman substantially implies for N’goola abiding by preconceived ideas of cleanliness, tidiness, and respectability as a result of the racialist precepts she has internalized at school. When Gwelnit tells her the whole story of his daughter and of his deep love and desperate search for her, Mary feels a “conflict between her desire to live like a white woman and her loyalty to traditions of the dark people” (133). Her considerations about her forgotten past and her unstable present reveal a struggling identity and a sense of doubleness deriving from an internalized experience of racial shame. Prichard shows that, on the one hand, Mary wants to conform to the models of the shaming white society that have been instilled in her by Western education, but, on the other hand, she feels the need to overcome the sense of shame and to remain loyal to her Aboriginal heritage. It is interesting to note that the conflict between these two opposing forces results in the temptation for Mary of keeping silent. Indeed, when she realizes she is the person the man is looking for, she doesn’t say a word for some time. Although by the end she breaks out by proudly asserting “I am N’goola,” silence and concealment represent potential consequences of her own shame, and metonymical representations of Australia’s shameful colonial history deliberately repressed under the so-called “great Australian silence.” Nevertheless, Prichard’s focus on shame in this story is not only meant to denounce the consequences of contemporary racial politics, but also

Different Shades of Shame  127 to present different perspectives on what is considered to be shameful. In a sort of postcolonial counterdiscourse Prichard explores a different shade of shame: the shame of Aboriginal people for having their blood contaminated by the whites. When N’goola is born, her mother is “overwhelmed by shame and rage” (126); the baby’s light skin colour immediately identifies her as the fruit of sexual intercourse with a white man. In this case, like in many others, the intercourse is an act of rape, the shameful exploitation of an Aboriginal woman by the white master: “It was the Boss, Mittoon said […] He took me into the store-miah and shut the door. Nothing would come of it. No one would know, he said. Now there is this child to shame me” (127). So N’goola, as a part-Aboriginal baby, born of an imposed sexual contact between a European man and an Aboriginal woman, embodies unacknowledged white shame: the unspeakable sin of miscegenation, bearing on her body the double stigma of racial shame and illegitimacy (that will bring to her removal, indeed). However, the shame of her mixed parentage is perceived through the eyes and feelings of the black woman, who is ashamed because, in accordance with her tribe’s beliefs, “light colour was considered a sign of weakness in a child” (126), and for this reason N’goola is disowned by her mother. White shaming is therefore counteracted by black shame in terms of Aboriginal pride, which represents an assertive response to humiliating practices of racial discrimination (Dalziell 145) and thus subverts the colonial hierarchical structure of white superiority and black inferiority. A similar shifting of power structures is to be seen in “Marlene” (1944) where a young Aboriginal girl gives birth to a baby that is again the secret fruit of the white master’s rape. The truth is kept hidden from the master’s wife who visits the camp with a friend to get news about the Aboriginal Molly, who hasn’t been working in the woman’s house for a while. Shame is first introduced in the story through the degraded conditions in which Aboriginal people of mixed descent are forced to live, in the only place they are allowed to camp. But the shameful state of the unhealthy and dirty place, which is acknowledged by Mrs Boyd (the master’s wife) as “a disgrace” (Prichard 1967, 111), instead of shaming the natives becomes, through the words of Albert (a sort of spokesperson for the Indigenous group), an accusation directed at white settlers for the inhuman policies they should be ashamed of: All the land about has been taken up. It’s private property now. We’re not allowed to work in the mines. We’re not allowed to sell the fish we catch – not allowed to shoot or trap. They don’t want us on the farms. They won’t let us work on the roads. All we’re allowed to do is draw rations and rot…though there is some talk of packing us off to one of those damned reservations ‘where the diseased and dying remnants of the native race are permitted to end their days in peace’. Excuse me quoting the local rag. (116)

128  Annalisa Pes Albert’s outburst is a response to being shamed by white Australians into a harsh and disempowered reality. As Dalziell explains, anger, as is the case of Albert’s reaction, can be a way to disguise the shame experience: “anything that touches on or threatens to trigger repressed shame creates emotional discomfort, and as Sigmund Freud pointed out, may be transformed into more acceptable emotions such as anger or sadness” (1999, 8). However, Albert’s shame and distress are not self-destructive because by making him give vent to these emotions, Prichard adopts a ­counter-shaming rhetorical strategy (164) that condemns the responsibility of the whites and shatters their shameful complacency. This is evident in Mrs Boyd’s accusation to Molly for her pregnancy and illegitimate child: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself” (Prichard 1967, 119), she tells her. Her paternalistic and prejudiced assumptions on the Indigenous people – “They’re an immoral lot, these half-castes” (120) – are counteracted by the ironical final revelation to the reader that the child’s father is Mrs Boyd’s husband. The knowledge of this secret, that all Aboriginal people in the camp share, gives them a counter-shaming power over the colonial power of the white woman: she should be ashamed of her husband and of herself, and of their alleged moral superiority – not Molly. Again, this accounts for the binary logic of colonial power that, as Paul Gilroy explains, is based on interdependency, on the mutually antagonistic relation between settler and native who were “bound to each other so tightly that each was unthinkable without the proximity and hostility of the other” (2005, 51). A similar conclusion is to be found in the story “Naninja and Janey” (1952) where two old Aboriginal women leave the camp to die in the bush so as not to be a burden for the rest of the group. When Mary, the wife of a white prospector who had taken up land there, understands what happened to the two women, she refuses to dismiss the fact as simply “tribal law.” On the contrary, she acknowledges the cultural and economic destitution that white mining settlements brought to Aboriginal people (Bird 2) and is confronted with the shame for the discriminatory practices inflicted by the whites: “I feel we’re to blame.” Mary could not rid herself of a sense of guilt and shame for what Naninja and Janey had done. “The prospectors and white people have broken up the native’s way of life, round here. They managed to live well enough until we took their wells and scared off the wild animals. Now, they’re starving, have to rely on what we can give them to eat. And we haven’t even been able to get government rations for them.” (Prichard 1967, 174) In this passage, again, the shame of the oppressed is transferred to the white oppressors, but if in the previous story shame was the object of

Different Shades of Shame  129 accusation by an Aboriginal character of white exploitation, here it is an act of self-acknowledgement by a white person. Getting back to Johnson’s theorization, shame is thus re-routed across colonial binaries: it differentiates white people (the shaming) from Aboriginal people (the shamed), but it also makes the shaming subject (Mary) ashamed. It can be argued that in these stories shame is presented as, in Gershen Kaufman’s words, “multidimensional and multilayered” (qtd in Burrows 127), but also as a mechanism that, as mentioned earlier, forges an interconnectivity between colonizer and colonized: the self/Other relationship determined by shame does not work here as a hierarchical intersubjective dynamic (Johnson 2013, 90); on the contrary, shame restructures relations of self and Other by giving them alternate positions of power. In this way, ­Prichard shows how shame can provide a strong critique of colonial history, and how it can be an essential quality to understand colonial relations. The experience of shame in this sense is not necessarily negative; it may “lead to an amendment of life intended to prevent the recurrence of a similar shaming event” (Dalziell 8). In this light, it is fundamental to resist the silence associated with shame, the avoidance to tell, and the secrecy and concealment that are the by-­ products of shame (8), which place the person experiencing it between the urge to disclose and the impulse to conceal (Miller 1985, 36). This association of silence and shame and the need to avoid the risk of turning shame into silence are issues that are dealt with, although in a different historical period and political climate, in the novel Sarah Thornhill written by Kate Grenville in 2011. The novel has received scarce critical attention, probably overshadowed by the outstanding success, the intense public debate, and the controversies that had welcomed Grenville’s previous The Secret River (2006). However, if The Secret River is mainly focussed on the concept and the dynamics of deliberately repressed guilt, it seems to me that Sarah Thornhill particularly lends itself to an analysis of the topic of shame, which is differently articulated in black and white characters, and in older and younger generations. Shame is indeed presented in the novel from different perspectives and in its various shades, in relation to the diverse degrees of responsibility of its characters towards Australian colonial past, mostly depending on the legacy of parents, passed down from first-generation settlers to ­second-generation white Australian children. All characters in the novel are affected and haunted, directly or indirectly, by a shameful past, and all of them prove how the legacy of the past, brought to bear on the present, can be turned into “unutterable shame” (Manne 2001, 49). Nevertheless, the confrontation with shame also involves self-awareness and self-transformation by means of exposure and denunciation. So, the message given by Grenville is that shame has to be uttered somehow; it has to be spoken in order to become a form of political responsibility and a response-ability, that is, the capacity to

130  Annalisa Pes concretely respond, to do something out of shame, and to move a step forward in the process of reconciliation. The first character deeply involved with shame is William Thornhill, Sarah’s father (the main protagonist of The Secret River), an ex-­convict who has been able to get over his sinful past and make a fortune in the colony. In spite of this rehabilitating progress, his present life is overwhelmed by shame. It could be claimed that William is affected by different shades of shame: a “white shame” and a “black shame” in the sense of being both shamed in front of certain other European settlers and ashamed in front of Aboriginal people. As an ex-convict, he’s aware of the fact that, no matter the social and economic stability he has been able to achieve, “as far as some people went, sent out meant tainted for all time. You and your children and your children’s children” (Grenville 2011, 5). The shame of convictism and its legacy on younger generations is for William like a stain that cannot be washed out, it can only be hidden under a made-up new version of his own personal story. As Tanya Dalziell observes, “in Australia, a tradition of concealing or ‘forgetting’ family history grew up from a desire for respectability and a fear of the continuing stigma of convict origins” (1999, 71). For William shame is related to the so-called “anxiety of belonging”: a tension about origins and an obsession with legitimacy that according to Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra (1991, 23–24) characterizes the settler’s condition. As Victoria Burrows underlines, the shame that is “connected to class insecurity adds a defect to dominant perceptions of whiteness” and determines the status of being white-but-not-quite, a racialized anxiety that is often turned into acts of violent racism against Aboriginal others (2006, 126). According to Dolores Herrero, this anxiety is reinforced with the growing realization that many white settlers’ existence and well-being had come about at the expense of unutterable acts of Aboriginal dispossession and genocide (2011, 286). And this condition exactly reflects William’s anxiety and represents the source of his “black shame,” not only because it is associated to a dark and bleak event in his own personal story (as well as in the nation’s history), that is, his involvement in a massacre of Aboriginal people, but also because this episode has since remained a deep dark and shameful secret that has allowed him to get the life and position he had so much longed for. According to Silvan Tomkins, the exposure of shame sets up a division within the self, a sense of splitting, of duality, in which “the self is experienced as part subject and part object, or as two different selves at different times” (1995, 22). This is evident in a passage in the novel where William offers some food to the Aboriginal people camped nearby (allegedly the survivors of the massacre or their descendants). Confronted with deep shame, he is indeed split into two different selves: on the one hand he is an active subject who has been guilty of murdering in the past; on the other hand he is a repented object of shame in the present.

Different Shades of Shame  131 On one side he is the master who wants to be called “sir” by his white subordinates; on the other he is the humbled man who stands in front of the blacks and begs them to accept the food they don’t want to take from his hands. In addition to this, as Helen Block Lewis states, in contrast to the experience of guilt, shame is vested in a “bodily awareness” (qtd by Johnson and Moran 5); it is felt, in Tomkins’s words, as “an inner torment, a sickness of the soul” (1995, 133) that is registered on the face. And actually, when William attempts to talk to her daughter Sarah about his past misdeeds, the unutterable shame for what he has done deforms his facial expression: “So what was that terrible twisting across his face? That thing that was like an animal eating away at him from the inside?” (Grenville 2011, 30). The sense of shame that devours William and leaves him speechless is something that is instead totally unknown to Margaret (Ma), William’s second wife and Sarah’s step-mother who embodies shame not in the sense of being ashamed, but in the sense of shaming others. The reason why Ma is not ashamed of her husband’s past or of the fact that she is benefiting from the social position and economic advantage that came to her family out of that past is to be found in her radical, attitudinal racism, and in her Darwinian belief in her racial superiority as a white woman. Her blind certainties and race consciousness make her wilfully (and shamefully) deny shame for herself, so that instead of acknowledging her discriminative and biased position, she is prompted to react with outrage and anger (which, according to Charles Perkins, is a typically white response to being shamed (Dalziell 164)): “I got nothing against the blacks,” she says to her daughters. “I pity them, truly I do, hardly better than beasts of the field. God in his wisdom put us above them […] But this begging in the street, that I can’t abide […] I wish they’d take themselves off and not go bothering respectable folk” (Grenville 2011, 19–20). Ma firmly believes in the power of whiteness – a power she thinks should be hers by right of birth. Whiteness is for her not only a marker of civilization and prestigious social position, it is also what separates her from the racial Other; indeed, it is what shamefully prevents her from being ashamed. This certainty is manifested in her attitude towards two characters of the novel: Rachel, the secret daughter of William’s elder son and of a Maori woman, and Jack, Sarah’s part-Aboriginal boyfriend. The girl and the boy, both of mixed descent, represent to Ma’s eyes the shame of miscegenation and the disgrace that they threaten to bring on her family. This is why William and Ma, after their son’s death, in a sort of precursory stolen-generation act, remove Rachel from her Maori family in order to educate her in their home according to white customs and values. By shaming Rachel’s blackness into a forced-upon, white education and civilization, Ma not only remarks the hierarchical subordination of the colonized to the colonizer, but she also keeps her own colonial shame at bay.

132  Annalisa Pes Even more complex is Ma’s attitude with Jack, and especially her outrageous reaction to his intention of marrying Sarah: Over my dead body you’ll marry that black! […] How dare you, Jack Langland! She shouted. Pushing your way in here! […] When you’re nothing! she said. Nothing but a black never going to amount to a pinch of dirt! Sneaking round sucking up to Mr Thornhill’s daughter! […] I warned your pa, she said. Get that black buck away before it’s too late, I told him! […] Forgotten, Dolly, have you? She said. That his mother was a black gin? The father good enough stock but you said it yourself, Dolly, it’s the mother’s blood he’s got […] You’ll always have the throwbacks, you know. Did you know that? Where you’ve got the dark blood. Want to look out, Dolly, or you’ll have something even blacker than him. (134–135) Ma’s violent verbal attack is her response to being shamed by Jack’s infringement of racial order and by the threat to lose her power of whiteness, and it is meant therefore to shame Jack by exposing his blackness as a vehicle of primitivism, immorality, lust, and wickedness. Jack’s blackness, which up to that moment had hardly been accounted for, now becomes in the eyes of Ma a Fanonian epidermal embodiment of a threat. Using Fanon’s words, his “corporeal schema” is replaced by a “racial epidermal schema” (2008, 84). It is his blackness, not his entire being, that is, shamed and subjected to Ma’s verbal brutality and racist gaze. On the other hand, Jack’s objectification into otherness makes him speechless and inarticulate, and this speechlessness does not only represent his incapacity to react to the shame imposed on him, but also the annihilation of his identity that from this moment onwards will undergo a process of transformation out of shame into the acknowledgement and acceptance of his blackness. As a matter of fact, when Jack is first introduced in the novel his blackness is overlooked: “Everyone knew that Jack was half darkie […] But he was no different from the rest of us. Talked about the blacks the same way everyone did. They were strange to him the same way they were strange to us” (Grenville 2011, 34). Even his own father encourages him to pass for a white: “You can pass for Portugee. You can pass, so do it” (57), he tells him, thus showing that he deems his blackness as shameful. Jack’s lack of racial awareness, at this stage of his life, exposes the workings of colonial shame that equates whiteness with a superior degree of humanity. It is interesting to note that his recovery from shame begins when he is faced with the most violent and shameful act of discrimination committed against his own people, that is, the massacre of the Aboriginal group his mother belonged to. When Jack comes to know the whole truth about it and, horrified, escapes to New Zealand, the healing of his shame goes hand in hand

Different Shades of Shame  133 with the recovery of his blackness that he will no more conceal, but, on the contrary, he will overtly show off. This is clear when he comes back, some years later, with his face and his body thoroughly carved by tattoos that represent not only his having embraced the black culture and customs of the Maori people but also his coming out of shame, his willingness to break the silence on his blackness: “He’d chosen who to be, and to show it on his face. This Jack had travelled into a different self. Another man had been carved out of the one I’d known” (275). If, as Susan Miller explains, “the ashamed person feels that he or she cannot escape from the significant self-image even though longing to do so” (qtd by Johnson 94), Jack’s refusal of self-erasure and invisibility, by means of his definitely visible tattoos, proves that he is no more ashamed of his black identity. The confrontation with shame as a legacy and a responsibility, and the way in which shame, as Michael Morgan asserts, “involves self-criticism and encourages self-transformation” (2008, 5) is particularly evident in the character of Sarah. Sarah is confronted with two shameful events, for none of which she is directly responsible, but that stir in her an active ethical engagement: the massacre of Jack’s people by the hand of her father, and Rachel’s removal from her Maori family by her parents. The massacre takes place before Sarah’s birth, and she is only a young girl when her father has Rachel removed from New Zealand; nevertheless, the shame related to both events overwhelms and affects Sarah, one in the form of legacy and the other in the form of witnessing. It can be argued that Sarah embodies the kind of shame that Raimond Gaita sees as distinct from guilt, but also vicariously associated to it through different generations: “though guilt may be plausibly limited to what one has done, shame cannot be. People can feel ashamed of their parents, their friends, their church and their country, even though they played no role in what they feel ashamed of” (qtd by Dalziell 3). This is exactly the position Sarah occupies, that, in the intention of Grenville, metaphorically associates her to contemporary white Australians, engaged in the role of taking responsibility for the earlier generations’ devastating treatment of Australia’s Indigenous people. Sarah is indeed a fictional representative of white Australians who, at the time of the book’s release, had been listening to the narratives of shaming collected in the Bringing Them Home Report in the position of witnesses, and were confronting with the shock and shame of Australian history, experiencing, as Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith write, “a sense of disease, shame, and responsibility” (2004, 109). Through the character of Sarah, Grenville shows to the reader the different ways one may react to vicarious shame, which correspond to the different reactions Australian people had at the breaking of the socalled Great Australian silence. When Sarah is informed by Dick (the lost brother who had cut any bond with his father after the massacre) of the

134  Annalisa Pes awful past events, she is indeed tempted to deny any sense of shame: “I wasn’t even born!” she professes, “[It’s] Pa’s secret, not mine!” (Grenville 2011, 253). But she soon realizes she cannot escape the legacy of a shameful history, because it is part of her own shameful story. As Dick reminds her, talking about their father: “That man’s blood in your veins, Dolly. Mine too. No getting away from that. That man’s money putting the food in our mouths and the clothes on our backs, and the money coming out of what he done that day” (253). She also realizes that the evil and the shame related to it are unavoidable and transgenerational, in a way that implies no easy escape: “It would be with me till the day I died […] You had to live with it, and your children too. And their children, down the line. Whether they knew it or not, they lived in its shadow” (260). The immediate response of Sarah to the unbearable weight of shame is that of withdrawing into herself: she stays in bed for days and falls into a state of numbness, unable to react. Her behaviour falls within one of the typical consequences of severe shaming that Wurmser calls “depersonalization,” that is, a state of profound passivity, a feeling of weakness, defectiveness, and dirtiness that makes one feel not only unlovable, but also undeserving of love and unworthy of a place in society (qtd by Johnson and Moran 6). However, this kind of reaction, Grenville seems to be warning the reader, can be very dangerous in terms of remaining silent and forgetting. Sarah indeed realizes that it is shame that keeps one silent, “shame and the wishing that it was different” (Grenville 2011, 264), and so, she understands that her shame doesn’t have to be concealed or ignored: it has to be lived and experienced every day. Moreover, carrying the burden is not meant as a way to relieve the shame, but it is necessary to give her back a sense of belonging to the human race. As Hutchinson observes, “to feel shame is not to make progress, in terms of absenting the conditions that give rise to one’s shame,” but it is progressive because shame “connects us, and reminds us of our connection, to our fellow human beings” (2008, 147). So, through the character of Sarah, Grenville denounces the shameful act of hiding the past and the shaming effects of uncovering what has been concealed; Sarah’s shame, which remains unresolved, is an acknowledgement of responsibility. Shame, unlike guilt, cannot be absolved, and as Kauffman points out, if guilt is the feeling that “I have done something wrong,” shame is the feeling that “I am something wrong” (2010, 4). This feeling of being wrong is the legacy left to Sarah by her father (and to contemporary white Australians by the earlier generations), and the shame related to it is, as Raymond Gaita says, as necessary as Aborigines’ pain and suffering in response to the wrongs of history (qtd by Ahmed 2004, 45): in other words, the two emotional paths of the shame of the oppressor and the pain of the oppressed are mutually necessary and go in the same direction.

Different Shades of Shame  135 These considerations open up to the analysis of shame in the final part of Grenville’s novel, where Sarah agrees to go to New Zealand to comply with Rachel’s family’s need to mourn her death. Sarah understands that accepting to go is a chance for her: not the chance of atoning for her shame, but the chance of continuing to feel shame. She also realizes that if the shame for her father’s involvement in the murder is a legacy, the shame for Rachel’s death is a responsibility: “I’d never known the people sleeping by the lagoon. The shame of what had happened there was mine only because of the blood I carried. But the girl was known to me. She’d withered under my eyes while my mind was somewhere else, and that shame belonged to me” (Grenville 2011, 281). Moreover, in New Zealand Sarah abandons her own protected and restricted individual dimension for a wider social context and, according to Lilian Alweiss, “shame, unlike guilt, implies a social dimension” (qtd by Callahan 2010, 412), that is, the presence of other people that make us feel shame. Indeed, in front of Rachel’s grandmother and relatives, uncomfortable with customs that are alien to her and with a language she does not understand, and unable to do what she is required to, Sarah feels consumed by shame and reflects in her gestures what Sara Ahmed calls the “physicality of shame,” that is, how shame works on and through bodies, involving “the de-forming and re-forming of bodily and social spaces, as bodies ‘turn away’ from the others who witness the shame” (2004, 97). Indeed, when Sarah goes through the painful process of telling the part of Rachel’s story she is supposed to know, she’s ashamed for having little to say; she wants to turn away from the women’s gaze on her, she is ‘de-formed’ by a shake in her voice and a twist in her mouth that make it almost impossible for her to go on, and by the end she’s ‘re-formed’ as an “emptied woman” (Grenville 2011, 303). Her emptiness is the evidence of the fact that shame implies a gesture of return, not to oneself but to someone else. As Ahmed again states, when others, who have been wronged, ask for signs of shame, then the expression of shame does not return ourselves to ourselves, but responds to demands that come from a place other than where we are. The apology in this instance would be a return address, an address to another, whose place we do not inhabit. (2004, 98) This aspect introduces the risk and ambiguity of saying sorry (another urgent topic of debate in Australia) which should not be conceived of as something that gets one rid of the burden of shame. On the contrary, shame is necessary not only to acknowledge wrong-doing but as a step towards reconciliation, but, as Rosamund Dalziell notes, “For reconciliation to be possible, the shame related to the experience of oppression, both that of the oppressed and the oppressor, must be confronted and addressed” (1999, 171).

136  Annalisa Pes This is why Sarah chooses to take on the burden of telling what she knows and of speaking her shame out, rather than saying sorry, which, she says, “was nothing but air” (Grenville 2011, 301). The only thing she can give as an apology is the shameful story that has been given as a legacy to her, and as she says, “of all the crimes done, the worst would be to let the story slip away” (304). This is the message that Grenville seems to be giving: the importance of speaking our shame for the responsibility one has for the past and towards the future, bewaring that, to close with Ahmed’s words, “the act of speaking our shame does not undo the shame of what we speak” (2004, 101).

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. Bird, Delys (ed.). 2000. Katharine Susannah Prichard: Stories, Journalism and Essays. St Lucia: U of Queensland P. Burrows, Victoria. 2006. “The Ghostly Haunting of White Shame in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon.” Westerly 51 (November): 124–135. Callahan, David. 2010. “History and Shame.” Interventions 12 (3): 401–414. Dalziell, Rosamund. 1999. Shameful Autobiographies. Shame in Contemporary Australian Autobiographies and Culture. Melbourne: Melbourne UP. Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto P (original ed.: Peau Noire, Masques Blanc, Paris: Seuil, 1952). Gilroy, Paul. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia UP. Grenville, Kate. 2006. The Secret River. Melbourne: Canongate. ———. 2011. Sarah Thornhill. New York: Grove P. Herrero, Dolores. 2011. “The Australian Apology and Postcolonial Defamiliarization: Gail Jones’s Sorry.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47 (3): 283–295. Hodge, Bob, and Vijay Mishra. 1991. Dark Side of the Dream: Australian ­Literature and the Postcolonial Mind. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Hughes, Robert. 1987. The Fatal Shore. A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868. London: Collins Harvill. Hutchinson, Phil. 2008. Shame and Philosophy. An Investigation in the Philosophy of Emotions and Ethics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, Erica L. 2013. “Colonial Shame in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng.” In The Female Face of Shame, edited by Erica Johnson and Patricia Moran, 89–99. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Johnson, Erica L., and Patricia Moran (eds.). 2013. The Female Face of Shame. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Kauffman, Jeffrey. 2010. The Shame of Death, Grief, and Trauma. London and New York: Routledge. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, and Adam Frank (eds.). 1995. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham, NC and London: Duke U.P. Kossew, Sue. 2013. “Saying Sorry. The Politics of Apology and Reconciliation in Recent Australian Fiction.” In Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres, edited by Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio, 171–183. London and New York: Routledge.

Different Shades of Shame  137 Manne, Robert. 2001. “In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right.” The Australian Quarterly Essay 1 (1): 1–113. Miller, Susan. 1985. The Shame Experience. London: Analytic P. Morgan, Michael. 2008. On Shame. London: Routledge. Phillips, A.A. 1950. “The Cultural Cringe.” Meanjin 9 (4, Summer): 299–302. Prichard, Katharine Susannah. 1967. Selected Short Stories by Katharine Susannah Prichard, Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. 2004. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: the Ethics of Recognition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. White, Patrick. 1994. Letters. Edited by David Marr. Sydney: Vintage.

6 Contemporary Australian Refugee Policies and Shame as Reflected in A.S. Patric’s Black Rock, White City (2015) Dolores Herrero Of all the problems that are haunting today’s convoluted world, one of the most difficult to digest, and by extension main source of shame for the so-called ‘First World’ to which Australia clearly belongs is, without doubt, that of the undeterred flows of population and the global refugee crisis which, now more than ever, evidence the existence of two worlds apart: that of the desperate and dispossessed, who leave their homes in the search of a better life, if not sheer survival, versus that of the safe and affluent, who refuse to accept that they are somehow partly responsible for the former’s fate. The main aim of this chapter will be to analyse how Serbo Australian writer A.S. Patric’s debut novel Black Rock, White City denounces First World exclusionary border laws, in particular Australia’s harsh refugee policies, and the shameful effects that these can have on both sides of the divide. In order to do this, I will begin by explaining the way in which several theorists have interpreted the concept of shame: both as an affect/emotion and as form, to then offer a brief introduction to Australian refugee policies from the 1990s onwards, especially as regards the way in which they affected refugees coming from the former Yugoslavia, the specific case tackled by the novel. Finally, a close reading of Black Rock, White City will show how the writing and erasing of graffiti are used in the novel to bring to the surface, not only the damaged self-esteem and shame suffered by those asking for asylum, but also the anxiety gnawing at many Australians, who may consequently end up experiencing a serious identity crisis that often leads them to commit shameful acts that deprive them of their own humanity.

Shame as Affect/Emotion The importance of shame among human emotions cannot be denied, but it has always been difficult to understand how anything so basic and concomitant with human nature can have so many different manifestations. Shame can take so many forms—we can feel inhibited, shy, embarrassed, humiliated, disgraced, dishonoured—that agreeing on a

Australian Refugee Policies and Shame  139 definition of it has become an almost impossible task. Affect theory has tried to offer some kind of answer. In his seminal book Affect Imagery Consciousness Silvan Tomkins, one of the fathers of affect theory, drew the crucial distinction between affect and emotion, and laid the foundations for the study of affect as a concept in its own right. According to this psychologist (“Affects” 1995), whereas affect is a physiological response that will eventually manifest itself as emotion and the experienced emotion itself, emotion is the cognitive perception and interpretation of affect. In other words, affect is the raw stuff of emotion, and emotions are intricate conglomerates of affect, concept, and memory-pattern resulting from the conflation of culture and personal experience. To give but one example, a new-born cannot know why it is crying. Its nervous system receives a trigger, and it cries. With the passing of time, the experience of crying, in combination with other unpleasant sensations, will teach it a concept, and that concept, together with all associated memories and habit patterns, will configure the child’s emotion. Emotions are personal but are also culturally constructed, that is, conditioned by language and norms of social acceptability. Last but not least, emotions are entangled with memories of all kinds, to the point that an emotion becomes part of a script. The affect system is of the utmost importance insofar as it guarantees that humans should be intelligible to one another, in spite of their different cultural and personal backgrounds. Tomkins describes the human being as endowed with primary affects that belong to three different categories: (1) Positive: Interest-­Excitement, Enjoyment-Joy; (2) Resetting: Surprise-Startle; and (3) Negative: ­Distress-­ Anguish, Fear-Terror, Shame-Humiliation, Contempt-Disgust, and Anger-­ Rage. As far as shame is concerned, it is a negative affect that can be ­defined as a physiological mechanism of renunciation, as “an innate auxiliary affect and a specific inhibitor of continuing interest and enjoyment” (“Shame-Humiliation” 1995, 134). Moreover, it is related to a sense of failure; the self feels that s/he does not meet the others’ expectations, nor his or her own. As Tomkins explains: Shame is the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression. […] shame strikes deepest into the heart of man. […] shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul. It does not matter whether the humiliated one has been shamed by derisive laughter or whether he mocks himself. In either event he feels himself naked, defeated, alienated, lacking in dignity or worth. (“Shame-Humiliation” 1995, 133) In keeping with these theories, contemporary theorists such as Michael Lewis (1992) have claimed that shame inexorably “involves painful self-scrutiny, and feelings of worthlessness and powerlessness” (1992, 123). Lewis insisted upon the fact that shame, unlike other important negative affects such as guilt or disgust, does away with the individual’s

140  Dolores Herrero self-esteem while making her/him feel like a social failure, like someone who is not worthy of being trusted, forgiven, and loved. Shame and guilt should be clearly differentiated, though. As Escudero-Alías explains, “whereas guilt attaches to what one does, therefore signalling a specific experience, shame attaches to and sharpens the sense of what one is, enacting an ontological and phenomenological topography which can last a lifetime” (2014, 225). Moreover, as sociologist Helen Lynd goes on to explain: Guilt also involves feeling that the ego is strong and intact: one is powerful enough to injure another, and one is also powerful enough to make amends. By contrast, shame feels like weakness and dissolution of the self, even for the wish that the self would disappear. Guilt is a highly individualistic emotion, reaffirming the centrality of the isolated person; shame is a social emotion, reaffirming the emotional interdependency of persons. (Scheff 2000, 92) Shame is central to our condition as social creatures, as it can become a stigma, a failure inextricably linked to personal and social isolation, and by extension to the formation of traumatised marginal identities. But, what happens when the individual does not recognise shame or simply refuses to acknowledge it? According to Brené Brown (2007, 88), when we are in shame we often feel the inexorable need to hide or protect ourselves by any means possible, and it is then that we may rely on several strategies of disconnection or ‘shame screens,’ which she describes as follows: In order to deal with shame, some of us move away by withdrawing, hiding, silencing ourselves and keeping secrets. Some of us move toward by seeking to appease and please. And, some of us move against by trying to gain power over others, being aggressive and using shame to fight shame. […] most of us can relate to all three strategies for disconnection. (89–90; emphasis in original) Individuals can therefore choose between turning shame into a (self) destructive weapon and making the most of it in order to better themselves and improve the lives of those around them. For his part, Tomkins reached a similar conclusion when he argued that affects can also play quite a redemptive role, since they are the main motivational system of human life. Unlike drives which, having been given so central a place in Freud’s psychoanalytical scheme, are nonetheless described as being rather limited in time and density due to their instrumentality and self-fulfilling nature, affects actually offer and allow for greater motivational freedom, since they make it possible for the individual to develop and expand her/his cognitive and emotional learning and competence,

Australian Refugee Policies and Shame  141 mainly due to the fact that they are all interconnected (“Affects” 56). In other words, positive affects can be temporarily transformed into negative ones, and vice versa. In the case under consideration, care, respect, and affection can turn shame into rather more positive affects, such as joy and interest. As regards Brené Brown, she coined the term ‘shame resilience’ (2007, 2010) to account for this positive phenomenon. According to this psychologist, shame resilience can be cultivated in four main ways: namely, (1) by recognising and accepting personal vulnerability; (2) by raising critical awareness as regards social and cultural expectations; (3) by forming mutually empathetic relationships that facilitate reaching out to others; and (4) by speaking shame, that is, by acquiring the language and emotional competence to discuss and deconstruct shame. Empathy and shame, Brown concluded, are on opposite ends of a continuum: if shame results in fear, blame, and disconnection, empathy is cultivated by courage, compassion, and connection, and is the most powerful antidote to shame.

Shame as Form In his book The Event of Postcolonial Shame (2011), Timothy Bewes analyses shame as a literary/formal phenomenon. In order to do so, he distinguishes between shame as subject of writing and shame as an event that occurs when writing. According to him, shame functions like trauma insofar as it is quintessentially unrepresentable. In other words, its representability can only be deemed possible when the very impossibility of writing about it is foregrounded. He relates this impossibility of understanding and writing about shame by referring to the term ‘shame spiral’ (2011, 14), which could in term be associated with Tomkins’s definition of shame and his contention that the exposure of shame increases the feelings of shame on the person who experiences this affect. Any explanation of shame will increase this feeling, since no comprehensive explanation can be offered. To quote Bewes’s words, “the paradox of shame [is] that the notion of shame is inadequate to the experience, which itself is one of inadequacy, or incommensurability” (14). He also links the idea that writing is a shameful impossible act with a crisis in ethics. According to Bewes, a crisis in ethics inevitably brings about a crisis of form; the sudden and traumatic historical changes and events that have taken place for nearly two centuries have generated mistrust in traditional forms of narrative, which are regarded as complicit with those discourses that precipitated the tragic events. The maintenance of these forms is therefore seen as a form of denial of what is really happening. Consequently, he affirms that the ethical stance of art is achieved by highlighting the very inadequacy of form. Inadequacy thus becomes positively valued. In tune with Primo Levi’s contention that, after ­Auschwitz, the rupture between ethics and aesthetics is absolute,

142  Dolores Herrero Bewes concludes that, from the early twentieth century onwards, “the ethical appears as a permanent rendering inadequate of form” (19; emphasis in original). Like Tomkins, he believes that shame is an affect that is both isolating and affiliative, “an experience simultaneously of exclusion and inclusion” (22) or, as Sara Ahmed explains, a dialectics of concealment versus exposure: Shame feels like an exposure—another sees what I have done that is bad and hence shameful—but it also involves an attempt to hide, a hiding that requires the subject turn away from the other and towards itself. […] Shame certainly involves an impulse to ‘take cover’ and ‘to cover oneself.’ But the desire to take cover and to be covered presupposes the failure of cover; in shame, one desires cover precisely because one has already been exposed to others. Hence the word ‘shame’ is associated as much with cover and concealment, as it is with exposure, vulnerability and wounding. […] Shame hence conceals and reveals what is present in the present. (2004, 103–104) Taken all of these ideas into account, Bewes concludes that shame is ontologically inseparable from the forms in which it appears. In other words, shame cannot be studied or represented as such, because it has no positive referent: The substance of shame is fundamentally a gap, an absence, an impossibility. Shame is not located primarily in the content of the work. It is, rather, a materialisation of the discrepancy between content and form, of the inadequacy of form with respect to content. (2011, 39) In short, shame can only be understood as a negative principle, which discloses a lack, an absence masquerading as presence. Just as shame implies a movement out of the self to the position of the other, from which the self sees himself/herself as deprived, the very action of writing entails a similar process: the writer exposes himself/herself before an other, from which s/he can in turn observe himself/herself. Moreover, Bewes goes on to explain, writing after so many traumatic events is in itself shameful, because the writer cannot claim ignorance of his/her own positionality. Writing can be seen as an appropriation of the other’s voice and implication in the events: the writer feels the obligation to write, but is also aware of the fact that s/he cannot do it innocently. By way of conclusion, Bewes argues that shame may also be studied as a form of dissent, because of its radical discomfort with itself as such. To feel shame means to feel implicated in, and condemned to, forms of representation and understanding that one can no longer recognise as appropriate, fair, and one’s own.

Australian Refugee Policies and Shame  143 Shame is the form in which we most directly encounter the ­ ecessity—indeed, the ethical necessity—to think in the absence of n forms, which is also to think the absence of form. […] In the work of certain [contemporary] writers […] shame has been a way to explore the unreliability or the tyranny of form. What we have in shame, potentially, is an approach to reading that understands that the truth of the text cannot be present in it as a positive entity. The text is read, then, not as a vehicle—of thought, of atonement, of ethics—but as an event, neither privileged over nor lessened in significance alongside other events. (46–47; emphasis in original) By the same token, the very act of reading will demand that the reader should be compelled to show an active stance so as to be able to decipher the clues and enigmas, presences and absences, exposure versus concealment dynamics around which the text is articulated.

Australia and Refugees in the 1990s: The Case of Those Coming from the Former Yugoslavia According to Section 2 of “An Annotated Chronology Based on Official Sources,” published by the Parliament of Australia, in the 1990s Australia admitted more than 100,000 refugees. The biggest group came from Europe (45 per cent of the total, mainly from the regions of the former Yugoslavia); the second biggest from the Middle East and North Africa (25 per cent of the total, mainly people from Iraq escaping the regime of Saddam Hussein and the consequences of the Gulf War); and the remaining ones from South-East Asia, Africa (excluding North Africa), Southern Asia, and South and Central America. As regards Australia’s humanitarian intake during these years, it is clear that the main international event was the Balkan wars. Proclamations of independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) by Croatia and Slovenia in June 1991 prompted the disintegration of the SFRY. The Serb forces of the SFRY retaliated and, in March 1992, when Bosnia and Herzegovina also proclaimed independence, the SFRY laid siege to Sarajevo. During the crisis, the Balkans suffered the worst human slaughter in Europe since the Second World War, and half a million people living in Bosnia fled to other countries. As Colic-Peisker states (2003, 3), at first many found refuge in neighbouring Croatia and Serbia, and other ex-Yugoslav republics, to later on be given temporary asylum in Europe, mainly in Germany, and then be forced to either return to Bosnia or permanently resettle in overseas countries, such the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Dayton Peace Accord, signed in November 1995, ended hostilities in Bosnia, but in March 1998 fighting began in the southern province of Kosovo. The conflict in Kosovo, between the majority ethnic Albanians and Serbs, brought about the displacement

144  Dolores Herrero and flight of thousands of Albanians, who ended up in a number of countries, including Australia, which offered them temporary protection. It was this latter refugee contingent from the former Yugoslavia that prompted two relevant innovations in Australian policy: on the one hand, the introduction of temporary ‘safe haven’ protection; on the other, the introduction of financial incentives to return home, the outcome of which being that, once Kosovo was declared safe in July 1999, most Kosovars returned at the earliest opportunity. This being said, it must also be noted that, on the whole, Australian refugee policy during this decade did not mark a political or philosophical break with previous official approaches. Actually, a number of polemical measures were taken during these years to combat people smuggling and to dissuade potential refugees from coming to Australia. One of the most important was the Migration Reform Act 1992, which formalised in law mandatory detention for all unlawful arrivals. The controversies of the early 1990s reached a climax in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the number of unauthorised arrivals in Australia by sea showed an exponential increase. To put an end to this situation, the Border Protection Legislation Amendment 1999 was passed, among others, to expand Australia’s capacity to board, search, and detain ships, and to detain persons aboard those ships at sea. The 2001 crisis of the Tampa, the Norwegian freighter that rescued 430 passengers aboard a fishing vessel that had broken down 80 nautical miles from Christmas Island, allowed the Australian government to test and increase the measures dealing with the validation and enforcement of border protection, the ‘excision’ of offshore territories from the migration zones, and the approval of a new humanitarian and refugee visa regime. This new legislative and administrative arrangement came to be known as the ‘Pacific Solution,’ under which asylum seekers have been infamously housed and processed at Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) and Nauru at Australian government expense for years. The plight undergone by the inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia was, without doubt, terrible. As a result of war and forced migration, the three main ethnic groups (Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians) became increasingly aware of their separate identities. Their communities eventually fell apart, and their respective cultures, together with the identities embedded in them, became utterly disrupted and traumatised. However, the situation of these refugees in Australia was far better as compared to that of others; Australian immigration policy privileged them over other refugee groups asking for Australian residency in the 1990s. The arguments used to justify this, Colic-Peisker argues (2003, 2005), were mainly two: the so-called ‘community argument’ and the ‘resettlement potential argument.’ The ‘community argument’ appealed to the presence of ex-Yugoslav communities in Australia, most of whom emigrated there after the Second World War, which were expected to support

Australian Refugee Policies and Shame  145 newly arrived refugees during their early resettlement. As regards the ‘resettlement potential argument,’ it was believed that ex-Yugoslavs’ relatively high educational profile and European background would make their integration in Australian society easier. This “residue of the White Australia Policy,” Colic-Peisker goes on to argue, “was politically expedient to privilege the ‘invisible refugees’ over the more visible non-­ European groups” (2003, 4). Ex-Yugoslavian refugees therefore became the ‘white refugee elite.’ Since white people are a group that “thrives on invisibility,” refugees from the former ex-Yugoslavia saw their whiteness as an advantage and a shield against prejudice and discrimination (Gale 2000, 258). Interestingly enough, they came from a country where people had been persecuted and killed on account of ethnicity/religion that had nothing to do with racial visibility (Colic-Peisker 2005, 624). They considered themselves to be more able and willing to integrate into Australian society than non-European refugees and migrants, and consequently tried to distance themselves from the other refugee groups. However, there were several elements that contributed to devaluing their identity, such as “its firm link with the unwanted refugee status” and “its embeddedness in the notorious ‘Balkan identity’” (624). Their refugee identity implied an inevitable loss of status and became a stigma often difficult to cope with and hide. On the other hand, all of these territories were by then regarded as the unsettled and violent “periphery of Europe” (Ramet 1999), that is, the perception of the Balkans as ‘not-quite Europe’ gathered more and more strength during the 1990s war, to the point that they were at times seen by many Westerners as ‘others.’ The terrorist attacks of September 11, which inevitably marked Islam and the  Muslim identity as problematic and potentially dangerous, also contributed to sometimes putting Muslim Bosnians in a more difficult position. In addition to this, limited English often prevented ex-­Yugoslavian refugees from gaining adequate employment—most of their schools taught Russian, German, or French before the war. To make matters worse, their qualifications were often not—or were only partly—recognised, which turned them into ‘cultural outsiders’ in Australia. Last but not least, the lack of language and recognised formal skills often combined with more specific refugee problems, such as post-traumatic stress disorders, which became even more intense when these refugees were eventually confronted with personal and family pressures to ‘down-adjust’ (Colic-Peisker 2005, 629). In short, although the early stage of resettlement of this refugee contingent may have been much easier than that of others, the second stage of economic and social integration was rather more problematic, especially for those with higher qualifications. As a matter of fact, professionals often fare worse, at least in relative terms, than low-skilled people from rural areas, since they have more to lose as regards job satisfaction, status, and by extension personal and professional fulfilment.

146  Dolores Herrero

Black Rock, White City: a Refugee Novel Black Rock, White City, by Serbo Australian writer A.S. Patric, tells the story of two Serbian academics who have fled Sarajevo and the Bosnian war to live as refugees in suburban Melbourne. Jovan was a literature university teacher and a poet, and Suzana also tried her hand at writing novels. In clear contrast to the intellectual life they left behind, in Australia they tidy up after others: Jovan works as a janitor in a bayside hospital, and Suzana cleans people’s houses. Whereas Jovan cannot speak fluent English, Suzana can communicate in this foreign language in a more articulated way than her husband, and strives to learn new words and expressions on a daily basis. Both of them are described as flailing and failing; they are deeply traumatised, not only by the torture and rape they, respectively, suffered during the conflict but above all by the death of their two children, who could not survive the horror of a war “waged not just in streets and villages but also in the corridors and classrooms of universities and other places touted as sanctuary” (Hay 2015, para. 4). In the afterlife of war and their struggle to survive displacement, they find it difficult to communicate, both verbally and sexually; they cannot make love as they did in the past, and words have become totally expressionless, unspeakable, like the deaths of the children they lost. All of a sudden, cryptic and disturbing graffiti aimed at exposing the shame and traumas of a number of targeted victims, appear in Jovan’s hospital, and it is exclusively up to him to remove and conceal them. The omnipresence of graffiti creates suspense by inviting readers to make their own guesses and, most importantly, makes it clear that the novel focusses on shame, not only as affect/emotion, but also as form, as the whole plot is articulated around the exposure/concealment dynamics of shame. Dr Graffito, as this anonymous psychopath is called, knows how to pick at the psychological wounds of the hospital staff and manages to create an atmosphere of ever-increasing suspicion and tension. His destruction scheme begins with the first graffiti that people discover on the hospital exam-room: “The / Trojan / Flea” (Patric 2016, 1). These are the words that leer through the shattered skulls of the victims of a triple fatality. The plastic of the X-ray photos has been glued to the interior of the X-ray light boxes and will be very difficult to remove. Like the subterfuge the Greeks used to win the Trojan War, Dr Graffito will become the parasitic enemy within, the corrosive agent that will try to destroy the lives of those he despises and regards as inferior and not worth living. It is only at the very end of the novel that we find out who he is, although the information given is by no means comprehensive: all we are told is that he is a surgeon with whom Jovan never had a reason to talk, and that he is “thin,” has a torso black with tattoos containing the same messages of the graffiti that Jovan had to erase, and “arms and legs […] strangely free of the ink-pale white limbs” (302; my emphasis).

Australian Refugee Policies and Shame  147 The fact that his whiteness is highlighted is by no means accidental: everything suggests that the culprit will most probably be a white Australian, that is, a representative of the so-called ‘normal Australian self.’ Although, as Colic-Peisker contends, since the 1970s “the Anglo-Celtic core of the Australian identity softened and became more inclusive […] the European origin of modern Australia—its ‘whiteness’ and Anglo cultural predominance—has remained the main prop of the process of political and psychological nation-building” (2005, 632). The ambivalent historical consciousness of the normal Australian self (or Australian national type) has been built, according to Ann Curthoys (1999, 5), around the myths of exodus and exile. As is well known, the myth of exodus narrates the Jews’ flight from the enslaving Egyptian Pharaoh under Moses’ guidance towards the Promised Land. Interestingly, the suffering of exile that the Jews had to go through worked not only to bind them together but also to help them justify their subsequent dispossession of the Canaanites. What Jews and white Australian settlers share, therefore, is their condition of victims of a foreign dominant culture, and their subsequent dispossession of those who inhabited the lands they ended up occupying. For their part, Kay Shaffer (1988), Bob Hodge and Vijai Mishra (1991), and Ann Curthoys (1999) argue that the Australian myth of the bushman endows the Australian national type with a halo of moral superiority, as it describes them as victims of Empire, whose laid-back and democratic nature contributes to detaching them from the punitive and castrating ‘fatherland’ that expelled them from home. Just as the suffering undergone by the bushman reinforced the ideology of mateship, equality and freedom of the new Australian type against its father (the British Empire), the portrayal of Australian nature as harsh and hostile, and thus as the white settler’s enemy in their conquest of the land similarly allowed them to accomplish and justify the dispossession suffered by Indigenous peoples. This feeling of superiority, however, cannot be separated from one of inferiority and shame. After all, they were expelled from their mother/ fatherland. As was argued before, shame represents a wound upon one’s own narcissism or ego ideal. Taking on board Freud’s essay “On Narcissism,” Andrew Morrison (1998) defines the ego ideal as the set of images and values that the self internalises as part of itself in a desperate attempt to make up for its lost sense of narcissism, in a word, its lost sense of harmony and perfection. As Morrison goes on to explain (27), this ego ideal is often projected onto a loved object with which the self tries to fuse in order to regain that lost equilibrium. Children tend to project their ego ideal onto their parents, and this explains why they often try to identify with them. Consequently, when they feel rejected by their parents, Silvan Tomkins claims (“Shame-Humiliation” 1995, 152–153), they inevitably experience a strong feeling of shame; children interpret their parents’ rejection as their failure to live up to the expectations of

148  Dolores Herrero the loved object, and, as a result, they feel inferior and unworthy. Conversely, other times it is the separation from the loved object that is much sought after, as separation is regarded as necessary for the development of the self’s own identity. In this case, the impossibility of withdrawing from one’s parents is seen as a failure to attain the desired autonomy (Morrison 1998, 55–56). As regards white Australians, Great Britain stands for the ego ideal that they both try to imitate and detach themselves from. This love-and-hate relationship leads them to be affected by what Victoria Burrows describes as “the settlers’ shame of being whitebut-not-quite” (2006, 126; emphasis in original). As this critic explains, this type of shame can be traced back to the white settlers’ myth of expulsion and subsequent ambiguous relationship with Britain, which “transmogrified into a kind of anxiety about their status within the safe zone of whiteness” (126). Having been rejected by the British, Australian settlers felt that they had lost their narcissistic/empowered status and had therefore become the outcasts of Empire. Moreover, the sense of defeat upon which the Australian national character was built, together with the deeply rooted misogyny that led them to give priority to male bonding at the expense of downgrading women, also points to the existence of some sense of inferiority and shame that surreptitiously lies at the core of their male narcissism. The devastating effects of shame are therefore clear. As M. Pilar Royo-Grasa explains (2017, 138), “this affect may work, not only as a state that may lead the subject to self-annihilation and isolation, but also as a tool for the dispossession—i.e. the racial marginalisation and ­oppression—of others.” In her analysis of the “(hetero)normative” function of shame, Sara Ahmed argued that shame can forge nations’ sense of collective identity in two ways. On the one hand, “shame may be ‘brought onto’ the nation by illegitimate others” (2004, 108). To put it differently, the building up of identity may entail the exclusion and criminalisation of others who are seen as the ultimate embodiment of those features and behaviour that “the good citizen” (108) should at all costs avoid. The inclusion of these illegitimate others within the group is thus regarded as a threat to the nation’s ego ideal and, consequently, as a source of shame. On the other hand, Ahmed goes on to explain, “the nation may bring shame ‘on itself by its treatment of others’” (108). In the case of Australia, the publication of the Bringing Them Home Report brought to light the nation’s shameful actions against Aborigines, which contributed to putting to the test the very premises upon which Australia had built its national ego ideal. It was clear that the nation had failed to live up to those ideals (freedom, solidarity, equality, and democracy), which supposedly united all of its members as a nation. Paradoxically, then, the illegitimate other stopped being “the origin of shame,” as it was the national subject that “bec[ame] shamed by itself” (108) or rather, by the atrocities they had committed against Indigenous

Australian Refugee Policies and Shame  149 peoples and, we could also add when dealing with contemporary Australia, against migrants and refugees. As was stated before, the usual reaction to shame is to move away, that is, covering and concealment (Burrows 2006, 125; Budden 2009, 1035; Kauffman 2010, 7; Morrison 1998, 7, 12). However, the shamed person may sometimes try to deny his/her sense of inferiority by moving against, that is, by pretending that s/he is not ashamed by adopting grandiose, arrogant, and thick-skinned attitudes, such as Dr Graffito’s sexist and racist beliefs. Shame is, without doubt, a highly toxic and destructive affect (Burrows 2006, 25). As a matter of fact, shame is not only a noun (a state of being) but also an action, and the shamed person may try to compensate for his/her insecurity by projecting his/her flaws onto others. Shame can here work, not only as the feeling of being dispossessed of one’s own self-esteem and sense of identity, but also as the act of dispossessing the other from his/her sense of identity and human dignity. In Black Rock, White City, the women and refugees working at the hospital are the main target of Dr Graffito’s shame, which is in turn the outcome of his gender and racial hatred. His first target will be Miss Richards, the optometrist, whom Jovan considers to be as withdrawn and afraid as himself. From the very beginning it is made clear that she is a finicky woman who has led a lonely and isolated life for years, as if she felt ashamed that she cannot possibly measure up against the rest of people in society. The optometrist is a woman getting old quietly as much as gracefully. […] Miss Richards, with her headphones plugged into her ears, her book before her eyes, ignoring as much of the clamouring world as she possibly can. (29, 33) Dr Graffito keeps on increasing tension by writing more and more graffiti in different parts of the hospital: I am so full of your death I can now only breathe your rot (stairwell, 6); I am a god of small knives … I am a devil of deep cuts (dots in red—operating room; 7); The dead will not bother you. The dead have left you a world. The dead will welcome you. The dead have slept here. The dead have been born here. The dead look like you. The dead have the same names. The dead already own your father. The dead have already fucked your mother (hospital room for children, 11–12); INSPIRATION (letters cut into the flesh of a dead woman, from throat to navel, with a scalpel, 13–14); DOG EAT DOG (cafeteria blackboards, 15); Masters of Destiny, Victims of Fate (cafeteria plates, 16); Dog eat dog eat dog/ Every man for himself/ Winner rapes all/ The last man standing/ Dog eat dog eat dog (back of the hospital newsletter, words overlaid onto a full page Rorschach image, 22); Origin of the Species (water cooler filled with human fat instead of water, 24–25); and a combination of I, COGITO, ERGO, SUM, OGRE, GORE, NON and

150  Dolores Herrero Do You Know Me, Do You know, Do You, Do, I, to make disturbing eye charts (28, 31–32), such as this: I GO COG ERGO COGITO ERGOSUMNON OGREERGO ERGOOGRE GOREGOREGORE OGREOGREOGRE COGITOERGOSUMNON The ever-increasing violence and hatred that they irradiate have a most frightening—and fascinating—effect on people working at the hospital. As far as the optometrist is concerned, although at first she thinks that the graffiti are not for her, that they are more or less random, she finally realises that this is not the case when, one day, she finds that all of her lenses have a letter engraved into them and, after lining them up, she reads the message “TEST TO DESTRUCTION” (45). Dr Graffito has achieved his devilish aim, he has laid a finger in her deepest wound: “The way to test full tolerance is a test to destruction. So she knows what it means” (45). David Dickens, the psychologist who is investigating the case, hits the nail on the head when he affirms that Graffito knows her very well. The fact that his latest graffiti were written in the form of eye charts also deserves special mention. Since affects are mainly conveyed through the eyes, Silvan Tomkins explained (“Affects” 1995, 140–142, 147–148, 153–154), the taboo on looking is of the utmost importance. Taking this into account, it might be concluded that it is by no means accidental that Graffito should have used eye charts to shame Miss Richards, that is, to make her invisible insignificance utterly visible, and therefore unbearable. Several days later, Miss Richards puts an end to her shame and suffering: she commits suicide by leaping off a train platform. However, unlike Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, in her case there is no book to close, no candle to blow. Her suicide is most un-­ poetic (64–65). Dr Graffito’s next target will be Bill, another janitor who, in spite of being the son of Greek immigrants, or perhaps because of this, despises and criminalises non-white refugees and would like to

Australian Refugee Policies and Shame  151 get rid of them all. He hates his job, and refugees in Australia, especially the Indian/non-white ones, for coping with menial jobs like his much better than he does. At one point in the novel he exclaims: “Look at these wobble heads,” […] “Why do we need these clowns?” […] They come over when it’s already fucking hard enough as it is and make enjoying the taste of shit part of cleaning up after the giant arsehole over our heads. (159–160) Jovan cannot stand his poisonous words and mind and threatens to strangle him, to which Bill responds by yelling abuse at Jovan and all the Serbs, whom he had until then respected on account of their whiteness. Some days later, Melissa, a nurse, is found dead by Leni, the nurse to whom Jovan had given a lift some days before. Leni found Melissa’s body in a hospital bathtub, face down in the water with bleach. She had letters written in black marker across her back and along her arms and legs and across the back of her neck. The message read as follows: “Waste of Life/ Life of Waste/ Life of Waste” (277). Leni has the soul of an artist; it is painting that she loves. Actually, she drew a portrait of Jovan in pencil, which she facetiously entitled “Romance of the Crash” and left on his car seat the day Jovan drove her to hospital. The reason why she chose to work as a nurse was her conviction that helping people in need would somehow give meaning to her life. She thought she would be able to cope with the ugly and brutal, but running into Melissa’s corpse was too much for her to bear. She took morphine pills to alleviate her shock, and ended up standing in the bus shelter, completely drugged. Jovan saw her; he first felt like passing by but then felt sorry for her and decided to help, take her home, and make sure she did not make anything crazy or foolish. When she came to her senses again, Jovan was dozing off next to her. Leni reached the conclusion that he must be the murderer and called the police, and Jovan was consequently arrested. Luckily, he would be released very soon, when the police got a confession from Bill, the janitor Melissa had been seen for a short while to leave him for a surgeon soon afterwards. It is only then that we are informed that Bill had been getting letters from Graffito, which the latter used to incite the former to hatred and violence. Bill thought he was Graffito’s confidant but was actually becoming a toy in his hands. Graffito has managed to shame and destroy the optometrist and Bill, but his main target is no other than the janitor in charge of obliterating all of his graffiti. As was said before, in Australia Jovan is no longer an academic, but a cleaner. Like the blood and fluids that he must clean away daily, he has become the abject that which must be discarded so that civilised life can go on. Although he was a superb poet back in his homeland, and is quite fluent in Russian and German (155), Jovan does not seem to show much interest in writing anymore, nor in improving

152  Dolores Herrero his English, which makes his wife think that “with him it’s some strange point of pride. That he doesn’t want to rid himself of the heavy accent that makes [Australians] talk to him as if he’s a cretin” (126). His dark skin disturbs Anglo-Australians, as they cannot easily guess where he comes from, yet his refugee and working-class condition makes him almost invisible to the eyes of most of them: the director of the hospital talks to him as if he were a complete stranger; Tammie, the frustrated and sexually dissatisfied dentist with whom Jovan has occasional sex— this is not an affair, not even a fling—finds it difficult to accept that he can be a clever and sensitive man, and sees him as “a brutish foreigner who can barely speak the language yet who fucks as if fucking is vital” (154). He is so irrelevant that white Australians do not even make the slightest effort to call him properly: “When attempting to pronounce his name they become retarded themselves—‘Jo … Ja … Johvon. Ja-Va. Ah, fuck it, we’ll call you Joe’” (3–4). Jovan lives in a dismal suburb, a most unfamiliar social concept for a Serbo Bosnian like him, since Australian suburbs do not resemble their idea of village as a closely knit community, nor that of urban living, where a large number of people can meet up in familiar places within walking distance. In such a suburban wasteland, people like Jovan cannot possibly enjoy life. His neighbours complain about his old and ugly car when he is not around, and his home is described as “a rental that still feels like a rental after three years” (13), a lightless building with second or third hand furniture where “there’s nothing to steal or protect” (179). Originally from Belgrade, whose meaning, interestingly enough, is ‘the white city,’ Jovan and his wife end up living and working in Melbourne suburbs like Black Rock. The binary black versus white, with all the implications it has, is conveyed by the very title of the novel. In this Australian environment refugees are often criminalised, no matter their skin colour, as when it is said that people working at the hospital “can’t believe [Graffito] is one of their doctors. They need it to be someone like Jovan” (8) or when the Australian woman cleaner exclaims, “Huh! Should’a known it’d be a foreigner” (92) when Jovan shows to her Graffito’s first unnoticed piece, “Arbeit macht frei” (91; emphasis in original), up on the room’s wall. She does not know it is written in German (actually, she says ‘Croatian’ but means Serbian), let alone that this is what could be read at the entrance of Nazi concentration camps. Sometimes refugees are also abused by their landlords, who let them paint and replace things without offering any concessions in rent, only to kick them and their families out as soon as they know that they can sell a much improved property. This is, for example, what happened to Slavko, Jovan’s friend (187–188). Graffito knows about Jovan’s trauma, about the war atrocities that he and Suzana witnessed and suffered. Above all, he knows that Jovan cannot forgive himself for having failed his wife. Like other university

Australian Refugee Policies and Shame  153 teachers, he insisted that their institution would escape that violence, and refused to listen to Suzana when she suggested that they should leave Sarajevo and go and settle in London when they still had the time and means to do so. Both of them survived their children and consequently suffer survivor trauma: they were given poisoned food, and, while Jovan eventually managed to recover, their children ate Suzana’s dinner and died. A few years later, Suzana tried to commit suicide, slashing her wrists in a bathtub. It was her sister who saved her in the last minute. Even today, Suzana cannot help thinking that what her husband saw as her generous act of sacrifice was nothing but her own survival instinct, which led her to give their children the lethal food that was meant for her (138). As for Jovan, he is utterly ashamed of himself, as he feels he is a complete failure: Utterly useless. He’d proved that. The most basic task given to him by God, the simplest function in this world, the only thing that mattered to his heart, mind and soul, was the preservation of family. He should be washed down as well. If he wasn’t a coward he would have already found a way to slide down to the devil. (243) Jovan and Suzana are haunted by nightmares: Jovan dreams that he looks for Suzana in empty houses (55–56); Suzana dreams that she is back in Belgrade and suffocated, either by snow (95–96) or by a collapsing building (195). Fragmented memories of the war and of their children often take hold of them as well. Suzana is haunted by television images of Belgrade being bombed, and can see her son “clearly in her mind,” while she also realises that, in fact, she has forgotten his face (262). As regards Jovan, he experiences something similar when he picks up his friend’s son and sets him on his feet (27), and finds it difficult to articulate and verbalise the horror he went through during the conflict they left behind: Those who have suffered a breakdown, such as Jovan has, often remember events during the crisis in chaotic clouds that roil through their minds. Flashes of lightning reveal electrified horror amid the details. The narrative sequence of Jovan’s life is not something he can lay out for himself. (59) In similar fashion, fragments of his poetry, which he never dared to memorise, suddenly visit him. Whenever Jovan is confronted with violence, in particular that emanating from Graffito’s messages, he “feels the fear building somewhere in the open space of his ribcage. […] It comes and tears at his heart and lungs [till] it fills his chest with a hundred crows, scrambling with their claws and beaks through black feathers for immediate release” (58). He tries to wash this fear away, to ease it

154  Dolores Herrero to nothing, but it persists, like a monster that devours his peace, his soul, his memories, and his whole life. All of these symptoms clearly corroborate Cathy Caruth’s words when she affirms that traumatic experiences often produce: a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviours stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event. (1995, 4) Moreover, trauma often implies the interplay between two (often paralysing) moments, the second of which suddenly brings to mind and retrospectively determines the meaning of the first (see Caruth 1995, 6–7; Forter 2007, 264). To give but one example, at one point in the novel, when Jovan sees blood on the hospital floor, he cannot help remembering the hospital where he got over his bloody diarrhoea thanks to the help of a very special nurse, Dragana Mihailovich who, in spite of having lost three sons in the war, was still able to comfort him. Just as this nurse’s care succeeded in helping him come back to life, Jovan’s empathy towards the people around him will prevent him from being utterly possessed by the monster that threatens to eat him up, by the unbearable sense of shame and failure that Graffito is so desperately trying to awake in him. In spite of the alienating life that he leads in Australia, Jovan is most willing to care and help those around him: he cared about Silvers, his mentally deranged neighbour whom everybody despised, to the point of ‘adopting’ his dog when he died; and also helped Leni, the nurse in need, because he feels he must protect people in need. He is a positive presence, a man to be trusted—“God didn’t feel bankrupt from his mouth” (185–186), his wife says when she watches him pray. By no means should he be associated with the violence that played havoc with the Balkans: he smiles to people and “assures them all he’s not to be feared. He’s just a cleaner in this world” (174). To rely on Brown’s terms once again (2007, 2010), it could be said that Jovan has decided to move forward, that is, to open himself up to the others, to please, to appease. Three years after his arrival in Australia and not without great difficulty, he has eventually managed to develop resilience to shame by cultivating the aforementioned four main skills put forward by Brown. However, it is also true that it is Suzana whom he loves above all things, especially now that she has decided to come back to life, now that they have been able to make love for the first time in three years and want to have another child, and now that she has resumed her writing. Graffito has done his best to put Jovan at the edge of his emotional abyss by making him the target of some of his most maddening graffiti:

Australian Refugee Policies and Shame  155 the one Jovan found in the toilet, “A River of Waste/ Just below Your skin/ your Bones rot in/ history’s flowing Shit” (162); the one Graffito left inside Jovan’s car’s glove box, “This is a Bomb” (181); and the most hurtful and direct of all: the black lined stencil markings of dead bodies on a hospital room—bodies of different sizes, ages, and sexes, and two in particular: that of a baby with the word Obliteration scrawled into its body and that of a pregnant woman with the word Oblivion over her bump—and the title of his creation written on the other side of the door: “Ethical Cleansing” (246). Unlike many hospital people, who cannot help being fascinated by such a disturbing presence in the hospital, Jovan knows, like Suzana, that Graffito is trying to move against, that is, to use violence to gain power over the others, to appease his shame by shaming the most vulnerable around him. Suzana and Jovan have been able to unmask Graffito’s shaming and shameful strategy, as this conversation between them shows: “Seeing your madness in someone else might make it feel more bearable. Even if it’s only a moment. And then you go back to the unbearable and wait for it to break you again.” […] “My point is that he’s not invested in only Miss Richards and Bill Dimitriadis. You get what I’m saying, right?” Jovan nods. “Ethical cleansing.” (296–297; emphasis in original) Much to Graffito’s anger, Jovan and Suzana’s resilience, together with their capacity to help those in need, have finally allowed them to move on, however painstakingly. For her employers and neighbours, Suzana, this Serbian woman with “a cutting voice and hard sharp eyes […] who never looks afraid of anything” (78), becomes simply irreplaceable: it is not a maid or a nurse that they need: they solely need her. Right at the end of the novel, Suzana gets pregnant, and they become a couple, a family once again. That is why they decide to put up photographs of their dead children and of themselves on the walls of their house. As regards Jovan, he makes some important decisions: he will buy Suzana a computer so that she can write her novel quicker and better; will buy a new car; and, most important of all, will leave his job as a cleaner at the hospital in order to help his friend Slavko to paint houses. The joke he makes about this when informing Suzana of his intentions and playing with the double meaning of the word ‘painter’ (house painter/artist) is utterly significant. He says, “There’s good money in [painting houses].” […] “And if people ask me what I do, I’ll make sure I’m wearing a beret and tell them, I’m a painter” (298; emphasis in the original). He will no longer obliterate/conceal waste, shame, and death manifestos; from now on he will become an artist, a creator, a free spirit, a giver of life: the very antithesis of Graffito. Graffito’s reaction to this comes as no surprise. If he cannot shame and annihilate Jovan as he did with his former victims, he will try to

156  Dolores Herrero destroy him by destroying what he loves most, his one and only interest in life, namely, Suzana and their unborn baby. When he is sure that there is nobody around who can help her, Graffito, in an attempt to fulfil the macabre prophecy of his “Ethical cleansing” graffiti, tries to drown Suzana in the swimming-pool. Luckily, though, Jovan, who was to pick her up at the entrance of the sports centre, crashes his old van on the way and walks instead into the pool, just in time to see the tattoos on the murderer’s torso and save Suzana by bringing down one fist after another into Graffito’s body and face. Just as he promised, Jovan has done away with death, has shamed and crushed shame-and-deathinducing Graffito in order to preserve life, to make it possible, as if he were some kind of god. He has saved his family, and by so doing he has redeemed himself and the world. I will quote Suzana’s final thoughts by way of conclusion: Her husband. How good. The only thing she can think is how powerful and great, how strong and noble. Jovan’s Pacific eyes. His mouth set—a storm swallowed. As expressionless as a god’s face as he does his work. Obliterating every other word. And how good she thinks, how good. Her Jovan. Her husband. Her good man. How very good. As expressionless as a god remaking the world. (306) As Black Rock, White City clearly suggests, it is not refugees, but blind prejudices that are the enemy within. The harder the so-called First World nations try to shame those whom they regard as the ‘illegitimate others,’ the more shame they will bring onto themselves. On the contrary, if they are kind enough to save and welcome those in need, these may just as well be kind enough to save them.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. “Australia and Refugees, 19012002: An Annotated Chronology Based on Official Sources – Parliament of Australia. http://www.aph.gov.au/About_ Pa rl i a m e nt / Pa rl i a m e nt a r y_ D epa r t m e nt s / Pa rl i a m e nt a r y_ L ibra r y/­ Publications_Archive/online/Refugees4 (accessed 18 May 2017) Bewes, Timothy. 2011. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Brown, Brené. 2007. I Thought It Was just Me (but it isn’t): Telling the Truth about Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power. Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada, Gotham Books. ———. 2010. The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You Are Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. Center City, MN: Hazelden Publishing. Budden, Ashwin. 2009. “The Role of Shame in Posttraumatic Stress D ­ isorder: A Proposal for a Socio-emotional Model for DSM-V.”·Social Science and

Australian Refugee Policies and Shame  157 Medicine 69: 1032–1039 www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S027 7953609004882 (accessed 10 March 2019). www.academic.edu/202776/ The_role_of_shame_in_posttraumatic_stress_disorder_A_­proposal_for_a_ socio-emotional_model_for_DSM-V (accessed 25 April 2016) Burrows, Victoria. 2006. “The Ghostly Haunting of White Shame in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon.” Westerly 51 (November): 124–135. Caruth, Cathy (ed.). 1995. Trauma. Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins UP. Colic-Peisker, Val. 2003. “Bosnian Refugees in Australia: Identity, Community and Labour Market Integration.” New Issues in Refugee Research, Working Paper No. 97. www.unhcr.org (accessed 18 May 2017). ———. 2005. “‘At Least You’re the Right Colour’: Identity and Social Inclusion of Bosnian Refugees in Australia.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31 (4): 615–638. Curthoys, Ann. 1999. “Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology.” Journal of Australian Studies 23 (61): 1–19. doi:10.1080/ 14443059909387469 (accessed 21 October 2012). Escudero-Alías, Maite. 2014. “‘There’s that Curtain Come Down.’ The Burden of Shame in Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch.” In Trauma in Contemporary Literature, Narrative and Representation, edited by Marita Nadal and Mónica Calvo, 223–236. London and New York: Routledge. Forter, Greg. 2007. “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form.” Narrative 15 (3, October): 259–285. Gale, Peter. 2000. “Construction of Whiteness in the Australian Media.” In Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, edited by John Docker and Gerhard Fisher, 256–269. Sydney: U of New South Wales. Hay, Ashley. 2015. “Black Rock White City: An Intimate Study of Life, Love and Grief.” The Australian, April 4, 2015. www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/ review/black-rock-white-city-an-intimate-study-of-life-love-and-grief/newsstory/c5389dd9fb382de6e4fb35b102f39715 (accessed 18 May 2017). Hodge, Bob, and Vijay Mishra. 1991. Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Kauffman, Jeffrey. 2010. “On the Primacy of Shame.” In The Shame of Death, Grief, and Trauma, edited by Jeffrey Kauffman, 3–24. New York and London: Routledge. Lewis, Michael. 1992. Shame. The Exposed Self. New York: Free P. Morrison, Andrew P. 1998. The Culture of Shame. Northvale, NJ, and London: Jaron Aronson. Patric, Alec S. (2015) 2016. Black Rock, White City. Sydney: ReadHowYouWant Limited (Large Print 16). Ramet, Sabrina P. 1999. Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the War for Kosovo. Boulder, CO: Westview P. Royo-Grasa, M. Pilar. 2017. “A Dialectics of Trauma and Shame: The Politics of Dispossession in Gail Jones’s Black Mirror.” In Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st Century Fiction, edited by Jean Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega, 128–148. London and New York: Routledge. Scheff, Thomas J. 2000. “Shame and the Social Bond: A Sociological Theory.” Sociological Theory 18 (1): 84–99.

158  Dolores Herrero Shaffer, Kay. 1988. Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition. Cambridge, NY, New Rochelle, Melbourne, and Sydney: Cambridge UP. Tomkins, Silvan. 1995. “Shame-Humiliation and Contempt-Disgust.” In Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, edited by Eve K. Sedgwick and Adam Frank, 133–78. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP. ———. 1995. “What Are Affects?” In Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, edited by Eve K. Sedgwick and Adam Frank, 33–74. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP. ———. 2008. Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Complete Edition. 2 vols. New York: Springer Publishing Company.

7 American Postcolonial Shame, Fiction, and Timothy Bewes David Callahan

Sociologist Jeffrey K. Olick concludes that “[t]he politics of regret […] appears to be the major characteristic of our age, an age of shattered time and shifting allegiances” (2007, 137). This characteristic has developed out of the changing contexts in which national responsibility has been considered subsequent upon the Second World War, whence it spread to a revisionist impulse throughout all modes of considering the past, from historiography to fiction for adults and children, from museum displays to local councils’ organization of public spaces, to commissions of truth and reconciliation. The generalization of this politics of regret in the West has naturally led to resistance, even informed resistance such as Pascal Bruckner’s The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western ­M asochism, in which “[r]emorse has ceased to be connected with precise historical circumstances; it has become a dogma, a spiritual commodity; almost a form of currency” (2010, 3). Like all such overdetermining concept flows it has also unsurprisingly experienced definitional problems, not only in historical studies but in such areas as psychology, moral philosophy and postcolonial studies, including the problem of the most appropriate term to be used in the first place. Regret or remorse may be perceived as too loose, too reticent or too all-embracing, while the concepts of shame and guilt come in and out of contention according to whether observers feel the terms imply social transformation or a merely personal self-scrutiny.1 1 See Michael Morgan, On Shame (2008) for a synthesis of the problems, as well as an intervention on the side of seeing shame as a spur to ethical reflection and self-­ remaking. The bibliography has become overwhelming, however, requiring diligent searching among disparately-specialized journals, as well as the consultation of a rapidly-expanding number of monographs, with no generally agreed starting point or methodology. This conceptually disputed territory could even be considered to prove the current significance of the term. Although synthesizing publications on the thematics continue to appear, those which have appeared most interesting to me include the work on affect theory by Silvan Tomkins, anthologized in Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed Eve Kosofky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, 1995), June Price Tangney and Ronda L. Dearing, Shame and Guilt (New York, 2002) and indeed anything by Tangney, even though her perspective differs from my

160  David Callahan In Timothy Bewes’s stimulating The Event of Postcolonial Shame he takes this politics of regret laterally, principally with respect to literary fiction, but in an unexpected manner that offers a very different way of talking about shame as well as being fruitfully extended to all manner of cultural texts. In his undertaking to explore shame as “an event of incommensurability: a profound disorientation of the subject by the confrontation with an object it cannot comprehend, an object that renders incoherent every form available to the subject” (2011, 3), Bewes is in the camp of those for whom shame leads to at least the sense that there should be concrete outcomes rather than shame’s existing solely as a moment in interior personal experience. The consequences for literature are profound: “nothing less than a groundbreaking new theory of the novel” in Tom Langley’s review for Interventions (2013, 143). Where for most observers, regret, guilt or shame work toward providing grammars whose objective is to speak the wounds of history so as to be able to process them better and then move around them, or at least to configure them as positively as circumstances allow, for Bewes “the substance of shame is fundamentally a gap, an absence, an impossibility” (Event 39). This means that for writing “[s]hame is not located primarily in the content of the work. It is, rather, a materialization of the discrepancy between content and form, of the inadequacy of form with respect to content” (Event 39). Shame cannot thus be written out, past or around, and indeed that should not be the objective. Even if it is the objective it is impossible to achieve, for shame is presented as an unavoidable formal consequence of the writing conditions which writers in certain contexts have inherited and cannot step out of. In Bewes’s approach, all postcolonial writing in fact materializes shame and cannot write its way past shame because it is shame. In an article in differences, “The Call to Intimacy and the Shame Effect,” Bewes own, Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2005), and Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton, 2007). Beyond these, absorbing perspectives and experimental results can be found in a dizzying variety of academic article. Among those I have found stimulating are Jeff Joireman, “Empathy and the Self-Absorption Paradox II: Self-Rumination and Self-Reflection as Mediators Between Shame, Guilt, and Empathy,” Self and Identity 3 (2004): 225–238; Mia Silfver, “Coping with Guilt and Shame: A Narrative Approach.” Journal of Moral Education 36 (2) (2007): 169–183; Gregory R. Gunn and Anne E. Wilson, “Acknowledging the Skeletons in Our Closet: The Effect of Group Affirmation on Collective Guilt, Collective Shame, and Reparatory Attitudes.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 37 (11) (2011): 1474–1487; Rita Barnard, “Ugly Feelings, Negative Dialectics: Reflections on Postapartheid Shame.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 13 (1–2) (2012): 151–170; and Thomas Scheff, “The Ubiquity of Hidden Shame in Modernity.” Cultural Sociology 8 (2) (2014): 129–141. What will be noted is how varied the sites in which the term is addressed are, and accordingly how great the potential for divergence in the uses to which the concept is put.

American Postcolonial Shame  161 clarifies that “[t]o speak of shame in the colonial or postcolonial context is to speak not only of a subjective, ‘ethical’ feeling but of a certain inadequacy of all available forms with respect to representing experience” (“Intimacy” 5). This inadequacy implies “feel[ing] implicated in, or condemned to, forms of representation and understanding that one does not recognize as one’s own” (“Intimacy” 5). Leaving aside for now the fact that being condemned to others’ inadequate forms has been the sentence writers have felt has been frequently passed on them from Modernism, not to mention a condemnation commonly experienced by women writers, queer writers, or simply rebellious youth, Bewes’s gesturing towards the representational catachresis in which the writers he uses as exemplification find themselves asks questions implicitly of the materialization his own writing embodies. Given that according to his analysis not even the most self-conscious postcolonial writing strategies can circumvent this aporia, not even the subtle doubling and self-­scrutiny of a J.M. ­Coetzee, one of Bewes’s primary examples, then this might also apply to Bewes’s own writing. Is he licensed to be the strong critic who is able to command what the fiction writers mired in the illusional moves of representation are unable to? If the inadequacy of available forms arises because of the postcolonial predicament of the writer, this conceivably includes any genre, including theory and criticism. In his analysis, Bewes, working out of the American university system, strangely does not include any examples of American writing. It could be said thus that the entire absence of American postcolonial shame in The Event of Postcolonial Shame becomes the gap of its own shame, a manifestation of the incommensurability in this context of the history of the United States’s own invading and colonial history, thematics that Bewes can only deal with by writing about other parts of the world, and other, in his words, failures to erode shame in writing (in the Caribbean and in Africa). Even if it is allowed that Bewes is originally from England, this hardly absolves him from being interpellated by the historical entitlements through which his life as a white person in the United States is structured, both on an institutional and a daily basis. On the contrary, the very fact of the United States is inseparable from the colonizing history of England, and the exemplification of the incommensurability of shame via examples that ignore the English colony that has had the most global impact can legitimately be construed as Bewes’s own event of shame. Approaching the question of such an absence, however, Bewes’s definitional stipulations possess the potential to exclude any counterexample that might be offered as a postcolonial writing past of shame, via the simple conclusion that if there is writing that at first glance seems in its form either not to be implicated in or to have dealt with and evaporated the shame effect then that is because it is not really inhabiting the event of postcolonial shame and therefore lies outside the problematic. Bewes could conceivably feel that inasmuch as he is English, or a resident

162  David Callahan American, that he does not inhabit the event of a possible American postcolonial shame in the same ways as his examples, but he is far too knowledgeable a theorist to believe his relation to the event is simply to be able to perceive and dissect it where it occurs. It may be simply that the areas that he writes about are those that he is more knowledgeable about, although he has written incisively about American literature in the form of Paul Auster, for example (Bewes 2007). Auster is not considered a postcolonial writer, but Bewes’s theorization hypothetically makes it possible to argue that the representational games, blind alleys and identificatory paradoxes of Auster’s writing include strategies to avoid speaking directly about America’s violent history and cultural flows derived from dispossession and oppression, and that this is only proper given that explaining or mastering American history would be illusory. Auster, however, is not the sort of example I am going to choose. To explore the usefulness of the gap of American shame as a potential route to the intelligibility of American fictions, my examples would probably be considered more proximate to those he has mobilized in The Event of Postcolonial Shame. These examples are offered, I hasten to add, not in the spirit of exposing the error of Bewes’s ways, but rather of indicating how extraordinarily productive they are. *** The first determinate absence, to use Pierre Macherey’s term, is that of Native Peoples. According to one blunt formulation, Indigenous writing is not postcolonial because Indigenous nations remain colonized. Cherokee scholar Jace Weaver, for example, admits that postcolonial literature is writing against metropolitan priorities, but cannot admit that this defining strategy makes American Indian writing postcolonial because “American Natives are not postcolonial peoples” (1997, 10). The frequent statement that the postcolonial cannot be applied to Indigenous peoples because they are still colonized is however to radically simplify the term “postcolonial.” The problem here is the unhelpfulness of considering the postcolonial as an ontology, a state that one is in, rather than as a hermeneutic, a decoding strategy which is used to read realities from a particular politicized perspective informed by a critique of colonial history, its injuries and its legacies. Examples of the use of such an ontology abound, and much more widely than in literary studies. In influential article “Rethinking Historical Trauma” by Laurence Kirmayer, Joseph Gone and Joshua Moses, for example, the authors refer unreflectingly to “the postcolonial experiences of Indigenous peoples in North America” (2014, 300), even though Gone is a member of the Gros Ventre people. It is easy to appreciate the strategic need of Indigenous nations to insist, correctly, that they remain colonized and accordingly their experience can never be “postcolonial” in this broad way.

American Postcolonial Shame  163 The relevance of the term as a productive mode of critique may nonetheless be seen in Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish-American Louis Owens’s Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel in which no less than three times did he quote the same sentence from the frequent whipping-boy when the term “postcolonial” is contested by Indigenous peoples: Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s seminal The Empire Writes Back (Weaver had also been responding to the same book). Owens was prepared to view the book as useful despite its total lack of attention to American Indians (and not because it is being scrupulous about their still being colonized and therefore not postcolonial, given that it does summarize writing by and issues connected with Australian Aborigines and New Zealand Maori). Owens’s triple-used quote states that “the central ‘crisis of identity’ in postcolonial literatures” is “the concern with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place” (1992, 36; 122; 156–157; from Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1989, 9). How can this not be applicable to us American Indians, Owens asked (or to newly independent white Americans in the early Republic, Lawrence Buell might add, in “­Postcolonial Anxiety in Classic U.S. Literature,” 2000)? Whether we are still politically colonized or not is not the point when it comes to considering the postcoloniality of discourse: the point is whether the discourse contests the injuries of colonialism and whether it helps us to communicate the oppositional ways in which we read our situation to the wider world by participating in conversations that are taken notice of. Following the argument that one cannot write postcolonially if one’s nation is still colonized, this would mean major theorists of the postcolonial would also have been un-postcolonial during significant portions of their careers, figures such as Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Amílcar Cabral or Mahatma Gandhi. When Weaver goes on to consider that a more useful term might be Barbara Harlow’s “resistance literature” (1987, 11), in effect he has been blinded by the prefix “post” to the fact that one of the central aims of postcolonial literature, as understood by most scholars of the postcolonial, covers much of what Harlow labelled resistance literature at a time when postcolonial literary studies had yet to really expand. Despite Harlow’s insistence on writing which attempted to contribute to material practices of resistance, as opposed to writing whose resistance was principally representational and textual, her work is seen as a significant contribution to postcolonial studies. Moreover, in Resistance Literature one of Harlow’s examples was Bolivian Indigenous writer and activist Domitila Barrios de Chungara. Owens also considered the idea that American Indians should not even participate in Western colonial discourse, by which in this context is meant academic discourse in general discussing American Indians, but he concluded pragmatically in Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place that “we do not have the luxury of simply opting

164  David Callahan out” because “we already function within the dominant discourse” (1998, 52). Despite such down-to-earth arguments, there remain American Indian critics who vehemently oppose the inclusion of Indigenous peoples within postcolonial studies. Yet when Eric Cheyfitz treated the issues in “The (Post)Colonial Predicament of Native American Studies,” the highly contested nature of the politics involved can be seen clearly near the beginning of the article when, while acknowledging “a resistance to critical theory within Native American studies itself” (2002, 406), he expostulates: “It is surprising then, if not a complete scandal, that post-colonial studies have virtually ignored the predicaments of American Indian communities” (406). If even a cursory examination of the vigorous postcolonial studies carried on in Australia and New Zealand, let alone neighbouring Canada, reveals that Indigenous studies lie at their very centre, particularly in Australia and New Zealand, the absence in the United States is cast into even greater relief. Symptomatically, two scholars for whom only Indigenous still-colonized peoples generate authentically postcolonial writing are Canadian critic Diana Brydon in “The White Inuit Speaks” and Australian Deborah Madsen in her introduction to Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon. But Owens and Cheyfitz’s summaries of the situation are going in the right pragmatic direction. Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw) is brisker when she asserts more recently that “indigenous peoples must be central to any theorizations of the conditions of postcoloniality” (2011, xiv) at the outset of her The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, in which it is precisely Indigenous peoples’ continuing experience of colonization which enables and sharpens their postcolonial hermeneutic practices. Such arguments have the benefit of preventing us from wasting time on ontological arguments and identitarian definitions, and concentrating on the actual position of American Indians and ways in which critique, postcolonial critique, can be developed so that their colonial present re-enters U.S. discourses more often and more urgently, both in creative work and in other types of work. In their writing Indigenous writers might nevertheless be thought to be inevitably processing the shame indicated by Sartre, as quoted by Bewes: the feeling “of being an object; that is, of recognizing myself in this degraded, fixed, and dependent being which I am for the Other” (Event 89; italics in original). Whether these are the exact terms used or not, the continual need to assert cultural priorities, even legal rights and boundaries, renders inescapable to American Indians that they are an Other to the majority history, culture and politics of the nation within which all their identitarian strategies are circumscribed. From one angle, this existence within discursive practices in which the objectification through others’ categories cannot be evaded, given that American Indians will never be able to insert themselves into pre-contact discourses, is something that might constitute an absorbing testing point for Bewes’s theory.

American Postcolonial Shame  165 In such a hypothetical examination, one type of text that might have been subjected to analysis would be the consciously appropriative text, such as Joseph M. Marshall III’s Hundred in the Hand, knowingly subtitled a Lakota Western. In this novel the masculine adventure narrative is principally focalized through the point of view of Cloud, a young Lakota warrior, and the events leading up to a historical battle in which U.S. soldiers were roundly defeated by Plains Indians’ strategy and force. Marshall has also written as a historian about what white historians refer to as the Fetterman Massacre in 1866, part of the contexts leading up to the period of the Battle of the Greasy Grass, or the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, the latter battle also novelized in his second Lakota Western: The Long Knives are Crying (2008). Marshall’s The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn: A Lakota History came out the same year as Hundred in the Hand, in a pairing which perceives History as being recomposed from a variety of textual strategies. We recognize the novel as practising appropriation, Bhabha’s mimicry, as subverting hegemonic practices through reshaping them for the purposes of Native American affirmation. After all, what is more hegemonic in terms of theme, not to mention the supposedly hegemonic certainties of realism, than the form of the American Western or frontier adventure narrative, a form often either celebrating and narrating the replacement of A ­ merican Indians in their territory by the activities of the invaders or, alternatively, sentimentally enjoying in narrative what had been safely disposed of on the ground? Hundred in the Hand begins with Cloud, now old, reading an official plaque marking the battle which says: “There were no survivors” (2007, 2). Given that most of the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho force did survive, and that such survival not only articulated primary meanings of the event for them, but ensured that these meanings would have the opportunity to circulate in their nations in the future, the plaque’s erasure of not just their historical protagonism in the event but their very status as human beings is brutal, the irony of the shadow the inscription casts over history heightened. What has instituted white Americans as actors in history has not been their degree of success in the event, whether they won (or in this case lost) the battle, but their ability to produce discourse that stands as History. For one of the very survivors and victors in the battle to gaze down at an inscription of white Americans as the only participants commemorated by history reveals only too materially that control over public forms of discourse stands for what survives as that history, regardless of the actual survival of particular nations, peoples or communities. Given that we cannot go back in time and point to events happening in order to disprove anyone else’s story, there exists the continuing need for discourse to contest simplistic and hegemonic narratives and hierarchies, discourse that can be named postcolonial in its opposing and dismantling of colonial agendas and categories.

166  David Callahan Simply reversing the Western’s moral investment, however, may not counter the shame of the narrative forms generated in a context of having been transformed into an object of white American history and cultural flows. The imbrication of Bewes’s shame with the form of any writing by American Indians cannot be evaded, given the abjection from the official American imaginary of their cultures to a type of symbolic excretion that can be worked up or wiped away as needed by the dominant discourses. Neither the instantiation nor the ignoring of the fact of shame matters: the form of American Indian writing in English can plausibly be seen in Bewes’s terms as the sign of its function as a replacement of the languages and structures of American Indian cultural flows by those of the people who have subjected, scattered and marginalized them. In this view, appropriating generic forms associated with and invented to serve a people’s defeaters does not write out the objectification, however ingenious the reversal, cultural pride or attempted translation of American Indian conceptualizations. It is not surprising in this light that one of Bewes’s examples is Kenyan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the most noted example of a writer who has acted on his perception of the trap of attempting to use Western languages to articulate opposition to Western power. Marshall, after all, speaks Lakota as his first language and could presumably not have written in English. So far, this sounds like a version of the plaque: American Indians have done battle with writing in English, and there have been no survivors. The term “shame” carries such freight of failure and abjection. In part, despite Bewes’s separation of shame as a thematic and shame as a structuring space of incommensurability, the freight remains unavoidably present, unloaded onto the dock of the identity projects of formerly and still colonized peoples. To accept this as failure, via the conclusion that, as Maureen Konkle synthesizes the opinions of others, “when Indians engage in the practice of writing, they undermine their own identity” (2000, 152), is nonetheless irritating. In such a view, “Native writers in English are then most successful in expressing their Indian identity when they provide evidence of what is understood as their culture through themes, forms, narratives, and figures correlated with the oral tradition written down by scholars” (151–152). In opposition to this, Konkle spiritedly unpacks such conclusions as nothing less than the political desire to construct Indigenous peoples as ultimately indecipherable, affirming their difference in order to exclude them, subjugate them or explain their unfitness to participate in the polity as equals. Even apart from this unspoken and perhaps unrealized political desire on the part of those Konkle is writing against, why should not such an insistence also lead to the absurdity of claiming that writers in English (providing they can claim British ancestry) can only be successful if their writing is proximate to the lineage of northern sagas, British folktales and indeed the oral traditions of the peoples who formerly occupied the British Isles

American Postcolonial Shame  167 before the Norman conquest, or even before the colonization by northern Germanic peoples which pushed Celtic peoples to the physical and cultural margins? This is a debate Bewes could conceivably have brought much to. At the same time, the problematic of identifying writing practices with nothing less than a whole people’s identity, as opposed to the decoding undertaken by a single writer, remains muddied in both accounts. If, on the one hand, for Bewes, “shame is not a message” in Ngũgĩ’s Grain of Wheat, “nor does it have any positive ontology or truth content” (Event 118), on the other hand, “the colonial system itself is shaming: by its modes of address, by the ways in which it objectifies every individual caught up in it, and by the absence of any possibility of freedom that is foreseeable from within it” (Event 119). To write so firmly about “the colonial system” without situating himself as living within and a beneficiary of such a system, as indeed as one who by his own terms must be objectified, might be seen as instituting one more gap of shame: that in which one lives within a colonial system and is part of the colonizing project (that which continues to colonize First Peoples, including those in Hawai’i and Alaska), but without noting the existence of either. Within the text of the colonial system in which Bewes is inserted, there may not be any “positive ontology” in the sense of an agreed-upon state of being or identity, but the “truth content” of the event of shame which Bewes’s book itself constitutes might seem ironically perceivable by some readers. Among those readers would certainly be found Native writers and critics. Ontologies may be suspicious entities in Bewes’s work, and indeed in much contemporary cultural analysis, but they do not exist solely as essentialisms to be brushed aside. As Creek writer and scholar Craig Womack, to take one of many examples from within Indigenous (and postcolonial) critique, points out, configuring ontology operates strategically for Indigenous peoples: “authenticity and insider and outsider status are, in fact, often discussed in Native communities, especially given the historical reality that outsiders have so often been the ones interpreting things Indian” (1999, 5). Part of the need for this discussion involves precisely the “truth content” of stories cognate with those in which the descendants of survivors contemplate plaques informing them there were no survivors. For such people to write anything at all is already to be writing over the plaque. For them to rewrite the story to which the plaque refers is to refuse the othering promulgated by the plaque, but as with Bewes’s example of Ngũgĩ, the event of postcolonial shame cannot be written away by simply telling your own version. The very need or desire to tell the “right” story cannot exist beyond the shadow of the colonizing story that is being contested. To have to write such a story is to have been unable to step outside the colonial history in which your relation to the people who have othered

168  David Callahan you and who continue to other you remains central to who you are. And yet at the same time you cannot not tell this story once you have access to writing and to publishing. In his reflection “An Indian Viewpoint of History” Marshall makes the imperative clear: “we must […] look at [history] honestly and perceive it realistically, and then tell it factually” (67). Indeed, expository clarity and evidential proof become a utopian ideal in American Indian retellings of history, as much in the work of radicals such as Ward Churchill (Keetoowah Cherokee) in On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality, or Vine Deloria Jr (Standing Rock Sioux), in works such as Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact, as of moderates such as Marshall. In such retellings, the reasoned outline of evidence of historical injustice in prose that might be thought of as a Western model has been adopted, an adaptation of the wielding of reasoned argument that all peoples have deployed, even if the nature of what counts as evidence may change according to circumstances and cultural values. Despite colonizers’ duplicitous and meretricious wielding of what they claimed to be reason and logic, Indigenous peoples continue to believe, albeit more warily, that intervention in identity flows, including via reasoned discourse, may still be efficacious in ways that help Native Peoples to resemanticize embedded discourses in wider culture and conceivably effect material changes in their position within the states in which they live. And indeed, there is clear evidence that this has happened. The self-images of American Indians and the ways they are configured in the United States are not the same as they were 50 or a 100 years ago, even if there still remain enormous material and legal problems, while in some other related polities, such as New Zealand or Australia, discursive transformations have been even more widespread, particularly in the former, albeit with uneven results in all cases. Determining whether it is worthwhile fomenting social debate around the remediation of the historical hinges that all polities have experienced at some stage in nearer or more distant history constitutes, it might be said, a precondition for postcolonial critique. Whatever the temporal criteria, however, it seems more than licit to insist that postcolonial discourse is applicable to the ongoing history of the United States, so that the absence of still-colonizing America in Bewes’s theorization may be perceived as a systemic gap. *** Bewes’s theorization, it would seem, could also extend to the consideration of writing by groups of people who have been displaced or established elsewhere as a result of the locational flows opened up by colonial and then globalizing history. In Marc Augé’s The War of Dreams he writes of how “analysts of modernity have effectively identified two

American Postcolonial Shame  169 opposing types of myths: myths of origin […] and myths of the future, eschatological myths corresponding to the modern time which makes the future the principle of meaning” (1999, 74). These myths however become coextensive in the immigrant’s project, in which the routes to subject formation of origins are overlaid upon the uncertain parlaying of the future in the context of an enveloping majority culture not only ignorant of one’s myths of origin but perhaps even hostile towards them. My example of a migrant writer, however, is one that Bewes or anyone else could not be blamed for leaving out: Geraldine Brooks. Brooks belongs to the truly invisible and unchampioned category of white ­Australian-American writers. Such writers are de-authorized from inhabiting the site of otherness in a racialized America in which shame can only be a site approached via the grammars of victimization in which the allowable forms are those variously made up of white Americans and those identified as not. Indeed, mentioning Australian-American writers in a book about the postcolonial might be seen in some quarters as anything from mildly distasteful to outrageous, even a sign of the shame as form taken by the form of my chapter, an invasion of recognized postcolonial categories by my own identity discourses that cannot find a place to come to form, that perhaps have no place other than the gap of shame. Once again, however, if we accept that the postcolonial is a hermeneutic, then it can be generated by anyone, even by English, Spanish or Japanese writers, not to mention white American authors, or, to return to my example, white Australian-born writers who have migrated to America. Geraldine Brooks’s March (2005), set in the period after the Civil War, and Caleb’s Crossing (2011), set in sixteenth-century Massachusetts, both deal with the types of racialized issues that lie at the heart of current Australian cultural anxieties. Nevertheless, Brooks is simply considered a historical novelist in the United States, rather than someone who writes from a very different historical knowledge to that of almost all American writers. Jane Smiley’s review of Caleb’s Crossing for the New York Times serves as a typical example; nowhere is Brooks’s Australian origin mentioned, and the novel “reconfirms Geraldine Brooks’s reputation as one of our most supple and insightful novelists” (emphasis added). Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian, does mention that Brooks is an Australian in his complimentary review of Caleb’s Crossing for the Washington Post, but draws no conclusion from it and makes no connection between that and the novel. Is it too unlikely to speculate that if such novels had been written by someone originally from India or Trinidad or Tanzania, or indeed by an Australian Aborigine, they would be considered postcolonial historical novels, meaningful perspectives on colonial hierarchies from the fascinating point of view of someone differently interpellated by empire? The fact that a white Australian tells these stories does not appear to activate an interest in the difference they conceivably embody;

170  David Callahan whiteness performs its customary cloaking of how the “dominant group de-emphasizes its function as a group and instead portrays its existence as the ‘norm’ or as ‘natural’ to mystify how its members obtain power by their group membership” (Hurtado and Stewart 1997, 303). Brooks’s whiteness and Anglo heritage trump any cultural origins. In my argument, however, drawing on Bewes, the form of Geraldine Brooks’s books as stories of America may gesture via the indirection of shame as form toward the blockage of Australian history as compared to the comfortably familiar narrative possibilities when dealing with American histories of the interface with its oppressed and racialized minorities. In Caleb’s Crossing Bethia, a member of the colonizing people, develops deep respect for the local Wampanoag people, even falling in love with the renamed Caleb of the book’s title. Bethia’s narrative provides a sympathetic response to the knowledge, resourcefulness and intelligence of a Wampanoag Indian. Caleb was in fact a historical character, the first American Indian to graduate from Harvard, although the novel, apart from this detail, is a complete fictionalization, a fictionalization of an alternative history, not only alternative to the principal history of hostility and prejudice between American Indians and settlers, but indirectly, to the history of Brooks’s native land as well, one in which such an alternative was much more constrained by colonial hostility. 2 In both March and Caleb’s Crossing fellow-feeling, friendship and forms of love between white people and marginalized Others offer the alternatively hopeful scripts to raced interactions that have proven both so popular and so controversial in contemporary Australian literature, where a bitter battle has been fought over how national history is to be commemorated, taught and remembered. American readers of Brooks’s work are unaware of these contexts, and after all we cannot expect readers to be informed about the histories and cultures of everywhere else, but the fact that she is a white Australian has the effect of making the reading of these two works as anything other than simply American historical novels (whatever that means) almost impossible. At a time when the politics of representation and bitter public debate over Australian history make dealing with colonial history by white authors highly politicized, it is legitimate to speculate whether Caleb’s Crossing articulates a form of unconscious recognition of Australian themes via an American story. It is true that Brooks now lives on Martha’s Vineyard, so that responding to local history is hardly a surprising option. In my argument, however, her response must also be informed by her having grown up in a country where a related history exists. 2 See Indigenous (Nyungar) writer Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010) for a superb narrative that attempts to be true to the historical record while exploring the possibilities of forms of amity even when modulated by the incomprehension of early contact, in this case between Western Australian Aborigines and British people.

American Postcolonial Shame  171 Through this circumstance the form of Brooks’s novel as an American book transforms the entire novel into an enactment of Australian postcolonial shame (which is not a criticism). In Bewes’s sense, shame “is not located primarily in the content of the work. It is, rather, a materialization of the discrepancy between content and form, of the inadequacy of form with respect to content” (Event 39). By that I mean the inadequacy of the form of an American story with respect to the Australian content with which Brooks grew up and through which the issues were unconsciously absorbed, issues so strong that according to Sheila Collingwood-Whittick “the pain of unbelonging” exists as an “endemic existential pathology in the contemporary (post)colonial nations of Australia and New Zealand” (2007, xl).3 As a result, “when compared with the writing of Indigenous authors, there is less confidence, greater ambiguity and, overall, a more tortuous and sometimes more tortured quality in these white authorial imaginings of what belonging might actually signify” (xl). What better way to avoid this than not to write about Australia at all, but what more complete example of the event of postcolonial shame than a book whose form avoids completely the “endemic existential pathology” by writing over it in the stories of an elsewhere that is nonetheless strongly cognate? Even Brooks’s March, set in the Civil War and not incorporating Indigenous peoples but rather the interface between African Americans and white Americans, could be seen as a configuration of questions of race and fellow-feeling which have bedevilled Australian history, questions which could only with difficulty be rewritten by a white writer into such a positive narrative in Australia. Once again, at the time she wrote the novel Brooks was living in Virginia, establishing a pattern of reacting to what is to hand, but as she has also written novels set in England and Europe, her fiction is alive to a much wider range of locations and issues than simply those of local history. All of her novels are centrally concerned with the pressure of larger societies on figures who have been figured as outsiders or different in ways defined by majorities with the power to impose categories, ostracism and punishment. In her memoir Foreign Correspondence, Brooks writes of her upbringing in Australia and having her eyes opened to “our own disgraceful history with Australian Aborigines” (2005, 104), but throughout her recollections she shows herself subject to the once typical Australian syndrome of validating history and cultures elsewhere as significant, while considering the local to be derivative and secondary. A period spent as a journalist back 3 This is what John Carlos Rowe references in “Buried Alive: the Native American Political Unconscious in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction,” where he writes of “how unsettled we [Americans] must remain until true justice is offered for the crimes from which we still profit,” except that in America this unsettlement remains repressed and unacknowledged (2004, 202–203).

172  David Callahan in Australia feels bland, the country’s problems “less acute” (234), with no allowance made for the acuteness of white Australians’ treatment of Aborigines. It is difficult for anyone who knows of the media and political environment in Australia in recent decades to credit such an absence, to the extent that it inflects Bewes’s wondering whether “the very acknowledgement of shame at the history of colonialism [is] a shameful act, destined further to expand the circuit of shame” (Event 12). Brooks’s swerving in various examples of her writing from the history of her original country, while largely invisible, is not because of ignorance. The relation of Caleb’s Crossing to Australian history could hardly remain invisible to an Australian reader, and Brooks admits in interview with Marylynne Pitz that [w]hile researching Caleb’s life, as an Australian, she felt she was on a bit of a moral holiday. ‘I have to bear the guilt of colonial treatment of aborigines in Australia. That’s my particular burden of guilt. I prospered off the backs of the mistreatment of that particular group.’ (2013)4 Brooks’s admission of her “guilt” here is proximate to the common lexical area of “shame,” but this locates it in her individual psychology, a different site to that of her books, in which the connection is nowhere explicit, making them also operate as types of palimpsest written over older texts (in terms of Brooks’s cultural origins) of injustice and dispossession. The disposition of Aboriginal bodies, territories and objects throughout Australian history has been so disturbing to recent discourses in Australian culture that it is impossible for anyone minimally in contact with the country not to have been exposed and sensitized to the rupture they represent with earlier narratives of pioneering and colonial energy. No one in Australia at present is unaware of the challenge to these narratives. Few people, other than, ironically, very recent immigrants, do not have a strong opinion on these matters, or do not feel they have to either aid in the process of recalibrating relations with the country’s original peoples or vociferously reject what they feel as an unjust imposition of blame and moral authority. Among other things, this is strongly contrasted with the situation in America where it is the interface between two non-originary peoples, Europeans and Africans, that constitutes the principal arena of arguments about unequal histories and current relative entitlements. As John Carlos Rowe points out, “It goes without saying that in the contemporary US Native Americans remain the

4 Brooks’s encounter with Aboriginal cultures is most clearly apparent in “Letter from Australia: The Painted Desert,” published in the New Yorker in 2003.

American Postcolonial Shame  173 repressed contents of an imperial cultural consciousness that has only recently been addressed directly.” And yet, as Rowe goes on, too little of this scholarly attention has been devoted to the ways in which native peoples have been rendered invisible both in the material practices of US genocide (‘Manifest Destiny’) and in the complementary cultural hierarchies for proper social self-representation (the ‘cultural symbolic’). (197) Brooks would no doubt object to my situating her work in the gap of shame by suggesting that she is writing about America because she cannot write about specific aspects of Australian history, but I hope it is clear by now that this is not supposed to be a criticism of her work, any more than it is of Bewes. My argument throughout this chapter has attempted rather to make both critic’s and creative writers’ work more provocative, to insert them into debates about postcolonial narrative from the perspective of the still new theoretical motor given traction by Bewes. Perhaps, also, to reprise Bewes’s own self-conscious brokering of his case at the outset of The Event of Postcolonial Shame, it is my desire for the rewriting of certain roles in the history of my own colonizing ancestors, a desire that can never be satisfied under current dispensations. This makes this essay a mark of my own insertion into postcolonial shame, which, insofar as it appears in this text, “is a gap, an absence, an experience that is incongruous with its own acknowledgment” (Event 2). That is, I will be able to acknowledge but never be able to decode myself past this shame, and it is possibly the very current awareness of this that is why all of Bewes’s examples are contemporary writers. Any phase of earlier postcolonial writers or proto-postcolonial writers coming into shame, as it were, is unexamined in his work, one more avenue for others to explore in the light of Bewes’s theorizations. The awkwardness of early American Indian writings in which what were then more alien forms to their authors were put at the service of incompatible concepts within the same work is a case in point, writings such as those of the Pequot William Apess or the mixed-heritage Muscogee Alice Callahan, writings that are much more formally problematic than Marshall’s comfortably accomplished realism. Bewes’s necessarily unbroachable frontier of shame calls forth responses in which writers in many more registers than those exemplified in The Event of Postcolonial Shame find themselves in company with a mixed bag of others who have also failed to cross the frontier, warming hands at a communal textual fire of those who are aware that the frontier is there, but necessarily unable to traverse it (for that would imply colonizing history had been tidied away, its colonizing effects superseded), out of which emerges some of the most subtle, prickly, and intriguing writing of the event of postcolonial American shame. And that includes Bewes’s own work itself.

174  David Callahan

Works Cited Apess, William. 1992. On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot. Edited by Barry O’Connell. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Augé, Marc. 1999. The War of Dreams: Studies in Ethno-Fiction. Translated by Liz Heron. London: Pluto P. Barnard, Rita. 2012. “Ugly Feelings, Negative Dialectics: Reflections on Postapartheid Shame.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 13 (1–2): 151–170. Bewes, Timothy. 2007. “Against the Ontology of the Present: Paul Auster’s ­Cinematographic Fictions.” Twentieth-Century Literature 53 (3): 273–297. ———. 2011. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. ———. 2011. “The Call to Intimacy and the Shame Effect.” differences 22 (1): 1–16. Brooks, Geraldine. 1998. Foreign Correspondence. Moorebank: Doubleday. ———. 2003. “Letter from Australia: The Painted Desert.” New Yorker, 28 July. www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/07/28/030728fa_fact4?currentPage= all (accessed 26 January 2018). ———. 2005. March. New York: Viking Penguin. ———. 2011. Caleb’s Crossing. New York: Viking Penguin. Bruckner, Pascal. 2010. The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism. Translated by Steven Rendall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Brydon, Diana. 1991. “The White Inuit Speaks.” In Past the Last Post: ­Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, edited by Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, 191–203. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Buell, Lawrence. 2000. “Postcolonial Anxiety in Classic U.S. Literature.” In Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, edited by Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, 196–219. Jackson: U P of Mississippi, (Revised 1992). Byrd, Jodi. 2011. Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. ­M inneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Callahan, S. Alice. 1997. Wynema: A Child of the Forest. (1899). Edited by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. Cheyfitz, Eric. 2002. “The (Post)Colonial Predicament of Native American Studies.” Interventions 4 (3): 405–427. Churchill, Ward. 2003. On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality. Oakland, CA: AK P. Collingwood-Whittick, Sheila. 2007. “Introduction.” In The Pain of ­Unbelonging: Alienation and Identity in Australasian Literature, edited by Sheila Collingwood-Whittick, xiii–xliii. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Deloria Jr, Vine. 1997. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact. Golden, CO: Fulcrum. Harlow, Barbara. 1987. Resistance Literature. New York: Methuen. Hurtado, Aida, and Abigail J. Stewart. 1997. “Through the Looking Glass: Implications of Studying Whiteness for Feminist Methods.” In Off White:

American Postcolonial Shame  175 Readings on Race, Power, and Society, edited by Michelle Fine et al., 297– 311. New York: Routledge. Kirmayer, Laurence J., Joseph P. Gone, and Joshua Moses. 2014. “Rethinking Historical Trauma.” Transcultural Psychiatry 51(3): 299–319. Konkle, Maureen. 2000. “Indian Literacy, U.S. Colonialism, and Literary Criticism.” In Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, edited by Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, 151–175. Jackson: U P of Mississippi. Langley, Tom. 2013. “Timothy Bewes: The Event of Postcolonial Shame.” ­Interventions 15 (1): 141–143. Leys, Ruth. 2007. From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Madsen, Deborah L. (ed.). 1999. Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon. London: Pluto P. Marshall III, Joseph. 1995. “An Indian Viewpoint of History.” In On Behalf of the Wolf and the First Peoples, 65–92. Santa Fe, NM: Red Crane. ———. 2007. The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn: A Lakota History. New York: Penguin. ———. 2007. Hundred in the Hand: A Novel. Golden, CO: Fulcrum. ———. 2008. The Long Knives Are Crying: A Novel. Golden, CO: Fulcrum. Morgan, Michael. 2008. On Shame. London: Routledge. Olick, Jeffrey. 2007. The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. New York: Routledge. Owens, Louis. 1998. Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman: U of Oklahoma P. ———. 1992. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: U of Oklahoma P. Pitz, Marylynne. 2013. “Preview: Father’s Reading to Author Geraldine Brooks Planted Seeds for Writing.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. April 8. www.post-­gazette.com/ae/books/2013/04/08/Preview-Father-s-reading-toauthor-­G eraldine-Brooks-planted-seeds-for-writing/stories/ 201304080134 (accessed 13 April 2017). Rowe, John Carlos. 2004. “Buried Alive: the Native American Political Unconscious in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction.” Postcolonial Studies 7 (2): 202–203. Scheff, Thomas. 2014. “The Ubiquity of Hidden Shame in Modernity.” Cultural Sociology 8 (2): 129–41. Scott, Kim. 2010. That Deadman Dance. Sydney: Pan McMillan. Smiley, Jane. 2011. “Geraldine Brooks’s Pilgrims and Indians.” New York Times: Sunday Book Review, May 13. www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/books/ review/book-review-calebs-crossing-by-geraldine-brooks.html?pagewanted= all&_r=0 (accessed 13 April 2017). Smith, Paul Chaat. 2011. “Book World: Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks.” Washington Post, April 29. www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/ book-world-calebs-crossing-by-geraldine-brooks/2011/04/22/AFdKyv8E _ story.html (accessed 13 April 2017). Weaver, Jace. 1997. The People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community. New York: Oxford UP. Womack, Craig. 1999. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.

8 “Like solemn Afro-Greeks avid for grades” Individual and Historical Shame in Walcott’s Earlier Poetry Angelo Righetti Dealing with a multifaceted artist such as Derek Walcott poses more questions than can be answered in a short essay, however much one may try to be comprehensive. From his childhood and early manhood Walcott envisions the vocations to be a poet and a painter, and the partial fulfilment of the latter yearning is his craftsmanship in watercolour techniques. Actually, many of them figure on the front cover of his collections, while Tiepolo’s Hound is illustrated with 26 full-page watercolours about St. Lucia’s sea- and landscapes matching the frequent verbal paintings of the island, analytically descriptive and/or densely metaphorical.1 In Walcott’s literary output poetry and drama run parallel, and in the latter field, he was successful as both a playwright and a stage director in St. Lucia, Trinidad, and later on in New York, as well as in Boston, where he was Professor of English and creative writing in the 1980s and 1990s until 2007. Moreover, the work of the prose writer – ­freelance journalist, book reviewer, critic, and keynote speaker at international conferences (Hamner 1993, 410–430) – actively participates in the heated debate over colonial and postcolonial issues, and some of his essays remain hallmarks of a constant intellectual and ‘political’ commitment (The Muse of History, What the Twilight Says, The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?, Caligula’s Horse, and, last not least his Nobel Prize speech, The Antilles. Fragments of Epic Memory). Bruce King’s ‘official’ biography of Walcott, published in 2000, witnesses to a lifetime attachment to his birthplace island and signposts his migrations to the United States, whereas other Caribbean writers of his generation found their way to England, allegedly still ‘home’, either in 1 I owe a debt of gratitude to Anna Walcott-Hardy and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, literary executors of the Derek Walcott Estate, for granting me permission to quote from the works. Hereafter for the titles of Walcott’s collections abbreviations will be used, followed by page numbers: 25 P (25 Poems,1948); EY (Epitaph for the Young, 1949); P (Poems, 1951); CP (Collected Poems, 1986); AL (Another Life, 1973), but quotations, followed by line numbers, will be from the text edited by E. Baugh and C. Nepaulsingh, 2004.

Shame in Walcott’s Earlier Poetry  177 search of a job (Sam Selvon, James Berry, Andrew Salkey, and George Lamming) or on scholarships towards tertiary education (foremost among them V.S. Naipaul and E.K. Brathwaite). By earlier poetry I mean the output up to 1973, the year of Walcott’s autobiographical poem, Another Life, a watershed in the poet’s career, with its distinctly narrative approach, a counterpoint to the lyrical substance of his many earlier and later books. The narrative structure of “The Schooner Flight” (1977), Omeros (1990), and Tiepolo’s Hound (2000) goes to confirm a statement of poetic intent he voiced as early as 1958 relating to a sequence of ten sonnets, “Tales of the Islands” (1958), later included in In a Green Night (1962): What I have been trying over the years is to get a certain factual biographical plainness about [my poems]. […] I suppose the idea is to do away with the prerogative of modern prose in narration […] The idea is the same as in prose: dispassionate observation (Baugh 2006, 38). And in a much later interview he confirmed the idea: “I’m trying to find a natural link between prose and poetry” (Hutchinson 2015, 175). Both statements have a Flaubertian-Joycean ring to them, while more recent collections record journeys through physical and mental landscapes – The Prodigal (2004) and White Egrets (2010) – or are deeply elegiac: The Bounty (1997), and his leave-taking, testamentary book, Morning, Paramin (2016). Self-publication characterizes Walcott’s earliest period between 1946 and 1951 – in succession: 25 Poems (1948), Epitaph for the Young (1949): and Poems (1951). It should be noted, though, as an indication of precocious self-criticism – almost a rejection of his apprenticeship – that only six poems out of the earliest collections (1948 and 1951) were selected for inclusion in In a Green Night 1948–1960, the first trade edition of his poetry, published by Cape in London in 1962. The choice was confirmed in the ‘authorized’ Collected Poems 1948–1984 (1986) and in The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 (Maxwell 2014), where 7 poems appeared from 25 Poems, and 5 were added from Poems 1951. Epitaph for the Young (1949) was apparently forgotten about and allowed to be published only in a special issue of the English poetry journal Agenda, dedicated to Walcott (2002–2003, 15–50: quotations and page numbers from this edition). Besides being, roughly, the first draft of an autobiography or a passionate, agonized cartoon of a Künstler/Bildungsroman in verse, Epitaph for the Young – subtitled XII Cantos – points to an ambitious however adolescent epic design starting from the central voyage metaphor. Also, Epitaph for the Young looks like the record or log book of an omnivorous reader of poetry in English (not forgetting the ‘poetic’ prose of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses),

178  Angelo Righetti French (with Baudelaire having pride of place), and Italian, Dante in particular, among the classics, all of whom are variously appropriated. In addition, as a sign of Walcott’s affiliations with modernism, the poem often exhibits echoes of Eliot’s experiments especially, absorbed with a young practitioner’s attitude divided between homage and outrageous parody (Brown 1991, 15; Fumagalli 2002–2003, 70; Hamner 1993; 21–34; Ismond 2001, 17–26; Pollard 2004, 9–10; Thieme 1999, 24–41): We had had enough of the Lady on the promontory, Figlia del tuo figlio. (EY 27) verging sometimes on the dithyrambic or the sophomoric, or both when drawing on The Hollow Men or Ash-Wednesday: This is the place This is the I say the Word only to those who hear, and who are not here to hear. (EY 36) And yet, under the various masks Walcott deliberately wears as a virtuoso performer of imitation of, allusion to, and contradiction and defiance of favourite poets and vogues, autobiographical overtones crop up of shame and disgust at age-old, ingrained racism in the colonial Caribbean and the humiliations he suffers owing to the colour of his skin, the mark of his mulatto origin, especially when confronting with attraction to, and nearly inevitable rejection by, the white blonde: […] Our first love Is always unrequited since the passion Has no proportion, green and indigestible… […] Gold hair divides the wind, but was no different, She being hurt and hurter. (EY 20–21) Further on in the poem the white female is represented by the image of an objet d’art, emphasizing again difference in skin colour and class status, adding to the frustration of ever-surfacing black male desire, and weaving into the lines an allusion to the Gospel’s parable of the prodigal son overlapping a reminiscence of Odysseus’ faithful Eumaeus: The brittle china shepherdess holds Her crook like a question sign, asks Why your complexion should have held you from me. You in the castle of your skin, I the swineherd. (EY 21)

Shame in Walcott’s Earlier Poetry  179 Young Walcott, who seems to have introjected a dream of whiteness, must face the shaming issue of different shades of blackness still at work – namely, the contagion of racial prejudice spread by the colonizer, affecting the descendants of the slaves in the now multiethnic Caribbean community: The burden of my people, first They would shed the racial pride and marry well, That the child may not be darker than the father. (EY 23) Moreover, touching on the chances of climbing the social ladder in a colonial society, Walcott – writing half-way between a poetic persona and in propria persona – has a keen eye on the third-class careers offered to brilliant black Caribbean arts graduates in a declining but die-hard British Empire, as one can see from a passage emotionally and tonally echoing Pound’s Mauberley (“There died a myriad. / And of the best”). The following lines reveal the horror of a prospective mimicry about to become second nature and trigger the poet’s sarcasm about the gap between effort, expectation, and achievement, often ending in tragedy. Here shame and the sense of an undignified treatment educated black youngsters undergo are gradually and psychologically preparing to turn into the meditated savage indignation of later years: They left school and some became Magna cum laude, Companions of inanity, knights of the order of rotgut, Others, desiring the unguent of fame, The sick ego, posturing to be applauded, Exhibited an Attic balance, were rewarded With demands for drawing posters, recitations, not what They had expected of an age of reason. They too succumbed in the wavering season Between forty and dying. Died most as Suppressor of His Majesty’s Conscience in the Colonies, Inspector of Civil Service lavatories. Vulgar, respectable, horrid at home, in the Forum, blest As fathers of their countries. Voucher and Report undid them, dulce et indecorum est – Attaché to the Assistant Attaché. Requiescat in papier. (EY 24) The 1951 Poems continue in the vein of thinly veiled autobiographical sketches relating to a three-year residence in Jamaica where Walcott has moved to read for a BA degree in English, French, and Latin at

180  Angelo Righetti the University College of the West Indies, a branch of the University of London. His life as a student in Jamaica features the exile’s alienation matching the dissatisfaction with the politics of a major Caribbean island that is testing self-government in preparation for independence, but above all having to tackle the negative influence of American moneyed tourism on the moral fibre of its inhabitants. Through repeated antiphrastic exhortations the poet notices that the renewed disgrace and degradation of servile attitudes both of those in power and of ordinary people is paving the way for a dollar-based corrupt and corrupting neocolonialism: Montego Bay – Travelogue II Hang out the flags, the assassins of culture come, Wrapped in the hundred thousand dollar charm; Whisk them all safely to the crisp hotel, Flatter them well. […] Let the picturesque fisherman’s picturesque poverty be Willing to row them to the cay Where Christopher kneeled […] Let the black hand of the tiller instruct the yachts Of the blonde’s desire to avoid the spittled rocks, Throw a coin nearer the propellers to see if the divEr returns alive. (P 6–7) That the policies of Jamaican politicians are in no way different from those of the former British masters in their lack of a moral or intellectual dimension is made clear in the poem The Statesman, a bravura performance that refashions a passage from Don Juan dealing with Byron’s personal ad hominem anti-romantic polemics and flaunting a blasphemous parody of the ten commandments: “Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope / Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey; / Because the first is crazed beyond all hope, / The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthey” (I, 1633–1636). Walcott translates a literary controversy into an ethically based political critique (the reversed commandments), and Byron’s aesthetic authoritativeness is curbed to enhance the forcefulness of the invective: The Statesman Thou shalt believe in freedom […] Thou shalt by bribes seduce the truth […] Thou shalt explain emancipation

Shame in Walcott’s Earlier Poetry  181 By a quotation From CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY2 […] Thou shalt not quite conceal complexion By a selection Of mistresses, cocktails, cliches […] Thou to the thief Shalt be the 7th commandment cut in stone, And to the ignorant thou alone Shalt be belief. (P 8–9) Erotic Pastoral, a poem addressed by a black would-be lover to his white (“snowy skin”) ‘coy mistress’, is intriguing in that through a conative refrain (“put away”) he renews his invitation to the young lady to yield to his emotional plea, although for her the match is anathema as it carries the taint of “miscegenation”. The male black addresser is conscious of the issue at stake, but in the end instead of insisting on romance to attain fruition, he surrenders by giving the final lines a metaphysical twist (yet again with an oblique homage to Eliot and, ultimately, Donne) whereby eros and thanatos seem to merge: Put away posture and part, Souvenirs that time stores Make a pawnshop of the heart, Hope’s bric-à-brac, chastity gee-gaws, Time’s milestones of bald skulls show where all moves. Put away talk of time, Love builds its own clock, Dust stuffs the mouth of rhyme […] Put away thoughts of race, First in the idle woods Love built the garden before genetics broke. There’s no pride nor disgrace In skins where the worm broods. The first miscegenation that time spoke Was when the skin wed dust, the bone in the womb’s groove. (P 25)

2 That is, the significant and controversial book by Eric Williams, Trinidadian historian and later Prime Minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago, published in 1944.

182  Angelo Righetti In Letter to Margaret racism seems to triumph again, despite the community’s cricket match ritual in which, as spectators, “children, women with blonde hair”; and white, Asian, and black people participate and mix, as if unaware of discrimination, And cricketers, advancing before the language of applause, Are cheered by yellow, pink, black hands, Suspiciously united in one cause, (P 26) – yet the evidence remains both of the degrading poverty and ignorance of the black majority: […] Barefoot Black laughter from those who cannot understand The wrongs of the social ladder, (id.) and, looking from the white side, there’s no escaping the fact that some sort of apartheid is practised by The blonde who shrivels when a seat Is taken [by] The nigger she will not eat near to. (id.) In spite of its dramatic original title, Margaret Verlieu Dies is marked by a sour-sweet approach later toned down when the poem was re-titled A Country Club Romance, in a slightly revised version, and finally published in the collection In a Green Night (1962). In the earlier text ­Margaret, a white blonde, and Harris, a black Barbadian, sharing a passion for tennis, settle down for a brief spell, but pretty soon their marriage falls apart. The failed romance is told ironically to warn white women against pairing off with black men as well as to suggest that black men are not entitled to infringe the colour bar – but, significantly enough – in the earlier version the couple “were ostracised”, whereas in the later one “she was ostracised” (my emphasis), i.e. the worst consequences of miscegenation fall on white women who should learn from Margaret’s disastrous example: The summer slams the sun All year, and Margaret Verlieu Made, as her friends had done Of tennis, a deuxième métier. […] Gold as Fort Knox her hair, Her eyes were blue as ponds, Her vigour, tanned and bare

Shame in Walcott’s Earlier Poetry  183 Was pure as Govt. Bonds. She drove out to the Club, For a bathe, a Coke, and a tan, She smoked, but vowed never to stub Herself on any man. The club was glamour and Paris, The lawns, Arcadian, Until at a tourney, Harris Met her, a black Barbadian. Love has its little revenges, Love whom man has devised; They wed and lay down like Slazengers Together and were ostracised. (P 32) […] And the blondes pray God to “teach us To profit from her mistake”. (P 33) The North Coast at Night signals a turn in Walcott’s reconsideration of the disgraceful burden of racial prejudice towards a deeper historical consciousness implied by the use of ‘we’ – a communal persona’s lashing response to the “gull” – a metaphor of reason and reconciliation between whites and blacks, and the natural representative of near-­ impossible peaceable solutions to be brought about by an anti-historical acquittal of the slave-drivers’ heirs; no forgiveness can be envisaged – blacks ought to “give back scorn for scorn” – as no idea of justice based on human dignity can be shared with “those whom an accident / of lust has bred in pink”: What history cannot instruct Is healing, and how not to hate The white hands’ usufruct Of slavery. “To be great”, The gull screams, “learn to absolve us”. We must learn not to love Those whom an accident Of lust has bred in pink, The gull’s impeccable tint. We must be ignorant And give back scorn for scorn (P 40) A Far Cry from Africa and Ruins of a Great House, two poems from In a Green Night written in the mid-1950s present a further development in Walcott’s reflections on the historical aporias of colonialism and imperialism, and their inherent, shaming inhumanity. The former agonizingly confronts the current Mau Mau liberation movement in Kenya, a

184  Angelo Righetti forerunner of decolonization in Africa; the latter offers a variation on the classic motif of the “ruins of time”, but the remains of the embodied emblem of the slave system in the Caribbean are still felt as an unhealed wound, an unforgiven and unforgivable abuse of power. In A Far Cry from Africa the poet foregrounds the atrocities of both fighting parties, while empathizing with the right of a people to claim freedom and independence: in the final part of the poem “compassion” embraces all the victims and helps him overcome his inner split (African descent vs English legacy) metaphorically represented by the battle between the “gorilla” – that is the insurgents’ guerrilla warfare – and the “superman”, namely the destructive power of imperialist retaliation: The gorilla wrestles with the superman. I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein, I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they give? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live? (CP 18) In Ruins of a Great House a consciousness of the wrongs of colonization and imperial rule, and the shame embedded in them, is conveyed by reference to disease, decomposition, and death – even an ordinary natural tropical image, the “lime”, is “rotting” – and Walcott insists on a lexis dramatically opposed to an environment of paradisal beauty. Musing on the descending parabola of the British Empire whose criminal project over the centuries has been passed off as the civilizing mission of Christianity, the poetic persona, “ablaze with rage”, thinks he hears What Kipling heard, the death of a great empire, the abuse Of ignorance by Bible and by sword, (CP 20) and then indicts three historical slave-drivers, identified as “ancestral murderers and poets” – who stand for a tragic, oxymoronic association of ethics (denied) and aesthetics (practised) – by conjuring up the scene of the Middle Passage permeated by feelings of disgust and execration (“ulcerous crime”, “stench”, and “charnel galleon”): Of men like Hawkins, Raleigh, Drake, Ancestral murderers and poets, more perplexed In memory now by every ulcerous crime. The world’s green age then was a rotting lime Whose stench became the charnel galleon’s text. (Id.)

Shame in Walcott’s Earlier Poetry  185 The harrowing memory of the Middle Passage, the original sin indelibly imprinted on the Caribbean, haunts Walcott in many of his poems of the 1960s and 1970s as a reminder of the slaughter of the islands’ Arawak natives and the exploitation of African slaves, to whom the gospel of Christ’s redemption of all men was preached, despite the patent denial of faith, hope, and charity. The fictional figures of Crusoe, the white, European, Christian master, and Friday, the black savage African turned into a slave of Western colonization, characterize Crusoe’s Island (1964), and within the discourse of colonial and postcolonial shame the emphasis is laid on “Friday’s progeny, / The brood of Crusoe’s slave” evolving into the epiphany of Caribbean beauty and a cure for the desolate shipwrecked and castaway Englishman: Black little girls in pink Organdy, crinolines, Walk in their air of glory Beside a breaking wave; Below their feet the surf Hisses like tambourines. (CP 72) In Crusoe’s Journal (1965), in a more dubitative mood the accomplishment of Crusoe’s mission is confronted with the questionable symbolic bearing of two sacraments, baptism and communion, central to Methodism, Walcott’s inherited version of Christianity and never wholly rejected – but they are mockingly rehearsed by the poetic persona, identified as a discerning, sceptical present-day Friday for whom faith belongs with “fantasies / of innocence”. It is significant, though, to notice that the first person plural “we” makes the rites into shared experience, in which the limits of subjectivity appear suspended for a moment, as if the shame of mimicking (“parroting”) imposed Christianity could be paradoxically redeemed by conveying the sense of an attempt at creating a spiritually regenerated community: like Christofer3 he bears in speech mnemonic as a missionary’s the Word to savages, its shape an earthen water-bearing vessel’s whose sprinkling alters us into Good Fridays who recite His praise, parroting our master’s style and voice, we make his language ours,

3 That is, Columbus.

186  Angelo Righetti converted cannibals we learn with him to eat the flesh of Christ. (CP 93, my emphasis) Laventille, from The Castaway and Other Poems (1965), the site of the destitute black population living on the hills east of Port-of-Spain, centres on a winding, excruciating line of thought, the intellectual counterpart of a physical ascent. And yet, from the detailed description of a degraded and degrading favela, the drive uphill ends up representing a socio-historical catabasis or descent into a hell of shame. Possibly on a trip there to be the godfather of a child about to be christened in the shanty’s parish church, the poetic I, looking at Laventille’s overcrowded shacks, sees in its inhabitants […] the inheritors of the middle passage stewed, five to a room, still clamped below their hatch, breeding like felonies, (CP 86) and a deep emotional involvement – emphasized by the same key-words painting the condition of captured Africans on a slave ship (“stewed”, “clamped”, and “hatch”) – brings back the shameful history of European whites criminally “inflicting pain” (A Far Cry from Africa), lasting to this day: The middle passage never guessed its end. This is the height of poverty for the desperate and black, (Id.) whose children “with rachitic bones” are “rescued from original sin” though their prospective lives will still “revolve round prison, graveyard, church”, as they are […] fixed in the unalterable groove of grinding poverty. (Id. 88) […] Something inside is laid wide like a wound, some open passage that has cleft the brain, some deep, amnesiac blow. We left somewhere a life we never found, customs and gods that are not born again, (Id.) – the two lines just quoted mark a distance from the poetics and practice of Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite, who promotes the search for retrieving and re-integrating African cultural roots into the Caribbean, questioned among others by Louise Bennett’s humorous poem

Shame in Walcott’s Earlier Poetry  187 dealing with creolization / métissage as a positively defining trait of the Caribbean: Back to Africa Back to Africa, Miss Mattie? You no know wha you dah seh? You haf fe come from somewhe fus Before you go back deh! Me know say dat you great great great Granma was African, But, Mattie, doan you great great great Granpa was Englishman? Den you great granmader fader By you fader side was Jew? An you granpa by you mader side Was Frenchie parlez-vous?4 Exile is a code word, explicit or implicit, for Walcott who knows and feels he belongs to the African diaspora in the Caribbean. Exile marks again and again his life and poetry, if one observes his departures for Jamaica, Grenada, Trinidad, and the United States, especially from the 1970s onwards. And yet the return to St. Lucia is the inescapable landfall of his nostos, not unlike Odysseus’ Ithaca, only to realize – as, for instance, in Homecoming: Anse La Raye – that he is mistaken for one of those hated and despised American tourists formerly labelled as “the assassins of culture”. The sinuous, intricate syntax of a dazzling one-period incipit extends for 23 lines: Whatever else we learned at school, like solemn Afro-Greeks eager for grades, of Helen and the shades of borrowed ancestors, there are no rites for those who have returned, (CP 127) […] […] sugar-headed children race pelting up from the shallows because your clothes, your posture seem a tourist’s. They swarm like flies round your heart’s sore, (Id. 127–128)

4 Cp. Paula Burnett (ed.) The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1986, 31.

188  Angelo Righetti plunging the poetic I into a depressing bout of shame since he is felt as an alien in his birthplace. The black kids who surround him vainly expecting coins give him the unwanted welcome of indifference, a shock of non-recognition. As often happens with Walcott when an ethical issue is at stake the narrative of the incident is woven with quotes from the Gospel working as a subtext: one consistent with the scene, but with its meaning turned upside down: “Suffer them to come to me” addressed by Jesus to his disciples on behalf of little children that surround him; the other, “entering your needle’s eye” suggesting that the poet, being a success story, perhaps behaves now as the rich who can hardly deserve entering heaven (St. Lucia?): for once, like them, you wanted no career but this sheer light, this clear, boring, paradisal sea, but hoped it would mean something to declare today, I am your poet, yours, (Id. 128) with an ultimate disconsolate reflection: all this you knew, but never guessed you’d come to know there are homecomings without home. You give them nothing. Their curses melt in air. (Id.) Shame is a fil rouge connecting Another Life (1973) with texts written and published by the poet from the late 1940s through the 1960s and selectively discussed in this essay. In the four books of the autobiographical poem, partly anticipated by the short memoir in prose, Leaving School (1965), Walcott returns to the central motif of racial prejudice frustrating and shaming the love story between a young mulatto (“The dream / of reason had produced its monster: a prodigy of the wrong age and colour”, 21–23) and a 16-year-old girl, Ann/Anna/Andreuille, “of the peach-furred body” (1406). The poetic persona rehearses again the pain of rejection from the girlie’s father on racist grounds. The subjective and the objective, the personal and the collective, mingle right from the beginning of the narrative: “a generation yearned / for whiteness, unreturned” (51–52), but, worse, this implies an introjection of self-­contempt and in the last analysis, self-hatred: “He had prayed / nightly for his flesh to change, / his dun flesh peeled white” (107–109). The I of the poem finds himself in a double bind: the “divided child” of the first book is wavering between the contrasting vocations of poetry and painting, and shares in perspective the dilemmas of the artist in the Caribbean,

Shame in Walcott’s Earlier Poetry  189 aware as he is of his worth as well as of the scorn from the natives for whatever lies outside everyday, banal island experience. A ‘portrait of the poet as a young man’ mirrors those of his painter-friend Dunstan (St. Omer), and the prospect of failure that leads to drunkenness and social irresponsibility, or to tragedy, as is the case with Walcott’s mentor Harold (Simmons) who takes his life owing to non-recognition at home. While appreciating Dunstan’s art in making Caribbean people and natural background come alive in his painting, the budding poet apparently finds reasons for shame in the adoption of a tradition imposed by the colonizer on the Caribbean: I had entered the house of literature as a houseboy, filched as the slum boy stole, as the young slave appropriated those heirlooms temptingly left with the Victorian homilies of Noli tangere. (AL 1835–1839) A new vocabulary identifying the natural elements of St. Lucia is rescued to counter the shame of colonization, and to respond to the visual-­ auditory appeal of the “mundo nuevo” that needs to be “christened” in order not to recede into historical “amnesia” (non existence): For no one had yet written of this landscape that it was possible, though there were sounds given to its varieties of wood; the bois-canot responded to its echo, when the axe spoke, weeds ran up to the knee like bastard children, hiding in their names, whole generations died, unchristened, growths hidden in green darkness, forests of history thickening with amnesia, (AL 1215–1223) and poetry is seen as the blessing of “Adam’s task of giving things their name” (3627) in the Caribbean Eden before the colonial project rounds off the shameful, obscene destruction of its features towards a tourist exploitation of the islands. Another way of facing shame and forestalling the amnesia brought about by centuries of slavery is to be found in a return to the natives’ history. Adult Walcott’s renewed consciousness that the history taught at school has never regarded Caribbean people involves some kind of redemption through a search for Arawak historical roots and by revisiting in nation language the nature of the mulatto’s double ancestry ending in the rejection of both his grandfathers: the “whining” white one who pretends to ignore the wrongs of Empire, and the black one whose “groans” are understood and recognized only to

190  Angelo Righetti claim justice for the future without forgiving the past and forgetting the present. A final passage deserves singling out where images are appropriated from Dante’s Inferno to focus on Walcott’s growing impatience with some tenets of third-worldism. A symptomatic instance of it is the rejection of the European names originally given to slaves and the adoption of invented African ones, a disgusting way of erasing the atrocious history of the Caribbean on a par with the mean stature of its politicians, and the shameful corruption of the current state of politics in the Caribbean islands. Here the autobiographer reprises and recapitulates attitudes and moods expressed over 25 years earlier in Poems (1951) – especially after the winding up of the short-lived Federation of the West Indies – and his saeva indignatio is strengthened by a shrewd use of the vernacular (or, to use E.K. Brathwaite’s words, the nation language): I enclose in this circle of hell, in the stench of their own sulphur of self-hatred, in the steaming scabrous rocks Soufrière, in the boiling, pustular volcanos of the South, all o’ dem big boys, so, dem ministers, minister of culture, minister of development, the green blacks, and their old toms, and all the syntactical apologists of the Third World explaining why all their artists die by their own hands, magicians of the New Vision. Screaming the same shit. Those who peel, from their leprous flesh, their names, who chafe and nurture the scars of rusted chains, like primates favouring scabs, those who charge tickets for another free ride on the middle passage, those who explain to the peasant why he is African, (AL 2942–57, my emphasis) These lines are coeval with The Muse of History (1974), an extremely important prose essay where Walcott takes issue with the mainstream of the critical debate on postcolonial history (probably influenced by revolutionary Cuban intellectuals): The New World servitude to the muse of history has produced a literature of recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants of the slaves or a literature of remorse written by the descendants of the masters, (Walcott 1998, 37) and a passage from Midsummer, LI (1984, no indication of page numbers) – partly autobiography and partly historical reflection – apparently

Shame in Walcott’s Earlier Poetry  191 sums up Walcott’s poetic itinerary in which personal history in, and History of the Caribbean are still a sore point, together with a caveat for the worshippers of literary theory that dreads being time-and-place specific: Since all of your work was really an effort to appease the past, a need to be admitted among your peers, let the inheritors question the sybil and the Sphinx, and learn that a raceless critic is a primate’s dream. You were distressed by your habitat, you shall not find peace till you and your origins reconcile; your jaw must droop and your knuckles scrape the ground of your native place. (my emphasis)

Works Cited Baugh, Edward. 2006. Derek Walcott. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Brown, Stuart (ed.).1991, The Art of Derek Walcott. Bridgend: Seren Books. Burnett, Paula (ed.). 1986, The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Fumagalli, Maria Cristina. 2002–2003. “Epitaph for the Young: Culture or Mimicry?” Agenda 39: 51–76. Hamner, Robert D. (ed.). 1993. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington, DC: Three Continents P. Hutchinson, Ishion. 2015. “A Voice at the Edge of the Sea: An Interview with Derek Walcott”. Virginia Quarterly Review 91 (1): 172–175. Ismond, Patricia. 2001. Abandoning Dead Metaphors. The Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott’s Poetry. Kingston, Jamaica: U of the West Indies P. King, Bruce. 2000. Derek Walcott. A Caribbean Life. Oxford: Oxford UP. Pollard, Charles W. 2004. New World Modernisms. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P. Thieme, John. 1999. Derek Walcott. Manchester: Manchester UP. Walcott, Derek. 1948. 25 Poems. Port-of-Spain, Trinidad: Guardian Commercial Printery. ———. 1949. Epitaph for the Young. A Poem in Twelve Cantos. Bridgetown, Barbados: Advocate Co. (reprinted in Agenda 2002–2003 M.C. Fumagalli Guest Editor: 39, 15–50). ———. 1951. Poems. Kingston, Jamaica: City Printery. ———. 1958. “Tales of the Islands.” In In a Green Night. Poems 1948–1960. 1962. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1962. In a Green Night. Poems 1948–1960. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1964. “Crusoe’s Island.” In The Castaway and Other Poems. 1965. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1965. “Crusoe’s Journal.” In The Castaway and Other Poems. 1965. London: Jonathan Cape. ———.1965. “Leaving School.” London Magazine 5 (6): 4–14. ———. 1965. The Castaway and Other Poems. London: Jonathan Cape.

192  Angelo Righetti ———. 1973. Another Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1974. “The Muse of History.” In Is Massa Day Dead?, edited by Orde Coombs. 1–28. Garden City (NY): Doubleday. ———. 1974. “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16 (1): 3–13. ———. 1977. “The Schooner Flight.” In The Star-Apple Kingdom. 1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1979. The Star-Apple Kingdom. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1984. Midsummer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1986. Collected Poems 1948–1984. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1989. “Caligula’s Horse.” Kunapipi 11 (1): 138–142. ———. 1990. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1993. Fragments of Epic Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1997. The Bounty. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1998. What the Twilight Says. Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 2000. Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 2004. Another Life. Fully Annotated. Edited by Edward Baugh and Colbert Nepaulsingh. Boulder, CO and London: Rienner Publishers. ———. 2004. The Prodigal. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 2010. White Egrets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 2014. The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013, selected by Glyn ­Maxwell, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 2016. Morning, Paramin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

9 Shame, Justice, and the Representation of Violence in Postcolonial Literature The Case of Caryl Phillips Vincent van Bever Donker Shame is commonly understood as a moral emotion. Defined by the ­Oxford English Dictionary as “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behaviour”, it reflects a (frequently) individual moral commitment (what Lévinas describes as an inescapable commitment) both to ourselves and the ­ethical complexities we negotiate. As such, it is an intricate and productive concept for exploring those complexities and difficulties in the scene of writing as well as within narrative lives. The understanding of shame developed by Timothy Bewes in The Event of Postcolonial Shame (2011), however, inscribes it as the depersonalised figure of the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in literature more generally, and postcolonial literature in particular. My goal in this essay is to dislodge Bewes’s understanding of shame, and in so doing to indicate what I consider to be a more productive and nuanced approach to the ethical space of literature, namely one centred on the concepts of tragedy and recognition, which would, in turn, enable a fuller investigation of shame in literature. I begin, therefore, with the more philosophical aspects of Bewes’s arguments, before turning more extensively to his readings of two works by Caryl Phillips, Cambridge (1993) and Crossing the River (2006), both of which sit uncomfortably within Bewes’s approach and consequently raise the possibility of a less reductive ethics of literature. Shame, as it is understood by Bewes then, differs from shame as it is commonly understood. Bewes considers shame as an event of writing, a complex, in which the tension between the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of literature is brought into sensuous existence, made manifest in all its irreconcilability. Shame […] is the material embodiment of that tension, a moment at which the formal possibilities open to the work are incommensurable with, or simply inadequate to, its ethical responsibilities. (2011, 1) Few would deny that there is a tension between the ethical and the aesthetic that requires negotiation. Discussing this same tension with

194  Vincent van Bever Donker regard to commemorating the Holocaust, Richard Kearney, in his book On Stories, puts it like this: How to represent without distorting? How, in dealing with the politics of memory, do we obviate the iniquity of oblivion on the one hand, and what Levi calls the facility of compulsory public distress on the other? The Holocaust, it seems true to say, has suffered from both under-remembrance and over-remembrance. The challenge is to remember in the right way. (2002, 49) Bewes’s contention throughout his book is that this tension is shame and is symptomatic of the conceptual underpinnings of colonialism. In making this claim, he attempts to shift shame away from the personal, ethical charge it usually holds to a structural symptom of literature in general and postcolonial literature in particular. For Bewes there are two kinds of shame: instantiated and uninstantiated. The first is our (more commonplace) subjective experience of shame, while the latter is the event of shame – the event of ­incommensurability – which the experience registers (2011, 5). Bewes attempts to show that experiences of shame are primarily experiences of incommensurability, of the inadequacy of forms to their content, and that shame is not a subjective emotion (though it might be experienced subjectively). He writes, “I am here taking issue with certain treatments of shame that insist upon its subjective quality, for example, in the work of writers such as Giorgio Agamben and Emmanuel Lévinas” (23). He pays most attention to Lévinas’s treatment of shame in On Escape (2003), however, taking issue with Lévinas’s argument that “What appears in shame is… the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself” (cited in Bewes (2011, 23)). Instead he argues, “Shame is a figure not of intimacy of the self to itself – or at least, if that is so, it is the very discontinuity of the self, its otherness to itself, that is emblematised in that relation. Shame […] is a figure of incommensurability” (23). What Bewes omits in his rejection of Lévinas’s analysis of shame, however, is that Lévinas does not neglect the importance of incommensurability. Lévinas writes: [Shame] is the representation we form of ourselves as diminished beings with which we are pained to identify. Yet shame’s whole intensity, everything it contains that stings us, consists precisely in our inability not to identify with this being who is already foreign to us and whose motives for acting we can no longer comprehend. (2003, 63) There is an experience of incommensurability – we are foreign to ourselves – yet what makes this experience shameful is precisely its

Shame, Justice, and Violence  195 inescapability: we cannot reject the self “with which we are pained to identify”. Lévinas therefore continues, “Shame is founded upon the solidarity of our being, which obliges us to claim responsibility for ourselves” (63). Nevertheless, despite the primacy of its inescapability, the trace of incommensurability remains in Lévinas’s conclusion: “Shame is, in the last analysis, an existence that seeks excuses” (65). Recognising incommensurability as characteristic of shame does not pry it away from a subjective self, and it is crucial for Bewes’s argument that he affirms a disconnect between shame and the self. What is at stake in this becomes clearer when we consider the similarities between his and Lévinas’s understanding of shame. In concluding his exposition of shame as not subjective, related to guilt, or extricable from its form (his three main hypotheses), Bewes makes an interesting comment: “the novel itself is thereby subjected to the shame […] which is described by Lévinas as ‘an existence that seeks excuses’” (2011, 48). The deployment of Lévinas’s “last analysis” of shame after stringently arguing against it is revealing, suggesting the possibility of a rephrasing of Bewes’s position: insofar as the novel is caught in an inescapable incommensurability with itself – which, for it to be a true aporia, a true incommensurability, must logically be the case – it is an event of shame. It is thus not the “tethering” as such to which Bewes objects. Lévinas’s structure of inescapability, of tethering to a locus, is present in Bewes’s understanding of shame: so long as this locus is viably understood as the novel rather than an individual. Yet this is precisely the problem. Bewes argues that when a “work affects us with shame” it is due to the event of incommensurability (22). However, to be affected with shame when reading is surely not to actually feel ashamed, to experience shame personally, but to be aware, perhaps, of shamefulness. And this is usually in relation to someone else and is a matter of empathy– whether it be with a character or with a writer. Yet it is precisely this movement of locating the shame in either a character or an author or the circumstances of writing which Bewes seeks to escape (22). What this means is that for the incommensurability in a novel to be shameful, it must be the incommensurability in itself that is the heart of shame, incommensurability as such with no need of a subject. So the crux of the argument is whether incommensurability as Bewes describes it is viably designated as shame. That this is problematic will become clear from a short detour through Derrida’s “Force of Law” (2002). Derrida’s paper is organised around two key terms, “enforce” and “address”, the one opening onto the question of law, or justice as law, the difference between them being sharpened throughout. Laws, Derrida argues, are established by, as it were, performative or creative acts of force, which are legitimised by the order of law established. Laws are therefore ultimately unfounded.

196  Vincent van Bever Donker Since the origin of authority, the founding or grounding, the positing of the law cannot by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground. This is not to say that they are in themselves unjust, in the sense of ‘illegal’ or ‘illegitimate.’ They are neither legal nor illegal in their founding moment. (242) As such, they are deconstructible. Because law is constructed, “because its ultimate foundation is by definition unfounded”, it is deconstructible (242). In contra-distinction, “Justice in itself […] outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible”(243), no more than deconstruction itself is, leading to Derrida’s famous statement that the possibility of justice is the possibility of deconstruction: “Deconstruction is justice”(243). That is to say, “Deconstruction is possible as an experience of the impossible, there where, even if it does not exist, if it is not present, not yet or never, there is justice”(243). In clarifying this, Derrida turns to the second organising English idiom: to address. He must, Derrida comments, address them, in English, addressing “infinite problems” gathered under the title of the colloquium at which the paper is being presented, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. “Address, like direction, like rectitude, says something about law and about what one must not miss when one wants justice, when one wants to be just – it is the rectitude of address”(245). Importantly though, “address always turns out to be singular. An address is always singular, idiomatic, and justice, as law, seems always to suppose the generality of a rule, a norm, or a universal imperative” (245). Thus, we get to the central aporia/impossibility of justice: “How to reconcile the act of justice that must always concern singularity, individuals, groups, irreplaceable existences, the other or myself as other, in a unique situation, with rule, norm, value, or the imperatives of justice that necessarily have a general form”(245). To simply apply a rule or a law might make one invulnerable against the critique of being illegal, but it is not justice: “[If I did this] I would act, Kant would say, in conformity with duty but not through duty or out of respect for the law” (245). “To address oneself to the other in the language of the other” is the condition for justice, but it is also impossible since “justice as law seems to imply an element of universality; the appeal to a third party who suspends the unilaterality or singularity of the idioms” (245). This deployment of the phrase “the third” is intentionally resonant with the work of Lévinas. Derrida comments that he would like “up to a certain point, to bring the concept of justice – which I am here trying to distinguish from law – closer to Lévinas’s” (250). For Lévinas, justice is the absolutely singular, dissymmetrical relation with the other, the relation “to the face of the other that commands me, whose infinity I cannot thematize and whose hostage I am” (250). The realm of law and

Shame, Justice, and Violence  197 calculation is, within this understanding, the realm of the third – that which arises from the ineluctable, never delayed, always already present arrival of another other who demands the same singular response. Faced with two singular others, calculation and questions of distribution and equality – of justice as law – arise. In this way, justice for Lévinas, as for Derrida, is infinite, singular, and impossible – despite the fact that it is precisely the demand for justice that gives rise to the realm of the third, to law and calculation, which in its generality violates the justice of the singular address.1 This is why in an interview of this subject, Derrida cites Lévinas’s cry, “What should I have to do with justice, because justice is unjust?” (1999a,68). Nevertheless, in “Force of Law”, Derrida “cannot be content to borrow a conceptual trait without risking confusions or analogies”, confusion and analogies that would be problematic due to some difficulties that he has with Lévinas’s work (2002, 250). It is sufficient, therefore, to simply note Derrida’s sense of this proximity by way of clarifying what he means by the singular impossibility of justice in itself. As a result of this aporia between the singular and the general, between justice in itself and justice as law: Law is not justice. Law is the element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable, it demands that one calculate with the incalculable; and aporetic experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of justice, that is to say of moments in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by a rule. (244) What is important to emphasise is that although justice and law are distinguished and are heterogeneous, they are also indissociable. Derrida comments, Everything would still be simple if this distinction between justice and law were a true distinction, an opposition the functioning of which was logically regulated and masterable. But it turns out that law claims to exercise itself in the name of justice and that justice demands for itself that it be established in the name of a law that must be put to work (constituted and applied) by force ‘enforced’. (250–251) There are consequently three aporias that Derrida notes, in concluding the first half of his paper, that are iterations of this experience of the impossible, which is the experience of justice: the epokhe (or suspension) of

1 See Totality and Infinity (Levinas 1969). See also Derrida’s discussion of this text in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Derrida 1999b).

198  Vincent van Bever Donker the rule, the haunting of the undecidable, and the urgency that obstructs the horizon of knowledge. It is unnecessary to go into these aporias. What is relevant is the similarity between the incommensurability which Bewes argues characterises the event of shame in the novel, and the incommensurability between justice and law as Derrida details it. The relationship between justice and law could, in fact, be rephrased in Bewes’s terms: the impossibility of not instituting laws and rules of calculation and equity, and the impossibility of doing so adequately. As Derrida writes, “incalculable justice commands calculation” (257); law and those who act under law can never rest, thinking themselves just – to be just is an infinite task, never completed, never arrived. Justice is always to come. The proximity between these two arguments reveals that Bewes’s argument on shame as an experience of incommensurability as such, stumbles, for the (similar) experience of the incommensurability between law and justice is not one of shame but rather of justice: “aporetic experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of justice” (244). If one experiences this aporia one is responding to the call of justice, approaching justice, even though one will never arrive. In short, I do not find the characterising of shame as incommensurability in itself, apart from the tethering to a subjective individual, convincing. What Bewes casts as the problematic of shame, then, can be understood as closely tied to the question of justice. And Bewes is, I suggest, for this reason unsuccessful in escaping the movement of grounding shame in another person, tethering it to a subjective self. Derrida’s work on the aporetic structure of justice and law is further helpful in clarifying Bewes’s understanding of ethics. For Derrida, this aporia is not an excuse for inaction. Indeed, the disjunction between law and justice is what enables law to be deconstructed and critiqued. Derrida notes, “This excess of justice over law and calculation, this overflowing of the unpresentable over the determinable, cannot and should not serve as an alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or state, between institutions or states” (257). In terms of the tension within literature between ethics and aesthetics for which Bewes argues, however, this is precisely what he seems to do. Bewes is responding to “habits of critical reading that seem to have become entrenched in the Anglophone literary academy and that presupposes a stable relation between what is present in the text and what is extrapolated from it – that is to say, between the aesthetic and the ethical” (2006, 34–35, 2011, 52). Yet what is problematic in his response is that he posits the relationship between ethics and aesthetics as one of failure. This is after all the crux of his incommensurability: that literature fails to fulfil an ethical demand that it cannot escape. As such, his focus on the “event of shame” is a focus on the failure itself (2006, 54, 2011, 70), from which he seeks an exit.

Shame, Justice, and Violence  199 It is more productive, however, to understand the relationship between ethics and aesthetics as more positive, as similar to that between justice and law in Derrida’s paper, and to invert Bewes’s understanding of ethics in the process. Richard Kearney argues that in considering the Holocaust the ethical obligation with which we are faced is simply that it be remembered. Among theorists that reject the more overtly narrative modes of doing so (such as Spielberg’s Schindler’s List) due to the imposition of a narrative meaning and coherence (which is for Bewes an aspect of the aesthetic failure of literature), it is unadorned testimony that is the most ethical way to remember. Thus, in his critique of Schindler’s List, Langer argues, as Kearney glosses it, that “the most honest form of witness may be the recognition of the failure and futility of narrative memory – the exposure of an absolute rupture between the dead past and the living present” (Kearney 2002, 196). Kearney’s response is worth citing as some length. In reply […] I would be inclined to say that even the most extreme form of what [Langer] calls ‘anguished’ or ‘humiliated’ memories, where the witnesses express deep anxiety about the lack of common ground between the reality they suffered and the words they are now trying to use, is still a form of narrative memory […] For we are only able to experience the futility and failure of survivors’ narratives because they are trying, however impossibly, to narrate the unnarratable […] A story in ruins, granted, but a story nonetheless. (2002, 196) This seems, to a certain extent, quite similar to Bewes’s argument: that every attempt to represent the trauma of the Holocaust (or slavery) is bound to fail (which, referring to two specific historical traumas, is nevertheless rather different from Bewes’s wider argument that narrative per se is always bound to ethical failure). Yet there is a very significant, if subtle, difference. For Kearney, narrative (in a broad sense) is the only way in which to remember (see also Kearney (1999)), as law, we might add, is the only way for there to be justice. Where for Bewes the relationship between ethics and aesthetics is one of shame and needs to be escaped, I argue that it is more positive, allowing for the possibility that narrative does not always fail – that although in some instances narrative is insufficient, it is not inextricably bound to failure and can, indeed, be successful in its seeming failure. Further, it also allows for a consideration of other ethical responsibilities in addition to that of mimesis. For Bewes, the ethical demand on literature is oddly singular– to represent adequately. Yet, literature can do more than this, including meet the need for past trauma (of the Holocaust, slavery, civil war, or whatever it might be), to be felt, an ethical requirement that literature is able to fulfil, and which Caryl Phillips’s work, contrary to

200  Vincent van Bever Donker Bewes’s claim, accomplishes. Additionally, Bewes also neglects an important difference between the ethical remembrance of the Holocaust and that of slavery: for slavery is caught up in the difficulties of history in a way that the Holocaust is not, with a number of witnesses still living. This is not to deny the historical difficulties faced by holocaust commemoration, yet in remembering slavery there are larger historical gaps, silences, and conformities to colonial discourses which it is important to interrogate and explore, as Ledent and others have noted Phillips attempting to do. We can trace the paucity of Bewes’s approach by considering his discussion of Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and Crossing the River. Cambridge is a novel that takes the form of three texts: a travel narrative, which recounts the journey of Emily to her father’s plantation in the Caribbean; a final testament from the eponymous slave Cambridge before his execution for murder; and a news article relating the events of the murder, trial, and execution. These three texts are enclosed by an epilogue and a prologue which take the perspective of Emily, but in a modern extra-diegetic style of narration, with liberal use of free-­ indirect discourse – a style in stark contrast to the nineteenth-­century style narratives that characterise the rest of the text. Crossing the River is similarly polyvalent, with four narratives, again bookended with a prologue and an epilogue. In the opening and closing of the novel we hear the voice of the “guilty father” who sold his children – Nash, Martha, and Travis – into slavery. The four narratives are of Nash (and Edward, his former slave master); Martha as she escapes slavery during the civil war; Joyce (who falls in love with Travis during the Second World War); and Hamilton, the slave trader who bought the three children. They are complex texts, which I have discussed more fully elsewhere (see Van Bever Donker 2016). Here, I want to focus on Bewes’s reading. In the body of critical work on Phillips’s novels, Bewes’s analysis runs counter to the majority. In his 2006 article “Shame, Ventriloquy, and the Problem of the Cliché in Caryl Phillips”, incorporated into his book, Bewes argues that Phillips’s novels do not provide “corrective narratives, telling a previously untold or mistold story about the past” but are rather an “almost pure example of the pathos of literary failure” (35). This “failure” is inextricable, for Bewes, from the text’s materiality, or contemporaneity, to which the “difficulties and ‘infelicities’” (35) of Phillips’s work – namely ventriloquy and cliché – draw our attention. What emerges, Bewes argues, is that the novels are “caught up in a drama of literary possibility that is riveted to their contemporaneity” (36). This “drama of literary possibility” is the negotiation of an inescapable tension within literature, namely the “incommensurability” of the ethical demand to speak with the aesthetic impossibility of speaking adequately (37), an incommensurability that, as we have seen, is for

Shame, Justice, and Violence  201 Bewes an event of shame and marks the materiality of (postcolonial) literature more widely. Bewes’s analysis of Caryl Phillips’s work in these terms focusses primarily on Cambridge and Crossing the River. Due to the ubiquity of ventriloquy and cliché in these novels, there is, Bewes suggests, no “authentic” voice present within them – neither that of the characters nor of the author – and, as a result, Cambridge and Crossing the River undermine the possibility of speaking adequately or authentically in the very moment of speaking. As Bewes puts it, in Phillips the “paradox” of “the aesthetic impossibility of speaking” and “the ethical impossibility of not speaking” “finds a ‘voice’ that is faithful to these impossibilities as such” (2006, 55). He therefore begins by noting that in Phillips’s work, especially those “dealing with slavery”, there is an almost complete absence of authorial commentary and third-person narration. Not only are his stories told entirely through the words and reflections of his characters; those characters are themselves, for reasons that are never specified, incapable of speaking ‘authentically’, on their own account or in their own voices. (43) It is primarily the second sentence that is crucial for his argument. Noting that Phillips has “often been praised” for his characters’ “authenticity of voice” (44), Bewes goes on to suggest that in actual fact, “many of [Emily’s] passages, especially those dealing with the physical appearance of the Negroes, read more like a satire of colonial speech” (44). Further, her writing is “derivative” and “ideologically unreflective […] inhabiting the literary discourse of a hegemonic, culturally dominant Europe” (44), and is correspondingly riddled with clichés. For Bewes, the result is to make Phillips an “upsetting writer” because the “endless pages of derivative prose penned by his characters” are unmediated by any narrator and are thus coextensive with the novel itself (45). Benedict Ledent’s reading of Phillips’s work is for Bewes “the most prominent illustration” of the common attempt to avoid this (56), “to prize Phillips away from his characters by introducing a succession of secondary sources between his and their texts” (45). This, he argues, neglects the materiality of the text itself. Specifically, he suggests critics are missing that “Phillips’s ability to ‘ventriloquize’ his characters” (46) is neither a matter of achieving “authenticity of voice” (46) nor of “speaking on behalf of anyone” (46). Instead, the purpose of what has been called ‘ventriloquism’ in Phillips’s text is rather the systematic evacuation of every discursive position that might claim freedom from implication in colonialism [….] What we get […] is the ubiquity of ventriloquy – voice precisely as ventriloquy. (46–47)

202  Vincent van Bever Donker So, for Bewes there is no authenticity of voice. Emily’s discourse is derivative and clichéd, as is Cambridge’s, with the consequence, Bewes argues, that when, at one point Emily denigrates Cambridge’s English as showing a “lunatic precision”, it applies “identically” to her own discourse as well (48). In briefly extending this argument to include Crossing the River, Bewes argues that the voice of the guilty father of the prologue and epilogue does not exhibit “any pretense at realism; the voice […] is disembodied, ventriloquized” (49). Further, and most importantly, the novel “offers a structure in which, seemingly, each of the children sold into slavery in the opening pages will successively speak his or her experience, but in fact none of them does” (49). For Bewes they are all, to some degree or another, mediated, with Nash’s discourse coming closest to Cambridge’s as “a discourse of pure imitation” (49). As such, Bewes argues that both of these novels respond to the ethical demand to speak precisely by dramatizing, in the very event of speaking, its impossibility. What is crucial to this argument, and runs into several difficulties, is that Emily and Cambridge’s voices are not representative: that as characters they do not speak “on their own account or in their own voices” (43). If the characters in Cambridge and Crossing the River are not ventriloquized in the manner that Bewes suggests, then the novels lose something of their paradoxical quality which, as we have seen, is crucial for his theoretical argument. The first difficulty for Bewes is posed by the work of Eckstein. There is an important sense in which Bewes’s description of Cambridge is correct – it is a pastiche of historical texts. Evelyn O’Callaghan notes three main sources for Emily’s journal, namely “writings by Monk Lewis, Lady Nugent, Mrs. Carmichael” (1993, 36), while for Cambridge’s narrative she notes as the main source Equiano’s Travels (38). Lars Eckstein’s more comprehensive study uncovers a number of other source texts, which includes some historiographic works from the period in addition to the near exact replication in Part Three of an historical report of the murder of a Mr Brown by a slave Cambridge (presumably, Eckstein comments, “the very historical document that served as [Phillips’] initial inspiration for the novel” (2006, 92)). He adds to O’Callaghan’s list of main sources for Emily’s narrative Janet Shaw’s Journal of a Lady of Quality and a number of less cited travelogues by F.W.N. Bayley, Henry Nelson Coleridge, and J.B. Moreton (Eckstein 2006, 75–76); for Cambridge’s narrative he adds James Albert Ukasaw Gronniosaw’s A Narrative of the Life of James Albert Gronniosaw, Ottobah Cuguano’s Thought and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, and Ignatio Sanchos’s Letters (85). The report in Part Three is taken from Mrs. Flannigan’s Antigua and the Antiguans (92). Phillips’s successful synthesis of numerous stylistically diverse fragments is the focus of Eckstein’s analysis. In order to dissect more rigorously the method behind Phillips’s success he marks a distinction between “montage” and “pastiche”: “montage” is to be understood as the citation of fragments from

Shame, Justice, and Violence  203 earlier works, while “pastiche” is the sustained imitation of the style of the earlier works. Eckstein writes: the novel is composed of numerous, in most cases slightly modified fragments of older texts (montage); at the same time, these fragments are supplemented and interconnected by passages which merely imitate the source-material stylistically while relying on Phillips’ own imagination (pastiche). (73) Eckstein proceeds by placing the various source texts alongside the passage which draws on them, enabling him to note the elements of montage as well as to analyse the technique of pastiche deployed in incorporating and connecting them into a coherent narrative. Eckstein argues that, in doing this, Phillips negotiates the tensions inherent in narrative memory already indicated. On one side is the argument for the exclusive use of personal testimony and reports since narrative imposes a structure of meaning on otherwise meaningless suffering, and thus does an injustice to the memory of those who suffered. Opposed to this is the argument for the importance of fictional narrative construction precisely because of its shaping effects, that is, in order to personalise and make the effect of the horror on an individual consciousness felt, so as to guard against events like the Holocaust being reduced to impersonal reports and facts which are “too gigantic to be digested or comprehended as such” (Eckstein 2006, 100–103; see also Kearney 1999). Phillips combines these two approaches, not simply including quotations, but weaving historical texts directly into the texture of the narrative itself. Phillips has created coherent characters which simultaneously embody something of the historical reality of what is being represented in the narrative. Published in the same year as Bewes’s article (though O’Callaghan’s, less extensive, article was published notably earlier, in 1993), Eckstein’s analysis nevertheless remains unmentioned in the later book version of Bewes’s argument. In his reading of Cambridge, there is one passage from Emily’s journal that Bewes cites as an example of how “the level of overstatement in her narrative is so spectacular that many of her passages, especially those dealing with the physical appearance of the Negroes, read more like a satire of colonial speech than an attempt to achieve ‘authenticity of voice’” (2011, 44). The passage is, for Bewes, “a model of contrived racial and stylistic offensiveness” (44). What this fails to take into account, however, is that many of these passages of “contrived racial and stylistic offensiveness” are citations. Although the one example that Bewes provides (and he does not give much more support than this) is not amongst those that Eckstein’s research has shown to be a citation, another possible example that could be described in Bewes’s terms, and is a citation, is the following:

204  Vincent van Bever Donker Just after turning off the island road[…] a number of pigs bolted into view, and after them a small parcel of monkeys. This took me by surprise, and I must have jumped […] However, on resettling my position, I discovered that what I had taken for monkeys were nothing other than negro children, naked as they were born, parading in a feral manner to which they were not only accustomed, but in which they felt comfortable. (Phillips 1993, 24) Emily has here just arrived on the island and is en route to the plantation. What it shows is that while there is one sense in which the passage cited by Bewes is indeed “contrived”, namely, what Eckstein terms pastiche, the sustained imitation of the style of the earlier works, they are, unfortunately, neither excessive nor pieces of satire. Bewes’s example passage is carefully crafted by Phillips to be consistent with the cited racially offensive passages that he has incorporated into the novel. There is another way in which we might say that Emily is contrived, which is due to Phillips’s method of pastiche and montage: while accurately constructed in terms of voice, Emily (and to a certain extent Cambridge) is created by this process to represent a specific ideological position. In other words, is there a sense in which we could say that, due to the process of selective citation of older texts, Emily is the historical worst-case scenario with the more ambivalent or positive aspects of the source texts being passed over and omitted? Phillips, though, was not unaware of this. On the one hand, the citations of older texts cover a range of topics, from the more ideological (and offensive) characterisations of slaves to the more mundane descriptions of the Antilles, the plantation houses, and the process of making sugar. While Emily and Cambridge are no doubt ideologically positioned by their author, this is not exclusively due to the selection of citations, which exceeds their ideological positioning. Additionally, Emily as a character is consistent with the historical record – Phillips has not distorted the historical material to create an impossible character. Nevertheless, what makes Emily a responsible agent is the inclusion of the extra-diegetically narrated prologue and epilogue. The latter, importantly, shows an ethical change in Emily, effected through her (previously constrained) friendship with Stella, and consequently creating more depth in her character. This reveals a peculiarity that these two sections, in which we gain access to Emily’s thoughts through the extra-diegetic narrator, are omitted from Bewes’s argument. Indeed, it is slightly ironic, considering Bewes’s emphasis on the materiality of the text, that without taking the novel’s structure into account he asserts that Phillips refuses “to signpost his intentions or to offer moral or political judgements, even implicit ones, on his characters” (2011, 45, my emphasis). Yet Phillips does precisely this through the careful structuring of his works: the contrasting of Emily’s and Cambridge’s narratives in Cambridge, coupled with the impact of

Shame, Justice, and Violence  205 the prologue and epilogue, are precisely how Phillips conveys his moral and political judgements, how the novel transmits its ethical sense (see Van Bever Donker 2016, 141–173). A final possibility for how we could understand Bewes’s argument that Emily and Cambridge are “contrived” is that if we assume Bewes accepts the novel as historically accurate and representative, he might be suggesting that nevertheless, because Emily and Cambridge are writing in a particular form, they are bound to those form’s conventions. This reference to form could be inferred from (in addition to the wider argument) Bewes’s comment that “[w]hat Emily calls the ‘lunatic precision’ of Cambridge’s use of English [….] applies identically to her own use and to that of the novel as a whole; to Phillips’s use, to my own in this article; to literary language as such” (2011, 48). However, in his discussion of the passage that he cites, this is not what Bewes has in sight, for it is precisely the content of Emily’s journal (the racial offensiveness, which is not dependent upon the form) with which he is primarily concerned. There is the added possibility that Bewes is referring to the fact that what is available for Emily to say is constrained by her historical moment, her archive in the Foucauldian sense. Yet if this is what he means, then the argument is generalised to the event of speech itself, broadening it to far beyond literature, in addition to omitting the fact that each iteration of discourse is done with a difference and does not negate choice (and thus some authenticity), neither within a particular ideological position nor – as can be seen with Emily – between different ones. It seems, then, that Bewes’s argument for understanding Phillips’s ventriloquy and cliché in Cambridge as non-representative fails to be convincing. The characters are not ventriloquized as he suggests, nor does Phillips proceed toward “becoming-imperceptible” (49). His all too brief consideration of Crossing the River, which argues that none of the three children speak in their own voices, is similarly unpersuasive. For Bewes, Nash’s English is imitative “of the discourse of nineteenth-­ century British literary English” (49) – though we do not know if he had any other language or type of English with which to write, having been raised and educated by his former owner Edward – and Travis’s story is told through Joyce –which is a misunderstanding of the narrative. It is rather that Joyce’s story, in which she speaks for herself, is included because of her love for Travis. Martha’s story meanwhile is mediated “in a combination of third-person narration and free-indirect speech” (49), a point which, on the one hand, is peculiar as it implies that first-person narration is the only way to give “voice” authentically, despite the fact that free-indirect speech is an incorporation of direct speech into the narrator’s own. On the other hand, this point is simply incorrect, omitting the prevalence of first-person narration in Martha’s section. Further, Bewes does not consider whether Hamilton the slave trader speaks “authentically”– a character that is important beyond simply removing

206  Vincent van Bever Donker “any notion of asymmetrical guilt from the colonial project” (49). Bewes’s reading of Phillips, and an important step in his overall argument, is, in my assessment, therefore flawed (see also Van Bever Donker 2016, 173–194). It is crucial for Bewes to show that Phillips’s novels exhibit a paradoxical character of both speaking and failing to speak, since this would be an instance of the incommensurability that he argues exists between the ethical demand to speak and the aesthetic impossibility of speaking adequately, which he suggests should be understood as an event of shame. He attempts to read Phillips’s work “by reference to the shame that is operative in it and around it – that is, in terms of its failure to communicate, its awareness of its failure, its strategies of materializing failure or of compensating for it” (41): in Phillips’s case is the ubiquity of ventriloquy and cliché. What I hope has become evident, though, is that the relationship between ethics and aesthetics (which, to be fair, is frequently a tension), rather than being an event of shame, is the basis for a multifaceted ethical criticism. The nuances of Phillips’s citations and character development slide beneath the surface of Bewes’s analysis, focussed as it is on failure. The attempt to de-personalise shame, to untether it from a subject, further, risks reducing its significance as an ethical response to moments of real failure or conflict. What is needed, instead, is an approach to ethical difficulties of narrative – and in particular narratives representing historical violence like slavery or the holocaust –without erasing or reducing other ethical considerations in the process. I want to close by indicating two concepts or figures that I argue enable this sort of engagement. This first is the figure of tragedy. In her lectures Religion and Literature, Helen Gardner (1971) provides a useful overview of different understandings of tragedy and concludes with the formula of tragedy she considers the most persuasive, put forward by Beethoven, scrawled, perhaps in jest, above the opening bars of the last movement of his last quartet: ‘Muss es sein?’ [Should it be?] ‘Es muss sein.’ [It should be] He wrote above the whole movement the words ‘Der schwer gefasste Entschluss’ ‘the Difficult Resolution’. (34) What differentiates the question and the answer is “hardly more than an inflection of the voice […] Protest and acceptance are like expressions on the same face” (34). The conjunction of affirmation and rejection, of positive and negative – the difficulty of which Gardner speaks here – is what I find engaging in the idea of tragedy. Tragedy, as it were, can look in two directions at once. It can articulate, in an enabling and productive way, a tension between irreconcilable ethical demands or situations. In the narratives of both Emily and Cambridge, it is their deep investment

Shame, Justice, and Violence  207 in discourses of progress and civilisation that leads, respectively, to Emily’s complete disintegration and ethical transformation, and Cambridge’s simultaneous justification of and resistance to slavery. The second concept is that of recognition or anagnorisis. Recognition is a focal point for numerous general debates: the recognition of human value, the recognition of individual and/or political identity, the recognition of animal value, and the problem of recognising too easily and completely. Recognition as anagnorisis, as a structural feature of fiction, however, is caught up with the particular, and often emotive, aspects of a narrative. Insofar as anagnorisis can be characterised as a more dramatic or literary recognition, bringing these two senses of the term into proximity leads to a productive movement between them: structural recognition scenes can be seen to be crucial to thematic moments for the novel’s ethical sense. Central to anagnorisis is the question of what is recognised. Anagnorisis is a formal feature of fiction, first discussed by Aristotle in the Poetics alongside its sibling peripeteia. It marks a shift in the plot and is often the cause of the sudden, surprising change of circumstances designated by peripeteia. The classical example is Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In the play, the sudden and unexpected reversal of circumstances (the suicide of Oedipus’ mother/wife, his self-blinding and exile) is brought about by the recognition of his identity and the consequent recognition of his crimes of incest and patricide. The recognition scene here clearly marks a structural shift in the plot. However, anagnorisis is not always so dramatic nor always so closely tied to the plot’s climax. A good example of more diffuse recognitions would be The Odyssey, where rather than a dramatic moment of recognition, there is “an extended anagnorisis and peripeteia” built up over a series of less comprehensive moments of recognition, which effect a “gradual shift from ignorance to knowledge” (Cave 1988, 41). However, in both the “tragic” recognition of Oedipus Rex and the “epic” recognition of The Odyssey, “a recognition scene is not conceivable except as both a structural shift and the exhibition of some object of knowledge” (225 my emphasis). It is precisely because the recognition scene is always the recognition of something or someone that it is open to being thematically filled by the fiction’s concerns, including its ethical preoccupations. As such, the question of what is recognised in a novel, the predicate of the characters’ revelations, becomes a useful lens through which to consider a novel’s engagement with the particulars that constitute its ethical and political concerns. Recognition and tragedy, taken together, open up a way of engaging with the ethical space of the novel in a manner that is flexible, context based, and able to take account of a range of ethical effects and concerns beyond mimesis. In Caryl Phillips’s two novels in view here, such an approach brings into view that, far from delivering stories marked by an unmediated barrage of cliché and ventriloquy that is a failure to

208  Vincent van Bever Donker sufficiently express the violence and violation of slavery, Cambridge and Crossing the River instead reveal the failure of recognition that imbued slavery and demonstrate this ethical failure through the citation of real historical voices which are consolidated into an effective, moving commemoration of past violence.

Works Cited Bewes, Timothy. 2006. “Shame, Ventriloquy, and the Problem of the Cliché in Caryl Phillips.” Cultural Critique 63 (63): 33–60. ———. 2011. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton, NJ  and Woodstock: Princeton UP. Cave, Terence. 1988. Recognitions: A Study in Poetics. Oxford: Clarendon P. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “Force of Law.” In Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar, 228–298. London and New York: Routledge. ———.1999a.“Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: a Dialogue with Jacques Derrida.” In Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, edited by Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley, 65–83.London and New York: Routledge. ———.1999b. Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas. Translated by PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. Eckstein, Lars. 2006. Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Gardner, Helen. 1971. Religion and Literature. London: Faber and Faber. Kearney, Richard. 1999. “Narrative and the Ethics of Remembrance.” In Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, edited by Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley, 18–31. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2002. On Stories. London: Routledge. Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP (original ed. Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’estériorité, Le Livre de Poche, 1961) ———. 2003. On Escape. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP(original ed. De l’évasion, Fata Morgana, 1982). O’Callaghan, Evelyn. 1993. “Historical Fiction and Fictional History: Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 28 (34): 34–47. doi:10.1484/J.RPH.5.100799. Phillips, Caryl. 1993. Cambridge. New York: Vintage International. ———. 2006. Crossing the River. London: Vintage Books. Van Bever Donker, Vincent. 2016. Recognition and Ethics in World Literature: Religion, Violence and the Human. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag.

10 Afterword A Swarm of Locusts Passed By Timothy Bewes

When I started work on the project that would become The Event of Postcolonial Shame, the argument I had in mind was simple: postcolonial critics needed to pay attention to the formal qualities of the works they were looking at before invoking the themes of postcolonial theory. For the very terms that are often assumed by critics to define postcolonial literature (diaspora, exile, hybridity, etc.) are also formal qualities of the novel as such. As a topic in literary criticism, therefore, the postcolonial condition could not be fathomed theoretically until scholarship had taken account of the dominance of the novel in postcolonial studies. The valences of Gayatri Spivak’s founding question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” – a question that addresses historical disparities of power and inequalities of access to discursive forms – had therefore to be rearticulated in relation to the figure of “transcendental homelessness” with which Georg Lukács theorized the modern predicament of representational discourse in The Theory of the Novel (1971, 61). Of the two formulations, it was easy to assume that Spivak’s is the one concerned with real historical processes; that, as Spivak herself insisted, the subaltern’s inability to speak is neither “mere tautology” nor “epistemic fracture” (1999, 309); and easy, likewise, to accept Lukács’s retrospective self-critique of The Theory of the Novel as a work “cut off from concrete socio-historical realities” (“Preface” 1971, 17). My work would revisit those assumptions by, in the first place, returning the question of the postcolonial subject to the formal context in which, as literary critics, we generally encounter it: the novel. What became apparent, as I wrote my way into the project, is that the encounter between postcolonial studies and novel theory opened up a larger problematic to do with the relation between literature – which tells stories in words that authors (using narrators and characters) find ready-to-hand – and criticism (or theory) – which uses words under conditions of deliberation and stringent accountability.1 This is a difference

1 J.M. Coetzee talks revealingly about this difference in a 1990 interview with David Attwell included in Doubling the Point. “The feel of writing fiction”, says Coetzee,

210  Timothy Bewes not only of rhetoric but of the constitution of the writing subject. Thus, in the works of fiction I was interested in, “shame” names something that cannot simply be taken up by critical discourse – as if the term adequately accounted for what was at issue in its usage. Indeed, the frequency of references to shame in this body of literature indicated that the concept could be elaborated as an illustration of this general problem, a proposition I tried to express in the three “preliminary theses” that provided the point of departure for my argument: that shame is ontologically inseparable from its formal manifestation; that no explanation for shame could be sought at the purely subjective level; that the ethical significance of shame is thus negligible. The first body of writing I paid attention to was Caryl Phillips’s two historical novels Cambridge (1991) and Crossing the River (1993), both of which deal with the transatlantic slave trade between Africa, Britain, and the Americas. In opposition to the so-called “historical” reading of Phillips’s work that prevailed among literary critics, oriented around the author’s source material – a reading that presumed the author’s mastery of his aesthetic choices and decisions, and thus the solidity and internal consistency of both author and text – I proposed a “functionalist” reading that attempted to avoid recourse to subjective categories (categories that might work well in the context of the “ready-to-hand” but that did not enjoy an easy transposition to the critical context) in favor of attention to the “materiality” of the work. In such a functionalist reading, the shame repeatedly invoked by many of Phillips’s narrators would require an explanation other than the one provided either by the work’s story or by contextualizing readings that treated the shame as self-evident. The principal historical figure in Phillips’s historical fictions, I would remind readers, was Phillips himself, which meant that the principal scene of shame was the scene of writing, not the “shameful intercourse” of the narrated scenes of slavery. If there is shame in Phillips’s works it had to be approached not, primarily, by reference to their eighteenth- and ­nineteenth-century settings, but to the event of Phillips’s own practice as a writer. The “historical” reading of Phillips’s work was thus a distraction from its real historicity: the moment of the work’s composition. Implicit in this approach was a further question about what it means to read historically in the postcolonial context. What I found was that the works of every author I looked at – not only the most formally self-aware, such as J.M. Coetzee and Zoë Wicomb, but also more conventionally is one of freedom, of irresponsibility, or better, of responsibility toward something that has not yet emerged, that lies somewhere at the end of the road. When I write criticism, on the other hand, I am always aware of a responsibility toward a goal that has been set for me not only by the argument, not only by the whole philosophical tradition into which I am implicitly inserting myself, but also by the rather tight discourse of criticism itself. (245–246)

A Swarm of Locusts Passed By  211 realist writers, such as Conrad, Naipaul, Ngũgĩ, and Gordimer – include moments of reflection on the logic of representation, moments that invite reference to the composition of the work itself. Furthermore, such instances of double reference invariably involve the feeling of shame, such that the location of the shame, and its origin, cannot be contained in the diegesis (the represented situation of the character or narrator), but migrates from the story to settle upon the scene of writing – i­mplicating the author, the reader, and the enterprise of representation itself. In postcolonial literature, then, shame becomes “crystalline” – absconds from the represented world in exactly the way that, according to Gilles Deleuze (1989), images of time become crystalline in a temporal medium such as cinema. Such moments – and the fact that every novel I read seemed to include them – make it impossible, in postcolonial literature, to preserve a clear separation between fictional and nonfictional worlds, fictional and nonfictional discourse. To approach the work through the optic of fiction was to fail to note this crystallization of shame, its refusal to adhere to the protocols of representation. The concept of fiction contains the shame in the diegetic situation. It thereby insulates the critic, and the exercise of interpretation, from the shame, neutralizing the capacity of the work to speak to the implication of literary representation in the failure to overcome colonial inequality. These observations helped me understand why the concepts of fiction and fictionality play so little role in the foundational works of the theory of the novel. 2 With this insight, I began to see the possibility of framing my study as an intervention in the theory of the novel, as much as in postcolonial literary studies. Shame would be the concept that resonated equally in both fields, the concept that, in my account, established their inseparability, and that helped to deflate, or transcend, the border between fiction and nonfiction. My interlocutors would be the René Girard of Deceit, Desire and the Novel and the Lukács of The Theory of the Novel, as much as (say) Paul Gilroy and Gayatri Spivak. Lukács’s characterization of the novel as “the form of the age of absolute sinfulness” would come to appear as the earliest, most direct statement of the constitutive place of shame in both the theory of the novel and the 2 The concept of fiction is barely mentioned, for example, in the work of Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, or Erich Auerbach, in the European tradition, or that of Ian Watt (The Rise of the Novel) and E.M. Forster (Aspects of the Novel) in the British ­tradition – other than as a generic descriptor. Fiction began to attract theoretical attention from narratologists from the 1980s onward (e.g., Gérard Genette, Wolfgang Iser, and Gerald Prince). However, Ann Banfield’s important, and still contentious, Unspeakable Sentences (1982) organizes its analysis of the novel, rather, around the concept of “represented speech and thought”. More recently, Eric Hayot (following Pheng Cheah) has proposed the notion of literary or aesthetic “worlds” (On Literary Worlds).

212  Timothy Bewes colonial enterprise – despite the fact that neither shame nor colonialism is mentioned directly in Lukács’s work. *** The Event of Postcolonial Shame (henceforth Event) has benefited from a number of generous and penetrating reviews that registered the central claims of the book, considered deeply their implications, and expressed a few misgivings, in both personal and political terms, about the book’s conclusions and emphases.3 The strongest claim made towards the end of the book proved, perhaps, the most contentious: that “to free ourselves of this most intimate residue of the colonial enterprise, it is necessary to overcome the very models of thought and perception that made colonialism possible in the first place” (Bewes 2011, 165). The model for a new mode of perception, elaborated in my final chapter, was the camera, in particular the film camera. The last chapter of the book presents a reading of Louis Malle’s six-hour documentary film L’Inde fantôme, contrasting Malle’s treatment of India with Michel Leiris’s 1934 ethnographic text L’Afrique fantôme as a work that solves the existential problems that defined Leiris’s project, and solves them not through the evolution of a particular ethical or political subjectivity but by the fact of a machinic apparatus. The camera, that is to say, enables a perception of the film’s subjects no longer organized around the relation between self and other – that is to say, between multiple consciousnesses caught up in a relation of perceiving and being perceived. The center of consciousness of Malle’s project, unlike that of Leiris’s text, is established “outside the human subject” (183). Leiris’s text, produced during the 1931–1933 Mission Dakar-­ Djibouti, was a central exhibit of my claim that it is the subjective “anchoring” of the perceptual gaze, rather than any particular (subjective or objective) content to the perception, that is responsible for the prevalence of shame in postcolonial literature. “The impression given by [L’Afrique fantôme]”, I had written, “is that of a man progressively and irrevocably removed from the world by the very gesture with which he looks upon it. Leiris is triply condemned to this state of removal by his profession (ethnography), his origins (Europe), and his medium (writing)” (168–169). By contrast, Malle’s camera, I suggested, liberates him from Europe, from the ethnographic gaze, and from the anchored consciousness of the writing self, enabling Malle to achieve “what Leiris found impossible: a sensuous connection with the ‘other’” (179). 3 See in particular three extraordinarily attentive and challenging review essays by Rita Barnard (“Ugly Feelings, Negative Dialectics: Reflections on Postapartheid Shame”), David James (“The Politics of Inadequacy”), and Michael Rothberg (“‘Ensnared in Implication’: Writing, Shame, and Colonialism”).

A Swarm of Locusts Passed By  213 This troubled reviewers, including some for whom the proposition seemed to suggest, for example, that colonialism itself should be thought of as “a model of thought and perception” (Rothberg 2012, 386) or that the literary equivalent of the camera’s impartiality, and thus the means of a literary overcoming of the shame relation, would be a form of narration “stripped of all subjective inflection” and “inoculated against the principle of focalization” (James 2012, 8–9). Towards the end of an essay on shame in the South African postapartheid context, which includes a substantial engagement with Event, Rita Barnard describes the “truly postcolonial” mode of perception put forward in my discussion of L’Inde fantôme, modeled on the cinematic apparatus, as “unappealing” and “modernist in a rather severe sense of the word” (2012, 163). Quoting an essay by Jed Esty (2009, 367), she characterizes this vision as a “vanguardist notion of difficult art that retains its capacity to critique society but at the cost of becoming almost noncommunicative” (Barnard 2012, 164). Her alternative to the solutions proposed in Event, also derived from Esty, is “a new kind of critical realism”, a mode more suited to South African writers less caught up in the anxiety of form than, say, Coetzee and Wicomb. Such writers, she surmises, are capable of speaking “quite directly” about shame, “and other ugly feelings” (164). In this connection, she discusses a memoir by the South African writer Jonny Steinberg entitled (in the US) Sizwe’s Test (2008),4 a work that deals with shame in the context of the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the 1980s – “a far cry”, she comments, “from the (Bewesian) novelist’s and critic’s anguished sense of the shame that inheres in his or her very enterprise”. What is at stake in Steinberg’s text, she goes on, is not a matter of any sort of constitutive inadequacy of literary form in postcolonial situations, but of very tricky social and personal negotiations. Steinberg soberly considers the possibility that his work might not only (or merely) be ethically inadequate, but that it must necessarily be unethical, given the conditions of his research, especially if it is to be good. He is forced to contemplate this possibility because his characters are not imagined figures of the subaltern, but real people, who make demands, and to whom he is very directly responsible and beholden. Moreover, the literary journalist must at some point also abrogate this contemplation and move on: for a fulsome accounting of the cost of representation, Steinberg declares [in a 2010 interview], 5 would surely lead to him abandoning his projects altogether. We seem, in sum, to be in the presence of a different 4 In South Africa, Steinberg’s book was published under the title Three Letter Plague: A Young Man’s Journey Through a Great Epidemic. 5 Daniel Lehman, “Counting the Costs of Nonfiction: An Interview with Jonny Steinberg” (2010).

214  Timothy Bewes set of generic codes and contracts, even though Steinberg is frank [in the same interview] about how the nonfiction writer “borrows fiction’s codes of characterization, of plot development” and the “way fiction elaborates a world”. (164–165) Barnard goes on to discuss the treatment of shame in Steinberg’s book, putting aside consideration of Steinberg’s remarks about “the continuities and distinctions between fiction and nonfiction” (165). However, I would like to use the opportunity of this “Afterword” to return to the questions Barnard defers, to do with the distinctions and, particularly, the continuities “between fiction and nonfiction”. My intention is not to defend my book from objections raised in Barnard’s article – objections that are framed (mostly) in subjective and affective terms (“discomfort”, lack of “appeal”, “uncongeniality”) (155) – but, rather, to clarify the stakes of the term “fiction” in my project and at the same time to suggest that there is nothing necessarily “vanguardist” or “noncommunicative” – nor indeed “difficult” – about the aesthetic strategies and commitments described in Event. This is also an opportune moment to revisit the place of Leiris’s L’Afrique fantôme in my argument. For the recent appearance of L’Afrique fantôme in English, in a consistently thoughtful translation by Brent Hayes Edwards, provides an occasion to return to this text and, in fact, to consider the possibility that the division I originally established between Malle’s L’Inde fantôme and Leiris’s L’Afrique fantôme, at the expense of the latter, gave a misleading impression of the capacity for “nonfiction writing” also to respond to the questions that, at the end of Event, I summarized in the following terms: What would a literature (or an ethnography) look like in which every residue of the colonial relation has been overcome? How is it possible to give adequate representational form to an experience of colonial encounter? Is freedom from colonial relations possible in a literary or ethnographic work, especially one set amidst relative poverty and deprivation? In that last chapter of my book I compared the technical and ethical achievements of Malle’s film, predicated on the perceptual capacities of a mobile, decentered (which is to say, nonhuman) apparatus, to certain moments in the works of each of the novelists under discussion: “crystalline” moments that (again), by bringing into being an incontestably documentary element to the text, speak to the moment of the work’s composition as much as to its fictional setting, and thus call into question both the concept of fiction and the structure of subject-object apprehension. If cinema is capable of such possibilities by the production of time-images that escape the representational frame, and if fiction is able to achieve something similar by the production of narrative moments that, like the effect of the apparatus in cinematic perception, refuse to be

A Swarm of Locusts Passed By  215 contained within the diegesis – what gestures of this kind exist for nonfiction, a form whose very credibility depends, according to Barnard, on a capacity for direct speech? *** In the previously mentioned interview from 2010, Jonny Steinberg makes a categorical distinction between fiction and nonfiction: What a nonfiction writer cannot do […] is pretend to know what is happening in a character’s head. As a nonfiction writer, I can spend a year shadowing a character, and yet I will only know what he dreams if he chooses to tell me. […] I am a middle-class white South African who has generally written about poor black South A ­ fricans. Behind the ways in which my subjects perform for me, want to please me, resent me, need to conceal things from me, dislike me, lies the story of a whole country. (2010, 32) The nonfiction writer, then, is riveted to himself – to his race, his positionality, his discourse, and his country – in a way that the writer of fiction is not. If the fiction writer is accountable, to mobilize the term I used earlier, it is to “something that has not yet emerged, that lies somewhere at the end of the road” (Coetzee 1992, 246). Steinberg’s nonfictional narrator, and nonfiction writing in general, are accountable, rather, to the present, but that means the past: categories of experience and knowledge that are recognizable and inhabitable, identity positions that have a long genealogy: “the story of a whole country”. Barnard is probably right to say that the “formal and ethical incommensurability” of the bodies of work that seem to be celebrated in Event is better viewed as a “possible” than as a “necessary” optic with which to resolve the problem of postcolonial shame (164). But the real difference in these visions of an ethically responsible postcolonial writing, it seems to me, is not between nonfiction and fiction but between a belief in the possibility of speaking “directly” – in one’s own name – and the refusal or inability to do so. We can distinguish, then, between direct discourse and indirect discourse, or between “anchored” perception and “decentered” perception. And these different genres or registers should be seen not just as competing formal strategies, or incompatible orders of political commitment, but as different ledgers of accountability. On the one hand, there is the attention we must pay to what Michael Rothberg calls the “historical terrain in which those structures [of colonialism and literature] emerge and mutate” (2012, 386); on the other, there is “the postcolonial writing to come”. On the one hand, race; on the other, the abolition of race. On the one hand, the determinations of history; on the other, a sense that such determinations are the traces of a logic that

216  Timothy Bewes impoverishes and demeans everything of importance: everything at the level of political aspiration. What both Rothberg and Barnard are asking for is some concession to those really existing people “who will never write” – as Barnard puts it – and yet are beset by feelings of shame (2012, 168) or, as Rothberg writes, to the question of the “specificity” of the postcolonial world and its power differentials within “this model of generalized incommensurability” (2012, 378–379). Another reviewer of Event posed the question in even starker terms: “Is postcoloniality really so much about literature?” (Dorfman 2014, 391). The only response I can imagine is to pose another series of questions: how feasible is it – technically, politically, ethically – for literature to address the “disparities of power” in the postcolonial world without attending to the implications of literature itself in those disparities? Are postcolonial societies, situations, and characters so easily graspable in writing? Is writing about people “who will never write” really an ethically uncomplicated answer to the question of postcolonial shame? And are the scruples of postcolonial writing resolvable simply by abandoning the realm of literature? Perhaps L’Afrique fantôme can provide an answer, of sorts, to these concerns, for the only writing that takes place in Leiris’s book is highly situated, both historically and geographically, and undertaken across a temporal duration and a spatial terrain whose specificity is unmatched, perhaps, by any comparable work. This is to say that no writing takes place in Leiris’s work that is not rigorously dated and located. Furthermore, unlike almost everything else Leiris published, L’Afrique fantôme makes no claims to being a work of literature and features few of the usual criteria for being considered so: the use of figures of speech, some quotient of literary inventiveness, the presence of fiction, etc. However, Edwards’s translation of L’Afrique fantôme has enabled another dimension of this text to become newly apparent to me: its quality as a practice (a term with ritual and ascetic connotations that will also pertain to my usage). I would like to see if this notion of a practice can be used to frame Leiris’s text in positive (rather than, as I originally positioned it, negative) relation to those speculative questions to do with the politics of postcolonial literature with which I concluded Event. L’Afrique fantôme does not address such questions directly – ­primarily because Leiris’s text never addresses any issue or question “directly”. Phantom Africa, despite being written in the first person and conceived, in part, as a documentary project, is a text composed solely of indirect discourse. When L’Afrique fantôme speaks, what it says is represented speech and thought, the speech and thought of a

A Swarm of Locusts Passed By  217 man at a particular time and place.6 Taken in isolation, the diary entries that make up the body of the text vary greatly in significance and interest. Many of the observations we encounter in L’Afrique fantôme are banal; Leiris is frequently preoccupied with details of his interior life that one would rather not know about. The book includes plenty of reflections that a reader expecting a conventional travelogue might label “self-indulgent”. Over the course of the book’s 600-odd pages, Leiris’s boredom and phases of depression are easily found tiresome or overwhelming. As a whole, however, the dimensions of the work that lend it the quality of a practice are maintained with discipline and consistency. Leiris adheres to daily procedures that are never violated: for example, that the narration unfolds in close to real time; that he writes every day; that nothing is subsequently corrected or amended; and that (as Leiris himself put it in a publicity flyer written – in the third person – for the 1981 edition) attention is paid “no less … to what was unfolding in his head and in his heart than to all the extraordinarily diverse things that touched him from outside” (quoted by Edwards 2017, 12). The indirect discourse that makes up the entirety of the work is never framed as such by the author. In other words, it is never supplemented by any direct discourse or address to the reader that, within the body of the work, serves to stratify the text or differentiate between moments at which the narration might be said to be more or less accountable for its sentiments. A passage that seems to offer a counter-example only proves the point. Precisely halfway through the expedition – that is, on day 319 of a 638day narrative – Leiris begins drafting a preface in which some of the book’s principles of composition are laid out explicitly: I relate few incidents of the voyage aside from those in which I was personally involved. I only recount events in which I myself took part. I describe little. I note details that anyone is free to declare misplaced or pointless. I leave out others that could be considered more important. I have indeed done nothing after the fact to correct what there is here that is too individual. But I have done so in order to attain the maximum of truth. For nothing is true but the concrete. (2017, 320) But the “directness” of this statement, its capacity to stand as an authorial explanation of the work we are reading, does not survive its

6 The phrase “represented speech and thought” is taken from the work of the critic and linguist Ann Banfield where it designates the quality of novelistic discourse (Unspeakable Sentences 12).

218  Timothy Bewes placement in the text. Just as Leiris is copying these lines into his notebook, he tells us, “a swarm of locusts passed by” (321). The effect is precisely that of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. Leiris breaks the frame of direct speech with a gesture that pluralizes the subjectivity of discourse in the work; this effect is only heightened by his immediate condemnation of the draft for its “pedantry” and “pretension”. A page or so later, Leiris supplies a second draft that he wrote earlier, suspecting it may be “better”, in which he offers a further rationale for the inclusion of trivial and abject details in the journal. “To expose the personal coefficient in the light of day”, he writes, is “to allow the calculation of error, which is the greatest possible guarantee of objectivity” (322). In his introduction, Edwards dwells on a fascinating passage dated a few months later, September 1, 1932, when Leiris is going through one of many periods of disenchantment and self-doubt concerning the viability not only of ethnography but of his project to dismantle or somehow overcome colonial relations of alterity, by approaching – as he puts it – “something whose depths I will never touch”: Today I feel better, though tired and irritable. I realize that I have been working too hard, that I am too enthusiastic about this research in a dangerous domain. I am beginning to discern, too, just what is to a large extent behind the violent sorrow that had overtaken me: a brusque realization of doubt within me about all of this. Poetry probably not quite as beautiful as I had believed. Possession perhaps less profound, confined to vague neurotic phenomena, and serving as a cloak for a lot of other goings-on … But above all, and in contradiction to all this, the piercing sensation of being at the edge of something whose depths I will never touch, among other reasons because I do not have the power to let myself go – as would be necessary – this due to a variety of motives that are very hard to define, but among which there are first of all questions of skin, of civilization, of language. (498) This entry is composed in Gondar, Ethiopia, and it takes place late in the narrative, by which point Leiris, against all expectations, has become fascinated by the phenomenon of zar possession. The nature of his fascination is partly ethnographic, to do with its ritual elements; but it is also clearly erotic. At this moment, Leiris relates an anecdote intended to illustrate “the irreducible gap between two civilizations” (i.e., Europe and Africa). The story concerns Emawayish, the daughter of a female zar adept, who refuses to wash her son because she is worried that one of the genies that possess her mother will strike her son with illness. In saying this, writes Leiris,

A Swarm of Locusts Passed By  219 she really thinks that one of the spirits dwelling in her mother’s head is capable of causing the death of her child. But she doesn’t hold her mother responsible and bears no resentment against her […] So everyone, then – Emawayish, her mother, […] myself – has his head peopled with little genies that in all likelihood are commanding all his actions (one for each category) without his being in any way responsible […] That is the great step I will never be able to take. […] I can hardly believe, for example, that right now I’m not the one who is suffering and rambling, that instead I am undoubtedly in the grip of an evil genie – a succubus, perhaps – and that, in any case, we have no solid foundation: tomorrow, for example, if I am happy, there is no reason to take the words I said today into account, because tomorrow I will no longer be the same person; I will be inspired by a happier genie. Yet this is what any of my friends here would think of my present state. (499, my emphasis) I will never be able to take such a step, he says. Shame, precisely. Shame, unnamed but “instantiated”. At the moment of writing, poring over a typewriter under canvas in the African desert, Leiris feels the pain and struggle of his project. He experiences, viscerally, the inadequacy and inconsequentiality of the Mission, of the discipline of ethnography, and of his present writing, tied, as they are, to his race, his profession, and his body, in the form of his phenomenological alienation from the field of vision. Leiris is riveted to his personhood. But two things are worth noting. First, the alterity that he longs to enter into is actually available to him through his “own culture” and indeed his literary vocation: not in the register of nonfiction writing but in the novel, the genre in which authors are permitted to people their heads with any number of little genies (Walser 2018). Second, and in contradiction with this first observation, it seems to me that precisely that step into the plurality of the I is in fact undertaken at every moment of Phantom Africa, not through trance or spirit possession but through writing – and that it is undertaken not at specific moments but in the entirety of the text, considered as a complete statement. For one of the effects of those principles of composition that are never once violated is that – in the face of that inadequate descriptor, “nonfiction” writing – there is no point of subjective stability in the text; no moment of speaking in one’s own voice; and no ownership of, nor responsibility to, any utterance that takes place within it. The work is void of expressions of regret (or justification) over the many questionable acts of robbery and fraud perpetrated by the French ethnographers at the expense of their hosts – other than as instances of disquiet, and even expressions of outrage, that are not sustained and do not convert into any kind of action. Phantom Africa is what Leiris called (in the 1951 preface) a “first take” (2017, 62n). The writing subject is a plural subject, whose

220  Timothy Bewes consolidation into a unity is perpetually deferred. Sometimes footnotes are added to define or translate particular terms; sometimes details of questionable significance are clarified (such as the purpose of the tweezers that Leiris is irritated to have lost on November 4, 1931, somewhere in Dogon country) (2017, 202). But these notes are always marked as additions to the text, never as corrections. In this way, mistakes and errors are accorded as much attention as truthful observations. So, although the only voice we encounter in Phantom Africa is that of Leiris himself, Phantom Africa is a “dialogical” text, in precisely the sense intended by Mikhail Bakhtin when he describes the works of Dostoevsky as “narration without perspective”. Dostoevsky’s narrator, says Bakhtin, “finds himself in immediate proximity to the hero and to the ongoing event, and it is from this maximally close, aperspectival point of view that he structures their representation” (1984, 225). In Dostoevsky, the lack of “perspective” is necessary so that the possibility of a “firm and finalized image of the hero” will be excluded from the outset (226). The  hero in Dostoevsky is only present in his own eyes, which means that the hero’s own views and opinions are as objectivized as anything else in the text. Nothing that is said in Dostoevsky’s narratives rises from the status of an object of representation to that of a principle of representation (24–25). This quality is present in Phantom Africa also. It demands a different approach to reading Leiris than the one we usually adopt with respect to works of ethnography – or, indeed, of literature. For the important things to be learned from this text do not concern the “knowledge” that is embedded in it, as an object of discovery and communication by its author. And they don’t involve the dissemination of ethnographic ­hypotheses – say, concerning the nature of everyday life amongst the Dogon, or the rites and rituals surrounding zar possession in Gondar. Leiris himself alludes to this quality in the 1951 preface to Phantom Africa – one of those retrospective framings that are permitted to stand – where he describes, precisely, the perspective of his text: It is a perspective based in very simple camaraderie in which – no longer aspiring to the romantic role of the White Man who, in one generous leap […] comes down from the pedestal created by prejudice in the hierarchy of the races in order to make common cause with men situated on the other side of the barrier – I hardly notice barriers any longer, if there are any, aside from those erected between oppressors and oppressed to divide them into two camps […] Such a change in perspective (some would call it a renunciation) increasingly makes me view the publication of these notes […] as a sort of confession. (2017, 64–65) These implicit criticisms of his own text for its “confessional” quality should not be taken at face value, I would argue – precisely because

A Swarm of Locusts Passed By  221 the “change in perspective” is, indeed, a “renunciation” of perspective. “I am now persuaded”, he writes in 1951, “that no man living in this iniquitous yet indisputably modifiable … world … should be able to get in the clear by means of a flight and a confession” (65). Phantom Africa is neither a confessional text nor a memoir (of the kind penned by Jonny Steinberg) because we are unable to establish a chronological gap or relation between the representing (or speaking) I and the represented (or spoken) I – between the moment of representation and the moment being represented. Such a relation, in which the speaking I takes its own earlier self as an object of reflection, is a condition of all confessional or autobiographical texts. In L’Afrique fantôme, however, no claim or plea is being made on behalf of the spoken subject by the speaking subject, because – as in Dostoevsky – neither is permitted to emerge from the status of an object of representation to become a principle of representation. There is, in fact, no speaking subject in L’Afrique fantôme.7 In his 1981 “Preamble”, Leiris retrospectively characterizes the book using the phrase “an ethnography of militant fraternity” (2017, 60). “Militant fraternity” denotes something like an ethnography of “maximal closeness” or “minimal perspective”. Leiris is evoking, then, not just a closeness of the subject to the object of study, but a closeness – to the point of inseparability – of the speaking subject and the spoken subject. This, as Edwards points out, is far from saying that the book is an “ethnography of the self”, as some analysts have claimed (2017, 12–13n); it is rather a collapse of the ethnographic relation itself, conceived as a separation of the moment of representation from the moment being represented. *** I will make one last observation. In his introduction, Edwards tells us about an earlier English translation of L’Afrique fantôme, completed around 1951, that never saw the light of day, despite interest from an English publisher in putting out an abridged edition culled of certain passages that reminded the publisher, Robert Hale, of “schoolboys’ 7 In an illuminating and ingenious account of Leiris’s work, Vincent Debaene speculates that there is, in fact, a conventional nonfiction text – of the kind that (say) Jonny Steinberg writes – in L’Afrique fantôme, a text that speaks – directly – of Leiris’s experience, offering “a unification … under the sign of a coming to consciousness, a realization”– what Edwards, referring to Debaene’s book, paraphrases as “a more retrospective memoir of lessons learned over the course of the expedition” (Edwards 51). But that conventional text remains unwritten, a “phantom book” alluded to by Leiris only in the text’s first prière d’insurer (or publicity insert), written for the book’s initial publication. See Vincent Debaene, Far Afield: French Anthropology Between Science and Literature, esp. 176–178. For the publicity insert in question see Michel Leiris, “Phantom India,” in Brisées, 46–47.

222  Timothy Bewes lavatory wall dirt” (25n). Leiris, however, did not allow an expurgated version to be published. Why would he have been so firm on this issue? Edwards does not address this directly; but it is worth pointing out that any abridgement of the text would immediately compromise what I referred to earlier as its dialogical quality. To make a selection of the material would be to introduce a subjective principle into the text – implicitly privileging certain information and knowledge (such as the episode of zar possession) over other information and knowledge (such as the purpose of Leiris’s missing tweezers or the “lavatory wall dirt”) – a subjective principle that Leiris’s own practice systematically excludes. Leiris expresses this in one of the two draft prefaces that appear in the book: “[it is] in carrying subjectivity to its peak that one attains objectivity” (321). This, perhaps, is the heart of the lesson that Leiris’s work offers us. For – to take Leiris’s own insight further – isn’t it only by taking “directness” to its extreme, banishing all indirect speech, that one is able to speak with perfect indirectness? And a last formula – one that, ultimately, may also apply to the work of Jonny Steinberg: is not speaking with a rigorous attention to one’s own racial positionality the only hope we have of transcending, and thereby escaping, the raced inequality of access to discourse?

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Banfield, Ann. 1982. Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction. Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Barnard, Rita. 2012. “Ugly Feelings, Negative Dialectics: Reflections on Post­ apartheid Shame.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 13 (1–2, January-April): 151–170. Bewes, Timothy. 2011. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Coetzee, J. M. 1992. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Edited by David Attwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Debaene, Vincent. 2014. Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science and Literature. Translated by Justin Izzo. Chicago, IL and London: U of Chicago P. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. “The Crystals of Time.” Cinema 2: The Movement-­ Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, 68–97. London: Athlone. Dorfman, Ben. 2014. “The Event of Postcolonial Shame.” The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 19 (3): 390–391. Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2017. “Introduction to the English Translation.” In Phantom Africa, edited by Michel Leiris, 1–56. Calcutta, London, New York: Seagull Books. Esty, Jed. 2009. “Global Lukács.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42 (3, Fall): 366–372. Hayot, Eric. 2012. On Literary Worlds. Oxford: Oxford UP.

A Swarm of Locusts Passed By  223 James, David. 2012. “The Politics of Inadequacy.” Twentieth Century Literature 58 (2, Summer): 365–375. Lehman, Daniel. 2010. “Counting the Costs of Nonfiction: An Interview with Jonny Steinberg.” River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative 11 (2, Spring): 31–44. Leiris, Michel. 1989. Brisées: Broken Branches. Translated by Lydia Davis. San Francisco, CA: North Point P. ———. 2017. Phantom Africa. Translated by Brent Hayes Edwards. Calcutta, London, New York: Seagull Books. Lukács, Georg. 1971. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT P. ———. 1971. “Preface.” The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock, 11–23. Cambridge, MA: MIT P. Phillips, Caryl. 1991. Cambridge. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 1993. Crossing the River. London: Bloomsbury. Rothberg, Michael. 2012. “‘Ensnared in Implication’: Writing, Shame, and Colonialism.” Contemporary Literature 53 (2, Summer): 374–386. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Steinberg, Jonny. 2008. Sizwe’s Test: A Young Man’s Journey Through Africa’s AIDS Epidemic. New York: Simon and Schuster. Walser, Hannah. 2018. “Proust’s Genies: In Search of Lost Time and Population Biology.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 51 (3, Fall): 482–501.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Aboriginal identity 126 accountability 209, 215 ‘act of apology’ 19 Aeschylus 67–8, 69n12 aesthetics and ethics 36–7, 141, 193, 198, 199, 206 affect/emotion 138–41 Affect Imagery Consciousness (Tomkins) 139 African National Congress (ANC) 18 After Darkness (Piper) 32, 33, 108, 109–15 Agamben, G. 20, 24 Agamemnon (Aeschylus) 65n10, 67, 68, 86 Age of Iron (Coetzee) 20, 32, 50, 58, 59, 61, 63, 65, 70, 72, 74, 75, 84n16, 85, 86 Ahmed, S. 135–6, 142, 148 anagnorisis 207 Another Life (Walcott) 36, 177, 188 “anxiety of belonging” 130 Arendt, H. 6, 24, 29n8 Ashcroft, B. 2, 163 Attic tragedy 31, 60, 61, 63, 64, 64n8, 65–7, 82, 85, 86 Attwell, D. 30–1, 62 Augé, M. 168–9 Auster, P. 162 Australia: identity 33, 122, 147; with Indigenous peoples 111–12, 123, 124; and refugees 143–5; traumatic history 18–19; unfinished business 106; Bicentennial 123 Bacchae (Soyinka) 65–6, 65n9 Balibar, É. 48 Banfield, A. 211n2, 217n6

Barnard, R. 32–3, 37, 212n3, 213–16 The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears (Mengestu) 32, 95, 96, 103, 104 Behr, M. 50 Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 7 A Bend in the River (Naipaul) 95n3 Bennett, L. 186–7 Bewes, T. 4–7, 16, 17, 30–2, 35–8, 43–50, 55, 71, 95, 108, 141–2, 160–2, 164, 166–73, 193–5, 198–206 Bhabha, H. 14, 165 Bitter Fruit (Dangor) 50 Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (Bernal) 64n6 blackness 16, 18, 36, 131–3, 179 Black Rock, White City (Patric) 34, 138, 146–56 “black shame” 130 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 71, 78 Black Sunlight (Marechera) 25 Border Protection Legislation Amendment (1999) 144 The Bounty (Walcott) 177 Bouson, J. B. 3 Brandt, S. 94 Brathwaite, E. K. 177, 186, 190 Brett, J. 106 Breytenbach, B. 47 Bringing Them Home Report (1997) 123, 133, 148 Brooks, G. 169–73, 172n4 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevski) 32, 94–5, 98, 102, 103

226 Index Brown, B. 140, 141 Bruckner, P. 159 Brumby Innes (Prichard) 125 “burning whiteness” 47 Burrows, V. 130, 148 Bush, G. W. 60 Butler, J. 79 Byrd, J. 164 Caleb’s Crossing (Brooks) 35, 169–70, 172 Callahan, D. 35 Cambridge (Phillips) 37, 193, 200–5, 208, 210 Can the Subaltern Speak? (Spivak) 6, 209 Caruth, C. 154 The Castaway and Other Poems (Walcott) 186 Charos, C. 17, 18, 27 Cheyfitz, E. 164 Christianity 184, 185 Churchill, W. 168 civility 48 cliché 200–2, 205–7 Coetzee, J. M. 10, 17, 20, 25, 29–32, 43, 46–52, 54, 55, 57–61, 63, 65–73, 76–8, 80, 82, 83, 85–7, 94, 161, 209–10n1, 210, 213 Colic-Peisker, Val. 143–5, 147 Collected Poems 1948–1984 (Walcott) 177 colonial grammar 21, 27 colonialism 3–5, 22, 23, 27, 30, 43, 63n5, 68, 77, 124, 125, 163, 172, 183, 194, 201, 212, 213 colonial relation 11–16, 106, 124, 129, 214, 218 Comaroff, J. 2 Comaroff, L. J. 2 community: Caribbean 179; civilization of 59; spiritually regenerated 185–6 ‘community argument’ 144 concealment vs. exposure 142 “constructive shame” 23 Coonardoo (Prichard) 125 Coquio, C. 58 counter-shaming rhetorical strategy 128 A Country Club Romance (Walcott) 182 creative sharing 33, 107

Crossing the River (Phillips) 37, 193, 200–2, 205, 208, 210 Crusoe’s Island (Walcott) 185 Crusoe’s Journal (Walcott) 185 “cultural cringe” 33 Curthoys, Ann 147 Dalziell, R. 128, 130, 135 Dangor, A. 50 Darian-Smith, K. 32, 107 David’s Story (Wicomb) 18, 50 “day of shame” 28n7 The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn: A Lakota History (Marshall) 165 Dayton Peace Accord 143 Deceit, Desire and the Novel (Girard) 211 Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice 196 Deleuze, Gilles 6, 17, 38, 211 De l’évasion (Lévinas) 10–11 Deloria Jr, Vine 168 Deonna, J. A. 9 depersonalization 134 Derrida, J. 36, 195–9 Diary of a Bad Year (Coetzee) 25, 31, 58, 59, 59n3, 60 “dictator game” 32 discrimination 27, 36, 122–4, 127, 132, 145, 182 Disgrace (Coetzee) 45, 46, 49, 50, 57, 58, 71, 80 distress 45, 128, 194 Dodds, E. 65–7 Don Quixote 84n16 Dostoevsky 32, 45, 46, 94, 95, 102, 103, 220, 221 “doublethink” 48 Doubling the Point (Coetzee) 49, 50, 55, 63, 209n1 Driver, D. 18 Durkheim, É. 23 Dusklands (Coetzee) 46, 58 East Asia Beyond the History Wars: Confronting the Ghosts of Violence (Morris-Suzuki) 107 Eckstein, L. 202–4 Edwards, B. H. 38, 214, 216, 218, 221, 221n7, 222 Elias, N. 21 Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee) 58, 72, 82. 85

Index  227 Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings (Bouson) 3 emotion see affect/emotion empathy 103, 115, 117, 141, 154, 195 The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin) 2, 163 Epidemic Prevention Laboratory 113 Epitaph for the Young (Walcott) 36, 177 Erotic Pastoral (Walcott) 36, 181 Escudero-Alías, M. 140 Esty, J. 213 ethnic branding 22 Eumaeus 178 The Event of Postcolonial Shame (Bewes) 4, 17, 35–7, 43, 95, 141, 160–2, 173, 193, 209, 212 existential-phenomenological model 7, 11–12, 57, 61, 70 exposure 28, 97, 102, 130, 141, 142, 199 Fanon, F. 1, 28–30, 125; Black Skin, White Masks 71, 78; phenomenological analysis 8; race, colonial order/nomos of 13; The Wretched of the Earth 14, 24, 46, 57 Farber, Y. 64n8 A Far Cry from Africa (Walcott) 183, 184, 186 The Female Face of Shame (Johnson and Moran) 3 fetishizing shame 7 fiction and nonfiction 215 ‘First World’ 34, 35, 138 First World War (1998) 21 NO Five Men (Herbert) 50 Flanagan, R. 109 Fleishman, M. 64n8 Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (Garimara) 109 Force of Law (Derrida) 195–7 Foreign Correspondence (Brooks) 171 Freud, S. 128, 147 frontier effects 32, 95, 98–9 Fugard, A. 64–6, 70 fundamentalism 26 Gaita, R. 133, 134 Gardner, H. 206 Garimara, D. P. 109

Gelder, K. 111 Gilroy, P. 12–15, 21, 28, 128 Girard, R. 211 Goffman, E. 97 Gone, J. 162 The Good Story (Coetzee and Kurtz) 47–8 Gordimer, N. 50, 55, 211 Gordon, A. 110, 111, 119 Grain of Wheat (Ngũgĩ) 167 “great Australian silence” 126, 133 Greek tragedy 43, 44, 63, 63n5, 65, 69 Grenville, K. 29, 33, 34, 109, 111, 122, 129, 133–6 Griffiths, G. 2, 163 Grossman, V. 6 guilt 5, 26, 27, 32, 59, 60, 63, 67, 70, 94, 107, 112, 118, 124, 128, 133, 140, 172 Guilt by Descent (Sewell-Rutter) 66 “haafus” (“half-caste” Japanese-Australians) 112 Hall, S. 22 hamartia 31, 61, 65, 69, 69n12, 78, 79 Hamilton, P. 32, 107 Harlow, B. 163 Harris-Perry, M. 3 Haslett, A. 93, 104 Hayot, E. 211n2 Head, B. 17, 45 Herbert, Z. 50, 85 Herrero, D. 34–5, 109, 130 Heyes, P. 84n16 Hill, C. 28n6 Hinton, L. 4n2 Hodge, B. 130, 147 The Hollow Men or Ash-Wednesday (Eliot)178 Holmes, K. 108 Homecoming: Anse La Raye (Walcott) 187 Homo Sacer (Agamben) 24 “hot returns” 25 Howard, J. 106, 124 human dignity 11, 93, 149, 183 human rights 24, 123 humiliation 21, 23, 33, 77, 92, 93, 96, 98–101, 178 Hundred in the Hand (Marshall III) 35, 165 Hutchinson, P. 9, 17, 84, 134

228 Index identity politics 11, 47, 78 “immigrant hunters” 25 imperialism 2, 4, 12, 22, 27, 123, 183 In a Green Night (Walcott) 177, 182, 183 incommensurability 6–7, 29, 30, 35, 37, 44, 45, 47, 48, 95, 161, 166, 194–5, 198, 200–1, 206 Inferno (Dante)32, 36, 95n3, 100 instantiated shame 194 In the City of Paradise (Fleishman) 64n8 In The Heart of the Country (Coetzee) 31, 58, 59, 61, 63, 65, 70, 83, 85 Ishiguro, K. 110, 110n8 Ishii Shirō 113 Ishii Unit 113 Jacobs, J. M. 111 Jameson, F. 45, 49, 92 J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory (Boehmer, Eaglestone, Iddiols eds.) 59n3 Johnson, E. 3, 124–5 Jones, G. 17, 18, 109 Kani, J. 64, 65 Kauffman, J. 134 Kaufman, G. 129 Kearney, R. 194, 199 Keiichi Tsuneishi 113 Kempton, A. 86 Kipling, R. 117 Kirmayer, L. 162 Kleist, Heinrich von 51–2 Konkle, M. 166 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve 11 Kossew, S. 19, 32–3, 62, 63, 124 Kristeva, J. 77 Kurks, S. 78 Kurtz, A. 30, 47–8 L’Afrique fantôme (Leiris) 38, 212, 214, 216–17, 221, 221n7 Lager 13 Lammy, D. 28n7 Langley, T. 160 La Vie et demi (Tansi) 20 Lazarus, N. 7, 7n3 Leaving School (Walcott) 188 Lehman, D. 213n5 Leiris, M. 38, 212, 214, 216–22, 221n7

Leist, A. 58 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) literature 3 L’Ésprit Créateur (Constable) 15 L’État honteux (Tansi) 20 Letter to Margaret (Walcott)36, 182 Lévinas, E. 10–11, 36, 58, 71, 194–7 Levi, P. 6, 15 Lewis, H. B. 131 Lewis, M. 139–40 “Lies about Crimes” (Hill) 28n6 The Lieutenant (Grenville) 109 Life and Times of Michael K (Coetzee) 30–1, 43, 50–1, 55, 58 Limon, J. 25 L’Inde fantôme (Malle) 38, 212–14 Lopes, H. 91 Lukács, G. 209, 211, 211n2, 212 Lynd, H. 140 Malle, L. 38, 212, 214 Mamdani, M. 14–15, 22, 26 Mania, lussa, atē, miasma, Erinyes 67 “Manichean delirium” 24 March (Brooks) 35, 169–71 Marechera, D. 25 Margaret Verlieu Dies (Walcott)182 “Marlene” (Prichard) 127 Marshall III, J. M. 35, 165 Martin-Granel, N. 19, 20 Martinsen, D. A. 94, 95, 102–4 The Master of Petersburg (Coetzee) 46 May, Theresa 28n7 Mbembe, A. 12, 13, 22, 25, 30, 92n2 “meaning machines” 92 “melancholic” syndrome 28 Mendible, M. 92, 93, 104 Mengestu, D. 32, 95, 98, 101 metamorphosis 74 Michael Kohlhaas (Kleist) 51–5 Migration Reform Act (1992) 144 Miller, S. 133 miscegenation 15, 16, 29, 36, 127, 131, 181, 182 Mishra, V. 130, 147 Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (Owens) 163–4 Molora (Farber) 64n8 montage and pastiche 202–3 Moore, C. 118 Moran, P. 3 Morgan, M. 4–5, 17, 124, 133, 159n1 Morning, Paramin (Walcott) 177 Morrison, A. 147

Index  229 Morris-Suzuki, T. 107, 110, 119 Moses, J. 162 “multidirectional” horizon 6 “multidirectional” technique 25 Munt, S. R. 4n2 The Muse of History (Walcott) 190 My Beautiful Enemy (Taylor) 32, 33, 108–10, 115–19 My Son’s Story (Gordimer) 50 Myth, Literature and the African World (Soyinka) 64n6 Naipaul, V. S. 4, 92n2, 95n3, 100, 177, 211 “Naninja and Janey” (Prichard) 128 “nation-building” 26 nation language (Walcott) 36, 189, 190 negative affect 139 ‘neo-colonial’ 2 neocolonialism 29, 180 New Ethnicities (Hall) 22 “N’goola” (Prichard) 125–7 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. 2, 4, 64, 93, 166 Nietzsche, F. 45, 57, 83–5 Nkrumah, K. 2 Noah, T. 79, 91, 92, 100 ‘normal Australian self’ 147 The North Coast at Night (Walcott) 183 Ntshona, W. 64, 65 Nussbaum, M. 23, 59 The Odyssey 207 Oedipus Rex 207 Olick, J. 35 Olick, J. K. 159 Omeros (Walcott) 177 On Escape (Lévinas) 194 “On National Shame” (Coetzee) 25, 59, 61 On Shame (Morgan) 159n1 On Stories (Kearney) 194 On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality (Churchill) 168 Oresteia (Aeschylus) 67 Orwell, G. 117 Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Owens) 163 overdetermination 8, 78 Owens, L. 163–4

‘Pacific Solution’ 144 Padel, R. 79 Patric, A. S. 34, 138, 146 peripeteia 207 Pes, A. 33–4 Phantom Africa (Edwards) 216, 219–21 phenomenological approach 7–11 Phillips, A. A. 122–3 Phillips, C. 4, 29, 37, 38, 193, 199–208, 210 Pinto, S. 109 Piper, C. 32, 33, 108–16, 118, 119 Pippin, R. 80 Plains of Promise (Wright) 109 Poems (Walcott) 177, 179–80 The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 (Walcott) 177 The Political Unconscious (Jameson) 49 positive affect 139 postcolonial approach 1, 2 Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Young) 1 Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon (Mabsen) 164 “post-imperial” 2 Prichard, K. S. 33–4, 122, 125–9 Pride, Shame and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment (Taylor) 9 Probyn, F. 72, 73 The Prodigal (Walcott) 177 “Protectors of Aborigines” 15 Queer Attachments. The Cultural Politics of Shame (Munt) 4n2 A Question of Power (Head) 17, 45 race 4n2, 13, 16, 22, 69, 99, 117, 125, 127, 131, 132, 134, 171, 215, 219 racism 14, 29, 36, 93, 122–4, 130, 131, 178, 182 récit fictionnel and récit factuel 20 recognition 27, 29, 37, 55, 78, 170, 193, 199, 207, 208 reconciliation 15, 26, 27, 33, 34, 106, 107, 111, 122, 125, 130, 135, 159, 183 Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (Deloria) 168 “relational grammar” 15–16 Relations in Public (Goffman) 97 Religion and Literature (Gardner) 206

230 Index The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro) 110, 110n8 resetting affect 139 ‘resettlement potential argument’ 144 Resistance Literature (Harlow) 163 resistance to tell 17 NO CVO “reverse colonization” 24 revolutionary optimism 45 Rhodes, C. J. 44 Righetti, A. 36–8 Rothberg, M. 5, 37, 108, 108n4, 215, 216 Rowe, J. C. 171n3, 172–3 Royo-Grasa, M. Pilar 148 Rudd, Amber 28n7 Rudden, M. 94 Rudd, K. 106, 107, 124 Rudhart, J. 68n11 Ruins of a Great House (Walcott) 36, 183, 184 Rwanda genocide 5, 6, 14–15, 22, 23 Sarah Thornhill (Grenville) 33, 109, 129–36 Sartre, J. P. 7–12, 14, 46–7, 53, 57, 59, 60, 76–8, 82, 164 scama 10n5 Schaffer, K. 123, 133 Scheler, M. 20 Schindler’s List (Spielberg) 199 Schmitt, C. 24 The Schooner Flight (Walcott) 177 Scott, K. 109, 170n2 scrutiny of shame 7, 8 Season of Anomy (Soynka) 65n9 Second World War 24, 33, 35, 58, 108, 112, 143, 144, 159 The Secret River (Grenville) 107n1, 109, 111, 129, 130 Sewell-Rutter, N. J. 66, 67, 86 shades of shame 130 Shaffer, Kay 147 shame 5, 166, 194; and colonial relation 11–16; effects of 43; efficacy of 108; as form 141–3; and guilt 124 (see also guilt); issue of 4n2; kinds of 194; and literature 16–29; Oxford English Dictionary 193; phenomenology of 10, 16, 19; and dis-alienation 14; humanity and hope 26; and self-alienation 9,28, 31, 61; and self-loathing 74,77,78,81,97,116; and self-awareness and

self-transformation 34, 129; and resilience 141; and contemporary Australians 123-4; and silence 129 Shame (Rushdie) 20 Shame and its Sisters (Tomkins) 45 Shame and Modern Writing (Sheils and Walsh) 4n2 Shame and Necessity (Williams) 43 shamelessness 11, 25, 29, 32, 60 “shame-rage spiral” 21 ‘shame spiral’ 141 shaming and counter-shaming 123 shaming conditions 122 Sheils, B. 4n2 Shinjuku Bones Affair 113 Shooting an Elephant (Orwell) 117 Singer, P. 58 Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (Harris-Perry) 3 Sizwe’s Test (Steinberg) 213 skem 10n5 slavery 37, 93, 189, 200–2, 206–8, 210 The Smell of Apples (Behr) 50 Smiley, J. 169 Smith, P. C. 169 Smith, S. 123, 133 Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) 143 Soleils des indépendances 20 The Song of Jacob Zulu (Yurgrau) 64 Sorry (Jones) 18, 109 Sorry Days 27 Soyinka, W. 64–5, 64n6, 65n9 Spivak, G. C. 6, 7, 37, 209, 211 States of Shame: South African Writing after Apartheid (Charos) 18 States of Shame: la honte (Constable), 15 Steinberg, J. 213–15, 213n4, 221n7, 222 The Stone Virgins (Vera) 45 Summertime (Coetzee) 66 Surprised by Shame (Martinsen) 94 ‘survivor guilt’ 15 Tales of the Islands (Walcott) 177 Tansi, S. L. 20 Taylor, C. 32, 33, 108–10, 115–19 Taylor, G. 9, 59 Temporality and Shame (Hinton and Willensen) 4n2 Teroni, F. 9

Index  231 That Deadman Dance (Scott) 109, 170n2 The Theory of the Novel (Lukács) 209, 211 “the tyranny of penance” 27 Tiepolo’s Hound (Walcott) 176, 177 Tiffin, H. 2, 163 Tomkins, S. 17, 45, 130, 131, 139–42, 147, 150 “tragic guilt” 60 transformative recognition 110, 111, 119 The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Byrd) 164 The Truce (Levi) 6 Trump, D. 91–5, 104 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 18, 26 Tutsi genocide (1994) 22–3 25 Poems (Walcott) 177 The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (Bruckner) 159 unfinished business 106, 107, 109, 110, 119 uninstantiated shame 194 “unrepresentability” 18 Unspeakable Sentences (Banfield) 211n2, 217n6 van Bever Donker, V. 36–8 van Weyenberg, A. 63n5, 65, 66 ventriloquy 200, 201, 205–7 Vera, Y. 45 Verfremdungseffekt 218 Vernant, J.-P. 60, 61, 65, 67, 70 vicarious shame 25 violence 12, 13, 18–21, 27, 30, 37, 48, 70, 80, 94, 95, 106, 150, 153, 206, 208 Violence and Civility (Balibar) 48

Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee) 10, 46, 58, 85, 86, 94 Walcott, D. 36, 176–80, 183–5, 187–91 Walsh, J. 4n2 Wanting (Flanagan) 109 Ward, S. 108 The War of Dreams (Augé) 168–9 Western humanism 60, 76, 87 Wetmore, K. 63–4, 63n5 white and indigenous relations 15 White Egrets (Walcott) 177 The White Man’s Burden (Kipling) 117 whiteness 131, 132, 145, 147, 151, 170, 179 White, P. 123 “white shame” 130 Wicomb, Z. 16–18, 50, 210, 213 Willensen, H. 4n2 Williams, B. 9, 11, 17, 26, 30, 43–5, 55, 68, 69 Williams, E. 181n2 “Windrush generation” 28n7 The Wizard of the Crow (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o) 93 Womack, C. 167 “world shame” 20 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon) 14, 24, 46, 57 Wright, A. 109 Young, R. 1 Youth (Coetzee) 46 Yugoslavia, former 143–5 Yurgrau, Tug 64 Zahavi, D. 9, 9n4 Zinato, S. 31–2 Zuma, J. 44