African Literature, Animism and Politics

Caroline Rooney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134558841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book marks an important contribution to colonial and postcolonial studies in its clarification of the African discourse of consciousness and its far-reaching analyses of a literature of animism. It will be of great interest to scholars in many fields including literary and critical theory, philosophy, anthropology, politics and psychoanalysis.

1 Clandestine Antigones and the pre-post-colonial

It was Antigone who symbolised our struggle.

Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

First, the bare bones of Antigone’s case may be given as follows: Antigone defends the cause of her outlaw brother, Polynices. He has been slain in a battle that he initiated against his brother, Antigone’s other brother, Eteocles, whom he has killed. Creon, the King, decrees that the outlaw brother not be given a proper burial. Antigone, believing in a justice beyond the law of the state, contravenes Creon’s edict and is sentenced to death. Or, this is what Mandela states:

[Creon] has decreed that the body of Polynices, Antigone’s brother, who had rebelled against the city, does not deserve a proper burial. Antigone rebels, on the ground that there is a higher law than that of the state. Creon will not listen to Antigone, neither does he listen to anyone but his own inner demons. His inflexibility and blindness ill become a leader, for a leader must temper justice with mercy. It was Antigone who symbolised our struggle; she was, in her own way, a freedom fighter, for she defied the law on the grounds that it was unjust.¹

Second, here are some propositions to get this going:
Antigone is a bearer of a message. She bears this message on behalf of the spirit of another being who is not able to make its (his or her) case for itself, in itself.

Antigone is, in a sense, writing.

She is not writing at the disposal of the sovereign subject.

She, as writing, tries to put herself at the service of the voice, petition, case of an overlooked other.

If writing, for philosophy, is put at the service of the would-be transcendental sovereign subject, Antigone, as writing, functions rather as literature does.

As far as a philosophy intent on maintaining the privilege of a singularity of authority is concerned, the reception of an Antigone is that which needs to be refused.

This is a refusal of the writing being and the being written.

In ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, Derrida, elaborating on a reading of Plato, puts forward a conception of writing in terms of the son.² For Plato, as opposed to the good son or ‘thread’, ‘fils’, the father’s true son and heir, there is writing as a bastard son, the father’s wayward, illegitimate issue. The good son could be considered as the faithful inscription and transmission of the paternal logos, while the bad son would constitute the contamination or corruption of the logos, where the written word would be seen as straying from the control of authorial intention, possibly in accordance with a love of the maternal. For Derrida, in working with philosophical givens, there is the supposed father as author or sender of theword and then there is what is delivered, so to speak, the issue, the written word, the son. What could be missing from this particular account is the moment of writing: writing itself, the being written and the writing being. For the moment, let us consider this in relation to the mother. While Derrida speaks of two types of son, we could say that there are then correspondingly two types of woman. There would be, first, the faithful wife, say, a writing medium that self-effacingly puts itself entirely and exclusively at the disposal of the paternal intention. Then there would be the adulterous or, even, lesbian woman, who deceives the father and conceives illegitimately so that the father cannot be sure if the child, the writtenword, is really his or the result of intentions other than his own. AsWalter Benjamin explores, and as taken up by Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baudelaire considered literature in terms of both the ‘prostitute’ (say, open to a host of invitations) and the ‘lesbian’ (say, intending only itself, a writing concerned with reflecting only itself as writing).³ Apart from the sender (father)/sent (son), there would be the question of the bearer or deliverer. Here, writing could be thought of as: angel, messenger, guardian, guardian angel, sister, witness-bearer. This is better than speaking of it as a ‘mother’ since that could confuse us with a thinking of maternal intention, in which case the ‘mother’ would be awomanwho behaves just like the paternal author. Antigone enables us to seewhat is at stake. For we can see that there are two brothers, the one who has paternal recognition and is the intended heir, Eteocles, and the one who is said to be the illegitimate pretender, Polynices. And thenwe can see that there is yet also Antigone, as a kind of guardian, who conveys a case on behalf of a brother. Moreover, she does more than convey his case for she also conveys her relation to it.

As regards the above, it could be easily objected that the written word as sent (as son or issue) is all that you can see. What could be said regarding this is that it depends on how you read or receive the text. We can see a text as ‘already composed’ or we can see it as a process of composition. As regards the latter, it makes itself in front of your eyes. Put another way, since this may sound weird, the text we receive is the text as it was written and as such it does not ever leave its time of composition. Although it may seem to us that we receive the text as completed, we also receive it as being written. If, for instance, you read a letter written twenty years ago, you do not simply return to the past or find it returning, you bear witness to the moment of the letter’s being composed so that the present moment of the past, in which the text comes to form itself, remains present, not statically so but continuously so in an act of making. The time of composition is, in a sense, never absent for it is there in the writing. In Derrida’s Of Grammotology, there is a section with the title ‘The Written Being/The Being Written’, which in the French is ‘L’être écrit’, where ‘being’ as transcendental signified, logos, is considered along with ‘being’ as a word, a signifier.⁴ As regards Derrida’s title, what could be signified is that ‘being’ is a both a written word and the word that inscribes (and there is also something of a pun in ‘L’être’ as ‘lettre’, letter, which though would produce ‘L’être écrite’). This is not quite yet a being in the process of writing – en train d’écrire – a being written in that sense. In French there is not a present continuous tense.

Famously, Derrida has considered that philosophy thinks of the distinction between speech and writing in terms of presence and absence. He deconstructs this opposition through maintaining a spectrality that cannot be reduced to either presence or absence. Yet could we not say that writing is as movement? I think that the positing of spectrality serves to deconstruct the opposition between presence and absence on the side of writing or the written, writing as a ghostly form of being. However, the opposition could also possibly be contested on the side of speech through a consideration of the present continuous. Put another way, whatever tense the written appears in, the tense of writing is that of the present continuous.

One of the reasons for addressing these different considerations of writing is that the battle between Creon and Antigone could, in some respects, be understood in terms of the ancient rift in understanding between the rational and the poetic.

Antigone is an extreme text, a text of extremes. The most difficult thing that I have found in trying to work on Antigone, likely to be a problem for other readers of the text, is that while she serves to call the stubborn self-certainty of a Creon into question, she herself is intensely certain of her cause. When I first worked on the text there was an automatic spell-checker activated on my computer that I could not find a way of switching off. Whenever I typed ‘Antigones’ (the plural), this would immediately be turned into ‘Antagonise’. Antigones Antagonise, that is what they tend to do. Related to the double resoluteness of Creon and Antigone is the dilemma of the play’s lack of allowance for negotiation.
Negotiation is to be worked towards, if possible.

It might seem strange to bring Antigone into a relation with African writing, or more broadly colonial and post-colonial discourses. However, as Mandela’s statement shows, Antigone does have a relevance for anti-colonial struggles. It was when I was working on two Zimbabwean novels, Chenjerai Hove’s Bones and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, that the figure of Antigone first came to seem particularly strangely relevant.⁵ Bones is a novel that deals with the Zimbabwean war of liberation, and concerns, among other things, spirit possession, justice for the outcast and the mourning of the unmourned. Bones could be placed alongside Mothers of the Revolution, a collection of interviews with women from the rural areas who speak of their experience of the war. In particular, there are accounts given of women who became possessed by the spirits of male relatives slain in the war, spirits whose demand was for a proper burial. Sosana Marange states: ‘It was through this girl that my dead son’s spirit appeared … she began to talk as if she was her brother: he told us that he had died in the bush at Rosito, and what he wanted to do.’⁶ And, Dainah Girori states: ‘When she arrived she cried a great deal and started to explain the circumstances of my son’s death. It was my son who was speaking through her.He told us that he had died in the war at Cabora Basa.’⁷ Both Bones and Mothers of the Revolution ask for remembrance of those forgotten in the aftermath of war and in the inheritance of the modern nation state. In striking contradistinction to this Antigone-like scenario, Dangarembga’s novel opens with the line: ‘I was not sorry when my brother died’. The novel, set historically in the period of the war of liberation, concerns a young girl’s entry into a Europeanised, Oedipalised family unit. She is not sorry when her brother dies because his death gives her the competitive advantage to get ahead and acquire the privileges of the white middle-class lifestyle that she aspires to. In short, the novel could be read as quite a direct counter-point to Antigone: ‘I was not sorry when my brother died.’ If Hove’s text is about empathetic identifications with the misfortunes of others, Dangarembga’s text shows that the imperatives of entering a Europeanised capitalist society involve a maximising of self-interest and self-control. There is, however, another daughter or sister figure in the novel who rebels against the bourgeois white-like family, and who is regarded as an ‘impossible woman’ in her refusal to respect her father’s dictates. The two young women in the novel function as each other’s double: say, one anti-Antigone, one pro-Antigone. The colonial education involves such a splitting.

The first half of this chapter will concern itself with the figure of Antigone as the not-part of the family, with references to philosophical readings of the play.
In this part of the chapter, the attempt is to allow for the hearing of the case of an Antigone, going with the text and following the lines of force in the texts in question. The second half of the chapter attempts to offer a more distanced and critical reflection on issues raised by readings of a cross-cultural Antigone or of texts that have their own Antigone-like configurations. Antigone constitutes only a starting point here, out of which bridging points can be made towards a reading of African writing. In the first part of the chapter, there will be an engagement with Lacan’s reading of Antigone and Derrida’s consideration of Hegel’s reading of the play. What this has in part been prompted by is an impression of certain comparative muteness or mutedness within French intellectual culture as regards colonial legacies whereby, given that Antigone may be redeployed as having an anti-colonial significance, the text serves as a possibly somewhat clandestine crossroads. What of the African Presence, Présence Africaine, in Paris: the legacies of Césaire and Senghor in their initiation of the negritude movement in Paris, the lively debates of the journal Présence Africaine, and the critiques advanced by Fanon? Fanon himself makes visible the invisibility of the black man in Black Skins, White Masks, as one of its most persistent preoccupations, where he refers explicitly to the evasions of the French cultural milieu in which he writes. This invisibility is particularly addressed in the chapter, ‘The Fact of Blackness’, in which Fanon considers not only the problems of negritude as a reverse discourse, a discourse dependent on that which it opposes, but also how a French Marxist discourse, typified by Sartre, serves to posit an African resistance to colonialism as but a phase in a universal class struggle in which ‘the negro’ comes to disappear. Fanon cites Sartre, from Orphée Noir (although I cut):

And undoubtedly it is no coincidence that the most ardent poets of negritude are at the same time militant Marxists … In fact: negritude appears as the minor term of a dialectical progression … the position of negritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity … This negritude is the root of its own destruction, it is a transition and not a conclusion, a means and not an ultimate end.⁸

Fanon goes on to dismiss Sartre as ‘that born Hegelian’ and to state: ‘Still in terms of consciousness, black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. I am not a potentiality of something … My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as lack. It is.’⁹

What is possibly at stake in this is both a French Republican understanding of citizenship and a Hegelian concept of the dialectics of the modern liberal state and of history. As regards the former, it is something of a commonplace that French colonial policy posits the colonised as citizens of France, where the realities of inequality conflict with the promise of equality and where the universalising of a dominant culture officially promotes a certain complex invisibility of the different experiences of a shared history. Tzvetan Todorov, himself of Bulgarian origin, is one who attempts to address the issue. For instance, in ‘The Co-Existence of Cultures’ he writes:

What does republican signify in this context? The fact that all individuals, regardless of their cultural allegiances are considered to be citizens with equal rights … The advantage of this solution lies in the fact that all members of society are participants in a culture which brings them closer and unites them; all have access to the same identity … But the disadvantage is clear for the majority is bound to be favoured over the minority.¹⁰

In other words, there may be access to the same identity but there is not the same or equal access to this equality of identity, and it is this which tends to be obscured.

When Fanon speaks of the fact of blackness, he could be seen as, among other things, confronting the distrust or avoidance of empiricism within the European intellectual traditions that he encounters. In the next chapter, we will look at how Hegel turns his back on the facts of Africa. All that will be said at this stage is that Sartre’s envisioning of the disappearance of the negro seems to owe itself, as part of a Marxist inheritance, to Hegel’s concept of history in which Africans become part of history on condition that they cease to be Africans. What, far more broadly, also gives pause for thought is the considerable influence of Hegel’s thought on twentieth-century French intellectual culture, which cannot be traced here. For the purposes of this chapter, Lacan’s re-presentation of Freud may be said to have its Hegelian inflections, whilst Derrida speaks of the ‘colonialisms and neo-colonialisms’ of Hegel’s thought, and this is very aptly put.

Beyond Fanon, there is also the sense of how the experience of ‘loosing Algeria’ constitutes a traumatic experience for the French, thus something hard to speak of, to say nothing of the traumas experienced by Algeria.

I
Clandestine Antigones

And now where was she? How did she get here?

Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy: Reflections of a Black-Eyed Squint

This section will concern itself with both colonial genealogies and occult or illegitimate inheritances in the production of knowledge, especially knowledge not usually identified in terms of colonial or post-colonial discourse.

Western knowledge is not usually referred to as colonial knowledge, which could be a question of experience. In La jeune née, Hélène Cixous writes: ‘I learnt everything from that first spectacle.’¹¹ There would be that learning or knowledge, and there would also be the question of imported textbooks, intellectual transferences and migration to the centres of learning in the Western world in order, it would seem, to have greater proximity to the masters, experts, sources.Once there, on the spot, so to speak, education and knowledge might not appear so visibly and divisibly labelled under ‘import’ or ‘export’. On its ‘home ground’, intellectual and academic knowledge is not often thought of as colonial knowledge: it is more common to qualify it as ‘Western thought’. Speaking with reference to this thought we say ‘we say’ rather than ‘they say’, and this ‘we say’ is taken to refer more to ‘intellectual affiliations’ than to particular historical and geographical locations. In this ‘we say’, it is possible to function as one who passes (exams, and so on) and passes for being a Western intellectual of the first world. Out of this form of immigrancy, deconstructive possibilities arise, such as:‘If I imperceptibly infiltrate you, you are not who you think you are; I am not who you think I am’. Derrida’s (and the nomination is unavoidable here) deconstruction (that assumed name), with its sensitivity to the problematics of belonging, with its attentiveness to the problematics of borders and margins, its attentiveness to the inside/outside, to the trace and the crypt, with its theory of the parasite virus, the foreign body, and so on, could be received (although not necessarily) as a thinking of (im)migrancy, in a manner of speaking. Ho...