Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Pos tc ol on i a l L i t e r at u r e a n d t h e
I m pac t of L i t e r ac y
Pos tcolon i a l
L i t e r at u r e a n d t h e
I m pac t of L i t e r ac y
Reading and Writing in African and Caribbean Fiction
N e i l t e n Kort e n a a r
c a mbr idge u ni v er sit y pr e ss
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, So Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge c b 2 8r u, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title:www.cambridge.org/9781107008670
Neil ten Kortenaar 2011
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2011
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Kortenaar, Neil ten.
Postcolonial literature and the impact of literacy : reading and writing in African
and Caribbean fiction / Neil ten Kortenaar.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-00867-0 (hardback)
1.Commonwealth fiction (English)History and criticism. 2.Literacy in
literature. 3.African fiction (English)History and criticism. 4.Caribbean fiction
(English)History and criticism. 5. Postcolonialism in literature.I.Title.
p r 9080.5.k 67 2011
823.90996dc22
2011008032
i s b n 978-1-107-00867-0 hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in
this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
Acknowledgements
page viii
1 Introduction
22
63
107
163
187
Notes
Bibliography
Index
193
208
220
vii
Acknowledgements
viii
Ch apter 1
Introduction
Introduction
a z u azu
m u mu (191)
Introduction
the novel are closer to Ugoyes listeners, who are also enjoying a narrative,
than they are to Oduche.
The story Ugoye tells and the words Oduche reads are both in Igbo
(not, however, as we shall see, the same Igbo), but the traditional tale has
been translated for the English-language reader while the page of writing
is left untranslated because reading lessons are language-specific in a way
that stories do not have to be. Ugoyes tale, like everything said by the
Igbo characters in Achebes English-language novel, appears transparent
and accessible to readers. The words that Oduche contemplates, however, cannot be translated because they are random and without context,
intended not to convey meaning but to teach the letters of the alphabet.
Although Achebes readers see the same letters as Oduche, we are not
doing what he is doing. He is not reading words but learning to read
them. We imagine him sounding out or mouthing the letters in order
to hear how the sounds they represent make words. Practised readers do
not hear the sounds represented by phonemes but see words as wholes.
We do not read letter by letter and often not even word by word but in
larger units.
Because his novel is a narrative like Ugoyes, Achebe insists on the continuity between his own writing and oral story-telling. The writers claim
to a relation to oral tradition is a familiar move in African literature:the
first two generations of African novelists and poets regularly sought to
establish such continuities by writing down oral traditions or by creating
styles that reflected qualities of the oral tradition. The rubrics of Lopold
Sdar Senghors poems indicate that they are to be accompanied by the
kora or the balafong, that is, by music. Achebes historical novels Things
Fall Apart and Arrow of God feature a proverb-laden style that echoes Igbo
oratory and traditional narrative.
The logo of the Clairafrique chain of bookstores in Senegal (Figure 1)
graphically expresses this notion that books perform the functions associated with oral culture and that African writers and literary critics are the
equivalent of town criers, griots or praise singers, and traditional singers
of tales. The logo features a drummer singing towards the sky against
the background of a book as tall as himself. The upright book and its
rounded spine echo the cylindrical and tapered shape of his drum. The
drummer, wearing no visible clothes, is clearly a figure of tradition rather
than, say, of contemporary mbalax music.
Even as African writers insist on their continuity with indigenous
oral traditions, however, they implicate themselves in an activity (writing) defined as non-African. Mamouss Diagnes magisterial Critique
Introduction
Introduction
de la raison orale, a scrupulous and authoritative investigation into traditional oral genres, has a subtitle, Les Pratiques discursives en Afrique noire,
which presumes that black African discursive practices are essentially
oral. African culture, Diagne writes, owes its distinctiveness to the conditions of its manufacture, just as European philosophical and scientific
culture derives from the nature of writing. Yet the author photograph on
the covers of his books shows Diagnes head against a wall of bookshelves
stocked with books of uniform height and varied colours. This is a fitting self-representation for the Senegalese scholar whose weighty tome is
a model of literary erudition with footnotes on every page and a comprehensive bibliography.
Every instance of oral discourse that Diagne analyses is quoted from a
book. The irony is readily explained:the task of recuperating the oral falls
to writers who attended school and were inspired by the literature they
encountered there to forge literary and scholarly traditions of their own.
In this sense then, there is no contradiction when Diagne writes about
oral reason, for orality was created as a subject matter worthy of academic
study by a literate tradition of scholarship. The question of orality arises
because of literacy; better said, the nature of orality is only a question for
literacy. That, at least, is the argument of Paulin Hountondji in Sur la
philosophie africaine.
A similar irony exists in Arrow of God. Achebe has proclaimed that he
would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past)
did no more than teach my readers that their past with all its imperfections was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans
acting on Gods behalf delivered them.5 There is an implied gulf between
the Igbo characters in Arrow of God, who have no need to learn that lesson, and Nigerian readers of the novel, who, precisely because they can
read English and have been exposed to a painful decentring of the world,
need to be healed of the wound their reading has caused. Put another
way:Achebes writing is intended to remind Africans of what their training in reading has made them forget. The novel marks its great distance
from Umuaro even as it seeks to recuperate precolonial Igboland for
Nigerian readers.
Although Achebes readers can understand Ugoyes story as they cannot understand the words in Oduches primer, we are nonetheless aligned
with Oduches point of view by virtue of the fact that we have before us
the very letters that he reads and, when reading, our upper bodies are
likely to be in the same physical disposition as his:heads down, eyes moving across the marks on a white surface held to the light. Furthermore,
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
heightened powers to orality. Her novel Myal, set in Jamaica in the second
decade of the twentieth century, tells the story of the coming of print literacy as a potential spiritual disaster averted by the spirit guardians of the
communitys oral memory. In Myal orality does more than survive the
transformation of the world by print literacy: as a medium orality sees
around and contains literacy, in the way that elsewhere literacy has always
claimed to identify and know orality.
The four novels by Achebe, Soyinka, Naipaul, and Brodber, recreating the coming of literacy before the births of the authors themselves,
together constitute a synoptic history of literacy in Africa and the West
Indies in the first half of the twentieth century, the same period covered
by the cultural historians Barber, Peterson, and Newell.
Canonical fiction in English (and French) from Africa and the
Caribbean, my object of study, is, however, largely a product of the
second half of the twentieth century, of the decade before and the decades since the wave of national independences that began with Ghana in
1957. Literacy was already well established in Africa and the West Indies
when the writers I examine were born. Conscious of their status as literary pioneers, Achebe, Soyinka, and Naipaul have all felt compelled to
seek the origins of their own practice of writing and to revisit the moment
when history, in the specific sense of a written record of the past, became
conceivable.
Because literacy created a new category of disadvantage called illiteracy, the critical distance from the immediate world that the written text
affords also gave rise to an alienation from the community. And when
writing objectifies language, the colonized have often found themselves
fixed on paper in powerful, pernicious ways. While Soyinka and Naipaul
celebrate the capacity of their writing to restore the past, Brodber regards
literacy as a kind of demonic spirit possession that alienates people from
their true selves and creates haunting shadow selves on paper.
Born a decade after the fathers of African and West Indian literature
and started upon a writing career significantly later, Brodber manifests
an ironic ambivalence to writing on paper. That ambivalence is shared by
postcolonial writers of the subsequent generations, as the values of modernity and nationhood that the first colonial readers associated with literacy come to seem like ironic mockery. The ambivalence has been strongest
where the possession of literacy skills was linked to racial divisions, as
in the West Indies or the white-supremacist settler colonies of Southern
Africa. In Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe), for instance, where writing on
paper was not just a metonym of modernity but also a direct tool of the
Introduction
totalitarian racist state, the connotations of reading and writing are more
bitter than anything encountered in West Africa. In Zimbabwean literature there is less optimism about literacy than in Soyinka but also less
emphasis on continuity with oral tradition, because of the peculiar dangers that the affirmation of tradition posed in a racist state that enforced
fixed notions of cultural essence. The fiction of Dambudzo Marechera, set
in the 1960s and 1970s in Rhodesia, depicts print literacys great capacity
for violence without upholding orality as an alternative value. Marecheras
is the first narrative considered here written in the first person, and as I
will show, the division that writing fosters between the self of the writer/
reader and the autonomous first-person pronoun written on paper became
charged in Southern Africa with the painful alienation suffered by black
Africans subject to state racism. As far as Marechera is concerned, the
only new consciousness fostered by literacy and literary ambitions is a bitter awareness that the world has been written by others. He experiences
writing on paper as a House of Hunger or a prison-house to which there
is no outside.
My study concludes by briefly looking at the Senegalese novelist
Boubacar Boris Diops Le Cavalier et son ombre, a pessimistic allegory of
the condition of the African writer in contemporary Africa, and at The
Farming of Bones by Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat, a novel that
directly addresses a question presumed by the historical novels of Achebe,
Soyinka, Naipaul, and Brodber:how does writing on paper provide access
to the past and to the dead? Danticats novel resurrects the 1930s and the
victims of the great massacre of Haitian cane workers in the neighbouring Dominican Republic.
Because I discuss the seven novels roughly in order of publication, as
well as in chronological order of when they are set, they allow me to tell
two parallel stories:a longside the history of the spread of writing on paper
and its changing significance I tell a literary history of Africa and the West
Indies. The first colonial literates, like Mr Biswas or Akinyode Soditan,
Soyinkas protagonist, were readers rather than writers. Their sons, among
whom were the founders of African and West Indian literature, came of
age and began their writing careers just as their countries became independent. In a later time of disillusionment, not just with decolonization
but also with the power of literature, the next generations relationship to
writing is more fraught with irony and even despair than their predecessors. The publishing careers of Brodber, Marechera, and Diop have been
more irregular than Achebe, Soyinka, or Naipauls Brodber and Diop
were late starting to write fiction and Marechera died of AIDS at the age
10
Introduction
11
sound we have built the shape and meaning of Western man.7 He meant
that alphabetic literacy, because it makes people more aware of language
as language, increases self-consciousness and changes the subjects relation to the world. When we consider Oduche mouthing the words in
his primer, however, we can turn McLuhans statement around to mean
something less absolute and totalizing:the meaningless sign linked to the
meaningless sound has become, at least in Southeastern Nigeria in the
1920s, the sign of the young African males participation in the modern
world introduced by the colonizers.
In McLuhans phrase the syntax is suspect and the logic circular. When
he says, we have built the shape and meaning of Western man, who does
the building? Western man is both the product of literacy and credited
with inventing literacy. As Deborah Brandt writes, What literacy makes
possible (that is, texts and meaningless signs) is taken as a model for what
makes literacy possible.8 How can we separate what writing does to our
consciousness from the meaning our consciousness attributes to writing? After all, Culture insinuates itself within technology at the same
time that technology infiltrates culture.9 It is tempting to say that it is
McLuhan, as the author of the aphorism, who has built the shape and
meaning of Western man.
As Bertrand Russell pointed out, we have no means of deciding
whether writing or speech is the older form of human expression.10 All
peoples everywhere have used and use both eyes and ears; there is no culture that does not involve both oral and written traditions,11 no society
that does not communicate with speech, and almost certainly no society without graphic marks used for communication. Alphabetic writing, however, and phonetic writing in general, differ from other graphic
forms of expression because their marks represent aspects of speech. By its
nature, therefore, alphabetic writing proclaims a temporal order whereby
writing succeeds speech.
Jeffrey Kittay writes, the different media do use each other, act as
inversions of each other, supplement and cede to each other. And there
is always, to a certain extent, a translatability from one to the other, that
is, speech can be transcribed and read, and writing can be put in quotes
and recited.12 Nevertheless, the sense of unilinear direction is very strong.
Not only did phonetic writing arise after speech historically, but people
become readers and writers only after they learn to speak. (Of course,
literacy is only learned after speech when education is in the learners
mother tongue. When the language of writing, whether English, French,
Arabic, or a standardized African language, is distinct from the learners
12
Introduction
Starting in the 1960s, McLuhan, Jack Goody, Ian Watt, Walter Ong,
and Eric Havelock, from disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, anthropology, classics, and media studies, independently and together developed
the thesis that the medium of communication shapes culture and consciousness. What has come to be known as the literacy hypothesis, the
autonomous model of literacy,15 or strong-text literacy16 propagated the
notion of a divide between orality and literacy. According to the literacy
thesis, the development of alphabetic writing and ancillary inventions such
as the vowels of the Greek alphabet (Havelock), the codex or book, spaces
between written words (Saenger), and the printing press (Eisenstein), are
responsible for a fundamental alteration in human relations, subjectivity,
and even consciousness by making people more aware of the nature of
language.17 Alphabetic literacy or print have been credited with inspiring
or at least making possible monotheism, the law, large states with their
bureaucracy, Greek philosophy, history, nationalism, democracy, secularism, science, the hierarchical division of mind and body, and the very
concept of the person. The contradictions involved here (literacy enables
monotheism and secularism, imperial bureaucracy and democracy) are
held to be a historical condition rather than a flaw in the thesis.
13
14
Introduction
Coming from another angle, Jacques Derrida has also critiqued the notion
that speech precedes writing and insists that the two are but versions of
the same phenomenon, language, equally far from (and equally close
to) meaning. Speech, no less than writing, is liable to misinterpretation,
ambiguity, and appropriation by another person, and so, by the terms of
the binary, there is no linguistic sign before writing23 and all societies
practice writing in general.24 In short, Derrida does away with orality.
All of his work is an extended mediation on what it means to write. His
imagery, of margins, folds, signatures, traces, erasure, hors-textes or plate
illustrations, hyphens, the recto and verso, archives, and the sans-papiers
or refugee, all derives from the experience of paper, and he writes, I have
the impression (the impression! what a word, already) that I have never
any other subject:basically, paper, paper, paper.25
As often as the literacy thesis has been exorcised, however, the binary of orality and literacy reappears, not least among those characterized
as belonging to oral cultures. Despite its deconstruction at the hands of
Derrida, the literacy thesis itself continues to thrive among posthumanists like Friedrich Kittler or Brian Rotman, who celebrate the imminent
demise of the alphabetic body. And the literacy thesis holds particular
sway in discussions of African and New World indigenous cultures, and
of the African diaspora. As we have seen, the distinction between orality and literacy is alive and well in Africa, as is opposition to the binary. Paulin Hountondji suggests that logocentrism, the privileging of
supposedly unmediated orality over the mediation of text, is not just
European, as Derrida has it, but a universal prejudice, deriving from the
exigencies of social life in general.26 Hountondji created controversy by
15
16
Introduction
of the roman alphabet. More significantly, Battestini also risks conceding that literacy is more important than orality and perhaps implicitly
agreeing that empires with literacy have been more important in history
than stateless oral societies. Konrad Tuchscherer, who also argues against
the myth of Africa as a historically illiterate continent and shows
that Africa has contributed to the world many rich traditions of writing
and graphic symbolism, is forced by the nature of his argument to say,
Perhaps humankinds greatest early achievement was the invention of the
written word, the result of which forever transformed communication
and record-keeping, altered the organization of societies, and changed
the nature of state administration.31 Tuchscherer wants to say Africa has
always had writing, but he also says writing transformed society. So there
must have been a time without writing, and there may have been places
without writing, perhaps even many such places. If so, that time and those
places are implicitly backward and outside history. The terrible and unfair
distinction between orality and writing returns in a surreptitious form.
On the one hand, Tuchscherer argues that in Egypt a new technology
would change the course of humanity forever;32 on the other hand, long
before the emergence of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Africa had a wealth and
diversity of graphic and plastic symbols that recorded and communicated
information without being systematically related to language.33 Writing
was new, but there has always been writing. The argument is circular.
The study of African verbal culture has thus produced two contrasting versions of the literacy hypothesis:one that sees Africa as primarily
oral and claims that orality is as valuable as indeed more valuable or at
least more authentic than literacy; and the other that insists that Africa
has always had literacy but that it has gone unrecognized. Both tend to
hypostasize Africa and, by extension, Europe as monolithic, unchanging
entities always mutually opposed. In the pages that follow I eschew the
literacy thesis, the notion that literacy and orality are opposites that determine behaviour and identity in predictable ways. I also assume that whatever Africans produce is equally African. The writers I examine do not
display a common attitude to print literacy, nor do the following chapters
champion just one way of regarding literacy. There are, however, several
reasons why the literacy and orality theses remain relevant.
The literacy thesis cannot be ignored because it has been so much a
part of the words and ideas applied to Africa by Europeans and Africans
alike. If mere ideology, it is nevertheless powerful ideology. It has shaped
the experience and the imaginations of the novelists I consider here.
Although it is neither possible nor desirable to characterize orality and
17
literacy in absolute terms, novelists have had to think deeply about the
opposition and have used it to create meaning and to produce genuine
insight.
The term literacy works the same way that Finnegan says the term
orality does:as a slogan that allows scholars to compare their work and
that African writers have invoked in order to imagine the political and
social forces that have made them.34 The term literacy brings certain
things into focus, even as it charges everything with political significance,
and organizes that significance into meaningful patterns. For instance,
when studying writing practices among Mali peasants, Assatou MbodjPouye found Goodys work useful for highlighting particular aspects of
literacy, such as the making of lists or recipes that might otherwise escape
the eye of a researcher as too familiar or, conversely, as not indigenous.35
Indeed, Goody is treated with more respect by African scholars than by
British or American ones and is quoted approvingly by both Diagne and
Hountondji.
In explicit opposition to the literacy thesis, Brian Street launched the
study of literacies (plural), and in particular of local literacies, meaning
both different forms of communication that might qualify as literacy and
different attitudes to printed text on paper. The literacy thesis remains
relevant, however, because local literacies cannot be understood in isolation. Street, Warner, and Niko Besnier, who all analyse particular historical or geographical literacies, sometimes imply a corollary of the literacy
thesis: that wherever literacy and non-literacy meet, literacy has been
accorded special significance. Neither literacy nor orality has meaning
independent of the other. The two are best understood therefore not in
terms of each other but as functions of local literacyorality systems that
must be compared to other literacyorality systems. If, as Hountondji
says, logocentrism is universal, it is also true that logocentrism takes a
different form in Africa than in Europe, and it takes many forms within
Africa. We must study local logocentrisms.
L i t e r ac y a n d l i t e r at u r e
How then to discuss configurations of literacyorality while eschewing
the too easily conflated binaries of writing and speech, Europe and Africa,
modern and traditional? One way to prevent binaries from collapsing into
a single all-powerful binary is to imagine the terms of the binaries as the
poles defining a spectrum. Examples of verbal communication may be
located anywhere along a continuum, closer to or farther from the two
18
Introduction
poles. Another way is to imagine the several binaries as axes that intersect
rather than parallel each other. Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher, for
instance, consider all verbal communication on two axes, one axis whose
poles are different media, that is, speech and writing, and the other that
records the relative distance between speaker/writer and listener/reader,
whether they are proximate or distant, present or absent.36 For instance,
face-to-face spoken interaction has more in common with a personal letter than either has with legal formulae, which are, in turn, potentially
closer to formal ritual.
Maurice Bloch writes, Literacy can be used (or not used) in so many
different ways that the technology it offers, taken on its own, probably
has no implications at all.37 That does not mean literacy should not be
studied, but that it should not be viewed as a monolithic phenomenon
equivalent to the European Enlightenment. Orality is not one single thing
either. Private conversations on the telephone are very different from political oratory, and swearing differs from preaching. Ruth Finnegan warns
against the temptation to presume that the term must surely correspond
to one concrete and single phenomenon just because it is used that way
by scholars.38
Myron Tuman has pried the terms literacy and orality away from writing and speech in order to make a distinction between ordinary conversations, context-dependent and limited to a known community, and
texts that come from the past or from elsewhere. The former, he argues,
confirm and reinforce the common understanding of social relations; the
latter challenge the status quo by offering alternative modes of thinking
and doing. Says Tuman, the crucial distinction is now between language
used as part of the daily interpersonal relations and language used to
establish an identity of meaning independent of such social interaction.
The former is largely the domain of speech and the latter the domain of
writing, although not exclusively.39
Oral communication could also be literacy in Tumans particular
sense of language used to create meanings that are valuable to others
independent of either immediate context or immediate intention,40 but
of course, his use of the word literacy suggests that writing is particularly suited to freeing language from context this way. We need another
word, other than literacy and other than literature, to refer to words,
written or oral, that have been removed from the flow of ordinary discourse and consciously heightened by genre and context. Karin Barber,
the great scholar of African culture oral and written, reserves the word
text for items of discourse that are somehow distinguished from ordinary
19
20
Introduction
Novels are useful for studying literacy because Texts are not merely outcomes of reading and writing processes; they are deeply about those processes. Thus the first requirement for understanding texts is understanding
that they refer to what people do with them.44 Written literary texts, like
all texts, are necessarily about how they were produced and how they are
meant to be received.
It is not surprising that novelists in particular should be fascinated
both by the potential of autonomous text and by the community of
writer and readers that texts create. This study of literacy differs therefore from those of historians, anthropologists, and sociologists in that
it does not look at popular or ordinary literacy but only at fiction in
English and French that can be classified as literature. Two of the
authors I look at have won Nobel prizes. All are studied at universities
around the world.
A potential problem with studying high literature is the risk of identifying the idea of literacy with the production and enjoyment of novels.
The word literature itself can mean either all things that are written or
verbal culture reserved for special functions and accorded a special prestige. Roy Harris notes the curious restriction of the term writing and the
verb write in common parlance to apply to the production of literary
compositions.45 The assumption is that The writer is one whose works
deserve to be circulated and preserved for posterity:and only writing can
ensure this.46 One result of this confusion is that people without writing
are assumed not to have literature in the sense of formal verbal culture
valued for its power, its beauty, or its social significance. But, as we have
seen, all cultures produce texts.
Marxists and cultural studies theorists solve this confusion by refusing
the hierarchies implied by the notions of literature and high culture
and treating all verbal discourse as the same. Their work is invaluable
for understanding how meaning is created, negotiated, subverted, and
resisted. My study, however, does not consider the texts discussed here as
physical objects or consumer goods, nor do I survey reading habits and
critical reception. I look at texts of a particular kind, that is, novels. My
assumption is that the prolonged and intensive investment of time and
energy, and the committed engagement with a genre, a language, and a
literary tradition in the pursuit of the ambition of being worthy of being
read and preserved can produce texts that, in turn, yield critical insights
to literary critics as valuable as the quantitative studies of sociologists,
anthropologists, and historians of the book. Because, as mentioned above,
the history of literacy cannot be separated from the history of attitudes to
21
Ch apter 2
23
by substituting sounds for letters.5 One pedagogue of the time wrote that
One must learn speaking from women, writing from men.6 The gendered
tasks were regarded as complementary:when European mothers taught
their sons to read, they thought of themselves as preparing future citizens
who would take their rightful place in the nation of men.
George Douglas Hazzledines The White Man in Nigeria, a 1904 imperialist text quoted several times without attribution in Arrow of God, imagined that young British boys would read the histories of Drake, Nelson,
Clive, and Mungo Park and be moved to repeat their heroic exploits.
Hazzledine congratulated British mothers on understanding their role
and not drawing their sons with nervous grip back to the fireside of boyhood, back into the home circle it is our greatest pride that they do
albeit tearfully send us fearless and erect, to lead the backward races
into line.7 Hazzledine, who dedicates his book to his own mother who
let me go, exhorts the young would-be imperialist to leave mother and
childhood behind in order to become a man who can rule over other men
supposed never to have left childhood.
The Senegalese novelist Boubacar Boris Diops childhood experience
of stories was gendered much as Kittler says the German childs was:his
mother told him traditional stories at night, while by day he read in
the extensive personal library of his father, a university administrator.8
The great difference is that, whereas nineteenth-century European and
American mothers read stories to their children, twentieth-century
African mothers tell stories. The African mothers voice echoes in the
minds of her adult children not when the latter read books but whenever they use or hear proverbs alluding to folktales. Indeed, in the bulk
of African literature, mothers cannot read, and in order to learn to
read, boys must leave home. The implication is that when men read,
they do not hear their mothers voices but miss those voices. Whereas
in nineteenth-century Europe and America the entry of the boy child
into adult literacy could feel like a natural and prepared-for step, the
acquisition of literacy in Africa has often felt like a break with the
mother.
Ng g wa Thiongos childhood memoir, Dreams in a Time of War,
which features a frontispiece photograph of his mother, concludes with
the young Ng g , like so many protagonists of African autobiographies and Bildungsromane, leaving by train to go to high school. When he
reads the anticipated sign W E L C OM E TO A L L I A NC E H IGH
SC HO OL, he hears his mothers voice speaking to him, but he does
not imagine her reading the English words but asking him if this is the
24
best he can do.9 He then silently renews the pact he once made with
her to pursue schooling and its dream of an alternative future. Ng g
attributes his ability to read and his desire to write to his mothers ambitions:This ability to escape into a world of magic is worth my having
gone to school. Thank you, Mother, thank you.10 The son inherits from
the mother what is not hers to give and fulfils her dream by leaving her
behind.
In a common irony, male African writers commemorate the rupture
wrought by literacy by dedicating their books to their non-literate mothers. Sembne Ousmanes first novel, Le Docker noir, is dedicated to his
mother although she cannot read: Just knowing that she will run her
hands over it is enough to make me happy.11 In the first chapter, the
protagonists mother ponders a photograph of her son on the front page
of a newspaper, but the words meant nothing to her for she could not
decipher them.12 Other Africans dedicate to their mother books that tell
the story of their journey away from her, including Camara Laye, whose
1953 autobiography is inscribed to you who carried me on your back, you
who nursed me, you who steered my first steps, you who first opened my
eyes to the wonders of the earth,13 Peter Abrahams, Ezekiel Mphahlele,
and the philosopher Paulin Hountondji. Writing by African men consistently measures its distance from the mother and its capacity to incorporate her in a medium from which she is excluded.
In the hearth scene in Arrow of God Oduches isolation, his monopoly of the light of the taper, and his recitation of mysterious words make
manifest to his family his privileged access to private sources of knowledge and authority. The marks that the young African is learning to
decode, because he can decode them, set him apart, and they carry meaning even if they signify nothing. Diop says every African adolescent learns
that there is a relation of cause to effect between an individuals mastery
of writing and the importance of his social position.14 Oduche is further
distinguished from his family by his loin-cloth of striped towelling and
white singlet, worn only to church and school (123). Throughout Africa,
books and school clothes have been markers of a new self and new social
aspirations,15 while non-literacy is frequently associated with a new definition of nakedness.16
Learning to read, however, comes at a price. Writing implies the
acceptance, a priori, of the life of a recluse in a society where the force of
social ties is such that every form of individual emancipation is frowned
upon.17 Diop recalls the alphabet book that he learned from with adult
horror:
25
How sinister it was, this schoolbook! In reality it noiselessly marked the defeat
of the wind. What I mean is that, between the greasy walls of the classroom, the
written text separated me from the fraternal rumour of the world. In order to
discover my identity, I no longer lifted my head and listened for the harmattan.
From now on I had to lower my eyes and try to seize reality through the inert
figures of the letters, too innocent not to be deeply perverse.18
Reading, in other words, was thought to create an interior space that the
reader would fill with a new and private self, and writing by these new
literate selves would in turn produce a public culture on the scale of the
nation.
The words in Oduches primer are fixed, detached from all context, and
organized in columns. So, too, school removed students from their homes
26
and placed them at individual desks facing the flat surfaces of chalkboards and texts of instruction and individual assessment.24 The neat column of interchangeable, essentially meaningless units that Oduche reads
imitates the rows of the pupils. As part of the new methods of discipline intended to establish a new kind of individual and new social relations among individuals, Barber writes that mission schools throughout
anglophone Africa insisted on establishing rectangular schoolrooms,
with regular front-facing rows of forms which positioned the children as
equivalent and attentive units before the instructor.25
Oduche monopolizes the light from the taper to practise his reading.
Under the Christian influence, literacy in Africa is commonly associated
with light and the absence of books with darkness. In Achebes earlier
novel No Longer at Ease, the people of Umuofia regard the study overseas by one of their sons as the fulfilment of the words of the prophet
Isaiah: The people which sat in darkness / Saw a great light, / And to
them which sat in the region / and shadow of death / To them did light
spring up.26 Ng g s mother used to tell him that Knowledge, meaning book learning, is our light,27 and her son reports that The school
has opened my eyes. When later in church I hear the words I was blind
and now I see, from the hymn Amazing Grace, I remember Kamandra
School, and the day I learned to read.28 Ezekiel Mphahlele remembers
how he hated school at first and would much rather have reveled in the
sun, the music of the birds, a plunge into a cool stream.29 By Standard Six,
however, he felt as if a great light of dawn had flashed into me:What
had earlier on been a broad and obtuse shaft of light, was narrowing,
sharpening and finding a point of focus.30 In Saint Monsieur Baly, a novel
by the Guinean Williams Sassine, teaching is described as plunging the
headlights of instruction in the furthest nooks and crannies of peoples
intelligence!31 Even as the eponymous hero is dying, he has a dream in
which he tells students, you dont have the right to leave the smallest
corner of your intelligence in darkness. Unite and build schools everywhere:transform the blackened walls of your kitchens into blackboards,
and you will awaken the God who lives in every black man.32 Prominent
in the documents promulgating the new alphabet of Nko, a Muslim
Afrocentric project designed by Souleymane Kant in 1949 to accommodate the Malink language, is a hurricane lamp, symbolic of the light that
the alphabet casts on the darkness of ignorance.33
The association of books with light is, of course, not arbitrary:words
on the page call out for light, as Alberto Manguel notes,34 and at night
they demand artificial light. On the other hand, Darkness promotes
speech, because There is something about sitting outside in the dark that
27
seems conducive to unfettered conversation.35 African readers often vividly recall the light they read by. Nighttime frustrates me because I read
by the light of an unreliable and coverless kerosene lantern, says Ng g :36
Some days we were without paraffin for the lamp. I had to read by firelight.
Dry cornstalks could produce sudden bright flames but the flames also died as
quickly. One had to keep on feeding the flames. It was a race to read as much
as one could within the span of one set of flames. It strained my eyes but I got
used to it.37
Sassines Monsieur Baly feels just how long he has been working and how
tired he is when the kerosene in his lamp runs low and only the smallest
flame is left.38 The Pastor in One Man, One Wife by T. M. Aluko also sees
in the struggle of a kerosene lamp to remain lit a physical embodiment of
his spiritual condition.39
When Diop recalls an alphabet book with flaming letters,40 the letters are probably aflame in his memory because they were read by the
shimmering light of a candle or hurricane lamp. The flaming letters take
on a terrifying reality in Simone Schwarz-Barts novel Pluie et vent sur
Tlume miracle, set in Guadeloupe. Ten-year-old twin sisters, having just
started school, are studying les petites lettres together, when one accuses
the other of hogging the light from the oil lamp. You want it, take it,
exclaims the other and, in her rage, she knocks over and shatters the lamp,
spilling burning oil on her sister, who runs wildly from the house, a living torch.41 Assia Djebar, the Algerian writer, describes the French language that she writes in as the tunic of Nessus from Greek mythology:it
envelops her as close as her own skin and it burns.42
The opposite of the flame of literacy is not darkness but Diops harmattan. A wind often blows through the rooms of readers in African literature, extinguishing lamps, rifling through pages, and strewing papers on
the floor. In Sassines novel Wirriyamu, a wind filled with demons and the
barking of dogs blows out both the oil lamp by which a man reads the Bible
and the candle by whose light a priest writes a sermon.43 Another wind,
bearing the villages cries and moans of pain, leafs through a book called
Mdecine chez soi, making the pages clap until it is defeated by the pages
weight.44 As we shall see, this wind also blows through Arrow of God.
T h e p y t hon i n a b ox
The book that Oduche reads from is identified as Azu Ndu, the popular
name for Akwukw Ogugu nke Izizi (First Reading Book), an Igbo primer written by the Reverend T. J. Dennis, published by the Society for
28
29
30
other words, the trope of the talking book is a colonial myth. There was
never an absolute first encounter with writing.
The true wonder of the talking book is the extent to which it is
repeated, translated, misread, displaced.50 The first encounter with writing happens again and again. Gates points out that, when Olaudah
Equiano, in his account of his travels as an eighteenth-century African
on European ships, relates how he talked to a book and put it to his ear
in hopes that it would answer, he is repeating a story already told by
another African, James Gronniosaw.51 And Jean-Loup Amselle points out
that, if Gronniosaw was indeed from Bornu as he declared, it is impossible to imagine that he had never seen a marabout reading the Quran.52
The scene in which Gronniosaw sees his master look at a book and move
his lips, the locus classicus of the talking book, may have origins in a much
older scene: the moment in the Confessions when Augustine, the North
African, marvels at his teacher Ambrose, who can read without moving
his lips or uttering a sound.
In modern times, the scene of the talking book comes endowed with
racialized connotations of African primitiveness and of European civilization. Jack Goody sees in Equiano marvelling before the talking book an
image of oral man,53 but Michael Harbsmeier disputes this, pointing out
that it is always a literate self who stages the scene of the talking book.
Equiano actually points in another direction:towards what writing does
to oral man: inventing him, creating him, producing him, describing
him, writing about him in order to control him, in order to make him
acknowledge his boundless debt to those who have given him his character, his name and his freedom, an image, that is, in which he could recognize himself.54 The meaning of non-literacy is created by literacy. Patricia
Seed reports that the possession of literacy does not distinguish civilized
beings from barbarians (or modern primitives), but it did differentiate
European ruling elites from their non-literate countrymen. Marvelling
was the response literate European elites expected from non-literate peoples well-acquainted with the belief in the marvellous supremacy of alphabetic writing.55 Whenever the scene of the talking book occurs in colonial
writing, it reinforces the superiority of those who have writing over those
who supposedly do not.
The talking book also occurs regularly, and more ironically, when the
colonized imagine the moment of encounter. In Guaman Poma de Ayalas
seventeenth-century account of the conquest of the Incas, for example,
Atahualpa, the Inca chief, finding that the Bible, which he is told contains the word of God, will not speak to him, flings it to the ground in
31
an act that horrifies the Spanish.56 Guaman Poma, himself a descendant of Incas, adopts the Incas point of view when he satirizes the act of
reading as crazy people talking to inanimate objects.57 The trope figures
prominently in modern African literature as well, where the irony is less
subversive. Alukos One Man, One Wife refers to the miracle of writing,
which can report what someone else has said.58 In Andr Brinks A Chain
of Voices, a young black slave, Galant, steals a newspaper from his masters
who do not want him to learn to read, but he cannot break the silence of
the rows of black ants that he is sure are telling wild stories.59 Try as he
will, the newspaper says nothing to him.60 Even where writing on paper
is known, the scene of wonder is repeated. In Seydou Badians Malian
novel Sous lorage, a father boasts that his literate daughter can even read
what has been written by a machine.61 In 1921, the eponymous trickster
hero of Amadou Hampat Bs memoir LEtrange Destin de Wangrin
explains carbon paper to an associate:a paper made with magic dye that
vomits on the sheet below it all that is printed on the page above. But
this magic paper preserves on it all that it has vomited. And that is its
magic. I just have to turn it over and expose it to the light to see the
secrets entrusted to it.62
In No Longer at Ease, set more than three decades after the events of
Arrow of God, Isaac Okonkwo, a long-time Christian convert, explains to
an illiterate kinsman the power of marks on paper in terms of traditional
graphic marks:
Our women made black patterns on their bodies with the juice of the uli tree.
It was beautiful, but it soon faded. If it lasted two market weeks [eight days] it
lasted a long time. But sometimes our elders spoke about uli that never faded,
although no one had ever seen it. We see it today in the writing of the white
man. If you go to the native court and look at the books which clerks wrote
twenty years ago or more, they are still as they wrote them. They do not say
one thing today and another tomorrow, or one thing this year and another next
year. Okoye in the book today cannot become Okonkwo tomorrow. In the Bible
Pilate said:What I have written is written. It is uli that never fades.63
32
guest has been to the house. All such writing, however, is done on the
body, on wood, or on mud walls.
Igbos have always known writing, Isaac Okonkwo affirms, but the writing brought by the colonizers is different. The difference is the medium.
Writing on the body is as dependent on physical presence as speech is.
The message does not circulate independent of the source of the message.
Doors, though more permanent, are even less mobile. In Arrow of God
Clarkes power comes from the paper he writes on, which is not only convenient for organizing information and transportable but, despite appearances, potentially more permanent because more carefully preserved than
speech or doors or bodies.
Bhabha discusses two English books that have made their way far
from England:a Christian Bible found under a tree outside Delhi in 1817
(the Bible translated into Hindi, propagated by Dutch or native catechists, is still, says Bhabha, the English book64) and Towsons Inquiry
into Some Points of Seamanship, which Marlow, in Joseph Conrads Heart
of Darkness, finds while travelling in the Congo. It is the foreign content
of these books that makes them out of place. Chinua Achebe, however,
never finds texts by Europeans about European things as much of a threat
as he does European texts that name and contain Africans. He has written about the harm he finds in European portraits of Africa such as Heart
of Darkness and Joyce Carys Mister Johnson.65
In the final pages of Achebes first novel, Things Fall Apart, occurs
the most famous example of an African majesty upright before a space
much too small for it that will nonetheless contain it. The final word in
that novel belongs to the British District Commissioner who contemplates how to write the events that readers have just learned. Igbo oral
story-tellers, reports Isidore Okpewho, commonly step into the frame of
their tale at the end in order to explain how they came to know about
events, whether they witnessed them themselves or heard about them
from participants.66 At the end of Things Fall Apart a teller for the tale
also steps forward, but this teller will not write the novel that readers
have just finished but an altogether different book called The Pacification
of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, in which the tragedy of the protagonist will figure as a mere paragraph. Major Arthur Glyn Leonard,
whose The Lower Niger and Its Tribes is Achebes model here, describes
several suicides, each in a single paragraph, to illustrate that Africans are
A very excitable, passionate, and quarrelsome race, who will commit
self-murder on the slightest provocation, even when they have been only
abused or chaffed.67
33
34
the page but elided in speech, making the spoken language sound a very
different thing from what it appears in books.69
The difficulty of connecting letters (graphemes) to phonemes and
phonemes to speech is made clear in Ezekiel Mphahleles memory of
reciting spelling lessons in South Africa, in the 1920s. He remembers
how the letter x represented a syllable of its own, even when the language was English:There we were, chanting away the multiplication
tables and word spelling:M-A-T, indicating each letter by clapping of
hands. The teacher bellowed out:F-O-X, fokos; B-O-X, bokos; F-I-X,
fikis, which we echoed while we marveled at the look of the words
on the board and the miraculous sound of them.70 The words aba,
ego, iro, azu, mu in Oduches primer differ from the Igbo words in
the narration proper, such as obi or chi or onwa atuo! (an untranslated
childrens cry meaning the moon has arisen (2)), whose meaning can
be understood from the context. For one thing the words in the primer are not italicized. For another, no one speaks them. They are more
arbitrary and more meaningless even than the sound G OM E , produced when Ezeulu beats his ogene or iron gong (2). Later Ezeulu hears
the church bell of the Christians also ringing G OM E , G OM E ,
G OM E (42). The convergence suggests that English speakers would
represent the sound of Ezeulus ogene as DI N G D O N G or B O N G
or G ON G . Because roman letters only reproduce phonemes, produced by the tongue, lips, and larynx, they have as much trouble capturing the sounds of percussion instruments as they have capturing the
tones of Igbo.
In Umuaro the sounds produced by drums are actually meaningful. A great drummer like Obiozo Ezikolo can use the Ikolo, king of
all drums, to address the six villages of Umuaro by name, to call the
names of important people, or to greet Ulu and the other deities with
their salutation names and habitual praises (69). He does so by reproducing the pattern of tones in spoken Igbo. Such drumming imitates tones,
not phonemes, but it rivals alphabetic writing as a non-spoken means of
representing spoken words and transmitting these representations over a
greater distance than unassisted speech can carry. Igbo drumming fulfils two of the three characteristics of writing identified by Coulmas:its
purpose is to communicate something and this purpose is achieved by
virtue of the [sounds] conventional relation to language. The only aspect
of writing not also true of drumming is that the latter does not involve
artificial graphical marks on a durable surface71 and therefore does not
endure in time the way that writing does.
35
The church bells Ezeulu hears also convey meaning. His youngest son
Nwafo translates what the bells say for his father:Leave your yam, leave
your cocoyam and come to church (42). The bells do not, as roman letters or talking drums do, mediate meaning through speech, but they do
have symbolic meaning:they are a claim to religious authority, as well as
a summons to Christians.
When the British District Officer, Captain Winterbottom, hears Igbo
drumming, he, of course, does not understand them but believes that he
hears something below thought or reason. The distant throb of drums
often keeps him from sleeping (29):no matter where he lay awake at night
in Nigeria the beating of the drums came with the same constancy and
from the same elusive distance. Could it be that the throbbing came from
his own heat-stricken brain? (30). The white man haunted by the talking
drum is the corollary of the trope of African in wonder before the talking
book. The British officer remains uncomprehending in the presence of
the drums, yet convinced that its sound has a magical power to envelop
him as the jungle does.
In sounding out the phonemes represented by letters and running them
together to form words, Oduches reading reverses the operation performed by the missionaries who reduced Igbo to writing. The Reverend
Dennis and his collaborators first broke down the language they encountered in speech into words isolated from syntactical and semantic context, and then broke the words down into phonemes that could, however
approximately, be represented by roman letters. They then reassembled
the letters into clusters they identified as words, and in the case of the
primer Azu Ndu, collected the words into a list of nouns. The intention was to distil the language by removing gesture, tone, and mimesis,
the elements of the body associated with speech. Contemporaries of
Dennis in what is now Zambia described African oral communication
as follows:
It would need a combination of phonograph and kinematograph to reproduce
a tale as it is told here Every muscle of face and body spoke, a swift gesture
often supplying the place of a whole sentence The animals spoke each in its
own tone:the deep rumbling voice of Momba, the ground hornbill, for example,
contrasting vividly with the piping accents of Sulwe, the hare.72
36
his meaning. In speaking he will, in all probability, jerk out his words with a
sublime disregard for such trifles as tense forms or conjunctions.73
Dennis hoped that, by eliminating the reliance on speakers extraordinary powers of gesticulation and insisting instead on tense forms, the
newly written language would not just improve communication among
far-flung Igbos (newly identified as such), but also chasten and discipline
the language.
The analysis and reconstitution of Igbo performed by Denniss team are
a function of all alphabetic writing everywhere and not just by Europeans
in Africa. Sybille Krmer explains that Speaking occurs as a continuum.
Certainly there are pauses in the flow of speech, however these pauses do
not correspond to phonetic and grammatical sub-divisions.74 With writing, however, communication became, for the first time, mere languageuse:
Phonetic writing not only transcribes language, but also analyzes and interprets it at the same time. Breaking down the flow of speech into abstract,
undetectable units that are imperceptible to the senses, produces a scheme, a
cartography, through which the sensory richness of oral speech can be spelled
out in discrete, abstract linguistic signs. Notational visualization makes the form
of language visible.75
37
on the letters of the alphabet which, in turn, are the results of historical
coincidences rather than systematic analysis.80
Oduches list of Igbo words transcribed into the roman alphabet
reduces all language to the same basic units and all words to the same status. The unit that matters is the word and not, say, the proverb; the units
that are taught are common nouns, not proper names; words must be
standard Igbo and not pidgin English or pidgin Igbo. Although Oduche
does not yet appreciate this, the primer also suggests that these words are
like words in English and probably have English equivalents. The language is thus opened to the capitalist laws of exchange: words become
exchangeable units without regard to the social agents who use them or
the social contexts in which they are used.81
Friedrich Kittler argues that learning to read from random syllables,
such as Oduche does, is characteristic of the modernist discourse network that took hold in Europe in 1900.82 Such arbitrariness teaches the
differentiality that precedes all meaning: the naked, elementary existence of signifiers.83 Kittler says that it is typewriters that brought about
this awareness of the arbitrary nature of language, but others attribute a
similar awareness to the experience of any writing. Goody, for instance,
observes that there is no word for word in LoDagaa or Gonja, two West
African languages without a literary tradition, and argues that the very
notion of word depends on written language.84 Other critics, however, dispute that peoples without writing on paper are less conscious of language.
Ruth Finnegan argues that the Limba of Sierra Leone were explicitly
aware of the subtleties and depths of linguistic expression:they possessed
and exploited abstract terms and forms; they reflected on and about language, and had strategies for standing back from the immediate scene or
the immediate verbal utterance through their terminology, their philosophy of language and their literature.85 To suggest that writing makes for
a more analytical and critical frame of mind is to support the great divide
between orality (primitive) and literacy (civilized).
Denniss phonetic transcription of Igbo was influenced not just by
his desire to tame the language but also by political expediency and the
perceived need for mechanical efficiency. Azu Ndu taught a standardized language called Union Ibo, which Dennis and his fellow Protestant
missionaries had created in order to make possible the translation of the
Bible. Union Ibo replaced the Onitsha dialect version of the language
propagated by the first Igbo primer, compiled in 1857 by the Yorubaspeaking missionary Bishop Samuel Crowther, with the assistance of
Igbo speakers J. C. Taylor and Jonas.86 At the time it was suggested that
38
Union Ibo was an effort by white missionaries, who had forced the ouster
of Crowther, an African, from the leadership of the Niger Mission, in
order to impose uniformity and so supersede local translation projects
and the African agents committed to them.87 The African missionaries
had wanted to translate the Bible into languages that people spoke and
could understand, even if that meant the translations could not travel far.
Dennis wanted a written language that would serve the whole community whom he identified as Igbos even if this meant it corresponded to no
one dialect as actually spoken.
As Krmer suggests, writing creates language in the sense of a discrete
object available for analysis, but it also makes salient another object:the
identity shared by a languages speakers. In Nigeria at the turn of the
century, the model of a written language that was also a national identity
was Yoruba. The word Yoruba, originally a Hausa term applied to all the
people south and west of the Niger, was adopted by Samuel Crowther
to name the people he worked among as a missionary. Fulford calls
Crowther the first Yoruba to call himself such.88 It was the success of the
missionary efforts and of the Yoruba Bible that forged a single collective
out of disparate city-states and kingdoms. Daryll Forde and G. I. Jones
note that the name Ibo was also first applied to people by outsiders:
Before the advent of the Europeans the Ibo had no common name The word
Ibo had been used among the people themselves as a term of contempt by the
Riverain Ibo (Oru) for their hinterland congeners Today the name is used
by the people primarily for the language, secondarily for Ibo-speaking groups
other than ones own, but with reference to oneself only when speaking to a
European.89
39
is, the variety of which the others can be said to be dialects.90 Dennis
did not, as Crowther had done for Yoruba, choose one dialect to be the
standard written language. (Admittedly that decision was also easier for
Yoruba.) Instead, operating on the assumption that five distinct dialects
were one single language and that a translation should be accessible to
them all, What Dennis did, writes Achebe, was go to a certain area
of Igboland and take a word, go to another area and take an additional
word, go to a third place and take another one to add.91 According to
Ak jobi Nwachukwu, the result was no mans dialect, but a kind of
Igbo Esperanto based on five different dialects.92 In effect, the missionaries decreed that the people of Umuaro speak the same language as the
curious dialect that Ezeulu hears in Okperi, in which Except for the
word moon he could not make out what they said (163). Union Ibo was
never spoken and lives today only in the pages of the old Protestant
bible.93 In a very real sense, then, what Oduche is reading is not in the
same language as his mothers story-telling.
Achebe has long been a vociferous critic not just of Union Ibo, but also
of its successors, Central and Standard Igbo, designed in 1941 and 1972
respectively, by nationalists rather than missionaries.94 He has argued that
an Igbo writer must write in the spoken dialect closest to his personal
formation, even though to do so would mean that only a minority of the
people who call themselves Igbo would be able to understand. Achebe
has been scathing in his critique of the distance from speech of all standardized written forms of Igbo. He quotes G. T. Basden, a missionary at
the time of Dennis and a friend of Achebes father, who opposed Union
Ibo:Bible reading becomes a burden, rather than a duty and a pleasure
One cannot find Lancashire, Devonshire, Cornish and Somerset dialects mixed up in our Bible. Why should such a system be inflicted upon a
poor uneducated people[?].95 Achebe reports that At no time did Dennis
ask, How does this sound to them? At no time did he ask Will you
use this language to sing songs of joy or cry tears of sadness? This question was not important to Dennis. And Achebe deplores similar trends
today:What is happening in schools these days is taking away from the
children some of the Igbo they spoke in their mothers and fathers houses
The child who writes fa is told to cross it out and write ha.
Given Achebes uncompromising opposition to a standard Igbo orthography, we can understand why he would regard Denniss primer as like the
box with the python, an artificial container that suffocates the elements
of the Igbo world that it stores. According to Achebe, language is not a
piece of iron that the blacksmith takes and puts into the fire, takes out
40
41
and the only things that move along the road as intended are policemen
and messengers. Mail runners bring the administrators in Government
Hill letters from the Lieutenant-Governor in Enugu and telegrams from
the nearest telegraph office fifty miles away. The litterarum praesidia, the
protection of letters, writes Bernhard Siegert of the Roman Empires reliance on its system of roads and its postal system, is a necessary part of
any functioning empire that is entirely based on transmittal and ensures
that a command is received and thereby thrust into the light of empire.104
As in Rome, where the postal system was reserved for the emperor and
his highest officials, the mail system in the British colony is intended for
official and public purposes. There are other users Clarke sends personal
letters home and missionaries also use the system (215) but these are not
the systems raison d tre. A Reuters telegram, every week (180) or twice
a week (32), brings ten words of world news (32).105 Newspapers are a
couple of months late (32). Ezeulu, of course, has no mailing address.
Messages to natives are entrusted to Court Messengers.
The outposts of empire do not just receive written messages but produce them. Many non-local Africans work as clerks on Government Hill,
recording all official dealings and writing reports (173), part of the larger
colonial project of recording Africa on paper. Winterbottom tells Clarke
that when Sir Hugh Macdermot first arrived as Governor he sent his
Secretary for Native Affairs to investigate the problem of ruling through
local chiefs (109).106 By the end of the novel we learn that that report has
been finally published (180). Clarke speaks dismissively of the British
love of Commissions of Inquiry, stating that We set up a commission to
discover all the facts, as though facts meant anything. We imagine that
the more facts we can obtain about our Africans the easier it will be to
rule them (109). The missionaries participate in a parallel enterprise, and
Goodcountry produces a report on the amazing success of the Gospel in
Umuaro for the West African Church Magazine (215).
Books are part of this larger circulation of writing. The Pacification of
the Primitive Tribes, the ethnographic memoir planned by the District
Commissioner at the end of Things Fall Apart, has, by the time of the
events narrated in Arrow of God, twenty or so years later, found its way
back to Igboland, where it is read by a new generation of British colonial
officers (although not yet by Africans). This particular corner of Igboland
first figured in print when George Allen, as the District Commissioner
and author is identified in Arrow of God, returned to Britain, where the
Igbo were exotic and news of them was therefore of interest to readers.
Now Winterbottom lends his copy of The Pacification to his newly arrived
Assistant, Tony Clarke, so that he may understand the Igbo-speakers
42
around him. Clarke is expected to abstract himself in the Englishlanguage book, read what other people like himself have written about
other people like them, and take inspiration from it in order to produce
his own written reports.
As if to emphasize the mediation of books in the subjectivity of the
British, Achebe takes the name of his District Officer from a doctor,
Thomas Winterbottom, who wrote An Account of the Native Africans in
the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone at the end of the eighteenth century.
Writing when Britain had just established its first colony in West Africa,
the historical Thomas Winterbottom was remarkably less racist and less
patronizing toward Africa and Africans than his twentieth-century fictional namesake is. Achebes District Officer is much closer to Arthur
Glyn Leonard, the colonial administrator whose book, as we have mentioned, was the model for The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes in Things
Fall Apart. Although more convinced of Africas absolute otherness than
were the British explorers and traders of a century before, Leonard proclaims on every page how deeply he understood the inner workings of
these people107 and how much he sympathizes with them.
When The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes reappears in the later
Achebe novel, its extratextual model is no longer Leonard but George
Hazzledine. THE CALL, an exhortatory passage from Allens memoir that we see Clarke reading, is lifted directly from The call for men,
a section in Hazzledines The White Man in Nigeria.108 Achebe clearly
feels that early-twentieth-century British writing about Africa redeploys the same discourse from one book to another. Achebe also puts
Hazzledines judgement of French colonial practice directly into his character Winterbottoms mouth,109 so that Clarke receives the words of The
White Man in Nigeria from two sources at once, the book he reads and
the mouth of his superior.
If there is any truth to Captain Winterbottoms colonialist lore that the
Igbo regard a six mile walk as travelling to a foreign country (102), it is
that the people of Umuaro live on a human scale and regard themselves as
the centre of their world. The new road, however, will change that. Arrow
of God contrasts the narrow, ancient footpath (80) on which Ezeulus son
Obika and his friend Ofoedu travel to join Wrights road-building crew,
and the road that the young men are forced to help build, which opened
like day after a thick night (80). The road, which can make even a cripple
hungry for a walk (139) resembles the very wide and clean road which
went to the town of the Creator in Tutuolas Ajaiyi and His Inherited
Poverty, so attractive and straight that there was no [sic] any human being
43
who might see it would not like to travel on it to the end.110 One man,
known to Ezeulu as Nwodikas son, a self-styled traveler to distant places
(168), has made the journey from Umuaro to Government Hill to work
for Winterbottom. He is saving in order to start a small trade in tobacco,
for he desires to participate in the race for the white mans money (169).
When Obika and his friend come on to the new road from the path,
they revel in the feeling of openness and exposure (80). The road, however, also makes Obika wary, because It made one feel lost like a grain of
maize in an empty goatskin bag (80).111 In his ambivalence, Obika feels
the road is a bag, a container like a box, but a container so vast that it
somehow combines openness and confinement, light and dark, being
exposed and being lost. The colonial system of roads broadens horizons
but also imposes a grid on the land that will shape all future development.
In effect, the road system transforms the nature of space, just as the grid of
the map does, by treating all space as equally mappable and thereby creating space waiting to be filled in, like the blank spaces on the world map
that so fascinated Conrads Marlow as a boy.112 This new, empty space can
feel large and bright, but also confining, especially to those who are not
doing the mapping but being mapped, because it requires that everything
be measured by the same instruments. The road being built by the British
is not a function of local space, that is, of where local people need to go. It
does not point in the direction of a stream or a market (80). Because it is
not a function of the land that it passes through but starts as a line drawn
on a map, a corrupt warrant chief and a drunken road overseer team up
to extort from people by threatening that unless they give money the new
road w[ill] pass through the middle of their compound (57).
The white man, the new religion, the soldiers, the new road they
are all part of the same thing, says Moses Unachukwu, the carpenter
who built Oduches box, for the white man does not fight with one
weapon alone (85). To Mosess list of things brought by the white man
can be added modern industrial clock time, which creates empty time to
be measured and policed in the same way the map creates empty space.
Obika is whipped for arriving late for work on the road construction.
Achebes narrative realism presumes clock time. When the narrative
point of view of the novel first travels to Government Hill, we see, within
the space of two pages, the District Officer and his new Assistant each
check his watch (31, 33):it is almost six, when they are scheduled to dine
together. Although each is alone, they share a common world underwritten by the synchronization of clocks. Clarke, who does not want to be too
early to dinner, kills time by reading George Allens book. As Georges
44
Perec observes, reading in Europe occupies the interstices and the ruptures in the rhythms of daily life and is commonly associated with filling
time and putting dead time to use.113 Roy Harris notes that the printed
book is designed so that its reading shall be entirely controlled by the
individual reader, who can pick it up or put it down at will, turn the
pages at leisure, go back and forth within its confines in whatever idiosyncratic patterns personal interest dictates.114 Reading a book therefore
appears a freer activity than telling stories because it is less dependent on
context and on coordination with listeners. But the time used for reading
is created by measuring and policing time. Erich Schn explains that in
the regimented world of the modern bourgeoisie, reading is approached
as work. Even free time partook of the same work ethic from which it
seemed to seek respite: determined by the laws of efficiency and selfimprovement.115 Just as the colonial officer must dress for dinner just to
survive in this demoralizing country, a custom Clarke finds very irksome in the heat (32),116 so, too, must free time be devoted to reading for
improvement.
A similar ambivalence about reading, which must redeem time not
spent at work by making it useful, is expressed in Allens (and Hazzledines)
THE CALL. British boys who read about Drake and Mungo Park
respond to the summons by leaving their mothers sides and following
their imperialist models into the world. Youthful reading does not prepare the boys for the desk or the counting-house (33), that is, for more
reading; instead, reading should be a preliminary to action. Allens (or
Hazzledines) manifesto implies that the former colonial officer has written down his experiences among the Primitive Tribes with the purpose
of moving readers to put down his book and forswear all further books
in order to make a mark on the world. Only thus will their adventures
someday inspire another generation of young male readers.
Allens book is suspicious of reading because it reinforces a sedentary
life and is therefore a sign of decadence and the end of heroism. The
author has reason to be concerned. Although his reader, Clarke, is part
of the colonial administration and so may be said to have heard the call,
he feels none of the heroism Allen celebrates. The British officers in Arrow
of God are primarily bureaucrats ploughing through paper whom Nigeria
fills with lassitude. Clarke feels compelled to finish the book because
Winterbottom lent it to him (323), but his reading is much slowed:One
of the ways in which the tropics were affecting him was the speed of his
reading, although in its own right the book was also pretty dull (33).
Clarke finds quite stirring the section entitled THE CALL, with its
45
oral rhetoric and its summons to leave the desk, but, in general, Allens
rhetoric is much too smug for his taste (33). He prefers Wright, the roadbuilder, who is without the besetting sin of smugness (102). Clarke tells
Wright that he would be happy if in all his years in Africa he built anything as good as his road, a remark that both compares written reports
to roads and suggests that roads are preferable because more useful (102).
The two connotations of the road are suggested by Wrights name:writer
and maker.
The people of Umuaro do not consult clocks to make plans to meet
their neighbour. The lack of regimented time in Africa does not mean,
however, that oral story-telling is a random event. As Finnegan explains
in a description of the Limba of Sierra Leone, the apparently spontaneous
telling of stories requires proper context and much coordination:
The evening was the usual time for stories. This meant that people had to have
come home to the village from working on their farms, often some miles away,
and be in the relaxed mood for enjoying story-telling. They had to have had their
main meal of the day (normally the early evening) and this in its turn depended
on a whole series of actions by a number of people: cooking, eating with the
due forms (the father being served first and so on), clearing the food away; and
behind this yet again lay all the organization necessary for acquiring the food
and the means for cooking and preparing it:getting the firewood, rice, leaves for
the sauce, pounding the rice, fetching the water (a time-consuming task for the
women and children), making the fire, boiling the water. Furthermore people
were not really relaxed without palm wine in circulation and that depended on
the daily evening visit of individual owners to their palm trees outside the village for the gourd left hanging there to collect the wine during the day. These
activities had to be completed before there was even an opportunity for the telling of stories.117
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47
starts to read, Ezeulu catches a glimpse of the new moon and announces
it to the clan. The light he espies is the light shining on the readers page.
Within the novel the Igbo characters must find a way to read the
new signs of the British, and they do so by coming to understand the
written language and the bureaucratic and social systems that the language serves. Concerned by the excessive zeal of the missionaries, Moses
Unachukwu engages an African clerk to write a petition to the Bishop on
the Niger. This project involves using both the governments postal system and its rhetoric:Being the work of one of the knowledgeable clerks
on Government Hill the petition made allusions to such potent words
as law and order and the Kings peace (214). The letter wins a response
from the big white priest far away, and people quickly learn that the
best way to deal with the white man was to have a few people like Moses
Unachukwu around who knew what the white man knew (215). What
Moses knows is quite sophisticated. He deploys the governments rhetoric
of law and order and the Kings peace against the missions (214). The
rhetoric succeeds because an earlier incident elsewhere of the killing of
a python by Christians had erupted in violence and required a show of
force by the Administration (214). Not wanting to be blamed for causing
more trouble, the Bishop sends a firm letter to Goodcountry instructing
him not to interfere with the python (215). Significantly, he also sends a
letter to the priest of Idemili, on whose behalf Moses had sent the original
petition and who is in all likelihood the first person in Umuaro ever to
receive a letter.
Voic e s h e a r d i n cl o s e d ro om s
When they are not writing, the British characters in Arrow of God are
reading. In their club at Government Hill in Okperi, one of the two
rooms is a library, where members saw the papers of two or three months
ago and read Reuters [sic] telegrams (32). We see Clarke reading a book,
Wright reading a letter, and Winterbottom reading an official memorandum from the Lieutenant-Governor (54).
To read his correspondence Winterbottom retreats to a private office
designed to his own specifications. Unlike the box with the python or the
tin trunk with papers, this confining space contains neither subject matter nor words but the reader himself. The office that fits Winterbottom is
an enclosed space, a camera obscura or black box, such as Peter Brooks
argues figures both the experience of reading and the scene of writing.123
Such a room is a projection outside the reader of the interior space that
48
reading fills. Or, as Mary Jacobus puts it, The room is the imaginary
projective space that allows us to think there is room for a book inside
us.124 The District Officer represents homo clausus, the solitary man communing with disembodied voices in a self-contained room that resembles
his own self-contained mind.
George Steiner identifies the figure of the man who reads alone in
a room with his mouth closed with the bourgeoisie in an industrial,
largely urban, complex of values and privileges.125 According to Norbert
Elias, homo clausus is the distinctive style of European selfhood in the
past four centuries or so, a personality claustrophobically involuted and
walled off from other people and the world.126 Peter Middleton argues
that this inward gaze characterizes western masculinity in particular.127
Homo clausus is a masculinist fantasy:as John Durham Peters puts it, the
luxurious imagining of literate men protected from diapers and dishes by
studies whose doors they keep closed.128 Certainly Government Hill is a
masculine homosocial environment.
As he reads the memorandum from the Lieutenant-Governor,
Winterbottom paces up and down, as restless as the boxed python. His
office, however, unlike Oduches box, is not fully sealed and cannot
be. Through the window comes what Diop would call the fraternal
rumour of the world129 in the form of a prisoners work song, distracting the District Officer from the concentration required for reading.
As in the hearth scene, there is an explicit contrast between the selfimposed isolation of reading and the communal nature of orality, a
contrast figured in this instance by the juxtaposition of two rectangles,
the page and the window, through both of which pass the words of
others. It is not, however, the nature of ear and eye, of orality and literacy, that are at stake in the scene of Winterbottom in his office, so
much as the meaning they have each been assigned in the racialized
space of empire.
Windows are a feature of the European square house and not of traditional Igbo architecture. They were found on colonial administration
buildings and in mission schoolrooms, where they fulfilled the colonizers plans for cleanliness and hygiene.130 In European literature, thresholds
and casements figure the imagined vistas that reading opens up. Garrett
Stewart follows Erich Schn in considering these vistas the compensation that literature provides for the lost bodily pleasures of listening in a
group.131 In Achebe, by contrast, thresholds and casements do not offer
visual scenes but allow sounds to enter the private space of a reader. These
49
The prisoners do not stop singing when Winterbottom tells them to, but
resume their song a bit further from the office. Like the road-builders, they
swing cutlasses and sing to make their work lighter. One worker supplies
the beat and the others respond in unison. The words of the songs issue
from bodies and accompany and reinforce the motions of those bodies.
Work songs, says Finnegan, are the biological roots from which rhythm
and poetry perhaps ultimately grew.134 Like Ugoyes story, the songs are
both familiar to many elsewhere in the novel workers adapt a funeral
dirge to make a comical work song (80) and arise out of the immediate
context in which they are sung. The workers on the road, unhappy about
not being paid, sing, Lebula toro toro a day (76 which Robert Wren
explains means Labourer threepence a day).135 The prisoners song that
disturbs Winterbottom is also in English and gives expression to feelings
generated by their condition:
50
The lyrics express a resentment and a challenge inspired not just by the
forced nature of the labour but also by the very action of levelling in
which the workers are engaged.
Compared to the physicality of the workers, the District Officer inhabits an abstract airless realm. Of course, the act of reading involves the
whole body as intimately as cutting grass does and imprints upon it certain postures and attitudes. In this case, however, the readers relation to
the body is distinctly uncomfortable. Winterbottoms pacing, as slow and
repetitive as the grass-cutting, lacks harmony and is an agitated response
to his confinement. An observer might even wonder who is the prisoner
here:the ones outside singing or the lone man pent up inside.
This is the Lieutenant-Governors memorandum that Winterbottom
reads and we read over his shoulder:
My purpose in these paragraphs is limited to impressing on all Political Officers
working among the tribes who lack Natural Rulers the vital necessity of developing without any further delay an effective system of indirect rule based on
native institutions.
To many colonial nations native administration means government by white
men. You are all aware that H. M. G. considers this policy as mistaken. In place
of the alternative of governing directly through Administrative Officers there
is the other method of trying while we endeavour to purge the native system
of its abuses to build a higher civilization upon the soundly rooted native stock
that had its foundation in the hearts and minds and thoughts of the people and
therefore on which we can more easily build, moulding it and establishing it
into lines consonant with modern ideas and higher standards, and yet all the
time enlisting the real force of the spirit of the people, instead of killing all that
out and trying to start afresh. We must not destroy the African atmosphere, the
African mind, the whole foundation of his race (556)
Achebe has lifted the bulk of this memorandum (starting from the
sentence that begins In place of to the end) from articles 6 and 9 in
Sir Donald Camerons 1934 memorandum The Principles of Native
Administration and Their Application.136 The effect of removing the sentences from their context is to satirize them. Readers of Arrow of God
will know to scorn the officiousness of the memorandums talk of modern ideas and higher standards and its avoidance of the themes that the
prisoners song addresses:labour, captivity, cutting down, and levelling.
The memorandum aspires to impersonality as it appeals to general principles to be adhered to by all colonial officers. His Majestys Government
51
52
pen, not from affluence, but from paucity of ideas. He took refuge in a cloud of
ideas, sometimes to conceal his meaning, oftener to conceal his absence of any
meaning, thus mystifying not only others but himself.140
53
those who write to him and that they are far away and so cannot know
what he knows. Each receiver then turns around and proceeds to write
orders for those below him. At every level therefore is recreated a division between the realm of signs and the realm of social realities, and
in each case the realm of signs risks appearing like some phantasmagoric shadow play divorced from the lives and actions of people on the
ground. Goodcountry feels the same impatience with his bishops policy of appeasement (215).
The British know very well the untruths fostered by official writing,
and trust direct experience more than they do literacy. They rely upon
gossip and background stories that are common knowledge (105) but
that never figure in official reports. Winterbottom trusts news that comes
to him from his house staff, through the window as it were, more than
he does that on the paper sent him by his superiors. Ear to the ground,
he hears rumours of the flagrant misbehaviour of a man whom he has
appointed warrant chief and of Wrights mistreatment of his workers
(57). The story that the white man had whipped Obika, which spread
through the villages and was brought home to Obikas compound by
his sister-in-law (87), reaches Winterbottom through his steward. Even
though it involves translation, the realm of the oral unites Umuaro and
Government Hill and locates them in a single world, a world determined
by story and personal relations and not just by the universal calendar, the
map, and the news.
Winterbottom asks Clarke to investigate the rumours of Wrights whipping of Obika, but Clarke is too new to appreciate the value of stewards
chitchat (155) and forgets to make inquiries:
It was only on his return to Okperi that he found a brief, late entry Wright &
natives scribbled in pencil on the second page of his touring notebook. At first
he had worried over it; then he had come to the conclusion that if Wright had
in fact been employing unorthodox methods he would have heard of it without
making inquiries as such. But since he had heard nothing it was safe to say that
the stories were untrue. In any case how did one investigate such a thing? Did
one go up to the first native one saw and ask if he had been birched by Wright?
Or did one ask Wright? (106)
Clarke is then forced to lie in his report that he found there was no truth
in all the stories of Wright whipping natives (106). The gap in the written
record representing what Clarke was not able to learn because he did not
talk with others is papered over. The written report relies for its authority
on the experience of the writer, but Clarke reverses that relation and uses
the authority of the report to confirm the experience.
54
55
When Ezeulu refuses the chiefly warrant Clarke offers him, the bureaucracy has trouble processing his rejection. Clarke decides to detain Ezeulu
but needs something to put down in the log (177). He is conscious that
what he writes will be read by others and feels that he must satisfy an
invisible audience of the administration above him, posterity, and his
conscience. He is therefore relieved when Winterbottom gives him the
formula Refusing to co-operate with the Administration that allows him
to justify the arbitrary detention (177).
Its openness to the eyes of others is the power that the written record
has over Clarke, but the power it has over Ezeulu is based on indirection and unequal access. As Michael Warner notes of Equiano, the
meaning of literacy does not lie in what it can do so much as in who
has it and who does not.144 Court Messengers, a new and notoriously
corrupt class of Africans who serve both the colonial administration
and the Native Courts, take advantage of the unequal distribution of
the new technology in order to cheat others. One particularly haughty
and disrespectful Messenger makes a big show of bringing out a very
small book from his breast pocket and open[ing] it in the manner of
a white man (137) in order to record Ezeulus particulars. He resembles no one so much as the Nambikwara chief in Claude Lvi-Strausss
The Writing Lesson, who pretends to be literate because he understands the power wielded by the violence of the letter.145 This character
is a corollary of the talking book. The native who takes advantage of
the credulity of his fellows to parade his claim to the magical powers associated with writing makes a regular appearance in writing by
Europeans. Jack Goody reports of a diviner in northern Ghana called
Oyie, whose magic takes the form of a school exercise-book filled with
sums of pounds, shillings and pence:
Oyie held the book sideways with one hand and in the other grasped a pencil
which hovered momentarily over the page, then darted from one figure to the
next, as if he were adding up the horizontal rows rather than the vertical columns. Suddenly, while pointing to something in the figures, he says, See your
56
cows (or some similar phrase), rounds on his client, and barks out a question,
his eyelids flickering rapidly as he does so.146
ava n t l a l e t t r e
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private orders that he must carry out even though they are impractical
and will prove disastrous. The orders concern the community but only
Ezeulu has access to them. The solitary man in a room that fits just him,
devoting his attention to a transcendent message while having trouble
keeping out the voices of people on the other side of a wall, is the prototypical scene we have associated with literacy, but here in a non-literate
context. Achebe suggests that the consciousness that literacy fosters in the
British can already be found in Umuaro.
The god Ulu insists to his priest that the ritual calendar, marked by the
priests consumption of a standard number of sacred yams, one every new
moon, cannot be abrogated even after it has been disrupted and no longer
coincides with the natural calendar of planting and harvesting. The thirteen yams that must be eaten in order to count down a year between
harvests constitute what Roy Harris calls an emblematic frame,149 that is
a self-enclosed structure with established rules to which meaning can be
attached. Other examples Harris gives of emblematic frames are a deck
of cards, the animals of the Chinese years, or the letters of the alphabet.
The symbolic choice that Umuaro offers the neighbouring clan of Okperi
of white clay for peace or new palm frond for war is another such frame
(15). Emblematic frames are not themselves scripts or systems of writing,
but are the basis of writing because they offer just what a script needs:a
notation.150
Goody writes that Only literate societies have to wrest the month away
from the moon, or the year from the sun,151 but Ulus command to Ezeulu
that the harvest must wait until all the yams are eaten is based on a literal
interpretation of the Law and shows an inflexibility and indifference to
context commonly associated with religions of the Book and with interpretative traditions that insist on an absolute fidelity to an unchanging
written text. Ezeulu feels he must obey Ulus directive, for he is but an
arrow in the bow of his god (192), just as Winterbottom is a servant
of the empire. The rigid adherence to an inflexible abstract principle by
both Ulu and the empire will have dire consequences for many, including
men like Ezeulu and Winterbottom instructed to implement policy. Over
the course of the novel, however, the Lieutenant-Governor will alter his
original directives and declare a moratorium on the creation of warrant
chiefs (180); Ulu, tragically, will not budge.
Taken by itself, Winterbottoms small office appears as a metonymic
allegory of reading, an example of reading that reveals the nature of reading. The juxtaposition with Ezeulu in his obi, however, makes clear that the
solitary man in a small room is an allegory for something else:the textual
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59
of history, as I noted above, but also the experience of reading. The men
each read the skies; we read both the men.
The men are also united in their enjoyment of the sounds of children
playing outside. Winterbottom asks his steward what they are singing, and, as he looks up, the wind that announces the first rains sweeps
through his bungalow, casting papers and photographs to the floor (30).
If, as Diop writes, literacy marks the defeat of the wind,156 that defeat
is never final. Winterbottoms servant quickly picks up the papers and
restores order, but for a moment the outside has invaded the inside.
Later Ezeulu and Winterbottom both make the mistake of taking
orders from an unreal, disembodied realm and retreating from the world
shared with other people, as represented by the prisoners working outside
Winterbottoms office or Ezeulus hungry neighbours. The signs of incipient mental instability can already be seen when we first meet the two
men, as Ezeulu argues with an inner enemy (3) and Winterbottom suffers from insomnia in this dear old land of waking nightmares (30). Just
as the song of the workers reaches Winterbottom through his window,
Ezeulu, alone in his obi, is briefly distracted by the bell of the Christians
(210). The priest, however, finds himself almost completely cut off from
his neighbours, and Umuaro became more and more an alien silence
(219). Eventually, both Ezeulu and Winterbottom descend into a private
madness, cut off from everyone around them. Winterbottoms office and
Ezeulus obi both come, in retrospect, to feel like coffins.
The two men do make contact with other minds Ezeulus god and
Winterbottoms empire but it can be argued that their messages come
from within in the sense that they are messages both men already know.
They become so trapped inside these messages, however unwanted they
may be, that they no longer hear the living voices from outside. Never
until now had Ezeulu known the voices of Umuaro to die away altogether
(218), but he finds that although he wanted to hear what Umuaro was
saying nobody offered to tell (219).
Madness results from the division between text and context, but
Achebe is careful to show that a text, when properly attended to, can
also provide access to other minds. In Arrow of God, there is a third man
who also retreats to a private space where he can be alone and where he
hears voices, both a disembodied voice from nowhere and the voices of
people directly outside whom he does not see, but this man, unlike the
two patriarchs, does not go mad. Edogo, Ezeulus eldest son and a mask
carver, unable to do his work under the profane gaze of women and children, retires to a specially built spirit-house, where he is surrounded by
60
the inspiring presence of older sacred masks (51). The hut is dark inside
although the eye got used to it after a short while, and he sits near the
entrance where there was the most light to shine on the white okwe
wood (51). Through the open door Edogo hears people talking as they
passed through the market place from one village of Umuaro to another,
but when his carving finally got hold of him he heard no more voices
(51). The spirit of the mask calls to Edogo from some invisible realm, and
he responds by shaping an object as the spirit summons. His concentration, like Winterbottoms, is broken, however, when he hears the voice of
a neighbour discussing the news of the python in a box (52).
This scene of an artist at work reflects the experience of the author
sitting at his desk, where, intent upon his material, he communes with
characters forty years in the past, but finds that, in densely populated
Igboland, it is difficult to shut out the sound of people, especially since
windows, in tropical West Africa, are without glass and perforce kept
open to let air through. Doris Lessing has said that there are few writers
from Africa because there is little privacy and few can answer affirmatively the essential question demanded of a writer: Have you found a
space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?
Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come
the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas inspiration.157
Edogo has found that space, and what comes to him is an understanding
of the consciousnesses of others.
Edogo is unique among the Igbo characters in the novel in that his
self-understanding incorporates a strong sense of how he must appear to
others. Thinking about his fathers seemingly unreasonable resentments,
Edogo realizes that the older his children grew the more Ezeulu seemed
to dislike them:
Edogo remembered how much his father had liked him when he was a boy and
how with the passage of years he had transferred his affection first to Obika
and then to Oduche and Nwafo. Thinking of it now Edogo could not actually remember that their father had ever shown much affection for Oduche. He
seemed to have lingered too long on Obika (who of all his sons resembled him
most in appearance) and then by-passed Oduche for Nwafo. What would happen if the old man had another son tomorrow? Would Nwafo then begin to lose
favour in his eyes? (91)
The free indirect discourse in which Edogos thoughts are presented allows
the characters inner words to take over the narration of the novel and
points to his interior life. Winterbottoms interior life is filled with large
impersonal entities such as the Lieutenant-Governor or Africa; Ezeulu
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The new forms of self made possible by literacy are the theme of Wole
Soyinkas novel sar, the subject of the next chapter. There the protagonists are all readers shown reading and writing, but their thought
processes never follow the words on the page; they follow instead new,
explicitly intersubjective conjunctions of memory and thought in order to
achieve new understandings of themselves and others.
Ch apter 3
In Chinua Achebes novel No Longer at Ease, set in the late 1950s, Isaac
Okonkwo, the aged father of the protagonist, has a room full of old books
and papers from Blackies Arithmetic which he used in 1908 to (his son)
Obis Durrell, from obsolete cockroach-eaten translations of the Bible into
the Onitsha dialect to yellowed Scripture Union Cards of 1920 and earlier.1
In the first half of the twentieth century, newly literate Africans often collected and saved all kinds of written material, including printed paper and
their own notes and letters, investing these samples of writing with all
their hopes for participation in the new field of the modern. Karin Barber
has labelled this phenomenon tin-trunk literacy.2 Oduches wooden box
imprisons the natural, the sacred, and the indigenous, but a tin trunk filled
with papers could be a repository of values, the crystallized tokens and
products of civilization, progress, enlightenment, and modernity.3
Isaacs adult son, Obi, looks with bemusement amounting to disdain
on his fathers collection, which time and insects have damaged and
whose contents time has rendered obsolete. He sees in the yellowed
pages an image of the older generations outmoded, almost superstitious
respect for the missionaries and the products of the colonizer. The title
Blackies Arithmetic refers to the British publisher, but probably strikes
the son as colonial condescension that his father had shamefully tolerated. In his own Lagos apartment, Obi himself has shelves with books,
and drawers in which he keeps his personal bits and pieces like postage stamps, receipts and quarterly statement [sic] from the bank (87), but
these papers, although a measure of his life, are not sacred objects the way
books and papers are for his father. This is not because Obi cares less for
book learning than his father did but precisely because he feels his own
book learning is superior. His scepticism about his fathers reading is the
product of his own, different reading.
Achebe notes that his own generation of writers, who came of age at
independence, were all products of government colleges, distinguished
63
64
65
the buffoonish, unsuccessful suitor Lakunle in the play The Lion and the
Jewel. Recently, however, there has been a reappraisal of the generation
that lived under colonialism. Barbers project of recovering the literacy
of Africans in the first half of the twentieth century has been joined
by others, including Stephanie Newells study of popular literature and
culture in the colonial Gold Coast, Stephen Mieschers book on colonial masculinities in the same area of the world, and Derek Petersons
study of writing in Gikuyu. And it is not just historians who show a
renewed appreciation for the period: almost twenty-five years after his
first novel, after having lived through the cataclysms of postcolonial
Nigeria, including coups and a civil war, Soyinka himself was able to
look back to his fathers era with a new appreciation for what that generation had accomplished.
From his father, Samuel Ayodele Soyinka, the writer inherited a tin
box full of papers exactly as Barber describes. As a child, he had punningly baptized his father Essay based on his initials and his proclivity
for writing those careful stylistic exercises in prose which follow set rules
of composition and are products of fastidiousness and elegance.9 When,
long after his fathers death, Soyinka finally opened the metallic box,
scraped off the cockroach eggs, and browsed through a handful of letters, old journals with marked pages and annotations, notebook jottings,
tax and other levy receipts, minutes of meetings and school reports, programme notes of special events, and so on,10 he does not feel the distaste
that Obi Okonkwo feels for his father Isaacs old papers and that Soyinka
himself might have felt in 1960. The scorn for the past or at least the
indifference that he had felt as a young man gave way to fascination, and
he was inspired to write a novel, sar, recreating the era of his father and
his contemporaries, which he now calls the very special class of teachers
of our colonial period (v).
The printed matter collected by his father granted Soyinka access to a
past when expectations of modernity were still sources of hope and the
nation-state of Nigeria a worthy dream. Carol Summers offers a description of Africans from Southern Rhodesia at the same time that could be
applied to Soyinkas father:
While these individuals were fully aware of state, settler, and mission power, and
often resentful of abuses, they portrayed themselves and acted neither as victims
nor as rebels. Instead within the schools, churches, and development programs
that expanded dramatically during this period they learned new things, experimented with new affiliations and organizations, and built themselves lives to be
proud of.11
66
Colonial education
67
C ol on i a l e duc at ion
Akinyode Soditan, the character based on Soyinkas father, is a teacher
in colonial Nigeria in the late 1930s. Like so many males in African literature the autobiographers Camara Laye, Amadou Hampat B, and
Ng g wa Thiongo come to mind Akinyode left behind his hometown
of sar in Ijebu Remo in order to go to a distant boarding school. Around
1920,15 at the age of fourteen, he travelled by train to St Simeons Teacher
Training Seminary in Ilesha, a fictional school based on St Andrews
College in y, formerly the Training Institution for Schoolmasters and
Catechists, which Soyinkas father had attended.16
The one scene we see of Akinyode at school is an updated and ironic
version of the talking book. The adult Akinyode recalls a sad experience
of cultural defeat at school, when Dr Mackintosh lectured on Schubert
and played Bakelite records but his students all fell asleep (51). The gramophone in the jungle is the twentieth-century successor to the talking book,
notable for the awe it inspires in the colonized.17 George Hazzledine, the
imperialist much cited by Achebe, refers glibly to the gramaphone [sic],
theodolite, and other wonderful ju-ju things beyond the comprehension
of the savage mind.18 Like the talking book, the gramophone is figured
as an animal in a box. In Ak Soyinka recalls his boyish wonder at the
picture on our gramophone into which a dog barked, below which was
written:H IS M A S T E RS VOIC E:Tinu and I had long rejected the
story that the music which came from the gramophone was made by a special singing dog locked in the machine. We never saw it fed, so it would
have long starved to death. I had not yet found a means of opening up
the machine, so the mystery remained (Ak, 41). Ezekiel Mphahlele also
remembers being told as a child that there were small people singing inside
the gramophone.19
Young Akinyode, however, does not marvel at the gramophone nor wonder how it works. Whatever interest he may have in the medium cannot
overcome his lack of interest in the message. What he has learned at school
is something else altogether: a blend of distraction from context and of
attention to an interior life. School successfully instilled in pupils an ennui
so great that it fostered the sense of an inner self existing in a space apart
from the world, and, as we shall see, this space becomes a resource that
Akinyode and his peers tap into at will simply by holding a printed page
before their eyes.
Akinyode and his former classmates from sar at St Simeons now
form a cohort modelled on traditional age grades, calling themselves the
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ex-Ils (3), a cross-language pun incorporating the name Ilesha and the
Yoruba word il, meaning house or home.20 In the present of the novel
the former students of St Simeons are pursuing modern careers throughout Yorubaland as teachers, civil servants, lawyers, and budding entrepreneurs, and the only time they can be sure to see each other is when they
return to sar during holidays. Nevertheless the experience they once
shared at boarding school continues to confer a kind of salience and a
kind of company too, as Barber reports of the alumni from St Andrews
at the same period, who called themselves the Tyb, that is, those who
have returned from y.21 Of the Tyb Barber writes, By being isolated from their families and fellow townspeople, they became permanent, vivid landmarks in the mental terrain of their educated peers.22
Akinyode failed to learn the attention to cultural monuments that
DrMackintosh sought to teach, but the colonial curriculum did impart
a cultural literacy that the ex-Ils later use to lubricate their own conversation and correspondence. When his star pupil fell asleep during the
playing of Schubert, Dr Mackintosh rebuked him:Et tu, Soditan? (54).
Akinyode immediately understood and years later recalls the reproachful
citation. Shakespeare will provide the ex-Ils with cultural references that
they marshal to speak to each other. A reference to Julius Caesar or The
Taming of the Shrew will point not to England but to a childhood experience shared with others.
When Akinyodes more rebellious friend, Sipe, was expelled from
StSimeons, he invoked a stream of literary allusions to dignify his exit,
comparing his fate to the guillotine, John the Baptist, Sindbad (sic) the
Sailor, and a phoenix rising from the ashes of defeat (67). His education
has not been for nought. Sipes cultural literacy provided him with the
resources for a protean personal mythology that he builds on throughout
his life. Because the school authorities regard him as a devil, Sipe happily
styles himself Mephisto-Rooster, ever ready to tempt Akinyode whom he
regards as a poor soul ruined by too much reading. At the same time,
in a strategic reversal, Sipe later has a dream in which the headmaster
who had expelled him himself stands revealed as Mephistopheles, a devil
with a long ape-like tail:Blind him, blind him, the Reverend Beeston
screams, he has seen what should not be seen (78).
Cultural allusions serve the ex-Ils somewhat as proverbs do the people
of Umuaro:they can be adapted at will according to context, although
the display of wit is more important than wisdom. To the next generation, who saw only the provenance of the ex-Ils repertoire of cultural
allusions, their elders might appear as colonial mimics, always ready
Colonial education
69
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the dictionary, that is the language itself in book form, that they cease to
be mimics.
Sipe was eventually expelled for passing exam answers to another student. As the students at St Simeons hunched over their answer papers
(67), deforming their bodies as well as their spirits, Sipe circulated his
answers surreptitiously along the floor. Beneath the official paper he set
in motion another, unofficial, and subversive circulation of written words.
Unfortunately, because the movement of the answer paper had been
detected on its homeward journey, that is, as Sipe tried to retrieve
it (67), the school authorities had the excuse they needed to expel the
troublemaker. The student who had uncovered the secret of words his
teachers were keeping from him had his own papers discovered in turn.
Although writing does have the ability to keep things secret, its fixed
existence outside sender and receiver makes its secrets more vulnerable to
discovery than are oral secrets.
Cast out Without a proper certificate to speak of, Sipe was still able
to find a well-paying white-collar job in Yaba in Lagos with the help of
his considerable charm and a testimonial written by a friend of his own
age and social status but composed by Sipe himself (68). What Sipe
has learned from his truncated schooling was the power and authority
wielded by messages on paper. If a new citizen is only what words on
paper say he is, then he can also be whatever that paper says he is.
T h e ph e nom e nol o g y of r e a di ng a n d w r i t i ng
The great South African educator, D. D. T. Jabavu, advised African teachers:You need a room that you can regard as private to yourself for meditation and reading. Move heaven and earth to get this.23 Akinyode is
fortunate in that he has both a study at home in Ak and a small personal
library in his fathers house in sar. When the novel opens, he is in the
latter, pulling a letter from an envelope, which he commences reading at
the same moment as readers of the novel do. He is momentarily disturbed
by the bleating of a ram that he hears through his window. The ram will
be sacrificed the next day to bless the first motor lorry in sar (56). Here
in concentration are several of the images we have found associated with
literacy in Achebes Arrow of God: the closed room, the silent communion with absent interlocutors, the auditory disturbance coming through
the window, the sacrifice of an animal (in this case a sheep rather than a
python), and the new road. The presence of windows creates a contrast
between inside and outside, private and public, silence and sound, and
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Akinyodes own retreat to a self-contained room to attend to disembodied words on paper is not, however, a mark of his alienation from those
around him, but instead allows him to commune with friends from the
past now at a distance (5). He has come to sleepy sar in the off-season
when none of the other ex-Ils will be there in order to get a break from
the bantering, debate, and business scheming among the Circle of ex-Ils
in Abeokuta and Lagos, and to sort matters out in his own mind. He does
not, however, leave the disputes behind. His letters kept him company
(5). At every moment he remembers what his fellows have said, addresses
himself to them, and imagines what they would say in reply. The voices
he remembers or imagines permeate his thoughts and fix them in a dense
social network of words and voices. Reading revives memories of interpersonal encounters in the past, nourishes the never-ending conversation in the readers mind, and inspires the desire to write to others. In
other words, his reading serves orality, both in his imagination and in the
future.
Orality is often taken to imply a small face-to-face community of
people who know each other, and literacy associated with dissemination,
the scattering of a message among strangers whom the writer will never
meet, but that is not the case in sar, where to read is to be addressed
by friends and colleagues and even ones past self. Akinyode never writes
for strangers. The one correspondent he has whom he has not yet met
is Wade Cudeback, a teacher in Ohio who had published a letter in the
Gazette seeking a penpal (8). But even Cudeback makes an appearance by
the end of the novel, as if conjured by Akinyodes letters.
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Sipe, the focalizer of the novels second chapter, relishes the reception
he foresees for a letter that he composes in his mind to Akinyode: It
was a good opening he thought. The teacher overwhelmed by that
opening salvo, would [] sink back into his armchair to relish the rest
of that narrative (64). It is simply not true, at least in the ex-Ils case,
that literacy favors the monad, its movement always swerv[ing] into a
self-contained whole the isolated, independent, and indivisible unit or
organism, the irreducible thing in itself .26 Instead, in sar, as indeed
in Victorian Britain, according to Nicholas Dames, the solitary reader
is not a sign of the atomization of preindustrial sociability, but the very
location of contemporary sociability.27 A novel-readers engrossment,
physiologically considered, is exactly where the social can best be
observed.28
In the opening pages of the novel, Akinyode prepares to reread texts
that he is already very familiar with. In the course of the long first chapter, entitled Ex-Il, Akinyode rereads a few articles on world events in
back issues of Elders Review of West African Affairs and its later incarnation, the West African Review;29 current affairs stories in In Leisure Hours,
a monthly magazine published by the Church Mission Society in Lagos;30
and The Nigerian Teacher;31 as well as a letter from his American penpal and notes kept in a personal notebook. These outdated journals and
personal papers, dog-eared, sometimes even termite-nibbled (43), constitute a personal library housed in two improvised Peak milk cartons, that
Akinyode consults twice a year when home in sar, the precious source
material for planning and decisions that required his utmost seclusion
(34). The personal notebook that he started keeping as a boy on the eve of
his first journey to St Simeons is not part of this library but is his constant companion in both Ak and sar (34). It contains excerpts from
church sermons, proverbs, analects, jottings, moral observations, snippets of vital information such as overseas college and university addresses,
page references to articles in journals which had engaged his professional
and other interests (334). It also has verses copied from books or from
Cudebacks letters. Together the notebook and the Peak milk cartons
will supply the contents of the tin trunk later opened by Soyinka. The
son, the implied writer of sar, is not the one who gives the assembled
papers meaning; these papers have always been central to Akinyodes selfdefinition. Akinyode contemplates his past and takes the measure of his
own life by engaging in an activity analogous to Soyinka, who has his
fathers tin box before him when writing the novel, and to us readers, who
hold the book about Akinyodes life in our hands.
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Akinyode is the reader of his own life and the novel is about his practice of reading and writing, but he and his friends do little actual reading
that we see. Their speech is larded with quotations from Shakespeare and
they debate the Wars of the Roses, but their reading material is mostly
current affairs journals. This corresponds with Achebes findings, around
the time he published Things Fall Apart, that, while European residents of
Enugu read fiction, poetry, and drama, Africans read history, economics,
mathematics, etc. or, as he facetiously phrased it, nothing.32
Akinyodes practice of reading is less a function of what he reads than
of how. Rolf Engelsing, in arguing for the existence of a reading revolution that took place at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe,
makes a distinction between extensive and intensive reading.33 In an earlier age, when books were hard to come by, people read intensively a few,
usually religious volumes, poring over and contemplating them. Later, as
printed reading material became more available, reading also became a
more casual activity and people read newspapers and periodicals extensively. A similar distinction can be made between Isaac Okonkwo with
his room full of old papers and Akinyodes milk-carton library. Isaac
learned to read in his village school around the turn of the century, never
got beyond primary school, and read primarily the Bible and religious
tracts. Akinyode, only a decade or so younger, travelled far to receive a
post-primary education, and his reading as an adult is eclectic and often
desultory. He is more likely to read magazines than the Bible.
Akinyode has taught his father, Josiah, to read, but the two generations
approach reading differently. Josiahs reading is entirely a function of his
conversion to Christianity, and we see him don spectacles in order to pore
over a C.M.S. hymnal companion (99). He must chew a lot of kola
nut, a stimulant, because his adventure into the reading world requires
a great effort (99), and he prefers the morning peace of sitting at the
door or window, greeting friends (82). Akinyode also enjoys greeting and
discussing with friends, but he does not require their presence. The pages
of his journals, letters, and notebooks provide him with the window he
needs.
The revolution Engelsing discerned has been cast into doubt:after all,
intensive reading always survives alongside extensive reading.34 Certainly,
although Akinyode reads a wider range of materials than his father does,
he is by no means a casual reader. He does not value printed matter for its
own sake as Isaac Okonkwo does, but he does carefully preserve the texts
that speak to him. His reading is actually less passive than we feel Isaacs
to be (Isaac who preserves but presumably never opens his sons volume
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continuity established between different moments in the life of the reading subject that is important.
Rereading is thus very different from reading for the first time. A first
encounter is linear and moves toward an unknown end; it arouses curiosity and desire. Rereading is circular and repetitive. Matei Calinescu
compares the rereader of an old favourite text to one who listens to a
familiar story:Both know how the action will develop and what the ending will be but they enjoy nonetheless the unfolding of the story, episode by episode, in the expected succession.39 Rereading therefore may
be invested with the significance of a small private ritual.40 In Akinyodes
case, rereading is a way of contemplating the arc that moves from the past
through the present and that is the shape his life has taken.
Memories of who he has been and dreams of who he desires to be jostle
together in Akinyodes mind with memories of past dreams of whom he
wanted to become, the whole stamped with his personal motto:He has
no future who fails to affect his present. It is a phrase he had heard as a
fourteen-year-old on the eve of his departure for St Simeons, in a sermon
preached by Archdeacon Howell41 and that had made such an impression
that he had copied it all in capital letters into his brand new personal
notebook, where it became the very first thing on the opening page (33).
Christian missionaries in Nigeria regularly cultivated such aphorisms, as
in this scene narrated by Aluko:
The minister read out the passage a second time, more slowly than at first. He
paused a little to allow the congregation to make a mental note of it. The very
few who were able to write made a pencilled note of the text. That would assist
further reference at home after the service and would aid spiritual digestion,
a thing which is by no means easy with village folk. (One Man, One Wife,
489)
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self became interdependent.42 Augustine was the first to suggest that the
self can be reflected upon as if it were a literary text and that persons can
reread themselves inwardly through the examination of the personal
narratives in their memories.43 A similar conjunction of self and text can
be found in postcolonial Africa. Sassines teacher protagonist Monsieur
Baly, awake in bed at night, conducts a sorrowful interrogation before
these small harmless words: Material and Moral Balance Sheet of his
life.44 Later he starts to record his experience in a red notebook, which
he characterizes as my only means of escape from the little prison that
is my life:I must learn to tell myself everything, to strip myself with the
help of this pen in front of a white page. My God, I do not yet know who
I am!.45
Monsieur Baly seeks not just to understand his life, but to measure
it:he could not stop himself from finding that worrisome and insidious
little internal question:Have I carried out my life well?.46 For Akinyode
the Archdeacons maxim recalls him to a duty that he owes himself and
his vocation as educator:to become the man he wants to be. It encourages in him not just a sense of the self as inner and as text but also as what
Stock calls an intentional narrative,47 that is, the self is the story of the
decisions the self has made.
In the present of the novel, Akinyode is disappointed by how far he has
travelled since his school days. The boyhood dream of travel elsewhere,
inspired by the train to Ilesha, now crystallizes around the exotic place
name Ashtabula, the Ohio postmark from which Wade Cudeback sends
his letters. Ashtabula represents all of Akinyodes aspirations for a larger world and a more expansive self. He tried hard to project himself
through the next ten, no, even five, years. Would Ak have become a distant, even resented, interlude? (37). Akinyode repeatedly questions how
fulfilled his life is, and his doubt has the self-fulfilling quality of making
him unhappy. How much longer, he asks himself, do I console myself
with merely fleshing out those alien worlds evoked by exotic names, the
smells, the textures and sounds? (37). The teachers dissatisfaction quickly
becomes self-criticism:So, Akinyode, he demanded of himself, did you
even choose to be a teacher? Or did you just settle into it because that was
what was expected? (34).
We could see in this desire for the foreign a harmful mental colonization. The Ashtabula that haunts Akinyodes imagination is not, however,
London or even Europe. It functions somewhat as Samarkand does in
Soyinkas poem of that name and its attraction has more to do with the
Orientalist than the colonial. At school, young Akinyode was ever the
77
browser in exotic texts (66). Yet an irony built into the novel means that
readers outside Africa will not share his sense of the relative interest of
places:for them Ohio is a literary byword for postmodern placelessness.48
This does not mean that Akinyodes aspiration is ironized. On the contrary, Ashtabulas significance is precisely as his invention, the focus of
his desire and imagination. Ashtabula can be found wherever the teacher
himself is, as Akinyode affirms at the end of the novel, when he greets
Cudeback, the intrepid Ohioan who has made the trip to West Africa,
with the paradoxical salutation Welcome to Ashtabula (262).
The command to affect his present in order to have a future has, ironically, become a mantra that suffuses Akinyode with nostalgia. The mantra
demands urgency but induces a subtly pleasurable, regret-filled meditation instead. It locates Akinyode in the present facing the future, but his
dreams of future success are associated with youth. The aphorism forges a
link to the lost past of boyhood, returning him to the time when he first
wrote it down. The repetition, however, gives the aphorism the appearance
of an eternal truth, something outside both present and future. Rereading
it allows Akinyode to enjoy three different perspectives all outside time:a
retreat to a private reverie outside career and civil duties, a vantage point
from which to measure his life and guide his decisions, and a golden ideal
that focuses his desire for a different life with larger horizons.
Paulin Hountondji writes that Philosophy, critical reflection par excellence, can only develop fully where one undertakes to write ones memories, to keep ones journal.49 Franois Dossou accuses scriptophiles
like Hountondji of believing that writing helps stabilize thought and that
the thoughts of those who cannot read go wandering where they may,
and are incapable of taking fixed form.50 Akinyode, however, is one
scriptophile whose thoughts both involve critical reflection and wander
uncontrollably. If anything, his literacy increases the muddle of his thinking, valued by the novel as fertile and creative. Akinyodes hyperliterate
consciousness does not display the consequences of literacy predicted by
Ong, Goody, or Rotman. His thinking does not privilege linearity, causality, or syllogistic logic, but rather repetition, rhythm, and random association. He does not think in abstractions but within a particular context
defined by his relations to others. And his literate consciousness does not
entail the physical absence and disembodiment of interlocutors but rather
their presence and embodiment. Literacy, in the world of sar, promotes
metaphor, wordplay, and the play of depth and surface.
When Akinyode has a problem and wants to know what he himself
thinks about it, he turns up the wick and rummages through his library,
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s.54 Having arrived at an od, the diviner recites from memory and in
arbitrary order at least four texts associated with it, one of which the client chooses as the oracular guide to the future.55 As Ruth Finnegan writes,
Since more than one piece can be quoted for whatever figure is thrown,
these are recited at random one after the other, and it is for the client, not
the diviner to select which applies to his particular case.56 If therefore
combines an ingredient of chance or destiny with a strong element of
choice.57 The recipient cannot chose the od, but chooses the verse, and
thus composes the text.58 In the privacy of his study, Akinyode rereads
texts he selected in the past but in an order he chooses in the present. He
acts as his own diviner. Wande Abimbola explains that If is the only
r [god] who does not possess his devotees overtly; instead he can
inspire them.59 Akinyodes rereading works similarly. It resists possession
by an external spirit:it involves a recovery and not a loss of self.
Akinyode is a writer as well as a reader. In the fourth chapter, called
Tisa (a Yoruba-inflected transcription of Teacher), we see him in his
own home in Ak, sitting Alone in his makeshift study, that is, the
famed corner of his front living room, into which he sometimes gave the
appearance of having been stamped from adolescence (105). It is Saturday
afternoon, time for his weekly ritual of reviewing matters that require his
attention as headmaster. His tyrannising stacks of files, school registers,
circulars and memoranda, account books, inkwells, and rubber stamps
and pads constantly presented an organising sleight of hand (107).
Teaching does not only serve the propagation of the contents of books. It
also involves covering paper with marks and creating files in order to keep
track of students, their learning, and their fees, and It was his duty to
close the registers for the year with a diagonal line across the space below
the last entry, write his comments within the right of the two triangles
thus created, and seal it off with his signature (109).
The eruption of ordinary life and embodied demands for interpersonal
communication threaten to interrupt the writers solitude. An impromptu
visit by another ex-Il makes concentration difficult, and a further distraction comes from the kitchen, whence the aroma of crayfish cooking
cut through his study with impudent ease investing the front room
so thoroughly that the teacher could no longer pick up a file or a school
report without absorbing the dense fumes through his fingertips (106).
The body of his friend and the senses and appetite of his own body conspire to distract him from his papers. Akinyode, however, has not received
the nickname Methodical for nothing, and he forces himself to ignore
the temptations and work another half hour.
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It does not help that Akinyode feels writers block. He finds his mind
near-jammed by the log of accumulated chores (105). By an effort of will
he chains himself to his desk and forces himself to review all his chores.
When he hits a block, his solution is to give his subconscious free rein, to
recall one of the literary allusions cluttering his memory and to jump laterally by association or wordplay, trusting that a way forward will appear.
For instance, when he racks his brain asking why the name Padua is so
familiar, a neighbour, the circuit preachers wife, appears outside his window, prompting the answer: Padua is the setting of The Taming of the
Shrew (11617). Even Akinyodes subconscious is highly literate.
The teachers desk was a tableau of inanimate queuing (107), and
the queue does not move forward sequentially. Akinyode does not finish with any file but reviews each in turn, satisfied with small editorial additions to each response that he is drafting. Writing is a process,
composition takes place over time. Nothing in the queue is resolved, but
everything moves a step forward. Time is needed for the right words to
percolate, for the writer to decide what he thinks, and for him to be satisfied with his decisions. Writing is a matter of intermittent and recurrent
attention, alternating with prolonged periods of inattention.
One of the outstanding items Akinyode must face is an angry parents
letter of complaint to the school board, with a covering memorandum
from the schools inspector. The matter had become formalised: Every
exchange was being forwarded and copied in triplicate (134). Akinyode
has already decided how far he is willing to compromise his dignity as a
teacher:In a separate folder lies his letter of resignation, which lacked
only his signature and date (134). He initiates a draft response to the latest letter, which he sets aside for further ideas in the morning (134).
In a folder marked PE R SON A L are the latest business propositions
from Sipe (114), and, as the end of the year is approaching, unsigned
Christmas cards (109).60 Also in the folder is a letter from a former
teacher-trainee who had developed too personal an interest in him (134).
Akinyode is obliged to compose an address to the Owu National Society,
no easy task for he is not related to the town of Owu. He plans to start
his speech with a joke and tries to recall one he once read involving blood
and taxes (even his jokes come from books). After a painful fifteen minutes, however, he must admit failure:So he left a gap for later inspiration
and proceeded to the substance, an exposition of the history of Owu,
into which he has conducted research. There are, however, controversial
episodes in that past that are difficult to broach, and once more he flings
down his pencil. He adopts a new tack, incorporating liberally from
81
his little notebook of quotes, some ready ticked for this address (139).
Although the address is far from complete, he decides to call it a day:a
day well spent. He was well ahead of his working schedule (140).
Akinyodes writing implicates his entire self:including his understanding of himself as a moral man and a teacher; his identity as a Yoruba, an
Ijebu (a subgroup of Yoruba), and a man from sar; and his relations
to colleagues, students, and neighbours. Writing is a matter of memory
and taking stock, of measuring the self against aspirations and principles,
of will and decision-making, of self-questioning and of self-presentation.
Like reading, writing promotes self-questioning: Fulfillment, he
enquired silently, because there was a listener in the room beside himself fulfillment, what does it mean? He glanced swiftly round his modest dwelling did these walls completely circumscribe his future? (113).
The writer decides what words he will use to speak for him, what words
he will live by, and what words to ignore.
T h e w i n d ow of t h e t r a i n
In Arrow of God the power of literacy is associated with the road, a road
built by the British and as yet so new it has seen no motorized traffic. By
the time of events in sar, a mere fifteen or so years later, a rudimentary
road has been built through the fast timber forests by the Ijebu themselves (241), and the ex-Ils plan to build a road between sar and Ibadan
as a logical extension of their even more ambitious plan to link Lagos,
Ikorodu, and sar by a year-round, all-weather motorable road (184).
The emphasis in sar, however, is not so much on roads, which
are taken for granted, as on the lorries and cars that ride on them.
Akinyode himself does not know how to drive, but, Now the roads
were better, he wants to learn (12). The novel opens on the proud occasion of the inauguration of the first lorry to be owned by a man in
sar. The driver is Wemuja, a friend of Akinyodes since they were both
young, when Wemuja had run away from his own home in the hope of
learning the printing trade (13). Finding himself in sar, Wemuja had
attached himself to Akinyodes father because Christians were known
to use books. There is no printing trade in sar but there is lumber,
and the driving of a lorry loaded with timber appears to many as a first
step to the printing of books (31). Wemuja boasts that he was not just
a lorry driver but was in the book-production business, that he and
Mr Teacher are in the same profession, just at different ends of the
production line (31).
82
83
his mother bears all the promise of modernity that young Akinyode
associates with English-language literacy (18). Described as both curiosity and adventure (13), his first train trip is the earliest incarnation of
The Great Adventure, his lifelong dream of stepping outside his life and
becoming someone different, a dream later attached to the unrealized
project of studying overseas (42).
The railway is also a metonym of modernity in Camara Layes LEnfant
noir, when it takes young Laye from his home to school in the distant
Guinean capital of Conakry. There the train is but the first wheel of the
engrenage that culminates on the last page in Layes arrival in France
with a map of the Paris Mtro in his pocket,62 a powerful reinforcement
of the connection between train and paper.63 Ng g also writes of his
excitement upon first taking a train to boarding school. He had always
been envious of John and Joan, fictional schoolkids in his English textbook, who lived in Oxford but went to school in Reading by train.64
John and Joans felicitously named destination reinforced the association
of the train with literacy, and the young Kenyan felt excited to make a
similar journey:Alliance High School, Kikuyu. Twelve miles away, but it
is as if Im about to ride a train to paradise.65
In Sembne Ousmanes Les Bouts de bois de Dieu, which tells the story
of a strike by railway workers, the machine was making of them a whole
new breed of men.66 Railways and books, both originally produced by
toubabs (the whites), dont know the difference between a white man and
a black (8) and belong to all who assert their claim to them. One of the
first steps in the strike is to make a list of the strikers. The workers have
African names that could derail a train (18), but they nonetheless successfully record, first on paper and then in deed, their intention to control
the railway and their fates.
Akinyodes experience of the train, by contrast, is not so much modern, as in Sembnes novel, as modernist, an aesthetic and psychological
response to modernity. The reverie Akinyode induces by rereading his
personal papers summons a memory of the first time he succumbed to
such reverie, his first train trip when the rhythm of the wheels lulled him
into a semi-conscious state:Muted echoes of his raucous first encounter
with the railway circled his skull in the silent afternoon (12). The hypnotic repetition of the wheels well up in the adult Akinyode as a kind of
Proustian involuntary memory that restores the entire world of the past.
Daniel Dennett warns against the common image of consciousness as
vehicles of content moving through the brain in a rigorously sequential
order, like railroad cars on a track.67 Soyinkas novel makes clear that
84
85
Those windows are contrasts to the page, but the train window Akinyode
remembers is a mirror of the page before him, through which he metaphorically enters another space. Reading promotes a reverie that sends
Akinyode far from what he is actually reading, but what he thinks of, the
train, by its similarity to reading, returns him to his immediate condition. Reading leads out to the world and back into memory, but both the
world and past experience have reading at their centre.
When the train stops, its rocking movement is somehow transferred
to the people on the other side of the window:the hawkers of food who
move in both directions, trays balanced on their heads, babies on
backs bobbing up and down (20). One hawker of yams stands before
Akinyode, her body rocking on the balls of her feet while a hand cupped
itself around the bottom of the restless baby on her back (21). The boy
who has just left behind his parents and embarked on a journey to school
asks the young mother through the window to give him food. This is the
constellation of mother and child and food already familiar to us from
Achebe, but whereas Achebe associates all three elements with orality
and contrasts them with literacy, in sar mother, child, and food appear
through a window that is implicitly associated with the page being read.
The literacy that takes the young African male away from his mother contains her and serves to restore her to him.
L i t e r ac y, or a l i t y, a n d p ow e r
In sar many of the usual connotations of orality and literacy are
reversed: Akinyodes literacy is associated with digression and circularity rather than with straight lines and syllogisms. Nevertheless, orality
remains associated with tradition and literacy with modernity, and the
two are involved in a struggle for power that culminates in the contest for
the position of Odemo of sar. In Soyinkas novel, orality and literacy
each have their own power, orality relying on secrecy and magic, literacy
on dissemination and display.
The forces of orality are represented by the aged Agunrin Odubona,
thought by most to be over a hundred years old and to embody the collective will of all of sar (229). In a deep irony, the Agunrin is called the
last surviving tome of sar, and indeed of Ijebu, history from before the
settled phase of missionary incursion (229). It is a mark of the penetration
of literacy that oral memory is itself imagined in terms of the book (just
as, in the digital age, human memory is imagined in terms of computer
memory).68 The same irony informs the oft-repeated proverb attributed
86
Soyinkas novel sides with Johnsons account of the past and depicts the
Agunrin as an outdated and irrelevant figure. According to Josiah, the
Agunrin still doesnt even accept that the railway or motor lorry exists in
this world (173).
It is a commonplace of African literature that orality is associated with
the old, but usually the old retain a wisdom the young would be well
87
88
[Nodes] lips, and understand their message, and read his thoughts (93),
but he has just died, and Node is more alone than ever.
The muteness ironically associated with illiteracy marks the failure of
communication across generations. To communicate with faraway children, illiterate parents must resort to the services of a letter writer. Node
employs Fatuka to send messages to a wayward son who never replies
(87). Akinyodes parents have more success communicating with their
son in distant Abeokuta. Akinyode has taught his father to read, and the
old man writes letters to him. The real test, however, is communication
with his mother, Mariam, who, like so many mothers in African literature, cannot read what her son writes and who, too, must employ Fatukas
services.
The letter writer has a sign painted by Mariams late brother, Tenten,
proclaiming his occupation in blazing colours on a board outside his
window:
A DE babs FAT U K A L E T T E R-W R Iter aN D C OF F E E D etial
SECKretries.
A L L ePI StolA RY and DocUMental M AT T E R S U NderTA king (89)
Tentens sign showed very clearly that he was neither gifted nor more
than barely literate (93). He has failed to master the conventions of written English regarding grammar, spelling, and capitalization, indeed seems
unaware that the written language has such conventions. Oral communication, after all, does not require them.
Tenten the sign writer (and Nodes interpreter), Fatuka the letter writer
who hires him, and Mariam, who hires the letter writer and cannot read
his sign (89), constitute an economy of mixed literacy very distinct from
that of the ex-Ils. Mariam does not believe that Fatuka does real work
and finds it sad to see a grown man still lolling about in his wrapper,
chewing-stick in mouth, when half the world was already at work and
some farmers were even sheltering from the suns ferocity after a hard
mornings work (86). She prefers to rely on personal messengers rather
than send letters:A well-brought-up girl, she thought appreciatively, could
be trusted to deliver a message faithfully and to report on the messages
reception to the one who sent her (91). When she must dictate a letter to
her son and Fatuka gives her the finished letter in a stamped and sealed
envelope, she looks for a traveller who can deliver it personally rather than
entrust it to the post office, whose workings remain mysterious to her.
Her son knows to check the stamp on letters from her and remove it if it
has not been cancelled (90).
89
In Alukos novel One Man, One Wife, an old woman whose daughter
has gone missing also misunderstands the privatepublic interaction of
the postal system and believes that a mailed letter will find her daughter:
Everybody knew that if a letter was written well enough it could go to any destination on earth. It was not necessary for her to know Toros whereabouts before
writing to her. Indeed if she knew her whereabouts there would be no point in
coming to seek the letter-writers assistance. All Idasa know that Royansons letters can see better than witches, she said. I want you to tell him to find my
daughter for me. (158)
When Royanson, the letter writer, cannot write a letter that will find her
daughter, Ma Sheyi concludes, Where, after all, was the alleged magic in
writing? (158). Alukos novel mocks her for imagining that letters can find
readers without addresses, but that is, after all, not so different from what
novels themselves must do when they imagine an implied reader. Writers
and readers of fiction have always been fascinated by people outside the
network of state-sponsored literacy and by the written message that cannot be received. In Anton Chekhovs story Vanka, an unhappy servant
boy surreptitiously uses his masters pen and paper and ink to write a letter to his grandfather in the village asking to be rescued, but at the end
of the story he writes the address To grandfather in the village before
dropping the letter in the postbox.75
Akinyodes mother does not imagine that the postal system is magic,
but in her experience writing a letter does involve a kind of spell. When
she dictates her letter to Fatuka she begins with the obligatory conventional salutation Omo mi owon, My dear son (87). The writing convention conjures up the presence of her son. Her gaze traversed the distance
between her and her son, and her voice sounded almost disembodied
(87); Her mind, by habit, was preceding the letter to its destination (88).
She immediately feels her loneliness reduced (90). Akinyode, as we
have seen, does the same thing when he imagines how he might write his
thoughts to the Circle of ex-Ils, how they will receive his letter, and how
they will discuss it afterwards. In sar writing is paradoxically associated
with the presence of the interlocutor.
Mariam urgently needs to tell her son about the loss of the money for
her esusu group (a self-help scheme to which members make monthly contributions). The money was in a biscuit tin that also contained personal
heirlooms belonging to her late brother and that has gone missing (85).
The box that preserves the property of the dead as well as the collective
hopes of a circle of close associates echoes the tin box in which Soyinka
90
found his fathers papers, which, as we have seen, is an image for the novel
itself. For most of the chapter, however, the mothers biscuit box is missing and where it should be there is only a hole. We eventually learn the
box was taken by members of the olifan cult, to which her brother also
belonged, and when they finally do return it, they have removed the personal items, which must remain with the initiated. This box does not constitute an inheritance, as Essays tin trunk does, but a mystery.
Mariam is afraid to tell her husband, Josiah, what is inside the box,
because she is afraid of dispersing the money with the mouth; to reveal
that money is missing could affect the chance of getting it back (84).
In Mariams imagination, if the word remains in one head alone, it is
possible to retain control over the thing the word represents. If the word
is spread by many mouths to many ears, all power over the thing represented would be dissipated and lost or, more dangerously, power would
fall into the wrong hands and could be used against one.
Tutuolas 1958 novel The Brave African Huntress retells a relevant story
about secrecy and oral dissemination and their dangers. Adebisi, the
eponymous heroine, works as a barber for a king and, as a result of her
access to the royal head, discovers that the king sports hidden horns. The
monarch forbids her to tell anyone his secret on pain of death. She, however, suffers physically from keeping this secret and becomes lean and ill.
An old man whom she consults advises her to unburden herself into a
hole in the ground, which she does, recovering completely. A more modern counsellor might tell her to keep a diary. There were many wonderful things in the days gone by, and two young trees sprout from the pit
to which Adebisi has confided her secret (44). The first man to see the
beautiful trees cuts them down in order to make a bugle from them. And
when he blows this horn in the royal presence, it broadcasts far and wide
the news that the king has horns (44). Keeping a secret (especially for a
woman a mans secret) exacts a physical toll, it seems, but it is also deadly
to utter it, for the least dissemination removes the secret from the owners
control.
Jacques Rancire calls writing the mute and chatterbox word,76 because
it involves both secrecy (in the form of specialized knowledge protected
by seals and envelopes) and dissemination to a large public of strangers.
But in sar mute and chatterbox best describes orality, which is associated with secrecy and dispersal. Either one speaks to no one or gossip
spreads to everyone. Precolonial oral texts, Karin Barber explains, were
deliberately constituted to be obscure and to require specialized exegesis
91
even though they were widely known and performed by people who did
not have the knowledge to interpret them.77 According to Barber, print
literacy brought a new dispensation to Africa:The emphasis now was not
on the secretion of meaning in opaque and allusive formulations, but on
transparency and coherence. The audience was envisaged not as a congeries of distinctive, differentially-knowledgeable categories of people, but as
an anonymous, potentially indefinitely extensive and unbounded public
made up of interchangeable units.78 The Circle of ex-Ils are a model of
such a public.
Traditional orality and modernizing literacy confront each other at the
climax of Soyinkas novel during the contest for the position of Odemo
of sar. In order to put one of their own on the throne, the ex-Ils organize an open election to be supervised by the Resident (a colonial officer).
They appeal to the modern notion of the will of the people instead of
to traditional authority. They win the election because they take advantage of their opponents mistakes on paper. Trying to negotiate a sharing
of power, Olisa, the regent, committed the unspeakable folly of writing
to Akinsanya, the ex-Ils candidate, and conceding that he enjoyed the
greater support (253). The ex-Ils promptly dispatched the letter to the
Resident as evidence of Akinsanyas right to the position.
The biggest obstacle to the ex-Ils campaign is the authority still
wielded by the Agunrin, whom the Olisa controls. Modern political and
communicative strategies cannot overcome the old man; only traditional
forces have any effect. Jagun, a contemporary of Akinyodes father but
an ally of the ex-Ils, retreats to the sacred space of the osugbo, another
camera obscura, in order to commune with supernatural forces and call
home the Agunrin (213). Jaguns magic words have the force of deeds and
the old man dies (237). Soyinkas novel works with a paradox:it celebrates
the triumph of the ex-Ils over the forces of obscurantism, but the modernizers benefit directly from the power over death wielded by Jagun, a
magic that they do not themselves understand.
sar retells the urban legend of a civil servant who drives from Yaba to
the island of Lagos without taking Carter Bridge, the one and only link
between the two. (Carter Bridge is named after the same man who forced
paper and roads so treacherously on Ijebuland.) When the civil servant
tells his wife about the hidden route, which takes less than a quarter of
the time one would normally take, she faints, realizing that her husband
has travelled on spirit ways (192). Spiritual communication takes next to
no time and does not require the mediation of a bridge. This makes it
92
more powerful than the new means of transportation and communication roads instead of spirit ways; writing instead of orality but it is
secret, dangerous, accessible only to a select few, and cannot necessarily be repeated. The ex-Ils, typical of the new generation, require more
mediation than their predecessors:they travel by bicycle, motor car, train,
or ferry, means of transport that are likely to break down, and they are
forever writing. Mediation, however, is not just delay, encumbrance, or
interference; it is also the very essence of the new kinds of consciousness
and the new ways of being.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the magical powers associated with orality
wield an attraction to the literate ex-Ils. The traditional powers of magic
are themselves, however, adopting the mediation of writing. One of Sipes
co-investors in a business enterprise, a man called Onayemi, insists on
consulting the spirit of an ancestor through the offices of a medium before
committing himself to the enterprise. Although barely literate, Onayemi
has prepared a written questionnaire, carefully dated and certified with
a witnesss signature, for the spirit of Layeni to answer. Akinyode marvels: Where else in Nigeria would you find spirits which actually read
English! (243).
Among the spirits instructions, which Onayemi carefully writes down,
is that the supplicants must cite or call a curious symbol, which evidently only the medium, and perhaps Onayemi, would be able to decipher,
cite, or call Sipe merely labelled it C U R IOUS SIGN in capital
letters (74).
Although the sign needs to be said aloud, it bears no clue to pronunciation. If this sign is part of a semiotic system, it is unlike the alphabet,
where the letters are independent of particular words, and more like the
Adinkra script among the Akan in Ghana, in which each sign represents
a word and must be learned individually.79 Such a system of signs, because
it requires personal instruction in the pronunciation and interpretation of
every word, favours secret knowledge by the initiated:some know what
others do not.
93
Esoteric knowledge and magic are themes also associated with literacy. Sipe has a dream in which he recognizes the C U R IOUS SIGN
as ancient Hebrew: No true Christian would dream of conjuring up
spirits in any other tongue (75). The ex-Ils know of a legend that the
missionaries did not share with Africans the Bible in its entirety but kept
back two books that originally completed the Pentateuch, the Sixth and
Seventh Books of Moses that detailed the secret of the patriarchs magical
powers (77). The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses is also the title of an
actual grimoire or occult grammar, with instructions on how to summon and control demonic forces, that originated in Europe in the nineteenth century and circulated widely in the British West Indies and in
West Africa. It was advertised in Nigerian magazines and sold by mail
order by William Lauron Delaurence from Chicago.80 Advertisements for
the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses might have appeared alongside Wade
Cudebacks ad for a penpal.
The prime example of power allied to secrecy in Soyinkas novel is If,
the Yoruba practice of divination. Jagun is the mouthpiece of If (96)
because he can read If (144). In If past, present, and future are imagined as already written in a single book. In order to consult the future it
is enough to flip the pages ahead. What one finds written in those pages,
however, is not fully fixed, as it might be in some books, but can be negotiated. A peculiarity of the oracular book is that it is deliberately kept
secret:only some know how to read it.
Modern literacy promises the one who masters it a different, explicitly non-magical power, albeit one intimately connected to a specialized knowledge that can appear near-magical. Akinyode is inspired by
the statistical activities of the International Institute of Agriculture (IIA),
founded by David Lubin in Italy, which gathers information on crops
from all over the world in order that After their tabulations, the experts
can state with mathematical exactitude what the world supply of wheat
will be in any current year (44). Akinyode admires the ambition of reproducing on paper, in the form of charts and numbers, a model of the world
that would so thoroughly measure the present state of things that it could
predict the immediate future. He himself is forever recording the data
from the school thermometer, barometer, and rain gauge (6), and the
pedagogical value of meteorological measurements is a regular theme in
The Nigerian Teacher.81
Although Akinyode does not believe in a book of predestination written by spiritual forces, he does believe in the power of a man-made book
created by accurate and thorough observation. If the numerical patterns
94
recorded in this book hold out the promise of manipulating the world, it
is because the world obeys fixed laws of causality. In the eighteenth century, Pierre Simon Laplace imagined a world on Newtonian principles
where the future arises from the present as effect from cause. He also
imagined an all-seeing divine intelligence so powerful that, given the
position and velocity of every particle in the universe, it could calculate
the unfolding of history.82 For such an intellect, wrote Laplace, nothing
could be uncertain; and the future, just like the past, would be present
before its eyes.83 The International Institute that Akinyode reads about
shares that dream. It assumes that the world on paper has a mysterious
capacity to model the world outside paper so thoroughly that the latter
becomes predictable and controllable.
Some among the Circle of Ex-Ils feel that this dream of modelling
and so knowing the world is a chimera. After all, Farming was a hazard at best, a slave of the vagaries of rain and sunshine, locusts, kwela
bird, foot-and-mouth disease, the black-pod blight, and fungoid parasites
(45). How could all the variables be anticipated? (45). Others feel that the
claim to omniscience is sacrilegious:No wonder there befell America the
plague of the Great Depression, from which note the African peoples
were not only spared, but of which they remained blissfully unaware!
(45). These sceptics want to preserve a realm of unpredictability in order
to leave some room for God to intervene in the world.
Sipes reproach to Akinyode is of a different order:he believes that if
his friend needs to know fully what will happen before he takes action,
he will never act. Sipe calls mathematical exactitude Akinyodes statistical talisman (43), meaning that the love of knowledge in the form
of numbers is itself superstition. The IIA is no better than If. Sipe,
who feels himself tainted by his business associate Onayemis superstition, is amazed to learn that Akinyode himself had once consulted the
same oracle many years before. The young man, who wanted to affect
his present for the sake of his future, sought the advice of an expert in
futures. He asked the obvious questions any young man would ask,
such as Would I be successful in life? Would I go to the UK or not?
Should I invest my money in stocks and shares or start up a business of
my own? (245). The oracle had replied, as is the wont of oracles, with a
riddle:Find Asabula (246).
In retrospect Akinyode hears in the oracular pronouncement an
uncanny prediction of Ashtabula, the home of his penpal, which, as we
have seen, fuels his imagination. The enigmatic Asabula is both magical
95
(the teacher had not yet received his first letter from Wade Cudeback)
and meaningless (Maybe it has no more meaning than Abracadabra
(246)). As Johannes Fabian points out, omens derive their meaning when
we construct them as a past for narratives to build on.84 Akinyode uses
the oracular pronouncement the same way he uses Archdeacon Howells
maxim about affecting the present: to shape his life into a narrative.
Both the oracular message and the Ohio place name are, in the context
of sar, without content, but their mutual ratification makes Akinyodes
life a narrative with a past and future. Ashtabula attaches itself to different objects, including the Great Adventure, until, at the end of the
novel, Akinyode locates Ashtabula in sar itself. He has found Ashtabula
because Ashtabula has changed significance. This is how an oracle
works:it provides a message, an image, or a word that allows the receiver
to bring things into relation. Akinyode constantly redraws the web of
personal relations, as he moves through the world, as his thoughts wander
restlessly, and as he tries to convince others of his opinion. The model
of the IIA would be, if realized, a single model as large as the world and
shared by all, while the web of allusion and referencing that Akinyode
develops is personal to him and always being adapted.
Akinyodes way of being in the world, which is also the way he reads
and the way he writes, is taken as a model by teacher trainees who spend
time at his school. For a time Akinyode sent his old periodicals to one of
these, Mrs Esan, who now lives in a remote town, where she can bomb
the English language worse than Hitler and no one will complain (155).
She copies out the passages in the magazines that Akinyode has underlined in red and keeps them by her (156). Another former trainee sneaked
into Akinyodes office when he was out and stole a passage from his
notebook, which now, many years later, the acolyte reads along with the
Bible, night after night, the same passage (154). In a strange, unintended
way, Akinyode publishes, that is makes public, his collection of private
jottings. As we have seen, print items from the public realm, in the form
of clippings from newspapers and magazines, marked with notes, acquire
personal significance that is not their original meaning. Items from this
private realm then in turn achieve a wider circulation, albeit not as wide
as the magazines themselves have. Akinyodes notebooks are like the
answers that Sipe circulates under the desks during an exam:a parallel
form of communication commenting on the official print. The teachers
personal notes communicate his engagement with a world larger than his
immediate horizons. One passage from a magazine that Akinyode sent
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Mrs Esan so incensed her with its patronizing colonial superiority that
she brings her copy of it, a lined, handwritten sheet, which showed its
nine or ten years aging (156), to her mentor to ask his opinion. She has
even written a protest letter to the West African Pilot (156).
As J. D. Y. Peel argues, the sphere in which the ex-Ils circulate ideas
has a relation to the new nation made up of colonial subjects who are
learning to conceive of themselves as citizens.85 This differs, however,
from the connection that Benedict Anderson has made between print
capitalism and the rise of nationalism.86 For one thing, the circulation
of words by Akinyode involves not newspapers but mere scraps of newsprint. And for another, the network through which these printed words
circulate does not extend beyond Yorubaland and remains based on personal relations.
The modern modes of dissemination that allow Akinyode and the ex-Ils
to shape the opinions of others also, however, make people vulnerable to
the snares of con-artists. The novels one scene set outside Nigeria involves
an Indo-Trinidadian entrepreneur in London named Ray Gunnar, who
advertises in the colonies for a correspondence school that does not exist.
He takes advantage of the pre-eminent obsession of the West African,
both in Britain and at home, which is studies:It did not matter the subject or the end qualification:London matriculation; bachelors or masters
degrees; higher, elementary, or primary examinations in the various professions law, medicine, pharmacy, accountancy, economics, etc. (176).
This progenitor of Nigerian 419 scams is not ashamed to invoke the name
of Paul Robeson and his dream of a Negro theatre in order to appeal to
African customers (177). He can use the new PanAfrican consciousness
linking America, Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa in order to cheat
those who aspire to this consciousness. The Nigerian Teachers Union is
finally asked to investigate the Trinidadian (181), but not before Gunnar
has roped in several victims. Sipe, himself a confidence-man in the two
senses of proclaiming himself resolute and of playing roles, sends off a
guinea for Gunnars course in theatre (182). Akinyode even tried to order
the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses from Gunnar, who has a sideline
in educational and oriental mystery books (185). Mail-order advertisements, no less than oracles, can be used to cheat the credulous. Such forgery, like transparency, depends on the doubled nature of the world on
paper:it can reflect and organize social relations, but can also conceal or
betray. The two relationships to ones audience as fellow citizens and
faceless dupes are both possible because the audience for print consists
of strangers.
97
R e a di ng a n d w r i t i ng h i s t or y
Wade Cudeback sends his many correspondents a typewritten and mimeographed description of his summer travels in Quebec, the Maritime
provinces, and New England. Reading that account fills Akinyode with
a deep dissatisfaction with his own seemingly unadventurous life in the
backwater of Ijebu. He wonders if a stranger could find in his corner of
Yorubaland anything to compare with Cudebacks marvels. When he
reads about his friends drive through Salem, Massachusetts, he wonders, where was sars Witches or Sorcerers House? (11). He is slightly
relieved to identify a local equivalent:Was it by any chance the iledi?
(11). These places also had their history, he realizes (11), and he dreams
of bringing his senior pupils on field trips as an extension of the history
classroom and then sitting them down to write the story of their passage
among the ghosts of their own history and sending the best student essay
to Cudeback (12).
What is this thing called history that northeastern North America
has and that Akinyode must seek out in Yorubaland? Cudebacks letter
focuses on three very different kinds of interest. First, the political history of wars and empires. The Plains of Abraham in Quebec speak to the
American of the epic imperial struggle of Wolfe and Montcalm. But the
battle of Quebec was a mere 1759 (11)! Yoruba history goes back further
than that. Yet somehow, even though the aged survivors of Yoruba wars,
men like the Agunrin Odubona, would sometimes recount their own
participation, bringing the scenes of courage and terror to life, and the
worthy Dr Johnson had chronicled these wars (1112), that history still
remains less substantial to Akinyode than do the French and Indian Wars
to the American. Akinyode wonders, where were the trails, the spots, the
landmarks (12) to testify to the history that existed before the coming of
the British? The Nigerian landscape seems to Akinyode as strangely mute
as the Agunrin himself.
Cudebacks history also records a second aspect of the landscape, one
less concerned with past heroics than with measuring how humans have
refashioned the world they live in. Akinyode is particularly taken by his
description of a paper mill in New Brunswick. The American brings to
bear on the world a secular, empirical, would-be-scientific gaze that finds
meaning in ordinary human activities that have tamed the physical landscape and transformed the social landscape.
The same eye that finds meaning in ordinary activity inevitably sees a
third kind of history preserved in the Witches House of Salem. This is
98
the realm of everything that resists the secular and exceeds the human
scale, that is, the exotic, the religious, and the irrational. If some activities transform the landscape to serve human needs and can be narrated
as man-made development, other activities that do not fit this narrative
appear as vestiges of the primitive, the world that secular history defines
itself against.
Cudeback has no difficulty identifying these different historical
sediments, because yet another layer superimposed upon them directs
his attention:a layer of words in the form of guide books, monuments
and written markers erected in the midst of the landscape, and guided
tours. It is a commonplace of history that history is whatever has been
written down, that before writing there was only prehistory. In part,
this is the prejudice of the literate, since everyone everywhere keeps
alive communal memories of the past. All people have a narrative of
the past, and much work has been done by African historians to show
the epistemological value to history of oral tradition. In part, however, the conviction that the past must be written in order to count as
history reflects a particular narrative tradition that is not found everywhere and that emphasizes these three levels of political event, human
industry, and the exotic primitive. Not all societies have had history
in this sense because many have narrated the past quite differently,
focusing not on how humans have made the world but on gods or
noble lineages or the models established by the ancestors. All people
can be fitted into a history such as Cudeback tells, but not all people
have told such a narrative about themselves.
Soyinkas readers recognize that Cudeback is not as original as he
appears to his penpal in Nigeria in the thirties. The Americans travels to
the sites of history are inseparable from his leisure as a tourist. His account
merely adds one more layer of words to the words of officially sanctioned
history, like the tourists need to photograph everything already pictured
in postcards. His sighting is inseparable from citing. Akinyodes task as
a colonial, however, in a world where the landscape has not already been
written down and written over, is fundamentally different. He must see
historical significance where none has previously been recognized.
Salim, the narrator of V. S. Naipauls novel A Bend in the River, achieves
a similar historical consciousness:
Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by
the postage stamps of our area. The British administration gave us beautiful
stamps. These stamps depicted local scenes and local things; there was one called
Arab Dhow. It was as though, in those stamps, a foreigner had said, This is
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what is most striking about this place. Without that stamp of the dhow I might
have taken the dhows for granted. As it was, I learned to look at them So
from an early age I developed the habit of looking, detaching myself from a
familiar scene and trying to consider it as from a distance.87
The juxtaposition of the image of the dhow on the postage stamp and
the actual dhows creates a stereoscopic illusion of depth, which lends
to the East African coast a fourth dimension, that of historical time. It
is the aura of historical depth that Cudeback sees wherever he travels.
Of course, he always travels to places where that aura has already been
vouched for by others.
Salims postage stamp, which travels the world through the postal
system, gives East Africa an existence in the world on paper. As Salim
learns to see the dhows as exotic in the way that powerful others do,
his own experience is relativized, even orientalized, but it also acquires
a new kind of significance:he comes to feel that not to be commemorated on paper is to be nothing. Akinyode starts from the representation
of foreign objects in the letter from abroad and tries to imagine how
the foreigner would see Yorubaland. What Akinyode wants is a history
that includes him and gives him meaning of the kind Cudeback has.
This is, in part, a desire that the great events of Yoruba history and the
great men responsible for them be remembered in books in the way that
Wolfe and Montcalm are remembered. The Reverend Samuel Johnson
wrote such a book. But that monumental history, while important, is not
enough. Akinyode also wants to register his world with the same secular
eye Cudeback has, an eye that finds meaning in the ways humans have
shaped their world.
In search of material to write about as part of the project of historicizing and hallowing Ijebuland, Akinyode once made a special excursion by bicycle to Iseyin and Saki, two towns known for their weaving.
Although he had often passed through both on his way to Ilesha, he had
never taken particular notice of them because at school he had not been
taught to look (12). Now, however, he wants to see them for themselves,
or rather what amounts to the same thing for what he might be able
to write about them.88
Akinyodes choice of destination is inspired by an almost ten-year-old
article in The Elders Review which refers to Gerhart Hauptmann, the great
German dramatist, who pictures the poor hand-weaver trying to compete
with the crushing loom (44). Akinyode has ordered Hauptmanns play The
Weavers from Foyles bookstore in London, but never received it (119). Just
knowing the German realist found drama in the plight of the working
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class is enough to inspire Akinyode to look for the interest in his own
surroundings. Reading (and misreading) incite the development of the
readers historical consciousness.
Why does history need to be written down for a landscape to be historicized? In part, because that is just what history means:the record of
the world on paper. But history needs to be written for another reason. In
order to make it possible for a distant reader to receive his text, the writer
must name and describe the setting with a level of detail and explanation
that an oral speaker who tells the story to an acquaintance physically present does not need. Writing for print teaches one to see the world with
a strangers eyes. In the process of rendering context in sufficient detail,
the writer hallows the setting he writes about and makes it equivalent in
importance to other such storied landscapes. He also becomes that special creature:the writer, whose perceptions and emotional responses are
of interest because they are his. On his trip to Iseyin, Akinyode composes
a letter in his mind on the model of his penpals disquisitions:As I pushed
my bicycle slowly through the main street of weavers, having dismounted the
better to savour the smell of dyes and bask in the industry of our ancient
craft, I felt like a two-legged spider strolling through arcades of multicoloured
webs (50). Akinyode writes as if he did not already know Iseyin but were
observing it for the first time. The cyclist must get down and continue
on foot in order to appreciate what is scenic about the scene. Then he is
able to adopt the objectivity and attention to detail that renders the world
vivid and of interest to people who do not already know it. By making
a landscape real and of interest to the penpal whom he only knows on
paper, Akinyode also gives it added significance for those like himself
who already know it.
The history that Cudeback sees everywhere involves both seeing value
in ordinary human manufacturing and finding interest in the exotic and
the local. The two kinds of meaning are woven together in Akinyodes
description of weaving and Salims awareness of the dhows. The activity
of weaving shapes places and organizes human society. At the same time,
the weaving techniques and the products of weaving are unique to this
part of the world and associated with tradition.
Perceiving significance in the world and creating significance are indistinguishable activities. Akinyode, the traveller inspecting traditional
weaving, compares himself to a spider weaving a web. Weaving is not just
Akinyodes chosen subject; it is also a symbol for the process of combining the foreign written form and the local content of personal experience.
In classical literature the Roman appropriation of Greek culture was
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dreams real. The paper and ink of books become fodder for his imagination. Although he resists romantic thoughts of books and backyard
paper mills la Ashtabula, Akinyode revelled for some moments in
a picture of himself riding, Wemuja-style, on the back of a giant log,
an endless log which began in his own concession in sar, was felled
with a thunderous splash all the way across the creeks of Epe then
smashing against the other side of the Atlantic and bouncing down
the Reversing Falls, where his friend Wade Cudebacks contemplation
would be rudely broken by this sight (48). This fantastic vision of writing/riding a log that would make a splash and reach a reader on the
other side of the world seems the opposite of the secular history that
Akinyode wants to write, but reflects the magic that adheres to even the
most deliberately realist writing.
Along with the typewritten account of his travels, Cudeback has sent
a handwritten personal letter. Akinyode breathes in the smell of this letter like the connoisseur of paper and ink that he is and finds suggestions
also of pinewood, river moss, possibly gum arabica (6). He then scrutinizes the handwriting for what it might reveal of the man whose hand
has left these marks. The result is an unusual example of ekphrasis:a verbal representation of another verbal representation treated as if it were a
pictorial representation:
Each exclamation mark was like the housepost of the ogboni shrine, or a
Corinthian column in the Illustrated Bible (Authorized Version). His I had
generous loops both up and down, resulting in a coracle shape, mildly unbalanced by a wave, akin to a fat cowrie, or a curled-up millipede. Each D was
consistently like the cauliflower ear of Osibo, the pharmacist, while the W
was just like an abetiaja, or the starched, bristling headgear of the Reverend
Sisters from Oke Padi hospital. And so it went on: the lower-case y had its
downward tail reversed and looped so far upwards that it became a hangmans noose, while an ultimate t, contrasted with the ordinariness of his t at
the start of a word, was slashed downwards with a vicious, decapitating stroke
which, extended far below the base of the letter, turned it into an amputee,
a cheerful acrobat dancing on its one leg, amusing the rest of its alphabetic
audience with that near-magical turn of the iguniko as it shoots up skywards
on one stilt. (67)
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104
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Soyinka the poet claims to suffer from the same double vision that sees
letters as both themselves and as other things. In a poem called Doctored
Vision he describes failing an opticians literacy test:
The errant eye discerns, at best
A charming alphabestiary. K
Flaunts wings, R wags a furry tail,
H sprouts horns, F is unicorn.
Rabbit ears adorn the simple U while udders
Droop from W. C has long closed ranks
He thinks of flawed O rings Am I
Doomed to crash from vaulting vision?99
The poet finds some consolation for this potentially disastrous blurring
when he qualifies it as poetic vision. Soyinkas doubled vision sees both
what is there and what is there only metaphorically. His two eyes only
harmonise / At certain magic intervals (15), recalling the near-magical
turn of the stilt-walker that Akinyode glimpses in Cudebacks final letter
t. The poets vaulting vision recalls Akinyodes cheerful acrobat.
As long as there has been writing, there has been a mystical tradition of
regarding letters as more than conventional symbols, as somehow revealing something deeper, or what in Wolof is called batin, the underside or
secret side.100 Sufi mysticism, for instance, regards Arabic calligraphy as a
kind of visual punning that confirms the hidden meaning of things:
the downstroke of the letter alif that begins the name of Allah can be continued
slightly to the left to become a D, and if bent further an R is revealed, and if
bent back upward a B emerges, and if further exaggerated an N appears. This
process may suggest a phrase beginning with the letters A-D-B-R-N, or their
numerical values may be added up so that the sum will reveal one of the ninetynine holy names of God or make some other important association.101
The importance of literacy for Soyinka is not, however, the secret mystical
signification it points to but the very fact of its doubleness: that letters
can be seen as well as read, providing the scope for putting two things in
relation and producing a metaphorizing consciousness. Akinyodes playful reading of Cudebacks hand is of a piece with his habit of rereading
material he is familiar with in order to spark personal associations. Michel
de Certeau compares the activity of reading to a dance:the drift across
the page, the metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of
the reader, the improvisation and expectations of meanings inferred from
a few words, leaps over written space in an ephemeral dance.102 In other
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words, the acrobat that Akinyode sees is a figure for his own activity as
reader.
Cudebacks hand conjures up before Akinyodes eye images of body
parts and appurtenances (ear and cap), of bodies shorn of key parts
(decapitation and the amputation of a leg), and of the violent rending of
bodies (a vicious slash and a hangmans noose). Yet the physical images
of execution and dismemberment somehow culminate in a cheerful and
near-magical acrobatic spectacle that shoots skywards to the delight of
its audience. The final image that the passage leaves us with is of resurrection. Handwriting is of the body and restores the body. Not, in this case,
the body of the writer but of the reader. Akinyodes experience of reading
restores him to himself.
When Akinyode holds Cudebacks letter up to his nose, he finds the
faint smell was not too dissimilar from his favoured Quink Ink (6). He
also detects traces of gum arabica and suspects that he had merely foisted
the strong fragrance from his own desk in Ak onto a strangers remote
corner of the world (6). The smell of gum arabica, the yellow viscous
fluid with brown and black impurities made from local ingredients (108)
that blocks Akinyodes access to the North America of his penpal, may,
however, function like Proustian involuntary memory to restore another
absent presence, that of Soyinkas father, to another reader:Soyinka himself. It is tempting to imagine the son seeking in the pages read by his
father traces left by the hands that once held them. In the next chapter,
we shall examine another son whose writing recovers his father.
Ch apter 4
When V. S. Naipaul writes his life story, a subject to which he compulsively returns, that story always has two cornerstones:how he came to be
a writer and his father. The two are intimately related:Naipaul, looking
back, marvels at how far the boy in colonial Trinidad had to travel in
order to become the published writer, and he considers his literary ambition to be his greatest legacy from his father, Seepersad, who had been a
journalist and had published a collection of short stories. The son even
received his original subject matter from his father, who had urged him
to take his, Seepersads, life as the theme for a novel.1 That novel became
A House for Mr Biswas (1961), which tells how a man utterly without a
story nevertheless fashioned his life into a story by making his son into
the writer who could write it.
Naipauls novel, like Soyinkas, is a sons fictional portrait of his father.
The two fathers are almost exact contemporaries: in 1938 Mr Biswas
is 33,2 Akinyode Soditan 32, and both have infant children. Both live
their entire lives in a British colony, receive a colonial education, and
are defined by their relation to the world on paper. Their experience
of the world of writing is that, as it widens their horizons, it threatens
them with a sense of personal irrelevance. Akinyode is haunted by the
Archdeacons maxim about the need to affect the present in order to
have a future, and the Self-Help books of Samuel Smiles fill Mr Biswas
with despair when he contemplates his life and wonders what Samuel
Smiles would have thought of him (141). The existential anxiety of the
protagonists, much more dire in Mr Biswass case, is nonetheless something valued by both novels:their fear of failure reflects the mens dissatisfaction with their circumstances, their desire for more, and their
reading-induced sense of responsibility to make something of their lives.
Because Akinyode and Mr Biswas endowed the world on paper with the
meaning of their lives, paper and print are now able to bear witness to
their lives.
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108
109
110
111
112
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written words that we read (44). The young boy has a talent for lettering
and turns the words meant to humiliate him into something stylish and
sassy that wins him the admiration of the class. He is learning that, if
written with style, words can almost rescue the individual from the mockery of oblivion. Certainly words can resist those who would consign one
there.
School offers its own compensations for the threat of insignificance:the
promise that the world can be known objectively, independent of the perspective of the knower. Ages correspond to grade levels. Dates must be
written at the tops of pages. Naipaul has said of himself:Only my school
life was ordered; anything that happened there I could date at once. But
my family life my life at home or my life in the house, in the street
was jumbled, without sequence.9 The seeming order of school discipline
does not reassure young Mr Biswas, however, any more than the pundits
almanac had. At school he is introduced to science, history, and geography, but he never believes the copious notes he takes (46). These subjects remain as abstract and unreal as Sanskrit.
Mr Biswas later devotes himself to reading the twenty volumes of the
Book of Comprehensive Knowledge on his uncles bookshelves: He read,
and quickly forgot, how chocolate, matches, ships, buttons and many
other things were made; he read articles which answered, with drawings
that looked pretty but didnt really help, questions like: Why does ice
make water cold? Why does fire burn? Why does sugar sweeten? (57).
The encyclopedia, like the pundits almanac, purports to contain the universe but does so by making the man-made universe appear a function of
physical laws independent of human agency. It tells how the world works
but not how it came to be made. As a result, Mr Biswas will be able to
teach Anand about Coppernickus and Galilyo (252) (the orthography
reflects the pronunciation of someone who has only read these names and
never heard them), and how to make a compass and an electric buzzer
(253) (learned from Hawkins Electrical Guide (71)), but this knowledge
remains magical and seems to have nothing to do with him. As long as
he believes that mastery of the world involves learning set procedures, he
is never in the position to act on the world himself or understand how it
has made him.
Mr Biswass own school learning, which does not speak of his experience, offers him no consolation for the existential terror that he has known
ever since his fathers drowning. When the adult Mr Biswas revisits the
place of his birth he finds nothing but oil derricks and grimy pumps, seesawing, see-sawing, endlessly, surrounded by red No Smoking notices.
114
His grandparents house had also disappeared, and when huts of mud and
grass are pulled down they leave no trace (38). Time and the demands of
the industrialized world elsewhere for hydrocarbons have obliterated the
world he knew. The world carried no witness to his birth and early years,
and Mr Biswas feels all the fragility and solitude of existence (38).
The scene with the derricks and pumps is quintessentially modern
because of the presence of printed words, in this case the red No Smoking
signs. The No Smoking signs do not interpret the scene, merely make it
safer, but they are part of a larger historical phenomenon whose power
Mr Biswas becomes aware of shortly after leaving school. The world of
things is being covered with a second world of printed words that manage human relations to things and make them knowable. A world that
had appeared almost part of the natural order (houses of mud and grass)
has been superseded by a world that is manifestly man-made (derricks
and pumps), which in turn is covered by metaculture (the No Smoking
signs). Metaculture is Greg Urbans term for artifacts and practices that
determine the reception of other artifacts and practices.10
In the contemporary world it is difficult to escape the ubiquity of
printed words, on signs; on packages; on clothes; on vehicles; and,
of course, on paper. Certainly one has to travel far to find a vista that
does not yet have a written label affixed to it, telling people where they
are, what they must think about it, or who put the words there. David
Henkin points out how little of the worlds reading actually takes place in
private.11 In Mr Biswass adolescence in the 1920s, however, Trinidadian
landscapes were only beginning to be filled with writing. Indeed, he himself participates in the initial invasion of the world by printed words. His
earliest career, arrived at almost by chance, is as a sign painter. He is given
work by a former school friend who remembers his fancy lettering on the
blackboard.
At that time, the first task of a sign painter was to convince customers
that they even needed signs. In a world where everyone knows everyone
else and knows their place, there is little point in advertising. When, however, the owner of the Keskidee Caf acquires a sign with keskidee birds
perched on the letters, the owner of the neighbouring Humming Bird
Caf feels he needs a sign, too. Mr Biswas, who cannot draw, must convince him that he wants words instead of pictures: The modern thing
is to have lots of words. All the shops in Port of Spain have signs with
nothing but words (68). But the only words Mr Biswas can think to put
on a sign are imported and express foreign sentiments. Fresh fruits daily,
Stick no bills by order, Trespassers will be prosecuted, Overseas visitors
115
welcomed (68) are unnecessary phrases in rural Trinidad, where all the
fruit is local and seasonal, and no one is yet posting bills. The suspicious
proprietor takes exception to the suggestion that he wants a sign saying,
Come in and look around:Is exactly what I have to fight in this place,
he objects (68). He would rather have a sign that says, Idlers keep out by
order (69). These last are also foreign words that, under other circumstances, carry authority and threat, but on a store front in rural Trinidad
only mark the colonials lack of understanding of the purpose of signs.
The coming of printed signs to a village world that has known only
sacred writing is a comic scene repeated perhaps as often in Indian fiction
as the talking book in African fiction. In O. V. Vijayans Malayalam novel
The Legends of Khasak, set in rural Kerala after independence, advertising
is something not dreamt of until a maverick sets himself up in competition with the local manufacturer of bidi cigarettes. Then, on the walls
of Koomankavu, on the little culverts, across quarried rocks, misspelt slogans in large letters appeared overnight, emblazoned with turmeric and
charcoal, Nizam Photo health-giving. Makes you hungry, incinerates even
putrid food in the gizzard!.12 The upstart manufacturer scatters hundreds
of his bidi wrappers on the footpaths around the village as part of his
campaign, an inspired conjunction of those two modern inventions,
advertising and litter.
Mr Biswass youth is witness to the gradual filling of Trinidad with
printed words that repeat the world with a strange, mocking insistence. Occasionally there were inexplicable rashes of new signs, whereupon every sign was required to be more elaborate than the last, and for
stretches the Main Road was dazzling with signs that were hard to read
(70). He discovers a Port of Spain plastered with posters, still wet with
paste, promising fresh gaieties for that afternoon and evening (279). The
authorities put up stern notices in French and English at the wharf that
forbid smoking (327, 483), welcome careful drivers at Arima (454), and
warn against bathing at Balandra (454). Physical objects all have names
written on them. Mr Biswas sleeps on a Slumberking bed (11), wears a
Cyma wrist-watch (424), and rides a Royal Enfield bicycle (425) with a
Brooks saddle (399). His children each receive a Shirley Temple fountain
pen and a bottle of Watermans ink for Christmas (315). A large sign in
front of Hanuman House announces, Red Rose Tea Is Good Tea (213);
salt, no longer just salt, is Cerebos Salt, fine and dry (456); Fernandes
Rum is The perfect round in every circle (406). Soon the modern colony resembles a near illegible palimpsest, such as Mr Biswas creates when
he paints signs for local elections on banners pinned to the wall:paint
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leaked through and the wall became a blur of conflicting messages in different colours (70).
When he was young and helping in Bhandats rumshop, it surprised
MrBiswas to learn that it was the same rum that went into bottles labelled
Indian Maiden, The White Cock, and Parakeet (61). He felt privy to a
secret about the workings of the world. Are the hot and cold drinks, the
soaps, and the lotions and tonics, like the varieties of rum, merely the same
contents under different names? In The Legends of Khasak, bidis are all
the same:though it was the same tobacco wrapped in the same leaf, the
innumerable little companies sported their own labels, and connoisseurs
staked their preferences for their favourite brands.13 The real secret is not
that the labels are false but how much power they have. Each brand of rum
had its adherents (61), and so do the drinks and tonics:Mr Biswass family drinks Ovaltine, Govinds family Milo (273), and Owad thinks Coca
Cola is The best thing in the world (302). Mr Biswas and the other Tulsi
sons-in-law each have a favourite tonic for their favourite ailment Dodds
Kidney Pills, Beechams Pills, Carters Little Liver Pills, Sloans Liniment,
Canadian Healing Oil (95), Tiger Balm (179), Sanatogen (222), Ferrol (268),
and Macleans Brand Stomach Powder (164). The Barbadian writer Austin
Clarke remembers that the writing on boxes of Beechams pills extolled
Englands greatness: we knew and believed that nought shall make us
rue, if England to itself do rest but true and takes Beachams (sic) pills.14
The decrepit and impoverished Bhandat spends his last days submitting
entries to slogan-writing competitions. Although he himself uses Palmolive,
MrBiswas helps him out by coming up with:I use Lux Toilet Soap because
it is antiseptic, refreshing, fragrant, and inexpensive (406).
In such a world, every man (the reference to gender is intended) needs
a sign to advertise himself, not so much to stir up business as to convince
himself who he is. In front of the solicitors office where Mr Biswas got his
birth certificate, a sign, obviously painted by the man himself, says that
F. Z. Ghany was a solicitor, conveyancer and a commissioner of oaths
(39), and the novel always refers to the solicitor by the full name on his
sign. George Macleans badly-written notice board proclaims him a carpenter and cabinet-maker but also a blacksmith and a painter; he made
tin cups and he soldered; he sold fresh eggs; he had a ram for service; and
all his prices were keen (214). Macleans sign is comic because the painter
manifests a nave belief that the purpose of a sign is to tell as much truth
as possible (and the truth about labour in the colony is that Trinidad
cannot sustain professions or careers, and people must cobble together a
living as best they can).
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little shop with its doors open on to a hot dusty road (72). Mr Biswas is a
sign painter who has lost his faith in signs. The one he puts up above his
store in The Chase
t he bon n e e sper a nce grocery
M. Biswas Prop
Goods at City Prices
119
to use the form inevitably backfires. Mungroo, his largest creditor and a
champion stickfighter, vows to make him eat this piece of paper (160).
With the help of another lawyer and another official form, Mungroo
threatens to sue Mr Biswas for damage of credit! The whole business is
actually a scam by the two lawyers, who use the law to fleece those who
put their trust in paper.
Mr Biswass heroism, such as it is, is that he does not give up. He still
longs to make a mark on the wall at Hanuman House as proof of his
existence (479), even if it is only a kick at a lotus on the wall in the Book
Room (123). When his own first child is born, Mr Biswas is upset that the
birth register has already been filled in by his wifes family. The Tulsis,
for whom words on paper retain the magical power to control the universe, have a superstitious notion that the name by which a child is called
should not be the childs real name, i.e. the name fixed on paper, lest that
name be used to harm her. So Savis birth certificate lists her as Basso.
Mr Biswas, however, scratches out Basso on the official certificate that
will be needed to register her at school and scribbles instead:Real calling name:Lakshmi. Signed by Mohun Biswas, father (146). This palimpsestic desecration issues a challenge to the pristine forms of officialdom,
as well as to the Tulsis. The gesture shocks both Shama and himself (146).
MrBiswas also scribbles out Occupation of father:labourer, a dire term
that had figured on his own certificate (45), and replaces it with the wishful term proprietor (147). Mr Biswas writes over the document that
would write him, as if to acquire some of the magical power of writing for
himself, not the magic that would control essences through their names
but the even more powerful magic associated with being able to name the
world and locate things in it. The power of his words is limited, however,
to disfiguring and rendering illegible:he does not change the official certificate lodged in the registry in the capital, and no one, including the
narrator, calls Savi anything but Savi.
On the back endpaper of the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare, a work of
fatiguing illegibility that completely defeats Mr Biswas (145), he writes
the proud names he intends to give his first child. The child, however, is
a girl; the masculine names he has chosen are never used; and the page is
merely spoiled. Mr Biswas forgets to write in the names of his later children (272). The intended palimpsest fails. Much later, however, MrBiswas
will write in the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare a promise to buy his son
a bicycle if he wins a scholarship, a promise that he has Anand sign as
witness (423). The written promise is an example of what J. L. Austin
calls doing things with words,18 and when Mr Biswas keeps the promise
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(more or less: he gives Anand his own bicycle when he himself gets an
office car (465)), he can take satisfaction in the fact that he was able to
write his own future.
L i t e r at u r e a n d t h e wor l d e l s e w h e r e
At the same time as brand names and advertising slogans are blotting
out the landscape, a large wave of printed material is sweeping through
the island, in the form of newspapers, religious and political propaganda,
schoolbooks, and instruction manuals. The pundits almanac is soon
overtaken in popularity by the Dodds Kidney Pills Almanac (43) and the
Bookers Drug Stores Almanac (191).
Young Mr Biswas receives a colonial education, designed to produce
colonial subjects, and has learned his lessons well. For a time he is called
the paddler after James Madison Bells poem about paddling ones own
canoe, which he knows from Bells Standard Elocutionist (96), a schoolbook he accidentally took away when he left school (46). He also studied from the Royal Reader, from which he learned to relish the word
bower (214); Macdougalls Grammar, another book he still has years later
(307), from which he gets the words abbess, hart, and vixen (116); and
Blackies Tropical Reader (307).
School learning, like everything to do with books, is easily dated, and
the next generation studies from Nesfields Grammar (307) and Captain
Cutteridges Nelson West Indian Readers (280), and so knows different
poems and stories. Captain Cutteridges texts, introduced in 1927, offered
more West Indian content than did the school readers in Mr Biswass
day, but the adult Mr Biswas resents them for suggesting that children
routinely tie up their goats before going to school in the morning (307).
Many among the West Indian bourgeois elite suspected Cutteridge of
wishing to cut off black children from the wider world of knowledge.19
Robert Fraser has argued that those who accused Cutteridge of sidetracking local aspirations to universal excellence really only meant English
standards of excellence.20 This is a fair comment on Mr Biswas, whose
longing for a larger world can be comically snobbish (to say nothing of
Anand and Naipauls own snobbery), but Mr Biswass impatience with
how the Caribbean is written by Cutteridge is also a desire not to be consigned to a world doomed to remain outside modernity. As Carl Campbell
notes, the Readers did have a rural bias, and Cutteridge in his Arithmetics
was more prone to ask pupils to add two and two oxcarts than two and
two motorcars.21
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speak his thoughts aloud and write inspirational words on his head with
his finger, magically trying to internalize them the way he has internalized the words he read (241).
Mr Biswas comes to feel trapped in the great world of others words. In
Green Vale, he lives in a single room in a barracks, a room so thoroughly
wallpapered in newsprint by its previous occupant that the back window
is covered and its position can only be guessed at (186). This room of
paper without access to the outside gives new meaning to the well-known
(mis)translation of Derrida that There is nothing outside the text.22 At
least, the hanger of the wallpaper was a literate and the newspaper is hung
right side up. Mr Biswas finds himself held hostage by the journalism
of his time, its bounce and excitement bottled and made quaint (186).
One phrase, in particular, possesses his mind:A M A Z I NG SC E N E S
W E R E W I T N E S SE D Y E S T E R DAY W H E N (190). He repeats
the words until they were meaningless and irritating, and he finds himself writing them over and over on packets of Anchor cigarettes and boxes
of Comet matches (190). This palimpsest is an image of the colonial condition of belatedness the world has already been written by others that
soon becomes a form of madness. Mr Biswas hangs Hindi inspirational
verses over the newsprint wallpaper in a vain attempt to hold at bay the din
of meaningless words and the anxiety that threaten to engulf him (190),
but the religious words merely contribute to the palimpsestic confusion.
To be contained in a small boxlike space of words written by another
is, of course, literally Mr Biswass fate as a fictional character. Although
the House for Mr Biswas feels considerably more spacious than the room
at Green Vale, which is the setting of just one chapter out of thirteen, to
be so thoroughly written is still restrictive and can be a terrifying fate. In
Salman Rushdies novel Midnights Children, the narrators mother has
nightmares of being trapped like a fly in flypaper, an image that seems
to express her prescient awareness of being in a book written by her son:
She wanders now, as before, in a crystal sphere filled with dangling strips of the
sticky brown material, which adhere to her clothing and rip it off as she stumbles
through the impenetrable papery forest; and now she struggles, tears at paper,
but it grabs her, until she is naked and long tendrils of flypaper stream out
to seize her by her undulating womb, paper glues itself to her hair nose teeth
breasts thighs, and as she opens her mouth to shout a brown adhesive gag falls
across her parting lips.23
Both Amina Sinai and Mr Biswas exist in books written by their sons.
If Mr Biswass fate as a character is not as bleak as Aminas, if he finds
himself accommodated by the novel that bears his name, it is because he
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is not merely part of someone elses story but has achieved a story of his
own.
L e a r n i ng t h e de s i r e t o be a w r i t e r
After a rest and a recovery from his collapse at Green Vale, Mr Biswas
travels to Port of Spain. He wanders up the steps of the Red House, past
the parking spaces lettered R E SE RV E D FOR J U D GE S (286) (he
has always found the combination of letters RES challenging and beautiful ever since he had done a sign for a restaurant (115)), to an area of green
government notice boards that he cannot help but read and where he is
hailed by a man who asks him if he is looking for a certificate birth,
death, marriage, marriage in extremis (287). Later Mr Biswas will write a
newspaper story about this man (318), but at the time he is overwhelmed
by the thought that in the office behind the green notice-board records
were kept of every birth and death. And they had nearly missed him!
(287). Mr Biswas inevitably thinks himself back into the mood he had
known in Green Vale, when he couldnt bear to look at the newspapers on
the wall (287). Now, however, standing before the offices of the islands
newspapers, he does not sink into a depression but conceives the ambition
to write what before he had only read.
All the stories Mr Biswas had got by heart from the newspapers in the
barrackroom returned to him, but this time he imagines himself as the
subject of a story that he himself writes (3878). As he confronts a receptionist in the offices of The Sentinel, the words that haunted him in Green
Vale echo through his head:Amazing scenes were witnessed in StVincent
Street yesterday when Mohun Biswas, 31 assaulted a receptionist (288).
The disjunction between the vision of himself as newsworthy and the
reality is comedy worthy of James Thurbers Walter Mitty. But it is also
something more. It marks the moment when Mr Biswas first determines
to make the words of others his own and imagines himself as the potential subject of a story.
Mr Burnett, the editor, thinking Mr Biswas has come with a lead, asks
him, And what is your story? Mr Biswas responds, I dont have a story.
I want a job (289). This is, of course, the wrong answer. Mr Biswas cannot become a writer until he learns to see himself as someone with a story
of his own. After a disappointing afternoon painting signs No Hands
Wanted (291) Mr Biswas is given a chance to submit some writing. The
articles that he hands in are all versions of his own obsessions:he writes
about parents and children and obliteration. His very first story, as yet
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he must find a story that will convey all the emotions associated with the
experience. As Robert Fraser writes, the story of the Scarlet Pimpernel in
a tree is a lie; it is also fiction. It is the very fiction that Biswas refrains
from writing out of a fearful persuasion that fiction is other and more
dignified than this.25
Mr Biswass career as a journalist is never fully happy. A new editorial regime at the Sentinel propagates what Naipaul calls the documentary heresy, the doctrine that writing must represent the world from a
would-be objective perspective. The new editors disapprove of giving
a personal stamp to news stories, and Mr Biswas is not allowed to do
what Naipaul says a true writer must: impose a vision on the world.26
The newsroom is now postered with slogans such as D ON T BE
BR IGH T, J US T GE T I T R IGH T and N E W S NOT V I E W S
and FAC TS? I F NOT A X E (334). The words frighten Mr Biswas
almost as much as the newsprint wallpaper once did. The new editors
issue a booklet called Rules for Reporters, the only book that Mr Biswas
ever sees that has his name on the cover (334). That booklet, however,
does not memorialize the man but polices him.
Mr Biswas resists the new regimes emphasis on bland objectivity I
dont call that writing. Is more like filling up a form. X, aged so much, was
yesterday fined so much by Mr Y at this court for doing that (334) but
once again he loses confidence:In the days of Mr Burnett once he had
got a slant and an opening sentence, everything followed. Sentence generated sentence, paragraph led to paragraph, and his articles had a flow and
a unity. Now, writing words he did not feel, he was cramped, and the time
came when he was not sure what he did feel (339). Mr Biswas is reduced
to writing stories about Deserving Destitutes, charity cases for whom he
must arouse readers pity. There is nothing of Mr Biswas himself in these
reports, even though he feels that he is Deserving Destitute number one
M. Biswas. Occupation:investigator of Deserving Destitutes (398).
Would-be objective documentary narrative misses both the writer and
the subject of the writing. Later, when Mr Biswas attempts a sociological
survey for the Community Welfare Department, he finds himself unable
to analyse the information he collects:He was dealing with a society that
had no rules and patterns, and classifications were a chaotic business (459).
The whole idea of representing the colony on paper is a foreign one:the
response of the people Mr Biswas interviews is sheer bewilderment:You
mean they paying you for this? Just to find out how we does live. But I
could tell them for nothing, man (457). The survey fails both to capture
Trinidad and to express its author and the circumstances of its creation.
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False writing
127
128
Mr Biswas the poet writes not of Bipti, who had remained unknown
and whom he had never loved (436), but out of his own need for a
mother. The poem features a journey he made a long time before, and
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he remembers how He was tired; she made him rest. He was hungry; she
gave him food. He had nowhere to go; she welcomed him (437). But the
scene that Mr Biswas remembers taking place with his mother actually
took place with his aunt Tara (534). He forgets how absurd and touching Biptis own behaviour at Pagotes had been, welcoming him back
to a hut that didnt belong to her, giving him food that wasnt hers (53).
The poem ignores the disappointment, his surliness, all the unpleasantness and transforms everything to allegory: the journey, the welcome,
the food, the shelter (53).
Mr Biswass poem was written out of a sense of loss:not of present loss,
but of something missed in the past (433). In Freudian terms, he has not
been able to perform the work of mourning that would accord his mother
a place in his psyche separate from his own ego. His problem is similar
to that ascribed to Hamlet by T. S. Eliot, the poet so strongly vilified by
Anand when under Owads spell, and later equally staunchly defended.
Mr Biswas has not found an objective correlative for his emotion: his
mother has aroused emotions in him out of all proportion to the weight
of her personality, emotions that envelop and exceed her.29
T h e i n h e r i ta nc e of l o s s
Writing involves what Naipaul calls finding a centre or an objective
correlative, to use Eliots terminology. For instance, Mr Biswass existential sense of utter desolation is always associated in his imagination
with the figure of a boy he had once seen at the door of a hut at night, a
boy leaning against an earth house that had no reason for being there,
under the dark falling sky, a boy who didnt know where the road
went (171). That unknown boy, alone and vulnerable in a universe indifferent to him, is an image of Mr Biswass sense of his truest self. It is also
an objective correlative in the sense that it is able to conjure the same
constellation of emotions in another. One time, as Mr Biswas leaves
Hanuman House for Green Vale, he looks back and sees his son Anand
under the arcade, standing and staring like that other boy Mr Biswas
had seen outside a low hut at dusk (237). The father recognizes his own
vulnerability in his son.
Growing up in Hanuman House and among the Tulsis, Anand feels
every bit as fatherless and as afraid of being lost as Mr Biswas ever did.
Anand is staying with his father when Mr Biswas suffers his nervous
breakdown, and he repeats his fathers experience of finding himself without a parent able to protect him in a hostile universe. The great rainstorm
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that blasts through Mr Biswass half-finished house and through his mind
leaves Anand alone to face the same black void (263) that his father himself had known as a child when his own father drowned. At Green Vale
Mr Biswas relives the original childhood moment of existential terror and
Anand lives it for the first time.
Paradoxically, what Mr Biswas passes on to his son is the dread of being
without a father. Mr Biswas, seeking vainly to impart paternal wisdom,
tells Anand that God is his real father. The lesson that Anand learns,
however, is something different: he learns that he has no father in the
sense of someone who can provide him with a name or a place in society.
And what about you?, Anand asks. Mr Biswas replies, I am just somebody. Nobody at all. I am just a man you know (251). So Anand will
grow up with a father, but not one who can protect him or give him a
place in the world. His father is Nobody at all, just a man he knows but
one he knows as well as he knows himself, because Mr Biswas has known
the same terror Anand knows.
Mr Biswas shares something else with his son. He entices Anand to
stay with him at Green Vale by offering him a box of crayons (251). This is
an image of the father passing on to the son a vocation as a writer that is
not even his to give. In the short time that father and son spend together
at Green Vale, Mr Biswas also teaches Anand to mix colours (252), and
about Coppernickus and Galilyo (252). The greatest imaginative experience of Naipauls own childhood was listening to his father read out the
stories that became The Adventures of Gurudeva.30 Mr Biswas never did
become a writer like Seepersad Naipaul, but because he conceived the
ambition to write and so learned to think of his life as a potential story
that could be written, his son Anand is now able to tell that story. An
image of this mutual dependence of event and narrative is the scene where
Mr Biswas has Anand read Macaulay to him while he takes it down in
shorthand. Afterwards Mr Biswas reads it back to Anand to verify it.
Anand, regretting the dying day, resists the chore (305), but is soothed
when his father assures him it is not intended as a punishment:I ask you
to do this because I want you to help me (305). Transcribing Macaulay
could be merely an image of colonial mimicry, especially if one recalls
that Macaulay is the author of the notorious Minute on Education of
1835, which argued for the creation in British India of a class of persons,
Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals,
and in intellect.31 In that case there would be little to distinguish Anand
from his cousin, who seeks to turn himself into a writer by copying out
Nelsons West Indian Geography (417). But Anand is not so much copying
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132
emotions as he has and that he can write about the terror best by writing
about another who has suffered it.
As long as he writes out of his own need for a parent, Anand is no more
successful than Mr Biswas with his poem about Bipti. Anand begins to
tell his father the story of a man Who, whatever you do for him, wasnt
satisfied (342), a story that, like Mr Biswass poem about his mother, he
cannot finish. Later, at the end of the book, when Anand gets the news of
his fathers death, he writes a strange, maudlin, useless letter (529). But
Anand will one day overcome his melancholy and be able to tell the story
of his father, not the parent whom he needs and will never find, but the
man who once knew a terror like his own and who told him to write it.
Because Mr Biswas passes onto his son his existential terror, his desire to
find meaning in writing, and an objective correlative (the house) to convey both terror and vocation, Anand is able to create the House for Mr
Biswas. The house on Sikkim Street in which Mr Biswas ends his days,
however unsatisfactory, allows him to make good a claim on his children
and allows them to recover his memory:
Soon it seemed to the children that they had never lived anywhere but in the
tall square house in Sikkim Street. From now their lives would be ordered, their
memories coherent So later, and very slowly, in securer times of different
stresses, when the memories had lost the power to hurt, with pain or joy, they
would fall into place and give back the past. (5234)
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(306). At school, Shama had even once had an English penpal; she, like
Akinyode Soditan in sar, is aware through writing of a world much larger than the colony. The correspondence with a penpal, however, came to
an end when she got married. Mr Biswas and Anand are each surprised to
discover the penpals letters and the Shama that they reveal (186, 384).
Anand finds a cache of documents, including his parents marriage certificate, his own birth certificate, and Shamas letters from her penpal, that
recalls the tin box Soyinka found containing his fathers papers. After his
discovery, Anand stands looking out of the window as Darkness filled the
valley (384), re-enacting the image of existential solitude his father once
recognized in him. Anand feels as his own the closing of doors and the
loss of potential that his mother suffered in marrying his father. When
Shama discovers her drawer has been ransacked, she cries out Some thief
was in the house (384), which we may imagine to be her reaction to her
sons novel as well.
Of course, if Shama has a story, it would be different than Mr Biswass.
Shama approves of the new regime at the Sentinel that imposes more rigorous standards for journalistic objectivity:It will teach you to have some
respect for people and the truth (334). Her own writing is remarkably
efficacious: she serves eviction notices to tenants in arrears. It amused
Mr Biswas to read the stern, grammatical injunctions in Shamas placid
handwriting, and he said, I dont see how that could frighten anybody,
but the truth is she is becoming a creature of terror to many (308). Her
strategy is to go out at night with a pot of glue and paste the notice on the
two leaves of a door, so that the tenant, opening his door in the morning,
would tear the notice and would not be able to claim that it had not been
served (308).
Shama, too, knows deep anxiety, but in her case it is Mr Biswass
fecklessness that inspires it. The house on Sikkim Street lands the family in so much debt that she feels disaster was coming upon her and
she was quite alone (512). An objective correlative for her story would
not be a house but the gold brooch that Mr Biswas is forever promising
to buy but never does. I suppose it would look nice in my coffin, says
Shama (440). She draws an explicit comparison between what the house
means to Mr Biswas and what the brooch would mean to her:If you
start throwing away your money I could always help you. Tomorrow I
going to go to de Limas and buy that brooch you always talking about
(512). Instead of a brooch she gets the house, which she feels is a millstone, and which Mr Biswas calls her necklace (512), a reference to the
story of that name by Guy de Maupassant in which a woman ruins her
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life paying off a friends necklace that she lost, unaware that it was but
paste to begin with.
In being faithful to Mr Biswas, Anand fears he misses his mother.
To say that the novel is unfair to Shama is not, however, to say that
Anands narrative is false, only that Shama marks its limits. The AfroCaribbean is, of course, another limit, one that we will consider in the
next chapter.
Ch apter 5
Achebe, Soyinka, and Naipaul all write about a period before they were
born in order to account for the presence of writing in their worlds and
thus for their own existence as writers. The vantage point from which
they look back implies writings triumph. The story that novels tell of
the coming of writing is teleological, even if, as in Achebe, the end is
regarded with ambivalence and the beginning, the predominantly oral
culture before literacy, is highly valued.
The Jamaican author Erna Brodber, however, retells the story of the
coming of literacy from the point of view of an orality that is not eclipsed.
Her 1988 novel Myal, set in a village outside Morant Bay in St Thomas
Parish in the second decade of the twentieth century, depicts a great
struggle between the spirit guardians of the communitys health, associated with orality, and the demonic forces that threaten it, associated with
print literacy. As so often, one of the terms in the pair orality and literacy
supplies the frame that contains them both, but in Brodbers novel, orality is able to see around and know literacy as thoroughly as literacy always
claims to know orality.
T h e l e t t e r k i l l s bu t t h e spi r i t s av e s
The second chapter of Myal begins with four stanzas from Kiplings poem
Big Steamers, in which the ocean-going ships of the title explain to a
child that they travel the world to bring him beef, pork, and mutton,
apples and cheese.1 On first reading, the lines could be mistaken for an
epigraph; they appear heterodiegetic or outside the narration of events. If
a reader does not know the verses are by Kipling, they might even appear
an alternative form of narration:Brodbers unorthodox style does feature
other items that are indented from the left margin and not right-justified.
Only when the text resumes at the left-hand margin does the reader
understand that the verses are neither outside the narrative nor part of the
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narration but constitute an event within the narrative. They are recited
aloud in the Anglican school before an audience of parents and dignitaries: The words were the words of Kipling but the voice was that of
Ella OGrady aged 13 (5). Kiplings poem, readers now understand, is in
quotation marks. The novel does not address the verses to us but tells us
about them. How to receive the written words of the imperialist and safely
quarantine them in quotation marks is the subject of the novel. Myal asks
how a reader can integrate anothers printed words into her own context
without them taking her over.
The ships that bring foodstuffs from the colonies to England carry
books on the outward voyage. Among those books in 1913, the year Myal
opens, might be A School History of England by C. R. L. Fletcher and
Kipling himself, in which Big Steamers was first published in 1911 as
a verse commentary on how the world economic system serves Britain.
Steamers and schoolbooks alike are part of the imperial system that has
shaped the West Indies. As the guardian spirits of Grove Town put it, the
original slave ships have dropped their sails and turned to steam, and
now they have dropped their ships and turned to books (67).
Teacher Holness, himself a black Jamaican, chose Kiplings poem for
recitation because it taught History, Geography and Civics! And better still, love for the Empire, so badly needed with England facing war
(27). Holnesss identification with the empire bolsters his sense of himself,
based as it is on respectability, civic leadership, and a mission to lift up
his fellow Jamaicans. Christian colonial education, Moore and Johnson
explain, was designed to mould a new type of Jamaican who would step
out of the ignorance that slavery had encouraged into civilised citizenship.2 Holness seeks to inculcate the virtues his name suggests, but his
pedagogy has pernicious results. Ella goes on to recite Kiplings White
Mans Burden. Clearly such a diet of imperialist propaganda is harmful
to the psychic health of the young colonized subject. Sitting in the audience, the Reverend Musgrave Simpson, the Native Baptist minister, wryly
describes Ella as an executionist instead of an elocutionist and not just
because she executes the poems so admirably (5).
Throughout the English-speaking world at the turn of the twentieth
century, school-taught literacy was profoundly oral for it was assumed
that reading was a branch of elocution.3 Bells Standard Elocutionist, the
schoolbook Mr Biswas carries with him throughout his life, has elaborate
instructions on breath, pronunciation, and gesture for public speaking.
The pedagogical value of reading was considered to be the public avowal
of widely shared truth in recitation.4 Myron Tuman quotes a critical
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survey of the US public school system in 1893 that judged that concert
recitations, the dominant mode of teaching reading, were preeminently
fitted to deaden the soul and convert human beings into automatons.5
The threat of zombification is even more dire in the British West Indies,
where the public avowal is of an imposed worldview originating elsewhere. Helen Tiffin argues that the discipline of voices and bodies in
public recitation casts young colonials not just as obedient readers of an
English script, but as the obedient re-producers and promulgators of it.6
Recitation had the deleterious effect of making black children perform
Englishness:The local body was erased not just by script and performance, but by the necessary assumption on the part of both audience and
performer that speakers and listeners were themselves English.7
Kipling, however, does not threaten all colonial schoolchildren equally.
Where the perceived disjunction between local bodies and English words
is greatest, reciters may actually be protected from the cultural imperialism of a Kipling. For instance, in South Africa, in the early 1930s, Ezekiel
Mphahlele remembers enjoying the recitation of both Byron and Tennyson
(Huff a leeeeegue, huff a leeeeegue, huff a leeeeegue onwaaard8), without
understanding the words:
European inspectors insisted that we use action while we recited, and pupils sent
themselves into all sorts of facial and muscular contortions to impress the educational officers. So impressed were we, including the teacher, with our own performance, that we carried poetry to the concert stage. We shouted and barked at
the audience. We leapt forward to show how the Assyrian came down like a wolf
on the fold, and stamped on the floor, and I think we drowned our voices.9
These young reciters revel in acting out war, barbarian hosts, and wolves.
Holness would not have approved.
Ella is more vulnerable than her peers in Grove Town because she is
not black. Born out of wedlock to a servant girl of mixed race working in
the home of an Irish policeman in Kingston, she is of the same class as
her rural neighbours, but the latter believe that her light colour will carry
her farther than they can go. Ella is a long face, thin lip, pointed nose
soul in a round face, thick lip, big eye country (8) and is pointedly made
to feel she does not belong. Her teachers, resentful that her share of whiteness means opportunities they never had, have stopped seeing her and
she too stopped seeing them, and when she puts up her hand, she goes
unrecognized (11). In self-fulfilling fashion, the teachers judge that she is
not very bright (26) and she proves them right, as she is Thirteen and
still in fourth book (26). Holness, however, chose Ella to recite Kiplings
paeans to empire because she alone in the school looks white (9). The
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recitation proves a success because, in her case, the audience judges the
local body and the English words to be in harmony.
At recess, Ella would often stand at the door of the classroom and
stare into space (10). Not surprisingly, the solitary child whose gaze
turns inwards seeks solace and escape in books. Ella is an avid reader.
Her reading displays the processes of minority resistance to majority culture:shunned by her classmates and unable to see a positive representation
of herself in her immediate environs, she looks for self-validation in representations of people who look like herself. In the course of her reading, she
had been to England several times. To Scotland too (11). She travels in
the company of imaginary friends:Peter Pan, Wordsworths Lucy Gray,
the boy who put his finger in a hole in the dyke to save the town from
flooding,10 and the Dairy Maid from the poem of that name by Mortimer
Collins. When Holness brings Ella Kiplings poems to recite, he wasnt
bringing any new idea to her (11); she had only to open her mouth and
let what was already in her heart and her head come out (12).
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, in the USA at least,
instruction came increasingly to favour silent reading.11 The goal of reading in school was changing from the public avowal of shared truths to
the comprehension of meanings not immediately shared by those with
whom we live.12 Ella is already a reader of this new kind. Books have
nurtured in her a rich capacity for imagination: When they brought
the maps and showed Europe, it rose from the paper in three dimensions, grew big, came right down to her seat and allowed her to walk on
it, feel its snow, invited her to look down into its fjords and dykes (11).
Ella has been to Cardiff with Peter and Lucy and spoken to Kiplings
steamers (12). Indeed, the three friends have done more than Kiplings
child speaker: they have boarded the steamer and travelled to Quebec
and Vancouver (12). In Soyinkas sar Akinyode, who reads of Wade
Cudebacks travels to Quebec, never does go there himself, not even in
his imagination.
Ellas reading, however, has severe negative consequences. Because she
identifies with the new friends she has met in books she suffers a mental
dissociation. A sheet of gauze descends to divide her imagination, filled
with white friends, from her memory, which is of her neighbours and
the landscape she shares with them. Her mother used to tell her that the
angels would keep her and teach her many things (11), and Ella welcomes
Peter Pan and his flying friends as those angels. When reciting Kipling,
she herself looks as if she were flying:Totally separated from the platform and from the people around her. Not just by colour but as an angel
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in those Sunday school cards is separated from the people below (17).
However, Ella is not happy up there in the sky. She wants to be real
(17). Reality for Ella is associated with the colour of her mother and the
blackness of the people around her. However much her angels may be
friends, she feels they are only pale-skinned people floating (46). Once
when Peter Pan took her to a coal mine and then up through a chimney,
she came out looking more like her mother and for the first time she felt
real (11).
The threat that reading poses to students in the colonies is not simply a question of the foreignness of the content. After all, Brodbers
narration itself makes frequent reference to British literature without
any qualms about cultural appropriateness: Ella is a silent Alice waiting on the Duchess (46); Maydene Brassington is like Mr Dombeys
sister of Dickensian fame (14); Miss Gatha, possessed by the spirit, is
Birnamwood come to Dunsiname [sic] (70); the Reverend Simpson feels
he will have a Dear Roger day (an allusion to Jonathan Swift) (71); and
he dashes away Polonius-style (107). The narrator is not a neutral reporter
of characters thoughts and actions, but a reader addressing other readers
as familiar with British literature as she is. She cannot, it seems, tell her
story without reference to other written stories. In none of these playful
allusions is there satire of the canonical literary sources. Instead, comparing Jamaicans to literary characters asserts equality. The narrators references to Dickens, Shakespeare, and Lewis Carroll all occur in similes and
metaphors, which have the quarantining effect of quotation marks.
Ella is more susceptible than most to mental splitting because of her
mixed race. Seeing her recite The White Mans Burden, the Reverend
Simpson thinks, And whose burden is this half black, half white child?
These people certainly know how to make trouble (6). The class of
in-between colours people is called new (1) because, unlike white and
black, it arose in Jamaica, the result of new socioeconomic conditions of
plantation-based production.13 Ellas body illustrates the Jamaican myth
of origin and fall as described by the anthropologist Jack Alexander. The
social divisions in Jamaica between brown and black are supposed to have
arisen in the nonlegal union of a white male master and a black female
slave, which produced an illegitimate brown offspring midway in status between slave and master.14 The black womans ambition for social
mobility is commonly blamed for a division of rank among the slaves.15
In Myal the Methodist minister William Brassington has similar origins:An invisible mother. Possibly half caste. Very like the kept woman
of somebody important (15). Brassington himself accepts the myth of the
140
Not all young women have been harmed by their reading. If Ellas reading list belonged to Maggie Tulliver in George Eliots The Mill on the
Floss, who had been actively discouraged from reading because she was
a girl, it would carry connotations of liberation. Similarly, in Dai Sijies
novel Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise, set in the Chinese countryside
during the Cultural Revolution, exposure to Balzac instils a healthy new
desire for independence and self-fulfilment in a young peasant girl. But,
141
for every Maggie Tulliver, there are at least two female characters who
suffer overheating of the imagination as a result of reading.
In Myal, reading-induced mental dissociation afflicts not only Ella, but
also another adolescent, Anita, even though she is not of mixed race and
is much brighter than Ella. Anitas head, too, was always in some book
(30), engaged in solitary mind expansion (57). Anita, however, does not
read romance, fantasy, or imperialist propaganda (the usual dangers associated with the unreality of books), but practises solfa-ing, reading music
by counting out the position of notes on the staff and singing them:
This took a lot of concentration. She had to read the notes first note on the
line is e and she had to remember the sounds. Do re mi fa so la ti do. So if
that was e, it was really mi and she sounded it. Now that next one is the first
space so it has to be f and if it is f coming after e then it must be fa and she
sounded that. (28)
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143
rides the Reverend Simpson, Willie Ole African, and Perce Mass Cyrus.
Although the communion between host and ancestral spirit is referred to
as spirit telephone (37), it resembles Bells invention less than does the
long-distance party-line telepathic communication between hosts that the
myal spirits make possible. Communication with the spirits is really communication by spirit with other myal hosts. When the Reverend Simpson
has a question for Ole African, Dan consults Willie. Indeed, Dan can
appear to be little more than a code name that Simpson uses on the myal
equivalent of ham radio when contacting Ole African and Mass Cyrus.
The myal spirits power to communicate across distances instantaneously
and their obvious enjoyment of each others company resemble the powers
and benefits that Ellas storybook angels, Peter Pan and the others, confer upon readers. Indeed, myalists were historically called Angelmen.19
Myal spirit possession, however, unlike reading books, does not detach
people from reality and divide them internally but instead allows for
an enhancement of the self. The link between the myal spirits and their
human hosts is mutually beneficial:the spirits gain bodies through which
they can act in the present; the living acquire memories that extend centuries back, and spiritual force with which to act on the world. Although
the myal spirits and their hosts can be distinguished, their relation is a
complete identity. Communication between humans and spirits is really
communion: the hosts are the spirits that mount them. The spirit Dan
prepares the Reverend Simpson for his sermon, takes his voice higher in
song, and warns him of what is going on in the village (367), but this
heightened consciousness remains Simpsons own. There is no need for
Simpson to consult with Dan, because he already knows all Dan knows.
Simpson is Dan, at every moment both the Native Baptist minister in
Grove Town and someone who has made the journey from Africa, the
man his neighbours see at the front of the church and part of the invisible team that shadows the community and strategizes to safeguard its
spiritual health (68). Myal spirit communion is therefore best not called
possession but rather transport.20
The communication that the myal spirits enable among hosts across
distance does not require the physical presence of the human interlocutors but otherwise resembles unenhanced oral communication. The
spirits exist in a realm invisible to most people but visible to each other,
a realm in which they have bodies of their own identified with barnyard
animals:Dan is a dog, Willie a pig, Perce a chick. The spirits also form an
ethereal musical band in which Willie plays the drums, Perce the trumpet, and Dan the cymbals, as well as performing vocals. In the world
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of the spirits, the talk among Dan, Willie, and Perce echoes the vivid
linguistic performances of West Indian males in homosocial settings.
However far apart their hosts bodies may be, the spirits smile at each
other, give each other five (98), and exchange bows (99). The other members of the team not only hear Dan but can also watch him dance (99).
Simpson cuts his eye at Maydene, who has joined the myal team (that
is, he looks at her, closes his eyes, and turns his head away in a gesture of
disdain) even though they are not in each others presence (99). In effect,
the myal spirits are extensions of the hosts selves into a wider arena that
resembles an amalgam of animal fable, jam session, and (anachronistically) Rastafarian groundation. Here there are no private lines; conversation always involves all the spirits on a party line.
In the past the conversations of the myal spirits appear to have been
male-only affairs, but in the present they are joined by a female spirit,
Mother Hen, who possesses Miss Agatha Paisley, the leader of the Kumina
tabernacle, a cult that deploys drum-induced trance possession to allow
devotees to go back to Africa (7). Mother Hen rarely speaks (111) and
is not part of the band of myal spirit musicians, but she dances to their
music. Quite unexpectedly, Maydene Brassington, the English matron, is
also able to claim a spirit identity and to join the myal caucus, apparently
the first white person to do so. She becomes White Hen. White Hen, like
Mother Hen and unlike the spirits that mount the men, lacks a Christian
name, but despite this gendered asymmetry, she is a full member of the
myal caucus and able to intervene in its deliberations, even if she speaks
in a more formal register than do the males.
Communication among the myal team extends across distances but
only as far as their hosts can walk, never across the sea, and never to
people who have not met each other in the flesh. Maydene Brassington
only acquires a spirit identity of her own after she has met Ole African
and Miss Gatha in person. She could not have joined from England;
there are no plans to launch a transatlantic satellite service. The spirits
Dan, Willie, and Perce, who originally accompanied human hosts on the
passage from Africa, remember Africa but have no communication with
contemporary Africans. Nor are Brodbers readers ever allowed to follow
Miss Gathas Kumina devotees back to Africa.
Myal spirit communication does, however, bear a relation to contemporary phenomena in England. Maydene Brassington tells her neighbour
Amy Holness, Somebody is fooling you people that only you know about
the occult (64). Some clergymen in the Christian church, she explains,
are taught how to handle spirits. My father was one (65). Spirits and
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demons have been part of Christianity from the beginning, but in the
late nineteenth century a strain of British Christianity became interested
in telepathy and communication with the dead as explicitly spiritual
phenomena.21 William Brassington, a colonial who met his wife while
studying at Cambridge, associates England with demystified religion
and Enlightenment reason. He seeks to bring those values to his fellow
Jamaicans, who, he feels, are wracked by dark superstition and magical
beliefs. His English wife, however, respects the occult and sees in the
rationality her husband upholds a stultified bourgeois conventionality and
lack of imagination. Maydene is first attracted to the drums in the hands
of Miss Gathas acolytes because they look like pictures she had seen in a
study of African drums in her fathers library long, long ago (77). (That
volume must be decades older than The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes
of the Lower Niger in Achebes Things Fall Apart!) She does not fear the
irrationality of the talking drums, as Captain Winterbottom does in
Arrow of God, but responds to their call. Only those who had those kind
of ears or who knew what the drumming could mean, could hear (79),
but she knew this was an event to which she was called (77).
Nicholas Royle argues that Victorian telepathy is historically linked
to numerous other tele-phenomena:it is part of the establishment of teleculture in general and necessarily related to other nineteenth-century
forms of communication from a distance through new and often invisible
channels, including the railway, telegraphy, photography, the telephone
and gramophone.22 The same is true of Jamaican myalism. Members of
the myal team initiate communication in a way reminiscent of the telegraph Ole African is resting when the tap, tap, tap of Dans code came
through to him (65); the telephone Maydene Brassington cleaning her
silver and Miss Gatha hoeing her field interrupt their tasks when Dan
rang them up (99); or the radio The air waves were thick with their
buzzing (109). Dan tells Willie, I read you, and Willie replies, Well
read (68), but reading here is an echo of short-wave radio rather than
of literacy. Although it does not itself rely on material technology, communication by myal spirit remains a cultural and historical phenomenon
reflecting the technology of its time.
Myal spirit communication resembles both orality before literacy
and modern communication since literacy because it is best understood
as orality beyond literacy. Although it serves to keep traditional wisdom in circulation, it can feel uncannily more modern than literacy.
Miss Gatha wears her headtie folded at the back into antennae (18)
remember, this is 1913! which enables her communication with spirits.
146
147
capacity to transcend the body. He finds speech with his poor black
parishioners difficult because it poses the dilemma of communication,
his term for the indirection that social hierarchy and the rules of civility
impose on speakers, preventing them from ever saying exactly what they
mean (95). Because bodies are marked by race and gender, and speech by
class and education, face-to-face communication is always disturbed by
what Brassington dismisses as silly linguistic rituals (21). What is said
cannot be separated from the body and the voice of the one who says
it. But writing, he feels, holds out the promise that the writer can reach
across bodies in order to touch the spirit. Michael Warner shows, however,
that print literacys promise that people can express themselves in public
as disinterested citizens independent of their bodies, a promise predicated
on the mediums disembodiment and anonymity, has always assumed the
opposite premise:that some bodies mattered more than others. Some had
more right than others to express themselves in print because their bodies, male and white and well-dressed, were so normative that they did not
even count as bodies, a concept Warner terms the rhetorical strategy of
personal abstraction.32
If the myal teams communication, like writing and telegraphy, appears
unmediated and free of the linguistic rituals associated with embodied
oral communication, that is in part an illusion fostered by the homosocial nature of the myal caucus and by the silence of its only female
member. When Maydene Brassington joins, it becomes clear that, while
spirit transport allows the self to transcend the limits of the body, the
self thus freed always remains constituted by gender and by a version of
race. Mother Hen and White Hen are distinguished from the other myal
spirits by gender, and while the distinction between animal species (pig
and dog and chick) matters not at all, White Hen remains marked as different from the others by the reference to her colour. The persistence of
gender and colour in the disembodied communication of the myal spirits
means that silly linguistic rituals are never eliminated. Dan continues
to behave with as much suspicion toward White Hen as Simpson does
with Maydene, and he resents her brash presence as much as the bachelor
minister does the Englishwomans. Maydene expects this, as she knows
that there are classes everywhere and that those below must hate those
above and must devise some way of communicating this without seeming
too obviously rude (21). We cannot escape the conclusion that linguistic
ritual persists because it is through linguistic ritual that the self is constituted. To leave linguistic ritual behind, just as to leave race, gender, or
class behind, would be to negate the self.
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When writing lost its monopoly as the chief record of human events
and intelligence, electronic media such as the telephone, the radio, and
the gramophone, by perpetuating and extending the reach of voice in
space and time, made writing appear (suddenly) sensorily challenged.33
Writings handicaps its blindness and deafness were suddenly
revealed.34 Peters explains that Where success in communication was
once the art of reaching across the intervening bodies to touch anothers
spirit, in the age of electronic media it has become the art of reaching
across the intervening spirits to touch anothers body.35 With the possibility of disembodied electronic communication voices and messages
emanating from nowhere and circulating in the air it became important
to touch the body, to register an impact on the body:Not the ghost in
the machine, but the body in the medium is the central dilemma of modern communications.36 That dilemma is solved by the myal spirits, who
retain their bodies in another realm and who conspire to touch and heal
the bodies and spirits of Ella and Anita.
Elisa Sobo explains that, in rural Jamaica, the health of the community is imagined as a function of the proper circulation of energies throughout the community; ill health arises from the blockage of
that energy in any member of the community.37 In order to cure Ellas
much exacerbated mental dissociation, the traditional healer Mass
Cyrus absorbs her pain and redistributes it outward in the form of bitter vibrations to all the living things in his grove, who then transform
it into positive energy. The natural world takes upon itself and thus
removes the sin-generated afflictions of the human world (2). The bastard cedar sheds tears in the form of enough gum to fill a jam bottle
and to seal a world of envelopes (2), and the physic nut bleeds just as
it did on Good Friday, many years ago when the Saviour of the world
was lynched (3). The exorcism is explicitly related to the Incarnation,
when the Word was made Flesh, and to the Passion, a moment that
raises both history and nature to the level of eternity. Mass Cyrus and
the creatures in his grove function in the modern way that Rotman says
is the opposite of the serial thinking fostered by alphabetic literacy:as
a single psyche that is at once porous, heterotopic, distributed and pluralized, permeated by emergent collectivities, crisscrossed by networks
of voices, messages, images and virtual effects, and confronted by avatars and simulacra of itself .38
After listening to the still small voice within (2) and the cries and
the hurts in his grove, Mass Cyrus lets the pain hurt him in his very
soul:From the soles of his feet to the tip of his head it threw him
149
upright and erect like a jack-in-a-box [I]t yanked his head back, stiffened his right arm in front of him, pointed his index finger and glazed his
eyes (3). The image here is of an orchestra and lightning conductor. Mass
Cyruss great spasm is not code to be interpreted; it is not even associated
with words or thoughts. It is an extreme example of what Rotman calls
an emblem gesture. Emblem gestures do not say anything outside their
own situated and embodied performance, but signify and have meaning
through the fact of their taking place, in the effects they help bring
about, in the affectual matrices they support, in all that they induce by
virtue of their occurrence as events.39 Mass Cyruss gesture is inseparable
from the emotion that inspires it and the energies it channels. Thought
and act are one.
Alphabetic literacy works differently. Christians in Africa and the
Caribbean have often suspected that the material page is dangerously
detached from the spirit. As St Paul proclaimed, The letter killeth, but
the spirit giveth life (2 Corinthians 3:6). According to Philip Curtin, The
characteristic doctrinal departure from orthodoxy in the early Native
Baptist groups was the emphasis on the spirit and a corresponding neglect of the written word. Most of the leaders could not read in any case,
and the shift accorded with the remnants of African religious attitudes.40
Moore and Johnson explain that in Jamaica,
The word of God was something that only the educated had access to, but
the spirit of God was available to all who sought it, and since the Word could
be interpreted in many ways it was the spirit which indicated the authentic experience. This was the true conversion. And having been immersed in the
Truth, touched by the spirit of the living God, one was, indeed, superior to
those who had not had that experience but relied mainly upon words in a book
in order to have communion with God. The children of the book were to be
pitied; they had not met God. The children of the spirit had had the true
experience and were the true children of God.41
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In the Jamaica of Myal, literacy is not necessarily the enemy. We see the
Reverend Simpson reading and writing, and Maydene, good daughter of an
English parson, delights in new words found in the dictionary (13). As we
have seen, books mediate her initial understanding of Kumina. Miss Gathas
acolytes themselves claim an association with literacy when they wear pencils in the head-tie on the right-hand side. All yellow and newly sharpened
(71). The problem is not with writing as such but with the penchant for
abstraction associated with writing, which leads away from the body but
also from the spirit, because body and spirit are intimately linked.
When it records and thus freezes a spiritual meaning, the book risks
deadening the spirit, or worse, perverting it. If, however, writing can
somehow be kept fluid and responsive, then it is as valuable as orality.
The anthropologist Maurice Bloch has found that in Mamolena, a village in Madagascar, the inhabitants use the technology of the Bible to
fight it.44 The economic weakening of the Malagasy state since 1975 has
meant that the Bible and the school no longer carry the meanings conferred upon them by the colonizers and missionaries. In Mamolena, the
village school survives, promulgating an image of a society of which
the villagers have to see themselves as the lowest echelon (178), but its
power has been tamed by the village (190), a process we might call the
Domestication of the Civilized Mind. Instead of literacy changing the
Malagasy, the Malagasy have adapted writing as a tool for the kind of
ideological practice which before had been oral. With writing they simply transmitted their ideology rather more efficiently (167). The written
word, says Bloch, was, and by and large still is, seen as a form of ancestral oratory (160). Elders are likely to have at least one chap-book into
which they have copied and preserved all kinds of information on many
subjects, including astrology: These books are very precious, and are
passed on from one head of a family to his successor. It is possible to
record in them the most complicated information, long successions of
proverbs, anecdotes and biblical quotations, which can then be produced
at the right moment (148). The people of Mamolena regard the Bible
as having great authority, but also as a source of danger, to which they
respond by writing their own Bibles:These gave their histories, their
genealogies and accounts of important status legitimating events. These
Bibles also gave accounts of traditional practices accompanied by their
origins which validated them. This was the traditional subject matter
of the knowledge and oratory of elders as it is the subject matter of the
Bible itself (160).
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152
Grove Town depends on connections and transparency among the members of the myal team who repeat and so preserve the shared common
truth that is at the heart of the community. This truth differs in nature
from the civic message avowed by public recitation in Teacher Holnesss
class:myal conversations are not public but rely on secrecy and social division. Only certain souls are qualified to join the myal caucus and only
they know who they are. The Kumina rituals of Miss Gatha and the exorcism by Mass Cyrus have public aspects, but the strategy sessions of the
myal spirits take place behind closed doors and are not even suspected by
the majority of people in Grove Town. William Brassington never guesses
that Mass Cyruss face carries a message, but his wife, a strong soul, can
insist on her right to join the spirits, and the community of spirits has
little choice but to accept her as a full member. She soon acquires a large
clientele for whom she must pray, Most of whom did not even know they
were her clients (91). The strong protect the weak, but would themselves
be weakened if the weak knew their secrets. Ole Africans verdict, The
half has never been told (also a line from Bob Marleys anthem Get Up,
Stand Up), does not mean that the untold half needs to be told but rather
that half must always remain untold.
The need for secrecy arises because the myal hosts are not the only ones
in Grove Town with spiritual capacities. Mass Levi Clarke, a former district constable and a deacon in the Baptist church, practises obeah, the
selfish siphoning off of spiritual power for personal ends. Joseph Murphy
explains that Obeah is the art of sorcery, practiced in private, if not secret,
and reflecting the disintegrative forces of a society under stress. By contrast myal might be seen as a force for social integration, bent on the
exposure of obeah, and defusing it with the power of communal values
expressed in public ceremonies.45 Through the centuries the myal spirits
have had to combat the threat posed by Conjure men, voodoo men, wizards and priests (66). When Mass Levi attacks Anita, hoping to acquire
some of her sexual power as a young virgin to compensate for his own
impotence, it requires the united efforts of the myal team to rescue her
from his spiritual clutches.
A mark of the unnatural character of the obeahmans powers is that
he must acquire them by art. Mass Levi Clarke, whose surname points to
his literacy, learns his black arts from books (75), probably the very same
mail-order books furnished by William Lauron Delaurence (spelling varies) of Chicago, who, as we have seen in the chapter on Soyinka, published
Writing as obeah
153
the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. Delaurence produced books that
served malice as well as books that taught healing. With the aid of the
former, Brodber reports elsewhere, a man such as Mass Levi could stone
a mans house or produce a poltergeist.46 The first Delaurence edition of
The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses was 1910, but other American editions are likely to have been available in Jamaica as early as 1885.47 The
first trial in Jamaica of an obeahman who used the Delaurence books
was in November 1915.48 Mass Levis bookish form of obeah is therefore as
new as the telephone and newer than the telegraph.
Like all spirit power, the form of obeah changes through time. Owen
Davies explains that Delaurences occult manuals had a huge market in West Africa and the West Indies in the early twentieth century
and, along with Coca Cola, were part of the rise of American cultural
imperialism rather than colonial imposition.49 Delaurence, however,
exploited American commercial techniques to repackage and promote
the wisdom and mysticism of the East and not the superiority of the
West.50 Because his commodities were alternatives to official authority,
Brodber reports that in Jamaica they were felt by black men to give
them power, whether it be mystical power or merely power in their relationships with others.51 For that reason, Delaurences books enlarged
the African Jamaican worldview into a political stance, something capable of giving power to the male of the group, who through the process
of socialisation would be conditioned to make use of it, something that
would be attractive to black men and anathema to a white power structure for this reason.52
Mass Levi takes to spending long hours morning and evening in the
only space that affords any privacy, bringing his Bible and his books into
the privy with him (62). His ownership of a privy Thing only big massa
have! (33) singles him out. He is that figure we have met before:homo
clausus, shut up in a room that fits him exactly. His wife imagines he is
praying for a cure for his sexual impotence, but worries that if he read so
much with that tinen lamp when the problem over he bound to be blind
(62). What Mass Levi is actually doing is working magical harm by sticking knives into the Bible and into a doll he has made of Anita. Needless to
say, the power generated by a knife through the Bible is not what Goody
and Ong associate with literacy.
When, after a fierce spirit struggle, the myal team pull out Mass Levis
obeah and kill him, a scene that resembles Jaguns calling the Agunrin
home at the end of sar, Simpson warns Miss Iris, who has found her
husband dead in the privy,
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Dont touch the Bible. Just pull the knife out of it by the handle and drop it
in the pit. Take the other books up one at a time in your left hand. Without
looking what is inside, tear the leaves out. Tear each leaf down, then tear it
across, then drop each too in the pit. Bury the covers the hard parts of the
books then when you have time, dig them up, pour kerosene oil over them
and burn them without reading what is written on them. (75)
Mass Levis obeah performs an action on the signifier (the book) in order
magically to control the signified (spirit power). The myal team must destroy the books to dissipate their power and restore the powers of health.
In Myal the colonizers are even worse spirit thieves than Mass Levi. We
have seen how Ellas reading has made her vulnerable. The Brassingtons,
who want the best for her, send her to America so that she might overcome her mental division by travelling with her body to the world she
has already flown to in her reading (46). In Baltimore, she finds it all
quite familiar (45):
Here there were only adult Peter Pans, Dairy Maids and Lucy Grays and a fair
sampling of their relatives seen not in daily intercourse but now and again when
they floated in through the big oak door, with their umbrellas and overcoats, on
appointment. This was the kind of life pale-skinned people floating that Ella
had seen for most of the many years of her daydreaming existence. (46)
Ella seems in as much danger of not seeing America, where she finds only
white British children now grown up, as she was of missing Grove Town.
The psychological split opened by Ellas reading is not closed by travelling to the world described in books but does begin to heal when she tells
her own stories. The gauze dividing the characters she has read about from
the people she has lived among disappears along with her hymen (80)
when she narrates her experience to her new American husband, Selwyn
Langley, a charming fellow (42), who had propelled himself through
the gauze partition and into Ellas carnate past:After a couple months
of marriage there was no gauze at all and Ella seemed to be draining
perpetually. And the draining brought clarity so that Ella could, after a
time, see not only Mammy Mary and them people clearly but she could
see the things around them. She could show him the star-apple tree (81).
In America, Ella learns to see Grove Town. It was now easy to touch
her mother and her new stepfather; to look into Anitas eyes and talk
to her; to ask questions of Teacher and Miss Amy (81). She can communicate with Grove Town across distances almost like the myal spirits
can. An attractive solution to the division between the world of the literary imagination and the world of experience is to make the two worlds
coincide by narrating the world of experience. Ella, the voracious reader
Writing as obeah
155
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spiritual resources:Mass Levi sought Anitas power to relieve his impotence; Selwyn, an even greater spirit thief, consciously withdraws sexual
energy from circulation. As Elisa Sobo explains, in rural Jamaican cosmology, the health of the community depends on the proper circulation
of energies, explicitly including sexual energies and seminal fluids, that are
all mutually convertible. Fearing the racial contamination of the family
line according to Americas single-drop rule, Ella is black, whatever her
appearance, even though in Jamaica she is assumed to be allied to white
Selwyn uses prophylactics, masturbates, or plays the monk rather than
risk reproduction with his mixed-race wife (80). Sobo explains:Unused,
semen symbolizes death and social breakdown as it does not get transformed into a child and does not help reproduce society.56 Selwyns play
Caribbean Nights is the equivalent of his masturbation: it substitutes a
fantasy image for the real body of his wife and constitutes a perverse male
compensation for the child he is unwilling to plant.
Ella wants her own chance to create, but she wanted to make something inside, not outside the body (82). She prays desperately that the
Lord Jesus enter her, but in her mad state, she wouldnt let him enter in
the right form and through the right door (84). The result is a parody
Incarnation as Ella suffers a bad, bad water belly (96), a familiar condition in rural Jamaica.57 Mass Cyrus must sacrifice his grove in a ritual to
excise the bad belly and restore the healthy circulation of energies.
De f e ns i v e r e a di ng
After Mass Cyruss exorcism has returned Ella to herself, Teacher Holness
hires her as a teacher. He had never thought much of her intelligence but
now reasons that She had studied. She had gone to far places (96). He
puts her in charge of forty seven-year-old boys and girls in the A class
(96), children who have never been to school before (97) and who are
being exposed to the alphabet for the first time.
Ella in front of a class sounds like a dangerous proposition. The new
teacher is the same staring person as before (96), as prone as ever to
the readerly habit of detaching herself from her immediate surroundings and looking inwards. Talking to her is frustrating: the Reverend
Simpson refrains from asking her questions lest he set her off on another
set of staring (98). When the time for the stare had come, he finds there
was nothing he could do but wait (97). Ever the plodder, Ella follows
Holnesss instructions about lesson plans to the letter:Write out first of
all the subject to be dealt with Reading. Write out the heading of the
Defensive reading
157
lesson, the page in the book and the name of the book. Then write out the
major points in the lesson which you want your children to grasp. Next
write out the method by which you intend to get the children to grasp
these points (99). In class she leads the pupils in recitation, which, as we
have seen, is the most unpromising form of pedagogy:
She would do something with every bit of her energy and then pause for some
moments of staring. Like there was a conductor in her head one, two, three,
stare; one, two, three, stare. She would make her a at the blackboard with the
deepest concentration and then stare outside. Under the almond tree where
the reading lessons were, she would take one little one up to her knee, take the
pointer finger of the right hand and guide it along the letters and the words
as she pronounced them. The whole class would follow, their pointer fingers
of their right hands sliding under the words and their voices trying to catch
up with Miss Ella. M-a-s-t-e-r, Master Then Miss Ella would stare and the
whole class of forty children with her. (967)58
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bitter lesson that exodus was exile (102). Independence is not what they
imagined, and they make their way back to Mr Joes (102). The story of the
animals willing surrender of freedom renders Ella livid (101) and then
depressed (103). She even worries that all this thinking and no solution
will return her to madness:to think it through for herself would mean a
long journey with much staring and she did not like it one bit to get back
home and find people looking furtively at her and worrying that she was
getting mad again (105). She decides to consult the Reverend Simpson,
who explains to her, You have a quarrel with the writer. He wrote, you
think without an awareness of certain things. But does he force you to
teach without this awareness? Need your voice say what he says? (107).
She comes to understand that the story of Mr Joes Farm is an allegory of
zombification, Flesh that takes direction from someone (108). Moreover,
she appreciates that she herself has endured the same process in America
and even before that, when reciting Kipling.
The lesson Ella herself draws, and it receives particular weight because
it is the final lesson in Brodbers novel, is that one need not read obediently. Ella learns to put quotation marks around the story of Mr Joes
Farm so that she is not immersed in it. She has become a critic in the
sense that Michel Foucault associates with the Enlightenment:while the
myal spirits are exegetes, probing Scripture and collective memory for
signs showing how to understand events and how to live, in the newer
episteme that Ella belongs to, one no longer attempts to uncover the great
enigmatic statement that lies hidden beneath (languages) signs; one asks
how it functions:what representations it designates, what elements it cuts
out and removes, how it analyses and composes, what play of substitutions enables it to accomplish its role of representation.59
Critics of Brodbers novel consistently celebrate this account of the subversive capacity of postcolonial reading as the books message. The myal
spirits hope that Ella will put her new critical thoughts into a seminar
and that her papers will one day find their way to the top of files at
Whitehall with the under secretaries bowing their heads and saying:Yes,
yes, yes. We are spirit thieves. We shouldnt have done it (109). Ellas
seminar, and by implication Brodbers novel, will attack the undersecretaries much as the myal spirits neutralize Mass Levi. To Ella and William
Brassington, the in-between colours people familiar with print, the myal
spirits have assigned the mission to correct images from the inside, destroy what should be destroyed, replace it with what should be replaced
and put us back together, give us back ourselves with which to chart our
course to go where we want to go (110).
Defensive reading
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160
animals, and child readers are, no doubt, invited to identify with them.
It is Mother Hen, ever responsible, who first suggests that everyone must
work, and she sets her chicks to sweeping. Miss Tibs and Mr Grumps
both refuse for they do not like work. The story does not feature a strike,
and there is no element of protest, but Mother Hen does lead the animals
on what the Reader calls a walk, out of the gate and down the road,
including Master Willy, whom she frees from his pen for the occasion.
Master Willy and Percy dash ahead and run into Mrs Cuddy, a cow in
a field who chases them. Mother Hen then leads the return to Mr Joes
where she is sure Mr Dan will protect them. Mr Dan, however, makes
friends with Mrs Cuddy, learns that she did not mean to chase the animals, and invites her to join them all at Mr Joes place, which she happily
does.
Newman and Sherlocks text, brief as it is, is susceptible of different
readings. Clearly, much depends on whether the characters are regarded
as colonial subjects or as members of Mr Joes family, which is how the
Reader itself defines them.62 Not everyone reads the text the way that Ella
does, as a kind of Animal Farm with a vocabulary of eighty-five words.
Brij Lal, who grew up on the other side of the world, in Fiji, the grandson of an indentured labourer, remembers being introduced to reading
through the Caribbean Readers Introductory Book One. The first sentence
he ever read was Mr Joe builds a house. (Was that also the first sentence V. S. Naipaul read?) The Reader offered Lal an unforgettable array
of characters:Fun-loving and loveable, they colluded and connived and
spoke a language we all knew well.63 Lal continues, We, of course, had
no idea what or where the Caribbean was, but that did not matter. First
experiences often etch indelible imprints on our memories, and Mr Joes
family has remained with me, like yesterdays songs.64
Ellas reading of Mr Joes Farm as an allegory of colonialism is like the
discovery by Akinyode and Sipe in sar that the name of their school,
St Simeons, constitutes a compromising pun. St Simeons is Soyinkas
invention and so, therefore, is the terrible secret of its meaning. In a similar fashion, Brodber plants the pernicious allegorical meaning that Ella
finds in the story of Mr Joes Farm. Brodber herself is not doing what Ella
does, recognizing the single meaning intended by the author in order to
resist it, but misreading Newman and Sherlock in a powerful new way.
The lesson we might draw is not just that the colonized must read critically, but that they must also define the colonizer to serve their own needs.
The truth about colonialism lies hidden in allegories and puns that the
colonized must learn to read and, just as important, to write. The story
Defensive reading
161
of the animals on Mr Joes farm allows Ella, her young students, and her
myal spirit overseers to identify the colonizer for themselves, denounce
him, and proclaim their freedom from his wiles.
At some point in the past, Brodbers novel implies, the myal spirits
were the animals on Mr Joes farm, and in some Platonic sphere they
continue to be. Mr Joes farm therefore functions in the novel something
like the Book of Fate in which everything that happens in history can
be read if one knows how to read it. For example, the taunt of Alabaster
baby (9) that Ella endured in the schoolyard was prefigured by a doll the
animals found in the barnyard (93). When Maydene acquires her powers,
the other spirits remind White Hen of a time she has forgotten, those
long long ago days in Mr Joes yard where they all lived then (93).
(Neither the alabaster baby nor White Hen figure in the actual Newman
and Sherlock story.) If the characters in a twentieth-century school reader
bear the secret names of spirits that came over from Africa, it must be
that the authors have somehow tapped the myal lines of communication,
learned of the identity of the spirits, and then fashioned a false representation in order to separate the followers from the leaders. The book Ella
reads with her class works obeah by invoking the actual names of the
myal spirits but deforming their story.65 Newman and Sherlock are literal
spirit thieves.
The names Percy and Chickee appear on a list that George Simpson
made in 1965 of sixty-two earthbound spirits that actually dance myal
in Jamaica.66 Did Percy the Chick exist in Jamaican folklore prior to his
incorporation in Newman and Sherlocks schooltext? That would suggest
that the writers are indeed working obeah. Or did the Reader inspire the
naming of the myal spirits recorded by George Simpson? If the latter is
the case, the uncanny resemblance between Dan, Willie, and Perce and
those other flying angels, Peter Pan and the Dairy Maid, is because both
sets of spirits come from books. Perhaps the question Which came first,
the chick or the book? is the wrong one, presuming as it does that temporal order is the key to causality and meaning. Myal, which relies on
anachronism to a degree that would horrify Naipaul, does not believe
that chronological succession has intrinsic meaning.
The lesson Ella learns, that readers must maintain a critical distance
from what they read, does not have to be the only one that Brodbers
readers take away with them. We may keep our own critical distance from
critical analysis and find another possibility. The existence of Myal and its
spirit characters suggests that reading need not be limited to demonic
spirit possession or secure critical distance from such possession but can
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Ch apter 6
What happened to those books after Lessing had devoured them, if the
white ants did not get them? Ezekiel Mphahlele, born the same year as
Lessing, remembers being a child in Marabastad, a black township of
Pretoria, and rummaging through the garbage, looking for discarded,
coverless, rat-eaten, moth-eaten, sun-creased books for my reading and
finding a tattered copy of Don Quixote an old translation.2 Ever afterward, he imagines Don Quixote not as a man weakened by too much
reading, but as a vigorous figure in tattered garments (129), inseparable
from the garbage where he was found but still alive. Sindiwe Magona,
raised in a township outside Cape Town, received her first reading material, both childrens books and adult novels, from a neighbour who worked
for a white family and who had been given the discarded books as gifts.3
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164
Isabel Hofmeyr points out that, in this reminiscence, Marechera sets out
satirically the ways in which books demand particular forms of behaviour; how they have almost choreographical force to compel performative
rituals; how they have the power to define and suggest space; how they
become experimental zones around which one can rehearse new worlds
and professions. Books are force fields that can rearrange space and
people.7 Hofmeyr is right, but only to a point. Neither by content nor
by format did the childrens encyclopedias, comics, and cheap paperbacks that the boys collected suggest office space. Indeed, to their original owners, the comics and pulp fiction Marechera salvaged would have
had a quality of trash about them even before they were thrown out.
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Marechera and his friends dream of an office was inspired by the ideal of
books rather than by the actual books in the dump.
Marecheras dramatic memories of finding books have been confirmed
by Washington and Wattington Makombe.8 But his playmates did not
become writers; only he did. The twins acted as Chairman and General
Manager, but Marechera, content to be the office boy in this mimic whitecollar and white world, longed less for social mobility than for the kind
of private space that Lessing had. Lessings books overwhelmed her furniture, reconfigured the contours of the room, and rendered the domestic
interior a reflection of her mind. Marechera spent the bulk of his writing career, short as it was, carving out private space for himself in the
midst of crowded, noisy, and desperately poor surroundings. Others have
commented on his capacity to shut out the world around him in order
to concentrate on reading or writing.9 This dynamic of a private interior space that feels potentially freer than a larger external space of confinement structures his semi-autobiographical novella House of Hunger,
the centrepiece of the collection The House of Hunger. Lessing was able
to retreat to a room of her own, but Marecheras narrators have never
known privacy, only privation. They are examples not of homo clausus but
of homo claustrophobic.
Marechera did not stay in Vengere but went on a full scholarship to an
Anglican mission boarding school, St Augustines at Penhalonga, which
had much in common with St Simeons Teacher Training Seminary in
Soyinkas sar. The missionaries at St Augustines refused to bow to the
racist policies of Ian Smiths Rhodesian Front, which did not want to
see blacks educated. There Marechera was exposed to the same books
Lessing had known. However foreign and disconnected, they would also
have seemed to promise a world beyond race. The University of Rhodesia,
which Marechera later attended and where the narrator of House of
Hunger follows him, also remained, even throughout the liberation war,
true to its original charter as a multiracial institution open to both white
and black students.
In Soyinkas novel, Sipe Efuape doubts whether the horrors of King
Leopolds Congo Free State ever existed. In Marecheras Rhodesia, nothing could be easier to imagine. Africans there experienced racially inspired
dispossession and violent constraint on a scale unseen in Nigeria, which
had never had white settlers, had not seen farmers lose their land, and
had achieved its independence without a war almost three decades before
sar was published. In the mid seventies, when Marecheras novella was
written and is set, Rhodesia was in the midst of a fierce guerrilla war
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167
the narrator as a young boy inside a house, pressing his nose and lips
against a window. He does not see the street or the rain falling outside.
All his attention is devoted to the glass immediately before his eyes and
to a raindrop on the other side. In the raindrop he sees a world of sun and
warmth that is a projection of his desire:It must be warm in there. Warm
and dry. And perhaps the sun would be shining in there. The green must
be trees and the grass; and the brightness, the sun I was inside the
raindrop, away from the misery of the cold damp room. I was in a place
of warmth and sunshine, inside my raindrop world.12 The boys position
inside a small room, looking out to another, even smaller space glimpsed
through an impenetrable but transparent flat surface, resembles the condition of Abrahams, the writer, as the book opens. The writer, too, holds
before his eyes a flat surface that opens out into a larger space he can fill
with memories of his longing.
A voice disturbs the boys reverie, interpellating him as Lee, which is
not the name on the cover of the memoir. The sound jerks the narrator
out of his raindrop world and back into his damp room. He sensed that
that was the sound by which I was identified (9). He turns to the man
who called him, feeling that Although I seemed to be seeing him for the
first time, he was no stranger to me (9). The boy remains unsure of this
man, until he turns from him and sees the woman on the other side of
the fire (10). Immediately, the word Mother leaped to my mind (10).
He now recognizes the man as his father!
The man invites his son, Come, Lee. Tell us what you see and well
make it into a story (9). It is difficult, however, to imagine how Lee will
share with his parents his experience of not recognizing them. The narrators first recorded memory is of being apart from his parents both physically and psychologically, contemplating a private vision others cannot
enter. Even when he turns away from the window, he incorporates the
pane and the semi-spherical drop as permanent lenses through which
he sees everything around him, including his home and his parents. The
new lenses mark the birth of a new subjectivity. Staring not through the
window but at the window and the raindrop on the other side has rendered Lee a subject confronting an objectified world outside himself. Selfconsciousness is necessary before there can be memory at all:These were
my people and I was seeing them for the first time in a way that I could
remember for the rest of my life (10). The time before this moment he
only knows from hearsay (10).
The self-consciousness that Abrahams developed as a child, we are
given to understand, was necessary for his vocation as a man of letters
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who will write the book we read, but the converse is equally true:when he
sat down to write his autobiography and summoned up his earliest memory, what he recalled, the raindrop outside the window, was a version of
his circumstances as a writer facing the blank page. His first memory even
has a literary model:in the South African classic The Story of an African
Farm, Olive Schreiner tells us that memories of infancy blur into each
other until such a moment as one picture starts out more vividly than
any, and then, after a storm when a rainbow rests on the earth, we look
out of a window we can barely reach at the white earth, and the rainbow,
and blue sky, and oh, we want it, we want we do not know what.13 In
other words, Abrahams own first memory has been coloured by what he
has subsequently read about memory (and that he may not consciously
remember).
On the opening page of Book ii of Tell Freedom, Abrahams repeats
the story of the birth of a new self-consciousness, but this time the catalytic function of the raindrop is performed by a poem by John Keats. The
poem, Bards of Passion and of Mirth, like the raindrop, promises the
young reader a peaceful land that offered peace (199). It proclaims that
poets are double-lived, having souls on earth and in heaven, and fosters a
double consciousness in its readers. Abrahams reading makes him aware
of another world:I lived in two worlds, the world of Vrededorp and the
world of these books. And, somehow, both were equally real. Each was a
potent force in my life, compelling. My heart and mind were in turmoil.
Only the victory of one or the other could bring me peace (127). Brian
Rotman explains that the doubling performed by writing, which repeats
the world in a graphic representation, is accentuated by first-person narration. When one is speaking, to say I is a self-evident move:the pronoun
is at once deictic, indexical, and self-referential. None of those qualities
apply, however, when one writes I. The written I could be any writer of
a text anywhere at any time for any purpose, a hypostatization or entification of the alphabets virtual user:an unembodied being outside the confines of time and space operating as an invisible and unlocatable agency.14
The new being created by writing I travels independently of the person
who wrote it and has the potential to survive her as well. When the writer
becomes a reader, that is, when she later confronts the I she wrote down,
she may remember less than or differently than her text does. It may even
testify against her. The result is a self that also appears self-originating:an
invisible, absent writing agency, detached from the voice, unmoored from
any time or place of origination, and necessarily invisible and without
physical presence.15 A similar doubling may afflict the reader. Georges
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surprisingly, the book ends with Abrahams departure from South Africa
altogether, a necessary condition for his being able to write about South
Africa.
W r i t i ng a n d a l i e n at ion
In a short story in The House of Hunger called The Writers Grain,
Marechera gives a much darker account than Abrahams does of the self
outside the self that writing creates. A writer tells a companion in a bar
about how close he has come to suicide. The word grain in the title refers
not to the consistency of wood, but rather to black specks:
But that night I sat at my desk seeing nothing of the book I had picked up at
random from my shelves. I was mechanically drawing all sorts of circles and
squares on my blotting-pad you should have seen the map of it! Little circles
eaten or eating the big circles and everything in everything else, so much so I
still wonder how on earth I found my way out of that labyrinth. Dark spots
danced about in front of my eyes. Dark spots danced madly about at a point
between my two eyes. (100)
Focusing on the page held in front of and at a point between the two eyes
has the capacity to exteriorize something behind the eyes and to make
that something available for contemplation, albeit, in Marecheras narrators case, a contemplation of horror:
Have you ever seen a face imprinted in empty air? Those dark spots multiplied
and swarmed about, and swooped into my face and shot out suddenly with the
very matter of my brains. And when the pain of that flashing cleared a little I
looked and saw my own face staring coldly at me. I started involuntarily. It was
insane, but I pulled myself together and put out my hand to touch it. And drew
back in horror! That horrible discovery! It pulled the skin of my face out, clear
out, by the roots. It revealed me to myself. And before I knew it I had heaved the
table onto its side, dragged all the books from their shelves onto the floor and
begun to hammer my fists on the walls. (100)
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They were my life. I spread my large handkerchief on the floor to try to catch
some of it. And I did. (101)
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the food his mother gives him, saying he is not hungry. Torn between
two sources of potential nourishment, the books and his mother, the boy
makes a great display of rejecting both. Presumably he wants his mother
to insist on feeding him, but she taunts him by enjoying her food in front
of him, turning his defiance into a weapon against him. The hunger in
this scene and in the title of the novella is literal and a product of poverty,
but it is also a craving for love and meaning that will drive the boy, like
Abrahams, to seek fulfilment in literature.
Ng g wa Thiongos memoir of childhood, Dreams in a Time of War,
also associates his mother with food and literacy with hunger, both literal
hunger and a figurative hunger for an alternative future. As the memoir opens, reading Eliots The Waste Land triggers in Ng g a memory
of cruel April when, as a boy, he had read an abridged version of Oliver
Twist:There was a line drawing of Oliver Twist, a bowl in hand, looking up to a towering figure, with the caption Please, sir, can I have some
more? I identified with that question; only for me it was often directed
at my mother, my sole benefactor, who always gave more whenever she
could.17 Books, which create hunger and take the young reader away from
the mother, also, however, have the paradoxical capacity of representing
both that hunger and the mother. According to Deleuze and Guattari,
there is a certain disjunction between eating and speaking, and even
more, despite all appearances, between eating and writing: To speak,
and above all to write, is to fast. Writing, however, transforms words
into things capable of competing with food.18
Discovering a bit of money in his pockets, the boy in House of
Hunger leaves to buy new exercise books (and some bread and butter).
He borrows his friend Harrys English books in order to recopy them. If
he hates his books for cutting him off from his mother and causing her
pain, he also turns to them as compensation for his mothers indifference
and to satisfy his hunger for something more. Marechera says of himself
that the Shona language was part of the ghetto daemon I was trying to
escape, for it had been placed within the context of a degraded, mindwrenching experience from which apparently the only escape was into the
English language and education.19 Back at home, the boy sits on the floor,
flicking through Harrys books, while his mother tells his father, eating
at the table, about the torn exercise books. Without warning or explanation, the father gets up and punches the boy hard enough to knock out
his front teeth. In the course of an unequal struggle, the boy falls onto the
new exercise books, Staining them with blood (14). The books now bear
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witness to what it cost to acquire them and prefigure the novel itself, an
English-language text testifying to African suffering.
The narrators reading habit increases his vulnerability. When he
presents his sixth-form report card to his older brother Peter, who has
moved in with his wife, Immaculate, and assumed the role of man of the
house, Peter appears as offended by the products of school as the boys
mother had been. He calls the boy Shakespeare as an insult (5) and holds
the paper by the scruff of the neck and shakes it, as if the paper with
the boys name on it were the boy himself (27). Peter throws the report at
his brothers feet and orders him out of his sight, but changes his mind,
commends him for his fine grades, tosses him some money and tells him
to get drunk. With the money, the narrator promptly goes and buys some
books by Robert Graves (perhaps including the suggestive titles The White
Goddess and Goodbye to All That). Upon his return, he finds Peter screwing Immaculate under a table (27). He navely shows his brother, still in
the throes of sex, the books he has bought, and the latter stares at him as
if discovering some shameful family secret; or the way one does when
one finds out that ones best friend is actually a murderous lunatic who
has escaped from a grim and satanic institution (27). Books are more
shameful than sex, which, in the House of Hunger, is accorded as little
privacy as reading. The boy turns from the sordid scene of his brother
copulating under the table, but Peter invites him to stay and even throws
off the blanket so he can see better. Immaculate tells him to leave the
boy alone, but Peter says, Hes my brother (28), implying that he has
a responsibility to initiate the boy into manhood. If shame attaches to
books but not to sex, it is because sex is an occasion for masculine display,
while reading appears to show a suspect indifference to masculinity. The
narrators mother complains that he was late to be weaned, late to stop
wetting his bed, and now late to lose his virginity:It must be those stupid books youre reading (79).
The equation of books and sexual abstinence is not the narrators.
Immaculate, his brothers wife, eventually joins the narrator in some bed
far from the house (28). Throughout the novella women are attracted to
the narrators gentleness to them (unlike others, he never beats women)
and to his innocence (he shows no guile and desires nothing from others
for himself). He, in turn, is drawn to women as fellow victims equally
subject to beatings from insecure bullies.
Some years later, in the scene that opens the novella, the narrator, no
longer at university, is reading by the only candle in a room that he still
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shares with Peter and Immaculate. As in Achebe, the small room where a
character reads cannot keep out the noises from outside:in the next room
a baby bawls and outside the house a cat tortured by children screams in
agony (5). For Marecheras narrator, however, the distractions are as much
from within the room as from without. While he reads, Peter beats his
pregnant wife with sickening violence. The narrator finds it impossible to
ignore the domestic and street violence in order to concentrate. He feels
Peter and Immaculate are somehow putting on a show for him that is not
unlike the sex his brother had forced him to watch years earlier, and he
laughs. His brother turns on him:And what are you sniggering about,
bookshit? (4). In vain, the narrator tries to resume reading:I drew the
candle closer to the book I was reading and after a moment found the passage I had reached (4). But Peter blows out the candle, spits in his face,
and shoves him violently into a chair and against the wall. The neighbour
children throw the cat they have tortured to death through the window
into the house, a furry and wet thing that struck me in the face (5). We
have met the configuration of book, window, noise, and sacrificed animal
before, in both Achebe and Soyinka, but nowhere is it as bleak as here.
Elsewhere in Africa, reading in the presence of others is also perceived
as a grievous insult. In a scene from Soyinkas memoir Ibadan, the protagonist, Maren, a version of the authors schoolboy self, immerses himself
in a book apparently in order to forestall a beating from a bully whom he
has challenged, but the act of reading invites aggression instead:
Im reading. Youre disturbing me.
Disturbing you! Disturbing you! I said, repeat what you said this morning.
But I dont remember what I said.
Youre reading on me. I am talking to you and youre reading on me. Take
your eyes from that book when Im talking to you.20
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and Dostoevsky, whose attraction is that they are a world away from the
history of British colonialism in Africa. Edmund also writes novels and
stories, and his locker was lavishly decorated with reproductions of portraits of the Devil and with enlarged texts of Satans speeches culled from
Miltons Paradise Lost (612). Edmund, however, is beaten to a pulp by
Stephen, an African nationalist who reads nothing but the Heinemann
African Writers Series (63). (Ironically, of course, The House of Hunger is
itself published in the African Writers Series.) If Stephens taste in reading material is intended to reflect badly on him, it must be because he is
guilty of caring less about books as such than about their Africanness,
that is about their covers (63). It is Edmund, not Stephen, who later joins
the guerrillas fighting for independence.
T h e pr i s on-hous e of pr i n t, a s e c on d
Hous e of H u ng e r
Marecheras narrator, like Naipauls Mr Biswas, is forever leaving behind
the squalid accommodations he shares with others in search of a space
of his own. Books offer an escape from the House of Hunger that is the
condition of Africans in Rhodesia, but the escape proves illusory and
English-language textuality proves to be its own House of Hunger. As
in Mr Biswass case, the distance between the squalor of lived conditions
and the dreams nourished by foreign texts and images inspires a debilitating dissatisfaction. In a brief story in The House of Hunger titled Are
There People Living There? (a play on the title of an Athol Fugard play),
the narrator describes how eleven people share a three-roomed house
along with three cats and seven dogs:Not a minute passed night or day
but was drowned by the sound of quarrelling, the din of cats and dogs
raining down from the sky, and the interminable half-lewd, half-innocent
whisperings of my vicious but sweet brood of children (150). The narrator
has nowhere to rest my elbows and stain pain with my inky articles (150).
When he writes at the kitchen table, an endless procession of kids would
suddenly materialise to demand onions and then proceed, each one of
them, to cut them right under my nose (150). Kitchen smells and domestic noises also threatened to disrupt Akinyodes writing in Soyinkas sar,
but never with the malice attributed to them in Marechera. Poverty has
forced the narrator to burn his books for firewood, and he reports sarcastically that his kids seem to have an exaggerated awe of my manuscripts;
my eldest, for instance, only tears off pieces from the margins to roll his
cigarettes and dope with (150).
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The night club whose walls are covered with paper and printed words
suggests the image of a textual House of Hunger. So does the room of a
prostitute who takes the narrator home:It was a prison. It was the womb
It was a Whites Only sign on a lavatory (25). Starkly white and black
The floor was painted charcoal black but the walls were spotless white
(24) the room comes to be a symbol of the racially divided nation. In a
corner is an effigy of Ian Smith, the Rhodesian prime minister, impaled
on a spike. The paper-covered room is not just something Marecheras narrator incorporates into his psyche, as Mr Biswas does with the newspaper
headlines that surround him in Green Vale, but an insane projection of
his text-bound consciousness. The result, however, is the same:the space
inside and the space outside mirror each other:The room had taken over
my mind. My hunger had become the room (25).
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other sources that I had given, by that document, the right to all the
minerals in my country (42). Small wonder, then, that black Rhodesians
should feel that writing is a deeply treacherous medium. The paper known
as the Rudd concession almost disappeared when the bearer got lost in
the Kalahari and was forced to hide the paper in an ant-bear hole filled
with honey. Marecheras narrator lambasts Lobengula for his foolishness
in Poking his head into a Pandoras box, like a baboon poking his hand
into a gourd-trap (42), and concludes, and so here we are all sticky with
the stinking stains of history (43).
In the centre of the ceiling of the House of Hunger in the narrators
nightmare, in minute characters, is the word C I V I L I Z AT ION , over
which some enterprising vandal, perhaps the narrators school friend
Edmund, has scrawled BL AC K IS (38). The graffiti mimics and mocks
the label, laying claim to civilization on the part of those who have been
excluded and at the same time defacing it. Painted on the floor in red
letters is the message A RT IS FA RT (38), at once a sign of disrespect
for art as defined by Europe and a manifesto that art in Africa will be
made of bodily effluvia. The English-language graffiti palimpsest, like the
scrawl of prisoners on the walls of their cell, merely confirms the solidity
of the prison-house of textuality in which the African finds himself.
The problem is not just the falseness of English words and images, but
the very nature of written words, which cover the world and impose on
the self a separation from the world and from the body. In the narrators
nightmare House of Hunger, other faded posters bear more elemental
messages:One said Earth. One said Fire. One said Water. One said Air.
One said I am Stone (37). The posters do not feature different elements
but rather the same element:English words. The word Earth is not the
earth below the narrators feet, the word Fire not the match he uses to
light the darkness.
Between a poster that says Water and another that says Earth is a
window through which the narrator sticks his head (37). There is a sexual
echo here:when admonishing her son to leave his books and start laying
girls, his mother had instructed him to stick it in the hole between the
water and the earth and the girl will then take you and your balls all in
until Shell heave you in up to the hairs on your head (78). Marecheras
narrators experience with sex has, however, infected him with syphilis,
and he finds that reading, too, involves thrusting himself into a space he
has been told to desire, a space that, like Pandoras Box or the ant-bear
hole, proves but a trap. The major difference between sex and reading is
that, when reading, the narrator inserts his head first.
179
Sticking his head out of the window to escape all the mocking words
and images, the narrator sees thousands of windows out there and there
were heads sticking out of them. Heads black like me (38).23 In Achebe,
windows provide a contrast to the page because they open onto a world of
sound and other people. In Soyinka, a train window serves as a symbol of
the access that writing offers to another space. In Marechera, the window
is also a symbol for the page, but neither window nor page offers access
or escape to an outside. Drawing his head back into the room, the narrator finds the window has become a mirror. Thrusting his head through
once more, he finds again Thousands of black heads were sticking out of
thousands of windows (38). The window functions either as a bathroom
mirror, showing the narrator himself in all his solitude, or as a barbershop wall of mirrors, revealing a world of others who are merely images
of himself.
Benedict Anderson has argued that the readers of newspapers and novels, although perforce strangers to each other, imagine a community of
fellow readers coterminous with the nation-state of which they will be
citizens. The mass ceremony of newspaper reading
is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is
well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by
thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose
identity he has not the slightest notion What more vivid figure for the secular, historically-clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?24
180
show the world his face but only a page with his photo where his face
should be.
Marechera, who once found reading material in the dump, imagines printed texts as so much debris and restores the litter in literature.
Impaled on the tree are two pages of white writing about black men, one
from Shakespeare, the other from the news; one from Europe, the other
from Europe in Africa. The implication of this windblown juxtaposition
is that European high culture and the settler racism of Rhodesia are of a
piece. The white world is one. Both at the elite level and at its most popular, at the centre and at its margins, it oppresses the African, an oppression as much linguistic and textual as political, economic, and legal.
In Marecheras mad and word-obsessed imagination, the contents of
the House of Hunger come alive:soiled dishes scolded and squabbled on
the grease-strewn table. An unruly crowd of empty beer-bottles had gathered in the shadows of the grimy wash-basin. The robot cupboard had
exposed its privates:a troop of salt and pepper tins reinforced by a bloody
ketchup character (40). The pun on privates links the individual body
and the national army. And in the juxtaposition of the salt, pepper, and
bloody ketchup there is a reference to the old riddle Whats black and
white and red all over?. The answer, as everyone knows, is a newspaper,
which is read all over (but only where there is literacy). But, in Rhodesia,
where the black and white of The Herald cannot be thought apart from
the racial division between white and black, newspapers do not have the
effect Anderson says they have elsewhere. Marecheras answer to the riddle is deliberately and perversely literal-minded:What is black and white,
and red all over? Rhodesia, the House of Hunger in which black and
white are covered with blood.
T h e v iol e nc e of t h e l e t t e r
In House of Hunger snatches of the European literary tradition are
strewn throughout the narration, much as they are in the London of
The Waste Land. Indeed many of Marecheras allusions are to Eliot. The
image of the dead tree on which the narrators photo is impaled derives
from Ezekiel by way of The Waste Land. The narrators friend Harry has
read Eliots play The Cocktail Party (15), in which a character redeems herself by going as a missionary to Africa where she is crucified and perhaps eaten. (The names of Marecheras characters Peter and Julia derive
from The Cocktail Party, as the name Harry is from The Family Reunion.)
Conrad was one of the set authors the narrator had to read at school, and
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Edmund mimics the Conradian phrase The horror the horror! (36),
which is also the epigraph to Eliots The Hollow Men. When the narrators
friend Harry recites apocalyptic poetry by Blake and Yeats, mangling and
running together The Tiger and The Second Coming Tiger tiger
burning bright. In the forest of the night. The falcon cannot hear the
falconer. Things fall apart. When the stars threw down their spears what
rough beast (18) the modernist mishmash even includes an echo of
Achebe.
The myriad allusions in The House of Hunger point to texts from elsewhere and relate them to the present context. In this they function much
as proverbs, but their relation to the present is entirely ironic, as they
highlight the distance between the texts alluded to and the Rhodesian
context. It is as though Marechera were saying to Eliot and Conrad, You
talk of the Waste Land and the Heart of Darkness? Well, let me show you
the House of Hunger. If Africa is a Heart of Darkness and a Waste Land,
it is because Europeans have made it so.
Like Eliot, Marecheras narrator longs for a whole that would redeem a
world of disconnected fragments. The narrator lectures his friend Philip:
There are fragments and snatches of fragments. The momentary fingerings of a
guitar. Things as they are but not really in the Wallace Stevens manner. The
way things have always been. A torn bit of newspaper whose words have neither
beginning nor end but the words upon it. A splinter of melody piercing the air
with a brittle note. Nothing lasts long enough to have been. These fragments of
everything descend upon us haphazardly. Only rarely do we see the imminence
[sic] of wholes. And that is the beginning of art. (60)
The narrator dreams of writing a black epic with authentic black heroes
who haunted my dreams in a far-off golden age of Black Arcadia (24).
He compares himself to an African Ajax, in the kraal slaughtering cattle (15) his friend Harry to Achilles sizing up Troy (15); and a woman
he knows to Athena (69). His friend Julia behaves like a Greek goddess
intervening in the Trojan War:she put on her armour again and with the
speed of greased lightning promptly dispatched Hector (47). The narrator
imagines setting his own story and that of his nation against the narrative
of the Iliad, as Derek Walcott, author of the verse epic Omeros, was later
to do.
Marecheras novella, however, no well-wrought urn, does not even try
to reassemble the fragments that have been smashed, the task of postcolonial poetry as Walcott describes it in his Nobel lecture.26 All the
narrators allusions to a desired wholeness point, as they do in Eliot, to
the absence of contemporary heroes. A friend called Philip says there is
182
nothing finer in the world than the figures on a Greek vase. Ode to a
Grecian Urn and all that. All rot, of course (42). Nestar, the prostitute,
has a statue of Venus and a bowl of apples, which she smashes, handing
the narrator not the golden apple but the pudendum (52).
Marecheras narrators exposure to European literature means he can
only see the world in terms of what is missing. Like Soyinkas Akinyode,
he can no longer see his world or even his body except through the lens
provided by what he has read. The results, however, are ironic: he does
not see more clearly but less, as if something had come between him
and the world. He says the countryside had left me cold and indifferent
until a hasty affair with Wordsworths Prelude swung me to the opposite extreme (49). Now he and his mates often take to the bush, following
prostitutes and their clients to where the heart of the matter was daily
revealing itself to the world (49). The intimations of mortality at the
heart of nature here differ substantially from the revelations in Romantic
odes. Literature appears either an outright lie or an ironic counterpoint
serving to underline the corruption of Rhodesia and its distance from the
meaningful world depicted in literature. The boys trail one prostitute in
particular, fascinated by the splotches and stains of semen that were dripping from her as she walked (49). The adult narrator later uses her in a
story as a symbol of Rhodesia (49). The parodic deployment of the synecdoche linking individual and nation, mother and Africa, obviously works
to undercut Rhodesia, but also mocks the literature for its irrelevance.
Part of the narrators difficulty with Homeric epic is that he identifies with the Trojans who lost the war. An identification with Troy is
how Virgil appropriated Homer for Rome, but Marechera can see only
treason. Philip alludes to the man who betrayed Troy Incanor, was
it? (42)27 and the narrator is beaten up by an informer he identifies as
the Trojan traitor (26). The real traitor, however, is within:Imagine the
human body having within itself a built-in Trojan Horse (42). In the
narrators references to examples of high western art, the colonial subject has internalized European literature so thoroughly that his deepest
desires (for black heroes worthy of Homer) and his deepest fears (of having a traitor within) are both versions of mental colonization. The narrator has created a labyrinthine personal world of writing, only to find that
the words would merely enmesh me within its crude mythology (7). The
labyrinth, itself an example of Greek mythology, is both an image for and
part of the prison-house of European writing.
In a similar fashion, the climax of Tayeb Salihs novel Season of
Migration to the North, set in Sudan, reveals to the narrator the contents
183
of a friends private library, which are also the contents of his friends
troubled soul:
Books on economics, history and literature. Zoology. Geology. Mathematics.
Astronomy. The encyclopaedia Britannica. Gibbon. Macaulay. Toynbee. The
complete works of Bernard Shaw. Keynes. Tawney. Smith. Robinson. The
Economics of Imperfect Competition. Hobson Imperialism. Robinson An Essay
on Marxian Economics. Sociology. Anthropology. Psychology. Thomas Hardy.
Thomas Mann. E. G. Moore. Thomas Moore. Virginia Woolf. Wittgenstein.
Einstein. Brierly. Namier. Books I had heard of and others I had not. Volumes
of poetry by poets of whom I did not know the existence. The Journals of Gordon
[of particular relevance in Sudan]. Gullivers Travels. Kipling. Housman. The
History of the French Revolution Thomas Carlyle. Lectures on the French Revolution
Lord Acton. Books bound in leather. Books in paper covers. Old tattered books.
Books that looked as if theyd just come straight from the printers. Huge volumes the size of tombstones. Small books with gilt edges the size of packs of
playing cards. Signatures. Words of dedication. Books in boxes. Books on the
chairs. Books on the floor Owen. Ford Madox Ford. Stefan Zweig. E. G.
Browne. Laski. Hazlitt. Alice in Wonderland. Richards. The Koran in English.
The Bible in English. Gilbert Murray. Plato Prospero and Caliban. Totem and
Taboo.28
There are also volumes by the owner of the library The Economics of
Colonialism Mustafa Saeed. Colonialism and Monopoly Mustafa Saeed.
The Cross and Gunpowder Mustafa Saeed. The Rape of Africa Mustafa
Saeed but not a single Arabic book.29 The discoverer of the library
feels like Ali Baba in the treasure chamber of thieves amid their ill-gotten
goods, and his conclusion is that the library constitutes A graveyard. A
mausoleum. An insane idea. A prison. A huge joke.30 This room is another
example of Marecheras House of Hunger, for in spite of the repletion it
offers, the overwhelming sentiment is of confinement and deprivation.
The African nightmare of a room furnished in printed words is a perversion of what had long been a European dream. Says Roger Chartier,
The dream of a library (in a variety of configurations) that would bring
together all accumulated knowledge and all the books ever written can be
found throughout the history of Western civilization.31 The library as big
as the world was only desired, however, as long as it confirmed the superiority of the scholar. When literacy became the possession of the masses
in the twentieth century, literary writers began to distrust it:Imagining
a possible world where everyone reads, the dream or nightmare of universal literacy, meant that representations of this practice ceased to be signs
of prestige and became instead oppressive confirmations that not even
by reading could the individual save himself from the quicksand of mass
184
Rhodesian apocalypse
185
to the self like a second skin preventing direct immersion in the world,
will rip apart revealing what lies beneath. When the narrator watches his
mother eat while he himself goes hungry, he feels his soul tear like the old
cloth in the Temple (14), an allusion to the tearing of the Temple curtain
at the moment of Christs death on the cross. His closed eyelids are the
red curtains of my soul (13), about to be parted. Later, when he becomes
aware of the public persona he has as a published poet, the old cloth of my
former self seemed to stretch and tear once more, and he wonders, What
shall I see when the cloth rips completely, laying everything bare? It is as if
a crack should appear in the shell of the sky (17).
In Rhodesia the longed-for apocalypse that will split the cloth and
reveal the object of mans desiring has a name. Julia, the narrators friend
and former lover, appears suddenly before him as two massive breasts that
were straining angrily against a thin T-shirt upon which was written the
legend Z I M B A BW E (19). The name across the bulging T-shirt both
suggests and undercuts the psychological intersections between desire
and nation, between Africa and woman. Z I M B A BW E , after all, is but
one more printed word stretched to cover something that it does not fit,
not unlike the posters covering cracks. And what is below the cloth or the
skin is flesh, anonymous and capable of pain. When the layer of wordcovered fabric or paper that inhibits the narrators direct contact with the
world of things, and with his own body, does tear, what pours out is not
light or truth but blood. After he beats Edmund to a pulp, Stephen, the
African nationalist, has his victims blood on his shirt, a rather large stain
which seemed in outline to be a map of Rhodesia (65). That Rhodesiashaped stain, because it testifies to and does not mask the violence and
suffering that are the nature of life in the House of Hunger is actually
truer than the T-shirt legend across Julias breasts.
Starting with the blood from his mouth that stains his notebooks as
a boy, his earliest memory of reading, Marecheras novella is filled with
stains: The bloodstains on my plate accuse the appetite that goes into
eating. The stains on the sheet when she left the next morning refuse
to be laundered away. In the sky, Gods stains are beautiful to see from
down below or from up above (401). Love or even hate or the desire
for revenge, says the cynical narrator, are just so many stains on a sheet,
on a wall, on a page even, including, notably, This page (55). Stains are
not words and do not create a representational model of the world. The
significance of stains is that they invade texts and blot out words. Their
palimpsestic quality horrifies Naipaul, but it is to the condition of such
stains that Marecheras writing aspires.
186
In House of Hunger, as in Sembne and Soyinka, the twentiethcentury train (9) functions as an explicit emblem of modernity, including literacy. The narrator, however, never travels on the train. Instead the
train passes at speed through the slums and kills pedestrians, most notably a parable-spouting old man whom the narrator has befriended and
who represents the elderly upholder of oral tradition familiar to readers of
African literature (79):The old man died beneath the wheels of the twentieth century. There was nothing left but stains, bloodstains and fragments of flesh, when the whole length of it was through with eating him.
And the same thing is happening to my generation (45).
The narrator, who wants to be able to read stains, offers this description of his own art. His frantic thoughts chalk themselves on the black
page of a dreamless sleep (39), something like a photographic negative of
a page in which print appears white on a sheet of black. In the morning
there was not a single space left on that page: the story was complete,
and the page is fully white (39). In the course of the developing process,
however, as he reads what he wrote in that other state, every single word
erased itself into my mind (39). The outward traces are absorbed inside
in a painful process that feels like a wound. Then they come to take out
the stitches from the wound of it, and the stitches are published as poems
(39). The goal of writing in the House of Hunger is not apocalyptic revelation, ripping open the veil to reveal the flesh. The goal is rather to suture
the skin closed. The narrators stitches, which are also his poems, run like
the great dyke [a prominent feature of Zimbabwes topography] across the
country (40). The inspiration is homoeopathic: the words that wound
must serve to heal. Of course, a little blood still seeps through (40).
Ch apter 7
The texts in this study were chosen for the range of attitudes they display
to literacy. If the chronological structure of the study suggests a history of
literacy in Africa and the West Indies or a history of postcolonial literature, that history is necessarily incomplete and potentially misleading. It
may be that the relation of African and Caribbean writers to reading and
writing has worsened over the generations, but that trend has not been
consistent. sar, the most optimistic of the novels discussed here, is also
the most recent in terms of publication. It is also not the case that West
Africans or West Indians are all more favourably disposed to writing
than Southern Africans like Marechera. Certainly literary dystopias, an
African speciality, are remarkably evenly distributed across the continent.
One conclusion this study does invite is that African and West Indian
novels set in the present are more likely to be pessimistic about literacy
than are novels set in the past. And the reason for that is not (just) that
there was more reason for hope in the first half of the twentieth century
than in the second. The reason is that African and West Indian writers are
most suspicious of writing when they consider its capacity to reach contemporary readers and most grateful to writing for its power to preserve
memory and even restore the dead. To illustrate, I will conclude with a
brief discussion of two novels published within a year of one another on
opposite sides of the Atlantic.
The Senegalese author Boris Boubacar Diops Le Cavalier et son ombre
(1997) is a complex allegory of the plight of the writer in a continent without readers. The Haitian American author Edwidge Danticats 1998 novel
The Farming of Bones commemorates the Haitian cane workers who were
killed in a 1937 massacre in the Dominican Republic. In both novels, a
river separates the narrator (and the implied writer) from the past that he
or she seeks to recover. On the far side is the lost loved one. The river is
not only a symbol for the distance that writing must overcome, but also
an image for writing itself and therefore for the means of crossing. The
187
188
surface of the river is like the blank page that faces the writer and the
page of rippling print faced by the reader, the pages in which writer and
reader must immerse themselves in the hopes of reaching the other side.
The
c r i t- va i n
189
Kinshasa to grasp at once the contrast between real life and our works of fiction
supposed to represent it. They speak of a world that does not resemble us.6
au del du miroir
190
Danticats novel is centred on the Massacre River, the political border dividing the island of Hispaniola into two states. When the killing
started, the river that had separated home and away for Haitians became
a line distinguishing safety from danger. In the novel, crossing the river is
associated with death, but also with mourning and remembering, that is,
with reaching across time to recover the dead. Danticat herself has written of standing on the banks of the river, looking for the people who had
once fled across it, people who were as fluid as the waters themselves.9
Central to the novels inspiration is the image of the forlorn child on the
bank of the river that has swallowed her parents even before the massacre. Amabelle, the orphaned child at the stream (132), spends much of
her life staring into watery surfaces, trying to see through them. Seora
Valencia, the wealthy Dominican woman for whom she worked at the
time of the massacre, reminds her decades later, When I didnt see you,
I always knew where to find you, peeking into some current, looking for
your face. Since then I cant tell you how many streams and rivers and
waterfalls I have been to, looking for you (303).
At the end of the novel, decades after the killing, when Amabelle
returns to the Dominican side and visits Seora Valencia, she finds the
past irrecoverable. At the waterfall that was the site of her trysts with
her lover Sebastien, whom she lost in the massacre, the drop was much
longer and the pool deeper than the one I remembered, and she wonders
if Perhaps time had destroyed my sense of proportion and possibilities.
Or perhaps this was another fall altogether (302). A fall, from innocence
or grace, divides the present from the past, and Amabelle does not find
Sebastien:He didnt come out and show himself. He stayed inside the
waterfall (306). The dead remain behind a shroud of silence, a curtain of
fate (283).
The Farming of Bones, however, can do what Diops novel cannot:reach
through the water to the dead. Throughout the first half of the novel, the
odd-numbered chapters, set in bold print and in the present tense, and
so brief as to constitute interchapters rather than chapters, are distinct
from the linear narrative of Amabelles story of the massacre. They create
a space apart, of uncertain status:do they represent memory or dream? In
one interchapter, Amabelle sees her mother rising, like the mother spirit
of the rivers, above the current that drowned her (207). The mother reassures her daughter that she has never been alone, as she has thought, but
that her mother has always been with her. In effect, in the interchapters
Amabelle is able to cross the river and rejoin her dead. Moreover, the relation of the interchapters to the narrative as a whole replicates the relation
191
of the book itself to events outside the book. The novels dedication In
confidence to you, Metrs Dlo, Mother of the Rivers implies that the
book itself will descend into the river where the mother now reigns as
Metrs Dlo.
One interchapter visits the cave behind the waterfall at the source of the
stream where the cane workers bathe, and where Amabelle and Sebastien
first made love (100). To enter the cave is frightening because it involves
stepping through the water. Once through, however, the world disappears
and all you see is luminous green fresco the dark green of wet papaya
leaves (100). When night comes to the world outside, the waterfall still
holds on to some memory of the sun that it will not surrender, so inside
the cave, there is always light, day and night (100). Entering the small
womblike space of the cave represents a reunion with ones own body,
with the world, and with the object of ones desire:
You who know the caves secret, for a time, you are also held captive in the
prism, this curiosity of nature that makes you want to celebrate yourself in ways
you hope the cave will show you, that the emptiness in your bones will show
you, or that the breath in your blood will show you, in ways that you hope your
body knows better than yourself. (100)
The prism of the cave resembles the raindrop sliding down the window
pane in which Peter Abrahams boyhood self imagined he saw a world
of sun and warmth that he longed to enter. Amabelle associates the
space behind the waterfall where you feel half buried, although the
light cant help but follow you and stay (101) with the far side of the
river where she feels her parents are waiting for her. She explains that
Heaven my heaven is the veil of water that stands between my
parents and me. To step across it and then come out is what makes
me alive (2645). Of her lover she says, His name is Sebastien Onius
and his spirit must be inside the waterfall cave, and sometimes she can
make herself dream him out of the void and he walks out of the cave
into the room where she sleeps (282).
The second-person pronoun At first you are afraid to step behind the
waterfall Still you tiptoe into the cave (100) has an elusive referent.
On the one hand, it is like the French on and refers to what anyone would
experience who entered the waterfall. The second-person pronoun is also
a version of the first person:You who know the caves secret is Amabelle
herself. At the same time, the second-person pronoun invokes someone
nowhere present in the scene but present to the page of its representation namely, the reader. The invitation to the reader is repeated by the
192
use of the deictic:this prism This is where (100). If we follow the narratives injunctions, we, too, dive into the page and enter a space on the
other side where Amabelle, Sebastien, and the others are.
This is where Sebastien and I first made love, says Amabelle, standing in this cave, in a crook where you feel half buried, although the light
cant help but follow you and stay (1001). In one sense, Amabelle and
Sebastien are the only two people in that fictive space. In another sense,
as the deictic this cave implies, Amabelle and the reader are both present. The result is to suggest that two lines of desire are consummated at
once:that between the heroine and her love and that between the narrator and the reader. In this case, of course, the heroine and the narrator are
the same person.
The second-person pronoun also refers to Sebastien, who, after all,
was the one with whom Amabelle first entered the cave. The small space
below the surface of the page that reading opens up is also the space where
the dead still live. The Farming of Bones tantalizingly shifts between two
spaces: a position outside the waterfall or on the far bank of the river,
where the abandoned child stands unable to reach her loved ones, and
a position behind the waterfall through which Amabelle the writer has
passed and where she can touch her dead. The first is the space of the
narrative chapters, the latter the distinct space of the interchapters. In the
latter, a self-representation of the text itself, the river becomes the very
medium that allows the reunion to take place.
Perhaps only in places like Haiti or Africa, where ancestors remain a
force in the present, can texts, however tentatively, restore the dead to
life. Texts there both are more sinister and have a greater power to redeem
than they have elsewhere. In Africa and the Caribbean, texts can be dead,
which is something that cannot be said of texts everywhere. They can be
dead because they can also be more alive.
Notes
1 I n t roduc t ion
1 Achebe, Arrow of God, 2nd edn, p. 191. All references are to the second edition (originally published in 1974) unless otherwise stipulated.
2 The story is told in full only in the first edition of the novel:Achebe, Arrow
of God, 1st edn, pp. 2359.
3 Gunner, Africa and Orality, p. 1.
4 George, Achebes Arrow of God, p. 356.
5 Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day, p. 45.
6 Newell, Literary Culture; D. Peterson, Creative Writing; Barber, Africas
Hidden Histories; Griswold, Bearing Witness; Fraser, Book History.
7 Quoted in Scholes and Willis, Linguists, Literacy, p. 226.
8 Brandt, Literacy as Involvement, p. 117.
9 Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, p. 7.
10 Quoted in Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 58.
11 Chamberlin, Living Language and Dead Reckoning, p. 17.
12 Kittay, Thinking through Literacies, p. 168.
13 B. Johnson, Writing, p. 47; Johnsons emphasis.
14 Finnegan, What Is Orality?, p. 144.
15 Besnier, Literacy, Emotion and Authority, p. 2.
16 Brandt, Literacy as Involvement, p. 2.
17 Havelock, Preface to Plato; Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change.
18 Todorov, The Conquest of America.
19 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy; Goody, The Domestication; Ong, Orality
and Literacy.
20 Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice; Warner, The Letters of the Republic.
21 Ibid., p. 6.
22 Ibid., p. 9.
23 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 14.
24 Ibid., p. 109.
25 Derrida, Paper Machine, p. 41.
26 [U]n prjug universel, sans doute li aux exigences de la vie en socit
comme telle:Hountondji, Sur la philosophie africaine, p. 130.
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
10 Urban, Metaculture.
11 Henkin, City Reading.
12 Vijayan, The Legends of Khasak, p. 26.
13 Ibid.
14 A. Clarke, Growing up Stupid, p. 53.
15 Garca Mrquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, p. 48.
16 Naipaul, Finding the Centre, p. 22.
17 Ibid., p. 56.
18 Austin, How to Do Things with Words.
19 Campbell, The Young Colonials, p. 100.
20 Fraser, School Readers in the Empire, p. 103.
21 Campbell, The Young Colonials, p. 101.
22 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 158.
23 Rushdie, Midnights Children, p. 127.
24 This was based on something that happened to Naipauls own father, who
had exaggerated it for his own newspaper account (Naipaul, Finding the
Centre, p. 38).
25 Fraser, Fathers and Sons, p. 104.
26 Naipaul, The Documentary Heresy, p. 24.
27 Naipaul, Finding the Centre, p. 45.
28 Ibid.
29 Eliot, The Selected Prose, p. 48.
30 Naipaul, Finding the Centre, p. 43.
31 Macaulay, Minute, p. 359.
32 Naipaul, Finding the Centre, p. 84.
5 L i t e r ac y i n t he wor l d no t ru le d by
pape r :M yal by e r n a brodbe r
1 Brodber, Myal, p. 5.
2 Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, p. 206.
3 Tuman, A Preface to Literacy, p. 42.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., p. 43.
6 Tiffin, Cold Hearts and (Foreign) Tongues, p. 914.
7 Ibid.
8 Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue, p. 129.
9 Ibid., p. 87.
10 The Brave Little Hollander is a story told in The Royal Readers 2
(London:Nelson, 1877), pp. 978. It also figures in a list of books available
to young children in Banana Bottom, Jamaica, a decade earlier than the
events in Myal:
Selections from Grimms and Andersons fairy tales. The Leather Stocking Tales. Bible
Tales done up into attractive and innocent forms. The story of Esther, Jacob and Esau,
Joseph and his brethren, John the Baptist and Jesus. Tales of a quick-witted and fearless Dutch child stopping a hole in the dykes with his hands all through the night
204
205
206
207
7 [S]a volont de se faire entendre de loppresseur est au moins aussi forte que
celle damliorer le sort de ses compatriotes; ibid., p. 164.
8 Ces auteurs qui parlent dune Afrique dont ils ne savent plus rien sont malheureusement les seuls pouvoir se faire entendre du reste du monde et donc
tre couts en Afrique. Ibid., p. 206.
9 Danticat, Preface, p. 8.
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Index
Abimbola, Wande, 79
Abrahams, Peter, 24, 16670, 172, 191
Achebe, Chinua, 8, 19, 73, seeIgbo writing
Arrow of God, 1, 56, 2263, 70, 145, 170, 201
No Longer at Ease, 26, 31, 634, 73, 82, 196
Things Fall Apart, 3, 32, 41, 42, 64, 145, 181
Adinkra, 92
advertising, 114, 11516, 176
Afigbo, A. E., 54
African literature
literary history, 910, 645, 166
African Writers Series, 64, 175
Alexander, Jack, 139
Aluko, T. M., 27, 31, 64, 75, 89
America, 22, 51, 76, 77, 97, 153, 154, 169
African American literature, 169
American literature, 155
and race, 156
Amselle, Jean-Loup, 30, 40
Anderson, Benedict, 46, 96, 179, 180
Arabic writing, 15, 105, 183
archive
tin trunk, 63, 65, 72, 89, 133
Armah, Ayi Kwei, 15
Augustine, 30, 76
Austen, Jane, 140
Austin, J. L., 119
B, Amadou Hampat, 31, 67, 86
Badian, Seydou, 31
Balzac, 140
Barber, Karin, 6, 8, 18, 19, 25, 26, 58, 61, 63, 65,
68, 90, 91, 194
Battestini, Simon, 2, 15
Benjamin, Walter, 46
Besnier, Niko, 17, 58, 193
Bhabha, Homi, 29, 32, 33, 109, 110
Bible, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 32, 39, 73, 74, 78, 93, 95,
102, 149, 150, 153, 177, 180, 183, 203
translation, 37, 38, 39, 64
Blake, 181
Bloch, Maurice, 18, 104, 150, 194
book
as box, 289, 39
as physical object, 6, 63, 64, 111
manufacture of, 101
Brandt, Deborah, 11, 19, 162, 193, 194
Brink, Andr, 31
Brodber, Erna, 8, 9, 19
Louisiana, 146
Myal, 78, 13563
Brooks, Peter, 47, 115
Brown, Nicholas, 46
Byron, 137
Calinescu, Matei, 75
Camara Laye, 24, 67, 83, 194, 201
Cameron, Sir Donald, 50, 52
Campbell, Carl, 120
Canetti, Elias, 184
Cary, Joyce, 32
Casement, Roger, 69
Certeau, Michel de, 82, 105
Cervantes, 163, 188
Chamberlin, J. Edward, 193
Chartier, Roger, 183
Chekhov, Anton, 89
Christianity, 25, 26, 28, 35, 73, 81, 145, 149
missionaries, 41, 47, 75, 93, 165, 177, 180
Clarke, Austin, 116
classics, Greek and Latin, 100, 121, 181, 182
Coetzee, J. M., 184
colonial administration, 41, 512
court messengers, 55
Indirect Rule, 52, 545, seewarrant chiefs
Native Courts, 545
unreality of, 524, 55
Conrad, Joseph, 32, 43, 49, 69, 180, 181
Coulmas, Florian, 34, 38
Crary, Jonathan, 78
220
Index
Crowther, Rev. Samuel, 37, 38, 39
Curtin, Philip, 149
Cutteridge, Captain, 120
Dai Sijie, 140
Dames, Nicholas, 72
Danticat, Edwidge, 9, 10, 187, 1902
Davies, Owen, 153
Delaurence, William Lauron, 93, 96, 152, 153
Deleuze, Gilles, 172
Dennett, Daniel, 83
Dennis, Rev. T. J., 27, 28, 35, 36, 3740
Derrida, Jacques, 12, 14, 40, 122, 193
logocentrism, 12, 14, 17
Diagne, Mamouss, 3, 5, 15, 17, 194
Dickens, Charles, 22, 121, 131, 139, 172
dictionary, 64, 69, 70, 150, 184
Diop, Boubacar Boris, 9, 10, 19, 23, 24, 25, 27,
48, 59, 187, 1889, 190, 195
Diop, Cheikh Anta, 15
Djebar, Assia, 27
Dossou, Franois, 15, 77, 194
Dostoevsky, 175
drums, 3, 34, 35, 144, 145
Edison, Thomas, 146
education, 3, 11, 25, 63, 6770, 79, 11213
Christian, 136
final reports, 79, 82, 173
learning to read, 223, 156
recitation, 1367, 157
textbooks, 278, 63, 83, 120, 130, 136, 155,
1578, 15961, 171, 172, 203, 204
Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 12
Elias, Norbert, 48
Eliot, George, 140
Eliot, T. S., 129, 172, 180, 181
encyclopedia, 113, 164, 184
Engelsing, Rolf, 73
English language, 40, 51, 88, 171, 172, 178, 189
African appropriation, 47, 196
Equiano, Olaudah, 30, 55
Fabian, Johannes, 46, 95
fathers and sons, 7, 23, 60, 634, 65, 73, 106,
107, 110, 12932, 167, 175
Finnegan, Ruth, 12, 13, 17, 18, 37, 45, 49, 79,
193, 194
Flaubert, Gustave, 140
Forster, E. M., 184
Foucault, Michel, 102, 158
Fraser, Robert, 6, 40, 78, 120, 125
French language, 188
Frye, Northrop, 126
221
222
Index
Index
and race, 51, 1378, 13940, 169, 176, 177, 180
and remembering, 71, 74, 75, 83, 85
rereading, 72, 75, 77, 78, 79
and sex, 141, 173, 178
and solitude, 478, 56, 701, 138, 141, 153
subversive, 158
and travel, 83, 138, 168
reading matter, 72, 73, 163, 164, 1823
realism, 46
repertoire, 68, 72, 78
Rhodes, Cecil, 177
Rhodesia, seeZimbabwe
road system, 40, 423, 81, 86, 87
Robbins, Sarah, 22
Robeson, Paul, 96
Rotman, Brian, 14, 77, 141, 142, 148,
149, 168
Royle, Nicholas, 145, 162
Rushdie, Salman, 122
Russell, Bertrand, 11
Saenger, Paul, 12
Salih, Tayeb, 1823
Sanskrit, 103, 111
Sassine, Williams, 26, 27, 76, 188
Scholes, Robert, 36, 193
Schn, Erich, 44, 48
Schreiner, Olive, 168
Schwarz-Bart, Simone, 27
Seed, Patricia, 30
Sembne Ousmane, 24, 83, 140, 186, 194
Senghor, Lopold Sdar, 3
Shakespeare, 68, 69, 73, 80, 119, 128, 129, 139,
169, 173, 179, 180, 184
Sherlock, Philip, 15961
Siegert, Bernhard, 41
sign-writing, 88, 11415, 11618
Simpson, George, 161
Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses,
seeDelaurence
Smith, Ian, 165, 176
Sobo, Elisa, 148, 156
Soyinka, Samuel Ayodele Essay, 65
Soyinka, Wole, 8, 19
Ak, 66, 67, 103, 199
Ibadan, 174
sar, 7, 9, 64106, 138, 165, 175,
177, 199
Lion and the Jewel, 64
poetry, 76, 105
St Andrews College Oyo, 67, 68, 71
Steiner, George, 48
Stevens, Wallace, 181
Stewart, Garrett, 22, 48, 194
223
224
writing (cont.)
as railway, 825, 186
and reason, 51
as road, 40, 812, 86
and science, 934, 113
and self-consciousness, 167
and sex, 154, 1556
and text, 18, 19, 578, 59, 62,
168, 171
Index
as water, 188, 1902
as weaving, 101
Yeats, 181, 184
Yoruba identity, 38, 81, 97, 99, 101
Yoruba in writing, 39
Zimbabwe, 8, 65, 166, 177, 180, 182, 184, 185
Zumthor, Paul, 86, 87