Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century 2019022963, 9780810141728, 9780810141735, 9780810141742

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Postcolonial Disaster

Critical Insurgencies A Book Series of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association Series Editors: Jodi A. Byrd and Michelle M. Wright Critical Insurgencies features activists and scholars, as well as artists and other media makers, who forge new theoretical and political practices that unsettle the nation-­state, neoliberalism, carcerality, settler colonialism, Western hegemony, legacies of slavery, colonial racial formations, gender binaries, and ableism, and that also challenge all forms of oppression and state violence through generative future imaginings. About CESA  The Critical Ethnic Studies Association organizes projects and programs that engage ethnic studies while reimagining its futures. Grounded in multiple activist formations within and outside institutional spaces, CESA aims to develop an approach to intellectual and political projects animated by the spirit of decolonial, antiracist, antisexist, and other global liberationist movements. These movements enabled the creation of ethnic studies and continue to inform its political and intellectual projects.

www.criticalethnicstudies.org

Postcolonial Disaster Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-­First Century

Pallavi Rastogi

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2020 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2020. All rights reserved. Excerpts from the introduction appeared in “Precarities, Resistance, and Care Communities in South Asia,” South Asian Review 39, nos. 3 and 4 (2018): 269–­74. https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2018.1538726. Copyright © South Asian Literary Association, reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of the South Asian Literary Association. Excerpts from chapter 1 appeared in “Tsunami Stories: Writing Out the Wave in the Oceanic Disaster,” Prose Studies 36, no. 2 (2014): 141–­58. https://doi​ .org/10.1080/01440357.2014.944256; reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Rastogi, Pallavi, author. Title: Postcolonial disaster : narrating catastrophe in the twenty first century / Pallavi Rastogi. Other titles: Critical insurgencies. Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2020. | Series: Critical insurgencies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019022963 | ISBN 9780810141728 (paperback) |  ISBN 9780810141735 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810141742 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Disasters in literature. | English fiction—21st century— History and criticism. | African fiction (English)—History and criticism. | South Asian fiction (English)—History and criticism. | Postcolonialism in literature. Classification: LCC PR830.D56 R37 2010 | DDC 820.9/3582—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022963

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction. Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-­First Century

3

Part 1: Explosion Chapter 1. Tsunami Stories: Writing Out the Wave in the Oceanic Disaster

41

Part 2: Slow Burn Chapter 2. “Better Fed than Free”: Buying Out of the Economic Disaster Chapter 3. Ripping Off the BandAIDS: Dying Out in the Medical Disaster

79 115

Part 3: Simmer Chapter 4. War of the Words: Fighting Out the Geopolitical Disaster

157

Coda. Catastrophes of the Now: (B)Reaching Out of the Refugee Disaster

197

Notes 205 Bibliography 261 Index 281

Acknowledgments

I owe the largest debt of gratitude to the editorial collective of friends, colleagues, and mentors who read this book in manuscript form. My writing group has anchored me intellectually since I came to LSU in 2004. Postcolonial Disaster started as a rambling series of thought-­ drafts that I could share, without shame or embarrassment, only with this particular cohort: Elsie Michie, Daniel Novak, Christopher Rovee, and Sharon Weltman. Thank you for reading countless drafts that must have amounted to reading the entire manuscript at least five times. All four of you have your own ways of critiquing my work, and of directing me as a writer, all of which radically improved four different aspects of this book. Elsie: extra thanks to you for reading the entire manuscript when I needed someone who could evaluate the book holistically. While finishing Postcolonial Disaster, I was also part of another wonderful writing group with Michael Bibler and Isiah Lavender. I am grateful to them for affirming the quality of the revised versions of the book. I am especially thankful to Michael for his amazing ability to identify exactly what was wrong with my writing and thinking, and his willingness to discuss at length how I could implement his hugely helpful suggestions. Chris Barrett, a colleague whose generosity and brilliance brighten my life, also read substantial sections of the book. Her enthusiasm for the project gave me hope that the book would take flight one day instead of landing on its face. Other colleagues at LSU who cheered me on include Brannon Costello, Jennifer Davis, Carl Freedman, Lara Glenum, Benjamin Kahan, Touria Khannous, Mari Kornhauser, Andrea Morris, Solimar Otero, Rosemary Peters, and Adelaide Russo. Excellent research assistance was provided by Alyssa Dobson, Alexandra Chiasson, Rachel Howatt, and Mary Pappalardo, and who probably know more about postcolonial disaster than they would ever want or need to know. I am grateful beyond words to Ashley Thibodeaux, who kept me sane for the three years I was director of graduate studies, which were the three years in which the bulk of this book was written and rewritten. Thanks also to my vii

viii Acknowledgments

department chair, Joseph Kronick, who supported me throughout and took genuine pleasure in my success. Outside of LSU, I have many people to thank from my intellectual community in postcolonial, South Asian, and African studies, especially Shane Graham, writing. buddy of fifteen years, who has read every draft of every chapter of all my books and has never failed to provide rigorous critique and generous praise in equal measure, and Monica Popescu, sister of my heart, who not only read the entire manuscript but responded promptly to texts and phone calls on every subject related to the book. I am thrilled that Monica, Shane, and I received book contracts the same year and I cannot wait to hold their books in my hands. Shazia Rahman and Jocelyn Stitt and also read the entire book and have been an invaluable source of critique, support, and friendship. Robin Field and I decided to share our writing with each other one summer. Robin’s superb editorial eye provided the book with the validation it needed in its last stages. She read and responded promptly on my schedule, for which I am eternally grateful. More than a writing partner, I gained a very dear sister-­friend in Robin as well as a staunch comrade-­in-­arms. The Eminent Cacti will endure for life. Madhurima Chakraborty and Nalini Iyer, this includes you too. Kanika Batra, Madhurima Chakraborty, Pranav Jani, and Madhavi Menon read parts and holes of the manuscript: thank you! I am also grateful to Susan Andrade, Anupama Arora, Ayelet Ben-­Yishai, Nienke Boer, Kerry Bystrom, Eleni Coundouriotis, Gaurav Desai, Prathim Maya Dora-­Lasky, Rahul Gairola, Sukanya Gupta, Ambreen Hai, John Hawley, Joe Litvak, Laura Murphy, Nalini Iyer, Bhakti Shingarpure, and Amritjit Singh for many conversations, general and particular, that gave this book fullness and depth. Amritjit and Joe deserve a particular shout-­ out for going over and beyond the call of duty in helping me search for a home for this book. I am also extremely grateful to Joe, doctoral dissertation director par excellence, for the kindness and friendship he has shown me over the years, even after I left graduate school. I am deeply thankful to Northwestern University Press for taking on this book. I owe the editors of the Critical Insurgencies series, Michelle Wright and Jodi Byrd, profuse gratitude for seeing promise in the sample chapters of the book and for including Postcolonial Disaster in their prestigious series. My editor at Northwestern, Gianna Mosser, was the perfect editor. She talked to me on the phone at length, read chapters and provided feedback, and always answered emails within five seconds of receiving them. While I am very glad that she has moved on to bigger

Acknowledgments

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things, I am very sad that she will not be at Northwestern to usher the book into the world. Trevor Perri, my new editor at Northwestern, has been as much of a joy to work with and a model of efficiency. I am also grateful to the two peer reviewers for their careful and kind assessment of the manuscript. The book is much better and stronger after incorporating their excellent suggestions for revision. Angela Piliouras has been a wonderful production editor, and my heartfelt thanks go to Mark Woodworth for his meticulous copyediting. I am most grateful to my family for their love and support. My mother, Radha Rastogi, will always be my role model in how to live with courage, grace, and dignity. She is truly the best version of herself. In her, I see my own possibilities, of what I should be, of what I could be. My father, Aditya Rastogi, whose rich potential for a full life was taken away too cruelly and too early, has been my biggest supporter all my life. My brother, sister-­in-­law, and niece are far away physically, but I always hold them close in my heart. Areendam Chanda is the best husband, best father, best human being, but only the third best economist I know. (Unfortunately, he cannot compete with Amartya Sen or Robert Barro, whose work is central to the argument made in chapter 2 of this book.) Postcolonial Disaster could not have been started, written, or completed without his constant reassuring presence. Finally, this book is for my daughters, Keya and Anaya, and for Laska, my four-­legged baby. Nothing will ever matter more to me than their well-­being and happiness.

Postcolonial Disaster

Introduction

Postcolonial Disaster Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-­First Century

August is the cruelest month—­at least in my home state of Louisiana. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in the region near New Orleans, drenching and drowning this beautiful bowl of a city. The damage it caused earned Katrina the dubious distinction of being the worst ecological disaster in the United States in the new century.1 Eleven years later, Louisiana was in troubled waters again. “The Great Flood of 2016” dropped catastrophic amounts of rain on the areas around Baton Rouge, washing away homes and livelihoods of people I knew well. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, everyone rallied around to help. Cajun navies went in where no government boats had gone before.2 People spontaneously bought groceries for the weeping flood victims standing in front of them at checkout lines. Educational institutions, houses of worship, neighborhoods, and even entire cities marshaled together to gut the rotting walls of homes damaged by water. Only twelve weeks later, life returned to the “new-­normal” of the postdisaster world. The children were back in school; the adults were back at work. We complained about the post-­flood traffic that choked our roads and abbreviated school holidays. Disaster now registers itself on our consciousness only in these small ways, even though thousands are still displaced from their homes more than three years after the flood. Witnessing these disasters first-­hand, even ones that left me relatively unscathed, helped me understand how crisis creates new states of normalcy and how accepting and living with the new-­normal allows calamities to go quiet in the collective imagination. Yet the cultural invocations of disaster, including literary writing, local films, and art 3

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Postcolonial Disaster

exhibitions, refuse to silence catastrophe.3 Literature, culture, and the arts can lodge crisis into the heart of political and public consciousness while soliciting new ways of negotiating with disaster. My project here is to understand the agenda of “disaster literature”—­how some work not only echoes but also quietens the thunderous roll of catastrophe that would otherwise overwhelm us all. * * * In October 2018, the New York Times ran a story entitled “In Disaster’s Grip, Again and Again.”4 While the article focused on the destitution of Sulawesi Island in Indonesia after the double whammy of an earthquake and a tsunami in September, the Times’s apocalyptic title summarized the state of the world: in disaster’s grip again and again, the most vulnerable populations in the world roil in the devastation of catastrophic events today. With the steady onslaught of tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, refugee and migrant crises, political upheaval, and medical emergencies, doomsday scenarios are increasingly easy to imagine. Meanwhile, earlier disasters in the postcolonial world have only accelerated their course: to name only a few, the destruction of Sri Lanka after the tsunami in 2004, the economic collapse of Zimbabwe in the early twenty-­first century, the AIDS epidemic in South Africa (which reached a breaking point at the start of the new millennium), and the geopolitical conflict between India and Pakistan that began with a violent Partition in 1947 and nearly erupted into a nuclear war as recently as 2019. The extension of these disasters into the twenty-­first century—­the fires that continue to burn—­has provided me with a thick archive for this book. Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-­First ­Century is the first book to create a narratology for postcolonial disaster fiction. This book uses and extends the concepts of disaster studies to examine the worst possible forms of suffering in the postcolonial world—­those of non-­human and human crisis. It then asks whether we can find some warning, some lesson for living life, perhaps some literary value or even some aesthetic pleasure in telling stories about disaster. The utility and morality of art in mediating distress has a long history of philosophical and literary deliberation. George Eliot on tragedy, Aristotle on catharsis, Theodor Adorno on poetry after the Holocaust, Betholt Brecht on the numbing effects of bourgeois theatre, and Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others are five intellectuals who have pondered these questions. Postcolonial Disaster interrogates a different set

Introduction

5

of issues: to understand how those constructed as “other,” both nationally or racially, respond to the communal scale of suffering in ongoing disasters, especially catastrophes with varying temporal ranges.5 My emphasis here is not merely for rhetorical effect, as this book’s choice of texts and regions is based on the extensive and widespread damage that disasters cause to a large, and often national, collective. Postcolonial Disaster examines four iconic catastrophes in South Asia and Southern Africa: the oceanic disaster in Sri Lanka, the economic disaster in Zimbabwe, the medical disaster in South Africa and neighboring Botswana, and the geopolitical disaster in India and Pakistan.6 These six nations, sharing a common history of British colonialism, have been subjected to crises of epic proportions since the turn of the century, ranging from environmental disasters to epidemiological, financial, and geopolitical catastrophes. Each catastrophe examined in this book became emblematic of a particular region in the contemporary present and also accrued a stereotypical cachet in the global imagination, often locking a nation or a geographic area into the image of its associated disaster.7 Given its cataclysmic effects and massive scope, fiction about disaster, no matter how temporally distant from the calamitous events it registers, is underpinned by what I call a Disaster Unconscious. I adapt this term from Fredric Jameson’s concept of the Political Unconscious (1981) as well as Neil Lazarus’s theorization of the Postcolonial Unconscious (2011).8 In his book, The Political Unconscious, Jameson asks us to blur “the convenient working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not” in order to foreground “the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history [of class struggle]).”9 The Disaster Unconscious not only anchors the literary narrative to disastrous events, which are often social, political, and economic in nature, but also focuses readerly attention on the need to disseminate information about, as well as manage, catastrophe through narration. The failure of the postcolonial nation-­state to adequately redress the effects of disaster further places an ethical burden on art and literature alike to seek forms of mitigation that the government is unable to provide. In The Postcolonial Unconscious, Lazarus argues that narrative postcolonialism should be rooted in liberation politics that have been erased or transformed beyond recognition through the canonization of metropolitan writers as well as through postmodern literary tropes and forms.10 Mock-­facetiously, Lazarus claims that he is “tempted to overstate the

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Postcolonial Disaster

case . . . and declare that there is in a strict sense only one author in the postcolonial literary canon. That author is Salman Rushdie.”11 Postcolonial scholarship committed another disservice to the field through reinforcing a very narrow definition of what counts as postcolonial literature “worth” reading: novels usually written with great literary flair, fixated on hybridity, transnationalism, and multiculturalism, and with only an implicit, rather than explicit, liberatory agenda (Postcolonial Unconscious, 21). This had led to a deficiency in addressing issues of class, race, and nation: [Some scholars lament that] Marxism has been obliterated as an enabling political horizon and that the eclipse of the idea of the ‘Third World’ as an historico-­political project is part of a wider—­ epochal—­shift. This shift is from the ‘old’ order of ‘modernity’ (whose constituent features and aspects—­unevenness, revolution, the centrality of the nation, even imperialism—­are seen to have lost their explanatory power) to the ‘new world order’ of fully globalised capitalism. These presumptions govern what, drawing on and adapting the resonant title of Fredric Jameson’s 1981 book, we might think of as the postcolonial unconscious. (Postcolonial Unconscious, 14)

The Postcolonial Unconscious, or the impulse toward cosmopolitanism, incommensurability, and fragmentation, obliquely directs postcolonial criticism away from the most vital issues discussed in postcolonial literature. Taking my cue from Lazarus in searching for the “big themes” of postcolonial literature, I theorize the Disaster Unconscious as embedded in liberatory politics seeking to redress the specific disaster in a particular literary text, while staging a broader allegorical claim about nation, state, and race. The word “redress” here encapsulates the project of postcolonial disaster fiction: to propagate information about disaster, including what to do when a disaster strikes, as well as to sketch out humanitarian ways of interacting with the victims of disaster without fetishizing their suffering. Like Lazarus, I expand the definition of what constitutes “good” postcolonial literature beyond the singular metric of its literary qualities such as the dazzling linguistic pyrotechnics of Rushdie. Lazarus, furthermore, asserts his keenness in “establishing a new research ‘archive’ different from the one currently prevailing—­ different[ly] weighted and with different emphases . . . I set out to defend

Introduction

7

theories that have been abandoned prematurely [such as nationalism and the nation] and to discuss writers whose work has received little attention or else is in need of urgent reinterpretation” (18). Postcolonial Disaster takes up Lazarus’s challenge to resurrect arguments from the past and to create a new archive of “postcolonial” texts for the present. If contemporary postcolonial criticism has too quickly jettisoned theory centered on nation-­building, national allegory as a form of reconstructing the nation, and the failures of independence for a transnational cosmopolitan postcolonial hermeneutics instead, postcolonial theory has also largely ignored the mass proliferation of genre fiction such as young adult literature, chick-­lit, and the romance novel that can readily relay important questions about the nature of postcolonialism or disaster today.12 Postcolonial Disaster retrieves some of the “old” concerns of postcolonial theory, perhaps dismissed too early in the new century, while it examines a wide array of fictional forms that enhance our normative understanding of disaster as well as the narration of disaster. Importantly, the book also shows how literature and literary criticism can expand scholarly definitions of disaster originating from primarily nonliterary fields such as disaster studies.

The Narratology of Postcolonial Disaster Fiction Postcolonial Disaster posits a central structuring hypothesis to create a narratology for disaster in formerly colonized parts of the world: in disaster fiction, the Story (that is, the literary elements of the tale) and the Event (that is, the real-­life disaster, its deleterious effects, and the need to manage those effects through narrative exposition) exist in a dialectic tension with each other. The intensity of the relationship between Story and Event is based on their temporal distance from the disaster. Because all the disasters discussed in this book are ongoing calamities requiring either urgent or long-­term redressal, the Event is always a central guiding principle in the Story. In more recent disasters, such as the Sri Lankan tsunami of 2004, Story and Event are inextricably linked as the urgency to circulate information and mitigate the immediate damage of a violent sudden-­onset catastrophe dictates the flow of the narrative. Even so, the Story attempts to occasionally detach itself from the Event and talk about something else: perhaps through a flash of humor here and there, or in a thematic digression or two, or by means of an unexpected plot twist. As the Story acquires more

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and more temporal distance from the Event, such as the 73 years that have elapsed since the Partition of India in 1947, it plays more with form and theme and tries to become bigger than a tale about an all-­ consuming tragedy. Like a tidal wave, the Disaster Unconscious crests with the disaster to which it is temporally close and recedes from the originary disaster with the passage of time. Story and Event are thus in a constant dance with each other, one in which the Disaster Unconscious plays the tune to which they move.13 As literary terms, Story and Event have been theorized at great length through centuries of folklore, narratology, and (more recently) even psychoanalysis. Wolf Schmid understands “the story as referring to the content of narrative (as opposed to discourse) . . . the presentation of a story consists of narrative and descriptive modes.”14 Mieke Bal says that “the story could be regarded as a result of ordering. If one regards the fabula as primarily the product of imagination, the story could be regarded as the result of an ordering.”15 The Story and the fabula form the heart of a narrative and are always activated by the Event. This is especially true in disaster fiction where the prevailing word, disaster, essentially controls the fabula and the Story.16 H. Porter Abbott declares, “. . . without an event or an action, you may have a ‘description,’ ‘an exposition,’ ‘an argument,’ ‘a lyric,’ some combination of these or something else together, but you won’t have a narrative.”17 The Event is key to moving a Story forward but acquires an urgent purchase in disaster fiction because it is also “a change of state manifested in discourse by a process statement in the mode of Do or Happen. An event can be an action or an act or a happening.”18 As Bal says, “events are the transition from one state to another state, caused or experienced by actors. The word ‘transition’ stresses the event is a process, an alteration” (Narratology, 13). While the transitive action can be as minor as a character caught in the rain without an umbrella, a key difference characterizes disaster fiction: The catastrophic Event is always so cataclysmic that the Event, the effects of the Event, and the after-­effects of the Event that often constitute Events of their own pressure the Story to orient itself around disaster. My use of Event in uppercase throughout this book indicates its dominating presence in disaster fiction. Similarly, my capitalization of Story represents the literary elements of disaster fiction as “frenemies” of the Event. Disaster fiction itself constitutes imaginative literary work that is directly in conversation with an actual, and not an imagined, crisis. Crucially, the Story has more room to play in disaster fiction through its temporal distancing from the Event than it does in

Introduction

9

other genres that are more heavily underpinned by the reality principle, such as literary nonfiction. Alain Badiou, the French philosopher, also places the Event in its specific historical and material locations: There are no natural events, nor are there neutral events. In natural or neutral situations, there are solely facts. The distinction between a fact and an event is based, in the last instance, on the distinction between natural or neutral situations, the criteria of which are global, and historical situations, the criterion of which (the existence of a site) is local. There are events uniquely in situations which present at least one site. The event is attached, in its very definition, to the place, to the point, in which the historicity of the situation is concentrated. Every event has a site which can be singularized in a historical situation.19

Badiou’s definition of the Event echoes the broadly configured taxonomy of disaster as arising from the constellation of specific social places, political actions, and material histories. For him, the Event also creates a collective that can initiate change, braiding itself with the interventionist agenda of the Disaster Unconscious.20 The relationship between Story and Event in tragedy and trauma studies—­disaster’s next of kin—­has also been well-­theorized. As Andreas Markantonatos says, “the unforeseen character of an event places heavy stress on the significance of the new narrative content.”21 Trauma narratology has sought to speak of the Event through the silences of its textualization. Critics have pointed out that trauma is often the Event that cannot be written or spoken. The use of ellipses, for example, is an important strategy in trauma writing to narrate the unnarratable. According to Bal, “in narratological terms repression results in ellipses  .  .  . the omission of important elements in the narrative” (Narratology, 44). Disaster narratives also negotiate with gaps, slippages, and omissions. Given the collective magnitude of disaster, the Disaster Unconscious always asserts itself, refusing to erase the Event but often driving the Story to move in other directions. This literary sleight-­of-­hand allows some relief from the intensity of the crisis as well as from the impossible task of representing the unrepresentable. My theorization of Story and Event are indebted to, and also deviate from, certain staple assumptions of narratology. I define the Story as

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Postcolonial Disaster

how the calamitous Event is narrated and the literary techniques used to do so. The Event is not merely an action here. Rather, it is a terrible, cataclysmic, and disastrous crisis that emplaces an onerous responsibility on the Story—­a burden so heavy that the Story often seeks to distract itself, and its readers, from the omnipresence of the disastrous Event. The Story in disaster fiction does not seek to only remember by speaking out the tragedy over and over again. Instead, it turns to literary maneuvers to make the weight of an all-­encompassing disaster more bearable. Suffering and horror, thought of as ubiquitous in the postcolonial landscape in which this book unfolds, are forgotten quickly, even though their spectacular effects often consume the global imagination for one flickering moment. The Disaster Unconscious teaches us to never forget. These key terms, Story and Event, speak to my methodological intervention in narratology, particularly the representation of disaster. Postcolonial Disaster rests on the tension between the Story, or a literary engagement with tracing the conventions of disaster fiction, and the Event, or a pedagogical assessment of how to live with disaster, while also reflecting on the morality of deriving literary pleasure from the ruins of other people’s lives, especially those historically marked as racially or nationally “other.” The Disaster Unconscious awakens, indeed is, the activist ideology lodged in the recesses of disaster fiction. Postcolonial Disaster studies how this activist ideology alters and shapes the literary narratology of catastrophic events. The literary qualities and pedagogical imperatives constituting disaster fiction not only push against each other but also interact in productive ways. Any pleasure derived from the Story is often punctured by the pedagogical imperative, especially in temporally close disasters, even as an investment in literary style evades the possibility of lapsing into pedantry.22 Art at its most powerful can often transmute pain into beauty and can vividly convey suffering to those who haven’t experienced it directly. As Nadine Gordimer argues in Three in a Bed, “the harsh lessons of daily existence . . . could be made sense of in the ordering of properties by the transforming imagination, working upon the ‘state of things’ . . . great art in fiction can evolve in imaginative revelation to fit the crises of an age.”23 Even for a writer highly immersed in craft and style, Gordimer’s apartheid-­era fiction is extremely limited both formally and thematically: Her oeuvre consists of short stories, novellas, and very slim novels all directly examining the roles that white South Africans (should or could) play in the antiapartheid movement.

Introduction

11

Art, particularly its so called-­greatness, is often severely circumscribed when produced in the moment of crisis itself. Gordimer’s writerly imagination branches out in the postapartheid period, yet that diversion is more stylistic than thematic. Her final novel, No Time Like the Present (2012), concludes at a whopping 432 pages—­compare its ponderous circumlocution to the economic and efficient prose of July’s People (1981) at 176 pages—­and uses a white male protagonist instead of her usual cadre of privileged white women. Like the earlier book, No Time Like the Present is still about the role that white people (should or could) play in the tumult of the postapartheid period, showing how the Disaster Unconscious recedes with time and with the Event’s changing nature, allowing longer and more stylistically experimental fiction to come into being, though never completely easing the thematic pressures it exerts on a text. While Postcolonial Disaster also articulates the tensions that Gordimer describes in Three in a Bed, my argument traverses a different arc. Gordimer talks about the role of fiction as artistic, political, and ethical. I reframe her political agenda of antiapartheid fiction as the ideological, oriented imperative in disaster ficactivist, pedagogical, or Event-­ tion. Instead of resisting an oppressive regime as antiapartheid fiction must do, the Event-­oriented imperative in disaster fiction teaches us how to live within the all-­pervasiveness of catastrophe while simultaneously resisting it. Throughout this book, I use the expositional and the pedagogical in virtually the same way, as a reflection of what they can tell us about disaster.24 Importantly, I do not prioritize the expositional over the literary. I do, however, claim that fiction about catastrophe circulates around the Event even though the circles become larger and larger, including more and more of the Story in their orbit as the catastrophe becomes more distant temporally. Thematically, disaster fiction cannot exist for the Story alone, for then it would be mere fiction. Disaster fiction also cannot exist for the Event alone, for then it would be mere documentation. Instead, fictional narratives of ongoing actual catastrophe reveal a fraught, fruitful, and temporally driven relationship between literature for literature’s sake and the labor that art must undertake in times of acute distress—­a tension already seen in crisis-­ driven cultural production of the anticolonial and antiapartheid eras. Intertwining the narration of disaster with a well-­crafted literary Gordimer’s “great art in fiction”—­ opens up the possibilsensibility—­ ity not only of enjoying the depiction of crisis but also of reducing the complex humanity of non-­Western, nonwhite people to spectacles of

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Postcolonial Disaster

aestheticized suffering. The ethical conundrum I trace here is close to, but not quite the same, as the popular term “disaster porn.” Jason Barr, in his book The Kaiju Film, says: The phrase “disaster porn” was originally intended to be a cultural critique of news media organizations, which in the push for high ratings, immediately rushed to the scenes of any disaster and began broadcasting from the site within minutes . . . In the realm of disaster porn, then, safety is the key word. Suffering may abound, but if it is undocumented or underreported, then people, particularly Americans, are comfortable watching endless coverage of the event.25

Both film and fiction are available to a certain kind of consumer: with money, leisure, and literacy. This often means Western and Westernized audiences who take vicarious pleasure in disaster from the safety of their own homes as well as sometimes participating in armchair activism through indignant petitions on social media. I am interested in reaching readers who may not have experienced catastrophe directly but are able to derive complex modalities of pleasure in a strong plotline or in well-­crafted stories about the worst possible forms of human suffering. Disaster fiction may teach unaffected, yet engaged, readers valuable action-­oriented lessons rather than serving as a template for existence only for those who have to learn to live in and through disaster. A new mode for thinking about how contemporary fiction negotiates disaster is still in an incipient stage. Narratologies of disaster fiction are virtually nonexistent.26 Literary scholarship on postcolonial trauma, mourning, and melancholia has proliferated in the last two decades.27 Disaster—­their natural extension—­has barely acquainted itself with postcolonial studies though. Postcolonial Disaster asks a number of key questions specific to literary renditions of catastrophe: How is disaster narrated in fictional form? Is literary narration not only a way of coping with disaster but also a means of offering a reason for and a resolution to postcolonial crisis? How can reading about disaster teach us to live our lives in the best possible ways? What happens when writers stop blaming the colonizers, while employing the present postcolonial dispensation as its natural continuation, for our state of disarray and instead simply stare disaster in the face? What can textual depictions of oceanic, economic, medical, and geopolitical calamities (among many others) tell us about the body politic and the health of postcolonial nations? What

Introduction

13

value lies in conceding that some lives must be played out against a perennial state of disaster? Can the wholeness of those lives ever be adequately depicted in the never-­fading shadow of catastrophe? My focus here is not so much on individual or even group suffering, which is often the subject of literary trauma studies, or has provided existential fodder for thinkers across the ages and around the world. Instead, I examine the national wounds that disasters inflict and explore how crisis can trouble Fredric Jameson’s infamous allegory of literature-­as-­ nation as well as create new allegories of its own.28 I neither describe the lives of people in the postcolonial world as disasters nor claim that the apocalyptic nature of catastrophes subsumes those who fall in its purview, thus robbing their selfhood of any transcendental complexity. Rather, I respond to the questions above through a focus on the temporality of disaster—­what I call disaster times—­to give disaster its definitional due. Fiction about catastrophe always uses the literary techniques embedded in the Story—­form, style, theme, plot, imagery, genre, metaphor, allusion—­to partly defuse the pressure to write exclusively about the Event and also to portray our full humanity in all its colors and shades. This dance around disaster tries to lighten the heaviness of an all-­encompassing tragedy. The techniques of theme and form may distract the reader from the immediate horror of disaster; yet small textual ruptures constantly undermine the dance, forcing a focus on the text’s pedagogical and documentary intent. This return to disaster as an overarching metanarrative—­the Disaster Unconscious to which I referred earlier—­acknowledges its centrality without allowing disaster to define the entirety of a text. Furthermore, disaster fiction also reveals a deep knowledge of its own content; each book concedes that the catastrophe it depicts is too large to be contained within the bounded confines of the written word. Instead, crisis is often encapsulated in micromoments that sketch the bigger picture through pointillism and impressionism—­tiny dots and fragments that individually, and later collectively, grow into something larger than themselves.

But What Is a Disaster? Postcolonial Disaster interjects the humanities, as well as the humanistic element, in disaster studies. Unlike other seemingly related areas such as trauma studies, disaster studies exists as an academic field with its own set of scholarly conventions around which think tanks and

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Postcolonial Disaster

universities have developed journals, interdisciplinary research centers, degrees, and professional certifications.29 This section engages with the most important scholarship on disaster not only to offer a definition of the term based on the debates in the field but also to segue into how literary criticism can enhance the standard definitions of disaster. The etymology of disaster as an ill-­starred event does not do the term justice, reducing infinite complexity merely to the fault in our stars.30 Most scholars agree that disasters refer to large-­scale shattering events that may occur once, such as the tsunami in Sri Lanka, or constitute an ongoing process, such as the military conflict between India and Pakistan.31 Disasters always have catastrophic consequences not only for individuals but also for the larger collectivities to which they belong. Robert A. Stallings says “for the discipline [sociology] as a whole, questions about disaster are less important than questions about societies that can be answered by studying disasters.”32 Although disaster may colloquially refer to as a “sudden and calamitous event,” disaster studies has a broader purview. Emerging in the discipline of sociology in the 1950s, disaster studies typically focuses on the causes, risks, effects, and management of “natural,” political, human-­engineered, and technological disasters. The field has also branched out from and into adjunct disciplines such as geography, anthropology, political science, and economics. Besides generally understanding disaster as a large-­scale cataclysmic event that has long-­term consequences, scholars vociferously disagree about what constitutes a disaster. Postcolonial Disaster uses this lack of consensus to advance a broad but productive terminology for disaster in order to create room for literature, particularly fiction, as an important part of disaster studies. Since disaster studies has not arrived at an agreement about its constitutive subject, this book, relying so heavily on the assumptions of disaster studies, cannot advocate a circumscribed classification of the term. Each chapter, however, narrows disasters into four different subcategories to offer a tightly focused definition of the specific disaster discussed in that section.33 Naming and defining a disaster through its temporal range, as well as through the nature of its originary event, generates concise nomenclature for a notoriously slippery term in the particular context in which it takes place. As the anthropologist Anthony Oliver-­Smith explains, it is “problematic to reach a consensual definition [of disaster because] disaster is a collectivity of intersecting processes and events, social, environmental, cultural, political, economic, physical, technological, transpiring

Introduction

15

over varying lengths of time. Disaster are totalizing events” (in Quarantelli, 180, emphasis added).34 Oliver-­Smith’s concept of catastrophe, with its focus on the variable time span of crisis nevertheless provides a robust foundation for constructing a working definition of the term in this book: [Disaster is] a process/event involving the combination of a potentially destructive agent(s) from the natural, modified and/ or constructed environment and a population in a socially and economically produced condition of vulnerability, resulting in a perceived disruption of the customary relative satisfactions of individual and social needs for physical survival, social order and meaning. (in Quarantelli, 188–­89)

Disaster is a cataclysmic event or process, either a singular occurrence or a concatenation of linked catastrophes in which the totalizing scale of its effects is important. Disaster can also bring about short-­or medium-­term psychological suffering as well as a permanent ontological crisis.35 Disaster terminates normalcy for the individual and for the social collective, often creating a new-­normal condition for existence. The sociologist and political economist, Wolf R. Dombrowsky argues, importantly, that “there is no distinction between disaster and [its] effects. Disasters do not cause effects. The effects are what we call a disaster” (in Quarantelli, 21). The scale and consequences of disaster, which may last decades, such as the India-­Pakistan conflict, magnify a crisis or a catastrophe into a disaster. Thinking of disaster as ongoing, or as a continuum, shifts our understanding of calamity as an abnormality that temporarily thwarts the progression of otherwise normal lives. The permanence of the catastrophe continuum in the postcolonial world also challenges Western ways of understanding disaster as isolated linear events that erupt without cause in the calamity-­prone context of certain parts of the world, undermining neoimperial discourses about non-­Western topographies that willfully contradict the holistic and complex realities of disaster.36 Disaster, instead, is a series of linked processes with clearly defined causalities tracing back to colonialism, religious and ethnic tension, military conflict, and environmental damage.37 Disaster studies has also generated its own terminology, such as risk, exposure, hazard, vulnerability—­vocabulary rooted in the language of the social sciences. According to the literary critic Mark Anderson: “in

16

Postcolonial Disaster

reality vulnerability is the concept that underpins the entire system of [disaster] assessment; it defines risk and the potential for trauma, as well as inscribing the boundaries between normality (as security) and the normalization of insecurity.”38 The vulnerability that structures the “grammar of disaster” is central to my choice of South Asian and Southern African fiction.39 Already struggling with issues of inequality and poverty caused by years of British colonialism, the nations in these regions also had to deal with postindependent ethnic conflict exacerbated by imperial policies of divide and rule, shaky economies created by anti-­Western fiscal reforms, and corrupt postcolonial governments (including military dictatorships), as well as a lack of the technological infrastructure needed to prepare for the oceanic ruptures to which some of them are prone. South Asia and Southern Africa are thus particularly susceptible to oceanic, economic, medical, and geopolitical disasters. As Anthony Carrigan comments, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the destructive combination of climate change and widespread globalization often involving the misappropriation of natural resources that impacted the “least developed” and most exploited regions of the world.40 The consequences of the “destructive globalization” that followed decolonization are only being felt in cataclysmic intensity now—­in the waning years of the twentieth century and today in the new millennium.

But What Are Literary Representations of Disaster? According to the environmental geographer, Kenneth Hewitt, social science research on disaster has not examined the “personal testimony and from the victims of disaster  .  .  . To focus on their words is to recognize that these [testimonies] are the only ways to recover experience in other places and times. To pay close attention to what they say, their story and concern gives them [researchers] direct entry into the concepts and discussions of social and disaster research” (in Quarantelli, 83). While Hewitt suggests that ethnographies of disaster victims are the “only ways” to arrive at a deep understanding of disaster, literary scholars—­particularly ecocritics—­have expanded this argument to include imaginative writing as also providing entry points into conversations on disaster.41 Literary criticism made forays in the field of disaster studies in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, especially through the rise

Introduction

17

of trauma studies and the “environmental turn” in the humanities. The French writer Maurice Blanchot is considered one of the more celebrated literary theorists of disaster. His book The Writing of the Disaster (1980) was perhaps the first to engage with the struggle with which almost all literary theorists of disaster grapple: how to represent the unrepresentable, and how to speak into and about something so big, so terrible, that it exceeds the human capacity to articulate and represent.42 Literary narrations of disaster are always aporetic in seeking to depict what cannot be put into words yet needing articulation in order to manage and prevent catastrophe. Most literary studies of disaster, however, have tended to theorize literature and catastrophe through the structuring terms of ecocriticism. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s pathbreaking book, Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia (2013), argues that the British Empire needed to circulate a rhetoric of disaster in order to justify its own existence as somehow being miraculously curative—­what Mukherjee calls “palliative imperialism.”43 Victorian writers, such as Emily and Fanny Eden, Flora Annie Steele, and Rudyard Kipling, developed a set of aesthetic norms that promoted imperial reform as the “palliative agent that eases the pain of those who are afflicted by [disaster]” (30).44 The palliative agenda also created a literary discourse of the South Asian colonies as sites of apocalyptic disasters that lingers even today.45 While Mukherjee’s book has been foundational to my thinking about the aesthetics of disaster, my work diverges from his, which focuses only on so-­called “natural disasters” in the Victorian period, in significant ways. Postcolonial Disaster uses a four-­fold taxonomy of disasters—­ oceanic, economic, medical, and geopolitical crises—­even though it also address how each disaster overlaps and intersects with others in both cause and effect. Ecocriticism has conducted pioneering work in juxtaposing environmental catastrophe and its representation in literature, establishing itself as far ahead of other fields that also have an organic connection to disaster such as narrative medicine and geopolitical literary studies. The expansion of the purview of literary disaster studies is a key distinction between my analysis of disaster fiction and those of most other literary critics who, if theorizing disaster by using the framework of disaster studies at all, have focused mostly on environmental catastrophes. Of course, I acknowledge that all disasters have ecological consequences, too. Yet the other major non-­environmental effects of disasters

18

Postcolonial Disaster

and how they interact with the environment must be examined too. For example, the destruction wreaked by the tsunami in Sri Lanka was severely exacerbated by the civil war, as was the economic disaster in Zimbabwe by a “simple” lack of potable water. The literary study of disaster creates scholarly conversations between the primary constituents of disaster studies—­such as the environment, politics, and history—­and key literary concepts such as colonial and postcolonial discourse, imperial and self-­representation, agency, narrative, and affect.46 The depiction of “natural” and human disasters in the postcolonial world also circulates colonialist stereotypes in which both nature and the non-­Western or (non)-­human are cast in the same roles as unstoppable agents of catastrophe: Hutus massacring Tutsis in Rwanda and the earthquake destroying Haiti come to mind here. Postcolonial Disaster investigates how non-­Western writers author their own narratives about “natural” and human disasters that may situate them as different actors in the script that colonial discourse provides. But how do they echo and subvert the colonialist rhetoric of not only natural catastrophe but also catastrophe-­as-­natural? How does contemporary postcolonial fiction about disaster create literary narratives even as it challenges or recirculates the rhetoric of palliative imperialism that Mukherjee discusses?47 My focus on fiction, rather than on journalism or the ethnography of oral narratives, seeks to understand the various aesthetic pressures that fiction—­to be fictional, to be aesthetic, to be literary—­ places on narratives of catastrophe and how those imperatives interact with the equally crucial ethical compulsion to represent the reality of disaster, or narrating disaster as disaster.48 Dancing in and around disaster is also a key theme in my conception of literary depictions of disaster: what I call moving within, rather than without, the closed circuit of catastrophe. Like Mukherjee, Kate Rigby’s Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (2015) again explores how we have talked about environmental disaster throughout the ages and explicates the literary forms those conversations have taken. Rigby contends that “historical reflection and narrative fiction might contribute to the material-­discursive praxis of learning more skillfully to ‘dance’ with the increasingly unruly elements of our disastrously anthropogenic environment.”49 I am also interested in how the “unruly” natural elements to which Rigby refers appear as unruly textual elements—­the Story and the Event, with all their literary, expositional, and ethical pressures that leak into each other—­around which narrative has to learn to “skillfully dance.”50

Introduction

19

Disaster fiction thus seeks to represent the unrepresentable in creating a Story or Stories of its own based on the disastrous Event or Events and also weaves itself into a literary, pedagogical, and ethical triangle, only to unravel the seemingly neat tapestry that the texts themselves configure. Most important, disaster fiction, as I define the genre, is always directly engaged with the real ongoing catastrophic event that it negotiates, although temporal distance shifts and modulates the nature of that negotiation.

But What Are Literary Representations of Postcolonial Disaster? The unique conditions of a postcolonial disaster require more particular theorizations of disaster in a literary context specific to place, space, race, and even colonial legacies.51 While the towering work of scholars such as Rob Nixon and Ursula Heise has oriented us toward the “slow violence” of the Anthropocene, it is now time for other areas in postcolonial literary studies to catch up with catastrophe. Postcolonial Disaster focuses on four different types of disasters—­oceanic, economic, medical, and geopolitical—­to stage an intervention in how Anglophone postcolonial disaster fiction can expand the field of disaster studies. 52 The book sketches broad cartographies of disaster in the postcolonial world; its methodology is also rooted in literary criticism and in the written word. As the late Anthony Carrigan urged, postcolonial studies must engage with disaster, particularly by exploring how “postcolonial texts challenge, reject or reconfigure key disaster studies concepts such as resilience, risk, adaptation and vulnerability.”53 Rather than only focus on how postcolonialism has altered the important terms in disaster studies, I also examine how catastrophic events pressure postcolonial disaster fiction to create a new literary corpus—­with its own way of telling tales, its own terminology, and an ethics of reading as well as its own expositional agenda.54 Additionally, I consider the specific potential of fiction about postcolonial disaster, such as its use of romance, fantasy, and myth, to both close and commence possibilities for hope and healing. Nonfictional texts, more underpinned by the reality principle, struggle to provide hope in the face of the grim truth of disaster. Nasrin Qader’s Narratives of Catastrophe: Boris Diop, ben Jelloun, Khatibi (2009) similarly pushes for writing about catastrophe as an opening. She attends to “what kind of a thing, a dynamic, a movement is a catastrophe; what can be and cannot

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Postcolonial Disaster

be said about it.”55 Ultimately, Qader views the telling of the story itself as enabling hope in moments of horrifying paralysis. Narrative as agent is also crucial to my understanding of the healing possibilities of postcolonial disaster. I argue, moreover, that an Event-­oriented agenda, such as stories about the tsunami urging people to seek higher ground as soon as the sea recedes, provides crucial documentary and practical information for surviving disaster in the future.56 Postcolonial Disaster avoids romanticizing global communities of disaster solidarities. In an essay on “Disaster Cosmopolitanism,” Daniel Brant argues that the Caribbean writers Daniel Maximin and Maryse Condé “outline a global ‘disasterscape’ in which catastrophe becomes the link between different peoples and cultures across the world.”57 Brant usefully proposes disaster as both a category for global analysis and a “solidarity” that unites disparate groups across class, cultures, nations, hemispheres, and languages. This categorization tends to define communities exclusively through disaster and evens out the scale and effects of different disasters. Brant’s creation of global solidarity also smooths the tensions within and between disaster literature that often glances inward and insists on a recognition of its own particular suffering. By contrast, much of the fiction discussed in Postcolonial Disaster resists celebratory readings of catastrophe that valorize the creation of worldwide communities of suffering people united and ennobled by a common sorrow and pity. Moreover, Postcolonial Disaster deliberately focuses on a wide array of writers, some of whom are direct victims of disasters and some of whom are outsiders, providing a sense of the full complexities at play in terms of the tension between the Story and the Event, as manifested in the literary aesthetics, pedagogical purpose, and ethical agenda of writing about catastrophe. Here, I depart from the methodological orientation of most of the scholars studying literary representations of postcolonial disaster, such as Phillip Drake, who focuses on the narratives of the direct victims of disaster.58 An overarching problematic, particularly unique to fictional representation, holds this book together: How can reading and composing imaginative texts depict the suffering of those who have been historically “othered” in ways that do not appropriate subaltern voices or perpetuate disaster porn? This question goes back to one of the oldest, and still unresolved issues, in postcolonial studies: Who speaks for whom?59 How can the victims of disaster speak for themselves in writing when they may be literally unable to do so and when our project as literary critics foregrounds imagined and fictional

Introduction

21

depictions of real events rather than ethnographic and anthropological perspectives? Is it ethical to add artistic flair to unspeakable immediate tragedies that should, perhaps, be presented the way they “really are,” with minimal outside interference? The “old” questions of postcolonial theory are constantly raised in this book to show how literary disaster studies reveal the continued relevance of issues such as how to best build a nation, in this case one shattered by disaster. Can nationalism be useful in certain parts of the world today? How do we best synthesize Western science and technology with indigenous traditions? Postcolonial Disaster shows how extreme crisis forces fiction negotiating with that extreme crisis to create a literary aesthetics of its own, through the vexed but productive relationship between Story and Event. Fictional narratives about disaster both open and foreclose opportunities for forward movement and healing through storytelling and their expositional agenda. Postcolonial disaster fiction insists on the recognition of catastrophe in its part of the world, no matter how much it may seem to seek solidarity from elsewhere. Fictional representations of postcolonial disaster reconfigure Anglophone postcolonialism for the here and now and paradoxically, yet importantly, emphasize the continued relevance of earlier postcolonial thought in the supposedly “post-­postcolonial” world of the twenty-­first century.

Narrating Catastrophe in Twenty-­First Century South Asia and Southern Africa Postcolonial Disaster makes no claim to be a comprehensive study of disaster. It does, however, create a temporally driven narratology for disaster, which I hope other critics will extrapolate, supplement, and broaden. The countries included here—­Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, function as “case studies” South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe—­ for the time-­bound narrative structure I trace in disaster fiction. Yet that is not the only reason I have chosen South Asia and Southern Africa as prime examples to demonstrate “disaster times” in postcolonial fiction. The disasters discussed in each of the following chapters are ongoing crises that have seeped into the present moment, generating a diverse range of fiction in our twenty-­first century. Postcolonial Disaster also explores a particular disaster that has become an emblem of a particular region in the present.60 A specific disaster as an allegory for a specific nation at a specific time in its history is not an unusual

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Postcolonial Disaster

conflation. As Mark Anderson says, some “disasters . . . are closer to the nation than others have been. They are disasters that became iconic and/ or ‘paradigmatic’—­that is to say they acquired national symbolism and precipitated or consolidated cultural and political shifts through literary mediation” (Disaster Writing, 28). How disaster fiction creates a shift in culture and politics while invoking new ways of negotiating with catastrophe is precisely my project here. While acknowledging the common colonial as well as neocolonial effects on the most disenfranchised parts of the world today, Postcolonial Disaster separates out two important regions in the Global South: South Asia and Southern Africa, both of which share a common legacy of British colonialism, common colonial stereotypes, a common imperial language, and, therefore, also an initially common literary discourse.61 To understand the shared rhetoric about disaster in South Asia and Southern Africa, this book must turn to a shared language; its selection of fiction is inevitably Anglophone. English-­language literature from these regions, especially in the immediate aftermath of decolonization, leaned into the novel as a dominant choice of genre and was also preoccupied with the theme of nation-­building as well as the failures of independence.62 How writers tell stories in English about South Asian and Southern African catastrophe and how they give disaster—­what I define as a cataclysmic process, a concatenation of catastrophes, a permanent ontological upheaval as well as a cautionary tale about human vulnerability—­a narrative form lies at the heart of the book’s intervention in disaster and postcolonial studies.63 Even though British colonialism created similar ground realities, such as economic exploitation, sickness, famine, and sectarian strife, the local situation of the disaster at hand as well as its temporal distance from the Event always determines its relationship with the Story. South Asia and Southern Africa also share a common history that suggests a useful juxtaposition. Both regions became independent in the same half-­century after decades of anticolonial struggle that left the population economically and emotionally depleted. The postindependence era was not a happy, cheerful, and fulfilling time that erased the horrors of colonization and ushered in a brave new world for formerly oppressed people. Indeed, new horrors, often sparked by the legacy of British colonialism, rendered these regions relatively d ­ ysfunctional even after independence. India and Pakistan became nation-­states in 1947 after a bloody Partition that left more than a million dead and 14 million displaced. Sri Lanka acquired independence in 1948 but

Introduction

23

fought a destructive internecine war with Tamil separatists from the late 1970s until 2009. Apartheid, often seen as a formal Afrikaner break from British colonialism, was instituted in South Africa in 1948 and ended with the constitution of a multiracial democracy in 1994, following decades of often violent struggle between its black and white populations. Rhodesia proclaimed a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965, becoming the black-­majority nation-­state of Zimbabwe in 1980 after a long war of liberation. Botswana declared its independence in 1966 with perhaps the least violent history of anticolonial struggle. Meanwhile, Pakistan split into the nations of Bangladesh and Pakistan in 1971, following yet another war with India in 1965. As even this brief recapitulation of these major historical events indicates, most countries in British-­ruled South Asia and Southern Africa have been locked in turmoil since independence, despite their potential to be regional superpowers and perhaps even exemplary states of fulfilled postcoloniality. Each disaster in these nations occurred because they were already vulnerable as a result of the tumult of decolonization, long-­drawn-­out wars of independence, postcolonial civil war, and ethnic strife. Each disaster prevented, or was at least one of the reasons that these countries could not realize, their full promise as postcolonial nations. Because the events that became full-­fledged disasters were pressure-­cooking themselves into a roaring boil in the last five decades of the millennium, the countries not only reached the point of explosion in or around the twenty-­first century but are also still bubbling crises today. A challenging year for these two regions, for example, was 1998: The AIDS epidemic peaked in South Africa, hyperinflation in Zimbabwe exploded that year, and India conducted its initial series of nuclear testing then. Given the number of cataclysmic events that took place at the turn of the century, it is no surprise that the first two decades of the new millennium have yielded so much rich literature about catastrophe from South Asia and Southern Africa.64 In its primary focus on South Asia and Southern Africa in the twenty-­first century, Postcolonial Disaster narrows the field of postcolonial studies to set up a new critical lens of disaster with which to look at fiction from the old colonies through contemporary eyes and ­sensibilities. I also build on my own work at the intersection of South Asian and Southern African studies. My first book, Afrindian Fictions (2008), examined the fiction of the Indian diaspora in South Africa to understand the varying diasporic concerns in South African Indian literature and to differentiate them from those of South Asian

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Postcolonial Disaster

immigrant populations living in the West. I not only selected South Asia and Southern Africa for Postcolonial Disaster as they fall within my area of expertise, but I also chose them because they provide exemplary laboratories in which to test out the concerns of postcolonialism vis-­à-­vis new forms of oppression that are often colonial in origin while neocolonial in extension. South Asia and Southern Africa both loom as powerful regional “subcontinents,” in effect, situated somewhere on the developed–­developing continuum, which makes the theorization of disaster in these nation-­spaces difficult and contradictory, yet of crucial importance. Including two regions gives me room for more-­general statements about the temporal relationship between narrative and disaster than a focus on one region would. It also allows me to study a wider range of disasters than if the book were confined to only one region. A tsunami, for example, is hardly likely in landlocked Botswana. Even though India’s economy was structured around Nehruvian socialism for more than forty years, there was no population of white settlers who owned most of the land and the wealth there. Therefore, no radical programs of redistribution such as those launched by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe—­and causing a rare economic disaster—­were ever instituted in India. Moreover, the term “postcolonialism” has become a catchall phrase today, with everyone claiming some sort of postcolonialism for themselves. Wrestling with the “decolonial trend” has turned into a global tendency among critics of contrasting intellectual and ideological persuasions that extend beyond those of the traditionally postcolonial.65 Examining disaster fiction in two different parts of the Anglophone postcolonial world gives this book enough room to generate theoretical possibilities for postcolonialism as a whole. But it still maintains a structured focus on two areas with a shared history of British colonialism that generate some similar questions: How do the vastly different regions of South Asia and Southern Africa, which nevertheless embarked on somewhat similar trajectories in the postindependence period, respond to disaster in similar literary ways? How has the history of British colonialism shaped the narration of the catastrophes that characterize these nations in the longue durée? The British partitioned India in 1947 with out-­of-­date maps and incorrect census data, and then shipped themselves back to England, leaving behind people with no experience in crisis management to deal with the disaster left in their hands. The current conflict

Introduction

25

between India and Pakistan is rooted in the bloodbath that was the British-­created Partition. That momentous event always hovers over fiction about the India-­Pakistan crisis like a silent, spectral presence. The British Empire amply contributed to the present disasters in the postcolonial world, including instituting the migrant labor system in South Africa that was partly responsible for the spread of AIDS as well as concentrating wealth among the white settlers in Zimbabwe that led Prime Minister and later President Mugabe to embark on his damaging plan of redistributing economic resources.66 Yet Western science, medicine, and technology have also helped manage and prevent disaster. So, how does fiction negotiate with the double-­edged sword of empire? How has the English language given the writers discussed in this book the space, the medium, and an appropriate international audience to which they can disseminate their knowledge about the disaster? The vexed presence of Western colonialism, Western audiences, and Western complicity are central to this book. Since Postcolonial Disaster borrows most of its structuring terminology from the field of disaster studies, which originated in the American academy and has gained traction through Western scholarship in the last three decades, its theoretical apparatus as well as its fictional selections are also Western-­ oriented.67 Yet narratives of postcolonial disaster tend to hybridize Western modes of seeing and writing. I am interested in how disaster fiction not only “writes back” to Western or Westernized audiences—­ another preoccupation of early postcolonialism mostly jettisoned by scholars today—­but also reinforces and challenges Western stereotypes of the former colonies as disaster-­prone areas perpetually afflicted with calamity.68 Postcolonial Disaster, then, grapples with issues that may not be resolved but nevertheless urgently need to be raised. Given the recursive nature of these calamities—­the curse that keeps on cursing—­ the book establishes a blueprint for the inevitable conversations on disaster and postcolonial literature that will take place in the future, especially as this body of writing becomes a genre of its own.

Disaster Fiction and Postcolonial Theory Today Postcolonial Disaster uses disaster fiction from the postcolonial world, as well as literary representations of actual disasters, to bring postcolonial analysis back to some of its originary sites in South Asia and Southern

26

Postcolonial Disaster

Africa. I do not, however, promote purist notions of postcolonial literature or theory. Rather, I show how disaster fiction revivifies some of the structuring concerns of postcolonialism: the language of the freedom struggle to talk about suffering during and after a disaster, national allegory, nation building, children or women as symbols of the suffering nation, children or women as symbols of hope for the suffering nation, reorientalism, the Western or Westernized gaze, Western or Westernized consumption, the savior complex, and a hybrid mix of indigenous and international knowledge as a way of moving within the closed circuit of postcolonial disaster—­and, if able to, then moving out. In providing “disaster fiction” with a clearly outlined paradigm, this book also formulates its key themes and examines their relationship to postcolonialism in the twenty-­first century. The fiction studied here reveals thick and nuanced images of postcolonial disaster and the consequences for those who live in its shadow. In many crisis-­prone areas, disaster is almost a way of life. People expect catastrophic things to happen to them, so they learn to live with disaster on a daily basis. Their frame of reference for perceiving the world shifts radically when the extraordinary is the ordinary and the abnormal becomes the normal. As Robert A. Stallings says, “disasters . . . involve the disruption of everyday routines to the extent that stability is threatened without remedial action. Increasingly significant is the loss of certainty and the undermining of faith in orderliness” (in Quarantelli, 131). Fiction, with its bounded structure (a book has definite starting and end points), can provide external orderliness and certitude (a book always carries the weight of some sort of knowledge) that may act as a desperately needed anchor in troubled times. The dance around disaster through fictional form can also promote a temporary relief from an all-­pervasive crisis. Yet the absolutes of a book’s form and texture are constantly interrupted by narrative frissons that remind us of disaster as disaster: a metacrisis that absorbs everything that falls in its ambit.69 Even though most major empires have fallen, their legacies haunt their former subjects through economic and cultural dependence on the West, signaling an absence of freedom, of independence, and of postcoloniality.70 The management of postcolonial disaster relies on the West, including Western media, art, culture, as well as on their Westernized manifestations in the postcolony, for representation and international circulation. Disaster fiction from the postcolonial world must speak in the dominating language and to the dominating audience, since the potential for redress rests heavily in this group of people.

Introduction

27

Thinking of disaster as a metacrisis risks situating the Third World, especially when filtered through the Western or Westernized gaze, as constantly being prone to catastrophe—­a formulation reinforcing the outlandish “otherness” of the postcolonial world. Disaster, thus, invigorates Edward Said’s foundational notion of alterity in Orientalism through which a Western or Westernized audience can soothe itself: “Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being: a white middle-­class Westerner believes it his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition ‘it’ is not quite as human as ‘we’ are.”71 Lisa Lau similarly examines the prevalence of Re-­Orientalism as a new manifestation of Orientalist Self-­Othering: Orientalism in the arena of contemporary South Asian literature in English: no longer an Orientalism propagated by Occidentalism, but ironically enough, by Orientals, albeit by diasporic Orientals. This process, which is here termed as Re-­ Orientalism, dominates and, to a significant extent, distorts the representation of the Orient, seizing voice and platform, and once again consignment of the Oriental within the Orient to a position of ‘The Other.’72

Disaster fiction may seem to comply with the project of reorientalism in which Western or Westernized audiences acquire a new form of superior selfhood through feelings of shock, horror, and pity that the continuous eruption of crisis evokes. Postcolonial disaster fiction pushes back against the unquestioning origins of disaster as something that merely is. Instead of infusing its readership with horror and pity, postcolonial disaster fiction also trains the readerly gaze to think about the complicated causes of catastrophe and to contemplate the many possible faces of relief, even as it first uses the sensationalism associated with crisis to capture the readers’ attention. Living with disaster on a daily basis changes the mental makeup of those who abide in crisis. Disaster becomes an ontological state. The body and mind either reduce catastrophe to a banal, quotidian, inevitable way of life or elevate one’s consciousness to a state of resilience in which one can, Zen-­like, somehow withstand the toll of the disaster.

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Postcolonial Disaster

This raises the issue of desensitization as well as reductiveness in the name of acquiring data about disaster. As Jonathon Veitch asks, How do we keep the genuine horror of possibility . . . from being submerged, neutralized, assimilated into the quotidian roar of statistical probability and its accompanying protocol? One might also turn the question around and ask, how we can avoid the paralysis that comes with dwelling too much on the horror of disaster?73

Effective disaster fiction not only presents data through the form of a story, which keeps us from neutralization by numbers. It also possesses a psychological integrity, an emotional truth, of its own. Gayatri Spivak’s notion of appropriating the subaltern perspective is useful here: In valorizing these nondocumentary voices, we go beyond the methodological operation of the social sciences. Whose voices are we, in fact, valorizing in the reading and dissemination of fiction rather than ethnography? Spivak also talks of a “productive appropriation”—­the term is mine—­in which those in power should speak for the powerless.74 In Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid, Mark Sanders discusses the notion of “responsibility-­in-­complicity” and argues that activists and intellectuals alike become complicit when they do not advocate through and into their privilege for the dispossessed collective.75 Keeping in mind the ethical responsibility of art to speak for, or about, the subaltern, fictional aesthetics make a project such as this one literary and not anthropological; fiction complicates rather than compromises the psychological truth, the core integrity, of these narratives as testimonies of disaster. Moreover, the “storyness” of the Story, the constant reminder of its fictional artifice, often lulls us to a viable middle point, between reducing disaster to data and paralyzing us into inaction. The debate between art as cultural warrior and art for art’s sake that characterizes early postcolonial writing emerges here again. In the 1960s and 1970s, writers such as Mulk Raj Anand in India, Ngugi wa Thiongo in Kenya, and Ousmane Sembène in Senegal all claimed that art was primarily an agent of liberation for defeated populations.76 Other writers, including Salman Rushdie, however, challenged the idea of art as political purpose.77 The reemergence of the tension between literary and political agendas in disaster fiction once again suggests that crisis animates the originary concerns of postcolonial theory.

Introduction

29

Although disaster is not often associated with terms such as cosmopolitanism, hybridity, and globalization, catastrophe can in fact do the work of these concepts, often inadvertently and sometimes even in negative ways. Would Homi Bhabha’s notion of “vernacular cosmopolitanism” accommodate Pakistan’s training of Sikh militants and arming them with Russian-­made Kalashnikovs, for terror attacks in India? 78 The geopolitical disaster allows for dangerous—­dare we say it?—­cosmopolitan networks to emerge. As Uriel Rosenthal states, “disasters and crises will come to feature transnational and even global characteristics. The original source of the problems at hand may continue to be local or national, but the immediate and long-­term impact of disasters and crises to come will span countries and continents” (in Quarantelli, 155). With its transnational reach, Postcolonial Disaster also shows how the literary narration of disaster as well as the study of the literary narration of disaster spans “countries and continents.” Disaster fiction is connected through a skein of transnational connections that occupied, and still occupy, postcolonial studies, although it reconfigures those concepts differently. So, for example, the Zimbabwean economic crisis, along with its representation in fiction, created diasporas of destitution elsewhere—­in South Africa and in the United States—­from the mainstreaming of diasporic movement from colony to metropole.79 Disaster fiction not only shows the continued relevance of the early concerns of postcolonial theory in the twenty-­first century but also demonstrates how it can take on the current interests of literary postcolonialism, such as those of contemporary African diasporas in the United States. The paucity of scholarship on disaster-­related fiction, which recognizes disaster as disaster, reveals a woeful ignorance about the omnipresence of catastrophe in the postcolonial world along with a willed refusal to discuss the postcolony as a disaster. Marc Nichanian asks, “who will ever be prepared to hear that art is mourning, catastrophic mourning?”80 What happens when postcolonial disaster fiction announces its arrival on the literary scene? How does postcolonial literary criticism talk about disaster fiction without engaging in “mourning, catastrophic mourning,” while focusing on the cataclysmic collapse of the known ways of being in the world that actually cause that mourning? Will postcolonial disaster fiction forever be exposed to the charge that it is always too political, too didactic, and too expositional and that it lacks the literary flair of great art when the texts themselves reveal a complicated and constantly porous relationship

30

Postcolonial Disaster

between the Story and the Event? In focusing on disaster as marking postcolonial topography thickly and deeply, how do we talk about postcolonial mismanagement of catastrophe without using colonialist rhetoric? In responding to these questions, Postcolonial Disaster shows how crisis, with its insistent push on reimaging the catastrophic and postcatastrophic worlds in collective terms, returns a nation to an earlier, even original, moment of postcoloniality. The vocabulary of the freedom struggle to talk about the economic disaster in Zimbabwe, or the evocation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to discourse on the medical disaster in South Africa, are only two manifestations of this return that can create an opening for the nation to start anew. Postcolonial scholars also seem reluctant to attribute disastrous agency to the formerly colonized, often holding them to a different ethical standard: The initial leeway given to Mugabe, to the African National Congress in South Africa, and to the Congress Party in India are only three examples of a Third Worldism almost as psychologically dangerous as colonialism itself.81 Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley see the intervention of postcolonial ecocriticism as accomplishing the following: [Engaging with] the complexity of global environmental knowledges, traditions, and histories in a way that moves far beyond the discourses of modernization theory on the one hand, which relegates the global south to a space of natural poverty, and the discourse of colonial exploitation on the other, which relegates the global south to a place without agency, bereft of complicity and resistance.82

My intervention echoes and extends the ecological mandate that DeLoughrey and Handley postulate. Disaster fiction calls out postcolonial nations as being both complicit in and resistant to the creation and management of disaster. Clearly, fictional representations of disaster raise uncomfortable questions about postcolonial societies. As this book demonstrates, their function is more than merely ideological or corrective. They not only teach the negotiation of catastrophe, but through the possibilities of literary experimentation they also seek to circumvent crisis even when they recognize disaster as being the foundational “base” on which all representation of catastrophe rests.

Introduction

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Disaster Times in Postcolonial Fiction: Unconscious Story, Conscious Event As this introduction has shown, disaster is not a singular event but instead a process or even a continuum. This raises issues of temporality and narrative: If disasters keep occurring as a consequence of a cataclysmic event, or a series of such events, then how can we think of disaster in any sort of linear, bounded form with an end point in sight? In her chapter on “Rehabilitation and Reconstruction” in Disaster Medicine, Elizabeth Temin writes: There is a vast spectrum of disasters and the process of disaster recovery can adapt the available tools to fit the specific situation. It is useful to apply a framework in thinking about the differences and similarities in disaster. They can be categorized as natural or manmade, sudden onset or slow onset. Examples of natural disasters that are slow onset are droughts or epidemics such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), sudden onset examples are floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Examples of manmade disasters that are slow onset are wars such as the war in Iraq and sudden onset examples are bombings or terrorist activities such as Sept. 11, 2001 attacks . . . In general the important differences are the duration of the impact and the severity of the direct and indirect effects. Direct effects are defined as the physical destruction and lives lost as the result of a disaster. Indirect effects are the worktime lost, jobs lost, and the change in spending in the community involved.83

Time, or the idea of “sudden-­onset” and “slow-­onset” disasters, structures Postcolonial Disaster, which begins in chapter 1 with the tsunami in Sri Lanka, a single and singular event with a distinct origin that resulted in catastrophic, long-­term damage. Chapter 2 examines the economic crisis in Zimbabwe. While also tied to a single occasion—­the election of Robert Mugabe in 1980—­the disastrous consequences of restructuring the economy over two decades, predicated on the dangerous Third Worldism I mentioned earlier, only became apparent in the twenty-­ first century. The book then shifts in chapter 3 to the AIDS crisis in South Africa. Rather than traceable to a single triggering Event, the medical disaster there has a longer backstory dating to racist ­government

32

Postcolonial Disaster

­ olicies, including migrant labor and land seizure from black Africans, p the limited availability of Western medicine, and an overreliance on indigenous healing traditions during the apartheid period (1948–­1994). Like the economic collapse of Zimbabwe, the AIDS crisis took years to reach the point of explosive no-­return, from which it has never receded. The final chapter focuses on the geopolitical conflict between India and Pakistan that has even longer antecedents than all the other disasters discussed here. Hindu-­Muslim tensions not only date to Partition in 1947 but even before to centuries of divide-­and-­rule policies by the British. While these disasters have different starting points, they all have no ending point. The extension of catastrophes into the twenty-­ first century, as well as their national effects and colonial origins, makes these crises into true “postcolonial disasters.” All the texts discussed in this book mediate the friction between literary aesthetics and the didactic-­expositional—­otherwise known as Story and Event—­to generate their own vocabulary to talk about the specific catastrophe that surrounds them. The tension between Story and Event and the cresting of the Disaster Unconscious depends on the kind of disaster that occurs in a specific region, and when. On the one hand, texts about a sudden and cataclysmic disaster, such as the tsunami, whose short-­term effects need immediate redressal, often end up pushing their informational aspect to the forefront even though literary technique refuses to be totally subsumed in these works. The Disaster Unconscious rarely lies far below the surface in this body of work. On the other hand, texts about slow-­moving disasters such as the India-­Pakistan conflict, where immediate redressal is impossible and the Disaster Unconscious is buried far more deeply, are able to offer a more leisurely and nuanced relationship between the expositional mission and literary style. The “in-­between disasters,” which form the in-­between chapters in this book, synthesize these two ways of writing about disaster. Narratives about the economic and medical disasters begin more discursively but end more reflectively. Each chapter shows how every disaster produces its own literary discourse and literary tension, its own internal motifs and symbolic structures, which are particular to the catastrophe that serves as the meta-­reference point for all the fiction generated within its purview. Given that the definition of disaster in this introduction is broad, each chapter also opens with a sharply focused definition of the particular disaster under discussion to demonstrate, for example, how scholars in disaster studies, as well as in other related fields, categorize AIDS as a “medical disaster” or view the

Introduction

33

financial crisis in Zimbabwe as an economic disaster; each chapter also expands these definitions through the incorporation of literature into the field of disaster studies. Postcolonial Disaster is divided into three parts, titled “Explosion,” “Slow Burn,” and “Simmer,” each of which traces the causal relationship between Story and Event through the temporal intensity of the originary disaster.84 This chronological figuration is taken directly from Elizabeth Temin’s concept of sudden-­onset disasters and slow-­ moving disasters, as well as from the field of disaster studies itself. My nomenclature imbues the timeline of disaster with rhetorical and metaphorical force by likening catastrophe both to unexpected explosions and to slow fires that erupt into volatile flames at irregular but frequent intervals. While my phrasing is new, the concepts of sudden and slow-­ onset disasters are staple assumptions in disaster studies as well as in literary ecocriticism, especially in Rob Nixon’s idea of slow ecological time.85 Yet popular and (most) literary conceptions of disaster have failed to recognize the slow-­burn or simmering catastrophe, especially the non-­ ecological slow-­burn crisis, as actually constituting a disaster. The book’s opening part, “Explosion,” consists of chapter 1: Tsunami Stories: Writing Out the Wave in the Oceanic Disaster, which studies the vast and diverse repertoire of writing emerging in and about Sri Lanka following the devastation of the tsunami in the region in December 2004. The suddenness of that tsunami generates a productive discord between the sublime pleasures of literature and the didactic agenda of managing catastrophe—­a tension differently crystalized through the use of various literary forms, such as Indran Amirthanayagam’s collection of poems The Splintered Face (2008), the Cypriot writer Yiola Damianou-­ Papadopoulou’s children’s novel The Blue Dragon (2006), and the British writer Philippa Hawley’s romance novel There’s No Sea in Salford (2013). My choices in that chapter deliberately reflect the range of fiction that emerges in a sudden-­onset disaster as well as its limitations. Given the tsunami’s recent date and its sudden occurrence, fiction dealing with this catastrophic tidal wave has been able to process the oceanic disaster only through short poetry or nonliterary fiction such as children’s literature and the “nobrow” novel. The diversity of genre here, though, proves the point I make in other chapters: that disaster fiction can be written in forms other than highbrow literary fiction. The readerly eye requires training to recognize that fiction can provide important interventions in disaster relief while at the same time setting the stage for more-­complex narratives written in the wake of temporally distant disasters.

34

Postcolonial Disaster

While tsunami stories often attempt to escape the ideological obligations that crisis imposes on them, the images of the catastrophe often short-­circuit any evasion, or even diversion, possible through the means of form and style. Yet the mere possibilities of literary diversion also short-­circuit the pedagogical agenda even while staging their own negation—­a dialectic of Story and Event seen in chapters 2 through 4 but not necessarily viewed with the same urgency of the tsunami narratives. The texts discussed in the first chapter all use the language and metaphors of the environment, particularly the sea, as well as of a biological futurity (or “the child”), to underscore and undercut the diversion provided through literary form. The Disaster Unconscious forces a recognition of the oceanic disaster through a continuous manifestation of this natural and biological imagery, even when the text dances around disaster in an attempt to talk about something else. The book’s second section, titled “Slow Burn,” consists of an analysis of the literary representation of two medium-­paced disasters. Chapter 2, “Better Fed than Free”: Buying Out of the Economic Disaster, examines stories of financial destitution in postcolonial Zimbabwe to understand the value of fiction in narrating economic crisis amid other catastrophes. It asks, what solutions can fiction and fictional aesthetics offer that exceed the purview of expert economists’ policy recommendations? What limitations or foreclosure of possibilities do they expose in other economic systems that style themselves as solutions to fiscal disaster? Selected because they were written during the height of the economic crisis but also in contrasting novelistic forms, Tendai Huchu’s The Hairdresser of Harare (2010) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013) both focus on “buying out” of, or attempting to leave, the financial crisis, which is the central structuring catastrophe here. “Buying out” is an aesthetic strategy that involves consciously turning away from crisis-­ridden Zimbabwe through plot line, literary form, thematic content, and geographic setting. The omnipotent nature of the economic crisis may impose omnipressures on writers, often leading to literary work that is wholly immersed in the representation of emergency. Buying out becomes a way to escape the crisis, literally and even literarily. The language of economics in general, and of the Zimbabwean economic disaster in particular, anchors these two novels. The literary maneuvers of this fiction attempts to escape the all-­encompassing cloud of catastrophe by using genre-­based inventions not usually associated with high tragedy, such as in the romance novel The Hairdresser of Harare, or when the protagonists leave the space of crisis to live in

Introduction

35

the new world of American diasporic plenty. The Disaster Unconscious embeds a commercial and economic vocabulary in the novels that brings them back to the generative space of disaster, thus revealing the impossibility of buying out. Chapter 3, Ripping Off the BandAIDS: Dying Out in the Medical Disaster, examines two novels about the AIDS crisis that devastated South Africa and Botswana in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first century, whose pernicious legacy continues to ravage those nations even today. Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow: A Novel of Postapartheid South Africa (2001) and Unity Dow’s Far an’ Beyon’ (2000) were both published when the AIDS crisis had peaked in Southern Africa, at a time when treatment attempts were thwarted by indigenous customs that relied largely on traditional healing rather than also on Western medicine. Again, fictional form has played an important choice in my selections here. Dow’s novel favors literary realism, whereas Mpe’s novel is characterized by modernist techniques, playfulness, and irony. Despite their stylistic differences, both novels use fictional strategies, such as a focus on the individual story to narrate the biography of a community and to reveal the subjective interiority of the literary protagonist, so as to place some distance between Story and Event. Even so, the Disaster Unconscious emerges as a medicalized rhetoric that always brings AIDS back into the conversation and constantly subverts these literary maneuvers. Both novels emphasize that the conversation around AIDS is part of what makes the HIV epidemic into a true medical disaster. The two intervene in reshaping the way we talk about AIDS: They shatter the silence around the epidemic as well as undo the myth and misinformation encasing the vocabulary of the disease. The ultimate agenda of these novels is therapeutic, emerging most clearly when the Disaster Unconscious forges a medicalized but Africanized vocabulary of diagnosis, treatment, and healing. This medicalized discourse also contains its own literary components, including metaphors and images of “foreign germs,” foreigners as germs, diseased bodies, and virology. These aesthetic gestures turn the mere presentation of facts into literary work. The reemergence of the catastrophe, and the pedagogical agenda of presenting crisis as crisis, short-­circuits the literary through the rhetoric of disease, treatment, and cure. A relatively slow-­moving crisis with no instant cure, the medical disaster does not require the urgency of remedial treatment. By contrast, the oceanic disaster, in which homes and schools are destroyed, or the economic disaster, in which people go without food daily, have a

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Postcolonial Disaster

more urgent pedagogical purchase. The reality principle is less obvious in the two novels discussed in chapter 1, and it is often subsumed or integrated into the literary aspects of the prose. As chapter 4 next demonstrates, the pace of the disaster then determines the dialectic between Story and Event. The last part, called “Simmer,” explores the slowest-­moving disaster in this book to show how seven decades of built aggression have contributed to the catastrophic relationship between India and Pakistan and to the rise in religious fundamentalism, militarization, nuclearization, and terrorism throughout parts of South Asia. Chapter 4, War of the Words: Fighting Out the Geopolitical Disaster, focuses on fiction about the seemingly endless India–­Pakistan conflict that has now left the subcontinent teetering on the edge of nuclear war. The geopolitical disaster changes the lives, perceptions, and ideologies of those who live in its shadow, especially in terms of how the personal and the political interact. Dailiness shifts and alters in the all-­pervasive, yet ghostly, presence of Partition, war, terrorism, and fundamentalism, all under a looming cloud of possible nuclear annihilation. Everything is political within a geopolitical disaster: The rhetoric and metaphors of politics and military discourse suffuse even the deeply affective language of personal relationships. The political is personal in the literature of the geopolitical disaster. This is not the same as second-­wave feminism’s well-­worn slogan: “the personal is political.” In the literature of the geopolitical disaster, Politics, with a capital P, and international conflict invade even the most personal relationships such as those between husband and wife or mother and child. The blurring of the political and the personal leads to a blurring of the Self and the Other, often generating a compassion for radical national difference. Jaspreet Singh’s Chef (2008), Moni Mohsin’s The Diary of a Social Butterfly (2008), and Manil Suri’s The City of Devi (2013)—­the three novels discussed in chapter 4—­all attempt to create neighborly national existence through obscuring the boundaries between the familiar Self and the foreign Other. All three novels can be placed in a temporal and affective sequence in their depiction of military conflict. Chef, a military novel, focuses on the remembrance of the lived reality of war; The Diary of a Social Butterfly, a satirical chick-­lit novel, hints at the possibility of war; The City of Devi deploys science fiction to close that sequence and examines the apocalyptic consequences of a nuclear war. In tracing the depiction of war as historical process, contemporaneous possibility, and apocalyptic futurity, the sequential

Introduction

37

progression of a militarized literary discourse captures the complexity of a long-­drawn-­out crisis. Despite their contrasting positions in the progressive narration of the geopolitical disaster and the vast difference in their novelistic forms, all three novels deploy similar techniques to stage their literary, pedagogical, and even political agendas. The Disaster Unconscious returns in its use of military and political metaphors in which war invades all aspects of private life; this intrusion of the public into the private allows a deconstruction of the Self and the Other by showing the Otherness of the Self and the Selfhood of the Other. My choice of fiction in the final chapter reveals that texts about slow-­ moving disasters are able to negotiate the tension between Story and Event more obliquely than texts that ask for urgent intervention. The former is able to play around with literary form much more than the latter, even though the Disaster Unconscious always structures how these texts narrate the crisis and manages the distance between Story and Event. My selections here, as well as elsewhere in the book, deliberately reflect the diversity of narrative forms in which disaster fiction arrives while teaching readers how to recognize disaster fiction and to understand its relationship with catastrophic time. This fictional medley in this book includes very well-­known writers such as Phaswane Mpe, NoViolet Bulawayo, and Manil Suri, along with well-­regarded, but relatively less known, writers such as Jaspreet Singh and Unity Dow, and unknown writers such as Indran Amirthanayagam, as well as the writers of foreign origin discussed in the tsunami chapter. The range of authors as well as the various fictional forms in which they choose to tell their stories about catastrophe foregrounds the central argument made in Postcolonial Disaster: that no matter how far the Story moves from the originary Event through genre, style, or time, the Disaster Unconscious refuses to relegate catastrophe to the margins of the narrative. Moreover, we can only arrive at some sort of composite understanding of literary narrations of catastrophe by putting together radically different fictional forms, such as the imperial savior novel, children’s literature, chick-­lit, science fiction, military novels, and, of course, conventionally realist novels, all of which fall under the umbrella of disaster fiction through their direct relationship to the catastrophic event. Postcolonial Disaster ends with a coda rather than a conventional conclusion. Catastrophes of the Now: (B)Reaching Out of the Refugee Disaster tests the methodological assumptions of this book. While Postcolonial Disaster begins with explorations of literary representations of

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Postcolonial Disaster

disasters in the Anglophone postcolonial world, it closes with a brief analysis of one of the most pressing catastrophes of our time—­the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis. My analysis of one of the first works of fiction on that crisis, Breach (2016), reveals that the tension between Story and Event noted in disaster texts from and about the postcolonial Anglophone world can also be extrapolated onto other Anglophone writing about disaster. Yet, Breach, a short story collection, also demonstrates a new turn in postcolonial disaster fiction. While the chapters in Postcolonial Disaster confine themselves to catastrophes that have defined certain nations at certain moments in their history, Breach, by Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes, reveals how the refugee crisis in Syria is the disaster that knows no nation, showing how the only thing worse than belonging to a disastrous nation-­state is to belong to no nation-­state. The origins of the collection also demonstrate the urgent need to communicate about crisis quickly, effectively, and creatively, bringing us back full circle to the ethical imperatives of the oceanic disaster. I hope that the provocations in the coda, as well as many of the other issues raised in Postcolonial Disaster that the first book on any subject cannot fully address, will be taken up by literary scholars to further expand on how we narrate, read, and respond to disaster.

Part 1 Explosion

Chapter 1

Tsunami Stories Writing Out the Wave in the Oceanic Disaster

When the American writer Adele Barker visited Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami, the taxi driver who collected her from the airport told her: “ ‘Madam  .  .  . your word tsunami was not known to our people before the sea came to the land. Now our people all know this word.’ ”1 Barker learned that on December 26, 2004, “97 per cent of the population of Sri Lanka had never heard the word tsunami before” (161). But it was not only Sri Lankans who suddenly became familiar with unknown nomenclature after the sea came to the land.2 The word “tsunami,” which means “harbor wave” in Japanese, was seared into the consciousness of people across the world when a catastrophe of monumental proportions occurred on the day after Christmas in 2004. The Indian Ocean tsunami hit Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, and Thailand with a series of cascading waves from the ocean; waves as tall as buildings swept onto the shores of South Asia and Southeast Asia, causing irreparable damage wherever they landed.3 The dead numbered around 230,000 in fourteen countries, making the Indian Ocean tsunami the “deadliest tsunami in recorded history” and one of the worst so-­called natural disasters ever.4 After Indonesia, Sri Lanka was battered most by the Wave5: some 35,000 people died and approximately 500,000 others were displaced from their homes. An estimated 48,000 people were killed all over the afflicted areas in the first twenty minutes of the tsunami. Did your eyes glaze over these numbers just now? Or did you feel horrified imagining the havoc wreaked by the Wave? Perhaps you experienced both reactions simultaneously? The striking images of the tsunami easily narrate themselves in words, embedding tragedy, awe, drama, pity, 41

42 Explosion

and terror in a few short sentences. The numbers also overwhelm, paralyze, and desensitize. In adding a literary element to the spectacle of the Event, narratives about the oceanic disaster subdue its horror while, paradoxically, revealing its terrifying scale.

Explosion: Oceanic Disaster Time The Sri Lankan tsunami has not yet yielded a wide range of literature, particularly in long-­form fictional genres. This chapter’s argument rests precisely on that point: violent, sudden-­onset disasters, such as this section’s eponymous phenomena of explosion, often produce certain kinds of writing—­either short lyrical bursts of poetry or genre fiction, which may be quicker to compose than more conventionally literary work. The eventfulness of the Event, or the pedagogical demands of the sudden-­onset disaster, requires immediate attention that often subordinates the Story. Postcolonial Disaster argues that genre fiction can narrate catastrophe seriously. The wide array of forms that genre fiction encapsulates, such as children’s literature and the romance novel, creates a diverse assemblage that comes closer to capturing the vastness of the tsunami than serious literary fiction alone. The works studied here range from Yiola Damianou-­Papadopoulou’s The Blue Dragon (2006), a children’s novel by a Cypriot writer, and Philippa Hawley’s There’s No Sea in Salford (2013), a British romance novel with imperial undertones, to Indran Amirthanayagam’s The Splintered Face (2008), a collection of poems by a Sri Lankan–­American diplomat. The publication dates are all-­important to my main point, considering how soon The Blue Dragon and The Splintered Face were published after the Wave. This chapter explores how the unexpected devastation of an oceanic disaster can generate a productive discord between the literary elements of a work and the pedagogical agenda of managing catastrophe. That tension is differently crystalized through the use of various forms, including short poetry and genre fiction such as children’s literature and popular romance. The wide diversity of these texts reveals the impossibility of containing disaster in any single genre. Yet each of these works employs a specific literary form that comes with its own set of thematic and stylistic conventions, demonstrating how a certain expressive mode is particularly well-equipped to narrate an Event distinguished by its explosive suddenness. While tsunami writing may attempt to escape the ideological obligations that crisis imposes on art,

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43

the desperate urgency to narrate the catastrophe often short-­circuits any evasion, or even diversion, possible through form and style. The pressing exigency to redress this particular crisis often subsumes the literary element. This particular crisis refers to an unforeseen and cataclysmic Event that requires getting the word out quickly so that lives can be saved, the wounded can be tended to in serviceable hospitals, homes can be rebuilt, educational institutions can function again, and the nation can be a nation once more. As later chapters show, the rupture between the literary Story­and Event-­oriented pedagogy often seems less dramatic in slower-­moving disasters, in which the catastrophes themselves—­and not merely their effects—­last for decades.6 I use the term “literary” to refer specifically to the technical, structural, and formal devices used to expand disaster-­oriented fiction into more than just informational or didactic tracts.7 I am especially interested in the conventions that govern narrative modes, such as foreshadowing, figurative language, metaphors, and pathetic fallacy, as well as in the pleasure principle underpinning literature itself. My use of the term “literary” includes the conventions of genre fiction, such as romance novels or children’s literature to provide happy endings, as well as the complications of those conventions. Disaster throws many of our conceptions of form into disarray, projecting the tumult it causes in the real world onto literature itself. According to Katy Shaw: Genre fiction constitutes an important space in which contemporary writers discuss the relationship between the global and the local, gender, class, and race. As a site to debate issues as diverse as the states and the individual, convergence, socio-­political, [and] transnational tensions . . . genre fictions are marked by reoccurring preoccupations or concerns that a growing rate of writers seek to explore or rationalize through their work  .  .  . Celebrating a history of hybridity, twenty-­first-­century genre fictions take an anti-­authoritarian approach to heritage, the past, and unequal access to storytelling . . . suggesting a wider crisis in story-­telling [in which] these texts strain at the limits of their fictional forms to contain new images and representations.8

Genre fiction has often been dismissed in favor of serious literary work. However, as Shaw and other critics assert, that mode of fiction forces a “crisis” in conventional storytelling to make serious points, both despite and through its supposedly “lowbrow” tone. In tsunami writing, poetry

44 Explosion

and genre fiction provide the possibilities of diversion from, and dilution of, Event-­induced horror; literary method subverts pure documentary and pedagogical intent even as it stages its own negation. Narratives about the oceanic disaster also show the occasional fusion of Story and Event that becomes smoother and more seamlessly integrated in slow-­ moving but long-­term disasters. There is, however, a paucity of fiction, whether highbrow or lowbrow, on the Indian Ocean tsunami, especially composed by Sri Lankans themselves.9 The generic orientation of Sri Lankan writing on the tsunami is relatively homogenous and heavily aligned toward life-­writing and memoir.10 My textual choices in this chapter not only reflect this absence but also use the gap to examine other modes of writing that may not have otherwise caught our eye. In an interview with Erica Kelly, the South African poet Ingrid De Kok remarks: “Especially, perhaps, when material is painful, formal systems . . . do two things—­they both contain and they intensify. Both effects must be present, or the poem could end up being either sentimental or patronizing; or exploitative.”11 This tension between the containment function of literary language and that language’s ability to intensify—­to make the reader feel the experience of violent disaster more viscerally than merely taking in an objective documentation of facts—­forms the fundamental points of contrast and complexity in tsunami writing. Can writing about disaster, which I have earlier defined as a cataclysmic and collective event or a series of events, both contain and intensify our emotions? Are containment and intensification at constant odds with each other precisely because of the extensive horror that disaster perpetuates? Does the specific disaster at hand—­here the tsunami, with its sudden volatility and the urgency of seeking redress—­mean that the containment-­intensification or literary-­pedagogic dialectic is broken?

But What Is an Oceanic Disaster? Of all the catastrophes discussed in this book, the tsunami is easiest to categorize as a disaster through using the metrics of disaster studies as well as viewing it through the popular and literary imaginations. The sociologists T. Jean Blocker and Darren E. Sherkat define a “natural” disaster as “typified as quickly occurring, unexpected, physically destructive events from which human collectivities recover through forming therapeutic communities and re-­establishing consensually based social structures.”12 While the tsunami can be simplistically classified

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as a “natural disaster,” most disaster theorists concur that natural disasters do not exist as entities unto themselves. As the authors of At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability, and Disaster write, “the term ‘natural disaster’ is often used to refer to natural events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or floods. However, the phrase ‘natural disaster’ suggests an uncritical acceptance of a deeply ingrained ideological and cultural myth . . . Extreme natural events are not disasters until a vulnerable group of people is exposed.”13 A cyclone raging in the middle of the ocean with no human life nearby to destroy would be considered a natural occurrence but not a disaster. “Tsunami” means “harbor wave” in Japanese, therefore, a tsunami always makes landfall, always affects people, and always metastasizes into a disaster.14 Since the term “natural disaster” has lost its valence in disaster studies, instead I use the term “oceanic disaster,” which signals to the specificity of the tsunami—­not to every “natural” disaster—­but which is capacious enough to include all ocean-­related disasters such as hurricanes, storms, and floods. The magnitude of the oceanic disaster creates an oppositional force field between art and information, bringing back the “moral” quandary of representing the vexed issue of subaltern voice and agency. Is it ethical to take literary pleasure in other people’s tragedies, while viscerally and vicariously experiencing their pain? Is there an element of appropriation in making suffering not our own into our own? Do we risk fetishizing the agony of others when we read about the horrors inflicted upon them in the safety of our own homes? The violent upheaval of disaster throws everything that comes within its ambit into disorder and confusion, including the usual conventions of literary technique as well as the morals and mores of our reading practices. The urgency of narrating the oceanic disaster is greater than that of narrating many of the slow-­moving disasters, thus imposing a different expositional pressure on both art and culture. Much of this urgency may affect craft—­an uncomfortable problematic that disaster writing forces us to confront. How important aesthetic technique is in literary narratives of sudden disasters becomes yet another difficult question that raises moral quandaries of its own.

Writing Out the Wave in the Oceanic Disaster Well before the tsunami in 2004, Sri Lanka was torn asunder by an internecine conflict between two different ethnic and religious groups—­Sinhalese-­speaking Buddhists and Tamil-­speaking Hindus.

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Their civil war began in the early 1980s and finally ended with the defeat of the Tamils in 2009 and the domination of a Buddhist-­Sinhalese government. While no exact figures are available, approximately 40,000 people may have been killed during the conflict. The Sri Lankan government was accused of systematic human rights abuse of the Tamil rebels, while the Tamils deployed terror tactics of their own, often against innocent people. The tsunami took place in a country already ravaged by civil strife, mixing interethnic violence into the wreckage. According to Alan Keenan, Sri Lanka Senior Analyst of the London-­based Crisis Group: The Indian Ocean Tsunami burst on to a fractured and deeply divided political landscape in Sri Lanka. In the immediate wake of the disaster people came together and cooperated along ethnic, regional, and political lines. Within weeks, however, old divisions asserted themselves, fuelled by new grievances and a new set of resources. Efforts to respond to the disaster quickly met difficult political challenges that affected the quality and speed of assistance.15

Sri Lankan society split further in the aftermath of the tsunami when tense ethnic histories slammed into several calamitous natural events. The narratives that emerged from that violent collision reveal how the friction between the literary and the pedagogical is negotiated according to the container of the literary form in which it is distilled. These narratives also demonstrate how short lyrical poetry and genre fiction can be especially adept at reflecting the pressures of a sudden-­onset disaster. Tsunami fiction underscores, in bold font, the devastating effects of ethnic conflict on basic humanitarian issues such as the need for medical and financial aid that arise from a “natural disaster.” According to the geographer Margo Kleinfeld, “in the aftermath, it was hoped that the North and East would be transformed into zones of humanitarian assistance and that Sri Lanka’s conflict geography would be depoliticized for a time, creating an opportunity for collaboration between the two enemies and the setting for renewed international donor interest, funding and action.”16 Instead, the oceanic disaster further perpetuated the current political crisis, despite the initial cease-­and-­desist it brought about, thus revealing the destructive intersection often occurring between the human and the environmental in so-­called natural disasters. Each and every text imposes upon itself the authorial responsibility

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to cite disaster as disaster, to show disaster as disaster, and to manage disaster as disaster. Yet, as the very words “cite,” “show,” and “manage” suggest, these are all documentary or policy-­oriented functions rather than aesthetic elements that characterize literary form. Stories about the oceanic disaster also act as testimony: a commentary on the true state of disarray and suffering but disseminated through ­literature—­a written word form that is accessible to people all over the world and that can “tell the truth” though with an aesthetic slant that makes less pedantic the uncomfortable realities that it represents. As Adele Barker remarks about her post-­tsunami book, “Writing changes the way people think; it changes people’s lives” (Not Quite Paradise, 165). The aspect of “psychological and emotional truth” gives the literature the “factuality” of bare-­bones data or dry media reports but without their cold blandness.17 Mark Anderson, a literary critic, argues that disaster narratives “not only organize the facts into a coherent, meaningful explanation of catastrophic experience but that they also factualize their version of events through the careful use of documentary and testimonial modes of discourse” (Disaster Writing, 7). The texts discussed in this chapter all issue fact-­based warnings about future catastrophes and often also detail how to work through the havoc they sow. These range from the practical (seek higher ground immediately!) to the emotional (surround yourself with those you love!) and the political (reconcile the warring factions in order to heal!). Even as tsunami writing struggles to keep its storytelling aspect from being subsumed by the Disaster Unconscious—­controlled by warning, information, censure, and resolution—­the unique aspects of literary form, such as metaphorical condensation, conflicted characterization, mythological evocation, and romanticized happy endings, often enable these practical imperatives to emerge with a literary agency of their own. In addition to cataloguing disaster, tsunami stories also focus on the rebuilding process, the next step in sudden-­onset disaster mediation. Rebuilding initially united people, especially local Sri Lankans, with those of other nationalities, even as the reconstruction process exacerbated rifts between Sinhalese and Tamils. The theme of the diasporic “coming home” to help reconstruct the nation is rendered vividly here. The tsunami made Sri Lankans out of thousands of people who had left the country and taken on other identities. The main character in Philippa Hawley’s romance novel, There’s No Sea in Salford, comes to mind, as do the central conceits in Indran Amirthanayagam’s collection of poems, The Splintered Face. Yet, as text after disaster-­analysis text

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points out, rebuilding is a long and arduous process, perhaps an impossible one. People did not simply die in the tsunami. As Judith Fradin and Dennis Fradin state in Witness to Disaster, a National Geographic report on the tsunami, “huge number of survivors also lost their means of earning a living as farm fields were flooded, fishing boats were demolished, and shops and hotels were destroyed. It will take decades for the tsunami-­ravaged regions to recover—­if they ever do.” Story and Event a battle mediated by resume their battle over representation here—­ the Disaster Unconscious, which often allies itself with the expositional army of the Event. Tsunami writing describes, supports, and critiques rebuilding without resorting to mere statistical citation or the kind of newspaper-­style editorializing in which expositional necessity brushes against the basic literary impulse to provide artistic pleasure. Pleasure, itself, then becomes a fraught emotion. Is it appropriate for us to lose ourselves in the lyricism of The Splintered Face when its very lyricism serves to document the horror of the thousands of lives lost in the Wave? Does “literariness” distract from the visceral horror of the oceanic disaster, even as it seeks to make that horror more real to us? Can disaster writing be so successful aesthetically and pedagogically, especially in letting us occupy—­from our safe spaces, of course—­the position of those people who actually experienced the disaster, that ideological politics falter ethically? Although the tsunami made Sri Lankans out of people who had assumed other national identities, it also made honorary Sri Lankans out of a large group of foreign aid workers who believed that they were called upon to assist the afflicted. The burning desire to help others heal evokes colonialist missions in the hierarchal distance it establishes between the healing touch and helping hand and those who need the healing touch and helping hand. Yet in The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot states, “there is no solitude if it does not disrupt solitude. The better to expose the solitary to the multiple outside” (6). Disaster transforms the suffering of the solitary into the suffering of the communal, while also allowing the outside to permeate the inside. Many of these international workers may showcase a colonialist sensibility, particularly a savior complex, despite—­or perhaps because of—­their love for Sri Lanka: such as the two Englishwomen doctors in No Sea in Salford who keep repeating “We must be able to do something useful . . . first the civil war and now the tsunami. It’s all too much . . . too too much.” “We must do something” may seem too too much as these Englishwomen

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are too too implicated in their own agency to rehabilitate and rebuild those rendered absolutely destitute.18 Kleinfeld claims: While  .  .  . reciting narratives of political transcendence and human compassion for international audiences, the audience (i.e. those contributing to relief and reconstruction efforts) would do well to see the role they inevitably play  .  .  . This requires a geopolitical imaginary that examines the political and spatial dimensions of humanitarian narrative and action (180).

Responses to disaster should also be seen in the political and historical context in which they take place and not merely as pure humanitarianism that allows the outside to permeate the solitary suffering of the inside, as Blanchot suggests. The knotty relationship between the Story and the Event is tied together in this context. The pedagogical imperatives of writing about catastrophe open spaces for anyone who has been deeply touched by crisis, and not necessarily as victims, to work with or write about disaster; the need to repair and regenerate is much greater than any ethical quandary that foreign intervention or “assistance” may raise. Yet the savior complex underpinning many of these narratives, not to mention the relative paucity of texts composed by Sri Lankans themselves, suggests that some tsunami stories may legitimize colonialist ways of seeing—­ and saving—­the world. This problem reaches into the deepest heart of colonial desire and even to the question of “provincializing Europe” (and North America).19 Yet form often pushes against the limits of colonialist ideology here. The imperial romance that is There Is No Sea in Salford undercuts its own thematic preoccupations with saving the world through the mechanics of style that reveals a deep ambivalence about the neocolonial project of disaster relief, similar to what Homi Bhabha describes as the “tongue that is forked” of colonial discourse.20 While postdisaster rehabilitation may be the imperial savior’s siren song, rebuilding inhabits the core of all tsunami stories.21 Most post-­ tsunami texts reveal a deeply ambivalent relationship to the sea, viewing it as a creature of destruction but also a creature of nourishment whose waters yield to coastal people the very livelihoods it takes away.22 The sea is also part of the people’s psyche. As Anderson states in ­Disaster Writing, “nature plays a constitutive role in the construction of human subjectivity through processes of identification: that is to say, that

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humans define themselves through nature therefore it is nature as humanity’s primordial other, that stimulated the human invention of culture in the first place” (3). Tsunami literature constructs identity through the sea, which becomes more of a determining factor of selfhood after the oceanic disaster.23 Like the sea itself, the child is a metaphor or perhaps an image that an author often, consciously or unconsciously, feels forced to depict; the literary demands of the work may seek an escape from this compulsive representation, yet the repressed returns to assert itself. The world in front of these narratives is almost always child-­oriented. The child represents the possibility of an efflorescent nation. This is an old trope in postcolonial studies—­Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) is an iconic text in that respect—­in which the child symbolizes the newborn nation. The recurring iconography of children in tsunami literature, more than 50 years after Sri Lanka’s independence, suggests that with each disaster a nation must go back to its starting point, its originary “postcoloniality,” as it were, in order to reconstruct itself from infancy to fully realized maturity. Again, the quandary between Story and Event emerges in fraught but ultimately generative ways. The child always appears as a metaphor, even if the narrative may push against that sort of obvious symbolism. Instead, the ambivalent aspect of this analogy reveals a deep suspicion in prescribing an aspirational futurity—­the tired trope of the child as the regenerative tomorrow—and an instance where the literary and the pedagogical jostle against each other by refusing to provide the “cruel optimism” that Lauren Berlant decries.24 The child is, therefore, a broken child. How can it be anything else? The damage done to the child is also continuous in the sense that there is no interruption in its destruction. In tsunami literature, damaged adults represent the past as well as the present, both times in which they intersect with the damaged children who represent the present as well as the future. The oceanic disaster emerges not only as an ecological calamity but also as an affective, or ontological, state. Some minds permanently inhabit a state of disaster; some people will always live in a state of disaster. The tension between the literary Story and the pedagogical Event articulates itself in a struggle to represent the permanently affective state of disaster in a bounded form. Rendering disaster into narrative further complicates the ethical questions about representing catastrophic events. Narrative deals in emotions but it also deals in limits of time, seeking to bind an ongoing state with temporal duct tape, so to speak. Disaster writing attempts to represent the continuum that

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is catastrophe within a finite chronological span, consequently raising questions about the ethics of depicting something both boundless and omnipresent—­the there that is always there—­within the formal confines of narrative. All the above themes and symbols, along with their dialectic relationship with the Story and Event, are urgently grafted onto narratives about a sudden-­onset disaster whose effects require immediate redress. Although Fredric Jameson refers to politics, specifically a Marxist ethic, as a throughway to understanding our world and our culture, his words resonate in the literature of the oceanic disaster, too: “these matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in however disguised and symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme . . . only if they are grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot” (Political Unconscious, 19–­20). Some of the works discussed in this chapter, such as the romance novel There’s No Sea in Salford, may be dismissed as genre fiction or lowbrow romance, partly because the need to narrate the world into order feels so important after experiencing an unexpected cataclysm that their craft often recedes into the background. Additionally, a novel like The Blue Dragon may seem ideologically simplistic, given its composition as a children’s novel. Meanwhile, The Splintered Face often lets us lose ourselves in its lyricism—­its quick and rich aesthetics of sudden disaster, made possible by a slim collection of poems and not by a longer novel or narrative poetry. These may well be the only forms in which a sudden-­onset disaster is rendered effectively in its immediate aftermath. While tsunami stories reveal the literary limitations in initial writing about sudden-­onset disasters, they also teach important lessons in how to read about and live with unexpected crisis. In conjunction with each other—­as parts of a large and ever-­shifting narrative of disaster in which these narratives about the Wave negotiate their pedagogical function and we question our own ethics of reading as well as our literary judgment—­all three books discussed in this chapter share “a single fundamental theme”: to narrate disaster as disaster in quick, fruitful, and sometimes fraught ways. Stefan Helmreich urges scientists to “find ways to calibrate geological time to social time, to risk mixing methods and theories in order to wrest their reproducible science into the present, into the unpredictable and turbulent moment of oscillating ocean time.”25 In putting these texts together—­mixing scientific memory and humanistic desire, genres and styles, the foreign and the indigenous, highbrow poetry with

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children’s literature and lowbrow romance novels—­a bigger story about the oceanic disaster emerges. Disaster, after all, is a collective wound. Literary responses to disaster are also therefore collective—­not simply collective in content but also collective in form, genre, theme, and even ideological orientation, so that we can arrive at a still incomplete but entirely holistic story about an unnarratable Event.

Mythology and Magic: The Storied Event in The Blue Dragon An unexpected cataclysm may be substantially encompassed through a variety of narrative structures, though some of these literary forms could be dismissed as unable to perform the serious work of narrating catastrophe. Children’s fiction, such as The Blue Dragon (2006) by the Cypriot writer Yiola Damianou-­Papadopoulou, however, can index disaster as disaster despite, or perhaps because of, the many distractions it provides through its formal conventions such as a happy ending, the use of mythology and folklore, and the fantasy of interethnic harmony. As Robert C. Bell and Robert M. Ficociello argue in America’s Disaster Culture, “when we look at children’s literature and disaster discourse, we should decide not to be dismissive and begin to find coordinates over time within disaster discourse.”26 A coherent sense of the narratology of a sudden-­onset disaster can be assembled solely through a hybrid mixture of literary narration, including children’s fiction. Moreover, the magnitude of a disaster as recent as the Indian Ocean tsunami cannot yet be captured by big, maximalist, epic forms that take years to compose. Children’s fiction—­including works such as The Blue Dragon—­often appear swiftly in the wake of their subject events. The relatively large amount of tsunami literature written by non-­Sri Lankans is not surprising, since the island nation is a popular tourist resort for foreign nationals, especially during the winter months. As Helmreich says, “islands themselves often feature in national, colonial, and anthropological imaginations as kinds of time capsules, cultural throwbacks separated by water from the contemporaneity of metropolitan life” (“Time and the Tsunami,” 7). Yet, islands are not just paradise; they are also stereotyped as hell. Think of Jamaica in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) or Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The binary tropes of Sri Lanka as Paradise and Hell—­motifs to describe tropical islands in particular—­are given further purchase when contextualized against where, how, and when the Wave washed off the littoral world.

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After all, it is easy to imagine media headlines screaming: Giant Wave Sweeps Away Edenic Island on the Day after Christmas.27 The Indian Ocean tsunami occurred in the middle of the Christmas break when many rich and middle-­class Westerners vacationed in Sri Lanka’s balmy climes. The event acquired a calamitous cachet in the global imagination due to the thousands of foreign tourists who died in the tsunami. The date and location of the Wave lend themselves to a certain kind of apocalyptic narrative appealing to foreign readers and writers, particularly because the colonialist stereotypes of unrivaled beauty and untrammeled destruction are resurrected there, stereotypes that sediment notions of catastrophes as occurring only in the backwardness of the Othersphere. Inhabitants of other islands, however, may feel a sympathy unique to those who occupy a similar topography. Damianou-­Papadopoulou’s Cypriotic origins may have motivated her to write a book with the unique agenda of The Blue Dragon.28 That book does not contain all the horrific details about the Sri Lankan tsunami punctuating its adult counterparts. As a children’s novel, it takes the sensibility of its young readership into account. Although novelistic form mediates the horror of content, The Blue Dragon still functions as a testimonial to a cataclysmic Event, a narrative in which children and young adults can redress the catastrophic effects of the Wave. The Blue Dragon guides the reader through the process of rebuilding after the tsunami, fulfilling the happy ending often associated with children’s literature where the Story may take precedence over the Event. The plot line is fairly simple and strongly oriented toward telling a tale: A group of children play along the beach while another group embarks on a school-­sponsored excursion. Then the tsunami strikes in the middle of these everyday activities, and the children are forced to save themselves and each other. The novel focuses on the resilience of the children, emphasizing that the future of the nation rests with them. The children on the bus excursion are left to fend for themselves: “They had left their homes as children for an enjoyable outing, and in just a few hours, they had turned into young adults.”29 The cataclysm is not just destructive physically but also psychologically and emotionally. As a recurring trope in tsunami literature, children’s growing up suddenly ominously stalls the natural process of childhood. According to Patty Campbell, “the end of the world is a fitting metaphor for adolescence with its end of childhood and changing boundaries.”30 The abruptness of Child, Interrupted, which is an absolute antithesis to conventional and beloved literary forms such as the Bildungsroman, is unique to

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sudden apocalypses such as the tsunami. The trope of swift maturity is also received as a comment on how art itself is forced to mature through the surging of the Disaster Unconscious: revealing not only the pressures of novelistic form—­ children’s literature, for example—­ but also the responsibility that the Disaster Unconscious places on art, especially after an unanticipated, accelerated catastrophe, to become purposeful, Event-­oriented art quickly. The seeming relegation of the “storyness” of the Story becomes an apt allegory for the sudden-­onset Event itself. The Blue Dragon’s jerky ebbs and flows, in which children grow up in a single sentence, conjures images of waves abruptly cascading on the shoreline, showing how the formal structure of literary work anchored to an unexpected brutal cataclysm may visually reflect the event it seeks to describe. The Blue Dragon firmly invests the Sri Lankan future in its youth. As Alice Curry states, “Globalization is rapidly changing the ways in which communities engage with their local landscapes; it is also changing the ways in which these landscapes are represented in literature for children.”31 How do children interact with landscape, especially when that very landscape is in a state of crisis? How is this interaction shaped through the structural and literary choices of children’s fiction? How does the pedagogical imperative of the Event influence the formal aspects of the Story in children’s fiction? The Blue Dragon raises all these questions for adult readers without necessarily providing the answers; for child readers, however, the novel offers both consolation and advice on how to live in and with crisis. The use of the dragon, a popular conceit in children’s literature, and long rooted in myth and fantasy, attempts to impose a defining literary sensibility on the Event-­oriented narrative of the tsunami. The Blue Dragon is also a metaphor for the Wave that aptly takes its name from tsunamis, past and present: “Everything had vanished in just a few minutes. Only those who lived some distance from the sea had survived, and over time had rebuilt their houses and shops again by the sea” (12, emphasis added).32 The use of the dragon conceit, so familiar from juvenile fiction, presents both the sea’s ferocity and its ultimate powerlessness.33 According to Curry, “the traditional myths incorporated in [children’s postcolonial literature] embody unique and collective understandings of Commonwealth landscapes and of the capricious workings of natural phenomena” (3). So, too, does the figure of the dragon evoke the visual particularities of the tsunami, with its spikes and horns bringing to mind the crests and troughs of the waves. Just as

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dragons never existed, their imaginary status evacuating their legend of any real power, the image of the sea-­as-­dragon suggests that ultimately the Wave has only as much power as myth itself. The legendry dragon also symbolizes the tension between the Story and the Event: Mythology becomes a way to escape the intolerable pressure of narrating catastrophe as catastrophe, even as the Story assumes fantastic and unreal proportions in the face of the Event’s terrible power. Nullifying the dominance of the sea is an impossibility for Sri Lanka. This negation turns The Blue Dragon into a Story that appeals to and appeases young readers elsewhere. Here crisis is deployed for other purposes than merely narrating disaster as disaster. The complicated ethics of “using” other people’s pain to soothe one’s self is a distinctly elitist and colonialist form of representation that postcolonial theory teaches us to finds in texts that may seem to be the antithesis of colonialist.34 The Event-­oriented agenda of The Blue Dragon emphasizes the warning signs of the Wave, which island inhabitants ignore at their own peril. In this passage the girl-­child Hanseni, one of the central characters in the novel, is looking at the sea: The sea did not seem to be at its best today. Small foamy waves broke on her feet, washing ashore seaweed and heaps of garbage. The seagulls, which usually flew above the waves, trying to catch any unsuspecting fish swimming on the surface, were leaving. They left in flocks with a conspiratorial shriek, as if sounding the signal for departure . . . Before long the spot where she was sitting began filling with crabs. They walked like demented things on the sand, not knowing which direction to take. It seemed odd to her. It was the first time she had seen so many crabs out of the water. Suddenly, she noticed that for some inexplicable reason, the sea was retreating.35 It retreated in one, steady rapid movement. For a few minutes she watched in fascination, then something inside her sounded like an alarm, like a small bell ringing in her heart. (40)

The surging of the Disaster Unconscious, wavelike itself, generates a dry, almost documentary-­style of narration as descriptive information is heaped on the Story here. According to Fradin and Fradin, “animals may sense impending natural disasters before humans are aware of them. Eyewitnesses reported many instances of animals behaving strangely in the hours and minutes before the tsunami waves struck in 2004”

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(Witness to Disaster). The Blue Dragon reproduces the language of the National Geographic report: The “demented” crabs here have already sensed the looming disaster. The washing ashore of seaweed and garbage evokes the human detritus that will soon float onto the beach. The unsuspecting fish foreshadow the unsuspecting human survivors who will be left “swimming on the surface.” Fiction can provide warning signs about the tsunami through its staple strategy of foreshadowing and can even teach an anticipatory preparation based on indigenous and natural hermeneutics. Here, then, the novel creates a template for its Event-­oriented documentary function. Yet data are not just presented; instead, they are redirected through the transformative techniques of the Story, such as metaphor and literary foreshadowing. Even as the novel baldly describes the state of the ocean before the storm, the striking image of garbage and seaweed already on the beach presciently gestures toward the havoc after the storm. The Story lurks underneath the Event but is often subsumed by more pressing exigencies in the sudden-­ onset disaster. Importantly, the child first notices the warning signs of the tsunami after the animals do. Stereotypically, the child is closer to nature and therefore to understanding the language of animals. The child functions as an interpreter, then, between the world of the human and the natural, instantly revealing thematic symbolism as a way in which the Story seeks to break away from the pressures of the Event to deliver some relief. Rather than the hopefulness that a child usually represents, this particular child not only anticipates the disaster but also is a sign of disaster itself.36 According to Roslyn Weaver, “young adult apocalyptic narratives use totalitarian motifs and disaster to portray adolescent issues” (Apocalypse in Australian Fiction and Film, 4). The opposite happens in tsunami literature: The child symbolizes the apocalyptic present and the always-­already-­damaged yet possibly redeemable future. The Event-­oriented function of tsunami literature is provided through the theme, symbols, metaphors, and language of the Story, while the literariness of those images is upended by the magnitude of the Event itself, during which the child immediately allegorizes disaster rather than disaster allegorizing the child. The Blue Dragon also presents the ethnic conflict as well as the tsunami in often childlike and ingenuous ways, a naïveté that is part of the generic conventions of children’s fiction but that is further complicated by the pedagogical imperative of Event-­oriented sudden-­onset disasters.37 “Nishian’s family was Buddhist. Half of the people in their village were

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Buddhist and the other half Christian but this did not cause problems. They went to the same schools and celebrated their feasts together” (The Blue Dragon, 24). Younger readers may not be able to absorb as much tragedy as older readers, so the novel dilutes the intensity of the ethnic conflict and even romanticizes war, in order to focus on the central Event. Yet naiveté can also be seen as a formal strategy of the Story, where the novel also provides its youthful audience with the hope of healing and harmony through the very theme of innocence that circles back to the pedagogical intention of the Event. In pushing the Event to the forefront of the narrative, the Disaster Unconscious does not merely influence but also shapes the form and theme of the Story. The literary traits used in The Blue Dragon include mythology, fantastic possibility, and the child as a metaphor for disaster. Triangulating all three storytelling strategies, one child in the novel has a dream imbued with the incredible promise of a fairytale: A mermaid came in my sleep and enchanted me with her song. She took me with her to the bottom of the sea. But when I saw that silent and unsmiling glass world I was scared. The mermaid said that the disasters that happen to people occur because they do not know how to be happy, or how to sing. She said the sea rose up today because people do not love each other. (109, emphasis added)

The word “disaster” is used multiple times in the novel, suggesting that the Story recognizes the centrality of the Event—­a disaster as disaster, even in depictions of high fantasy. Anderson says that people “often attribute disasters to human abuses: nature is a battered mother, mistreated and exploited by her human children, and disaster is seen as both retribution and an opportunity for new beginnings” (Disaster Writing, 5). The novel provides easy cause-­and-­effect scenarios and easy solutions to an unexplained, once-­in-­a-­thousand-­years disaster: Sing! Be Happy! Love! The monk who listens to the dream recognizes the real truth of the mermaid’s tale: “The mermaid could be right. So we must give love to our world, so it can be safe and happy. The mermaid taught you a very good lesson that you will carry with you throughout your life. You are a very lucky boy” (109). Again, this cautionary fable-­like tale is associated with the formal mechanisms of children’s literature. No amount of love and human kindness can prevent the tsunami, or indeed a ferocious civil war, from occurring again.

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The conventions of the form in which the Story is composed occasionally push against the Event or allow it to remain as manageable and assimilable into a still-­healthy life, even in violent, sudden-­onset disasters. As Cardozo, Griensven, Thienkrua, et al. point out: Cultural differences may influence how survivors of the Tsunami interpreted events . . . Anecdotal evidence suggests that some of those affected by the Tsunami believed that the spirits sought revenge for the human exploitation of the sea. It is possible that by providing an understandable explanation to an otherwise incomprehensible natural disaster the belief system makes the events less of a random occurrence and even gives the individual and the community a sense that they have a certain level of control, however limited.38

Rendering scientific causality into myth enables the children to assume partial control over the world they will have to rebuild. Adults, too, use their own mythology, their own aesthetics, to survive. The Blue Dragon merely deploys a leaner and more overt form of grown-­up coping strategies to reach its younger audience. Here, the Story is not necessarily subverted by the pedagogical imperative of the Event; rather, it becomes a way, through Hope Simplified, of surviving the repeated appearance of the Event as well as looking forward to a new life after a violent and sudden catastrophe. There is neither room nor time for civil war when a whole world that has been destroyed needs to be rebuilt right now. No wonder, then, that the monk in the story preaches peace, talks of love, and tries to simplify religious conflict. The Blue Dragon ends more prescriptively than descriptively, with the inevitable conversation of rebuilding, particularly through education: “The Tsunami had no respect for the school either. Part of the roof had been blown away like a feather in the wind, leaving a great hole through which the sun beamed directly onto the heads of the children” (129). Yet, even after water has wreaked such destruction, the sun protects the school with its warmth and dryness. The teacher then gives the children a lecture on the scientific process of the tsunami: Perhaps for these children who had experienced the great Tsunami, life seemed like an incredible tale. They would always remember it and tell it to their children who, in turn, would pass the tale on to their children. Only now, they would no longer talk

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about a giant Blue Dragon with two enormous arms, open wide and a gaping mouth like a well, gulping houses and people. Instead they would tell the story of how an underwater earthquake created giant waves that devastated the village. At least now the children understood the actual causes of the Tsunami. And perhaps one day they might even be able to protect themselves from the worst of its destructive forces and tame the cruelty of the Blue Dragon. (The Blue Dragon, 160, emphasis added)

The teleological process, in which Western science replaces non-­ Western myth, also subverts and supplements the high fantasy and simple romance discussed earlier. The children will no longer talk about the Blue Dragon only as a Story but will instead describe the Event as the underwater earthquake it really was. They will cite disaster as disaster rather than retreating behind metaphor and myth, which the urgency of their situation might have demanded. While a wholehearted embrace of Western technology may be problematic, scientific discourse overlaps with the pedagogical purpose of the text. Science can build, repair, protect, prevent, and also tame future tsunamis. According to Helmreich, “[novelist Amitav] Ghosh fastens on to the emotion of science as vocation, to a structure of feeling that takes objective knowledge as subjective succor” (“Time and the Tsunami,” 7). Similarly, the literary and affective charge of tsunami writing is woven through the entire passage, which seeks emotional relief in scientific certitude. As the novelist Minoli Salgado says about her novel, A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014), “in one passage describing the tsunami I brought several different discourses into play—­the journalistic, the scientific, the mythic, and the apocalyptic among them—­in a kind of excess or overflow to show how the tsunami tested the limits of language and representation, how no one kind of language could accommodate it.”39 In the “excess or overflow” that a sudden apocalyptic disaster creates, life after the tsunami is like an “incredible tale,” made up of various competing discourses narrated by means of oral traditions through generations. The scientific and pedagogic, rather than the mythological and literary, may be central to rebuilding a shattered nation after the “incredible tale” of the Wave. Just as there is no escape from the Event-­oriented imperative to narrate the oceanic disaster, there is no escape from at least attempting to render the disaster through the form of the Story. Ultimately, though, agency is restored not to science or education but instead to the child who can use technology to harness disaster and be an intelligent actor

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in moments of crisis. A juvenile novel oriented around the theme of disaster, such as The Blue Dragon, exhorts children to participate in a shared sense of responsibility toward healing from the oceanic disaster. In asking children to take on the burden for “planetary health” (Curry, 7), and even to become adults before their time, the Disaster Unconscious also punctures the simplicity of the happy ending—­the storied vision—­ usually associated with children’s fiction, pushing it instead toward embracing the stark reality of the Event.40

Survivors and Saviors in There’s No Sea in Salford Philippa Hawley’s novel There’s No Sea in Salford (2013) focuses on how different individuals, particularly women and children, come together to constitute a community in a time of crisis—­a theme underpinning the literature of the oceanic disaster in general. Despite the novel’s high-­ minded aspirations, colonialist agendas and colonialist actions still drive the plot. This neoimperial ideology also establishes the tsunami as a postcolonial, global event, revealing varying ways of writing about the Tsunami as well as of healing from its trauma. Formally, There’s No Sea in Salford includes and eludes the usual characterizations: lowbrow fiction, romance novel, imperial savior fantasy, and the like. These structural slippages allow the novel to incorporate the wide conglomeration of tropes constituting the corpus of tsunami stories. In From Lowbrow to Nobrow, Peter Swirski describes “nobrow” texts as aspiring toward the themes of “great” literature but written in a “lowbrow” style. Nobrow is not a derogatory term. Instead, he claims, “neither lite entertainment nor heavy-­duty art, when nobrow fiction fails to go platinum it falls between the cracks and vanishes from both public and scholastic radar. In the end, such absence of evidence of popular genre art becomes the evidence of absence.”41 Nobrow fiction, such as There’s No Sea in Salford, falling through readerly spaces as neither literary nor popular, fails to register its presence. In that absent place, the labor that nobrow literature conducts is erased, especially how it foregrounds great literary themes, such as the tsunami, but in a popular, and perhaps even populist, style.42 Produced in the metaphor-­laden world of tsunami stories, There Is No Sea in Salford uses children and women, along with their bodily trauma and the liberatory potential in educating these wounded women and children, to emphasize the pedagogical imperatives of the Event. This

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is a common trope in disaster fiction where the suffering female body is meant not only to mirror the suffering nation but also to rehabilitate self and nation from disaster. The novel’s main characters include Kiri, a Sri Lankan woman married to an abusive Tamil husband, Raja, and living in England, and Jean and Penny, two British doctors. “She [Kiri] was having one of her bad days. It was Boxing Day 2004. . . . She’d struggled with her hearing for two years now, ever since Raja had struck her across the side of the head. She had bled from her ear that night and never regained full hearing” (1).43 While Kiri’s loss of hearing is literal, it is also immediately metaphorical. She is deaf to the trouble in her homeland till she hears the news of the tsunami, even though her psychological and physical state on the day of the tsunami presciently registers the onslaught of the Wave. Domestic abuse, ironically on Boxing Day, then evokes a larger allegory that has national as well as ethnic resonances.44 Raja is Tamil and Kiri Sinhalese. Although he is Indian, his physical violence symbolizes the terror tactics of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, particularly emphasizing the innocence of their victims. Kiri is a breast cancer survivor, too. Her very organs associated with nurture have been destroyed; one of her breasts has been blasted away by radiation, unable to provide the basic nourishment that a mother gives to her child. Her single remaining breast evokes the broken, bleeding, maimed anatomy of Sri Lanka itself. Discussing the novel Melal, Anthony Carrigan says, “the production of disability—­including reproductive disorders . . . is portrayed as being entwined with the long-­term effects of nuclear disaster.”45 Kiri’s pre-­tsunami life echoes the violent nature of everyday Sri Lankan life before the Wave and even anticipates the future violence of the storm. The Event can exist as a narrative premonition, a smaller story lurking beneath the symbolism of the Story, like a foreshadowing seen in The Blue Dragon when Hanseni notices nature in retreat before the storm. Literary foreshadowing is not just prescience, though. It attempts to represent disaster, something capaciously unbounded, within the temporal and chronological confines of narrative. Significantly, when Kiri first hears about the tsunami, she “felt the cloud over her grey house darken” (There’s No Sea, 2). That cloud presents Kiri’s grief as a natural tragedy, its aerial origins echoing and inverting the subterranean origins of the Wave.46 Allegory, foreshadowing, and pathetic fallacy are all classic literary elements that brighten into a Story, temporarily shadowing the Event. De Kok’s image of containment and intensification resonates here, showing how the

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Story may not only subtly subsume the Event; sometimes it also contains rather than intensifies the Event, rendering its horrors more palatable. Penny and Jean, the two British doctors who worked in Sri Lanka in the 1970s, reminisce about their days as medical students when they hear the news about the tsunami. Novelist Hawley portrays the wounded body as the wounded nation and foreshadows natural disaster through an earlier tragedy in the remembrance of things Sri Lankan past: They saw things they’d never seen in England—­tetanus, malaria, life-­threatening gastroenteritis, extreme pneumonias and more. Children died when they should have lived and doctors and nurses had to harden their hearts to the grieving mothers who never left, and slept beneath their children’s beds. Penny and Jean found it hard to witness the suffering they saw. (There’s No Sea in Salford, 23–­24, emphasis added)

Images of beaten, orphaned, or dead children, as well as grieving and emotionally broken women, emerge over and over again in tsunami literature. In underlining the death of the children in the past—­this is, after all, the 1970s—­the novel predicts the catastrophic future that lies ahead for Sri Lanka, not only because of the ethnic conflict but because wounded children symbolize the Event.47 Penny’s and Jean’s response, filled with images of dead children and grieving mothers, along with their own inability to face so much pain, can be seen as classic colonialist tropes inserting the ethical questions, which postcolonial studies has consistently raised, into the heart of the narrative. Pity for the “suffering native” is often the prime mover behind the altruistic impulse, where our own tangential trauma after encountering such horror displaces the focus from the actual suffering of the Other. The Western gaze of a Western audience hovers over disaster fiction, often occupying the position of the narrative’s receiving subject and of its expositional agenda. As Lasse Heerten points out, “in the Western gaze, postcolonial conflicts turn into a spectacle of suffering that observers wish to alleviate . . .—­a new form of internationalism characterized by the shift from solidarity to a politics of pity.”48 If the Western or Westernized or colonial gaze still occupies center stage, the anti-­imperial agenda—­to deflect, subvert, and undermine that gaze—­remains one of the primary projects of postcolonial disaster studies too. Catastrophe, especially in its spectacular version, forces a shocked, pitying, hierarchical glance on the suffering other. Yet this Western gaze, anchored unsteadily by

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a conflicted ideology, is not only imperialist but also uneasy with itself. Still, in that shifting and stumbling rhetoric of difference lie traces of a somewhat egalitarian empathy for the Other. Despite all the complications of form and ideology discussed above, the tsunami remains the central governing event in the past, p ­ resent, and future—­its signature appending every text about the Wave. Given the constant presence of disaster, if there is optimism in No Sea in S ­ alford, it appears as a broken and fragile sense of hope—­appropriately presented through the broken and fragile figure of the child—­which is always freighted with the political tragedies of the past. In one such instance, Dilvan, the son of Kiri’s lover, dies in an LTTE suicide mission: One day there was a suicide attack on the police station in Trincomalee where Dilvan worked. He was killed outright. A message came to them in Batticaloa the following day and Amanthi collapsed. Sam [Kiri’s lover] put her to bed and she didn’t move or eat for almost three weeks . . . In time things improved, but Dilip [Dilvan’s brother] always remained the quiet, sensitive member of the family. Sam was very proud though that he now helped as a volunteer support worker in his spare time, helping people injured in the Tsunami. (195)

Hawley traces a clear line of cause and effect here: The suicide attack by the Tamils destroys a family of small children, one of whom uses the calamity of the present-­past to ease the suffering in the calamity of the present-­future. The trope of the damaged child, always a sign of the centrality of the Event but also concealing traces of the Story in its very “tropeness,” emerges yet again. Hawley further extends this trope by portraying the damaged child as a possible healer. In an essay on children’s cinema in India, Jayashree Rajagopalan writes: This optimistic and transformative approach adopted by some Indian children’s film makers can in fact be viewed as an indication of the impact that reforming Indian cinema for and about children can have, compared to its adult masala-­garnished counterpart. Indian children’s cinema is not unlike the child—­ frequently marginalized, surviving against all odds, calling attention to itself as a powerful area of expression in its own right, and with immense potential to bring about positive change at the individual and social levels.49

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If Indian cinema is a metaphor for the child, then ­representations of the oceanic disaster are metaphors for children as a category, emphasizing the collectivity of the effects of the tsunami rather than individualizing them. The singular individual, the “I” that characterizes so much literature, is often subsumed by the metaphorical whole in the narration of catastrophe, retuning us to the national allegory mode that postcolonial critics such as Jameson view as a key characteristic of third-­ world literature. Children are also a metaphor for disaster and disaster narratives, historically marginalized in postcolonial studies yet always rendering the dangers of disaster legible through their very presence. Education, then, is an important aspect of the Event-­oriented agenda of rebuilding—­recall how The Blue Dragon, too, ends with the image of a new school constructed upon higher ground. The school where Kiri starts to work “was built on a slope  .  .  . The headmistresses’ house, the office, one classroom and a hall-­like dormitory block had defiantly stood their ground” (There’s No Sea in Salford, 97). The school built on a slope echo the warning signs that ring with bell-­like clarity in tsunami stories: “seek higher ground.” The word “defiantly” connotes resilience and hope through education. Again, the Disaster Unconscious shores up Event-­oriented information: “the school will survive though. We have received some money from a disaster fund, and some from charities and this has enabled us to move into another building nearby. It is little more than a collection of shacks at present, but as I write this the builders are trying to improve it . . . They have arranged dormitories for girls who have lost their families . . . This place has become my home” (97–­98). The matter-­of-­fact language here makes no effort to shy away from the Event, even when it involves relegating the Story to the background. There are no plot twists or character development, just bare-­bones facts pointing toward an opening for the future. The future in There’s No Sea in Salford is not only child-­oriented but also female-­oriented. The resurgence of Sri Lankan women and children working together, to fulfill the promise of education, gestates a new nation. Kiri explains how “the Boxing Day tsunami had woken her from a twenty-­year sleep, and made her realise she needed to get back to Sri Lanka, even before the death of her husband” (158). Like The Blue Dragon, fabulist myths such as the generic echoes of Rip Van Winkle or Sleeping Beauty, can momentarily distract us from the terrible present, even as fantastic allegory ultimately exists to narrate disaster as disaster. This point is further underlined through Kiri’s charity organization, a collective enterprise assembled by a group of women:

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She seemed to benefit from having a project to latch onto and establishing her charity for the school in Sri Lanka was the ideal project  .  .  . They met the charity lawyer, who gave them the advice they needed, and now she and Shelley worked together on a mission statement and a business plan. (169)

“Mission statement,” “business plan,” and a business partner named (Percy Bysshe, anyone?) Shelley all bring to mind proselytizing Christianity, Western financial schemes for economic restructuring, as well as Western nomenclature itself and an entire literary canon. Yet again, the Story opens the way for emphasizing the Event. Rebuilding must incorporate hybrid, and perhaps problematic, European modes of reconstruction and repair. The phrase “latch onto” also evokes the child and—­somewhat miraculously—­transforms Kiri’s maimed and “breastless” body into that of a suckling infant. An adult’s becoming a child could be read as regression, a movement backward that is particularly loaded in a group of texts in which the child represents calamity. Yet hope emerges through the oblique depiction of nursing mother and suckling child locked in a symbiotic, symbolic relationship that represents a return to an original postcoloniality, with women and children leading the way forward through the ironic imagery of moving backward to the natal stage. With this chance to start over with a different leadership, the novel recognizes the tenuousness of optimism in the postcatastrophic present as well as the impossibility of its own fantastic aspirations of a world in which women and children may actually bring a genuinely postcolonial nation into being.50 Yet Hawley is able not only to configure the hybrid mechanisms required to rebuild a nation but also to situate Sri Lankan women and children as instruments of hope that potentially can undo, or at least complicate, the colonial rescue narrative presented in her novel. The novel ends with Kiri teaching at a girls’ school in Sri Lanka and falling in love. Her cancer also gets controlled. With social healing comes not only personal healing but also healing of her broken body, an allegory for the nation itself. While this is a highly romanticized description of the post-­tsunami reality, disaster narratives of this type can soften the harshness of the Event through a focus on the fantastic restorative space cleared by the Story, even as they prioritize narrating disaster as disaster. Romance and myth are urgently needed in sudden-­ onset disasters such as the tsunami, in which active response must be immediate and decimated psyches must be given the will to reconstruct

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themselves right away. If storytelling, style, and literary language are sometimes pushed to the background in the process, then that, too, is one of the collateral damages of the Wave, as well as a characteristic of genre fiction. There are no good or easy ways to write about sudden disasters that require an immediate response, especially in a long genre such as the literary novel. Yet the emergent corpus of tsunami literature reveals the various forms through which the oceanic disaster foregrounds aspects of the Story as Story while intensely focusing on the Event. The collective nature of disaster also warrants, or perhaps even mandates, our response as also being a collective literary response. As Sam says: “Kiri, I was not alone. So many people lost loved ones and we all struggled to survive, but we had to rebuild our community for the sake of our young people and the next generation. We have no choice but to carry on and help each other, whatever our background and politics. That’s the one thing we can learn from a natural disaster—­I just hope the politicians and the Tigers agree with me, but I fear the troubles are not over yet.” (There’s No Sea in Salford, 196)

Disaster brings communities together, consisting of people who often have no choice but to carry on in the name of the generation left behind, particularly when the postcolonial state fails (yet again) in its inability to control the human conflict that the oceanic disaster exacerbates. The sociologist and human geographer Kristian Stokke notes: Recognizing that this politicization of relief and reconstruction poses a serious obstacle to efficient and fair distribution of aid, Sri Lanka’s international donors has demanded that a joint mechanism should be established between the government and the LTTE. However, the negotiations between the LTTE and the government over this joint mechanism have so far failed to reach an agreement . . . The joint mechanism seems to be close to collapse even before it has been formalized.51

The government and the Tigers were unable to embark on a permanent ceasefire, despite an urgent need for unity after such a violent, sudden-­onset disaster. Literature can offer an antidote to governmental

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failure, by means of hope and optimism expressed through fiction. The Story provides this hope and optimism, along with stereotypical and clichéd happy endings, but the “cruel optimism” of a contrived closure is also a necessary mechanism for survival in a catastrophic world as well as a much-­needed counterbalance to the dire factuality of Event-­driven data and statistics.52 A chatty, romantic, nobrow novel assumes ideological and literary cachet when placed alongside other forms of tsunami writing—­especially children’s fiction, like The Blue Dragon, from which their adult thematic extensions, including romance and marriage, find organic closure in a novel such as There’s No Sea in Salford.

Calling Migrants Home in The Splintered Face An outlier in terms of the dominant forms of tsunami writing, as well of the fictional orientation of Postcolonial Disaster, the poetry of Indran Amirthanayagam is nevertheless an appropriate selection for a chapter made up of outliers and outsiders. In The Great Derangement, his book on climate change and the writerly imagination, Amitav Ghosh observes: Poetry . . . has long had an intimate relationship with climatic events: as Geoffrey Parker points out, John Milton began to compose Paradise Lost during a winter of extreme cold, and “unpredictable and unforgiving changes in the climate are central to his story. Milton’s fictional world, like the real world in which he lived, was . . . a ‘universe of death’ at the mercy of extremes of heat and cold.” This is a universe very different from that of the contemporary literary novel.53

If poetry has been the dominant choice historically for writing about “climatic events,” and since very little tsunami fiction by Sri Lankan writers exists, we turn to poetry to hear the voices of Sri Lankans themselves. Amirthanayagam’s poetry also has a quality of “flash fiction,” where each poetic vignette actually tells a story with a definable plot as well as a clear starting and ending point, integrating smoothly with the genre fiction discussed in this chapter.54 The Splintered Face finds poetic utterance in a highly individualized voice and point of view, deploying the first-­person singular to stake a nationalistic claim. Sri Lankan writers, including those living abroad

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such as Amirthanayagam, may experience and, more important, narrate the tsunami in different ways from non-­Sri Lankans. Sri Lankan writers may also etch out a national collectivity with thicker lines than their non–­Sri Lankan counterparts, especially in the wake of trauma. Almost every poem in The Splintered Face speaks to the diaspora, urging Sri Lankans abroad to integrate with the nation through the process of rebuilding. While these poems instantly assume a political imperative, the point of view, perspective, metaphors, imagery, and symbols of diaspora—­in other words, its literary elements—­constantly flesh out the “message-­driven” aspect of the verse, seeking to divert readers from the pedagogical mandate of the Event so as to dive into the Story itself. Yet the Disaster Unconscious surges at precisely these moments to wash away the Story and render the Event even more transparent in its calamitous reality. Amirthanayagam’s poetry often weaves elaborate aesthetic conceits into sublime imagery that takes us away, for a brief and shining moment, to a world of great beauty. The sublime has been specifically associated with nature writing and also more loosely with inspiring awe at the beautiful, the grand, and the majestic, even as philosophers such as Kant remain cognizant of the terror behind the “sublime”; the irony of my use of the word is therefore deliberate.55 The Splintered Face can also be read as nature writing. It mostly focuses, though, on the horror of an uncontainable wave, whip-­sharp rain lashing down, literally cutting people into strips, trees seized from their foundations and sent flying across beaches, causing unmeasurable destruction and death wherever they land. Yet there is also something sublime in the lyricism these poems offer. Disaster takes everyday literary concepts and turns them upside down, asking for a consideration of how the Story must be molded around the Event. The Story, if we can call it that, in The Splintered Face is characterized by diasporic literary elements manifesting themselves in the constant reappearance of the in-­between migratory subject, particularly through images of liminality, including children, hotels, beach communities, and fishermen on boats. The key themes in tsunami writing—­including damaged children, the urge to control uncontrollable nature (particularly the sea), and the thwarted process of rebuilding—­foster a new narrative from that of postcolonial nation-­building: one in which migrant and native, and often foreign outsider as well, come together to reconstruct the nation. While Amirthanayagam deploys literary techniques to deflect the catastrophe momentarily, he returns to the catastrophe through the same

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techniques—­especially a pronounced lyricism and extended metaphors of diaspora—­that often upend standard poetic conventions. According to Amitav Ghosh: There is an additional element of the uncanny in events triggered by climate change. . . . All of this makes climate change events particularly resistant to the customary frames that literature has applied to “Nature”: they are too powerful, too grotesque, too dangerous, and too accusatory to be written about in a lyrical, or elegiac, or romantic vein . . . They confound the very idea of “Nature Writing” [because their origin often originates in human interference in the environment] or ecological writing: they are instances, rather, of the uncanny intimacy of our relationship with the nonhuman. (32–­33)

The conventional lyric is usually associated with the rehearsal of the coherence of the self, rather than with the world, despite whatever tragedy may initially plague the self. Amirthanayagam’s poetry transforms the “lyric I” to a “lyric we,” to the collective subject of the nation. The “we” is not only human but also more porous to altered interactions with the nonhuman, particularly with the sea. The poems in The Splintered Face actively embrace rather than retreat from the “uncanny intimacy of our relationship with the nonhuman,” making repeated references to the Wave as well as recuperation from its effects.56 Again, disaster molds literary conventions into a specifically postcolonial trope—­here taking lyric poetry, a genre singularly invested in the I, and recasting it in a communal, even national and allegorical, mode. Although lyrical poetry is able to condense and convey the vast scope of the disastrous in a word or a verse, Amirthanayagam also recognizes the limitations of poetic verse in conveying the intensity of the Event. The Splintered Face opens with a preface in which the poet describes his agenda in blunt prose: One can overcome the natural and shocked silence that results from tragedy . . . On the day my country of birth lost half its face, I needed to write that face back. I hope these poems made in the urgent hours, days, and weeks after December 26th—­ with the disasters now of time and sad accumulation of other disasters—­will help the reader remember, bear witness, pray, kiss the beloved, run outside and shout to the birds and flowers we are alive and we are grateful for the borrowed day, the extra time.57

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The preface encapsulates the central objectives in the poet’s narration of the oceanic disaster: the need to articulate disaster as disaster, despite turning to poetry to tell the Story of disaster; overcoming obstacles through personal resilience; valuing the here and now; communing with nature; and ending in shocked silence. The restorative capacity of literature enables the writer to speak through, indeed into, startled speechlessness. The preface also underlines themes generated through the writer’s national origin that are most usefully crystalized through the crisp economy of poetry. The poet claims that his country lost half its face during the tsunami. In nationalist iconography, the body politic is often imagined as a faceless, albeit human, form. “Losing face” could be interpreted as half of Sri Lanka’s being wiped out literally, but also more metaphorically as Sri Lanka’s losing face amid the mismanagement of disaster. Writing back that lost face evokes not just individual or collective coping mechanisms but also the poet’s preoccupation with the nation: here, attempting to restore credibility to Sri Lanka by saving face. This emphasis on rehabilitating the country emerges with “authentic” force in a text by a writer of Sri Lankan origin. It also returns to the creation of a new and better nation, the originary project of postcolonialism. The second poem in the collection immediately renders the preface into literary form. “Face” opens with the lines “imagine half your face / rubbed out yet / you are suited up / and walking to the office” (The Splintered Face, 17). A simple comment on how life appears to go on after disaster, these lines can also be read as a complex comment on the diaspora’s disconnect from the homeland. While half the face of the nation has been rubbed out, diasporics still suit up to work in their comfortable jobs in their comfortable offices. In later using the word “remember,” the poem moves to a note of resilience through memory that simultaneously conjoins the affluent life in diaspora with the suffering of the nation: “Do we remember/ that time erases/ the shore, grass/ grows, pain’s/ modified?” (17). The move from the second person (“you” in a suit going to work) to the questioning collective (“do we remember . . . ?”) underscores suffering and rebuilding as communal enterprises that must involve the diaspora. The turn from lyric ­poetry’s obsessive “I,” which it seems is always reconstituting itself through memories of childhood, becomes the accusatory “you” and then expands into the communal “we,” thus confronting the way time really moves. Again, pronoun usage, metaphor, imagery, and other literary strategies powerfully invoke, and end on, the pedagogical imposition, or what

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De Kok refers to as the intensification effect, of the Event: Here, to call upon the diaspora to come home and build the nation alongside those left behind. Among the many metaphors depicting the liminal state of the diaspora in The Splintered Face, the child most resonates with other forms of tsunami writing. Children represent the border between nascence and development through which the diaspora is rendered in symbolic terms. The opening preface-­poem is dedicated to the author’s children and . . . For all the children of the Tsunami Survivors of the dice thrown By human and god: Let that wave stay away For more than a thousand years

Visually, the poem not only produces a wavelike effect but is also shaped like an hourglass, the Story subtly suggesting the Event’s embedment in temporality. Story and Event fuse not merely formally but also in terms of the (literal) picture they paint together. Thematically, disaster immediately expands outward—­from the personal to the natural and eventually the national. The tightness of poetic narrative harnesses a cruel and boundless game of chance. The elaborate conceit of a malignant divinity rolling a set of dice to determine human destiny temporarily decenters the Event, giving the tsunami a prehistory, in effect a Story, of its own instead. The word “human” subtly underlines the contribution of people-­based agency to the deleterious aftereffects of a “natural” disaster such as the tsunami, showing how the Event seeps into the Story. The separation of the natural and the human in the creation of catastrophe is also immediately blurred as politics—­“human” probably refers to the ethnic conflict—­which again invades the literary arrangement of these simple lines. Lyric poetry exploits a concision of language, encoding and embedding layers of history in one small word or phrase, even as the very genre of poetry promises an escape from the political intensity of the national allegory that the postcolonial novel so stereotypically embodies.58 The almost prayer-­like directive “Let that wave stay away/ for more than a thousand years” seeks to slow down the storm’s aggregating and unrelenting momentum; yet the words “that wave” conjure images of one specific entity through which the poet resigns himself to the inevitability of other

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future tsunamis. “For more than a thousand years,” a literary hyperbole used for rhetorical effect, still binds into recognizable time various events that escape human modes of chronology, as well as echoes the scientific consensus that the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 was an extraordinary ecological disaster occurring only every thousand years. Tsunami writing often uses so-­called Western ways of ordering the world, suggesting that managing catastrophe, “just” through literary narrative and representation, cannot avoid a science-­oriented teleology of disaster that interrupts any “purely poetic” or literary experience that readers seek. Somewhat later in the poem, the term “global village” also suggests that coping with catastrophe involves a hybrid mode of interpreting the signs around us: “We live in a global village;/ . . . . Why couldn’t/ Somebody/ Warn us?/ . . . Nobody saw/ The message from Hawaii” (30). In fact, NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) sensed the oceanic reverberations as far away as Hawaii and immediately tried to inform countries in the Indian Ocean area about the tsunami, but the speed of the quake thwarted the successful transmission of global warning. The irony, then, is emphasized here of living in an international village where communication is instant but not instant enough. The poem ends with a weather advisory for the future that combines science with indigenous knowledge to provide hybrid strategies for surviving disaster: “You see/ that tree,/ that high high/ tree/ that’s where/ my aunt held/ on and she/ lived; my son” (The Splintered Face, 31). The poet’s aunt survived because she climbed a high high tree. The emphasis on the speed of communication in a verse, in which the line-­ breaks severely slow down the speed of the poem, creates jarring pauses in the flow of speech that present an ironic juxtaposition with the steady incessant building/movement of a wave. The slowness of communication bemoaned in the poem is precisely a result of its practical, indeed life-­saving, purposes. Poetry is stereotypically understood as a genre that needs to be savored slowly with great reflection, since it is not motored by practical exigencies. In another reversal of poetic conventions, the line-­breaks and repetition force the Story to halt and focus on the “high” tree that remained standing during the Wave and thus saved lives. Story and Event do not just battle here; they seamlessly meld into each other through the very form of the poem that uses speed in its structure and its content. Having left the reader with an image of the “high high tree,” literary repetition gives the Event a certain oratorical flair. In demanding a focus on the importance of the height of

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the tree to enable climbers to survive the tsunami, the Disaster Unconscious anchors the expositional possibilities of the Event itself. The child’s acquiring wisdom from the actions of his father’s aunt through his father, or even through two generations, opens the possibility for a regenerative hybrid future. Analyzing disaster narratives recasts a core precept of postcolonial theory: that calamities can be managed through a combination of Western science and indigenous lore, by means of using the wisdom of ancestral generations as well as recognizing the futurist potential of the child—­in effect, through the amalgamation of the Story and the Event.59 That the father in “Global Village,” presumably the figure of the diasporic-­poet, links the “native” wisdom of the aunt with the exported knowledge of Western science emphasizes the role of the diasporic in creating new narratives of national rejuvenation through the hybrid fusion of East and West. The very use of this diasporic figure punctures the narration of the tsunami as a purely Sri Lankan tragedy when the Wave transcended nations and races. Diasporic perspectives pervade this collection of poems in their search for an Event-­oriented agenda that is nevertheless eventually diluted. In “Wrecked: Coconuts,” a fisherman makes his way back to the community after having been lost at sea, only to discover that his wife and children had died in the tsunami: “I want to go back/ there is no other/ life for me /but casting nets . . . / would anyone/ like to join me back/ on the island?” (The Splintered Face, 93). A symbol for the diaspora, the fisherman is at sea, literally and metaphorically. The title word “coconuts,” with its cynical resonances of “white in the inside and brown on the outside,” when coupled with the word “wrecked,” suggests that the diaspora is as wrecked by the tsunami as the nation itself, even that to be in diaspora is perhaps to be wrecked.60 This also reveals a moment when the Event may fight against certain images generated by the Story but when the metaphors, such as those of a coconut, reveal the return of the repressed: Here is diasporic anxiety on full display, taking away from the narration of disaster as disaster, instead of reinforcing the effects of the catastrophe. The angst of diaspora, suffused through this poem, then stage an important intervention in the way we talk about disaster—­fleshing it out and complicating it more, yet also, perhaps, taking away its rendition of disaster as disaster and compromising its Event-­related purpose, as the poem becomes more about diasporic unease rather than disaster itself. Echoing shipwreck, the two words of the poems title “Wrecked: Coconuts,” bring together some of the central conceits in the poem in a

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precise economy of phraseology. Anthony Carrigan observes, “the devastating toll taken by the tsunami was partly due to the ways in which Sri Lankan beach communities were already rendered vulnerable by these ongoing experiences of compound crisis. Such complex interweaving of disasters highlights the importance of considering as long term processes that pervade numerous aspects of social life.”61 Pushing open the symbolism of beach communities further reveals not just the real economic devastation behind the symbol but also how much the diasporics—­who are imagined in this collection as existing in-­between states such as children, fishermen in boats, beach economies, and luxury hotel dwellers—­not only have suffered from the tsunami but also are implicated in postcatastrophic rebuilding. The “beach community” lives right at the nation’s edge, calling attention to the natural boundaries of the country and representing the point where those boundaries are entered, exited, and then reentered—­naturally, by a wave; socially and culturally, by emigrations and migrations of various types: a point beyond which all that exists is the blank vastness of the ocean. The image of beach communities also reveals the diasporic perspective, here the artfully employed metaphor of the liminal space, in which point-­of-­view stages a pause in the way that disaster is narrated, perhaps lessening the impact of narrating disaster as disaster but counterbalancing that loss with the gain of rich metaphor and imagery. The Sri Lankan writer Minoli Salgado, author of A Little Dust on the Eyes, a novel partially about the tsunami, claims that her poem “The Waves” (2005) was: [W]ritten in a couple of hours on New Year’s Day [right after the Tsunami]; I woke up with these words and voices that I had carried with me from the camp. It’s a raw, fragmented, and impressionist[ic] piece—­one that lends itself to both short narrative and the form of a prose poem—­that was published a few months later without any editorial changes. In contrast, A Little Dust was a part of my imaginative world for a very long time.62

Salgado’s comments capture the complex tension between temporality and writing out the oceanic disaster: the need for quick composition in the immediate aftermath of sudden brutal catastrophes, the recognition that quick composition may initially use a form such as short lyric poetry that can be molded more rapidly toward instant production and dissemination, or can even result in other forms, such as genre

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and nobrow fiction, that are “raw, fragmented and impressionistic.”63 Yet all tsunami stories share some core thematic, pedagogical, and aesthetic qualities that build a literary corpus for the oceanic disaster. In each work, too, the Disaster Unconscious often foregrounds the Event so that we remember the bodies and memories—­the shadowy presence of “corpse” in the word “corpus”—­that make this aesthetic archive possible.

Part 2 Slow Burn

Chapter 2

“Better Fed than Free” Buying Out of the Economic Disaster

When journalist Nicholas Kristof visited Zimbabwe thirty years after its independence in 1980, he discovered a fiscally impoverished and psychologically defeated population.1 So much so that the elderly generation, which could remember the bad old days of white supremacist rule, actually longed for the material security of daily life in separatist Rhodesia: “ ‘It would have been better if whites had continued to rule because the money would have continued to come’  .  .  . [said]  a 58-­year-­old farmer named Isaac. ‘It was better under Rhodesia. Then we could get jobs. Things were cheaper in stores. Now we have no money, no food.’ ”2 Better Fed than Free. Black Zimbabweans are “buying out” of the economic disaster in the postcolonial period and into the days of apartheid and segregation, a notion that flies in the face of an entire belief system that values political independence over “mere” economic adequacy.3 According to the economic historian Derek Aldcroft: Disaster, tragedy, chaos, crisis [are] all words that have been used to describe the economic experience of Africa, especially SSA (sub-­Saharan Africa) since decolonization  .  .  . Africa’s growth performance has been described as the largest economic disaster of the twentieth century . . . Broadly speaking there was very little material progress on average in the post-­colonial period . . . Nearly one half of the world’s poor live in Africa . . . No other region can match this disastrous economic record.4

As my emphases indicate, any index of economic growth demonstrates that much of sub-­Saharan Africa was an economic disaster in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. Self-­serving Western 79

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interference floated unpayable loans to many African countries, even as a small, corrupt cadre of the indigenous elite held the reins of political and economic power. Indeed, the data that Aldcroft provides supports the lamentations of Isaac, the Zimbabwean farmer quoted in the interview with Kristof above: “per capita incomes were generally no better than by the end of the twentieth century than they had been in the early 1960s, and in some cases they were a good deal worse. ‘For many Africans, conditions of life are scarcely better, and possibly worse, than they were when their colonial rulers departed’ ” (312). Zimbabwe has been no exception to this economic meltdown; its downfall in fact was later and even greater. Rhodesia had a functional economy and an educational and administrative infrastructure comparable to the best in the world before 1980, when Robert Mugabe became prime minister, giving it a cushion till the very late 1990s.5 Zimbabwe’s independence was supposed to usher in a new era of economic equality in which access to its superior infrastructure would be available to everyone. That story of hope and promise played out very differently in real life. As Zimbabwe stagnated economically, many countries in sub-­ Saharan Africa, such as Ghana, Rwanda, and Botswana, embarked on upward trajectories of economic growth in the second decade of the twenty-­first century (post-­2008). Zimbabwe stands out in particularly stark relief as an ongoing economic disaster.6

From Explosion to Slow Burn I: Economic Disaster Time From the sudden explosion of the tsunami in Sri Lanka, Postcolonial Disaster now moves to the slow burn of the economic disaster. “Slow” is a relative term in disaster studies, encompassing just decades if not merely years and months. According to the earth scientist Susana B. Adamo, Slow onset hazards, like drought, insect infestations, and disease epidemics take months or years to develop . . . A slow-­onset emergency or disaster is defined as one that does not emerge from a single, distinct event but one that emerges gradually over time, often based on a confluence of different events.7

Unlike sudden-­onset disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis that are characterized by one-­triggering Event, slow-­ onset disasters are the consequence of a series of linked events. A

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sudden-­onset disaster immediately captures our imagination and ignites our altruistic impulses, the roaring flames of its scale and unexpectedness revealing the Event in all its spectacular intensity.8 The constant flow of media coverage and international assistance during the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 is only one example of how sudden-­onset disasters energize action-­oriented communities in their immediate wake. The need for response and redressal is more urgent and typically is provided more quickly after these events, as destruction is writ large for the world to see. Slow-­onset disasters often do not register their calamitous magnitude till they have become full-­fledged catastrophes. People drowned in areas afflicted by the tsunami; their deaths were immediate, graphic, shocking, and visible. People starved in Zimbabwe; their lives unfolded through slow suffering not immediately measurable in catastrophic terms.9 As a slow-­onset disaster, the economic crisis in Zimbabwe took nearly a decade to pressure-­cook itself into an explosion. The fiscal catastrophe was not oriented around a single Event like the tsunami, even if it was set in motion by the election of Robert Mugabe in 1980.10 Yet the constellation of minicrises following independence—­including mass inflation in 1998, the suspension of international aid to Zimbabwe in 1999, as well as land seizures, fraudulent elections, and extreme food shortages in the first three years of the new century, all came together over a period of years or decades to create an economic disaster in the twenty-­first century. According to Ranka Primorac, Since the start of the new millennium, violent social change has dominated every aspect of life in Zimbabwe  .  .  . In the early years of the twenty-­first century the government of R ­ obert Mugabe appropriated and redistributed most of Zimbabwe’s privately-­owned agricultural land [from white Zimbabweans], and under the guise of effecting the final resolution of the nation’s long-­standing unfinished business, caused widespread hunger, violence and suffering. The economy collapsed, the claims of civil society and political opposition were suppressed and the rule of law and freedom of expression were severely compromised.11

The staggered temporal range of the slow burn of economic catastrophe—­ meaning the time it takes to become a raging conflagration—­can cause economic disasters to seemingly go quiet as

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economic disasters. Yet the literature about and around Zimbabwe’s fiscal collapse reveals that the economic disaster is always built into the novels discussed in this chapter, even when they attempt to acquire distance from a calamitous reality—­a distance not possible in a recent, sudden-­onset violent disaster such as the tsunami.

But What Is an Economic Disaster? In Economic Disaster: What the Average Person Can Do to Prepare (2015), the financial consultant Keith Rawlinson says: A major economic disaster changes life as we know it, is extremely severe, lasts for a very long time, effects a very significant percentage of people in a region, or all four of these at the same time . . . A major economic disaster is characterized by such things as a severe disruption in everyday life, the complete collapse of an economy, the total failure of a currency, complete failure of the government, military action.12

Rawlinson, claims, furthermore, that the consequences of a major economic disaster include high to complete unemployment, lack of food, and “very high prices for things that are still available . . . [and] looting and general lawlessness, mob mentality,” a barter system, unavailability of basic goods and services, and a world in which “life will be reduced to the very basic necessities.” Zimbabwe, as seen from the quantitative data provided here as well as the qualitative “data” excavated from the novels discussed in this chapter, meets every metric of a true economic disaster. Rawlinson’s extreme definition of a fiscal crisis situates that country’s financial collapse as an economic disaster and not “merely” a crisis, with its connotations of a severe short-­term calamity.13 How economists define an economic disaster serves as the crux of my usage of the term. Harvard professor Robert J. Barro’s formulation of economic collapse is considered to be the foundational definition of the term.14 Barro claims that “actual and potential economic disasters could reflect economic events (the Great Depression, financial crises), wartime destruction (world wars, nuclear conflicts), natural disasters (tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, asteroid collisions), and epidemics of disease (Black Death, avian flu)”15 (826). Barro defines economic disasters as: “a [GDP decline of] 1.5–­2% per year with a distribution of

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declines in per capita GDP ranging between 15% and 64%” (1). If the baseline for an economic disaster is a 15% decrease in GDP, a country would need to record a continuous annual decline of slightly less than 1.5% over a 10-­year period, making an economic disaster an extremely rare occurrence. Yet the per capita GDP in Zimbabwe in 1998 was $1,348; in 2008, that measure fell by more than half, to $590—­a decline amounting to almost 8% every year when compounded on the GDP from the preceding year. The GDP thus fell by a horrific 56%: a full 41% more than the minimum baseline for what Barro, and other economists after him, define as an economic disaster. Zimbabwe therefore easily falls under the rubric of what economists call a “rare economic disaster”; its status as a rare slow-­moving disaster that happens elsewhere, in Africa, also negates its catastrophic qualities in the literary and popular imagination. Moreover, as Barro’s foundational definition stipulates, to be regarded as a true disaster an economic crisis can only be measured over a period of time. Even in terms of its basic definition, any economic disaster must be calibrated with slower temporal markers than the oceanic kind, erasing the spectacular immediacy that is a signature of sudden-­onset disasters.

Buying Out of the Economic Disaster This chapter analyzes two novels of financial destitution in twenty-­ first century Zimbabwe to show how the Disaster Unconscious refuses sublimation or subordination even in fiction that stakes flamboyantly literary claims, as well as to understand what fiction can tell us about economic crisis. What solutions can novels and novelistic techniques offer that exceed the purview of economists’ policy recommendations? What limitations or foreclosures of possibilities can fiction expose in other economic systems that style themselves as solutions to fiscal disaster? What metaphors and images does it use to describe fiscal crisis? How is the economic disaster configured in literary terms? Black Zimbabweans were supposed to gain the most in terms of political and economic equality after their country’s independence; instead they were left dispossessed, disaffected, and disenfranchised after Mugabe’s reckless socioeconomic restructuring plunged the country into a financial whirlpool. Tendai Huchu’s The Hairdresser of Harare (2010) and No­Violet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013) both focus on “buying out” of the financial crisis—­the central literary motif in this chapter.

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The selection of these novels reflects their placement in two crucial moments in the timeline of the economic disaster, and, therefore, their different, yet startlingly similar, ways of writing about fiscal collapse. The Hairdresser of Harare was published during the years of the economic reforms that Mugabe was forced to undertake in 2008, and its characters occasionally reveal a guarded optimism about economic circumstance. We Need New Names was published after the reforms, when the hope from the initial economic uptick had more or less dissipated. The two novels occupy contrasting positions in the compressed chronology of that African economic disaster. My neologism “buying out” describes a prioritization of the Story that involves consciously turning away from crisis-­ridden Zimbabwe through choices in novelistic form, narrative voice, thematic content, and even geographic setting. In a crisis whose triggering Event took place in 1980, and was seen as an occasion for great celebration, President Mugabe’s depredations took decades to register themselves as an economic disaster. Because the Event comprises a series of slow-­burn sequences and not a one-­time explosion, the Disaster Unconscious plants the catastrophe slowly, but inevitably, on the Story. The omnipotent nature of the economic crisis may seem to impose omni-­pressures on writers, often leading to literary work that is wholly immersed in representing the Event-­oriented emergency. Buying out thus becomes a way to escape the crisis, literally and literarily through the modalities of the Story: It is an exit from the market but also demonstrates the subject’s interpellation, or formal positioning, in a market. The economy exited never allows a departure—­instead, it haunts new constructions of the self in the new economy entered. Narratives of the economic disaster reveal the subject’s implication in the logic of the market. Buying out also means spending something or, more metaphorically, losing or leaving something. A postcolonial fiscal crisis will always hold its victims in the thrall of a First World capitalist scheme—­not only in terms of the promise of a better material life but also through the variety of literary genres that now proliferate in the publishing bazaar and offer escape from the narrative compulsions of the Disaster Unconscious.16 Zimbabwean novels of economic disaster often generate new Stories within the same Event or attempt to depart from the Event itself. Although the title We Need New Names boldly announces the necessity for new stories, the Disaster Unconscious always returns to the Event, no matter how much the Story seeks to drift away.

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While buying out may seem to be the Freudian or Lacanian equivalent of disavowal, even as buying out turns away from itself, it eschews the radical sublimation of psychoanalytic displacement by also turning toward itself. Buying out involves a conscious rejection of the totalitarian effects of economic catastrophe as well as a sublimated recognition that the economic catastrophe is so deeply embedded in these works of fiction that buying out is already a failed endeavor. The textual maneuvers of fiction attempt to escape the all-­encompassing cloud of catastrophe by using types of genre-­based invention that are not usually associated with high tragedy, such as the satirical faux-­romance novel style of The Hairdresser of Harare, or the turn of events in We Need New Names when its child narrator leaves the space of crisis to live in a brave new world of American plenty. Yet the Disaster Unconscious returns via the language of economics in general and of the Zimbabwean economic disaster in particular. Textual decisions, then, are always played out in the shadow of what was left behind. Just as Isaac, the farmer whom journalist Kristof interviews, invoked the ghost of separatist Rhodesia, so too do these younger writers invoke the Event, meaning the economic disaster, from which they sought to “buy out” their lives through a focus on the Story.17 Postcolonial Disaster traces this tension between the Story and the Event to show how literary choices can circumvent, complicate, and enhance the pressure to narrate crisis as crisis; yet the necessity to depict catastrophe often stalks what may appear as the escapist impulses of literary technique. Images of the child and the sea haunt narratives of the Oceanic Disaster described in chapter 1; so too does fiscal imagery, including the language of Zimbabwean commerce and economics, underpin the two novels discussed in this chapter that portray economic destitution, and even buying out itself. The current novels may tell Stories to buy out of the economic disaster, yet the Event returns in the form of pedagogical messages that the texts seek to disseminate about managing, and living in, the financial crisis as well as in their continued use of fiscal collapse’s imagery and language. The pedagogical effects of the literary texts are often represented indirectly, sometimes even requiring great interpretive effort by readers seeking to understand their oblique commentary on crisis. In these two novels, not only do readers acquire a sense of the suffering of ordinary Zimbabweans under Mugabe—­the dissemination of information so crucial to managing disaster—­they also provide valuable life-­lessons on the importance of community and the small and large gestures of selflessness and

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sacrifice that are necessary to live within the economic disaster. As Maurice T. Vambe says: Literary narratives can never command sufficient vocabulary that can enable them at any imagined secure vantage perspective to capture all the nuances of the Zimbabwe crises in their political, economic and legal dimensions. This inability to settle on an absolute representation of the Zimbabwe crises can be viewed as a welcome development if . . . literature’s images and metaphors are flexible enough to anticipate the shifting nature of the crises and allow varied interpretations.18

While metaphors may never adequately capture the crisis in its totality, some metaphors, such as those of economic disaffection and daily commerce, encapsulate the catastrophe more effectively simply because they are closer to the lived reality of disaster, even when life is no longer being negotiated in that lived reality. Tracing the ebb and flow of the Disaster Unconscious ensures that these metaphors are harnessed, or can be read in a certain way, and that the novels are more Event-­ centered than they may initially or intentionally seem. In a review essay on the state of postindependence Zimbabwean ­literature as of 2010, Bill Schroeder states that: Recently there have been tentative signs that the Zimbabwe economy has bottomed out after imploding in the early 2000’s. The Zimbabwean literary scene has also shown some encouraging signs in the last few years. Two fresh voices [Petina Gappah and Brian Chikwava] are serving notice that Zimbabwe fiction is emerging from several decades in the doldrums. 19

Schroeder suggests that the economic disaster reached its nadir in the early first years of this century, descending to the rock bottom of deepest depression from which only an upward incline was possible. He further implies that the fiscal “recovery” of Zimbabwe’s economy has also had the effect of recharging the emotional energy of its literature in the period after 2008.20 Yet a report from The African Economic O ­ utlook in 2015 claims that: The period 2009–­12 was marked by an economic rebound following the introduction of the multiple currency system, with

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the economy growing at an average rate of 11.0% per annum. However, GDP growth decelerated sharply from 10.6% in 2012 to 4.5% in 2013 and an estimated 3.1% in 2014. Real GDP is projected to marginally improve to 3.2% in 2015. This projected marginal improvement will be on the back of planned investments in agriculture, mining, communications and other infrastructure projects, including in the water and energy sectors.21

The fiscal “recovery” occurring between 2009 and 2012 was, therefore, temporary, because the GDP rose only to fall again. While The Hairdresser of Harare was published in the immediate aftermath of the fiscal reforms that Mugabe was forced to conduct around 2009, the novel also refers to the early years of the economic disaster when the crisis first took hold of Zimbabwe in the new millennium. The novel’s mood, therefore, reveals the slings and arrows of Zimbabwe’s outrageous misfortunes. The Hairdresser of Harare, composed in the tumultuous years of fiscal reform and their subsequent failure, reflects the hopefulness in buying out and the hopelessness of buying in of its time. The novel initially echoes a cautious optimism that pervaded the country after Mugabe was pressured to reform the economy. The characters in this novel, and even its tonal affect, still attempt to buy out of the economic disaster, standing at a literary distance from the calamitous reality through thematic intervention in textual expectation and in storyline.22 Readers would likely expect high pathos or dense and gritty realism to be the genres of choice in disaster fiction. The Hairdresser of Harare is marked by wry humor, irony, satire, and a twist to the conventional romance novel, which I will not spoil for my readers right now. The theme of buying out emerges precisely through this tonal archness. The novel tries to sidestep the economic disaster by assuming a levitas that momentarily distracts from, or even displaces, the gravitas of the world in which it was produced; yet the economic disaster permeating it weighs so heavily on the text that even the genre’s lightness cannot avoid its implication in the heaviness of material reality. The Story cannot elude the Event. There is no escape, even in escapist fiction. By contrast, We Need New Names was published in 2013, when it was clear that the reforms implemented had plateaued to the point of grim hopelessness. The first part of the novel is set in an economically deprived but nevertheless politically independent Zimbabwe. The narrator, named Darling, moves to the United States for a better life, thus

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actively buying out of the economic disaster. Geographic setting functions as a narrative front, a literary gesture, that removes the novel from the Event-­oriented reality of Zimbabwe. Yet almost every action Darling takes in America, as well as every re-­action, is mediated by her experience of economic scarcity in Zimbabwe. Buying out is never entirely possible for her, because the memory of crisis drives human behavior and even structures both linguistic and sensory perception wherever people may relocate themselves. The very title, We Need New Names, can be seen as a lamentation of there being no new themes to talk about other than the country’s economic disaster, despite every effort to talk about new themes. In We Need New Names, writing about the economic disaster involves migrating outward, crossing over from a life spent in the shadow of starvation into the sunny world of a full stomach, whereas in The Hairdresser of Harare buying out involves not only leaving one’s country to live in a suspended state of diaspora but also discarding the expectations of genre, the responsibility to write about the crisis in “serious” ways or even to write about the crisis at all. Both novels turn away from the reality of the catastrophe but also recognize the impossibility of distancing oneself from the crisis. The viability of First World capitalism as another economic option to people’s lives in crisis-­ridden Zimbabwe is severely undermined but, paradoxically, also revealed as their only viable economic option, even in its heavily compromised version. In being the sole “alternative,” First World capitalism captivates, and keeps captive, those who buy into the material fulfillment that it promises. Importantly, both novels have a sharp, satirical bite that challenges the outside reader to even try to pity ordinary Zimbabweans. Who needs the sympathy of the outsider when the insider can create cutting satire from the shards of catastrophe? Both novels take the ethics of appropriating the pain of the Other away from their Western or Westernized audiences by refusing to let agony be their guiding emotions. “Buying out” functions, then, as a wide, blank space on which can be mapped the tension between Story and Event and the ebbing and surging of the Disaster Unconscious within the temporal registers of this particular economic disaster. Literature emerging from economic crisis recognizes and critiques the failure of Zimbabwean independence. As Primorac points out in her study of the Zimbabwean novel, “in Zimbabwe, the official projections of the future have a curious way of pointing to the past. Even as

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they claim to be continuing the struggle against Zimbabwe’s colonial masters, Zimbabwe’s rulers mimic many of their strategies for clinging on to power” (Place of Tears, 2). The vocabulary of the freedom movement, of seeking to break free from political oppression, is incorporated into the narrative arrangement of disaster fiction as well as into the rhetoric of buying out, revealing once again the continued relevance of earlier postcolonial theory in the new century. “References to early nationalist goals [such as democracy and the restoration of land] continue to be among the principal means through which the Zimbabwean state can be held to account, and twenty-­first century struggles over the meanings of freedom and democracy are still conceptualized by their participants as struggles over the nature of the nation” (Primorac, Place of Tears, 4, emphasis added). While harking back to the idea of buying out of settler Rhodesia and into Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, the use of anticolonial sentiments to describe the economic disaster acknowledges that postcolonial Zimbabwe is gradually reaching a point where those who can will buy out, or free themselves from its economic and narrative oppression. Yet, just as the shadow of imperialism lurks in the hyphenated spaces of the word “postcolonial,” so too does anticolonial vocabulary in fiction written about independent Zimbabwe suggest that buying out from one economic system may be inevitable, although it precludes the ability to buy out fully: Rhodesia lurks in the Zimbabwean present; Zimbabwe lurks in the post-­Zimbabwean future. This “ghosting” is built into the vocabulary of the two texts that invokes the surrounding economic disaster, even as the authors seek to leave crisis behind through a variety of literary maneuvers.23 What the novels want to tell us about economic crisis—­the pedagogical purpose of Event-­ oriented disaster writing—­conceals itself under the storytelling modes used to momentarily distract us from a transparent rendition of catastrophe. The pedagogical imperative constantly bubbles to the surface to compromise and to complement literary aesthetics, although with less urgency than in stories about the tsunami, where imminent death and destruction are always in sight, as is the urgency of rehabilitation and restoration. The two novels record the creation of diasporas of destitution, which are marked by a longing to return to the homeland but also a recognition that choosing physical nourishment over national sustenance (buying out resonates again here) means that literal return is impossible. While those who leave absent themselves from national collectivity, disaster

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is often survived through, and with, a collectivity. When suffering is common to all, the social unit becomes the primary mode of solidarity. This coming together exacerbates the isolation of diasporics who flee the economic crisis for a better material life: “Where there is no suffering, there is no sharing,” runs the motto. Literature not only pays tribute to this community of common sorrow but also forges communities of its own through the creation of fictional worlds, thus bringing together a diverse collectivity in a readerly affiliation with disaster—­a merging of Story and Event that becomes more frequent as the triggering episodes recede in the background and the disaster stretches endlessly into the future. Even though buying out means giving up on this collective solidarity, Zimbabwean fiction emerging from these diasporas of destitution is able to re-­create that community, primarily through the Disaster Unconscious that infuses the texts with the language of economic despair. Fiction, along with its literary signatures, creates a fellowship between there and here: an imaginary buying in to the Event-­oriented homeland, despite an economic buying out through the Story-­oriented diaspora. The repeated return to economic language foregrounds the pedagogical imperative of narrating crisis as crisis even when the text turns away from the obviousness of such representation. Although the struggle for disaster relief pulls a given nation back to its struggle for independence, the diasporas of economic destitution take a different path from postcolonial migration. If the diasporic road most traveled was originally that between the former colony and the ex-­ imperium, We Need New Names moves the novel’s heroine, Darling, all the way to the United States and her father next door to South Africa, showing how catastrophe reconfigures some of the fundamental trajectories of postcolonialism. As the thwarted possibilities of buying out reveal, diasporas are still emotionally engaged in the home-­space, however. In a chapter titled “Exiting Zimbabwe” in their book about that country, Jonathan Crush and Daniel Tevera point to a crucial fact about diasporas: [I]n the development of the countries of origin . . . diasporas are rapidly replacing remittances as the new ‘development mantra.’ . . . There has been a growing recognition in destination countries that diaspora individuals, groups and organizations are engaged independently in activities that have developmental aims and outcomes and that these should be encouraged and supported.24

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The two novelists whose work grounds this chapter, Tendai Huchu and NoViolet Bulawayo live in Scotland and the United States, respectively, and publish fiction about Zimbabwe from afar. Writing about their native Zimbabwe from outside can also be seen as a form of “remittance” to Zimbabwe: as an exercise that has the “developmental” aims of facilitating literary “production”—­the economic resonances of the word are appropriate here—­in the middle of catastrophic circumstances that may not allow for the creation of literature in the home-­space. Storytelling then takes on an ethical and Event-­oriented imperative here—­whether to physically return or in other ways to give back to the homeland. These novels are also unhappily aware of the limitations of healing when trapped in the closed circuit of economic crisis catastrophes that encase the quotidian in absolute ways. Yet, as the editors of a special issue of African Identities dedicated to Zimbabwe literature and culture state: The disquieting aspect is that there is now in Zimbabwe a culture of crisis; leaders taking crisis as normal, thriving from it, and holding the lives of the people to ransom. When the crisis has been formalised as a culture within state institutions, it distorts attempts at resolving tensions and conflicts that lead to crisis in the culture. Since culture reflects on the materiality of the nation, there can be a crisis of culture when leaders, people and writers joust and fail to move out of the orbit of this culture of crisis that produces crisis in the culture.25

Phrases such as “fail to move out,” words that come from scholars, rather than from the fiction writers themselves, assume the existence of unrealistic possibilities of moving out rather than moving in and about. The repeated return to the Event, through the language of economics as well as its metaphors and symbols, heavily underlines the ability to move in rather than out of the closed circuit of catastrophe by means of the possibility of the Story. While this may suggest that the Event overdetermines the Story—­which it often does in disaster narratives—­it also reveals the paradoxical empowerment in at least being able to move within the closed circuit of catastrophe: to make as much of a Story out of the Event as possible. Novels such as The Hairdresser of Harare and We Need New Names can teach us how to live with catastrophic systems, recognize their totalizing power—­since they do have totalizing power over body, mind, and

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soul—­and then how to recover agency within that mechanism. While they do not always address the question of how to eliminate fiscal disaster, in both its current and recurring forms, they offer vital templates for survival in the short and medium term. In revealing that possibility of physical and emotional survival, buying out also serves as an important caution against celebrating the turn to capitalist economics, including its generic and literary innovations such as the faux-­romance novel, which provides fantastic spaces in which to escape. Ultimately, this fiction exposes the failure of capitalism, and its cultural by-­products, as a safe space for those seeking to escape economic crisis. Just as disaster is embedded in every work of fiction discussed in Postcolonial Disaster, no matter where it is produced or what it is even about, the Disaster Unconscious inserts the language of economic crisis into the very structure of Zimbabwean fiction, no matter where and when it is produced or what it is even about.26

Building Romance: Fiscal Crisis in The Hairdresser of Harare The mercurial nature of the Zimbabwean economy is manifested in the up-­and-­down attitude toward buying out in The Hairdresser of Harare. Published in 2010, the novel is set in a relatively functional economy—­ with dollarization imminent to ease the pressure of the hyperinflation of Zimbabwean currency—­especially compared to the bleak financial world presented in We Need New Names. This fiscal near-­normalcy is itself a form of buying out: It is implicated in a capitalist economy that is fundamentally at odds with an economic crisis generated under the guise of socialist restructuring, in which some people zip around in fancy cars and shop at posh malls while others cannot even put food on their tables. Yet the undercurrent of economic despair running through The Hairdresser of Harare reveals how buying out in this volatile economy is also unstable. Literary strategies always showcase their variability under the cloud of catastrophe. The novel first attempts to buy in with a vigorous investment in Zimbabwean everyday life, especially its economy. As the economy spirals downward, the novel literally ushers in the process of buying out, which culminates with Dumi, one of the main male characters, leaving Zimbabwe for England. The language of fiscal crisis, however, shadows every attempt to buy, whether in or out. The Hairdresser of Harare uses the genre of romantic comedy to dance around the notion of defining itself exclusively as a literary critique of

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the economic disaster.27 It initially distracts its readers from what Anne Schumann calls “the aesthetics of emergency”28 with a heterosexual romance plot, but it then disowns the male–­female love story that seemingly moves the narrative forward by revealing that Dumi, the man whom the female narrator, Vimbai, loves, is gay. Even so, this reworking of the heterosexual romance trope, despite all its Story-­centered aspects of plot twists and turns, demonstrates the impossibility of economic buying out. The Hairdresser of Harare may appear to be a romantic and humorous satire. The tonal affect of the novel is indeed somewhat airy and fluffy, perhaps like a pompadour, to use a hairdressing simile. But it is precisely through this lightness of form that the heaviness of theme emerges. The novel tries to retreat from the gravity of the economic disaster by assuming a breezy and funny tone that revolves around the style and theme of a romantic comedy; the all-­pervasive economic disaster of its setting weighs so heavily on the text, though, that buying out reveals its eventual impossibility. The parodic edge of so many crisis-­driven texts suggests that satire is often the dominant, even the most appropriate, literary mode through which to narrate an economic disaster. Satire’s willful exaggeration of a harsh reality provides a respite from the very harshness it depicts through the distance produced by excessive representation. Discussing the Zimbabwean newspaper comic strip Chikwama, Wendy Willems argues that, “postcolonial laughter . . . cannot simply be treated as resistance against those in power but instead fulfills a self-­reflexive role in which those subject to power reflect on their own powerlessness and lack of agency.”29 This is precisely how moving within the closed circuit of disaster—­to use humor and a light genre to reflect on the authoritative possibilities and limitations of the Self and not merely on the authoritarian and absolute power of the Other—­formulates important pedagogical templates for living with disaster. The Hairdresser of Harare critiques the economic disaster. It is also a meditative manual, a how­to, on existing within disaster. The “how-­to-­ness” of the novel repeatedly clouds its efforts to buy out through the form of the romance novel and the biting sharpness of satire. In a slow-­burn disaster, the pedagogic imperative repeatedly closes the window on literary relief but often leaves the blinds open for some light, and lightness, stream in. The novel is set in a hairdressing salon in which Dumi, a genius male hair artist but unable to find work elsewhere, becomes the styling star of an all-­female workforce and embarks on a relationship with Vimbai, one of the other employees. Dumi is, however, gay, and Vimbai ultimately

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purchases Dumi’s safe passage to England so that he can live his life without fear of homophobic persecution. The novel’s plot reveals its twin investment in the aesthetic of the romantic and the pedagogical of the economic by generating its central tension in the workplace. The primary importance of the collapsing economy and the corresponding dilution of aesthetic or literary representation is established as early as its opening pages: “Khumalo Hair and Beauty Treatment Salon was in the Avenues  .  .  . There was a rust metal sign painted white with black lettering on the front gate that pointed to our establishment. The rust, accumulated over so many rainy seasons, had eaten so much of the sign that only Khu-­l-­, a drawing of a lady with a huge afro and an arrow still showed.”30 In the symbolic registers of the novel, political freedom has been achieved with black lettering superimposing itself on white space. But the relative fiscal stability under white rule has crumbled, leaving only a rusty economy in place. The legacies of colonialism, here manifested through the faded English words of the sign, may have eroded but can never disappear; only the remnants of an African name—­Khumalo—­can be seen. In this economy of starvation, the absence of detail in the depiction of the human body suggests it is wasting away. Instead, the readerly eye is drawn to the huge Afro, bringing to mind Mugabe’s Afrocentrist agenda, which is further emphasized through the arrow and its evocation of an older, less modern, hunter-­ gatherer economy. The physical sign in the novel is also a metaphorical sign pointing to the subtle ways in which literary symbolism can paint a powerful picture of a brutal reality through a few quick (hair)brushstrokes. Story and Event live together in harmony, no hand heavier than the other here. The novel also reveals the rapid shifting of the Zimbabwean economy that is manifested in its vacillating attitude toward buying in or buying out. Only a few years ago, the narrator, Vimbai, had a lover who gave her large amounts of cash, since in those days “it was still possible to carry money in a wallet” (21). This is not the economy of extreme deprivation seen in We Need New Names or even in the later parts of The Hairdresser of Harare. The economy is about to be dollarized and is building up to the small amount of initial prosperity, and eventual stagnation, that dollarization brought in: “the few petrol stations that had fuel only accepted foreign currency or coupons although it was still technically illegal to carry out transactions in a foreign currency” (24). In another intrusion of economic metaphors that initially seem to promote a buying in, or of committing to life in the harsh economic reality Zimbabwe,

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Vimbai describes her employer, Mrs. Khumalo, as a “jack-­of-­all-­trades”: “In Zimbabwe you have to learn to be jack-­of-­all-­trades: Mrs. Khumalo was a hairdresser, farmer, trader, IT consultant, you name it, she did it” (14). A creative hustler, Mrs. Khumalo serves as a life lesson for those who choose to stay—­a template for survival when you buy in. The pedagogical agenda asserts itself everywhere in the novel, here by educating us on how people survive the economic disaster. The use of the classic English idiom “Jack [or Jill] of All Trades” again shows the causality between colonialism and the economic crisis, inserting literary techniques by turning to metaphor. The Hairdresser of Harare depicts Zimbabwe caught on the cusp of economic prosperity, albeit for a very select few, and details its transition into absolute destitution. The novel often talks about football matches between schools and soccer clubs, aspects of normal life not seen in We Need New Names. Zimbabwe was fluctuating between relative economic deprivation and total economic deprivation at this time in the novel. That economic oscillation drives the novel’s shifting attitude toward buying in and out of the economic disaster as well as its shifting attitude on finding the balance between Story and Event in a slow-­burn, long-­range disaster that seems to have no end in sight. So, Vimbai’s brother exclaims, “it’s funny how we seem trapped between modernity and the past. We have power lines but half the time no electricity runs through them. We have cars, but no petrol to run them on, mobiles but the network is intermittent” (55). The infrastructure for power lines, the cars to drive, the mobile phones to talk on all exist. Yet the generative forces needed to render them active—­electricity, gas, and communication signals—­are nowhere to be found. Even as the novel commits to buying in, a feeling of hopelessness, of the desire to buy out, yet not having the resources to do so, hovers over the text initially and then ultimately takes over: The air hung thick with woodsmoke. No one could afford paraffin, if you could find it that is. A lot of people greeted me as I walked along. I felt an atmosphere of friendliness, violation, innovation, poverty, joy but the one thing that hung over everything else was despair; an air of hopelessness as if everyone was in a pit that they could not climb out of. I knew that feeling all too well. It’s like seeing a plane high up in the sky and knowing that you will never be on it. (26)

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The image of a pit evokes a subterranean abyss; at its opposite end is the “aerial plane of possibility,” of boarding a flight that takes you to a land of plenty. The hope of buying out, however, is undercut by the certain knowledge that you can see the opportunity soar above your head but it will always pass you by. Deploying a similar vehicular metaphor that gradually begins to abandon buying in, the novel builds up to the inevitable process of buying out, of the Disaster Unconscious shifting the Story to the Event. Vimbai says: “There were more cars on the road because the petrol situation had improved. The government was allowing more stations to sell petrol in foreign currency and that had eased the acute shortages. The kombi [minibus] we took was full and we hung on for dear life near the door, which seemed about to fall off” (153, emphasis added). While this passage shows the effects of dollarization, as well as its initially salubrious consequences, it also explodes those inflated expectations by the image of the door nearly falling off the packed kombi. You may want to buy out by hopping into a vehicle that takes you far away, but the door of that vehicle will always threaten to fall off and spill you onto exactly what you sought to escape. This didacticism is presented through a word picture that readers have to decode with extreme subtlety. A switch in descriptive tone creates a distance from the depiction of crisis as crisis but instead leaves it to the readers to trace its pervasive residue. The constant fluctuation between Story and Event represents in small form the tensions between the hope and hopelessness of the economy, of buying in and buying out. The Hairdresser of Harare also uses the image of a child as a literary strategy to point to the foreclosure of the future and, therefore, the necessity to buy out. In an essay on youth music in the Ivory Coast during its own economic crisis, Anne Schumann notes: Young people who had been failed by the state . . . [are] the primary victims of the economic crisis. Vidal, for example, notes that for several years these urban fractions of Côte d’Ivoire, severely impoverished by the economic crisis, have undergone a general downgrading that particularly affected the youngest layers of this population. (“A Generation of Orphans,” 539)

That is no country for young people. That is no country for hope. ­Vimbai looks at the children playing outside her house and thinks: “the

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children were back in their mud hole, their joyful faces wrapped in the innocence of childhood. I was here to protect them” (Hairdresser, 10). For just a moment, the text digresses to show us the world of children at play; yet the sentence that follows brings their doomed state to the forefront again: “I was here to protect them.” The word “wrapped” gestures toward the artificial packaging of childhood that will come undone in the “mud hole” of the current economic disaster. In dropping and moving around a few letters of the word “wrapped,” the word “warped” comes to mind, highlighting the literally warped nature of a childhood spent in economic destitution.31 This is another instance of a constellation of Story and Event: The Event is not simply wrapped in the Story, but over the passage of time becomes warped in the Story, attempting to manifest itself as something else. The warping of childhood is reiterated in another moment later in the novel: I stood at the gate and looked at the long procession of Churchill boys and Roosevelt girls going to school. Was there a future for them when they finished, I wondered? The generation who came before us had stolen hope to such an extent that we regarded the future with trepidation. I knew people who never looked beyond the next day. Their circumstances only allowed them to focus on the here and now, which is pretty much what animals did, though we regarded ourselves as superior. (113)

Churchill boys and Roosevelt girls: The names of the children’s schools point to the lingering traces of Western colonialism that postcolonial Zimbabwe has never been able to wash away, the eroded letters of the sign on the novel’s first page notwithstanding. The association with leaders from the English-­speaking imperium—­Great Britain and the United States, lands of the free, homes of the brave—­also hints at the possibility of buying out, of escaping to the democratic nations that Churchill and Roosevelt ruled as elected heads of state. Like Mugabe, they were mythologized as great emancipators. Unfortunately, Churchill and Roosevelt also often exercised totalitarian authority. Winston Churchill was a rampaging imperialist who engineered the Bengal famine during World War II—­the lack of food representing an eerie historical throughline with Zimbabwe—­while Franklin D. Roosevelt interned Japanese-­Americans in concentration camps through an autocratic Executive Order. The Churchill boys and Roosevelt girls not only subtly evoke Robert Mugabe

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himself but also show that the freedom promised by the West is invariably also underpinned by authoritarian tendencies, an authoritarianism from which the Zimbabwean diaspora sought to buy out. Keeping the process of buying out moving along, Vimbai applies for a passport to get away. Seeing the lines at the passport office, she observes wryly that: The queue at the passport office was the longest I’d ever encountered, which was saying something . . . All the people waiting in line seemed to be young. Their desperation to leave the country showed on their faces. A thin security guard whose blue overalls hung on his matchstick frame walked around with a baton stick ordering people to stay in their places. It was ironic that during the war of independence people had not left in the way they were doing now under the same revolutionary government that had freed them. Could it really be that independence had become a greater burden than the yoke of colonial oppression? (122).

Vimbai again echoes the idea of buying out. People are literally lining up in droves to leave the country. The preponderance of young people exiting suggests that Zimbabwe, in its despondent destitution, has lost its youthful hope. The almost documentary-­style narration is relieved by metaphor, which the Disaster Unconscious presents to us, ironically and appropriately, in the language of commodity and economics. Even the security guard, a symbol of state power and surveillance, is described as a matchstick man. The word conveys the stick-­art that children often draw, bringing to mind the ubiquitous image of malnourishment in times of economic crisis as well as caricaturing the police as thin men, literally and metaphorically. The security guard’s baton, like the arrow on the sign for the hairdressing salon, not only suggests a return to older methods of social organization, but also symbolizes his impotence: that in an impoverished authoritarian state, even the agents of state power have no real weapons to wield. Literary method returns again to subtly make a powerful point about the Event, or about the state of the world, in which Vimbai lives. As we move further from sudden-­ onset disasters, where the pedagogical message is deliberately clear and simple, we must work harder to decode the more-­muted metaphors of crisis in slower-­moving catastrophes. The rhetoric of “better fed than free” is thus evoked again. Black people found Rhodesia more livable: There was at least freedom to

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fight for, along with its wonderful promise of democratic emancipation. What happens, though, when you win freedom, discover that it is empty and hollow, but cannot fight to re-­free yourself because you are supposedly already “free”? What happens when you lack the physical energy, generated by the simple nutrition you need to get through the day, to fight state power? In keeping the colonized fed, the colonizers inadvertently also gave them the psychological will to free themselves. Nothing defeats the human spirit to fight more than hunger. Unlike the stories from the South Asian tsunami, there are few tales of Zimbabweans going back to their country to rebuild a shattered nation. The economic disaster in Zimbabwe is an ongoing event; first revolution, then rebuilding, seems to be the only way to end the crisis. But how can people revolt against a tyrannical government when their stomachs are empty and their minds consumed by the desire to put food on the table? The economic disaster, then, raises numerous questions for readers to consider about how to live with catastrophe, especially in terms of its temporal longevity, even as it puts forward different Event-­oriented imperatives, such as learning to cope, and not rebuilding physically. “Better fed than free” echoes the material welfare under the colonialist state, and emphasizes buying out in the turmoil of the economic disaster: “Better Fed Up in Diaspora than Free at Home.” This is again a vital lesson that the novel teaches. Sometimes the only way to cope with disaster is to leave the space of crisis, even though its psychic and emotional consequences always haunt those who manage to leave. The inevitability of buying out is represented through repeated images of transportation as well as the long lines for passports that herald eventual migration to the West. The death of the narrator’s brother, Robert, who goes to England for a better life and then dies when he falls asleep at the wheel of a car there, reveals the thwarted possibilities of buying out: “We all shed tears and he promised to be back soon. After all, he only wanted to work in England until he had enough money to buy a house and then he would return . . . He sent the family money home . . . [but] there was always something more to be done or someone else to educate; so, in the end, he felt that he had to stay in the UK to support the family” (29). Like Darling in We Need New Names, Robert, too, knows he has gone away for good. He has, in fact, bought out. Yet, that he is only in England because there is always one more person to educate back home points again to the impossibility of his truly buying out. He is implicated in the capitalist economy of the First World because it allows him to keep his family in Zimbabwe financially afloat. The name

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Robert once again invokes Mugabe and shows the subtle ways in which crisis haunts those who leave. In another metaphorical instance of the failure to buy out that nevertheless pushes forward its pedagogical message, Robert’s family is able to bring his body back home and bury him there. Vimbai muses: “I was glad because I’d heard many stories about Zimbabweans who had died in the Diaspora whose bodies could not be sent home. There were families who never found the closure that comes from seeing your loved one committed to the ground” (30).32 Robert’s return marks the end of buying out, as his body is slid back into the earth he sought to escape. There is no clarion call for the diaspora to return and restore the country. Instead, there is only a bitter recognition that there is no escape even through escape. Formal conventions in this novel, then, are an attempt to seek relief from the intensity of the dailiness of catastrophe, of a literary buying out, so to speak. The economic disaster, however, infiltrates everyday life to occlude the fantastic, and even heartwarming, possibilities of the comic romance novel, which the novel initially sets up by having Vimbai fall in love with Dumi. Vimbai says, “I walked into Harare Gardens, the once lovely botanical masterpiece that now looked exactly how I felt. The rows of once neat flowers were wilted and the lawn was a brown desert. On the benches lay the homeless soaking up the sun. Amidst the squalor was a blue uniformed ice-­cream man ringing his bell, trying to entice people to buy a cone” (79). The romance novel—­ but not this one!—­is a mirror opposite of the scene depicted here: In a typical romance novel, the disorderly tumult of thwarted passion comes by way of “loverly” consummation between hero and heroine.33 In the end, however, the natural order triumphs to form beautiful bowers for lovers, well-­manicured gardens of heteronormativity in which our romantic couples can cavort, metaphorically and sometimes even literally. The Hairdresser of Harare can be seen as the “blue uniformed ice-­ cream man” ringing the bell of the romance genre in an attempt to entice us to read the novel as fiction confounding expectations about how the economic disaster is narrated and how leaping away from the Event leads to its paradoxical manifestation through literary gesture. The disrepair of Harare Gardens symbolizes the spoilage of the flowery garden of the heterosexual romance novel: Dumi, Vimbai’s love interest, is in fact gay. That in itself is a move away from the heterosexual mainstreaming of the romance novel, especially in postcolonial fiction. But,

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before this discovery, readers are treated to this scene of attempted heterosexual seduction that could be “straight” from a bodice-­ripper: “Hello.” My voice was slightly hoarse. I caressed his chest and began to kiss his abs. His perfect torso shivered with every touch. I ran my tongue over his belly button and slowly moved up to his chest. I could feel his heart pounding beneath me. His skin was soft but his muscles were rock solid. I kissed his neck and could feel a slight stubble. His hands lay flaccid besides him as if he did not know what to do. I took them and guided him towards me. My breathing grew louder and louder. I could hear it in my ears. There was a fire burning through me, which I’d never felt for any man before. But Dumi tensed when I kissed his lips. (131)

Shades of a Harlequin romance such as In the Market for Love or The Sheikh’s Bought Wife? Notice the economic resonances of these titles, too. The Story travels in another direction from the crisis by speaking through a popular novelistic form about one of the oldest themes of literature. The critic Gibson Ncube reads this scene in the novel as one in which Vimbai begins to come to terms with the reality of Dumi’s sexual orientation: The hasty ending of the description of the decidedly erotic encounter creates a psychological hiatus that compels Vimbai, as well as the reader sympathetic to her, to question Dumisani’s refusal to engage in coitus. As the story unfolds, the narrator multiplies such episodes in which Dumisani’s sexuality is interrogated. In this manner, The Hairdresser of Harare can be read as a Bildungsroman relating to the gradual awakening of the narrator to the realities surrounding homosexuality because there is a noticeable shift in how Vimbai views this subject.34

Describing The Hairdresser of Harare as a bildungsroman again situates disaster fiction as something besides disaster fiction, for the Story to exceed the Event by placing itself in literary genres such as the bildungsroman and the romance novel—­or perhaps even creating an altogether new genre called The Bildungsromance Novel. The Disaster Unconscious renders sexual orientation as an allegory for the totalizing

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effects of the economic disaster. The revelations of Dumi’s gay identity coincide with the escalating crisis in the economy. Dumi is forced to leave Zimbabwe, because even the president, the architect of the economic disaster, condemns homosexuality in the most strident terms possible.35 As Anna Chitando and Molly Manyonganise say: Homosexuality continues to be a controversial issue in Africa. Those who are opposed to homosexuality often argue that the practice is “un-­African”, “foreign” and “unchristian” . . . On the other hand, supporters of a human rights approach argue that there have always been homosexuals in Africa and, even if it is a new phenomenon, those who practice it need to be protected by the law. In Zimbabwe, the issue has been complicated by political leaders such as President Robert Mugabe who have over and over again denounced homosexuality. This has made it difficult for activists to push for the rights of homosexuals as this could be interpreted as direct opposition.36

The end of European rule following Zimbabwe’s independence also involved an evacuation of all the foreigners’ vaunted ways of structuring the country’s polity, economy, and social and sexual mores. Mugabe’s Afrocentric agenda, in which he sought to return Zimbabwe to a precapitalist, almost premodern economic state, can be extrapolated on to the Zimbabwean rejection of homosexuality, especially homosexuality as an identity—­a Western norm that Zimbabwe must reject in order to recover its Afrocentric past. Dumi ends up buying out of Zimbabwe, not for economic freedom but really for sexual liberation; yet his emancipation is presented in economic terms. Even though the novel tries to focus on the Story with a highly energetic tale and then adds a twist to that tale, the Disaster Unconscious continues to depict everything in terms of the Event-­oriented vocabulary of the economic disaster. While Dumi’s flight is obviously an escape from sexual persecution, the economic underpinnings of the romance novel bring out a deeper awakening of normative assumptions in general. The pedagogical agenda imposes itself on the genre-­based imperatives of romance novels, with all their happy endings. There is no room for Dumi, as a homosexual, in the heterosexual economy of postcolonial Zimbabwe, which is modeled on the patriarchal Big Man culture of many African countries as well as directly derived from the British military structure introduced into colonized Africa. Chitando and Manyonganise point out

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that, “while we appreciate [author] Huchu’s attack on Zimbabwe’s ruling elite, the involvement of Mr. M. [Dumi’s lover] in homosexuality tends to suggest that homosexuality is part and parcel of the general corruption and decay that the country is experiencing” (24). Yet the government’s cadre of closeted gay people reveals its implication not so much in the “corruption” of homosexuality itself but in the problems the Mugabe administration created by linking economics and sexual orientation to the “scourge” of Western colonialism that must be eliminated, leading to a mass exodus elsewhere or to people like Mr. M.’s pretending to be what they are not to simply survive in postcolonial Zimbabwe. The lessons taught are simple: hustle like Mrs. Khumalo, flee like Robert and Dumi, or closet like Mr. M. But even buying out into a world of relative safety for gay people—­ Dumi leaves for England at the end of the novel—­means that the norms of the world, including the economic disaster left behind, constantly follow him about. Significantly, his “emancipation” is purchased in economic language. Dumi’s freedom can again be seen as one of the tropes of the romance novel, in which a suffering lover sacrifices himself or herself for the beloved. While this is an instance where the Story can play, the Disaster Unconscious immediately renders the literary in economic, or perhaps Event-­oriented, terms: Vimbai tells the Minister, with whose husband Dumi has been having an affair, that she will offer her life as “indemnity” for Dumi’s going to England and keeping silent there (Hairdresser, 187). The minister tells her “my debt is paid to you in full” (186). Later Vimbai refers to this “deal” she made with the minister so that Dumi could live his life in peace “to the fullest, without fear” (189). What can be seen as a bargain to protect two gay men in a homophobic society—­a thematic diversion from the economic disaster that recasts the conventions of romance novels—­is instead presented to us in fiscal and monetary terms.37 Wendy Willems says that Chikwama “reflects on the powerlessness of ordinary Zimbabweans in the face of the crisis and the immutability of the system in which they are caught up  .  .  . Because of the growing impact of ‘hard politics’ on people’s everyday lives, cartoonists were compelled to address the growing interference of the crisis with social life in general” (“Comic Strips,” 140–­41). The Hairdresser of Harare shows the increasing impact of the economic disaster on “social life in general.” That this struggle for sexual freedom is once again expressed in the language of economics reveals how the most basic human decisions and ways of being in Zimbabwe are routed through the language of the definitional metacrisis even when

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presented in a literary form such as the romance novel, with its own internal conventions of thwarted lovers and happy endings.38 Buying out for Dumi paradoxically involves buying in for Vimbai, who sacrifices herself by engaging in economically articulated transactions to purchase Dumi’s sexual freedom.39 According to Ncube, “the narratives render the readers sympathetic to the plight not just of homosexuals but of all other socially marginalised groups and individuals” (“Festering,” 73). Through the romance novel plot, The Hairdresser of Harare shows the braiding of other social issues, such as homosexual oppression, within the economic disaster. Yet the Story-­oriented twist to the heterosexual romance novel only points to the totalizing effects of economic crisis, even as it sets out to play with readerly expectations of literary theme and form. Although the economic disaster has been simmering slowly so far, it begins to boil over as the novel ends. No wonder, then, that the economic imagery becomes more and more difficult to ignore, unlike earlier parts of the novel where the imminence of dollarization promised a better world that could distract readers from the totalizing effects and consequences of crisis. In the end, Vimbai is indebted, in every sense of the word, to crisis-­riven Zimbabwe, just as the Story is indebted to the crisis-­riven Event, not matter how much the Story seeks to “play” and move in other directions.

They Need New Games: Childhood and Migration in We Need New Names We Need New Names also uses the perspective of a child to show how Zimbabwe’s economic disaster can actually stunt human growth. Making the protagonist a child suggests that the novel is already playing with literary convention—­through a bildungsroman—­to talk about economic collapse. The novel’s investment in the Story is forestalled by the Event when it becomes evident that, unlike the conventional bildungsroman, there is no growth, no future, for the child or children of Zimbabwe. The child, as is evident by now, is a recurrent trope in disaster literature, symbolizing catastrophe as well as redemption from its totalizing effects. The child is a recurrent trope in postcolonial literature, too, symbolizing the youthful possibility of the new nation. The oppressive conditions of disaster often bring a nation back to its starting point, repeatedly using the child as a symbol to evoke some of the originary concerns of postcolonialism, especially those of national struggle and

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nation-­building. Yet, as J. L. Powers states, “children bear the brunt of war as a nation’s most vulnerable citizens . . . Exile is a universal experience of young people who spend all or part of their childhood in a war zone. Exile is both literal—­leaving behind a country, family, or home—­ and emotional—­leaving behind the person they once were or could have become.”40 The child embodies not only a splitting of self from self but also a splitting of self from nation, undoing the postcolonial logic of the child as representing a nation’s youthful future. We Need New Names opens in Harare with multiple stories of multiple children and then focuses on the single story of a single child, the narrator, Darling, who is transplanted to the United States to live with her aunt in Detroit. These plural narratives make the same point about the thwarted possibilities of childhood and allegorize the thwarted possibilities of the youthful independent nation, where political freedom does not necessarily mature into economic freedom. The critique of the postcolonial nation-­state places the novel into the larger tale that so much of postcolonial fiction tells and emphasizes its own investment in the Story. Yet the expansion of allegory in national terms, particularly as a symbol for the economic disaster, yokes the Story back to the Event. The novel actively signals toward the idea of buying out, in its striking opening lines: “We are on our way to Budapest.”41 In a work of fiction with a declarative title announcing the importance of nomenclature, names become a way not only of managing crisis but also of setting the literary elements in play. According to Maxwell Kadenge and George Mavunga: Zimbabweans nicknamed their country Ijipita lit: ‘Egypt’ as a way of expressing their frustration with the oppressive and repressive conditions that they were surviving in during the crisis. The terrible situation in Zimbabwe was likened to what was occurring in Egypt during the time when the children of Israel were being ill-­treated by Herod’s oppressive government.42

If Egypt is a metaphor for suffering, the name “Budapest” conjures wonder out of destitution. While Hungary is not usually considered to be a dream destination for migrants from the Third World, the opening sentence still suggests a physical departure from the intolerable realities of Zimbabwe, even if it is to Hungary’s capital city.43 Yet there is no conscious buying out here: Budapest is of interest to the children only because guavas grow there. Bulawayo allegorizes the economy of

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deprivation through food, the most basic necessity of all. Darling and her friends live in a particularly poor area of Harare paradoxically called Paradise, which suggests not only eviction and exile from an Edenic past but also buying out—­of dislocation to another world—­because of the desire for food or fruit. Guavas are apples here. The allegorical chain of Budapest, Paradise, and forbidden fruits—­ with all their literary echoes of the Bible and Paradise Lost, as well as the foreshadowing of Darling’s exile—­are ways for the Story to move and play; yet a deeper meaning binds literary narration to the Event. In showing the complete immersion of even children in the Zimbabwean economic crisis, We Need New Names performs the pedagogical function of educating readers about the scope and scale of the economic disaster while operating on a symbolic and literary register through the voice of its child narrator and even focusing the Budapest section on a group of children playing in the street—­a thematic turning away from the crisis that always turns back to the crisis. Constantly dreaming of America and the better life it would bring for her, Darling spends most of her time in the streets with her friends, primarily to steal food: Bastard says when we grow up we’ll stop stealing guavas and move onto bigger things inside the houses. I’m not really worried about that because when the time comes, I’ll not even be here; I’ll be living in America with Aunt Fostalina, eating real food and doing better things than stealing. But for now, the guavas. (12)

In the thwarted childhood of the economic disaster, Bastard cannot imagine a life that exists outside of catastrophic destitution. Not for him are the usual boyish ambitions of becoming an astronaut or even a doctor or an engineer. Instead, he will simply grow into—­and not grow up—­stealing bigger things to keep himself alive. The fantasy of economic betterment, of buying out in the imagined vast plenitude of an American life, is evoked repeatedly. Fantasy is an important way to sustain the psyche and strengthen the heart. Yet the storied fantasy of a better life there is taken away by an evocation of the instant immediacy of the Event-­oriented theme of economic devastation: “for now, the guavas.”44 The Disaster Unconscious structures the vocabulary and imagery in both these novels in economic terms, productively as well as

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combatively. So, when Darling surveys the ironically named Paradise, she observes: To pass the time I let my eyes wander towards Paradise. When I’m on Fambeki like this I feel like I’m God, who sees everything. Paradise is all tin and stretches out in the sun like a wet sheepskin nailed on the ground to dry; the shacks are the muddy colors of dirty puddles after the rains. The shacks themselves are terrible but from up here, they seem much better, almost beautiful even, it’s like I am looking at a painting. Then I look up at the sky and see a plane far up in the sky . . . It’s what I will take myself when I follow Aunt Fostalina to America. (36)

Bulawayo, the author, puts the high literary technique of ekphrasis to work here: the narrator who watches from a distance and resists immersion, the Godlike status of the all-­seeing protagonist, the visual appearance of the scene mimicking that of a beautiful painting. The novel attempts to play numerous literary tricks that are still conjoined to the economic echoes of the text. Paradise, both in Darling’s world and in religious mythology, is Paradise only when those evicted from its Edenic orchards, and its less than Edenic shacks, buy out and look at Paradise from the distance of belonging to another world. The jarring juxtaposition of the “painting” seen Godlike from above and the airplane seen from below establishes a spatial hierarchy between the downward spiral of remaining here and the upward mobility of moving elsewhere. We Need New Names is imbued not only with the theme of economics but also with the language of economics and transactional exchange, including the commercial imagery that a painting, and looking at a painting—­usually conducted in the rarefied space of a museum or an art gallery—­suggests, as well as the economic opportunity that moving to a richer country can purchase. The Disaster Unconscious entwines art and literature with their own economic undercurrents to narrate the crisis at hand. As Kadenge and Mavunga claim: Language reflects the everyday experiences and realities of a people. The nature of words that have been analyzed in this study [of Shona metaphors used to describe the troubled economy] shows the experiences that the people of Zimbabwe went

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When metaphors take on the dimensions of the physical reality, then even the games that Zimbabwean children play—­indeed, the games the Story itself plays—­are predicated on a national hierarchy that contains fiscal overtones. We Need New Names first paints a picture of children at play. The “country-­game” is based on a stratum of racial and, most importantly, economic privilege: But first we have to fight over the names because everyone wants to be certain countries, like everybody wants to be the U.S.A. and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and France and Italy and Sweden and Germany and Russia and Greece and them. These are the country-­ countries. If you lost the fight, then you just have to settle for countries like Dubai and South Africa and Botswana and Tanzania and them. They are not country-­countries, but at least life is better than here. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti, like Sri Lanka, and not even this one we live in—­who wants to be in a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart? (We Need New Names, 51)

The children fight to take on new names of rich countries in the serious work of play, although Russia and Greece—­ recall Budapest, too—­seem to be odd members of this premier fiscal fraternity, given their recent economic meltdowns.46 The “second-­tier” countries are measured by the economic yardstick of life there being “better than here.” The phrase “rags of countries” describes “countryness” in material terms, also conjuring images of the rags worn by children in Zimbabwe. “Things falling apart” in the quotation above obviously references both Chinua Achebe’s iconic novel of postcolonial Africa (1958) as well as William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” (1920), written after World War I and at the start of the Irish freedom struggle. This literary intertextuality allows the Story to break free from the Event through references to other literary texts that are important signatures of postcolonial storytelling. Intertextuality is still presented in material terms: things falling apart. When things—­or the basic necessities that humans

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need to stay alive—­fall apart, so do countries and people. The Disaster Unconscious reveals how economic vocabulary subverts the hyperliterary overtones and referential schemes that Achebe and Yeats evoke. After Darling’s father returns from South Africa, literally “falling apart” from a cough that slowly extracts the life from his body, a group of women and children attempt to heal him by singing songs of solace while standing in a protective circle around him. Again, this can be seen as the Story seeking to loosen itself from the Event—­the musical threnody of a song providing a break from the intensity of the crisis. In that moment of ritualistic compassion, Darling and her friends touch her dying father: “We are touching him, just touching him all over like he is a beautiful plaything we have all rescued from a rubbish bin in Budapest. He feels like dry wood in my hands, but there is a strange light in his sunken eyes like he has swallowed the sun” (105, emphasis added). Empathy for a dying man can only be imagined as economic objects such as playthings and dry wood, probably used for fire to cook in the midst of severe rationing, as well as in terms of material possession. Except in this world of extreme deprivation, material possession itself is scoured from the rancid depths of a rubbish heap. In the conflagration of catastrophe, people become kindling—­reduced to an economic function—­from the dry wood of their own remains: Darling’s father’s seeming to have “swallowed the sun” suggests a spontaneous combustion of sorts, even as the Story wraps around the Event in an almost magical-­realist moment. Still, this devastation also creates groups of solidarity and compassion. Misery does not love only company; it also loves community. Again, disaster fiction teaches important lessons: how solitary suffering can be transformed into communal compassion, even as the metaphors used to push this healing forward tangle themselves in a union with the grim realism of economic despair. The vocabulary of fiscal destitution in this novel is constantly modulated by the possibility of buying out, as well as recognizing the impossibility of doing so. Bastard disparages Darling’s desire to go to America, claiming, “America is too far away . . . What if you get there and find it’s a kaka place and get stuck and can’t come back? Me, I’m going to Jo’burg, that way when things get bad, I can just get on the road and roll without talking to anybody; you have to be able to return from wherever you go” (16). According to Poul Wisborg, “the political and economic disaster in Zimbabwe, unfolding with particular intensity with the turn of the millennium, has displaced people on an extraordinary scale . . . Many Zimbabweans went to South Africa for its job

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opportunities despite the often harsh living conditions.”47 So, Darling says: Mother had not wanted Father to leave for South Africa to begin with, but it was at that time when everybody was going to South Africa and other countries, some near, some far, some very, very far. They were leaving, just leaving in droves, and Father wanted to leave with everybody and he was going to leave and nothing would stop him. Look at how things are falling apart, Felistus, he said, one day, untying his shoes. (We Need New Names, 93)

In revealing the geographic range of the diasporas of destitution, the novel shows how disaster reconfigures the conventional nodes of migration in postcolonial studies. The narrator repeats the word “leaving” as well as juxtaposes it with the fatalistic “just” in its second iteration. The literary gesture of repetition, often seen as comforting in its rhythmic function, emphasizes economic despair against its own formal purpose.48 Leaving may suggest a finality of departure, although the novel refuses to stage an arrival elsewhere, an end point to the leaving. The word “droves” brings to mind cattle, or some other unthinking, sheeplike flock, tiredly directed to their destination by an invisible hand. “Nothing [no thing] would stop him” emphasizes the importance of the thing, as does the repetition of the phrase “things are falling apart,” which is tied not solely to the economic materiality of the thing itself but also to the image of the father taking off his shoes. Shoes are a symbol of the working life, of the world outside. Taking off one’s shoes while stating that things are falling apart acknowledges the inability to find a working life in Zimbabwe as well as the vital, life-­saving necessity of turning elsewhere for economic sustenance. But “elsewhere” is always here. The literary imagery of the Story and the economic reality of the Event exist in a dialectic tension with each other, especially when seen through the failed attempt of buying out. This idea is repeated in the novel’s last section, set in Zimbabwe, titled “How They Left.” The two-­page text consists of staccato repetitions of the same phrases, its incantatory quality itself a literary strategy that balances out the grim realism of the economic disaster: Look at them leaving in droves . . . just look at them leaving in droves . . . when things fall apart . . . they flee their own wretched

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lands so their hunger may be satisfied in foreign lands . . . the wounds of their despair bandaged in foreign lands . . . leaving because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because you just cannot be the same once you leave behind who you are, you just cannot be the same . . . look at them leaving arm in arm with loss and lost, look at them leaving in droves. (147–­48)

The author uses lyrical force to make her point—­repetition, the distancing device of the alien “they” suddenly turning into the familiar “you,” the change in third person to second: The passage’s internal poetry enhances the poignant representation of the catastrophe. Yet the catastrophic Event bumps up against the lyrical Story. Hunger as a driving force cannot be underestimated. “They” leave because their hunger drives them to go. “They” leave because things fall apart. “They” leave because the satiation of hunger has at least “bandaged” the gunshot wounds of economic disaster. “Bandaged” also suggests that migration is not strictly a cure; it’s just a temporary cover-­up for a deep and festering injury, just as the Story is a cover-­up for the deep and festering injury of the Event. Even though the novel insists that the migrants will “never be the same” because they have left behind who they really are, the idea of leaving behind itself—­of buying out—­is repeatedly undercut by the image of these migrants leaving arm-­in-­arm with loss and lost, which are here virtually represented as people with distinct personalities. Loss and lost, all-­ pervasive and all-­encompassing, impede migrant incorporation into the new economy. The fiscal tenor of the words “loss,” especially when paired with its absent partner, “profit,” is clear here. The economic disaster creates different diasporas, all of which seek to buy out from the financial crisis. Yet return is always built into the diasporas of destitution as the economic disaster follows migrants wherever they go, never allowing them to fully belong to the new life.49 According to Anna-­Leena Toivanen: The abject state of the home country refuses to loosen its grip on the emigrants. The novel gives voice to manifestations of nostalgia, thus conveying a profoundly contradictory idea of nationhood as violent and repulsive, but simultaneously attractive in its communal aspects.50

Nostalgia for the home country is often considered to be a defining characteristic of diasporas.51 In all diasporas of destitution, the

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memories of economic deprivation in the home place make return particularly fraught and often impossible, thereby furthering nostalgia and romance. What can people do when they want a full stomach and the warmth of home? Narratives of economic destitution force a confrontation with one of the most difficult choices faced by migrants today. When she moves to Detroit, and has all the food she wants to eat, Darling emphasizes the thrall of First World capitalism and its potential to enslave with its promise of a full belly: If I were at home I know I would not be standing around because something called snow was preventing me from going outside to live life. Maybe me and Sbho and Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Stina would be out in Budapest, stealing guavas. Or we would be playing find bin Laden or country-­game or Andy-­ over. But then we wouldn’t be having food, which is why I will stand being in America dealing with the snow; there is food to eat here, all types and types of food. There are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find the food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix that. (We Need New Names, 155)

Better Free than Fed? Sometimes Darling can’t decide. While she would much rather be well-­fed in America than starving in Zimbabwe, she acknowledges that the soul lacks nourishment amid the gluttony of the First World. Still, there is often no choice between satisfying a real physical hunger that breaks your body to bits and a spiritualized national hunger that “merely” tears your soul apart. Better Fed than Free. The repressed continues to infiltrate the economy of the sated, another strategy through which the Story stages its own return. Reflecting on life in “Destroyed, Michigan,” the contorted pun adding literary heft to the Event-­oriented agenda, Darling muses: “Some things happen only in my country, and this here is not my country” (149). The repetition of the word “things” once more evokes the economy, the material world, left behind, which is rendered nostalgic through departure. Messenger comes to America as a refugee smuggling guavas for Darling: “Bringing fresh foods and stuff from home is not allowed; if the border people find them, they throw them away, so I am just glad my guavas survived. Even before I finished unwrapping the smell of guavas was all over, delicious and dizzying. I closed my eyes and inhaled like I hadn’t breathed in

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ages” (188). In a novel whose language is infused with the brute reality of economic deprivation, the glory of a guava instantly symbolizes rather than tritely reprethe resilience of Zimbabwean agronomics—­ senting the resilience of the human spirit—­which defiantly continues to produce fruit and food in the midst of disaster. The evocation of Zimbabwean agronomics also demonstrates again the impossibility of buying out as material products from the life left behind will enter the new economic system over and over, as will the literary texts produced in that new economic system. Literary techniques are constantly marshaled to exist in a dialectic purpose: here, not only to show the despair that an economic disaster generates but also to reveal that escape from the physical consequences of the crisis never involves release from its emotional toll. Zimbabwean agronomics also keeps Darling from over-­romanticizing First World capitalism: “In America we saw more food than we had seen in all our lives and we were so happy we rummaged through the dustbins of our souls to retrieve the stained, broken pieces of God. We had flung him in there way back when we were still in our own country, flung him during desperate, desperate moments when we were dizzy with hunger” (240). Significantly, Darling uses the Zimbabwean-­British word “dustbins” and not “trash cans” or “garbage cans” to describe the recovery of the divine, even though by this time in the novel she has spent a significant amount of time in the United States, again holding the British partly responsible for the economic catastrophe and bringing the postcolonial back into disaster. Foraging for comestibles by “rummaging” in “dustbins” used to be a life-­saving, food-­generating activity for Darling and her friends back in their home country. Far from being a simple assertion of “Hallelujah, we found God here!,” even retrieving the Almighty in America, a spiritual activity, is conveyed through the vocabulary of earlier economic destitution. In certain instances, then, the Story and the Event join together to forge an aesthetically pleasurable experience, delighting readers with lovely language even as that fusion generates an understanding of disaster as disaster. Because short-­term resolution, here by leaving for America, is possible in the face of the economic disaster, the Story and the Event are still tightly hooked together to provide that resolution. The Event, however, often supersedes the Story to critique the long-­term viability of that resolution—­the bandages on a gunshot wound. The Disaster Unconscious emerges through the language of economic disaster in almost every symbolic, literary, and formal register of the novel. The first part of We Need New Names

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teaches us how economic crisis is a part of everything that every day follows the same pathway as it does in The Hairdresser of Harare; in the second part of We Need New Names the vocabulary of fiscal crisis reveals that the economic disaster can never be left behind, even when it is physically abandoned. It will infiltrate new constructions of the self in new geographies: Darling will always be a material girl living in a material world.

Chapter 3

Ripping Off the BandAIDS Dying Out in the Medical Disaster

If you take a look at the cover of Time magazine from the week of Feb­ ruary 12, 2001, you will see a black-­and-­white photograph of an African woman with a child nestled against her.1 The interplay of light and dark in the image suggests that all color has leached out of their lives. Woman and child—­evoking a bizarre inversion of “Madonna and Child”—­both look emaciated, gaunt, and ill. They gaze in different directions, their expressions vacant. The title, Time, itself is partly obscured by the picture. Only the last two letters, spelling out the word “me,” are visible. “This is me,” the photograph seems to declare, ascribing humanity—­and “me-­ness”—­to the anonymous African woman and child. The caption next to the picture states, “This is a story about AIDS in Africa. Look at the pictures. Read the words. And then try not to care.” The cover’s agenda is all too explicit. It seeks to garner Western sympathy for the African continent by using the overdetermined image of the ravaged, suffering, sick body as a symbol of Africa itself. But what if a different representation of a dreaded disease could spark a different emotion in you?

Slow Burn II: Medical Disaster Time This chapter studies two novels—­Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow: A Novel of Postapartheid South Africa (South Africa, 2001) and Unity Dow’s Far and Beyon’ (Botswana, 2000) to understand these different representations of AIDS. AIDS is a medical disaster, operating within a similar temporal register as the slow burn of economic catastrophe, but it becomes much more of a roaring conflagration when 115

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its flame is ignited. According to health scientists Peter Tsasis and N. Nirupama: Although a stabilization of the HIV/AIDS epidemic has been noted in the last few years, the infection continues to spread rapidly in actual numbers. Of the many reasons why HIV/AIDS stands out as atypically disastrous is that its impact is gradual and thus referred to as slow onset. Although disasters are often thought of as sudden, the worst consequences of disasters are not necessarily felt at the point of occurrence and can easily emerge long after the causes and effects have been identified. HIV/AIDS is one such disaster.2

With catastrophic consequences depositing themselves endlessly on the original event, the AIDS crisis in Southern Africa took decades to boil into a full-­fledged disaster, let alone be recognized as one. In The Origin of AIDS, Jacques Pepin states that “June 1981 is the official birthdate of the HIV epidemic”—­almost exactly overlapping with the precipitating event of the election of Robert Mugabe as ­Zimbabwe’s prime minister in 1980.3 However, AIDS has a much longer backstory. Pepin, claims that the prehistory of AIDS originated from “cross-­species transmission” somewhere in the first thirty years of the twentieth century. The disease spread like wildfire over the next few decades due to “medical interventions requiring the massive use of reusable syringes and needles  .  .  . rapidly expanding the number of infected individuals from a handful to a few hundred to a few thousand. This set the stage for the sexual transmission of the virus, starting in core groups of sex workers and their male clients and spreading to the rest of the adult population” (Pepin 1–­2). Pepin further asserts that “this tragedy was facilitated (or even caused) by human interventions: colonization, urbanization, and probably well-­intentioned public health campaigns” (4­ –5). Since both colonization and urbanization, as well as the introduction of reusable syringes, were direct consequences of European occupation and Western medicine, the provenance of the AIDS crisis in Africa is distinctly imperial in origin; its current status, therefore, is that of a true postcolonial disaster. AIDS traveled through east Africa in the 1960s and ’70s, with the first HIV epidemic reported in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa. The virus “entered a wide urban sexual network” and charted its destructive course instantly, primarily through sex workers, migrant labor, truck

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drivers, and a poor medical infrastructure. AIDS only reached Southern Africa (Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique) in the 1980s; however, Southern Africa became the epicenter of the AIDS crisis in the early 1990s, coinciding with the end of apartheid (1990) and the transition into multiracial democracy (1994) in South Africa. The African National Congress government “concentrated on unifying the country’s health systems and expanding primary health care for the poor. This restructuring weakened the health systems just as the HIV/AIDS epidemic was at the peak of expansion.”4 AIDS “denialism” further promoted the spread of the disease in both South Africa and Botswana.5 Proponents of denialism claimed that AIDS was not in fact a disease or that HIV did not cause AIDS, antiretrovirals were not effective forms of treatment, and big Western pharmaceuticals were frightening people into undertaking medical plans of dubious efficacy. Thabo Mbeki, president of South Africa from 1999 to 2008, also espoused denialism in refusing to give credence to the causal link between HIV and AIDS, making inexpensive antiretrovirals impossible to access, and even appointing cabinet ministers who supported traditional healing practices exclusively. The social and economic conditions in Botswana also lent themselves to the rapid spread of AIDS. John Iliffe claims that: Botswana’s epidemic was also fueled by ethnic and cultural homogeneity, facilitating social interaction and by its new-­found diamond wealth. . . . Yet as its citizens said, Botswana was a ‘rich country of poor people.’ 47 per cent of them living below the poverty line in 1993–­94. Such polarization fostered both risk-­taking in the rich and vulnerability in the poor.(42)6

Iliffe further argues that Namibia and Botswana were comparatively rich, “with great mobility, extreme income inequality, little female opportunity, and high levels of sexually transmitted diseases,” (42) which made them fertile ground for the spread of AIDS. While not necessarily subjected at length to the same sort of denialism prevalent in South Africa that trickled down from the highest echelons of the government to the poorest of the poor, Botswana too laid claim to the general stigma of the disease. Iliffe states, “the confrontation between this traditional moralism and medical rationalism was most acute in Botswana, the most vigorously modernizing of African states” (94). Traditional healers in that country, who exerted a huge

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influence on most of the rural and generally illiterate population, rejected both scientific explanations for the origin of the virus and Western medicine as an effective form of treating it. Instead, they claimed that the disease had emerged as a result of witchcraft, as punishment for people’s abandoning Tswana customs to embrace Western mores and ways of living. In those neighboring countries, then, pushback against Western science and ways of “treating” the world was partly responsible for the spread of AIDS.7 By the start of the twenty-­first century, no one could deny any longer that AIDS was in fact a medical disaster in Southern Africa. Reparative action only began in the new millennium, also revealing itself in the literary fiction published around that time. HIV medication was finally being administered at affordable prices to poorer sections of the African population, but only after Western drug companies were pressured to make antiretrovirals more cheaply available. The use of condoms was widely promoted, the disease was destigmatized with some public figures admitting they were HIV positive, and widespread campaigns were undertaken to educate the populace on the disease’s sources and cures. The comparison between South Africa and Botswana today remains apposite in almost every way. The virus had similar etiologies in both countries, its victims shared similar prejudicial beliefs, and both countries eventually took similar corrective measures—­one more successfully than the other—­to address the crisis. Botswana became an exemplar for AIDS treatment and management in the second decade of the twenty-­first century, even though the epidemic still rages in Southern Africa. As this brief history of the spread of AIDS in Africa shows, that medical disaster is a textbook case of a slow-­onset, long-­ranging catastrophe. Like the economic disaster in Zimbabwe, the medical disaster became a full-­fledged disaster only in or around the twenty-­first century, after a series of linked events occurred over a period of time. Unlike the oceanic disaster in Sri Lanka, the devastating consequences of the AIDS pandemic were exacerbated by a refusal to acknowledge the disaster as a disaster, even when catastrophe was staring people in the face. Although the economic disaster and the medical disaster share temporal similarities, once AIDS was recognized as a disaster in Southern Africa, its victims received extensive global attention and assistance, unlike the people of Zimbabwe. Was this because AIDS was a contagious disease and the “developed world” didn’t want diseased black bodies with whom it would come into contact? Was this because the West had experienced its own AIDS epidemic and had some sympathy

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for the suffering Other? Or was this because the images conjured by AIDS incited action through their shock value? Even though the AIDS crisis was as pernicious in its effects as the economic disaster in Zimbabwe—­what could be worse, a hungry person with no food or a dying person with no medication?—­rapid advances in scientific and cultural knowledge ushered in the realization that the disease could at least be treated or controlled, if not eliminated. While this may lead to more Event-­oriented literary texts that insist on working toward a solution, because the origin-­story of AIDS has been obfuscated over time and the catastrophe took many decades to boil into a full-­fledged disaster, writing about AIDS has also had more time and space to yoke the Story to the Event in varied ways. The Disaster Unconscious often pushes the Event forward, especially when it advocates treatment for the disease. The Event fuses with the Story in order to install a pedagogical agenda to change hearts and minds in ways that do not seem doctrinaire and that appear more forceful than if they were documentary-­oriented and less fictional in form.

But What Is A Medical Disaster? AIDS is a four-­letter word meaning the exact opposite of itself. It is an acronym for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, which sows anguish and terror in the hearts of those unfortunate enough to be diagnosed as HIV positive. It is also a disease that once conjured homophobic images of gay promiscuousness in the Western world but accrued a different imagistic density—­of black backwardness, unbridled sexuality, and non-­Western uncleanliness—­throughout Southern Africa, which hosts the greatest number of AIDS victims in the world.8 Leslie Swartz, Marguerite Schneider, Theresa Lorenzo, and Mark Priestley state, “HIV/ AIDS is without doubt the most serious health threat in the world today, with the burden of the epidemic being felt most strongly in sub-­Saharan Africa . . . More people die of AIDS-­related illness in sub-­Saharan Africa than of any other cause.”9 Approximately 20% of the adult population in South Africa is infected with the HIV virus. Although that country has a better medical infrastructure than other African nations, in 2015 a shockingly high percentage of 22.2% of Botswana’s adult population tested as HIV positive.10 As Unity Dow and Max Essex say in the introduction to their anthology on AIDS, Saturday Is for Funerals (2010), “The epidemic of HIV/AIDS has often been described as a calamity that could destroy

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Africa.”11 The African AIDS crisis thus meets all the metrics of a medical disaster, what physicians have calibrated as “the interaction between the acute medical consequences of a multiple casualty event (MCE) and the total medical capacity of the community affected [that] determines if the event amounts to an acute Medical Disaster.”12 Similarly, the authors of Disaster Medicine define a medical disaster (MD) as “any event that causes a large number of individuals to become ill or injured such that the medical resources available at a given time in a given jurisdiction are overwhelmed.”13 The relationship between the extremely high number of HIV positive people and the extremely scarce resources available in both South Africa and Botswana to take care of their sick populations creates a medical disaster, in terms of both the percentage of the infected population as well as the paucity of palliative treatment such as antiretroviral drugs and physicians trained in virology. The effects, management, and discourse of AIDS in the sociocultural and politico-­economic matrix of Southern Africa, such as its ostracizing stigma, have also had calamitous consequences. As Dow and Essex explain, while the research and treatment for the disease have made quantum leaps in the last few years, any progress in terms of applied medication and treatment is always hampered by “no vaccine, inadequate financial resources, and relative lack of physicians and nurses. Too often there is also a lack of political will. When taken together these limitations are usually devastating. This is what has happened in Africa” (Saturday Is for Funerals, x).

Ripping Off the Band-­AIDS This chapter borrows its structure from narrative medicine to situate the medical disaster within the cultural, political, and social context of Southern Africa in and around the millennium. Framing questions include how literary writing registers these sick possibilities? What boundaries—­between well and unwell, empowered and disempowered—­do these texts invite us to burst? What emotions do they evoke in us? How does narrative “treat”—­in every sense of the word—­the themes of disease and disaster? And what are the ethics of training the readerly gaze on the sick black body? What literary signatures and rhetorical flourishes do African writers use today to talk about AIDS that do not simply evoke but also empower? How does the Disaster Unconscious modulate the tension

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between Story and Event in a slow-­moving disaster that reached the boiling point a decade ago but with only some cooling down in sight? The medical sociologist Didier Fassin argues that “sociologists and anthropologists might benefit from the work of historians who, through their surveys of illness and the medical profession, often manage to bring the human social dimension to situations that medical language tends to disembody . . . Epidemics are moments of truth when both knowledge and power are put to the test.”14 If epidemics are in fact moments of truth and power, then art and culture are empowered to create alternate modes of knowledge that expand our understanding of truth to endow us with even more power.15 Literary narrative can insert emotional factuality and believable embodied characters into public discourses where affect, emotions, and even people may be flattened and depersonalized in the horror—­the horror!—­of the HIV epidemic. As Njabulo S. Ndebele claims in his foreword to Nobody Ever Said AIDS, “the intimate ways in which people across all communities are being affected by HIV/AIDS are all too often lost in media reports and statistics. It is creative responses such as these that remind us of the power of art in foregrounding the human face of suffering.”16 AIDS is a long-­ term, endless, and recursive disaster, in which a single infected person may infect another and thus start a new cycle of the epidemic. Even though urgent redressal is still required, as a result of the long presence of AIDS in Southern Africa, the Story fuses more symbiotically with the Event, not only to render the crisis visible and nameable but also to teach readers and victims alike to live with its presence in the longue durée and to embrace the new medical treatments coming their way. Unlike the economic disaster, in which the closed circuit of catastrophe cannot be broken without a change in the political dispensation, the possibility of healing from AIDS is less fatalistic. The Story in the medical disaster transcends the limitations of bland data and heartless-­sounding governmental and nongovernmental organization reports to provide an emotional and compassionate rendition of the AIDS crisis. The Story also helps create a sense of will and purpose to thwart the debilitating effects of the Event. Nobantu Rasebotsa, Meg Samuelson, and Kylie Thomas discuss the importance of a rehabilitative narration of the AIDS crisis in their introduction to Nobody Ever Said AIDS (2004), an anthology of stories and poems about AIDS in Southern Africa: What does it mean to live in a society where so many young people are dying? How has HIV/AIDS affected the ways in which

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Considering the narratives of those suffering from HIV and AIDS gives a “human face to suffering,” radically different from what we saw splashed across that cover of Time magazine: pain and adversity exist alongside community, courage, humor, ambition, and familial loyalty. These texts also reveal how the literary representation of diseased Africans by Africans themselves complicates the way in which AIDS in Africa presents itself in the global consciousness, providing an outlet of empowerment for writers, characters, and readers. Through the power that the Story holds to transmit itself into our collective imaginary, its ideas about life and living may also reach those afflicted with the disease, albeit in indirect ways. Literary empowerment manifests itself through varying maneuvers that point toward the Event even as form and style often provide relief from the intensity of the crisis. Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) and Unity Dow’s Far and Beyon’ (2000), the two novels discussed in this chapter, offer practical and pedagogical strategies to cope with a medical disaster. Both use fictional and literary techniques, such as streams of consciousness, a focus on the individual story to narrate the biography of a community, and concentration on the subjective interiority of the protagonist, to help their readers understand that medical disaster in collective terms. Both novels were published at the very beginning of the new millennium—­around the time when AIDS awareness first registered itself as a crisis and also made its mark on Southern African literature. The novels stand as exemplars of AIDS narratives in the moment when disaster is recognized as disaster.18 Welcome to Our Hillbrow and Far and Beyon’ examine the consequences of a slow-­moving disaster that reached the boiling point of inciting action decades later. Both novels use imagery specific to the crisis they narrate. Metaphors and themes of foreign germs populate both these novels, as do foreigners as germs, AIDS as alien and unnamable, the false naming and false provenance of the disease, sick and dying bodies, as well as illness and pathology in general. Welcome

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to Our Hillbrow heralds us into a postapartheid, postapocalyptic world of AIDS, poverty, crime, and the general sense of despair that prevails in a country trying to imagine itself “after the thrill is gone.”19 While less overtly political than Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Far and Beyon’ also uses the AIDS crisis to critique the paucity of women’s and even human rights in Botswana. The Disaster Unconscious generates a medicalized rhetoric that renders the representation of the medical crisis visible even as the stigma around AIDS, and the pressures of telling a story, depict the disease in increasingly oblique ways. Both novels emphasize that the conversation around AIDS—­a diseased discourse itself—­is also responsible for its devastating effects. The novels intervene in shaping the way we talk about AIDS through their Event-­oriented agenda: They shatter the silence around the epidemic as well as unwrap the tissue of myth and misinformation encasing the vocabulary of the disease. The ultimate project of these novels is therefore therapeutic, emerging most forcefully when seen through a medicalized, although hybridized, tripartite framework of diagnosis, treatment, and healing. It is precisely through this framework, at once Event-­oriented but also a fundamental aspect of narrative medicine, that Story and Event merge in fraught and fruitful ways. breaking book, Narrative As Rita Charon says in her ground-­ ­Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness, “my hypothesis in this work is that what medicine lacks today—­in singularity, humility, accountability, empathy—­can, in part, be provided through intensive narrative training. Literary Studies and narrative training . . . seek practical ways to transduce their conceptual language into palpable influence, and a connection with health care can do that.”20 Charon’s argument is transposable onto the relationship between Story and Event, where dry data and the single-­minded focus toward practical redressal that characterize the Event must be augmented by the Story’s emotional, psychological, and literary aspects.21 The tripartite continuum in these novels uses the tools of both Western or allopathic and African or traditional medicine to achieve this “palpable influence.” As Dow and Essex remark, “AIDS is a disease made for witchcraft” (Saturday Is for Funerals, 2). So, my use of the first term, “diagnosis,” rather than “divination,” deployed here does not reject African ways of detecting the disease but instead argues that the tools of hard science are sometimes the most appropriate instruments to recognize AIDS as AIDS, or what I have earlier referred to as citing disaster as disaster.22

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The widespread denial of the disease arises from a failure to give the virus its proper name, along with an inability to see the epidemic for what it really is. Part of the pedagogical function of these novels, then, is to use a medicalized discourse to diagnose or call out the disease by calling it by its name. Charon also talks about how health care professionals “bear witness to patients’ suffering” (ix), a phrase echoing the manifesto of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and highlighting the importance of bearing witness to apartheid’s hidden atrocities in the new South Africa.23 Bearing witness also emphasizes the need to bring to light any disaster, whether it is political, such as apartheid, or medical, such as AIDS; that act further ties the narration of this medical disaster to the particular postcolonial politics of South Africa, where the TRC casts a shadow over most literature written in its wake. The second part of my tripartite model, that of “treatment,” is also deeply influenced by Charon’s assertions about how narrative can influence medicine and function as “a form of health care that recognizes suffering, provides comfort, and honors the stories of illness” (ix). Charon uses the term “narrative medicine” as a “new frame of health care . . . [that] offers the hope that our health care system, now broken in many ways, can become more effective than it has [been] in treating disease by recognizing and respecting those afflicted with it and in nourishing those who care for the sick” (4, emphasis added). Part of the treatment advocated in these two novels is to respect, not stigmatize, HIV-­positive people. Charon’s work, importantly, exhorts us to pay attention to nonverbal signs and oral intonations of patients—­to take care to actually hear their stories. She asks doctors to “listen expertly and attentively to extraordinarily complicated narratives—­told in words, gestures, silences, tracings, laboratory test results and changes in the body—­and to cohere all these stories into something that made provisional sense on which to act” (4, emphasis added).24 Narrative as treatment emerges most forcefully not only in listening to the stories that AIDS survivors tell us but also in having the “provisional sense on which to act,” both in this chapter and in the rehabilitative project of disaster writing. In showing how to uncover metaphors, the silences, and the aporias of literary texts, these novels diagnose disaster as disaster and empower, or often treat, ourselves and others through that knowledge. A literary prescription for an AIDS treatment plan must prioritize an ethical duty to listen to stories of sickness instead of turning away because we can’t bear their pain or can only gaze at them in voyeuristic

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fashion. The binaries between us and them blur through the nuanced hermeneutics of narrative medicine. Literary empowerment may “just” consist of recognizing illness and disease as calling for more than the condescending pity that images of Africa often evoke. Yet a different ethics in responding to the way we view or read about the suffering of the Other may sometimes be “just” enough for African writing about AIDS to succeed in its pedagogical agenda. In this fusion of Story and Event, the Story emphasizes the Event in fruitful and productive ways. The last term I use to structure this chapter is “healing.” Again, Charon offers a useful way to think about narrative healing and its goals: By equipping ourselves with narrative competence, we are able to use the self as a therapeutic instrument . . . With our narrative attunement to temporality, we mark the passage of time . . . With the narrative tools of diction and dictation and metaphor, we can represent and therefore recognize and admire singular individuals in contextualized situations . . . Through narrative effort, we achieve first the subject position and then, with luck, the intersubjective bond between ourselves and others, thereby inaugurating and framing the therapeutic relationship . . . With narrative acts and skills, we recognize and live up to the ethical duties incurred by having heard one another out . . . Instead of depleting us, this care can replenish us . . . [Offering] its own reward, this care envelops us all with meaning, with grace, with courage, and with joy. (236)

Notice the use of literary or Story-­oriented terms such as temporality, dictation, metaphor, narrative effort, and action. Charon’s concept of healing echoes Isabell Lorey’s invocation of “care community,” where she calls for constituting “a ciudadanía, a care community in which our relationality with others is no longer interrupted but is regarded as fundamental.”25 This healing is not, however, merely psychic and emotional. The intersubjective relationships formed by listening to stories of AIDS told by Africans themselves create a real-­world exchange of useful information, much like the practical advice disseminated in the tsunami stories in chapter 1, helping us understand heuristic—­and therefore alternative—­approaches to managing the AIDS crisis. While dealing with a disease that refuses to be called out by its name, the literary apparatus of the Story shows us how to name the Event as what it really is.

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My use of the word “healing” also suggests an Africanized attitude toward a return to health rather than a “cure,” which implies a more Westernized attitude toward finding a solution, an end point to the crisis. According to Ellen Grünkemeier, “the great number of African healers indicates the crucial role traditional medicine has played in the health care system . . . 60–­80% of the South African population visit ‘traditional healers’ as their first contact for advice and/or treatment of health concerns . . . simplistic binary oppositions [between African and Western medicine] obscure the dynamic and heterogeneous realities of medical practice in . . . Africa.”26 The hybrid medicalized mode of narration foregrounded in this chapter constitutes a large part of the healing that the literary texts offer. Framed in the governing terms of Postcolonial Disaster, the Event-­oriented function of writing about crisis reveals how narrative can both heal and soothe; yet narratives of the medical disaster must heal and soothe through a combination of two different, often oppositional, ways of treatment—­the Western and the African. This hybrid medicalized narration is a Story-­strengthened mode itself. Much like rebuilding after the Indian Ocean tsunami, the diseased discourse of the medical disaster can only be subverted through a synthesis of Western and African knowledge-­systems as well as their forms of storytelling.

This Is Us: Cosmopolitan Inclusivity in Welcome to Our Hillbrow The discourse of the medical disaster is imbued with South African colors in the novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow, especially when framed against the disillusionment of decolonization as well as the unique political occasion of apartheid and its aftermath.27 This not only puts the Event in conjunction with the Story but also merges the novel into the grand narrative of postcolonial literature: the failure of independence and the struggle for a bright, true freedom. According to Grünkemeier, “the fight against the epidemic is frequently signified as the ‘new struggle,’ thereby establishing an analogy with the ‘old struggle’, the resistance movement against South Africa’s state policy of apartheid  .  .  . Continuity between the ‘old struggle’ and the ‘new struggle’ can also be recognized in the degree of overlap amongst the people involved. Many South Africans who fought against the apartheid system are still active in the fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS” (105–­106). South African

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AIDS narratives can also be placed on a trajectory involving “bearing witness,” resisting the oppressive practices of African healing and Western medicine, confessing the truth, and forgiving both the Self and the Other. This novel not only follows the great postcolonial Story but also the Story of postapartheid South Africa. The novel’s literary qualities expand outward to encompass the postcolonial metanarrative as well as contract inward to register South African history. This turning out and turning in tacitly acknowledge larger literary discourses, showing how even Event-­oriented disaster fiction is always nestled within bigger literary corpuses that make their Stories complex and rich. Rasebotsa, Samuelson, and Thomas discuss the “enormity of the task of bearing witness to suffering and facing loss” in many of the works in their collection on AIDS (Nobody Ever Said AIDS, 12). This sobering responsibility brings to mind the nature of apartheid-­era literature, which often testified to the atrocities of the apartheid regime that operated under the same cloak of silence and denial that constituted the hallmark of public discourse on AIDS. The three editors of Nobody Ever Said AIDS also argue that: Many of these writers included in this volume rightly perceive HIV/AIDS to be a threat to the rights for which they and their predecessors fought in the previous decades. They have returned to the language of the struggle to confront both the pandemic and the inadequate response to the local governments and the international community. Many of the poems and stories [in this collection] . . . represent a call for recognition and resistance. (13)

The struggle against the totalitarian economic policies of Mugabe was also articulated in terms of the long freedom struggle against white rule in Zimbabwe. Postcolonial crisis often reveals how “old” postcolonial and anticolonial theory and history can shed light on the problems of the “past-­colonial” present. The same Story, of fighting for independence and equality in the newly free nation, is often repeated in crisis literature through the language of the freedom struggle. Welcome to Our Hillbrow articulates the apartheid-­era imperatives of “bearing witness” as well as answers the freedom struggle’s “call for recognition and resistance,” what can be medicalized as diagnosis. The novel links the way it talks about AIDS to the postapartheid period, especially the workings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Sarah

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Nuttall says, “if people start writing about hiv/aids the structure of the narrative can still be related back to the TRC’s interest in traumatic narrative. A kind of confessional culture in general, if you like.”28 If the AIDS narrative in South Africa is in effect endowed with the structural legacies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, then its ultimate agenda also reflects that of the TRC: reconciliation through truth, or what can be medicalized as Treatment. Most important, AIDS narratives, such as Welcome to Our Hillbrow, also focus on a restorative well-­being achieved through embracing collective culpability as well as extending forgiveness—­such as the TRC’s governing concept of restorative justice—­or what can be medicalized as Healing.29 My use of “diagnosis,” “treatment,” and “healing”—­all Event-­oriented terms themselves—­not only shows how the Disaster Unconscious scaffolds the Event onto the Story but also emphasizes the necessity of medical rhetoric in areas where the life-­saving properties of Western medicine are impugned merely because they are Western in origin. The novel is addressed to the deceased central character Refents˘e, often deploying the pronoun “you.”30 The author, Phaswane Mpe, not only diagnoses the discourse around the epidemic as a disaster but further offers a three-­pronged medicalized strategy to counter the effects of a diseased discourse. As Ato Quayson states, “literary representations of disability [in which I include illness and disease] are not merely reflecting reality; they are refractions of that reality with varying emphases on both an aesthetic and ethical kind.”31 Welcome to Our Hillbrow stages ethical and healing interventions through its literary modes that can be directly mapped onto major political strategies in apartheid and postapartheid South Africa. As a diagnostic mechanism, narrative as discursive rehabilitation echoes the idea of “bearing witness” to the atrocities of apartheid perpetuated in altered form in the postapartheid era; metafiction as psychological healing echoes the TRC as a process in which reflection on the act of telling through the telling sheds the unhealthy skin of secrecy and provides treatment; cosmopolitanism as ontological corrective echoes the idea of forgiveness of both Self and alien Other, with the vital second agenda of the TRC being to establish itself as a mode of healing. The novel’s thematic and literary structure—­ its Story, in other words—­ reflects the same diagnostic-­treatment-­healing paradigm that can also be projected onto the Event-­oriented history of South Africa. The apartheid era, as well as the colonial period, always shadow the postapartheid, postcolonial era. Although the political turbulence in South Africa is implicitly

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present in my analysis of the novel, I focus more on the three-­pronged medical intervention that is part of the novel’s schema, in order to foreground how the Disaster Unconscious intervenes to rectify the diseased discourse of AIDS in supposedly fictional work.

Diagnosis: Narrative as Discursive Rehabilitation The novel’s geographic setting expands outward to England and contracts inward to the village of Tiragalong, but its emotional center resides in the vicinity of Hillbrow. Geographic displacement may dilute the intensity of the Event. However, AIDS is a sickness carried within and cannot even be escaped through bodily migration to a “better” world. According to Carrol Clarkson: Mpe’s novel is set in Hillbrow, an inner-­city neighborhood of Johannesburg. In 2003, the population of Hillbrow was ­estimated to be over 100 000 during the week and ­possibly over 200 000 over weekends. These figures become more striking with the realisation that Hillbrow comprises less than one square kilometer. Until 1991, when the Group Areas Act of 1950 was scrapped, Hillbrow was the legal preserve of white residents but by 1970 people classified as Indian and Coloured had started moving into the neighborhood; by mid 1993 approximately 85 per cent of Hillbrow’s population was black  .  .  . Increasingly today, the population of Hillbrow consists of populations from other parts of Africa.32

Once a microcosm of the racial and international diversity of South Africa, Hillbrow has fallen prey to the postapartheid reconfiguration of apartheid-­era purity. As the demographics shift from whites-­only to Colored and Indians and then to black South Africans to finally Africans from other countries, xenophobia rears its ugly head: “Cousin would always take the opportunity during these arguments to complain about the crime and grime in Hillbrow, for which he would hold such foreigners responsible; not just for the physical decay of the place but also for the moral decay.”33 While the rhythmic, playful prose of “crime” and “grime” seeks to move away from the intensity of the Event, the Disaster Unconscious cascades through words such as “foreigners” and “moral decay”—­the latter

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a recurring image in this novel—­that instantly spell out the promiscuity stereotypically associated with HIV. So Refents˘e thinks sardonically: “I wish those girls and boys in our villages had more respect for their genitalia and did not leave them to do careless business in Hillbrow, only so that we can attribute the source of our dirges to Nigeria and Zaire and . . .” (20). Again, irony and sarcasm can be seen as literary techniques, but here they serve to conjoin with the Event to make us understand its intensity even more. This melding increases with long-­ term, slow-­onset disasters. The narrator points out that AIDS is seen as a moral problem, one of sexual looseness, when it is much more complicated than such a simple explanation. Literary narration takes on the role of an autodidactic aesthete here, insisting that we discard the too-­easy explanation of blaming our unwellness on foreign germs, also locating ourselves—­I am deliberately lapsing into the collective voice of the novel here—­as the source of the scourge. The literature of the medical disaster forces readers to think more about who is “responsible” for creating the catastrophe as well as how its deleterious effects can be managed in holistic ways. Grünkemeier cites Shula Mark as stating that “precisely because the virus is transmitted sexually, it makes government and indeed public health intervention particularly fraught” (Grünkemeier, 13); this tension is exacerbated by apartheid-­era memories in which the government assiduously sought to intervene in the private lives of nonwhite South Africans and even to take control of their bodies, once again revealing the postcolonial framework that structures the fictional representation of these disasters. Given the tense discourse around a disease that is transmitted sexually, literature can makes bold interventionist claims, particularly through the masquerade of fiction and in its own Storyness. The novel is laced with references, metaphors, and imagery of germs, medicine, illness, and AIDS to critique the dominant discourse about the virus that blamed the spread of the disease on foreigners migrating from elsewhere in Africa: One of the stories that you remember vividly was of a young man who died of a strange illness in 1990, when you were matriculating. The migrants said it could only have been AIDS. After all, was he not seen roaming the whorehouses and dingy pubs of Hillbrow? While his poor parents imagined that he was working away in the city, in order to make sure that there would be a huge bag of maize to send back for all at the homestead. The

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migrants, most of whom insisted that he was a stubborn brother, who suffered because of blocking his ears with gum while they dished out advice to him, also said that he was often seen with Makwerekwere women, hanging on to his arms and dazzling him with sugar-­coated kisses that were sure to destroy any man, let alone an impressionable youngster like him. He died, poor chap; of what precisely, no one knew. But strange illnesses courted in Hillbrow, as Tiragalong knew only too well, could only translate into AIDS. This AIDS according to popular understanding was caused by foreign germs that travelled down from the central and Western parts of Africa . . . Migrants deduced from such media reports that [the] AIDS travel route into Johannesburg was through the Makwerekwere and Hillbrow[,] . . . the sanctuary in which the Makwerekwere basked. (3–­4, emphasis added)

Bright-­eyed Boy goes to Big City. Bright-­eyed Boy succumbs to seduction of Big City. Bright-­eyed Boy dies of Deadly Disease Associated with Foreigners in Big City. This is not a new myth about how AIDS spread in Africa. But Mpe is one of the first novelists to attach the truth to the Story. Hillbrow is an urban cosmopolitan area infected with a threatening and foreign Otherness, which is appropriately allegorized, as well as literalized, as a virus populated with “foreign” germs. Using heavy irony as a rhetorical tool that foregrounds the Story but also links itself with the Event, Mpe critiques South Africans for blaming other African migrants for the spread of AIDS, while absolving themselves from taking responsibility for the crisis. The novel echoes the “bearing witness” aspect of the antiapartheid struggle by uncovering the layers of secrecy that shrouded apartheid-­era atrocities on the one hand and the AIDS crisis on the other. Welcome to Our Hillbrow fills a gap in public discourse on disease: “Were the two [Johannesburg and the foreigners] not equally dangerous . . . Immoral . . . drug dealing . . . murderous . . . sexually loose . . . money grabbing . . . Others said: What a pity that Refents˘e’s mother had to pay the price for the loose Hillbrowan sins, her only mistake being that she used medicines that were too strong in her attempts to save him from himself” (46). Missing from this litany, of course, is AIDS—­the disease that cannot be named. Public conversation adamantly refuses to name AIDS as itself, pretending that the metropolis, along with its

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foreign inhabitants, was responsible for the spread of AIDS. The idea of purity brings to mind apartheid-­era rhetoric, which claimed that “apartness” was best for all ethnic groups since it maintained the essential integrity of the races. Behind this ugly fiction of purity lay the equally ugly reality of racism as political and economic empowerment. Just as antiapartheid narratives sought to expose the truth behind the fiction of apartheid rhetoric, so too does Mpe’s novel intervene in the rhetoric about AIDS by creating an alternative story to reveal all the perpetrators and all the victims, and to think about the paradox of victims as perpetrators. The vocabulary of the disease is rehabilitated to allow for a fictional or Story-­oriented, yet factually valid, narrative to emerge. Mpe foregrounds the Story through the use of humor as well as stream of consciousness writing and marshals medical metaphors, such as those of germs and infection, in order to show us the Event-­oriented reality of AIDS. While these narrative techniques may often skew the “real” project—­of speaking truth to power and the urgent need to talk honestly and directly about AIDS—­the Disaster Unconscious pushes the Event to the forefront despite, and sometimes even through, the use of “distracting” imagery. In its ability to show, not just tell, metaphors can articulate brutal truths that plain language sometimes cannot. Yet their metaphorical status also risks our nearly missing the brutal truths staring us in the face, precisely because metaphor and imagery train the readerly gaze to look indirectly rather than directly. The Story itself, in short, is simply not enough in a disaster. It must conjoin with the Event in order to narrate crisis as crisis.

Treatment: Metafiction as Psychological Healing With its investment in narration, literary craft, and the facticity of fiction, Welcome to Our Hillbrow imbues itself with the qualities of a metanarrative. Refents˘e writes a short story about Hillbrow and AIDS, which is accepted for publication in a “reputable literary magazine” (30). The story within the Story originally opens on an autobiographical note with a recapitulation of Refents˘e’s one-­night stand: It became instead a story about an HIV-­positive woman from Tiragalong, who was ostracized by her fellow villagers when they learnt about her health status. The Tiragalong of your fiction

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said that she deserved what she got. What had she hoped to gain by opening her thighs to every Lekwerekwere that came her way? And, as Tiragalong well knew, the cry of a person who has committed suicide is a drum; when it plays we dance. So in your story, as in real life, Tiragalong danced because its xenophobia—­ its fear and hatred of both black non-­ South Africans and Johannesburgers—­was vindicated. (54)

Xenophobia functions as a metaphor for AIDS here. Foreigners symbolize the alien body of the virus that enters the system, depleting the host till it dies. AIDS is also depicted as suicide, a gendered, sexualized, and xenophobic form of self-­death. Leaving the country for the city is another a form of suicide, physical as well as psychological. Yet the metafictional aspects of the novel complicate such a simplistic assessment. According to Evan M. Mwangi, Welcome to Our Hillbrow presents the problems facing postapartheid South Africa in a fiction that sees the reality in the society as stranger than the fiction. It is through this commingling of fiction and reality that the narrative sustains a sense of irony with which it presents the disjunction between expectations and reality in the newly independent nation.”34 The phrase “commingling of fiction and reality” points to the conjoining of Story and Event. In constantly analyzing the process of creating a Story, metafiction invites us to think about the constructed nature of public discourse: “You had her [the character in Refents˘e’s short story] write a novel about Hillbrow, xenophobia and AIDS and the prejudice of rural lives. Given the limited length of your short story, you could not explore the issues in any satisfactory detail” (55). So, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, the fictional novel framing the metafictional short story, “explore[s] the issues of AIDS in “satisfactory detail” instead of investigating the character. The figure of threatening Otherness embodied in the etiology of AIDS represents the diseased foreign body as well as death itself. The racial purity of apartheid is evoked as a national purity instead. Disease then becomes a marker of Self and Otherness. In this bio-­narration of lives cut short and left incomplete, Refents˘e’s heroine cannot finish her book on Hillbrow: “So the story of Hillbrow and xenophobia and AIDS and the nightmare of rural lives remained buried in the heroine’s files” (58). The effects of AIDS are so all-­consuming that even metafiction, along with its therapeutic qualities, is left unfinished, relegated to files. While

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this may seem to be a moment when the Event subsumes the Story, it crucially initiates the incomplete process of healing, which is almost always presented as the fantastic possibility that is necessary for cautious hope: Your story was in English, since unlike the naïve and hopeful woman of your fiction, you knew the limitations of writing in Sepedi. But, like your heroine, you wrote your story to find sanctuary in the worlds of fiction that are never quite what we label them. You wrote it in order to steady yourself against grief and prejudice, against the painful and complex realities of humanness. (Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 59, emphasis added)

The circulation of alternative forms of knowledge about the medical disaster reveals that telling always exceeds the teller. AIDS is such an unconquerable disease that even its narration cannot be commandeered to suit the purpose of the author. The Story is unable to contain something as capacious as the Event. Yet narrative also becomes a way of coping with, or treating the disease of the prejudices it generates, and of the painful burden of sexual stigma even if its ability to heal is always partial, incomplete, and limited in scope. The fragmentary narrative structure of Welcome to Our Hillbrow—­the stream of consciousness narration, the incomplete sentences, the repeated use of ellipses—­shows how the Story and Event can harmonize to the point that they actually reflect and enhance each other. The novel’s metafictional agenda is also highlighted through the character of Refilwe, Refents˘e ex-­paramour. She reads his short story about “AIDS, xenophobia, and Hillbrow” (a recurring refrain in Welcome to Our Hillbrow): It was because of these frustrations, because she had come to value so greatly the importance of literary honesty and risk-­ taking, that Refilwe appreciated Refents˘e’s short story so much; his story that looked at AIDS and Makwerekwere and the many-­sidedness of life and love in our Hillbrow and Tiragalong and everywhere. His scarecrow heroine was a big influence of Refilwe’s thinking. She had read the story many times, and each time it made her weep anew. Partly because of the memories it brought of Refents˘e. And partly because it made her see

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herself and her prejudices in a different light. Since his death, she had much cause to rethink her own stereotypes of Johannesburg women. (95–­96)

While the term “scarecrow” brings to mind a handicapped and debilitated body—­ another recurring image in this novel—­ metafiction achieves what the primary fiction tries to accomplish in real-­world terms: to make people confront and “rethink” their own prejudices about who acquires AIDS from whom, especially also why women prostitutes are stigmatized as carriers of the disease. The Disaster Unconscious soars upward to catch the Story even when the Story attempts to fly away from the Event through the literariness of metafiction. Literary and philosophical contemplation are seen in medical terms, as if someone is having a stroke or an aneurism—­again, an Event-­ oriented return to which so many disaster narratives circle back: As you, Refents˘e, watched the tragedy of this life story unfolding, as you sat in the lounge of Heaven and pondered the complex paradox of life, death, and everything in between, you seemed to see, simultaneously, the vibrating panorama of Hillbrow and all its multitudinous life stories, conducting themselves in the milk, honey and bile regions of your own expanding brain. Your head became incredibly painful. You heard the echoes of ­Welcome to Our Hillbrow . . . hitting relentlessly against your skull, as if trying to fight their way out of the bony encasement. Your skull threatened to collapse at any moment, causing you the worst headache known to humanity. Your head spun at untold speed and you became intensely dizzy in these hot, whirling webs of sensory input, your memory picking out choice words here, scenes there  .  .  . the infinite fragments combining and recombining in the containing frame of your head. Until the roaring pressure of your skull finally exploded. (79, emphasis added)

The numerous iterations of the word “story” suggest that the novel knows the importance of the Story in representing the Event but also realizes its own artifice when faced with the reality of the Event. Notice the phraseology here—­the brain expands, the head is “incredibly painful,” the words “Welcome to our Hillbrow” fight to exit the mind, the skull is on the verge of collapse, the mind is spinning, the protagonist

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is dizzy, and his brain finally “explodes.” Metaphorically and medically speaking, these phrases could signal a stroke or some other violent upheaval in the brain. The literary narration of the medical disaster has biophysical consequences on the writer even as literary narration shapes the biophysical discourses of the disease. Heaven, too, is not free from the effects of AIDS. Its consequences are so pernicious that they follow the narrator into the supposedly sweet release of death. Metafiction provides a form of psychological treatment, yet the act of representing such a brutal reality and the real reality of that reality further impairs the writer in both physical and mental terms.35 The vastness of the Event here literally destroys the Story. Metafiction as partially successful treatment echoes the structural process of the TRC, which also functioned as a scopic analysis of the process of storytelling in order to disembark at Truth and embark on the new journey toward Reconciliation. The process of healing lies somewhere between the actually acquired reality of Truth and the ever-­ present but never-realized possibility of Reconciliation. Just as Mpe’s characters are “retraumatized” by the process of telling the Truth, so too did the TRC fail to fully achieve its goal. According to Hugo Van der Merwe and Audrey Chapman, “with regard to healing, some survivors declared that testifying at the amnesty hearing was also a traumatic experience in that it opened up their old wounds and made them feel depressed.”36 Reflective fiction such as Welcome to Our Hillbrow keeps us from romanticizing the healing possibilities in narrating the medical disaster. In reading the Story and witnessing the author fleshing out the narrative, we may arrive at the Truth of the disaster, but that Truth may not always bring about healing or reconciliation, especially with the fullness we desire. The use of metafiction as a literary strategy to promote treatment, or a path to healing, reveals the incomplete success of the pedagogical agenda in this case. The literature of this medical disaster is only able to offer fragmented solutions to the AIDS crisis, a partial panacea that is fittingly represented in the way the book is also written—­as a series of broken meditations on an unbroken crisis. This is also a characteristic of the slow-­burn, long-­range disasters in which no instant and immediate cure is in sight. Unlike the tsunami, after which something can be done right away—­such as rebuild demolished houses, schools, and even the nation—­AIDS requires a much more long-­term treatment plan that includes changing attitudes about the disease.

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Healing: Cosmopolitanism as Ontological Repair Yet the novel continues to attempt to heal itself and others. Refilwe goes to England to study where she encounters many of the same stereotypes about diseased Otherness circulating in South Africa. The novel warns us that the rhetoric of medical disaster, and whom we hold responsible for the disease, reinscribes the boundaries of racial purity, which the West still upholds and which postapartheid South Africa swore to forsake: It was not the same for these other Africans. These Africans from the West were the sole bringers of AIDS and all sorts of other dirty illnesses to this centre of human civilisation. Their passports were scrutinised, signatures checked, double checked and triple checked. Our Heathrow strongly reminded Refilwe of our Hillbrow and the xenophobia it engendered. She learnt there, at our Heathrow, that there was another word for foreigners that was not very different in connotation from Makwerekwere or Mapolantane. Except that it was a more widely used term: ­Africans. (101–­102)

The engagement of the first-­person plural is a literary device in which the Story uses the resources at its disposal to narrate the Event productively, rather than subsumed by the intensity of the Event. Refilwe notices how easy it is for South Africans to pass through immigration because of their native country’s association with the developed world, unlike West Africa, which is still associated with “dirty disease” and death.37 Medical sociologist Didier Fassin quotes Drew Forrest, a journalist, as stating that “those who advance a viral explanation of AIDS believe that black people are unclean, uncivilized and sexually promiscuous” (When Bodies Remember, 122). Only after she leaves the African continent does Refilwe understand both what it means to be racialized as African as well as the destructive potential of South Africans’ racializing other Africans through colonialist tropes. The literary strategy of setting, and the critical distance that “being away” produces, shows how the Event follows the Story around no matter where it seeks to go. Mpe repeatedly asserts that blaming the medical disaster on a collectivity from outside is to subscribe to the same sort of r­ acialist logic that kept apartheid, and discourses of Western superiority, alive. The

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lessons of older postcolonial theory, of the anticolonial and antiapartheid movement, reveal themselves with vivid clarity in the contemporary present. In a novel that connects the village to the city and then to the cosmopolis, Refilwe realizes she is infected with AIDS only in Oxford after she falls in love with a Nigerian man with whom she has sex: Refilwe . . . must have been infected a decade or so. Except that she had not known that. So when the disease struck it seemed that it came suddenly, with no warning. It came with the speed of lightning and was just as fatal. The cold damp weather of Oxford, as well as her brooding concern about her loved ones at home, did not make life any easier. Her brooding was as bad as the encroaching English autumn weather; just as bad as all the ailments that did the rounds in her body. With such a concoction of ailments, bad weather and brooding, Refilwe knew she had to be finished quickly. (117)

The mention of autumn may well be a nod to Keats—­“seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness”—­ and a postcolonial reversal of the ­season’s life-­fulfilling possibilities.38 Literary reference and antireference both show the Story seeking to break away from the triggering Event of AIDS, even though the Event returns to haunt the Story. Mental ailments, such as brooding and the SADness generated by climatological extremes, alters the body in as toxic a manner as the AIDS virus.39 Refilwe then becomes “the scarecrow woman of Refents˘e’s fiction” (120) who is also judged by the members of her community: They were going to see AIDS incarnated. They did not realize that several of the people they had buried in the past two years were victims of AIDS. It was easy to be ignorant of this, because the disease lent itself to lies. Such people were thought to have died of flu or of stomach-­ache. Bone throwers sniffed out the witches responsible, and they were subsequently necklaced. (121)

The novel criticizes African customs that forsake the rational thought required to treat a life-­threatening sickness. Mpe also denounces the way in which people pretend that AIDS is always something else instead of embracing the reality of the disease: “Linguistic chisels [were

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sharpened], furthering the process of carving your death that AIDS had begun. Speeding the process up. As if the sooner you died, the better for their belief in the evil of the Makwerekwere and the AIDS they are said to bring” (122). Language is a disease in and of itself but also paradoxically a cure for the disease. For it is through language that a diseased discourse can be diagnosed, treated, and healed. If language is a fundamental aspect of the Story, then it also harmonizes with, and indeed enhances, the representation of the Event. The last chapter of the book is entitled “The Returnee” and ends with Refilwe’s going back to South Africa, to the village of Tiragalong: She wanted to be laid to rest in our Tiragalong, even if it meant exiting this world amidst the ignorant talk of people who turned diseases into crimes. She knew . . . that it was difficult for a woman to face her friends, colleagues, and the whole community and say her name, when they had all judged her to be just a loose pair of thighs with voracious appetite—­thighs in search of wandering penises to come and caress them. (116)

The only cure for the social effects of AIDS is to erase the boundaries of Self and Otherness we use to protect ourselves from taking responsibility as the co-­perpetrators of the disease. According to Mwangi, “Welcome to Our Hillbrow . . . opposes traditional purism and calls for the cosmopolitan abandonment of superficial boundaries” (163). A cosmopolitan embrace, with all its connotations of contact and intimacy, is the sole cure for the psychological effects of the disease. The novel ends with triangulating its three calls to curative action into one inclusive comment that further merges Story and Event: Metafiction speaks of a generous compassion that also assigns collective responsibility for the spread of the disease instead of solely projecting it onto the figure of foreign Otherness: Because soon, very soon, she would be joining Refents˘e, ­Lerato, Bohlale, Tshepo and the others in the world of our Heaven. Together, they would talk about Hillbrow and Tiragalong and Oxford. They would share their thoughts about love, AIDS and xenophobia. They would discuss ways of turning their spoken and unspoken thoughts into written fiction and poems. And as Refilwe comes to this part of her journey to AIDs and Tiragalong condemning her and the Bone of her heart and

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The stream-­of-­consciousness narration here not only plays on modernist discourse—­Refilwe is diagnosed with AIDS in the heart of the Empire, after all—­but also mimics the muddled delirium of a feverish brain. The constant triangulation of Tiragalong (village), Hillbrow (city), and Oxford (metropolis) shows that no matter how much we expand outward—­how cosmopolitan we come to be—­the medical disaster converges into similar prejudices and similar outcomes of death and fatality. Similarly, “love, AIDS and xenophobia” formulate another triangulation within the book’s central problematic: how to represent these themes and find healing in literary form, and how to use the Story without subsuming the Event or allowing the Event to control the Story in such a way that it ceases to be a literary narrative. According to Neville Hoad, “the continued attachment to the dead in the form of melancholia can be mobilized by the living in the interests of their own survival is a question that the sublimating, aestheticizing end of the novel may beg.”40 The whimsical fancy that, after death, “they would discuss ways of turning their spoken and unspoken thoughts into written fiction and poems” reveals the power of the Story in long-­term disasters. Taken literally, this statement makes no sense—­unless there are actually books in heaven—­but, metaphorically, it can be seen as the power of the book, of writing, to live on after the death of the author in order to continue fighting the medical disaster.

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As Refilwe reaps the “bitter fruits” of her own prejudice in death, she also realizes that her heart can open up to include all humanity. The rejection of witchcraft and bone-­throwing forsakes only certain aspects of African ways of knowing the world and foregrounds the hybrid form of healing discussed earlier in the chapter. Mpe suggests that in the face of this disease, which recognizes no racial or class or national barriers, our medical and emotional responses should also be boundaryless—­based on love, compassion, and sympathy. According to Oscar Hemer, “the tone of voice is that of a comforting parent or relative, incessantly repeating the phrase ‘Welcome to our Hillbrow.’ Yet the embracing inclusiveness stands in stark contrast to the xenophobia, superstition, violence, disease, and death.”41 Important though its critique of prejudice may be, the novel chooses to end with this “embracing inclusiveness” by ushering out its own title: Welcome to our Hillbrow is replaced with “Welcome to the World of our Humanity.” While this may resonate with echoes of a colonizing Western humanism, Mpe’s compassion toward the Other expands outward from the local to the global and back to the local again, suggesting that death and sickness connects us across the lines of region, race, and even nation. Flying in the face of postcolonial celebrations of a sophisticated cosmopolitanism, and also against the postcolonial metastory of national failure that the novel initially propagates, Mpe emphasizes that disease is the most cosmopolitan form of being, since it truly knows no borders. An adequate response to such a worldly sickness can also only be similarly cosmopolitan in scope. The cosmopolitan vision outlined here maps onto the forgiveness urged by the TRC after all the stories hidden during apartheid were brought into the open and reflected on through the judicial process. Jacques Derrida’s essay on “cosmopolitanism and forgiveness,” especially its memorable assertion that true “forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable” rings with bell-­like clarity here.42 To be cosmopolitan is to embrace the other in the space of multiplicity we all inhabit. Embracing the Other means truly forgiving the Other. Linking cosmopolitanism to forgiveness through the concept of Ubuntu further subverts the Eurocentric connotations of cosmopolitan people as untethered world citizens. The Xhosa term “Ubuntu” is associated with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and was “an organizing trope of the TRC . . . [that stressed] the importance of communality, social cohesion, and solidarity to identity and humanity and simultaneously opposed the principle of retribution because it was seen to violate those principles.”43 Mpe, too, argues for

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a cosmopolitanism rooted in forgiveness, not in retribution, as well as in community, both local and global. His healing practice is emphatically located in process and not as the terminus of cure and is, thus, a hybrid fusion of Western and African modes of medical knowledge. As Hoad says, Mpe’s novel “implies that ‘cosmopolitanism’ is not an individual or even the attribute of an individual. Instead it is something like a structure of feeling, a web of relations [or Ubuntu] between the living and the dead, the rural and the urban, the healthy and the sick, the kinsman and the stranger, the Africans and the world” (116). The only way to work through the medical disaster is to unite and not segregate. Welcome to Our Hillbrow thus concludes with emphasizing its Afrocentric, but also humanistic, cosmopolitan vision: Heaven is the world of our continuing existence, located in the memory and the consciousness of those who live with us and after us. It is the archive that those we left behind keep visiting and revisiting; digging this out, suppressing this or burying that. Continually reconfiguring the stories of our lives, as if they alone hold the real and true version. Just as you, Refilwe, tried to reconfigure the story of Refents˘e; just as Tiragalong now is going to do the same with you. Heaven can also be hell, depending on the nature of our continuing existence in the memories and consciousness of the living . . . Refilwe, Child of our World and other Worlds . . . Welcome to our Heaven. (124, emphasis added)

The important theme of memory making is reinforced by the corpse-­ like imagery of digging and burying, of visiting and revisiting a grave, as it were. The word “archive” further brings to mind the TRC, whose recordings of people’s stories ran into volumes and volumes of books, returning to the iconic site of South African independence as if to find there some opening for a real postcoloniality. Mpe warns us that mere biographical fact does not contain the reality of our lives and that public narrative is very different from the “true” story; fiction must strain against this dominant narrative to provide counterfiction, just like the oral stories presented in the TRC testimonies. The Event must be tethered to the Story. How we are remembered determines the nature of our afterlife, so it is up to us to provide a corrective to any narrative—­here the diseased discourse of AIDS—­ that may misrepresent us. Significantly, Heaven is defined as a collectivity, our heaven, suggesting that

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in the afterlife, or at least in its narration, we can find a space to live a life based around Ubuntu, of cosmopolitan inclusivity and forgiveness, which dailiness, illness, and the diseased narration of illness deny us insistently.44 This, too, can be seen as the fantastic element of the Story where the only way to end the Event is to present us with “radical hope” through imaginative possibility. Discussing the restorative power of art, Rasebotsa, Samuelson, and Thomas state: Art allows us to enter into the world of others and sometimes even to recognize ourselves in those worlds. The power of words to transport us from isolation to a sense of community, even if only imaginary, is particularly important in a context where so many people are made to feel cast out—­alone with illness, with loss, with grief. (Nobody Ever Said AIDS, 11)

Our Heaven is an imaginary collectivity, or perhaps a collective imaginary, that separates us from the isolation of disease, allows us to mourn our own demise as well as that of others, and helps us come to terms with the disaster around us by reshaping the vocabulary of disease, albeit in fragmentary ways. If the solution to long-­range disasters is a long-­ range process, then the closed structure of the Story also reflects the impossibility of containing the ongoing Event. Welcome to Our Hillbrow recognizes the limitations of art in managing disaster, but the lesson it teaches is to never give up trying.

Bringing AIDS Near and Beside in Far and Beyon’ Unity Dow, a Motswana judge, lawyer, and human rights activist, also writes about the AIDS epidemic, although with fewer literary pyrotechnics than Mpe. Her novel, Far and Beyon’ (2000), foregrounds the medical disaster to rally for female autonomy in a nation caught between African traditions and Western influences. Analyzing an essay on Dow’s later novel, The Screaming of the Innocent (2002), Christine Matzke says, “Dow . . . firmly embeds the discourse of ancient ritual in the context of modernity. By using multi-­focalisation and cinematic narrative techniques, and a group of politically conscious women . . . Dow avoids simplistic dichotomies of good and evil and calls attention to the on-­going project of a national liberation in a Botswana riddled with injustices, contradictions and disillusionment.”45 Far and Beyon’ uses

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the AIDS crisis to seek the “national liberation” espoused by its successor novel; in both works, Dow argues that such freedom can only be achieved through the empowerment of women and girls. Like Welcome to Our Hillbrow, these thematic preoccupations of Far and Beyon’ can be most productively read through the filter of a hybrid African-­ Western medical process of diagnosis, treatment, and healing as well as through the metaphors and images of diseased bodies, foreign germs, and pathology through which the Disaster Unconscious advances its Event-­oriented agenda.46

Diagnosis: What’s in a Name? According to the diagnostic schema in Far and Beyon’, the collective inability to name AIDS as itself is a sickness too. The novel establishes its narrative strategy of coding the text with references to AIDS in its opening dedication, showing that the failure to name correctly merely casts a light patina of denial over the corroded reality of a disease that has spread everywhere. In a society refusing to assign appropriate nomenclature, the Story can force a name upon the disease through metaphor, imagery, and direct textual references, thereby fusing itself into a dialectic with the Event: Trudge not, through life, leaving ugly gashes. Tiptoe not, through life, leaving half-­formed impressions. The essence of self is carved by oneself; only the essence Of a diviner’s bones is carved by a human hand.47 (Dedication/Epigraph, Far and Beyon’)

An epigraph itself is a literary flourish that establishes the text as a Story and not just an agenda-­driven tract. The phrases “ugly gashes” and “half-­formed impressions” bring to mind a shadowy, mutilated, and scarred body as well as the spectral skeleton to which the AIDS victim is physically reduced. The image of “carving” the “essence of self” also suggests the violence perpetrated on the human body, as does the image of the bones of a diviner chiseled by a human hand. The explicit “take-­ charge-­of-­your-­own-­destiny” theme of the epigraph—­and its focus on self-­diagnosis rather than Other-­oriented divination—­is anchored to its implicit investment in pathology, disease, and specifically AIDS, providing readers with the first instance of narrative embedment of the

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HIV virus, before the novel even starts.48 Although the metaphors in the Story point us to the Event, they do so in subtle ways, leading more to a dialectic dance of the literary and the pedagogical. Far and Beyon’ opens with sifting the impact of the disease through the consciousness of Mara, an older and uneducated Botswanan woman: “the ignorant white doctors claimed that her two sons had died of AIDS-­related diseases” (7, emphasis added).49 While the tension with Western medicine and the displacement of HIV from an African illness to a Western-­disease is set up right away, AIDS cannot be named as itself even when its provenance is already distanced through its association with Western ignorance. Mara is only willing to say, and say to herself alone, that the ignorant white doctors claimed her sons had died of AID-­related diseases and not AIDS itself. This inability to face the reality of sickness, taking refuge in vague euphemisms and linguistic legerdemain instead, is endemic to the way the characters in the novel attempt to displace, destroy, and deny the pervasiveness of the disease: Tradition demanded the division [of the sexes], and the curse of AIDS could possibly be attributable to failure to adhere to this and many other traditions . . . Vague words such as “long illness always meant something was being hidden. Mara thought she heard someone say the word “AIDS,” but she could not be sure. In any case she could not imagine anyone being courageous enough to utter that dreaded acronym, especially at a funeral: “this disease”, “the radio disease”, “phamo kate” [the Sesotho word for a sexually transmitted disease] or “the disease that has a short name” were the more acceptable synonyms. (Dow, Far and Beyon’, 12–­13)

According to Grünkemeier, “Powerful people—­whites, E ­ uropeans, and Americans—­are blamed for the deliberate fabrication of the virus and a means to scare [black] Africans away from sexual intercourse and reproduction in order to reduce their number and to further their marginalization” (Breaking the Silence 18).These alternative ways of naming also echo the West in their association with technology—­ the radio disease—­and the use of acronyms—­the disease that has a short name, which further expunges AIDS from the authentic reality of Africa and propels it into the “hedonistic” spaces of Europe and North America. Although phamo kate is a Sesotho phrase, the language is spoken mostly in South Africa, which is often considered to be the most

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Westernized of all African countries. The Disaster Unconscious rises here and pushes up bland, data-­driven information around the Event without any plot, metaphors, or imagery to foreground the Story. Despite noting the failure to name, Mara also displaces AIDS as AIDS by resorting to alternate nomenclature herself: Poverty no longer earned one the privilege of a cockroach-­free environment. Now Mara could boast even bigger roaches. Some say they came all the way from Cape Town, on the southern tip of Africa. Others argued that had come with the American Peace Corps. Volunteers, who had formed a large contingent of expatriate teachers since the mid-­1960s; after all weren’t things bigger and better in America? It really did not matter where the nasty creatures had come from; they were clearly here to stay. (Far and Beyon’, 55–­56)

According to Grünkemeier, “metaphors, especially war metaphors, have been pervasive in representing infections in general and HIV/AIDS in particular, both as a global pandemic and as a national epidemic” (90). While the use of images such as “The War on AIDS” was a strategy deployed by AIDS-­activists, here the virus is represented as foreign insects, as it is in Welcome to Hillbrow, and with the same xenophobic collapse of South Africa into America/the West that is deployed in the use of phamo kate to refer to AIDS.50 Although Mara realizes the virus is here to stay, she has trouble not only naming the disease but even acknowledging its true ancestry. Rasebotsa, Samuelson, and Thomas discuss the destructive impact of this negation of disease: “Denial runs across all social strata across the region . . . One of the terrible consequences of this state of denial is the erasure of the lived experience of people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS” (Nobody Ever Said AIDS, 12). The Story can recover this erasure of lived experience precisely because it does not have to “name names” of real people, even while forcing a recognition of the true name of the illness, or of the Event; it can protect the anonymity of the victims of a stigmatizing disease without compromising the reality or roundedness of these characters. The psychological truth of fictional narration can speak for those who are rendered silent or those who prefer to remain silent. Literary vivification, through the form of the Story, is able to provide more flesh and depth to the spectral skeleton to which the discourse of the medical disaster has been reduced, even as metaphor provides a

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comforting illusion of distance from the Event: We can always pretend that we are simply reading. The diagnosis of false naming and false provenance intersects through the friction between African tradition and Western modernity that has contributed to the social tensions in postcolonial Botswana. Mara’s uncle asks her: Why have your ancestors forsaken you? Where is your God? Why has God turned his back on you? Your children are dying. You have lost your old sparkle. You are a shadow of your old self. There is a wind blowing through your house. There is sadness and death. You will excuse me for asking this straight out, but it is my duty. Child of my aunt’s child through your mother. I am your uncle and your father. I must ask. (Far and Beyon’, 42)

The incantatory rhythm of repetition—­God, God, Old, Old, Child, Child—­is a literary strategy that not only lulls and soothes but also evokes African oral chanting and ancestral heritage. The images of death and disease, the loss of a “sparkling self,” and the shadowy nature of the present persona all bring a diseased body to mind. Even while dancing around naming the disease, Mara’s uncle still conjures up the spectral skeleton of AIDS through the words he uses, showing yet again that the language of the disaster can never be escaped. Mara’s losses are never directly attributed to AIDS, though, for it is still the disease that cannot be named. Instead, the Gods Must Be Crazy Angry to inflict such devastation on an individual.51 According to Fetson Kalua, “the conflict between tradition and modernity is at the core of her [Mosa, Mara’s daughter’s] despair and confusion,”52 precisely because true diagnosis would mean forsaking some aspects of African thinking in order to claim AIDS, a “Western” disease, as not existing Out of Africa but literally in and of Africa. The Story here captures AIDS through its various literary techniques and forces it into the bounded nomenclature of the Event.

Treatment: Naming the Disease as Itself; Recognizing It as Ours As the novel moves from diagnostic to treatment mode, the narrative also begins to explicitly name the disease as itself. If diagnosis consists of understanding that the failure to name properly and falsifying the

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provenance of the disease are sicknesses requiring urgent redress, then treatment consists of grabbing the bull by its horns, looking it in its eyes, and assigning it proper nomenclature to underline and emphasize the existence of the Event.53 The novel initially seeks to name AIDS through embedding an elaborate network of images in the narrative that evoke the virus explicitly. The spectral skeleton of AIDS, for example, is conjured through Mara, who “had been stretched thin by the demands of the living, the dead and the dying” (Far and Beyon’, 27). In highlighting the emotional toll on the survivors of those felled by the disease, Dow allegorizes the physical effects on its victims and the psychic trauma of the survivors. This allegory has a deeper narrative purpose, though. Dow roots the vocabulary of the disease that cannot be named in the narrative, forcing readers to name the epidemic themselves when they find the clues hidden in the text. AIDS then invades even the most coded euphemisms. Until the characters can fully articulate the name of the disease, Dow continues to show this narrative sickness by inserting coded references to the illness into the narrative. The Story then becomes a way to enhance the Event-­oriented agenda, especially in a situation where there is a willed refusal to acknowledge the disaster as disaster. AIDS is thus part of the unconscious minds of the characters, even if they consciously refuse to name it as such. The Disaster Unconscious activates the Event to make a true naming possible. In another instance of the coded invasion of AIDS, Mara’s hair is cut off as part of the death rituals after she loses her son to the disease. “Soon, Mara was as bald as the soccer ball the boys were kicking about, and Mma-­ Ranko gently pushed her forward for everyone to see” (Far and Beyon’, 45). The bald pate again brings to mind the diseased body of the AIDS victim that society refuses to acknowledge as an actual AIDS victim. A child whispers to Phule’s daughter Nunu that “she was special only because her father was dead. None of the adults responded to that, deciding that ignoring the episode would be better than trying to intervene” (48). Like the whispers of the child that still fall with the force of blows, AIDS is always there, omnipresent and omnipotent, its reality never undermined by a silencing rhetoric of denial; instead, it is integrated into the very structure and imagery of the narrative. Denial rather than intervention, euphemism rather than true naming, blaming the provenance of the disease as Western rather than acknowledging it as also African: The novel diagnoses these aspects of the AIDS discourse as diseases, too, and treats them by calling AIDS out as AIDS in

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both overt and covert ways. When this naming is covert, the Story takes precedence with the ebbing of the Disaster Unconscious; as the naming becomes more overt, the Event takes precedence with the surging of the Disaster Unconscious. While Mosa, Mara’s daughter, represents the future of the country in terms of acquiring power through the truth of naming and provenance, she is also a symbol of grim hope. According to Kalua, “Mosa sees the collapse of ‘truth’ (pertaining to culture in this case) as it has been constructed by her society over many generations for ages” (76). Kalua also reads Mosa as “a character in a state of cultural transition, proceeding from a traditional and prescriptive tradition to a state of becoming” (77).54 Both becoming and treatment suggest a process toward healing rather than an end in and of themselves. As Mosa begins this process of treatment—­the long walk to freedom—­she has a moment of epiphanic understanding: “AIDS is everywhere,” she declares, “but people still do not want to talk about it” (Far and Beyon’, 98). Direct references, rather than truths embedded in the narrative, emerge more explicitly as the novel charts its course toward a treatment and thus becomes more Event-­oriented.55 In one such instance of direct referencing, Mosa admits to Stan that her brothers had in fact died of AIDS: “No, they died of AIDS as surely as I am lying here. I did not have the courage to admit it because I could not face the truth. As for what mother believes, I see no reason to challenge her just for the sake of challenging her. The part I do not like is blaming someone for your ills. For example, I do not believe that Auntie Lesedie ever bewitched us” (107). In this revelatory moment, Mosa realizes that AIDS is a medical disease—­it is not caused by witchcraft or Western-­ influenced sexual depredations—­and that the individual must accept responsibility for contracting the disease: The part I do not like is blaming someone for your ills. Yet even naming the disease as itself often means highlighting it as a scourge from the West rather than fully recognizing it as an African illness, too. Mosa and her family feel profoundly uncomfortable while listening to a broadcast about AIDS, which dares to call the sickness by its name but still doesn’t take full ownership of the disease: A woman who had an assumed American accent was talking about the dangers of AIDS and was advising listeners how to avoid the dreaded disease. The speaker kept switching between Setswana and English. Mosa thought the speaker’s explicit language was inappropriate for a national radio station listened to

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The radio, bringing to mind the earlier reference to AIDS as the radio disease, the fake American accent, and switching between English and Setswana all show how even people fighting against the disease can fail to recognize its origins, constantly associating it with the West instead. Mosa is ready to be educated about AIDS as long as the sexual nature of AIDS is not made explicit. Dow asks us to embrace the unease, to keep the radio on, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us.56 The Event collapses under the Story here as metaphor takes precedence over action. Indeed, seeing the novel itself as a metaphorical radio broadcast to which we must listen, no matter how uncomfortable the truths it tells, reveals its orientation toward the Story. Even though Mosa urges the more skeptical Stan to think about why people may reject Western medication and turn to African ways of treatment,57 the novel continues to undercut its own investment in African modes of diagnosis and treatment: But the truth was that the daughter was dying of AIDS. Just like her friend’s two sons had died of AIDS. She had not bewitched her friend’s sons. Just as her friend had not bewitched her daughter. The sons had died, and now the daughter was dying, just as many other people around them were dying. They were dying of AIDS. That is the simple truth. A painful truth. A truth exploited by many diviners, priests, and false prophets for their own financial gain. (163)

Dow, like Mpe, asserts that both direct nomenclature and recognition of provenance constitute vital parts of the process of treatment and that the false rhetoric of AIDS as an Occident of fate or a consequence of witchcraft will only delay arriving at the truth, and at treatment and healing. She treats the diseased discourse by embedding it in the narrative when the characters are unable to name it as such. As soon as they are able to recognize the virus for what it is, Dow further broadens the ownership of the disease by forcing a recognition of its African provenance.

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Healing: The Future Is Another Country As it finally embarks on its healing mode, the novel pushes open the idea of ownership beyond just claiming responsibility for discourse and rhetoric to women’s owning their bodies and becoming healthy through this empowering self-­possession. 58 In the climactic turnaround of the novel, Mosa accepts that she too may have AIDS. With acceptance comes the courage to move forward and to find long-­lasting well-­being rather than using Band-­AIDS, so to speak: “I need to accept my own role in this to be able to heal. Victims are rescued. I cannot wait to be rescued. You always have a choice, I think. Choosing the easiest and most obvious way out would be my undoing” (Far and Beyon’, 110). This is a remarkable act of courage from a young woman in a society in which there is little infrastructure or support system for AIDS, where even taking an AIDS test is cause for public humiliation. As Mosa and Stan talk, more secrets come tumbling out: “as the two swapped stories, they realized the powerlessness of girls in the face of abuse of power” (111, emphasis added). In this metamoment, the novel promotes a simple and powerful way to psychological, and perhaps even physical, health: Tell more Stories! Talking about disease can create a regenerative space, through what Ato Quayson calls “aesthetic nervousness,” which can lead to both self and social empowerment. The Story cannot supersede the Event, but it can flesh out the bare bones of information and act as powerful correctives to misinformation. Through sharing her truth, Mosa eventually empowers herself to take an AIDS test. According to Kalua, “Mosa’s resolve to remain outside the confines and dictates of her culture [through the HIV test] suggests she has adopted a rhizomic identity” (“New Perspectives,” 86). The Story can offer practical, real-­world strategies for managing the Event. The Disaster Unconscious begins to operate in more forceful ways now. Here, the directive of “Go, take an AIDS test” names the disease as itself, asks the African collective to accept the importance of Western diagnostic tools, and thus offers an Africanized healing for a sick rhetoric. That Mosa is female is crucial, since AIDS carries a specific gendered and sexualized stigma in Africa that infects its discourse. Mosa takes ownership in naming the disease, ownership of the provenance of the disease, ownership of what has happened to her body. Through this ownership she refuses to let the disease control her anymore. Mosa’s empowerment is not simply used for individual purposes. She also becomes a rallying point for community-­oriented female power. Led

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by Mosa, her fellow students rebel at the sexual misconduct in their school and protest the government’s refusal to punish that misconduct: All the students involved were scared. They had planned the whole thing over a couple of months, but having done it, they were not as convinced of the wisdom of it anymore. Being involved in the drawings and the poetry in anger and frustration blinded them to the fact they were dealing with powerful people in a system that needed to be protective of its own. (Far and Beyon’, 189)

The healing powers of art and literature can enable a courageous and truthful narration of disaster. In another instance of metanarration, the students stage a play they have created about the “powerlessness of girls in the face of abusive teachers. About the failure of innocent teachers to get involved or to intervene. About silence from the capital in the face of oppression in a small village. It was a cry for help, an indictment and a challenge all rolled into one” (190). The play within the novel is another instance of metafiction, of the Story’s asserting itself to ultimately conjoin with the Event. In the end, the visiting Minister of Education is shamed into helping the girls and exhorts them to ‘“keep their courage . . . You will go far in life . . .’ ‘and beyond,’ Mosa responded softly” ’ (191). In this dialogue echoing the novel’s title, Far and Beyon’ promotes valor in the face of adversity and fully spells out the word “beyond” for the first time in the novel. The repetition with a difference suggests that a crisis such as AIDS can never achieve a permanent transcendence or reach a full “beyond”; instead, its successes can be celebrated in the few instances when “beyon’ ” transforms itself into the wholeness of “beyond.” Even small choices in punctuation then direct the Story toward the Event. According to Kalua, “Mosa’s questioning of the practice [of teachers sexually abusing students] involves a deterritorialisation, a process during which a rupture takes place” (“New Perspectives,” 81). That Mosa thinks she has AIDS because of a relationship with a teacher allows disease, or even its possibility, to create a schism through which wider social transformation can take place because of the medical disaster. The novel ends, happily enough, with Mosa discovering that she doesn’t have AIDS after all. Given the momentum of the text, this may seem somewhat anticlimactic. Happy endings, however, are often a fundamental part of the cautious hope that disaster narratives provide.

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Still, the novel forces a consideration of the “what if . . . ?” What if I did have AIDS? What then? Through confronting the possibility of contracting a life-­shattering disease, Mosa is able to embrace its consequences. She tells Stan: First we have to accept that both Thabo and Pule are gone. What is important is that we have survived the ordeal intact as a family, or what remains of that family. Look around you: many have not. Families are breaking up; others are being expanded in ways the members cannot cope with. We are the lucky ones. So go on and take advantage of what Mr. Mitch [his teacher] is offering you. And if we have not learned from our experiences, we will never learn. (Far and Beyon’, 167)

Both Welcome to Our Hillbrow and Far and Beyon’ promote the idea of moving on through simple survival and opening the human heart to everyone else. The phrase “remains of that family” may conjure up images of death, with its carcass-­like imagery. Yet the word “remains” also suggests that not everything is lost; something always remains. Another AIDS victim is described as a “testimony to the power of the maternal bond that the little girl still saw, in this blackened, horizontal remnant of humanity, her mother” (168, emphasis added). The allegorical possibilities of the Story thus exceed the Event in showing us how to look beyond a shadowy, recumbent body on a sheet: Humanity still remains, albeit in a blackened and horizontal form. The fact that the little girl survives to look on at her mother, and is still able to feel that bond between parent and child, is a testimony to the resilience of the girl child as well as an evocation of the girl child as a symbol of healing for the future. The metaphors in the novel change as AIDS comes to be recognized as itself. While the novel still provides oblique references to the disease, it also names the disease as itself and offers up other metaphors, such as the potential of that very girl child, to embark on the road to rehabilitation. A different Story emerges then, even when the Event remains the same. The Story attempts to break free of the Event in an alternative way here: to reinvent itself through another trope, revealing the oblique ways in which the Disaster Unconscious operates in the narration of long-­term catastrophes. Both Welcome to Our Hillbrow and Far and Beyon’ infuse the medical disaster with political hues. Narratives about disaster rehabilitation are often constructed along the lines of anticolonial rhetoric. Yet disaster

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is a fierce and complicated antagonist, pointing to the recursive nature of the problems of postcoloniality. Mosa recalls her teacher’s saying: “Africa is held together by circular rhythms: almost an ideology” (30). The narrative of decolonization and disaster are part of a circular rhythm that makes it difficult to break the closed circuit of disaster but that nevertheless tells us important things about each other through their very circularity. The tension between literary technique and pedagogical intent are also part of this circle of disaster that can mutually undercut as well as, optimally, enable each other. In a relatively slow-­moving catastrophe—­the redressal of the AIDS crisis, which requires long-­ term change in both action and thought—­these novels move from only telling to telling and showing, and finally to showing.

Part 3 Simmer

Chapter 4

War of the Words Fighting Out the Geopolitical Disaster

“It was peacetime. Or so they said.”1 The opening sentence of “The Nativity” chapter in Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) exposes the myth of peacetime, especially when reduced to false blandishments by the Indian government. The c­ hapter demolishes the peace and tranquility associated with nativity, and indeed negates its own title, to reveal instead the nativism that characterizes contemporary India—­a nativism that cannot exist without its Essential Other: the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Roy then introduces the primary source of international conflict, the contested province of Kashmir. Members of the Association of Mothers of the Disappeared—­ Kashmiri freedom-­fighters who had vanished in their long crusade for an independent nation that belonged to neither India nor Pakistan—­visit the Super Capital of India carrying signs that say: The Story of Kashmir DEAD = 68,000 DISAPPEARED = 10,000 Is this Democracy or Demon Crazy?

This chapter is not about The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. It opens, however, with a description of a significant moment in The Ministry to show how the conflict between India and Pakistan, especially over Kashmir, serves as a metathematic arc in Roy’s novel. Seventy years after the bloody Partition of 1947, even the best-­known Indian and Pakistani writers are still preoccupied with what is happening across the border and in Kashmir, reflecting the intensity of the ongoing geopolitical

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crisis hanging over South Asia that has resisted political mediation from everywhere. Twenty years ago President Bill Clinton had pronounced South Asia as “the most dangerous place in the world today,” particularly singling out “the Indian subcontinent and the line of control in Kashmir.”2 Clinton’s prescient, albeit apocalyptic, remarks to the “One America Meeting with Religious Leaders” were made on March 9, 2000, at the start of the new millennium. Six months later, the cataclysmic events of 9/11 forcibly registered the long geopolitical conflict in South Asia onto global public consciousness. The 42nd president of the United States had already acknowledged that geopolitical disaster as a geopolitical disaster in the while giving that recognition a rhetorical flourish of his own. The South Asian geopolitical disaster makes for sensational narration even when reduced to an incident in a highly anticipated literary novel or to pithy presidential prose. Juxtaposing Clinton’s comments in 2000 with Roy’s novel from 2017 reveals not only the constant presence of geopolitical crisis in South Asia today but also suggests how the conflict between India and Pakistan may ebb and flow over the years but will never recede completely: especially in the new millennium rife with the exacerbation of Hindu–­Muslim tensions in India, the push and pull of Islamophobia and terrorism across the world, and rapid advances in nuclear and technological development.3

From Slow Burn to Simmer: Geopolitical Disaster Time The final chapter in Postcolonial Disaster explores how Indian and Pakistani novelists have represented the ebb and flow of this particular geopolitical disaster while writing about seven decades of built aggression. The book circles back to South Asia from Southern Africa to focus on the contemporary crisis with the longest history studied here. The economic disaster in Zimbabwe and the medical disaster in South Africa and Botswana took two to three decades to slowly burn themselves into a roaring fire in the twenty-­first century. The geopolitical disaster in South Asia commenced with the explosion of Partition in 1947, regularly erupted into border skirmishes and large-­scale wars over the next five decades, and is perpetually perched on the brink of a nuclear war in the twenty-­first century, always about to set off an atomic conflagration with the potential to destroy both India and Pakistan. That geopolitical disaster is, at once, the furthest as well as the most immediate disaster

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in its temporality from the other catastrophes discussed in this book. The term “simmer” of this section’s title suggests both the unsteady steady state of the “warm peace” between the two nations and its potential to suddenly erupt into flames. While war and extended international conflicts all fall under the purview of disaster studies, the field has not been able to generate a term for the unique conflict raging in South Asia over the last seventy years, because its progression defies the mainstream teleology of conflict and catastrophe. I use the term “geopolitical disaster” after multiple attempts to find a phrase that accurately depicts the India–­Pakistan crisis within the rhetorical framework of this book.4 In framing contemporary war as a consequence of colonial legacies, Frederick M. Burkle’s definition of “complex humanitarian emergencies” in Disaster Medicine comes close to encapsulating the situation in the Indian subcontinent today: [W]ar and conflict have increasingly become an internal problem for fragile nation states as they have emerged from the control of colonial and repressive regimes. These disrupted states often suffer from inequalities in social, economic, and political development that are exacerbated by long-­term ethnic, religious, and minority animosities and the fierce competition for existing resources. Once disrupted states deteriorate into war, they are commonly termed complex emergencies (CEs) because of the myriad causative characteristics that lead them into collapse. [The global health and development scholar] Zwi defines “situations as CEs in which the capacity to sustain livelihood and life are threatened primarily by political factors and, in particular, by high levels of political violence.”5

A CE often involves wars over long-­term religious and ethnic conflicts, vulnerable new nation-­states often rendered even more tenuous in their state as legitimate full nations, and their populations living in constant exposure to internal and international aggression. While Burkle’s definition of CEs converges with my definition of a geopolitical disaster, it does not address the specificity of the simmering geopolitics in South Asia. This chapter, titled “War of the Words,” focuses on the slowest-­moving and longest disaster in the book—­one that is a true disaster not only because of a singular catastrophe, such as Partition, but also because of a series of tragic events occurring across international borders over

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the longue durée of 70 years.6 The geopolitical disaster merges singular disastrous events into one large—­and endless—­catastrophe. The forced migration of Partition in 1947 that led to unprecedented sectarian violence; many wars, most with horrific casualties to both sides; multiple terrorist attacks; and the threat of a nuclear apocalypse, each constellate with the preceding catastrophes to create the South Asian geopolitical disaster. That disaster encapsulates what I call the “catastrophe continuum” in South Asia through commodious time: The disaster of Partition in the past, the disaster of military conflict and terrorism in the present, and the disaster of nuclear annihilation in the future all aggregate international conflict into the momentous magnitude and extended temporal scale of the geopolitical disaster. The greatest difference between the geopolitical disaster and the other disasters discussed in this book is that the oceanic, economic, and medical disasters all reached an explosion point in the twenty-­first century, one suddenly and the other two more slowly. South Asia, however, had already exploded with the Partition of 1947; although the people in the subcontinent have lived with the effects of the triggering event for more than seven decades, they continue to exist under the cloud of nuclear war even today. In calling the conflict in South Asia a geopolitical disaster, I give the hostile relationship between India and Pakistan a name. This nomenclature recognizes the volatile international relations on the Indian subcontinent as a disaster, thus lodging it in our consciousness as a catastrophe, raising all the attention, and generating the remedial action that an ongoing crisis requires. Giving the crisis in South Asia a name also avoids evacuating the term “disaster” of all its terminological relevance when interpolated into a relatively loose term such as “Complex Humanitarian Emergencies.” In providing a definition that is specific and also has potential for expansion, I seek not only to enlarge the nomenclature of disaster studies, but also to categorize, in meaningful and robust ways, what the field includes as its constituent subjects. In more literary terms, calling the India–­Pakistan conflict a geopolitical disaster reveals that the Disaster Unconscious is deeply embedded in fiction, most of which may not appear to be wholly driven by catastrophe. Fiction about the geopolitical disaster changes the lives, perceptions, and ideologies of those who live in its shadow, especially in terms of how the personal and the political interact with each other. The Story is always negotiated against the backdrop of the multiple Events

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playing out over a long period, including the all-­pervasive, yet ghostly, presence of Partition, the conflict over and within Kashmir, terrorism, religious fundamentalism, nuclear war, and constant hostility between national neighbors. The Disaster Unconscious politicizes everything in the India–­Pakistan conflict: The rhetoric of international relations tethered tightly to geographic proximity and military discourse, suffuses even the deeply affective language of personal relationships. The ­political is personal in the literature of the geopolitical disaster.7 The blurring of the political and the personal leads to a blurring of the Self and the Other, often generating a compassion for those defined as “the national other” by the self-­serving nation and, thus, for temporary reconciliation. Fiction can potentially dilute “otherness” through merging the political into the personal, offering a temporary corrective to conflict. Let the generals fight their war, the politicians sign their treaties; writers will reveal alternative strategies for creating what I call “neighborly national existence,” or how to live in harmony when the country next door is almost the same but not quite.8

But What Is a Geopolitical Disaster? To understand the definition of a “geopolitical disaster,” some unpacking of the term “geopolitics” is necessary, both in the “real world” of international politics and in literature. The political geographer Geoffrey Parker says that geopolitics is “the study of international relations from a spatial and geographic perspective” (in Cohen, 16).9 The term “geopolitical” is concerned with international relations, particularly regarding proximate geographic areas. “War of the Words” focuses on the slowest-­moving and longest disaster in this book. This geopolitical disaster merges singular disastrous events into one large—­and seemingly endless—­catastrophe. In her analysis of contemporary geopolitical novels, Caren Irr suggests that “authors of the geopolitical novel understand the present as a moderate crisis, not a severe catastrophe.”10 While most authors writing about geopolitics do not consider the world around them in apocalyptic terms, South Asian novels about the India–­Pakistan conflict—­but not all South Asian novels, by any means—­do represent the relationship between the two countries as a “severe catastrophe.”11 As a result of the complexity of the multiple Events, as well as the temporal distance

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from the primal rupture of Partition, the relationship between Story and Event is more oblique. Readers need to decode the novels with great care to reconfigure the centrality of the Event. John Marx, in Geo­ politics and the Anglophone Novel, argues that novels and writers “can contribute meaningfully to interdisciplinary debate about governance,” an argument I have made throughout Postcolonial Disaster about how narrative can help us think about, and through, disaster.12 In “War of the Words,” the authors discussed, and their characters, recognize a near failure on the part of the government to achieve any kind of meaningful dialogue with the Enemy Other and instead take it upon the individual, or the Self, to intercede in geopolitics. Even though the field of disaster studies seldom uses “geopolitical disaster” in any specific way, some scholars have used the term to describe the ground reality on the Indian subcontinent. According to the political scientist Itty Abraham, “the creation of Pakistan was a Geopolitical Disaster for the Indian state . . . The national problem epitomized by the new Muslim state on India’s borders engendered its own crisis . . . The independent state of Pakistan had become India’s largest diaspora.”13 Partition appears as the triggering Event, the originary wound, to which literary memory returns over and over again. The novels examined in this chapter—­Jaspreet Singh’s Chef (2008), Moni Mohsin’s The Diary of a Social Butterfly (2008), and Manil Suri’s The City of Devi (2013)—­can be variously placed in the past, present, and future stages of the catastrophe continuum.14 Yet all three novels attempt to create what I call “neighborly national existence” through blurring the boundaries between the familiar Self and the foreign Other, particularly by imagining alternative communities and axes of relations that transcend traditional models of kinship and national belonging. All three can be situated in a temporal and affective sequence in their depiction of geopolitical conflict. Chef focuses on a real war in the past. The Diary of a Social Butterfly details the constant military conflict and terrorism in the present. The City of Devi closes that time-­sequence and examines the apocalyptic consequences of a future nuclear war. The geopolitical disaster in South Asia is defined through the central tension that guides these novels: The uncertainty of life under the penumbra of slow-­moving or historically extended disasters. The Disaster Unconscious registers itself more forcefully when the Story turns back to remember an Event in the past, or when the Story is afloat in an Event in the present, or when an international incident presages an Event in the future.

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Fighting Out the Geopolitical Disaster Chef, the first text discussed here, deals with the lived reality of warfare to comprehend its human consequences. The novel critiques the various wars between both countries in the last 30 years and portrays how vulnerable populations live under such circumstances as well as how they use narrative to understand the explosive world around them. Chef is more oriented toward war as a remembered, and real, Event that has deep roots in the past. The Diary of a Social Butterfly, by contrast, is haunted by the all-­pervasive, yet shadowy presence of war and terrorism—­a present occurrence and future possibility that is continuously deferred but also continuously there. The City of Devi paints a picture of what could happen in a war between India and Pakistan if it took place in the twenty-­first century, presenting the apocalyptic futurity of nuclear disaster. “War of the Words” traces the depiction of international conflict as historical reality, contemporaneous possibility, and apocalyptic futurity in order to understand the sequential progression of the narration of the South Asian geopolitical disaster. Yet, despite their different positions in the narrative timeline of this geopolitical disaster, all three novels deploy similar techniques to show a more staggered, as well as smoother, relationship between Story and Event, as the Disaster Unconscious surges with the memory or occurrence of a microcatastrophe (such as a border skirmish) or the imminence of a macrocatastrophe (such as nuclear war). Like the other disaster narratives discussed in this book, fictions of the geopolitical disaster have their own leitmotifs, too. They use the language of politics and war in which international conflict invades all aspects of private life. Since the invader is the neighboring Other, who was the Same before Partition, literary discourse reveals a deconstruction of the Self and the Other by showing the Otherness of the Self and the Selfhood of the Other. The blurring of boundaries between India and Pakistan is important here. For these are no ordinary boundaries lightly constructed on a Lacanian sense of Self and Otherness. Selfhood and Otherness were arbitrarily imposed from the outside before and during Partition and then solidified through thick, ideological boundaries. Once fiction writers reveal the artifice of these boundaries, the walls built on difference may also tumble down. Compassion for the other is also not the same as what Eleni Coundouriotis has accurately described as “sentimental reconciliation” in an African context.15 No permanent reconciliation exists in these novels; rather, windows and doors for hope and healing open

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slightly—­becoming mere cracks and apertures that allow a temporary breach of boundaries. Instead of the Disaster Unconscious activating the Event-­oriented agenda seen in temporally close disasters, Partition—­ the originary Event that led to the assemblage of all the other Events into the geopolitical disaster—­is deconstructed through the process of the Story, especially through the themes of neighborly national difference or of compassion for the other. Other books could also replace any of these novels on the catastrophe continuum; what matters most, though, is what each text says about a particular moment in the sequence of disasters that make up the geopolitical disaster.16 My choice of fiction here deliberately ranges widely in novelistic form. The subgenres of these three novels can be classified under realist military literature (Chef), satirical “chick-­lit” (Diary of a Social Butterfly), and apocalyptic fiction (City of Devi). The fictional medley in this chapter, and elsewhere in Postcolonial Disaster, foregrounds its central argument as well as echoes Irr’s claims about national allegory in the context of catastrophe: Disaster functions as the metanarrative underpinning fictions of crisis even when narrative articulates itself in varying forms to give the crisis literary purchase. Indeed, some sense of the wholeness of disaster, as well as the pervasiveness of the Disaster Unconscious, can only be acquired through absorbing a wide arrangement of fictional forms. Putting the geopolitical disaster in a thematic and chronological sequence through these three novels reveals a clear teleology of the catastrophe continuum: Partition took nearly a million lives and displaced 14 million people, making it the largest mass migration in the history of the world.17 India and Pakistan then embarked on numerous wars—­the most destructive ones fought in 1965 and 1971—­and in skirmishes over Kashmir.18 Kashmiri freedom-­fighters, along with the Al Qaeda terror cells harbored in Pakistan, subjected both countries to horrific acts of terrorism. Partition, thus, led to wars and acts of border aggression, which in turn escalated terrorist activities in the region. Mark Anderson, citing other scholars of disaster, states that: “rather than representing the collapse of historically constituted social and political orders, disasters reveal the normal order of subordination and inequality. In this framework, disasters rather than isolated events represent the culmination of a historical process that has resulted in certain populations living in a state of heightened vulnerability, which explains how a single disaster affects people from distinct social groups

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in very different ways” (Disaster Writing, 21). The historical sedimentation of disaster that Anderson mentions is important to consider while analyzing narratives of present hostility: Postcolonial disaster is a process, a continuum, and not a single isolated event. Narratives about postcolonial disaster struggle to depict this continuum within the bounded confines of the written word. All three novels under discussion go back to catastrophic events that happened years ago, often in oblique ways, to help readers understand the here and now. In the fiction of the geopolitical disaster, the past is present—­in both senses of the word. History is always there in all these texts; in a novel such as Chef, in fact, history is the present protagonist. Narratives of international conflict, especially of military conflict, corroborate Fredric Jameson’s maligned notion of national allegory, particularly his assertion that the “very different ratio of the political to the personal” (69) is much higher in so-­called third world literature than elsewhere.19 According to Irr, “a number of contemporary authors [from South Asia] have mixed national allegory with features drawn from the literary traditions of the subcontinent as well as English Romanticism to modulate the national allegory” (111).20 National allegory finds various forms of expression but never entirely disappears in novels about the geopolitical disaster. Again, the originary concerns of postcolonial theory echo with startling resonance in the twenty-­first century. India and Pakistan haunt every narrative, even when a text is set wholly in one country and not in the other—­a ghosting that reveals the presence of the Disaster Unconscious. Chef, ostensibly fiction about a military cook in India, is as much about Pakistan as it is about India, although the book is set entirely in India. The tension between armed forces requires a belligerent partnership between dual agents—­the two hands needed to clap—­which can never be separated. The question of how we think about the Other, who was the Self before Partition and is still the Self in many ways, resonates with particular intensity here. The so-­called happy ending, at which literary cynics may scoff—­but which is often a signature of disaster fiction—­may at least open a fictional space through the fantastic elements of the Story for negotiating catastrophe, in individual, national, and collective terms. Living in a state of geopolitical disaster profoundly affects the collective and individual psyche. Heightened emotions and xenophobic nationalism become the order of the day that are in turn reflected and critiqued in literary narrative. As Marc Nichanian asks about the

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conflict in Armenia, “how can one give an account of Catastrophe if one persists [in] interpreting the history of those crucial years in heroic terms?” (143).21 Nichanian goes on to say: The Catastrophe never appears as such. It shows up only through oblivion and ignorance. As long as the fratricidal logic of the propaganda war prevails, the Catastrophe will remain hidden, it will not occur, it will remain behind the horizon. In the fratricidal war, each side pretends to [be the] noblest representative of the aspiration of liberty and all live in a deadlock, a lethal confrontation, denouncing the “other” to the historical responsibility of the failure, or simply refusing him the right to existence. (146)

According to Nichanian, geopolitical catastrophes are rarely articulated as geopolitical catastrophes; both sides only attack the other rather than recognize the “fratricidal logic” at work in how they justify their actions. Reducing disaster to mere conflict can also camouflage the reality of the situation, making the harsh “truth” seem less dire than what it is. The conflict between India and Pakistan must be assigned accurate nomenclature, just like AIDS must be called by its name. Fiction can bring about an acknowledgment of a geopolitical disaster as a geopolitical disaster and can even initiate the modes of redressal that disasters require. The novels discussed in this chapter commence a confrontation with, and an ultimate disentanglement of, the feigned Otherness of a national neighbor. Fiction about this geopolitical catastrophe teaches us to recognize how much of our Self is poured into the vessel of difference, thereby undermining the radical alterity of our national neighbor as well as the consequences of the disastrous Events. These three novels, then, put the neighborly back into the phrase “neighborly national other” by taking out the “other.” In teaching us how to live with war, terrorism, and border aggression on a daily basis, they further diffuse the Otherness that Indians and Pakistanis negotiate every day as well as promote the Event-­oriented agenda of the disaster narratives discussed in this book. The Pakistani narrator in The Diary of a Social Butterfly deliberately embraces an Indian cultural and sartorial identity so that she can empathize with people across the border. According to Priya Kumar, “literary and cultural productions can make a significant contribution to contemporary intellectual and political efforts to envision the peaceful coexistence of diverse groups

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in the Indian subcontinent.”22 Texts about the geopolitical disaster also inch toward a settlement of the conflict. Compassion for the Other—­ Indians for Pakistanis and Pakistanis for Indians—­through a dilution of difference emerges as a possible mode of temporary reconciliation rather than absolute resolution. Mutual sympathy helps us understand that the enemy is suffering as much as we are and that innocent people on the ground have little to no say in perpetuating geopolitical conflict. The identity of the enemy is not always clear, especially when reading these novels through the idea of “compassion through dilution”; that blurring of the antagonist is vital to acquiring a sense of neighborly national difference. The South Asian geopolitical disaster opens up new possibilities for cultural awareness and interreligious contact.23 Empathy creates opportunities to inhabit the psyche of the Enemy-­Other, to understand the world in which she or he lives, and to feel the trauma that she or he may undergo. In The People’s Right to the Novel (2014), her pathbreaking study of the war novel in Africa, Eleni Coundouriotis asserts: As a protest against the dehumanization it protests, the war novel offers important analytical insights on violence and its representation. It addresses the dangers of reinforcing stereotypes by balancing its specifically historical project, located in particular places and conflicts, with the more universalizing discourses of war and humanity rooted in humanitarian discourse. Humanitarianism is not only a form of governmentality that seeks to take care of precarious lives, but also a form of witness that gives an account of trauma “narrating war in the language of suffering.” (2)

Coundouriotis’s definition of humanitarianism comes close to my definition of the dilution of Self and Other, except that my use of the term is based more on the work of novels, and what their characters do, rather than on the role of the government. Coundouriotis also takes a similar stand when she argues that the “war novel goes beyond the self-­limiting realm of humanitarian discourse and shapes the identification between the educated (the writers and readers of novels) and the ordinary people in order to galvanize a democratic movement” (2). Galvanizing a better world may not be the project in the novels discussed here, since all of them recognize the permanence of the geopolitical disaster. The projection of war in the language of mutual suffering brings the reader

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into an ethical position of understanding the subjectivity of people who live under the cloud of conflict. It also gives the war novel in South Asia a moral agenda of its own. The equation written here, then, is a simple one: Partition + War + Terrorism + Prospect of Nuclear Annihilation = 70 years of geopolitical disaster. Of course, reality cannot be reduced to theorem, but it can be expanded into theory. The novels in this chapter demonstrate a complex theory of geopolitical disaster through the ways in which they trace the causal relationship between Partition, war, terrorism, nuclear testing, and the possibility of atomic attacks in order to generate a literary rhetoric about international conflict. While literary scholarship on Partition proliferates in postcolonial studies, only a small body of scholarly work on the teleology of the geopolitical disaster has been published so far, despite the rich corpus of primary texts, fictional and nonfictional, on the subject.24 None of these works, moreover, consider the relationship between India and Pakistan as a disaster or theorize the fiction of the geopolitical disaster as a commentary on an iconic condition of contemporary South Asian postcoloniality.

Food, Bloody Food: War as Reality in Chef War is a lived actuality in Jaspreet Singh’s novel Chef (2008). The book examines the ongoing battle over Kashmir in the 1990s from the perspective of Kirpal, also called Kip, a cook in the Indian army. Kip is Sikh, the third faith in the great triangulation of religions in India. He is, therefore, able to cast a discerning eye on Hindus and Muslims, on India and Pakistan. A grain of salt may need to be thrown into that discerning eye, as the Sikhs were often described as “the fighting arm of the Hindus” during Partition and were the victims of Muslim, not Hindu, massacres in the riots that followed.25 Yet Chef offers a different side to stereotypes of Sikhism and particularly Sikh men. According to Nikky Singh, “it is so seldom that post-­colonial literature has Sikh protagonists, and if and when they are, the Sikhs are blasting bombs—­not defusing them.”26 While Sikhs are associated with the military and especially with militancy, the Sikh protagonist is a mere cook in this novel. Cooking is a chore often yoked to nurturing femininity and domesticity. In having been made an army cook, Kip is not necessarily feminized—­ most chefs are men, after all, as are cooks in the military—­as much as

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he represents an alternative form of nurturing masculinity rather than militancy and terrorism. As Meenakshi Bharat claims, “the gastronomic motif that Singh invokes in both the title and the text seems to suggest that the only way to achieve a via media is through the agency of culture, food being one of the most distinctive cultural signifiers.”27 Kip is an outsider in multiple ways—­he does not belong to either of the two warring religions, and his occupation is not only different from that of the usual cadres in the military but also one that associates him with the life-­giving properties of food. His anterior perspective enhances his insider access to information and events in the novel because of his profession and his religion. Such careful choices about the protagonist and his point of view not only reveal the literary threads that weave the Story into the Event but also show how the earlier rupture between Story and Event is fused, each enhancing the other. Moreover, the readerly glance is trained to see how contemporary disaster fiction can challenge postcolonial stereotypes about Sikh men and war. Chef opens with a chilling epigraph from the Caledonian warrior Galgacus (84 AD) that echoes the first sentence of “The Nativity” chapter in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: “They make a desolation and call it peace.”28 Epigraphs, as noted in Unity Dow’s Far and Beyon’, are a part of the Story-­making elements of the text, although the choice of a nonfiction quote from a historical military figure attaches the Story to the Event in real-­life terms. Right away Chef offers us its framing metaphors for the geopolitical disaster. Continued military conflict does not bring resolution; an absence of war—­a blank space—­replaces it instead. The ambiguous pronoun “they” suggests that both sides are to be blamed for the “warm peace”—­the “Simmer” of this part’s title—­in South Asia generally and Kashmir more specifically.29 Chef also launches into its structuring language of international conflict on the very first page: “the [U.S.] President is visiting India today to sign the nuclear deal” (3). The sentence conveys not just the intensity of the nuclear conflict in India and Pakistan but also the continued role of the West as an intermediary in the conflict. Colonialism may be dead and gone but its ghosts linger in neoimperial entities, such as the United States, which attempt to mediate conflicts they created in the first place. Europe and North America can never be fully provincialized. While most of the novel consists of Kip’s remembering the past—­ 14 years ago he served as a chef to a military officer in Kashmir30—­the Disaster Unconscious politicizes everything through the language of

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international conflict; military rhetoric; borders, both national and personal; and the cold—­literally and metaphorically—­détente between the “warm” wars: They (again, note the ambiguous pronoun that nonetheless unambiguously refers to the government) had discovered the “fully preserved body” of a soldier who had died in an air crash in 1934 (13). It is uncertain to whom the soldier found in the obscure glaciers of the Himalayas belongs—­India or Pakistan—­since the subcontinent was still “India Intact” in 1934. That the soldier could be Indian or Pakistani, or Indian and Pakistani, suggests the blurring of boundaries between the two nations. The perfectly frozen body of a military man, signifying the fighting arm of the nation, also evokes the simmering peace between the two countries. Significantly, Kip’s father had died in an airplane crash over the Siachen glacier on the border of India and ­Pakistan, becoming “one with the glacier” (30).31 In a review of the novel, Jena Habegger-­Conti states: It is not surprising, then, that one of the main figures of the story is the glacier itself—­viewed as a place of banishment by soldiers. An estimated 5,000 soldiers have died atop Siachen in the past twenty years, but more men die from avalanches than from gun battles. The novel recounts how soldiers suffer from a lack of oxygen and see djinns, fall into deep glacial crevices and have no possibility for rescue, and how some would rather die than spend another night on the glacier.32

Fusing into the glacier between India and Pakistan suggests the merging of the Self and Other over the arbitrarily constructed boundaries of the two nations, since borders are official markers of where the Self ends and the Other begins. That this fusion happens in death demonstrates how diluting national otherness may not be possible in real and living ways, even as the novel nevertheless teaches us the importance of attempting to do so. While Chef may seem Event-­oriented, with its narrative of war, the Story—­here the metaphorical reading of the glacier to which the Disaster Unconscious points us—­actually enhances the Event-­oriented agenda of compassion for otherness through this dilution of difference. The Disaster Unconscious renders the profoundly personal consequences of war in political, even militaristic, terms. Kip recalls his mother’s psychological breakdown over his soldier father’s continuous

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absences: “Now that I think about it she too was fighting battles. While my father was fighting a war in Kashmir with the Pakistanis my mother was fighting battles with herself” (Chef, 22, emphasis added). Caught in the middle of a geopolitical conflict everything, including the psyche, becomes political and infused with the language of war. Even when looking at the setting sun, Kip thinks it “reddens the kitchen walls before it sets in the enemy land” (48). Evoking blood, the sun coats the walls of the Indian kitchen before it slides into Pakistan. Again, this suggests a blurring of Self and Other as well as of the private and the public: The interior space of the kitchen is marked by the same sun that stains the exterior space of the enemy’s land. In another spillage of military language into personal relationships, Kip’s employer, the General, calls every married couple “India and Pakistan” (49). In the General’s configuration, India is the domineering aggressive husband and Pakistan is the pliant, passive South Asian wife. Pakistan’s refusal to perform the role of that pliant, passive South Asian wife exacerbates the tension between the two nations. This alignment flips prejudicial national stereotypes, given that Pakistan is often represented as lawless, clannish, and violent and India as a functional secular democracy. Narrative forms associated with the Story, such as metaphors in this instance, can often generate powerful expressions of the reality of the Event—­ here, the political situation between India and Pakistan—­more swiftly and efficiently than can long policy analysis.33 Kip, though, is disgusted by how the conflict has shaped the Indian population’s psyche: “The more I witness their lives the more ashamed I feel. Ashamed of my country. Is it for them my father died? Did we lose so many men in the army for such useless people . . . If I tell them about my time in the army they will say: ‘We would like to hear stories about the heroism of our soldiers; These people think war is TV’ ” (81, emphasis added). Discussing the representation of disaster in movies, Lennis G. Echterling and Mary Lou Wylie observe that “the portraits of psychological and social reactions are stereotypical, superficial, misleading and inaccurate . . . Disaster movies end shortly after the disaster, with a sense of relief and a suggestion that, now that the adventure is over, people and communities will quickly return to their previous routines. The complex and challenging process of recovery is almost never treated in disaster movies.”34 The representation of disaster in the mediascapes—­to borrow Arjun Appadurai’s term—­provides a romanticized narrative with a happy ending when in reality, and often

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even in fiction, disaster is frequently recognized as being only a continuum of catastrophe.35 The phrase “war is TV” once again interjects the military into the personal, since television, unlike movies, is usually watched in the private space of the home. Yet the Event is also grafted on to what may simply be the Story but through literary devices that fuse message with art. At this point in the novel, Kip is on a train reflecting on his fellow passengers, who evidently take their freedom for granted, who are not aware are of what is going on at the border. Again, even taking a train ride is freighted with political implications, even though most of the characters on the train do not know that their lives are hanging by a thread. Disaster becomes a negative, a lack, although the shadowy presence of the Disaster Unconscious lurks underneath the text. The train also echoes the 1947 Partition—­the originary Event referred to earlier—­with the railways ferrying massacred bodies from India and Pakistan. As Marian Aguiar says, “the train is often depicted as the emblem of a forward-­facing modernity. . . . Yet South Asian Partition literature set on the train often challenges, if not undermines, the notion of progress . . . The train held an important role for this dividing India; it enacted that division by displacing people across the border.”36 The image of the train returns Pakistan to a scene that is not about Pakistan when its unexpressed presence emerges through the literary device of the train as a physical setting. A quotidian mode of vehicular transport takes on political resonances while the ghostly presence of Pakistan blurs the boundary between Self and Other through the invasion of the geopolitical conflict into the private lives of Indian citizens. In another instance, Kip hears about a terrorist attack while working in his kitchen: “In the kitchen I heard that the general’s car had been grenade-­attacked downtown. The news terrified me. Kashmiris, Major. Terrorists, Major. Close to the vet’s clinic the car had slowed down to negotiate the speed-­breaker when a Kashmiri lobbed a grenade” (Chef, 97). Kip finds out about the terror attack in the kitchen, that most domestic of all spaces. The bomb itself explodes outside a veterinarian’s clinic, once again suggesting relative domesticity—­or the private space—­since vets usually treat domestic animals. The closer the enemy comes to invading the home space, the closer the boundaries between Self and Other coalesce and dissolve, as does the distance between Story and Event. Later in the novel, Kip’s mentor, Kishen, who also goes by the name of Chef, is transferred to the glacier after he makes a blunder in front

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of some visiting Muslim clerics. In his journal Kishen proclaims: “We are condemned. For us there is no hope. The Pakistanis fire at us from the other side. Are they filled with hope? They are on lower ground than us and yet filled with hope” (Chef, 114). Losing hope for people in the trenches is an immediate consequence of the geopolitical disaster, even as the local populace may remain unaware of the dangers undergone by the people fighting for their safety. As noted throughout this book, children appear regularly as symbols of biological futurity in tsunami literature. In this novel of the geopolitical disaster, the trope of reproductive failure is marshaled repeatedly instead. After Kishen returns from his stint at the Siachen Glacier, he is unable to have an erection: “The glacier had sucked him dry . . . That field of snow . . . had sat on top of him and demolished his erections. He could no longer get it up; it had become a bonsai” (Chef, 123). Sex, a private act, often seen as an agent of healing between warring factions, also becomes loaded with political resonances. The harm caused by the geopolitical disaster to the body politic is evident in the failure of the male body to “get it up” and reproduce the nation. Kishen is another name for Krishna, one of the most important gods in the Hindu pantheon, famous for his virility. The failure of Krishna to repopulate the nation—­999 concubines and multiple wives nothwithstanding!—­also demonstrates the failure of the future of a Hindu nation. Chef presciently looks forward to The City of Devi, which entrusts procreational futurity to a multireligious and queer India. Again, the Story invites us to read metaphorically, to truly understand how the image of the glacier can convey the catastrophic qualities of the Event rather than simply giving us the Event as is, in unvarnished form. Kishen further reflects on the futility of war when he makes a speech to the soldiers on the glacier: “Why do we need Kashmir. Ask. Does Kashmir need us? We shit on the glacier, and the shit freezes and we have to break it with rifles. And I say the same thing to the bastards on the other side. What are they dying for, the Pakistanis? This ice is no place for human beings. It has wasted the lives of our finest soldiers” (Chef, 167). The image of excrement is the exact opposite of reproduction: One suggests composition, the other decomposition. The geopolitical disaster can freeze the nation, returning the concept of a frozen détente to the center of the novel. Again, the Disaster Unconscious returns with its use of military rhetoric when a private bodily act such as defecation becomes politicized: The frozen pieces of shit have to be broken with the butts of rifles. Speaking about the Pakistanis on

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the other side of the battlefield dissolves the binary of warring factions through recognizing mutual suffering that may then engender mutual empathy.37 The novel ends with the marriage of Rubiya, the General’s daughter, to a Pakistani man, literalizing, albeit in reverse, the General’s description of married couples to Kip. A journalist, Rubiya pens an editorial on the state of India and Pakistan in which she reflects on a childhood spent watching movies projected on an outdoor screen with members of her father’s military unit: “Now, many years later, I think the border between India and Pakistan is a bit like the white film screen that belonged to the open air cinema. Both sides happen to be watching the same film, sometimes projected from India and sometimes from the Pakistani side, and our left is their right, and our right is their left” (231). Indians and Pakistanis, in effect, are the same—­laterally inverted versions of each other. Rubiya ends her story on the India–­Pakistan conflict by saying, “during times like these it seems foolhardy to focus on an ordinary woman and her daughter. And yet I feel the story of Soofiya [aka Irem] and little Naseem [a Pakistani woman taken prisoner along with her daughter] is the story of the whole of Kashmir” (Chef, 233, emphasis added). The individual once again stands in for the collectivity, as national allegory folds itself into the fabric of the Story, thereby underlining the importance of the Event. The image of soldiers watching the same film from both sides of the screen handily projects the central theme of this chapter: The geopolitical disaster may invade the personal realm, but it also dissolves the rhetoric of Self and Other by forcing us to recognize that the Other is watching the same movie from behind the same screen. The Other may exist as laterally inverted versions of ourselves, but they are as much ourselves as we are. The white screen on which the film is projected not only metaphorically evokes the Partition of India but also literally partitions two nations that are only separated by thin, sheer, and transparent material. Its whiteness further evokes the white British who arbitrarily carved national boundaries with little sensitivity toward religious and ethnic demographics, once again asserting the role of the imperium in the extended damage to their colonies. The film’s base, however, is made of celluloid, extremely flammable plastic sheets synthesized from camphor and nitrocellulose. Celluloid immediately suggests the volatility of borders, boundaries, and demarcations as well as, like plastic, their artifice. Slender though they may

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be, dividing lines always have the potential to burst into flames and burn those around them. The vivid depiction of soldiers across the border watching a movie beamed through a swath of celluloid, and the layers of history and politics that the depiction encapsulates, shows again how literary technique can often convey images of disastrous events that policy and data may not be able to convey, especially at such a visceral and emotional level. As the disasters become more distant and more drawn out over time, the pedagogical impulse also slows down to the extent that instead of presenting the catastrophe directly, the novel seeks to recognize the catastrophic qualities of the geopolitical disaster through literary imagery instead. Since urgent and immediate redress is not possible in slow-­moving disasters, these texts demonstrate how to live with crisis in more oblique and long-­term ways than single, Event-­oriented disaster narratives. Rubiya has a profound impact on Kirpal, who reads her work and tells her: “Your poems have changed me. I feel like running through the narrow trails. I feel like climbing up the mountains to request the people of Kashmir not to lose compassion for us Indians, and I feel like telling my own countrymen not to lose compassion for Kashmiris. Rubiya, your words are helping people like me to say the things we want to say” (245). Rubiya’s poems are another instance of metafiction, already noted in both Welcome to Our Hillbrow and Far and Beyon’. In both these (relatively) long-­drawn-­out disasters, the literary text recognizes itself as text, not tract. Kirpal’s response converges Story and Event by showing how poetry can evoke the human emotions of empathy and compassion that are so crucial to managing disaster. Even though Rubiya crosses the border to facilitate some sort of allegorical prisoner exchange for Soraya and Irem, her words linger as the only possible way to not necessarily emerge from but at least negotiate with disaster. Irem is a Pakistani woman who is accused of being a spy or perhaps even a suicide bomber. She was raped and impregnated by an unknown Indian soldier. She refuses to abort the child and go back to Pakistan, because something unspeakable happened to her there. That Irem cannot give utterance to what happened to her suggests that disaster, like trauma, cannot be fully articulated as itself. The baby and Irem remain in an Indian prison where the growing child eventually attends prison school. The image of the child raised in a prison evokes stalled reproduction and children unable to thrive. Again, the Disaster Unconscious returns to activate the Event in the Story—­this time bringing

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to mind Partition and the thousands of refugee camps for abducted women that mushroomed in both nations. Kirpal is in love with Irem, yet he still decides to abandon her since, after all, she is the enemy. His former boss, the General, says: “Sometimes I think the desire for the enemy is more than the desire for our own. No one knows this better than you and that is why you left. That was the real reason. You did not want to act on your desire” (Chef, 219). According to Meenakshi Bharat, “in the non-­Kashmiri outsider, Kip’s sympathetic identification with the Kashmiris, the text demonstrates one way of dealing with the problem” (Troubled Testimonies, 47). In keeping with the enhanced Storyness of slow-­moving, historically extended disaster—­here through literary intertextuality—­Kirpal shares his name with another famous character who also turns away from the love of his life because he cannot assimilate her Otherness in the time of war: Kirpal Singh (a.k.a. Kip) in Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient (1992). Framing this in more psychoanalytic terms, the Self desires the Other more than itself, yet it retreats from the Other instead of acting on its desires. Healing cannot be activated even at the human level because of the taboo on loving the enemy. Yet Chef shows a way to create this healing, precisely by demonstrating, and analyzing, its failure to reveal at least the potential for sympathetic identification. Mawkish though it may sound, compassion for the Other, even when it emerges as a thwarted romance, may well be the only way to dilute, if not dissolve, the effects of the geopolitical disaster, both in its fictional as well as its real-­life manifestations. Calling for a new form of compassionate ethics, Jacques Derrida describes this form of empathy as “the sharing of . . . suffering among the living.”38 Chef highlights the mutual suffering of Indians and Pakistanis and suggests how the Disaster Unconscious can insert a pervasive language of international conflict into personal life. The novel acknowledges the enemy’s capacity for suffering and, therefore, their humanity, weakening the unyielding binary of Us versus Them that gives the geopolitical disaster the power to cast a shadow over the psychic well-­being of not only individuals but also the nations of which they are a part. It stages an ethical intervention in teaching readers to understand the suffering of others in compassionate and nonvoyeuristic ways, slowly working to undo the Orientalist gaze. Even if the romantic relationship between Kirpal and Irem is ultimately unable to consummate itself, the novel both reveals and undoes the complicated, circular “fratricidal logic” at work in the India–­Pakistan conflict.

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Conflict Irresolution: Satire as Disaster Relief in The Diary of a Social Butterfly: Moni Mohsin’s novel The Diary of a Social Butterfly (2008) wittily depicts the social escapades of a Pakistani woman at a time when the political fabric of her nation was unraveling with accelerated terrorism following the horrors of 9/11 in the United States. The protagonist, named Butterfly, is seemingly oblivious to the world blowing up around her, but political and militarized data seep into the narrative anyway. The novel turns away from the erudite style and linguistic pyrotechnics that characterize the postcolonial canon, yet the Disaster Unconscious nevertheless infuses the text with heavy political issues. Like There’s No Sea in Salford, Mohsin’s novel eludes the usual novelistic categories. Best described as satirical chick-­lit that uses its own conventions to stage a political claim, The Diary contains all the gendered characteristics of South Asian chick-­lit, what Sandra Ponzanesi describes as “arranged marriages, educational aspirations, career paths, but also related to the art of cooking, the role of spices and fragrances, the nature of saris and textiles, the importance of jewellery and beautification . . . appearance and manners, religious rites and traditions.”39 In a war of words, even a literary form as apolitical as chick-­lit can be suffused with the allegory of military and politic conflict. In this novel, the centrality of the Event is also obliquely displaced through language, satire, and the conventions of chick-­lit: “He’s [the narrator’s husband] started making such elliptic comments. Recently he’s been firing off letters to Mush and Bush about burning of that newspaper, Frontier Past. Uff, I said to him, why bother? It’s not as if it was your father’s paper. Why are you taking it so personally, baba?”40 Rather than personalizing the political, the geopolitical disaster politicizes the personal. Janoo thus interprets the political act of burning a newspaper in personal terms. The literary scholar Muneeza Shamsie says, “Moni Mohsin and Maha Khan Phillips [another Pakistani writer] bring their own unique voices to the traditions of social satire.”41 The narrator’s deliberately misspelling the name of the newspaper as Frontier Past (instead of Post) generates a distinctive satirical voice. A frontier constitutes the extreme limit of a border. Past this last border—­or past the post—­suggests that frontiers, or boundary lines, can be crossed and blurred, even the most ideologically rigid ones separating nations and religions. Butterfly’s grammatical slips, while obviously intended to be humorous and ironic, convey that either we can get past frontier tensions or should leave them

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in the past. Again, literary strategy works in tandem with the Event-­ oriented message of compassion for Otherness. But the pedagogical message is rendered so oblique that it needs to be scooped out from the wreckage of the narrator’s linguistic lapses. These linguistic lapses are, however, more than simply grammatical errors. They also create an insider–­outsider dichotomy in which Hindustani-­speaking Indians and Pakistanis constitute the insider community and the non-­Urdu and non-­ Hindi speaking world constitutes the outsiders. As the Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie says, “[the] satirical Diary of a Social Butterfly . . . is so steeped in bilingual wordplay and untranslated Urdu expressions that it simply wouldn’t make sense to most anglophone audiences. India doesn’t merely share knowledge of the language, but also of the social world that Mohsin parodies.”42 In rendering the fullness of The Diary comprehensible solely to Indian and Pakistani audiences, Mohsin not only blurs the boundaries between Self and Other but also bridges the political gulf between the warring nations by making her book accessible to the private world of readership in both countries. Again, Story and Event come together to fuse into one seamless directive here. Janoo also represents a foil to the initially politically apathetic Butterfly. A foil itself is a literary strategy that makes an Event-­oriented narrative more than mere citation and documentation. Janoo says, “You can go dance your feet off if you want, but with Balochistan in flames I can’t find all that much to celebrate” (Diary, 181).43 Even literally dancing around disaster at Butterfly’s parties still means that catastrophe comes back into daily life, albeit in indirect ways. According to the journalist Marc Gerstein, a cardinal rule in negotiating disaster is to “avoid being in denial. There is often a gap between our intellectual understanding of a risk and our emotional acceptance of its danger.”44 The novel reveals these contrasting responses to disaster through Janoo and Butterfly, showing his intellectual and emotional acceptance as well as her intellectual and emotional denial.45 Each chapter in The Diary of a Social Butterfly is opened by two sets of headlines: one relates to geopolitical events and the other to Butterfly’s social life. At first this binary structure may seem to create an opposition between Story and Event: “Anti-­terrorism law amended in bid to curb sectarianism. The Old Bag [Butterfly’s mother-­in-­law] has vagina [“angina” in Butterfly-­speak] attack” (Diary, 12). As the psychologists Krzysztof Kaniasty and Fran Norris explain, “disasters provide people with opportunities for a wide range of social comparisons. Media are omnipresent in the immediate aftermath. Television, radio,

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and newspapers bombard us with endless stories.”46 In this world of violent contrasts, the “wide range of social comparisons” between antiterrorism laws and the angina attack of a mother-­in-­law are brought together, suggesting a link between the political sphere and the day-­ to-­day, seemingly ordinary, suffering of the human body. Scholars of PTSD (Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder) such as Jeffrey P. Staab, Carol S. Fullerton, and Robert Ursano assert that “disasters and traumatic events are an all too common part of everyday life. From earthquakes to hurricanes, war and terrorist events, we are constantly told of the frequency of these frightening events by televisions, radios, and newspapers that have made us a global village.”47 Even as Butterfly seeks to live out her life in utter denial, the media bombardment of disaster blocks complete inoculation against calamity. Gerstein says, “media is a powerful force that can cloud our perceptions of risk . . . The news media and social gossip tend to promote stories that are unusual and emotionally intense” (28). What happens, though, when the “unusual and emotionally intense” political narrative becomes the norm and is then reflected in personal lives and intimate relationships? The Diary of a Social Butterfly mimics the media bombardment of the military conflict in the domestic world of those who fall within the ambit of the geopolitical conflict as well as the normalization of that narrative into the structure of the everyday. Although it satirizes the media information overload from which we all suffer, the genre of chick-­lit provides little respite from the metanarrative of the geopolitical disaster. Even when the Story is no longer subordinated to the Event, there is still no escape from the crisis, for it will always seep into the text in subtle and oblique ways. Medium-­and long-­range disasters, such as the AIDS crisis and the India–­Pakistan conflict, often force an acknowledgment of the disaster as disaster upon the reader. These crises can be less immediate in their catastrophic effects upon the social collective and can therefore be more easily denied in their calamitous reality. Then 9/11 happens, and Butterfly’s life is deeply enmeshed in the fallout from the attack. The parallel headlines in the novel say it all: “NATO forces invade Afghanistan. Butterfly wonders why invasion should dictate her social life” (30, emphasis added). Again, subtle word choices indicate the presence of the political in the personal. The word “dictate” brings to mind not only Pakistan’s long rule of military dictatorship but also new forms of dictatorship that emerged in the wake of the geopolitical disaster, including the rise of American imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism. The juxtaposition of the epigraphs

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suggests that the geopolitical always invades the personal, diluting the boundaries not only between the Self and the Other but also between the personal and the political. As Gerstein says, “even if people are aware of a problem, accept its potential harm, and are cognizant of what needs to be done to correct it, they may not be willing to support a solution inconsistent with their own self-­interests, be they financial, political, or organizational” (64). Butterfly initially fails at recognizing the geopolitical disaster as a geopolitical disaster because it is against her self-­interest. The structure of the book instead reveals she is perfectly cognizant of all that is going on around her. The geopolitical headline literally sitting on top of the personal headline on the printed page shows how the Disaster Unconscious pushes the Event above the Story as the crisis comes closer to explosion. The visual topography of the page subtly reveals the importance of the Event through literary tropes such as chapter epigraphs. While Pakistan contemplates war with India, Butterfly prays for peace: “Hai, I hope so we can make friends with India. Imagine hopping across to Delhi every time you need a new outfit or a new earring ka set” (59).48 Obviously, these are superficial reasons for creating a sense of neighborly national difference. But the novel deliberately uses this superficiality to stage an important intervention through the vanity of the fashion-­conscious female socialite: If clothes maketh the (hu) man, then Indians and Pakistanis are, metaphorically, cut from the same cloth, so to speak. They dress the same, wear the same kind of jewelry, eat the same food. Butterfly is able to dilute the boundaries between Self and Other through an appearance-­oriented persona that can nevertheless imagine new forms of kinship. Vanity and frivolity also become ways to claim autonomy in lives that could be otherwise owned by disaster. Butterfly decides to embrace Indianness in an effort to build India–­Pakistan solidarity all by herself. She wears saris, eats vegetarian food, and claims: “my mission in life is to be just like all my new best friends across the border. I’ve even started speaking like them” (107). Saris and vegetarian food are typically associated with Hinduism, as is the Hindi language that Butterfly presumably begins to speaks. Butterfly demonstrates a compassion for the Other through diluting alterity in making the political—­flaunting an Indian identity in the face of militant Islamic and Pakistani fundamentalism—­into something deeply personal through the tools at her disposal as a “social butterfly.” Here, the supposedly vain superficiality of chick-­ lit acquires powerful social and

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political consequences in the way that disaster is narrated, using its own formal conventions to broadcast an ethical message about mediating conflict. Butterfly becomes increasingly and explicitly politicized, precisely because her vanity is at stake. She attends a pro-­Iraq rally so that she can silence her critics, mainly her in-­laws, who think she is self-­involved and superficial (73). She later goes for another rally as the religious fundamentalists seem bent on taking over her social life: The fundos are not prepared to live and let us live. They tau are control freaks, yaar. Like class monitors they want to tell us when we can talk and when we can’t . . . Today they are saying that I can’t wear sleeveless and must wear dupatta on my head. Tomorrow they will say I must wear chador. The day after that I must cover my face . . . Then they will say that I can’t drive . . . Parties tau will be completely out. (199)

Butterfly’s flippant, grammatically incorrect, and hilarious language is an important literary attempt to distract us from disaster. And it succeeds! Almost. The extent of the geopolitical invasion of the personal is revealed when restrictions on fashion mobilize politically apathetic citizens such as Butterfly. Again, satire camouflages the pedagogic intent, which becomes less obvious and more oblique through the humor in the language used here. Butterfly realizes the impact of something as political as religious fundamentalism on the private domain of the socialite when she says, “THAT’s why I went to the march. Because I’ve realised there’s no turning a blind eye with the fundos [fundamentalists]. Because they won’t let you” (200). International conflict will not allow turning away from the geopolitical disaster. Indeed, Butterfly turns to the international conflict as a way to resist the domestic limitations created by the “fundos” in Pakistan. Attending a rally then becomes a way to share trauma—­ “being part of a collective or larger unit stitched together could make this experience [that of disaster] less threatening and less confusing, and hence more understandable and tolerable” (Gist and Lubin, 30). The rally represents the force of communal will, a collectivity that has the capacity to combat fundamentalism and to share sorrow. Butterfly becomes more and more radicalized with the progression of the novel now that her actions, such as attending a rally, are finally upstaging the

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more coded and buried language of politics that initially only leaks into the text. The Diary ends with the assassination of Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007, and for once the narrator is totally demoralized, so much so that the flip and arch language that characterizes her tonal affect seems dead, too: “I don’t feel like going to any parties, any weddings, any GTs [get togethers] even. Why? Because Benazir is dead. I don’t feel like going anywhere or doing anything . . . I didn’t like her . . . So why am I sad? So, so, so sad? I feel like someone in my family’s died. I miss her” (220, emphasis added). Butterfly had earlier accused her husband of taking political events too personally. Here, she mourns the death of a politician as if she has lost a sister. In his study of Pakistani foreign policy, Mehtab Ali Shah states that Bhutto was considered to be “softer” on the subject of nuclearization (and therefore prospects of war) than her male predecessors and successors (150). The Oxford-­and Radcliffe-­educated Bhutto represented Pakistani women’s entry into the public and political arenas. Her assassination, at the hands of religious fundamentalists, meant the foreclosure of a certain horizon, a particular possibility of living and being for Pakistani women. Ultimately, the novel emphasizes that the geopolitical disaster politicizes even the most elite and sheltered lives to such an extent that the assassination of a political figure is equivalent to the loss of a family member. As Kaniasty and Norris explain, disasters “defy time limits . . . as various facets of a disaster eventually imprint themselves on every aspect of life” (25, emphasis added). In her afterword to the novel, Mohsin echoes this idea of political disasters’ embedding themselves everywhere: I have also tried to include in this column the bigger events of our times that have reverberated even in the life of one as coddled as the Butterfly  .  .  . Moreover the larger socio-­political trends of recent years have also . . . been adequately reflected in Butterfly’s life: the face-­off between civil society and the army, the rise of consumerism, the increasing cultural alienation of the rich, the gradual breakdown of law and order, the media revolution, women’s growing presence in the workplace, the tension between landed gentry and new money, and the multifarious pleasures and pains of globalization. So without ever intending to be, The Diary of a Social Butterfly has become . . . a record of some of Pakistan’s most turbulent years. (Diary, 226)

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The afterword also reveals the slow movement of the geopolitical disaster, inching forward in parallel lines, that eerily echo train tracks, with the existence of the Pakistani nation itself. The novel, then, is as much a history of Pakistan, bringing national allegory as a central metaphor for this geopolitical disaster. The Diary catalogs the seismic events that have shaken the nation to its very core since its inception as a nation, especially how such events invade the relatively sheltered private realm, even anchoring chick-­lit into the specific, canonical traits of postcolonial literature. As John Berger points out in Ways of Seeing, “the shock of such contrasts is considerable: not only because of the co-­existence of the two worlds shown, but also because of the cynicism of the culture, which shows them one above the other.”49Amanda Gryzb further explains that according to Berger, “our Western culture of consumption and commodification clashes with our humanitarian interests and obligations; we are easily seduced away from a full acknowledgment of the suffering refugees with a turn of the page” (63). The novel’s unique style may mimic the world of the newspaper that Berger describes. It also refuses to allow us to turn away from a full recognition of human suffering, showing instead how the shock and pain of geopolitical catastrophe infiltrate two worlds that might seem radically apart. Butterfly speaks in a very chatty voice, including grammatically incorrect English, intended to defuse the terror around her. Satire is an important way to soothe the horror of disaster through a certain Story-­telling mode and also to refuse to allow the Event to take over our lives, even as the novel explicitly acknowledges disaster as disaster. Yet the longue durée disaster is able to only partially escape the healing imperative behind the single Event-­oriented disasters, such as the tsunami, where immediate redressal is possible and necessary. The end of Mohsin’s second novel, Duty Free (2011), provides a fitting closure to the way in which Butterfly ultimately ends up negotiating with disaster in both books: Between you, me, and the four walls, I was a little bit edgy about the security. More bombs burst last week. One in DG Khan that killed twenty-­four. Another in Peshawar that I don’t know killed how many. And more shootings in Karachi. Janoo was looking at the papers the day before the wedding and he said in his special Doomsday voice: “This year more people have died in bombs and shootings in Pakistan than in Iraq. What will become of us?”50

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The “Doomsday voice” replaces the flip and arch tone in asking a serious question that returns the novel completely to the geopolitical disaster: What will become of us, indeed? Narratives about this geopolitical disaster, in which the catastrophe continues to unspool for decades, leave that question unresolved. Kenneth Hewitt points out that “the origins are seen in upsetting of human relations and social vulnerability. Kreps stresses the importance of disasters as social catalysts” (in Quarantelli, What Is a Disaster, 73). Disaster disrupts normal human relationships; the social catalyst at work makes normal life abnormal to such an extent that the abnormal becomes the normative—­more, not only the normative but also the normative narrative. Yet the internal tensions within literary narrative, its many aporias, and its stylistic techniques, all work to slowly deflect, question, and replace the normal narrative of the abnormal even while acknowledging catastrophic narrative as the metadiscourse through which we must always speak. The Diary of a Social Butterfly shows how an understanding and acceptance of social responsibility politicizes the individual so that she or he can withstand disaster within the framework of disaster.

Empowering Triangles, Triangulating Empowerment in The City of Devi If Chef depicts war as a historically predetermined reality, The Diary of a Social Butterfly presents military conflict as an always-­present possibility. Both novels describe a culture of extreme politicization in which international relations and military discourse suffuse personal life. Manil Suri’s City of Devi (2013), by contrast, provides a template for how the Disaster Unconscious imposes its authority on a text that ruminates on a speculative, but extremely probable, nuclear catastrophe rather than punctuated by remembered and imminent crises.51 What difference does an actual, albeit futuristic, nuclear war make to literary narration? Which literary tropes and metaphors can most effectively harness the imagery of international conflict, especially that of an ongoing, although imaginary, technologically savvy war? While war ensures that the Event is continuously present in The City of Devi, the imaginary apocalypse allows the Story to play around as much as in other fiction about the India–­Pakistan conflict than it would in an actual nuclear conflagration.

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The City of Devi opens with Sarita, one of the two narrators, reflecting on the complete annihilation of the known world: “four days before the bomb that is supposed to obliterate Bombay and kill us all, I stand in the ruins of Crawford Market, haggling with the lone remaining fruit seller over the price of the pomegranate in my hand.”52 The pomegranate—­which looks like a bomb and sounds somewhat like pomegrenade—­is a recurring motif in this novel, once again through the very sound of the name inserting military imagery and language into everyday life despite its literary resonances.53 In its potential to inflict violence, as the pomegrenade mentioned above, it first sits oddly with its womblike shape that is full of seeds. “According to the Kamasutra . . . a pomegranate acts as an aphrodisiac to enhance sexual power” (Dwivedi, 86). The pomegrenade is all at once uterus, sperm bank, and weapon of mass destruction; it turns the reproductive symbolism of fruit into an agent of obliteration that can take away life on an unprecedented scale. Again, the Disaster Unconscious inserts the geopolitical into the personal through an orientation around the Event, albeit in small and oblique ways. The recurring image of stalled reproduction thrashing about violently with the mass mayhem and murder of war also emerges with startling intensity here. Ostensibly about Sarita and Jaz, two separate people searching for Karun—­Sarita’s husband and Jaz’s lover—­the novel tracks their romantic relationships taking place under the cloud cover of an apocalyptic nuclear holocaust. Sarita glances around herself and says: “I look at the sign for Crawford Market behind me, still smoldering from last night’s air raid (or has it simply been another terrorist bomb?” (3). The use of the word “simply” to note the presence of a bomb, albeit another bomb, indicates that terror has been normalized in the discourse of daily life; the fact that bombs hail down on a market suggests the presence of the military and geopolitical in the everyday.54 The name Crawford brings to mind the ghosts of the British whose partitioning of India caused the geopolitical conflict to infiltrate the daily lives of millions of Indians and Pakistanis, again revealing the pernicious legacies of colonialism decades after India’s independence, as well as marking the geopolitical disaster as another postcolonial disaster.55 Waiting for the bomb to drop, however, leads to a note of suspended animation: “Of course, it hardly matters where we hide if the Pakistanis have decided to jump the gun. If their promised schedule is a ruse, and this is the day they drop the Big One” (16). Metaphors of weapons of

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small-­scale and mass destruction govern the narrative. “Jump the gun” operates in both the symbolic and literal registers of this sentence, bringing together Story and Event through a simple turn of phrase. The Pakistanis have not only metaphorically “decided to jump the gun” but also literally so: choosing the nuclear bomb over the simple guns of earlier conflict. In this world, “dirty bombs” are set up all over the world, and the Internet comes to a standstill (18). Hindus and Muslims in India are at war with each other, and Hindu fanaticism matches its Muslim counterpart in nationalist intensity. Here in dystopia, a character remarks, “I remember the new coalition government’s edict to mollify their loony right fringe: all cartoon characters must now have traditional Hindu names. Bugs Bunny has become Khatmal Khargosh. Superman was first dubbed ‘Maha Manush,’ but with Superdevi’s success, gets by as ‘Supermanush.’ Archie and his gang have been banned altogether for being too culturally subversive” (23). These cartoon characters are dated icons whose antics Indian children devoured in print and on television over their long summer holidays in the 1970s and ’80s. To change Superman into the Hindi name Maha Manush—­literally meaning Super Man—­once again reveals governmental intervention into the private lives of Indian children. It also shows how the literary can be marshaled into the service of the pedagogical in reactionary ways.56 Yet Superman’s series of name changes, from the literal Maha Manush to the linguistically hybrid Supermanush, compromise the success of right-­wing propaganda. Superman simply cannot exist in his Hindu nationalist colors. At best, he emerges as a hybrid mix of East and West; even here the Western word takes precedence over the Hindi one simply because the English iteration comes first. In this case, the secondary linguistic placement of the Hindi word also depicts the failure to reinforce a Hindu identity that would stand up against corresponding Western and Pakistani entities. Superman cannot be turned into a Super Hindu Man who inscribes the boundaries of Self and Otherness that zealots seek to author. Through simple word choices, the novel uses the Story to ameliorate the effects of the all-­pervasive Event. The repeated failure of Hindu supremacy only leads to a fortification of Hindu militancy: “saffron is everywhere: flags fluttering from poles, kiosks sprouting from the sand, a banner that has come loose and undulates in the wind—­the beach has been inundated by a saffron wave” (77). Like the beach in narratives about the oceanic disaster, a benign landscape associated with people frolicking in sandy spaces takes on ominous resonances. An iconic symbol of cosmopolitan Bombay,

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even the beach assumes Hindu associations, showing the other side of warfare: not Pakistani militancy but its Indian counterpart. As Paul Williams says, “South Asian writers have understood the possession of nuclear weapons—­particularly the testing of India’s nuclear arsenal in 1998—­as being central to the Hindu nationalism which achieved electoral success during the 1990s and 2000s.”57 Nuclear prowess and Hindu nationalism are shackled together in this novel, reinforcing their agency in contributing to who is the Self and who the Other. Although Bombay is a cosmopolis harboring the diversity that only port cities contain, the novel warns against complacency about its resilience and hybrid identity: “They claimed this could never happen. Bombay was too cosmopolitan, its population too diverse, its communities too interdependent to ever become another Beirut or Belfast . . . ‘Just think of the financial give-­and-­take alone,’ my [Jaz’s] father would say . . . Without everyone’s cooperation the economy would simply dry up . . . ‘Bring on whatever havoc you will—­the city will remain united even if the country splits up’ ” (33–­34). Bombay, nevertheless, splits across religious lines where it is dangerous to cross boundaries between Hindu and Muslim areas. But Bombay is not only imploding; it is also exploding as Pakistan rains bombs upon it, literally putting the “bomb” in Bombay. Sarita says, “I stand on the road to clear my head. Anti-­aircraft fire still echoes in the distance, but I know the planes with the bombs have already flown away” (58). Suri never refers to the City of Devi as Mumbai, keeping the war imagery intact in the word Bombay. As more than a stylistic choice with deep thematic effects, the reference to Bombay instead of Mumbai can also be seen as resistance to Hindu nationalists who changed the name of the city from Bombay to Mumbai in 1995. Life comes to a standstill in the nuclear apocalypse: “the threatened bomb had done what a thousand traffic engineers couldn’t do—­made walking through even the most congested areas in the suburbs a breeze” (147). No one knows anymore who shot which rocket, who dropped which bomb. The Indians attack each other as much as the alien Other. In the process, the question of who is really Indian comes up in a novel that has no Pakistani characters. As Jaz’s cousin Rahim tells him: “You can scream you’re Indian, you can disavow your religion, you can even be the next incarnation of Krishna for all your Hindu countrymen will care. Their HRM [Hindu Rashtriya Manch] will pull down your pants and check your foreskin and slaughter you just the same” (166). Again, the political invades the personal when genitalia, or the presence or absence of a foreskin, can determine religion and nationality. History,

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too, especially the originary Event of Partition, is evoked here: Hindu and Muslim mobs would strip men who outwardly looked the same and then murder them based on the presence of a foreskin (Hindu) or its absence (Muslim).58 Otherness is also diluted by Indian Islamophobia toward Indian Muslims. Indian Muslims have long felt profound disaffection in post-­ Independent India, which has not always lived up to its constitutional promise of a secular state.59 National belonging and citizen identities shift and alter when an Indian Muslim can effortlessly be accused of being Pakistani or being an antinationalist terrorist, or both. In India, where it is impossible to distinguish between a Pakistani and an Indian by speech, appearance, and even food and clothing, the Othering act of xenophobia, in which selfhood is determined by foreskin, reveals the Otherness of the Self. Anyone can be a Pakistani agent. Here, the empowering gestures of Butterfly, who begins to dress and eat like an Indian, take on darker and more threatening resonances. The difference between legitimate and illegitimate violence is also murky, in this scenario of extreme militarization. The nation-­state often perpetuates the same sort of violence derided in its enemy, whether the foe is another nation or a group of homegrown terrorists.60 The City of Devi questions the legitimacy of state violence, asking us to think of “officially perpetrated” terror not just as a form of national protection but also as something as underhanded and venal as the very forces the state is claiming to fight. The novel criticizes militant Hinduism, whose emergence is rationalized as a response to militant Islam. In blurring the distinction between state-­sanctioned and enemy-­sanctioned forms of terror, Suri’s novel undermines the similarity between the benign Selfhood of the nation and the hostile Otherness of the national neighbor. The fiction of the geopolitical disaster thus seeks to equalize suffering and create compassion for the Other. The Disaster Unconscious constantly projects the geopolitical into the space of the personal. Sarita says, “looking back I can pinpoint the exact night things changed with Karun. Pakistan had joined the Chinese invasion two days earlier, making a series of bombing sorties all the way to Delhi that morning” (105). Calibrating time, even evaluating relationships, is radically altered in the geopolitical disaster. Sarita can only measure the destruction of her relationship with her husband in terms of when political events took place. Sarita’s honeymoon, an intensely personal and romantic experience, is disrupted by war and terror. Karun

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and Sarita visit the Pink City and find that most of its fabled architecture has been destroyed: The terrorism responsible for abbreviating our sightseeing in Jaipur wasn’t isolated. A series of attacks had continued ever since our wedding, with at least one set of bombs going off every two or three weeks in different states. Other incidents of violence had increased as well—­towns and villages all over India seemed afflicted by an epidemic of riot and rampages. Some explained this rising mayhem as a cycle of provocation and reaction engineered by the notorious Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, others pointed at Maoists insurgents or criminal syndicates. On the radio one day, I heard a news analyst trace the surge back to Superdevi, ascribing the blame to its climactic orgy of bloodshed. (87)

The personal punctuates the political and vice versa here: The chronology of the attacks is measured against the timeline of Sarita’s wedding. The violence is omnipresent, yet no one knows the source of the violence. Is it Indian? Pakistani? Or perhaps Kashmir freedom fighters? While the boundaries of Self and Other are dissolved here again, often the mode through which that is done is destructive and associated with death rather than regenerative and associated with life. Fiction originating from long-­range disasters, while offering slivers of hope, often refuses to provide any kind of totalizing—­and therefore cruel—­optimism. The personal relationships in the novel are played out against this background of war and terror. Karun has vanished. Sarita embarks on a journey through Muslim and Hindu areas in Bombay to look for him. Karun’s Muslim ex-­lover Jaz, or Ijaz, assists her. Jaz wants Karun to acknowledge what he is: a gay man, while Sarita simply wants her husband back. The question of who is Karun’s true partner—­the legal Hindu wife or the “illegal” male Muslim lover—­runs through the entire book. Karun functions as a symbol for Kashmir. Both names’ sharing their first two letters layer an Event-­related narrative with elements of the Story. In making Karun’s sexual orientation into a metaphor for who can claim the bisexual (or gay?) man, Suri also shows us how extreme Otherness can unite people as different as Sarita and Jaz through their hunt for Karun, or indeed can even dilute their mutual hostility. The

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character of Jaz not only stands in for the gay man as Muslim, but also represents the religious Other that Pakistan has become. The queering of the heterosexual romance plot, as seen earlier in The Hairdresser of Harare, not only is a clear literary strategy but also enacts a pedagogical, ethical intervention that disrupts normative boundaries between Self and Other in larger, even national and religious, terms. The City of Devi not only seeks to ameliorate the effects of disaster but also urges the nation-­state to live up to its promise of an inclusive postcoloniality. Sarita later discovers that her husband had a long relationship with Jaz: “Here, in the middle of this war, in this hotel where we wed, I start to see my marriage with Karun in a revealing new light” (310).61 War strips away the layers of denial, as Sarita finally realizes why her husband never had penetrative sex with her. War also leaves people with a lack of options. Sarita wonders how to forgive Karun for his “betrayal” but then says, “On the other hand, what is the alternative? What chance do I have to start again, with the war and all its looming threats? Surely with some work I can salvage enough of my earlier contentment. Screen off what happened, since it occurred before our marriage—­not let it drive us off the track” (310). Sarita realizes that war forecloses otherwise available options as military aggression enters everyday life and permeates the way we think about ourselves. The Disaster Unconscious not only imposes the rhetoric of the military and the political onto the personal, but the military language also suffuses and changes the romantic decisions that characters take. The phrase “drive us off the track” once again evokes the ghostly trains of Partition, bringing Pakistan back into a narrative set squarely in India, reconfiguring boundaries between Self and Otherness in oblique, even spectral, ways. “Screen off,” similarly, brings to mind the giant screen described at the end of Chef that both unites and screens off Indians and Pakistanis, Selves and Others, from their oppositional alter egos. The novel ends with the sexual union of Karun, Jaz, and Sarita in a seemingly bizarre ménage-­a-­trois, followed by Karun’s death and Sarita’s pregnancy.62 While Sarita and Jaz collaborate to find Karun, they know the Hindu fundamentalists will kill him before he can reveal the secrets to making the bomb. This threesome is first hinted at by Sarita’s musings on triangles: It occurs to me that this is the first time that Karun, Jaz, and I have been alone. So alone, in fact, that we could be the last three people on the planet. Didn’t Karun always maintain three

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was the basic configuration of the universe? That triples governed everything from space to quarks. The geometry we lived in, the primary colors we saw, the particles pulsing around our atoms, the stars in their celestial triads above. Except not all triangles are as natural or sustainable as he claimed. For instance, this triangle in which we find ourselves unwillingly conjoined. (341, emphasis added)

Husband, male-­lover, wife: War creates startling new configurations and fresh patterns for living life. While triangles may echo the Hindu Trinity, inadvertently validating the triumphant Hinduism critiqued in the novel, Karun’s description of the power of triangles is rendered in precise scientific and mathematical terms, deflating the domination of religion in the conjoining of husband, wife, and gay paramour as well as the binaries associated with terms such as Self and Otherness. Karun and Sarita proceed to have heterosexual intercourse while Jaz penetrates Karun from behind. Most unsurprisingly—­think of the overdetermination of the sexual triangle, especially since the only man capable of producing life-­generating sperm in a time of war and mass destruction will be killed by Hindu fascists—­this leads to procreation and the prospect of a child. The strict narration of the apocalyptic Event of a nuclear war is interrupted by the reappearance of the Story through the romance novel plot. But, like The Hairdresser of Harare, this romance novel turns the conventions of the form on its head. The half-­ Hindu, half-­Muslim child born of a queer union with two fathers is no ordinary child. Already imbued with messianic qualities, the Super Baccha, echoing Super Manush and Super Devi, may bring about religious and international healing, perhaps even erasing homophobia, as it advances through its postapocalyptic life.63 The City of Devi militates against the trope of stalled reproduction, seen in Chef, by initiating a pregnancy at the end of the novel. The child’s conception also short-­circuits the conventional heterosexual, and even gay, romance plot, in which sex redeems a socially thwarted couple.64 There is no couple to redeem here—­only an impossible triangle, which dissolves on its own through Karun’s death, although it reconstitutes itself as the queer triad of Jaz, Sarita, and the child they will raise together. That the child must be seen in political and religious terms shows the return of the Disaster Unconscious in the private domain of copulation and conception. That the child is yet unborn—­ the novel only gestates a pregnancy that may miscarry—­defuses some

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of the cathartic possibilities of the child. If hope can ever be found in disaster, it exists as a frail possibility, as cautious, not cruel, optimism. In No Future, Lee Edelman argues: We are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the child. That figural child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights in its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed. For the social order exists to preserve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly valued than the actuality of the freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such freedoms fall due. Hence, whatever refuses this mandate by which our political institutions compel the reproduction of the Child must appear as a threat not only to the organization of a given social order but, also and far more ominously, to social order as such, insofar as it threatens the logic of futurism on which meaning always depends.65

According to Edelman, the social insistence on reproduction preserves a restrictive political and social order with the absence of reproduction, or reproductive capacity, signaling a challenge to an oppressive regime of heterosexual procreation. Yet children in disaster literature as a whole, and the child produced through the triangulation of Karun, Sarita, and Jaz in particular, already subvert normative regimes. Paternity has been queered here through sexual triangulation. The queer parentage also challenges the heteronormativity of the nation-­state. The half-­Hindu, half-­Muslim child belongs to nobody and also to everybody. In the end, Jaz agrees to stay on with Sarita and father her baby. Always a nomad, an identity claimed by some Indian Muslims who are at home neither in India nor in Pakistan, Jaz finds the idea oddly appealing: But there are discoveries waiting here as well. The future is just as uncharted, as unrevealed. The step I have committed to, the role I’ll assume—­becoming a father, taking on responsibility. Isn’t it precisely the newness of the experience that attracted me?—­the rung towards adulthood, towards filling the gap I sense inside? Had Karun recognized this need, tried to communicate it to me from the beginning? Could he have seen into the

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future as Sarita claimed, set this opening as a gift to me? (City of Devi, 380, emphasis added)

As Om Prakash Dwivedi points out, The City of Devi “challenges nationalist discourse and the very idea of Indianness through the figure of Jaz, the ‘oversexed cruiser.’ ”66 Jaz realizes in the midst of all this trauma that new life is vital for the survival of the old, but it can only be lived haltingly, as conveyed by the words “set this opening”: “Perhaps this is the place to stop. And acknowledge these myriad paths along which we strive. The sun peeps out and begins to shine on the Jazter’s face. The bruised earth hurtles along, hoping to survive” (381). Disaster can act as a moment of emotional space-­clearing, even when Otherness is blurred through the healing possibilities of a child born from an interreligious queer union. The image of the “bruised earth hoping to survive” echoes not merely defeating violence and its corollary—­cautious optimism—­but also what could happen when, not if, the nuclear bombing actually happens. The sun shining, again an old trope that beckons to a glorious new future, takes on disturbing resonances if the sun is seen as analogous to a nuclear conflagration with its power to burn with heat and light. The literary impulse of disaster fiction to provide happy endings—­recall that the sun shines on the school built in the wake of the destruction caused by the tsunami in The Blue Dragon—­is diluted to gestures of cautious hope, perhaps itself a consequence of the slow-­onset, long-­process disaster in which the eternal simmer bursts unexpectedly into flames and then subsides again.

Cautious Optimism and Some Future The geopolitical disaster continues to hover over texts that promise us hope of a better future by undermining its own literary tropes of symbolic optimism as well as by refusing to completely defuse its own optimism.67 Every personal act—­whether it be Rubiya’s deciding to marry a Pakistani man in Chef so that the hostage Irem can remain in India with her child, or Butterfly’s dressing, speaking, and eating as if she were Indian in Diary, or Ijaz’s deciding to parent his dead lover’s child with his dead lover’s wife in The City of Devi—­is not a personal act unto itself; rather, it has deep political causes, effects, and consequences. These political causes, effects, and consequences, along with their influence on personal lives, also have an ethical charge: They dilute the boundaries

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between Self and Otherness, create alternative models of kinship that provide openings for hope and healing, and paradoxically even undermine that hope and healing through aporetic textual ruptures. They also teach readers to notice the intricate moral positions that people whose lives are caught up in a long-­term disaster may occupy and to see their selfhood as full of complexity and humanity rather than as only existing under the shadows of a horrific genocide, a constant war, and a nuclear holocaust that may or may not come to pass. “War of the Words” began with an anecdote from The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. It also, appropriately, ends with that novel and Arundhati Roy’s vision for South Asia in the twenty-­first century. The Kashmiri freedom-­fighter, Musa, decides to return to Kashmir, where he will die fighting for the liberation of his people: He would leave for Kashmir the next morning, to return to a new phase in an old war from which, this time, he would not return. He would die the way he wanted to, with his Asal boot on. He would be buried the way he wanted to be—­a faceless man in a nameless grave. The younger men who would take his place would be harder, narrower and less forgiving. They would be more likely to win any way they fought because they belonged to a generation that had known nothing but war . . . [Tilo] would not be undone [at her grief over Musa’s death] because she was able to write to him regularly and visit him often enough through the crack in the door that the battered angels in the graveyard held open (illegally) for her. (443)

Throughout Postcolonial Disaster, I have used terms such as “cautious optimism,” “horizons of possibility,” “slivers of openings,” and “apertures of hope,” so that readers can recognize the catastrophic consequences of disaster but are not left to flail in their postapocalyptic musings, because of either the gravity of postcolonial crisis or any “cruel optimism” that literature may provide. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness may not quite live up to the absolutism of its title: The end of the novel still conjures up Kashmir as a battlefield with hardened warriors, scarred veterans who can speak no words of peace for they have known only words of war. Yet the novel renders what I have been using as symbolic (the aperture of hope in disaster fiction that is such a fundamental part of the fantastic possibility of the Story) as literal (the crack in the door in the graveyard held open by “battered angels” that allows

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interaction with what is outside). South Asia was, is, and always may be a graveyard, as far as its geopolitics are concerned. Yet the graveyard has a door. The door has a crack. The crack, suggesting rupture without a complete break, implies that Kashmir, India, and Pakistan can never be separated from each other—­they are Self and Other, simultaneously. The crack is the real and metaphorical opening through which we commune with the Other across the boundaries that divide us, in life, in death, and particularly through the arbitrary national borders constructed by the stroke of an imperialist pen.

Coda

Catastrophes of the Now (B)Reaching Out of the Refugee Disaster

August is the cruelest month, at least in my home state of Louisiana. As I typed the first words of this coda in August 2017, Hurricane Harvey had already destroyed Houston and dropped large amounts of rain in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Meanwhile, nearly 1,200 people had been killed in catastrophic flooding in Mumbai while Hurricane Irma gathered strength as the most powerful storm in the Atlantic in decades. Postcolonial Disaster culminates with a tentative open-­ended coda rather than with a conventional conclusion signifying closure: If the effects of disasters never end, this coda asks, how is it even possible to finish a book on contemporary disaster? Postcolonial Disaster has focused on both sudden-­onset and slow-­ moving disasters. The ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, however, confounds this cataloguing of catastrophe.1 The influx of Syrian refugees into Europe and other parts of the world may have appeared to be a sudden-­onset disaster, as wave after wave of persecuted people were unexpectedly seeking shelter on safer shores in 2016–­2017. This humanitarian catastrophe is also a slow-­moving disaster, though: The refugee crisis took years of living under a military dictatorship, and then the fundamentalist counter-­regime of ISIS, to reach a point of implosion and explosion. Once again, the West was involved in this unholy holy mess. According to Christopher Phillips, “the decision to turn on Assad by the west and regional actors would play a key role in the move towards civil war . . . These states, having been so conscious of the dangers of instability in Syria early on adopted such a hard line so suddenly, further escalating the situation.”2 A historian of political Islam, Fawaz A. Gerges, states that that a “key factor in the resurgence of ISIS [first instituted in 2005

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as a caliphate] is the breakdown of state institutions in Syria and the country’s descent into all-­out war in 2011.”3 The refugee crisis took time to build up and then suddenly reached the explosive point of no return, literally and metaphorically.4 Breach, the first collection of short stories on the Syrian refugee crisis, was published in 2016. Cowritten by Nigerian-­German poet Olumide British writer Annie Holmes, Breach is Popoola and Zimbabwean-­ every bit as anthropological as it is literary. Popoola and Holmes spent months interviewing refugees in the camp at Calais, France, colloquially called The Jungle. Part of a special series called “Peirene Now,” Breach was especially commissioned as the editors of Peirene Now discovered that: Every now and again there are urgent topics that Peirene likes to see addressed in literature but we can’t find any suitable stories. So, we have decided to launch a new project: Peirene Now! where we commission writers to respond with fiction to current political topics.5

Because Breach had to be written immediately, craft was not the final focus of the collection as much as the expositional agenda or the pressing need to get the Story out, thus bringing the refugee disaster back to the pedagogical imperatives of the sudden-­onset oceanic disaster. Olumide and Holmes spent a year interviewing refugees in camp Jungle; the eight stories in the collection are based on refugee testimonies. Breach engages with oral narratives and converts them into fictional form. Morally, the issue of outsiders’ appropriating the suffering of others to tell stories for commercial gain can be raised again. Yet the fact that someone, somewhere, felt that the Syrian refugee crisis needed stories that went beyond mere documentation testifies to the urgency in rendering catastrophe into literature. Breach also provides a fitting conclusion to the general project of Postcolonial Disaster, which has insisted on the need for stories, with the literary flourish that makes stories into stories but that also renders their depiction of catastrophe so problematic, to round out our understanding of disaster. While the Syrian refugees in The Jungle are unable to speak for themselves—­ they are the ultimate subalterns, after all—­the psychological integrity of their narratives is still preserved through the act of vicarious testimony that ethnography involves. The collection expands its pedagogical

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purview to include people from the host country, not merely to reveal their racism but also to ask why they are so afraid of helpless refugees. My purpose, however, is not to conduct a close reading of Breach as a narrative about disaster but instead to understand how the refugee crisis is a new sort of tragic occurrence, one that combines all the elements of the other catastrophes discussed in Postcolonial Disaster.6 Breach offers useful ways of thinking about other similar disasters whose immediacy has not yet produced stories. This coda also functions as an opening point to examine the refugee crisis in terms of the arguments made in this book: to show how the ideas generated in Postcolonial Disaster may be extrapolated onto other narratives of catastrophe.

The Refugee Crisis and the Oceanic Disaster Even though Syria has been under the Bashar al-­Assad dictatorship since 2000, ISIS/L not only had been long in the making but also had transformed and transmuted over time. The civil war, raging since 2011, led to a sudden influx of Syrian refugees to Europe, North America, and the Gulf States. Only recently have we been inundated with images of children failing to survive the perilous journey to freedom and safety: The iconic image of Alan Kurdi, the toddler who drowned and found dead on a beach when his boat capsized in 2015, made international news everywhere. Water, then, emerges as an important symbol in the refugee disaster, both in its literature as well as in “real” life, because it is one of the few ways to escape the crisis on land, echoing a startling similarity with the oceanic disaster where water is a source of life as well as of death. Children, too, are important symbols in the refugee disaster, resonating with all the disasters in this book. In addition to Alan Kurdi, the five-­year-­old Omran Dagneesh haunted global consciousness in 2016 after images of him, pulled from the debris of a bombed building and staring vacantly into the cameras photographing his blank anguish, were circulated for the world to consume or avert its eyes from. The second story in Breach, entitled “The Terrier,” emphasizes the emptiness of those exposed to violence in Syria. The story opens from the perspective of a Frenchwoman who houses a refugee boy and girl but is unable to establish any affective communication with them. The narrator describes the boy’s emotions as: “what I felt from him was defeat

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but with something iron hard beneath it. A proud rage.”7Postcolonial Disaster ended with the idea of “cautious optimism” and “some future,” although the refugee disaster may in time point to the abject failure of these concepts. In the oceanic disaster, Sri Lankan diasporics and foreigners returned to rebuild a shattered nation. What rebuilding is possible in Syria, where bombs fall from the sky like fiery rain?

The Refugee Crisis and the Economic Disaster Like the economic disaster, the refugee disaster in Syria also shows the futility of resistance when the stomach is empty. The refugee disaster is also a form of buying out: of such absolute defeat by the circumstances in the home country that leaving is the only option. The refugee disaster, unlike the economic disaster, is not about scouring trash cans for rancid food. It is about the inability to even sift through rubbish heaps for food lest a bomb falls, or even the the very absence of trash cans. The home country and the factors leading to migration both punctuate the stories about the refugee disaster in Breach so that buying out completely is never possible. How to survive physically and emotionally are important concerns in the refugee disaster where even the so-­called First World is unable to provide a safe haven and where refugees live in fear of not having the correct documents, of arrests, and of deportations or of not being let in at all. Like the economic disaster, in which writing in diaspora becomes a form of cultural remittance to the home country, the refugee disaster also creates literary communities that help get the word out about the crisis. New fiction has been published about the refugee crisis around the same time as Breach or immediately after. This includes Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017); Refugee Tales (2016), partly based on The Canterbury Tales; and Mediterranean (2018) published by the periodical Warscapes. A journal dedicated exclusively to publishing articles by refugees only, and appropriately named The Journal of Interrupted Studies, has commenced publication recently.8 My point here is not to list the growing work on the refugee crisis but instead to show how people are advancing beyond Breach, which was written by people outside the crisis to create an authorial space for people inside it. Crisis always creates community and, often, the resulting communities are brought into being through books and writing, especially in the state of forced diasporas created by both the economic disaster and the refugee disaster.

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The Refugee Crisis and the Medical Disaster While the coexisting medical disaster in Syria may seem to have the least resonance with its refugee disaster, health workers have warned about its pernicious effects, and potential crises, especially with refugees fleeing from a broken health system. According to M. Mobayed and M. Abou-­Saleh: Attacks on Syria’s medical community and infrastructure have devastated the health care system. Government forces—­and sometimes opposition groups—­have deliberately targeted medical professions, hospitals, ambulances, and supplies, preventing untold number of people from getting medical care and stopping medical professionals from providing services when they are critically needed. In a ruthless conflict, where depriving citizens of food and medical care has become a medical tactic, medical professionals have become high value targets.9

Breach also mentions refugee camps as breeding grounds for disease. In the story “Extending a Hand,” one of the refugees thinks back to diseases encountered in Africa and how the camp in Syria itself generates illness: “Your mother has told you many times of the great famine. And the great song. And the great humiliation. She used to say ‘There are no other pictures. We are always the famished skeletons with the kwashiorkor belly only. It’s not enough, it’s not right, that this is all there is to us’ ” (Breach, 53, emphasis added). This image of “famished skeletons” evokes the cover of Time magazine discussed in chapter 3: of the picture that locks Africans and other non-­Westerners into a certain image that conjures up disease wherever they may be.

The Refugee Crisis and the Geopolitical Disaster The crisis that resonates most strongly with geopolitical disaster is the refugee crisis, although it intersects sharply with the other disasters discussed in this book, as well. The Syrian crisis was also long in the making, like the war between India and Pakistan. Obviously geopolitical in their ramifications, regional and international politics have played important roles in creating this particular disaster. Yet the crisis in Syria does not go back as many centuries as the conflict in South Asia: It

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started as recently as 2011, after the government cracked down on demonstrations following the Arab Spring. The opposition also took to force in response to the Assad government’s brutal crackdown, and fierce fighting began between the two warring factions. The Islamic State, or ISIS/L, reemerged in this context, much like the India–­Pakistan war bred even more terrorism over the decades. Moreover, like India and Pakistan, the conflict has also taken on a religious dimension, with the Sunni majority now fighting Assad’s Shia Alawite community. The U.N. has determined that both sides are guilty of war crimes, which makes daily life untenable for ordinary Syrians. Like the Indian subcontinent, Syria is also at war with its national neighbors, particularly Lebanon. Politics with a big P invades every aspect of Syrian life, including the literature it generates. The refugee crisis consolidates the themes and aesthetic maneuvers of the other chapters in Postcolonial Disaster. The literary texts in all four chapters demonstrate the need for a hybrid mechanism which fuses East with West and North with South in fighting disaster. So, too, does the refugee disaster require this fusion, although one in human and humanitarian terms. At the end of the story “The Terrier,” the Frenchwoman adopts two Syrian “children,” knowing full well that the boy is pretending to be underage because he then would be subject to the same legal protections as his younger sister. “I waited by the shelter as Omid and Nalin said goodbye to their friends, and then we three walked back to the car and drove home in the dark. By the backdoor, I patted the handlebars of my old motorbike. That’s another one that will be moving out of here soon” (Breach, 47). Not only does the narrative create an unusual triad of a Frenchwoman and two Syrian children—­ like the ending of City of Devi—­the narrator decides to give up the motorcycle, which symbolizes French modernity and a life of female independence, to parent refugee children instead. Postcolonial Disaster claims that the healing and soothing effects of narrative often smooths out the rough edges of catastrophe. Breach is no exception in this regard. The happy ending or the apertures of opportunity also present themselves in this collection. In the story entitled “Counting Down,” a group of refugees appropriately counts down to their arrival in France after a harrowing journey. “Suleyman starts laughing but his chest pushes up too much and he holds it, bending over, coughing. Harh-­harh-­harh. GPS opens his face; the laughter falls like his hands: beautiful and long” (Breach, 26). The impact of Suleyman’s laughter, and the joy it signals, is instantly undercut by his inability to

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breathe properly. The cough also gestures toward the physical trauma of migration as well as to whatever hardships the cold weather in France might bring, subtly using something as small as a coughing fit to foreshadow the hard times ahead. Yet the story ends on a wave of laughter, with the word “falls” perhaps connoting the movement of water. The fragile hope dangled at the end of the story is immediately undercut with a reminder of the catastrophe by something as oblique as a single world like “falls.” In “Extending a Hand,” the main character, who tries to prostitute herself to buy herself time (through money) in France, is referred to as “you.” As a literary and ethical choice, the pronoun choice has a powerful impact. The protagonist is collapsed not only into every refugee on the planet but also into all of us through the use of the word “you.” In Breach, the writers are more careful of the dance around the ethical dilemmas of fetishizing the suffering of others, perhaps because they too are immigrants: As stated earlier, Popoola is Nigerian-­German and Holmes is British-­Zimbabwean. An outsider writing about another outsider may open up different places of sympathy and create a contrasting affective alignment of Self and Other.10 The refugee disaster as an Event knows no nation in its catastrophic possibilities. The future is literally another country. In the story “Ghosts”—­an all too fitting appellation for refugees—­the appropriately nameless narrator says: You want to talk about gambling and chance? We’ve lost the game already, I want to tell him. If they’ve got your fingerprints, you’ve lost. If you’re on a crime list, you’ve lost. No chance. OK, say it’s a lottery, and you know what? We got the dud ticket. Our country is just plain out of date. Ten, twenty years ago, sure—­ asylum, refuge, future. But the roulette wheel spun round and round, and some other country’s landed in the lucky spot. ­Ka-­ching. (Breach 91–­92)

The phrase “our country is just plain out of date” emphasizes that what is metaphorical in other disasters as an attempt to bring about a better future—­to change the devastated country from within—­is literal in the Syrian refugee crisis, as those who flee have no country to which to return. They have lost the great gamble of life. The image of the lottery conveys vividly through metaphor what reams of documentary information and policy data cannot—­that life is a cruel game of chance in

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which certain people, such as Syrian refugees, have completely and utterly lucked out. Their only option is to keep moving and hope that some friendly nation will someday house them. The story “Oranges in the River” touches on that theme and also opens a window of possibility: “There’s a kind of freedom in moving at last after the hours of waiting, the beat of blood in Jan’s ears, the thud of his feet on the ground, but it never lasts, this exhilaration” (Breach, 126). Again, the window closes as soon as it opens. Although the exhilaration may never endure, at least the narrator has a brief moment of that joyous possibility. The only way to deal with disaster, as we have learned from the other chapters, is not to keep running away, since it is impossible to escape its closed circuit, but instead reaching deep within to find possibilities of hope and healing in a calamity that will never come to a full stop. But it’s now time for me to put a full stop to my treatise and conclude the book that cannot merely conclude with a reflection on how the dialectics between Story and Event and between the Disaster Unconscious’s surging and ebbing reveal themselves in the refugee crisis. Breach is more carefully crafted than some of the texts about sudden-­onset disasters, such as the Indian Ocean tsunami. Popoola and Holmes are already accomplished writers; their stories are also based on interviews. Since the authors did not have to conjure fiction out of thin air in limited time, they could spend more effort on craft despite feeling an urgency to get the word out about the refugee crisis. Breach is a relatively successful amalgamation of Story and Event, of literature and ethnography. The authors also took care not to appropriate the voice of the Other, although their own immigrant—­but not refugee—­status perhaps gives them a certain empathy with other outsiders. On the one hand, some of the stories, such as “Oranges in the River,” are written in the first person voice, which could lead to the charge of appropriation, of getting into the mind of a person who is suffering in unfathomable ways. On the other hand, the use of the first person also allows readers to feel pain more viscerally, and that feeling may result in some real-­world action, such as actively urging governments to harbor more refugees, in order to ease the crisis. The refugee disaster reveals a fundamental truth about crisis: that all disasters have ecological, economic, medical, and geopolitical consequences. In seeming to separate these consequences in its four chapters, Postcolonial Disaster uses nomenclature to clarify and heighten their status as disasters, to enhance our awareness of their status as such, and possibly even to broadcast calls to action arising from our awareness of their status as disasters.

Notes

Introduction 1. The spot for first place was claimed by Hurricane Sandy seven years later, in 2012. 2. The term “Cajun navies” refers to Louisiana citizens who used their own boats to rescue people from flood zones. “Cajun” is the name for an ethnic group in Louisiana, which traces its roots back to the French-­ Canadian area of Arcadia. In August 2017, unofficial Cajun navies traveled to Texas to help the victims of Hurricane Harvey. 3. Literature and culture have always attempted to come to terms with catastrophe. See, for example, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2008), which depicts the Bhopal, India, gas leak in1984; Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998), which sought to understand white culpability in the context of the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa; the comic strip Deogratias (2000) about the genocide in Rwanda; and Haitian filmmaker Arnold Antoin’s movie, Chronique d’une Catastrophe Annoncée (2010), on the earthquake in Haiti. The Caribbean Studies journal Small Axe also started “a new series of commissioned artist projects and essays centered on the theme ‘The Visual Life of Catastrophic History’ [in which] one artist’s portfolio and one essay will be featured in each issue of the journal between Small Axe 35, July 2011, and Small Axe 42, November 2013.” Unsigned editorial, “The Visual Life of Catastrophic History: A Small Axe Project Statement,” Small Axe 15, no.1 (March 2011): 133. 4. Hanah Beech and Muktita Suhartono, “In Disaster’s Grip, Again and Again,” New York Times, October 6, 2018. 5. I have been deeply influenced by the work of Susan Sontag, especially her short essay collection Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), Sontag states that: Not to be pained by these pictures [of war], not to recoil from them, not to strive to abolish what causes this havoc, this carnage—­ these, for [Virginia] Woolf, would be the reaction of a moral monster. And, she is saying, we are not monsters, we are members of the

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notes to page 5 educated class. Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy. We have failed to hold this reality in mind. (3)

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 3. 6. In giving each disaster a name, I do not intend to restrict, but rather to amplify, its intersectional qualities with the ecological, the medical, the economic, and the political. I narrow the nomenclature to specific meanings as linked to specific spaces, which are already marked in certain ways in representations (and self-­representations) of many of the world’s postcolonial regions. 7. An image comes to mind here: of the hollowed-­out, skeletal body of an AIDS victim in Africa, particularly that of a child. 8. Peter Hudson, a South African political scientist, extends Fanon’s notion of a colonial unconscious in order to understand how postcolonial texts are still preoccupied by colonialism, which forms a subtext in all their work. Hudson examines “the colonial unconscious and the relationship between it, and on the one hand, the South African state as a liberal democratic constitutional state, and on the other, the South African state qua national democratic state (that is qua state defined by its anti-­ colonialism.” Similarly, the Disaster Unconscious also embraces a similar paradox: how to be democratic when postcolonial democracy has failed so spectacularly in managing disaster. Peter Hudson, “The State and the Colonial Unconsciousness,” Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies 39, no. 2 (2013): 263. 9. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 20. 10. In an interview with Postcolonial Text, Lazarus says: When I was writing this book, I had it in mind that it was going to be called Mind the Gap! And the gap was between what “postcolonialist” criticism tends to address and what ”postcolonial” literary works tend to disclose. It was precisely in thinking through the question of ideology that I turned to the category of the unconscious, . . . meaning . . . the field of vision, or the problematic, that structures postcolonial thinking or postcolonial studies as a discourse, discipline or sub-­discipline; and that was how the idea of “the postcolonial unconscious” came up. Is there a set of assumptions which a very large number of postcolonialist critics tend to hold even if they don’t talk about them or even if they don’t raise

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them explicitly? It seemed to me that there were; these make up the postcolonial unconscious: assumptions about the historical conjuncture, about literary form, about emergent tendencies in society, about political action very generally. And obviously, then, I am writing in criticism of the particular “unconscious” that governs postcolonial studies. I am arguing not only that these structuring assumptions need to be brought into the open (because some critics have been bringing them into the open), but also that they must be contested. I recognise that this rather commits me to arguing against “the postcolonial” as a notion, as such.

Accessed July 23, 2019. https://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/ article/view/1506/1389. I am grateful to Meghan Gorman-­Darif or sharing this article with me. 11. Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 22. 12. See John Marx’s excellent essay, “What Happened to the Postcolonial Novel” on African postcolonial genre fiction. According to Marx, genre fiction allows the novel to liberate itself from the pressures of narrating the nation and to speak of city life instead. Postcolonial Disaster, however, claims that disaster returns even genre fiction to narrating the nation as crisis. John Marx, “What Happened to the Postcolonial Novel: The Urban Longing for Form,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 50 no. 3 (November 2017): 409–­425. 13. It could be argued that colonialism itself has been a long disaster with catastrophic consequences that linger into the twenty-­first century. While the aim of this book is to study postcolonial disasters—­that is, catastrophes that take place in the period after the formal break from colonialism—­I hope the project will open ways to extend and expand “disaster times” to the temporality of earlier colonial disasters. My point about the s­ tory’s ability to play more as the originary event recedes in the background (even as its calamitous effects linger in our unconscious minds) is amply proven through a quick glance at early postcolonial literature, which in the beginning was directly about anticolonial resistance, nationalism, and national allegory. As we move into the twenty-­first century and grapple with the legacies, rather than the actuality, of colonialism, postcolonial literature explodes into a thousand different fragments in which we can see the shards of colonialism—­such as the use of the English language itself. But that literature is no longer so solely centered strictly on the event(s) of past European colonial oppression.

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14. Wolf Schmid, Narratology: An Introduction, trans. Alexander Starritt (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter GmbH and Co, KG, 2010), 5. 15. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 4th ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 49. 16. Fabula and Syuzhet are both narratological terms, associated with the Russian formalists, particularly Viktor Shklovsky and Vladimir Propp. 17. H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 12. 18. Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003, 1987), 8. 19. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 178–­79. 20. As Badiou says: In collective situations—­in which the collective becomes interested in itself—­politics (if it exists as generic politics: what was called, for a long time, revolutionary politics, and for which another word must be found today) is also a procedure of fidelity. Its events are the historical caesura in which the void of the social is summoned in default of the State; its operators are variable; its infinite productions are indiscernible (in particular, they do not coincide with any part nameable according to the State), being nothing more than ‘changes’ of political subjectivity within the situation; and finally its enquiries consist of militant organized activity. (340, emphasis in original)

21. Andreas Markantonatos, Tragic Narrative: A Narratological Study of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter GmbH and Co, KG, 2012), 116. 22. Elena Machado Sáez’s book Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015) deploys the phrase “market aesthetics” to “describe the ways that the style and content of the historical fiction articulate a conflict between the pedagogical ethical imperative and the market lens of the reader” (5). Sáez discusses the pressures operating on Caribbean historical fiction to be written in a certain way to appeal to Western or even global readers hungry for a particular multicultural narrative while also fulfilling a writerly promise to itself. Although my analysis proceeds along those lines, I also examine how fiction responds to the pressures of contemporary and continuing disaster, which often require swift response and redressal. 23. Nadine Gordimer, Three in a Bed: Fictions, Morals, and Politics (Bennington, Vt.: Bennington College, 1991), 4.

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24. The didactic is more delivery-­oriented, its focus being on the person who delivers the message, and the pedagogic more learning-­oriented, its focus being on those people who receive the message. My use of the word “we” throughout this book concentrates, therefore, on its readers who receive the pedagogic message of disaster fiction. 25. Jason Barr, The Kaiju Film: A Critical Study of Cinema’s Biggest Monsters (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2016), 133. 26. See Kevin Rozario, The Culture of Calamity, Disaster and the Making of Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) for a cultural history of how the media feed a public desire for the spectacle of disaster. Rozario’s outstanding work breaks new ground in the study of disaster, especially through its wide historical range and deep cultural archive. His book differs significantly from mine, however, in that his scholarly orientation is that of a historian of American culture rather than a postcolonial literary critic. Also see Marie Hélène Huet’s The Culture of Disaster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) for another intellectual history of catastrophe; and see Eva Horn’s The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). None of these three books, however, really intervenes in the field of disaster studies or focuses solely on postcolonial disaster and literature. 27. Studies of postcolonial trauma are too numerous to list here, so I will merely cite a few representative examples: See the special issue of the journal Studies in the Novel, edited by Stef Craps and Gert Buelens, on “Postcolonial Trauma Novels” (40), nos. 1–­2. (2008); K. I. Baxter’s article “Memory and Photography: Rethinking Postcolonial Trauma Studies,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47, no.1 (January 2011):18–­29; the special issue edited by SN Nikro on “Situating Postcolonial Trauma Studies” in Postcolonial Text 9, no. 2 (2014); Ogaga Ifowodo’s monograph History, Trauma and Healing in Postcolonial Narratives: Reconstructing Identities (New York: Palgrave, 2013); Stef Craps’s book Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Sam Durrant’s seminal monograph, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). Also see Arthur Kleinman et al., eds., Social Suffering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), and Ramu Nagappan’s Speaking Havoc: Social Suffering and South Asian Narrative (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), both for research on group trauma. Jay Rajiva’s excellent monograph, Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) also looks at group suffering in South Asia and Southern Africa through collective trauma as well as focuses on the figure of the child.

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28. See Fredric Jameson’s essay “Third World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 65–­88. 29. My home institution, Louisiana State University, for example, offers an undergraduate minor in Disaster Science and Management (DSM) through the Department of Geography and Anthropology. 30. Providing a history of the etymology of the term, Al-­Madhari and Keller state: The word “disaster” entered the English language originally in the 16th Century from the French word “desastre”. This was composed from the prefix “des” (dis) and “astre” which was derived from the Latin word “astrum” and means star; thus, desastre means literally “bad star,” which corresponds to an astrological configuration describing an extremely unfavorable event. The astrological context of disaster has been lost in modern language usage. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a disaster is: “Anything that befalls of ruinous or distressing nature; a sudden or great misfortune, mishap, misadventure; a calamity.” Another contemporary dictionary echoes the principal components of this definition with a disaster being: “an occurrence inflicting widespread destruction and distress.”

A. F. Al-­Madhari and A. Z. Keller, “Review of Disaster Definitions,” Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 12, no. 1 (March 1997), 18. 31. The definition of “disaster” is so contentious that entire books have been focused on sketching its contours, without arriving at a consensus. All the essays in Enrico Quarantelli’s edited collection What Is a Disaster: Perspectives on the Question (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), attempt to define disaster, and often end up quarreling with each other in the process over basic definitions. All my section headings in this introduction play with the title of Quarantelli’s book. 32. In Quarantelli, 144. 33. Obviously, disaster can be broken into more than four subcategories and, obviously, more than just the AIDS crisis in Southern Africa, for example, can be a medical disaster. I hope scholars will use the framework of this book to expand on the definitions and case studies I provide here. It is beyond the scope of any one book, however, to provide a comprehensive history or definition of each and every disaster and subdisaster throughout the world.

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34. Oliver Smith seems to echo the debates around economic crisis here. See Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007), in which she argues that the Western world deliberately implemented damaging economic and political policies to the disaster-­struck parts of the world such as Iraq and Sri Lanka. 35. Boris N. Porfiriev’s definition of disaster in a Russian context further cements these assertions: “Webster’s definition of disaster treats it as a discrete event [when it is really] a process or a state (condition) of affairs accentuating its physical impact, while the interpretation of calamity is based towards its socio-­psychological aftermath” (in Quarantelli, 53). 36. For example, see Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia (New York: Palgrave, 2013). 37. Uriel Rosenthal’s description of the indices of disaster particularly resonates here: [Disasters are] complex, linked, connected, processual . . . the classical distinction between natural and man-­ made disasters has given way to more advanced thinking. [Scholars]  .  .  . agree upon the fact that floods, droughts, and other so-­called natural disasters relate directly to human intervention into the ecological system as well as to outright technological interference and human exploitation. (in Quarantelli 151, emphasis added)

38. Mark D. Anderson, Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 21. 39. Porfiriev’s description of exposure as a category of analysis vis-­à-­vis disaster is useful here: The idea of vulnerability is a theory or theoretical approach to explaining the origin (causes) and development of disaster, and thus answering the question of ‘why a disaster’ rather than ‘what a disaster is’ and ‘what disaster does,’ that are often the principles used in the definition of disaster. (in Quarantelli, 57–­58)

He proposes categories of “destructive agents” that include: “Natural including permanent impact . . . (and) . . . temporary impact . . . anthropogenic (technological and sociopolitical)  .  .  . (and)  .  .  . combined (in Quarantelli, 58).

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40. Anthony Carrigan, “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies,” in Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan, eds. (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 122–123. 41. For more cultural scholarship on disaster, see the following monographs: Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011); Mark Anderson’s Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); and Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002). Also see Gary Webb’s essay “The Popular Culture of Disaster: Exploring a New Dimension of Disaster Research” (2007), Havidan Rodriguez, Enrico L. Quarantelli, and Russell R. Dynes, eds., Handbook of Disaster Research (Springer, New York: 2007), 430–­40. Besides Anderson’s book, which focuses on Latin America, most of the texts mentioned above focus on culture in a broad sense rather than specifically literature. Pramod K. Nayar’s Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2017) is again a cultural studies text that centers on the ecological and that focuses only on one disaster—­the Union Carbide leak in 1984. Published the same year and in the same series, titled “Ecocritical Theory and Practice,” the edited collection Eco Culture: Disaster, Narrative, Discourse (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2017) contains several essays on postcolonial literary disaster, but again all rooted in the ecological. 42. Theodor Adorno’s explications of poetry after the Holocaust lie at the heart of all literary theorizations of disaster and other types of communal suffering: The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposes intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-­satisfied contemplation.

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Theodor Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 34. Adorno is commonly misunderstood as suggesting that poetry cannot—­or should not—­be written after the Holocaust. In the passage quoted above, he is wondering, like Blanchot after him, how literature can aesthetically capture the magnitude of a totalizing experience like the Holocaust without ethically compromising itself, and he is calling for a form of thinking about art that goes beyond “self-­satisfied contemplation.” 43. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 18. 44. In Mukherjee’s essay “Touring the Dead Lands: Emily Eden, Victorian Famines, and Colonial Picturesque,” he demonstrates how disaster, particularly famine, disrupts the conventions of the picturesque in Emily Eden’s Indian travel narrative, Up the Country (1866): Famine, then, emerges in Eden’s narrative as a secretive code that can be used to decipher the unspoken essence of Victorian empire and Victorian modernity. Even as she declares the blessings conferred on India by her own entourage, Eden hints at her unease by lavishly documenting death, decay, and the destruction of the social fabric through industrial, financial, and colonial/imperial capitalism. In this, she remarkably anticipates the contours of later Victorian famine debates. Stylistically, her troubled imaginations about death and empire cannot be accommodated within the norms of the picturesque, as her critics have done. Rather, her colonial/imperial picturesque, in attempting to frame the historical material of the ravages of empire, emerges as a necessarily uneven mode that must transgress its own aesthetic boundaries. India, seen through this lens, can neither quite be sealed off within the ruined realm of a glorious past, nor within the entombed otherness of perpetual death.

Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, “Touring the Dead Lands: Emily Eden, Victorian Famines, and Colonial Picturesque,” Critical Survey 21, no. 1 (January 2009): 37. 45. Mukherjee begins Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire with analysis of how the rhetoric around Hurricane Katrina echoes the language of Victorian ways of depicting disasters in the Indian empire. For a historian’s perspective, see Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts, in which he argues that natural disaster and imperial greed as well as egotism intersected to

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produce some of the most horrific tragedies at the end of the nineteenth century. Also, see Davis’ Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2007), where he claims that urbanization, and its corresponding poverty, will bring about a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. 46. As Carrigan says, we need to: [R]efute the tendency for many economically disadvantaged societies to be portrayed as crisis-­ridden “risk zones,” situated less as sites of progressive reconstruction . . . than as “security” threats for western states, ever-­threatening to be “engulfed by disaster” (Sachs, 1999, 21–­22). Such rhetorics often determine approaches to disaster response and management, instituting exceptionality in place of comparative discussion of how vulnerability is produced. Brathwaite’s alternative cartography helps reframe understandings of disastrous history in this respect as it is not only temporally and geographically expansive, but also asserts continuities between “natural + social” catastrophes that remain subdued in disaster studies but should be the subject of postcolonial critique.

Carrigan, “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies,” 129. 47. Let us not forget the vested interest in recirculating this rhetoric: To cite powerless non-­Western or colonized people as the problem that not only creates disaster but also results in the mismanagement of its effects actually conceals the postcolonial state’s own desire to blame people for problems of underdevelopment as well as the ex-­empire’s own desire, in turn, to blame the postcolonial state for its problems of underdevelopment. 48. Moreover, disaster has been largely underrepresented in literature and therefore in literary criticism. Other forms of narrative such as photography, art, film, and television programs have perhaps even revealed a morbid fascination with catastrophe, especially in the last two media. 49. Kate Rigby, Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 5. 50. Nidesh Lawtoo’s excellent book Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, ­Mimesis, Theory (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2016) argues that Joseph Conrad’s work is characterized by a doubled vision in which the apocalyptic world of catastrophe is mediated by a healing vision of hope and reconciliation. Recently, several books about disaster and narrative have appeared: Kasia Mika’s Disaster, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing

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Haiti’s Futures (New York and London: Routledge, 2018) focuses only on one disaster and one region: the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Although Mika dexterously uses some of the concepts of disaster studies, she does not tie them into a system that accounts for narrative exposition across different parts of the world and at different times. In her provocative book The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism: Spectacles of Suffering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), Lasse Heerten presents a chapter titled “Biafran Babies: Humanitarian Visions of Postcolonial Disaster” but does not engage with the term “disaster” per se. John Marx has written two powerful essays (“Failed-­State Fiction” and “Fiction and State Crisis”), where he argues that crisis brings the novel back to the nation. Marx does not use the framework of disaster studies to examine the narration of failed states though. 51. My book is the first book-­length project that uses disaster, in its ecological and human manifestations, as a lens through which to read certain types of postcolonial fiction in the twenty-­first century. No literary monographs studying postcolonial disaster in a broad international context yet have been published; even scholarly articles on the subject, while geographically wide-­ranging, are very small in number. 52. I have cited the most important work on literary representations of postcolonial disaster in the body of this chapter, particularly focusing on books and articles that theorize the intersection of postcolonial literary studies and disaster studies. Essays on the specific disasters discussed in this book, such as literary criticism on the Tsunami in Sri Lanka, are cited in the text of the chapters in the book, in end notes, and in the bibliography. 53. Anthony Carrigan, “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies,” 119. 54. My thinking in this book, however, has been greatly shaped by the small body of literary articles on postcolonial disaster including the work of the late Anthony Carrigan, especially his essay “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies” (2015). Carrigan’s work, however, is rooted in the environmental humanities as well as on how postcolonial literature retheorizes the structuring terminology of Disaster Studies. Carrigan uses the following methodology to formulate postcolonial disaster studies: Approach towards a self-­conscious reformulation of disaster studies methods, which from an environmental humanities perspective must include a more rigorous understanding of how narratives shape our perception and understanding of what constitutes a disaster. It is especially interesting in this light that along with the lack of

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notes to page 20 attention to identity categories, there has been scant consideration of disaster narratives and imaginative depictions more broadly in mainstream disaster research. This is something that literary and cultural critics can redress directly in conjunction with related disciplines like history by exploring how postcolonial texts challenge reject or reconfigure key disaster studies concepts such as resilience, risk, adaptation and vulnerability. (123)

55. Nasrin Qader, Narratives of Catastrophe: Boris Diop, ben Jelloun, Khatibi (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 5. Qader’s definition of catastrophe does not include ecological damage; instead she focuses on the genocide in Rwanda as well as prison riots in Algeria. While the subtitle of my book (Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-­First Century) is similar to Qader’s and she too focuses on the empowering aspects of the story, she does not trace a temporal genealogy of narratology. 56. Phillip Drake’s Indonesia and the Politics of Disaster: Power and Representation in Indonesia’s Mud Volcano (London and New York: Routledge, 2016) examines the representation of environmental catastrophe in Indonesia through a range of narrative forms including data reports and scientific surveys, as well as literary production itself. Each representation of the mudflow disaster, according to Drake, is equally an assertion of power, from those who have it and those who do not. While Qader’s and Drake’s studies provide a useful framework, they are necessarily more limited in terms of their “data sets”—­their books examine cultural production in only one or two /two countries, or study no more than three writers. 57. Daniel Brant, “Disaster Cosmopolitanism: Catastrophe and Global Community in the Fiction of Daniel Maximin and Maryse Condé,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 17, no. 2 (June 2014), 215. 58. Drake’s earlier essay “Under the Mud Volcano: Indonesia’s Mudflow Victims and the Politics of Testimony” (2013) attempts to give aesthetic agency to the victims of disaster themselves. He argues that: A . . . reason . . . [for] devoting attention to written texts is that their aesthetic qualities are never fully subsumable to politics, even when deployed in the political practices of the mudflow victims. This is not to suggest that these works could function independently of politics; rather, on an aesthetic scale where apolitical art for art’s sake occupies one pole and the other has art that is merely decorative to political expression, these written texts operate somewhere in between.

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Philip Drake, “Victims Under the Mud Volcano: Indonesia’s Mudflow and the Politics of Testimony,” Indonesia and the Malay World 41, no. 121 (2013): 302–­303. Drake’s formulations are very useful for my project, especially in thinking about the value of art in narrating the unnarratable and the constantly shifting ratio between the literary and the political in texts about crisis and catastrophe. However, like Gordimer, he too defines the political as exclusively political rather than focusing on the pedagogical imperative of disaster texts. 59. Qader, in Narratives of Catastrophe, offers a solution through the récit, or the repetition through difference, in the process of storytelling: One must not become too jubilant about the possibilities of catastrophe for literature and forget the utterly destructive dimension of catastrophes for people and nations. I will show how the two dimensions of catastrophe communicate, that is, how and in what sense the inscription of catastrophic events in literature opens something affirmative in the heart of total destitution—­not because destitution is affirmative, but because the story is. So long as there is storytelling, something remains, in spite of everything. This remainder must be thought [of] because this literary possibility is ethically and politically necessary. In the end, when all has fallen into the abyss of annihilation, survival must be imagined, inscribed, thought. This récit resounds with the voice of this survival; it is the aftereffect of catastrophe that it cannot repeat except from a distance and at a distance and through distancing. The stories of survivors come to them from a distance; they repeat these stories in the récit but without the ability of ascertaining that these are indeed their stories. The survivor thinks and speaks in the récit in a faltering manner and with great uncertainty as to whether what happened indeed happened. The story becomes both the affirmation of a memory and the affirmation of a radical destitution leaving its marks within the subject’s language and thought. (6)

60. This is not to say that only a single disaster can allegorize a nation at any given moment or that a nation can be subject to only a single such cataclysmic event. Obviously, a nation can have multiple and simultaneous allegories as well as be prone to multiple and simultaneous disasters. I identify what I think have been important, perhaps even dominant, disasters that have come to be a symbol of a particular nation at a particular time, and,

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most important, have yielded fiction in the present century. Climate change and the Anthropocene, while utterly catastrophic, has yielded little fiction from South Asia and Southern Africa, apart from Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide (2004), even though “cli-­fi” itself is a burgeoning genre in North America and Europe. This could well be because climate change has not yet been recognized as a disaster in many non-­Western countries, and has more of its fair share of deniers even in the West. See Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2016) for noting and analyzing the absence of literary fiction about climate change. Also see Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s new book, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019) for an analysis of how island culture has depicted the Anthropocene, and its nexus with imperialism and the failed postcolonial state, allegorically. 61. See Mukherjee’s Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire for more on the apocalyptic and extrapolative language of Victorian writers that was instrumental in creating the enduring impression of all the British colonies as being zones of disaster. 62. Postcolonial criticism has focused at length on the relationship between the novel and the project of creating the new nation. Priyamvada Gopal, for example, claims that the “idea of India . . . constitutes the possibility of the Anglophone novel,” in her book The Indian English Novel: Nation, History, and Narration, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 7. Susan Andrade argues that only men writing about the nation have been given prominence and shows us how women also wrote about the nation in her book The Nation Writ Small (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). In a more general vein, Timothy Brennan states that “it was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of the nation . . . by mimicking the structure of the nation,” in Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 7. 63. Carrigan asserts the necessity of the following: [M]aximizing literary studies’ contribution to “humanizing disaster studies—­placing identity politics and social stories at the core of understanding disaster—­and in seeing vulnerability reduction as predicated on culturally and historically nuanced understandings of human-­environmental relations. This includes how differential experiences of trauma, environmental devastation, and post-­disaster aid are inflected by histories of oppression that continue to evolve in the present. (“Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies,” 131)

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64. One could argue that the Arab Spring was a geopolitical disaster, in many ways. That movement is still too young to have yielded much by way of fiction. 65. To use the methodology of postcolonial theory is not necessarily a bad trend in academic scholarship. When everything and everyone becomes “postcolonial,” however, the term tends to lose its theoretical valence. 66. The British first instituted the migrant labor system in South Africa, at around the time the Land Act was enacted (1913), which was then made more concrete and solid by the Afrikaner government. 67. In a recent essay, an environmental geographer, J. C. Gaillard, argues that “the study of disasters in the non-­Western world by Western scholars does not differ from what Edward Said . . . called Orientalism . . . or the study of the Orient by Western anthropologists, geographers, and historians over past centuries” (S12). Gaillard urges a theorization of “different epistemologies to reflect diverse local realities. A sort of subaltern disaster studies should emerge driven by increasing consciousness of the capacity and knowledge of not only local researchers but also local people to conduct their own research to inform their own practice of disaster” (S15). Gaillard’s essay paves the way for the path on which my book has embarked, although literary studies of postcolonial disaster are still woefully few in number. JC Gaillard, “Disaster Studies Inside Out,” Disasters (December 2018), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/disa.12323. 68. The term “writes back” is so well-­known that it may not even require citation. It is taken from a book by the same name, The Empire Writes Back, which in turn borrows a phrase by Salman Rushdie, “The Empire Writes Back to the Imperial Centre.” Bill Ashcroft, Garett Griffiths, and Hellen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures, 2nd ed, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2002 (1989), 32. 69. In this book, I frequently use the term “disaster as disaster” or “­crisis as crisis.” A gloss on phraseology may be necessary here. I refer to the citation of disaster as the calamity that it is, without equivocation, metaphor, or any sort of linguistic adornment. I have found it necessary to use these phrases because I have been astonished to discover how few scholars and theorists will name these calamitous events as disasters, even though the fiction writers under discussion refer to them as such, and the events themselves clearly meet the metrics of disaster in disaster studies. 70. Disaster reveals this dependence through the reliance on Western aid in the aftermath of the South Asian tsunami or on antiretroviral drugs to treat the HIV epidemic in Southern Africa.

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notes to pages 27–28

71. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 78. 72. Lisa Lau, “Re-Orientalism: The Perpetration and Development of Orientalism by Orientals.” Modern Asian Studies 32, no. 2 (March 2009), 571–590, 571. 73. Jonathan Veitch, “Introduction: What We Talk About When We Talk About Disasters.” In Disasters: Remedies and Recipes. Special issue of Social Research: An International Quarterly 75, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 657–­58. 74. In an interview with Leon De Kock, Spivak seems frustrated at the romanticizing of the subaltern and the unwillingness of people with power to do something for the subaltern out of fear of being accused of appropriation: You bring out the so-­called subalterns from the woodwork; the only way that that speech is produced is by inserting the subaltern into the circuit of hegemony, which is what should happen, as subaltern. Who the hell wants to protect subalternity? Only extremely reactionary, dubious anthropologistic museumizers. No activist wants to keep the subaltern in the space of difference  .  .  . You don’t give the subaltern voice. You work for the bloody subaltern, you work against subalternity. To do a thing, to work for the subaltern, means to bring it to speech.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nations Writers Conference in South Africa,” interview by Leon De Kock, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 23, no. 3 (July 1992): 46. 75. Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). 76. As Sembène says in an interview, artists “have to broaden the people’s awareness. If art does not address the vital changes taking place at the moment and the explosive problems of today’s society, art will become self-­ satisfied, careless, and sooner or later it will degenerate into commerce.” Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, eds. Annett Busch and Max Annas (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), 99. 77. In his controversial introduction to Mirrorwork, Rushdie bemoans the persistent critique launched against Anglophone South Asian literature: “It is interesting that so few of these criticisms are literary in the pure sense of the word. For the most part they do not deal with language, voice, psychological or social insight, imagination or talent. Rather, they are about class, power, and belief. There is a whiff of political correctness about them.” Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing, 1947–­1997, eds. Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), xii. For an

notes to pages 29–41

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analysis of readership as well as balancing the relationship between the aesthetic, political, and ethical, see Elleke Boehmer’s new book, Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-­Century Critical Readings (New York: Palgrave, 2018). 78. Homi Bhabha uses the concept of vernacular cosmopolitanism to offset the global cosmopolitanism of the privileged migrant. According to Bhabha, “vernacular cosmopolitanism measures global progress from the minoritarian perspective. Its claims to freedom are marked by a ‘right to difference in equality.’ ” Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), xvi–­xvii. 79. See Yogita Goyal’s essay titled “We Need New Diasporas” for more on how novels such as We Need New Names offer a model of diasporic exchange that goes beyond the usual diasporic frame normalized in postcolonial and black Atlantic studies. Yogita Goyal, “We Need New Diasporas,” American Literary History 29, no. 4 (December 2017): 640–­63. 80. Marc Nichanian, Writers of Disaster: Armenian Literature of the Twentieth Century; Volume One: The National Revolution (Princeton, N.J. and London: Gomidas Institute/Taderon Press, 2002), 82. 81. Vasant Kaiwar’s book The Postcolonial Orient: The Politics of Difference and the Project of Provincializing Europe (Amsterdam: Brill, 2014) critiques precisely this sort of contemporary nativism and Third WorldEurocentric ism, which precludes the formation of a genuinely non-­ coalition. 82. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley, eds., Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19. 83. Elizabeth Temin, “Rehabilitation and Reconstruction” in Disaster Medicine, ed. Gregory R. Ciottone (Philadelphia: Mosby Elsevier, 2008), 317. 84. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer of my book for providing the term “slow burn,” which in turn helped me configure the rest of the book through similar metaphors. 85. Nixon, Slow Violence, 11, 13.

Chapter 1 1. Adele Barker, Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 167. Sonali Deraniyagala, author of the ­tsunami memoir Wave (New York: Knopf, 2013), also mentions that she had never heard of the word “tsunami” before the storm. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), his nonfiction book on the role of or absence

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of “serious” fiction in discussing climate change, the author describes a freak tornado that hit New Delhi in March 1978: “So unfamiliar was this phenomenon that the papers literally did not know what to call it: at a loss for words, they resorted to ‘cyclone’ and ‘funnel-­shaped’ whirlwind” (14). Similarly, no one knew what to call the torrential rains in Louisiana in 2016 and finally settled for “The Great Flood of 2016.” 2. Sri Lankans described the tsunami as “when the sea came to the land” (Barker 167). 3. A National Geographic publication on the Indian Ocean tsunami says, “the earthquake in the ocean triggered tsunami waves that raced towards the shores of a dozen countries along the Indian Ocean. Some locales were struck by waves 110 feet tall—­the height of an 11 story building.” Judith and Dennis Fradin, Witness to Disaster: Tsunamis (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2008), Kindle. 4. Fradin and Fradin. Given the magnitude of this, and the other disasters discussed in this book, all numbers for casualties and other loss of health and property are approximate and sometimes even contradictory. 5. Writing on the Sri Lankan tsunami often refers to the oceanic disaster as “the Wave.” 6. Early trauma theory often took it as a truism that to convey a traumatic rupture in consciousness requires an experimentation or a “breaking” of the form. I push this argument further to claim that the pedagogical impulse in disaster narratives causes an additional rupture of literary form. 7. Literary aesthetics have also often been confused with a depoliticized art-­for-­art’s sake methodology. While my usage of the term is associated with literary craft and technique, throughout this book I take heed of what Alan Singer and Allen Dunn, editors of Literary Aesthetics, claim in their anthology: It is one of the ironies of contemporary literary study that, as it has moved towards greater interdisciplinarity, it has grown skeptical of the aesthetic . . . In resisting this trend, this anthology asserts the continuing vitality and importance of literary aesthetics but insists that aesthetic value can be understood properly only in the context of a broader inquiry into human values and cultures . . . Unlike the more restricted discourse of philosophical aesthetics, literary aesthetics has explored the ways in which value commitments extend across disciplinary domains by reckoning with the practical concerns of art production and consumption. (3)

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Alan Singer and Allen Dunn, Literary Aesthetics: A Reader (New York: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 3. 8. Katy Shaw, ed., Teaching 21st Century Genres (London: Springer, 2016), xviii. 9. Minoli Salgado’s A Little Dust on the Eyes (Leeds, U.K.: Peepal Press, 2014), is a novel by a Sri Lankan writer about the tsunami. Yet, the disaster itself enters the narrative relatively late. Most of the novel deals with family secrets against a backdrop of the civil war. The book was published almost a decade after the tsunami, thereby giving itself more time to absorb the disaster, unlike the three principal texts discussed in this chapter. Temporally, Salgado’s novel does not fit neatly into the sudden and startled literary responses that typically follow in the immediate wake of an unexpected cataclysm. Moreover, the civil war in Sri Lanka has long been the dominant theme in Anglophone writing in that country, further demonstrating my point about long-­range disasters’ yielding more variety in both genre and the sheer volume of literature produced. 10. For more on the tsunami and life-­writing, see my essay: Pallavi Rastogi, “Tsunami Stories: Writing Out the Wave in the Oceanic Disaster,” Prose Studies 36, no. 2 (December 2014): 141–­58. 11. Erika Kelly interview, “Strangely Tender: An Interview with Ingrid De Kok,” Scrutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 8, no. 1 (2003): 34. 12. T. Jean Blocker and Darren E. Sherkat, “In the Eyes of the Beholder: Technological and Naturalistic Interpretation of a Disaster,” Industrial ­Crisis Quarterly 6, no. 2 (1992): 154, emphasis added. 13. P. Blaikie, P. Cannon, T. I. Davis, and B. Wisner, At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability, and Disasters (London: Routledge, 1994), 1. 14. Blaikie et al. go on to say: “The ‘natural’ and the ‘human’ are so inextricably bound together in almost all disaster situations, especially when viewed in an enlarged time and space framework, that disasters cannot be understood to be ‘natural’ in any straightforward way” (9). 15. Allan Keenan, “Building the Conflict Back Better: The Politics of Relief and Reconstruction in Sri Lanka,” in Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional Dimensions, ed. Dennis B. McGilvray and Michele R. Gamburd (New York: Routledge 2011), 17. 16. Margo Kleinfeld, “Misreading the Post-­Tsunami Political Landscape in Sri Lanka: The Myth of Humanitarian Space,” Space and Polity 11, no. 2 (August 2007): 171. 17. John Marx discusses how postcolonial writers are already in conversation with the social sciences and urges critics to do the same. (John Marx,

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Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 9 and 49. 18. Philippa Hawley, There’s No Sea in Salford (Colchester, U.K.: Wiven Books, 2013), 95. 19. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 122. 20. The oceanic disaster thus not only tests the resilience of a people already battered by war but also teaches others a lesson in how to withstand tragedy of this magnitude. Writing absorbs the trauma of the collective, turning it into something restorative that changes the writer as well as the reader. According to Blanchot, “it is dark disaster that brings the light” (The Writing of the Disaster), 7. 21. As Anderson says, “many researchers have pointed out that natural hazards such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions are the norm rather than the exception. What is exceptional is the degree of urbanization and the accompanying increase in human vulnerability to natural hazards” In Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press), 6. 22. See Minoli Salgado’s interview with Liam O’Loughlin concerning the sea as if it were a creature of violence that is nevertheless conjoined to the people’s psyche and livelihood (168–­69). ‘“A Different Way of Seeing’: An Interview with Minoli Salgado,” interview with Liam O’Loughlin, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 47, no. 4 (2016): 167. 23. As the anthropologist Stefan Helmreich says, “we might add to these two temporalities [politics and geology] the unpredictable time of the sea, that oscillating body of water imagined to contain the immensities of primeval time as well as the more immediate intensities of everyday time, with its flows, fluxes, and calamities.” Stefan Helmreich, “Time and the Tsunami,” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 6, no. 3: 2006, 2. 24. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 25. Helmreich, “Time and the Tsunami,” 9. 26. Robert C. Bell and Robert M. Ficociello, eds., America’s Disaster Culture: The Production of Natural Disasters in Literature and Pop Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 59. 27. For a history of the Caribbean as Paradise and Hell, as well as the deconstruction of those tropes, see Supriya Nair, Pathologies of Paradise: Caribbean Detours (Charlottesville, V.A.: University of Virginia Press, 2013).

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28. Cyprus has historically occupied a similar space in the Northern European imagination. Like Sri Lanka, Cyprus too is a nation still split by the conflict between Muslims, Greek Orthodox, Turkish Cypriots, and Greek Cypriots. The ethnic and religious conflict in Cyprus could be another reason why Damianou-­Papadopoulou was drawn to write about Sri Lanka. 29. Yiola Damianou-­Papadopoulou, The Blue Dragon (London: Wattle Publishing: 2006, 2013), 77. 30. In Roslyn Weaver, Apocalypse in Australian Fiction and Film: A Critical Study (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2011), 111. 31. Alice Curry, “Our Common Earth: The Local and Global Flow of Narrative in A River of Stories,” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature 51, no. 1 (January 2013): 2. 32. The novel also focuses on the extensive damage done to the land as the wave sweeps through. The landscape it tears across is unrecognizable: What lay before them was not the village they knew, but an unknown half-­demolished site. The few houses that were still standing were unrecognizable since the neighborhoods that surrounded them were no longer there, nor the trees, nor the once-­green, small coffee and tea plantations offering beauty and life. What they now saw was a lagoon containing the remnants of a once verdant village. They were shipwrecked on an unknown island, with no one to care for them. (The Blue Dragon, 47)

Everything in the known world is taken away. Nothing is the same. Water has infiltrated the land to such an extent that Sri Lanka is now an island within an island. The use of the word “shipwrecked” again points to the intimacy that coastal people share with the sea, the liminal state that not only diasporics but also Sri Lankans occupy. 33. See, for example, Barker, Not Quite Paradise, and Deraniyagala, Wave. 34. While Cyprus may not be prone to massive tsunamis, it has certainly seen earthquakes. 35. “This unexpected, rapid withdrawal of the sea is called drawback” (Fradin and Fradin, Witness to Disaster). 36. The childlike writing heralds the cataclysm through its very simplicity. The catastrophe itself is in many ways a simple event itself, albeit one with complex, life-­altering causes and effects. Significantly, Hanseni cannot decipher the signs around her. Her internal and immature system rings an alarm bell before her more-­adult consciousness can evaluate the signs in their full complexity.

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37. Yet the very precociousness of the child may redeem the nation and help it move forward, though the youth have hardened into adults before their time. Rajagopalan states: [Indian children] films place the child at the center of their cinematic narratives of growth. They chart the progress of the protagonists in particular and society in general from individual and social despair to hope and reform. Thus, these films support the expectation that children’s cinema tends to be optimistic and conveys the possibility of positive change through affirmative action.

Jayashree Rajagopalan, “Heal the World, Make It a Better Place: Social and Individual Hope in Indian Children’s Cinema,” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature 51, no. 1 (January 2013): 12. 38. Cardozo et al., “The Mental Health Impact of the South East Asia Tsunami,” in Mental Health and Disasters, ed. Yuval Neira et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 389–90. 39. Salgado, interview with O’Loughlin, 167. 40. According to Curry: The collection [A River of Voices] rests on the understanding that children are capable of making ethical choices in relation to their interaction with the environment. A reading of this collection in the context of worsening environmental crisis points not only to the tales’ increasing relevance to a modern child readership but also to the capacity of the common earth motif to provoke a sense of shared responsibility in the struggle for planetary health. (Our Common Earth, 7)

41. Peter Swirski, American Crime Fiction: A Cultural History of Nobrow Literature as Art (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2016), 90. 42. For more on nobrow fiction, see also Peter Swirski earlier work, From Lowbrow to Nobrow (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2005). 43. This is a common metaphor in postcolonial literature. See, for example, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1988, 1991). Also see Rajiva, Postcolonial Parabola. For an analysis of disabled children and their connection to postcolonial issues, see Claire Barker’s Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor, and Materiality. London: Palgrave McMillan, 2011.

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44. For more on domestic abuse as national allegory, see the essay “The Gendered Subject of Human Rights” in Leslie Bow, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). 45. Anthony Carrigan, ‘“Out of This Great Tragedy Will Come a World Class Tourist Destination,’ ” Disaster, Ecology, and Post-­Tsunami Tourism Development in Sri Lanka,’ ” in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 273–­90. 46. Kiri cannot get in touch with or reach out to people, because her husband prevents her from going out or even making phone calls, echoing the desperate attempts the tsunami survivors made to locate their loved ones after the disaster. 47. The missionary complex also reveals itself in the way that Penny and Jean help Kiri: “you did say in your letter you needed help. We just felt we were the ones chosen to do the helping” (97, emphasis added). 48. Lasse Heerten, The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism: Spectacles of Suffering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 10. 49. Rajagopalan, “Heal the World, Make It a Better Place,” 11. 50. Throughout this book, I describe hope as slivers of possibility, as cautious optimism, and I write of how hope—­in its simplified, fantastic, romanticized, and even improbable forms—­is necessary for healing from disaster. In so doing I have been greatly influenced by the work of philosopher Jonathan Lear, particularly Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), in which he considers what it means to stare at the end of the known ways of being. Yet hope in an ongoing disaster, during which people are buffeted and tossed by repeated traumas, can only be apertures, not portals; windows, not doors; cautious, not radical. 51. Kristian Stokke, “After the Tsunami: A Missed Opportunity for Peace in Sri Lanka.” Niassnytt 2 (June 2005): 12–­13. 52. The phrase “cruel optimism” is taken from the title of Lauren Berlant’s book of the same name. In Cruel Optimism (2011), she argues that optimism can foil our growth. I claim that the fantasy of a cautious optimism may be important in the aftermath of catastrophe, especially in countries such as Sri Lanka, where the government fails to provide a safety net when other infrastructure crumbles. I revive the term “cautious optimism” at various moments in this book. 53. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 26–­27. 54. Flash fiction is characterized by its brevity, often condensing its narrative to a few hundred words or even fewer.

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55. If I follow through more fully Immanuel Kant’s ideas on the sublime, he too uses “violent storms” as an example to explicate the sublime and convey how the human imagination is unable to contain the magnitude of the sublime. Kant turns back to reason as a failure to capture the sublime, though not necessarily on the incommensurability of the disastrous event. The sublime, in its normative sense, has most often been associated with nature and Romanticism. See, for example, Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). 56. The tsunami, however, was not a product of climate change but a “one-­ in-­a-­thousand-­year” event. Nevertheless, Ghosh’s point about the writerly inability to compose appropriate words about climate change applies even to the tsunami, where Nature is too large and ungraspable to approach in a supposedly all-­encompassing form such as the literary novel. 57. Indran Amirthanayagam, The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems (New York: Hanging Loose Press, 2008), preface. 58. See, for example, Timothy Brennan’s essay “The National Longing for Form,” in which he argues that the novel is intimately linked to the project of nation-­making, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha, 44–­70 (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). 59. The aunt in this poem performs a role similar to that of the figure of Mama Ya-­Ya in Ninth Ward (New York: Little Brown, 2012), Jewell Parker Rhodes’s novel about Hurricane Katrina. She is able to provide inspiration for surviving disaster simply by using her instincts and her ability to decode the signs around her. 60. This is not an uncommon metaphor in postcolonial studies. V. S. Naipaul uses the word “shipwrecked” for the state of diaspora in his novel The Mimic Men (New York: Vintage, 1967, 2010), 117. 61. Carrigan, “Out of This Great Tragedy,” 276. 62. Salgado, interview with O’Loughlin, 165. 63. For example, both Ben Okri (“Grenfell Tower,” 2017) and Sherman Alexie (“Hymn,” 2017) instantly produced shorter, poetic works of wonder after Grenfell Tower—­a housing complex in London—­burned down horrifically in June 2017 and following the violent turn taken in the Charlottesville, Virginia, antisupremacist rally in July 2017.

Chapter 2 1. The title of this chapter, and the recurring refrain “Better Fed than Free,” is taken from a chapter in Shashi Tharoor’s book India: From

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Midnight to the Millennium (New York: Vintage, 1997), in which he uses the term to describe the “bread versus freedom” debate (199). This longing for the colonial past when life was materially better is not a startling revelation. See, for example, Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2009), which looks at the generative aspects of apartheid, especially in terms of art and culture. The following description of the economic crisis from Maxwell Kadenge and George Mavunga is useful in establishing a basic sense of what happened to Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe: The protracted and multi-­staged economic and political crisis that plagued Zimbabwe in the 2000s was accompanied by a rapid decline of the economy, characterized by, amongst other things: steep declines in industry and agricultural productivity; historic levels of hyperinflations; informalization of labour; the dollarization of economic transactions; displacements; and a critical erosion of livelihoods . . . This economic implosion reduced the majority of the population of Zimbabwe to paupers, black-­market hustlers, and sex workers.

Maxwell Kadenge and George Mavunga, “The Zimbabwe Crisis as Captured in Shona Metaphor,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 23, no. 2 (2011), 157. Similarly, Vambe claims: The chronology of decline is apparent from the inflation in Zimbabwe that rose to trillion percentages, the opposition party fragmenting, rural malnutrition continuing, the victims of urban destruction not rehoused, the on–­off availability of petrol and diesel playing havoc with transport, and the servicing of such infrastructure . . . remotely attended to. (94)

Maurice T. Vambe, “Zimbabwe’s Creative Literatures in the Interregnum: 1980–­2009,” African Identities 8, no. 2 (2010), 94. 2. Nicholas Kristof, “Postcard from Zimbabwe.” New York Times. April 7, 2010. 3. This moment is also echoed in We Need New Names: No, those were evil white people who came to steal our land and make us paupers in our own country.

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notes to pages 79–80 What, but aren’t you a pauper now? Aren’t those black people evil for bulldozing your home and leaving you with nothing now? You are all wrong. Better a white thief do that to you than your own black brother. Better a wretched white thief.

NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names (New York: Reagan Arthur Books, 2013), 77. 4. Michael J. Oliver and Derek H. Aldcroft, Economic Disasters of the Twentieth Century (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2007), 312. 5. Mugabe was removed from power in a relatively bloodless change of regime in 2017. The incumbent, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who came from Mugabe’s ZANU-­PF, was elected president in a controversial election in 2018. Even despite our lack of knowledge about the ethos of the new government, the effectiveness of what it might do to retailor the economy will only be tracked by data over a certain period of time. Regardless, it will take a long time for Zimbabwe to emerge from the crisis into which it was plunged. The African Development Bank Group’s report, entitled “Zimbabwe Economic Outlook,” for 2019 suggests that recovery will be a lengthy uphill climb because of the damage done in the past: The economy is projected to grow by 4.2% in 2019 and 4.4% in 2020. The high and unsustainable debt-­to-­GDP ratio; the high fiscal deficit; the cash shortages, three-­tier pricing, and limited availability of foreign exchange, which continue to constrict economic activity; and the persistent shortage of essential goods, including fuel and consumer goods, remain the major headwinds for any meaningful economic recovery. The agricultural sector and mining are expected to be the main drivers of growth, backed by increased public and private investment.

Accessed July 22, 2019, https://www.afdb.org/en/countries/southern-­africa­/ zimbabwe/zimbabwe-­economic-­outlook. 6. According to The Africa Competitiveness Report, released by the World Economic Forum in 2017, Rwanda, Mauritius, and Botswana have the highest amount of institutional equality on the continent as well as the best-­ranked infrastructure. Ghana was 12th on the list. Zimbabwe was ranked 25th of 32 nations. “Rwanda tops Africa’s best performing institutions, Ghana is 12th.” May 6, 2017. Accessed July 22, 2019, http://citifmonline.com/2017/05/06/ rwanda-tops-africas-best-performing-institutions-ghana-is-12th/.

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7. Susana B. Adamo, “Slow-­Onset Hazards and Population Displacement in the Context of Climate Change.” Protection Gaps and Responses: Challenges and Opportunities, 1–­16. Center for International Human Rights, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY New York Liaison Office, UNHCR, April 27, 2011. http://www.ciesin.org/documents/Adamo_ CCMig_cuny_april2011.pdf. 8. As Rob Nixon says, “violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need to engage . . . a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2. 9. Again, Rob Nixon’s work on the slow violence of climate change can be extrapolated onto the slow workings of an economic disaster. He argues that “the insidious workings of slow violence derive largely from the attention given to spectacular and unspectacular time  .  .  . From a narrative perspective such invisible mutagenic theatre is slow-­paced and open-­ended, eluding the tidy closure, the containment imposed by the tidy orthodoxies of victory and defeat” (Slow Violence, 6). Nixon, however, focuses mostly on the slow-­moving effects of climate change events rather than on other disasters in his study of what he calls “environmental time.” 10. As Daniel Compagnon says, “the most spectacular sign of the collapse of Zimbabwe’s economy was the highest inflation rate in the world. It reached 231 million according to official figures in July 2008, although independent economists, using black market exchange rates as a proxy, then estimated it to be in tens of billions.” Daniel Compagnon, A Predictable Tragedy: Robert Mugabe and the Collapse of Zimbabwe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 260. 11. Ranka Primorac, The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe (London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006), 1–­2. According to Compagnon in A Predictable Tragedy: With the food riots, the mass strikes, and the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), 1998 was certainly a turning point. However, for most observers only the violence associated with farm invasions and the 2000 parliamentary elections was a true eye-­opener. Many former ZANU-­PF sympathizers then began to

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notes to pages 82–84 criticize Mugabe openly and asked the obvious question: What went wrong? (4–­5)

12. Keith Rawlinson, Economic Disaster: What the Average Person Can Do to Prepare (2015), Kindle. 13. Mainstream economists have historically tended not to use the word “disaster” but instead “catastrophe” and “crisis” to describe economic collapse. However, many experts of late have begun not only to study the economic consequences of disaster but also to urge the use of the word “disaster” in terms of describing fiscal cataclysm. 14. As further evidence that more scholars are calling for economic crisis to be described as disasters, see John Singleton’s book Economic and Natural Disasters Since 1990: A Comparative History (London: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2016). Indeed, Singleton, an economic historian, argues that Robert Barro’s (see note 15) “benchmark of 15 per cent of GDP per capita is too stringent” (9) even as he commends him for understanding that “severely adverse financial and macroeconomic events are in some objective respects similar to other types of disaster and should be described in the same terms” (6). 15. Robert J. Barro, “Rare Disasters and Asset Markets in the Twentieth Century,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 121, no. 3 (August 2006): 826. 16. Studies of literary narratives about economic disasters are scarce to nonexistent, probably because “real” economic disasters are the rarest of rare fiscal crises. Some literary scholarship on the financial crises of the twenty-­ first century has emerged recently, mostly because the events involved the collapse of Western markets. As the literary critic Paul Crosthwaite says: The speculative, ontologically unstable condition that such texts attribute to finance capital would be conveyed to the reader with immeasurably greater power, however, if, rather than merely being described matter-­of-­factly, it were absorbed into the fabric of the narrative discourse itself.

Crosthwaite thus suggests, without using my terms, that a seamless merger of Story and Event holds greater authority with the reader, whereas I argue that disaster actually renders that merger unstable. Paul Crosthwaite, “ ‘Soon the Economic System Will Crumble’: Financial Crisis and Contemporary British Avant-­Garde Writing,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 32, no. 3 (2012): 38.

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17. I am not collapsing “buying out from postcolonial Zimbabwe into the West” as meaning “buying out from postcolonial Zimbabwe into segregationist Rhodesia.” I am, however, constellating these spaces to unpack the freighted resonances of the phrase “Better Fed than Free,” used as the title of this chapter. 18. Vambe, “Zimbabwe’s Creative Literatures,” 93. 19. Bill Schroeder, “Zimbabwe Fiction—­Signs of a Rebound: Harare North/An Elegy for Easterly,” Journal of the African Literature Association 7, no. 2 (2013): 194. 20. African Development Bank, OECD, United Nations Development Programme, “African Economic Outlook 2015 Regional Development and Spatial Inclusion,” 291. 21. Schroeder, in “Zimbabwe Fiction,” concludes his review essay by stating: It has often been noted that hardship inspires art and Zimbabwe certainly has endured hard times over the last decade. In retrospect, the period in the late 1980’s, when the exuberance of post-­independence was still fresh and the economy still relatively robust, can be viewed as the golden age of a country aspiring to be a beacon to the continent. Sadly, what followed was a descent into something approaching failed state status marked by hyper-­ inflation, endemic corruption, and loss of hope—­the epitome of the dangers of Big Man African leadership models that Zimbabwe once hoped to avoid. (197)

22. An article in The Economist explains that in Zimbabwe “dollarized” its economy in 2008–­2009, allowing the use of U.S. dollars in everyday transactions. This led to a quick economic upswing but also an equally quick economic downturn: The advantages of the switch to the dollar were many. Overnight, financial discipline was imposed on wayward officials. ­Inflation stopped dead, boosting growth and bringing about a general expectation of macroeconomic stability. Once normal commerce resumed, importers enjoyed reduced transaction costs and foreign investors did not need to worry about exchange-­rate volatility. But now the economy is on the skids again, thanks largely to mismanagement, and this time the lack of a local currency is exacerbating its ailments.

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notes to pages 89–93

“Zimbabwe’s Economy: “Nothing for Money.” The Economist, February 12, 2015. 23. For more on ghosting, see Anne McClintock’s essay “Imperial Ghosting and National Tragedy: Revenants from Hiroshima and Indian Country in the War on Terror,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 819–­29. 24. Jonathan Crush and Daniel Tevera, eds., Zimbabwe’s Exodus: Crisis, Migration, Survival (Cape Town, South Africa: Idasa, 2010), 18. 25. Alois Mlambo, Maurice T. Vambe, and Abebe Zegeye, “The Culture of Crisis and Crisis of Culture in Zimbabwe,” African Identities 8, no. 2 (2010): 89. 26. Petina Gappah has certainly tried to “buy out” of the economic disaster. Her Book of Memory (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) is about an albino prisoner on death row and mostly flashes back to the Rhodesian past. Yet, even in her jail cell, the prisoner, named Memory, feels the effects of the economic crisis as resources begin to dwindle. Gappah’s latest novel seems to even further distance itself from the economic crisis. Out of Darkness, Shining Light (2019) is about the African servants of the famous explorer David Livingstone who transported his corpse to the coast. However, the Zimbabwean novel receiving a lot of buzz in 2018–2019—­The House of Stone by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma—­first traces the history of colonial Rhodesia and then inevitably zeroes in on the failure of independence and the economic crisis. 27. In A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Pamela Regis describes the romantic comedy as a form where “the sublime absurdity of comedy is not completely pure and the ideal fantasy of romance in the larger sense has not completely faded . . . The essential elements of the romance novel’s plot can best be identified and analyzed through the set of narrative elements linked to comedy’s ending in marriage with suitable changes made to the heroine’s central role in the romance novel.” Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 28. 28. Anne Schumann, “A Generation of Orphans: The Socio-­Economic Crisis in Côte d’Ivoire as Seen Through Popular Music,” Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute 82, no. 4 (2012): 541. 29. Wendy Willems, “Comic Strips and ‘the Crisis’: Postcolonial Laughter and Coping with Everyday Life in Zimbabwe,” Popular Communications 2 (2011): 128. As Willem further explains: However, in this case, [the character named] Chikwama did not necessarily reflect conversations about political elites, but its

notes to pages 94–103

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primary concern was the everyday impact of the crisis. Chikwama and his friends were portrayed as sarcastically joking about the pain and misery inflicted by the crisis, hereby mirroring the broader culture of joking that emerged in the face of the crisis . . . Recurring themes in Chikwama’s dialogues included the eroding value of salaries as a result of the hyperinflation; the rising commodity prices; the shortage of commodities and resultant long queues; the nostalgia and longing for a pre-­crisis Zimbabwe; and the diaspora and growing number of emigrants. (136)

30. Tendai Huchu, The Hairdresser of Harare (Harare, Zimbabe: Weaver Press, 2010), 1. 31. For example, the hairdressers get popsicles from a little street boy: “We all bought the frozen popsicles more out of sympathy than because of the heat. He came by every day and sometimes we bought nothing. There were many more like him roaming about the city” (15). Even children have to take up jobs in this economy of extreme destitution. The thwarted possibilities of youth are revealed again when Vimbai plaintively asks, “when had I ever been carefree? When had any young people with my background?” (134). 32. Similarly, the narrator fights with her family over “a material dispute” and bemoans the fact that they “could not rise above” the financial aspects so they could “come together for [her brother Robert’s] memorial” (27). 33. The typical romance novel follows a standard plot of passionate sex, thwarted romance, and ultimately a happy ending. 34. Gibson Ncube, “ ‘The Festering Finger?’ Reimagining Minority Sexuality in Tendai Huchu’s The Hairdresser of Harare and Abdellah Taïa’s Une Mélancolie Arabe,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 25, no. 1 (2013): 70. 35. According to Ncube, “Tabona Shoko also asserts that in Zimbabwe, ‘politicians call them [homosexuals] the festering finger, endangering the body of the nation; churchmen say God wants them dead; the courts send them to jail’ ” (66). 36. Anna Chitando and Molly Manyonganise, “Saying the Unsaid: Probing Homosexuality in The Hairdresser of Harare,” Journal of Homosexuality 63, no. 4 (2016): 560. 37. While describing the novel as “didactic,” John Hawley offers a different but equally valid reading of the ending: The book is engagingly simple, didactic, and clearly intended to answer many of the stock arguments against the LGBTIQ community

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notes to pages 104–105 in Zimbabwe, starting with a  .  .  . narrator (Vimbai) who is suitably outraged by the secret life of Dumi, her closeted boyfriend, but who gradually recognizes that her intolerance is grounded in misinformation. Her process of unlearning opens up the possibilities for new futures. While Dumi feels forced into starting a new future elsewhere (in a London that has just managed to overcome its own homophobic hysteria), Vimbai is a straight hope for a queer future in Zimbabwe. (122)

John C. Hawley, “In Transition: Self-­Expression in Recent African LGBTIQ Narrative,” Journal of the African Literature Association 11, no. 1 (2017), 122. 38. Pamela Regis quotes Northrop Frye as stating that “a romance is normally comic in the sense that the heroine’s wiles are successful and the story ends with marriage or some kind of deliverance” (Regis, Natural History of the Romance Novel, 28). 39. The novel thus engages with “hard politics,” from which readers learn more, as Willem, in “Comic Strips and ‘the Crisis,’ ” suggests at the end of her essay: Furthermore, the strip Chikwama has demonstrated how media discourse came to reflect the way in which politics slowly invaded the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans, hereby reinforcing the importance of treating media as embedded in broader social discourses. Because of the growing impact of “hard politics” on people’s everyday lives, cartoonists were compelled to address the growing interference of the crisis with social life in general. Popular culture could then be seen as the space where “issues central to the everyday life of the majority of population are being articulated and debated, and new modes of life are made visible, audible, thinkable” . . . The analysis of Chikwama shows that “cultural expressions . . . demonstrate how perceptions, experiences and problems are being ‘worked out’ in an open, never-­ending process”  .  .  . An analysis of the Chikwama comic strip can therefore potentially tell us more about how “ordinary” Zimbabweans experienced the state and the “crisis” of the 2000s on an everyday basis. (141)

40. J. L. Powers, “Children’s Experiences in War Zones,” World Literature Today 88, no. 2 (2014): 6. For a list of novels about children in war

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zones, including We Need New Names and Chris Abani’s Song for Night, see ­Powers’s essay cited here. 41. Bulawayo, We Need New Names, 3. 42. Kadenge and Mavunga, The Zimbabwe Crisis, 157. 43. The real city of Budapest, obviously, has a more complicated history. Hungary went through economic crises of its own under what was called “goulash communism” during Soviet rule. The economy experienced another round of instability when it shifted from a communist economy to a market economy in the 1990s finally escalating into a financial crisis with severe recession in 2008–­2009. Yet, Budapest is often “ranked as the most liveable Central or Eastern European city on EIU’s quality of life index.” Accessed July 23, 2019, https://earth.esa.int/web/earth-­watching/ image-­of-­the-­week/content/-­/article/budapest-­hungary. 44. The guava continues to be an important motif in the novel, echoing the theme of the impossibility of buying out. At one point, Darling says, “there is guava in my mouth, sitting there like a bitter stone; I can’t swallow it and I can’t spit it out” (We Need New Names, 115). Even in economic exit, migrants cannot swallow the old system of economic organization but cannot spit it out either. Ingestion and expectoration are both impossible. 45. Kadenge and Mavunga, The Zimbabwe Crisis, 164. 46. According to Anna-­Leena Toivanen: Besides these uneasy instances of identification, the children sometimes actively reject the abject national affiliation. One such instance can be found in their “country-­game,” a pastime in which the children choose different countries as their homes and then try to push each other out. Everyone wants to be a “country-­country,” which refers to Western welfare states. (7)

Anna-­Leena Toivanen, “Not at Home in the World: Abject Mobilities in Marie NDiaye’s Trois Femmes Puisssantes and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names,” Postcolonial Text 10, no. 1 (2015): 7 47. Poul Wisborg, “Farms as Camps: Displaced Zimbabweans on Commercial Farms in Limpopo Province, South Africa,” in The Shadow of a Conflict: Crisis in Zimbabwe and Its Effects in Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia, ed. by Bill Derman and Randi Kaarhus (Harare, Zimbabwe: Weaver Press, 2013), 261. 48. Arundhati Roy explains why she uses the strategy of repetition in her novel The God of Small Things (1997):

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notes to pages 111–117 Repetition I love, and used because it made me feel safe. Repeated words and phrases have a rocking feeling, like a lullaby. They help take away the shock of the plot—­death, lives destroyed or the horror of the settings—­a crazy, chaotic, emotional house, the sinister movie theater.

Accessed July 22, 2019, http://arundhati-roy.blogspot.com/2004/11/ winds-rivers-rain.html. 49. Significantly, Darling’s mother says, “things will get better” to which her father laughs and says: “you all don’t get it do you? Is this what I went to university for? Is this what we got independence for? Does it make sense that we are living like this” (94)? 50. Toivanen, “Not at Home in the World,” 7. 51. In an iconic essay on diaspora, titled “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1, no. 1 (1991), William Safran lists the defining characteristics of diaspora: “retention of collective memory, vision or myth; the belief that full acceptance by the host country is not possible, with consequent alienation and insult; regard for the ancestral homeland as the true or ideal home and place of eventual return; commitment to the maintenance or restoration of the homeland to its safety and prosperity” (83–­84).

Chapter 3 1. Nelson Mandela was released from prison on February 11, 1990. Time’s choice of using a cover image of African suffering rather than African hope for an issue so close to the anniversary of his release date perfectly encapsulates the way the world sees the continent, or wants to see it. 2. Peter Tsasis and N. Nirupama, “Vulnerability and Risk Perception in the Management of HIV/AIDS: Public Priorities in a Global Pandemic,” Risk Management Health Policy 1 (2008): 3. 3. Jacques Pepin, The Origins of AIDS (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2011, 1–­2. 4. “The History of AIDS in Africa.” Accessed June 12, 2018, http://www.​ b lackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/section/real-stories/the​ -history-of-aids-in-africa/. 5. The term “denialism” comes from Adam Sitze’s essay with the same title in which he traces the long history of denying the existence of AIDS in South Africa. Adam Sitze, “Denialism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 4

notes to pages 117–119

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(Fall 2004): 769–­811. Also see Brenna M. Munro, South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), which covers the political circumstances behind this denialism. 6. John Iliffe, The African AIDS Epidemic: A History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 42. 7. As noted in chapter 2, Mugabe staged his economic reforms for similar reasons, too. 8. In a Western context, see Cindy Patton’s Inventing Aids (New York and London: Routledge, 1990) where she argues that medicine has closed its heart to AIDS treatment because of the stigma associated with the disease. 9. Leslie Swartz, Marguerite Schneider, Mark Priestley, and Theresa Lorenzo “HIV AIDS and Disability: New Challenges,” in Disability and Social Change: A South African Agenda, ed. Brian Watermayer (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2006), 108. 10. The statistics on AIDS in Botswana is based on a UNAID Gaps Report conducted in 2016. See the link below for more information. Although a substantial portion of Botswana is still HIV positive, it has only recently been considered a model for how to manage the AIDS crisis. According to Avert.org, an AIDS prevention website: [Botswana] was the first country in the region to provide universal free antiretroviral treatment to people living with HIV, paving a path for many other countries in the region to follow. The impact of its treatment programme has been widespread. New infections have decreased significantly, from 15,000 in 2005 to 9,100 in 2013, although in recent years they have begun to rise again, with 9,700 reported in 2015. AIDS-­related deaths have dramatically decreased from the 14,000 recorded in 2005. They fell to 3,200 in 2015.

Accessed August 21, 201, https://www.avert.org/professionals/hiv-aroundworld/sub-saharan-africa/botswana. Also see: [In 2002] Botswana became the first African country to launch a national antiretroviral treatment project. MASA (meaning ‘new dawn’) was to be equally financed by the Botswana government, the Gates Foundation and the drugs company Merck. Treatment uptake was slow at first as there was a major shortage of health

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notes to pages 120–122 workers and even these few cases overwhelmed the health system. The programme gained momentum and by 2007 approximately 95% of HIV positive people in the country were being treated. Botswana’s successful treatment programme allayed doubts that antiretroviral treatment for poor African countries was unfeasible. Its programme has been by far the most successful in Africa, although Namibia (treating 71% of those in need in 2006), Rwanda (72%), Kenya (44%), Malawi (43%) Swaziland (42%) Uganda (41%), have also been regarded as reasonably successful at rolling out treatment.

Accessed June 11, 2018, http://www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/ section/real-stories/the-history-of-aids-in-africa/. 11. Unity Dow and Max Essex, Saturday Is for Funerals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), ix. 12. Jamil D. Bayram and Shawki Zuabi, “Disaster Metrics: Quantification of Acute Medical Disasters in Trauma-­Related Multiple Casualty Events through Modeling of the Acute Medical Severity Index,” Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 27, no. 2, 135. 13. David E. Hogan and Jonathan L. Burstein, eds., Disaster Medicine, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams, and Wilkins, 2007), 128. 14. Didier Fassin, When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 31–­32. 15. Epidemics attack a more concentrated group or groups, whereas pandemics are the global circulation of an epidemic. AIDS is thus both an epidemic and a pandemic. 16. Njabulo S. Ndebele, “Foreword,” in Nobantu Rasebotsa, Meg Samuelson, and Kylie Thomas, eds., Nobody Ever Said AIDS: Stories and Poems from Southern AFRICA (Cape Town: Kwela, 2004), 9. 17. Ndebele, Nobody Ever Said AIDS. 18. While I deliberately focus on early twenty-­first century AIDS fiction to understand how people finally recognize this catastrophe, AIDS narratives published recently play much more with form and plot, thereby demonstrating my point about time and literary form even in a compressed time frame. See, for example, Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2017), a grim comedy about the drug trade in antiretrovirals in South Africa, and Futhi Ntshingila’s We Kiss Them with Rain (2018), set in a squatters camp in Durban, South Africa. In both these novels, the characters recognize their infection and acknowledge the prevalence of the disease, while other themes and plot twists also come into play. Obviously, too, several literary

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critical texts have taken on this rhetoric of denialism as well as the suffering of AIDS victims as AIDS victims, although most have not theorized AIDS as being a medical disaster. One very powerful book that focuses on creating places for collective mourning is Kylie Thomas’s Impossible Mourning: HIV/AIDS and Visuality After Apartheid (Bucknell, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2013), which examines, among other genres, photographs as a form of community mourning. 19. I borrow this term from the title of Rita Barnard and Grant Farred’s guest-­edited issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly, entitled After the Thrill Is Gone: A Decade of Post-­Apartheid South Africa (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). 20. Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), viii, emphasis added. I am using Charon as my primary reference point for narrative medicine, since she is widely recognized as a pioneer in the field. 21. John Marx situates postcolonial crisis fiction as having a similar agenda: Social scientists who acknowledge literary efforts tend to think of fiction as giving crisis a human face.  .  .  . With stories that “stick to the gut and the brain,” postcolonial fiction makes it difficult for social scientists to turn away from “biopolitical horrors [that] stand side-­by-­side, incongruously, with clear markers of development” (75, 70). If fiction forces “the coolly distant development expert to the inside of a maelstrom” (75), political science entices fiction to perceive the state less as art’s habitual antagonist—­the sovereign power that censors and bans, imprisons and exiles—­than as an object that art might help to reform. Political science imagines a collaborative model in which fiction brings anomalies to the attention of researchers, who then tweak their statistical analyses and policy recommendations to account for this new data. But fiction does not simply flesh out social-­scientific practice. Instead, it shapes a counterdiscourse. While fiction does offer a humanizing counterpoint to the cold facts of statistical calculation, it also portrays life in the failed state as an education—­the sort of education, in fact, that might make one more expert than the experts. (Marx, “Failed-­State Fiction,” 598–­99).

22. This may remind readers of chapter 1, “Tsunami Stories,” in which the necessity of Western science’s detecting the Wave is declared as

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important as indigenous methods of saving lives by climbing a “high high tree.” 23. For more on the importance of bearing witness in the South African imagination, representative texts include Samuel Durrant’s article “Bearing Witness to Apartheid: J. M. Coetzee’s Inconsolable Works of Mourning,” Contemporary Literature 40, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 430–­63, and Katherine Mack’s book From Apartheid to Democracy: Deliberating Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). For a more general and global examination of bearing witness, see James Dawes’ That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). 24. Mpe himself recognized these hybrid modes of acquiring medical knowledge when he trained to become a healer. In an interview with Lizzie Attree, he says: But of course I know many traditional healers. Beyond using herbs, they are also interested in stories. Because when people come to you and say, “I’ve got a problem,” you don’t just say, “well is it a headache? Here is medicine for your headache,” you also want to know how they are doing in their social relationships, because perhaps the headache might come from elsewhere, from a source other than a germ or virus. So you really have to be interested in stories, and I see a connection there.

Lizzy Attree and P. Mpe, “Healing with Words: Phaswane Mpe Interviewed by Lizzy Attree,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40, no. 3 (January 2005): 147. 25. Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious (London: Verso, 2015), 15. 26. Ellen Grünkemeier, Breaking the Silence: South African Representations of HIV/AIDS (Suffolk: James Currey, 2013). 27. I have cited the scholarship directly related to my argument about Welcome to Our Hillbrow in the body of the chapter. See the bibliography in this book for a partial list of the lengthy and voluminous scholarship on the book. 28. Quoted in Oscar Hemer, Fiction and Truth in Transition: Writing the Present Past in South Africa and Argentina (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2012), 199. 29. For more on how the unique political situation in South Africa led to a perfect storm in terms of the AIDS becoming an epidemic, see Grünkemeier, Breaking the Silence, where she explains that while “the extent of

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the epidemic can generally be read as a shortcoming in the presidential and ministerial response” (34), the pandemic also commenced with the “township revolts of the mid-­1980s” and crested during the end of apartheid in 1994 when everyone, but most especially politicians, was focused on the change in governance instead of also giving HIV the utmost importance in terms of remedial action, both medical as well as governmental. 30. Welcome to Our Hillbrow begins with this sentence: “if you were still alive, Refents˘e, child of Tiragalong, you would be glad to know that Bafana Bafana lost to France in the 1998 soccer world cup fiasco” (1). The novel’s simple commencement semaphores in multiple directions: One: The addressee in the book is dead. Two: South Africa lost to France in the World Cup that year, suggesting a European victory over Africa. Three: That loss and, by allegorical extension, South Africa itself is imagined as a fiasco. Four: The novel also sets its own timeline as after 1998 when the AIDS crisis had reached its peak and measures to cure it were beginning to fall into place. 31. Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 19 (bracketed emphasis mine). 32. Carrol Clarkson, “Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 3 (2005): 452. 33. Phaswane Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow: A Novel of Postapartheid South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011, 2001), 17. See Grünkemeier, Breaking the Silence, for an extensive reading of some of these instances in the novel. “Cousin” here refers to Refents˘e’s male cousin who lives in Hillbrow. 34. Evan M. Mwangi, Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, ­Sexuality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 216. 35. See Mwangi for more on the metafictional aspects of the novel. 36. Hugo Van der Merwe and Audrey R. Chapman, eds., Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 127–­28. 37. See Grünkemeier, Breaking the Silence, for a detailed reading of this incident. 38. The reference here, of course, is to John Keats’s famous poem, “To Autumn” (1820). Accessed July 21, 2019, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems/44484/to-­autumn. 39. The term SADness is a play on the depression caused by SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, an ailment from which people in cold, sunless areas often suffer in the winter months.

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40. Neville Wallace Hoad, African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 115. 41. Hemer, Fiction and Truth in Transition, 112. 42. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London and New York: Routledge) 2001, 32–­33. 43. Claire Moon, Narrating Political Reconciliation: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2008), 35. 44. For more on African cosmopolitan in Welcome to Our Hillbrow, see Hoad’s chapter entitled “An Elegy for African Cosmopolitanism” in African Intimacies. 45. Christine Matzke and Susanne Muehleisen, Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 13. 46. Dow has also most recently coauthored a work of hybrid fiction and nonfiction, entitled Saturday Is for Funerals (2010), which consists of a series of short stories, based on real-­life narratives, about the AIDS crisis. I choose to focus on Far and Beyon’ because it represents the apex of the medical disaster in terms of the AIDS crisis. Indeed, Unity Dow and Max Essex assert the importance of the turn of the century as the cresting point of the AIDS crisis, in their preface to Saturday Is for Funerals: “in the year 2000, the World Health Organization Estimated that 85 percent of 15-­year-­olds in Botswana would eventually die of AIDS; life expectancy would fall by forty-­four years, from a projected seventy-­three years to just twenty-­nine” (ix). 47. Unity Dow, Far and Beyon’ (San Francisco, Ca: Aunt Lute Books: 2001). Dedication. No page. 48. The prologue attempts to open on a note of hope, and to erase the novel’s anxiety about sickness, by beginning with the birth of a baby girl and with the mother’s vision of the glorious future she has planned for her daughter: “She will send her to school so that she will not be as ignorant as her mother. Then she will not have to depend on a man for her survival . . . Pain mixed with love and hope and anxiety, and joy came spilling out and soaked her pillow” (2). The novel seeks to generate precisely this mixture of pain, love, hope, anxiety, and joy in its readership, to show us the mixed feelings that also come with disease and illness. 49. Like Mpe, Dow also critiques the narration of AIDS among African communities. Most of the first chapter consists of Mara consulting her witch doctor, emphasizing her unflinching belief in the power of this figure to divine and diagnose. According to Grünkemeier in Breaking the Silence:

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The hypothesis that the virus can be traced back to its origins in Africa is challenged and turned on its head. “Many doctors, academics, journalists, government officials and other educated people believe that the virus was sent to Africa from the United States, an act of bacteriological warfare (whose aim was to decrease the African birth rate), which got out of hand. . . .” (Sontag, 1990, 140). While these conspiracy theories present a counter-­reaction to the western-­centered perspective, the virus is still signified through myths. (18)

50. The rhetoric here is startlingly similar to that in Welcome to Our Hillbrow, with its depiction of foreigners as disease-­bearing insects. Instead of immigrants swarming into South Africa, in this novel, South African immigrants are coming into Botswana and bringing in disease with them. The novel also associates disease with the American Peace Corps, once again emphasizing the denialist concept of AIDS as a disease emerging from Western contact and from Western promiscuity. 51. So, for example, a diviner had advised that it was a signal that Pule, like Thabo before him, had really died in infancy, because they had both been marked at birth by “displeased ancestors” (46). 52. Fetson Kalua, “New Perspectives in African Literature: The Case of Unity Dow and Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana,” English Academy Review 24, no. 1 (2007): 80. 53. Mosa and Stan, Mara’s children, have an argument about AIDS and their brother’s death: The recent tragedies had only helped deepen the rift. The two had not come together in grief but had been further estranged. It had not helped that Stan had attempted to force a discussion about AIDS after the death of the first brother. Mosa had ended the discussion with a clear statement that of course her brother had died from having sex with a woman who had recently had an abortion. In the announcement was also an assignment of guilt: Stan had been a friend of the girlfriend’s cousin, and ought to have known and warned their brother about the abortion. Mara, although she shared Mosa’s beliefs, would have preferred that Mosa let Stan have his say. She believed that only through hearing her son’s views could she begin to get him back to thinking rationally. That, however, had closed all discussions about that particular matter. This

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notes to page 149 was more than a year ago, before Mosa’s own whispered abortion. (57–­58)

AIDS cannot be named as itself. Instead, women—­and indeed all Others—­ are blamed for the spread of the disease. Mara thinks that standard African beliefs are the rational way to think about AIDS as being transmitted from women who have had abortions. 54. In seizing this reality, the novel seemingly sets up a binary between Western medicine and conventional African ways of knowing the world. But it undermines this reality continually: He [Stan] did not want to seem disrespectful but he was not looking forward to yet another encounter with a diviner: as far as he was concerned, they had caused more problems than they had solved. They were always blaming some relative or friend for the misfortune of their clients. No names were given, only vague descriptions for the clients to decipher. (80)

The diviners, or traditional ways of knowing, then blame adjacent ­ eople instead of the real sources for the scourge of AIDS. Denial continues p to be perpetrated. Even abortion becomes part of this alternative story perpetrated by African convention. Mosa considers herself to be safe from the predatory teachers at her school, as “she considered her abortion to be protection, because she would be regarded as unclean for at least a year” (89). 55. People from Botswana also demonstrate the distrust of foreigners critiqued in Welcome to Our Hillbrow: “No one at the meeting believed that anyone was stupid enough to refuse cleansing after a partner’s death. Even a South African from the bright lights of Johannesburg would not be that naïve” (Far and Beyon’, 40). Yet refusal can be empowering, too. “Death is not supposed to claim a strapping man in his prime” (3). Mara cannot remember Pule as he was: “he had been a strong confident boy . . . but that picture was pushed out of her mind by the most recent one: the picture of a young man reduced to a bag of bones and glazed eyes” (5). Even as the image of the ravaged body replaces the image of the healthy body in the character’s mind, the narrative again intrudes to provide another image that undermines the image of death and disease. The novel chooses to remind us that Pule was a “strapping man,” that he had a prior existence before his image was locked into the fleshlessness of AIDS. Dow refuses to give AIDS a final victory by her prose that constantly undermines the power of the disease.

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56. The child becomes a symbol yet once more. Here she stands for the future that is not permitted to hear the true story of AIDS because it comes from a Westernized source, such as the radio, and also because the true narrative about the medical disaster recognizes the importance of sex in the dissemination of the disease. 57. Fetson Kalua explores this point in his article, “New Perspectives in African Literature,” especially focusing on Mosa’s rhizomatic identity. Yet again, Dow teaches us how narrative can function as a cure: “Mosa wanted to get as much information about HIV and AIDS as possible before going for a test” (Far and Beyon’, 119). The novel not only provides us with that information but also tells us, in a didactic vein, that this is what we need to do in order to survive the possibility of an HIV diagnosis. Unfortunately, and somewhat predictably, Mara is not able to get the information she needs. This is how AIDS becomes a disaster—­not just because of the disease itself but also because of the lack of information available to victims. This is also why Mosa gets into “one of her dark moods: a mixture of anger, frustration, and belligerence” (145). If Mpe advocates a benign cosmopolitanism toward those who suffer from AIDS, Dow’s characters are full of anger and frustration at their fate. Mosa says passionately: “I cannot believe we are just helpless. I refuse to accept that. That we must just let all this go on without lifting a finger. People are dying around us because of AIDS. Telling women to expect their husbands to sleep around does not help the situation. Telling them to be passive is a recipe for disaster. Surely everyone can see that” (156). I stress the word “disaster” for it evokes, from an HIV victim herself, how the epidemic has become a disaster and how women, and their encouraged passivity, are being blamed as the source of the scourge. Naming the diseases, as well as recognizing its sources rather than creating convenient scapegoats, is an important aspect of treating the disease. 58. The title of this section is taken from Nadine Gordimer’s essay in Transitions 56 (1992), edited by Stephen Clingman. Nadine Gordimer and Stephen Clingman, “The Future Is Another Country,” Transition 56 (1992): 132–­50.

Chapter 4 1. Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 2017, 99. 2. Accessed November 7, 2017, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_ asia/687021.stm.

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3. As even highlights from the brief timeline below, and the constantly changing numbers, indicate, India and Pakistan have been living in a state of actual geopolitical disaster since their inception as two nation-­states in 1947: 1947: The Indian subcontinent is partitioned into supposedly secular India and the Muslim-­majority Pakistan. Nearly 1–2 million people are killed in Partition-­related violence; Approximately 12–14 million people are displaced from their homes, making Partition the largest mass migration in history. Kashmir, with its Hindu ruler and largely Muslim population, is given to India rather than to Pakistan. This will become the greatest source of conflict between the two countries. 1952: India becomes a republic with a president, instead of its colonial ruler Great Britain’s queen, as its titular head. 1956: Pakistan becomes an Islamic republic. 1965: India and Pakistan go to war over Kashmir. Who won this war is still doubtful, although most military specialists favor India, but deaths on both sides run into thousands. 1971: East Pakistan rebels against West Pakistan. India comes to the aid of East Pakistan. West Pakistan eventually surrenders to the joint forces of India and East Pakistan; the latter becomes the nation of Bangladesh. Casualties are said to be the highest ever in the conflict between India and Pakistan. 1998: India and Pakistan test nuclear weapons, causing global panic. 1999: The Kargil War was precipitated by Pakistani entry into “Indian Kashmir.” While this so-­called war had few casualties, it caused alarm over its possible escalation into nuclear conflict. 2001–­2002: Terrorists with alleged ties to Pakistan attack the Indian Parliament; the world holds its breath in anticipation of a nuclear war that never happens. 2008: A series of shootings and bombings takes place in Mumbai: 164 people are killed and 300 are wounded. The one terrorist captured alive admits that the attacks were assisted by Pakistan’s secret service, the ISI. 2011: Shooting on the Indian–­Pakistan border takes place. Supposedly, one Indian and three Pakistani soldiers are killed. Both sides blame the other for starting the skirmish. 2013: An Indian soldier is beheaded by the Pakistanis, a claim that India makes but that Pakistan refutes. According to some reports, two Indian and four Pakistani soldiers are killed. The hostility escalates between the two countries as five more Indian soldiers are killed a few months later. Note that the death count in all these cases varies based on who is reporting the casualties. 2014–­2015: Border scrimmage continues. Multiple soliders and civilians are killed and injured.

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2016: Militants attack Indian Army Headquarters at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir. A reported 19 Indian soldiers are killed, many of them noncombatant cooks. India claims that it conducted a series of attacks against the Pakistani military in September 2016, and estimates 35 to 50 soldiers were killed. Pakistan counters this claim and states that only two Pakistanis were killed but more Indian soldiers had been killed in what it described as a border skirmish. 2017: Nawaz Sharif is ousted as prime minister of Pakistan. The media worries that the future of Pakistani democracy is at stake. Sharif names his brother as his successor to lead his political party. Elections to decide which political party will rule Pakistan will take place in one year. Accessed July 29, 2017, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/07/pakistan-nawazsharif-names-brother-successor-170729150243727.html. 2018: The cricketer Imran Khan becomes prime minister of Pakistan. 2019: On February 14, a Kashmiri suicide bomber kills 40 Indian members of the armed forces in what the New York Times Editorial Board described as the: Deadliest attacks in the divided region since 1947 . . . India sent warplanes into Pakistan for the first time in five decades. Indian officials say they had struck Jaish-­e-­Muhammad’s “biggest training camp” and killed a “very large number” of militants, although those claims are called into doubt. Pakistan counterattacks, leading to a dogfight in which at least one Indian jet is shot down and a pilot captured by the Pakistanis. . . . [Despite some attempts at alleviation] the threat of nuclear war remains.

New York Times Editorial Board, “This Is Where a Nuclear Exchange Is Most Likely (It’s Not North Korea),” New York Times, March 7, 2019. 2019: Narendra Modi, leader of the right-­wing Hindu party (the BJP), is reelected as Prime Minister on a promise of saffronization that novels such as the City of Devi eerily predict. India revokes article 370 of the constitution, which gave Kashmir special status, further precipitating hostility between the two countries. 4. For example, I have tried to use terms including military disaster, partitioned disaster, and political disaster. None of these conveys the combined impact of the Partition of 1947, the military conflict that followed, and the endless political negotiations and skirmishes between the two countries since 1947, not to mention the issue of how ordinary people’s lives are unwillingly caught up in international politics. A good correlative might be Ariella Azoulay and Tal Haran’s term “Regime-­Made Disasters,” which

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they use to describe the political situation in the Middle East. See Ariella Azoulay and Tal Haran. “A Tour of the Museum of Regime-­Made Disasters,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 4, no. 3 (Winter 2013): 345–­363. Yet, the South Asian case is far more complicated than the choices certain political regimes may impose on its population, although the disaster has certainly been exacerbated by the various regimes on the Indian and Pakistani side as well as the British empire. 5. Frederick M. Burkle, “Complex Humanitarian Emergencies,” in Disaster Medicine, eds. David E. Hogan and Jonathon L. Burstein, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams, and Wilkins, 2007), 86. 6. The longue durée is a historical approach associated with the French Annales school in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and linked with theorists such as Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and, most famously, Fernand Braudel. The latter prominent historian considers events that have been going on for centuries—­such as the crusades—­as being examples of the longue durée. As noted in any study of disaster, time operates in a compressed frame, making what is slow or fast, long or short, very different from standard historical usages of those terms. 7. As I explained in the introduction to this book, the slogan “the personal is political” is well-­known in its association with second-­wave feminism. The phrase “the political is personal,” by contrast, seeks to show how the larger political world of government decisions and international crisis infiltrates the daily and domestic worlds of nations either at war or embedded in international crisis. 8. I am here echoing Homi Bhabha’s famous formulation on the thin line between mimicry and hybridity. See his essay “Of Mimicry and Man” in The Location of Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 131. 9. Saul Bernard Cohen, Geopolitics: The Geography of International Relations. 3d ed. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 16. Cohen further defines geopolitics as: [T]he analysis of the interaction between, on the one hand, geographical settings and perspectives, and, on the other, political processes. The settings are composed of geographical features and patterns and the multilayered regions that they form. The political processes include forces that operate at the international level and those on the domestic scene that influence international behavior. Both geographical settings and political processes are dynamic, and each influences and is influenced by the other. Geopolitics address

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the consequences of this interaction. In this analysis, geography is defined in spatial terms as “places” and the “connections” between and among them. “Places” are bounded settings in which the interactions between human and natural environments occur. “Connections” refers to the circulations of peoples, goods, and ideas that tie places together and have an impact on them. (16)

10. Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-­ first Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 17. 11. Irr’s definition of the geopolitical novel, in its American manifestation, also resonates with the texts discussed in this chapter: [T]he twenty-­first century political novel actively reorganizes existing literary forms . . . [It] presents detailed, descriptions of ordinary, dedicated people wrestling with problems of the new millennium. Contemporary problem novels are explicitly political in their subject matter. In these problem novels, common tropes repeatedly appear, and repeating these scenes, figures, and conflicts reveals some key features of contemporary political experience . . . Contemporary political novels are explicitly political in their subject matter. Politically charged characters, settings, conflicts and styles of narration comprise the foreground of the narration as well as the background of the geopolitical novel. This fiction directly addresses questions of collective identity and power, appropriate means of collective action, and the struggle to articulate ideals and goals that orient action. It makes a political problem fundamental to the story . . . It shatters isolationist myths, updates national narratives, provides points of access for global identification. (3–­4)

12. John Marx, Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890–­2011 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. 13. Itty Abraham, How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 2014, 152 (emphasis added). 14. I define the position of each novel on the catastrophe continuum in terms of when it is set and what it is about, rather than when it was published. 15. Eleni Coundouriotis. The People’s Right to the Novel: War Fiction in the Postcolony (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 30.

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16. The list of Anglophone fiction about the 1947 Partition and the ongoing India–­Pakistan conflict is extremely long. I am, therefore, going to provide the titles of some iconic, and less well known examples, such as Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), and Shame (1983), Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988), Muhammad Umar Memon, ed., An Epic Unwritten: The Penguin Book of Partition Stories (1999), Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (2001), Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2008), Aatish Taseer’s Noon: A Novel (2011), Amit Majmudar’s Partitions: A Novel (2012), Anand Julka’s Mona’s Compulsion: A Family Saga (2013), Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s Between Clay and Dust (2015), Malik Sajad’s graphic novel Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (2015), N. H. Senzai’s children’s novel A Ticket to India (2016), Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs (2016), Nadeem Aslam’s The Golden Legend (2017), and Badri Raina’s collection of nonfiction essays, Kashmir: A Noble Tryst in Tatters (2017) 17. According to the historian Crispin Bates, the Indian Partition of 1947 “was accompanied by the largest mass migration in human history of some 10 million. As many as one million civilians died in the accompanying riots and local-­level fighting, particularly in the western region of Punjab which was cut in two by the border.” Accessed July 27, 2017, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ history/british/modern/partition1947_01.shtml. 18. The Muslim-­majority province, but with a Hindu king, became a part of India during Partition and has been claimed by both India and Pakistan, as well as by separatist Kashmiri groups wanting an independent nation of their own. See Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (London: Verso, 2011), coauthored by Arundhati Roy, Tariq Ali, and Pankaj Mishra, among others, for an impassioned appeal for Kashmiri independence and self-­governance. 19. See Coundouriotis’s “Introduction” in The People’s Right to the Novel for a discussion of the national allegory debate. 20. Examples that Irr cites in Toward the Geopolitical Novel (111) include Amitav Ghosh’s Glass Palace (2000) and Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics (2000). 21. In describing the Armenian war and genocide as a Catastrophe, Nichanian gives me room to describe the South Asian conflict as a disaster. 22. Priya Kumar, Limiting Secularism: The Ethics of Coexistence in Indian Literature and Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xv. 23. This is not to say that other cultural products from both sides do not act as propagandist vehicles for reinforcing national boundaries. Bollywood, in particular, has made some very unidimensional films about the conflict in the early decades of Independence. Priya Kumar cites the

notes to page 168

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following Bollywood films that depict either Indian Muslims or Pakistan and Pakistani Muslims in simplistic and stereotypical ways: Mani Ratnam’s Roja (1992) and Bombay (1995), Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Mission Kashmir (2000), Veeru Devgan’s Hindustan ki Kasam (1999), Boney Kapoor’s Pukar (2000), J. P. Dutta’s Refugee (2000) and L.O.C. Kargil (2003), and John Matthew Matthan’s Sarfarosh (1999) (in Limiting Secularism, 181–­ 182). According to Kumar, “the disquiet around the figure of the Indian Muslim takes the form of the split between the “good” Indian Muslim who is made ritually to swear allegiance to the nation and the “evil” Pakistani Other . . . who dares to challenge Indian sovereignty” (182). 24. Kumar also discusses religious “coexistence” in India, especially how it is incorporated into the rhetoric of secularism that characterizes postcolonial India. Kavita Daiya’s Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2011) and Bhaskar Sarkar’s Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009) also frame Partition as the original wound that bleeds into contemporary culture and politics. See, too, the work of Ananya Jahanara Kabir, including her monographs, Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Partition’s Post-­Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia (London: Women’s Press, 2013), and Meenakshi Bharat’s Troubled Testimonies: Terrorism and the English Novel in India (London and New York: Routledge 2016). Nisid Hajari’s Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition (New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 2016) and Shahan Mufti’s The Faithful Scribe: A Story of Islam, Pakistan, Family and War (London: Other Press, 2015) are not about fiction and film but rather provide useful political analysis of the longevity of the conflict. Ramu Nagappan’s Speaking Havoc: Social Suffering and South Asian Narratives (2005) uses the idea of narratives’ “speaking havoc” in order to understand how fiction and film determine the way we react to suffering. Nagappan begins with Partition, but includes the assassination of Indira Gandhi as well as the tensions between India and Pakistan, and also focuses on “minor” tragedies and not just catastrophes. Vazira Fazila-­ Yacoobali Zamindar’s The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press 2007) extends our understanding of Partition by taking a long view of this cataclysmic event, although her perspective is that of a historian and not a literary critic, thus also reflecting her analysis of oral narratives. Deepti Misri’s book Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India (Urbana Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014)

254

notes to pages 168–169

examines how Partition has “inspired” Indians to continue to perpetrate violent acts, especially gendered ones. Her focus, however, is on India and not also on Pakistan, and concentrates on gender. See also Suvir Kaul’s outstanding work on the Partition and Kashmir, including his edited collection, The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Divisions of India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) and Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Politics, Poetry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). Patrick Hogan’s excellent book, Imagining Kashmir: Emplotment and Colonialism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016) focuses on a wide array of writing about Kashmir to think about how narrative can be used to comprehend real life. For an excellent interdisciplinary edited collection on the long Partition and its spillage into contemporary South Asian culture beyond the usual provenance of Kashmir and Punjab, see Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics (Kentucky: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), edited by Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola. While my work is also influenced by the idea of “the long Partition,” it is differentiated by my theorization of Partition and its aftereffects as past and present war as well as an imaginary, but always present, nuclear apocalypse; my framing of these events as a geopolitical disaster focuses on how a militarized rhetoric seeps into these novels about international conflict and further sets my argument apart. I am interested, too, in how India and Pakistan appear as ghostly or corporeal presences in novels about geo-­political conflict but from the “other” nation. 25. For more on the effects of Partition on the Sikhs, and their role in the violence, see chapter 4, “A Community in Crisis: Partition and the Sikhs,” in The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, edited by Gyanesh Kudaisya and Tan Yong Tai (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 99–­122. 26. Nikky-­Guninder Singh, “Twice Repressed: The Case of Ondaatje’s Kip.” Journal of Religion and Film 8, no. 2 (April 2004), Article 5, http:// digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol8/iss2/5. 27. Meenakshi Bharat, Troubled Testimonies: Terrorism and the English Novel in India (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 45. 28. Jaspreet Singh, Chef (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), epigraph. 29. The term “hot peace” is a common one in political discourse. I encountered it first in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay entitled “Cultural Talks in the Hot Peace: Revisiting the Global Village” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce R ­ obbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 329. In contrast, I

notes to pages 169–176

255

use the term “warm peace” in keeping with the theme of this part’s title, “Simmer.” 30. In another, perhaps odder and older appearance of colonialist stereotypes, Kip’s serving as a personal chef to a military officer brings to mind the old figure of the Indian manservant in colonial fiction. An example of one of the most problematically beloved man-­servant figures is that of Ram Dass, the Lascar, who acts as a deus ex machina in A Little Princess (1905), by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The point, however, remains the same: Traces of old colonial and postcolonial tropes will bubble to the surface in supposedly post-­postcolonial, twenty-­first century literature. 31. According to Sankaran Krishna, even though the rest of the border was constructed on the glacier, the nation-­making authorities didn’t actually map the border because they figured that the terrain was too “inhospitable” for it to become an issue later. That the boundary between Self and Other is blurred on terrain that is too dangerous to map, which resists the artifice of cartography, is significant. Sankaran Krishna, “Cartographic Anxiety: Mapping the Body Politic in India,” Alternatives 19 (1994): 507–­21, 511. 32. Jena Habegger-­Conti, “Chef by Jaspreet Singh.” Transnational Literature 3, no. 1, November 2010. 33. The perspective “from below,” a term that Coundouriotis uses in The People’s Right to the Novel, allows the protagonist to be privy to conversations that another narrator may not be able to access. 34. Lennis G. Echterling and Mary Lou Wylie, “In the Public Arena: Disaster as a Socially Constructed Problem,” in Response to Disaster: Psychosocial, Community and Ecological Approaches, eds. Richard Gist and Bernard Lubin (Ann Arbor: Braun-­Brumfield, 1999), 331. 35. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 35. 36. Marian Aguiar, Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 86. 37. Later in the novel Kirpal comments: “No one will pay any attention to Irem. People like her do not matter. Damaged people like her do not matter at all. Even when they leave the hospitals they remain sick. Even when they leave prisons they remain trapped. Their sickness is being alive. Their crime is that they continue to exist” (Chef, 216). 38. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 27.

256

notes to pages 177–184

39. Sandra Ponzanesi, The Postcolonial Culture Industry: Icons, Markets, and Mythologies (Basingstoke, U.K., and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 157. 40. Moni Mohsin, The Dairy of a Social Butterfly (New Delhi: Random House, 2008), 5, emphasis added. 41. Muneeza Shamsie, “Pakistani English Novels in the New Millennium: Migration, Geopolitics, and Tribal Tales,” in New Soundings in Postcolonial Writing: Essays in Honor of Bruce King, ed. Janet Wilson and Chris Ringrose (Leiden/Boston: Rodopi, 2016), 149. 42. Kamila Shamsie, ‘“International Writing’: Past, Present, and Future Directions,” Wasafiri 24, no. 3 (August 2010): 111. 43. As Moni Mohsin, the author, says, “in order to make her silliness apparent I needed a counterpoint. Hence Janoo” (224). While her husband is the voice of direct political commentary, Butterfly is the voice of indirect—­and sharp—­social satire. 44. Marc Gerstein with Michael Ellsberg, Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents Are Rarely Accidental (New York/London: Unique Square Press, 2008), 241. 45. Denial runs through long-­term disasters such as the medical disaster. The refusal to call AIDS by its own name is another example of the ease with which the existence of long-­term and slow-­moving disasters are negated as disasters, since they have been normalized in our imagination, unlike single Event-­oriented disasters such as the tsunami or even the economic crisis in Zimbabwe. 46. Krzysztof Kaniasty and Fran Norris, “The Experience of Disaster: Individuals and Communities Sharing Trauma,” in Response to Disaster: Psychosocial, Community and Ecological Approaches, eds. Richard Gist and Bernard Lubin (Ann Arbor: Braun-­Brumfield, 1999), 30. 47. Jeffrey P. Staab, Carol S. Fullerton, and Robert J. Ursano. “A Critical Look at PTSD: Constructs, Concepts, Epidemiology, and Implications” in Kaniasty and Norris, “The Experience of Disaster,” 101. 48. Literally translated as “set of earrings.” 49. Quoted in Amanda Gryzb, The World and Darfur: International Responses to Crimes Against Humanity in Western Sudan (Montreal: McGill-­ Queen’s University Press, 2009), 63. 50. Moni Mohsin, Duty Free (New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2011), 246. 51. The City of Devi is part of a trilogy that includes The Death of Vishnu (1998) and The Age of Shiva (2007). Neither of these earlier novels are about war, or the catastrophe continuum, although The Death of Shiva focuses on Hindu–­Muslim tensions in post-­Partition India. As I have stated earlier in

notes to pages 185–188

257

the book, a disaster novel can easily be included in other genres, or as a part of linked novels like The City of Devi, without compromising its status as disaster fiction. 52. Manil Suri, The City of Devi (London and New York: WW Norton, 2013), 3. Suri’s decision to refer to Bombay as Bombay, rather than its Indian name of Mumbai, is deliberate and explained later in the chapter. 53. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives this etymology for the word “grenade”: “[S]mall explosive shell,” thrown rather than discharged from a cannon, 1590s, earlier “pomegranate” (1520s), from Middle French grenade “pomegranate” (16c.), earlier grenate (12c.), from Old French pomegrenate (see pomegranate). Form influenced by Spanish granada. So called because the many-­seeded fruit suggested the powder-­filled, fragmenting bomb, or from similarities of shape. See pomegranate.”

Accessed September 2, 2016, http://www.etymonline.com/index. php?term=pomegranate&allowed_in_frame=0. 54. This also echoes a moment in Moni Mohsin’s Duty Free when the geopolitical disaster effects the most mundane of activities, showing how the ordinary choices that people make are determined by the catastrophe: I swear I feel frightened myself going to the bazaar in case some mad weirdo arrives and shoots me for buying western food like chips or for wearing western clothes like pop-­socks. All the time I’m looking over my shoulder, all the time thinking someone standing behind me in a shop or parked beside me on a bicycle in a traffic jam might blow me up. (63)

55. Crawford Market in Bombay/Mumbai is named after Arthur Crawford (1835–­1911), an imperial administrator of the city. 56. Obviously, the use of art as a tool for extremist propaganda is not new: Leni Riefenstahl’s movies and Richard Wagner’s operas come to mind here. 57. Paul Williams, Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-­Apocalyptic Worlds (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press), 2011, 203. 58. As Iqbal, a character in Khushwant Singh’s classic novel of Partition, Train to Pakistan (1956), says: “Where on earth except in India would a man’s life depend on whether his foreskin had been removed? It would be

258

notes to pages 188–191

laughable if it were not tragic.” Singh, Train to Pakistan (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988), 188. 59. This is especially true now, under the Hindu fundamentalist Modi administration, at a time when Muslims are being lynched by Hindu mobs for eating beef. 60. Discussing Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Alan Sinfield says that “violence is fundamental in the development of the modern state” whose denizens are schooled to understand official violence as “qualitatively different from other violence and perhaps they don’t think of State violence as violence at all.” Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 95. 61. The Hindu fanatics then kidnap all the scientists to keep them safe and to use their knowledge to build more bombs. The fascist Hindu leader says, “It’s more for your peace of mind—­all these empty threats and rumors floating around. You’re the most brilliant intellects in all of Mumbai—­my responsibility is to keep you happy and sound” (280). The scientists are being used to help with technological warfare in a medieval war fought with modern weapons. As Paul Williams points out, “the key paradox of Hindu nationalism . . . is that an independent India remains reliant on the iconic currency of the Anglophone West, because it wishes to borrow their symbols of power” (Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War, 205). 62. This sex scene in the novel won the annual “bad sex in fiction” award” from the U.K.-­based Independent, which described it as “an ecstatic bisexual orgy, which climaxes against a backdrop of imminent nuclear annihilation.” Accessed August 20, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/ arts-entertainment/books/features/the-city-of-devi-manil-suri-s-subatomicbisexual-orgy-beats-hillbilly-humping-to-bad-sex-in-fiction-8981162.html. Karun is eventually killed by a hail of bullets. 63. Bacha is the Hindi and Urdu word for “child.” I am using it deliberately here as it not only plays off Super Manush and Super Devi—­which are both Hindi words—­but because bacha combines both Hindi and Urdu words for “child,” revealing again that the language that Hindus and Muslims use are one and the same despite the difference in script. 64. See, for example, the movie My Beautiful Launderette (1985), based on the screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, in which a romantic relationship between a Muslim British youth and a white British youth provide a salve to the racial and religious rifts between South Asians and white Britons as well as between Muslims and Christians.

notes to pages 192–200

259

65. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 11. 66. Lisa Lau and Om Prakash Dwivedi, Re-­orientalism and Indian Writing in English (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 89. 67. I am obviously playing here with the title of Edelman’s No Future and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, first mentioned in Chapter 1 of this book.

Coda 1. There is no doubt among scholars and activist that the Syrian refugee crisis is a disaster by the metrics of the term used in the field. For example, the journal Disasters recently published its lead article on the Syrian refugee disaster in April 2019: María del Mar Gálvez-Rodríguez, Arturo Haro-­de-­ Rosario, María del Carmen Caba-­Pérez, “The Syrian Refugee Crisis: How Local Governments and NGOs Manage Their Image via Social Media,” Disasters (April 10, 2019). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ disa.12351. 2. Christopher Phillips, The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 60. 3. Fawaz A. Gerges, ISIS: A History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), 15. 4. Accessed July 17, 2017, https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/publications/the-­ syrian-­humanitarian-­disaster-­disparities-­in-­perceptions-­aspirations-­and-­ behaviour-­in-­lebanon-­jordan-­and-­turkey. 5. Accessed July 17, 2017, http://www.peirenepress.com/about_us/ about​_us. 6. At this point in the twenty-­first century, the same sort of crisis, with the potential to metastasize into a full-­fledged disaster, is already raging at the U.S.–­Mexico border. 7. Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes, Breach (London: Peirene Press Ltd, 2016), 29, emphasis added. 8. The journal describes its mission as follows: Based in Oxford, The Journal of Interrupted Studies is an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the work of academics whose work has been interrupted by forced migration. Publishing both complete and incomplete articles the Journal is currently accepting submissions in the sciences and humanities.

Accessed August 20, 2017, http://www.jis-oxford.co.uk/.

260

notes to pages 201–203

9. George Christodoulou, et al., eds., Disasters: Mental Health Context and Responses (Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2016), 178. 10. Referring to The Blue Dragon by the Cypriot writer Yiola Damianou-­ Papadopoulou in chapter 1, I have argued that people living on islands may share a similar sensibility and therefore similar sympathies toward one another.

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Index

Abraham, Itty, 162, 251n13 Achebe, Chinua, 108, 109 Adamo, Susana B., 80, 231n7 adaptation, 216 African Identities (journal), 91, 229n1, 234n25 Afrindian Fictions (Rastogi), 23 After the Thrill Is Gone (Barnard and Farred), 241n19 agronomics, 113 Aguiar, Marian, 172, 255n36 AIDS as AIDS, 123, 146 Aldcroft, Derek, 79–­80, 230n4 A Little Dust on the Eyes (Salgado), 59, 74, 223n9 America/United States: African diasporas in, 3, 85, 88, 106–­7, 108, 112–­13; imperialism, 179 Amirthanayagam, Indran, 33, 42, 47, 67–­69, 228n57. See also Splintered Face, The (Amirthanayagam) Anderson, Mark, 15, 22, 47, 49, 57, 164–­65, 211n38, 212n41, 224n21 Anthropocene, 19, 218n60 apartheid, 23, 32, 79, 117, 124, 126, 127–­33, 137–­41, 229nn127–­33; writings on, 8, 127, 132, 241n18, 242n23 apocalypse, 54, 160, 184, 187, 254n24

Appadurai, Arjun, 171, 255n35 appropriation, 28, 45, 204, 220n74 Arab Spring, 202, 219n64 Assad, Bashar al-­, 197, 199, 202 Attree, Lizzie, 242n24 Barro, Robert J., 82–­83, 232nn14–­15 Bates, Crispin, 252n17 beach, 53, 56, 68, 74, 186, 187, 199 beach communities, 68, 74 Berger, John, 183 Berlant, Lauren, 50, 224n24, 227n52, 259n67. See also Cruel Optimism (Berlant) “Better Fed Than Free,” 34, 98, 112, 113, 228n1, 233n17 Bhabha, Homi, 29, 49, 221n78, 224n19, 228n58, 250n8 Bharat, Meenakshi, 169, 176, 253n24, 254n27 Bhutto, Benazir, 182 bildungsroman, 53, 101, 104 Bildungsromance Novel, 101 Blanchot, Maurice, 17, 48–­49, 213n42, 224n20 Blue Dragon, The (Damianou-­ Papadopoulou), 33, 42, 51–­61, 64, 67, 193, 225nn29–­32, 260n10 Bollywood, 253 281

282 Index Bombay (Mumbai), 185–­87, 189, 257n52, 257n55 bombing, 193, 248n3 Boxing Day, 61, 64 Brant, Daniel, 20, 216n57 Breach (Popoola and Holmes), 38, 198–­204, 259n7 Bulawayo, NoViolet, 34, 37, 83, 91, 105, 107, 230n3, 237n41, 237n46. See also We Need New Names (Bulawayo) Burnett, Hodgson Frances, 255n30 “buying out” strategy, 34–­35, 79, 83–­85, 87–­90, 92–­100, 102–­6, 109–­11, 113, 200, 233n17, 237n44 Calais, 198 calamity, 15, 25, 50, 63, 65, 82, 119, 179, 204, 30, 35, 219n69 capitalism, 6, 88, 92, 112–­13, 210n28, 211n34, 211n35, 213n44 care community, 125 Carrigan Anthony, 16, 19, 61, 74, 212n40, 214n46, 215nn53–­54, 218n63, 227n45, 228n61 cautious hope/optimism, 87, 134, 152, 192–­94, 200, 227n50 celluloid, 174–75 Charon, Rita, 123–­25, 241n20 Chef (Singh), 36, 162–­76, 184, 190–­91, 193, 254n28, 255n32. See also food in Chef chick-­lit, 7, 36, 37, 164, 177, 179, 180, 183 childhood and migration, 104 child narrator, 85, 106 children, 3, 26, 50, 57–­60, 63, 68, 73–­74, 85, 96–­98, 108,

115, 173, 186, 202, 235n31, 237n46 children’s literature, 33, 37, 42–­43, 52–­54, 57, 225n31, 226n37 children’s novel, 33, 42–­43, 51–­54, 57, 60, 65 Churchill, Winston, 97 City of Devi, The (Suri), 36, 162–­64, 173, 184–­93, 202, 249n3, 256nn51–­52 Clarkson, Carrol, 129, 243n32 climate change, 16, 67, 69, 218n60, 221–­22n1, 228n56, 231n7, 231nn9–­10 Clingman, Stephen, 247n58 Clinton, Bill, 158 closed circuit, 18, 26, 91, 93, 121, 154, 204 collectivity, 14, 64, 68, 89–­90, 137, 142–­43, 174, 181 colonial discourse, 18, 49 colonialism, 5, 16, 21–­25, 30, 95, 97, 103, 169, 185, 206–­7 colonialist rhetoric, 18, 30 compassion, 36, 49, 109, 139, 141, 161, 170, 175–­76, 178; for the Other, 163–­64, 167, 180, 188, 193 confessional culture, 128 cosmopolitanism, 6, 20, 29, 128, 137, 141–­42, 216n57, 221n78, 244n42 Coundouriotis, Eleni, 163, 167, 251n15, 252n19, 255n33 crisis as crisis, 35, 85, 90, 96, 132, 219n69 Crosthwaite, Paul, 232n16 Cruel Optimism (Berlant), 224n24, 227n52, 259n67; cruel

Index optimism (concept), 50, 67, 189, 192, 194 Crush, Jonathan and Daniel Tevera, 90, 234n24 Dagneesh, Omran, 199 Daiya, Kavita, 253n24 Damianou-­Papadopoulou, Yiola, 33, 42, 52–53, 225nn28–29, 260n10. See also Blue Dragon, The (Damianou-­Papadopoulou) Dawes, James, 242n23 decolonial, 24 De Kock, Leon, 220n74 De Kok, Ingrid, 44, 61, 71, 223n11 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 30, 212n40, 218n60, 221n82, 227n45; denialism, 117, 238n5, 241n18 diagnosis, 35, 123, 127–­29, 144, 147, 150, 247n57 Diary of a Social Butterfly, The (Mohsin), 36, 162–­64, 166, 177–­84 diaspora, 23, 29, 68–­71, 73, 88, 90, 98–­100, 162, 200, 221n79, 228n60, 238n51 diasporas of destitution, 29, 89–­90, 110–­11 Didier, Fassin, 121, 137, 240n14 disaster as disaster, 18, 26, 29, 47, 51, 52, 55, 57, 59, 64, 69, 70, 73, 74, 113, 123, 124, 148, 179, 183, 219n69 disaster porn, 12, 20 disaster rehabilitation, 49, 153 Disasters (journal), 259n1 disaster studies, 13–­21, 25, 32–­ 33, 44–­45, 62, 80, 159–­62, 209n26, 214n46, 215n50,

283 215n52, 215n54, 218n63, 219n67, 219n69 diviner, 140, 144, 150, 245n51, 246n54 dollarization, 92, 94, 96, 104, 229n1 Dow, Unity, 35, 37, 115, 119, 122, 143, 169, 240n11, 244nn46–­ 47, 245n52. See also Far and Beyon’ (Dow) Drake, Phillip, 20, 216n56, 217n58 Durrant, Samuel, 209n27, 242n23 Duty Free (Mohsin), 183, 256n50, 257n54 Dwivedi, Om Prakash, 185, 193, 259n66 economic disaster, 82–­83 Economist, The, 233n22, 234n22 Edelman, Lee, 192, 259n65 education, 58–­59, 64, 150, 152, 177, 241n21 ekphrasis, 107 empire (former), 17, 25–­26, 140, 214n47 Empire Writes Back, The (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin), 219n68 English Patient, The (Ondaatje), 176 epigraphs, 144, 169, 179–­80, 254n28 Essex, Max, 119–­20, 244n46 ethnic conflict (Sri Lanka), 16, 46, 56–57, 62, 71, 159, 223n15, 225n28 explosion, 33, 42, 80–­81, 84, 158, 160, 180, 197

284 Index Far and Beyon’ (Dow), 115, 122–­23, 143–­53, 169, 175, 244nn46–­47, 246n55, 247n57 Fetson, Kalua, 147, 149, 151–­52, 245n52, 247n57 First World, 84, 88, 99, 112, 200 flash fiction, 67, 227n54 food in Chef (Singh), 35, 79, 81–­82, 92, 97–­99, 106, 112–­14, 119, 168–­69, 180, 200–­201, 231n11; shortage, 121 foreshadowing, 43, 56, 61, 106 Freud/Freudian, 85 fruit, 106, 113, 123, 138, 140–­41, 185, 257n53 fundamentalism, 36, 161, 179–­81 Gaillard, J. C., 219n67 Galgacus, 169 Gappah, Petina, 86, 234n26 gay themes, 93, 100, 102–­3, 119, 189–­91 GDP, 82–­83, 87, 230n5, 232n14 gender, 43, 254n24, 227n44 genre fiction, 7, 42–­44, 46, 51, 66–67, 207n12 Geopolitical Disaster, 161–­63 geopolitics, 159, 161–­62, 195, 224n17, 250–­51n9, 251nn12–­13, 256n41 Gerges, Fawaz A., 197, 259n3 Gerstein, Marc, 178–­80, 256n44 Ghana, 80, 230n6 Ghosh, Amitav, 59, 67, 69, 218n60, 221n1, 227n53, 228n56, 252n20 glacier, 170, 172–­73, 255n31 Gordimer, Nadine, 10–­11, 208, 217n58, 247n58

Great Derangement, The (Ghosh), 67, 218n60, 221n1, 227n53 Grünkemeier, Ellen, 126, 130, 145–­46, 242n26, 242n29, 243n33, 243n37, 244n49 Gryzb, Amanda, 183, 256n49 Hairdresser of Harare, The (Huchu), 34, 83–­84, 87, 91–­104, 114, 190–­91, 235n30, 235n34, 235n36 Harlequin romance, 101 Hawley, Philippa, 33, 42, 47, 60, 62–­63, 65, 224n18, 235n37. See also There’s No Sea in Salford (Hawley) Heerten, Lasse, 62, 215n50, 227n48 Heise, Ursula, 19 Hemer, Oscar, 141, 242n28, 244n41 Hewitt, Kenneth, 16, 184 Hoad, Neville, 140, 142, 244n40, 244n44 homeland, 61, 70, 89, 90–­91, 238n51 Horn, Eva, 209n26 hot peace, 254n29 Huchu, Tendai, 34, 83, 91, 103, 235n30, 235n34. See also Hairdresser of Harare, The (Huchu) Huet, Marie Hélène, 209n26 humanitarianism, 49, 167, 215n50, 250n4 humor, 7, 87, 93, 122, 132, 177, 181 Iliffe, John, 117, 217n58, 239n6 imperialism, 6, 18, 89, 218n60

Index income, per capita, 80 index, 52, 79, 237n43 India-­Pakistan conflict, timeline of, 248n3 inflation, 23, 81, 92, 229n1, 231n10, 233nn21–­22, 235n29 irony, 35, 68, 72, 87, 130–­31, 133 Irr, Caren, 161, 164–­65, 251nn10–­ 11, 251n20 ISIS/L, 199, 202, 259n3 Jameson, Fredric, 5–­6, 13, 51, 64, 165, 206n9, 210n28 Jungle, The (camp), 198 Kadenge, Maxwell, and George Mavunga, 105, 107, 229n1, 237n42, 237n45 Kaiwar, Vasant, 221n81 Kant, Immanuel, 68, 228n55 Kashmir, 157–­158, 161, 164, 168–­ 69, 171–­76, 189, 194–­95, 248n3 Kaul, Suvir, 254n24 Keats, John, 138, 243n38 Khan, Imran, 249n3 kinship, 162, 180, 194 Klein, Naomi, 211n34 Kleinfeld, Margo, 46, 49, 223n16 Krishna, Sankaran, 255n31 Kristof, Nicholas, 79–­80, 85, 229n2 Kudaisya, Gyanesh and Tan Yong Tai, 254n25 Kumar, Priya, 166, 252n22 Kurdi, Alan, 199 Lacan/Lacanian, 85, 163 land, 24, 68, 89, 111, 171, 199, 219n66, 222n2, 225n32, 229n3; seizures, 32, 81 Lau, Lisa, 27, 220n72, 259n66

285 Lawtoo, Nidesh, 214n50 Lazarus, Neil, 5–­7, 29, 206n10, 207n11 Lear, Jonathan, 227n50 leitmotif, 163 Liberation of Tamil Tigers Elam (LTTE), 61, 63, 66 literary aesthetics, 20–21, 32, 89, 222n7 literary rhetoric, 168 longue durée, 24, 121, 160, 183, 250n6 Lorey, Isabell, 125, 242n25 lowbrow fiction, 43–­44, 51–­52, 60, 226n43 lyric, 8, 42, 46, 69–­71, 74, 111 lyricism, 48, 51, 68–­69 Mack, Katherine, 242n23 Marx, John, 162, 207n12, 215n50, 223n17, 241n21, 251n12 Matzke, Christine, 143, 244n45 Mbeki, Thabo, 117 mediascapes, 171 medical disaster, 119–­20 metafiction, 128, 132–­36, 139, 152, 175, 243n34 metanarrative, 13, 127, 132, 164, 179 migrants, 67, 105, 111–­12, 130–­31, 140, 237n44 Mika, Kasia, 214n50 military: discourse, 36, 161, 184; language, 171, 185, 190; literature, 164, 173; rhetoric, 170 Misri, Deepti, 253n24 Mobayed, M. and M. Abou-­Saleh, 201 modernity, 6, 95, 143, 147, 172, 202, 213n44, 255n35

286 Index Modi, Narendra, 249n3, 258n59 Mohsin, Moni, 36, 162, 177–­78, 182–­83, 256n40, 256n43, 257n54. See also Diary of a Social Butterfly, The (Mohsin) motifs, 32, 52, 56, 83, 163, 169, 185, 226n40, 237n44 Mpe, Phaswane, 35, 37, 115, 122, 128, 242n24, 243nn32–­33. See also Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Mpe) Mugabe, Robert, 30–­31, 83–­85, 87, 98, 94, 97, 100, 102–­3, 116, 127; impact on economy, 24–­25, 127, 80–­81, 229n1, 230n5, 230nn10–­11, 239n7 Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo, 17–­18, 211n36, 213nn43­–­45, 218n61 Mwangi, Evan M., 133, 139, 243nn34–­35 myths, 19, 35, 45, 54­–­55, 58–­59, ­ 5, 123, 131, 157, 218n62, 64­–6 245n49, 251n11; mythology, 52, 55, 575–­78, 97, 107, 256n39 Nagappan, Ramu, 209n27, 253n23 narrative medicine, 17, 120, 123–­25, 241n20 narratology, 4, 7–­10, 21, 52, 208n15–­16, 216n55 national allegory, 7, 26, 64, 71, 164–­65, 174, 183, 207n13, 227n44, 252n19 nationalism, 7, 21–­22, 165, 187, 207n13, 258n61 natural disasters, 31, 44–­46, 55, 58, 62, 71, 213n45 Ncube, Gibson, 101, 104, 235nn34­–­35

Ndebele, Njabulo S., 121, 240nn16–­17 neighborly national existence, 36, 161–­62, 164, 166 New York Times, The, 4, 205n4, 215n50, 229n2, 249n3 Nichanian, Marc, 29, 165–­66, 221n80, 252n21 Nixon, Rob, 19, 33, 212n41, 221n85, 231nn8–­9 NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), 72 nobrow fiction, 33, 60, 75, 226nn41–­42 Norris, Fran, 178, 182, 256nn46–­47 nuclear war, 4, 36, 158, 160–­63, 184, 191, 248n3, 257n57, 258n61 Nuttall, Sarah, 128 oceanic disaster, 44–­45 Oliver-­Smith, Anthony, 14–­15, 211n34 O’Loughlin, Liam, 224n22, 226n39, 228n62 Ondaatje, Michael, 176, 254n26. See also English Patient, The (Ondaatje) Orientalism, 27, 219n67, 220n71 Orientalist, 27, 176 Parker, Geoffrey, 67, 161 Partition, 36, 157–­65, 168, 172, 174, 176, 185, 188, 190, 248n3; deaths, 252n17; scholarship, 252n16, 253n24; trains, 172, 183, 190, 252n16, 257n58; Train to Pakistan (Singh), 257n58 pathology, 122, 144

Index Peirene Now (series), 198 Pepin, Jacques, 116, 238n3 Phillips, Christopher, 197, 259n2 poetry, 4, 33, 42–­43, 46, 51, 67–­72, 74, 111, 175, 212n42, 243n38, 254n23 Ponzanesi, Sandra, 177, 256n39 Popoola, Olumide and Annie Holmes, 38, 198, 203–4, 259n7 Porfiriev, Boris N., 211n35, 211n39 postapartheid, 11, 35, 115, 123, 127–­29, 133, 137 postapocalyptic world, 123, 191, 194 postcolonialism, 7, 19, 21, 24–­26, 29, 70, 90, 104, 241n21 postcoloniality, 23, 30, 36, 44, 50, 65, 142, 154, 168, 190 postcolonial state, 5, 66, 105, 214, 218n60 postcolonial theory, 7, 21, 28–29, 55, 73, 89, 138, 165, 214n47, 219n65 Powers, J. L., 105, 236n40 Primorac, Ranka, 81, 88–­89, 231n11 PTSD, 179, 256n47 Qader, Nasrin, 19–­20, 216n55, 217n59 Quarantelli, Enrico, 15–­16, 26, 29, 184, 210n32, 211n34, 211n37, 211n39, 212n41 Quayson, Ato, 128, 151, 243n31 queer/queering, 173, 190–­93, 236n37, 239n5, 259n65 radical hope, 143 Rajagopalan, Jayashree, 63, 226n37, 227n49

287 Rajiva, Jay, 209n27, 226n43 Rawlinson, Keith, 82, 232n12 reality principle, 9, 19, 36 rebuilding, 47–­49, 53, 58–­59, 64–­65, 68, 70, 74, 99, 126, 200 redistribution (Zimbabwe), 24 refugee, 4, 37, 38, 112, 176, 183, 197, 198–­204, 253n28, 259n1 refugee disaster, 37, 197, 199–­205, 259n1 Regime-­Made Disasters, 249n4 Regis, Pamela, 234n27, 236n38 reorientalism, 26–­27 reproduction, 145, 173, 175, 185, 191–­92 resilience, 19, 27, 53, 64, 70, 113, 153, 187, 216, 224n20 Rhodesia, 23, 79–­80, 85, 89, 98, 233n17, 234n26 Rigby, Kate, 18, 214n49 risk, 14­16, 19, 27, 45, 51, 134, 179, 214n46, 216n54, 223n13, 238n2 romance novel, 7, 33, 42–­43, 47, 51–­52, 60, 85–­87, 92–­93, 100–­104, 176, 191 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 97 Rosenthal, Uriel, 29, 211n37 Roy, Arundhati, 157–­58, 194, 237n48, 247n1, 252n18 Rozario, Kevin, 209n26 Rushdie, Salman, 6, 28, 50, 218n62, 219n68, 220n77, 252n16 Rwanda, 18, 80, 205n3, 216n55, 230n6, 240n10 Safran, William, 238n51 Said, Edward, 219n67

288 Index Salgado, Minoli, 59, 74, 223n9, 224n22, 226n29, 228n62. See also A Little Dust on the Eyes (Salgado) Sanders, Mark, 28, 220n75 Sarkar, Bhaskar, 253 satire, 87–­88, 93, 177, 181, 183, 256n43 savior complex, 26, 48, 49 Schneider, Marguerite and Paul Rohleder, 119, 239n9 Schroeder, Bill, 86, 233n19, 233n21 Schumann, Anne, 93, 96, 234n28 science fiction, 36–­37 selfhood, 13, 27, 37, 50, 163, 188, 194 Sembène, Ousmane, 28, 220n76 Shah, Mehtab Ali, 182 Sharif, Nawaz, 249n3 Siachen glacier, 170, 173 Sikhs, 29, 168–­169, 250n24 simmer, 159, 169, 193, 255n29 Singh, Jaspreet, 36–­37, 162, 168–­ 169, 254n28, 255n32. See also Chef (Singh) Singh, Nikky-­Guninder, 168, 254n26 Singleton, John, 232n14 slow burn, 33–­34, 80–­81, 84, 93, 95, 136, 158, 221n84 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 28, 220n74, 254n29 Splintered Face, The (Amirthanayagam), 33, 42, 47–­48, 51, 67–­75, 228n57 Stokke, Kristian, 66, 227n51 subaltern, 20, 28, 45, 198, 219n67, 220n74

sublime, 33, 68, 228n55, 234n27 Suri, Manil, 36–­37, 162, 184, 187–­89, 257n52, 258n62. See also City of Devi, The (Suri) Swartz, Leslie, 119, 239n9 Swirski, Peter, 60, 226nn41–­42 technology, 21, 25, 59, 145 television, 171–­72, 178, 179, 186, 214n48 Temin, Elizabeth, 31, 33, 221n83 temporality (disasters), 5, 7–­8, 14, 19, 22, 24, 81–­83, 88, 99, 115, 160–­62, 216n55 “Terrier, The” (Breach), 199, 202 terrorism, 36, 158, 161–­64, 166, 168–­169, 177–­79, 189, 202, 253n24, 254n27 Tharoor, Shashi, 228n1 There’s No Sea in Salford (Hawley), 33, 42, 47–­49, 51, 60–­67, 177, 224n18 Things Fall Apart (Achebe), 108–­11 Thomas, Kylie, 241n18 Toivanen, Anna-­Leena, 111, 237n46, 238n50 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 30, 124, 128, 136, 141–­42, 243n36 Tshuma, Novuyo Rosa, 234n26 tsunami, 4, 18, 20, 33–­44, 37, 41, 45–­49, 51–­53, 59–­64, 67, 71, 75. See also Wave, the tsunami literature/writing, 42–44, 48, 50, 60, 68, 72 tsunami stories, 33, 241n22 Tutu, Desmond, 141 Ubuntu, 141–­43

Index Vambe, Maurice T., 86, 229n1, 233n18, 234n25 virology, 35, 120 vulnerability, 15–­16, 19, 22, 211n28, 214n46, 216n54, 218n63, 223n13, 224n21, 238n2 Wave, the, 41–­42, 45, 48, 51–­ 55, 59, 61, 63, 66, 69, 72–­74, 222n5. See also tsunami Weaver, Roslyn, 56, 225n30 Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Mpe), 35, 115, 122, 126–­43, 153, 185, 242n27, 243n30, 244n44, 245n50 We Need New Names (Bulawayo), 34, 83–­55, 87–­88, 90­–­92, 94–­ 95, 99, 104–­14, 221n79, 229n3

289 Western gaze, 26–­27, 62, 115 Westernized audience, 12, 25–­27, 88 Western medicine, 25, 32, 35, 116, 118, 126, 128, 145, 246n54 Willems, Wendy, 93, 103, 234n29 Williams, Paul, 109, 187, 257n57, 258n61 Wisborg, Poul, 109, 237n47 witchcraft, 118, 123, 140, 141, 149, 150 xenophobia, 129, 133–­34, 137, 139–­41, 188 Yeats, W. B., 108–­9 Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-­Yacoobali, 253n23