Black Sunlight by Marechera

I closed the huge doors behind me and walked softly towards the altar. I was in the opium of the people. The huge cross dangled form chains fixed to the roof. I stood looking at the crucified Christ. He looked like He needed a stiff drink. He looked as if He had just had a woman from behind. He looked as if He had not been to the toilet for two thousand years. He looked like I felt. That was the connection. That was what made Him big, this mirroring quality that made your right hand a left hand and your sins the path out of themselves. He hung there like on in dire need of a cigarette. Not just passive, but alively so, like a picture out of a men’s magazine, explicitly showing all His wounds and orifices with an air of spirited invitation. In these terms Nick had described Him to me, described Him as one describes a thorn in one’s flesh, or the spreading disease between one’s thighs.

It was so quiet in there I could hear my thoughts arranging themselves all over His body. Why had I come? I always came to watch Him whenever the soulessness was too much for me. It always ended with the same humiliated ridiculousness of becoming aware that I was staring at a man-made statue expecting a miracle to take place. I had once brought Marie here but she had taken only a few steps towards the altar when she shivered violently and vomited. [...]

There was a sharp crack. With a cry I stepped back. The heavy cross crashed almost at my feet, the flying chain nicking my cheek. The broken thing smoked with plaster and dust. I stared.

IN Marechera’s writings, the essence of people’s souls is dust. The essence of their bodies are stains. Art is transcendence, although incomplete. One reads Marechera as one might ingest an opium intoxicant, and have enough after just a few pages — enough to think about for a life time. And yet, I don’t find his writing particularly otherwordly or nihilistic. He manages to retain hold of reality and is quite acute in observing it. More than that, he doesn’t turn away his head, no matter how gruesome the images are qhich assault his senses. He is not a victim, therefore, of Western metaphysics, which can be taken as a soft blanket shielding us from our individual experiences, so that we never come to recognise them as being peculiar to us as individuals. Instead, with western metaphysics, we are led to think in broad and simpler categories: strong versus weak, man versus woman, masculine versus feminine, light versus dark, etc. – so that we never own and recognise our personal experiences as they may pertain to the real,concrete spirit which fights and repels these vulgar assaults on our physicality, twisting and turning us, against our will.

Marachera’s writing is the opposite of nihilistic then, because he does recognise who and what he is, completely.

He is certainly not a western nihilist — therefore cannot be an Uncle Tom, either.

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The exile

The state of cultural exile always involves distancing. I’m not sure if this is always an intellectual distancing — it is certainly emotional. The reason that Wittgenstein was not quite right and not quite wrong with his idea that there can be no private language, is well… the exile.

I am inclined to think that Wittgenstein’s caution against us imagining anyone can have a private language is corroborated (although not in any depth, and not developed explicitly as an argument)by Damasio. How does Damasio come into this? –Because he recognises the neurological role of cultural conditioning. So, as George Lakoff says, “cafe phenomenology” or ultra-subjectivism (actually, he just calls it Subjectivism) is incorrect. The meanings we can construct are derived from the social realm. Yet it is crucial to add something to Lakoff to see how meanings might be derived from the social realm — the idea that cultural conditioning is also neurological conditioning. That is, cultural conditioning produces changes in the way we think. Presumably, these changes are not always temoporary, but quite the opposite. The way a culture conditions us to think can stay with us for a lifetime.

So, whereas those who haven’t moved from their place of early cultural conditioning may not experience a difficulty with communicating, those who have had to move will have learned their cultural “language” in an environment (both physical and verbal) which has given them quite different reference points — along with the conditioning of emotional tempo which goes with that. Whereas they learned their language socially, they cannot necessarily still use it socially — at least not in the same ways as they had before. In some ways, the cultural exile may therefore feel like she has been endowed with a “private language”. (Needless to say, this probably does not feel like a blessing.)

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Fetch me my axe: Word of the day: "helot"

Fetch me my axe: Word of the day: “helot”

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Discussion on how racism is structurally understood

I certainly think, as Angela has argued, that racializing processes don’t have to remain focused on skin color.
Jennifer C Says:
June 28th, 2006 at 12:15 am

Right. We agree on this issue. But you also need to read the in-depth analyses on my blog. What I explain on my blog in various entries is that if cultural differences are NOT taken into account, due to the either politically strategic or lazy tendency (or both) of classing all whites as privileged, then this DOES in fact create a DE FACTO situation (or at least open up the area for one) of cultural discrimination based upon race.

How do I position myself as one who has been systematically disempowered by Western ideologues? I mean, honestly, how the hell am I to correctly position myself? All the pressures on me say that I am to position myself as a privileged western white person, looking into african literature. Yet, that, unfortunately, just isn’t who I am. I’m rather somebody who has experienced almost continual discrimination from the left and the right in such a way that HAS prevented me from getting and keeping a job, which HAS affected my physical health over a long term duration, and which certainly has limited my career options overall.

So, how do I position myself? As privileged? As superior? Can I look at Marechera and say that I am totally different from him, due to the absolute dividing line of race which ontologically separates us as different categories of being, forever? Am I SUPPOSED to imply that, at least so that I can be accepted in the sphere of academia somehow?

What may suprise a lot of westerners is that colonial whites don’t draw the same kinds of racial dividing lines as they do in the West. It’s less absolute than that — in your terms, I’d hazard that the colonial lines of race have more in common with your designation of “class distinction”, within which one may move up or down. It’s less absolute than the western notion of race — one cannot change one’s skin colour, after all.

So, I am very uncomfortable with the idea that Marechera and I are ontologically separate categories of being, and that our experiences can have very little of human commonality. I think I have been oppressed enough — by you westerners — to have at least an inkling of his point of view.

But if I am forced to position myself ethnographically as ONE OF YOU WESTERNERS, then surely my voice will be as silenced as that of Marechera, and I will have nothing more to add to this discourse of African literature!

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evils of colonialism

When as a Western intellectual one easily alights upon conventional touchstones — the evils of colonialism, the normative division of people on the basis of their colour and their gender — one would do well to be aware that these touchstones and the compulsion to alight thereon, are also ideas which derive from the West, and that not everybody has a Western conceptualization of these concepts. I am one of these who didn’t have any knowledge of these ideas until very late.

I was born in Africa and lived there as a child. When, at the age of 15, I was forced to migrate to the West with my parents, I left everything behind. I left behind a place with which I had identified, I left behind animals I loved, I left behind places I loved and was familiar with. In a decisive sense, as I have discovered in retrospect, I left behind meaning — and like a traffic accident victim, I had to rebuild my very self from the ground up. Only, unlike a traffic victim, it was the spiritual self, the sense of well-being, the sense of meaning and purpose and understanding which I had to build up again, not my physical self exactly. And, I had to do this all under circumstances wherein I was either not understood or catered to at all, or was treated with direct hostility. (My father’s misplaced aggression and extreme, inherited misogyny did not help.)

Truly, I lost very much indeed — things that were priceless and will never be returned. I was a child, and had not yet inherited very much power in society. The Rhodesian school system was rigid, and I lived in fear a great deal. I was unsophisticated in terms of how most of those in the West determine sophistication: I knew nothing about recent world history when I migrated, I was relatively uncultured in terms of popular culture, I had no concept of industrial relations, nobody had imparted to me any social or political theory, and I barely knew how to make friends with those who had all these accoutrements.

So, I came to live in the West, and although I sensed that I’d lost a great deal, I came to lose even more when I was attacked because of my ‘situation of origin’.

You see, to certain Westerners, despite my humble manner and deep and terrifying desire just to get along and be accepted — to some of them I was an evil colonial. Needless to say I have been punished a great deal for the western need to see me in this way. I lost my health because of it, for quite a long duration. Then, of course, I ended up in the evil patriarch’s house and copped some more physical and mental misogynist abuse for my troubles!

So, being white, I’ve never had much power. I’ve always only been struggling for it, but for the life of me I’ve been unable to achieve very much to date. I’m still struggling economically and in other ways.

I do see whites who have power though — and whilst I admit that they may not have very much more than I do, they often (if they are at all intellectual) have internalized a trope which designates that certain people (whose identity is ostensibly based on their skin colour or origins) are evil colonials.

Often the hint I get that somebody has designated me as being an evil colonial is quite subtle and indirect — yet they are dismissive. Implicitly I understand the way that conversations develop (or fail to) when I’m being designated the evil colonial of the party.

Yet, the fact remains that generally when this is done to me, I am the weaker party of the two carrying on the discourse. I have no or little power — the other person is in a position of greater dominance.

And at times, I am compelled to ask myself about the nature of their dominance. Usually, they haven’t had to leave their home, and they’ve rarely been attacked on the basis of their ethnicity or origins. Usually such people who will address me and dismiss me in this manner are quite powerful people in their own right who have already had a relatively easy ride up some career ladder compared to myself, who doesn’t have any career and has had to struggle for the very, very little I have in terms of material means.

So, I meet these people, who are privileged within the Western world, and I ask myself, “what gives them their dominance?” — and then I sit back and I listen for a whisper or an echo of some sound.

I rarely receive anything like an answer, so I don’t bother to ask myself why I am being ignored. I point to Western empire building and western hedging of the bets concerning how various colonialist projects would work out (were the “Winds of change” really something more than that?) I consider the Western disingenuousness of pointing to the “problems of past colonialism” in various academic disciplines when current neo-colonial adventures are not mentioned. I consider the way in which those who smugly hedged their bets about African colonial projects are sitting pretty, whilst reaping the benefits of oil from Iraq and a higher standard of living on the backs of poorer Indian workers. And, I really don’t think I have a case to answer as the archetypal “evil colonial” apparently so much in demand!

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Unmediated self

One of the aspects of culture which can be very stunting is that particular understanding; that particular behaviour, and (consequently?) that interpretation of others as having a culturally — and hence I think, unavoidably politically — mediated self.

What this sort of thinking implies is that everything I do will be to obtain some kind of leverage. And why shouldn’t that be the case? In a Modernist situation, where everybody is plugged into the System somehow, it is logical that they should each to their best to maximise their individual advantages, from the position of where-ever they happen to have become attached.

Yet living and functioning within such a system of culturally mediated meanings which can be manipulated by individuals within the system (the fact of which at least some people have become aware of), produces a dearth of spontaneity as well as a distrust of spontaneous behaviour. There is always the heavy, dragging question which emerges: “But what does it mean?” — when one individual is ‘foolish’ enough to speak or act in a way which draws its qualities purely from joy in life, or a desire to express a strong feeling. Acting or speaking without having it “mean” anything, within the realm of dominant socio-political ideas, is considered by almost everybody (if my experience is anything to go on), as extremely foolhardy.

Perhaps this is the source of the foolhardiness which I recognise in Marechera as well as in myself. There is a desire to privilege “whim” over the dictates of theoretical constructs, as important as these theories might be. But the desire to privilege “whim” is not merely “individualistic” or a contrived aspect of counter-theory or anti-theory. At the risk of offending those who habitually mediate their experiences, I will explain it this way: It is more primeval, as well as more fundamental than “anti-theory”. Indeed, such spontaneity cuts to the quick in terms of enacting a social commentary about what could be corrected in a non-spontaneous (non-free) society — and all without caring whether the commentary is heard as such or not! (“Whim” is not a means for approaching theory paradoxically through counter-theory, as the postmoderns try to do. It’s not all that theoretical at all — its ontology is based on human fundamentals.)

Unmediated self — that is a rare thing within Western civilisation. Still, it is possible — and whim is the means by which it becomes possible. However, one still has to expect that there will be enough people around who might respect whim, in order to allow for spontaneity to grow — otherwise it stays at the level of “the individual”, with a disdainful crowd gathering around said individual, all trying to determine what sort of “leverage” a person might be trying to achieve by throwing saucers at the chandeliers!

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on being wasted

,…….and my point is that if the common mood which is part of the cultural mode of operation no longer exists (due to a different cultural context) for me to point to, then there is indeed no longer any ontological reality to point to all and words which would endeavour to do so are wasted.

…and that in turn means that if you are used to pointing to a common feature of cultural practice, just as you might be used to pointing out the weather, or the nature of the turn of the breeze on a hot spring day, then that feature of oneself is gone for good.

If you were used to IMMERSING yourself in a certain aspect of cultural behaviour, and nobody practices that behaviour now, in front of you, then that part of your language, and that part of your being is gone for good.

You have become ontologically diminished.

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on cultural experience and peculiar usages of language

Many of the ways we used to use terms in Zimbabwe lost the subtlety of their emotional meanings in Australia. One of the reasons was that the cultural experience of rebellion versus conformity was not at all strong in Australian schools.

In Zimbabwe, there were various ways I had been used to refer to those of my friends whom I really liked: “She’s MAD!!!” “She’s so….strange!” “They’re just …Naughty!”

The meanings of these ideas were not quite the same as the now ubiquitous teeny usage in my local Western realm, wherein “sick” describes something that delights one. For a start, this use of words I’ve given examples for above, was often peculiar to myself: In other words, I had invented these ways of speaking about things. Few other people used these phrases in order to indicate what I intended by them. Yet, I believe that most of those around my age, whom I would speak to, knew exactly what I meant by them. The tone of my voice and glee in my eye would have been the dead give-away to someone sensitive to these cues.

Why is it that when I reached the West, these ideas were not understood? Not only were they not understood so well, they were in fact not understood at all. I think one of the reasons was that I had no-one to point to, who was behaving in the abandoned and yet joyful fashion which I had become used to describing as “mad”. And if I was to go so far as to refer to someone being “mad” when there was no-one dancing around naughtily, bringing a gleam to my eyes, then I would surely have been even further misunderstood!

No — a general and almost complete lack of experiential basis for this quite particular phenomenon of joyful madness was what made the difference to my ability to communicate this idea in the West. The sense of being high spirited (and consequently a little out of control) as a common and POSITIVE experience was almost completely missing from my peers at the Western schools.

“Mad” to students who went there was just a simple but negative expression, and perhaps also a very undesirable state. My tendency to attibute it as a compliment to imply a certain daring anti-authoritarianism would only cause me to be misunderstood.

What I could never grasp is why there was a tendency for Westerners to punish those whom they had misunderstood. I guess I didn’t (and to some much lesser degree still don’t) understand the importance of the solitary and detached ego, for those of a Western mindset. They tended to attribute wilful intent to do ego damage to people (myself) and situations which were often merely fraught with cultural misunderstanding.

So it was that I developed a tight band of tension around my throat, and became afraid to speak. This sensation lasted several years.

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George Lakoff speaks

The last chapter from Metaphors We Live By, entitled “Understanding”, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, is very wonderful indeed. It says so succinctly what I have already discovered through experience (what I call my experience of racism). Here is a sample:

“When people who are talking don’t share the same culture, knowledge, values and assumptions, mutual understanding can be especially difficult. Such understanding IS possible through the negotiation of meaning. To negotiation meaning with someone, you have to become aware of and respect both the differences in your backgrounds and when these differences are important. You need enough diversity of cultural and personal experience to be aware that divergent world views exist and what they might be like. You also need patience, a certain flexibility in world view, and a general tolerance for mistakes, as well as a talent for finding the right metaphor to communicate the relevant parts of unshared experiences or to highlight the shared experiences while deemphasizing the others. Metaphorical imagination is a crucial skill in creating rapport and in communicating the nature of unshared experience. This skill consists, in large measure, of the ability to bend your world view and adjust the way you categorize your experience. Problems of mutual understanding are not exotic [my note: although they have an element of exoticism to them if you happen to come from a very different culture from the person to whom you are talking]; they arise in all extended conversations where understanding is important.

When it really counts, meaning is almost never communicated according to the CONDUIT metaphor, that is, where one person transmits a fixed, clear proposition to another by means of expression in a common language, where both parties have all the relevant common knowledge, assumptions, values, etc. [....]

Communication theories based on the CONDUIT metaphor turn from the pathetic to the evil when they are applied indiscriminately on a large scale, say, in government surveillance or computerized files. There what is most crucial for real understanding is almost never included, and it is assumed that the words in the file have meaning in themselves — disembodied, objective, understandable meaning. When society lives by the CONDUIT metaphor on a large scale, misunderstanding, persecution, and much worse are likely products.

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I suppose that one of the other images I often have, when juxtaposing my own immigration experiences to the West with the images of where I’d come from, is that of a flattening of communal experience. I wonder how common it is, but I see in Marachera’s writing the way the main protagonist in The House of Hunger appears to embrace a friendship with a certain faux-sauve character called “Harry”, who has some unsavoury qualities, amongst them being that he is an agent for the Smith regime. When I was at school in Zimbabwe, I had many acquaintances and friends, some of whom I did not feel a complete unity or solidarity with — and yet they were valuable for their liveliness, or their stangeness; in any case, their entertainment properties.

Just as Harry and the main character of the novella can be friends, so was I friends with many of whom I did not overtly approve. They entertained me. I always found something to like about even those which were very different from me. I hung on to that aspect of what was likeable about them — which as I said, was more than often their inadvertently entertaining qualities. Somebody could be likeable BECAUSE they were classified as a type of nerd, for instance. Somebody could be likeable BECAUSE they had a kind of weird body shape, and that was entertaining. Somebody could be likeable because they were one of a set of twins — in which case, you’d have to like both of them equally, (whilst admiring their quirks, which give you extra amusement!)

One more piece of evidence for Western A PRIORItising and African avoidance of this habit: In the West you tend to only “like” the people who are similar enough to you to warrant friendship with them. APRIORI : Do they fit the category? In Africa, you could be friends with people who were very different from yourself, since “who we are” was less an issue than being entertained by others at one’s leisure.

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Cultural fluidity

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 our
search was doomed from the start because the elixir seemed to be right under our
noses and yet was not really there. The freedom 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 than one became intoxicated by it even before one had
actually found it. It was like the way a man licks his lips in his dream of a
feast; hte way a woman dances in her dream of a carnival; the way the old man
rean 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.
Life stretched out like a series of hunger-scoured hovels stretching endlessly
towards the horizon.
Marechera’s The House of Hunger, p 3.

 

—–

Unlike within Modernist cultures, the mass culture of Zimbabwe was one of emotional infectionability. That be as it may, the material circumstances of the culture which gave birth to Zimbabwe were impoverished and consequently limiting to this spirit.

A vivifying sense of cultural fluidity was something I was used to before I came to the West — I hardly anticipated people gazing at each other distanced and indirect, as if through perspex boxes; part of their office machinery.

The impoverishment of material circumstances don’t seem to have prevented the vivifying and exciting spirit. Such impoverishment did prevent it from coming into a more fuller fruition rather than dying on the vine. There was no overall materialist determinism predicating the nature of the Zimbabwean culture. Yet, the flow, the sense of infection with a “spirit” in which all partook, is distinctly (to my mind) non-Western. I attribute this quality of cultural fluidity and infectiousness as being part of what is allowed to a pre-Modernist mindset, which has not imprisoned individuals within the narrow perspex conceptualisations of the office environment. I associate the latter cultural feelings with the effect of Modernisation. The organisational structures of Modernisation do appear to me to be more potently culturally deterministic than premodernist material conditions are or have been.

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Friendship

The real problem with Modernity is that people who are taken with it as a practice — that is, people who have made of themselves an instrument of a machine larger than they are — are not quite capable of friendship. If you want to understand how human friendship can be, then look upwards, my aquaintances and sundry, to the Third World!

Most under Modernity are no longer capable of friendship, I have found. They may look like they are at first. But underneath and behind thos shiny eyes is simply a great void, an emptiness. There is an overall inability to understand and value human organic lives for what they are, and may be. “Reduce yourself and be Consumed!” is the Modernist motto.

When one is required to put the better part of one’s energies towards pleasing a “boss”, the residues of one’s organic energies are all that’s left to go towards a friendship. No wonder the very notion of friendship is degraded and devalued under these arrangements. And those who imagine that by an act of will they can change their attitudes — to make themselves into better friends — are certainly delusional! Even I have been contaminated by the degradations of Modernism which insist that giving one’s all to the boss is somehow “selfishly delightful!”

No– there are few people who can retain the quality of being able to be a friend. Most can’t — having been reduced to half or one-third people (on third of the potential of their full humanity!) If you are like this, then I expect you might feel fully normal, but a real friend is someone who you will not be able to tolerate, due to your emptiness. Beware that you do not stab them in the back for being foolish enough to befriend you — you who are not capable of friendship because you feel compelled to put your boss first!

So there are few who are capable of friendship — and perhaps those who are have had to undergo some pretty rough experiences in order to know how to value friendship properly, and not to cast the real valuables of life asunder!

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epistemological limitations

The range of experiences one has had, especially as a child will determine what one is capable of knowing as an adult — one may find oneself limited in terms of understanding certain ideas if one has not had the experiential background to understand them. This neurological framing aspect also has a strong culturally determining component. In a sense, we are all “conservative” with regard to the strong features of our early upbringing, as we conserve the memories and the tendency to reproduce these features within our very psyches.

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Soyinka speaks about the terrains that he covers in Africa–specifically Nigeria. He is he feels that nothing can and should limit his range of movement, even if a situation he might be encroaching on, by entering it, is ostensibly dangerous. It is not rationality that motivates his movements, but a kind of a-rational emotiveness: specifically the dislike of being limited and contained. (And to what degree does the Modernist metaphor AND actuality imply limitation and containment? — the office cubicle or high-rise office high rise building is especially an arena of stark containment! They are also exemplerary features of Modernism and Modernisation.)

The emotional terrains of personhood are also, for him, vitally connected to the terrains pertaining to actual, concrete movement.

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Mind as terrain but not often in the West!

Even with Marachera, who writes surrealistically, you get the impression that what he is trying to show you is the TERRAIN of his own mind. There’s that metaphor again!

I find something quite different going on in a lot of (most?) contemporary (especially populist) Western novels. There is less a sense of “I’m a gonna show you the terrain of my here mind,” and more a sense of, “I’m going to emotionally or intellectually seduce you to a point of you concurring with me.”

I’m not quite so sure how to conceptualise what I see as the difference going on here. Of course there are overlaps. Graham Greene’s novels tend to show insides of minds, as do existential novels. Yet, I wonder to what degree western novels seem to run on the basis of TYPES of humans engaged in TYPES of actions? So, once you recognise the TYPE, that is almost key to anticipating the character’s next move — and, in turn, being foiled by a clever writer who can ostensibly “read your mind” enough to know what it is you have been anticipating because of your cultural expectations regarding the particular TYPE.

So, if I am right, then much of Western writing is all about basing a reader-author interface on the common expectation of the nature of particular, culturally recognisable TYPES of human beings. But, then, Western writing must tend to be strongly predicated on a common matrix, which is to say a common conceptual framework — whereby characters are recognised on the basis of their a priori categories or categorisations within the particular culture.

African writing, on the other hand, shows you the environment that one has grown up in, and points to it quite directly. It may engage with “types” on various levels, too — but perhaps in a way which is less inclined to gesture with a nod and a wink to the reader. I suspect (from my limited reading so far) that the types of African literature are more likely to be more plastic and transformative in many ways (I’m speaking of their fewer a prioris — ie. fewer unchangeable character features) than those which Westerners would more readily identify with. I could be just assuming a great deal, here, but these are, as they always have been, my raw thoughts, and are not to be taken for something other.

Much African writing shows you the landscape of a person’s psyche as they change from one state to another. Much Western writing, on the other hand, shows you the same person, only this person is changing on the basis of their decisions and choices, so as to become relatively worse or better off in the end. Western writing might often tend to greatly limit a character’s plasticity, because of the strength or proliferation of Western a prioris.

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absence of the ascendent motif in African autobiog.

There is a relative absence of the depiction of ascension (as in to a position of power) in African autobiography. Even when the writing is that of an esteemed politician, the motif is missing.

The metaphor of “rising up” within society also appears to be missing. Upward movements in general are not often depicted, and when they are they cannot help but evoke Modernity — the aeroplane (a modern machine) going upwards, the centrality of organisation which would enable such a thing as hierarchy to develop. These are objects of Modernism, and they have their accompanying Modernist implications for the Psyche.

By contrast, the broad dimensions of African literature are portrayed in the metaphor of the “lay of land” — which resonates either mentally or physically, but at times in both ways simultaneously. See the short story by MarEchera which gives a pastoral depiction of his little village of of origin, near Lesapi.

African ways of depicting the effects of Modernity

What is it about African memoirs which unavoidably invokes ideas of these immense expanses? Even the most statesmanlike of the memoirs inscribe qualities of immense expanses, and of the vigorous journey over them, through some rugged terrain, past a couple of bushes, down near a rivulet, following the stream.

African autobiographies encounter Modernity in various ways, all quite different. Modernity might, for instance, be something which snatches the protagonist or author/writer from his ensconced comfort — or conversely discomfort — within his community. We see this with Falola’s autobiography. The young boy takes a train journey and is transformed by it, at least in the eyes his home community, from whom he has absconded. The train, a symbol of Modernity is thus able to impose symbolic transformations — the boy gets back to the community and gets the ‘witchcraft’ purged from him. What was it that injected the witchcraft substance into the boy, but his half-forbidden engagement with Modernity?

In the work of Lloyd Matowe, we see that Modernity has a categorising feature, whereby people are judged and divided on the basis of their country of origin, just as the sheep are separated from the goats  for the Christian afterlife. This categorising feature of Modernity ignores the real identity of a person, treating all alike on the basis of the aspect by which it regulates. It doesn’t matter if you are a doctor or a professor — you still go into the queue for those from poor African countries, not the one for the special countries, whose travellers are deemed worthy of the modernist remedy of fast queues and efficiency.

For myself, an encounter with Modernity was to undergo aphasia. Under the spotlight of Modernity, I found myself, for the first time, unable to speak clearly about anything, especially that which used to engage me. The experience of Modernity coincided with the unmooring of my soul, which is the common experience of every unwilling migrant. My general sensibility of self remained in Africa along with my emotional engagements with field and friends. Stripped naked, my psyche had to learn to speak again. As a thinker and as a human interacting with other humans, I also had to learn to speak.

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Simple metaphors to explore!

Let us make everything simple by talking about a ruralistic perspective and counterposing that to the city, which implies Modernity.

So many objects of my rural consciousness are so distant when most proximate. The little gulleys, trees and burnt fire wood sensations which I experienced as a child are simultaneously emotionally proximate but physically distant. And doesn’t this fact that it can be so imply that when I am most close to you, I might still be apart — with some part of my “soul” (or let’s say ‘Psyche’) roaming the fields of my previous experiences, never quite finding its home?

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Distance in proximity and proximity in distance.

There are two kinds of distance — one geographic, one emotional. The modernist conception (and the more I think about it, the more this seems to be true) is that physical presence is almost always taken as implying emotional presence. A person may not be an open book, but something quite similar to that is presumed — it is almost as one were to assume that the contents of their speech alone contain all there is to know about them. What about the person behind? IS there a person or persons or a series of hidden emotions and gestures behind the logical positivism of the words which are spoken? The modernist conception would say no. And, I think it is almost the case that the degree to which something might be considered “Modernist” is the degree to which it asserts a greater, rather than lesser, ‘no’ to this question.

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change of course

I am wondering about why it is that I have adopted the thesis of African literature, and am now studying predominantly black people. Why do I care about their psychology, anyway?

–I think it is because, after all this time, I now understand it implicitly. I would not have done so without my father, who — lacking an outlet for his sense of exile but full of the rage of disempowerment — began treating me like some much, much lesser human being. A dog perhaps? Perhaps I stood, for him, in the place of the lost dominated ones: the “lowly” colonial blacks.

By virtue of the simple fact of my presence within his range of vision, I apparently enticed his need to try to make a victim out of me — and naturally,this domination was somewhat along the grooves of pre-established thinking about masters and servants to which he’d been accustomed.

As so it is that I know what it means even to be treated like a pile of human excrement. I understand the experience of being dehumanized more than most. I leant from all of this the meaning of hatred.

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Frantz Fanon

“The archetype of the lowest values is represented by the Negro” (189).
“In the remotest depth of the European unconscious an inordinately black hollow has been made in which the most immoral impulses, the most shameful desires lie dormant. And as every man climbs up toward whiteness and light, the European has tried to repudiate this uncivilized self, which has attempted to defend itself. When European civilization came into contact with the black world, with those savage peoples, everyone agreed: Those Negroes were the principle of evil. // Jung constantly identified the foreign with the obscure, with the tendency to evil: He is perfectly right. This mechanism of projection — or, if one prefers, transference — has been described by classic psychoanalysis. In the degree to which I find in myself something unheard-of, something reprehensible, only one solution remains for me: to get rid of it, to ascribe its origin to someone else. In this way I eliminate a short circuit that threatens to destroy my equilibrium” (190; “Negro” relegated to the unconscious — cf. Irigaray on ‘woman’; cf. Kristeva).

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Two things about stretching

There are at very least two things which give to me a psychologically jarring feeling. There are two things, and neither of them are very pleasant. I’m usually ready for them, but not always — and when I’m not ready, that is when the psychologically jarring feeling is acute!

There are two things, at least, which lend to me their psychologically jarring feeling. Two things. I bump against them just as I would bump against dark cavern walls, if I was passing through. It appears suddenly as if the walls are closer to you, the ceiling lower than you had been expecting. You expected to stand up fully, but you hit your head. Now you are crouched down low again, rubbing the sore spot which pounds the top of your head!

There are two things, two things mostly, which astound me. Two immensely harsh and painful things. There are these two things…

One is a cave ceiling. It crashes down on me, it seems, although I’m really rising up. I can’t rise up! I am prevented! No, don’t stand up to your full height in here: This isn’t quite your culture — or the culture you were born into. Also, there are other preventatives: Women here are Mary Poppinses. Do you want to be a Mary Poppins? — Be counted as one! Otherwise, remain crouching. Stand up, assert yourself, and you will bump your head! Not Poppinsy enough to stand right up, not yet. You will be penalised for excessive assertiveness, unbecoming of the Poppins.

Two things. The other are the cave walls. Don’t reach out! Don’t reach out, for you will indicate that you are not dependable. Keep stiff and low and narrow — for this is what is expected of you, now. But don’t reach out to see what lies beyond you without knowing first. You must emulate the museum case embalmed expression of the Western woman.

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If the metaphor dominating African socialisation, in the more rural areas especially, is “distance” considered as being apart from others, potentially or actually, on a flat plane, then the metaphor of contemporary Western society, in the more urban areas especially, might be “proximity” — perhaps or perhaps not extending up the high-rise office tower. Is “African” society, then, somehow (at least in my own head) to be equated with rurality? Is Western society to be equated with urbanisation? As things rest, this is how it seems. By employing this mechanism of understanding, I am able to make sense of my own experiences, at least.

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Identity politics, reification and the migrant experience

Identity politics and Modernisation appear to go hand in hand. Perhaps identity politics was a reaction to modernisation? Industry has no time to “get to know you”, and tends to use the surface attributes of any person in order to determine where they might fit within the machinery of industry. Superficial attributes, thus, would have driven the machinery of industry:

How do you dress?– are you “upper” (managerial) or “lower” (general dog’s body) class? Are you black, white or inbetween? — for these colours all reveal probabilities concerning features of your education and upbringing! Are you a boy or a girl? — because these features also indicate, at least historically, your capacity to take control of
power or to relinquish it.

Hence, historical movement away from an organic, pre-Modernist structuring of society leads to greater superficiality of categorising on the basis of surface characteristics.

And “identity politics”? That was the revolt of people who found that the ways in which they were being categorised put them at an economic disadvantage under Modernism. It was a reaction against an inevitability of categorisation upon the basis of surface characteristics. But in much of academia, it has often become a runaway train — whereby people are constantly categorised according to their surface characteristics (for example, there is a world of difference between having white and black skin!)

The practical needs of the industrial machinery and those who managed it, to have a “short-hand” basis for ‘knowledge’ concerning who to employ, has led to a general hypostatising of the meaning of external features of the body, voice and manner as being THE relevant features of identity, within Modernist (including post-Modernist) societies.

Identity politics re-affirms and reproduces the tendencies to treat people on the basis of their surface characteristics, as a way of reacting to the dehumanisation of being treated on the basis of surface characteristics. (This is the problem I have with much of “postmodernism” whereby six or seven salient all too obvious –and probably misleading — “characteristics” of a person are reified into their social “identity”, so that the person whose identity is thus reified can either play the “appropriate” role of victim or apologise (“appropriately”) for being a dominator. Such boring and predictable games!)

But Africans (black OR white) who have not been participating in this part of Western history, know little about what these political and psychological games are supposed to be about. White or black — they are, in different ways, unfairly penalised for this lack of Western historical knowledge. Without having had direct experience of the action of Modernisation (which categorises as it depersonalises) they are in the [dark] about the meaning of identity politics and postmodernist role-playing (roles of victims versus dominators, always).
If you were to actually ask the African newcomers, you would probably find that they came to the West to avoid all that, expecting rationalism.
It’s very hard to intuitively understand the subjective history of the West without being born within it, and having intuitively reacted against various aspects which one has found particularly damaging.

The experiences of Africans has often been very different from that of those born and bred in this particular historical and industrial period of Western development. The mistake of many an identity theorist, or postmodernist identity theorist, is to imagine that “the human experience” has been, broadly, The Same. They thus reify the historically-defined aspects of their own experiences, without even being aware that they are doing this. Simultaneously, they condemn others for reifying their experiences as being, somehow, “true”.

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Soyinka and group therapy

Soyinka does not necessarily attribute his reactions as cultural reactions. However, he does mention that the cultural events of group therapies — which he ascribes to Americans — are not for him.

I think he pinpoints something more than just a narrow personal preference, here: Group therapy sessions appear, to Soyinka, to diminish the value of such human faculties as human will, human dignity and so on. Furthemore, they expose and make public what is organically personal — that private space which one requires to remain personal if one is to heal.

I feel the same way about many Western transactions wherein varius parties presume to know me, whilst in effect just running on the basis of some kind of generic ideas about how human beings ought to interact. One loses something in this kind of a transaction — although its often very hard to put one’s finger on it, and to say exactly what.