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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

Examining images of literacy in African and West Indian novels,

Neil ten Kortenaar looks at how postcolonial authors have thought
about the act of writing itself. Writing arrived in many parts of
Africa as part of colonization in the twentieth century, and with
it a whole world of book learning and paper pushing; school and
bureaucracy; newspapers, textbooks, and letters; candles, hurricane
lamps, and electricity; pens, paper, typewriters, and printed type;
and orthography developed for formerly oral languages. Writing
only penetrated many layers of West Indian society in the same era.
This book examines what the experience of writing and its material
culture mean to postcolonial writers. The range of writers is wide,
and includes Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and V. S. Naipaul. The
chapters rely on close reading of canonical novels, but discuss gen-
eral themes and trends in African and Caribbean literature. Ten
Kortenaar’s sensitive and penetrating treatment of these themes
makes this an important contribution to the growing field of post-
colonial literary studies.

n e i l t e n k or t e n a a r is Director of the Centre for Comparative

Literature at the University of Toronto.
 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, São 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.â•… cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-00867-0 (hardback)
1.╇Commonwealth fiction (English)–History and criticism.â•… 2.╇Literacy in
literature.â•… 3.╇African fiction (English)–History and criticism.â•… 4.╇Caribbean fiction
(English)–History and criticism.â•… 5.╇ Postcolonialism in literature.â•…I.╇Title.
p r 9080.5.k 67 2011
823′.90996–dc22
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.
 

To Luc and Anja

 Contents

Acknowledgements page viii

1 Introduction 1
2 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe 22
3 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà by Wole Soyinka 63
4 Mr Biswas finds a home in the world on paper:€V. S. Naipaul 107
5 Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal by Erna Brodber 135
6 Southern Africa’s Houses of Hunger 163
7 Conclusion:€the frontiers of writing 187

Notes 193
Bibliography 208
Index 220

vii
 Acknowledgements

This book was written during my term as a fellow at the Jackman

Humanities Institute (JHI) at the University of Toronto and owes every-
thing to that wonderfully stimulating environment. I am very grateful
to the JHI; its director, Bob Gibbs; and my fellow fellows. Where this
project is concerned I want to acknowledge especially Pamela Klassen,
Rosemary Sullivan, Jonathan Burgess, Mareike Neuhaus, and Maya
Chacaby. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of Toronto who
read or listened to parts of this manuscript and gave me feedback:€Ato
Quayson, Uzoma Esonwanne, and Sean Hawkins, as well as Susan
Gingell at the University of Saskatchewan. I had editing help from Aine
McGlynn and Stephanie Halldorson. I had important advice from Alan
Bewell and Melba Cuddy-Keane.
The second chapter, on Achebe, was originally written as a presentation
for a conference on ‘Theories of the Novel Now’ at Brown University in
2007, to which Olakunle George invited me. Material in the chapter on
Erna Brodber originally appeared in a much different format in A R I E L
30.4 (1999), 51–73.

viii
 Ch apter 1

Introduction

In an almost archetypal scene in Chinua Achebe’s 1964 novel Arrow of

God, a mother and her three children gather in her house in her hus-
band’s compound after dinner. The novel is set in Southeastern Nigeria
in 1922, when British colonization and Christian evangelization were
first penetrating every level of Igbo society. Half in darkness, Ugoye
tells two of her children a story. She and her listeners sit in a ‘close
group near the cooking place’, enjoying a communion that comple-
ments the completed communal acts of preparing and eating food.
Sitting apart from the others, beside the palm-oil taper that is the sin-
gle source of light, is the eldest brother, Oduche, absorbed in his new
school reader, the first book ever to enter the family’s compound. He
sits near ‘the entrance to the one sleeping-room’:1 reading, like sleeping
and dreaming, opens a door to a separate, interior world that each per-
son enters alone.
After negotiating with her listeners, Ugoye embarks upon a story about
a man with two wives, one ‘wicked and envious’ and the other good and
long-suffering (191).2 That story arises from and returns to the lived con-
text of the teller and her listeners as Ugoye expresses her own feelings
as the younger of two wives in a polygynous household. The children
attend eagerly to a story they already know but have not heard ‘too often’
(190). The tale narrates the differing fates of two sons by two mothers who
travel to the land of spirits. By contrast, Ugoye’s own son, Oduche, is not
reading a story such as his siblings listen to but is performing a school
exercise, and his reading appears mechanical and a chore. Oduche’s ‘lips
moved silently as he spelt out and formed the first words of the reader’,
words entirely stripped of context:
â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… a b a aba
e g o ego
i r o iro

1
2 Introduction
a z u azu
ọ m u ọmu (191)
The contrast between speech and writing is a central topos in African
literature. Although, as Simon Battestini has shown, there have always
been graphic traditions in Africa, the practice of writing and read-
ing words on paper, as opposed to graphic marks on textiles, walls, and
bodies, has come relatively recently to many parts of Africa south of the
Sahara, brought either by Arabs or by Europeans. The forms of writing
used by the European colonizers, including the roman alphabet, but also
the printing press, the codex book, the genre of the novel, and the prac-
tice of reading for pleasure and self-cultivation, have therefore frequently
been regarded in Africa as both new and foreign, and have occupied a
central place in the configuration known as modernity. Print literacy’s
association with the modern and the foreign has, in turn, generated a
corresponding association of spoken communication with the traditional
and the indigenous.
Africa has been called ‘the oral continent par excellence’,3 and many
Africans have readily accepted the label. In response to the long tradition
in Europe that values written stories over stories that are merely told, an
important task of modern African writers and thinkers has been to recu-
perate oral traditions and insist on their dignity and richness. Orality,
meaning both oral communication and the memory of that communi-
cation, is frequently regarded not just as the repository of African values
and traditions but as a medium that is itself essentially African, regard-
less of content. Even critical discussion of African writing has tended to
value orality as the bearer of tradition and of the cultural expression of
the unschooled majority, and therefore as the premier sign of Africanness
and cultural authenticity.
In the second edition of Arrow of God, published ten years after the
first, Achebe retained the hearth scene but cut the bulk of Ugoye’s story.
The elimination of the digression to another narrative sharpens the con-
trast between hearing a story and reading a page. Olakunle George
judges that Achebe’s novel ‘places orality and literacy in coeval time, and
recasts their relationship as a supple dialectic rather than a determinis-
tic teleology’.4 He follows Eileen Julien in arguing that orality is not the
measure of Africanness and authenticity, and literacy not that of mod-
ernity or alienation, but rather that the two media coexist and establish
distinct but intersecting generic traditions and discursive communities.
Achebe, however, weights the scales in favour of orality because readers of
 Introduction 3
the novel are closer to Ugoye’s 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. Ugoye’s tale, like everything said by the
Igbo characters in Achebe’s English-language novel, appears transparent
and accessible to readers. The words that Oduche contemplates, how-
ever, cannot be translated because they are random and without context,
intended not to convey meaning but to teach the letters of the �alphabet.
Although Achebe’s 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 Ugoye’s, Achebe insists on the con-
tinuity between his own writing and oral story-telling. The writer’s 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 Léopold
Sédar Senghor’s poems indicate that they are to be accompanied by the
kora or the balafong, that is, by music. Achebe’s 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 associ-
ated 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 (writ-
ing) defined as non-African. Mamoussé Diagne’s magisterial Critique
4 Introduction

Figure 1╇ The logo of the Clairafrique chain of bookstores in Senegal. Clairafrique
is dedicated to the diffusion of African literature through its stores, its
programmes, and its publishing arm.
 Introduction 5
de la raison orale, a scrupulous and authoritative investigation into trad-
itional 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 con-
ditions 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 Diagne’s head against a wall of bookshelves
stocked with books of uniform height and varied colours. This is a fit-
ting self-representation for the Senegalese scholar whose weighty tome is
a model of literary erudition with footnotes on every page and a compre-
hensive 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 imperfec-
tions€– was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans
acting on God’s behalf delivered them’.5 There is an implied gulf between
the Igbo characters in Arrow of God, who have no need to learn that les-
son, 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:€Achebe’s writing is intended to remind Africans of what their train-
ing 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 Achebe’s readers can understand Ugoye’s story as they can-
not understand the words in Oduche’s primer, we are nonetheless aligned
with Oduche’s 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 mov-
ing across the marks on a white surface held to the light. Furthermore,
6 Introduction
although none of the people of Umuaro can read the English-language
novel in which they appear, Oduche, we assume, will one day be able to
join us, the circle of readers, and read as he is now being read. Achebe’s
Nigerian readers, even today, are likely to have read books in circum-
stances similar to Oduche’s. While he is seated on the floor, contempor-
ary Nigerian readers are more likely sitting in chairs or perhaps on steps,
but they, too, will have had to find a private retreat in the midst of family
and, even where there is electricity, will know what it is to read by the
flicker of candlelight. They will know books intimately, as tactile objects
whose covers fade in sunlight, whose pages yellow and curl with humid-
ity and can be tunnelled into by insects, and whose corners become soft
like cloth. They may also know them as treasures that fit easily in the
hand and whose machine-produced lines of type, numbered pages, and
conventions of illustration bear testimony to the often distant city where
they were produced.
Although it has not received as much critical attention as orality, lit-
eracy is as prominent a theme in African literature and for good rea-
son:€postcolonial novels are all written texts. African authors share with
all writers a deep personal experience of the materials and conditions of
writing. Scholars, novelists, poets, and journalists all know writing as an
activity involving the body, requiring light and silence, and, in the case of
typewriters, making noise. They also know reading and writing as men-
tal activities, promoting forms of concentration that can be described as
either alertness or distraction and reverie. African writers have seen their
names and photos on books that travel the world independent of their
creators. These experiences cannot but leave a mark on the texts that they
write.
The importance of literacy in Africa as a subject of study has recently
been recognized by historians and cultural anthropologists. Stephanie
Newell has studied the place of English-language literacy in Ghanaian
popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century, and Derek
Peterson the genres of Gikuyu literacy in Kenya during the same period.
Both Newell and Peterson figure among the scholars that Karin Barber
brought together in a collection of research on ordinary literacy among
Africans under colonial rule. Wendy Griswold has studied the reading
habits of contemporary Nigerians, and Robert Fraser has written a post-
colonial book history, tracing the development of the market for books
and other printed material in Africa and India.6 Literacy as a theme in
African literature, however, in contrast to orality as a theme, has not yet
received critical attention.
 Introduction 7
Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy traces the history of
the spread of literacy in Africa and the West Indies in the twentieth cen-
tury by using historical novels as case studies. I examine first Arrow of
God, set in 1922, and Wole Soyinka’s novel Ìsarà, set in the late thirties
and early forties, which recreates the experience of the author’s father’s
generation, that of the first West African readers sufficiently numerous to
constitute a class of their own.
The same tension between orality and literacy exists in the literature
of the Caribbean, where the bulk of the population is descended from
African slaves. Slaves were prohibited from learning to read, and mission
schools were set up in the English-speaking West Indies in the nineteenth
century, not much earlier than in West Africa. Throughout most of West
Indian history, only a small elite was ever literate, and the vast bulk of
the verbal culture of the Afro-Caribbean was and is oral in expression.
Because oral memory preserved tales, proverbs, and figures of speech
from Africa, and because the tongues of the colonized preserved the
sounds of the languages of Africa even as they spoke English, French, or
Spanish words, oral culture has commonly been regarded as the reposi-
tory of Afro-Caribbean cultural authenticity. Certainly, the scene of the
elder telling stories to children is as regular a feature of West Indian lit-
erature as it is of African literature.
Indeed, in Caribbean literature, the divide between literacy and orality
can seem even wider than it does in African literature. Because, in the
West Indies, the oral and the written involve the same language, their
mutual imbrication is more obvious, as are their divergent implications
for class and relations to the imperial metropole. The Indo-Trinidadian
novelist V. S. Naipaul, uncomfortable with orality’s association with
Afro-Caribbean culture, attributes an absolute value to the act of writing
and to the historicizing consciousness that he believes it promotes. His
novel A House for Mr Biswas, the earliest of the novels studied here, like
Soyinka’s Ìsarà, is a novel about the author’s father and his growing con-
sciousness of being surrounded by words printed on paper. Alone among
his generation, Mr Biswas measures himself by what he learns of other
worlds from books and newspapers. The result is both a painful, even
debilitating, existential despair and a deeper awareness of the capacity of
writing to record and so to counter that despair. That awareness consti-
tutes Mr Biswas’s legacy to his son.
No African (and perhaps no European) writer would go as far as
Naipaul in finding redemption in writing, but neither would any be
prepared to follow the Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber in attributing
8 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 lit-
eracy as a potential spiritual disaster averted by the spirit guardians of the
community’s 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, recreat-
ing 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 dec-
ades 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 lit-
erary 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 illiter-
acy, 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 mod-
ernity and nationhood that the first colonial readers associated with liter-
acy 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 9
totalitarian racist state, the connotations of reading and writing are more
bitter than anything encountered in West Africa. In Zimbabwean litera-
ture there is less optimism about literacy than in Soyinka but also less
emphasis on continuity with oral tradition, because of the peculiar dan-
gers 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 literacy’s great capacity
for violence without upholding orality as an alternative value. Marechera’s
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 bit-
ter 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 Diop’s 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? Danticat’s novel resurrects the 1930s and the
victims of the great massacre of Haitian cane workers in the neighbour-
ing 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,
Soyinka’s 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 inde-
pendent. In a later time of disillusionment, not just with decolonization
but also with the power of literature, the next generation’s relationship to
writing is more fraught with irony and even despair than their predeces-
sors’. The publishing careers of Brodber, Marechera, and Diop have been
more irregular than Achebe, Soyinka, or Naipaul’s€– Brodber and Diop
were late starting to write fiction and Marechera died of AIDS at the age
10 Introduction
of 35€ – and their novels conform less to the expectations of genre. My
study concludes with Danticat, who represents at once a hope for and the
limits of postcolonial writing. Danticat was not even born when Achebe
published Arrow of God. Her migration to the USA as a child has meant
that her relation to the world of publishing and to the market of readers
of fiction is a happier one than Marechera or Diop enjoy, but, writing
in English about Haiti, she also lives farther from the people she writes
about than do any of the other writers in my study.
The story I tell here of the coming of literacy, a narrative of early excite-
ment, later compromise, and final ambivalence, is a corrective to the nar-
rative that has dominated previous scholarship, a story that too absolutely
identifies Europe with the book, and Africa and Africans with orality.
The story of literacy in Africa and the West Indies is not simply a story
of a foreign cultural medium deforming the oral essence of the people’s
spirit. But neither is it the story of how the coming of print brought with
it democracy and modernity, a triumphant story frequently (and often
misleadingly) told about Europe and America. While many writers have
insisted on the continuities their writing maintains with oral tradition,
just as many (and sometimes the same writers) have insisted that the cul-
tural dynamics now associated with literacy have always been present in
some form. As represented in literary fiction at least, the experience of
Africans and the African diaspora with writing on paper does not con-
stitute a single narrative, whether of progress or of cultural loss. The
experience of literacy differed widely from place to place and from one
generation to the next, and its depiction in literature involves a host of
perhaps surprising elements such as spirit possession, houses and prisons
of printed paper, and the resurrection of the dead. Although one can beat
out a rhythm on a book, books do not make the best drums, and African
and West Indian novelists are more likely to compare books to masks,
boxes, roads, trains, and watery surfaces.

T h e l i t e r ac y t h e s i s (a n d t h e or a l i t y t h e s i s)
The beginner’s vocabulary that Oduche mouths draws attention to pho-
nemes and words. In the next chapter I shall say more about phonemes
and words themselves as inventions of writing. For now, suffice it to say
that, in the page Oduche is reading, there is no referent beyond liter-
acy itself to comprehend. Of course, literacy is a large referent. With his
characteristic hyperbole, the theoretician of communication Marshall
McLuhan wrote, ‘By the meaningless sign linked to the meaningless
 The literacy thesis (and the orality thesis) 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 subject’s rela-
tion to the world. When we consider Oduche mouthing the words in
his primer, however, we can turn McLuhan’s 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 male’s participation in the modern
world introduced by the colonizers.
In McLuhan’s 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 writ-
ing? 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 cul-
ture that does not involve both oral and written traditions’,11 no society
that does not communicate with speech, and almost certainly no soci-
ety without graphic marks used for communication. Alphabetic writ-
ing, 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 learner’s
mother tongue. When the language of writing, whether English, French,
Arabic, or a standardized African language, is distinct from the learner’s
12 Introduction
speech, as so often in Africa, learning to read a language may precede
speaking it.)
The succession of two events invites a narrative, and the narrative most
commonly associated with the phonetic alphabet is one of loss:€writing is
assumed to be a step further from thought or from meaning than speech
is, and the development of literacy a fall from organic oneness with the
world. A parallel narrative of progress celebrates the phonetic alphabet as
a technology that improves the human capacity to communicate and store
knowledge. Europeans have tended to see themselves as uniquely literate
and therefore more advanced than others:€Barbara Johnson explains that
‘The hidden but ineradicable importance of writing that Derrida uncov-
ers in his readings of logocentric texts in fact reflects an unacknowledged,
or “repressed”, graphocentrism.’13 The two narratives of loss and of pro-
gress appear to pull in opposite directions, but both are linear and unidir-
ectional. They are also related to each other:€Ruth Finnegan refers to
that romantic but at the same time guilt-ridden projection onto others of our
own wishes and nostalgias, apparently so typical of recent Western culture. In
this the opposite to our own, supposedly utilitarian, print-dominated, mechan-
istic, rationalising, industrial form of life is pictured as being found in that lost
Eden dwelt in by those others in the past or far away from us.14

Starting in the 1960s, McLuhan, Jack Goody, Ian Watt, Walter Ong,
and Eric Havelock, from disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, anthro-
pology, classics, and media studies, independently and together developed
the thesis that the medium of communication shapes culture and con-
sciousness. What has come to be known as the ‘literacy hypothesis’, ‘the
autonomous model of literacy’,15 or ‘strong-text literacy’16 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, secular-
ism, 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.
 The literacy thesis (and the orality thesis) 13
The power of the thesis is attributable to its combination of simplicity
and extendibility. The thesis starts with familiar experience:€some forms
of knowledge management, for instance, the list, the table, the formula,
and the flow chart, but also the newspaper, the novel, and the diction-
ary, are unimaginable without writing. From that simple observation,
the hypothesis goes on to explain something much in need of explan-
ation:€why Europe? What gave Europe its capacity to conquer such large
tracts of the world? It is tempting to imagine that European military
might and technological prowess were the result of new and powerful
ways of thinking about the world and themselves and others. Tzvetan
Todorov, for instance, has argued that Europeans were more aware of
differences in systems of thought and so could understand and exploit
the thinking processes of others better than those others could imagine
how Europeans thought.18 McLuhan, Goody, and Ong suggest that this
powerful understanding was the product of literacy.19
Too much explanatory power, however, comes dangerously close to the
power it seeks to explain. To explain is to risk justifying. Brian Street and
Michael Warner have made the case that the literacy thesis of Goody and
Ong merely recreates the power divide between Europe and the rest of
the world in ideological terms, thereby making the injustices of history
seem inevitable.20 The European empires that carved up first the Americas
and later Asia and Africa regarded the roman alphabet as the pinnacle of
writing and the cornerstone of civilization, and saw other peoples, par-
ticularly in Africa and the Americas, as without writing and therefore
without ‘history’, meaning both a written record of the past and a par-
ticular form of consciousness of time, secular and linear, that the posses-
sion of a written record inspires. According to colonial ideology, peoples
defined as without history were bound, first, to be ruled by the peoples
who made history and, later, to embark on the same historical path forged
by the history-makers.
Street, Ruth Finnegan, and others have argued that every society is
capable of logic, abstraction, and self-consciousness (the qualities that lit-
eracy supposedly instils) and that to maintain the opposite is to reinstate
the hierarchy of difference that colonialism originally created in the name
of civilization and culture. The distinction between orality and literacy
presumes the separation of two things that cannot be separated. The dis-
tinction is therefore entirely ideological:€its meaning is projected onto it
and is not inherent in it. The literacy thesis argues, from the point of view
of literate westerners who share in hegemonic power, that literacy changes
people and brings into being modern individuals. The result, as Warner
14 Introduction
argues, is that ‘enlightenment and democratization, instead of being seen
as politically contested aspects of social organization, now appear as the
exfoliation of material technology’.21 Everything attributed to print liter-
acy becomes inevitable as the result of impersonal forces beyond ethics or
politics. Warner critiques the notion that technology is independent of
human consciousness and symbolic action:
The assumption that technology is prior to culture results in a kind of retrode-
termination whereby the political history of a technology is converted into the
unfolding nature of that technology. Everything that has been ascribed to the
agency of printing€– from formal characteristics such as abstraction, uniformity,
and visualization to broad social changes such as rationalization and democra-
tization€– has been retrodetermined in this way. What have historically become
the characteristics of printing have been projected backward as its natural, essen-
tial logic.22
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 writing’23 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 bin-
ary 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 posthuman-
ists 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 oral-
ity and literacy is alive and well in Africa, as is opposition to the bin-
ary. 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
 The literacy thesis (and the orality thesis) 15
arguing that African philosophy exists not in oral traditions (which, he
argues, are the repositories of wisdom, not philosophy), but in the ana-
lytical texts that Africans have written, including those they have written
about the oral tradition. Although it is possible ‘to recuperate snippets
of philosophy from our oral literature’, says Hountondji, ‘we must know
that, when it comes to true philosophy, everything begins at the moment
of inscription, the moment when the memory, having shed the knowledge
that burdened it and whose safekeeping is now conferred to papyrus, is
free for the critical task that alone inaugurates, in the only conceivable
sense of the word, proper philosophy’.27
Not all African scholars reason as Hountondji does. Mamoussé
Diagne agrees that philosophy only arises when there is writing and that
African verbal culture, predominantly oral, is therefore comparable to the
thought of the Presocratics and the sophists and different from that of
Plato.28 But, says Diagne, philosophy is not the only thing worth study-
ing, and Africans should study the logic of orality. François Dossou con-
cedes that knowing how to write equips a person to deal with the forms
of knowledge that have been created by literates, such as algebra, but he
disputes whether the thinking processes of literates and non-literates are
by nature different. He accuses Hountondji of conferring ‘juju status’ on
the alphabet.29
Others who dispute the great divide espoused by the literacy thesis have
also questioned the link between Africa and orality. Simon Battestini
argues that Africa has always had systems of graphic inscription:€‘Research
in Africa has proven, and continues to prove, that all Africans made use
of what the Western world calls “writing”, as well as a number of other
systems for recording memory and messages.’30 Battestini is inspired by
the work of the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop, who encouraged
Africanists to locate Egyptian civilization firmly in Africa. Egyptian hier-
oglyphics are the source of alphabetic writing everywhere, and there are
African novelists, Ayi Kwei Armah for instance, who have laid claim to
this tradition. Battestini also emphasizes the role played by Arabic in the
Sahel and the East African coast, the systems of writing such as Nsibidi
and the Vai syllabary, invented in West Africa, and the many other kinds
of graphic marks on textiles, bodies, and walls used for communication
in Africa.
Battestini’s case for African literacy, however, raises as many problems
as the argument he seeks to counter, that Africans are quintessentially
oral. He assumes that, since Arabic came from North Africa and not
from Europe, its presence in Nigeria, say, is more legitimate than that
16 Introduction
of the roman alphabet. More significantly, Battestini also risks conced-
ing 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 humankind’s 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 contrast-
ing 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 deter-
mine behaviour and identity in predictable ways. I also assume that what-
ever 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
 Literacy and literature 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, Aïssatou Mbodj-
Pouye found Goody’s 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 isola-
tion. Street, Warner, and Niko Besnier, who all analyse particular histor-
ical 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 literacy–orality systems that
must be compared to other literacy–orality 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 literacy–orality 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 let-
ter 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 pol-
itical 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 writ-
ing and speech in order to make a distinction between ordinary con-
versations, 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 Tuman’s 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 particu-
larly 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 dis-
course 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
 Literacy and literature 19
language and so made available for contemplation and discussion. The
process of demarcating texts she calls ‘entextualization’.41 Texts have a
metacultural component to them, a self-conscious relation to the verbal
culture they emerge from, as well as to the generic and textual tradition
they deploy. Texts always raise the question of their own nature, includ-
ing their relation to audience, to a tradition they inherit but also redefine,
and to the means of their production.
Barber’s notion of entextualization makes it possible to say that Africa
has always had ‘text’, that it has always known ‘literacy’ in Tuman’s sense.
When novelists such as Achebe or Diop insist on their continuity with
precolonial and contemporary orality, they do not have in mind speech
in the sense of ordinary conversation but rather oral text in the sense of
heightened discourse such as proverb, story, and poem.
The concept of autonomous text and its paper-based connotations are
especially important for understanding what writing on paper has meant
to African novelists. Certainly the aspect of literacy that has registered
most deeply with African and West Indian writers, even more than its
provenance, is its nature as mediation. Writing on paper involves objecti-
fying thought in a fixed form that can be shared with strangers in the
absence of the writer. The objectification of thought in text makes distant
worlds and alternative worlds available for contemplation, a broadening
of horizons that, as we shall see in the chapters on Soyinka and Naipaul,
inspired the first colonial readers to reimagine themselves and their world.
As textual mediation provided access to other worlds, however, the dis-
tance between the reader and language also opened a gap between the
reader and the world of his or her immediate experience. The gap that
Naipaul celebrates for making possible a new historicizing consciousness
of the way the world had been made by human action is lamented by
Brodber for the alienation it creates in readers.
Entextualized discourse cannot be detached from a community of
people who create meaning by communicating with each other. Writing
is not, as Ong and Goody might have it, ‘a rather self-fueled force that
ruptures from the world of things and settings, reorganizes experi-
ence, and then gives it back to people, transformed beyond any original
reckoning’.42 Instead, as Deborah Brandt argues, ‘Writers and readers in
action are deeply embedded in an immediate working context of aims,
plans, trials, and constructions (which themselves are tied to circumstan-
tial and cultural contexts of all sorts).’43 While Barber argues that orality
and literacy can both produce autonomous text, Brandt reminds us that
writing, no less than speech, produces a community that shares meaning.
20 Introduction
Novels are useful for studying literacy because ‘Texts are not merely out-
comes of reading and writing processes; they are deeply about those proc-
esses. 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 there-
fore 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 iden-
tifying 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 pres-
tige. 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
 Literacy and literature 21
literacy, it is important to study how literacy has been imagined by the
literary imagination.
Studying the meanings attributed to written texts and to the acts of
reading and writing as depicted in those texts will teach us about local lit-
eracies in Africa and the Caribbean. I also believe that what African and
West Indian writers have to say about literacy will tell us about the nature
of language, modernity, reading, and writing. That is, it will tell us some-
thing about the activity that I and the readers of this book, whoever and
wherever, are engaged in now.
 Ch apter 2

The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God

by Chinua Achebe

Achebe’s Arrow of God is an extended meditation on what it means to

write in Africa. The hearth scene in which Oduche reads while his mother
tells a story radiates outward so that we find images of literacy everywhere
in the novel, even where it does not appear on the level of the story. In
particular, the experience of reading and writing informs three different
narrative spaces integral to the novel:€the container so confining as to be
suffocating, the straight line that cleaves through the natural world, and
the small room with a single occupant receptive to a disembodied voice
but disturbed by the voices of people outside.

L i t e r ac y, t h e h e a r t h, a n d t h e wor l d
The domestic hearth in Ugoye’s hut is a space apart from the masculine
adult world of political and religious conflict that is the main focus of the
novel. It can be usefully compared to the hearth scenes in European and
American literature discussed by Sarah Robbins and Friedrich Kittler, in
which parents read to or are read to by children. The western ideal, dating
from the Middle Ages, is ‘of the mother teaching her little boy to read’.1
As Garrett Stewart notes, ‘a written text inspiring an oral intimacy is …
the Dickensian family scene par excellence’.2 And, according to Robbins,
the conjunction of adult, children, fireside, and chores was emblematic of
domestic-based literacy in nineteenth-century America.3
Literacy everywhere, because it is learned after speech, seems a step
away from childhood and from the mother. However, in order to make
that transition seem natural, nineteenth-century German pedagogy
urged mothers to teach sons to read by having them follow the mothers’
fingers on the page and repeat the sounds. The intention was that, ‘when
later in life children picked up a book, they would not see letters but
hear, with irrepressible longing, a voice between the lines’.4 The ‘Mother’s
Mouth’ would reinforce the alphabet, thus freeing ‘children from books’
22
 Literacy, the hearth, and the world 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 Hazzledine’s The White Man in Nigeria, a 1904 imperi-
alist text quoted several times without attribution in Arrow of God, imag-
ined 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 boy-
hood, 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 Diop’s childhood experience
of stories was gendered much as Kittler says the German child’s 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 mother’s voice echoes in the
minds of her adult children not when the latter read books but when-
ever 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 ũg ĩ wa Thiong’o’s childhood memoir, Dreams in a Time of War,
which features a frontispiece photograph of his mother, concludes with
the young Ng ũg ĩ, like so many protagonists of African autobiograph-
ies 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 mother’s voice speaking to him, but he does
not imagine her reading the English words but asking him if this is the
24 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
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 ũg ĩ
attributes his ability to read and his desire to write to his mother’s ambi-
tions:€‘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 moth-
ers. Sembène Ousmane’s 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
protagonist’s 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 consist-
ently measures its distance from the mother and its capacity to incorpor-
ate her in a medium from which she is excluded.
In the hearth scene in Arrow of God Oduche’s isolation, his monop-
oly of the light of the taper, and his recitation of mysterious words make
manifest to his family his privileged access to private sources of know-
ledge and authority. The marks that the young African is learning to
decode, because he can decode them, set him apart, and they carry mean-
ing even if they signify nothing. Diop says every African adolescent learns
‘that there is a relation of cause to effect between an individual’s 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 defin-
ition 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:
 Literacy, the hearth, and the world 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
Diop concludes, ‘access to writing was necessarily accompanied by a
renunciation of our own culture’; writing is a kind of ‘treason’.19
Oduche’s new literacy is inseparable from the presence of Christian
missionaries who established an Igbo orthography, published the primer
he reads, and set up the school that he attends. The word for ‘Christians’
in many African languages (though not in Igbo) is the same as the word
for ‘readers’:20 Christians are the People of the Book. The Bible, the Book
par excellence, was imagined to speak for itself to those engaged in ‘the
daily and solitary confrontation with the Truth that reading brought to
the heart of man, in the secret wrestling of conversion’.21 Isabel Hofmeyr
notes, ‘In evangelical thinking, documents have an astonishing capacity to
“seize” and “capture” readers and bring about radical transformations and
conversions in them’:€‘Little wonder then that the Bible€– and sometimes
books more generally€– were referred to as the “white man’s fetish”.’22
In much of early-twentieth-century Africa, literacy and the school sys-
tem used to inculcate it represented a new form of discipline intended to
shape modern Christian subjects. The missionaries believed in the effi-
cacy of the Bible, but they also thought books in general and the practice
of reading would effect a civilizing transformation of primitive people.
Karin Barber writes,
Printed texts were agents of proselytisation which could go further and last
longer than the spoken word of the preacher. Solitary reading was held to foster
an introspective disposition and an individual spirituality based on conscience
and private communication with God, central to Protestant theology. The read-
ing habit was in itself held to be conducive to civilisation, and the development of
a local literature was a sign that a culture was maturing and flowering. Through
reading and writing, the missionaries fostered a new community, based not on
kinship or indigenous hierarchies but on co-operation in a discursive sphere.23
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 Oduche’s primer are fixed, detached from all context, and
organized in columns. So, too, school removed students from their homes
26 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
and placed them ‘at individual desks facing the flat surfaces of chalk-
boards and texts of instruction and individual assessment’.24 The neat col-
umn of interchangeable, essentially meaningless units that Oduche reads
imitates the rows of the pupils. As part of the new methods of discip-
line intended to establish a new kind of individual and new social rela-
tions 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 Achebe’s earlier
novel No Longer at Ease, the people of Umuofia regard the study over-
seas 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 ũg ĩ’s mother used to tell him that ‘Knowledge’, mean-
ing 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 Kamandũra
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 people’s
intelligence!’↜31 Even as the eponymous hero is dying, he has a dream in
which he tells students, ‘you don’t have the right to leave the smallest
corner of your intelligence in darkness. Unite and build schools every-
where:€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 N’ko, a Muslim
Afrocentric project designed by Souleymane Kanté in 1949 to accommo-
date the Malinké 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
 The python in a box 27
seems conducive to unfettered conversation.’35 African readers often viv-
idly recall the light they read by. ‘Nighttime frustrates me because I read
by the light of an unreliable and coverless kerosene lantern’, says Ng ũg ĩ: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
Sassine’s 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 let-
ters 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-Bart’s novel Pluie et vent sur
Télumée 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 ‘liv-
ing torch’.41 Assia Djebar, the Algerian writer, describes the French lan-
guage 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 Diop’s harmat-
tan. A wind often blows through the rooms of readers in African litera-
ture, extinguishing lamps, rifling through pages, and strewing papers on
the floor. In Sassine’s 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 village’s cries and moans of pain, leafs through a book called
Médecine 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 Akwukwọ Ogugu nke Izizi (First Reading Book), an Igbo pri-
mer written by the Reverend T. J. Dennis, published by the Society for
28 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
Promoting Christian Knowledge, and bound in a single volume with
Akwukwọ Ogugu nke Ibọa (Second Reading Book). Akwukwọ (the spell-
ing varies) means ‘leaf’ but, as with the English word ‘leaf’ or the French
‘feuille’, has come to be associated with ‘paper’, and so by extension with
books, school, and education. A student is a nwakwukwọ, literally ‘a
child of a book’. Dennis’s primer was called Azu Ndu because those were
the first words to appear as an intelligible pair in the first nkuzi or les-
son. Robert Wren says Azu Ndu means Live Fish or Fresh Fish.45 After
sounding out a series of near random words€– ‘nye, bia, nni’€– the first
readers might have been excited to come across two words that supplied
each other with enough context to be understood:€the ‘fresh fish’, identi-
fied even though not present, would have succeeded in communicating.
Once the book had acquired its popular title, however, the name may
always have seemed ironic:€how can the printed word be said to be ‘live’
or ‘fresh’?
Azu Ndu is not the first new and strange object that Oduche brings
home. The boy had earlier occasioned a scandal when he put a python,
sacred to the god Idemili, in a wooden box. The box, made for Oduche
by Moses Unachukwu, a ‘lay reader’ in the new church and the clan’s
only carpenter (47), is as foreign as the ‘new book’ (191). ‘Only people of
the church had such boxes’, and Oduche’s is ‘the only one of its kind’ in
his father’s compound (43). As a new Christian challenged to take a stand
against heathenism, Oduche decides to kill a python by stuffing its living
coils into a box where he hopes it will ‘die for lack of air’ (50).
The image of the box in which the python refused to die may have
been suggested to Achebe by the title Azu Ndu. Oduche’s box, after all,
could be labelled ‘Live Python’. It can be read as an allegorical figure of
‘the domestication of the savage mind’, Jack Goody’s term for the effect
of literacy on consciousness.46 Paul Wearing’s graphic image of the snake
in the box, the round in the square, on the covers of the African Writers
Series editions of Achebe’s novel after 1986, reminds us that the book is
itself an airless rectangular container filled with elements that have never
been contained this way before. Both Oduche’s box and his book confine
wild, sacred, and African elements ‘struggling to be free’ (43).
When Oduche’s unsuspecting family comes across the box convuls-
ing and bumping across the floor, they react with bewilderment. Ezeulu,
the boy’s father, does not want to give the impression he ‘was afraid of
whatever power his son had imprisoned in the box’, and he bravely pries
the box open with a spear (44). He looks down into the crate, and for an
instant, his gaze coincides with that of the novel’s readers, as we, too, look
 The python in a box 29
down at the page, with as little immediate understanding. What he sees
is an ‘abomination’, ‘enough to blind a man’, and his wife prays, ‘If this is
medicine, may it lose its potency’ (44).
In itself the python is familiar and harmless. The fear is that the divin-
ity Idemili will be angered by the disrespect accorded the snake and will
punish the entire clan of Umuaro. At least as much of a danger, however,
is that imprisoning the snake may rob power from Idemili and all the
autochthonous gods. Power does not belong to the box’s contents or to
the box; it is generated by the act of containing.
We can discern in the scene of Ezeulu opening the box a displaced ver-
sion of a familiar colonial trope:€the African who stands dumbfounded
before a mysterious object, most commonly a book or a phonograph,
which speaks to the white man but refuses to speak to him. Henry Louis
Gates calls the scene of the ‘talking book’ the ‘ur-trope’ of the Anglo-
African tradition.47 Homi Bhabha also discusses the common ‘scenario,
played out in the wild and wordless wastes of colonial India, Africa, the
Caribbean, of the sudden, fortuitous discovery of the English book’,
which inspires wonder in the colonized.48
Arrow of God alludes more explicitly to the trope of the magic book
when Ezeulu is summoned before an Assistant District Officer with the
telling name of Clarke (a name derived from ‘cleric’), whom he finds
busy writing:€‘The first thought that came to Ezeulu on seeing him was
to wonder whether any black man could ever achieve the same mastery
over book as to write it with the left hand’ (173).49 The priest judges that
the white officer has little sense:€ ‘But he had power; he could shout in
my face; he could do what he liked. Why? Because he could write with
his left hand’ (189). Ezeulu’s ignorance of the source of Clarke’s power is
mildly comic, but the comedy is close to pathos. The African protagonist
stands uncomprehending before the very object, an official government
record, that we readers understand contains him.
Although Ezeulu does not understand Clarke’s capacity to record,
store, and organize information about him, he has seen writing on paper
before:€ the Court Messenger who summoned him to Government Hill
wrote in a notebook (137), and he has seen the large clerical staff employed
by the colonial administration and has met the Chief Clerk (173). Oduche’s
primer is the first book in Ezeulu’s compound, but books have been in this
part of the world for a while. Azu Ndu itself was first published in 1904,
almost twenty years before the events in Arrow of God. The first Igbo pri-
mer was fifty years before that, in 1857. Furthermore, Oduche’s teachers,
Mr Molokwu and Mr John Goodcountry, are themselves Africans. In
30 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
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 writ-
ing 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 impos-
sible to imagine that he had never seen a marabout reading the Qur’an.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 civiliza-
tion. 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 charac-
ter, his name and his freedom, an image, that is, in which he could recog-
nize 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 peo-
ples well-acquainted with the belief in the marvellous supremacy of alpha-
betic 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 Ayala’s
seventeenth-century account of the conquest of the Incas, for example,
Atahualpa, the Inca chief, finding that the Bible, which he is told con-
tains the word of God, will not speak to him, flings it to the ground in
 The python in a box 31
an act that horrifies the Spanish.56 Guaman Poma, himself a descend-
ant 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. Aluko’s One Man, One Wife refers to the miracle of writing,
which can report what someone else has said.58 In André Brink’s 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 Badian’s Malian
novel Sous l’orage, 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 Hampaté Bâ’s memoir L’Etrange 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.’â•›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
In Arrow of God, we are told that, on important ritual occasions, a woman
may trace ‘black patterns of uli and faint yellow lines of ogalu on her
body’ (66). In the past, the people of Umuaro practised facial scarifica-
tion, called ichi, and they continue to carve similar marks on their doors
(132). And when a man visits another’s home, the guest uses white chalk
to draw ‘his personal emblem of upright and horizontal lines on the floor’
(205), and to paint his toe or face, as a ‘token of goodwill between host
and guest’ (21). Such marks tell viewers where a man has been or which
32 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
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 writ-
ing 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
Clarke’s power comes from the paper he writes on, which is not only con-
venient for organizing information and transportable but, despite appear-
ances, 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 cate-
chists, is still’, says Bhabha, ‘the English book’64) and Towson’s Inquiry
into Some Points of Seamanship, which Marlow, in Joseph Conrad’s 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 writ-
ten about the harm he finds in European portraits of Africa such as Heart
of Darkness and Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson.65
In the final pages of Achebe’s 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 contem-
plates 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 pro-
tagonist will figure as a mere paragraph. Major Arthur Glyn Leonard,
whose The Lower Niger and Its Tribes is Achebe’s 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
 The python in a box 33
Okonkwo, in the District Commissioner’s paragraph, is like the snake
in the box, something African in a container of European origin too
small for it, but Oduche’s new primer is written in Igbo and would not
be considered an English book by anyone but Bhabha. Why then is it
a form of harmful confinement? Françoise Raison-Jourde explains that,
in severing language from its social context and reducing it to writing
and to grammatical principles, the missionary linguists manipulated lan-
guage like a ‘natural object’ that they had removed from a state of nature
and transformed into culture.68 The words that we see Oduche reading
from the book are not simple transcriptions of things spoken but radically
denatured.
The graphic marks read by Oduche (and by readers of the novel) refer
to no referent apart from sound, and even that, given the tonal nature
of Igbo, they do very imperfectly. Without context and without tonal
markings, the letters before the reader could represent any number of
words that an Igbo-speaker would hear not as homonyms but as words
pronounced utterly differently depending on whether the tone of a syl-
lable was high, medium, low, rising, or falling. According to Michael
Echeruo’s Igbo–English Dictionary, iro could mean ‘hatred’, ‘folktale’,
‘compound’, or ‘road’; and aba has even more possibilities:€ ‘metal rod’,
‘bottle’, ‘tree branch’, ‘road junction’, ‘open wound’, ‘season’, or ‘masked
spirit’. Oduche, who has as yet little practice, is reading with as little
comprehension as Achebe’s readers, and that is true even if those read-
ers are also Igbo-speakers! The words of Oduche’s primer refer to noth-
ing but themselves. They serve literacy, instead of literacy serving verbal
communication.
The tones of spoken Igbo are not the only thing that the roman alpha-
bet had trouble indicating. The missionaries who first wrote down Igbo
speech had to adapt letters to represent sounds not found in English. For
instance, they merely ignored a kind of implosive ‘b’ not found in English
and referred to the language itself as Ibo. Later versions of Igbo orthog-
raphy used the combination ‘gb’ to designate the sound. Both spellings
of the name of the language appear in Arrow of God. The narrator speaks
of ‘the Igbo’ (11), the spelling that came to prevalence in the 1960s, but
District Officer Winterbottom in 1922 speaks of ‘Ibos’ (38) and an African
corporal not from Umuaro addresses Ezeulu in ‘Ibo’ (154). Writing, which
has its own semantic needs distinct from speech, also represents things
that are not spoken. Ida Ward, who was responsible for a later orthog-
raphy called Central Ibo, found that a difficult part of the transcriber’s
task was restoring vowels that were necessary for grammatical sense on
34 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
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 Mphahlele’s 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 lan-
guage 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, ọmu’ in Oduche’s primer differ from the Igbo words in
the narration proper, such as obi or chi or onwa atuo! (an untranslated
children’s cry meaning ‘the moon has arisen’ (2)), whose meaning can
be understood from the context. For one thing the words in the pri-
mer are not italicized. For another, no one speaks them. They are more
arbitrary and more meaningless even than the sound ‘G OM E ’, pro-
duced 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 Ezeulu’s ogene as ‘DI N G D O N G ’ or ‘B O N G ’
or ‘G ON G ’. Because roman letters only reproduce phonemes, pro-
duced by the tongue, lips, and larynx, they have as much trouble cap-
turing the sounds of percussion instruments as they have capturing the
tones of Igbo.
In Umuaro the sounds produced by drums are actually meaning-
ful. 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 reprodu-
cing 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 ful-
fils 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 [sound’s] 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 surface’71 and therefore does not
endure in time the way that writing does.
 The python in a box 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 let-
ters 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, Oduche’s reading reverses the operation per-
formed by the missionaries who ‘reduced’ Igbo to writing. The Reverend
Dennis and his collaborators first broke down the language they encoun-
tered in speech into words isolated from syntactical and semantic con-
text, 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 inten-
tion 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
The historical Dennis, however, had a derogatory notion of the Igbo
speaker, who, he wrote,
being a born orator and mimic, depends quite as much upon his extraordin-
ary powers of gesticulation, facial contortion, mimicry, voice modulation, and
of producing imitative sounds, as upon his articulate utterances to make plain
36 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
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’ ‘extraordin-
ary 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 Dennis’s team are
a function of all alphabetic writing everywhere and not just by Europeans
in Africa. Sybille Krämer 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 writ-
ing, however, ‘communication became, for the first time, mere language-
use’:
Phonetic writing … not only transcribes language, but also analyzes and inter-
prets 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
Writing therefore functions as a kind of incarnation of speech in order to
compensate for doing without the body:
On the one hand, phonetic writing erases the mimetic, gestural, and tonal traces
of the human body from language-use; on the other hand, it gives language
pure discursive materiality and corporeality. Through this process, the epistemo-
logical essence of language achieves a scriptural existence anchored in time and
space. Language acquires the status of a thing and/or an object only through
this process.76
The orthographer’s ‘presupposition that the pronunciation of a word or
phrase combines a finite number of discrete elements which are its con-
stituent “sounds”’ is a problem, says Roy Harris:77 ‘To ask “how many
sounds are there in this word?” is to ask a nonsense question (for the same
kind of reason as it is nonsense to ask how many movements it takes
to stand up):€ a continuum can be described and analysed, but it does
not consist of a finitely denumerable concatenation of single elements’.78
According to Robert Scholes and Brenda Willis, ‘phonemes are a com-
ponent of a speaker’s awareness of language only if that person can read
an alphabetic representation of his language’:€‘we know about phonemes
because we know about letters’.79 The notion of a ‘phoneme’ ‘is modeled
 The python in a box 37
on the letters of the alphabet which, in turn, are the results of historical
coincidences rather than systematic analysis’.80
Oduche’s list of Igbo words transcribed into the roman alphabet
reduces all language to the same basic units and all words to the same sta-
tus. 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 lan-
guage 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 net-
work that took hold in Europe in 1900.82 Such arbitrariness teaches ‘the
differentiality that precedes all meaning:€ the naked, elementary exist-
ence 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, dis-
pute 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 lan-
guage, and had strategies for standing back from the immediate scene or
the immediate verbal utterance through their terminology, their philoso-
phy 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).
Dennis’s 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 standard-
ized 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 Yoruba-
speaking missionary Bishop Samuel Crowther, with the assistance of
Igbo speakers J. C. Taylor and Jonas.86 At the time it was suggested that
38 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
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 commu-
nity whom he identified as Igbos even if this meant it corresponded to no
one dialect as actually spoken.
As Krämer 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 language’s 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 one’s own, but with reference to oneself only when speaking to a
European.89
Missionaries, such as Crowther and Dennis, created ‘Ibo’ as a term for
convenience and for analytical purposes, to distinguish the people of
Southeastern Nigeria from their neighbours, but the term was taken up
by the people to whom it had been applied.
In Arrow of God, set a generation after Dennis, in 1922, the people of
Umuaro distinguish between ‘the Igbo people of the forests’ and ‘the riv-
erain folk whom the Igbo called Olu’ (11), on the other side of the Niger
(48). The notion of Igbo remains incipient and vague. The prime level of
identification continues to be the village and the clan, and there is as yet
no sense of the Igbos as one ‘tribe’ among others, such as the Yoruba and
the Hausa. By the time the novel is written, of course, there will be.
All translators face the problem that an unwritten language is always
a family of unwritten dialects. As Coulmas points out, in a family of
dialects ‘it is not always easy to determine the point of reference:€ that
 The python in a box 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 ụjụọobi Nwachukwu, the result was ‘no man’s dialect, but a kind of
Igbo Esperanto based on five different dialects’.92 In effect, the mission-
aries 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 mother’s 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 stand-
ardized written forms of Igbo. He quotes G. T. Basden, a missionary at
the time of Dennis and a friend of Achebe’s 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 dia-
lects 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 ques-
tion 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 Achebe’s uncompromising opposition to a standard Igbo orthog-
raphy, we can understand why he would regard Dennis’s 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 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
and knocks into shape or moulds as it pleases him. Language is sacred, it
is mysterious, it is fearsome. It is living and breathing’, and Dennis did
not respect that.96 Discussing Igbo, Robert Fraser uses a similar image
when he writes of the ‘efforts to squeeze this multifarious regional tongue
into a single mould’.97
The notion that speech is natural and writing is artificial is, of course,
itself ideological. Achebe does not think of the Igbo words in Oduche’s
primer as the boy’s mother tongue and has written more recently, ‘To
take a child’s mother tongue away from him is like taking his mother’s
breast away from him, pulling his mouth from the breast.’98 His rejection
of the compulsory creolization of the language imposed from above by
non-native speakers like Dennis risks, however, fetishizing what Kittler
would call the great voiced signified of ‘the Mother’s Mouth’.99 As Jean-
Loup Amselle writes, the very notion of ‘mother tongue’ acquires its value
as part of a plurilinguistic environment organized hierarchically; it does
not have an absolute value of its own.100

T h e roa d t h roug h t h e j u ng l e
Unlike the missionaries who translate the Bible into African vernaculars
and thereby transform those languages, the colonial administration works
with English. They write an objective and rational language intended to
serve bureaucratic needs and to generate scientific knowledge of the world.
This standardized language permits travel across distances and therefore
acts as a vehicular language. The vehicle that is English travels on the road
that is literacy. Writing is not just a box that contains the jungle, but also
a road that cleaves through it. The British administration in Arrow of God
is cutting an actual road through the rainforest using African labour, and
the name of the man in charge, Mr Wright, punningly associates the road
with literacy.
When books became commonly affordable and accessible in Europe
in the eighteenth century, reading was ‘viewed not as a place, but as a
road’.101 Derrida notes that writing is commonly imagined as ‘the possi-
bility of the road’,102 as the ‘breaking of a path against resistances, rupture
and irruption becoming a route (rupta, via rupta), violent inscription of a
form, tracing of a difference in a nature or a matter which are conceivable
as such only in their opposition to writing’.103 Certainly the British regard
the coming of literacy as the building of a road where there had been no
roads and not even any straight lines.
The new road presumably joins the hinterland to a port and expedites
military movements, but there is not as yet much in the way of trade,
 The road through the jungle 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 Empire’s reli-
ance 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 system’s raison d’ être. 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 prod-
uce 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 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
around him. Clarke is expected to abstract himself in the English-
language 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 fic-
tional namesake is. Achebe’s District Officer is much closer to Arthur
Glyn Leonard, the colonial administrator whose book, as we have men-
tioned, was the model for The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes in Things
Fall Apart. Although more convinced of Africa’s absolute otherness than
were the British explorers and traders of a century before, Leonard pro-
claims on every page how deeply he ‘understood the inner workings of
these people’107 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 Allen’s mem-
oir that we see Clarke reading, is lifted directly from ‘The call for men’,
a section in Hazzledine’s The White Man in Nigeria.108 Achebe clearly
feels that early-twentieth-century British writing about Africa rede-
ploys the same discourse from one book to another. Achebe also puts
Hazzledine’s judgement of French colonial practice directly into his char-
acter Winterbottom’s 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 Winterbottom’s 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 Ezeulu’s son
Obika and his friend Ofoedu travel to join Wright’s 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 Tutuola’s Ajaiyi and His Inherited
Poverty, so attractive and straight that there ‘was no [sic] any human being
 The road through the jungle 43
who might see it would not like to travel on it to the end’.110 One man,
known to Ezeulu as Nwodika’s 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 man’s 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, how-
ever, 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 cre-
ating space waiting to be filled in, like the blank spaces on the world map
that so fascinated Conrad’s 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 Oduche’s box, for the white man ‘does not fight with one
weapon alone’ (85). To Moses’s 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.
Achebe’s 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 underwrit-
ten by the synchronization of clocks. Clarke, who does not want to be too
early to dinner, kills time by reading George Allen’s book. As Georges
44 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
Perec observes, reading in Europe occupies the interstices and the rup-
tures 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 idio-
syncratic 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 Schön 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 self-
improvement’.115 Just as the colonial officer must dress for dinner just ‘to
survive in this demoralizing country’, a custom Clarke finds ‘very irk-
some 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 Allen’s (and Hazzledine’s)
‘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 pre-
pare the boys for the ‘desk’ or the ‘counting-house’ (33), that is, for more
reading; instead, reading should be a preliminary to action. Allen’s (or
Hazzledine’s) manifesto implies that the former colonial officer has writ-
ten 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.
Allen’s 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 (32–3), 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
 The road through the jungle 45
oral rhetoric and its summons to leave the desk, but, in general, Allen’s
rhetoric is ‘much too smug for his taste’ (33). He prefers Wright, the road-
builder, 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 any-
thing 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 Wright’s 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 vil-
lage 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 tell-
ing of stories.117
Umuaro measures the passage of time by new moons, cycles of planting
and harvesting, and annual rituals. The days of the week are reckoned by
the local markets, each held every four days. February in Winterbottom’s
calendar roughly corresponds to what Ezeulu calls the fourth moon after
the Harvest. Winterbottom says the Igbo have ‘no idea of years’ (35),
which is nonsense:€everyone in Umuaro born within a year or two belongs
to a particular age grade with a unique name. But it is true that Umuaro
does not have a universal calendar with an absolute Year One, which
would allow local events to be related to events elsewhere, even to events
as yet unknown.118 Counting years from Year One encourages the notion
of progress:€the years succeed each other like milestones on a road. The
British think of themselves as moving forward and of the Africans they
live among as static until they enter the path forged by the British. The
46 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
universal calendar made possible by literacy also created a new spatialized
sense of time that Benedict Anderson, following Walter Benjamin, calls
‘homogeneous, empty time’.119 Like empty space on a map or free time
marked by the clock, empty calendar time demands to be filled. What
fills it is history.
It is the presence of the British officers that allows us to date the events
in Arrow of God. Because the narrative has access to Winterbottom’s con-
sciousness, we learn that the novel opens in mid February (29). Later
we learn that it is more than two years since 1919 (109). Plotting events
in Umuaro and Okperi against the universal calendar allows readers
to relate them to a larger, already known history that includes the First
World War and the Russian Revolution (180), a history that the British
officers and Achebe’s readers know but that the people of Umuaro do not.
Of course, because the novel was published forty years after the events it
depicts, it also invites us to relate events in Umuaro to Nigeria’s decolon-
ization. Nicholas Brown reads the events in Umuaro as serving the ends
of ‘History itself’.120
The synchronization of watches highlights the narrative’s capacity to
move from Winterbottom’s consciousness to that of Clarke€– we under-
stand that the two men in different places occupy the same time. If the
narration in Arrow of God is able to shift freely not just from one British
officer to the other but also from Ezeulu’s consciousness to Winterbottom’s
with no more than a paragraph break between them, it is because the
British and the African characters are ‘co-evals’, Johannes Fabian’s term
meaning that they occupy the same moment.121 Achebe’s novel partakes
in the realist assumption that any two people existing at the same time
within a few kilometres of each other can be related to each other. From
that relation of coevalness, readers are entitled to go further and read the
novel as Brown does, as a ‘snapshot of the totality’ that contains both
Umuaro and the British.122 Indeed, we cannot but fit Ezeulu into a larger
narrative that, as readers, we already know.
We who read about Ezeulu in a book, like Achebe who sat down before
a blank page and began to write, know more than the priest does; we
know what will happen to village worlds like Umuaro. Our access to
all the characters, British and Igbo, puts us in the position of gods. And
Ezeulu is eager to read what we readers know. On the first page, the priest
sits alone at the ‘threshold’ of his obi, scanning the sky for the new moon.
He peers up, through a special entrance cut in the roof, to ‘where the
moon had its door’ (1). His intent upward gaze is the first thing that meets
the readers’ downward gaze. Each time a reader opens Achebe’s book and
 Voices heard in closed rooms 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 reader’s 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 lan-
guage 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 government’s postal sys-
tem 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 King’s 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 government’s rhetoric
of ‘law and order and the King’s 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 Reuter’s [sic] telegrams’ (32). We see Clarke reading a book,
Wright reading a letter, and Winterbottom reading an official memoran-
dum 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 mat-
ter 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 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
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 com-
muning 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 Oduche’s box, is not fully sealed and cannot
be. Through the window comes what Diop would call ‘the fraternal
rumour of the world’129 in the form of a prisoners’ work song, distract-
ing the District Officer from the concentration required for reading.
As in the hearth scene, there is an explicit contrast between the self-
imposed 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 lit-
eracy, 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 trad-
itional Igbo architecture. They were found on colonial administration
buildings and in mission schoolrooms, where they fulfilled the coloniz-
ers’ plans for cleanliness and hygiene.130 In European literature, thresholds
and casements figure the imagined vistas that reading opens up. Garrett
Stewart follows Erich Schön in considering these vistas the compensa-
tion 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
 Voices heard in closed rooms 49
sounds interrupt reading, and Winterbottom shouts through the window
at the workers to be quiet. Reading demands concentration and requires
blocking out the immediate context. The District Officer represents a
milder version of the chief accountant in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
whom Marlow encounters keeping books in his office in the jungle,
‘barred from neck to heels with narrow strips of sunlight’. When a ‘vio-
lent babble of uncouth sounds burst out on the other side of the planks’,
the accountant observes, ‘When one has got to make correct entries, one
comes to hate those savages€– hate them to the death.’132
The written page that Winterbottom reads proclaims the singleness
and autonomy of its message€– it carries no background noise, no extra
marks, only its message. This is in contrast to the view through the win-
dow, which always includes in its frame elements that are not the focus
of attention. Hearing is even more indiscriminate:€noise is always present
in the form of wind, the talk of strangers, birdsong, insects, or, as in this
case, the voices of others. Unlike the written page, traditional oral stories
have the potential to incorporate background noises, whose distinction
from the story-telling performance is never absolute. As Finnegan notes
of Limba stories:
I almost never recorded a story without some ‘extraneous’ noise of interrup-
tions€– the crying of a baby, goats bleating, rain hammering down and drown-
ing bits of the tape, someone coming past and greeting€– should all that appear?
Maybe not€– but it was part of the real situation of the oral narration, and surely
one element if we want to consider performance and context.133

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 Ugoye’s 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 coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
When I cut grass and you cut
What’s your right to call me names? (55)
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 inhab-
its an abstract airless realm. Of course, the act of reading involves the
whole body as intimately as cutting grass does and imprints upon it cer-
tain postures and attitudes. In this case, however, the reader’s relation to
the body is distinctly uncomfortable. Winterbottom’s 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-Governor’s 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 devel-
oping 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 … (55–6)

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 Cameron’s 1934 memorandum The Principles of Native
Administration and Their Application.136 The effect of removing the sen-
tences from their context is to satirize them. Readers of Arrow of God
will know to scorn the officiousness of the memorandum’s talk of ‘mod-
ern 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 prin-
ciples to be adhered to by all colonial officers. His Majesty’s Government
 Voices heard in closed rooms 51
has an opinion, and it is single and absolute. The memorandum eschews
the emotional in favour of the rational, itself a form of rhetorical appeal.
Michael Warner explains how, in modern democratic ideology, the ano-
nymity fostered by print literacy promises ‘direct access to the object-
ive, impartial, disinterested voice of political reason, a fantasy fed by the
printed text’s evacuation of its own relationship to human production’.137
Disinterestedness is a virtue the memorandum espouses. It exhorts its
readers, colonial administrators, to apply a decontextualized abstract
principle to every context.
The power of the written text is its participation in the realm of pure
reason, and it appears to derive this power from its indifference to the
persons of those who read it. It is addressed to anyone who occupies a
similar institutional position, or ‘to whom it may concern’. It speaks to
the position and to the institution rather than to the individual. In con-
trast to the pidgin of the prisoners’ song, the Lieutenant-Governor’s offi-
cial memorandum appears to inhabit ‘the pure language of writing’,138 a
language coded as white. The memorandum, however, is not above the
subjective realm:€ it represents the white community to itself, especially
when the subject of the writing is the best way to administer black sub-
jects. Even as Achebe renders the Igbo spoken in Umuaro in a Standard
English that can travel easily, he reduces the would-be abstract and uni-
versal English of the administration to a particular kind of local. Warner,
writing about eighteenth-century America, notes that ‘Just as the white
community would not have been the same community without its oppos-
ition to other groups and its constitution through writing and printing,
so also written media would not have entailed the same dispositions of
character€– and would not have had the same identity€– had participation
in them not entailed membership in that community.’139
Winterbottom himself, however, is frustrated by the combination of
impersonal policy and personal directive in the Lieutenant-Governor’s
memorandum. He feels that it is mere ‘Words, words, words’; ‘Civilization,
African mind, African atmosphere’ all strike him as worthless abstractions
(56). He echoes the judgement of Charles Temple, a Lieutenant-Governor
of Northern Nigeria, who regretted all the ‘writing, writing, writing’ pro-
duced by the British colonial administration. Temple uses a description of
Philip II of Spain to characterize the typical imperial bureaucrat:
He hated to converse, but he could write a letter eighteen pages long, when his
correspondent was in the next room, and when the subject was, perhaps, one
which a man of talent could have settled with six words of his tongue … He was
slow in deciding, slower in communicating his decisions. He was prolix with his
52 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
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
Winterbottom concludes that ‘The great tragedy of British colonial
administration was that the man on the spot who knew his African and
knew what he was talking about found himself being constantly overruled
by starry-eyed fellows at headquarters’ (56). Sir Donald Cameron him-
self, the author of Achebe’s model for the memorandum, criticized Lord
Lugard, the Governor commonly associated with the notion of Indirect
Rule, along similar lines:€for ‘administering from an office in comparative
seclusion, with but little contact with the outside world and that little of
one’s own seeking’.141
Outside his office, Winterbottom represents the Law, and the prison-
ers forced to cut grass are made aware of the Law’s violence. The policy
memorandum from the Lieutenant-Governor reminds Winterbottom,
however, that he is himself subject to the Law and must carry out a
policy of which he disapproves. The impersonal memorandum fills
Winterbottom with an irritation against the ‘bloody man’ who wrote it
(56), an irritation inseparable from the resentment he feels at having been
passed over for promotion in the past (‘if this minute had been written
by any other person Captain Winterbottom would not have minded so
much; but Watkinson had been his junior by three years and had been
promoted over him’ (54)) and at having lost his wife to yet another man.
Further, Winterbottom does not believe in the impartiality of the abstract
modalities of His Majesty’s Government. It is precisely because the text
awakens unpleasant feelings and memories that he feels the concentration
needed to read it such an effort and he is so easily distracted.
In spite of his disgruntlement with the abstraction of official commu-
nications, Winterbottom is himself adept at translating local experience
into a decontextualized language that others elsewhere will be available
to receive. He gives Wright permission to conscript forced labour in a
letter that is typically double-voiced, excusing what it condemns (76).
When Wright receives the written permission, he ‘glanced through it,
crumpled it up, and put it in the pockets of his khaki shorts. Like all
practical types he had little respect for administrative red tape’ (76).
The transmission of written orders from above, it seems, never pro-
ceeds smoothly:€ at every level, the one receiving a written command
resents the command and feels that he knows better than the writer.
The receiver’s resentment and his sentiment of superiority are both
functions of distance:€ he feels excluded from the privileged circle of
 Voices heard in closed rooms 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 div-
ision between the realm of signs and the realm of social realities, and
in each case the realm of signs risks appearing like some phantasma-
goric shadow play divorced from the lives and actions of people on the
ground. Goodcountry feels the same impatience with ‘his bishop’s pol-
icy 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 Wright’s mistreatment of his workers
(57). The story ‘that the white man had whipped Obika’, which ‘spread
through the villages’ and ‘was brought home’ to Obika’s 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 Wright’s whip-
ping 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 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
Clarke reports to Winterbottom that he has heard nothing of Wright’s
abuse of workers ‘on the spot’ (106), which his superior receives as
a sting:€ ‘On the spot indeed!’ (107). Winterbottom, of course, feels
that he himself is the ‘man on the spot’ (56) and that the Lieutenant-
Governor is hopelessly out of touch, but now Clarke is behaving as if he,
Winterbottom, is ‘some desk-ridden idiot at headquarters’ (107). Because
they know very well the untruths fostered by official writing, the British
characters all trust direct experience more than they do literacy.
Africans, on the other hand, experience Indirect Rule not as a web of
indirection but as direct tyranny. The policy of Indirect Rule purports
to call for the adaptation of abstract principle to concrete local condi-
tions, explicitly including respect for local notions of the sacred and the
hierarchical. Adaptation to the local is paradoxically made a universal
principle to be applied everywhere with utter disregard for context:€where
there are no local rulers, the British will create some. The Lieutenant-
Governor’s memorandum employs an abstract language of metaculture
that does not need to name or acknowledge other societies because all
others can be reduced to the same kind of thing:€everyone everywhere,
it assumes, has ‘institutions’, a ‘system’, a mindset, and a racial founda-
tion. In short, everyone has a culture capable of being identified, studied,
and understood by the colonial administration. Whatever the culture,
the administration can work with it. However, when Winterbottom yells
at the workers outside his window, he contravenes his instructions and
makes clear just how direct was so-called Indirect Rule.
Indirect Rule is a form of social engineering that pretends not to be. It
presumes that white administrators will follow their written instructions
and rule Africans by ritual and tradition, ‘the real force of the spirit of the
people’ (56), that is, without paper. However, the new class of traditional
chiefs created in Igboland in the name of preserving tradition were con-
secrated with a piece of paper called a ‘warrant’. A. E. Afigbo, the great
historian of the warrant chief system, writes, ‘For the first time in the
people’s history a scrap of paper had the power to change the course of
events.’142 Afigbo explains how the Native Courts set up by warrant inev-
itably transformed the social structures that Indirect Rule was supposed
to preserve. At the heart of the transformation was writing on paper:
the Native Courts adopted certain practices which were characteristic of the
Supreme Court. There was the taking of evidence in writing, which was an
entirely new idea. There was the use of printed forms or writs. By 1924 the forms
used by a Native Court included the warrant instituting the court, the warrant
appointing the members, summons to the accused, summons to witnesses, civil
 Voices heard in closed rooms 55
summons, warrants of arrest, warrant of imprisonment and three other forms
for returns. A move to reduce the number of these forms in 1925 paradoxically
led to the addition of another€– the search warrant. These forms the clerks gen-
erally ostentatiously displayed to the view of people in court. Then there were
judgment and cash books and the other paraphernalia of ink-pots, pencils, pens,
blotting-paper and the like which the clerk needed for his work. If none of these
articles was directly contrary to tradition, they were all new and their purposes
generally misunderstood.143

When Ezeulu refuses the chiefly warrant Clarke offers him, the bureau-
cracy 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 indir-
ection 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 Ezeulu’s particulars. He resem-
bles no one so much as the Nambikwara chief in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s
‘The Writing Lesson’, who pretends to be literate because he under-
stands 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 pow-
ers 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 col-
umns. Suddenly, while pointing to something in the figures, he says, ‘See your
56 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
cows’ (or some similar phrase), rounds on his client, and barks out a question,
his eyelids flickering rapidly as he does so.146

Although the Court Messenger in Arrow of God is not literate himself,

he can still rely on the superstitious awe associated with writing to ask
for a bribe that has nothing to do with the message that he was given.
After coming in contact with Europeans, the Efik, neighbours of the
Igbo, invented their own form of writing, called Nsibidi, which also pre-
serves secrets by displaying them before the eyes of people who cannot
read them:€the symbols ‘just signal knowledge, and the power and pres-
tige that go with it. The surface manifestation of secrecy affirms its all-
powerful existence without revealing what it is.’147
The control of access to writing is a source of power not just among
Africans but also among the British. When Clarke takes over his super-
ior’s duties as District Officer, he is authorized to open official letters, ‘for-
midable with red wax and seal€– the type junior Political Officers referred
to lightly as Top Secret:€Burn Before You Open’ (180). When he reads his
first such memo, Clarke ‘felt like a man who had just been initiated into
an important secret society’ (180). If Ezeulu is wrong about the source of
Clarke’s power€– it does not have to do with left-handedness€– he does
understand that writing is always accompanied by a kind of magic.148

W r i t i ng a n d r e a di ng ava n t l a l e t t r e

Although the images of literacy that I have been exploring in Achebe’s

novel are overwhelmingly negative, my argument is not that the novel
rejects literacy, but that it deploys the opposition between orality and
literacy in order to understand its relation to both. The novel wants to
evade what it presents as the power of literacy to reduce and fix the world,
but also wants to harness the power of literacy to circulate and thus cre-
ate community. Part of the novel’s strategy is to disrupt the binary that
would equate literacy with the British and orality with the Igbo. As we
have seen, even the most staunchly imperialist of the British characters,
Winterbottom or George Allen, values orality over literacy, and the people
of Umuaro are not strangers to writing.
Immediately after the scene in which Oduche is spelling out his first
written words, the narration shifts abruptly from the words in the primer
to Ezeulu alone with his thoughts in his obi, another camera obscura.
Suddenly the priest hears the imperious voice of the god he serves. Like
Winterbottom, Ezeulu receives from a source not physically present
 Writing and reading avant la lettre 57
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 proto-
typical 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
priest’s 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 thir-
teen 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 Ulu’s 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 inter-
pretative traditions that insist on an absolute fidelity to an unchanging
written text. Ezeulu feels he must obey Ulu’s 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, Winterbottom’s small office appears as a metonymic
allegory of reading, an example of reading that reveals the nature of read-
ing. 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
58 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
condition. Barber has recently argued that ‘writing is only an extension
of processes already well established and flourishing without it’:€ ‘Fixing
words, attaching them to material objects, making them object-like in
themselves, making a mark, constructing vast networks of linked and
mutually-suggestive formulations, creating forms that others can recog-
nize, appropriate and inhabit, are what “oral cultures” do.’152 One example
of such decontextualized discourse is the proverb. As Illich and Sanders
explain, ‘Writing is not the only technique we know for making the flow
of speech coagulate and for carrying clots of language along intact for tens
or even hundreds of years. When melody, meter, and rhythm combine
with a proverb, the result is often an indestructible nugget of language.’153
Another form of decontextualized oral discourse is narrative myth, such as
the ‘Coming of Ulu’ recounted by Ezeulu every year at the Festival of the
Pumpkin Leaves (70–1). Greg Urban explains that ‘Myths facilitate trans-
duction by reducing the number of changes in form that must be made to
relocate the discourse from one context to another.’154 Thus the decontex-
tualized, impersonal quality of the Lieutenant-Governor’s memorandum,
which facilitates administration by making it appear faceless and above
individuals, is not indicative of the difference between literacy and oral-
ity. It would be more accurate to say the memorandum and the folk tale
represent different genres. It is commonly assumed, notes Niko Besnier,
‘that spoken language is universally more “involved”, “emotional”, and
better suited for the representation of emotions than written language’,
but this is not necessarily the case.155 Writing does not have to be imper-
sonal, even if arguably it makes impersonality more possible than orality
does. And decontextualized, impersonal, easily replicated language can
also be found in oral genres, especially those associated with ritual or
with communal wisdom as opposed to individual or quotidian discourse.
Arrow of God links Ezeulu and Winterbottom not just by time and
place but also by thematic repetitions involving the disposition of their
bodies. Chapter 1, which introduces Ezeulu, and Chapter 3, which opens
with Winterbottom, each present a man alone, looking up from under a
roof at heavy clouds and seeking some kind of sign, while outside chil-
dren laugh and play. Ezeulu looks for the new moon and Winterbottom
stares at the first rains, relieved that the dry season and its unbearable
heat are at an end. Ezeulu and Winterbottom do not have synchronized
watches and in that sense do not live in the same time, but when they
look up they exist under the same sky. Their upward glances set up a dis-
tinct space/time triangulated through the writer and reader who are look-
ing down at the book and at them. What unites them and us is the time
 Writing and reading avant la lettre 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 sing-
ing, 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. Winterbottom’s 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
Winterbottom’s office or Ezeulu’s hungry neighbours. The signs of incipi-
ent mental instability can already be seen when we first meet the two
men, as Ezeulu argues with an inner ‘enemy’ (3) and Winterbottom suf-
fers 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. Winterbottom’s office and
Ezeulu’s obi both come, in retrospect, to feel like coffins.
The two men do make contact with other minds€– Ezeulu’s god and
Winterbottom’s 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, Ezeulu’s eldest son and a mask
carver, unable to do his work ‘under the profane gaze of women and chil-
dren’, retires to a specially built spirit-house, where he is surrounded by
60 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
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 concentra-
tion, like Winterbottom’s, 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 affirma-
tively 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 father’s 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 actu-
ally 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 hap-
pen 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 Edogo’s thoughts are presented allows
the character’s inner words to take over the narration of the novel and
points to his interior life. Winterbottom’s interior life is filled with large
impersonal entities such as the Lieutenant-Governor or Africa; Ezeulu
 Writing and reading avant la lettre 61
is preoccupied with strategizing. Edogo’s interior life alone is filled with
interpersonal relations:€he is concerned with what others think and what
they think of him.
Edogo achieves his insight into self, others, and self-in-relation-to-
�others because of his habit of withdrawing from others and concentrating
on an object held just before his face, a Mask or a door (90), to which he
gives shape. The wooden surface he carves acts as a mirror of his deepest
self. His carving allows him to express something inside the same dis-
tance behind his eyes as the object being carved is in front of his eyes.
Masks and doors create depth by implying a division into outside and
inside. Masks imply faces; doors can be opened. I am arguing that Edogo
is in the position of a writer and that writing promotes both an inner
space filled with others and a self outside the self available for contempla-
tion. But if writing has this effect on consciousness, we must note that all
societies, including preliterate Umuaro, always already have writing.
Just as the novel draws to a close, one of Edogo’s creations, a ‘new
ancestral Mask’, is ready to appear in public (194). What had once been
the focus of its solitary maker’s gaze will now receive the attention of
many. As the Mask dances, aggressively charges the crowd, and salutes the
assembled elders, Edogo moves ‘from one part of the crowd to another’,
hoping to hear the audience’s reactions (200). The Mask that had been
the focus of his deepest attention has become the focus of many eyes.
The literacy thesis associated with Ong and Goody characterizes texts
as ‘walls against which to project private thought’,158 but literacy is about
not just detachment but also intersubjective communication:€ ‘Texts
shine back at writers and readers a developing allegiance to a common
orientation, a specific and intimate present that each relies upon for
meaning and order, a common knowledge accomplished uniquely by
“the we”, writer and reader, whose paths through the texts grow difficult
to distinguish from one another.’159 The lesson is not to quit the maker’s
closet and join the voices outside; nor is it to incorporate the voices into
the maker’s private space. The model for art here is to move regularly
between inside and out, between private and public, between creation
and reception. This is the function of Edogo’s Mask, and implicitly of
Achebe’s novel.
Edogo’s intersubjectivity is not introduced to Umuaro by literacy. A
traditional proverb already knows that ‘The world is like a Mask dancing.
If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place’ (46). But reading
and writing can foster this intersubjectivity, always present in potential.
Barber writes,
62 The coming of literacy:€Arrow of God
Writing extended potential already present in orature€– the potential to make a
mark, to establish forms of words that would be repeatable and would be objects
of attention. While cutting off some of orality’s assets€– the responsiveness to a
live audience, and the embodied, multiple means of signification at the live per-
former’s disposal€– the autonomy of the written text also introduced new possi-
bilities that orality did not have. Literacy participated in personal transformation
not only because it was very widely associated with upward social mobility, but
also because writing and reading made possible new forms of self-objectification,
self-projection and self-management.160
The new forms of self made possible by literacy are the theme of Wole
Soyinka’s novel Ìsarà, the subject of the next chapter. There the pro-
tagonists 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

The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà

by Wole Soyinka

In Chinua Achebe’s 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 Blackie’s Arithmetic which he used in 1908 to (his son)
Obi’s 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 col-
lected 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 Oduche’s 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
Isaac’s adult son, Obi, looks with bemusement amounting to disdain
on his father’s 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 generation’s outmoded, almost superstitious
respect for the missionaries and the products of the colonizer. The title
‘Blackie’s Arithmetic’ refers to the British publisher, but probably strikes
the son as colonial condescension that his father had shamefully toler-
ated. In his own Lagos apartment, Obi himself has shelves with books,
and drawers in which he keeps ‘his personal bits and pieces like post-
age 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 father’s 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 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
from mission schools by their well-stocked libraries.4 His character Obi,
whose nickname at school was ‘Dictionary’ (32), as was Achebe’s,5 read
English in Britain, where, along with Durrell, he discovered Waugh (36),
Eliot (17), Auden (36), and Graham Greene (35). He values books not
as objects but rather for what they contain, and he feels that his father’s
respect for paper, all and any paper, is a form of superstition.
As we have seen in the previous chapter, Isaac Okonkwo celebrates
ink on paper as ‘uli that never fades’ (115). But fade it does. Newly pub-
lished books, by the smoothness of their pages and covers, make older
books seem unattractive and old-fashioned, and their contents out of
date. Print is especially associated with a precarious materiality in Africa.
Becky Clarke, an editor at the Heinemann African Writers Series based
in Britain, tells of opening ‘envelopes posted from remote parts of Africa
that still bear the smells of wood-smoke or the stains of kerosene and
palm-oil’.6 The Teacher in T. M. Aluko’s One Man, One Wife tears open a
soiled envelope to find a letter in which ‘Spots of oil here and there indi-
cated that the great literary feat had been performed at night with the aid
of a kerosene lamp’ (27–8).7 Because paper in the tropics often seems old
as soon as it is written upon, what is written on it also sometimes suffers
from the perception of obsolescence, as if African writing always emerged
from a distant past. Moreover, because, as we have seen, the orthograph-
ies of the major African languages have all been overhauled several times
in the course of the twentieth century, texts written in those languages
have suffered repeated textual obsolescence, as with Isaac Okonkwo’s
Bible in the Onitsha dialect. As Jeffrey Peires notes of Xhosa, the effect of
new orthographies ‘was to turn every literate African into a functioning
illiterate’.8
On the eve of Nigeria’s independence, young men educated beyond
their parents, like Obi, but also like Achebe himself and Wole Soyinka,
scorned what they felt was the overly high opinion their parents had of
the whites and their ways. When Achebe wrote his first novel, Things
Fall Apart, he turned to his grandfather’s precolonial generation for
his subject matter. He originally planned a trilogy to tell the story of
twentieth-century Nigeria through three generations, but only wrote one
sequel, No Longer at Ease, about his contemporaries, and never was able
to write the middle volume about his father’s generation. His generation
felt ashamed of its parents for having been colonized, and he could not
tell their story.
As a young man, Wole Soyinka, too, refused to cast an eye back on the
colonial world in which he grew up, except to satirize it in the figure of
 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà 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. Barber’s project of recovering the literacy
of Africans in the first half of the twentieth century has been joined
by others, including Stephanie Newell’s study of popular literature and
culture in the colonial Gold Coast, Stephen Miescher’s book on colo-
nial masculinities in the same area of the world, and Derek Peterson’s
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 father’s era with a new appreciation for what that gener-
ation 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 pun-
ningly 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 father’s death, Soyinka finally ‘opened the metallic box,
scraped off the cockroach eggs, and browsed through a handful of let-
ters, old journals with marked pages and annotations, notebook jottings,
tax and other levy receipts, minutes of meetings and school reports, pro-
gramme notes of special events, and so on’,10 he does not feel the distaste
that Obi Okonkwo feels for his father Isaac’s 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, Ìsarà, 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 descrip-
tion of Africans from Southern Rhodesia at the same time that could be
applied to Soyinka’s 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, exper-
imented with new affiliations and organizations, and built themselves lives to be
proud of.11
66 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
In the process, they became ‘fundamentally different sorts of people from
those conquered in the nineteenth century’.12 Ìsarà looks back to the time
when it was possible to look forward.
The 1989 novel is often regarded as the prequel to Soyinka’s 1981 mem-
oir, Aké, for both are named after locales in Yorubaland of personal sig-
nificance to the author and both imagine in loving detail the world of the
past. But whereas Aké narrates in the first person Soyinka’s own thought
processes as a child, Ìsarà imagines a time he was too young to remem-
ber and enters the thoughts of others.13 The names of the characters are
fictional, and the narrative scrupulously eschews ‘any pretence to factual
accuracy’ (vi). Ìsarà is therefore a novel rather than a memoir, closer to
V.€S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, also based on the author’s father,
than to Aké.
Soyinka is the first writer of the postcolonial generation of African
writers to give the previous, colonized generation its full due, and he can
only do so in a novel. However much an historian such as Newell insists
on the worth of the ambitions and activities of the literary clubs in the
colonial Gold Coast, the written production that she analyses inevitably
appears much less sophisticated than her own book.14 To postcolonial
eyes, her objects of study seem to invite the charge of colonial mimicry. In
Ìsarà, on the other hand, the colonized generation appear as fully rounded
and deeply engaged with the world as readers of the novel feel themselves
to be, because the novelist enters the thoughts of his characters, and he
depicts them as intelligent readers engaged in the same activity as the
readers of the novel are.
In the ‘Author’s Note’, Soyinka invites us to imagine him sitting with
his father’s papers spread out before him and making an imaginary
‘Voyage around “Essay”’ (the subtitle of the novel). Soyinka does not
treat the archive as an historian might:€ seeing through the papers to
what he can discern of his father and relegating the papers themselves to
the equivalent of sources and evidence. Instead, he finds his father, the
teacher and the reader, in those papers. The focus of the novel is on the
pages themselves. The novel lovingly imagines the circumstances and
the spirit in which the letters and other documents were first produced
or in which they were received and read. (At least that is the impres-
sion Soyinka creates:€he may be inventing particular papers.) Ìsarà is not
an epistolary novel, but it might as well be because the characters are
always depicted reading, writing, recalling what they have read, or com-
posing in their heads what they would like to write. They are what they
read and write and nothing more.
 Colonial education 67

C ol on i a l e duc at ion
Akinyode Soditan, the character based on Soyinka’s father, is a teacher
in colonial Nigeria in the late 1930s. Like so many males in African lit-
erature€– the autobiographers Camara Laye, Amadou Hampaté Bâ, and
Ng ũg ĩ wa Thiong’o come to mind€– Akinyode left behind his hometown
of Ìsarà 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 Simeon’s Teacher
Training Seminary in Ilesha, a fictional school based on St Andrew’s
College in Ọyọ, formerly the Training Institution for Schoolmasters and
Catechists, which Soyinka’s 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 gramo-
phone 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 Aké 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 R’S VOIC E’:€‘Tinu and I had long rejected the
story that the music which came from the gramophone was made by a spe-
cial 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’ (Aké, 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 won-
der 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 Ìsarà at St Simeon’s now
form a cohort modelled on traditional age grades, calling themselves the
68 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
ex-Ilés (3), a cross-language pun incorporating the name Ilesha and the
Yoruba word ilé, meaning ‘house’ or ‘home’.20 In the present of the novel
the former students of St Simeon’s are pursuing modern careers through-
out Yorubaland as teachers, civil servants, lawyers, and budding entrepre-
neurs, and the only time they can be sure to see each other is when they
return to Ìsarà 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 Andrew’s
at the same period, who called themselves the Tọyọbọ, that is, those who
have returned from Ọyọ.21 Of the Tọyọbọ Barber writes, ‘By being iso-
lated from their families and fellow townspeople, they became perman-
ent, vivid landmarks in the mental terrain of their educated peers.’22
Akinyode failed to learn the attention to cultural monuments that
Dr€Mackintosh sought to teach, but the colonial curriculum did impart
a cultural literacy that the ex-Ilés later use to lubricate their own con-
versation 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-Ilés 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 experi-
ence shared with others.
When Akinyode’s more rebellious friend, Sipe, was expelled from
St€Simeon’s, 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. Sipe’s 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-Ilés 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 gener-
ation, who saw only the provenance of the ex-Ilés’ repertoire of cultural
allusions, their elders might appear as colonial mimics, always ready
 Colonial education 69
with a quotation from Shakespeare or a tidbit from British history, but
ill-equipped to judge their colonial rulers. Indeed Soyinka at one point
invites such a judgement of Akinyode and his friends:€when, as an adult,
Akinyode uncovers ‘a reference to an ancient indictment by a British
knight who had uncovered unspeakable cruelties by the Belgians in
the Congo!’ (59), he finds the atrocities hard to credit. The reference is
to Roger Casement’s report on the reign of terror perpetrated in King
Leopold’s Congo Free State, where hands were routinely cut off and vil-
lages obliterated when quotas of rubber were not met (conditions that
were the inspiration for Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). Sipe casts
doubt on the discovery:€‘How do we know for certain … Whoever heard
of civilised people cutting off ears and hands for failure to fulfill the sup-
ply quota of cassava and rubber … It was far too improbable’ (59). Unsure
what to make of what they have learned, the ‘Circle resolved that the
teacher write to England for further details’ (60).
The ex-Ilés, however, are not usually this naïve. As schoolboys, they
suspected that their British instructors were not sharing all their know-
ledge. Akinyode ‘stumbled on the word “simian”â•›’ (66), and the pupils
of St Simeon’s responded with horror at the near homonym. The word
is not ‘in their prescribed Elementary English Dictionary, and they had
to wait until night, when a volunteer squad, led by [Sipe] Efuape, broke
into the staff library and borrowed the much bigger Oxford Dictionary’
(66). What the students discover in the dictionary is not the hidden truth
about the mindset of the colonizer, however much they feel it is. It is
unlikely that the school’s name was chosen as a racial slur€ – after all,
there exist St Simeon schools and churches in England€ – although it is
certainly possible that the white teachers ‘enjoyed a racial joke at the stu-
dents’ expense’ (66). The real lesson of the incident is a complicated point
about the nature of colonial mimicry. Students who attend St Simeon’s,
intent upon acquiring by emulation the culture of the missionaries, can-
not prove their humanity by their imitation of the standard the colonizer
holds up to them. The school authorities read the imitation of their pupils
as proof not that the latter are becoming English but that they are tal-
ented mimics, that is, just like monkeys. Breaking into the staff library
is an image for the entry of this group of new literates into the world
on paper. The discovery of the word ‘simian’ allows the group to express
their understanding of colonial education and to mount psychological
resistance. The name of the ex-Ilés’ school is Soyinka’s own invention,
intended for purposes of satirical comment, and the students, led by Sipe,
are learning to use words the same way. It is at the point that the boys use
70 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
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 stu-
dent. As the students at St Simeon’s ‘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 teach-
ers:€‘You need a room that you can regard as private to yourself for medi-
tation and reading. … Move heaven and earth to get this.’23 Akinyode is
fortunate in that he has both a study at home in Aké and a small personal
library in his father’s house in Ìsarà. 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 Ìsarà (5–6). Here
in concentration are several of the images we have found associated with
literacy in Achebe’s Arrow of God:€ the closed room, the silent commu-
nion 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
 The phenomenology of reading and writing 71
establishes the three-dimensionality of the fictional worlds that Achebe
and Soyinka create. It also suggests another unseen dimension:€ Mary
Jacobus refers to ‘“the scene of reading”€– a scene in which imagining an
open book in an empty room gives rise to a series of equivalences, such as
“inside the book” and “inside me”’.24
S. A. Adenle, a prominent schoolmaster and inventor in Oshogbo,
Yorubaland, who returned from St Andrew’s College, Ọyọ in 1925, shortly
after Soyinka’s father had, used to shut himself up in his room to think,
and the people around him ‘thought he was mad’:
There was a large intellectual gap between himself and his wives, and they didn’t
understand what he was doing. He would shut himself away in his room at night
to write. They (and other people too) thought he was in a cult and that the spirits
would come at the dead of night to discuss with him. They thought he was writ-
ing all those things at the behest of the spirits. They thought that instead of writ-
ing those things he should have been making money.25
Akinyode’s own retreat to a self-contained room to attend to disembod-
ied 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 Ìsarà in the off-season
when none of the other ex-Ilés will be there in order to get a break from
the bantering, debate, and business scheming among the Circle of Â�ex-Ilés
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 inter-
personal encounters in the past, nourishes the never-ending conversa-
tion in the reader’s 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 Ìsarà, where to read is to be addressed
by friends and colleagues and even one’s 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 Akinyode’s letters.
72 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
Sipe, the focalizer of the novel’s 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-Ilés’ 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 Ìsarà, 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-reader’s 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 chap-
ter, entitled ‘Ex-Ilé’, Akinyode rereads a few articles on world events in
back issues of Elders Review of West African Affairs and its later incarna-
tion, 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 pen-
pal and notes kept in a personal notebook. These outdated journals and
personal papers, ‘dog-eared, sometimes even termite-nibbled’ (43), consti-
tute a personal library housed in ‘two improvised Peak milk cartons’, that
Akinyode consults twice a year when home in Ìsarà, ‘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 Simeon’s is not part of this library but is his ‘con-
stant companion’ in both Aké and Ìsarà (34). It contains ‘excerpts from
church sermons, proverbs, analects, jottings, moral observations, snip-
pets of vital information such as overseas college and university addresses,
page references to articles in journals which had engaged his professional
and other interests’ (33–4). It also has verses copied from books or from
Cudeback’s 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 Ìsarà, is not the one who gives the assembled
papers meaning; these papers have always been central to Akinyode’s self-
�definition. Akinyode contemplates his past and takes the measure of his
own life by engaging in an activity analogous to Soyinka, who has his
father’s tin box before him when writing the novel, and to us readers, who
hold the book about Akinyode’s life in our hands.
 The phenomenology of reading and writing 73
Akinyode is the reader of his own life and the novel is about his prac-
tice 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 Achebe’s 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
Akinyode’s practice of reading is less a function of what he reads than
of how. Rolf Engelsing, in arguing for the existence of a reading revo-
lution that took place at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe,
makes a distinction between extensive and intensive reading.33 In an earl-
ier 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 exten-
sively. A similar distinction can be made between Isaac Okonkwo with
his room full of old papers and Akinyode’s 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. Josiah’s reading is entirely a function of his
conversion to Christianity, and we see him don spectacles in order to pore
over ‘a C.â•›M.â•›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 Isaac’s
to be (Isaac who preserves but presumably never opens his son’s volume
74 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
by Lawrence Durrell). When journal articles, even particular sentences in
articles, strike a chord in him, Akinyode marks them with red or black
ink or copies them into his notebook (44). Arguably, his reading is more
intensive than that of earlier readers because more personal. He regards
his papers as objective crystallizations of the meaning of his life, and he
cares for them the way other Christians preserve the Bible.
It would also be wrong, however, to suggest Akinyode studies the con-
tent of what he reads. For him, ‘reading was rarely an end in itself; most
often it was conceived as a means to an end, which was the creation of
a contemplative state of mind’, as Brian Stock says it was for medieval
European thinkers.35 Maintaining the concentration needed to absorb con-
tent when reading is a difficult task, but distraction and semi-�conscious
reverie have their own value as forms of attention to inner thought proc-
esses. In Akinyode’s case, the content of the text itself always matters less
than the state of receptivity it fosters, a mode of reverie that, in turn, gives
access to the inner self, past selves, and the others within the self.
Marcel Proust argues that it is a mistake ever to think that one can
find truth in books. Instead books are valuable because they spark the
search for truth within the interior life of the reader. Reading is ‘an
intervention that, even as it comes from another, is produced within
ourselves. The impulse is from another spirit, but it is received at the
heart of solitude.’36 The wonderful thing about such interventions is that,
whereas for their author they represent ‘Conclusions’, for the reader they
represent ‘Incitements’.37 But reading can only act as a goad; ‘it cannot
substitute for our personal activity; it merely allows us to develop that
personal activity’.38 Akinyode, who values reading for the way it con-
centrates the senses of sight and hearing on an inner object, does not
learn self-knowledge from those whose words he reads. No writer has
taught him to think of himself differently. His reading provides mater-
ial for reflection, but often because he reads it idiosyncratically in order
to draw out a meaning personal to him, a meaning inseparable from
memory.
Proust writes that the images that childhood reading leave in us are
not so much of their contents as of the places where we read them (36).
Certainly Akinyode’s rereading revives memories of the circumstances
in which the words were first read, of the emotions the words triggered,
and of the discussions he has had with others about the words. He also
remembers remembering. The present context of his reading matters less
than the sum of past moments linked by their connection to a text. His
thought process may lead from the text in many directions, but it is the
 The phenomenology of reading and writing 75
continuity established between different moments in the life of the read-
ing 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 curi-
osity 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 end-
ing will be … but they enjoy nonetheless the unfolding of the story, epi-
sode by episode, in the expected succession.’39 Rereading therefore ‘may
be invested with the significance of a small private ritual’.40 In Akinyode’s
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 Akinyode’s 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 Simeon’s, 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,
48–9)
In Akinyode’s case, Archdeacon Howell’s aphorism ‘stamped a special
mandate on his departure, coated it in an aura of special designation
which remained with him all through college and even through his car-
eer. He often assessed the activities of his friends, their plans, through
these special lenses placed before his eyes by the unsuspecting prelate’
(34). The aphorism accrues meaning associated with the beginning of his
new life at school and the exciting train journey that takes him there. And
now that the boy’s future has become the man’s past, Akinyode assesses
how successful he has been.
Akinyode is learning to identify his self with the words he writes on
paper. Brian Stock argues that, with the development of silent reading
in the European Middle Ages, ‘For the reflective reader, the text and the
76 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
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. Sassine’s 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 Archdeacon’s maxim recalls him to a duty that he owes himself and
his vocation as educator:€to become the man he wants to be. It encour-
ages 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 Akinyode’s aspirations for a lar-
ger world and a more expansive self. He ‘tried hard to project himself
through the next ten, no, even five, years. Would Aké have become a dis-
tant, 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 teacher’s 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 coloniza-
tion. The Ashtabula that haunts Akinyode’s imagination is not, however,
London or even Europe. It functions somewhat as ‘Samarkand’ does in
Soyinka’s poem of that name and its attraction has more to do with the
Orientalist than the colonial. At school, young Akinyode was ‘ever the
 The phenomenology of reading and writing 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 Akinyode’s aspiration is ironized. On the con-
trary, Ashtabula’s 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, ironic-
ally, become a mantra that suffuses Akinyode with nostalgia. The mantra
demands urgency but induces a subtly pleasurable, regret-filled medita-
tion 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 excel-
lence, can only develop fully where one undertakes to “write one’s mem-
ories”, to “keep one’s journal”.’49 François 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 think-
ing, valued by the novel as fertile and creative. Akinyode’s hyperliterate
consciousness does not display the consequences of literacy predicted by
Ong, Goody, or Rotman. His thinking does not privilege linearity, caus-
ality, or syllogistic logic, but rather repetition, rhythm, and random asso-
ciation. 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 Ìsarà, 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,
78 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
‘turning the well-worn pages, thumbed and flagged and underlined in
red and black … till he found what he was looking for’ (42–3). Reading
induces a state of being outside the present moment and even outside the
current of time altogether. The state of abstraction is also procrastination,
allowing the dreamer to escape from the immediate demands made by
the world:€‘The teacher pulled himself up abruptly, alarmed at himself.
Akinyode, what is going on in your head? … This is worse than daydream-
ing, this is madness!’ (48). As Jonathan Crary notes, ‘Though its history
will never be formally written, the daydream is nonetheless a domain of
resistance internal to any system of routinization or coercion.’51
Akinyode’s reading is a rereading of texts and portions of texts con-
sciously selected and preserved. In a sense he is reading messages he has
composed in the past to his future self. The reader is thus a creator and
even a kind of writer. Akinyode imagines his life as a text, but that text is
not a novelistic narrative; it is a collection of maxims that have accompan-
ied him for years and that over time have accrued different connotations.
Taken out of their original context, preserved alongside other articles, and
marked up with his comments, the fragments Akinyode rereads become
his own modernist composition.
Akinyode’s reading does not involve a text so much as what Robert
Fraser calls a ‘repertoire’,52 a swarm of materials that, although derived
from texts, do not have to be read in a particular order, but lend them-
selves to different orders, with different emphases, upon each rereading.
The texts Akinyode rereads are like the store of proverbs shared by a com-
munity like Umuaro or like the Bible quotations that Oduche has learned
to flourish in Christian debates. Rarely are proverbs recited in a single
outpouring;53 the Bible may be read through but is usually read in dis-
continuous bits. These are flexible resources that can be drawn upon for
different ends in different contexts. As Fraser writes, ‘Those conscious of
any one ingredient in a given repertoire are not necessarily, as with a text,
aware of all€– or any€– others’ (50).
An example of a repertoire that Fraser gives, one that is explicitly pre-
sent in Ìsarà, is the Yoruba practice of Ifá divination. By various means,
including, for example, casting small objects such as palm nuts or half-
nuts of the òpâ•›èl è fruit attached to a chain, the diviner creates a binary
code that yields one of 256 possible permutations, each known as an odù.
This is not unlike other kinds of divination, such as the Sortes Sanctorum
or bibliomancy, which is performed by opening the Bible at a random
page and seeking personal meaning in the first verse the eye falls upon.
Associated with each of the odù is a set of as many as 600 poetic texts or
 The phenomenology of reading and writing 79
ẹsẹ.54 Having arrived at an odù, ‘the diviner recites from memory and in
arbitrary order at least four texts associated with it, one of which the cli-
ent 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 Ifá therefore
combines ‘an ingredient of chance or destiny with a strong element of
choice’.57 The recipient cannot chose the odù, 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 Abimbola explains that ‘Ifá is the only
Òrìşà [god] who does not “possess” his devotees overtly; instead he can
inspire them.’59 Akinyode’s 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 Aké, 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 writer’s solitude. An impromptu
visit by another ex-Ilé makes concentration difficult, and a further dis-
traction 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 con-
spire 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.
80 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
It does not help that Akinyode feels writer’s 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 lat-
erally 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 preacher’s wife, appears outside his win-
dow, prompting the answer:€ Padua is the setting of The Taming of the
Shrew (116–17). Even Akinyode’s subconscious is highly literate.
‘The teacher’s desk … was a tableau of inanimate queuing’ (107), and
the queue does not move forward sequentially. Akinyode does not fin-
ish with any file but reviews each in turn, satisfied with small editor-
ial 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 sat-
isfied 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 parent’s
‘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 lat-
est 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 min-
utes, 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
 The window of the train 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).
Akinyode’s writing implicates his entire self:€including his understand-
ing of himself as a moral man and a teacher; his identity as a Yoruba, an
Ijebu (a subgroup of Yoruba), and a man from Ìsarà; 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 him-
self€– fulfillment, what does it mean? He glanced swiftly round his mod-
est 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 Ìsarà, a mere fifteen or so years later, a ‘rudimentary
road’ has been built through ‘the fast timber forests’ by the Ijebu them-
selves (241), and the ex-Ilés plan to build a road between Ìsarà and Ibadan
as ‘a logical extension of their even more ambitious plan to link Lagos,
Ikorodu, and Ìsarà by a year-round, all-weather motorable road’ (184).
The emphasis in Ìsarà, 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 occa-
sion of the inauguration of the first lorry to be owned by a man in
Ìsarà. The driver is Wemuja, a friend of Akinyode’s 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 Ìsarà, Wemuja had
attached himself to Akinyode’s father because Christians were known
to use books. There is no printing trade in Ìsarà 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 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
De Certeau points out that ‘In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass
transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one
takes a “metaphor”€– a bus or a train.’61 A similar pun is at work when we
think of both lorries and words as ‘vehicles’. The conceptual link between
transportation and communication becomes especially important when,
as in Africa in the twentieth century, motor vehicles and print literacy are
equally new and appear to embody the principle of modernity. A prom-
inent journal of African literature and culture is called Matatu (a public
transport minibus in Kenya), and a South African literary journal was
called Staffrider (someone who rides without paying on the outside of a
train).
If African modernity is represented by vehicles for transport and com-
munication, however, it is troubled by hold-ups and reversals. Achebe’s No
Longer at Ease opens with the complaint of a white judge, ‘sick and tired
of these constant excuses about the problem of locomotion’ (No Longer at
Ease, 1). As Sipe discovers, ‘A motor vehicle was still largely a mystery, and
breakdowns were simply part of its God-given character’ (62). He finds
himself stranded after a ferry and a lorry both break down during a trip
to a friend’s wedding. The dead time of an interrupted journey can, how-
ever, be put to use. On the side of the road, the impatient ex-Ilé finds ‘the
time had to be occupied somehow’, so he begins ‘to “bring his books up
to date”’ (62). In ‘The Fourth Stage’, an essay about the Yoruba gods and
the processes of creativity, Soyinka writes about the spiritual importance
of the state of transition, where the subject has left one space but not yet
arrived at another and cannot be certain of arriving.
Like Akinyode, Sipe contemplates both his life and his current state in
terms derived from school:€‘His card, even before he reeled off his myriad
undertakings for detailed assessment, read “Poor. Below expectations”’
(62). Although this stock-taking is a private activity, it involves others
as Sipe composes letters in his mind ‘to the bridegroom to explain his
absence, and of course to the ex-Ilés recounting the day’s misadventures’
(61). At the end of the chapter, as he sinks into sleep (both of the first two
chapters end with falling asleep), his entrepreneurial subconscious, given
free rein when the mind is forced to stand empty, finds something to
redeem even this wasted day:€he realizes that Nigeria could be a market
for wool suits from Italy such as the one he himself wears, which does ‘not
become rumpled or lose [its] crease’ (78).
More prominent than the road in Ìsarà is the railway, which first carried
young Akinyode to school. The ‘ponderous progress’ of the train, which
runs on fixed rails and in one direction€– towards school and away from
 The window of the train 83
his mother€ – bears all the promise of modernity that young Akinyode
associates with English-language literacy (18). Described as both ‘curios-
ity 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 Laye’s L’Enfant
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 Laye’s arrival in France
with a map of the Paris Métro in his pocket,62 a powerful reinforcement
of the connection between train and paper.63 Ng ũg ĩ 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 text-
book, ‘who lived in Oxford but went to school in Reading by train’.64
John and Joan’s 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 I’m about to ride a train to paradise.’65
In Sembène Ousmane’s 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), ‘don’t 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 suc-
cessfully record, first on paper and then in deed, their intention to control
the railway and their fates.
Akinyode’s experience of the train, by contrast, is not so much mod-
ern, as in Sembène’s 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 hyp-
notic 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 Soyinka’s novel makes clear that
84 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
not only is consciousness not like a train as commonly conceived, but
the experience of a train is not like such a train either. The train that the
adult Akinyode remembers taking as a boy, like his train of thought as he
remembers, combines backward and forward movement. The train was
experienced as a confining space, as small as the room to which Akinyode
later retreats to read, and its characteristic motion was a rocking back and
forth and from side to side. Rocking, and not linear notion, is also the
motion of the reader’s eye, jumping in saccades up and down and forward
and backward as well as left and right.
In contravention of his explicit instruction, young Akinyode sticks his
head out of the window as the train rounds a bend. In phrasing remin-
iscent of an open book, he sits ‘on the inside of the train’s curved spine’
(19), from where he can look backward and forward and see the whole.
He ‘began to count the coaches, a methodical instinct taking over, as if
anticipating and preparing himself for the lessons ahead’ (19). Akinyode
shows why his schoolmates will give him the nickname of ‘Metodiko’,
a corruption of ‘Methodical’ (107, 109). Counting the railway cars is
Akinyode’s first (and literal) act of ‘stock-taking’ (38), which will become
his characteristic activity in private moments of contemplation. Thus even
in this early journey, Akinyode positions himself to be at once inside and
outside, at a vantage point from which to see the whole from beginning to
end. The train becomes a symbol both for the progress of Akinyode’s life
and the self-conscious, yet peculiarly objective detachment with which he
looks upon that trajectory.
What Akinyode remembers is not the farewells at the station nor the
arrival at his destination (neither are mentioned), but a stop mid-journey
where hawkers swarm the window offering a panoply of smells, sights,
and cries. The train window is filled with the outstretched hands of the
sellers and with faces as close as the viewer’s own face in a hand mirror.
The steam from boiled yam held up to the window hits Akinyode in the
face (20). The scene€– a rectangular space filled with white through which
dimly appear shapes, hand reaching up to meet hand reaching down,
face staring into face€– is remarkably close to the sensory experience of
Akinyode the reader who, in the present of the novel, holds in his hands
a similar rectangular frame, the pages of the notebook, at the same dis-
tance before his eyes.
When Akinyode remembers the view out of the train window, he
projects that window onto the page before him. The train window thus
performs a different function than the window in Winterbottom’s office
or Akinyode’s room, through which sounds enter that disturb reading.
 Literacy, orality, and power 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 meta-
phorically 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 condi-
tion. 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 Ìsarà 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 con-
tains 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 Ìsarà many of the usual connotations of orality and literacy are
reversed:€ Akinyode’s literacy is associated with digression and circular-
ity 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 Ìsarà. In Soyinka’s 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 col-
lective will of all of Ìsarà’ (229). In a deep irony, the Agunrin is called ‘the
last surviving tome of Ìsarà, 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 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
to Amadou Hampaté Bâ, ‘Every time an old man dies in Africa, it is as
if a library has burnt down.’69 Odubona, who still remembers a world of
primary or elementary orality, Paul Zumthor’s terms for a world scarcely
influenced by literacy,70 survives in a lettered culture where every verbal
expression is more or less marked by the presence of writing.71
In his youth, the Agunrin had led Ìsarà’s resistance to the colonizers,
and he continues to associate paper and roads with the treacherous arrival
of strangers, and with the violent invasion of Ijebu by Sir Gilbert Carter
in 1891. Carter’s predecessor had sent an agent to bribe the Awujale of
Ijebu to sign a treaty, underplaying the significance of the written docu-
ment:€ ‘Just sign here on the paper, his agents said, just sign here, we
promise you no one will know about it’ (232). When that failed, Carter’s
soldiers had pointed their guns at the representatives of Ijebu ‘and ordered
them to put their thumbs on the paper’, but ‘not one of them would put
their hands to the wretched paper’ (233). Later Carter brought in from
Lagos two Christians with a claim to Ijebu blood to sign in the emissar-
ies’ stead (233). The treacherous treaty demanded that all routes be ‘open
to every Christian riffraff and company agent’ (233), and, in the Agunrin’s
judgement, forced Ijebu to ‘Throw open all our roads, the lagoons, the
rivers, our ancestral pathways, to the desecration of aliens. Why not our
bedrooms and our daughter’s thighs?’ (233). The old man believes subse-
quent events have vindicated his resistance to both writing and roads:€‘had
everything not simply scattered?’ (233).
Written books remember the coming of writing and of roads to Ijebu
differently. The Reverend Samuel Johnson, himself an eminent Yoruba,
in his History of the Yorubas credits Carter with removing the obstacles to
trade between Lagos and the hinterland imposed by the Ijebu:
To the vast majority of the common people [the pacification of Ijebu] was like the
opening of a prison door:€and no one who witnessed the patient, long-�suffering,
and toiling mass of humanity that week by week streamed to and from the coast
with their produce, their manufactures and other articles of trade and returned
with their purchases, could refrain from heaving a sigh of gratification on the
magnitude of the beneficial results of the short and sharp conflict.72

Soyinka’s novel sides with Johnson’s account of the past and depicts the
Agunrin as an outdated and irrelevant figure. According to Josiah, the
Agunrin still ‘doesn’t 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
 Literacy, orality, and power 87
advised to consult. In the conditions of secondary orality such as now
prevail in Ìsarà, however, where oral culture is defined in opposition to
writing, not only does writing ‘tend to extenuate the values of the voice in
practice and in the imagination’, as Zumthor says is bound to happen,73
but the Agunrin’s actual voice is itself almost mute. He ‘was not known
to have uttered a word in human hearing for the past ten years of his
life’ (229), and his voice ‘had dwindled progressively into a hoarse, uneasy
whisper that sometimes appeared to have journeyed from the depths
of a densely forested gorge, then given up altogether’ (242). The pun
on ‘gorge’, meaning both ravine and throat, suggests that the oracular
voice of the land itself has become overgrown and then silenced. It is the
Agunrin, locked in and unable to communicate even orally, rather than
the hyper-literate Akinyode, who is the figure of homo clausus. The former
lives ‘with his memories, a still-active but closed circuit within the tight-
skinned independency of his head’ (229).
The result is that the state of ‘preliteracy’ is on its way to becoming one
of ‘illiteracy’, where ‘not being able to read and write’ marks a cultural
disadvantage.74 The inability to read or write has not, however, prevented
Node from becoming the wealthiest man in Ìsarà and owner of the first
lorry. Remarking that so many ‘successful businessmen were either illit-
erate or semi-literate’ (73), Sipe wonders if, in a condition of mixed oral-
ity and literacy, illiteracy is not an advantage. He marvels at the success
of another businessman, Arimoje, who was no more than an ara oke or
country bumpkin, yet ‘the number of motor lorries that bore the sign
A R I MOJ E T R A NSP ORT SE RV IC E S€– even in that rudimentary
stage of the motor vehicle in West Africa€– was the envious talk of the
country’ (57). (Note that Sipe considers the current level of motor trans-
port ‘rudimentary’ compared to a future he looks forward to.) Lorries,
metonyms of modernity and themselves the bearers of prominently dis-
played written messages, do not need literate owners. ‘Perhaps’, concludes
Sipe, ‘that was the trouble with himself and The Circle€– they were crip-
pled by too much literacy’ (57). The non-literate can appear to the literate
more mobile, more spontaneous, more focused on the concrete and the
present, and less paralysed by self-consciousness than themselves.
Both the Agunrin and Node, however, lose the power of speech and
must rely on others to act as mouthpieces. The Agunrin’s ‘sole link with
the present’ is Olisa, the regent, who acts as his interpreter and ‘trans-
lated reality to him’ (229). Node, paralysed ‘by the evil machinations
of a treacherous friend, as all Ìsarà knew’ (5), needs Tenten, Akinyode’s
maternal uncle, to speak for him. Tenten could ‘follow the faint tremor of
88 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
[Node’s] 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 chil-
dren, 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). Akinyode’s 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 litera-
ture, cannot read what her son writes and who, too, must employ Fatuka’s
services.
The letter writer has a sign painted by Mariam’s 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)
Tenten’s sign ‘showed very clearly that he was neither gifted nor more
than barely literate’ (93). He has failed to master the conventions of writ-
ten English regarding grammar, spelling, and capitalization, indeed seems
unaware that the written language has such conventions. Oral communi-
cation, after all, does not require them.
Tenten the sign writer (and Node’s 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-Ilés. 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 sun’s ferocity after a hard
morning’s 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 message’s
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).
 Literacy, orality, and power 89
In Aluko’s novel One Man, One Wife, an old woman whose daughter
has gone missing also misunderstands the private–public 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 des-
tination on earth. It was not necessary for her to know Toro’s whereabouts before
writing to her. Indeed if she knew her whereabouts there would be no point in
coming to seek the letter-writer’s assistance. ‘All Idasa know that Royanson’s let-
ters 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). Aluko’s 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 can-
not be received. In Anton Chekhov’s story ‘Vanka’, an unhappy servant
boy surreptitiously uses his master’s pen and paper and ink to write a let-
ter 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
Akinyode’s 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 conven-
tional salutation Omo mi owon, ‘My dear son’ (87). The writing conven-
tion 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-Ilés, how they will receive his letter, and how
they will discuss it afterwards. In Ìsarà 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 con-
tributions). 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 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
found his father’s papers, which, as we have seen, is an image for the novel
itself. For most of the chapter, however, the mother’s biscuit box is miss-
ing 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 per-
sonal items, which must remain with the initiated. This box does not con-
stitute an inheritance, as Essay’s 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 Mariam’s 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 repre-
sented would be dissipated and lost or, more dangerously, power would
fall into the wrong hands and could be used against one.
Tutuola’s 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, how-
ever, 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 mod-
ern counsellor might tell her to keep a diary. There were ‘many wonder-
ful 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 man’s secret) exacts a physical toll, it seems, but it is also deadly
to utter it, for the least dissemination removes the secret from the owner’s
control.
Jacques Rancière 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 Ìsarà ‘mute and chatterbox’ best describes orality, which is associ-
ated 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
 Literacy, orality, and power 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 conger-
ies 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-Ilés are a model of
such a public.
Traditional orality and modernizing literacy confront each other at the
climax of Soyinka’s novel during the contest for the position of Odemo
of Ìsarà. In order to put one of their own on the throne, the ex-Ilés organ-
ize 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 advan-
tage 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-Ilés’ candidate, and conceding that he ‘enjoyed the
greater support’ (253). The ex-Ilés promptly dispatched the letter to the
Resident as evidence of Akinsanya’s right to the position.
The biggest obstacle to the ex-Ilés’ 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 Akinyode’s father but
an ally of the ex-Ilés, retreats to the sacred space of the osugbo, another
camera obscura, in order to commune with supernatural forces and ‘call
home’ the Agunrin (213). Jagun’s magic words have the force of deeds and
the old man dies (237). Soyinka’s novel works with a paradox:€it celebrates
the triumph of the ex-Ilés over the forces of obscurantism, but the mod-
ernizers benefit directly from the power over death wielded by Jagun, a
magic that they do not themselves understand.
Ìsarà 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 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
more powerful than the new means of transportation and communica-
tion€– roads instead of spirit ways; writing instead of orality€ – but it is
secret, dangerous, accessible only to a select few, and cannot necessar-
ily be repeated. The ex-Ilés, 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-Ilés. The traditional powers of magic
are themselves, however, adopting the mediation of writing. One of Sipe’s
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 witness’s signature, for the spirit of Layeni to answer. Akinyode mar-
vels:€ ‘Where else in Nigeria would you find spirits which actually read
English!’ (243).
Among the spirit’s instructions, which Onayemi carefully writes down,
is that the supplicants must ‘cite or call … a curious symbol, which evi-
dently 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 pronunci-

ation. 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.
 Literacy, orality, and power 93
Esoteric knowledge and magic are themes also associated with liter-
acy. 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-Ilés 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 patriarch’s 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 sum-
mon and control demonic forces, that originated in Europe in the nine-
teenth 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
Cudeback’s ad for a penpal.
The prime example of power allied to secrecy in Soyinka’s novel is Ifá,
the Yoruba practice of divination. Jagun is ‘the mouthpiece of Ifá’ (96)
because he can ‘read’ Ifá (144). In Ifá past, present, and future are imag-
ined 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 nego-
tiated. 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, expli-
citly non-magical power, albeit one intimately connected to a special-
ized 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 repro-
ducing 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 writ-
ten 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 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
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 cen-
tury, 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-Ilés feel that this dream of modelling
and so knowing the world is a chimera. After all, ‘Farming was a haz-
ard 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.
Sipe’s 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’ Akinyode’s ‘stat-
istical talisman’ (43), meaning that the love of knowledge in the form
of numbers is itself superstition. The IIA is no better than Ifá. Sipe,
who feels himself tainted by his business associate Onayemi’s supersti-
tion, 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
 Literacy, orality, and power 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 Howell’s
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 Ìsarà, without content, but their mutual ratification makes Akinyode’s
life a narrative with a past and future. Ashtabula attaches itself to dif-
ferent objects, including the Great Adventure, until, at the end of the
novel, Akinyode locates Ashtabula in Ìsarà 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.
Akinyode’s 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 under-
lined in red and keeps them by her (156). Another former trainee ‘sneaked’
into Akinyode’s 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. Akinyode’s 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 teacher’s
personal notes communicate his engagement with a world larger than his
immediate horizons. One passage from a magazine that Akinyode sent
96 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
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-Ilés 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 news-
print. And for another, the network through which these printed words
circulate does not extend beyond Yorubaland and remains based on per-
sonal relations.
The modern modes of dissemination that allow Akinyode and the ex-Ilés
to shape the opinions of others also, however, make people vulnerable to
the snares of con-artists. The novel’s 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 sub-
ject or the end qualification:€London matriculation; bachelor’s or master’s
degrees; higher, elementary, or primary examinations in the various pro-
fessions€– 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 Gunnar’s 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 advertise-
ments, no less than oracles, can be used to cheat the credulous. Such for-
gery, 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 one’s audience€ – as fellow citizens and
faceless dupes€– are both possible because the audience for print consists
of strangers.
 Reading and writing history 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 mime-
ographed 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 Cudeback’s marvels. When he
reads about his friend’s drive through Salem, Massachusetts, he won-
ders, ‘where was Ìsarà’s 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? Cudeback’s letter
focuses on three very different kinds of interest. First, the political his-
tory 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 (11–12), 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.
Cudeback’s 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 land-
scape 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 contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
the realm of everything that resists the secular and exceeds the human
scale, that is, the exotic, the religious, and the irrational. If some activ-
ities 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, how-
ever, the conviction that the past must be written in order to count as
history reflects a particular narrative tradition that is not found every-
where 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.
Soyinka’s readers recognize that Cudeback is not as original as he
appears to his penpal in Nigeria in the thirties. The American’s 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 tourist’s need to photograph everything already pictured
in postcards. His sighting is inseparable from citing. Akinyode’s 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. Naipaul’s 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
 Reading and writing history 99
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.
Salim’s 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 commemo-
rated 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 histori-
cizing and hallowing Ijebuland, Akinyode once made a special excur-
sion 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
Akinyode’s 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 Hauptmann’s play The
Weavers from Foyle’s bookstore in London, but never received it (119). Just
knowing the German realist found drama in the plight of the working
100 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
class is enough to inspire Akinyode to look for the interest in his own
surroundings. Reading (and misreading) incite the development of the
reader’s historical consciousness.
Why does history need to be written down for a landscape to be his-
toricized? 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 pre-
sent does not need. Writing for print teaches one to see the world with
a stranger’s 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 spe-
cial 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 penpal’s 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 Akinyode’s
description of weaving and Salim’s 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 indis-
tinguishable activities. Akinyode, the traveller inspecting traditional
weaving, compares himself to a spider weaving a web. Weaving is not just
Akinyode’s chosen subject; it is also a symbol for the process of combin-
ing the foreign written form and the local content of personal experience.
In classical literature ‘the Roman appropriation of Greek culture was
 Reading the traces of presence 101
often conceived as a Latin warp woven onto a Hellenic woof’.89 Mrs€Esan,
Akinyode’s former trainee teacher and now a teacher of homecrafts in
Saki, resents the imported velvet cloth that has captured the local mar-
ket. The import is called petùje or ‘the cloth which elipses etù’, etù being
the local and traditional product, ‘that noble cloth whose warp and weft
spun the very fabric of the history of the Yoruba!’ (151). Mrs Esan decides
to do something about the foreign competition:€‘aided by the weavers of
Saki and Iseyin, she set up her looms in the school, unravelled the velvet
impostor along patterns borrowed from the disparaged etù, then filled
them in with cotton yarns, based on the original colour motifs. The result
was lighter, more porous, and therefore more suited to the climate’ (151).
She names the new product èye etù (151), meaning the ‘glory of etù’.90 In
other words, much as her mentor Akinyode had taught her, Mrs Esan
adapts local content to foreign patterns (which had imitated local pat-
terns in the first place), and, in the process, creates a new product that can
compete with the European manufacturers and the Lebanese and Indian
traders who monopolize the cloth trade (58). At the crowning moment
of the novel, the triumphal procession that will install a new Odemo,
the ruler is appropriately wearing ‘an agbada made entirely from èye etù’
(258).
The kind of writing Akinyode wants to produce requires travel and
research. This writing records smell and touch, realms of experience often
thought to be below language, and it does so by coming up with new
points of comparison:€the weaving towns are like Cudeback’s tourist sites;
the viewer is like a spider; the cloths are like webs. Akinyode sends the let-
ter to Cudeback and a copy to his cousin Saaki Akinsanya, who responds
favourably.

R e a di ng t h e t r ac e s of pr e s e nc e
There is another way of reading, one more reliant on metaphor than on
metonymic detail. Akinyode copies out Cudeback’s description of the
manufacturing process at a paper mill, but feels this is a feeble substi-
tute for the actual printing of books such as his friend describes:€‘This
was where books began, at least the material which made them books,
not the mere facts and fancies of nature and experience, of reality and
imagination’ (10).91 Imagination, he feels, must be recorded in books
or it remains unreal. He dreams of making books in Ìsarà so that
Nigerians, too, can give substance to what they know and what they
imagine. It is typical of Akinyode, however, that he dreams of making
102 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
dreams real. The paper and ink of books become fodder for his imagin-
ation. Although he resists ‘romantic thoughts of books and backyard
paper mills à 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 Ìsarà, 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 Cudeback’s contemplation
would be rudely broken by this sight’ (48). This fantastic vision of writ-
ing/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 let-
ter like the connoisseur of paper and ink that he is and finds ‘suggestions
also of pinewood, river moss, possibly gum arabica’ (6). He then scruti-
nizes 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 ver-
bal 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 unbal-
anced 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 hang-
man’s 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. (6–7)

Akinyode’s ideographic construal of Cudeback’s handwriting presumes

literacy€ – he recognizes the letters€ – but resists reading. As Michel
Foucault writes of calligrams, written texts whose graphic form creates
meaning,
For the text to shape itself, for all its juxtaposed signs to form a dove, a flower,
or a rainstorm, the gaze must refrain from any possible reading. Letters must
 Reading the traces of presence 103
remain points, sentences lines, paragraphs surfaces or masses€– wings, stalks, or
petals. The text must say nothing to this gazing subject who is a viewer, not a
reader. As soon as he begins to read, in fact, shape dissipates.92
An illiterate would see a script, say, Roman or Arabic or Devanagari, as
a whole, rather than pick out individual letters. In One Hundred Years
of Solitude, for example, Aureliano Segundo thinks Sanskrit looks ‘like
clothes hung out to dry on a line’ and ‘more like musical notation than
writing’.93 A literate characterization of handwriting would see the line
and its flow, which could be qualified as masculine or feminine, educated
or rustic, professional or childish. Akinyode is unusual in focusing on the
individual letter and the image that it conjures up. His is the perspective
of one who knows how to read but still remembers the newness and won-
der of being introduced to letters for the first time.
In his memoir Aké Soyinka remembers as a young teenager helping his
mother teach adult women to read. His mother invited learners to draw
their own bodies in order to make letters. For example, she taught the
letter b thus:
Like this. Look, put down this stick, no, no, make it a straight piece of wood
like an electric pole not a crooked one. Or do you think it’s your husband’s leg
you are drawing? Now put something like a curving road on it€– no, no, not like
that. Don’t you even know what your belly looks like when you and your hus-
band have been getting up to God knows what? En-hen. I knew that would do
it. Now that is a ‘b’. One electric pole, and your big belly resting at the bottom
of it€– ‘b’ bente-bente … asikun bente-bente … bente-bente, asikun bente-bente
… (Aké, 181)
The teacher then moved ‘smoothly into an improvised song-and-dance’
(181). Writing involves the body as deeply as dance does. The woman her
son calls Wild Christian teaches writing by inviting learners to put their
entire bodies into the act.
In the previous chapter we discussed writing as if it removed the
body€– timbre, tone, and gesture€– from language, presumed to be oral.
But, of course, writing also involves the body, as when we discuss the
character of a person’s hand, meaning his handwriting. Handwriting
is inseparable from the body and as much an expression of natural-
ized acquired skills as gait or facial cast.94 Akinyode does not approach
Cudeback’s writing as a form of notation, a coded representation of
language, but instead treats it as a ‘direct sampling or capture’,95 like
the registering of voice by a tape recorder or of electric pulses by an
MRI machine. Cudeback’s writing, a trace left by an actual hand and
bearing witness to the writer’s passage through the world, is as personal
and distinct a mark as fingerprints. Akinyode’s own signature, called a
104 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
‘masterpiece’ (74), looks ‘like an ornamented cluster of musical notes,
appropriately perhaps, since music, like gardening, was one of his pas-
sions’ (109). And he has just to think of Sipe and his friend’s handwrit-
ing flickers ‘on his retina’ (37).
Akinyode, who has the sense that ‘Wade Cudeback always humped
Ashtabula with him in his rucksack’, seeks in the marks the American
made ‘the Ashtabulan essence of the man himself ’ (7). Maurice Bloch
explains of Japanese calligraphy that it is considered ‘the outward reflec-
tion of inner wisdom. What is inside one is the character, not the words,
and the calligraphy is the fleeting material manifestation of this inner
state. The Japanese view is that the characters in one self [sic] are the
knowledge and that these can be manifested very poorly by speech and a
little better by writing.’96 The images that Akinyode finds in Cudeback’s
handwriting are not, however, the writer’s conscious creations but reveal
more than the writer intends or is aware of. An exclamation mark can
reveal the writer’s ‘state of mind by its girth, by the agitated impres-
sion left by Cudeback’s nib’ (9). Reading his penpal’s letter Akinyode
resembles the graphologist who saw ‘in the signature of Marat with its
prominent looped flourish descending from the final letter … “a rope
and dagger”, appropriate for “the blood-stained hangman of the French
Revolution”’.97
The images conjured up by the letters do not, any more than the phon-
eme or the word, provide direct access to Wade Cudeback. The Ohioan,
after all, is unlikely even to know what a coracle or a cowrie are, let alone
an ogboni house or an iguniko. For some of these objects there is not even
a word in English. W is for abetiaja! And Cudeback could not know the
shape of Osibo’s ear. Perception in this case is projection, and the clues to
his correspondent’s personality that Akinyode finds in the letters say more
about the reader than about the writer.
In Cudeback’s writing Akinyode sees items from his own experience.
The relation of what is read to what is seen in the letters is not transla-
tion, because, as Jean-François Lyotard explains about a kind of visual
joke that relies on the same distinction between words that are read and
a picture that is seen, ‘Every translation passes through the signified; here
it is simply an equivalence in the order of signifiers that is given.’98 When
Akinyode does finally encounter Cudeback, the latter, not surprisingly, ‘in
no way resemble[s] his handwriting’ (262). If the handwriting Akinyode
contemplates points to an ‘Ashtabulan essence’, we are reminded that
Ashtabula is where the Nigerian already is.
 Reading the traces of presence 105
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 optician’s ‘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’. Soyinka’s 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 Cudeback’s final letter
‘t’. The poet’s ‘vaulting vision’ recalls Akinyode’s ‘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 reveal-
ing 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 ninety-
nine 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. Akinyode’s play-
ful ‘reading’ of Cudeback’s 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
106 The contents of the tin trunk:€Ìsarà
words, the ‘acrobat’ that Akinyode sees is a figure for his own activity as
reader.
Cudeback’s hand conjures up before Akinyode’s 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 hangman’s 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 resurrec-
tion. Handwriting is of the body and restores the body. Not, in this case,
the body of the writer but of the reader. Akinyode’s experience of reading
restores him to himself.
When Akinyode holds Cudeback’s 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 Aké onto a stranger’s 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 Akinyode’s access to the North America of his penpal, may,
however, function like Proustian involuntary memory to restore another
absent presence, that of Soyinka’s father, to another reader:€Soyinka him-
self. 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

Mr Biswas finds a home in the world

on paper:€V. S. Naipaul

When V. S. Naipaul writes his life story, a subject to which he compul-

sively 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 ambi-
tion 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, Seepersad’s, 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.
Naipaul’s novel, like Soyinka’s, is a son’s 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
Archdeacon’s 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 Biswas’s case, is nonetheless some-
thing valued by both novels:€their fear of failure reflects the men’s dis-
satisfaction 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.
107
108 A home in the world on paper:€V. S. Naipaul
One difference between the two men is that Akinyode is a reader,
whereas Mr Biswas acquires the ambition of being a writer. Naipaul seems
to take little pleasure in reading himself and has little good to say about
other writers.3 Reading he regards as valuable only insofar as it awakens
the desire to be a writer and inspires writing. He gives a particular mean-
ing to ‘writing’:€ it is at once the recording of experience as a means of
understanding the writer and the world that has shaped him, and itself a
way of being in the world (A Way in the World is the title of a volume of
fictionalized history and memoir).
Unlike most authors from Africa or the Caribbean, Naipaul never
asserts his continuity with a precolonial oral tradition. As Michael Gorra
argues, Naipaul regrets his own loss of an original cultural wholeness asso-
ciated with Hindu India, but never longs for a return to what was before.4
Where others in the Caribbean seek to recover cultures that have been
lost or assert that the cultures have not been lost but only submerged,
Naipaul insists there is only rupture. He feels that the catastrophe of
colonialism and the malevolent social engineering projects of slavery and
indentured labour have meant that the Caribbean has lost its access to the
‘whole’ societies of the past, whether those be the cultures of the abori-
ginal inhabitants or the cultures of Africa or India that West Indians are
descended from. He is especially wary of Afro-Caribbean assertions of
continuity with Africa and with African oral traditions, a fear that may
reflect his experience growing up when East Indians were a minority in
Trinidad.
The same colonialism that wrought such terrible disruption in the
Caribbean also brought writing, the practice of keeping a record that sur-
vives its making and thus bears witness to how humans have remade the
world. Writing makes possible a historical awareness, related to the his-
toricizing eye Akinyode brings to the weaving towns of Iseyin and Saki,
but in Naipaul’s case raised to the level of a painfully acquired absolute
good. Indeed, he judges that his awareness of the tragedy of the past is
more valuable, because more attuned to the human condition, than not
having lost at all.
Naipaul imagines that communities that rely primarily on oral com-
munication are without his sense of historical change:€‘When men know
their world well … when everything exists in balance, and there is nothing
from outside to compare, what idea can men have of the passing of time?’,
he asks.5 Whenever he finds contemporary vestiges of this historylessness,
whether in India, Africa, or aboriginal America, he feels an almost phys-
ical revulsion. In a story in A Way in the World, a �late-twentieth-century
 Palimpsests and lack 109
would-be revolutionary, making his way upriver in a South American
country like Guyana, meets aboriginals who show him a ‘modern’ suit
of clothes left to their grandfather by the previous European visitor. In
what for Naipaul is a chilling revelation, the traveller discovers that the
clothes are ‘a doublet of Tudor times, new clothes of three hundred and
fifty years before’, left by Raleigh or a contemporary (Way, 67). Peoples
without writing Naipaul imagines as having no awareness of the past dif-
ferent from the present and therefore they cannot keep track of past time
beyond a few generations. Colonialism, on the other hand, imposed its
own kind of pastlessness, not the achronicity that Naipaul says belongs to
‘whole’ societies, but the depthless amnesia of damaged worlds doomed to
incompleteness. The colonial forgets the past because it is too ugly to face.
The only satisfactory response, in Naipaul’s books, is to face the truth of
the past squarely.
In Naipaul’s bleak version of the literacy thesis, only the few who are
writers can be called genuinely literate. The writer has a responsibility to
see truly and preserve his insight; he owes no duty to the bulk of soci-
ety doomed to fantasy or corruption, favourite Naipaul words. Writing
is both Naipaul’s career and an existential need:€he must keep adding to
the shelf of his books because, unless the past is rendered into the spa-
tial equivalent of written text, he feels that it is lost, and the self runs the
risk of sinking into a similar oblivion. There is no one in African litera-
ture who would say anything like this. Perhaps no one in Europe either.
(Jamaica Kincaid from Antigua, however, does share Naipaul’s sense of
the redemptory powers of writing€– writing ‘saved’ her life, she says6€– as
well as his pessimism about the Caribbean.) Naipaul’s lonely elitist vision
of the writer’s vocation is why he is so disliked by postcolonial writers in
general and his fellow West Indies writers in particular, but it remains of
significance for it arose in the Caribbean, the region where colonialism
has lasted the longest and had the most thorough-going impact.

Pa l i m p s e s t s a n d l ac k
Mr Biswas develops the ambition to be a writer but never becomes one.
Homi Bhabha sees in ‘the spectacular failure of Biswas’s desire to be both
Father and Author’ an image of colonial loss and of the failure in the
colonies of the bourgeois order that underwrites novelistic realism in
Europe.7 Bhabha stresses that Mr Biswas builds nothing worth preserving
and acquires no culture. Instead, he goes mad, loses almost every house
he ever had, and at the end is abandoned by his son, who goes to England
110 A home in the world on paper:€V. S. Naipaul
to study. I will argue, however, that Mr Biswas successfully asserts his
paternity because he enables his son Anand to become an author. Landeg
White and Roger Greenwald have both shown from clues within the
text that A House for Mr Biswas is the creation of Anand’s memory.8 In a
deep paradox entirely characteristic of Naipaul, it is Mr Biswas’s psychic
deprivation and his anxiety about his own insignificance that are his leg-
acy to his son and that enable Anand to become the writer who can write
his father’s story.
Key to Mr Biswas’s story is how close he comes to not having a story,
to living and dying as he had been born, ‘unnecessary and unaccommo-
dated’ (13). The descendant of Indian indentured labourers, he feels both
that the historical past is inaccessible and that his own life is rushing into
the void. His father drowns when he is very young in an incident for which
he is held responsible. Unable to support the family, his mother is forced
to send her children to live with others. The adult Mr Biswas’s desire for
a house is inseparable from his sense of having inherited no status, no
place, and no identity. Mr Biswas never does own a worthy house, and his
story has an element of tragedy that Ìsarà does not. But Naipaul suggests
that the desire is enough and that Mr Biswas does achieve a house after
all, not the ramshackle and mortgaged house on Sikkim Street in which
he ends his days but the House that is the novel.
Bhabha rightly regards the orphan Mr Biswas’s primordial lack as
symbolic of the Indo-Trinidadian loss of India in particular, and of
the colonial condition in general. However, not everyone in Trinidad
feels this lack as sharply. Mr Biswas’s two elder brothers remain on the
land and never long to escape as he does. Pratap is eventually richer
than Mr Biswas (23), but the elder brothers never learn to read and, in
Naipaul’s logic, never feel the lack of a story of their own and therefore
do not have stories. Neither do the members of the Tulsi family, the
extended family into which Mr Biswas marries, have individual stories.
The strong family structure is designed to prevent them from feeling
the loss of India. Each Tulsi daughter can expect ‘to be taken through
every stage, to fulfil every function, to have her share of the established
emotions:€ joy at a birth or marriage, distress during illness and hard-
ship, grief at a death. Life, to be full, had to be this established pattern
of sensation’ (144). When Mr Biswas and the other Tulsi sons-in-law
enter the monumental Hanuman House, they find their own ‘names
were forgotten; they became Tulsis’ (88). Hanuman House is the kind of
structure that the novel and its protagonist must escape, not the kind of
house they can arrive at.
 Palimpsests and lack 111
In Naipaul’s understanding, a necessary condition for the historical
awareness that fosters writing is the consciousness of destitution. In order
to have a story of his own, Mr Biswas must achieve three things that
set him apart from those around him:€a house he can call his own, the
acknowledgement of his son (a house in the sense of a lineage), and the
self-consciousness that comes from writing. But before he can achieve any
of these things Mr Biswas must learn that he does not have them.
Mr Biswas is born into a world where few are literate and books are
regarded as having magical power. The universe is a book of signs that one
can read with the help of the key contained in another book, the astro-
logical almanac. The sixth finger with which Mr Biswas was born and the
stars present at his birth are signs in which the pundit, by consulting his
almanac, can read the boy’s Fate (15). Many, like Mr Biswas’s grandfather,
find it reassuring to be written in the Book of Fate, however restrictive
the circumstances to which they are consigned (15). Not so Mr€ Biswas,
to whom the Book of Fate appears an antiquated relic pointing to a lost
world. The pundit’s almanac is ‘a sheaf of loose thick leaves, long and
narrow, between boards. The leaves were brown with age and their musty
smell was mixed with that of the red and ochre sandalwood paste that
had been spattered on them’ (16). The book that pretends to timeless-
ness itself bears the marks of its age, as does the cosmology it propagates.
Other Hindu volumes in the Trinidad of the novel are at risk of losing
their nature as books altogether:€‘Many were simply stacks of large loose
brown-edged sheets which looked stained rather than printed. Each sheet
carried partial impressions of the sheet above and the sheet below; the ink
had turned russet; and each letter lay in a patch of oil’ (108). Palimpsestic
blurring, the result of poor quality material and tropical conditions, is a
dread symbol of transience and oblivion for Naipaul.
Jairam, a pundit to whom young Mr Biswas is apprenticed, is another
who believes that all meaning is already written and all that remains
is repetition and exegesis. He is busy on a Hindi commentary on the
Ramayana (47) and assigns the boy the task of copying out Sanskrit verses
on strips of cardboard (48). But the boy cannot understand the Sanskrit
that he must copy. The power of these words lies not in the world that they
speak of, an India which is manifestly absent, but in the graphic repeti-
tion of the words themselves. Later, as an adult at Green Vale, Mr€Biswas
will write similar inspirational verses, also on ‘strips of cardboard’, hoping
that the holy words will work magic and give him peace (190). The words
he copies in Green Vale are in Hindi, which he can understand, but they
are no more effective than the Sanskrit verses copied at Jairam’s.
112 A home in the world on paper:€V. S. Naipaul
At school Mr Biswas becomes acutely conscious of a different power that
resides in writing. His first day at school, he is asked for a birth certificate.
His mother, Bipti, takes him to the office of the solicitor F.€Z.€Ghany, who
can induct them into the modern world on paper in its bureaucratic form,
which maps, names, and records in a deliberately neutral and objective
fashion. The birth certificate Mr Biswas receives does not reveal character
or the individual’s allotted place as the astrological almanac claims to do,
but its indifference to inherent meaning, its concern only with recording
whoever exists, means that to be without this piece of paper is not to exist
at all. As F. Z. Ghany prepares the certificate, the date stamp breaks:€the
lengths of rubber with the dates and the months fall apart because they
are turned more frequently than is the year (41). The solicitor gives the
broken rubber bands to the boy to play with (41):€young Mr Biswas’s first
lesson in the relation of printed figures to time. The dates and the months
recur in cycles that might seem endless to a traditional perspective (the
almanac cares only for days and months, not years) but that are not:€the
rubber, like the almanac itself, eventually rots. The year, however, can still
be printed, a reminder that the years never return but follow each other in
infinite succession, burying the past.
At school Mr Biswas has impressed upon him a sense of homogeneous
empty time:€time that can be counted and measured by clock and calen-
dar but is emptied of Fate and meaning. He is introduced to the notion
of zero€– the formula ‘Ought oughts are ought’ is drilled into his bottom
with a rod (41)€– and to numbers beyond his imagining. The sheer scale
of mathematical number applied to time threatens to reduce the indi-
vidual to ‘ought’ himself. During an arithmetic test, Mr Biswas finds
himself with an ‘astronomical number of hours in answer to a problem
about cisterns’, and unable to cope with this measurable but infinite time,
he writes ‘C A NC E L L E D very neatly across the page and [becomes]
absorbed in blocking the letters and shadowing them’ (44). This, the first
word written by Mr Biswas that actually appears in the text of the novel,
is the boy’s naïve attempt to cover the inexorable piling up of time in a
printed message of his own. More than thirty years later, his son Anand
will fill a geography exam with his initials, ‘outlining them in pen, shad-
ing them in pencil’ (429). The boys’ palimpsests are, of course, childishly
ineffective:€it is not the problem that is cancelled thereby but the test writ-
ers’ scores.
The power of the written word to resist time is nevertheless real, as
Mr€ Biswas discovers. His punishment for spoiling his test paper is to
stand at the blackboard and write ‘I AM AN ASS’, the second set of his
 Palimpsests and lack 113
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 mock-
ery 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 per-
spective 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 pundit’s
almanac had. At school he is introduced to science, history, and geog-
raphy, but he never believes the copious notes he takes (46). These sub-
jects 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 uncle’s 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 didn’t really help, questions like:€ Why does ice
make water cold? Why does fire burn? Why does sugar sweeten?’ (57).
The encyclopedia, like the pundit’s almanac, purports to contain the uni-
verse 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 Biswas’s own school learning, which does not speak of his experi-
ence, offers him no consolation for the existential terror that he has known
ever since his father’s drowning. When the adult Mr Biswas revisits the
place of his birth he finds ‘nothing but oil derricks and grimy pumps, see-
sawing, see-sawing, endlessly, surrounded by red No Smoking notices.
114 A home in the world on paper:€V. S. Naipaul
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 man-
age 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 Urban’s 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 world’s reading actually takes place in
private.11 In Mr Biswas’s adolescence in the 1920s, however, Trinidadian
landscapes were only beginning to be filled with writing. Indeed, he him-
self 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, how-
ever, the owner of the Keskidee Café acquires a sign with keskidee birds
perched on the letters, the owner of the neighbouring Humming Bird
Café feels he needs a sign, too. Mr Biswas, who cannot draw, must con-
vince 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
 Palimpsests and lack 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 circum-
stances, carry authority and threat, but on a store front in rural Trinidad
only mark the colonial’s 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. Vijayan’s 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 compe-
tition with the local manufacturer of bidi cigarettes. Then, on ‘the walls
of Koomankavu, on the little culverts, across quarried rocks, misspelt slo-
gans 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 Biswas’s youth is witness to the gradual filling of Trinidad with
printed words that repeat the world with a strange, mocking insist-
ence. ‘Occasionally there were inexplicable rashes of new signs’, where-
upon 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 Waterman’s 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 col-
ony resembles a near illegible palimpsest, such as Mr Biswas creates when
he paints signs for local elections on banners pinned to the wall:€‘paint
116 A home in the world on paper:€V. S. Naipaul
leaked through and the wall became a blur of conflicting messages in dif-
ferent colours’ (70).
When he was young and helping in Bhandat’s rumshop, it surprised
Mr€Biswas 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 Biswas’s fam-
ily drinks Ovaltine, Govind’s 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€– Dodd’s
Kidney Pills, Beecham’s Pills, Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Sloan’s Liniment,
Canadian Healing Oil (95), Tiger Balm (179), Sanatogen (222), Ferrol (268),
and Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder (164). The Barbadian writer Austin
Clarke remembers that the writing on boxes of Beecham’s pills ‘extolled
England’s greatness’:€ ‘we knew and believed that “nought shall make us
rue, if England to itself do rest but true and takes Beacham’s (sic) pills”’.14
The decrepit and impoverished Bhandat spends his last days submitting
entries to slogan-writing competitions. Although he himself uses Palmolive,
Mr€Biswas 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 solicitor’s 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 Maclean’s ‘badly-written notice board’ proclaims him ‘a car-
penter 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). Maclean’s sign is comic because the painter
manifests a naïve 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).
 Palimpsests and lack 117
Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude features a
comic version of the modern proliferation of signs. When a plague of
amnesia strikes Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía, alarmed to discover that
he has forgotten ‘even the most impressive happenings of his youth’, takes
up ‘an inked brush’ and marks ‘everything with its name:€ table, chair,
clock, door, wall, bed, pan. He went to the corral and marked the animals
and plants:€cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava, caladium, banana.’15 Soon the inter-
ior walls of the house are pasted with words on paper. Ever since Plato,
the coming of literacy has commonly been narrated as a crisis in collective
memory. One Hundred Years retells this narrative of loss reversing cause
and effect:€no one knows what produces the amnesia plague and writing
serves as a counter measure. The townsfolk even put up a sign that says
M AC ON D O at the beginning of the road. Macondo thus joins the
many towns around the world that, even when they do not recognize that
they suffer from amnesia, have put up such signs. A sign is even needed to
remind people in Macondo that G OD E X IS TS . Such signs, too, have
become common on the side of roads (and on the backs of cars and lor-
ries) and nowhere more so than in the Americas and Africa.
Naipaul himself once painted signs and was proud of his first sign-
board, painted for a man called Bogart:€‘I thought it looked genuine, a
real sign. I was amazed.’16 He later felt a similar exhilaration about his first
successful story, inspired by the same man. Years later, however, Naipaul
rediscovered Bogart, now running a tawdry shop in Venezuela, beneath a
bright sign that promises ‘Grandes Rebajas! Aprovéchese! “Big Reductions!
Don’t Miss Them!”’ and the sign is, he feels, but a measure of how dull
and disappointing the man’s life has turned out to be, quite unlike the
story Naipaul once wrote about him and that started his career.17 The sign
that once bestowed meaning on both painter and subject now betrays and
robs of meaning because it participates in the hollow world of commercial
exchange, deliberately indifferent to the correspondence of words to the
world.
Mr Biswas is painfully aware how words on signs, especially those
of foreign provenance, do not charge the world with meaning but draw
meaning away. When he paints ‘Santa Clauses and holly and berries and
snow-capped letters’, they appear ludicrous and thankfully impermanent;
‘the finished signs quickly blistered in the blazing sun’ (70). When he has
to paint late into the night in order to meet a deadline, the combination
of urgency and the light of a gas lamp can for a moment persuade him
that ‘he lived in a land where romance was possible’, but, when morning
comes, he always remembers that ‘the sign would hang over a cluttered
118 A home in the world on paper:€V. S. Naipaul
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
– is ineffective, because the largely illiterate villagers continue to call his
shop ‘the Tulsi Shop’ (136). Much later, in Port of Spain, he wonders how
to go about setting up as a sign painter again:€‘Could he simply put up a
sign in front of the house and wait?’ (282).
The first time that Mr Biswas’s own printed words actually have a meas-
urable effect on the world, they are not on a sign but on paper, and the
results are disastrous. As he is painting the Tulsi shop in Hanuman House
with ‘B A RG A I NS ! B A RG A I NS ! ’, one of the daughters catches his
eye and he writes her a one-line love note. Readers of the novel see the
message on the note€– I love you and I want to talk to you€– not when Mr
Biswas writes it but at the moment in the narrative when Mrs€Tulsi, hav-
ing intercepted the note, reads it (77). Mr Biswas, whose public writing
has always seemed to him without effect, finds his private writing more
powerful than he intended.
The Tulsis conveniently skip the expensive traditional wedding and
dowry, and have the wedding of Mr Biswas and Shama performed at the
registry office. The marriage certificate seals Mr Biswas’s fate as his birth
certificate did not. In the great mash of printed words that is the mod-
ern colony, a particular power still adheres to the words on legal forms,
such as birth, marriage, and death registries, but also traffic summonses
(200), employee subsistence claims (457), or government questionnaires
(457). Forms, where information is filled in on ‘many dotted lines between
printed sentences’ (157), give people the impression that they are writing
themselves into the legal apparatus of the colony and even manipulating
it for their own ends. Inevitably, however, they find themselves written by
the apparatus instead.
As an unsuccessful shopkeeper in The Chase, Mr Biswas is tempted to
use legal means to recover money from the many to whom he has given
credit. He fills in a legal form with ‘a mauve stamp, slightly askew’ that
says ‘that L. S. Seebaran was a solicitor and conveyancer’ and that provides
space for the one seeking legal redress to include his own content (157).
The form promises to put at the disposal of the plaintiff all the power of
the law and of English, ‘the language of the law’, but Mr Biswas’s attempt
 Palimpsests and lack 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 Biswas’s 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 wife’s family. The Tulsis,
for whom words on paper retain the magical power to control the uni-
verse, have a superstitious notion that the name by which a child is called
should not be the child’s real name, i.e. the name fixed on paper, lest that
name be used to harm her. So Savi’s 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 call-
ing name:€Lakshmi. Signed by Mohun Biswas, father’ (146). This palimp-
sestic desecration issues a challenge to the pristine forms of officialdom,
as well as to the Tulsis. The gesture shocks both Shama and himself (146).
Mr€Biswas also scribbles out ‘Occupation of father:€labourer’, a dire term
that had figured on his own certificate (45), and replaces it with the wish-
ful 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 cer-
tificate 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 chil-
dren (272). The intended palimpsest fails. Much later, however, Mr€Biswas
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
120 A home in the world on paper:€V. S. Naipaul
(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 pundit’s almanac is soon
overtaken in popularity by the Dodd’s 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 Bell’s poem about paddling one’s own
canoe, which he knows from Bell’s Standard Elocutionist (96), a school-
book he accidentally took away when he left school (46). He also stud-
ied from the Royal Reader, from which he learned to relish the word
‘bower’ (214); Macdougall’s Grammar, another book he still has years later
(307), from which he gets the words ‘abbess’, ‘hart’, and ‘vixen’ (116); and
Blackie’s Tropical Reader (307).
School learning, like everything to do with books, is easily dated, and
the next generation studies from Nesfield’s Grammar (307) and Captain
Cutteridge’s Nelson West Indian Readers (280), and so knows different
poems and stories. Captain Cutteridge’s texts, introduced in 1927, offered
more West Indian content than did the school readers in Mr Biswas’s
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 ‘sidetrack-
ing 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 Naipaul’s own snobbery), but Mr Biswas’s impatience with
how the Caribbean is written by Cutteridge is also a desire not to be con-
signed 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
 Literature and the world elsewhere 121
Mr Biswas is a reader long before education becomes essential for any
hope of employment and Trinidad becomes filled with busy ‘Readers and
Learners’. It is his ‘habit, whenever he [buys] something new, whether a
pair of shoes or a bottle of patent medicine, to read all the literature pro-
vided’ (462). A sign painter in search of ever more extravagant forms of
lettering, Mr Biswas takes to scanning foreign magazines and soon finds
himself reading them (70). From magazines he moves to local material. As
an angry young man, he conspicuously reads Aryan Association booklets
in Hanuman House and leaves propaganda for a little-known Christian
sect about (112). More than two decades later, Owad and Anand display a
similar zeal in spreading copies of the Soviet Weekly (486).
The most important items of print, of course, are foreign novels and
books. Some, like the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the Discourses
of Epictetus, will remain with Mr Biswas throughout his life, providing
the solace that the religious inscriptions copied onto cardboard never
could. Others, however, have the debilitating effect of convincing him
that the real world lies elsewhere:€‘Descriptions of landscape and weather
in particular excited him:€they made him despair of finding romance in
his own dull green land which the sun scorched every day’ (70–1). Samuel
Smiles’s Self-Help books in particular present him with unattainable ide-
als:€‘Mr Biswas saw himself in many Samuel Smiles heroes:€he was young,
he was poor, and he fancied he was struggling. But there always came
a point when resemblance ceased. The heroes had rigid ambitions and
lived in countries where ambitions could be pursued and had a meaning’
(71). All that Mr Biswas’s reading teaches him is to see himself from the
outside and to measure himself:€his ‘clothes which hung so despairingly
from the nail on the mud wall were definitely the clothes of a small man,
comic, make-believe clothes’ (141), and the ‘Samuel Smiles depression fell
on him’ (143).
Mr Biswas finds that in ‘the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared
and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger,
his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear
with the most difficult part of his day’ (337–8). The grotesques of Victor
Hugo, however, have the opposite effect. At Green Vale, where Mr Biswas
works as a driver (an overseer of agricultural labourers), his reading of The
Hunchback of Notre Dame in the Reader’s Library edition, bought for the
attractiveness of its cover, makes him acutely aware of the threat posed by
other people and the pain the body can suffer. As he looks at his fingers
‘dusted with gilt from the pall-like cover of the book’ (240), his mind is
filled with great ominous clouds that migrate from the book. He starts to
122 A home in the world on paper:€V. S. Naipaul
speak his thoughts aloud and write inspirational words on his head with
his finger, magically trying to internalize them the way he has internal-
ized 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 him-
self writing them over and over on ‘packets of Anchor cigarettes and boxes
of Comet matches’ (190). This palimpsest is an image of the colonial con-
dition 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 Biswas’s 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 Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, the narrator’s 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 Biswas’s fate as a character is not as bleak as Amina’s, if he finds
himself accommodated by the novel that bears his name, it is because he
 Learning the desire to be a writer 123
is not merely part of someone else’s 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 beauti-
ful 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 couldn’t bear to look at the newspapers on
the wall’ (287). Now, however, standing before the offices of the island’s
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 (387–8). As he confronts a recep-
tionist in the offices of The Sentinel, the words that haunted him in Green
Vale echo through his head:€‘Amazing scenes were witnessed in St€Vincent
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 Thurber’s 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 poten-
tial 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 don’t have a story.
I want a job’ (289). This is, of course, the wrong answer. Mr Biswas can-
not 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
124 A home in the world on paper:€V. S. Naipaul
fiction and not news, is headlined ‘FOU R C H I L DR E N ROA S T E D
I N H U T BL A Z E’ (292). Although he does not recognize this himself,
the story expresses both his fear as a fatherless child of being lost and
unremembered and, ironically, his desire as a man of 31 to free himself
from family and commitments. His first published news story, about a
dead baby found on a rubbish heap, also expresses this existential anx-
iety:€why, it asks, does one child win the Bonny Baby Competition, while
another is abandoned and damned? His big break, the story that finally
satisfies Mr€Burnett’s demand that Mr Biswas write something that will
shock him, is a story about an American explorer of the Amazon sent
home in a coffin. That story begins, ‘Somewhere in America in a neat lit-
tle red-roofed cottage four children ask their mother every day, “Mummy,
when is Daddy coming home?”’ (295). Mr Biswas later regrets the ‘gro-
tesque’ quality of this story (530), but he has put into it his own experi-
ence of losing a father and, by rendering it as melodrama, has given it
meaning. The story also expresses a new and as yet unconscious desire:€to
be recognized as a father by his own four children.
A short while later, Mr Biswas, in his capacity as the Scarlet Pimpernel
whom readers of The Sentinel must recognize in order to claim a prize,
makes the trip home to Hanuman House, where he has always felt a mere
dependant, and where his children are growing up without him. They
now acknowledge him with delight as if seeing him for the first time:€‘You
are the Scarlet Pimpernel and I claim the Sentinel prize!’ (297). The Tulsi
children have never had much luck with contests:€they fill in ‘their names
and addresses on dotted lines’ on competition entry forms but never win
(191). They might have better luck if they sent in the forms (191). But now
Mr Biswas brings the contest to them and ‘Savi and Anand at once took
possession of him’ (297). Shama holds up the newest baby and asks it,
‘Who is that man?’ (299). This is an echo of an earlier scene when Mr
Biswas had asked Shama to close her eyes, open them, and imagine it was
the first time she saw him:€‘What would you say I was?’ (143). Mr Biswas
is on the way to providing an answer. He is not a sign painter, shop-
keeper, or overseer, but a man learning to invent himself by borrowing a
name and a role from a novel.
In his capacity as Scarlet Pimpernel and out of ‘memories coming from
he knew not where’, Mr Biswas writes about a terrifying night spent in
a tree:€ ‘It was midnight and I was alone’ (297).24 The terror derives its
power from his childhood in Parrot Trace, when his father drowned, and
from his nervous breakdown during the terrible rainstorm in Green Vale.
Mr€Biswas is learning that, in order not to succumb to the terror he feels,
 Learning the desire to be a writer 125
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 Biswas’s career as a journalist is never fully happy. A new editor-
ial regime at the Sentinel propagates what Naipaul calls the ‘documen-
tary 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 regime’s emphasis on bland objectivity€– ‘I
don’t 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 gener-
ated 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.
126 A home in the world on paper:€V. S. Naipaul
Indeed it fails to capture Trinidad because it is false to Mr Biswas’s sense
of himself and his place in the world. The sociologist lives in two rooms
with his family and does the bulk of his writing in the bed (434), which
he shares with his son. In carrying out the survey, he ‘covered many sheets
with long, snakelike addition sums, and the Slumberking was spread with
his questionnaires’ (459). Once again, as at Green Vale, writing threatens
to surround and swallow Mr Biswas.
Frustrated by journalism, he attempts to write literature. He takes
courses by correspondence from the Ideal School of Journalism in
London (about the same time that Sipe in Ìsarà writes away for courses
from the Ray Gunnar Inter Correspondence School). The principal of
the Ideal School of Journalism has discovered ‘the secret of every plot
in the world’, twenty years or more before Northrop Frye discovered it,
and claims ‘his discovery had been accepted by the British Museum in
London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford’ (309). The secret of every
plot, as in Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, is that literature reflects the four
distinct seasons of the non-tropical world and addresses an audience with
already fixed expectations. Although Mr Biswas dutifully writes essays on
summer, spring, winter, and autumn€– ‘Autumn is with us again! “Season
of mist and mellow fruitfulness”, as the celebrated poet John Keats puts
it so well. We have chopped up logs for the winter’ (310)€– the only thing
he learns is that the secret of literature seems inapplicable to a colony
like Trinidad. He is also asked to write ‘pieces on Guy Fawkes Night,
Some Village Superstitions, The Romance of Place-Names … Characters
at the Local’, and he finds himself ‘stumped’ (310). These topics presume
a modern world that can appreciate superstitions and eccentricities as sur-
vivals from a past left behind. In the uneven development of the colony,
it is impossible to judge what are superstitions and what are eccentrici-
ties, or even what is safely the past. If every plot in the world is known,
Mr€Biswas feels his writing and his very life remain without one.
As a novice journalist, Mr Biswas interviews an English novelist vis-
iting Trinidad, ‘a man about his own age, but still young, and shining
with success’, who treats him with condescension (294). Mr Biswas, the
colonial, had thought of ‘all writers as dead and associated the production
of books not only with distant lands, but with distant ages’ (294–5). His
interview with the living writer does not go well. The novelist deliberately
evades the colonial’s questions for he assumes that, as an Englishman,
he alone is able to write the encounter. Years later, coming across the
novelist’s travel book, Mr Biswas sees himself described as an ‘incompe-
tent, aggrieved and fanatical young reporter, who distastefully noted my
 False writing 127
guarded replies in a laborious longhand’ (295). This is a comic version of
the quintessential colonial experience that Achebe casts as tragedy:€ Mr
Biswas finds himself fixed on paper by a metropolitan writer in an unflat-
tering and constrictive vision that not only betrays his sense of self but
also squelches his dreams of becoming something more. The English nov-
elist’s description insists that the Trinidadian reporter could only be pre-
tending to write, that he could never really offer a version of the world in
which others recognize themselves.

Fa l s e w r i t i ng
Mr Biswas never does become what Naipaul would consider a writer. His
attempts at literary writing only produce ‘scurrilous descriptions’ of people
immediately around him (165), or variants on a story called ‘Escape’, a
romance in which the hero leaves his family and finds the love of a beauti-
ful (and barren) European woman (311). The stories of Escape are mere fan-
tasy, a phenomenon whose history in the Caribbean the author of A€Way in
the World traces back to Walter Raleigh, the failed explorer, and Francisco
Miranda, the failed revolutionary. Raleigh’s dream of El Dorado, a land
of gold that does not need to be worked for, has always been for Naipaul
the epitome of harmful fantasy. When Mr Biswas, the journalist, visits the
place where he was born and finds only oil derricks and no witness to his
birth, the demand for objective writing at the Sentinel does not permit him
to express his true feeling. Instead his report bears the falsely cheery head-
line:€ ‘R A L E IGH ’ S DR E A M C OM E S T RU E … But the Gold
is Black. Only the Earth is Yellow. Only the Bush Green’ (38). Pseudo-
objectivity and dangerous fantasy are intimately linked.
The only valid response to the wound of colonialism, according to
Naipaul, is to eschew both objectivity and fantasy, and to achieve the crit-
ical awareness of historical change that comes from standing apart from
the world and fixing it on paper, that is, to become what he calls a writer.
Writing, however, is as likely to encourage false dreams as true ones.
Naipaul says his own vocation as a writer had originally nothing to do
with a love of books (he did not have the means to appreciate them), but
arose rather from a ‘fantasy of nobility’, ‘the conviction that is at the root
of so much human anguish and passion, and corrupts so many lives€ –
that there was justice in the world’.27 To want to write because writing
will be a ‘triumph over darkness’, a ‘refusal to be extinguished’, is false,
says Naipaul.28 Writing does not put an end to darkness nor eliminate the
terror of extinction. It finds inspiration in them.
128 A home in the world on paper:€V. S. Naipaul
Mr Biswas’s story of spending a night in a tree as the Scarlet Pimpernel,
which is as close as he comes to writing about his deepest anxieties, is, like
the novel itself, inspired by a parent. Mr Biswas has just recently found
out that his long-widowed mother, Bipti, whom he had thought ‘useless,
depressing and obstinate’ (296), is staying with his brother Pratap and
moreover was ‘active and lucid’ and ‘a lively and important part of Pratap’s
household’ (296–7). He feels ‘reproached and anxious’ (297), unable to
respond as he feels a son should. Later, upon her death, Mr Biswas is out-
raged by the condescension of the doctor called in to sign the death certifi-
cate. He writes him an angry eight-page letter, filled with quotations from
the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare as well as the New Testament and the
Gita (436). It thrills Mr Biswas to ‘think of the doctor’s surprise at receiv-
ing such a letter from the relation of someone he had thought to be only a
peasant’ (435–6), and he conceives the idea of publishing a series of open
letters to important people, to be dedicated to Anand (436). He never does
publish those letters nor any of the others he writes:€the many letters of
resignation, ‘varying from the abusive to the dignified to the humorous
and even to the charitable’ (338); the unsent letter to Mr Burnett including
‘detailed denigrations of the new members of the staff’ (347); or the letters
to his son suffering his own crisis of solitude in England (528). The extent
of Mr Biswas’s triumph is that he receives replies to his letters from a news-
paper editor (448), a judge (431), and, in a particularly sweet moment, the
doctor who certified the death (444).
The letter from the judge is an invitation to join a literary group. Asked
by the group to read a contribution, Mr Biswas writes a poem about his
mother. His only completed piece of literature is, like his son’s novel, a
work about a parent. The poem, however, is unsuccessful. Reading it
aloud, Mr Biswas cannot finish and breaks down into tears. The prob-
lem is that he was not ‘free of what he had written’ (437). The emotions
aroused by the recent news of her death have not been resolved by the let-
ter to the patronizing doctor:
the wound was still there, too deep for anger or thoughts of retribution. What
had happened was locked away in time. But it was an error, not a part of truth.
He wished this stated; and he wanted to do something that would be a defiance
of what had happened. The body, lying in earth, was unhallowed, and he owed
it honour:€ the mother who had remained unknown and whom he had never
loved. (436)
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
 The inheritance of loss 129
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 (53–4). He forgets ‘how absurd and touch-
ing’ Bipti’s own behaviour at Pagotes had been, ‘welcoming him back
to a hut that didn’t belong to her, giving him food that wasn’t hers’ (53).
The poem ignores the ‘disappointment, his surliness, all the unpleasant-
ness’ and transforms everything to allegory:€ ‘the journey, the welcome,
the food, the shelter’ (53).
Mr Biswas’s 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 Owad’s 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 Eliot’s terminology. For instance, Mr Biswas’s exist-
ential ‘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 didn’t know where the road …
went’ (171). That unknown boy, alone and vulnerable in a universe indif-
ferent to him, is an image of Mr Biswas’s 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 father’s experience of finding himself with-
out a parent able to protect him in a hostile universe. The great rainstorm
130 A home in the world on paper:€V. S. Naipaul
that blasts through Mr Biswas’s half-finished house and through his mind
leaves Anand alone to face the same ‘black void’ (263) that his father him-
self 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 some-
body. 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 experi-
ence’ of Naipaul’s 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
Nelson’s West Indian Geography (417). But Anand is not so much copying
 The inheritance of loss 131
Macaulay as he is learning to copy from his father’s dictation, and Mr
Biswas is using Macaulay as practice for the gifting of his life story to
Anand. Mr Biswas also reads Dickens to Anand and makes the boy copy
out passages, saying, ‘I don’t want you to be like me’; and ‘Anand under-
stood. Father and son, each saw the other as weak and vulnerable, and
each felt a responsibility for the other’ (338).
Mr Biswas’s twin legacies are the writer’s vocation and the fear of desti-
tution, and they are inseparable. Naipaul writes of his own father:
And what is astonishing to me is that, with the vocation, he so accurately trans-
mitted to me€– without saying anything about it€– his hysteria from the time
when I didn’t know him:€ his fear of extinction. That was his subsidiary gift
to me. That fear became mine as well. It was linked with the idea of the voca-
tion:€the fear could be combated only by the exercise of the vocation.32

Anand has every right to be disappointed in Mr Biswas as a father. When

father and son join the two Tulsi sons for a bathe in the sea, Anand almost
drowns while his father is clowning for the benefit of the others. When
the boy goes missing, Mr Biswas announces, ‘The boy all right. Ducking.
His grandfather was a champion diver’ (320), recalling with chilling self-
mockery the earlier tragedy when his father drowned in the pool at Parrot
Trace. It is Shekhar who must rescue Anand. The incident makes clear to
Anand once again that he does not have a father who can protect him. It
also brings home again to Mr Biswas his own painful weakness.
Father and son are unable to express to each other the vulnerability they
share. A wounded Mr Biswas beats Anand, who has his revenge later that
same evening, when he pulls the chair out from under his father to the
merriment of his uncles (323). But the mutual humiliation is also a form
of communication:€the next morning Mr Biswas gives his son money for
milk at school. Father and son both respond to the near-tragedy by writ-
ing. Mr Biswas writes ‘an angry article about the lack of warning notices
at Docksite’ (321):€he wants someone to cover the abyss with printed words
warning people off. Anand writes a school composition called ‘A Day by
the Seaside’ (322), which marks his discovery of the power of words that
are his own. The essay eschews Anand’s usual stylistic quirks and the
images of luxury that he would normally invoke as peculiarly suitable to
writing, and provides instead an unembellished account of the incident
the day before. This is his first honest writing. It names the horror associ-
ated with the descent into the void and, in a small measure, masters it. He
has not yet, however, found an objective correlative for the experience. He
will not find that until he recognizes that his father has known the same
132 A home in the world on paper:€V. S. Naipaul
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, wasn’t
satisfied’ (342), a story that, like Mr Biswas’s poem about his mother, he
cannot finish. Later, at the end of the book, when Anand gets the news of
his father’s 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 con-
vey 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. (523–4)
The house, by providing an anchor for memory, makes it possible to write
the novel.

T h e mo t h e r’s s t or y
As an adolescent, Anand, however, lies awake at night, afraid that the
house will fall (519). Significantly it is Shama’s heavy step that he fears
the most. In bearing witness to his father, has the novel, that other house,
not been unfair to his mother? Does she not also have a story? Shama
has a ‘little bit of reading and writing’, but ‘Nothing to worry about’, her
uncle Seth had reassured Mr Biswas (81). She, too, has been to school, and
throughout their married life, it is she who keeps the accounts, ‘writing
in her round, stylish, slow Mission-school hand’ (132–3), which ‘always
deteriorated after the first two or three lines’ (144). Mr Biswas finds it
touching that she writes just as she talks:€‘phrases he had only heard her
speak committed to paper’ (144), but he mocks her keeping of accounts as
her ‘little daily puja’ (306). She explains, ‘I only trying to give you a raise’
 The mother’s story 133
(306). At school, Shama had even once had an English penpal; she, like
Akinyode Soditan in Ìsarà, is aware through writing of a world much lar-
ger 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 penpal’s letters and the Shama that they reveal (186, 384).
Anand finds a cache of documents, including his parents’ marriage cer-
tificate, his own birth certificate, and Shama’s letters from her penpal, that
recalls the tin box Soyinka found containing his father’s 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
son’s novel as well.
Of course, if Shama has a story, it would be different than Mr Biswas’s.
Shama approves of the new regime at the Sentinel that imposes more rigor-
ous 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 Shama’s placid
handwriting, and he said, “I don’t 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 Biswas’s
fecklessness that inspires it. The house on Sikkim Street lands the fam-
ily 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 Lima’s and buy that brooch you always talking about’
(512). Instead of a brooch she gets the house, which she feels is a ‘mill-
stone’, 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
134 A home in the world on paper:€V. S. Naipaul
life paying off a friend’s 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
Anand’s narrative is false, only that Shama marks its limits. The Afro-
Caribbean is, of course, another limit, one that we will consider in the
next chapter.
 Ch apter 5

Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal by

Erna Brodber

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 writing’s 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 community’s health, associ-
ated 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 Brodber’s novel, oral-
ity 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 Kipling’s 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:€Brodber’s 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
135
136 Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal
narration but constitute an event within the narrative. They are recited
aloud in the Anglican school before an audience of parents and digni-
taries:€ ‘The words were the words of Kipling but the voice was that of
Ella O’Grady aged 13’ (5). Kipling’s 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 another’s 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 Kipling’s poem for
recitation because it ‘taught History, Geography and Civics! And bet-
ter still, love for the Empire, so badly needed with England facing war’
(27). Holness’s 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 citizen-
ship”â•›’.2 Holness seeks to inculcate the virtues his name suggests, but his
pedagogy has pernicious results. Ella goes on to recite Kipling’s ‘White
Man’s Burden’. Clearly such a diet of imperialist propaganda is harmful
to the psychic health of the young colonized subject. Sitting in the audi-
ence, 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 Bell’s 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
 The letter kills but the spirit saves 137
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 else-
where. 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 perform-
ance, 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 imperial-
ism 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 onwaaard’8), 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 edu-
cational officers. So impressed were we, including the teacher, with our own per-
formance, 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 white-
ness 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 Kipling’s
paeans to empire because she alone in the school looks ‘white’ (9). The
138 Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal
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 cul-
ture:€shunned by her classmates and unable to see a positive representation
of herself in her immediate environs, she looks for self-validation in repre-
sentations 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, Wordsworth’s 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 Kipling’s poems to recite, ‘he wasn’t
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 read-
ing 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 dimen-
sions, 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 Kipling’s
steamers (12). Indeed, the three friends have done more than Kipling’s
child speaker:€ they have boarded the steamer and travelled to Quebec
and Vancouver (12). In Soyinka’s Ìsarà Akinyode, who reads of Wade
Cudeback’s travels to Quebec, never does go there himself, not even in
his imagination.
Ella’s 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 plat-
form and from the people around her. Not just by colour but as an angel
 The letter kills but the spirit saves 139
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 sim-
ply a question of the foreignness of the content. After all, Brodber’s
narration itself makes frequent reference to British literature without
any qualms about cultural appropriateness:€ Ella is a ‘silent Alice wait-
ing on the Duchess’ (46); Maydene Brassington is like ‘Mr Dombey’s
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, compar-
ing Jamaicans to literary characters asserts equality. The narrator’s refer-
ences 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 Man’s 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
‘Â�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 Ella’s 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 sta-
tus between slave and master’.14 The black woman’s 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 ori-
gins:€‘An invisible mother. Possibly half caste. Very like the kept woman
of somebody important’ (15). Brassington himself accepts the myth of the
140 Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal
black woman’s fatal weakness even as he excuses her guilt:€‘How can a
black woman really be Eve when the God of the garden had stacked the
cards so that she could not say “No”?’, he asks himself (87).
Her race puts Ella at risk, but so does her gender. The unreality of
books and the concomitant danger of reading is a theme as old as the
novel, but the threat is always regarded as most acute for young women
of child-bearing age. The hold that reading has on eligible virgins, such as
Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, or newly married brides, such as
Emma Bovary, has often been perceived as a threat to the very fabric of
society. According to Naomi Tadmor, it is still common among scholars
to imagine that women in eighteenth-century England were idle drones
given over to too much reading of novels:
[The historian Lawrence] Stone sees novels and the female novel reader not only
as manifestations of empty-headed idleness, but also as potential agents of social
change. Novels have stimulated romantic notions in the hearts of young women,
taught them to fall in love, vent their feelings in unrestrained ways, and make
imprudent and unhappy choices of marriage partners. Fiction reading also set
impossible expectations of marital bliss, which were doomed to failure. The
result was that idle and frustrated women threatened to undermine the social
cohesion of the nuclear family.16
Sembène Ousmane diagnoses a similar menace in the reading fare of
N’Deye Touti, an educated young Senegalese woman prone to reading
western novels:
She lived in a kind of separate world; the reading she did, the films she saw,
made her part of a universe in which her own people had no place, and by the
same token she no longer had a place in theirs. She went through the normal
acts of everyday living as if she were dreaming, and it was a dream that was
constantly filled with the image of some Prince Charming from her books …
In the books she had read, love was something that went with parties and cos-
tume balls, weekends in the country and trips in automobiles, yachting trips and
vacations abroad, elegant anniversary presents and the fall showings at the great
couturiers. Real life was there; not here, in this wretched corner, where she was
confronted with beggars and cripples at every turning.17
Not all young women have been harmed by their reading. If Ella’s read-
ing list belonged to Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s 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 Sijie’s
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,
 The letter kills but the spirit saves 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. Anita’s 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 asso-
ciated 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)
Anita’s seemingly anodyne study of the musical score, however, no less
than Ella’s dreamy reading of storybooks, ‘splits the mind from the body
and both from the soul and leaves each open to infiltration’ (28). As a
virgin reciting aloud and alone, Anita is vulnerable to spirit attack, and
a ‘poltergeist’ starts throwing stones on her tin roof (54). Soon a hostile
spirit visits her in her bed at night.
Neither Anita’s solfa-ing nor the words of the love song she is decoding
give any indication of serving empire. The danger she faces has to do with
her solitude€– the Reverend Simpson warns that ‘the child shouldn’t be
inside of herself but with company’ (57)€– and the mental concentration
that reciting from a written score demands. Anita would presumably not
be at risk if she learned music by ear. When Ella recites poetry and Anita
reads music, the acts involve subordinating the voice and mind to the
written intentions of a disembodied other.
Brian Rotman gives a neurological explanation for the split in con-
sciousness that reading creates. He argues that, when the alphabet tran-
scribes the sounds produced by the larynx, tongue, lips, and breath, it
leaves out ‘the passion and spirit of speech … the affect, tone, rhythm,
emphasis, pitch and the movements of spoken language which among
other things make song possible’:
The action of the alphabet thus institutes … a horizontal and vertical separ-
ation. In place of a balanced bilaterality€ – the integration within speech of
right-brain prosody and left-brain syntax€ – there is intensification of the left
and marginalization of the right; and instead of a two-way limbic–cortical traf-
fic there is a hierarchy:€a foregrounded neocortex over a weakly active or absent
midbrain.18
142 Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal
The result, according to Rotman, is that the alphabet conjures up ‘an
autonomous mind-agency’, ‘a being for whom the loss of prosody is no
loss at all; a psychic entity who speaks in a voice without tone, emphasis,
irony, distance from itself, humour, doubleness, affect, pain or the possi-
bility of such things; an absent, invisible, bodiless being who/which has
presided over the writing of speech in the West since its inception’ (4).
The guardian spirits of Grove Town call the process by which such a dis-
embodied other gains control over the embodied self ‘zombification’.
The problem with recitation, as Myal presents it, is that it reverses
the direction of symbolization. Instead of the voice expressing thought,
which may subsequently be written down, the source of meaning is the
‘autonomous mind-agency’ of a printed text, which is rendered into spo-
ken words before being integrated into the mind of the speaker. Speech
thus imitates writing instead of the other way around, with the further
danger that thought may follow speech. The result is that the organs of
articulation are split from the mind and put at the disposition of another’s
thoughts.

T h e i de a l of u n m e di at e d c om m u n ic at ion
Instead of reading, which introduces a dangerous division in the self,
Brodber’s novel celebrates the unmediated transmission of thoughts and
feelings between souls. The ideal is porosity between self and other and
between self and world. Maydene Brassington is aware of Miss Gatha
passing in the night without seeing her because she ‘picked up the scent
of an elderly female’ (17). The two women love each other without ever
having spoken:€‘neither needed words to know that each was happy that
the other existed’ (17). Even Maydene’s husband, Willliam, usually an
obtuse soul, acquires enough sensitivity over the course of the novel that
his nerves can register what is bothering his wife. He twitches involun-
tarily, ‘picking up the enormity of the problem and without her having to
tell him’ (44).
Maydene’s transmission of feelings to Miss Gatha and her husband
requires physical proximity. Some people in Grove Town, however, are
able to exchange thoughts in the form of words across distances. We never
see the Reverend Simpson, Mass Cyrus, and Ole African together in one
physical location€– the latter two are hermits as well as traditional healers€–
yet the three males are able to consult each other over the spirit ‘air-waves’
(109). They are myalmen who host ancestral spirits called Dan, Willie,
and Perce, who have been engaged in conversation ever since Africa:€Dan
 The ideal of unmediated communication 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 Bell’s 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 com-
munication 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 other’s company resemble the powers
and benefits that Ella’s storybook ‘angels’, Peter Pan and the others, con-
fer 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 cen-
turies 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 (36–7), but this
heightened consciousness remains Simpson’s 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 invis-
ible ‘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 interloc-
utors 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 trum-
pet, and Dan the cymbals, as well as performing vocals. In the world
144 Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal
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 mem-
bers 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 other’s 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 (anachronistic-
ally) Rastafarian groundation. Here there are no private lines; conversa-
tion 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 Brodber’s readers ever allowed to follow
Miss Gatha’s Kumina devotees back to Africa.
Myal spirit communication does, however, bear a relation to contem-
porary 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
 The ideal of unmediated communication 145
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 Gatha’s acolytes because they look like pictures ‘she had seen in a
study of African drums in her father’s library long, long ago’ (77). (That
volume must be decades older than The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes
of the Lower Niger in Achebe’s 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 tele-
culture 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 tele-
graph€– Ole African is resting when ‘the tap, tap, tap of Dan’s 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, com-
munication 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 wis-
dom 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 Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal
At her Kumina tabernacle, acolytes call out to the spirits, ‘Telephone
from earth to heaven, telephone’ (73). The telephone was introduced in
Jamaica in 1878,23 two years after it had been invented. By 1912 there
were 17,000 telephones in the West Indies as a whole.24 Presumably, the
telephone took years to penetrate into the rural areas, but, even before it
did, the idea of the telephone must have shaped notions of orality, com-
munication, the spirits, and the self. As Lisa Gitelman writes, ‘listening
was changing’.25
The metaphor of electronic technology was applied to spirit communi-
cation throughout the British empire. The ‘Hindu Secret Mail’ or ‘Mental
Telegraph’ was ‘held to have spread insurrection during the Indian
Mutiny’.26 Kipling, whom Ella recites, wrote Gothic stories in which the
technology that sustained the empire was imbricated with the occult
associated with India. For instance, a 1902 short story called ‘Wireless’
features an amateur radio operator trying to pick up radio transmissions
between ships at sea, while in another room someone receives spirit trans-
missions from Keats.27 That story was written at the time of Marconi’s
ship-to-shore tests in the English Channel and gives new meaning to the
poem ‘Big Steamers’, in which a child speaks to ships at sea.
John Durham Peters notes that ‘The two key existential facts about
modern media are these:€the ease with which the living may mingle with
the communication traces of the dead, and the difficulty of distinguish-
ing communication at a distance from communication with the dead.’28
Electronic media are ‘populated by spectral beings who look or sound
human but offer no personal presence and possess no flesh’.29 In Brodber’s
next novel, Louisiana (1994), set in the 1930s, an African American eth-
nologist becomes aware of ancestral spirits speaking through her when
she hears their voices on her ‘recording machine’, referred to as ‘this pre-
cious instrument, first of its kind’.30 This is a version of Electronic Voice
Phenomena and Instrumental Transcommunication, a field of research
begun by Thomas Edison, who, ‘impressed by the “startling possibility”
of the phonograph preserving the voices of the deceased … attempted
until he himself died, to increase the sensitivity of his machine to a point
where it could pick up directly, without the need for a human medium,
the faint vocal vibrations that emanated from the dead’.31 The early twen-
tieth century, when Brodber’s novel is set, is a moment when British ‘sci-
ence’ and Jamaican ‘science’ coincided.
Brodber imagines traditional orality and modern electronic media in
terms of each other and contrasts both to writing. What the Cambridge-
educated, mixed-race William Brassington values about writing is its
 The ideal of unmediated communication 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 literacy’s promise that people can express themselves in public
as disinterested citizens independent of their bodies, a promise predicated
on the medium’s 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 bod-
ies, 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 team’s 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 homo-
social 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 dif-
ferent 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 Englishwoman’s. 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 con-
stituted. To leave linguistic ritual behind, just as to leave race, gender, or
class behind, would be to negate the self.
148 Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal
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
‘Writing’s 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 another’s
spirit, in the age of electronic media it has become the art of reaching
across the intervening spirits to touch another’s body.’35 With the possi-
bility 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 mod-
ern 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 com-
munity is imagined as a function of the proper circulation of ener-
gies throughout the community; ill health arises from the blockage of
that energy in any member of the community.37 In order to cure Ella’s
much exacerbated mental dissociation, the traditional healer Mass
Cyrus absorbs her pain and redistributes it outward in the form of ‘bit-
ter 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 ‘bas-
tard 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 plu-
ralized, permeated by emergent collectivities, crisscrossed by networks
of voices, messages, images and virtual effects, and confronted by ava-
tars 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
 The ideal of unmediated communication 149
upright and erect like a jack-in-a-box … [I]t yanked his head back, stiff-
ened 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
Cyrus’s 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 Cyrus’s 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 neg-
lect 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 authen-
tic 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
Rastafarians believe in the incompleteness and bowdlerization of the
Bible as it has come down to Jamaicans and of the need to read between
the lines in order to recover what has been lost.42 A similar distrust of
the letter can be found in contemporary Zimbabwe, where the Masowe
Apostolics preach that the Bible is an impediment to reaching God. The
Masowe prophet Godfrey Nzira asks rhetorically, ‘What is the Bible to
me? Having it is just trouble. Look, why would you read it? It gets old.
Look again. After keeping it for some time it falls apart, the pages come
out. And then you can take it and use it as toilet paper until it’s finished.
We don’t talk Bible-talk here. We have a true Bible here.’43
150 Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal
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 Gatha’s
acolytes themselves claim an association with literacy when they wear ‘pen-
cils 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 vil-
lage 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 con-
ferred 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 sim-
ply transmitted their ideology rather more efficiently’ (167). The written
word, says Bloch, ‘was, and by and large still is, seen as a form of ances-
tral 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).
 The ideal of unmediated communication 151
True literacy, according to this model, involves listening to the spirit
and not conning the book. Before he performs Ella’s exorcism, the face of
Mass Cyrus bears the Italianate notation designed for classical music:€on
it is written ‘the dulce melodia€ – sweetly please€ –, the pp for soft, the
diminuendo poco a poco€– turn it down please€–, and the curlicues for
rest’ (1). A musical score written on paper is harmful, but when writ-
ten on the face it is not. The problem with writing lies with the prop-
erties of paper, in particular the fixing of meaning. When writing is as
changeable and ephemeral as speech, it can also be as close as speech
to the thoughts and feelings of the self. We understand that the roman
letters and Italian words are a metaphor for what the face says without
words and do not literally appear on Cyrus’s face, but the face does bear a
graphic message that can be read the way writing can be. The metaphor-
ical musical notation is translated for us into two paragraphs of Mass
Cyrus’s internal dialogue, full of rhetorical and dramatized questions,
in a combination of standard and creolized English. Quotation marks
suggest we are getting access to his inner thoughts, which presumably
are framed in words he speaks to himself. The writing on the face, the
unspoken word-thoughts, and the soul all say the same thing. The mes-
sage on Mass Cyrus’s face is not inscribed from outside, like a tattoo, but
emerges from within. The facial expression is before words and as close
to the body as wrinkles and scars.
The score on Mass Cyrus’s face, no less than the score Anita sounds
out, must still be read. William Brassington is impatient when his fran-
tic demands that Mass Cyrus cure Ella receive ‘no response’ (95), but the
fault lies with the Methodist minister who does not know how to read
the hermit’s expression. Brassington is a poor reader of physiognomies
because, as one of his parishioners says, ‘Parson read too much book …
That’s why him can’t look straight in people eye’ (52). He never under-
stands that Mass Cyrus’s face carries instructions addressed to him per-
sonally. While Brassington and his sons (whose family name suggests the
noise they make) are ‘blasting’ the healer’s ears and ‘shaking’ his ‘eth-
eric’ with their demands, the face they cannot read registers a complaint
against their raucous ‘discord’ and tells them to mute their ‘percussions’
and ‘clashing cymbals’ (1). Mass Cyrus’s face calls for silence, but in order
to be read, demands the attention that only silence can foster. Those not
already silent are doomed to misread it. Mass Cyrus’s ‘talking look’ is at
once a window onto his thoughts and impenetrable to the illiterate. And
that failure is its message.
152 Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal

W r i t i ng a s obe a h
Grove Town depends on connections and transparency among the mem-
bers 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 Holness’s
class:€myal conversations are not public but rely on secrecy and social div-
ision. 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 exor-
cism 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 Cyrus’s 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 African’s verdict, ‘The
half has never been told’ (also a line from Bob Marley’s 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 dis-
trict 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 con-
trast 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, wiz-
ards 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 obeahman’s 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 var-
ies) 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 man’s house’ or ‘produce a poltergeist’.46 The first Delaurence edition of
The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses was 1910, but other American edi-
tions 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 Levi’s 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 Delaurence’s occult manuals had a huge mar-
ket 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 rela-
tionships with others’.51 For that reason, Delaurence’s books ‘enlarged
the African Jamaican worldview into a political stance, something cap-
able 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 struc-
ture 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 stick-
ing 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 Levi’s
obeah and kill him, a scene that resembles Jagun’s calling the Agunrin
home at the end of Ìsarà, Simpson warns Miss Iris, who has found her
husband dead in the privy,
154 Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal
Don’t 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 Levi’s obeah performs an action on the signifier (the book) in order
magically to control the signified (spirit power). The myal team must des-
troy 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 Ella’s reading has made her vulnerable. The Brassingtons,
who want the best for her, send her to America so that she might over-
come 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 Ella’s reading is not closed by travel-
ling 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 Ella’s 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 Anita’s eyes and talk
to her; to ask questions of Teacher and Miss Amy’ (81). She can com-
municate with Grove Town across distances almost like the myal spirits
can. An attractive solution to the division between the world of the liter-
ary 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
without a Jamaican narrative to balance her love of British texts, remedies
this lack by creating her own narrative. Telling her story also allows her
to touch the people immediately around her. She finds Selwyn was now
‘ordinary people. And more, Ella could touch him. He had taught her to
and as a matter of fact, she liked touching him’ (81).
However, the very experience that restores her to mental wholeness, tell-
ing her story to another, also opens Ella to manipulation by the receiver of
the story. Ella’s husband, who ‘could make a story live’ (43), fashions from
her stories a minstrel show entitled Caribbean Nights and Days that griev-
ously misrepresents Grove Town as a tropical heart of darkness threaten-
ing the purity of whiteness. White American literary culture at the turn
of the century had ‘a habit of assuming that others are more fully alive
than oneself and a presumption that there is no reason not to appropriate
that life for oneself’.53 The imaginative agenda of the quest for regional
and racial distinctness was ‘not of dismantling prejudice but of feeding
an appetite for consumable otherness’.54 Where Ella’s reading had once
enhanced her self but cut her off from those around her, Selwyn’s staging
of Grove Town robs her of her self altogether by replacing her experience
with something she cannot identify with. The coon show is a represen-
tation of living, named people with the same sinister power as the doll
of Anita into which Mass Levi sticks nails and knives. Selwyn plans to
immortalize his coon show as a film, in which case ‘Ella’s spirit and with
it that of Grove Town would be locked into celluloid for the world to see
for ages on end’ (92). The new technology of film, because it records and
fixes, wields the same demonic powers as writing on paper, just as the
telephone and radio, because they transmit but do not record, continue
the healing powers associated with orality.
Selwyn wrongly assumes Ella will be pleased with ‘what had been
done with all that had left her body’ (82), but his show produces in her
a great psychological and somatic shock. Ella was ‘beginning to feel
dry. Overdrained’ (82). She is once again divided into several selves.
One self blames Selwyn but it suffers the reproaches of an inner child
who has learned the lesson of a young George Washington in The Royal
Readers:€‘Speak the truth and speak it ever / Cost it what it will / He who
hides the wrong he did / Does the wrong thing still’ (84).55 Her disintegra-
tion into multiple, incomplete selves is a demonic parody of the myal cau-
cus, which brings several selves, each whole and consistent and enhanced
beyond the body, into communion.
Both Selwyn Langley and Mass Levi steal energy from a young woman
who has not yet borne a child in order to restore their own depleted
156 Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal
spiritual resources:€Mass Levi sought Anita’s power to relieve his impo-
tence; Selwyn, an even greater spirit thief, consciously withdraws sexual
energy from circulation. As Elisa Sobo explains, in rural Jamaican cos-
mology, 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 America’s 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 trans-
formed into a child and does not help reproduce society.’56 Selwyn’s 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 some-
thing inside, not outside’ the body (82). She prays desperately that the
Lord Jesus enter her, but in her mad state, ‘she wouldn’t 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 condi-
tion 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 Cyrus’s 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 surround-
ings 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
Holness’s 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. (96–7)58
Something is different, however:€Ella’s ‘staring had a clearer pattern’ (96).
When she stares, she is no longer travelling through the air with friends
from books but ‘listening for the earth’s response to what she was doing’
(97). This new kind of attentiveness is like that of Mass Cyrus, who, when
he cured her, sat ‘staring at the prostrate body of his patient’ as he attended
to the cries of pain emanating from the grove (3). Maydene Brassington,
her foster mother, also often smiles ‘into space’ (22). This form of star-
ing is even metaphorically associated with reading:€thinking about Ella,
Maydene ‘stared through the frosted bedroom window as if she could see
some writing beyond’ (45). Anita’s mother also retreats ‘deep into another
world. That half-sleep place where questions write themselves upon black-
boards before your very eyes’ (39). This is the kind of attention displayed
by Edogo when carving a mask, or Akinyode Soditan when contemplat-
ing his notebook. The distraction associated with reading can have value.
Rather than a dangerous detachment from reality, Ella’s habit of staring
now provides a valuable critical distance from her reading. As Ella reads the
story she has to teach the next day, Brodber’s readers also learn the story
of Mr Joe’s farm and the animals who live there, including Dan the dog,
Master Willie the pig, and Perce the chick, as well as Miss Tibs the cat,
Miss Peg the donkey, and Mr Grumps the goat. Ella reads the book alle-
gorically, and aspects of it make her unhappy. In Mr Joe, who makes the
animals work, she sees a figure of the colonizer. The animals remain sub-
ject to him, she reasons, only because they are divided among themselves
and mistrust their own, especially the best and brightest, Perce and Master
Willie. When the animals go on strike and leave the farm, they learn the
158 Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal
bitter lesson that ‘exodus was exile’ (102). Independence is not what they
imagined, and they make their way back to Mr Joe’s (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 Joe’s 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 Brodber’s novel, is that one need not read obedi-
ently. Ella learns to put quotation marks around the story of Mr Joe’s
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 (language’s) 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 substitu-
tions enables it to accomplish its role of representation’.59
Critics of Brodber’s novel consistently celebrate this account of the sub-
versive capacity of postcolonial reading as the book’s 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 shouldn’t have done it”’ (109). Ella’s
seminar, and by implication Brodber’s novel, will attack the undersecre-
taries 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, des-
troy 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 159
The lesson Ella learns, however, to put a critical distance between
herself and the narratives of others, complies with a strategy concocted
behind the scenes without her awareness. Her new critical reading skills
are developed with the help of the Reverend Simpson, who is putting into
practice the advice that Willie gave Dan:€‘Get in their books and know
their truth, then turn around ship and books into those seven miles of the
Black Star line so desperately needed’ (67).60 Ella herself remains unaware
of the myal spirits’ existence, and never realizes that she appears as a doll
in the alternative barnyard world of the spirits. She cannot tell her stu-
dents ‘the half’ that she was unable to tell Selwyn because she still does
‘not know it’ (56). The guiding spirits are happy to keep it that way:€Ella
need not know their intentions in order to serve the community. Perce
congratulates Dan for his success in steering her:€‘And they never knew
that you did it. Roll on my Dan, Right on my man’ (99). The forces of
orality know and see around the forces of critical literacy.
Ella’s critical reading is more complex than usually acknowledged. The
story of Mr Joe’s farm exists outside Brodber’s novel in Caribbean Readers
Introductory Book One, which was first published in 1937 (and not actually
available in St Thomas in 1918). The series was written by the Jamaican
educators A. J. Newman and Philip Sherlock. Sherlock, author of many
books on West Indian folk culture and history, has been called ‘One of
the fathers of West Indian literature’.61 Newman and Sherlock’s story of
Mr Joe and his animals is not a simple allegory of imperialism. Mr Joe is a
black man in the Caribbean who builds his own house and cooks his own
food. He does not have a farm and only acquires animals when they come
to him:€ first, Miss Tibs the cat, who invites Mother Hen, who hatches
some chicks, including a black one called Percy. Eventually Mr€Dan the
dog, Mr Grumps the goat, and Master Willy (sic) the pig wander in and
join the community.
Along with the development of community, a major theme of the
story in the Reader is the establishment of boundaries delineating inside
and out. Master Willy and Percy the chick repeatedly go where animals
should not, into the house or the shed or out of the gate, and so get into
trouble:€ Master Willy is trapped in a box that falls on him until he is
rescued by Mr Joe, who then builds him a pen in order to keep him out
of trouble. Master Willy’s confinement does have connotations of the end
of freedom, but the colonial allegory that Ella finds is not clear-cut. Not
everyone likes Willy, although Mr Joe does, but no one treats Willy and
Percy as ‘sub-normals’, as Ella argues they are treated (97). On the con-
trary, Percy and Master Willy have the most personality of any of the
160 Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal
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 Joe’s
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 ani-
mals, and invites her to join them all at Mr Joe’s place, which she happily
does.
Newman and Sherlock’s 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 Joe’s 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 grand-
son 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 sen-
tence 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 Joe’s
family has remained with me, like yesterday’s songs.’64
Ella’s reading of Mr Joe’s Farm as an allegory of colonialism is like the
discovery by Akinyode and Sipe in Ìsarà that the name of their school,
St Simeon’s, constitutes a compromising pun. St Simeon’s is Soyinka’s
invention and so, therefore, is the terrible secret of its meaning. In a simi-
lar fashion, Brodber plants the pernicious allegorical meaning that Ella
finds in the story of Mr Joe’s 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 critic-
ally, 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 Joe’s 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, Brodber’s novel implies, the myal spirits
were the animals on Mr Joe’s farm, and in some Platonic sphere they
continue to be. Mr Joe’s 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 Joe’s 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 represen-
tation 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 Sherlock’s 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 tem-
poral 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 Brodber’s
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
162 Literacy in the world not ruled by paper:€Myal
itself be a form of beneficent spirit transport. Georges Poulet argues that
reading is a ‘giving way not only to a host of alien words, images, ideas,
but also to the very alien principle which utters them and shelters them’:
Now it is important to note that this possession of myself by another takes place
not only on the level of objective thought, that is with regard to images, sensa-
tions, ideas which reading affords me, but also on the level of my very subjectiv-
ity. When I am absorbed in reading, a second self takes over, a self which thinks
and feels for me.67
When he reads, says Poulet, ‘I am on loan to another, and this other
thinks, feels, suffers, and acts within me.’68 Nicholas Royle suggests that
all literature is haunted by telepathy, the communication of spiritual
messages directly without mediation, whether between living parties or
between the living and the dead.69 Certainly fictional realism obeys a set
of otherworldly conventions whose strangeness readers are prone to forget.
Narrative omniscience, for instance, affords readers access to the mental
processes of characters. Through free indirect discourse, Brodber’s narra-
tive not only allows us to overhear the myal team, but also shows us Amy
Holness’s angry thoughts about Maydene Brassington (20–1), and Mass
Levi’s wife, Miss Iris’s thoughts (34). We have seen that inveterate readers
like Akinyode and Sipe conjure up each other’s presence when they com-
pose mental letters. And both Soyinka and Naipaul lovingly recover the
presence of their fathers through reading and writing.
There is healthy reading and harmful reading, Brodber implies; read-
ing can empower as well as deform. Reading need not be an alienating
activity but can be an invitation to readers to join a realm not unlike
that where the myal spirits meet. According to Deborah Brandt, the pri-
vate self of the writer or reader is an illusion created by treating a text as
autonomous. The truth is that ‘Texts shine back at writers and readers a
developing allegiance to a common orientation, a specific and intimate
present that each relies upon for meaning and order, a common know-
ledge accomplished uniquely by “the we”, writer and reader, whose paths
through the texts grow difficult to distinguish from one another.’70
 Ch apter 6

Southern Africa’s Houses of Hunger

Doris Lessing, who grew up in Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe),

recalls how she became a reader and eventually a writer. Although her
family lived in a mud hut on a remote farm, she was exposed to books
from a young age and had little to do but to read:
The bookshelves at home were full of books not only because my parents took
books with them to Africa, but because they continually ordered books from
London, every kind of book and periodical. In those days it took a long time.
First the letter from the farm in Africa took over a month to get to London.
There the order had to be processed. Then the parcels of books took a month
or so by ship to Africa. They went from the port by train to old Salisbury, were
put on another train, and were fetched from the station by a servant who bicy-
cled or walked the seven miles. I shall never forget my excitement as the books
were unwrapped. What had arrived this time? A remarkable mix of books, and
I seized Black Beauty, or Little Women, or Pride and Prejudice, or The Mayor of
Casterbridge, or the story of Alexander the Great, and bore them off to my room,
where books were piled on chairs, on the empty bed beside mine, around the
walls€ – where they were always in danger of being devoured by fishmoths or
white ants.1

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 after-
ward, 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 mater-
ial, both children’s books and adult novels, from a neighbour who worked
for a white family and who had been given the discarded books as gifts.3

163
164 Southern Africa’s Houses of Hunger
In the late fifties and early sixties, young Dambudzo Marechera
haunted the dump outside the town of Rusape, in Southern Rhodesia,
foraging for whatever printed matter he could find. As he tells it in a self-
interview,
I scratched around in the rubbish with other kids, looking for comics, maga-
zines, books, broken toys, anything that could help us kids pass the time in the
ghetto. But for me it was the reading material that was important. You could
say my very first books were the books which the rabidly racist Rusape whites
were reading at the time. Ha-ha my most prized possession was a tattered Arthur
Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia€– very British Empire orientated but nonetheless a
treasure of curious facts about the universe and the earth. There were jingoistic
British Second World War comics. Superman. Batman. Spiderman. Super this,
super that. Mickey Spillane, James Hadley Chase, Peter Cheyney, Tarzan things
and Tarzan thongs.4
Himself consigned to the category of the abject by the racist state€ –
Vengere, the township outside Rusape where he grew up, was a ‘seething
cesspool’5€ – he retrieved reading matter from the dump with the same
excitement as Lessing had received books from the hands of the servant
who fetched them from the station.
The paper that Marechera and his friends collected became the centre-
piece of a makeshift office in the midst of garbage. As Marechera tells it,
I had these two friends, Washington and Wattington, twins. They had built
‘offices’ of mud and tin and cardboard, offices about two and a half feet high.
They had a children’s typewriter. They were the Chairman and the General
Manager. I was the office boy. We had a library there€– of books and comics sal-
vaged from the dump. Every day it was the rubbish dump€– and then the offices.
Washington typed down meticulous records of each day’s acquisitions. See what
I mean? There was the typewriter, there were these books. After school every day
that was what we did.6
Isabel Hofmeyr points out that, in this reminiscence, Marechera ‘sets out
satirically the ways in which books demand particular forms of behav-
iour; 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 children’s encyclopedias, comics, and cheap paper-
backs that the boys collected suggest office space. Indeed, to their ori-
ginal owners, the comics and pulp fiction Marechera salvaged would have
had a quality of ‘trash’ about them even before they were thrown out.
 Southern Africa’s Houses of Hunger 165
Marechera and his friends’ dream of an office was inspired by the ideal of
books rather than by the actual books in the dump.
Marechera’s 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 white-
collar and white world, longed less for social mobility than for the kind
of private space that Lessing had. Lessing’s books overwhelmed her fur-
niture, reconfigured the contours of the room, and rendered the domestic
interior a reflection of her mind. Marechera spent the bulk of his writ-
ing 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 inter-
ior space that feels potentially freer than a larger external space of con-
finement 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 Marechera’s 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 Augustine’s at Penhalonga, which
had much in common with St Simeon’s Teacher Training Seminary in
Soyinka’s Ìsarà. The missionaries at St Augustine’s refused to bow to the
racist policies of Ian Smith’s 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 Soyinka’s novel, Sipe Efuape doubts whether the horrors of King
Leopold’s Congo Free State ever existed. In Marechera’s Rhodesia, noth-
ing 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
Ìsarà was published. In the mid seventies, when Marechera’s novella was
written and is set, Rhodesia was in the midst of a fierce guerrilla war
166 Southern Africa’s Houses of Hunger
for black rule that would eventually lead to an independent Zimbabwe
in 1980. (Of course, since independence Nigeria has seen horrors of its
own in the form of massacres, civil war, and totalitarian regimes, which
Soyinka has lived through and chronicled; in part Ìsarà regards the colo-
nial period with nostalgia for the optimism for the future that had once
been possible.)

T h e f i r s t-pe r s on pronou n a n d t h e s e t t l e r s tat e

Marechera remembers a world of ‘horrible dark nights’.10 Although
there was electricity at school and the university, ‘the street lights never
worked’.11 The narrator of ‘House of Hunger’, a former university student,
reads by the fitful light of a candle, which casts as much shadow as light
on the page, and the erratic, stark, and disconnected scenes of the novella
emerge from and return to a surrounding darkness. The narrator repeat-
edly lights matches in pitch-black rooms in order to discern what kind
of space he is in or to look at the face of the person with him (28). In a
nightmare hallucination, he lights up a room with his pain, which flares
up but then dies down, leaving him with just a burnt matchstick, like a
‘burnt-out insurrection’, which is the sum total of ‘the stories of those
black heroes among whom my story was merely one more skin-lightening
pain’ (25).
Electric light, because it is shared, is mounted on the ceiling, and illu-
minates everything, appears neutral and objective. It lends itself to third-
person narration. So does the communal fire. The light from a match,
on the other hand, emanates from between the thumb and index finger,
the same fingers that hold a pen. There is a correlation between the light
from a match held before the eyes and Marechera’s use of first-person nar-
ration. A match lights only the space immediately around the striker, its
light is fitful and brief, and the risk of burning fingers is high.
Writing by Nigerians who came of age at the time of independence,
like Achebe and Soyinka, is overwhelmingly in the third person. I think
it can be shown, however, that black literature from Southern Africa in
general and Zimbabwe in particular is just as overwhelmingly narrated in
the first person. The use of the first person is invited by the traumatic self-
division produced in Africans by the experience of racism in the settler
states of Southern Africa.
The first black writing from South Africa was autobiography. Tell
Freedom, the memoir of Peter Abrahams, the South African Coloured
writer, born in the same year, 1919, as Lessing and Mphahlele, opens with
 The first-person pronoun and the settler state 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 boy’s position
inside a small room, looking out to another, even smaller space glimpsed
through an impenetrable but transparent flat surface, resembles the con-
dition 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 boy’s 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 we’ll
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 narra-
tor’s first recorded memory is of being apart from his parents both phys-
ically 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 ren-
dered Lee a subject confronting an objectified world outside himself. Self-
consciousness 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
168 Southern Africa’s Houses of Hunger
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 mem-
ory, 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 cata-
lytic 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 narra-
tion. 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 entifica-
tion of the alphabet’s virtual user:€an unembodied being outside the con-
fines 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
 The first-person pronoun and the settler state 169
Poulet explains that ‘Whenever I read, I mentally pronounce an I, and yet
the I which I pronounce is not myself.’ Since ‘every thought must have a
subject to think it, this thought which is alien to me and yet in me, must
also have in me a subject which is alien to me’.16
The division that Abrahams knew as a child between the township he
lives in and the world of books is subsequently mapped onto another div-
ision:€that of race. An older Abrahams walks through white Johannesburg
at night, looking through the lighted windows of the houses. Now he is
on the outside and is struck by the dryness and warmth of the interior
spaces:€‘There was the magic of electricity. A boy could read Lamb’s Tales
[from Shakespeare] without strain in such light. And often, I saw whole
walls of books. What a sight!’ (Tell Freedom, 164). Looking through these
windows, he sees the same light-filled, warm, and dry world he saw in the
raindrop, now explicitly identified with books and the space that they
open up for the reader. But the adolescent is painfully reminded of his
exclusion by the signs ‘RESERVED FOR EUROPEANS ONLY’ that
meet him everywhere (164, 260, 310).
The three books the boy himself owns, Lamb, Palgrave’s Treasury, and
Keats, ‘fed’ his desire and his resentment. A still older Abrahams discov-
ers the shelf marked ‘American Negro literature’ at the Bantu Men’s Social
Centre in Johannesburg. The books on it inspire him by ‘crystallizing my
vague yearnings to write’ and ‘showing me the long dream was attainable’
(197). He tries to tell his family about his newfound black nationalism
but cannot, because to them America seems far away and they do not
see themselves as black. Once again, Abrahams suffers a painful moment
of self-consciousness, cut off from those immediately around him:€‘They
talked happily about the little rounds of their days. I realized, quite sud-
denly, that I was rapidly moving out of this Coloured world of mine, out
of the reach of even my mother and sister. I saw them with the object-
ive eyes of a stranger’ (197–8). This third moment of self-consciousness
and alienation from family fulfils the dialectic that yokes literature and
race:€desire for another world€– exclusion from another world€– identifica-
tion with yet another world.
Toward the end of Tell Freedom, when the published poet returns home
to Vrededorp from Diocesan Training College in Pietersburg, he under-
goes yet another scene of division from family. Now, however, it is his
sister who has trouble recognizing her ‘educated brother’ (229). He insists
he is the same person, but her ‘eyes said:€ No, you’re not’:€ ‘And because
she had made me aware of it, I realized I had changed. I had a new, see-
ing coldness that had nothing to do with coldness of feeling’ (228). Not
170 Southern Africa’s Houses of Hunger
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 Writer’s 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 Marechera’s narra-
tor’s 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)
The exteriorized thought-object functions as a mirror, showing the speaker
his own brains and face, but the process is distinctly more sinister than
Edogo carving a mask in Achebe’s Arrow of God. And it gets worse:
And through it all the person, I mean my face, was coldly observing me as
though I was a distant, slightly interesting experiment. And there was some-
thing funny going on on the floor where the blotting-pad had fallen … The
circles and the squares, they shot upward like a little explosion, and slammed on
the ceiling leaving a sooty imprint on it, and then fell slowly back to the ground
like a fine black dust. And they were my thoughts, too, these fine black grains.
 Leaving the House of Hunger, finding a home in books 171
They were my life. I spread my large handkerchief on the floor to try to catch
some of it. And I did. (101)
This is a literalization of the notion of ‘dissemination’, the scattering of
grains beyond the writer’s control. In writing, as in sneezing, something
from outside enters the head, where it merges with something within, and
then emerges. What comes out resembles liquid brains and can be col-
lected on a white sheet like a handkerchief. Marechera’s speaker feels that
his ‘soul’ has passed into those dark spots collected in his handkerchief
(102). The speaker takes the grains to a scientist friend ‘at the Institute’,
but all the tests, ‘with a microscope and then with an electronic photo-
thing and then finally … a series of elimination tests’, turn out ‘negative’
(101):€ the grains on the handkerchief do not show up under the micro-
scope. The face, however, whom the speaker calls his ‘elemental twin’
(102), reappears. The speaker hopes that he can control his doppelgän-
ger with the grains in the handkerchief:€ ‘Though how, I did not know
exactly. Those grains, could they be a poison of some sort? Or an anti-
dote? Or were they, those grains, nothing, �completely useless? But it was
something to clutch at. Something palpable’ (106).

L e av i ng t h e Hous e of H u ng e r , f i n di ng
a hom e i n b o ok s
Marechera’s novella ‘House of Hunger’ is a first-person account of becom-
ing a writer in Rhodesia. When, as a young boy, the narrator came home
from school, eager to tell his mother what he had learned, she put an end
to his innocence by slapping him hard. He did not know why until she
rebuked him for speaking to her in English, which she did not under-
stand and thought he used merely to show off (13). He had not even real-
ized he was speaking in English. He had thought he was merely telling
her a story. As in Achebe, reading separates the young boy from the world
of his mother, but the rupture is more extreme than Oduche’s because
what the boy reads is in another language. As in Achebe, the mother’s
speech, meant to contrast with English and writing, is itself written in
English. The mother’s objection to English takes on a greater significance
than she could ever have intended, unless she already sensed that not only
would school draw her son away but she herself would have an existence
in a text she could not read.
Because his mother’s rejection of his speech feels like a rejection of him,
the boy pulls out his English exercise books from under his bed and tears
them up ‘with a great childish violence’ (14). The boy also pushes away
172 Southern Africa’s Houses of Hunger
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 ũg ĩ wa Thiong’o’s 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 mem-
oir opens, reading Eliot’s The Waste Land triggers in Ng ũg ĩ 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, look-
ing 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 Harry’s 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 mother’s 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, mind-
wrenching 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 Harry’s books, while his mother tells his father, eating
at the table, about the torn exercise books. Without warning or explan-
ation, 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
 Leaving the House of Hunger, finding a home in books 173
witness to what it cost to acquire them and prefigure the novel itself, an
English-language text testifying to African suffering.
The narrator’s 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 boy’s
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 boy’s name on it were the boy himself (27). Peter throws the report at
his brother’s 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 ‘screw-
ing’ Immaculate under a table (27). He naïvely 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 one’s 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, ‘He’s 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
narrator’s 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 stu-
pid books you’re reading’ (79).
The equation of books and sexual abstinence is not the narrator’s.
Immaculate, his brother’s wife, eventually joins the narrator in ‘some bed’
far from the house (28). Throughout the novella women are attracted to
the narrator’s 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
174 Southern Africa’s Houses of Hunger
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 Marechera’s 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 pas-
sage 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 Soyinka’s memoir Ibadan, the protag-
onist, Maren, a version of the author’s 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:
‘I’m reading. You’re disturbing me.’
‘Disturbing you! Disturbing you! I said, repeat what you said this morning.’
‘But I don’t remember what I said.’
‘You’re reading on me. I am talking to you and you’re reading on me. Take
your eyes from that book when I’m talking to you.’20

Maren, however, is able to do what Marechera’s narrator cannot:€ ‘he

shrugged, re-opened his book, and appeared to resume his reading. It
never failed. Odali leapt forward to snatch the book away from him,
encountered a fist wrapped around a jar.’21 Soyinka’s flattering alter
ego is able to transform the book into a disguise, a trap, and even a
weapon. His hand can emerge directly out of the book in order to strike
a blow, the kind of direct action of which most African writers can only
dream.
The mission school in ‘House of Hunger’ fosters a similar dynamic
of books and bullies, but the boy who reads does not triumph. A stu-
dent named Edmund is admired by the narrator because he reads Gogol
 The prison-house of print, a second House of Hunger 175
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 por-
traits of the Devil and with enlarged texts of Satan’s speeches culled from
Milton’s Paradise Lost’ (61–2). 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 Stephen’s taste in read-
ing 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
Marechera’s narrator, like Naipaul’s 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 Biswas’s case, the distance between the squalor of lived conditions
and the dreams nourished by foreign texts and images inspires a debili-
tating 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 domes-
tic noises also threatened to disrupt Akinyode’s writing in Soyinka’s Ìsarà,
but never with the malice attributed to them in Marechera. Poverty has
forced the narrator to burn his books for firewood, and he reports sarcas-
tically 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).
176 Southern Africa’s Houses of Hunger
The speaker decides to ‘write the definitive magazine article on the
with-it African family’ for a new magazine with ‘a Modern African Family
slant’ (149). It is a project that will require him to ignore his dreadful liv-
ing conditions and imagine ‘A ten-bedroomed villa surrounded by elegant
acacia trees? A cocktail bar somewhere in it? Foam rubber seats and cush-
ions and poufs and couches and folding beds? On a use-now-pay-later
basis, of course. A television. A giant radiogram’ (151). The writer imagines
advertisement agencies would want him and his family to pose for photo-
graphs ‘recommending Ambi Skin-Lightening Cream, Coca-Cola, Castle
and Lion Lagers, Benson and Hedges, Pure Wool Suits, and, yes, Fanta
Orange Tastes So Good’ (151). Dreaming of an escape from the House of
Hunger only creates another kind of hunger:€‘We would consume chunks
of sermons, chunks of earnest prayers, and consume to the hilt the know-
ledge of our station in the human hierarchy’ (151).
In the novella ‘House of Hunger’, a black night club has walls ‘plas-
tered with advertisements for skin-lightening creams, afro wigs, Vaseline,
Benson and Hedges’, and Castle Lager (23–4). Who eats whom in this
House of Hunger, whose walls are papered over with texts and images
inviting unattainable consumption? Textual representations create in
Africans a self-traducing desire for what others have. The ‘black woman’,
in particular, is
mugged every day by magazines that pressure her into buying European beauty;
and the advice columns have such nuggets like ‘Understanding is the best thing
in the world, therefore be more cheerful when he comes home looking like thun-
der.’ And the only time the Herald mentions her is when she has€– as in 1896/7€–
led an uprising against the State and been safely cheered by the firing squad22 or
when she is caught for the umpteenth time soliciting in Vice Mile. (50)

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 Marechera’s nar-
rator 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).
 The prison-house of print, a second House of Hunger 177
The narrator later returns to the textual House of Hunger in a private
nightmare in which his ‘mind slowly became the room’ (37). Now the
walls are covered with posters papering over the cracks as he cracks up.
The ceiling ‘was pasted over with the crinkled fragments of a sky that
had been cut up recklessly with an old razor’, and ‘The floor was a mirror
reflecting in reverse the parable of the ceiling’ (38). On the walls of this
projected House of Hunger is a poster of a ‘bushman’ cave painting, the
oldest form of durable graphic marks in what is now Zimbabwe, and the
narrator notes how the ‘inner lens of the artist had captured in those few
deft lines the incredible face of human existence’ (37). Such artists, how-
ever, have disappeared from Rhodesia. Another poster shows what has
replaced them:€ ‘a toothy photograph of a black man, ankle over knee,
grinning, holding in each hand a cheap cigar and a rolled cigarette’ (37).
The poster appears to advertise a play, for a ‘price-tag pinned to his cheek
read:€“Fugard”’ (37). The grinning black man also wears a tiny badge that
‘screamed quietly “I A M M E”â•›’ (38).
In Fugard’s best-known play Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, set in apartheid
South Africa, a man acquires the legal means to remain in the city by
switching passbooks with a dead man. The play focuses on a successful
subversion of the tyranny of words written on paper that the white regime
imposes on its black subjects, but the celebration that accompanies the
proclamation of Sizwe Bansi’s death and loss of his name underlines the
inhumanness of that tyranny. The proclamation ‘I am Me’, impossible in
these circumstances, is made even more difficult because the actor play-
ing the former Sizwe Bansi speaks lines by a white playwright.
The foolish trade of a world for a book is at the heart of Rhodesian his-
tory. The boys at the mission school recite a well-known bitter witticism
about the white missionaries in Africa:
‘They had the Bible!’
‘We had the land!’
‘Now they have the land!’
‘And we have the Bible’ (36)
And at the origins of Rhodesia is a tale of literate perfidy similar to the
coming of the British to Ijebu as remembered by the Agunrin in Ìsarà. In
1888 Charles Rudd, a friend of Cecil Rhodes, tricked Lobengula, the king
of the Ndebele and ruler of most of the territory that is now Zimbabwe.
Marechera’s narrator quotes a letter from Lobengula to Queen Victoria:€‘A
document was written and presented to me for signature. I asked what it
contained, and was told that in it were my words and the words of those
men. I put my hand to it. About three months afterwards I heard from
178 Southern Africa’s Houses of Hunger
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. Marechera’s narrator lambasts Lobengula for his foolishness
in ‘Poking his head into a Pandora’s 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 narrator’s
nightmare, in minute characters, is the word ‘C I V I L I Z AT ION ’, over
which ‘some enterprising vandal’, perhaps the narrator’s 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 narrator’s
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 narrator’s 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 ‘She’ll heave you in up to the hairs on your head’ (78). Marechera’s
narrator’s 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 Pandora’s 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.
 The prison-house of print, a second House of Hunger 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 nar-
rator 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 barber-
shop wall of mirrors, revealing a world of others who are merely images
of himself.
Benedict Anderson has argued that the readers of newspapers and nov-
els, 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 secu-
lar, historically-clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?24

Jacobus comments, ‘Notice how Anderson’s scene of reading makes one

reader indistinguishable from the next. Reading enters the public sphere
at the cost of making readers, as well as newspapers, a visible fiction€ –
exact copies of one another, a collectivity of reading heads replicating the
same activity.’25 Anderson’s imagined community becomes Marechera’s
narrator’s nightmare when he finds only mirrors of the self with whom no
dialogue is possible.
The condition of being covered by and unable to escape printed words
on paper is also at stake when the narrator imagines he is a ‘dead tree, dry
of branch and decayed in the roots’ but ‘still upright in the sullen spleen
of wind’, in whose branches are caught ‘a page from Shakespeare’s Othello
and page one of the Rhodesia Herald with a picture’ of himself ‘glaring
angrily at the camera lens’ (19). In a kind of backward motion, the leaves
in books have returned to the trees they came from, but now nature is
swathed by culture, and print textuality adheres to the narrator like leaves
to a tree or even like his own skin. Like Sizwe Bansi, the narrator cannot
180 Southern Africa’s Houses of Hunger
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, imagi-
nes 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 popu-
lar, at the centre and at its margins, it oppresses the African, an oppres-
sion as much linguistic and textual as political, economic, and legal.
In Marechera’s 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 gath-
ered 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 ‘What’s 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. Marechera’s answer to the rid-
dle 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 Marechera’s allusions are to Eliot. The
image of the dead tree on which the narrator’s photo is impaled derives
from Ezekiel by way of The Waste Land. The narrator’s friend Harry has
read Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party (15), in which a character redeems her-
self by going as a missionary to Africa where she is crucified and per-
haps eaten. (The names of Marechera’s 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
 The violence of the letter 181
Edmund mimics the Conradian phrase ‘The horror€ – the horror!’ (36),
which is also the epigraph to Eliot’s The Hollow Men. When the narrator’s
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 else-
where 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, Marechera’s 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 cat-
tle’ (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.
Marechera’s novella, however, no well-wrought urn, does not even try
to reassemble the fragments that have been smashed, the task of post-
colonial poetry as Walcott describes it in his Nobel lecture.26 All the
narrator’s 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 Southern Africa’s Houses of Hunger
‘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).
Marechera’s narrator’s exposure to European literature means he can
only see the world in terms of what is missing. Like Soyinka’s 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 Wordsworth’s Prelude swung me to the oppos-
ite 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 drip-
ping 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 synec-
doche linking individual and nation, mother and Africa, obviously works
to undercut Rhodesia, but also mocks the literature for its irrelevance.
Part of the narrator’s difficulty with Homeric epic is that he identi-
fies 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
narrator’s references to examples of high western art, the colonial sub-
ject has internalized European literature so thoroughly that his deepest
desires (for black heroes worthy of Homer) and his deepest fears (of hav-
ing a traitor within) are both versions of mental colonization. The narra-
tor 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 Salih’s novel Season of
Migration to the North, set in Sudan, reveals to the narrator the contents
 The violence of the letter 183
of a friend’s private library, which are also the contents of his friend’s
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]. Gulliver’s 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 they’d just come straight from the printers. Huge vol-
umes 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 Sa’eed. Colonialism and Monopoly Mustafa Sa’eed.
The Cross and Gunpowder Mustafa Sa’eed. The Rape of Africa Mustafa
Sa’eed’€ – 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 Marechera’s 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 per-
version 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 super-
iority 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 univer-
sal 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 Southern Africa’s Houses of Hunger
democracy that engulfs everything.’32 Peter Kien, the bibliophile in Elias
Canetti’s novel Auto-da-fé, summons his precious library to join him in
the war against the working class who do not value books. He marshals
his volumes thus:€‘Between the letters of your pages you will crush him
to death; each line is a club to batter out his brains; each letter weight to
burden his feet; each binding a suit of armour to defend you from him!’.33
In E. M. Forster’s Howards End, working-class autodidact Leonard Bast
is crushed under a falling bookcase.
Marechera, the working-class colonial educated beyond his station,
strikes back by staging his own version of that scene. In the story ‘The
Writer’s Grain’, an African student at Oxford, as Marechera once was,
attacks a kitten that has entered his room by hurling at it ‘a complete
Shakespeare, a complete Oscar Wilde, the Variorum edition of Yeats’
plays, a Concise Oxford Dictionary, and Thomas Hardy’s Collected Poems’
(110). The cat succumbs to the barrage of tomes:€ ‘Shakespeare dazed it.
Wilde was wide off the mark. Yeats stunned it. Hardy made it scream like
an innocent being tortured. And the Concise Oxford drugged it enough
for me to raise my foot and crash it once, twice, three times’ (110). The
speaker cannot ‘decide to which author or poet to give the privilege of
finishing the little shit’, but finally uses a volume of the Encyclopedia
Britannica to bash ‘the shit to death’ with (110).
The great cat massacre stages a graphic version of what the narrator
feels is his own fate. He believes, contrary to J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth
Costello, that whites treat their animals better than they treat Jews and
blacks:€‘What is done to animals is nothing compared to the grisly his-
tory of man’s appetite for inflicting misery on other men’ (111). He cannot
strike at those with power in Oxford or Rhodesia, so killing an animal
with hardcover projectiles is an act at once of twisted revenge and of self-
hatred, doing to a helpless thing belonging to others what has been done
to him.

R hode s i a n a p o c a ly p s e
Marechera’s narrator converts the House of Hunger that is Rhodesia into
the English-language novella that will accommodate his experience, but
the textual ‘House of Hunger’ feels every bit as confining. In the Rhodesia
of the seventies, people long for an apocalypse in the sense of an end to the
world as it is presently constituted. ‘Apocalypse’ literally means ‘unveiling’
in Greek, and the narrator dreams that the printed paper that covers the
walls of the House of Hunger, blocking access to an outside, and clinging
 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 Christ’s 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 man’s desiring has a name. Julia, the narrator’s 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 word-
covered fabric or paper that inhibits the narrator’s 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 victim’s blood on his shirt, ‘a rather large stain
which seemed in outline to be a map of Rhodesia’ (65). That Rhodesia-
shaped 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 Julia’s breasts.
Starting with the blood from his mouth that stains his notebooks as
a boy, his earliest memory of reading, Marechera’s 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, God’s stains are beautiful to see from
down below or from up above’ (40–1). ‘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 Marechera’s writing aspires.
186 Southern Africa’s Houses of Hunger
In ‘House of Hunger’, as in Sembène and Soyinka, ‘the twentieth-
century train’ (9) functions as an explicit emblem of modernity, includ-
ing literacy. The narrator, however, never travels on the train. Instead the
train passes at speed through the slums and kills pedestrians, most not-
ably 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 twen-
tieth century. There was nothing left but stains, bloodstains and frag-
ments 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 descrip-
tion 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 reve-
lation, ripping open the veil to reveal the flesh. The goal is rather to suture
the skin closed. The narrator’s stitches, which are also his poems, ‘run like
the great dyke [a prominent feature of Zimbabwe’s 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

Conclusion:€the frontiers of writing

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 litera-
ture, 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. Ìsarà, 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 con-
temporary 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 Diop’s Le Cavalier et son ombre
(1997) is a complex allegory of the plight of the writer in a continent with-
out readers. The Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat’s 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 Conclusion:€the frontiers of writing
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 é c r i t- va i n

As Le Cavalier et son ombre opens, the narrator Lat-Sukabé Cissé arrives in

an unnamed town on the frontiers of the anonymous nation seeking pas-
sage across the river to the village of Bilenty in obedience to the summons
of his former lover, Khadidja. He has difficulty finding and then persuad-
ing the one man who can ferry him across:€a M. Ngom, simply called le
Passeur. The wait on the banks of the river reads like a Kafkaesque par-
able of the failure of communication in general and of writing in particu-
lar. The narrator and his narrative never do arrive on the far side.
The bulk of the narrative consists of Lat-Sukabé Cissé describing his
past years with Khadidja. Poverty had once forced her to accept employ-
ment in a wealthy house as a ‘professional story-teller’ (29).1 Her instruc-
tions had been to recite ‘whatever comes into your head about everyday
life or even invent stories’ (53)2 to an unseen stranger on the far side of an
open door. Khadidja could never know if her stories pleased or even if
there was someone listening to them:€‘she was condemned for a long time
to cast her words into the void, always waiting for an echo, however fur-
tive, or the feeblest sign of life, from the other side of the room’ (51).3 This
is an allegory for the plight of the writer:€a story-teller who never sees and
must invent her audience. Khadidja imagined a young boy as a listener
and then invented wild stories to amuse him, but the lack of contact with
an audience or with reality drove her mad, and she started to live in her
stories. In the present of the novel she has joined the Cavalier of the title,
a sort of Don Quixote who is her own invention.
Diop explains that no one is as consumed by doubt and discourage-
ment as the African author because, ‘Addressing himself in a foreign
language to an audience that is in any case too busy surviving to want
to read books, he is almost always sure he has to proclaim his revolt in
a desert.’4 Williams Sassine, the Guinean novelist, used to say that ‘un
écrivain africain est un “écrit-vain”’, a pun that pairs the African writer
with futile writing.5 Part of the problem is language. Diop wonders if the
French language has not deformed African literature:
We might ask ourselves if we are not working with a dead language, that exists
nowhere, so little is it marked by the evolution of lexis and syntax. It is enough
to walk through the colourful, joyous, and boisterous streets of Yaoundé or
 Haiti au delà du miroir 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
In a subsequent novel, Doomi Golo (2003), Diop abandoned French for
Wolof, only to return to French in his most recent novel. In effect, the
African writer has always had ‘a double public’, one in Europe and one in
Africa. As Diop notes, ‘His will to be heard by the oppressor is at least as
strong as his desire to improve the lot of his fellow citizens.’7
Language is not the only problem. There is a crisis of the book in con-
temporary Africa. Where once cheap editions of set school texts were
readily available in markets, ever since the economic crisis of the 1980s,
books have been priced out of the range of most. As states suffered pol-
itical turmoil, often including tyranny and war, people had neither the
resources nor the leisure to think of reading. The universities suffered a
huge collapse, and African scholars emigrated en masse. School systems
deteriorated. The crisis reached a point in which it was not clear whether
there would be a generation of writers to take up the mantle of the writ-
ers who came of age at independence. When, eventually, new writers did
appear, they had often been educated in and lived in Europe or the United
States. The doubleness of the audience for African literature thus became
even more asymmetrical, prompting Diop to write, ‘These writers who
speak of an Africa they no longer know are unfortunately the only ones to
be heard by the rest of the world and so, inevitably, to be heard in Africa’.8
This is the context for the bitter allegory of Le Cavalier et son ombre.

Haiti au del à du miroir

The 1937 massacre of Haitian cane cutters in the Dominican Republic

occurred more than thirty years before Danticat was born. The Farming
of Bones is therefore not a novel of memory the way that Ìsarà or A House
for Mr Biswas are. In the novel, survivors of the massacre complain to the
priests collecting testimonials in order to document what happened:€‘You
tell the story, and then it’s retold as they wish, written in words you do not
understand, in a language that is theirs, and not yours’ (246). A similar
charge might be levied against Danticat’s English-language novel, written
for foreigners in a foreign language. The novel, however, proffers a more
positive judgement of the power of writing to preserve and to restore. In
an afterword Danticat acknowledges the many books and historians she
has consulted. Although she originally knew about the massacre from her
mother, writing about it required research in the archives. Without books
the massacre would not be known.
190 Conclusion:€the frontiers of writing
Danticat’s novel is centred on the Massacre River, the political bor-
der 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 writ-
ten 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 novel’s inspiration is the image of the forlorn child on the
bank of the river that has swallowed her parents even before the mas-
sacre. Amabelle, the ‘orphaned child at the stream’ (132), spends much of
her life staring into watery surfaces, trying to see through them. Señora
Valencia, the wealthy Dominican woman for whom she worked at the
time of the massacre, reminds her decades later, ‘When I didn’t see you,
I always knew where to find you, peeking into some current, looking for
your face. Since then I can’t 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 Señora 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 didn’t 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 Diop’s 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 Amabelle’s 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 reas-
sures 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 rela-
tion of the interchapters to the narrative as a whole replicates the relation
 Haiti au delà du miroir 191
of the book itself to events outside the book. The novel’s dedication€– ‘In
confidence to you, Metrès Dlo, Mother of the Rivers’€– implies that the
book itself will descend into the river where the mother now reigns as
Metrès 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 one’s own body,
with the world, and with the object of one’s desire:
You who know the cave’s 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 can’t 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’ (264–5). 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 cave’s 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 representa-
tion€– namely, the reader. The invitation to the reader is repeated by the
192 Conclusion:€the frontiers of writing
use of the deictic:€‘this prism … This is where’ (100). If we follow the nar-
rative’s 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, ‘stand-
ing in this cave, in a crook where you feel half buried, although the light
can’t help but follow you and stay’ (100–1). 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 pre-
sent. 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 narra-
tor 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

1â•… I n t roduc t ion

1 Achebe, Arrow of God, 2nd edn, p. 191. All references are to the second edi-
tion (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. 235–9.
3 Gunner, ‘Africa and Orality’, p. 1.
4 George, ‘Achebe’s Arrow of God’, p. 356.
5 Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day, p. 45.
6 Newell, Literary Culture; D. Peterson, Creative Writing; Barber, Africa’s
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; Johnson’s 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 préjugé universel, sans doute lié aux exigences de la vie en société
comme telle’:€Hountondji, Sur la philosophie africaine, p. 130.

193
194 Notes to pages 15–24
27 ‘… nous pouvons sans doute aujourd’hui récupérer les bribes philosophiques
de notre littérature orale, mais nous devons savoir qu’en fait de philosophie
authentique tout commence au moment précis de cette transcription, au
moment où la mémoire, débarrassée du savoir qui l’encombrait, et dont la
garde est désormais confiée au papyrus, se libère pour une tâche de critique
qui inaugure, au seul sens concevable de ce mot, la philosophie proprement
dite’,€ibid., p. 135.
28 Diagne, Critique de la raison orale, p. 22.
29 Dossou, ‘Writing’, p. 289.
30 Battestini, African Writing, p. 28.
31 Tuchscherer, ‘Recording, Communicating and Making Visible’, p. 37.
32 Ibid., p. 39.
33 Ibid., p. 41.
34 Finnegan, ‘What is Orality?’, p. 147.
35 Mbodj-Pouye, Des cahiers au village.
36 Koch and Oesterreicher, ‘Sprache der Nähe€– Sprache der Distanz’.
37 Bloch, How We Think They Think, p. 171.
38 Finnegan, ‘What is Orality?’, p. 143.
39 Tuman, A Preface to Literacy, p. 29.
40 Ibid., p. 20.
41 Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, p. 22.
42 Brandt, Literacy as Involvement, p. 17.
43 Ibid., p. 4.
4 4 Ibid., p. 5.
45 Harris, Rethinking Writing, p. 9.
46 Ibid., p. 10.

2╅ The c omi ng of li t e r ac y:€A rrow of G od by

c hi n ua ac hebe
1 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 13.
2 Stewart, Dear Reader, p. 180.
3 Robbins, Managing Literacy, p. 130.
4 Kittler, Discourse Networks, p. 34.
5 Ibid., p. 34.
6 Ibid., p. 84.
7 Hazzledine, The White Man in Nigeria, p. 33.
8 Sugnet, ‘Dances with Wolofs’, pp. 147–8.
9 Ngũg ĩ, Dreams, p. 256.
10 Ibid., p. 67.
11 ‘Je dédie ce livre à ma mère. Bien qu’elle ne sache pas lire … Penser qu’elle y
promènera les doigts suffit à mon bonheur.’ Sembène, Le Docker noir, p. 7.
12 Ibid., p. 2.
13 ‘[T]oi qui me portas sur le dos, toi qui m’allaitas, toi qui gouvernas mes
premiers pas, toi qui la première m’ouvris les yeux aux prodiges de la terre’.
Camara, L’Enfant noir, p. 7.
 Notes to pages 24–27 195
14 ‘Tout adolescent africain a très tôt appris à établir une relation de cause à
effet entre la maîtrise par un individu de l’écriture et l’importance de sa pos-
ition sociale.’ Diop, ‘Ecrire’, p. 87.
15 Nuttall and Attwell, ‘Visual Representation of Reading’, p. 85.
16 Hawkins, Writing and Colonialism.
17 ‘L’écriture … implique l’acceptation, a priori, d’une vie recluse, précisé-
ment dans une société où la force des liens sociaux est telle que toute forme
d’émancipation individuelle est très mal perçue.’ Diop, ‘Ecrire’, p. 90.
18 ‘Qu’il était sinistre ce manuel scolaire! En réalité, il avouait sans bruit la défaite
du vent. Je veux dire par là qu’entre ces murs crasseux de la salle de classe la
chose écrite me séparait de la rumeur fraternelle du monde. Pour découvrir
mon identité, je ne levais plus la tête et ne tendais plus l’oreille à l’harmattan. Il
me fallait désormais baisser les yeux, essayer de saisir le réel à travers ces figures
inertes, trop innocentes pour ne pas être profondément perverses.’ Ibid., p. 88.
19 ‘[L]’accès à l’expression écrite s’accompagnait nécessairement d’une renoncia-
tion à notre propre culture’,€ibid., p. 87.
20 Fraser, Book History, p. 135.
21 ‘[C]onfrontation quotidienne et solitaire avec la Vérité que la lecture apportera
au coeur de l’homme, dans le débat secret de la conversion’:€Raison-Jourde,
‘L’Echange inégal de la langue’, p. 644.
22 Hofmeyr, ‘Metaphorical Books’, p. 105.
23 Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, p. 150.
24 Brandt, Literacy as Involvement, p. 103.
25 Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, p. 151.
26 Achebe, No Longer at Ease, p. 7.
27 Ng ũg ĩ, Dreams, p. 224.
28 Ibid., p. 67.
29 Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue, p. 12.
30 Ibid., p. 86.
31 ‘[P]longer les phares de l’instruction dans les plus petits recoins des intel-
ligences!’:€Sassine, Saint Monsieur Baly, p. 44.
32 ‘[V]ous n’avez pas le droit de laisser le plus petit recoin de votre intelligence
dans l’obscurité. Associez-vous et construisez partout des écoles; transformez
les murs noircis de vos cuisines en tableaux, et alors vous réveillerez le Dieu
qui dort dans chaque Noir.’ Ibid., p. 210.
33 Amselle, Branchements, p. 158.
34 Manguel, The Library at Night, p. 270.
35 Ibid., p. 269.
36 Ng ũg ĩ, Dreams, p. 67.
37 Ibid., p. 222.
38 Sassine, Saint Monsieur Baly, p. 106.
39 Aluko, One Man, One Wife, p. 13.
40 ‘[U]n livre d’alphabet aux lettres flamboyantes’:€Diop, ‘Ecrire’, p. 88.
41 ‘… [G]arde-la pour toi, ta lumière’ and ‘une torche vivante’:€Schwarz-Bart,
Pluie et vent, p. 24.
196 Notes to pages 27–36
42 Djebar, Fantasia, p. 217.
43 Sassine, Wirriyamu, pp. 22, 29.
4 4 Ibid., p. 155.
45 Wren, Achebe’s World, p. 151.
46 Goody, The Domestication.
47 Gates, ‘James Gronniosaw’, p. 55.
48 Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, p. 102.
49 The phrase ‘mastery over book’ is one of the rare occasions when the English
of the narration drops an article in imitation of the syntax of pidgin and
Igbo, spoken languages. In Achebe’s earlier novel No Longer at Ease Obi
Okonkwo is sent to England to ‘learn book’ (p. 9).
50 Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, p. 102.
51 Gates, ‘James Gronniosaw’, p. 68.
52 Amselle, Branchements, p. 69.
53 Goody, ‘Restricted Literacy’, p. 206.
54 Harbsmeier, ‘Early Travels’, p. 78.
55 Seed, ‘Failing to Marvel’, p. 32.
56 Ibid., p. 28.
57 Ibid., p. 28n41.
58 Aluko, One Man, One Wife, pp. 31–2.
59 Brink, A Chain, p. 54.
60 Ibid., p. 53.
61 Badian, Sous l’orage, p. 21.
62 ‘[U]n papier fait avec une matière magique colorante … Il vomit sur la feuille
placée sous lui tout ce qui est imprimé … sur la feuille placée au-dessus de
lui. Mais ce merveilleux papier garde sur lui tout ce qu’il a vomi. Et c’est là sa
magie. Il me suffira de renverser le papier carbone et de l’exposer à la lumière
pour lire la confidence consignée.’ Bâ, L’Etrange Destin, pp. 183–4.
63 Achebe, No Longer at Ease, p. 115.
64 Bhabha, ‘Signs’, p. 108.
65 See Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day.
66 Okpewho, Once upon a Kingdom.
67 Leonard, The Lower Niger and Its Tribes, pp. 259–60.
68 Raison-Jourde, ‘L’Echange inégal de la langue’, p. 655.
69 Ward, An Introduction, p. xii.
70 Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue, p. 12.
71 Coulmas, The Writing Systems, p. 17.
72 E. W. Smith and A. M. Dale quoted in Finnegan, The Oral and Beyond,
p. 82.
73 Quoted in Fulford, ‘An Igbo Esperanto’, p. 475.
74 Krämer, ‘Writing, Notational Iconicity, Calculus’, p. 526.
75 Ibid., p. 527.
76 Ibid., p. 528.
77 Harris, Rethinking Writing, p. 130.
78 Ibid., p. 131.
 Notes to pages 36–43 197
79 Scholes and Willis, ‘Linguists, Literacy’, pp. 218–20.
80 Coulmas, The Writing Systems, p. 40.
81 Raison-Jourde, ‘L’Echange inégal de la langue’, p. 653.
82 Kittler, Discourse Networks, p. 221.
83 Ibid., p. 209.
84 Goody, The Domestication, p. 115.
85 Finnegan, The Oral and Beyond, p. 26.
86 Achebe, ‘Tomorrow Is Pregnant’.
87 Fulford, ‘An Igbo Esperanto’, p. 459.
88 Ibid., p. 491.
89 Quoted in ibid., p. 492.
90 Coulmas, Writing Systems, p. 229.
91 Achebe, ‘Tomorrow is Pregnant’.
92 Nwachukwu, Towards an Igbo Literary Standard, p. 13. Fulford quotes Ida
Ward and R. F. G. Adams, who said in 1929 that Union Ibo was based on
four dialects:€‘An Igbo Esperanto’, p. 490.
93 Nwachukwu, Towards an Igbo Literary Standard, p. 13.
94 Emenyonu, ‘Chinua Achebe’s Vision’, p. 434.
95 Achebe, ‘Tomorrow is Pregnant’.
96 Ibid.
97 Fraser, Book History, p. 132.
98 Achebe, ‘Tomorrow is Pregnant’.
99 Kittler, Discourse Networks, p. 34.
100 Amselle, Branchements, p. 43.
101 Fischer, A History of Reading, p. 255.
102 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 107.
103 Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, p. 214.
104 Siegert, ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire’, p. 309.
105 George Hazzledine reported from Northern Nigeria that ‘the little band of
white officials can see the papers and read Reuter’s [sic] telegrams. The news
of the world seems very real when it is condensed into ten words twice a
week.’ Hazzledine, The White Man in Nigeria, p. 35.
106 Macdermot is based on Sir Hugh Clifford, who became Governor of Nigeria
in 1919. The report is based on the 1922 Report on the Eastern Provinces by the
Secretary for Native Affairs by S. M. Grier (Wren, Achebe’s World, p. 186).
107 Leonard, The Lower Niger and Its Tribes, p. 450.
108 Hazzledine, The White Man in Nigeria, pp. 44–5. In borrowing from
Hazzledine, Achebe has only changed the references to ‘Northern Nigeria’
to read simply ‘Nigeria’.
109 Ibid., p. 96; Achebe, Arrow of God, p. 36.
110 Tutuola, Ajaiyi, p. 97.
111 In Nigerian folklore being stuffed into a sack is a topos associated with slav-
ery. Such a fate befalls both Tutuola’s Simbi and Azaro, the narrator of Ben
Okri’s The Famished Road.
112 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 12.
198 Notes to pages 44–56
113 Perec, ‘Lire’, pp. 16–17.
114 Harris, Rethinking Writing, p. 83.
115 Quoted in Stewart, Dear Reader, p. 78.
116 Hazzledine mentions ‘the advisability of dressing every day for dinner€– if
only as a general tonic’:€The White Man in Nigeria, p. 40.
117 Finnegan, The Oral and Beyond, p. 121–2.
118 Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders write, ‘It was not until some time in the thir-
teenth century that notaries ventured to place so trivial a proceeding as a
change of ownership of a piece of farmland in direct relation to the birth of
the Lord and thus to the course of the history of human salvation. Through
this method, the history of salvation was chartered as the history of the
world. As a result of this dating, time through the text became something
new:€no more the subjective experience of a relative distance in the course
of the world or the pilgrimage of the writer, but an axis for absolute refer-
ence on which charters could be nailed like labels’ (ABC, p. 41).
119 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 24.
120 Brown, Utopian Generations, p. 110.
121 Fabian, Time and the Other.
122 Brown, Utopian Generations, p. 121.
123 Brooks, Body Work, p. 52.
124 Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading, p. 23.
125 Steiner, Language and Silence, p. 383.
126 Quoted in Peters, Speaking into the Air, p. 179.
127 Middleton, The Inward Gaze.
128 Peters, Speaking into the Air, p. 181.
129 Diop, ‘Ecrire’, p. 88.
130 Barber, Anthropology of Texts, p. 152.
131 Stewart, Dear Reader, p. 134.
132 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 22.
133 Finnegan, ‘What is Orality?’, p. 138.
134 Finnegan, The Oral and Beyond, p. 117.
135 Wren, Achebe’s World, p. 160.
136 Kirk-Greene, The Principles of Native Administration, pp. 196, 197.
137 Downes, Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism, p. 51.
138 Warner, The Letters of the Republic, p. 13.
139 Ibid.
140 Temple, Native Races and Their Rulers, pp. 239–40.
141 Quoted in Nicolson, The Administration of Nigeria, p. 233.
142 Afigbo, The Warrant Chiefs, p. 258.
143 Ibid., pp. 270–1.
144 Warner, The Letters of the Republic, p. 12.
145 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, pp. 294–304.
146 Goody, ‘Restricted Literacy’, p. 205.
147 Battestini, African Writing, p. 154.
148 Collins and Blot, Literacy and Literacies, p. 21.
 Notes to pages 57–67 199
149 Harris, Rethinking Writing, p. 109.
150 Ibid.
151 Quoted in Diagne, Critique de la raison orale, p. 45.
152 Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, p. 101.
153 Illich and Sanders, ABC, pp. 5–6.
154 Urban, ‘Entextualization, Replication, and Power’, p. 42.
155 Besnier, Literacy, Emotion and Authority, p. 115.
156 Diop, ‘Ecrire’, p. 88.
157 Lessing, ‘On not Winning’.
158 Brandt, Literacy as Involvement, p. 57.
159 Ibid.
160 Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, pp. 203–4.

3â•… The c on t e n t s of t he t i n t ru n k :
Ìsar à BY wole S oy i n ka
1 Achebe, No Longer at Ease, p. 115.
2 Barber, ‘Introduction:€Hidden Innovators’, p. 3.
3 Ibid.
4 Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day, p. 40.
5 Egejuru, Chinua Achebe, p. 19.
6 B. Clarke, ‘The African Writers Series’, p. 170.
7 Aluko, One Man, One Wife, pp. 27–8.
8 Quoted in Fraser, Book History, p. 84.
9 Soyinka, Aké, p. 14.
10 Soyinka, Ìsarà, p. v.
11 Summers, Colonial Lessons, p. xv.
12 Ibid., p. xxvii.
13 Aké and Ìsarà actually cover roughly the same years, the late 1930s and early
1940s, yet the former is set at a later time in the life of the family. The child
who corresponds to Wole in Ìsarà is but an infant, although Soyinka himself,
born in 1934, would actually have been old enough to remember these years.
14 Newell, Literary Culture.
15 The novel would appear to open some weeks before New Year 1938. A letter
from an American penpal tells of his adventures in the summer of 1937 (8)
and his plans for the following summer. There is no mention of his hav-
ing realized those plans. The climax of the novel, the election of one of
Akinyode’s modernizing friends as the Odemo, the traditional ruler of Ìsarà,
takes place at New Year sometime during the Second World War. The con-
test for the Odemo title was an actual historical event that took place in
1941–3 (Peel, ‘Christianity and the Logic’, p. 135). However, the novel gives
the impression that only a few weeks pass in total.
16 Peel, ‘Christianity and the Logic’, p. 132.
17 Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, p. 122.
18 Hazzledine, The White Man in Nigeria, p. 8.
200 Notes to pages 67–76
19 Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue, p. 22.
20 Peel, ‘Christianity and the Logic’, p. 132n7.
21 Barber, ‘Writing, Genre’, p. 386.
22 Ibid., p. 393.
23 Quoted in B. Peterson, ‘The Bantu World ’, p. 247.
24 Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading, p. 18.
25 Barber, ‘Writing, Genre’, p. 391.
26 Rotman, Becoming beside Ourselves, pp. 93–4.
27 Dames, The Physiology of the Novel, p. 44.
28 Ibid.
29 The West African Review was primarily addressed to ‘Coasters’, white traders
and colonial administrators in British West Africa, but every issue featured
one article written in Yoruba and another in Hausa, and Africans often wrote
articles. For instance, in the November 1940 issue, Samuel Anfah wrote an
article entitled ‘The Problem of Peace:€ A West African View’, arguing that
European imperialism in Africa was the same as the fascism that the war
opposed (pp. 14, 16).
30 Peel, ‘Christianity and the Logic’, p. 139n12.
31 A journal designed for African teachers, it featured many tips on pedagogy,
as well as articles on nature study, industry, and traditional culture. After
1937, it became Nigeria.
32 Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day, p. 38.
33 Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette, p. 165.
34 Chartier, Inscription and Erasure, p. 114.
35 Stock, After Augustine, p. 17.
36 ‘[U]ne intervention qui, tout en venant d’un autre, se produise au fond de
nous-mêmes, c’est bien l’impulsion d’un autre esprit, mais reçue au sein de la
solitude.’ Proust, Les Hautes et Fines Enclaves, p. 52.
37 Ibid., pp. 45–6.
38 ‘[Q]ui ne peut en rien se substituer à notre activité personnelle; elle se con-
tente de nous en rendre l’usage.’ Ibid., pp. 52–3.
39 Calinescu, ‘Orality in Literacy’, p. 69.
40 Ibid., p. 52.
41 Probably based on the Right Reverend A. W. Howells II, Bishop of Lagos
(Peel, ‘Christianity and the Logic’, p. 130).
42 Stock, After Augustine, p. 22.
43 Ibid., p. 57.
4 4 ‘[U]ne interrogation douloureuse devant les petits mots anodins:€ Bilan
Arithmétique Matériel et Moral de sa vie’:€Sassine, Saint Monsieur Baly, p. 38.
45 ‘[P]ourtant ce journal reste mon seul moyen d’évasion de la petite prison
qu’est ma vie:€il faut que j’apprenne à tout me raconter, à me dénuder à l’aide
de ce stylo devant une feuille blanche. Mon Dieu, je ne sais pas encore qui je
suis!’ Ibid., p. 90.
46 ‘Lorsqu’il chassa ces souvenirs, il ne put s’empêcher de retrouver l’inquiétante
et insidieuse petite interrogation intérieure:€“Ai-je bien rempli ma vie?”’ Ibid.,
p. 42.
 Notes to pages 76–86 201
47 Stock, After Augustine, p. 19.
48 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, pp. 49–50.
49 ‘La philosophie, réflexion critique par excellence, ne peut donc se dévélopper
pleinement qu’à condition d’ “écrire ses mémoires”, de “tenir son journal”.’
Hountondji, Sur la philosophie africaine, p. 133.
50 Dossou, ‘Writing’, p. 288.
51 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p. 77.
52 Fraser, Book History, p. 50.
53 Proverbs are recited in a mighty chain indifferent to context by Obika when
he carries the ogbazulobodo masquerade in Arrow of God (225–6), which sug-
gests that Umuaro at least does have a sense of proverbial wisdom as self-
contained and complete.
54 Abimbola, Ifá Divination Poetry, p. 6.
55 Fraser, Book History, p. 41.
56 Quoted in ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., p. 42.
59 Abimbola, Ifá Will Mend, p. 26.
60 Stephan Miescher notes that the exchange of greeting cards ‘served as “kin
work” to maintain relations between’ akrakyefo, the class of newly literate
men in 1930s Ghana (Making Men, p. 88). (The word akrakyefo comes from
the English word ‘clerks’.)
61 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 115.
62 Camara, L’Enfant noir, p. 218.
63 Adele King has shown that Camara did not write his memoir by himself.
That does not change the power of many of its tropes. King, Rereading
Camara Laye.
64 Ng ũg ĩ, Dreams, p. 253.
65 Ibid.
66 Sembène, God ’s Bits of Wood, pp. 33–4.
67 Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 144.
68 Ivan Ilich and Barry Sanders write, ‘Only after it had become possible to
fix the flow of speech in phonetic transcription did the idea emerge that
knowledge€– information€– could be held in the mind as in a store. Today,
we take this idea so completely for granted that it is hard for us to recon-
struct an age when recollection was not conceived as a trip into the cellar
to pick up stores, or look into a ledger to verify an entry. Since the fourth
century bc, memory has been conceived as such a deposit that can be
opened, searched, and used. Philosophers have disputed where this deposit
is located€ – in the heart, the brain, the community, or perhaps in God,
but in all these discussions memory has remained a bin, a wax tablet, or a
book’ (ABC, p. 15).
69 E.g. Diagne, Critique de la raison orale, p. 13n8.
70 Zumthor, La Poésie et la voix, p. 10.
71 Ibid., p. 49.
72 S. Johnson, The History of the Yorubas, p. 623.
202 Notes to pages 87–113
73 ‘[T]end à exténuer les valeurs de la voix dans l’usage et dans
l’imaginaire’:€Zumthor, La Poésie et la voix, p. 49.
74 Stock, After Augustine, p. 19.
75 Chekhov, The Portable Chekhov, p. 38.
76 Rancière, La Parole muette, p. 92.
77 Barber, ‘African Histories of Textuality’, p. 67.
78 Ibid.
79 See Willis, The Adinkra Dictionary.
80 Davies, Grimoires, p. 219.
81 See Ndaguba, ‘Experimental Work’; and ‘Farm and Weather Records’.
82 G. Johnson, Fire in the Mind, p. 156.
83 Ibid.
84 Fabian, ‘Of Dogs Alive, Birds Dead’, p. 232.
85 Peel, ‘Christianity and the Logic’.
86 Anderson, Imagined Communities.
87 Naipaul, A Bend in the River, p. 22.
88 Chief Ojo, the Bada of Saki, did write a history of that town in Yoruba, Iwe
Itan Saki ati Saki Keji, published in 1937 (see Falola, Yoruba Gurus, p. 12).
89 Chartier, Inscription and Erasure, p. 96.
90 Jeyifo, Wole Soyinka, p. 200.
91 Compare Fegan, ‘The Making of Books’.
92 Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, p. 24.
93 García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, p. 189.
94 See Sirat, ‘Handwriting and the Writing Hand’.
95 Rotman, Becoming beside Ourselves, p. 41.
96 Bloch, How We Think They Think, p. 167.
97 Harris, Rethinking Writing, p. 179.
98 Lyotard, ‘The Dream-Work Does Not Think’, p. 46.
99 Soyinka, Samarkand, p. 14.
100 Roberts and Roberts, A Saint in the City, p. 47.
101 Ibid., p. 174.
102 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. xxi.

4â•… M r Biswas fi n ds a home i n t he wor l d

on pape r :€V. S . Naipau l
1 Naipaul, Letters, p. 177.
2 We know this because he is 33 years old when he buys his typewriter (Naipaul,
A House for Mr Biswas, p. 312), and this is in 1938 (Ibid., p. 13).
3 See Naipaul, A Writer’s People.
4 Gorra, After Empire.
5 Naipaul, Way, p. 56.
6 Kincaid, My Brother, p. 196.
7 Bhabha, ‘Representation and the Colonial Text’, p. 119.
8 White, V. S. Naipaul; Greenwald, ‘The Method of V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction’.
9 Naipaul, Finding the Centre, p. 41.
 Notes to pages 114–138 203
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 García Márquez, 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, Midnight’s Children, p. 127.
24 This was based on something that happened to Naipaul’s 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.

5â•… 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. 97–8. 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 Grimm’s and Anderson’s 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 fear-
less Dutch child stopping a hole in the dykes with his hands all through the night
204 Notes to pages 138–153
and saving the whole country from inundation. Of the perils of fisher-folk life on the
Cornish coast. Of Alpine drifts and Saint Bernard dogs. Tales of all children, except
Negro children, for little black and brown readers. (McKay, Banana Bottom, p. 61)
11 Tuman, A Preface to Literacy, p. 44.
12 Ibid., p. 43.
13 Thomas, Modern Blackness, p. 51.
14 Alexander, ‘Love, Race, Slavery, and Sexuality’, p. 173.
15 Austin-Broos, Jamaica Genesis, p. 189.
16 Tadmor, ‘In the even my wife read to me’, p. 163.
17 Sembène, God ’s Bits of Wood, p. 57.
18 Rotman, Becoming beside Ourselves, p. 2.
19 Senior, Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage, p. 341.
20 I borrow this distinction from Taussig, The Magic of the State, p. 54.
21 Klassen, ‘Radio Mind’.
22 Royle, Telepathy and Literature, p. 5.
23 Huurdeman, The Worldwide History of Telecommunications, p. 182.
24 American Telephone and Telegraph, Telephone Statistics, p. 3.
25 Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, p. 26.
26 Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, p. 158.
27 Ibid., p. 178.
28 Peters, Speaking into the Air, p. 149.
29 Ibid., p. 141.
30 Brodber, Louisiana, p. 32.
31 Rotman, Becoming beside Ourselves, p. 117.
32 Quoted in Stubbs, ‘Telegraphy’s Corporeal Fictions’, p. 102.
33 Peters, Speaking into the Air, p. 138.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., pp. 224–5.
36 Ibid., p. 225.
37 Sobo, One Blood.
38 Rotman, Becoming beside Ourselves, p. 134.
39 Ibid., pp. 19–20.
40 Curtin, Two Jamaicas, p. 33.
41 Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, p. 52.
42 Pulis, ‘Citing (Sighting) Up’.
43 Engelke, A Problem of Presence, p. 2.
4 4 Bloch, How We Think They Think, p. 160.
45 Murphy, Working the Spirit, p. 120.
46 Brodber, ‘Brief Notes’, p. 99.
47 Hayes, Folklore and Book Culture, pp. 18, 120n22.
48 Elkins, ‘William Lauron DeLaurence’, p. 215.
49 Davies, Grimoires, p. 224.
50 Ibid.
51 Brodber, ‘Brief Notes’, p. 92.
52 Ibid., p. 93.
 Notes to pages 155–172 205
53 Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, p. 205.
54 Ibid., p. 206.
55 The Royal Readers 2 (London:€Nelson, 1877), pp. 24–5.
56 Sobo, One Blood, p. 235.
57 Ibid., p. 286.
58 I have misquoted misleadingly for rhetorical effect. The word ‘Master’ here
applies to Master Willie in the story she is teaching and indicates only that
he is younger than the other characters.
59 Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 79–80.
60 The Black Star line is an allusion to Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa
movement.
61 Burnett, The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse, p. 404.
62 Newman and Sherlock, The Caribbean Readers, p. 14.
63 Lal, ‘Primary Texts,’ p. 239.
64 Ibid., pp. 239–40.
65 This point is made by Catherine Nelson-McDermott as well (‘Myal-ing
Criticism’, p. 64).
66 Simpson, Religious Cults, p. 162.
67 Poulet, ‘Phenomenology of Reading’, p. 57.
68 Ibid.
69 Royle, Telepathy and Literature.
70 Brandt, Literacy as Involvement, p. 57.

6â•… S ou t he r n A f r ic a’ s Houses
of H u nge r
1 Lessing, ‘Green Glass Beads’, p. 239.
2 Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue, p. 85.
3 Magona, To My Children’s Children, p. 26.
4 Veit-Wild, Dambudzo Marechera, pp. 2–3.
5 Ibid., p. 1.
6 Ibid., p. 3.
7 Hofmeyr, ‘Metaphorical Books’, p. 2.
8 Veit-Wild, Dambudzo Marechera, pp. 58–9.
9 Ibid., p. 60.
10 Ibid., p. 2.
11 Ibid.
12 Abrahams, Tell Freedom, p. 9.
13 Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, p. 130.
14 Rotman, Becoming beside Ourselves, p. 7.
15 Ibid., p. 118.
16 Poulet, ‘Phenomenology of Reading’, p. 56.
17 Ng ũg ĩ, Dreams, p. 4.
18 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, pp. 19–20.
19 Veit-Wild, Dambudzo Marechera, pp. 3–4.
206 Notes to pages 174–189
20 Soyinka, Ibadan, p. 117.
21 Ibid., p. 118.
22 The reference is to Nehanda and the First Chimurenga.
23 The reference to heads ‘black like me’ is to Langston Hughes’s poem ‘Dream
Variations’, a copy of which featured prominently on Marechera’s locker
at school (Veit-Wild, Dambudzo Marechera, p. 71), and to John Howard
Griffiths’s memoir of that title, yet another book written by a white man
about blackness.
24 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 35.
25 Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading, p. 35.
26 Walcott, The Antilles, n.p.
27 Actually it was Antenor.
28 Salih, Season of Migration, p. 137.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., pp. 137–8.
31 Chartier, The Order of Books, p. 62.
32 ‘Imaginar un mundo posible en el que todos leyesen€– sueño o pesadilla de
la alfabetización universal€ – hizo que las representaciones de esta práctica
dejaran de ser signos de prestigio para tornarse oprimentes refrendos de que,
ni siquiera leyendo, el individuo podia preservarse de las arenas movedizas,
que todo lo engullen, de la masa democrática.’ Catelli, Testimonios Tangibles,
p. 18.
33 Canetti, Auto-da-fé, p. 93.

7╅ C onc lusion:€t he f ron t ie r s of w r i t i ng

1 ‘[C]onteuse professionelle’.
2 ‘[T]out ce qui vous passe par la tête sur la vie de tous les jours ou même
inventer des contes’.
3 ‘[E]lle fut condamnée pendant longtemps à jeter ses paroles dans le vide, en
espérant à chaque instant un écho, même fugitif, ou le plus faible signe de vie,
de l’autre côté du salon’.
4 ‘S’adressant dans une langue étrangère à un public de toute façon trop occupé
à survivre pour avoir envie de lire ses livres, il est presque toujours persuadé
d’avoir à hurler sa révolte dans le desert’. Diop, L’Afrique, p. 28.
5 Nkashama, Ecrire à l’infinitif, p. 14.
6 ‘On peut se demander si nous ne travaillons pas avec une langue morte, qui
n’existe plus nulle part tant elle est peu marquée par l’évolution du lexique et
de la syntaxe, en particulier en milieu urbain. Il suffit de se promener dans
les rues colorées, joyeuses et hurlantes de Yaoundé ou de Kinshasa pour saisir
d’emblée le contraste entre la vie réelle et nos œuvres de fiction supposées en
rendre compte. Elles parlent d’un univers qui ne nous ressemble pas.’ Diop,
L’Afrique, p. 166.
 Notes to pages 189–190 207
7 ‘[S]a volonté de se faire entendre de l’oppresseur est au moins aussi forte que
celle d’améliorer le sort de ses compatriotes’; ibid., p. 164.
8 ‘Ces auteurs qui parlent d’une Afrique dont ils ne savent plus rien sont mal-
heureusement les seuls à pouvoir se faire entendre du reste du monde et donc à
être écoutés … en Afrique.’ Ibid., p. 206.
9 Danticat, Preface, p. 8.
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 Index

Abimbola, Wande, 79 Blake, 181

Abrahams, Peter, 24, 166–70, 172, 191 Bloch, Maurice, 18, 104, 150, 194
Achebe, Chinua, 8, 19, 73, see€Igbo writing book
Arrow of God, 1, 5–6, 22–63, 70, 145, 170, 201 as box, 28–9, 39
No Longer at Ease, 26, 31, 63–4, 73, 82, 196 as physical object, 6, 63, 64, 111
Things Fall Apart, 3, 32, 41, 42, 64, 145, 181 manufacture of, 101
Adinkra, 92 Brandt, Deborah, 11, 19, 162, 193, 194
advertising, 114, 115–16, 176 Brink, André, 31
Afigbo, A. E., 54 Brodber, Erna, 8, 9, 19
African literature Louisiana, 146
literary history, 9–10, 64–5, 166 Myal, 7–8, 135–63
African Writers Series, 64, 175 Brooks, Peter, 47, 115
Alexander, Jack, 139 Brown, Nicholas, 46
Aluko, T. M., 27, 31, 64, 75, 89 Byron, 137
America, 22, 51, 76, 77, 97, 153, 154, 169
African American literature, 169 Calinescu, Matei, 75
American literature, 155 Camara Laye, 24, 67, 83, 194, 201
and race, 156 Cameron, Sir Donald, 50, 52
Amselle, Jean-Loup, 30, 40 Campbell, Carl, 120
Anderson, Benedict, 46, 96, 179, 180 Canetti, Elias, 184
Arabic writing, 15, 105, 183 Cary, Joyce, 32
archive Casement, Roger, 69
tin trunk, 63, 65, 72, 89, 133 Certeau, Michel de, 82, 105
Armah, Ayi Kwei, 15 Cervantes, 163, 188
Augustine, 30, 76 Chamberlin, J. Edward, 193
Austen, Jane, 140 Chartier, Roger, 183
Austin, J. L., 119 Chekhov, Anton, 89
Christianity, 25, 26, 28, 35, 73, 81, 145, 149
Bâ, Amadou Hampaté, 31, 67, 86 missionaries, 41, 47, 75, 93, 165, 177, 180
Badian, Seydou, 31 Clarke, Austin, 116
Balzac, 140 classics, Greek and Latin, 100, 121, 181, 182
Barber, Karin, 6, 8, 18, 19, 25, 26, 58, 61, 63, 65, Coetzee, J. M., 184
68, 90, 91, 194 colonial administration, 41, 51–2
Battestini, Simon, 2, 15 court messengers, 55
Benjamin, Walter, 46 Indirect Rule, 52, 54–5, see€warrant chiefs
Besnier, Niko, 17, 58, 193 Native Courts, 54–5
Bhabha, Homi, 29, 32, 33, 109, 110 unreality of, 52–4, 55
Bible, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 32, 39, 73, 74, 78, 93, 95, Conrad, Joseph, 32, 43, 49, 69, 180, 181
102, 149, 150, 153, 177, 180, 183, 203 Coulmas, Florian, 34, 38
translation, 37, 38, 39, 64 Crary, Jonathan, 78

220
 Index 221
Crowther, Rev. Samuel, 37, 38, 39 Fugard, Athol, 175, 177, 179
Curtin, Philip, 149
Cutteridge, Captain, 120 García Márquez, Gabriel, 103, 117
Gates, Henry Louis, 29, 30
Dai Sijie, 140 George, Olakunle, 2
Dames, Nicholas, 72 Gitelman, Lisa, 146, 193
Danticat, Edwidge, 9, 10, 187, 190–2 Gogol, 174
Davies, Owen, 153 Goody, Jack, 12, 13, 17, 19, 28, 30, 37, 55, 57, 61,
Delaurence, William Lauron, 93, 96, 152, 153 77, 153
Deleuze, Gilles, 172 Gorra, Michael, 108
Dennett, Daniel, 83 gramophone, 67
Dennis, Rev. T. J., 27, 28, 35, 36, 37–40 graphic traditions in Africa, 2, 15, 16, 26, 31, 177
Derrida, Jacques, 12, 14, 40, 122, 193 Graves, Robert, 173
logocentrism, 12, 14, 17 Greenwald, Roger, 110
Diagne, Mamoussé, 3, 5, 15, 17, 194 Griswold, Wendy, 6
Dickens, Charles, 22, 121, 131, 139, 172 Gronniosaw, James, 30
dictionary, 64, 69, 70, 150, 184 Guaman Poma de Ayala, 30
Diop, Boubacar Boris, 9, 10, 19, 23, 24, 25, 27,
48, 59, 187, 188–9, 190, 195 Haiti, 189, 190
Diop, Cheikh Anta, 15 handwriting, 102–4, 132
Djebar, Assia, 27 Harbsmeier, Michael, 30
Dossou, François, 15, 77, 194 Harris, Roy, 20, 36, 44, 57, 194
Dostoevsky, 175 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 99
drums, 3, 34, 35, 144, 145 Havelock, Eric, 12
Hawkins, Sean, 195
Edison, Thomas, 146 Hazzledine, George Douglas, 23, 42, 44, 67,
education, 3, 11, 25, 63, 67–70, 79, 112–13 194, 197
Christian, 136 Henkin, David, 114
final reports, 79, 82, 173 Hindi, 111
learning to read, 22–3, 156 Hofmeyr, Isabel, 25, 164
recitation, 136–7, 157 Homer, 181, 182
textbooks, 27–8, 63, 83, 120, 130, 136, 155, Hountondji, Paulin, 5, 14, 15, 17, 24, 77,
157–8, 159–61, 171, 172, 203, 204 193, 194
Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 12 Hughes, Langston, 206
Elias, Norbert, 48 Hugo, Victor, 121
Eliot, George, 140
Eliot, T. S., 129, 172, 180, 181 Ifá divination, 78–9, 93
encyclopedia, 113, 164, 184 Igbo identity, 38
Engelsing, Rolf, 73 Igbo in writing, 3, 33–4, 35–6, 37
English language, 40, 51, 88, 171, 172, 178, 189 Achebe’s opposition to, 39–40
African appropriation, 47, 196 Central Ibo, 33
Equiano, Olaudah, 30, 55 Union Ibo, 37–8, 39, 197
Illich, Ivan, 58, 198
Fabian, Johannes, 46, 95
fathers and sons, 7, 23, 60, 63–4, 65, 73, 106, Jabavu, D. D. T., 70
107, 110, 129–32, 167, 175 Jacobus, Mary, 48, 71, 179
Finnegan, Ruth, 12, 13, 17, 18, 37, 45, 49, 79, Johnson, Barbara, 12
193, 194 Johnson, Rev. Samuel, 86, 97, 99, 193
Flaubert, Gustave, 140 journal-writing, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77
Forster, E. M., 184 Julien, Eileen, 2
Foucault, Michel, 102, 158
Fraser, Robert, 6, 40, 78, 120, 125 Kanté, Souleymane, 26
French language, 188 Keats, 126, 146, 168, 169, 182
Frye, Northrop, 126 Kincaid, Jamaica, 109
222 Index
Kipling, Rudyard, 135, 136, 137, 138, 146, 158, 183 Nigeria, 165, 166
Kittay, Jeffrey, 11 Nsibidi, 15, 56
Kittler, Friedrich, 14, 22–3, 37, 40, 194 Nwachukwu, Ak ụjụọobi, 39
Koch, Peter, 18
Krämer, Sybille, 36, 38 Okpewho, Isidore, 32
Okri, Ben, 197
Lal, Brij, 160 Ong, Walter, 12, 13, 19, 61, 77, 153
Laplace, Pierre Simon, 94 orality
law, 52, 118 as African, 2
legal forms, 112, 118, 119, 123, in Caribbean, 7
133, 177 and colonial administration, 53–4
Leonard, Major Arthur Glyn, 32, 42 and dissemination, 53, 90–1, 144, 152
Lessing, Doris, 60, 163, 164, 165, 166 relation to writing, 2, 3, 5, 10, 12, 35–7, 71,
letter writing, 47, 51, 56, 71, 72, 80, 89, 100, 128, 85–8, 91, 108–9, 149–51, 186, 188
133, 177, see€postal system songs, 59
professional, 88–9 and spirit powers, 91–2, 94–5, 135, 142–4, 153,
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 55 see€Myalism
literacy thesis, 12–14, 16–17, 61 Osterreicher, Wulf, 18
critique of, 13–14
Lobengula, 177 Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower
Lyotard, Jean-François, 104 Niger, 32, 41, 42, 44, 145
PanAfrican consciousness, 96
Macaulay, 130 Paul, 149
magazines, 72, 73, 74, 82, 95, 99, 121, 176, 200, Peel, J. D. Y., 96, 199, 200
202 Perec, Georges, 44
Manguel, Alberto, 26 Peters, John Durham, 48, 146, 148
Marechera, Dambudzo, 9 Peterson, Derek, 6, 65
House of Hunger, 164–6, 170–86 Plato, 117
Marley, Bob, 152 postal system, 41, 47, 89, 99
Maupassant, Guy de, 133 Poulet, Georges, 162, 169
Mbodj-Pouye, Aissatou, 17 Proust, Marcel, 74, 83, 106
McKay, Claude, 204
McLuhan, Marshall, 10, 11, 12, 13 Raison-Jourde, Françoise, 33
Middleton, Peter, 48 Ramayana, 111
Miescher, Stephan, 65, 201 Rancière, Jacques, 90
Milton, 175 reading
Moore, Brian L., 136, 149 act of, 5–6, 46, 47–8, 50, 52, 73, 74, 84, 121,
Mphahlele, Ezekiel, 24, 26, 34, 67, 137, 174, 179
163, 166 opposite of action, 44–5, 87, 174
Murphy, Joseph, 152 and alienation, 5, 8, 19, 24–5, 121, 138–9,
Myalism, 142–3, 148, 152, 155, 161 141–2, 151, 154–5, 167, 169, 171
and attention, 74, 77, 78, 157
Naipaul, Seepersad, 107, 130 and body, 141–2
Naipaul, V. S., 8, 19, 160 and community, 71, 72, 73, 95–6, 162, 179
A Bend in the River, 98 as creative activity, 105
A House for Mr Biswas, 7, 9, 66, 107–34, 175, and eating, 85, 171–2, 176
176 and free time, 43–4
A Way in the World, 108, 127 and gender, 140–1, 176
early career, 117 and inner self, 71, 74, 75–6
Newell, Stephanie, 6, 8, 65, 66 and lenses, 75, 167, 182
newspapers, 96, 122, 123–4, 125, 133, 176, 179, and light, 26–7, 166, 174
180 and mother, 1, 22–4, 40, 44, 85, 88, 167,
Ng ũ g ĩ wa Thiong’o, 23, 24, 26, 27, 67, 83, 172, 171–2
194 and noise, 25, 48–9, 59, 70, 174
 Index 223
and race, 51, 137–8, 139–40, 169, 176, 177, 180 Stock, Brian, 74, 75, 76, 87
and remembering, 71, 74, 75, 83, 85 Stone, Lawrence, 140
rereading, 72, 75, 77, 78, 79 Street, Brian, 13, 17
and sex, 141, 173, 178 Summers, Carol, 65
and solitude, 47–8, 56, 70–1, 138, 141, 153 Swift, Jonathan, 139
subversive, 158
and travel, 83, 138, 168 Tadmor, Naomi, 140
reading matter, 72, 73, 163, 164, 182–3 talking book, 29–31, 35, 55–6, 67, 115
realism, 46 telecommunications, 145–6, 148
repertoire, 68, 72, 78 Tennyson, 137
Rhodes, Cecil, 177 Thurber, James, 123
Rhodesia, see€Zimbabwe Tiffin, Helen, 137
road system, 40, 42–3, 81, 86, 87 time
Robbins, Sarah, 22 calendar, 45–6, 57, 112
Robeson, Paul, 96 clock time, 43–4
Rotman, Brian, 14, 77, 141, 142, 148, of story-telling, 45
149, 168 synchronicity, 46, 53, 58
Royle, Nicholas, 145, 162 Todorov, Tzvetan, 13
Rushdie, Salman, 122 Tuchscherer, Konrad, 16
Russell, Bertrand, 11 Tuman, Myron, 18, 19, 136, 194
Tutuola, Amos, 42, 90, 197
Saenger, Paul, 12
Salih, Tayeb, 182–3 Urban, Greg, 58, 114
Sanskrit, 103, 111
Sassine, Williams, 26, 27, 76, 188 Vai syllabary, 15
Scholes, Robert, 36, 193 Vijayan, O. V., 115, 116
Schön, Erich, 44, 48
Schreiner, Olive, 168 Walcott, Derek, 181
Schwarz-Bart, Simone, 27 Ward, Ida, 33, 197, see€Igbo in writing
Seed, Patricia, 30 Warner, Michael, 13, 14, 17, 51, 55, 147, 193
Sembène Ousmane, 24, 83, 140, 186, 194 warrant chiefs, 54–5, 57
Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 3 Watt, Ian, 12
Shakespeare, 68, 69, 73, 80, 119, 128, 129, 139, White, Landeg, 110
169, 173, 179, 180, 184 Winterbottom, Thomas, 42
Sherlock, Philip, 159–61 Wordsworth, 138, 182
Siegert, Bernhard, 41 Wren, Robert, 28, 49
sign-writing, 88, 114–15, 116–18 writing
Simpson, George, 161 act of, 6
Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, and alienation, 168, 170–1, 188
see€Delaurence and the body, 31, 35–6, 50, 79, 103–4, 106,
Smith, Ian, 165, 176 147, 148, 150, 151, 172, 178, 185–6
Sobo, Elisa, 148, 156 and changes in consciousness, 10–11, 37
Soyinka, Samuel Ayodele “Essay”, 65 and community, 19, 61, 91
Soyinka, Wole, 8, 19 and fraud, 43, 55, 69, 70, 86, 96–7, 177
Aké, 66, 67, 103, 199 and history, 13, 16, 46, 80, 97–8, 99, 100,
Ibadan, 174 108–9
Ìsarà, 7, 9, 64–106, 138, 165, 175, and magic, 56, 89, 91–3, 102, 111, 119, 122,
177, 199 144–5, 190
Lion and the Jewel, 64 and modernity, 11, 24, 63, 66, 82, 92, 114,
poetry, 76, 105 145–6, 186
St Andrew’s College Oyo, 67, 68, 71 and mother, 88–9, 128–9, 132–4, 191
Steiner, George, 48 and philosophy, 15, 77
Stevens, Wallace, 181 and privacy, 60, 165
Stewart, Garrett, 22, 48, 194 process, 80, 89
224
writing (cont.)
as railway, 82–5, 186
and reason, 51
as road, 40, 81–2, 86
and science, 93–4, 113
and self-consciousness, 167
and sex, 154, 155–6
and text, 18, 19, 57–8, 59, 62,
168, 171
Index
as water, 188, 190–2
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