“Nothing is whole or holy, least of all African literature”: They Called You Dambudzo, by Flora Veit-Wild

I first read (and reviewed) Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger a few years ago, and fell in love with this strange, indefinable, and incandescent piece of work. His observations on language – and the use of English by outsiders (master’s tools/master’s house) to serve their purpose – were acute and brilliant, and there was something iconoclastic about the way he took on legendary figures such as Ngugi in his claim that “if you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you.”

Over the years, in my foray into literature from the African continent, Marechera’s name cropped up repeatedly, a long shadow (even though the man himself died young – in the 1980s – of AIDS). So when I heard about the existence of “They Called You Dambudzo”, a memoir by Flora Veit-Wild, I picked it up immediately, and ended up reading it in an extended twenty-four hour sitting. It reminded me of some of the other great literary biographies and memoirs in the field: Obi Nwakanma’s “Thirsting for Sunlight” (about Christopher Okigbo, who also died young), and Binyavanga Wainaina’s “One Day I Will Write About This Place.“

Flora Veit-Wild is a German professor of African literature, the editor and executor of Marechera’s “literary estate” (so to say), and also – as it turns out – was romantically involved with Marechera while living in Zimbabwe in the 1980s. This gives the memoir a particularly unique flavour: Flora Veit-Wild plays the roles of biographer, critic, and lover – all at once – while also negotiating the whole range of issues that come with being a White person writing about a Black writer. For the most part, she walks the line very well.

In the first part of the memoir, we get a snapshot of Veit-Wild’s childhood and youth in post-war West Germany, her revolutionary activities during the 1968 student uprisings, the black-listing of her and her husband from academic jobs because of their association with militant student radicalism, and their final departure to a newly-independent Zimbabwe to – in a sense – rebuild their lives. This part of the memoir may not be all that interesting to those focused on Marechera, but I found it a fascinating window into what it meant to be a left-wing radical student in post-war Europe, and the price that was paid by those who were genuinely committed to the political cause (or, a range of causes – from being anti-Vietnam war to campaigning for the Zimbabwean freedom struggle).

Flora Veit-Wild

The first part of the memoir also informs the rest of it: Veit-Wild’s intense engagement with – and ultimately estrangement from – revolutionary politics creates an “elective affinity” between her and Marechera, who was one of those few Zimbabwean writers who didn’t buy into the nationalist project upon Zimbabwe’s independence, and stood outside it as a critic – a position that triggered his own estrangement and alienation from the post-colonial Zimbabwean literary scene.

Veit-Wild’s account of her romance with Marechera is the most intriguing part of this memoir. Marechera as an individual does not come out of it particularly well – indeed, his behaviour towards both Veit-Wild and Veit-Wild’s husband, Victor – both of whom allow him to stay at their home for an extended period – is full of emotional blackmail and verbal violence, which at times makes for difficult reading. This seems to be a courant with Marechera’s personality in general, and his behaviour towards the world at large – simply distilled and amplified in the context of his intense personal relationship with Veit-Wild and Victor. However, the really interesting part is not that; it is that this period coincides with Marechera’s most fruitful literary output, some of which is inspired by his equation with Veit-Wild. Veit-Wild herself switches between the roles of lover and critic – for example, at the height of their romance, he sits down with her for an extended interview about his literary “philosophy” and style, with both of them seemingly able to seamlessly transition into this more arms-length, “professional” relationship. What is equally interesting is that through Veit-Wild’s eyes, we get an entirely fresh perspective into some of Marechera’s most famous poetry, which was written for her – or at least, written with her in mind. I don’t think I know of any other memoir with this unique positioning – where the memoirist is the subject’s literary critic and lover, at the same time!

The final part of the memoir follows Marechera’s death of AIDS (it turns out that he probably passed on HIV to both Veit-Wild and Victor), Veit-Wild’s return to Germany and her taking up a Humboldt University professorship, her guardianship of Marechera’s literary through editing and publishing work left unfinished or unpublished upon his death, and her own struggle with clinical depression. As a story of a complete life – or rather, three complete lives, if you count Marechera and Victor – this is an account that is filled with generosity, warmth, and humanity.

Perhaps the only issue where the memoir stumbles a bit is Veit-Wild’s engagement with the question of race. As I write at the beginning, Marechera is Black; Veit-Wild is White. There are fraught issues here that cannot be brushed aside. Veit-Wild seems to move between being almost *too* self-aware about this, to not being self-aware *enough*. At particularly difficult moments, she appears to dismiss the issues too quickly; and at other – seemingly more innocuous times – agonise at great length about the racial equation between them. This is understandable, but it does add a few jarring notes to an otherwise beautiful memoir.

But perhaps that is the point. After all, as Marechera wrote, “nothing is whole or holy, least of all African literature.”

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See also: “On Dambudzo Marechera: The Life and Times of an African Writer“, by Helon Habila; Me, Dambudzo: A Personal Essay“, by Flora Veit-Wild.

“Night has become more than a moment in time. It is duration, space, the colour of ages to come…”: Leonora Miano’s “Season of the Shadow”

“The clan lived as if it had given birth to itself. Terrorized by violence, it ritualized and regulated it, so as to resolve conflict with words. Mukano embodied this philosophy to perfection. Did he do wrong?”

 

Over three and a half centuries, white Europeans transported more than 12.5 million enslaved Africans to the Americas, in a brutal seafaring voyage called “the middle passage.” More than two million died on the voyage, with many others perishing during the march from the interiors to the coasts. The Middle Passage has been depicted in literature, perhaps most famously in Maryse Conde’s Segu. But the industrial scale of the colonial slave trade would never have been possible without the active collusion of  some powerful African leaders themselves – an issue that, for obvious reasons, remains sensitive even today. And it is that piece of history that it is at the heart of Leonora Miano’s Season of the Shadow, a novel set in present-day Cameroon, at the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade.

After a great fire runs through their village, the Mulongo Clan discovers that twelve young men from the tribe have disappeared. To the Mulongo, who live within themselves and have abjured violence in favour of “resolving conflicts with words”, the disappearances are bewildering and inexplicable. And so begins a long quest to discover the fate of the lost young men, a quest that takes the Mulongo, led by their Chief Mukano, to the neighbouring queendom of the Bwele, and into the jaws of the creeping slave trade. At its climax, the story branches into three parts: Chief Mukano’s search for the lost men, the fate of the villagers who stay behind to wait, unmindful of the peril they are in, and the journey of Eyabem one of the bereft mothers, searching for her son through the Bwele queendom and all the way to the murderous coast. And each of these narrative threads finally come together to reveal how the Mulongo have been caught in the crosshairs of a newly-ruthless world:

Now she knows that the shadow that hovered over the hut of the women whose sons went missing is hovering over the world. The shadow drives communities to conflict, pushes people to flee their native lands. Once time will have gone by and moons will have followed on moons, who will retain the memory of all these displacements? In Bebayedi, yet-unborn generations will learn that their ancestors had to run away to save themselves from predators. They will learn why these huts are built over streams. They will be told: Madness took hold of the world but some people refused to live in darkness. You are the descendants of the people who said no to the shadow. (p. 138 – 9)

At one level, Season of the Shadow is a simple and oft-repeated story of the disintegration of an indigenous culture upon first contact. This story has its more famous versions – predictably, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between come to mind – although, of course, every fresh retelling brings with it its own unique heartbreak. But there is something more here: while colonialism and the colonial slave trade provide the backdrop to the novel, Season of the Shadow is not about colonialism. It is not even about the conflict between indigenous cultures and the militant spread of Islam within parts of the African content (which was explored in Segu). In Season of the Shadow, it is neighbour who falls upon neighbour, destroying and enslaving for the benefit of the European slave traders. And so, as far as the grand narrative is concerned, Season of the Shadow complicates matters, showing us with great clarity that the moral world is rarely a binary between colonisers and colonised, oppressors and the oppressed, and good and evil.  

But beyond that, the power of Season of the Shadow lies in the universality of its story: the loss of innocence, the grief of loss, the admirable wilfulness to hold on to something in the teeth of an altered world, that incontestable core of human dignity in the face of every humiliation imaginable, and more than anything else, the refusal to die, at a moment when living no longer seems worthwhile:

The women say that you cannot dispossess people of what they have received, learnt, experienced. They themselves could not do so, even if they wanted to. Human beings are not empty calabashes. The ancestors are here. They float over bodies that embrace. They sing when lovers cry out in unison. They wait at the threshold of a hut where a woman is in labour. They are in the cry, the babble of newborns … children grow up, learn the words of the earth, but the bond with the realms of the spirit lives on. The ancestors are here and they are not a confinement. They conceived a world. This is their most precious legacy: the obligation to invent in order to survive. (p. 235 – 6)

After finishing Season of the Shadow, perhaps what lingers longest in memory is its depiction of the Mulongo people: an ethical system and a world-view that substitutes violence with words, an origin myth centred around a pioneering woman founder, and a self-contained cosmology and way of life, all of which seems so alien and out of step with the world, that its ultimate destruction appears as a tragic inevitability, like the slow decay and death of a language in a newly-conquered territory. But at the very end, there remains a seed of hope that memory will triumph against forgetting, and that that the “intransigence of reality” will yield to the “plasticity of language”; because, as the Mulongo always say, “May we know how to welcome the day when it comes. The night too.” (p. 237)

“If light had a sound, it would be Salia’s voice…”: A round-up of African Writing

For the last few months, I have been editing a series of interviews titled 100 African Writers of SFF,  over at the Strange Horizons magazine. While the interviewees are writers of science fiction and fantasy, the conversations have been naturally broad-ranging, involving discussions of contemporary African writing that goes much beyond SFF. Some of the references have been tantalising enough for me to track them down, and buy and read the books themselves. Quick notes follow:

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms is a sensitive, empathetic – and, ultimately – tragic novel, set in the outskirts of Abuja (and sometimes transitioning to the conflict-torn city of Jos). Binta Zubairu, the novel’s protagonist, is a fifty-five-year-old widowed grandmother, survivor of a loveless marriage and the violent loss of her oldest child, and long reconciled to a cloistered existence and a slow exit from the world. All that changes when Hassan Reza, the local gang-leader and drug-dealer, jumps the fence intending to rob her, but falls in love with her instead. Through the course of their transgressive relationship, always teetering on the edge and threatening to come undone, either through the public discovery of Binta’s defiance of social norms or through Hassan’s one-brush-too-many with the law, Ibrahim brilliantly depicts both the suffocating, one-sided sexual repression that corrodes a conservative society, and its inevitable flip side – political violence.

For all its sensitivity, there is very little of the sentimental in Ibrahim’s novel. His account of human relationships is grimly realistic. Love is portrayed in all its messiness, confusions, and petty betrayals, a distinctly earthy emotion. And yet, there is a strangely suppressed lyrical quality to the prose, that almost struggles to make itself heard:

She dreamt like sepia. Like rust-tainted water running over the snapshots of her memories, submerging her dreams in a stream of reddish-brown. (p. 76)

This is immediately followed by memories of blood and violence (recollecting the murder of her son), as though to give way to lyricism is almost to insult the reality of the world (“What poetry after Auschwitz?”). In the riven worlds of Abuja and Jos, where even bare life cannot be taken for granted, love is not – and cannot be – an exception.

Other reviews: The Guardian;  The African Writer. 

Odafe Atogun’s Taduno’s Song: Also out of Nigeria, here comes a much bleaker and darker novel. Taduno’s Song is a thinly fictionalised story about the legendary Fela Kuti, the Nigerian composer and singer who critiqued both colonialism and the post-colonial State through his music, and was violently targeted for it.  The eponymous Taduno is a dissident singer, who is exiled by the President of his  repressive one-party State. On returning from exile, he finds that his existence has been completely erased from the memories of his fellow-citizens, and even from the memory of the regime and the President – who, suspecting a trick, has decided to hold his partner in secret custody until he is found. With his vocal cords damaged in an earlier police beating, Taduno struggles to recapture his voice and regain his identity, so that he can save his partner. The quest takes him through the city of his childhood and youth, the neighbourhoods that knew and now disown him, the mansions of the rich and the squares of the homeless, and the underground prisons of “Mr. President.”

The austere, pared-back prose and imagery of Taduno’s Song, with its small cast of characters, its refusal to identify its setting in any concrete manner, and its grimly linear trajectory, is reminiscent of Kossi Efoui’s The Shadow of Things to Come, another “dictator novel” from nearby Togo. The novel’s minimalism sharpens the focus on its single, key theme – the limits of human resistance to concentrated power. Like Season of Crimson Blossoms, Taduno’s Song is also a novel tinged with tragedy – but also like Season of Crimson Blossoms, its sensitive account of how an individual struggles against power prevents it from being overwhelmed by tragedy, even if the outcome seems foreordained.

Other reviews: The Financial Times; Indirect Libre.

Out of South Africa, Nthikend Mohlele’s Rusty Bell is something altogether different. This is a coming-of-novel, whose combination of exuberance, self-deprecation, and linguistic pyrotechnics reminded me of Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place. The narrator – a young, black, South African man – takes us through noisy post-Apartheid South Africa, predominantly through a series of exchanges with his psychiatrist (no, it’s not written as a metaphor for the nation), but also through failed love-affairs, parental discord, and a surprise narrative appearance by a cat. Jagged, unorganised, and almost aphoristic at times, the prose shines brokenly like sunlight reflected off shattered glass. In the midst of which, however, you find passages like this:

Frank could have been a great banker, one of the greatest, if he hadn’t been born at the wrong time and with the wrong skin colour. His acumen with money, his softest of hearts, did not earn him a cushioned life in the South Africa of then and of now. There was a measured pride about him, though, a discreet pride in how he chose to love a world that showered him with doubt and disdain. For as long as I can remember, my father worked as a delivery man for Almond S. Spender Pharmaceuticals, criss-crossing Johannesburg’s avenues, responding to ailments of suburbs and, for extra income, weekend shifts transporting ‘Urgent Medical Samples’ for hospitals.

It was from this – what he called life’s tragic pranks – that he managed to put me through school, that chinks appeared in his quiet pride, fissures that made his thoughts drift, prompting that heavy sigh and yearning: ‘I would have loved to fly aeroplanes, Michael.’ He later joined Harmony Gas & Fuels as a man who fought to be master of his life, but who instead helplessly watched as life and history drained all that was supposed to make life pleasurable, a drop at a time. His was a life not lived, but leaked away, soundless, in the single-roomed tin shack we called home.

…

As far as love goes – untainted, ocean-current love – none comes close to the one I witnessed in our one-room shack in Alexandra. It was not the kind depicted in lifestyle magazines: of walks along sunny boulevards, boat cruises on blue oceans, nose rubbing in restaurants. It was not, though it had a poetic glow, love spoken about by forlorn poets, not one of horse riding and romantic bicycle excursions into the countryside, not burdened by visits to the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal. It was a love that had learned to ridicule lack, a brazen kind of feeling, resolute, daring even, so ahead of earthly imperfections that it seemed otherworldly: that silent hand holding of theirs, that drinking from one coffee mug when sugar was in short supply…”

This is beautiful writing. It is as though every word has been strained through a sieve.

I came across an excerpt from Rusty Bell and a short story by Ihrahim in a remarkable book called Africa39, which I found lying around in Blossoms Bookshop at Bangalore, last summer. Africa39 is a 2014 collection of thirty-nine short stories or novel excerpts from African writers “South of the Sahara.” The quality is stupendously high, and the collection has a beautiful Introduction by Wole Soyinka, who refers to Mandela’s frisson-inducing line about how reading Chinua Achebe made “the prison walls fall down”, and follows it up with this lush description:

One of my favourite browsing grounds remains, unrepentantly, the garbage dump, or, to put it more elegantly – the flea market, especially of books. Those rows and jumbled stalls and trestles of broned, dog-eared second-hand books, pages frayed with age, evocative of contemplative, even escapist hours in the company of unknown faces, redolent of distant places and exotic adventures both of mind and body – such musty, unruly way stops have the edge, for me, even over the fragrance of newly-minted volumes on tidy rows of antiseptic shelves, with careful labelling under subject matter, author, geography etc. You never know what you will find in the flea market!

To an Indian, this resonates, doesn’t it?

“They were eyes that stung you to tears…”: Dambudzo Marechera’s ‘The House of Hunger’

In the prefatory essay to The House of Hunger – a collection including the eponymous novella and eleven other aphoristic, semi-autobiographical sketches – the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera sets out his relationship with the English language. “I took to the English language as a duck takes to water,” he writes:

“I was therefore a keen accomplice and student in my own mental colonization. At the same time of course there was the unease, the shock of being suddenly struck by stuttering, of being deserted by the very medium I was to use in all my art. This perhaps is in the undergrowth of my experimental use of English, standing it on its head, brutalizing it into a more malleable shape for my own purposes. For a black writer the language is very racist; you have to have harrowing fights and hair-raising panga duels with the language before you can make it do all that you want it to do. It is so for the feminists. English is very male. Hence feminist writers also adopt the same tactics. This may mean discarding grammar, throwing syntax out, subverting images from within, beating the drum and cymbals of rhythm, developing torture chambers of irony and sarcasm , gas ovens of limitless black resonance.” (p. 7)

This is an interesting paragraph, because it calls to mind an old debate over whether there can be – in the words of Colm Toibin – a “language that is free and untouched by occupation.” Toibin certainly believed so when, in Love in a Dark Time, he wrote of “independent writer[s] whose true home, as I have said, is the language.” Seamus Heaney believed so, when in The Redress of Poetry he wrote of “language pure as air or water, a language which carries the reader (as the truest poetry always does) into the sensation of walking on air or swimming free.” Marechera clearly doesn’t. And his indictment of English as both racist and misogynist recalls the feminist critic Marina Warner, who wrote that “the speaking woman, her tongue freed by the ability to write as well as read, found that the emblem books were still filled with the iconology of female wantonness and frailty and their contradictory companions, fatality and power… women often had to work with the grain of misogyny, and then found the timber broke their tools.” The tools of language – image, metaphor, even words – are deeply political; and therefore, for Marechera, the choice of using a language – and then, how you use it – are political choices.

In fact, the sentence “a keen accomplice and student in my own mental colonisation” brings to mind Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s memorable indictment of “European tongues”. In Secure the Base, wa Thiong’o wrote that “within the African nations, European tongues continue to be what they were during the colonial period: the languages of power, conception and articulation of the worlds of science, technology, politics, law, commerce, administration, and even culture… every educated African who remains doggedly locked within the linguistic walls of European languages, irrespective of his avowed social vision… is part of the problem and not the solution.” However, while Thiong’o’s response to this was to stop writing in English altogether, and write in his indigenous Gikuyu language (he would then translate it himself into English), Marechera, instead, sought to engage in “discarding grammar, throwing syntax out, subverting images from within, beating the drum and cymbals of rhythm, developing torture chambers of irony and sarcasm, gas ovens of limitless black resonance…”

This shows in The House of Hunger, Marechera’s haunting, broken, almost-surrealistic narrative about growing up in pre-Independence Zimbabwe, where English becomes an instrument of distilled violence. If Robert Bridges once wrote that English civilisation “is in great measure founded upon wrecking“, Marechera employs metaphor, image, and word to show how the English language might be founded upon violence. For instance, in simultaneously describing the death of the narrator’s father in a railway accident, and his mother’s verbal violence upon him, Marechera writes:

“Drinking always made her smash up her words at one particular rail-crossing which – as had really happened with the old man – effectively crunched all meaning or significance which might be lying in ambush… the expletives of her train of invective smashed my body in the same way as that twentieth-century train crunched the old man into a stain.” (p. 20)

Smashed-up words, where “meaning” and “significance” are crunched: this is The House of Hunger, where “the tinfoil of my soul crinkled” (p. 28), where “the pain was the sound of slivers of glass being methodically crushed in a steel vice by a fiend whose face was like that of my old carpentry master who is now in a madhouse” (p. 37), and where “the flood of political rhetoric escaped like a cloud of steam out of my crater of a mouth, leaving me dry and without words” (p. 38).

Marechera’s themes are themes of violence – the violence of a broken, colonial society in the process of violently struggling to free itself (“I found a seed, a little seed, the smallest in the world. And its name was Hate. I buried it in my mind and watered it with tears. No seed ever had a better gardener. As it swelled and cracked into green life I felt my nation tremble, tremble in the throes of birth – and burst out bloom and branch…” (p. 29)), violence both political and personal; this, in itself, is not unusual. Violence has been depicted to great effect in books as diverse as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathiser. However, what is unusual about The House of Hunger is violence is not merely extra-linguistic, in the content of the description, but linguistic. Even the brief moments of joy are described in metaphors of violence: “And now here he was already gripping my arm with a tongue-scalding coffee joy…” (p. 21); “I smiled, crumpling up the tinfoil of my delight” (p. 40); “the rain came down in little liquid rocks which broke on their heads with a gentleness too rapid to be anything other than overpowering. She laughed a laugh that had little sharp teeth in it and it warmed them, this biting intimacy with the rain…” (p. 118); and: “My dreams still clung defiantly to the steel wire of old memories which I no longer had the power to arrange clearly in my mind.” (p. 124)

One should not think, however, that The House of Hunger is limited to stylistic virtuosity (although, as exhibited above, Marechera’s use of language is brilliant). The underlying theme – the critique of the broken colonial society, and the broken individuals it rears – risks being submerged by Marechera’s linguistic fireworks, but there are times when it emerges forcefully, reminding us that what is at stake, beyond violence, is an indictment of an entire political, economic, and social system of oppression. For instance, at the beginning of the novella, the narrator describes the process of growing up, which can be taken to be purely an instance of existentialist doubt, but in the broader context, is clearly a comment on the manner in which the colonial regime systematically denied fulfilment to its “children of a lesser God”:

“There was however an excitement of the spirit which made us all wander about in search of that unattainable elixir which our restlessness presaged. But the search was doomed from the start because the elixir seemed to be right under our noses and yet not really there. The freedom that we craved for – as one craves for dagga or beer or cigarettes or the after-life – this was so alive in our breath and in our fingers that one became intoxicated even before one had actually found it. It was like the way a man licks his lips in his dream of a feast; the way a woman dances in her dream of a carnival; the way the old man ran like a gazelle in his yearning for the funeral games of his youth. Yet the feast, the carnival and the games were not there at all. This was the paradox whose discovery left us uneasy, sly and at best with the ache of knowing that one would never feel that way again. There were no conscious farewells to adolescence for the emptiness was deep-seated in the gut. We knew that before us lay another vast emptiness whose appetite for things living was at best wolfish.” (p. 13)

The “House of Hunger“, therefore, refers not simply to the literal hunger that colonial poverty brought with it (the narrator mentions staying in the “house of hunger”a few times in the novella, making it clear that its use is both literal and metaphorical), but a different kind of hunger, and a different kind of thirst, that social structures were designed to leave un-sated:

“All the black youth was thirsty. There was not an oasis of thought which we did not lick dry; apart from those which had been banned, whose drinking led to arrests and suchlike flea-scratchings.” (p. 12)

The distilled intensity of The House of Hunger might speak for Marechera’s short life: an education at Oxford University was cut short when, on being offered a choice between a psychiatric examination and being sent down for trying to burn down the college, he chose the latter; The House of Hunger was composed while sleeping penniless, rough and rootless in different parts of England and Wales; when it won the Guardian First Book Award, Marechera celebrated by throwing plates at the chandeliers during the award ceremony; on his return to (independent) Zimbabwe, he lived homeless and died of AIDS-related complications at the age of 35. This life of restless – and often violence – discontent – is summed up by Marechera himself, in Thought Tracks in the Snow, one of the autobiographical essays that comes at the end of The House of Hunger:

“As the plane burred into the night, leaving the Angolan coast and heading out into the void above the Atlantic, I suddenly remembered that I had, in the rude hurry of it all, left my spectacles behind. I was coming to England literally blind. The blurred shape of the other passengers was grimly glued to the screen where Clint Eastwood was once again shooting the shit out of his troubles. I was on my own, sipping a whisky, and my head was roaring with a strange emptiness. What was it really that I had left behind me? My youth was a headache burring with the engines of a great hunger that was eating up the huge chunks of empty air. I think I knew then that before me were years of desperate loneliness, and the whisky would be followed by other whiskies, other self-destructive poisons; I had nothing but books inside my head, and they were burning me, burring with the engines of hope and illusion into the endless expanse of air. Who was I leaving behind? My own prematurely grey had still sat stubbornly upon my shoulders; my family did not know where I was or whether I was alive or dead. I do not think they would have cared one way or the other had they known at that moment I was thousands of feet above the earth, hanging as it were in the emptiness which my dabbling with politics had created for me. I felt sick with everything, sick with the self-pity, sick with the Rhodesian crisis, sick! – and the whisky was followed by other whiskies and my old young man’s face stared back at me from the little window. Would Oxford University be any different – was I so sure of myself then? Dawn broke as we flew over the Bay of Biscay; and the fresh white dove’s down of breast-clouds looked from above like another revelation that would turn out, when eaten, to be stone rather than bread.” (p. 140)

Even here, at the very end, in the throes of seriousness, Marechera cannot avoid just that little dose of linguistic pyrotechnics!

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Other reviews of The House of Hunger: The Guardian; The Rumpus.

On Marechera more generally: The Life and Times of an African Writer (VQR).

“You just gave yourself to the dream in the rhythm…”: Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s ‘The River Between’

“And she seemed to hold him still. Not with her hands. Not with anything visible. It was something inside her. What was it? He could not divine what it was. Perhaps her laughter. He thought there was magic in it because it rang into his heart, arousing things he had never felt before. And what was that shining in her eyes? Was there a streak of sadness in them? For a time Waiyaki was afraid and looked around. His mother was watching them. He turned to Muthoni. The magic was not there any more; it had gone. In the next moment Waiyaki found himself wandering alone, blindly away from the crowd, wrestling with a hollowness inside his stomach.”

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart occupies pride of place as the post-colonial African novel dealing with the theme of the first contact between indigenous communities and colonial power, and the social disintegration that inevitably follows. But only seven years after Things Fall Apart, a young Ngugi wa Thiong’o published The River Between, his own novel dealing with similar themes. The River Between was Thiong’o’s first written novel (composed at university), and the second that he published. It is not as well-known as The Wizard of the Crow or Petals of Blood, and certainly not a novel that comes to mind when thinking of books that deal with the initial relationship between colonialism and community. This is a pity: in some ways, The River Between is an even more ambitious novel than Things Fall Apart, because it deals with an issue where the moral lines seem to be as clear as anything could be in our compromised world: female circumcision – or, as we know it, female genital mutilation.

The book begins like this:

“The two ridges lay side by side. One was Kameno, the other was Makuyu. Between them was a valley. It was called the valley of life. Behind Kameno and Makuyu were many more valleys and ridges, lying without any discernible plan. They were like many sleeping lions which never woke. They just slept, the big deep sleep of their creator.”

Between Kameno and Makuyu, both home to the Gikuyu people, there is an ancient rivalry, which is now exacerbated by the advent of colonialism, and the Christian religion that the colonisers bring with them. In Makuyu, Christianity has found a believer in Joshua, who has all the zeal of the convert. His proselytisation, however, creates as many enemies as it does followers; and rebellion, at last, reaches his own home. When female circumcision is banned as contrary to the Christian faith, Joshua’s daugther, Muthoni, refuses to abide by the decree, which goes to the heart of how the Gikuyu culture and way of life.

Into this milieu comes Waiyaki, the book’s ambiguous and conflicted protagonist. Waiyaki has been brought up to be the prophetic “saviour” of the people from the increasingly frequent depredations of the colonisers. Sent to be educated at the nearest missionary school – to learn the master’s tools to break down the master’s house – while retaining a firm foothold among his people, Waiyaki is the man marked to reconcile and unify the warring factions, and take on the colonisers. His chosen weapon is that of education.

However, Waiyaki will come to realise that reconciliation is not so easy. As Uzodinma Iweala remarks in his excellent introduction, while dealing with Muthoni’s own decision to undertake circumcision while remaining faithful to her father, “most utopias can accommodate only one grand vision.” Those who seek to expand them must either end in compromising, or in tragedy. And that is at the heart of The River Between.

The ambition of The River Between – as I mentioned above – is that Ngugi wa Thiong’o chooses as his site of conflict between colonial “modernity” and indigenous belief a practice that almost all of us would condemn unreservedly, both intuitively, and on careful reflection. What do the defenders of circumcision have to say for themselves? What can they possibly have to say for themselves? In Facing Mount Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta (independent Kenya’s first President) might have written that “this operation is still regarded as the very essence of an institution which has enormous educational, social, moral and religious implications… for the present it is impossible for a member of the tribe to imagine an initiation without clitoridectomy” – but surely that is no justification for something that is so obviously oppressive.

In The River Between, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s answer is to remove the authorial voice almost entirely from the novel. Female circumcision relies entirely upon its novelistic advocates for its justification, and one of those advocates is Muthoni as well. Echoing Kenyatta, Thiong’o describes how, for Muthoni, circumcision is what gives her membership in the tribe any meaning at all; without it, she is bereft, like an atrophied limb, cut off from its body. Now, we may dismiss this as false consciousness, as internalised oppression; but Thiong’o’s Muthoni is too fiercely intelligent, too reflective, and too human for any such easy resolution. And this is the singular achievement of The River Between: Thiong’o gives us a character whom we must take seriously, whose choices we must evaluate as choices. This is particularly important because, as recent scholarship has shown, the conflict over the abolition of oppressive gender-practices between the colonisers and indigenous societies was conducted on a terrain in which any kind of agency or voice was entirely denied to those whom it was ostensibly for: women. As an Indian scholar writes, the conflict “was not so much about the specific condition of women within a definite set of social relations as it was about the political encounter between a colonial state and a supposed ‘tradition’ of a conquered people.” In this context, Muthoni’s is the absent voice, now foregrounded front and centre.

Muthoni’s certainty and strength of will is a stark contrast with the ambivalent and unsure Waiyaki. Primed to belong to both worlds, he too falls victim to the totalitarianism of utopias, and finds himself struggling to belong to either:

“Again he was restless and the yearning came back to him. It filled him and shook his whole being so that he felt something in him would burst. Yearning. Yearning. Was life all a yearning and no satisfaction? Was one to live, a strange hollowness pursuing one like a malignant beast that would not let one rest? Waiyaki could not know. Perhaps nobody could ever know. You had just to be…”

Waiyaki is a neat inversion of the familiar fictional trope, the “half-blood” who, straddling two worlds, emerges as an unlikely saviour. Through Waiyaki – who, again, like Muthoni, is too human to simply reduce to a type – Thiong’o demonstrates just how difficult a task that is in moments of extreme flux, where one order, backed by raw power, clashes with another, supported on nothing but memories and dreams. And it is only towards the end of the novel that we get a sense of where Thiong’o himself stands on the issue:

“A religion that took no count of people’s way of life, a religion that did not recognize spots of beauty and truths in their way of life, was useless. It would not satisfy. It would not be a living experience, a source of life and vitality. It would only maim a man’s soul, making him fanatically cling to whatever promised security, otherwise he would be lost. Perhaps that was what was wrong with Joshua. He had clothed himself with a religion decorated and smeared with everything white. He renounced his past and cut himself away from those life-giving traditions of the tribe. And because he had nothing to rest upon, something rich and firm on which to stand and grow, he had to cling with his hands to whatever the missionaries taught him promised future… if the white man’s religion made you abandon a custom and then did not give you something of equal value, you became lost.”

Here we have that flash of insight, delivered in spare, clean prose, that is such a staple of the later Thiong’o. The River Between shows us a young Thiong’o, still honing and polishing his craft, the craft that would reach its peak in a novel like The Wizard of the Crow. But for a first novel, it is still an astonishingly accomplished work, subtle, complex, and above all, humane and empathetic.

“Such a meaningless thing as the judgment of history…”: Ahmadou Kourouma’s ‘Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote’

“You are now considered to be the breakwater on which founder the waves of international communism surging towards Africa. The media and public opinion in the Free World no longer have the right to criticize you. One does not demoralize a solder fighting at the front by criticizing the way he handles his rifle.”

—

There is a point in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote when the first elected President of the newly-independent Republique du Golfe is attempting to resist the coup that will soon cost him his position and his life. If he is killed, he says to his advisers, “it would mean that everything I have learned is sham, lies, that all my spiritual leaders have lied to me. It would mean that Africa is a sham, a lie; that talismans and sacrifices are worthless. It is unthinkable, impossible. It cannot be true.” There is something particularly poignant about “it would mean that Africa is a sham” at the moment of the strangulation of a fledgeling African democracy, a collateral casualty in Cold War politics, and a moment that occurs and recurs in the actual late-20th century history of the continent. If Africa, at that point, symbolises a long history of colonialism, resistance, and (ultimately) liberation, then the guns and soldiers that surround the Presidential Palace represent the “sham” that liberation ultimately turns out to be.

Waiting for the Wild Beasts is a story of that sham. It is narrated over six nights – “six vigils” – by Bingo, a griot and his “responder”, Tiecoura, in the presence of Koyaga, ‘President-Dictator’ of the Republique du Golfe, his ‘Minister of Orientation’, and seven most celebrated hunters of the Republic. Tiecoura, like the court jesters of the medieval European kings, “can do as he wishes, everything is permitted him, and nothing that he does goes unpardoned.” Through the course of the six vigils, then, the griot and his responder (with various interjections by the Minister) recount the personal history of Koyaga in the form of a donsomana (a performed epic) which, inevitably, becomes the history of the Republique du Golfe, and a searing indictment both of colonialism and of the betrayal of the post-colonial promise.

In his essay on Virgil’s Aeneid, Adam Parry highlights the “two voices” of the Roman epic: the dominant register, which celebrates conquest and imperium, linking Aeneas to Augustus, but also a counterpoint, a submerged register that questions and undermines that narrative. In Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, there are not two, but three voices that complicate the narrative. The dominant register is the griot’s donsomana, which is essentially a praise-song. Its form requires vaulting hyperbole and exaggeration, (deliberately) performed to such an extent that it overleaps itself and falls upon the side of disbelief. Koyaga is made out to be a man with superhuman powers, protected by the magic of his mother and a seer; his exploits while serving in the French army in Indochina, his violently successful ascent to the Presidency of the Republique du Golfe, and his surviving multiple assassination attempts, are all attributed to magic. The coup that ends with the murder of the elected President Santos is depicted as a clash between two powerful shamans, hurling magic at each other. But even as these stories are told, the griot also provides his audience the other, more prosaic explanations (political intrigue, betrayal, outright violence, chance), while ostensibly debunking them as the invention of bitter and jealous political opponents. And even beyond these two voices contained within the donsomana, Tiecoura takes advantage of the latitude offered him to – occasionally – disrupt the praise-song by speaking some blunt home-truths to power:

“Koyaga, you have many faults, grave faults. You were, you are as tyrannous as a savage beast, as untruthful as an echo, as brutal as a lightning strike, as murderous as a lycaon, as emasculating as a castrator, as populist as a griot, as corrupt as a louse, as libidinous as a pair of ducks. You are… You are… You have many other faults which if one were to try to expound them all, catalogue each one at a stroke, it would surely tear one’s mouth at the corners. So specifies the responder, redoubling his jeers, which draw a good-natured smile from him they appear to insult.”

These three registers mingle, alternate and disrupt each other, never quite allowing the reader to settle. What emerges from them is a highly effective – and unsparing – critique of mid-20th century African history. Like Ngugi wa Thiong’o in The Wizard of the Crow (which was written ten years after Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote), Kourouma is painfully aware of the ‘Free World’s’ Cold War-induced complicity in creating and propping up African dictatorships:

“De Gaulle succeeded in granting independence without decolonizing. He succeeded in this by inventing and supporting presidents of republics who referred to themselves as fathers of the nation, architects of the independence of their countries, when in fact they had done nothing to win independence for their republics and were not the real masters, the true leaders of their peoples.”

This is a familiar theme, described eloquently by Chinua Achebe’s memoir of the Biafran War, There Was a Country. Recounting the manner in which the elections leading up to the independence of Nigeria were rigged by the outgoing British colonialists, Achebe writes that “In a sense, Nigerian independence came with a British governor general in command, and, one might say, popular faith in genuine democracy was compromised from birth.”

And yet, Kourouma is also keenly aware of the risks in letting this origin story become determinative of the future, and of reducing causality to a linear sequence in a manner that absolves the leaders of post-colonial African nations from the burdens of moral judgment. This comes through with particular brilliance in the griot‘s account of Koyaga’s visit to four other African dictators, who have devised various stratagems for staying in power. In particular, this is how one of them deals with an alleged communist plot against his government:

“Remembering the precepts of the Qur’an, the Emperor ordered the regiment to beat them to death before cutting off their hands, as the Belgians had routinely done in Congo, and their ears, as the French had done in Oubangui-Chari…”

In one sentence, the griot locates the origins of this particularly brutal kind of political violence in colonialism, while making it clear that the moral culpability of the doer is in no way mitigated by this history. Not only that, there is also an equally keen awareness of how that history is invoked in discourse to at least attempt to hide, or distract from, that moral culpability. While maintaining a brutally repressive regime, Koyaga memorialises the day of his father’s death as “the Feast of the Victims of Colonialism“, a moment of heavy irony where historical trauma is pressed into service for propping up a social order that exhibits many of the same tendencies that it claims to repudiate.

There is a very similar moment in The Wizard of the Crow, where a regime member’s response to external criticism is to say “Racists… putting as much hatred as he could into his voice”. The transition from reckoning with colonialism and racism for emancipatory purposes to a veil for hiding oppression is brutal and unforgiving, made all the more starker by the wry, self-aware, bleakly humorous tone that characterises both Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote and The Wizard of the Crow.

The story of the Republique du Golfe is a thinly-fictionalised history of post-Independence Togo, although Togo is never mentioned. And yet, lest the fiction appear too remote, from time to time Kourouma drops in real countries and real people, as if just to remind us that this is real, this actually happened. French political interference, American and British Cold War machinations, Gaddafi and Idi Amin’s ‘African solidarity’, all play walk-on roles, and even the IMF’s notorious ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’ enter an appearance, making it all too clear that despite its allegorical style, Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is anything but an allegory. It is the true story of an imagined future that turned out to be – in one of the many acute proverbs that line the tale –  “as untruthful as an echo.”

 

“The mirage shimmered before me in the wilderness of longing”: Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

“Are these the people who are called peasants in books? Had I told my grandfather that revolutions are made in his name, that governments are set up and brought down for his sake, he would have laughed.”

As a classic of postcolonial literature, Tayib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North has been extensively critiqued and reviewed (see here, here and here for samples). What I found particularly compelling – and unsettling – about this book was the shifting, ambiguous place that it occupies somewhere between realism and allegory (taking, for a moment, these categories as given). If Chinua Achebe is an exemplar of the first, and Emile Habibi of the second, then Season… is both, and yet neither. Written in the immediate aftermath of Sudan’s independence (1966), the narrative itself spans the last years of colonial rule, and then the beginnings of self-government. The political is never far away (as the excerpted paragraph above demonstrates), but it is also never in the foreground. Through the lives of the two protagonists, we are shown glimpses of the destruction that colonialism has wrought – both on the individual, and on society – but always in a subtle, indirect – almost, questioning way.

The story’s narrator returns to his Sudanese village after three years in England, writing his doctorate on an “obscure English poet” (we are never told which poet). The book begins with an atmosphere of utter tranquility, the narrator imagining that he has finally come back “home”, where everything is as it should be. This tranquility is disturbed when he meets the enigmatic Mustafa. One night, seemingly in a drunken stupor, Mustafa breaks into perfectly-accented English poetry, revealing – to the narrator’s astonishment – that he too spent years in England. On being pressed, Mustafa recounts a harrowing – and tantalisingly incomplete tale of his time in the metropolis, his destructive liaisons with European women – ending with his killing his wife – and his eventual return to his country via stops in half the capitals of the world, to lose himself in an unknown village. The next day, Mustafa disappears – presumably drowned – and the narrator is left to pick through the aftermath, and try to stave off another – inevitable – tragedy.

The life of Mustafa in England – in particular, his use of all the classic Oriental tropes as tools of seduction (he repeats “my hackneyed phrases” many times in his story), and the life of the narrator in Sudan – in particular, the dissonance between himself and his fellow-villagers, that only comes to the fore as the novel progresses – can be understood as a synecdoche for the mutual – yet always unequal – interrogation between the metropolis and the colony. When Mustafa says, for instance, about one of the women he seduced, that “I was the symbol of all her hankerings”, and then proceeds to describe his bedroom straight out of a Francis Burton work – we think immediately of Aida, of Burton himself, of Disraeli, and of the multitude of examples that we find in Said’s Culture and Imperialism.

It is not surprising, then, that Salih often resorts to the language of illusion. “One mirage kept raising us up, another casting us down, and from deserts we were spewed into yet more deserts.”  Ultimately, the book is about mirages – England, as imagined and experienced by the colonial immigrants, and the immigrants themselves, who come to occupy some nameless, shadowy, liminal space between cultures, belonging to both and to none. Perhaps nowhere is this expressed more vividly, more forcefully and more evocatively, than here:

“It was as though I were a slave Shahrayar you buy in the market for a dinar encountering a Scheherazade begging amidst the rubble of a city destroyed by plague.”

This moment of self-realisation comes in the middle of yet another series of Orientalist tropes, and with the clarity and precision of a knife, lays bare – literally – the poverty of that discourse. There are many things that the “city” could stand for here: the crumbling of the edifice of Orientalism itself, built as it is around structures such as The Arabian Nights – or the cities of the metropolis and colony, intellectually and morally crumbling from the result of their destructive interaction. Perhaps it stands for both, or neither, or many more things – but if there is one line in all of literature that, for me, simply sums up colonialism, this is it.

A central theme of the book is interrogating questions of choice and agency, individual against structure. Mustafa’s trial becomes, in the end, not about his action, but his inability to act otherwise, caught in the space between two cultures, one alien and incomprehensible, the other distant and abandoned. And similarly, the narrator’s own life back home is marked not so much by his irrelevance, but by the paralysis of thought and action that follows upon it. It is this Hamlet-like attitude of delay and deferral that ultimately leads to the second tragedy that marks the book; and leads him to cry out, in the end:

“I had lost the war because I did not know and did not choose. Outside, my world was a wide one; now it had contracted, had withdrawn upon itself, until I myself had become the world, no world existing outside of me…”

And again, although colonialism is vaguely implicated in all this, there is no crude determinism at work here, but something much more subtle, complex and ambiguous. Marx once famously said:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Season of Migration to the North, then, is a beautiful story about men and women, history and circumstances.