Black and White

Cinema, politics and the arts in Zimbabwe

Agnieszka Piotrowska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317595403
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In Black and White Agnieszka Piotrowska presents a unique insight into the contemporary arts scene in Zimbabwe – an area that has received very limited coverage in research and the media. The book combines theory with literature, film, politics and culture and takes a psychosocial and psychoanalytic perspective to achieve a truly interdisciplinary analysis.

Piotrowska focuses in particular on the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) as well as the cinema, featuring the work of Rumbi Katedza and Joe Njagu. Her personal experience of time spent in Harare, working in collaborative relationships with Zimbabwean artists and filmmakers, informs the book throughout. It features examples of their creative work on the ground and examines the impact it has had on the community and the local media. Piotrowska uses her experiences to analyse concepts of trauma and post-colonialism in Zimbabwe and interrogates her position as a stranger there, questioning patriarchal notions of belonging and authority. Black and White also presents a different perspective on convergences in the work of Doris Lessing and iconic Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, and how it might be relevant to contemporary race relations.

Black and White will be intriguing reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychotherapeutically engaged scholars, film makers, academics and students of post-colonial studies, film studies, cultural studies, psychosocial studies and applied philosophy.

1
On Touching and Speaking in (Post) (DE) Colonial Discourse – From Lessing to Marechera and Veit-Wild

Introduction

Jean-Luc Nancy in his seminal book on the body and its significance in the history of philosophy, Corpus, makes a point that the body and the discussions about it ought to be open. He says that in reflecting on it he did not want to “produce the effect of a closed or finite thing, because when we talk about the body we talk about something entirely opposed to the closed and the finite. With the body, we speak about something open and infinite, about the opening of closure itself, the infinite of the finite itself” (Nancy 2008: 122).

This particular reflection came upon him whilst walking through the streets of Paris on his way to give a lecture on the body. Suddenly, he heard about the atrocities in Bosnia and felt compelled to abandon his well-prepared talk and instead find an open space to talk about the links between the body, the soul and our place in the world. He says in his book: “Body is certitude shattered and blown to bits” (ibid.: 3) – a phrase which, in the age of terrorist attacks, sounds particularly ominous.

In this chapter I will focus on voice and touch in colonial and post-colonial encounters as a site of loss, representing the unrepresentable collapse of ordinary human communications, reclaimed gradually in the de-colonial period. The work discussed in this chapter is “touching” something, which is indeed very difficult, if not almost impossible, to talk about. This chapter is by no means anything definitive: as our world is continuously finding that its post-coloniality is not a history lesson but rather a living daily occurrence, sometimes painfully violent, the connections between the body, the language and the touching is worth considering from a different perspective.

Here I will look at Doris Lessing’s seminal novel The Grass is Singing (1950) and Dambudzo Marechera’s excerpt from a larger work called Choreodrama entitled The Portrait of A Black Artist in London (1980) (and published for the first time in Veit-Wild’s Sourcebook in 1992). These read together, as if speaking to each other, thus form another “body” of work. Their work boldly addresses a painful legacy of colonialism through fiction and not a factual report. They offer a rare insight into the trauma involved in emerging from colonialism and finding a voice with which to express the pain.

It is worth here recalling Jacques Derrida’s essay “Demeure”: attending to “the context of relations between fiction and truth which is also to say, between literature and death” (Blanchot & Derrida 2000 [1994]: 15). In it he reminds us that it is often only through fictional stories, which offer a distance to the unrepresentable pain, that we can express the essence of the matter in an ethical way.¹ Derrida echoes here Jacques Lacan’s notion of truth having a structure of fiction (2006: 684); it is often simply too painful and impossible to deal with facts just as sheer facts. In order to avoid the “ethical violence” that accompanies any attempt at “giving an account of oneself ” to the Other (Butler 2005), it is sometimes necessary to fictionalise that account to make it “representable” at all, however, imperfectly. This is what I believe takes place in Marechera and Lessing’s pieces of literature: they represent something that still remains largely unspeakable in the (de) colonial context: namely the (non) touching and (non) speaking with the Other. I will also in connection with this briefly mention here Flora Veit-Wild and Dambudzo Marechera’s personal relationship and her unexpected confession regarding the nature of this relationship, which took place in early 1980s, but which was only accounted for in 2012: I will return to this below.

Testimony and the academy

The word “demeure”, which means “remains” (but also in fact “home”), and its various derivations and forms dominates Derrida’s whole essay: to give a testimony of one’s experience of unbearable suffering is also in some way to want to combat it, to defy death itself, and to “remain” against the inevitability of time. In order to be able to attempt that at all, one has to find a voice which the Other can hear – and Derrida despaired on the unknowability of the Other’s response to one’s pronouncements elsewhere, in particular in The Ear of the Other (1988 [1985]). Derrida, himself a victim and triumphant survivor of colonialism (he was born Jewish-Algerian in French Algeria, discriminated against both there and later in France²) was a proponent of the personal and “high theory” in one space. In his controversial quote below Derrida asks for greater freedom in the academy, precisely in order to be able to approach the “unrepresentable”. In his provocative lectures and seminars in Montreal more than 30 years ago (1982) Derrida focused on the connection between one’s experience and one’s work. To put it differently, Derrida enters a difficult place in which “the scholarly” might need to share space with “the emotional”: an almost prohibited move in the academy even today. That means an acceptance of a certain sense of fragmentation of the presentation. This is what Derrida says:

I would like to spare you the tedium, the waste of time, and the subservience that always accompany the classic pedagogical procedures of forging links, referring back to prior premises or arguments, justifying one’s trajectory, method, system, and more or less skillful transitions, reestablishing continuity, and so on. These are but some of the imperatives of classical pedagogy with which, to be sure, one can never break once and for all. Yet, if you were to submit to them rigorously, they would very soon reduce you to silence, tautology, and tiresome repetition. (Derrida 1988 [1985]: 3–4)³

This paper, as with most of my other work, attempts to enter such an open space in which the scholarly and the emotional co-exist, even if I accept that some links will have to be forged and some references to premises and arguments made.

I start by presenting a psychoanalytical reading of Lessing’s novel which is, in some ways, in opposition to interpretations advanced over the last 20 years by literary scholars. In particular I take issue with some of the notions presented by Joy Wang (2009) in her article “White Postcolonial Guilt”, which also sums up a number of other scholarly interpretations. The paper offers Mary’s complex relationship with Moses as a classic “interracial romance” and a kind of reparation, putting The Grass is Singing in the same context as a number of other seminal, post-colonial works, thereby framing Mary’s desire as “abject” within the colonial discourse. Here is what Wang says:

This historical portrayal of white female desire for the black man as an abject and indirect form of apology is entrenched within landmark texts such as E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Paul Scott’s depiction of Daphne Manners in The Raj Quartet (1966–73) and J. M. Coetzee’s character Lucy in Disgrace (1999).

If abjection can be broadly defined, as Anne McClintock argues, as an act of expulsion, casting away, and social exclusion, then these relationships were, for white women in Lessing’s apartheid South Africa, descriptively to be labelled as abject simply by virtue of their social unacceptability. (2009: 38, my emphasis)

I take issue with interpreting Mary’s drama as a form of abjection and suggest here instead that it might be more productive to reflect on the issues of touching and the voice in the novel and the (linguistic, political, affective) limits within which Lessing’s unreliable narrator is capable of addressing these issues. In other words, the pain and trauma and desire felt by the protagonists remain “unsymbolised”: “unrepresented” and therefore doomed. The violence that follows fits in well with Ranjana Khanna’s contention that unsymbolised loss will lead to violence (2003):⁴ in a post-colonial context in particular but also in any other traumatic situation.⁵ I will return to this later in this essay.

The issue of symbolisation and representation can perhaps offer a response to various critics’ confusion over Moses’ murder of Mary. Having been told repeatedly “don’t speak English to me” (2013 [1950]: 41) Moses is banned from “metaphorisation”, a ban especially fraught since Lessing’s narrator actually has no idea what it is that he might want to say: “what thoughts of regret, or pity, or perhaps even wounded human affection were compounded with the satisfaction of his completed revenge, it is impossible to say” (ibid.: 206).

There is something else here too though. Derrida in his discussion of Nancy’s work Corpus, makes some important points regarding touching in Descartes’ Six Meditations, in which Derrida stresses the point that to touch means “to tamper with, to change, to displace, to call into question; thus it is invariably a setting in motion, a kinetic experience” (Derrida 2005 [2000]: 25). This is in direct and hard opposition to the colonial and post-colonial notions of ideas being set in stone, what Edward Said in his discussions of colonialism called “frozen, fixed” (Said 2006 [1978]) and deeply patriarchal and conservative. The touching, Derrida reminds us here, is a harbinger of change – it can be a good change, or bad, but it’s a movement, and when it is accompanied by a voice and language, it can become explosive and revolutionary. It is for these reasons that it is prohibited in any situations in which difference is a marker of danger – as it is in contemporary world today too. To define a female desire in this context as “abjection” is to miss its political dimension – it is a big move away from a separateness always evoked by the patriarchal authority.

Here, in Lessing’s novel the touching takes place – and is silent in its threat. Taking this voicelessness and the power-relations it signifies as a point of departure, I am interested here in reading Marechera’s work in the context of searching and finding the voice that Moses, the black protagonist of the novel, never has. To oversimplify my project here, if Moses could express his rage in Lessing’s novel, might he not say what Marechera says in his poem? Could one therefore read the two pieces of work as entering into dialogue with each other – an apparently impossible dialogue which still haunts the contemporary relations between races and genders in Southern Africa?

The novel

To repeat then: The Grass is Singing deals with colonial relationships in Rhodesia in the late 1940s. As a direct result of the absence of either means or ability to articulate pain by the white woman and the black man at the heart of the story, violence ensues. That absence is clearly created by the systematic abuses of colonialism but the incident is still a local and private matter: Mary, the white woman, is murdered by Moses, the black man. Instead of exploring the incident’s evident political significance I will reflect here on the implicit and actual prohibition of touching in the colonial times as evoking desire and despair. Derrida, and more recently Emma Wilson (2012), have spoken, in their reflections on the image and absence, about a longing for the embodied presence of the beloved Other who is no more. Derrida again talks movingly about any desire aroused by absence and I am borrowing the quote below from him:

The desire to touch, the tactile effect or affect, is violently summoned by its very frustration, summoned to come back [appelé à revenir], like a ghost [un revenant], in the places haunted by its absence. (Derrida & Stiegler 2002: 115)

Wilson too talks about “images yielding a trace of embodied experience, of sensuousness, of engagement with the world, up to and beyond death (…) I look at the ways in which the dead still touch us and the ways in which we may respond to their demands with love” (2012: 6). If we read Lessing’s and Marechera’s works in this context, namely the context of longing, loss and melancholia rather than abjection and guilt, the readings might lead to more conciliatory outcomes, both in the academy and elsewhere. Lessing and Marechera in their fiction evoke images of desire and despair over the absence of embodied encounters in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe: an absence which is aggravated or perhaps even created by the absence of actual physical touching as well as verbal communications.

Lessing was a white Zimbabwean, or rather a white Rhodesian as Zimbabwe only gained independence in 1980. I suggest here that this absence of a clear voice on the part of her protagonists in her novel is connected to the issue of “mourning and melancholia” and trauma linked to the period of colonialism, on the part of the white and black participants of the era alike. The physicality of an encounter with the Other and an actual prohibition of engaging with that Other was thrown into sharp focus during pre-independence times in almost all countries subjected to colonisation. As my field work in recent times has been taking place in Southern Africa and particularly in Zimbabwe, my experience of its legacy is both first hand and in some ways unexpectedly painful: touching is still an awkward thing in contemporary Zimbabwe. In my documentary film Lovers in Time or How We Didn’t Get Arrested in Harare (2015) my lead actor Michael Kudakwashe admitted in an interview that the touching in public, an innocent touching, was still an area of contention.

In former Rhodesia prior to independence a physical encounter with the black Other was a taboo which was heavily sexualised but it was also illegal and used as a way of discouraging any physical contact, however casual or innocent, with the indigenous population: touch, just ordinary touch between members of different races was discouraged, even if it was not against the law per se. The colour bar with strict separation was as bad, or worse, than in South Africa.⁶

I will first briefly recall here the notion of touch as connected to voice and its importance in Judeo-Christian art and literature. It is from that tradition I argue that the prohibition of touch in colonialism comes, closely linked to the missionary work with the so-called “savage” populations.

Touching and not touching

In an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Point of View, British novelist Will Self speaks about the importance of touch in human relationships (2015): here he focuses on the topic in connection with our contemporary over-reliance on technology and its emphasis on a disembodied means of communications, through social media such as Facebook, Twitter or WhatsApp. He evokes Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novel from 1957 The Naked Sun in which, in a world called Solaria, all human contact is mediated through technology and any form of touching or of embodied encounter is forbidden: people are not allowed to be in one room together for the fear of what might ensue. Touching is dangerous as it invites proximity the consequences of which are not clear to envisage or control.

Self reminds us that in Christianity the dualism of body and soul over the centuries had been translated in the Middle Ages into a reticence over a physical touch, in case that might turn into a dangerous sexualised encounter leading in its turn to Sin. Self evokes in his article the phrase “Noli me tangere” – Latin for “don’t touch me” or “don’t tread on me” – the words attributed to Christ in St John’s Gospel when Mary Magdalene recognises him after the resurrection and wants to touch him. Christ is de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of images
• Introduction
• 1 On touching and speaking in (Post) (de) Colonial Discourse – from Lessing to Marechera and Veit-Wild
• 2 Mourning and melancholia at the Harare International Festival of the Arts
• 3 Lovers in Time – Practice research in the times of patriotic journalism in Zimbabwe
• 4 Contemporary cinema in Zimbabwe – part one: The radical “minor gesture” of Joe Njagu’s Lobola
• 5 Contemporary cinema in Zimbabwe – part two: Gender, class and tradition in Zimbabwe – Rumbi Katedza’s Playing Warriors
• Concluding remarks: Language, testimony and fiction in practice research
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index