Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature

Reading Beyond the Single Subject

Jay Rajiva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429657436
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire africaine

This book uses the conceptual framework of animism, the belief in the spiritual qualities of nonhuman matter, to analyze representations of trauma in postcolonial fiction from Nigeria and India.

Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature initiates a conversation between contemporary trauma literatures of Nigeria and India on animism. As postcolonial nations move farther away from the event of decolonization in real time, the experience of trauma take place within and is generated by an increasingly precarious environment of resource scarcity, over-accelerated industrialization, and ecological crisis. These factors combine to create mixed environments marked by constantly changing interactions between human and nonhuman matter. Examining novels by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Jhumpa Lahiri, Nnedi Okorafor, and Arundhati Roy, the book considers how animist beliefs shape the aesthetic representation of trauma in postcolonial literature, paying special attention to complex metaphor and narrative structure. These literary texts challenge the conventional wisdom that working through trauma involves achieving physical and psychic integrity in a stable environment. Instead, a type of provisional but substantive healing emerges in an animist relationship between human trauma victims and nonhuman matter. In this context, animism becomes a pivotal way to reframe the process of working through trauma.

Offering a rich framework for analyzing trauma in postcolonial literature, this book will be of interest to scholars of postcolonial literature, Nigerian literature and South Asian literature.

1 Survival’s strange shape

Prophecy and materiality

The object, Harry Garuba writes in a 2012 e-flux article, is a thoroughly modern invention (2012, 3). It indicates a relation, for Garuba, between western empiricism and the “spectral Other” represented by animist modes of beliefs. Animism is excluded from the western object in toto, per the racist characterizations of animist beliefs that date back to the nineteenth century, giving us “the primitive, who, like an infant, cannot distinguish the animate and the inanimate” (2012, 1). Contra this dismissal of animism, Garuba notes the recent upswell in animist criticism, a “new interest [that] has overturned the old prejudice” and led some to “proclaim the end of objectivism and its dualistic epistemology” (2012, 2). Wryly, Garuba notes what he considers the “optimistic” nature of these proclamations, yet still he chooses to begin his essay with this claim, to establish the urgency of the question. Doing so allows him to form an important distinction in his appraisal of animism. On the one hand, we have the possibility of an animism as presented in Indigenous African traditions, indicating a relation between subjects and within a lifeworld that productively decenters the rational Cartesian subject. On the other hand, we have a western characterization of animism as merely the “found” object of empirical science, reduced to a step along a teleological chain, degenerated to “the status of data, objects used only as sources of primary evidence” (2012, 6). This latter type of animism causes in Garuba some consternation, since the beneficiary of such animist enlightenment is always and only “the modern self, moving forward in linear time” (2012, 6). Citing Johannes Fabian’s critical examination of the practices and methodologies of anthropology, Garuba draws our attention to a disciplinary given whereby a hierarchical rupture in time – the West has moved forward, while other cultures are stuck in the past – informs how animism is studied, thought of, and finally incorporated into Western epistemologies. This rupture positions modernity as the omega of development, to which animism, the childlike alpha, is subsumed:

So even though it may appear that “animism” is the ground upon which these new epistemologies stand, it is not the “real” animistic practices of other peoples and cultures that matter; what matters instead is “animism” as a knowledge construct of the West, and this is what is being revisited to derive new Western knowledge constructs and paradigms.

(2012, 7)

The danger is apparent: reduced to an aspect of Western knowledge, animism becomes the modern object, calcified data caught in an “authorizing discursive form” (2012, 8) that remains tacitly but resolutely Western. Such a framing represents a profound violation of the spirit of animist practice and thought. If we are to use animism productively as a method of infusing the world of objects with spirituality, as Garuba calls for, we must also challenge what he sees as the “rigid dualisms consecrated by the modern/western epistemological order” (2012, 7–8).

Let me offer a second framing. In “Being Alive to a World Without Objects,” Tim Ingold interrogates the contemporary tendency to infuse the material world with agency, noting rather caustically that “the more theorists have to say about agency, the less they seem to have to say about life” (2014, 214). A simple determination to invest objects – he is very specific about the word – with agency merely recreates what he calls the “world of objects,” populated by actors “for whom the contents of the world appear already locked in their final forms, closed in upon themselves” (2014, 217). Examining the cognitive givens that shape a typically materialist view of the world as one replete with bounded objects, Ingold offers two scenarios that demonstrate, for him, the limits of an agentic view of matter: the closed space of a study contrasted with a walk outside, in nature. In the first scenario, Ingold argues, the very constraints of the study’s space militate toward an illusory view of things as objects: taking every object – books, tables, lamps, and so on – out of the study would result in what he refers to as an “uninhabitable” space, uninhabitable because shorn of the objects that allow the pursuit of a given “activity” in that space (he doesn’t offer specifics, but reading, researching, and writing are the clear outcomes). This is a dead space, clearly, composed of objects, and so Ingold has to take us outside (the second scenario), in order to demonstrate that every “object” we encounter – including but not limited to trees, bushes, and birds – defies its status as an object when we consider it more closely. The tree, for example, has bark that contains insects and algae on its lower base; its roots are in the earth; birds nest in its branches; squirrels use it as a pathway to food; and the wind keeps it in motion. Any sense of the tree’s object-based singularity, Ingold argues, vanishes upon careful examination. At this juncture, Ingold draws on Heidegger, urging us to stop ordering dead objects and start meshing with living “things,” a move that allows us “not to be locked out but to be invited into the gathering” (2014, 215). One enters, then, into an environment without objects, where one can participate “in the processes of formation” (2014, 217), which for Ingold are without end. “Life,” he observes, “is open-ended: its impulse is not to reach a terminus but to keep on going” (2014, 222).

In opening with these two frames, I draw our attention to animism not as a static term containing portable and transparent meaning, but as a shifting element within a correspondingly mutable discursive field. Animisms are not equal or identical to each other, nor do we all mean the same thing, necessarily, when we use the word. Held seriously in critical consciousness, animism is a structure of meaning, not merely a data point. In this chapter, I want to explore what it means to adopt an animist structure of meaning as a way of representing postcolonial trauma, through the trope of prophecy, and by way of a combined reading of two Nigerian novels in tandem: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen, which is in explicit intertextual dialog with Achebe’s novel.

What happens when we take seriously the idea that prophecy, and its apparently disordered relationship to time, a challenge to the western paradigm indicated above, does not merely foreshadow or represent trauma, but offers an animist framework by which that trauma can be known and partially worked through? How does our understanding of postcolonial trauma expand by infusing the narrative mechanic of prophecy with animist principles? In the first part of this chapter, I want to examine the narrative structure of both novels, paying attention to repetition and aphorism as evidence of what I will call a formal indeterminacy – that is, an ominous aesthetic and narrative effect that provides a sense of how characters in both novels are blind to the animist lifeworld, having internalized an anti-animist view of controlling and shaping matter (per Johnson’s idea of the “horde”). This indeterminacy is the combined effect of reading the novels in tandem, both intertextually and with respect to their relationship to specific collective traumas in Nigeria. From there, I move from examining anti-animism to considering the possibility of an animist language of trauma in both novels. In this move, I treat both animism and trauma not as data objects within western epistemologies, but rather, following Garuba, as ontologies that shape Things Fall Apart (1958) and The Fishermen (2015) coterminously. Reading trauma in these novels, I suggest, means reading them together as a meshwork, per Ingold, a narrative and intertextual lifeworld constituted by lines of flight without fixed endpoints. Examining both novels through the lens of animist materiality, we are obliged to follow the provisional patterns of trauma that implicate us as readers, rather than searching for closed encapsulations of traumatic experience that position us at an easy and comfortable distance. In this posture, reading becomes a creative activity in which elements “leak” into each other.

Situating the reader

To say that Achebe’s Things Fall Apart has had a transformative effect on literature – Nigerian, postcolonial, and literature more broadly – is both to speak in cliché and to cheapen the nature of the book’s impact. Swiftly, we can pass over the known details: first published in 1958, two years before Nigeria gained its independence, Things Fall Apart offers a highly contestable fictionalization^⁠1 of the initial encounter between Igbo communities and western, Christian missionaries at the end of the nineteenth century, dramatized by the rise and fall of the novel’s protagonist, Okonkwo, a man of great physical strength and energy but born to an indolent father whose debts force Okonkwo to work ceaselessly to develop his land and rise out of poverty. A self-made man, Okonkwo, at the outset of the book, is a person whose fame is “well-known throughout the nine villages and even beyond” (Achebe 1994, 3). However, Okonkwo’s fall from grace begins when he actively participates in the killing of his foster-son Ikemefuna, who had been given to the village years earlier as a ransom from a neighboring village whose warriors had killed two of Umuofia’s people. Okonkwo, prior to the killing, has been warned by both the priestesses of the village and his own friends not to take a direct part in the boy’s death, since doing so would anger the gods. When Okonkwo’s gun accidentally fires in a council meeting, killing another villager, he is exiled for seven years, during which time Christian missionaries establish a presence in Umuofia. Okonkwo, upon returning from exile, is disturbed at the changes, particularly since his own son, Nwoye, has converted to Christianity, having never been able to forgive Okonkwo for killing Ikemefuna. As the village attempts to resist the onset of the colonists, Okonkwo beheads a messenger sent to establish terms of interaction between the Igbo and the British, but this violence does not result in any organized resistance. In despair, Okonkwo commits suicide, just as the colonial Commissioner takes charge of the village.

The novel opens with descriptions that seem to encompass whole worlds, but which bear the reader upon the task of establishing context within specific moments of time. “Okonkwo,” so the famous opening line reads, “was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond” (Achebe 1994, 3). Stability is established by the certainty of this fame, this focus on the novel’s protagonist, not merely an ordinary citizen of Umuofia, but someone whose hard work, physical stature, and feats of strength have allowed him to surpass the memory of his indigent father, Unoka, who dies in disgrace, leaving behind only debt and dishonor. Okonkwo is situated within a meshwork of relations that the third-person narrator knows but that he himself does not. Or at least, Okonkwo’s knowledge is fixated on the aspects of Igbo culture that matter to him: physical strength, aggression as proof of masculinity, ceaseless labor, and a life without the ambiguity of civic and interpersonal codes of conduct. What Okonkwo knows, in other words, is limited by his stunted and diminished valuation of Igbo spirituality, a fact that the reader discovers early in the novel, before Okonkwo himself does.

The lacunae, of course, begin to emerge before much time has passed. Okonkwo’s rise through the village ranks is chronicled in brief narrative time. In swift succession, we see him shaking off the burden of poverty inherited from his father, working like a man possessed to cultivate his land, and finally earning a seat at the elders’ table, fulfilling the Igbo proverb. Therefore, when the neighboring village of Mbaino kills a daughter of Umuofia and the village gathers to send a representative to collect ransom, Okonkwo is the unanimous candidate. His physical prowess and aggressive demeanor embody the stern front of Umuofia, a village that is feared in battle not merely for their strength but also because they have potent magic on their side. Okonkwo, from the start of Achebe’s novel, is aligned with an animist lifeworld that shapes the decisions made around and for him. In this environment, he returns from Mbaino with an unnamed girl and Ikemefuna, the doomed boy who stays in Okonkwo’s household, and whom Okonkwo later kills, both obeying the priestesses’ injunctions – Mbaino’s act of war demanded a comparable sacrifice – and violating those injunctions, by performing the deed himself.

Time is mythic here, even at the outset of a novel in which forms of time begin to compress and fold in upon each other. After all, the famous epigraph, taken from Yeats, notes that “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” The first chapter of Things Fall Apart chronicles Okonkwo’s fame throughout the nine villages but at a narrative distance, as if describing the actions of a hero in an epic. Of course, what follows is not epic but tragedy, as Sam Durrant notes – a conjoining of “mythic and historical time,” in which “[e]vents unfold in a narrative time that is simultaneously governed by the internal logic of prophecy and the external logic of colonial history” (2017, 98). Appreciating this layering of logics requires paying attention to both the historical backdrop of the novel and the reader’s own encounter with the trauma that emerges from this history.

Here, I want to spend time with Durrant’s framing of reading as a uniquely African (I would say, Nigerian) response to the trauma of colonialism. We are therefore not speaking of any reader, but of a contemporary Nigerian reader – contemporary at the time of the novel’s publication in 1958 – on the eve of Nigeria’s independence from Britain’s colonial rule. In other words, we speak of a reader situated in a particular time and place:

Half a century later, Achebe, the son of a Christian minister, and his fellow readers are about to regain control of a land from which they themselves have grown apart. Leading lives that are no longer regulated by the beliefs of their ancestors, they have become estranged from their very indigeneity. In order to become a nation, they must first find a way to become kinsmen, both to themselves and to their ancestors. In order to conjure, on the eve of independence, that elusive spirit of the people, they must find a way of inheriting the alienated spirit of Okonkwo. As many critics have pointed out, Okonkwo represents only a certain aspect of Ibo culture; his macho tendency to valorize violent action over reason and dialogue is representative of only one side of Ibo society. Nevertheless, Achebe’s novel is structured in such a way as to suggest that it is indeed Okonkwo’s spirit that must be recovered if his contemporary readers are to reconnect with their history. In short, they must find a way of “ancestralizing” his lost spirit, of resacralizing his polluted corpse, if they are to overcome their own estrangement.

(2017, 99)

Durrant frames the task of reading as a specifically Nigerian endeavor shaped by historical context: Nigeria’s incipient independence from British rule, and the need, in this particular moment, for Nigerians as a whole to overcome the estrangement from culture that colonialism has produced. Part of that overcoming, for Durrant, involves a direct recognition of the trauma embodied in Okonkwo’s downfall, even though Okonkwo is undoubtedly a flawed character and only partially representative, in any robust sense, of Igbo culture. If, in the novel, “the community’s tendency to forget, selectively and temporarily, certain defining principles of its culture, so that contradictions arise between specific practices and general beliefs” (Hoegberg 1999, 70), is implicated in the rise of British colonialism, the act of “re-sacralizing” Okonkwo must, of necessity, include the totality of his character: what is worth saving and what is not, to avoid a repetition of the forgetting that forms part of the narrative trajectory of Things Fall Apart.

Circle back, though, to a fascinating element of Durrant’s insightful articulation of the reading dilemma occasioned by Things Fall Apart. The words used – resacralizing the polluted corpse of Okonkwo, in order to recuperate a sense of indigeneity driven underground by British colonialism – point to the challenges of the postcolonial period. Indeed, on a certain level, they are constitutive of the vexed relationship of the colonized to their own culture, in the period immediately following decolonization. However, this language of Durrant’s also emphasizes a reader connection that is tactile, present to the senses, that seeks to establish a spiritual connection to traditions lost in the colonial period. In short, reading Things Fall Apart is itself an animist act, wherein the founding principles of animist tradition are imparted to the text-thing in front of the reader. (Why not literature as animist thing? Why are we driven to detach the reading process from the insight that every thing, even the thing we are confronting in book form, matters?) This reader response is a double articulation, formed by a contextual act of reading that takes the thing of animism as it passes through cognition: we read in awareness that we are reading, encountering the novel-thing animated by a spirituality both within and outside the text. In other words, the problem of examining animism in both Things Fall Apart and The Fishermen isn’t merely one of representation, but also of approach. In short, I want to argue that the literary enmeshment of the two novels is demonstrative of an animist relation.

Metaphor and metamorphosis

Let us examine The Fishermen through the meshwork, Ingold’s structuring mechanic. Obioma’s novel, spare in its physical length, spans 18 chapters, each one beginning with a rendering of one of the novel’s characters that reads like an incantation.

We were fishermen. (Obioma 2015, 3)

Omi-Ala was a dreadful river. (15)

Father was an eagle. (26)

Ikenna was a python. (41)

Ikenna was undergoing a metamorphosis. (62)

Abulu was a madman. (89)

Mother was a falconer. (97)

Locusts were forerunners. (128)

Ikenna was a sparrow. (144)

Boja was a fungus. (155)

Spiders were beasts of grief. (175)

Obembe was a search dog. (192)

Hatred is a leech. (207)

But Abulu was a leviathan. (215)

Hope was a tadpole. (239)

My brother and I were roosters. (252)

I, Benjamin, was a moth. (272)

David and Nkem were egrets. (282)

The first chapter opening gives a sense of grief, the past of the novel already appearing before us in sepia tones, an act of the four brothers already fading into its traumatic recall, immediately tied to the “dreadful river” at which the four brothers first encounter the madman, Abulu. In the modal relation of so many of these descriptions – such as Benjamin’s father being an eagle or Ikenna as a python – we can find an implicitly animist conception of the world. Benjamin’s father, for example, is not “like”...